Hooligans

by Chloe Garner

  The furling stopped its attack on the young man called Paul and turned with curiosity toward Lizzie, holding out a paw. Paul gasped again and tried to warn her, then fell back against the wall with the sense of futility she remembered from Robbie. She couldn’t see. She didn’t know. She wouldn’t believe.

  The furling reached her and put its paw on her finger and she absorbed it. Paul cried out and shoved himself into the corner. She looked at him and pressed her lips, and his eyes widened. She gave him the tiniest of nods, then looked at his mother, who was trying to get him to calm down and hadn’t noticed Lizzie at all.

  As the elevator doors opened, Lizzie swallowed and took a step to intercept the woman as they got off the elevator, walking alongside her for a moment.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Can I talk to you for just a second?”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “He’s not dangerous, I promise. The outbursts really aren’t that common.”

  “My brother was diagnosed with psychotic schizophrenia when I was in high school,” Lizzie said. “Started telling us that things were out to get us, worrying that we were going to die or that something bad was going to happen to us. We tried everything for him, including a lot of nasty stuff that it broke my mom’s heart to do to him, just trying to help, but nothing worked.”

  The young man was standing against the wall next to the elevator like Lizzie had grown another head that only he could see. It wasn’t that far off.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said, putting an arm out toward her son and trying to coax him forward. He didn’t budge.

  “He was in and out of all kinds of treatment facilities until he met his wife, and then all of a sudden everything got a lot better,” Lizzie said. The woman paused, and Lizzie nodded.

  “I spent a lot of time trying to understand what changed, and I finally made some progress in the last few months. I lived with him for a while, and it really made a difference.”

  The woman was not trying to pull away from her anymore, but she was still looking at Lizzie with mild mistrust.

  “Can I talk to him? Just for a minute, just right over there, sitting in the chairs over there in the lobby?”

  “Not without me there,” the woman said, and abruptly Paul came off the wall.

  “I want to talk to her,” he said, walking past them. He looked back at her, then at the floor, and Lizzie shook her head and drew a breath. It was so familiar.

  “I won’t, if you don’t want me to,” Lizzie said. “But I might be able to help.”

  The woman hesitated, and Paul turned back.

  “Mom,” he whined.

  “Okay, fine,” the woman said. “I haven’t seen him care about treatment like this…”

  Lizzie nodded.

  “I’ll be brief, I promise.”

  She walked across the lobby to where Paul was waiting, and they sat down at a pair of chairs. His mother fluttered past, just out of earshot, looking uncertain.

  “You can see them,” Paul said, leaning forward.

  “I can,” Lizzie answered.

  “They’re real,” he said, and she nodded.

  “Your mom isn’t going to want to hear me say it,” she said. “She doesn’t believe it, and she’s never going to.”

  He frowned, chewing his lip.

  “She doesn’t believe me,” he said. Lizzie shook her head.

  “This is hard,” she said. “I know it is. But you can’t react to them. Can’t talk about them. They’re real, but no one else can see them, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “But…” he said, turning his face away as another furling stalked past outside the glass wall, belly to the sidewalk.

  “I know,” Lizzie said. “You see things that aren’t happening. And there’s not a lot I can do to help you with that. You’re still going to have episodes and no matter what, your mom is going to worry about you. But if you can get it under control…” She tipped her head forward to look at him. “My brother was out of treatment for years. Still is. And you may not be able to get out of all of it, but you can cut back on it a lot if you can get it under control.”

  He swallowed and looked at his mom.

  “You want me to lie to her.”

  “I want you to not tell her,” Lizzie said. “Because she can’t understand it. I spent my entire life not understanding, and trying to find the next treatment for my brother. And none of them were ever going to help. They weren’t going to make him stop seeing them.”

  He scratched his head.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “You on anything?” Lizzie asked. “Anything unprescribed?”

  “What?”

  She raised her eyebrows, and he shrugged.

  “Maybe.”

  “Ditch it all,” she said. “I know it helps, but you could hurt yourself. And it’s just going to make her more frantic.”

  “She sent me to rehab last summer.”

  Lizzie nodded.

  “It only gets worse. Cut it out now. I mean it.”

  He scratched his chin.

  “Are there other people like… us?”

  She nodded.

  “Some. Not a lot, but some.”

  “Can I meet them?”

  Lizzie sat back in her seat and thought about it for a minute.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think that’s up to your mom.”

  He leapt to his feet and hopped over the chair and charged his mom.

  “She says there are other people like me that she knows,” he said. “Can I meet them?”

  Lizzie closed her eyes, remembering the cult flavor she’d gotten off of Trevor and Robbie. Just the thought of what it would be like to have Zee around Paul and his suburban mother gave Lizzie a cold chill.

  “What do you mean?” the woman asked, looking at Lizzie. Lizzie paused, looking at her hands for a minute.

