by H T G Hedges
A glint of light caught from something shining for a brief moment out of the murk, a long, cylindrical object being hefted to a shoulder, its bearer kneeling awkwardly in the sticking sludge. I rubbed at the grime on the window, spreading it like green algae under my palm, squinting down, trying to make out what was going on. Suddenly it swam into focus and was only too clear.
"Shit!" I shouted, pushing away from the window. "Get out of here! Down!" But it was too late. I caught the plume of smoke through the glass, heard, or imagined I heard, the keening whistling whine of the rocket, and then everything exploded in a crunching ripple of shattered glass and crumbling masonry. Someone was screaming, maybe several someone’s, as the world went red.
And then I was falling as the ground rushed up to meet me – gray and massive - with crushing speed as, in a moment of pain and exclamation, everything melted mercifully to black.
I awoke, face down in sucking, swallowing mud. For a moment I scrabbled ineffectually in the grey, suffocating slime like some kind of Western Front nightmare before at last I found some purchase to claw myself free.
I pushed myself up to rest on hands and knees. My head was throbbing, ears full of a tinnitus ring. My whole body ached and I was covered in ash and soot and caking filth. But I was alive once again and otherwise, after a moment taking stock, seemingly undamaged. I thanked my lucky stars, wondering how much longer what luck I seemed to have could possibly hold.
A moan away to my left brought Corg into focus. Stumbling to my feet, I half fell and half limped over to where he lay. A large gash was leaking blood that, against his deathly pale face, looked shockingly red. Still, I judged him to be in one piece and more or less whole and unharmed as well.
"You OK?" I asked stupidly, helping him to his feet, his hand feeling cold as a corpse’s in my own. He grunted as a scream cut through the cold air, suddenly strangled out into nothing. It was an awful noise, more animal than human, and the silence that followed rang heavy with finality.
I squinted through the floating smoke, trying to get my bearings, trying to work out what I had heard and from what direction it had come from.
"This way." We stumbled our way across the uneven ground, splashing through deep puddles of sinking water and fighting against mud that wanted to swallow our feet whole. The going was tough, pulling ourselves through a mix of debris and torn up, broken rock. Gradually, out of the smoke and haze, was unveiled a sight from someone’s macabre imagination.
Erected like some kind of gothic monument, a broken, standing frame and some wire rope had been re-purposed into a makeshift gallows from which the Make it Happen Man gently swung.
The mist and smoke swirled and eddied around his suspended feet as the shapes of more figures were gradually revealed. There were three of them, distorted silhouettes rendered nightmare like and inhuman in the drifting mist, busy in their work. Supported between two of them was the pale and seemingly only semi-conscious figure of Loess. The third figure, bald and heavily muscled with a spike of black beard oiled and gleaming like a sharpened eel, was uncoiling another loop of cord in his hands. I glanced up past Mr. Happen’s swaying form: there was still plenty of room on the frame.
Without another word I started to run. Careering across the broken wasteland I slammed into the first figure I reached, one of those holding Loess, and tackled him to the ground, sending us all sprawling into the freezing mud. From the corner of my eye I saw Corg charging in just behind me, bringing up a crunching knee into the face of the other man as he struggled to rise, knocking him flopping back over once more.
I grappled ingloriously with my opponent. Somehow, he had found a grip around my neck and was exerting an iron pressure. Together we spun and twisted in the coating sludge. Still dazed from the fall as I was, he was gaining a definite advantage now that the shock of my attack was negated. I had lost the element of surprise and, with it, the flow of battle was turning against me.
I hammered at him with my fist but those blows that landed felt imprecise and weak and he drove home his advantage of greater weight and stability. It was getting harder to think as the pressure around my throat increased and I sunk slowly further, the darkness in my mind growing. Dark spots were developing in front of my eyes, expanding as my consciousness faltered.
