The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  Fucking bitch ass…

  * * *

  And then the tick is on my back, clamped tight; and it’s not fangs or a feeding tube—it’s not physical at all—but I can feel the bite at the back my neck, at the base of my skull, feel it reaching in to shred my thoughts and suck them out. Loyalty? I’m a fucking freak of a beast of base desires kept in line by a lie. There’s no love here, only need, the need to follow, to fawn, to be favoured with treats and scraps of attention, the need to be needed, to be needed to need—

  13.

  And I’m turning, growling at this fucking wretch of a weak handler on the ground in front of me, this fucking faggot kid on his back, his throat exposed like the craven whelp he is, just some backwoods bottom boy who opened himself up to a tick once before, no fucking wonder he let it happen again. All I can smell now, as I crouch to leap, is his fear and my anger, his weakness and my power.

  I don’t know how he manages it, the roll to one side as I jump. The crossbow smashing down on my nose.

  * * *

  —Don’t you fucking dare, he says.

  I’m still growling.

  —Off! he shouts.

  And he’s bringing the gun up even as I go back and down, firing it once, twice. The bullets don’t hit my skull, but it feels like they might as well have as the tick is blasted off me. There’s a scream of pure despair that hits my boy hard. I see the gun barrel turning, pointing up, towards his chin, but he’s my boy again now, and—I’ll apologise later for nearly biting his hand off.

  I whirl to spit twisted steel at the tick. And howl.

  * * *

  I howl as it scrambles upright, limbs clicking back from ragdoll dislocations to roughly human placements. I howl as it backs away, scuttles to this side and that, looking for a point of attack. I howl at the tick from all fours, standing over my boy, guarding him as he hauls himself back and up. I howl like Cerberus at the gates of Hell as he stumbles to his feet beside me, lays a hand on my back, a hand that steadies as I howl, as purposed as the one that’s raised now, pointing.

  —Sic him, boy, he says. Kill!

  * * *

  I hit the tick as a berserker, slashing chest and belly, tearing through one leg’s hamstring as it spins, wrenching the other leg off at the knee. I catch it by the wrists as it flails, raise it in a cruciform and tear its jaw from its face with my teeth, spit it into the grave. Half its head follows in a crunch of bone. Then the rest. With a foot on its chest, the fucker’s arms pop from their sockets like chicken wings.

  When I’m done shaking it in my teeth like a stuffed toy, there’s not much left.

  14.

  Still, there’s something left. Fingers twitch and grapple at air. Toes curl. Wherever there are joints intact, they jerk and spasm. This is the creature in its natural state, I reckon—a set of clutching convulsions, twitches and shudders, driven by a brainless impetus to play out its travesty of existence. I crack open its ribcage, chew out the brown lump that passes for a heart and drop it in front of my boy, like a ball. He empties a full chamber of silver bullets into it and dissolves what’s left in homeopathically-diluted holy water. Eventually, everything is still.

  * * *

  My boy stands there with the empty gun still dangling in one hand, looking down at the mess of the creature that ate Jared Swift. The scent of a moment of crisis is still on him, and for all the grim determination summoned by a bloody-minded howl of defiance, there’s a hint of shame too. He’s not happy, and it’s my fault, I know. Don’t know why, but I know it’s my fault.

  Then he looks at me, and something changes in his eyes, and he says two words and everything changes.

  —Good boy!

  And I am motherfucking magnificent.

  * * *

  I shift back to humanity, feeling slick and shiny, and I don’t just mean with the viscerae. I feel fierce. Every shift is a remaking, after all, and if the transformation to wolfman unleashes a beast in me, well, so does the return to this human form. Like humans aren’t beasts too? I grab his hand as he moves toward the stairs, towards disposal chemicals and rubber gloves and all that jazz, pull him in to lick his face, exuberantly. Hey, it’s cleaning, sorta. He stops me, wipes a sleeve across my mouth.

  —Like people, he says.

  And we kiss.

