The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  He was still telling him. Naggingly, like a whining child. No but really I am.

  Emilio had ordered a pair of backups to stand down on the first floor. Their guns were enormous, too, and well made. Begrudgingly they assumed their posts and Emilio took Bauhaus up alone. This was personal, a matter of sullied honor.

  He acknowledged a chance, however slim, that he might not get the big come of killing both the whore and his sleaze weasel ex-runner. Only if he was beaten and dying would he summon his cavalry.

  '307. It's his.' Bauhaus' eyes were beginning to track independently of each other.

  'Keep your voice down.' Emilio hoisted him ahead. He'd be good as a shield, if nothing else.

  'Wanna gun.'

  'Shut the fuck up.'

  As soon as Emilio released his arm Bauhaus sat down hard, as though bonked on the noggin. They both heard a door close on the floor just above them. Footsteps in a big hurry, thumping toward them around the close turns of Fergus the landlord's rickety landing.

  When the black kid rounded the turn he saw a shotgun concentrating on filling his nostrils. He jammed to a stop with the fear of a bust bright in his eyes. He had a sling bag over each shoulder and was not in a social mood.

  'Awww, shit.'

  It was comic but Emilio wasn't set to chortle. 'Who the fuck are you? Say now.'

  'I'm Ajax and I'm moving out as of now. I ain't gonna stay here. Too fuckin' many people with guns pointing at me all the time. I don't wanna get shot and dead; I wanna leave. Please.' He shrugged. 'That's about it.'

  Emilio's voice was kept low, resoilant, invisible. 'I want Cruz.' The bore of the riot gun stayed where it was and Ajax started perspiring.

  'Don't know him, man, listen, I got to-'

  'Wrong answer.' The gun got ready to do something other than protect a Witness.

  'Uh. ' Ajax 's reality was hastily redefined in terms of big moby gun. 'Cruz. Right. Brown motherfucker. Like you. I mean, one of them Hispanic dudes, right? Black jacket, like a, uh, whatcha call 'em… army jacket, y'know? He's number 307. I seen him a little while ago. He's got a goddamned gun too. Pointed it at me, too.'

  'Where upstairs?'

  'Right off the landing. Right around the corner, man. It's like, I look out to see what all this motherfuckin' noise is and I…'

  'Keep your voice down.'

  'Yeah, right, and I, uh, seen all this hardware, all this firepower, man, and I say to myself, I cannot deal, 'cos guns scare me, y'know, and I get confused, and 'Fuck off.' '

  There was just enough room for Ajax to skin past and embrace whatever life awaited him outside of Kenilworth. With him went Cruz's tape player and camera, stolen a while back from 307, which had been left open and empty.

  Ajax hit the foyer and fled into the backslapping fronts of snow. Even the worst blizzard in ten years was preferable to the brand of white-boy lunacy he'd just ducked.

  ***

  It was the evil opposite of birth. Anti-birth.

  Cruz squeezed through headfirst in a spurt of blood and discharged necrotic tissue, anointed in smegmatic ichor that glowed the same color as the coating in the tunnels.

  He emerged into the last place Kenilworth remembered him to be, inside of Jonathan's apartment. Mistaken data. Who knew from accuracy in matters such as these?

  It was a disaster area of staved-in carton and strewn possessions. The eastern window, facing Kentmore, had been totally destroyed; a pyramidal hummock of snow was rising on the floor. The dresser mirror was fogged with the cold. Blood gleamed from the walls.

  Cruz located a towel and mopped at his face. The jellied mucous clung tenaciously, prohibiting his pores from drawing any of the fouled air. It reeked of liquid putrefaction. He had been tackled by the Blob and slimed. It hung like setting gel in his hair when he raked fingers back through it.

  Christ, but this place had been wrecked.

  The walls had skewed inward. The ceiling had bowed down far enough for Cruz to bump his head on the light fixture. The place was unstable and hazardous. He heard water dripping.

  When the black cat rubbed against his leg, he nearly threw a clot.

  You have got gook all over you.

  Cruz jumped; the shock was a physical pain deep in his head. How could that be? The brain wasn't supposed to have any nerves to feel pain.

