Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  “He’s talking about The League of Zeroes. Buddy the Brain. He’s been the head of the League for two seasons now.”

  “The idiot who put his brain in a box?”

  Dr. Shinori nodded Yes and pointed at his drawing.

  “And Dr. Tikoshi is his doctor?”

  Another nod. Then Dr. Shinori flipped the page on his art pad and drew a clock with an arrow outside of it pointing counter-clockwise, and after that, a small explosion coming out of the ground. I’d spent a good portion of my higher education experience watching game shows, so I got it right away.

  “He used to be your patient?”

  “What?” asked Dara.

  “Look at his drawing—the past, the explosion.”

  “So?”

  “Was, mine.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Yeah, but it was right.” Dr. Shinori was nodding and pointing his charcoal at the page excitedly as if to say, “You got it. You got it.”

  “Wait,” Dara asked, “If he can conjugate English responses into these complex visual interpretations, why can’t he just speak to us?”

  Dr. Shinori said, “No.”

  Dara tweaked his wrist again.

  Dr. Shinori drew. He turned the page to me, excited to see if I would nail it again.

  On the far left there was a shoddy drawing of a man in a lab coat with swirling arrows above his head. In the middle there was a snare drum. On the far right there was a rudimentary sun cresting over a hill.

  “Dr. Tikoshi is dizzy from drumming in the sunshine?”

  “No.”

  “Dr. Tikoshi is spinning…um, he’s dancing…no, he’s crazy?”

  Dr. Shinori pointed at his nose. I’d nailed it.

  “So he’s crazy from drums and sunshine.”

  “No.” And Dr. Shinori had to be right, because “crazy from drums and sunshine” isn’t a thing.

  I stopped. I spun in place. I felt oddly guilty for holding this charming man under the threat of violence. And then the answer hit me.

  “He’s crazy, and he’s working on something to do with drums. The last part is the dawn.”

  Another nose point. I was crushing this game.

  Saying the answer out loud made me think of something, but Dara extrapolated faster than I did.

  “Wait…what about Robbie Dawn? I mean, it still wouldn’t make any sense to me, especially the drum part. That can’t be right. I don’t know. Maybe you did see something about him on your computer screen. But why would working for him make Dr. Tikoshi crazy?”

  Dr. Shinori pointed to his drawing of the clock with the arrows pointing counter.

  “No. He thinks Dr. Tikoshi has always been crazy.”

  “And why would he be working on drums for Robbie Dawn?”

  “No.” And Shinori added a negative head shake to let us know that there was no further info forthcoming on the topic.

  “Okay, Dr. Shinori—I feel like you’re being very honest with us, and I thank you for that. We’re almost done here, and I’m going to release some of the pressure on your arm now.” Dr. Shinori gave a relieved sigh. Dara continued. “Do you think Dr. Tikoshi could also be involved in some kind of genetic experimentation? The kind of thing that might create a new type of lifeform?”

  He took to drawing again. He turned the art toward me.

  Some kind of machine press was spewing out tiny coins.

  I got it. Makes cents.

  “He says that would track.”

  “Okay then, Dr. Shinori, it’s time for the million dollar question. Where is Dr. Tikoshi?”

  He said, “No.” But he also reached over and pulled out his drawing of the man with lines running from a box to his head and handed it to me, and that was our first step on the path to abducting Buddy the Brain.

  The phone was set to vibrate, and I hadn’t felt it buzzing against my leg when we were playing our demented parlor game in Shinori’s office.

  One new message.

  Please let her be okay.

  My heart decided I was running a sprint, though I was sitting still in the passenger seat of the blue sedan. Dara activated the door locks and decided we should keep moving.

  I played the message. A strange series of clicks, then her voice.

