by Brian Hodge
Wentworth had also called Mikey "Scoop," with equal derision. For Scoop Shovel, meaning Mikey's mouth. The Cherub had just referred to him as Scoop four times in the last two minutes. The mind bees shook off their happy hour stupor long enough to help Mikey with elementary addition.
Wentworth and the Cherub were in cahoots all along, they chittered. They've been talking. About you.
The Cherub turned to Cobbler. "To free the face of the planet of Ms Wentworth, how much did we, at-hum, estimate?"
"To render her sub-potent, we budgeted fifty large, not counting the extra per diem for the sharpshooters. This gentleman owes you $75,000. There is a $25,000 discrepancy."
"At-hum. Do you have my money, Scoop?"
It was brain-boggling. The Cherub had been playing at making a pact with Wentworth, to get her into the crosshairs of his overpaid assassins, then Mikey had killed Wentworth for free … and now the Cherub wanted change.
Mikey's marrow froze. "Will you take a check?"
"That's very funny," the Cherub said humorlessly. He stroked the bridge of his nose. "Acey. Deucy."
No chance in hell, thought Mikey, that the Cherub was proposing a card game aimed at his debt. No, he had beckoned the goons at the door, who on verbal command took two giant steps forward with precision ballet synchronicity and cross drew two of the largest nickel-plated Auto Mags in the entire world. The simultaneous shuck-click of their actions going hot sounded like chrome knuckles, cracking.
It was time for Mikey to die, once again.
Two loud bangs chased each other; tight thunderclaps.
Mikey threw himself hard on deck, onto his face. His whole body tried to contract.
The twin bangs had not been gunfire. They had been the double doors of the Cherub's lair being kicked in. Mikey was still headed for the floor, working on lame excuses, when gunfire came for real. Lots of it.
The Cherub's mouth had been forming some officious protest when his head vaporized, raining crimson mush all over the bulletproof window behind him. Mikey flinched and got sprayed anyway.
The sound was the atomic chatter of MAC 10s on full auto, firing through fat suppressors. The room started to come apart as Mikey rolled toward the Cherub's desk. Through the steamy hell of cartridge fog he caught Cobbler's last moves as a living thing.
The mysterious glass globe exploded as Cobbler stopped a hailstorm of slugs and smashed down to the Persian rug, squirming. The expression on his pallid face reasonably qualified as disappointment. The guards, Acey and Deucy, were already three hundred fifty pounds of dead beef … less the weight of their pistols, dropped unfired.
Blowback from the blitzkrieg faded, leaving Mikey the survivor. Everyone else in the room was dead…
… until Roach made the most of his entrance, stepping grandly over the ventilated corpses. His pal Ratso brought up the rear. Their weapons were smoking, matte black, with taped double clips.
Roach. Ratso. Jesus H. Christ, esquire.
Mikey's sadistic guardian spirit had just swapped bishops for knights: Equal point value, same threat potential … but the new ones move crooked.
"Jeezo-crikey, Roach, peek at that! It's ole Scoop wif his butt up in the air!"
"Scoop Butt," Roach said.
Scoop this, Scoop that, jeezo-crikey. Had every single lowlife in New York City heard his imbecilic nickname? He would be known as Scoop until he died…which looked to be a minute or two from right here, right now.
"Nice Scoop Butt," said Ratso, who generally agreed with anything that fell out of Roach's mouth.
The entry wounds garnishing the Cherub's formidable mass were still exuding penetration mist and leaking blood. Cobbler's brains could now truly see the light.
"Scoop-O, what the fuck you doing hanging wif scumboys like this fat turd right here?" Roach had actually said dayfock and rye-cheer; the mind bees freely interpreted this output for Mikey, having grown bored of their spot body count. "Read Street News, bro. Don't you know Mister The Cherub is history, as in ancient? Grab yourself an update, hoser. Me and Ratty is where you should be dipping your wick."
"We be happening," agreed Ratso.
Mikey rolled slowly over to get a look. Broken glass and frags from the Cherub's skull vault spilled away.
"Hello, Roach. Glad to see you can finally afford a cable station that gets reruns of Miami Vice."
"What da hell's he talking?" said Ratso.
Mikey's eyes tried to drink them in and gagged. There was too much to digest. They were still seeing the updrawn guns of the guards, fading.
