Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  But this was 45th. Zero ambulances were forthcoming, and I didn’t know how long this thing would be preoccupied with its smashed cowboy leftovers.

  The thing lifted the man’s head from the asphalt and then slammed it back down with two hard, sharp blows. It was clear from the sound that the man’s skull had gone shattered eggshell. The thing laughed, pleased by the ease of access, and bent to eat.

  Then: I reverse belly-crawled to my gear with all the grace and speed of a crushed armadillo, wondering at how death had come for me in the guise of some jacked-up mutant-mouthed Popeye-jawed gorilla-armed man-thing.

  Honestly, part of me was really glad I wouldn’t have to go to jail.

  My right foot landed on something—the duffel. I chanced a quick look back and found my backpack and Deck’s carrier. But that’s it. Where was my supposedly lethal Hi-Pepper Bear Spray now? Wasted in my fuck-it-up frenzy at the bank. My knife? Nowhere, flung to the street when Egbert grabbed me. No, it couldn’t have gone too far…

  I rolled to my right to check my radius for the knife, and despite bracing myself with my arm, my chest lit up like wildfire.

  If you’ve ever felt a pain like that then you know holding in a yell isn’t some macho choice you can make. My scream was an autonomic pain vent, a short but very loud, “AAAAH!” that exploded from my mouth, followed by a wave of instant regret as I saw the thing across the street snap-to from its mind-munching reverie.

  It rose from its hunched position over the corpse, standing about seven feet tall. Nowhere near the size of the Sasquatch I’d imagined when it had first grabbed me, but its frame was thick and over-muscled. Its neck and jaw pulsed and shifted in the streetlight in ways I told myself were only imagined, but even twenty feet away I could hear bones moving and locking in to place, the synovial pops of a structure under duress.

  The thing walked toward me. I hoped that it was slow and sated, but also guessed it had assessed me as a limited flight risk. I rotated my head to the left and scanned for my knife to no avail other than the added benefit of sending another pain-shock through my chest.

  Was this all a dream? The bank assassin killed Egbert, this thing killed the assassin, and maybe a T-Rex was about to stomp down 45th and make a snack out of the brain-eater…

  “Doyle, you dumb motherfucker.” Oh, god, that voice. Distorted and low from moving through a wind-tunnel of a voice box. And happy. The thing was happy. I wouldn’t lift my face to see its smile, that joyful blasted planet of a face with blood on its chin.

  It’s talking. Maybe you can reason with it. Maybe it wants the money.

  “You’re looking at our bag of money? We’ll be taking that. You have nothing for us. You bent-dick cocksucker!” The thing gave an Etch A Sketch shake to its head, disturbed by its own outburst. “Some of us don’t know we’re dead yet. The anger stays at the surface.”

  What? The thing’s inflections had changed with each sentence, its voice shifting oddly, at first malevolent and then too bright and lucid for the monstrous shape from which it emerged. I imagined producing any speech from that contorting cavern of a mouth to require deep focus.

  “Your files are of use. The banker thinks you knew more than they could extrapolate from the security footage. You pushed me, faggot! I’m going to slice off your turtle’s legs and slap him around with a hockey…QUIET.” It took a deep breath. “You’re not a popular guy around here.”

  I looked up at the thing. Its meaty forehead was scrunched with effort over its too-close eyes. Most of its face was mouth, and it barely had enough skin to cover the tips of its huge, thick teeth. It took another breath and the exhale brought waves of dumpster meat heat. It raised its left arm and surprised itself when no soothing hand landed on its forehead. The stump of its blasted limb was sealed with a gray/black crust.

  “Oh. Shit.” It waved the stump in the air while shaking its head. “Doc’s gonna have to fix this up. But first things first: Does anyone else have a copy of your files? Have you been in contact with the media?”

  Damn—I’d approached this whole debacle in Lone Wolf terms. Note to Self: If ever again embroiled in conspiracy, please buy a gun and establish life-sustaining fail-safes. For now all I had were more lies.

