Monster City

by Kevin Wright

  Carmine suddenly stopped. “Hmm?” Something tingled underneath his left hand, pressed against the wall. Almost imperceptibly, he could feel something, a slight vibration? Carmine kept moving along the wall and the vibration became a soft buzzing noise, a rhythmic buzz, barely audible. It was … music?

  His gun was in hand, he noticed vaguely, even before the dread overtook him. From a large zip lock bag in his pocket he pulled a small loop of garlic on a string. He placed it around his neck. Meager protection, maybe. His revolver, loaded with silver-tip rounds, was the real security. He took a deep breath and watched the mist evaporate.

  The feeling intensified. The feeling that someone, somewhere near, was watching him. It sat in his gut, stalking him, at his back, his neck.

  “Shlllggh!” he gurgled, as something black and sinuous flashed for the briefest instant before his eyes and around his neck—

  It was too late.

  His mind raced for the half-second it took for his vision to collapse to a tunnel, to pinprick, and then to nothing. “Where?! Who!?” he screamed, but he didn’t scream, couldn’t scream.

  Vaguely, he heard his gun echo, clanging to the ground as he did so, too, and as he struck the ground, head bouncing off the hard floor, the grip on his neck loosened a bit; his vision clouded back.

  “You are the Carmine,” said a voice from above.

  “Huh? What?” He blinked and tried to push himself up, but couldn’t. Someone had something, a rope, maybe, around his neck, very tight, had him pinned on his stomach to the cold, wet, red floor of the meat room. The antiseptic stench burned his nostrils. Beef soared swaying about his head like flensed angels.

  “Yeah, I am the Carm … I’m Carmine,” he croaked. His gun lay on the floor, far, very far away. From the corner of his eye, Carmine could see a dark man in a red suit poised above him, the maitre d’, waiter. One of his long arms snaked toward Carmine and held him by something wrapped around his neck.

  “It is a ruhmal,” the maitre d’ said. “A silk scarf. I could kill you easily. And I will, soon. Your shakti, your power, will be a sacrifice to the Black Mother.”

  “I gave at the church,” Carmine grunted, but the ruhmal closed tight for a second, along with the arteries to Carmine’s brain.

  “Upon the demon’s corpse she stands and watches. Me, her very faithful son, sacrifice.” The maitre d’ pulled close to Carmine and whispered in his ear, “My name is Sanjay; I am King of the Stranglers.”

  Straining his eyes and neck further, Carmine looked the man in the eye. Behind him was a door in the wall, open. “What do you want?” Carmine’s eyes were wild, flitting now to his gun, even further away.

  “Do not try,” Sanjay said, “I could kill you with the flick of my wrist.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Carmine said, “saw this movie once, said fat guys are hard to choke.”

  “Apparently that is not the case.” Sanjay tightened his grip for an instant, and then loosened it.

  “What do you want?” Carmine said, blood rushing to his head again.

  “I want to know where the boy, Peter, is,” said Sanjay, “but first, I want you to beg.”

  Carmine commenced begging.

  Chapter 32.

  THE THIRD GRIMGORGON, the Kyberwulf, stood like a statue, a glint in his malevolent eyes the only hint of his presence in the dark. That, and the round tip of his cigar, the diameter of a silver dollar, which flared with each deep pull he took off it, lighting his entire torso and face with an orange blaze, also hinted at his presence.

  The Kyberwulf was fuming, literally. Smoke poured from his nostrils with each exhalation he took from the kielbasa-sized cigar, but also from his second left arm, the lower of the two. Steam, or smoke, poured from the lower end of his thick appendage that ended in something resembling a hellish Gatlin gun. It had been riveted searing hot into his flesh decades ago by the German doctor Hans Ulbrick von Stengler.

  The Kyberwulf had nearly died that day, long ago, forty years give or take, disemboweled, his arm torn from his body and ingested by the Hunstruck Wyrm as they two battled. He did not die, for unconscious he was found lying upon the corpse of the great wyrm strangled to death by the very entrails it had laid bare. It was the good doctor who had found him, who had fixed him, who had healed him, conjoining him and the gun, and who had, indeed, made him better.

  The binding of a demon, however, is not without risks, as the good Doctor soon found out.

