Pride's Spell

by Matt Wallace

  She looks over at Darren, staffing the fresh smoothies station. He’s done a brisk trade in nut butter smoothies all night, visibly having to stuff giggles every time somebody orders one.

  She’s still kind of pissed at him, but Lena can’t help smiling at that.

  “Lemme get one of those eggplant kabob deals,” a smooth, masculine voice bids her.

  Lena turns back to her task and finds herself face to face with Producer One, smiling beatifically at her.

  Lena retrieves one of the skewers and folds a napkin around it carefully, handing it to the man.

  “I produced the film we’re celebrating,” he informs her without being asked.

  “Oh,” Lena says, caught off-guard. “We didn’t get to see it.”

  “That’s cool. That just means you’ll buy a ticket.”

  He takes a bite of one of the eggplant rounds lanced by the skewer.

  The producer makes a satisfied sound as he chews.

  “Not bad. So, you work with the infamous Bronko Luck?”

  “I work for him, yes.”

  “Like the gig?”

  Lena forces a thin, professional smile and just nods.

  The producer laughs. “I can see, yeah. You digging LA, at least?”

  “You’ve got excellent tacos,” she says neutrally.

  He nods. “Fuck Trump, I say. Let ’em all come over here as long as they’re cookin’.”

  He finishes his skewer, oblivious to how distasteful she obviously finds his humor.

  “So,” he says, wiping his manicured fingers with the napkin, “is this your first movie premiere?”

  Lena nods stiffly.

  “Not impressed?”

  “It’s . . . different than I expected,” she carefully replies.

  He leans over the table and whispers. “Kind of dull, huh?”

  Lena half-shrugs.

  The producer nods, then a wicked grin forms on his lips.

  “Just wait till the after-party, my dear.”

  He winks and walks away.

  Lena’s spent the evening elbow-deep in foodstuffs, but it’s the first time that night she’s longed for a shower.

  The party begins winding down surprisingly early. The penthouse crowd thins and what’s left of the food goes largely ignored.

  Lena’s not sure what she expected, but it wasn’t this.

  Eventually Bronko appears through the increasingly sparse crowd.

  A few people even recognize him and stop him to say hello and snap a picture with their phones.

  “So?” he asks, approaching her station.

  Lena shrugs. “They liked it. I guess. No returns, anyway.”

  Bronko grins at that, but it’s clear he cares even less about this party than she does.

  “Well, brace yourself, girl. Jett and Nikki are ready to light the candle on the after-party. You and Vargas and Pac’s crew start breaking down up here, get the leftovers wrapped, and then get downstairs.”

  Lena stares up at him quizzically.

  “What’s going to happen downstairs?”

  This time Bronko’s grin is different.

  Lena isn’t sure whether to be excited or frightened.

  LOS MUERTOS

  Cindy returns home after her fourth straight night of eating dinner at Abyssinia, quite possibly the best Ethiopian restaurant outside of Ethiopia itself. She’d never eaten nor had any desire to eat Ethiopian food before moving to New York, and only tried the restaurant initially because she found herself living a few blocks up from its small, nondescript storefront on West 135th Street. Now she’s thoroughly addicted, and eats her weight in lentil-filled sambusa on a weekly basis.

  Cindy’s condo is comfortable, even luxurious. It’s unburdened by tchotchkes, or even more personal mementos. She’d wanted, initially, to settle in an older, more historic building, but the steadily shifting demographics in central Harlem (which includes Cindy seeing depressingly fewer black faces than she expected) made the hunt frustrating. In the end she bought in one of the many burgeoning condo developments that dominate the landscape, not only replacing ornate pre-war co-ops with travertine and marble and perfectly square drywall, but erasing the history of the neighborhood and the identity of the people who built and sustained it.

  Cindy enters her unit with two large shopping bags and a small plastic one, its handles tied together around the container of leftovers from the restaurant. The latter she stashes quickly in her refrigerator. The other two she carries into the bedroom.

