by Sawyer Black
“What number, please?”
“555-836-3373.”
“One moment, please.”
Henry sagged back into the cushion and closed his eyes. He held the phone between his head and shoulder and dropped his hands in his lap, twirling the ring on his finger over and over. He had always hated talking on the phone. Texts or emails were okay, but telephones sucked time and energy like a starving whore. A little bit of his soul every time he raised it to his face. “Can I get some hold music or something?”
A click and a hiss, then Johnny Cash’s voice rose through the static. When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder.
“Um … thanks.”
Henry rubbed his forehead and tried to ignore the hunger and that nagging feeling that he was missing something important.
“Yeah, man.” The deep voice in his ear sounded thick and distorted, like the guy was eating a burrito. “What can I do for ya?”
Henry sat up, juggling the phone back to his ear when it fell from the crook of his neck. “Is this the Purveyor?”
“Maybe.” The man ended with a loud yawn.
“Well, I’m looking for something.”
“Whatcha looking for?”
Henry pulled the phone away and growled in frustration, looking to Heaven for some patience. He took a calming breath and brought the phone back up. “It depends on what you’re selling.”
The guy sighed. “Look, dude. I’m not playing games here, okay? I need to know what you called for.”
“A guy named Peterson told me to.”
“Peterson gave you this number? Shit, man. Why didn’t you say so at first?”
Henry pinched the bridge of his nose and shrugged. “I don’t really know.”
“So, check it out. I’m gonna talk to the dudes at the Viazo, and then I’ll call you back.”
“Whoa. No. I need to speak with the Purveyor.”
The line went dead. Henry snarled and slapped the phone closed with one hand. He drew it back to sling it across the room, but paused when he caught its gleam from the corner of his eye and thought better of damaging a relic. He sagged and dropped the phone on the cushion beside him and stood. He held his forehead in his hands and swayed as nauseating hunger rolled through him.
The pulling grew, and he couldn’t think. He slid the ring from his right hand and slipped it onto the left. Hunger boiled over to a crippling punch to the gut, and the pulling in his mind became the howl of the city’s unceasing pain.
Henry tore the expensive tuxedo off and threw it to the floor. He rushed into the bedroom and pulled his hoodie and jeans on in a frenzy. A quick stop in the kitchen to fill a pitcher full of cold water. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, tipped the water up, and with every swallow, the screaming pain washing over him from the shadows of the city compressed into a point of agony.
The smell was intoxicating.
Henry set the empty pitcher down and pulled a full breath through his nose, savoring the sweetness that filled his mind with anticipation. He crossed the room to the window and pushed it open. Stepping through, Henry braced his feet on the stone sill and leapt into the night, wrapping himself in shadow, rocketing through the dark like a laser. The brightness of the pain he’d sensed from his apartment pulsed like a beacon.
He planted his feet on the edge of a roof above the pain and anxiety floating up from the alley below, then stepped out of the shadow to stand in the light and hunkered down to look at three hoods bent over a dirty hobo in the space between two dumpsters. One drew a foot back and launched a kick that Henry heard connect all the way at the top of the building.
Laughter and shouts. The three punks jumped back as fire sprang out on the homeless man’s pants. His scream rose to Henry’s ears, and though its flavor coated his palate, it wasn’t what he craved.
Henry longed to taste the pain he caused.
He stepped off the edge and plummeted into a drop that billowed his hoodie out like gray wings, roaring with joy that screamed like a missile.
Three shocked faces looked up as one. Two light. One dark. Eyes wide and staring. Mouths hanging open, expressions twisting from mad glee to panicked confusion. Henry landed with his feet planted on either side of the hobo’s hips. The wake of his fall washed around him. A deafening rush that blew the flames and swept greasy trash into whirling eddies that filled the air with garbage.
“All right, fuckers!”
Before the haze settled, Henry roared again and lunged at the nearest kid.
The punk backpedaled, his red hair sticking up in gelled spikes. A clawed swipe to his thigh, and Red fell with a scream of pain. Blood spurted into his face as he toppled.
