“Why, are you jealous?”
“More curious, I guess. I mean, here we are, at the end of your less than incredible lifespan. You’re dying, weak. Pathetic, like this whole ridiculous pathetic ruse you’re trying to protect?”
Sheila spat at the floor.
Koosh continued, “Or rather, this year’s newest model of Anchor? Tell me, what moves a person to make that kind of sacrifice?”
She hacked up a cough, her throat on fire as she struggled against her restraints. She quickly reined it in, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing her like this.
He eased around the back of the chair, running his hand between her shoulder blades. “You know he can’t help you. This little dream sequence of ours. There’s nothing to be done, Sweetness. It’s all coming to an end. It’s gorgeous. Water down the plughole. Everything’s going just the way Chuck planned, and now...telling your little boytoy all of the big secrets made no difference at all. So why do it?”
“He’s different.”
“How?”
At that point Chuck’s voice cracked through the air, given weight by the rubber thump of his boots on the dusty floor as he stomped, through the office door. “He’s the last, you pinhead,” he said. “The little hero our Imprints have been foretelling...since this whole charade began.”
“The last Anchor?” Koosh scoffed. “Come on, Chuck. That’s a children’s tale. One of those fairytales we tell our kids.”
“He is real,” said Sheila.
“He is,” agreed Chuck. “An Anchor, with the insights and understanding and power to bend and reshape reality fully and to his will.”
“You said he nearly shat it when he, what, hovered earlier?”
Chuck exhaled loudly, signalling Koosh to stop. “A nexus of truth,” he continued. “Lending shape and form to the world around him. He is in control, but he must be made to see the futility of it all.” He circled around the room and put his hands on Sheila’s shoulders, massaging her neck slowly.
“Why haven’t we killed him yet?” Koosh asked
Chuck’s lips curled. He crossed the floor so fast, Sheila didn’t even see him as he knocked over her chair and ended up right in Koosh’s face, pushing his back up against the office door. His knee was in the man’s groin as he pressed his knife to his throat. It was a sequence like fluid martial arts, but actually just precise, unthinking potentiality. “Don’t you ever fucking listen? Because I need him, doos!”
They stood there a second, eyes locked and their breath heavy between them, before Chuck whispered, “Because I need him, and because he’s family.”
A nauseating pause filled the room, this nexus of tattoos and hellfire. Panic sat strapped to a chair, alone and kidnapped. A man with dreadlocks, confronted with the tip of a knife. The beginning of the end.
And a death head, Daedalus, raising his blade end, sneering at the gloomy world he had created. He lowered the knife, and crossed to the window as the service door opened downstairs and Clark’s band started shuffling in. “And we save the best torture for family.”
–
“I hate to play the straight man here, Crink, but...are you sure this is going to work?”
The pair stood at the bottom rung of a retractable fire ladder, grating agonisingly against the rusted springs that kept it attached to a fire escape landing. The landing, in turn, was a metal cage, affixed to the rear office of Central’s Checkerboard nightclub. Alex and Crink had wheeled a paper recycling bin beneath it and were considering this brittle proposition under the cover of darkness.
“Dude...probably? I don’t know right now, man, that dude kicking me gave me a fucking migraine. Is your face really all just pink and blue stars or is that all me?”
Alex smiled. Minutes before, Crink had explained how, during the first-year Christmas vac, he’d wooed Chandré Daniels, the scowling, wiry punk manager at the club, by showing up during her shift on this same fire escape with a half a bottle of Malibu and a bag of heart candies he’d customised for the occasion.
“Look, he’s obviously got something in store here, man, I just think it’s in our best interests not to try strolling in through the front door.”
“But a fire escape, man? I mean, I’m not questioning your thinking, but when did my life become a Bruce Willis movie?”
“It’s our best shot! We get in, grab Sheila and your brother, and bail before he can do anything stupid, like give them one of those prison tats of his.”
