by Chuck Wendig
She’s snarling past a lipstick-smeared face.
She’s got a revolver. Comically large. Looks like a Smith & Wesson Model 29. Mookie thinks, She can’t handle that gun. That hand-cannon’s going to go off, with nothing tethering it to the deck of her metaphorical boat. And like a rogue cannon, it’s going to fly back from the recoil and crack her in the mouth and knock her cold.
That’s when Ropy leaps on Mookie’s back. Mookie roars, pivots—
The gun goes off—whoom.
A .44 round mushrooms through Ropy’s chest.
And keeps going, into the meat of Mookie’s shoulder.
Pain like a fireplace poker pressed into his flesh. He shakes the dead weight of Ropy off like the punk’s a heavy coat. Mookie feels blood trickling down his back. He turns, and there stands the nude girl. Leering. Grinning. Gun up. Smoke drifting lazily from the barrel, bringing with it that spent powder stink.
She thumbs back the hammer.
That’s when Hot Pocket starts to move. Mookie forgot about him, but suddenly here he is—hopping up from behind the couch, Hot Pocket still in his goddamn mouth like he’s a dog with a bone, running toward the exit like a man on fire.
That’s the one I want. The one who runs is the one I need.
The naked woman—she sees the movement, too. She hesitates.
Which is all Mookie needs. He bumrushes her. Hits her like a train—shoulder under her gun arm, hands up, gun goes off. It’s like a clap of thunder next to his head. Ears ringing. Stench of gunsmoke. Before he even knows what happened she’s down on the ground and knocked out cold, the gun spinning away. Mookie lurches up, bleeding—
Hot Pocket is about to make his exit.
And Mookie, he’s spilling red. And he can’t hear anything out of his one ear. Everything is a screaming computer tone, high-pitched and shrill like a splinter made out of sound. He paws at the couch. Uses it to pull himself up just as Hot Pocket—
Catches a shovel across the face and falls flat on his ass.
The shovel pitches forward. Clangs on the ground.
“Freckle-dicked clowns,” comes a voice.
An all-too-familiar voice.
Werth—that old goat—walks in through the door.
20
We need a cenote—a “low place.” Can’t be man-made, has to be a natural part of the landscape or something. Like certain caves or pits or coves. Such places, according to Hrothk, have both the Great Below and the Infinite Above bleeding into them a little bit, and so that means it’s a place I can go and someone from the daemon families can go, too. Meaning, it’s a place we can meet. Question is, where? East Coast doesn’t have any. A few down Mexico way. One in Canada Hrothk knows about. But he also said that he knows a few on the West Coast. I’ve always wanted to see the West Coast. Hey, maybe I’ll actually get to see a sunset. Of course, first we have to cross half of the country underground to get there...
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
Hot Pocket moans around his Hot Pocket.
Mookie barely hears him. He’s staring at his old lieutenant, his old boss-below-the-Boss: James Werth.
Werth looks much like he did in the dream. Got the pallor of a river-dragged corpse. Goat horns sprout from his brow and curl inward: not tight spirals, but wide, drooping arcs that end in broken, cracked tips. Gone is the bloody gut-shot shirt.
He leans on the shovel like a man on a cane.
“You,” Mookie says.
“Me.” Werth winks. Licks his dead gray tooth. The word comes in muted, muffled, through Mookie’s screaming ear.
“You were dead.” Maybe he’s still a ghost. But he’s got a shovel. A real shovel. That he just used to bash into some thug’s face.
“Still am, I’m afraid.” Werth lifts his shirt. Shows the gunshot wound, which looks ragged, but bloodless. Like a bullet-hole in a lunch tray. He drops the shirt. When he does, a scent comes off him. Wet dog. Goat cheese. The rankling odor of pickled roadkill. “Think of me like those poor sad fucks down there in the dark of Daisypusher. Dead flesh containing living purpose. Animated by a need to do something.”
“Do what?” Mookie growls.
“Save you. Your daughter. Make things right.” Still sounds like the old goat is talking underwater. But slowly, Mookie’s ears start to feel better.
“You made them right enough. You gave me the Red. That got me out of Zoladski’s mansion.”
“And I also put you there as part of a trap.”
