Discount Armageddon

by Seanan McGuire

  Buttering the tortillas and filling them with aged sesame noodles and sweet-and-sour chicken produced a passable, if bizarre, form of fajita. I will eat something healthy for lunch, I promised myself, knowing full well that by the time I could swing a “lunch break”—sometime after midnight and before two, depending on the foot traffic at work—I’d settle for a platter of potato skins and some hot wings.

  “It’s the thought that counts,” I said, shoving the second half of my “fajita” into a plastic baggie that would hopefully keep the sweet-and-sour sauce from staining my coat. I put the baggie in my pocket.

  If it was the thought that counted, maybe I ought to think about buying groceries. Food was easier at home, where Mom did all the shopping and Dad did the bulk of the cooking. Living at home came with a lot of bonuses that hadn’t been visible until I moved out. The cheering in the closet rose in volume again. I winced. Bonuses like the mice having their own sound-proofed attic.

  “I’m leaving for work now,” I called, unlatching the kitchen window. A week of careful oiling and counter-weighting had rendered it incapable of standing open on its own. It would slam closed as soon as I let go. “Try not to break anything else today, okay?”

  Distant cheering seemed to be the only answer I was going to get.

  Choosing discretion as the better part of valor, I hoisted myself onto the windowsill, careful to keep a firm grip on the edge of the window itself. It was only a three-story drop to the unlit courtyard, but I knew from studying it during the daylight that it was narrow and cluttered with a wide variety of convenient ways for me to get hurt, ranging from trash cans to the ever-popular “rusty chain-link fence.”

  It was dark enough that I couldn’t even see the window of the apartment across from me. The ambient glow of the city lights illuminated the sky, but none of it seemed willing to penetrate the space between the buildings.

  Sliding my legs out the window, I pushed off from the windowsill and fell into the dark.

  Three

  “Pass the dynamite.”

  —Frances Brown

  Just outside the window of a small semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, plummeting

  IT HAD ONLY TAKEN AN AFTERNOON for me to memorize the layout of the courtyard, although keeping the dimensions straight in my head had required bouncing off the fire escape twice and coming within a single missed handhold of breaking several major bones. Learning the layout of the neighborhood had taken a little longer. It had been almost three weeks before I could make a full circuit of the block without needing to remove my blackout goggles at least once, and I still wasn’t willing to cross streets when I couldn’t see the status of the light. That would come later.

  “Remember, Very,” Dad used to say when I whined about the goggles, “if your opponent has night vision and you’ve never bothered to learn the local landmarks by anything but sight, you’re going to be in a bit of a pickle when it’s time to avoid getting disemboweled.”

  Truer words have doubtless been spoken. If they were spoken in our household, they probably had something to do with causing—or surviving—severe bodily harm. Other kids got chores and teddy bears; we got gun safety classes and heavy weaponry. Normal’s what you make it.

  I fell about four feet straight down, building momentum, and grabbed the bottom of the fire escape just before the fall could get out of my control. Swinging myself around, I hit the corner of the building with both feet and shoved off, translating the energy of the impact into a leap that carried me across the five-foot gap and onto the building across the way. I was off and running, leaving mouse holy rituals and semilegal sublets behind me as I started accelerating in the direction of work. I could make it on time if I managed to avoid any rooftop traffic jams.

  None of my teachers in elementary or high school thought there was anything weird about the way I ran home after school for “lessons.” Most of the kids I knew had some sort of “lessons” to go to, although most of them were also more willing to explain what they were learning. It was probably a good thing that no one ever asked me. The early classes would have seemed normal enough—a lot of little girls take gymnastics and ballet—but they were just to determine where my specific skills were. The serious classes started when I was twelve: unarmed combat, Krav maga, and free running.

  (Krav maga is an Israeli-developed fighting style centered on the idea that when I put you down, you stay down. It’s fast, it’s brutal, and I love it. Sort of like club dancing with more eye gouging and less grinding.)

