by Matt Wallace
She walks past the miniature mountain range of flesh that is Hara, sprawled out on the floor near the boxes, not so much snoring as chewing invisible redwood trunks whole in his sleep.
Cindy stands in front of the card table, folding her arms and staring down at Ritter. “How you doing, droolly?”
He doesn’t even look up. “Trying to summon the enthusiasm to haul these boxes out like Luciana told us to.”
Cindy frowns at how much he doesn’t sound like himself, in words, in tone, in spirit. She hopes Jett pummels Monrovio into a pair of bloody designer heels.
She takes a deep, steadying breath.
“I want to tell you a few things, shit I never had before, and now seems like a good time, what with you being all spell drunk.”
His eyes roll up toward her just slightly. “I dunno what you’re talking about, Cindy.”
“I know. That’s the point. That’s why I’m going to tell you this shit now.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
“When you found me and offered me my spot on this team, you saved my life. If I had any doubts about that then, I sure as hell don’t now. I wasn’t lost, I knew exactly where I was going, and that was to my own damn grave, as fast as I could get there without just going and doing myself outright. I’ll always love you for that, and for every day since.
“That’s the other thing I want to tell you. Some days you’re like my little brother and other days you’re like my big brother, and I love you like that. I do. But you know that’s not the only type of love I have for you. You give me all I need of the first kind, but I know you won’t ever be able to return that other kind. And that’s okay. That doesn’t bother me none anymore. But me from years back always wanted to at least say it to you, and me now owed her that one. So I’m saying it.”
“Okay,” Ritter says, staring through her with his glazed eyes. “Are we done?”
“No,” Cindy says, resolutely, and kicks him in the face.
It’s not hard enough to break his bones, in fact Cindy took care to only send her leg out at half-speed, but the blow is more than enough to topple Ritter’s chair and send him falling backward over it. He recovers slowly and awkwardly, wobbling on his feet when he finds them again. Both of his nostrils are rimmed with blood.
He looks at her like a blackout drunk who’s just been ejected from the bar. “What . . . what . . . ?
Cindy reaches down and grips the edge of the card table, hurling it from her path as she strides toward him. Without another word she drives the heel of her right palm under his chin, snapping Ritter’s head back. She hits him again the same way, this time aiming for the bridge of his nose, causing his eyes to cross and flash with phantom lights.
Ritter waves his arm, instinctually and lazily, trying to ward her off without really trying.
“Quit it, Cindy!”
“Well, that’s a start,” she says. “There’s almost some bass in your voice.”
Cindy twists at the waist to her left at an extreme angle, allowing her to drive her right elbow powerfully into Ritter’s mouth and chin. He staggers back several steps, cupping both hands over his face.
“Fuck!” he yells, and it’s the most cognizant he’s sounded to her in days.
“There you go now! I know my boy’s still in there somewhere!”
Cindy advances on him, feet spread apart and fists held aloft like a boxer. She begins peppering him with sharp jabs, not throwing them hard enough to do serious damage, but hard enough to get really annoying after the first few.
Each blow seems to reshape Ritter’s expression a little more, turning the sallow, empty look he had when she walked in the room into a bloody mask of anger and eventually rage.
After the eighth jab, Cindy rears back and throws a big right cross aimed at the center of Ritter’s face.
His palm intercepts the blow, his fingers wrapping around her fist and stopping it dead like a brick wall.
Cindy grins at him under their conjoined hands.
She’s still grinning when Ritter’s feet leave the ground, his body pivots in midair, and he thrusts the sole of his right foot into her chest.
Cindy loses the next several seconds to an inner abyss and her next conscious thought occurs while she’s sprawled out on the floor next to a still sleeping Hara.
Ritter is kneeling over her, his chest and shoulders heaving and blood dripping from several facial orifices both natural and unnatural.
