Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth

by Cassandra Khaw

  I have nothing to say to that. Demeter takes the scenic route, lazily winding around food stations, periodically stopping to pop open lids and inspect contents. The buffet, from the little I can see, is unexpectedly wholesome. Roasted aubergines and brie-drizzled asparagus; mushrooms steeped in rich brown stew, a hint of anise and peppercorn wafting in the steam; golden buttered corn, char-grilled cauliflower, thick slabs of herb-crusted lamb, perfectly roasted. There’s even stuffing. And gravy.

  “Rich fare for a soup kitchen.”

  A sidelong glance and a small smile. “I try to make it worth it for them.”

  I shiver.

  I’m silent as she points out stove and microwave, oven and freezer, the location of every utensil and pot and article of crockware, my head bobbing in time with every pause. The idea of divine charity is as incomprehensible as thermonuclear physics. What agenda could they have? What are they doing with so much good food? Demeter might be the embodiment of agriculture, but this cornucopia of exquisitely seasoned excess had to have cost her, had to have cost them. Yet at the same time—

  “You got everything?”

  “Crystal.”

  We both pause.

  “I’ll just assume that you just said ‘yes,’” she announces drily, then walks away, no goodbye offered, cold again.

  Finally unchaperoned, I scan the kitchen, make eye contact with the other staff, a coterie of uniformed men and women, no more memorable than the proverbial man on the street, their plain-faced humanity only slightly too flawless to be authentic. They stare at me in return, silent, their eyes refracting the amber sunlight.

  I’m on the verge of salutations when the front door swings open again and everyone swivels, Demeter’s voice pouring out in warm contralto welcome. The people who shamble in are old, young, male, female; every ethnicity you can name and every shade of lost. They’re received without prejudice, however, with Poseidon himself escorting each new arrival into the ever-expanding queue.

  And soon, there’s no time for nurturing suspicion, just work, just doling out food and replenishing empty tureens, just good,cleanlabor. To my surprise, I enjoy it. It’s possible that Demeter watered her harvest with the blood of one-armed orphans, but I can’t see any evidence of foul play, nothing bloodier than fresh-plucked poultry and shelves packed with raw beef. For once, my kitchen isn’t a place of murder, and I’m not going through the motions, perpetually careful to not speculate on the origin of the meat I’m marinating. For once, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel human.

  Thump. The door opens, but it doesn’t shut. I look up. Men in suits pour through the front door, grim-faced, straight-backed, an army of Agent Smiths equipped with briefcases. They assemble in two lines, one on each side of the exit. Stop. Wait.

  “Shit”—Demeter’s voice, from the corridor that leads to the bathrooms—“get the fuck down!”

  As one, the men snap open their briefcases and extract SMGs, beetle-black and gleaming. There is no posturing, no overture to violence, no commanding the innocent to move out of the way. Before the last syllable of Demeter’s warning can die, they open fire and the world frags into gore and muzzle flash.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DESPITE THE MEDIA’S hard-on for it, death isn’t glamorous. It isn’t blood in the water, or curds of brain dribbling from a neat round hole, still wisping smoke, or a clean red sickle opening like a smile under your chin. It’s piss and shit and screaming and bodies in hypovolemic shock. It is spluttering gut wounds and grown men crying. It is the smell of compromised intestines, still processing the junk crammed down the gullet that morning. It is fecal matter and bile and so much vomit because it is hard to hold your lunch when your stomach’s honeycombed with fresh holes, and you’ve plugged fingers into every opening, hoping it’ll stop the blood that pisses out with every whimpering breath, but it won’t fucking stop.

  The suits are relentless. Theirs is a death by number, eschewing efficiency for quantity, proselytising the idea that if you put enough rounds in something, it will eventually die. They’re not wrong. In the last two minutes, we’ve lost at least twenty-five people: mostly patrons, but also a handful of the staff. The rest of us are holed up behind kitchen equipment, all bashed up with no place to go.

  “Who the fuck are they?” I scream as more bullets bang against the food station.

  Veles, jaw hanging by a twist of muscle, laughs uproariously. “High-interest credit card company!” I’m not sure how I’m hearing him speak.

