by Chuck Wendig
Then he uses his one good hand to grab Burnsy’s skull.
Burnsy feels the pressure under the motherfucker’s earthen fingers.
“You hit me with a chair,” Hrothk says.
“Because you’re a fucking traitor, you fucking traitor.”
A low avalanche tumble in the barrel of the golem’s chest. “You heard.”
“Damn right I heard.” Burnsy tries to wriggle. But he gets nothing for his trouble except his skin feeling like it’s trying to split and slough off. “Nora, man. Nora.”
“Where is Nora?”
“She’s... off. Strategizing or some shit.”
“With Candlefly.”
“Why? You wanna go kill her now? Pop her head like a pimple? Put a bullet in her temple? You fuck. You fuck.” Burnsy struggles, a futile effort. He tries to conjure a gob of spit but that, too, is a worthless endeavor—his mouth is as dry as a lizard’s asshole.
“You have a family, yes?” Hrothk asks.
“You motherf—what? You wanna kill them too?”
“Imagine that what’s below is allowed to be above. Not just incursions of goblins. Not just a few Snakeface assassins. But all of it. Imagine that veins of Cerulean fill the streets. Imagine sinkholes pulling down whole skyscrapers, entire towns. Cankerpedes nesting in attic eaves. Consumptive slime molds dropping on infants in the night and leaving only bones by the bleak morning. Ghosts wandering the roads and god-worms eating the living and the dead. Death made living. Cults and creatures. Monsters and madmen. And who knows what else will be dredged up from the dark? That’s what could be coming. And your family will live in a changed world. A ruined world where the sun hides behind a sackcloth cloud, where the night is blacker than a Vollrath’s heart. Your wife will be someone’s toy. Your child: food, or a slave, or entertainment. That is what could be coming. That is what Nora may bring.”
The air is sucked out of the room. Burnsy stops struggling. The weight of what Hrothk has said falls on him like a building. “You... you’re lying. You don’t know. You sonofa...” But the word dies in his mouth and he’s left to silence.
“I don’t know. That is correct. This is not confirmed territory. The prophecies are never clear, no matter how certain the Bellbooks claim to be. And I need to be certain before I act. This is not my desire. This is my burden.”
“Fuck your burden. Just tell her, man.”
Hrothk leans in. Burnsy smells the golem’s breath—like the smell of a wet road after a rainstorm. “Do you really believe that will change anything?”
“I do. It might. We have to try.”
The Trog pauses. Then opens the cot burrito and steps back.
“Then go. Tell her. We shall see.”
*
Burnsy waits in Nora’s room.
He thinks about his wife and his daughter. His mind is cruel. Maybe everybody’s brain is this way but no matter how hard he tries to shut it out he keeps finding worse and worse images in there for what the monsters will do to his family if they are allowed.
Eventually, Nora shows. She starts to tell him about her latest meeting with Candlefly—she actually uses the phrase “wedding planning” unironically—and he interrupts her and tells her everything.
Overhearing Hrothk talking to... somebody.
Their fight.
The revelation.
Everything.
And Nora, she’s taken aback. She stops. Hands working into fists at her side—that’s a thing Burnsy’s seen Mookie do. On him it looks like he’s ready to beat somebody down. On her it looks just looks anxious.
“He said he didn’t really know,” she says.
“What?”
“He didn’t know. If that would really happen.”
“If there’s any chance...”
“I can’t give this up,” she says, suddenly resolute. “I can’t be... down here anymore. You said that this isn’t guaranteed and so I need to keep at this.”
“But—”
“If we find out that it’ll happen, I’ll... I’ll stop.” But she flinches like she’s not sure. “I won’t go ahead with it. But until then, I’ve got less than ten days to this thing. I can’t stop it now. The door is open only this once.”
“Once this year. We can come back to it next year, take time—”
“I’m not doing this again for another year!” she yells. Then, suddenly quiet, “I can’t. I won’t. I’ll kill myself if that’s what’s coming.”
“Maybe you’ll kill us all if you keep going.”
“Just trust me. This feels right. It’ll be fine. I swear.”