“Jesus, Cin, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m not okay, motherfucker! You titty-kicked me across the damn room! I should—”
Through the pain in her chest, back, and head, and the rage searing through her eyes, Cindy manages to really see Ritter for the first time since regaining her senses. What she sees pushes all other emotion and sensation into the background.
It’s him. She’s looking at Ritter, and Ritter, the real Ritter, is looking back at her.
“What the hell happened?” he asks her. “I feel like I just woke up from a nightmare I’ve been having for weeks, and why did I kick—”
“Succubus,” Cindy says quickly. “Monrovio. She is one, I mean. She’s had you in thrall for a goodly while now.”
“Oh.”
That information seems to put Ritter totally at ease, and his expression returns to its normal, unreadable state. He reaches out and offers her his arm, helping Cindy to her feet.
“That makes sense,” he says. “Although the fact I didn’t see it coming doesn’t make me feel great about myself. Are you okay? Seriously?”
Cindy is holding both forearms against her breasts, breathing in and out slowly. “I owe you a good shot in the balls, but that’ll keep for now. I’ll be all right.”
“So, what did I miss? And what did I do?”
“Later for that,” Cindy says impatiently. “Right now, I need you to help me figure out how to snap Hara out of it, because I’m not punching him in the face, I’ll tell you that right now.”
Ritter peers down at the literal sleeping giant, thinking.
“Three or four syringes of adrenalin to the heart ought to do the trick.”
Cindy raises an eyebrow at him. “For real?”
Ritter considers the question. “You’re right. We’ll make it five, just to be safe.”
EXTREME INGREDIENTS
Nikki sits inside the darkened pantry of Sin du Jour’s main kitchen, earbuds snugly tucked in and iPod piping a Richard Cheese album directly into her brain. The volume is low enough to be heard by her alone, and she’s careful to mouth the lyrics to the stylish lounge covers of heavy metal and hip-hop songs silently. The line should be starting their shifts soon.
She’s left the platter of brownies on an end table she brought in from home. It’s placed strategically so it’s the first thing in sight upon entering the kitchen. The brownies themselves she’s stacked into a tall pyramid. Nikki has frosted each one brightly in green, purple, and gold, all of them dusted with a sparkling edible glitter; she wants the treats to be as eye-catching as possible.
The final touch is the note she placed in front of the brownie platter, addressed to the line, instructing them in simple, direct language to eat the entire platter.
Nikki signed the note with Luciana Monrovio’s name.
She keeps the pantry door cracked so she can survey the scene in secret. Rollo, Chevet, and Tenryu shamble into the kitchen sometime after nine in the morning, dour, hollow-eyed, and single-file like workers in some Orwellian factory. Dorsky isn’t with them, and Nikki hopes he’s not far behind.
Rollo, the bear of a man looking even hairier and more unkempt now that he’s lost what little free will he ever displayed as Dorsky’s constant toadie, is the one to pick up and inspect the note. It takes him far longer to read the few lines than it should, and Nikki, still watching, wonders if that’s a product of Luciana’s influence, or if that would still be him on his best day.
Rollo silently passes the note among the other members of
the line. The three of them obediently pick up a brownie and they each take a tired bite. In fact, their next several bites are mirror images of their first. Slowly, however, a new light infiltrates their eyes and they begin to eat with more vigor. By each of their third brownies they are practically jamming the confections whole into their mouths and swallowing without chewing.
In the pantry, Nikki has to restrain herself from clapping. Considering the sheer amount and variety of energy drinks she poured into that batter and had to mask with other flavors, it’s less a victory and more a miracle they were able to choke down the brownies, let alone ingest enough to start frenzying on them.
Ten minutes later the platter is home to nothing but crumbs and Chevet and Tenryu are running frantic laps throughout the grid of prep stations while Rollo dumps entire trays of poisoned rumaki into a commercial sink.
“Can you believe we cooked this shit?” he practically shrieks at the others. “What were we thinking? Are we a catering party for housewives in the fucking age of glasnost?”
