Crime Rave

by Sezin Koehler

  So why are you not comforted?

  Why is it the knot in your stomach that began as stress has calcified into fear, and worse, dread?

  Maybe it’s because you know that proof of God wasn’t worth this much loss? Thirty-five thousand four-hundred and eighty-six tickets sold, and only sixteen survivors.

  You would have rather doses of healthy doubt in your faith and see all those dead kids go home tonight than this heartbreak. Tears prick behind your eyes. You clear your throat to stop them. There will be plenty of time for tears later. An entire lifetime for it, and especially for the families of the lost.

  We have the evidence of divine intervention we always wanted, but who will give a shit now amid so much collateral damage?

  Who will flock to as cruel a God as this?

  Faith is a double-edged sword that today cut hard, fast, and unrelenting. The wounds are deep, the scars will be epic. How will anyone’s faith recover? What will become of religions without believers?

  God, if you’re listening: Why?

  Why? Why?

  6:55 PM Spruce-Musa Hospital

  Teresa Chalmers, slumbering deep, receives a visitor: a woman with long flowing red hair and yellow robes. Teresa is reminded of her daughter, though there’s nothing to compare physically. For the first time since surviving, the screaming in Teresa’s head stops.

  “Are you an angel?” Teresa asks.

  The woman shakes her head, making the room shimmer.

  “Are you here to take me to the other side?”

  Another shake of the head. The woman smiles and Teresa understands.

  “You want me to stop screaming.”

  The woman nods.

  “I need to wake up.”

  Another nod. The woman speaks. No, not speak, resonates: The battle is coming, Teresa. Another one you must fight. That is why you are here. Why we brought you back. Remember how to use your scream to protect the innocent. Use your love. Use your rage, your sadness. Help us win.

  “Who are you?” Teresa breathes.

  I am Maga, goddess of magic and healing. Wake up now. I’ll see you again soon.

  The goddess disappears and Teresa Chalmers opens her eyes, her head quiet for the first time since the awakening, filled with a purposeful resolve. She rings for the nurse, asks to be taken off the sedative drip, requests to speak with Detective Red Feather, and wants today’s menu. All that screaming and sleeping really takes it out of a woman.

  Mother, The Ancient One

  You’ve disentangled from your resting place in a tempest of furor, a battle cry that wounds all celestials in earshot—all except for Kaleanathi and The Elementals, who have cloaked themselves, and well, a fact that only adds to your infuriation.

  At the stone circle of the elders, you arrive to find a confrontation in process: The Dimoni Overlords have breached your multiverse demanding reparations for The Source your shortsighted children have stolen from them. As fierce as are the Dimoni, with the cruelly deformed faces of rejected monsters from your own multiverse, and as resentful as they are of their long-ago expulsion, even they kneel at your feet. With one fiery glance, they would be begging for forgiveness like your wayward Ethereals, who send up every platitude available to placate the roseate that has become your countenance.

  With only one pointed look, The Dimoni know you will return their stolen energy once your house is back in order. They back away from you, bowing and apologizing—they would never have bullied your children if they knew you were awake—as they teleport out of your multiverse and back to their own. At least one cataclysm today averted.

  Your Ethereals cower before you, penitent. They entreat your forgiveness, they plead for your help to set things right. Your tired sigh is a rumble even the humans below can feel, looking up to your heavens for the storm that’s coming. You close your eyes and begin replenishing the all-but-depleted Source.

  7:00 PM LAPD Headquarters Lockup

  After writing and signing a full confession as accomplice to Charles Wallace Crane’s mansion massacre as well as the unrelated murder of his girlfriend Liria Fairchild, LAPD cops remand DJ Fetish to a holding cell until his transfer to county lockup. CSIs extracted Liria’s body from the sewage drain—rather, her bones and what little tissue hadn’t been gnawed on by rats. In lockup, a guard sits near the DJ’s cell on suicide watch, the prisoner’s behavior giving everyone pause. Talking to someone who isn’t there, screaming at her, flinging himself against the metal bars like Dracula’s good buddy Renfield. The DJ’s screws are loosening one by one as the ghost of the woman he murdered continues to haunt him.

