by Lee Bond
“Those are their names?” Granger really wanted a cigar. He … he just couldn’t handle this bullshit. “Why can’t you keep normal names? Why do you all have to sound like idiots all the time? Goddamnit, I hate you people. Give me a den full of crackheads. Or bath salt zombies. Or fucking krokodils. Christ! Any day. Wombag. Up you go. Stop your idiot friend with the mask, please.”
“Those aren’t words!” Cherry Cristal shrieked, nearly incomprehensibly. The shrieking continued when Wombag picked himself up off the ground and hurtled himself at Senator, snatching the man around the waist and pulling him down, executing a tackle that would’ve made his old man proud. “How are you doing this?”
“Believe me, missy, I’d rather be in my hotel room, drinking myself unconscious so I don’t have to deal with the misery in my life.” Granger pointed at the other Zigg-head. “You must be … fuck my life … Slinkydog. Be a good boy and fetch the other one that’s not the one with the pink hair, okay? Off you go, who’s a good boy?”
Slinkydog found himself up and moving before he even knew what was happening. He launched himself at Frigget, caught the idiot around the neck and slammed him into the ground. Maybe there was a click, maybe there wasn’t, he didn’t know. He just knew he had to sit on his dumb ass until he was told to let go.
Granger nodded to himself, satisfied. “I am told it’s a limbic conditioning thing. I don’t understand it all, but … the drug you love so much … it comes with a burden. Surely you feel it, sometimes, here,” the Fed rubbed a spot on the back of his neck, right where the spine met the skull, “like it’s either trying to burrow out or climb in. I’ve spoken with a lot of your kind. Anyways. The words. You’re right. They’re not English, or any other language you’ve ever heard. It’s … it … it won’t be spoken for a while.”
Cherry stepped forward, senses absorbing everything about the man, the Zigg in her system singing songs about who he was, about the words that’d spilled out of his mouth. “We’re unstoppable, how did you stop us?”
“Fucking Christ. I just told you.” Granger took his hat off. He needed to have something in his hands or he might very well pull his gun and shoot this stupid woman in the head. “The drug. What do you call it?”
“Al-alphon-Zee.” Cherry tried to stop from answering, but the words, they just fell out of her mouth.
“See, that’s funny. But you won’t get the joke. The whole drug, the names … just as circuitous as an actual Ziggura … stop.” Granger waited until the woman with the pink candy floss hair and the regrettable choice in clothing –really, even though it was San Francisco and the weather was going to be nice for quite some time, it still got a bit chilly at night, and wearing your BDSM fetish gear all the time had to get tiresome- to stop struggling against the binds that now held her in place as well before speaking. “You know Zigg is more than just a drug, right? I can tell by how completely fucked up the five of you are that you’ve been using for at least two years, right? Just swung into full-bore addict mode in the last six months?”
“Something like that.” Cherry nodded. “The drug is making us more. Somehow. We don’t talk about it to people like you. Not even if they try to make us. The words don’t come out of our mouths when we’re around people like you, but …” she trailed off, confused. “But I’m telling you. The words … won’t stop.”
Granger nodded, understanding the confusion. This wasn’t the first time he’d used Zigg-heads on Samiel’s orders, and it was the same every time. Hopefully, this would be the last time. “Programmed into you from the first hit, and continually refreshed, with each dose. The language, and other things, too, from time to time, depending on … depending on his needs.”
Cherry Cristal’s skin pebbled as a wind blew in from the middle of nowhere and right through what little remained of her soul. She knew what was happening to her, they all did, if they ever managed to live this long. They all saw it, day in and day out. Friends would take a hit, go out into the night to find more cash or valuables for the next hit, they wouldn’t come home. Then they’d be found dead, their skin all white and pasty, their eyes hollow, empty sockets, almost as if they’d seen something in those last few minutes before Aphon-Zee had turned them into ghosts.
But those that did make it past that point, survived that hit that was different for everyone –hers, for example, had been the third or fourth, while Senator’s had been his eighth- … they knew something was happening on the inside.