Roach detested the Sixties, so his nom de guerre had nothing to do with pot farmers or free love. Nothing came free to Roach, and if it wasn't worth buying, it wasn't worth squat. Roach was so called due to his buggy body or his insectile, praying mantis jawline–Mikey could not recall which. He never removed his mirror shades even dead past midnight; he just did not. Whenever you spoke to Roach, you always saw yourself, reflected twice, distorted in convex.
Roach's wingman, Ratso, appeared to have been sculpted from shit, or really spotty clay, to be more polite about it. He had the kind of fruitcake complexion that could inspire you to wince and check your own face for zits the next time a mirror caught you. And if you happened to check in Roach's shades, which nine out often customers could not help doing, then you'd eat some hurt.
Togged to the nines in costly flash, Roach and Ratso looked like two ugly kids wearing their parents' clothes to a taping of The Arsenio Hall show. Just now, these selfsame ugly kids seemed the heirs apparent to a widespread drug empire belonging to anyone they could successfully murder.
"Great, you guys. Top drawer." Mikey was trying to generate enough saliva to inquire about potential employment opportunities. At least he didn't owe the Roach.
"Yo, it's pretty gas groove so far!" Roach cackled and slapped Ratso a high five. Then he shot up the room some more. "We gonna be the kings, we gonna be the man, get us some rooms with ice water!"
"Shit." Ratso, discovering he was out of ammo, reversed his clip and locked down.
"Only one small prob," said Roach. "You a witness, Scoop-O." He laughed, a genuinely unappetizing glottal hack.
"Wait a minute," said Mikey, rising for the first time from ground level. "You know I don't care about this fat slob, he was just about to wax me. I need a situation. You know that, Roach; that's why I've been keeping my head down all this time."
"I understand, Scoopy. Scoopy-Poopy."
"Lemme kill him," said Ratso.
"Wait!" Mikey was still trying to re-combobulate himself, his heartbeat still echoing the fusillade. "Roach, you of all people know I had the Cherub on my ass and Wentworth trying to lop off my dick at the same time–"
"Sounds like a crotch-load," said Ratso.
"Prob is," said Roach, gesturing with his gun, "you shoulda come to us first-like."
"You're not gonna lemme kill him, are you?" Ratso was pouting. "Wanna kill him. Just once."
"You got ajob wif me, Scoop. I ain't shut you out the way you ignore me."
Yeah, a job as corpse landfill, thought Mikey. He snapped his trap. He had, once again, been on the verge of making excuses, whining, pleading. Whenever he tried to talk his way free, the shit that happens when people say shit happens…happened.
"But you and me, we ain't get on wif any kind of meaningful relationship," Roach said with studious emphasis, "wifout you don't suffer some discipline."
"Discipline!" Ratso sniggered and dropped his gun.
Roach planted one foot on the Cherub's extremely dead remains and nestled the muzzle of his MAC 10 beside Mikey's ear.
Shit's about to happen, advised the mind bees, needlessly, not knowing how ironically correct they were already.
Which is how Mikey came to be duct-taped to the Cherub's decapitated corpse, face down in the sewer at half past two in the morning, earnestly trying to float.
Shit was happening. Wetly. With the consistency of cold brown oatmeal. A thousand gallons upon a t
housand gallons more, it kept on happening to Mikey.
He thought of his toilet., For the first time in his life, he pitied it.
He thought of telephones. How many were there in Manhattan? Probably as many as there were toilets. The digestive cycle of the average Homo Sapiens required a bowel movement at about the twelve-hour mark, with a ring-and-rinse cycle after an additional twelve. That was at least two trips per day to the throne for every citizen, not counting what Mikey's second-grade teacher, Mrs. Stephenson, had quaintly termed Number One.
And not counting folks with the trots.
Mikey thought of his old constituents, all those ground-pounders who had kept parasites like the Cherub and Wentworth in the business of controlled substances. Drug abuse did horror movie things to your metabolism, and more horrible things to the stuff that departed your metabolism as waste products.
The mind bees cheerfully advised Mikey to throw up. Number Three. Now.
But to vomit, you had to inhale, and Mikey was currently facedown and drowning in the accumulated liquid compost of several million telephone users, a hapless Ahab clinging to a headless whale. The Cherub's saturated carcass was a capsized canoe of hanging fat and soggy clothing. Whenever Mikey tried to heave-ho with a slosh, the Cherub's sheer girth defeated him, sluggishly. Cadavers could be slow and uncooperative that way.
