We needn’t have been armed. The people in that basement assumed their money had given them immunity from our type of intrusion. They had no weapons. Three of them were barely conscious.
Robbie Dawn was still awake. His unblinking eyes and ratchet jaw said he was deep into a Hex bender. Both of his hands cradled a green glass pipe in his lap.
“What the fuck, man? I said no extra security. Y’all are fired as of, like, yesterday. Fucking with my private time.”
Private time: a middle-aged couple passed out on a futon in the corner, breathing slow next to a bed stand filled with pipes/spikes/spoons/vaporizers. A hi-res camera looped live through an eighty inch wall-mounted television. A silver roller rack filled with petite lingerie. A girl of maybe twelve, dressed in a plaid skirt and barely-needed red bra, cuffed by her ankle to the wooden claw foot of a vintage couch. A coffee table just in front of her decked out with Hex in enough forms to ensure that a small girl could be dosed right into the realm.
You know—rich people stuff. Staying in touch with the little people. Keeping it real.
I should have told Dara to go back upstairs. I should have known what would happen.
She walked over to the girl. Covered her with a blanket she found on the floor. Looked into the girl’s eyes and gasped.
“When did you dose her?”
“I didn’t dose her,” said Robbie. “She wanted to do it. She’s a big fan, lady. Groupie kicks ain’t the same. They want a memory. Something special.”
“Her eyes are going. We’ve got to get some blocker into her.”
“You’re not doing shit, lady. This is all some consensual, agreed-upon business. It’s a done deal.”
The money on the kitchen island. Who dosed the kid?
“Y’all need to go. You are seriously fucking up my night.” He meant it. He was a mid-sized, moderately talented man on a couch in his t-shirt and boxers, but he thought he had authority over two people with masks and guns. Because of his fame. His money. His allegiance to the Vakhtang.
Bad gods.
“The key to the cuffs, Robbie.”
“Hell no. Katy’s mine.”
Dara pulled the SoniScrape from her back pocket, pointed it at Robbie Dawn, and pressed the silver button on top.
His hands went to his ears. He flopped to his side on the couch and convulsed. His stomach emptied, the smell of green bile and booze mixing with stale smoke.
She released the button. Robbie’s hands fell from his ears, blood in his palms.
Dara yelled to compensate for the damage she’d done. “The keys. You have three seconds. Three, two…”
“Mom’s got’em, I think. Don’t wake her up. I think she was having second thoughts.”
Dara rolled mom, snagged the keys from the back pocket of her jeans. She ran over to unlock little Katy. I tried to remember how we’d ended up here at all.
I said, “Robbie, we need some information. We know you’ve been working with the Vakhtang, and we know about the drums, so don’t bother lying.”
Tell him you know about Tokyo, Trunk Man.
“We know about Tokyo, too.” The color and Hex-fortified confidence drained from Robbie’s face.
“That was an accident. I’m precise with my shit. The girl lied about her weight, that’s all. I know she did. She’d still be here if she told the truth.”
I recognized the terror in his eyes. He’d pushed too much Hex at once, got a girl subsumed, watch the realm pull her right through into nothing.
Then Dara was at Robbie’s side, and she had the SoniScrape pushed right against his forehead and she pressed the button again. By the time she relented, his hands were behind his back in Katy’s cuffs. I could tell from the blood streaming from his ears that he would never hear music the same again.
“You like mimics, Robbie? You want to see what they see?” Dara grabbed two full syringes from the coffee table and brought them over in one fist. She held the needles just above his thigh.
Robbie Dawn never cried in his music videos or in his attempts at crossing over as a film star, and I could see why. His face went double-ugly when the tears kicked in.
“What do you think is waiting for you over there? You know the Vakhtang sold you a lie. Are you ready to go?”
Why was Dara smiling? Did she know how terrifying she was at that moment?
“No. I can’t go to that place. I’m not supposed to. That’s part of the deal. It’s in my contract.”
“We don’t have any contract with you.” She pushed the needles into the top of his leg.
