Nightlife

by Brian Hodge

  Inside, he could see little more than dusky brown shadows, but once his eyes grew accustomed he made out, from behind, a man lying prone on the boxcar floor. A rifle notched against his shoulder.

  Kerebawa ducked back from the doorway. The man was too low, spread out flat, a poor target for an arrow. And with the floor itself nearly chest high, he doubted he could climb up in perfect silence.

  From above, then?

  Kerebawa backtracked along the boxcar’s frame, found the coupling hitch. A starting boost, at least. Then he looked up and saw the ladder. He set the machete down, all but one arrow.

  And began to climb.

  Sand. All this exhausting time and turmoil for bags full of sand? Sand?

  Justin slammed down the trunk lid, didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream.

  Seconds later, he could scratch laughter from the list; someone else had beaten him to it. His shoulders slumped even before he turned and saw Tony and his Goliath of a friend and bodyguard. Where they had come from he couldn’t tell, maybe from behind one of the nearby truck trailers. Didn’t really matter. What did was that they were there, not ten feet away, and looked very pleased with themselves, and that Lupo held a small submachine gun on him.

  Justin rested his right hand against his hip. Inches from the Beretta. Half a chance, given half a chance .

  “Ah ah ah. Naughty, naughty.” Lupo jiggled his gun. “Hand away from that bulge under your shirt.”

  Dead hope was plummeting beyond the reach of light when he heard another squeal of hinges. He looked back to see a door opening on the very car he’d just jimmied, and a third man came out.

  “Make sure Mister Barrington gets that gun in your pants,” Tony said. “Just ease it out with your thumb and your pinkie.”

  He obeyed, looked over at April. She stood with eyes downcast, and he noticed she was no longer trembling. Barrington took the pistol, and Justin tightened his hold on the tire tool held alongside his leg. Barrington was in reach. He started to bring it around in a whistling sidewinder.

  Barrington must have read his mind. The guy’s body was incredibly lithe, and he spun into a wheelkick, his foot connecting solidly with the right side of Justin’s face. He might as well have been swatted with a board. He flopped back onto the trunk lid, tasting blood inside his cheek. He dropped the tire tool, and it was scooped up before he even saw where it landed.

  Kerebawa — where is he?

  Lying back against the trunk, Justin rolled his eyes toward April. Statue-still. Eye contact at last, though, and she looked haunted with hollow resignation. He held out his hand, mumbled her name, now wanted only to die with the touch of her on his fingers.

  But she didn’t reach out.

  Didn’t move.

  And finally averted her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Justin,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  He blinked at her. Stupidly, blankly. Sensing the birth of the blackest notion he had ever come to know.

  Tony, began to applaud. “Good job, April,” he said. Laughed again. “You did perfect.”

  Justin shook his head to clear the numb ringing. Couldn’t believe he was hearing this right.

  But when she looked his way again, smothered with guilt, and their eyes met — he knew it was true. Crushingly true. “You set me up.” His voice sounded far away.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You set me up?”

  “You don’t understand!” she shrieked. “He said if I didn’t do this, he was going to send a copy of that movie to my parents! It would kill them, Justin. My dad — my daddy — he … it would…” She shrank into herself and went silent.

  How? When? was all Justin could wonder. Monumental questions. Then it clicked. Morning rituals, April checking her answering machine. Thursday morning, when he had gone outside after getting the bad news about skullflush, soon followed by Kerebawa. Leaving her alone. Tony must have left a message on her answering machine. April’s mood had gone into a morose nosedive ever since.

  If he’d had anything in his stomach, he would’ve lost it. The way he’d lost everything else he was clinging to in this last-ditch attempt at a new life.

  Tony was laughing grandly. “Fuck a duck, man, I wish I had all this on film!”

  Even hate was beyond Justin now. Couldn’t love her, couldn’t hate her, couldn’t even hate Tony. Nothing was left, he was empty. Emotion was alien, in a heart that was cauterized shut. He lay on the trunk lid, a Julius Caesar to April’s Brutus, bleeding from that unkindest cut of all.

