All at once the audience members had jumped up and were allowing pure panic to rule them, to guide their feet, which Gold and Myrrh now plainly saw weren’t hooves at all. The heads were indeed false. Some crumpled in collision with each other, one or two even fell off to expose the frightened human visage beneath and mouths that poured drool of their own.
Leaning even farther over the side of the box, Gold and Myrrh felt little surprise when the entire structure broke off from the wall and they plummeted down into the mêlée like two explorers in a bathtub going over a waterfall. The box landed upright with a violent shudder and they stood dazed and bruised as the tassels entangled themselves around the arms and necks of a dozen panicked audience members, who began bolting for the exit.
There was a stampede, a desperate flight away from the composite actor and his outpouring of drool, a scramble for the streets of Spittle, wet and oily in name alone, for the fresher but not fresh air, the higher but not high skies. Open burst the doors of the auditorium and through the lobby surged the crowd and Gold and Myrrh rode their chariot like reluctant warriors entering a conquered metropolis, bouncing and showering sparks on the surface of the uneven road as the frantic herd attempted to put as much distance between themselves and the theatre as feasible, dragging the box along behind them.
Horses peeled away from the main mass. Some tripped and remained on the ground or slowly stood and dusted themselves down before sauntering off in some other direction, removing their heads and slipping into the shadows. Now there were only the steeds that had become entangled in the tassels. Some of the tassels broke and the chariot slowed down. At last it came to a halt as those who still pulled it gave up the flight and sagged from fatigue.
Gold and Myrrh climbed out and began heading home, which was only a couple of streets away. They were shaken but still capable of post-play analysis and they discussed what they had seen all the way to their front door. Clearly it had been a big ironic joke, a chaotic play of all plays for a chaotic city, and yet the joke had backfired, because at the present time there was temporary order, stasis even, and Spittle was not a city of all cities but merely one variation in the interminable list of possible places. And the saliva had been a primitive device, spit without polish, a violation of all the drools.
“But the horses? What was that about?”
“We should have dressed up too. We weren’t warned.”
“Yes, but why? To see that play!”
“No one would have come if it had been advertised truthfully,” Myrrh said thoughtfully. “Apart from you and me.”
“Not even us,” said Gold as they reached their house.
Before inserting the key, they kissed on the doorstep, exchanging saliva with tongues. The play hadn’t finished yet.
The Coin-operated Man
—Gregory L. Norris
I.
The body sidled closer. Derringer sensed he was its destination in that fucked-up way that fucked-over cells and souls come to recognize through a cheap version of second sight, human instinct at its most basic.
“You Derringer?” a gruff voice asked.
Derringer sipped the weak tea that passed for beer at the End of Time without reacting, not showing the slightest tick. “Depends.”
He studied the odd figure in the fractured mirror above the low-shelf liquor behind the bar, most of which had been bottled from the same Moosejaw conglomerate whose mining arm was presently digging up the Ragglands. And the shit was about as pleasant to a man’s palate as a mouth full of dirt. Oily, foul concoctions that should have killed him, only there wasn’t enough mercy in the alcoholic content to finish the job. All the water mixed into the dirty glasses didn’t help.
“Please,” the man whispered—Derringer guessed his new friend was a man, given his beard. This far out, this close to the Ragglands, you couldn’t always be sure. “James Derringer, I’ve travelled a long way to find you.”
“You’ve found me. That doesn’t mean I care. Doesn’t mean I’m looking for new drinking pals when the usual crowd’s so much fun.”
He tipped his chin, indicating the gallery of skulls lined up in warning, along with a hand-painted sign that threatened the six former heads were the last brave customers stupid enough to skip out before paying.
“I want to hire you.”
“Is that so?” Derringer said without added emotion. “Sorry, darling, but you’ll probably want to go looking to Spittle City for that kind of fun. Men living on the edge of the world got less to lose. Me, I don’t swing in that direction.”
