So when Reggie Cates opens the trunk of Mark’s car, he’s learning a very important lesson, and that lesson is this:
Don’t mess with METRO.
• • •
First, a primary fuse igniter is severed—which creates a half-second chemical reaction that fires a tiny explosive charge into the first five-pound block, and when that first block goes, it becomes an explosion more powerful than the car bombs that first tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. That explosion erases Reggie Cates from the face of the earth in one hot second, as it detonates the other ten pounds of C-4 in the trunk, which are also wired to the fragmentation grenades and the anti-infantry mine.
Which turns the whole car into a two-kiloton explosive device.
Which turns the next four seconds into doomsday for everyone.
It’s such a large explosion, in fact, that even the brief flash-fire created from the small amount of gas left in the tank of the car (it was a fairly long drive out here from Austin) is extinguished almost instantly, snuffed out and replaced by a series of deep thunder hits that shake the lawn, blow the front porch into kindling, and launch the engine block straight through the house like an oversize cannonball.
The concussive shock wave—moving faster than the speed of sound—kicks Maggie/Penelope’s beat-to-hell Fiat into the air (it also has a damn near empty gas tank) and tumbles the thing backward in space, two tons of heavy metal and superheated glass wheel-kicking like a fan blade, not stopping for nearly a quarter mile until it plunges into the lake on the other side of the property. The Fiat actually absorbs most of the forward push of the main blast when it’s launched into the air, which has the odd final effect of only blowing up about a third of the house in a series of smaller progressive ripples that last for exactly one more second.
The main wave expands in the other direction and rips the flesh off the six men on the lawn, shaking every tree within twenty yards, and even shattering four of them—and it picks up Reggie’s big black truck and sails it a quarter mile through the woods, destroying more trees. The top floor of the house collapses in a lopsided implosion, the roof blowing off at a bizarre angle and showering debris all across the estate, as the pier and the boathouse and the barn burst apart like matchstick models. The truck parked inside the barn is thrown into the lake, but somehow, miraculously, remains intact. There’s a series of smaller explosions clustered together in rapid succession that sound like a city blowing up. Bullet-fast projectiles that used to be shingles and wood struts tear what’s left of the men on the lawn limb from limb, and everyone turns into a child again, blinded and bleeding and broken, punched through with deadly shrapnel—and no one even has time to scream much. The final moment of their lives are filled with nothing but the instantaneous white-hot horror of being grated and diced.
By the fourth second, the house is only half-there, collapsing inward on its own wasted skeleton, the sturdy steel-reinforced frame holding just barely, but not for long. Fuel lines are ripped apart and electrical wiring goes south in a hurry. The gas leaks will start to be a bigger problem in about thirty more seconds—when one of those nasty sparks turns into a secondary detonator—but for now there’s not as much flame as there is property damage and human casualty. That’s another movie myth: that C-4 lights everything on fire like a big gas bomb. The reason for the myth is simple: In movies, that’s what they use—gas bombs. Looks prettier that way.
In real life, this is the invisible fist of God, punching your lights out.
The only people relatively unaffected by what happens in these four seconds are Jollie and Andy. They are still in the basement when everything blows. They don’t get obliterated like everybody else.
But that won’t last long.
• • •
Jollie is thrown to the concrete floor as the room shakes up and down, the hard raw punch of the initial blast grabbing her heart in her chest and shaking it like a tambourine—and then she hears the house shatter and implode above them. Andy lands on the floor next to her, but she doesn’t notice him until he screams something intelligent:
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?!”
The blast wave subsides, but the floor still shakes, just above the sound of bursting lumber and twisted steel coming down all around them—and then the doorway at the top of the stairs cracks open, separating halfway off its hinges as a dead man comes tumbling through the splintered wood. It’s one of their bodyguards, shot several times in the chest, half-crushed and bloody, going head over asshole until he slams into the concrete at the foot of the steps. Jollie almost doesn’t hear his skull shatter on the hard floor because the first ruptured gas line up top blows in the same moment, and that cancels out pretty much everything else. A support that helps to hold up the stairs almost snaps as the whole house tilts again on its upper foundation, dust and smoke reaching down after them in dragon tendrils. The hanging light fixture over the stairs swings wildly, the room spinning in a crazy series of shadow patterns, and then the bulb finally bursts apart into the snapped support, leaving them both in near-darkness.
Jollie panics and then catches her snap—then panics again.
“Andy! The house is . . .”
Another explosion kicks up, and she forgets whatever she was going to say.
