by Unknown
The Freak opened the lid and its face was twisted with hate.
“You don’t hurt me!” it screamed as its left hand grasped Jolene by the hair and yanked her head to the edge of the box.
“You don’t fuck with me!” it shrieked as its right hand grabbed the lid and slammed it shut on Jolene’s head. Jolene hollered in pain and pure terror as thick, fuzzy black spots appeared in her vision.
“No one!” the Freak howled as it slammed the top on her head again, catching it like a pecan in a nutcracker. Jolene’s hands came up again, but this time just begging.
“No one!”
This time Jolene’s head gave a loud crack and changed shape slightly.
One room over, in Mel Geloff’s office, Mel was on the phone dialing 911. Joe licked his lips and peeked out the door, then flung it open.
“Luther!” Unthinking, he rolled his best friend over. Luther’s eyes fluttered open and he hissed in pain. There was a trail of blood from the wall to where he lay, and his gun was discarded on the edge of a spreading pool of it.
“Joe…” he whispered.
“Joe?” The voice that repeated the word was low, gravelly and cracked.
Joe turned to see a blue-eyed man coming out of the coffin room, blood seeping through his shirt.
“Joe Kimble?” The man asked. His eyes narrowed and his face twisted. “What the fuck did your parents do to you…?”
“Leave him alone,” said a voice from the front door.
Joe and the Freak both looked up, but only Joe recognized Kate. She was aiming a revolver.
The Freak took a deep breath. It was getting tired of this shit. It was low on juice, but it had more than enough for another Still Pond.
“Lady, I got business with this man. If you want to get in my way, take your best shot.” The Freak opened its arms and stood there.
“Mom, that’s the Freak!” Fly unzipped, Leslie had just returned, was standing in the doorway to the foyer.
“Bullseye,” Kate whispered, and fired a single round right between the Freak’s eyes.
Joe stared as the man’s flesh rippled, and reformed, unharmed. A single drop of blood trickled down the side of its nose. Joe’s lower lip started to quiver, his legs went weak and he sat on the floor next to Luther.
“That the best you can do?”
“No,” Kate said, letting the gun fall to the floor.
She’d been playing out her major charge quite a bit. She’d arranged the meeting between Jolene, Phil King and the Freak (although she didn’t know it, any more than the rest of them did). She’d shielded herself from capture. She’d guided herself to Joe and Leslie. So perhaps half of her caged chaos had been dribbled out.
She hooked her fingers into claws, raked them through the air, took the rest of her power and flung it into the Freak’s body.
The Freak’s will had made its cells like a still pond, able to flow around bullets and blows, but Kate’s will was greater, her sacrifice more profound, and the still pond was whipped like an ocean in a hurricane. The Freak couldn’t scream very loud with scarred vocal cords, but it tried as ten deep furrows appeared down its front, ripping through skin and muscle and bone. It dropped to the floor, curled in a fetal ball.
Joe turned his ashen face to Kate and muttered, “What did you do?”
“Sweet Jesus,” Leslie murmured, tentatively creeping forward toward Luther and Joe.
Then the Freak uncoiled off the floor, exploding up like a sprinter coming off the mark. It crossed the room in less than a second, and before Kate knew what had happened it had slammed her into the door frame. She heard a crack, felt it through her entire body, and she went limp.
“Mom!” Leslie screamed, and he didn’t even think about it before picking up Luther’s gun and aiming it. Leslie had never fired a gun before, but (as Carla had told Kate) the Glock has few safety features, so he was able to just shoot and shoot. Even ignorant, he was in close quarters. He missed, then hit, then missed again twice while the Freak was staggering back from the gunshot—a gunshot that had hit it without the protection of magick, a gunshot that had blown a chunk out of its shoulder and made its left arm useless. But with its right arm the Freak grabbed a chair and threw it as hard as it could, turning its hips to put its back muscles into it.
The chair sailed through the air and knocked Leslie clean off his feet. The gun went under a sofa. While Leslie was struggling to disentangle himself, the Freak stomped over to him.
“Ballsy,” it said, “You borrow a pair?” Then threw a right cross and Leslie lay still.
It was suddenly very quiet in the funeral home. The only sounds were distant sirens, getting closer, and Joe’s moans.
Turning to face Joe, the godwalker considered its rival.
Joe desperately tried to remember what Leslie had tried to tell him at lunch. How he could stop the Freak. How he could do an end-run around it. But all he could think was that this was real, all real, all true, all the invisible ascensions and radio people and magick was real and everything he’d known, that stuff was the bullcrap and this thing had caught a bullet with its face and he was going to die.
“Oh Jesus, don’t hurt me,” Joe moaned.
The Freak shook its head.
“This is the big confrontation? I kill two professional assassins, face down a mage and an avatar to get to you, and all you say is ‘Jesus don’t hurt me’? They thought you… you… were going to dethrone me?”