They didn’t talk about it much. The words weren’t there, and when you found the words, no one wanted to listen because it felt bad to bring it up. The same thing that was changing them knew they were trying to talk about it, and stopped you.
Except this man, this man who was no user, he wasn’t one of the chosen, the ones to go first and worst … he knew all their secrets, didn’t he? He did. He seemed familiar, too, and the longer they stood there talking, the more familiar he became. His boring old man’s face in the stupid hat … he was in there and that was why Wombag and Slinkydog had been just slow enough for him to stop them with those words.
“How do you … how can you … what is going on here?”
Granger tried ignoring the bitter wind blowing through the park and failed. It was one of those nights, and with him, here, on this hill, talking to these twisted freaks, that wind felt about as foreboding as anything.
Ordinarily he wasn’t one to believe in signs and omens.
Until they happened. Signs of a misspent youth reading books on the supernatural when he should’ve been applying himself to things of a more … scientific nature. But that’d happened and here he was now, feeling watched and not by the Baron.
Stupid old man, craving that drink, that whole damned bottle, scaring himself when the Zigg-heads nearby were more than enough to fill him with nightmares. What kinds of things had they done in their desperate bid to get high, to keep on keepin’ on?
Questions for a different day, with answers probably not worth hearing.
“What is going on,” Granger took a step forward, perversely enjoying the thrill of watching Cherry Cristal –who was dreadfully far gone down Ziggurat’s path, far enough that he was certain if she bore a child, it’d be ready for Zigg-Gameth without missing a beat - take a nervous step backwards, “is that you’ve been chosen for a mission. You and your friends. Isn’t that exciting? Something to do? More than run through the night, breaking into houses, killing people, stealing their stuff? That sounds boring to me, night after night. Wouldn’t you rather have a mission?”
“What’s in it for us?” Cherry demanded, jutting her bony chin outwards defiantly. Missions were all very well and good and you couldn’t just diminish the thrilling feeling that the words being spoken by Boring Man weren’t setting fires under her skin, but she liked breaking into houses, liked seeing how the other half lived. Sometimes, when the drug was at low ebb, she remembered all she’d left behind in New York to begin the odyssey she was on.
And that was when people got hurt.
Ziggurat … Alphon-Zee … it was a hell of a drug, and it was best to be on it all the time when you were on it. The comedown was ferocious.
“What’s in it for us?” Cherry asked again, looking at her friends. Slinkydog and Wombag were sitting on top of Senator and Frigget, heads swiveling this way and that, idiots watching a tennis match with words. The other two, well, they weren’t putting up much of a fight at all. The leader of the quintet was pretty sure Frigget was asleep, in fact, and with the stupid mask on, Senator could just as easily have bitten his own tongue off with those shattered teeth.
“Lifetime supply.” It was sickening to see the instant, interested and calculating look in three of the five Zigg-heads, the gleam of Ziggurat in their eyes, almost as if the drug itself was alive somehow, wired right into their minds, hearing and seeing everything they did. Getting excited to have more of itself put in.
“Lifetime.” The word was almost a moan. No more hassle trying to find The Man
who moved around the city every day. No more wasting sometimes more than half the high skulking through neighborhoods where the people watched you so hard you could feel their peepers on your skin. No more behaving around police, either, Cherry supposed. “H-h-how would that work? Lifetime supply. The Man carries only enough every day for us. He knows how many of us there are. Carries the right number of vials. Sometimes a few extras, for newbies. But not too much more. Sometimes he’s dry, too. And that’s the worst, because Boring Man, Alphon-Zee burns. And burns.” Slinkydog howled into the night sky and Wombag started repeating burns burns burns over and over again. “The less of it in us, the more it burns. And then we die.”
Slinkydog howled again and Wombag started up with die die die.
“Magic.” Granger replied simply. The first time he’d tried explaining this particular trick to Zigg-heads, he’d actually tried the truth, talking about time travel and the powers of the Baron. All he’d gotten for his troubles was a riled up pack of Zigg-heads angry at him for being a smartass. He’d had to use a whole passel of the language to keep them right where they were until he’d gotten himself away safely.
