The Mind is a Razorblade

by Max Booth III

  His surprise quickly fades. A smile returns to his pale face.

  “The thing is,” I say, “it doesn’t matter if I can’t remember who I really am, or if you’ve made up some false god to get rich. In the end, it’s all artificial—memory, money, gods, and identities. None of it matters. The only thing that anyone should ever give a shit about is the now. And right now, all your men are dying, and you are alone. Right now, I am going to take my little girl, and we are going to be safe. Because right now, you’ve lost, and I’ve won.”

  The smile on Indigo’s face transgresses into full on laughter. Crackles.

  “Oh, you are precious,” he says.

  It doesn’t matter.

  I squeeze the trigger and I don’t let go until bullets stop spitting out of the muzzle, spilling into his flesh. He flies a few feet and lands flat on his back. Blood and smoke pour from his body like the cauldron of a cannibal.

  And my ears are ringing, but it doesn’t prevent me from hearing every one of the harvies in the room screech like mad banshees. They explode simultaneously, leaving behind in their dust nothing more than small, confused spiders. They flee into the shadows.

  “Well, that was easy.”

  Ezzy’s cries also overpower the ringing in my ears. I drop the empty machine gun and pick her up, hugging her close to my chest.

  “Oh, baby, it’s okay, Daddy is here. It’s all right now. I promise.”

  chapter twenty-four

  But she keeps crying. We need to get out of here.

  It doesn’t take as long to get back to the casino’s main floor as it had taken getting up to Indigo’s private penthouse. Now I know my way around. We take the elevator down and quickly move through the labyrinth of hallways. I hold Ezzy close to me, hoping she stops crying, but of course she doesn’t. Gunshots are going off like fireworks. Thankfully we don’t encounter any trouble in the hallways.

  Downstairs is where the real action is. In the main casino room—the location of the fighting cage and the slots—the world is a bloodbath. Corpses litter the floor like cigarette butts on the street—both casino henchmen and naked Refragatio alike. It’s not just them but the patrons, too. Everybody. Covered in bullet holes. Covered in arrows. Covered in death. Jesus.

  But they’re not all dead. The battle rages on right before our eyes. A man in a suit hides behind a pushed over bar table, hands trembling as he holds his pistol up to defend himself from any attacks. But he’s too slow: one of the Refragatio comes running and flips over the table, decapitating the man with a machete in midstride. His head goes rolling across the room like a loose marble.

  The machete-wielding Refragatio is shot down by another guard seconds later, who in turn is shot through the eye by an arrow.

  Ezzy continues to cry.

  We hide behind the bar, crouching down under the drink counter. I try to muffle her sobs by pushing her face against my chest, although I don’t know why I’m even bothering, given the volume of the gunfire.

  A few people scream from another room. The sound alone makes my skin turn cold. This is a disaster. I made this happen. What else did I expect?

  Ezzy drools down my chest, and I think, at least she’s safe. That’s what this is all about. I’ve saved her. I’ve taken down Indigo. We are going to be safe. Oh, sweet Christ, we are going to be okay.

  Footsteps approach the bar. He or she stops right next to where we’re hiding. The intruder’s breaths are heavy.

  We sit for a moment, holding our breaths, the assailant standing just two feet away. Both of us are waiting for the other to move. If I don’t do anything, then it’ll give the other person the upper hand. Best to act now while they’re not expecting me to actually do something. There’s an empty beer bottle on the floor next to us. Sighing, I grab it by the neck and jump up, holding the bottle back over my head with full intentions of bashing it in the face of whoever is standing here.

  “Whoa, stop!” Molly shouts, raising her arms up in defense.

  I manage to stop just before engaging into full-on swing-action. “Molly, what the hell are you doing here?” I ask, dropping the beer bottle.

  “Mommy!” Ezzy exclaims from in my arms, reaching out for Molly.

  Molly’s face instantly brightens. “Oh, God, Ezzy!”

  The baby practically leaps from my arms to hers. It’s like I don’t even exist. I can’t help but smile. Molly pushes Ezzy’s face into her chest. A warm feeling washes over me and I know I’ve done good.

