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

by Lee Bond

  And hopefully, if he played his cards just right … lunchtime.

  ***

  Gary Bad Chicken loved his new job. Oh, he still had and loved his old job –that of fence and acquirer and redistributor of items of questionable provenance- but his new job was just the sort of thing for a man like him.

  More importantly, Gary knew that Messers Jerry, Richie and Steve hated the Black Altar as much as they realized it was a necessary release valve for members of the Church who weren’t quite as … conditioned … to the lifestyle as they’d like.

  It was how things were, and in his new –and unremarked- position as the fourth cornerstone of the Church of Nothing, Gary understood and even commiserated with those goers who found the high octane lifestyle a little too much; as a member who was utterly and completely not religious in any sense of the concept, Gary liked to think that the Black Altar was just the sort of thing Jerry Seinfeld’s group needed.

  It was utterly nonsensical to believe anyone could wander around all day being so spiritual and wonderful without wanting to gouge someone’s eyeballs out with their thumbs before the sun set. No one could live like that forever.

  So the Black Altar became an important fixture. Men and women got together and did things to themselves and one another that, under the absolute and strictest sense of privacy, they could do nowhere else. And sometimes, if they got out of hand and the walls had to be hosed down and repainted or if things needed to be … disappeared … well, that was where his old lifestyle came into play just as quick as you pleased. Jerry specifically hated it with a flowering passion that might one day soon bring things to an ugly head, but both Richie and Steve had been seen in the darkened back rooms.

  Every time Jerry mentioned closing the doors to the Black Altar, all it took from Gary was a quick reminder that it was easier to keep someone empty of their sins if they had a place to indulge every now and then. Some people came once a month or less, others ... more frequently, but at the end of the day, so long as they kept purged, the Church would continue to grow.

  And on the plus side, the Black Altar gave Gary ample opportunity to continue raking in extra cash, cash that would never see the inside of an official coffer.

  Gary Bad Chicken liked win-win situations. The concept had been described to him by Garth Nickels and it'd settled in quite nicely.

  Shifting his ass cheeks to relieve some of the pressure from sitting for so long, Gary rubbed his eyes as he beheld someone he would’ve never expected to ender his dark den of iniquity stroll right in as if he owned the place. Then he really did do an actual, full on double-take as the special little something left behind by Garth's capacity to wreak change ... lurched inside him.

  "Well." Gary stroked his thin moustache quite thoughtfully. His talent -oh, they all had talents, those who'd interacted with the 'Changemaker' on his last day on Arturii, though of them all, he'd never made mention of his and he never would- had never reacted so strongly to another person since it'd raised it's curious head inside him. "Wellwellwell."

  Where Jerry had the gift of the difficult-to-ignore gab, and Richie could smell a secret a mile away and Steve had developed a capacity for blood and violence that was quite unsettling, Gary Bad Chicken could see a person's inner darkness as though it were a shining beacon. He needed to see it in person, but ... he could sniff it out plain as day.

  And from the looks of things, not only did Darren Freoli -too fresh from the hospital to be out of doors, let alone skulking in through the front doors of the Black Altar- have a darkness in him, it was a living thing, darker than any he'd seen.

  Curiosity aroused, Gary hopped off his chair and started a slow, casual stroll around the patrons sitting at tables, nodding here, winking there, making the Churchgoers feel more comfortable with the drinks and other recreational substances arrayed before them, all the while keeping a more than casual eye on Darren as he, too, cruised the scene.

  "Everything okay, boss?" This, from one of his surveillance guys in the quiet room.

  Gary loved his team, and trusted them more than he would honest men because honest men would feel compelled to shriek what they'd seen and heard from the nearest rooftop, whereas his cadre of hardened men didn't care one way or the other what happened, or how often. They'd seen it all and done even worse over their careers, which was why they were so trusted; not only were they unimpressed by the antics of your average Churchgoer, they were extremely well compensated to keep their mouths shut when they weren't on duty.