  “I did what you wanted, you bitch, now leave me alone!” the DJ screams, throwing his prison-issue metal mug at blue-haired Liria, hitting the cell bars. She stops for a moment, looks at the cup rolling from side to side in the corner of the six-by-four, and continues her malevolently gleeful laugh. This time louder. John Doe puts his hands over his hears even though he knows this won’t help. The sound comes from everywhere, sort of like the music program he created to help Crane kill the ravers. If karma’s a bitch, irony’s the bastard.

  “And now you’re gonna pay, motherFUCKER!” Liria cackles, dancing around the DJ, taunting him. “Pay pay paypaypay!” Liria paces, screaming profanities, when a dark figure materializes outside the cell.

  “Help me! Please!” The DJ begs, clinging to the cell bars.

  The figure’s eyes flash hellfire and the DJ falls back, burned. He crawls under his cot.

  “Fiero,” Liria breathes, “Are you here to—”

  The hooded being nods, skeleton face breaking into a smile.

  “Good.” Liria bows and the goddess of murder places a hand on her forehead. Liria re-corporates, her filmy self becoming flesh in a painful metamorphosis.

  “Finish him,” the murder goddess Fiero orders, her voice the sound of rotten sandpaper. Liria’s grin is grotesque, her purple tongue lolling out the side of her mouth.

  “Thank you,” Liria whispers as Fiero vanishes in a blink.

  Liria turns and cackles, the policeman down the hall hears this non-DJ sound, pauses, and mutters, “Fucking schizo.”

  From under the cot Liria grabs the DJ and pulls him out like a rag doll, throwing him against the cement wall. His shoe falls at her feet. It’s not a knife, but it’ll do. Liria beats the DJ to death with his Converse, one painfully magnificent blow at a time, remembering the way his army knife glinted in the moonlight as he stabbed her to death, the pain heightened by the ecstasy pill that had made her feel so good just minutes before.

  DJ Fetish’s screams echo through lockup. Liria smashes until nothing of his skull remains but a gory smear on the grey floor. Someone walks over the duty cop’s grave and bile rises up his throat in response.

  The smog goddess Kaleanathi shivers as she eats the DJ’s soul, lost tribute returned. “And then there were fifteen,” Kaleanathi says, burping, as Fiero and Aranya, the spider goddess, look on smiling.

  To Liria a doorway appears, ringed by light so bright she shields her eyes from it. Drawn toward, Liria opens it and enters, justice finally served.

  The Ethereals

  You let out another wail to end all wails as Kaleanathi works her magic and yanks one of your precious survivors from your grasp. Again.

  The DJ was supposed to be held accountable, but not like this.

  Not by her.

  Kaleanathi: the thorn in your cosmic side. The reason Mother, The Ancient One is in the middle of the biggest bout of rage you’ve ever experienced. And she shows no sign of abating.

  Nor does the smog goddess, ensconced in a lair of spider goddess Aranya’s making, impossible to find unless Aranya wills it.

  Worse, the humans below aren’t responding to the miracles as you’d hoped. At least you could have reaffirmed their faith in divinity, a
nd yet you seem to have done the opposite. You gave them evidence—scientific proof of celestial beings’ existences—and they aren’t happy. All the dead souls in Kaleanathi’s embrace, their loved ones below, weeping and demanding to know why. Why did you do this? Why did you ruin their lives? How could you? The collective human fury almost matches that of Mother.

  How could this be happening? How could everything have gone so wrong?

  You each retreat to corners, far from each other—Maga, goddess of magic; Amaria, goddess of love; Ganza, goddess of revenge; Veritas, goddess of truth; and Lastyme, goddess of sadness—and regret what you’ve done.

  Tampering with free will is an action punishable by banishment.

