Slashback can-8

by Rob Thurman

  Homemade chloroform.

  This time I moved with more purpose. There was pain in my shoulders as I tried to inch across the floor. Stopping, I drew in several ragged breaths and tried to sit up. It took me several tries and nearly ten minutes, but I made it and by the time I did, I knew where I was.

  I was in a basement. Junior’s basement and through the pounding headache the stench was stronger, making the smell of vomit nothing. Death and decomposition. I could see the blurry outline of stacked bags of quicklime against another wall. It could do only so much this close to the pit dug in the corner. The haze across my vision was fading and I saw that too clearly, but not as clearly as the rot I choked on. If it smelled this tainted and wrong to me how badly had it smelled to Cal when I’d tried to tell him this maniac was a grocery store butcher?

  At that moment, choking on air that reeked of dead bodies and seeing that my hands were fastened with police-issue cuffs around a metal support pole, I realized big brothers don’t get to mess up.

  Not once.

  Not ever.

  Look what happened when you did.

  “I talk to the darkness and the darkness talks to me.” Junior’s voice drifted down from the stairs leading up. He would be sitting on the top stair as I could see his knees folded and his scuffed sneakers. One of those sneakers had a single drop of crimson blood on it. Small and as big as the sun all at the same time. “But he’s not all darkness, my master. At times he’s a light that blinds. A light that’s just for me when I give him an especially good offering.” He seemed genuinely pleased about it. Like a dog who’d done his trick just right and got a pat from his master. “I know what he wants. What he likes.”

  I knew what his schizoid delusion wanted too: death.

  “Sometimes he watches from above, when the lightning fills the sky.”

  Skylight. Attic, I thought with instant desperation.

  He stood and walked halfway down. He held Cal cradled in his arms as he would an overtired, sleeping child ready for bed. If it weren’t for his small chest moving, I would’ve thought he was already dead. His head was resting against Junior’s shoulder, his hair hanging in his face, his hand fisted in the man’s shirt, because he, at some level, thought it was me. He thought I’d come to save him. . not hear him die above me while chained in a basement.

  God.

  “He’s such a scrap of a thing. I’ll bet in a year he’d have shot up like anything. Guess we’ll never know about that, will we? Feisty too. Tried to stab me with a kitchen knife. Kids.” Junior smiled fondly, his eyes bright, cheerful, and so happy.

  So very crazy.

  “I know you’re close,” he said with an approving tone that made my flesh try to creep off my bones. “Not all brothers are, but I’ve seen you watching out for him. Getting home before dark to check on him because your mama sure doesn’t. A thief and a whore and worst. She would’ve been on my list, you know, if we weren’t neighbors? You two weren’t. You’re innocents, but you were nosy and that’s that. Looking in my windows, following me in that old biddy’s giant green car. I saw you at the hospital too. They say you shouldn’t piss where you live, but you wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Nothing I could do for you then, nothing but this.”

  In all ways Junior was more than I’d thought and in the one way he was exactly what Cal had thought. “But for being innocents, for that I’ll give you a gift. When I’m done with him, I won’t clean the knife. I’ll cut you up with the same one. Your blood will mingle. It’ll be good, saving a family. Sending you on high. But first I’ll sign him. I like to sign my work.”

  Cal murmured in his chloroform-induced unconsciousness. Junior smoothed his hair and I wanted to vomit again, but there was no time. No damn time for anything. “I like family. You’ll be together always now, the two of you. It’ll make me proud, the work I do, when I see that.”

  He started up the rough wood stairs to the first floor. “Good.” He was whispering to himself or Cal now and I didn’t know which made me feel more sick. “It’ll be good.”

  I’d fucked up. I hadn’t believed Cal unconditionally. I thought he might have made a mistake. I wanted it to be a mistake. I wanted to find proof first. I hadn’t wanted to leave an anonymous tip and ruin a man’s reputation if Cal was wrong and I hadn’t wanted, more importantly, to get the police anywhere near us.

  Worst of all: I’d wanted a normal life. I’d been willing to close my eyes to anything to get that.

