Monster City

by Kevin Wright

  “I’m sorry Svetlana, I — holy shit!” he yelled, as a pimp, bat in hand, burst through the door.

  “What is this!?” the pimp bellowed, a metal tooth gleaming in his mouth. “Whose blood?” he screamed, but he wasn’t interested in an answer, for he set about whacking Peter in a terrible pimp fury.

  “Ivan will kill you. He has strength of ten pimps!”

  Falling back against the onslaught of the vicious pimp, Peter tripped into the nightstand, knocking over the lamp. Its dim half-light winked out with a spark.

  “I’m sorry!” Peter scrambled to his feet, knocking over a lamp.

  “Whack him, Ivan!” Svetlana screamed.

  Ivan whacked him. Repeatedly, with the whacking-fury only a pimp defending its hoes can muster.

  “Die you bitch mother-fucker!”

  Whack!

  Peter grabbed the bat as it banged next to his head, and pulled himself up, only to be whipped bouncing across the bed on Ivan’s back swing.

  With a crash, he landed on the floor, and his own fury tore open, awake, alive, aware as his sense of horror and sorrow boiled away into nothing.

  Ivan charged round the bed, shoving Svetlana out of his way, cocked the bat back and stopped. “Shit,” he said.

  The gun was in Peter’s hand, cocked and trembling in full anticipation of death. In an instant, the pimp’s fury yellowed to fear. The bat dropped, and he retreated, hands up, pursued step for step until his back hit the wall.

  Rage without trace of sanity boiled in Peter’s black eyes, ash coursing from his mouth like smoke from a stack.

  “Please, no,” Ivan whimpered, eyes clamped shut.

  Teeth gritted vise-wise in a savage jagged gash, Peter drove forward, his gun pressing into the pimp’s skull, pressing until blood started to ooze down Ivan’s forehead in a thin trickle, bisecting his face until his forehead, around the gun barrel, grew brown. The brown spread beneath the pimp’s skin like the shadow of tumorous tentacles, digging, pulling, rending.

  Ivan screamed.

  It could be heard for miles.

  Necrotic black flesh peeled off in flakes around the gun barrel on Ivan’s forehead as the brown cloud pushed from within its flesh and bone prison, ragged marks as though some great beast within his head clawed, struggling to burst out.

  Peter’s eyes were black as night. “RRRRRRrrrrrg…” He pressed further.

  Ivan’s soul screamed then, touched by some great black beast, and though Peter had never heard the scream of a soul devoured, somewhere in the back of his mind, dimly, he knew exactly what it was, and he did not stop.

  * * * *

  In the last instant, before unconsciousness stole him, and the tunnel vision rushed in, Detective Winters pulled his hat over his face and took a deep breath from the air bubble trapped within. Life rushed to his brain, and the screaming in his lungs abated. He opened his eyes.

  No lights shone above the water now, and Detective Winters, stiff, freezing, half-drowned, swam hard beneath the waves toward the riverbank. Swishes behind spoke of a worse fate than horrible death.

  They were coming hard.

  Fistfuls of slimy mud he grasped as he reached the bank, and it was satin, silk. He loved it in that instant, would have hugged it, kissed it. Each fistful he loved, but that first he loved most.

  His head shattered the water’s surface, and he gasped a mouthful of freezing air, heaven, and cut like a snake through the water, fast, smooth, silent.

  Claws latched upon him then, digging into his legs, as he tug-of-warred himself slogging onto the riverbank. Gasping, he lost, his fingers furrowing the mud in ten long lines as he was dragged back into the water, back into blackness. Clutching at mud, grasping at weeds, he turned. Amber eyes met him. Needle teeth grinned. Detective Winters glanced at the police patrol far away and let go, drawing his pistol.

  The head of the kappa and the river water muffled the shot, and Detective Winters’s feet tingled with cold and adrenaline and anticipation to be free of the black ink of the kappas. He crawled until he was meters from the water, his back against the chain link fence that ran along the river.

  In the water, at the bank, dozens of pale eyes regarded him, clambering up onto the mud like a pack of leopard seals.

