He could have met Charlie. Alive. He could have seen her, been seen, talked to her. Could have given her that smile, taken her out, turned into some awful, perfect two-headed monster—Charlie and Max, Max and Charlie—could have had a blissfully stupid, easy, fantastic life. Could have had a happily ever-bloody-after.
Only, not now, not ever.
He’d nicked himself shaving.
*
“You’re going to be good?” Charlie asked, smoothing her sleeves for the fourteenth time that evening, picking off bits of lint that didn’t exist and reordering the whole damn flat.
Max watched her, dizzy by the force of her flinging around.
“I’ll be good,” he repeated, also for the fourteenth time.
She nodded, picked up the remote. Flicked the telly on. Crossed her legs. Uncrossed her legs. Scrolled through every channel they had and some they stole from the bloke next door. Crossed her legs. Snapped the telly off.
“Don’t fuck this up, Max.”
“He’s not taking me out.”
“Max.”
“I’ll be good.” Fifteen.
He watched her. Only, sneaky, because being watched made her nervous and she already looked halfway to a heart attack. Charlie, normally his rock in the middle of a deep, deep dank cave, vibrated worse than a motel bed, fluttering off to the kitchen to rearrange the fridge, to glare at the sink, to take out a mug, put the kettle on, take the kettle off, over and over.
“Jesus, Charlie—”
“Don’t Jaysus, Charlie, me.”
“Have a sit, yeah?”
Halfway out of the kitchen, the light framing her back, she stopped and looked at him. Breath he didn’t have caught in his throat and Max didn’t know who the hell was coming, but he hated the bastard more than he’d ever hated anyone in his entire bloody existence.
Charlie looked… like Charlie. No fancy, slinky dress. No heels, no bright paint. Just a T-shirt, old jeans, and Max couldn’t begin to put a voice to the sheer injustice of this moment.
“Max, I appreciate the effort—”
“You don’t.”
“I don’t,” she agreed. “But look, tonight, you are not here. I don’t see ghosts. I don’t talk to a dead man who haunts my apartment.”
Well, Charlie looked like Charlie.
“Also, you’re never sarcastic, you love children and old people who drive slow in traffic, you never have an unkind word to say about public employees—”
“Max.”
“And you enjoy long hours waiting at the DMV,” he finished. “Charlie.”
She eyed him. “You are going to be good.”
“Yes, dear.” Sixteen.
She bared her teeth, ready to fly into him probably, but then the doorbell rang and she went rigid. Max hated the bloke waiting outside, but he hated the gray on her mouth more.
Gently, he said, “You’ll do fine, love.”
Charlie nodded. “I know.”
“That’s my girl.” He grinned, and he meant to say more, but then she opened the door with that enormous smile and blood started dripping down the back of his neck.
Outside, a moderately sized monster stood with a bundle of flowers and a sheepish grin, his shoulders filling the whole frame.
Mason.
Fuck.
He knew Mason. They’d been sort of friendly acquaintances back when he hadn’t been relegated to dripping nonexistent brain matter on the sofa. And other than his really awful “Mason the mason” joke, there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with him. A truly shining example of humanity. Put simply, Mason was fucking perfect.
“Hey.” He had a smile in his voice, like the one on his damn face wasn’t enough, showing a whole bunch of teeth and not a one crooked or knocked out from brawling. “You look gorgeous. You don’t really seem like a flowers and chocolate kind of girl, but I got these for you anyway.”
Half bewildered, Charlie accepted the bundle of flowers, took one look at them and laughed—fucking laughed—like she did it all the time.
“Origami?”
Mason the mason shrugged his freakishly huge shoulders, still fucking grinning. “Seemed more your style.”
She grinned and had to practically break her neck to find his head to talk at. “They’re awesome. Come on in. I want to put these in a cup or something.
“Sure. All right.”
As he walked inside, Max elbowed a bit up off the couch to watch, expecting Charlie to shoot him a warning glance on her way to the kitchen, but she didn’t even look. She just kept on smiling, holding a bunch of paper flowers and all right, yeah, it was a clever gift for a girl like her, but… but—
“Oh wow,” Mason said, catching sight of his shelves and his telly and his tables and his carpet and his fucking flat. “I thought I recognized the number coming up here.”
