Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  One of the familiars peered through the gap created by Spider-Man’s thighs and his retinas flashed white-green in the black silhouette of his head. Robin stooped instinctively, watching over the edge of a shelf. “And even then, darkness doesn’t always save you.”

  “Where is your sign shop, Ken?” asked Wayne. “Maybe we can make a break for it.”

  Kenway thought about it, rubbing his nose with his forearm. His hands came to rest naturally on his hips, and with not a small amount of humor and attraction, Robin thought it made him look like a superhero.

  “Umm.” He pointed one way and then the other, turned around, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “About a half block that way. On the other side of the street.”

  “Isn’t the canal behind us?”

  Kenway nodded. “…No, it’s behind my shop. But I think I might know where you’re goin with this. There’s a storm drain in the alley behind this shop. It probably runs past the drainage grate in my garage and empties in the canal out back. You figure we could use it to sneak over there?”

  “Yeah.” Wayne got up and went through the door in the back, shouldering past the movie screen hanging from the ceiling.

  Joel followed him. “Hold up. Make sure there ain’t no fire alarm.”

  The adrenaline in Robin’s system began to fade, her shoulder singing Halleluah. She sat down in a booth and pulled her shirt back down, ferreting her new left arm out of the sleeve; blood still leaked freely from the surgery scar and now all of the stitches had been broken, the staples pried loose and jutting out haphazardly, so that they caught on the fabric.

  “When you finish with Sara,” she asked, “will you do something about my stitches and stuff? It’s killing me.”

  Gendreau nodded. “Almost done.”

  In the grey light seeping through from the front of the shop, she could study the arm’s fibrous surface, a thick plait of hard but yielding cables. It was as if she’d never lost her arm at all and now it was sheathed in a tight gauntlet of vulcanized tire-rubber. Her hand was as tough, the fingers pliant yet hard. Taking her demon hand in her human hand, the silky copper hairs brushing her palm, Robin felt an awed chill and wondered if this was what Andras felt like.

  Does he know? Does he know who I am? What I am? The next question was Will he recognize me? but she realized that she didn’t care.

  Or perhaps she did; she wanted Andras to see her face and know her as she killed him. A compelling, irrepressible anger billowed up inside of her and Robin wanted to smash things, she wanted to destroy and pulverize. No, It. That thing is an It and It is going to die. That thing is going to die for what it did to my mother, and what it’s done to me. For the life it’s forced me to live.

  “Wow,” said Kenway, leaning on the booth table. “So your arm grew back. That’s pretty damn sweet, yeah?”

  Robin nodded, forcing a smile.

  When he spoke again, she could tell his smile had drained away and left him cool, his voice low. “I know it’s weird. And it’s hard to deal with. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  His own hand curled around hers and it registered that she could feel it with the Andras-arm, she could feel things with it, and compared to the leathery skin his fingers were as soft and warm and fragile as a very old man’s.

  Instinctively, Robin shrank away. She didn’t want her strange demon hand to touch him.

  “If my leg grew back I wouldn’t care what it looked like,” he said. “You know? I’d be happy just to have it back.”

  A sick thought occurred to her. Is he jealous that this happened, that it grew back? Was there a part of him that felt…that felt a kinship, or a satisfaction when he’d found out she’d lost her arm to Theresa? Robin brushed it aside. Of course not. What kind of a person would he be to think that way?

  Her fears were vanquished handily when he leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “I like you anyway, the way you are,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead again, “hell, I think it looks badass—you’re, like, a superhero now,” and then he kissed her on the mouth and a flashbang tumbled pleasantly down her chest, her heart thumping.

  Robin reached up with her human hand and clung to him, mashing their lips together, and kissed him back. His beard clouded against her face like candy-floss made of silk.

  “Thank you,” she said, finally.

  Her cheeks were wet. She scraped them dry with the demon-hand and winced at the hard crag of her thumb.

  “For what?”

  She didn’t know what to say to that, so she kissed him again.