He attacked the next kid, the one who had put the boot to the homeless man. Henry delivered a kick of his own, his shin plowing into the kid’s upraised arm, shattering bone and continuing into the side of his head. Boots fell in a marrowless heap, and Henry spun to grab the trailing hood of the third kid before he could make his escape.
He snatched the kid back and twisted, throwing him through the air.
The kid hit face first into the brick above the homeless man’s staring face. He bounced back to land in the alley next to Red who was crawling back, pressing his hands over the spraying wound in his thigh.
Red’s face glistened with sweat and blood, the skin pale and gray. His mouth spread in a pleading grimace as terror rolled off his body in waves. Henry inhaled a gust as he stalked the kid’s frantic movement. Red’s good foot kicked in useless arcs. Henry’s shadow fell on him. He froze, his eyes widened to their limits.
Henry dropped to straddle Red’s legs, sniffing at the kid’s body like a dog as he rose to his face. He looked into Red’s eyes and saw a spiraling darkness as his system shut down from blood loss. Then they closed, and he fell back. Henry caught him by the shoulder and thrust his mouth into the kid’s neck, nuzzling past his jacket collar. He bit down, and the blood flowed into his mouth. Terror and pain pulsed into his throat. Henry pulled Red’s departing life force into his own body then reared up to roar into the night as electricity flowed into him.
His senses sharpened. Light and sound bursting onto his brain. The struggles of the terrified Hobo Bob behind him. The detached fear of the two unconscious kids on the ground. The millions of souls crying out all over the city.
He turned and lifted Boots by his shattered arm. His eyes sprang open in his dark face, and the scream of pain as he jolted awake was like the start of a second course. Henry shook Boots like a doll. He lowered him to the ground and stepped on his chest. His cry died with a whooshing sigh, and Henry tore his arm from its socket, planting his foot deeper into the teenager’s collapsing chest.
Blood burst from his mouth and nose, covering Henry’s foot. A gout of blood shot from the kid’s stump of a shoulder, and he died with his life force floating up into Henry’s body, filling him with a spasm of ecstasy and strength.
He dropped the arm behind him and caught his breath, his heart pounding like he’d just done a bump of cocaine. While running a marathon. With a refrigerator on his back.
Hood scrabbled through the dirt and blood, struggling to reach the alley’s mouth. His thoughts were fragmented with disjointed colors and flashes of his screaming face. Henry stepped over his flailing form and spun the kid to his back. His face was split and pouring blood, filling Hood’s mouth in sputtering pools as he coughed his own life into the air. Henry squatted down and tore his jacket open, exposing his T-shirt.
He exposed the kid’s belly … then stopped.
“What’s a matter?” Hobo Bob was leaning forward, his sneakers still smoking, watching Henry with an unsteady gaze.
“What?” Henry said.
“Fuck that kid. He was gonna burn me up when you showed. I mean, you look kinda fucked up, but you put it out.” The guy swayed, catching himself with an outstretched hand to the dumpster. “And then you stopped.” He shook his head and furrowed his brow. “Why’d you do that? Stop, I mean?”
&nbs
p; Henry looked back to the kid splayed in the alley. “Cuz he’s wearing my shirt.”
“He’s a thief, too? God damn kids.”
Henry Black’s Comedy Monster Tour. Black with a red pentagram covered in cartoon blood. His most successful piece of merch ever. Twenty bucks and it went all the way up to 4X. He’d died on stage more times than he could count, but killed more often than not.
Just not like this.
Hood coughed a bubble of blood that broke out of his lips in a spray that splashed into his open eyes. They didn’t blink. He drew in a ragged breath and let it out, trailing through the air with the wet sigh of his death. Henry scrambled forward, panic squeezing his heart. “No, no, no,” he whispered.
He bent over to look into Hood’s eyes, and the life force washed up, passing by his lowered head. His stomached heaved, and Henry sat back on the kid’s thighs.
The fuck is wrong with me?
