The Blue Blazes (15 page)

 

15

 

The gobbos are tribal. Possibly even hive-minded, as each individual gobbo seems confused, inept, like an ant who has wandered too far from the hill. But when together, they work together. They work as one. Tribal breakdowns do exist among them – some by belief, some by purpose, others by the way they look. Some gobbo groups are hunters, killers. Others are… well, I don’t know that “religious” is the word, but they seem to congregate only at temples, gurgling and howling their dread songs to the Hungry Ones, the gods of this place. Some gobbos are fat and gray. Others pale, milky white, or with a rubbery, rusty skin. For a long time I thought that the Naga were the opposite: lone creatures, smarter by themselves than when together, generally distrustful of one another and operating on singular agendas. I no longer know if this is true.

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

 

The two thug bodies fall like heavy rolls of carpet. They splash into the water of the sewer tunnel. Sorago quickly covers the manhole from underneath.

Two shadows emerge from the darkness of the tunnel.

Sirin and Sarnosh. Sirin of the golden eye. Sarnosh of the thick black scale. Both brothers in the assassin’s caste. Two Naga loyal to Sorago. Loyal to the Candlefly clan.

Above, the sound of sirens. And humans, yelling. Such a fearful, excitable lot. They’re like ants whose hill was knocked over by a child’s boot.

Lucky to have rescued the bodies from the street before the police arrived. The shootout with Mookie Pearl ended poorly for the two human killers – for Sorago, that fact offers little surprise. Those two were not assassins. They were dumb brutes.

But Sirin and Sarnosh…

At Sorago’s nod, the two of them stoop by the two corpses. Their teeth flick forward, glistening. They nip the necks of each corpse. Fresh blood flows. Their tongues flicker out, catch a copper smear on each, suck the blood back into their mouths. Then they clamp their mouths on the wounds. Noisily gulping.

When finished, they stand.

Spall and Lutkevich’s bodies are hollow, now: like tires, deflated. Eyes bulge in shrunken faces. Fat tongues thrust out of wine-dark lips.

Both of the Snakefaces shimmer. Their flesh rippling, scales like an array of mirrors turning – and like that, they are changed.

Spall and Lutkevich stand before Sorago. Over their own dessicated corpses.

Dopplegangers. Fairly good ones, too – the eye color is different (it always is); the skeleton beneath the skin isn’t quite right (it never is, and it’s not even a skeleton so much as it is a shifting cartilaginous mass meant to simulate a skeleton).

But, otherwise, good enough.

Not-Spall and Not-Lutkevich step forward.

“Humans,” Sorago says, making a face like he just ate a week-dead rabbit. His fangs click together – the sound of a thumb running across the tines of a plastic comb. “Inefficient and weak. The only reason they have claimed the Infinite Above is by dint of their number. But we start doing the good work today, my brothers.” And they really are his brothers. Both egg-mates from the same brood-whore. “You know the task at hand?”

They nod. Together Sirin and Sarnosh hiss: “May the Candlefly light the dark.”

Sorago bends down. Grabs the cell phone off each thug corpse. Spies a flash of human pornography on the one screen: two women, each with her head between the other’s legs. Like a crass facsimile of a Naga’s breeding circle. He scowls, hands one phone to each of his egg-mates.

“I will call soon.”

They nod.

“Destroy the remains.”

Sorago turns and walks down the tunnel. As he does, he hears the sound of his brothers hissing and spitting on the three corpses – the sizzle-pop of skin, soon the melting of bone. The smell in the air is one of vinegar and rot. Sorago smiles, and disappears into the dark.

 

Sorago stands in an alley between an open-air grocer and a small bakery. The human herd passes him by, bleating and bubbling. Unaware of who he is. To them he looks small, unassuming – a weak man unworthy of their gaze.

Camouflage, of course.

He dials Candlefly.

“My friend,” Ernesto says.

Sorago explains what happened. Then adds: “Pearl is more of a problem than we anticipated.”

He heard Candlefly
tut-tut-tut
on the other end.

“Surely, you don’t think he can best you.”

“Never.” Sorago feels his pulse-beat quicken in his neck. The thought of some… lumpy, gone-to-seed human besting him? Is that even a meaningful question? Why would Candlefly ask him such a thing? A test. That’s what it is. Always a test.

