Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  “Yup. Talk to you later.” Garth reached over and thumbed the ‘end call’ button on his phone, looking thoughtfully off into the distance. Devlin was a thorn in his side he could do without, that was for certain.

  There had to be a way to get her off his ass and onto someone else’s…

  “Son of motherfucking bitch!”

  Garth looked towards where the sounds of someone experiencing absolute frustration with their life-choices originated; they’d been echoing up intermittently during his call with Benny Wall, Esquire, but not loud enough for him to deal with, but this last one bore the hallmarks of a growing problem.

  The worst part of it was, Garth suspected he knew exactly what was causing all the headaches.

  Double-checking that the software installs on the first of his computers would continue without delay and that the second PC was close enough to being finished where he could take a bit of a break without feeling lazy, Garth headed downstairs. He could spare the couple of minutes it’d take and besides, he wanted to get a look at the progress…

  ***

  The downside to any good con job was that for it to work, you had to eventually take a blind leap of faith and hope that you’d done enough diligence in making sure the strangers surrounding you on all sides weren’t thieves, working for the opposition, or just plain old opportunists looking to make a big score on the sly.

  For Garth, he was in unfamiliar and unlikeable territory; in an effort to jumpstart the shit out of his endeavors, he'd done something wildly impractical, no matter which direction you came at the decision.

  He’d hired both 'Dave's Construction' and 'Triple-A Destruction' at the same time.

  It'd been a rash, almost stupid decision, because under normal circumstances, you kept the bit players in your con down to less than the fingers on a single hand, yet here, he was looking at anywhere from one to two hundred people roaming around his property doing who-the-fuck-knew what.

  Five year olds addicted to Teletubbies knew that was a bad fucking idea, but then again, he wasn't operating in a beneficial environment. The Arcade of Awesomeness –Garth was kinda hoping the name didn’t stick when it came time to print up flyers and brochures and do the website and all that because it was just … awful- had to be up and running before Baron Samiel’s ‘Drake Bishop Honeypot’ aka SlimJim’s, and that meant going balls to the wall in every direction, all at once.

  All the while running the risk of spies, bugs, cameras, thieves, and just, like, General Disarray fucking everything up.

  Thus, Dave’s Construction Team and Triple-A Destruction, working in tandem, with one group literally gutting a room or hallway with Dave’s guys running around behind, laying down the groundwork for –in Garth’s own supremely enlightened and fantastic opinion- what was going to be a seriously excellent layout for an arcade/living quarters/world domination lab.

  There were just so, so many guys.

  All over the place. On one erratic 'fuck I need fresh air or I’mma murder everyone' jaunt, he'd literally wandered into the path of two dudes working their way through what’d looked like the remnants of a joint big enough to qualify as a runner up in the Olympic torch category.

  Now, he understood and even recognized that sometimes you had to get your head down and get yourself right –he had been a Specter, after all, and some of the people he’d teamed with had needed to down the local equivalent of a planet’s worth of cocaine just to do the job and, most of the time, things had gone okay- but that’d been then, and this was now. Cheech and Chong had gracefully if muzzily understood the terms and conditions explained to them and were even now doing whatever it was major stoners did when they got sent home from work early, which was probably getting some more bong time in before crawling into bed with a large mushroom pizza and a liter of cola.

  “Mister Nickels, you got a sec?”

  Garth tracked the voice as he came down off the stairwell. It was Triple-A’s mildly oily boss, Armin Delano. He’d been earnestly avoiding the tiny little displaced Brooklynite for about five hours now, relying on his ‘absolutely no one goes the fuck upstairs without my permission because I’m doing serious fucking business up there and can’t handle my privacy being invaded’ rules to keep everyone at bay.

  He should’ve known Armin’d be loitering around the stairwell, using his guys’ distraught mood as a trap.

  Garth took a quick look at the crew tasked with breaking down the hallway and –for about the eightieth time- wondered how in the hell they remained ignorant of the fact that they were chilling in a hallway that made Stanley Kubrick’s elevator scene look … mild. One guy was sitting on his cooler smoking a cigarette as angrily as one guy could, while his buddies were drinking what’d better be water or Gatorade or whatever and not booze because they’d get bounced as well.