“Fuck you for that, by the way.”
Werth shrugs. “See? I didn’t make all things right, did I? Besides—” He adjusts his stance, wincing with obvious pain. “It’s not just about you, you big hairless skunk ape. Bad things are coming. I told you that.”
“So that really was you.”
“Really was, yeah.”
“How?”
Werth sneers a smile. “All in due time, Mook. Point is, the bad things that are coming are at least partly my fault. I helped that Candlefly fucker. I stuck with the Boss even when I wasn’t sure who the Boss even was or if he was still alive. And that got Nora brought in. Then you. The dominoes are falling toward a big pit, Mook, and I helped give some of them a push, you see? I wanna make it right.”
“You don’t got an honorable bone in your body.”
“Oh, aw now, that hurts. Still. You’re right, you’re right. I didn’t. But death is clarifying.”
“Yeah. No shit.”
“No shit.”
Hot Pocket moans. Mookie kicks him hard in the leg. The man yelps.
“You got shot?” Werth asks.
“Yeah.” Mookie starts to feel around for the wound.
“Wouldn’t be the first time, eh?”
“No,” he says with a flinching grimace as his fingers find the wound. It’s hot. Itchy. And—
Already closing up?
It’s already puckering. He can feel hard skin. Scabby. The blood isn’t even running fresh anymore. It’s the Viridian. The Green Grave is patching him up—churning through his body like a crackhead with a needle and thread.
Powerful voodoo at work.
“So,” Werth says. “This Irish-bred greaseball, the one who smells like a McDonald’s fry-o-later. What’s his deal and why do we care?”
“He knows things.”
“Does he?” Werth yells down, “Whaddya know, Joe?”
“I... I don’t know shit,” Hot Pocket stammers. He’s sweating like a glass in summer, even though it’s winter. “I can’t help you, I’m just—”
“I need to know where the Get-Em-Girls have gone. Looking for a couple of them in particular, looking for—”
Whong.
The shovel comes down on the back of Hot Pocket’s head. The skull collapses inward like a hairy pumpkin under a hard boot. Hot Pocket stops moving.
Mookie roars. Rushes Werth. The shovel clatters as he jacks the old goat against the wall. “You sonofabitch. You said you wanted to help!”
“And I am gonna help,” Werth gurgles and grins. “I know where your Get-Em-Girls are, Mook. They’re in Brooklyn.”
*
Cab fare to Brooklyn would be a killer, so they’re on the M Line. The train wobbling and rocking through the dark—kagung kagung, kagung kagung. Mookie’s not on the Blue stuff but the Green Grave does the trick. Normally, he’d be looking through the schmutz-smeared windows and he’d see things out there. Something squirming. A goblin scurrying. A face in the old brick, the only brightness in the dark.
But he doesn’t see anything. No goblins. No milk-spiders. No nothing.
The monsters have been quiet. And even after his time comatose, that doesn’t seem to have changed. That worries him.
Werth, standing next to Mookie on the train, is also quiet. Like this is no big thing. Like who cares that he’s dead? Business as usual. Like the old days. Mookie and Werth going out together to solve some problem (or cause a new problem, if that’s what the
job demanded). They’d go out, break some shin-bones, snap some wrists. Steal back some Blue from rogue Moles. Cut down a pack of gobbos running a brothel. Shake down some Snakeface running an opium den. That was the job. And these two did nearly all of it because what they did was specialized. Werth was a knife. Mookie was a hammer. They were designed to break this world—the real world, the one where monsters exist and Hell is not a metaphysical domain but rather a giant fucking labyrinth underneath everyone’s feet—into its constituent parts.
They were never really friends. Not in the sense everyone means that word. It was mostly about the job. They knew each other’s frailties and foibles well. And they knew what the other was good at, too. They talked work because life was work. When Mookie was having issues with Jess and Nora, he didn’t bring it to Werth’s table. And when Werth was shacking up with whatever bartender or waitress or drug-mule, Mookie didn’t probe. Didn’t judge because that wasn’t his job—and that was one of the things Werth always said, “You live in a hair house, don’t throw lit matches.”
