Concrete Underground

by Moxie Mezcal

  Back in the theater, I cough. The woman on my left shushes me angrily. The me on the screen whips his head around and looks over his shoulder, past the fourth wall and into the audience. I can see his face, and he isn't me. His deep blue eyes are filled with piercing anger, glaring at me through the darkness, projected larger than life.

  The image on the screen flickers and dissolves briefly into static before cutting to a grainy, wide-angle shot of a room, the monochrome image washed in blue, giving the impression it is a feed from some kind of surveillance camera. The room is small and sparsely-furnished with only one occupant – a man sitting on the edge of a bed, his back turned to the camera. In the bottom right corner of the screen are digitized numbers reading: 00033.

  I turn to my left. The woman beside me casts a disapproving look at me and says, "You shouldn't be here." Her face is covered by a half-mask made of dark gunmetal. I reach out to lift the mask, but when I see her face, I realize she's not who I thought she was.

  I turn to my right and see a man sitting in the previously-empty seat, his face covered in a grotesque black mask pocked by red boils oozing puss. A long crooked nose protrudes from his mask, and underneath his lips part to reveal a mouthful of jagged yellow teeth jutting out from purple, bleeding gums.

  The man in the mask starts laughing – a tinny and mechanical laugh, like the sound of a clanky old film projector.

  ---

  When I came to, my assailant was gone. I struggled slowly to my feet, feeling my head throbbing and my stomach stinging like hell. Then to make matters worse, that damned phone in the hallway started ringing again.

  Once I finally regained my bearings, I realized that the vent cover had been fully removed and the box had been taken.

  My head still swimming, I staggered out into the hallway in time to see the leopard-print lady from the lobby pick up the phone.

  "Hello?" she answered and then turned her head to look directly at me.

  "Yes, he is," she said after a brief pause, then held out the receiver to me. "It's for you."

  I took the phone from her and took out my reporter's notebook from my back pocket. "D's Sporting Goods. This is D speaking."

  "Did you find the parcel?" asked a man's voice on the other end of the line, low and raspy, almost sounding mechanical.

  "Who is this?"

  "Did you get it?" he demanded.

  I wrote the word "parcel" in my notebook. "You mean the little blue box? No, I was too busy getting bludgeoned into unconsciousness with a baseball bat. Now would you mind telling me who the fuck you are?"

  I heard multiple voices whisper faintly in the background, but couldn't clearly make out what they were saying. One of them might have said something like, "He's going inside."

  "You shouldn't have been late," said the man. "You need to get out of there right now. If you don't, we can't be held responsible for what happens to you."

  The line went dead. I hung up the phone and made a few more notes before heading back downstairs. On my way through the lobby, the manager rushed out from behind the front desk to cut me off.

  "Hey, there's a visitor's fee here. Twenty bucks," he said.

  "What?"

  "All visitors pay twenty bucks. I have to clean up after you assholes. And between scrubbing the jizz stains out of the hookers' rooms and mopping up vomit and blood and God knows what else in the dealers' rooms, twenty bucks a pop don't even start to cover it. So pay up – and that goes for you, too."

  I looked over my shoulder to see that the manager was also addressing a man who had just walked through the front door. He was a giant shit-kicking type, easily 6'8" and built like a bulldozer, with a shaved head and a dark olive complexion of indeterminate ethnicity. He wore leather pants, steel toe jack boots, and a black t-shirt with "Bad Seed" printed in white block lettering.

  "What did you say?" asked the newcomer.

  The manager stepped towards him, holding out his left hand face up and jabbing his right index finger down into the open palm. "You heard me. I said put some God-damned money, in my God-damned--"

  The tall man head-butted the manager in the face, mashing his nose into a red squirting pulp. He looked up at me, blood dripping down his forehead, and said, "He shouldn't have blasphemed." I couldn't tell if he was joking or not – probably wasn't.

  I just shrugged in tacit agreement and stepped past him towards the exit. On my way out the door, I looked back to see him heading upstairs. Something told me he was probably headed for room 313, but I'd be damned if I was going to follow him to find out.

  * * *

  3. This Machine Kills Yuppies

  "Congratulations, jackass, you just got us sued."

  My editor, Sharon, was standing in front of my desk. She was apparently not happy.

  I shrugged, slouching further down in my chair, trying to hide from her gigantic crazy eyes behind my computer. It was a white laptop with a sticker that said "This Machine Kills Yuppies" slapped over the corporate logo on back.

  She reached out with one of her freakish man-hands and slammed the screen shut. "Let me try this again. You just got us sued six times over."

  Sharon Sinclair was a six-foot-tall beast of a woman with a huge mane of wiry black and gray hair pulled back in a pony tail. I had every confidence that she could tear me in two and use my bloody carcass in some kinky hedonistic lesbian cult ritual or something. So I usually tried to choose my words with the appropriate care around her.

  "Jesus-fucking-Christ, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet, and my head's still reeling from the Louisville Slugger that pummeled it last night. So I really don't feel like dealing with whatever annoying hormonal episode you have going on here."

