Crime Rave (28 page)

Connie Jones, aka Console

F
itful sleep means wicked visions, the ones for which you’ve become known since your eye surgery.

This time you’re dreaming of a young woman, dark skin, long dark hair. She has a handful of books. She’s speaking a language you don’t understand, you can’t even recognize the script, but somehow you know it’s Czech and she’s in Prague. She’s on the tram, on her way home. A group of shaved-head neo-Nazis board the tram and start calling her names. Telling her to go back to India. They surround her, a pack of hyenas. She keeps her head down. This isn’t the first time. She doesn’t expect help from any of the whites on the tram. Romany are the most hated of the hated in Eastern Europe.

Her tram stop. They part for her. Follow her out the door. Now she’s getting scared. This is going too far, and she still has a ten-minute walk before arriving home. She walks faster. They keep up, Doc Martens thudding on the ground behind her. Still calling her names. A rock hits her square in the back and she falls to the ground, skinning her hands and face, books flying. She screams for help but finds none. Another brick hits her forehead, splitting it open.

The neo-Nazis drag her to a nearby park. They take turns beating her. Savage kicks and punches from brass knuckles and steel-toed shoes. She’s spared further violation. It’s dirty enough to them to touch her gypsy skin at all. They cut off her hair. While she’s unconscious they dig a hole. They dump her in it. Rocks on top so they remember the spot and they can come back to urinate on her grave.

She’s still alive.

You wake up with the taste of dirt in your mouth and an aching in your ribs. This just happened! There is time to save her! Get her help! You push the call button. Over and over, praying that it’s not too late.

Please don’t let it be too late.

6:30 PM Spruce-Musa Hospital

C
onnie Jones, the silver-eyed final survivor, pushes the call button over and over again, knowing that once was plenty but help isn’t coming fast enough. Nurse Jonelle saunters in.

“Hold your horses, honey! You ain’t the only patient we got here today.” Jonelle’s patience is worn thin by the wretched encounter with Countess Barona.

“I’m sorry but you have to help me. There’s a girl buried alive and I need to talk to the police!” Connie’s breath goes in and out ragged. “Plus, that guy in the corner is really freaking me out and he won’t leave no matter how many times I ask him!” She glares at the trenchcoated figure standing in the corner, arms crossed, a shape around him like stencil wings on the white walls.

Nurse Jonelle turns and looks, seeing nothing.
Oh Lord. Not another one,
remembering the ruckus when they arrested the DJ earlier. “You get out of here!” She says anyway, humoring the girl, making shoo gestures into the corner with her hands.

“And don’t come back!” Connie says as the man shimmers and disappears. “Oh, thank you, Nurse. He was creeping me out, just staring at me. Who was that?”

Nurse Jonelle is not even going where invisible men live. She clears her throat, avoiding the question altogether. “So, what was this about someone buried alive?”

“A girl was walking home, through a wooded area, and these Nazi dudes attacked her and buried her alive. Someone needs to go help her!” Connie’s eyes plead
Believe me!

“Honey, you do know that they dug you up out of that rubble right? I think you were just having a bad dream. Maybe even a memory.” Nurse Jonelle fiddles with the IV drip Connie has dislodged with her violent dreaming.

“Yes, they told me,” Connie says, “but I swear it wasn’t me in the dream. It was in Prague, that’s especially how I know.”

“Prague, Nebraska?” Nurse Jonelle has a cowboy cousin there.

“No. The Czech Republic!” Connie wrings her hands, using the sheet as a buffer.

Nurse Jonelle looks confused. “I think we’re gonna need to schedule an MRI for you, hon. I’ll just go and page the doctor.”

“Nurse!” Connie is frantic. “Please, no, I need the police!”

Nurse Jonelle humors her again and leaves the room. Connie goes over what she saw in her vision: the girl, long dark hair, dark skin, olive eyes, a gypsy. The men, five of them, neo-Nazis. Burying her, loading her grave down with stones. Horrifying.
Dammit, where’s my laptop, I could find that girl and help her myself!
Though she knows she really couldn’t. Even her hacking skills are insufficient to stop a murder or dig a woman halfway across the world out of a shallow grave.

Connie stews in her bed, plotting an escape, when Detectives Red Feather and Günn knock on her door.

“Detectives, thank God! I need to report a crime. A girl was beaten and buried alive by some skinheads in Prague! I dreamed it, and she’s dying!”
Please, someone, believe me!
her eyes scream.

Red Feather feels goosebumps break out over every inch of his body. “Do you often have dreams that come true?”

