by Luke Arnold
“But what about her?” Damn. I searched my pockets for a Clayfield, forgetting I was all out. “When we take down the mansion, are you going to understand?”
The answer was no, but what was the point? I’d been lucky to visit her these past few years. It had been my little sanctuary, but it wasn’t my right. As dazzling as the light inside her had been, there wasn’t a chance in hell it was ever coming back. So, what was I waiting for? The vines will crack her eventually. Or the bark will flake away. Or the old tile roof will come crumbling down and crush her into splinters on some unimportant, forgettable night when nobody even knows.
What did it matter if it was done by time or some nameless man with a steamroller? The end would be the same. The end will always be the same for all of us.
I tried to say “go ahead”, but my tongue wouldn’t let me. It took all my strength just to nod. Baxter went to say something, but just smiled.
“You’re similar,” said Baxter. “You and Edmund. Before the Coda you were both so full of beans. Perhaps you both felt you had something to prove to the world, being what you are. Heavens knows, I understand that urge myself. But now, it’s like you’ve been released. You’re handling this better than most of us, Fetch. Rye is the same. For all the damage the Coda has done, I believe it’s made you better men.”
They smiled, and I wanted to be sick. I opened the door and got the hell out the building. I was dangerously close to having a change of heart and burning this whole goddamn city to the ground.
I took the long road home, hoping to cough up the switchblade that was stuck in my chest. Why did it suddenly feel real? She’d already been gone for a long, sad, eternity of time. All they were taking away was the shadow.
On these dark, hungover, dust-covered days, I sometimes get scared that maybe I imagined it all. That there was nothing special, just the distorted idea of an uneducated boy who didn’t understand the world, or women, or anything. I have to count the little moments till it all makes sense. They might seem like nothing to anyone else but they are everything to me. An old calendar marked onto my mind as clearly as the shame on my arm.
I know them all in order and off by heart. Every time I saw her during the long, dumb years of misunderstandings and muted passion. Spread out over time it seems inconsequential, but when I chain it together, it’s everything:
The first day in the slums and the long walk home. Second escort to the suburbs and lunch from the vendor (skewers, soda, hot sauce). The concert when we sat side by side and listened to the band in silence. A delivery to her house when she hugged me from nowhere. Making her laugh when the missionaries came. First time at dinner. Meeting the Ambassador of Perimoor when she sang my praises. The drive to the springs and the swimming and drinking the green lemonade. The pictures and the park. When Hendricks came back. Dinner where she lost her temper and later put her head on my shoulder to say that she was sorry. The Governor’s house at sunset. The twins’ birthday. The old bunch back together again. Eastern guests. When they burned the chicken. The Ditch, no drinks. Dinner with the orange cake. Sulking dinner. Passing on Tenth Street, which was the only time we didn’t talk. Sad night at the Governor’s house. The morning at your door. The party after. Cocktails at the wedding reception. The long, weird phone call when you said you’d come around but never did. Noodle Bar. Dinner with the Fae. Slums with the nurses. Morning walk in the park when the dogs followed and you said that I was handsome. The slums with the Governor and he told you that you’d won. The police parade when you got day-drunk and held me by my arm for hours. That night. The next day when we didn’t talk in public but everything was hidden in the corners of your eyes. The hotel with the hounds-tooth cushions. The party with your hair down and the late-night ice-cream and the noise you made when I kissed your neck. The New Year’s party. The week in the park, preparing for the hospital. The last dinner with Hendricks. The weekend away. The last time you smiled. The end.
That’s all of them. The only days that mattered. For all my mistakes and all the bad I’ve done, it was worth it all for that.
16
I woke up, and the phone was ringing. Twice in one week. I was becoming popular.
I stumbled over and slammed my knee into the desk. In the old days, the streetlights would have blasted in those windows at all hours. Now, the street wore darkness like a second skin. I found the phone. The sound in my ear was Pete’s heavy, grating breath.
