Am I going to hell?
How the fuck should I know?
You're an angel.
You're a two-bit crook. What's your point?
But I've done bad things. I've killed people.
And?
Doesn't that mean I'm going to hell?
Like I said. It's not about bad or good. It's about who gets to you first.
We turn another corner and I see the metro's squared-off brown monolith. There's a flash off to my right, and this lady drops out of nowhere. She wearing a patterned print nightgown, and she's old. She gets up on her feet, looks over at us. I stop.
Keep moving, says Mancini.
Where'd she come from?
I don't know. It doesn't matter. She's dead now.
Is that big horse thing going to get her?
Probably, yeah. But maybe not.
Shouldn't we help her?
Can't help everyone. He grabs my arm and hauls me away.
We get to the metro, hop on the down escalator. Mancini reaches behind his back and pulls out a handful of clips, hands them to me.
These will piss him off, he says. They might even hurt him. But they won't stop him. Remember that. You have to get him to come after you. It shouldn't be hard. He's got a temper like you wouldn't believe. If we're lucky, he'll forget about Henry.
Why can't you do it? I'll grab Henry.
It's against the rules. Me and Moloc, we can't hurt each other.
Why not?
He shrugs. Like I said. It's the rules.
Bullshit.
Just be ready.
What happens if he catches me?
Mancini ignores that, steps off the escalator. The tunnel into the metro is on the dark side of dim, lit by recessed lights in narrow-grated canals on either side of the walkway. The turnstiles at the other end are open. The air down here smells different — somewhere between burnt matches and gunpowder.
Ok, says Mancini. We —
He stops, cocks his head, and then I hear it too: a sort of whining whooshing rushing noise, coming from the inside of the station.
Shit, says Mancini. Come on. He spreads his wings. They're even bigger than they looked folded, nearly twice as wide as he is tall. He jumps, flaps once and flies through the tunnel, takes a sharp left, sails over the turnstiles.
I look behind me, up the escalators, at the hard white light, the quiet, the looking-glass two-dimensional world full of demons and six packs and fuck knows what else. And then I slot in one of my clips and run down the tunnel, through the turnstiles, onto the platform.
The train's blurring into the station. Xinhao's on the edge of the platform. He's got one hand on Henry, who's just sort of standing there, slumped, swaying, staring out at nothing, like he's just smoked a garbage bag of weed. Xinhao's got his back turned to me and he's looking up at the ceiling, a concrete archway honeycombed with recessed squares. He's laughing, shouting stuff in a sort of heavy-metal insect language. Mancini is so bright now he's hard to look at, flying along the curve of the ceiling like a sunrise. I flip off the safety and get down in a crouch, just like they taught me in basic, move up. I'm going too fast to stay totally quiet, but the train should be loud enough to hide whatever noise I'm making.
It isn't, though.
Xinhao turns around, taking his time. He looks exactly the same as he did in the real world, except for one thing: his face is a bunch of different strips of skin quilted together: black and pink and tanned and brown, old and young, lined and smooth. His mouth is made out of at least five different kinds of lips. One of his eyebrows is black and bushy, the other thin, blonde, plucked. It's not a Frankenstein job: everything fits together fine, like a jigsaw puzzle.
Hello Frank, he says. He's smiling. How the kids?
His eyes don't match. I can see that now. One of them is green, the other brown.
I look over at Henry. He's missing an eye.
That sets me off. I don't know why. I prop the butt against the crease of my shoulder and start shooting.
Xinhao takes it full in the chest, lets go of Henry, staggers back, glances off the incoming train. I follow him, keeping my finger on the trigger until the gun's clicking over empties. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mancini streak past.
Xinhao sees it too. He tries to get up. I slot in another clip, aim, fire. He goes down.
The train doors slide open. I glance over. The car's full of stoners, all of them just standing there, staring straight ahead, like tranquilized cattle.