He let the power dissipate, drifting up and away. He didn’t reach for it. The thought of filling himself made him sick to his stomach, even as the energy from the other two coursed through him.
Sirens screamed in the distance, and Henry’s head snapped to the end of the alley. A crowd had gathered, smartphones aimed into the dim tunnel of asphalt, dumpsters, and blood. He spun away and staggered to his feet. Slapped the hood and rushed into the shadows. Away from the street lamps shimmering off the pools and spatters of crimson.
He curled forward and walked on numb feet. The kid’s face swelled in his mind, and became something else in his imagination. Softening. Round and smooth. Blonde hair spreading beneath it. The face of his daughter.
Amélie staring into the sky with dead eyes, blood turning her garish.
He couldn’t save her. She would be stuck in Hell, and they were going to turn his baby girl into a monster just like him.
Samantha. He needed to see her. Confess that it was his fault. Their precious daughter had been taken from them because of him. Stuck in Hell because of him. All those kids murdered at the Burg Spires Massacre. It was all him.
He wanted to hold them both. Tell them it would be all right. And it would be. If he could just talk to Samantha. The only woman who had ever truly understood him. Loved him for his flaws. Blind to how deep they really ran.
“Where you going, buddy?” Hobo Bob held out a sloshing bottle of cheap wine. “Let’s have a toast.”
Henry wrapped himself in shadow and flew into the night.
He would apologize to his wife for damning their daughter.
CHAPTER 10
The beige sedan was back in the driveway. That meant the fucking cop was there.
Henry rose out of the shadows behind the bushes in front of the living room windows of the home he had died in. The shades were pulled, but he could see the shapes of the couple inside. Dancing.
Fucking dancing.
Music pressed against the glass. Frank Sinatra. Good music to dance to, but Henry had hated dancing when there was even the tiniest possibility that he would be seen. Samantha tried for years to get him over his fear of looking foolish when he started his flailing. A fat and sweating monster under the lights and scrutiny of everyone in the room.
Fuck that.
Another thing to regret. Samantha would come around the corner, twisting and rocking, her hips pulling his eyes to her waist. She would beckon him with a smile, and every time, a part of him had wanted to surrender. Step into her waiting arms and move with her. But Henry didn’t understand that kind of freedom.
Now she was in the arms of another man. And Henry fucking hated that guy.
Their silhouettes swayed to the big band rhythm, probably coming from his fifteen-thousand-dollar McIntosh audio system. That remote had taken him a week to figure out, but it had also been his greatest purchase. The house. The Lexus he hardly drove. None of it had been as satisfying as sitting in his leather recliner with Rush rattling the windows.
The Mike Stone silhouette pulled away from the Samantha silhouette. Henry leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. The cop crossed the room and bent over to pick his phone up off of the coffee table. His dumb head nodded, then he jogged back to Samantha where she received him into an embrace, tipping her head for a kiss.
He let her go and she sagged back as he ran out of the room. Henry pressed himself down out of sight. Mike popped out from around the corner and ran to his car, his jacket trailing behind him as he searched for the opening of his sleeve. He peeled out of the driveway, his headlights washing over the glass above Henry’s head.
Henry stood to look at Samantha, standing with her arms wrapped around herself, lonely shoulders slumping forward. He wanted to crash through the window and sweep her up, but Mike’s siren pierced the air as he sped away, and Henry shot into the shadows, soaring into the night after his wife’s boyfriend.
Following Mike Stone was easier than facing her.
Cloaked in the darkness that reached out to him as he passed, Henry followed the sedan, careening through the streets, blue and red lights flickering behind its grill. Over the Thompson Street Bridge along the path Henry had just taken. Anxiety crept into his gut when Henry realized where Stone was going.
At the head of the alley where he had killed three kids for setting a homeless man on fire. Where he had raged like the monster he had become. Or had always been.
Henry stopped in the deep darkness of a doorway under the stairs of a Chinese restaurant's lower entrance. The bare bulb above the door dangled from a thin wire, swaying in the socket as a breeze kicked up around his shoulders. He switched the ring to his Serafino hand and stepped into the flashing lights of an ambulance. A crowd milled in a ragged circle around the rear doors. Henry pushed himself into the crush of gawkers.
