by Jerry
“I like you, you know.” Her thumb played with her fingers.
“What burned you out, Moon? How’d you end up here?” Time ticking over, blip blip of liquid crystal before she answered.
“My mother’s crazy, see. She didn’t like the way I drew pictures and had a thing about Tarot cards and drinking.”
And that’s why she’s in Jessa’s lot and not in Weylin’s or Alex’s. Jessa didn’t just take the best, she took the fuck-ups, too.
*
So there we were. Drinking up in some back-door booze can that a friend of a friend of Oreo’s recommended, the place all done up in Rock Deco. That Mad Max thing so big. All ink black and broken walls and rusted up hunks of Mack truck. A mammoth 3-D shark dwarfed one wall, a man-sized skeleton standing in its mouth. The skeleton was pointing and the whole background realigned itself in my head to form a giant peace symbol. Black lights jury-rigged overhead made it all glow like the devil and the deep blue sea. A sheer stack of speakers made my chest rumble, feel warm. The bass sounding was a mother’s heartbeat inside the womb.
Omnivore and Ferris flipping and jiving the dance floor with Hardkid moves and old stuff Alex taught them; boy and girl interchangeable in long hair and cutup denim. Jessa and Oreo at the bar with drinks, Jessa cleaning the roof of his mouth with her tongue.
So it’s me holding Moon’s hand while someone needles one dot at a time onto her hip. Ink making a quarter moon on that perfect skin; her first tattoo bought behind a rice paper divider with Jessa’s borrowed silver. Me adding up odds she’ll want into my bed tonight, my own inked dragon rustling under my sleeve, longue and jaws flicking from under my cuff saying, “You need,” and it started up the other ghosts drawn onto my body, going, “Please, Sander, please, we need a part of her, please.”
Moon has her eyes squeezed shut, hands on my chest while we’re up against the abrasion of speaker sound. Head tilted, mouth open to mine. A big spin of lights going green, yellow, blue, red, orange with the synthetic of the bass sound over all of us on the dance floor. Everyone with their eyes closed doing Hardkid spin, except I see two coming at me like they’ve got their own Hollywood soundtrack. Two dough faces bordered with dark shades and earplugs trailing wires; Cleanheads with brushcuts so blonde it’s white. Eyes and ears on filters and scanners. Everything I had on my hands and I was the first one to notice the Bulldozers were onto us. Right.
I’m so busy on them I missed the third one with the zipgun across the room. She straightarmed the homemade gun wrapped in duct tape before I caught her and, bang, something plows a hole through Moon and slams into me. Spit trails of red blood everywhere.
The sound of it’s got everyone running—except the people on the floor that the bullet came through to hit me. That gun firing homemade rockets of spent uranium and steel. Moon with a hole the size of a small fist in her chest, twitching on the floor beside me. Eyes rolled up. Blood spilling like a drain overflow. The Bulldozers were on me then, mini-UZI’s ripping twenty holes in my chest before I could prick my finger with the copper pin and flick out a drop of blood in defense. The hot metal smell of lead slugs hanging in midair like raisins dropped in honey. I bite my lip and spit out blood and a curse.
And the Bulldozers and the zipgun girl light up like matchheads. They scream once and burn out their insides when they suck in a lungful of fire.
*
Jessa and Oreo were carrying what they thought was a dead man between them until I started swearing. Omni and Ferris were at the bottom of the fire escape. The booze can turning into a 4-alarm blaze and people running for life. Jessa going “Sonufabitch, he’s alive!” and Oreo with big whites around his eyes. And I know, sick like eels churning inside my chest, that I bled all the luck out of Moon to survive back there and left her hollow corpse on the floor. Hand to my chest, my fingers poked through the ribbons of my jacket salted with Moon’s blood. The plink of flattened lead slugs dropping to the pavement. I made a fist and hit my chest. It made a wooden sound.
“Body armour,” I said. “We’ve gotta go.”
*
Coming up, it put long hard edges around buildings and corners. Deep-frosted blue creeping back across the sky. Sunrise like a bad wound coming pink and orange. And another ugly taste in the back of my throat. Hot sweats turning cold too quick down my sides. Matte black sockets of sunglasses, my eyes still watering. We ran between the long belts of sunlight.
