They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy

by R. D. Harless

  He pointed to a school building down the road with a bunch of burnt-out fuck-ups littering the playground with themselves. "Next thing: you get your drugs there. Anything you wanna smoke, snort or shoot is there, fuckin' gratis. People been usin' the classrooms to trip out, just be careful which one you go in 'cause turf is already staked out, an' some of it's so small you won't know you stepped in it. Same with any of the apartment buildings, everybody got their claim." He pointed to a reddish two-story building. "That's the place for drinkin' right there, the cantina. Again, gratis, my man. The girls you see around are for everybody but don't be greedy, ain't no harems here. Don't get in with these fucking rape gangs roamin' around, either. Fuckin' foreigners are crazy an' shit. Don't be an asshole, stay away from 'em.

  "Last thing is just watch your ass. Tensions is high as a motherfucker. Three Vietnamese guys beat the shit out of a Cambodian last night; he died this morning and disintegrated half the library where he was hidin'. People gettin' in fights all over, so don't fuck with anybody don't look and talk like you, which I guess shouldn't be a problem for you, right? Just lay low and get in line to get your shit when the bosses are finished."

  A black motorcycle shot by us, the throttle wide open. The rider popped a wheelie, flipped the bike, and slammed it and him both into a rock. The dude got up and dusted himself off with a triumphant yell in some language that wasn't mine.

  "Fuckin' leadskins, man," the jackhole said. "That was that black Ducati, too. I was gonna ride that one later. They better get us some fuckin' new rides soon, you feel me?"

  No, I did not fucking feel him. But I said, "That sucks, man," like I gave a shit. I needed information. "Hey, you know a guy named Stagga Lee?" I asked him. "Black guy from St. Louis? Guy's a friend of mine and I'm trying to track him down."

  The jackhole shook his head. "Don't know 'im. You said your friend's a black guy?"

  "Yeah."

  "Huh, that's--" Then he exclaimed, "Oh, shit, son!" Somebody had run up to the fallen rider and cold-cocked his ass. The rider and the new guy got into it, and everybody lost their shit like they had never seen a fight before.

  The jackhole left me to run to the fight. "You in building number three way down there," he called back. "They're labeled. Ask for Shimbley, he'll tell you what room."

  I blew smoke out the side of my mouth. Shit.

  The jackhole got into the middle of the fight he had nothing to do with and threw a punch at the rider, then yelled because it hurt his hand because, y'know, the guy was a fucking leadskin. His buddies cleared the bleachers to join him and throw down, another idiot flew out of the sky to clock the jackhole with a bottle of rum, and somebody used whatever their fucking power was to wrench the red metal tower off its base with their mind. Its top twisted into a sharp spike, but before it could do any damage, some guy jumped out of the squabble and grabbed onto it, and his touch collapsed the whole thing tower to metal pieces that fell on everybody in the mix.

  I walked away before the shit spread and got me roped up in it. Fucking retarded bullshit.

  Walking the streets of Pyramiden felt a helluva lot like being walked down the Pib. Everybody watched me and took my measure without really watching me. They could all go to hell, though, I didn't have the time or the energy for any more pissing contests. I just needed to find my building and lay low until I could figure out how to get in touch with Lee. He had Spencer's original hardware in him, I figured, so he could turn my nanites back on and keep Silvy the hell out of my head. Somebody in town was bound to know him. I kept the opening riff of 'Ice, Ice, Baby' looping in my head, alternating it with the alphabet and the days of the week, like psychic white noise to distract Silvy if she tried to hang around my thoughts. It wouldn't totally work, but it was better than not doing jack shit.

  I finally found building number five, then four. Four had been tagged: 'It is purely illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.' - Pierre Bayle. The shit was getting really fucking old.

  Next to it, my building, number three, looked like it was being guarded by a lot of angry white guys. A lot of them. Most had shaved heads. Many also had swastikas tattooed on their arms. And someone had spray-painted 'ARYAN' on the door.

