Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  At the end of another long corridor we reached Ms. A.’s command center, which turned out to be a La-Z-Boy recliner, abutted by a small end table holding a lamp, a remote control, and much to my relief, Deckard in his travel case. A massive flat screen TV hung from the concrete wall. A screensaver of slowly drifting clouds served faux-window duty.

  Already disappointed by the lack of candles, occult books, and cauldrons, I was doubly let down when Ms. A. rose from her chair and revealed herself. Two sleepy hazel eyes behind wireframe rims, bright white teeth, gray and blonde hair in a bob cut. Light blue sweater. Khaki capris. Flip-flops. A total absence of bushy hair, shrunken heads, snakes, crystal jewelry, or sassy talking animal sidekicks. She reminded me of a demure bank teller, the kind who quietly took their breaks with a crossword puzzle and had husbands named Vern and got really excited about baking for company picnics. Totally not mystical, which was weird because earlier I think she might have spoken to me telepathically or through her hand or…something. She had been so close in that room, and I realized I hadn’t felt her breath.

  She approached me, arms out. “Mr. Doyle! I wasn’t sure you’d be joining us.”

  I was still so wrapped up in the dissonance of her appearance that I didn’t even lift my arms when she came to hug me. She insisted, locking her small frame against mine and putting her head against my chest for far longer than socially reasonable. She sighed with relief, but I filled with anxiety at the sensation—the feeling of her reminded me of my mother.

  Mom.

  Was she even still alive?

  Ms. A. said, “You have made a brave choice. I was not certain, after all you’ve seen, that you would choose to remain.”

  “Well, you put a gun to my head.”

  “No. I put a suggestion in your mind and a gun in your hands.”

  I wanted to argue with her, to let her know that playing Zen master now didn’t strip the past of its more Jim Jonesian bent, and that I knew the gun in my room wasn’t the only one she had trained on me, but then I looked at her face, at the wrinkles deepened by the strain of always living under the rules of war, and at the ways her eyes had misted over, and I realized she was both relieved and happy that I wasn’t another casualty.

  I think she really softened me up with that hug.

  Ms. A. turned away from me and approached Dara.

  “I can see you’re distressed, dear. I can imagine how trying the last few days must have been for you. You’ve been stronger than anyone should have to be. I know Cassandra would be so proud of you.”

  At that—the mention of Cassandra—I saw Dara’s face tighten. Her hands clenched. She stood up and widened her shoulders.

  Oh, Ms. A., you are fucking GOOD. Whatever you just did, you put the fight back in your soldier.

  It was then that I realized we would never escape.

  Ms. A. walked over to the end table in the center of the room and picked up a remote control.

  “I’m so grateful that you’re both here now, because there’s something that’s been troubling me this morning, and I think Mr. Doyle may be able to shed further light on this problem.”

  The televised image shifted, blue sky and clouds replaced by the paused image of a peroxide-blonde reporter chomping at the bit to deliver what the bright red on-screen graphic promised would be BREAKING NEWS.

  “And now a K-10 exclusive. Our own Mitch Cardell is live on the scene of a triple homicide just reported in the NoBu financial district. Mitch, what can you tell us about the scene there?”

  “Thanks, Melody. Information is scarce so far. As you can see, police vehicles are still arriving and the crime scene is being contained as we speak. We know that there have been three deaths, and that the bodies were found in the alley behind me, adjacent to high-end restaurant Au Vin. Though police are not yet releasing any details, we were able to interview a local resident who agreed to speak with us on a condition of anonymity.”

  They cut to a close-up swarm of pixels, the “anonymity” angle clearly being played by the news station to obscure the fact that their credible witness was, in actuality, a pickled stew-bum, his slurred speech apparent even when it was pitch-shifted to a lower resonance. I swore that the batch of yellow pixels on the screen had to be a piece of corn in the guy’s beard.

  “They came into my home. So rude, man, you know nobody cares, but they woke me up anyway, and I thought somebody was digging into my buffet, but the moon was barely up, so the restaurant ain’t closed yet. You know. So I go around the corner of the trash bin to see what the noise is about and that’s when I saw it. This gorilla, I swear, biggest damn one I ever saw, and he’s got a guy pinned to the ground, squirming, one hand holding the guy’s wrists and the other smashing down on his face. I spot two other guys, but they’re already dead. You can tell. So, you know me, I’m not letting some monkey make me the next meal, so I tuck back until the slurping sound is over and then the thing jumped right up to the fire escape and disappeared. All I know is, Metro Zoo better send out some folks with elephant guns.”

  A voice from offscreen. “Can you tell us anything about the condition of the bodies?”

  “Bodies? Shoot, bodies was fine. Nice suits, all of ’em.” The stew-bum itched his beard, displaying what could have been a pixelated Rolex on his wrist. “It’s their heads that wasn’t. [Beep]ing monkey popped their heads open like some kind of nutcracker. Or skullcracker, I guess. Ha! Kind of thing, might drive a man to drink. By the way, you think I could…”

  The station was wise enough to cut before The Dread Alley Pirate Cornbeard finished asking for his booze payout.

