Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Delta MedWorks: those motherfuckers. Melted dead jerks. Welted head burns. The enemy. The key. All day. All night. They were a scourge, a bank-backed monster, and I would prove it. I pulled a cliff-jump and requisitioned wire archives for a ten year stretch. I knew the request would find its way into an email to management, and had an explanation pre-fabricated. I’d claim a friend at the Fed had tipped me off to a retrospective review of dual signature docs and approval levels. I would make certain our files were clean, especially for our biggest client. Protect the bank. Protect our customer. Wink.

  My Crooked D was despondent, barely functional. I researched Peyronie’s disease, the scarring of the carpora cavernosa. I set up a multi-screen jack-off overture, all of my favorite scenes on loop. Nothing. Sitting in the desert in a car with no gas, pumping the accelerator. Tripled my Hex dose and forced the issue. Pain as I came, molten lead in my urethra. One testicle nearly sucked back up into my body, to escape the atrocity.

  Mom called. I let it go to voice mail.

  “It’s broken, Deckard. It’s just broken.”

  His shell took on a golden aura, shimmering through my tears. He hissed. I realized I was still naked and wearing Maria Scharf’s lipstick. I dressed and cleaned my face, never looking at the mirror.

  “I’m sorry. How about some extra worms tonight?” I fed him. Set him on the floor for a walkabout and cleaned his enclosure.

  “I love you. Deck.”

  I thought the sound of thoughtless, whooping grief was coming from a neighbor’s apartment, but the wailing disappeared when I stopped to catch my breath.

  The Delta wire files arrived. I shuttled them from my office to the trunk of my car via briefcase. It took forty-two laps. I sent a mass email thanking my fellow employees for tolerating my unorthodox run/walk training. Marathon coming up. When I shut down my laptop for the day I saw a reflection in the black screen. That was me, wasn’t it? How long had my nose been bleeding?

  “Sir, I’m afraid we’ll need a valid I.D. to accompany your initial deposit.”

  “Come again?”

  “Well, sir, the I.D. provided isn’t matching your new account documentation.”

  Shit. I was slipping. Who opened the New Era Credit Union account? Martin? Trevor? Maria? Was I supposed to be wearing a dress? No. No. Think fast. I knew the girl working new accounts was a trainee. I’d made sure. I had to act before she called over the Operations Supervisor.

  “Sir, if you could…”

  “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry.” Big grin. Sell it with everything you’ve got, damn it. Does MK-Oil have credit union accounts? Am I Trevor? I’m probably Trevor. Take the gamble. “I must have given you my brother Martin’s I.D. This is so embarrassing. We had poker night last week and, you know, boys being boys, we ended up at a strip club and my brother got tipsy and lost his I.D. there. Then he has the audacity to ask me to get it back for him the next day. I must have grabbed it by mistake.”

  Her suspicious squint opened up, her eyebrows raised. Sell it. Grab that I.D. before she can scrutinize the photo a moment longer. You’re sweating now. Not good. Shit, I should have visually differentiated Martin and Trevor with more than hairstyles. Glasses, maybe? An eye patch?

  “I’ll be right back, sir.”

  “Oh, that’s not necessary—I’ve got my I.D. right here.” Shaking fingers, scrambling my wallet as fast as I could. “I…gosh, I’m kind of mortified…it’s been such a long day already and we’ve had a lot of tension in our family and this isn’t helping things and I…oh, okay, here it is.”

  I reached out my hand with Trevor’s I.D., the other hand outstretched for reciprocal pass off, engulfed by a new sheet of cold sweat as I realized I’m trying to sell this brother story when the I.D.’s have different last names. Maintain eye contact. Don’t let her look at the license again. Try to pop some tears. Everybody has family strife. And, despite the Hex-issue ocular dryness, I managed a lower lip quiver and the slightest of well-ups and this girl was just green enough to make a banking decision with her heart. The I.D.’s were exchanged, Martin’s license back in my pocket so fast a tiny sonic boom should have issued.

