As per instructions, Speedy folded the leather over the book without actually touching it and stuck the bundle under his arm. Fat Bob opened his mouth as if to speak, but closed it again with an expression of chagrin when Speedy gave him a look.
The two men stepped over the DB in the doorway and hurried outside into the light of day. This was Hunter’s View, the projects south of the City proper. Scarred apartment blocks surrounded them, bars on all the windows and most of the units obviously uninhabitable.
As they walked quickly past a burned plastic play structure in a playground, a black kid on a ten-speed cruised around a corner and past them. As he saw the two pale faces, the kid’s eyes widened like he couldn’t believe it. As he pedaled rapidly away, the kid commenced with a loud Indian war whoop, a warbling cry coming from his mouth as he rapidly patted his lips with one hand. After a few seconds, the war whoop was echoed from several unseen spots in the surrounding block; the whoopers sounded like they were getting rapidly closer.
Speedy and Fat Bob broke into an unashamed sprint and rounded the building to the street proper. Little Willy saw them coming with obvious relief, and he pulled the Le Mans away from the curb before their respective car doors had even slammed shut all the way.
They were in Hunter’s Point, so they booked west on Third Street past Candlestick Park, away from China Basin and the derelict Shipyard. When they hit the Bayshore Freeway onramp north, the tension in the car diminished almost visibly: phase one was complete, gone down much easier than the Man had led them to expect.
Speedy hit a bank of payphones in Union Square for the reach out. Fat Bob lounged in false casualness a few phones away, watching everything happening behind Speedy’s back and ready to crunch anyone trying to swoop on his crimie’s blind side; Speedy’s brother Little Willy was double-parked at the curb chain smoking, flicking one butt after another out the Le Mans’ window, thinking thoughts and suffering his usual epiphanies.
Stolid German tourists waited to ride the cable cars running up and down Powell Street, as if imagining this to be the typical American experience. Surrounding the Square was one of the trendiest shopping districts this side of the east coast: Armani and Louis Vuitton and Tiffany & Co.; Saks Fifth Avenue and Salvatore Ferragamo, Bulgari and Arthur Beren; Nine West and 240 Stockton and Dior Homme.
Union Square was a cash cow, designed to make the local rubes swarm up and vomit their cash – SF was traditionally a town for the nouveau riche, her often unlettered wealthy eager to purchase the accoutrements necessary for establishing superiority over the rabble.
Speedy dialed the number he’d been required to memorize, and the Man picked up before the first ring had finished.
“You have the book?” the Man asked.
“In my car and ready for delivery,” Speedy said. “You have what you promised?”
“Well,” the Man said, smug glee tingeing his voice. “About that. You will get what is coming to you.”
“That’s about what I expected from the git go” Speedy said, giving a round up gesture to Fat Bob by twirling his finger. Bob bumped erect from the phone booth he’d been leaning against and rotated in place, looking for the inevitable chop and knowing Speedy would turn it around on the fools as soon as they showed their hand.
Fat Bob bounced on his feet in prep, the wrecking bar held down along his leg. He pointed at Little Willy waiting in the car and raised his brows interrogatively at Speedy. Speedy nodded and Fat Bob meandered that way, glaring at everyone in his path – observant people darted to the right and the left to get out Bob’s way.
“You are at the Transamerica Pyramid as I instructed?” the Man asked.
“Well,” Speedy said. “About that. You never gave me reason to trust so I must confess we’re not at that specific location. You really thought we’d let you ambush us? I’m the king, bitch – no one fucks me, I know what you were gonna do.”
The Man was silent for several pregnant seconds. “Not there?” Whatever smugness he’d been feeling was no longer evident in his tone. “Not there? But that is where you have to be. It is the locus, the intersection for the lines of power.”
“Whatever you say chief. Let’s re-negotiate the exchange.”
“There will be no re-negotiation,” the Man said in a voice simultaneously resigned, and on the verge of breaking down. There was a chunky, crumbling sort of sound on the other end of the phone line, and Speedy pulled the phone handset way from his ear as a sudden waft of arctic cold came out the ear piece.
“Master,” the Man burbled, and then there was silence.
