After a long pause, Blake watching more lizards scatter, she said, “We had a loving household, Mr. Blake. But it was not your average home life.” A smile slipped through, but Blake noted it was not a smile indicative of happiness. “Our parent’s Hollywood connections led them away from us often. We immersed ourselves in the library, the entertainment center, with books and movies and whatever amused us. Many of the books were of a subversive nature.” She tapped chipped nails on the hood, scratching the paint. “Our imaginations took it all in. We created our own world. We called the world the dark frontier. A trippy world where drugs and madness reigned.”
“Why drugs and madness?”
“That was the focus of many of the books. Our parents, specifically father—mother was along for the ride, barely there when she was there—embraced all that was obscure or, again, subversive, while in the real world, he was a conformist to the T.”
“Drugs…? Madness…?”
“The books, more for looks than to be read, something father collected for when he retired. He wanted to know all the weird and wonderful and strange things in the world. Our parents never read anything unless it was to be turned into a potential blockbuster. But his life was cut short”—emotions rising, then swiftly settling across her features—“before he had the opportunity to enjoy his collection. But Marlon and I, we explored those books. We were never limited in our quests, never told no, always open to anything. Father enjoyed our interest, wanted us to look at the world with original eyes, or at least not corrupted by what he created.” She snickered, a sad, defeated sound. “Waiting for a time to join us and have us tell him what we had learned. A way of getting us to think outside the proverbial box, but he waited too long. When Marlon left, it threw him out of sorts. He never recovered. The fire ended his misery.”
“I still do not understand why Marlon left.”
Jane put her hands in her pockets, shuffled her feet. “Being…impressionable, he was more inclined to take the words in all those books as law. Our world was a game we played, to align the many ideas and ideals from the books. But…he was not a well boy. Always fighting this or that sickness, allergy…mental glitch.”
“Mental glitch?”
“Funny, I have always assumed it was something genetic, handed down from our parents. Where father always wanted to know too much, push too much, never resting, never psychologically happy, what with the cage of producing those hit movies he had created, this measure of activity enforced long bouts of insomnia and sleep deprivation that flip-flopped into his daily life. He was brilliant, but flawed, as we all are. Flawed.”
Blake noted that smile again, the one not born of happiness. He suspected the memory inspired it, perhaps a glimmer of joy, but nothing more than a glimmer.
“But Marlon was not brilliant. He was scarred, flawed, got all the flaws and none of the good. His mind stayed in the dark frontier more often once he’d made friends who dabbled in drugs and something there, something in the chemistry of his own madness and the drugs, as well as the books we indulged in, meshed as a kind of reality that ran parallel to ours, then took over for him.” She slipped her hands out of her pockets, rubbed them together, then thrust them back. “He’s been there ever since, I expect. Stuck somewhere in an imaginary realm made real. His life probably the life of a junky, in a way, but a junky with a high-octane imagination.”
This was all a bit much for Blake. The aspects of reality and imagination that Marlon had dissolved in a glass of water and lapped up as if an elixir, preposterous. Yet Jane’s words only once hesitated, and that had nothing to do with her spin on Marlon. More so, she seemed relieved to have gotten it all out. Furthermore, where exactly did this leave them? Because over the last few days, Blake’s take on reality had been hit hard.
“What makes us think we have a hold on reality and this dark frontier is not as real as what we know?”
Jane lifted her eyes from their perusal of the ground, her shoes. Her eyes glassy, two marbles, polished and beautiful, but empty. “Did I say it wasn’t real? I believe reality is what each of us makes of it. I think your take on reality is quite different than mine.”
Blake banked on this, for sure. Though with their paths crossing, he was getting a sense for hers…
“As is Marlon’s, though a seed of understanding, because of our upbringing, perhaps gives me a feel for his. Or perhaps I’m full of shit.”
The moment lingered., Blake’s cell phone chirped loudly, grabbed his attention .
“Talk.”
“I’ve got something.”
