Get Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  On the lawn, a few white robes fluttered in the wind, the fallen Anas so thin as to be two-dimensional when lying flat. Others had retreated to the nooks and crannies of the geometric house, firing weapons at the gate. Up ahead, two black sedans had formed a roadblock and the dark-suited men were peppering the Anas with gunfire. Where the bullets struck the house, little plumes of white were freed to wash into the windy blue.

  The gate creaked open. Slowly. Much more slowly than Brady’s Porsche.

  “Uh, Brady?”

  She hit the gas. I don’t know if the stars in the windows turning into lines were actually there or if I imagined them. I knew Chewie had fixed the hyperdrive this time, and the world was about to spin into a barrel roll as we made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. The men at the gate had become aware of the low white car barreling at them with no regard to safety, physics, or object permanence.

  “Hey, Brady?”

  Maybe she had been conditioned so that every time someone said her name she had to go faster, because her foot came down harder on the gas. It had to be scraping the floor by now. I imagined the Grim Reaper was sitting in the back seat waiting calmly for us to plow into the roadblock. I prayed for airbags, knowing this car didn’t have them, and even if it did, they would be likely to rebreak my nose as a best-case scenario. The gate opened at the same stately pace as always, used to reacting to the slowed synapses of an Ana acolyte, not to Ingrid Brady, a woman whose starvation had turned her into something almost superhuman.

  “Bra—”

  That’s all that came out as the car streaked through the gap in the fence. I winced, cowered, and generally tried to retreat into the shell evolution had so cruelly denied me. I expected the scream of metal, maybe for a sideview mirror to get clipped off and go hurtling into the gravel, or just a cacophony like the sound of a hundred empty drums rolling into a quarry. Nothing. Nothing except the two sedans and all the guys with guns who were just figuring out it might be a swell idea to, you know, make us fail the next Ana weigh-in via the injection of lead into our bodies.

  Brady pulled the parking brake and spun the car into a controlled skid, spraying up the best smokescreen of dust, gravel, and cancerous rubber smoke I’d ever see. She gunned the car, spinning around the back end of an enemy sedan. The guide rail was less than an inch from her car, but it never touched, and as soon as she saw open road, she hit the gas again and we were at warp speed. I think they got off all of one shot, and it never even came close.

  She slalomed down the winding street, heading back into the city. She merged the Porsche into traffic on Franklin and instantly slowed, at once blending with the herd.

  “What did you want to ask me?” she said finally.

  “Does this car have a place to vomit?”

  “Of course,” she said, touching the glovebox. It opened, revealing a selection of airline barf bags. “Sometimes one of the sisters has a lapse and it must be corrected.”

  “I think I changed my mind.”

  “Suit yourself. They’re in there if you need to. Or if you want to lose some of that disgusting flab around your middle.”

  “I think it gives me gravitas. Or possibly gravity. I forget which.”

  “What did you really want to ask me?”

  “First, I need something to eat. Could you get me to someplace that serves breakfast? What’s good around here? Right, dumb question.”

  “I am not going into a restaurant, wizard or not.”

  “Then take me to a place with takeout. I don’t care where.”

  She sighed, taking me to a deli. It was an upscale place, used to serving the rich and famous of the Hollywood Hills. They made an egg sandwich and coffee, and frankly that’s all I really cared about.

  I got back into the car and Brady was scowling. “Open a window. It smells like a chicken’s ass in here.”

  I rolled down the window.

  “I can still smell it,” she moaned.

  “Take us somewhere where we can talk and you won’t whine.”

  She sighed, peeling off from the traffic and gunning it back up into the hills. I barely paid any attention, instead savoring the aromas Brady found so horrifying. If you ever get to the point where bacon, eggs, and cheese smell bad, it might be time to reassess your life. That’s all I’m trying to say.