Speedy waited in growing paranoia and impatience. After a bit he snarled, “Are you there asshole?”
On the other end a voice kicked up, not the Man’s, sounding like it was squeezed out through a vat full of mush: “You imbecile – the Man is deceased.”
“Speedy,” Willy wailed.
Speedy goggled at the car – amber light billowed from its interior, blurring Willy’s outline so he was no more than a silhouette. The light strengthened even as Speedy watched, wafting forth out the windows like spreading mist. Fat Bob had his hand on the back seat door handle but let go and scrambled back a few steps. Speedy sprinted to join Bob and the crime partners stood together, eyes wide and glittering as the filthy lemon light strobed.
“Get out the car Willy,” Fat Bob rasped, his voice gravelly from all the times he’d been punched in the throat. “It’s a bomb.”
“I can’t,” Little Willy said, wrenching his arms around without releasing his grasp on the book. “It’s stuck to my hands, I can’t let go of it.”
The book lay open in Willy’s lap and his gaze was rapt on its pages, from which the growing light originated – shining on his face from below, the sickly glow made Willy look like a jaundiced corpse. Speedy took a single long stride to the car and flung open the driver door.
“Knock it out his hands, Bob,” Speedy said. “Motherfucker poisoned it or something.”
Bob approached with obvious reluctance, and took a good swipe at the book with his wrecking bar. The book didn’t budge at the bar’s impact – instead the wrecking bar bounced back like it had hit a brick wall and Bob dropped it with a cry, shaking his hand.
The wrecking bar squirmed and contorted on the ground, morphed into something resembling a huge saffron centipede and slithered down the nearest storm drain muttering to itself. “The fuck,” Fat Bob yelled, back pedaling away.
A woman started screaming over and over somewhere out of sight, and the windows of all the surrounding buildings went milky and opaque as if they’d grown cataracts. Speedy and Fat Bob were instantaneously back-to-back as if their shoulder blades had magnetized together. The sawed-off was in Speedy’s hand; Fat Bob’s truculent fists were capped by his white faced berserker scowl.
“What is it Speedy?” Bob whispered. “Nukes? Some kinda Russki shit?”
“Slide over Willy,” Speedy said, and climbed behind the wheel as his little brother complied, Willy’s hands still seemingly glued to the pulsing tome.
Speedy glanced almost apologetically at Fat Bob as he shut the driver door. “I’m thinking the Transamerica Pyramid is the only shot that makes sense. I’ll understand if you maybe want to walk from here brother.”
Fat Bob paused in obvious reluctance. The unseen woman’s shrieks segued into maniacal laughter, the crowd waiting for cable car rides ran screaming as two of the cable cars started mating, and the man nearest Bob clawed at his own face until blood flowed down his cheeks. Bob hastened to climb in the back seat.
“Eye of the storm, right?” Fat Bob growled in exasperation. “How’s about we step on it then.”
Speedy smoked the tires away from the curb and they headed down Market Street, but whatever was going on followed them: people pointed at the car as they drove by – looking out the rear windshield, Fat Bob saw the Le Mans leaving sallow tires tracks in its wake as if it had driven through paint. The yellow seeped and spread to both sides, up the curbs
onto the sidewalk, and even up the building exteriors.
Bob slowly faced front as they roared down the street: everything apparently normal up ahead. It was close of business for ‘the Wall Street of the West.’ and afternoon rush hour was kicking in.
The more rarefied office people had direct express elevators to below ground parking, and their de rigueur Beamers & Benz’s were queued up at the lot exits up to the street. But as they passed one parking lot exit and the yellow oozed onto the ramp and down it, Fat Bob saw the garage attendant leave his booth and approach the first car in line awaiting its turn to vomit forth into traffic. The attendant, who was surprisingly disheveled and looking more than a little jaundiced, leaned in the car window and started suckling at the driver’s face, which caved in rapidly.
Bob winced and turned away to look at Little Willy; Willy shed silent tears as he continued to read the book, as if his now yellow eyes were just as trapped by it as his hands were. Bob caught Speedy’s eye in the rear view mirror, hoping he didn’t look as terrified as Speedy did.
