Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  “Your mother doesn’t know what she’s done.”

  Part of the door gives way, and a bloody hand reaches in to feel for the handle. It finds the dresser first.

  “You’re talking, baby girl.” Paul lets out a manic laugh, and grabs his head. “You’re talking.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, half-blinded by tears.

  “Oh my god,” Paul whispers.

  “Did I…misspeak?”

  “No, sweetheart.”

  “I’ve been practising for days now!” she says with a smile, out of place amidst her tears.

  “Oh, child. You sound beautiful.” He can’t stand it.

  Through the gap in the door, the other man shouts: “Open this door right now, Paul. You’re only making it worse for yourself. The LAPD are on their way.”

  Paul gets up, slowly, and staggers, looking at his girls. Full-fledged evaps. Talking. Happy. Damned.

  Paul kisses Pythia on the forehead. “I’ll fix this, don’t you worry.”

  “What’s broken?” she inquires, marking the question with an anxious, tear-fed gasp.

  He turns his head, loosing tributaries from the streams running down his cheeks. He picks her up, and carries her to her bunk.

  Angela, frightened, has balled up in the corner of her bunk—sent there by the warnings her mother’s issued through the broken door.

  Paul tucks Pythia into bed, and reaches for Angela. “Baby, I just want a hug…hug your dad goodbye, will yah?”

  She shakes her head, eyes wide with fear and glossed over with saline separation. She kicks the comforters up, trying to squeeze as far back into the corner as geometry and physics will allow.

  Angela’s face grows pallid, and her eyes beam red. No. Paul bites his lip. He’s mid-episode. I need out. I need fresh air.

  He slides the dresser out of the way of the door. The substitute and Rachel pile in. Rachel swats at Paul, in the way of the other man’s offensive, and Paul squeezes past her and into the hallway. The banshee and her minion chase him out the front with hateful promises and warnings.

  Stumbling into the street, Paul is welcomed by the sound of sirens. Two police cruisers make a V at the base of the driveway, scorching the grass with their mag-levellers. A third cruiser slides behind Paul’s truck and immediately begins scanning his dot-plate, registered to a nicotine-yellowed RIM tick.

  A bald-headed brute lumbers out the passenger side of the nearest police car and severs Paul’s trajectory with an out-faced palm and the threat of a gravity mallet.

  A second moustached officer, tightly harnessed into his exo-suit, approaches Rachel. “Mrs. Sheffield? Is everything alright?”

  “Ms. Irhap,” she looks over at Paul who’s already resigned to the will of the bald cop and handed over a gun she had no idea he was carrying, “It’s Ms. Irhap. And no, it’s not alright.”

  Chapter 13: UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB

  THE MOUSTACHED OFFICER cuts the restraints. Paul’s purple hands fall free.

  “You’re good to go.”

  Here—cold, sterile, and glossed-over by bleach and florescence—is as good a place as any. “Huh?”

  “Bail’s been posted.” The moustache audibly hinders the cop’s enunciation.

  Paul rubs his bruised knuckles. “By who?”

  “No idea. Above my pay grade.” The officer throws a transparent-plastic bag bulging with a jacket, car keys, revolver, and a wallet, into Paul’s lap. “Car’s not permitted in the Blue Zone. I’m guessing you don’t have the paperwork handy…”

  “It’s a rental.”

  “I bet. Should be processed and ready to leave the lock-up any time now. It leaves with you, back to wherever you’re from.” His left pupil oscillates independent of the right, likely reading a Monocle brief. He nods, and jabs Paul’s bag of belongings. “The license on that firearm is about to expire. See that you renew it or you’ll being seeing me real soon. Confiscated the ammo, just so you don’t try anything stupid. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, after all.”

  “And a black eye teaches a lesson,” murmurs Paul.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  The officer looks for resistance to snap at, but Paul gives him nothing. “That’s right. We’re also checking your piece against details regarding a cold case.”

  Paul’s confident that whichever one of the twenty-or-so cases the cop’s possibly alluding to won’t thaw. He spreads the bag out on his lap.

  The officer picks at his teeth, and mumbles a follow-up: “Barstow’s where we’ll find you, correct?”

  “Wherever was more accurate.”