“He is but one problem of many. We have greater concerns.” On the other end, a liquid sound: Candlefly sipping a drink. An espresso, most likely. “Sirin and Sarnosh are on the task?”

“Lieutenants. Then the gang-heads.”

“Excellent. I want you to coordinate the next attack. If all is to go as designed, we need the gateway opened.”

“I shall lead the charge directly.”

“No. We have the numbers. You won’t be needed there. The gob-folk will overwhelm those dead fools. You’ll take one of the Vollrath. Find the miner again. Morgan. Get what we need from him. Don’t let him escape without giving it up, this time.”

“Yes, of course.”

“And Sorago?”

“Master?”

“If you see Pearl or his daughter: end them yourself.”

Sorago smiles. “I will deliver them into shadow.”

 

“We didn’t get the drop wrong?” Benny Scafidi asks, licking his lips again and again – so often that the lips and the skin around them are chapped. He just can’t help it. He licks ’em to get ’em wet, but then they get dry again and it’s all:
lick slurp lick
.

The other Mole, Jenny Greenteeth, scowls at him and bares her rotten chompers. “This is the place. I’m not a goddamn idiot, Benny.”

The two of them stand underneath the High Line Park trestle. Benny’s clutching a brown paper bag to his chest, a narrow shoulder-width alley to his back.

“I’m just saying,” he says. “Mookie would’ve been here by now. Right?”

“Somethin’ fuckin’ goofy is going on,” Jenny says, picking at a pimple embedded in her eyebrow. “You know how I’m stickin’ it to that bag-boy from the Bronx? Raza?”

“Yeah, I know.” A bag-boy: another drug runner like them. Carry the drugs in a bag, pass it along to whatever dealer, soldier or lieutenant it goes to. Benny nods and tries to repress a shudder thinking about crusty-ass Jenny getting all sloppy with some heroin mule in the Bronx. “But I think the one with the dick is the one that does the sticking?”

“Shut up. I stick who I wanna stick. Anyway, I called him.” She waggles a filthy burner phone at him. “You know what he tells me? Says he was just on the phone with his crew chief, that ahhh, that lieutenant with the… the one with the glasses? And the mustache?”

“Ehhh. Bloom. Saul Bloom.”

“Right, right. Says that he’s on the phone with Bloom and suddenly Bloom is arguing with somebody and then there’s a couple gunshots and Raza says he hears like, Bloom screaming bloody murder – then there’s like, a, a, crunch? Like the sound of someone biting into a crispy fucking apple, that’s how Raza put it. And then nothing.”

“Then nothing?”

“Then
nothing
. It adds up to somethin’ bad. The Boss is sick. Then somebody gets Bloom. And now Mookie’s not here?” Her eyes pop and she clucks her tongue. “Something’s up, Benny. Fuck fuck fuck.”

Benny eyes the bag. His temples itch. His palms sweat. “So we could…?”

“Wait. Yeah.” Her thin lips curl over puckered gums. “The Blue is ours.”

It’s like a trip to Disneyland. Benny feels elated. Like he’s dancing with the angels. The Blue makes him feel impossible: like he can do anything. Like he can
see everything
. Fuck Mookie Pearl. Fuck Four-Top. Blue.
Blue!
He starts to unfurl the bag–

Just as a gun barrel presses against the stem of his neck.

“Oh, look,” comes a girl’s voice behind them. “Mole Men. How gross.”

Jenny spits, but misses and the phlegm-blob lands on Benny’s cheek.

He goes to wipe it away, but the gun presses harder into his head.

“Hand me the bag,” says the voice.

Benny tries to turn around, but the girl says, “Don’t even.” Then to Jenny: “You. Take the bag, hand it to me over his shoulder.”

Jenny scowls, but rips the back from Benny’s reluctant grip.

“Hey,” Jenny says, handing over the bag. “You’re Persephone, eh?”

“Maybe I am.”

“You used to run a crew of Moles downstairs. Femurcrack’s crew. With Betty and that other guy. Magnum.”

“
Man
gum,” Persephone says. “They all ended up dead.”

Benny feels his heart flip-flopping around like a stun-gunned rabbit. “Are… are we gonna end up dead?”

“Not today,” Persephone says.

