The Blue Blazes (11 page)

The joint is empty. Except for Mr Smiley, sitting in the middle of the room at a two-top table. Tiny teacup to his left, with a small purple clay teapot just behind it.

This, then, is Mr Smiley:

Were Mookie here Blind, he’d see an Asian man of indiscriminate national origin – long face, big smile, hair black and oily like it’s been shellacked to his scalp, like it’s slick plastic snapped to the head of a LEGO figure.

What he sees instead – what the Blue Blazes
show
him – is a man whose face is a nearly perfect mix of
serpent
and
human
. The head is human-shaped but balanced on a too-long neck, the nose is just a pair of fleshy slits, the eyes are wide coppery diamonds whose irises shift and warp like you’re staring through a child’s kaleidoscope. The mouth – still smiling, for he is always oh-so-very
happy
– ill-conceals not just a pair of curved fangs, but rather a whole maw of them. A wet pink tongue – not forked, but thin and prehensile – slides over them like a slug over piano keys.

Mr Smiley’s arms are not arms, but snake-like protrusions, tentacular and ever-undulating. The fingers are smaller versions of the arms, like little baby garter snakes attached to the tail of each substantial python.

“And here I thought we were closed,” Smiley says, grinning.

“Gorth let me make a late appointment.”

A twinkling fang-laden smile. “Then sit.”

Mookie pulls a chair, reverses it, sits with his battleship chest against the back.

“What can I do for you, Mr Pearl?”

“I need information.”

The smile doesn’t leave, but Smiley’s eyes flash irritation. “Yes. Obviously.”

“I need to know where my–” He’s about to say
daughter
, but he catches himself. The Blazes make him restless. Foolish. Like he’s tap-dancing on the edge of the abyss. These people don’t know Nora is his daughter. Nobody does. Nobody but Werth. “Where my
friend
Persephone is.”

“Persephone. Persephone.” He doesn’t blink. He just stares at Mookie as he says the name again and again. “No. I don’t think I know that one.”

Mookie pulls his wallet. He knows how this game goes.

But Smiley stays his hand. An almost imperceptible shake of his head. “No.”

“No?”

“Not this time.”

“Well. What, then?”

“I want information.”

“Like I got anything you don’t already know?”

“Your Boss is weak.”

Mookie feels heat rising off the back of his neck. “He’s got it all together.”

“Your Boss is
sick
.”

Figures. Of course he knows.

“Don’t know what you mean. That’s a nasty rumor going around.”

“It’s not. And you know it’s not. Metastatic lung cancer.” The snake fingers flick and undulate. An expression of excitement? Happiness? “I want to know more about that. I want to know where he’s vulnerable. I want to know where the chinks in his armor lie.” Smiley laughs. “I always wondered: is that racist? Chinks in armor?”

Mookie wipes away sweat. Sneers. “I can’t answer any of that.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Ask me something else. Anything else.”

“No.” So petulant. And giddy at the same time.

Mookie stands. Knocks the chair over with a clatter.

“We’re done here,” he says.

Smiley baits him. “Don’t you want to know how I know? About the cancer?”

Mookie’s answer is a hard stare. His eyes like two nails trying to pin Smiley to the wall.

“Besides it being my job to know things,” Mr Smiley says. “Not just my job, actually. But my pleasure, my absolute and unswerving pleasure. I like to categorize the little chips and shards of information – the sweet, sweet secrets – that come in here and, quite honestly, most are worthless. Some have a very narrow edge: a prison shiv meant only for another person, a secret useless to most but powerful to a select few. Other secrets are very powerful, indeed. A hand swept across a table, knocking everything upon it to the floor below. Your Boss’s cancer is just such a secret. It’s a storm that can change a coastline. An earthquake that alters the topography, a bomb that–”

“Just get to it.”

“Ah. Impatient. I see that you’re running ragged – look at those pupils! Fat like black flies. Blazing hard tonight, are we? Yes. That secret about your Boss? It was Persephone who told it to me.”

Mookie’s gut twists.

“Funny thing is, Mr Pearl, that secret truly is a big one, but it comes part and parcel with one of those very personal secrets. A piece of information that has a fingerprint pressed into its clay. It’s a secret meant for you.”

The world feels hot and cold. Mookie’s hands form into fists so hard it’s like having a pair of cinderblocks at the end of his arms.

He knows where this is going.