  His eyes flicked from one to another, Tony to Lupo to Barrington. Settled on Tony, obviously calling the shots. Tony’s exuberance started to chill, celebration apparently short-lived. Justin feared he was too.

  “You know what I want from you,” Tony said. “You took two things from me. One of them you can give back. The other — you’re gonna pay, and pay, and pay.”

  Justin refused to blink, for fear he might miss something. Tony had become a live wire. With a queasy sense of his own vulnerability, Justin felt the cut across his cheek from Barrington’s kick. The trickle of blood working its way toward his chin, jawline.

  Saw Tony stare at it.

  Sniff the air, intently.

  And lick his lips.

  “I don’t need you,” Tony said abruptly, and his voice had grown huskier. “I can get the skullflush back from her.” A nod to April.

  Watching the blood…

  Tony produced a large plastic packet. Moonlight distorted color, but Justin knew what it would be. Tony’s nose dipped low, and there came a snuffling sound. He jerked his head back, shivered, returned for more, and more.

  “I was gonna save this for later,” he said, his voice sprouting fearsome rough edges, “but I just can’t wait.”

  And the change descended with the fury of a storm.

  The first thing Kerebawa did after reaching the top of the boxcar was remove his shoes. Better for silence. He was halfway to a perch above the doorway when he saw that the situation over by the junked cars had fallen to pieces.

  Crossroads. He weighed options and alternatives with the speed of a striking snake and decided it best to eliminate the man in the boxcar before anything else.

  Why does he not shoot? Kerebawa wondered while getting into position. As silent as a panther. Then: His job is maybe the same as mine. Someone to act only in case of trouble.

  He heard April’s voice, could not make out what she was shouting. Only knew that accuracy and timing were more crucial now than ever.

  He notched the arrow he’d brought into the bowstring, frowned at the way it felt, so different from the bamboo he was used to. He drew the arrow back nearly to the head, steeled his arm against the tension, and clamped the index and middle fingers of his bow hand against the arrow shaft. He could hold it this way, but not for long. He dropped his other hand away and, poised over the doorway, held fast to one of the metal ribs spanning the roof.

  He leaned out, held the bow downward. Fixed his gaze on a pale strip of the man’s neck, between his neatly trimmed hair and shirt collar.

  Adjusted the aim…

  And let his aching fingers spring open.

  The feathers burned as they whickered past his fingers, but the arrow dropped straight and true, spearing through the man’s neck just beneath the base of his skull. Kerebawa saw him jitter for a moment and hoped the gun wouldn’t clatter to the ground. It didn’t, was too far inside.

  He looked back to Justin and the rest. And saw a sight that froze him in place.

  The hekura … It wasn’t supposed to happen like this tonight, not like this.

  Out of arrows, he’d brought only the one. It would be quicker to jump to the ground, but at this height, with rocky ground below, he might cripple himself. He scuttled back across the roof and slid down the ladder, seized his arrows and then the machete. Ran along the boxcar to the doorway.

  The dead man had been nailed completely through the neck to the car’s wooden fl
oor. Kerebawa lifted the rifle from his limp hands.

  Shotguns he had fired. This was something else entirely. A grip that stuck down from the stock, like a pistol’s. A long, curved metal box sticking down from the center. This was like one of the wasp-guns that Padre Angus’s enemies had brought to the jungles back home. He knew he dared not try to work it. But took it anyway.

  Kerebawa crouched and began to cross the space between the tracks and the chain-link fence separating him from the others. Twenty yards, fifteen. He kept low inside the thicket of dry weeds choking the ground.

  Close enough.

  He notched another arrow, and when he looked up he saw someone ahead with the body of a man and the face of a demon, newly emerging from the contortions of the change.

  Kerebawa hated these new arrows. Too short, too light, their balance all wrong, all wrong. As soon as he let it fly, he knew that his aim was off and saw it sail over the heads of their enemies to ping into the side of a truck trailer.

  At least it got their attention.

