Writing

Black House Chapter 3

As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

3. The Starlight Motel

The motel had a bar and restaurant, a small round space next to the office. The bar was also round, and the tables were arranged in a circle. Marks was dizzy for a moment, standing just inside the door, letting his old eyes adjust to the gloom. The smell was familiar: Sawdust, grease, stale beer. The sounds were familiar: Old radio rock, the murmur of conversation, the clink of glassware. There were six cars in the restaurant’s parking lot, so Marks guessed this was where the old-timers and welfare check folks went to do their drinking. He knew exactly what kind of place it was, even though he knew he’d been sober for at least two years now, maybe longer.

He sat down at the bar. The bartender was an old man with a preposterous belly. It preceded him by at least two feet, Marks thought, somehow entering the future a second before the rest of him. Marks thought this was the situation for which anything accurately described as a truss had been created, and could only imagine the lower back pain the poor man lived with.

A coaster was tossed at him. “Huh?”

“A Coke,” he said.

The bartender snorted through the white hairs exploding from his nose, expressing his disapproval. He placed a glass in front of Marks and filled it using the hose.

“Thanks.”

This elicited another snort.

The place had seven other patrons. Five of them sat alone; in one corner there was a middle-aged couple, fat and red-faced, cackling and sitting close, drinking shots and beers. Marks thought they looked happy in their delirium, wet-mouthed and insensible but together. He had a feeling the evening would end with them screaming at each other in the parking lot, because something told him he’d seen that couple many times in his life.

Four of the others were old men, slumped in their seats, staring and silent.

The final customer was a young girl. Marks thought she looked like a kid, a teenager. She was dark-skinned, her hair a tangled mass of curls that had been pulled back in a messy, half-hearted arrangement, lopsided and whimsical on her head. She was wearing jeans and a pink halter top, and she was skinny and athletic-looking. Sitting at a booth, she was playing with her phone, a cheap older model. She stood out in the dark, sticky bar, the sort of place that people came to wait for death. She stared back at Marks for a few seconds until he looked away.

“You want a menu?”

The bartender sounded unhappy, as if asking the question somehow broke unspoken rules and treaties dating back to long before Marks had dared to enter the place. He held a menu halfway between them, and Marks reached out to take it.

“And you!” the bartender suddenly shouted, looking at the girl. “Order something or get the fuck out, yeah?”

The girl looked down at the table and bunched her jaw muscles, pretending not to hear. Marks studied her, the menu in his hand. He thought, good fortune soured if you kept it to himself. And he knew better than most that those old superstitions were usually more real than people thought.

“Hey, you want a burger?”

She looked up at him, surprised. They held each other’s gaze for a second, and then she nodded and looked away.

Marks handed the menu back. “Two burgers,” he said, pointing at the girl. “One for her.” When the bartender stood there looking back at him, menu held in one hand, Marks pulled out his wallet and laid a hundred on the bar and tapped it with his finger until the bartender’s eyes were dragged downward. There was a still moment, tense with inaction, and then the bartender snorted again, his white hairs fluffing in the breeze.

“Comin’ the fuck up,” he said.

Marks smiled at his back. Then he turned and offered the girl a thumb’s up. She stared back at him, something almost nearly a smile on her face, and then Marks felt silly, so he shrugged and contemplated his Coke, which offered every sign that it was flat and past its sell-by date. He kept staring at it, though, because otherwise he would stare at the bottles behind the bar, from the dusty top shelf where a single bottle of Glenlivet sat, sad and dejected, to the crowded bottom shelf, where Early Times ruled the day. He didn’t see his old brand, and for that he was at least somewhat grateful.

“Hey, old man.”

Marks paused and turned. The girl leaned against one of the old cars in the parking lot, a station wagon that had seen six-digit miles, its old wood paneling missing, scars of glue and screws left instead.

“If I’m old, what’s the guy behind the bar?”

“Dead.”

He nodded. “Got it.”

“Why’d you do that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a lucky day. I wanted to spread it.”

She nodded, chewing her lip and staring at him. “I ain’t … I’m not gonna … I’m not –”

He held up his hand. “Never thought you were. Just looked hungry.”

“Thanks.”

The next morning Marks woke up sweating, on the floor, wearing his suit and jacket, the stacks of currency like rocks in the lining. He stared up at the water stains and wondered at the noise until it resolved in his mind as pounding on the door.

He struggled to his feet, feeling like a stiff and bloated turtle, his back aching, his legs numb. He staggered to the door and opened it to find the girl, wearing the same clothes. She had two paper cups of coffee in her hands.

“Here,” she said, thrusting one towards him. “It’s free in the office every morning. They usually get donuts too, but those go fast.”

He reached out and took one of the cups. It was painfully hot, and he turned and placed it on the table in the sitting area, cursing. When he turned back, the girl was in the room, looking around.

“By the way of thanks for dinner last night,” she said. “And for not requesting a blow job in return.”

He grimaced. “You get that a lot?”

“Jesus yes,” she said, moving towards the little kitchenette. “The shit old fat guys think deserves a blow job range from not raping me to being polite to me. I was afraid a fucking hamburger would take me to a whole new fucking level of rapey grief.”

He blinked. “Jesus.” Then he blinked again, looking down at himself. “Fat?”

She peeled the lid off her coffee. “You know what’s jesus, old man? This fucking room. How long you stuck here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He eyed her warily. Homeless teenagers haunting cheap motels made him worry over his cash. He pushed his hands into his pockets, realized he was barefoot, and felt scratchy and foul-smelling.

She looked back at him, shifting her weight and smiling a little. “Divorce? She kick your ass out, cut up your cards? Lose your job?”

He smiled back, suddenly, without planning it. “I lost everything, a long time ago. This is a high-water mark for me. This is me on the way up.

She nodded, her face a mask of delighted surprise. “Aw, man, that is some sad sad shit right there. This is your come up? Talk about jesus. You’re havin’ some kind of world-record jesus moment.”

“I suppose I am. What’s your name?”

She hesitated. For some reason giving out her name suddenly felt like a step, an advance into intimacy. Then she took a deep breath, deciding that her choices had narrowed down, and the bar had lowered to the point where a man who bought her a meal without creeping on her was the best thing she’d seen in days.

“Dee,” she said. “Deandra, but call me Dee. What are you, anyway?” She eyed him, sipping coffee, the sunlight from the open door lighting her up auburn and cocoa. “Salesman? You got a I-didn’t-make-my-quota-oh-shit-I’m-fired thing going on.”

Marks shook his head, crossing over to the table and pulling the lid off his own coffee. It was light with cream. “I’m a … an investigator.”

“No shit? Like on TV.”

He shrugged, sipping the coffee tentatively. It was terrible, watery and bitter, but it was free. Or, he reminded himself after months and months of that silent math, not free, but already paid for. “Kind of, I guess, but I sort of concentrate on … strange stuff.”

“Ghost hunters?” she said immediately, excited. “Are you a fucking ghost hunter?”

Marks smiled, leaning back against one of the chairs and holding the scalding hot coffee in one hand. “Sometimes. Usually it’s not that easy to explain.”

She eyed him again, sipping. “And I can see that business is a-boomin’, huh?”

He gestured at her with his coffee. “I got a room. You got a room?”

She nodded and compressed her lips, but didn’t say anything, returning her wandering attention to the room. She suppressed a surge of emotion that she knew would have her crying. She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t a crier.

“I had a room,” she finally said. She looked back at him. “You really an investigator?”

Marks nodded, tensing.

She looked down into her cup of coffee. “I maybe got something to investigate.”

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Essays @ The No Pants Cocktail Hour

Photo by Dan Cristian P?dure?

NEW YEAR, same old podcast … with a slight twist. THE NO PANTS COCKTAIL HOUR has been going strong since 2018, through 65 episodes of me talking about … well, me. And my writing! I am still inordinately proud of this trailer I created for it long ago:

The No Pants Cocktail Hour

The No Pants Cocktail Hour is Jeff Somers’ podcast where he talks about … well, himself, mostly, and a short story he’s written. He discusses the story, has a cocktail, then reads the story with some music and sound effects. Grab a drink and join him! https://nopantscocktailhour.libsyn.com/

For 65 episodes the podcast has been focused on fiction (and alcohol), but this year I thought I’d mix it up a bit and spend 12 episodes talking about and reading nonfiction essays I’ve published over the years. To start with, I chose “You’re Eating Yourself, You Don’t Believe It,” an essay I published in Angry Thoreauan back in 2000.

It’s just me riffing on an incident from my college days, living in a windowless, subterranean, and possibly illegal apartment with my friends Ken and Jeof. Slowly going insane, one night we decided to make a horror film using a random VHS camera that had come into our possession. As with most of our projects at the time, what began with lofty ambition soon soured in Apocalypse Now-esque insanity and failure.

Now, if that isn’t a compelling hook for a podcast, I don’t know what is. Check it out! And remember: Whatever else might be true, I am very likely delicious.

Black House Chapter 2

As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

2. The Past

The voice on the phone had said, “Can you come out?”

The voice was distant and scratchy. Marks had gotten good at plucking sounds from the noise that might be words; the cell phone was an old one, and the plan was the cheapest he could find, one that still charged by the minute. The sound quality was always awful. The ambient sounds of Washington Square Park weren’t helping; it was a humid, sunny day and everyone in the universe had come outside, including an elderly man who’d somehow wheeled a concert piano into one of the open spaces.

Marks frowned at the pigeons waddling around his feet. “To New Jersey?” he asked.

“It’s not a foreign country, Mr. Marks.”

Marks did some math in his head, speculating on the cost of public transportation to the Garden State. He imagined it to be very expensive when compared to his finances. He also imagined it to be a very lengthy and involved trip, possibly requiring rations, a change of clothes due to crossing through different climates, and a passport.

“I will of course reimburse you for the expense.”

Marks still sat staring at the pigeons, thinking. He compared his poverty and need for money with his desire to not leave the city. There had been a time, he thought, when he’d left the city all the time. When he’d traveled. He couldn’t be sure, but his old apartment, when he’d had an apartment, had been filled with tiny objects, mementos, things that had the look and feel of souvenirs and keepsakes from various far-away locations. All of it gone, now.

Finally, money won out. “All right,” he said. “Give me the details.”

The voice spoke a name and address, which Marks wrote down on a small pad he’d purchased from the grocery a block away from his communal office space. Sixty-nine cents. He wrote on both sides of the paper in careful, tiny script that gave away his age. Then he closed the phone and stood up, feeling the cardboard inserts in his shoes sliding, sweaty, as he walked.

The office was populated at this time of day. He liked it when it was occupied: All younger people, busy, determined. None of them had money, but there was a difference in definition. For them, not having money meant they had roommates, it meant they went out to dive bars and ate dollar pizza and were impressed with their intestinal fortitude. For him, sloping down the other side of the divide, older, with a head full of gauze and a wobbliness in his balance he wasn’t sure was age-related, it was more literal: He was carrying around his net worth in a thick yellow envelope, one hundred and fourteen dollars and change. He paid his bills with prepaid cards bought at the pharmacy. He slept in the office when he could, when no one was working too late. When he couldn’t, he bought a coffee at the Luxe Diner and nodded off in a booth. The waitresses usually let him be for a few hours.

But in the afternoons, there was energy, all these partnerships and companies that couldn’t afford real offices. The communal space gave them the semblance of offices: A reception desk, a conference room. Everyone had magnetic badges that granted access. There were a few individuals, like Marks, but for the most part they were these well-dressed kids in tight groups, sitting in front of laptops and texting, texting, texting.

