Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (27 page)

Down the road, he eased the Bel Air into one of Idio’s narrow parking spaces. The lot winked at him in rainbow flashes, the oils in its pavement awakened by the mist and the moonlight. Prester shoved his pad into his pocket and picked up the cigarettes.

Inside the club, he pulled a pile of cheap placards from another pocket and started handing them out. They promoted a fake show — a band he’d come up with last year — and asked their bearers to spread the word through graffiti and Xerox. The show, Prester’s placard promised, would make their wildest dreams come true, but only if they’d spread the word.

At the bar, Fidence, the tender, thrust a meaty finger in Prester’s face. “Stop handing that shit out, Prester.”

Prester didn’t want a fight. He shoved the remaining placards back into his pocket. Later, he’d count them again so he could tell aLan how many he’d released.

He spread his hands placatingly. “Just want a beer, Fid.”

“Out,” Fidence reported sourly.

“You’re out?” Prester challenged. “Of beer?”

“Floated the last of it ten minutes ago,” Fidence said. “Damned if Bachs didn’t run inventory just last Wednesday. We’re gonna lose at least a thousand tonight without it.”

Prester’s shoulders tightened. First the cop, now this. It was absurd. Idio had never run out of beer, and Prester hadn’t pissed anyone off recently — not any charmers. Who’d be throwing wishes at him?

Prester looked around uneasily. “Well, all right. I just came to celebrate.”

“Go somewhere else, then,” Fidence grunted.

Prester left, unnerved. Outside, a rivet fell from one of the gantry-towers spanning the rail line behind the club. One of the metros chimed its way over the tracks on the other side of the avenue, its over-lit riders like stage-painted extras inside. Prester could see a few looking at him as they slid by.

He had to get to Sixx — Taylor was usually there, and he was starting to worry. Maybe Andrick’s charms were no good. Maybe he’d white-washed some old ones, and Prester’s security-rite was trying to harness dead wishes. He flinched. That always meant trouble.

He eased into his car, stunned when he glanced into his mirror to see a gutter-thread scenster standing at the back of the car. The guy looked like he had sheet-metal skin, like his hair was just head-rust and lichen. The kid’s eyes shone with the homogenized orange glow of the surrounding city lights.

Prester turned, but the people he could see crossing the lot looked normal — normal for Idio, anyway. Though he looked, he didn’t see anyone in his lane.

He lit another cigarette as he picked his way out of the lot, brakes squealing their distaste.

•

Sixx wasn’t as crowded as Idio. Prester even liked the music better — they played things downtempo here. He could only take so much drum-and-base from Idio.

Taylor was with some corduroy kids in a corner booth. Prester bummed a light from a passing bearded guy and hurried toward the booth.

He’d broken the guy’s lighter.

“Hey, Taylor,” he said, anxious.

She looked up, the light from her pad throwing venomous, green reflections across her glasses.

“Get that one moving tonight,” she told the others.

The kids slid out of the booth, clutching their pads. Prester sat.

“Hey yourself,” Taylor said, cinching her shoulders. “Get your rite off?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Money’s good.”

“You’re a goddamn idiot,” she said, the air-filter clicking in the rafters overhead.

He swallowed. “Yeah? Why?”

“Just wouldn’t listen to me, would you?”

He’d play along — decided he
had
to play along. “About what?”

She leaned across a cluster of empty beer glasses. “You’ve been took.”

“By the Levites?” He tried to keep his eyes out of the abyss of Taylor’s plunging neckline.

“Designed a security-rite for them, didn’t you?” she pressed.

“Yeah.”

“They already had one.”

“No they didn’t,” Prester scoffed. “aLan marked their entire grid before I even started collecting charms.”

“Yes,” she said, “they did. I tried to warn you off, but what the hell do you think I can say over the ‘line? Christ, they’ve got familiars listening everywhere.”

He swallowed. Maybe they had other servers, remote units that didn’t splice from the Pipeline as the main grid. He shook his head. Even so, aLan would have picked up their relays. No familiar can keep quiet for that long.

