Left Hand of Doom

by Mike Allan

  The shot cracks out from the bricks up and to the right. Phillips whistles and the bullet zips wide and kicks off the wall to his left. Another four shots, but they all veer around him. He grunts out some unintelligible syllables and a bite of the rooftop bursts into a cloud of red brick dust.

  We thought his power might go this far. We decided to risk it anyways. Just because you can hear everything doesn't mean you're right about what you hear. How many people thought Hendrix was singing about kissing dudes in that one song? And there's ways to make things quiet. Some tape, some cheap socks, even a garland of grenades is pretty quiet.

  I yank on the string linking them all together. The handles ping and cartwheel through the air. The grenades dribble at my feet. Phillips drops me. I scurry back towards the Hour and dive down the stairway. Three seconds. Two. One.

  It’s almost as loud as the crossroad titan’s shout. Dust and bits of alley rain down on me. After a moment I get up the nerve to crawl up the stairs and peek my head out. Where Phillips stood hangs a cloud of smoke and grit. A whistle cuts through the ringing in my ears. A sudden puff of breeze shreds the cloud, revealing Phillips at its center. His new left leg is almost done. Sound strands tug his unhinged jaw back into place. A glowing latticework stretches over a scoop of exposed brain, slowly filling in, grid by grid.

  I head for the door. Time for my plan. The real plan. The one I didn’t tell Jack and Liz about. Because I was hoping this one would work, shitty odds or not. Step one, get through the door.

  The door’s locked. I kick at the handle, again and again, jarring pains shooting up my leg. About two thousand kicks and two hours later the handle bends and breaks. The next one tears out a hunk of jamb and the door swings inward, then snaps on a heavy chain.

  “Shitshitshit.”

  There’s not much room in the landing, but I back up to get a running start and throw myself at the door. The chain groans but holds. I climb up a few stairs and fling myself down. The door doesn’t budge beneath my one man mosh.

  “Eddie.”

  Phillips stands at the top of the stairs. He raises his left hand, the swirling sound stuff showing through his shredded, smoldering gloves, and snaps his fingers. I leave my boots behind for the flight into the door. The chain tears off the wall. So do the hinges. So does most of the skin on my back. Step one complete.

  Door and I crash into the bar. My right arm snaps, the sound a toothpick pop, but I don’t feel any pain. A stool topples and one of the legs glances off my head. Through the blur of tears and pain I see it. Still there. The cops didn't take it for evidence. Purd didn't bring it home.

  Fighting back pain, I clamber over the bar and up onto the chest cooler to reach the Explorer. Phillips crunches down the stairs, kicks aside the bent door. I get the guitar positioned. It’s out of tune, but I only need the top two strings. Just a simple lick. Each motion of my fingers on my broken arm wrings tears out of my eyes. I pluck at the guitar, but no sound comes out.

  “That won’t work,” he says. “I cut you off after your ‘escape’, remember?” He shakes his head like a disappointed teacher. “As if anything you could play could possibly harm me.”

  “I know.” I keep plucking at the silent strings. “So just let me play. Just a little. Before you take me out.”

  He laughs. “Don’t be foolish. You don’t get to have a final moment. There’s no coda to your life.” He raises his hand towards me. “Goodbye, Eddie.”

  Bullets burst out of Phillips chest, dragging blood and sound corkscrews in their wakes. He wavers, just a little, and all of a sudden there’s sound coming from the strings. I set the world land speed record for tuning the top strings. As Liz bursts in, pistol in one hand and cymbal-ax in another. Phillips barks a word and an airy razor slices towards her. She dances aside, plants her feet, and swings. His teeth snap around the cymbal’s edge. Fissures march across the brass as his jaw tightens. She blasts the last of her clip into his face and it does absolutely nothing.

  There’s things you need for ritual. Blood I have, leaking from my shoulder, from half a dozen cuts and scrapes. Signs and marks, I have broken glass and the body of the guitar’s plenty soft. Amplification would be nice, but you don’t need it. I don’t not for this. I don’t need to go back far. I just need to go in.

  I don’t feel the pain in my arm anymore. I hardly feel anything as I shut my eyes and play. When I open my eyes the ground is white around us.

  Phillips freezes. His eyes go wide. “No,” he mumbles around a mouthful of cymbal.

  All three of us start to sink.

  I keep my eyes open this time.

  It’s just like I remember. White all around, billowing, pulsing. More horizons than there should be. Picking one and locking on stops the churning in your guts. Nobody wants to find out what happens if you puke in the Scape. Colors swirl out in the distances like food coloring drops in water.

  “Hey.” A voice I don’t know. Just someone calling out to a friend, maybe a stranger on the street to bum a cigarette or ask the way. On its journey out of the Scape the sound buffets me into a slow spin.

  "What've you done?" I look what I've decided is "up". Phillips tumbles end over end, flailing madly. His spinning and mine conjunct and for an instant our gazes meet. "What've you done?"

  A gentle sigh brushes me aside and into something solid. Liz. She grabs onto my wrist, spins me around. “What did you do?” Reverb bubbles behind her voice.

  “Just a little trick Phillips taught me. Takes us back in time.” I twist my head around. “Not very far though. Without an amp, probably only a couple of minutes.”

  “What good does that do us?”

  Down below us, or maybe above us, the Scape yawns open onto a before-Hour. Tumbling end over end up above us, Phillips' shouts turn to wordless rage.