Up the stairs and inside. Dusty white light around the edges of opaque curtains. Jessa’s mismatched gang back to perch. Rustle of long coats and blankets. The half-lit vision of Ferris on the couch, eyes fluttering behind gold hair until they stayed closed. Oreo and Jess turning out their guns and loose ammo onto the kitchen table before settling into the loft above. Dry timber boards creaked for minutes till they slept. Only little Omni kept awake with me across the gun-littered kitchen table. Chin tucked in the collar of her jacket, eyes getting heavy, she watched me.
Me sitting back in the chair, reached deep down in my trenchcoat and rags of jacket. Took out revolver and .45 calibre Colt automatic, and then sawed-off shotgun, buck knife, switchblade and loose rolls of shells and bullets. And finally Omni rolled her head to one side and asked, “Is Alex not coming back because Weylin died?” and me not knowing what to say.
“Alex isn’t coming back because I’m here,” I said. “She’s my better half.”
“But you’re so much like Weylin,” talking into her sleep.
I shook my head, tired.
“Weylin was always older.”
*
The freight elevator worked but I took the stairs. Climbed and creaked the steps of what used to be a munitions factory. Black and brown crud paint peeling off the clay brick. Alex’s place was like an acre of bare warehouse. Open girders wrapped in birchbark and wood and rope and baling wire. A forest in the dusty twilight of skylights. Chimes and bones of badger skulls hung from dead branches. Frayed hemp knotted to the ceiling; ropey arms and curtains like old willows. Wire sculptures of wild horses galloped out of the floorboards. Frozen. She’d brought up smooth things from the beach: sand and driftwood and stones. Rust-caked iron bones and skin-flakes of washed up ships and garbage machinery.
I followed the pattern gouged and painted into the floor. Alex’s briars and vines forming pentagrams and circles that conducted her energies. I walked the spiral around her sculptures until I found the spinner herself. Alex sitting crosslegged beside a smoke pot of myrrh. The incense smell of the whole place.
“Things have always been tougher for you, Sander, being the youngest.” She looked at me, not really sad. Waiting. “Who did this?” she asked.
“We all have enemies.” I closed my eyes. “I always wanted what you and Weylin had. You had Nelson. I never got to learn.”
“Fate only casts its coins once for one person, Sander. We had to share and you made do with what you had.” She stood, walked behind me.
I remember what I’ve done. “It’s only necromancy.”
Alex is back again with a talisman of empty brass cartridges and knocked out pennies. She puts it over my head. “It happened again?” a whisper beside my ear.
I nodded.
*
On my back in a circle of candles and white crystals and incense. Candleheads shook and smoke tails of myrrh drifted away. Alex bent over my bare body; red hair pulled back. She’s drawing, stab, stab, stab, on my leg with a silver needle. A woman-in-the-moon. Moon’s ghost shivering and brushing up with Mica’s dragon down my arm, Tavia’s crane on my shoulder blade, and biggest and most delicate, Sandra’s dolphin spiralling in water over my heart. My namesake. “It’s fate,” Alex always says to me. “This is the way you live.” But that time I cried to her. Cried the whole time.
“I need him, Alex. You and Weylin had a father. I need to see Nelson.”
And a long lime later she said, “I think I can find him.”
*
NELSON, 7048
You could spend the whole day down below. Bone condu
ction headphones crammed into your ears, body encased in best leather and rags. Slamming through the tunnels until it’s dark when you came up again. Feels like a thousand kinds of worm trails eaten out by cobalt blasts until a train car could fit through. A hundred people smeared their faces up against the window. They kicked and moved like that film of the rat being eaten by maggots. Then red and off, red and off. Hazard light blinking read.
Then the last face came up. A woman with hair long except shaved on the temples with Frankenstein studs in her head. “Got a live one here!” she yelled somewhere. A silver loop like IV cable snaked out of a headsocket, flashed a tongue of fibre optic light before she plugged it into the console of my coffin. Fuckit freezing in there. I remembered the metro dream and got hot tears behind my eyes.
The woman and two more pulled the door open and it cracked like a stuck refrigerator door. The first breath I sucked in corroded the back of my throat and ate into my lungs.
