The Weirdness (30 page)

Come on, Lucifer
, he thinks.
Make me a goddamn monster
.

Nothing. He stands there with his fists clenched for a long second. He releases them.

He contemplates just using the intercom and seeing if someone will buzz him in.

And then he thinks:
Fuck this
. He returns to the van and pops open the back.

He rummages until he finds a tire iron.

The glass in the door is treated with some kind of safety film, so the first blow just spiderwebs it, albeit with a satisfying crunch. Nobody’s around to see this except a few Honduran guys pushing a wheeled cart stacked with a half-dozen Igloo coolers. They give Billy a look for all of about half a second before they write him off as part of the scenery: just another insane white dude. It’s a classification that Billy can live with.

He takes four more swings and the sheet of pulverized glass begins to crumple, detaching from the doorframe along one side. Enough that Billy can get a shoulder into the gap and push his way through.

He climbs the stairs, the tire iron dangling at his side, and as he climbs he imagines taking that piece of reassuringly weighty metal and swinging it at Cirrus’s skull, imagines the shudder it would make when it connects.

But you don’t do that
, he thinks.
You don’t just kill people
.

Shut up
, he tells himself.
You can kill these people
.

And that ends the debate for the moment, because he’s on the second floor landing and he’s kicking the door open, and right behind it is Anton Cirrus with a gun, pointed directly at Billy’s face.

“You’re trespassing,” Anton says.

“Call the fucking cops,” Billy says.

“I could,” Anton says, looking Billy up and down. “You’d go to jail. You killed a man. You’re covered in blood.”

“Like you’re so clean,” Billy says. “You shot my fucking roommate. I have a witness. You want to call the cops? Go ahead. I would love to see what happens.” Given the lack of subtlety of his entrance, he’s a little surprised that the cops aren’t here already.

“Drop the tire iron,” Anton says.

When someone has a gun in your face, you feel compelled to do what they say. And so he does it.

“Get inside,” Anton says.

And Billy enters the Bladed Hyacinth offices, basically a single room, dark at this hour, lit only by the light of Macintosh Thunderbolt displays running Cupertino-bred screen savers. The room contains six fancy Aeron chairs, each one stationed at a desk with a MacBook and a surprising amount of jumbled paper. On one desk, Billy notes, is also Anton’s duffel bag.

“Face the wall,” Anton says. “Hands up.” The wall that faces the door is all bookshelves, loaded with literary magazines and proof copies of novels, and Billy dutifully reaches out and gets a grip on the edge of a shelf at eye level.

“So, what, you’re just going to shoot me now?”

“Maybe,” Anton says, pressing the barrel of the gun behind Billy’s ear.

“Anton,” Billy says. “That’s not going to help you. You can kill me. You can kill my friends. But you can’t kill Lucifer. You can’t kill him, you can’t hide from him, and you can’t stop him. You already lost. All you should be thinking about is how to minimize your losses.”

“And how do you recommend I do that?”

“Give me the Neko,” Billy says. “Give me the Neko and I walk out of here. You never see me again. You shot my friend, but you know what? Give me the Neko and I’ll just look past that. We’ll call it even. I won’t tell the cops. You get to keep your shitty little literary empire; you get to keep your book contract; you get to basically go on being
yourself
, which seems to be something you enjoy. All you have to do is hand over the Neko.”

“Do you know what the Neko
is
?” Anton says.

“Some piece of bullshit,” Billy says. “Why do you want it, anyway? You can’t get the sixth seal off it and even if you could—”

“Billy, it’s a
perpetual motion machine
. Get your
mind
around that for a second. What that would
mean
for the people who discover it. How much people would
pay
for it.”

“Look,” Billy says. “I don’t give a shit about the thing. I just want it to go away. Deep down, you want the same thing. I mean, honestly, do you really have some fantasy where
you’re
the guy who breaks the laws of physics once and for all?”

“Deep down inside?” Anton says. “You know what I believe deep down inside? I believe I’m intended for great things.”

“Yeah, you know what? I believed that, too. But you know what? All our ambition? It made us do goddamn stupid shit. We each picked a side. We picked sides because we came across people who we thought could help us, who could provide us with some advantage. And now, we both committed felonies tonight and are
both pretty much ready to commit another one, which should be an indication to both of us that we were pretty goddamn stupid to have picked the side that we picked. Look, Anton, we’re in the same damn boat. Just two fucking
writers
who are trying to figure it out and maybe made some bad choices along the way. We shouldn’t be fighting. We should be friends.”