“Persephone is your daughter. Eleanor Pearl. And very few people know that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking ab–”

“Deny it all you’d like. But here comes the time where we play a lovely little game, a game called
Test Your Loyalty
. Because now you can either tell me the information I seek – and together we can explore how to undo the empire your Boss has built for the last thirty years – or I can share with that very Boss that it was
your daughter
who killed
his grandson
. How does that–”

Smiley doesn’t get the chance to finish.

Mookie moves fast. Flips the table up into the Naga’s face. Smiley catches the table with his writhing snake arms, flings it aside–

It’s all Mookie needs. That moment of disorientation. Soon as the table clears, he drives a fist into the Snakeface’s elongated neck, collapsing the throat. Suddenly Smiley is gasping a gassy squeak, trying to catch air.

Mookie grabs the neck.

Then runs at full speed to the back of the teahouse.

Wham
. He slams Mr Smiley into the back wall. Snakefaces have no bones, they’re just a series of tendons and muscles and cartilaginous gel that push and pull off one another. But the Naga keens in pain and hisses just the same.

Snake arms and legs wrap around Mookie. It’s like trying to wrestle an angry squid. Serpentine tentacles wind around his wrists. His midsection. His throat.

Hate glows in Smiley’s eyes. His smile now burned to ash. The Snakefaces flashes his fangs – the curved teeth growing out of blistery poison sacs lining the creature’s grub-white gums, dripping poison the color of dying violets.

Mookie’s on a fast-moving car speeding toward a broken bridge. A little voice in the back of his mind knows this is a bad move – you don’t muscle someone like Smiley. He knows too much. And to kill him? That has consequences. Not the least of which is he’s under the paid protection of the Boss – and Smiley pays in
big
.

And yet here Mookie is, ready to crush his windpipe. The fire of the Blazes eating up his insides like they’re just twigs and newspaper.

“Tell me where she is,” Mookie growls through gritted teeth. “
Where is Nora
?”

“
Daddy is mad-dy
,” Smiley gurgles.

A baring of those fangs. Jaw snapping, teeth clacking.

It’s then Mookie sees–

The fangs oozing dark fluid. Each clack milks more from the glands–

Mookie tilts his head to the right just as the Naga spits a jet of venom.

It misses. Hits a table behind them.
Squit
.

Mookie punches him in the mouth. Fangs break. A stupid move. If those fangs cut his hands, if the venom got into his bloodstream…

He finds he doesn’t care. A dangerous place to be, but fuck it. All he does is ask the question again:

“Where is Nora?”

The tentacles tighten around him. Now it’s not about trying to hurt Mookie – he’s too jacked up for them to get much purchase, and despite Smiley’s subterranean lineage, this Naga is not a trained assassin. Just a broker for information, not a fighter. Now it’s about trying to get away – he’s trying to wrench himself free, trying to fling himself to the far corners of the room where he’ll slither out through some hidey-hole (being boneless can really have its advantages).

But Mookie isn’t giving quarter. He just slams Smiley back into the wall.

“Where.”

Slam
.

“Is.”

Slam!
 

“Nora?”

SLAM
.

Smiley spills. “She’s–”
Hiss.
“Holed up with the Get-Em-Girls.”

“I know that part.”
Slam
.

“Not up top! They have an enclave. Down below. Connected to a warehouse in Hell’s Kitchen–”

The floor shakes. The whole teahouse shudders.

The fist comes down on the back of Mookie’s head like a boulder toppling off a mountain peak. Appropriate, since the fist is made of rock.

A garden of pain blooms behind his eyes.

Mookie lets go of Smiley. The Snakeface thuds against the floor, wheezing–

And, sure enough, the Naga flings himself into the rafters of the room, swinging from beam to beam, clinging to each like an octopus in a tree–

Mookie turns, narrowly dodges another fist coming in from Gorth, the golem.

That granite fist craters a hole in the teahouse wall.

A kick follows fast after. Mookie ducks it, gets under the foot, grabs the craggy heel. Then he gives it the old heave-ho. Gorth cries out as the massive rock-body turns a teahouse table into long splinters.

Mookie knows that punching Gorth isn’t going to do him any good. Hit a Trogbody and all you get for your trouble is a hand that’s no longer a fist and is now a floppy skin-sack holding shattered bone-nuggets. As the golem struggles to stand, Mookie reaches into his satchel, and catches the sheathed cleaver as it tumbles out.

He utters a silent “thank you” to Karyn, then frees the blade from its sheath.

