The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes (The King Henry Tapes)

by Richard Raley

  The register’s computer screen went silent with a mournful beep. I’d managed to make the two twenties back that I’d stolen from myself the day before. Look at the money rolling in. Going to pay back Ceinwyn any time now making forty bucks on antiques every day. Only take me about one-hundred years or so . . .

  Holy crap, I did that math in my head . . . I hate you anima conversion formulas, how I hate you . . .

  “Are you just pulling my chain, King Henry?” Tyson asked, fiddling with his iWhateverthefuck in his pocket . . . one hopes that’s what he’s fiddling with at least. “Or do you actually have some new stuff to show me? If not, just tell me and I can go get my games before they’re sold out.”

  “You don’t reserve, T-Bone?” T-Bone is the nickname I gave the guy. He hated it, but since when has that stopped me?

  “Well . . . yeah . . . I do.”

  “Bummer, thought we’d finally found an area where you showed some rebellion. But, nope . . . you’re such a good boy you even reserve your video games.” I slammed the register shut and locked it before my own rebelliousness made me steal two more twenties. I worked so hard for those twenties . . . the business owner part of me deserved them more than the larcenous part of me. “If you did reserve then why you so worried? What’s the point of reserving if not to lighten your anxiety in this time of oppressive fucking consumerism?”

  “That’s it exactly . . . I don’t trust the cashier to hold them for me if they sell out,” T-Bone said, still fidgeting like he had thoughts about bailing on me for whatever new fix Japan had pumped out. He was so nervous he even forgot to complain about me calling him T-Bone instead of Tyson.

  “That’s good, never trust the cashier. Bastard steals from me all the time.”

  “Aren’t you the cashier?”

  “Would you trust me with your money?”

  A worried frown came over his face. He lifted his thumb-callused hand to scratch under his eye in a nervous tic, actually staring at me for once and seeing how shady I could be perceived as to people not aware of my exalted job title. “But . . . don’t I trust you with my percentages on the lightning rings?”

  “Static defense rings, SDRs, no lighting, no fantasy CGI crap . . . and yes, you do.”

  The frown continued. “Have you sold any?” he asked cautiously, curious but trying to be polite. Stupid ass parents, making your kid polite is the worst thing you can ever do for them. Polite is just a step away from gullible. Make your kids suspicious . . . then you’re actually preparing them for this world.

  “Two of them last month actually. I owe you like five-thousand dollars; remind me next week to write a check. Tonight we’re busy with important stuff . . .”

  “Five-thousand dollars!”

  “Twenty-five percent of what I made.” I started rummaging under my counter for two new toys I’d been experimenting on. T-Bone was going to love them. I was particularly proud of my inventiveness in taking what I already knew and expanding it to another school of the Mancy. “That’s the deal, ain’t it?”

  “But . . . wait . . . you sell them for ten-thousand each?” The frown had gone away and his expression went with the goggle eyes.

  If I hadn’t owed Ceinwyn so much money I probably would have been impressed by it too. Fourteen-year-old-me back before the Asylum would have thought it enough money to retire on. I don’t think I even knew they made dollar bills higher than twenties back then.

  Poor little fool.

  All of us out of the Asylum have a strange relationship with money. Unless you’re a rich fucker like Welf, I guess. Or Miranda. But for most . . . going without money for seven years? Not having to think about taxes or housing or car insurance until your twenties? We’re worse about it than even college seniors getting ready for the cog-force.

  “These items, even my little experiments, are rare and expensive, T-Bone. That’s why the Guild of Cocksuckers has such a monopoly.” I really needed to clean up my counter bottom. There were old anima conversion formulas crumbled up in wads of paper, plus pieces of glass and metal I’d played anima games on all over the place under there.

  I’m lucky a corporeal anima conjuration hadn’t popped up from the excess . . . that’s all I needed, one of those little freaks under my counter, annoying me all day with hints of prophecy and divination. Next time one of them calls me Dirt King I’m going to kill the thing . . . somehow. “Ten-thousand per SDR is at a discount since I knew the guys and they’re with ESLED. Normal mancer I don’t know a thing about? Twenty-thousand, maybe more . . . lots more if it’s a snobbish asshole like Welf.”