As he shook the water off his boots there in the club driveway, Alex smiled. “Thank you so much for helping me out with this, man. I feel like such an ass bunker asking for your help, I just—”
“I know, dude. It’s Clark.”
“I mean, I’d consider calling the cops, except that’s a fucking joke.”
“Unless there’s a murder actually in progress, PE cop services are always stretched pretty thin.”
“Plus, if what we read in the papers is true, Chuck’s got no qualms about sticking a knife in a police officer.”
They split another pause, out there on the half-finished curb end, jutting out like so many other pieces of unfinished architecture in this part of town. Old and jarring, like part of a rib cage, sticking out into thin air.
Alex spoke first, this time. “I should have told you more about this when it started happening, man. I just...I didn’t want to pull you any deeper into this mess than I needed to.”
“Well that worked nicely.”
Alex looked into the face of his best friend and smiled. Then, looking back up toward the fire escape, which dangled between them and the club like a drawbridge, he asked, “What was it you wrote on those heart candies?”
“What?”
“The ones you got for Chandré Daniels.”
Crink got up to his feet, extending his open right hand down towards Alex. “I’ll tell you in a minute.”
–
Ronnie, the bassist, was staring at his shoes while the band helped his little sister April set up her drums. “Isn’t it a little on the nose that they actually have a checkerboard floor pattern in this place?” he asked, scuffing his tekkie along the linoleum.
“No more of a cliché than the bassist standing around while the rest of the band do all the work.” Clark smirked and lifted April’s kick drum over his head and onto the stage.
“You guys’ve got it covered. I’ll just get in the way.”
The club was empty. The stage spots, door lights and balcony LEDs lit up the dingy room, a dozen shadows thrown off from preamps, band flags, speaker systems and crummy patio furniture left in haphazard semi-circles from the last gig here. Walls plastered thick with gig posters, an overlapping tapestry of foot stomping and Black Label drinking, put together over years of Saturday nights. Dozens, hundreds of bands—aKing, Zebra and Giraffe, Fuzigish, BGF, Aftertaste, those Viking-metal cats from Cape Town with the bagpipes that came down that one time. Hikatori. FFD. Stickup Kid, Leek and the Bouncing Uptones. The runoff from a lifetime of music and strained necks, splashed across the walls. Bleeding into the air. Heavy, thick, and loaded like brushstrokes, or clicks and hisses in a demo tape.
Clark noticed the dreadlocked guy shutting the door behind them. He thought he heard a click.“New manager here?” he asked, as Chuck wandered up to the side of the stage.
“Yup. Last month or so.”
“What happened to Bob and Tina?”
“They had to split,” he replied, hoisting himself up onto the stage to let his legs dangle over the side.
Clark sat down next to him. “So - another ghostly quiet reception for Stone Cold Briefcase.”
“It’s always like this before a set. People only start getting here around nine thirty. They’ll be here.”
“I don’t see anyone working the door, though.”
“I’ve got Bernard posted outside waiting. Don’t stress, kid. We gotcha.”
Clark got up from his spot and shook the tall man’s hand. “Nice tats, man.”
>
He smiled warmly, the thin man. “Thanks, kid. Now you guys get set up, I’ve got some stuff I need to do in the back.”
Clark checked his phone, frowning in the stage light as he watched the club manager retreat to the back of the room. Three missed calls from Alex during the past two hours. He’d better phone him quickly, before the soundcheck started.
He wandered over to the bathroom to get signal on his phone. With his hand raised up towards the windows, he paced up and down a few minutes. Back and forth, in the hallway, under the neon glow of the McDonald’s arches across from the window, until it showed up, that elusive green bar. He smiled. “Now who’s gotcha?”
He dialled, but stopped, as the sound of what sounded like a woman groaning oozed out into the passageway.
He spun around, unable to place the noise. “Hello?”
He heard nothing, at first, then another groan, longer this time, coming from the storage room at the end of the passage. He tucked his phone back into his pocket and approached the door, where he turned the handle and opened it to find Sheila, the girl from the arts festival, half conscious and tied to a chair with a gag in her mouth.
