Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  The other thing I noticed, right away, was that she had only her right eye, the left covered by a patch. She passed her partner and leaned close to look at me, chamomile on her breath as a nice contrast to Mr. Snak-Um’s. After a second’s confusion, I figured out how to focus solely on her remaining eye, the green iris flecked with tiny hints of yellow. The beauty of it stood out in isolation.

  Her gaze stayed on me. “Let me guess—He has a bunch of fake I.D.’s?”

  “Well, a few. So the bank fraud part of his story, especially when you add in that big old sack of cash, that’s probably legit. It’s not so much that, as it is…well, check out this license.”

  Waking naked and strapped to a table after an overdose should have been awkward, but I’d heard their voices and knew that this situation was somehow par for their course. I was so grateful to be back in my body that I was barely conscious of my nudity, of the way my Crooked D was probably shriveled from the cold, of the fact that they must’ve attended to my other functions over the last few days. No, it was only when Dara turned to look at my fake I.D. as Maria Scharf that I felt my skin flush with embarrassment.

  Part of this feeling came from knowing that I’d made such an ugly woman. My DMV yellow-neon-lit drag photo was some hellish mockery of the beauty that this woman effortlessly radiated.

  Part of this feeling came from a sudden realization: From the very first moment Dara had looked into my eyes, I was falling for her.

  Doom isn’t something you want to focus on, but when you unexpectedly find yourself wanting someone who is literally surrounded by the truth of who you really are, it feels like disaster. This would not be my meet cute overdose or some story Dara and I would tell to our kids. I knew this would be another stillborn dream to file away.

  But when she looked at the incriminating I.D., she smiled and nudged Tim. “Wow. Do you think he even checked the mirror? Yeesh. He’s much more handsome as a man.”

  And then she winked at me and laughed, and hope returned as quickly as it had fled.

  If there were an audio recording of my first day in Tim and Dara’s warehouse hideout it would reveal that I was attempting to spin my story into one of charming haplessness, to find some way to de-creep my path to their sanctuary.

  I answered enough basic questions—Who are you? Which bank did you work for? Who was your Hex supplier? Does anyone else know about your plan?—to earn my way out of restraints and into a warm blanket on their couch. Dara handed me my own mug of hot tea and a towel-covered ice pack for my chest and gave me a warning.

  “You’re still in the early stages of separation from their signal. We got you this far. It would be very unwise for you to try to run. It’s clear the officials are looking for you, but after what’s happened to Mr. Port and Mr. Egbert, the authorities are the least of your concerns. I can tell you we’ve reviewed your hard drive, and read a very unflattering portrait of you in the Post, but I’m hoping you can give us a fuller picture.”

  I’d heard her, somewhere in the midst of my fugue state, speaking with the one they called Ms. A. It was my involvement in the death of the Hex dealers that they were truly intrigued by. I’d give them all the info I had on that subject, but I knew I’d be remiss if I passed up this shot at revising the whole of my history.

  So I tried to paint myself as an anti-corporate crusader, some Robin Hood trapped in the grip in a very bad drug habit, but my bag of cash (clearly never distributed to any poor souls) and the profound size of my Hex stash had already told them deeper truths.

  I left out the unholy amount of masturbation, but they’d already seen Crooked D in all his punch drunk glory.

  I tried to sell the idea that I had some agency in my escape from danger, but they’d found me broken and rag-dolled. Hell, beautiful dumb luck and their rescue efforts were the only reason I was speaking to them at all.

  Every time I veered from the ugly truth into a version of the story more amenable to the survival of my ego, I noticed their eyes squinting, their lips tightening. Tim and Dara were ace lie detectors. I was mostly untrained at selling my delusions to anyone other than myself. It was frustrating.

  When it came time to tell them about the thing that attacked me on 45th, I figured their bullshit detectors would swing way into the red, but during that part they quietly listened and nodded. There is no feasible way to describe being mauled by a near-invincible brain-eating man-gorilla with multiple voices and an extendable jaw without sounding like you should be committed. But then I remembered what Tim had said:

  You’re here right now because we know all about that place.