  "Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me," I said. I flicked my spent cigarette away. But of course that's where they had put me. Of course. I had torched Wilmont Avenue, which was on the edge of a mostly black neighborhood. So, of course, I would get along great with a bunch of Neo-Nazi racist shit heads. Why the fuck not?

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of Red's jeans and kept walking. Goddammit, I hated those three assholes. Fucking unbelievable.

  People had burgers and sandwiches in wrappers, so I headed the direction they looked to be coming from to find something to eat. It took a little while to back-track them because they were just about all drunk off their asses, but I found the place. Food trucks had been set up in a field ringed by squat buildings that had a bust of fucking Vladimir Lenin at one end and a red, blue and green sign with a white polar bear on it at the other.

  The quad was packed with people throwing elbows down on the ground and shit being thrown out of the windows from the buildings around us. Three of the trucks were already on their sides and completely looted out, including the tires and the engine, which, who the fuck would want some fucking truck tires in the middle of the desert? The fuck were they gonna do with them? One truck had been crushed almost flat and just gushed gasoline that nobody cared they were stepping in. Another one had been ripped in half and two guys were trying to pull the stovetop out of it. They both wore prison uniforms. As a matter of fact, a lot of people in the crowd did. Not a lot of steady job holders around. And more reasons for people with badges to take notice of what was going on here.

  Five guys rocked another truck and yelled shit until they tipped it over. When it hit, everybody swarmed it like roaches and got everything they could carry because everybody was too drunk and too Post-Human to fucking wait in a goddamn line.

  Somebody behind me shouted "Das Biest!" and I didn't fucking look, just tried to find which truck had the burgers in it and if there were any left. The shit heads in the crowd were trampling as much food as they were carrying away.

  Some old guy with a gray and white beard down to his stomach and a beer gut down to his balls came around from behind me and got in my face, waving at me with both hands. He was buck-ass naked. "Hey, Das Biest von Feure," he said happily.

  I backed away before he touched me with any part of his body. "The fuck's your problem?" People turned around to get cell phone pictures of him.

  "I am a fan," he said. "I am from Netherlands. I see you on TV when I younger. You kill police on TV, very cool."

  "I didn't kill any cops in Europe," I told him. "And the Internet is wrong, I'm not from the Netherlands. Get the fuck away from me, man."

  "You want Ecstasy? I have for you if you need some. It's very cool."

  "Dude. Get the fuck back. I'm not playing."

  "Beast," somebody else said behind me.

  I turned to the voice. "Jesus, what?"

  A Filipino taller and wider than me stood there like somebody had carved him out of rock. "You got a meeting," he said.

  Shit.

  "With who?'' I asked him.

  "You are fan of Das Biest, too?" the old guy asked excitedly. "What race are you?"

  The Filipino stared over my shoulder. "That guy's naked."

  "Yeah, I know. What's the meeting for?"

  "You are very big. Is your power great strength? I have very cool flexible, strong joints."

  The Filipino's brown eyes gave me nothing. He just said, "Come with me."

  "Do you want Ecstasy, brave Samoan warrior?"

  I turned around and pushed the old guy back. "Would you get the fuck outta here, man? Fuck, just go." I asked the Filipino, "Who's the meeting with?" again.

  He exhaled hard and pulled
a phone out of his pocket like I was asking him deathbed favors. He shielded the screen with his hand so that only I could see it. It just said: SILVY SAYS YOU GOT ME ON YOUR MIND. COME SEE ME. LEE.

  Shit, man. 'Ice, Ice, Baby' would be stuck in my head for fucking days and Silvy had still read me.

  "This really Lee?" I asked the Filipino.

  He nodded. I don't know what the fuck I expected him to say; I didn't exactly catch him in a brilliant mind game with that question. Having a sit-down with Lee sounded too fucking good to be true, but I needed Silvy out of me and what other option did I have than the nanites? My number one fan, Naked Santa?

  "All right," I told the Filipino. "Give me a minute. I need some food."

  He nodded his chin at the newspaper bundle in my hand. "You got some right there."

  "This is a piece of a woman's ass."