  41

  THE BEDAZZLED BASEBALL BAT glittered in Joel’s hands like a disco ball, flinging arrows of light all over Fisher’s videotape room. He’d found it where his brother had left it Sunday morning, propped against the futon. Along with the half-cup of cold coffee he’d never finished.

  Joel stared at the coffee, thinking about Fish.

  “Mister.”

  He snapped out of it. The boy, Wayne, was a collection of shapes in the darkness. “Do you have a key for this back door?”

  The movie room—Fisher’s personal home theater, at least as theatrical as a futon in a closet and a thirty-year-old TV and VCR could be—had three doors: the one leading back to the shop, the one on the right that opened on the stairway to Fisher’s loft apartment, and one on the left at the end of a short hallway. That one went out back.

  “I don’t know.” He fished the shop key out of his pocket. “I hope so. The rest of the keys are with Fish.”

  They stood there in the shadows, regarding each other. For the millionth time, the pistol in Owen Euchiss’s hand barked fire into Fisher’s face and Joel watched his brother’s body capsize languidly into water the color of time. Joel had closed his eyes but he didn’t flinch, weak acid spattering his face and chest in a mist.

  “I’m sorry aboutcher brother, mister Joe-elle.” Wayne’s glasses reflected the light from the shop in two bulging squares of white. “He was cool. A real nice guy.”

  “Me too.”

  Joel sighed and followed Wayne down the little hallway to the fire exit, choosing action over thought.

  The more he did, the less he could think, and the less he thought the less he could watch those brains spray on the Movie Night screen of his mind.

  Feeling around the surface of the door, he found a handle with a keyhole in it and a deadbolt. The deadbolt didn’t behave like the front door, it was a simple house door. He unlocked both of them and pushed the door, a heavy wooden solid-core.

  Silver daylight rushed down the inside as it came open and stuck, scraping on the concrete. Joel shoved it the rest of the way with a dull scuff. Outside, a narrow alleyway ran to their vanishing points in both directions. Boxes were piled in one corner by a steel utility door that led into the water heater closet, and two wheel bins leaned against the far wall.

  A chain-link fence framed the area on both sides. Joel was peering into the storm drain when a dark figure came out of nowhere, crashing into the fence and scaring the hell out of him. He flinched, raising the Batdazzler.

  Blood ran down the man’s temples in heavy blotches and made glossy sealskin of his black suit. His shirt was ripped open.

  “It’s Lucas,” said Wayne, opening the gate.

  The magician staggered in, arming blood and sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. “Goddamn, damn, damn, I thought that was the end of me.” He leaned against the wall. “Everybody make it okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lucas thumped his chest with pride. “Then my glorious sacrifice was not in vain.”

  They brought him into the comic shop, where Sara gave him a hug and Gendreau shook his hand. “Good work back there, soldier,” said the self-proclaimed curandero. “How did you get away from the mob?”

  Lucas collapsed into the booth, wiping his face with Miguel’s Pizzeria napkins.

  “Well, I lasted about ten seconds and then they had me on my back, kickin the shit outta me.” He fished a
cigarette out of his shirt pocket and shakily stuck it in his mouth, patted himself down for a lighter, didn’t find one. “But then I heard a roar—I guess Sara did something?—and then everybody ran away. I don’t know where the burnt-lookin guy with the rifle went; he ran off while I was gettin worked over.”

  He scanned the dark shop. “Did the dog make it?”

  A little black shadow came out from under the booth table. Lucas picked Eduardo up and hugged him.

  “My leedle Dog Star mascot,” he said in a bad moose-und-squirrel accent, making air kisses. The terrier slavered all over his face, knocking the cigarette out of his mouth. He crooned at the dog, tousling and rubbing him all over as if he were fluffing a pillow. Eduardo did the shimmy-shimmy-shake, an expression of dumb pleasure on his face. “You knocked em all down with water from your magic mind-powers, yes you did, yeah! Yes you did! What a good boy.”

  Sara shook her head. “Sometimes I think Ed forgets he’s supposed to be human. And maybe you do too.”