I scrambled desperately in the muck with my hands, but they felt stupid and heavy, like two bloated lead balloons at the end of arms made of rubber. My muscles were liquefying, losing all strength and responsive feeling. The numb, pawing fingers found something heavy, a solid shape in the muck, and somehow closed around it as, with the last of my strength and fading will, I swung whatever it was towards the snarling head above me. With satisfying, cracking weightiness it made contact and suddenly the pressure abated as he slid away from me.
For a moment, I could only lie there in the wet earth, sucking in great ragged breaths. But there was no time to rest and, with an effort of will, I pulled myself in a loose circle back to attention.
I heard the click as I regained my feet: Corg was on his knees, the barrel of a pistol pressed hard against his temple, the spike-bearded giant grinning at the other end, a feral satisfaction gleaming in his beady eyes.
"Toss it," he said. I was half crouched still, facing him, the length of pipe I had used to bludgeon his companion held out behind me. In that moment, I ran through a number of calculations in my head. How long it would take me to cover the ground between the two of us and wrap the pipe around the giant’s face against how long it would take him to pull the trigger.
I dropped the pipe, hard, onto the sucking ground where it landed, jutting quivering from the rubble like some fairytale king’s sword.
"Good," he said, stroking the length of his oiled spike with his free hand. The barrel of the gun ground painfully against Corg’s temple and I saw him wince in pain and annoyance.
"Who are you?" the gunman asked, his voice deep and heavily accented. His teeth, I saw as he spoke, still smiling, had been sharpened to nasty little points. A curving line of tattoos ran up his bulging arm, words in a strange script I didn’t recognise that ended in a snake with a human skull as its head, eating its own tail. "You don’t look like Happen’s soldiers." He looked, to my mind, like some kind of crazed Victorian prize-fighter.
"Just in the wrong place at the wrong time," I said.
"Unlucky," he growled, his pointed smile growing. Right, I thought. I could see his finger tightening on the trigger, knew what was coming next. My muscles bunched, calves tensed. I had no idea what I was going to do but I had to act somehow. He opened his mouth to say something, one final parting quip, perhaps.
Whatever he was planning to say next, however, was lost forever as a shape rose up behind him, catlike and graceful, and drew a thin red line across his throat from ear to ear with a scalpel thin blade flipped from a sleeve.
"Fuck you," Loess drawled as the blood began to run freely, drenching his chest. He took a short, wobbly step to the side, pawing stupidly at his cut jugular, before his legs buckled from under him. She spat once, disdainfully, as he hit the floor - like a slab of meat landing wetly on the butcher’s block - and lay still.
"That’s for trying to hang me."
Mr. Happen was dead by the time they pulled him down – not that there had been much doubt beforehand. A brooding silence followed the removal of his cold corpse from the scaffold amongst the former ruler’s remaining vassals. Corg and I sat apart from them, their milling uncertainty and growing sullen hostility leaving us unsure where we stood once more.
My skin felt rough and dirty with plaster dust and mud, my eyes gritty.
"What do we do now?" Corg said at last, keeping his voice low, whether from the infectious air of respect or from a growing sense of the ill-will at our backs, I couldn’t say for sure. A deferential hush lay over the coldly mist-shrouded site.
I shrugged. "Looks like running isn’t an option, nor hiding. If you believe what he said then trouble’s going to find us wherever we go."
"And do you believe it?" he said with direct frankness. "The guy was a couple of suits short of a full house," he added, though I noted he took care to keep his voice down.
I wasn’t sure but, as I looked around at the desolation - at the still form of Mr. Happen stretched out still warm on the hard ground – his words didn't seem inconceivable to me. "Seems like maybe it happened here."
"We have our own shit to blame for this," Loess said, breaking away from the group and striding over. Behind her, I could see doubt in the eyes of her companions.
"So what will you do now?" she asked, echoing Corg’s question.
I looked away from her, stared at the cold gray clouds for a long time. The way I saw it, there was only one person who might be able to tell us what was going on. I looked back at Corg.
