City of the Lost

by Stephen Blackmoore

  Giavetti heaves a theatrical sigh. “Is this where you say something like ‘over my dead body’?” he says. “Because we can do that.”

  “And what, we kill each other? You shoot me, I shoot you?”

  He thinks about this. “You’re right,” he says. “Julio, kill him.”

  Julio lurches off the couch with inhuman speed. I spin around. I double tap two bloodless holes in his chest that you could run a train through. The suppressor drops the sound to something like a loud slap. He doesn’t even slow down.

  Mariel screams. Runs to him. He backhands her with the force of a bulldozer. She hits the wall like a sack of garbage, bones cracking like glass.

  Takes me a second to realize I’ve got my priorities screwed up. I turn to take out Giavetti, but he’s already on me. Old man moves like a goddamn ninja. Sweeps the gun from me with one hand. I take a jab with my left, and he ducks under it like he’s twenty years old.

  He delivers a side kick to my bad knee. Tendons shred, the kneecap pops over to the side. I drop in a wave of agony, punching out and clocking him on the side of the face, but by then Julio’s got me by the throat.

  He lifts me off the floor. Shakes me, a dog with a gopher. I’ve got no air. Punches are useless. I snag the skin flap at his throat and tear a meaty chunk off, but it doesn’t faze him. He’s crushing my windpipe, and I can’t make him let go.

  My lungs are screaming. I can feel my eyes bugging out, blood so tight in my head my face is burning. My entire chest is on fire. I get tunnel vision, shades of gray fading in from the edges. Nothing left but empty gasping as my body tries to get some oxygen.

  A thousand miles away, I can hear Giavetti’s laughter.

  Chapter 4

  When the water hits me, it takes a second to remember I’m not in jail.

  Back in the nineties I spent three months sitting in county on a weapons beef that ended in a hung jury. Green-gray industrial paint, grimy white tile. When I open my eyes, it’s like having flashbacks.

  “Mornin’, sunshine.” Giavetti tosses the empty bucket as I splutter water out of my mouth.

  Hands cuffed above my head to half a shower fixture jutting out of the tiled wall. Dirty water dripping from busted ceiling pipes swirls down rusted drains. A single light hangs from the ceiling, throwing out a flickering pool of yellow.

  The walls are covered in gang signs, the floor in broken bottles and crack vials. Stink in the air like meat gone too long in an unplugged fridge.

  Last thing I remember is Julio crushing my windpipe, squeezing me like an overripe tomato. Breathing feels funny, air not coming in quite right. Something wrong with the sound in the room. Quiet in away I can’t place. Something missing.

  I run through my catalog of injuries, and they’re all coming up blank. Throat, knee, all those old aches and pains that I’d learned to ignore are gone, conspicuous in their absence. The fuck is wrong with me?

  I tug on the cuffs, more to give me something else to think about than from any realistic hope of getting out.

  “Sorry, son. Police issue. They’re not coming off.”

  Giavetti crouches, far enough away that I can’t get to him, jaundiced in the dim light. He’s got a blue polo shirt, chinos, pair of slip-on loafers. If not for the Beretta in his hand and the gleam of insanity in his eye, he’d look a lot like my grandfather.

  “How are you feeling? Wondering when you were going to come back.”

  “Fuck you.” I give the cuffs another tug. Like I could be anywhere else.

  “Now there’s a pity. I was hoping for better than that. Fact you can talk at all’s a good sign, though. Let’s try something else. What’s Simon’s problem?”

  I give him the finger, just in case he didn’t catch me the first time around.

  “Interesting. That’s different. That’s good. What if I said please?”

  I stare at him for a good long minute, and with each passing second he’s getting happier and happier. I finally open my mouth just to burst his bubble.

  “Simon didn’t send Julio to kill you. Just wanted to talk. Find out if you knew what happened to the guys you hired from him.”

  “Just talk,” he says. “Right. So he sends his goddamn gorilla over with an ax handle? Just like London.” He twists his mouth and a pretty good impersonation of Simon comes out. “ ‘No ’ard feelins. Bygones ’n all that.’ Limey cocksucker. They’re dead. He knows why. And what about you? Suppose I’d be seeing you for a ‘talk’ sometime? No, not a goddamn thing’s changed.”