  Eventually, Brady pulled to a stop. A clean hillside looked out over Hollywood. It was actually very pleasant, even with Brady for company. I had a seat on the curb, watching the traffic on the 101 move through the Cahuenga Pass and into the Valley, and enjoyed my sandwich. After several bites, I felt the look. I turned, and sure enough, Brady was starting at me in rapt horror.

  “Seriously?” I asked her.

  “Do you know what that’s going to do to you?”

  “Stop my stomach from sounding like a Tibetan throat-singing choir?”

  “Cholesterol. Building up in your tissues. Making you slow, sick, stupid. It’s going to kill you.”

  “Does cholesterol kill wizards? Because Elminster never mentions it at our weekly meetings.”

  Now the look said she was trying to figure out if I was being serious or not. I took the time to polish off the sandwich and wipe the savory grease off my hands with a napkin.

  “What do I call you?” Brady asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Erick Levitt? That’s what they call you at Quackenbush Security. Or is it Nick Zorotovich? Jonah Bailey? David Antonucci? Brandon MacGruder?”

  “The name’s Blank.”

  “All right, Mr. Blank.” She considered. “That sounds fake.”

  “Very much so.”

  “Ask me what you’re going to ask. You’ve already made me watch that disgusting act with the heart disease time bomb, so you might as well talk.”

  “You mentioned a ‘first hit’ back there. Did someone try to kill you?”

  “Sunday morning. You used Victor Charlie’s protocol to contact me, so you know about the ways we arranged meetings.”

  “In broad strokes.”

  “Each member of the group had a different protocol to contact one another. The first step gets the attention, second says the kind of meeting, third verifies the sender, and the fourth selects the location. Anyway, I went to my usual dead drops. I wasn’t expecting anyone, since after Shaw’s disappearance, our group has been somewhat quiet. That morning, I saw Oana Constantinescu’s protocol. I followed it, and she set the meeting at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale. I never trusted Constantinescu. Not completely.”

  “Because she’s V.E.N.U.S.”

  “Correct. Their devotion to an outmoded body form threatens not only the health of the present generation but of our daughters and our daughters’ daughters. Constantinescu was only in the group because of Greene. He recruited her. Said she could be trusted. Of course, now Greene is dead.”

  “You knew about that?”

  “By Sunday, of course. Even if I don’t retain contact with my group, I keep tabs on them. I knew when Zhukovsky was arrested at the V.E.N.U.S. compound, and I knew when Greene’s body was found.”

  “Were you worried Oana was trying to set you up?”

  “The thought crossed my mind. The Guardian Servitors expected V.E.N.U.S. to retaliate after the hit on Duplessis came to light, but they never did. Eventually, we figured they might not. Anyway, I decided to trust my former ally, but I took a pistol. Trust, but verify.”

  “That’s actually the opposite of trust.”

  “It’s a good thing I did, because a hit squad was waiting for me, one that looked like the men in front of the Temple of Anamadim,” she paused to draw a finger over her mouth, in the Ana equivalent of a Catholic genuflecting, “today. Might be the same men for all I knew. I fought my way out and returned to the temple. I only left in disguise after that.”

  “Speaking of which, what’s up with the drag? Is it for the mystical power or an identity dodge?”

  “A little of both.”

  “Makes sense.” I
put what Brady told me with the rest of the information I had. The puzzle was beginning to take shape, and fit better than it had when I had thought she was behind it all. Fewer forced pieces, certainly.

  “If you’re not trying to kill me, then who is?” she asked.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “I think it shakes out like this. About a year ago, I had a run-in with Burt Shaw at the Griffith Observatory. You probably don’t know this, but Neil Greene was there as well, with a team of Satanists.”

  “What was Greene doing with Satanists?”

  “He was one.”

  “I thought he was just a Freemason.”

  “And you’re just an Ana.”

  “That’s Guardian Servitor,” she sniffed. “Ana is a pejorative term cooked up by those behemoths in V.E.N.U.S.”

  “Neil was a reasonably high-ranking member of the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist.”

  “How high-ranking?”

  “I don’t know, deacon? I never asked. I saw him at a party.”

