We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (70 page)

For one second, I thought:
What if he’s
right?

What had I ever done to convince myself that I was the one to save everything? I’d done nothing but make things worse. I’d fumbled every chance and killed everyone. More than once, in some cases. For a moment, I eased my hands and stared down at him, my old teacher. What if the
Udug
was telling him the fucking truth?

I started to get light-headed and thought:
Fuck it.

Staring down at the familiar face, I knew I didn’t want to kill him. My mind was getting foggy, a red pulse overlaying my vision with every heartbeat, but then Hiram’s thrashing slowed. He opened his mouth and his tongue lolled out, pale and liverish, and the light in his eyes changed. It was like watching someone swim to the surface. His eyes tightened, as if in sudden pain, and then closed as he went limp under me.

The plug dissolved in my throat and I collapsed onto Hiram’s unconscious form, heaving and gasping. The monkey gave me one last tiny swipe with its claws and scampered back to the couch. When I eventually turned over, exhausted, it was sitting quietly, hands folded over its belly again, staring at me with those deep eyes.

I used the blood leaking from my million monkey-inflicted wounds to wrap Hiram up in Binding Cantrip and weld him to the floor, then a Muting to take his voice away. Still shaking, every breath painful, I pushed my hands into his pockets until a glancing touch

secret panel in ceiling

brought the dry, affectless voice from the
Udug
into my brain. I cried out and threw myself backwards, goose bumps springing up all over my body. I wanted to hold it again so fucking badly, and my stomach turned at the thought.

I turned my head. The monkey was a few inches away. It regarded me calmly, flaring its black nostrils.

Slowly, I crawled back to Hiram and put my hand in his pocket more carefully, finding the metal chain he’d attached to the
Udug
. I drew it out. All the light in the dim room seemed to leap for it, leaving everything else in shadow. I’d stopped breathing and had to force myself to resume.

“Not tonight,” I whispered to myself. “Tomorrow. In the daylight.”

The monkey made a little sighing grunt. I turned. It had closed its eyes and settled in to sleep, hands still folded over its belly.

I DIDN’T SLEEP. I
sat and stared at the
Udug
until the sun rose. Hiram’s eyes tracked me from the bedroom to the kitchen, where I ate my breakfast straight from some cans and lit a cigarette. The monkey leaped up on the counter and stared at me intently until I spooned some canned meat out for it. It took handfuls and nibbled, making tiny grunts of satisfaction.

“Hiram, it appears I have stolen your
asag
.”

Hiram did nothing, unable to move or speak. I felt bad for a second, then winced as my chest caught on something sharp, and I didn’t feel bad anymore. I took the Token, the gun, and the
Udug
and walked down to the lobby and out onto the street. As I stepped outside, the monkey streaked out and danced around my feet, making cute cooing noises.

The sun felt good. I sat down in the street and smoked three more cigarettes. Then I went back in, down to the parking level, stood near the huge, ugly chair, pulled the
Udug
from my pocket, and dangled it in front of me. I thought back over my past experience with it, in another time line. You could control it, I thought. At least in the short term. My weak right arm trembled as I held it up, making it dance in the low light.

Some warm-up exercises,
I thought.
Get into the swing of it.

I closed my eyes and thought,
are we the last people alive in the world,
kept thinking it on repeat, over and over, and closed my left hand around the
Udug
.

Without transition, the slithering voice was in my head.

trees, the trees there are five hundred five hundred left look for the red trees

I let go. I was breathing hard and bathed in sweat. Five fucking hundred people left.

I thought, concentrating,
should I kill the monkey

I clutched the
Udug.

you or the monkey one of you will kill the other Artifact most powerful Artifact in history buried in desert coordinates

I let go. I looked at the monkey. I would have sworn it knew what I was thinking.

I took a deep breath. I cleared my mind.
How the fuck do I use the
kurre-nikas
?

I clutched the
Udug
.

she is her thread is she is gone truly gone it must be personal must be personal remember every detail must be remember remember choose wisely what could be different to change everything what could be different sit and concentrate sit and listen listen here are the Words

Holding the
Udug
tightly, I sat in the old dentist’s chair. And listened.