“I don’t know nothing ‘bout that.”
“If I hadn’t killed so many people, it would be almost funny.”
“I’m nothing special!” Joe screamed. “I don’t want to be you! I don’t want to do anything to you! I ain’t one of those radio people, I don’t know jack shit!”
The Freak took a few steps closer and looked down at him. It felt pity and contempt twisting in its guts. From the smell, it was pretty sure Joe had shit himself.
It was tired, and it heard sirens, and it just wanted to be done. It reached forward to grab Joe’s heart and make it stop.
Only its fingers touched shirt, and skin, and they stopped.
“What the…?”
As he’d been taught in Basic, Joe rammed his knee up into the Freak’s groin and slammed his hands into its ears on both sides. He tried, anyhow. The knee connected, but he misjudged the Freak’s instinctive hunch forward, so Joe’s hands hit the bone on the back of its skull, bouncing off and clapping together. The Freak’s right shoulder slammed into him, knocking Joe back and down.
“Guess I’ll just kill you the old fashioned way,” the Freak snarled, but its voice was drowned out by another gunshot. It whipped its head around and saw Leslie, hands shaking, still holding Luther’s gun.
“Stop,” Leslie croaked, and the Freak wasn’t sure why Leslie’s voice had a begging tone. Was it afraid the Freak would continue? Or was it afraid to pull the trigger again?
“How many bullets does that gun hold, hm?” The Freak asked, turning towards Leslie. “You been counting?”
“I’m pretty sure there’s one left in here,” Joe said.
Looking, the Freak saw that Joe held Kate’s discarded revolver. His aim looked considerably more stable.
The sirens were closer.
“You’ve seen me take gunshots. You really think you can put me down?”
“I’ve seen you bleed, too. You’re bleeding now,” Leslie said.
“Just leave me alone,” Joe said, and his voice had gotten cold and flat. “Why can’t you just let me be?”
The Freak thought about the times it had been helpless, had been confused, had been the victim. It thought about Scotty and Roger, watching them die, watching Dirk kill them—casually, just in passing, just because they got in his way.
“I have to protect myself.”
“What the fuck can I do to you?”
The Freak looked away. “You can become godwalker. Not today or tomorrow, but in fifty years maybe. And that’s all I’ve got, Joe. That’s all I am.
”
“He won’t,” Leslie said. “He’ll swear.”
And just like that, Joe remembered. “I swear it on my honor as an oathbreaker,” he said.
And he felt something.
The Freak felt it too.
Something was watching them. Something big and immaterial and not so much powerful as simply Power Itself. The Freak had felt this regard before, in 1967, when it had swallowed acid to gain the power to change genders at will. It had felt it again in 1982, watching the old godwalker die and taking her place as the Mystic Hermaphrodite.
Beneath reality, something seethed and surged, and the Freak knew this was a turning point.
“Your honor as an oathbreaker, huh? So if you keep it, it’s invalid, you’re no oathbreaker and you break taboo. But if you break it, you’re consistent and break taboo there, too. Thinking in contradictions. Nice.”
The Freak panted for a few moments, then stood up straight. Both men kept their guns pointed, but it was unafraid.
“I think that’ll hold,” it said. “I think you got me. ‘Cause I have to contradict, don’t I?
I can’t be true to anything. Not to vengeance or mercy. Not to violence or peace. Not even to self-interest.”
It turned toward the door, stopping in the doorway to look back.
“You’re a lucky man, Joe Kimble.”
EPILOGUE
The local hospital had green linoleum floors. Joe’s boots made muffled clunks as the tromped down the hall. Leslie’s footsteps were shorter, quicker, light taps in flat-soled wingtips. Luther was off duty, but he wore his cop shoes anyway. They made little sound.
Joe remembered the floor. He hadn’t been in the hospital since his mother died, and he only now remembered that he’d had his head down so much, then.
They reached the door.
“Do you want me to…?” Luther gestured at the door.
Joe shrugged. “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to.”
“Then if it’s all the same…”
“Yeah,” Leslie said. “Maybe it’s better if you stay out here.”
Things had quieted down. No one had died in four whole days, not since Jolene. Everyone was still on guard though.
Sheriff Lee and his men were still all over town. One of them nodded to Luther from his chair by the door.
Chief Walter Stelke had buried Andy Brault two days ago. Big Phil King had openly wept at the funeral, while the two newest officers just stared on, faces blank.
Leslie was still at the same motel. The charges against him had been dropped.
Joe was staying with Luther, with deputies making periodic sweeps by the house to make sure he was all right.
“Is it okay if we go in?” Leslie asked. The deputy nodded.
Joe and Leslie went in to Kate’s room.
* * *
Miles away, an expensively groomed middle manager was called in to see his boss. When his secretary gave him the news, he nodded and put his desk in order. But he didn’t take the elevator up to his boss’ office. Instead he went down to the car park and, with the calm and measured movements of someone who is doing exactly what is right and expected, he got behind the wheel and turned his key.
