Skullcrack City (32 page)

You think you're better than human only because you're less. You want to live forever and you never lived at all. Is that what keeps you up at night, destroying things you don't understand? I can't fathom it. To be honest, I'm barely trying. 

You’ve got to give in. I know how this virus works. I built the structure which surrounds your mind. If you don’t relent, I’ll bring everything down. I’ll induce an aneurysm. I’ll reach out and wrap your hands around Dara’s neck and watch her eyes bulge as she dies and the last thing she’ll believe is that you killed her.

You've hurt me. You've hurt everyone I love. That has to stop. Something good must come from this. 

You killed your mother. Your petty fantasies brought her to me. This will be all you’ve ever accomplished. You might as well have fed her the poison yourself.

Do you want to watch her die again?

No. 

Please. No. 

You're a broken machine. Stop. 

Let go. 

Not broken. Immortal. You granted me the keys and I’ll rule over you forever.

I'm not so sure about that. What did Nozomi say about the voices? "They're like a flood."

There are other voices here. A few are sick like yours, but still alive somewhere inside. All of them have a reason to hate you. 

The flood is coming. We're going to wash over you and flow through you until there's nothing left but sand and maybe, if we're lucky, we keep some of the knowledge that our shitty world saw fit to grant you. Or you disappear entirely. That's okay, too. 

You will watch her die. Again and again. She cries. She rages. She swallows the poison. She must have been so cold on that table. Where were you?

Where were you?

Stop. 

Please, stop. 

I wasn't there. 

But she loved me, and she knew I loved her. At least there's that. 

I'm opening all the doors. 

The other doors in our mind burst, thoughts spilling loose like cold black water from a broken dam.

We are the deluge. We are the undertow. We are watching a fire killing a man hoping to heal wishing there was anything else we could do with our life. We are swimming we are selling our self in tiny pieces called time we are thinking that maybe we’ll quit but the knife always feels right. We are hoping that someone will notice us, someone will lie well enough to make us happy.

We are inside of your ears your mouth your nose your lungs. You cannot stop us.

We picture you as a man with eight arms and we shackle each appendage to a concrete floor beneath the sea of us.

You are Dr. Tikoshi.

We are closing the door. We remember words which saved us once. Maybe they will again.

BY SMOKE FROM LIPS BY LIGHT FROM BLOOD BY THOUGHT FROM THOUGHT ALONE WE CLOSE THIS GATE AS STONE.

The time of broken machines is over.

We live here now.

The blue curtain beneath my body was stained purple with fresh blood. Dara held a cool, damp washcloth to my forehead. Her other hand held a syringe, its needle still buried in my left shoulder.

She’d used the last of our perphenadol to bring me to the surface.

“Were you in their realm?”

“No.”

“But your nose was bleeding. I barely got it to stop. And you were mumbling one of our prayers.”

“It was…we had to hold him…there was a flood…”

“It’s hard to explain?”

Somebody was going to have to strip Ms. A.’s Understatement of the Year award and give it to Dara. I checked the alarm clock on the bed stand. I’d been out for eight hours. Had she been with me that whole time? She drew the spent syringe from my arm.

“I made coffee. Would you like some?” She wanted to pull me from my orbit with the gravity of common, comfortable things.

“Sure. Little bit of cream, please.”

She brought it over and set it on the bed stand and sat down in a plush hotel chair. She said nothing, waiting for me to find my way. I watched her sip her coffee, steam curling from the cup and drifting across yellow lamplight. After all I’d seen, the beauty of her kind, patient face put a dull ache in the center of my chest.

She stood after a few minutes and ran a dermal thermometer across my forehead. “Temp’s down two degrees. I think the z-pack is kicking in.”

“That was our last perphenadol?”

“Yes. For now.”

“I need to rest, then. Just for a few hours, before the voices come back.”

“The voices don’t have to come back. We can find more blocker. I can reach out to other missions.”

“No. I think I need the voices to return. We’re all that’s holding him back, for now. I don’t know if he could eventually find his way past the effect of the drug. I don’t know how anything works anymore.”

“What did…”

“I can’t tell you right now. I will, but…I can’t. I need none of this to be real, for an hour or two. Please.” I couldn’t talk about what had happened to my mom. That would make it true.

“Okay. Maybe you’re right. I’m about to pass out anyway.” She placed a dry hand towel over the puddled blood by my head. “Can you scoot over?”

I could. I tried to pretend I didn’t feel the weight of the pack on my back or the tugging at the base of my skull.

Then Dara turned off the light by the bed stand and stripped off her clothes, and I was about to say something, probably the wrong thing, until I saw the look on her face.

She said, “Be here for a moment, okay? Only here. Only now.”

She crawled in next to me and turned her back to me and brought my left hand to her breast, then her mouth. I felt her reach back with her other hand to unbutton my pants and then she was pulling roughly on me and opening herself and putting me inside of her. She brought my left hand down between her legs and I could feel myself in her and she said, “Hold me open and push down hard with your hand,” and then her left hand joined mine and her fingers found a rhythm and she twisted and pushed back and forced me deeper and her thighs tightened over our hands again and again until she arched and the sweat from the back of her neck brushed across my lips and she was laughing like she’d lost her goddamned mind and it was the best thing I’d ever heard in my life, and nothing was real for an hour or two and we fell into sleep like intertwined hands, confused as to which was the other.