Marks hadn’t sprung for a private office, so he was in the bullpen. For his fifteen dollars a week he got Internet access, a beat up old desktop running an old version of everything, a hardline phone, and a chair.

His briefcase was where he’d left it. Inside the briefcase was a change of clothes: He owned two shirts, two pairs of pants, and two sets of underwear. His sports jacket was heavy. In the summer it weighed a ton and made him sweat. In the winter it was the only thing between him and the cold.

It had been like this for a while. He was beginning to think this was how he died: alone in this office, a vessel giving way, and the kids wouldn’t notice until he started to stink.

.

.o0o.

.

At the train station, he bought a coffee for one dollar and regretted the expense. The train cost two dollars and fifty cents, but he thought he would tell the client that he’d also needed a subway, ask for five dollars in expenses. In the chill air of the new car, he tried to think of another way he could earn a living since he wasn’t doing much living being Philip K. Marks.

It wasn’t a fruitful rumination. As often happened, his mind wandered. Fragmented memories: A newspaper office. A glowing computer screen, green text on a black background. Sitting in bars, drinking, compelled to by something outside of himself. T-shirts with messages on them. An empty house and singing.

When he snapped back to himself, he’d gone two stops too far and had to backtrack. At least it didn’t cost anything extra to transfer.

.

.o0o.

.

“Mrs. Wadell?”

“Mr. Marks,” the handsome woman said, smiling and offering her hand. Standing in the doorway, he had an immediate impression of warmth: She was past fifty, but not by much, and looked good. Toned, tanned, healthy. Her hair was salted and her face deeply lined, but she was strong and thin and had a good grip and strong, white teeth. Her eyes were a luscious brown, and her smile was very natural and well-worn, a woman who had smiled a lot in her life. “Please, come in. Thank you so much for coming all this way.”

Marks hesitated, suddenly feeling dirty and sweaty, and loathe to ruin what appeared to be an incredibly clean and tidy foyer. Finally, the danger of being perceived as rude came up behind him and pushed him forcefully through the door. Mrs. Wadell stepped aside to let him pass and then pulled the door shut.

“Come in!” she said cheerfully. “Follow me.”

He did, and she brought him into a cheerful, sunny living room. Wood paneling and a dark wall-to-wall carpet dated the space, but it was so clean and neat and obviously cared for he was frightened. Mrs. Wadell was, apparently, one of those incredibly competent women who took men like himself in hand and turned them out much improved, and he didn’t want to be improved. He was comfortable being broken.

He pushed a hand through his hair and resisted the urge to push his shirt tails more firmly inside his pants.

“A drink?” Mrs. Wadell asked brightly. “It’s early, of course, but I’m trying to train myself to enjoy life while I can.”

Marks shook his head. “No, thank you. I don’t drink. I don’t remember why.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Wadell said, momentarily nonplussed. She recovered very quickly. “Water, perhaps?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well,” she said, standing indecisively. Marks had the sense he’d forgotten the rules of polite society, had somehow given offense. Were you supposed to accept something when entering someone’s home? Was honor not satisfied?

Finally, she swept a hand at a comfortable-looking chair backed up to the large windows. “Please, sit. You found us okay?”

Marks nodded. “Yes, thank you.” The chair was as comfortable as it looked. Mrs. Wadell was, he thought, exactly as feared: A woman who knew how to do things like choose furniture and the precise width the curtains should be opened to allow in the optimal amount of sunlight. “You said you were concerned about your husband?”

Mrs. Wadell nodded and looked about to launch into an explanation. Marks rushed forward. “Do you mind telling me how you came across my name?”

If Mrs. Wadell was put off by his abrupt manner, she didn’t show it. She smiled. “One of my husband’s former business partners told me he had dealings with you, oh, years ago. When I … well, Mr. Marks, I’ve been asking anyone I can think of for help with Gerald. His old pal Wayne Hutton gave me your name, but all the information in his Rolodex was outdated.” She cocked her head, seeing an opportunity to finally complete the requirement of small talk. “Did you really once work for the Times?”

Marks shrugged. “I don’t remember, honestly.” He knew that coupled with his refusal of a drink, this comment would make up her mind about him, but he preferred that to continuing the conversation. He searched his fragmented memories for the name Hutton. For a moment he thought perhaps there was something, and then it was gone.

“Well,” Mrs. Wadell said after a moment, “I told him that Gerald had been to many doctors. He’d tried everything they suggested. I don’t know what’s worse: His health continuing to deteriorate without explanation, or his attitude.”

“His attitude?”

“Yes, well, Gerald doesn’t seem to believe he can get better. Oh, he does whatever’s suggested, by me or the doctor, but he doesn’t really seem to believe in any of it. It’s as if he knows something I don’t. And Mr. Marks, that isn’t how our marriage has been. We went through plenty of rough times. Not ten years ago we weren’t sure we would ever be able to retire. I used to joke I would be working at Wal Mart when I was ninety, and we would fight not because I meant it, but because he would get upset about the very idea.” She smiled. “But no matter how bad things got, we always talked it out. Always.”

Marks looked around. The room and the house were nice enough. “Money troubles?” he asked. The concept of having enough money to be in trouble about it suddenly seemed exotic and fascinating.

She leaned forward, eyes wide. “Oh! How rude. Mr. Marks, please do not worry over your fees and expenses! This was years ago. Gerald found work. Very good work, very well-paying, and we rebuilt our savings and more.”

Marks nodded absently. Words like savings and well-paying seemed like distant concepts, symbols for things he had no direct experience with. “Mrs. Wadell, perhaps you could walk me through why you asked me here? Your husband is ill, but you obviously have the resources to care for him. Did Mr.—” he searched for the name, already fading “—Hutton tell you what I … specialize in?”

Mrs. Wadell grew quiet, looking down at her lap and plucking at some invisible piece of fluff. “Gerald has been to every doctor we can think of. We have the money, now, thank goodness, and we’ve been everywhere. No one can figure it out. Tests come back inconclusive. The symptoms … shift.” She looked up, and her eyes were red. “Mr. Marks, my husband is dying and no one knows why. He himself seems to have given up.”

Marks swallowed. “This is not really my field, Mrs. Wadell. I’m sorry, but I focus on—”

“Yes, I know.” She held up a hand. “But my husband’s condition is strange. Please. Let me introduce you. Look into it. I will pay you for your time—in advance—even if it leads nowhere.”

Marks sighed. It would be nice to buy some new shoes, he thought. And he’d been honest with her. “Fine,” he said.

.

.o0o.

.

She led him down a hallway into a small bedroom, much too small for the immense bed that crowded it. No other furniture would fit. In contrast to the bright and cheerful rest of the house, the bedroom was gloomy and dark, and it took Marks a moment to realize that a human figure occupied the bed. He was an older man, dwarfed by the huge bed and sunk deeply into the soft mattress, as if the bed was swallowing him.

“Gerald, this is Mr. Marks. He’s here to ask a few questions, see if he can help us.”

Gerald turned his head slightly and peered at me with yellow eyes. He was a man greatly reduced; his hands and head were large, the rest of him wasted and drained. His skin looked thin and pale, and his hair, white as snow, had fallen out in patches.

When he spoke, Marks wished he hadn’t.

“Thank you, Beatrice,” he rumbled, the voice deep and impossible to ignore. It had once been a powerful boom, Marks suspected, but now it was a ruined bubbling wheeze.

“All right,” she said, hesitating just a moment. “Don’t strain yourself, dear.”

She stepped out of the room soundlessly, closing the door behind her. Marks stood awkwardly for a moment, looking around the dim space. It smelled like cleaning supplies and something sweet and sticky, like cough syrup. There was no place to sit because there was so little floorspace left.

“Your wife is concerned about you, Mr. Wadell.”

He snorted a laugh. “Mr. Marks, I don’t know exactly who you are or what you do, but please don’t be insulted. There is nothing for you here. You are—she is—wasting your time.”

Marks nodded. This was, more or less, what he thought as well, but he’d made it all the way out there, he felt he owed it to the very nice woman to at least ask a few questions. “Your wife said it’s been difficult to diagnose your affliction?”

Wadell laughed, and dissolved into harsh coughs that made the bed shake beneath him. Marks waited them out, standing still, watching.

“Get out, Mr. Marks. There’s no healing me. And you would ruin everything if you could. Go out there and tell Bea that I was congenial and answered all your questions. Tell her you’ll do some digging, ask around. Bill her what you want. We have the scratch.” He barked another laugh. “We’ve got the money, Mr. Marks! That’s for sure. More flooding in all the time. Go on now. Leave me to my dying.”

Marks took one last look around the room. Then he stepped closer to the bed, leaning down over the shriveled old man, studying him carefully as the oversize head glared up at him. “Well, Mr. Wadell, here’s the thing: You’re not my client, your wife is.”

He turned and walked out of the room, leaving behind an outraged sputtering that melted into another round of painful-sounding coughs.

Back in the tidy living room, Mrs. Wadell crossed from the windows where she’d been staring out at the street. “What do you think, Mr. Marks? Please don’t say anything comforting. I’ve had all the comfort I can suffer.”

Marks nodded. “Where does your husband keep his private records, papers and such?”

.

.o0o.

.

With a single email printout folded up and slid into his jacket pocket, Marks stepped out into the street and the heat settled down on his shoulders. The house had been cool and pleasant, not overly frigid, but pleasant. He’d gotten used to it. It was amazing, he thought, how it took years to get used to being hot and sweaty, to being always uncomfortable, but mere minutes to get used to luxury. A few hours in the air conditioning and now he was miserable to be without it.

The trip back to New York yawned in front of him like infinity, an infinity spent on trains and buses, crowded, hot, unhappy. In his pocket were two crisp hundred-dollar bills, a retainer from Mrs. Wadell, more than he should have accepted but when she’d opened her wallet and the green money had bristled like a flower opening he’d lost his mind, momentarily. He told himself she would get value for the money. And now he struggled: A cab back to the city would be forty, fifty dollars. A fortune. But he had so little luxury in his life, and sitting in an air-conditioned back seat for an hour instead of the horrors of the transit system was tempting.

In the end he walked the half mile to the train station. His two-hundred dollar days were few and far between, and as he paid his fare he felt virtuous.

.

.o0o.

.

Marks was always surprised how few spouses of either sex knew the complete financial story of their marriage. There were always blind spots. He supposed some of it was willful ignorance—no one wanted to know everything about their wife or husband, not really—and some of it was misplaced trust. He’d learned, somewhere along the way, that a huge proportion of mysteries involving marriages could be solved quite easily by acquiring some bank statements. The Wadell’s marriage proved to be one of them. Mrs. Wadell sent him bank statements going back to their more impoverished years, and he noted several dozen entries for a company called Passus, Inc. over the years.

He went to work researching the company, and found nothing more than a single address and the most basic paperwork filed with the city. Instinct told him he’d found something at least worth looking into, and that Mrs. Wadell had been wasting her time seeking medical advice.

The address on the printout led him to an office building on Fifth Avenue that was the embodiment of unfriendliness. The moment he walked into its ice-cold lobby, the security staff was in motion, and by the time he arrived at the desk, which seemed to be several miles from the entrance in this massive, open space, they had already done a quick background check and determined there was no possible way he might have any legitimate business.