A lie, he knew, but Derringer almost believed it. Another glance in the grimy mirror showed Jamie Derringer was almost past the prime of his brutish good looks, which had gotten him this far, to a barstool in a place where little was certain. Another year—hell, maybe a day—and the long face might renounce that last residue of handsomeness.
“Okay,” he sighed. “I’ve got a room upstairs.”
The piece of tail—bearded, dressed in flannel and denim and a cap that hid most of the man’s eyes—flashed a humourless smile. “Wait. No.” Then he leaned closer, and Derringer caught the bitter edge of sweat. “I want you to take me somewhere.”
“Other than on a date to the End of Time?”
The man glanced cautiously around. Nobody was listening, Derringer knew. No one cared. “To the end of this miserable town. I can pay you. Handsomely.”
Derringer finished his beer in one final pull. The face in the mirror already looked older. If he didn’t leave soon, the temptation to test the warning posed beside the other patrons who’d defaulted on tabs and tips threatened to get the best of him.
He tossed money on the bar. A blood sample would have worked. Sex, too. Maybe for another year. Perhaps less.
“I heard you were the best man for hire. That you know your way around corners.”
“That’s me,” Derringer said, and suffered the weight of the watery piss-beer in his gut. “The coin-operated man. Come on.”
<~~O~~>
His name was Thorndyke and, more than once on the walk up to Derringer’s room, the coin-operated man sensed Thorndyke wasn’t really a man at all but a woman in disguise. It could have been an effect of whatever was being mined out there at the pits in the Ragglands. More than the details of Moosejaw’s town limits seemed to alter as more of the substance got squeezed out of the rocks. Several mornings back—it was difficult to say when exactly, as the days had started bleeding together—a bird with two heads had pecked at the window as though seeking permission to enter. He’d spent every morning since attempting to translate the visitation as either an omen or illusion. Thorndyke was, possibly, the latest in a string of two-headed birds.
The room had bottled the stale smell of sweat—Derringer’s, and all the other faceless, hopeless multitudes of coin-operated men for hire before him, waiting out their sentences, serving time in the hope of avoiding the mines or worse. He refused to open the windows. There was no airing out the gloom.
“What?” Derringer barked.
“Protected escort to an abandoned mall out at the edge, near Razor-17,” Thorndyke repeated.
Derringer felt his face tighten and shook his head. “The Razorside? Are you nuts?”
“I can’t pay you in the traditional way.”
“You are nuts. Get the fuck out of here.”
“Not in money. Something more valuable. Safe passage for two. Me and the kid. It’s a great deal.”
Derringer narrowed his gaze. Thorndyke renounced some of his masculinity between the prison bars of Derringer’s eyelashes. “You and a kid, out there?”
“Yes. I know that because of your contacts you have discretion to move about freely in the Ragglands.”
“Not that deep. Do you know how close the Razorside is to the mining operation? The shit they’re pulling out of the ground—”
“The Umlaut.”
“Umlaut? Didn’t know it had a name,” Derringer sighed.
“Rings of
Saturn, Tears of Jove, Umlaut…if we hurry, if you take us to the old mall, we can be out of this place forever, you included. They say Spittle’s the edge of existence on this rock, but there’s a secret doorway to a better place at that mine.”
Derringer had the fucker down on the floor, with a blade to his throat, quicker than Thorndyke could prepare for the attack. “What game are you playing?”
“None, I swear!”
Thorndyke was lying, he discovered, after a sharp yank tore the sleeve from the man’s shirt. A pale blue patch, something medical, likely high-yield, was attached to the prick’s upper arm.
“What the fuck’s this?” Derringer demanded.
<~~O~~>
II.
Synthetic testosterone. According to the hastily told tale, she’d soaked up the shit as a way to survive the rape gangs in the grease trap of Wire City—not that disguising herself as a man was much of a deterrent.
As Derringer said in that moment of indecision where he wanted to both fuck Thorndyke and slit her throat, “Life is just a succession of skid marks, one after another.”