“I can’t... I can’t. My family. You have to think of my family.”
“I have to think of me,” she says.
And there it is. The scorpion and the frog. The scorpion always stings. The frog always dies. He knew it. She’s told him this. Nora is who Nora is. She’s not like Mookie. She’s not a do the right thing kind of girl. Everything about her is ultimately selfish.
“I can’t help you anymore,” he says. “I gotta go.”
“Then go.” No hesitation. “I’ve got this. I don’t need you.”
Way her face twists up when she says it, he sees the ghost of a vicious teenager—a mean girl, a cruel child, angry that someone just told her it’s not nice to pull the heads off of butterflies.
Burnsy stands. She seethes.
He leaves. Slowly, surely. Like maybe she’ll call after him. Maybe she’ll say, Wait, come back, I was wrong. But that never happens. He gets so far and the only answer she offers him is a slammed door. It feels like all of Hell reverberates with it.
PART FIVE
MOOKIE
29
Met with Owen today. Ernesto wanted to chaperone but I told him that wasn’t an option and he could either walk back up to the bluff or he could chaperone from the bottom of the ocean. (I was feeling a bit prickly, what can I say?) Owen brought me a few candy bars and, drum roll please, In-n-Out. I told him it was too early for that and he said he convinced one to stay open long enough to make him one and bring it down here. He even had it in this little thermal bag. I thought about telling him. Telling him what Burnsy said about our wedding. But then Owen had to ruin it by ascribing too much importance to the burger. You know how guys do that, right? Oh, hey, I did something nice, it means we’re fated to be together. What he actually said was, “See? I brought you the burger you wanted. It must be love.” People think love is this shallow thing when, really, it’s as deep and dark and scary as the sea. I know that, and I’m basically a horrible person. Sorry, Owen. Go find a prostitute. You’re cute. Maybe she’ll give you a discount or something, jerk.
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
Kolbasnaya restaurant. Little Odessa.
Nestor Volodin twirls his nosh razvedchika—his scout’s knife. Simple black handle. Long, sharp, gleaming blade. He’s fast with it. He was never Spetsnaz, but his father was—and he learned all the tricks he could from the old man. The knife is an extension of one’s arm, of one’s entire being. It is not a thing you pick up—it is as much a part of you as fingers, tongue, or cock. The way the blade moves is like it’s dancing—doing tricks for his amusement, animated all on its own.
He sits on the counter, doing this. It’s midnight. The staff of the restaurant has all gone home. The smells of the day linger: lamb, dill, the crisp sting of old charcoal.
Shapes at the door. Good. Oleg and Dominika. With a third between them.
Their captive.
Nestor is going to enjoy this.
The door opens. Bell rings. They drag the woman—the head of the recently resurgent girl gang, the Get-Em-Girls—in through the front door. Nestor signals to his other soldiers—Mikhail, Anatoly, Yaroslav—to go help bring her in. They grab her feet while the others get her head. Nestor flags them over with two fingers. He taps those two fingers against the table of a booth in the corner, the seats the color of smashed beets.
They
throw her into the booth.
Nestor sits down across from her. His scout’s knife always dancing.
The guards form a half-circle around the table, facing inward. Watching her.
Not that she can do much at this point.
They have beaten her.
Her nostrils are crusted with black blood. One eye, shiny with a fresh bruise. All her teeth are in place, but her lips are fattened, the lower one split. She hunches, too—her neon blue hair hanging in front of her face like the fringed curtain at a Moscow brothel.
“You, the remnant of an older day,” he says in English. His English is pretty good, he likes to think—he was born in Omsk, but has spent the last ten years here, in America. Upstate New York. Running cons for the Mafiya. Simple jobs. Too simple for his skillset. When the city became a vacuum of power, it was his place to step in. Help take over. He’s elite now. A Brigadier. Serving underneath the Pakhan—the Boss—Konstantin Orlov, the Hammer of Irkutsk. “Your world is gone and yet you scuttle about like rats and roaches.” Here he mimes the scurrying creatures with his free hand—fingers scrabbling across the table. “Your Organization has fallen. You are not protected. You’re hanging out in the open, like a man’s dick dangling from an unzipped fly.” More miming—two fingers becoming a limp dick flopping about in a stiff wind.
