I woke to the smell of burning coffee, the remnants of the last pot gone black on the warmer. I stretched my arms and the movement roused Dara. She opened her eyes, looked at my face, and screamed, backing across the bed.
“No. No. No. Shit.”
I’d seen one night stand regret before, but this was something else. She was afraid.
“Your right eye.”
I stood, found my equilibrium, and approached a mirror. Dara walked up behind me.
“Are you sure you didn’t go to the realm?”
“I’m positive but maybe we should quit talking about it.” I moved closer and saw burst blood vessels in profusion across the surface of my eye. Not pretty, but probably just a side effect of the whole “being eaten/undergoing invasive surgery/intra-brain battle with a war criminal’s consciousness” kind of week I’d had. “It’s not jellied, but it’s pretty fucked up. I think my brain swelling might have caused some issues. I can still see though.”
But Dara was already looking off in the distance, distracted. I watched a sheen of sweat pop on her skin. Her cheeks flushed red.
“Do you think that maybe, if you fell into the realm, all the other minds you’re connected with would start transmitting too?”
“I’m not sure of anything anymore, but I can imagine that happening. Sure.”
“Oh, god.” Dara ran over to her clothes piled on the floor and grabbed the phone Ms. A. had given her for mission-only messaging. She showed me the screen: “CD indicating Vakhtang uppers v excited about acquisition in yr territory. Rumors say bio-weapon. L.A. closing down ops, sending agents back for assist.”
“Not good. But we got to Dr. Tikoshi before them, and I’m sure he encrypted all of his research. Delta probably set fail-safes for the destruction of his labs.”
“Yeah, I hope so. But what if they got Akatsuki?”
It was my turn to sweat. I knew too much.
“It might be that. It might be something else. Either way, we need to get in your car right fucking now.”
I brought Dara up to speed on the way back into the city, running down Dr. Tikoshi’s almost incomprehensible capacity for bugfuckery. She seemed to know better than to ask about my mom. Whether that was a kindness, or necessity trumping mourning, I wasn’t sure.
We ran end-of-the-world extrapolations:
1. Akatsuki had returned from his trip to the Delta MedWorks corporate HQ with nothing to show for the jaunt aside from a few assholes’ memories added to his roster. Maybe he found Dr. T.’s lab massacre and was hunting for us, vowing revenge. Somehow, that was actually the best-case scenario. On the flipside, maybe he returned to town and found himself captured by members of the Vakhtang. In which case, they were now in possession of a creature which could easily consolidate the human consciousness which they sought to control and attune to their universe-ending wolf god. And whether they knew it or not, Akatsuki was designed with longevity in mind, and could reproduce via viral transmission using some kind of snot tube ovipositor.
2. Robbie Dawn had a show in a few days, and the way I saw it, he was now in possession of a bioweapon of his own. I thought about the children who’d been found skinned on the farm in Canada, and how the rumors pointed to Hex distro networks. I remembered Buddy’s description of falling backwards through space when he heard the drums in person. Bobby was running with the wolves. Once I threw in Dr. T.’s prior Vakhtang employment and “materials used” and the cryptic notes and inexplicable extortion photo, it all added up: the Vakhtang were grooming Robbie Dawn as some kind of death drum Pied Piper, using tonal weapons and bad mojo to slowly drag a global fan base into alignment with their poorly-chosen point of worship.
3. Delta MedWorks and the bank had big plans, multi-national partners in dominance, and a total willingness to kill for the god who kept them in yachts and beach houses in the Seychelles. Maybe they had Akatsuki and Tikoshi’s research and were already working on a way to put his poison into our brains.
4. Or, we guessed, the Earth’s final shitshow might just be a fun combination of All of the Above.
Stop number one: Leon Spasky. Guns.
Dara copped a long range rifle, but none of the other weapons she wanted.
“Sorry, beautiful. My whole supply’s been exhausted in the last two days. Heat like this, makes me think I might head to France for a while.”
“Vakhtang buying everything up?”
“You know I can’t say. Business is business. But if I was you, I might not make this the last gun you buy today.”
Stop number two: Claire DuBois’ office. Information.
Dara copped nothing. Claire—the “CD” from her text who had first gotten the info out—was either buried so deep in her Vakhtang undercover that she couldn’t communicate, or she was buried so deep she couldn’t breathe.
Stop number three: Brubaker Tropical Fish and Aquarium Supply. Feeder fish.
The perphenadol was wearing off. The voices were surfacing. The first to poke his head from the ether was Deckard. I was afraid to close the door to his hallway. What if he was one of the voices keeping Tikoshi under the surface? I felt like I’d formed a pact with the ten minds who now shared real estate with my own consciousness.
Fish please. Fish please. No sun here. Fish please. FISH!
Deck’s demands were incessant, and I found they stirred my hunger. What kind of two-way street were we building?
Dara barely tolerated the stop, since I had to send her in. Even if I was in training for The League of Zeroes, I looked too rough to pull off casual pet shop business. And who knew if I could still be recognized from the employee photo they’d been running for weeks on the news?
Dara jumped back into the car with a plastic bag filled with water and three inch-long goldfish. “So how does this work?”