Nothing happened.
“I told him you’d run.”
The middle manager jumped and let out a short scream as he worked at turning around in his seat.
The man in the backseat was enormous. He had a scar on his face and it seemed impossible that he could have gotten there unnoticed. But he had.
“There are two ways this goes,” the large man said. “We go upstairs and you tell him the truth and I break your neck with one quick snap. Or you waffle and play innocent and act indignant and resist. If you go that route, I go home with sore hands and your blood probably ruins a set of my clothes. But either way we get the truth and you die.”
“Look, I… you should know…”
The big man put a finger to his lips.
“Shh. Save it. Take a moment and think. Okay?”
The manager thought. He considered running but knew it was absolutely hopeless. He knew what this man behind him could do, had done… had done on the manager’s orders.
He closed his eyes and thought, for the last time, about his sister.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
* * *
“How are you?” Leslie asked, his voice quiet.
Kate gave him a grim smile. “The bad news is, I probably won’t be able to walk into my murder trial. The good news is, the penitentiary for paraplegics is minimum security.”
There was an awkward little pause, and then the sound of Leslie’s muffled sobs crept in.
“Oh Mom,” he whispered.
“Sweetie, no, hey, I’m sorry… Joe, bring him over here.”
Awkwardly, Joe complied, guiding Leslie to his mother’s bed. She reached out and brought her son to her.
“Shh…” she said. “Sh, it’s okay. I had to. I had to do it.”
“No, Mom, you…”
“I had to,” she repeated. “To save you. It’s okay. I wouldn’t change anything.”
Leslie sniffled and wiped his eyes. He raised his head and looked at his mother.
“Not even the part where he… it… where your back got broken?”
Again, the sad smile. “Maybe that part. But you know how chaotic systems work. You can’t just change one element. If you pull off the butterfly’s wings, the storm becomes a breeze.”
“Well, thanks anyhow,” Joe said, awkwardly, standing off to the side. He kept looking around the room, then looking at Kate, then looking around again.
Her gaze stayed on him, while her hands kept patting Leslie.
“It was the least I could do,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” Joe said. “I mean that… fuck, that thing – I wouldn’t of asked anyone to fight that for me. You could’ve run. Anyone could.”
“I had to save my baby,” she said, looking straight at Leslie.
He hugged her again, hard this time, and she started to cry.
“I just hope I made it up to you,” she said.
“Mom, there’s nothing…”
“No, there is, I know there is. We were wrong, Leslie. What we did to you was wrong. We wanted to go all the way and we… we treated you like you were just… just something to use.”
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “I forgive you.”
“And Joe, I’m sorry for what we did to you too.”
Joe shrugged. “Hey it’s not… not your fault that that crazy guy k… killed my dad. You didn’t make him do it.”
“No but we brought him into your life, we…”
“Nah,” Joe said. “Don’t think like that. It’s not your fault.” But he wasn’t looking at her as he said it. He was looking out the window, squinting.
“And there’s… there’s something else.”
Her tone made Leslie release his grip and slowly rise up. He looked her in the face.
“What?”
“Joe you… you had a sister.”
“Huh?”
“A sister. You had a twin sister. In fact…” Kate’s lip was trembling, and when she drew breath, it was something like a gasp, something like a mirthless laugh. “You still have her.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Have you ever had an abdominal x-ray?”
Joe shook his head.
“Well, if you did, they’d see… something.”
“What are you talking about?” Without thinking, Joe had put a hand to his stomach, to the spot where all his shirts seemed to develop stains.
“You had a twin sister and… and when you were both inside me you… engulfed her.”
“Huh?”
“It’s sort of like a molar twin. That’s what they call it. People have had tumors removed and the doctors find hair or teeth in them. In the tumors. And…”
Leslie stood up, face pale.
“So wait,” Joe said
, “You mean I… I got…?”
“That’s what protects you. Her spirit, it’s bound to you, lives through you. And she, she defends you – that’s why spells can’t harm you, she leads them away…”
“…And they can’t hurt her because she’s already dead,” Leslie said, stepping backwards.
“The pregnant man,” Kate whispered. She chewed her lips. “Leslie, sweetie, you have to understand…”
“Oh mom…”
“Listen!” Kate’s voice rose as her son moved away from her.
“You killed her?” Joe asked.
“No,” Leslie said. “They made you kill her, Joe. That’s what Dad meant, wasn’t it? That Joe might be a born killer?”
“It was the only way!” Kate wailed, straining her arms at her retreating son. “Don’t you see? He was alive and dead both! Male and female both! We had to! We did it for the world, for everyone!”
“I gotta get out of here,” Joe muttered, heading for the door.
“Leslie? You understand, right? You forgive me? Please son, it was wrong but I’m sorry, it saved him, I’m sorry, forgive me!”