Burning Sky

by Weston Ochse

  Chapter One

  Six Months Later, Los Feliz, Suburb of LA.

  BRYAN STARLING AWOKE in a pile of his own vomit, the taste of bile-coated Fritos, beer, and pepperoni pizza coating his cheeks, nose, and lips. His eyes beheld a sideways universe where the floor was one wall, and the kitchen was another. Stacks of pizza boxes and plates rested against the counter, miraculously not falling, even though they were at an angle to the ground. A brown creature stroked its mandible beside his eye. Then he watched as it reached out and blurred, now too close for his eyes to adjust.

  He groaned, causing the creature to run.

  He blinked once, then fell back into a stuporous sleep where a thin white goat held by a young girl in a dress lapped water from an underground cistern. He watched the creature for a dream eternity, until it turned to him and bleated.

  His eyes snapped open and he felt leathery whiskers tickling his face.

  The creature fell off and backed away, seeming to appraise him.

  His eyes widened. A cockroach—it had been chewing on his eyelashes.

  He scooted away, brushing frantically at his face.

  His sideways world tilted right side up as the wall became a floor, sending his stomach lurching at the shift. He dry-heaved, a thin string of stinging bile finding its way out of his mouth. He spat it onto the floor, then turned and sat roughly on one haunch, trying to think what the last thing was he could remember.

  Flashes of—

  A line of half-snorted coke.

  The glowing orange end of a joint, then him toking like a furious Hunter S. Thompson.

  A neon sign with the image of a girl sitting in a martini glass, legs askew.

  A knife smearing peanut butter onto a pepperoni pizza, then shaking a bag of crushed Fritos onto it.

  The bulging eyes of a dying Afghan man, tongue protruding.

  Starling slammed his eyes shut and vigorously rubbed his face, as if the motion could wipe away the images, but the visage of the man stayed with him until the life was choked out of him and his head sagged to the side.

  That hadn’t happened last night.

  That had been a long time ago… the problem was that it hadn’t been long enough ago.

  Starling shoved himself unsteadily to his feet. His mouth tasted like a dry lake where frat boys had thrown the mother of all parties. He stumbled to the bathroom and caught the nightmare of his face in the mirror. Bags under his eyes, sallow skin, crusted puke at the corners of his mouth: he was anything but a boy scout. He’d fallen far and fast, only he didn’t know why. It seemed like just a few days ago when he’d been the leader of an Operational Support Team, finishing a successful tour, his team members going their own ways, deployment cash and danger pay filling their pockets, fueling their dreams.

  And now look at what he’d become.

  He’d been a tall six-foot-four, two hundred-pound US Army Ranger who’d left the service after eleven years to work contracts in and out of Afghanistan. After a couple black-ops contracts that were more sitting than doing, he’d found himself leading an operational support team and recognized that the multiple daily missions gave him the necessary adrenaline he needed to fuel his excitement-junkie soul. With wide broad features and red hair, he’d been the quintessential Midwestern boy next door. He’d gone to church every Sunday, been an Eagle Scout, and had a bachelor’s in American literature from Iowa State University. He’d been that guy everyone wanted to be.

  Until now.

  Now he was roach food.

  Sure, he was still six-foot-four, but now he weighed two hundred forty pounds, most of it packed onto his gut, making him slump, bent forward like a man twenty years his senior. His once perfect hair was now stringy with sweat and dull from being unwashed. His eyes were hollow, devoid of any of the passion that had once powered his every breath.

  Staring at himself, he hated what he was seeing and slammed his fist into the mirror, shattering it. Blood blossomed from his hand and dripped into the dirty sink. He turned on the faucet, ignoring the shards in the basin, and ran water over his cut knuckles. The water went from red to pink and he shook his head in defeat, droplets spraying everywhere.

  How much longer could he live like this, if you could even call it living?

  He felt a vibrating in his left pocket.

  He shoved his hand in, felt around, and came out with a phone. Without thinking, he answered it. “What is it?”

