4.

"What the hell was that back in there?" I asked when we got back into the car.

"I've never seen something like that before," Eddie said. "I've seen stuff that's just as bad. But never quite like… that."

There was a shifting in the air, and a scrabble from my pants; Nagi had wrapped a robe around himself again, and there was a clink as his manicured nails placed a number of glass vials into an ornate box. A soothing green glow beamed up at him from where he'd opened it.

"What is that?" I asked.

"A chemical stabilization unit," Nagi said. The green glow cast a bizarre shade on his face, and he slowly closed and sealed the box. "I would suggest you not touch, look, smell, or taste this fluid. I had a bit land on a talon. Singed straight through to the bone. I was able to stop the dissolution process by twisting and isolating that part of my DNA, but as you can see…"

He held up his finger to us. A white, gnarled piece of bone stuck from where the skin had blackened and charred.

"Is it acid?" I asked.

"Doubtful," Nagi said. "Acid leaves a different smell, and the chemical components of the biological effluvia has a different puddle pattern to it."

"You seem to know an awful lot about how a human body decomposes."

"Before 3P, one had to be handy in order to remain undetected," Nagi said, his voice carefully measured.

Something snagged and bobbed in my stomach. I wondered how many people Nagi had murdered, really, when it came down to it…

"Where to next?" I asked.

"We take this to be analyzed," Nagi said.

"Like a forensics place?"

"Something like that," Eddie said.

"Yara. Please take us to Master DeFoe's," Nagi said.

"Right away, sir," she said.

"Who is Master DeFoe?" I asked.

Eddie and Nagi said nothing, and the car slipped away into the morning.

We were in a dark back alley beneath a hospital. Yara had parked a few blocks over, and Nagi, Eddie, and I hoofed it; Nagi holding the stabilization unit like it was made of dynamite. We slipped inside of an old iron door that Eddie prized open with his fingertips and then walked into what looked like a long, bent, curved hallway, with moss on the water-stained bricks and the smell of mildew heavy in the air.

Low floodlights, almost hospital-style incandescents, buzzed overhead. Our shadows grew large and awkward, bizarre in places. There was a door with a slot in the top and a buzzer on the side at the far end of one hallway. There was a lizard crawling its way along one of the gutterings on the floor.

"Whatever you do, don't berate him," Nagi said.

"Don't call attention to his appearance," Eddie said.

"I would ensure you reply to him promptly," Nagi said.

"But don't let him mess with your head, and don't respond to him being inappropriate with you," Eddie said.

"Jesus guys," I said. "How bad is this going to be?"

"There's a reason you haven't met Gurg yet," Eddie said. "He's useful, in his own way, but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him."

"As strong as Eddie is, neither of the two of us could toss Gurg very far," Nagi said.

"What is he?" I asked.

"Well, he's not human," Eddie said.

"No shit. What, is he a vampire, a werewolf, a zombie?"

The two of them looked at one another and then fell silent.

"Just stay on your toes," Eddie said.

"Did you bring your mask?" Nagi asked me. "You should have brought your mask."

A crimson LED light on a camera in the corner had flickered on. It seemed to track us.

"There's no time," Eddie muttered. "He's already heard us. Let's just get this over with."

Eddie stepped forward and pressed in on the buzzer. It whined; somewhere in the distance, I heard splotches, like wet footprints, and a far-distant buzzing.

The intercom blasted on with a whine.

"And so you come to me in your time of need, again," DeFoe said, his loud voice booming, and I swear as he spoke I could smell swamp gas and decomposition like a foul hearty breeze splash against my face.

Eddie pressed the buzzer in on the intercom.

"Look, Gurg, it's kind of an emergency," he said.

"Move out of the way of the camera," DeFoe said. "Who is that gorgeous woman out there with you?" Gurg's voice was like water sloshing down a drainpipe.

Eddie looked back at me. I nodded at him, and his face twisted, before he moved and bowed. I stared into the camera, head at an angle.

"What a beauty," Gurg's wet voice said. "Well, how can I say no to a gorgeous specimen such as her? Come in, come in."