As he was being politely but firmly walked back to the door, he tried to profit as much as he could. He noted the name of the security firm on their green jackets. He noted there was no corporate logo on the walls. He noted how delightfully cold it was. He noted they knew his name, based on a single use by one of them that was almost certainly a mistake.

Back out in the humid air of the street, he took a moment to compose himself. He had no records any more, no address book or Rolodex, and often found he couldn’t remember the name or contact information for someone, even though he could picture them and knew what they could provide to him. It was frustrating, but sometimes, randomly, his brain would serve up a memory that was useful and coherent. This time, it served up the face and name and phone number of Stuart MacKenzie. He couldn’t precisely recall who Stuart was, but he knew something about him immediately: MacKenzie was a rich man who owed him a favor.

.

.o0o.

.

MacKenzie met him at a corner deli that was humid and dirty inside. Marks entered hungry and wondering what, precisely, he’d done to be owed a favor from a man who worked on Madison Avenue; his memory was spotty. His appetite became spotty as well as he smelled the heavy vegetable scent of the place and felt the thick, spongy atmosphere, imagining all sorts of pathogens and egg pods floating in the air, hair growing on everything.

His dream of MacKenzie buying him lunch died, and he sat glumly, waiting.

MacKenzie himself was a big, broad red-haired man who seemed perpetually out of breath. He entered bustling and managed to bustle while sitting, fidgeting and blowing breath out of his nose to express various emotions. He sat down with a curt nod at Marks, ordered tea, and didn’t offer to get Marks anything, which under the circumstances Marks was happy about. He spent one more moment trying to remember why this man owed him a favor, and then gave up. He decided that the universe had been so hard on him for so long, it was okay to accept blind luck.

“What can I do for you, Phil?” MacKenzie said, looking at his watch. Marks noted it was a cheap model, and that MacKenzie was missing a button on his suit jacket, although it was an expensive piece of fabric. “I’m really busy.”

Marks hesitated. Then he decided he had no choice but to take some chances: He had no resources, and Mrs. Wadell’s two hundred dollars was weighing on him. “Mac, I need you to make an appointment at a place called Passus, Inc.

MacKenzie leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest, making his suit suddenly seem tight and ill-fitting. “Okay, why would I do that?”

Marks leaned forward, figuring it was his only psychological advantage. “Because they’ve been sending money to my client’s husband, and their building is an unmarked mystery box, and I can’t pass for money.”

MacKenzie blew air out his nose again. “So I make an appointment, and then what?”

“I go in as you. All I need is the credit check.”

MacKenzie accepted his iced tea with ill grace, then sat staring at Marks unhappily. Then he pointed at him. “And after this we’re square, right?”

Marks nodded. “After this we’re square.” He wondered if he’d made a good deal.

Whatever financial troubles MacKenzie was experiencing, he encountered no trouble making an appointment with Passus, Inc. The girl he spoke to on the phone was courteous and slotted him for the next day at three in the afternoon. MacKenzie reported they’d asked very basic biographical questions, and it hadn’t struck him as anything more ominous than making a doctor’s appointment.

Sitting in the empty shared office in the dark, craving a drink and afraid to move for fear that motion would simply result in him sitting at a bar somewhere, a hole he might never climb out of, Marks wondered if he’d miscalculated, if they were onto him. It was too easy. Then he worried that he’d never pass for MacKenzie who, even in apparent decline, had more money on his back and on his fingers than Marks himself typically saw in a year.

The next day he woke up with the searing sun as it invaded the conference room, hot and clear like boiled water, the building’s air conditioning fifteen minutes from kicking on. Sweaty and gritty, he washed up in the kitchenette, splashing water and scrubbing down. Then he inspected his suit and feebly tried to improve it, smoothing out the wrinkles and shaking it out, as if the stale humid air of the office would somehow revive it. He went into the restroom out in the hall and dressed, trying to take care and approximate success and a diet that wasn’t more or less 90% junk food. He was depressed surveying the results; the man in the mirror was thin and loose-skinned and looked very much like he cut his thinning hair himself. This was the end result no matter what: Dissolution and the Slow Fade. No blaze of glory, no heroics. Just a little less of you every day until there wasn’t enough left to get you out of bed in the morning.

After a moment, he reached into his pocket and extracted the cash left from his payday. Grabbing his briefcase he went and lived a normal life for three hours.

He bought himself breakfast at a diner: Eggs and toast and bacon and coffee and butter and ketchup. It was more food than he’d eaten at one time in years, and afterwards, forcing himself to finish his fourth cup of light, sweet coffee, he felt bloated and stupid.

He bought himself a haircut and a shave at an old-school barbers, a Belorussian man named Boris who kept up a professional stream of small talk and anecdotes as he hovered over Marks, snipping and shaving and measuring.

He bought himself a new dress shirt, hoping it would offset the shabbiness of his suit. The total cost of his splurges was sixty-three dollars, leaving him with a bit more than a hundred left. He felt better, and decided to continue by strolling through the park and having some lunch before heading back downtown to MacKenzie’s appointment. He hoped that by larding up on food and grooming he would pass, however briefly, as normal. All he wanted was more information to go on.

When he returned to the Fifth Avenue address, he found a different team of security professionals, and instead of being run off his name was checked against a list and he was issued a visitor badge and instructed to head up to the fifth floor, where he was greeted by an efficient young man dressed in what Marks imagined the phrase “business casual” meant. He was tall and thin and scrubbed, youthful and cheerful.

“Mr. MacKenzie!” he boomed. “I am the Interviewer—we deprecate names here—and I will be conducting our interview today. Please, follow me.”

Marks followed the kid through an unmanned reception desk and into a maze of cubicles beyond, ushering him into one of the identical spaces, where Marks sat just inches away from The Interviewer as he settled himself in front of a laptop. There was no decoration in the cube, and as far as Marks could tell, no one else in the office.

“Okay, Mr. MacKenzie, I reviewed your pertinent details earlier and I do believe your current financial difficulties, health, and age make you an ideal candidate!” The Interviewer twisted around awkwardly to grin at Marks. “I’m very glad you were put in touch. I just have a few questions, and then we’ll need to set up the lab appointments and get your banking details.”

Marks kept himself very still. He had not been on a job interview in a very long time, and he felt a creeping paralysis coming over him, a debilitating fear that his face wasn’t obeying his commands, that the words he heard himself saying weren’t the same that everyone else heard.

“Okay, everything looks right, Mr. MacKenzie. Don’t worry, your financial troubles will be going away presently. We’ll just need you to get through the physical exam, the labs, and you can start earning.” He looked at me, smiling. “The whole process takes about two weeks.” He studied Marks’ face and tilted his head, misinterpreting the expression he found. “Don’t worry, just hold out against those creditors a few more weeks and everything comes together!”

Marks nodded and managed a tight, off-kilter smile. He was confused; Mac was apparently not nearly as well-off as Marks had assumed, yet this was apparently exactly what Passus was looking for. He scrambled for a question that might get him more information without giving the game away.

“How—how does it work? Exactly.”

The Interviewer smiled. “Sure, there’ll be an orientation once you sign the NDA and the other contracts. But don’t worry: Once you sign and you’re processed, you don’t have to lift a finger, or do anything.” He shrugged. “Except suffer, of course.”

The Interviewer’s smile was bright and easygoing. Marks blinked at it like it was a sun lamp. He ran the word suffer through a few internal algorithms and decided that questioning it would be a tactical error, so he forced a smile on his face and nodded.

“Great! I’ll take you through to our medical team. You did clear your morning, didn’t you?”

.

.o0o.

.

Marks walked around, feeling depleted. They’d taken a lot of blood, all very professional. The tubes they’d filled had been marked with odd, esoteric words. Filament. Limnal. Rotundity. They wanted urine samples, and after he’d filled a cup they plied him with water until he felt loose and unmoored, eager for more. They insisted he stand inside a circle chalked on the floor, and what he took for humming he was convinced by the end to be chanting, a specific circular invocation each of the men and women were almost constantly reciting.

Somehow, he felt as if they’d taken much more than just a little blood, a little urine, a little saliva carried from his mouth via tasteless, neutral swabbings. He felt unsettled, unbalanced, and he walked despite a leaden sense of exhaustion, carrying his jacket and briefcase like weights around himself, pulling him down. He sat down on a park bench, feeling overheated, and listened to someone playing the sousaphone very, very badly as he tried to figure what he’d gotten himself into. MacKenzie was not as rich as Marks had assumed—he realized that in his current state of financial distress anyone who wasn’t living on hot dogs and borrowed air-conditioning would seem like a socialite—yet Passus had been overjoyed to sign him up. And had then exhibited zero interest in his financials, but a deep interest in his physical state and identity.

He couldn’t sleep. He wandered all night, missing the window when he could slip back into the office and bunk down for the night, after the cleaning people had left but before the security guards locked everything down. He walked until he was in a trance, and then he sat down on a bench in Washington Square Park, and fell asleep.

Marks was awakened by the insistent squawking of his cheap phone. Bleary, he startled up and almost fell off the bench. For one moment he stared around blindly, uncertain of his whereabouts. Fragments of a dream clung to him, a man dressed in black pursuing him, a bartender asking him if he was all right.

Dumb, he fumbled for the vibrating piece of plastic and put it to his ear.

“Phil?”

It was MacKenzie. His voice had an element of fear and desperation to it that pinged Marks’ own alarms, leaving him standing rigid, gripping the phone tightly.

“Phil, what did you do? What’s happening?”

Marks blinked around the twilit park. A little before sunrise, he thought. “What’s happening, Mac?”

“I’m rich, for one thing,” Mac said, panting. “There’s a deposit … from Passus. It’s … substantial.”

“Oh,” Marks said, his brain stiff. “Oh.”

“And I’m sick,” Mac said, his voice taking on a rough edge of panic. “I went to bed and I was fine, Phil. Fine. I woke up not feeling right, and I’m sick. Like, really sick.”

Marks shivered and began to pace back and forth. “What does that mean?”

“Oh, shit,” Mac said, his voice suddenly going molten and phlegmy. He dissolved into coughs. “Phil, I don’t know. I woke up hot and dry and bloated , and my skin is all … wrong. What happened? What’s happening?”

Marks worked his mouth but had no words.

“I gotta go, Phil. I’m heading for the hospital. Call me later, okay?”

Marks nodded, dumb. There was an awkward amount of silence, and then Mac clicked off. Marks stood for a moment, the phone still held to his ear, staring at the brightening park.

.

.o0o.

.

“Mr. Marks?”

Marks tried a smile, realized midway that it wasn’t working, and nodded, squinting. The result was mysterious to him: He had no idea what his facial expression might be conveying.

“Mrs. Wadell,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

She was as neat and tidy and cool as Marks felt wrinkled and hot and unsettled. Her hair was pinned up perfectly, and she wore a simple skirt and blouse with effortless ease. The house behind her, however, smelled of medicine and sickness, uncirculated air that was becoming heavier with microbes and coughed-up mucous molecules, damp and sour.

“Of course not, Mr. Marks,” she said, stepping aside. “You have some news on my … well, what’s the word? Case? Issue?”

I pushed my way past her and didn’t answer. I didn’t wait for further invitation; I kept walking. The air got denser as I approached the bedroom in the read of the house. She didn’t start to murmur protests until I was through the door.

Mr. Wadell hadn’t moved or changed in any perceptible way. He was still just a lump on the bed that was slightly heavier than the sheets and blankets. His eyes, though, yellow and swollen, leaped to Marks the moment he entered the room, alive and clear.

