by Chuck Wendig
Makes Tundu’s place look like the Taj Mahal.
What matters, though, are the walls. Or rather, what’s on them.
Cason thinks: So he’s a tinfoil-hat type.
All across the walls are photos, newspaper clippings, print-outs, documents, and more, all stuck to the wall with little thin carpenter nails. He begins scanning the walls—there, a blurry photo of a woman in blue walking in a wheat field. Here, an article about a man struck by lightning in his own house. Articles about bank failures and 9/11 and the Spanish Flu of 1918. Wikipedia articles covering a weird array of topics: triremes, Viking axes, volcanoes, Homeric epics, Nazi occultism, hallucinogenic drug use, jaguars.
Many of them strung together with red thread wound around one nail, then to the next, then to the next. Forming connections that make no sense to Cason. Nor anybody else but maybe this man, this bomber—the ‘Cicatrix.’
It’s like the guy’s walls are a one-man-band crazy-ass version of the Internet.
As Cason winds his way through the apartment, his index finger tracing his own invisible (and ill-conceived) connections between things, he sees something on the floor that gives his heart a reason to gallop with swift and heavy hoof.
It’s a shoebox. With his name on it in thick permanent marker.
CASON COLE.
Beneath it, a question mark: ?
It’s not dusty like everything else. It’s been opened recently.
Cason opens it. And immediately wishes he didn’t.
The underside of the lid is affixed to another piece of red thread, like that which connects the images and articles on the walls—and when Cason opens the box, the thread tugs on something, and then that something gives.
He hears a snick.
He catches sight of a small canister inside the box.
A bomb, he thinks.
And there’s a slow-motion moment where anger strikes him—anger that he was so stupid, anger that he hasn’t found a way to bring his family back together, anger that he hasn’t punished those who put him in this situation.
There’s a hiss—and a cone of white fog blasts up and hits him square in the face. His hand slams the cardboard lid back down, crushing the box and killing the spray, but it’s already too late. His face burns like he just pressed it into a plate of hot peppers. His nose runs. His throat starts to close. The corners of his eyes tear up and those tears burn like blown-out match-tips.
He can’t see. Can barely breathe. Cason shoots to his feet, almost falls—
Behind him, he hears the door.
The room shakes. Footsteps. Closing in. Fast.
This is a trap.
He pivots on his heel, throws a clumsy kick wide—it goes nowhere, swish. But there’s a scuff to his left and then something hard jabs under his armpit and his whole world turns from swarm of fire ants to thrown into the witch’s oven as his darkness brightens with pain and light and his body goes rigid—
—he thinks about the man struck by lightning inside his own home—
—about Barney and how he looks so much like a little boy now—
—about that time he fought Choo-Choo Ortega in Vegas, and how that crazy sonofabitch almost choked him out but how after one good reversal he was able to get Ortega in a hold and rain a hail of ground-and-pound blows on him till Choo-Choo tapped out—
—about how he doesn’t want to go out like this—
He lets himself go. Releases himself from the misery like in the old days, in the octagon days. Doesn’t ignore the pain so much as disappear beneath it. He opens his eyes: a new misery, but fuck it. Past the watery curtain his vision looks like a melting masterpiece of running paint, but he can see movement, and there’s an exaggerated rictus swimming across his vision like some mad cackling Jack-o-Lantern.
Cason stabs out with a straight punch. Connects. His enemy gurgles, yelps—
Opportunity. He throws another punch low and up—connects with his enemy’s gut, hits hard enough he imagines it sinking deep, grabbing his opponent’s heart, and squeezing it like it’s an overripe grapefruit.
A new thought strikes him:
To win is to escape.
He shoves his foe out of the way and makes a bolt for the door. Or at least the door-shaped smear of brown at the far side of the room.
But his opponent has other ideas.
He hears the sound of a gun’s hammer drawn back.
Only two options. Flee or stay. His life now in that regrettable role of being left only to hope—a trembling kitten beneath the dangling Sword of Damocles, the blade held up by only a little red thread.
