Body Surfing

“I’ve been asking the wrong question. I shouldn’t have been trying to find out what he told you, but what you told him. What did you tell him, Q.? Did you tell him how much fun we had together? Me and you and Sila and Jasper? Did you tell him about our road trip?”
    At the mention of his dead friends, Q. felt tears of frustration sting his eyes. “Why did you do this to me? Why did you make me—make me kill my friends?”
    The demon shook his head. “My God, you’re clueless. I don’t give a rat’s ass about you, Q. Prototypical teenaged boy who can’t keep his dick in his pants—or, more to the point, out of his girlfriend. It was Jasper I was after. Jasper . You were just a means to an end.”
    “Jasper? I don’t understand.”
    “No, Q., you don’t understand. And guess what? I’m not going to provide you any last-minute revelations. Maybe you’ll find him on the other side, as they say, and he’ll tell you himself. But before that happens you’re going to answer my question. What did you tell J.D. Thomas?”
    “Why don’t you ask me that question, Leo?”
    The voice came from inside the house. Leo’s head snapped in that direction, his eyes wide with surprise. His arm raised, but before he could move there was an explosion of sound and color—the color was red, and it burst from the demon’s chest. The demon stumbled backward toward the edge of the terrace. There was a second explosion and he was propelled through the air. His thighs caught on the balustrade, he teetered wildly for a moment, and then—silently, as if he’d never really been there—he disappeared over the edge. But the most unnerving aspect of the whole scene was that Q. could have sworn Leo smiled before he fell off the terrace.
    Q. saw the smoking barrel of the double-barreled shotgun even as he heard a crash, and then the keening of a car alarm nine stories down filled up the night.
    J.D. Thomas walked out of Q.’s parents’ bedroom. His hands were trembling, but a proud smile flickered at the edge of his mouth.
    “Come on, Q. It won’t be long before he’s back.”

17
    H e’d been shot a dozen times before. Fourteen to be exact. Boris Petrovich Alushkin remained the worst. It was really, really hard to concentrate with a big hole in your temporal lobe, but two shotgun blasts to the chest was a close second. And then falling nine stories? Fuck but that hurt. Thank God there was a Town Car idling on the curb to break his fall.
    A small crowd had gathered by the time he woke up. One hundred forty-three seconds. Not bad, not bad at all. By rights he should’ve taken a couple of hours to repair the worst of the damage before he tried to move, but he could hear sirens approaching. He didn’t have the luxury of minutes, let alone hours.
    There was a lot of blood spurting from his chest, and he had to push a rib back in before he was able to stanch the flow. Then, concentrating, he eased the pressure from Larry’s crushed L2, which was pinching his spinal cord. Feeling returned to his legs way too fast, at which point he discovered he’d snapped his left femur in two places. That probably explained why it flopped sideways over the edge of the car like a broken candy cane. It was no fun at all setting the bone. He aligned the three pieces as best he could, then sent jets of calcium ions into the semimembranosus and the semitendinosus in back and the vastus lateralis and vastus medialis in front. The calcium caused the actin and myosin muscle fibers to contract tightly, basically mimicking rigor mortis. The rigid muscles held the bone together and, grimacing, he eased off the crushed Town Car.
    An old woman fainted. No one noticed.
    Leo spat out a mouthful of blood, a couple a teeth. “Somebody help that woman. Good God, were you all raised in barns?”
    It was hard to interface with Larry’s senses. Sight and sound were particularly fucked up—he didn’t even notice the car alarm going off until he was on the sidewalk. By now it had been three full minutes since he’d fallen from the terrace. According to New York City nuisance laws, the alarm should have cut out 120 seconds ago. He bent over, reached past the driver into the crushed cabin. Pressed the button on the keyring that turned off the alarm.
    Silence.
    “Serves you right, buddy,” Leo said to the chauffeur, whose head hung limply off his neck. “Disturbing all these nice people.”
    He straightened slowly, took a moment to align the five pieces