  “We’re going to be rich . . .” T-Bone whispered to himself, dreams of having every video game ever made flying through his head.

  “No we ain’t. You? You might have some extra cash coming your way. But me? I’m pretty sure I’ll still be broke as a dog without a bone to gnaw or a bitch to fuck,” I decided, finally finding my boxes and pulling them up.

  “Why are you in such a bad mood today?” T-Bone grumbled, put out by the fine display of cursing, “Days you show me new toys are usually the days you’re at least pretending to smile but today you look like you’re thinking about going on a killing spree like all the other crazy three-named white boys out there.”

  “You know you sound incredibly uncomfortable when you say ‘white boy’, right?”

  “Pointing out race isn’t my thing usually,” said the black giant raised by an Asian guy and a white lady.

  “Then don’t go there next time. Just say I look like I want to bash in faces and be done with it.”

  T-Bone nodded, watching me instead of the boxes with the toys. “Why?”

  “Why, what?”

  “Why are you pissed off more than usual, King Henry?”

  I cracked my knuckles by pushing against my countertop. All eight in rapid succession like air filled gunshots. Pop. Pop. Pop. “Saw my sister yesterday.”

  “I didn’t know you had any siblings.”

  “Two of them actually.”

  “You talk about your father and Mrs. Dale told me what happened with your mother . . . but you never mention sisters.”

  “You got sisters or brothers?”

  “Only child . . . that I know of. I guess my biological parents could have had others. I try not to think about the what-ifs. Plus, if they turned mancer I assume they would have showed up at the Asylum by now.”

  I shook my head, thinking of my own what-ifs and the did-happens I’d gotten with Susan and JoJo. “Lucky fucker.”

  He shrugged my way, moving a considerable amount of body to do it. “Gets boring not having family to argue with. End up getting addicted to video games.”

  “And porn.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Maybe even Japanese porn . . .”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Why don’t you have a girlfriend anyway?”

  That earned a glare. “Why don’t you?”

  “I’m busy saving the world here. You though . . . you should be rolling in the rebellious college-girl pussy looking for huge dicks.”

  For once T-Bone got mad. “You rat-bastard, stop trying to turn this on me and tell me why you’re so pissed. And quit talking about the size of my dick . . . that’s racist assumption. I could have a very small dick for all you know.”

  “Never seen a guy admit to a small dick before . . .”

  “I’m not saying I do!”

  “Sounds like you kind of are . . .”

  “Your sister, King Henry!”

  “My sister . . .” I started, but stopped . . . trying to think where I could start with JoJo’s tale of woe. At least with Susan there are good memories. I know there must have been some with JoJo too, but all I could bring up out of the recesses was the fighting and name calling.

  “The reason can’t be so bad as holding it in,” T-Bone decided, like it was his place to know my head, “The teachers always said holding it in is dangerous for mancers—especially Ultras.”

  I si
ghed. Therapy lesson from the only other Ultra in Fresno, just what I needed. Better than Ceinwyn showing up, I guess . . . I figured I should just throw the whole shit-bucket out on the lawn: “My sister, who I haven’t seen since I was thirteen, is married to Horatio Vega.”

  T-Bone stayed silent for awhile as the words settled in the air. They settled with pure stank. “Tit-balls,” he finally said, “that is bad enough to hold in . . .”

  My dirt eyes perked up. “You know the name?”

  “I’m an Ultra in California, of course I know him. The guy came by my house the first week I got back in town from the Institution and had a meeting with me about not causing trouble.” T-Bone started frowning again. “Wait . . . he didn’t for you?”

  “Never heard of him before yesterday.”

  “He’s the King of the Coyotes.”

  “Knew they were around abouts, but never ran into them.”