Marks stopped, feeling sweaty and vague. He took a deep breath.

“I think I just killed a man.”

Wadell gave no overt reaction. “You stupid bastard,” he hissed, his overlarge hands gripping the top of the blanket. “What did you do?”

Marks shifted his weight. “I signed up under an assumed name.”

“Fucking hell, the name’s all that matters,” Wadell hissed. The moment of anger seemed to exhaust him, and he sank even more deeply into the bed that was slowly consuming him. “It’s all right,” he said, weak and soft, as Mrs. Wadell entered the room in a state of constrained, restrained alarm. “Mr. Marks and I just have something to discuss.”

She looked at Marks, indecisive, then smiled, patting her chest. “Very well.”

“Is this what you do, Mr. Marks? Wander the world making trouble for people? Barging into voluntary and private situations and make a mess of things?”

Marks shrugged. He felt like he had no way of answering the question. “What can I do? Will he die?”

Wadell didn’t answer right away. “No. But depending on what he’s taking away from the client, it’s going to be ugly. It’s a painful way to live, Mr. Marks. You’re sick. All the time. Worse some days. It takes a toll, I won’t pretend it doesn’t. Carrying someone else’s cancer, someone else’s cirrhosis, someone else’s Parkinson’s. It wears you down. They switch you out before you die, but … sometimes I wish they didn’t.”

Marks closed his eyes. “The ultimate health care plan.”

“Fuck you. The compensation’s fair.”

“Is it?”

“Fuck you again. I made my choices. Whoever you just fucked over didn’t.”

Marks turned to go, then hesitated. Without looking back, he said “And your wife? She’s okay with your choices?”

Wadell didn’t respond right away. When he did his voice was soft and weak. “She’s cashing the checks, ain’t she?”

.

.o0o.

.

Once again, Marks had washed up, brushed his jacket, and wore his new shirt, which hadn’t been laundered but was still in better condition than anything else he owned. He stepped into the office quickly, and ignored the extended hand of the bland, handsome man behind the desk.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr—” Marks said.

“You can simply call me The Broker—we do not like to use names here.” Bland Man said in a booming, hollow voice. “Of course. Our freelancers are our lifeblood. What can I do for you, Mr. MacKenzie?”

Marks looked around. The office was large but generic. The furniture wasn’t special or custom: Just a metal desk and a standard chair, a lamp and a mid-range computer. No phone, no credenza or wet bar or decoration. It smelled neutral. It was as if The Broker and the whole organization was making an effort to leave no mark. Although he assumed the young Interviewer and The Broker could not be the sole employees, the whole floor was quiet and felt still and unused.

“My name’s not MacKenzie. In fact, I went through your whole process under an assumed name, and now a man is suffering without knowing why.”

The Broker’s smile fell away. His face flushed, and for a second Marks felt his adrenaline dumping, as if he could sense or smell a fight in the air, somehow. “That is … disappointing. What is your name, then?”

Marks couldn’t resist a smile. “I don’t like to use names, either.”

The Broker sat very still and silent for a moment. Then he leaned back and propped his chin up on one finger. “We must set this right. Your Mr. MacKenzie must be in some distress.”

Marks nodded. “He seemed to be, yes.”

The Broker leaned forward. “Our clients pay us to remove from them pain and suffering. To deliver to them health and happiness. It is impossible—impossible—to reverse these actions. The solution is simple: You must take his contract. This deception is your responsibility.”

Marks stiffened. He’d known this. He’d told himself this as recently as moments ago, when he was riding the elevators up, accompanied by two security guards who remained suspicious that The Broker would wish to see him despite Marks’ insistence and the confirming phone call from the desk, the two of them eager to toss him back out on the street like their comrades had.

But he dreaded the idea. Cold and viscous, the dread filled him as the idea was verbalized. He swallowed. “What … what will I –”

“The term is twenty years,” The Broker said. “The afflictions will vary.”

Marks closed his eyes. Afflictions was a terrible word. It was generic, and when it came to endless suffering, generic was terrible. It was wide-open. He had no choice in the short-term: To allow MacKenzie to suffer was impossible. He had to start by having the contract transferred, and then he would be able to figure out what to do next.

He looked at The Broker. “How do we do this?”

The Broker brightened, opening a drawer. “I have the paperwork here.”

.

.o0o.

.

“Jesus.”

MacKenzie didn’t look at Marks. He was wrapped in a plush-looking terrycloth robe, but was sweaty and gaunt, unshaven and hollow-eyed.

“It’s faded a bit,” he said as Marks stepped into his apartment. “I’m feeling better.”

Marks didn’t say anything. He thought Mac looked awful.

The apartment wasn’t what he expected, until he remembered that Mac had passed the initial screening at Passus because he wasn’t nearly as rich as Marks remembered. The place was nice enough, and felt luxurious to Marks, but was another generic space: Builder’s beige, the smell of fresh paint, fluorescent lighting. They stood awkwardly in the tiny foyer, but Mac made no move to lead Marks further in. In the next room, Marks could see boxes piled up on a card table.

“Listen, Mac, I did something. I didn’t mean to, and I’m here to make it right.”

Mac nodded, then exploded into a coughing fit, hunching over, red-faced and swollen. He held up one hand to forestall intervention. Marks startled, then settled back on his heels, watching anxiously. When the fit passed, MacKenzie spent a few moments doubled over, gasping, then finally straightened up.

“All right, Phil,” he said, his voice wet and ragged. “Tell me.”

Marks told him. MacKenzie listened, stone-faced, occasionally biting back more coughing.

“So rich assholes pay me to take their diseases,” he finally said, wonderingly. “That’s fucking brilliant, in a way.”

Marks wrung his hands, shifting his weight. “I’m sorry, Mac. If I’d known—”

Mac laughed, a barking, harsh noise that cut Marks off.

Marks sobered. He reached into his jacket and extracted the papers the Broker had given him. He swallowed. “I’m prepared to make this right, Mac. These are transfer papers. I’ll take on your account. Your afflictions.” He wondered what it would be like. He appreciated the twist: He would finally have money, but he would suffer for it. But hadn’t he been suffering for nothing for a long time already?

Mac stared at the papers, then looked at Marks. “Jesus Christ, Phil, no.”

“No?”

Mac swallowed more coughs. “Did you see the zeros? The money? I ride this for a year or two, I’ll be set. All of it, set right.”

Marks thought of Mr. Wadell, faded and shrunken. “Mac, I don’t think—”

“You want it?” Mac said, peering owlishly at Marks. “Huh? You saw the zeros, you regret not taking the slot. Jesus, Phil I know you’re broke. I know you’re basically on the street. Get your own contract.”

Marks stared. “Mac, I don’t think you understand—”

Mac gestured at the door, weaving on his feet and looking faint. “I gotta lie down, Phil,” he said, sounding distant. “Get out. Take your fucking papers. Get your own contract.”

Marks hesitated, uncertain. Mac’s face took on a bloated red expression of meanness.

“Fine. A payoff, right? You fucking slug. You fucking grifter. You realize you fucked up, and here you are trying to stick your head under my skin. Fine, you want a payday.”

Mac stormed off, his breath loud and damp, leaving Marks standing awkwardly in his foyer. A moment later, he returned with a shoebox in his hand. He handed it to Marks.

“Take it,” he snarled. “My emergency fund, which I was just about to tap into. All I had left. Five grand. Take it and call it a fee or whatever, and go get your own contract, if that isn’t enough.”

Marks remembered weighing the box in his hands, then lifting the lid and peering inside, stunned at the bills. Real money. Actual money. He remembered looking at MacKenzie, who stood there flushed with fever, eyes reddened and weeping, breathing shallowly, mouth open. He looked awful, and after a moment Marks turned and slowly walked to the door. Opening it, he listened to Mac’s labored breathing and thought about how the apartment already smelled like disease, like something invisible burning, being depleted.

He turned in time for the door to slam in his face. He stood for a moment, listening to the low, subconscious buzz of ambient noise. Then he became aware of his own body: The lack of pain, the ease of his breathing, the steady beat of his heart. He took a deep breath and turned away from the door, smiling. Five thousand dollars. He remembered thinking he would go sleep indoors for a few days, see what happened.

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Black House Chapter 1

As has become hallowed tradition, I’ll be posting my novel BLACK HOUSE on this blog one chapter per week in 2024.

This novel features my recurring character Philip K. Marks, who has popped up in a bunch of short stories I’ve published (“Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” in Crimes by Moonlight edited by Charlaine Harris; “A Meek and Thankful Heart” in Buzzy Magazine; “Three Cups of Tea” in Hanzai Japan; “Howling on for More” in Black Denim Lit; “Supply and Demand” in No Bars and a Dead Battery; and tangentially in “Zilla, 2015” in The Lascaux Review). I thought he deserved a novel.

There’s an episode of The No Pants Cocktail Hour about this one, and a playable text adventure version of the book, if you’re so interested. Enjoy!

1. The Starlight Motel

Motel life was a step up. Thirty-five precious dollars a day, but he’d come into a windfall and it was wonderful to have hot water on demand and privacy again. If only for a little while. If only until the money ran out.

He was fascinated by the economy of the space. The little kitchenette was old and greasy, but in just four feet of space they’d packed everything one could need: A tiny fridge, a hot plate, a sink, some cabinets. The bathroom was enough space for one person at a time. The sitting area was by the window, a pair of old, stinking armchairs and a battered wooden table. The bed. He thought it best to not think about the bed, since he certainly wouldn’t be sleeping in it.

He thought about an entire life played out in the room. Breakfast, dinner, nights in front of the ancient cathode-ray television, the digital converter on top like even more ancient rabbit ears, the slowly shrinking choices of lives in an age when everything was increments and nothing was free. He thought about the question of how small things could get—how small could your whole world be and still support your life. The room was probably three hundred square feet, he thought. It still felt big to him; he’d been stealing time in his communal office, sleeping on the floor, scraping by. Now he had a room to himself. It felt like luxury, even if the sheet on the bed gave him the heroic heebie jeebies, imagining the germ civilizations they contained.

How much smaller could it be? He tried to imagine the smallest possible space that would be livable, workable. He mentally sectioned off the room and crammed everything into it, imagining a smaller bed, no sitting area. A hundred square feet? Fifty? He thought his life was something of an experiment to discover just how little space was needed to survive in. He saw himself in a box, hunched over, compressed, squeezed down to the essentials. And then the larger question of what the word essentials meant, really. What was essential? He’d found that things formerly thought of as essential could be jettisoned and done without. The longer he lived the more he came to believe that this process could be continued infinitely, in the same way you could cut something in half infinitely, down to the quantum state, and always have something left over, no matter how tiny.

He sat in one of the ancient chairs by the window, just to experience the novelty of having someplace to sit, a place dedicated to sitting. He had no use for a television; it had been so long he didn’t know what sort of shows were on the air these days. He thought about the little clock radio, finding some music, but didn’t want to stand up. Just sitting was entertainment, the stillness, the peace and quiet. A roof over his head.

He took the shoebox from his bag and opened it to look at the currency inside, more than five thousand dollars, a fortune. It had been easy money, really; a job that had left few scars and cost him few sleepless nights for a change. Good fortune felt odd and unreal to him. He kept opening the box and checking to see if the money had dissolved, turned to dust, the ink smeared off.