  But Cal hadn’t been wrong, and because of me we were going to die. My little brother was going to die. Sliced up, throat cut, chopped to pieces, God knew what, and his body would be thrown down that dry well already brimming with death and covered in quicklime. My little brother who’d trusted me. There was blood seeping over handcuffs that had me trapped around the iron column in front of me. I’d already started to pull and yank at the cuffs desperately while Junior had been on the stairs and I continued to rip flesh against the metal. Blood was good. It made things slippery and once I dislocated my thumb then I could slip a cuff. I’d read that in a book. I read most everything in a book because books were easier than real life, but look where I’d ended up. Nothing is as real in life as death.

  No thinking of that now. I could. . I would stop Junior because that was the only choice I had.

  This was not happening. I wouldn’t let it.

  Arms secured tight, I slammed my hand with brutal force against the pole because pain was nothing when that maniac had Cal. Pain was nothing. Pain was what I deserved. I repeated the motion again and again as blood splattered. It couldn’t be that difficult to dislocate your thumb or break your hand. It couldn’t be. It. .

  That’s when I saw it.

  The red eyes of a Grendel were peering in the narrow crack between cardboard taped to the glass and the bottom metal sill. Curious eyes, sweeping side to side looking for Cal. Always following, always watching.

  They watched. They didn’t stop. And for once that was all right. For once it was hope and not fear that sent acid bubbling through my veins.

  “I don’t know what you want with Cal,” I said hoarsely. Junior was terrifyingly intelligent in his way and I hadn’t seen it. Smart enough that I could taste some sort of bleach solution he had sprayed down the back of my throat while I was unconscious to keep me from screaming. I knew the Grendel could hear me, ragged whisper or not. Tapered predatory ears were made to hear fearful breaths and screams far away.

  “I don’t know why you wanted him born and why you watch him, but that monster upstairs”-the Grendel showed an improbable stretch of metal teeth, laughing; it was laughing, at the word monster-“is going to kill him. He could be killing him right now.”

  No. No.

  “Whatever you want with Cal you’ll never get it now. Not if he dies”-not if he’s is slaughtered-” upstairs. Do you understand me?” I demanded desperately.

  The Grendel blinked slowly but the scarlet of its eyes flared like a rising sun and it faded into the sliver of night. How pathetic was I, how much of a failure that my best hope for saving my little brother depended on siccing one monster on another? I didn’t care. I’d take any hope I could get.

  I felt the nauseating pain of my thumb slam one more time against the pole and pop out of the joint. There are times pain isn’t pain; it’s relief and it’s hope and it was life. My life. Cal’s life. I folded my fingers into as narrow a wedge as I could, tore them out of the metal cuff, and I ran.

  I wasn’t lithe and sleek as my martial arts teachers would’ve hoped. The one cuff still fastened to one wrist and rattling, I stumbled up the stairs, falling once with splinters ramming under my short nails and hitting my dislocated thumb. It should’ve hurt. It should’ve paralyzed me with agony, made me curl into a ball as pain exploded through me.

  I didn’t feel a thing.

  I slipped in my own blood dripping from my wrists as I hit the cheap kitchen linoleum and kept moving. The attic I spotted in a nerve-freezing moment. The pull
-down stairs in the hallway were waiting for me and I went up them as clumsily as the basement ones, but I went fast. Speed over form. Life over death. There was dried blood on them. Long soaked into the raw wood. Cleaner wouldn’t get that out of the grain, would it? No, never. There was death on every step upward, but this wasn’t Jacob’s ladder. This trail of screams and mortality didn’t raise you up-it led to Hell. I knew it.

  Cal. . God, Cal, don’t be dead.

  In the space above there was a skylight and it let in enough streetlights and faint painpricks, because they hurt-what they showed-hurt, of stars as well as a quarter moon.

  I saw it all.

  Cal’s shirt was neatly folded, such a neat serial killer was Junior, on a table of knives and scalpels and other things that wouldn’t leave my memory as long as I lived. My brother was there, his hands duct taped behind him and his dark head flopping loosely with chin down against his chest. He was facing the wall, slumped bonelessly in a far corner.