  “It’s alright.” She leaned forward, confiding, the smell of her sweet and light, her voice filled with the kind of innocence that the bank would systematically remove (if her job survived her issuing my fraudulent account). “I’ve got a teenage sister who’s taking my mom and dad for a ride right now, and I’ll tell you, I barely recognize her sometimes.”

  I nodded. “Those are tough years for any parent. Shoot, my parents ended up divorcing and sending my brother to military school. It got so ugly later that Martin stopped speaking to my dad and took my mom’s last name.” Too much? Am I overselling it? Damn it. Shut up and get out.

  But her face relaxed further, my retro-fitted reality erasing her last doubt, creating false trust. And my head was already tilted down to avoid the scrutiny of electric eyes, so I didn’t have to adjust to account for shame.

  My bed was wherever my body just gave up. Waking on the bathroom floor was less of a surprise than the pain behind my left eye. Pressure, distension, some kind of fluid built up behind the optic nerve, sloshing like tiny razors. Popped a triple dose of dot-cons, shifted my head to the position which triggered the lowest agony. Smelled the smoke of an extinguished wooden match. The pain passed, but the ghost of it sat in my chest making accusations: This is killing you.

  I arrived at work earlier and earlier, relieved that my I.D. card didn’t seem to have any time restrictions, but still knowing that this deviation from pattern popped as anomaly. Late night cleaning staff gave me friendly greeting waves and then set to talking shit in a language I couldn’t identify. No need for the overhead fluorescents, face warmed by coffee steam, monitor light falling across my eyes like recognition mapping grids. Tikoshi Maxillofacial Surgery in high focus. Was Dr. T. copping bodies from Hungarian Minor before somebody decided that Hungo was better off minus one brain? I found a three month pattern, disguised Delta shell funds moving to Dr. T., followed within days by a transfer of similar amount to Anson BioMed, further followed by a series of structured cash withdrawals.

  Anson BioMed barely registered as a business. Just a PO Box, state registry as an LLC, and a tiny strip mall storefront with a few diabetes kits in the windows and some canes on the wall. The sign on the front door read, “Nature Calls—Be Back Soon!” but I had my sincere doubts that this place would exist once the lease was up. My fraud antennae—attuned by my own recent work in the art—called Anson BioMed for what it was: a Delta MedWorks filter and front for local business beneath the radar of acceptability. Anson’s accounts were held outside of my purview, but I knew that if I could access the other bank’s security footage I’d have some nice shots of Hungo, or maybe his crony Felton, putting their mitts on Delta’s dirty money.

  But why?

  It was a question I couldn’t answer from the safety of my apartment and the digital corridors of my undernet system. Which meant it was time to pay a down low visit to Dr. T.’s office and find out what kind of man would want bodies in secret supply.

  Drive time killed my inertia and allowed thought: A stakeout? Seriously—where’s your Honorary Hardy Boy’s Detective Club badge? When’s the last time you ate? You really think a global medical company would leave a fraud trail so blatant that some Hex-head could expose the thing? Are you breathing enough? Can you take five sustained breaths? If you die, Deckard will starve. You think anyone will come and care for him? Does your mom deserve to bury you? Do you want to bequeath your porn collection to anyone? If you’re right about Delta, what on Earth would stop them from crushing you? How many days left until the bank checks the Foreign Transit Comp GL? Haven’t you seen that green car in your rearview before? How many times? Why did you give up the violin? Why won’t anyone ever love…and so I turned up the stereo to distortion-level and took to gumming powdered Hex from a tiny plastic baggy in my shirt pocket. I put the A/C on max hoping an ice age would
slow my mind.

  “Honey bear, I know you’re always busy with your new job, but I feel like we haven’t talked in forever and you know how I worry. Anyway, I’m probably being silly, but give me a call when you can. If I don’t hear from you soon I’m just going to make the drive. I’ll bring you some iced brownies. So call me. Love you.”

  The screen changed during my morning wire review. I was tracking the flow of funds, blackheart Delta pumping out millions to its tributaries, when a deposit far above the standard amount jumped from Anson to Dr. Tikoshi. But the funds never moved that direction. So I checked who’d sent the money to Anson BioMed and saw a name: ROBERT LINSON.

