by Chuck Wendig
“Non-pareils.”
“Yeah. Those. I’ll bring you a big bag of those.”
She kisses his cheek. “Bye, Daddy.”
He can’t seem to say goodbye. Looks like he tries, but his mouth can’t form the words. Instead he nods, musses her hair like he used to do when she was little.
Then he’s gone.
31
I’m between. I mean that. Like, I don’t belong anywhere? I’m alive but bound to the land of the dead, which means I’m not all that alive, am I? I’m just a prettier zombie than the rest of these people here in Daisypusher. I feel between in a lot of ways, actually. I’m not a good girl, but maybe I’m not such a bad one. I love my father, but there’s a still part of me that hates him, too, because of Mom. I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t even know who I am. Burnsy tells me that’s called “being human” and, worse, “being a teenager”, but I think maybe he’s just trying to be nice. I’m just… between. I’m nowhere. I’m nobody. Maybe that’s OK. Maybe I can do something with it. For now, this place is my home. Not Daisypusher. I don’t belong here either. I mean, all of it is home. The Underworld. I press my hands to its walls, and I can feel it there. Almost like it’s aware of me – as much as I am of it. One day soon I’m going to explore my new home. All of it.
– from the Journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
It’s an accounting of the dead.
First: Werth’s apartment. Mookie cleans it out. It’s a – well, a rat-trap isn’t the word because of all the cats. Turns out, Werth really liked cats. Or hated them and had them anyway. Maybe that makes it a really good rat-trap? Mookie doesn’t know, doesn’t care. He gives away everything that has value. Takes the cats to a shelter. All of it is hard to do with his one arm in a sling and the rest of his body feeling like it’s been put through a meat slicer. When he’s all done he stands at the door of the apartment and closes it and says goodbye to Werth inside his head. He’s still not sure how to feel about him. He liked Werth. But Werth treated him like shit for years. And at the end…
Well.
That poor old goat.
A day later: Karyn’s. At first he can’t tell her. He pretends that he’s here about losing the cleaver. But she’s distracted. She tries to push some charcuterie on him – good stuff, too, cantimpalo chorizo, salchichon, Jamon Serrano ham. But he can’t do it. Can’t take from her again and again, and finally he just spills it. Tells her all about Lulu. How he was there. How she died. He doesn’t spare a detail. What’s the point? He was never a good liar anyway. She breaks down. He sees it: the love was real. Not just a thing born of intensity. A lot of love isn’t love, it’s just a strong feeling that over time fades, but this, what Karyn feels, is true blue. And it kills her. And she kicks him out because he was there and, even if he didn’t kill Lulu, he can be her scapegoat. He wants to be. Deserves to be. She can pile all her grief and blame upon his ox-like shoulders and boot him out the door. Which she does.
On the third day: Davey Morgan’s funeral.
The cops found Cassie Morgan, Davey’s daughter, unconscious in her NYU dorm room. Half-dead, saved by a wandering RA. She’s at the funeral. Looking bleak. Barely keeping it together. Her emotional state blown apart like rock by dynamite. Mookie doesn’t bother trying to talk to her. She wouldn’t remember him, anyway. That was another lifetime. Besides: what would he even say?
The funeral – there’s a line out the door of people waiting to pay their respects. Sandhogs from the 147 and the 147½. EPA guys. Bunch of cops and firemen. They loved Davey. He ran dozens of crews over the years. He is beloved.
Few of them recognize Mookie. The ones that do give him looks.
You ain’t welcome here, Mikey.
He isn’t. But he stays just the same.
On the way back from the funeral, he puts some money into an account. For Lister’s kids. For Lister’s wife. He doesn’t know how long that money will last now that the Organization has gone to hell, but he does what he can.
Later, he talks to Skelly. She said she’s been down to see Nora already and asks him, has he gone yet? He tells her he hasn’t – he’s sent her a care package, meats and cheeses and those non-pareil things, but he says he’s got one more thing to do before he sees her.
“I gotta go see my ex-wife,” he says. “I made a promise.”
He knows something’s wrong when the plane turns over the ocean. Candlefly can feel it bank hard to the right – and then they’re flying in a new direction. Traveling south along the Spanish coast, not across the country. Which means he is not going home.
Home is Mallorca.
They’re heading toward…
The Canaries. That has to be it.
This is not good news.
As soon as everything went to hell – in some ways, quite literally – at the dig site, Candlefly knew it was done. Something had happened. No – Mookie Pearl had happened. A rogue element he again underestimated. His mistake. A big mistake. A final one.
He told Haversham to run.
Haversham didn’t hesitate. He turned tail and bolted.
As he ran, Candlefly shot him in the back of the head.
Then for him it was time to book a private plane and get out of here – already they were calling what happened a terrorist attack. If that got attached to him in any way, that would blow back on his family. They’d stayed hidden and out of sight for a long time. How crass and hollow it would be to suffer now not from some supernatural danger but from the mortal bureaucracy of American Homeland Security.
And now this. A turn of the plane.