"I need to talk to Whimsy again," I said. To my surprise he nodded in agreement.
I thought back to the night that I had called the odd-ball investigator, confused and unmanned by his erratic, short-fused manner. Everything had changed so drastically in such a short space of time that I felt like it must have been someone else hesitating as they dialled a number scrawled on a scrap of torn paper from an old note-pad, jumping at shadows that had turned out not to be so empty after all.
"They’ll have tossed your apartment." Corg warned me, stepping unnervingly into the landscape of my thoughts once more.
"I know." But would they have bothered with the phone? My gut told me they had already heard everything they needed to, so what would be the point? It had to be worth a shot.
"They’ll be watching it too at a guess," I said. "In case we’re stupid enough to go back there."
"Well then," Loess interjected with a smile, "Looks like you boys are going to need some help." I looked at her, grateful for the show of support but unwilling to drag her into the sprawl of our mess.
"Wait. You’re going with them?" A young, sandy haired guy had heard her words and detached himself from the milling crowd. He looked all at once upset, angry and confused. Always a flammable combination, made more dangerous by the fact that I knew he was armed, as were the silent figures at his back. I didn’t think we’d made many bridges here but if we did it looked like we would be burning them all before we left. I looked again at Loess and the fire in her eyes: all but one, I mentally corrected myself.
"Now?" he continued, "Did you forget? Mr. Happen didn’t want anything to do with them."
Loess glanced once, lightning quick, at the shape of Mr. Happen. Someone had laid a sheet over him but the undeniable moisture in the air had turned it as good as see-through where it lay against his skin.
"Maybe he was wrong," she said sharply, then seemed to think better of whatever she was planning on saying next. "Look, Faber, all of you," she said, switching to address the wider group as a whole.
"We need to Re-group. Call everybody in. Everybody," she repeated. "We need to work out what happens next. Get safe." After a moment she added, "And I’ll be back." She said it all with an authority that made me wonder about her place in the hierarchy of this crumbling family. Without Happen they suddenly seemed lost: lambs who desperately needed a new shepherd. But then, as I looked at them more closely, at their lean, hungry faces, I thought that there might just be wolves in this flock too.
"But why are you going with them?" Faber couldn’t help but ask, looking at Corg and I like we were already dead, breaking my train of thought. He seemed almost personally slighted and I wondered if there was more to his objection than simply group loyalty.
Loess shrugged. "They saved my life." It surely was not that simple but it was all she was offering. From the way she’d talked about Happen and the way he’d been carrying on, I guessed there had been a fracturing of ideologies along the way in recent times, long before we showed up. Something had clearly torn apart this side of the bridge, turned them into the press’ Wildlands. My guess was Happen had played a substantial part in that.
Without another word, Loess turned her back on Faber, on the sullen group and on the cooling shape that was once the Make It Happen Man.
Later, once the three of us were alone in the relative comfort and seclusion of Loess’ car - a nondescript green wreck – I told her again that she didn’t have to come with us. Saying it, I felt conflicted even as Corg looked daggers back at me. But, out of a sense of honour, I still didn’t want to be responsible for dragging her into whatever lay ahead.
To my surprise she just rolled her eyes.
"Trust me," she said, "You’re doing me the favour. Happen was the only thing holding us all together, without him we’ll descend back into all the squabbling, back biting, backstabbing free for all bullshit it took us so long to crawl out of. I’ve seen it before. And make no mistake, we call it a family, but Happen rose to the top by being a ruthless son of a bitch.
"There are still grudges there - and deep wounds - those of us who supported him in his coup would be well advised to sleep light and watch our step for a while. We’ll be at war from within even if we survive the one from without. It’s a situation I’d much rather not be a part of, at least for now."
She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose in an unconscious, tired gesture. "Besides, everything’s changed over here. Happen changed. You heard what he said, he only saw you because I made him and I was barely able to do that. His paranoia had pretty much taken us over, to be honest. He spent more and more time in his trances, if you believe that, whispering about his “unlucky man”." She didn’t look at me as she said it and for that I was grateful.