And then, like that, the gun barrel is gone from Benny’s neck. He turns to see the girl darting down the alley, the brown bag of Blue in her hand. He weeps softly.

 

16

 

Some dead men become ghosts, yes – but it is also true that some ghosts refuse to leave the body. Those souls who are truly affixed to this world, who feel that they have work yet to complete, can linger behind in the body by sheer force of will. Though it is not a pleasant thing, being married to dead flesh. One corpse I spoke to from the town of Daisypusher said that it was a bit like being walled away in a tenement forever – everything falling apart, rats in the walls. Surrounded by eternal decrepitude. Things break down and no landlord comes to fix them. You dwell in the ruins of your own body. Ruins that will forever be crumbling.

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

 

A hundred feet beneath the old marble cemeteries on Manhattan’s East Side sit the gates to the town of Daisypusher. Mookie and Skelly stand at these gates – a series of bones both animal and human wound to an old chainlink fence with coils of wire and swatches of black electrical tape – and stare through to the distant lights of the town past: a town that is carved out of the rock, itself a kind of tomb.

“Huh,” Mookie says, the two of them standing bathed in the light of a couple dusty old lanterns lit with the glow of some phosphorescent fungus smeared on the inside of the glass. He taps one of the lanterns. “Nora and I used to chase fireflies on the front lawn when she was little. I showed her that if you smushed their glowy butts it’d keep on glowing even after you smeared it on your cheeks. She cried for the little fireflies.”

To this, Skelly says nothing. That sad look on his face. She wants to say, “Times have changed,” because Nora’s not the type anymore to cry over a little lightning bug. But she doesn’t. She just kicks a stone with her heel.

Mookie then asks: “You ever been here before?”

Skelly gives it a look, shakes her head. “Heard of it. But no.”

Above their heads, bats rustle wings, clinging to dark tree roots pushing through earth and stone.

“You don’t have to be here.”

She smirks. “And yet, here I am.”

“Couple hours ago you were thinkin’ on cutting me open from nuts to nose.”

“Pssh. I wouldn’t have done it.”

“Maybe not. But you still don’t want to be here.”

She winds her fingers around a femur, stares through the gap. “No, I don’t. Maybe you need someone to keep you safe.”

“Maybe you need
me
to keep
you
safe.”

At that, she smiles, and winks.

He continues: “Hell. Maybe this is a trap. Maybe you’re just doing what Nora wants. You come at me…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She waves him off. “Smart money says, if I come at you, you’ll break me in half like a frozen candy bar. And if you come at me…”

He shrugs. “Lemme guess: you’ll cut my nuts off.”

Another wink. “You sure know the sweetest things to say. Gets my panties damp, big fella.”

He grunts. Is that him blushing? Score one for Skelly.
That
gives her a thrill.

“How do we get in there?” she asks.

“Like this.” Mookie kicks the fence. It rattles a mighty racket – bones against bones, bones against metal: an unholy cacophony like a symphony from the Devil’s own orchestra.

Then they wait.

Doesn’t take long before the gates shudder and start to drift open.

Inside the open gates stands an old woman – an old
very dead
woman, her desiccated flesh like dry, mouse-chewed leather against her bones, all of it ill-concealed behind a diaphanous gown that, once white, is now tobacco-brown.

Her eyes are like rotting grapes, rotating in their sockets until eventually they point their mushy pin-prick pupils toward the two of them.

Skelly suppresses a shiver. She’s a tough cookie, or likes to think she is, but the Underworld… this place… all this
death
. Gets under her skin.

“Mookie Pearl,” the old woman rasps. She coughs a few times. A clot of pillbugs tumble into her bird-claw hands. She tilts the hand, and the bugs fall to the ground. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

“Mother Cougar,” he says, nodding.

“I mean that literally, by the way. My eyes are sore as stubbed toes. When I blink it’s like I’m blinking past broken glass. Eyes’re too dry, too dry. You got any Visine?”

“No. But I could get you some if you give me a day or two.”

“Day or two? Heck, by then they might shrivel up and fall out of my fool head. I may just need you to lick ’em or something.” Breath whistles through nostrils shriveled tight to her face. The undead – those whose bodies still contain the specters of the former inhabitants – don’t need to do things like eat, breathe, or shit, but they often still do, if only out of habit. Or to make other people sick. “Whatchoo doing here, anyway? And who’s the girlie with the hair?”

