The New Hero: Volume 1

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  ‘It’s how I like it.’

  ‘You come back to the city, you might actually climb the ranks. Get a crew of your own instead of doing this mercenary shit. What? You allergic to work?’

  ‘Just tell me about the next job.’

  ‘I’m just saying, Mook—’

  ‘The next job.’

  Werth knows that tone. He nods, then starts talking.

  ***

  This is Mookie Pearl.

  Mookie the Meatman. Mookie the Monster. Mookie the Merc.

  Mookie the, well, Mook.

  Some people pronounce it Moo-key. Others say, Muck-ey.

  Some people, like that old goat Werth, just call him ‘Mook’.

  Because that’s what he is. A fucking mook. Least, that’s what they say.

  He’s built like a brick shithouse whose bricks are themselves brick shithouses. He’s got hands so big, each finger is like a baby’s fist. Chest like a tomb, forehead like a marble slab, bald head like the skull of a king gorilla. An underbite so bad some of his white pebble teeth press on his upper lip, giving him a perpetual sneer.

  Mookie makes money by helping bad people get rid of worse monsters.

  Example: Mookie spent this morning down at the docks putting fist-to-face in order to stop a cabal of goblins from pilfering a shipping container full of Filipino immigrants. Mookie’s bosses wanted to put the Filipinos to work: sex, muscle, whatever. The gobbos wanted to cook the poor bastards over a barrel fire. Easy choice. The night before that? Mookie cleared out a meth lab that a bunch of gray-skins set up in a pigeon coop. Amazing how many of those goddamn uglies they were able to cram into that tiny space (with pigeons still present, cooing and shitting down tarps pulled taut over windows.) One week ago? More goblins. Making weapons down in the warehouses. Strange weapons. Things that could turn a human inside out.

  These days, it’s all goblins, all the time. They’ve risen up. They’re everywhere. Like a plague. A plague that needs to be stepped on, choked out, curb-stomped. The money that Mookie makes goes two places, and two places only. Some of the money he spends on his bar, a bar whose only name is ‘Bar’, a bar that sits so far off the beaten path that the only people who find it are the ones who know where to look. In this bar is a small kitchen and a big freezer, and Mookie keeps the freezer turned off—it’s where he hangs meat: pigs, mostly. Good breeds, too, not those garbage eaters you find in the grocery store. Duroc, Hampshire, and his favorite, the Berkshire. He’s even got a Mangalitsa and an Iberian Black back there, each growing green-gray fuzz right now, each an animal closer to the boar than the modern pig—each a snarling brute, dark and bristled, meaner than a bee-stung rattlesnake. In that way, those animals are just like Mookie.

  As to where the rest of his money goes…

  Well.

  ***

  The front door squeaks open. Werth jerks his head to see as Mookie stands fast, hand moving to the wooden chair, ready to shatter it into pieces and use any part as a bludgeoning device.

  It’s a girl. A teen girl, actually—black sweater pulled tight, tartan skirt over pine leggings. Plain hair draped over slumping shoulders.

  Bathed in the light of the neon beer signs, one might wonder if she has been crying.

  ‘Dad?’ comes a small voice, a mouse’s voice, a voice that has drawn his heart time and again like a butterfly toward a bug zapper, and Mookie grabs Werth by the top of the head and twists the man’s gaze ’round to him once more.

  ‘You gotta go,’ Mookie says to Werth.

  ‘We ain’t done talking about business. I got a gig for you.’

  ‘Give it to somebody else.’

  ‘But there’s someone new moving in downtown, we need your—’

  ‘You gotta go.’

  Mookie has That Voice. He says something in That Voice, you know he means business. You know that you don’t do what he says he’ll twist your head off the neck and take a big bite of it like it was an onion or an apple. Werth knows the score.

  Werth knows the score. He scowls, skirts past the girl like she’s uranium on two legs, then disappears.

  Mookie doesn’t cross the distance.

  The girl doesn’t, either.

  ‘Sit,’ he says, finally, pointing to a table. ‘I’ll fix us a plate.’