She grabbed his hand. “Maybe if you ever came out instead of just calling me when you need favors, I could have given you the jump.” She lit a cigarette. “Now you’re just fucked.”

“Let’s say you’re right.” He palmed the sweat from his brow. “Me laying a new rite over an existing one doesn’t mean anything. Nothing wrong with redundancy.”

“Except,” she said, exhaling rooftops of smoke, “you’re the test. You’ve set yourself up to be screwed and screwed and screwed. You laid out the code, loaded their terminals with your rite, and then empowered it with your own charms. Fine. Except now, as the charms’ suckers forward and sign and mail to their wishing-hearts’ content, they’re keeping your rite alive, meaning the old one will keep feeding off it.”

She took a drag from her cigarette. “Eventually, it’ll track the charms back to their source and decide that you’re a better target. Hell, it may have figured that out already.”

Prester rubbed his face. “Wait.”

She folded her arms across her chest.

“Who coded it?” he asked.

“I did. Two months ago.”

He scooted closer. “Well, Christ, Taylor — call it off!”

She lidded her gaze. “You think I’ve got ties to it? Don’t be a dumb ass. I took precautions.”

Prester could feel the tiny fans in his pad powering up, venting the machine’s mechanical heat. “How, then?”

“Damn you,” she said, scooting out of the booth. “Come on.”

•

“No,” he said, pulling away, “let’s take my car.”

Taylor reached out and grabbed his hand again. “You’re lucky you made it this far in it,” she hissed. “If you want my help, you’re coming with me. By now, the brake fluid’s gone, the plugs are corroded — who knows?”

Prester relented and walked with her toward the metro. He thought about the cop outside of town. About Idio. Taylor’s rite had figured him out — he knew it had.

“I can’t believe I’m helping you,” she muttered. The mist had congealed into rain, and it was now gathering in shimmering beads on her mostly bare shoulders. “This is stupid.”

Prester held his tongue.

On the sidewalk, they picked their way brusquely through the opposing crowd. Everywhere he looked, Prester saw people slicked by the rain, their wet skin and clothes reflecting the city back at him. Neon curves and brickwork smears gathered in the dampened shadows of the walkers’ dark faces. He saw the walk-sign white men pacing
through
people, stop signs in flashes across wet cheeks. Power lines and metro cables tangled in hair.

One walker slammed into him, his many-ringed fingers crunching against the pad in Prester’s pocket — he hoped the stranger hadn’t scrambled aLan.

Dragging him onward, Taylor pulled him through a trio of night-outers: long-haired girls in clean sweaters from the campus down the lane. They glared at him with eyes like street signs.

He couldn’t be sure if he lost his balance or if a nearby light pole had taken a swipe at him.

When they passed the entrance to the metro, Prester tugged. “Train?”

She jerked back, flashing a look of wet annoyance at him. “We’re walking.”

“Where to?” he asked weakly. One of his fake placards flopped from the crowd into a puddle at his feet. Absently, he slid a hand over the pocket where he’d stashed them, but he suspected that this one had come back from elsewhere.

Taylor dragged him without answer, slamming him into person after person, banging his shins against smooth-bricked, sidewalk flower gardens. As the traffic thinned, and the buildings stared less at the people and more at each other, Prester started to relax. Here they had shadows, corners and abutments and alcoves without neon, without windows. Places where facades had long since succumbed to the stains of old coal smoke and weak mortar. Prester imagined that these, in the great municipal decay, were only architecturally aware of
themselves
. Aware that, at some other point, there’d been others. A time when they, the buildings, had directed the realities in town. When the integrity of their girders and the strength of their re-bar had dictated at what pace things would change. Now, they knew only that entropy was coming at them from different angles. That things fell apart when they shouldn’t, that styles matured and moved on before their time. That, ultimately, they would only be roads.

