Skullcrack City (10 page)

I can’t emphasize enough the sensation of being propelled forward by some benevolent force, that my righteousness had created a shining path. Perhaps that’s how a pawn feels when moved forward by a self-assured chess player.

I cleared the Kept Squad blocks at a near jog, my left shoulder stressed from trying to keep Deckard’s travel case steady. Regretted not having purchased a gun—
What has two thumbs and throws itself headfirst into corporate conspiracy without first buying a single firearm? This fucking guy. But I’m packing a red-eared slider turtle with a vicious hiss and a kitchen knife which struggles to slice steak fat…
Contemplated a way to brandish the knife without looking like a guy running down the street with a knife, a turtle, a duffel on my chest, and a backpack on my back. Nope—that was the best of my bad options. I stopped to reconfigure my travel set-up and the world pretty much exploded.

First: A shot to the kidneys and I dropped. Then I was dragged back up to my feet and pulled into an alley to my right. I heard my knife fall to the street. Saw Deckard and the duffel sitting exposed. Fists the size of my head wrapped around my backpack straps and hoodie, dragging me upright. I brought my hands up to protect my face from the pummeling that was about to commence.
This is how it all ends—everything you worked for stolen by some tweeker in a back alley. They’ll probably turn Deck into soup or use him for a baseball. Will anyone even find your body?

The grip on my shirt tightened. Hot, sour breath rolled across my face. Then a familiar voice, tainted by fear, shaking, “Is it still out there?”

“Egbert?”

“Shhh. Shhh. Quiet, motherfucker. It’s out there.”

“What’s…”

“The thing, D. The thing got Port. Took a bullet and still got him.”

“Wait, what?”

“Same thing that got Hungo.
Has to be
. Cracked Port’s head open on the sidewalk and hunched over and started…just…slurping.”

“You’re not making any sense. Listen, I need to grab those bags…”

“You don’t need shit, motherfucker. You brought this down on us. I told Port from the beginning—bad news.”

Egbert’s left fist tightened its grip and he slammed me against the bricks to ensure compliance. Whatever air I was holding rushed from my chest, left me straining to breathe. Egbert’s right hand reached for the machete sheathed on his back. His all-black eyes fixed on mine for a moment and then his gaze went beyond and I realized he’d decided I was a plague rat to be destroyed.

“You must have brought this thing.
It said your fucking name
. So I’m going to give it what it wants.”

Egbert raised his Right of Refusal to the sky.

Then: Three loud cracks in sequence, and Egbert’s machete-wielding hand disappeared, followed in short order by the front of his face, followed by a final blast which took off the back of his head. All that remained of Egbert’s once sizeable skull was a fractured protrusion—one ear still attached, a cross-section of tattered brain exposed—and his considerable jaw. His beard was a mop of blood, his barely tethered tongue lolling above. His left hand hadn’t forfeited its grip on me and the mass of his collapsing body dragged us down. My body landed on top of his and I watched his tongue flop back into the cavern where his face had been, and then, I swear, the force of my weight on his chest pushed a final breath from his lungs and his tongue flapped and flailed like a goddamn blowout noisemaker at a kid’s party.

Then: I laughed. Because how else do you process something like that?

Then: “Alright, Doyle, on your feet.”

And the man approached me and I heard the growl of a wolf grow louder and then I saw my savior. He looked like any other cowboy from my bank—pricey dress shirt, black slacks, slight paunch, gray at the temples. He had some kind of gun in his right hand, made from a burnished yellow plastic, blue smoke still oozing from the barrel. From the way Egbert’s head had segmented I guessed this was not standard ordnance. I knew better than to question the man. The response would be a variation on their central theme—“Who are you to ask?” I felt certain that this man had been the one following me, that his purposefully nondescript green car was parked somewhere very near to my abandoned vehicle. He raised his gun and pointed it at me as I exited the alley, approaching my duffel and Deckard’s enclosure.

“Leave the turtle, shitbird. Grab the bag.” He glanced down quickly, referencing something on his phone. “Looks like there are still about eighty-two thousand in funds that we need to recover. You’re going to help me with that before we deal with your corollary accountabilities.”

