I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  “That’s right. Same little girl me and him played with in your big ol’ backyard. We used to take turns swingin’ on that swing back there, you and your mosquito. What was his name?”

  “Mr. Nosy.” A faint smile. “I still have him. He’s in my van.”

  “He must be old as hell now.”

  “Falling apart. I’ve had him fixed so many times, I can’t even remember.” The smile spread a bit more. “I love that stupid mosquito so much.” A fresh tear re-wet the track on her face. “I remember playing dress-up with you and Fish in my room in the cupola. You used to love puttin’ on my mom’s old dresses and pearls. I remember.”

  Joel stroked the strange hand. “You’re still here. You’re that same little girl with that same stuffed mosquito. Only you grown up now, and there’s a little different but not much. I’ve changed too—there’s been a few dirty things in my system and my lungs are prolly as black as my outsides by now—but under it all, I’m still that little boy in your mama’s old dresses and high-heel shoes too big for my feet.”

  All the hardness had drained from Robin’s face, though her tone was still a bit lost, as though she were speaking from the far side of another world. But with each word, she seemed to get a better handle on herself.

  “Yeah. We’re still the same,” she said, her eyes warming. “Okay.”

  He let go of her demon-hand and she balled her fist again. The sound of it flexing was simultaneously like the creak of oiled leather and the thin, fibrous crackle of wicker.

  “This ain’t him,” Joel told her, taking her woody fingers in his. “It ain’t. This is you, girl. It’s just a little more badass than the rest of you.”

  She nodded and wiped her cheeks with the back of her human right hand.

  “You can’t go through this life and not pick up a little shit here and there. We are all the sum of our lives, hon … and we all gotta carry a piece of crazy to the end.” Joel got up off the floor, using the Batdazzler as a cane. The bullet-graze across his thigh had been re-closed at the hospital, and now it hurt only when he bent his knee. Of course, the pain meds they’d given him were helping. “Yeah, you got a big piece. But I’mma help you carry it, aight?”

  She nodded again, and a hardness came back to her, but it wasn’t the Crazy-Eyed-Lord-on-His-Throne, Off-With-Your-Head look again; it was a positive and steely resolve. The lost-ness was gone. Joel sensed he had dragged his childhood friend back from the edge of some dark, destructive promontory.

  “I love you, yeah?” His tone said this was not optional. “And this boy over here”—Joel pointed at Kenway with the end of the bat—“he love you too. Dig on that.”

  Robin wiped her face again. “I can dig it. Yeah.”

  Clank, clank, clank.

  The sound of someone knocking on the front door echoed back to them. Everyone seemed to shift into a combat stance. Kenway turned and peered through a gap between the shelves. “Who the hell…”

  “I thought I heard a police siren earlier,” said Sara. “Maybe the cops are trying to disperse the familiars. Hell, maybe the familiars have even come back to their senses.”

  “No. I don’t think—”

  A man stood on the other side of the glass, his hands cupped around his eyes so he could see through into the shadows.

  The rifle-toting mutant. Roy Euchiss.

  “Hey, anybody in there?” called the ruined man, wispy strands of hair haloing from his acid-burned head. “I know you’re in there.” He gave a ragged cough. “I saw somebody moving. You open yet? You got this month’s Batman? I’m a fan, you know.” He raised the rifle, shouldering it. “Don’t get up. I have a key.”

  The first shot thundered in the comic shop like a judge’s gavel. A hole appeared in the Plexiglas door. “Shit, we got to get out of here,” said Lucas, and the magicians ran for the back door, cutting through the movie room. Kenway grabbed Robin’s hand and led her away, but at the last second, she pulled herself free and turned to look.

  “What are you doing? Come on!”

  Placing his bedazzled bat on the sales counter, Joel took hold of his sleeve, ripping it free of his sweater. “Y’all go on out the back. This the man killed my brother.” He tore the other sleeve off, revealing his biceps, still muscular from days carrying stone pavers and bags of fertilizer in the summer heat. With his sweaty fade and naked muscles, he looked every bit like the women on his brother’s movie posters. Rocky and Zula would be proud. He picked up the bat and flourished it. “This shit ends here.”

  BOOM! Roy fired another bullet through the glass and started kicking the door, rattling it in the frame. A cardboard standee of Iron Man fell over with a clap.