  “You were at a Satanist party? That should not surprise me.”

  “It’s a wizard thing. Anyway, Neil and any number of other Satanists witnessed what... uh... what happened to Shaw. Because of certain assumptions that had already been made...”

  Brady cut me off. “What assumptions?”

  “That I might be the Antichrist.”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know! How do you know something like that?”

  Brady fell silent. “Did you know your father?” she asked finally.

  “Well, no.”

  “Did you grow up with large, scary dogs?”

  “Are you just running through what you know from The Omen? Because newsflash, not real.” Everyone knew Rosemary’s Baby was the docudrama, but I didn’t want to throw gasoline on this particular fire.

  “I’ve never dealt with devil worshipers extensively!” she snapped.

  “Anyway, taking what they—and I cannot emphasize this enough—thought they knew about me, they assumed the creature, I, ah, I summoned, was Satan. And he took Shaw to Hell.”

  “What was it actually, and where did it take him?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  She moved another butt-length away from me on the curb. Well, butt-length for me. It was like eight or nine for Brady.

  “All right,” I continued. “Neil takes this story back to the cult. They’re thrilled. They’ve seen Satan in the flesh and he’s in LA. They get ready for his coming. A group maybe takes things too far, thinks the heads of the two big cults in the city are doing things wrong, so they set up their own group, the Sons of the Crimson Gaze, and start stealing converts from the Church, the Order of the Morning Star, and even the OTO. Neil either joins and thinks they’re going too far, or else he finds out about it after the fact. So they kill him. Neil had already brought in Vassily Zhukovsky as a convert, which is how they knew about you, Oana, and VC, and now they’re killing everyone who knew about Neil’s connection to other corners of the Information Underground. They framed Mina because she was convenient. They knew about her from the party, where she basically humiliated them by walking out with me.”

  Brady chewed it over, since it was the closest thing she would get to protein. “I’m not sure.”

  “Neither am I. But we’ll find Neil’s killer at the headquarters of the Sons.”

  “We?” Brady asked.

  “Yeah. You’re in this with me now. Someone tried to kill you, and that same someone offed my friend and framed my girlfriend. We both want the same thing. Conspiracies make strange bedfellows, Ingrid.”

  “Never, ever, imply that you and I are in bed together.”

  “I didn’t say we were having sex. We could be watching Project Runway or something.”

  “Stop talking please.”

  I dusted myself off and looked out over the city. She was still beautiful, even if the last couple days had made it abundantly clear she was mad at me. And who could blame her, really? Walking out on her for a year, only to come back unexpectedly and start doing my whole roguish noir antihero thing and stirring shit up. Maybe coming back had been a bad idea. But as the wind brought me the clear salt smell of the Pacific and I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face, I thought maybe I had rushed to judgment last year. Maybe the city wanted me back after all.

  “You coming, Blank?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Monologuing.” I tapped my temple and got into the car.

  Brady gunned the engine, spinning the car around on the cul-de-sac and burning down the hill. “Where’s this headquarters?” she asked.

  “An old theater on Hillhurst. Los Feliz.” I kind of wanted to talk to Brady about what had happened. It’s not like we were friends or anything, but straightening a few things out would have been nice. After I McClaned her in that hallway last year, I had followed it up with the colossal dick move of sending her a pair of shoes. At the time I felt justified, but it really was unseemly. With all the lying and betrayal, we should have more of a collegial atmosphere. Yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to broach the subject. It helped to remind myself that in the scheme of things, she had been involved with some pretty bad people over at Quackenbush Security.

  Just like me.

  On the stereo: some horrifying self-help stuff.

  A woman who sounded maybe a thousand years old spoke in a frog’s croak about the power of denial in the self. She ranted—in a soft, grandmotherly way, but still—about the tyranny of eating and how it was an artificial concept real humans could do without. I didn’t mention it to Brady and she didn’t comment, although occasionally she would make a little noise of agreement in her throat and nod ever so slightly.

