Metro

by Stephen Romano

  He stands there in the lobby of the ER for a moment.

  Thinking.

  Goes into his right inside coat pocket and pulls out a stick of strawberry chewing gum. The sugarless variety, with extra flavor crystals.

  Pops it in his mouth.

  Chews slowly.

  Then he leads his boys straight for the elevator, which will take them to the trauma ward on the fifth floor. If there had been a security guard, it wouldn’t have been a problem. There should have been one, but the guy is actually around the corner right now, spending his last five dollars in cash on a Coke and a bag of M&Ms. (Breakfast of champions, obviously.) He’s an old man with arthritis in both hands. He’s not even wearing a sidearm. His name is Karl Munt.

  Mister Munt wouldn’t believe you in a million years if you told him that the Coca-Cola Company just saved his life this morning.

  • • •

  Jackie-Boy Schaeffer dreams of many things.

  The bad lieutenant will never know what any of them are.

  Tomorrow there will be another job.

  Tomorrow there will be—

  “A complete pesthole.”

  • • •

  The voice is low and strong, gentle and heavy all at once. Each syllable perfectly enunciated. Everything in its proper place.

  The bad lieutenant turns and he sees the apparition and his heart drops.

  There’s three guys standing behind the apparition, and at least two more that Mudd can see in the hall just outside. They are anonymous and forgettable in plain dark slacks and black tees under long coats and down jackets. You’d never know they were murderers. You’d be minding your own business a thousand ways till Sunday, right up to the moment when one of them pulled a gun on you and asked politely for your money and your wife.

  “It’s not the Ritz,” Mudd says to the apparition. “But it could be worse.”

  The gentle-strong voice again, sliding slowly across mismatched lips: “It’s a pesthole. Did you see the mess in the hall out there? I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to a place like this. It’s just unsanitary.”

  He takes almost four whole seconds to produce that last word.

  Like it’s a disgusting thing crawling out of his mouth.

  His hand is holding something metal. “Then again, my worst enemies wouldn’t know the difference, would they?”

  It’s a scalpel, covered in blood.

  Mudd looks again and sees the hand of someone dead in the hall, just visible beyond the doorjamb.

  • • •

  “It was a massacre. They knew my brother was coming and they ambushed him. You’re going to tell me who did it, Jake. You’re going to tell me now.”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, Jake. You disappoint me.”

  “Goddammit, you guys—”

  “There are two leading causes of death for people who happen to be standing where you are right now. The first are usually the words You don’t have the guts. The second are the words I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Don’t insult me, Jake. I’m not in the mood.”

  “I’m not trying to insult anybody! I really don’t know what’s going on!”

  “Okay. We’ll explain it to you.”

  The apparition nods to the two anonymous men behind him. One of them closes the door to the hallway. The other pulls a sleek Semmerling LM-4 pistol from under his down jacket. Starts screwing on a silencer.

  Jake Mudd gets to his feet. Shaking.

  The apparition raises his eyebrows, making his zigzagged lips into something really terrifying. “Give me your gun, Jake. Hand it over nice and easy.”

  “What have you people done? What did Eddie tell you?”

  “The gun, Jake. I won’t ask you again.”

  Mudd tries to jump-start himself one more time—but his brain misfires in weird panic-attack sputters. He’s missed his medication this morning and his whole body shudders now. The voices, bouncing in his skull, hammering him hard.

  Hand over that gun and you’re dead. God only knows what they plan to do to you, how many they’ve already killed in this building. They’ve done the nurse for sure—that’s her out in the hall. Shit . . .

  He reaches for his weapon, slowly.

  It’s heavy .38 iron, snapped tight into the shoulder holster.

  He unsnaps it, pulls it out with two fingers.

  The voice, even slower and more terrible now: “On the floor now, Jake. Kick it over to me, gently.”

  They’ll kill my ass anyway. It’s only a question of how many I take along with me. I could maybe peg the one on the right before the one on the left got me in the leg. Or I could kill that ugly son of a bitch. And then he’d sprout fangs and come back from the dead and eat my whole goddamn soul in one big goddamn bite, man. Goddammit, this is so . . . so fucking . . .

  Fuck.

  He bends over and sets the gun on the floor.

  Kicks it gently over to the apparition, who doesn’t reach for it.

  Instead, he says: “Six of our guys are dead. You should have seen it. I’ve got some video from the crime scene that would turn your stomach. Everybody is very upset about it.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard. I’ve been here with Jackie-Boy all night.”

  “You were the one who made the call, Jake. You told them where to go and who to look for. Eddie is thinking you set my brother up to be ambushed.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I wasn’t sure until now. But I think you’re still smart. I think a guilty man would have tried to shoot us just now. I think you got as much information as you could out of the child and you’re just as surprised as we are about what happened. So I guess I need to have a word with the child.”

  “Then there’s no reason to kill me.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Goddammit . . .”