“I don’t know. I wish I could connect to Tikoshi’s knowledge without the rest of him coming to the party. I think I’ll get sick if I put them in the pack. I’m not sure that thing actually digests or produces waste. So I guess it’s bottoms up for me.”
I hesitated on the first fish, tasting too much of it, feeling its wiggle as it halted in my throat. I took mercy on the next two, delivering big molar chomps to their heads before a speedy swallow.
“Is that better, Deck?”
Fish. Yes.
And it was good to know I’d made him happy. Did he get a food dopamine kickback or pick up the salty sensory input of my taste buds? How much control did these other minds have? I wasn’t ready to start jerking off next to trash fires or murdering people just to feel something.
“That’ll do it?” Dara asked.
Sleep now. Dream sun.
“Yeah. We’re good. Where to next?”
I hadn’t let Dara talk to me about mom, so she couldn’t have known that what was left of her was still at Dr. Tikoshi’s primary lab. I thought it was too risky to return to the site, but Dara’s heat scan said the place was clear and nothing in the surrounding area set us on alert.
“We can get Buddy’s brain if it’s still in there.”
“Buddy had some kind of battery pack around his waist. What if that kept his tank functional? What if his brain’s gone bad? I could poison everything in my pack. I could go mad like him.”
I once ate an egg which had been buried in the ground for one hundred years, and it was the most delicious thing I ever tasted. Modern food is poison anyway. You can’t be so uptight.
Huey was helping. I tuned him out.
“I think Buddy knew more than he was able to express. And he was friends with Robbie Dawn. Buddy could know something that’ll help us find him.”
We went in armed. I felt extra paranoid and exposed once I realized that any shot through the pack might as well be a bullet to my head.
Nothing had changed in the lab, though the smell was far worse. How many buildings sat along 45th like this, populated only by final mistakes and rolling fields of maggots?
Dara scoured Dr. T.’s pharmaceutical sup
ply, boosted small vials of antibiotics and perphenadol.
I approached the surgical stations and put my hand on the table where my mother had last been alive.
“Mom.”
Dara came over and put a hand on my shoulder.
“She was here that day,” I said.
“I knew it. I could see it in Tikoshi’s face. But I didn’t want to believe it.”
Neither did I. But now I was here, and it was real, and it was the only memorial Samantha Doyle would ever get.
“She beat him. She was so strong. And she was really…really great at swearing.”
Dara laughed, tears rolling out as she smiled.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s not okay, is it?”
“No. It’s not. I owe her so much that I never gave. I tell myself I killed the man who murdered her, but that’s not even true.”
“Doyle, no.”
“I’m still here. And I don’t know how I feel about that anymore.”
“What would she want you to do?”
I knew the answer—Keep shoveling shit. Keep living. Don’t let the cocksuckers keep me down. Try to find the joy in it, where I could.
“She’d want me to see things through.”
With that I walked to the tray I’d seen Tikoshi place in cold storage, knowing that I wouldn’t recognize what was left of my mom. I carried the container to the micro-incinerator and flipped the switch, feeling a blast of dry warmth across my face.
“Goodbye, mom.”
Dara helped me tilt the tray.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Doyle.”
And that was the last of her, in a flash of heat and light.
There was too much left of Buddy and Boudreaux to burn, but the bugs were doing their best to dispose of the remains. We promised to place a call to the cops about their bodies, so their loved ones could find some peace.
Hopefully the families wouldn’t mind that we took Buddy’s brain. It was too risky to stay on site while we contemplated whether or not to risk integration. Instead I sat in the front seat of Dara’s car, barely able to breathe in between Buddy’s box and my pack, wondering how many residual drugs I’d be ingesting with Buddy’s frontal lobe.
In the end, we realized that we were only still alive because of Buddy’s bravery. I thought of the sound of his box crunching into Tikoshi’s face and it gave me no small satisfaction. Courage, then, was the order of the day.
Also: FUCK IT! WHY NOT?
I moved to the back seat, cracked the case, cut loose a quadrant of Buddy’s thinker, and slid it into the locking bay on the pack. I sealed the lid and we waited for the world’s most famous surgical patient to say hello.
“Buddy?” Nothing. Cognitive crickets.
“Hello?”
Trunk Man? This is strange. I was nowhere for so long, but I think I found my way back to the future mist.
Where was all the regret, fear, and neurosis of the others who’d been integrated? Had Buddy and Huey’s training time in dissociative states prepared them for a life as free-floating consciousness?
“It’s great to hear your voice.”
I can’t see anything.
“I know. That can be scary. You should be able to see memories, at least, if you imagine you have eyes. I’m going to make a hallway for you in here. It will be your place.”
Awesome. Hey, I have so many pets. Can I have a falcon in here?
“Sure. Also, I should tell you that yours is not the only hallway. There are eleven others here. Dr. T. is one of them, but we had to lock him up.”
Oh, good. He’s the worst. His voice gives me the heebie jeebies and his hands are like crazy fighting birds.
“Agreed. So if you find a hallway that’s closed by a huge stone door, leave that closed. In fact, it might not hurt for you to spend some time thinking about that door having an extra lock with your name on it.”