“Yeah?” she called from the kitchen and came out with a yellow charity-shop vase. It should have looked gaudy, but somehow everything sorted itself out pretty around Charlie. “Been here before?”
Mason smiled. “Friend of mine used to live here—Max Mulligan. Had some kind of accident, though. He leave all this behind?”
“Left a lot of it behind. I’ve been shipping stuff back to his parents when I can.” She plunked the fat yellow vase full of fat yellow flowers down on the coffee table. It looked adorable. Immediately, Max hated it. “There. Ready to go?”
Eyes like a damn dog, Mason looked at her. Full adoration, no doubt about it. “You’re fantastic.”
She grinned. “I am.”
He laughed and she laughed and they babbled inanities together, walking out the door arm in arm, already bubbling up into Charlie and Mason, and Max just sat on the couch like he’d been told to, bleeding into the fabric, watching them go.
The door closed. The deadbolt flipped. Footsteps padded down the hallway, out of earshot. A TV chattered on in the upstairs apartment, faint and angry. Someone sang down in the street. Maybe Mason. Maybe he’d made up a song for her. Charlie the Artist. Mason the Mason. The two-headed monster of fucking romance.
Max sat on the couch.
Mason didn’t have a thing in the world wrong with him. Not a plague or a birthmark or a bad attitude. Any girl would want him. He was big, but not dangerous. He could make anybody laugh, liked mild-mannered adventures, two beers after work.
He’d be great for her. They’d get married. She’d get knocked up with two point five real live babies and then that’d be it. They’d move.
She’d move.
Charlie was the only thing in the world that made him feel real anymore and she’d move.
Like hell he wouldn’t follow.
Max shoved up off the couch and walked out. Just walked out into the hallway like any other evening, off to the pub, maybe, or off to a concert. Something fun, something important. Three feet down the hallway and the sick of it hit him like a wave. He felt bits of himself breaking into static until he couldn’t. Couldn’t feel anything. Unanchored, a bubble of fear kind of swelling up all over, Max floated.
Coward, she’d called him.
He kept going. He needed to leave. Needed to get out and see the world again. Needed to be able to make sure Charlie was okay if he had to, but he couldn’t right now, being a damn coward hidden away from the world and the girl.
Max walked. He wrenched himself away from his flat and down the stairs, going farther and farther until even he couldn’t see himself, making his way through the halls as some kind of floating consciousness. But, what the hell, yeah? He never felt especially visible alive, so what’d changed?
It took some time. More than that night. More like a string of nights, over and over and during the day when Charlie went out, he went out after her. Barely a fragment in the window, some days he followed and some days he wandered, going further and further out like a roll of toilet paper tossed down the stairs. Either way, he didn’t give up. It took him a month to get good at it, but eventually, he could go wherever the hell he wan
ted.
And he wanted to go with Charlie.
*
Max trailed behind them as they headed down to Murphy’s, hand in hand and laughing like the monster he’d pretty much figured they’d become. Talking about shit that didn’t matter and enjoying it—stories about work, about people they’d seen and people they knew. One time, a story about him, but Charlie just laughed like she hadn’t heard it from his side already and flashed her ID to get into the bar.
Max made a face at the bouncer as he passed, thought about kneeing him in the ‘nads. Bloke had given him a fair bit of trouble over the years, after all, but he didn’t want to touch him and find out he couldn’t, so Max just followed.
Smell of beer hit him, twined up like an orgy in sawdust and peanuts and something fried and delicious that they’d not sold the year and a half before. Lights lit the low stage, giving off the smell of hot dust. He didn’t know the band playing but they felt good, low rhythm and steady beat and a woman with a great deep voice.
He followed Charlie, tracing the muscles cording in her arms as she leaned over the bar to order, tendrils of hair falling out of its tie to kiss the back of her neck. He counted the freckles on her knuckles, awash in the bland, clean smell of her cheap-arse shampoo.
Max touched her.
