by Barr, Jeff
"This goddamn thing. This Skrunge," Arneson bit back the urge to correct him, settling for scuffing at the gravel with the toe of his boot. "It's heading toward the tipping point."
"Yes sir, I know, but—"
"It's spreading faster, mutating right in front of our eyes. And we got nothing that can stop it."
"There has to be some way of containing it. This situation has been in the playbooks since nineteen seventy-eight, for Christ's sake." Arneson's free hand was shaking, and he stuffed it into his pocket.
"We are looking at a total burn-down of everything south of your location, all the way down to the Mexico border. Maybe further."
Arneson went cold. "You're fucking kidding me."
"You want to watch your language when you're addressing me, son." Staunton's voice twanged like am over-tuned guitar string. "I am not kidding, not even a little bit. We are pulling everyone out. Today. Without support, without money. Find a way."
"I need to bring someone."
"Is she infected?" Staunton said it softly, but with weight. "Are you?"
Arneson said nothing. The silence hung until Staunton broke it.
"Don't go all wiggy on me now, boy. This is your country we're talking about—the survival of the USA. You got to take care of your own problems—and if you can't…" Arneson didn't need Staunton to tell him what would happen then. He would be cut loose. And there was no retirement plan for guys in Arneson's line of work.
"But the person I need to take out—she's different. Not like any of the other Skungers. Maybe she'll be able to answer some questions about the origins. She was right there when it hit the States. If she didn't have personal contact with Patient Zero, she knows someone who does."
There was a brief pause. "I'm listening. Tell me what you know."
Arneson told Staunton everything. Sugar's encounter with the boy from Kansas, her and Jynx's subsequent infection, Palmetto, all of it. Arneson was a man used to his own counsel, but he had been feeling adrift, floating out here on his own. His chest loosened as he unburdened himself.
"OK. That's good son, that's real good. Hold on."
The muffled sound of Staunton holding the phone to his chest, and the bass rumble of his voice. When he came back on the line, his voice gave away little except enormous tension.
"Head north. There's a facility in Oregon. Junction City. You know the place, I believe?"
"I know it." Arneson had grown up only thirty minutes south of Junction City. Of course Staunton knew that. He knew everything: the label on Arneson's boxer briefs, the name of JFK's killer, the price of rice in China. Guys like him knew it all.
"In the northeast corner of the city, there's an office building. Juniper Ridge. One of our sites. I know a man there. He's a doctor. Not a medico, but a kind of...researcher, you might say. If anyone can figure out a way out from under this goddamn thing, it's him. He's a bit of a duck, but give him my name and tell him 'Frank sends his best.' Can you remember that, son?"
"Yes."
"That's all I got. You get yourself and your girl there, ASAP, and maybe he can help you. Maybe not. But that's all I got. God forgive me. Good luck, son."
The line went dead. Arneson lowered the phone, his nerves buzzing. He dropped the phone to the ground and crushed it into glittering plastic shards.
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
Maas eyed her like a savanna lion contemplates a limping gazelle. "Hi there, Sugar."
Sugar fidgeted, the thick carpet rough against her bare feet. "Hey." Sweat ran down her side, and she resisted the urge to brush it away.
"Having a good day?"
"Yes."
"The air agrees with you?"
She crossed her arms. "What do you want? I'm kind of busy right now. On a shoot." She pointed to a monitor that showed the pool deck. Vanessa was crumpled into a deck chair, sobbing. The director stood nearby, checking his phone. Every few seconds he would look up, bark silent orders, and go back to his phone. No one ventured near the crying girl.
"Yeah, I saw that. I saw what you did to that girl." He stood up and walked around the desk. "I have to say, it turned me on a little bit."
She swallowed and said nothing. He had the air-conditioning cranked up, and she willed herself not to shiver in the cold air.
Maas leaned on the edge of his desk. He popped the top button of his shorts.
"Get on your knees," he said.
"Listen, Dennis, I can't do this right now, I—"
His eyes narrowed. "I give a fuck what you think. Get on your knees."