  “Of course. The moment my name hits the obituaries my contact at the Post will be releasing a copy of my files to a number of interested parties. And there’s a safe deposit box accessible only to my lawyer.”

  “Bullshit. If you’d done any of that they’d have had me solve this problem at the first hint of an outside leak… QUIET!” The thing’s eyes rolled back in its head and it took two more breaths of deep exertion. The “QUIET” had the distinct sound of a stern schoolteacher silencing a room of rowdies. The thing continued. “We don’t care anymore. We believe the only people who’d heard your story are within us now.”

  Who had heard my story? Port and Egbert? And I’d only told them parts.

  The thing’s eyes rolled back in its head for a moment. Then it smiled again, lips curling back off blood-stained enamel. “No. You are lying. The time for formalities is over. We will know the truth once you have joined us. There’s room now.” The thing’s remaining hand absentmindedly rubbed its belly. A rivulet of red-tainted drool ran from the corner of its mouth.

  I backed away. The thing walked toward me, one long arm swinging in its lope. A smile broke across its semi-simian face. This thing loved feeding time.

  I wanted to say goodbye to Deckard but my tongue was frozen by my mind’s thrumming NONONONONO and I realized that the paralysis felt in nightmares is a premonition of how you feel the moment you’re about to die and then the thing was hunched with its good arm to the ground like a gorilla before leaping and I slid back and my fingers found something cold and metal behind me and then the thing was on me, so heavy, so strong, and without a thought outside dumb animal survival I was closing my eyes and swinging whatever I’d found toward the beast, and then my chest was pelted with wetness and warmth and I opened my eyes and saw the hilt of my steel kitchen knife twitching with each pulse of black blood that coursed around the blade in the creature’s neck.

  And at last, somehow: The sound of a wounded beast’s bellowing filled the night, soon joined by the sound of my voice crying out as I willed my broken body—to roll away from the infuriated creature, to find all I had left in the world, to gather it and to escape. After that all I can remember is the sound of footfalls echoing through the cold tenement night, each one falling faster and faster, as if, through sheer exertion, they could catch up to my mind, long gone.

  The day had started with a barrel of coffee, ritual pill popping, and bone-deep anxiety. The day ended in a terror-induced sprint away from the street where death tried to claim me three times over.

  I mistakenly believed that my life had finally reached the peak of Crazy Bullshit Mountain.

  Hindsight would indicate I’d only just made it to base camp.

  I finally stopped running when the pain managed to override the fear and adrenaline. Whatever I had left in my gut made its splashing exit, a puddle of bile on cold concrete. I gingerly touched my busted torso with my free hand and wondered if all the running had allowed my smashed rib to saw open something inside.

  Deckard hissed from his enclosure and I couldn’t find the breath to apologize. Instead I kept walking.

  Toward where?

  I was certain I’d be jumped for my loot until I caught my reflection in a window: shell-shocked, blood-spattered, hair matted by a crust of dried spittle, my backpack and duffel and plastic carrying case as seemingly random accessories.

  You look homeless.

  I am.

  You look crazy.

  I am.

  I’d become an invisible, too low for the lowest to rob, too crazy for the crazies to bother, a shambling object lesson response to all those “FUCK IT! WHY NOT?’s.”

  I limped down back streets just north of 45th, staying to the dark, thin membrane of territory which separated our wo
rkaday citizens from the scrappers on the other side of the tracks. Dawn approached. The harsh morning light brought three realizations:

  1. Having my paranoia confirmed delivered not comfort, but the deeper terror of knowing that most things would remain beyond my understanding right up until the moment they killed me.

  2. I was probably dying. Everything hurt. I couldn’t remember what I’d last eaten or when I’d had water. I might be bleeding inside.

  3. It was morbidly depressing to realize I was already jonesing for more Hex—even imminent death by machete/yellow pistol/brain-eating would not scare me straight.