  "Yeah, I'm all good." Gary flashed a quick OK sign at the nearest camera. It was a double verification thing everyone who worked in BA did to absolutely confirm their status to surveillance. "Just saw someone wasn't expecting to see. Gonna go talk to him."

  "We see him. Weird he's here. Last guy, right?"

  "Right." Gary pulled at the whiskers of his beard once more. He was probably going to cut it off soon. Just wasn't growing right. "Hey, uh. Keep an eye on this one while he's here. And ... bury the footage. I don't want untarnished eyes seeing anything they shouldn't."

  The pause from surveillance was long and understandable. It was rare their employer ever asked both of those things, and never without justification.

  “Roger, boss. All eyes are on you two. We’ll be waiting if something happens.”

  Gary smothered a dry grin. If only they could see people how he saw them, they’d understand that if something happened, they’d be too late by far. The kind of darkness rising from Darren Freoli’s breast was a many-tentacled thing, a writhing shape of black smoke tinged with fire.

  How best to turn this darkness to his advantage, that was the thing he was going to try and learn tonight. Gary put on his best ‘hi, how are you’ face and went to approach the new Face of the Church.

  ***

  In his old life, as CEO, Jordan had been to more than a few dens like this one, and then, as now, he wasn’t really all that impressed.

  Roomfuls of men and women pretending to be bad, filling their heads with stories of how delightful it would be if their loved ones and friends finally saw them as they really were, finally understood them.

  They liked pretending that when that happened, they’d finally be able to cast off the rotten skin of their fake lives and embrace that which they really were with their whole hearts and that in doing so, they’d become free. As if they were horrid caterpillars waiting for the chrysalis to transform themselves into floating butterflies.

  Except they could never do it. None of them could. When the drugs or alcohol started to wear thin, when the savage excitement of doing things they shouldn’t began to fade, they started thinking about that ‘hated’ life, the life where they had to go to work –yes, even trillionaires had to work, especially if they wanted to remain absurdly wealthy-, where they had to pay their bills and see their wives and children and to be normal, they realized they couldn’t abandon all of that.

  Because no matter what they did in places like this, the drugs they did, the pain they caused, the rush they felt or the lies they told each other in the midst of their dark doings, they were still afraid. They still measured their lives by how they were viewed by their family, their friends, and their coworkers.

  Jordan didn’t bother keeping the sneer from his lips. Didn’t matter, not in a place like this! Here, in Gary Bad Chicken’s Black Altar, you could be whoever you wanted to be and do whatever you wanted. If someone took his sneer the wrong way, they both might learn if there really was a limit to what the fourth member of the Church would let slide.

  Jordan pitied them, all of them. And there were so many people, all around him. Cavorting, half-naked, draping themselves over each other, stoned or drunk out of their minds, filling the air with drunken braying.

  But that wasn’t all, no, not nearly all; Jordan’s heightened senses easily snatched the scents of fear, pain, lust –not to mention blood and other excretions- right out of the air, could almost feel the savagery happening in the rooms with the closed and b
olted doors. He wondered what lies those people told themselves when they left in the morning, shivering from exhaustion, sporting bites and cuts and burns and who knew what else.

  They imagined they were free. The sneer came to Jordan’s lips again. They weren’t free. If they were, they’d come here once, break the seal of their innermost selves, and then stride boldly out into the daylight, whole, powerful, unrepentant.

  “That’s quite the look on your face, Darren Freoli.”

  Jordan pretended to flinch because that was the sort of thing ordinary people did when they were snuck up on; he’d sensed someone moving his way with all the intensity and caution of a jungle cat stalking their prey, from almost the minute he’d entered the Black Altar.

  Switching the sneer to an apologetic half-smile, Jordan turned to greet the man he’d come to find. It was nice when things worked out so smoothly, though in this case, perhaps he’d been overthinking things.

