John sauntered through the lobby, congruous in a suit and tattersall trimmings, a locked briefcase in one hand. In a shoulder holster a small black handgun, unsafetied, invisible. The handcuffs jingled in his pocket. He stopped by the specified elevator and checked his watch and waited. The doomed passed and fraternized, oblivious to John’s enterprise.
“Back to the wall, Johnny,” said a scratchy male head-voice. Ridley.
John’s back was already to the wall. The front doors twirled before his eyes.
“Feet tight, shoulders square,” Ridley coached. “Don’t make their eyes, don’t make their eyes. There, that’s right. Cool as a cucumber. Cool as a cucumber, is Johnny.”
Ridley oversaw these ventures. He was a natural mentor, had been in the military, supposedly. John chaperoned him to the Patriots Day parade every year.
After several minutes an athletic blond man entered the leftmost door, also carrying a briefcase. He wore a suit like John’s, and the blue-rose boutonniere John was to look for. The blond stopped by the elevator and pushed a button. The two made no acknowledgment of one another.
“Get next to him,” Ridley said. “Don’t let these cock-knockers between you an’ him, or it all goes pear-shaped.” John positioned himself intently beside the blond. They stood watching the floor-light blink down.
The doors dinged open and the men boarded, filing into a passel of doomed. When the two were abreast and the doors closed, John set down his briefcase; after the first stop, the blond set his down, too. At the second stop, the blond left carrying John’s briefcase. On the third, John left carrying the blond’s. There was a bathroom nearby.
“Careful, Johnny,” Ridley said as John ambled down the corridor, brushing elbows with the walking dead. “If they’re gonna make a grab, it’ll be now. Be ready.”
The bathroom was lousy with men. John took an open stall. He latched the door and sat on the toilet lid, the briefcase across his knees, unopened. The handcuffs soon mated it and his left wrist, the metal clothed by his natty shirt. John was right-handed.
John quit the bathroom, rejoining the foul throng. “Steady, Johnny,” Ridley cautioned. “It ain’t over yet. Still gotta make the drop, so don’t you go half-assing on me.” The stairs were empty. John pell-melled down all three flights, shuffling in small dance.
“Steady, Johnny. Steady.”
He escaped the high-rise to traverse the city common, seeing everything at once. The city was now a bustle of potential assassins, malice in these faces, all living things conspired and conspiring. Ridley made note of this, repeatedly.
The car was where he’d left it, the engine still warm. He checked thrice for traps, then let the handcuff chain to length and got in and keyed the ignition and left.
***
Three blocks later, John remembered needing egg.
“Oh, Johnny,” Ridley said, hearing the shared brain’s thoughts. “That’s a no-no. You got a delivery here, son.”
“I know,” John said, U-turning away from the drop, for the Keeper’s. The Darkness threatened as he did so, whispering that his city was in fact dying, that there was no hope beyond its destruction. It invoked a feeling like breaking glass, and a keen desire for more egg. He drove faster.
“Bad news, Johnny,” Ridley warned. “Do I even have to tell ya? Bad news. Martin’ll be pissed.”
John said that he knew, and tried not to think about Martin. Martin didn’t like the delivery business in the first place, nor the egg. John wouldn’t think about Martin.
It was darkening now, the streetlights throwing onion-hued cones. The traffic had thinned to allow a comfortable drive, the day’s fatalities cleared from the streets. John opened his collar down to his chest, almost relaxing. Ridley had gone quiet. The countryside stole in.
The Keeper’s was an hour north of the dying city, in a mansion atop a seaside cliff, the peaky architecture hanging precipitously; John always feared the place collapsing into the drink before he could get the dope and be gone. The spired house loomed in silhouette as he snaked the winding one-lane road. It was raining a little.
The Keeper’s mansion was gated with massive rows of wrought-iron not just for show, its securities hidden and many. John idled beneath a camera at its sally port, waiting to be buzzed in. He eased down his window and poked out his head, forcing a smile and waving the hand not tethered. The gate soon parted and he drove to the porticoed front entrance. He got out, sheltered from the rain. Domingo the butler was waiting.