  A collective hiss, in a rush they could take him, easily, but more would die, for Detective Winters knew their secret, their gift, their immortality, their gurgled curse that they would not risk, and so they came no further. They could afford to wait.

  * * * *

  “What are you doing to him!” Svetlana gasped.

  The ghost glimmer of reason left in Peter’s mind knew what was happening to Ivan, was horrified, but frozen, but that glimmer grew, sparking, flaring, glaring bright as he stared into those lifeless pimp eyes.

  “No—” Peter wrenched backward with two hands, one on the grip, the other on the barrel. “NO!” Peter heaved back on the gun, greedy beast that it was, straining to pull it away from the pimp. It was strong, though, and it was hungry, crazed, starving, and this was its first chance to feed in days. It would not relent, “Stop!”

  He placed a foot on Ivan’s chest and PULLED!

  “Let him go!” he screamed, veins standing out on his neck, teeth gritted, hard chitin scraping on bone, slipping, scoring, biting, “MOTHERFUCKER!” and Peter ripped the pistol bloody back.

  He fell.

  Ivan fell, too, slowly, to the floor. His arms postured decorticate inward, twitching, twisting, unnatural.

  “Jesus Christ,” Peter gasped, sitting back up.

  He sneered at the gun in his hands, a faint green glow oozing like venom from its barrel and chambers. Rage pulsed palpable from it; tendrils of it coursed into Peter, inviting him to feel the same, and he did, his vitals twisting into knots as it welled up in the back of his throat, choking him until he felt he could spit it out, scream it out, puke it out. He made to hurl the gun, smash it. Destroy it! And he could! He would!

  But he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He turned.

  “What have you done? What have you done to my Ivan? Oh, mother of God, what have you done?” Svetlana was sobbing. On the floor, curled up in a ball she lay there trembling. Eyes wide with fear were lost, roaming. “Get away from me.”

  “I’m sorry.” He stepped toward her.

  “Stay away. Away!” she cried as she scrambled back against the bed, pushing it a bit in a desperate attempt to escape. There was nowhere to go. “You are monster!”

  Peter started and just looked at her. Then he looked at the gun in his hands, felt the tips of his teeth with his tongue, sharp. She was right; he was a monster. He was a monster, and his tenuous grip on who he once was and would never be again had slipped, was gone.

  “What did you do to him?” Mascara scored Svetlana’s cheeks.

  Peter said nothing; he looked away.

  “What did you do to him?”

  “I don’t know,” he lied, not looking at the prostrate pimp, not looking at the woman. “I’m sorry,” he said again as he turned to the door. He paused by Ivan as he stepped out.

  The pimp was breathing. His eyes, wide in frozen panic, locked on something, something clutching, horrible, near. Peter felt for a pulse; it was so fast he couldn’t count it. The claw marks from the inside of his face showed bright red now, crisscrossing gashes. In the center of his forehead, the size of a quarter, was a hole surrounded by flaky black necrotic flesh.

  Peter had seen it once before. “Call 911.” He grabbed his coat, and then he left, closing the door behind.

  * * * *

  The trail ended abruptly.

  Detective Winters shivered, gazing east and then west along the banks of the river, but there was no choice. It took only a second, if that. Brudnoy would not have gone back in the water. The wind changed then, and Detective Winters could now smell Brudnoy’s passage north, back into the city. He had leapt the chain link fence in one bound. Detective Winters squinted. Yes, the depressions where he had landed on the other side
were plain. There was no choice.

  Detective Winters stepped back a pace, then forward, leaping and grasping the chain links as high up as he could. He pulled himself up. His shoulder, stiff and sore, burned, but he reached the top, swung a leg over, and let go. He landed with a thump and continued on.

  His pistols were in hand.

  The silver collar pressed at his side.

  He could smell Lord Brudnoy’s passage, could smell what he had been feeling at the time: a mixture of burning hatred, hunger, anger and confusion. Yes, mostly confusion, it tainted his every move.

  He had gone into the slaughterhouse district. Sliggtown. Bad.

  Here, he had licked his wounds.

  Here, he had marked his territory on a Mercedes.

  As Detective Winters followed the trail through a parking lot, back towards the river, and then along it, he sensed a new emotion in his quarry, urgency.