As the Le Mans blew past and the yellow spread to them, long queues of lower echelon cubicle workers filed down the entrance stairs into the underworld of BART stations running the length of Market. As the lines of people descended, unreassuring noises caterwauled from the depths below – no one was coming back up from underground that Speedy could see. The Muni stops were mobbed by thousands of mass transit commuters fornicating, murdering each other in various creative ways, or doing both simultaneously – the yellow clung to their skin, and their outlines altered in ways not good to see – people melting together into new amalgams, or growing in heaves, or crumbling into dust and scattering away.
As they approached the Montgomery Block, Speedy’s eyes traveled up the Transamerica Pyramid’s seemingly endless 48-stories to the pointed tip, which stabbed toward heaven – it looked like an extended middle finger, as if SF was flipping the world the bird. Almost against his will, Speedy thought of Little Willy’s eternal fascination with the Pyramid. Willy once told Speedy it looked like some kind of cyclopean occult device built by business executives to invoke the Demon of Money and sell their non-existent souls to it. Now it was as if Willy’s whimsy had dictated a new reality: the Pyramid hummed with power, and exuded a rank sulfurousness that polluted the air around it like a Golden Gate fog bank.
As he careened past Clown Alley, Speedy realized it was a forlorn hope to think heading here could make any difference. The yellow following the Le Mans had caught up, and stained all the surrounding skyscrapers until merging with the more brilliant gold cloud pulsing from the Pyramid – the Pyramid’s humming grew ominously louder.
“What do we do now Willy?” Speedy asked, skidding to a stop at the Pyramid’s base, next to the main entrance. “C’mon brainiac – what’s in that freakin book? How do we make this stop?”
“We don’t,” Willy said, sounding distracted as he continued scanning the lines. He reached the bottom of the page and it turned by itself to the next, without any outside assistance Speedy or Bob could see. Both Bob and Speedy instinctively did their best not to look directly at the book – but it kept sucking at their attention, there in the corner of their eye.
“We’re cards in a deck,” Little Willy said. “This time we got shuffled into a lousy hand. But this is only one end for us – the hand will be dealt again, and we’ll all be in it. The Yellow King does not rule all, only his own little bedraggled corner. Our tough luck, to die here. But take courage: the book says we’ll only have to face a few that are worse than this one, throughout infinity.”
“Cut the happy horseshit Willy,” Fat Bob shouted. “Fuck the yellow king, figure this out for us.”
“I already have,” Little Willy said, opening his door and getting out.
Willy walked to the Pyramid’s main entrance. The lobby security guard on duty inside no longer fit his rent-a-pig uniform, instead kind of spilling out of it – the clothes were probably the only thing shaping ‘him’ into any approximation of an oatmeal-hued human form, and if it had a face anymore Speedy couldn’t discern it. The amorphous uniformed blob kind of seethed out its seat and reeled to the door, holding it open for Little Willy like a bellboy.
“Willy,” Speedy howled, climbing out the car and taking a step toward the entrance with his hand outreached.
Unhurried footsteps sounded – Bob couldn’t say if they were a million miles away or right next to his ear, but the delicate footfalls cut through the background noise like they were the only sound in the universe. The lights had gone out inside the Pyramid and, from the depths of the lobby’s gloom, a figure appeared and approached.
It was impossibly tall and inhumanly angled beneath its billowing goldenrod-hued ragged robes; its hooded head scraped the ceiling. A ragged mask covered its face with eyes of a sort peering oh-so-tiredly from above the mask’s concealment. It reached the door where Willy awaited, and the security blob aimed its featureless face toward the floor as if in awed respect.
The Yellow King fumbled at its tattered mask. Speedy and Fat Bob both gasped and reared back, unable to close their eyes against the upcoming revelation. But Little Willy reached up and stayed the Yellow King’s hand, holding out the book as an offering.
The Yellow King pointed its face at Willy, who did not recoil. The King took the book in one taloned paw, clasped Willy’s hand, and the two walked back into the darkness together side-by-side.
“Speedy,” Bob yelled from the driver’s seat. “I’m leaving. You might want to consider going with me.”
Speedy got in and they barreled away onto the Embarcadero.