The cold light in Maas' eyes pinned her there, like an insect on a board. His hand shot out and locked around her wrist, grinding painfully. He began to pull her forward, the corded muscle standing out on his arm. Maas noticed her trembling and smiled like a crocodile. "So much like your mother. She liked to fight sometimes, too—but she always ended up where she belonged."
He guided her hand until it brushed against the bulge in his shorts. With a growl, she grabbed tight, clutching his cock and balls in her fist. She twisted savagely, laughing at his howls of pain, at the spots of blood that soaked through his shorts. She—
She blinked away the fantasy and sank to her knees. She wondered if there was a psychologist somewhere that was working on an emotional dictionary. A lookup table to draw a line between a given mix of emotions and their physiological counterpart. Where would loathing—pure, unfettered disgust, the kind that causes your stomach to bubble with acid and your teeth to grind—where would that connect to lust?
A thought struck her. How many of those lines were artificial lines? Dotted lines created by habit and repetition rather than genuine, healthy interaction. She knew that this wasn't right. This was compulsion.
"Crawl to me."
She began to crawl jerkily, a puppet with half its strings broken. She turned it over in her mind. Those dotted lines between the body, the mind, and the heart.
"Just like your mother. Always my good girl." He unzipped his pants.
The tumbling, swirling feeling in her stomach, the one she had felt so many times before. She felt it only with Maas…why didn't she feel it with Arneson? The thought froze her mind. She thought she was a slave to her own sexual need, but was it possible she had just mistaken lust for some other feeling? Fear? Shame?
"No." She stopped.
"Yes. Come here." Maas freed his cock, and stroked himself. He smiled at the way her eyes followed it. "Just like your mother."
"No, I'm not like my mother at all." Once she spoke the words, the tumbler in her mind clicked over. The enormous truth of it slammed into her body. She wasn't like her mother, and she didn't want Maas. He had tricked and subverted her mind and her body. He had raped her. Since she'd known him, he had been shaping her, working her mind with his tricks and his words and his orders. And now look at her. Porn, webcamming, all of it; meaningless and perverse.
She stayed where she was, head down, hair hanging in her face, marveling over this new bit of information. It was only just occurring to her that she should get to her feet and leave, when Maas' foot slammed down on her hand.
He ground his bare foot down, twisting until the skin felt ready to tear loose. She cried out and bared her teeth at him. He bore down, smiling, and she felt the skin tear.
"I used to do this to your mother. She got off on it." He reached down and pulled her to her knees by her hair. "I bet you do, too."
He pulled her level to his crotch. She stared at his erection, hypnotized by its gentle sway. His fist tightened in her hair, and at the pain, her mouth dropped open.
"Yes," he hissed, pulling her forward. The tip of his cock touched her lip and caught, sticking to the dry skin. He pulled her forward, looking down, the tip of his tongue poking out from between his teeth, the color high on his cheeks.
She opened her mouth and let him in.
Palmetto, gently pulling aside her bloody bandages, encouraging her to squeeze his arm while he worked, even when she clawed bloody half-moon
s into the skin of his forearms.
Arneson, his mouth on her neck, his hands in her hair. Nothing between them, and everything between them.
Jynx, fluttering down to the pavement like something broken.
Her mother, laughing with her in the car, her eyes the same green as her dress and the rain-drenched trees.
Sugar bit down.
Blood squirted into her mouth, and her eyes squinted involuntarily at the hot spurt of the initial salty burst. Her teeth punched through the delicate skin on the top of his penis, then through the dorsal veins. She bore down, through the capillaries, through the spongy meat of the Corpus Cavernosum, stopping only met with the muscly resistance of his urethra.
He shrieked and cuffed her across the face, splitting the skin above her eye and sending her spinning to the floor. The remaining strands of flesh still holding his cock to his body stretched and snapped like a strand of al dente spaghetti. The top half of his cock flew out of her mouth and bounced across the carpet, dangling oozing purple veins and chewed scraps of flesh. The head of it came to rest against his foot. He screamed again and reared back, slamming into his desk and sending a huge monitor crashing to the floor. He clutched at his groin, bending at the waist like a child needing to pee.
