Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  “Stand back. Give her some room.”

  Ms. A. lifted up Dara’s head, barely kept it from lolling back down. She held a hand to Dara’s forehead, then held that same hand a few inches from Dara’s face and closed her eyes.

  What was this? How could I help?

  “What can I do?”

  Ms. A.’s eyes opened and her face snapped to mine. “You can shut your goddamned mouth.”

  I’d never heard Ms. A. break from her Good Witch composure. Something was very wrong.

  Ms. A. had her hand back in front of Dara’s face, her own eyes closed, sweat beading on her forehead from exertion.

  “I can’t close it down. She’s looping. What happened out there? Why is she transmitting? She’s been able to block them out for years.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Cassie. We’d talked about their realm. Her overdose. She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Ms. A. lifted Dara’s eye patch. Something swirled beneath the hardened black surface of her eye.

  “Was anyone following you?”

  “No. Dara said we were in the clear.”

  “Would anyone have known where you were going?”

  “Toro. He knew we were headed to the clinic to see Shinori. Damn it. We should have found a way to intercept Shinori outside of his work.”

  “It’s too late now. They could have set up there in advance. If they sent a full surge broadcast with a wave cannon it would have brought the fluid inside her jellied eye back into sync. And I believe she was thinking about Cassandra…We are left with only one choice, and we must move quickly.”

  I grabbed supplies, as best I could, from Ms. A.’s instructions, though the scarabs were far harder to round up than I’d anticipated. And when I secured the superior rectus forceps and what appeared to be a child-sized scalpel, I realized we were about to remove Dara’s ruined eye.

  You can feel scorching hot inside, and still find yourself coated in a cold sweat. I was no doctor. I didn’t know any of Ms. A.’s rituals. How were the two of us going to pull this off without killing Dara?

  I was the one who asked her about Cassie. But I didn’t shoot her with a wave cannon. I didn’t even know what that was.

  I shook it off. There could be only purpose now. Dara was the only living person, other than my mother, who even knew my real name. She wasn’t going to die like this.

  I made my way back to the base of the stairs to see Ms. A. had dragged Dara’s limp body ten yards down the hall. I caught up and set the supply bag on the ground and grabbed Dara’s feet. We got her next to the cot in one of Ms. A.’s makeshift surgical spaces.

  “On three. One, two, three!”

  We lifted Dara beneath her hips and her shoulders and flopped her deadweight onto the stretcher. Ms. A. opened Dara’s shirt. We felt a wave of heat lift from her torso.

  “We don’t have long. Grab the supply bag.”

  It was unsettling to notice that Ms. A.’s attention was constantly being drawn to the doorway of the O.R. I did my best to hand her the items she needed and to wipe the sweat from her forehead. I brushed Dara’s matted hair back from her face and applied a cool washcloth to her brow and a wide blue ice pack to her chest.

  Ms. A. cycled through the ritual, running a perphenadol spike, applying the scarabs, pushing her hands against some invisible resistance above Dara’s eye. I joined Ms. A. in her ceremonial chanting, an incantation of light and blood that I found I’d memorized without trying.

  We couldn’t bring down Dara’s temp. Her blood pressure soared, her vascular system a topographic map across her skin.

  Ms. A. said, “I have no choice. We cannot wait any longer to perform the enucleation. Please bring me the satchel.”

  I brought her the closest thing I could find to what she’d requested, less a satchel than a marble bag made from bright silver chainmail with a fold-over steel latch on top.

  Ms. A. opened the latch and sat the bag on the tray next to her. Then she grabbed the forceps and asked me to pick up a tiny scalpel.

  “We’ve always been concerned that an x-ray might activate Dara’s eye in some way we couldn’t predict, so I’m not sure whether or not her optic nerve is still attached. If it is, I’ll need you to sever it as quickly as you possibly can. But first, I need you to make an incision in my thumb.”

  “What? If you bleed on her that’s an infection risk.”

  “No, it’s our only chance of confusing the jelly into thinking it’s still in contact with flesh while we move it.”

