by Chuck Wendig
One swings the baton. The other comes at him with the blade.
Mistake. He blocks the baton with the shotgun, cracks her in the head with the stock of the gun. The other gets the shotgun’s mouth smashed up against her nose. The knife falls out of her now-open hand, the blade stuck in the wood.
He stomps on the knife like a hammer pounding a nail. It’s wedged in there good.
He calls again:
“Nora! Nora.”
He goes to take another step–
Skelly comes up alongside of him. He sees the glint of metal–
Then she sticks a giant Bowie knife up under his crotch.
“I’ll spill your sugarplums, sugarplum. You know what happens to a testicle when it’s pulled out of its sack? It unravels. Like a ball of yarn batted around by a mean old housecat.”
“I just want to see my daughter.”
“Rattle your cage all you like. That’s not happening today, daddy-o.”
He turns slowly. “You’re making a mistake.”
“Could be.”
“You making a move at the Boss?”
“Could be that, too.”
“Whole city does that, it’ll be chaos. Already had the Lantern Jacks came at me. They didn’t make it.” He sniffs. “This goes down, all the gangs are gonna want a piece of the island and what’s beneath it. Bloodiest game of King of the Hill in history.”
“Maybe we got an ace up our sleeve.”
“You better hope.”
Mookie’s not real good at reading women, but he’s damn good at reading criminals. And Skelly looks worried. All of them do. Skelly opens her mouth to say something and–
Gunfire.
Bullets pop and whine off the front of the building. Loud chatter. Fully auto. Punching holes in dirty glass. Mookie’s about to yell for everyone to get down, and he reaches out with a massive arm to throw everybody to the ground–
But then he sees Lulu. Standing there stock still, the side of her neck open like a blooming rose. Blood starts to pump, a little at first, then a squirt. Her lips are red, too. A red far darker than her lipstick.
She starts to fall. Mookie reaches for her.
What he catches is a dead girl. Limp and lifeless. Eyes like the marbles in a mannequin’s head.
Skelly’s already crying out, running to the back. The other two girls follow with fleet feet–
Mookie hits the floor and army crawls to the door. He lifts up his cueball head, cracks the door and peers out. He has to know who’s shooting at them. He wants to know who did this. So he can break a baseball bat off in their bowels. He thinks, it’s gotta be a gang hit – they’re all making moves now, all riled up and ready to dance–
His heart sinks when he sees.
The car is a black Cadillac Escalade. Two guys hanging out – a fat fuck out of the passenger side, a weaselface out the back window. Weaselface has a little Tec-9 submachine jobby, spitting fire and lead. The other has a long and mean AK-47.
He knows the both of them.
The Weaselface is Tommy Spall. The fat fuck is Karol Lutkevich.
Spall and Lutkevich. Two of the Boss’s killers. Soldiers, technically, but specialized. Neither trucks much with the Blaze trade or the Underworld. They break legs, break heads, put bullets in hearts and brains.
Lutkevich changes the magazine. The Tec-9 in Spall’s hands keeps on barking.
A couple bullets punch through the wood next to Mookie. For a moment he doesn’t move. Can’t move – pinned down. He’s trying to parse this. What does this mean? The Organization’s coming to hit the Get-Em-Girls? Are they here for Nora?
Or – and here, a chill runs over his hide like a tide of spiders – are they here for him?
He sees Lulu there. Bleeding out. Heels stutter-spasming against the floor.
He pulls the door, shoves the barrel out–
Takes a shot. Choom. The back window of the Escalade explodes in. The weasel – Spall – screams, his face suddenly a red mask of broken glass and buckshot.
It’s enough. The fat fuck, Lutkevich, turns, sees that his partner’s hit – he slides back over to the driver’s seat.
People on the street are screaming. Running. Hiding.
Mookie’s already up and out the door. Shotgun up. One blast, then another: both tires pop in a flip of black rubber ribbon. Spall, howling, leans out and fires a burst but the bullets go wild: he can’t see anything through the blood.