“This is my friend, Skelly. I’m here looking for someone.”

“Who isn’t? Well, come on in, then. We don’t get many visitors of you
blood-pumper
types. You’ll have to pay the toll, though.”

Mookie nods. Comes up through the gates, waves Skelly on through.

As she steps up, Mookie opens his mouth. Stoops over. The old woman hobbles her gangly, poorly-held-together frame over. Leans in, sticks that rotten nose right up to his mouth. Skelly knows she’s staring, but she can’t help it.

“Go on,” the old dead woman whispers. “Blow it on me.”

He breathes. Slow and hot.

The old woman takes a long languid sniff.

“Meat,” she says. “I always smell meat on your breath. I smell the spice. The fat. It’s a beautiful thing, Mookie Pearl.”

Mother Cougar pulls away. Then looks to Skelly. “You’re next, sweetheart.”

Skelly shoots Mookie a panicked look. If she could contain a single question inside her gaze it would be a loudly shrieked “
What the fuck?
”

He nods. Impatient like, “hurry up”
.
 

Skelly opens her mouth.

Mother gets all up in there. Another long sniff. “Oh, damn, what’s that? Broccoli? Tofu? Jesus Christ, girl, you a vegetarian?”

“Vegan,” Skelly says, but then she inhales through her nose and then a smell shoots up into her nostrils like a half-dead raccoon crawling up in there. Suddenly she staggers backward, blanching. Skelly turns away, bends sharp at the waist, and pukes.

Mother Cougar laughs, a gurgling guffaw. “Aw, shoot, girlie, that was your first time, wasn’t it? My bad! I should’ve warned you not to breathe through your nose. Caught a whiff of my…
perfume
, it seems.”

Skelly wipes her mouth. Looks to Mookie who gives her a shrug. He’s smiling. A rare sight. “You think this is funny?” she asks.

“A little.”

“Asshole.”

“Yep.”

“All right,” Mother says. “Let’s quit sniffin’ each other’s butts. See if we can’t find you who you’re lookin’ for.”

Now, at least, Skelly remembers why she became vegan in the first place.

 

The walk to Daisypusher from inside the gates isn’t a long one. Five minutes and they start seeing the first ramshackle house: corrugated tin tilting atop crooked walls of mold-streaked plywood. A window cut out of the wood, a flickering fire-glow coming from within – a glimpse of a dead face, half-skin and half-skull, peering out.

It’s a subterranean shantytown – the streets are paths cut between each hastily thrown-together junk-house. Mookie sees one house with a wall formed from the plow of a bulldozer; another with a roof made of the cellar doors stolen from some New York City sidewalk. One house across the way is lined with shattered broken subway tile – a sign for the Columbus Circle station hangs from wire outside a front door made from an old coffin lid. It’s hard to count from here, but in the past Mookie figured there were fifty, sixty houses here. Now it looks like that number has grown.

There exists a kind of beauty here, too – all around, little flowers and birds cut from tin and wound with copper wire. Some of them are bedazzled with bits of colored glass while others are smeared with luminescent fungus. Other little tidbits of curious décor hang about: a rusted bird cage with an owl skeleton slumped inside, an old-school big blue mailbox spackled over with chewing gum; a series of hitching posts topped with human skulls that are each decorated in a unique way (glittery glass, teeth replaced with hematite, flowers painted on bleached bone, an American flag motif, ivy growing out of an open jaw).

In the distance, Mookie hears a subway train:
gung gung gung GUNG GUNG GUNG gung gung gung
. The ground shakes, the vibration crawling up his feet and legs. When it passes, a dog barks in the distance. Windchimes tinkle.

“So, who you need?” Mother asks. As she walks, her skin sounds like two rough roofing tiles scraping together.

“Man named Steve Lister.”

She barks a laugh. “You know better than that. We don’t go by our old names here.”

“But you know him.”

“I know him. Burnsy. That’s what he goes by.”

Burnsy. That figures.

As they walk, they hit the center of Daisypusher – a circle where the dead commune around a bubbler fountain made of misshapen gobbo skulls heaped in a clumsy pyramid. At its peak sits the cracked geode head of a Trogbody, dark and dirty water pouring out of the thing’s open mouth, cascading down.