Fuck her or kill her. Maybe he’d do both, and not necessarily in the expected order. The woman—a woman by definition now only in some circus freak sideshow—shrieked for him to wait.
“You’ll want to hear me out,” Thorndyke blathered, and now she did sound enough like a woman to really confuse him. “There’s something huge in this for you!”
Of that part, Derringer was certain, whether it meant him busting a nut or bashing open a skull through its expanding bald spot on top, visible now that his cap lay on the floor.
“The old mall,” a voice said at his back.
In wrestling Thorndyke down, he’d stupidly aimed his back at the door. Derringer cursed himself while expecting the jab of agony from blade or bullet that would, long last, free him from his burdens. He righted and turned. The owner of the pixie voice was a young boy, a dirty little puke that looked like he’d escaped hard time in a different mine, a different slave city. At first, Derringer suffered something in the vicinity of sympathy for the brat, whom he guessed was the second party in Thorndyke’s little expedition. Then he experienced an emotion that punched him in the guts and tickled him unpleasantly behind the balls. Derringer’s gorge rose. Bile painted the soft lining of his throat and the back of his tongue.
“Let him go or it gets worse,” the kid said.
“Don’t you mean her?”
“I’m warning you, Mister…”
For a terrible second, maybe two, the kid’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, and every ugly, vicious thing Derringer had seen through his own lenses or forced others to endure in his years for hire flashed across the screen within his mind, in high-def. Vomit powered past his lips and sprayed the floor. Something thicker than tears poured down his cheeks. Blood, he assumed by the vibrant surge of red color visible at the corners of his sight. The vile sensation unleashed made breathing impossible.
“Stop it, Milo,” Thorndyke ordered. “We need him!”
The kid’s eyes rolled back, bloody now, too. The skin of his grimy little face had taken on the pallor of the underside of a mushroom. The brat—Milo, according to the bearded lady—seemed only half there, about to disintegrate.
Derringer wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. The dark emotion sank. He considered opening a window to air out the rank odour of vomit. Best, however, not to invite more two-headed birds into his world.
The kid recovered and pinkness returned to his cheeks. Thorndyke moved protectively beside him. All the humanity had been ironed off their faces.
“So, Mister Derringer, are you interested or not in what we have to say?”
“Your boy here’s a psychic?”
Sure, he was interested.
<~~O~~>
Because of the Umlaut, he explained, the mine kept sharpshooters—and worse—guarding the roads into the pits of the deep Ragglands. And by worse, Derringer was certain they’d see a level of shit out there that would put the sludge exhumed by Milo’s little parlour trick to shame, the little fucker.
“Watch your mouth,” Thorndyke said.
“Why? That one-nutted, hairless lab rat of yours got sensitive ears?” Derringer fired back coolly.
Thorndyke pouted, and though he was loath to admit it, Derringer found himself intrigued with the bearded lady like no other lay, male or female, in far too long.
“The son of a neighbour, back in the Wire,” she said. “We always knew Milo was special. Sixth son of a sixth son of a sixth son.”
“The little devil,” Derringer said, and ran his fingers briskly through the oily mop of the small body stretched across his bed.
Milo batted at his fingers and flopped onto his side, ending his funereal pose atop the covers. “Quit it!”
“Just making sure you didn’t have horns. If we’re gonna do this…”
“So, you’ll help us?” Thorndyke asked.
“As for that part about my compensation,” Derringer said. “You’re sure the little bastard can open a doorway past Moosejaw and the rest of this fucked dimension to someplace else, someplace better?”
“The fabric of time and space out there, near the mines, is worn to its thinnest now,” said Thorndyke. “So yeah, with you getting us close enough and Milo’s gift, he should be able to, just long enough for three people to slip through to a much better place.”
<~~O~~>
III.
All it took was a glance at the surface of the Trembling River, now clotted over with a scum of oily red candy color, runoff from the mine, to understand that anywhere was better than here.
Dare he think it possible? Escape from this life of odd jobs and anarchy? Like giving his back to doors, Derringer knew better than to let his mind wander. This was his reality. Hard time, a slave to the Five Cities. The biggest of life’s skid marks.