  At the merest thought of the pills, the chorus of justification began their sweet song: Even if you wanted to detox, in this state the withdrawals would probably kill you. No, better to ride this out. Besides, the Hex only did what you wanted. Made you sharper. Put you on the trail. You found something real, something they’re willing to kill you to hide. You can collate your evidence and sell it. Just a few more pills to get you through to shelter. Might be the only thing to keep you from going into shock. Might make the pain fade.

  And with that, the volume of the chorus clouded the last remnants of reason and doubt, and I was alley-bound. Then I was hunched, groaning, hiding, ignoring the drip of dark blood which fell from my nose and spattered on the pavement, ignoring the ever-ripening smell of my spit-soaked cranium, hoping that this could be a right thing, and my hands found the stash and there were four pills and that was a good start and the morning light shone bright silver.

  This would save me.

  I waited for the moaning audio vortex of the come-up, the confidence and propulsion, a return to the profligate power which had carried me through the storm of the last twenty-four hours, but instead I found only PAIN, sudden and crushing. A vice grip to the temples, my eyes being pushed out from behind, my chest a foundry fire, my buck eighty machine gun pulse wracking my ribs. Too many pills. Fuck.

  And then the sounds came, as a flood, from behind my left shoulder—The black wolf’s growl, never closer than that moment, furious but changing, rolling suddenly into a pained bark, a drowning cough, a wet splash, and then something massive was screaming, the sound like piston pressure knocking me flat, driving me blind, pulling me from my body in the alley to a tiny space somewhere inside my mind. There I was surrounded by a seething black ocean of consumption, only and always hunger, and I curled further into the shell of my consciousness, wanting, somehow, to pull the pills from my stomach and wake, to escape the rushing fluid around me as it wailed and surged and ruined all it touched. This place was worse than a vacuum or any simple absence. It was atrocity on loop, a space outside the laws of light and the time it brings, and whatever I was diminished until I only knew I existed because I could feel myself falling backwards, and the further I fell, the smaller I became, and the last vestiges of protection shattered and washed away, replaced by the dead black weight of that place, reason lost to the pain of being crushed into always-less and before thought disappeared beneath a squall of suffering I realized this would be all I’d ever know, and that I was being swallowed whole, forever.

  “You shouldn’t have brought him here.”

  “Really? Wait till you see what he’s got with him. Trust me—we’re lucky I grabbed this guy before the ambulances got there.”

  “I don’t care. Look at his nose. He’s still bleeding. He’s connected. They can hear…”

  “Nope. C’mon. Check out his eyes.”

  “Oh…Jesus! They’re gonna jelly if he stays hooked in much longer.”

  “Yeah. I mean, he could be all the way subsumed, but I thought it was worth a shot. Besides, check this out.”

  “A turtle? You brought his pet turtle. That’s really fucking helpful.”

  “No, not that case. Give me a sec…Okay, look in this bag.”

  “Is that for real?”

  “Does that even matter? If it’s counterfeit we can sell it to…”

  “Kill it! Let me put some earplugs on this guy.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m telling you, he’s fried past the point of transmitting. He’s in their realm right now, the poor fuck. Besides, how do you know they couldn’t still hear us through the vibrations on the hairs on the back of his hand, or his skin or something? We’ve been making assumptions.”

  “Can I assume you already ran a blocker?”

  “Hundred fifty milligrams, right when I found him. He’s so speedy I could barely get a vein to pop. I was thinking I’d have to resort to a rectal dose right before I got a thirty-one gauge to slide in by his clavicle.”

  “Rectal dose would have been a waste with him this far gone, anyways.”

  “I know…if I wasn’t trying to save him then I would have felt weird grabbing all his stuff. I’m not a vulture.”

  “If he dies here, though, you’ll keep his shit?”

  “I mean, that’s enough money to keep us going for a long time.”

  “And the turtle?”