"You crazy fucking bitch," Maas gasped. His face had gone gray with shock, save for two hectic patches of red high on his cheeks. He hopped across the carpet, blood falling from where his hands cupped his crotch. "Give me back my cock!"
She wondered how she must look, her grinning, bloody mouth and crazed eyes. She decided she didn't care how she looked, and spit blood at him. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a bright red smear. "Go ahead, it's right there. I don't want it." A giggle rose unbidden to her mouth, along with the remnants of a school-yard taunt. "Besides, I choke on small bones."
Maas' eyes blazed at her. "I am going to cut your throat and skull-fuck the hole." Hectic patches of color crosshatched his cheeks and his chest rose and fell like a bellows. "You're going to die fucking screaming." His mouth trembled between a pained grimace and a sneer. "I'll have your boyfriend do it. Arneson."
She got to her feet. "If you think he's your running dog, you may be in for a surprise."
The sneer dropped from his lips as she approached. His hands remained clutched over his groin. Blood dripped down his balls, hanging in fat drops like overripe fruit.
She stepped to him, her face inches from his. "You think just because you pay him, you own him?"
"You think because you fuck him that you do?" He looked smaller now, gray, sunken, aged. "You don't control anything, you crazy bitch."
"Fuck you," she said. "My mother was crazy." She leaned over him, smiling at the way he cringed. She reached behind him, and picked up a shiny steel camera. She looked at it, looked at him, and brought it up in a wide, looping blow that slammed into his jaw and sent two of his teeth rolling across his desk like dice. He howled, blood spattering from his broken mouth. She dropped the camera. "But I'm not."
She slammed the door on her way out.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
Sugar held the enormous Bowie knife over the candle flame, watching, fascinated, as tongues of fire forked over the steel. Soot formed on the chrome like the breath of a ghost. The drops of her sweat sizzled as they dripped on the blade.
The razors she had employed in LA were pale shadows of the large, chromed blade of the Bowie. It was majestic. It was made for tasting blood.
She brought the glowing tip to her arm and began to prick at her skin with the blade, watching fascinated as tiny red pearls of blood welled up. Under the naked light of the bathroom mirror it was almost purple. The smell of burning flesh wafted up to her, and she welcomed it.
She twisted the tip of the knife into her flesh, boring through skin until she felt an electric shock of pleasure so sharp it hurt. She levered the blade to pry up a writhing gossamer thread of the Skunge. She held it up under the light, watching it shiver and coil around the tip of the knife. Colors ran up and down its length, blurring together to form hues she had never seen before. She pulled it, watching it emerge. It felt like she was sewing her own skin, pulling a stitch tight, the raw tissue underneath bunching up pulling taut. She ripped the thread free and held it up to the light. The thread curled, wriggling while depending from her index finger. It tightened around her finger for a moment, then went limp. She smiled.
She cut more. She had missed the feeling, that clean, sharp feeling of the blade as it split her skin, releasing her tension, her anger, whatever else coiling up inside her. She missed the ritual: the cadence of cut, burn, and blot.
With every burning line of pain, her mind cleared. But not enough; never enough. She kept cutting.
Minutes passed like hours. The flexible bullet of pain and pleasure rocketed around her skull, reverberating and gaining speed.
She rolled her arm over, looking at the branching blue highway of her Cephalic vein. It would be as easy as breathing. Just ease the tip of the Bowie in, usher the blood, and let it wash everything away. That's what the letting of blood was for, after all: to cleanse the body of infection.
Some animal instinct pricked up its ears inside her. Footsteps approaching, moving up the walk to the front door. She rose to her feet, the knife clutched in her hand, and moved toward the sound. The footsteps stopped on the other side of the door.
She thought it would be Maas, or at least one of his paid killers. Like the animal he was, mere pain wouldn't stop him from finishing the kill. The victim: her psyche, her body, her soul.