  Tired of Paul’s attitude, the cop stamps his foot. Paul flinches.

  “Got your attention now, do I?”

  Paul whips his gaze upward like a scolded adolescent.

  “Between the two of us,” the officer rolls up his meched-out sleeves. “If we catch you over by your ex’s house again, John Law won’t be so understanding.”

  Paul nods in agreement.

  “You need to do better than that, Mr. Sheffield.” The cop crosses his arms, blue with faded tattoos and oversized veins. “Y’understand?”

  “Doctor…”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Half-turning, the cop mumbles, “No point, anyway.”

  Paul plunks his belongings on the seat beside him and tears the plastic film to the point of tearing. “Sorry?”

  The officer drops his shoulder revealing a poorly-hidden smirk. “They won’t be there. Outland is putting them up in a protected residence until Sentinels can confirm they’re safe. Somewhere nice downtown. Might even throw them in the Citadel. Princesses belong in castles, don’t they?”

  “Why the hell would they do that?” asks Paul, standing up—losing his head in one of the few places that could legally keep it.

  The officer unfolds his arms, and steps toe to toe with Paul. “Customer satisfaction. Keeping RIM ticks away from decent people. Charity.” His eyes widen. “Di’look like I have a fricking crystal ball?”

  Paul averts his look of disdain and plays the beta. “No. I just think…”

  The officer thumbs Paul in the chest. “That’d be a nice change.”

  Murderous rage wells up behind Paul’s vacant stare, which he rolls up. Keep it cool. “I just think that a guy should be allowed to know what’s going on with his family.” He steps back. “That’s all.”

  “Well your family’s going on without you, so drop it. Don’t let me see you again—oh, that reminds me!” He zips up his black vest, revealing a chrome-coloured plastic badge pinned to the front. The lettering espouses virtue and justice for all.

  “Yeah?”

  “Outland sent a private dick to the courthouse to review your case. Memo said you violated a—hold on, I’ve got it here…” he intuits the message onto his Monocle, “You violated a privately-negotiated, legally-binding restraining order. Pretty serious business, Mr. Sheffield. Better hope a bounty hunter doesn’t find you before the bigwigs figure out how best to proceed.”

  “Won’t matter. The result will be the same.”

  THE AIR OUTSIDE STINKS like rotten oranges and barbequed kelp. It complements the other senses LA’s unsurprisingly ready to upset. Whatever is making the Stars and Stripes shiver on the police station’s poles isn’t natural, and sure as hell doesn’t look natural: a dense, yellowish fog billowing out of the city’s split veins. Another revolting night in the City of Angels.

  Shouta’s Whipblade—a flashy, over-the-top Thorium convertible—hums in neutral at the base of the steps, pulled up onto the curb like he owns it. And he—the potential inheritor of Winchester’s noospheric fiefdom—might as well. His wiry frame, angled at a nonchalant seventy degrees above the vented hood, is nothing less than a swastika against the headlights’ xenon field.

  Paul sighs at the sight of the spidery outline. “Should’ve guessed.” He pulls his heavy arms through the sleeves of his jacket, squirrels the revo
lver behind his belt, and trudges down the steps.

  “Beat your friends to it,” chirps Shouta, half-bowing.

  “Couldn’t have been much competition.” Paul’s tone is as chalky as his complexion.

  “Thought it would be a step towards repairing that bridge.”

  Paul buries his gaze beneath his furrowed brow, avoiding eye contact. Through weary slants, he concentrates, instead, on Shouta’s knife-gash of a smile. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing.” The loaded word chips through his perfect, white teeth.

  “Thanks, I guess.” Paul half-turns, patting his jacket pockets—growing anxious with every unsuccessful feel. The pouches secreted behind the leather fail to yield the goods. “God-damn-it,” he mumbles.

  Observing his debtor’s vexation, Shouta nimbly pulls a pack of premium cannaberettes out of his satchel, and stabs the offering across Paul’s frontage. “Thought you had quit.”

  Paul’s mug transforms with relief at the sight of the trademark pinstripe design. Walruses. The trenches arrayed across his forehead and under his eyes smooth and shallow. He looks past the depressant to its donor. “And I know for a fact you don’t smoke.”

  Shouta’s smile cuts to bulging cheeks.

