Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel

by T. M. Goeglein

  I closed my eyes, visualizing my parents, asking them to help me do the very thing I’d spent the last four months trying to avoid—putting us all at the mercy of the cold-blooded Outfit—and whispered, “Please . . . help me . . .”

  “Please . . . say something. Anything,” Doug murmured.

  I walked around the corner, seeing him sitting across from Johnny on the couch. “You’re awake,” I said.

  “More than this poor guy, even though his eyes are open,” he said. “Actually, sort of open. The red one is like a searchlight but the blue side is pretty droopy.”

  “I think Sec-C cut really deeply into his brain. It’s like he’s teetering on the edge of recovery or . . . you know.” I shrugged.

  “Could’ve been me,” Doug said quietly.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’ve been turned inside out, tongue first,” he said, sipping the Screaming Banshee and shuddering. “By the way, this earns its name. I’ve been screaming out both ends.” He tried to explain how he felt, physically and emotionally, describing the first like a savage flu—his guts rejecting everything, all of it pouring out deep red—and the second as being trapped in a wonderful dream that became a hellish nightmare, then a dream again, over and over. “Taking Sec-C, all of your happy emotions are intense, like you love someone to death, and flowers are beautiful, and sex . . . ,” he said, pausing, “is actually a possibility someday. And that’s life-saving! It’s a release from being the unattractive fat kid, and because you stop eating, you’re really not him anymore! Except the drug ebbs away, and then you are again, at least in your head. You crash like Wall Street, and it’s brutal. The unhappy emotions take over, and you hate yourself to death, and flowers are disgusting, and sex does not occur because you love someone or even like them. Instead, it’s raw manipulation. It’s telling a terrible lie with your body. And then you slurp more Sec-C and it starts again.”

  “Are you done with it, Doug?”

  “Maybe. Probably,” he said. He added sheepishly, “Are you done with me?”

  I petted Harry vacantly, scratching beneath the little dog’s chin. “That sort of betrayal . . . allowing me to walk into that suite?” I said, shaking my head and looking directly at him. “The only reason I’m not dead is because of a wild baseball.”

  “I know,” he said, welling up, “I hate myself for it. I’ll always hate myself.”

  “Everything I’ve fought for, every inch I’ve clawed toward my family, could’ve ended right there,” I said. “So yeah, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Doug Stuffins, Mister Popularity, was totally unforgivable.”

  “Sara Jane . . .”

  “That’s why I’m forgiving you. Those internal suspicions you have, those mental whispers that you’re unlovable and destined to be alone forever? The ones that made it easy to take Sec-C? I know they’re nonsense,” I said, “because I know the real Doug. The smart, loyal person who would never have done that unless his mind was twisted by some very bad drugs. So there’s no ‘maybe’ or ‘probably’ when it comes to being done with Sec-C. If you want my friendship and confidence, there’s ‘definitely’ and ‘forever.’”

  Doug pinched moisture from his eyes. “Definitely. Forever,” he said quietly. The way he looked at me wasn’t pleading or hopeful; it was resolute, full of truth, and meant as much to me as his declaration. He patted his deflated belly and said, “I get to keep the body, right? My version of post-rehab Heather Richards?”

  “Speaking of,” I said with a sigh, and I told him about her and cold fury, her and Max, and her and the ice cream creatures. With a shudder, I repeated Lucky’s request—correction, demand—for Johnny’s red eyeball. Doug had a million questions and observations, convincing me that he was finding the best parts of his old self. Finally, I explained my last-ditch effort to save my family by using cold fury on Lucky.

  When I finished, he said, “What if?”

  “They’re already dead? Well . . . then at least I tried.”

  “Then you would have outed yourself for nothing. The Outfit needs a counselor-at-large, I get that, but not so badly they’d allow the daughter of a dead rat—no offense—to mediate their dirty business. Besides, you know what Lucky will do if you get him in a cold fury headlock,” he said. “Look, if your family is . . . not here, there’s still a whole life left for you to live. If you can’t help them”—he shrugged—“maybe it’s time to step back.”