“Stop! Stop! What…what do you want?”
“Where are the drums?”
“Special storage at Freedom Finance Mutual Center. Doesn’t matter, though.”
“Why not?”
“Whatever happened at the last tune-up, they got things just right. We used them to cut the new single, and they made me and the engineer wear noise-blocking headphones and only watch levels. I had to play on sense memory. Took like forty takes. Main producer was shooting up with something else while he listened.”
“How are you supposed to play them at the show on Friday?”
“I’m not. They’re going to dub in the drums from the studio recording.”
“Won’t you hear the drums when you play live?”
“There’s no more ‘live’ for me. It’s going to be a fucking hologram show. One time only, then they leak the new single at midnight. Definitely the end of my career. I knew it was coming. But…”
“What?”
“I didn’t know how sad I’d feel. Thought this party might help me get over it, but now this is blown too. Fucking assholes.”
Katy moaned on the couch. Robbie popped more crocodile tears. “For all I know, you’re fucked too. They could be outside right now. They said they’d be sending an armed escort to get me out of here. Something else is going down. They told me to head to my place in Spain for a while.”
“What’s going down?” Dara pushed the needles to the hilt and rotated her hand.
“Aaah! Jesus, I’m not part of their crew. I only work for them. They protect me from that shit. They said for me to get out of town. That’s it.”
“Nothing else?” She waved the SoniScrape in front of his eyes with her other hand.
“No. I don’t know. Come on. Fucking lay off. Only other thing is what Birch said, but Birch is fucking nuts, so I paid it no mind. But he told me to stick to drinking beer until I landed in Spain. So whatever that means. I don’t know. You gotta take these cuffs off me.”
“Sure, Robbie. You won’t be wearing them for long.” Her tone was flat.
Katy started shaking on the couch. Her eyes were almost jet black.
“Doyle, you’ve got to get her up to the car. There’s a vial of perphenadol from Dr. T.’s lab in the dash.”
I picked up Katy and rolled her arms into the blanket so they wouldn’t flop loose. I headed for the stairs, giving Dara one more glance before ascending. She was straight across from Robbie, looking right into his eyes.
I deposited Katy and injected her with perphenadol. By the time I returned to the house, smoke was already rising into the kitchen.
The butcher paper cash bundle was burning at the parents’ feet. They stirred but didn’t move as smoke curled its way into their lungs and the fire climbed toward their nodding slumber.
It’s beautiful.
I felt the strongest urge to watch the bed burn, even though I would die there. I closed the door on the arsonist.
Robbie yelled. “Dude, you gotta get me out of here. This chick has fucking lost it.”
“Dara?”
She didn’t turn.
“Listen—you get me out of here and I’ve got enough money to buy you a fucking island. What do you want?”
She said nothing.
“Come on. I’m sorry. I know what I was doing was fucked up, okay, but I’m sorry. I had some bad shit happen when I was a kid, you know. My head’s all twisted up. You gotta
save me. You gotta get me out of here. You’re not gonna leave me here to burn alive.”
“No, I’m not.”
I couldn’t see her face, but he could. That’s why he started screaming.
“You’re going home, Robbie.”
She slammed her fist down on the syringes, driving the plungers, sending a super-dose of Hex rushing through his system.
Robbie’s eyes rolled back, vibrating, turning darker by the second. His mouth dropped open. He said nothing, but I knew that wherever he was in that moment, he was praying that the fire would reach the couch and burn through him before he was forced to meet the god he’d served.
We drove without speaking for a few minutes. A harvest moon glowed orange-gray over the city. I could feel the gravitational pull in my bones like bad electricity.
“The dad was Vakhtang. When I went to grab the cuffs I saw his hands.”
“Missing pinkie finger.”
“Yeah. And a U-shaped scar across his palm. He was high ranking.”
He was on the Capitoline force. I used to deliver coffee to that piece of shit.
I closed the door on Egbert. I had to focus.
Katy shifted in her blanket in the back seat.
“Will the perphenadol be enough? Don’t we need the scarabs?”