“Don’t sweat it, soldier.” The woman stabbed me in the arm with a mechanic in her hand. “It’s just breathing real air again. By the way, I’m Ecker, your therapist.”
Sound was clearer, grainier. And real air smelled like sweat stink and machine tools. Warm hands pulled me out of the bed of plastic and onto a stretcher. Patches of onionskin paper floated and disintegrated on the air. They chafed my arms and legs, up and down my body. Clouds of translucent skin flew off in strips. Somebody coughed out a curse and the woman said, “Think how the stiff feels: he’s wearin’ it.”
She lifted my arm and read my tattoo. “Well, A. Nelson, B253 631, welcome to the living. We’ve got a job for you.”
The crew flicked on hand spots and picked up my stretcher. It was pitch in the corridors, the only light from steady green LEDs inside each coffin and the wobbling lines from the handlights. We edged by a woman hanging tubing and cable across the ceiling, followed the bulkhead around the station.
“Looks like another Bela Lugosi ahead,” someone said. We got closer and Ecker shone the light into a dark coffin.
“Hey, Nelson, remember this guy?”
Inside was a shrivelled charcoal stick figure.
“Not anymore, you don’t.” And we walked on by.
“Accidents happen after all these years. Some systems just fail.”
And I’m absorbing “all these years” and getting ready. It had been a Big Sleep. We’re in the elevator and climbing. Number after number lit up.
“You know, Nelson, I kinda hate to do this to anybody, but you’re no use to us the way you are,” Ecker said. I had a very sick, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Hit him again,” she nodded to one of the others.
I felt the next stab, then a whole lotta nothin’.
*
Nelson, I said. Nelson, you’re asleep. When I heard that I knew I’d wake up. Eyelids broke open on blurry, too-close grass blades. One ear wet, pressed to the ground. Dapple lines of leaves over my hand in the sun; cool where the shade started. Green grass cool on bare skin. I closed my hand around it. Hair-pulling sound and it came out. Feeling like when your arm’s been asleep. Wind howled but my eyes told me there was just a breeze. Enough to make the leaves nod their heads. Alive again. On my feet, the sky too bright beyond the trees. There were stone cliffs ahead. Everyone had gone and left me naked in the garden.
“Hey,” I questioned.
Music came up. A slow tease from above. From the cliffs. A song from before I was born. I remembered an actual dust jacket in my parent’s house. A plastic record. We few, we band of brothers, for he who sheds his blood with me today shall be my brother. Hut there were sisters in my war. And my war was over.
I followed the music. Each step light, the air smelled like sex. Words trickled through my head on squeams of blood; failed to describe the world around me with anything better than green. The cliffs grew into my vision, mossy and vine crusted. Ten-metre faces of Buddha rough-cut and merging with the wall; Oriental versions of Dali watches. The graves of giants.
There were punched-out ledges and windows when I got closer. Black mouths into stone. Up rough stairs and I’m at the cave mouth where the music is. The green seems far away. Rattle of wood and bird calls. Funny music like a Tarzan movie soundtrack. A mottled lizard made a hard climb up the cliff face.
“Nelson,” she said and threw me an apple.
Alex was waiting, touching the grass with one hand. Bob-cut red hair shaggy. Light freckles on bare back, dark colour wolf tattoo on her shoulder. She got up, eyes glint hard in smile-stretched face. I was hard; her nipples stood up. We were together, hot breath on her neck and rolling and biting and mounting, and wanting inside her.
Her long fingers through my hair and tattooed wolf moving on her shoulder. Jaws and legs running over shoulder blade. Eye looking sideways at me, teardrop red on black. We made love like jackhammers.
“Nelson,” she breathed, first words. Something about pheromones.
Fifteen minutes later six was around me again; bare-thighs twisted together, open mouth kissing. And a half hour after that, marginally slower.
“Earth sky doesn’t look like that,” I said.
“Greenhouse effect,” Alex said, like it explained everything.