  The Arcade of Awesomeness had to be built properly, to specifications, without any corners being cut in any way at all, either through laziness, urgency, or stupidity; the entire environment would undoubtedly be put through some fairly hairy shit in the coming months, and the last thing he wanted was for an ODDity to find it super easy to, like, rip through the walls thanks to Drunk As Fuck Bob stumbling his way through building a fucking wall with a quart of vodka in his system.

  “Hey, Armin, what’s … what’s goin’ on?” Garth tried not to flinch or pull away as Armin sidled up and actually linked their arms together.

  “Let’s you and I discuss the matter of the … ah … antique nature of some of the things in this building we’ve agreed is going to be gutted and transformed into something far greater than what it is.”

  “O-kay.” This was no worse than any other touchy-feely weirdo that liked to get all … touchy-feely. He could handle it.

  Allowing the brightly dressed foreman –honestly, it looked more like Armin was on his way to a wine and cheese tasting party which would then be followed up by some very intense drinking in a very VIP’d out room than overseeing the destruction of a mostly dilapidated old school- to steer him to a more out of the way area, Garth took the few seconds to do a quick visual inspection of the work already done.

  Dave and Triple-A deserved commendations for their work efforts, that was for sure. Fully half the downstairs classrooms and offices had already been gutted and carted away in massive containers, giving Dave and his crew the time and space to begin settling in for the long haul of perpetrating some very serious renovations.

  Dave –an honest construction worker and dressing the part more than his counterpart- had taken pains to explain that the demolition side of things was a helluva lot easier and quicker than the renovation side, clearly and plainly worrying during the whole conversation that his newest employer was going to expect similar results.

  Garth flashed Dave a quick flick of the fingers as he and Armin tooled their way towards the stairwell that’d lead them down into the basement. Dave smiled and nodded; ever since that awkward conversation, he’d been a lot calmer, because Garth was the kind of guy that understood very well that creating something was a lot more difficult and time consuming than tearing something down.

  “Hey, uh, Armin, I ain’t comfy going down into the basement. It’s nothin’ personal or anything, and God forbid I imply that I don’t trust any of the people in this place, but I’ve got some pretty expensive gear upstairs that’s currently being unmonitored. Also, I kinda binge watched a lot of horror movies growing up as a kid, and yeah, basements … not safe. I'd, like, need a Sherman tank to go any further." Garth put the brakes on just as they got to the top of the stairs.

  Armin unlinked arms and looked at Garth, a picture of clear understanding. “Oh no, I know, Mister Nickels, no I get that completely. Let’s be honest, some of the guys both Dave and I got working for us, maybe they got the right papers to be working, maybe they don’t, maybe they need a few extra bucks to pay the rent tonight, maybe not. It’s the way of the world these days. I get that. I take no offence.”

  “Awesome.” Garth
smiled confidently at Armin. “So what’s this all about?”

  Armin pulled a silk embroidered handkerchief from a pocket and wiped at the beads of sweat forming on his forehead. “As you may or may not know, being as how you’re technically still a foreigner in this fine country of ours, there’s been something of a … boom … in antiques, Mister Nickels. You see, a lot of these older buildings, they … they got stuff in them that collectors and museums and all go positively mental over, and what I get my guys to do when we get to a new job, is, is they go through the place and sort of take … informal stock, if you will, of what’s … restorable. Or not, because sometimes, it’s about the rust and the wear and tear and all that, you follow me? Like, you just can’t find stuff like this in newer buildings, on account of how the cash just isn’t there to put in good old-fashioned American steel into things.”

  “Sooooo … you wanna buy my junk?” Garth asked quizzically, peering through the doorframe and into the relative darkness of the stairwell leading down into the basement. He’d seen enough horror movies to know that –even if you technically couldn’t die- going into that situation without a full SWAT team and possibly a few magical swords wasn’t something anyone sane would do.