  * * *

  So maybe I get a bit carried away as we’re washing the gore off each other with holy water. Maybe it’s the wolf in me that ignores the protest of not here. Or maybe it’s the human in me that says, especially here. So you think we’re both monsters? A hellhound and a human so offay with carnage we don’t see how fucked-up it is to let the passion loose here and now?

  I say it’s life, to fuck as humans in the ruins of death.

  As living, breathing, eating, shitting, fucking human beings in the ruin of death.

  Troublesolving

  by Tim Pratt

  Here’s how I got involved with Cameron Cassavetes:

  I was walking along Lakeshore Avenue, close to Christmas, just window shopping really since I was a) broke and b) didn’t have anyone in my life who expected a gift, or anyone I expected something from, except maybe my ex-wife, depending on her particular disposition come the day. I paused outside the little co-op bakery, my nose parsing the emerging aromas of the day’s handmade vegetarian pizza: goat cheese, rosemary oil, fresh basil. The odor alone was enough to make me forget my troubles, until I remembered I didn’t even have eighteen bucks to buy a pie. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket and walked on, head tucked down, wishing I had a hat— winter takes its time coming to Northern California, and it’s nothing to an old East Coaster like myself, but there was a bit of a bite in the air nonetheless, and the tips of my ears were practically shivering. I went past the last table on the sidewalk, vaguely aware there was a woman sitting there with a coveted slice of pizza, mostly because I had to step out of my way to avoid tripping on the enormous overstuffed black-and-blue canvas bag beside her feet.

  “Here.” She stood and stuck a business card under my nose. I looked up, and she was a perfectly put-together woman in her maybe mid-thirties, on the pretty side of plain, with chestnut eyes that so exactly matched the shade of her hair, scarf, and sweater that she might have had them dyed to match. Her smile was bright and brief, a flash of sun on a cloudy day (or slash of lightning in a clear sky), and she flicked the outstretched card with her fingernail. “Take this. You’ll need it.”

  I took the card. It was white, with a very restrained and elegant font, and read “Cameron Cassavetes,” and underneath that, “Freelance Troublesolver,” and under that, a phone number with an Oakland area code.

  I tried to flirt—my ex-wife, who pities me, says I should practice more—saying, “Troublesolver, huh? I’ve always been more of a troublemaker myself.” I fished up my most sincere smile, and Cameron sighed like a doctor bearing bad news.

  “Just hold onto the card. Call if you need me, any time, day or night. If you don’t reach me right away, just leave a message.”

  I finally frowned. “What’s this about? What is it you do?”

  “I fix broken things.”

  “Do I look like a broken thing?”

  “Oh, Stephen.” She patted my cheek, scooped up her enormous bag, and walked off purposefully down the sidewalk and around the corner. She was out of sight before I thought to wonder—you probably noticed this already—how she knew my name.

  I threw her card in the first trash can I passed. I didn’t know what Cameron’s deal was, but I didn’t like the whole cheesy Twilight Zone feel of the situation. I had enough problems—did I ever—without mysterious women slipping me their numbers in spooky fashion.

  I did my shopping, because even though I was too broke for shampoo and soap, I wouldn’t get any more gigs if I smelled like braised hobo in sweat sauce. I noticed a guy in the drugstore wearing exactly the same clothes I was, and wondered when I’d become so generic—I used to have style. I mean, professionally. Th
e cashiers were huddled together talking in low voices, and as soon as I approached, they separated and cast sidelong glances at me. Was I already smelly or something? Did I look like a shoplifter? I hadn’t become quite that economically desperate yet.

  I carried my sad sack of toiletries back the way I’d come, toward the lake and my condo beyond. I wasn’t looking forward to going home, because there’s nothing sadder than the remains of an apartment where a pair of interior designers once lived, after they break up.

  In the lobby, I found another business card wedged in the door of my mailbox. Cameron Cassavetes, Troublesolver. This one included a street address—just a few blocks away—in addition to the phone number. I was a little creeped out. Was this woman stalking me? Or just desperate for work? The latter, I could relate to, but I was annoyed. This is supposed to be a secure building, but it’s not like there’s a doorman, and anyone who wants to get buzzed in just has to punch intercom buttons until somebody answers, and then claim to be a UPS or FedEx delivery.