  "I am still your fan, very cool Das Biest. I will take more Ecstasy and get a whore now."

  I set the old guy's damn beard on fire, and he yelped and threw himself face-down into the grass to put it out. People snapped pictures of his flat, wrinkled ass.

  The Filipino sighed at me heavily. "Just fuckin' follow me and don't talk."

  Chapter 20

  Lying Tracey's Ass Off

  The Filipino led me without another word to a badly-lit stairwell across town where we were supposed to wait. The outside of the building was covered in Chinese letters or something that somebody had scorched into it over the spray-painted tag: 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Seemed like a pretty good place to murder a dipshit in a Seminoles jersey.

  Two nearly identical little Asian guys with matching suits, one white, one black had come barging into the stairwell when we came in the side door. The Filipino showed them something on his phone that got them to stop barking, and they settled down to just watching us, feet apart, fists clenched, knuckles forward like they were ready for a martial arts showdown. The metal stair rail gave me a shock like the whole place was flush with static electricity.

  For twenty minutes, they stood there watching us while Filipino played a game on his phone and didn't talk to me.

  "Lee on his way?" I asked him.

  He didn't look up from his game.

  I eyeballed the little Asian guys. Creepy little pricks. Whatever, though, it would only take a second to burn all these motherfuckers.

  "Hey, you know they got no plumbing in these buildings?" I asked the Filipino. "People're pissing out windows."

  He still didn't look up from his phone. "Pipes didn't come with the place."

  I pulled a cigarette out to smoke but put it back when Ching and Chong's fists started to crackle.

  Nearly a fucking hour after we got there, three knocks came at the side door to the stairwell, and the Filipino put his phone game away to open it. Two more guys walked in: one in a dark green hoodie and jeans, the other a dreadlocked Rastafarian in Adidas shorts and a pearl-snap western shirt. The Asian twins shook their heads and wagged their fingers at them, so the guy in the green hoodie got into it with them in their language. The voice was Lee's.

  The Rasta in the shorts came and stood uncomfortably close to me. I backed away a step, but he stepped with me. "Stay close," he said. "I keep you safe from mind readers."

  I shifted Tracey's ass to my other hand and confronted fears of intimacy with another man.

  Ching and Chong retreated deeper in the building, still shouting at Lee as they went, him shouting right back at them until the door to the stairwell closed.

  "Goddamn, they some assholes," he said, nodding to the Filipino, who took his cue and made his exit. Lee pulled his hood off and jerked his head at the Rastafarian. "He fuzzes psychics up, but you gotta be within a couple of feet of his brain. Stay close to him. He's fine. He's just a car thief, got paroled last year."

  "They got cars in Jamaica?" I asked the guy standing six inches from my face.

  The black as midnight Rastafarian sucked a swallow of beer from a green Heineken bottle. "Yeah, they gots five cahs in Jamaica. I had to steal the same one ovah an' ovah." He turned to Lee. "You were right 'bout dis guy, Mistah Lee."

  "'Mistah Lee,'" I said. "Look at you. And you speak Chinese now."

  In the dim emergency light of the stairwell, I could see the whites of Lee's eyes were grayish with little patterns like circuits. "What'chu want, Don? I'm gettin' asked too many damn questions about why you keep thinkin' about me and wantin' to find me. Put that with the fact that you don't like my bosses, and I'm gettin' some difficult questions."

  "Good to see you, too," I said. "You want the questions to stop, that's an easy fix. Just turn my nanites back on so Silvy can't read me. That's all I want. You put them in me, right?"

  Lee shook his head and rolled his eyes. "'That's all.' You act like that's not a big thing, turnin' them back on. I didn't put them in you, either, so don't start that up. Tracey gave you some water at the bunker, right? Outside? They were in there so if you got picked up by the cops they couldn't read you. Your boy got 'em, too. Tracey and her bottles, man. Don't trust 'em."

  Fucking Tracey again.

  "Where is she?" I asked him. "Will's dead. I want to discuss that with her. She in the tent city?"