A half hour later they land. The pilot doesn’t show his face. The door opens, and the steps descend. Outside, to one side is the snow-tipped peak of Mount Teide. On the other, the steel-blue ocean. And ahead: men with guns.
Ah. That’s how this is, then.
They walk him down a trail. To an old church with a dead tree outside that looks like a skeleton’s hand reaching toward – and forever failing to reach – heaven.
At the steps he sees her:
Renata.
His wife. Beautiful – those dark eyes, those broad hips, the way the wind feathers her shoulder-length hair. She looks like an eagle, cutting a dark, strong, noble shape.
The men with guns step aside and he thinks: I am pardoned. At least in part. This, then, a sign he is not welcome home, but at least a sign that he is still allowed to be with his family. He runs to embrace her at the top of the steps. He holds her close.
“Where are the children?” he whispers in her ear after kissing it. He calls for them: “Oscar! Adelina!”
She pulls away from him. Icily, she says, “They did not come.”
The men with guns step in behind him.
“Renata–”
“The family is displeased.” A pause. “All the families are.”
“My love–”
“Our bond is broken,” she says. “I am no longer your wife. I am once again a Glasstower. I am not a Candlefly.” His heart breaks. He almost collapses. “And neither are you. Goodbye, Ernesto.”
She cups his face with both hands, and then pushes past him. He reaches for her, tries to go with her – but the men with guns push him back. He tries to strike one.
A butt of an AK-47 crashes into his face. He feels an explosion behind his eyes.
They drag him into the church. And it’s then he sees what is to be his fate.
An old gate. To one of the many hells. The Underworld beneath New York is just one of many – one of nine major hells, to be exact. All of them dead-ending in the Expanse. Where the Hungry Ones still dwell.
This gate is just a hole ringed with stone. The rest of the church innards never existed. It’s just a façade, a false temple meant to fool crusaders so many years before.
Above it is a rope on an old pulley. At the end of that rope hangs a noose.
He screams. Tries to fight. Another hit to the nose. The nose breaks. He can’t see through the tears now. He taste
s blood along with the salt air.
They wind the rope, not around his neck, but around his ankles.
Then they push him down, down, down–
He cries, “I cannot go! It is forbidden! Wait! Wait–” But his words are drowned out as the pain seizes him. The pain is like being robed in fire and ice, like being drowned in lava and frozen in a glacier. It feels as though his skin is being stripped away. As though hot iron rods are thrust up into the marrow of his bones. It hurts in his teeth. His balls. His soul.
It hurts eternally.
For he is immortal. And now, so is his pain.
Jess lives in a small house on Staten Island. It was their house once. But Mookie took his name off it a long time ago. Same as he took himself out of their lives. A fact he regrets now. He’s old and has nothing. Almost nothing. He can see Nora. He’ll see her every day if she’ll let him. It’s better than nothing, yeah. But it’s so much less than what he could have had.
He needs to tell her what happened. He can’t tell Jess the truth. How could he? He doesn’t want to poison her with that nonsense. Mookie never let her see any of that before and doesn’t want to start now.
So he can’t say, “Our daughter is alive but down in the dark.”
Or could he? Could he tell her everything? Could he show her?
He’s not sure. He holds the idea. Lets it swish around his head.
First, the hard part: knocking on the door.
Things have changed around here. Not a surprise. A new look out back: white picket, a classic fence, instead of the chain-link he put up. He hears a dog barking out back, too. A little yap. Like a terrier or something. So she has a dog. Potted plants line the steps. Mums. She wasn’t much of a green thumb, always killed plants, but as far as he knows, mums are pretty hardy flowers.
He stands on the stoop. One arm in a sling.
He’s faced gobbos and inhuman crime lords and ancient worm-gods and yet here he’s more scared than he’s been in a long time. Mookie wants to run. Like a gun-shy puppy.
But then he’s doing it even before he realizes it.
Knock knock knock.
Footsteps. Fast approaching.
The door opens and a young girl, maybe twelve years old, stares out. Red hair in pigtails. She squints. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m…” She catches herself. “Not telling you that. Mom!”
She runs back inside the house, slamming the door.
A minute later, a woman comes to the door. A short, squat woman. Hand inside a dishtowel, which is itself inside a glass as she cleans it. “Help you?” she asks.
“You’re not Jess.”
“No. I’m Marie.”
“I want Jess.”
“Jess Stevens?”
“No. Who the hell is Jess Stevens?”
“Lives down the block.”
It strikes him like a fist to the gut. She got remarried.
“Mid-forties?” he asks. “Hair the color of a penny?”
“No. Early thirties. Blonde. Bartender at Coyle’s.” The woman suddenly narrows her eyes. “Wait, are you talking about the woman who used to live here?”
“Yeah. Jess Pearl.”
“Who are you?”
“Her husband.” He sighs. “Ex. Ex-husband.”
The woman’s face falls.
“I’m sorry, but….” She looks suddenly uncomfortable. “She’s… she’s dead.”
“What?” He almost laughs. “She’s not dead.”
“She died… not quite two years ago. Bad hit-and-run accident. Some drunk plowed into her. Accident, I guess. We bought the house out of auction from her – your, ah, her? – daughter. She’d just turned eighteen or something and we put in a bid…” She stops talking. “I’m so sorry.”