Of course, then everything went pair-shaped. Nora came back into his life. Lied to get in close. Then Zoladski’s cancer, Candlefly, Vithra, the Sandhogs and the third water tunnel. Werth betrayed Mookie to save his own ass but then somewhere along the way either grew a quick conscience or decided he was backing the wrong pony. He saved Mook just to catch a bullet and...
Well, now here he is.
Dead. But not different. Not really.
“The Organization’s gone,” Werth suddenly says.
“Hn? Yeah.”
“That’s fucked, right? It’s like finding out the US government’s collapsed and now the White House has been taken over by a bunch of fuckin’ crackheads.”
“I guess, yeah.”
More silence. The train bangs and shudders. A pasty white hipster in skinny jeans and a deep, deep V-neck adjusts a big bulky set of earphones that dwarf his narrow skull. Across from him, a black lady sits with a garbage bag on her lap and she’s poking through the clothes inside of it, casting looks left and right like she’s afraid someone might come and take it from her.
Sometimes they look at him. Because he’s covered in blood. His own.
“How’s Nora?” Werth asks suddenly.
“Don’t pretend you wanna know that.”
“I do. So what?”
“Last I checked, you hate her. She shot you once, you remember that?” It’s why Werth has that limp. “Then her and Candlefly—”
“She saved herself from that. Tried to save you, too, at the end. She and I are square.” Way he says it, Mookie’s not so sure. Something in how he grinds his jaw, or how he leans suddenly harder against the subway pole like he wants to slam into something but can’t. “I got capped before it all went down—Haversham, that fuck—but I heard she almost died down there?”
“Did die. In the Expanse.”
“You made it to the Expanse?”
“...yeah.”
“Fuck, Mook.”
“So she’s all right? What’s she doing now?”
Mookie tells him. He gives the story short shrift but covers the basics up to now. He leaves out the fact he’s working with (or for, a little venomous voice says in the back of his mind) Woodwine and Bellbook. He doesn’t mention that Nora’s apparently working with the Candlefly family, either, nor does he mention that he recently fell from a very precipitous height, ruined the Yonder market, and basically died from a Vermilion-fueled heart attack.
The rest is enough of a doozy. Werth whistles. “You’re looking for the book, then.”
“Yeah,” Mookie confirms.
“Maro Mergos is a real thing. No shit. I always thought it was a myth or something. You got someone to translate it?”
Mookie hesitates. “Not yet.”
“So you don’t even know if it does what it’s supposed to do?”
“I’m working on it.”
“You’re working on it? You sure?”
“I said I’m working on it,” Mookie growls.
And that’s the end of that conversation.
*
Big brick building behind wire fences and coils of barbed wire. Outside a rusted metal sign is hung, and letters have been cut out of it, spelling a word: CRASHLANDING.
Outside, wind keens. Trash blows. A block away, on Flushing, someone honks their horn. A baby cries. A homeless guy laughs. Hipsters walk. Brooklyn. Williamsburg.
“Looks like some kinda factory,” Mookie grunts.
“Is. Was. Been a roller derby flat track for years.”
“Years.”
“Yep. Get-Em-Girls always had a presence here.”
“And why didn’t I know about this?”
Werth shrugs with his mouth and eyebrows. “This place was never really a hot-bed of criminal activity. Not like a dog fight or something—at a dog fight, you bring in all kinds of nasty sorts. The drugs, the girls, the guns. This is just roller derby. They were a team before they were a gang, remember.”
“Yeah, fine, that makes—” He’s about to say sense, but suddenly his heart flutters like a bird in a cage, wings banging against iron bars, and his heart goes fast, faster, ripping a rough hard beat that suddenly starts to slow down—
The world starts to dim. He can feel the awareness start to leave him.
He feels dizzy. He needs more Viridian. He fumbles the tin out of his pocket, barely manages to pop the lid. Werth gasps when he sees it.
“Mook, that’s the Green Gra—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Mookie barks, then dips the little spoon into the tin.
He lifts his shirt with one hand.
Trying desperately not to fall like a chainsawed redwood.
Werth watches as Mookie slides the spoonful of the shimmering green powder into his chest-hole, his “port.” The spoon’s entry is cold, like an icicle that doesn’t go just through his heart but all the way through his soul.