  The man’s a penchant for thinking ahead. “Carrying those just in case I drew empty?”

  “I had a sense you might feel like relapsing and relaxing...in excess.”

  “Did you really?” Paul demurs in an audibly stale Japanese. He snatches it up and picks it in the corner of his mouth. Shouta lights it reflexively with an Outland-branded lighter.

  “Well, you’re damn right.”

  “Please do not mention it. Besides, this is a vacation of sorts, however morbid the cause for your coming. You should enjoy yourself.”

  Like it’s my last. Paul sneers. “Yeah, like I said: thanks.”

  He circumnavigates the convertible, and throws his hand up futilely, praying for a cabbie or a sky scoot with telescopic vision. Although legally able to repossess the red truck in the police impound, Paul’s sick of the bureaucratic waivers and slip sheets. It’s not worth the headache. A police hover-car whips by, bleeding red and blue light through the smog.

  Shouta waits for the siren to wane before speaking again. “No need, Paul. I will take you to wherever it is you need to go.”

  Paul looks down the empty street, striated by LED lamps that sop-up moon beams with counterfeit daylight. “No roads where I’m headed.”

  Shouta laughs. “Good lord! Try not to be so macabre.” He taps the broad-faced watch affixed to his wrist, and throws open a holographic map. Spreading his fingers and pedalling them, as if on a keyboard only he had the benefit of seeing and hearing, Shouta zooms into a store-front image of a road-side café, buried beneath gargantuan-corporate towers. Lime neon, alloy stools, smoke-stained bay windows. “How about that coffee?”

  Paul sniffs, and stretches. If I didn’t have a small audience, I’d collapse and weep. “What exactly do you want?”

  “I told you: just to talk.”

  “Is this about the message from Allen?”

  “What message?”

  “I didn’t mention it?”

  “No.”

  “The night you called—the night Allen died—I received a comm from someone purporting to be him. The message was virtually blank.”

  “Hmm. That was probably just a delayed comm; nothing more than a digital artifact scripted to play by a dead composer. After the Purge, we got that kind of cross-chatter all the time from digital ghosts until we patched it over and updated the system. Chalk it up to lag.”

  “Then whaddya want?”

  A cop strolls out of the station and hastily pulls an inhaler out of his pocket. He looks down at Paul and Katajima, pauses—taking a moment to rationalize blind service to addiction—and decides to huff a cylinder anyway.

  Katajima shakes his head. “Thought we might be able to help one another.”

  Quailing, Paul snaps back, “Oh, I bet.”

  Shouta crooks his neck, clearly penning his frustration behind his fleckless, professional façade.

  Paul recognizes that unmistakeable tick. A sudden rush of guilt and hope finds him, both coupled with a memory: a climber once told him that any crimp’s worth gripping when climbing in the dark. (Not too soon after, that wise and harried consultant fell to his death.) Paul makes the leap: “You think you can change Rachel’s mind?”

  That loathsome smile makes its way back across Shouta’s narrow gab. “No, we both know I could never…but I could certainly work on Pythia’s and Angela’s.”

  Paul scratches his chin, unintentionally showcasing his consideration. And turn back the clock? Reverse cataclysm and dull error’s blade? He draws, illuminating his look of incredulity. “Where’re you thinking?”

  “I know we had agreed to meet tomorrow, but I figured we could zip over to Ruby’s tonight so I could get some perspective and a little bit of a head start. Ruby’s off Old Temple Street, just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away.”

  Caving slightly behind the amber glow, Paul closes his eyes, and concedes in a cloud of smoke. “Ruby’s would be great…if this were an exotic Outland luncheon.”

  Shouta quickly internalizes the criticism, and this time fails to conceal his exasperation. “And given that this is not an Outland luncheon?”

  “I’ll do you one better: Indian in the Cupboard. You know it. Might seem like a half-remembered dream, but I know you know it. A few more blocks down. Far more private.”

  Shouta gestures to the car. “Privacy at the cost of security.”

  “Something like that.” Paul strides over to the passenger side and rests his elbows on the window frame, pleased with the Walruses’ ability to let him sense so much, and feel so little. Not quite his SIKS—serving to destabilize rather than level—but something to help mute his demons and focus on the real.

