Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  “Serbian, I think.”

  He snorted. “Lovely. Let’s go.”

  He sat sideways facing me, the gun pointed in my direction but not quite at me.

  I didn’t slow for the turn into the driveway, partly to minimize the time he’d be looking toward the mailbox farm in case I’d fucked that up, and partly so I’d make noise skidding on the gravel. When he made no objection to cowboy driving, I gunned it the rest of the way up the driveway, putting that alleged cross-country suspension to a test that for my money it failed. By the time we pulled up behind my Honda—really mine, this time—I was certain Nika had heard us coming. She was not in sight, and I could detect no signs that anyone had been here. No lights on that had been left off, or the like. The door I’d left standing open behind me when I left was still open.

  Okay. If Nika was here, she knew this was Allen with me. What she might not know—

  “You want to watch where you point that fucking gun, Sundance?” I snapped as I got down from the driver’s eyrie.

  “Shut up. Where are you going?”

  “Give me a second.” Just beside the house, in the tool shed, was an item I’d never gotten around to disposing of, had done my best to forget existed. Susan’s wheelchair, from the final days of end game. The best we could afford. It made it possible to get Zudie inside without accepting assistance from Allen.

  I parked it by the stereo and vinyl/tape/CD collection at the far end of the living room. The nearest place to sit was more than five meters away, and the nearest comfortable place was even further. It was the best I could do.

  Where the hell was Nika? I had to know where she was hiding if I was going to sucker Allen into turning his back on her. Was she in the house? Outside?

  I couldn’t find anything to suggest she’d ever been in here. Allen’s backpack was right by the door where he’d left it, apparently untouched.

  “How’s your thumb, Russell?”

  Until then I’d forgotten. “It hurts like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “Like a son of a bitch.”

  “I’m so glad. Thanks for sharing.” He was inspecting the scraps of duct tape I’d left. “What did you do, bite through it?”

  “After I started it with the paper clip.”

  “Really? You’re not entirely as stupid as you act.”

  I sat down in the same chair as before, by the broken window, the one that swiveled. “You want to tape me up again?”

  He came over and sat in his old chair, the one that reclined, his back to Zudie and the room. “Why? It didn’t work the last time. I’m thinking it would be simpler to blow your kneecap off.”

  I couldn’t help flinching and grimacing and shuddering. His painhelper drug was still in me, and I knew a broken kneecap was way up there on the agony scale to start with. “What if I bleed out? You won’t learn my girlfriend’s name until you read it on the warrant.”

  “Shoot your foot off, then.”

  “Have you shot many people?”

  “To be honest, no. Have you?”

  “No, but when I was a kid I worked in a hospital in New York, pushing a mop. I saw a lot of GSWs. I saw guys survive six in the chest, and I saw guys bleed out from a toe wound. I’m six-one and I weigh less than sixty-six kilos. Suit yourself—I’m done running for tonight.”

  He thought about it. “Very well. Then by all means let’s get right to it. Tell me her name and address and particulars, at once.” Kissy-smile. “Then I can shoot you with a serene mind, whenever the mood strikes me.” He set his gun down on the coffee table beside his chair, hopelessly out of my reach.

  It was suddenly time. “Her—”

  “Excuse me one moment. Thank you. Have we established to your satisfaction that I can tell when you lie to me?”

  I closed my eyes. “Yes, we have,” I agreed hoarsely.

  “Very well. Let me just say that if you are tedious enough to try, I have a drug in my pack over there which will make it physically impossible for your oversensitive friend Zandor Zagadanuga-naga over there to stay unconscious. How soon I go get it is entirely up to you.”

  Again I flinched violently, and bowed my head in submission and despair. “Please. I’m cooperating.”

  “Then go on. Who is she, where is she, what does she do? Speak up!”

  I kept my face down, and answered loudly but very slowly, each word dragged out of me with maximum reluctance. “She’s not really my girlfriend. I hardly know her, actually. Her name is Nika. Nika Mandiç. I don’t even know her home address. She’s a cop. That’s right. A constable in the Vancouver Police Department. And if I’m timing it right, she should have a gun to the back of your abominable head about…now.” I looked up. “Yep. I nailed it.”