  "That's right, she is. Good luck gettin' to her. As for turnin' yours back on, these nanites in me log everything I do with 'em. I command 'em, but I ain't got the programming skills to do anything they can't already do. That's probably why Tracey made me take 'em. Every action I task is dumped to a server, and every IP address in somebody's head I alter gets sent to the bosses in a daily spreadsheet report. I can't do anything for you, man. Get this off your mind 'cause You're makin' problems for me thinkin' about it, and I don't got time to fool with petty shit. Go roll one up and relax."

  Again with the 'petty' shit. Goddamn. "Well, I'm sorry my needing your help is such a goddamn inconvenience for you," I said to him. The Rasta pulled me closer to him because I was getting out of range of his mind field or whatever. I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. "Can't you hide the file or upload a virus or something so they don't see?"

  "They're nanites, man, not magic fucking genies. I don't know shit about programming a virus, and they don't work like on TV."

  "Can you download one from the Internet?"

  The Rastafarian let out two solid laughs in my face.

  Lee wiped the sweat from his forehead with a clammy-looking hand. "Go get high or something, man. I really ain't got time for this. Silvy's got her attention focused elsewhere right now anyway, all right? Don't worry about her, just stop thinkin' about me. She'll leave you alone if you shut up and think about something else." He stepped closer to me. "But tell me right now, with him here blockin' you. Are you plannin' something?"

  The interior door squealed on its hinges. An ugly, short sonuvabitch with a ponytail stuck his head in, the twins in the white and black suits behind him. Lee nodded to the pony-tailed guy, the guy nodded back, and he closed the door. Then he screamed at the Yin Yang twins.

  "You come up in the world," I told him.

  "Yeah, well, I'm bringin' shit to the table now. Now, like I just asked you, are you plannin' something?"

  I leaned against the stair railing. "That depends. Am I talking to Stagga Lee from Branson or am I talking to Stagga Lee, Uncle Bob's salaried boy?"

  Lee put his hood back on. "No, we done here. Go back to your room. I heard they set you up with some nice boys to play with."

  I didn't budge. "That's bullshit, and are you really gonna stand there and throw me out with nothing after what I did for you at that meeting? You're really that kind of guy?"

  He bowed up involuntarily. "You cost my girls private school is what you did," he said defensively. "I didn't ask you to talk for me to Tracey, and you didn't need to talk for me."

  I went into my pocket for a cigarette. "I did it to keep you alive. You don't know Tracey like I do, man, but you know her enough--" he tried to interrupt me but I just got louder "-
-that you saw her kill a man right in front of you because he annoyed her, Lee. Fucking think about that."

  Lee pointed to my bundle with a twitchy hand and changed the subject. "Why you carryin' that piece of her around? 'Cause you hate her so much?"

  The Rastafarian coughed and something wet hit my face. "Fuck, man," I growled at him and wiped it off. "Man, I don't know, Lee. It doesn't seem right to just throw it out, and if I leave it somewhere, who knows what the fuck somebody'll do with it. Did you see the video of what they did to her?"

  "No, I didn't. But that's going a lot outta your way for someone you're tellin' me is a murderin' bitch."

  I ran my fingers through my hair. "Yeah, I know that, Lee. I know that. It's fucking complicated, all right?" This wasn't getting me anywhere. I lit my cigarette and put my free hand back into my pocket for the stroke of goddamn genius I had felt in there.

  I pulled out Rosemary's agent badge and flipped it open, keeping the flap with her ID pointed at me. "Here's the thing, guys. I work for the SCEIA. You help me out and I can make things go a lot easier."

  That caught them both completely off guard. Like, fucking shocked.

  "You what?" Lee said.

  The Rasta's eyes rolled back in his head. "Oh, fuck, mon." He instinctively backed away from me, and I pulled him back to my side.

  "That's right, Dreadlock King. 'Oh, fuck.'"

  Lee stared at the silver piece of metal. "Uh-uh, man. No. That's, I don't know what that is, but you ain't a Skee-Ay. If you're smart, you'll go melt that thing down and get rid of it. That's a death sentence if anybody sees it."