He didn’t mean to, but he couldn’t help it. He brushed a hand against her upper arm and watched the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up. Blindly, she reached out for Mason. Static arced between her fingers and the peppering of blond hair on his arms. He laughed, rubbed the spot, pulled her close.
Charlie leaned in, but didn’t smile, scanning the space where he hung and looking right through him. Max sank into the bar, feeling the backbeat through the wood.
Toilet paper, he thought. Stuck to her shoe.
*
When they left, Max followed, down the darkened streets, the conversation as inscrutable as their linked arms. Mostly, he drifted, feeling bits of him still in the bar and bits of him in the street the way they’d come. Halfheartedly, he started gathering up bits of his sad, one-ply self, just as a real can of piss rounded the corner. Wild eyed and raggedy, the bloke thrust out an outstretched hand mottled with filth, the other jammed deep in the pocket of his battered jacket.
“Don’t say nothing,” he barked. “Just hand over your money.”
Next to him, Charlie froze and glowered, her face a hateful rigor.
“Like hell, you fuck,” she growled, pulled a knife out of her pocket and flipped the blade open. Figured his Charlie’d have a switchblade, and it also figured it’d be as long as her forearm, but the black-eyed man across from her just snarled and whipped out a gun.
“I said gimme your damn money!”
Quickly as the giant freak could move, Mason pushed Charlie back and behind him, holding up a hand.
“Hey, now, buddy. Easy—” he started, but Max couldn’t hear him.
All his parts slamming together like a train wreck, Max flew, spanning the distance between Charlie and the gun in a half second to bash the fucker’s face in. He didn’t think about it. Didn’t have to think about it. Over and over, he just pounded him into the ground, fists slamming through his skin and into whatever sat behind, piloting this sorry sack of shite.
Jerking with the blows like some kind of ineffective, epileptic thief, the weasel bastard dropped the gun, hit the ground hard on his knees. Max followed, wrenching him upright to slam against the wall again. He barely even had a shape anymore, just a mass of rage and remembered motions—knee to the gut, punch to the skull, hadn’t had a row like this in ages and like fuck he’d let the bastard go. Not after pointing a gun toward his Charlie. Fucking no one pointed anything at his Charlie.
Choking and whining, the bastard mewled a whole circus of sounds: “please, fuck, help somebody, I don’t, sorry, can’t—” going on and on without making any kind of sense in between Max trying to have his teeth out. And then somewhere between begging God for his life and actually losing it, the shit bag must have realized the stakes. His eyes went wide, and for a second, he believed. Not much, not for very long, but enough to see Max.
Teeth bared, growling obscenities, he tried to land a dirty punch. His arm went straight through. It did wonders for Max’s mood.
“Gonna kill you,” the scumbag shouted. “Gonna rip your goddamn faggot head off!”
“Fuck you,” Max growled, reached all the way down into the blighter’s throat, and wrenched him out.
Wide-eyed and gawping, the man stared at him. His mouth opened and closed like a fish. He scrabbled back toward the sack of flesh he’d just been pulled from, crawling and clawing and trying to get back in, but Max kicked him solid in the gut, knocking him away and into the street, into mist, as his corpse slumped empty onto the pavement.
“You wanna fuck with my girl?” he bellowed after him, watching him disappear, watching him just leave, skipping off into the after when Max bloody couldn’t. “Come on, you wanker! Come on and fucking try it!”
Behind him, he heard Mason pulling Charlie away, hissing, “Fucking tweakers. Come on. Let’s just get out of here before he gets up.”
And then Charlie, with her voice dark, “He’s not getting up.”
Max turned. Mason held Charlie around the shoulders, putting himself between her and the body. But as they picked a wide, ginger circle around the body, Charlie stared Max dead in the face.
Bad dog, her eyes said. Bad dog, wouldn’t stop chasing cars, looking for somebody to gnaw apart, and now that he had, now that’d he gone and pissed all over everything, was he finally fucking satisfied?
Max bared his teeth at her. Charlie looked away. Had to. Had to go back to pretending to be sweet and normal, had to fold up that knife quick and jam it back down deep in her pocket with tension singing in her shoulders, rage in her frame.
