Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer

by Jeff Somers

  Stepping close, I worked the wound on my hand open again. They always healed up, shallow and burning, but closed. Somehow when you pulled the gas out of yourself you healed up halfway, although a lot of times you still got an infection, angry and red. Tearing the thin scab open, a fresh wave of warm, thick gas hit the air: myself, dwindling away.

  I stood there for a moment, running my eyes over the surface of the container, somehow seeming smaller and more manageable up close. And there, along the top and the bottom, almost lost among the black lettering, small holes about the size of a dime each.

  I remembered, twenty years before, my father. Coming home with that box with holes all along the top and the bottom, and I remembered thinking there was a puppy inside. Or a kitten. Dad had gotten me a puppy or a kitten. Or a turtle. Dad had gotten me something and it was alive and therefore needed air holes. For days I waited patiently for Dad to give me whatever it was. The box never moved, and I eyed it covetously from the kitchen table, where Mom served us meals in silence and Dad sat stewing in hangover fumes, renewed daily. And I worried that he wasn’t feeding it, whatever it was, that he wasn’t taking care of it. And so one night I crept downstairs in the dark and went into the kitchen and opened the box. And inside was a scrap of newspaper acting as a lining, and absolutely nothing else.

  That was Dad. Drunk all the time, he did shit that made no sense and forgot about it five minutes later. My childhood was littered with bullshit like that: rides out to the middle of nowhere, being told to pack a bag at three in the morning, all of it resolving to nothing. I remembered the box because of the moment of hope it had given me, and I remembered those air holes, and they had looked exactly like these.

  I stepped back and gestured at one of the other guys in orange. “Open it up.”

  The three guys still standing exchanged looks, then turned to look at the first one, back on his feet. I noticed Charlie had disappeared. The first guy studied me uncertainly for a moment, obviously unsure. Then shook his head while rubbing it with one hand. “We got orders,” he said. “We got clear instructions: Do not fucking open anything.”

  I nodded and smiled, mumbling softly. When using a Charm, it was best to do some of the heavy lifting by being nonthreatening. The Charm itself was six syllables, my own invention, and it settled on Baldy like syrup, smoothing out his face and slumping his shoulders.

  “Come on,” I said, still smiling. “Let’s just take a peek.”

  Baldy smiled, a twitchy thing that flickered, died, and then bloomed on his face. In an instant he became a teddy bear, shy and gentle. He nodded, then looked past me. “It’s all right, boys, we’re just gonna take a look.”

  The other two looked at each other again, then stepped back, wanting nothing to do with it. Rain was getting inside the collar of my coat and making its freezing way down my back, and my hands had gone numb and stiff even though it didn’t seem that cold out, overall. Baldy followed me around to the rear of the truck. The container looked pretty solidly on there, like every other truck you saw on the highway. Baldy pulled a set of cutters from his pocket and cut off two metallic-looking tags from the locks, then worked the levers and pulled the doors open.

  For a second, it was impossible to see inside. As gloomy as the day was, it was darker still inside the container. The rain created a screen between my eyes and everything else, and so it wasn’t until they started moving that I realized the box was full of people.

  They were dark-skinned and wearing rags, packed in so tight they were just leaning against each other, exhausted, barely alive. Baldy muttered a curse and stepped back, dropping the cutters. I stared into the gloomy interior of the space. At first I felt nothing. Then a tiny voice spoke in my head, faint and unpleasant, asking, What does an ustari need with dozens of people?

  And the answer came involuntarily: Blood.

  Someone had hired Heller to get them a lot of fucking gas for some bitchin’ Ritual. And Heller had sent me in to make sure anything that went wrong, got fixed.

  “Fucking hell,” I whispered, looking down at my shoes. I reminded myself: We are not good people.

  If I fucked it up, Heller was coming after me. If I let it slide, sixty-odd assholes who’d done nothing as far as I knew were going to be bled like pigs. Not for the first time, I wished I’d started drinking much, much earlier in the day. Or, perhaps, died in my sleep.