• • •
The smell of natural gas burning and the faraway heat of it reaches Andy’s nose as he looks up to see the door rip all the way off the hinges and tumble down the stairs, showering the dead man next to them with rough debris. The next explosion lights the hallway above them in a red/yellow pulse-glow, and he can see part of the roof collapse up there. His instincts seem to be almost inhumanly fast—faster than Jollie would have imagined. He grabs her with his good hand and yells words that might be Come on let’s get out of here this place is coming down hurry fuck fuck FUCK—and she might be screaming back, We can’t go up there everybody’s dead oh God Mark Mark MARK—and he’s still grabbing her and they’re both still screaming and he’s yanking her up the shuddering staircase—Come on, Jollie, COME ON COME ON COME ON! And it all thunders past her senses in slow motion, as more explosions start to happen in the house, the wood buckling and nearly collapsing under them. They get to the top of the stairs a million fast-forwarded lifetimes later and he’s looking down the main hallway of the house, which isn’t really a hallway anymore—it’s a smoldering maze of falling chunks and glass, like a shifting junkyard, shaking and glowing at the edges, tiny flames bursting out in rough little flashes. Andy yanks her into the maze . . . and everything is burning and blowing up all around them, but he manages to pick his way through the debris, holding up his wounded arm, using the cast as some pathetic shield as he pulls her with him . . . and she sees her whole life flash in front of her eyes, just like everybody always said it would at the end of everything, the flames and the rubble falling on all sides in epic split-second blasts between the flashes that define her life and sum up the whole goddamn experience so far . . . her mother, making out with some new guy on the couch . . . and Andy, grabbing her hand as she cries and says It’s no use, we’re trapped in here, but NO, he says, NO WE CAN MAKE IT . . . and here comes the realization when she was twelve that nothing is sacred and everything a lie, the explosion of her mother’s skull and the pink spray of brains on the carpet . . . and something hard and hot lands on her from above, sending her to the floor and keeping her there, and she thinks This is it, this is the end, this is how I finally die . . . but Andy is pulling at her again, and she’s saying I can’t move, can’t MOVE, DAMMIT and he’s screaming NO GODDAMMIT I WON’T LET US DIE . . . and Andy is pulling the door off her, using both hands, even his bad hand now, and she is scrabbling upward on her hands and knees, and he’s asking her if she can move and she says yes and she moves forward with him . . . and he is her rescuer . . . and she feels the warmth of his touch for the first time in the living room, that moment when all the teasing is done and they
sigh into one another’s throats . . . and he is her champion, her rescuer, her shining knight in a very bad place . . . and this is forbidden, but she loves him anyway, loves her beautiful Boy Prince . . . and the world rumbles and collapses . . . and they are together and it is her shame . . . and . . . it is her folly . . . and . . . everything she shouldn’t want and yet wants so much . . . AND . . . ANNNDYYY . . .
• • •
They are almost to freedom when the main gas line finally blows.
Half the house goes up in an instant fireball, knocking down Andy as he shoves Jollie toward what’s left of the foyer and the pile of kindling that used to be the front porch. Every bit of glass and chemically treated wood that surrounds them erupts in a magnum flash. Jollie doesn’t look back to see what happens to her Boy Prince. Doesn’t see a burning wood strut fall on him and pin him mercilessly. She’s still clawing her way through the smoke and the terrible flashes of her life, all flooding in so damn fast, so damn relentlessly, so damn true and final . . . and her shirt catches fire and she doesn’t notice that either. She throws herself on the lawn, just beyond the burning house—and she hears Andy start to scream back there as someone grabs her and rolls her across the grass. She smells smoke. Smells her own hair burning.
Andy . . . where are you, Andy . . .
• • •
She sucks in air and finds that she’s breathing smoke. Her lungs seem to collapse, and she loses everything, loses the memories, loses the fire, loses her whole damn mind as the whole damn world shorts out and crashes backward. And then she’s looking up, gasping. Air coming in now, just little bits of it. Someone hovering over her, a strange black-and-white shape, shimmering in a bizarre fog of heat waves and smoke, a powerful voice commanding everything around him:
“Get in there! The boy is still in there! Don’t let him burn!”
The fire, pulsing in her eyes now, just feet away. Men in suits scrambling, pounding the ground with their feet, going back the way she came.
She looks up at the strange shape, her eyes wild, her voice shot:
“Who are you? WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?”
And then she collapses on the lawn, giving into unconsciousness as the shape leans closer, smiling at her. The last thing she sees is the shape’s face, that smile—and it terrifies her like nothing she has ever known. He is a man split in half. Yet serene.
Like a doctor.
“Darian, sweet child. My name is Darian.”
III
THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT EVERYTHING
10
young adult
Eddie Darling really digs those romantic comedies. He’s watching one right now, on the big screen in his living room. The ex-wife couldn’t stand them, of course, and his boys still can’t figure it out either, but screw those guys. And especially screw the ex-wife. She had to go because she had no sense of humor. That, and she never knew she was married to a monster. The people who know either accept it and move on—or they end up dead. Eddie has never cared which.
Anyway, the rom-coms.