He sat and considered hiding places. The problem with a rented space was there were no secrets, or if there were they weren’t your secrets. He imagined cleaning crews unscrewing heating grates, flipping mattresses, moving pictures and mirrors from the walls as a matter of course every day.

In the end, the money stayed with him. He spent some studious time picking at the lining of his relatively new, if inexpensive, jacket, and slipped the money inside in discrete stacks, holding back just five hundred to keep on him at all times. Then he sewed the lining back using the tiny little kit he carried with him, doing a terrible job. But he felt better, because he would sleep in the jacket and not have to worry. He wasn’t used to good fortune, not that he could remember.

He put the five hundred-dollar bills into his wallet, then pulled out a wrinkled, oft-folded old business card. It had been cheaply printed to begin with on light stock, and much of it had faded and worn away, leaving just his name, PHILIP K. MARKS, and the word PRIVATE. Everything else was just a blur of old ink. Five thousand dollars, he thought. As usual, it wasn’t enough, would never be enough, not considering what he’d done to earn it.

He’d started a new ritual of remembering. Things slid so easily into the gray mass that was his past. He tried to pause once a day and remember. He paused now, and remembered how he’d gotten his five thousand dollars.

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‘The Salted Earth’ Excerpt

The final novel in the latest Avery Cates series, The Machines of War, is coming out on November 15th (pre-order it!). The fourth novella that comprises that novel, The Salted Earth, will also be available then. Here’s the first chapter of that novella for your reading pleasure.

THE SALTED EARTH

Part Four of THE MACHINES OF WAR

a cute little Fuck You roaming the halls

“There,” Marko said, pointing with a spidery metal arm. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

I inhaled cigarette smoke and squinted down at the holographic map of the installation. “A power surge,” I said after a moment.

Marko opened his mouth, then hesitated. “Yes. A power surge we didn’t cause.”

I spent a profitable moment examining my constant urge to smack Marko in the face. He was, at this thinned-out point in my increasingly unlikely existence, my oldest friend, and one of exactly two people left to talk to. And I wanted to strangle him on a regular basis.

You should read his old evaluations, Marin whispered in my head. You’re not alone.

Smoke curled up between us and I marveled. Cochtopa was absolutely packed with cigarettes. They were shitty and System-grade, but I was making my way through them at an unhealthy pace.

“A glitch,” I said. “This place has been collecting dust for years. And we just murdered its AI administrator.”

Me, Marin whispered, sounding affronted. You murdered me.

Marko shook his head. The control center was enormous, clearly designed for dozens of people. It was a circular room with banks of black-box data storage lining the walls. Long desk-like stations with data cube ports and holographic displays filled most of the room, but with just one activated and only one and a half people moving in the space, I imagined I could feel the weight of the mountain above us, pushing down, making the air dense and difficult to breathe.

The fucking System. We were literally inside its corpse.

“Maybe,” Marko said in a tone of voice that both implied doubt and made the urge to hit him rise significantly. “But it’s not just some circuit flicker. It’s significant, and the pattern is the same each time.” He glanced at me as if he suspected I was contemplating violence. “Also, it’s moving.”

“You think it’s a problem.”

Marko hesitated again. I was glad he’d learned to be careful. It was beneficial to our relationship.

“I think we have superficial control over this installation,” he said. “I think the code base is mammoth and there are layers that go back to the earliest days of the System. I think there are technological iterations that came long after I was iced out of things. I think there may be security layers we’re unaware of. I think, in short, that there’s no operating manual for this place, and we should not be ignoring anomalies.”

I nodded, standing up. I drew one of the Roon 87s I’d picked up from the armory and cracked it, peering into the chamber. “Okay. Let’s check it out.”

He blinked. “What, now?”

“If the System has a cute little Fuck You roaming the halls, I’d rather know sooner than later,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Deep. Down in some unfinished chambers, the projects that stopped dead when everything crashed.”

I studied the map for a moment. It was an area I’d never been to before. I was looking forward to a slightly different shade of gloom, a slightly ranker scent of sulfur. I touched the earpiece that had become my constant companion “Moreau?”

Cochtopa was a tomb filled with tech. Covered in dust, wrapped in plastic, stacked high on palettes in underground vaults so large you shuddered to run into the machines that had created them, there was every conceivable toy. Earbuds that worked through thick stone walls underground, with no central server or satellite necessary? The ghost of the System had them. Guns? Every fucking where, and piles of ammunition. Implants, augments, prosthetics? Yes, and grim, buried surgical theaters in which to apply them. Moreau was attempting an audit, digging himself deeper into the guts of the mountain every day, and after years of scrabbling after every bullet and N-tab, I thought the endless supplies were starting to drive him crazy.

After a moment, Moreau’s voice was in my ear, breathless but without a hint of static. “Yeah?”

I tapped the earpiece. “Danni?”

“Boss?”

“Want to go on a bug hunt?”

####

Every new area we invaded yielded an astonishing amount of late-System tech. There was one room filled with electric buggies running off power cells, each one programmed to follow one of several thousand prescribed routes through Cochtopa. All you had to do was punch in the appropriate code and it took off, smoothly steering around obstacles as it raced through the halls and crevices of the mountain.

Moreau, naturally, filled most of the cabin, which had been designed for normal-sized people, or at least their normal-sized avatars. Danni was crushed against me, squeezed every time the buggy took a turn. Moreau, in a mood I’d almost call jubilant, bristled with firepower—every time we cracked open a crate and found something new he added it to his arsenal. As someone else who’d spent a lifetime searching for bullets and piecing together guns from leftover parts, saying quick prayers against explosions every time he squeezed the trigger, I understood the urge. You never knew when the last vestiges of civilization were going to collapse on top of everything that had already collapsed, after all.

Danni carried a single gun: A Roon model 13, an older weapon for a more settled time, designed to be small and more of a discouragement for panicked rich people than a deadly weapon. I was sure you could kill someone with it, with some determination or creativity, but I suspected Danni liked how light and easygoing it was, and I supposed if I had the ability to lift hovers off the ground with my thoughts I wouldn’t worry much about what fucking gun I had strapped to my thigh.

“If this is rats,” she said, sounding tired, “I’m going to kick your Mr. Marko in the balls.”

“He’s not my Mr. Marko anymore,” I said. “He belongs to all of us, now.”

The buggy slowed and came to a stop, jostling us as it rocked on its suspension. The door popped up, and I crawled stiffly out into one of the familiar tunnels that snaked through the installation, the floor polished and smooth, the walls rough, conduits and pipes running along both sides up near the ceiling. I popped up a map of the place on a small vidscreen I’d scrounged from some random supply closet and zoomed in on our location.

“End of the ride,” I said. “Looks like the buggy’s programmed not to go any further because it’s technically off-map—we’re headed into a section of Cochtopa that was never finalized and added to the grid.”

Moreau grunted. “Fuckin’ typical. We find rides, we can’t use ‘em. Universe fuckin’ hates us.”

“We’re still alive,” Danni suggested.

In unison, Moreau and I grunted. I gestured at the little floating map and it zoomed in on the last spot where the power surge had been detected. It glowed softly in a field of unbroken, blank black on the map.

“That’s an unfinished, late-stage expansion area,” Marko buzzed in my ear, sounding like he was right next to me. “Looks like they stopped work on this project abruptly shortly before you, er, pulled the plug on the whole world.”

I hesitated a moment. “Before,” I echoed.

“Yup. Based on the logs I’m able to parse from here, all work on Auxiliary Tech-AV Development Zone 344 was halted about sixteen days before you and Orel went at it.”

I looked up into the darkness stretching out before us.

“No lights,” Moreau rumbled.

“Not connected,” I said, trying to pinpoint the spot where the light failed and the tunnel vanished. “But there’s a power surge.” I looked at Moreau. He nodded and suddenly there was a shredder in his hands, the slight whine of its powerup loud and ominous in the low light, a billion pounds of rock and tech above our heads.

“Fuck us all,” Danni muttered, fishing out a pair of low-light goggles and handing them to me. “We get fucking murdered gaining access to this place, turns out someone else is just living here, in the near-total darkness?”

Slinging the goggles around my neck as she pulled a second pair out of her bag for herself, I shrugged. Spectacular Dan had seen some shit and lived through some rough years with me, but I was the original, and I was used to the never-ending buffet of shit the universe had waiting for us all. For a while I’d thought I’d opted out, rotting away in the wilderness, content with my part in ending the world, but here I was, dancing to the same tune as always. One more job. One more death. One more excruciating torture session, one more week spent eating dust and drinking runoff and seething.

She’d learn.

Within a few dozen feet, the smooth, polished floor gave way to an uneven path of gouged and pulverized rock. The ceiling sloped downward and the walls closed in until we were walking down a corridor just wide enough for the three of us and just tall enough for Moreau to stand up straight. The rest of Cochtopa had been designed for some legendary race of giants, your presence in every room echoing off the walls. This sudden return to human scale was oppressive.

The tunnel advanced for a few hundred feet. We all slipped our goggles on, everything outlined in light, glowy blue, the universe ray traced. After another few hundred feet, the tunnel abruptly ended at a serious-looking metal security door, bolted directly into the rock. There was no keypad, handle, or obvious locking mechanism.

“That,” Danni said cheerfully, “is a door you’re not supposed to open.”

“Mr. Marko? You see our position?”

After a moment, Marko’s voice buzzed in our ears. “Yeah, Avery. There’s no door on the schematics. No wiring, either. If I had to guess, it was put in place to seal off whatever’s behind it.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I think you’ll probably have to blow it.”

Moreau brightened. I held up a hand.

“Zeke, any files in there relating to a seismic study of this place? As in, will blowing shit up bring the fucking mountain down on our heads?”

Moreau looked around. “They built this place to be a fortress, Avery.”

I pointed back the way we’d come. “They built that to be a fortress, you fucking simp. They stopped building whatever this was supposed to be.”

Moreau shrugged off his pack and advanced on the door. “Better grab some cover, then.”

Danni and I exchanged glances. She shrugged. “I’ve been contemplating suicide recently anyway.”

I sighed. “The universe won’t let me go that easy.” Somehow I knew that my death would be excruciating and humiliating, not sudden and simple. It gave me a strange sense of invulnerability. I waved at Moreau, and he gleefully began pulling explosive gel from his pack. He’d been itching to use it ever since we’d discovered crates of it piled up in one of the many, many storage areas they’d built into the mountain.

Danni and I watched as a ghostly, blue-outlined Moreau worked on the door, applying the gel with clinical precision.

“Man loves his work,” Danni murmured.

“You didn’t become a Stormer unless you enjoyed cracking heads and blowing shit up,” I said. “Shit, Little Moreau was probably pulling wings off flies as a kid.”

Moreau turned and trotted back towards us, moving pretty fast and nimble for such a slab of a man. He knelt down. There was no cover to take, so Danni and I crouched behind him.

“You motherfuckers,” he muttered.

“Relax,” Danni said, sounding almost giddy, “I got you, big man.”

It was strange. We’d formed a kind of friendly gang, stuck together in the world’s most impressive, most useless fortress of modern tech. My whole universe had contracted to these three people, and the last remaining ghost in my head, flickering in and out like a long-distance signal you were moving away from.

When the door blew, the goggles turned everything blindingly white. I shut my eyes and turned away with a snarled curse, and a rush of wind pushed past me. There was an incredibly loud sound of the door smacking into the rock walls, and then an eerie silence.

