John Shirley - Wetbones (27 page)

It smacked into Gamer then like a baseball bat: The realization.
He
was doing this to the kids. He,
Reverend
Garner. He was contributing. He had paid for the cloud of secondary crack smoke that descended now over that three year old.

"I wonder can you get you C.A. check now?" Charlie was saying. He was talking to Gretchen. "I mean in the fuckin mo'ning, can you get one, if you show you pregnant."

Garner looked at her. She didn't look . . .

He looked at her harder. She was pregnant. The 2nd trimester, maybe. Of course he'd known it. She was emaciated but . . . in the bathroom when she'd tugged those pants down . . .

She
was
pregnant. He was giving crack to the baby in her womb. He. Garner. Was helping funnel crack to the baby in Gretchen's womb; was merchandizing the misery of the kids on the mattress.

Gretchen was watching him. Saw the panic on his face.

"Let's go get a hit," she said, trying to head him off. "I'm fi'in to find this girl you going to like, she do somethin' for you fo' a ten rock -"

But he lumbered for the door. Pausing long enough to babble, "I'm sorry - I'm - I'm sorry - " at the children. Before fumbling the lock open, bolting out into the hall.

Gretchen and Charlie came trotting up behind him as he plunged down the stairwell. Into darkness.

Oh shit
. He was in a dark stairway in the Projects. A fucking maze the cops wouldn't come into unless they were forced to.

Feet and heart clattering, he descended into the stink of urine; of rotten chicken from a garbage bag someone had left on the stairs. He nearly lost his footing, stumbling over the bag, but found the cold iron of the railing as he fell, caught himself. A light came wobbling behind: Gretchen and Charlie - who was muttering "Motherfucking motherfucker tryin gaff me off, owes me some shit I done let him use my place, I fittin to kick his mo'fuckin ass," - coming down after him, using a Bic to light the way.

Then Garner found a doorway, was out in the open air. But in the midst of the Projects. He stood there gasping, pulse hammering in his ears, thinking he might have a heart attack. Trying to look for the street, but the concrete walls seem to melt into dead ends of graffiti and trash, wherever he looked.

Four men were standing together ten feet away, staring at him. They were all wearing baseball caps turned backwards on their heads and identical gold coloured suit jackets and fake gold chains and red laces in their sneakers. Project gangsters. "Who he wid?" one of them said.

"He ain't wid shit."

They started moving toward him.

Gretchen stepped out of the door behind him, and Charlie. "He wid me."

''Bullshit. He ain nobody. Fuck him."

One of them moved around behind Garner, as he was trying to decide which way to run, and grabbed his hair. That was first. Garner shouted in pain, and yelled, "Gretchen!" The gangster dragged him by the hair back into the stairway. Garner struggled, but it only made the pain worse.

The others had vise-grips on his arms, were all dragging him along now, though Gretchen was yelling in the background somewhere. Something about how he was hers, she'd found him, they had to give her some of this . . .

In the ephemeral flare of a Bic he glimpsed the place they dragged him to. It was a basement of the Projects. A furnace room, strewn with trash. Something moved sinuously in one corner. All thoughts of self destruction vanished in the prospect opening before him: He wanted to get away before they did what this room and this time and these people promised they could do.

It would go on and on . . .

He screamed and tried to wrench free but someone smashed an elbow into his nose; he felt it pop like a smashed grape. Someone kicked his feet out from under him. He could hear Gretchen yelling something; felt hands pawing his wallet from his pocket. Other.hands skinning off his pants. A low pitched grinding as someone kicked him in the ribs; a squealing sound as someone kicked him in the head. The flicker of a lighter.

"What he got? He got rock? Lemme see that fuckin' wallet, bitch. He got -"

"He think he goin somewhere." They started again. Starbursts, flashes of light that were the kicks to his head. Tasting the floor through blood and smelling hot piss splashing around him and hearing Gretchen laugh . . .

And it did: He'd been right. It went on and on.

10
Near Malibu

Lonny wasn't sure how long he'd been crouching in the old cactus garden between the main house and the smaller one out back. He'd crawled in on his hands and knees and nestled among the yucca spears and he had only been jabbed once or twice. He held the gun lovingly as a kitten in his hand as he peered through the bushes, wishing he'd never come, feeling sure that Mitch was dead. Not wanting to find what they'd done to Orphy.