  Irate, he refused to tread air in this rat-trap, talking meaninglessly to a cat and waiting for another tremor to collapse the entire building. His system was flying loops with the White Lady; he wished he had the leisure to suck some base and flower out. He did remember to load the Sig Sauer's spare magazine.

  Then he remembered to put it into the gun.

  The dope had been lost, but not the battle. At least he was packed.

  His wheezy respiration, his slurred speech had been left behind with the tunnels. He felt amped and in regained control. Back in Dade there had been pals of his - Cobalt, Dice, Klondike - who did five grams a day and pulled guns on anybody who talked back. Uncool. Very.

  Voices in the hallway. Clumping on the stairs.

  He eased around the inside door of the airlock. The cat persisted in pushing through first.

  'Piss off, comewad,' he whispered.

  You smell just loverly your ownself, big guy.

  Cruz snapped the action - silently - and opened the exterior door to 207, stepping out.

  Ajax thundered away in a mondo hurry. Smart people did that when you pointed ordnance at their heads. Even idiots, sometimes.

  'Straight. Bet your fucking life I am.'

  Bauhaus was on the spoil. Emilio's hangover cocktail could do only so much patch work before it was rinsed away by the gusher of drugs presently altering Bauhaus' state at instant-replay speed.

  'Shut up.'

  There was no movement in the second floor hallway. Emilio backed into the turn and swung through, bringing the riot gun to bear on the unknown space. Nada. His eyes moved in synchronization with the bore, sweeping.

  The elevator dinged and slid up stable. Emilio spun on it and almost cut loose a round.

  The car was vacant. Bloodstains inside.

  He backtracked to Bauhaus, still sitting on the stairs, before this whacked-out fun-daddy could start feeling genuine pain and cutting some ruckus.

  Emilio assumed the third floor units were configured identically to those on the second floor.

  Bauhaus stopped on the landing and slumped where there was more room to sit. He looked like a whipped and pouting child; a whiner. Emilio thought, for my lack of a silencer, you get to live a while longer.

  He wasn't thinking of the shotgun, but of his backup piece, a matte-finish Bren Ten also selected from the armoire. Only a fool strolls in without a fallback, and he had two staggered box-column clips full of humungous ten-millimeter ammo.

  Two guns. Two clips. Thirteen steps. Two primary targets. One secondary plus improvisation. The oranges-and-apple mathematics of firefighting and tactical ops equals so much dead meat. Emilio always tried to score one hundred on his tests.

  He hugged the wall. Tight but a clear field.

  'Make her eat her own tits,' Bauhaus mumbled behind him. 'Chomp, chomp, such a fancy meal. Fucking cunt.'

  He saw the outer door to 307 hanging open. He closed in on it and lifted the knob so the door would not scrape back audibly as he entered.

  The figure standing in the room turned as Emilio booted the inner door wide and cut loose with the shotgun. By the time the shooting started downstairs, he was too busy to hear it.

  The damned cat had to dart out ahead of him. Goddamned animals, Cruz thought. Little booger-flicking monster.

  Bauhaus was already staring in his direction, his attention drawn by the cat, and here was Cruz stuck dead bang, framed in the doorway to 207.

  Sugar-tit son of a bitch! He should have kicked its black puckerhole down the elevator shaft when he'd had the chance.

  If Bauhaus had drawn down on him it would have been lights out. When the fat man got angry instead
of western, Cruz realized he was unarmed.

  He also got a closer look, in that instant, at Rosie's best Chi-town bud. Bauhaus looked freshly rolled from the compacting bin of a garbage truck. His clothing was askew; all wrong for someone so natty and fastidious. His eyeballs hung in caverns of purple darkness. His face was the color of bread dough misted with fever sweat. Cruz smelled fresh feces in the air.

  Bauhaus sat there and tittered.

  'You look like shit, kiddo.' Blood antiqued his dentition.

  You double. Cruz neglected to speak.

  'You are a lot of fucking trouble, my laddie. You are death. Why pick me?'

  Now was the opportunity to declaim, to testify, to bring home to this bloated leech some of the agony he had paid out.

  Cruz could not locate a single word. He couldn't even make his facial muscles editorialize for him. He raised the Sig Sauer a foot from his ex-boss' veiny nose.

  Bauhaus had already lost command of most below-the-neck motor functions. He could still loll like a beached bass, and flop the aimless paddles of his hands. His stink was bovine, primitive, and his gaze was the zombie stare of a sheep watching the oncoming sledgehammer.