“But Billy,” Anton says. “I can’t be your friend.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a terrible writer.”

Billy sighs. He may or may not be a terrible writer, but he still doesn’t seem to have kick-ass rhetorical skills. Time for a different strategy. “Okay,” he says. “You want to fight? Let’s fight.”

“It’s hardly fair,” Anton says. “You can turn into a wolf.”

“A hell-wolf,” Billy clarifies. “You have a gun to my head, though, which I think kinda evens the odds. But let’s do this differently. Let’s do this old-school. Old-school literary fistfight. Hemingway vs. Stevens.”

Anton pauses. “Mailer vs. Vidal,” he says finally. He lowers the gun. Billy tentatively turns around, looks into Anton’s face.

“Ridgeway vs. Cirrus,” Billy says. “That’s what I’m talking about. You make me cry uncle and I leave here empty-handed. I’ll tell Lucifer that I couldn’t beat you, and you, you get a head start. But if I win—”

“You won’t win,” Anton says. He sticks the gun down into the waistband at the back of his pants and shoves Billy in the chest.

Billy takes the impact hard, stumbles back against the bookshelves. Anton’s hands come up, get a grip on Billy’s head. He presses his thumbs into Billy’s face, as though he were violently shaping a wet lump of clay. Billy snaps his teeth, hoping that flashing his canines might send a message: keep your fingers out of my
orifices. But to no real avail: Anton carries on with his attempt to use his heavy hands to smear Billy’s features down to nothingness.

Billy shoots his arm up between Anton’s, gets a grip on Anton’s ear. He pulls, and Anton grimaces. He tightens his grip and lets himself drop down to his knees, banging one savagely on an outlet strip. Anton, not wanting to lose his ear, goes down right along with him, and the two of them thrash on the floor for a minute, each trying to get a better grip on the other.

Billy rolls over onto his back, and then realizes this was a mistake: it allows Anton to press him down, planting one hand on his sternum, the other directly on his belly—Billy groans as Anton squashes his liver, or stomach, or whatever soft organs are down there, unprotected by bones. Anton uses Billy to push himself back into an upright position, and, once risen, he begins to kick Billy with his square-toed Fluevogs. Through the pain, Billy wonders whether it hurts worse to be kicked with square-toed shoes than with the normal kind. This thought is disrupted when Anton kicks Billy in the chin, splitting it open, sending a shower of stars through his skull. One more blow like that and he’ll be unconscious.

Billy rolls onto his stomach, crawls under the nearest desk, drags himself through the maze of Bladed Hyacinth’s cable management system. Anton tries to lunge down, grab his ankles, drag him back out, but Billy’s fear has given him the advantage of speed. He comes out the far side and keeps crawling, heads under a second desk. He gets tangled in a dangling curtain of wires but he needs to keep putting distance between Anton and himself, so he continues to advance, tugging one of the big monitors off the desk. It crashes down onto the small of his back, and he gives up a yip of pain.

But. He has the space that he needs now. Just a few feet, but
that buys him the time to get back to a standing position, to strike his best imitation of a fighting stance.

Anton Cirrus lumbers toward him, slowly, clumsily, all six chairs in the place somehow in his way.

Billy makes a fist. He tries to remember whether he’s supposed to put his thumb on the inside or on the outside. Which way keeps you from breaking your thumb? You put it on the inside, right, so it’s protected by the other fingers? Or is it the other fingers that crush it and pulverize it if you do it that way?

In the end, he isn’t even sure which one he opts for. The second Anton’s head bobs into punching range Billy just pops out at it as hard as he can, fueling the jab with as much animal ferocity as he can muster, with all his frustration and anger—at Anton, at Lucifer, at himself, at the extent of all he’s lost, at just the whole grand stupidity of his life now. He thinks he’s aiming for Anton’s chin but he miscalculates a little bit and gets him instead right in the throat.

Anton gurgles. His eyes bulge. He performs the arrested fish-gulp you perform when you try to take a breath and fail. He does it again and then he crumples down, grips the edge of a desk with both hands to keep himself from collapsing completely.