  If he was telling the truth—and the fact that I was back among the living with two beetle heads sticking out of my chest gave me cause to believe he was—then they had seen weirder.

  They had seen worse.

  When I started to tell them about the overdose, they both held up their hands to cut me off.

  Tim spoke first, “You don’t need to talk about that place. There are…um…this is hard to explain, but there are reverberations of that place inside of you, in ways you can’t remove. In ways we don’t really understand. But we know that the more you talk about them, about that place, the stronger those vibrations become. It brings you back into their interest. They’ll start to use you again, and…”

  Dara raised another hand to silence Tim. She came over to the couch and sat beside me. I spilled a splash of scalding tea on my leg but pretended not to feel it. She was so close.

  She made eye contact with me again, and said, “Don’t look away, okay?”

  Then she reached up and lifted the patch that covered her left eye.

  Except it wasn’t her eye in that orbit anymore. It was a jet-black glass stone.

  “The longer you’re there,” she said, “the more you become their instrument, the more your body becomes part of their signal. Eventually your matter softens as they pull you across. The eyes go first—they become a kind of jelly. This almost happened to you.”

  “But you saved me.”

  “Tim and I saved you, just as he and Ms. A. saved me years ago…The sacraments…the medicines we use…were not as strong back when I had fallen into their realm. Ms. A. was unable to save this eye. The jelly hardened like glass.”

  “You couldn’t remove it?”

  “Ms. A. believed it might explode in my skull if we tried. Besides that, it serves as a reminder of why I have to live like this.” She gestured to the expanse of the creaking, mostly abandoned warehouse with its ad hoc rescue room, metal tubs, extension cord networks, and cots for beds. She flipped the patch back down over the orb. “It reminds me of our sacred mission.”

  I’d never been close to someone who spoke like she did, with a clarity of purpose and resolve. It was intoxicating. I hoped neither she nor Tim could read that feeling on my face. I hoped she’d never get off the couch.

  I’m staring at her. I’m sitting here staring at her. Am I smiling? Should I be smiling? She just showed me some hardened black jelly eye and told me she’s on a sacred mission. I should have something to say. Her hair looks so soft. I wonder what it smells like.

  “Mr. Doyle?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m drifting. Not feeling one hundred percent yet. I mean, I’ve still got this beetle-heart thing going on.” I tapped the dried insect heads latched on to my chest and cringed at the pain. She leaned back.

  I’m fucking this up. How do I fix this? Try to engage her.

  “So you guys are like an anti-Hex rescue or something?”

  “Or something. It’s not just Hex we’re fighting, but that’s their strongest instrument right now.”

  “And when you say ‘them’ you’re talking about the dealers.”

  “No, the dealers are only part of their forces. But they’re the part that you managed to gain some influence with before they were killed.”

  This isn’t about me. Shit. She’s being friendly to get information about Port and Egbert. Maybe Hungo, too. And I don’t rea
lly know anything about them outside of the fact that they’re dead and something gigantic ate their brains. But she’s intrigued. Keep her going.

  “What’s the name of their group? You said they were part of some gang. ‘Walk-Gang’ or ‘Wu-Tang’ or something.”

  Not even a smile from her. Fucking this up again. Why would she want a cutesy joke? You want to be irreverent about some part of her sacred mission. There’s such a thing as being dumb and clever at the same time. Slow down. Think, damn it.

  “They are called the Vakhtang. And no, it’s not quite a gang, though portions of their group function using similar hierarchies. They tend to steal the most effective parts of other organizations’ methods.”

  “Like the Yakuza finger thing?” Her face brightened at the observation.

  “Yes! Exactly like that. They’ve been honing methods of fear and control for centuries.”

  “Centuries?” It was my turn to lean back. “This is some Mason or Illuminati thing?”