  “Hi, honey. It’s mom. I can’t tell you how good it is to get a message from you. I’m so grateful to know you’re alive. This last week…it’s been really hard, and I don’t want to believe anything they’re telling me. I told them that you liked your job and that you’d just had a big promotion and you wouldn’t even need to steal, but they showed me some footage, and…I know you. You wouldn’t hurt a fly. Whatever has happened, you know I still love you, okay, and we’ll meet up and figure things out and I think I can do one of those reverse mortgage things if we need to get you a lawyer. Your timing is great, anyway. I had to get out of the house. The cameras were driving me crazy, and I swear I heard someone on the roof. I’ve been having these weird pressure sensations in my head, and…well, you don’t need to hear my problems right now. I’m in the car, headed your way. I’ll probably stop for some tacos, so I’ll be in town in about two hours. Call me when you get this, okay? We’ll figure things out. Love you so much.”

  I dialed her three times. Nothing. Maybe her battery was dead. She always forgot her charger. Maybe she was eating tacos. She didn’t like to talk when she was driving, especially in the evening.

  Maybe she’s tied to a chair. Maybe someone working for Delta is speeding up her Pelton-Reyes with a riot-busting radiation rifle. Maybe someone is injecting a super-dose of Hex into her neck right now and waiting for her eyes to turn black.

  Dara looked over at me. “Nothing?”

  “Nope.” I kept it short. Saying any more would let the panic go full bloom.

  “Best case scenario says they’re tracking her to you. They’ll want you to communicate. Between these two calls and your attempts to reach her, they’ve probably pinged your phone. If we get back to the compound we’ve got a short burst communicator that can reach her without trace once she’s in a twenty mile radius. Maybe Ms. A. can think of a safe meeting spot, or at least some place we’d have the advantage.”

  Dara sounded confident, but I remembered what she’d said earlier: They ruin everything.

  I cracked my phone in half, pulled the components, and flung them from the car window.

  Dara’s grip on the steering wheel was white knuckle, but she drove slowly and came to a full stop at every signal. Even a cursory traffic violation at this point would billboard our faces across the tracking networks.

  And there are murderers watching my mom, right now. And it’s my fault.

  I needed something to stop me from thinking.

  “Who’s Cassandra? Ms. A. mentioned her back at the compound.”

  Dara’s jaw muscles clenched.

  “Was she another partner of yours with the mission, or…”

  “Cassie was my sister.”

  “Was.” Damn it. I should have figured.

  “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “No, it’s okay. I love Cassie. I’m not pretending she never existed to save myself from pain. That kind of thing kills you inside.”

  It sounded like something Ms. A. would have told her—Dara remembering her sister kept the fires stoked. It kept her on mission.

  “You have any siblings?” Dara asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, you might not completely understand what I tell you, but that’s okay. The thing about a sibling is that you can hate them, and that comes and goes, mainly because of how much they’re just like you, or because you think of all the love you have to share with them and what it might be like if you had it all. But no matter how you feel about them, the moment they’re in pain, you hurt with them. You share their suffering because they’re pretty much a variation on the theme of you, you know?”

  I didn’t, not really, and I knew better than to say, “Sure, that’s
how I feel about Deckard,” because I was just smart enough not to compare her dead sister to my turtle (and I simultaneously realized how sad it was that Deckard was my closest friend). Still, I nodded because the way she was speaking kept me from thinking about what was happening. It was selfish of me, but she could have stopped at any time. Maybe this was a ritual for her.

  “So Cassie had an accident when we were kids. A freak thing, falling into a campfire, but the way she landed had destroyed one of her arms by the time we made it to the E.R.”

  “That’s brutal.”

  “It was worse afterwards. We shared a bedroom, and she used to wake up screaming, thinking her arm was still on fire. None of the specialists could do anything for her. They said her brain would have to reorganize itself around the absence of her arm, and after that the phantom pains would disappear. But they didn’t go away. They got worse.”

  We stopped at an overlong red light. Dara scanned our surroundings, since we were almost back to the compound. She grabbed a device from the back seat—something like a cop’s speed detector—and held it against the roof of the car.