  T-Bone wondered aloud, “Why would he meet with me but not with you? I don’t mean to inflate your ego, King Henry, but you’re the big leagues, I’m just a desk jockey playing with computers.”

  I gave him an are-you-retarded? look. “Ceinwyn Dale.”

  Those two words explained all, T-Bone just nodded along.

  “Think she knew my sister married him for all this time? Think she kept it a secret from me even though I’ve wondered about where JoJo’s been for years?” I asked, gravel grinding in my throat to hold back some of my rage.

  “Uh . . .”

  “That’s a yes, ain’t it?”

  “Uh . . .”

  I slammed a hammer-fist down on my counter, making the lighter of the two boxes hop. It was a small miracle an accidental anima discharge didn’t break some antiques. “That controlling . . . that game-playing . . . that fucking bitch! Will she never stop interesting my damned life?”

  “Maybe you should call her and let her explain . . .” T-Bone tried.

  “Fuck her.”

  “She probably did it to protect you . . .” T-Bone tried again.

  “Fuck her in the armpit.”

  “Listen,” T-Bone tried a third time to reason with me, “she probably figured that if you found out about your sister being married to a Were, that you’d go to war with them over her; to get her back and protect her.”

  My expression went full on disgust. “Over JoJo? I wouldn’t do anything for that brat. She made her call when she ran out on me! You wonder how come I don’t have a girlfriend? This is why! All the women in my life drive me nuts! Making deals with a Were Nation behind my back! Not telling me my sister is married to Horatio Vega! Putting a fucking gun to my head! Not asking for help when I could have kicked Suit’s ass for her! Damn her!”

  “Uh . . . which one? I’m confused.”

  “Both of them,” I fumed. “This is so screwed up I’m expecting Annie B to walk through that door any minute! Or Valentine . . . that’s all I need right now . . . crazy, the whole lot of them . . . coolest girl in the world one minute then the other type of cool the next . . .”

  “Who’s Annie B?”

  “I didn’t tell you about that?”

  “Nope . . .”

  “I’m a bad friend . . .” I mumbled.

  “Well . . . it could be worse, I mean . . . you’re at least here in person. Most my friends are just voices over the internet.”

  I really needed to get T-Bone into a club or something with real women, not just virtual ones. “Annie B is a vampire baroness. Met her a few months back. Be glad you didn’t.”

  T-Bone’s jaw hung open. “For real?”

  “Too real . . .”

  “Man . . . how’d you meet a vampire?

  “Ceinwyn Dale.”

  “Okay,” he admitted. “Maybe she is controlling you a bit, but it’s probably for your good. I’m telling you, she knew if you and the Coyote Nation met up it would be very bad. I haven’t known you for very long and even I can work the equation.”

  Bad . . . bad alright. Very bad? That too. A war? We’ll see . . .

  That’s when I heard the truck engine over screeching brakes outside my shop.

  I glanced up from the two boxes on my counter and out my front window just in time to see Suit, Tatter, Overcoat, and two more guys unload from the back of the same grande off-road truck as the day before. There were another couple guys inside it.

  That’s not good, I thought in the spare second I had to contemplate how right T-Bone had been about where this whole Coyote thing was heading. Then I saw they had fucking machineguns and I stopped thinking at all.

  [CLICK]

  So you’ve built yourself a Totem and sanctified it by killing a great many animals and trapping their anima natures inside the Totem field. PETA is very disgusted with you . . . so’s Sarah McLachlan, but fuck her, those commercials are depressing. Now you want to start forming your nation.

  With your nation on the verge, perhaps you want to be seen as taking charge and will go first, or perhaps you are cautious and will make a friend do it. It really doesn’t matter as far as leadership of the nation is concerned. The Totem doesn’t care about leadership; it merely links all of you and your powers together. The real world isn’t some werewolf romance with alpha males of Scottish descent running around magically dominating in their presence, throwing women over their shoulders and rushing off into the woods.