I pop in my last clip. Xinhao's getting up. He doesn't look hurt, and he's not smiling. Xinhao's creepy when he's smiling, but it turns out he's absolutely fucking terrifying when he's not.
Mancini and Henry are gone. I don't turn around to check, but I know. It's just me, and Xinhao, and a trainful of stoned dead damned people.
A chime sounds, and a smooth voice says: Doors closing. Please step away from the doors.
I bring the AK up and fire, catching Xinhao in the head. He staggers, drops down to one knee. I take two steps back, into the train, firing still, hoping my ammo outlasts the doors.
It does. Another chime, and the doors slide shut. The train starts moving.
I watch Xinhao through the window. He crouches and springs and flattens himself against the glass, hands splayed frogstyle, then jacks his head back and slams it into the window. It shudders and cracks. He tips his head back again, smashes the glass, and now the crack's a cobweb, spreading out toward the corners. He tips his head back again. I put the barrel of the gun up against the middle of the cobweb, and pull the trigger right as he's coming if for another one. I'm shooting dregs now. The last of my ammo blasts out into his forehead, snaps his head back, then blows him off the train.
We go into the tunnel.
I stand there for a minute, breathing the panic out of my body. The train's moving fast, and the wind blowing in through the hole in the window is deafening. I turn to the nearest dead guy. A big fat guy with a giant bushy beard, hair in a pony tail.
I say: How's it going?
He doesn't answer. I wave a hand in front of his face, flick his earlobe. Nothing. Just standing and swaying and staring, in his own little world. Not all that different from regular, alive subway people, really, except for the being dead.
The train puts on the brakes, starts slowing down. Next station coming up fast, and fuck knows what's waiting for me there. I check my magazine. Empty. I close my eyes and say a prayer to whatever god is running this fucking show.
That's when it hits me.
Branch Avenue is the last station on the green line.
This train shouldn't be going anywhere. It should be turning around and going the other way.
I push my way up to the head of the car, look through the door into the next one.
It takes me a while to see it. There's something making its way down the car, a sort of distortion, like the shimmer that comes off hot tarmac. Whenever it touches one of the stoners, they go nuts: they're flailing and screaming and ripping at themselves, at each other.
I turn around and run the other way, pushing stoners out of the way. I get to the opposite door, open it, step through into the next car. There's three cars between me and the back of the train. I look over my shoulder. The distortion is coming fast, and stoners are going apeshit not ten feet away. The sound of their screaming drills into my head.
Two more cars.
One.
I'm at the end of the last car when it touches me. I don't know how to explain what it feels like. Imagine the worst pain you've ever had, then triple it and live inside of it for a billion years. Then imagine feeling that same pain through your children for a billion more. That's a start.
I slam through the last door, off the train, onto the tracks. Every fuse in my brain is blown, but I manage to get on my feet and stagger back up the tunnel. I go maybe a hundred feet, then look back.
All the stoners inside the train are writhing like downed powerlines now, throwing themsel
ves at the windows, tearing off their clothes, and then their skin. I don't blame them. I got a little taste of what they're feeling right now. I wouldn't want my body anymore either.
I turn back up the tunnel and start walking, trying not to hear the screams.
Mancini's waiting at the top of the escalators. You made it, he says.
I drop down on my ass, lean up against the side of the brown monolith, say: Fuck you.
Fuck you too. Henry's on his way to heaven, if it's any consolation.
It is, but I don't want him to know that. I say: Can I go home now?
Home?
Yeah.
No home for you, my friend. You're done with that place.
I knew that already, on some level. I think about my boy, my wife. If my dad hadn't beat the shit out of me every time I cried when I was a kid, I'd cry now.
OK, fine. What do I do now?
That's why I'm here. You get to work for me.
I work for Teddy Dandelion.
You know what Teddy Dandelion is?
Yeah. He runs Ward 8. He gives me money to do bad things.
One, that don't mean shit down here. Two, his real name is Abaddon. He also goes by Angel of the Abyss and The Destroyer. Right? So you may want to consider a lateral move here.
