City of the Lost

by Stephen Blackmoore

  The dog tosses me like a Frisbee. I carom off stacks of old cars, busted trucks. The pain’s so intense I don’t really much feel it anymore.

  It would be nice if I could pass out, but the best I can hope for is the dog finally crunches on my skull and makes it all stop.

  I come crashing down into the open top of a car compactor, the one I dropped the guards into the other night. My already useless left leg snaps into a pretzel. Without thinking I twitch my remaining hand and grab the edge before falling in. It barely holds.

  But it does. Whatever Giavetti did to me is wearing off. I can sort of jerk my body up, grab the edge, inch my way up with numb fingers. I feel like I’m full of novocaine for all the control I’ve got, but with some creative twitching I get myself up and over the lip.

  Not that it helps much. I’m lying on a thin ledge of machinery, the ground fifteen feet below me on one side, the yawning gap of the compactor on the other. I’d opt for the ground, but the mastiff’s growl below me doesn’t make that a particularly attractive option.

  There’s a blur of black as it leaps to a high ledge to look down at me. It stands on a teetering tower of Detroit’s finest. One jump and a quick snap of its jaws, and it should be over. If I’m lucky.

  But I’m not done just yet. It springs from its high perch and with what little coordination I’ve got left, I roll myself off the ledge to the gravel below.

  The mastiff hits the compactor with a thud that would put a train wreck to shame. It lets out a bellow, tries to scramble out. But there’s not much for it to grab. Enough time and it will probably find a way.

  Better I not give it any. I drag myself over to the controls, strength slowly returning to my shattered limbs. It’s just like what I did the other night. Only with more meat.

  I shove my whole weight against the ON button and the machine jerks to life.

  The grinding of metal gives way to the shriek of Giavetti’s demon dog as the compactor folds in on itself. Its howling turns to screams, high-pitched squeals that should never come out of a thing that big.

  In a few moments there’s no sound but the machinery grinding it into paste.

  I pull myself away, a trail of meat and shattered bone behind me. Losing more and more of myself at every inch. I can’t remember where my legs went.

  Seconds crawl by. Feels like hours, days. I can’t tell. Every second’s turned into a meaningless eternity. They pile up on each other. Waves against sand, the slow grind of inevitability. At some point they all catch up with each other and time comes crashing back in on me.

  It’s still night. The moon is still shining down, a thin white crescent in the dank blue of a darkened sky.

  I’m not gone. I’m mostly bone held together by gristle. I’m missing an arm, both legs, most of my face. But I’m not gone. Through rotting holes, I can see the tendons in the hand I have left.

  I can feel the stone nearby. Like that one girl you knew you’d give everything for. As soon as she walked into the room, you knew it. The one you swore you’d crawl on hands and knees over broken glass for.

  So I crawl.

  It takes a thousand forevers. Every foot is a mile.

  The hallways of burned-out husks and crushed junkers opens into a field of twisted metal. Cars piled high like trees. Danny hangs upside down, strung from the fender of a Studebaker, one leg suspended, the other crossed over behind it like an inverted 4. I think he’s still alive. But he won’t be for long.

  I watch, fascinated. Danny gets older by the second. Fingernails grow long, skin warps and wrinkles. He curls in on himself as his spine shrinks. Every second of his youth is draining away.

  Giavetti lies underneath him on the roof of a desiccated Volvo, spread-eagled. What’s left of Danny’s blood drips down onto him. Onto the stone resting on his forehead.

  And with each drop Giavetti is getting younger.

  The stone’s brilliance catches me for a moment. I can take it. Just crawl up, and it’s mine. Let it heal me, take me away from this horror show I’ve turned into. I start to lurch forward, catch myself in a lucid moment that’s becoming less frequent as the seconds tick by.

  If I take it, Giavetti will just come back for it, and I’m back at square one. I’m nothing but sticks held together by bits of gristle now. I’ve left a trail of intestines and blood across the gravel like some demon slug. Skin nothing but shredded paste. My mind is unraveling like a cheap sweater.

  I remember what Darius said about killing Giavetti. Maybe taking the stone just won’t be enough.

  I pull a chunk of twisted metal from the ground. It’s long and sharp and makes a perfect shiv. Crawl onto the Volvo, look at Danny hanging there. A slice in his throat like a new, bloody mouth stares at me, face slick with rain and his own draining blood. We look at each other. I can see a plea to kill him in his eyes. In due time, kid. I got priorities.