  What? Who? Okay, this needs a screen print and then… And then the screen refreshed and ROBERT LINSON was long gone, replaced by the name of another Delta arterial, Selpak Transfers Inc.

  I grabbed my private notebook (now number thirteen in a series, the prior twelve sitting at home, the canon of conspiracy) and wrote ROBERT LINSON as fast as I could, before I lost the thought to a random blackout or some fresh panic. Our wire system was live, but not malleable from my office. There had to be a user code tied to the change, some way of identifying who had altered the sender data, but I didn’t know how to access that information. Call the proof office? Talk to someone in I.T.? Wouldn’t I send up another red flag? And if the system was live, did the person on the other end know who had accessed the record? Was I meant to see this name, a way of throwing me off the trail? Or did I happen to catch the alteration by being here so early? Am I the early bird or the early worm? No, this means something. They’re getting sloppy. I’ll be the king soon. I made it three hours into the standard workday before bailing for an imaginary dental appointment. As I backed out of the parking lot I spotted three cowboys watching me from a second floor window.

  None smiled, none waved.

  You type something like “government collusion in corporate pharmaceutical testing” into a standard search engine, you almost expect the screen to go blank followed by “PLEASE WAIT, SIR” flashing in bold, followed by a pinch on the neck as the needle goes in, followed by everyone wondering how you could have died so suddenly. So, even when using my undernet connection I hesitated while typing in the admittedly-less-ominous search term “Robert Linson.” Still, I pressed Enter, then took a break to scrub the mildew smell from Deckard’s tank. I’d added so many layers of encryption and established a multi-national path so convoluted that the response would take more than a few seconds to ping back. When my results finally arrived I first heard the sound of Deck splashing around in the fresh water end of his tank, followed by the high pressure wash of my heartbeat filling my ears, an insistent double-bass pedal flutter thump. Because the first result returned made everything make even less sense:

  “Robert Matthew Linson, better known by the stage name Robbie Dawn, is an American musician, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, activist, and philanthropist. Although initially popular for his early work with boy band Mode 5, he is best known for his solo career, pioneering production methods, and his innovative music label SonsJeunes.” Three pages of scrolling, and every linked result was Robbie Dawn, until I reached a smattering of Bob Linson pro-fishing videos, obituaries, social profiles, and corrupted partials.

  “Fuck me, Deck—I’ve finally lost it. I’ve really lost it.” But what other Robert Linson would have six hundred thousand dollars to send to a physician? The pro-fishing guy wore the same pants in every video—it ain’t him. No—“Robbie Dawn” has the stadium-filler money. This is real. It can’t be, it makes no fucking sense…but it feels real, doesn’t it? Are you sure you saw his name on that screen? Yesterday you tried to eat a granola bar with the wrapper still on. You’re losing it. This is your brain on Hex. You saw Robbie Dawn on The League of Zeroes and now he’s part of the puzzle. How convenient. Are you sure your mom isn’t the secret head of Delta MedWorks? How long until Deckard is part of the conspiracy? You are fabricating false twists to cover the truth: This was the wrong path, you’ve reached the end, and there’s nowhere else to go.

  But as long as there was more Hex, more action, there was always somewhere else to go. I would keep trickling down this hill until I joined the larger river. A vast power was waiting for me to join its forward surge.

  The new rabbit hole was a blur of band bios, big booty back-up dancers, and progressively more absurd/expensive music videos. Chronological clips charting a young man’s growth from a gangly pop pawn to a self-styled Svengali who felt comfortable saying things like, “The real key to the mastery of my art has been staying humble and staying hungry.” I watched everything in order, looking for a reason, a way in—I hoped to witness his face changing shape, taking on a leonine tightness, some way to explain his payment to Dr. Tikoshi. It had to be reconstructive surgery on the sly. But no—all this motherfucker did was age natural (and I’ll be damned if his wrinkles didn’t add charm), make hits, buy custom cars, and date starlets. I mapped his touring and studio sessions and there were no large gaps or extended stays when he came through town. Watched some of his videos twice, partially hoping his back-up dancers could stir Crooked D from his damaged slumber and partially because these songs were produced in the way that makes you shell out for serious headphones or a twelve point surround. I turned the music up—the swirling drums took on new resonance. Turned it up again and my bones shook. The gray tendrils of Hex-vision swirled in the periphery. The upstairs neighbor expressed his dissenting opinion with a double stomp on his floor and a muffled but still audible, “Turn it down, motherfucker.” I dropped the volume and smiled. Popped another Hex off the coffee table and drowned it with a mug of cold coffee. Something had changed. I could feel it. There was something here. Streetlight through the window called me delusional, forced its outside perspective. I closed the blinds.