“How do you do, Mister John,” said the genteel old Spaniard, with an obsequious bow. The Keeper dealt only in first names.
“Hi, Dom,” John said, clenching the briefcase he shouldn’t have here. “Is the man handy?”
“As always,” Domingo said, and opened one door, conducting John with a learned hand. His mess jacket was spotless.
The Keeper’s house was open and sterile, fragrances of honey and apples, the interior embalmed in excess. It was everything John had avoided after attaining wealth: highbrow art, columns, amphorae, superfluities of all persuasions. Every sound echoed. Wordless, John followed Domingo through the museum that was the upper stories, then into the expansive basement. Long hallways and branching rooms, bossa nova Muzak, a friendly catacomb of carpet and pastels. Then a bewaring door for which Domingo supplied a passcode, allowing them into the factory proper. Next came a waiting room, kempt with leather furniture and houseplants. Domingo deposited John there, as usual.
“Would there be anything for you, sir? A drink?” Domingo asked.
John said, “No, thanks,” and consigned himself to an armchair. He put the briefcase in his lap, both hands over it.
Domingo excused himself through a door of frosted glass, and it reopened a minute later, the Keeper preceding Domingo through. Shrunken and hoary, the Keeper skittered noisily over the pile, his hurry suggestive of fires raging all around. He nodded to John, glanced at the unmet briefcase.
“John, yes, John,” he said, slightly accented. He sounded like Ridley. “Come, yes. Bring money.”
John complied and was led deeper into the factory, the Keeper trudging ahead of him and Domingo.
“And what are we looking for today?” The Keeper asked without turning. He wore an ankle-length frock that made wings behind him.
“Egg,” John said. “Thirty, please.”
“Thirty egg, thirty egg,” the Keeper said many times, nearing a thick door terminating the hallway. He said this still as they entered the crystalry.
The crystalry was a narrow corridor valleyed with large shelves, caged and half-sentient beasts manufacturing the substance for purchase. They were mostly vegetable, headless and limbless but for vinelike appendages that whipped and snatched. Low hooting issued from no seen orifice, chorused into a din. The Keeper led John down the right row and to one of the baskets there, in it a calm white egg. The slicery was next door.
Dominating the chamber was a gigantic metal machine for slicing, its many columns and arms betraying the uncomplicated task. The Keeper assumed the great contraption, donned opaque rubber gloves, and gently cracked the egg, revealing the precious crystal inside. He entrusted the specimen to a formfitting metal holder and pressed a button. The whole of it vanished into the works.
“Thirty?” he confirmed, hunched perhaps in supplication. Domingo lingered at the door, officiating.
“Thirty,” John said, and watched the Keeper punch buttons and turn dials and at last pull a lever, setting the slicer to slicing. There were hums and whirs and the sound a cat makes when shaking its head, then small plastic slides appeared down a chute, each hair-thin and sized for one smoke. After thirty had fallen in rank, the machine silenced and the Keeper sat awaiting pay.
Using his right hand, John produced a corpulent wad of bills and rubbed out a stack. The Keeper made it disappear and handed over the egg.
“Thank you,” John said sincerely. He accepted the slides with the same hand that had doled the money.
The Keeper
said the same, and again glanced at John’s briefcase without comment. Domingo showed John to his car.
***
The ride home was agony, the pain like waters rising, and John several times considered stopping off for a smoke. The Darkness was working the button again—the shot, the flounce, end it—and he wanted to scream. Also, there were ominous stirrings of Martin, deep in the well of his head, chastising him for this detour. He pushed them away, but without egg, they would only go so far.
The drive was uneventful until a sedan pulled furtively into John’s rearview, graceful as a ghost. The windows were dark and the car tarried far behind, slowing when John slowed and speeding when he sped. Ridley said something alarming and John cut him off. He unsnapped the gun’s holster.
The car remained as John made the dying city, and just as he planned to lose it, another appeared. The newcomer shot in front and screeched still, along with that at John’s rear, men pouring from both and the faces terrible. John missiled from his car and betwixt the converging men, pumping his legs and once more seeing the whole world at once. The men wore solid black and shouted and took chase, boiling through the street. A number drew guns and aimed but didn’t shoot.