Magic, on the other hand, was something even the most far-gone Zigg-head could understand. It was the closest word to explain what was happening to them inside, and so the concept of magic for other things was easily understood.
“Magic.” Cherry Cristal went to laugh, but there were too many things happening tonight to make magic seem silly. “Magic?”
“Yes. You go to bed, and when you wake up in the morning, one of those shiny purple vials is under your bed or in your pocket or wherever you want it to be. Only one, only for you. No one else.” Granger hoped they understood this part. Cops in various parts of the world had discovered more than one blood-soaked apartment or squatter’s den full of corpses and no real explanation why or how things had happened. “You save it for someone else, you try to turn them, to make new friends with it, it’ll stop coming. That’s how it works. The vial you find is for you. Not only will it stop coming, but there’s a good chance that the person you give it to will kill you right on the spot.”
Slinkydog snickered. “As if I’d give my magic Zigg to someone else. That’s just stupid.”
Wombag whacked Senator in the side of the head, just because he could. “Stupid! Mine is mine. Always mine. What’s the mission? Like in video games? No escort mission though. Those are stupid.”
“So stupid.” Slinkydog agreed. “I remember this one time, the person kept running away and getting killed. Every time. Every every time. No matter what. Just … kept dying.”
“I played th…”
“Shut the hell up, you two. Boring Man and I are negotiating.” Cherry’s words slapped into Slinkydog and Wombag like fists. She turned a triumphant smile at Boring Man as if to say ‘see, my words work just as well as yours do’. He looked disinterested, and the smile almost faltered, but she kept it up. “You say mission. We heard of some man talking to others in the … other park. What happened to them? Is your mission a suicide?”
“Worth the risk, for a lifetime supply.” Granger was beginning to feel soiled. Dirty. At one point, these five idiots had been normal kids, with hopes and dreams and plans. A future. And now here they were, encrusted in filth, so far gone on a drug that did wicked things to them, both inside and out, with him, prompting them to go further down that rabbit hole. “I did talk to others. Sketch and Ferret and Crink. They failed. Now I’m here, talking to you. Making you the same offer.”
“Give us some drugs.” Cherry Cristal said bluntly. “Give us each a hit and we’ll listen.”
“Actually, no. That’s not how this works.” Granger replied, just as bluntly. “You agree or you don’t. Then I go away and find another group of you people. Then I try again. And again and again until I find people willing to do what needs doing. I don’t need to prove myself, or to give you drugs, or to say anything else but two words. And maybe an address, depending on my mood. I’m sick of talking to you, and so you’ll either say yes or no. Make up your damned mind.”
Cherry wanted so badly to close the gap between her and Boring Man she could taste it in her mouth. She could see what she’d do to him, the pain she’d cause, the bones she’d break, the suffering he’d endure before he gasped out his last, boring breath. But at the same time, she could hear him saying something. Something worse than ‘stop’. Maybe … maybe he could do something worse to her with those weird words that weren’t American, but sounded that way all the same.
Magic. Who knew magic was real? Wonder had been burned out of her a long time ago, and here she was, in this park, believing in magic all over again.
“All right. We’ll do it. What two words do you have for us?”
Granger prepared himself. The last time –with Sketch and crew- announcing Garth’s name had been … volatile. Like nothing he’d seen. Most of this crew wasn’t as far gone as the others, but the one with the hair … she was maybe even a little bit further down the road than Sketch. It was hard to tell.
The Fed licked dry, crusty lips. “Garth Nickels.”
The two words slithered into Cherry's brain like living puzzle pieces, sounds that clicked and clacked in her and suddenly, there was … something … something inside her now, words and commands that set her afire with promises of violence and mayhem and yes, down at the very bottom of this miraculous arrival, guarantees of endless Ziggurat should they prove capable of dealing with this man named Garth Nickels.