“You—” he said.
Clark felt the impact of cold steel on the back of his head, but it only hurt for a second. Then he sank to the floor, inexplicably tired, as a vision of a dreadlocked man danced in his vision. Everything swirled, the ceiling crashed down on him, and he was out.
–
Chuck was standing in the middle of the dance floor, staring up into the ceiling lights. His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides. He hadn’t moved or said anything in minutes. The band, fully set up and growing disquieted and confused as to when they were going to start the soundcheck, stood among their instruments on stage, watching his back.
“Uh, hey,” Ronnie piped up. “Have...you seen our guitarist anywhere?”
Chuck called out into the rafters of the old building, addressing the black expanse behind the supernova spotlight bars that hung there. He ignored the kids. “You know, the fire escape would’ve been genius if I hadn’t used it the first time I staked out this place.”
Ronnie stepped down from the stage, glancing up at his bandmates, then back to the new club manager, as he approached him. “Um, come again, man?”
“You know, this shithole little club could be so much more.” Chuck smiled and brought his gaze down from the ceiling to the gangly boy approaching him.
Ronnie put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Hey, have you seen—”
The force of Chuck’s elbow shooting out from his side knocked Ronnie into the air, his head snapping back. His bandmates switched instantly to panicking, frantically scrambling out towards him. As the ginger boy’s limp form crashed to the floor, Chuck calmly pulled a 9mm Glock from his jacket pocket. He trained it immediately and with purpose, on Ronnie’s sister and Teddy, the singer, as they leaped towards Ronnie’s unconscious body.
The room grew deathly instantly.“You son of a bitch,” Teddy snarled.
“Hmmm, technically no. I’m not really a son of anything. Neither are you. But, if you’d like, I’ll put a fucking bullet in your head right now, and we can skip tonight’s philosophy lesson.”
Chuck drifted his gun arm calmly between Teddy’s and April’s faces. “You know, Joburg clubs really are the benchmark for South African concert facilities. The comfortable seating, tasteful décor. Gangbangs in the back rooms. This place...this place is a hole, Alex.”
He paused, as if waiting for a response. Nothing. Then he picked up again. “Funny story. You know how I convinced that Chandré bitch to let me in here? The first time I showed up here in person. I told her I was from the fokkin’ health inspector’s office. Can you believe that? That we’d received numerous complaints about food poisoning and suspected toxoplasmosis originating from this place. I told her we were here to shut this fucker down.
“It wasn’t even that much of a lie, to be fair. This place is comically filthy. Still, man, you should have seen her. What a mess of a woman. All Ramones T-shirts, eyeliner and self-delusion. Bitch basically grovelled for me to leave the place be. ‘I’m supporting a family. This is my sole income’.” He laughed the words out, dripping with mock terror in a cruel impersonation of the club manager’s pleas. “I took my time taking fake notes on this place, really making her think she was done for. It’s...better when you put the fear of God into someone. To obliterate them at the height of their fear.” A shiver of pleasure rolled through him, right there on the dance floor.
“Of course, I could have blinked her out in a second. It’s so easy I don’t even need the other person to participate anymore. The mechanics of it all are more like art, Alex. It really is phenomenal. I don’t need to tell you what’s going on to make you realise it. The reality reflex. Like a muscular spasm, you just need to know how to induce it. Just a little push.”
As if on cue, Koosh wheeled two office chairs into the room. They had their backs tied together, and Clark and Sheila sat on each chair, half conscious. There was a fresh shiner on Clark’s eye.
“I killed her instead, you know,” Chuck said, proudly up into the lights. He held up his gun and fired off two imaginary shots into the darkness. “Pop, pop. I don’t know, it’s just more personal that way. Taking a life, man. It’s an almost spiritual experience. I mean, even if spirits and everything don’t exist anymore.” He put the gun to Sheila’s head. “It ain’t nothin’ but a good time, friend.”
Crink’s shoe emerged from the darkness first, flung with force at Chuck’s pistol. He missed it by a solid three metres.