He sounded like a banker, burying murder under jargon. I hoped I could appeal to his inherent greed.

“There’s way more than eighty-two in that bag. Maybe you grab the duffel and I grab the turtle and you tell the boys back home that I’ve been dealt with. I’ll hide deep. I swear. I’ll leave the country and…”

“Kill it, Doyle. You shut your fucking mouth. You think it’s just about the money? No way, pal, not anymore. We know about the research. Your attempts to inhibit our business relationships. And beyond that, there are four deaths which must be accounted for.”

“Deaths? What deaths?”

Standing still, spinning.

“You didn’t hear the news? Two prominent bankers and two federal agents died today. Some kind of chemical attack floored them and they didn’t escape the fire which claimed the building. Agent Torres had asthma, so they’re guessing he died before the fire even reached him. The rest probably burned alive. It’s all over the news—you’re a domestic terrorist. The media might be outside of your apartment by now. Do you wonder what they’ll find? I don’t. You come with me, we set things straight, maybe we can cut them off before your poor mother turns on the TV and finds out her son is a cross-dressing, porn-addicted, pill-popping terrorist.”

“You’re bluffing. I saw the sprinkler system turn on. I only started a tiny fire.”

“Do you remember who financed our corporate center?”

Shit. Our own commercial division. They hired shifty, itinerant contractors, pocketed nebulous supply costs, and ran every project as cheap as they could. That sprinkler system could have been pumping out Mr. Bubbles for all I knew.

“I’m growing impatient. I’ve been authorized to close out this endeavor as I see fit. You can come with me now, or I can leave by myself. But think of your mother—the media circus, all those unanswered questions, nothing left of you to place in a coffin…”

My head swirled. I snorted back fresh blood and crusted Hex. I believed the man was willing to call it a day and vaporize me like Egbert’s head—eighty-two grand was a pittance as a write off, and even if I’d really murdered those people, there’s no way they actually wanted to take me to trial and risk my ideas entering the public record.

I raised my hands and stepped slowly toward the bag of cash.

Part of me—some selfish bastard part that didn’t mind dying—always knew this was a potential endgame. But I pictured Deck starving without me, waiting in his enclosure for someone to come along and smash his shell out of dull curiosity. And I thought of my mother, the sad monologue she’d left on my voicemail as our final interaction, the way the stress of the media coverage would speed her decline from Pelton-Reyes and leave her ostracized in her conservative community, the way the vultures would perch in her yard and speculate and ensure they found the worst archival photo of me to let their viewers know I was a batshit crazy threat from birth and that my mother had failed in her duty to create a good citizen and…

Then: The sound of a starving animal attacking a carcass came from the alley behind me, low grunts and deep inhales and crunching bone.

“You brought this thing.”

I twisted enough to catch the alley in my peripheral: a massive shape was hunched over Egbert’s blasted leftovers, its face nuzzled deep into what remained of the dead dealer’s head.

“Enough stalling, Doyle. Grab the goddamned bag.”

“I’m not stalling. There’s…”

The thing heard us; its head snapped to attention, and just as quickly it was running toward me.

“Doyle!”
Its voice was so low it approached subsonic—I felt the rumble of my name in my chest.

It turns out that the body can automatically recalibrate to a new threat response. Mine instantly decided that Being Shot in the Face was a far better death than Being Eaten Alive by a Creature Which Knows My Name. I bolted in the direction of my bank’s hired gun and the only real thought in my head was, “NO!”

I made it three strides before the thing had me in its hands. Too fast. Too strong. Its grip like a steel clamp on each side of my ribs until I heard a snap and felt something give on the right side of my chest. I was lifted off my feet. I felt the heat of the thing’s breath ruffle my hair and the smell of decayed meat engulfed me. Then the sound of more bones popping, but no new pain bloomed in my ribs and I realized the sound was coming from the thing’s mouth. I pictured the jaws of the creature unlocking, extending out to strip away the candy coating of my scalp.