  Melody from K-10 was back onscreen. “We promise to stay with this story as…”

  Ms. A. had paused the broadcast and pulled up another show from her recorder.

  “I believe it’s worth noting that this next report aired at the same time last night.”

  Another talking head was on-screen, the man’s blinding porcelain veneers competing for info-space amid tickers, trackers, corner grabs, and a graphic reading HOSPITAL IN CRISIS.

  “…while officials have not released information about the nature of the homicides, we can confirm that three patients in the St. Mercy intensive care unit were killed. Early reports also indicate that two hospital pharmacists were assaulted and the hospital’s entire supply of an atypical antipsychotic known as perphenadol was stolen.”

  Dara gave Ms. A. a confused look.

  “The hospital’s media liaison will be issuing a statement regarding the tragedy once the victims’ families have been notified. Stay tuned…”

  Ms. A. paused the footage again and pulled up a third file. “This aired half an hour later.”

  “Police are asking for assistance in identifying the man seen here, from closed circuit camera footage provided by St. Mercy Hospital. Though the man’s face is not visible in this footage, police say that the man’s missing left arm and substantial size—he’s estimated to be around seven feet tall and weigh about four hundred pounds—may be enough to aid in identification. Viewers with any information about this man are asked to call…”

  Ms. A. flipped the screen back to the idyllic drifting cloud setting and turned to look me in the eyes. “I think now you can understand why I’ve been troubled.”

  Because you live in some underground tunnel prison system packed full of undying agents of the Vakhtang? Because you look like you’re supposed to be dropping little kids off at lacrosse, not threatening the life of one of your very confused captives? Or is it the thing with the corn in the guy’s beard? Because I agree, it’s gross.

  I said none of that, of course, only raised my eyebrows inquisitively and hoped she’d continue.

  “Dara related your story to me during your last period of recovery, and I think there was more veracity to it than we’d originally suspected.”

  There’s a feeling you get when the death of others makes people believe what you’re saying is true, and it is far from vindication. I nodded my head, th
en asked, “So what are we supposed to do now?”

  “Well, we have to follow our assumptions. So, assuming that you’re right, and Delta MedWorks has been funneling massive amounts of money to Dr. Tikoshi for the work that resulted in the creation of these things…”

  “Wait. Things?”

  “Yes. You saw the reports. They were both live on the scene within minutes of each other. St. Mercy and Au Vin are miles apart. And only in the latter report was the assailant said to be missing an arm. So we must assume that the thing which launched the assault on the hospital and stole the sacrament was the same which attacked you and the other men on 45th.”

  “But I stabbed that thing in the neck. It had collapsed.”

  “Something that large, something with that kind of appetite…perhaps its neck is not so densely packed with vital elements. I could show you a man in room twenty-eight who has thick parallel scars running across his throat, and he’s still very much alive.”

  Initially I wanted to grab Ms. A. and shake her and say, “I know. I get it. You guys are living in bizarre, cryptic world of opposing mystical forces and everything I believed has been a lie, but please, can we focus on the problem at hand without any more asides reminding me of how little I know.” But then I realized I was just kind of embarrassed about not having killed the thing which attacked me. I wanted Dara to think of me as a capable, “Can Totally Kill An Enemy With A Knife To The Neck” kind of guy. The new truth—I dumb luck pig stuck the thing hard enough to allow me to run away—played a lot less macho. And the fact that it went on to slaughter a batch of feeble hospital patients was beyond insult to injury.

  It was damning.

  Could I have stopped that from happening? Could I have saved those poor people?

  “I can see this is disturbing you. But you are neither responsible for this thing’s existence or its actions. All you can be responsible for is what happens next. In order to stop this we need to know why these things have been created, and why the Vakhtang were so intrigued by Delta MedWorks and Dr. Tikoshi that they kept you alive and gave you access to so much of the dark signal.”

  Dara spoke. “The quantity of Hex we found in your bag was greater an amount than even Hex dealers are allowed to carry. With that level of dosage provided, we suspect they were periodically operating you as a mimic. Did you have frequent nosebleeds, or extended black-out periods during which you still appeared to have done research?”

  I got the inference—my own paranoid research was of such scattershot quality that every once in a while the Vakhtang had to hijack my consciousness to get some real work done.

  “That happened pretty much every day, for weeks.”

  “If you were on that level of dosage, you could have been subsumed into their realm at any time. The fact that they kept you alive and working means your investigation was of great interest. They only abandoned you once it appeared that your physical vessel had been wrecked.”

  Ms. A. jumped in. “Or maybe they believed, as we do, that the creature you described was eating people’s brains for purposes other than nutrition.”

  All of those voices coming out of the thing’s massive mouth.

  We will know the truth once you have joined us. There’s room now.

  I’d barely had time to process that night, to even believe it had really happened.

  “So maybe they shut down my body in the hopes that the thing would survive, come back, and get a second chance at cracking my skull?”

  Dara and Ms. A. nodded, both watching my face to see how a man might respond to the news that his brain was offered up as bait.

  I pictured my body collapsed in the alley, my mind raw meat hiding the egg of some parasitic dark force hoping to be consumed by a massive mutant man-gorilla. I saw my masticated gray matter sliding down a gullet, merging with whatever nasty network of nerves would allow a man’s consciousness to be stolen within the belly of a beast.