Slicked palms got them only as far as Shilling’s Arch, the last stop on the way to the old mall. Derringer ditched his truck behind one of the many houses that had been completed but never occupied. What would have been a neighbourhood for workers at the Razorside Mall had withered with its demise.
The structure loomed beyond a cathedral of twisted trees. A series of domes and spires, the old mall maintained an illusion of newness in the sun’s waning rays. Between blinks, however, it began to disintegrate. Derringer noted the blackened scars from the fire in its distant past that had doomed the project, before the extensive mining operation chewed up the Ragglands.
“Come on. Stay close,” Derringer said, and checked to make sure that all of his weapons were where they ought to be.
In this place, even the mini-nova holstered under cover of his vintage bomber jacket wasn’t much in terms of reassurance. Nor was the garrotte secreted in Derringer’s belt, or the numerous blades and switchblades hidden in both boots, in pockets, the tiniest behind his left ear.
“They say it got burned down by a rival company out of Ersatz,” Milo said to Thorndyke. “But that’s a lie. The mine did it.”
“You’re sure?” Thorndyke asked.
Milo nodded. “The Umlaut. They first found it when those old houses were going in. Didn’t know what it was. They still ain’t sure.”
Derringer scanned the trees. “Stop jabbering. Keep your eyes on the woods. You—Milo—keep your third eye peeled for anyone or thing between us and the food court.”
They hadn’t travelled far into the tightening press of the forest when the kid stiffened and his legs gave out. Derringer backtracked quickly and yanked Milo to his feet. The boy’s ashy color was worse now, and his pupils had gone large. They seemed to stare through Derringer.
“What is it, Milo?” asked Thorndyke.
“Yeah, out with it.”
Milo blinked. Unable to resist, Derringer smacked the boy across the cheek. Thorndyke started to protest but Derringer made sure she got a good look at the mini-nova.
“Smarten up. You’re supposed to be looking around.�
��
“You don’t understand. I was, I swear. But we’re so close. The Umlaut, for a second, I think I saw what it is.”
“Don’t matter,” Derringer said, and pushed the boy forward. His balance restored, Milo now led the way. “We’re getting out of this nightmare, if you’re able to do what he claims. She.”
Derringer invoked several more pronouns on their way into the heart of the cathedral, where the trees grew so close together that their canopy nearly hid the sun.
“What was it?” Thorndyke pressed. “The Umlaut? What are they mining out there in the Ragglands?”
“A piece of God. Some god. Maybe the devil. A cell, a limb…I’m not sure. But it’s been under this part of Moosejaw forever.”
Derringer listened without commenting. So the Umlaut was the rotting flesh of the All-Seeing and All-Powerful? Clearly, the All-Mighty hadn’t seen the results of dropping a piece of cosmic belly button lint across this section of the firmament. Yanking Umlaut out of the pits had put a sour smell in the air, something he equated with spoiled fruit. Goose bumps rose across his skin—and beneath it, with a prickle that conjured repulsive visions of burrowing insects.
The smell thickened as the trees thinned, and the trio found themselves facing the mall at the edge of the world. The landscape beyond the domes, spires, and overgrown parking lot had been blasted from existence. Hills were gone, gouged down to giant holes in the ground that wept an oily red liquid.
A sound of industry rose up from the pits, the tell-tale of earthmovers, jackhammers, blasting, and blasphemy. The air thrummed with a moan made from many voices. Birds circled above the pits; at least Derringer assumed the vague stains in the sky were birds. Carrion feeders, eager for a taste of the dead deity.
“Hurry,” he said, and started toward the dead structure’s shell.
His nausea flared. If only he’d skipped off without paying his tab at the End of Time, his inner voice taunted. He didn’t know if he believed an escape from Moosejaw was possible, any more than he believed the blood seeping up from the raped landscape was divine. Worse, Derringer didn’t know if he cared.
Slave Stories Page 11