  Here he had doubled-back on his own trail twice.

  Rage overtook him here; he had mauled a telephone pole.

  Here he had eaten a German shepherd.

  Less hunger now…

  More urgency…

  Why?

  Here Lord Brudnoy had collapsed for a short time, exhausted. Detective Winters gazed up at the sky; the moon had set. And not far ahead, Lord Brudnoy had done something he had done only once in decades. He had become a man.

  Chapter 38.

  IT WAS BACK TO THE STREETS for Peter. With a black purpose, he moved now, darker than the deep night. Images, ideas, flashed through his head as he hustled along, head down, hands thrust deep within his pockets. Even this late at night the city was alive still with sounds. Cars screeched. People yelled obscenities, declarations of love, hate. Sirens wailed, and lights flashed, fending off the darkness.

  Peter saw none of this, heard none of this. He was focused now. Today he had tried to kill two people, to murder two people. He had failed, succeeded.

  Only through luck had he been able to regain some semblance of sanity, to hold himself back at that last instant, when it was already too late, when he had already given in, failed.

  It was this last reserve of what he called sanity with which he propelled himself toward a new goal. They were both dead, perhaps. Probably the pimp was dead, and if not, worse, certainly. That hole was deep. Until morning, just a couple hours away, he would cling to that last mote of sanity, and he would kill one last time.

  His decision was made.

  He walked.

  He thought.

  He remembered images of his family. When it was a family. They flashed through his mind along with the scent of Thanksgiving dinners and the bickering of his grandparents on the Fourth of July, and Trina, the day he’d got the balls to ask her out, the first time they danced, her smell, the way she felt, her laugh, her smile.

  “I fucking had her!” He kicked over a trashcan. “God damn fucking shit licking, FUCK!” He screamed at the sky, collapsing against a car parked in the street. Tears began to roll from his eyes as he slid down the car, until he was crouched on the pavement. He elbowed the car behind him in fury.

  Inside his pocket, he squeezed the gun until he thought his bones would snap, but they didn’t, they couldn’t. Peter crouched there sobbing for how long? He did not know.

  “Come on. Get up. Suck it up.”

  Finally, and once more, he pulled himself up, shoving away from the car and off in the direction he had been traveling.

  It was still dark when he reached it, the bridge. The moon had set; the sun had not yet risen. As he ambled along the span, he looked only down and at his feet.

  In the middle, he stopped. He looked up and gazed out over the dark waters sandwiched by city.

  He drew the gun forth and gazed at it, turning it over in his palm. He hated it. And it … it hated him.

  Pussywillow had been right. The gun despised him. He could feel it even now, pulsing, alive, a thing of dark murder, slithering, sliding, sickening hate encased in cold, black steel.

  “How could I not feel this before?” he asked.

  The gun did not answer.

  Hungry, it was so hungry, and Peter would not feed it ever again, would not serve it, and so one of them must break, and one of them must break here.

  “Flesh is stronger than steel.”

  No cars drove down the bridge. The sounds of the city were dim and distant, carried in whispers only on the occasional waft of air that broke through the walls of brick, concrete, and steel.

  Water roared by underneath.

  His stomach growled.

  The wind blew soft, but it was rising.

  Soon it was strong, and it tugged, pushed, howled.

  “I hate you,” he said to the gun, though still he stared out over the black horizon. No cars were coming. Then, raising the gun over his head, Peter slammed it down onto the concrete wall of the bridge.

  Slam!

  Slam!

  Slam!

  Bright sparks of green hatred flew like fireworks as steel met concrete, as steel bit into concrete like a devil into bone, again and again and again. Until he was breathless, Peter smashed; until his arm felt as though it would break, he smashed; until sweat caked his skin in a salt sheen, he smashed, and though he could lift the gun no more, he did anyways.

  Smash! Smash! Smash!

  Finally, collapsing, he caught himself upon the wall. He knelt there, cold, gazing at the water below, then at the gun, unscathed. A huge gouge stared unblinking out of the wall where he had done his work.

  “Fine.” He was breathing heavy, fast, faster, his heart pounding. “Fine!”

