by Adam Cesare
“Gimme a break, even before,” I wave my hands around, indicating before, y’know, the apocalypse, “There wasn’t a real South Philly mafia. Not since the ‘70s”
“Sure there wasn’t,” Rolf says, gives me the ol’ nose swipe. It looks funny when you’ve only got the bottom half of a nose. How he happens to hear these “rumors” are beyond me, there aren’t too many folks left he could gossip with, even if he did manage to hobble away from his stoop when I wasn’t around to see him do it.
See, the initial hit, the descent of the cloudy red sky and whatever lurks beyond; the arrival of archdemons, the mass hysteria, etc., all of that combined took out about half of the population.
For those killed it wasn’t really the rapture, because being pulled apart by sky-piercing tentacles doesn’t exactly seem analogous to “ascending bodily to heaven” but it was a Culling.
After that the more... violent half humanity left on earth took care of the more easygoing half.
So we’re left with a quarter, give or take. It’s not like anyone’s had time or means to take a census. But there’s certainly more leg room in coach.
I guess I should back up. This wasn’t your “traditional” Judeo-Christian Judgment Day. How could it be? You ever stay up later than you should, maybe buzzed, and while channel surfing stumble across religious paid programming? Megachurch preachers or faith healers? Or see some bible-belt politician talk about his “personal relationship with god”? If you’re anything like me you see that stuff and think: these mofos can’t possibly have it right.
Well they didn’t. But neither did the Muslims, the Hindus, the Ancient Greeks, the Shintoists, and whatever religion Philip Seymour Hoffman made up in that one flick.
Some of them got it kinda right. Parts of it. The takeaway is that there is are big old intelligences out there and they’re pretty much uniformly dickheads.
And how does any of that explain why is Rolf missing half his face? Hell, he’s got to be missing half of his brain and there’s been no apparent impediment to his speech or cognitive abilities.
Well the arrival of the archdemons didn’t just mess up the clocks, if ya know what I mean. It sorta messed up everything and everyone. Everyone except me, because...
No time to get into that whole business right now.
“After you catch a nap, maybe you should go down there. Talk to these guys, convince them that wiping each other out isn’t in humanity’s best interest.”
“I’ll think about it.”
He gives me a name and an intersection and lets me slink away.
What is he, my mother?
Back in April I decided to do away with handlers. Permanently.
***
Sleep never comes.
I may not carry any physical scars from the day the Asshole Gods took over, but boy do I have some mental ones.
I’m out of the West Philly Mash I’ve started using to anesthetize myself to sleep.
Sober, all I get when I close my eyes are various ghosts listing the ways in which Joy Clark has let them down.
You were supposed to save us! My best friend shouts. Then her face melts away.
To hell with that noise, I open a fresh can of Sterno and use it to brew some coffee, then I go to work.
***
I don’t spook easily.
That’s not a boast. It’s simply a byproduct of fifteen years skulking around cemeteries, hunting ghouls and ghosts.
Yes, I started this shit way before doomsday and sometime since April I’ve had my 30th birthday. But again: clocks! So who can tell?
Anyway. I didn’t get any braver during that decade and change, it’s more like my nerves grew calluses.
But the lonely street corner where I’m supposed to be meeting Rolf’s contact gives me a chill. And not because it’s cold out, it’s actually warmed up considerably since night fell, the sky darkening to a black nearly imperceptibly tinged with burgundy. Which is business as usual, what with the world upside down.
No, the street is creeping me out because down here on 4th St, a few blocks south of South, most of the storefronts still have their windows and someone’s been sweeping the street. It’s almost... normal. Like a street before.
The sensation of standing on a city block that looked like it did pre-Joy’s Big Fuck Up is akin to seeing a ghost.
“Yer even prettier than your picture,” a deep voice says from three feet below my ears.
I look down to whoever’s pulling on my coat aaaaaaaaaaaannnd: post-apocalypse normalcy restored.