  But Mother can’t banish Ethereals, can she? Without you there is no art, or beauty, or healing in any of the worlds.

  So what now?

  What happens next?

  Is Mother, The Ancient One angry enough to annihilate everything she’s built? All these thousands of years?

  You never once considered she actually might.

  And for the first time you wish Zhed, the goddess of fear, hadn’t abandoned the heavens to live in the human world. You need someone to coach you through this emotion you’re experiencing for the first time.

  Desperation doesn’t become you. Neither does immortal terror.

  7:05 PM Spruce-Musa Hospital

  Red Feather is shocked to hear that the screamer, Teresa Chalmers, is awake from her sedative haze and asking for him. Nurse Pratchett has given up trying to make sense out of the looking glass into which they’ve collectively entered. There’s no way in the known world that a person with that much morphine in her system could open her eyes and speak, let alone ask for the IV to be removed and if she could talk with Detective Red Feather.

  “She asked for me by name?” Red Feather rubs his forehead.

  “She did indeed,” Nurse Pratchett says, shrugging. “I give up trying to make sense of it.”

  “You and me both, sister.”

  Nurse Pratchett tosses him a tired smile and walks back to the nurse’s station.

  Red Feather knocks on Teresa Chalmers’s open door and introduces himself.

  She’s sitting up in bed, hands folded in her lap, waiting for him. She gestures to come in.

  “You’re the last in a long line of miracles today,” Red Feather says, once again at a loss to comprehend the woman sitting in front of him, who should be half dead from morphine ingestion.

  “Yeah, they said that I had enough sedatives in me to put down a small elephant. They have me on an IV detox drip now, but I feel fine. Not even sleepy at all,” a wan smile takes over her still tired-looking face.

  “Just give me a second to set up the recorder,” Red Feather fumbles with the machine, not used to playing both roles. Once it’s whirring he pulls up a chair next to Teresa’s bed. Clears his throat. The question feels redundant but he asks it anyway.

  “What do you remember about the rave last night?”

  “I’ll start from the top. You’re probably wondering what a fifty-year-old woman was doing a rave with a bunch of kids, right?”

  “The question had crossed my mind.”

  “My daughter killed herself. She was being abused by my shit of a husband. I don’t even know how long it was going on or how I couldn’t have figured it out sooner. She’d always flinch when he touched her and she avoided looking at him…” Teresa’s voice fades as she thinks about all the awkward hugs she witnessed, Lana almost pushing him away, he with his face in her hair, breathing in deep. She shivers and shakes her head, coming out of her reverie.

  “He was drugging my milk before bed. One night I started sort of dreaming about them. What he was doing to her. How he was talking to her. She was terrorized by this man, my husband. Her father! I was watching it all happen and I started screaming. I wanted to wake up but I couldn’t. I just screamed and screamed. He seemed to have a heart attack. He keeled over. ‘We’re free!’ I thought.”

  “But Lana would never be free. I watched her climb into the tub and slit her wrists. By the time I woke up from my pseudo-coma I thought it was just a dream. But then I found her. She’d been dead for hours.” Tears stream down Teresa’s face, but her voice is steady. “I found him in her bedroom, pants down, also dead. I can’t explain the dream. Well, it wasn’t a dream was it?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “After, someone told me about astral projection. It seemed like what happened to me, if you believe in that kind of thing.”

  “Teresa, today has taught me that anything is possible.”

  “The police, bastards, thought that somehow I was responsible. That I staged my daughter’s suicide because I was jealous of her. Pricks.” Teresa spits. “I moved. Didn’t even sell the house. Just left it there. Got an apartment in Santa Monica. Got a job working at a flower shop. It was the only thing that kept the grief from crippling me, just get up every day and go to work, smell the roses. But it caught up and I started therapy. My doc is really into holistic stuff, but also found that pure MDMA—ecstasy—to be helpful in trauma treatment. And she was right. I started going to raves, not to be high, but to be with people Lana’s age. Be the cool mom I never was with her. The mom I wanted to be and never knew how. I started connecting with young women and in a way mentoring them. It made me feel a little like I had my Lana back. That is why I was at the rave last night.”