Will do, Trunk Man. Hey, my falcon Balthazar is made of purple fire. That’s fucking great!
Was that formed from a memory? How did he remember…
Oh, yeah. Drugs. Subjectivity. All that. I decided to leave it alone before Huey popped up and called me percepticentric.
“I want to meet all your pets, Buddy, but first I was hoping you might be able to help me with something.”
Shoot, Trunky.
“I really need to know something about your friend, Bobby. Where does he usually stay when he comes into town for a show?”
Dara and I had pictured Robbie Dawn holed up at the Haversham or Bunk West or some private penthouse with its own production studio. I imagined lobster served on silver platters with Robbie’s name spelled out in cocaine around the border. Concubines. Eunuchs. Portuguese ventriloquists you could pelt with fruit.
You know—rich people stuff.
But Buddy said that Robbie eschewed the celebrity trappings when he could, calling off security and crashing with friends out in the Brookton district. Staying in touch with the little people. Keeping it real.
We drove by the craftsman home where Buddy said Robbie would be staying the night. I recognized a vintage Jaguar in the driveway, bright yellow paint shining high gloss in the last vestiges of dusk light. How many vehicle swaps did Robbie and his security detail have to execute to get him out here without tabloid drones hovering? He’d ridden in that car with Brazilian supermodel Beatriz M. in the video for “Let Me Toss It.”
“That’s his.”
We parked two blocks away and popped out masked and packing. Dara slung her new rifle over her shoulder. My gun no longer felt heavy and unnatural. Despite the mask, I felt like I could see better in the dusky light than I had in the past. If I’d felt Deck’s hunger, was it possible that the animus ciborium was effecting my body in other ways? Can you not see the potential of what’s on your back?
Dara ran a few steps ahead of me, gliding, light, in her element. I did my best to keep up and tried to find a smooth stride where my data cord didn’t pull down with each step. As we reached the lawn I saw a quick flash of light from a guest bedroom window above the garage.
Direct approach before full dark. Idiots. Drop and veer left.
The bank’s assassin was unimpressed by our tactical choices, but I thought he might be right. I swerved left and yelled to Dara to drop. She responded instantly and hit the wet grass rolling. I hesitated because I didn’t want to risk landing on my pack. It was rigid, but I wasn’t sure it would hold under my full body weight.
When the voltage darts hit my chest, I knew Buddy had been wrong—Robbie had definitely retained security.
White light/legs gone/jaw popped. Shaking on my side.
Make it stop/No/It hurts/Too hot.
Everyone had an opinion on the issue.
Dara lay flat, her new rifle swinging up toward the window. She pulled the trigger and there was a soft “fwump” sound and then the window shattered and there was an aerial pop like a small firework concussing.
No motion in the window. A man moaned. Thin white curtains billowed out, flecked with red.
Frag rounds. Nice shot for a broad, too. Head in now. If the guard is still alive, he might make it to communications. Better to extract your target and interrogate elsewhere.
The bank assassin’s utility value almost made me forget the whole “tried to kill me/murdered foreign sex workers for fun” aspect of his personality.
Dara ran over and brushed the voltage darts from my chest with the back of her hand. She tucked her arms under mine and helped me stand on wobbling baby deer legs.
“Thanks. Let’s head in. We can extract Robbie and interrogate him somewhere else.”
She nodded in agreement, unable to conceal the surprise on her face.
The front door was unlocked, which was convenient, but it prevented me from finding out if there was anyone in my mind who knew how to pick the thing. If I was going to suffer this bullshit mutant mod, I might as well exploit the situation.
The first floor was clear, though there were dishes in the si
nk and the kitchen still smelled like coconut oil and curry.
The second floor was also empty. The lights were on in what appeared to be a little girl’s room. Signed Robbie Dawn posters for wallpaper. Plush animals by the sitting window.
We checked under bedframes and in closets, in case someone had heard the frag round and decided to hide.
Nothing.
Back downstairs. Dara spotted it first—a brown paper parcel on the far corner of the kitchen island, sitting next to a bulk pallet of bottled water. She undid the twine which held it closed. The butcher paper fell away. Cash. Banded, fresh hundreds in tidy stacks. Serious money.
I was about to tie it back up and tuck it between my body and pack when the smell hit me—the weird blood and barbecue sauce scent of Hex smoke.
I looked to Dara. She smelled it too. Without either of us saying a word, we walked over to the kitchen sink, wet two hand towels, removed our masks, and wrapped the damp cloths around our faces. Neither of us could afford Hex exposure. Who knew how it would affect me now?
Dara pulled out her pistol and gestured toward a white door in the corner of the kitchen. The door pointed toward the interior of the house, just beneath the staircase we’d taken up to the second floor.
A basement.
I drew my gun and approached the door.
Turn the knob quietly, but once it’s open you get down there as fast as you can and check all corners. If they’re armed, surprise is your only advantage.
I rotated the knob and pushed the door in slowly, praying that the hinges were well oiled. Dara and I looked to each other and nodded. We took a deep breath through our cloth masks, and then rushed down.
Skullcrack City Page 24