John disappeared around a corner and, placing himself, plotted a course in his preternatural way, the city a part of him. He stormed a cursive path through small shortcuts known to few, upsetting nightwalkers and cur dogs and the odd cadaver, his free arm in metronome. And still the men kept pace, thrashing incredibly and bruiting intent, their breath endless. They took several shots, all wild.
John soon came to a nightclub called The Mourner’s Bench and burst inside, the doorman crying out and making fists. John exploded into the club proper and the crowd opened before him, a mess of eyes staring at the panting man with the briefcase. He darted to a door painted with camels, behind it a dungeon bordello and, eventually, a postern. His pursuers arrived just as he closed the door, rataplan footsteps like crazed rain.
The bordello was dark and cramped and smelled of what transpired there, the fornicators looking up but not stopping. John was just nearing the exit when the men found the camel door, their shouts drowning the incumbent moans and screams. The scowling night awaited, outside air cool on his face.
He was discarded into a steaming back alley. Waiting there, amidst the trash and the dead, was a lone chair that went firmly against the door. John tested it and left at speed, rounding a corner as the first shoulders crashed forth. He stole a look back, found the chair holding, and then smiled and ran.
Ridley had started into something congratulatory when a black-clad man magicked from a doorway and swung a sap. John fell before he knew what hit him, his world tapering into an unimportant black dot.
***
For a time John swam a galactic black, that which all must know and reconcile. Then: “Wake up, Cuntshit.”
John opened his eyes to a lesser black, blinking. His head raged, but his left hand was worse, broadcasting a red pain unnameable. A discorporate bar of light placed him in a dark room.
“Hey, Cuntshit,” the voice said from between his ears. “Have a nice sleep?”
“Shut up, Martin,” John said, though it hurt to do so. Each word harassed the grapefruit atop his head. He tongued his mouth, finding it septic and bad.
He started up, then sucked wind and fell back. The pain from his hand trumped the rest, along with all known to him hitherto. There was burning and stinging, sizzling pangs that clenched his teeth and brought sweat. The hand felt funny, too, somehow numb.
“Yer gonna die,” Martin mocked. “Cuntshit’s gonna die.”
John was distracted by the handcuff. It was still there, but on the wrong hand. He raised his right arm, and the chain pulled taught with a shrink! that didn’t echo. He grabbed at the chain with his left hand but got only air. He put the same hand to his cheek but the cheek said there was no hand to speak of. His right hand confirmed this. He screamed.
“That’s right, Cuntshit,” Martin said, taking pleasure in this. “They sawed it off. I watched ’em do it.”
John thought, Shut up, screaming more. He eventually raised the stump to what light there was, just showing a crude bandage, suspiciously clean. A smell like burnt flesh.
Footsteps, and the bar of light shadowed and jumped, pronouncing it a door threshold. Muffled voices said things John couldn’t make out.
“Tsk, tsk,” Martin said. John saw him shaking his enormous bald head. “All for some egg. Told ya that habit would catch up to ya one of these days. Chapter ’n’ verse.”
John ignored him, and fussed with the handcuff again. The chain was reasonably long and led to a cold block wall opposite the door. He gripped the chain and tugged it gingerly and it gave not an inch. The pull brought a shockwave of hurt; he bit back howls.
Martin disparaged as John went through his pockets. His gun was gone, and the knives secreted throughout his person, but the egg and his money remained. He held up the zephyr slides and wanted more than anything to smoke several. Laura. He needed Laura.
“Lauruh, Lauruh, Lauruh,” Martin said in a schoolyard intone. “You two make a good pair. Cuntshit and cunt. Has a ring to it.” He spit to the ground of wherever such things dwell.
John slumped against the wall, defeated. The Darkness ran a playful finger down his mind—shot, flounce, end it—and he snapped it off, refusing it purchase. He would be strong now. He chose to be strong.