  I looked at Ms. A.’s near-panicked face, then down to the beetles latched in to Dara’s chest. Ms. A. was right—this was neither the time nor place to enforce traditional medical standards.

  Ms. A. pulled the latex covering from her left thumb and put it just above Dara’s eye. I placed the scalpel against the pad of her finger, but hesitated.

  “She’s dying, Doyle. I don’t know if we can stop her from being subsumed.”

  I pushed in, and after a second’s resistance the scalpel slid right through to the bone. I pulled back from the shock of it and almost flayed Ms. A.’s thumb wide open. She inhaled sharply, but held her stand steady. Dark blood pooled over the obsidian surface of Dara’s eye. Ms. A. pushed down with the forceps in her other hand, moving them past Dara’s eyelids as delicately as she could. Once she had purchase on the underside of the eye, she looked to me.

  “I’m going to pull up now. If anything at all is holding that eye to Dara’s head, you slash right through it without pause. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.” Sweat dripped from my forehead to Dara’s bare skin. My whole body shook with each heartbeat.

  Ms. A. said, “And…pulling…now!”

  The black eye held there for a moment, and then there was a burbling, sucking sound as the orb moved upward and Ms. A.’s pooled blood rushed down to fill Dara’s eye socket. I did my best to watch the underside of the eye through the blood and when Ms. A. didn’t seem to be able to lift any further I placed my face right down by Dara’s and felt her shallow breath and slid the scalpel down into the thin space between the eye and the socket beneath, and I rotated my wrist to sever whatever held strong.

  Lubricated by Ms. A.’s blood, the eye slid free of Dara’s face without a sound. The thinnest vine of twitching blackness—like a severed spider’s leg—clung to its base. A light drift of smoke rose from Dara’s empty socket, something purified in blood.

  Ms. A. reached over with her free hand and opened the small chain-mail bag on the surgical tray and gingerly placed the eye inside. She flipped the fold-over latch and secured the steel pins and only then did I see her stop to inhale.

  Ms. A. and I worked to clean Dara’s wound and be certain she was comfortable. The way her eyelids flopped inward was unsettling. She’d definitely want a glass eye, or maybe even a functional implant, once she was well. She wouldn’t even have to wear the patch anymore. In the meantime, we taped sterile gauze over the socket.

  “She’s stabilizing, and I don’t sense any further transmissions coming from this thing.” She held the silver bag at arm’s length like it was worm-riddled dog shit. “To be sure, I’d like to place this in another containment device for storage until we can be rid of it.”

  “‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it away,’ huh?”

  “Christian?”

  “No, but I tried to read the Bible in my early twenties. Too many pages of people begetting each other, so I skimmed for the trippy parts. Do you need me to join you?”

  “No, you stay with Dara.” And when she said it I realized that was exactly what I wanted to do, and I looked down to find I was already holding Dara’s hand.

  The explosion came from the hallway moments later.

  Smoke and the smell of burning flesh rolled through the door in filthy plumes. Concrete chips skittered across the ground.

  Ms. A.

  I thought the eye had exploded as she’d feared it might, but then I heard men’s voi
ces.

  “Clear?”

  “Clear. Mostly. It’s kind of a mess.”

  “Shit, man. Try to save a couple to take back to council and we won’t get busted for jumping the gun.”

  “Agreed. Just remember, the one-eyed bitch is mine. I’m not feeding her to the council.”

  The first I didn’t recognize. The latter was Toro.

  Even with our scramblers on, they could have followed Dara’s signal right to our doorstep. That’s why Ms. A. kept checking the entrance during surgery.

  I remembered the pistol tucked into the back of my jeans, pulled it, flipped off the safety.

  Killing is easy for them. But it shouldn’t be for us.

  Did I have any choice? I could hear their footsteps in the hall. I pushed Dara’s stretcher across the room and tucked it into the corner closest to the entrance. She mumbled something at the disturbance.

  “You hear that?” Toro said.

  “Yeah. Third door on the left.”

