“My one-thousandth kill. You can take comfort in that. No matter how crappy your life was, at least you were special to somebody.”
“One last request?” the boy coughed.
For the first time Sam’s eyes connected with the boy’s. The boy hadn’t cried. Sam could tell. And even now, at the moment of his death, there was no trace of fear in those eyes. He saw nothing but anger, hate and cold-blooded defiance.
Sam’s fingers tightened. He was savoring the moment. Let the kid’s heart die slowly.
“Tell my father I didn’t beg.”
It was time to finish this. Sam knew it. He gave the boy a curt nod. Why not tell his father? This was a special occasion after all! He pictured how he would tell it to the old man’s face. Putting a warrant on his own son, that geezer didn’t deserve the satisfaction. Sam collected his strength for the final, glorious grab.
Then he did something he hadn’t done in almost a century.
He hesitated.
***
Camden, New Jersey looked like the asshole of the universe. Houses that weren’t broken down or burned to the ground, were covered in graffiti with the windows boarded up and crack-addicted scarecrows were roaming the streets. It smelled as bad as it looked. Sewage, smog and rotten meat.
Sam’s Mercedes vibrated, making its way over the garbage-riddled road. Somewhere in the distance, Sam could hear gunfire. There were Morrigan birds sitting in the trees. Black raven-like creatures with fuzzy, shadowy edges and red eyes. Somebody had died here recently. In this very street. A warning to everyone with the mental flexibility to see them.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Letting the boy go. Not like he would survive out there on his own. And for what? One last giant fuck you to a man who died a long time ago?
It was the homeless man, standing in the middle of the street that pulled him out of his thoughts. Sam’s back ached. So did every flesh-part his body still had. Normally, after a drive of seventeen hours, he would have been angry at the man. Maybe even killed him. This time however...
There was no guarantee that they weren’t already after him. To some of his colleagues a death called out. It made a physical noise they could hear. Even blood had produced what had been described to him as an eerie melody. Singing to the sensitive...and the hungry.
He hit the horn, startling the man, but he still didn’t move. Probably stoned out of his mind. The noise attracted one of the other denizens of Camden however. A shirtless man with a revolver tucked into his underwear, proudly showing off his swastika tattoos, made his way towards him. Sam let down his window. This man might be of some help.
“So what are you in the market for?”
“Last time I have been here, this was still Italian territory.”
The guy gave him a yellow-teethed laugh.
“When were you last here?” he said.
1967.
“It’s been a while.”
“Yeah we just recently acquired this particular street. And we are forever grateful you give your patronage to the honest, Christian, hard-working Americans that live here. So what’cha want?”
“Jerimia Antonio Falcone. They called him Stubnose, but it’s been a while.”
He laughed again. Only this time there was an edge to it.
“He some kind of mobster?”
“Yes. Well, freelancer, not a made man. But most of our customers were Family.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Are you sure? He would be about seventy right now. Lived just down this street.”
“Listen. I’m a busy man. Buy something or piss off.”
Sam glanced ahead. The homeless man had moved out of the way now. He did the math. This was probably the least supernatural street in what had to be the universe’s worst neighborhood. There were no crevasses, wrinkles, side-side-alleys or even nooks anywhere to be found. He was driving a ’97 Mercedes 190. It looked new though, because it was. There was an Inbetween factory in Germany that never stopped making them. Best car Mercedes ever built and—cut off from all his resources—his only ride.
“I have a thousand dollars for you now,” said Sam. This got the man’s attention “Two thousand dollars afterwards. Consider it a tip for keeping an eye on my car.”
Sam got out, counted the money and handed it over, getting two thumbs up in return.
“You stack the honor of your gang on the condition of my car?”
“Yessir. As Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of All Men is my witness, not a single scratch as long as I got bullets!”
In a neighborhood that had rampant bands of addicts stripping houses for copper, that was as good as it could get. Not that Sam had many options. Time was not his ally on this one.
“Excellent. On behalf of... well... white people everywhere, thank you.”
Now he just hoped Stubnose was still living here. And alive. Otherwise this was going to be a short trip.
***
The shotgun’s thunder was followed by a rain of wooden splinters of what had formerly been a door.
Sam pressed himself against the wall next to it, his eyes searching for better cover. Sam’s resistance to sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and—as he found out—microwave radiation not withstanding, he was pretty sure his delicate brain would get cranky about receiving a shotgun blast.
The floor was dirty and the stairs reeked of piss.
“Stubnose, it’s me!”
His voice carried far. No doubt people were listening to their conversation. He wondered how many of them cared.
An old man’s voice answered him.
“Jimmy sent you here to finish me off?”
“What? I killed Jimmy.”
“You telling me you killed Jimmy Addams?”
“Who?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Sam.”
“Bullshit.”
Another shotgun blast ripped a hole into the wall, too close to Sam’s head for comfort. Sam’s left ear was throwing a fit.
“It’s Samuel Alastor Virgino Jeremiah Whitestaff. We met fifty-three years ago at that job with the Chinaman? Two days after, that Irishman bit part of your nose off?”