Ratso had married them, wrist and ankle, with duct tape, the most tenacious binding in the drug dealers professional repertoire. Almost indestructible, even when wet.
Almost.
Mikey listed to port far enough to gulp half a lungful of air. The other half was still fermented sewage. He gagged in a spray and inadvertently propelled himself down, down, down … not for the third time, but for the hundredth. Stuff stuck in his teeth.
This was not how he intended to end his day; just another turd in the GI tract of New Yor–
Mikey's forehead banged against concrete and he swore. A whole expletive burst from him. And echoed.
The Cherub had beached himself. Mikey could inhale, exhale, all manner of forgotten pursuits. It was a hard-ass, by-damn miracle! He was healed! He was respirating!
Then he puked.
When he relaxed his head, he went nose first into the mush of the Cherub's neck stump. Being on top of this bloated sack of shit still had disadvantages. The bees rallied, urging Mikey to blow lunch again, do it, we understand! We LOVE this guy!
Mikey haulked until he was dry … on the inside, at least.
His waterlogged sense of smell had long since pulled the cowardly abandonment bit. No sooner had Mikey drawn a complete breath unencumbered by waste products or the backdraft of his last meal, than he noticed a very familiar sensation. Pain.
Something was busily gnawing on his foot, the one without the shoe. Tiny teeth sought his tender arches through his blood-soaked sock. Seasoned by bilge and water-softened, his toes would be dessert. The Cherub's fat feet had already been chowed.
"Oww! Jesus goddamn!" Mikey was not a religious man, not even a foxhole convert. He never capitalized proper names in holy epithets. This sort of stuff, however, was all he could think of to say as a large sewer rat chomped a jawful out of his calf.
Sharp biting, everywhere now. All the while he and the Cherub had been boating, these nasty rodental motherfuckers had been having a picnic. Saving Mikey for freshness' sake. Mikey was starting to get a tad piqued.
Too dark to see. He thought it was a rat. Hoped. The last bite felt big enough to qualify as a small Rottweiler.
Mikey thrashed as much as he could. The rat was just as single-mindedly committed. Mikey's flesh tore free. He screamed and kicked; felt his foot connect in the dark and a satisfyingly disoriented squeeeek, followed by a splash.
Mikey had kicked the rat away. His right foot was free of the duct tape.
The little sonsabitches had eaten through the tape, which was saturated in thick, rich, A1Sauce-type blood!
Still three-quarters bound, Mikey strained to flop each of the Cherub's dead-ass flipper arms up and over, to smear the wrists, tied to his own, in the casserole of the Cherub's neck stump.
For this to work, he would have to trade the high end for the ratty end, sprawling backward, making an island upon which the rats might gather to feast.
He could give thanks to Edgar Allan Poe later, if he survived.
Mikey tried to turn his own weight to advantage, bearing down hard. The pressure caused the late Cherub to fart, raising greasy bubbles that echoed. His own bacteria was dining on him from the inside, processing him into gas.
The Cherub continued to deflate until Mikey was at low tide, nostrils barely rippling the water's surface. Rats evacuated from his pantlegs and swarmed to the high end. Mikey thought of the Titanic passengers who missed the lifeboats. He listened as the critters hungrily did battle over the potluck in the neck stump. Those that were elbowed out made for the next tastiest target–the wrist bonds. If Mikey could have seen the length of his own arm, he would have been pleased by the cluster of wriggling rat butts there.
A tail lashed into Mikey's nose. This was too goddamn much. He arched up and bit, grinding his teeth. The rat took off as though airlifted. Resolving never to eat anything ever again, Mikey spat out the chunk of severed tail. It tasted like chicken.
He could feel his good hand easing looser.
The next five minutes bore a mutant resemblance to a championship round of Whack-A-Mole, that revelatory arcade diversion in which a contestant attempts to fatally bash as many pop-up rodents as possible. Whack-A-Mole was not as moist a game; this was. In Whack-A-Mole, thought Mikey, your targets did not make such pleasing death sounds when the maul swung down. It was a transcendent moment. Once he had freed himself, a bludgeon had materialized in his fist, and he dealt righteously with his tormentors. He visualized them flung, squashed and broken-boned, gagging on their own ratty blood and drowning. Most of them had either Roach or Ratso's face. It helped Mikey's aim in the dark.