What's the difference? You said it yourself. The only thing that matters is who gets to you first.
Right. But it matters a lot.
He steps aside, and I see the old lady from earlier, the one that dropped out of the flash in the sky. She's as stoned as the rest of them.
I look at Mancini. And?
And you get to escort this nice old lady to heaven. If you do a good job, maybe you'll get other jobs.
Why the hell would I want more jobs from you?
This is me offering to help, Kinsley. It won't happen again.
I close my eyes, open them, stand up, say: I lost my gun.
Mancini pulls an Uzi out of I don't know where, hands it to me. Hold on to this one, dipshit.
Where am I going?
National.
Airport?
Yeah. Put her on the first plane you see.
What if I try to get on it too?
It doesn't work that way. You live here now. Get used to it.
He turns around and blows out his wings, flaps them a couple of times, rises a couple feet off the ground. Welcome to the team, dipshit.
And then he flaps his wings again, hard enough to blow me a couple steps back, and takes off into the metal sky.
The city goes quiet.
I check the Uzi's chamber, drop the extra clips in my pocket. I look at the old stoner lady. She kind of reminds me of my grandma. I put my arm around her, and we start moving west, toward heaven.
Ramsey Shehadeh is a computer nerd trapped in the body of a computer geek. Under various pseudonyms, he has produced such enduring classics as “Oliver Twist,” “Gone With the Wind,” and “The Bible.” He subsists entirely on absinthe and the blood of his enemies, and his dreams of world domination are often shattered by the indescribably loud howling of his beagle. You can find him online athttp://doodleplex.com.
BELAIR PLAZA
(In which we discuss various things that, like guns, do not kill people)
by Adam Corbin Fusco
On a slight rise overlooking Belair Plaza, behind a Mini Market that has been robbed only twice despite constant patronage by a decidedly sketchy element, is found the body of a teenage girl. We will not describe the condition of the body. Suffice it to say that the body lies in a certain posture cradled by autumn leaves and surrounded, as such places always are, by decades-old cigarette butts, rusted Coke cans, and anonymous shreds of newspaper.
In an analysis of the situation you must take into account the surrounding environment, most especially Belair Plaza. It is a line of shops built when the rest of Gladesboro was built, in the early 1960s, as part of a Levitt town that offered affordable housing in exchange for conformity. In this city of Gladesboro there is a section referred to as Belair, though no sign proclaims it so, and in the northern portion near the golf course there is a Belair Drive. The name Belair is obscure in its origins. It elicits an associative link with an unattainable higher class, though this image is antithetical to the plaza itself. There are countless locales across the country named Belair.
The back of Belair Plaza is a whitewashed, mottled wall of loading platforms which front an access road and a wood. Utility meters stain the wall with rust. Dumpsters ooze a sickly sweet substance. If you look closely at the whitewash you can see, as if at a photographic negative, the remnants of sandblasted graffiti that can be read again, like palimpsests. This is the real graffiti of decades past, not the artistic tagging of names. Here is Boner, Fuck, and Dick. Here is the iconographic phallus composed of two circles connected to a length rounded at the top, identical to the design carved into the lava-block streets of Pompeii pointing to the locations of brothels. You must not dismiss where these inscriptions likewise may point.
The façade of Belair Plaza has never changed despite the efforts of postmodern architects to squat a pyramid shape above the stores of contemporary “strip malls” elsewhere, or offer a village aspect through scrolled signage proclaiming each “shoppe.” Here there is a series of planters in front of the stores composed of low brick rectangular walls that, since the plaza is built into a gradual slope progressing upwards left to right, are taller on one side than the other. The planters are irresistible to children to walk upon as if a balance beam, a precarious perch between sidewalk and prickly bushes; but a child walking down the wall soon finds himself too high off the ground to jump. As you walk next to them now they seem too low to bother. The foliage here has not changed. The patterns created by serrated shiny leaves and yellow marigold blooms are the same as if the old plants had never died.