Cason doesn’t know which option affords him the best chance. But he’s blind. And his face feels like napalm still burning.
He stops. Panting. Out of breath and out of shape.
“Don’t move.” The voice, rough and rusty like a can full of nails and screws. The words imperfect, too—hissed over lips that aren’t lips but caterpillars of scar tissue, irregular and inflexible. “You want answers, yeah?”
“Go to hell.”
“Been there and back again. You want to know the score? You want to know what they did to you and your family? You want to know who they are? I can pull back the curtain. I can set the stage. You want to see? Then let me show you.”
CHAPTER NINE
Ex Nihilo
“DO YOU THINK I’m pretty?”
Psyche asks the question idly, as she tugs back the curtains on the bedroom window and stares out and up into the sky. Looking for anything with wings. The Driver is coming one way or another, soon as it catches her scent. She’s done a great deal to distort and disturb the psychic imprint she leaves in her wake—but eventually the Driver will figure that out.
So, in the meantime then, idle conversation.
It’s a lie, this idleness. The question neither empty nor casual. But the way she asks it: flip, one-off, like it’s a half-formed thought.
“I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Alison says. Her words take on a dreamy, listless quality.
“Thank you,” Psyche says. But the woman’s words do little to soothe the kinks out of her tangled nerves—after all, Alison is only saying that because Psyche is making her. Which makes it all the more surprising when the woman adds:
“You’re the most beautiful and... the most... horrible.”
That last part, a struggle to get out. Those final three words lose the dreamy vibe as a coldness creeps in, a stinging saline slush. Psyche didn’t make her say those words. And couldn’t stop her, either.
Psyche’s just... rusty, is all. That’s what she tells herself. Honestly, she’s been rusty ever since Zeus abandoned them and Aphrodite made her a captive.
“Yes,” she says in response, still watching pale clouds crawl across the washed-out watercolor sky. “I am horrible. But you don’t know what I’ve been through, do you? My poor husband. His horrid mother. I tried, you know. I tried to make it all work. I did things in pursuit of her approval that I never thought I could do. Finally I’d done enough to earn her esteem and stave off her jealousy... and for a time it was fine. But then the Usurper came and three decades ago threw us all out of our houses.” Even Zeus, beautiful Zeus. She sighs. “And now here we are. My husband is dead. Yours is a killer. I’m trying to make things right.”
“Yes, of course,” Alison says. Once more her voice soft and slow. “You don’t deserve what they did to you. You’ve proven yourself again and again. And you’re so pretty. I’d do anything to be allowed to kiss any part of you. Anything at all for any part.”
Psyche turns, shrugs. “You’re just saying that because I’m making you. Besides, I am still stung over the demise of my husband. I couldn’t dare share myself with another.” Though, of course, he was by no means chaste, was he? Gave himself up to whatever warm mouth or open hole he found appealing on a given evening. Used them up and left them as dry, gormless husks yearning only for his touch for the rest of their short, inadequate lives.
But he never gave his soul to anyone. That she’s sure of. Because it’s hers. Or was, at least. Now it’s gone. She can’t feel it anymore. Can’t touch it. His mind and heart, closed forever—no, not merely closed, but walled off, sealed away with endless bricks piled atop one another. It deadens her. Psyche feels no grief—only an empty raggedy hole where grief once should’ve lived. When she found out that he was gone, the sorrow welled up within her and spouted like a geyser—screams of rage and visions of madness—and then she found her wings and fled to the skies. But soon after, it was like the sorrow was milk in a glass and she’d spilled it all—and now the glass would no longer fill.
Alison continues to clean the weapons strewn across her bed. Barney sleeping in the middle—Psyche couldn’t abide the child’s questions. Incessant. Like the whining buzz of a gnat venturing into your ear canal—ugh. Children. So she reached into the child’s mind and turned his conscious mind off for a time—easy enough to do, as the mind is her domain, and his is like a simple toy. Now he sleeps, and Alison brings and cleans the weapons.