  Garigtch Porfol aka Gary Bad Chicken –a moniker apparently given to him by Garth Nickels himself- was the kind of man who’d make it his business to know everything about everyone, and the newest celebrity Churchgoer would arriving in such a place would be of intense interest to such a man.

  “I …”

  Gary could see Darren was going to make some kind of lame excuse and quickly decided to not have his time wasted. A man harboring the kinds of secrets that Freoli had inside him would appreciate the candor.

  “Let’s not bullshit each other, Darren. You were gonna give me some kinda crap about not knowing what to expect when you came here, that the look on your face wasn’t one of snide dismissal or what the hell ever, and I could stand here and nod and smile and give you some tripe about how most ‘goers come here at one point or another and they quietly freak out and leave. Then I’d offer to buy you a drink or whatever and we’d dance and pussyfoot around shit for the whole night until you finally decided to get whatever it is off your chest, but I’m not interested in fucking around, not tonight, not with you.”

  Jordan was mildly taken aback by Gary’s directness; the beast in man’s clothing had been prepared to do precisely as the black sheep had described, regardless of the excruciating waste of time. “I … appreciate your openness.”

  A smirk tugged at Gary’s lips. “Learned it from the man himself, Darren. The so-called Changemaker is one of the most upfront people you’d ever care to meet. If he’s giving you the straight talk, he is one hundred percent not lying, and you can tell the difference with him if you know how to listen properly. Now, I’m going to tell you something here in a minute that’s going to either cause you to leave this place and never come back, which will be a shame because I know you need to be here, or it’s going to completely revolutionize our blossoming friendship into something magical and wonderful. And more importantly, profitable as fuck for the both of us. If that’s something you’re interested in.”

  This was most unexpected. “What could you possibly have to say to me that I would find either troublesome or intriguing, Gary Bad Chicken?” The words came out like ice cold steel.

  No harm now in letting a little of the beast out, seeing as how Gary was being so brutally open.

  Eyebrow quirked a bit at the absolute change in inflection and strength in Darren’s voice, Gary nevertheless didn’t back down.

  The spiraling blackness coiling and uncoiling around the man had already prepared him for … well, Gary supposed he didn’t really know what to expect, but he knew it was there, and that was enough.

  “Gonna give you a Church secret. Ordinarily, you’ve got to work your way through the ranks, tirelessly pandering to the Three and, not coincidentally, giving them all your money and a fuckload of secrets to be used against you should you choose to leave the Church at some later date.”

  “I am all ears.” Jordan pushed the clamor of the Black Altar away and focused all of his senses on Gary.

  “What they say about Garth is true. About the people he chooses to interact with.” Gary gauged Darren’s reaction. When he got nothing, he continued. “Jerry and the others were the first to come out with it. So they claim, anyways. But I was the first person he properly spoke with here on Tenerek, I was the one who sold him the ship. We talked at great length while we haggled over that fucking ship, he and I, and he told me stories about what he’d done. And … that changed me. First. Before the others.”

  “Changed you how?”

  Gary stepped closer, minimizing the chances they’d be overheard. It wasn’t likely, given that all the nearby tables were in full swing, but there was always the possibility. “I see the insides of people, Darren Freoli. Almost like looking right into their souls. I don’t see what’s good and right about people because that doesn’t serve my interests. No, me? I see the darkness. It’s why the BA does as well as it does. I know what these people need. And when I look into your heart, I see something that’s not even human.”

  “And here you stand. Telling me these things, all unafraid. How very brave of you.” Jordan mocked the lesser man, but only a bit, because if there was anyone on Tenerek who could help him with his need, it was this … soothsayer of the soul.

  Gary laughed so hard he snorted. “Nothing to do with bravery. Not at all. I’m an opportunistic career criminal who hammered his way into the Church proper primarily because I saw a chance to make real money. They couldn’t get rid of me once I showed up because I proved I’d been Changed. Now they can’t get rid of me because unlike them, anything I learn in these blackened corridors really will be leaked to the whole fucking world in the space of half a second if they even try.”