“Can you do an old friend a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Anything? What if I asked you to bury a body?”
I tried to laugh it off.
“You never used to be so dramatic, Pete.”
The Dog-man’s breathing slowed to a deadly calm.
“Doesn’t need to be dramatic, that’s just what it is. The Credence Textiles Mill. Steel district. Right now. You in?”
Shit.
Like most of Hendricks’ associates, I was never sure if Pete secretly hated me and just put up with me for my boss’s sake. He wasn’t a friend, exactly, but we were tied to each other. Most of all, he was tied to Hendricks. If you wanted me to do something, there was no quicker way to convince me than to poke me in my guilty, cracked conscience.
“Yeah, buddy. I’m in.”
I skipped the larger roads and made my way along the back streets till I was down in the darkness of the steel district. From there, I could see the candlelight that flickered in the windows where the unemployed Dwarves were still squatting. I knew the names of the factories from my time as an errand boy but now, they all looked the same: façades blasted by time till the bone showed through. When the magic dropped out of the machines, the textile mill was abandoned along with all the others.
Old air was trapped inside. Burnt and thick with the memories of livestock and dye and little old ladies hunched over the loom. The stray reams of wool and cotton that were hanging from broken hooks had become the foundations upon which a thousand opportunistic spiders had sprouted their creations. Twisted arteries of silk wound their way from the floor to the rafters in tight cylinders and sheer webbed sheets. It was easy to see the path Pete had cut through the factory. Torn strands parted in ragged archways from the entrance into the darkness. I stepped my way through, twitching and slapping as things tickled the back of my neck. Soon, I could no longer tell which itching was paranoia and which was the real thing, so I gritted my teeth and ignored them all.
The flame in my hand danced in the dead air. In the corner of the enormous warehouse was the foreman’s office. The glass was fogged over with grime but the lamplight from inside forced its way through.
When I pushed the metal door open and stepped into the office, neither of the figures inside made a move. One, because he would have recognized my smell the moment I stepped into the building. The other, because his brains weren’t exactly in his body. The red-haired teen had a hole in his head larger than the lame piercings he’d slashed into his jacket. His pockmarked skin had lost its insipid pink and was now turning a sickly gray.
The injury was a hard one to identify. A few blows to the skull, that was clear, but his jaw was making a unique statement: broken, dislocated and almost wrenched out of his face. If I had to guess – and I suppose I didn’t have to – I would say that someone held him by the chin, their fingers in his mouth, and drove the back of his head into a wall till they were holding pink jelly.
Pete was sitting on his hairy ass with his back against the wall and his head facing down.
“I’m sorry, Pete,” I said, stepping slowly over to him. “I never woulda thought he’d come after you.” Pete lifted his uneven eyes. “So what’s the plan? You can’t just leave him here?”
“Nope. This isn’t where it happened anyway. There’s a trail from an alley in Swestum if anyone cares to look, and if it leads them to the body, I’m done. He’s covered in my scent from his toes to his tonsils.”
I swatted a spider from my sleeve and a few uncomfortable questions from my mind.
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“So, it’s bone-saws and burlap sacks?” I asked, hoping he knew it was a joke.
“The canals are swollen and kicking up their guts right now. There’s a good chance anything we throw in will find its way back to shore. I know another place just out of town.”
All of a sudden, I got really, really tired.
“Not the pit.”
He nodded. “The pit.”
There was plenty of old cloth to wrap him in and plenty of rope to tie him up. While I went about turning the remains of the redhead into a human burrito, carefully covering the parts that were still oozing liquid, Pete was searching in the back of the old motors that once powered the industrial sewing machines. In his Human left hand, he held an old soup container. With his dog-like right, he wiped the remnants of coal and oil from the machinery and collected them in the tin can. The whole scenario was packed with too many things I didn’t like, but once you go out to dump a body you don’t go home till you or the dead are buried.