  The drive was a relatively short one. I directed her to park right around where VC and I had the previous day. It felt like a hundred years ago. I was going to start measuring everything in dog years just so it would make a lick of sense later when I tried to unpack the whole mess.

  “That’s the theater?” Brady asked.

  “That’s it. I’m thinking there should be a side entrance and we use that.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?”

  “We’ll know it when we see it.” I put a lot of confidence in my voice. Maybe Brady was convinced. I sure wasn’t.

  I ducked down the narrow alley running between the theater and the dry cleaner next door. A gutter ran down the middle and a single Dumpster slumped against the side. The alley barely looked big enough for a single car. A fire door led inside, and the lock clunked open after a second of tinkering with a section of wire hanger I found under the Dumpster. Brady and I went into the warm dark of the theater.

  We were in a small corridor, with three stairs leading to another door. This would be the side exit. I opened it a crack. I recognized the booming voice, even if I wished I didn’t.

  “Nobody expects me. Not even my family. I show up to Thanksgiving and it’s like, bwah! Boom! Pow! And I have a headache, so it’s time for some stuffing.” The voice, with its Valley inflections and lazy vowels, belonged to Rodrick Rand, movie star and member in good standing of the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist.

  “I am certainly pleased you’re here, Mr. Rand.” That voice belonged to Hollis Nguyen, who appeared to be the current leader of the Sons and former member of the Order of the Morning Star. “Our condolences in your time of mourning.”

  “When the little guy got blown away, it was amazing, like his life force just shot right into... have you ever had a Bangkok Balloon?”

  “I’m sorry, a what?”

  “It’s where you get, like, a narrow hose and pump liquid cocaine into your cock.”

  I supplied the confused frown in the pregnant pause that followed. “I can’t say I have.”

  “It’s fucking amazing. Stick with me and you’ll get one. And a Backwards Cactus, Four-Fingered Push-Up, maybe a...”

  “We can catalogue the various sex acts later, Mr. Rand.”

  “It
’s called a Balloon because it’s like you’re getting inflated. With cocaine.”

  “I figured that out.”

  “When the midget died, his life force went right into my cock. And now it’s like I have his soul in me, too. Only I ate it with my penis and now I am power.”

  “Right, yes. My condolences. And congratulations.”

  “Fuckin’ ay.”

  “So, with you as the nominal head of the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist, we need to formalize your absorption into the Sons of the Crimson Gaze. This will of course begin with your ritualized rejection of your former heresy and an initiation...”

  “And then you make me the leader.”

  “No, Mr. Rand. We already have a leader. You will be... well, think of yourself as a bishop, though we do not need titles. The important thing is making this world a welcoming place for our lord and to prepare as much of the population as possible to follow Him.”

  “By beating them in a cage match, one by one.”

  “No, to alter the culture and educate the masses.”

  “With face kicks.”

  “No.” Nguyen sighed, going for a different tack. “I don’t have to tell you how much informal power a celebrity of your stature holds in our culture.” He paused, as though expecting Rand to say something insane.

  “Go on,” Rand said.

  “Oh. I thought you were going to tell me about... doesn’t matter. The point of this is, with your assistance, we can reach a wider audience than ever before, and our message, the true message, carries with it the weight of someone the listener already trusts. Has already invited into his or her home.”

  I opened the door a bit wider. Because of the way the door swung, I could only see into the audience, rather than what was transpiring onstage. There were a few people in the crowd I recognized, including Brenda. Some of the other faces were from the theater earlier, others from the Church. I trusted in a combination of religious rapture and my black suit against black walls to camouflage me. If there were answers, they would be backstage.

  “Yeah. The midget wanted me for the same reason. I’m a hot commodity. On fire!”

  I moved purposefully down the aisle, never once looking over to catch anyone’s attention. I was up the stairs and behind the curtain in a few quick strides. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that they had a table set up onstage, the house lights on Rand and Nguyen. A few others were onstage with them, all in costumes I remembered seeing in the dressing rooms downstairs.