  She glared at me silently, watching me squirm a little before asking, "Are you done?"

  "Probably."

  "Good," she said with a suppressed grin as she took a seat next to me. "Because I just let you publicly accuse the mayor and the valley's most powerful corporations of conspiring to defraud the taxpayers. So what's your plan for keeping my ass off the firing line?"

  I tilted back in my chair and met Sharon's gaze. "Look, we knew we'd get a strong reaction. Let them sue. We have e-mails to back us up."

  "These legal briefings say your e-mails were forged," she responded, waving a thick stack of papers in my face.

  "Of course they're gonna say that. That's why I made sure to get corroboration. Abrasax confirmed that the e-mails between Dylan Maxwell and City Hall are legit. But you know all this, so I don't know why we're wasting time going over it again."

  "Because Abrasax is not returning calls or answering any questions related to your story. They won't confirm that their spokesperson actually gave you that statement. They've cut you loose."

  I felt my stomach sink. "You're kidding me?"

  Sharon shook her head. "Nope. You know how you were telling me that their admission was almost too good to be true? Well guess what...?"

  I leaned forward, propping myself against the desk on my elbows and massaging my temples. My headache was getting worse.

  "It would make things a lot easier if you told me who your source on those e-mails was," she pressed.

  "I can't. I promised them complete anonymity."

  "Fair enough," she conceded, "but you got to give me something here, D. What's your plan?"

  "I have to talk to Abrasax again and make sure they're still backing my story. Only this time I have to talk to Dylan Maxwell himself, not that horrible shrieking bitch flack, Lynch." I paused, stroking my chin, then added, "He'll probably be at my sister's wedding tonight. Hell, it might make the thing actually worth going to."

  Sharon relaxed her posture a bit and softened her tone. "Nice to see you finally joined the conversation. Because if this thing goes to court, and you can't get Maxwell to back up those e-mails, then I'm forced to go into damage control mode. And that starts with publishing a full retraction and shit-canning your sorry ass."

  Just then an intern app
eared at the entrance of my cubicle with three full mail trays stacked on top of each other. "Here's the mail you asked me to bring in, Ms. Sinclair," she said meekly.

  "Just set it down on his desk," Sharon instructed with a nod. The intern obeyed, struggling with the weight as she hefted the load onto my desktop with a thud. She was typical of the girls Sharon brought in – idealistic college students with big vocabularies and big tits. Not that I ever complained.

  This particular intern had a lip ring and dyed jet-black hair. She wore a denim shorts over ripped black fishnet stockings and a carnation pink t-shirt with a silk screen of She-Ra that I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be ironic but at any rate was definitely a size or two too small. As I turned my gaze back to Sharon, I saw that she was also checking the girl out.

  I shook my head. "Not worth your effort. I know her type. Probably has a long-term boyfriend, some dweeby music major with a pony tail or something."

  "Says you," Sharon replied with a smirk. The intern stood there awkwardly, her eyes shifting back and forth between us.

  "Prove me right, Princess of Power," I said.

  "What?" the intern asked tentatively, her pale cheeks becoming flushed.

  "Oh now don't go getting all embarrassed," I said. "I know we're living in more enlightened times and it'd be totally inappropriate for me to just ask you straight up if you like to eat box or not, and of course I want to be sensitive to all that bullshit. But this has to be settled, so just tell me this – which of the two of us would you be more likely to fuck?"

  She-Ra shook her head, not quite sure to make of the situation. Finally, with an apologetic shrug, she answered, "Well I'm not gay, but definitely her."

  Sharon laughed heartily as the intern walked away. I flashed a wolfish grin at her. "So what's all this?" I asked, indicating the mail trays.

  "That's the hate mail generated by your article. Most of them just question your journalistic integrity – granted, they use some very colorful language to do it – but there are also a handful of bona fide death threats in there."

  "I'm just surprised that many people actually read this paper," I muttered.

  I wasn't really worried about the heat my article was bringing down. I knew Sharon could handle it, and I knew that she would get my back.

  ---

  Sharon Sinclair ran away from home for the first time at age 14 to go see the Stooges. She ran away for the last time two years later and moved to New York. It was the late seventies, and she split her time between two movements – punk rock and gay lib. Somewhere along the way she got into journalism. She'd let me read some of her early stuff, and they were crazy good – frenetic gonzo journalism fueled by heroin and the self-righteous conviction that she was the coolest bitch on the planet.

  By the time I met her, she had ended up here and started the Concrete Underground. It had meant something to her at some point, but now she'd just resigned herself to babysitting a bunch of mediocre smart-asses – present company most definitely included.

  She drove a prehistoric beater with a biodiesel-converted engine. The rear bumper was plastered with old campaign stickers for failed Democratic candidates as her own little fuck-you to the world. Seriously. If only I were into homely dykes old enough to be my mother, I'd have proposed to this woman years ago.

  ---

  I thumbed through the tray of hate mail absently, not really looking for anything at all, and came across a small blue envelope that caught my attention. It bore no stamp or postmark, but was addressed to me in care of the newspaper. The back flap was stamped in silver foil with the crowned globe symbol from my dream.