  Screaming, he rose, drew his hand back to hurl the gun into the water, far into the deep black water. His hand shot forward, and the gun, the gun stayed in his hand as though glued.

  “No.” He looked at his hand. The gun was not glued. It was that he could not release it. He couldn’t control his hand.

  “RRRRRrrrrg!” He pried at his fingers, but couldn’t open them. He bit at them, prying with his teeth! And still he couldn’t open them. But … he could cut them.

  “My knife?” He patted his pockets, but it wasn’t there. “Where is it?”

  The gun did not answer.

  “We’ll just wait then. Wait till the sun comes up.” Peter leaned on the stone parapet. He looked at the gun. He held it out over the water. “Be rid of each other then.”

  * * * *

  Detective Winters slid through the alleyways, between the ancient slaughterhouses, monstrosities of brick and steel and corrugated iron. Blanketed in a yellow mist of industrial waste, the monstrosities rotted defiantly along the north side of the river, and Detective Winters was one who dared learn what they house. It had not been pleasant. The abode of the leeches and worse. Sliggtown.

  Men that came here, heavily armed men, came here only during daylight, never lingering late or long, concluding clandestine meetings well before the sun had even met its zenith.

  Even were he still a hulking wolf, Lord Brudnoy would be in danger here. But now … now he was probably just a dirty old naked guy, his only defense being the fact that he was a dirty old naked guy.

  Detective Winters stalked on, gaining ground, tracking, Brudnoy’s trail growing stronger with each footstep Detective Winters took through keystone archways and dark megalithic crypts where not only bovine blood had been spilled daily in the last two centuries.

  Brudnoy’s trail told a different tale, now. A tale still of confusion, yes, but a tale now intertwined with fear and panic. He was a man hunted.

  Detective Winters hurried.

  Through tells and spoor, Detective Winters glimpsed a man lost, utterly lost, devoid of even primitive survival instinct. A man who knew not who he was, let alone where he was. Adrenaline alone drove him now.

  Silently, Detective Winters cursed the loss of his Tommy gun, now at the bottom of the Merrimack. His hands tightened on the grips of his pistols.

  Terrence Brudnoy was a man stalked by Detective
Winters and now leeches, many leeches. They were coming out of the woodwork.

  Detective Winters could smell them, now, too.

  He ran.

  * * * *

  The horizon pinked, barely.

  “This is it,” Peter muttered, squinting, for even the dim first light of dawn was painful. “Hope she’s right. Just make it fast.”

  Wasted, bruised, broken, he wanted it to be over. To be done. That’s all he wanted. He glanced at the gun in his hand and sneered, holding it out over the water. When he burned, it would fall. “Sploosh.” He smirked.

  He glanced down one end of the bridge then the other. “No chance for second thoughts, either.” A long way, either way. No escape, no cover from the sun, even if he did change his mind, which he was convinced he wouldn’t.

  He was weak, though, he told himself, and once the pain really started, once the process was in full effect, once the flesh was sloughing off his bones in strips, he might not be himself.

  His thoughts turned to Billy Rubin, didn’t need to see that, agony, pure, screaming, squishing, crying. He was a baby, though.

  A few cars rolled by on the bridge and the sky lightened.

  Peter readied himself. He pulled his coat off, hung it over the wall and did likewise with his blood-stained shirt, faster this way, sunlight directly on his skin. He thought briefly, very briefly, about taking off his pants, too, but dismissed it. There was suicide, and then there was masochism.

  Peter turned his head, covering his eyes with his arm, gun thrust out over the water, unwavering.

  The sun peeked above the horizon. “RRRRRRRRg…” It burned his eyes, then the rest of him. “AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! MOTHERFU—” he screamed as the sun clambered above the horizon and bore its blare through him, searing white-hot rays of pure pain flaring across every square inch of his being.

  Shivering, lowering his arm, he opened his eyes, forcing himself to gaze for one last time upon that which was to destroy him.

  “AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  Just then, a school bus pulled up.

  * * * *

  “Marduk’s balls.” Detective Winter skidded to a halt, reading the signs of struggle.

  There had been four of them, street trash, junky-sucks, moshers. Minutes ago. Detective Winters’s eyes skimmed over the scattered signs of ambush left in the alleyway.