  “Oh, and I didn’t mention the dead police officers either. Five of them. Your men. And I don’t mean ordinary dead. I mean professionally dead. All head shots. Not a single miss. These weren’t amateurs. The slaughter pattern was government sponsored. They were using heavy ordnance and dropping the marks fast—turning them off like lights and leaving them steaming in their own guts. I’d know that pattern anywhere.”

  He knows because he’s the same breed of monster.

  He knows because he’s magic.

  Mudd has never seen anything like him, not in ten years of seeing everything. The scary son of a bitch would have cased this whole hospital, dropped anyone who could have stopped them, made sure nobody would come running when the goo hit the fan. He would have carved his window of opportunity from steel and set the dominoes falling.

  Mudd knows it all too goddamn well.

  “Jackie told me a name and an address,” Mudd says. “Our guys were just following a lead. I don’t even know who those people we hit were. They were Jackie’s friends. Some asshole named Mark Jones. It’s all I know—you’ve gotta believe me.”

  The apparition smiles and lowers the scalpel.

  “I believe you, Jake. I really do.”

  Darian Stanwell then barely nods, and the silencer to his right hisses, filling the room with muted thunder.

  • • •

  Jake Mudd feels his left kneecap blow out from under him, going to the floor. The hard surface smacks him in the face as he falls.

  He grits his teeth and lives with it.

  You fucks. You fucking goddamn fuckers . . .

  Darian hovers over him with the scalpel.

  “You’re not traitor material, Jake. You were always a good soldier. Always a member in good standing. I’ll never forget the wild times we had together in the Squad. Those are the things that define a man’s soul—those things we did. And you always kn
ew about loyalty to family. Always looked out for the little guy, and I admire that. Jackie thanks you. And I thank you.”

  Darian gets much closer now.

  Crouches low, his voice deep and sweet and excited.

  “Can I tell you a little secret that might make you smile, Jake?”

  Mudd doesn’t say anything. He’s busy choking back the pain, his brain still misfiring, trying to figure out how he ever ended up in this place.

  He coughs and tastes blood.

  “I’ll take that as a yes, old friend,” Darian says, and looks Mudd right in the face, his breath filling the bad lieutenant’s air, like it always did, back in the day.

  Back in the corridor of love and freedom.

  • • •

  “The secret is . . . I love you, Jake. And when you love someone like that—when you truly respect what they are and live through the best times and the worst times—well, it just makes you feel all sunny inside. You know how that works. I’ve seen it on your face a lot. Do you know how rare love really is, Jake? We are the only animals on earth who know the privilege—and we take it for granted every single day of our lives. We don’t understand how lucky we are. Jungle cats with elegance and beauty beyond human imagination don’t know what we know. We name the animals, Jake. We are the rulers of all creation. You believe me when I tell you that, don’t you? You know that I’m sincere?”

  Mudd looks into Darian’s eyes.

  Go screw yourself, psycho. Get it over with.

  “I’d like to kiss you good-bye,” Darian says. “Would you like that?”

  Fuck you.

  “I’d like that,” Darian says. “So here goes.”

  Darian reaches over with the scalpel and runs it along Mudd’s upper lip in a quick whispering sizzle, makes just a tiny cut, enough for the blood to come slowly. Mudd isn’t shocked when Darian does it—he doesn’t even feel the pain because the throbbing in his blown-to-shit kneecap trumps all of that. It doesn’t even register much when Darian smears the blood on Mudd’s flushed cheek and leans even closer, licking it off, licking it clean. It should feel like a diseased lizard bathed in strawberry slime tonguing him, but it doesn’t feel like anything. He knows that Darian isn’t really kissing him—he’s kissing the past. Kissing the boys. Kissing them good-bye.

  Mudd has been doing that for such a long time too.

  In the corridor of love and freedom.

  “You’re so beautiful, Jake,” Darian says, when he comes up for air.

  The heat of it, like something from hell.

  Darian whispers now, low and lost, like a child in awe: “I’m not sorry I have to do this. This is the way to true enlightenment. But I know how it is for you now. I know how much it hurts someone else when you love them with such purity. So we’ll keep it short. For old time’s sake.”

  Mudd hears the words come from Darian’s heart and breath, passionate in those last moments before the kill. He’s heard it a million times, but he never thought it would happen to him, this close—that awful scent of a child’s gum and the salty slather of his own blood, still trickling down his chin. The cold heat of true love. Because true love is nothing but blood to a man like Darian Stanwell.

  Fuck you, Darian. Fuck you and fuck Eddie and fuck the whole goddamn perverted Monster Squad. Just fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU.

  But Mudd doesn’t say any of that out loud.

  “Do your worst, you filthy faggot,” he says instead, hoping Darian will keep his promise and kill him quickly.

  • • •

  It doesn’t work.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later, he finally drops the F-bomb on Darian Stanwell out loud. The sound chokes through like something half-alive, struggling through gurgling deep red and folds of torn flesh.

  Jackie wakes up just in time to see it.

  Sees the bad lieutenant who protected him since he was born tell the monster he’s feared all his life to go fuck himself through a river of blood.

  Jackie thinks it’s still part of the nightmare.

  Darian Stanwell turns and smiles at the kid in his bed.