  I shoved the card in my pocket to throw away when I got upstairs, then rode up the elevator—with its inspection notice expired eight months before, always reassuring. The moment I stepped into the long dim hallway I knew something was wrong. My door, the last one on the right side of the hall, was standing ajar. I should’ve probably called the police right then, but I did the stupid rationalization thing: “Did I leave the door open? Did the cleaning lady leave it open?” Even though I a) would never forget to lock up, being a cautious guy and b) hadn’t had a cleaning lady since my ex-wife moved out and took eleven-twelfths of our clients with her.

  I went to the door, stepped inside, and discovered devastation.

  Mere desolation would have been okay. That was normal. My ex took most of the best of our possessions when she left, and I agreed in order to keep the condo for myself. (She moved in with her—with the guy who— with Harold. Fucking Harold.) I was a decorator, so reversion to college-era chic Ikea shelves and a futon for a bed depressed me thoroughly. But poverty-in-Sparta décor looked splendid compared to what I beheld.

  I dashed to the kitchen first, to turn off the water in the overflowing sink, but the faucet handles had been ripped off, so I settled for pulling out the wads of dishtowels the vandals had used to clog the drain. I repeated the process in both bathrooms, where the fixtures had been similarly torn away. My carpets were soaked, but I dared hope water hadn’t leaked into the apartment below mine. Every room was a diorama of disaster, furniture smashed, cushions slit open and stuffing strewn about, books torn apart with their halves tossed in distant corners, refrigerator toppled and leaking odd fluids, toilets reduced to shards of porcelain, mirrors smashed, garbage in the remains of my bed, and windows and walls all spray painted with lurid graffiti in colors from Bauhaus Gold to Peek-A-Boo Blue to Rich Plum to Catalina Mist. Some of the spraypainted scrawls had the vaguely familiar look of graffiti tags from the neighborhood, but others were strange and sinuous, like sigils from some lost and secret civilization.

  I squelched across my ruined carpet to the landline and saw the phone was in pieces, too. I pulled out my cell, and hesitated—was this a 911-type situation? The vandals were gone. I could have looked up the non-emergency number, but my computer had been taken apart and dumped, mostly in my toilet, and the monitor spray-painted red over every pixel.

  Then I remembered the business card I’d shoved in my pocket. Cameron Cassavetes. Troublesolver. I had her number.

  I didn’t call her, either.

  * * *

  When she stepped in and turned on the light, I spun around in her chair and gave her a nasty smile. “When you weren’t here, I took the liberty of breaking into your office.” I’d smashed in a panel of glass with my elbow, reached in, and flipped the deadbolt, feeling every inch the righteous avenger.

  “I go through more windows that way,” Cameron Cassavetes said, seemingly unbothered by my presence in her office. She unbuttoned her sand-colored coat, unwound her long scarf, and hung both on a coat rack, then sat in the chair on the other side of her desk. I couldn’t help but notice she had the better of the two seats—hers looked like a Freedom chair from Humanscale, while I was sitting in some $89 steno chair from an office supply store. Why would she have the crappier chair behind her own desk?

  “I hope you weren’t waiting long,” she said.

  I decided to ignore her non-sequitur—and my curiosity about her furnishing choices—and stick to my script, which I’d been practicing during the hour I sat in the dark with no appreciable lumbar support. “So is it like a protection racket? If I don’t pay you to ‘solve my troubles’ you make sure I get a lot of trouble, starting with having my apartment destroyed?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with the vandalism at your home.”

  Denial, I’d expected. I snorted. “You think I’m stupid? It’s just coincidence you approached me out of the blue right before my place got wrecked? And that I found your card in my mailbox?”

  “Of course it wasn’t coincidence.” She looked totally relaxed, like she was conducting a job interview. “But, again, I didn’t have anything to do with the destruction.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited for elaboration. None was forthcoming. She just looked at me with that clear unwavering stare, like she was trying to calculate my body fat percentage or judge the weight of my soul by gaze alone. “Why’s that?” I said finally, conceding that I’d somehow lost control of the situation.