“All the time! Please, help.” Connie reaches out to the detective, who sits on the edge of her bed and takes her hand.

Red Feather smiles. “Me too. Tell me what you know.”

Connie begins relaying the dream from the beginning. Red Feather takes notes in his pad even though there’s nothing the LAPD can do about a possible vic in Prague. Still, he knows well enough to honor someone else’s visions.

The winged trenchcoat figure, earlier banished by Nurse Jonelle, returns to the room, lurking in a corner hidden from Connie’s view, now focused on the female detective.

The Angel Curiel

Y
ou’re unsettled. There’s no reason for this girl to be dreaming about Prague. You know her visions are prescient, linked to her future and the future of people she loves.

Something is not right. Not right at all.

Kaleanathi and her minions are up to evil, you can feel it to the tips of your wings.

The Ethereals are still recovering from their morning’s exertions bringing what survivors they could back to life. Not to mention, they have Mother, The Ancient One to contend with. They’re no match for The Elementals right now.

If only you could find a way to harness the power of these extraordinary humans and channel it toward Ethereal protection, but every time you try you hit a wall. Kaleanathi. She’s machinating.

Nothing is going as planned. A thread in the grand tapestry has been pulled and can’t be woven back. You’ve all meddled too much.

You turn your attention back to the matters in your employ, right at your hands. The female detective is not going to make it unless she accepts all of what she sees, has seen today. Her brain already shows signs of spiritual bleeding from all she’s repressing. You try to help her, too, but her defenses are almost as impenetrable as Kaleanathi and crew. You haven’t the time or the energy to break through.

But you can still help with one survivor: The regressed girl, Una O’Doole, whose most recent memory is that of being molested by her priest. While Una sleeps, you right the crossed wires. When she awakes, she’ll be her twenty-two-year old self again. She will not remember the abuse she’d repressed so well before her resurrection. You rebuild that wall yourself. Let her have some peace. She and the others still have many battles ahead.

You check in on the other survivors.

The alien girls pace their rooms, they know what’s coming for them.

The vampire drinks his ninth blood bag, feverish with addiction. This wasn’t supposed to happen! He was the prophet, that’s why you brought him back. But now he’s again broken. With every blood bag he’s further removed from his true self. You put him to sleep and try filter out the poisons in his system. It doesn’t work.

You watch—again helpless—as an evil woman removes the cyclops from the protective sphere. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. Why isn’t there anything you can do to stop it?

The circle is crumbling. The darker future you’ve seen in your nightmares has already begun unfolding and you are, for the first time in your angelic existence, completely and utterly powerless.

6:40 PM The Barona Estate

L
ily and the Countess Barona arrive at Tartarus—the Countess’s vast and well-fortified property—automatic locks clicking as Barona’s chauffer releases Lily’s door. Lily looks around, praying for an escape, but the estate is impenetrable, from inside or out. Lily isn’t the first to want to make a dash for it upon hearing what was in store.

The mansion itself is enormous, eerie, like it’s been set on fire and never repainted. All sooty granite and shadowy turrets. The front door is a toothed mouth, hungry. Janosh emerges wearing the black and white suit of the help, takes hold of Lily’s arm. Lily moves to struggle, but one threatening look from the Countess takes the wind from her sails.

How could I have survived for this?
Lily wails inside, once again wishing she were dead.

Entering the grand foyer, the sensation heightens that the house is eating her, drawing her energy, making her weak. The Countess Barona, on the other hand, looks in her element and rejuvenated by entering her far-from-humble abode.

She’s a goddamn vampire,
Lily thinks.

Yanosh brings Lily to the basement where workers have arranged a film set replicating a young girl’s bedroom, hardly makeshift. Professional lighting, a catering table, and even dressing rooms for the actors.

“Countess!” Johnny Teeze, the director, is a squirrel-faced little man with a strip of fuzz on his upper lip and greaseball hair. “How delightful to see you again!” He moves to kiss her on the cheeks, she puts one finger up to stop him.

“Do not touch me. Ever.” Barona sniffs. Johnny Teeze’s mouth curls in a sneer as he draws back.
Stuck-up bitch.

“Where are the actors?” Barona looks around.

“Upstairs at the servant entrance. Waiting. As instructed.” Johnny Teeze’s beady eyes are sunken in his face and a sheen of sweat breaks out over his high, pockmarked forehead. He’s high as fuck on coke, the Countess can smell it on him.