How could people like this hang out in the world at all? Why was it allowed?

There was a light in the window of the guest house, downstairs. Once, he thought he heard Orphy's voice from over there. Some of the others came and went - just shapes in the darkness, some of them nude, some of them in sloppy clothes - and now here came four more, so he scrunched, down lower, biting off a shout when he accidently drove a cactus needle into his right arm near the elbow. Grimacing, he felt for the broken-off needle and plucked it out. He was going to lose an eye in here next. Had to get out.

But he was safe in the cacti. Maybe he should stay till daylight. These sick fuckers probably slept during the day. Or maybe they never slept. That wouldn't surprise him, either.

Two more of them went by, carrying something long and sodden that dripped onto bricks. What they were carrying didn't have to be a man's severed arm. Not necessarily.

They paused a moment, next to the pool. One of them bent and seemed to tease the surface of the water with the drippy end of the thing he carried in his hand. Lonny thought he saw something sparkle, faintly, in the pool, then, but he wasn't sure. The two laughed. Were they men? Yes, now, seeing them pass across the open area of the terrace where more starlight reached them, he could see they were white men, both clothed but one of them with his dick hanging out his fly - from here it looked like a little white worm.

They paused at the door to the back house - and both glanced over their shoulders at the cactus garden. A flash of teeth as they grinned. Then they went into the house.

Holy shit, Lonny thought. The fuckers knew he was there. They'd known it all along.

They wouldn't leave things like this.

Lonny crouched lower, got down under the curve of the yucca spears, and squirmed like a soldier moving under barbed wire, pulling himself with his elbows, till he got free of the cactus garden. Then he got to his feet and ran in a crouch across the big terrace.

He still had the gun, anyway.

And he had to know. He scurried up to the lower window of the guest house. The windows were curtained. He heard voices. One of them was Orphy. Sounding delirious. He had a drunk, disbelieving quality about his

voice and Lonny couldn't work out exactly what Orphy was saying.

He made up his mind. He went toward the door, circling the treetrunk-thick stem of the huge rose bush growing up the side of the place - looking quickly away from the yellow bony thing wired into the roses. (Bones with only the grease of a human body left on them.) Gun at the ready, Lonny walked through the front door of the guest house. There was a hallway, strewn with trash and rose petals. Beyond it, a sickly gray light from the hall corner.

The trash moved. Lonny stared. There was a man among the bottles and cans and old rags. He looked like a rag himself. He was crawling through the trash toward Lonny. He wore only bloodstained diapers. Baby's disposable diapers. Scabby rips all over his gray skin. He was . . . Lonny shook his head with amazement. He'd never seen anyone that skinny except on TV commercials about those starving kids overseas. A skeleton with skin shrunk-wrapped on it.

"Don't . . ." the guy rasped. No hair on his head. His eyes looking two different directions. "Don't . . ." The voice like a rustle of paper, barely audible. His body made a dry scraping on the floor when he moved a few inches closer. Saying, "
Don't let them do this to you
."

Lonny's mouth went dry. Instantly. He turned to run - then he heard Orphy yell his name. "
Lonny ya fucking . . . Feez motherfucker . . . Don't . . . Lonny . . . !
" Something skewed wrong in his voice - the words were pleadings, protests - but the tone was childishly happy.

"I've got the gun," Lonny murmured. And maybe they had Mitch with Orphy.

He forced himself to go around the corner and look through the door into the room.

There was one dirty white bulb directly in the middle of the ceiling. Under it was a kind of platform, about bed-height from the floor. It took him several seconds of staring to be sure that the platform and the chairs around it were made of human arms and legs. The bone-ends, the bits of meat at the join, showed it was real. They'd preserved it and crudely stitched it together and tied it up with strips of skin; clunky and haphazard looking, but it held together as Orphy thrashed on it.

Orpheus was strapped spread eagled, naked on the bed with the Feasters - so Lonny thought of them - crouched around him, or sitting in bodypart chairs. They were connected to him. Something like stretched-out bits of glue ran from their mouths and exposed genitals, into Orpheus. The stretched-out bits quivered and flowed, and Lonny could see that they were alive, that they were something . . .

