Between Jobs

by W. R. Gingell

  I didn’t so much catch him as I was squashed by him, but I remembered in time that I was supposed to be making myself indispensable to my three psychos. I grabbed the shoulders of his coat to stop him hitting his head on the shelving.

  Down the end of the aisle—had it been that far away or that indistinct before?—three men approached us. It must have been my imagination that gave them four arms each, but I knew I wasn’t imagining the knives they had in each of their four hands because one exactly the same was sticking out of JinYeong’s chest, the silver-embossed characters on its hilt glowing softly at me. And now someone’s four-armed self only had three knives.

  “What?” panted someone’s voice again, and it must have been mine, because JinYeong didn’t speak English and there was nobody else nearby. Well, nobody but the four-armed men who were sprinting at us down the length of the aisle, and if they really did have four arms I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be speaking English, either.

  I yelped and hauled JinYeong’s prone body back toward the end of the aisle, careless of the damage to his pants legs, but the edge of the end shelving caught the ankle of my jeans and sent me tumbling backwards with my armful of vampire and cloth before I could clear the aisle. There was a moment of startled comprehension that I was probably going to die, then something swept past us both in a streak of white, cold, fury, meeting the charge of the four-armed men.

  I struggled to sit up, my elbows hooked under JinYeong’s armpits, and there was Zero’s broad back and leathery scent, planted directly between us and our attackers.

  Over his shoulder, Zero said crisply, “Pull the knife out. He’ll be fine.”

  I pulled it out before I could think about it—at once. At least, I thought it was at once, but between seeing my hand wrapped around the hilt of the knife, and seeing that blade oozing with dark blood, free from JinYeong’s torso, there was a big, blank moment. There must have been, because when I looked up from the bloody blade Zero’s face was right behind it, and there was something black and sticky and wet on his face, too.

  “Stay behind me,” he said.

  I thought he was talking to me, but JinYeong coughed up a small spurt of blood and sat up, dragging me with him. He said, slightly hoarsely, “Ye, Hyung.”

  I’m not sure whether I helped him up or whether he pulled me up with him, but when we were on our feet, JinYeong shook me off and straightened his blood-soaked shirt.

  “Yeah, that’s a lot better,” I said, hoping he couldn’t see how close I was to chucking up. I gave him a thumbs-up and added, “Chic.”

  He still wasn’t steady on his feet, but he gave me a narrow look with the slightest edge of canine. I’d have been more concerned about that if I hadn’t noticed the grocery store had gone…odd. Odder. The bit around Zero’s back was still pretty normal, and if I only stared at his back things didn’t look too bad.

  It was only when I took my eyes off his back that I noticed there was a body at his feet now, and that the air around that body was sort of…swirling. The shelves didn’t look quite like shelves anymore—they looked more like steps, or rungs—and the things on the shelves weren’t the sort of stuff you find in grocery stores, either.

  I reached out a bloody, shaking hand and picked up what had once been a small tin of cat food but was now a stone with a very small tree growing on its dimpled surface, its roots wrapping around the stone. Yeah. You can’t pick up stuff like that at your local Woollies.

  I put the stone in my pocket to think about later, but I didn’t look back up to see if the lights were still different. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know whether we were still in the grocery store, or if we’d come somewhere else during that blank bit of time after I reached out to pull the knife out of JinYeong’s chest.

  Someone threw another knife, and then it didn’t matter whether or not we were still in the grocery store, because JinYeong was slow on his feet and I had to jerk him down by the sleeve as Zero’s bulk moved to intercept another knife and left a sliver of space that was filled with dark figures and glittering knives. JinYeong hissed at me and Zero moved again, blocking the sliver. His shoulder jerked backward and I saw the inky blue blot that grew at the back of his shirt around a point that shouldn’t be sticking out there.

  JinYeong snatched his sleeve from my fingers and dived beneath Zero’s swinging arm with a snarl, his eyes black and reflective. Someone said, “Idiot!” but I couldn’t be sure if it was me or Zero, because it was what I was thinking, but my voice couldn’t be that gruff.