The man on the sidewalk has a hair-lip splitting his face diagonally. And he’s got no legs. He’s riding around on one of those small pallet movers, like he did his wheelchair shopping at an Ikea.
Ghastly as the man’s disfigurements may seem, they’re so pedestrian that I have to wonder if the hair-lip and/or the legs predate the warp.
But then I notice that the split bifurcating his face is sprouting tiny pointed teeth at its puckered edges. That’s definitely the result of some eldritch demonic juju. Hollister would have known the make and model of deity that’d given this poor bastard a facelift, but Hollister’s dead. They’re all dead and I’m on my own: winging it.
“Well thanks. You’re Rolf’s friend?”
“In a way. I’m Mark. Pleased to meet you,” he says and extends a hand.
I shake it, the knuckles are full of sidewalk grit and I stifle the urge to suggest that Mark loot some cyclist’s gloves from the bike shop up the road.
“What can I help with, Mark?”
“We can’t talk here,” he says, lowering that big voice of his. “Gotta do it somewhere private.”
And as he says the second part I hear the emptiness of the street, the slight echo that we used to get when it snowed and the blanket of white dampened the sounds of the city. I wonder if the red clouds are capable of snow, whether it’ll ever snow again.
Ash doesn’t count.
“Lead the way,” I say.
Mark uses his hands to glide himself down the sidewalk. I follow and he lets the well-oiled casters ride onto the asphalt as we turn into one of South Philly’s narrow alleyways.
Following a double amputee down a dark alley, back in the day, would have pinged my well-tuned “this is an ambush” sensors. But, even though I’ve been keeping busy in this brave new world, the list of people (and un-people) who want to kill me is significantly diminished.
There’s no reason to have me killed now. They won. They beat me.
Mark leads me to a vestibule, we enter, no need for a lock because he’s got a wad of newspaper—Headline the understatement of the century: Astronomers Worried—used as a door jamb.
We pass through the vestibule and... we’re outside again, in a small courtyard.
When Philly was originally established, way back when the capital used to be here, the days of Washington’s slaves, this area of South Philly used to be considered the suburbs. It was all single homes and liveries. Where we were standing was probably a stables before it was turned into apartments.
Mark puts on the breaks, which for him is putting his hands flat on the brick walkway and skidding to a stop.
“They’re using the church across the street,” he says, whispering. It’s quiet out, but it’s not that quiet. Unless he knows something I don’t and these apartments around us aren’t as abandoned as they seem.
Defiling churches, that sounds like some archdemon shit.
“Horns or scales?” I ask Mark.
“Huh?”
“Do they have horns,” I pantomime long rounded horns sprouting from my head, “or do they have scales?”
“Neither. They’re just guys. Humans. The dope boys go in, resupply, then sell that poison all over.”
“Dope?” Heroin and pills used to be one of the few thriving economies in North Philly, and not your usual junkie suspects, but soccer moms driving over the bridge from Jersey to get some extra strength Mother’s Little Helpers. But there’s bee
n nothing doing on the drug front since the crash. Probably some impromptu meth making once the pharmacies were looted, and I myself support the budding bootleg liquor business (we still have plenty of bottled liquor...but it won’t last forever). No. The months after the apocalypse was mandatory rehab for most junkies. Many didn’t make it.
“I... I... I don’t know what it is,” Mark says, “I just know that it’s hurting people.” The stutter gives me a better idea of who this guy was before the crash: he sounds like Piglet. He was a Nervous Nelly, probably the housebound head of his neighborhood watch squadron. It’s a miracle that he’s survived this long. Especially with no legs.
“’kay. Wait here then,” I say, unbuttoning my too-fashionable-to-be-warm peacoat to reveal the hilt of Victoria and the butt of my sawed off shotgun.
The shotgun doesn’t have a name; names are for swords.
“You’re just going in there? Right now?”
“What did you expect? You brought me here. I don’t give estimates.”
“I thought you would, uh, observe? A stakeout.”