An old geezer put his head through the hole in his door, narrowly avoiding a mean splinter. He only had a small patch of silver hair left and his nose had a crater where others had a tip. He had the wrinkles of a grumpy son of a bitch, but now he smiled, revealing cheap dentures.
“Well, fuck me!”
“Done worse. You letting me in or what?”
***
Stubnose’s apartment was a blast from the past. The carpet, lamp and sofa in his living room had been ugly in 1965, now there was almost a designer quality to it. Stubnose had a backup apartment door ready, seven chains dangling off it and he wouldn’t hear of thirty-looking Sam, helping two-hundred-looking him.
“Visiting family?” Stubnose asked, “Or reliving the glory days?”
For a second he could see the fun, Italian-American asshole that Stub had once been. Glory days... Why hadn’t he ever come by. He had always been so busy. Always focused on the next job. Never looking back.
“I need your help, Stub.”
“Well, look at that.” Stub actually managed to lift the door. Sam could hear his bones creaking under the weight. “High and mighty Sammy Whitestaff, meanest killer the world has ever seen, asking me for help! What did you do?”
He started to screw in the hinges.
“I need to know where the Wishing Tree is.”
Stub’s hand stopped in mid-air.
“You getting nostalgic about your father now?”
“My father killed seven of his eight children, trying to get enough juice to buy himself immortality. My only regret is that I can’t kill him again.”
Stub was turning the screwdriver in his hand, pondering.
“That is a dark place.” Stub still had the brown eyes of his youth and he was looking at Sam’s face for clues with the same vigor
. It was nice for Sam to see that he hadn’t gone senile.
“You know where it is. I tried to find it by myself, but this neighborhood has changed.”
“That’s what any-wish-for-a-price magic does to a neighborhood. Crackheads see it in their dreams, travel there, start sacrificing things. A desperate place for desperate people.”
Sam nodded.
“It’s that grave, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I am never going to see you again, am I?”
“No.”
Stub slow-old-man-walked into his bathroom. There was a four-dimensional compartment in the wall. There, but, not there. Seeing other people with the ability to handle them always creeped Sam out. Like his most important evolutionary advantage was suddenly leveled.
The four-dimensional compartment held an antique wooden drawer that clashed with the Caribbean green bathroom tiling. From it he pulled a three-dimensional wire-model. It was a map.
“So you kept busy,” said Sam, but Stub was lost in thought. He turned the model around in his hands for about three minutes, until understanding dawned on his face.
“There.” His bony finger pointed at a knot and Sam understood instantly.
“Thank you, old man.”
“I hope you make it,” he said. “Run far away from all of this.”
“I intend to.”
Sam could see him cry now. It was bizarre. He had the face of a retired Marine Drill Sergeant.
“You were my best friend, did I ever tell you that?”
Now Sam could feel something stir, deep inside of him. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time.
“Every time you were drunk enough, Stub.”
Before he knew what he was doing, he gave the man a hug.
***
The gamble had not paid off. The guy who was to watch Sam’s car was gone. Instead he saw a new guy. Crew cut, cargo pants, army boots, with enough decency to put on a shirt, but undoubtedly armed. Sam did not have time for this.
“We had ourselves a little chat with the boss. He likes your car.”
Sam didn’t break his stride.
“Matter of fact. His grandfather has one just like this one.”
Sam was almost at arm’s length, when he stopped.
“Well, naturally, old car like that, isn’t that hard to steal. Thing is, boss wants to take his children for a drive in this thing. So whadduya say you hand over those keys?”
“Pull your gun.”
“Say what?” The Nazi goon was trying to give Sam his best angry face, but failed miserably.
“PULL YOUR GUN, SOLDIER. NOW,” he yelled.
He reached, but Sam was fast. He gave the man’s wrist a little touch, sending the gun down on the asphalt as the man’s hand hung down lifelessly from his wrist.
“I obliterated the nerves in your hand. For the rest of your life that thing will be useless.”
The man was moving his jaw, but the words didn’t seem to come out.
“Oh don’t give me that look. You weren’t putting it to good use anyhow. So you have a choice now.”
Sam took out his keys and jingled them at the gun on the sidewalk.
“You can pick that gun up with your other hand, or you can get the hell out of my way.”
This time the man saw reason and stumbled away.
Sam looked at his car. Immaculate silver. He had it hosed down after the blood rain and now it shined. As he sat down behind the wheel he realized this was the first car he ever truly loved. Almost made him feel bad for all the Germans he had killed in World War 1.
“Ok,” he whispered. “On to the most evil place on Earth.”
***
The tree was magnificent. Between an ex-apartment building (now a half-collapsed crack house) and an ex-department store (now a graffiti-covered crack house with boarded-up windows) stood a black, dead, full-grown tree. Its empty branches probed at—and seemed to become one with—the black patch of sky above it, building a stark, trans-dimensional contrast to the shiny, clear weather in the mundane world. It didn’t root in earth. What seemed like white stones from afar were in fact shiny weather-bleached bones, sucked dry over the decades.