Lids slammed shut, eyes rolling into the back of her skull, the powerful, overriding puzzle kept on going, finally forcing the resilient Cherry to the ground like the rest, body lurching in ways uncomfortably reminscent of religious fervor.
Granger had never seen this kind of reaction to the preprogrammed commands that Samiel sometimes left inside Ziggurat; at most, the Zigg-heads' eyes slammed shut for a few seconds as the chemically ingrained directives were funneled through from the subconscious to the conscious mind.
This … this was uncomfortably similar to direct, intimate contact with Baron Samiel across the void and gulf of time, and while Granger had absolutely zero concern for anyone stupid enough to fall down the spiral that was Ziggurat, he nevertheless found himself commiserating with these addicts if they were experiencing anything like that.
It looked so painful! Now, more than ever, Granger was pleased that no one had ever seen him suffering through either contact with Samiel or the even more brutal temporal revisions.
Curious to learn more about these Zigg-heads while they danced through their commands, Granger did something that was perhaps not precisely the wisest thing he'd ever done in his life: he moved closer to the weird girl with the even weirder hair.
As he got close enough to make out her face in clearer detail, what the Federal Agent saw set his stomach churning, and he had -in the course of both his service to the American Government and to Baron Samiel- seen more than his fair share of oddities and grotesque moments.
The girl with the cherry pink hair … her face was drawn back into a grim rictus, mouth stretched out so wide that her lips were pulled back and away from her rotten brown teeth so tightly they were beginning to spit; already, thin streams of red blood were mixing in with flecks of spittle. Beneath lids sealed shut, eyes roved relentlessly, almost recklessly and with such exagerrated motion that Granger feared her eyes might very well burst out of their sockets.
But that wasn't the worst of it. He'd seen OD's before, seen strokes and epileptic seizures that were the stuff of nightmares. Hell, he'd even sat through the original Exorcist without flinching, a feat that'd never failed to astonish the people in his life.
No, it wasn't the seizure, it wasn't the way her back would arch so painfully that her spine surely came close to cracking before it slammed her ruthlessly into the dirty grass, it wasn't the way the skin around her face was pulled so tight she seemed a particularly mobile mummy.
No. It was none of those things.
/> It was … it was this … roiling under the skin. Like maggots or bugs or something, pulsing and throbbing just beneath the flesh of her bare arms and legs, alien motion pushing muscles around in directions they weren't meant to move.
"Jesus fucking Christ." Granger danced off to one side, barely managing to get away from the girl with the hair before sour bile and the last meal he'd eaten -a memory long since forgotten- burst from his lips to stain the grass at his feet. He adopted the usual stance, hands on knees, slightly bent over, letting another stream of bile fall out of his mouth. Long ropes of spittle, thick and stringy, followed. "Jesus. Just … fuck."
He'd long known -as did every permanently addicted Zigg-head- that they were becoming something else, and if … if that hideous motion was any hint of what that might be, Granger genuinely and sincerely hoped he was dead and buried a long time in the ground before their metamorphosis was complete.
The strange mewling and clicking sounds rising from the mouths of the five Zigg-heads dissipated into a gentle susurration that eventually fell away to nothing.
"Boring Man."
A zing of fear pushed Granger into spinning around as quick as he could, hand already at the holster at his hip. The girl with the hair -he had no desire to learn her name, especially since it was pretty certain she was going to fail as hard as the others- and the rest of her crew stood side by side, arms linked together.
"What is it?" He demanded, wiping bile and spittle from the corners of his mouth with the cuff of his blazer. "What do you want?"
"We're ready to go." Cherry said, feeling … euphoric. With actual purpose, actual reasons to live and breathe and move shining bright in her -their- minds … it was almost as wonderful as a fresh hit of Alphon-Zee.
"You need the address."
Cherry tapped the side of her head.
Granger understood. Samiel had given them a lot more data than the first crew. Garth Nickels was probably the highest value target in Samiel’s crosshairs at the moment, if not of all time. "You need descriptions of the guards that I saw."