Impossible. His thoughts spin around inside his head like a tornado. One second he wants to cry out, push past this woman, find out where they’re hiding Jess. The next second he wants to punch her in the mouth, knock her head clean off her shoulders for lying to him like that. Then he wants to collapse here on the stoop, curl up in a big broken ball of grief and gristle, and weep till the sun goes down and the moon pops up.
All he does is mutter, “Thank you” in a voice he’s not sure is his own. Then he shuffles away from the front door and takes ten steps.
He stands there. This was their house. That was his wife.
Hit-and-run accident.
She died.
She’s dead.
We bought the house out of auction from your daughter.
That wouldn’t have been long before Nora came to him the last time. When she lied to him. And got him to wipe out that nest of gobbos. And shot Werth. Jesus. He always wondered where she got the capital to set up shop so early. From this. From the house sale. And from insurance and whatever money Mookie’d been sending to Jess.
He’d been inadvertently funding his own daughter’s attacks against him.
He didn’t even know his own ex-wife – the mother of his child – was dead.
No wonder Nora hated him.
He does all he can do. He goes home, to the bar, and drinks himself to sleep.
He wakes up at the bar. A plate of chicken fingers in front of him, mostly cold. He knows he didn’t put it there. Nor did he put the bottled water there.
He lifts his brow. Bleary-eyed, he sees Nora sitting next to him.
“Hey, Daddy-o.”
The voice. Rich, dark. Bourbon and cigarettes and chocolate. No. It’s not Nora. It’s Skelly. Or Kelly. That’s what she said: “Call me Kelly from now on.” So he does.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey back.”
She runs her hand across his scalp like his head’s a bowling ball and her fingers are seeking the holes. He holds up the water. “This you?”
“No, it’s a water bottle.”
“Funny.”
“I thought so.”
“Thanks for the water. And the chicken.”
She pats the top of his head. “My pleasure, big fella.”
“You want some meat?” he asks.
“That a come on?”
“I got meat in the fridge.”
“Nope, still not sure if this is a come on or not.”
He musters a chuckle, then goes and fixes her a plate. “I’m a vegan.”
“Ah, shit. Sorry?”
She sighs, then says, “I used to love a good hamburger. Still miss it from time to time.”
Then she picks a piece of prosciutto and pops it in her mouth.
He grins. “That’s the sexist thing I’ve ever seen.”
“What now?” she asks.
“For the first time in a long time, I dunno. I always came back here, but then the call would come. I’d be on the job.” He stares at the racks of liquor he’ll never drink. “Always on the job. But now there’s no job.”
“Maybe that means it’s time to move forward.”
“I wish I knew what that even meant.”
“It means you pick a path and walk down it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Where do I start?”
She holds out her hand and starts to lead him away from the bar toward the steps and up them. “It starts here. It starts tonight.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every book is the product of more than just one person, even though the author is the one who wears the laurels on his crown.
Thanks to my wife and child for putting up with the weird bearded hobo who lives with them and writes these fanciful stories.
Thanks to dangerous deviant Dave Turner who, despite his city-dwelling pretensions, is a most excellent reader and editor of books.
Thanks to Robin Laws, who gave me reason to conjure the character of Mookie Pearl for the anthology, The New Hero.
Thanks to Lee Harris and all the Grumpy Cyborgs who helped make this book into what it is.
Thanks to Stacia Decker, agent extraordinaire, who knows h
er way around a hard-ass novel edit and who kicks ten kinds of ass. No, eleven. Twelve.
Thanks to author friends like Stephen Blackmoore, Adam Christopher, Gwenda Bond, Kim Curran, Mur Lafferty, Lauren Beukes, Myke Cole, Saladin Ahmed, Delilah Dawson, Karina Cooper, Matt Forbeck, Matt Funk, Jimmy Callaway, Dave White, Joelle Charbonneau, and Dangerous Dan O’Shea who repeatedly inspire me (and frequently conspire with me).
And thanks to all you people for picking up and reading his book. You are why I’m here after all, allowed to do this crazy author voodoo.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer.
He is a fellow of the Sundance Screenwriting Lab. His short film (written with co-author and director Lance Weiler) Pandemic showed at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. That same year, Collapsus – a digital transmedia drama, also co-authored with Weiler – was nominated for an International Digital Emmy and a Games 4 Change award. He has contributed over two million words to the game industry, and was developer of the popular Hunter: The Vigil game line.
He currently lives in Pennsyltucky with his beautiful wife Michelle, their taco terrier Tai-Shen, their red dog Loa, and their son (known as “B-Dub”).
You can find him at his website, terribleminds.com, where he remains busy dispensing dubious writing wisdom. Said dubious wisdom is collected in eBook form, such as in the popular 500 Ways to Be a Better Writer. His next book for Angry Robot is the third Miriam Black novel, The Cormorant.
terribleminds.com
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Mookie take it off again
An Angry Robot paperback original 2013
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Copyright © Chuck Wendig 2013
Chuck Wendig asserts the moral right to be
