by Chuck Wendig
Mookie looks at it like it’s a cankerpede.
“Still, thanks for being honest. And don’t think I don’t know. I know you killed me.” He draws a deep breath, then lowers his voice. “… but I killed me, too. I hurt my family worse than you ever did.”
Mookie knows that feeling all too well.
Burnsy continues: “I’m not forgiving you. That’s not the kind of thing I can stopper up in a bottle and throw into a dark hole. Every day my skin feels like I’m being bitten by a thousand black widow spiders. Every day is a day I have to sneak up top to see my family – you know my wife got remarried? Some banker turd. My kid’s smart, at least. Spelling bee champ. Good with numbers, too.”
“That’s something.”
“But…” He fumbles around under some mess for a blue plastic spray bottle. He spritzes some all up and down his face. “What I’m saying is, you wanna ask me for a favor, I’ll let you ask. At least.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I need to find a ghost.”
“Find a ghost.” Another water spritz.
“I heard you got into that. Tracking specters.”
“Most of us Daisypusher types fall into that kind of work. We’re good at it. Who you wanna find?”
“The Boss, his grandson–”
“Died, I know, I heard.” Burnsy waves away Mookie’s surprise. “Information has weight, and this place has gravity. News always trickles down. You want me to find the grandson’s ghost? So you can solve the murder, I’m guessing.”
“They say my daughter did it.”
Burnsy whistles. “That I did not know. What do you say?”
Mookie doesn’t answer. Can’t answer. Won’t.
“Right, OK. If he’s down in the dark somewhere, I can find him. But this isn’t a favor. This is a job. And I take this job, you gotta pony up.”
“Whaddya want?”
“My family.”
“I can’t give you them back. Or you back to them.”
“No, not that. I want them cared for.”
“You said she’s remarried, that the girl is… smart.”
Burnsy stares hard, those bright white eyes like uncovered light bulbs. “And I want to be the one making their lives better, not worse for once in my… life. Unlife. Whatever. I want to take care of them. One last time.”
“Name the price.”
“Fifty thousand.”
Mookie almost chokes.
“A year,” Burnsy adds.
“Christ, Lister.”
“That’s the cost. Pay it or hit the schist.”
Mookie’s not good with math, but he knows what he makes a year and he knows that while the Boss is good for stuff like this, he has no idea how long the Boss is going to be hanging around what with the cancer and all.
A counteroffer, then. “Twenty-k a year for five years.”
“Thirty for twenty.”
“Twenty-five for ten.”
The dead man stares. It’s then Mookie realizes this is his thinking-about-it face. Most people’s faces are expressive – the way the skin tugs at the cheeks, the way the eyelids narrow. But his flesh is stretched out. The eyes permanently exposed.
Finally, Burnsy nods. “Done.”
They shake hands. Burnsy’s hand is hot like beach-sand.
Skelly says, “I’m proud of you two crazy kids for making it work.” In her hands is an old wooden box. Scalloped edges. Distressed brass trim.
“We’re not exactly giving each other hand-jobs,” Burnsy says.
Mookie nods at the box. “What’s that?”
“That? Nothing.” Mookie keeps staring, so Burnsy goes on: “I collect. Find all kinds of strange stuff above and below. Especially when I’m hunting up a spook for someone like you. I got soul cages. Monkeysblood crystals. Jumping vicar-seeds. Plus I got a wholly unholy host of funguses-amonguses. I’ve got crow-dimple, black-shelf, glow-worm, hob-tongue…”
But all the while, Burnsy’s eyes are following Skelly as she moves to put that box back on the shelf. Mookie gently catches her hand. He looks to Burnsy. “What’s in it?”
“Like I said, nothing.”
“By nothing, you mean something.”
Burnsy reaches for the box, but Mookie takes it, pulls it away.
He lifts the lid. Inside is a warped glass phial with a cork stopper. He picks it out of the box – Burnsy winces, mutters something about being careful – and, inside, a sap the color of milled wheat oozes sludgily back and forth.
“What is it?”
“I dunno.”
“You’re lying. You do know.”
