Body Surfing

of his shattered pelvis, then began hobbling up the street toward the ambulance.
    The broken rib poked out of his chest. He pushed it back in.
    A little boy ran screaming.
    “Hey buddy,” said a guy with a Scottish terrier on a leash. “You just, like, fell out of the sky. Want to sit down?”
    Flames came out of the man’s mouth when he spoke and his Scottish terrier kept turning into a Dyson vacuum. Leo squinted, decided it was unlikely the man was a demon from hell, and his dog probably wasn’t a home appliance.
    He felt around the back of Larry’s head, found something that felt like a toothpick but turned out to be three inches of antenna. It had punctured his occipital lobe, which played havoc with his visual processing.
    Leo looked at the bit of antenna in his palm. It writhed and spat venom like a baby cobra. This is your brain, he thought. This is your brain with a metal spike in it.
    “Buddy? You okay?” The Scottish terrier made a whooshing noise as it hoovered up bits of broken glass. Leo would’ve kicked the doginto traffic if his leg hadn’t been broken. He settled for dislocating the man’s jaw.
    “I got shot too. Dumbass.”
    He shook his right hand painfully. Turned out half a dozen metatarsals were broken on top of everything else. How do you break a goddamn fingerbone without breaking your arm? The universe was so arbitrary .
    There were no more incidents as he limped around to the front entrance of the building, prying buckshot out of his torso and dropping the pellets on the sidewalk. He lifted himself unsteadily into the seat of the ambulance. Turned the engine over, dropped the bus in gear. Pulled out just as the ambulance that had come to retrieve his fallen body drove up behind him.
    If there were a therapist for the Mogran, Leo might’ve admitted, yeah, maybe he wasn’t the best at controlling his hosts’ psyches. But there wasn’t a demon in history who could manipulate the corpus as well as he could. Hell’s bells, he’d just fallen ninety-four feet and taken thirty-three pieces of Number 1 buckshot to his gut, chest, and throat. Name another demon who could get up three minutes after that, let alone drive an ambulance through New York City traffic? Come on, just one.
    In fact, it was all he could do to hold Lawrence Bishop’s body together, which unfortunately let the paramedic’s psyche run rampant. His host’s drug-addled memories merged with Leo’s in ways that made it impossible to tell what was really happening and what was hallucination. The bulbs at the top of the pole lamps were like yellow whirlpools swirling upside down into the sky. Changing stoplights seemed to open up rifts in space through which he glimpsed other places, other times. In the red light: the court of the emperor of Japan during the time of Genji. In the yellow: Charlemagne walking around in a rusty suit of armor reeking of piss and sweat. In the green: hey, was that Solomon? It was! Talking to those two women fighting over the baby. The wise king threatened to cut the disputed child in half.
    “Do it, Schlomo! Cut that little fucker right down the middle!”
    The sound of Larry’s voice knocked him out of his spell, and Leoshook his head to clear it. Man, that was a bad idea. The ambulance veered left and right across the avenue, clipping parked cars on both sides of the street. He stomped on the brake pedal, slammed into the steering wheel, knocked that goddamn rib out of his chest again . As he pushed it back in, he repeated something Napoleon had said to him during that long cold march into Russia.
    “Slow and steady wins the race, Leo. Slow and steady. Wins the race.”
    He’d said it in French of course, and he hadn’t used Leo’s name. Hadn’t used exactly those words, but you got the picture.
    His name.
    The doctor had said his name. So the Legion knew who they were chasing. But he also knew who was chasing him.
    What to do, what to do? Go after the doctor and Q., or attend to his fledgling? It was a real pickle—but were those real pickles, diving from the top of the building on the corner of 59th and First?
    Probably not.
    Just then he heard a low moan from the back of the bus. For a moment Leo thought it was J.D. Thomas, but then he remembered the other psychiatrist. Dr. Miller. Sue.
    Good ol’ Sue.
    Good-time Sue.
    Good-to-go Sue.
    “Gotta go, Sue,” he said out loud.
    Larry’s girlfriend was living proof that things could always turn out worse than you