Weapons is a bit of a misnomer. Kitchen implements, mostly. Knives and forks and other stabby things. Two screwdrivers. A sharpened toothbrush. A whittled broomstick. But the piece de resistance, a real weapon: a small rosewood-handled .38 special revolver. Now gleaming thanks to Alison obsessively polishing it, staring into the blue-black barrel with dead eyes.
It won’t stop the Driver, but it’ll slow it down. Alison will make a wonderful sacrifice should it come to that. The child, too, if need be. And, if the Driver does not come, then she will be armed when it comes time to kill the woman’s husband.
Psyche will enjoy that. Or so she tells herself. She hopes that empty hole inside her heart can at least be filled with happiness over an enemy’s pain, if not grief over her husband being ripped from the grand and cosmic tapestry.
“I’m... hungry.” Alison’s voice is again small, steely, cold.
“Oh. Yes.” Psyche hrms. Alison looks pale and peckish. Humans need to eat, don’t they? Such frail little beasties. With such curious origins, too. Did man come out of nothing? Or was he born from chaos? Or the sea? Or from clay? Or from two divine parents who fucked and squirted him out on the dusty desert ground? The truth is, she doesn’t know. Nobody seems to (though they’ll be sure to tell you otherwise)—not Zeus, not Shiva, not Marduk or Inanna. Lucifer once told a story that said men were not made in the Usurper’s image but rather were the manifestation of sin—sprung out of the Devil’s head fully-formed. A lie perhaps stolen in a way from Athena. Matters little now. Nobody’s seen the Devil in years. And he was always a liar, anyway.
Everybody has their own tale to tell and no proof that there’s truth in the telling.
But one thing that seems certain: humans, however they came about, are weak.
And they need to eat. Ugh.
“Go,” Psyche waves her off. “Go make yourself a... whatever it is you eat.” She feels for the woman’s mind and a cascade of images spring forth: a bowl of cereal, a hot sandwich, a plate of noodles, a crisp wet salad. And interspersed within, an image of Alison putting the snub-barrel gun to Psyche’s temple and pulling the trigger. A crass fantasy and one that will yield no fruit, but Psyche decides that the human may keep it for now.
Alison sets the gun down. “I... Barney. Food.”
“The boy doesn’t need to eat. He’s asleep. All of him is asleep. Even his hungers.”
“But—”
“I said go.”
She gives a small, hard psychic shove.
Alison’s eyes lose focus and she stumbles out of the room. Psyche calls after in a sing-songy voice:
“Don’t be long, precious. For soon we hunt.”
CHAPTER TEN
Show, Don’t Tell
THE SEPTA BUS stinks like the worst smells of humanity. Body odor and stale urine. Foot odor. Spilled beer. The vinegar tang of goulash. The sour stench of kim chi—Cason knows it’s kim chi because, sure enough, there’s some barefoot Korean guy with a Tupperware container in his lap digging into it with a spoon and shoving fermented cabbage in his mouth with great gooey slurps.
Sitting next to Cason is the man known as Cicatrix—sitting so close that you might almost suggest he was cuddling up, though the gun under the tented newspaper pressed into Cason’s ribs defies that definition.
Cason watches him. The man’s foam-slick tongue wets lips made only of scar tissue. His finger—a crooked twig, puffy with cracked calluses—probes the crater in his head that was once an ear but is now just a hole. He’s trying to figure out how old the man is. Older than him, surely. Late 40s? Early 50s? Older still? The maimed face offers too few clues—all buried beneath criss-crossing furrows of scar tissue. Scar tissue that Cason can now see continues well beyond his face—down his neck, around his arms, each finger laced with a mesh of old slices and gashes.
The man jabs Cason in the ribs with the gun.
“You like staring at me?”
“Not really.”
“I dunno about that. Way you and everybody else on this bus is watching me I half expect some of you to hike down your shorts and start diddling yourselves. Maybe I should put up a website. Charge people for the peep.” All the man’s consonants are hissed and whispered as they come out of his ruined mouth—some are lost entirely, dropped into a dark hole and forever forgotten.