  With that, he vaults over the barricade, skin tearing where it fails to keep up with the sudden multiplication of muscle tissue, frayed hide trailing like gauze. Veles’ body ripples like a column of tumors developing in fast-forward, and he laughs as he rolls his shoulders, cartilage popping even as his spine sprouts another two feet of vertebrae.

  “Come! Vanquis! Veles is not scared of you.” He pounds a fist into an open palm, guffaws as his face warps into a muzzle, blood drooling from newly wolf-yellow eyes.

  The intruders pause, just for a heartbeat, as though silently conferring; twitching and rocking on their heels, mouths palpitating, Adam’s apples bobbing in concert. A consensus is reached, and the air splits with the sound of twenty-six high-power firearms unloading in unision.

  The rounds punch deep into Veles’ neo-nightmare mass. Ordinarily, the bullets would simply bed down in the vitals, pinpoints of metal lodged in a slurry of liquefied meat. But this is a numbers game, and volume’s an ace up its own sleeve. Wounds iris wider with every new perforation, exposing punctured, oozing viscera.

  And still Veles keeps laughing, keeps stalking through a sea of chewed-up corpses, arms held wide.

  A lucky shot takes his jaw off completely. Veles screams in rapture.

  Shit.

  “Ham kha—are we really going to sit here while he gets himself killed?” I demand, scrabbling across the floor for a knife. If this is the best that the Greek gods can do, I’d best start evaluating contingencies.

  “No.”

  Demeter rises, power steaming from her skin, evaporating into filaments of possibility. Reality dithers like an old television set. And for one infinitesimally brief moment, the universe peels open, and I can see everything—how physics and velocity and time intersects with the idea of a heaven above, how meta co-exist with the fundamental truth of their non-existence, how the sun can be a star can be a ball of dung rolled across the galaxy by a gargantuan beetle. Suddenly, it is all so clear.

  And then Demeter pulls on the strings of what-is and what-can-be, and the room goes white.

  “Fight, Rupert!” Her voice, a command that spears through my breastbone, anchors itself in my ribs and drags me forward through the all-encompassing light. Not a compulsion, but a call to arms, an entreaty to put down fear and arm myself with vengeance. It is the last thing I hear before another detonation—gunshots clipping too close—removes my hearing.

  Before I know it, I’ve cut deep into a vein. Blood gushes and with every drop, I pay out another microsecond of my lifespan, another unoccupied neuron. My tattoo-spirits lap it up, drink it down, and regurgitate raw power into my soul. Buoyed by the surplus, Bob drags himself to the surface, wreaths my face in bone, and with a curse between my teeth, I leap over the food station.

  Hell unravels in silent, flashing vignettes.

  Bang. Veles kneeling atop an agent, fingers on the man’s chest. Pulling until the seams of his skin give out, and breastbone gleams red-slick in the light.

  Bang. Demeter, not-Demeter, a thing that could have been Demeter, bearing down on a pair of vacant-eyed men, screaming something that I can’t hear.

  Bang. Poseidon, his arm held high, fingers curled. Beatific as he stares at a man floating in the air, legs kicking, water burbling out of his mouth.

  Bang. The kitchen staff, shimmering between guises. Swarming. Teeth and talon, threads of black hair, constricting about wrist and throat and—

  Bang.

  A weight slams into my
side and I go down, hand already whipping around to bring the knife on my assailant. The blade cuts cleanly through his chest—a boy, maybe eighteen, hollow but still so achingly young—to emerge the other side, and even though he’s starting to hiccup blood, he doesn’t stop. The youth wedges the muzzle of his SMG under my sternum, pins his weight over the machine, depresses the trigger.

  I’d be dead ten times over if it weren’t for Bob, who howls up to swallow the bullets, to swallow the kid’s arm, amputating the limb at the elbow. The suit doesn’t scream, just falls back, more baffled than anything else. He gawks at the stump of his arm, brow rucked, looks up at me, eyes clearing.

  I see a jitter of confused terror but it’s too late to stop Bob. United, we twist onto all fours and lunge, landing with our teeth in his throat and our hand cupped around his heart, which spasms in my grip like a terrified hummingbird.

  And. I. Squeeze.

  POP.

  Or, maybe, splorge.

  It’s all the same when you’re elbow-deep (both literally and figuratively, ang moh) in the fight. Regardless, the fighting ends almost as quickly as it begins.

  “SO, VELES GET share of money, yes?”