Gorth lurches to his feet. Quartz eyes gleaming red – a lava furnace of anger behind those crystal pockets.

Mookie spins the cleaver so it’s the flat back of the blade facing forward.

The golem lunges.

Mookie brings the back of the cleaver down hard on Gorth’s skull.

Sounds like a gunshot. The head cracks – a fissure split from forehead to skull peak, a mini canyon formed along the ridge of his uneven stone skull. From within the rift, a faint magma glow. Gorth makes a moan like a distant foghorn; then he hits the ground, utterly and eerily still.

The floorboards lie cracked and buckled beneath him.

The golem’s head sizzles. Steam rises.

Mookie kneels down, pats Gorth on the shoulder. The golem will heal up eventually – the poor lunkhead will need to spend some time back down in the dark, patching himself up. But for now, he’s out of commission. And Mookie, chest heaving, body throbbing, nerves jumping like sparking wires, doesn’t see the Snakeface anywhere. The slippery sonofabitch must have gone up into a duct or something.

No more time to waste here.

He needs to find the Get-Em-Girls. He needs to find Nora.

 

11

 

The horror of the half-and-half is unparalleled. Consider it: you are a child with only one human parent. Your other parent is no parent at all, merely a contributor of darkly squirming seed, a mote of ill magic spawned in the cracks and crevices of the Great Below. It happens however it happens: a man stumbles into a storm drain or rocky grotto, is seduced by gobbos who to him look like lovely lasses with their bosoms bared. Or shadows creep up from the fraught fissures and take a woman in her bed – either by the lie of a human façade or by malevolent force. The result is always the same: a pregnancy. If it is the monster that is full with child, then that child will most likely be born down in the dark, and its humanity will forever be a liability. At its best, gobbos sometimes use such hybrid children as mules. At the worst, they are sacrifices to the deepest gods or test subjects for some strange new weapon. If it is a human mother whose belly has grown round with the dread energies of the Underworld, then she will most surely perish during birth; I’ve not yet heard of one who survived. The child is ever part human, yes – in all the weakest ways. And also part monster, in all the strangest ways. The design of the monstrous half cannot be predicted as it follows no discernible pattern nor does it seem related to the inhuman parentage. I’ve seen and heard tell of half-and-halfs who look like minotaurs or mermaids, or who have the flesh of reptiles or the insect limbs of pale cave crickets. One thing can be sure: they are embraced by neither world but possess the power and frailty of each. Our world sees them as human, but a human that doesn’t quite seem right. The world below sees them as human, too – a human that will never belong. It is a horror, to be sure, but in my most sleepless nights I wonder if I would’ve been better born among them. I feel as a man between worlds.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

Werth’s phone rings. He fishes for it in his pocket, tilts it up–

It’s Mookie.

“Mook,” Werth says, answering.

“Where you at?” Mookie asks.

“Out.” He clears his throat. “And about.”

“I got a line on Nora.”

“Good. Whatcha got?”

“She’s with the Get-Em-Girls.”

Werth sniffs. “You don’t say.”

“Yeah. They got a little place carved out of the Great Below. It’s a warehouse in Hell’s Kitchen. I think I know the place. Couple blocks from Port Authority. I think the place is a gateway to the Deep Downstairs.” Upstairs, downstairs. This world, that world. Earth, and Hell. Werth doesn’t like that place. He likes it up here.

“And you think Nora’s with them,” Werth says.

“I talked to Smiley. He’d know.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there.”

“How close are you?” Mookie asks.

“I’m uhh, a ways away yet.”

“I’m in Chinatown. Meet there?”

“See you inside of an hour – 46th and 10th.”

Werth punches the end call button.

Then he looks up at the warehouse where the Girls are hiding Nora Pearl. He reaches in the trunk of his 1988 Cadillac Seville, pulls a Winchester Super X 12 gauge from inside. Thumbs five shells into the gun’s undercarriage, saving the sixth for the chamber.

He slides the action forward, thumbs the safety off, and heads toward the warehouse door. It’s a vertical warehouse – tall, narrow, brick the color of dried blood. Looks like an old fire station.

Door’s got a cage over it. Locked with a chain-and-padlock.

If Mookie were here, Werth might be able to ask the big lug to just punch it into smelt. Or bite through it like a circus performer. But this isn’t a job Mookie needs to be around for. It’s 4am, nobody’s really up yet, and it’s the same city it always was where something bad happens and nobody calls the cops…

Werth stands back. Levels the gun.

Choom
.