“It’s a… a sap. Like amber. But more yellow.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Down in the…” Burnsy sighs. “Down in the Tangle. I was lost. I was following some of Oakes’s old-ass maps and I fucked up somewhere. I came upon this gobbo campsite and they were there roasting cankerpedes and I knew they were all riled up because they were fighting and fucking and so I thought I better find a way around. Ahead was this little crevice – like a vent running through the wall and I thought, OK, I’m gonna crawl in there. I did and… fuck it if it didn’t go anywhere but a dead-end, but at that dead-end I found these tubes. Like those wasps make. Mud-daubers? I broke it apart and…” He points to the phial with a blister-tipped finger. “That stuff came out. So I bottled it up.”
As Mookie moves the glass toward the light, the dull yellow patina suddenly brightens as though flecks of glitter hang suspended in the sap. Gold like a burnished lamp.
“This is Ochre,” Mookie says, his heart suddenly racing.
“No. What? I… y’know. Probably not. That stuff’s a myth. Though, shit, careful with it, don’t drop it for Chrissakes–”
Skelly steps up. “That the real deal, daddy-o?”
“I want to buy this,” Mookie says. Could be fake. But what if it’s not? What if it’s really one of the Five Occulted Pigments? He’s already got a little tin of what might be Vermilion – the Red Rage. To have a phial of Ochre? Golden Gate? Be a damn fine bargaining chip. He ever finds himself swinging on the end of someone’s rope it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have these in his pocket to save his ass.
Or to save Nora.
“I can’t do that,” Burnsy says, a fast hand darting out and pulling the phial away. “You got what you came here for. I’ll do the gig. You’ll take care of my family.”
“I can help you. I can…” Here Mookie’s reaching, but it’s worth a shot. “I can get you back on the payroll. With the Organization. Lister, c’mon.”
“Mookie, go home, go get some sleep. You look like batter-dipped shit–”
Just then, outside, a hard bell clangs. Like an old iron dinner bell. Another bell joins in. And a third. A murmur of voices rise up amongst the alarm.
Burnsy bares his teeth. Grabs for the tire iron.
“What’s going on?” Skelly asks.
17
Few can say what the gobbos actually want. Certainly by examination their wants and needs are crass, even evil: they enjoy the pain of others. They take great pleasure from the torment of human beings – they enjoy it the way a dog enjoys rolling around in roadkill, or the way a cat takes pleasure in torturing a rat. Gobbos hunt. They hurt. They eat. They breed. They steal. They kill. And yet that’s just what we see of them: and until the Sandhogs broke into the Great Below years before, the gobbos had little exposure to mankind. So what did they do before they met us?
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
The bells are ringing.
Someone screams.
A sick, sinking feeling hits Skelly’s stomach, like her guts have no bottom, like it’s just a hole that pulls her into herself.
Some of the dead run toward the danger. They hold swords. Claw-hammers. Old-timey double-barrel shotguns, barrels rimmed with rust. Most run away. Faces frozen in mortified panic. Wretched limbs dragging them
along.
A corpse in a moth-eaten tuxedo, a crumpled top hat held tight to his sunken chest, cries out as he hurries past. “Gobbos. Gobbos.”
Goblins.
She’s seen them. At a distance. The Get-Em-Girls don’t fuck with the Underworld much. Sure, they’ve carved out a few hollows here and there. They use the secret tunnels carved out beneath the city, winding in and out of forgotten subway stations and access passages. Once in a while a lone gobo creeps through the dark or the girls find a pack of them scurrying down some dark alley, but she teaches her girls to stay away. To call in the Organization. Let guys like Mookie handle it.
But she knows what they are. What they like. What they do.
Mookie draws his cleaver.
She bites the inside of her cheek. It hurts. It wakes her up.
Skelly draws her Bowie.
They begin to move. Through the fleeing corpses. The rotten stink coming and going in waves. Burnsy says, “The gobbos have always had a thing for this place. A few sneak around the edges, try to steal us away, God knows why. But they been gettin’ ballsy recently. And coming in bigger and bigger groups.”
Somewhere ahead a gunshot sounds. A shriek. A jabbered, inhuman cry.
Corpse-bodies jostle past.
Through the crowd, fire streaks in a wide arc.