  And now I knew they had their guns trained on our room. There had to be a way to regain the element of surprise. I scanned the space. There was some kind of gas tank in the corner, but I didn’t know what I could do with that. Open the valve? Maybe that poisons everybody. Throw it into the hallway and hope I can pull off a trick shot? Even if I could, what’s to say the explosion wouldn’t engulf us all?

  Then I saw the carrying case. I wasn’t sure how Ms. A. selected which scarabs to use for her ritual, so I’d brought down a plastic box full of the things. I grabbed the case and crept closer to the door, pistol in my other hand. When it sounded like the men were about ten yards away, I flipped the lid to the container and slid it as hard as I could down the hall.

  Gunshots erupted. Plastic shattered. A man screamed.

  I rounded the corner as low as I could to see Toro collapsed on the ground, frantically trying to knock the beetles from his body.

  “They’re in my fucking pants, Pedro!”

  Pedro looked up from his friend in time to see the man who’d beetle-bombed them, but I had the drop. I pointed in Pedro’s direction and closed my eyes reflexively and squeezed off three shots. The first knocked me on my ass, and I heard the second ricocheting down the concrete corridor, but the third shot was accompanied by a grunt. Pedro was on the ground now, too. And he was smoking.

  No, he was…steaming?

  His skin bubbled bright red. Vapor rolled from his mouth, ears, and nose, and the hole in his abdomen. He looked up at me just as his eyes erupted outward and two puffs of steam floated from his face.

  What had Dara called these? Boiler rounds? Why did something like this exist?

  Toro was rising to his feet, pushing up with his good arm, covered in crushed Coleoptera fragments. I aimed at him, eyes open this time, but that seemed to throw me off. My three remaining shots went wild, embedding in concrete or flying off down the hall. Behind Toro I could see all that was left of Ms. A.: flesh-and-blood wallpaper showing the blast pattern of the detonated grenade.

  Toro charged, firing his gun. I dove back through the doorway to Dara’s room. Thudding to the concrete stole my breath. I couldn’t reach the scalpel on the surgical tray.

  Toro rushed through the entrance, shoulder-checking me so hard I flew against the back wall and slid down to the floor. He lifted his gun and aimed and pulled the trigger. It clicked on nothing because he’d wasted his bullets on beetle shelters and hallway concrete. Undeterred, he charged toward me and swung a boot into my ribs and I fell over and he brought his boot down on my chest again. I reached into my back pocket with the arm pinned underneath me, realizing my pilfered knucks were all I had, and held up my other arm to shield off his boot as he tried to stomp my head.

  My fingers laced in through the silver knuckles and the thing felt warm and heavy in my hand. Toro lifted his leg again, swinging it back in a full pendulum arch, and I reached out and grabbed his other leg and pulled it toward me as hard as I could.

  Toro dropped and let out a sincerely felt, “OOF!” and then I was above him on my knees and I aimed my heavy metal hand for his jaw, but he raised both his arms and my punch glanced downward and caught him right in the center of his chest.

  Which, it turned out, was exactly what I was supposed to do with those things. But at the time, per my M.O., it was dumb luck.

  Dara explained the Core Purge to me later: It was a Vakhtang weapon they’d secured, and it did something to bone and cartilage which caused it to vibrate at precisely the wrong frequency for the human body.

  So at that moment, when my punch landed square in the middle of Toro’s xyphoid process, it turned his rib cage into some kind of ungodly tuning fork. He vibrated on the floor and his eyes rolled back in his head. Having just seen what boiler rounds were capable of, I knew well enough to step back.

  Toro reached out his arms to me, as if I could stabilize him, and then his back arched until his horns scraped on the floor beneath him, and there was a low rumbling from his mouth as the purge came: body-wracking spasms rolled through him and he flopped onto his side and there was a heaving sound and then a splash as he let loose the liquefied slurry that used to be his organs.

  It only stopped once his esophagus prolapsed and hung from his mouth like a massive cow’s tongue. All of this took about a minute, but time stretches out when you’re witnessing an abomination.