  Red Feather nods, thoughtful, nodding along as Teresa recounts the strange tale of vulval blobs and killer DJs he’s heard several times today. She identifies all the survivors by name. He feels a comforting sense of closure in hearing the retelling from beginning to end for the last time.

  “Pretty strange group you’ve got here,” Teresa says, handing back the stack of Polaroids.

  Red Feather laughs, “I think that might be the understatement of the century.” He pauses. “I’m sorry about your daughter. That’s a hard loss to come back from.” Red Feather thinks of his dad and grandfather. “Is there anything else you’d like to share?”

  “No, I think I’m good for now,” Teresa chuckles.

  Red Feather gives her his card and she shakes his hand goodbye.

  After the detective leaves Teresa sits back and re-folds her hands in her lap, waiting for the something wicked that this way comes.

  Detective Atticus Red Feather

  You feel it in the air. The smell of blood. Smoke over the water that tells you a battle is coming. And fast.

  You know you should report back to the station. You have other jobs to do now. Transcribing the interviews, writing up reports, preparing to get your ass reamed for all the crazy you’ve seen that none of the higher-ups will believe, even with video evidence.

  Instead, you go back and talk to Chamelia, the shape-shifting alien girl who feels like the unofficial leader of the survivors. She tells you more about gamma ray weapons, and supersoldier clones who look like Dolph Lundgren, and a shark girl, and a crocodile boy, and assorted aliens. She has some kind of psychic link to Colonel Ransom. She knows what’s coming.

  Red Feather tells her about the other survivors. Their powers. The invisible girl with Wolverine nails, the screamer who shorts out electricity, Cherie Beauxden and her poison pheromones, the bird girl and her pyrokinesis, the acid vomit girl, the werewolf Trip, the vampire, and of course the redhead bearer of the blob.

  “Sure you don’t want to run?” You ask the lizard woman, hoping.

  “No more running. We fight.” Chamelia says, strategizing. “You sure you don’t want to run, Detective?”

  “Not on your life.”

  Chamelia joins you in a tobacco ceremony, the smoke carrying prayers for a successful fight up to the heavens. You don’t know that for once someone is actually listening, and gratefully accepts the power that comes
with your prayer.

  You go to the roof, brief the SWAT team on what you know, and same for the teams manning the basement.

  You instruct every cop to retrieve all spare rounds of ammunition from patrol cars, and to spread the word.

  If we’re gonna go down, we’re gonna do it with firepower.

  And if you survive, you’re leaving the LAPD and going back to Pine Ridge. Your roots are calling. It’s finally time to go home.

  7:10 PM LAPD Headquarters Interrogation Room 2

  Special Agent Quatro already knows from Red Feather and Günn’s interviews that the mansion’s owner Charles Wallace Crane as well as the DJ conspired to kill all the partygoers. But now she knows something they don’t thanks to the diligent work of forensic IT specialists who recovered emails from the Cullen brothers’ wiped hard drives: who paid the Bad Vibe Kids to vaporize all the evidence. The joy of keyword searches, that’s what the IT forensics team said. Quatro wasn’t surprised. She’d suspected it from the moment she laid her hands on the crime scene earlier today. A full confession never hurts, though, and most especially one captured on camera.

  Armed with the audiotape of Frank Cullen’s interview, Quatro heads into the interview room where Frank’s brother Tommy sits, his legs restlessly tapping against the floor, feet clad in Doc Martens. Tommy looks not a day over fifteen, even though he’s a few months past his eighteenth birthday. Dressed all in black, pale skin, pale hair, a rash of acne across his forehead and cheeks. To Tommy’s credit, he doesn’t look scared anymore. Just resolute. And resigned.

  “Hi Tommy. I’m Special Agent Quatro from the CIA. This is Assistant Chief Ortiz of the LAPD.”