The Blue Blazes

by Chuck Wendig

  “Outta my way,” Mookie says.

  “You Blazing?” the Jack in front of him says, then cackles. These assholes, always with the theatrics. “You carrying the Blue? Huh?”

  Behind him are snickers and hisses. The chain rattles.

  “You know who I am?”

  From behind him, one whispers, “Mookie Pearl.”

  “Good. So you know to get the fuck outta my way.”

  “Give us what you got, Pearl.”

  The skinny Jack in front of him flicks his wrist – a straight razor gleams.

  “We got a truce,” Mookie says.

  “Do we?”

  More cackles.

  “Last I checked. You want to throw it away?”

  The razor flashes in the air. Slicing a figure eight. The skinny Jack’s bag makes a crinkle-noise as he thrusts his tongue out of the mouth slit, waggling it.

  Footsteps behind him. The Jacks are moving in.

  Ballsy. Real ballsy. And stupid. And with the next thing the skinny Jack says, it makes sense–

  “Sure glad I don’t have cancer.” Way he says that last word, it’s a droning weasel-whine: caaaaanceeeeeeer. Another happy cackle. “We heard the word. Persephone’s telling everybody.”

  Shit. Nora. “So that’s what this is. Boss is fine. Healthy as a champion horse.”

  Hesitation. The skinny one lets the razor hang. Takes a half-step back with one foot.

  “You’re lying.”

  “And you’re about to be lying, too. Lying dead.” Not his best line, but Mookie’s not real good at the banter. For extra spice he adds, “You little shit.”

  Skinny Jack screeches like an owl.

  It’s on. He rushes at Mookie, razor out at the side like a Samurai making a charge against a mounted soldier–

  Mookie hears the three behind him close in and close in fast, feet on cracked pavement–

  The chain loops around his neck.

  The razor comes for his face.

  His big hand catches Skinny Jack’s wrist before the blade can cut him.

  He wrenches the hand sideways. The arm breaks at the elbow. Sickening crunch. Bone out of skin. White bone. Red blood. Skinny Jack howls as the chain pulls tighter around his neck. The razor clatters.

  One down, three to go.

  Mookie tilts his body at the waist, lurching forward and down. The Jack with the chain goes launching up over him and down on top of his compound-fracture buddy – he scrambles to get up, trying to find the chain, the razor, something–

  But it’s too late. Mookie drop-kicks his head. Hears the jaw give way.

  Mookie spins.

  Gun in his face. Big fucking gun, too. Some kind of Dirty Harry revolver. Makes it all the easier to grab, which is what Mookie does – he snatches it with a twist, bashes the paper bag pumpkin mask hard enough to tear it down the center. Brown bag stained with red.

  The fourth Jack – a dumpy, pudgy dipshit in baggy pants – just runs.

  Mookie throws the gun.

  It’s heavy. It clocks the fat shit in the back of the head. He drops, face forward, into a scum-slurry puddle. Mookie stomps over. Bends down and growls in the kid’s ear:

  “I got my own message to send out. The Boss is alive. The Organization is strong. And Persephone better watch her back.”

  Then he kicks the kid in the ass as he scrambles forward on all fours.

  Mookie picks up the gun, chucks it in a dumpster.

  He hopes they heed his warning.

  But this is a warning for Mookie, too. They know. They fucking know about the Boss and his cancer. If these piss-ant pumpkin-heads know, that means the other gangs know, too. And it won’t be long before those big gangs outside the city like the Latin Kings and the Triads find out. The Boss is right: they’re gonna smell the blood in the water like so much frothy chum. Blood begets blood. A little now. A lot later.

  Shit. He can feel the edges of his world start to give in a little – it’s suddenly claustrophobic here in the alley, like the walls are going to topple and crush. Mookie’s world is the Organization. If that falls, what does he have?

  The thought makes him feel small and weak like a starving dog. A starving old dog.

  Then he realizes: part of it is the Cerulean. The Blazes suddenly gutter and spark and go dark – it feels like something’s taken from him. Breath from his lungs. Bones from his legs. He steadies himself. Shudders like it’s suddenly cold.

  He hoped to have eyes on when he went to see Mr Smiley.