  ***

  It’s the culatello on melon she eats first. ‘It’s good,’ she says. He thinks she’s telling the truth but he’s never sure. She knows how to play him, drag him along like a suckling pig on a string. Still. The look on her face: Mookie thinks her pleasure is sincere because before she says anything, she’s lost in a moment. An unconsidered instant of pleasure.

  Mookie knows that look. It’s the only way he gets enjoyment.

  ‘How’s things?’ he asks, feeling himself slipping into that same rigmarole, the routine of expected questions. He’s nervous. He never gets nervous.

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘I guess okay.’

  ‘The car? The car working?’

  ‘It got me here.’

  ‘What about school? You gonna be in the school play or whatever? They do one every year, yeah? You like that acting thing.’

  ‘I wasn’t good at acting. I mostly did set design.’ Even Mookie gets the irony, there. She stares down at the plate of charcuterie. ‘Besides, I graduated last year.’

  ‘You graduated?’

  She nods.

  ‘Shit. Shit. Hold on.’ He stands fast, almost knocks the chair across the room, then hurries to retrieve the envelope Werth gave him. Mookie presses it into her hands. It’s how it always is: him racing to do for her without a hair’s breadth of hesitation. She doesn’t have to tell him to jump to get him to ask how high. She just needs to pout, or sigh in just such a way, to have him hopping about like a clumsy Lord-a-Leaping. ‘This is for you. Graduation present. Take it.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’ She’s lying. She always wants it.

  ‘I said take it.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m here—’

  ‘I said take the goddamn fucking money, Nora.’

  That did it. The words came out his mouth, a tumble of boulders, a verbal truncheon, and he sees her suck in a scared breath and pull the envelope into her lap and stare straight ahead—not at him, but at any point around his prodigious bulk. He knows the look. The pout. The watery eyes. The tender hands pulling back and hiding under her armpits. Is it real? Or just a show? He feels guilty just for thinking that. Shame rises in his gut and sucks at his heart but it is what it is and this is what he is.

  He sits back down, fumbles another piece of Lardo into his mouth.

  ‘It’s my boyfriend,’ Nora finally says, still watching the margins of her father.

  ‘You have a boyfriend?’

  ‘He’s sick. No. Not sick. But in the hospital. Someone… did something to him…’

  She goes to brush a stray hair out of her eye, and that’s when he sees it.

  Her fingertips: stained slightly blue.

  As she moves the hair, he sees that her temple has a similar azure smear, like a fingerprint of faded library ink.

  The moisture goes out of his mouth. Feels like he’s sucking on a stone. He bites down on his own teeth so hard he’s afraid they’ll crack.

  He grabs her hand, tilts them up under the light above the bar table.

  ‘Nora,’ he says, his voice a rising growl.

  ‘Don’t be mad.’

  ‘The Blue Blazes,’ he whispers—more for himself than for any edification he could give her. An image, then: him, sitting on the living room floor, a bent needle of a Christmas tree in the corner coiled too-tight with pretty lights, her mother crying on the couch, little Nora in two blonde pigtails like the McDonald’s arches (her hair would eventually change to a dark chestnut), and him leaning up against an old bunker of a television, dipping each index finger into a little makeup kit of blue powder— ‘I got work to do,’ he says before massaging the stuff into his tem
ples, his eyes rolling back in his head…

  In retrospect, he probably should’ve seen this coming.

  Shit.

  She’s really crying this time. She’s wounded. Someone did something to his baby girl. Whoever hurts her gets hurt. That’s how it’s always been.

  ‘Hospital,’ he says. ‘Name. Now.’

  ***

  The stink of antiseptic completely overwhelms the odor of disease, but Mookie thinks he’d rather just smell the sickness. Sickness is natural in its own way. Putrefaction and decay, fermentation and chemical entropy—it’s all as it should be. And just the thought of it is making his stomach growl.

  The kid—Bentley, what a fucking name, Bentley—lays there comatose on the bed, pale like a grub under a sweat-soaked sheet. Big black staples hold closed a monster-sized gash on his head. Mookie picks up the chart like he knows anything about anything, reads the words ‘brain’ and ‘bleeding’ near enough to one another to tell him what’s up.

  He throws back the covers, sees one of the kid’s hands there, fingers curled up like the legs of a dead, sun-baked crab. The fingertips, blue. Blue like the blue on a crab’s claw, too.

