Skullcrack City (11 page)

It’s talking. Maybe you can reason with it. Maybe it wants the money.

“You’re looking at our bag of money? We’ll be taking that. You have nothing for us.
You bent-dick cocksucker!”
The thing gave an Etch A Sketch shake to its head, disturbed by its own outburst. “Some of us don’t know we’re dead yet. The anger stays at the surface.”

What? The thing’s inflections had changed with each sentence, its voice shifting oddly, at first malevolent and then too bright and lucid for the monstrous shape from which it emerged. I imagined producing any speech from that contorting cavern of a mouth to require deep focus.

“Your files are of use. The banker thinks you knew more than they could extrapolate from the security footage.
You pushed me, faggot! I’m going to slice off your turtle’s legs and slap him around with a hockey…
QUIET.” It took a deep breath. “You’re not a popular guy around here.”

I looked up at the thing. Its meaty forehead was scrunched with effort over its too-close eyes. Most of its face was mouth, and it barely had enough skin to cover the tips of its huge, thick teeth. It took another breath and the exhale brought waves of dumpster meat heat. It raised its left arm and surprised itself when no soothing hand landed on its forehead. The stump of its blasted limb was sealed with a gray/black crust.

“Oh. Shit.” It waved the stump in the air while shaking its head. “Doc’s gonna have to fix this up. But first things first: Does anyone else have a copy of your files? Have you been in contact with the media?”

Damn—I’d approached this whole debacle in Lone Wolf terms.
Note to Self: If ever again embroiled in conspiracy, please buy a gun and establish life-sustaining fail-safes
. For now all I had were more lies.

“Of course. The moment my name hits the obituaries my contact at the Post will be releasing a copy of my files to a number of interested parties. And there’s a safe deposit box accessible only to my lawyer.”

“
Bullshit. If you’d done any of that they’d have had me solve this problem at the first hint of an outside leak…
QUIET!” The thing’s eyes rolled back in its head and it took two more breaths of deep exertion. The “QUIET” had the distinct sound of a stern schoolteacher silencing a room of rowdies. The thing continued. “We don’t care anymore. We believe the only people who’d heard your story are within us now.”

Who had heard my story? Port and Egbert? And I’d only told them parts.

The thing’s eyes rolled back in its head for a moment. Then it smiled again, lips curling back off blood-stained enamel. “No. You are lying. The time for formalities is over. We will know the truth once you have joined us. There’s room now.” The thing’s remaining hand absentmindedly rubbed its belly. A rivulet of red-tainted drool ran from the corner of its mouth.

I backed away. The thing walked toward me, one long arm swinging in its lope. A smile broke across its semi-simian face. This thing loved feeding time.

I wanted to say goodbye to Deckard but my tongue was frozen by my mind’s thrumming NONONONONO and I realized that the paralysis felt in nightmares is a premonition of how you feel the moment you’re about to die and then the thing was hunched with its good arm to the ground like a gorilla before leaping and I slid back and my fingers found something cold and metal behind me and then the thing was on me, so heavy, so strong, and without a thought outside dumb animal survival I was closing my eyes and swinging whatever I’d found toward the beast, and then my chest was pelted with wetness and warmth and I opened my eyes and saw the hilt of my steel kitchen knife twitching with each pulse of black blood that coursed around the blade in the creature’s neck.

And at last, somehow: The sound of a wounded beast’s bellowing filled the night, soon joined by the sound of my voice crying out as I willed my broken body—to roll away from the infuriated creature, to find all I had left in the world, to gather it and to escape. After that all I can remember is the sound of footfalls echoing through the cold tenement night, each one falling faster and faster, as if, through sheer exertion, they could catch up to my mind, long gone.

The day had started with a barrel of coffee, ritual pill popping, and bone-deep anxiety. The day ended in a terror-induced sprint away from the street where death tried to claim me three times over.

I mistakenly believed that my life had finally reached the peak of Crazy Bullshit Mountain.

Hindsight would indicate I’d only just made it to base camp.

I finally stopped running when the pain managed to override the fear and adrenaline. Whatever I had left in my gut made its splashing exit, a puddle of bile on cold concrete. I gingerly touched my busted torso with my free hand and wondered if all the running had allowed my smashed rib to saw open something inside.

Deckard hissed from his enclosure and I couldn’t find the breath to apologize. Instead I kept walking.

Toward where?

I was certain I’d be jumped for my loot until I caught my reflection in a window: shell-shocked, blood-spattered, hair matted by a crust of dried spittle, my backpack and duffel and plastic carrying case as seemingly random accessories.

You look homeless.

I am.

You look crazy.

I am.

I’d become an invisible, too low for the lowest to rob, too crazy for the crazies to bother, a shambling object lesson response to all those “FUCK IT! WHY NOT?’s.”

