by Chuck Wendig
Mookie always knew the Get-Em-Girls liked their blades, but this is a step up.
Mookie blows a bloody clot out of his nose and growls. “I need Lacey Aces.”
“You can’t see her,” says one skater—black girl, big afro, lipstick as pink as a mouthful of Bubblicious.
“Yeah, bitch,” another—arms tatted all the way from wrist to shoulder with jaguar spots, zebra stripes, burning birds.
“You oughta get the fuck outta here,” the thirteen-year-old says.
Suddenly, the crowd all moves. Awareness of a new player. They shift and mumble and step aside.
And Skelly steps up.
She sees Mookie. Her eyes go wide. “Mookie.”
“Hey, Kell. Skell.” He grunts. “Whatever you’re calling yourself.”
“Back away,” she says to everyone. “Come on. Buzz off, little bees. I got this, it’s ice cube cool.” Then she offers him a hand.
And a look of what might be love, or what might be sadness.
21
Of course, the cenote won’t be enough. The wedding rite won’t work. We need an in-between place, what Hrothk calls a “ceremonial interstitium,” whatever the hell that means. He doesn’t even seem to know, which doesn’t give me much hope here. All the more reason I need someone from the daemon families to lend me a hand. This journey is long and hard and it better fucking pay off.
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
The three of them sit in the derby track office—old wood paneling, ancient radiator, the wall covered in posters of bands Mookie’s never heard of and will likely never hear of again. The room is up above the track, and they can look down on it. For now, practice is over, but many of the girls are milling about in circles, throwing looks up at the window and talking. Skelly pulls the blinds down.
Mookie’s got a bag of frozen peas held up against his nose, and he’s peering over the edge of it. Werth is just standing in the back corner, arms crossed, scowling with his wire-beard chin pressed firmly to his chest.
Skelly sits on the far side of the desk. Leaning forward. Staring. Mookie’s mad at her, but he also can’t help but think she’s beautiful. Hair-dyed like
“I thought you were dead,” she says in a small voice.
“I am dead,” Werth says, then takes the temperature of the room. “Yeah, you’re not talking about me, are you?”
The look she gives him could cook a pig.
Her gaze—softer now—turns back to Mookie.
“I did die,” Mookie says. “Maybe. Almost. I dunno.” Unconsciously, he itches at the iron ring beneath his shirt. The skin around it tingles and burns, as if bitten by tiny, invisible ants. “That why you’re back at all this?”
“You mean the gang?”
“You know that’s what I mean.” Those words come out sharper than he expected.
“I told you I was coming back to this when I left you,” she says.
Werth whistles. “Trouble in paradise.”
Mookie and Skelly turn and at the same time, say, “Shut the fuck up, Werth.” And then the two of them look at each other. Her mouth fishhooks into a tiny smile and Mookie feels a blush rise to his cheeks—like sun warming a concrete block.
A moment, shared. Small, but not inconsequential.
“I’m glad you’re not dead, sugar,” she says.
“Not sure I feel the same yet.” And he tells her much of the story he told Werth—about Nora, mostly. “I feel a little lost here.”
“You want Lacey.”
“I want the book.”
She hesitates.
“Shit,” Mookie says.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Hey, yo, hello,” Werth says, stepping forward and waving his hands like he’s trying to warn a car that the bridge is out. “I’m behind on your little lovebird shithead shorthand. What happened?”
“The book is gone already,” Mookie says. Hands into fists.
Skelly shrugs. “Was gone before I got the gang back together.”
Mookie’s good feeling evaporates. A gamboling deer turned to mist and fur by an onrushing tractor trailer. “Where is it?”
“I’ll...” Skelly sighs. “I’ll go get Lacey.”
*
Lacey’s guarded. Pouty. Ready to be judged.
Mookie doesn’t hold back.
“I saved you,” he snarls. “Down there. The Skinless. I saved you.”
“So?” she asks.
“You still took the book.”
