The Collected Short Fiction, page 146
“What’s going on?” Tony arrives, half-naked and thundering. He quickly takes in the situation and gets right in her personal space. “Who the hell are you?”
I’m afraid he’ll hit her, shatter her smirk with his mallet fist. I’m terrified he won’t. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I can’t move, can’t speak. My body is cold from the inside out.
“You’re Anthony. Hello.” She extends her hand.
He brushes her gesture aside. “And you’re Julie. Yeah, I recognize you. Step, lady. You aren’t welcome.”
“C’mon, stud. Put her there.” She smirks mischievously and reaches for him again. The light in the room dims because she’s sucking it into her eyes. She snags his hand and clasps it tight with both of hers the way politicians do, the way a black widow fastens to her prey. Squeezes so hard that blood drips from their joined fingers. That’s the end. Tony sways in place and she stands on tiptoes to whisper into his ear. It goes on for maybe ten seconds until she releases him and steps back.
“Oh, wow,” he says. Tony usually talks loud enough to break your eardrums. This is a mousy little whisper. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” His face changes as he turns away. His skin tightens and his mouth and eyes stretch at the corners, but I only catch a glimpse. He shambles toward the living room, gone forever.
“Not with a bang but a whimper,” Julie Five says, quoting the only Eliot she’s likely memorized. Julie didn’t use her own brain to get through college. She relied upon cunning and nascent savagery. The light in the room drains away and she floats above me, a pale gemstone revolving against the void. She draws the dwindling heat from my bones and into her huge, luminous eyes.
I belatedly notice the feathered dart protruding from my breast. Steely J drifts from the unknowable depths, pistol in hand. He salutes me and drapes his arm around Julie Five’s waist.
I am very, very tired.
They wink, synchronized, and I wink out.
Vadim talks while he carries me in his arms, the Bride of Frankenstein.
“There are these worm things, or leech things, neither, but you get the picture, and they detach or are expelled from a central mass. These worms, or leeches, crawl inside you through whatever opening is available. The urethra and the anus are likely access ways. That’s what happened to the dinosaurs. It’s one theory. I think it works.”
“Put me down, man.” My voice is hoarse and my skull aches. My breast muscle hurts too. Whatever Steely J hit me with packs a nasty hangover.
We stand there, wherever there is. An abandoned hotel lobby? Lots of dust, boarded windows, and the light fixtures are fubar. Bright though, because sunlight streams through cracks and crevices. I ask the obvious and he shrugs. He too received a visit from Julie Five and a follow-up dart from Steely J. Like me, he came to in this place.
“Uh-oh.”
I follow Vadim’s gaze and see a thick man all in black standing on the mezzanine steps. His face is pale and freaky as shit. The flesh is so tight, his eyes stretch to slits, their corners near his temples. A machete dangles from his fist. Blood drips from the blade.
“Tony?” Right size, wrong face, except maybe it was the right face, I’d seen it changing at the casa ...
“Tony isn’t Tony no more. That’s Mr. Flat Affect.” Vadim grips my arm. “Let’s book.”
We book. I try the obvious things—exterior door handles are locked and chained from the outside; the windows are barred. I glimpse a dry pool in the courtyard. The yard has gone Planet of the Apes. Grass run riot. The palm trees are dull yellow. Mort is spiked halfway up the bole of the biggest tree. He’s covered in dried blood, but I recognize his voice when he calls for help, for god, for death. There are several more people nailed to trees. Harder to identify. I don’t want to know.
Before long, I stop to catch my breath.
“This is about the ritual.”
“Duh,” Vadim says. “The goon is one of Zane’s pets, or something like that.”
“But why are they after us? We’re part of the inner circle, right? Ground floor of the new order and all that jazz?” I hadn’t taken it seriously, had only gone along because of the pressure. I hadn’t swallowed ZT’s apocalypse fantasies. Now, here I am trying to lawyer my way out of getting murdered.
“He lied. We’re the blood in the blood pact.”
“Pact with whom?”
He gives me a sad look for not paying attention during class.