  I unsealed the flap and pulled out the paper inside. It was a thick white sheet with a typewritten message:

  Have you seen today's Morning Star?

  Page 9-B

  The Morning-Star was the major daily paper in the valley. As a rule, I never read it. So when I asked Stan, our movie listings editor, to borrow his copy, he was understandably suspicious. I had to promise to return it unharmed and not burn it in effigy or anything.

  I pulled out the B-section, Local News, and flipped to page 9. Buried at the bottom of the page was a small one-column story about a woman found dead in a ditch on the side of Highway 77, about three miles south of the Hastings Airfield at the far southern tip of the valley. She had been strangled. Police found no identification on the body, and she did not match the descriptions of any known missing persons in the area. The police spokesman said that she was most likely a vagrant.

  I turned the page. On the back of the article, page 10, there was a full-page color ad for Abrasax, again with a photograph of their CEO Dylan Maxwell. With his shaggy, jet-black hair, slim build, and loose, brazen way of carrying himself, people tended to think of him as more rock star than tech executive. I stared at the photograph, meditating on the way he seemed to gaze out from the page with those intense blue eyes. My brain flashed to an image of that same steely gaze projected larger than life on a movie screen. I felt a chill course through my body and make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, then imagined for a second that I could hear the sound of an old, clanky film projector.

  * * *

  4. Strangers on a Bathroom Floor

  There were a good many things I'd rather do on a Friday night than try to gain entry to the St. Augustine, an exclusive west-side hotel that catered to two types of clients – the rich and the powerful. And yet there I was, trying to weasel my way past some overgrown Aryan doorman blocking me from the grand ballroom.

  "No, you don't understand. I'm a journalist, man. I have credentials."

  I flashed him the first thing I found in my jacket pocket, which happened to be my press pass from a tech trade show two months past. It didn't seem to help my case. It probably also did not help that I showed up to a wedding in a five-star hotel wearing jeans and chanclas. Or that I reeked of whiskey. In my defense, however, I had to rush straight from work to make it here, so there was no way I could have stopped both at home to change and at the bar to get suitably blitzed. Something had to give.

  I persisted in arguing with the doorman until, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a very short, very angry young Mexican woman in a wedding dress charging towards us from across the ballroom.

  "Now you've done it, Adolf. Get ready to see what happens when you infringe upon the rights of the Fourth Estate."

  The young woman reached past the doorman and grabbed me by the arm.

  "It's okay," she said. "He's my brother."

  ---

  Jenny and I were twins, and we were always close growing up despite our very different personalities. Besides a birthday and a couple dead parents, there wasn't much else we shared in common. She was an over-achiever and a bit of a kiss-ass, always trying to make mom and dad proud, which she seemed to pull off with ease. She was the girl in high school who played every sport, joined every club, ran the student council, and somehow still managed to pull A's without breaking a sweat. Intense doesn't even begin to describe her. I could never compete with that, so instead I decided to build an identity for myself as the rebel. Unfortunately, I somehow equated rebelling with turning into a giant asshole.

  We grew up in a middle-class suburban family. Our father was a teacher and our mother an architect. They were the kind of couple that kept a date night to go dancing every Friday for the 31 years they were married. They died when Jenny and I were twenty-two. We sold the house where we grew up and split the cash; neither of us wanted to set foot in it again.

  Jenny used the money to pay for her Master's. After school she went to work for James McPherson, one of the most powerful and richest men in the city. Aside from owning the St. Augustine, McPherson had interests in real estate, land development, venture capital, and other things I really should've known more about. The McPherson family was old money here going back to when this valley was nothing but orchards. If I said that at one time or another the McPherson family had owned every single square foot of land in our
city, I'd probably be exaggerating – but not much.

  Jenny ran the McPhersons' charitable foundation, which basically meant that not only did they have so much money that they had to start giving it away, but they even had to hire someone else just to get rid of it for them.

  ---

  Jenny grabbed two glasses of scotch from the bartender and handed one to me.

  "From the look of you – not to mention the smell – I know I really shouldn't be giving you this, but.." she trailed off and shrugged.

  "Here's to your big day," I said as I clinked my glass to hers.

  "So big that you showed up an hour late and missed the ceremony completely," she added, flashing me an expression of disapproval that made her look like our mother. I opened my mouth to protest, but mercifully she pressed her finger to my lips to silence me. "I'm just happy you made it."

  "I am, too," I replied.

  We managed to sneak away from the reception through the hotel kitchen and out a service door that opened onto a loading dock at the back of the hotel. We sat on the dock and caught up over scotch and cigarettes.

  "I haven't smoked in ages," Jenny said after exhaling a series of perfect rings. "If Brad saw me, he'd flip."

  "What are you going to do when he smells it on you?"

  "Blame it on you, of course."

  I chuckled and stubbed out my cigarette butt. "Do you remember when we were in high school and we used to sneak out onto the roof over the garage to smoke?"