“I didn’t ask you to save me. I’m not Princess Peach, and you sure as hell ain’t Mario.” She grumbles under her breath, “King Koopa or Donkey Kong, maybe.”
Mookie doesn’t know what any of that shit means. “You left me down there to die. I was having a heart attack.”
“Wait, what?” Skelly jumps in while Werth leans back, watching it all.
Lacey retracts. Starts to turn, “I don’t have to listen to any of this.”
Skelly braces an arm against the door of the office, blocking her path. “You do you still want to stick with this gang.”
Lacey turns. “Fine. I’m sorry, okay?” She says this not to Mookie but to Skelly. “He saved my ass but then wanted something for it and then... he started clutching his chest and he fell over and...” Deep exhale through her nose. “I skated away.”
Skelly pistons a punch into the girl’s midsection.
Then grabs her by the hair and holds here against the doorjamb.
“You little cooze,” Skelly says. “You knew he was my man at the time. No way you couldn’t have. And you left him there on the floor to die like a dog? Didn’t even call anybody? That’s cold, little sister. Colder than ice cube up a snowman’s ass. Now you’re going to make up for that slight and you’re going to tell us—who’d you sell it to?”
“I had a debt—”
She thumps Lacey’s head against the jamb again. Not enough to do any damage, but enough to hurt. “Go on.”
“To the Russians. Okay? They bid well.”
“Mafiya?” Werth says from the back of the room.
A hesitant nod from Lacey.
“No,” Mookie says. “That shit don’t add up. The Russians are new at this. They don’t have any history here. Book like the Maro Mergos is fuck-all to them. They’re criminals, not cultists.”
Werth slowly applauds. They all turn toward him. “What? I’m proud of my baby boy, here. Mook, people said you were dumb as a bucket of boulders, but truth is, you got a real head on your shoulders. Sorry for doubting you.”
Hard to tell whether the old goat is being sincere. Mookie just makes an nnngh sound and turns back to Lacey and Skelly. “Someone else is involved here.”
Thump. Skelly jams Lacey’s head again. “Dig deep, little peep. You really sell to the Russians? Don’t make me brain you again.”
“I did! I did. I sold to the Russians but—they said, ow, they said there was someone else, okay? They were, you know, they were middlemen. Okay? Brokers.”
Skelly looks to Mookie. He shrugs and nods. She lets Lacey go.
“You know who it was?” Mookie asks.
Lacey, wounded and hesitant, shakes her head.
“Who’d want the book?” Skelly asks.
Werth rolls his head on the wall, craning his neck, the vertebrae crackling and popping—it’s one of the ways he thinks, Mookie knows. “That’s a long fuckin’ list. Uh, let’s see. Any cult. Any rich occultist. Anybody who trucks in artifacts and antiquities of an, ah, hellish nature. A dozen Snakefaces I could name. Couple criminal types. That’s a wide open field, my friends.”
“Guess we’re gonna have to shake down a Mafiya type,” Mookie says.
“I’m in,” Skelly says.
Mookie gives her a look. “You sure?”
“Sure as a shiv in the back.” She grabs Lacey around the neck. “And this little filly’s in, too. Ain’t that right, rainbow?”
Lacey scowls. “Yeah, gr
eat. Count me in.” She twirls her finger like a lasso and mutters an unenthused, “Whee.”
22
It’s been weird. Traveling across the country, but doing it underground. It’s like, Hell is Hell no matter where you go but it still takes on, how to put it... regional flavors? Along the coast you find boats down in the dark. More water, too, dripping in some places, streaming in others. Up under the mountains we kept crossing over into old silver mines with the mine carts and long-dead miners sealed off. Under the desert it’s dry as a bone, everything the color of blood, sand streaming—it’s like the Grand Canyon in places except if you put a big stonking lid over the whole thing. We found a horse wandering in the dark, blind and mad. We saw a school bus filled not with dead children but heaped with the bones of animals and the dry cankers of old gobbo egg-sacs. Occasionally we get really close to the surface and Hrothk or Burnsy heads up top to steal some food and water while I sit around down below, feeling the slow pulsing of the Great Below and the pressure of the living world above, each coming together and putting my brain in a migraine head-lock. But the trip is almost ever. Thank fucking God.
