Skullcrack City (17 page)

Initially I wanted to grab Ms. A. and shake her and say, “I know. I get it. You guys are living in bizarre, cryptic world of opposing mystical forces and everything I believed has been a lie, but please, can we focus on the problem at hand without any more asides reminding me of how little I know.” But then I realized I was just kind of embarrassed about not having killed the thing which attacked me. I wanted Dara to think of me as a capable, “Can Totally Kill An Enemy With A Knife To The Neck” kind of guy. The new truth—I dumb luck pig stuck the thing hard enough to allow me to run away—played a lot less macho. And the fact that it went on to slaughter a batch of feeble hospital patients was beyond insult to injury.

It was damning.

Could I have stopped that from happening? Could I have saved those poor people?

“I can see this is disturbing you. But you are neither responsible for this thing’s existence or its actions. All you can be responsible for is what happens next. In order to stop this we need to know why these things have been created, and why the Vakhtang were so intrigued by Delta MedWorks and Dr. Tikoshi that they kept you alive and gave you access to so much of the dark signal.”

Dara spoke. “The quantity of Hex we found in your bag was greater an amount than even Hex dealers are allowed to carry. With that level of dosage provided, we suspect they were periodically operating you as a mimic. Did you have frequent nosebleeds, or extended black-out periods during which you still appeared to have done research?”

I got the inference—my own paranoid research was of such scattershot quality that every once in a while the Vakhtang had to hijack my consciousness to get some real work done.

“That happened pretty much every day, for weeks.”

“If you were on that level of dosage, you could have been subsumed into their realm at any time. The fact that they kept you alive and working means your investigation was of great interest. They only abandoned you once it appeared that your physical vessel had been wrecked.”

Ms. A. jumped in. “Or maybe they believed, as we do, that the creature you described was eating people’s brains for purposes other than nutrition.”

All of those voices coming out of the thing’s massive mouth.

We will know the truth once you have joined us. There’s room now.

I’d barely had time to process that night, to even believe it had really happened.

“So maybe they shut down my body in the hopes that the thing would survive, come back, and get a second chance at cracking my skull?”

Dara and Ms. A. nodded, both watching my face to see how a man might respond to the news that his brain was offered up as bait.

I pictured my body collapsed in the alley, my mind raw meat hiding the egg of some parasitic dark force hoping to be consumed by a massive mutant man-gorilla. I saw my masticated gray matter sliding down a gullet, merging with whatever nasty network of nerves would allow a man’s consciousness to be stolen within the belly of a beast.

In retrospect, I should have understood that this was exactly what Ms. A. wanted me to see.

At the time, all I could feel were waves of violation, and in their passing, rage. The kind of anger which good leaders know well enough to harness.

Ms. A. said, “The forces which compel the Vakhtang are most concerned with access to human consciousness. Something in our minds—maybe some subatomic vestige of their darkness which slipped into our universe eons ago—vibrates at the exact frequency which allows them access to our world. Their goal, since the dawn of our existence, has been to attune enough human minds to their signal to allow our world to be pulled into theirs.

“They have used many tools to access our minds throughout history—religions, rituals, hive dynamics, and most recently, pharmaceuticals.”

“And you think they want this creature as some kind of new tool?”

“Either that, or they view it as competition.”

“Hearts and minds, huh?”

“Just minds.”

“Those motherfuckers.”

“Please calm down.”

And Ms. A. must have known that the best way to keep a person angry is to tell them to calm down.

“No. We’ve got to find some way to stop this.”

“I agree. What would you suggest?”

“You’ve got to have some kind of crack team, right? People trained like Dara who could launch a raid on Dr. Tikoshi’s office.”

“Would you be surprised to hear that Tikoshi Maxillofacial Surgery has been closed for the last two months? His voice mail says he’s in the Bahamas. We hope otherwise. And no, we don’t have a special team dedicated to situations like this. Tim and Dara’s primary mission was rescue, reducing the number of minds held by the dark signal. Our other two local operatives are currently on loan to Los Angeles, investigating a new kind of film projector which causes us great concern. I’m afraid that Dara is our only resource right now.”

Dara looked down and sighed. Missing Tim? Something else? I was only beginning to understand her existence in this pressure cooker.

I said, “She shouldn’t have to face this alone.” Dara’s head lifted in my periphery. “I know a lot about this case, or whatever it is. I’m joining your mission.”

“Very good. Very good.”

“Is there some kind of ritual I need to go through, or a secret training camp or something?”

“No, Mr. Doyle. I only need you to answer a question.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Do you pledge to give all you have, including your life, to defend our world from the scourge of the Vakhtang?”

I thought, “What life?”

I said, “Sure.”

And Ms. A. was hugging me again, and Dara placed her hand on the center of my back, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel a big, crazy smile spread across my face.

Before Dara and I hit the streets, I asked Ms. A. if she could do four things:

1. Acquire my clothes—The feeling of being fully dressed in my own attire was almost foreign at first, and my hoodie and thick denim jeans felt like combination cloak/armor. I’d really always taken clothing for granted.

2. Remove the bugs—The scarabs on my chest appeared to be well and fully dead. Ms. A. swept her hand over my chest. The beetles unclenched their jaws and fell to the floor. My heart fluttered and then resumed its regularly scheduled beat. I filed the whole experience under the tab “Magic Shit I Must Compartmentalize and Ignore So I Can Keep Functioning.”

3. Feed my turtle while we were out—It was tough to tell if Deck had lost weight, but I imagined this must all have been very stressful for him, and I wasn’t sure he’d been properly tended. I made sure his case had fresh water and I promised him I’d grab him a fat batch of feeder worms at the next opportunity. I almost picked him up to kiss his shell, but Dara was watching.