A pop of glass.
A bloom of orange.
“Molotovs,” Burnsy says. “They light the fence on fire. Keeps ’em back.”
They push to the edge of the crowd. The dead gather ahead, some with lit bottles, others with weapons. She sees two clad in old-school Vietnam-era flak jackets. One’s got a chestplate of armor made of soup and soda cans. Covering the arms are drainpipes and downspouts.
Past the houses, Skelly sees more bottles hit against the fence. Plumes of fire belch forth, sweep over the fence – the air warped around it, heat vapor shifting.
A few short, squat bodies clamber over the fence-top – on fire, burning, thrashing – and hit the ground and start running toward Daisypusher. Ten, twenty feet in, the bodies plop forward and stop moving. Still burning.
But then–
The fire starts going out. She hears the sizzle of flames. Something wet spattering.
From the edges in, the fire starts guttering. And failing.
Nearby, Skelly sees a dead woman swaddled in thick rags holding a rifle scope – just the scope, no rifle – to her eye. Mookie marches past and grabs it, takes a look down at the fenceline.
“Ah, shit.”
“What?” Skelly asks.
He hands her the scope.
She peers through – at first she can’t tell what she’s looking at. But then she finds the fire, the last of it – and sees the gobbos on the other side, past the wire, past the bones. They’re… doing something. She sees something dripping from the fence.
More climb on top. That’s when she sees what they’re doing.
They’re opening their mouths.
Something’s pouring out. Geysers of spit or vomit, she doesn’t know. Whatever it is, there’s a lot of it. And it’s putting out the fire.
Now gobbos are climbing up over the fence tops.
They hit the ground running. A dozen at first. Then another dozen. More. Jesus. She catches glimpses of open maws. Whipping tongues. And weapons: rusted knives and baseball bats swaddled in barbed wire. Is that a – some kind of antique? A blunderbuss?
Behind the goblins, a dark shadow rises. Like a black curtain blown loose of its rod. Floating behind, then over top the swarming gobbos.
Suddenly the scope is gone, snatched away by Mookie’s massive hand.
She’s about to protest, but he growls: “Here they come.”
Mookie’s tired. More than tired. Empty. Like he’s a scarecrow that’s been chewed out from the inside and all that’s left is the burlap sack and felt hat. As the gobbos rush – thirty, maybe forty of the gibbering, howling gray-skinned, snot-slick mutants – there comes a tiny moment of doubt, a cigarette cherry in the darkness of his heart that burns hot and burns deep, and the doubt says: You can’t do this. You can’t save this town. You can’t fight anymore. You don’t even want to. Sit down. Lie back. Give up.
But then, that ember of hot ash is extinguished by a tide of anger.
He hates gobbos. Hates them. Sees what they’ve done. What they can do. They have nothing they believe in. A crazy loon like John Atticus Oakes thinks they have beliefs and even morals, twisted as they may be. He points to their temples, to some strange religious-seeming cave carvings, to their language that he supposedly helped to decipher. Says maybe they worship the Hungry Ones, the gods of the deepest dark. Mookie doesn’t buy it. More important, he doesn’t care.
They’re awful creatures with no place in this world. Above or below.
And that drives him forward. He draws the cleaver. Nearby a pistol shot. He sees the top of one gobbo’s head peel back, greasy brains bubbling over like a shaken beer.
The gobbos return fire. Mookie sees one gobbo skid to a halt, pointing a fat-mouthed blunderbuss. There’s a ground-shaking choom, a pyrotechnic flash of light, a gout of sickly yellow smoke. One of the dead men next to Mookie, an older fellow with a big distended belly and a beard squirming with earthworms, falls back, body peppered with holes that don’t bleed.
He screams and thrashes as cankerpedes come pouring out of those holes, squealing, squirming, chewing at him–
The gobbo starts to reload, stuffing a filthy wad of writhing, struggling rags into the mouth of the old-timey gun. The rest of the gobbos are only ten feet away.
Mookie bares his teeth. Twirls his cleaver.
And meets the tide of gobbos like a human seawall.