Prester looked up, watching the rain cascade from a length of the Pipeline between the gutters of two buildings. Its insulation had been agitated bare by the data stream, he could tell — and when he planted his palm against a pock-marked ashlar to brace for Taylor’s sharp turn into the alley, he could feel the ‘line humming through the stone, animating the self-blind building beyond its time, into tasks it couldn’t contain.

He heard things walking behind him as they cleared the alley. Looking over his shoulder, he saw diamond-plate elbows and dumpster-green eyeballs sucked out of his view by the fall of new shadows. They looked now like their metaphors: trash bins and fire escapes. The dark places were groaning in the rain. Taylor’s rite was piecing its agents together with from the city’s dying body parts.

Taylor wheeled about — they were standing now in a bricked lane. Coffee shops and book stores lined the far side of the pedestrian mall, and oak trees stretched in stylized planters, their leafy fingers foaming with green-wet light under the glare of nearby security lamps.

“Check the air,” she ordered.

Obediently, Prester fished out his pad. Its face had cracked in the collision with the ringed walker, but it had life enough to glow aLan’s thoughts. Prester hammered a few quick commands into the pad’s rubber buttons, but aLan couldn’t detect the Pipeline’s wireless gaze here.

“Atmospherics,” he reported, looking up. Taylor was tapping at her own pad.

“Let’s hope so,” she said, her hair now flat against her neck, dark ribbons tracing the bluish veins just beneath her pale skin. Prester’s own hair was guiding rain in cold runnels down his back.

“So what now?” he asked, squinting.

Taylor cinched up her shoulders. “By now, your accounts have been reabsorbed — your new faces are gone. I expect your apartment might already have burned down, but the rain may have delayed that.”

“Christ,” Prester said.

She looked at him. “My rite is bouncing forwards and routing letters by the dozens every minute. It’s got chat bots spreading ideas in rooms all across the ‘line. It’s not that hard for it to get people’s wishes aligned,” she said. “It just has to encourage the right ones in the right order. I mean,” she paused, “none of the wishers knows they’re helping it get you when they wish for a shift in road maintenance or a clearing-out of the tenements on your side of town.”

“Coincidences,” he realized.

“Results, rhetoric,” she continued, waving a hand. “The rite can
encourage
them to wish what it wants. Vague is good when you’re talking about thousands to harness. The rite only has to harvest them up and send them where it needs.”

Prester laughed. “You mean at me.”

“Well, your work, really.”

He looked at her. “So why are we here?”

She pointed. Prester followed her arm. They had approached it from a different route, so he hadn’t recognized the place, but he could see it now. The Arts Council, smug and clean at the end of the mall.

“The collages,” he realized.

She nodded. “Bait and switch.”

Prester started dragging
her
this time. If the place was still open, and if he could find some ‘line for aLan, they might be able to reuse some of Prester’s old rites. Their effects had long since died off, and he could only remember a few of them: job opportunities, a nice table downtown — a carburetor with a longer life. If he could salvage even a few of the charms out of the old yarn-and-newspaper rite-maps, he could set Taylor’s rite on a dead trail, send it chasing work down causal lines that no longer existed. Like the buildings around him, Prester would decay himself out of the rite’s starving reach. He would reduce himself to dead art: a collection of strings and paper that had long since lost its meaning. A road that went nowhere.

“You’re thinking,” she said.

“My new face is my old one,” he said back, feeling everywhere upon him the harmonics of the rain. The sidewalk hummed beneath its aquatic massage, the gutters sang — the old buildings could hope once again that the sky might wash away some of their entropic scabs. Things were breathing while decay stared at itself with unblinking neon eyes.

He would kick his way into the Arts Council if he had to, if Taylor didn’t have any charms that she could work on a forgetful night watchmen and the rotation of the lock. And once inside, he would replace the chain in one of the place’s brushed steel commodes with his aged length from Idio. He would let visitors and custodians flush his old chain’s power into the walls, back into the art. It would buy the ruse some time.

“Come on,” he said, pulling her to him under a nearby awning. He held his breath, hoping that the cigarettes in his pocket would
still
light
.

