New Tales of the Yellow Sign, page 16
Bremer wonders where he’s got Dori stashed. Is she in a cell, until she gives in and agrees to keep dating him? A safehouse maybe? He probably thinks he can protect her, but can he?
Conceivably she’s still at home, scared brainless, waiting for the shoe to drop. Bremer sure hasn’t tried to call her.
He runs and reruns the possibilities. He drinks from the coffee container on his dashboard. It’s empty, but the prop lends him superficial cop-like qualities. Or so he theorizes.
He’s asleep and then awake.
The dog is thumping in the trunk. Bremer squeezes over to the backseat and tries making soothing noises. The trunk bumps harder.
Now cop heads are turning toward him.
He has no key to the trunk. To open it he has to pop it from the glove compartment. He duckwalks back. They’re all looking at him. A cop calls out to him.
“Hey you.”
Shit shit shit.
A bunch of them come toward him.
“All copacetic guys,” he announces.
No choice but to open the trunk wider. He stands well clear and opens the dog box.
The creature springs out. It hits a security agent’s chest, knocking him down. Froth flying, it savages him. Agents pull guns. They can’t fire without hitting their man. The dog rips his victim’s ear off.
Bremer tears it for the driver’s seat. He touches the wires together. The engine roars. He peels it out of there. Bullets pling off the side of the car. Hey, it’s ballistically shielded. Bremer hunches. The windows blow out.
In the rear view he sees the creature with a severed arm clamped in its jaws. As he turns a corner, he hears a barrage of gunfire. He hairpins into the first alley he sees, gets out of the car. Worried about leaving DNA behind, he grabs his coffee cup and starts a nonchalant, non-run. He stops. There’s also probably traces on the box. The agents wouldn’t have seen it, just the beast coming out of the trunk. Bremer turns around. He hefts the box, telling himself that it’s good cover. They’ll be looking for a fleeing guy, not one carrying this big-ass metal case.
After only a few blocks, his arm starts to give out. Bremer steels himself and keeps moving. He didn’t get Sutherland but at least there’s no monster in his basement anymore.
Hours later he drags his ass onto the porch and fumbles for his house key. He nearly jumps out of his skin.
It’s waiting for him, hunkered down behind a cement flower pot. Its bloody paws stain an old throw rug.
Bremer sets down the box.
The dog stands, ready to be let back in.
***
Bremer’s in the living room; the dog’s in the basement. It’s been days since the security station incident. Not a whisper of it on the news. That means they’re scared. You can’t hardly blame them for that. The dog works for him and he’s fucking scared.
Three times a day during office hours, Bremer checks the telex for a message from the funeral home. Eventually it rattles off another delay notification from Tissue Services. The regime must be in worse straits than he thought. Street talk pegs the TSC as one of the few agencies that turns a profit. If it’s as backlogged as Motor Vehicles, as Rationing and Supply, as Public Works, then the entire shebang is irrevocably snarled. When the cafe gang would go on about the government’s last legs status, Bremer wrote it off as wishful. As an excuse to hang back and wait. Now it seems like maybe they were right. Hey, Sutherland would know, wouldn’t he?
The pause on the funeral suits Bremer okay. Whenever he thinks about it he pictures himself alone in a damp chapel with row upon row of empty plastic seating. No rush as far as he’s concerned.
As for the dog, he has also hit the pause button. Bremer can hear his claws clicking on the concrete flooring down there, but it isn’t whining so much. He concludes that its stomach is still full from the massacre. Idly he wonders how many agents it took down. He saw only the first few kills. For all he knows it did get Sutherland.
Bremer eats cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, frozen Salisbury steak and fries dinners for dinner. He watches episode after episode of “Mike Kruger, Guardian of Justice.” State TV runs it as a marathon. It’s still possible to root for the title character because he lives in a bullshit version of reality where the rules are different.
Five nights in, a knock at the door comes, right as Bremer’s changing into his sleep duds. So this is it, he thinks. He hollers for the cops to wait and puts his day clothes back on. Better not to get hauled down in his skivvies.