  The words clatter into the gory silence, innocent, too loud. I’ve an arm around a pudgy man with a flamboyant hat, glasses cracked but somehow still in position. Ropes of dark hair cling to his face in bloodied loops. His name’s either Weasel or Ferrett, or something else that is sleek and deceptively cute. I can’t remember exactly. But he is remarkably ebullient despite his injuries, radiant despite a face bleached of its natural pinkness.

  “Money?” I ask as I usher the man out of the soup kitchen. Wobbling, he doffs his hat at me, and shambles away.

  “Money. From dead pool.”

  “Like in the movie?”

  “Veles—” Demeter’s voice again, thick with warning.

  “Da. Just like in movie.” Veles resumes, oblivious, once again topically human. “We make bets on who survive each evening. Win big, sometimes. Ariadne won flat-screen television that way.”

  I toe at a corpse flipped on his face, arms splayed, face pillowed by a plate of mash. From a distance, congealing blood—especially blood with extraneous bits—could be mistaken for lingonberry sauce. It is not a pleasant revelation.

  “That is morbid.”

  “Da. But Greek gods don’t pay, and homeless people don’t tip.” Veles shrugs, hefting a body onto each shoulder. He beams. “So, we do what we can. On bright side, Veles get loads of money on main gamble. Thirty-two dead! Right on the cash!”

  “I—what?”

  “Had to wait for necessary casualties, but was worth it.” Veles thumps his chest with someone else’s foot, the leg itself broken at the knee, white bone jutting from the ruined joint.

  I consider the ramifications of his words, and chew out a question that I already know I don’t want an answer to. “You mean we could have saved some of these people?”

  “Da. Easy.” Veles begins to stroll towards the kitchen, where he offloads his burden of bullet-torn carcasses. “Vanquis goons are pushovers.”

  “Wait. Wait right there. So, you’re telling me”—my voice trembles towards an octave it can’t quite reach, and I ball my hands into fists, wincing—“that we could have saved aaall these people, but instead we—”

  “I don’t think you’re approaching this correctly,” Poseidon intrudes. I turn to find the god sweeping bodies towards the kitchen like so many hairballs, limp arms and legs flopping everywhere. A hysterical laugh saws through my chest. Ragdoll physics; they get you even in the real world. “You could have gone out there all on your own. You never needed a ‘we’ behind you.”

  “But—”

  “But what? Exactly?” Poseidon is relentless. “But you were afraid? But you weren’t prepared to go out there alone? To risk your life for unwashed strangers? Is that what you were going to say?”

  “Poseidon, that’s enough.” Demeter finally stepping in, too late.

  His grin is salt-white, cold as the deep. “Before you pass judgment, perhaps spend some time meditating on the fact that you are a dyed-in-the-wool coward.”

  “I said, enough.”

  That was unfair. Three small words. They hang stillborn from the tip of my tongue. I want so badly to tell him that he’s being unfair, that he was mistaken about my intentions, that the hail of bullets was a perfectly legitimate thing to be afraid of, that the desire to survive is practically constitutional.

  But he’s right.

  He’s right.

  “If it helps, it wasn’t as though they were destined for a long life rich in grandchildren.” Poseidon shrugs and returns to his labour, smile feline. “Cheap fuel for the divine fire.”

  Another frisson of dread, echoing my earlier unease, but I swallow it down and tug on the straps of my apron, flattening the cloth.

  “It’s fine.” I clear my throat and straighten my spine, head held stiffly, an old line twisting in my thoughts: Fake it until you make it. I can do that. I can feign dignity. I’ve done so before. “Everything’s. Fine. So, what are we going to do with all these bodies?”

  Two triangles of corpses lie stacked in the kitchen, one on the counter and one on the floor, limbs still comically splayed. Gore dribbles and drips like so much discolored treacle, while blank eyes gaze up at blood-speckled staff, standing silent as statues. I stare at them, stare at the two piles, breath twitching in second-long intervals, an uncomfortable epiphany skittering multi-legged up my bones.

  “Blood and meat is the oldest communion,” Demeter announces, tone inscrutable.

  “Waste not, want not,” Poseidon says. “Get to work.”

  IT’S EASIER WHEN you don’t think of them as people.

