We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  I looked down at my hands. Mysteriously, my straight razor was clutched in my right hand, open, gleaming. I wondered if I could bleed. If I could speak the Words. Or if I could cut my own throat, solve the world’s problems that way. I stared at the razor. Where had I gotten it? I couldn’t remember.

  The kurre-nikas. I wondered if they’d already used it. It was an obvious question. Why hadn’t I asked it? Something like that would take calibration. Trial runs. Experimentation. I looked up at my big, dumb hetero life mate in silent appeal.

  “Lem,” Mags whispered.

  But I knew it was useless. I would tell them. The realization calmed me. My body stopped trembling. My breathing and heart rate slowed. Everything went quiet and calm.

  “It’s okay, Magsie,” I said.

  It felt good to give in. I took a deep breath. Felt Mags take a deep breath.

  And then I told them.

  41. I KNEW I WAS IN Nebraska, because there was nothing to see.

  Again, teleportation was disorienting by its nonexperiential nature. There was no visual or audio cue; suddenly, you were somewhere else. I stumbled because the ground was uneven after the perfect floors of the Shanghai apartment. I was in a field. It was fucking freezing, and pitch-black, and the wind was so strong I thought if I held open my coat, I’d catch a breeze and take off. I immediately began shivering.

  I spun around, peering into the gloom. I was alone. Fallon and Mags were nowhere to be seen. The Girl Who Was Not a Girl or Elsa or whatever had sent us to different spots. Safe passage didn’t specify anything else, I supposed, and now the deal was done, so staying in the spot they’d sent me seemed unwise. I half expected a tiger to materialize out of thin air. Or a dimma.

  Teleportation was an expensive spell for which I didn’t have gas or the know-how, so I started walking. I’d taken three steps when I felt the faintest tremor, as if something had exploded far off in the distance. The world swam around me like I was about to pass out, but I felt fine. Everything blurred, then snapped back into place a second later.

  I’d never had a chance to ask Hiram whether prolonged exposure to magic gave you brain tumors. Maybe that was what was wrong with enustari.

  I resumed walking and sliced my thumb with my switchblade. Muttering three syllables, I closed my eyes and felt for a highway. Something with two lanes, at least. Felt a road beating softly against my left cheek and turned into the wind. I pulled my coat closed at the neck and started off in that direction.

  The road was ice-cold and hadn’t seen a car in hours. Maybe days. I stood shivering on the shoulder, my hand at my throat, and considered my options. I was somewhere. It felt the way I’d always imagined Nebraska to feel, though I couldn’t be sure unless I found someone or put some gas into it. Fallon’s old friend Elsa knew how to send someone to the fucking middle of nowhere, I had to give her that.

  I chewed on the kurre-nikas and whether it had already been used.

  Jesus. My brain snagged on that thought and wouldn’t let go. The universe resetting around me, silent, my own fucking past being rewritten. And no one knowing, except Mika Renar. The spider in her web, rubbing the threads.

  I stared into the inky dark and felt the wind pushing its fingers into every seam, every gap, between each and every hair to freeze my skin.

  MY HEAD WAS SWIMMING and I felt hot.

  The kids were all drunk. The kid driving, a girl named Lucy who the others called Loose, was probably the least drunk, but it was still kind of unnerving. I’d given them a hair too much Charm, three degrees west of innocent, and they were all looking at me with big drunk teenage eyes like I was their Prince Charming come to save them from working three years at Walmart and then having sixty kids. The car smelled like pot and bourbon, and the radio was playing a song I’d never heard, all rhythm, no guitars. The two in the backseat on either side of me kept touching me. Ten years before, I would have gone for it.

  Ten years before, I reminded myself, these kids had been seven.

  Lucy was tall and had black hair, not pretty at all, but skinny enough to finish high school pregnant. Her two blond friends and their unfortunate haircuts and too-tight tops were in the back with me. The redhead in the passenger seat had blue eyes, hadn’t smiled once, and looked about ready to cry.

  None of their phones worked. They didn’t seem surprised. They said no one’s phones worked, and they hadn’t had Internet in weeks. I asked about landlines. They stared at me.