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
A hand trails across Mookie’s neck. A soft, fluttering touch. He moans a little. Turns toward it. Skelly. He reaches across the sheets of his bed—
The hand grabs his ear hard and twists.
He howls, lurches up, swings a fist. A shadow steps out of its range.
Click-click. The pull-cord of the lamp across the room.
Minerva Bellbook stands by his bed. John Wesley Woodwine stands by the lamp.
“You sonsabitches—” Mookie growls.
“One week gone,” Minerva says. Pursing her lips. “Two weeks remain. Tick-tock, Mr. Pearl. The Equinox is coming. Your daughter will give her hand and her soul to the Candlefly family in exchange for freedom from Hell and meanwhile you sit here and sleep. Time is a carriage that does not stop for the likes or you or me, Mr. Pearl.”
“Ennh,” Mookie says, propping himself up on the bed, rubbing his eyes.
“What exactly have you been doing?” she asks. “You wanted the book, so go get the book.”
“I’m working on it, Christ.”
They don’t know where the book is. Not yet. Shaking down some random Mafiya thug isn’t going to get them anywhere—he won’t know squat, and since that thug will then run to his superiors to tell them exactly what’s going on, they’ll then pop a bullet into the back of Mookie’s brainpan. Lacey said she interfaced with a man named Fyodor Volodin. So it’s him they’re trying to scare up. This time with the offer of more Maro Mergos—the story being, they found missing pages, want to sell those, too. He’ll think it’s double-dipping. He won’t like it. But, Mookie hopes, he’ll show his face.
“You’re not working fast enough,” John Wesley says, stepping forward.
“I’m not on your timetable, I’m on mine.”
“No,” Minerva says. “You are on the timetable of the Equinox. And on the timetable of how much Viridian we can—or choose—to give you.”
John Wesley pleads with his hands, palms up. “Mookie. Forget the book and just do your magic. Take the plane ticket. Go out there to the West Coast tonight. March into the tunnels beneath LA, find your daughter, beat the blood and piss out of anybody who gets in your way, and drag her ass back here.”
“No,” Mookie says. “You don’t get it. That’s not how this is gonna work. Any time I tried to make her do anything, I fuck it up. Nora’s got ten times the will I do. And where I’m strong? She’s clever. I gotta do this right. I gotta offer her something. This has gotta be her choice. Not one I make for her.”
Minerva bristles. “We asked you to handle this because we like to believe that you’re invested. She is your daughter, about to be married to someone from a family you have dealt with... unkindly in the past. They are an enemy of ours as well as yours. But if you cannot get the job done, please believe that we will be more mercenary about it. It would be no thing at all to find someone willing to handle this for payment.”
“Goddamnit, don’t you dare.”
“Then get it done,” she snaps. “Because this is important.”
“Why? Say she gets married. What’s the big fuckin’ deal?”
Minerva pauses. “The big deal is that the world we live in has distinct boundaries. It is a world necessarily divided between the Great Below and the Infinite Above. It is man’s domain that cuts the line between these two, and cosmically, metaphysically, it is separated by a very thin membrane. An interstitial realm—a fontanelle of sorts like the soft spot of an infant’s head. Meant to stretch and accommodate growth and tumult within the bones, but also vulnerable to trauma. All our prophecies suggest that a marriage between a daemon and someone who has partaken of the Caput Mortuum would constitute such trauma. And such trauma could destroy that membrane. The worlds would come crashing together.”
“So what?” Mookie asks. Rubbing the back of his head—the faint stubble rasping against his callused palm. “The monsters can already come up here. Humans can already go down there. Who gives a shit? What changes?”