  “There’s no drone signal, for now.”

  The light turned green.

  “So by the time we hit high school, Cassie’s phantom pain was hitting her in broad daylight, and you can imagine how popular that made her with the student body. Some football guy…what was his name? Scotty Halstrom. He used to pull his arm into his sleeve and shake his elbow at her and say, “’Where’d my arm go, Cassie? I’m stumped!’”

  “Christ.”

  “Yeah. So I broke his nose, got expelled. Zero tolerance policy. I switch to a new school, leaving Cassie alone with those shitbricks, and the first kids I make friends with are, um, I think the friendly term was ‘free spirits.’”

  “Loadies?”

  “Yup. And I was pissed, so I dug in deep, and fast. There’s no gateway drug if you try all of them at once. And this was, how long ago now? Jesus, eighteen years ago. So Hex was landing, and it was my go to, my absolute favorite. You know how it pulls you in.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I’m in love with Hex. I live in that world, all silver, all the time, zero problems. A little paranoia about the wolf I can feel over my left shoulder, but you know how quickly you get distracted. And I started to think I was an absolute genius, because I’d figured out how to help my sister.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know now that they’d probably planted the suggestion, because it wasn’t rational. I mean, Hex didn’t really even block the hurt so much as it kept all the signals so busy that pain became scattershot. Still, I thought it would help her. I truly did. She was barely sleeping by then, from the phantom pain. We were in separate rooms, but I’d hear her moaning. So I told her to trust me, that I had medicine that would really help her. I knew she wouldn’t smoke it or snort it, so I told her to put it on her gums.”

  “But I thought it wasn’t very effective as a sub-lingual.”

  “It still worked. Well enough at least. She didn’t really sleep, but all that stimulus blocked the pain. She thought she was free. I thought I’d saved her from some curse. We sat on her bed all night, holding each other, talking…”

  “Dara, you don’t have to…”

  “No, I really don’t, do I? You know how it goes from there…Eight months later, Tim finds Cassie and I in a fucking dumpster. She’d been dating a Vakhtang who called himself Romulus, made sure she had a steady line on her medicine. He must have been bored that night, because he decided we’d be more fun as mimics. I remember being pinned down, then falling backwards into nothing.

  We know all about that place.

  “Cassie’s dose pretty much melted her. Mine must have been lower, or my tolerance had built up, or Tim got the perphenadol into me first. I don’t know. But Ms. A. took me in, and I never looked back. My parents know I’m alive, but I’ll never see them again.”

  “You were just a kid.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I did what I did. Ms. A. sent my parents an anonymous message to let them know where they could find Cassie. Supposedly Tim cleaned her up and put glass inserts in her eye sockets, for my parents’ sake. I thought that was really kind. Ms. A. and her crew were my new family, and that was the only way I could stand to keep going.”

  “Dara, I’m so…”

  “I know, but it doesn’t change anything. And we’re here.”

  She killed the engine, and we hopped out of the car. I set the safety on the pistol she’d given me and tucked it into the back of my pants. We were parked in a different spot than when we’d left, further from the compound. The sedan’s engine ticked as it cooled. Fifty story towers loomed over the street, but if you tilted your head and looked straight up, you could still see the night sky.

  “Ms. A., I’ve got to get in contact with my mom right away. She’s already headed into town.”

  “You spoke with her?”

  “Just messages back and forth.”

  “And you’re one hundred percent certain that the voice on the phone was hers?”

  “Of course…wait…what are you saying?” But I knew. My brain wouldn’t let me think it any sooner. If the Vakhtang got to her, they could have turned her into a mimic. It would be a great way to gain access to me, maybe even to Ms. A.’s compound. “It definitely sounded like my mom. The cadence, the inflections, everything. Nothing she said sounded suspect, but I think she’s definitely being followed, and her phone is making a ton of clicking noises.”