He likes them for the same reasons Jollie Meeker hates them, which is a cosmic irony neither person is ever likely to know about. It would blow Jollie’s mind to discover just how deeply Eddie Darling gets into this stuff and how well he is able to deconstruct the formulas, agendas, and social crimes these films embody. It’s his way of buying into anarchy. He thinks horror films and gangster movies are far more obvious, and so he doesn’t watch them. What’s really, truly horrifying to a guy like him is a movie like Young Adult. That’s the one he’s watching now. The one with Charlize Theron as a ghostwriter of teenybopper trash hopelessly drowned in her own self-loathing, trying every dirty trick she knows to fulfill some tacky self-prophecy and get her old high school sweetheart to fall in love with her again, thirty years later. It’s excruciating to watch. He almost can’t. The film borders on directorial sadism in the way it lingers on poor Charlie’s pain—but then again, she’s a despicable person who never really learns anything in the end, even after sleeping with the village cripple, played by some pudgy stand-up comic he’s never heard of before.
This is the deep end of humanity.
White people tortured by white people.
There are a few rom-coms out there with all-black casts, but he prefers the Caucasian variety—the way some soul brothers say they can’t get enough of fine white chicks with blonde hair named Debbie. He has a theory that it’s probably along the lines of why they stopped making blaxploitation films in the mid-seventies, just after The Exorcist came out. He was there to see all that, and the phenomenon was incredible to behold. Someone eventually did some high-and-mighty mathematical survey, and the numbers showed that huge numbers of black men and women were showing up for that one—which said to the people running Hollywood that families of color would much rather see films where white people were killing white people. (Or, you know, turning into demons and vomiting pea soup or something.) So there you had it. And here you have it now:
One of the toughest black men ever to walk the earth, mesmerized in his sofa chair with a beer, laughing out loud at the terrible misfortunes of Charlize Theron.
Hey, everybody needs a hobby.
He’s seen this flick seven times. His record is a Kate Hudson abomination called Something Borrowed. Thirty-seven times and counting. He loves that one particularly because the problems those people have are so goddamn disconnected from anything like his world that it’s kinda like watching an alien species make out on the nature channel. He’s not even really sure what animal planet most of these assholes are actually from. It makes him almost happy, while he keeps far more malevolent thoughts at bay.
The young nubile flesh doesn’t hurt either. Never hurts one damn bit. That is, after all, why these films are generally referred to as escapist entertainment.
If he were to allow his mind to wander back into malevolence, he would think about the many faces he’s seen, drowning in pools of their own blood. He’d think about the night his wife found out why he called his posse the Monster Squad. The night he finally murdered her over obsessing about his obsessions.
That week, it was Kristen Stewart.
And he didn’t even care, because it was all part of the whole damn master plan. All part of riding the Great and Terrible Wave they taught him about so long ago. Darian hid the body under the street and everybody laughed about it later. They’re all still laughing now. He’s laughing at a dumb white bitch named Charlie, who goes down hard under the excruciating hammer of her own pathetic life.
He laughs, because it’s goddamn funny.
• • •
It’s just past three in the afternoon when the phone rings.
His ring tone is the theme from Shaft.
He lets the first verse cycle before he leans forward and picks the thing off his glass coffee table, setting down the Blu-ray remote in its place. Hardly glances at the caller ID, because he knows who it is.
Eddie just says this: “Are we happy?”
“We’re happy.”
Eddie smiles, looking at the frozen image on his HD screen.
Poor Charlie.
And that’s right when some asshole kicks in the door and shoots him in the back.
• • •
Settling up.
First words that come into his head.
He sluices halfway back to life and sees the son of a bitch standing upside down in front of him. He realizes his own legs are clamped together above him, realizes he’s strung up the wrong way, feels the pain of a billion bumblebees buzzing in the thick meat of his upper shoulder. Feels the burn of the blood dripping down into his eyes. Spits at the son of a bitch’s feet and tells him to get on with it.
But the son of a bitch only smiles and kneels in front of him, his eyeline almost matching up with Eddie’s. And his perfectly calm voice comes, just like a
lways: “This isn’t about revenge, Eddie. I want you to know that.”
A hand strokes his face, in rivers of blood.
“You’ll be past tense in just a few minutes. Your life is draining from you right now. I can still save your life if you want it to be saved. I don’t want to kill you, Eddie. I never wanted to kill you.”
Bullshit.
“I can see that you don’t believe me. But why would I lie? I could blow you away right here. But I don’t want your life, Eddie. I want what is yours. That’s how we finally settle up. For my brother. And a lot of other things. You know how this works.”
Fuck you.
“I want the keys to the kingdom, Eddie. And you will give them to me. And then I will save your life.”
FUCK YOU.
“You can hang there and grunt at me all you want. You can curse my name until the moment when you finally do die. But none of that will alter the inevitable. If you don’t hand me the keys now, I’ll just find some other way to unlock the door. And you’ll be dead. And your death will have been pointless. Because I don’t want revenge for my brother. I want the keys for my brother.”
FUCK.
YOU.
MOTHERFUCKER.
“Okay. Have it your way, old friend. We’ll just wait around until you change your mind.”
Eddie sees his own men surrounding him, upside down in the dark room—this room, which is ten feet below the basement of his thirty-million-dollar drug-dealer mansion.
This room, where he’s kept everything for years.
The son of a bitch standing upside down in front of him has known all about the room for years too. He knows almost everything about Eddie Darling. Except what’s behind the locked door. So he needs the keys to the kingdom.
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