  So – now what? Go in Blind? Or dose up and keep push-push-pushing?

  Inside, the chattering voice: Go blue! Go deep! Blaze, motherfucker, blaze! Can’t hurt. Feels good! Makes you strong like ox. You’re already stupid, why be stupider? Open your eyes!

  A reiterative chant: Blue! Blue! Blue! Blaze! Blaze! Blaze!

  Without even realizing it, he’s got the tin of powder already in his palm and open.

  Damned if he does.

  Damned if he doesn’t.

  Mookie dips a thumb into the powder and smudges his temples.

  The ravening fire takes him, hot and cold all at the same time.

  The “teahouse” has a bouncer. Mookie knows him. Trogbody named Gorth, goes by the human name of Gary. Shorter than Mookie, but not by much. Bulky stone body shoved into a black T-shirt and cargo pants. Eyes are glittering quartz deposits tucked into a pair of craggy hollows. Mouth full of stalactite and stalagmite teeth.

  “Mookie Pearl,” Gorth says by way of greeting. Whenever he speaks – really, when any Troggo speaks – you hear something in the back of his throat that sounds like a couple loose rocks bouncing down a mountain slope.

  “Gorth,” Mookie says. The Cerulean’s starting to wear him down. He feels his neck tendons pulling tight like piano wire. He’s gotta chill out. Focus up. His daughter’s life is at stake here. Mookie takes a deep breath. “I need to see Smiley.”

  “We’re shuttin’ down for the night.”

  “Hell you are.”

  “Almost four in the morning. Sun’ll be up. Smiley doesn’t like the sun.”

  “Sun ain’t up yet.”

  “I know, but–”

  “I’m tired. I’m burning too long and too hard–” Here Mookie taps his temple. “I just need some info. Ten minutes. Tops.”

  “I dunno–”

  Mookie’s nostrils flare. “Got two ways to do this. First, you move aside, open that door. Second, I gotta find my own way in. And I’m not that smart. So that means I go through you. We’ll fight. It’ll be ugly. But I’m tired. And cranky. And Blazing hard. So I’ll send you home with a couple cracked fingers. An arm broken off at the wrist. Head split like a geode. And I’ll be beaten into mashed potatoes, too. That sound like a good way to end your night? I don’t think it sounds too goddamn good.”

  The golem’s quartz eyes flicker and flash. “That sounds bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK. Go ahead in.”

  Gorth steps aside, his rock joints clattering.

  The teahouse. The first floor is all dark wood, so dark it might as well be black. Trim the color of matcha powder. Rice paper screens the color of red poppies.

  The joint is empty. Except for Mr Smiley, sitting in the middle of the room at a two-top table. Tiny teacup to his left, with a small purple clay teapot just behind it.

  This, then, is Mr Smiley:

  Were Mookie here Blind, he’d see an Asian man of indiscriminate national origin – long face, big smile, hair black and oily like it’s been shellacked to his scalp, like it’s slick plastic snapped to the head of a LEGO figure.

  What he sees instead – what the Blue Blazes show him – is a man whose face is a nearly perfect mix of serpent and human. The head is human-shaped but balanced on a too-long neck, the nose is just a pair of fleshy slits, the eyes are wide coppery diamonds whose irises shift and warp like you’re staring through a child’s kaleidoscope. The mouth – still smiling, for he is always oh-so-very happy – ill-conc
eals not just a pair of curved fangs, but rather a whole maw of them. A wet pink tongue – not forked, but thin and prehensile – slides over them like a slug over piano keys.

  Mr Smiley’s arms are not arms, but snake-like protrusions, tentacular and ever-undulating. The fingers are smaller versions of the arms, like little baby garter snakes attached to the tail of each substantial python.

  “And here I thought we were closed,” Smiley says, grinning.

  “Gorth let me make a late appointment.”

  A twinkling fang-laden smile. “Then sit.”

  Mookie pulls a chair, reverses it, sits with his battleship chest against the back.

  “What can I do for you, Mr Pearl?”

  “I need information.”

  The smile doesn’t leave, but Smiley’s eyes flash irritation. “Yes. Obviously.”

