Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  “Shh,” I said, backing him into the entryway with the SIG.

  “Kleck?” A feminine voice caught up with us. Another little person.

  “Shh,” I said, covering her with the Browning.

  My eyeline was hampered. Holding three-foot-tall people at gunpoint was new to me.

  They went into fear clinch, grabbing each other, just as another person rounded the archway—Mason Stone.

  “Hey, Kleck, do you think it would be possible to—” Stone’s mouth stalled at midpoint. To his credit, he reacted quickly, backpedaling the way he had come. If he was going for a weapon I needed to know about it.

  “The photographer,” I said as I trooped the short people backward through the archway and into the main room. “I’m here for the photographer. Not you.” Stone was in a half crouch in front of Artesia Savoy, who was seated on a mushroom-shaped pedestal divan near the crescent bar. The back of the bar was toward the curtained windows. Was Stone trying to shield her? He obviously was not packing.

  It was difficult to make out the other occupants, due to the size of the room and the dimness of the light. A big fireplace threw dancing shadows. I was facing a circular sofa that sat between the two archways. It was gaudy and velvet, a giant padded donut with a spire in the middle, like something picked up at a brothel fire sale. Turban Guy had risen from it, and seemingly, kept on rising. He was huge, at least six-five without the headgear.

  “Please…” said the little man in the W. C. Fields suit.

  “What the fuck is this?” said Stone, grabbing for command. “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck is this? Where’s Dick?”

  “Dick has gone away,” I said. “Shut up. Sit down. Now.” All warm bodies were inside my forty-five-degree cover sweep.

  Turban Guy kept coming. His carriage said he would not stop until he grappled me into a headlock. I cross-elevated the SIG and stuck a pill into his sweet spot. He grunted on impact and kept coming … so I did it again and he fell face forward, trying to keep his blood inside. Mildly amazing, that he could absorb the carnage of two Hydra-Shoks and keep thrashing.

  It also froze everyone in tableau. Peripherally I saw them looking for openings, thinking I was distracted by Turban Guy.

  Kleck—the dapper midget—got a half step toward the fallen giant and yelled out “Uno!” before he remembered to hold still. His distaff partner began weeping.

  Artesia Savoy had flinched as though bee-stung with each silenced shot. She would offer no resistance whatsoever, and Mason Stone had to concentrate on appearing to protect her.

  “Everybody listen. Photographer. I need him. I saw him here. Where?”

  On the floor, Turban Guy stopped squirming and made my argument for me. The pool around him widened.

  Off to my immediate left, a row of doors punctuated the long wall opposite the window side. Two of these had opened in response to the ruckus. In the nearest was Spider Girl, who got the special attention of the Browning. She did a fast fade and slammed the door.

  “Any other way out of there?” I said.

  “No,” said Kleck. “Leave us alone.”

  “Give me the photographer. Elias, Julian, whatever he calls himself, I want him now. Don’t wait for me to say please.”

  That was when Gator Guy pushed past a nearly naked normal human in the second doorway, roared like a T. rex, and actually fucking charged me.

  The firelight edged him in feverish orange. I thought: That’s not a mask. Real teeth showed inside his mouth, which was open wide—impossibly wide. Flinging spittle, his talons chittering on the marble floor, he charged me.

  Rather, he charged the Browning, which was closer by one arm’s length.

  I disliked shooting left-handed, but at this distance it didn’t matter. He took five in the torso, nipples to navel, before he lost his trajectory and crashed into the bar, knocking it over. The racket of the unsilenced Browning meant that palaver was done. The lizard-man rolled amid shattered bottles and pungent liquor but did not seem intent on getting up. He did not seem to possess nipples or a navel.

  Kleck was pointing mutely at another door, the one I’d seen nearest the window in the corridor.

  I moved sideways to maintain cover and gave the door my foot. Too much tough guy … it wasn’t even locked. But violent, declarative actions would keep everyone else on edge, and therefore transfixed for a few more vital seconds. The frame was cheap crap and the door banged open with a satisfying amount of telegraphed threat.