“I don’t know. The blocker is all we had. We can get more in a few hours, I hope.”
“Wait, why not now? Are we going to destroy Robbie’s drums?”
“No. What’s the point? If that recording really works now, the drums are penny ante by comparison. No. We’re going up to Meier Reservoir.”
“What?”
“Why would a member of the Vakhtang have such a huge new stash of bottled water in his kitchen? And why would they tell Robbie to stick to drinking beer until he was in Spain? Let’s say they did manage to capture Akatsuki and found out that they could pull all of those collected minds into a single powerful transmission to the realm. Why wouldn’t they want more of those creatures running around?”
“Maybe they tried Robbie’s new recording on Akatsuki.”
“I don’t know. They’d need some kind of rite of connection. The user has to at least think they want whatever is connecting them to the realm. Maybe they’d tell him that Hex would help with the voices. Whatever they’re doing, I think they want to replicate it.”
I thought of how proud Dr. Tikoshi had been regarding Akatsuki’s ovipositor, how it secured his legacy to the world.
“You need to drive faster. Fuck the drones. Fuck the cops. Let them see us. We need everyone who wants to stay human to get up to that reservoir right now.”
We took an old logging trail up the back of Mt. Meier toward the reservoir. Dara and I had no idea the trail existed, but Huey used to daytrip up there and hike naked.
The sound of the wind in the trees would sync with the feeling of air moving over my skin and I’d try to meditate roots from my body into the soil, but it never worked. And I got poison oak.
I closed the door on Huey once we passed the gate to the path. His presence was clouding my vision with a swirling purple-green aura. I needed clarity, not acid flashbacks.
I realized this was too crucial of a situation to allow even a moment’s interference or strange influence. To be certain I didn’t find myself staring at fire or relishing the sight of a dead body or thinking about goldfish, I isolated my mind.
I’m closing all the doors.
After spotting half-rotted shotgun-blasted signs for the reservoir we parked the car behind a rise in the hill.
Dara checked on Katy in the back seat.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know if we gave her enough. Ms. A. would have known. Shit. She’s burning up. Shallow breath. They’re inside of her now.” Dara gently lifted one of Katy’s eyelids with her thumb. “Still dark. She might lose her eyes. Goddamn it.” She bent and kissed the girl on the forehead. “I’m sorry, Katy.”
She backed out of the car and grabbed her rifle from the trunk. We didn’t bother with masks—the cameras here were all centered on the reservoir, and the absence of street lamps and neon signs meant you could see drones’ lights from four hundred yards. Dara told me that there were enough city officials on the Vakhtang take that security would probably be down anyway. Nobody would want a recording of this night to exist.
I don’t know if I could sense what was coming, or if maybe the combination of minds in my consciousness had made me more aware than I used to be, but I knew we had to stop for one moment, despite everything.
I put my hands on her face. “Dara Borkowski.”
She put her hands on mine. “Shenanigans Patrick Doyle.”
We kissed then. We found the joy in it, while we could.
I still remember the way her breath rolled across my skin as she exhaled and pulled away.
We resumed our climb to the bluff overlooking Meier Reservoir.
We lay flat on our bellies, looking down at all the delusional motherfuckers plotting the end of the world. I thought they’d be wearing robes, but they were dressed like anybody else. Some expensive suits in the mix, sure, and a disconcerting number of police uniforms, but no ceremonial headdresses made from wolves or jewel-encrusted swords or censers spewing black smoke.
Lots of guns—they were hell-bent on protecting tonight’s event.
Dara repositioned herself with her rifle, trying to get a better look through her telescopic sight. Her elbow knocked loose a scattering of gravel. We ducked down and cursed but the men below didn’t seem to notice. They were paying close attention to a beeping coming from the trees by the reservoir.
Two vehicles backing up. The first a flatbed truck with a blue tarp strapped across something huge on the back, the second a crane, its arm extending above the tree line.
The truck reached the edge of the reservoir and tilted its flatbed down toward the water. Four men hopped on and untethered the tarp and peeled it back.