“Is that the best you’ve—”
The force, in the next instant, of Alex’s body colliding, out of nowhere, with Chuck’s shoulder was enough to pop the bone out of its socket, sending his pistol flying off into the corner. The room filled with screaming: Alex’s, Sheila’s, the band’s; Chuck screeched fiercely. The tumbling, awkward motion of this played out like some sort of joke. Fast in all the wrong places, it was laughably amateur.
Chuck had lost his weapon. He howled with rage, a scraping metal screech of pain and fury. He sounded like an animal. His voice flapped and warbled and broke, as he rolled and stopped on the tiling, a torrent of testosterone and clenched jaws.
Crink dropped out of the ceiling a second later, bouncing off the floor as his other show flew off his remaining foot. He’d hit nobody.
–
“You know what sucks about being the bad-guy in a world where everybody’s already dead?” Chuck pushed himself to his feet as Alex and Crink scrambled to theirs on the other side of the room.
In the midst of the confusion, Teddy the vocalist had got up to chase after Chuck’s dropped weapon, only to be stopped, mid-crawl by Koosh, holding his bandaged leg with one hand, and a bowie knife in the other. “Please let me not be the only one getting stabbed this week, monami.”
Chuck continued, “No one ever takes you seriously when you threaten to kill everyone.”
“That must be tough,” Alex said, dusting himself off, then sprinting immediately towards Daedalus. He’d barely cleared four paces before the man had April under his arm and a knife at her neck.
Alex squeaked to a stop in the middle of the floor, panting in the spotlights.
“As with all philosophy, not even the most profound knowledge will be worth a damn when I cut through your friend’s carotid artery, Alex van der Haar.”
“Leave them out of this, shitbag.”
“A compelling and, might I add, eloquent argument.”
Crink lurched to his feet, jutting out a thumb at their attacker. “Yo Alex, I thought you said this dude was prison trash. Why’s he speaking like a philosophy douche?”
“My guess? He’s been a douche for a very a long time, man. Whattaya say, Chuck? Think you’re up to taking me on yourself? You’ve put enough of my friends in danger. Enough of this human shield BS. I’m the one you want, and you’re taking too long. I’m beginning to think you�
��re afraid of me.”
Chuck took a deep breath and puffed out his chest. “Heroes.” He shoved April to the side, sending her pinwheeling off towards the stage as he sprinted, hard and blurry-fast at Alex. He picked him up at the waist, and they barged, together and screaming, through the glass screen doors and out onto the balcony.
-
Alex let out a pained grunt as they collided with the wooden deck railing. Chuck lifted him up by his shoulders, wincing under the weight of his own damaged shoulder, and screaming a wolf’s howl into the Central night sky.
He threw him up against the rail again, the wooden balustrade creaking, then splintering with the impact. There was a deep crunch that emanated from between them as Daedalus’s shoulder popped back into place under the pressure of the impact. Alex’s back exploded with pain. Ashtrays and tumblers cascaded into the street below, showering the asphalt in heavy, twinkling glass.
Daedalus pulled their faces close. “Fly away little birdie,” he whispered, before ramming his forehead into Alex’s nose. The pain broke and rushed through, like a torrent, an axe carving through his face—javelin through his eye.
“Fly away, birdie!” Another head butt split Alex’s lip this time, and his mouth rapidly filled with blood. Everything was pain, and they’d only been fighting a minute. The Checkerboard porch lights became a violent, blinding swirl of colour shot through his perception.
Chuck pulled away, his fists still balled up in Alex’s jacket, his face spattered about the cheeks and the bridge of his nose with Alex’s blood.
“Fly away—”
Alex shot his right fist out, furiously, from between Daedalus’s arms, ramming directly into his throat and knocking him back two steps, choking. With his attacker bent over, on the balcony, Alex van der Haar wasted no time getting his hand on the back of his collar, and hoisting him up. His voice was quiet, horse but carrying his next words flawlessly through the night.
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