“That was swift.”
Jane’s posture firm, she crossed her arms over her now wrinkled blouse as if bracing herself for bad news.
“Only a tidbit. Passed on the info to a handful of people who should be able to give us more details soon, but when I got it to Kyle Sumners from the Agency”—one of the covert intelligence organizations, that’s all Blake knew, not needing anything more than trust in Potters’ connections—“his immediate reaction, well, if I said priceless, it was also bizarre. He said, and I quote, ‘No way. That Russian slime.’ He informed me of a handful of rumors he’d heard, stuff that puts any ideas on what you’re dealing with to shame. Obvious fodder formulated to add, as you noted, menace to the mystique, but he said”—stopping, taking a deep breath, letting it all out in one fell swoop—“this guy, rumor has it he’s a Russian thug, freelance assassin, yadda yadda yadda, but, dig this, was born the day of the Chernobyl disaster, crawled from the radiation and took shape as a man, lightning bolt hair, some kind of new breed of human and radiation, a blotch, an aberration, cancer with teeth. He went on and on in this vein. I had to stop him, his voice swinging between revulsion and almost giddy awe. I knew I had to get you this much, no matter the obvious illegitimacy of the info. Something about what you’re dealing with—”
“Makes it less fantasy and possibly grim fact. No matter the outrageousness of it all.”
“That’s pretty much my thinking. Not that I believe any of this. A hybrid of human and radiation? He’d be dead for starters. Either that or a nuclear-powered Marvel Supervillain intent on taking down Batman, Superman, and any other worthy superheroes. You are no superhero, my friend. You ready to step away now?”
“Gotta push on, pal. No turning back.” Though he wanted to, he wanted to. Every indicator, every iota of instinct suggested—demanded—and pretty much expected him to.
“Perhaps this will change your mind.” With that, Potters told him the big guy’s name. Blake heard it and as seconds lingered, Potters said, “You got that?”
“Yeah,” he said, then folded the old school cell phone closed.
“What? What did he have for us?” Jane said.
Blake’s eyes remained frosty, distant.
A glam rock star from the pit of a nuclear reactor. A gigolo with the intentions and means to fuck whatever it wanted to extinction. To annihilate whatever he—it—wanted.
Who else would call himself Rudolf Chernobyl, besides a madman, a mad being, the devil himself?
Shaking his head, Jane chattering in the background, he strolled away from her, to the dirt and cactus and abundant lizards skipping about, weaving their wiry paths in the dirt.
When his eyes dropped to his shoes, he noticed the trail of one lizard, a cursive scribble that looked like the name of another town.
Their next destination?
He continued to shake his head, taking in a monster named Rudolf Chernobyl, and a helpful lizard indicating a destination no longer unknown.
“Jane…”
Chapter 16 Chernobyl
Rudolf Chernobyl sat in the only chair ever to bring him comfort, in the only room ever to bring him joy, taking in another masterpiece: Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina sculpture. Bernini was a man after his own cruel heart, what with his slashing of the face of Costanza Piccolomini, a married woman he was having an affair with, because of the possibility she’d had a liaison with his brother
. Just the possibility. His control of the situation and the woman was something Rudolf could appreciate on many levels.
He ran his fingers over his face, displeased with his recent meltdowns, control stumbling and seeping out of his flesh.
As with many of the classic art pieces, for the proper price they could be obtained, as long as one had the sleight-of-hand skills necessary to acquire said piece of art, while leaving a close to perfect copy in its place. A copy so perfect, it might even be better than the original. With The Rape of Proserpina, he’d commissioned a fellow freelance mercenary artist, a covert, skilled sculptor known as Templeton—another shadow dweller dealing in the black market—to create the perfect copy of Bernini’s sculpture. It was so perfect, those who dealt in the art underworld at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Italy, wondered why he didn’t just keep it and pocket the money he’d spend on obtaining the original, not that they minded his donation to their bank accounts.