  The whole room was aglow with low-frequency hydroponic lamps, the kind used to nourish plant life. The air was thick and humid. From behind a translucent drape, I saw Elias’s now blond head snap up. He was flat on his back on a gauzy canopy bed. Something else was on the bed, too—something with flashing silver eyes, like dog or cat eyes.

  I brought both guns to bear and started shooting.

  PART TWELVE

  ELIAS

  My next session at Salon was even more disorienting than the first, and I was supposedly in charge. All it took was a phone call to Tripp Bergin to divorce me from Vengeance Is for another day. No celebrities were on set and nobody needed shots of the crew wrapping and striking for a company move.

  “You tell me if the heat’s off,” Tripp had said earlier, from beneath the bill of a cap for Invisible Enemies. “You decide to tag along or not. You’ve turned out to be pretty good at this second career, the whole unit photography thing. But it’s one of the first gigs that gets cut as production winds down. Your job is only safe through last day of principal photography. After that, I don’t know where to stash you. If there’s a problem, let me know now.”

  “There’s still a bad guy out there who wants my blood,” I said. “I’m looking over my shoulder every second, except when I’m at the Salon.”

  Tripp popped three pieces of citrus-flavored gum. “They say this sugarless crap makes you fart. Some chemical in it.” He frittered. “Cops are looking for Elias McCabe. That makes me an accessory if you really did something wrong, just so you know. No—I’m not looking for an apology. Just know what you’re doing, hear me?”

  “Roger that. ID my body if I don’t make it.”

  “Boy, you’re just a bubbling fountain of good cheer. You got any kind of fallback plan?”

  “Cap’s been teaching me to shoot.”

  “Whoa, stop right there, I don’t want to know any more. The only thing you can shoot worth a damn is a camera.” He doffed his cap and raked his diminishing crop of hair.

  “That’s Cap’s opinion, too.”

  “Just make my life easier and don’t try to bring a piece onto the set, willya?”

  “I already got the lecture.”

  “Nah, I mean … look, we’re in friggin New Jersey; anybody here without a gun in their glove box is called a victim.”

  Here was a side of Tripp I had not yet seen. “You have a gun in your car?”

  “Shh!” He scanned around for potential eavesdroppers. “I’m just sayin. If I was in your position, I’d be strapped, too.”

  “Strapped?”

  “Packing.”

  This was fun, in a perverse way. “You mean you would have a gun.” I was surprised he didn’t call it a gat or a roscoe.

  “That would be way illegal.”

  “Said the master of phony ID cards.” I actually cracked a smile. It felt ill fitting and foreign to my face. “Mister ‘call me from a pay phone.’ Mister ‘lose the whiskers.’”

  “Ah, who can talk to you when you get this way?” Now he was frittering around in place as though he needed a urinal. “Listen, I told you everything I needed to tell you. I’m your friend, not your keeper.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  He came in close, mouth to ear: “Just do me a solid and explain it to me when it’s all over.” Then, more generally: “I’ve gotta go make sure Hunnicutt can transpo his birds across state lines.”

  “Is it a bird, or is it a bird-bird?”

  “This is a bird,” Tripp s
aid, showing me his middle finger.

  * * *

  The first session of Salon photos exceeded my hopes beyond dreams. I had some teaser shots into the bosses at Serpentine Clothing, and early word was that they were ecstatic. Having surpassed the introductory awkwardness of the initial shoot, now I was able to go back with a plan. I knew precisely how I wanted to pose Erik, to light Mejandra, to flatter Kleck and Klia, and to immortalize Davanna. This time, they would all be included—the hypercephalic Lyle, the cyclopean Uno, the Visible Man that was Tabanga.

  Kleck was trusting this financial gambit to my good offices … because even the darkside lure of the Salon was risky and unreliable, when it came to paying bills. Strict confidentiality. Each member of the Salon owned his or her own image rights and I was the sole designated sublicensor. Kleck appointed me as the deal-maker, the business face of the Salon in this venture. I had done nothing to earn his respect, except maybe not call him a dwarf. Perhaps Lyle had read my intentions and whispered in Kleck’s ear.