  “That’s all I get. No hello? No good morning?”

  Starling flipped through his mental Rolodex. Who the hell was this?

  “What’s wrong, Bryan with a Y? Cat got your tongue?”

  Larsson. Fucking Larsson. “What do you want, Larrson?”

  “I have an address for you.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “You’ll know what to do when you get there.”

  “What’s the price?”

  “Five large.”

  “Make it ten.”

  “Five.”

  “How about eight?”

  “Five.”

  “Six?”

  “It’s five, Bryan with a Y. Now get your ass over there and take care of business.”

  Starling wrote the address in blood on the wall beside the broken mirror, then took a picture of it with his phone.

  He cleaned up as best he could, finding the least dirty pair of jeans and an old shirt that said Army of One amidst a wave of wrinkled gray. Rather than wash his hair, he took an electric razor to it and shaved it to a stubble that matched what he wore on his face. He didn’t have any Band-Aids, but he did find some duct tape. He took a kitchen towel, tore it into strips and used it to bind his bleeding knuckles, then used the duct tape to keep the towel in place.

  When he was ready to go, Starling searched around and spied a half-open bottle of water. He took it, sniffed it to make sure that’s what it was, then slung it down. He grabbed the 9mm from where he kept it under the sofa cushion and slid it into a holster in the small of his back. He shook his T-shirt to ensure it covered the area, then he was out the door.

  He waited at the bus stop with two homeless men, an elderly woman going grocery shopping, and a kid with a skateboard. He watched as the kid appraised each of them. Starling tried to stand a little straighter and a little taller. Even though his clothes were of the same caliber and cleanliness as the homeless men, he didn’t want to be categorized with them. The kid must have noticed because he sneered and shook his head.

  Starling turned away and stared at the graffiti painted on the metal side of the bus stop.

  TRES DIABLOS

  FREE BLOWJOBS CALL 1-800-YOU-SUCK

  SUZIE LOVES STEVE COCK

  MISSING GIRL – HAVE YOU SEEN HER

  His gaze focused on the last line. An emptiness filled him until he wanted to sob. His body was a vessel full of nothing and that nothing weighed him down until he felt like falling to his knees. He turned sluggishly, his vision narrowed to a claustrophobic monocular, as if he were living from the end of a telescope. Then, as if as an afterthought, he noticed vaguely that the world had stopped, everything freeze-framed and silent. He reveled in the oddness of it, honing in on the minute details of everything to help him forget the vacuum inside. Then something moved at the corner of his vision. Deep blue skin glinted in firelight. Talons curved at the end of long fingers. A hunger began to eat at him. He tasted blood in his mouth.

  A metal-on-metal squealing jerked everything back. The sound of the big city hit him. The sudden movement dizzied him. He grabbed onto the side of the bus stop with his duct-taped hand to steady himself.

  “Fucking crackhead,” said the skateboarder, a look of disappointment on his face, as if he were his mother or drill sergeant or both. Then the kid shook his head and skipped through the door and to the rear of the bus where he found a back seat to slump in.

  Starling let the others on the bus ahead of him as he regained his senses, then found a seat next to a man eating a giant pretzel, white salt turn
ing his lap and the front of his shirt into ski slopes in miniature. Pretzel man gave Starling a wary eye and shifted so that he could eat his killer carb load in semi-privacy.

  Starling lived in a third-floor apartment in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. He had a view of the hills from his window, but other than that, it was just what it was—a studio he could afford in a community that was as lost as he was. Two transfers and seven blocks later, Starling found himself walking down 8th Street in Koreatown. He passed a flower shop next to a market, then a noodle shop. At Harvard, he turned south and headed down to the next block. Three houses in on the left, he found the bloody address on his phone. A sprawling multi-family unit took up the corner, surrounded by a fence. The second structure in was a tiny Craftsman with a ten-foot fence—the sort of barrier he’d expect in an industrial section and not around a home. Strange. The third house was also a Craftsman and didn’t have a fence. No cars were parked in the driveway. Nothing lived in the dirt front yard.