  You can tell when they’re coming for you if you study their faces. They smile more than they used to. They agree emphatically with casual statements and laugh longer than they should. It’s a hood made from synthetic interactions, and you’ll belong right up until the noose is snugged into place. I knew that, and things were too goddamned jovial that Friday morning. I even received a pat on the back and a “Doyle, howyabeen?” from a cowboy I hadn’t spoken to in months. That was a clear enough sign, but the Robbie Dawn/Tikoshi link had me in blinders and I was on the hunt for other entities which might front funds for the pop star. Then I received the email. The subject line was: “Quick Meeting in Conf. Room B?” The light tone and question mark—as if the meeting was just another fun choice I could make—said one thing:

  I was fucked.

  I hustled over to an empty office on the fourth floor and scanned the parking lot—two vehicles I hadn’t seen before near the entrance, both shiny black with deep window tints and incongruously colored plates. Government vehicles? Local cops? Whose jurisdiction was I even under anymore? Could be the FBI, FDIC, Secret Service, DEA, hell, maybe even the Postal Inspector. Whoever they were with, I knew I was facing thirty years minimum. They could bury me deeper—it all depended on the breadth of their knowledge. With the volume of Hex stashed at my place, I could even envision a trafficking arrest. No reasonable jury would believe all of those pills were for me. I’d almost feel too embarrassed to convince them otherwise. My stomach pinged acid pain like a whole field of bleeding ulcers had erupted. I could hear my teeth grinding as my panicked breath fogged my view of the offending new vehicles. You knew this was coming. Maybe they only want to ask you about the Foreign Transit Comp GL? Can you spin it? Say the funds were being moved to test security levels for our Bruxton 505 compliance? But where did that money go, Doyle? How will you explain the missing funds?

  Nope—FUCKED. On my way to a pig-roasting bunk party at maximum security overflow, teeth punched out, Aryan rape squads trying to see who can prolapse my colon first.

  What have I done?

  My peripheral vision shrunk to pinpoint, and I couldn’t tell if it was a Hex fluctuation or conscio
usness fading fast. Then the low growl of a wolf came from behind me, a full-body electric shiver, the closest thing I had to the holy guidance of cherubim. The sound vibrated in my bones and cleared my vision, filling me with new purpose and animal exigency:

  I was surrounded by hunters, and I would escape at any cost.

  I moved through the building with a new kind of confidence. Having left myself without any acceptable choices, I decided to embrace the unacceptable and go all in. FUCK IT! WHY NOT?

  That meant lighting a trash fire in the fourth floor bathroom, knowing that the sprinklers would kick in shortly and the full-building evacuation would override whatever today’s proceedings were to have been.

  That meant a final jaunt to my office, head down, walking fast—I copped my last private, hand-written notebook and connected a nasty, virus-riddled USB stick to my laptop. Granted permission for baboon-fucker.exe to run and hoped to scorch enough of my trail to slow their realizations.

  That meant throwing open the door to Conference Room B and only hearing, “Hello, Mr. Doyle. Thank you…” before my thumb depressed the trigger on my canister of Hi-Pepper Bear Spray, coating the tiny room in blinding, breath-sucking mist. Four occupants instantly dropped: my boss, his boss, and two younger men in cheap suits. I caught a glimpse of handcuffs flopping from the jacket of Cheap Suit #1, figured that meant pistols within reach. I didn’t wait to find out why they wanted to thank me.