  “The fuck do you want, anyway?”

  The question seems to surprise him. “You’re always this inquisitive, aren’t you? That’s really good.” He pulls up a half-burned sofa cushion and sits back on it. “I want to be left the fuck alone. I want Simon to hold up his end of the bargain and not try to rip me off again.”

  “The man’s got people lining up to suck his dick. What the hell could he possibly want from you?” The longer I stall him, the better chance I have of getting out of this mess.

  Giavetti belts out a laugh like a mule. “Oh. You poor, dumb bastard. You’ve no idea what this is about, do you?”

  He settles in on the cushion, cross-legged. Like he’s about to tell stories to the third graders.

  “Immortality,” he says. “Living forever. It’s a neat trick, if you can pull it off.”

  If I hadn’t already known I was being held by a psychopath this pretty much clinches it. Play along, Sunday. Stall for time. Talk slow to the crazy guy with the gun and maybe you’ll walk out of here. Oh, and ignore that whole zombie Julio problem that’s banging on the back of your skull.

  “Suppose you can do it, huh?”

  “Of course I can. And Simon knows it. That’s why you’re here. Betting he fed you a load of horseshit, but trust me, that’s the reason.”

  “Is it now? And here’s me thinking I was coming to feed you to a woodchipper.”

  “The thing that gets me,” he says, ignoring me, “is how he’s able to get you stupid fuckers to listen to him. I mean, he is one of the worst liars I’ve ever met. What is it? Is it that you want to believe him? Is that it? Or does he just make his bullshit sound better than the truth?”

  “Hear him tell it, he handed your ass to you in London.”

  Giavetti’s eyes flash, the grandfatherly mask twisting into something darker, older. Like he’s got a demon under his skin, and he’s barely keeping it inside. I almost start to believe that Simon was right.

  Just as quickly it’s gone. The grin is back on his face. Like it never left.

  “Yeah, well, there is that,” he says with a shrug. “I got lazy. Get to be my age, and it’s a wonder you can remember where your own dick is. I owe him for London. He thought he took me out. But, hey, I’m a survivor. Little this, little that. I’m good as new.”

  “Fountain of Youth, right? Live forever?”

  “Exactly.”

  I nod at his sallow arms, skin hanging off the bone like a liquefied chicken. “Didn’t stick, did it?”

  “Well, maybe not Fountain of Youth so much as Fountain of Not Staying Dead. But I’m working on that one.” He rummages around in his pocket. “Hey, want to see something neat?”

  He pulls out a stone, an opal about the size of a small egg. It catches the light. I can feel it pulling at me, drawing me in.

  “It’s an attention getter, isn’t it?” Giavetti says, breaking the spell. I shake my head to clear it, look away.

  It’s the stone Simon’s been going on about. Has to be.

  “British stole these babies from the Australian aborigines a hundred years ago, give or take. There are only a couple left in the world. One of them got blown up when a French lieutenant took an artillery shell in World War I. Another one’s sitting at the bottom of the ocean. I think some crazy Chinaman ground one of them up and shot it into his dick or something. Then there’s this one.”

  He turns it in the dim light, crazy colors spinning on its surface. “This beauty turned
up at a collector’s in Beverly Hills. Funny how things turn out, huh? Doesn’t look like much, does it?” He kisses the stone, slides it back in his pocket.

  “That’s it? That’s what you hired three guys for? Jesus. You could’ve gotten a tweaker with a sawed-off cheaper.”

  “You’re telling me. Wouldn’t be dealing with this bullshit if I had.” He looks at me, waiting for something. When I don’t give it to him he sighs. “So, aren’t you going to ask? You know you want to.”

  “Ask what? How that’s got a goddamn thing to do with your psychosis?”

  He throws up his hands in the air. “You still don’t get it. This baby’s what makes it all possible. The works, the magilla, the whole shebang. This is the thing that raises the dead, makes you live forever. Hell, I bet it’ll shake your dick after you take a leak, if you ask it nice.”

  “Raise the dead.” It sounds insane just coming out of my mouth, but the image of Julio, gray skin and gasping like a fish is worming its way into the foreground. “Really worked great on Julio.”