Stone was already out, talking to a uniformed officer next to the ambulance. Henry couldn’t hear what they were saying, so he pushed closer to the thin wooden barricade and turned his ear to the conversation.
Scraps of words. Tone of voice. Anxious. Angry. A woman in yoga pants with a huge backpack on her shoulders looked at Henry with a sneer of disgust, sidling away in a hurried shuffle.
Whatever, bitch.
Henry turned back and a gurney rolled out of the alley steered by two paramedics. A third followed, huffing his fat ass to catch up. He looked like he might need an ambulance of his own. Hobo Bob sat up in the gurney, looking at the crowd like a starlet before her adoring public. His bandaged feet splayed out in front of him. He pulled his bottle from inside his jacket and saluted and the crowd cheered.
The fat paramedic caught up and reached for the bottle. The crowd booed. Henry joined them. Hobo Bob slapped the hand away and tipped the bottle up, fending off the fat paramedic’s attempt to curtail his fun. Henry clapped with the crowd, and Hobo Bob bowed with the bottle held just out of reach of the fat paramedic’s questing grasp.
God, if that guy falls, I’m gonna piss myself.
The gurney hit the end of the ambulance. Hobo Bob dropped his hands for balance and watched his bottle get snatched like a toddler losing his favorite toy. Henry added his voice to the disappointed groans.
Stone held the paramedics from lifting the gurney into the ambulance. He leaned in to ask Hobo Bob a question then reeled back when the answer washed over his face.
“The kid stole his shirt.”
“Which one?” Stone asked. Henry leaned over the barricade to catch the words.
“The black one.”
“The black kid? You know his name?”
"No, dammit,” Hobo Bob shouted. “The black shirt.”
“You killed them because they tried to set you on fire after they stole your black shirt?”
Hobo Bob threw his hands up with a dramatic flair. The crowd laughed at his antics. “Not me.”
“Somebody else killed these kids and set you on fire?”
“No,” Hobo Bob said, rolling his eyes. “He killed them after they set me on fire. Came outta nowhere and blew the flames out. Killed the little arsonist fu
ckers and took off when the cops showed up.”
“You ever see him before.”
“Hell, evrybody has. It was the Hooded Angel.”
Stone stepped back, shaking his head and waving for them to set the drunk inside.
“May God have mercy on your souls,” Hobo Bob shouted through the closing doors.
The ambulance pulled away, and Stone turned to look at the crowd. He froze when his eyes landed on Henry.
Henry looked around and noticed the circle of empty space around him. Eyes on him with disgust. Fear. He looked down at the drying blood covering most of clothes. His heart skipped a beat. Fuck.
“Hey!” Stone reached to his lower back and dropped into a shooter’s stance as his pistol came around to find his other hand. Pointed right at Henry’s chest.
The crowd scattered in a screaming panic. Henry threw himself to the side and weaved through the stampede. Stone’s voice behind him was joined by the shouted commands of the BCPD. But Henry was gone.
Shadows at the edge of the crowd swallowed him. So he fled into the night, cursing his stupidity.
CHAPTER 11
After the alley murders, Henry kept the ring on his right hand. It fixed the city’s dull throbbing at the edge of his hearing like distant bass booming from a concert and turned gnawing hunger into a nagging heartburn that was easy enough to drown with a bottle.
He had taken up part-time residency at a seedy bar five blocks from Boothe’s apartment. Like a snowbird sick of Montana winters, he vacationed at Pub Brothers Bar & Grill. Whiskey and all you can eat chili cheese fries.
He walked through the dark streets, belly sloshing, waiting for a phone call. Or for Mandyel to pop out of a burning bush.
He started watching TV in the mornings. The news was too depressing, so he switched to Telemundo and tried to laugh at the Spanish until it was time to go drink. Lonely walks full of alternating boredom and blame.