  “Close it up,” I said roughly. “Can you replace those tags?”

  Baldy didn’t reply right away. “Maybe. It’ll cost.”

  “Close it up,” I said. “And fuck the tags, I’m broke.”

  I looked up and Mags was there, peering into the container. “Aw, man,” he breathed.

  The rain pelted us, wearing us down.

  As Baldy started swinging the doors shut, I felt rather than saw Mags turn towards me. I cut him off. “We can’t afford to help them, Magsie.”

  “Oh.”

  I reached up and pushed rain out of my hair, slicking it back. I stood there feeling my heart pound, knowing that seconds were ticking by and I was running out of room to maneuver. I felt each dollar on my shoulders, strangling me, crushing me.

  I looked at Mags. He was still staring at the container like he could still see the people inside through the metal. For a split second I hated him, resented this. This was not my problem. These people were not my problem. I hadn’t kidnapped them, I hadn’t paid for them. And if it hadn’t been for Mags and the spotlight of pure, unadulterated fucking goodness he beamed around like a goddamn weapon, I’d have shepherded this steel box from point A to point B and gotten back to zero. Which was where my life was now, struggling to get back to zero.

  I had a sudden vision of waking up the next day with Mags gone. He would just leave, no note, no explanation, and creep back to Hiram’s, who would take him in, box his ears, and set him to cleaning the grout in his bathroom for the next ten years as punishment. And I would know that Mags had ditched me. Because I was an asshole, and a coward. I told myself it was one thing to get rid of Mags on purpose. It was something much worse to have someone with a brain the size of a pea decide I was a waste of his time.

  And I knew if Mags gave up on me, then I was truly fucked. I wouldn’t survive it. It would eat me alive, losing that pure faith and stupid affection. I had a Moment of Clarity. My Moment of Clarity told me that every decision I’d made in the last few years had been about hanging onto Mags, my last and only friend.

  Fucking hell.

  “You know any good Glamours, Mags?”

  He kept staring at the container. “Nope.”

  I closed my eyes. “Then we’ll have to lose them.”

  FOR ONCE, IT worked. Mags was no fucking help. But it worked. And I lived up to my title. I Fixed it.

  It was expensive.

  First, I had to bleed on a fresh Charm for Scum Beard and his buddies. Made their eyes roll back in their heads and come out smiling and happy, agreeable. Then, on top of that, because I’d found that layering spells on top of each other made both spells more effective, I gassed up six singles from my hollow and cobwebbed wallet so they looked like crisp hundred-dollar bills. This left Mags and me with seven dollars in the Disaster Fund, which meant we would all just have to hope against hope that whatever disaster we faced would involve dollar tacos at the joint on Sixteenth Street.

  Scum Beard and his friends were happy to accept a bit each in exchange for rigging the back of the container and loaning us one of their cars. They finished securing the container to the truck while we watched, and then offered me loopy thumbs-up gestures as they climbed into the cab and fired her up.

  I walked Mags back to Charlie’s office in the rain, feeling half-dead from blood loss, asleep on my feet. We found Charlie back at his desk, exactly as we’d first seen him. He looked up as we stepped inside, dripping and shivering.

  “We good?” he asked. “I figured it
might be best the less I saw. In case I was asked to describe the scene later on.”

  “We’re good.”

  “I’ll handle the gate myself, then,” Charlie said in a distracted, competent way, “so there won’t be any record when they drive out. Clean. No records anywhere, and Mr. Heller can rest easy. You tell him I was helpful, huh?”

  I nodded. “Sure, sure. We’re taking a car out, too, right behind the truck.”

  Charlie hesitated for one still moment. “Okay.”

  We had reached the Event Horizon of Charlie’s curiosity on the matter. I nodded again. Nudged Mags and we went outside, to stand in the rain rather than smell the burnt-coffee stink and exchange stares with Charlie. I had a feeling Charlie had been here long before Heller and the rest of us Tricksters had found him, and would be here long after we’d all been bled dry and buried in lime pits somewhere, gas for some enustari’s Ritual.