  I climb over Giavetti, press the shiv against his throat. I’d say something witty, but my tongue fell off a while ago.

  I close my eyes, pray to whatever sick twisted fuck there might be in heaven that this works, and ram the shiv through him as I pull the stone off his forehead.

  The effect is immediate. The stone flashes bright and purple, and I can feel my skin fill in, new bones grow, muscles wrap themselves together like cables. My rotted flesh sloughs off to be washed away by the rain.

  Beneath me Giavetti screams and thrashes around. I stab and keep stabbing. Slicing jagged holes through him. He reaches up to ward me off, but as I get stronger he gets weaker.

  Finally, I bring the shiv down into his chest, tear through the sternum. My hands dig into the hole, make it wider. Yank flesh and bone aside.

  I bend my face down to the shredded hole in his chest and lose myself in the feast.

  Chapter 29

  I roll over in a pool of dripping gore, stare at the sun burning in a crystal blue sky. Most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen. The stone is heavy in my hand, pulsing.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been out. Long enough to grow everything back. Legs, hand—I check the inside of my mouth. Yep, even tongue. I take an experimental breath, pull air into my lungs, waiting for that rush that tells me everything’s fine, that this was all some kind of bad dream.

  But it’s just like inflating a balloon. I’m still dead.

  I pull myself up. My clothes are shredded rags, my pants in particular. They look like bad cutoffs from the seventies. Parts of me are covered in thick slime, a holdover, it seems, from my rotting spell the night before. I stink like a fucking slaughterhouse in summer.

  Where Giavetti should be, splayed out on the roof of the Volvo beneath me, there are just bones and scraps of meat. And I thought I went to town on Neumann. There’s hardly anything left.

  But it might still be enough. I gather up the bones and put them into an empty oil drum. Pour gasoline over them. Light them on fire. Let them cook.

  I find some old work overalls in the junkyard’s office and put them on in place of my torn up clothes. They’re not great, but they’re better than walking around in blood-soaked Daisy Dukes.

  I cut Danny down. His wizened body is light as a child’s. Poor bastard. I lay him down on the ground and go out front to bring in his car. Park it far in the back and pull the plates. Nobody will find it. No one will come looking.

  Danny’s featherweight corpse goes into the car compactor, a couple hundred pounds of scrap on top of him. It grinds him into paste.

  Giavetti’s charred bones get the same treatment, but only after I’ve broken them into as many small chunks as I can.

  It takes awhile. I run the compactor half a dozen times, adding more scrap each time. Whatever’s left of Giavetti is sandwiched between broken headlights, radiator grills. I’d piss in there, if I could.

  If that doesn’t keep him dead, I don’t know what will.

  The drive to downtown is short. No one’s on the road. It’s nine in the morning, and the freeways should be packed. Something monumenta
l happened last night, and it’s almost as though the city knows it. The storm has passed. It’s a fragile feeling. If you look at it too hard, it will pop like a soap bubble. I wonder how many people actually felt it, or even knew what it was.

  I pull off the freeway and have to double back through side streets to get to the hotel. The police have set up a webwork of crime scene tape, official looking sawhorses.

  The radio paints a scene of intense, if short-lived, insanity last night. The official body count’s still coming in, but it seems there were riots from Pasadena to San Pedro. Looting, arson, murder. The usual.

  There’s a story about some guys in gorilla suits running rampant through Griffith Park and killing the horses at the equestrian center. Another of a mob of homeless in Santa Monica killing half a dozen people on the Promenade and trying to eat them.

  And then it all just stopped.

  Not sure how I feel about that. I’m the one that did it. Does that make me a hero? Did I save the day? I decide I’m not the hero type and shut off the radio.

  At Gabriela’s hotel the bar is back. The red leather door in the wall just as out of place as it was before.

  “Welcome back, Dead Man,” Darius says as I step inside. He’s got a tall Bloody Mary sitting on the bar in front of him, a lone celery stalk in the glass. “Slew the dragon, saved the fair maiden. You deserve a celebratory drink.”

  The band is playing some Glenn Miller tune. His phantom dancers are spinning each other slowly across the floor.

  “What is it?” It doesn’t smell quite like a Bloody Mary.

  “Mostly V-8,” Darius says. “Some tabasco. Some pepper. Other stuff.”

  Other stuff. “That’s what worries me.”

  Darius laughs. “This is a gift. Gabriela managed to secure a line of hearts from a boy down at USC Medical. She had hoped to get it to you earlier, but the boy couldn’t deliver until today. So drink up. It’ll cure what ails ya.”