Another Mr. Flat Affect saunters through a door and confronts us. He too wields a machete. However, he’s clad in a white paper suit. The suit is streaked and grimy. It’s a bad moment, but Savate! I expect great things from Vadim’s size-eleven Doc Martens. Vadim yells, “Oh fuck!” and elaborately gathers himself like he’s tossing a kaber and snaps this kind of slow-mo roundhouse kick that misses by a mile. Maybe a mile and a half. He lands on his ass. And it would be hilarious except I’m shitting my capris. Mr. Flat Affect doesn’t hurry; I doubt he ever hurries. He raises the machete and splits my best friend’s skull. Does him like the islanders do with coconuts, with a lazy overhand chop. Kerthunk. The killer pauses to savor the gurgling and spurting.
Doc Martens are peachy. I swear by Nikes. Canary yellow with Velcro, nobody’s got time for laces. I put mine to their best use—slapping tile at a high rate.
III: The Bear Catacombs
I run through an archway and am back in Alaska in the Toombs family basement. The bear catacombs. It has to be a nightmare because I instantly recognize the late 90s. Sister, those were bad times for yours truly—nobody told me “it gets better,” they told me to sit down and keep my mouth shut.
A party is in progress—music on full blast, lights ablaze, half the kids from our high school graduating class doing the bump and grind. Zane lurks on the fringes, a loud, fat, glittery-eyed kid. His smile is sly. He’s exactly as I remember, only more so.
There my high school self is, on the edge, crushed against a skinny senior track star. My hair is dreadful in spiked hair and a lime mesh tank top, and Stu Whitlock flaunts a mullet. Merciful Jesus, I had no idea I had so much to apologize for.
The band grinds to a halt and the lead singer chugs from a bottle of whiskey. My youthful double disappears up the stairs. A few seconds later, the shrieks begin. That would be Dave Teague, naked and insane, busting a move for the front door. I remember the rest with unpleasant clarity—there’s a hot blond Ukrainian transfer student lying mangled and murdered in a bed on the top floor. Some lowlife snuffed her and tried for the daily double with Dave. The killer is in fact shambling after Dave into the night. In a few minutes, state troopers scrag the psycho killer on the access road. I also recall that someone mentions the psycho’s face is white with greasepaint, or he wears a mask, and shit, it hits me—Mr. Flat Affect has been with us since when.
Mind. Blown.
“La!” Julie Five steps from the crowd. Modern day Julie Five, fully envenomed, egg sac probably full to bursting. She was sort of a cute kid. Not anymore. She grins and tweaks my nose. Her fingers are icy. “You’re bleeding, sweetie.”
The blood is Vadim’s—I’ve come through so far without a scratch, and that’s ironic, because I’d bruise if somebody stuck a pea under my mattress. I’m speechless, unable to twitch, Julie Five seems to have that effect on my nervous system. Behind her, kids begin milling around the exposed section of wall where the pipes and tree roots form a maw. There’s some scuffling and I see my erstwhile date Stu Whitlock crawl inside. He’s followed by that beefy guy who played linebacker the year we went to state. Then another, and another, wriggling like sperm to fit through the crack in the earth, burrowing their way to god knows where. Doesn’t take long for the last pair of legs to disappear into the darkness and it’s us chickens left behind in an empty basement.
Mr. Flat Affect emerges from the corner where the coats are piled. Sways in place, devilish gaze locked on me. He’s a meat suit and whatever powers him came from the deep earth. I whimper.
“Don’t be afraid,” Julie Five says. “You made the cut. We wouldn’t dream of harming a hair on your frosty little head. You’re our final girl. I always hoped you would be.” She takes my hand, leads me upstairs, and seats me in the parlor at a plain wooden table. The moon glows hard in the upper corner of a bay window. Its light seems to recede, shrinking to a dot as I watch. She removes a black moleskin notebook from her purse, opens it before me, and clicks the action on a ballpoint pen, places it beside the notebook. “Your memoir. It will be important someday, after everyone has forgotten how all this started. There’s a fire safe in the den.”
Two more Mr. Flat Affects have noiselessly appeared at her flanks. One in white, the other black. Their expressions are identically monstrous. She links arms with them and they glide into the shadows. “Good luck,” she says from somewhere. Her voice echoes as if bouncing around a canyon. “Enjoy yourself.”