  We start with dismemberment, the team of kitchen staff and I, separating limbs from torsos, heads from shoulders. Legs and arms are divided from hands and feet, fingers and toes amputated, breaded, and fried to a crisp.

  Next: we skin the bodies, strip them down to the muscle. Ram-horned kitchen boys, now pared of glamour, scour the vast sheets of epidermis, plucking hair and draining abscesses, anything that might dilute texture and taste. After that, the skins are either cured, or baked, or fried as the individual sous chef desires.

  When it’s just bone and meat, unidentifiable from any other slab of raw muscle, we suspend the decapitated torsos from hooks in the freezer, drain out the blood into freshly scrubbed buckets. Then the carving knives come out.

  Just ingredients now: tripe and sirloin, drumstick and heart.

  I don’t waste anything. Not even the gallbladders, which I spice and saute, before slicing them thin and plating them with creamy globs of yoghurt. The small intestines are rinsed, over and over, until only the faintest stink of decomposition remains, then poured into the food processor with garlic, layers of caramelized onion, pepper, and a glazing of white wine. At some point, after they’ve been sewn up into their casings and left to smoke for weeks, we’ll turn them into proper andouille.

  Everything else, I play by ear, too dazed to consider the slaughter. Easier to be a function, easier to pretend that this is nothing but marrow and tissue, a carnivore banquet to salt, season, and stir-fry. No thinking about the why, or the who it’s from. That’s how I’ve always gotten along.

  I make bowls of pho, bake powdered calcium into bread, roast bone-in calves with nothing but sea salt and black pepper, a hint of thyme at the end. Nothing ostentatious, though, no feats of molecular gastronomy. I can’t manage that. Not today.

  “It makes no sense,” I slam the butcher’s knife on the cutting board, straightening. Around me, kitchen staff jump, stare, cat-eyed and eerily silent.

  “What doesn’t make sense...” A woman tiptoes closer, unguligrade feet making for a syncopated walk. She cocks her head about twelve degrees too far, a reptilian grin held up uncertainly, as though the purpose of the expression confused her to no end. “...sir?”

  “Everything.” I snap. “Nothing. I—”


  I’ve been at peace with being a coward. Heroism kills, after all. But there was just... something to Poseidon’s sneering dismissal. Or maybe it was losing everything I’ve loved, or becoming a political fugitive. Or both. Probably both. Probably all the events of the last six months, meeting up with the psychic repercussions of every bad decision I’ve ever made.

  Or maybe, just maybe, it’s my stomach disagreeing with personal responsibility.

  “Nothing,” I say again.

  The woman nods. Hunger, or some unfortunate circumstance of genetics, has cooked the softness from her face, laying bare an alien framework. The cheeks are built too high, the mouth—a teeth-riddled slit—pulled too close to the chin. A tail whips free from under her pinafore, a tuft of brown fur slaps against the counter and sways away.

  “What is your name?”

  I wipe my hands on my apron and smooth a hand over my skull. The buzzcut is beginning to grow out; I make a mental note to do something about it. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “What...” Like the old song goes, the words don’t come easy. The syllables sound unpracticed on her tongue, unnatural, like a parrot’s caricature of a conversation. “...is your name?”

  “Rupert. Obviously. I’m sure you’d been briefed.” Now the entire kitchen is listening to us, every pretense of decorum dropped along with their glamour. From the corner of my eyes, I see fur and coiling tails, scales arranged in rainbow gradients, and even stranger appendages.

  “What is your name?” she repeats, a frown creasing her eggshell brow.

  Oh. The texture of the air alters. Curiosity becomes airless anticipation, thick enough to fillet and grill. A prickle of fear travels my spine. That kind of name. I feel the collective lean in, hungry, but I’ll be damned before I give up something like that so easily. (Technically, I’m already damned, but that’s hardly relevant to the story, is it?)

  I flick a glance around me. The staff has me circled. Not exactly lynch-mob-in-waiting levels of surrounded, but definitely in the you’re-staying-right-here-buddy genus. Nothing to do but procrastinate. So I do. I wash up. I scrub down the knives, disinfect the cleaning board, whisk peeled fingernails into the bin. Under my breath, I reel off most of a warding spell—the last vocable, the trigger, I keep tied up in my throat—and feed the loop of sounds to Bob, who picks it up and repeats it in a droning subvocal circuit.