On the way to the door, he decides that the knocking is too casual, too measured, to be cops. They’d be banging and pounding. No, they’d be busting it down and coming in through the windows.
Opening the door reveals a short, balding man in his fifties or sixties. He wears a work cap, a beige windbreaker, denim shirt, work pants. The look says tradesman, or contractor maybe.
He moves past Bremer into his living room with an attitude that both is and isn’t asking for permission. The man gestures to a chair, announcing that he’s going to sit down in it. He’s inviting Bremer to have a seat, in his own house.
“Bunkered down are we?” he asks, his voice quiet and expressionless.
“Who the hell are you?”
“A friend.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Good answer.” He remembers to be polite and take off his hat. “Call me Winston.”
Bremer hasn’t sat down yet.
“You run effectively,” says Winston, “for an improviser. You’ve wondered, haven’t you, why the bulls didn’t find you from your school records?”
Bremer’s legs go rubbery on him. Now he sits. “I should have thought of that. But it never occurred to me.”
Winston smiles, sort of. “Like I said. Improviser.”
“So why didn’t they pull my records?”
“They did but mutual friends altered them.”
“You’re from the north.”
Winston nods, maybe. “Your weapon. Can it be duplicated?”
A rapid shake of the head from Bremer. There’s something he can’t place about Winston’s eyes. Crazily, they remind him of the dog’s.
Winston assumes an easier posture. “What can you tell me about it?”
“So Walker, then? He made contact with you guys.”
“We made contact with him.”
“He told you about me. But he didn’t tell Sutherland about you. Which means he had his misgivings.”
“Luckily. Your weapon?”
Bremer’s hands squeeze into fists. “I can’t explain and you’re better off that way.”
Winston rolls his tongue around inside his mouth. “That’s certain then?”
Bremer nods.
“Only you can use it?”
Bremer nods.
Winston rises and heads for the exit. “The next move is obvious then, yes?” He drops a folded sheet of paper on the side-table.
Bremer checks it as soon as he’s gone. A map of the downtown core. Circled in red: a gap in the security perimeter.
***
Bremer cases the parade route first. The wooden bleachers, where the ticketed dignitaries and bootlicks will gather, have yet to fill in. Citizens, lured by a rumor of ration stickers, already line the sidewalks. He finds Winston’s so-called security gap. There are uniformed cops there, like anywhere else.
It could be a trap.
Winston’s network could have been rolled up already.
But what the hell.
Bremer leaves.
He times his stay at home to the drive-by time, and to the length of the trip, adding time for the increased weight.
He returns with the box. He’s a little ahead of time. He hangs back near a dumpster.
His watch alarm buzzes. He breathes deep, lifts the box, and approaches the temporary checkpoint. The dog murmurs from inside its cage.
The cops see him coming. They touch the bills of their caps. They wave him through.
Forced cheers bounce off office building walls. Cronies on the bleachers clap and throw streamers. Proles on the sidewalk whistle and holler and wave expectant ration books. The motorcade is coming.
Bremer sets down the box. He’s behind a couple of kerchiefed old ladies in threadbare tartan coats. The issue of collateral damage occurs to him. Oh well too late now.
Up on the bleachers, two thirds of the way up the block, he sees Sutherland. Dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, overcoat. Other men dressed the same way surround him, along with their wives. His arm rests on Dori’s shoulder. She’s dressed like the other regime women, in matching jacket and skirt, with ruffly fake-silk blouse and a patterned scarf. She’s been buffed and coiffed. The outfit and make-up are two decades too old for her. It’s hard to tell from this distance, and maybe Bremer’s projecting, but she seems not so happy.
He waits through the first wave of motorcycles and the second. Then two unmarked security vehicles. Finally the General, gold-braided, fake-tanned, white-gloved, waving from the back of a fin-tailed burgundy-red convertible. A six-man security detail walks alongside the slow-moving car, flanking it.
Bremer springs the box door. The dog bursts through. It bowls through the pedestrians. Onlookers shriek and gasp. They don’t believe what they’re seeing. The dog looks different now, like it’s halfway made of smoke.