  The smile is gory and awful.

  “Hello, child. I’ll be with you in just a minute.”

  • • •

  The house is on the east side, of course.

  That’s where METRO has most of their safe houses.

  A bit of a joke, really.

  It’s a neighborhood that looks bad on the surface but is really full of cops and lawyers and upscale web-development executives who got good deals on real estate and turned the world around. The catch is that it all still has to look shitty on the outside—keeps the IRS away and fools the local riffraff into thinking you don’t have a TV worth stealing.

  It’s a typical one-story affair, bad shingles, one big living room window sealed off with a plaid curtain. No porch, just a tiny concrete landing, and the lawn is scorched from the Texas summer, scabbed over and half-dead like a dog with mange. Every lawn in Austin looks like that after a bad August. There was record heat this year.

  Mark hauls the Black Box to the cement landing, checks the front door. Unlocked, just like the text message he got ten minutes ago said it would be. Inside, the living room is big. He needs to check the fridge. Jollie will need fruit juice. She always needs a lot of liquid sugar to come down from ecstasy.

  There’s juice in the fridge, it turns out.

  Lots of juice, lots of food, lots of everything.

  They are good here.

  • • •

  An hour later, Jollie sits on the couch, sipping a glass of Ocean Spray 100% No Sugar Added—Sweetened with Real Fruit Juice—Cranberry Cocktail.

  Fruit juice sweetened with fruit juice?

  She thinks that might be an ironic statement about her current situation, but can’t for the life of her figure out what the hell it is. Sees herself reflected in the shimmering crimson cranberry pool, wondering if she’s still dreaming.

  Andy sits on the shag-carpeted floor, smoking a joint.

  He’s looking at the new plaster cast on his hand, custom-molded, secured there with ACE bandages, which covers the fresh needle-and-thread work. The wound seemed awful at first, almost separating his thumb from his hand, but now it doesn’t even hurt. The field pack from the Black Box was filled with goodies. Everything from needles preloaded with morphine to surgical thread and plaster gauze.

  Almost like Mark knew this was gonna happen.

  Even had bags of weed and blow in there.

  It only took Mark seven minutes by the clock on the wall to sew the wound closed, wrap it up tight, and set the plaster cast. Mark never said a word the whole time. Stitches and needles. Just add water. His eyes and his breathing regulated carefully, hands unshaking. Like a professional. Then he rolled Andy a fatty and lit the good end for them, explaining that they needed it to calm down. And all at once, the room was filled with the familiar, comforting smell of high-grade weed. Just like home.

  It’s all so incredibly surreal.

  Andy passes the joint to Jollie and shifts his gaze to the open Black Box, seeing what else is in there, as Mark paces the room, waiting on a phone call.

  • • •

  After a very long time, Jollie finally says something.

  She hasn’t spoken in almost an hour.

  She says this: “Those people back there, they were dead, right? Those people in our house.”

  “Yes, they were dead,” Mark says.

  “Who killed them?”

  “They were going to torture and murder us.”

  “Who killed them, Mark?”

  “It’s better if you don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I think I have a right to know. I think Andy and I both do. Haven’t you been telling us enough lies?”

  “It’s not
about that, Jollie. It’s about what’ll make you safe. I didn’t think we’d be in this situation. I didn’t even think I would ever have to use the Black Box. It’s an escape kit you’re not allowed to break into unless the shit’s really hitting the fan.”

  “What kind of shit—and what kind of fan, Mark? I just want the truth.”

  That’s always what she’s wanted, Mark thinks. Always the truth with this one, no matter what the cost.

  He thinks about her radical pals in Philly. Senator Bob. He thinks about their petty filibuster scheme. He wants to let Jollie know how close she’s been all these years—and how far away too. He wants to tell her she’s been asking the wrong questions.

  But he can’t do that.

  Not yet.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says to her. “You’re still stoned.”

  She almost laughs. “This whole damn night has been one hell of a buzzkill.”

  Mark smirks and starts rolling himself another joint.

  “They blew her head off,” Andy suddenly mutters, running his finger along the slightly-rusted .357 handgun in the Black Box. “That girl I was making out with. They came in my room and grabbed her and asked me what my name was . . . and then . . .”

  Mark closes his eyes, picturing it. The moment when those goons shattered the peace of the Kingdom.

  Marnie Stanwell, brother of Darian—the Son of Satan.

  This is so goddamn bad.

  “It was the Monster Squad,” Mark says out loud, before he can think better of it. “They’re the only guys Razzle could have brought in so fast. I don’t even know how the hell they knew—”

  He stops himself, hard.

  Looks at Jollie just as she looks at him.

  “Knew what, Mark? What did you do? And what Monster Squad?”

  They’re a bunch of really perverted fucks. They kidnap children. Sell them. They also deal drugs and kill people.

  That’s what he wants to tell her, but he doesn’t.

  So Jollie starts screaming: “Jesus fucking Christ, Mark! You have to talk to us! You said something really heavy happened and you were leaving us and you wanted me to come with you—”

  “Just calm down.”