Dozens of dead folk eye Mookie and Skelly as they pass. The dead each bear the marks of their deaths. An armless girl in a pink dress smiles. A man in a rusty wheelchair – the spokes coiled with dead dry snakes – sits like a pile of moist garbage, flies buzzing all around him. A moldering hausfrau stands around in a pink bathrobe. A big no-eyed trucker type with a Peterbilt hat crosses his arms. A teen boy in a snazzy orange vest turns his head – the noose still hanging from his swollen, empurpled neck swings.

Mookie nods as they come closer. A few nod back. Others just stare.

The circle is ringed with trees – not real trees, but trees made of bundles of chain and fence and piled-high trashcans, the branches formed from twisting pipes, mannequin arms, and braided wire. Fake trees that cast long shadows.

Sitting in the makeshift tree branches are cats. Dozens of cats.

Each in various states of… unlife. Ribs showing through an old calico’s side. A tomcat with half his face mashed in. Another cat that’s just skeleton and skin hanging off the bones like old, wet curtains. Cat-bones click and shift in the branches. Mrowling and cooing and hissing.

Skelly stares up. Jaw slack.

Mother sees her. Laughs. “Girl, you gonna dress yourself up with skulls and death, you ought to know what it really looks like.” The old woman snaps her fingers and lickety-split Mother Cougar is covered in cats – a whole coat of undead felines crawling up her arms and slinking around the hem of her gown, leaving it wet with a trail of moist decay. “Death ain’t romantic, girlie. It ain’t pretty. It ain’t fashionable. Go on. Get a face-full. Gawk like a tourist!” Another laugh.

It’s then that Skelly turns. Sees how all the other dead are staring. She stops walking as Mother pauses to play with her kitties. Mookie watches as Skelly stiffens. Her hand falls to her knife and rests on the silver skull of the Bowie’s hilt.

“Relax,” Mookie tells her.

“I don’t like being made to feel like a heel,” she whispers. “That old woman is cruisin’ for a bruisin’.”

“Cool it. You start shit here, you won’t find me protecting you. You’ll find me on the other side, hauling your ass out. These folks are dead.”

“Yeah, I got that part, genius.”

“I’m just saying, they got it hard enough as it is without you comin’ in here like one day you won’t be a body in a hole, too.”

That shuts her up. Her hand drifts away from the knife.

Mother shakes herself free of all the cats but one: a lanky black cat that looks healthy until you see the roving stitch-scar that winds across the animal’s body. Toward the belly, the scar is open, and a few bits of what look to be curls of dried potpourri come drifting out. Mookie catches a scent like death and cinnamon.

“These are my best friends,” Mother says. “My
babies
. I find them up top sometimes – hit by cars or beaten to death by shitty blood-pumper kids or just dyin’ because it’s their time to die. They come to me without me asking. I bring ’em here and they keep the rat population down something fierce. This one got her back end crushed up by a taxi. Smelled pretty bad for a while, but she’s good now. Ain’t that right, Midnight?” She strokes the black cat behind the ears. “
Wooshy booshy kitty witty
.” The cat purrs like a guttering chainsaw – a sound too big for such a tiny beast. “Anyway. There’s Burnsy’s house.”

Up ahead is an octagonal structure, the walls of which are wooden pallets woven together with heavy gauge chain and wire. The roof is slate – cracked, busted slate, but slate just the same. Mookie sees sudden movement atop the roof: a scuttling shape, a glistening light on a hardened carapace. A roach-rat. Half-roach, half-rat. Never in the same proportion. This one looks like it’s got a bug’s head and wings perched atop a fuzzy body with a long pink tail.

Then a black flash. The cat – Midnight – launches up off Mother’s shoulder. Bounds over two roofs,
clang clang thud
, and hits the roach-rat like a fuzzy cannonball.

Mookie can’t see what becomes of the roach-rat. But he hears its trill scream. Hears the sound as the cat feasts.
Crunch crunch crunch
.

“See?” Mother says. “Anyway. That house over there, that’s Burnsy’s place. Be nice. He’s prickly. Probably on account of his skin and all.”

Skelly gives Mookie a look. He averts his gaze and walks forward, guilt dogging his heels like a starving hound.

 

Mookie knocks.
Whonnnng, whonnnng.