  “I need to know where my–” He’s about to say daughter, but he catches himself. The Blazes make him restless. Foolish. Like he’s tap-dancing on the edge of the abyss. These people don’t know Nora is his daughter. Nobody does. Nobody but Werth. “Where my friend Persephone is.”

  “Persephone. Persephone.” He doesn’t blink. He just stares at Mookie as he says the name again and again. “No. I don’t think I know that one.”

  Mookie pulls his wallet. He knows how this game goes.

  But Smiley stays his hand. An almost imperceptible shake of his head. “No.”

  “No?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Well. What, then?”

  “I want information.”

  “Like I got anything you don’t already know?”

  “Your Boss is weak.”

  Mookie feels heat rising off the back of his neck. “He’s got it all together.”

  “Your Boss is sick.”

  Figures. Of course he knows.

  “Don’t know what you mean. That’s a nasty rumor going around.”

  “It’s not. And you know it’s not. Metastatic lung cancer.” The snake fingers flick and undulate. An expression of excitement? Happiness? “I want to know more about that. I want to know where he’s vulnerable. I want to know where the chinks in his armor lie.” Smiley laughs. “I always wondered: is that racist? Chinks in armor?”

  Mookie wipes away sweat. Sneers. “I can’t answer any of that.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “Ask me something else. Anything else.”

  “No.” So petulant. And giddy at the same time.

  Mookie stands. Knocks the chair over with a clatter.

  “We’re done here,” he says.

  Smiley baits him. “Don’t you want to know how I know? About the cancer?”

  Mookie’s answer is a hard stare. His eyes like two nails trying to pin Smiley to the wall.

  “Besides it being my job to know things,” Mr Smiley says. “Not just my job, actually. But my pleasure, my absolute and unswerving pleasure. I like to categorize the little chips and shards of information – the sweet, sweet secrets – that come in here and, quite honestly, most are worthless. Some have a very narrow edge: a prison shiv meant only for another person, a secret useless to most but powerful to a select few. Other secrets are very powerful, indeed. A hand swept across a table, knocking everything upon it to the floor below. Your Boss’s cancer is just such a secret. It’s a storm that can change a coastline. An earthquake that alters the topography, a bomb that–”

  “Just get to it.”

  “Ah. Impatient. I see that you’re running ragged – look at those pupils! Fat like black flies. Blazing hard tonight, are we? Yes. That secret about your Boss? It was Persephone who told it to me.”

  Mookie’s gut twists.

  “Funny thing is, Mr Pearl, that secret truly is a big one, but it comes part and parcel with one of those very personal secrets. A piece of information that has a fingerprint pressed into its clay. It’s a secret meant for you.”

  The world feels hot and cold. Mookie’s hands form into fists so hard it’s like having a pair of cinderblocks at the end of his arms.

  He knows where this is going.

  “Persephone is your daughter. Eleanor Pearl. And very few people know that.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking ab–”

  “Deny it all you’d like. But here comes the time where we play a lovely little game, a game called Test Your Loyalty. Because now you can either tell me the information I seek – and together we can explore how to undo the empire your Boss has built for the last thirty years – or I can share with that very Boss that it was your daughter who killed his grandson. How does that–”

  Smiley doesn’t get the chance to finish.

  Mookie moves fast. Flips the table up into the Naga’s face. Smiley catches the table with his writhing snake arms, flings it aside–

  It’s all Mookie needs. That moment of disorientation. Soon as the table clears, he drives a fist into the Snakeface’s elongated neck, collapsing the throat. Suddenly Smiley is gasping a gassy squeak, trying to catch air.

  Mookie grabs the neck.

  Then runs at full speed to the back of the teahouse.

  Wham. He slams Mr Smiley into the back wall. Snakefaces have no bones, they’re just a series of tendons and muscles and cartilaginous gel that push and pull off one another. But the Naga keens in pain and hisses just the same.

  Snake arms and legs wrap around Mookie. It’s like trying to wrestle an angry squid. Serpentine tentacles wind around his wrists. His midsection. His throat.

  Hate glows in Smiley’s eyes. His smile now burned to ash. The Snakefaces flashes his fangs – the curved teeth growing out of blistery poison sacs lining the creature’s grub-white gums, dripping poison the color of dying violets.

