by Jamie Quaid
I know Zone inhabitants are often derisively referred to as trolls. If we were trolls, these guys were gold-digging gnomes. Or maybe treasure-hoarding dragons. Creeps with money.
The drunk at the bar scanned the room, looking for more trouble. I thought he nodded at the suits, but that could have been my paranoia. I disliked the look he cast in my direction.
“That’s the chippie sent her boyfriend up in flames?” the drunk asked of no one in particular, glaring unsteadily through the gloom in my direction. “There’s people who would give good money to hear how she did it.”
Like a balloon, he started to rise, but a waitress distracted him with her cleavage, and he settled back down to salivate.
A nervous shudder wracked me. What people? And did they really believe I’d killed Max? That was ridiculous. That had to be alcohol and hot air talking.
A plate of spaghetti slid onto the table in front of me, and I looked up to see Andre slipping onto the bench across the table. He deposited another plate of pasta there. He did not look like a man who had just kissed the snot out of me and wanted to do it again. I couldn’t decide if I was disappointed. I liked the kiss. Andre, I wasn’t so hot about.
Had he heard the drunk? I refused to inquire.
“No salad?” I asked, picking up the napkin-wrapped utensils a waitress hurried to lay down, pretending the kiss had been an aberration like all the other aberrations around me.
“It’s coming.” He unrolled his napkin and spread it on his lap without acknowledging me, just as if this were a business dinner. “Nice table choice, but you should be sitting over here, where people can’t see you.”
I relaxed. I could do casual. “Old cowboy trick, back-to-the-wall defense. Besides, I’m enjoying the view. The suits are the ones who have you worried?” The spaghetti was edible. I made better marinara, but not often. Cooking was merely a survival technique.
The brute at the bar shouted an obscenity. I glanced up to watch one of Ernesto’s bouncers leaning on him. Ernesto’s efficiency went up a notch in my estimation. I dragged my wandering mind back to Andre. He hadn’t even noticed I’d wandered.
“It’s that the suits are here at all that worries me,” he said in reply to my question. “They’re from the city. If they visit just the once, they’ll dismiss the vanishing clock and talking manhole covers as special effects, not know your hair isn’t natural, and everyone else will stay out of their way. They’ll leave without understanding what we are. But if they keep coming and bring more eyes and ears with them, our days are numbered. The EPA will cordon off Edgewater as well as the harbor, and we’ll all be out of luck.”
He was biting off more than I could chew. I put my fork down, held up my hands in a time-out signal, and tried to formulate a thousand questions into one. “Beginning, please. I moved here two years ago, went looking for a job on the bus line, and you hired me. At the time, I was a tourist who thought the blue buildings were special effects. Are you telling me that most of the city is stupid enough to believe this?” I wasn’t in my happy place, and he wasn’t making things better.
“The rest of the city knows we’re regularly hit by floods, engulfed in chemical stenches, and that industrial waste is dangerous. They stay away, and we don’t advertise. Acme pays off the EPA, and the media forgot about us years ago. We don’t have much in the way of families requiring government agencies coming around. The cops know what goes down, but I take care of them.”
“Bribery?” I asked in disbelief. “Why?”
“Just think of it as protective coloration. We want outsiders to overlook us.”
I had vaguely grasped that the Zone was weird, but I’d always considered it more like fun-house weird. Someplace one would go to be entertained by the oddities. Of course, up until Max died, I hadn’t met invisible thieves or chimpanzee shifters, either. “And you want to keep out others, why?” I asked.
“You’ll understand if you stay here long enough,” Andre said, not even looking up from his pasta. “None of us is exactly what we seem, which is why we’re keeping an eye on you. Blowing up boyfriends is not on our list of accepted activities. Blowing away reporters might be.”
“I didn’t do either of those,” I protested indignantly, forgetting drunks and bouncers and bribery in my outrage that Andre could believe the reports. “Max crashed my car! I didn’t ask him to do that. And his biker friends trashed the media. Anything else is pure imagination.”