  She sets the shopping bags on her bed. From the first she removes a long, carefully wrapped parcel.

  She’s generally thrifty to a fault, forgoing lavish meals, transportation, entertainment, or even amenities like a private sauna or a big-screen TV.

  Cindy does, however, cultivate two expensive vices: antique weapons and designer fashion.

  She tears away the parcel’s wrapping to reveal a beautiful example of eighteenth-century British naval boarding axes, purchased from an auction house in SoHo that afternoon. Cindy runs her hands over the wood grain, around the simple wedge shape of the axe head.

  She’s already prepared a spot on the far wall, which is dominated by her collection of fighting axes, tomahawks, and several smaller blades.

  Cindy hangs the boarding axe in its chosen spot and stands back to admire her work.

  Several moments later she returns to the other shopping bag and withdraws several shoe boxes bearing the Kate Dégradé logo and a single Philipp Plein wrap gown the color of Bordeaux wine, carefully preserved in plastic.

  She trains with the weapons often and with great joy in the guest room she’s converted into a modest dojo, covering the space where a bed might go with tatami mats.

  The clothes, shoes, boots, and other accessories remain untouched and in perfect, alphabetized order throughout several closets, the main one on the other side of her bed.

  She’s never worn any of it, not a single item, not even on special occasions or to formal events (not that she attends many of those).

  She simply never learned how. Raised by a single father and with three brothers there was no one to make such things a priority, let alone teach her. Cindy wasn’t even aware of fashion or aesthetics until she was well into her twenties, and despite falling deeply in love with both, she’s never developed a context for it in her very practical, utilitarian world. While she adores the fantasy of it, the reality of stepping out into everyday life bereft of her usual uniform doesn’t fit her perception of herself.

  Still, it remains a quiet passion her job affords her the opportunity to indulge herself in at will. She also follows a wealth of fashion blogs, Twitters, and Tumblrs. She’s seen every season of Project Runway.

  Occasionally Cindy will even hold an outfit in front of her and look into the mirror, or wear the shoes around her condo while she’s relaxing. She loves the feel of an Inbal Dror evening gown against her skin as much as the wood of an ancient battle axe handle in her hand, but in the same way she’d never wield her antique weapons out in the field, she’d never leave her condo in anything other than her surplus BDU pants, tank top, boots, and a sports bra.

  The thought of pieces from either of her collections being damaged or ruined is as distasteful to Cindy as what other people might assume about her if they saw her with or in those pieces.

  She hears her phone’s default ring and realizes she left it in the living room.

  Walking briskly from the bedroom and retrieving it, she smiles when she sees Ritter’s name on her smart phone’s screen.

  He’s probably drunk. He’ll often drunk-dial her to explain some fight scene in whatever movie he’s watching and why it works or doesn’t.

  The boy has a charm despite himself, she always thinks.

  Cindy answers the call.

  “Cin, the Easter Bunny just tried to whack me,” Ritter informs her without preamble. “Clear out of your apartment now and muster with the team at Sin du Jour.”

  “What in th
e pan-fried hell are you—”

  Cindy stops talking and holds the phone away when she sees the first giant flaming pumpkin about to smash through her living room window.

  She sees it, even if she can’t yet fully reconcile that’s what it is.

  As the glass shatters she’s preparing to dive onto her couch. Every part of her avoids the gargantuan flaming gourd except for her hand. The pumpkin knocks the phone from it, melting the small illuminated screen, and sears the meat of her palm.

  She clutches her hand against her abdomen in shock and surprise, watching as a broad, dark figure sails through the window, breaking away what glass is left.

  Black, rotted robes flit around a headless body. It hovers there in her living room, levitating several feet off the carpet and away from the window it just destroyed.

  Cindy quickly observes it’s less a “body” underneath the cloak and capes and more of a skeleton.

  One fleshless hand holds aloft a jack-o’-lantern carved with a classic, jagged-tooth visage.

  The jack-o’-lantern is alive.

  She knows because it begins laughing at her.