“Look,” I say. “I’m not the police. There is no time,” or personnel, all of my friends are dead, “for me to be watching junkies come in and out of a church.”
“But there are men. Big men,” he pauses, putting a conspiratorial emphasis on the next few words: “Important men.”
“Status from the old world?” I say, finding myself bending slightly at the waist, not to meet Mark halfway, but to tower over him. “It doesn’t mean shit. Not anymore. These guys were bad before? Dangerous? Well, this is the new world and they’ve been knocked down the pecking order a couple hundred cosmic notches.” And besides, I add, not aloud but just for myself: if they’re as dangerous as you think, maybe they’ll put me out of my misery.
Mark begins to stutter out an “okay” but I’m out the door to the vestibule before he can reach the second vowel.
On my way out I trample the newspaper doorjamb and let the door lock behind me.
Astronomers were right to be worried.
***
It’s a Catholic Church, but not one of the pretty ones, a low whitewashed building that looks like it might have been a bathroom supply warehouse twenty years ago and was converted to a church because it was the only building in the area with choice parking attached.
Even still: the South Philly mobsters of old were Italian and Irish, all uniformly Catholic. It’s a bold move to be converting a church, ugly or not, into a drug lab.
I’m not going to waste time with recon and playing the detective game, but that doesn’t mean that I’m stupid. I don’t go through the front doors, instead use one of the basement windows around the back of the lot to drop myself into a darkened room.
As my eyes adjust, I see I’m in a carpeted room with cartoon representations of bible stories on the walls. Jonah is getting his ass eaten by the Whale. This was either the church’s daycare or where they held CCD.
I cross my arms around my waist and feel for Victoria with one hand and the shotgun with the other. Decisions, decisions. The blade or the boom?
Or is this going to end up being an op that requires diplomacy? Trying to think of what advice Hollister would give causes me to tear up unexpectedly and think of the snappy rejoiner that Tris would have added in my earpiece.
None of that, I tell myself. So many have lost so much more, and it’s your fault that they need to live this shitty existence. Tris and Hollister were the least of the collateral damage. They went willingly.
I exit into a basement hallway. The ceilings are low, but the stairs must be near because I can hear footsteps and voices.
I button my coat. Shit. Now, in the insolated basement, I’m too hot. I can’t win today.
“Hey!” A male voice shouts at me from behind... I guess there are stairs back that way too. I’m learning so much.
I hunch and duck one hand into my coat. I’m trying my best to affect the withdrawal chills of a junkie but what I’m really doing is smoothing out the surgical tape I’ve wrapped around the grip of the shotgun.
I turn, slowly as not to agitate whoever’s behind me.
“Is this not where I check out?” I say, putting a tremble in my voice. “Need to buy.”
“Don’t play that shit. How did you get down here?”
The guy puts a flashlight in my eyes, but before he can raise it all the way I catch a glimpse of his face.
Thick eyebrows. Thick slicked-back hair.
I would be describing a picture of the Italian mafia stereotype if that black greasy hair wasn’t spread all over his face, turning him into Giovanni the Dog-faced boy. With the incredible variance post-crash deformities could take, you’d think something like this would surprise me, but I’ve spent a lifetime dealing with monsters. Now all people are monsters and nobody uses that word anymore.
“You caught me,” I hold my non-gun hand up to my eyes to cut the light. “It’s freezing out. I thought the church might offer sanctuary. For the night. Do you guys still do that thing where you give out the free groceries every Tuesday?”
He crosses to me as he talks: “Look lady, church is closed. Indefinitely. Why don’t you go—”
The hairy guy takes a bunch of my coat at the shoulders and I call an audible, switching sides of my belt to pull Victoria. I slice through the bottom button of my coat and I hear the molded plastic bounce against the wall into the dark hallway. Coat’s going to be even less effective now...
The Wolfman of East Passyunk starts to yell, but I bring Victoria up to his throat. The blade cuts close enough that I hear the sandpaper rip of her shaving a patch of neck hair. He hears it too and quiets down on his own, without me needing to cover his mouth.