The salad was delivered, but I’d lost my appetite. What had I done by coming to work down here? Had I ruined my life even more than I had protesting crooked provosts?
“What are you if you’re not what you seem?” I returned to his earlier statement, diverting the subject from myself. Besides, I was curious. Everything about Andre was out of place in this sleazy bar.
He forked his lettuce and chewed it thoughtfully, his gaze considering me. He had disgustingly thick lashes for a man, and eyes of a peculiar blue-green. “I’m not sure I ought to tell you.”
“You can’t tell me, because you’re making all this up to scare me and haven’t the imagination to pretend you’re an illegal immigrant who smuggles drugs.” I was getting even for his earlier cracks.
He snorted and nodded toward the bar. “I started out like him, except over at Acme.”
I turned and watched Detective Schwartz, wearing a security guard uniform, take a glass of water from the bartender. He looked damned good in khaki. He didn’t see me, and I pulled back into the booth. I hadn’t known he worked for Ernesto. Apparently Andre was right: I didn’t know a lot.
“You were a cop? You moonlighted as a security guard? And then what, you started blackmailing the Man, made enough to buy your first bar, and the rest is history?”
“You should write a book,” he suggested wryly. “I was a boy from the hood who went to war, got messed up, came back and took a job as security, and got caught in the first chemical flood. And that’s all you need to know until I figure out if you’ll fry me for saying more.”
“If I knew how to fry you, I’d have done it long since.” I blew a strand of hair out of my face in frustration. I wanted to know more about getting messed up, but Andre’s expression made it clear he was done talking about himself. “So you’re nailing me as a freak simply because I got my hair fixed?”
He looked impatient. “You could have dyed, permed, and added extensions to your stringy mop and it wouldn’t look like it does now. Down here, good looks come at a price.”
Andre’s calm acceptance of Zone peculiarities was chilling as well as eye-opening. I didn’t want to believe anything he said, but either I believed I was morphing into weirdness or believed I was insane. I wasn’t even sure which I’d prefer.
I snorted. “Good looks come at a price anywhere. Check out your former high school class. What do the beauty queens and athletes look like now? Unless they’re paying for upkeep, they look like the suits over there.” I indicated the paunchy, saggy-jawed specimens ogling the pole dancer who’d just emerged onstage. But he was right again, damn him. My hair wasn’t real.
“Your glibness doesn’t disguise the changes we can see with our own eyes. It’s happened too often down here for you to hide from us. Sarah isn’t our only shape-shifter. Until now, though, no outsider has paid attention to our oddities. If Max was an unfortunate accident, I’m sorry for all of us. We’re a pretty reclusive lot, and we prefer our privacy. No one else has ever done anything quite so media-worthy as blowing up their boyfriend and a bank in the same blow. Do you even know who Max really was?”
I propped my elbows on the table and shoved both hands into my hair, not meeting his eyes. “I thought he was my boyfriend. If you want to tell me more than that, go easy.”
“Max’s father was once a senator who decided he’d make more money as a lobbyist. Word is, he was persuaded to that decision because of a few bad political and personal calls, including influencing the zoning for the chemical plants, but for some odd reason, the media never
followed up on the rumors. Max had a healthy trust fund. He left it to a half-dozen environmental agencies.”
Oh, crap and filth.
I’d sent a rich do-gooder to hell.
11
Apparently sensitive to my distress, Milo leaped up to the bench beside me. He smelled of fish. I was beginning to think that feeding him fish from the Zone was not a good idea, except he’d probably been born down here. Were the defects genetic by this point?
I wanted to pull out my compact and yell at Max for not telling me he was a damned trust-fund baby, but I resisted that particular eccentricity. “Is it the air or the water or the food or what exactly are you claiming is hazardous to our health?” I asked.