  “Now you’re making it weird.”

  “I’m making it—?”

  “We’ve got things to do,” said Robin, getting up and heading for the back door. “We don’t have time to sit around petting dogs and chit-chatting.”

  Kenway stopped her by the movie screen, his shadow sharp on the giant white-silver sheet. His hand lightly cupped her elbow. “Slow down,” he told her. “Take a minute. You just got out of the hospital and lived through a roll-over and a mob. I thought you wanted dude over here to take a look at your, uhh … your arm?”

  She hesitated, her face grim.

  His look of concern became one of reproach.

  Sighing, she came back and unfolded one of the Movie Night chairs, plopping down into it. Gendreau took off his jacket and pushed up his shirt-sleeves.

  His shirt was tailored, but without the Willy Wonka blazer his sleeves belled at the elbows and narrowed at the cuffs. With his platinum-blond hair, Arctic eyes, and Nordic face, it made him look a bit like a cover model for a romance novel. “All right,” he said, as Robin wrenched up her shirt impatiently. “This may hurt a bit at first—I’m going to have to pull the rest of these staples out, because I can’t quite achieve the effect I need with them in the way. And then I’ll need to press the wound together manually.”

  “Whatever you need to do, doc,” Robin said noncommittally. She took off the helmet and let her head tilt back. “I took another couple of pain pills a minute ago. I figured I might as well, since I threw up.” A hard, workmanlike sort of temper had come over her since Joel had seen her last.

  This must be her Go Mode, he decided. This was what it looked like when the going got tough and Robin Martine shifted into Four Wheel Drive.

  “You’re pushing yourself too hard,” said Kenway.

  She pointed at him. “You have no idea what—”

  Joel thought he could tell what she was about to say, and that would have been the wrong thing. Was the wrong thing, he knew, because he could tell by the hurt look on the veteran’s face that he had read between the lines too.

  “Don’t even go there,” Kenway said, grimly.

  “I’m sorry.” Robin winced as Gendreau picked the bent staples out of her.

  Her eyes were rimmed in red. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just saying … I’ve pushed myself harder than this.” She stretched the neck of her shirt open and pointed at a scar on the left side of her chest, high, directly under her collarbone. “This came from a girl in Connecticut last spring. She stabbed me with a pair of kitchen shears. Missed my heart by two inches.”

  She pointed to the tiny pink commas peppered up her arms and the blade of her jawline. The pea-sized pit by her ear. “Scratches. From Neva Chandler, and others. God, those bitches always scratch.” She hiked up her left jeans leg and pointed at her shin, even though it was too dark to really see. “Got whacked with a shovel in Florida, ended up with a minor fracture.

  “I’ve broken three toes and two fingers.” She waggled the fingers of her right hand. “I’d show you one of those broken fingers, but Theresa took it. Along with the rest of my arm.”

  The more scars she explained, the angrier and more harried she seemed to get. Ferociously unbuckling her belt, she ripped her fly open and thrust out her pelvis, shucking her jeans with one hand, flashing utilitarian white panties. Her voice took on a choked, raw quality. “I got burnt all over my legs tryin to light up this witch in St. Louis—”

  Both of her thighs rippled with pink, gnarly patches of long-healed burns.

  “I been doin this for a long time now.” The tears on her cheeks silvered in the light coming back from the shopfront windows. “I can handle myself, goddammit.”

  “I need you to quit moving,” Gendreau said blandly.

  Robin looked at him, irritation clouding her face. Her eyes briefly danced between the curandero’s, and then she pulled her jeans back over her hips.

  The noise of the crowd outside gradually began to diminish to an occasional shout. Joel thought he heard police sirens, but it was so far away it could have been more cat-yowling from the familiars.

  Robin buried her face in her hand and sat quietly.

  Kenway’s arms were folded. He stood at the edge of the generous Movie Night space, leaning against a rackful of action figures, his ankles crossed so that his prosthetic leg lay on top.

  “I love you,” he said, after a not-inconsiderable amount of time.