  Limp.

  Unmoving.

  Rivulets of blood on the floor.

  My brother.

  Foulmouthed, purple handprints on the refrigerator, smart and lazy, read stacks of comic books instead of schoolbooks, who’d taken on a raging, drunk Sophia to save my money for college, who taught me the difference between shades of gray and black and white and lied to little old ladies if there were cookies in it for him. My brother who I’d seen born and who I’d let die because I didn’t believe him soon enough.

  I didn’t look for Junior. I didn’t care. Kill me, don’t kill me-I did not care.

  I pulled Cal up in my arms. He wasn’t Sophia’s, he wasn’t the Grendel’s, he wasn’t Junior’s. He was mine and I would keep him as long as I could.

  Forever if I could. With my brain crumbling at the edges, fracturing through the middle, forever seemed. . right.

  I pushed his hair from his eyes, leaving my blood on his face. They were closed, black lashes against paper white skin. There was a sluggishly bleeding slice straight across his chest a few inches below his nipple line. The top slash of a J.

  “I like to sign my work.”

  No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t right. His blood should be inside him, not out. I wiped a hand frantically over the blood, trying to push it back in the wound, back inside Cal. I only ended up smearing it everywhere over Cal’s stomach and thin chest, making it worse.

  How could it be worse?

  The thought staggered me.

  Swallowing broken glass that had nothing to do with the bleach, I thought numbly. . wait. . no. . the dead don’t bleed. And they don’t breathe. Cal was doing both. I clutched him tighter, so damn small, and all there was in my world.

  Junior. Where was Junior? Where was the dead man?

  Someone was growling savagely. It might have been me.

  There was another crumpled pile in the opposite corner of Cal. This bundle was much larger. I settled Cal against the far wall, carefully making sure the blood wasn’t as much as I’d thought. He wasn’t bleeding out. It was a slow flow, I could see now. For a moment it could wait. Cal wouldn’t mind, considering what I had planned.

  I limped over and nudged clothes and muscle disguised as fat over onto his back. Junior’s eyes were half open and bloody foam framed his mouth. That would be from the vicious slashes that penetrated his clothes and several inches of flesh from the base of his neck to just above his groin. I caught the faint foul smell that had to be the spill of intestinal contents. The room had a colored tint to the air, red as the blood all around us, from the crimson moon shining through the tiny skylight made of scarlet glass.

  The Grendel had listened.

  It had come and gone, but it had listened. It had done what I couldn’t do.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but it was worth it. Right now it was worth it.

  But it hadn’t finished the job. Oh, given three minutes and Junior would be as dead as the victims in his basement, but the Grendel had left me a present.

  Or it might be a reminder.

  They were watching Cal. I needed to do that too and do it better.

  I picked up the knife that lay across Junior’s slack palm. It had blood on it, Cal’s blood. Junior didn’t get any of that. It didn’t belong to him. I methodically wiped the blade on my pants. “I have a line, you know. It’s been moving around lately, but I have one,” I said cold and brittle as frost. “You, motherfucker, crossed it.”

  I rammed the knife through flesh and bone and into his heart.

  The faint uneven beat vibrated through the metal, the handle, and into my hand before finally stopping. He touched my little brother-I stopped his heart.

  It was a fair trade.

  15

  Cal

  Present Day

  It wasn’t fair.

  Robin and Ishiah made plans. I guessed that’s what they did. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t care. I had my own plan. If I could lure Jack far enough away from Niko, then I could open a gate inside him. Nik wouldn’t die from the mass of moving crystal-feathered shrapnel that was the inner Jack and I’d try to gate away in time to avoid the same fate. If I made it, great. If I didn’t, shit happened. I’d go down fighting. It was the best end I had hope for in my life anyway.

  Life wasn’t fair, childish to complain, but there you go.

  I would save Nik-that was the bottom line. He hadn’t survived twelve years ago to die at the whim or hand of the same monster now.

  Life wasn’t fair and who told you that it was?