I felt a massive row of flat teeth latching in above the base of my neck and the warmth of a tongue against my head like a pulsing microwaved steak and then—barely perceptible over the interior static of my mind being aware it was about to be eaten and swallowed—there was the sound of gunfire. The thing spun and threw my body to the street and everything was meat/electricity/smoke and bellowing and the wet sensation of the thing’s saliva soaking my scalp.

Then: A vision. Couldn’t be real. Had to be the combination of Hex and exhaustion and the raw pain of my cracked rib. Because the thing I’d been certain was a massive beast was wearing sweatpants and an oversized hoodie and a pair of tan work boots, and he was staring in shock at the stump of his left arm, missing from the elbow down. I rolled further away, certain with each rotation that something in my chest was about to puncture and deflate my lungs. When I looked again the thing was in mid-air, its overlong remaining arm outstretched, its power pole legs extended for first impact with his assailant’s torso. Then the thud of bodies colliding, the cracking/clacking sound of the bank’s assassin dropping his weapon as the thing snapped his wrist, the sound of joints popping as the thing’s lower jaw opened to engulf the man’s head. The thing pushed its brick-sized chin into the man’s mouth, splitting my would-be-murderer’s face open with crowbar efficiency, then it locked in its upper row of teeth along the man’s forehead. The creature’s maw was huge and thick and gleaming wet in the streetlight, and with one straining bite, jaw muscles pulsing like knotted rope, it collapsed the front of the man’s face.

This did not stop the man from screaming through the final vestiges of his mouth. That sound was mercifully cut short as the thing crunched its fist into its prey’s trachea.

I turned to crawl toward my bags, but the sensation of taking my eyes off the thing was repellent, like turning your back on a suddenly visible great white shark while out swimming. I pushed my body backwards with my arms and stayed low and tried to keep from crying out when my busted rib cage told me to stop and wait for the ambulance.

But this was 45
^th
. Zero ambulances were forthcoming, and I didn’t know how long this thing would be preoccupied with its smashed cowboy leftovers.

The thing lifted the man’s head from the asphalt and then slammed it back down with two hard, sharp blows. It was clear from the sound that the man’s skull had gone shattered eggshell. The thing laughed, pleased by the ease of access, and bent to eat.

Then: I reverse belly-crawled to my gear with all the grace and speed of a crushed armadillo, wondering at how death had come for me in the guise of some jacked-up mutant-mouthed Popeye-jawed gorilla-armed man-thing.

Honestly, part of me was really glad I wouldn’t have to go to jail.

My right foot landed on something—the duffel. I chanced a quick look back and found my backpack and Deck’s carrier. But that’s it.
Where was my supposedly lethal Hi-Pepper Bear Spray now?
Wasted in my fuck-it-up frenzy at the bank. My knife? Nowhere, flung to the street when Egbert grabbed me. No, it couldn’t have gone too far…

I rolled to my right to check my radius for the knife, and despite bracing myself with my arm, my chest lit up like wildfire.

If you’ve ever felt a pain like that then you know holding in a yell isn’t some macho choice you can make. My scream was an autonomic pain vent, a short but very loud, “AAAAH!” that exploded from my mouth, followed by a wave of instant regret as I saw the thing across the street snap-to from its mind-munching reverie.

It rose from its hunched position over the corpse, standing about seven feet tall. Nowhere near the size of the Sasquatch I’d imagined when it had first grabbed me, but its frame was thick and over-muscled. Its neck and jaw pulsed and shifted in the streetlight in ways I told myself were only imagined, but even twenty feet away I could hear bones moving and locking in to place, the synovial pops of a structure under duress.

The thing walked toward me. I hoped that it was slow and sated, but also guessed it had assessed me as a limited flight risk. I rotated my head to the left and scanned for my knife to no avail other than the added benefit of sending another pain-shock through my chest.

Was this all a dream? The bank assassin killed Egbert, this thing killed the assassin, and maybe a T-Rex was about to stomp down 45
^th
and make a snack out of the brain-eater…

“
Doyle, you dumb motherfucker.
” Oh, god, that voice. Distorted and low from moving through a wind-tunnel of a voice box. And happy. The thing was happy. I wouldn’t lift my face to see its smile, that joyful blasted planet of a face with blood on its chin.