  “Hardly junk to someone in the right industry, but essentially, yes.” Armin nodded. “My guys tells me that you’ve got quite a few cherry pieces of gear down there, Mister Nickels, from the boiler that provided heat to the whole school to the old-fashioned alarm clangers.”

  “I don’t think that’s the right word.” Garth instinctively pulled out his phone and started Googling in search of the proper word when Armin closed his hands around the device. "Clangers isn't the right word."

  “It doesn’t matter what the right word is or not, Mister Nickels, what matters is I’m in the position to offer you a fairly sizeable offer on everything.” Armin beamed a brilliant, trust-me-I’m-being-honest face and hoped that the man didn’t delay the process by wandering around taking stock of everything that might be up for grabs; though Dave Winters wasn’t exactly the kind of guy to get interested in flipping old-school hardware, he was exactly the kind of guy to butt in where he wasn’t wanted, talking about fair market value, auction versus selling to a picker, blah blah blah.

  “Now sure, look, we can go tru this whole building, room by room, floor by floor, piece by piece, but is that what you really wanna do? You got that situation going on in the main foyer with that angry fella screaming at empty space, you got guys showing up with I don’t know what every five or ten minutes, you got whatever you’re working on upstairs … all that needs your attention, don't it? I’m gonna make you an offer, Mister Nickels, and it’s gonna be fair as fair can be. Understand, of course, that I gotta make a profit here, too, so it’s not like I’m gonna be giving you no six digit figure or nothing.”

  Garth gently pried Armin’s ‘comforting and honest’ hands off his phone and shoved it back into a pocket. Armin wasn’t wrong. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the day fucking around playing Industrial Archeologist with a guy dressed up like a 1970’s mobster, bickering over how much he should get for each of the old-school alarm bells hanging on the walls every five or so feet. He did want to get to the hallway and see what the fuck was going on.

  But the Specter in him couldn't let go that easily, either. There was money in the air, and if there was one thing Garth needed more than anything else, it was a legitimate, non-Special Agent Angela Devlin-invoking source of income. There might be some issues in dealing with a guy who was either mobbed up, had been mobbed up, or was looking to mob himself up in the near future, but that wasn’t his problem. There just happened to be another enormous construction project going on in roughly the same neighborhood at the same time that’d taken the truly top-notch rated companies, that was all.

  Who was he to blame for hiring guys like Armin?

  “What’re we talking, here, Armin?” Garth asked cagily. “For everything, including the stuff you’re prolly not mentioning and hoping I don’t find out? I’m sure the turn-of-the-century light fixtures and, y'know, old-fashioned-y Red Cross posters are, uh, the stuff of wet dreams to weir … collectors all over the globe."

  A small zing of excitement lanced through Armin, but only just. His newest friend Mister Nickels was a cagey sonofabitch. Had to be, to set something like this major deconstruction/reconstruction project up within three days of landing on American soil. It took a guy with an awful lot going on upstairs to keep it all together, all while goofing around on his computers upstairs, so naturally he was going to realize that the overall value of everything that was potentially worth actual money might not necessarily include everything.

  “Hey, whoah there, Mister Nickels,” Armin did his best not to hang his head when he started talking defensively with his hands like some kind of goddamn idiot from the movies, “let’s not start making suggestions that can’t be taken back over there, all right? I’m a legitimate businessman making a straight up, legit offer over here. Ain’t … No one’s going to be hiding anything here. If you want, we can put a pin in this while one of my guys goes around and makes a list of everything. It’s gonna take a bit, y'know, he's gotta walk around wit' a camera, doin' the Google thing, gonna slow down my end of things, which … naturally … is gonna slow stuff own on good old Dave’s end, but I get it. You wanna get your end. Place this size, with all these here nooks and crannies and everything … what say … what say we reconvene here in a week?”

  Garth almost laughed at Armin as he stood there, pretending to calculate the length of time it’d take to properly assess the value of everything worth taking the time to remove from the old school safely. He was like a slightly taller, skinnier, better dressed version of Joe Pesci in every movie Joe Pesci had ever been in. Not quite a caricature, but close enough to one to keep fucking with his head.