It’s Woodwine who speaks. He plucks a bottle from the floor—one of Mookie’s stash from the bar. Angel’s Envy bourbon. It sloshes as he gestures with it. “Look at it like this. The boundaries between, say, two states or two countries is largely invisible. You cross one you might not know unless there’s a sign telling you. Right? Just the same, there are laws. Laws that govern each space. You can buy liquor in one state on Sundays, but not in the other. Virginia lets you stick it to your cousin, but West Virginia will let you fuck a pig, long as you ask nice first. Different laws. Different currencies. Different customs, norms, traditions.”
Miranda says, “Except these laws are metaphysical.”
“Indeed.” Woodwine uncorks the bourbon with his teeth. Goonk. Takes a pull. “The monsters from the Deep Down? They don’t have much power up here. The sun hurts their eyes, particularly gobbo-eyes. They can’t feel the realm way they can down below. They have magic in that space. Goblins build a temple down there in the dark, it has real power. Up here, it’s just a collection of skulls and pillars. Worst of all? The Hungry Ones. The god-worms, they come up here, they’ll wither in the sun or die from a well-placed sidewinder missile right up the, ahem, wormhole. They’re weak in our space. Our kind made sure of that thousands of years ago. But that’s threatened now. The work we did. The laws we made. It gets undone, it’s Hell on Earth, Mookie.”
“And like all apocalypses,” Minerva says, “it comes with a measure of physical disaster. Seas gone to blood, boiling over. The earth’s mantle trembling and cracking. Skies falling. Lava roiling. Disease. Starvation. All that ugly business.”
Mookie sits over on the edge of the bed. Buries his face in his hands. His daughter: harbinger of the end? Does she even know? Would she care? It bothers him that he’s got to ask that question but there it is.
While staring at the wall he says, “So handle it yourselves. Why would any of you even jump into this kinda marriage if it’s gonna knock over the whole house of cards?”
“Time is long and memory distorts,” Minerva says.
“Eight families,” Woodwine says. “One of them is gone. Wiped from the earth. The remaining seven don’t... agree on this point. Some of them think the prophecies are vague, uncertain, easily misinterpreted.”
Minerva scoffs. “Pfah!”
Woodwine continues. “And not all of them think the result would be so bad. The families have lost a lot of power over the years. Some of them have temporal power, but most are pushed to the fringes. There’s bitterness on their tongues—”
“They believe they did the world a service so many eons and epochs ago and have never been paid properly for it,” Minerva says. “They are beginning to believe they made a mistake and wish again to make bargains with the dark.”
“Lemme guess,” Mookie says
. “That’s an idea put out by the Candlefly assholes.”
“But not them alone at this point,” Woodwine says. “Three other families see opportunity here. And they’re trying to play to that opportunity.”
Mookie turns. “I can do math. Seven families. Candlefly clan is starting it. Three see opportunity. That means three don’t. But there’s only two of you here.”
“Our third... prefers to remain sheltered.”
Woodwine mumbles, “Leaving us flapping out in the open like a wagging cock.”
Minerva frowns. “Must you?”
John Wesley shrugs.
“Get out,” Mookie says. “Both of ya.”
“Do not push us,” Minerva says. “Do not betray our trust. We will betray yours in return with but a blink of our eyes. Your daughter can be a casualty in this. So can you. So can anyone you care about.”
Mookie starts popping knuckles.
“Don’t forget, you need the Viridian we’re supplying you,” Woodwine says.
“I said I’ll handle it, and I’ll handle it. Now get out.”
“He needs his beauty sleep,” Woodwine snarks.
Minerva huffs.
And then they’re gone.
*
Hour later, the phone rings.
It’s Werth. “We’re on,” the old goat says.
“Fyodor?”
“Fyodor.”
“When and where?”
“Sun-up. Underneath Riverside.”
Shit. “The Freedom Tunnel?”
“Yep.”
“Well. Fuck.”
“Well, fuck, indeed.”
Werth tells him they need to meet before that. Get set up.
Mookie goes and starts getting dressed. Sleep, it seems, is done and gone.