  Molly peeps an eye over Ezzy’s head. “You did it,” she says.

  I give her a knowing nod, wanting to hug her like she’s hugging our daughter, but still alert enough to know that we’re nowhere close to being in the clear yet. The sounds of people screaming and gunshots going off penetrate the casino’s interior like thunder in a titanium barrel.

  “I told Mercedes not to let you come. What are you doing here?”

  “What do you think?” Molly says. “I came for our baby girl, the same reason you’re here.”

  “Then why the bloody hell am I here?” the Rev asks, and it’s the first time I notice he’s standing behind her, rubbing his ass. “I don’t got no fookin’ tyke.”

  “Because you were scared to be left alone in the big old scary tunnels,” Molly says without bothering to look back.

  “Ha!” the Rev says, cheeks turning red. “That’s...that’s a good one, there, Mol.”

  “Bobby,” Molly says, more serious now. “Did you get him? Indigo—did you kill him? Did you?”

  “He’s gone,” I tell her. “It’s all right now. But we still need to get out of here, fast. Where’s Mercedes?”

  “Beats the hell outta me,” the Rev says.

  Molly doesn’t know, either. “She ran in right ahead of us, and we lost her almost immediately. She could be dead for all I know. God knows almost everyone else is.”

  There’s another gunshot from a nearby room, and someone screams.

  “Not everyone,” the Rev says.

  I shake my head, wanting to be done with this nonsense already. “Screw it, let’s just go. We can meet her at the mono.”

  “Sounds like a plan, mate,” the Rev says. I crawl over the bar counter and we head out of the cage room, making sure to grab a discarded pistol along the way.

  The front entrance is in our sights. Our speed increases, and it feels like everything actually is going to be okay. What we’ll do once we make it out of the casino, I have no idea. I don’t care about that right now. All I’m concerned about is getting out of here. We’ll figure the rest out later.

  “Oasis,” a voice says, and we stop dead in our tracks.

  Mercedes stumbles through the entrance lobby, falling to the ground. She scrambles back to her feet, leaving behind bloody handprints on the marble floor as she rises.

  “Oh, Christ,” I whisper, helping her regain her balance. “They got you.”

  Mercedes gasps for breath, struggling to form coherent words. She falls down again and grabs onto the Rev’s leg to keep herself from hitting the ground. She reaches inside his kilt pocket, and the Rev goes wide-eyed. “Oy, the hell? Leave that alone.”

  She removes her hand and stands up again, ignoring him. “Indigo,” she says to me. “We were winning, we had taken over...then Indigo came. Killed us, killed us all.”

  “That’s impossible,” I say. “I shot Indigo. I made sure he was dead.”

  Mercedes looks at me with absolute dread. “Something’s happened. He isn’t normal. He’s changed.”

  “What do you mean? How has he changed?”

  “I don’t...I can’t...”

  “What do we do?”

  “If he lives, then the rest of us will die,” Mercedes says. “You must stop him. Otherwise...nothing has changed. All these deaths tonight would be a waste.”

  The Rev gives a nervous laugh. “Lass, no offense, but we need to get our sorry arses out of here before we, well, before we end up like you.”

  “He’s right,” Molly s
ays, nudging me. “We gotta go, Bobby, now.”

  Mercedes slips something into my hand, something hard and oval-shaped, something she’d pulled from the Rev’s pocket, and she goes weak in my arms. She lets out a long, disgusting groan. “Make it mean something, make it mean something.”

  Then her eyes roll in the back of her head and she says no more.

  I gently lower her limp body to the floor. I slip the object Mercedes handed me into my pocket, not looking at it but knowing what it is all the same. Molly is grabbing onto my jacket collar, trying to drag me out the door with her. Ezzy is saying, “Da-doo, get up, Da-doo, get up!”

  “Come on, Bob-O,” the Rev says. “She’s gone, let her be, we gotta jet.”

  “Let’s go,” Molly says.

  “No,” I mutter, already regretting what I’m saying. “She’s right.”

  “What?” Molly says.