  “Really? You want us to believe your story about brain-gobbling man-monsters and international pop stars feeding money to a massive bank and biomed conspiracy, but you’re incredulous when it comes to this?”

  She had a point.

  Tim spoke up, reminding me that he, you know, existed.

  “He’s been to their realm. And Ms. A. probably won’t let us release him until we figure out what happened with Hungo, or Egbert and his buddy. Plus, everybody already thinks he’s a nut. Let’s just tell him what we know. At least enough to get him to stop asking dumb questions. Maybe if he knows about them it will spark some memory to help us.”

  Thank you, Tim. I don’t even mind your little dig, so long as I can keep her sitting here, talking to me.

  “Fair enough. Can you grab the teapot? I think there are a couple of cups left in there.”

  Yeah, Tim—Go get us something to drink.

  “Alright,” she said to me, “it’s my turn to sound like a lunatic, but I swear that everything I’m going to tell you is true.”

  I tried to turn my body toward hers on the couch, to show her I was really listening, but my ribs lit up again like I was kicked by a spooked horse. I let loose a high-pitched yelp and popped tears before I had a chance to exercise the kind of restraint I thought she might find attractive. I collapsed back to my slouched position on the couch and felt a sheen of sweat bloom across my face.

  My dance of seduction continued as my blanket flopped open, leaving me exposed, cringing, bruised and dead-bugged next to Dara.

  “Don’t move. Just…stop. I can help you.”

  She repositioned my ice pack. “Do you think you can sit up a little bit without making any of those sad animal noises?” She didn’t wink this time, but the kindness in her voice still came through. Was she the type who liked damaged goods, or was I confusing her bedside manner for something more?

  She moved to wrap the blanket back around me, but halted. “That ice seems to have calmed your bruising a bit. Look at that.”

  The bruise, clear as day now, showed the shape of the massive hand which had so easily fractured my frame. Dara and I looked at each other with wide eyes. Sure, this was good for proving out my batshit story, but this also meant I hadn’t suffered some feverish Hex hallucination that night, which further meant that we had to adjust our reality to fit in fucking brain-munching mutants.

  Dara put it into words. “Oh dear. That is one hundred percent no good.” She yelled across the warehouse, “Tim, you’ve got to see something.” Then she turned back to me. “You say this thing knows who you are?”

  I nodded.

  “You killed it though, right?”

  “I think so. I mean, I stabbed it in the neck. I don’t think it could have survived that.”

  Yeah, but it also shrugged off having an arm blasted clean away.

  Tim had returned with the teapot. “What’s up?”

  She gingerly peeled back my ice pack to reveal the outline of the beast’s hand.

  Tim’s eyebrows raised. “Oh.”

  Dara was shaking her head from side to side, the way you have to when a new burden is thrust into a life that’s already reached its bullshit threshold. “Yeah. It’s a problem, right?”

  And I knew Tim would say “Right” without even thinking, the ingrained call and response they’d developed while fighting in solidarity for so long, but instead of his voice there was a sharp cracking sound from the other side of the warehouse and Tim said nothing at all because the teapot in his hands had somehow exploded, and the look on his face told me that didn’t make any sense to him until he looked down to see the smoking, heart-sized hole in his chest.

  Dara was closer to Tim when the shot hit and she caught the worst of the blowout, a mist of scalding water, blackened blood, and porcelain shrapnel. I expected her to look back to me, the shock on her face confirming that this had really happened, but she had already dropped from the couch and was moving in a crouch toward a small wooden cabinet in the corner. Only once she reached the cover of the case did she look back to see if I was alive.

  And there I was, still half-slumped on the couch, holding my mug like I was waiting for Dara to come back and finish her story, frozen in some old reality that had been blasted in half.

  She yelled, “Get down!” and the sound of her voice pulled me into the now. I rolled from the couch to my knees and tried to flatten out. My ribs popped in protest and the pain must have overridden whatever adrenaline was supposed to send me running to safety, because my next step as a man of action was to pass the fuck out.