  Mookie looks to Nora, his daughter. Wonders how she got the boyfriend into this mess. What did she tell him? What promises did she make? She quickly wipes tears away, then taps at her head at the same spot Bentley’s gash sits.

  ‘Shit,’ he says, pulling out the little tin of blue powder. Smurf Blood, Smurf Jizz, Blue Raspberry, the Blue Blazes, a hundred names for the same shit. He holds it up, uses it to gesture at his daughter in the same way a father might gesture with a pack of condoms or a pack of cigarettes. ‘You’re done with this stuff.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Just because I use it doesn’t mean you use it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What I do isn’t what you do. You’re better than me. You have to be.’

  To this, she says nothing. Nora merely trembles in the doorway.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he says, and rubs some of the blue powder between callused thumb-and-forefinger. He massages it into his temples. His knees almost buckle. He almost goes down like a stack of crates. He smells lilies. Feels ants on his skin. The world goes sideways. It shifts, tilts, then snaps back. The edges of his vision are electric blue. The clouds are gone. The veil is pierced. He feels hot, alive, aware.

  The gash on Bentley’s head isn’t just a straight line anymore. It’s a fat knobby knot split both ways by a plus-sign cut. Clinging to his head is a foul, grey-skinned creature—like some unnatural conglomeration of monkey and worm—and from the thing’s rubbery translucent lips slips a tongue like the tongue of a hummingbird, darting out and sucking at the pus and blood like it’s sweet nectar. The fiend’s eyes roll around in its head.

  Mookie grabs it with one hand. It barely has time to thrash and scream before Mookie pops its head like a zit. Black brains like pomegranate slurry ooze to the floor.

  Bentley shudders. He doesn’t awaken from the coma. Not yet.

  ‘Wh… what did you do?’ Nora asks. She can’t see. Because she’s not on the stuff.

  ‘He had a… friend,’ is all Mookie says. A gobbo—goblin—larva. Goblins are forever the kings of mad misery, their weapons deliver effects far beyond those of mere physical damage. Bentley’s injury looked to be from a slug cudgel: a star-headed beat-down stick that, if it tastes blood, plants a little egg—like a frog egg, gelatinous and ocular—in the wound. Not long after, it grows another baby gobbo who crawls free from the wound and sups on the suffering like a kid with a milkshake. Until the victim dies. Easy to get rid of if you know what to look for or who to call. But so few do. ‘I took care of it. He’ll get better soon enough.’

  ‘Now what?’ Nora asks.

  Mookie stands there, scowling. ‘Now you get the hell out of my way.’

  She does like he says.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asks.

  ‘Break bones till someone tells me who sold you that poison.’

  ‘Here,’ she says, pressing a slip of paper into Mookie’s hand. The paper is no bigger than the fortune from a fortune cookie. It has one word on it. A name.

  ‘This is where you bought your stuff?’

  She bites her lip, nods. The dominoes fell in a straight line: Mookie was a user and, eventually, his daughter became one, too. But the Blue Blazes wasn’t easy to come by. Few people’d ever heard of the stuff. Even fewer had managed to get a hold of it and use it to rip the scales from their eyes and see the truth about the world around them—the really old blazeheads called a Blue Blazes trip a katabasis, a ‘journey to the Underworld’. Nora dove in, went deep, got caught with the wrong people to get a hold of the stuff—people that weren’t people at all. Those goddamn cannibalistic in-bred goblins. Gobbos, grubs, worms.

  Monsters.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. ‘I know where to go. Who to see.’

  ‘Thank you, Daddy.’

  There it is. The kicker. He lives for that. Thank you, Daddy. As satisfying to him as the taste of cold-smoked Speck ham. Both enlivening and enervating. Fills him with life and takes the air from his lungs. Mookie wants her to say it again.

  But he won’t push his luck. Instead he wonders if maybe he should kiss her on the forehead or hug her, but he knows if he hugs her he’ll probably collapse one of her lungs. The Blazes drug makes it hard for some to know their own strength sometimes. The most affection he can clumsily muster is to poke her in the breastbone with one of his big fingers and say, ‘Don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave this room. You leave this room and I will hunt you down and tie you up and duct tape you to the ceiling so you don’t run off and do more stupid shit.’