  He made his pouty smile of amusement. “Did you see that work in a movie, or something? I turn around to look now, and you disable me with a hardcover book or something?”

  Nika said: “I am Constable Nika Mandiç, Vancouver Police. You are under arrest for attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping. It is my duty to inform you that you have the right to retain and instruct counsel without delay.”

  A champion tiptoer, that woman.

  4.

  I was so buzzed I remember thinking how ironic it was that when a cop used the simple, elegant command, freeze!, nobody ever froze—and here was Allen, frozen solid as a mammoth by this verbose stream of ritual absurdities.

  But by the end of her third sentence, he had managed to thaw at least one limb and his neck. He turned his head to the right and up to get a look at her, moving slowly and carefully to dissuade her from shooting him. As he turned, his right hand quite naturally slid back along the arm of his chair to give him leverage to torque his neck that far.

  And then suddenly it darted around behind the chair. I couldn’t say for sure just what it did back there. Nika drew her breath in with a horrid gasping rasp, a death-rattle sound, and found she could not release it, her throat blocked by a scream too large to come out. Her automatic fell from nerveless fingers and hit the carpet with a thump. Her eyes were bulging.

  He faced forward, adjusted his hold slightly, rotated his shoulder and—I don’t know, did whatever he was doing back there very hard.

  The scream tore its way out. Her face went white as a sheet and she went down. Her knees hit the carpet with a bad sound.

  He let go, retrieved his own gun from the coffee table, stood, turned around and beamed down at her. “I do hope you brought your own handcuffs, Constable. Ah, excellent.”

  She was in civilian clothes. Old running shoes. Dark blue jeans. Light grey cotton turtleneck. Brown lightweight waist-length nearly-leather jacket with big lapels. The shade of brown clashed with her empty shoulder holster. She knelt there helpless as a stunned cow, moaning softly, while he hooked her wrists up behind her. He had a very professional way with handcuffs. I think it must have been her first experience with really monstrous pain. It’s nothing like ordinary pain, not something you can resist.

  He straightened up. “Go sit on the couch,” he told her.

  She gaped up at him, clearly trying to work out how you communicate the concept I lack the power to stand here on Planet Pain.

  He nodded understandingly and reached under her armpit with two fingers.

  She shrieked, leaped to her feet like a spastic marionette, Chaplin-walked to the couch at my left, and sat heavily on it, banging her head against the wall hard enough to make her groan. He got a pair of his own cuffs from his backpack, and hobbled her ankles with them while she was still groggy.

  He stood over her and looked down at her for a long time, thinking, now and then thinking out loud. “…of course you haven’t told the department anything; what could you possibly tell them?” Then: “…you live alone, obviously…” And: “…you’re straight! Sure, you are…” And finally: “…recovering already…wonderfully, wonderfully strong, like a racehorse!”

  “Pisam ti u krvotok, Pickica Drkadzijo,”
she snarled at him.

  He backed away five or six paces, bent and retrieved her gun. He looked it over, made it safe, and tucked it into the right-hand pocket of his baggy slacks. Then he resumed his seat, pointed his gun at a point midway between me and Nika, and beamed at me.

  “Russell,” he said, “I think I love you.”

  I cried out, an inarticulate sound of disgust and revulsion.

  “Really. You’ve made me very happy. Happier than anyone since…well, in a long time.”

  “You haven’t even tried my coffee, yet,” I mumbled.

  “A telepath and a female cop, delivered into my hands on the same night, with no way in the world to connect me to the disappearance of either one of them? Not to mention this wonderful little place, on this wonderful island. I had no idea places so isolated could be found this close to town. This is much more convenient than my Fortress of Solitude up in the country.” He shivered with pleasure. “Really, Russell—I had been planning to simply put you quickly out of your misery, like some dog or homeless person. But you’ve given me such special pleasure, gone so far out of your way to bring me treasures I never dreamed of, that now instead I just feel it incumbent on me to dream up an extra special excruciation of some kind for you. One of my worst deaths ever. Something truly…startling, just for you, as a token of my extreme gratitude. I’d like, if I can, to make you as unhappy as you’ve made me happy. And I freely admit it will be a challenge.”