I woke to the smell of burning coffee, the remnants of the last pot gone black on the warmer. I stretched my arms and the movement roused Dara. She opened her eyes, looked at my face, and screamed, backing across the bed.

“No. No. No. Shit.”

I’d seen one night stand regret before, but this was something else. She was afraid.

“Your right eye.”

I stood, found my equilibrium, and approached a mirror. Dara walked up behind me.

“Are you sure you didn’t go to the realm?”

“I’m positive but maybe we should quit talking about it.” I moved closer and saw burst blood vessels in profusion across the surface of my eye. Not pretty, but probably just a side effect of the whole “being eaten/undergoing invasive surgery/intra-brain battle with a war criminal’s consciousness” kind of week I’d had. “It’s not jellied, but it’s pretty fucked up. I think my brain swelling might have caused some issues. I can still see though.”

But Dara was already looking off in the distance, distracted. I watched a sheen of sweat pop on her skin. Her cheeks flushed red.

“Do you think that maybe, if you fell into the realm, all the other minds you’re connected with would start transmitting too?”

“I’m not sure of anything anymore, but I can imagine that happening. Sure.”

“Oh, god.” Dara ran over to her clothes piled on the floor and grabbed the phone Ms. A. had given her for mission-only messaging. She showed me the screen: “CD indicating Vakhtang uppers v excited about acquisition in yr territory. Rumors say bio-weapon. L.A. closing down ops, sending agents back for assist.”

“Not good. But we got to Dr. Tikoshi before them, and I’m sure he encrypted all of his research. Delta probably set fail-safes for the destruction of his labs.”

“Yeah, I hope so. But what if they got Akatsuki?”

It was my turn to sweat. I knew too much.

“It might be that. It might be something else. Either way, we need to get in your car right fucking now.”

I brought Dara up to speed on the way back into the city, running down Dr. Tikoshi’s almost incomprehensible capacity for bugfuckery. She seemed to know better than to ask about my mom. Whether that was a kindness, or necessity trumping mourning, I wasn’t sure.

We ran end-of-the-world extrapolations:

1. Akatsuki had returned from his trip to the Delta MedWorks corporate HQ with nothing to show for the jaunt aside from a few assholes’ memories added to his roster. Maybe he found Dr. T.’s lab massacre and was hunting for us, vowing revenge. Somehow, that was actually the best-case scenario. On the flipside, maybe he returned to town and found himself captured by members of the Vakhtang. In which case, they were now in possession of a creature which could easily consolidate the human consciousness which they sought to control and attune to their universe-ending wolf god. And whether they knew it or not, Akatsuki was designed with longevity in mind, and could reproduce via viral transmission using some kind of snot tube ovipositor.

2. Robbie Dawn had a show in a few days, and the way I saw it, he was now in possession of a bioweapon of his own. I thought about the children who’d been found skinned on the farm in Canada, and how the rumors pointed to Hex distro networks. I remembered Buddy’s description of falling backwards through space when he heard the drums in person.
Bobby was running with the wolves
. Once I threw in Dr. T.’s prior Vakhtang employment and “materials used” and the cryptic notes and inexplicable extortion photo, it all added up: the Vakhtang were grooming Robbie Dawn as some kind of death drum Pied Piper, using tonal weapons and bad mojo to slowly drag a global fan base into alignment with their poorly-chosen point of worship.

3. Delta MedWorks and the bank had big plans, multi-national partners in dominance, and a total willingness to kill for the god who kept them in yachts and beach houses in the Seychelles. Maybe they had Akatsuki and Tikoshi’s research and were already working on a way to put his poison into our brains.

4. Or, we guessed, the Earth’s final shitshow might just be a fun combination of All of the Above.

Stop number one: Leon Spasky. Guns.

Dara copped a long range rifle, but none of the other weapons she wanted.

“Sorry, beautiful. My whole supply’s been exhausted in the last two days. Heat like this, makes me think I might head to France for a while.”

“Vakhtang buying everything up?”

“You know I can’t say. Business is business. But if I was you, I might not make this the last gun you buy today.”

Stop number two: Claire DuBois’ office. Information.

Dara copped nothing. Claire—the “CD” from her text who had first gotten the info out—was either buried so deep in her Vakhtang undercover that she couldn’t communicate, or she was buried so deep she couldn’t breathe.

Stop number three: Brubaker Tropical Fish and Aquarium Supply. Feeder fish.

The perphenadol was wearing off. The voices were surfacing. The first to poke his head from the ether was Deckard. I was afraid to close the door to his hallway. What if he was one of the voices keeping Tikoshi under the surface? I felt like I’d formed a pact with the ten minds who now shared real estate with my own consciousness.

Fish please. Fish please. No sun here. Fish please
.
FISH!

Deck’s demands were incessant, and I found they stirred my hunger. What kind of two-way street were we building?

Dara barely tolerated the stop, since I had to send her in. Even if I was in training for
The League of Zeroes
, I looked too rough to pull off casual pet shop business. And who knew if I could still be recognized from the employee photo they’d been running for weeks on the news?

Dara jumped back into the car with a plastic bag filled with water and three inch-long goldfish. “So how does this work?”

“I don’t know. I wish I could connect to Tikoshi’s knowledge without the rest of him coming to the party. I think I’ll get sick if I put them in the pack. I’m not sure that thing actually digests or produces waste. So I guess it’s bottoms up for me.”