  The Kyberwulf healed fast, and full, and when he did, when he was strong, stronger, of course, he shattered the pentacle the good doctor had bound him with, for it was flawed, and then tore the very bones from his body as he lay screaming for pity. The good doctor received none, for the Kyberwulf does not understand pity, and if he did, he would not condone it.

  Outside the Gates of Hell, he stood. Cracks in the stone floor emanated from round the giant’s feet, for the very spine of the earth cracked when the Kyberwulf chose to exact his stride upon it. Rarely does he speak, but when he does, it is the sound of titanic slabs of granite dragging and scraping slowly across one another, echoing deep within the caverns of the earth where no men can tread.

  The Kyberwulf fumed because he was smoking, because he was part machine, and because he was bound by an oath. He had served fifty years of that oath, and weary he had grown. Hateful, even more, the demon had grown. That is saying something, for demons, by nature, are hateful beings, but the Kyberwulf, even more so. Men who know not of the Kyberwulf sleep better at night.

  “HHHHHHHRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMM … ENTER,” the Kyberwulf rumbled, as a small crowd strode past. With his great upper left arm, he pulled the massive door open and allowed the five vampires in. Music blared and bass pumped and strobes flickered through the open door. The Kyberwulf knew them for what they were, though, for although they appeared human, one cannot hide their soul, even traces of it, from a demon. For that is their trade.

  He slammed the door shut with a thunderclap and waited for others.

  It did not take long. A young one, not nearly turned, soon showed up, moving apprehensively in the dark. The Kyberwulf squinted. This one burned with a strange fire, different, a fire the Kyberwulf had not seen in this world … something familiar?

  He let the boy in, shut the door, and then pondered.

  The Kyberwulf, third and last of the grimgorgon, slayer of the Hunstruck Wyrm, the stripper of bones, was the bouncer at the sassiest new nightclub in town. He wears a tuxedo to work at night, and it is tailored to him perfectly.

  * * * *

  “He’s been in there too long,” Elliot said.

  “It’s his Graceland.” Shotgun buttered a roll.

  “No. Come.” Elliot shot to his feet, his chair blasting back.

  People muttered.

  Shotgun stood. “What’s the matter?”

  “He’s in peril,” Elliot hissed, his brown eagle eyes latching onto the kitchen door. “Come!”

  Elliot was off, limping awkwardly, at first, across the dining room.

  Shotgun followed, stuffing the last of his buttered roll into his mouth, and grabbing his coat.

  Halfway across the room, Elliot unbuttoned his double-breasted jacket, and at his right hip and side was the hilt of the sword, Durendal, the blade strapped to his leg. As he limped across the crowded floor, he managed to unsheathe the blade from its hazardous scabbard without cutting pants, patrons, or privates, but it was a close thing.

  With a crash, the kitchen doors split like lightning, and Elliot and Shotgun poured through.

  The cooks scattered.

  Elliot never broke stride. As he reached the meat cooler doors, he wrenched away the thick padlock as though made of paper.

  The door was open.

  He was in.

  His breath froze.

  “CARMINE!” he roared, and it echoed. The walls shivered.

  Elliot could see nothing but swaying shanks of dead cow suspended from the ceiling, an impenetrable wall of meat. He could sense so
meone, though.

  “Carmine!” Shotgun slid in. He knelt, looking beneath the meat. “There!” he pointed, and that was all he had to do.

  Elliot, like a jungle trailblazer, split a path through the cascading carcasses, straight and true.

  Beef plummeted.

  “Help him!” Elliot leapt over the prostrate form of Carmine, towards a fleeing crimson figure.

  The figure disappeared through a doorway. It slammed shut. Elliot, full speed, met it with his shoulder and blasted it concave off its hinges.

  The figure fled in the dark, and Elliot pursued, his blade gleaming, but froze mid-stride when Shotgun yelled, “Elliot! Carmine needs help!”

  Eyes slits of vengeance, Elliot watched the figure disappear in the dark and distance for a split second before turning.

  Carmine’s face was blue. He wasn’t breathing.

  Shotgun knelt over him, examining the inside of his mouth. His fingers were pressed into Carmine’s neck.