  There wasn’t much left of me. Emotionally, physically and intellectually, I was running on fumes. I’d have fainted long since if his damn drug had let me. I understood that what he was saying was truly horrible, but the awareness evoked hardly any emotional response. My hopes had bungeed too violently too many times in too short a space of time. I was pretty much out of all the emotional neurochemicals, except a few remaining cc’s of despaireum and regrettol. My chest ached. My calves throbbed. My thumb pulsed. My head pounded. Plan-wise, I had nothing. I no longer believed in plans. I no longer believed in anything but unfairness and pain. Come to think of it, I’d believed in them since Susan died. Okay, motherfucker: bring it.

  Since he seemed to want me to say something, I said the first thing that came into my head. “You really think you’re some kind of genius, don’t you? On a level with de Sade—”

  He laughed out loud. Nothing like the giggles and chuckles I’d heard from him before; this was a guffaw. “Oh, you’re wonderful—so perfectly wrong!” He shook his head admiringly. “Russell, de Sade was merely the Homer of Cruelty. I am its Aristotle. Its Newton. Its Tesla. I’m not just a fucking artist, I’m a scientist.” He stood up, walked around behind his chair and rested his hands on its back, still keeping the helpless Nika covered with his gun just in case she decided to fling herself bodily across the room at him and try to chew through his Achilles’ tendon. She looked mad enough to try. “But I admit,” he said to me, “that I’m as proud of the uglinesses I’ve invented and catalogued as any human artist could be of the beauties he creates. Like Leonardo, I want my work to live, for the ages. I like the idea that five hundred years after my death, my name will be enough to make strong men pale and children weep.”

  I had just enough forebrain left to see a logic problem. “But how can you poss—” And then all at once I got it, and shut my eyes so tight I saw neon paisley. “Oh, no. Dear God, no, don’t say that. No—”

  Twinkling eyes. Puckering anus smile. Bashful nod. “It’s true. I have a website.”

  I heard myself giggle. “Of course. Of course you do.”

  “Not on the worldwide web, of course. You can’t Google me. But I get hits.”

  I nodded. “No doubt.”

  “The knowledge I’ve acquired has been perpetuated, and is being studied. Eventually it will form a book. I plan to call it, Very Bad Deaths. Do you like it?”

  “Catchy.”

  “There may well have been other scientists before me, but I’m the first ever to be granted a foolproof way to publish, in perfect safety.”

  “Information wants to be free,” I agreed.

  Closing my eyes had made the whole visual world go away. I wondered, if I closed my ears, would the auditory world go away? Then all I’d have to do was figure out what to close to do away with the worlds of smell, taste, and touch—very important that last, don’t neglect touch—and I’d be dead. Worth a try.

  Allen cocked his gun and said, “Oh, are you fucking kidding me?”

  Not to my knowledge. Oh God, was Nika trying something suicidally brave and stupid? I lifted my head and opened my eyes to witness her final moments, wishing I’d thought of it first.

  Nika was still on the couch, eyes wide, staring.

  Allen was standing with his back to me, staring.

  At Zudie.

  On his feet, and coming.

  He looked like a no-shit zombie, a barely animated corpse of no great freshness. His eyes were wild, and his face was twisted up beyond recognition. His knees trembled violently at every slow step.

  He kept coming.

  “Okay,” Allen said. “You asked for it. Here—”

  Zudie screamed. Whatever Allen hurled at him struck with the force of a firehose to the chest.

  And that was exactly how he treated it: leaned into it and kept on coming.

  “Yeah? Try this—”

  This time I could almost see the beam of concentrated evil he leveled at Zudie, soiling the air between them. If the last had been a firehose, this was a water cannon. Zudie was beaten back a pace, and then another. One knee started to quiver dangerously.

  Nika’s bellow was so loud, Allen and I both started violently. “GO, ZANDOR, GO!”

  Zudie planted his feet.

  I turned my entire brain into a giant bullhorn, that brayed: You can do it, Zudie. I have no idea what the fuck you’re doing but I know you can do it. You’re stronger than you think, Zudie. You always were, Zudie.