The anchor store, as such things are now called, is a grocery store that has never changed names and belongs to a chain. Walking into it you notice a hint of the same smell you remember from entering the place truly countless times in the past. The cheerful, whistling black man who loaded packages and a prattle of pithy advice into customers' cars is gone, but this store still exudes its haven-like atmosphere. This is the “safest” store of all in the plaza. Nothing bad may happen here.
Belair Plaza can be regarded as of two parts divided by the anchor store, which sits a third of the way from the left side. The slope leading to the body of the teenage girl progresses to the right. The stores toward the left possess an empty quality, as if the plaza starts with the grocery store instead. This left side is less substantive, as if the proprietors moving into these spaces already know their businesses are going to fail.
Sitting on the left shoulder of the grocery store is a delicatessen that likewise has not changed its name, but still attains the “left side” aspect because you have never been inside it. It still holds a quality that prevents you from entering. To the left of the deli are two or three small spaces that you cannot remember containing anything of notice, and even now your eye skips over them. Perhaps they had been or are office spaces for lawyers or entrepreneurs. One has neat white lettering on its glass door proclaiming R. H. Cliden & Associates, and looking into the blinds you see bare carpet, white partition walls, a planter, and a chair, until the grey light of the lowering sky washes out the image.
Next to these squats the expanse of the Good Hearts Thrift Store. People donate furniture here for tax deductions. The sullen interior is shrouded behind the glass. Black women in paisley scarves and white women with smoke-leathered faces pick over tables piled high with cardboard-backed packages of generic pantyhose, shriveled bras, melon-colored throw rugs, and the snapping gold clasps of matte-black pocketbooks. The floor is the same tile used in your elementary school but shellacked with a thicker layer of dust. The smell is of old books; the lighting is that of attics. The furniture for sale here is anonymous, constructed of unclassifiable wood that entraps the ghosts of musty cl
othes. The gargoyle-smiles of tarnished brass pulls reflect the ones made by the light poles in the parking lot with their double arcs, a leering grin with anomalous linkages to the grimace of George Corley Wallace's would-be assassin as he is led away from a crowd, witnessed by you on television after school long ago — a sudden crack of gunfire that took place, it so happens, in a neighboring town.
This store makes your suspect list. This furniture has witnessed countless ejaculations in rooms smelling of Lysol.
The leftmost occupant of the plaza — separated from the rest by a space that flickers between a paint store and a lawn care center — sells trophies and plaques. It is confusing to you how such a place could stay in business. How many people win trophies? How many people need brass plaques? But they sell ice skates and cheerleader accessories as well, and it becomes clearer. The patrons of such a store have daughters that possess the kind of pure, bright-eyed excitement found only at a certain age and nowhere else in the universe. (This becomes more significant when we get to Scanlin & Sons Dry Cleaners.) The innocence associated with state finals, pom-poms on skates, cheerleader batons, laces, white leather, and waterproofing cream indicates the need for this establishment to sit at the end of the plaza away from other influences.
The trophy store goes on your suspect list.
To the immediate right of the anchor store is a pizza parlor. It has changed names through the years — Maria's, Assisi's, Roma Delight — but never its decor or nature.
The tables are covered with red-and-white checked tablecloths upon which squat glass shakers of Parmesan cheese and red pepper flake. Wood paneling hides moldy plaster. One must stand at the counter for a long time before getting service even if the place is empty, which it usually is, but the pizza is good and made with care. The jukebox plays only puppy love songs that teach love as loss. The wanness of these songs is periodically drowned out by the beeping of a Pong game and an Indy 500 pinball machine.
Next to this is a store that changes proprietorship so rapidly that the sign on the façade displays bare fluorescent tubes. It is a knick-knack kind of place. In significant times it was a macramé store. Though we refuse to describe the condition of the body, this binding referent must not be dismissed.
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