Taylor laughed, playing along, and thumbed the cigarettes afire with her lighter. They smoked, safe for now, exhaling together into the rain. Giving it back what it was giving them.

•

Jenn Reese

We got a whole pack of demon dogs watches out for us, led by this fierce half-husky we call Taser. They hang around and eat our food, sometimes bring us guns and drugs in their toothy mouths — tails wagging, tongues lolling, and sending us in this direction or that, to steal or fight, or just to break.

Me and Keys, we climb the telephone pole. I can see him looking at the scars on my arms and legs as we go, can feel his jealousy. We get to the top and toss a pair of Markus’s sneakers over the wire. Markus got shot two weeks ago, and now his Nikes’ll keep the goddamn birds away from us and ours while we smoke and do our planning. Those fucking pigeons will tell everything they see to the packs of girls that gather where we’re not. But the shoes are like piss, marking our spot, and they got a deep magic, buried in sweat stains and dirty rubber.

We shimmy down and Taser is waiting for us, sitting on the asphalt like it’s some kind of throne. He wants us to do something. I feel Keys staring at me, can hear his breathing coming ragged near my ear. The dogs always come to me. They know I can get it done, whatever it is they want. I’ve climbed in small places and broken into cars and stolen for them. I’ve distracted the cops and the store owners and boys from the other gangs. I’ve sat out in the darkness keeping watch for hours and hours, and I’ll do it again when they ask me.

Taser’s eyes flash. His tongue rolls out over pointed teeth and he pants, grinning. When he gets up and trots down the street, we got no choice but to follow.

Keys calls back to the others, tells them we’re headed out after Taser. I can hear the pride and the fear in his voice. This is his first trip, his skin still dull and ordinary. Rick Z., who calls the shots these days when the dogs let him, nods and goes back to his weed. We made a big score two nights ago, and it’ll be another couple of days before any of us does much of anything besides smoke and eat. Even the guys old enough to catch pussy will keep their dicks to themselves while we got enough pot to stay high.

We follow Taser through a tangle of streets and alleys, all dark and smelling of drunks and garbage. Taser’s nails click against the black road. His tail wags from the motion of his jog, not from any real joy he gets from leading us this way. I suppose maybe he does take some happiness in us, maybe even some pride, but he sure as hell won’t let us know if he does, and not by some lame-ass tail wagging.

Keys is younger than me, but bigger. Taller by two inches, maybe. I gotta look up at him when I talk, but that’s true with most of the others, too. I’m shorter than all but the youngest of us. As the night creeps colder and we ball our fists at the shadows, Keys throws me a lot of looks, a lot of questions with his eyes. Taser never pulled him from the group before, and he’s as like to shit in his pants out of fear as excitement.

I don’t look at Keys, don’t tell him not to worry. I relax my shoulders, take bigger steps. This is my zone, and Keys needs to know it. Needs to feel it. Needs to tell the others every fucking detail.

Taser keeps on going, till even I start to lose track of where we are. The apartments flatten out into duplexes, the duplexes split into houses, then grow into bigger houses as we walk. The people change color, too. I never been this far from home, from the territory we cover. Birds fly overhead, and there’s no sneakers to guard us from their seeing out here. Even the dogs in the yards we pass have dead eyes. Their mouths have never tasted the cool metal tang of a gun, only some tasteless, dry-ass kibble crunched up from a plastic bowl. They’re nothing like Taser.

The sun falls. There’s growling in my gut from lack of food and too much weed. Keys is going crazy behind me, trying to act like he’s not. Taser takes us to a strip mall. Maybe he wants us to take one of the cars — there’s a sweet little Mustang I already got my eye on — but then we walk through the lot and around back. A streetlight sputters overhead, and it’s like someone keeps flicking the switch on the sun for the way it’s fucking up my eyes.

Trash bins and bottles, cardboard boxes and the smell of rotten fruit. The stuff we always find in alleys. The stuff that makes this place, no matter what neighborhood it’s in, more ours than theirs. And then, up ahead, scuffling. A whimper. Taser steps to the side and sits, tongue hanging out his mouth in that twisted smile of his.