  “Everyone here died tonight, everyone who helped us. They all died. For what?”

  “For helping us save the life of our daughter, dammit,” Molly says. “Now come on.”

  I stand up, finding it hard to take my eyes off Mercedes. Because she’s right. If we leave now, with Indigo still alive, then what was the point of any of it? Yeah, we saved Ezzy, but for how long? Indigo will keep looking for us, and he will find us eventually. As long as Indigo is alive, we will never be safe.

  “Listen,” I say, turning back to Molly, trying not to let my voice crack. “This isn’t done. I haven’t finished what I started. You guys, you need to go ahead without me. Get on the mono, retreat back to the tunnels with the rest of the Refragatio. I’ll meet up with you guys later, after I’ve taken care of this. If I don’t come back by sunrise, well...get the hell out of the city, as fast as you can.”

  “Are you fucking nuts?” Molly says, crying. “You aren’t staying behind. We need to go. You need to be with us.”

  “I will,” I tell her, “I’ll make it back in time. I promise, sweetheart, nothing bad will happen.” I kiss her on the lips, tasting the bitter salt in her tears.

  “I get no say in this, do I?” she says, and I shake my head and as I kiss her again, Ezzy wraps her arms around my neck and hugs me.

  I tell myself that she’ll be hugging me again soon. I don’t know if that’s true. I want Molly to believe it is, though. I want to believe it is.

  “Just go,” I tell her, “and imagine I’m right behind you. I’m off to go save the world again.”

  Molly opens her mouth to say something, then she closes it, thinks for a moment, and finally says, “I love you, Bobby.”

  “I love you, too,” I tell her, and then both her and Ezzy are running out the door, Ezzy shouting my name (“Da-doo, Da-doo”) as they leave.

  The Rev pauses before moving. He looks over his shoulder at me like he’s expecting never to talk to me again. “Vivian.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He clears his throat. “My name, my real name. It’s Vivian.”

  I can’t help it. I laugh.

  “You royal cunt,” he says.

  “Love you too, Rev,” I say, and watch as he limps out the casino entrance.

  I make sure the pistol in my hands is loaded, and I turn back around, heading for where Mercedes had come from. I follow the sound of bullets. The sound of screams.

  I arrive at the bottom of a stairway. The steps are covered in random limbs and thick puddles of gore. Indigo stands at the top of the steps, slowly walking down toward me. He wields a hideously huge shotgun, blowing away the last few survivors unlucky enough to be in his way.

  Indigo’s mouth curls into a snarl that makes my heart skip a beat. His face is deformed and dripping of melted flesh, thanks to my previous machine gun escapades. Yet it doesn’t seem to stop him. If anything, he’s stronger—faster.

  How is he still walking?

  How is he still breathing?

  Indigo keeps his eyes on me as he walks down the steps, even as he pulls the trigger of his shotgun and blows away the already dying corpses crawling at his feet. He smiles at me, actually enjoying this. He’s looking at me like he’s saying, I told you this would happen, you didn’t believe me, but now you know.

  And he’s right. Now I know.

  Fuck.

  Now he’s at the end of the steps, and he’s standing right in front of me. Our eyes become one.

  I say, “You were dead.”

  And he says, “So were you.”

  I forget about keeping my heart intact and focus every single cell in my body on making Indigo a whole lot uglier. It doesn’t even fucking faze him.

  He lifts the shotgun. I lift my pistol. He’s faster.

  A noise erupts my eardrums and I’m flat on my back, bleeding out of my stomach. My vision dies and I’m back home in the warmth of darkness.

  All I hear is Indigo laughing.

  chapter twenty-five

  Darkness. And then light.

  A light so bright and sharp I can feel it stab into my eyeballs. It pains my teeth. My jaw unhinges and a scream attempts to escape, but my throat is too weak, and only a low pathetic squeal is audible.

  The light, it’s from a flashlight. It’s hooked up to some mechanism above the seat that has become my new prison. It’s like a gurney, keeping me in a slanted vertical stance. Metal straps keep me pinned to the cushion.