  There came shouting, and then angry starbursts of a wasp-gun, and Kerebawa dropped to the ground while above him, the weeds disintegrated as if hacked with a scythe. And fell like dry rain.

  Justin was ready to shut his eyes and surrender to the inevitable. Tony had finished his contortions and was ready to leave Lupo’s side, and the Barrington guy was looking at Tony as if he had been the one to drop hallucinogens.

  Then the unmistakable twang of a bowstring.

  A wild shot, but priceless in its reprieve. Tony, or whatever he had disintegrated into, froze. Lupo was on top of it in a microsecond, raking a line of fire through the fence.

  Justin dropped beside the LTD and watched April cry out in anguish and reach into her own waistband. He had forgotten all about it, the hitman’s other gun. The .32 revolver. She held it out crookedly, and it jumped three times in her hand, and the night was full of fire and thunder, and Lupo’s throat spewed a shower of blood that glistened black in the moonlight.

  Spraying in a beautiful arc…

  Splattering onto the brand-new Tony Mendoza.

  “Justin!”

  He heard his name screamed from behind, and when he looked back he saw Kerebawa running hell-bent for the fence. Hurling something dark and sleek into the air. Some of it was shiny, some not.

  Then he recognized the shape.

  It slammed onto the hood of the LTD, clattering across sheet metal and then through the gap where once had been a windshield and now was open space.

  Lupo was firing haphazardly, as if his trigger finger was spasming. Bullets sprayed in one direction, then another, in a random waste. When Justin looked back, he saw why.

  And what fate had befallen him.

  April had dropped to the ground and scrambled for cover behind another of the junkers, and now Barrington had regained some of his mind-blown senses and was swinging the silenced Beretta around to fire. The sound was deceptively gentle, delicate, and Justin went diving headlong across the LTD’s ruined trunk, through the empty back window frame, falling into a back seat littered with crystalline safety glass, and soggy and mildewed from a thousand rains.

  Just as the bullets began to chop out the last of the side windows, bringing them in on him like hailstones.

  The hunger had begun even before the change. As soon as Tony had noticed the blood on Justin’s face, smelled it on the salt air. Residual effects of the drug must have included heightened senses, because from that point on, his urges were not his own. Just like this morning at Agualar’s. Then the change, against his better judgment, like an alcoholic grasping for the lethal bottle. Finally the faceful of Lupo’s blood. Hot. Rich. Potent.

  Instincts surged, ancient and primordial, powerful enough to have insured the survival of a species for millennia. He could not fight them. There was no resisting them. Only bending before them, paying the homage that was their due. He was no longer their master.

  He dropped the package of skullflush to follow the spouting blood back to its source. Bathed in it. Watched the insane horror shatter in Lupo’s eyes as Tony brought him down to the asphalt with a roar and let the morbidly efficient jaws go to work.

  Oblivious, while all around, the battle raged.

  With Barrington firing blindly into the car, Justin slithered to the floorboard and reached around the front seat. Groped with one splayed hand through grit and dirt and rotten upholstery and slime until his fingers touched metal. They closed, and he maneuvered it back with him, paused a moment to see what he had.

  The shape was familiar to anyone who had watched the news of ghetto violence and schoolyard massacres. An AK-47.

  Justin popped up in the back seat while snapping the assault rifle to his shoulder. Hazily wondering where it had come from, if Kerebawa had disarmed some fourth member of the welcoming committee. Had to be it. He didn’t know where the particulars of this weapon were situated, could only trust that if a sniper was ready to fire if needed, the safety would be disengaged.

  He slammed the gun onto the back window deck, swiveled it with a loud cry. Amazing, the way a shift in the balance of power could infuse a dead soul with fresh hatred. He boiled, he raged. The magnitude was ungodly. He brought the muzzle onto Barrington and squeezed the trigger as fast as he could, for the sniper had it set on semi instead of full auto.

