Midnight Taxi Tango

by Daniel José Older

  A pudgy hand goes up.

  Karina points at the kid. “Musafa.”

  “You gave them African names too?” I ask.

  “Naw. Their parents did that. You know how some’a them white parents be.”

  All I can do is shake my head.

  “Jimmy has fingerprints.”

  “Shut up!” another little boy yells. His blue eyes well with tears.

  “It’s true!” Musafa insists.

  “Jimmy,” Karina commands. “Come here, love.” The little guy waddles through the pediatric throng, sniffling back a sob. “Yes, be strong, little mister. Don’t cry now. Lemme see ya hands.”

  He holds up both palms, but there’s nothing strange, no ink, no prints to speak of.

  “Musafa, what you mean Jimmy has fingerprints?”

  A girl in the front with strawberry blond pigtails and a bright pink jumpsuit stands up. “Not on his fingers.”

  “Where, Esme?”

  She walks up to us and lifts Jimmy’s superhero shirt. “On his body. Look.”

  I crouch down to squint at the shimmering blue markings on the boy’s torso. Musafa was right: little handprints crisscross his back and flanks. They’re not from dirt though . . . These are ghost prints. “Shit,” I say.

  “Ooooh!” the crowd of kids hums.

  “What we say about what Mommy and Daddy find out?” Karina says.

  “Nothing,” they answer as one.

  “Alright, then.” She looks down at me, and I can tell she’d just been playing cool for the kids’ sake. “What . . . the hell . . . is that?” Karina whispers.

  I stand up and turn because a strange motion flickers at the edges of my consciousness.

  Something is happening. My hand goes to my cane-blade as I scan the perimeters of the park. Nothing.

  “Carlos?” Karina says.

  “Keep the kids close,” I say. “Especially Jimmy.”

  “What is it?”

  At the far diagonal from us, a car’s brakes screech, and someone lets out a stream of curses.

  “What’s happening?” Jimmy moans.

  I’m about to tell Kia to keep an eye on things when I realize she’s nowhere in sight.

  “Where’s Kia?” I demand, fighting the edge out of my voice.

  Karina spins around, panicked. “I don’t know . . . There!”

  Kia has her back to us as she fast-walks toward a fat kid and a girl with a massive weave by the northeast corner.

  “Fuck.” I hop the small fence around the playground and break into a run. An eruption of translucent fluttering bursts to life along the northern edge of Von King Park. I hear a revving engine, see a newspaper fly up into the air beneath a streetlamp and start to drift down like giant falling leaves.

  “Kia!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Kia

  Renard Deshawn White.

  Dark brown like me and round and those perfect arms, thick as my thighs with great dangling dollops of flesh. Folds I coulda sunk into on a lazy Sunday, some Sunday locked forever in my imagination, some faraway woulda, coulda type shit, as in coulda been all mine but instead, instead, instead . . .

  Renard Deshawn White, sitting serene and stupid like a beached manatee on that park bench in Von King, Maritza perched on his lap, her long manicured fingers stroking his cornrows. Fuck this.

  If they’d been making out, that woulda been predictable. Fine. Make out. That’s ya girl. Alright. But this . . . this uninhibited performance of domestic bliss? Unacceptable. No little teenage love affair has any business looking this much like an ol’ middle-aged couple, no way, no how. It’s a ruse. Unacceptable, and unacceptable shit gets called as such. That’s how I move. And regardless of how I move in general, this is how I’m moving now: flushed forward on long strides, fists tight at my sides, face tight so they know I truly will smite down a bitch lest they test me.

  I’ll not be tested.

  No plan, no words formulated to blast out upon arrival, just fire and the simple truth that this shit, this shit, this shit will not stand. Nuh. Uh.

  Maritza turns first. Renny’s eyes are still closed, his head leaning back and his pleasant smile still splattered across his big, stupid, beautiful face. Her fingers stop caressing those cornrows; her mouth crinkles into a shrill frown.

  “What happened, babe?” Renny murmurs, and it’s then, in the second before he opens his eyes, that I remember my own eye, my newly damaged face, what a true disaster I must look like. My mouth drops open, panic rises in me, and instead of fire, nothing comes out: air. I wonder if I can vanish before he sees me, just be a story Maritza tells and surely she’s kidding; Kia would never roll up on us like that, right? Right?