Bad puppy, he thought. Bad, bad, disgusting puppy, rolling in corpses.
Only then, looking down at the empty body curled up against the wall, Max stumbled into a fucking brilliant idea.
*
It was easier than nicking coats at a party. He’d done that once or twice as a kid, and this was no different—climb in, walk out.
It felt dirty, disgusting as hell, but Max reached in and sank into the body on the ground anyway, filling out the abandoned flesh. Took longer than the coats to get all his limbs accounted for, but once he had a good grip on the arms and legs, Max stole one long, last look at the city through his old eyes and shoved his head down.
Panic closed overhead, snubbing out the light and Max scrabbled backward, through the dark and moist, trapped in the cavern of flesh trying to climb up and out—can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t—and then the body sucked in a great heaving breath, his eyes came open and Max looked around at the world like a brand-new baby.
His teeth felt weird. They were all different shapes, missing in different places. More or less, his body felt just the same—mealy and strange but holy shit, he was alive. He was fucking alive.
Max jolted up from the ground cheering and promptly stumbled over, heaving the contents of his stomach into the street.
“Fucking drunk,” someone muttered, and a group of teens in fur-collars gave him a wide berth walk around.
Max grinned into the gutter, wiped his mug on the back of his sleeve and grinned.
It took him a bit to get his new body under control and standing upright. But once he’d managed to work out the whole balance thing again—and there was some trouble there, the body off its face on something strange and very illegal—he went rifling through his new pockets and came up with wads of cash. Probably stolen, but fuck that.
Tonight, he’d eat.
*
Walking into the first fast-joint he found, Max bought a half dozen of whatever meat they felt like putting between two buns and plopped down on the edge of the cracked pavement outside to eat it. Just the squish of the bun under its waxy paper and Max felt like a kid again, a woman in his hands
for the first time and just that—bliss. He rinsed his mouth with a swig of cola. prickling ice cold little needles down his gums, and spat into the gutter.
And sitting on the pavement in the dark, Max ate.
He pulled buns apart just to feel the fluffy, half-crushed cheap white bread. Crunched sesame seeds between his new front teeth for the joy of it. Flaked apart salty, crap meat and pressed it flat against the roof of his mouth, sucking out the juices with pornographic abandon. Sour, crunchy pickles squeaked against his teeth, laced with mustard and fatty mayonnaise, and Max went through three burgers before he could slow down enough to chug down his cola, carbonation a clean fire that felt like coming back to life.
Wads of undercooked fries squished between his fingers, squelched between his teeth, hot grease flaying his gums with salt and wonderful, beautiful fat. Ketchup flecked his stubble, salt and grit under his nails. The body felt alien, but the grit felt like home.
When he put the last burger to rest and buried the wad of waxy, greased paper in a reeking, overflowing rubbish bin, Max felt like a new man. He pointed himself toward home and walked to the nearest petrol station. There, he bought one of those bloody stupid razors with the lather built right in. Washed his face and shaved in the gas station loo. He nicked a red line in that tricky spot by the ear, trying to navigate a whole new face, but he survived.
Max walked out of that gas station, hit the one the next block down and bought a box of Twinkies. They’d never tasted like much to him alive—gritty cream and dry cake—but now when the cake sucked the moisture from his mouth, coated his tongue with sugar and preservatives, it took his damn breath away.
Abandoning the box in the open side of an old skip, Max walked down a few blocks around the corner for the nearest ice cream place. Grinning like a puppy dog at the red-striped woman behind the counter, he got a banana split.
It felt like eating the Sistine Chapel. Strawberry syrup like sweet, perfect plastic. Lukewarm melted chocolate, banana thick with sugar, ice cream that tasted like cold air. Max wolfed it down, sucking air through his nose, smelling everything, touching everything. Sticky up to the wrists, arm hair matted with sugar residue—uncomfortable and full and alive.
Max sucked the last of the chocolate sauce from the spoon, tossed the plastic away as he walked out the door, and followed his nose to the street vendor two blocks down hawking hot, greasy slabs of pizza.
Dead on Arrival Page 5