Something clanked behind the door. A puddle of murky water bellowed forth as the barricaded entryway opened, and Eddie gestured me inside, walking ahead.

"Go ahead," Nagi said, voice gentle. "This used to be an honor, once upon a time."

It was some kind of dark, dank, underground swamp in this room—wires and facets had been arranged in a semi-circle that ran against the wall, insulated, as it headed to a console in the next room. Stained windows peered forth into other chambers. Dark water lapped at my feet from a deep basin etched into the floor, the bottom of which was unknowable. Here and there were bits of technology used to prop up bits of wilderness that had faded and withered from the lack of light. A small, wizened tree spider-webbed itself up and around, its roots dipping deep into the water, another faintly buzzing light gloomily flickering over it, its branches spread wide against one wall. It felt like… well… the whole thing felt like an alligator enclosure.

A massive eye the size of a beach ball, iris slit like a cat's, raised itself on a fleshy stalk from another window, peering at me myopically, unblinkingly following me as I stepped alongside the narrow pathway to yet another rusted door inside.

"Don't fall in the water," Eddie said. "I won't be able to grab you."

"What is that thing looking at me?" I hissed.

"Don't pay it any attention," Nagi said. "It feeds on your attention."

We walked past the dirty windows and into another chamber. The Eye had dipped back below the surface again. I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding, and then turned my attention back to the room we were in.

A long, rickety bridge led over the water to another door in the back. Something slimy, some kind of extra-large tentacle had slapped itself up against the brick here, mindlessly rubbing itself against the window glass. We walked past it, and I made the mistake of looking down into the waters beneath the raised walkway. Little red eyes stared up at me.

"Head up," Nagi said.

"Almost there," Eddie said. "Just this final door."

Moss quivered on the walls as the last iron-bolted door opened with a whine, and then an even more putrid smell of rot hit me…

Gurg raised himself from the subterranean basement swamp, squirming forth from the water like a bilious worm, his corpulent flesh pale and white. His head was bald, separated from the rest of the pile of his flesh by a narrow collar wrapped around a piece at random. The top of his head jutted up into a cone shape, smooth and bald and white, and he wore a pair of sunglasses. His mouth opened when he saw us, and several rows of sharp teeth shined at us.

"Two of my favorite people. And you've brought me a remarkable young woman. What a gift the two of you have brought me."

The skin on the back of my neck shuddered. The sight of this worm-like thing was horrific. Whatever was left of him, however much was hidden, was still submerged deep into the brackish water. Every now and then, hidden gill flaps would open and suck air in. At random, parts of his exposed flesh would shudder, and what seemed to be an infant's arms would begin to ripple and press against the flesh.

"We're here for your help, but the woman is off-limits," Eddie said.

"What a tease," Gurg said, swiveling closer to us. Spiracles opened where a nose might be, and a long, sinuous tongue slid and danced in the air before me. "She smells heavenly. Like the moon on a bright night filled with stars."

"We did bring you some other gifts," Nagi said. "We need your help with them. Samples. We need to know the composition of these chemicals, asides from the human substrate."

The spiracles on Gurg's face opened and closed, and his neck swiveled, snake-like, over to Nagi.

"How kind of you," he said. "What is the occasion?"

"Forensics work," Eddie said. "A human died. Real messy. At least, we think it was a human. They melted before they took ten steps."

"Could be normal decomposition," Gurg said. "Nothing my palate would need to discern."

"The human was alive this morning," Eddie said. "His friend confirmed with the authorities that she heard from him the night before. There's no way that level of decomp could happen in that short of a period."

"Unless," Gurg said, hissing. "Open the snackbox, Nagi, I'm starving."

"Patience," Nagi said. "I'll feed these to you one by one. But you should also know that I managed to expose myself to some of the effluvia. It burned right through my flesh."

"Ooooh, that's what that smell was," Gurg heaved. "Let me have a taste, Nagi."

"Can you isolate the caustic substance in this?"

"I can isolate anything from everything," Gurg said, voice salacious. "I can tell you if a rat pissed in a vat of peanut butter, if a human was allergic to latex, and if a vampire drank deep of someone they ought not to. There ain't a flavor I can't isolate and reproduce, no odor rank enough for me to not identify. Y'all know this. Now are you going to offer yourself up to me, Nagi, or are you gonna sit there and keep giving me a case of the blue-balls?"