  A commotion rises from the edge of the park, newspapers flutter down in the orange glow of a streetlight. I remember the disasters everyone keeps talking about, and then Renny looks at me, face scrunched with concern, and opens his mouth.

  The voice that says my name isn’t his though. If Renny did speak, it got run over by Carlos’s hoarse shout from behind me. I’ve never heard Carlos sound scared. The next thing he yells is “Run!” But I don’t run. I turn to look at him.

  The motherfucker is crazy. Carlos Delacruz is barreling full speed toward me from across the park. I don’t know where he thinks I’m going to run to. I don’t even know what I’m running from. Then his eyes go wide at something in the air between us, something I can’t see, and he pulls a long, shiny blade out of his cane. Behind me, Maritza lets out the girliest scream I’ve ever heard. I stumble back a few steps, and I’m about to run when an icy grip slides around my ankle, then up along my leg, and swings me around.

  A thousand tiny icicles needle into my neck. Pain blurs the world around me, a dull roar and a cloudy haze. Then the haze lifts and I’m looking into two wide translucent eyes. Dark rings circle them, and a shimmering face, its mouth stretched out into a scream, chipped, malformed teeth, buckets of gelatinous drool, an eternity of darkness down its throat. This is a child’s face, haggard and broken but still so young. Those eyes burrow into mine; I realize the ice on my neck is from its two tiny hands crushing my windpipe.

  The face takes up my whole vision—it’s pressed up so close to mine I feel the frigid air around it, its stale breath—but a figure stirs in the hazy world beyond this thing. Carlos. He’s poised to strike, that blade of his raised and ready. The thing turns and I see Carlos clearly—his brow furrowed and frown uncertain.

  I’m trying to figure out why he doesn’t just kill this demon-ass child mothafucka when the creature hurls into him, throwing Carlos on his ass. The sudden absence of pain is the first breath of air after drowning. I gasp, scramble a few steps, and then break into a run.

  • • •

  So many people have come out on this warm end-of-winter night, like their collective presence can somehow ward off whatever evil’s been plaguing this park. Surely that thing, that horrible, broken-faced, icy demon child of frosty fucking death will find one of the many other folks here to attack once it’s done eating Carlos’s soul or whatever. Or maybe getting shoved will wake Carlos’s aloof ass up and he’ll take care of business finally.

  Either way, I’m out.

  I dip and dodge between concerned onlookers, ignoring the stares and the icy feeling that hasn’t left me, cross Lafayette, skitter out of the way as a biker flies past and curses me out, and then cut around a corner and run hard. I don’t know where I’m going. Everything inside screams, Away, far, far away from that hell. I pass the Junklot where the old guys used to play dominoes beneath that dazzling dragon mural and the bodega I used to get candy at with Karina. Start to slow as a stitch erupts in my gut, cross another street, and then my hands are on my knees and I’m leaning over like I’m gonna hurl. Then I do hurl, right there in the street, just watery yellow crap—bile, I guess. And I look up, back t
oward the park, and then I scream.

  It’s just a hazy flicker in the night, but there’s no mistaking it: the demon child is a block away, swimming toward me in watery, uneven strides with its arms outstretched. I can’t move. A city bus passes, oblivious to the nightmare my life has suddenly become, and the whoosh of air wakes me up. One more glance—the thing launching upward into the sky, mouth stretching wide—and then I turn and run.

  My breath is still short—I don’t have much left—and immediately the sharp ache reopens beneath my ribs. Carlos is who knows where, and I have nothing to fight with, no idea even how to come at a ghost, but I won’t get got running. I whirl around, fire raging in me again, ready to die.

  It’s closing on me from above, long fingernails stretching, mouth twisted into a silent howl. My left legs shoots back, and I pivot just so, twisting my body out of the way. The ghostling rushes past with a chilly gust of air, spins back around and charges. For this perfect second, I am smooth. Born from unholy terror, this is my ginga. I don’t know how long I have before either this grace abandons me or I get strangled again, so I anchor my right leg and spin kick the little motherfucker right in the face.