“Screw you,” she says. Mush-mouthed. Are those tears in her eyes? Good.
“You have been toying with me. You have been watching me. Two of my men were found dead. My brother, Fyodor, is missing—”
“I killed him.”
Nestor’s blood goes polar.
“What did you say, little cunt?”
“I said, I killed him. With a knife a lot bigger than your little thimble-dick toothpick there—”
He roars, grabs her hand, spins the blade and slams it down—
The blade crunches as it goes through the back of her hand.
And through the table.
She wails like a kicked cat.
She’ll make far worse sounds before this night is over, Nestor decides. Fyodor was a fucking kook—way too fascinated with all the occult trappings of what lurks below their feet, far too compelled by that world. But Fyodor was still his brother.
And this woman will pay for what she’s done. All of them will.
*
It’s then she knows she’s made a terrible mistake. The blade pinning her hand to the table. The blood welling up and pooling between the fingers. They already beat her up. She should have kept her mouth shut. Telling him about Fyodor was only going to make him mad, but that’s what she wanted, and Skelly convinced herself that him being mad, being off balance, was a win for them, a win for the plan. But now she knows she pushed too hard, too far, too fast. She said what she said not because it was part of the plan—it wasn’t—but because she wanted to see the look in this motherfucker’s eyes when she told him his brother was dead, and she was the killer.
A bad call, baby doll.
And now everything is in jeopardy.
Unless—
*
Nestor grabs her by the chin. Wrenches her face up. Tears pushing muddy mascara down her cheeks. He spits in her face. She cries out.
“You fuck,” he says. “You little girls play at being bad-ass. Little gangs all over the town like children playing pretend. Pumpkin-heads and girls on roller skates and silly costumes and all that bullshit. Times are changing. We are the new Organization. We have new partners. Big partners. The El Gallo Nation. The Coonan-Cochran Gang. The El Salvadorans. The Hell-Riders. Real gangs. Real criminals. Not your softball, faggot-ass old white businessmen with all their little bitch-gangs lining up for a taste. We’re going to tear down the remnants. We’re going to tear open Hell itself and feed the people with its fruits. And we are going to get fucking rich atop your fucking bodies—”
At first he thinks she’s crying. Head shaking, shoulders hitching, a keening banshee cry rising up from the back of her throat.
And for a moment, that satisfies him greatly.
Until he realizes that she’s not crying.
She’s laughing.
He grabs the hilt of his scout’s knife and presses it sideways—the flat of the blade opening the wound in her hand wider. Blood rises from the hole like water from a backed-up drain. Her laugh falters—but then keeps on coming, half a cackle, half a scream, wide-eyed, mad-eyed, howl-mouthed.
“What?” he screams. “Why are you laughing?”
“I didn’t just kill your brother,” she says between gulps of air.
“Oh? Tell me. Tell me.”
“We stole the book.”
He lets go of the knife. “What?”
“The book. The one Fyodor bought off my girl? We got paid, then stole it back.”
“That’s not—that’s not possible. The buyer... the buyer is coming. Tonight.”
Again she laughs. He wrenches the knife out of the table and out of her hand, then backhands her hard. She tilts sideways like a coat-rack falling over, tumbling out of the booth. Crumpled and broken like a shattered lamp.
He grabs a fistful of her hair. “Come with me.”
Then he drags her into the kitchen, through the double doors. His men—and woman, Dominika—follow after, guns slung over their shoulders. Nestor makes the journey hurt. Her legs scramble futilely on the tile, and any time she gets her feet under her he jars her sideways—banging her head into a counter, into a dangling soup ladle, into a shelf holding pans. And then he pitches her forward, so she slides across the floor and shoulders hard into a massive door. The freezer.
Nestor throws open the freezer. Pulls her in there. Past racks of beef and lamb swinging. His breath is a cloud. The chill bites at him.
There, in the back of the freezer:
A safe.