  A Korean man walking his dog gave him a long look, the sort of look you’d do when you figured you might need to give a description to the police. The dog looked like a muscular miniature poodle whose pure-bred mother had probably been had by a stray Pitbull. The upturned nose matched that of its owner.

  There were two kinds of people who lived in this neighborhood, and Starling was neither of them. Koreatown was in the middle of the city and was treasured for its location. This was an older neighborhood filled with Koreans who hadn’t been priced out by gentrification. The occasional Lexus or Land Rover in a fenced driveway told of upwardly mobile professionals who could afford to drop dime on run-down older Craftsmen homes and turn them into showcases. Starling saw evidence of this here and there along both sides of the street.

  Starling rubbed his newly shaven head and grinned at the older gentleman.

  The Korean’s expression never changed—probably click, click, click—taking mental pictures for a future line up.

  Starling waited for the man to turn the corner. When he did, Starling hurried up the home’s broken sidewalk. He stepped onto the porch and tried to see through the curtain on the door’s window, but it was too opaque. He tried the knob. It was locked.

  Glancing behind him, he moved to the right side of the porch, vaulted over the railing, and landed on the driveway. He almost fell but was able to catch his balance at the last second. He followed the driveway around the side of the house. A few stubborn clutches of grass wouldn’t give into the imminent domaincreep of dirt. On the right was a detached garage, doors closed. A colorful mélange of shirts and pants hung on a clothesline. He could see by the way they moved in the breeze that they were all but dry. That made his job simpler.

  There were stairs to the back door, but also a handicapped ramp. He found a place beside the back steps and squatted down to wait. He kept his mind dull and his body alert, much like he’d done on countless operations, waiting for the enemy to show, willing the action to happen.

  Ten minutes later, the doorknob turned and the inner door opened. The screen door protested, then slammed back in place. A twenty-something Korean woman in yoga pants, tennis shoes and a bathrobe hurried down the ramp to the clothes. She stuffed them into the plastic basket she’d brought out with her. When she was finished, she turned and went back to her house. It wasn’t until she was almost to the back door that she saw him squatting against the side of the house.

  He barely had to lift the pistol in his hand to make her understand his purpose.

  Together they strode inside, tears in her eyes, his own heart turning to stone for what he was about to do.

  Chapter Two

  Later, Koreatown

  STARLING FOLLOWED HER through a sparse kitchen with an old Formica table and matching red vinyl and chrome chairs that hearkened back to the sixties. A twenty-year-old refrigerator hummed loudly, almost covering the sound of his boots on the wood floor. The interior smelled of pine oil with a hint of something rancid.

  She left the basket of clothes on the table, then continued into the living room with him close behind. She bypassed the couch and threw herself into a low-slung library chair—one of a pair that faced the couch. She pulled an E-cig from the pocket of her bathrobe and took a deep drag. Then she blew out a prodigious amount of vapor, which temporarily hid her face. When the cloud dispersed, he noticed that her lower lip had curled into what could only be a sideways grin. Gone was her defeat, now replaced with a look of irritation.

  Starling glanced around the room. Four corners. A sofa and another chair. A glass coffee table rested on a flower-patterned throw rug. The wood-paneled walls made the room look dark. A fireplace took up half of one wall. Stairs and a hallway took up the opposite. A large picture window with the curtain pulled was by the front door. The only brightness in the entire room was the white popcorn ceiling.

  “What’s your name?” Starling asked, his pistol at his side rather than pointing at the girl.

  “Don’t you know?” she asked. Her words still held a vestige of her Korean heritage.

  He regarded her for a moment. Her hair was cut into a bob, which accentuated her high cheekbones and long neck. He shook his head. “Sometimes I’m surprised at the sheer amount of shit I don’t know. I’ll ask again. What’s your name?”