  'Shit punk.' A spasm twisted his head to the left. 'Gahhh.' His tongue was gray and inflated.

  Cruz thumbed back the hammer of the automatic. He wanted no secret codes, no confessions. He was not starved for a neat homily that could right his world at the last minute. He pointed the gun. It was all he had to do.

  'What are you waiting for?'

  Cruz swallowed. So dry, his mouth. That would be all the dope. Yeah.

  Dope. That was how Bauhaus looked - strung out to the max. Blood and brain cells were dying by the millions in there. His mind was slamming shutters. CLOSED: SORRY WE MISSED YOU. His head would burst like a cantaloupe from the internal pressure.

  Capillaries were rupturing in Bauhaus' eyes, making their sclera the red glass tint that Cruz remembered from the Corvette. Soon his vascular plumbing would fill his lungs with blood and he'd drown from the inside out.

  Bauhaus stared down the barrel of the automatic. That prissy, pissy, put-upon expression Cruz knew so well resurfaced.

  'You haven't got the dick.' Pink froth speckled his Ups. One nostril blew a languid bubble of saliva. 'Lame. Limp. Dead meat. You're a corpse… and you don't even know it.'

  A horrid phlegmatic noise convulsed him briefly. Then he grinned with bloodied teeth. When he laughed in Cruz's face, foam slopped onto his chest.

  Cruz shut his eyes and fired four times.

  ***

  Emilio instantly tried to kill the creature he saw. His snap of the riot gun's trigger was instinctual, a survival reflex. The thing on the receiving end demanded to be erased from the earth. The good, sane earth of coke royalty, drug addiction and murder for comedy.

  The 'Slugger' round blew a baseball-sized hole through the upper left tit and made a wide, messy exit. The northern casement behind it was noisily terminated and a sleetstorm of glass knifed into the room, followed by the equally cutting attack of the blizzard.

  The thing grunted. The foot-poundage of the slug knocked it back one step. It looked up at Emilio as though it had just been hit with a turd snowball. Pique misted all of its eyes.

  Emilio skipped simple shock, pumping and firing again. The buckshot round hit with the force of ten thirty-eight caliber bullets all at point blank range. Shreds of clothing and flesh erupted in a violent rearward spray. The hair on the back of the creature's head twitched and wet stuff hit the wall.

  Emilio could see through its chest, and it was still standing there. He saw the eyes, too many and in the wrong places. He saw the blood dipped switchblade, then the razor.

  Fresh hot blood began to issue from the pellet holes in the wallpaper. Blood leaked from the casement to mar the fangs of glass still depending from the frame. It steamed in the furious cold.

  Emilio shucked and fired for every step it took toward him, snarling an incoherent warcry. When the magazine ran dry the thing was reaching for his throat.

  Emilio felt his shoulders hit the corner, felt his trigger elbow knock the door shut. He had not been aware that he had been backing away. He did not back off from anything. Still thinking artillery would rescue his ass, he cross-drew the Bren Ten as one black claw vised around his neck.

  He snapped the trigger professionally, then convulsively, until the pain made him stop.

  There was no leeway to puzzle what this thing could be, how it could be, or how it absorbed bullets like hand lotion. Emilio did not know it. It seemed to know Emilio, though.

  Pain in his throat. His shoes were off the floor. He felt his neck muscles herniate, dark patches of his own blood blossoming beneath his flesh.

  His hand found the platinum razor beneath his shirt, jerked the special chain. His thumb levered open the blade and he began to slash into the rotten chest and neck.

  Spitting into one of its eyes would have been as effective.

  The face leering into Emilio's own was an inept quiltwork of components - nose, eyes, mouth - disrupted by a diagonal fissure. Topside the flesh was pale, mottled with liver spots. The eye was a murky green. The other eye was a turquoise color, poked into mulatto flesh. Another eye in the left cheek was bright blue.

  Emilio could only reach to the thing's neck, where his razor bisected the gray eye of an old woman. Vitreous humor spurted like snot. His vision was beginning to flower with snaps of bright yellow light. He tried to kick but could not feel his legs.

  In the dresser mirror he saw his own face turning maroon, eyes bulging whitely. He saw other portions of himself through the perforated torso of the monster holding him up against the wall.