  We stood in the rain and I reviewed my lessons from Hiram. Few and far between, but there had been lessons. At the pace he’d been teaching me I would have expected to achieve the rank of ustari by about age seventy-five, likely followed by a massive coronary and Mags, old and withered, weeping by my grave. Hiram had taught me all about perception. What people believed to be true was true, at least when backed by a little gas. Even mages. My head was sizzling with weariness, and I wobbled a little on my feet. Mags reached out and steadied me, silently, with a hand on my shoulder.

  I was just a con artist. The realization bled into me, slow and cold. I’d spent my childhood hating my dad, my family, the dull, boring life they’d doomed me to live. Then I’d found magic and I thought: Here’s what I am. I’m fucking special. So I went looking, and I found magic, and I’d spent ten fucking years with Hiram, learning—but here I was, just a fucking con artist. I was a con artist with an edge, was all. And I was woozy from blood loss and broke and I owed Heller thirty thousand dollars and despite being a con artist with an edge I had no way to pay him back.

  Zero. Getting back to zero had become my goal.

  Outside the gate, a small brown car pulled up and one of our Charmed guys in orange overalls emerged. He looked around as if appreciating the rain and leaned against the car with his hands in his pockets, waiting.

  The truck faded in from the screen of rain, lurching towards us in bouncing, heavy slow motion. As I watched it, it seemed likely the trailer would snap right off and tumble down into the mud, or that our not-quite-properly-locked rear doors would pop open. Neither happened. The truck rumbled up to the gate. Charlie emerged to squint at it, then returned inside, and a moment later the gate began to crank open. I tapped Mags on the shoulder and we walked through the gate to the brown car, the owner of which was a good-looking kid with dirty blond hair too long for his own good. He looked delighted to be giving us his car, and walked off into the rain as Mags and I climbed in, all jaunty.

  I drove. Mags had never learned. He was this side of feral.

  I let the truck ease in front of us and then drafted it, not allowing anyone to get between us. Ours was a stick shift, and it had been years since I’d driven a manual, so the first few miles were laborious, with stalls and sudden stops and jackrabbit leaps forward. I started to pray the clutch survived long enough, but had no confidence.

  Mags began humming to himself. At first I thought it was just a random, nerves kind of humming, but as I listened it became clear that it was an actual song, a melody. I couldn’t place it. When he reached the cadence he absentmindedly spun back to the beginning and went through it all over again, a distinct pattern of verse-chorus-verse.

  I waited until we were downtown, people everywhere in heavy traffic. Without signaling, I steered us into the left lane and hit the pedal, pulling up in front of the truck. Settled in for a second at the same speed, counted to three, then thought to look at Mags.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Put your seat belt on.”

  It took him nearly a minute, finding it hard to move in the cramped space, his shoulders up against the roof of the car. When he was finally strapped in, I took a deep breath, feeling my heart take a leap in my chest and my head clear a little. Then I hit the brakes with both feet.

  The truck smacked into us and sent us rocketing forward into an old station wagon; the impact made my teeth click together, jerked me forward and smashed my forehead into the steering wheel. We half spun and came to rest wedged between the truck and the car in front. For one second I sat there in relative silence, listening to the engine click and Mags’s whistling breath. There was gas in the air, and after a moment blood dripped from my nose onto the steering wheel.

  “Come on,” I said, my voice like rust. My door wouldn’t open. I summoned three Words and felt the blood in my nose burn off, the spell blowing the windshield out. I climbed out onto the hood, lost my balance, and slid backwards, hitting the wet pavement with a painful jolt. The passenger door exploded outward and Mags leaped out, the torn fragments of the seat belt clinging to him like a vine. He reached down and lifted me to my feet, then held me in place for a moment.

  I nodded. “Okay, come on.”

  He kept one hand on me as I limped down the length of the truck. Baldy was still in the cab, a radio handset in one hand, and he didn’t look at us.

  In the back, as planned, the container doors had popped open. With me pretending to look worried, we circled around the back . . . and I wiped blood from my eyes and said, “Fuck.”