Pete filled his container with black muck and left me waiting while he slunk out through the cobwebs and into the night. I’d hated the way the redhead had talked while he was alive but it was nothing compared to the way he talked when he was dead. We sat with the spiders and silence saying too damn much to each other.
The puttering of tired pistons rumbled down the side road. I got down on one knee and wrestled the kid over my shoulder. I’d grown soft over the years, but it was hardly a struggle. There was nothing to him. His brains and bravado were in pieces on the floor and all that remained was the shell of a dumb kid who wouldn’t grow up to be a dumb man.
A chain rattled outside. I walked towards the roller door and it grated open with a rusty squeal to reveal the filthy Werewolf beside a first edition Slinger: Model C. The Slinger was a Human-made car that they stopped making over a decade ago. Like most Human inventions outside of Weatherly, they were quickly improved with magical technology and the original models were phased out. Magic-powered automobiles were only just becoming widely available before the Coda killed the power. There has been talk about bringing the Slinger back into production, if they can fire up the factories, but it’s a long way down the list of things to do. If I hadn’t been watching the car puff exhaust, I would have put more money on Pete resurrecting the hollow-skulled punk in the sack on my shoulder.
“Where the hell did you get that?”
“Scrapyard,” barked Pete proudly. “Dozens of cars piling up there since the Dwarves stopped mining. Anything before a Model E has no keys, you just need something to get it pumping. Hopefully we have enough fuel to make the distance.”
The Model C had no roof or doors, just two seats, a trunk, four tires, a big gear stick and a wheel to steer.
I stepped up on the running board of the Slinger and dropped the meat package into the open top of the trunk. I had to fold it over itself to make it fit and then squash it down to make it look less like a body.
We secured the kid with the remaining rope and I jumped in the passenger seat. With his one good hand, Pete drove us out of the side road and on to Second Street. For the first time ever, I was thankful for the death of the streetlights. The night was as dark as our deeds. An occasional lamp danced behind windows, and we passed a few figures waiting on corners or poking out from alleys, but Pete knew the backstreets like his own smell and we made it out of the city without anyone stopping us.
The car sputtered to a stop a mile out of town. I was worried we’d have to unload the kid and drag him by his bootstraps, but Pete just gave the fuel tank a few kicks. It dislodged some dried-up residue inside, and after a couple of cranks, we were coughing down the road once more.
We repeated the clumsy routine all the way to the edge of the redwoods. That’s when the old crate hacked up its dying breath and rattled to a stop for the final time.
“This’ll have to do,” growled Pete, and stepped onto the road. We untied the kid and dragged him to the ground where he landed with a fleshy crunch. Then Pete wrenched the steering wheel all the way to the left and put it into neutral. “Push.”
We forced the dead Slinger off the road, through the gravel, and into an overgrown berry bush that was already rich with debris. The old heap looked at home amongst the hubcaps and brambles as if it had been there for years.
We wrapped two ropes around the sack – mine at his head and Pete’s at his ankles – and lifted them over our shoulders. Pete took the lead, hunched over, and we headed into the forest.
The undergrowth was six inches deep and damn soggy. Our boots made a habit of catching in the slush and sending us tumbling over. Was I so desperate for friends that I’d risk my neck, my health and a good night’s sleep on some dumb midnight march? Was I so convinced that I was somehow to blame for all this? Did I really think it was my fault?
Of course it was. Trace anything back far enough and it was easy for me to take the blame.
It took well over an hour to reach our destination. A Dragon pit is a patch of land that has been irrigated by the magic beneath it. A rare phenomenon. A proper pit takes more than a hundred years to develop. Over the century, a stream of magic would leak into the earth, breaking it down to a kind of cosmic quicksand. Eventually, the soil would be rich enough to become fully active. Once that happened, the next animal that entered into it would be absorbed. That’s how we got Dragons. The animal and the activated earth merged to become one miraculous beast. Then the entire piece of land would get up and walk away leaving a big ol’ crater in its wake. The most common pits were formed out in the Ragged Plains where the explosive desert-dust made life inhospitable for most creatures. Only the leather-backed lizards that could survive the heat wandered into those pits. Therefore, most of the Dragons evolved from those rock-skinned reptiles.