  I came to just moments later, static haze on my vision making everything seem like a broadcast floating somewhere behind my head. Some kind of warrior woman was across the room, tucked down low, searching desperately through a wooden cabinet. Someone was coming after her, I could tell. She ran her hands through her hair and it stayed slicked back. A sheen of sweat coated her, the light from the lamps far overhead shone on the muscles of her arms as they tensed.

  The woman had found something. She pulled what looked to be a bright silver surgical steel slingshot from the cabinet. She turned to me and yelled, “Close your eyes, Doyle.”

  Man, she was beautiful. This was a great show.

  Wait.

  Doyle?

  That’s.

  ME.

  And the show was over and now we were about to die again, and I tried to process her command but I also thought that whatever was coming to kill me would have a way easier time if I was lying prone with my eyes closed, so instead I pushed up on my arms and tried to crawl toward her and I saw everything.

  Dara rose up from behind her cover with the slingshot pulled back. A man in a brown suit was running toward her, his outstretched arm holding a plastic yellow gun still discharging blue smoke.

  My enemies. My fault. And he’s got the drop.

  I yelled, “Over here!” as loud as my chest would allow.

  The man turned his head for the slightest moment.

  Dara released the band of the slingshot.

  The man dropped. Dara closed her eye and ducked back behind the cabinet.

  Something was stuck to the man’s chest.

  At first my brain processed the object as a rotten mandarin, and I thought Dara had made a real desperation move, flinging old fruit from their pantry at our would-be assassin.

  But then the thing started to move, flattening to the shape of a shimmering oil puddle over the man’s heart. Tendrils spread out from the center, swimming over and under his skin, knitting itself across the surface of him.

  It didn’t think to fill his mouth, so we could still hear him screaming.

  As quickly as the fluid web had spread across the surface of his body, it hardened, and there was a shifting, clicking sound, the chitinous crunch of insect jaws.

  The man turned to look at me, both of us flat on the cold concrete.

  “Please. No.”

  His eyes, black jelly now, oozed to the ground.

&nbs
p; The web in his skin compacted toward an invisible center near the man’s back, bending and rolling his limbs and neck beneath his torso.

  The skyscraper-drop sound of all of his bones breaking at once echoed through the warehouse.

  Whatever had tried to stay inside the man found the pressure too great as the tendrils knitted themselves, smaller and smaller, into a shrinking black mass. A rupture of organs fell wet to the floor.

  The clicking, fist-sized tumor spun a few feet from the floor, gaining speed until a cold black shimmer came from its center and pulled at my chest.

  That place. He’s going to that place.

  Then, without a sound, the dark light disappeared, spun into nothing, and even though this man had tried to kill me, the only thing I could think was, “Please. No.”

  She was the one who placed the weight of the dead on my chest. There’d been no mirrors or moments to reflect for so long, but the shock in her face made everything real. Tim had saved my life, and because of that, he was gone.

  “We have to move. See if you can get yourself dressed while I call Ms. A.” Sharp, direct, the softness and compassion in her voice departed. Zero eye contact. What was I to her? Maybe an asset. Definitely a problem. Toxic cargo she was forced to carry.

  Make yourself useful. Get off this floor. Find your clothes. Grit your fucking teeth against the pain and don’t let her hear a word out of you unless she asks for something. She just lost her friend. She killed the man who came for you. Find some way to make this right.

  But how can any of this ever be right? That man…

  “Ms. A.? We’ve lost Tim…No, I don’t sense they were involved in this…I think this is related to Mr. Doyle’s other activities…That’s a strong possibility...We’ll await transport…I’ve secured the interior…There’s something else...I…I used one of their recovered armaments…The cell bomb…I swear to you, there was no other choice. You know…Yes…I believe he watched…Oh, no, I can take care of it.”