There comes a moment when Skelly thinks: it’s all over. Mookie steps forward, spinning a cleaver that looks too heavy for her even to pick up, and then they slam into him like a collective fist. Then he’s gone. Gone underneath a carpet of goblins. She catches a flash of bald scalp, a glimpse of a fist–
Her own Bowie knife at the ready, she resists every urge inside her body crying for her to run, flee, hide, don’t step over the edge, don’t jump into the chasm, and instead bolts toward the fray. A gobbo does a gymnastic tumble in front of her, springing up like a Jack-in-the-Box except this toy is armed with a chair-leg studded with fragments of chipped glass.
The gobbo screams. Leaps for her. She cries out, leans back, swipes–
Gobbo body hits ground. Gobbo head hits a half-second after, rolling away.
Mookie is already shaking off the gobbo tide the way a dog shakes water from his coat. One gobbo, cleaved in twain. Another kicked so hard his head crumples like a rotten pumpkin. He throws one to the ground, stomps on it. Tosses another in the air and cuts it in half at the waist. Dark blood spurts. Covers him.
Some of it’s his, too. Red blood. Human blood. A gash over his ear. A bite on his hand.
She steps up. Without meaning to, they form a system. He throws them off, she sticks them in the belly, or hacks them across the back, or caps them like she’s cutting the top off a pineapple. All this in a kind of slow motion, pockets of the battlefield revealed–
Mother Cougar pointing at the onrushing horde, her finger like a gun. Zombie-cats are her ammunition, screeching and leaping for the monsters, tearing with teeth, clawing at eyes.
Burnsy jumping like a maniac, up and over the heads of gobbos, bashing skulls with his tire iron. Cackling. And screaming.
Another burst of the blunderbuss: another corpse down. This time it’s the one-eyed trucker, the fabric of his shirt and jeans rippling as a tide of venomous cankerpedes pours out. Bodies are dragged, kicking and thrashing, toward the gates. Abducted. For grim goblin purpose.
Skelly turns. Lops the arm off a fleeing gobbo. A corkscrew shiv clatters on the stone.
It’s then she hears the screams coming from behind them. Back toward town.
The gobbos are there, too. Not possible, she thinks. They haven’t broken the line. And the town
is carved out of the stone – it butts up against hard rock.
It seems the monsters have found a way.
She yells to Mookie, tries to warn him–
But he’s gone. Charging forward. Toward the blunderbuss gobbo.
She can handle this. She knows she can. She’s a bad-ass chick. A deadly doll. She’s a souped-up hot rod with a stacked rack. She’s one coo-coo crazy cooze, daddy-o.
Skelly shakes the Bowie knife free of goblin blood, then runs back toward Daisypusher.
Choom.
Mookie sidesteps the shot – or thinks he does. Something tears into the meat of his bicep just as a pair of gobbos rush him. He bashes one in the face with the flat of the cleaver, and swipes the blade left to slice the other’s head in half at a hard diagonal just as something pushes up out of the hole in his arm–
He knows what it is. He feels it squirming.
As soon as the cankerpede pops its glistening black mandibles out of the wound, Mookie grabs it and turns its head like a key in a lock, twisting the head right off the body. He pulls the rest of the foot-long worm from the wound – spppplup – trying not to scream as each of the little razor-footed legs tears the edges of the exit hole – and flings it against the stone.
Up ahead, the gobbo with the gun is frantically trying to reload.
Mookie doesn’t like that idea. He bellows and stomps forward. The gobbo tries to backpedal and evade but he grabs its hand, pulls the writhing rag-clot of cankerpede ammo from the depths of the gun, and crams it forward, hard into the gobbo’s mouth.
Then he slams the gobbo’s jaw shut, just to make sure.
It doesn’t take long that the gobbo starts thrashing like he’s on fire – and his gray, greasy flesh starts undulating like a blanket laid overtop a bunch of breeding snakes.
The cankerpedes are doing their work.
Mookie grabs the blunderbuss, breaks it over the gobbo’s head for good measure.
By now, the battlefield is looking thinned out. Good. A gobbo flees toward the gates, a half-rotting cat clinging to his rubbery head like a skullcap.
Mookie turns to find Skelly.
But he doesn’t see her.
Then, somewhere, he hears her scream.