  They started talking in a dreamy, drunken way about how fucked-up their town was. Half the place had moved away. The other half was made up of unemployed men who occasionally shot their wives and then themselves, and anyone else walking by. School had ended early this year. Two months ahead of schedule, they just called it a day. No one knew for sure if they were going to bother having school next autumn, and now, unexpectedly, the girls weren’t sure they were happy about that.

  They drove me to the interstate, and then the driver, Loose, seriously considered taking me the whole way. She idled in the middle of the empty road for a long time, the choppy engine on the Malibu like a giant clearing his throat. Her three friends sat there, befuddled and dreamy, and let her wait. I sat there with half an erection and a contact high, knowing what she was thinking. Why not go with me, wherever I was going?

  I THOUGHT ABOUT NEW York, about Billington and the Army of Assholes she’d assembled.

  The redhead was snoring slightly, her head resting on my shoulder as the bus bumped and turned. I’d gassed the driver into stopping in the middle of the fucking highway, cornfields rotting on either side of us, and then I’d gassed up five tickets. It didn’t take much. The driver didn’t have a uniform on. He was an older black guy with a friar’s halo of white hair. Management, filling in. Odds were the official driver had stepped off the bus at a rest stop and just kept walking.

  The Malibu, noble and last serviced in the previous decade, had died a slow, agonizing death. Everything got dim so slowly we didn’t notice at first, and then we were driving in pitch darkness. The car was still running, but the lights and the dash had gone dark. For a minute or two we kept going, just driving into a wall of darkness, and then Loose cut the engine and let us coast to a stop, saved by the uncanny straightness of midwestern highways.

  Red smelled like soap. Just simple soap, clean and dry. Lucy and the two blondes were sitting in the row behind us. The bus was deathly quiet. Twenty or twenty-five people, most of them young. None of them had any luggage. None of them had noticed we were taking a slight detour, the driver cheerfully gassed to be cooperative. Fifteen minutes in, I was the only one who had his overhead light on. I looked around and pulled my pack of cigarettes from my jacket pocket, shook one out, and placed it between my lips. I lit it with a cheap plastic lighter and wondered briefly if they were still making cheap plastic lighters somewhere, if the workers were still showing up, if there were still trucks carrying palettes of them around the country to filthy gas stations and head shops. I breathed in smoke, sent a plume into the air. Waited for anyone to complain. Two guys were sitting across the aisle from us. One was skinny with a shaved head and wore a button-down shirt and a sweater, his face thin and flushed. The other was younger, skinny with brown hair grown over the ears. This one couldn’t sit still for one moment, constantly rearranging himself.

  The older guy leaned over and jostled my knee. His scalp was pink and smooth. “Can I bum one?”

  THE SHOCKS ON THE old Ford creaked alarmingly as we went a little too fast down the dirt road. Both windows down, it was colder in the cab than outside. The old man was dressed entirely in denim. Jeans, denim jacket, blue denim work shirt. He had white hair that shagged over his ears, and pink, permanently sunburned skin. He hadn’t said three words since I’d gassed our way into his vehicle.

  In the bed, the four girls and three guys were chattering. Smoking my cigarettes, freezing their asses off. I hadn’t Charmed a single one after hitching my ride with Lucy. The three guys had told me their n
ames, but I hadn’t listened.

  The old familiar burn of scars forming on my arm felt good. It had been too long. I used to go to bed every night with that burning sensation, collapsing into a pitch-black exhaustion, the pain and itch of a dozen short cons my only company. It felt good to get back into that dark, red place where everything throbbed and going to sleep was as easy as closing your eyes.

  The driver reached forward and turned on the radio. It was an old beat-to-shit radio, perfect for an old beat-to-shit Ford. He scanned through static for a while. Not a single station. Then he gave up and pushed an ancient cassette in. George Strait began singing something depressing.

  “You got a cigarette for me, son?” he said over the music. “I quit twenty-three years ago.”

  “YOU’RE A HARD PERSON to find.”

