Crime Rave

by Sezin Koehler

  Chief Medical Examiner Guy Severin is an LAPD history buff, poring through old arrest files in his spare time and photocopying any and all relating to Hollywood’s silver screensters, not discerning between megastar status or bit player. He plans to publish his findings in a coffee table book, his small contribution toward combatting the bad rap the department gets these days on account of too many instances of police brutality. Today was supposed to be his day off, but when duty calls the faithful respond.

  Severin sits with the body parts from the Crane explosion and watches them grow. His gaze returns to the one-eyed head as its neck and shoulders reconstitute, the bones creaking as they lengthen. When her torso appears Severin covers her chest with a sheet. He’s convinced that at any moment her one eye will open and she’ll speak. The thought fills him with terror and fascination. He reminds himself this is not a movie. This is real. I am watching this happen.

  The hand with long acrylic nails is now an arm. The long green tail has the start of a rump growing from its length. Severin covers her too, when her breasts appear.

  The torso Severin was told to not handle under any circumstances blossoms under the sheet. The peaks and valleys of her limbs make a white landscape.

  The leg and foot with metal bones and veins has now added a crotch, a second leg, and grows its way up the body.

  The half a face with silver eyes is now a full face: African American, a blond afro, Ethiopian features. Severin keeps closing her eyes but they open of their own volition, glinting in the harsh fluorescents. As her torso develops he covers her, as well.

  Four more body parts—nondescript compared to the one-eyed girl and others—each in distinct growth stages. Thighs turning into legs and feet, torsos refitting arms, breasts, necks, faces. The sounds remind Severin of the rhubarb farm of his childhood, sitting in the tents after the sun went down, listening to the stems creak and moan as they grew fast enough not just to hear, but see.

  Severin makes sure the video camera captures everything; there is no other way anyone else will believe what’s going down. Medical science is about to change, and he is its first witness. Still, that twinge of fear persists, growing in size as the body parts reconstitute: What is going to happen when they wake up?

  Detective Atticus Red Feather

  You’re accustomed to the feeling of déjà vu. Ever since you were a little boy you’ve had premonition dreams. Your grandfather called them visions, sent by The Creator. He stressed the importance of taking the visions seriously.

  “Write them down,” Grandfather would say, in spite of being part of an oral culture. He knew that your half-white blood would require its own honoring. Balance is everything, that is the Lakota way.

  In spite of his support, Grandfather wasn’t crazy about your white mother, the Indian bloodlines are already so watered down, and yours was still so strong. But all her kids look Lakota, and this made him happy. Not like all the other mixed kids you can’t even tell are Indian at all, save for their long braids and jewelry. Grandfather told you how he felt sorry for those Indian kids in limbo stuck between the white man’s world and the Lakota.

  When you had the dream about your father’s death you told Grandfather. He was a stoic man, you’d never seen him so shaken. And when you had the vision that you, your mom, your brother and sister were driving to California, Grandfather’s heart broke. You could see it in his eyes.

  “Why aren’t you coming with us?” You cried when the day came.

  “I am the land, Atticus. And this land is me. Without this, without here, I will die.”

  “Like a flower without water?” A nine-year-old desperate to understand.

  “You are a smart boy,” he says. “Don’t let them change you.”

  Nobody knew yet the lung cancer that would take Grandfather’s life was already too far gone to cure. He would die alone in his trailer, clutching a photograph of his son and family.

  The only time you returned to Pine Ridge Reservation was for Grandfather’s funeral, just a year after you all left. The wind howled over the prairie. Tumbleweeds flying. His coffin was light, the weight of all Grandfather’s knowledge now gone to the Spirit Realm. You weren’t supposed to cry, but you did anyway. All the great men die eventually.

  You honor his wish and you don’t let California change you. Every morning you make a tobacco offering. Every night a smudge ceremony and prayer. You grow your hair long. You wear Grandfather’s breastplate under your uniform on his birthday. You’re the first Indian detective in the LAPD. At least, the first one who admits it. Who knows how many of these guys are half-bloods, passing as something else to not be seen as a redskin.