  “That’s understandable. That’s good. I can tell I’ve upset you, but it’s a necessity that we stay aware of all possibilities. Dara, did you have a clear path home?”

  “Considering the nests we stirred up, surprisingly clear.”

  “Hmmm.” Ms. A. turned and walked toward a thin unfinished hallway, pushing aside the beads strung across the entrance. “Let’s grab the short burst radio and see if we can’t guide mom to a safe zone.”

  “But won’t her phone still be tapped?”

  “Of course. She’ll have to acquire an interim phone. And even if she makes it to a safe house without being tracked, we’re going to have to cover her head and treat her with the sacrament.”

  “You’re going to bag her and shoot her up with perphenadol?”

  “We aren’t protecting proprietary fast food recipes here. This compound is one of the last few American outposts working against the Vakhtang. We are admitting your mother as a great kindness, and with great risk.”

  We neared the end of the hallway and a single steel door with three locked deadbolts and a key code entry box.

  “I meant to ask you, Ms. A. If their cult or gang or whatever is called the Vakhtang, what are we called?”

  “We have no name. Something named is more easily defined, infiltrated, and broken. Our desire is to function outside of any rigid structure—to simply exist, in as low-profile a way as is possible, as a counterbalance, until the blessed day when we are no longer needed.”

  “So Lazer Crew is off the table?”

  “I can hear the wavering in your voice, and I do not mind your humor. If it helps you survive, then it has value. But I need a moment to track down the radio, please.”

  She entered a long string of numbers and the steel door unlatched. Here, finally, were the accoutrements I’d expected in her office. Heads in jars (their all-black, unblinking eyes staring back at me), perfect steel cubes emanating a low red light, a six-legged rat in a wire cage, rows of hanging herbs, surgical supplies floating in a thin purple gel. A glass case filled with iridescent scarabs denuding a too-fresh lamb’s head. An entire wall dedicated to guns, ammunition, scopes, and grenades. And to our right, a six-tiered rack of shiny silver devices, their metal carrying the same sheen I’d seen on the slingshot Dara had used to launch a cell bomb.

  I looked over at Dara to find her quiet and distracted. I’d forced her to think about Cassie. Now she couldn’t stop.

  Ms. A. hunkered down by the second she
lf from the floor and pushed aside an object which had altogether too many electric wires and elongated probes.

  “Here we are.” She pulled out a small rectangular receiver with two dials and a CB-style communicator hooked onto the side. She blew years of dust from the top and then nodded her head. “This old thing ought to work perfectly. We should be able to transmit from the main room. Shall we?”

  She turned and headed out of the storage zone. I followed far enough behind to grab something which had caught my eye.

  I’d always wanted brass knuckles. I’d never punched anyone, but they seemed like they were exactly what you’d need if you did have to go in swinging. The fact that this pair was bright silver and filed under a tag reading “Core Purge” made them even cooler.

  They fit perfectly, and felt warm when I slid them into my back pocket.

  Back through the rattling bead curtain, around a corner, up a flight of stairs, and we’d made it to what Ms. A. was referring to as the main room. The coolness of the space told me we were still underground, but Ms. A. gestured toward a rectangular gap in the concrete at the center of the chamber. She set the radio beneath the gap, then hopped on a stool so she could reach a red button submerged into the concrete ceiling. Two steel grates separated and thin moonlight poured into the corridor above our heads, illuminating a fine lace of copper circuits covering the walls.

  “We can amplify and reach out from here.”

  I looked back and noticed Dara hadn’t entered the room. I walked back to where we’d come in and heard a quiet moaning at the base of the staircase. Dara was seated with her head in her hands. I hurried down to her.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just a hell of a headache. Long day, you know?”

  She tried to stand, but her legs buckled underneath her.

  I yelled to Ms. A. “Something’s wrong.”

  I heard her flip flops slapping the concrete as she rushed to us.