Weird Tales, Volume 350

by Norman Spinrad

“I'm out,” said Ray-Bans.

  I looked at Fatso. His high forehead was greasy; his eyebrows overhung his bloodshot eyes.

  “You're all in, aren't you?” he stated.

  I ignored him. I needed to see his cards right then. I had to know. “What have you got? Show us what you got.”

  He shrugged, leaned back with a hand behind his ear, and stretched the other forward to flip over his cards. I stared at them. I looked at mine, and then looked back, disbelieving.

  A two of diamonds and a jack of spades. Fatso had nothing!

  “Jack high,” he said.

  “Ha!” I burst out. I leaned forward, my ass lifting right off the chair, and flipped my two precious, wonderful, sweet little cards over. The last one to show was the queen

  of diamonds. Her Mona Lisa lips smiling serenely for everyone to see.

  “Queen high!” I said. “I won. I've got queen high!” I immediately gathered the pot with both hands, scraping the chips towards me. I was laughing out loud and couldn't stop. “I'm cashing out,” I declared.

  They all looked at me as if I was stupid. The pot was nothing substantial—just a modest beginning to a promising night. But for me, it represented a big enough chunk to get my first treatment incubating. Like I said, luck had been turning on me all week. I wasn't going to risk losing this pot, or anything else, again.

  I carried my chips to the desk, grinning. Clipboard was standing beside Baldy, going over papers. “Cashing out?” Baldy asked.

  I nodded and handed him my winnings. He returned them to his tray, counting carefully. Clipboard retrieved my ice-cream tub and one of the insulated containers from under the desk and placed them on the floor, the scale between.

  “He gets eleven ounces,” Baldy announced.

  “Eleven,” Clipboard repeated, pulling a pair of latex gloves from his green cotton pants and stretching them over his fingers with a snap. A cloudy bath of dry ice overflowed the lip of my tub when he lifted the lid. He packed the CO2 to the sides, making a pocket inside. Then he unzipped the insulation on the larger container and unclasped the lid, releasing a gasp of pressurized air. Someone shuffled cards back at the table, and Fatso laughed. Clipboard reached inside the container and clattered a handful of bluish-pink digits onto the metal pan of the scale. Three fingers, a thumb, four toes, and something I couldn't identify—a wrist? — frozen and stubby. Their bloodied ends red like the lipstick stain on a half-consumed cigarette.

  “Here, you have to sign this,” Baldy said.

  I stepped to the desk, and I signed where he showed me, holding the pen carefully. He returned my papers and I slipped them into my pocket. Baldy had finished measuring out my salvation, and held my tub up for me, its lid in place, still leaking CO2.

  “You should fix that crack with something.”

  “Don't worry,” I said, “I'm going right to the clinic with this.”

  I took it from him, gripping the handle as securely as I could with the two remaining fingers of my right hand.

  Peter Atwood is a writer and editor who lives in Ottawa, Canada, where he once grew up and to where he returned after living in Toronto, Seoul, and Cairo.

  HOW I GOT HERE

  (In which angelic shapes and demonic intent are all muddled)

  by Ramsey Shehadeh

  It's July, middle of the afternoon, hot as hell. Henry the Bagman is coming around the corner stuffing his shirt in his pants with one hand and shifting his satchel around on his shoulder with the other. I've got one gun on him and Pedro up in the window over Maxim's has another and Xinhao on the roof across the street has the third. The way it's supposed to work: Henry gets to Father Mancini's front door, he rings the doorbell, the door opens, and then we plug him, all of us at the same time, just rip him to fucking pieces right there on the stoop: Pedro and Xinhao from up high, me up close and personal. We don't so much as graze Mancini. We spatter him with bits of Henry, but we don't hurt him.

  It's a message, I guess: my boss, Teddy Dandelion, saying something to Mancini. I don't know what. Guys like Dandelion and Mancini, they talk to each other on a different level than the rest of us. It's all who gets hit and who doesn't, what bits of territory you claim and which ones you leave alone, who you fuck and who you fuck over. I don't know the language, but I guess I am the language. Or part of it.