  Mookie’s on a fast-moving car speeding toward a broken bridge. A little voice in the back of his mind knows this is a bad move – you don’t muscle someone like Smiley. He knows too much. And to kill him? That has consequences. Not the least of which is he’s under the paid protection of the Boss – and Smiley pays in big.

  And yet here Mookie is, ready to crush his windpipe. The fire of the Blazes eating up his insides like they’re just twigs and newspaper.

  “Tell me where she is,” Mookie growls through gritted teeth. “Where is Nora?”

  “Daddy is mad-dy,” Smiley gurgles.

  A baring of those fangs. Jaw snapping, teeth clacking.

  It’s then Mookie sees–

  The fangs oozing dark fluid. Each clack milks more from the glands–

  Mookie tilts his head to the right just as the Naga spits a jet of venom.

  It misses. Hits a table behind them. Squit.

  Mookie punches him in the mouth. Fangs break. A stupid move. If those fangs cut his hands, if the venom got into his bloodstream…

  He finds he doesn’t care. A dangerous place to be, but fuck it. All he does is ask the question again:

  “Where is Nora?”

  The tentacles tighten around him. Now it’s not about trying to hurt Mookie – he’s too jacked up for them to get much purchase, and despite Smiley’s subterranean lineage, this Naga is not a trained assassin. Just a broker for information, not a fighter. Now it’s about trying to get away – he’s trying to wrench himself free, trying to fling himself to the far corners of the room where he’ll slither out through some hidey-hole (being boneless can really have its advantages).

  But Mookie isn’t giving quarter. He just slams Smiley back into the wall.

  “Where.”

  Slam.

  “Is.”

  Slam!

  “Nora?”

  SLAM.

  Smiley spills. “She’s–” Hiss. “Holed up with the Get-Em-Girls.”

  “I know that part.” Slam.

  “Not up top! They have an enclave. Down below. Connected to a warehouse in Hell’s Kitchen–”

  The floor shakes. The whole teahouse shudders.

  The fist comes down on the back of Mookie’s head like a boulder toppling off a mountain p
eak. Appropriate, since the fist is made of rock.

  A garden of pain blooms behind his eyes.

  Mookie lets go of Smiley. The Snakeface thuds against the floor, wheezing–

  And, sure enough, the Naga flings himself into the rafters of the room, swinging from beam to beam, clinging to each like an octopus in a tree–

  Mookie turns, narrowly dodges another fist coming in from Gorth, the golem.

  That granite fist craters a hole in the teahouse wall.

  A kick follows fast after. Mookie ducks it, gets under the foot, grabs the craggy heel. Then he gives it the old heave-ho. Gorth cries out as the massive rock-body turns a teahouse table into long splinters.

  Mookie knows that punching Gorth isn’t going to do him any good. Hit a Trogbody and all you get for your trouble is a hand that’s no longer a fist and is now a floppy skin-sack holding shattered bone-nuggets. As the golem struggles to stand, Mookie reaches into his satchel, and catches the sheathed cleaver as it tumbles out.

  He utters a silent “thank you” to Karyn, then frees the blade from its sheath.

  Gorth lurches to his feet. Quartz eyes gleaming red – a lava furnace of anger behind those crystal pockets.

  Mookie spins the cleaver so it’s the flat back of the blade facing forward.

  The golem lunges.

  Mookie brings the back of the cleaver down hard on Gorth’s skull.

  Sounds like a gunshot. The head cracks – a fissure split from forehead to skull peak, a mini canyon formed along the ridge of his uneven stone skull. From within the rift, a faint magma glow. Gorth makes a moan like a distant foghorn; then he hits the ground, utterly and eerily still.

  The floorboards lie cracked and buckled beneath him.

  The golem’s head sizzles. Steam rises.

  Mookie kneels down, pats Gorth on the shoulder. The golem will heal up eventually – the poor lunkhead will need to spend some time back down in the dark, patching himself up. But for now, he’s out of commission. And Mookie, chest heaving, body throbbing, nerves jumping like sparking wires, doesn’t see the Snakeface anywhere. The slippery sonofabitch must have gone up into a duct or something.

  No more time to waste here.

  He needs to find the Get-Em-Girls. He needs to find Nora.