  “No. Never. I’ll keep at it until there’s nothing left . . . them or me.” I sighed. “It’s just that I’ve wasted so much time trying to comprehend a dead language—”

  “Hey!” Doug said, taking the Screaming Banshee away from Johnny, who’d lifted it like a glass of ice water and gagged down a mouthful.

  “So much time trying to crack the code of Ice Cream Cohen and Weston Skarlov . . . ,” I said, the words trailing off as Doug and I watched the effects of the noxious concoction on Johnny, who was shaking all over, staring at me as his lips began to move.

  “Weston,” Johnny mumbled through a foamy dribble, “west . . . on . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” Doug said. “Are you . . . trying to talk?”

  “Skarlov. S-s-s-karl . . . ov,” he said, dissecting the words with his teeth and tongue. “S-s-s-karl . . .”

  We moved closer as his eyes widened, seeing something terrible that wasn’t there. “It must be Screaming Banshee,” I whispered.

  “Please don’t let them take me back,” he gasped. “There’s blood in the air . . .”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Weston,” Johnny said, biting down on the syllables, “west, on . . . skarl . . . s-s-s-south karl . . . ov . . . av . . .”

  “Avenue,” Doug said slowly.

  I put it together, saying, “West . . . on South Karl Avenue?” Doug attacked his laptop as I thought aloud. “Uncle Jack’s scrunched handwriting, recording the location of the Pure Dairy Confection headquarters so long ago. His small o—ov—looks just like a small a—av. The phrases that faded away between the word partner . . . I assumed it was a name, but it was directions to a place.”

  “Then who helped Ice Cream Cohen rob the Bird Cage Club? Who was the partner?” Doug asked, pulling up a map.

  “Who knows?” I murmured, looking over his shoulder. “Another dead secret.”

  “Here it is, South Karl Avenue!” He pointed. “A dead-end near Back of the Yards! It has to be the place!”

  After all of this time, seeing the tiny digital street as an actual place was unreal. Joy and relief flared and faded, replaced by regret as I asked myself, What if I’d been smarter reading Uncle Jack’s hidden pages, or faster tracking down Juan Kone? What if I hadn’t been so fearful and had told Heather everything about cold fury?

  And then, before my eyes, South Karl Avenue began to glow with possibilities.

  I turned for the elevator and the Lincoln, yelling for Doug to bring Johnny.

  It had to be the place because there were no other places left, and no more time for what-ifs. There was only now, before it was too late.

  25

  NOT LONG AGO, MANY OF THE NATION’S hooved and cloven animals were turned into meat in a small neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. This bastion of butchery, called the Union Stockyards, spawned numerous side businesses since something had to be done with all of those animal carcasses. In the world of recycled snouts, bones, organs, and tails, one institution rose above all others when it came to stinkiness—the rendering plant, where leftover parts became lard or tallow through a process of boiling and straining, which smells exactly like what it is—animal corpse soup. It’s a putrid stench that assaults a person’s senses, conjuring up images of milky maggots, of flies swarming roadkill. Although the majority of Chicago’s South Side rendering plants have closed, the odor lingers, especially on warm afternoons.

  It was unseasonably hot when we crept westward on South Karl Avenue.

  The humidity made it smell like driving th
rough the rancid sweat sock of a giant.

  It was a dead end on the south fork of the Chicago River, that notoriously foul stretch nicknamed Bubbly Creek. A chain barrier blocked the end of the road where, a few feet later, water the consistency of yogurt belched up pockets of methane gas from a century of decomposing animal carcasses on its muddy floor. I creaked to a stop, seeing the burned-out shell of a factory on one side of the street, its brick walls still black from a fire that must’ve happened decades ago, and a boarded-up warehouse on the other, its windows covered in warped wood. “That’s got to be it,” I said, feeling my heart beating in my throat. I’d be going in there with cold fury that didn’t affect Juan Kone or his creatures, and the presence of my family—my intense love for them—deactivating the electricity. I looked at Doug and said, “The answer is no.”

  “Because there are dangerous things that only you can do in there, you want to protect me, blah-blah-blah,” he said. “Listen, I’m always going with you, no matter where it is. So why waste the words?”