  So far, he’d run into three … no, four distinct types of people in the Emperor’s ‘reality’.

  People like the original Drake and Sparks, recreations who were either one hundred percent completely actualized in every sense of the word or so close that not even he could tell the difference. The main NPCs, so to speak, the ones the production company’d spent all their money and effort voicing and coding so the player would be drawn right into the game. For what it was worth, Special Agent Angele Devlin had fallen right into that category without even trying, and was prolly going to take up more of his time than he wanted to spend.

  Then there were guys like Armin Delano. Bit players, not necessarily important to the overall flow of the story, but important enough to require voice acting and a few choice dialogue trees, complete with motivations and enough backstory to make it interesting enough to engage. Larry from the café and Dave fell into this category but they were –specifically, when it came to Armin- just this side of ‘too ridiculous’ to be real, and that was where the story began falling apart. Garth was having a hard time taking anything Armin did or said with absolute seriousness, and he could tell from the way the man’s forehead was juuuust beginning to pinch that the destruction specialist was picking up on that lack of respect.

  Garth had been a lot of places, had seen a lot of people who’d seemed to be pulled right from movies or television or even from his own warped imagination at times, and that was owing to the very nature of the Unreal Universe. You couldn’t escape the fact that –every now and then- you were flat out gonna run into someone or something that was just too far fucking out there to be any kind of real.

  That made everything here, wherever he was, doubly or even triply suspect.

  Then there were people like Emerson Lane. The only one of his kind to be encountered so far, Emerson Lane had … done what? Garth wasn’t sure. Provided a bit of relief? An opportunity to get outside of his own head? Had introduced him to the possible reality that this place was real? Whatever else the aggravating little shit had done, he’d brought the fact that nothing was probably as it seemed into sharp fucking contrast.

&nbs
p; The fourth and final group surrounded him on all sides. Very bit players, minor actors, the swarming hordes of people who didn’t have anything at all to do besides that which they were already doing. The Emperor’d gone out of his way to provide them all with names and voices and all of that, but were all of them really real? If he decided to track down one of the stoner idiots he’d booted off-site, what’d happen? Would they suddenly spawn a whole new set of responses?

  It needed more investigation. Some time after the arcade was done and Changetech was up and running, he’d sit down, pick some rando peep from the white pages and just, like, examine the shit out their life. It might seem like a crazy thing to do, especially with the Baron and his goons hovering just out of sight three months down the road, but … it needed doing. There was simply no way that the Emperor had this kind of power, even with the temporal incongruity at his beck and call.

  Plus, with the hollowness in soul where his grief used to live further coloring his interactions … something needed to be done.

  The Engines of Creation wouldn’t … couldn’t … allow something like that to exist. It undermined everything they were …

  “Hey, Mister Nickels, not for nothing over here, but if you wanna go wander around inside that truly impressive cranium for a year or two, I am all for that, but we’re in the middle of negotiations over here.” Armin snapped his fingers a few times and waved his hands around like some kind of swami trying to summon mystic forces.

  “Eighty grand.” Garth said automatically.

  Armin staggered back against the wall, clutching his heart like it was going to explode. He looked off to one side, engaging an invisible third person in their little conversation. “Guy think’s he’s got a Maserati in the basement over there. Thirty.”

  “Thirty?” Garth wheeled around in a circle, throwing his hands up in the air. “Thirty? I don’t get outta bed for thirty, Armin. That’s an embarrassment. Like you said, I don’t even know what I got in this place, and I am willing to bet that some of your guys already took some shit to your ‘interested parties’ for a good long gander, am I right? A few alarm bells go missing when they’re pulled off the walls, a couple interesting jpegs get taken … no, no, no, I ain’t doin' thirty, if you want thirty, we’re definitely going piece by piece. I’ll set a desk up outside with a computer, I’ll hire a secretary, we’ll do it up right. You want it all without me being the wise, fifty-five.”