  In retrospect, I should have understood that this was exactly what Ms. A. wanted me to see.

  At the time, all I could feel were waves of violation, and in their passing, rage. The kind of anger which good leaders know well enough to harness.

  Ms. A. said, “The forces which compel the Vakhtang are most concerned with access to human consciousness. Something in our minds—maybe some subatomic vestige of their darkness which slipped into our universe eons ago—vibrates at the exact frequency which allows them access to our world. Their goal, since the dawn of our existence, has been to attune enough human minds to their signal to allow our world to be pulled into theirs.

  “They have used many tools to access our minds throughout history—religions, rituals, hive dynamics, and most recently, pharmaceuticals.”

  “And you think they want this creature as some kind of new tool?”

  “Either that, or they view it as competition.”

  “Hearts and minds, huh?”

  “Just minds.”

  “Those motherfuckers.”

  “Please calm down.”

  And Ms. A. must have known that the best way to keep a person angry is to tell them to calm down.

  “No. We’ve got to find some way to stop this.”

  “I agree. What would you suggest?”

  “You’ve got to have some kind of crack team, right? People trained like Dara who could launch a raid on Dr. Tikoshi’s office.”

  “Would you be surprised to hear that Tikoshi Maxillofacial Surgery has been closed for the last two months? His voice mail says he’s in the Bahamas. We hope otherwise. And no, we don’t have a special team dedicated to situations like this. Tim and Dara’s primary mission was rescue, reducing the number of minds held by the dark signal. Our other two local operatives are currently on loan to Los Angeles, investigating a new kind of film projector which causes us great concern. I’m afraid that Dara is our only resource right now.”

  Dara looked down and sighed. Missing Tim? Something else? I was only beginning to understand her existence in this pressure cooker.

  I said, “She shouldn’t have to face this alone.” Dara’s head lifted in my periphery. “I know a lot about this case, or whatever it is. I’m joining your mission.”

  “Very good. Very good.”

  “Is there some kind of ritual I need to go through, or a secret training camp or something?”

  “No, Mr. Doyle. I only need you to answer a question.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “Do you pledge to give all you have, including your life, to defend our world from the scourge of the Vakhtang?”

  I thought, “What life?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  And Ms. A. was hugging me again, and Dara placed her hand on the center of my back, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel a big, crazy smile spread across my face.

  Before Dara and I hit the streets, I asked Ms. A. if she could do four things:

  1. Acquire my clothes—The feeling of being fully dressed in my own attire was almost foreign at first, and my hoodie and thick denim jeans felt like combination cloak/armor. I’d really always taken clothing for granted.

  2. Remove the bugs—The scarabs on my chest appeared to be well and fully dead. Ms. A. swept her hand over my chest. The beetles unclenched their jaws and fell to the floor. My heart fluttered and then resumed its regularly scheduled beat. I filed the whole experience under the tab “Magic Shit I Must Compartmentalize and Ignore So I Can Keep Functioning.”

  3. Feed my turtle while we were out—It was tough to tell if Deck had lost weight, but I imagined this must all have been very stressful for him, and I wasn’t sure he’d been properly tended. I made sure his case had fresh water and I promised him I’d grab him a fat batch of feeder worms at the next opportunity. I almost picked him up to kiss his shell, but Dara was watching.

  4. Offer sanctuary to my mother—I told Ms. A. that I would make contact with my mother while we were out, and she swore to ready a safe room near the entrance to their compound where things were more ho
mey and less underground jail-y.

  And because my brain believed in nothing so much as deceiving itself, I emerged onto the streets of my city feeling like things, in whatever weird way, were finally looking up.

  Dara said she thought she knew someone—a low level Vakhtang Hex dealer named Toro—who could help us find Dr. Tikoshi.

  She had a busted-up blue sedan parked three blocks from the compound. I wondered whether the massive dents and whole body scratches were an artifice or relics of past conflicts, but decided it was cooler to not ask. I was doing a good job playing detached until I hopped in and Dara told me to reach under the seat.

  The pistol felt cold and heavy in my hands as I pulled it loose from a mounted holster beneath the bucket seat.

  Dara said, “You have any experience with those?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right—you’re more of a pepper spray kind of guy.” She smiled.

  I tried to smile back, but when someone puts a gun in your hands, whatever you’ve just agreed to do gains a little more gravity.

  “Safety’s on the side there. I recommend you leave that on until we get to Toro’s place. At that point, I’d definitely suggest you turn it off.”

  Toro’s place was outside the city in a commuter burb called Hilston Heights. We parked a block from his house and got out. I knew the streetlights were rigged and the drones were on their circuit, but I always felt less watched in the outskirts: the sound of crickets at early dusk, the smell of barbecue and fresh cut grass (for those who could afford to pay the water premiums). It was deceptive.

  Dara handed me a face mask with a plastic strap on the back. Every inch of the face was beige and polygon-warbled.

  I knew about these from our bank’s security bulletins—the masks were the last volley against facial recognition technology, but you had to have a 3D printer to make them, and those had been outlawed long ago.