It surges at the convertible. It leaps past one bodyguard and opens a hole in another’s side. The driver of the convertible pulls out a sidearm and blasts at the dog. The shots miss it and hit the crowd. People fall and groan.
Bremer crosses his arms as the scene goes batshit.
The beast claws open the driver’s face on its way to the General. The Supreme Leader and his wife dive for cover beneath the back seat. The dog scrabbles in the driver’s lap. Blood fountains up. The driver tries to hold it. It slips free. It bites off hunks of seat cushion. The General has his pistol out. He fires at the dog and hits the driver. Enraged, the dog yowls. It clamps its jaws on the General’s wrist. The gun drops. The hand comes off. Using the General’s spurting stump for leverage, the dog pulls itself into the backseat. It guts Mrs. General with its back legs while slicing into his abdominal cavity with front claws and teeth. Bodyguards insert themselves into the situation. They lose arms.
A stampede cascades through the bleachers. Security agents and their consorts lose one another in a madness of trampling.
Parade watchers run. Parade watchers stand stunned. Parade watchers laugh. Parade watchers applaud.
An emboldened, heedless vanguard leaps the barricades to storm the procession. They fear not the dog. They tackle cops, grab sidearms, shoot security men down.
The perimeter guards who let Bremer through are ditching their fake uniforms for the street gear underneath.
Bremer loses sight of the creature. It no longer seems to be in the car. From the movement of the crowd, he thinks it’s gone off toward an alley opposite.
“Bremer!” It’s Sutherland. He’s on the street and rushing his way, 9mm outstretched.
Dori staggers behind him, stockings torn, leg bleeding. “Suth! Don’t!”
Sutherland fires. A fleeing citizen, darting between them, takes the hit.
The dog tackles him. Sutherland goes down. The dog bites into his ear and into his brain.
Dori lowers herself to her knees, hands covering her face.
The dog lifts its head. It fixes Bremer with a curious four-eyed look he thinks he’s meant to understand, but doesn’t.
It bounds onto Dori and reduces her to shattered bone and shredded flesh.
***
Bremer staggers through lawless streets. Smoke purls from a burning police station. Soot occludes his sight. An old territorial flag, its design painted on a bed sheet, flies from the state TV tower. A truck smashes into a supermarket storefront. Looters dash in to scuffle for flour bags and water bottles. Along the way he’s scooped up a revolver, its pearl handle spotted with blood. He’s reasonably sure he hasn’t fired it, though the barrel does smell of cordite.
A corpse hangs upside down from a statue of the General. Ankles roped together with duct tape, he dangles from the Supremo’s mighty sword. A piece of cardboard taped to his chest bears a block-lettered word: INFORMER.
He reaches home as mortar fire thuds in the distance. This time he is not surprised to find the dog on his doorstep. He levels his gun at it and braces for impact.
The dog tilts its head at him.
“I’m pointing this at you, you fucker.” Snot runs from Bremer’s nose and into his mouth. He’s shaking.
The creature knits its rubbery brow.
“You know what a gun is. I’ve seen you react to them before.”
It lifts a back leg to scratch itself. Sharp as they are, its claws do not penetrate the thickness of its hide.
“Come on you fucker, kill me.”
The dog keeps scratching, but nothing more.
“Kill me!”
No reaction.
Bremer shoots at the dog. The chamber contains four rounds, bang bang bang bang. The reports linger in the air.
The creature sniffs, as if offended. The bullets didn’t bounce off, but they don’t seem to be bothering it, either.
He falls onto the dog, punching it. His blows slip off its oily skin and hair. “Attack me!” He skitters back to kick at is face. The beast shudders. It lowers its head submissively. Bremer rolls off the porch and onto the lawn, where he plucks up stones from the borders of his mom’s derelict garden. He whips them at the dog. It still won’t go for him.
Bremer straggles inside, shutting the door tight behind him.
The dog presses its moist muzzle against the screen door and keens for its master.