  Giavetti’s face twists into an ugly frown. “Yeah, the others. They’ve already fallen apart. But that’s what experiments are for, right? I want to use this baby on myself, I got to make sure it works on other people. Got close with your buddy. Damn close. Almost licked that problem with accelerated decomposition and free will.”

  “Missed a couple ingredients, did you? Not enough nutmeg?”

  “Exactly,” he says. “It’s not like this is a science, you know. More like art. Anyway, I messed up. By the time your buddy tried to take his head off he was already falling apart.”

  “Bullshit.” Julio was fine when I saw him. Already dead, my ass. I remember the blood flowing out of him, the life draining from his eyes. I don’t believe it. But I can’t believe any of this, either.

  “No?” Giavetti says. “Not buying it? Eh, doesn’t matter. I’ll celebrate anyway.”

  “Celebrate what?”

  “I’ve done it. Finally. Least, I’m pretty sure I’ve done it.”

  His words sink into me. He’s done it? The fuck does that mean? Jesus. Let’s assume he’s not talking smack. That he can pull this off. Crazy and immortal? How do you kill a dead man? How do I stop him from killing me? If this isn’t all bullshit, I am seriously fucked. I shove my panic down. Keep him talking. Only way out.

  “Yeah? You think that?”

  He gives me this look like I’m a lizard in a bell jar. “I don’t know,” he says. “You tell me.”

  It takes me a few seconds to register what he’s said. And when it does, my world drops out from under me.

  I tell myself that I don’t feel any different, only I do. My lungs, the missing aches and pains, my blown-out knee. I peel back one of the bandages on my sliced up hands. The cuts are gone.

  My body feels like somebody’s thrown the off switch but forgot to tell me about it.

  Bastard laughs at me again. “Yeah, I’d say I worked out the kinks,” he says. He gets up to leave. Stops, slaps his forehead.

  “Dammit. I knew I was forgetting something.”

  He shoots me in the head.

  Chapter 5

  White hot light. A blast of thunder like sticking my head in a jet engine. I shatter into a thousand pieces, bone and flesh blasting out in a fan behind me.

  Everything black. A beat. Maybe two. Then it all snaps back like a rubber band.

  My jaw is missing, along with the entire left side of my face. I can feel blood running down my front. I’m blind in one eye. Probably because it’s not there anymore.

  My right foot spasms, shuddering from the misfired signals it’s not getting. I think I can feel a draft on the inside of my skull. Oddly enough, none of this hurts.

  Slowly, how slowly I have no idea because my time sense is as fucked as it gets, I can feel things shifting, growing. Brain tissue filling out. Muscle, bone, and skin knitting back together like some crazy aunt’s nightmare afghan. Blood spills out of the sealing chasms in my face.

  My vision slides back, hearing clears. Teeth coming into a new jaw. Nerves knot themselves back together, firing away happy as chattering fucking magpies. My foot stills.

  I have no idea what the hell just happened.

  “Well, that was … different.” Giavetti’s looking at me like I just shit out the Vienna Boy’s Choir.

  It takes me a minute to find my voice. Vocal cords still tying themselves back into their proper knots.

  “Gimme the gun,” I say, “and I’ll show you how it feels from this side.”

  “Think I’ll pass,” he says quietly.

  “Might want to salt that gun,” I say. “Cause when I get out of here I’m gonna feed it to ya.”

  He says nothing. Just steps backward out of the light from the overhead lamp. The darkness swallows him whole.

  I sit there, stunned. My jawbone is lying in my lap along with pieces of pink, rubbery flesh I can’t identify. I spit out a couple of old teeth.

  Questions. Too goddamn many questions. Can’t sort them out for all the noise in my brain. One bubbles to the surface, though. One I don’t know how to answer.

  Am I dead?

  I can’t be. I’ve had my head blown open and sealed back up like a run-flat tire. I’m still moving. I can still think. Cogito ergo fucking sum.

  A slow, steady calm settles on me. I’m fine. Have to be. That, or I’ve completely snapped.

  It takes me about twenty minutes to screw up my courage. It’s not like I haven’t done this before. Lots of times.