I do as she says and write down what I know. I stash the notebook in the fire safe. Sun devours moon and the second decade of the twenty-first century absorbs the 1990s. The Tooms mansion decays around me. The table becomes stone and the stuffed moose head wilts unto a living death. I’m once again thirty-something and utterly fabulous despite the bags under my eyes, the tremor in my hand, and the caked-on gore.
Steely J, Julie Five, and Zane Tooms are long gone. The others remain as remains—Vadim, Morton, Candice, Clint, and Leo. Bloated, purple-black, in a pile near the hearth. Candice’s shoe has fallen off.
Had the poison been in the ring or the liquor? The ring is how I bet. My crazy-person epistle isn’t going to do me any favors in a court of law. Story like mine is a one-way trip to the booby hatch. What will happen to me when the authorities make the scene? That gets an answer when the pair of troopers roll up to investigate after the anonymous call. They are none too reassured by my appearance and wild story. Two seconds after they nearly trip over the pile of corpses, I’m staring down the barrels of automatic pistols.
My finger bleeds from a wound that will never close. I make a fist without a thought as I mumble apologies for being here in this house of horrors, wrong place, wrong time—oh, so most def the wrong time. I needn’t bother. The tearing pain in my hand lends an edge to my voice. My breath steams, a dark cone, and both troopers shudder in unison. Their guns clatter on the floor. Color drains from those well-fed faces, skin snaps tight and their eyes, their mouths, shiver and stretch. The transformation requires mere seconds. Their peculiar, click-clicking thoughts scritch and buzz inside my own psychic killing jar. They are mine, like it or not.
I do like it, though. A bunch.
Mist covers the world below this lonely hilltop. It’s bitter cold and I’m barely dressed, yet it doesn’t touch me. Nothing can. I am Bela Lugosi’s most famous character reborn and reinterpreted. The Tooms estate is my mansion on the moor, my gothic castle. Time has slipped and I wonder if Tony is still out there in Malibu, waiting to meet me and fall in love. Do I care? Must I?
Who originally said some men want to watch the world burn? Whomever, he meant assholes like Zane and Julie. They chose me, corrupted me, and invested in me some profane force. Its trickle charge impresses my brain with visions of debauched revelry, of global massacre, fire, and slavery. Do my minor part to spread mayhem and terror and a few years down the road I can be on the ground floor of a magnificent dystopian clique. I can be a lord of darkness with minions and everything.
What shall I do with such incalculable power?
“Fix me a cosmopolitan,” I say to ex-trooper, ex-human, Numero Uno. He does and it’s passable.
There are numerous doors inside the Tooms mansion, to say nothing of the crack that splinters through bedrock and who knows where from there. I could wreak havoc in the name of diabolical progress. Or I could flap my arms and fly to Hollywood, whisper in the right ears and watch a sea change transform the industry. Or I could return to my senior year and seize Stu Whitaker by more than the hip, tell Father dearest to get bent with a martini in one hand and a smoldering joint in the other.
Decisions, decisions, you know?
Ears Prick Up
First published in SQ Mag 18, January 2015
1
My kind is swift to chase, swift to battle. My imperfect memory is long with longing for the fight. Gray and arthritic in the twilight of retirement from valorous service to the Empire, my hackles still bunch at the clink of metal on metal. My yawn is an expression of doom sublimated. I dream of chasing elk across the plains of my ancient ancestors. I dream of blizzards and ice fields that merge with the bitter stars. In my dreams, I always die.
2
I traveled far from home in my youth. Dad and I slugged it out with a whole platoon of black hats one night as we strolled across the tundra of the Utter North. Military commandos hired to assassinate us; every man and dog marked with the mark of a secret gang, scents masked in case of failure. Poor, stupid fools. Probably sent by General Aniochles who figured Dad was gunning for his job. Bet my bottom chew toy the sonofabitch made the call. He gave Dad dagger eyes whenever they chatted at court. Bastard smelled guilty to me and that’s what I knew. Well, I knew right.