Pity, he’d have thought earnest lovers of art would understand the reason why one wanted the one and only, no matter the number of copies that might be distributed throughout art galleries across the globe. To touch the marble that a great man, a great artist touched, is to be as close to a true god as Rudolf could imagine.
His purpose here was not to relish art, though.
He had a plan.
In most cases, when a snippet of self is taken and used as a homing device, Rudolf would jack in, get a location, then internally shift the homing device from the purely visual, to a topographical map of the location. A blip accompanied the process, escalating as he approached his quarry.
This time, he was not going to shift and move into hunter mode. He was going to settle in and observe everything as it happened. He was going to try and establish a link that would show him more, perhaps give him a clue as to the next stop along the precarious path. If there’s a drug being used to engineer travel, perhaps if he remained locked into the visual, he could follow along, even as the blip fell silent. Staying connected.
Perhaps he could, at the very least, get a clue to the follow-up destination, glean something from within the process, and cut out precious minutes. Put himself face-to-face as opposed to just missing his mark. After all, he had just missed Marlon Teagarden at the last stop. Under the circumstances and not one to court frustration on a regular basis, it seemed a legitimate strategy.
One that might lead to him slipping into the oddest places imaginable.
The images from Marlon’s world were hazy at best. Through Marlon’s eyes, he saw fish and wondered if Teagarden was drowning. It went on and on, though, and Marlon didn’t struggle. Until he saw a monster, something out of an H.R. Giger sketchbook. Or perhaps it was one of William Blake’s muscled figures, yet it lacked something he could not define.
Rudolf saw a child floating in this dim realm.
He expected something he could latch on to, something familiar. Why were the images draped in the guise of the fantastical? The sense of it all was layered in nonsense, yet as the scene played out, another entered the fray. A man whose body seemed a playground for a menagerie of beings, alien and human.
What was going on?
A battle ensued—clumsy, amateurish—but within the sloppy struggle, the last one to enter the scene had tripped over his own feet and cracked his head on a dresser.
Afterward, the sketchbook monster and Marlon exchanged something: a syringe.
Through the mental mist Rudolf saw something swimming in the syringe, in the milky liquid: maggots. Something like maggots. Or was the milky liquid alive? He sensed as Marlon took the syringe and thrust the needle into his neck.
The sleeping child woke, eyes red as Hell’s red light district, a sleazy invitation. No, something else he could not read.
Then—
A pooling darkness, ink stain fluidity. Blotch as beginning point, yet spreading. He heard buzzing. In the previous scene, he heard nothing; silence is usual. But here, a soft thrumming took him, a low, keening buzz.
He thought of blood flowing in one’s body. Head to a pillow and the ability to hear it even more clearly. This felt like that, with no pillow. A metallic ting shimmering at the height of the sun-dappled wave. A blood wave. A blood tide. He did not know, yet he surfed in the dark place without fear.
Static pierced the thrumming, the metallic ting, a bleat of voices, music.
Rudolf’s hands braced the arms of the wooden chair. Tiny slivers pricked his palms. He narrowed his focus, listened in.
“I only want to help,” said one voice.
“Help yourself again, right?” said another.
One of Penderecki’s ominous odes to suffering and terror slithered into the thrum, unnerving Rudolf.
“What are we supposed to do with him?” The first voice again.
“No,” said the second voice, now screaming. A sensation as if being trapped, caged, ears plugged and no more sounds except what thrives within, the Penderecki snippet shoved aside by Jim Morrison’s middle of the desert, back of the car warning from “Riders On The Storm,” the rain coming down and splashing upon Ray Manzarek’s delicate keyboard ministrations, winding into something by Dark Angel Asylum, Aleister Blut’s corrosive wail threaded with anguish, lyrics from a song he did not know actually cut through, with intent—“No more rules and regulations/slaughtered here your destination/chiseled on the walls of time/no future here, not yours or mine”—slanting into Queen, Freddy Mercury ranting and railing about the “Great King Rat,” and more, an avalanche of music and lyrics pouring through his ears, but not from the outside, it all clamored for cacophonous attention from within. From within Marlon Teagarden’s mind.