  “No, you don’t,” said Robin.

  He thought about it a minute and said, “Yep. Maybe I do.”

  She shook her head. Her voice was still rusty. “Look at me. Look at this thing I have for an arm now. You just think you do. Why would anybody love me?” The demon-hand flexed with a stony rasp. “Look at it. It’s a… it’s a piece of him. He ruined my mother and now I have to carry a goddamn piece of him. I belong in Hell with the rest of the devils.”

  The edges of her front incisors met in a disgusted grimace as she balled a dragonish fist. She growled through her teeth, “What even is this?”

  Gendreau had no answer. Neither did anyone else. Sara pretended to be absorbed in picking her fingernails, while Lucas babied the man-dog in low muttering tones. Kenway stared at the floor as if chastised, his brow dark.

  Joel got up and knelt by her. “It’s you, is what it is.”

  Robin looked down at him and he felt a thin ripple of fear. There was a terrible, angry thing in her spooked-horse eyes, a sweaty sort of madness come to the surface, and suddenly it was as if he were a vassal supplicating to a medieval lord drunk on both power and liquor.

  The baseball bat even completed the analogy, because as he took a knee in front of her the business end of it rested on the floor and leaned against his knee like a knight’s sword. The fake diamonds glued to the wood even mirrored the faint light much the same way.

  He thought to hold her hand, but had the idea to take the strange dark hand; he held it and was struck by how alien it was, like a sculpture of a human hand made of driftwood and sooted in a fire—a human hand but larger, the fingers hooking in blunt claws. Fleecy red hair grew all down the back of it in a singular finlike shag and ended in a final punctuating tuft over her knuckles. Up close, he could see veins of dark green tracing between her jagged knuckles.

  It was the most foreign, outlandish thing he’d ever seen.

  “I love you too, girl,” Joel said, gazing up at her half-mad face. “We’re almost brother and sister, you and me. We grew up together, remember?”

  She said nothing, but the corner of her mouth twitched and her eyes lost a bit of that fearsomeness.

  “You think of me as a sister?” she asked.

  “Y— Yeah, I do.” He was still wearing his silk do-rag. He took it off and bunched it in a ball in his fist against his chest.

  “I never had a brother before.”

  Joel smiled. He had put on eyeshadow and eyeliner that morning before he’d gone back to the hospital to check on Armstrong, and even thoug
h it was dark and he was slick with sweat, he knew he still looked good. “I ain’t got to be your brother. I can be your sister.” The smile widened into a grin. “Either or, you know, it’s okay. Whichever one you want, baby.”

  “It’s okay,” she echoed, a bit dreamily.

  “You’re the same Robin I grew up with, all right?” He put his other hand on top of the dark hand, and it was as if he clasped the horny, splintered base of a broken branch jutting out of a tree. He wondered if it hurt, the hand, as dry and hard as it felt. “You’re that same little girl me and my brother ate breakfast with in that big ol house. You remember what I said at Miguel’s?”

  “Ain’t nothin in this world that good bacon can’t make better.” Robin’s eyes focused on his.

  “That’s right. That same little girl that me and him played with in your big ol back yard. We used to take turns swingin on that swing back there, you and your mosquito. What was his name?”

  “Mr. Nosy.” A faint smile. “I still have him. He’s in my van.”

  “He must be old as hell now.”

  “Falling apart. I’ve had him fixed so many times I can’t even remember.” The smile spread a bit more. “I love that stupid mosquito so much.” A fresh tear re-wet the track on her face. “I remember playing dress-up with you and Fish in my room in the cupola. Oh my God, you used to love puttin on my mom’s old dresses and pearls. I remember that.”

  Joel stroked the strange hand.

  “You’re still here. You’re that same little girl with that same stuffed mosquito. Only you growed up now, and there’s a little different but not much. I’ve changed too—there’s been a few dirty things in my system and my lungs are prolly as black as my outsides by now—but under it all I’m still that little boy in your mama’s old dresses and high-heel shoes too big for my feet.”