  The air is chilly and thick on my foot. The ghostling hurls backward, and then something yanks it out of the sky. Another shimmering shape, this one taller, wider. It thrusts the demon child into the ground and unleashes a solid thrashing on it. My breath comes in sudden fitful gulps; my whole body shivers.

  The taller shape looks up: a woman’s face with a surly frown, eyebrows creased down toward each other. “You okay?”

  I don’t answer; I just stare at her with my eyes filling up with tears. Another shape appears beside her, a man. He peers down at the subdued child demon squirming under the woman’s shimmering foot.

  “Nice catch,” the man says. Then he looks at me. “She aight?”

  The woman shrugs.

  He looks back down at the demon, now writhing. “The fuck we gonna do now?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Reza

  Each tiny shuffle of my feet echoes through the tunnel around me. Water streams down the middle, and an ancient, moldy smell pervades the thick air around me. And I realize something, something I’ve been wondering about since the moment Charo reminded me how close we were to the house we tore up all those months ago: they are connected, the two sites. Some underground tunnel links one to the other and who knows how many more. And I’m in the dank belly of that tunnel, trying not to get my feet wet or make too much noise and gliding along toward those occasional muffled grunts. Or sobs. Or moans. Each one is a little different. I’m not even sure they’re all from the same person.

  I step forward and almost yell because my foot doesn’t find the floor; it just goes down into a thick, wet muck. I come down hard on the other knee, soaking that pant leg too, but stop myself from crashing all the way in and pull my feet back. When I catch my breath and make sure nothing’s crawling on me, I probe around the edges of the hole with my steel-tipped toe point. It’s not so large. I can easily hop across. The question is, how many more are there? And how deep do they go? I hadn’t wanted to use my flashlight because there’s really no better way to warn someone you’re coming than shining a light down a dark tunnel, but at this point I’m not even sure if it matters. I didn’t scream, but I’ve definitely caused some ruckus on the way.

  • • •

  Something else I’ve learned: I take power from my dapper. Perhaps I have some well-dressed angels watching over me, whoever they are, but when I have my slick on full charge, I am unstoppable in combat. It’s just how things work for me. And now my pants are definitely ruined, I’ve probably got some awful fungus living in my sock, and who knows what else?

  Up ahead, a dim light pours out of some larger room, delineating the edge of the tunnel. I’m so transfixed by it, I step forward again and slip into a world of shit, all the way to my waist in ick. I slosh forward. Things are rubbing against my legs and I don’t have to reach down to know they’re body parts. But I do. I do, and I pull out an arm. It’s thickly muscled and green with decay and it’s not the one I want, but now I know something; I reach again into the muck and retrieve another arm, discard it and then another and another. And then I stop, because the ring I gave Angie is staring back at me from the rotten, gray-green finger. It is connected to a hand, an arm. It’s not Angie’s—not the way I remember her. Peels of dead skin hang off the water-bloated forearm, and the whole thing is tinged with that sickly rot green. I don’t want to see the face. I can’t see the face. I have to see the face. I’m about to pull her all the way out when a scream bleats out up ahead. Then the walls around me come to life.

  It’s dark, so I can barely make it out, but everything is moving. It’s not just the walls. The black water froths with tiny ripples, and little shiny pale backs dip and wrestle across the surface. I catch the scream in my own mouth, bury it back down. Holding tight to Angie’s dead arm, I raise my eyes toward the edge of the tunnel. All the movement is directed toward the light. Shelly—it is her; there’s no doubt—is screaming like her skin is being flayed off. In between screams she whimpers, sobs, and pleads. It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard.

  I can’t lose Angie again. Not even her rotten corpse. I can’t. The burden of it is holding me up, but there’s nothing else to be done. I leave her hand sticking out of the water at the edge of the tunnel.

  The tunnel opens into a dim cavern. In the center, a cement platform rises out of the black water. Shelly’s dangling a few inches over the platform, suspended by ropes that reach into the darkness. There’s a pale man in a long black robe standing behind her, and beside him is a short, lopsided man with yellowish skin and a sweat-soaked button-down shirt. He looks familiar somehow; maybe I knew him during the Bad Years, although it’s hard to imagine forgetting a face as collapsed on itself and anguished as that one. Then again, there are a lot of things I’ve erased from that time.