  I look at it. Think about it.

  “Where is she, anyway?” I assumed she made it out all right or the guy at the front desk would have said something.

  “Out tending to her flock. Lots of folk hurting out there this morning. Like suffering from the mother of all hangovers. She’s making sure things are okay. So, whatta ya say? Partake of the kindness of the Bruja?”

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t keep my end of the bargain. She only owes me this if I deliver the stone. I haven’t delivered the stone.”

  “Ah,” Darius says. “You know, bargains are funny things. You have to look at the wording. For example, she offered to find a way to keep you from rotting that didn’t involve eating human hearts.” He points to the drink. “That, my friend, is made out of human hearts. She didn’t keep her end of the bargain, either.”

  “Of course, it’s not like you need it.” He reaches over and taps me on the chest with a wink.

  I learned the hard way that a safe isn’t very safe. Before I left the junkyard I tore a hole into my chest with a chunk of metal and shoved the stone up behind my sternum. It’s sitting there nice and comfortable, and I’ve felt better with it there than I’ve felt the entire time I’ve been dead.

  “Maybe you and I ought to talk about this,” I say.

  “Maybe we should. You know, that thing there’s not exactly hidden. But at the same time, only some of us can actually see it. So, I have a proposition for you. Interested?”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “I don’t talk about your, ah, inside jewelry. But one of these days, I just might want to. And when that day comes, well, the only thing that’ll keep my fool mouth shut is an incentive. Like, maybe a favor. Are you following me, Dead Man?”

  “I’m following you. You say nothing. Tell no one. Don’t even fucking hint that it’s there. Ever. And you get one favor. That about the gist of it?”

  “Oh, that’s it exactly. Do we have a deal?” He puts out his meaty paw.

  What’s the big deal? Really? I don’t want anyone knowing I’ve got this thing on me, not even Gabriela. It’d just cause problems I don’t need.

  And I do a job for Darius. I do jobs all the time.

  “Deal.” We shake on it and there’s that weird non-pop sound in my ears that seals it.

  “You might want to drink the drink, anyway. Looks less conspicuous that way. And I wouldn’t want to tell our young miss that you didn’t. She might get suspicious.”

  Good point. I down the drink. It’s not bad.

  Darius hands me a napkin. “You got a blood mustache,” he says. I wipe my face.

  “Thanks. I think.”

  A couple of Darius’ phantom patrons cozy to the bar, order sidecars.

  “Friendly advice,” Darius says, shaking up nonexistent cocktails for nonexistent customers. “Get to know your new people.”

  “My people?”

  “You know who I’m talking about. This here’s a community, like it or not. It’s bloodier than most, but nothing you shouldn’t be able to handle. Things are different now. You got yourself some breathing room. Take in this brand new world. See what you can do with it.”

  “What’s that friendly advice gonna cost me?”

  “Friendly means free. Take it when it’s offered. Doesn’t happen often. Besides, I’ve taken a shine to you, Dead Man. I’d like to see you around. And Gabriela could use a hand. Coked-up vampires and sketchy gangbangers don’t make for the most stable support system for a young lady.”

  Maybe he’s right. I’ve jumped down the rabbit hole and, for the moment at least, Wonderland’s not trying to kill me. Best I get the hang of it before it gets me.

  “What about you?” I ask. “You work for her. What does she need me for?”

  He laughs. “Oh, you don’t get how this works, do you? No, no, no. I work for myself. I’m here because I like it here. It’s nice and cozy. And the Bruja’s not the only game in town. No, I have my iron in a lot of fires. Never know which way the day will take you.”

  He reaches under the bar, pulls out a small envelope. My name is written on the front in a flowing script that looks disturbingly familiar. “Speaking of which,” he says, “this is from a mutual acquaintance.”

  He slides the envelope over to me. I open it and pull out a note that reads, “I couldn’t have done it without you. Love, Sam.”

  I stare at the note. There’s a faint scent of perfume on it. The same scent she was wearing last night when she shot herself.

  “When did you get this?”

  “Oh, ‘when’ is such a subjective idea. Why be so linear about things?”

  “Okay, how did you get this?” I thought I’d had it all figured out. Samantha dead, Giavetti gone. Now I don’t know who’s playing who.

  Darius slides a scotch neat in front of me. “Have another drink, Dead Man,” and gives me an inscrutable smile. “Enjoy it. You’ve earned it.”