The lock blasts open.

The cage grate squeaks open.

Werth tries the door behind it. Unlocked. Good.

Into darkness, then. He can make out shapes. A desk to his right. Ahead, narrow shelves with narrower aisles. They look empty, but it’s hard to tell. He thinks to pull out the little flashlight he’s got in his pocket, but all a flashlight does in a situation like this is give someone something to shoot at.

Instead, he creeps. Let’s his eyes adjust. Creeping doesn’t come naturally for him. He’s got a limp and, to those who can see them, a pair of cracked goat hooves that would easily fit a set of Clydesdale horseshoes. Even if someone were looking at him blind, they’d still
hear
the way he clomps around like a clumsy donkey.

So, creeping takes extra effort. It’s almost comical, he figures – raise one leg up, bent at the knee, gentle fall. Like Elmer Fudd sneaking up on that asshole rabbit.

He manages.

And his eyes adjust.

He keeps his finger on the shotgun trigger. Just in case.

He does a serpentine. Down one aisle. Up another. Sees now that the stacks are metal frames with splintery plywood shelves. And, like he figured, nothing on them but cobwebs and little herds of tumbling dustballs.

Finally, he makes the whole circuit.

Nothing. And no one.

Certainly no floor blown out. No way to the deep downstairs.

They’re gone. Those squirrelly bitches up and left. They knew they were on the radar, and so they set up a dummy location for just such a time like this. Confirms doubly that Nora isn’t operating alone; they’re with her on this. With her lock, stock, and barrel.

And suddenly it makes sense. The front door is padlocked. On the outside. Nobody goes out that way. Comes in, maybe. But never goes out. This is just a ruse. A front.

Shitfuck.

He’s not going to get to kill Nora Pearl today. And that, make no mistake, is what he’s here to do: kill that little bitch. She tweaked Mookie’s head last year, led him around by his nose until he cleaned out that big nest of goblins, then took over a little slice of the Blue trade. She’s been moving and shaking ever since, and now to hear that she killed Casimir which means she’s probably gunning for the Boss, well…

Oh, and then there’s that other thing –
she shot Werth in the fucking hip
. He owes her for the limp. He owes her ten times what he got in pain.

So to lose the chance to pop her today…

Whoa, hold up. What’s this?

Werth sees something. Just a shape of an image on the back brick wall.

Flashlight time. He pops the flashlight, turns it on, screws it between his lips like a fat cigar, and walks forward.

Well, looky-looky.

It’s their mark. Their sigil. Painted on the wall like graffiti.

A girl’s hand. Thorn tat on the wrist.

The hand holds an upside-down roller skate like it’s a gun. The skate is Pepto pink. The wheels are robin’s egg blue. Their gang colors.

Inked on the side of the skate: GEG.

Get-Em-Girls.

They use this sign to mark their territory. Which encompasses parts of Hell’s Kitchen – oh, pardon,
Mid-Clinton-West-Town-Bullshitland
or whatever they’re calling it now – and the northernmost blocks of Chelsea. That means this is their place. Or was, at least.

Werth runs his hands over the mark.

The floor judders beneath him. Just a faint tremor.

He starts to wonder what that means, but doesn’t need to wonder long.

Because the floor drops out from under him, and he plummets into darkness.

 

The flashlight spins in the air. Drunken strobe.

Werth sees he’s falling down a cylindrical shaft.

Sees more red brick.

And a ladder, too – a metal ladder bolted in. He reaches for it – the gun falling from his hands – and he starts to catch a cold rung, but he’s falling too hard, too fast. His wrist twists. He yelps in pain. His body bounces off the shaft wall. His head hits the ladder –
gunggggg
– and stars explode behind his eyes.

Then the ladder is gone.

So too is the brick.

His hooves hit rocky ground. Pain shoots up into his hip.

That old wound reawakens like a sleeping dragon with a forge-hot sword shoved up its nethers. It’s lightning and salt, fire and spear. Werth drops, rolls onto his side.

He whimpers.

He
hates
that he whimpers.

His eyes adjust. It doesn’t take long.

It’s lit down here. With torches bolted to rocky walls. And a shitload of candles.

Mattresses on the floor. Couple wooden barrels and oil drums – some holding candles, others turned into tables. Posters on the wall: old movie advertisements.
Scarface
.
Taxi Driver
.
Zardoz
, of all things. On the black, wet walls are pink and blue spray paint. GEG. Graffiti images of skates. Some held like guns, as in their mark. Others upright, with blue flame belching out of the top.