I wasn’t a pup then. I wasn’t approaching my warranty date, either. My eyes glowed red with atomic radiation. My fangs gleamed in a grin that would have made a T. rex flinch, appropriately enough, because they named me, my whole series, after the terrible king extinct these many eons but unforgotten. Dad papered the walls of my kennel with color photos of dinos and wolves and exploding missiles to give me the right idea about how I should behave when he cried, “Sic ’em, Rex!”
Dad let slip the leash and I sicced, oh boy. The happiest of growls is the snarl of a locked jaw.
Bullets cracked and fire flashed all around us, while I lunged to and fro, hip deep in blood and mud the way dearly departed Kennel Master Callys and his best dog, Shotsum-Loathsum, taught me at the war academy. Shotsum-Loathsum was one of a kind, the failed Cerberus series, and they never again made his equal. He had two heads, one more vicious than the other! Might’ve been the meanest mutt to ever prowl the yard. Gave me this beauty scar on my muzzle, and I thank him.
I belched hellfire and howled sonic death. With each snap I sheared an armored arm here, a leg there. Those days were my destroying angel days. I could tear the tread from a tank and whip you with it. Fear pumped acid through my blood and accelerated my reactions. Fear tasted like raw meat; made me drool. Fear made me greater than my design that had attempted to render me fearless. That’s why they canceled my line too. Hard to control a thinking dog.
I leaped in front of Dad as somebody opened up on him with an antipersonnel weapon and got shot a whole bunch for my troubles. The impact knocked me flat and splintered a stand of trees into kindling.
They shouldn’t have done. Dad cursed his worst. He powered the prototype off-market rockets on his exoskeleton and gave an eye for an eye, lit a mushroom cloud where we struggled. Could have spotted us from orbit. In the end we killed the bastards and collapsed upon that slagged hunk of arctic plain, half done in ourselves. I groaned, fur shredded, titanium plates pierced and leaking the good stuff almost too fast for my cloud of nanobots to plug. Go little nanobots! My tongue lolled and I whimpered.
Dad patted my head. “Live it up, Rex. Once all the bad guys are dead, they’ll retire us to the Happy Hunting Grounds.”
Vexes me to this day that I don’t know about the Happy Grounds. The pertinent entry seems to have been purged from my data banks.
3
Revisit this twenty or so years down the line. I’m a grizzled veteran. The powers that be have phased out the Rex Series. Dad must truly be sentimental because he keeps me around despite an abundance of options. My joints ache, my servos grind louder. I hope nobody notices.
The train sprawls in the long grass, a ravel of silver below this bare hill. A stutter of pops and flashes and the tyrant is dead. I should be down there, jaws agape, eyes flashing fire, my howl obliterating the courage of the enemy. Instead I crouch at my master’s heel and growl in malice. Younger men and younger dogs do the dirty work.
Dad has killed the Emperor with a word. Long live the Emperor.
Dad’s men approach, mud yet green on their faces, and report that this is so. They are good soldiers. He picked them carefully, as a farmer picks the best fruit from his orchard. They present him with a basket containing the tyrant’s head—a basket of white birch in the ancient samurai custom. There are no longer samurai, but we do not forget.
Dad’s men report that the tyrant’s wife is also dead; the young, beautiful one who refused to part from him when the palace fell and his people lit great fires and shouted for his blood. Dad’s men report how they have killed the tyrant’s children, even the one who hid cleverly below the floorboards. They are good men, thorough men. He is pleased. I see it in the relaxing of his shoulders, smell it in his scent. I smell sadness too—he and the Emperor were pack, once.
Our new Emperor Trajan is jubilant. He commends our valor when Dad calls on the red phone to explain that the garden has been weeded. The new Emperor asks Dad to fetch the tyrant’s banner to Prime. Trajan will spread it before the door of his toilet. There will be celebrations; we are invited. I will receive a medal of valor and a juicy ox bone. I have a cabinet of medals. I am the most decorated canine soldier in the history of the Empire.
Even as they speak on the red phone it rains, and through the rain I watch the tyrant’s banner curl with flames. No matter. Dad knows of a three-fingered tailor in New Naples who will make us another.
4
Mom is happy when we finally return to our home by the white cliffs. She feeds Dad grapes from the vineyard and cheese from the goat. She bathes him from a ceremonial basin. They retire behind a bamboo screen to mate.