61.
I WAS OUT OF
BREATH
by the third floor, head spinning and heart thudding weakly in my chest. For a moment I clung to the banister, gasping as everything receded and I almost lost my footing. Then Mags had me, the seams of my jacket groaning as he took hold of it and set me on my feet, steadying me with his other hand on my chest, almost squeezing me to death.

“I got you, Lem,” he said. “Take a moment.”

I took a moment.

I stood there taking in great gasps of air, waiting for the dots to clear out of my vision. The old familiar pain in my throat returned, a strange burning on my neck as if someone had tied a rope around it and given it a good tug, and a sharp pain that caught at my lungs as I breathed. It didn’t always happen, but it happened often enough to make me worry. Too bad
idimustari
didn’t have group health care.

I raised my right hand and flexed it, fighting through another bout of the strange numbness I’d been experiencing. It came and went. Sometimes I was totally normal, and then all of a sudden I’d get weak and numb and my hand would feel like it belonged to someone else. I was fucking falling apart.

On top of that, I was bled white. Our luck kept getting worse and worse, and we were five minutes from living on the street. We’d started the day with seventeen dollars and a bit more gas in our veins, and through a spectacular series of complete bullshit decisions, I’d managed to back us into a final play that had almost zero chance of working out. And if I bled for three more spells, I was going to pass out.

The building smelled like tobacco and cabbage. I wasn’t sure how I managed to identify those two smells, but it was absolutely accurate.

I lowered myself into a sitting position on the stairs by inches, shaky. Mags dropped down like a bomb next to me, making me jump an inch. He blew an explosive sigh through his lips and began twiddling his thumbs.

“Don’t worry, Lem,” he said cheerfully. “Things’re gonna be great now. This is gonna be a Win.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up. I wanted to tell him that he was getting dumber, somehow, as impossible as that was. I wanted to tell him that he’d made a huge mistake following me out of Hiram’s apartment all those years ago. It had been slow, and easy to ignore, but looking back it was obvious: Mags had been near the bottom of the world when we’d met. And all I’d managed to do was drag him down closer to it.

“Right, Lem?” he said, nudging me hard enough to bruise.

“Right!” I said, a little too loud. My heart felt thready, thin and too fast.

“Treasure,” he said. “That’s what it is. Gold and shit.”

I stared down at my bandaged hands. Two fingers without bandages. I’d gotten tired of cutting my forearms, scarring the same skin over and over again, some of the scars hard and raised, making me feel like a mutant.

Footsteps above us, and I felt Mags stiffen in terror, going silent. We just sat and waited, and eventually, the Oldest Man in the World appeared, huffing his way down the hall from the opposite end; the landings just opened out into the hallways, and you had to walk past a bunch of apartment doors to get from one flight to the next. The green carpet was ancient, sending up little clouds of dust as the old man walked. He was wearing what appeared to be a smoking jacket, black socks, and sock garters with no pants.

He stepped nimbly past us down the stairs. We kept our heads down. I didn’t have it in me to cast a Charm. I’d fall asleep on the stairs.

A few seconds after the old man had disappeared around the next landing, Mags snorted. “Nielsson, that cocksucker. Did you know he used to be a pilot?”

I was in no mood to joke about the old man, who had sat there laughing with his green teeth and bottomless liver while we piled on the gassed-up dollar bills and made him stupid. It had taken forever, and I was about to vomit and pass out because of it.

“Now he’s all alone,” Mags said, getting dreamy and sad. “That’s why he’s always at Rue’s, you know? Because he’s got nowhere else to be. I remember when I was living with Hiram and it was scary and he yelled at me all the time but I was happy because I had somewhere to be, you know?”

He settled himself more firmly. Patient. Happy to wait. He began humming to himself.

I turned my head. Here was Pitr Mags, the perfect organism. You could feed him garbage and he would grow strong. You could treat him terribly and he would love you. You could frighten him to death and he would wade into fire to defend you. You could drag him onto the streets and make him live in poverty and he would refer to you as home. Pitr Mags, the perfect organism.