  I have one Glock out and leveled steadily at the air around Shelly. She’s still in her clothes, but they’re hanging at weird angles, and she’s trembling, gasping, screaming. She’s between me and the two men. I can’t make out what they’re doing to her, but it looks like both have their pants on, so that’s something. All I need is for one of them to move just far enough away for me to get a clear shot. The water around me is still frothing with its millions of swarming vagrants; they’re paddling frantic billions of legs, propelling their shelled monstrosity selves toward the platform. They don’t even seem to notice or care about me, and that’s just fine, because it gives me the mental space to keep my aim steady.

  Just when I think I’m going to have to change my position and risk blowing my hiding spot, the tall, robed one steps to the side. Before I fire, I make out his face—a middle-aged man, white, with light brown eyebrows and a tensely furrowed brow. His eyes squint with intense concentration, and his mouth opens and closes in what I can only imagine to be some demonic prayer. He’s alongside Shelly now, reaching to her face with a long, ugly hand—too long, I think, just before I squeeze the trigger and blow a nice hole in it. My second shot rips through his chest. That should be the kill shot, but he doesn’t fall, just turns toward me.

  The little sweaty one roars, a terrible high-pitched sound that I wish I’d never heard, and then vaults across the water into the darkness of the far side of the room. He moves fluidly; he’s somehow short and gangly at the same time, and his head is so big and boxy it looks like it should throw him off-balance. But this one’s the least of my concerns right now, considering the guy who I just shot twice is still standing there staring at me and Shelly is screaming again and the army of insects has begun swarming up the platform toward her.

  This is the part where I don’t panic. It’d be easy to. It’s what my body aches to do. But I don’t. I unholster the second Glock, train one at the head and the other right at the heart. Before I can squeeze the trigg
ers, though, the slippery fuck ducks down. At first I thought he was finally collapsing, but no. Instead he slides into the water and wades quickly toward me.

  This is the part where I panic. A little. I don’t know how many shots I squeeze off, only that I’m firing and firing and the air is exploding around me, the cruel bursts of gunfire echoing up the dark walls of the cavern, and I don’t stop shooting until the clicks that mean I’m out of bullets.

  For a second he just stands there. Angry holes pockmark his face, his hands, those long robes. Little curls of smoke plume out of each one, and I can only imagine what the blowout from the exit wounds must be like on the other side. Then I see the skin on his neck shudder; it’s moving. It’s alive. It’s one of those evil fucking insects, making its skittish, evil way up his chin and across his startled face. Another one detaches itself from his flesh and then another, and I finally understand: they are his flesh. They pour across his face, burst from his sleeves. What’s left is a trembling skull, tattered skin barely hanging on, two wide eyes. The robes he was wearing cave in on themselves and sink into the water as a thousand little shiny monsters swarm out of the murk where the man was just standing.

  I’m frozen. Nothing in the world is alive except the billions of crawling fuckmonsters and the memory of Angie, and Angie’s dead, she’s definitely dead now, and that thought alone, her monstrous corpse, her empty eyes, that is what finally breaks me from this nightmare of stillness. Shelly is still dangling and whimpering. I move toward her at first without thinking, automatic pilot, through the scattering of life, careful not to get caught up in the thing’s robes. Something moves in the darkness beyond the platform, and I snap to attention. My Glock is reloaded and pointed at the nothingness; little splotches dance across my sight line. I see nothing.

  “Please,” Shelly moans. “Please.” I move closer to her, but I keep my eyes on the emptiness and my gun ready. And then I finally turn to her, because something keeps calling my attention, something just out the corner of my eye. It’s a splotch on her leg. She’s filthy and her light brown skin shines with sweat, but there’s something else. I heave onto the platform, finally out of that filth, and she looks up at me. Black rivers of eyeliner and sweat swivel down her cheeks. Her lipstick is smudged straight across her face, and her dress hangs loosely from her shoulders. But most important of all, that dark smudge on her calf: it’s red. Dark red. A bullet hole. Shelly’s been shot, I realize as I fuss with the ropes around her wrists. I shot her.