4. Offer sanctuary to my mother—I told Ms. A. that I would make contact with my mother while we were out, and she swore to ready a safe room near the entrance to their compound where things were more homey and less underground jail-y.

And because my brain believed in nothing so much as deceiving itself, I emerged onto the streets of my city feeling like things, in whatever weird way, were finally looking up.

Dara said she thought she knew someone—a low level Vakhtang Hex dealer named Toro—who could help us find Dr. Tikoshi.

She had a busted-up blue sedan parked three blocks from the compound. I wondered whether the massive dents and whole body scratches were an artifice or relics of past conflicts, but decided it was cooler to not ask. I was doing a good job playing detached until I hopped in and Dara told me to reach under the seat.

The pistol felt cold and heavy in my hands as I pulled it loose from a mounted holster beneath the bucket seat.

Dara said, “You have any experience with those?”

“No.”

“That’s right—you’re more of a pepper spray kind of guy.” She smiled.

I tried to smile back, but when someone puts a gun in your hands, whatever you’ve just agreed to do gains a little more gravity.

“Safety’s on the side there. I recommend you leave that on until we get to Toro’s place. At that point, I’d definitely suggest you turn it off.”

Toro’s place was outside the city in a commuter burb called Hilston Heights. We parked a block from his house and got out. I knew the streetlights were rigged and the drones were on their circuit, but I always felt less watched in the outskirts: the sound of crickets at early dusk, the smell of barbecue and fresh cut grass (for those who could afford to pay the water premiums). It was deceptive.

Dara handed me a face mask with a plastic strap on the back. Every inch of the face was beige and polygon-warbled.

I knew about these from our bank’s security bulletins—the masks were the last volley against facial recognition technology, but you had to have a 3D printer to make them, and those had been outlawed long ago.

“They didn’t get your printer with the identichip overrides?”

“No,” said Dara, “they did, and we turned the husk over to the government. But not before we 3D printed our own knockoff printer. It doesn’t work as well, but these masks turned out great. I hope.”

“Cool. What’s the plan here?”

“Follow me. And Doyle?”

“Yeah.”

“Safety off now. Aim at his chest, but don’t pull the trigger unless it’s the only choice.”

I flipped the switch and looked at the pistol in my hand, knowing that the device was now officially set to Kill. A layer of slick sweat caused my mask to slip around on my face. I focused on Dara. Even in this situation, the way she moved was beautiful. She crossed the street with confidence. I moved behind her in what could only be called a scamper.

She ran around to the side of the house and quietly lifted the black metal latch on a gate to the backyard. I edged along with the gun pointed up, doing my best to remember how the fake police approached in movies. I was supposed to clear corners, right? Was I supposed to pull the trigger, or squeeze? Should I keep my elbows bent? The mask was blocking my view, giving me tunnel vision. Dara never stopped moving.

I rushed into the backyard with her, but she started running without warning, great gazelle leaps toward something I couldn’t see, and then I heard a shot and felt wood shards pelt the right side of my face and I decided the best idea was to hit the fucking deck.

The grass was so green. Like they’d spray-painted it. The soil smelled fresh and wet.

My cheek was definitely bleeding. You can tell when it’s blood moving across your skin because of the warmth.

“Doyle!”

I popped up and ran toward the voice. My mask was making it hard to tell where she was, but I heard a man say, “Goddamn, bitch! Easy, easy…” and then they were in my view.

At first it was really confusing, because the man had horns and I believed Dara had caught the devil, that she had his arm pinned behind his body at an angle that had to be just short of snapping the thing. Then I reached up under my mask and wiped away the blood in my right eye and that’s when I realized the devil was wearing sandals and Bermuda shorts and sporting a much bigger beer belly than any metaphysical being would bother to have.

“Doyle! Coverage!”

She pushed Toro’s body out further from hers but maintained the cruel angle of his arm between them. I pointed my gun at the man’s torso and tried to stabilize my shakes so the guy wouldn’t pick up the amateur hour vibes I must have been radiating.

Toro cringed. “Alright, cyclops. You got my gun. Your man’s got me covered. Think you can ease up on that arm now?”

Dara pulled down on his wrist and he yelped at the shock. She pushed his body toward a red metal barbecue grill near the fence.

“Steaks, Toro? Doesn’t that border on cannibalism?”

And then I realized I’d seen this man before, during the first season of
The League of Zeroes
, and back then he was known as The Bully. His modification scheme wasn’t that inventive—a bovine imitation setup with the bull ring in the nose, horn implants in the forehead, bull tattoos galore, and a synthetic tail implant. He was voted out of the Big Top early in his season. If I remembered right, he was an asshole then. Apparently that wasn’t an act.

Dara shifted closer to the barbecue and used her free hand to lift his tongs from the side of the cooker and bury them deep in the smoking coals.

Toro started to sweat. “You think this is the first time someone’s tried to home vade me? C’mon, girl, I’m no dummy. Whatever you’re looking for, it ain’t here. You roll out now, maybe I don’t have security gridtrack you. They’re probably on their way for a ‘shots fired’ call anyway.”

“I don’t want your poison, and I don’t want your money.”

“Shoot, girl. You want an autograph? I don’t even charge for that.”

She pushed him closer to the grill. The treasure trail hair under his belly button curled away from the heat of the fire. Another inch and the suburban air would fill with the smell of Toro’s sizzling yellow belly fat.

“Okay, okay. I’m listening.”

“You answer straight the first time. I know how you make your money now that you’re off the freak circuit. So does the Kept Squad. Any more bullshit and we rope you up and drop you on the wrong part of 45
^th
. I heard they’re taking dealers’ brains now.”