  “The people that I met, when I lived with my brother,” she said slowly. She drew a breath, resolving to tell as much of the truth as she could. “They’ve all been through aggressive and unsuccessful treatment. They’ve had hard lives and ended up in places that their families wouldn’t be happy about. It’s one of the reasons I look and… smell like I do. I spend a lot of time around them, and that means being in rough places. But they aren’t bad people, and a lot of it isn’t their fault. At this point, they tend to stay together, because they’re with other people who understand.”

  “Like group,” Paul said. Lizzie sucked on her upper lip, not sure what the right words were, trying to remember how this was going to sound to a woman who only wanted to protect her son. Her reaction wasn’t what Lizzie expected.

  “How do I contact you?”

  Lizzie sighed and laughed to herself, pulling her cell phone out.

  “I just moved here, and my cell phone blew up. I don’t have a number or an address for you right now. I’d have to meet you somewhere.”

  “Where?” the woman asked, staring at her son.

  Lizzie gave her the location of the park where the pack had worked, last time. A safe public space she knew how to find. It was the best thing she could think of with no notice.

  “When?”

  Lizzie opened and closed her mouth.

  “When works for you?”

  “Tomorrow after school?” Paul asked, and his mother nodded.

  “We will meet you tomorrow at four-thirty,” she said. “What are your rates?”

  And then Lizzie saw the opportunity that fate had placed firmly in her lap.

  “Seventy-five an hour for the first hour a week. A hundred per hour after that.”

  They’d be paying two-fifty upstairs.

  “All right, then,” the woman said. “I’ll need your references.”

  “I’ll bring them tomorrow,” Lizzie said. “I don’t have a degree. My background is in treatment systems management.”

  “What does that mean?” the woman asked.

  “Up until I really got a handle o
n it, I worked with a company that specialized in organizing packages of mental treatment services, focusing on cost and effectiveness.”

  The woman squeezed her mouth as she considered, then nodded.

  “I didn’t get your name.”

  “I’m Lizzie,” she said.

  “Magda,” the woman said, offering Lizzie a handshake. “We will see you tomorrow.”

  ***

  Lizzie walked quietly back toward the abandoned building, doing math and trying to figure out how much money she needed, absolute minimum, to house herself and feed the hooligans. They needed a safe place to be, if they wanted it, so while the true minimum was going to be an efficiency or a one-bedroom, she would prefer to have a little more room for furniture where they could sleep, if they needed to. And then the cost of food. How much did it cost to feed a dozen people, if you really had to be careful?

  She got back to the building and found Slug standing outside the door, chewing his nails and tapping a toe against the wall at the same time.

  “What is it?” she asked. He grabbed her arm and started dragging her.

  “If we’re fast, we might catch him,” he said.

  “What?” she asked, letting him pull her along.

  “Zee,” he said. “He called a hunt and you weren’t there.”

  She shrugged, still keeping up.

  “Then he should have planned further in advance.”

  Slug looked at her with a sort of despair and she gave him half a smile.

  “Look, either this works or it doesn’t. But I’m not going to let him treat me like that.”

  Slug frowned hard.

  “Your name is Mercy,” he said. “Remember that.”

  She rolled her eyes and trotted on. One battle at a time.

  ***

  They didn’t go far. Lizzie was a bit surprised that the next battle was within walking distance again, but she was drawn toward her spot on the field; this was it, without a doubt. Even as she walked, furlings came tearing in past her, narrowly missing her ankles as they ran. She toyed with the idea of kicking them as they came by, but it didn’t serve a purpose other than making her feel better, and whatever else they were, they were sentient creatures. She wouldn’t abuse them just because it was easy.

  She wasn’t that person.

  The ground shook, and for a second she thought that there had been an earthquake tremor, but none of the buildings reacted at all. That was Zee.

  She grimaced, glancing back for Slug, but he was gone.

  She missed Robbie.

  She continued on toward her spot, stumbling once as the ground shook again. Furlings screeched and tore past her in greater numbers, and she straightened, looking around with the realization of just how many there were.

  She’d never seen furlings like this, the number of them just overwhelming, crawling on the sidewalk, in the street, along the sides of the buildings to either side. They were already skirmishing as they went, just a scuffle here and there, but already there was a risk that they’d start merging, and Lizzie wasn’t even to her spot yet.

  Once more, the ground shook, and furlings fell off of buildings, landing on each other, causing more fights. They scrambled and swarmed, and bigger furlings appeared all around her.

  She sped up.

  She hit her light at the next great shake, and she found the hooligans similarly scrambling, trying to pull apart the knots, trying to form shapes and patterns that could attract the furlings’ attention, but the chaos was already much too advanced. They were all reacting, both sides alike, rather than executing intentional strategies, and Zee shook the ground once more.

  Lizzie’s temper spiked, and the ground around her opened in a starburst of light patterns. She clenched her jaw, trying to control it, feeling the furlings form a pool of still around her, some of them absorbing, others slowing, but most of them just staying out of the way. Zee was a presence out there, some distance away, and she wanted to rip the ground open between here and there, hit him with a bolt of light, but she could barely expand the reach she had.

  With her mind’s awareness of the space, she saw the building that the furlings would hit.

