I clenched my teeth and my eyes started to water.
“You have a lot of blood left. That’s amazing. I always assumed you were dried up and empty like a scarecrow.”
I pushed her hand away and pulled my jacket closed.
“Yeah. I’m lucky like that.”
I tried to swallow but choked, spraying a fine mist of blood out in front of me. The Insect caught it in the face and wiped it away with one hand.
I smiled.
“That’s on the house.”
The Insect looked at her sister and shook her head.
“You’re a slave-trader, feeding your brothel with the starvation of my people. And you’re playing host to a psychotic murderer with no shred of justice or honor.”
The Boss-Lady shook her head and began to reply but I interrupted, sputtering but firm.
“Justice! Honor!”
I groaned and steadied myself.
”These people aren’t slaves. They’re here by choice.”
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve but I was just moving blood around at this point.
“And even so… better to be a slave than an animal.”
The Insect slid the needles back into her belt and looked at me.
I pushed my hands to my stomach.
“If you keep feeding them. If you keep letting them just… eat and eat… they’ll be slaves to this imaginary need forever. And Jesus knows that. He’s just going to take that hunger and make himself the King of your little crappy kingdom.”
She scoffed and looked at her Sister.
“Typical smoothie bullshit. You drink and you pop pills and you kill whoever and whatever you like. You come down to my village and you stir up trouble and you manipulate them for… what? Entertainment?”
I shrugged.
She took a step back toward the door and addressed us both.
“You know. We are going to make everything better. We’re going to build the old world all over, but better this time. All these people have is hunger. We’ll feed them. And we’ll protect them. And we’ll bring real justice and peace. And people like you? People like both of you? You won’t be around to enjoy it.”
I waved farewell to the back of her head as she walked out the door. I had no horse in this race, but the Boss-Lady looked rattled.
She gestured to my stomach.
“I’m sorry about that.”
I shook my head.
“It’s okay. I was stirring up trouble. Her friends got to me today and I guess I just wanted to take it out on somebody.”
She gestured to the bartender.
“Do you believe everything you just said?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“What?”
The bartender handed her a jar of shine and she passed it to me.
“About the people being slaves to need.”
I took a sip, swished it around my mouth and swallowed it. It was thick and cloying.
“We’re all slaves to something.”
She sighed.
“Well, go sit down and try to let the trouble come to you, instead of the other way around.”
The timing was perfect.
"Well, well, well. I know that broken face. Did you come looking for another taste?"
I could smell him before I heard him. Through the metallic taste in my mouth, through the tar and the smoke and the shine. Sweet and wet. Vaguely salty. Like his sweat-slick stomach had split open and was leaking all the desserts and the red meat and the wine of the old-world.
Muscles stood at the top of the stairs. He held his shirt in one hand and the other was balled into a fat fist. His stomach was swollen and the skin stretched tight and glistened with sweat. Short, purple scars ran along his sides.
I wasn't in the mood. My stomach had been thoroughly ventilated and it hurt to move. The doorman stared out onto the street but I could see the bouncers moving subtly into position. They were all staring at me.
The Boss-Lady looked at Muscles and back at me.
"You're here to do a job."
I nodded and licked my lips.
"Of course. I'm the height of professionalism. Don't worry about it."
I stepped out toward the foot of the stairs and held up a warning finger.
"Now you had better behave yourself, slim. These people are here to relax, to be safe and to have a good time. So keep those fat fingers to yourself."
He grinned and swaggered down the stairs, dragging one blunt paw along the banister.
The Boss-Lady stepped back and watched with vague interest, eyebrows raised. It looked a little like an invitation but I wasn't sure. I was probably projecting.
I squared up and put one hand on my waist - two fingertips stroking the shiv in my pocket. My stomach was aching and cold. I wouldn't be able to throw any meaningful power behind my fists. If I was quick I could get the shiv out and up through his chin - try for a crap-shoot penetration of the brain. Scramble his motor centers.
It wasn't going to happen. I took a sip of shine and held the jar out to the doorman. He looked at it and looked back at the door. I could barely hold my head up.
I would wait until he got close; wait until his stomach was pressed up against mine. Maybe wait until his fingers were around my throat or he was lifting me by my collar. And I would jam the shiv into his stomach and lever it against his belt buckle - mincing his organs until he was just a hollow shell of bones with a canvas of skin.
He stopped on the bottom step and looked over my head. His body seemed to radiate heat. I could hear his stomach churning.
"That was fun." He chewed his words and spat them at the Boss-Lady. She nodded and smiled.
"I'm glad. I'll pass on the compliment."
The sight of his bare, flushed skin turned my stomach. The Boss-Lady didn't seem offended. I watched her face closely. I couldn't read the expression in her eye. Her tone was relaxed, even friendly.
Blood rushed to my face and my lip started to bleed again. I bit the wound and turned back to Muscles. He was staring at my lip with a wide grin on his face.
"How's your face, tough-guy?"