Something like worms. And they were part of the people around the bed, half a dozen people including the guy who called himself the More Man and the little guy, the Handy Man, and a woman whose eyes seemed to shine . . . you couldn't see her face at all, there was a kind of gas mask effect because the transparent slick white stuff had erupted from her mouth to cover most of her face. The other worm things squirmed into the wounds on Orpheus's throat . . . Another woman crouched over his genitals, chewing them up, as a worm thrashed whitely next to her pink tongue . . . A fat man crouched next to Orpheus's foot; the ankle had been broken, a bone end sheering out through the breached skin and the guy was licking marrow from it. Orpheus looked down at the guy and made a sound of pleasure.

Orpheus made that sound?

They'd done something to him. He was writhing,

Lonny saw now, not in pain but in ecstasy . . . as the More Man used the severed arm of the security guard to fuck a wound in Orphy's side, the arm a dildo. Orphy writing in repugnant happiness. Feeling no pain while they snapped his bones. He looked invitingly at Lonny. Mucous bubbling from his mouth as he urged: "Git on, Lon!" he said wetly. "Take a hit!"

The worms thrashing and squirming over this feast. Not eating flesh but taking something - taking what? The woman looking up at Lonny with eyes that were glossy with sensation but something imploring in them too.

Use the gun on me, boy. Use it on me

Was that
her
voice?

Use it on me, Mein Schönes jung. The head. Shoot me in the head

Orpheus's belly was humping up with the movement of the things probing in him and he was way beyond yelling now, he was just staring deep into the lightbulb and going
"Ack . . . ack . . . kuh . . . ack
 . . ." as they probed into him, his eyes bulging, the joy in his face worse than anything else. All of them smiling through the wormstuff at Lonny. Reaching out . . .

Lonny felt a buzz in his head. A flush of pleasure.

"NO FUCKING WAY!" Shouted so hard he could feel something rip in his throat. And the gun came up -

Me, herrliches boy
 . . .

- but he wrenched the .45 away from the target it wanted, and pointed it at Orpheus. Fired. Felt it jump in his hand, glimpsed Orphy's brains splash. He fired it wildly at the others till it expended its magazine - with the last round, the light bulb exploded and the room went dark.

He threw the gun into the darkness and spun, careened into the hall. Sprinted for the front door.

He stumbled through the trash. Bottles and cans rebounded from his feet; he felt his heels crunch something that was probably a spine. A fading murmur of gratitude came from underfoot. Then he was outdoors and racing across the terrace. Someone lunged from the shadows under an oak tree and he felt a hand close around his wrist and he shrieked his best approximation of a karate yell and slammed a fist into a soft part of whoever it was. They went flailing down and he kept going, tearing through brush and feeling it tear through his skin, until he got to the black metal fence. He was over it in seconds, wailing one long note like a siren the whole way over. Dropped to the other side, ignored the pain in his ankles and ran on. Another fence. It was nothing. He went up it like a cat up a treetrunk. Dropped into the sand on the other side. Thought he heard a really pissed-off yell behind him. They hadn't expected him to get away.

He just kept going, shouting hoarsely, "Not me you fuckers!" He kept going, running at random into the brittle, aromatic brush of the countryside, until his legs stopped working. He fell into sand and rocks.

After a spinning while, the sobbing started. With that, came strength to crawl.

It didn't matter how he went. He just had to keep going.

Culver City, Los Angeles

Prentice had been sitting with a stack of books at the table in the Los Angeles main library since eleven a.m. It was almost two. His butt hurt from the chair and his stomach growled, but something kept him there. He imagined Amy saying,
You always did give up too easily, Tom. Like with me
 . . .

He shook himself, and focused on the book. It wouldn't do to let the Amy obsession haunt him again. He turned the page, and then he saw them. Sam and Judy Denver.

The book was called
Those Fabulous Hollywood Parties
. The Denvers had been known for their parties. Prentice was looking for anything he could find about them - he wanted to get some kind of impression of them, and judge how likely it was that Mitch was actually being held out there . . .