  Anyway, Teddy needed his best shooters, people who know how to stay calm and do the job and walk away. That's me, and that's Pedro, but it's not Xinhao. Xinhao is a solid gun, and he's loyal as a dog, but he's out of his fucking mind. I did a bank job with him once, easy in and out at this little regional branch over in Virginia. It went smooth: everyone got down on their faces when we told them to, tellers gave up the cash nice and quick, no one tried to be a hero. We were on our way out when Xinhao stopped and turned around and went to the head of the line and just stood there, staring at one of the tellers until he said yes sir and Xinhao said are you ready for me and the teller looked at him and then he looked at me and then he said yes in this really small voice. So Xinhao went up to the counter and said I'd like to make a withdrawal and wrote out a check and slid it through the grating and the teller said sir we don't have any more money and Xinhao shot him in the face. Everyone started screaming. Xinhao turned around and screamed back at them until they settled down. And then he went over to the next teller, a scared blonde surfer-dude-looking guy and did the same thing, spattering the inside of his head all over the sailboat calendar behind him. This time no one screamed, but there were a bunch of people crying now. He went over to the next teller, this kid who looked like she just got out of high school, and started writing out another check.

  I don't like people dying when it's not necessary, or at least profitable, so I put a hand on his shoulder and said let's go man. Xinhao turned around and gave me this look. I can see it now. It still keeps me up at night. His face is calm, he's smiling, but there's something going on with his eyes — his pupils keep warping out and in, out and in, like they're breathing, and there's something dark happening behind the whites, shadowshapes skittering like insects, doing shit I can't make out. No, that's not right. I can make it out. I don't want to. Because some old buried instinct is telling me that if I do figure out what it is I'm looking at I'm going to have to claw my eyes out.

  What I wanted to do right then was run. The only thing that made sense was me turning around and running until I collapsed or fell off the edge of something. But I didn't. I said: Come on, man. We got what we wanted. But I said it in a scared little girl voice, and I think that's what saved me, what saved everyone in that fucking bank. Because Xinhao just started laughing; shaking his head and laughing. He put a hand on my shoulder and said: You funny man, Frank. You make laugh. And then he walked out.

  These are the people I have to work with.

  I'm leaning against a bus shelter, just down the street from Mancini's place, across from a couple of whores flashing their tits at a car full of college kids. I'm wearing a big bomber jacket, so I'm sweating puddles — because you can't hide a sawed-off under a t-shirt. That's one of Teddy Dandelion's maxims. He's got a million of them. Dead men don't talk, but you oughta cut out their tongues anyway, just in case. You can't shoot your best friend, but you can shoot his brother. Women are better than money, but you can't buy money with women. He'll usually pull one out when you're talking to him, then nod and look all serious, like he's just said something worth hearing.

  Henry the Bagman's walking up the stairs now. I look at my feet, count the cracks in the sidewalk, listen to the whores cooing their gutter routine. I don't have anything against Henry. He's a good guy.

  I'll plug him, I'm not saying I won't plug him. But it'll probably keep me up tonight.

  My phone rings. I pull it out of my pocket, flip it open.

  Back off, says the voice on the other end: Dandelion.

  What?

  Back off. You're done.

  Henry's clear?

  Did I say that? I said back the fuck off.
Xinhao's got it.

  I look up at the roof across the street. Xinhao's not there. When I look back down he's coming out the front door, hands in his pockets, that little tattoo smile on his face.

  You sure, Mr Dandelion?

  How many times I got to say the same goddam thing? Turn around. Walk the fuck away.

  I flip the phone shut. Xinhao crosses the street, taking it easy, not hurrying, that little tattoo smile on his face. Pedro's not in the window over Maxim's anymore.

  I flash back to the bank job, and then I just know: Xinhao's going to do Henry, and then he's going to do Mancini, and then he's going to step over their bodies and go in the house and do the rest of Mancini's family. Mancini's got two little girls, and a boy. The boy's seven, I think. My son's eight.

  This is none of my business.

  I start running toward Mancini's house.

  Henry rings the doorbell.

  Xinhao steps up on the sidewalk.