  When you make detective it’s because of your knack for solving cold cases. It’s the dreams, you see. The visions lead you to where the trail ended and show you how to pick it up again. You have several partners before Günn, but their intolerance of your heritage becomes a millstone. Detective Tonto, Injun, Prairie Nigger, the names they call you behind your back, and occasionally to your face after too many whiskeys. A rage simmers in you, but you never throw the first punch. And you never quit, though it’s clear your colleagues want you to. The inside outsider in the LAPD.

  Nobody knows the real reason you’re there at all is because you’re convinced one day you’ll dream of the men who killed your father. You’ll find them, and your family’s deficit of justice will finally be repaid.

  4:00 Spruce-Musa Hospital

  Red Feather’s cell rings as he and Günn are still outside the wolf girl’s room.

  “Captain, hey, what’s the news?” Red Feather puts it on speakerphone.

  “Consider yourselves FBI deputized. I just got the word. The paperwork’s on the way, but we’re to work as if it’s already cleared.” Anderson still flexes and opens his stiff left hand.

  “You serious? I’d think they’d want this all to themselves.” Red Feather never heard of the Feds giving up high-profile anything.

  “Thought the same. But I guess damage control is the bigger problem since we got the perps and all that’s left is four witnesses. Bigger fish to fry now.”

  “Well, okay then.” Red Feather rolls his shoulders, feeling the weight of the responsibility coming down hard.

  Anderson’s voice is strained. “We moved all the body parts to the morgue already. We’ve got the ME’s people over there keeping an eye and patrolmen for security. Apparently the body parts are still growing. Fuck if I understand how.”

  “Thanks for the update, Boss,” Red Feather says, staring at the wolf girl.

  “How’s the interviews?”

  “We just got here, but, where to start. Um, remember the girl in the wolf costume?”

  “Yup, amputated leg. What?”

  “The leg. It. Um. Grew back.”

  Anderson is silent, but his heart pounds to a syncopated beat.

  “I’m serious, Boss.” Red Feather cringes, waiting.

  “The leg grew back.” Anderson wonders if two nips from his special flask are necessary. “She awake?”

  “Not yet.” Red Feather pauses. “There’s something else.” He has no idea how to say it.

  Anderson waits.

  “It appears that her wolf costume, well, isn’t.” Red Feather hates the words coming out of his mouth.

  “Come again?”

  “You remember JoJo the Dog Face Boy from those old-timey carnival freakshows?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “She’s like JoJo the Wolf Face Girl. It’s not a costume.” Red Feather feels embarrassed. He’s spending too much time with Günn. Her cynicism is rubbing off.

  Anderson sighs, loud. “You know, I’m just trying to figure out how I went to sleep last night in Los Angeles and woke up in the fucking Twilight Zone.”

  “I hear that, sir.”

  And
erson clears his throat. “What about the other survivors? You talk to them yet?”

  “On our way there now. Unless you want us to go to the morgue first?”

  Anderson thinks. “Go talk to the survivors, I’ll send another team to the Morgue and you can meet them later. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Sleeping Wolfie will rise by the time you’re done with the others. Get to the morgue when you’re done.”

  “Got it, Boss.”

  Anderson hangs up. Red Feather pockets his phone and takes a long look at the werewolf snoring in her hospital bed. He forces himself to use the word werewolf even though it still doesn’t sit right on his tongue.

  Günn’s sense of numbness deepens—This isn’t real, this isn’t real, she tells herself over and over. And damn her twitching eye.

  Red Feather and Günn head back to the Nurse’s Station where Nurse Pratchett is waiting. Red Feather hands her his card. “If I’m not already here, call me the moment she wakes up.” Nurse Pratchett nods. “Now,” Red Feather continues, “where’re the other survivors?”