“You got a piece?” I ask.
He nods.
“Give it.” I say snaking my free hand up under his arm like an embrace. He reaches into his jacket and hands me a well-oiled 9mm. Well-oiled but never used, I have a sense for those kind of things.
“How many upstairs?”
He stalls, not because he’s stonewalling me but because I can hear him making a tally under his breath. If I eased up with Victoria, he might be able to count using his fingers and toes.
“I don’t know. Eleven or twelve.”
Eleven or twelve? Jeez, I thought I’d be catching them during the graveyard shift.
“What’s your name? You’re being very helpful.”
“Vinny. Uh, thanks.”
Vinny, of course.
“Look, I don’t particularly want to, but I can and will peel your prickly face off your skull, you get me?”
“I thought you were, like, a demon hunter. Why do you care about it?”
Ah, the benefits of celebrity. Also what he said doesn’t make much sense to me. He hit that it rather hard. Ambiguous pronoun usage, if you ask me that’s the real bane of society.
“I care plenty about scumbags trying to bring back the drug trade and intimidation rackets. Care even more when they’re prioritizing it before people have a way to get fresh water. But why don’t you show me what you mean?”
We head upstairs. My tread is uneasy and I end up giving Vinny a couple of nicks. I can smell the blood. He doesn’t complain.
***
The eleven or twelve Vinny came up with turns out to be twelve, but they probably add up to a “four-out-of-ten” on the threat scale when you take into account that most of them are zonked out with needles in their arms, slumped in the church pews. Two of the twelve bodies are a lab-tech looking couple standing behind a clear plastic tent erected around the foot of the church’s pulpit. They’re wearing surgical masks but from the cut of their white coats I can tell it’s one male, one female.
The church floor’s only real threat is the gorilla with the tubular neck tendrils. He’s wearing a sharkskin suit and has an AR-15 tucked under one arm like he’s Rambo if Rambo was applying for a job as a Men’s Warehouse floor manager.
Nobody but junkies see me as I walk Vi
nny up the aisle. Their sunken eyes brighten a little, but their lips say nothing. Nobody’s raising an alarm.
I was never married, never had the time and never had a boyfriend who could resist getting killed off by whatever monster of the week. But it’s hard to approach the guy with the machine gun without thinking that Vinny’s walking me down the aisle, giving his little girl away and when I get there I’m going to have to kiss this guy with the machine gun and facial issues.
The growths on the back of Rambo’s neck twinge and I know he’s sensed me.
“Drop it,” I say. Trying to make myself sound bigger with my voice. It’s all in the diaphragm. “No need to even turn around, just throw it over there, towards the...” I draw a blank on the name of that little trough you baptize babies in. “Towards the candles.”
The heavy doesn’t do what I say. He just turns, gun up.
“Whatcha got back there?” I use Victoria’s hilt to point at the tent. It’s a motion that angles the blade deeper into Vinny’s neck, breaking the skin. He screams.
“None of your business,” the big guy says. “And me and Vinny never got along.” He points the barrel of the AR more deliberately at Vinny’s trunk.
He’s right about that, the bullets would sail straight through our fuzzy friend and still have enough momentum to slam into me.
Inside the tent, the lab-techs are turned towards us now, heads bobbling like curious zoo animals in their plastic antiseptic hutch.
It’s not a bluff. I can tell by his expression that the big guy will have no problem shooting Vinny to take me out, what I can read of his expression beyond the gross facial tubers.
I pat Vinny on his flank, am thankful for slicing my coat open, then reach inside, covering the sound of the draw with an educated guess:
“Archdemon, is it? Whatchu got back there? Its friends are going to be pissed.”
The guy in the suit is at first perplexed, then enraged. He takes half a second to settle the stock against his shoulder (he’s big but he’s not “accurately hip-fire a military grade weapon”-big). He’s too late, half a second is all I need to bring the shotgun up to Vinny’s side and light the big guy up.