  Jordan thought back to the files he'd had Spur draw up on Nickels and his time on Tenerek and compared the Gary Bad Chicken from then to the one before him now, and was suitably impressed; of the two main Church leaders he'd met thus far, it struck him that Gary had undergone a more decisive transformation than the 'leader' of the Nothingness. Jerry was even more loquacious and people did love listening to him, but Gary ... was more than just a low-level career criminal these days.

  There was a hunger in the small man, a hunger that was something that could be exploited.

  "Well," Jordan said pleasantly, "now we've got all that out of the way, what is there left to talk about? As for my part, this ... darkness ... you see in me? Stems from dying and being reborn again, Gary. I endured a pain unlike anything you can imagine."

  Gary gestured towards an empty table. Darren took the hint and the two of them headed off to sit down. When they were settled, the owner of BA took the opportunity to stretch his back out. "I'm thinking, Darren, that you need something. Something you can't get on your own and that you'd prefer people like Jerry didn't know nothing about. I may be able to provide you with that."

  Jordan was almost inclined to disbelieve the Tenerekian, yet ... the unmistakable stink of people having died on the premises was a faint whisper of shed blood in the air, which suggested that Gary was far enough down the path of darkness himself that all it'd take to secure the deal was an offer, and a promise.

  "I need a few things, Gary. Some are easier to acquire than others."

  "Such as?" Since opening the BA, Gary had become more than an expert on people. His people. Beyond the singing darkness pouring from Freoli like shadows on a desert, there was something ... very off about the man.

  "I assume my apartment, so graciously offered to me by the Church, is under constant surveillance?"

  "Obviously." Gary personally didn't approve of bugging Churchgoers, a facet of his personality that was in direct odds with his extreme interest in gaining the upper hand on everyone in his line of fire. People did deserve their privacy, after all. "Does this bother you?"

  "Actually, more than I can possibly hope to articulate." From Gary's mannerisms, it was fairly apparent that the man was trying to figure out precisely what was different about 'Darren Freoli' and the gleefully smug part of him had Jordan more than excited for the reveal. "But I presume there's nothing I ca
n do about that."

  "Well, no, not for the time being." Gary realized that a part of the problem with Freoli was that he was preternaturally still. Awkwardly so. "Not until you start drawing an actual paycheck from the Church. What do the things you need from me have to do with your apartment?"

  "I need unfettered access to the world's networks, Gary. I need to find things out, and it'd be best if Jerry Seinfeld and the other Church leaders remain completely ignorant of my search."

  "Okay?" Gary didn't even know what to do with that. It's not like Jerry or Richie or even Steve would be particularly shocked or surprised at anything Freoli might go hunting for. An awful lot of early Church members had -prior to their evangelical rebirth- been politicians and other people of influence, and as everyone knew, that kind of power brought along with it some very particular quirks. Gary said as much, adding, "What in the hell are you looking for?"

  Time to see if Gary’s allegiance to the Church was greater than his desires to be more than he was. “You call him the Changemaker.”

  Gary hastily made the signal to get his guys to drop the cameras and microphones and could only hope they did. The kind of talk coming from Darren right that second was tantamount to heresy, even here, in a place where everyone said and did whatever they wanted. He let out a nervous laugh to cover the fright. “I don’t call him the Changemaker. I call him by his name.”

  “I caught that.” Jordan admitted. “A rather pointed but very subtle argument against one of the fundamental premises of the Church.”

  “Unlike the rest of them,” Gary shot back snidely, “I had a working relationship with the man even before he came here on that fateful day. Unlike them, I’m allowed to call him by his name. I should be where Jerry is, not where I am right now.”

  “I know all about your relationship with Garth Nickels, Gary Bad Chicken.” Jordan caught the suspicious twitch in the other man but there was nothing he cared to do about easing Gary’s conscience. By the end of their chat here, in this busy and dank den, they would either be the fastest of friends or … well, Jordan supposed everyone from top to bottom would be dead as doornails and he’d be satiated for a while.