I don’t have a piece, but fuck, I wish I did. Taser never asked me to fight for him, but there’ll be a day when he does, and I got nothing but my knives when that shit comes down.

Another whimper, and a gurgle. No thug in the world could make that noise, so we’re probably not headed into a fight. Behind me, Keys goes, “Huh?” But I say nothing. I got to keep cool in front of him and Taser. I take a few steps forward till the shadows sink into their true shapes.

There’s a woman, a baby, and a dog.

Woman’s pale as paper except where there’s dirt, and there’s a lot of dirt. But her eyes shine wide and scared, and she starts pulling at the baby.

The baby’s on the ground next to the panting dog — a brownish bitch, maybe a Shepherd — and is sucking hard against the dog’s belly. Goddamn nursing, is what it’s doing. Keys steps up, almost beside me but just behind, and mutters a bunch of the words I’m thinking.

“What are we supposed to do?” he whispers.

I look at Taser. Most dog’s faces are hard to read, except when they’re begging or humping, but there’s something in Taser’s eyes, something dark and tangled, that speaks directly to my mind in a way stronger than words.

Abomination
, he says to me.
Kill it dead
.

Christ. I suck in my breath before I can stop myself, and Keys notices. I turn my back to the woman and the doomed kid, and tell Keys what Taser wants, steeled for his outrage and his fear.

But Keys only looks over my shoulder, at the baby, and nods. “Yeah, we can do that easy,” he says. “No one around. We can probably do the woman, too.”

My palms are sweaty. “No, just the kid,” I say, not too fast, but slower than I want. I never spilled blood before, except with my fists or my feet, and I never killed. Maybe Taser thinks I’m ready. Maybe this is a test. I refuse to turn my head and look at him again. I’m not that weak, and I don’t want to look like I am.

Jesus, I can only imagine the scar I’ll get for doing this. The harder the job, the harder the dogs bite into flesh, tearing and marking and scarring. My arms and legs are covered in punctures and lines, but they’re shallow, might even fade away to nothing when I grow. Then I’d have nothing to show for this life, nothing to stop the others from playing with me like I was just a smaller, weaker piece of shit.

“I’ll hold the woman,” Keys says, again looking over my shoulder, “and you can take the kid.”

He’s offering it to me. He knows his place, and he’s respecting me, honoring me — not trying to take what he knows he doesn’t deserve yet. There’s no way Taser would have picked him for this job without me, and Keys knows it, is showing me he knows it. Only…
shit
.

I rub my palms against my pants, buying some time so I can think. I got my knife, and it’s more than sharp enough to kill a baby. No issue there, except for keeping the blood off my clothes as it dies. Keys’ll take care of the woman, cover her mouth with his hand until the kid is dead and there’s no point in her screaming. She’s got enough dirt on her to know how to shut up after it’s done.

But doing it. Jesus. I never slid my knife into a person’s flesh before. I thought about it plenty of times, while the others pounded me into my place, before the dogs started favoring me. But I always thought I’d do it while I was fighting — no time to think, just time to thrust. Slash. Twist. Pull away.

Taser growls, a low rumble that sets my teeth grinding, makes me feel like pissing in my pants. I look at the woman. She clutches that little baby to her chest, almost smothering it. The Shepherd bitch is still lying on the ground. I can see little brown blobs — maybe six — curled near her white-furred belly. Her pups. Not moving. The woman probably killed them to make room for her kid.

That makes it easier. She killed off the dog’s babies, and all Taser wants now is paybacks. Revenge is as big a part of us as the urge to find food or jack off. I take a step forward. That’s all Keys needs. He walks fast and grabs the woman. She struggles, tries to scream, but she’s slow and clumsy from whatever shit she’s on. Keys silences her with a rough hand and whispered threats in her ear. Her eyes grow wider, darting from side to side in their sockets like mice in a cage.