“Bring in the ten with the largest members. Into the gallery. Have them undress and I will examine them shortly. Here is the girl.” Barona snaps her fingers and Janosh brings the wriggling Lily forward.

“Holy shit,” the director breathes taking in the basketball-player height human cyclops before him. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“Quite.” Barona is pleased with herself indeed.

“This is gonna be a hit, I can tell you right now. You, little girl, are going to be a star.” The director, whose head only comes to Lily’s chest, reaches up and caresses the skin around her perfectly formed eye. She flinches away. Johnny Teeze frowns.

“Get her to costuming and make-up.” He claps his hands, beckoning his assistant, Sugar. Face blank, she obeys. “Just relax,” Sugar whispers to Lily. “It’ll be over soon.”

“Please help me!” Lily whispers, begging Sugar with her weeping eye.

The Countess roars, “Your job is to listen! Not to SPEAK!” Sugar jumps out of her skin, her face dropping blank once again, dragging Lily behind her to the make-up and costume department.

“Get her ready. I will be back post haste.” The Countess sashays out of the basement as the make-up girl/aging porn star, Jenna Juicy, fusses over Lily’s wardrobe: a schoolgirl dress, pigtails, knee-high socks, Mary Janes, and crotchless underwear.

“Please don’t let them do this to me,” Lily’s eye tears up again, smearing her makeup.

“Don’t you dare cry,” Jenna says, her voice ice daggers. “You’ll ruin all our work.”
Nobody was kind to you on your first day, so you’re not kind to anyone on theirs. Fuck
’
em, is your motto. Literally.

Lily’s tear spills over. Jenna slaps her good across the face. Lily cries out, reaching for her cheek. Jenna Juicy grabs Lily’s wrist hard enough to leave fingermarks for bruises. “Don’t you dare. Touch. Your fucking face.” Jenna finishes her work.

The costume mistress, Tawny Porthole, is kinder to first-timers. “It’ll be done before you know it. Have you ever had sex before?”

Lily shakes her head, nails digging into her palm so as not to cry. Tawny fishes around in her bag, emerges with a bottle of pills and hands one to Lily. She considers, taking in the girl’s massive size, and then hands her a second. “This’ll take the edge off.”

“What is it?” Lily blinks away her tears, not wanting another slap from Jenna Juicy.

“A muscle relaxant. It’ll help. Trust me.” Tawny Porthole hands Lily a bottle of water and watches while she drinks the pills down.

Johnny Teeze

Y
ou look around the makeshift set, pleased as the donkey in Tijuana live sex shows. You hate that the Countess won’t let you make this current masterpiece out at your lot in The Valley, with its perfection of light design and the myriad ready-made scenes in which this giant cyclops girl could become a real star, but you’ll let it go: this film is going to be your bestseller. You can feel it in your boner.

You miss the good old days when your movies were made on actual 8mm film and not this straight-to-VHS crap. So much of the artistry lost in the transition, as well as perception of your movies as cinema rather than smut. Good luck finding a movie theater that’ll show one of your works now. The world has moved on, and you do what you do to maintain.

As you survey the aging porn stars working behind the scenes instead of cunt and center, their faces and bodies visibly weathered from gang bangs and drug abuse, you feel grateful to be a man in the industry, and a producer at that.

Jenna Juicy has worked for you since back in the 8mm days, but after her anus prolapsed on set a few years back and she lost her looks from the meds and depression, she’s about as useful to you in a movie as a canker sore on a starfucker. You felt for her though, and that’s why she’s over there now being a bitch and doing makeup instead of on the street hooking or whatever she’d be up to out of your purview. You fancy yourself the good guy in this scenario.

You watch as Tawny Porthole, another of your butt babes from way back when, hands the cyclops a pill from a small medical bag. A trick she learned from John Holmes himself, famous for carrying a suitcase of meds for his co-stars to help them accommodate his fourteen-inch member. Nobody ever fucked John sober. Now that you think about it, the female stars are rarely sober at all. How many times you’ve walked in on them shooting up or snorting or whatever. You don’t understand why. Never did. Like they need to be in an altered state to have sex, which makes no sense. You would’ve given your left nut to get paid to fuck, but you didn’t have the looks and God didn’t see fit to endow you with a pornworthy penis. So you’re in the director chair instead.

Not that you’re complaining. Next best thing to getting paid to fuck is getting paid to watch. You’ll be getting one of the most memorable fuck sessions of your career in just a few, and you can’t wait. Your dick throbs with anticipation, and you wonder if there’s time to rub a quick one out before the show begins.