  Fans of white fire spat from the muzzle, four times, six, ten, and he screamed the whole time while watching the karate kid disintegrate into wet fragments. The AK-47 put out a solid meaty roar that made all the other guns sound anemic by comparison. Barrington was dead on the ground and twitching, and still Justin didn’t trust him, kept firing even as he pushed himself through the window and across the trunk. Even as he slid to set foot on solid ground once more. Until there was barely enough left to bury.

  Then he turned his attention to Tony Mendoza. Grand architect of all misery in the known world. Survival instincts must have taken precedence over hunger, for Tony rose dripping black blood from the mangle of Lupo’s throat. Grappled for the fallen submachine gun.

  “Don’t kill him, Justin!” he heard from somewhere behind him. Kerebawa’s voice barely registered. “Don’t kill him, DONT KILL HIM!”

  “Fuck that,” Justin whispered, and squeezed the trigger.

  Blood and tissue flew from Tony’s shoulder, as the impact knocked him back and sprawling across asphalt. Justin took the time to carefully sight in while behind him, Kerebawa screamed and clambered up the fence. Again, fire. Dark blood splotched on Tony’s shirt, just left of center chest, and coughed out through the exit wound. Raise the gun, fire again. Stalk this tumbling body across the asphalt like a dark avenging angel, watch organic shrapnel pinwheeling from the side of Tony’s leviathan head.

  Fire again, and again, and again, the magazine in the AK-47 bottomless. Sometimes he missed, sometimes he grazed, sometimes he plowed home with deadly accuracy, and beneath the crackling rumble of the gun he began to hear a new sound, something completely out of place.

  Tony was laughing.

  Laughing like a man who understands the funniest, most ironic joke ever conceived, to your exclusion. Justin stilled his trigger finger, stood wreathed in the war zone stink of smoke and death — and watched him sit up. Laughing. His ruined features began to melt and flow beneath moonlight, achieving some ghastly netherworid state between his two polarities.

  “Nice try,” he rasped, and rose halfway to his feet.

  Justin stood rooted to the asphalt. Nothing could have survived that kind of damage. Nothing. Barrington lay deader than roadkill. Justin’s finger twitched on the trigger twice more, blew Tony back another six feet, but it only seemed to help him along. He lurched, hobbled back toward the warehouse, and Justin could do nothing more than watch wide-eyed as this darkly spattered figure made his retreat.

  Kerebawa came running up to his side, scooped up the fallen packet of the green drug. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he cried. “Do you know what you’ve done!�
�

  Justin could only stare.

  “We must go.”

  Justin nodded. Heard the muffled sound of an engine revving to life. A moment later, one of the loading bay doors exploded into curled panels of metal and flying glass. A pale Olds sedan bulldozed out, tires squealing, and hooked sharply to its left and careened for the exit. There was no choice but to let it.

  “We must go,” Kerebawa repeated. “Now.”

  He was right; the police would be converging on this scene like flies. Justin hung on to the assault rifle, snatched up the fallen pistol from beside Barrington’s body. The rented Dodge — he spun in circles, disoriented, probably couldn’t find his own feet.

  Only then did April emerge from behind her own shelter.

  Hate may have been out of the question before. Not now.

  He looked at the guns in his hands. Then the one in hers; so far as he knew, she still had two shots left. He was sure she had gotten the same idea at the same time. Who’s first? he wondered. Finger tightening all over again, nauseous fright.

  April let the .32 fall to the ground. She walked closer, eyes empty, mouth downturned in sorrow. She looked half dead already. Then she stopped. Yanked open her blouse hard enough to pop a button free and expose more chest. Like a target.

  “If you’re going to do it,” she said, “do it.”

  Justin shut his eyes, felt his own tears burn. Caesar and Brutus, betrayer and betrayed. Bestower and recipient of Judas’ kiss. He actually felt his finger put more pressure on that trigger before he shook his head.

  “Live with it,” he said, anything but forgiveness in his voice. Nor was it in his heart.

  But there was necessity.

  “Come on.”

  He grabbed her wrist, yanked her along to follow. Kerebawa was already at their car. And sirens wailed in the distance.

  Chapter 29

  FRAGMENTATION