Cason blinks raw, red eyes. Sniffs. His nose is still crusted with mucus—the so-called Cicatrix didn’t give him time to clean up. He just grabbed a newspaper and a crumpled paper bag and used the gun to politely urge Cason onto the bus.
“What the hell was in that canister, anyway?”
“Tiger piss and pickle juice,” the man growls. “Whaddya think it was? Pepper spray. Capsaicin. My own special brew. I used a couple of those ghost chilis—the, ahhh, naga booty whatevers. Stuff’s so potent it’ll eat the chrome off a bumper.” His bloodshot eyes roll around in their lidless sockets and point toward Cason. “Speakawhich, seems like it worked as designed. You look like you shoved your face in a bee-hive. Your face is almost as ugly as mine, and I look like a human garbage fire.”
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah, yeah, fuck me. Such a nice Kenzo boy.”
So he knows more about me than I do about him. “Where we going, anyway? Heading south, but why? Where? Thought you were going to tell me what’s going on.”
“I said show you. Showing’s always so much better than telling. You rather hear about an elephant butt-fucking a pony, or you rather see it?”
Cason’s twisted face gives him the answer.
“Bad choice, maybe. Point is, I tell you what I tell you, even after all you’ve seen, you probably won’t believe me. But if I show you, you’ll get it lickety-split.” The freak fishes in his pocket, pulls out a plastic bottle of unlabeled eyedrops, pops a few in each eye. “Gotta moisten the old jeepers-creepers, you know.”
“Fine. Whatever. Where we headed? Might as well tell me, because I’ll see when we get there.”
“North of the airport. Eastwick.”
Eastwick’s a shithole. So much of the city is. Run-down houses. Some flooded and damp—that whole area’s on a marshy plain. Then there’s the dump sites: the area’s the closest thing you can get to ‘rural’ living inside the city margins, with tracts of open land here and there. Companies have been using that land to dump trash and chemicals and medical waste. Burying it sometimes; other times, maybe not so much with the burying and more with the ‘leaving it out in the open.’
“And what’s in the bag?”
“You’ll see. Why spoil the fun?”
THE BUS LEAVES them in a cloud of fumes.
“Walk,” Cicatrix says.
They move to cross an empty parking lot, leaving road traffic behind. They head toward a sidestreet lined with grungy townhomes.
The freak stays behind. Gun still hidden under the newspaper, bag tucked under his armpit. Cason starts to think that he can take him
. He has to move fast—no move is faster than a bullet, but that’s not the point. The point is to disarm. Or point the gun elsewhere. He just needs opportunity. But when?
“So. Cicatrix. Quite a name.”
“Not a name. More like a... nom de plume. A CB handle.”
“Got a real name?”
“Steve. Bob. Delbert. John Jacob Jingle-titties.”
Cason shrugs. “I’ll just call you Trixie, then.”
“No, I don’t think you will.”
“Sure thing, Trixie.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“No problem, Trix. Hey, I dated a girl named Trixie once. Had a dog named Trixie, too—cutest little poopsy-doodle poodle.”
“I swear to—you know I have a gun, right?”
“Trixie’s a good gun moll name. I bet you tuck it in your garter belt—”
“Frank!” the freak yells. Spit flecking the back of Cason’s neck. “My name’s Frank, mmkay? Frank Polcyn. Now, I know what you’re thinking, Cason Cole. You’re thinking now’d be a real good time to do some of your fancy ninja fu-fu shit and kick the gun out of my hand or twist my wrist or whatever wily bullshit you got up your sleeves. You do, you’ll never know. You’ll never know why your boss was some kind of freaky seduction magnet. You’ll never know how I unzippered him like a fucking Members Only jacket. You’ll never know why your wife and son turned on you.”
Cason stops. Fingers tightening into fists.
He’s frazzled. He’s waving his hands around like a drowning man.
And he’s right. Now’s a good time for that fancy ninja fu-fu shit.
Frank the freak.
His fists relax.
“I need to know,” he says, voice low and quiet. “You promise to show me?”
“I promise. But first you gotta walk.”
Cason walks.