by Chuck Wendig
“He’s alive,” she says. Happiness and horror doing a clumsy waltz inside her.
“He is, at that. Very tough man to kill, your father. He’s like a grizzly bear. They are apparently hard to dispatch, even with a gun. Two to the head and they just keep on charging. But again, his strength is now his weakness. Because his life is now in my hands. Doubly miraculous—and proof, I think, that this was all meant to be—is that he brought us the last component for our missing key. Once more, he is the delivery of a much-needed Pigment—he brought us Viridian. The Green Grave. A hellborn miracle, my dear. And with that said, you know what comes next.”
“You’ll kill him if I don’t comply.”
He kisses his fingers and holds them to the sky, as if to relish in the glory of the coming day. A big, buttery smile spreads across his face—a bonafide shit-eating grin.
“Your weakness was always your father. And you are his weakness. You hated him so much, or so I thought. But the truth is, you love him. You love him too much. And so you’ll tell me here and now that this wedding will continue. Because if you don’t, one phone call means my friend, Aurora, puts two in his head. And then, just to be sure—he is quite the grizzly, after all—we’ll set him on fire. Burn the body so that it may never return. Then I’ll give you the ashes. I’ll make you eat them.”
“You’re fucking twisted.”
“Only in service to what I want. I don’t relish this. I find it disgusting. But I need things, Nora. I need this to happen. You’re going to help make it happen because the consequences are too dire otherwise.”
“I’ll kill myself.”
“Then your father dies, too.”
“I’ll kill Owen.”
“We’re very hard to kill, us daemons.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“Get in line, little girl.”
“I will,” she says. “I’ll do the wedding. I’ll marry your boy. And when that’s all done, I’ll come for you. I’ll wait in that line until I’m at the front of the queue and then I will make you wish that you were hanging there in that pit again. I will make you beg to be allowed to go back to that torment.”
He backhands her. Her head rocks. She tastes blood. Then he does it again. And again. And another three times, each harder than the last until finally he takes a few hurried steps backward, as if he wouldn’t stop if he didn’t remove himself.
“You’ll hang here,” he says. “The tide will come in. It’ll come to your neck. But no farther. It will be cold and miserable. Your body will pucker. Tomorrow, you will be wed. Tomorrow, the world that we know ends. And the world that I know begins.”
Nora screams.
Candlefly turns and leaves.
PART SEVEN
MOOKIE
36
I’m trapped. I have nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. My father is alive, and the only way I get to enjoy that fact is if I help to end the world.
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
Mookie presses his head against the wrought iron bars—bars with a dusty patina, a patina that calls to mind Cerulean and Viridian mixed together. The iron is cool. He lets his big Magilla Gorilla arms dangle out. He imagines them closing off Ernesto Candlefly’s windpipe. Crushing until the throat is mush, until the head pops off like that of a tick’s—splurt, blood gush, body drop.
He got off the plane okay. Crossed the tarmac at Brackett Field, a small airport outside the city in Los Angeles county. Soon as he got inside this old wooden hangar, everything lit up—red and blue strobes paired with bright spotlights. Cops. Feds. Someone with authority, he didn’t know. He ran because what else was he supposed to do? Wait and end up in a jail cell somewhere? Get thrown in a hole? He’s a man with connections to one of the biggest crime syndicates in recent history. Sure, that syndicate shit the bed bloody, but he can still do harm to people.
It didn’t matter. He ran back out the hangar only to have two more GMC Yukons screech to a halt in front of him. Men out. Guns up.
He thought about charging them. Do the full bumrush move. Smash one into the door, spin him around so he catches the bullets from the other and—
And Mookie will just catch lead from the guys on the other side.
Then he’d never see Nora again.
He roared like a T-Rex, then let them cuff him and put him in the back of one of the SUVs. Nobody said anything for a while. Just men in suits looking him over. Two on each side of him. One of them started to speak—
Mookie got out. Of the car. Did they really think he wouldn’t? He’s built like a mechanical bull. He bucked and swung his wrecking ball head around and kicked out with a boot, throwing open the door and diving out—
Road rash on his shoulder. Scraped raw and red. He got his feet under him and—
Taser. The leads bite into him. A full charge. Bzzt.