  The thing’s other skeletal hand reaches inside its cloak and pulls out another, uncarved pumpkin.

  It quickly and magically comes aflame.

  She dives onto her couch, narrowly avoiding the absurd yet deadly projectile.

  Cindy bolts from the couch and slips deftly around the corner of the living room into the hallway.

  She can hear the horror-movie-villain laughter booming behind her, following.

  In her bedroom, Cindy grabs a custom RMJ Shrike tomahawk with one hand and a used Vietnam War–era Peter LaGana tactical tomahawk with the other, ignoring the burning pain in it.

  She turns back toward the bedroom door just as the Great Pumpkin or whoever-the-fuck-it’s-supposed-to-be hurls another flaming pumpkin at her.

  Cindy swings the Shrike, slicing through it cleanly and sending the two halves breaking apart against opposite walls, showering herself with orange muck and seed-dappled tendrils.

  In almost the same motion she cocks the hand holding the LaGana tomahawk and launches it at Jack Skeleton. The slender axe flies end over end until the blade sinks into the middle of the thing’s chest.

  The creature jilts backward a full step, but that’s pretty much the totality of the normally fatal blow’s impact.

  The jack-o’-lantern perpetually perched in its right hand laughs a shrill, terrifying laugh at her.

  Its host reaches under its rotted cloaks and produces another pumpkin, which magically comes aflame.

  Cindy instinctively dives below the side of her bed, narrowly avoiding the thing as it goes sailing over her in midair.

  Cindy lands on the carpet unharmed.

  However, the flaming pumpkin explodes in the recesses of the closet behind her, incinerating thousands upon thousands of dollars in beloved high fashion.

  Cindy’s head pops up above the bed.

  She is lightning moonshine pissed.

  “Oh-no-you-motherfucking-did-not-you-goat-shit-veined-sack-of-mule-dung—”

  The rest of the rapid-fire curses degenerate into a guttural war cry as she leaps up and jumps onto the bed, using it and her momentum like a trampoline to launch herself directly at the creature that’s just destroyed her precious babies.

  The thing doesn’t have time to ready another pumpkin bomb.

  The jack-o’-lantern’s laughter turns into a surprised, panicked shriek as Cindy, both hands wrapped around the handle of the tomahawk, brings its blade down into its thick orange hide, obliterating it in the skeletal creature’s hand.

  The shriek twists into a sound of intense pain and then ceases altogether.

  The eviscerated body holding the jack-o’-lantern loses whatever spark animated it to begin with, collapsing to the carpet, lifeless and inert.

  The remains of the chopped jack-o’-lantern roll away from its spindly bone perch.

  Cindy stomps on it with her booted foot, still cursing and shouting, until she realizes she’s only further ruining carpet she’ll have to pay to replace.

  She stops.

  She stands there, shoulders rising and falling with every heavy breath, staring at the carnage. Then she remembers/realizes her closet is on fire. Cindy dashes to the kitchen and retrieves the fire extinguisher she keeps under the sink. It takes her a full minute to eradicate all the flames.

  Everything in the closet is ruined and the walls surrounding it are burnt black. She wishes with everything she is that she could kill that fucking thing again, several times, but for now there’s nothing to be done.

  Twenty minutes later Cindy is sitting on the lid of the toilet in her master bathroom, securing a medical Velcro patch on the bandage wound tightly and expertly around her burnt hand. A first-aid kit is open beside her on the sink.

  The sound of her front door being kicked open is followed immediately by Ritter’s voice calling her name, which is the only reason Cindy sighs instead of bolts to her feet.

  “I’m in here!” she yells.

  Ritter is in her bathroom in three seconds flat.

  “Did you kick in my door?” she asks him irritably, ignoring the slightly startled look on his face.

  “Uh. Yeah.”

  “Did knocking not occur to you at any point?”

  “Sorry.”

  Cindy shakes her head. “It’s all right. Don’t mean to give you shit. What’s happening?”

  “It’s a hit,” Ritter says. “We’re all being targeted. No one’s answering phones. We have to go. Now.”