I took a sip of shine and swallowed it through clenched teeth. I ran my eyes over his groaning stomach and the wet muscles twisting from his biceps, over his shoulders and up his neck. Veins crawled over his skin like vines and pulsated with every heartbeat.
I looked him in the eyes and stretched my mouth into a wide smile. Warm blood was still pooling in my mouth.
"Do you remember sausages? Do you remember? Like... fat and cartilage and liquefied meat all stuffed into a tube of skin?"
He stared at me but didn't reply. The grin was fading.
"You're a human sausage, friend. I can't stay mad at that."
I threw him a wink and took a step backward. There was a brief silence. I could hear breathing. He looked between the bouncers, across at the bar and back to me.
Boss-Lady began to laugh. An honest laugh without malice. The bartender joined in a stilted, artificial manner and the bouncers followed suit.
"You two. You two are hilarious. You should make friends. You'd be a real team."
She put her hand on both of our arms.
"You really are just old world boys, aren't you?"
I shrugged and laughed. He pulled his lips into a counterfeit smile but his eyes didn't follow suit.
"I'll see you both soon."
He stepped around the Boss-Lady and backed toward the door, pulling his shirt over his massive chest and staring at me with dark eyes. A loose strand of hair fell down over his face.
I waved goodbye with one finger and turned back to the Boss-Lady. She bit her lip and watched his wide back disappear into the tar.
"Your sister keeps volatile company"
"Ah, he's not so bad. He's just a simple thing. He likes to eat and he loves his body and he loves that boyfriend of his. And then he likes to come here once a week to mess around a little. I don't know. Seems pretty harmless to me."
I pointed
to my face and glared at her.
"Didn't feel quite so harmless when he was jacking my face up."
She waved me away and started back up the stairs.
"Ah, people do bad things and think they're doing good. And people do good things and think they're doing bad. And some people just do what they're told..."
She gestured to the door. The doorman was stalling a line of tar-drenched traders and their slaves
"..and I think those people are the lucky ones."
At this stage I couldn’t remember what the pay was supposed to be.
I had all the shine I could drink and more blues than I could eat in a day.
I’d folded my jacket, my shirt and my trousers and put them in the corner of the lobby, sandwiching the tyre iron and the shiv between them. I’d put my boots on top and told the doorman to watch the pile and… I guess he had agreed. He didn’t overtly disagree. He didn’t give any indication that he’d heard me.
And now we were in the alley, stripped naked and cheered on by ferals and slaves and traders crowding around the doors and windows.
The slave was short and thin and the skin on his stomach was puckered around his intestines so tightly that he looked like a living illustration of the digestive tract. We were both completely black with tar. His fists were so small and fast that it was impossible to avoid them by just the ambient light of the purple sky.
He hit me with two fast hooks, just below my eyes. I threw a blind kick that caught him in the stomach and knocked him on his back. The street was red for a moment and I put my hands up to protect my face while it faded back to black. He scrambled back to his feet and wiped the tar from his eyes.
My stomach was warm and throbbing. I’d run four or five jars of shine through it until the wounds wept a diluted pink. The worst was over. I twisted to the side and caught a clumsy roundhouse by the ankle. He threw a jab that slapped against my neck and I swept his other leg from under him. He hit the ground hard and I lifted my heel to stomp on his crotch. My arms and legs were hot and my heart was racing. My vision was sharp and clear. I dropped his leg and lowered my heel, taking a few steps backward.
“Get up. Let’s go. Round Two. Shake it off.”
He rolled onto his stomach and slowly lifted himself off the ground.
“Tell me when you’re ready.”
He feigned a low kick to the left and threw his whole body behind a brutal haymaker. I moved just enough to miss the full weight of the punch but he caught me in the mouth with two knuckles. My lip split open fresh and tar poured into the wound. A lungful of pain exploded from my chest and I blew a cloud of blood and saliva and tar.
I dropped my head and hit him with a low uppercut in the kidneys. He jerked backward in pain and as he lowered his hands I threw a hard right hook that twisted all the way from my back foot to my hips and into my shoulders and caught him beautifully right across the bridge of his nose.
He went limp and hit the ground with a wet thud. My knuckles were singing and the final blow had awoken a brutal agony in my stomach.
The crowd cheered and a trader came out to drag his boy away.
I'd done well. He was crumpled like a piece of rough and so still that it seemed unnatural.
The trader bent over the body with no concern, fished in his pockets, scooped up a handful of tar.
He put a hand over the boy’s mouth and the eyes sprang open and the limbs jerked to life. The slave rose to his feet. He looked as fresh as the moment we started.
“Hey. Hey you.” I moved under the awning and somebody passed me a towel through the window. I pointed at the trader and tried to get his attention.
“What did you just do to him? What was that? I knocked that sucker out cold. That last hook was a certified curtain-dropper.”
I started to scrape the tar from my skin. It was thick and oily and just seemed to move around in stubborn clumps.
The trader and his slave stared at me and said nothing.
“Hey you. I’m talking to you. What was it? Was it a blue? What sort of blue was it? I’ve been eating blues since the curtain fell and I’ve never felt as good as he looks.”