Chevet and Tenryu laugh, grabbing the antiquated appetizers they prepared and throwing them at each other as they continue running like spastic five-year-olds around the kitchen.
Nikki can’t believe how well her plan has worked. Not only did her baked Trojan horse snap them out of their fugue state, they’re so horrified by the thoroughly uninspired food they prepared under Monrovio’s control that they’re destroying it, not even seeming to realize it’s poison.
Nikki stands and begins an enthusiastic, albeit still silent, victory dance. She sways her hips, pointing at her own butt with both index fingers for no reason she’d be able to explain if someone were to ask her to verbally interpret the gesture.
Then she hears a familiar voice, albeit bereft of its usual verbal swagger: “What the hell did you guys do?”
It’s Dorsky.
Nikki stops dancing and peers out through the crack in the pantry door. He doesn’t have the authoritative presence of a willful Dorsky, but he’s still Bronko’s sous-chef and second-in-command, and Rollo immediately stops purging their antique hors d’oeuvres.
“Boss,” Rollo begins, still jacked from the spiked brownies and grinning like a madman, “I don’t know, maybe we hit the bar too hard lately after work, but we cannot serve this splooge. It’s beneath us.”
Dorsky stares cow-eyed at him as if Rollo is from Mars.
“It’s the menu Luciana gave us,” he meekly insists. “You gotta stop—”
Without thinking, Nikki pulls open the pantry door and leaps back into the kitchen.
“Tag!” she shouts over him.
Dorsky’s next word and the thought attached to it seems, thankfully, to die on the vine. He turns his attention from Rollo and the app massacre to regard her with a hangdog look of confusion.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says.
Nikki thinks about that for a moment. “Well then . . . you better come over here and make me leave, huh?”
It takes a while for Dorsky’s succubus-addled brain to process the logic of that statement, but it obviously rings true to the orders he’s been issued by Luciana.
Dorsky shuffles across the kitchen, the rest of the line and the menu forgotten. As he draws near, Nikki backpedals slowly through the door, returning to the darkness of the large pantry. Dorsky follows her inside. Nikki manages to circle back around to the door once he’s in the pantry, Dorsky almost tripping over his slowed feet as he attempts to stay with her erratic movements.
Nikki, still facing him, reaches behind herself and shuts the pantry door, jamming the lock with her earbud cord.
“What are you doing?” Dorsky finally asks.
Nikki stares at him in the darkness, the only light slicing through the cracks in the door from the kitchen beyond.
“Plan B, I guess,” she says, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “Okay. I’ll definitely remind you again after, but . . . never, ever tell Lena about this.”
Dorsky is still beginning to process the first few words of that statement when Nikki abruptly leaps at him, causing him to fall to the ground with her body smashed atop his. Any question or protest he might attempt is lost as she attacks his lips with her own, one of her surprisingly strong hands gripping him by the hair while the other hand delves beneath the waistband of his chef’s pants.
Those who know Nikki well would have no problem likening her to a case of Red Bull in human form, even if they never imagined this particular application.
SLEEPLESS FOR HIS OWN REASONS
Lena stands outside the closed door to Bronko’s office, staring at the deep lines of the mahogany wood. She’s thinking about the times she’s burst through this door without knocking over the past year. It seems to her now that every one of those occasions revolved around her burning desire to not work at Sin du Jour. She’d stormed Bronko’s office, violating the most deep-seated of protocols regarding respect for one’s executive chef, intent on not being pulled back into his world of monsters and magic and madness.
And every single time, Lena left Bronko’s office to rejoin the line.
She knocks gently on the door. “Chef? Are you in there?”
“Perpetually,” a ragged voice confirms from the other side.
Lena opens the door a foot and carefully peers around it, spotting Bronko’s linebacker frame sunken into the cushions of a leather sofa wedged against the wall of his office.
“Sorry, Chef,” she says. “Are you sleeping?”
“Those days are over, it seems. Come ahead if you’re comin’.”