I opened my eyes. The goggles took a moment to flicker back online. Where the door had been was a rectangular opening leading to darkness. Stepping forward, I drew the Roon and held it down by my thigh. A chill breeze pressed against us as we approached. Moreau had the shredder in his hands, pressing himself against the scarred, pitted wall to the left of the ruined doorway, and Danni hung back, hands up, ready to throw some weight around.

Crouching down, I pressed myself against the wall to the right, then leaned over to peer into the space beyond. The goggles outlined the space in fine detail. It was a large cavern, the jagged ceiling way above us. The floor was relatively flat, and covered in what initially appeared to be bundles or sacks. But it only took me a second to realize what they really were.

“Bodies,” I said quietly. “We’ve got bodies.”

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Collections, the Whole Book

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

WELL, Collections is done. Ideally I’d have novels that had 52 chapters each and every time, but this time we shorted the year a little bit, but that’s okay.

If you’ve been reading along, I hope you’ve enjoyed the book. If you were waiting to download the whole thing so you could read it at your leisure like a normal person, now is your time to shine–links to the whole enchilada are below.

In a week or three I’ll ask for opinions on what the next weekly novel should be, based entirely on titles with zero other contextual information, because I am a tiny god here and can do as I please. Feel free to let me know your thoughts! Until then, thanks, as always, for reading!

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Collections: Epilogue

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

Epilogue

“Well,” Rachel said, glancing down at her watch. “I gotta run. Job interview.”

I blinked. “What happened to the library?”

She smiled at me, standing up and gathering her purse. I leaned back and stirred my civet coffee in its white cup. I reached up and touched the thick bandage on my nose, and wished I healed faster. Then I shot my cuffs in my new custom suit—full canvas, one-fifty thread count, double-breasted, notched lapels—and looked around McHales, which The Bumble and I had made into our unofficial clubhouse. We’d footed the bill for Falken to move on and still had plenty of scratch to live on for a while between what I’d scraped from my own apartment and what we’d picked up in Newark, though it wasn’t a retirement plan. We were the only people in it aside from the bartender, who was a young musician of the usual sort struggling to stay awake in the afternoon sun, a coffee cup on the bar in front of him.

The Bumble sat at the bar, engrossed in the sports page. A tiny cinnamon-colored kitten with long fur sprouting from its ears sat on the bar between The Bumble’s beer glass and a bowl of milk. Billy had found it out back and adopted it, and named it Stanley.

Rachel looked like a million bucks in a nicely-cut suit, big cuffs spilling out over her jacket, her hair pulled back in a long, shiny tail. She looked expensive, but that had always been Rachel’s main grift: She just looked expensive, no matter what. “They fired me the third day I just didn’t show up, dummy. That tends to happen. You can’t take an unannounced vacation at the Holland Motor Lodge in New Jersey and just go back to your job whenever you’re ready.”

I nodded. “You need anything?”

She shook her head and slung her bag over one shoulder. For a moment she stood there looking at me. “No,” she said. “Connie and I are having lunch next week, if you want to join us.”

I frowned trying to place Connie. Then I blinked again. “You’re having lunch with Rusch?”

Rachel smiled again. “Why not?”

I shrugged. “No reason. Just seems … random.”

“We spent days locked in a motel together. You get to know each other a little, that way. Anyway,” she said, and hung there awkwardly for a moment. I had a feeling that with anyone else, this was where Rachel leaned down and kissed their cheek. Instead, after a moment she just nodded and turned away. “I’ll stay in touch,” she said as she walked out of the room, not meaning a word of it.

For a moment I sat there feeling blue, bored and restless. Then there was a noise out in the main bar and Billy stood up, glanced at me blank-faced, and went out to investigate, returning seconds later.

“It’s the Jew,” The Bumble said, resuming his seat at the bar and picking up the sports page.

As The Phin entered the back room of the bar, I sat up a little and pushed a smile to my face. He looked exactly the same and was trailed by Michael and Maurice, blank-faced in their standard-issue black leather coats. They pretended they’d never seen me before and stayed up near the door, visibly irritated that The Bumble paid them no attention at all.

The Phin walked briskly back to me, carrying a stout-looking walking stick with a solid-gold lion’s head as a handle.

“You look like someone tried to kill you, kiddo,” he said, breathless, his face pink. “Can I have a seat? Talk a little business?”

I gestured at the chair. “Sure thing, Phin. How’s tricks?” This was protocol: The Phin had tried to beat money out of me not so long ago, and I’d burned down one of his joints, but even so you started off every meet with polite chat.

He settled himself in the chair with some grunting and heavy breathing, setting his walking stick on the table and folding his hands in front of him.

“We’re fine, thanks. Any chance of a drop of something? It’s thirsty work, tracking you down. You’re off the grid.”

I shrugged. “There’s a chance of anything,” I said, gesturing at the bartender. “But he lacks a certain enthusiasm for his job, you know?”

The Phin waved his hand over his shoulder, and Maurice strode purposefully towards the bar.

I eyed him carefully, and produced a thick yellow envelope from my pocket. “This is what we took from your people during the, uh, disturbance,” I said. “Plus fifteen percent over three weeks, to be fair. I thought you might think of it as a loan you forgot you approved.”

He reached out and took the envelope, weighed it in his hand theatrically, and nodded, stuffing it into his coat pocket. I watched him carefully. The Phin could choose to view this as a closed episode, or he could decide I owed him a tax. I didn’t have any backing any more, there was no one to intercede for me, so if The Phin put my name in the books I was going to have trouble.

Mo arrived with a full glass of whiskey and set it gently in front of him. The Phin waved him back to his perch with an irritated gesture and took a swallow, wiping his gleaming lips with the back of his hand.

“I’m inclined to go along with that, and here’s why,” he said. “Since Frank McKenna’s untimely demise, it’s fucking chaos. Where’s Frank junior? No one fucking knows. Chino’s dead, Mikey D’s dead, the kid’s missing. It’s fucking chaos.” He shook his head, then leaned back and laced his fingers over his belly, staring at me from under his eyebrows. “It’s also an opportunity.”

I raised my eyebrows. My nose throbbed. I wasn’t taking anything for the pain. I hadn’t seen Frank Junior after he’d entered the warehouse, and I didn’t know where he’d flown to. It hadn’t occurred to me to check up on him.

“Frank’s little kingdom is still there,” The Phin said. “It’s still in one piece, for a few more days, maybe. Because the kid’s missing. Frank Junior might come back with fresh muscle, put the house in order, so people are hesitating. Who cares if he comes back. Someone could step in there, and just take over.” He shrugged. “Wait another week and it’ll be five thousand kingdoms, each a fucking block long.”

I frowned. “You’re thinking I step in there?”

He threw his hands up. “Why not? You know Frank’s operations. You know everything. And you collect, kiddo.” he waved his hands again, leaning forward to reclaim his drink with a moist-sounding grunt. “We had our differences, sure, and you do fucking owe me restitution. But for years you paid that fat Irish bastard like interest on a bank account. He used to brag about you. You know how to make people pay you when the last thing in the fuckin’ world they want to do is pay you. That’s the secret, kiddo. You cracked the code.”

I nodded, thinking it over. It was ridiculous … but it wasn’t. It was what I did, just writ large. “And you want to back me?”

He winked. “Sure. I can’t take on Frank’s territory, his people wouldn’t like it. I’d spend more fuckin’ money and time conquering neighborhoods than anything else. Fucking gunplay, body bags, my friends on the force getting cold feet.” He made a disgusted noise and snorted. “You’ll have some unhappy folks, but most of ‘em know you and could work for you. But you don’t have enough seed money, or muscle. You don’t have political contacts. You were never sitting at the table, huh? So, I’ll be your fairy godfather. I’ll stake you. You need muscle, call me and I’ll send you more legbreakers, gunmen, whatever. You get into a spot of trouble, I can clear it up. All you do is step into Frank’s shoes and keep things runnin’, and be my vassal.”

I nodded. “And tithe to you. How much?”

“Thirty beans,” he said immediately. “I’ll be workin’ hard for you, kiddo. Thirty off the top to me. But I’m giving you a fucking territory it took McKenna twenty-five years to build. All you gotta do is not fuck it up.” He shrugged, slugging back his drink. “It’s worth it, I think. You think on it. Let me know tomorrow.”

He stood up, and the kitten suddenly leaped up onto the table in front of me and sat down, sniffing the creamer and trying to figure out how to get its snout into it. I watched The Phin huff his way through the bar towards his goons. At the doorway leading to the outer bar he spun, raised his cane, and winked.

“Good to see ya, Kiddo,” he said. “If Billy Bumbles ever learns English, tell him I said hi.”

Billy snorted and extended a crooked middle finger over his shoulder without turning around.

The Phin and his boys trooped out, and I picked up the kitten and leaned back in my seat, putting Stanley in my lap and dragging a hand over him. The cat rolled onto its back and grabbed my hand with its paws, pulling me to its tiny mouth and biting. It’s tiny teeth didn’t hurt at all, and I could feel it purring. I looked over at The Bumble, who looked back at me, shrugged and returned his attention to the paper.

It could be done. I hadn’t thought about it at all, but now that someone had said it to me, I could see it, how it would work. I knew everything I needed to know. I thought about the work involved in getting everyone in line, everyone paying up the right amounts on time, and my heart beat a little faster, saliva flooding my mouth. It was bloody work, but it was work I was good at, it was work I enjoyed. And there would be a lot of it.

I looked down at Stanley, who had rolled back onto his belly and suffered me to pet him, still purring, his eyes almost closed and his pink nose wet and glistening. I rolled him around in my hands and felt their power, the energy I had in me. I could hurt the cat, I knew. It would be easy; I could feel him vibrating with energy, nerve endings and blood vessels. I opted instead to scratch behind his ear, making him rub his head into the palm of my hand with pleasure.

I could hurt him, but I chose not to.

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Collections Chapter 37

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

37.

Frank went down easy, collapsing under me like he was made of papier-mâché with an undignified squawk of shock. The gun went off between us, and then it was just gunshots in the air, a drumline of them like bombs going off, punctuated by shouts, like dogs barking. Frank was stronger than a lifetime of rare steaks and bourbon would have led you to believe, struggling beneath me, trying to bring the gun to bear on me again. I had no leverage; with both hands on his wrist I put my weight into play to hold his arm down. After a few seconds of this he reached around and took hold of my hair, yanking back suddenly and viciously, tearing a clump out by the root and jerking my head back painfully.

Then The Bumble crashed into my field of vision, leaping onto Frank’s chest with surprising grace and speed, bending over him, big arms working. Frank started kicking and twitching beneath us like a madman, the gun in his hand leaping like it had a brain of its own, wriggling and twisting in my hands while the noise level grew and grew around us.

Then, with a sudden heave, The Bumble’s shoulders rolled and Frank jerked beneath us, then fell still. His arm went limp under my hands and the gun slipped from his fingers.

I stared down at it, panting, sweat pouring into my eyes. I looked up at The Bumble’s back; he remained turned away from me, shoulders heaving as he sucked in breath. I’d always known Billy had come up the ranks, just like any other big guy with no skills except his muscles and a willingness to take orders, but I’d never really thought about what that meant.

As I stared, Billy whirled and took hold of my arm, scooping up Frank’s gun and dragging me behind one of the Rape Vans, bullets digging up the pavement at our feet as we scrambled behind it. We leaned against the van and struggled for breath, and suddenly The Bumble was laughing. We looked at each other, and I found myself smiling back into his red, boulder-like face.