  “He is dead?” Elliot said.

  “Not breathing.” Shotgun adjusted Carmine’s head. “Has a pulse. Can’t get an airway.”

  Elliot bolted to the kitchen. With his massive sword he pointed at one of the kitchen help who stood mummified in shock. “If an ambulance is not here in two minutes it will be a bloodbath.” Elliot turned.

  “His throat’s crushed.” Shotgun patted his pockets then pulled out a Leatherman and started unfolding it. “Fucking bastard crushed his throat! Going to have to crike him.”

  Elliot raised an eyebrow.

  “Cut a hole in his throat so he can breathe!”

  Elliot looked down, and pushed Shotgun gently out of the way.

  “What the—?” Shotgun said.

  Elliot raised Durendal in a two-handed grip, point down.

  “Holy shit,” Shotgun gasped. “I’ve got a — Dio. No! Too deep!”

  From somewhere, far down the tunnel, music wafted upon dark winds, and as Elliot struck down, disco rocked on.

  * * * *

  A haze of marijuana smoke hung in the air above the crowd and shivered with each boom of the bass that cranked so loud it shook down to even the most atrophied cores of the shriveled souls present.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Peter slid amongst them. Amidst the bodies wrapped round one another, amidst the fists and elbows that flew as people seized to the music, slamming into one another for fun, spite, and might: the mosh pit. A tangled mass of salty bodies slamming into one another, people flung each other into walls of flesh and stone. God forbid one fell to the sticky, wet ground, plastered with broken bottles and old moist joints soaked in sweat and beer.

  Is that her? Peter squinted. No.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  The lead singer, a pallid crack-whorish skeleton of a man, swathed in crushed-red velvet, clutched a microphone big as his fist and screamed with passion and little else. Wreathed in neon and strobes, like heroin gods the band stood on the stage amidst the waves of wild men and women and the others.

  Is that? No.

  Through the sweat and flesh of the crowd, inch by inch, and with as much control as a canoe in a typhoon, Peter fought. Faces and bodies of men and women and monsters flashed before him as he drifted haphazardly through the mess. His heart pounded with each boom of the bass, and it was getting faster. And with each beat of the bass and of his heart, his grip on the butt of his gun became tighter and tighter.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Okay, might be blond, might be a red head, probably blond, though. Very attractive, she’s very attractive. Great, they’re all very attractive. That was the full extent of Peter’s dossier on Pussywillow, compiled collectively from the mental stylings of Ringo Lister and Sid the Midget. Hell, she might be a six-hundred-pound fricking blond walrus. Well, no. Hundreds of blond women were cavorting, and most were very attractive, even the scary Goth chicks. Any one could be Pussywillow.

  Through the waves and jolts of the mosh pit, Peter tumbled free onto the other side of the enormous room and crawled forward on hands and knees. He looked up. The pale faces above cast buckets of disdain upon him. In neon, above the bar and faces, a sign read, ‘Styx.’

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Peter stood.

  Pale lithe women in tight black leather tended bar, while grim-trendy would-be sharks with overdeveloped pectoral muscles and tight shirts gawked on. In the midst of the feeding frenzy, against all odds, a bartender, an attractive one, acknowledged Peter’s existence. She smiled and was very attractive doing so. Leaning way forward over the bar, she wiped it down. She pointed up at the neon sign then shouted in Peter’s ear, “You need to forget!”

  “What?!”

  “I said, you look like you need a drink!”

  “What?!”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DRINK!?”

  “NO THANKS!”

  “WHAT?”

  “I’M GOOD!” Peter glanced down the bar and immediately looked the other way, and kept looking that way.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  “HEY, YOU OKAY?! LOOK LIKE YOU SEEN A GHOST!?”

  “I AM A GHOST!”

  “WHAT!?”

  “Nevermind!”

  Peter slowly turned and snuck a glance down the bar at the face he’d feared he’d recognized. Unfortunately, he did. Carlo, bad neighbor. Damn. Peter looked away again as Carlo scanned past, up the bar. Long red scabs across his face formed a misshapen ‘W’ up one side of Carlo’s face and down the other side. Winthrop, good boy.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Two men stood at either of Carlo’s tattooed shoulders, desperately trying to look aloof and cool. They might have been the two men who broke into Peter’s apartment that night; he wasn’t sure. Peter hadn’t really studied their faces, hadn’t recognized them as people.