  They were still cowering in the depths of the container. Every one of them. They stared back in silent motionless . . . what I wasn’t sure. Shock? A compulsion spell? I was very tired, but I was still bleeding from my scalp, so I took a deep breath and tried to think of something useful. A little mu that Hiram had used to jolt me out of bed when I overslept came to mind. Obnoxious, effective, and cheap in terms of gas. Four Words, too many for something so small, but I didn’t have time to rub it down and polish it. I had to add two, even, to expand its target. So I muttered six Words and felt the icy fingers of the universe reach in and scoop out a little more from me, and then every person in the container screamed and jumped.

  A second later they were pouring out, leaping down onto bare feet, dressed in rags, and running. They went scattering in every direction, eyes wide, skeletal people with brown skin and matted dark hair. I watched them all run until the last one had hobbled around a corner. Then I looked around at all the people who’d gotten out of their cars to stare, all of them standing in the same pose, one arm propped up on their open car doors.

  Everything was shimmery, and I floated. I’d never been this low on blood before. It was like being high, in a way, everything slippery and a constant tingling under my skin. I reached up and grabbed at Mags.

  “Lem?”

  “It’s okay, Magsie,” I said. “They’re gone. I fixed it.”

  “YOU’VE GOT TWO things going for you.”

  Miserable, I looked up from my whiskey at Hiram. Fat, red-faced Hiram who had slapped me in the mouth and called me a “fucking wretch” when I couldn’t remember something he’d mentioned in passing months before that had suddenly been revealed as a crucial lesson in my magical training. Hiram, who had set me to cooking his meals and making his tea and mending his trousers. Hiram, in red suspenders and a black belt, a linen suit just an increment too tight on him, standing over me with a gin and tonic in one hand.

  Hiram, our savior.

  “Hi, Hiram,” Mags whispered next to me. He sounded like a small child who had been caught peeing his bed.

  Hiram glanced at the huge man for a second and then looked back down at me. He took a deep breath. “One,” he said in his booming bad actor’s voice, rich and pompous, “Heller may be a bottom-feeder, but he’s a mage. He’s part of us, and he obeys our customs. You’re my urtuku. He won’t kill you without my permission.”

  My guts squirmed. I thought I’d been under Hiram’s loathsome thumb befo
re.

  “Two,” the old man continued, “I’m not personally in the mood to kill you just yet. I’ve got too much invested in you. And you have too much potential.” He sighed theatrically. “And I still hope that someday you’ll see the error of your ways and return to your training.”

  Hiram, the lying fuck, would have gladly sent me to Heller’s wolves, but he’d negotiated some small gain for himself, I could tell.

  HELLER HAD KNOWN. Of course he’d known. The second I’d called it in, I could tell he wasn’t buying any of it. But he toyed with me. He showed up in his stinky, ratty fur, his shaved head covered in a henna ink spiderweb drawn in a shaky, unsure hand, his glasses huge and black, making him look like some horrible fly. He’d inspected the truck, the crash scene, the tags. He’d grunted to himself, breathing hard, trailed by a gang of his kids and two Bleeders, a man and woman who were superskinny and scratched at themselves constantly and who had agreed, for various reasons, to cut themselves and bleed to provide blood for any spell Heller wanted to cast. So that he wouldn’t have to bleed himself. Not much by way of Bleeders, but so far above my level it was fucking intimidating.

  He’d pretended to consider the possibility that I was an innocent failure, scratching his chin and humming thoughtfully. And then he’d gestured and someone bled and he’d cast, and I was paralyzed, frozen in place, and Heller was right in front of me, breath like acid in my face, melting my skin.

  “You,” he hissed, “are a fucking cunt. You know who you just screwed over, Vonnegan? You fucking piece of shit? Not me. Nossir, not me.” He smiled. “You just fucked over a goddamn enustari.”

  Archmage. The top of the heap. I’d already figured that out, of course. The only people bleeding whole bodies for their spells were the superpowerful mages. Enustari. The people who’d started wars and set off plagues just to collect the blood they needed for their spells.