San Francisco screamed. Buildings and hills collapsed all around them and new rules of order arose in novel patterns. The yellow skyline melted and flowed along the hills, the buildings popping into a disjointed array both alien and familiar: a medieval looking ocean of battlements and rooftops, cupolas and towers, as if the entire City had just morphed into one huge haunted castle.
In an electronics store, a three headed elephant puppet was disemboweling another doll over and over on a bank of about a dozen stacked televisions; the puppet entrails spilling out the sacrifice’s belly incision were tawny. People shuffled or sprinted about on the sidewalk, many of them already so altered from humanity that their mere outlines were impossible for Bob to look at for more than a second or so.
Fat Bob saw person after person on their knees genuflecting in reverence toward the Pyramid, and the Yellow King. Bob spat out the window.
They hit the Bay Bridge onramp and merged onto the lower deck. Fat Bob tingled in relief – but looking over at Speedy, Bob saw his crimie crying; Speedy’s cheeks were wet with tears.
‘Willy,’ Fat Bob thought, then: ‘Fuck that.’
“Don’t you dare wuss on me Speedy,” Bob snarled. “Don’t do that.”
“Right,” Speedy mumbled. “Right.” But he sat up straighter, wiping his face with the back of his hand, and Fat Bob was reassured.
Traffic was thick already, it being rush hour – only now the eastbound span of the Bay Bridge was packed with automotive refugees attempting to flee the City for Oakland just as Speedy and Fat Bob were. Lanes were ignored as cars sideswiped each other, grinding bumpers and trying to squeeze past, under, and over the other cars ahead of them – everyone striving desperately to attain another priceless car length away from the yellow hell unfolding behind them, everyone damning the horrible people occupying the space ahead that they all wanted to move through and occupy.
Almost immediately, Logjam City: the Le Mans couldn’t move another inch, and neither could any other auto on the bridge. The two men sat in their seats, both with equally stupid expressions on their face. Cunning was useless now.
“I say we head out to Bakersfield on foot from here,” Fat Bob said firmly. “We can lie low out there in the sticks till all this blows over.”
“Blows over?” Speedy shook his head and stared at his friend in bemusement, bitterly envious of Bob’s
utter lack of imagination.
Something clambered down from the upper span, squeezed over the railing and onto the lower level. The thing was maybe the size of a forklift, with way too many legs, a club of a tail held over its head, and numerous hooked grasping members. It was most like a huge, fleshy crab, its skin an unwholesome shade of saffron – hundreds of eyes covered its upper surface, all of them rolling idiotically.
It approached with a surprisingly dainty side step, its shearing mouthparts threshing wetly. It giggled with the voice of a small child as it peeled the top off the nearest car and began eating the passengers like bon-bons – their screams made a dissonant counterpoint to its high pitched titter.
It paused after biting the head off the last passenger, and slowly swiveled until it faced the Le Mans with the decapitated corpse dangling from its grasping members. All its eyes peered at the Le Mans.
“Speedy!” the crab thing crowed in Little Willy’s voice, dropping the remnant of its last meal and starting in for them.
Speedy and Fat Bob exited the car with urgency, but the thing was already upon them, and it was not to be denied. It snagged Fat Bob’s arm and dragged him up into the air, where he howled as he dangled awaiting ingestion.
Speedy ran toward it with his face in a rictus, letting go with both barrels when he was close enough to touch it. Half its eyes burst under the buckshot – it dropped Fat Bob like a bad habit and shambled rapidly away cursing imaginatively, still in Willy’s voice.
“You all right?” Speedy asked Bob, helping him up.
“Just a scratch,” Bob said, “Nothing much at all.” But the stain spreading on Bob’s jacket was yellow, and he wouldn’t meet Speedy’s eye.
With a metallic shriek the span upheaved as if an earthquake had snapped it loose from its moorings, and it ponderously tilted downward like a dump truck preparing to spill them all into the sea. Fat Bob managed to grab hold of the side railing, but Speedy slid off the ragged edge of the shattered span, barely managing to clutch hold of the ragged edge of asphalt where the span ended.
A Season In Carcosa Page 27