  That’s what they always said. Fine. This time I said, that’s who, and I didn’t care if that was childish or immature. I said it was going to be fair therefore it would be and God help you if you got in my way. But God wouldn’t help, would He? God didn’t interfere and that was a damn shame for you.

  I knew because I did nothing but interfere, and I didn’t work in mysterious ways. I worked in bloody ones.

  At least Jack had let Niko take his katana with him; that was something. That his phone was centered in Nik’s perfect anal-retentive manner on his dresser meant no tracking him by GPS, which was why I was ripping the list off the printer of the search I’d done on abandoned churches in the city. Ishiah said Jack would be in a church. I’d find that church and if I had to tear it down brick by brick to get to Nik, I would. I shoved the list in my pocket and went to my room to get a few things. Opening a gate in Jack was the only chance I had, but Nik would tell me to prepare for any eventuality. He had learned that lesson the hard way. I wouldn’t do him any justice to forget that now.

  “Where are you going?”

  Goodfellow sounded odd, his words moving slowly as though the air was water. “To the churches. To kill Jack. To bring Nik home.” It was a stupid question and he seemed to realize it.

  “I think I meant more what will you do?” He chose his words more carefully now. “To accomplish those things. Jack can’t be killed.”

  “An Auphe can kill anything. You know that.” He did. He’d seen it often enough before.

  As I finished gathering my weapons, he said tightly, “If they don’t care about surviving, that’s true. But I know better than to have this talk with you and I don’t know that I would do any differently. This once I won’t play the hypocrite. Start at the top of your list. Ishiah and I will begin at the bottom. If we find them first, we’ll call you.”

  The air was air again and I felt more human than I had in a long time. Nothing brings out the humanity in you like sheer terror. “He thinks it was his fault. I tried to help him. I think I did, some, but what if he thinks he deserves this? To be to Jack what I was to Junior? What if he doesn’t fight hard enough? Shit, Robin, what if he doesn’t wait for me?”

  He pushed me hard enough to have the pain of my broken rib slicing through my panic but not hard enough to actually injure me. “Don’t be an idiot. Yes, he feels guilty, but do you think for a second your brother would willingly transfer that guilt to you?” He pushed me again, this time in m
otion toward the hall and then the front door.

  Robin was right. Nik wouldn’t do that to me. He would do anything to be there when I showed up, still alive. . still fighting. I glanced at the door, then back at Goodfellow. “I won’t be needing that. Look for him. Find him. Call me.” I pulled the gate, a gate I thought about because Nik would want me to, around myself and left this world.

  I reappeared at the location of the first church. I knew it, had passed it a hundred times. It was one of the locations I was familiar enough with to travel through a rip in the world and arrive at its step. I was wearing Niko’s long coat he’d left behind. It covered up enough weapons to take out the entire NRA. Nothing covered up that I’d appeared in broad daylight out of thin air surrounded by the violent purple and black oil slick of a wound that was reality torn around me. I was separated from the sidewalk by a chain-link fence, but it wasn’t much of one and people saw. I don’t know how many, but from the shouts and gasps it was more than one or two.

  There’d be hell to pay for that later. . if there was a later. I didn’t care about the consequences. I did care about finding Nik as fast as I possibly could. If I had to reveal every hidden paien alive to an unknowing human world, so fucking be it.

  This church wasn’t that old. It was that ugly, square industrial look from the 1950s with one of those steeples that don’t actually have a cross or a bell and you wonder why they stuck a steeple on it at all. What did I know though? Sophia and religion hadn’t gone hand in hand. As far as I remembered, I’d never been in a church. It had nothing to do with being Rom. Rom were the same as everyone else; some were more religious than others and religious traditions varied from clan to clan.

  It was amazing the shit your mind could come up with to stop the mental images of your brother being skinned alive that ran through every thought like a garrote rusted red with old blood.

  Time to go.

  I shot the chain and lock off the door and ran into my first church. I searched the two floors and the basement, kicking down the more flimsily locked doors. I didn’t get what I was praying for. Except for rats the building was empty.