Still didn’t stop him.
He kept running. The highway’s edge—the lip of an overpass. If he could make it and just jump over it—
Something else stuck into him. Right in the back of his leg. Thwip.
Didn’t do shit. Or so he thought. Mookie kept running. Boots pounding macadam as cars honked and careened past. Then something took his mind in a squishing fist, dragged it down into wet concrete. His limbs suddenly went numb. His lips felt like fat slugs. Tongue like a dead fish in his mouth. Drugged, he thought.
Then he went out.
Heard voices as they dragged him back across the highway. Candefly’s gonna owe us for this one. And told you the Taser wouldn’t do dick. You owe me five. And what was in that thing? A zoo tranquilizer. Used on hippos. Then nothing.
Then he woke up here. Still boggy as someone new had a hold of him: some pot-bellied biker-looking hick with a mane of sandy hair and a patchy pube-scratch beard. Fat around the middle, but arms like a pair of cannons stolen off a pirate ship. He was the one dragging Mookie through this place—some old Spanish-style mission, walls as orange as a chemical sunset. Bright alien flowers in copper baskets overhanging balconies. Somewhere, the crash of the ocean. The smell of the sea.
The fucker pitched him in the cell, but not before unlocking the handcuffs. He said he’d give Mookie a chance to fight back—wasn’t much of a chance, given how the tranqs were still like heavy wet clothes hanging off his line, dragging him down into the mental muck. Then the sonofabitch—who had this growly, gravel-crunch voice like he was gargling windshield glass and cigarette butts—introduced himself as Liam Hogstooth, and threw a punch that was so telegraphed it was like watching a train pull into a station from miles away. And yet Mookie could barely get out of its way, and it hit him like a train, too—like someone pushed him in front of an old-timey locomotive, the cattle-catcher throwing him forward before dragging him under. And so began a lopsided, ugly brawl. Mookie got in his shots. Hogstooth met them and matched and then exceeded them with graceless, easy rage. He put Mookie back under.
Since then, he came to. A woman stood there. Golden hair. Just a little bit tan. Fake smile stuck to that pretty face.
“I’m Aurora Candlefly,” she said.
“I’m Fuck You Let Me The Fuck Out Of Here Pearl.”
“I’m sorry, that won’t be possible.” She had that flight attendant vibe to her—like she’s saying all the right things and in a placating way, but just behind it all is a purposefully detectable sense of disdain and dismissal.
“Ernesto. Where’s Ernesto? This is all him, yeah?”
“This is all of us. The entire clan acting as one. Before, our dear Ernesto was operating on his own. But this, you’ll find, is a more unified effort. We’d like to consider you an ally in this instead of an enemy. We can be very good friends.”
His knuckles crunched as he closed his hands into fists. “Sure, sure. Just unlock this thing and we can be best buds. Real pals.” Words spoken through grinding pebble teeth.
“I detect insincerity.”
“Bring me Ernest
o.”
“In time.”
“You have things of mine. My book. My... tin.”
“And we’ll be keeping both. We also have your daughter. Ernesto is with her now, as a matter of fact. Reminding her of why she’s here with us in the first place. And also letting the girl know that her father, as it turns out, is not dead. But he can be and will be if she doesn’t warm up her cold feet.”
Cold feet. That means she was reconsidering?
That made Mookie’s heart jump.
Aurora did her best to squash those good vibes, though. “I should say thank you for already being our ally in this. You brought us the Viridian you were missing. And you brought yourself, which was the leverage we need to convince your daughter to engage with and endure in the bonds of matrimony.” This hit him worse than any punch thrown by that Hogstooth motherfucker. She saw it, could probably smell that shame and compunction on him like a bad cologne. An earnest, cruel smile played at the corners of her mouths as she said, “This is the second time you did this, isn’t it? Gave us exactly what we needed at the time when we needed it. You truly are our ally.”
“This’ll also be the second time I ruin everything for you. The second time I kick the Candlefly family into the hole. Enjoy this while it lasts.”
“You’re awfully confident from your cage, monkey.”
“You’ll see. Just wait.”
“Well, the wedding is in twenty-four hours. I suppose you won’t be RSVPing?”