Martin had more commentary but was interrupted by the door opening. After an irascible explosion of light, a squat manshape silhouetted the door. An overhead activated and the shape became a man, black-clad like those who had seen John to this hell.
“Mister Bartholomew,” the man said, and swaggered forward. The door closed behind him.
John stood and faced this fiend, despite the pain. He said nothing; he didn’t know a Bartholomew. The room was cinderblock, he saw now, floored with rough cement and trash. Sallow light seeped from a naked bulb, the filament branding to the eyes. Amidst the dreck lay a plastic icebox John hadn’t noticed before.
The man gave a searching look and came forward, stopping just beyond the reach of John’s tether. “How does it work?” he asked conversationally.
John’s eyes burned holes in him.
The man took to pacing, hands knit primly at his back. “So you wanna play games, eh?” He lowered his head, making extra chins. John looked down at the stump, then quickly away, squinching his eyes. “Well, we can play games,” the man said as he paced. His head jumped a little with each step.
John watched the man return to the door and hammer it twice with the blunt of a fist. It opened almost instantly and another man entered, this one in servant’s liveries and bearing a salver heavy with food. The salver went over the floor, beyond John’s grazing area. Meat in gravy, sausages. Cheeses. Wine. Side dishes that steamed. The smells combated that of John’s cauterized stump, sublime.
The suit lorded over the meal, regarding John. “Tell us how it works, and it’s all yours. Plus a ticket out of here.” He kicked the icebox within John’s reach. “Might even be able to hitch this back on.”
John's eyes flickered to the box and back to the man, not acknowledging the food.
The servant absented himself, tacitly closing the door, and the other man stared at John for a long time. After a mile of pacing, and more requests to know how it worked, the man sighed and cut the light and left. The door banged, reinstating the sneering dark.
John at once made for the food but was restricted by his cuff, pitifully short. His stomach creaked like a hinge. He collapsed against his wall, fighting tears.
“Told ya, Cuntshit,” Martin chimed. “You die in here.”
John swung out with his remaining hand, battering air. Martin laughed genuinely.
***
He slept and then awoke, and he was still alone in the dark. Consciousness was plague.
He eventually remembered the icebox and felt for it. It was cold to the touch, the pl
astic knurled like gunstock. He opened it blindly and was unsurprised to find his severed hand. It was cold like the box, and felt nothing like he remembered. There was some ice in the cooler and he ate some. He was very thirsty.
He soon returned to sleep.
***
After what could’ve been a day or six, John awoke to screaming and destruction, gunshots punctuating long stanzas of upheaval. He opened his eyes, found the same old black, and started back to sleep, unconcerned.
“John,” a voice said. “Johnny. Wake up, soldier. Bad shit goin’ down. Wake up.” Ridley.
John obeyed groggily. More screaming from beyond the door, plangent reports of violence that might involve animals. He could smell cordite and something bitter and sulfurous, mixed with the food rotting across the room.
“Somethin’ tells me things didn’t go accordin’ to plan,” Ridley said, his voice smiling. “Might work in our favor.”
More ruckus and brutal exclamations, someone of indeterminate sex crying, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”
“Or not,” John said, sounding dopey and withdrawn.
“Don’t you dare give out on me, soldier,” Ridley snapped, hardening. “We’re in this together, and I’ll be damned if yer gonna lay down and die. Now, ten-hut!”
John gave an absent nod. There was an exploding noise, and a bassy thump stirred the walls, followed by panicked footsteps and a narrative of ornery shadows from under the door.
“Sounds like a helluva mess out there,” Ridley said. “Stand ready, son.”
John went feebly to his feet. His head was better but his stump was afire. He favored it at his side.
Some minutes later, the door slashed open and a shape ducked inside, the door slamming behind it. John readied what strength remained, but then the light went on and he saw it was only his friend from earlier.
The man crushed his back to the door, chest heaving. He was dirty with blood or oil, hair out of place and eyes wide. Sweat ran freely. He remained frightfully against the door, as though holding it up, then his forehead smoothed and he broke away, inches from John. He kicked over the salver and seemed not to notice.
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