Even though this Dragon pit was rendered dormant by the Coda, it was still highly dangerous. A deep pool of molten rock bubbled away, filled with some half-formed element stuck between two worlds. If you wanted something gone, it was as good a place as any.
The pit wasn’t hot or explosive. It was almost silent, other than a gentle hissing and the occasional pop of escaping gas. It constantly moved like it was rolling in bed but couldn’t ever get comfortable.
We didn’t say anything to each other. Pete just dropped the kid’s feet by the bank and kicked them in. I pushed from the shoulders and the pit seemed to reach up and swallow the midnight snack.
I didn’t want to be here. I was supposed to be finding missing people, not making them disappear myself. But this is who I am: a spineless kid who can get talked into anything because he thinks it will make up for his mistakes.
The trail of rope slid in after the boy but Pete had already turned and walked away. I followed. Hating myself for coming here and hating Pete for what he’d done.
We walked through tall grass, abandoned timber mills and dead forests. We walked till our backs cracked and our boots choked on swollen feet.
On the outskirts of the city, the sun frowned over the east and I pulled myself up at an old checkpoint. I sat on the guard stool beside the boom gate and turned the soles of my feet inward to give them a break from treading on the world.
Pete stopped but didn’t turn around; he just stared out towards the city and tapped his long foot. He was waiting for me to catch my breath and likely hoping that I wouldn’t ask him those questions that didn’t need asking.
We were at the point in the road where the Maple Highway reached the city limits and became Main Street. The first lamp was beside me; a copper pole with a cradle at the top, filled with dark soot and spider webs.
“Why would he come alone?” I finally asked. “If the kid attacked you, he was too much of a coward to—”
“I’m not interested in playing your little detective game, Phillips. He didn’t find me. I found him. You told me what he looked like and what he planned to do so I tracked him down. Not because I was scared or I wanted to strike first but because I could. Because I had an excuse. I wai
ted till he left the bar and I jumped him.”
I’d always remembered Pete as garrulous and flowery; he was a diplomat, after all. I’d never heard him speak so plainly about anything.
“He was just an angry kid, Pete.”
“I know.”
“So, you don’t feel anything?”
“Like what?”
“Guilt?”
He smiled with the half of his face that could.
“Yeah, I do. But you know more than anyone why that doesn’t matter.”
“Do I?”
“Yeah. Because guilt feels good. Well, it feels a hell of a lot better than the other demons singing in my head since this world shat itself out all over the place. Sure, this is bad, but I’ve seen worse. I’ve lived through far worse. And I’d rather be ashamed of the things I’ve done than ashamed of the things that others have done to me.”
The logic tried to fit into my ears but I didn’t want to let it in.
“You want proof, Fetch? Look in the mirror. You hold on to guilt like it’s a life preserver. So angry at yourself, and your mob, that you can’t smell the blood on the hands of the rest of us. But it isn’t about you and your kind tonight. It’s just me. Sometimes, the one who looks like a monster turns out to be a monster.”
He shrugged and turned away, and there it was; the scratch that causes the infection.
Pete was right. There are a million reasons why Rye could have disappeared but there was one that I was hoping for. If this was done by Humans, or because of the Coda, then I could take out my anger on my kind and myself. That was the world that made sense to me and that was the story I wanted to hear.
But maybe the monster isn’t in the mirror this time. Maybe he’s the one with the fangs who spent hundreds of years hanging on for dear life.
My brain was too tired to form any conclusions, but there was a bug in it now. I’d been looking at the world through grimy glasses; blinded by too many days down in the dirt. The infection grew slowly as I scraped my feet back into town and up the stairs.