  Empathy was another matter altogether. I was a rank tyro until Davanna schooled me. She had been able to see inside me from the first.

  Even for people who have slept with thousands of other people, the memorable moments, the personal bests and frissons, or the rarest-of-all instances of unadulterated romantic fulfillment, cook down to about sixty seconds of flashback images, the kind you store in your personal file until you die.

  Being inside Davanna was a once-in-a-lifetime jolt I could never have anticipated, or prepared for, and could never replicate. It ruined me for all other partners forever. And I knew this, as it happened.

  It separated me from everything.

  In the outside world, people fretted about whether black was back in or not. They invested time in worrying about how to spice up their fall neutrals with bold splashes of color, or must-own handbags that cost more than a car. The age-old Republican versus Democrat circle jerk was still considered to be news, which reminded me of Poe’s pendulum—no matter which way it swings, it’s always moving down, and eventually it slices you in two. Nobody thought it odd that airport security had become, in itself, terrorism. Everybody was kept at a high pitch of panic about finance, and if that wasn’t enough to fog your thinking, there were so many glittering distractions available for purchase that it was a miracle the average citizen remembered to put on clothes before venturing out into the daily fray.

  The classic film beauty Gene Tierney had a great line in a movie no one remembers (That Wonderful Urge): “The great reading public isn’t interested in normal human beings. They want freaks served up with all the trimmings.” In her case, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  As a steady diet of stomach acid, the freakside had drawbacks normal people would never know.

  And now I was serving up the freaks myself. Just as they were using me in return.

  The great reading public wanted hyperbolic adjectives and earthy blow-by-blow particulars when it came to sex—that is, mere sexual coupling. This was not that. This was something else, something other. I was only inside of her for a few seconds. In that time she learned everything about me she needed to know, because she was a true empath. In turn she permitted me to see within her, just as profoundly. The contact was electric. It exploded time.

  There were myriads of inadequate ways to express it. Hyperbole.

  She said she wanted to know about me. With her wings spread, she lowered herself onto me. That was our only point of contact. I could not touch or caress or grab—that would leave marks; that’s how sensitive she was. Her translucent flesh caught the light and scattered the spectrum in new ways. I could feel her inside of me, at the same moment I experienced the weird hallucination of looking out through her eyes. At me.

  Whatever she saw did not alarm her. That was my deepest fear, to be rendered completely naked in front of another mind, with no succoring darkness in which to hide. She saw me, and I saw her seeing, and the fact that she was not repelled (or taken aback at some sinister motive I had tried to conceal), flooded through me in an amplified echo. This was more than reassurance or safety or love. It was something akin to joy, hard to identify because I had so little experience with joy.

  “Oh,” she said as I felt myself gripped. As in: I see now; it is clear; I get it. I would never find out what that revelation was …

  … because that was when the door to the room was kicked rudely open. Gunshots. I felt the bullets punch through me. The pain folded me up into a fetal ball, and abruptly, I was free of her. Her blood misted my face. She fell toward me. The room seemed abruptly devoid of oxygen.

  Only later did I sort out impressions, as though decompressing a complicated file. She divined my reason for exploiting the Salon had changed from usury and my desire for escape from the shadow of Clavius to endorsement and a strange, protective desire to assist these invisible people who existed behind their bizarre exteriors. It would have been so easy to be like Mason Stone, to smile with veneered teeth to conceal a deeper sneer, to coast through it all for kicks. The Salon was as socially disenfranchised as I had become, in my new identity. My freak was Elias McCabe, and my aberrations were all on the inside.

  She fell forward onto me, almost featherweight, no longer concerned with bruises or marks, and before gravity tore us apart, I felt her die inside.

  Sex. Violence. Strength. Contest. What we all use to sell, well, everything, including our own fake ideals of ourselves.

  It took a heartbeat and a half for me to realize the bullets had not ripped through me, but through her while our psyches were conjoined.

  A thousand things told me the silhouette in the doorway was Gun Guy, back for one more. His stance. His movement. He was so halated in an aura of violence and malignancy that he seemed to leave faint blue vapor trails.

  The bloodspray on me had come mostly from a heavy-duty slug exiting her perfect, unique face. Her outside died a moment after her inside.