I wipe my palms again, swallow, step. All I can hear is blood pounding in my ears. I pull at the baby, but the woman holds it tight. Keys yanks her head back a little, whispers something through cruel teeth, and the woman lets go, surrenders as much as she has to, but no more, to keep on living.

The baby wails. Goddamn thing is heavy in my hands. Not real heavy, just heavier than I thought. Real and warm and breathing and smelling of spoiled milk. Ugly as sin, too, with its twisted up pink face, eyes screwed shut, and too-big head. But Jesus. It’s breathing and moving in my arms, like something alive.

I pull out my knife, and Keys heaves the woman back another few feet. She struggles, and I can tell Keys is enjoying it. His left hand, the one not over her mouth, is pressed heavy against her breast.

Then that fucking baby goes and opens its fucking eyes. Sky blue eyes look up at me, squeeze shut, open again and stare.

It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s not supposed to feel this way. It’s supposed to feel like you’re fucking the world when you stab someone. Like you’re winning the biggest pissing contest ever. Instead, I want to vomit. Maybe, even, I want to cry.

I step over the dog and turn around, so Keys and Taser are both in front of me.

“We’re not killing it,” I say, my voice growling out of my throat, my knife ready, hilt nestled in my hand.

Taser pops to all fours, his teeth bared, his eyes full of hell.

“What the fuck are you doing, man?” Keys says.

Taser turns his muzzle towards Keys, maybe just noticing him for the first time, and something passes between them. Keys hesitates. He starts to look at me, but remembers where I am, what I’m doing. Then his knife is out, flashing across the woman’s throat as he pulls his other hand away. A splash of red and she falls, gurgling, to the ground.

“We got to kill the kid now,” Keys says. His eyes glow like Taser’s. He keeps turning back to look at the woman. His body is shaking, vibrating. He looks like he just fucked the world.

Taser steps closer. He’s only a few feet of dog, but he feels like a bulldozer. My hand with the knife shakes. The more I try to stop it, the more it wobbles.

I drop down to one knee and hold the knife over the prone Shepherd. I keep my eyes on Taser. Keys moves, but stops at one sharp bark from the demon dog. This is between him and me, and he lets Keys know how it is.

Nothing happens, and so much. Taser and me look at each other, and I feel like all the heat of a furnace is blazing against my skin. I want nothing more than to look away, to lower my head from his disdain. His disapproval. His hate.

But Lord, if I back down now, then I’m nothing. Maybe not even that much. I stare back into those deadly dog eyes, and then, somehow, the knife stops shaking in my hand. I reach a new place, the peak of some mountain, and on the other side is calm strength to fill me up and chase out the weakness.

Taser stares at me with his husky eyes. He could kill me. We both know it. But there’s something going on here, something different. I’m not challenging him for dominance of the group. I’m just after dominance of myself. His power sears me, prodding, poking, testing me. And then, just as I’m getting ready for another wave, Taser backs off. My heart is beating so hard that it makes my chest ache. I lift my knife from the dog’s throat.

Taser turns, walks to Keys. With that lightning strike of understanding, Keys drops to his knee and offers an arm. Taser looks at me as he opens his mouth and drives a fang through Keys’s skin. Keys yells, part agony, part joy, and Taser rips his flesh, deep and true. It’ll make one hell of a scar. But it’s to remind me, as much as Keys, of this night. I’m sure of that as I’m sure of anything.

Taser’s expression changes as he looks at me, and now it’s disgust in his eyes, as if he was looking at trash instead of his once-upon-a-time most faithful. He releases Keys and starts trotting back towards the street. Keys, grinning and clutching his bleeding arm, stumbles after him.

I follow, too, a good number of feet behind, and drop the baby on the doorstep of one of them fine houses we pass along the way. I got no idea what will happen when we get back to the others, or what kind of a place I can make among them now, after tonight. Shame crawls over my skin, burrows its way towards my heart, and I let it. I fucked up and I gotta pay, maybe even with my life. That’s for Taser and the rest to decide. But if I live, I’ll be more me than I ever was, and that’ll run deeper than any scar.

•