After a second, his eyes started following something over my shoulder, and the smile faded. Silently, he pointed.

I followed his gaze and saw Alt James, suitcase in hand and Alt Rusch a few steps behind, struggling to keep up with the big man’s long strides. They were just running away. The cops and Frank’s boys were spitting bullets at each other, popping up from behind cover in a weird little ballet, oblivious, and Alt James was just walking away. I suddenly remembered the strange, distant noises I’d heard right before Alt James had shown up.

“Motherfucker,” I breathed. He was using an alternate world to teleport around. Someplace like where he’d tried to leave me, empty and abandoned, with no traffic or cops to slow him down, but with the same infrastructure and layout. Zap himself over there, drive wherever he wanted to go, then zap himself back. Avoid obstacles, get the drop on people—he was going to disappear into the night like a ghost and show up again on my doorstep, grinning, implacable.

I looked up and grabbed the door handle of the van, hauling it open and throwing myself inside, scrambling over broken glass to the driver’s side. The keys hung in the ignition; as I turned them, the passenger door slammed and I found The Bumble sitting there, carefully buckling his seatbelt. I had a moment of affection for Billy: He smelled like onions and he thought hot dogs were food, and maybe he’d started off life as Frank’s eyes and ears on me, but fuck if he hadn’t turned out to be my best friend in the whole fucking universe.

The van started up, smooth and powerful. Trust criminals to always have tip-top vehicles. A spray of bullets ventilated the side door as I put it into gear, making me jump. I slammed my foot down on the gas and we lurched into a skidding, screeching motion, clipping one of the cops’ SUVs as we staggered out of the OK Corral, another spray of bullets trailing us and shattering my driver’s side mirror. I reminded myself that even if I was, in fact, some sort of weird immortal, Billy wasn’t, and I didn’t want to end our freshly minted love affair by getting him shot to death in Newark.

I eased up on the gas and circled the van around, searching for Alt James. I spotted him on the edge of the parking lot, a hundred feet away, getting into his Cadillac.

“Hang on,” I said, and spun the wheel, goosing the van into a tight turn until I had the Caddy in my sights, then mashing the pedal down and fishtailing for a few seconds, the van leaping forward just as I saw Alt James and Rusch slamming their doors, brake lights popping on. The van felt like a coffin rattling towards the incinerator as the speedometer inched past forty, fifty, fifty-five, but I kept the gas on and clench the wheel until my knuckles hurt.

The Caddy leaped into life and immediately peeled out, turning sharply left and accelerating. I started to turn the van and cursed, feeling it lose its grip, pulling my leg up and tapping the brakes a little, easing it into a wider turn and loosing seconds on the deal. The van ran like a top but it was a fucking box on wheels and didn’t want to do anything strenuous. By the time I had the Caddy’s brake lights in view again he’d gained twenty or thirty feet on me, and at sixty miles per hour I wasn’t gaining on him. We were both, however, gaining on the fencing around the parking lot. We’d crash the chain fence easy enough, but I tried to imagine the van’s suspension surviving the low concrete wall at sixty miles and hour and I couldn’t do it.

The streetlamps flashed by like silver trees, the noise of their passing roaring in through the shattered door windows.

Suddenly I could see an arm poking out of the passenger side of the Cadillac, quickly retrieved. As I watched, the suitcase of cash was thrust out and held for a moment out the car window.

“Ah, shit,” The Bumble said.

The suitcase flew back towards us, and I jerked the wheel but too late, the windshield disintegrating into a mist of shards. The suitcase clipped my shoulder and tumbled into the empty rear of the van as we went into a spin, tires squealing. We smacked into one of the streetlamps and everything came to a sudden stop, my internal organs swimming around with unspent inertia, the engine dying with a wheeze.

I looked over at Billy. He was looking back at me, his big calloused hands held up in front of him in a comical gesture of shock.

“That motherfucker just threw a half million dollars at us,” he said.

I started laughing, grabbing hold of the keys and turning the ignition. After a gurgling hesitation, the engine roared back into life. I floored the gas pedal again and the van staggered forward with a groan of tearing metal. Mashing my foot down hard on the pedal, I crept up on the Caddy, the whole van shaking and shuddering, air blowing in and moving around us like a living thing, connected and sinuous. We pulled up alongside the Caddy and I looked down at them; Alt Rusch stared back at me in abject terror, her wrinkled face white, her mouth open. She was saying something, her mouth just moving in silence, as she stared up at me. Her arms were spread, like she was trying to hold herself inside the car despite a pressure trying to expel her.

Beyond her, I could see Alt James’ hand moving over something between the front seats, something with glowing lights.

The moment I saw it, the noise began: A deep, loud screeching noise that sank into my chest and vibrated my bones, smacked into my head and gave me a headache. I winced and the van veered and wobbled as I lost control for a split-second. Grabbing the wheel tightly, I checked the speedometer—ninety-five—and leaned forward, watching the fence approach at disturbing speed.

“He’s going to pop!” The Bumble shouted suddenly.

I looked back at the Caddy. It suddenly looked … blurry, as if it was fading away. The noise got louder, piercing—I imagined it was shaking the van even more, that we were going to start popping bolts if I didn’t shut it down soon.

I looked from the Caddy to the fence. Then I looked over the Cadillac and saw one of the lampposts zooming towards us, a few feet past the Cadillac. I sucked in breath and wrenched the steering wheel to the left.

Tires screaming, we veered sharply and hit the other car with a hollow thud, bouncing me in my seat. The wheel jerked and moved under my hands as the Caddy turned with me, the lamppost right there, immediately in front of it. The noise had reached a volume that made me want to stick pencils in my ears, and then there was an explosion, or the sound of an explosion, and the lamppost flashed by and suddenly there was nothing resisting the van and we spun.

In sudden silence, I felt my stomach lurch inside me and I realized we were in the air. The sky flashed by, and then a streetlight, like a dim, orange moon. The silence was wonderful, the sense of weightlessness was wonderful. It was like I’d hit a ramp at seventy-five miles per hour and launched myself into orbit.

We hit the ground with a bang and the steering wheel hit me in the face with a wet snap, pain flashing through my head like a spike being driven home, wonderful, clarifying. The van skidded on its side for five seconds or so, then smacked into another lamppost and stopped dead, glass shattering and raining down on me, my whole body flopping once like a ragdoll. Then we were still, and everything was silent.

I unbuckled my seatbelt as The Bumble pushed the passenger door up and open. He climbed up onto the side of the van and reached down, taking hold of my wrist and hauling me up. I felt jittery and weak, like I’d been in a coma for a year and was trying to walk. My head was ringing, and blood was pouring down from my shattered nose in a disturbing way. The pain felt good. I wanted to reach up and squeeze my nose, see how bad it was, but resisted. There would be time enough for scab-peeling and bruise-squeezing later.

Dizzy, I patted Billy on the shoulder and jumped down to the pavement. My legs gave out and I fell, hitting my head again and making my vision swim. I started to laugh a little, and tried hard to swallow it as I pushed myself back to my feet, my hands, I realized, cut up and bloody. Glass clung to my coat and fell off in random showers as I moved, limping heavily towards the lamppost I’d steer him into.

The Caddy was gone. Tire marks started about fifteen feet away and stopped abruptly right before the concrete base—he’d managed to jump into some other place, some other version of Newark. Was there a lamppost there? Had he suddenly materialized out of nowhere and slammed into it at full speed and killed himself? He had to have. He would have been heading for a Newark he could still navigate, a Newark with the same streets, the same layout—the same lampposts.

I turned and staggered a few steps to my left, almost losing my balance. Billy was walking towards me, smiling. He looked like he didn’t have a scratch on him, like he’d been sitting on the sidelines watching.

“Well,” he said, “we got this, at least.” He held the battered but still-closed suitcase up in front of him. It was silence for a second as I stood there shaking and laughing, no gunfire or shouting behind us. And then, dim, distant: Sirens.

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Collections Chapter 36

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

36.

Alt James noticed me looking at him and winked, making my leg twitch with the desire to kick him in the teeth. I imagined there might be an alternate universe where that would be possible, where I might take someone’s magic car through the noisiest invisible tunnel in the universe and track down some unsuspecting version of James and just assault him, but it wasn’t this universe. In this universe I was unarmed and standing next to The Bumble, and we were surrounded by Frank’s men on one side and the remnants of James’ cops on the other, guns fucking everywhere, dead bodies still staring in shock, chaos and open wounds.

I wasn’t entirely clear how Alt James had gotten his band of dirty cops to trust him, although having a dead body of his twin probably helped a little. There were only three of them left, led by the now-grimy and disheveled woman, short, a deep cut on her forehead and strands of dull brown hair hanging in her face. She watched everything from under her pale eyebrows, head tilted down, and looked fucking crazy, like she was going to go home and arrest some graffiti kids in her neighborhood and beat the living shit out of them just to relieve some stress.

It had started to rain, an annoying misty drizzle that you could ignore until you realized you weighed an extra fifty pounds because of the water your clothes had absorbed. Everyone else stood like they had more important things to worry about, like a fresh gunfight breaking out and everyone getting killed, so it didn’t seem smart to complain. I just stood there with the rain making me blink, getting in under my collar and dripping down my back. Everything had gone to fucking hell, but there was always hope things would go to hell again and all my problems would end up killing each other as planned.

About two blocks away, a car turned the corner, headlights washing over us. Everyone stiffened, but Alt James stepped forward immediately, hands up in front of him.

“These are my associates, is all. Mr. McKenna, let’s stay calm and do some business.”

Frank raised a hand and his crew did absolutely nothing, but that at least included not shooting at me, so I was pretty happy with the result. Everyone kept telling me I was immortal, but I had little desire to find out by direct experiment.

“All right,” Frank said laconically, smiling a little.

We waited in silence as the car pulled into the lot, rolled to a halt, and killed its lights. Everyone twitched a little when the doors popped open, but no one moved as Alt Rusch and the young red haired woman I’d met in the back of a car outside the Templar emerged, looking clean and pressed. They didn’t approach right away, just hung back.

“Go to this truck,” Alt James shouted over his shoulder, keeping his smile on Frank, “and bring me that suitcase.”

His version of Rusch glanced at the girl, shrugged, and set off, unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. She looked thinner and more wasted than my Rusch, her skin looser, more brown spots on her. She opened the passenger door of The Second Coming’s SUV and rummaged around, finally emerging with his suitcase full of cash, holding it with both hands and dropping it at Alt James’ feet like a lead weight. He grinned and glanced down at it.

“All right, Mr. McKenna, let’s make a deal. I got a lot of money in this case you can have. It’ll clear up your losses, and make up for your trouble to boot.”

Frank’s eyes flicked down to the suitcase and stayed there. “I’m curious what a bunch of civil servants thinks is a lot of money.”

James nodded and kicked the suitcase, sliding it forcefully into Alt Rusch’s legs. She yelped and jumped; all of the assembled goons snickered a little, eliciting a venomous glare from Alt Rusch I tried, and failed, to imagine on my own version of the woman. This version of Rusch would slit your throat for gas money, I thought.

The old woman knelt down and snapped the case open. The bills were still neatly stacked inside. Frank stared at it for a second too long, and then shrugged, looking back up at James.

“All right,” he said with the same careless drawl. “What would you want for that kind of money?”