  I excelled in all my lessons, but the one where I really fell in love was free running. It’s a lot like parkour in that it’s a discipline that teaches you the entire city is one big obstacle course. It’s also a lot like a form of dance, and your partner is the environment you’re in. Free running takes the best elements of tumbling, gymnastics, and being a professional superhero, and mixes them in one incredibly rewarding, incredibly fun package. It’s just hard to explain. “Hello, my name is Verity Price, and I like to take the overland route whenever possible” isn’t the sort of thing you can put in a personal ad. It even confused my landlady. When I tried to explain the importance of having solidly constructed fire escapes and a variety of ways to reach the roof, she looked at me funny and asked, “Who do you think you are, Batgirl?”

  The simplest answer would have been “yes.” At least “yes” didn’t require a history lesson or a copy of the family tree. Still, I would have expected a Sasquatch to understand the need to know how many escape routes I had available to me—and that there’s no better way to study an urban cryptid population than by meeting them on their own level. Half the time, that level is straight up. (The other half is usually straight down. Cryptids like to live where humans don’t, but they also like to be close enough to steal cable.)

  The rooftops were anything but dark. Light poured up from the street and out the windows of a hundred high-rise buildings, leaving the night twilight-clear. I tried to focus on covering ground, rather than lingering to explore the changes sunset brought to the city. Dave was a stickler about punctuality, and “I got distracted while I was free running” would just bring on another lecture about the occasional need to take a cab. (He’s given up trying to convince me to take the subway. I’m sorry, but that method of transit is a horror movie waiting to happen.)

  I hate New York cabs almost as much as I hate New York cabbies. No self-respecting cryptid would drive one, a fact which puts them comfortably outside my field of study. I was officially in New York for the sake of documenting and assisting the city’s cryptid community, and that meant I could avoid anything that didn’t actually impact my mission. Like cabs, street corner hot dog stands, and Times Square.

  (Times Square probably counts as proof that tourists constitute a completely separate species. This is a theory I will never put forward at a family meeting, thank you very much. Tourism is an urban activity, which means I’d be expected to conduct any necessary studies. No way in hell.)

  Tourists and crazy cab drivers aside, New York is an amazing city. I spent two months in Los Angeles during the filming of Dance or Die—America’s number-one televised reality dance competition—and it was a great change from Portland, but New York! New York was practically designed for aspiring ballroom dancers looking for their big break.

  It was also designed for cryptids. That was enough to justify my decision to spend a year an entire country away from the rest of the family, and convinced them that I wasn’t doing it just for the dancing. Mostly for the dancing, sure, but not just. Besides, Mom and Dad knew I needed the time to think about what I was doing with my life. You can be a cryptozoologist, or you can be a world-class ballroom dancer. There isn’t time to do both. For a little while, maybe, but not forever.

  After three months away from home, I still didn’t know which way I was going to go. At least New York was providing me with plenty of distractions. Any major urban center is guaranteed to have a population of nonsentient cryptids. They’re l
ike normal animals, drawn to the easy pickings generated by lots of people in close proximity. That thing that knocks over your garbage can every night? Yeah, there’s a good chance it’s not a raccoon. New York is also home to one of the highest populations of intelligent cryptids on record, and no one’s really tried to get in touch with the community since the last time the Covenant came through slashing and burning. It was time to take another shot at getting to know the locals, sometimes with literal bullets. Since no Price worth the name would be caught dead unarmed, that wasn’t a problem.

  Making it to work on time …now that was a problem.

  The door on the roof of Dave’s Fish and Strips was unlocked. Good; that meant Dave hadn’t forgotten about me swapping shifts with Kitty for the rest of the week. I was the only non-winged member of the staff who insisted on using the rooftop entrance. If he’d been expecting Kitty, he would’ve made sure the day shift left the door in the cellar unlocked.