  Zandor Zudenigo looked into the face of his ultimate nightmare—everyone’s worst nightmare, but his worst of all. He stared into the furnace of Allen’s mind and did not blink. He squared his shoulders. Lowered his head. Moved forward.

  You can do it, old friend. Whatever it is, I know you can do it.

  “Guess again!” Allen cried happily, and with the special thrill cheating gave him, he lifted his gun, took his wrist in his left hand to steady it—

  Zudie made a sweeping gesture, quick and crisp as a slap. The gun tore from Allen’s grip and flew across the room, ricocheting off the metal chimney with a crash and landing on the tile around the wood stove with a crack.

  “No!” He groped in his pants pocket for the gun he’d taken from Nika.

  “Take him now, Zandor!”

  I’m sorry, Zudie. You have to.

  “Damn you,” Zudie told him sadly.

  He took the last few steps. Closed the gap. Stood in front of Allen. Locked eyes with him. Rested both his hands gently on Allen’s shoulders.

  “Jebem ti prvi red na sahrani,” he said. Nika told me later what it meant. What I knew right then was, for the first time in my memory there was absolutely no trace of forgiveness anywhere in Zandor Zudenigo’s eyes.

  Allen gave up on the gun—took his hand from his pocket—reached up like a striking snake—located a spot below Zudie’s ribs—pressed hard—

  Zudie didn’t seem to notice.

  Allen leaned into it, used his body weight.

  No effect.

  Zudie took a long slow deep breath. Held it. Closed his unforgiving eyes.

  “Jebem te u mozak,” he murmured.

  —Allen stiffened—filled his lungs as deeply as he could—shrieked for as long as possible, a sound that went on and on and horridly on—trailed off in a wet gurgle—fell down dead.

  There was no question in my mind. He fell strings-cut, landed boneless, failed to inhale, began to bleed from the nose and ears but stopped almost at once. His open eyes looked dry, like marbles. As I watched they seemed to acquire dus
t.

  Zudie opened his eyes. Sighed heavily. Stepped over the corpse and headed for the door.

  “Zudie! Wait!”

  To my surprise, he stopped and turned. His eyes met mine. They were his eyes once again: they forgave me for stopping him. I didn’t ask the question aloud but still he answered it—or tried his best, anyway. “I made his selves disbelieve in himself.”

  What does that mean? You tell me. I still wonder. All I can tell you is, the way he said it made it sound like the most obscene thing a person could do. Maybe it is.

  I was crying. “You had to. God damn it, you had to.”

  He shrugged. “Sure.” He turned again to go.

  “Zandor—” Nika began.

  “I know, Nika,” he said wearily, and trudged on. “Don’t worry. I’ll handle it. Yes, really. I know someone. Send me his full name, address and e-mail address: that’ll be enough.”

  In the doorway he stopped and turned. “For forty years,” he said to us, “twice every day of my life for the last forty years, morning and night, I’ve sworn a solemn oath to myself, that I would never, ever do that to another human being again, no matter what. No matter what.” He smiled with infinite sadness. “Now it’s twice.” He walked out.

  But the fat bastard deserved it, I sent after him.

  He stuck his head back in the door. “Everybody deserves to die, Russell,” he said gently. “God obviously thinks so.”

  Then he was gone. I didn’t see him again for a very long time.

  I hated having to touch Allen, even dead, maybe especially dead, but the keys to both sets of cuffs were in his pocket. I turned Nika loose, and made us both strong Irish coffees, and we sat beside the body and discussed things until we had each had and gotten over the shivers, and our cups were empty. Then we slapped a hasty cardboard patch over the hole in the living room window, and closed all the shades and blinds, and I showed Nika the guest room, but when I got to my room she was still right behind me, so we lay down together and held each other and slept like the dead until well after dawn. Then we had coffee and talked some more.

  We poked around together until we found a spot we both liked down by the stream. Between us we managed to drag Allen’s body down there on a kind of sled we made of an old piece of plywood. We dug a hole with shovel and mattock—Nika did nearly all the digging, I did a little root cutting—and we rolled him into it and filled it back up and tossed the extra dirt into the stream. Then I pissed on him, and we went back up the hill for more Irish coffee.