The onslaught was unprecedented. Rudolf hung on as it all swirled with dreamscape lucidity, these sounds, as accompanied by images that veered from the source material—Morrison’s visage, Aleister Blut, ear pressed to the Marshall Stack, Freddie Mercury with long hair and skin tight white body suit, along with images bathed in a degree of utter strangeness and perversion that included many nods to copulating insects, as well as an adult cartoon spin on Alice in Wonderland in which Alice was being fucked by the Mad Hatter while she orally pleasured the Caterpillar as the Queen of Hearts masturbated in the corner.
Morrison laughed in the background, somewhere unseen, but it was his voice: “I want whatever you’re taking, Marlon.”
What surprised Rudolf the most about this whole menagerie of madness was how he found himself thoroughly enjoying the ride. Never one for drugs, this one, whatever the Centipede was, was something he sensed he would enjoy.
Perhaps he’d get a nip, once he delivered Marlon to his employer. Perhaps he’d take what he wanted and skip on the formalities.
The momentary flutter of his own thought—of something beyond observation and riding along the psychic, psychedelic, psyche-bound roller coaster; a thought separate from the ride—loosened his grip. Yet before he was unceremoniously thrust back to his reality with all the whiplash abruptness of a slingshot, he registered one thing:
Movement. The experience had been accompanied by a sense of moving forward…to a next destination. This impression was curiously made relevant when Alice, face dripping with Caterpillar cum, said to him, “Follow the black tar stained tunnel if you want to know where Marlon will end up next,” before slurping up more of the green substance from the still groaning Caterpillar’s penis.
Looking beyond the orgy of strange, the sensation as if on a boat. Floating forward at a casual pace. Allowing the water—the drug—to assimilate and show him what was next. Taking him to his next destination.
Thinking in the flurry before returning: I see a light. A light. The next stop? So far ahead. What if I rush forward? What if I…
But too late, the slingshot return slamming him into his own reality, the hardback chair turned to chips and ash all around him. His clothing also turned to ash, the fabric cinders at his feet.
Naked, he stood up, his body as white as his hair, a flare never t
o be extinguished. Beneath the skin, movement as well; a different kind of movement. He felt the heat swell, as well as his engorged penis, spewing as one would food poisoning, a paradox of two sensations he’d never felt at this heightened level before. The first one completely foreign, while the second one joined in only when he was at his worst: a dopesickness that made his head feel light, a balloon about to fly off into the deep blue, swirling as it did with dizziness and euphoria. He vomited out his pleasure, his seed, the spark and splat of liquid eating through the floor as he dropped to his knees. The first full-on lack of control he’d felt in years.
He pulled it all within, bringing the world into place again. Semen gushing from his still achingly erect penis.
The sensation ate brain cells and judgment for dinner, yet he welcomed the final jerk of semen, the surrender he had experienced.
Years of control, of utilizing his skills and the inherent justification to need this control, burned away in the sticky white liquid eating away at the hardwood floor. Sizzling with determination.
He cherished life, detested those who catered to experiences that blotted the living of life to nothing more than the passage of time. But with this experience, and only from the outside—he could not imagine the full effect—he knew, when he delivered Marlon to his employer he would also insist on a bit of this Centipede drug.
Insist.
Demand.
He needed just one fix. Just one real fix.
He was hooked, though he would never admit this to himself.
He took a deep breath, a deep controlled breath.
Something had changed.
Chapter 17 Blake
Switching his cell phone on as he exited the plane with Jane Teagarden in tow, Blake retrieved a message from Potters, confirming, at the very least, that Rudolf Chernobyl was for real, was bad news, and was an enigma, despite an appearance that would seem to make him stand out. The info was lean, the bone stripped bare.
Riding the Centipede Page 12