  She nods. She plays scared. But is she?

  Mookie shoves past her, only for a moment pausing to consider that his affection is as blunt and crushing as his massive hamhock hands.

  ***

  The city is where Mookie belongs. It’s why he doesn’t come here. He doesn’t like belonging to this place. Tall shadows ever-swaying. Grease and blood in the storm drains. A smell in the air like death and rotten food (garlic, curry, fish sauce).

  He walks the streets, though, and the city knows to fear him.

  A snake with a human face coils around a lamppost, tries not to be seen.

  A pair of knockers hunker down next to an ATM. One taps on it with a small ballpeen hammer. Another listens to it with a stethoscope, looking for its heartbeat. The one with the hammer sees Mookie coming, screams, and bolts.

  In the gutter lurks a nixie, sagging breasts resting on the cracked curb—occasionally she bows her head to drink the foul water run-off. When she sees Mookie, she holds out her hands and whispers: ‘You’ve come to kill me.’ A statement, not a question. And wrong all the way. Mookie waves her off, keeps moving.

  He knows his destination. It’s written on the little piece of paper Nora gave him.

  Sgradevole’s.

  ***

  The restaurant is packed. It always is. Lot of humans, humans who think this is haute cuisine but damn sure don’t know any better. That guy there, he thinks he’s eating an amuse-bouche of beef tartare with carmelized fennel, but what he’s really getting is a Ritz cracker slathered with goblin vomit. The guy’s date, the blonde with the shiny hoop earrings? She’s eating a bile-soaked shoelace, thinks it’s calamari ceviche. Sucking it into her mouth like that dog from that movie. Lot of these people will end up with stomach problems. Parasites, too. A few might get fat. Others might get dead. You never know at Sgradevole’s. Tastes good going down. But it always comes back to getcha.

  Mookie doesn’t have long to think about all this. The maître-de—a sallow-faced jowly goblin stuffed in an ill-fitting tux, his teeth red with old blood—sees him, knows him (because they all know him) and sounds the alarm: an ululating scream.

  He shouldn’t have come.

  But he had to. His anger knows no margins. It is boundless. These creatures hurt his daughter. And now he ha
s to hurt them. The equation, and what it adds up to, are alarmingly simple. With Mookie, it’s always simple. Even when it’s not.

  Three blow-darts stick in the meat of his arm. Thwip-thwip-thwip. Each tasseled not with feathers but with the seaweed-like underarm hair of goblin assailants.

  The darts are probably tipped with poison. Mookie doesn’t give a shit. Won’t work on him; he’s too big, and the Blazes have him jacked up hard.

  The maître-de tries to run. Mookie grabs a chair and throws it overhand. It hits the fleeing gobbo dead-center of his bulging tuxedo back. Mookie hears bones break.

  They’re coming from everywhere, now. Gobbos at all corners. Out from under tables. Swinging and shrieking on a chandelier. Rolling forth on food carts and dessert trays. One comes at him with a hatchet: Mookie grabs the creature’s arm, snaps it like he’s breaking a goose’s neck. Another fires wantonly with a rusty revolver. Mookie takes three to the back, but doesn’t care. He’s still got a grip on the hatchet goblin, so he uses the shrieking freak like a weapon—the thing’s filthy razor teeth bite into the flesh of his wretched cohorts. He takes out the gun-toting fucker first.

  The humans here—well, they react like any human confronting the madness of the monstrous reality. They pass out. Face first into soups, desserts, filets. After which most are dragged away by enterprising goblins (soon becoming victims for the goblin breeding tents, the work camps, or the kitchens of this very restaurant.)

  Mookie wades through the fray. He feels the blood pooling at his lower back, above the hem of his pants. A piece of glass bites into his thigh. He crushes his attacker’s rotten melon head between forearm and bicep: one squeeze, pop. Skull goo like forcemeats.

  The goblins scream. They keep coming. He keeps dispatching them. With each a new cut, a new hole, a new bite mark on his brutish body. His fat head’s too slow to duck the crude gobbo tomahawk coming his way, so instead he just offers it his forehead and stops it dead in the air.