Mookie shoots him in the head. A burping fountain of blood and brains.
Lutkevich: hand on the wheel, the AK up and pointed out the passenger side window. A chatter of bullets. Mookie ducks. Slides and slams his shoulder against the passenger side. Dents it. Soon as the bullets stop he throws open the door, slaps the rifle away with a meaty paw, drags Lutkevich part of the way out.
“You killed a girl in there,” Mookie snarls.
“Suck my dick,” Lutkevich says. Ballsy even still. “Time’s over, Mook. New regime coming in. The Boss is sick. The prick kid is nowhere to be found. They want you dead.”
Mookie closes the door on Lutkevich’s head.
The man screams.
He keeps opening and closing the door until his head is shattered skull inside the meat-sack of ruined features. A broken vase in a bloody sock.
And then it’s done. Both bodies, still.
Two of the Organization’s own men. Dead by his hand.
That’s a problem.
Somewhere in the distance: sirens. People hiding around corners, staring.
Cops. And soon: the Organization will come. They’ll want answers.
They’ll want his head.
Up here, he sticks out worse than a sore thumb. He sticks out like King Kong’s dick. They’ll find him soon enough if he hangs out here.
But…
Downstairs, they got nothing. He knows that place better than any of those assholes. Better than Werth, even.
14
For as much as it is true that the Underworld is not a place of the spirit but rather a corporeal reality, that does little to negate the fact that the Great Below remains bound up with the energies of death. It has been seen from time to time that men who die upon the surface – men who die with purpose in their hearts, who die unexpectedly, who die in the hands of intense violence or grief-soaked tragedy – are given to leave their bodies as spirit and specter: a ghost of life, restless and insane. What is known is that these ghosts, when in proximity to a gateway into the Great Below, will eventually wind their way into that dark space. Wandering down, down, ever down. I’ve seen them here – the Cerulean gives me the sight. They move through the Shallows, toward the Tangle and through its catacombs. Though what happens if – or when – they reach the Expanse, I could not say.
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
Nora throws open the door to her apartment. Hurries inside, slams the door, chains it, turns all the locks, goes to the windows and closes the blinds and the curtains.
Then she sits. On the couch. Hands on her knees.
She starts shaking again.
Casimir is dead.
It hasn’t caught up with her. Not yet. He’s dead. And the blood is on her hands. Not literally, not anymore, but…
They were going to change things. Together.
And now…
Nora chokes back a sob. Kicks out with a foot, knocks over her coffee table. Everything feels like a rope slipping through her fingers, the frayed end almost in her hand and out of her grip.
All this time she thought she could go against her father, go against the Organization and control the Blue trade. What a joke. She had the money. She had no one or nothing holding her back. She played Mookie. Shot Werth. Bought some thugs. Got the Get-Em-Girls on her side. But she was David flinging stones at Goliath, and in this story, Goliath stomps David into a sticky puddle. The Organization came back on her like an ill-cracked whip. Her guys were bought back or killed. Her own Mole Men, exe
cuted down in the dark of the Underworld. Soon as those were gone, her territory was in the wind – the Organization soldiers took it right back. And then her Blue started to dry up.
She wants to bail. Get in a cab. On a train. Use the last bit of her money to hop a plane. Whatever, wherever. Just gone. Run away.
But then, another voice says: you need to calm the hell down, bee-yotch. Focus up. You can fix this. You’re already fixing this. The plan is the plan – you still need the gangs. You can still do this. Don’t be a spaz.
We do this right, we can still tear it all down and dance around in the rubble.
Then Daddy will listen. Then he’ll really know who I am.
Nora feels under her couch. Pulls out the .38 she once used to pop a bullet into James Werth’s hip when he caught her at her father’s bar last year.
She knows what she needs. Time to make the gangs listen. Time to pay for their attention in the only currency that really matters right now:
Nora needs more Blue.
You’re awesome, she thinks. You’re a righteous mean-ass smart-ass little bitch.