  My hands were shaking. I pulled the silver knuckles from my fist and threw them across the room.

  Those were in my back pocket. Jesus. What if I’d sat down too fast?

  I looked at Dara, sliding in and out of consciousness, stirring on the stretcher. We had to move. It was possible Toro and Pedro had launched their rogue assault on the fly, but what if they were always transmitting to the Vakhtang organization, sending their experiences to some kind of central hive? I understood nothing, truly, aside from the fact that people were trying to kill us, and they would not stop. And the compound, painted in a fresh coat of Ms. A., wasn’t a safe place anymore.

  I rolled Dara into another room, so if she woke she wouldn’t find the puddled remains of Toro. I ran from room to room and gathered what I thought we might be able to fit in the blue sedan. Every little sound was Them, someone else who’d come to kill us. It was tough to focus through the fear, and I couldn’t stand being away from Dara while I knew she was incapacitated.

  I piled our gear by the front door—Ms. A.’s radio, Deckard in his enclosure, one suitcase filled with clothes and cash, our guns, my backpack. Was this all we had?

  I found an old picture of Dara by her sleeping cot. She was much younger in the photo, her arm wrapped around another girl, both of them smiling on a picnic blanket. The younger girl was leaning to one side, doing her best to conceal a missing arm. I popped the picture out of the frame and slid it into my pocket.

  I rushed back toward Dara’s room, passing the steel door with the white symbol painted on the front. Clarence heard me walk by and called after. “They’re here, pallies. I can feel them. All will be aligned at last! They’re closer than ever!”

  I yelled back, “Shut the fuck up, Clarence!” But he was right. They were closing in. I could feel it too.

  I reached Dara and tried to wake her gently. I placed one hand against her cheek and brushed back her hair with the other.

  “Dara?”

  Her eye fluttered open briefly, then rolled back in her head. She moaned in complaint.

  “You’ve got to wake up. We have to go. I think the Vakhtang know we’re here.”

  Their name hit her like freezing water. She opened her eye and focused on me.

  “I’m still alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck. My bad eye? They did something to it…”

  “We got it out.”

  “Where’s Ms. A.?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “She left ahead of us?”

  “No.”

  “Oh…”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re in real
trouble.”

  “Yeah. I think so. We’ve got to go now.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s a hell of a plan.”

  “I came up with it myself. I only know we need to go, and now. Do you think you can walk?”

  She pushed herself upright on the stretcher. Dead scarabs fell from her chest, their signal-blocking services rendered as sacrifice. She swayed and held her head. Staying up was taking all her focus. “My balance is kind of a hot mess right now. Think you could button up my shirt?”

  I could.

  “That’s better. Now you think you can put your arm under mine while we walk?”

  I did.

  There’d been no time to alter the hallway’s abattoir status. Dara leaned on me and we walked softly through the remnants of what was left of her world, trailing bloody footprints on our way to a future that neither of us could any longer imagine.

  If there was another compound set up and waiting somewhere in the city, the only woman who knew about it had been vaporized. As business resumption plans went, the mission’s was far too dependent on key figures not being murdered.

  Dara asked me to drive, slow and steady, while she combed her contacts for someone sympathetic to our cause. But it turned out that even people who’d contracted for Ms. A. in the past weren’t too keen on the idea of taking in a one-eyed woman, a known fugitive, and his turtle.

  Leon Spasky ran guns to the mission, but his industry demanded no ideological loyalties be shown. “I’m not snitching or anything, but I take you in and that goes public, maybe I lose a major client. Maybe worse. Sorry. Good luck, y’all.”

  Claire DuBois worked undercover for narcotics. She’d survived deep cover in a low level Hex distribution ring thanks to information fed to her by the mission. Ms. A. had literally saved this woman’s life before, and yet: “There’s too much heat on your pal. Rumor mill is saying he killed two of ours. They find you guys with me, that’s a death sentence. I can’t. I’ve got to go.”

  I realized I had killed two of theirs. Just not the two they knew about yet. Still, I riled at the scapegoat status I was catching from every side.