Fuck You You’re Not Getting Out of This Car
“Fuck you you’re not getting out of this car. Go ahead. Try it. The door’s soldered shut. And the duct tape it is taped with has been triple consecrated according to a secret working known only to me. Its power cannot be undone. Not now, with the celestial mechanisms turning in our favor. In favor of the dispossessed, the bitter, the stink-assed, the fucktrodden. The end is nigh, and it’s nigh for you.
“You with your yuppie designs on our souls. Who would remake us in your bland, tut-tutting, sweater-wearing Martha Steward images. You nanny-staters, you condescenders, you executors of lifestyle magazine morality. You think you empathize with us, with your socialist voting patterns and your green concerns but it all takes a back seat to the fucking purity of your lawns and your soft-skinned children fast-tracked into good schools ahead of the rest.
“Well I got a knife you’re gonna empathize with. You’re not gonna live to see the coming days. When we get where we’re going I’ll have you get on your knees and thank me for this mercy I visit upon you. What comes next, you don’t want to see. The influenza dreams of a thousand madmen all writ true. Fighting each other, tooth and claw, motherfucker, the insanest new paradigm wins. Bursting through the pages of an old old book and now it’s a meme and now it’s rewriting your brains and now it’s opening gates to all sorts of foulness you can’t conceive of in the false and comfortable bubble you’ve made for yourself and that pissant family of yours.”
***
“You got that fucking right I boil with hatred. And don’t fool yourself that it’s generalized, or delusional. I despise you specifically, your family specifically. I have selected you for the purpose of my rage, as its receptacle. Your ceremonial dismemberments—yes, shitknocker, yours is only the first, I’m wiping all of them out, I’m obliterating your name and salting your earth—your deaths will bring me the power your kind—and here, yes, that’s the generalized you—have denied me all my life. That’s what this is all about. Power is zero sum, motherfuck. There’s only so much of it, and it does not go around. What you have, I cannot. So this is the start of us—the generalized us—taking it back.
“They’re coming back into the world. The primordial things, the impossible things, the breaks between logic. The warps between cause and effect. They’re coming whether we ask them or not. Our choice—the choice presented only to a few visionaries, those whose brains have heretofore been gassed up wrong but now will be prophets, baptized in blood and reborn in viscera—the choice is between predator and prey.
“You don’t get to choose. You’re meat. Fucking fodder. But the majestic few, we can bring them in, shape them. They need a reality imposed on them to move through our world. A semblance of it, anyway. At least for a while. This is where we come in. The spat-upon, the deranged—you’re nodding like you get my point. You don’t get my point. You are incapable of that understanding. All you’ll understand is the snap of ligament, the snick through cartilage, when my knife goes in you.
“Don’t look at me like that. Even now, even doomed, that superiority. I’ll not let you bring that to bear on me. It’s fruitless but you’re trying anyway, to reimpose your bankrupt order upon me. To define me downwards, back into lunacy, into a patient in need of perception-deadening medication. Disenfranchising, marginalizing, then using the rhetoric you hone on me to lobby for bike lanes and organic farm subsidies. I tell you to fuck off with that! Or I’ll stop the car here and finish you here.
“Oh wait you’d like that wouldn’t you. To use my righteousness against me, to dull it, deflect it, keep me from my prize. You think I fucked the dog telling you I’m coming for your family systematically. You’ll disrupt my plan, force me to slay you impulsively, before we reach the altar, outside the decreed geometry. Well coprophage I’m a million thoughts ahead of you!
“You are not getting out of this fucking car until the appointed hour and appointed time, at my behest, under my control. Your volition has ended. Mine is all there is, for you. You are overriden, fuckhole. Overridden.”
***
“These are not tears. Okay maybe they are. Tears of excitement. Tears of joy. These are not tremors. I am shaking with pleasure. A metaphysical orgasm. Metaphysical I said! Oh, your commonplace morality! Putting me in the gutter where your thoughts are, the thoughts you dare not act on. I am without sex. I transcend sex. I hacked them fucking off you fucking scumfucker, in preparation for this holy day. In a gas station washroom. Rust on the taps. Decades of grime in the sink.