  Then Erik chomped Gun Guy’s shoulder from behind with his frightening mouth. I was still on the floor.

  They fought, briefly, all snarls and gasps. Erik snapped and missed by an eyelash—his definitive kill timing was off. Gun Guy grabbed his arm and howled, wounded. All in spinning shadows. A stray gunshot obliterated one of the hydroponic lamps used for Davanna’s comfort. It spark-arced into a cloud of phosphorescent shrapnel with a bright flash, and suddenly I was blind.

  More gunshots, and the unmistakable sound of Erik hitting the polished floor. Another sound—which I now recognized as a clip change, a reload.

  Then Gun Guy collected me, as others crowded the entry, time-lapse brave in the face of killing weaponry.

  “Hi, Elias, old buddy,” he said through clenched teeth.

  I was rousted off the floor. The hot muzzle of a pistol cooked a tiny circle into my cheek. Ssssssss. The hammer was already back.

  “I want my gun.”

  I told him the Kimber was not here. I was ready for him to click me off.

  A wave of even greater rage from Gun Guy, like the door of a hot oven opening and closing.

  “Then you’re going to take me to it. Or every one of your little sideshow fuck toys is going to die while you watch.”

  Boom—gunshot. That’s all, folks.

  But it was not the gun at my head that had gone off. Gun Guy had two. I heard Klia cry out. Fast shuffle of movement.

  “Believe it,” said Gun Guy. “There’s no time-out. No countdown. You take me to it. Now.”

  I heard Kleck sputtering in grief. “Please don’t hurt us any more!”

  “He got bit.” Mejandra’s voice, talking about Gun Guy.

  “He’s still got all the guns.” Mason Stone’s voice. “Back out of the doorway. Clear the way for whatever this nut bag wants.”

  “What I want isn’t here, you dinky fuck!”

  Nobody ever called Mason Stone a dinky fuck to his face. Except …

  I feverishly hoped nobody said, “Now just calm down,” to this man.
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  * * *

  The barter was implicit. My life for those in the Salon.

  Gun Guy grabbed my head and banged my face into the brick wall outside. Three times. A tooth chipped. I felt my nose try to skew.

  He kept muttering “asshole,” over and over, while he did it.

  “‘Julian Hightower?’ That’s ultracute. That’s mega-adorable. That’s cost me too fucking much, amigo. Your little butt-buddy in the office? The pasty boy with the video camera? He sold you out. Welcome to Hollywood, sailor. The only reason you’re still breathing is my gun. I want it back, you worthless piece of shit.”

  To keep me malleable, Gun Guy had only permitted me to wear my shirt and trousers. I was barefoot and could feel broken glass and tetanus-laced frags embedding the soles of my feet in the alleyway behind the hotel. My face felt coated in hastily smeared dry blood and terror sweat. Pulsing pain in my cheek, from my fresh branding.

  “Did you kill Arly, too?” I asked. My lip had sprouted a fresh bleed.

  He shook his head as though he still had not figured out why himself. “No, actually.”

  He shanghaied me into a characterless rental car. Strapped me in, commanded me to sit on my hands. He was going to take his time killing me, once he had resolved the issue of the MIA Kimber. Pressed to the wall, I knew I would rather be dead fast than dead slow. If I antagonized him the right way, just pushed him a teeny bit, he’d spread my brains and leave me for roadkill, mission accomplished, bye-bye Elias.

  But.

  I knew something Gun Guy did not. Yet. Kleck and I had discussed it, during the first photo session, when I was finding ways to light Erik’s crocodilian teeth so they would pop properly in a photo.

  “His bite is mildly venomous, as you may have surmised,” Kleck said.

  I had tried not to react unseemly. “Mildly?”

  “A little cocktail of amino acids in his saliva which activates as a threat response,” said Kleck.

  “It’s in my spit,” said Erik.

  I told him to hold still.

  “We did a bit of research and found out that it’s called a ‘denmotoxin,’” Kleck went on, happy to wax erudite. “Characteristic of chewing reptiles lacking front fangs for hypodermic delivery.”