Billy steps back, bumps into the wall of bookshelves, and gets the bright idea that the grand finale here is to grab one of the bookshelves and topple it, burying Anton underneath. It would just look so cool. He turns, gets a pretty good grip on two shelves, and pulls, but it turns out the thing is maybe bolted to the wall or something? Or maybe the shelves in here were just built into the wall directly? He stands on his tiptoes to try to get a better look and when he comes back down, having learned nothing, Anton Cirrus jams the barrel of the gun into the back of Billy’s jawline.

Billy puts his hands up without being asked.

“Uh,” he says, breathing hard. “You’re not supposed to use the gun, remember? That was the whole point of this exercise.”

“Fuck you,” says Anton, his voice coming out all pinched and strangulated-sounding. “Walk.”

“Where are we going?” Billy asks, as Anton directs him out the door.

“What,” Anton says. “You think I’m just going to shoot you here in my office? Spray your brains into my bookshelves? No. I’m going to take you out and shoot you on the goddamn street and watch you die in the gutter.”

“Oh,” Billy says.

But at that moment he spots someone pushing into the stairwell through the broken glass of the street entrance. A cop? He’d really like to see a cop right about now.

But it’s not a cop. It’s Denver, with her video camera in its shoulder-mount, its red LED blinking blithely at him.

“Hey, fuckstick,” Denver shouts up at Anton, from the bottom of the stairwell. “Drop the gun.”

Anton Cirrus looks down at Denver. “Who the hell are you?” he croaks.

“Let me tell you,” Denver says. “I’m the one who’s getting really good high-definition footage of you committing assault with a deadly weapon.”

The pause that this gives Anton is palpable. He takes the gun away from Billy’s head and hesitates. And that’s the moment. Billy turns, and grabs Anton’s shoulders, and throws him down the stairs.

The gun discharges harmlessly into the ceiling and Billy thinks, just for a moment, of Chekhov. Anton goes down the stairs, all the way down, more or less on his face, banging his elbows and knees
against the walls. Denver films his entire descent until he’s lying in a heap at her feet. The gun skitters to a halt next to her, and she pops a folding screwdriver off her belt, deftly lifts it by its trigger guard, and makes it vanish into some holsterlike compartment on her belt.

Billy gathers up the tire iron and the duffel bag, and hurries down the stairs to meet her. Cirrus is conscious, but dazed, and for one final time Billy contemplates smashing his skull open, reducing his human intelligence into insensate muck. But no. Instead he steps over Cirrus, and he and Denver hurry out onto the street.

“The Ghoul called me,” she says. “He told me you were coming here. I thought I’d see if—if you were in trouble.”

“I thought you were still pissed at me,” Billy says.

“I am,” Denver says. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t show up. That’s what I keep saying.”

Billy pauses, and he lets this sink in, and he says, “Thank you.”

Then he looks both ways for Lucifer, but there’s no sign of him; the two hours aren’t quite up yet. There are no NYPD personnel in sight, either, even though the sidewalk is covered with clear signs of forced entry. The only official on the scene is a Traffic Enforcement Agent, busy printing a ticket for the Trusty Econoline Van.

“Fuck,” Billy says. “Can’t she see that the hazards are on? That means
back in a minute
!” But Denver puts her hand on his shoulder, steers him away from the van, directing him instead toward a yellow cab, idling at the curb. Billy stops when he sees it.

“I told them that I’d get you, and take you to see them,” Denver says.

“Who?” Billy says.

“The Ghoul. Anil. They just want to see you, Billy.” She speaks cautiously, as though he may be insane.

Billy winces. He’d already pretty much assumed that after this afternoon he’d never see any of them again, and while he is still far from
coming to terms with that
there was at least a way in which he thought it would be
easier
, emotionally. He’s never really liked long goodbyes and the idea of sitting with them, knowing that it’s the final time, seems grueling.

He contemplates running. But then he remembers last night, at Barometer, just sitting there and laughing and enjoying everyone’s company. He remembers feeling, even if it was only for fifteen minutes, like everything in his life was going to be okay. He’d like to have that experience one final time. A last toast together before Lucifer sucks him down to Hell. Sad, but it would give him a thing to hold on to, an image he could take with him down to the void. And he sees no prohibition against it; it doesn’t appear to violate his vow, as long as he comes when Lucifer calls. So he lets Denver steer him into the cab, and off they go, into the night.