Papa Whitestaff had planted that tree, almost a century ago. This tree was the reason his father tried to kill him and this tree was the reason why Sam still lived.
It exuded the finest odors. Fresh-baked cookies at one time. Then money-bills, then crack. Humans were, after all, its primary food source.
Sam brought his car to a stop and walked up to it. The really interesting part about the tree was the gashing wound in its stem that never, ever healed. Through that you could suck at its resin. The rules were simple enough. Make a sacrifice, as deep-cutting and personal as necessary and suck up the leaking resin as a reward. This way you could make your dreams become reality. The only catch was the diminishing returns. And the fact that few people knew what they really wanted. The tree could grind people to dust, one ill-conceived wish at a time. Evil as a Vegas casino.
Sam wanted to cut it down decades ago. Now it was his only hope.
“Hello Samuel,” said the singsong voice behind him.
Sam had not seen the man until it was too late.
***
“How did you find me?” said Sam.
While Sam was human and became something else, this—for lack of a better word—man came from the Inbetween and was now pretending to breathe air and pay taxes.
He looked like a middle-aged cubicle worker with empty blue eyes, staring into nothingness. They never got the eyes right. Why bother pointing them at things when you could see with your whole body?
“I have been following you, ever since you left Mr. Falcone’s apartment.”
So they were tracking flexible minds. Made sense. In this neighborhood a lot of people went over the edge. And when their brains finally saw the truth they brought desperation, poor impulse control and guns to where the Powers That Be didn’t want them. That left a single question.
“So why am I still breathing?”
“You have served us well for a considerable time. It would be an inconceivable waste of talent.” They also couldn’t get emotions right, and by extension language. The man accentuated arbitrary syllables, like he had been speaking Cantonese for all his life and only recently learned perfect English. From books.
Even though it was impossible to read the man, Sam understood the subtext perfectly well. His laugh echoed across the entire street.
“You haven’t found him, yet!” said Sam.
“We will in time.”
He gave him a smile. Like clockwork his body started to dance around, studying his opponent’s reactions.
“Be faster if I could help though.”
“Indeed.”
“Pass.”
“Pity.”
Winning a fight.
Winning a fight of any kind was about two things: speed and precision. The secret was that it wasn’t enough to know what you’re doing, striking out and crushing a man’s throat had to be as natural as breathing.
Side-step, feign, attack from the side.
The fight was over, before the man realized it had started.
***
The middle-aged-looking man was lying on the ground with Sam on top of him. Sam’s arm was buried in the man’s belly.
Every intelligent foe had a nervous center or an equivalent. Without complex interconnections, no consciousness.
“I would say I was going to make this quick, but I don’t want to lie to you.”
The man was as cold as he was. Emptiness given form. When killing a human all Sam needed to do was shock-freeze the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that took care of things like breathing and maintaining a heartbeat. The subject would be dead before hitting the floor.
With creatures from the Inbetween it was force. If he grabbed the high-dimensional bubble of consciousness in the creature’s center, he could literally squeeze the life out of it.
“This is a special occasion, you see. It’s the big one-triple-zero.”
The man lay still as death, but for the first time Sam could sense an emotion in him. It was fear. Nothing living wants to die.
“My one-thousandth kill. You can take comfort in that. No matter how crappy your life was, at least you were special to somebody.”
The man’s body lost shape. Sam was arm-deep in a black cloud now.
“Goodbye, you pathetic little thing. Congratulations on your accomplishment.”
The black cloud convulsed now, growing larger and smaller. Angry little tendrils shot out of it, thrashing at Sam, as the man’s most primal impulses withered and died, one by one.
At the end, the man’s remains collapsed in itself, leaving nothing but a shriveled purplish-black potato.
The Wishing Tree was looming over Sam. It was time for his sacrifice.
***
Sam held the remains up in the air.
“I give you this trophy. My one-thousandth kill.”
He tossed it to the ground. A tiny black root shot up from between the bones and dragged the black bulb down, with eerie speed.
Sam stepped up to the tree’s wound. And kissed it.
The tree tasted like ash. The little resin that seeped from the wound gave him a tiny buzz. The tree was right. After one thousand kills his latest didn’t matter to him anymore. It barely even registered as exciting. A memory that was fading fast. Maybe the trophy could have become precious to him but, as of late, time was not something he had.
He let the fingers of his left hand, his human hand, slide across the rough bark of the tree. What else could he give him?
His car.
It seemed like a dumb move, him being on the run. But he could always get another car. One that he did not love that much. This tree and its power were the only thing that could help him now. Desperation makes for shitty negotiations.
He walked over and opened the trunk, intent on taking some ranged weapons. That’s when he saw the burlap sack and it took him back.
Johnathan Whitestaff III. had already been an old man when he discovered the tree in Sweden. Sam had learned from his father’s notes that he was obsessed with finding immortality. So obsessed that he raped all eight of his housemaids, repeatedly, until they conceived. He locked them in his basement. Sam had been four years old when he had first seen the sun.
Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift Page 5