And then it kicks in. Slippy, slidey, all-gone-wonky.
Blue flame, green flame, dragon eyes, chameleon skin.
Then his heart picks back up again. A steady beat. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
“What the fuck was all that?” Werth asks.
Mookie thrusts a finger and says, “You don’t tell anybody about this. You hear me? Not nobody.”
*
Punk music blares: a few shrieking guitar chords on hard repeat with a simple bip-bap-bipbip-bap drum beat. That set to the sound of skate wheels clacking and hissing on the scuffed-up track—a track marked off by blue lines of painters tape. Women in helmets and T-shirts skate forward, then stop at the tape lines—then skate forward and stop again. It seems in time to the music though Mookie’s not sure how.
“Running drills,” Werth says.
“How d’you know that?”
He shrugs. “You never watched roller derby?”
“No.”
“Missing out, big guy.”
They take a few steps inside.
A girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, is cleaning skates by a wooden bench propped up against the fence bordering the indoor track. Her pigtails bob and bounce.
“Hey,” she says as they approach.
“We’re lookin’ for somebody,” Mookie says. Before she can answer, Mookie notices Werth giving him a crooked grin. Like a proud dad after his son takes a first sip of beer and doesn’t make a sour face. “What?”
“My boy’s all grown up. Time to take the diapers off.”
The girl watches the conversation, suddenly bewildered.
“The hell you mean?” Mookie asks.
“I mean, most times we went out together, I always led. You’re not... the best with conversation. Sometimes words come tumbling out of your mouth like turds out a bulldog’s ass, Mook.”
“You keep talking like that you’ll have teeth tumbling out of your mouth.”
The old goat holds up his hands—the fingers dark like the cracked-black of goat hooves. “Hey, slow your roll, big palooka. I’m s
aying I’m proud of you.”
Mookie grunts. Turns back to the girl. “Like I said: lookin’ for somebody.”
The girl cocks an eyebrow. “I don’t know ‘em.”
“We didn’t tell you who.”
“You also didn’t put any money in my hands.” She gives him a look up and down. “Or any Blue.”
“Jesus. Does everybody do Blue now?” Mookie reaches into his pocket. Finds his wallet there, which he’s thankful for given that he just woke up from some kind of supernatural coma earlier in the day. He pulls out a twenty and holds it just outside her reach. “Twenty bucks. You know Lacey Aces? Or Skelly? Any of the Get-Em-Girls?”
She pauses, like she’s thinking. She starts to reach for the twenty when Werth elbows him. “Mook. Look. Blue skates.”
Sure enough, a flash of blue skates.
On the feet of one Miss Lacey Aces.
Mookie yanks back the twenty. He and Werth leave the girl behind, start to walk toward the track. But then the girl is up and waving her arms, yelling:
“Lacey! Run!”
It’s like watching a gazelle on one of them nature channels. Body stiff, eyes wide, suddenly spooked that a cheetah is coming up on the watering hole. She pivots hard and skates off the track toward a back door.
Mookie and Werth go after her.
But the girls on the track? They don’t skate idly past. They all turn, a mob on skates, and charge forward. Hurtling forward to that punk beat. Mookie tries to sidestep—he doesn’t feel like knocking anybody down, giving somebody a brain injury—but sidestepping one means stepping into another. He catches an elbow to the nose. A dark squid-ink shadow of pain hides behind his eyes as they start to water—suddenly it’s just shapes winging past. A hip checks him into Werth. Werth is already hobbled, and goes down fast. Mookie keeps running, keeps charging like the bull that he is, but even strong bulls are prone to gracelessness—
One of the skaters yells, “Illegal move incoming, bitch!”
Then a skate hooks his ankle and the world rushes up to meet him.
The flats of his hands smack hard against the concrete outside the track. Pain vibrates up his arms. He just barely stops his head from cracking. He starts to scramble, but skate-toes kick him in the ass, the ribs, the shoulder. From the sounds Werth is making, he’s suffering the same. He rolls over if only so he can see where the attacks are coming from, and suddenly the kicks all stop and there’s that thirteen-year-old girl with a goddamn broadsword pointed down at his throat.