Pithecanthropoidally, Mikey clutched his weapon, and made for higher ground, feeling his way along with feral grunts. He eventually discovered the lip edge of the sewer tunnel and groped up to a concrete ledge about five inches wide. It was slimy with accretions.
In the dark, he fancied he could see dim, reflected light, or hear distant voices talking nonsense. It was just the mind bees, making up stuff to occupy him.
The weapon in his hand, yet unclassifiable, was about two and a half feet long, tapering, studded with little bumps or rivets up one side. Slightly curved, it felt like wood, waterlogged to porous smoothness.
The sudden voice startled Mikey; his club tried to panic-slip from his hand and his pants tried to fill, but that would have been redundant. The voice was big, hollow and booming thanks to sewer acoustics, sounding like the Lord of all the Underworld, and it said:
"Lookums!
Two hulking shapes were blocking the dim light Mikey thought he had imagined.
"Lookums, Edict." Big reverb. "He wears the Suit of Rats."
"Tapshoes," said a smaller, reedier voice. "Yes. The Suit of Rats. He wields the scepter of the Big Moby Eater."
Rats were, in fact, eagerly re-ascending Mikey's legs, hankering for Round Two of the species competition in which the winner gets dinner. Big time hungry and still death-wish fearless, they swarmed upward until Mikey looked like he was wearing moist fur pantaloons–a downscale satyr with very jumpy vermin. He began whacking the topmost ones back into the drink.
"Uhh–excuse me, guys?" Whack, splat. "You wouldn't happen to know the way out of here, would you?"
"Speaks!" said the big voice.
"He speaks, unto us, our ownselfs," confirmed the reedy one, with a hint of awe.
"HOOO-BAAH!" they both howled at once. The noise blessed Mikey with an instantaneous migraine.
It also divested him of lingering rats. They flung themselves free as though demagnetized, splashing down into the muck and vanishing.
"You are the Comer," said the reedy one
. "As was prophesied. You wore the Suit of Rats. You have come to lead us to the Upworld of 490 burgers and all one may drink."
"During happy hour only!" said the big one. "You wield the scepter of the Big Moby Eater!"
"Stop bowing!" Mikey yelled.
Abrupt silence. Bewilderment from the two acolytes, who looked at each other like pinheads trying to puzzle out a revolving door.
"We have offended you."
"No, no, look…I just want to climb out of this freak show. Okay? Yes? Good stuff?"
They kept on rising and bowing, rising and bowing, which made Mikey want to kill them. Finally the little guy said, solemnly, "As we must all ascend. You have been sent to lead us. You are the Comer."
"Sorry, pal. I don't even know where I am."
"Lost, as are we all, awaiting your Coming. We are the ones cast adrift, the–"
"Will you shut the fuck up, please?"
"Lookums!" bellowed the big one, drowning Mikey efficiently out. "Feast!"
"As foretold, the Comer brings the feast to quell our long fasting."
"What?" Mikey ached to rewind, to go back to the simplicity of rats trying to eat him. His calf was nudged as the chewed-up, waterlogged corpse of the late Cherub bumped up from behind. Bright boy that he was, Mikey figured it all out in a flash.
"Oh. Feast. Right."
Mikey's lifesaving club turned out to be the bleached jawbone of some large, toothy carnivore. He learned this by firelight, like some primitive hominid in mid-evolution. An odorous trashcan fire illuminated the dank, cavernous switchback to which he had been grandly escorted. This was some long-forgotten dump drain for overflow, made redundant, superseded by progress, abandoned, lost, disused for years.
The denizens of the drainpipe had been living here quite a while. Each subterranean derelict shuffled forth, begging introduction, seeking favor from Mikey … the Comer.
The big loud one was Tapshoes. The reedy-voiced keeper of the faith was Edict. Then Fishlip, then Scroat, then Skidmark, and finally Egg, the only female in the congregation. Ragbags all, complete social disaffiliates from the topside world that had begotten so much of Mikey's recent misery. They loitered around, wheezing and excreting, waiting for Mikey to intone some pronunciamento while what was left of the Cherub was roasted on a spit made from a construction foundation rod. Tapshoes had wrangled the Cherub onto the spit, stump-through-anus. The Cherub's fat sizzled.