  It is the nation members who decide on leadership and how they rule. It’s the humans who run it, not the animals. A pessimistic part of me wants to comment that this means a nation is far more horrible than any pack of animals . . . and the politics much more superficial than smelling someone’s ass.

  Let’s assume you have yourself a guinea pig—we hope not a Guinea Pig Nation however—and you use your patsy first. You’ll provide for him his animal and will help him drag his animal over to the Totem. At the Totem he will first spill his blood inside the field, then will spill the animal’s blood inside of the field. This lets the Totem know your anima natures are to be linked together.

  Next, you kill the animal, still inside of the field. Immediately, a piece of the animal in question will be excised from the corpse and fed to your patsy. This tells the patsy’s body that their anima natures are linked. Your patsy is then made to step into the field himself and touch the Totem. This completes the Matching, binding the animal anima into the human anima.

  Next time, we’ll talk about what this means for the patsy . . . or for my sister.

  [CLICK]

  It probably speaks highly of my personality that I didn’t think of myself first, instead I thought of T-Bone first. That’s like . . . honorable, right? Okay, so I thought about T-Bone first because I knew he’s too much of a tard-flower to dive down on the floor and was about to get himself shot, but at least I thought about him.

  I could have dived under my counter and let the guy go out in the bang of glory all Untouchables style, machinegunned by the gangsters into a million little pieces of T-Bone. Mancy knows the guy is big enough to make a million little pieces . . .

  But I didn’t let it happen.

  What I did . . . was punch T-Bone right in the gut and then pushed him as far as I could. I got lucky in the fact that T-Bone had apparently never been gut-punched before. Or he just wasn’t expecting his friend to gut punch him. Whatever . . . I’m being heroic, remember? Regardless of the why, he reacted perfectly natural—he doubled over, his butt swung back, and his feet rocked on their heels, fighting over whether they would step back or stand straight.

  I got to admit, gut-punches hurt. Easily in the top five, maybe even top three. Liver punch is at the top, kick to the balls is second, then you’re fighting it out with some tough competition. If you’ve got some muscle like me or if you’re some corpusmancer workout freak, you might be able to clench in that second before the fist lands and not feel much at all. But for most of the human population . . .

  T-Bone is a big guy. He sits in a computer chair for eight hours a day. His hobbies are video games, reading fant
asy books, and fiddling with electronics to figure out how they work. About the only exercise the guy gets is when he walks to the store and back to his car.

  His gut was not prepared for my wonders.

  He didn’t stand, he stepped. I waited for it—one eye on my window and all those guns, the other eye on T-Bone’s shifting body. He stepped and just as he put his foot down I heaved on his shoulders with everything I had.

  You know the saying ‘the bigger they are the harder they fall’? Pure bullshit. If I’d have shoved a midget that hard he would have went splat ten yards down the road. T-Bone just kind of crumbled over on his butt not a foot from where he’d stepped.

  “What was that for?” he growled at me, trying to crawl off the floor and keep up an annoyed face at the same time.

  Shit, I thought, not good. “Stay down!” I told him, with a pointing finger at the floor for extra explanation.

  “The Mancy finally drive you mad?”

  “King Henry Price!” a voice yelled from outside my shop. I recognized it as Suit’s. He was a pissy sounding motherfucker. “I lied about letting you off the hook! This is what you get for screwing with me, asshole!”

  At that instant, five machineguns pointed towards my shop, in which I happened to be inside. Heroics died. T-Bone was on his own. The bastard gave me electro-anima once a week, not pussy. I have limits, and to cross the five machinegun limit, electro-anima ain’t enough. I chose to save my life and hoped for the best outcome with T-Bone sitting on the floor like he was.

  Guess that makes me an optimist.

  A really shitty one.

  I threw my whole body on the floor. On the floor? Wrong word choice. I threw my whole body at the floor. If I could have turned into goo and fallen through the cracks like some vampire, I would have. My ass was the highest vertical part of me as I smashed face first into the green carpet I’d bought at a discount . . . let this be a lesson, you shithead, buy linoleum next time.