“You’ll know my RSVP when you get it.”
That rattled her. A little. A crack in her porcelain.
And then she turned and left.
And now Mookie waits.
Day dies on the vine, withers into night. Reality sets in like an infection: he’s a ghost. His heart needs fuel, and that fuel is no longer his. He’s clinging to this life by dint of time and time only. And meanwhile, Nora will be married. The world may or may not end. And this cell will be his grave.
It’s then that his nose detects something. Already he’s been smelling the scents of a distant candle burning, the salt of the sea wind, the ozone of a storm rolling in. But now something else. A little fat. A little meat. His stomach rumbles, sure as thunder.
Then: footsteps.
Ernesto Candlefly emerges from darkness into the flickering lantern light.
“Mookie Pearl,” Ernesto says. His voice is soft and dire. He has a plate of meat and cheeses. “I have brought you dinner.”
“You’re a peach.”
“Yes. The peachiest.” He eases the tray onto the floor, then nudges it forward with a foot. As he does, Mookie notices the man’s leg shakes like that of a nervous dog’s.
“You’re not the man I met before,” Mookie says. “You’re different.”
“I am diminished, yes.” It’s then that Ernesto lifts his gaze—not to meet Mookie’s stare but to look farther up. “You’re different, too. You’ve been touched.”
“Hnnh?”
The daemon points to Mookie’s scalp. “Heaven’s angels have marked you.”
“You know about them?”
“The Aerie. The Ascended Host. Yes. Never seen them. Nor do I care to. They leave us and this world alone. It is their way.” As Candlefly speaks, Mookie stoops with a grunt and begins picking at the meats and cheeses. Cheap, store-bought stuff: salami, pepperoni, Swiss cheese, a glob of old and musty Brie. But it works. His guts grab the food like a greedy child. “They are watchers more than they are actors. They do not concern us. But obviously they have concerned themselves with you.”
“They didn’t seem happy to see me.”
“And yet they let you live.”
Mookie says no more on the subject. He just keeps eating.
“You were hungry,” Ernesto says.
“Still am. I’m always hungry.”
“I have children,” Ernesto says suddenly. “Two children who are my angels. They are the sky to me. The stars, the moon, all the galaxies, all the universes. My son is... well. He is my son. My daughter is like my wife. She is both the crack and the sting of the whip. And yet I would do anything for her. So I understand your need to come here. I recognize the lengths you will go for your daughter.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh, yes. I come to you now not as one of my larger family but rather as a member of a much smaller one. I come to you as a father. Your daughter, however rebellious she feels now—driven by guilt, a surprising emotion I didn’t expect she had, an emotion that makes me wonder about my own daughter—will benefit from this marriage. She will be made a queen. She will again be able to walk in the daylight. As fathers, is it not our duty to give our daughters all that we can give them? Give them the stars, the moon, everything? Do not impede your girl’s happiness. Do not undercut her power.”
Mookie, around a mouthful of pepperoni, growls, “I’m gonna get her out of Hell. That’s my job. This isn’t the way.”
“Ah. Yes. The book. The Maro Mergos. You haven’t even translated it yet, have you? Hm.” That sound, hm, the dot at the bottom of a question mark. Like he knows something Mookie doesn’t. Well, no shit. Guys like Candlefly always know more than Mookie does. Mookie’s job isn’t to know things. It’s to do things. To get shit done no matter what the cost. “No matter. We have taken the book away. It’s already on a plane. Back to Mallorca for our own people to dissect.”
Mookie pauses in his chewing. He feels queasy. He steadies himself against the iron bars and squeezes his hand so hard he’s hoping to bend the metal. But without access to the Red Rage, that’s not an option. The book is gone. My last offer is off the table. The realization is cold and dark: he has nothing to give Nora.
No way to help her.
He swallows what he’s chewing but takes no more. “Tell me something. Her gettin’ married. It really gonna end the world?”
Ernesto hmms. “I think so. Certainly those more far-seeing amongst us daemons say so. The vagaries of this apocalypse are unclear, but the grand inversion is coming. Above as Below and all that. Do you know the origin of the word, apocalypse? We assume it to mean the end of the world, and perhaps it is. Tumult and chaos. But an end isn’t always an end, you see? It can be just an end to the way things are. The way we see things. Apocalypse is from the Greek. Apocalypsis. An unveiling. A revelation.”