  I saw the determination on his face, nodded once, and turned to the backseat, where Johnny sat staring straight ahead, rigid but not completely disconnected from the present. We’d given him an additional dose of Screaming Banshee, which had drawn him out of his walking coma even more. Softly, I said, “Stay here, okay? If something happens, take the car . . . if you can drive.” I nodded at the boarded-up warehouse. “How do we get inside?”

  A tremor crossed his shoulders. “Not there. There,” he said, pointing at the torched shell of a building across the street.

  I looked at the structural skeleton through which the moving river was visible. “Is there a basement or something?”

  He pointed into the brown water. “The boat. Touch it.” I looked through the building at a red skiff in the distance, then back at Johnny. “The boat,” he whispered, and sat back with his eyes closed.

  Doug and I exchanged a look and then slipped out of the car. As we crossed the cracked, weedy street, I could’ve sworn that everything—the burned-out structure, river, and red boat—moved slightly in the breeze. We approached the building and, cautiously, I poked at the scene, which rippled softly beneath my finger. “It’s digital,” I whispered, amazed. “A huge, flexible screen, draped over the whole thing.”

  Doug licked his lips. “Push the boat.”

  I did, carefully, and a section of the screen—a digital door—popped open softly. My mind was going like a hummingbird, and I heard Doug’s hurried breathing as we stepped inside and looked up at the hidden building—three stories of white brick with the words PURE DAIRY CONFECTION COMPANY over the facade. There were no cameras looking at us, no touch pads to gain entry; the building was well hidden, of course, but the lack of electronic safeguards spoke more to Juan’s ego and arrogance than airtight security. I gripped the .45 as we entered the building, Harry’s claws tick-tacking on the floor, and paused outside the only door. I turned to Doug. “Ready?”

  “No,” he said seriously.

  “Here we go,” I said. I counted to three and pulled it open.

  It was a room as deep and vast as an airplane hangar, purely, hygienically white, illuminated by enormous hanging light fixtures. The floor was cut into four quadrants. In a far corner, a fleet of black trucks sat gleaming, ready for a chase. In another was a steel vat bearing the words SECODAL CORTEXITRATE. Tubes ran from it into a large, droning pump, while sticky red puddles pooled at its base. A third corner held a sophisticated laboratory behind glass walls. It was outfitted with a computer bank attached via hundreds of slim wires to a large, industrial refrigerator marked simply ANTHONY RISPOLI; instinctively I knew it held gallons of my dad’s blood.

  A steel box as large as a small house, with a narrow door and single barred window, squatted in the fourth corner—my family’s prison.

  I wanted to sprint for it and tear the door off by its hinges.

  I would’ve, if it weren’t for all of the bodies in my path.

  I stood with my feet cemented to the floor, looking at a scene eerily reminiscent of the Catacomb Club massacre.

  It was twenty or thirty perfect-looking dead people with chiseled features and gray, parted lips, staring into eternity. Their slim model bodies lay where they fell, as if it were a big game of musical chairs and they’d all lost. A smeared red trail of Sec-C led from the vat to them, the dead, right into their hands holding empty silver cones. It was so still—being around so much fresh death made it feel disrespectful to move, but I had to, there was no way I couldn’t. I gave Doug the .45 and said, “Find a safe place and cover me.” He didn’t seem to hear me, his gaze pinned to the bodies, until I touched him roughly. He turned with tears in his eyes, nodded, and led Harry away. I tiptoed through the corpses to the steel box and stepped inside, whispering, “Mom? Dad? Lou?”

  Nothing, silence, a muted gasp of breath.

  I felt along a wall, found a light switch, and stared into a nightmare. All of those simplistic movies show a prison cell as a little home away from home with a tidy shelf of books, sparrows landing at the window, and a spare but clean toilet and sink. Instead, I looked at a dank, dirty hole where people were thrown to die. The complete inventory—stained mattresses with handcuffs; a jug of brown water; bits of moldy bread and bowls of slop; cases of empty baby-food containers, the labels marked High in Iron! to fortify my dad’s blood; a heart-wrenching message scrawled on the wall. Seeing it written in something thick and auburn, looking at the crude drawing of a Ferris wheel, I became murderous hatred incarnate. The words spoke only to me:

  We are alive

  in Sara Jane

  Each day we wait

  for Sara Jane

  Our daughter, our sister, our savior

  Sara Jane

  “Creepy, huh? It’s like a . . . a prayer,” someone slurred, and I spun to see Heather emerging from a dark corner of the cell, except it wasn’t her. It was the alternate-universe version of her—a staggering living-dead with red, leaking arteries and burn marks seeping at her temples, painfully visible since her golden tresses had been shorn away. She was wrapped in a hospital gown fouled by scarlet streaks and spatters. Her eyelids fluttered, and if I hadn’t thrown out my arms, she would’ve fallen on her face.