I reached up and tousled his hair, then patted him on the neck. For a strange moment I imagined I could feel his nervous system, his heart beating, his lungs filling and deflating. I took a deep breath and felt almost human again.

“All right,” I said, hauling myself up. “Hurry up now. It’s time.”

The door looked like a normal, everyday kind of door. I stared at it with a stone roughly the size and shape of a bowling ball in my stomach. The handle seemed to pulse with evil energy. I had this feeling that if I grasped it, I would be shocked or stabbed or burned.

Mags was almost dancing, he was so excited. “This it?” he asked. “Huh, Lem? Is this the right door?”

In Mags’s head, we were already sitting down to a steak dinner and renting a suite at some Times Square hotel. We were rich. Mags couldn’t count very high, so his idea of
rich
was kind of a funny one, but whatever the word meant, Mags assumed we were moments away. As if gold coins would spill out into the hallway once we managed to open the fucking door, maybe with a leprechaun surfing down the wave, giggling and farting clovers. It was the right door. And it wouldn’t take more than a drop or two of gas to pop. But I stood there staring at it. My arm had gone numb again, and in the back of my mind, a whisper—or a memory.

She is gone
.

I stood there, hands at my sides, and listened to it. A strange voice, flat, with no emotion.

She is gone
.

“Lem? C’mon, Lem, before someone
comes
.”

Mags was dancing again. Now, though, it was out of fear and anxiety.

I looked at my numb hand, holding it up in front of my face. Three fingers and the thumb sported flesh-colored bandages, damp from recent wounds. The cuts always healed, but sometimes lightly, and they tore open again. My whole body had sizzled in slight, tiny pain for years. I rarely noticed anymore.

She is gone
.

I blinked. I turned and looked at Mags. He had discovered a piece of hard candy somewhere in his pockets and was unwrapping it, his face a wide-open mask of pleasure. He was my best and only friend. I looked back at the door and thought about what, if anything, we might find behind it. Then I looked at Mags again and laughed; he’d put the candy in his mouth, and his big, broad face had screwed up into a cartoonish mask of distaste, which was a risk when you ate random candy of unknown vintage found in pockets.

I felt like the biggest asshole on the planet, because Mags deserved to be dressed in jammies and put in a warm, dry bed and told a story every night, not terrified and exhausted.

I thought,
Start tonight.
I had no money, and one more good bleed would make me pass out. And I thought,
Start tonight anyway
. Because I thought of Mags happy, laughing, delighted, and relaxed, and it made
me
happy.

I reached out and touched his shoulder. He frowned a little. “Lem?”

I looked back at the door. In between the unsteady, ragged beat of my heart, I felt the thunderous, slow march of Mag’s pulse somehow. It felt natural and familiar, and sleeping under an overpass one more night didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

EVERY NOVEL HAS A
team of people behind it. First of all, and most important, there is the author, the person who actually wrote it, that is to say, me. I’d like to start off my thanking myself for all those poor decisions in life that have conspired in complex and unknowable ways to bring me to this junction in my life.

Behind every author is a person who whispers encouragement and dire threats in his ear as he writes, and for me that person is and has been my lively wife, Danette, to whom I owe everything and who knew I would sell this book, this book you are now holding in your hands, before I had even actually written it, such are the powers my wife possesses.

Let’s see how many commas I can squeeze in here, want to? Commas are fun, and underappreciated, much like writers.

Every author, the guy who actually writes the book, that is, me, has someone in a windowless room somewhere collecting the pennies that cascade in from our crime syndicates and book sales, and also who buys the author drinks, and that person is my redoubtable literary agent, Janet Reid.

Every author, that is, the guy who actually writes the books, which
is to say, me again, every author needs hooligans who tempt him from serious work and encourage him to consume adult beverages in lieu of pious labor, and my hooligans, aside from my aforementioned literary agent, who on many occasions incapacitated me with drink when I should have been home tapping words into a hard disk, aside from her the hooligans in question were fellow authors Sean Ferrell and Dan Krokos, who so often suggested I spend my time drinking curated whiskeys while viewing Internet Celebrity Gossip sites, supposedly in an ironic manner, although I suspect the irony was a pose as I really do enjoy celebrity gossip.