The knob turned, and she gripped the knife tighter.
Oh no, not you. Please, no.
When Arneson walked in, she raised the knife to stab him, and stopped. She couldn't—at least not without then turning the knife on herself. And that, she had decided, was not the way her story would end.
She dropped the knife, and wrapped her arms around him. She said nothing, because she didn't have to. He wasn't here to kill her for Maas—he didn't have to say that, either.
"We have to leave. Now." He looked her over, examining the cut over her eye, the damage to her hand. "I have a kit in my trunk. Get packed, and get ready to leave."
All at once she was furious with him; his gruff certainty and his sticky politeness and his goddamned insufferable fucking eyes that said that everything was going to be OK. She withdrew her arms and clutched them around herself. She needed something from him—a promise.
"I'm not going."
"Listen, babe, we have to. And we have to do it now."
"Do we have somewhere to go?"
He hesitated, as if weighing what he had said against a great many more things he could say. "The Skunge is getting worse. The system is going to start showing cracks pretty soon, and when it breaks, the bad news is going to be a flood. We are right in the way of the worst of it. I have a place."
She stepped to him and took his face in her hands. She held his eyes with hers, searching them, and hoped would know if she saw the truth. "Are you going to keep me safe?" she asked.
His eyes were steady. "Yes."
"I don't believe you."
He stared into her eyes. Stared into her. "Let me tell you a story," he said.
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
He spoke. She sat, listening, while he paced.
"She was beautiful. I mean, really, really gorgeous. But other than that first attraction, none of that matters after a while. She fit together with me, from the first time we met. Nicole. She is, in a way, how I ended up here.
"I was a bad guy, in the old days. I mean, I made myself believe that I was really a decent guy who just kept getting in scrapes…but it wasn't true. You can't really fool yourself.
"Anyway, I grew up fast, and I grew up mean. I didn't know my mother, but I knew too much of my dad. He was a small-time dealer, a drunk, and when I was ten, I'm pretty sure he killed my older brother. Davey went out one night, to 'help out with something', and he never came back. In a l
ot of ways, neither did dad—he was like a floating shipwreck after that. The government tried to take me away, but I kept running back, and eventually they just gave up.
"Then I left school, and started helping out on Dad's runs. I was the muscle for him. I was only fourteen or so, and I could get into places he couldn't. He'd send me to middle schools to drop or collect. One time a teacher got wise to me and tried to hold me there to call the cops, and I broke his arm. We left that town behind the next day, but it wasn't more than a couple weeks we settled into a new town. My dad, he was like a parasite; if the host dies, he'd just attach himself to a new one and start sucking the juice.
"I felt bad when I had to beat up kids younger than me. Felt so bad that to punish myself, I'd go out to bars at night and pick fights with whoever I thought could take me. I took beatings so bad that I pissed blood for days. One time I was in a coma for a week. As soon as I woke up, I busted out of there.
"And so on and so on. I was living rough, trying to keep me and my dad's heads above water. I did things that I can never tell another soul. If there was a God, he would have turned his face away in disgust.
"And all the while, I told myself I was a decent guy, helping out his dad. Life was life; take what you want, but you eat what you take.
"Then I met Nicole.
"We were in different places, but it didn't matter. We met, and we got together, and nothing could have stopped that. Nothing could have stopped what followed, either, but I spent years trying to prove otherwise.
"We got married a year after we first met. I didn't want to change. Sure, I wanted to get out of the drug business. But there was always one more job, nothing big, just one more. I tried to get out, I really did. I picked up shifts as a security guard, working nights, keeping straight. She was a pharmacist, so we both worked nights and spent our days together. Days in the Mojave desert are long and bright. We had the light, at least for a while. Then she confessed. To get through school, she had been a dancer. She had worked clubs in Vegas, Reno, San Francisco. She danced at night, and went to classes during the day. She had taken stuff—speed— to help her get through it. She had been hooked, but that was in the past.