  “You sure?”

  “I got this, baby.”

  Leaning through the doorway, Kenway held out a fist to the pizza-man. “Beast mode, man.”

  Joel fist-bumped it. “Beast mode.”

  “Speaking of beasts,” said Sara Amundson, as the others fled out the back, “I’ll stay here and give you a hand, if that’s okay. I’ll make a monster.”

  Joel shrugged. “If you—”

  CRASH! The front door imploded. At the same time, Sara vanished.

  Glittering grit crunched under his boot soles as Roy Euchiss stooped underneath the mullion barring the middle of the door, passing through the gap. The rich, buttery stink of gunpowder mixed with the feeble vanilla funk of old comic books.

  Up close, Roy was horrendous. His ears had deteriorated, leaving ragged stumps of raw skin, edged in black. Two gaping Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera nostrils marked where his nose had melted, and one of his eyes was a milky cataract. The skin all over him was like the world’s worst sunburn. He racked the bolt on his rifle. An empty brass casing flipped out and tinkled across the glass sales counter.

  “Where the fuck are you, ya brother-killin’ porch monkey son of a bitch!” he bellowed with a wrathful shiver.

  “Y’all killed my brother first—” Joel yelled, anger stripping him of self-control, and he knew it was a mistake as soon as brother passed through his lips. Roy’s head jerked in his direction and he shouldered the rifle, firing. A box exploded above Joel’s head, peppering him with bits of plastic and paper. Racking the bolt, Roy stormed down to where Joel had been hiding, looked up, saw him crouch-running around the other end, and fired at him.

  BOOM! A Walking Dead coffee mug shattered.

  Joel scrambled across the aisles of toys and games. The rifle coughed fire again, and a hole appeared in a Monopoly box behind him. He crawled as quietly as he could, trying to put as much space between him and that gun as possible.

  His shoulder bumped into a knee and he found himself looking up into the telescoping jaws of an alien. Joel almost screamed until he realized it was Fisher’s replica Xenomorph statue.

  “Attention!” bawled an amplified voice outside. “This is the police! You are ordered to disperse!”

  The cops? Joel crept behind the Alien statue. Had the cops come to put the hurt on the mob out there? The crowd became chaotic, screaming and angry. Footsteps raced past the broken front door. Familiars snarled ferally.

  “Get your asses outta here!” continued the bullhorn warning. “Right—”

  It was cut off by the hollow slap of gunfire.

  “You might as well stop running,” warned Roy, turning and striding back the way he came, following the sound of Joel scuffling against the carpet. He racked the bolt, loading a fresh round.

  Boxes throughout the comic shop blew open in shreds of cardstock, one or two at first, like the first kernels of popcorn in the bag. Roy stopped to look around in confused surprise. They were all cracking open in a percussive symphony, POP-POP-POP! Action figures tumbled to the floor in a rain of plastic arms and legs.

  “What kind of trick is this shit?” Euchiss asked the shadows. “Let me guess, here’s the twist: you’re some kind of Negro hoo-doo magician descended from Haitians or Jamaicans or somethin’, right? Ain’t that how these things always go? I wat
ch movies when I ain’t cuttin’ throats, you know. I ain’t completely uncivilized yet. I love a good movie. Especially when there’s plenty of chaos to go around.” He giggled madly. “The more crazy, the better.”

  Something brushed Joel’s ankle. A tiny plastic superhero scuttled under a shelf. Another miniature man slid past, and another. The floor was an ant-like armada of action figures, all tumbling and rolling toward the other end of the sales floor.

  Roy opened his bolt, checked it, slammed it home again. “Well, listen here, Afrocadabra: you ain’t got nothin’ on Miss Cutty, I can tell you. She got more magic in her pinkie finger than in all your queer little body.”

  “You’ll never win, Red Skull,” said a tiny voice.

  As if by instinct, Roy spun and fired at it. BOOM!

  Captain America flipped ass over teakettle into the shadows. “I am vengeance!” said another voice, behind him. “I am the night!” Others chimed in, growing into a cacophony of chirping battle cries:

  “This is where it ends, Skeletor!”

  “Thundercats, Thundercats, Thundercats, hooooo!”

  “Transformers! More than meets the eye!”