I didn’t even need her extended sight to see what was on the truck: Akatsuki, head aimed toward the water, torso pinned to the bed by a massive steel clamp. His arms and legs had been removed and the stumps were covered in bandages stained grey-black. They’d turned him into an obscene, massive version of the pack on my back.
Two men pulled a blanket off Akatsuki’s abdomen. Coiled there in a fleshy spiral was his ovipositor. The men carefully lifted the organ and extended it until it reached a metal pipe running down into the city’s drinking water.
Akatsuki’s ribs showed through his skin, and I guessed they’d been starving him, but I didn’t know why until the crane swung toward him.
Hanging from the hook at the end of the crane arm, upside down and bound at the hands and feet, was a young man. He didn’t seem conscious of the fact that his body was hanging over Akatsuki’s starved maw.
The beast’s eyes went wild. His lower jaw shifted, separating and pushing out two feet from his face in anticipation of the warm meal hanging just out of reach.
Dara pointed her sight at the man as he spun on the hook. “He’s in their realm. And they want him inside that thing.”
The crane arm let out a hydraulic blast and started to descend.
“Get ready to run.”
Dara lifted up on her elbows and steadied the rifle and moved her finger over the trigger, ready to fire twice in succession and hope that the frag rounds shattered two skulls and put an end to the night’s feeding. It was our only shot.
I always wonder what would have happened if Dara would have had that chance. What if those bullets would have flown true?
If only we’d heard the door to Dara’s car open and shut.
If only we’d heard the footsteps behind us.
If only I’d turned in time to reach up and stop that rock, before it crashed down into Dara’s skull.
If only.
Instead, I was watching the reservoir, and anticipating the shots, and I only knew that everything had gone wrong when I felt Dara’s blood spl
atter against my cheek. She collapsed, eyes open in shock, staring at me as if I could answer her questions.
I saw legs standing above Dara and thought only to grab them and get the person who was hurting her away from her body. I threw my full weight forward and felt my shoulders crash into something and there was a crunch and a pop as her attacker’s knee hyperextended.
Had the Vakhtang heard us below? No. Screaming rose up from the reservoir, masking the sound of our struggle. Akatsumi had found his poisoned dinner.
Whoever had attacked Dara was trying to stand on a busted leg. I steadied my vision and it had to be a trick of the moonlight because all I saw was a little girl smiling at me, her nose bleeding below two dull jet-black eyes.
They’re inside of her now.
They ruin everything.
Katy tried to step toward me, but the leg I’d tackled was broken worse than I thought, and her weight pushed the compound fracture through, white bone glinting like a knife and peeling free from the muscle of her calf. She fell to the ground and laughed, the sound a sad mimicry of human happiness. My head swam. Her laugh echoed around me, amplified, turned into a low moan bringing me into tune with their dead frequencies.
She was pulling me in to their realm. I reached back to grab my pistol but my arm seemed one hundred feet above me, then miles below, and when I finally found my waist band I realized the gun was gone, lost when I tackled her.
I collapsed. My chest magnetized to the earth. My eyelids were lead aprons. I crawled toward her, wondering if I could still breathe under all the pressure. Her hand reached out for me, to close around my throat, to claw my eyes from my face, to hold me to her sickly flat chest as she slipped through into their world.
I lifted my hands to cover my ears, but the sound held me in its thrall. I dragged my hands across the dirt and found nothing. Katy crawled toward me, mouth open wide, face held in a rictus.
Then she was on top of me, her open mouth pressing down to amplify our connection, fresh blood dripping from her nose to my face. The sound was everything. My vision drifted, black swirling in from the periphery. I saw a flash frame of the girl as an infant, once loved, now betrayed, now ruined, and I thought of my mother in restraints and of all the people who would suffer like this forever and I swirled backwards through my mind and decided that Dr. Tikoshi had lived so long not because he’d been wise but because he’d been terrible, and this was a cruel world given over to those who thought themselves gods so I opened all the doors in my mind to see which of us might survive.
Skullcrack City Page 25