  “When we go through, we’ve got a few seconds before the grabbies pull us back in and send us back to when we belong. We’ve got to survive that long.”

  “And then what?”

  “We hope titans hold grudges.”

  We come into the past just where we were--me behind the bar, the guitar in my hands, Phillips and Liz grappling out on the floor. Liz twists her ax out of Phillips’ mouth and drops into a ready stance. He ignores her, butt slides over the bar, and yanks the guitar out of my hands, but not before I jerk the top strings into slack uselessness. Cursing, he tosses the guitar from the future down and grabs its past self from above the bar. He whistles his artificial hand into a blade and cuts himself from elbow to wrist, splattering more blood onto the guitar. “Backmask,” he mutters. “Just play it back, get out before they come.”

  “Stop him!” Liz vaults over the bar, but I throw my arm across her path.

  Phillips takes a deep breath and plays.

  For a moment, nothing happens. Several more moments, nothing still happens.

  He plays again, hands bouncing madly up and down the strings. Eyes wide and searching, he looks at me.

  “It’s out of tune.”

  He looks down at the guitar, at the writhing mass swarming towards us through the floor. He laughs. A tentacle whips around his arms. “Never was much of a player.”

  The tentacles shriek as they drag us through the Scape, down and up and around the rolling clouds. Bursting through a thick bank of foggy, funky bass notes, the city stretches out below us. Like everywhere in the Scape, it offers no comforting horizon or orientation to latch onto. Ouroboros spires curl back and devour themselves. Domes flicker between concave and convex. What might be streets writhe and wriggle over each other. Somewhere beneath/above/within that place is the vault I broke into when I tried to steal the G5. Deeper, or higher, or whatever, there’s the ursound. The perfect sound of which even the lowest and slowest of skull crushing riffs is just a shabby degeneration.

  Liz starts to scream. I know that scream. It belongs to someone who’s never seen the place before.

  “Put your eyes on one spot!” I try to reach her but the tentacles j
ust coil tighter, their endless yowling pitching higher. “One spot and focus on it! Don’t try to make sense out of it.” Good advice in general, actually.

  We descend towards an open space among the leaning, quivering towers. The tentacles go silent, then release us to fall onto what feels like concrete. Groaning, I push myself up to hands and knees. On her feet already, Liz’s arm wobbles as she raises her pistol at Phillips, still curled up on the ground. Something catches her attention and she lowers her arm. I follow her eyes.

  We’re in a circular courtyard, surrounded by senseless columns. Out past fetal-position Phillips, seven titans march in a wedge. The titans on the wings halt suddenly, but the one at the point strides towards Phillips. Its eyes blaze red. Screaming, Phillips unfurls and scrabbles back like a spooked crab.

  The titan punches through his chest without breaking stride. The cracking bone tolls like thunder. Phillips’ back arches into a spine snapping peak. The sounds fly out of him in strands, out his nose, out his eyes, his mouth. His hand unravels like an old tour shirt worn a few too many times. The titan gives him a last shake and lets him fall.

  It turns towards me. Its eyes fade to coal black.

  “Thief.” The voice booms inside my brain, ricocheting against the inside of my skull. “We pay our debts.” It raises one hand and signs. “Thank you.” I know that one.

  For a moment I just stare at it, wondering what to do. It doesn’t move. Before awkwardness completely curdles the moment, I turn and go, giving Liz a shrug. Hesitating, she decides to follow me. The city around us dissolves. The ground congeals to wood under our feet. My foot stomps onto the dented front door.

  Sirens doppler closer. Liz grabs my elbow. “Come on. Let’s a find a speaker and we’ll jump through.”

  It's a good idea but hell if I'm going to tell her so.

  “Hey, Liz. Thanks for taking a chance.”

  She doesn’t even glance over her shoulder. “I hear about you fucking around with sonomancy again I’ll find you and put a bullet through your eye.”

  I chuckle. Not that I doubt her, but I have a feeling she won’t be able to get to me before the titans do if I start sticking my fingers in where they don’t belong.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “I know.” Does make we wonder, though, what's next. I've hardly ever known the answer to that. Still don't.

  Purd’s back’s to me as I step down the stairs. A chunk of plywood on cheap hinges hangs slightly askew and ajar. It doesn’t creak as I push it open. Her broom whispers across the floor, sending glass tinkling.

  “We’re closed. Maybe for good this time.”

  I wince. “Hey.”

  Her back bunches up and her hands tighten around the broom handle. Her gaze bounces off the mirror behind the bar and skewers me. “This you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You learn from this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Such a fucking liar. Well, I can’t say I warned you. I told you to do what you wanted. Fuck me, right?”

  I don’t laugh.

  “You want anything else?”

  “Just came to say hey.”

  “Hey. Now get the hell out.”

  I open my mouth, snap it shut. I don’t know what I came down here for. Sometimes people won’t forgive you, and you’re an asshole for expecting them to.

  I turn around and walk up the stairs.

  The rain sizzles on the pavement, turning it slick and black like a spider’s belly. From over the drooping roofs a church bell tolls. There’s certain things you need for a rite. Blood. The right stars. A venue swirling with energy. There are certain things you need to play music that anybody will actually care about. Electricity. Speakers. An instrument. But when it’s just you, walking home after another self-induced disaster, your hands and your lips do well enough to wring a few minutes of certainty out of things.

  “What is this that stands before me?”

  END