"Patience," Nagi said.

Gurg drew himself up. Hands and arms bulged from his sides, fleshy extrusions sticky with webbed skin.

"You talk to me of patience?" Gurg bellowed. I gasped in. It smelled like stomach acid. "I have been down here, isolated, left alone from all of creation, with only my brothers and sisters from my birth swamp here to keep me company. I could feed freely in the old days, and now all you do is come and give me scraps? You feed me now, Nagi, and I won't rise up out of this water and swallow all three of you alive!"

"We can always leave," Eddie said.

There was a tense moment, for a second or two, and a great flickering of expression on Gurg's face, before it collapsed again.

"Fine," he said. "Have it your way. I have been less than a gentleman, and it's nice to have company for a change. At your leisure, Nagi. May as well have a bit of a talk and chatter while we're at it. I can have my assistant make you some tea. Got a special recipe. Grown from my own trees right here in my own swamp."

"Finally," Nagi said. "I was beginning to think you'd lost all sense of propriety."

There was yet another chamber we walked through, with a phonograph and a tea table set up in one part of the room. Gurg had withdrawn deep into the water, and with a shaking of the foundation beneath us, he raised himself again, this time much smaller, much more diminutive, rising up and extruding a bit of himself and his face that looked very much the size of Eddie. He sat, legs crossed, like a gentleman, while the rest of him dangled in the water.

He sat at the head of the table. I sat opposite him. Eddie and Nagi sat on either side. Some scampering furry thing came in and poured us some scalding hot tea. I tried not to look at the slimy window near me. The eyeball on a stick was there again, unblinkingly staring at me.

"Some music?" Gurg asked. "I've got some Loretta Lynn. I was always very partial to her."

"That would be lovely," Nagi said, consummate house guest.

The furry monkey thing turned on the record player. I snuck another peek. The eye was still there.

"Ignore him," Gurg said. "That's my dumb fool of a brother. Never could talk to women, even when he was, well, different than now. He'd stand back and stutter, slack-jawed. Now he just peeps 'em."

"What is he?" I asked.

"My flesh and blood," Gurg said. "Don't we all have family we'd rather not talk about?"

He had a point…

"I come from the bayou," Gurg said. "We all was born like you, once upon a time. Then something came down, washed from the reactor, maybe. Or maybe it was a chemical left over from the war. Maybe even, as I suspect, an angry woman I did wrong. However it happened, we went for a dip, and became what you see. Creatures of the brackish water. Of course, my current form gives me a benefit that the old me never had."

"A starter," Nagi said. "Stacey, perhaps you'd better look away."

A glimmer of a knife, a squirt of blood, and the clattering of bone on porcelain. Nagi hissed, controlling his breathing, and then offered up the finger on the plate, passing it reverentially over.

"I do declare, vampire flesh. Perhaps this is a new flavor I may come to enjoy."

I looked away. It sounded as if Gurg was eating a chicken wing. After a few moments of contemplative chewing, Gurg coughed and retched.

"That's awful," he said. "Oh, how delightfully disgusting. Mellow notes of human—but not just human. Golden blood. More of that night sky filled with stars flavor. And then the trenchant, fishy amphibian taste. You've been transforming quite a bit, Nagi."

"Astute observation."

"It flavors the meat so nicely," Gurg said. "Now, the interesting bit is here."

Gurg spat up the bone on the plate again.

"Notice. There are no corrosion marks on the bone. That means whatever this was was not a chemical catalyst capable of dissolving calcium. That means, more than likely, that this was a non-human chemical. Human chemicals tend to be a bit more brute strength and take everything out with them. And yet another subtle flavor—it also had an effect on your DNA sequence, causing advanced decomposition, despite your mitochondrial light-speed. It was able to overwhelm your healing factor and destroy the cells, until you broke the transfer sequence."

"That sounds like what happened," Nagi said.

