Authors: H T G Hedges
It left a queasy sickness in the pit of my stomach and an ache behind my eyes. Then, with it, came another memory. A news report half digested in a split second before the bullet. Something had been burning.
It took me about twenty minutes, running all the way, to cross town and make it to work. I’d drawn attention cutting through traffic, barefoot, dressed in a pair of dirty med scrubs that, on some level, I knew I didn’t want to bring upon myself. But still I ran, relishing the feel of pavement beneath my feet and life in my lungs even as I dreaded what I might find when I reached my destination.
Rounding the last corner I stopped dead, staring at the gutted burned out shell that was all that was left of Last Rights, wreathed in yellow police tape, still wetly smouldering in the dull afternoon half light. A police cruiser loitered on the curb, two patrolmen drinking coffee and watching the street. I had no reason not to walk over and ask them what had happened, but something stopped me. I didn’t feel like I was operating in the same space anymore, but rather detached, cut adrift.
No survivors - I’d seen the words on the screen. Someone was clearing up a mess that I’d inadvertently started, I was sure of it. Someone had known where and when I was going to be and this fire was designed to take care of Corg and anyone else we might have told.
I realised I was walking in circles and stopped dead. Except, I thought, I knew Corg better than whoever was pre-empting us and there was no way he would have been at work yesterday with his beloved hearse in the lockup: he’d have been getting in someone’s face and giving them hell about his precious car.
Instinctively I reached for my phone, but it was gone along with my wallet and keys and other personal effects.
I started to walk towards Corg’s apartment then stopped again. If Corg was still breathing, his business razed to the ground, me shot dead at rush hour, he wouldn’t be at home. But I knew where he would be.
I changed course once again and set off in the direction of Quiets.
Stepping in off the street, the constant half-light swallowed me with pleasant familiarity, like an oily second skin. Quiet nodded as I crossed the sticky boards towards the bar, reaching for a bottle at the same time.
"Mr. Hesker," he rumbled from the shadows, leaning on the dark wood of the bar and fixing me with an appraising look, "Rumour had it you were dead."
"I’m getting a lot of that," I told him. He clicked his tongue by way of answer and poured out a generous helping of amber liquid into a heavy based tumbler, then glanced at me and added another few fingers to the glass.
"Look that bad huh?" I said and he grinned, flashing a row of perfect white teeth as I tried to catch my reflection in the mirror behind the bar, thick with the grime of at least a decade of miss-care. But the dirty blur looking back at me could have been anyone.
"Quiet," I said, addressing the barman the way all the regulars did, despite the fact it wasn’t his real name, "Is Corg here?"
He nodded. "Couple of hours. He’s out back."
I knocked back the drink in one and headed through a kind of saloon door into what we jokingly called the VIP area. The whiskey burned its way down my throat with a certain satisfaction as I crossed the sawdust. Everything felt different, the thick air, the smell of stale beer and cigarettes, even the whiskey.
I sat down and nodded at Corgen who stared blearily back for a few moments then lifted a bottle of house-vodka - stuff that would burn through the bottle if you left it long enough - and swallowed deeply. Liquid ran down his chin and onto his white shirt, but he didn’t seem to care. He shut his eyes for a long time, then opened them again and took a long look at me. I think he half expected me to have disappeared in the meantime.
"What the fuck," he said, "Is going on?"
"Nothing?"
He laughed then, half crazy and half really, really drunk. It went on for an uncomfortably long time. "Easy for you to say," he struggled out eventually, "You’re not the one talking to a dead man." Then he descended back into dipsomaniac mirth.
"I might be if you don’t take it easy on the hooch, old man," I said, eyeing the dubious spirit uncertainly. He nodded at this and put the bottle down. That in itself was strange - Corg never usually listened to me.
"You toasting my memory?" I asked him.
"Something like that. Been sitting here, waiting for someone to come finish what they started with you and that fire. Come pop a bullet in my head or an ice-pick or-"
"I get the idea," I interrupted. He grinned, but that grin quickly slipped off his face again.
"Danvers is dead. Everyone’s dead. We’re out of a job," he said, waving the vodka around a little shakily.
I took a swallow from the proffered bottle. It tasted like paint thinner but the booze didn’t seem to be doing anything to soften the bizarre sharp focus the world had taken on. I felt wired, buzzing like there was electricity in my blood. Ready to kick down the doors and start screaming. Like a coiled spring, all that shit. I took a long look at Corg as I drank.
He didn’t look so hot, I thought: still in his work suit but rumpled and soiled by smoke and spilled drinks. His face too held a drunk’s glassy vacancy. I sighed to myself; it was time to get him sobered up.
"Nice duds," he slurred, motioning with a jut of his chin to the scrubs I wore, seemingly fully taking in my appearance for the first time.
"No-one says duds anymore," I said.
"I do," he countered with boozy belligerence.
"Oh yeah, you bringing it back?"
"For me it never went away," he snickered, sounding a little more like himself again. He fixed me with a serious look. "You’re not a ghost are you? You know my views on ghosts, right?"
"Yes," I said with a sigh. "I do. You’re fine with them, in general, as long as they leave you alone and stay out of living-folk’s business. You’ve told me before. Several times, weirdly." He was still looking at me with glazed expectancy.
"I’m not a ghost."
"Good," he said.
"Good. Well, I don’t fancy getting ice-picked right now, so we’d better be getting out of here. If I can work out this is where you’d head in a crisis I’m willing to bet someone else could too." I stood up, "Bring the bottle if you have to."
Dark clouds were shifting round my head. "Storm’s building." He raised an eyebrow but I waved it away.
"Let’s go."