  I stayed behind Zero. Now that I wasn’t trying to hold up JinYeong I could see the full scope of the attack; there were still two men—or were they men? four arms!—attacking Zero, and another two that JinYeong was ripping into—literally ripping into, his white shirt soaked in scarlet and his throat slick with the sheen of blood.

  My fingers instinctively curled themselves around the leather strap that belted together at the back of Zero’s jacket, his momentum pulling me forward, pushing me back. His footwork scuffed across the blood-slicked tiles that were somehow still grocery store tiles even though the rest of the scene wasn’t, and I slid after him.

  Did he have a sword again? I mean, of course he had a sword; how else could he have been fighting off four-armed men; but where the flaming heck had it come from?

  Those men, or things, or whatever—they were trying to kill me. Or maybe they were trying to kill JinYeong. But JinYeong was tearing someone’s throat out, and really, should I be more afraid of four-armed men with knives or someone who tore people’s throats out? I stayed behind Zero anyway, slipping in the blood and clinging to that leather strap for dear life, the buckle grazing my forefinger.

  Two more of the four-armed men went down, JinYeong looking around in swift hunger for someone else to kill, and Zero ceased dragging me back and forth across the slippery floor.

  I took a breather, just glad I was alive, and that all my limbs were attached. Two bloody eyes fastened on me.

  Hang on. Was JinYeong looking at me—

  Zero said, “JinYeong.”

  Those eyes flicked away from me and up to Zero’s face. “Hyung?”

  “That’s enough for today.”

  JinYeong’s tongue ran over one canine, his gaze now on Zero. There was challenge in it, and rebellion, dark and bloody. I gripped Zero’s sleeve instead of the leather strap, glaring at JinYeong.

  “Don’t hurt the pet,” Zero said. “Who do you think is going to clean the blood out of your clothes if it doesn’t?”

  JinYeong seemed to consider that. He tilted his head to the side for one instant, then very deliberately wiped the blood from his face with the remainder of one formerly white sleeve.

  “That’s gross,” I told him, but he only gave me the smirk that displayed one warning tooth.

  Flamin’ fantastic. I was sharing a house with three homicidal maniacs, and at least one of them wasn’t averse to killing me.

  “You’d better do something about the blood before you go back,” Zero warned. “You can’t walk around in that when there are humans around. They’ll get agitated.”

  “Back where?” I asked. That was sort of stupid; it was obvious we weren’t exactly in the grocery store anymore. But in my defence, it wasn’t as if it was actually possible for us to have left the middle of the grocery store during the fight without moving a heck of a lot more than we had. Or some walls moving, anyway.

  JinYeong rolled his eyes and stripped off his suit jacket, then his bloody shirt. Zero, as if he’d just remembered I was there, clinging to his sleeve and glaring at JinYeong from behind his arm, shook me off and looked down at me in surprise.

  “What are you doing here?’

  Well, that wasn’t good. Had one of the four-armed men clipped him around the head? I said cautiously, “You told me to come here with him and get supplies so I could cook tea.”

  Zero shook his head impatiently. “Not there. Here. Hobart Between.”

  “Dunno what you’re talking a
bout; I’ve been with you the whole time. Why do those blokes have four arms? Actually, what I really wanna know is why were they trying to kill us?”

  JinYeong replied in Korean, and Zero agreed, “That’s right; they weren’t trying to kill you. They were trying to kill JinYeong.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Nah, I understand that.”

  Oh well. The bloke already wanted to kill me anyway.

  Zero’s eyes narrowed in amusement despite the line between his brows. “You came with us partway into our land.”

  JinYeong muttered, but to my surprise, there was a dark glitter of amusement to his eyes as well.

  “It’s yours as well,” Zero said. “Maybe not by birth, but birth doesn’t really matter much to your kind, does it?”

  “Ne,” said JinYeong, and this time he displayed both canines in a cold, deadly smile, “Kunang—pi.”

  The line vanished from between Zero’s brows. “Just blood? I thought you didn’t agree with that sort of thinking. Are you finished stripping?”