I limped down back streets just north of 45
^th
, staying to the dark, thin membrane of territory which separated our workaday citizens from the scrappers on the other side of the tracks. Dawn approached. The harsh morning light brought three realizations:

1. Having my paranoia confirmed delivered not comfort, but the deeper terror of knowing that most things would remain beyond my understanding right up until the moment they killed me.

2. I was probably dying. Everything hurt. I couldn’t remember what I’d last eaten or when I’d had water. I might be bleeding inside.

3. It was morbidly depressing to realize I was already jonesing for more Hex—even imminent death by machete/yellow pistol/brain-eating would not scare me straight.

At the merest thought of the pills, the chorus of justification began their sweet song:
Even if you wanted to detox, in this state the withdrawals would probably kill you. No, better to ride this out. Besides, the Hex only did what you wanted. Made you sharper. Put you on the trail. You found something real, something they’re willing to kill you to hide. You can collate your evidence and sell it. Just a few more pills to get you through to shelter. Might be the only thing to keep you from going into shock. Might make the pain fade.

And with that, the volume of the chorus clouded the last remnants of reason and doubt, and I was alley-bound. Then I was hunched, groaning, hiding, ignoring the drip of dark blood which fell from my nose and spattered on the pavement, ignoring the ever-ripening smell of my spit-soaked cranium, hoping that this could be a right thing, and my hands found the stash and there were four pills and that was a good start and the morning light shone bright silver.

This would save me.

I waited for the moaning audio vortex of the come-up, the confidence and propulsion, a return to the profligate power which had carried me through the storm of the last twenty-four hours, but instead I found only PAIN, sudden and crushing. A vice grip to the temples, my eyes being pushed out from behind, my chest a foundry fire, my buck eighty machine gun pulse wracking my ribs. Too many pills.
Fuck
.

And then the sounds came, as a flood, from behind my left shoulder—The black wolf’s growl, never closer than that moment, furious but changing, rolling suddenly into a pained bark, a drowning cough, a wet splash, and then something massive was screaming, the sound like piston pressure knocking me flat, driving me blind, pulling me from my body in the alley to a tiny space somewhere inside my mind. There I was surrounded by a seething black ocean of consumption, only and always hunger, and I curled further into the shell of my consciousness, wanting, somehow, to pull the pills from my stomach and wake, to escape the rushing fluid around me as it wailed and surged and ruined all it touched. This place was worse than a vacuum or any simple absence. It was atrocity on loop, a space outside the laws of light and the time it brings, and whatever I was diminished until I only knew I existed because I could feel myself falling backwards, and the further I fell, the smaller I became, and the last vestiges of protection shattered and washed away, replaced by the dead black weight of that place, reason lost to the pain of being crushed into always-less and before thought disappeared beneath a squall of suffering I realized this would be all I’d ever know, and that I was being swallowed whole, forever.

“You shouldn’t have brought him here.”

“Really? Wait till you see what he’s got with him. Trust me—we’re lucky I grabbed this guy before the ambulances got there.”

“I don’t care. Look at his nose. He’s still bleeding. He’s connected.
They can hear
…”

“Nope. C’mon. Check out his eyes.”

“Oh…Jesus! They’re gonna jelly if he stays hooked in much longer.”

“Yeah. I mean, he could be all the way subsumed, but I thought it was worth a shot. Besides, check this out.”

“A turtle? You brought his pet turtle. That’s really fucking helpful.”

“No, not that case. Give me a sec…Okay, look in
this
bag.”

“Is that for real?”

“Does that even matter? If it’s counterfeit we can sell it to…”

“Kill it! Let me put some earplugs on this guy.”

“Don’t worry. I’m telling you, he’s fried past the point of transmitting. He’s in their realm right now, the poor fuck. Besides, how do you know they couldn’t still hear us through the vibrations on the hairs on the back of his hand, or his skin or something? We’ve been making assumptions.”

“Can I assume you already ran a blocker?”

“Hundred fifty milligrams, right when I found him. He’s so speedy I could barely get a vein to pop. I was thinking I’d have to resort to a rectal dose right before I got a thirty-one gauge to slide in by his clavicle.”

“Rectal dose would have been a waste with him this far gone, anyways.”

“I know…if I wasn’t trying to save him then I would have felt weird grabbing all his stuff. I’m not a vulture.”

“If he dies here, though, you’ll keep his shit?”

“I mean, that’s enough money to keep us going for a
long
time.”

“And the turtle?”

“I don’t know. Penance? Always wanted a pet.”

“Sure. But how about instead of penance, we just pull this guy through? We bring him back from their side, he might not even care about that money anymore.”

“Right?”

“Right.”