  4:15 AM Beverly Center

  The lines outside 2222 South Figueroa have never seen the like: dozens of thousands of concerned parents, family members, queued up with toothbrushes, combs, and other assorted DNA-bearing items belonging to individuals now presumed to have been at Charles Wallace Crane’s Hollywood hilltop rave. The sports field is now a mobile lab, in which dozens of cops, lab techs, and Red Cross workers collect DNA samples, carefully tagging the family and victim’s name. Each item a piece of wasted hope for a family who will never see their child again, nor have the luxury of a body to bury.

  One lab tech can’t help but think about concentration camp lines. Another thinks of food banks in the 1930s, with all measure of person in bleak wait for their turn.

  Hysteria abounds. Doctors dole out anti-anxiety medication and tranquilizer injections, offering information for trauma counseling services. In all these cases the expressions are the same: desperation, pain, fading glimmers of optimism. After all, each and every one has seen the footage of the devastated hill on the news.

  Still, they plod forward, forcing one foot in front of the other. Every segment of Los Angeles society is represented here. The Beverly Hills moms who still took time to put on their faces before leaving the house. Maids who worry they’ll be fired for missing work today. Single parents, grandparents, guardians, and everything else in between.

  Grief: ever the great equalizer.

  Mother: The Ancient One

  The grand and earthly soul scream that tears through the heavens wakes you from a thousand-year slumber, one from which you had hoped not wake for several hundred more years. From your vantage of everywhere and nowhere—the totality and singularity of omnipresence—you take stock of the perversions underway.

  A young goddess—a new being, smog dwelling, childish thinking, abandoned by those who should have guided and protected her—has broken all the laws you set in ether before assuming your rest, including the most important: Thou shalt not visibly meddle in human lives. And The Ethereals, to fix Kaleanathi’s mistakes, are making it all the worse.

  Where are The Watchers? Have The Angels abandoned their posts? Your mind brushes from itself the fog of a deepest sleep, psychic tentacles reaching out tentatively into the open atmosphere to take stock of the damage you feel in the everything and nothing that is you in repose.

  Next come the first glimmers of anger. You kept order for thousands of millennia. You taught The Ethereals and The Elementals how to get along, work together, how not to encroach on roles that aren’t theirs. You set in place the checks and balances of universal maintenance. A blink of time later, and they’ve befouled it all almost beyond salvation.

  Your anger deepens into rage, a violet aura pulsating with streaks of red. The Angels feel you now, waking up. And they have the good sense to be frightened. Mother doesn’t like being woken up early. She never did.

  The cataclysm below has depleted the multiverse’s power source in a magnitude you never imagined possible. There’s nothing left to re-harness your own forces, which makes your rage catapult into fury.

  This attention-seeking goddess is a force who got what she wanted: your full attention. Pity nobody warned her: Nothing good happens when someone has Mother’s full attention.

  4:20 Spruce-Musa Hospital

  The second survivor of the Crane Mansion Massacre is awake and lucid. A pale man, dark hair and Wolverine-inspired lambchops, who lived through America’s new greatest cataclysm with not one injury. Marvel upon marvel. He smiles at Detectives Red Feather and Günn when they enter with Nurse Pratchett, flashing two sharp incisors that glow against his skin.

  “Hello, Nurse. Lovely to see you again,” he says in an accented voice.

  Eastern European? Red Feather wonders.

  The nurse smiles at the old world charm. “These are Detectives Red Feather and Günn to see you.” She looks at the cops, a stern face. “You take it easy, and when he gets tired, that’s it. Interview over. Understood?”

  Günn, irritated by Mary Fucking Poppins here, moves to retort that they’ll take their damn time and as damn long as they want, but Red Feather silences her with his Not now shake of the head. Red Feather smiles at the nurse, agrees, and watches as she leaves the room after sneaking another glance at her watch.