*
There were others at the valley; maybe a dozen of us were at the bonfire, roasting up the meat they had left for us. They. Ecker. Our employers. I had spilled out my footlocker like pirates’ treasure and was in 501 blue jeans and sunglasses. Winged Raven tattoo spread on my chest. Hunks of wet wood snapped and floated red sparks on the bonfire updraft.
Alex was sprawled in my lap, dreaming. A ganja spliff between her fingers. The sounds of the burnt wood and others everywhere and faraway all at once. That’s where she found us, Ecker.
“What’s the job?” I watched her.
She reached out and ran fingertips on my neck, over the silver studs. “I thought you’d ask about these first. Or why you hear and see so good, or why sex is better. Why your reactions are quicker.” She took the cigarette and inhaled, reached again and put it between my lips. “What you’ve got in your head is a second mind. It tells you things you wouldn’t naturally get. And when you’re stressed, when your fight or flight kicks in, so does that second little brain. It’ll do the thinking for you then.”
Alex took the spliff away, pulled her own lungful.
“And it’s wired all through you, Nelson,” Ecker said. “We can hook you into anything and it’s like a part of you. That’s your job for us, soldier.”
*
And I’m running with the gun rig back up the corridor, imagining that door one step closer every time I put a foot down. Alex, almost out of my sight when the vaults started to open. And they started jumping through, and I knew something had gone terribly wrong with Ecker’s operation.
Tactical cops in midnight blue and brown body armour, faces moulded in plastic masks. Like those semi-lifelike department store dummies. Gunsight lasers spinning all around to cover them. And they’re all coming between me and Alex.
And my little brain, that second little brain they buried in the back of my head, went click.
I hefted the gunrig into bayonet position, one fist clamped down on the trigger handle. Still running. I kept blinking something out of my eye until it settled down as white crosshairs projected from xenon laser watching around the barrel of my gun. A sound like a jet engine warming up, the cooing stand-by of the gun. Zipping little messages up and down from my eyes to gun to eyes to a little brain saying kill? kill? kill? And I’m still running and the message going back down to the gun, too many times saying Yes, oh yes yes yesyesyes.
Till it’s a wall of wind I’m running through. Too slow. So slow that it’s hard to pick up and put down each leg. A wall of gun-recoil wind, barely counting each 15mm bam bam bam of shots.
Wrecking the store dummies. Watching them break and fall apart, melting hot wax under a firehose of boiling water wherever the X passes over. Up to them, through them. Over busted-up bodi
es. Waving the gun like a magic wand; where it goes, they all fall down. Coughs of flame out of the gunmouth. Up to, at the door, pushing them back. And finally face up to them. Dead faces of clay. And they drop yes, yes, yes and something hits my leg, takes part of it away. Moving back, sliding on one leg that won’t work. Rockets dozing by, all at me, lead bees floating by.
And a hit like a punch in the chest pushed me the rest of the way, pinned up against the wall.
My blood going squirt, squirt onto hands and gun. One fist on the handle, one mind refused to let go, saying yes yes yes way beyond the time I’d be dead, and too stupid to stop when the targets were dead too.
*
NELSON 2049
And dropped ten feet deep, straight into my skull.
“Nelson,” Alex said, inside my ear. “Nelson, it’s time to go.”
Nothing underneath me. Just the vague feeling of my body away and below somewhere. Waking and knowing it’s happened again. “I’m dead,” I said, wanting it.
“You’re alive, Nelson, you’re coming with me; they said you could. They put you back together again.”
And God damn fate, I knew it was true.
*
ALEX 2049
Nelson woke up the third time on the highway, in the desert, with the shivers. He squinted and put on the black sunglasses. Hiding gunmetal blue eyes that had always been green as mine until They gave him new ones. Landscape slid by the open window. Him scrunched in the corner formed by the seat and the door. His freckles had already started to darken in the midwest sun.
“Where are we?” he asked.
I watched him sideways for a long time. “Going home,” I said, and turned away.
I kept my eyes ahead on the heal devils shivering up off the road. He slowly curled into a sitting position and twisted the dial-o-matic radio knob, playing with the fitful signal off a West Texas transmitter. For the third time, like he’d forgotten again, he opened the glove compartment and look out the revolver. Discreet, as if looking in on sleeping children, he popped open the cylinder and checked that all six bullets were loaded.