  I eased her onto a mattress, asking urgently, “Where are they? My family?”

  She parted her lips, her voice rustling like dry grass. “You’re too late.”

  Three little words—the summation of my quest—made me want to scream in her face, to run for the door. Instead I shook her lightly, trying to keep the insanity strength out of my grasp. Heather’s eyes opened slowly; the irises weren’t blue anymore but ashen gray, drained of an essential element. “Gathered them up. Took them away,” she said, her words a garble. “Wouldn’t take me . . . told me to die. Said it’s better for a junkie like me.” Her gaze shifted to nothing. “Made me drink something . . . made me sick.”

  My heart raced and my body surged, knowing I’d missed them by torturous minutes. “Who took them? Juan?”

  “One of them. With the red eyes, but different . . . ,” she murmured, as a line of spittle leaked from her mouth. “Your dad, so weak, barely moving. Your mom asked where they were being taken but it hit her, oh God, hit her so hard . . .”

  “Sara Jane!” Doug bellowed, his voice rolling across the floor.

  I stared at the inscription on the wall, inscribed it on my heart, and carried Heather across the floor, trying not to look at the bodies beneath me. Doug stood outside the laboratory, waving me over. He did a double take when he saw Heather, dropped the .45, and helped me carry her into the lab and onto a gurney. He nodded past me then and said, “Look.” I stared beyond the computer screens glowing with digitized brains and alphanumeric data at a plush velvet chair and ornately carved desk. Juan sat crumpled behind it like a large-headed spider on a spindle body, greedily sucking a straw jammed into a bag of life-sustaining blue goop. Empties were scattered across the desk like squashed jellyfish. />
  When he glanced up, the R I’d punched into his forehead winked painfully red. His eyes were crazed, the only part of him besides his lips that moved. I moved closer, cautiously, seeing his reedy shoulders and concave chest folded in a jackknife, nearly touching his paralyzed hips and legs, while he clutched at his middle with a bony hand. Things were leaking out of him between his fingers, some red and bloody, some blue and goopy, and that’s when I understood—the pump in his stomach was gone. He removed the straw from his smeared lips, squealing, “Judas! ¡Renegado! Look what it—that traitor!—did to me! It worked among us, lived among us, disguised as one of my very own creations . . . and then tried to kill me! Oh, my beautiful pump. The murderous thing ripped it right out of my body!”

  “What about them?” I said, unable to look out at the massacre.

  “I worked my fingers to the bone creating that workforce! And it had the audacity to wipe out every last one of them! Murdered them all with a tasteless, odorless poison . . . slipped it into Sec-C!”

  “Oh no,” Doug murmured, glancing at Heather, who was barely alive.

  “And then—¡hijo de puta!—it took my test subjects!”

  “My family,” I said. “Who was it? The person disguised as a creature? The one who betrayed you?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said, his voice dropping conspiratorially, “unless I install a new pump quickly, I’m in trouble muy grande! Without a consistent source of this pulpy protein, my body will eat me!” His gaze moved to Heather as he drank. “So the traitor poisoned her, too? Ah well . . . she was useless. Years of substance abuse had compromised her enzyme GF. But you . . . you’re as pure as the driven snow! Lay on that table and I’ll draw the blood, six small vials, which we’ll add to your father’s, sí?”

  “How do you plan to make me do that?” I said.

  “Not me. It,” Juan said, and I turned to Teardrop entering the lab like a deadly skeleton in a crisp black uniform, eyes glowing like hot coals. “I sent you out to snatch her, and instead she came to us!” Juan said cheerily. “Es maravilloso, yes?”