  Shouta pantomimes Paul’s posture, driver side. “I am truly sorry about what has brought us together, but nevertheless glad to see you.”

  Unexpressive—his face a dead plate of nerves—Paul snaps the roach. “You sure’ve a knack for leaving and finding me at my worst, Katajima.”

  Chapter 14: TOO MUCH SMOKE, TOO MANY MIRRORS

  THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD is a low-life, low-tech hangout run by a Navajo trader with whom Paul is quite familiar. Paul had written some security algorithms for him back in the day, among other things. Manuelito, or “the Chief,” owns several dives throughout the RIM as well as some PILOT chop shops (off the books). The Cupboard is headquarters.

  The Indian in the Cupboard was initially a veteran’s clinic after the War, but now it’s a licensed black hole, popular with RIM ticks with central access as well as with shady Blue Zone types whose business requires privacy—the kind afforded by four Harpocrate jammers. Manuelito brokers, overlooks, and blesses Paul’s Barstow dealings in exchange for the odd favour. Paul knows he can count on the Chief to keep things quiet if a deal ever gets out of hand and to get him deals if things ever get too quiet.

  Contraband-cigarette smoke is thick in the air around them. It serves to soften the creases at the fringe of Paul’s mouth, suffusing soft, colourful halos around the antique-neon beer signs that flicker above a booth underscored by photoluminescent braces.

  A grizzled bartender carries over two steins dripping condensation. Paul pushes aside the candled bell-jar planted at the centre of the knotty-wood table, making room for the frosty delights. The bartender, standing awkwardly—incongruous outside of his coop—looks around with one eye twitching. Evidently unsuccessful in his review, he slams the steins between Paul and Shouta.

  “Er, thanks Frank,” Paul slips, reflexively, staring at the moisture and froth cascading over the lip of his stein like amber comets, side-lit by the candle.

  Shouta raises an eyebrow at Paul’s familiarity, having previously entertained the belief that Paul’d behaved and stayed north of the mountains.

  “Sheffield,” Frank
pronounces coarsely, as if a question by itself. He drops his gaze to stare at Paul’s bloody knuckles.

  Paul looks up to Frank’s porcine chin-set, and tucks his hands under the table. “Yeah?”

  “Long time no see.”

  Paul looks across the table to Katajima, who lets Paul know he’s no fool with a big Cheshire cat smile. “Yeah, a few years, at least.”

  “Huh? Yeah, sure. Have you seen Max?”

  “Maxine?” Paul surveys the bar. “Nope. She supposed to be in tonight?”

  Frank clicks his tongue against his teeth and breaks into an oafish stretch. Along with his hairy belly, he exposes fresh cyborg elements. The combination of body odour and unhealed flesh hits Paul like a silent freight train. Satisfied with a cartilage pop, Frank turns.

  “Bitch is fetching on Manuelito’s dime, I just know it,” he mutters.

  Before Paul can piece together a response, Frank’s crunching across the peanut-shelled floor. He disappears into the lime and red haze.

  Both Paul and Shouta perseverate on their drinks. Shouta interrupts their trance, seizing his glass. He poises to offer a witty toast, but Paul’s already a gulp in. Undercut, he sips, then lowers the cup—his gentle convention disemboweled by Paul’s.

  “Quite the cheery place,” Shouta determines, aloud. He sets his beer next to the jar. “But it will have to do.”

  “That’s right. It will.”

  In an overzealous attempt to down his drink all-at-once, Paul sends a torrent down his neck, into his shirt. He quickly grabs a napkin, and pats himself dry. With Shouta ignoring his former colleague’s little accident, Paul bashfully fans out the napkin on the table, noticing a penned scrawl bleeding all over the inside: “HEADS UP. YOU HAVE COMPANY. SENTINELS.”

  Paul crumples the napkin, and scans the room. Nothing out of place…except for two bulky Japanese men sipping on Saki tins, backlit by the jukebox’s incandescent oranges.

  What is this? “You gaming me?”

  “I beg your pardon?” says Shouta, still smiling.

  “Who’re your friends?”

  Shouta chuckles. “I see you were unable to outgrow your paranoia. It is a well-documented fact that those smokes of yours inflame such delusional fantasies. Are you still taking SIK-greens?”