  She peered at me through the gloom, the oldest shotgun I’d ever seen in my life wedged into her tiny shoulder, an old triple shot. She was chewing gum. The shotgun had been sawed down to a ridiculous nub and would kill every living thing within twenty feet if it went off. She was wearing a black-and-blue Germs T-shirt, a pair of ratty jeans, and pink cowboy boots. Her black hair was short, but she’d contrived to have a lick of it hang in her face. Her nipples were hard, and I felt shitty for noticing.

  For a few seconds Claire chewed her gum loudly. Then she slowly lowered the boomer. “Unfind me,” she said.

  The truck idled behind me, belching white exhaust into the cold air.

  “I brought a few friends.”

  Her eyes flicked over my shoulder, then back to me. “They’re fine where they are.”

  “It’s time we talked, Claire.”

  She kept studying me, her face impassive. “How’d you find me?”

  I sighed. “Every time I try to cast a spell on you or in your general direction, Claire, it bombs. Just falls flat, disappears.” I grinned a little. “So a year ago I cast a few Seeking mu and got nothing until I figured it out. Figured out that when it’s aimed directly at you, magic shits the fucking bed for some reason. So I did it the hard way, the Trickster way. I cast a spell to tell me where you weren’t. Then narrowed it down.” I shrugged. “It took a while.”

  Behind her, the front door to the saggy little house opened, and Daryl Fucking Houy emerged, a bottle of beer in his hand. He ambled to the top of the porch stairs and leaned against a post that was set on a bad angle. The wind blew his hair around—longer than I remembered. He’d let his beard grow a bit. It suited him.

  “Holy heck,” he said, smiling. “I remember you.”

  I nodded without taking my eyes off Claire. She was as pretty as I remembered. She’d gained a few pounds, and that suited her. “Daryl.”

  “Go on, Lem,” Claire said tiredly. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”

  “Except that I just told some enustari where you are.”

  For a second she just stared at me. Then she broke. It was something like hurt, something like betrayal. Like she’d thought we were friends. Her eyes got shiny and she looked away, swallowing something hard.

  “Daryl,” she said, her voice a little shaky. “Get the Run Bag.”

  I took a step forward, holding up one hand. “Wait!”

  The shotgun came back up. “Jesus, Lem,” she said, sounding angry now. “Wait for what?”

  I smiled. “It’s okay. I lied.”

  “AN OLD TRICK,” I said, politely declining to ever take a second sip of the coffee Daryl Fucking Houy had just served me. “It’s simple. If you believe something is true, if you really believe it, it fools everyone. It fools the universe.”

  I heard Hiram’s booming voice. Reality is perception.

  “Basically, I cast a little spell that ensured I believed a lie to be true for a while.”

  Buoyed by my own cleverness, the interior of the bungalow felt surprisingly charming. I sat at an old, weathered kitchen table, but the cabinetry and appliances were in great shape, and the whole place had a freshly painted glow to it. The kitchen had been done in a pale yellow that was cheerful, and through the kitchen doors I could see the living room, where my new friends were being entertained in fine style by Darryl Fucking Houy. It was done up in a baby blue that worked, somehow.

  The domesticity of the scene made no sense. This was Claire Mannice. Murderer, survivor, marked.

  “So you lied,” she said, arms crossed in front of her chest, one hand with a cigarette clamped between two fingers, “and they believed you because they thought you couldn’t lie.”

  I nodded. “The enustari always think too much of their spells. Sure, go after the main line and you’ll get a bloody nose. You don’t go after the main line. You get a wedge in the cracks.”

  She nodded. “Where’d you say I was?”

  “North Korea.”

  “Seriously?”

  I nodded. In the living room, a soft wave of low laughter went up. Daryl had served home-brewed beer and homemade deer sausage, proud as a new father. It sounded like it was going over well.

  “We got lazy,” Claire said suddenly, curling her hand so she could scowl down at her cigarette. “Haven’t seen a soul out this way in months. Not a single car, not a single person. No mail, no cops. Months. Montana might as well be the moon, for all the traffic we’ve seen.” She looked back at me. Her face was exactly as I recalled it, the exact lines and weight. “So we stopped being so careful. Otherwise you wouldn’t have made it this close.”

  I shrugged. “I know a lot of tricks, Claire.”