Corg lived on the third floor of a behemoth of formerly grandiose apartments, now forgotten and fallen largely into disrepair. The front of his building still boasted a derelict sort of splendour that hinted at the kind of luxury that it might once have contained. Twin columns supported the front entrance whilst ugly, element disfigured gargoyles leered around the eaves. I knew that once it had been a hotel, cruelly and mercilessly carved into flats by a developer with no interest in civic history.
I knew, as well, that Corg had chosen this particular block because it backed onto a district of warehouses and storage depots, one of which he owned under in a fake name and used to hide and smuggle contraband booze and, very occasionally, guns from across the bridge.
Coming here was probably not a very good idea but what was one more mistake in a litany of poor decisions? Besides, I thought, where else was there to go?
Corg fumbled with his keys. We’d made it up two flights of stairs and it had taken some time but he was slowly sobering up; his skin was waxy and dead looking in the pallid light of a bare emergency bulb, red drink rims framed his eyes. I wasn’t sure how much vodka he had drunk but Corg’s constitution was legendary, he’d be over it soon enough.
It took some time but he eventually found the hole with the key and I heard the mechanism click as the door unlocked.
"Wait," I whispered and could see in his suddenly clearer eyes that it had occurred to him, too, that there might be someone waiting for us inside. Apparently the threat of impending death can do the work of a pint of strong coffee and a good night’s sleep in record time.
I held up a hand to show that he should stay, took a step back from the door, then kicked out at it. It crashed open, splintering into the wall on the extreme of its arc, the boom echoing down the narrow corridor. The following silence stretched on nerve janglingly.
Without waiting I rushed the gap, flicking on the light as I went and ducking as I crossed the threshold. Nothing happened. Light flooded Corg’s long sitting room, shining off a lot of chrome fittings and one of those televisions that’s too big for any room, Corg’s favourite lounger sitting front and center of it.
"That was a bit on an anticlimax," he said drily, wandering in and closing the door behind him. "I need to take a leak," he continued, heading down the corridor, flicking on a rack of low lighting as he went and illuminating some abstract paintings in a broken line along the wall. "Find us a beer will you?" he added before disappearing into the bathroom.
Still feeling like something was wrong, I headed through the decorative arch into the adjacent kitchen and towards the fridge, working from the dim light leaching in from the sitting room that lent a low greenish glow to the room.
I was about halfway across the floor when the sound of breaking glass shattered the silence. My head whipped round meaning the zip of the piano wire intended for my windpipe bit into my cheek and chin instead. Clawing wildly, I just managed to get two fingers between the skin of my throat and the wire before it went taught, slicing into them and cutting off the circulation.
To panic would have been to die, instead I flailed with my free elbow, making contact with something that grunted but achieving no tangible effect on the wire squeezing round my neck. Changing tack, I kicked out against the sideboard with both feet, sending the two of us crashing into the opposite wall. We must have hit the switch because the lights bloomed into life.
For a split second the pressure on the wire slackened, and that was all I needed. Twisting away, ignoring the pain in my digits, I again hammered an elbow backwards, felt it connect with my attacker’s skull, then pushed away from the surface, pulling his weight with me. At last, as we were both sent sprawling over the linoleum, he lost his grip on the end of the wire entirely and it went dancing away across the kitchen floor.
I pushed myself to my feet as he bounced back into a fighter’s stance, balanced, knees slightly bent, fists raised. His movements were graceful in a scary kind of way. For the first time I had the opportunity to take in his appearance and he looked like he meant business; bedecked in head to toe black body-armour, boots, facemask. This guy, I thought, was someone’s black-ops nightmare.
And then he was in motion, jabbing two quick punches into my face that snapped my head back then a third from the left that sent me reeling. I cannoned into the counter once more, spilling shiny bamboo-handled knives from the block that skittered and bounced across the veined marble.
There was blood in my mouth as he moved in once more, confident now, an executioner stepping up to the block. His fist drew back as my own fingers found the cold metal handle of a one piece silver paring knife and closed around it. Corg was inordinately proud of these knives: I hoped they warranted it.
The blow, when it came, thundered into my face, the force of it swinging me sideways as I did my best to move with it, turning on the balls of my feet into within the defensive line of his fists, slamming the blade full force into his abdomen.
He grunted as the blade snapped against the enforced black body protection and bounced away, tip embedding in the floor. My guess was that would cause some pretty nasty bruising but nothing more.
As Black-Ops fell back to regain his composure, I saw his hand going for the concealed holster at his waist, caught the flash of dull metal as he thumb-flipped it open and went for his gun.
Without thinking, I leaped forward, lashing out with the jagged shard of blade still clasped in my hand, slashing it across his throat and slicing it open like steak. As the ardent spray hit the wall, painting crimson over the white paint, I offered a breathless prayer of thanks to Corg for the obsessive care with which he maintained his kitchen knives.
And then I was alone in the room, blood over the walls and a pool of it spreading towards my filthy bare feet. The air smelled of copper and death.
No time to take stock, no time and nothing to gain. I knelt over my late antagonist, ignoring the sickly sticky feel of the blood I had spilled spreading beneath my bare toes, and eased his gun from the holster. The cold, dead weight of it felt strange in my hand as I walked down the hallway, leaving ruby treads on the beige carpet, and fired a round into the lock of the bathroom door.
It was the first time that I had ever fired a gun, and it seemed odd to me; the way it jumped and bucked in my hand, the noise of it.
The door swung open on oiled hinges onto a strange scene, suddenly disturbed. Corg was on the floor, the stone tiles covered in shattered glass from the basin cabinet mirror that glittered under the soft light. There were cuts all over his right hand which was clamped around the wrist of another masked assailant, the twin of the one adorning the kitchen linoleum. This one held a knife poised over Corg’s eye in the gripped hand and had shards of glittering glass clinging to his mask. They both looked at me as I entered, intruding on their bizarre theatre.