  Cindy nods, steeling herself and rising to her feet.

  “Who’s targeting us?” she asks.

  Ritter is already out the door of the bathroom when he calls back to her, nonplussed: “Hell.”

  ROANOKE

  Hara owns a formerly abandoned factory in one of the worst neighborhoods in the South Bronx. He occupies the second floor as his living space, and if Ritter and Cindy’s lavish homes can be called “Spartan,” the appropriate word to describe Hara’s home is “barren.” He sleeps on several bare mattresses all pushed together on the immaculately clean floor. The only furniture is a milk crate filled with paperback books new and old and covering a variety of esoteric subjects.

  One of the few non-work-related sentences he’s ever spoken to Ritter was to express his dislike of owning anything that can’t be carried on a horse.

  The first floor of the converted factory is what shines. Hara has turned it into something like an eclectic children’s museum. Most of it is dominated by a dojo in which he teaches local and other borough kids a variety of martial arts ranging from kyokushin karate to kurash (a Turkic form of wrestling in which competitors grapple with each other by sashes worn around the waist; always a good bloodless way to squash the inevitable beefs that arise between children).

  Most of the kids, of course, come to learn how to fight.

  Many end up staying to learn what else Hara has to teach.

  He has stations erected throughout the back of the space, all of which he built himself. There’s a puppet theater where he stages small historical plays (no one knows, but Hara carves all of the delicate, shockingly accurate puppets himself, as well). There are language and technology labs. There are metal and woodworking shops where the kids can build anything they can imagine. There’s a reading room and a sewing room (the boys are always tentative, even crude about it until Hara hunkers over one of the vintage machines and begins stitching his own clothing).

  All are welcome, free of charge and at any hour, as long as they respect Hara’s one very simple rule: Treat all property and people the way you wish to be treated.

  Everyone gets a second chance when they break that rule the first time.

  A third chance is rarely required.

  Likewise, Hara has only had one incident of vandalism and theft. The police never found the perpetrators. The reason they never found them quickly circulated throughout the neighborhoo
d and beyond.

  No one has violated the sanctity of the space since.

  Hara naturally gets a lot of questions about himself. He answers few of them. No one is even sure what ethnicity he is or isn’t, and that may be a reason he’s so readily accepted by all.

  Ritter and Cindy arrive at the factory to find a gaping hole ripped in the heavy metal hanging door that serves as the main entrance. What appear to be golf ball–sized bullet holes pockmark the area around it. The smell of burnt metal lingers on the air, and some of the depressions are still smoking.

  Still, there’s nothing but silence beyond.

  They quickly run inside through the largest hole in the door.

  The two find Hara as they usually find him here, standing stoically by himself on the large sparring mat in the center of the space, lost in whatever complex multitasking his mind occupies itself with while the rest of his mountainous form conserves energy.

  There are a couple of key differences, however.

  Hara is slathered in what would look like blood, except it’s dark green, more like sludge in texture, and stinks inhumanly.

  The other unusual element is the pile of mostly decapitated, far-rotting corpses at his feet all dressed like pilgrims from a period film about early American colonization, complete with giant belt buckles and stovepipe hats (which many of the lopped-off, rotted heads are still wearing).

  There are muskets with their muzzles flared like Victrola horns scattered about the mat.

  Like the holes in the main door, some of them are still smoking.

  Hara’s breathing is only slightly elevated, and he’s still holding the head of one of the rotted corpses by its greasy hair in one hand.

  “Zombie pilgrims?” Cindy asks, surveying the carnage. “For real, though?”

  “Better than a giant goddamn turkey, I guess,” Ritter remarks.

  Cindy shakes her head. “No more big-ass birds. Not ever.”

  “Is this all of them?” Ritter asks Hara.

  The giant nods.

  “All right. Hose yourself down and meet us at Sin du Jour. We’re going for Moon. There’s a lot more going on.”

  Hara nods again.

  Ritter turns and heads back out the door, Cindy at his flank.