  The door opens. Mancini comes out.

  Xinhao gets to the bottom of the steps and pulls out a knife.

  I slow down, staring at that knife. There's nothing right about it. It's huge, a giant meat cleaver thing, way more knife than you need to kill anything smaller than a elephant. And then it's black, pitch black, like it's made out of tar. But most of all it's just wrong, and the wrongness spreads out from it in rings. You can't see it, but you can tell how far it's got by the way people around it act. A lady on the other side of the street drops her groceries and turns all the way around, hands out, palms up, like she's fending off wolves. A baby up the road starts screaming. A dude in a muscle shirt yelps and runs the other way, flat out. Dogs are howling up one side of the block down the other.

  Mancini sees Xinhao first. He shouts something, steps back, and Henry spins around, hand already going inside his jacket. Street instincts, but they don't do him any good, because Xinhao takes two quick steps and pulls his arm back and buries the knife in Henry's chest, all the way down to the hilt. I see the tip of it poke out of Henry's back, and then it's out again, and back in, out and in, out and in. He stabs him five times, arm pumping piston-fast, so quick that the strokes blur together. It's all over before Henry gets his shit together enough to scream.

  I'm running full tilt, and I'm almost there when Henry falls against Xinhao, lips peeled back. Blood's leaking out of the cracks between his teeth. Xinhao gets him in a bear hug.

  I was expecting Mancini to go inside, call in some heat, grab a gun, come out blazing. But he doesn't do any of that. He says: You can't have him, demon.

  Already got him, says Xinhao, laughing. Your boy dogmeat.

  I'm at the bottom of the stairs now, so I've got a good view. Xinhao's hugging Henry close with one arm, raising the knife up with the other. But here's the thing: either the knife looked smaller from far away, or it just got bigger, because it's long as a sword now, and wide as a two-by-four. Up close, it's more than black. It looks like a knife-shaped hole in the world.

  I lunge for Xinhao.

  He brings the knife down in a wide arc, buries it in Henry's back. It slices through his body, out the other side.

  Into Xinhao's belly.

  Out Xinhao's back.

  A square of the world around Henry and Xinhao turns dingy brown, warps in, warps out. It's like I'm looking at their reflection in a sheet of tin.

  And then everything snaps back to normal and Xinhao and Henry do what dead people are supposed to do: they fall down. I get out of the way; let them stutter down the steps to the sidewalk. They're still stuck together, like two bugs on the same pin; Henry flopped on top of Xinhao, the hilt sticking out of his back. Xinhao lying there. He's looking at me. He's smiling.

  Mancini's coming down the stairs. He brushes past me, grabs the hilt and pulls it free, kicks Henry off. He looks at Henry for a long time. He looks at me. He says: You're Dandelion's, aren't you?

  I nod.

  You want to work for me?

  I don't answer. It's kind of a fucked up question, under the circumstances.

  You deaf? Yes or no?

  I shrug. No.

  Wrong answer, he says, and jams the sword through my throat.

  I freeze, try to breathe. But there's no air. Not for me. Not anymore.

  I could tell you what dying feels like, but I won't. You don't want to know.

  I'm lying flat on my back, staring at the sky. It's grey and sheet-iron solid, more like a ceiling than a sky. The air smells like the inside of an old cardboard box, tastes like an old gym sock. And it's heavier than it should be. It's like I'm breathing mercury.

  I sit up. I'm where I was before, in front of Mancini's house, just outside the city. Except it's not Mancini's house. It's like someone took a picture of his house and blew it up to actual size and propped it up in front of a picture of his front steps, between pictures of the buildings on either side, in the middle of a picture of the rest of the neighborhood. Everything's flat. There aren't any shadows, and the light is white and fluorescent and it comes out of nowhere and there's no sound anywhere.

  You just gonna sit there?

  I look around. Mancini's standing behind me, popping a clip into an AK-47. He's got wings.

  I stand up, slow, letting the dizziness burn off. Mancini's wings are huge, big as an eagle's, and they're made out of white feathers. He's naked. His body is smooth and hairless and ripped, and there's a sort of round bumpish thing where his dick is supposed to be. He looks kind of like a Ken doll.