  “Joon. Joon Park.”

  “Do you know why I’m here, Joon?”

  She stared at him for a long moment, inhaling, then exhaling. Finally, instead of answering she asked, “Why do you keep doing this to me?”

  This took him aback. “What do you mean? I’ve never seen you before.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “I’ve never been here. You must be mistaken.”

  She took another drag from her e-cig and stared at him.

  “Are you saying you know me?” he asked.

  She sighed. “You always act so innocent until you’re not.”

  He began to pace. “This makes no sense.” He rubbed the tip of the pistol against his temple, then tapped it hard against the side of his head. He glanced at her and shook his head. “Why would you say any of this?”

  Her half smile fell as she pushed herself back in the chair, lifting her feet into it and hugging her legs. “Please don’t hurt me again.”

  His eyes narrowed as he tried to understand the sudden shift. Just a second ago, she hadn’t been afraid of him even though he carried a gun. Nothing had changed. All that had passed between them was the same thing that would have passed between two strangers in a store, with the exception of his pistol and the fact that Larrson had sent him. Then he realized what he’d been doing with the pistol.

  “What makes you say that?” He waggled the pistol in the air for a moment, then slid it back where it belonged. “Why do you think I’m going to hurt you?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?” she asked. She relaxed a little and took another drag off her E-cig and on the exhale said, “I think you’re messing with me. You come here acting like you don’t know anything, but we know different, don’t we?”

  His frustration crescendoed. He felt like punching Larrson in the face. What was it he was supposed to do? As it was, he felt damn stupid standing in the middle of a Koreatown house not knowing why the fuck he was supposed to be there. His usual job of evicting crack addicts who’d taken occupancy of abandoned homes or of getting money from street thugs they owed their loan shark was something he could handle.

  But this?

  Whatever this was, he didn’t want to be part of it.

  He started to back away.

  “Larrson sent you, didn’t he?”

  This stopped him. “How do you know?”

  “He always sends you.”

  “Me?” He swallowed. “Did you say he always sends me?”

  Instead of answering, she asked, “Ever wonder if you’re a character in the wrong story?”

  “What is it you’ve done?” he asked.

  “They never tell me.”

>   They? Who is they? “But you must know.”

  “I don’t know anything. I just want you to stop coming.”

  How many people had Larrson sent? What was it she’d done? Why was he here? Normally, it was an obvious answer: a coffee table full of coke and cash, a pimp with a bruised and black-eyed woman gripping his sleeve, or even a drunk with a dented fender, blood and hair still clinging to the metal. But this was something completely different.

  “You have to tell me what you’ve done so I can fix this somehow.”

  She let one of her feet stray from the protection of the chair and onto the floor. She took another immense drag of her E-Cig and blew it out. “I haven’t done anything. I’m just me.”

  “I’m just me,” he repeated. “You have to have done something, Joon.”

  “You’re certain about that?”

  He sighed. “There’s very little I’m certain of nowadays.”

  He glanced around the room, searching for evidence of her life—pictures, trophies, knickknacks brought back from Disneyland or Hawaii or Mexico… anything. But there was nothing, not even any photos. The mantle was empty. The walls were empty. Even the table between the chairs only held a lamp. It was like he’d walked onto a Hollywood set instead of into a house. He spun, turning, searching, eyes narrowing. There had to be something. She had a basket of clothes. The kitchen was lived in. There had to be some evidence that she existed.

  “What’s wrong with him, Mommy?”

  Starling turned to the new voice and almost fell backwards.

  It was a boy, perhaps ten years old, with wide eyes. He was Korean like his mother, but had a pure California kid accent. His black hair was tousled. He had on shorts and a shirt that read I Heart Venice Beach with an actual heart in place of the word. But the physical blow that shoved Starling to his knees was the rest of what he saw. The boy sat in a low-slung wheelchair, the kind you steer with your mouth. His legs ended at nubs where his knees had been. His arms ended at nubs where his elbows should have been.