Lena slips inside. As she closes the door behind her, Bronko sits up with a deep groan. The noise he makes when he stands is barely human, except for the sound of half his bones popping. He shuffles around his desk and drops into the large wingback chair there.
Lena takes a seat across the desk from him in one of the simpler guest chairs.
He looks worse than he did before. The bags under his eyes are now more like gun turrets on a decaying B-52 bomber. He hasn’t shaved in well over a week, and his skin has a sickly tinge to it.
“I’m sorry to bust in on you, Chef.”
“That’s never stopped you before. What do you need, Tarr?”
Instead of rising to that remark, or his question, Lena is quiet. She didn’t tell Nikki or Cindy about this next part. She didn’t share her thoughts or suspicions with either of them. At the time Lena assured herself it was because they’d protest or disagree, but the truth is she didn’t tell them because she didn’t know how to say it.
Now she has to say it to Bronko.
“I kept thinking about the last time I was in here, talking to you. I kept thinking about the look on your face and in your eyes, and how . . . it’s not the same as everyone else around here lately. You’re not quite the same as they are. And I don’t think everyone would necessarily be able to see the difference, but I just happen to be unlucky enough to know that look. I saw it . . . I saw it over there, during my tour. I saw it on the faces of a lot of men and women. And I saw it in the mirror every day when I came back from Afghanistan. I saw it there for years.”
Bronko sighs a deep, almost ancient-sounding weariness. “What’re you plowin’ at here, Tarr?”
Lena suddenly realizes she’s not sure she can say it out loud, but in the end she also knows she’s come too far to turn back.
She stares deep and probing into those raw, tortured eyes of his. “You know what Luciana is, don’t you, Chef?”
“You mean a succubus?” Bronko replies flatly and without hesitation.
Lena falls against the seat back of her chair as if he’s just jabbed her in the center of the chest with a pool cue.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “A succubus.”
Bronko nods. “Of course I know what she is. You don’t think I know everything about my people?”
“So then . . . you’re not under her spell or in her thrall or any of that.”
“Of course n
ot.”
“Then . . . why do you look like this? Why are you acting this way? Why aren’t you sleeping, Chef?”
For the first time in perhaps months, Lena sees Bronko smile. It’s one of the top five saddest sights she’s ever witnessed in the flesh.
“Tarr . . . you said you’ve seen what I’ve got goin’ on here before.” He waves one of his gnarled catcher’s mitt hands around his face. “You say you saw it in the mirror. That’s right?”
Lena nods.
“All right then, you tell me . . . what did you see back then when you closed your eyes?”
Of course, Lena can’t answer him, and even if she had the ability to do so she would still probably refuse.
“Right,” Bronko says. “Could you sleep?”
Lena shakes her head.
Bronko’s smile only gains a new depth in its sadness.
“But . . .” Lena struggles, eyes searching his desktop as if she’ll find her next sentence there. “Chef, why are you letting her do these things? Why did you let her take this place over?”
“What choice do I have, Tarr? Hell is nipping at the heels of all my kids here. Having that fire kiss my fat has-been ass is one thing, but I purely cannot abide it taking any of you. I won’t abide that. And Allensworth is our only protection from it. There’s nothin’ and no one else in this world, probably any other world. If his price is putting a few of y’all to sleep so he feels like he’s in control—”
“What about Boosha, Chef?” Lena demands, leaning forward in her chair. “Monrovio almost killed her! Isn’t Boosha one of us?”
For the first time, Bronko looks caught off guard. “Boosha . . . what . . . why would Luciana—”
“She had the line poison all the apps for Consoné’s next speech! She’s trying to use us to kill everyone in that audience! I don’t know why, but it’s true, Chef. I swear it. We have to stop her.”
Bronko stares at her, seeing the urgency dripping from every contour of her face. He leans back into the deep leather folds of his chair, eyes darting from right to left as parts of his brain he’d practically shuttered kick back on and start spinning the rust off wheels.