  “What about the bodies?” I asked, as JinYeong scrubbed the remainder of blood from his face with his shirt. He didn’t try to put it back on; he just put his suit jacket back on, where the darker patches could be taken for water.

  Zero was brief. “You ask too many questions.”

  He’d said we were going back, but nothing he’d said about that made sense, and he still wasn’t moving. Instead, he gazed, frowning, at the five bodies he and JinYeong had made.

  JinYeong kicked one of the bodies. When he spoke, his voice was curious, but Zero only shrugged in reply and went through the pockets of one of the men closest to himself. I heard him grunt once, an expression of distaste passing momentarily over his pale face, and it occurred to me that apart from when I’d surprised him, it was the only real expression I’d seen on his face.

  I crouched beside him. Now that they were dead, they didn’t look like people anymore—or maybe it was that they didn’t look quite real. I reached out and touched the body with my forefinger, and regretted it straight away. It felt like a real person, not even like a dead person—whatever that felt like.

  Zero plucked me away by the nape of the neck like the pet they said I was, and said, “Get out of it.”

  “That one’s got something around his neck,” I said, wrapping my arms around my knees where he’d dropped me, and pointing with my chin. I wouldn’t have touched that thing again, anyway.

  Zero didn’t reply. He fished something limp and tissue-y out of his pockets, grabbed the hand with which I’d touched the body, and wiped it thoroughly. He wasn’t gentle, and if I’d thought it would help, I would have said ouch.

  Instead, I asked, “What? Is it bad to touch?”

  “You’re cooking our food later,” he said briefly, and grabbed the other hand. “I don’t want this filth on our food.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  I mean, the guy was dead. It probably wasn’t a good idea to touch dead guys before making dinner; and now that Zero had wiped down my hands, there was none of JinYeong’s blood on them, either. That was a plus.

  I looked away from Zero, who was taking the necklace from the dead guy I’d touched, and looked at JinYeong instead. He didn’t seem to be as concerned about the blood being on him as Zero had been about it being on me, and now he looked like a cross between a really drunk guy with a bloody nose and a guy who’d murdered someone.

  “You missed a bit,” I said, jerking my chin at the smear of blood that ran from his ear to the collar of his suit jacket. The next second, JinYeong’s bloody shirt hit me in the face. “Gross,” I grumbled into the bloody haze, and pulled it off my face.

  JinYeong looked smug.

  Zero said, “I just cleaned it off! Now you’ve made it dirty again!”

  “Mianeyo.”

  “I’d believe you were sorry if you weren’t so pleased with yourself,” said Zero.

  JinYeong raised his brows at me and indicated his neck. What a rat. He wanted me to clean him off.

  “What are you, two?” I grumbled, but I obeyed anyway. I prefer my blood inside my body. It didn’t stop me scrubbing much harder at JinYeong’s ears than I strictly needed to do, though. Or from saying, “What a sook!” when he made a small, inarticulate protest.

  Zero might have been grinning when I finished with JinYeong’s neck, but if so, he stopped so quickly I couldn’t be sure. He had more of his little tissues, and he wiped my face as thoroughly as I had wiped JinYeong’s neck. I didn’t make a sound, which made JinYeong’s lips purse; and I felt a bit smug about that.

  “Time to go,” said Zero, when he was done. He didn’t throw away the tissues; he put them in a bag and put that bag somewhere, though I wasn’t sure where. Wherever it was, JinYeong’s shirt went there, too. “Ready?”

  I nodded, but it wasn’t me he was talking to.

  JinYeong said “Caja!” and, walking out of the aisle, disappeared for a moment. I blinked, and he was there again, a few feet away but somehow not quite as there as he should have been.

  “Hold onto my jacket again,” said Zero. “Don’t let go. I won’t come back for you.”

  I grabbed the strap on his jacket just in time; and as the world dragged around us like molasses, I was tugged back into a world that sat more familiarly around me than it had a few steps ago.

  I looked back into the aisle once. There were five bulk packs of dry dogfood strewn across the aisle, their contents spilling out from splits and holes. No bodies, only ruined stock. The aisle was once again the right length, and it had lost that twilight look, but I no longer had any desire to pass through it to get my bacon.