  She gave me the slightest ghost of a smile. “All right, Vonnegan. I’m not saying I’m in, but what do you need me for? All this time I’ve been lying low so that dotty old bitch doesn’t snatch me, and now you’re here to bring me in from the cold.”

  I thought of my little spell being sucked into a black hole centered on Claire, the way her magic resistance had evolved, changed. “You’re my secret weapon.”

  She looked back at her cigarette. “Tell me this is important. Tell me this isn’t just some fucking grudge match.”

  Instead, I told her it wasn’t over for her, even if she wished it were. I told her what they were doing. That she was the most important person in the world, and now two totally batshit insane enustari were after her. I told her that her empty town and its zero visitors were directly connected to stories on the news every day about endless tragedy and horror. I told her that Renar had been trying for years to find her, that she was still marked, that the world was cracking open like a rotten fruit from the pressure of being bled, bled, and bled again, all in preparation for Renar’s next attempt at forever.

  She frowned, snuffing out her cigarette in an old-school brass ashtray. “If they’re going to change everything, why do they need me now?” She looked at me, genuinely curious. “If they change that moment and everything happens the way they want it to back in New York, why bother with me now? And the other one—the girl. Why does she need me in the first place?”

  I thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” I said. I was used to her look of disappointment. All the recruits always looked at me that way the first time they realized I didn’t know shit about shit. “Fallon told me it has to be you. If they try to cast the tah-namus again, it has to be you . . . but I don’t know why.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s just insurance—they’ll fuck with reality if they have to, but if they can strap you in first, they’ll go that route.”

  She nodded like this was always the most likely answer. Which it was. She reached for her pack of cigarettes. For a moment, the noise from the living room faded away, leaving us alone together in a dying world, smoking the last pack of cigarettes ever. Me and Claire at the end of the world felt right.

  “All right, Chief,” she said. “If I was going along with this, what would be the next step?”

  This, at least, I’d thought about. “We’re heading back to New York, first of all. That’s where Fallon and Mags will be headed, and a few other folks you never met. We’ll have a war council.”

&nb
sp; She looked at me sharply and stared for a few beats. “Pitr?”

  I frowned. “Pitr Mags, sure. Why?”

  Her expression didn’t change. “Because he’s been dead for two years, Lem.”

  42. THE TOLLBOOTHS AT THE GEORGE Washington Bridge were abandoned. All three of our cars sailed through, joining an anemic trickle of other vehicles heading in and out of New York. It was me and the old man, Claire and Daryl, and the eight people we’d picked up along the way. I hadn’t asked any of the hangers-on to come along. They just had.

  I sat in the cab with the old man and stared at the thick plume of black smoke rising out of Harlem and felt nothing. I looked down at the switchblade in my lap and wondered at it. Looked back at the plume of black smoke and thought about the kurre-nikas.

  I remembered Mags standing next to me in that apartment in Shanghai. Remembered him tearing ass out of the motel in Seward. I couldn’t sense him now, and I hadn’t been able to since arriving in the middle of fucking nowhere courtesy of Elsa and friends. I didn’t know what had happened to us when Mags had come back from death, but I’d felt him since then. His heartbeat, mainly, like a goddamn drum, but sometimes other things, like his temper or his breathing. At times it seemed like I could live inside his entire nervous system.

  Now, nothing. He wasn’t there. Had he been before? Had he really come back from the dead? Had he ever been there at all? Two fucking years, Claire’d said.

  But he had been. And then . . . he hadn’t. The kurre-nikas. It had to be. Why I retained this memory, I didn’t know. But Renar had pulled the lever on her terrible difference engine and erased my friend from the universe. Claire told me Mags had bled out in the desanctified church and I’d bled some poor kid dead, tearing the place down, raging.

  When had Renar first used the kurre-nikas? I wondered. Because Mags had been there, then he’d been dead, then somehow he’d come back—and I had no fucking faith I’d had fuck-all to do with that—and now he was dead again, the last few years a dream. Unless I’d fucking cracked and I’d been imagining Mags there, a Glamour, a ghost, and everyone staring at me in mixed pity and fear as I called the thin air a fucking moron.