Not far away is the shotgun.

Werth reaches for it.

An oxblood Doc Marten stomps down on it. And pulls it away.

Shadows encircle and close in.

Here comes the girl gang.

Faux 1950s punk abounds. Hairnets and garter belts. Polka dots and cherry lips. A whiff of Rosie the Riveter meets the girls from
Grease,
with a heavy vibe of neo-future dystopian Bettie Page.

A dozen of them close in. Like wolves descending upon a fallen goat.

One steps out past the gang line. Ravensblack hair with a shock of electric blue bangs. Black button down shirt and jeans so tight they may be spray-painted on. Hanging at one side, off the girl’s neon blue belt, is a pair of nuclear pink skates. Hanging at the other side is what looks to be a Bowie knife held fast in its sheath.

She’s a kid to him – he’s got twenty years on her at least – but older than most of the girls here.

Werth knows her. Or, knows of her.

She’s the head of the Get-Em-Girls. Has been for damn near a decade. Kelly McClure is her name.

But she goes by “Skelly”.

As evidenced by the white skeleton stitched into the thighs of her jeans.

And the ink-black skulls stitched into the sides of her hot pink skates.

And the silver skull – mouth open in horror – that tops the Bowie knife’s hilt.

She rests her hand on that silver skull just now. Blue nails clicking against it.

“What’s buzzin’, cousin?” Her voice is a long slow pull of whiskey. Not the gargling glass cheap shit, but smooth stuff. An expensive pour that goes down like warm butter. “You’re Werth. I got that right?”

“Yeah, that’s–” He winces. Even talking sends jags of pain into his hip. “Yeah.”

Skelly looks to another girl: a real dieselpunk sweetie, cherub cheeks and thick hips and a tat of a big-ass fire-wreathed wrench on her one bicep. “Lulu, gimme the gun.”

The other girl tosses Skelly a gun.
His
gun. The shotgun.

Skelly looks the gun up and down. Then she racks the pump – the shell currently in the chamber flips out onto the hard rocky ground.

She does it five more times. Shells bouncing on stone. Until none are left.

Then she hands the gun back to Lulu.

“We don’t like guns,” she says.

“I know.”

“You brought a gun into our home.”

“And what a nice home.”

“It does us all right.”

“I gotta ask, though. You ladies piss in a communal bucket? What do you do with your tampons? Just fling them into the corner? If you’re all on the same cycle–”

She steps forward, puts her boot on his hip. And presses down. Misery. Sheer misery that refuses to stay contained to that one space. It’s like touching a downed power wire. White. Hot. Cold. He cries out. She steps off.

He has to blink back tears. Suck back a snot bubble.

“You know,” she says, “being a woman isn’t easy. It’s tricky sometimes. But I’ll tell you if there’s one advantage we have, it’s that everybody always seems to underestimate what we can and will do. Men, mostly – but even other women do it. Isn’t that sad? It lets us get away with a lot, daddy-o. Lets us pull little surprises. Lets us get
tricky
.”

“Fuck you.”

“You want me to stand on that broken coat-rack you call a body again? Maybe we’ll all have a go. Use you like a trampoline. Sound fun, sugarplum?”

He winces past the pain and offers a placating smile. “My…
apologies
. Ma’am.”

“That’s better. I like a puppy knows when it’s licked. Keep showing your belly and maybe you’ll get out of here alive.”

“Wasn’t sure that was an option.”

Now a new voice: “We need a messenger.”

He knows that voice.

He heard it
one time
. And it told him
sorry
just before a bullet tore into him.

Nora Pearl.
Persephone
.

She steps up. And he can see that she’s not with these girls. Not really. Nora looks like she did a year ago, if a bit more made-up. But it’s still the same costume: navy cardigan, a tartan skirt. Like she’s jailbait, still in high school.

Werth can’t even think of something snappy to say. He just waits there. Seething.

“You look a little pale,” Nora says to him. “You feeling OK?”

“I should kill you.”

“That’s what you came to do. Isn’t it?” With the toe of her shoe, she kicks a few 12-gauge shells around. “Oops.”

“You’re in deep water, little girl.”

“To carry the metaphor, I’m actually sailing
on top
of the water in my pretty pink sailboat. You’re the one sinking beneath the water, dude. You just fell two stories. Possibly broke your leg or, at the least, aggravated an old wound–”

“An old wound
you gave me
.”