“Like the Book of Revelations.”
“Exactly that.”
“Things are getting awfully fuckin’ biblical up in here. Hell, Heaven, demons, Apocalypse. There a God and a Devil wrapped up in this somewhere?”
Ernesto smiles. “It’s not like that. The Bible is just doing what all myths and religions have done. Taking what little we know or can detect of the truth and parsing it through the culture and anti-culture of the times.”
“That sounds like fancy talk for it being all bullshit.”
“Let us cut through the bullshit. Will you help your daughter? Will you give her the sun and the moon and all the universes? Or will you rot and die in this cell?”
Mookie lies. “Let me out and I’m on your side.”
“Not so fast. If you still feel this way after tomorrow, after she is married and all is done, then we will talk about how you get out of this cell.”
“I’ll die in here first. You see this?” Mookie lifts his shirt, shows off the iron-ringed port in the dead center of his chest. “My heart ain’t my heart anymore. It needs the Green Grave. I don’t get Viridian, I expire like old milk. Then you won’t have anything to hold over my daughter anymore.”
“Ah, yes, the Bellbooks saddled your ox-like shoulders with quite the heavy yoke, hm?” Ernesto says. “Minerva, I’m guessing. No matter. Your Viridian found its purpose already. It’s gone. Might I suggest not getting worked up, then? Meditate, perhaps. Find your center. Calm your heart. If we can get your daughter married, then we can talk about how to keep you alive.”
*
He does what Ernesto Candlefly says: he tries to calm the fuck down. Sitting here behind these bar
s, though, knowing his daughter’s going to be married in—what? Less than twelve hours now? It’s not yet morning, but that’ll be here soon. Less than twelve hours to the end of her world. The end of his. The end, maybe, of everybody’s.
It’s not helping to calm him down.
Reflux. Guts twisting. Jackhammer heart. Sweaty palms. Dry tongue. He’s sick and hungry and thirsty. (Candlefly didn’t bring him anything to drink, that dick.) He wants to gnaw his way through these bars.
Sometimes his vision blurs. Goes double, then triple, then snaps back. Then he gets a little dizzy. Like there’s an earthquake—but it’s just for him.
It’s his heart. Churning and burning through the Green stuff. He’s a car who isn’t yet down to the fumes, but will be before too long. Right now he’s just trying to keep the campfire warm through the night.
He sleeps. Or half-sleeps. Curled up like a big Baby Huey in the cell. The crass facsimile of sleep comes with a twenty-one-nightmare-salute: dreams of a world gone to Hell, gobbos running through Times Square like it’s New Year’s Eve for them, god-worms sunning themselves on Broadway, Snakefaces hunting men and women through hallways and alleys as sport. Dreams of his daughter on a throne made of infant bones. Black daemon’s blood dripping from her nostrils, her eyes taking on a Death’s Head glow—faintly purple like those little glowing mushrooms. He hears noises while sleeping, too—sounds he chalks up to the nightmares. Sounds like cannonfire booming. Vibrations in the mission walls like the footsteps of giants reverberating.
And then someone clears his throat, and Mookie jerks upright with a start.
Another visitor. His third.
“I don’t know you,” Mookie says to the young man. Kid’s got a white T-shirt and jeans, James Dean style. His hair a flip, mussy wave. He’s thin, wispy, like a ghost.
“My name’s Owen.” The kid clears his throat. “Sir.”
“Owen. I know that name—” And then it hits him like a suicide jumper falling out a skyscraper window. Owen. Owen Candlefly. That’s the name that thick prick Alonzo told him—Owen is Nora’s groom. Mookie roars and slams against the bars like a bull elk hitting a parked car. He reaches through and the kid is dumb, slow, doesn’t know to stay back, and Mookie’s got him. Hand around his throat. Reeling in close. The kid smells like mint and hair gel. Mookie breathes on him as he pulls the kid’s face up to and almost through the bars. “You. You. Goddamn motherfucking Candlefly piece of shit—”