  I can’t move. I can’t think. I can’t breathe.

  A numbness overwhelms my stomach, makes my body warm, my mind dizzy.

  Oh God, what is this?

  The brightness of the light slowly fades, and Indigo’s face becomes more apparent as he stands above me with his malformed snarl.

  “Welcome back,” he whispers.

  “Where the fuck am I?”

  He chuckles. The sound makes me want to vomit my soul away.

  “You’re back home, Detective Oasis,” he says. “Where you always belonged.”

  “Where’s Molly—where’s Ezzy?”

  “Don’t really care about them at the moment,” he says. “I’ll find them later, when I’m bored and hungry. Right now, you’re the center of attention. You’re the premium meat.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?” I try to move, but it’s impossible.

  “It means,” Indigo says, “that I’ve taken quite a liking to you. I tried to turn you already, and it didn’t work. You kept fighting. The spider, the parasite left your body. That never happens.”

  I’m lucky to lift my eyes to see, lucky to open my mouth to scream.

  “Your mind,” Indigo says, “it’s unlike any I have ever encountered. It devoured my spider, my little harvester converter, and spat it right out. I don’t know what makes you so special, Detective Oasis, but I know it’d be a shame to let you go to waste.”

  This is fucked. This is so fucked.

  “You told me that you didn’t believe in Conundrae. You called me a fake, a con artist,” Indigo says. “What you don’t remember is, that’s exactly what you said last time you were on this chair. Last time, though, your words angered me. All those years you spent supporting our Master, and it was all fake. I become very, very upset.”

  I’m thinking about Molly, about Ezzy, about the Rev and everyone else I no longer remember. My father, my mother. My dead brother.

  Where are they now? Am I about to join them?

  “But this time,” Indigo says, “I am not so mad. I am more...amused. I am sure you’re wondering why I am still standing. I should be dead. Well, Detective Oasis, the truth is, I’ve been dead for a while now. The truth is, it’s not just you and I that’s in this room right now. It’s not just me that’s talking to you.”

  Fuck, fuck this is crazy, this is fucking crazy...

  Indigo’s cold, cataract eyes transform from a state of listlessness into a set of mesmerizing red flames.

  He stares into my soul and I feel it melting away.

  “This world is mine, Detective Oasis,” Indigo says, only it’s not Indigo anymore.

  “Conundrae,”
I whisper.

  The demon nods.

  “Now that I’m here, I am going to need someone to lead my army of harvies. There’s lots of food out there, Oasis, and I am starving.”

  “No...”

  “Yes...and your mind is just what I need to lead them. It’s been a long time coming, Detective, but we’ve finally made it. What have I always said?” He snarls. “Slowly but surely, sugar pie. Slowly but surely.”

  Something tickles my skin. It only takes me a moment to realize it’s a spider crawling on my neck. Not just one spider, but dozens.

  “NOOOO!” I scream, my fingers straining to stretch inside my jacket pocket. They just reach, curling around the object Mercedes gave me before dying.

  “Shh,” says Conundrae, “it’ll be over soon. And then...we feast.”

  Molly, her face, her long red hair. The way I first saw her when I walked into the bar, the way she danced, and the way her beautiful eyes brightened when they saw me. I want to be back in bed with her, at our shitty little apartment. I want to be holding her. I want to be kissing her. I want to feel her skin, oh God, I want to feel her breath. I want to place my lips on her chest and kiss her heartbeats.

  The spiders enter my flesh and all I can hear is the demon laughing.

  Inside my jacket pocket, I’m finally able to pull the pin on the grenade, and then I’m the one laughing.

  The darkness is overcome by the brightness of Molly’s smile burnt into my memory.

  She’s holding Ezzy, and we’re all together again.

  Forever.

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  About the Author

  Max Booth III is the author of Toxicity and The Mind is a Razorblade. He’s the Editor-in-Chief of Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing and an ongoing columnist at LitReactor.com. He works as a hotel night auditor in a small town outside San Antonio, TX. Follow him on Twitter @GiveMeYourTeeth and visit him at www.TalesFromTheBooth.com.