He really did look good. The trader wiped the tar from his face and his skin was only barely flushed. A little red, a faint purple and flat tan. He put one hand to his nose and twisted it back into shape, leaving a black hand-print and two bright paths of red blood that ran into his mouth.
I had no idea what I looked like but I was damned sure it wasn’t pretty. It had been a long day and I’d been eating it up like a masochist.
I followed the slave and his trader back inside and put my clothes on. I’d done a shoddy job of cleaning myself. My skin hissed and rogue streaks of tar boiled away in the light.
The bartender divided the bets along the bar, arranged them according to some invisible value system, slipped the house cut beneath the bar and distributed the rest to the winners.
I slipped the shiv into my pocket and the tyre iron through my belt and took a jar of shine from the doorman. He nodded very slightly, his face still expressionless, and it felt like a minor victory. I smiled and nodded in return.
A trader sat at my stool at the bar. I pushed him away with the back of my hand and sat down, slipping the first few inches of the shiv from my pocket without looking at him. He blew a hot cloud of stale breath against the back of my head and walked away.
The bartender pulled my earnings from beneath the bar and pushed them in front of me. I drank the last of the shine and slid the empty jar toward him.
I waited for him to refill my jar and looked over the winnings.
The items sat on a stack of home-spun paper. All roughly square, all thick and powdery, all painted with that same human figure that Jesus had been spraying so liberally around town.
It was mildly reassuring to know that the scavengers and traders hadn’t been tainted by Jesus and his posse.
The reward was scant. Mostly scraps of plastic and metal with a few useful highlights.
A brittle coil of copper wire, probably ten feet long if I unwound it.
A handful of nails and screws, all wrapped up in a few squares of browning cloth and tied with a piece of leather.
I pressed the leather to my nose but it smelled like nothing. Or tar. Nothing or tar.
None of it did me any good, but I would give the paper to the Doctor to throw in with the rough and give the rest to Dad and that would keep me in blues for a month or more.
I put the wire and the nails in my pocket and folded the flyers, wedging them under my shirt and into my jeans.
The slave I had just fought sat at the end of the bar, propping his head on two fists. His skin was flushed and he was breathing heavily. His trader pushed a jar of shine in front of him and tapped him on the shoulder. He closed his eyes and shook his head. His jaws were clamped tight.
“Hey, you. Good fight.”
I knocked sharply on the bar with my knuckles and jerked my chin in his direction. The slave didn’t look up and his trader glanced at me without expression.
“Tell your boy he fights well.”
I exaggerated each word in an attempt to cut through the voices.
The trader looked back to his slave and said nothing. His hand rested around the slave’s neck and he kneaded the muscles with his thumb.
The bartender filled my jar and nudged it back toward me. The shine spilled out onto the bar and I wiped it up with my fingers and stuck them in my mouth.
He turned away without apology.
Something had jolted that slave alive out there in the alley. That last hook was flawless. If it was me I’d still be out there, blowing bubbles in the tar. I took a mouthful of shine, rinsed my mouth, swallowed a ball of blood and rank saliva and pushed a blue between my bottom teeth and my lip.
“This is my seat, right here”
I gestured to the stool, gave a vague warning look to everybody around me and moved to the end of the bar, edging up on the far side of the slave.
The trader glared at me across the slave’s wet face - one hand poised at his hip. I slowly raised my hands, palms out, fingers wide, and turned to lay them flat on the bar.
“I just wanted to talk to you. I have questions.”
He didn’t relax, just slightly nodded his head and tapped on the bar with his black fingernails. He was a little shorter than me, his torso was wrapped in a black-stained length of plastic-cum-fiber and tightened at the waist with likewise rope. He wore a pair of leather pants; cut off at the knees and his forearms and calves were wrapped in heavy gauze.
His face looked like a mask - heavily scarred and stained with tar. I couldn’t read his expression. He didn’t seem to have an expression. Just two narrow eyes and a mouth in a perpetual grimace, teeth moving just enough to let the words slip out.
I cleared my throat and turned toward the bar, making slow, exaggerated movements as I picked up the jar and put it to my mouth. I shaped each word clearly and loud.
“I have had a rough day. Tomorrow is going to be worse. I have been knocked out, head-butted, bitten. I’ve had a broken jar jammed into my back and I’ve had two pipes rammed through my gut. My knuckles are probably broken, I’ll likely lose a few teeth, and that’s not including the expert beating your boy gave me out in the alley.”
I paused and took another sip. I gave the trader time to process the words, if he was even listening. I held one hand out, spread the fingers clearly and slowly opened my jacket, taking my pipe and the wad of tobacco from my pocket.
“I don’t have much. I have shine. I have blues. I have reds and I have my fists. I’ve got good credit at the meatbin.”
I split the wad of tobacco into three piles and blindly pushed two of them toward the trader.
“I just want to feel alive. And right now I’m feeling dead.”
Blue Meat Blues Page 9