  Are you an angel? I say.

  No, dipshit, I'm a ferret.

  I reach out and touch one of his wings. It feels real, soft as pillow down. Mancini does something fast and complicated with his hands, and I'm on the ground again, but now my head feels like it's gone through a meatgrinder.

  Mancini bends down. You touch my wings again, I'll tear your arm off and shove it up your ass. All the way. Clear?

  I wait until there's just one of him, then nod. Clear.

  Good. Get up. Moloc's probably halfway to hell already.

  Who?

  Moloc. He looks at my expression, sighs. The chink.

  Xinhao?

  Yeah.

  He's here?

  Jesus. Mancini straightens, looks around, says: He's probably heading for Branch

  Avenue. There's not much time. Stand up.

  I stand up. My stomach does a little backflip, and the pain in my head starts banging through a sledgehammer chorus, but I stay on my feet. He hands me another AK-47. It doesn't have a clip in it.

  Here's the plan, he says. You distract him. I get Henry.

  Plan, I say, still reeling a little.

  He nods and turns around and starts walking. I don't want to follow him, so I stand there for a minute, waiting for a better idea to show up. It doesn't.

  I have to run to catch up. I say: Where are we going?

  Branch Avenue metro.

  Why?

  To get Henry away from Moloc.

  Who's Moloc?

  He looks at me, drops into a grade school patter. He's a demon. He wants to take Henry to hell. We don't want Henry to go to hell.

  Xinhao's a demon?

  Yeah.

  And you're an angel.

  Yeah.

  And we're in heaven?

  Does this look like heaven?

  I don't know. I hope not.

  We turn a corner, and I see a little crowd of people in the distance, bobbing toward us. There's a giant black something behind them.

  It's purgatory, says Mancini. It's where you people get sorted out.

  Sorted out?

  It's where dead people hang out until they move on.

  I know about purgatory. My grandmother was a hardcore Catholic. Her house was plastered with church shit, crosses and pictures of Jesus and Mary and that shriveled pope dude. She'd sit me down every Saturday when my mom dropped me off at her place and tell me all the things that would happen to me if I went to hell. She was a sweet old lady, but the shit that came o
ut of her mouth when she was talking about hell made my little ten-year old sack shrivel up till my balls hurt.

  I say: OK. So this is where they decide who's good enough to get in heaven?

  Yeah, in theory.

  What do you mean in theory?

  I mean that's the way it's supposed to work.

  But it doesn't?

  Not for the last couple thousand years, no.

  Then how do you get to heaven?

  You know the right people.

  Who's the right people?

  Me, says Mancini, and grabs my shirt and hauls me onto the sidewalk. The little crowd of people are getting closer. There are two rows of them, three to a row, all naked, all wearing collars, all the collars tied to a harness that runs between the rows into the hands of the giant black thing that's driving them. It's got a horse's head and a woman's body and horns running down its arms. It draws up abreast and turns toward us and opens its mouth and a baby's head rolls out and drops until it comes up against the limit of the tongue it's attached to and bungies around there, upside down. It doesn't have any eyes. It opens its mouth and makes a sound like a cloud of angry locusts attacking a scream. I piss myself.

  Mancini puts a hand on my shoulder, says: Back off. He's mine.

  The baby's head leers. Its mouth is way too big for its head. Its teeth are made out of eyes filed down to points. It laughs, then rolls itself up the tongue, back into the mouth.

  The black thing shakes the reins, and the people start moving. None of them look over at me. They're just trudging, slumped over and listless, baby steps, one foot in front of the other.

  I look at Mancini. What the hell was that?

  A six-pack.

  A what?

  The demons like to take their damned down in sixes. They're all about sixes. Mancini steps off the sidewalk. Let's go.

  I look over my shoulder. The horse-head thing leans over and bites off one of the six pack's heads. A stream of blood geysers up out of his neck, splattering the side of the building nearby, but the guy doesn't seem to notice. He keeps moving. I piss myself again.

  Jesus, said Mancini, wrinkling his nose. Get ahold of yourself. We're almost there.