  “I don’t know. Penance? Always wanted a pet.”

  “Sure. But how about instead of penance, we just pull this guy through? We bring him back from their side, he might not even care about that money anymore.”

  “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You think it’s too soon for more perphenadol?”

  “Not if we slow drip it and give him an ice bath.”

  “Sounds good. After that?”

  “Maybe we scan the other bag, count that money, and wait to see if this guy is ever coming back from the big black.”

  “Hey!”

  “What’d you find?”

  “Check it.”

  “Damn. That’s just… that’s officially too much Hex.”

  “More at the bottom of the backpack, too. Looks like he ripped the bag open to get at his last fix. Who knows how many he took?”

  “Maybe he’s a dealer who didn’t pay attention at orientation?”

  “Can’t be. Check his hands—that’s a full set of fingers. None of the other marks, either, and I think our dealer database is current. Besides, habit like this, they would have culled him a long time ago.”

  “Then how the hell did he get that kind of supply?”

  “Well, bags of money have certain capabilities.”

  “No. I mean, they’d give it away free if it weren’t for the connection rites. There’s got to be something else. Whatever this guy was doing, they needed him in their sphere of influence. They wanted a non-stop feed.”

  “Speaking of, he started showing signs of regular REM like ten minutes ago.”

  “Told you. One more round of perphenadol, a fluid push, and if he’s still breathing tomorrow morning we bring in Ms. A. and cut those fuckers off.”

  “You think he’s still in there?”

  “I hope. I don’t think they could send a mimic signal with this much blocker in his system. Besides, if they were running the body, why would they force it into an O.D.?”

  “Shit. Well…would it be paranoia to say maybe they wanted us to take him in? Like they’re on to us…”

  “No, if they were on to us they’d send some Vakhtang goon. Or maybe they’d rig him or his turtle with a cell bomb, in which case we’d both be mushed, because they’d blow that before the perphenadol kicked in.”

  “Right?”

  “Right. So, we’ll keep pulling for this guy and maybe tomorrow he can answer some questions. Did you crack his hard drive yet?”

  “Maybe twenty more minutes and I think we’ll have something.”

  “Alright. That’s enough time to take care of this shit.”

  “Okay. I’m with you. I’ll grab the rest of the pills from his bag and meet you out at the barrel.”

  “No!”

  “Whoa.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. I just…No, we need to stay dual custody with the stash until it’s gone. It’s kind of talking to me right now.”

  “Goddamn. Okay, I’m glad you said it. I was
thinking about pocketing one from his bag. Seriously. After everything else, still…”

  “It’s not your fault. Shit’s persuasive. Must be some part of the connection rites hanging on. We’ll have Ms. A. check us out tomorrow, make sure we’re at full break.”

  “Okay.”

  “Right now, let’s burn this batch before we convince each other to make an awful mistake.”

  “Agreed. We should drag the burn barrel to the back of the building first, run it through the exhaust fan filters. That much Hex smoke might send out a creeper signal if we take it to the alley.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “That’s the last handful.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “One hundred percent. I can already feel the itch disappearing from my shoulder.”

  “Shit. I can smell it through the mask.”

  “Yeah. I can smell it too. Filters should be working, though.”

  “What’s it smell like to you?”

  “The crash. Hot metal, gasoline…Marco…”

  “Burning?”

  “Yeah…Yup…”

  “…”

  “What do you smell?”

  “My sister’s campfire accident, when we were kids. We were twenty miles out from the hospital. That’s how she lost her arm.”

  “Christ.”

  “Weird thing is, it doesn’t smell like the fire, or her arm. It smells like her breath, when she was crying, before she went into shock. My mom held her in the back seat and they had her arm wrapped in a wet towel. I sat next to them, tried to help hold her still so she wouldn’t hurt herself any worse, and she kept crying and yelling with this big open mouth and I remember her breath had this warm electric smell, like she was screaming the life out of her body.”