  Kitty wasn’t going to be waiting any tables for a few days at least. She was off to play stage candy for her boyfriend’s band, a Rob Zombie knockoff with an uninspiring “creatures of the night” theme. The only thing it had going for it was the fact that the “creatures of the night” in question were totally genuine, but since they couldn’t admit that part, they were going to need to make their fortune on talent alone. I expected Kitty to be back on the nine-to-three shift before the end of the month.

  Even if she wasn’t, I’d made it clear that I had zero interest in making a permanent swap, no thanks, no way, no how. Let Dave find himself another naturally nocturnal waitress; I’d come to New York for a reason, and between ballroom competitions and cryptid chasing, my nights were booked for the foreseeable future.

  Our dressing room was waitstaff only; the “talent” had their own place to change, one that probably didn’t smell like stale nachos and beer. Or maybe not. Everything at Dave’s tended to take on that dry, greasy smell after it had been there for a while. A couple of the other girls were loitering inside, killing time and making vague adjustments to their uniforms before going back into the club. I waved as I stepped in. They didn’t wave back, and I didn’t take offense. Waving is a human thing, and humans are a minority at Dave’s.

  “Evening, Carol, Marcy.” There was no lock on the locker with my name on it. Locks cost money, and Dave didn’t spend a penny he didn’t have to. “How’s the crowd tonight?”

  “Insane,” Carol responded, not looking away from the mirror. She was trying to fit her wig into place, and her hair wasn’t helping, hissing and snapping at her fingers as she shoved the individual tiny serpents under the weave. She’d been hired a week after I was, and most of the girls had offered to help her get changed during her first few days. They stopped when it became apparent that getting too close to her head before the wig was on meant a good chance of getting bitten. And the snakes she had in place of hair were venomous.

  “Good insane, bad insane, run screaming from the building because this isn’t worth it insane?” I pulled off my T-shirt, wadding it up and tossing it into the bottom of the locker.

  “Somebody put our name on another tourist website and we’re getting swarmed by sweaty businessmen who think it’s okay to play grab-ass with anything in a short skirt.” Marcy snapped the top of one knee-high white sock, cracking her gum at the same time for punctuation. “Candice went home sick. Said it wasn’t worth the tips.”

  Marcy looked unconcerned, despite the alarming implications of Candy’s departure. Candy was a dragon princess, and she pursued money the way a cop in a buddy movie pursues donuts. I blamed it on the fact that Marcy had the emotional and physical sensitivity of a rock. No, really; all the research on Oreads has concluded that they have the durability and resilience of quartz, assuming quartz decided to turn into an attractive young biped and go out for a stroll. No amount of grab-ass was likely to cause her more than brief annoyance.

  “Who gets Candy’s tables?” I asked, trying to ignore the sinking sensation in my stomach as I unloaded my weapons into the locker.

  “You do.”

  Sinking sensation, officially impossible to ignore. “Great.” I grabbed my uniform. “Just what I always wanted. Extra tables.”

  “With extra grab-ass on the side,” Marcy said.

  “I wish you’d stop saying that.”

  “I wish I had a pony.” Marcy gave her socks one last adjustment and strode out of the changing room, leaving me alone with Carol.

  “You’d probably eat the pony,” I muttered.

  Carol shot me a sympathetic look in the mirror. “Aren’t you glad you’re working overnights for Kitty?”

  “Ecstatic,” I said, and unbuckled my pants.

  Every profession since the dawn of time has had its own uniform, its own special set of signals used to broadcast the identity of its practitioners to anyone who meets them. Sadly, the uniform of the cryptozoologist is “whatever is going to help you blend in with the locals.” The need to blend in led, in a roundabout way, to Dave’s Fish and Strips, the only gentlemen’s club in New York City almost exclusively staffed by cryptids.

  I had the utmost respect for the other humans on the staff. They weren’t lucky enough to receive my early training in human/cryptid interactions, but they all did just fine—for values of “all” that mean “the three of them,” anyway. Dave didn’t practice discriminatory hiring; most humans were simply seized with the uncontrollable urge to scream and run away after spending more than ten minutes in a room with him …and he wasn’t the strangest thing on staff.