  The switchblade, growing from the hand that gripped his neck, sniffed toward his carotid artery and began to press. The thing was hacking back with its own razor now, as Emilio's thrusts and death-dealing surgery weakened.

  An arm, baby-sized, snaked from the thing's chest cavity and arrested Emilio's razor hand, python-tight.

  Emilio felt himself opening up downstairs.

  Fuckers. The world was choking on fuckers all lined up to take from him. His whole life. All takers.

  Hydrostatic pressure unmoored his eyes. He saw, in the mirror, jets of blood shoot from his ears and nostrils. He died two seconds after he was blinded.

  The monster released its deathgrip on Emilio's neck, and began taking, and taking, and taking.

  ***

  As Cruz pulled the trigger of the automatic he heard powerful gunfire upstairs. None of his business. He had his mind and hands full just shooting at Bauhaus.

  ONE: Chiquita wobbling barefoot on the rail, just out of reach as she teeters, then turns the fall graceful by pretending it's a high-board dive.

  TWO: She falls, arms swanned, the whole descent more fearsome because she doesn't make a sound all the way to the concrete.

  THREE: He rushes to the rail, leans, follows her with his gaze, tracking her like a NASA dish all the way to splashdown. His mind tries to force his eyes not to look. It is impossible to turn away from-

  FOUR: Impact.

  The shooting above comes faster, panic fire, then stops altogether. The sound is submerged in the riptide echoes of Cruz's own gunfire. The shots are nearly simultaneous.

  Chiquita's bikini bottom, the only thing she is wearing, snaps apart when she hits. Her ebony hair spreads to corona her head. She lands face down, twisted; Cruz can see her naked ass from ten stories up.

  'You're probably wasted and stupid enough to jump off, Chiqui. Go on. I dare ya.'

  Bauhaus' damning gaze had dared him to shoot, and he did. Four times.

  When Cruz opened his eyes he saw Bauhaus cringing, his body trying to roll into a ball like a dung beetle. He was quivering, eyes gone in tight wrinkles of closure that leaked tears. His mouth was soundlessly agape.

  Four bullet holes formed an arc in the wall just above his head. They began to bleed.

  Shivering, his hands bunched benea
th his chain, Bauhaus opened his eyes. Cruz was still standing there with the gun, and that was the worst scenario he could envision. It made him want to cry even more.

  'Bang,' Cruz said, and Bauhaus flinched as though shot in the ass.

  The red-lipped bullet punctures tore. Bleeding cracks in the wall stretched to connect with each other. The sound was mealy and meaty. Blood dripped to soak Bauhaus' winter coat.

  'You're not worth it,' Cruz said.

  He was not a killer. He was not to blame for the death of Chiqui, or anyone.

  'Hear me? You're not worth my time or ammo, Bauhaus.'

  Bauhaus was easing back into the wall. Being swallowed by it, as the cracks connected and sagged away. His eyes had rolled to whites; it was unlikely that he could even hear Cruz's big discovery as his head was engulfed.

  'Hey! You're not worth it!' His lips were peeled back. Bravery had rolled in too late, as usual. Now it did not matter.

  Bauhaus had cheated him one last time. When Cruz had finally worked up the spit to yell, Bauhaus was beyond hearing his comeuppance.

  Cruz hung around long enough to see the first coil of Kenilworth 's resident parasite loop around Bauhaus' midsection, to pull him into the wall like a hooked fish. The greasy dun-colored body slid and cinched. Bauhaus died with his mouth hanging open and his pants-full of shit. The drugs probably put him under before he felt much pain, or before the beast could bite.

  Cruz backed down the stairs and ran for the next landing. The flight impulse ruled his whole body, even atop the overdose of coke poisoning him.

  Home free, he thought as he barreled down the last set of stairs.

  Down in the eastern foyer of Kenilworth, the side of the building facing the street where Bauhaus' deceased hit man, Marko, lay entombed in snow, Cruz found that the doors and windows of the building had been forgotten.

  ***

  Mailboxes. A bulb on a dangling cord. No windows, no grate and no front door.

  There was no way out.

  After the creature with Jonathan's eyes appropriated Emilio's, it rose as erect as its crooked carriage would permit.