  Soon, the voice-chip recordings of dozens, hundreds of action figures swelled into a singular angry robot chorus, a dissonant and anticipating pitchfork mob. Vibrations welled in the floor, radiating from some ponderous epicenter in the middle of the shop, a rumble that rose and opened into a slow roar.

  Rising from between the racks was a great mound of jack-shapes, a head and shoulders and then a towering many-colored gestalt, five feet, six feet, seven feet tall, a Grendel made of action figures. It lurched down the aisle toward Roy on two swimmy elephant feet as if it were wading in deep mud, light glistening on shins and biceps. Sightless electric eyes winked all over, red and green laser-dots flashing and flickering like Christmas lights. The synthetic bravado of battery-operated ray-guns and lightsabers hissed and whizzed from deep inside: pew pew pew! Bzzzz-bkow! Boom! Bling-bling-bling! The dwindling electronic eeeeewwwww BKSSHH of a blockbuster bomb. Roy made a face, wincing almost in embarrassment. “Is this supposta scare me, pizza-man?”

  Joel stepped from behind a shelf and swung the Batdazzler up into the rifle, shattering every finger-bone in Roy’s left hand.

  Fake diamonds broke loose, glittering across the carpet. The Serpent’s right hand impulsively pulled the trigger, POW!, tearing through boxes of toys, and he screamed in pain and rage. Raising the sparkling baseball bat, Joel brought it down in the middle of the gunman’s forehead with an impact that jolted his forearms, numbing his hands. Roy backpedaled, collapsing against a shelf, and the whole thing toppled over in a spill of sleeved comics.

  Before he could get up, Joel lunged in and hammered him across the chest. Ribs gave way underneath with a muffled, delicate crunch.

  “UUNGH!” Roy corkscrewed out of the way and BANG! like a drum, Joel knocked a splintery hole in the back of the wooden shelf. Diamonds pattered across the wood. Roy spun off onto the floor, hugging the rifle, and as soon as he fell on his back, he came up with it, the barrel pointed at the pizza-man. The Batdazzler raised, Joel paused in terror at the sight of that gaping black barrel.

  Hot madness roiled up inside of him, becoming a strained, kamikaze sort of bravery. “Shoot me, son!” Joel bellowed at the supine killer. “Shoot me, you burnt-up Wonderbread motherfucker!”

  Roy pulled the trigger. Click.

  “Shit!” he hissed, and racked the bolt.

  Joel clubbed the rifle out of the way, striding across the back of the fallen shelf, and stomped his chest as if he were killing a particularly foul insect. Bones flexed protestingly under Joel’s foot.

  “URRRFUNNNNCK!” Roy spat, saliva misting. He rolled over, abandoning the rifle, and beetled away across the carpet, drooling.

  “You look like somebody peeled a hot dog,” Joel snapped.

  Having knocked so many of the diamonds off, the Batdazzler was little more than your average baseball bat. Joel stepped down from the overturned shelf and walked almost pleasantly alongside the belly-crawling serial killer. He twirled the bat in a jaunty, careless way, but his face was the essence of grim, hard-bitten rage.

  “This for all ’em cats you burnt,” said Joel, and whipped the bat hard across the killer’s spine.

  Vertebrae snapped with a soft crackle. The Serpent screamed into the darkness of the comic shop. He turned over and put up his hands, trembling, his eyes wide and pleading. Only his upper body did so, his waist helixing, his legs sprawled uselessly where he’d left them. Joel nosed the bat sharply back and forth, knocking his hands out of the way.

  “No!” Roy screamed. “Please!”

  “This for my brother,” Joel grunted. The bat slammed into Roy’s face on the diagonal, caving it in with a thick, wet sputch and cutting him off mid-scream.

  The business end stayed in the ruins of Roy Euchiss’s face. One eyeball bulged from underneath the wood, staring at the floor. Joel stood up slowly, warily, as if he were afraid the floor were about to fall in.

  “Adapt and overcome,” he told the corpse.

  28

  The witch-hunter led them through the grate behind the shop into a storm drain. Only about waist height, the drain was filthy, strewn with old trash and dried mud; it was all she could do to keep from dry-heaving. Kenway struggled along behind her, his prosthetic leg scraping on the concrete. Gendreau, Lucas, and Wayne duck-walked, the curandero’s jacket rolled up under his arm so it wouldn’t get wet.