  “Two reasons. First, I don’t charge for my services, so it wouldn’t make much sense for me to shake you down, would it? And second, if you’ll allow me…”

  She came around the desk, and I pushed back in my chair, because I’m naturally obliging even when I don’t mean to be. Plus, as a freelancer myself, I was still trying to get over the idea of a freelance anything who literally did her work for free. I mean, I like decorating, but I wouldn’t do it for nothing, except maybe for a close friend, and I’m all out of those.

  She unlocked one of the drawers and withdrew a slim silver laptop, opened it up on the desk before me, and clicked and tapped with her fingers. A window popped up onscreen, showing webcam footage…of my hallway. The camera must have been at the far end of the hall, up high in a corner near the ceiling.

  “You’ve got my place bugged now?”

  “Observe.” More tapping, and the timestamp on the video ran back to the morning hours. I watched a couple of young guys in sweatshirts, carrying backpacks, open my door, apparently with a key, and go inside. About half an hour later they emerged, walking down the elevator, the webcam getting nice clear views of their faces.

  “So you document your acts of vandalism…”

  Cameron pulled a little thumb drive from the side of the laptop and handed it to me. “Here. The footage. Take it to the cops, tell them you set up the webcam because you heard there’d been some break-ins in the neighborhood—that’s always true around here—and ask if they can identify the perpetrators. The boys are both well known to the cops, believe me, with a string of minor priors.”

  “Aren’t you worried they’ll turn you in?”

  She rolled her eyes. She was cute when she did it. I took that as a sign of trouble. “No, Stephen. They don’t know who I am. I’m not the mastermind. I’m trying to help you.” Cameron returned to her comfy chair. “Give that to the cops, and they’ll put the boys away. But it won’t help your essential problem.”

  “What is my essential problem? And how do you know my name, or anything else about me?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Not yet.” I started to speak, intending to tell her to quit jerking me around, but she talked first. “Your essential problem. Have you ever heard of gangstalking?”

  “No.”

  “Well…imagine a group of people, not anyone you know, just strangers, who decide to destroy your life. They arrange problems for you, from minor annoyances—broken tail
lights on your car so the cops pull you over, your mail being misdirected, your windows smashed with rocks thrown from the street—to more serious things, like the kind of vandalism your apartment suffered today. They might call in multiple noise complaints on you to the police, or accuse you of flashing a bunch of kids at a playground. Basically the goal is to destroy your life, but to do so in a gradual, cumulative way, and with an ever-shifting cast of assailants, so you can’t point to a single perpetrator. The people who stalk you will seemingly have no relationship with one another, no motive, and since there are dozens or even hundreds of people involved, even if you manage to get one or two of them arrested on minor charges, it won’t really help. The gangstalkers might even have friends in the police or local government who cover for them, or who conspire to frame you for crimes.”

  “Christ. Why would people do something like that?”

  She shrugged. “Motives vary. Some people are truly chosen as random victims, for part of a gang initiation. Others are being punished by governments or other agencies for things they’ve said, or done, or seen.”

  “Stuff like that really happens?”

  Cameron frowned. “No, not really. Gangstalking isn’t real. Some mentally ill people believe they’re being gangstalked, but it’s just another flavor of paranoia, a way to weave every slight and accident and difficulty into a vast tapestry of persecution. The victims—they call themselves ‘targeted individuals’—incorporate everything around them into their delusions. If they see someone on the street talking on a cell phone? They think the person is talking about them. If they see a helicopter, they assume it’s spying on them. If people in a crowd stand close to them, it’s intentional intimidation. If a stranger laughs, they’re being mocked. If they encounter people dressed similarly to themselves, or reading the same magazines, it’s meant to unnerve them. Wrong numbers or hang-ups are perceived as torments. Even ‘negative people’ who ‘drain their energy’ are considered attackers. It’s sad. Unfortunately, the internet has allowed a lot of these people to find one another, share stories, and feed into one another’s delusions.”