  “Fuck,” Peter said; nobody even came close to hearing him.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Strafing down the bar, away from Carlo, Peter moved slowly, deliberately. The swarm of grim-trendies suffocating the bar was intent on liquor and sex, so the going was not rough. As Peter shouldered past some ladies, he felt a distinct pressure in the hand clamped around the gun. A distinct pressure of up-and-out, as though his hand were iron and some magnetic force were wrenching it up from his pocket.

  Peter barely noticed it until his arm was free of his jacket pocket, the gun rising in the direction of the bar, toward Carlo, where Carlo was standing, where Carlo was standing and looking directly at him. Flickers of recognition sparked in his eyes, then fear. The few people who noticed the gun ducked and moved, clearing a path between the two.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  “Jesus!” Teeth grinding, Peter forced the gun down, wrestling it back into his pocket. Peter glared at Carlo, who stood wide-eyed for a second, then grinned as the gun disappeared.

  Peter turned and walked.

  No one got in his way.

  * * * *

  The room was still part of the club but entirely different. It was not so dark. It was not so dreary, in the traditional sense. A raised checkerboard island of red, blue and yellow and green squares blinked on and off to the rhythm of the music, surrounded by a sea of mist. It was the dance floor. The rhythm was the same for every song. It was dance, it was, debonair? No, it was disco. The ladies loved it. And because of this, so did the men.

  The Bee Gees played on. They almost always played. No one seemed to mind. Some were the vampires who, nostalgic, had been turned thirty years hence, when disco ruled the charts, and would be forever drawn, compelled to such tastes and styles.

  Pussywillow, dread princess of the night, disco queen extraordinaire, was not one of those hopeless sots. She had been turned a few years ago and was here because she chose to be. She was not compelled. She was not compelled to do anything.

  How many years she had been changed, she was not sure. For once the intoxicating elixir of immortality sets in, even the undead kind, the first trait lost, not counting the conscience, if indeed the person ev
er possessed one, is the concept of time. Tonight she did not think about her loss of life, or time, or her questionable conscience.

  Tonight, she danced.

  Later, she would dine.

  Breath-taking she was on the dance floor; they all were. Like sleek cats they flowed, poised and balanced, no matter what their posture. Fingers skyrocketed up and down as pelvises jolted to the beat of the song, hair whipping about as they spun and twirled and ducked and dodged. The music took them. They took the men.

  Tim, Eric, Alex, and Jay were not so breath-taking, nor so skilled, but they tried their best because they wanted desperately to hook up.

  In the center of the dance floor the four vampire sisters converged and twirled synchronous in a rotating circle. Neon lights blared, arms shot skyward, cool mist rolled amidst a forest of high spike-heeled shoes and long, long legs; hips gyrated, swayed, thrust.

  The frat boys drooled outside the circle, jockeying for position like jackals around a wildebeest carcass.

  “How about now?” Mocca licked her teeth. They were gleaming white.

  “Yeah,” Cherry pouted, “I’m getting hungry.”

  “Uck,” Ilyana, Mistress and Daughter of Pain said, “frat boys are like Chinese food, fleeting satisfaction, and they cannot dance properly. We will be hungry within the hour.”

  “You’re so bad.” Pussywillow shook her head as she shook her thang. “Dessert? Already? My my. Right here?”

  “Yes!” Ilyana spun in rhythm to the music, grabbed Alex by the throat and dragged him like a polar bear dragging a baby seal, fast, hard, close, and as her lips caressed his neck, and her tongue felt his blood pumping fast and strong through his carotid artery, she stopped. Her eyes went wide for an instant as she glanced past Alex’s head.

  “Oh Puss,” she mumbled, her mouth full, “I do believe it’s our lucky night.”

  “Hmmm? Well…” Pussywillow looked past Ilyana and prey. Her eyes clamped to mascara-slits, as the young man who just entered the room picked himself up off the luminous floor and looked around to see if anyone had noticed him trip.

  “Gnar,” she said, gliding off towards him, followed by her three sisters.