Tall as he is. Twice as wide. A Killheiser safe with a Sargent & Greenleaf 8500-level lock-and-dial. Torque resistant. Thwarts lock-punch attacks. Immune to X-Ray imaging. A tough beast of a safe. And she’s claiming they got in here?
Bullshit.
He kicks past her, goes to the door, spins the dial to each number (a date only he knows, the date he strangled his mother in a bathtub)—
He pulls the door open.
Inside: guns (and an RPG) on the left; on the right, file boxes, jewelry, stacks of cash, and at the very bottom—
The book. The Maro Mergos. A book of bone and skin.
He shakes his head. Whistles shave-and-a-haircut, then slaps the safe twice for the two bits. Nestor turns, points to the book with the knife.
“That book?” he asks. “You thought you stole that book?”
The woman looks up. She’s not laughing. But something on her face is wry, defiant, mocking. He grips the knife hard—
Mikhail—buzzcut and broken nose—pokes his head into the freezer, past the others. “The buyer is here.”
Nestor nods. “Send him back.” Then, to her, “You see that? I still have the book. And the buyer is here. And you, little whore, are about to die.” He grabs her hair, winding it around his fingers. He lifts her head and raises the knife.
Then he sees something.
She’s there. Shirt lifted just a little.
He sees something tucked on the inside of the waistband of her jeans. A little black box. Flat. Green light winking. He lets go of her hair, grabs the device, and cuts it free from her pants—just as the buyer walks in.
Big guy. Thick. Young—a real gorilla. Not what he expected. But he’s got a case, and that case should be filled with stacks of cash that’ll fit perfectly in the safe once this foolish book is taken out and handed off.
Nestor gives him a side-eye. “You’re Candlefly? You don’t look like Ernesto.”
The man nods. “I’m Alonzo. He said he told you he was sending me—”
“Whatever,” Nestor hisses. Money is money. He looks at the little blinking device in his hand, then thrusts it under the woman’s nose. “What is this? What the fuck is this.”
&n
bsp; “An Amber Alert device.”
“What? The fuck is that?”
“Fifteen bucks at Wal-Mart,” she says, smiling woozily through busted mouth. “You put it on your kid’s jeans or in her backpack and then you can track her wherever she is. GPS. Pretty precise, actually.”
He doesn’t get it. And he feels like he should. Something gnaws at his innards like he’s supposed to understand this—like this is a Rubik’s Cube he spins and spins but none of the colors ever seem to line up.
So, he finally asks, “Why would you need this?”
She laughs again: that mad laugh, that horrible sound bubbling up.
“So they know where to place the explosives,” she says.
Nestor blinks. “Explosives?”
He doesn’t need to wait long for an answer to his question.
Because suddenly the floor jerks and shudders as if some great giant has shouldered the mantle from beneath—this arriving along with a series of hard concussions, one right after the next, choom choom CHOOM—
Everything drops. Because the ground is now gone from underneath them.
*
Dust fills his lungs and Nestor staggers upright, coughing into one fist while waving his other around, trying to part the clouds. He calls out, “Mikhail! Veronika! Anyone!” Someone nearby groans. Answers him in Russian: “What... what happened?”
He blinks. Particulate matter stinging his eyes. All the sound that reaches his ears is dull, muted, a throbbing mumble swallowed by the lub-dub of his own beating heart.
At his feet, someone rolls around. It’s the buyer. Candlefly. He’s clutching his middle like he’s been shot. Rolling around like a dog with gastrointestinal distress.
Shit. Shit. What happened? What did that bitch do?
Explosives. Something about explosives.
He waves away more dust—and slowly, it all starts to settle, like ghosts gone back to the grave, weary after another restless haunting.
His men emerge from behind him. Guns up. Scanning the plumes of dust and the darkness behind. There. There. A shape. A woman’s shape. By—by the safe. His safe! Now open because he opened it. Shit! She’s already got the book in hand. He can see the bone-white text, can see her handing it to someone—another woman, a woman who moves away fast, the sound of hard wheels hitting brick and stone. Skates.