  Sixty or seventy feet in, the ceiling opened up to the ink-blue clouds of the afternoon sky, and through a grate extending the width of Broad Avenue they could see the familiars shambling around above. Shoes clomped across the steel as the crowd capered back and forth, shrieking and fighting each other.

  “I forget,” said Lucas, bringing up the rear, “how long does the feral stage last after a dormant familiar is activated?”

  “Several hours,” grunted Gendreau. “Depends on the witch. But Cutty? Who knows?” A little girl on her hands and knees over the grille searched the darkness for them, her fingers laced through the steel slats. Her eyes were softly luminous moon-dimes.

  “Attention!” echoed an augmented voice above. “This is the police! You are ordered to disperse!”

  Lucas blinked. “Police? Do they think it’s a riot?”

  “Get your asses outta here! Right—” The amplified voice was interrupted by the high crack of a grenade launcher, followed by chemical hissing and the rakka-tak of nonlethal rounds and the chest-thumping boom of beanbag shotguns.

  Tear gas wafted down through the grille with a pungent reek, making Robin’s eyes water. “It’s happened before. There was a pretty bad incident with familiars in California last year. The governor claimed it was a riot over that court case. You know, the minority shooting where the cop got off?”

  “Christ,” said Sara. “Which one?”

  Familiars ran past, their shoes clattering across the grille.

  “That was you?” asked Gendreau. “The Dogs of Odysseus suspected it had been familiars.”

  “Yeah. I was trying to burn Adeline Stidman and she had the whole damn neighborhood after me. Chased me into a college campus, had the campus police involved. Biggest fuckup ever. Anyway, I guess when people don’t have any other explanation, people make shit up to fill in the blanks, you know?”

  Gendreau chuffed humorlessly. “Connect the dots.”

  “Here we go,” said Kenway.

  Robin had been so focused on moving, she hadn’t noticed they’d crossed both lanes of Broad, gone under the opposite sidewalk, and were underneath his sign shop. A grille showered the drain floor with warm yellow light.

  Black engine grease made the floor into a disgusting skating rink. The two of them positioned themselves under it.

  “Super gross,” said Wayne.

  “Sorry,” he said. “This is where I park cars for vinyl wraps. They have a bad habit of leaking fluids.” Kenway gripped the d
rain grille with both hands and braced himself, pushing. “Damn.” He stood up, bent over at the waist, and raised himself until his shoulders and the back of his head were against the metal, and he pushed with his legs. After only a few seconds, he was straining so hard, he was vibrating. “Unnngh, damn. It won’t move. It’s glued in by all the muck. It might even be bolted down.”

  Robin pressed her human hand to his chest, gently shooing him out of the way. “Here, let me try.”

  “I don’t know how—” he started to say.

  She cleared her throat. “Trust me.”

  Taking his place, Robin looked up through the grate. She could see the ceiling of the garage. Kneeling on one knee, she reared back with the demon hand and struck the grille with her open palm as hard as she could. Her freakish left hand, twice the size of her right hand and as hard as a tree stump, clanged noisily against the steel.

  Dry grease rained down onto them and Robin shielded her face, scraping her lips with her shirt. She’d expected it to hurt to some degree, even though it was tough, but there was nothing. Only the reverberations of the impact traveling up to her shoulder.

  It was sort of liberating, to be honest—what else could she do with this? How sturdy was this thing? The fibers were each almost as big around as her original arm; they had stretched out the U-shaped scar like a yawning mouth, the edges strained and ripping until the hole had been five, six inches across. Skin pulled taut over the scabrous blackwood bone that was now her new arm. The self-proclaimed curandero had worked his strange shamanic healing magic on her (she still hated calling it magic, and now she felt this was because the word cheapened something she’d come to know and fear as a powerful force), and without the bent staples embedded in it, the surgery wound had scarred over.

  Now the pain had abated to a constant arthritic ache. Whatever Gendreau did had blended her skin with the demon-skin; the cells combined in a jagged, organic fashion, interlocking and growing together, like splinters embedded painlessly in her flesh. It was as if she’d been born this way, and in light of Joel’s pep talk, she supposed she had been.