“Probably all of the above. The nonprofits that Max left his money to are all out to shut us down as a toxic waste dump. I suppose they could have people out on the street now, trolling with the rest of the suits, but nonprofits are notoriously understaffed. I doubt they move that quickly. Max was different. He had connections to Acme, the plant that caused the spill.”
Trust funds and matters of money made mighty good motives for killing an annoying insect, and much as I liked Max, he was more than annoying. He could be a worse tick under the skin than Andre.
So just who might Max have been biting before he died? And could they be after me now? And why? Suddenly, looking into the limo hit-and-run and Max’s death wasn’t guilt-relief but a matter of survival.
I glanced at the drunk now pawing another dancer. Was he a regular? Or one of the creeps out to spy on me? And did I really want to know? Because he was causing an ugly gnawing in my gut. Maybe I’d better go back to keeping my head down. Had Max been using me to spy? That would certainly have explained why a trust-fund hunk would take up with a pint-size gimp. I didn’t have issues about my body but I’m a realist, and the possibility hurt, bad.
“And there’s some reason why the Zone shouldn’t be shut down?” I demanded, releasing my pain in obnoxiousness. “Just exactly how dangerous is it?”
“No one knows, but there’s nowhere better to give misfits a second chance. Frank used to be a bum living under the bridge until he developed a nose for finding things. Bill has served time for beating up people for a living, but he graduated from bouncer to bartender after he settled a few fights with some weird Zen hum. I was an addict who could have gone postal at the drop of a pin until buying out people I hated became more important than attacking them. At the same time, we’ve had other inhabitants turn to murder or end up in the homeless camp or lunatic wards. Nothing about this place is predictable except knowing that if you stay, you’ll change. Ernesto is new. We’re holding out hope he’ll improve.”
“After I chop off his hands,” I said cynically, dismissing Ernesto while trying to imagine Cora’s boss as a homeless bum. Frank disappeared into shadows like a spook, but he had an uncanny way of finding things. Uncanny. I sighed. That explained a lot. It was harder to believe that gentle, cat-loving Bill had been a goon. “So you have some funny idea that the Zone makes some people better, and that’s why it should exist?”
He shrugged. “I know it changes people. You’ll see for yourself once you open your eyes. Because we’re different doesn’t mean we should be destroyed.”
I’d seen Sarah turn into a chimp. I didn’t know if I was ready to see more. And yeah, it didn’t seem fair to throw her into a loony bin or to the media if she wasn’t hurting anyone.
“But should you allow the innocent to be polluted?” Innocents like me, I wanted to shout in fury, but Milo bumped his head against my chin and I behaved myself. Or I was distracted by the drunk hurling obscenities as the bouncer frog-marched him out the door. No one seemed to find the altercation unusual, but I was relieved to see the back of him.
“At this point, the innocents who suffered the initial spills are gone, and mostly what we get are people coming down here looking for something,” Andre continued with a shrug. “We get kids occasionally, slumming, but we’re not Disney World. They get roughed up and go home. Adults who stray down don’t generally hang around unless they’re already lost. It’s not as if there’s anything down here for them.”
Was that the drunk’s excuse for being obnoxious? He was lost? Would the Zone save him from himself? Still not buying it.
“If you hadn’t fit in here, you wouldn’t have hung around, Clancy.” Andre didn’t look in the least apologetic for possibly ruining my life by hiring me.
“I think you’re making this up as you go along.” I tucked Milo into my bag and slid out of the booth. “I have studying to do. Are you going to tell me I can’t go home?”
“You’d be better off staying down here now, but if you want to go home, I’ll take you. I’ll have someone clear the halls at your place before we get there, although the reporters have probably all left by now.”
“But you think other interested parties might not have? Really, you have a bigger imagination than I do if you think anyone would bother with someone as insignificant as me. But—since I don’t like taking the bus at this hour—your offer of a ride is accepted, thank you. Shall I sneak out the rear exit or make heads turn by marching out the front?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and stood up with me. “Sneak, please. You’re going to be a pain in the ass, aren’t you?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said nonchalantly. If he meant to yank my chains, he’d learn I yanked back. “If I can’t stay out of trouble by keeping my head down and working hard, then where’s the point in keeping my mouth shut?”