"That’s why I warned you before, I had no idea how he was going to react when you arrived, what he might believe. Every stranger had become an enemy, pretty much." She was silent for a moment.
"He’d always have a light on, you know, even when he slept, must have been in his sixties and he developed a fear of the dark. How does that even happen?" She kept on talking and we let her, for my part I figured it was probably cathartic.
"No," she said, "I’m better off out of here. I’ve become something of a lone voice of late, speaking out against the increasing violence, the escalation of hostilities with all our neighbours, fuelled by Happen’s paranoid delusions, that and the voices that whisper is his head. Whispered. I’ve no idea what’s going to happen now."
She lapsed into sudden silence with the embarrassment of one who realises they’ve been holding court for the last few minutes.
"Sorry," she said.
We rumbled on for a minute, the only sound the hum and cough of the old engine. It was as much to break the uncomfortable silence and change the subject as anything else, although I was curious, that I threw the next question into the awkward pause.
“So how did you and Corg meet?”
This was the story that they told me.
It was one of Corg’s early jobs for the family, deep enough in that he’d earned some stripes but not so far that he could call himself anything like trusted.
The run had started out the same as the others as he crossed the cold stone of the bridge, butterflies of expectation rising in his gut, feeling every inch the badass outlaw. The night was warm and balmy and he’d put some rock on the stereo and wound down the window, cruising through the Old Quarter and enjoying the feel of the cool breeze on his face.
It wasn’t until he pulled into the garage that things started to deviate from their normal course. The first difference was that there were three figures waiting in the dim space rather than just the usual one. Ray was there as ever, dressed in his habitual combats and camouflage snood, but with him were two newcomers.
The first was a woman wearing a black hooded top and black running trousers, ash blond hair tied back in a tight ponytail. The second, a guy, wore a fitted training vest and had thick metal bracelets on both wrists. He had a lime green beanie on his head and sported an arrow head of beard just below his bottom lip. From the moment he set eyes on Corg, he seemed to take an instant dislike.
“Who is th
is?” the beanie wearer demanded as Corg stepped out of the car. “I don’t know this guy. Who is he?”
“Relax Kolic,” Ray said, patting Corg on the shoulder, “He’s fine, we’ve worked together before.” For Corg’s money, however, Ray seemed ill at ease today, in contrast to his unusual amiable nature.
“Well I don’t like it,” Kolic muttered, offering Corg a dark look, “Working with new blood on something like this.”
“Relax,” the woman said, echoing Ray, extending a hand of greeting towards Corg. “I’m Loess,” she said, as they shook and, looking into her face, Corg found himself suddenly struck dumb. She smiled. “Quite the talker. That’s fine, let’s get started.”
“Listen,” Ray said, seriously. “Things are going to be a little different today. We need to travel for today’s shipment, if you’d do the honours.”
“Sure,” Corg agreed. “But what’s different?”
“Guns,” Ray said simply, with just a hint of distaste. “No booze today.”
“What are you doing telling him that?” Kolic demanded.
“He’s got a right to know,’ Loess cut in. “It’s higher risk if he’s caught, he should know the odds. Higher return too,” she added, addressing this last to Corg with a smile, though he got the feeling that she too, like Ray, wasn’t thrilled at the prospect.
They piled into Corg’s car and he pulled out of the garage, following Ray’s directions. The big man was in the front passenger seat, Loess behind with the stormy face of Kolic popping up from time to time in the rearview. They drove in silence apart from the occasional left and right from Ray with the warm night air whispering in through the open windows, sweet with the carnival smell of the Old Quarter.
The sky was pink with the promise of dusk when at last they pulled into an abandoned lot with a small, storage house at its centre. A dirty Winnebago stood empty to one side next to a set of rickety double doors that looked one kick from tumbling down.