  “I hear I’m something of a miracle,” the man says.

  “I don’t know if miracle would be the word I’d use,” Günn says. “Inexplicable is more like it.”

  “Isn’t that just a euphemism?” He smiles, the incisors give Günn the serious creeps.

  “Are you a religious man, Mr.…?” Red Feather interjects, seeing that Günn is fiending for a new place to put her aggression.

  “How rude of me. Icarus Lazlo, pleased to meet you.” He affects a gentlemanly bow from his bed, offers his hand to the detectives, and only Red Feather accepts. It is cool to the touch, dry and raspy, like old parchment left in a cool cellar. Red Feather and Günn stare at him; the silence turning awkward. Icarus clears his throat, breaking the detectives out of their reverie.

  “Our turn to apologize,” Red Feather says. “I almost have no idea where to start. Did the nurses tell you where we found you?”

  “They said I was one of four survivors after an explosion that killed thousands of others.” His accent gives the statement a formal, almost rehearsed, tone Günn finds unsettling.

  Red Feather nods. “Correct. So, let’s not get into the hows and whys. Let’s just talk about what you remember about the rave party you attended last night.”

  “It’s just called a rave,” Icarus smiles. Günn can’t help but think of Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf in grandmother drag.

  “What do you want to know?” Icarus folds his hands in his lap and waits.

  “Start from the beginning. Who’d you go with? What time did you get there? What happened during the course of the night?” Red Feather pulls up a chair, flips open his notebook while Günn sets up a video camera on a tripod.

  “Is that contraption really necessary?” Lazlo looks concerned as Günn fiddles with the machine.

  “The hell?” Looking through the viewfinder Günn sees only her partner and an empty hospital bed. Red Feather looks as well, puzzlement creasing his face.

  “I was afraid of something like this,” Lazlo says, as an increasingly frustrated Günn tries to figure out what’s wrong with the machine. “You see, I can’t be captured on film.”

  “And why the hell not?” Günn snaps.

  Lazlo looks embarrassed. “Because I’m a vampire, of course.”

  Günn feels the blood leave her head, it takes all her strength to fight past the white spots she’s seeing and use the wall behind her for support. Red Feather’s eyes are saucers.

  “I’ll start from the beginning the
n, shall I?” Lazlo looks at Günn. “You’re at least getting my voice through?”

  Günn plays back and a tinny representation squeaks from the camera mic. She nods. Red Feather scratches his head and sits back down. Even Günn sits. She can’t trust her legs right now and doesn’t want anyone else to see how badly they’re shaking.

  Lazlo speaks.

  “In the beginning. The year 1795. Prague. I was twenty-seven, already considered an old man in those days, unmarried and with only a small salary as the accountant to a nobleman. Each year people’s suspicions I was of that other persuasion mounted. But you see, I was in love with my employer’s daughter—that obsessive kind of true and tragic love the Romeo and Juliet romantics espoused—and knew I would never be considered a suitable match for her. No matter how much money I saved, no matter how high I rose in society. Not to mention, she didn’t even know I existed. It would have been a different story if my love had at least been requited.”

  Lazlo laughs, a sound like only the heartbroken can make. It reminds Günn of a woodchipper; Red Feather thinks about the career drunks in White Clay just off the rez, waiting for the liquor stores to open.

  “Each night I’d drown my sorrows in absinthe and whores. And then back to my pining the next day. It was a prostitute who turned me into this. She bit me, drained me, left me for dead. But—curse the Heavens—I didn’t die. I became one of her kind. A nightwalker. A revenant.

  “For years, I was lost. I left cosmopolitan Prague for the countryside, feeding my thirst for flesh and blood. Ah, the pleasures of flesh I’d never known, my teeth sinking into its tenderness, sucking the marrow out of life, blood hot against my face and warm into me. I began travelling the world seeking fresh experiences. People taste different depending on where they come from; I became something of a connoisseur in human plasma. A picky eater.