Nora flips the cylinder. Sees the shiny ends of six .38 shells gleaming.
Then it’s out the door to fix what’s fucked.
The tunnel is lit with striations of pulsing light from squirming fungus tucked in the pockets of the open jaws and eye sockets of all the skulls lining the walls, one skull after the other, rows and stacks, not merely stuck to the rock but married to it as if they have always been a part of this place. The Blazes are like that: the blue stuff doesn’t merely tear aside the façade to reveal the monsters, but when on it, the whole of the Underworld pulses with a different kind of energy. Like staring at the world under a blue light.
As Mookie charges forward, boots pounding on hard stone, splashing in murky puddles of water dripping down from the streets and sewer tunnels above his head – the Blazes crackle and hiss, the candles behind his eyes gone suddenly dark. It takes the wind right out of him. His legs buckle. He skids on limestone scree–
Mookie falls forward, catching himself on stinging palms.
Heavy breath. Labored. Wheezing. Too old for this. Too old by a country mile.
“You OK?” comes a voice from ahead of him. He’s so disoriented that, for a moment, he doesn’t know who it is. But then she says in that bourbon-and-smoke voice, “How’s that classy chassis holding up, sailor?”
He hacks and coughs, suppresses a dry heave, and spits.
“Just fine. Drug picked a funny time to hit the bricks is all.” He doesn’t bother saying anything about that whole I’m old and tired business.
Skelly comes up, pats him on the shoulder. “Bluelight Special went dark, daddy-o?”
“Cut the slang shit.” He stands – not easily, his legs still feeling like a couple Slinkies staple-gunned to his ass. She looks wounded. He mutters: “Sorry.”
“You have blood on you.”
He looks. He does. Hands. Shirt. It takes him a second–
“Lulu’s dead,” Skelly says. Is that fear in her voice? Anger? Both?
“I’m sorry.”
He replays Lulu’s final moments – open neck, blood up like from a water fountain, mouth agape, gone. And when she falls, he sees Karyn standing in her place.
Karyn. Shit.
Death is a fact of his life. He loses guys down here all the time. This isn’t a forgiving place – it seems like the Grim Reaper has a house around every corner, in every pit, up every hollow shaft. Walls like these, lined with hundreds of human skulls, do little to shake the feeling. Whose skulls are these? He doesn’t even know.
But it isn’t about the dead. It’s about those who get left behind. Survivors are like amputees: a part cut off them, a phantom feeling and false limb put in place as a piss-poor replacement. Hobbling around. Never quite whole again. He doesn’t know how death is for the really truly dead, but for those left standing in its wake, it’s the worst thing in the world. Like Karyn. Karyn, who thought maybe she was in love. Karyn, who had a partner in this life.
Karyn, who doesn’t yet know that Lulu got a bullet to the neck.
A bullet maybe aimed for him.
Her blood is on him. In more ways than one.
The skulls around him no longer glow with swimmy, watery light – their open mouths and empty eyes have gone dark. The only light is from Skelly, who holds a torch – really, an old chair leg swaddled in gas-soaked rags and lit. The torch-flame pops and spits.
He wants to sit down in the silence and still cool air of this place.
He thinks, just give up. Let the gobbos come. Let them tear him apart, make charcuterie from his meat. Long pig pepperoni. Mookie salumi. Pearl prosciutto.
Or maybe one of the shadows would come for him. Sweep over him, silent as an owl, then down upon him–
But he’s got work to do.
Mookie breaks the silence.
“Where’d the rest of your girls go?” he asks.
“Different tunnels. Split up just in case. All part of the plan.”
“I need to know where my daughter is.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“It ain’t Jersey City.”
Skelly pauses. Eyes him up. “No. No it ain’t.”
Mookie pushes in against her. Chin out. Hands in fists. His shadow darkens her brow. “So then: where the fuck is she?”
That move – him standing there like a grizzly bear on its hind legs – usually gets most people to talk. Or at least flinch. Skelly stands firm.