"Whatever this is is some kind of quick-speed pathogen," Gurg said. "It spreads from cell to cell, destroying them and implanting itself into the next cell. It mutates and kills as it goes. I think I've discovered just about all I can discover from this sample. It may be a little more useful to give me, perhaps, some human tissue tainted with whatever this biological agent is."

"Already ahead of you," Nagi said.

"Drink your tea, darling," Gurg said, looking at me.

"I have a caffeine allergy," I said.

"Good thing there ain't no caffeine in this cup," Gurg said. "This is fresh-brewed sassafrass tea, filled with the healing waters of my swamp. Men used to travel for miles to get a cup of the water I swam in. You're staring at Montezuma's fabled folly, my dear."

"And I so appreciate that," I said. I held the cup up and pretended to take a sip. I closed my eyes. It smelled like sulfur and eggs in my nose…

"Samples," Nagi said. His taloned hands, minus a finger, passed over a glass vial. "This was an extraction of spinal fluid."

Gurg picked it up, removing the cap and sniffing in deeply.

"Ahhhh, how refreshing," Gurg said.

I couldn't watch it. He made a noise like someone slurping through a straw, and then the vial was drained. I could see him swish the fluid around in his mouth like it was wine, and then he swallowed deeply.

"Yes, yes. Very pure morpheum, that. And a bit of intelligence. Heavy undertones of marijuana. Terpenes of a particular variety. The deceased was a heavy cannabis smoker and recreational opiate addict. Not just any old regular addict, mind you. He was a gourmand, a man of particular taste… yes, I would wager it was a man, judging by the testosterone overlay. Any other extracts you have for me?"

"Some organ and brain matter," Nagi said.

"Some liver pate may just be what I need," Gurg said.

"I'm afraid the organs were all splattered," Nagi said. "This is more of a mid-body slurry than anything else."

Gurg looked at the next vial with some distaste and then nodded.

"A man must do what a man must do," he said and knocked it back. His eyebrows—more suggestions of fleshy overhangs than furred parts over his sunglasses—shrugged upwards. "I declare. That is a mess of an endocrine system. This man was two steps away from renal failure. Judging by that and the cell degradation, I would wager he was an older fella, at least for a human being. Approximately sixty to sixty-five years of age. Strong constitution, did regular work, but it was a matter of time. This might have been a blessing, all things considered."

"Anything other that you're detecting?" Eddie asked.

"I'm getting there, and it'll be in my time," Gurg said. "What else have we in the way of horsie doovers? "He said it this way on purpose, with a twinkle of glee in his cheek, and it made me want to hurl.

"A little bit of brain matter next," Nagi said. "This was a struggle to crack into with an audience."

The snake-like tongue slid out of Gurg's mouth and into the vial, and he inhaled rapturously.

"Oh my," Gurg said. "Oh, oh, oh. This is the real pleasure."

He smacked his lips, salivating, and rippling bodily.

"I think I have had my fill of this swill," Gurg continued. "I have to say, a few particular piquant notes stick out, some that I noticed from the beginning. Nagi—the taint on your blood hid the base essence, at first, and it was so subtle in the spinal fluid I dared to think I was imagining it entirely. However, more of that unctuous older man's body revealed his plight to me. He had imbibed a concoction laced with a particular form of Clostridium Perfringens sub-mutate. This is a guess, at best, but the typical human infection of clostridium perfringens in and of itself causes a condition known as gas gangrene, which leads to necrosis of the flesh—an accelerated rotting accompanied by a putrid smell, caused by the aerated decomposition of cellular tissue. I daresay this Clostridium variant, whatever it was, had been fed on some kind of ethereal accelerant. Likely—and don't quote me on this—the clostridium in the mixture was a by-product caused by poor sanitation techniques. In other words, this was a drug created for intravenous injection, and poor sanitation and keeping standards caused an accelerated decomposition effect on human and vampire flesh."

"You thinking what I'm thinking?" Eddie asked Nagi.

"Yeah," Nagi said.

"I'm not in the loop," I said.

"Drug manufacturer," Eddie said. "Clearly the guy was a druggie already. Whatever this was he got, it was going to push him over the moon, but it was tainted."

"So who could have manufactured something more potent than morphine?" I asked.

"Witches," the two of them said, as one.