  But it’s different when the thumbs you’re trying to break are your own.

  I yank hard on the handcuffs holding me to the wall, hoping I can find a different way to do it. I’m having trouble focusing. I lose the thread of what I’m doing a couple of times, but eventually I just do it.

  I grip my left thumb with the fingers of my right hand, take a deep breath that echoes hollow in my chest, and yank.

  It snaps at the joint with a loud crack. Kind of like popping bubble wrap. In the back of my mind I’m nauseated at the sound, but like the bullet to the brain, it doesn’t hurt.

  With the thumb hanging limp, I worm my hand through the cuff away from the rusty pipe.

  Already I feel tendons start to mend, pulling the thumb back into its original position. It takes a few seconds, but when it’s done, it may as well have never happened.

  I pull myself up from the floor, blood sticking in a thick sheen to my pants where it’s pooled beneath me. I snap my other thumb, toss the bracelet to the floor.

  First thing is to figure out where the fuck I am. The shower room has seen better days. A long time ago. What’s left of the fixtures looks to be from the forties. Same for the tile.

  No freeway noise. A virtual impossibility in this town. Up in the Hollywood Hills? No. Place like this would have been bulldozed years ago.

  The Santa Monica Mountains? Lots of dead space up there. Place like this might go untouched for a long time. Place like this could be easily forgotten among the canyons and coyotes. One of those places Los Angeles sweeps under the rug, hoping nobody looks at it too closely.

  The showers aren’t the worst. I stagger through a locker room, metal doors ripped from their hinges. A maze of corridors that zig one way, zag another. Windows boarded over and covered with graffiti. Empty doorways leading to rooms gutted and torched years ago.

  Time stretches away from me in a haze. I wander the halls looking for an exit like I’m walking through mud. I’m reaching for something in the back of my mind, but it keeps sliding away like it’s on ice.

  I need to get out of here. Until I know what the hell’s actually happened to me I need to get away from Giavetti. Regroup. Come up with a plan. Get my head together. Maybe literally.

  I hang onto that thought. It keeps me going. But somewhere along that dark walk, stumbling over broken furniture and shattered thoughts it comes to me.

  I can’t leave. Not yet.

  My thinking’s still muddy, but
the brain fog’s lifting. Takes a while to rebuild a brain, I suppose. As it does, I find myself thinking more and more about what this all means.

  If I’ve got this right, I can’t die. Well, I can’t be gotten rid of, at least. I’m like fucking Superman. Go ahead, put a bullet in my brain. Like I goddamn care.

  That’s kind of cool. But the more my brain comes back online the more it doesn’t sound so great.

  What happens a hundred years from now? Two hundred? What happens when I’m exactly like this and everything I’ve ever known is so far away I can barely remember it?

  Jesus. Twenty years is a long time. Can I handle two hundred years of not dying? Yeah, probably. I mean, it’s not a stretch to think I can just keep plodding along, right? Easier to imagine being here tomorrow than not being here at all.

  But something’s eating at me. Takes a few minutes to figure out what it is.

  Choice. The bastard’s taken it away from me. It’s not that I necessarily want to go back to what I was. Hell, I just got here. Who knows what this is going to lead to. I might like it, I might not. It’s not that I don’t want immortality, it’s that I want to choose.

  The stone’s the key to all this. Giavetti couldn’t have done this to me without it. Maybe it can reverse it, maybe not. And as long as Giavetti’s got it he’s got something to hold over me.

  I hit a staircase littered with burned-out bed frames and rotting mattresses. I pick my way past the debris, feet crunching on shattered crack pipes, empty beer cans.

  The smell hits me halfway up. Rot from the next floor. Meat gone far past bad. A lot of it.

  When I get to the top I see why.

  Bodies. Half a dozen. Maybe more. Bloated, oozing from splits in the skin. Meat falling off bones. They look weeks old, but I know at least one of them isn’t. I can see Julio’s dragon tattoos stretched across his back, open sores and maggots swarming around it where the skin has torn. I wonder if his wife is in there, too.

  The corpses are piled against the corridor walls, facedown on the floor. I wonder who all those people are and if they’re all really dead.