“I told you, I don’t know. That was part of the deal.” She flips her Kool-Aid bangs back. “You really messed things up with her, you know. She’s got it out for you.”
“You don’t get to tell me that.”
“I’m just asking: were you a Bad Daddy, daddy-o?”
He shows his teeth. “You don’t get to ask me that, either. I did the best I could.”
“That so?”
No, he thinks. But all he says is, “Shut up and get out of my way.”
“I’m coming with you.”
He shoves past her. “No, you ain’t.”
She saunters after him, not as a trailing puppy but rather as someone confident in her inevitability to catch up. “Maybe I can help you.”
“I don’t need help. I do this alone.”
“You need me.”
“You’re the enemy.”
“Seems like maybe you’re the one who’s on the wrong side of this. Those thugs who shot at us – they were Organization men, weren’t they?”
He doesn’t say anything.
Finally, she asks, “You got a plan, then?”
He turns. Teeth grinding so hard they could mill wheat. “I’m gonna find out who killed Casimir Zoladski. Prove it wasn’t Nora.”
“Your daughter says she did the deed.”
“What?” The air, sucked out of his lungs. “She tell you that?”
“She passed that message along. To your buddy. The goat-man.”
Now: fire in his lungs. In his belly. Up his throat. “Werth came to you?”
“Mm-hmm. Was planning on killing her. Maybe killing all of us. She got the better of him. We roughed him up pretty good. She sent him home with a message: she killed Zoladski’s grandson. Heir to the throne.”
His head reels. He tries to imagine it: his daughter murdering someone. She said she was going to change things. But murder? He knew she’d gone mean, was maybe mean for a lot longer than he ever figured, but killing someone? That takes something he didn’t know she had. You don’t walk into their house and pulp their brains against the floor just because you can.
And could she have done that? Not by herself.
But then: a little tiny flare of hope, like a lit cigarette tossed up into the darkness. Skelly says, “I don’t think she did it.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“I know bad girls,” Skelly says. “I’m a den mother to bad girls. Shoot, I’m a former bad girl myself. She’s bad, all r
ight. Got a rattlesnake mind and bullwhip tongue. But I don’t think she’s evil. And that’s what it takes to kill someone. You gotta have a little evil lodged up in there. Maybe a lot of it.”
“What about you? You got evil in you?”
She hesitates. Steps closer. “Maybe a little.”
“Me too.” She presses herself against him. He smells her perfume. The lingering odor of an occasional cigarette behind it. He feels the heat coming off of her…
He shakes his head, pulls away from her. He says, “So I still need to find the killer. But I don’t know how. I’m fuckin’ lost over here.”
“Too bad you can’t just ask Casimir Zoladski himself.”
It hits him like a fist.
“I can,” he says.
“What?”can ask him. I know someone.” He waves her on. “C’mon. We need to head to Daisypusher. I gotta see a man about a ghost.”
15
The gobbos are tribal. Possibly even hive-minded, as each individual gobbo seems confused, inept, like an ant who has wandered too far from the hill. But when together, they work together. They work as one. Tribal breakdowns do exist among them – some by belief, some by purpose, others by the way they look. Some gobbo groups are hunters, killers. Others are… well, I don’t know that “religious” is the word, but they seem to congregate only at temples, gurgling and howling their dread songs to the Hungry Ones, the gods of this place. Some gobbos are fat and gray. Others pale, milky white, or with a rubbery, rusty skin. For a long time I thought that the Naga were the opposite: lone creatures, smarter by themselves than when together, generally distrustful of one another and operating on singular agendas. I no longer know if this is true.
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
The two thug bodies fall like heavy rolls of carpet. They splash into the water of the sewer tunnel. Sorago quickly covers the manhole from underneath.
Two shadows emerge from the darkness of the tunnel.
Sirin and Sarnosh. Sirin of the golden eye. Sarnosh of the thick black scale. Both brothers in the assassin’s caste. Two Naga loyal to Sorago. Loyal to the Candlefly clan.