  Most of the buildings were dilapidated, falling down and abandoned, but there was one that was still in use. The glass was whole in all of its windows, the doors had locks, the sidewalk was swept. It shone like a beacon to her, and she took a breath, ignoring the next tremor and pushing toward that building.

  Already the furlings were congregating that way. The hooligans were out of position, nowhere near where the furlings were going to end up, where they were going to blow up. With this many of them, Lizzie shuddered to think what the last one was going to look like. She had the sensation of trying to tear fabric between her hands, stiff, heavy fabric that she wasn’t strong enough to rip. The ground around her throbbed with the intensity of her effort, but even now the cracks were beginning to recede.

  One of the hooligans had caught a clue and was starting toward the building, but the rest were still trying to engage the furlings where they were, a block away. The hooligan on his own was beating the walls and drawing some attention, but Lizzie could feel it. It wasn’t the normal sort of interest that they had. One by one, they pounced him, disappearing, and he collapsed against a wall.

  The ground ripped.

  A great, wide tear formed down the sidewalk and across the street, and Lizzie followed it like walking on water, above the chaos and the destruction going on around her, toward the pinned hooligan and the worst of the fighting.

  They couldn’t touch her.

  The swell of furlings was so thick and the fighting so intense that they kept falling into the light and absorbing, and some part of her knew that she would feel that later, but for now, she was in a space that they couldn’t touch, and she was walking toward a young man, tall, with perhaps an Asian feel to his skin tone, though slumped against the ground with his face turned away, she couldn’t be certain.

  The furlings kept jumping into him, attacks, and she brushed them away with a wave of light. The ground shook, and her tear narrowed, but she held firm, reaching him and pulling him away from the wall, onto the stretch of bright white where the furlings couldn’t reach him.

  He writhed and then yowled, and then sat up and looked at her with wild eyes and scrambled away.

  She watched after him for a moment, then turned her attention to the furlings fighting and scraping around her. They were as big as dogs, most of them, and they spilled into her path and turned into nothing with an alarming frequency.

  She couldn’t be here. Couldn’t do this.

  Not on her own.

  She felt Zee as he pushed another gust of frenzy into the furlings, and she turned and walked back out her path as it closed behind her.

  ***

  Something in the building turned out to be flammable. She hadn’t been very far away, when it had ignited, and the explosion had been enough to flatten her to the ground. She thought of the chemistry lab, of the way the air had pulsed past her when it had blown up, but it was nothing compared to this. She hoped the hooligan had gotten far enough away that he was safe, but the light had gone from her immediately, and she couldn’t feel where everyone was, anymore.

  She started back for the building, stunned, a bit deaf, and very, very cold. By the time she reached the building, she was shivering and clutching at her arms, though the sun was still up and the air was temperate. This was a bone-deep cold that came from inside of her, made worse by the fact that she had no one she could rely on or trust to watch over her. It felt like a single furling could topple her, right now, but the first one she saw, she glared down and it fled.

  She had a hard time believing there were any furlings left in the city, at this point.

  She went up to the roof and sat against the back of the structure that contained the stairs, wrapped around her purse and shivering.

  She’d had such an optimism, coming back from her job hunt. There had been number
s in her head that were going to work. A plan, even. She would need more than one client, but if she could even find two or three teenagers that she could help in a meaningful way, she could support all of the hooligans and give herself a safe place to recover from.

  A bath tub, for instance.

  But here she sat in the open, stinking air, cold beyond her ability to understand it, alone, and with no way to make sure that it was better next time.

  Zee was just going to keep beating her until she died.

  That’s the inevitable end of it.

  He’d nearly killed the hooligan who had gotten caught up in the worst of it, and he’d shown no intent of slowing down or trying to help.

  For a moment, her reasoned mind tried to compare that to Trevor letting Sybil lay face-down in the water, but it was nowhere near the same. She couldn’t begin to compare Trevor to Zee, and she wouldn’t.

  He had no regard for life, and neither did the furlings, here. The way that they’d attacked the hooligan kept playing in her mind. She’d never seen furlings with that kind of menace to them, and she didn’t know how to react to it.

  Yes, they’d attacked her. It had been making a point, and she’d been aware of it. This had been something else.

  They were willing to kill because they could, and they appeared to exist in such sheer numbers, here that it was inevitable that they would overwhelm her, at some point.

  They’d killed Lara, after all, and Lara had been so much stronger than Lizzie.

  “Pathetic,” Zee said. Lizzie looked up and found that the rooftop was ringed with hooligans and Zee was pacing a line up and back, over off to her right.

  She rolled her head onto her shoulder and watched him, uninvested just now.

  “You all deserve what you have coming to you,” the demon said, grinding his fist into the other palm in a sort of nervous habit kind of a way. He was angry and abusive even when he wasn’t thinking about it.

  “I hope they kill you faster, so that I can get some hooligans who actually know how to deal with them. Pitiful. You didn’t even begin to stop them.”

  “If they die, where do you think you’re going to get new ones?” Lizzie asked. Hooligans didn’t travel. She remembered that right, didn’t she?