  The strippers didn’t have an official uniform, since they’d just take it off, and the bartenders were allowed to wear jeans or skirts and T-shirts with the bar’s logo. The waitresses weren’t so lucky. Dave seemed to be under the deeply mistaken and deeply regrettable impression that pleated plaid micro skirts, knee-high socks, black heels, and midriff-baring white shirts with the club’s logo on the front combined to project an aura of “class.” Or maybe he was going for an aura of “ass,” since that’s what the uniforms actually managed to project.

  I stepped into my heels and walked over to the mirror. Carol moved to the side, giving me room for my contemplation while she continued her epic battle of gorgon vs. snakes. Finally, I sighed, and said, “No matter how many times I put this on, I can’t get past the part where I look like a hooker.”

  “No, you don’t, honey,” said Carol. “Hookers get better tips.”

  With a final belabored groan, I grabbed an apron from the pile—it was more like a belt, but at least it gave me a place to store tips and my order pad—and tied it around my waist before heading to the door.

  Bullets cost money. So do dance shoes, and the terms of my year in New York included the need to support myself as much as possible. Family finances are solid, thanks to good investing, a certain amount of alchemy, and the gratitude of the cryptid community. That doesn’t make them good enough to take care of us all forever. Dave’s might be a lousy place to work, but the boss understood when I had to call in sick because I was chasing something nasty across the rooftops of the city. Add it all together, and well …it was time to start my shift.

  If you’d asked me in Oregon whether I was a prude, I would have responded with an offended “absolutely not.” My home life was strange, my hobbies were stranger, and it’s hard to do competitive Latin ballroom dance without shedding all taboos about nudity and invasion of personal space. I considered myself a tolerant, enlightened woman of the world, fully prepared for any perversity my quest for the elusive urban cryptid might bring me into contact with.

  That was before I started working at Dave’s Fish and Strips, a place that could’ve been used as the answer to that age-old question, “What does the bogeyman do when he’s not hanging out under your bed?” If the bogeyman in question is Dave, an individual with little tact and less taste, he opens a tacky titty bar. If the bogeyman in question is Kitty, she gets a job there.

  (The word “bogeyman,” muc
h like the word “human,” is gender-neutral. If you ever want to see a bogeyman laugh herself sick, call her a “bogeygirl,” or better, a “bogeywoman.” The last time I saw someone make that mistake with Kitty, she laughed so hard I was afraid she was going to rupture something.)

  The main room was decorated like the bastard offspring of a nightclub and a sideshow tent—a deeply patriotic sideshow tent with a serious longing to return to the United Kingdom, where it would doubtless be greeted with pitchforks and torches, because the British probably wouldn’t want it either. Stages were set up at strategic locations around the room, each tucked into its own little acoustically isolated group of chairs. The main stage provided the ambient music for the club, as well as the highest percentage of tips and “grab-ass.” That was supposed to be Candy’s territory. Thanks to her cowardly departure, it was going to be mine.

  Oh, well; it wasn’t like I could blame her. Dragon princesses are greedy and proud, not brave. When you’re bred to be the humanoid support staff for giant carnivorous lizards, there’s no reason to be brave. The giant lizards can do it for you.

  After a stop at the bar to pick up the pending drinks—two trays’ worth, which was a bad sign for the shift ahead—I waded into the crowd. Marcy was a few tables away, distributing baskets of fried fish and blithely ignoring roving hands. Several would-be gropers were sucking bruised fingers and looking confused. That’s what they got for trying to goose an Oread.

  I wasn’t so lucky. I’d barely cleared three tables before a hand latched onto my left buttock and squeezed. I jerked out of the way, nearly spilling my remaining drinks. General laughter greeted this reaction, followed by a man saying, “Shit, honey, you’re lots prettier than the last one!”