  “Bacon,” I said, hoarsely, because I didn’t want to think about how four-armed bodies could turn into sacks of dog food by leaving an aisle in the grocery store.

  JinYeong grinned.

  Zero said, “What?”

  “Can’t make bacon and mushroom pasta without the bacon,” I said.

  “Jal haesso, Petteu,” JinYeong said, with a bright flash of white teeth.

  “I don’t know what that means, but you should leave the store,” I told him. There were already two cashiers and some sort of manager watching him anxiously; his hair was wild, he was still swaying a bit, and without a shirt beneath his suit jacket he looked, at the best, homeless. “Those blokes think you’re gunna steal stuff.”

  JinYeong gave me a look and stalked away. What? I’d hurt his feelings?

  I glanced up at Zero, but his pale eyes told me nothing. “Bacon,” he said, and grabbed the handle of the trolley.

  Zero was much easier to shop with than JinYeong. It wasn’t so much that he spoke English, it was more the fact that he tended not to speak at all. Well, they do say it’s an early sign of an unbalanced mind when you talk to your pet, I s’pose…

  At any rate, all I needed to do was announce where we were going and Zero would silently follow me there with the trolley.

  When we got out, JinYeong was waiting for us, his shoulders propped against the front window of the grocery store and his grin more threatening than welcoming. I wasn’t surprised to see people making a wide berth around him, and it wasn’t all about the blood, either; JinYeong had a dark glitter to his eyes most of the time that was more frightening than blood.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, wary of it myself. “We got all your garlic.”

  I was making dinner when Athelas got home. I didn’t know where he’d been, but they wouldn’t have told me if I’d asked, so I didn’t bother. Zero, who was sharpening his knives at the dinner table, looked up sharply and said, “Oh, you’re back.”

  JinYeong stepped up from the lower lounge room into the kitchen and said languidly, “Wasso?”

  He must have been there to see strife, because when Zero held up the pendant he’d taken from one of the dead men, his eyes lit up.

  “What’s this?” Athelas asked calmly.

  “You tell me,” said Zero, and tossed it to him. He went back to sharpening his knives. �
�It’s one of ours, isn’t it?”

  Athelas looked up sharply from the pendant. “You were attacked?”

  “JinYeong was attacked. I stepped in.” Zero looked at Athelas down the length of one wickedly shiny blade, and his voice could have chipped ice. “I thought I warned you about sending people after JinYeong.”

  “Dear me,” said Athelas.

  If Zero’s voice could have chipped ice, the entire room now seemed encased in it. I put my head down and chopped garlic fervently. I’d already seen the way JinYeong’s angry, predatory eyes followed Zero; seen the way they could fight together. What would happen if all three fought each other? Athelas would die, that’s for sure. Even JinYeong would probably drop before Zero would, so if there was potential for splitting up, I was best off making myself indispensable to Zero. He was the one who had paid the bond on the house, or the deposit—I still wasn’t sure which one. I could be sneaky and conniving, couldn’t I? ’Course I could.

  “I think,” said Zero thoughtfully, putting down the cloth he had been wiping down one last knife with, “that you should begin to talk.”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” Athelas said. He looked pretty unconcerned for a willowy bloke facing off against someone as big as Zero. “It would be a waste of a perfectly good pet.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Want a cuppa?”

  “Be quiet, Pet,” said Zero.

  I shut up, but I made Athelas a cup of tea anyway.

  “What sort were they?”

  The four-armed sort, I could have said, but I didn’t. I poured boiling water over the tea leaves instead.

  JinYeong said something with a sharp edge of canine that was either a smile or a baring of teeth.

  “Rank and file?” Athelas took a seat at the kitchen table and leisurely crossed one leg over the other. I don’t know how he could do that while Zero sat so still and alert, fairly buzzing with pent up violence. “I wouldn’t send rank and file after you, JinYeong. I’ve no interest in sending you fodder for a day’s eating.”

  To my surprise, one corner of JinYeong’s mouth turned up in a real smile. He said something that made Athelas smile back in the first moment of perfect agreement I’d seen between them.