Andre didn’t even bother to sigh in exasperation but planted his taller breadth between me and the rest of the room as we walked behind the stage of gyrating dancers. I was more aware of him physically than was healthy; there’s no explaining hormones.
The evening was young yet, and the girls were barely warming up. There were only two onstage, garbed in harem outfits and lackadaisically writhing around poles to some weird version of Egyptian music. The poles seemed to be writhing back. The guys at the front tables were more interested in their beers and burgers.
Behind the stage was an exit customers weren’t allowed to use. The dancers and waitresses mixed in this hall between the club and the kitchen, going out back for a smoke or just taking gossip breaks. A couple of scantily clad waitresses looked up as we passed. I recognized one of them as the one the drunk had pawed, but Andre didn’t bother speaking to them, so I followed his example.
Outside, the back lot was cloaked in darkness. Ernesto was apparently too cheap to spring for bulbs in his security lamps, and ground zero to the harbor had no lighting except a few scattered campfires near the water. Schwartz was watching over Andre’s Mercedes in the alley by the Dumpsters. The good detective raised his eyebrows at me, but we didn’t exchange greetings. I was beginning to feel like a mafia moll with Andre leading me around and telling me what I could or could not do.
I was too disturbed to complain. I needed to process the overload of information. That there was more to learn, I understood. I just didn’t want to know more until I digested what I’d been told. I didn’t believe everything Andre said, but I’d seen enough evidence to worry some of it had to be true, no matter how weird.
As we drove away, I saw the fat drunk stagger around the corner. He stared at the Mercedes as we passed by, keeping my fear intact.
When we reached the tenements, I noticed a shiny Escalade had parked next to my Miata. The parking lot sometimes contained a battered gas-guzzler or two, but on the whole, this was a neighborhood of students who preferred to save their money for food, not gas, so we bought small and cheap. Escalades were neither.
I was now officially paranoid about strange cars. Who would be interested in me, the Queen of Nonentities? I couldn’t tell them anything. I was so ignorant, I didn’t know shampoo goo could grow hair. Shouldn’t we have been bottling the stuff? Provided we could figure out how to make it, since I was pretty certain the only kind I’d used was from the dollar store, so I
didn’t know how Zone chemicals could have crept into it.
I still wasn’t about to believe in magic, so goo it had to be if I wanted to explain my hair.
Rather than stop near the Escalade, Andre drove through the lot, down the alley, and up to the rear entrance by the garbage cans. He checked his phone, then looked over at me. “Clear now. I can’t promise it will be in the morning. I have a vacancy closer to the Zone if you change your mind about the hassle. Any surveillance equipment these people might have won’t be as reliable down there.”
Surveillance equipment? Now that really was carrying paranoia a little far. It wasn’t as if I was on the FBI’s most-wanted list.
“I have classes,” I responded, too wound up to trash his concerns. “I don’t want to waste half my day commuting.” Besides that, I was striving for normal. I didn’t want to be a mutant. “Thanks for seeing me home, but I’ve been fine this long. The media leeches will find someone new to suck dry soon enough.”
I was almost tempted to lean over and kiss Andre’s frown, but I’d had enough shocks for one evening. I’d save my destructive impulses for a better cause.
I slid out, closed the door quietly, and used my key to enter through the back. I hurried up the stairs and checked to see if the corridor was clear. When I reached my door, I locked it behind me with a sigh of relief and let Milo loose to prowl.
Rather than contemplate all the other notions Andre had planted in my head, I strode straight back to the bedroom and the familiar—Max. I’d left the blanket off the mirror, and the hallucination appeared the instant I knocked, although the cracks strained his image.
“Stay away from Andre,” he shouted inside my head. “He’s slime!”