Alt James gestured at Alt Rusch without looking at her, and she closed the case again and stood up to kick it back over to him. He was an impressive sight, tall and armored up, a big chrome-plated auto tucked in his waistband, the god of fucking war. I saw the cops behind them exchanging some looks—not liking that James was giving away that much cash, not liking that they didn’t know what the fuck was going on, not liking any of this shit.

“Wait a fucking second,” the woman said, stepping around to cut between Frank and Alt James. “Wait a fucking second. Captain, you got dead cops back there. Right behind you. That your fucking twin killed. And you’re just conducting business as fucking usual with this piece of trash?”

She was livid, and a small fire of hope lit inside me. Maybe this was going to go off the rails and get bloody again after all.

Alt James didn’t look at her. “Walker, we can discuss this later, okay? You all came into this knowing there was risk. You all are gonna retire young riding on my back. You got complaints, go talk to Internal Affairs, see where it gets you.”

She shook her head. “This shit—”

“Fucking cops,” Alt James snapped. “You’re all fucking the same everywhere. Think you can take the money and still set the tone. But the money sets the fucking tone. You want to take a vote and walk on out, go on ahead, but be fucking quiet about it, huh?”

She didn’t seem inclined to move. “This isn’t what we signed up for. This isn’t what you used to be all about. Now, we—”

With a fast, almost casual move of his arm, Alt James drew the shiny chrome automatic from his waistband, pushed it against her shoulder, and pulled the trigger. The noise was terrible, like a sonic boom, and her shoulder exploded, red pulp sprouting like a geyser. She seemed to think about it for a moment and then spin around from the impact, her other hand fluttering up to clamp down on the wound as she stumbled and staggered, falling over her own feet and landing with a wail of pain on the floor.

Behind him, the other cops all jerked as one. He pointed the gun at the sky and pulled the trigger again without turning around. “Any of you feel like you gotta express your displeasure, this ain’t the time or place.” He waited a beat, then lowered the gun and shrugged a little at Frank, rolling his eyes and grinning.

“What I want,” he said evenly, like he hadn’t just shot a cop in front of witnesses, “is your boy. Falken. Bodily.” He shrugged. “Alive or dead, don’t matter.”

Frank glanced at the cop on the ground, being helped by two of the burly, bald cops in jeans and tight T-shirts, both of whom looked like they’d just lost their cherry on shitting their pants. I was enjoying the show, seeing these assholes who strutted around like their badges made them untouchable feeling a little heat. I liked watching them squirm.

“All right,” Frank said, looking back at Alt James. I could almost see the thought bubble above his head: He thought this was the easiest money he’d ever make. “That works for me. One little problem, though, Captain: I don’t have Falken. I gave up on that shithead a long time ago.”

A feeling of hot frustration started to burn in me. All this, and both these motherfuckers were going to walk away, and I’d likely end up with a bullet in my head for my trouble.

“These two know where he is,” James said, cheerful. He looked around. “Looks to me like you were planning on beating some shit out of them tonight anyway. Why not see if that shakes loose? I can wait. I’m a patient man.”

Frank looked at us, his face still. His Thinking Face, I knew. He chewed on something for a few seconds, and then smiled. “Chino,” he said. “Billy Bumble, bring ‘im over here, okay?”

I tensed up. Chino, daydreaming, took a moment to get his fat ass in motion, and came up to Billy gun in hand, which was bright. Under normal laboratory conditions, The Bumble could bend Chino into interesting shapes and use him as furniture. The gun evened things out. Billy gave him a shrug as he approached, and stepped over to Frank without assistance, his jowly face blank, his eyes sleepy. The Bumble wasn’t going to let some fat asshole like Chino manhandle him.

Frank nodded at The Bumble. “How you doin’, Billy?”

The Bumble shrugged, massive shoulders rolling. Frank nodded cheerfully. “Chino, give me your piece.”

Chino handed it over. Frank made a show of weighing it in his hand for a moment, then raised his arm, putting his shiny automatic against Billy’s forehead. Everything got quiet; even the cops stopped their cursing and muttering to stare. I stiffened and started to take a step forward, but Chino and the rest of Frank’s mutts turned and covered me, almost casually. Chino even had the balls to wag a finger at me, shaking his head with a grin.

“Billy,” Frank said, sounding almost tired, his injured hand cradled up by his chest, his belly straining the faith of his shirt buttons. “I’m fuckin’ tired of this, and I hate bein’ in fucking Newark, so tell me where the fuck you got Falken stashed and then we all go home.”

The Bumble’s eyes had opened slightly when Frank had put the gun against his head, but now were their usual sleepy slits. He shrugged. “Can’t do that, Frank.”

I put my eyes on Frank and kept them there, trying to judge his body language. I couldn’t believe he would fucking shoot Billy Bumbles like that, but then Billy had been cast out; he wasn’t part of Frank’s crew any more, so it wasn’t against the rules or any bullshit like that. And then it occurred to me that this was a process: He’d ask Billy, and if Billy refused to answer he’d shoot Billy in the head, and then he’d ask me, and Billy would be proof that he was serious. He’d chosen Billy because he thought Billy was the tougher one between us. And he was probably right.

My heart started pounding.

Frank nodded, and shoved the barrel of the gun hard against Billy’s forehead, making the big man wince. “Sure you can. One last chance, or I fucking blow the top of your head off.”

Billy shrugged again, but didn’t bother answering. Frank’s whole body kind of sagged, a defeated sort of movement, and I realized immediately he was going to do it.

I took a deep breath, told myself I was immortal, and launched myself at Frank.

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Collections Chapter 35

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

35.

I knew The Second Coming of Alt James was going to ram the cops the moment he herded us into his sleek, stolen SUV with the heated seats and the individual television screens, and winked at me as he backed away to slam the door, gun trained on us. “Let’s see if we can’t draw my twin out from the shadows with a little rumpshaker, huh? Fasten those seatbelts, y’all,” he said, smiling.

“Shit,” The Bumble said, sounding happy. “He’s going to fucking ram them.”

We both sat there with ridiculous, inappropriate smiles on our faces. I wasn’t sure what The Bumble was thinking, but my heart was racing as I pictured it: Bodies in the air, sparks grinding between the vehicles, the thud and thump of the tires rolling over people, the chaos, the pain, the excitement of it. The glorious part of it was that I was a prisoner, powerless, and thus free from guilt.

The Second Coming of Alt James put the SUV into gear and it rolled soundlessly down off the overpass. With a little goose of the gas pedal he hopped the curb and cut over a small island of sidewalk, popping out onto the main approach to the warehouse parking lot. The lot was surrounded by a chain link fence sprouting from a low concrete wall, but the entrance was a double gate thrown wide open. Headlights off, he moved at a crawl towards the huge structure ahead. We could see the cops clearly enough; there were evenly spaced streetlamps sprouting from the blacktop every twenty feet or so, giving off an eerie orange glow. The cops, still milling about like they owned the fucking world, secure that their badges and guns would protect them from anything, didn’t notice us. For a few seconds we glided along in silence, wrapped in darkness. The Second Coming held his automatic up in the air so The Bumble and I could see it, one hand casually on the steering wheel, his own seatbelt cinched tight over his wide chest.

When we were half a long block away, he hit the gas, and we all jerked back into our seats.

It was eerie, but no one noticed us until right before we slammed into them. At the last second there was this moment of stillness, shock, paralysis, where all of them turned almost as one and stared into the grill of the truck. A surge of adrenaline swept through me, carrying away all the pain and aches, all the weariness, filling me with electricity and making my mouth dry up like a desert. Then we crashed into a knot of people as the night erupted into screams, and time snapped back to normal speed, everything in flashes. The SUV clipped the butt end of one of the Rape Vans and we spun, moving sideways and scraping over three or four bodies before smacking into the side of the warehouse, my teeth leaping in my mouth.

The Second Coming was out of the SUV before I could even orient myself, popping out with guns in both hands. I watched him feeling something akin to awe as he moved low and easy, throwing shots. With one hand he almost casually put bullets into the prone bodies littered around the truck, while with the other he tracked the surviving cops as they ran for cover behind the vans and trucks, pulling their own weapons and shouting. He put down one more with an impossible shot before he’d chased them all behind cover.

The Bumble started to move, but I put my hand on his shoulder. “Wait. No one but James knows we’re in here, and this is the whole damn point: Let them kill each other.”

He sagged back into the leather, grimacing. “Yeah,” he said, and turned his head to watch out the passenger window.

Almost casually, The Second Coming moved behind one of the vans between us and three cops who’d gathered behind one of their own SUVs. Two more were using the other van as cover. I counted five of them down, most likely all dead, and wondered how fucking lucky we were as a universe to have gotten my Stanley James, who hadn’t been above a shakedown and been kind of a pain in the ass, but generally a good enough cop, a good enough person. Reasonable. Not a bloodthirsty killer like every other Stanley James I’d met so far.

The Second Coming was moving, then, gingerly backing his way down the length of the van, popping out from behind it on the other end, completely exposed to the five cops crouching ten feet away. He poured fire at them, hitting two of them almost instantly and flushing the other three up and out, firing back as they scrambled to the next truck for new cover, their shots wild. The Second Coming took his time, following them to their previous spot.

Suddenly, some distance away, there was a second or two of a loud, eardrum searing noise, like static from the world’s largest radio. It there and gone, making my whole body tense up. When I focused on the parking lot again, James and the cops didn’t seem to have moved, but Frank’s men were pouring out of the warehouse, shouting, moving behind the SUV we were in for cover. Mentally I set my stopwatch for police involvement at about five minutes, with all the noise going on. Although it was Newark. That was a variable I couldn’t handicap.

Frank’s guys didn’t know what to do, at first. They didn’t know who any of these other assholes were. Just as Frank himself emerged from the warehouse, smoking a cigarette and holding his bandaged hand up like a talisman in front of him, his men spotted The Second Coming. With shouts and yells they started firing at the SUV he was hiding behind. The cops—who I was actually starting to feel sorry for—started firing their weapons more or less in every direction at once, displaying the sort of training and calm I’d come to expect from city police. I had to admit, in all fairness, that your Captain and chief dirty cop suddenly ramming into you with a truck and shooting at you was probably unsettling, and probably hadn’t been covered at the fucking academy.

Bullets slapped into our SUV, surprisingly loud, sending a shuddering vibration through the whole chassis that made The Bumble and me sink down in our seats, cursing and jerking. Frank’s men as one unit decamped for the Van The Second Coming had recently been using as cover. Peeking up over the dashboard I could see Frank just standing there smoking, like nothing in the world could ever hurt him.

I leaned over and eased the lock of my door open. “Stay here,” I said to Billy. Without waiting for a response, I pushed the door open just enough for me to slip out onto the pavement, silently pushing it closed behind me. Not ten feet away, Frank stood watching, red in the face and puffing away at his cigarette. It was amazing, but no one was paying any attention to him. The idea that I’d gotten everyone together just so Frank could miraculously survive was a sudden and heavy anxiety, and I thought if there was ever a time to get over my phobia of guns, this was it. All or nothing.

I dropped to the greasy, gritty pavement and pushed myself under the SUV. On the other side lay one of the dead cops, a big guy with a shaved head burned red and angry from the sun, peeling in spots, his gingerish hair in a monk’s halo just over his ears. His gun was still holstered in the small of his back, and I crawled under the car towards him, reaching out gingerly as shots banged out just a few feet away, making me cringe and wince each time.

Another drawn-out second of ear-bleeding static filled the air just as I managed to unsnap the holster and take hold of the gun, a snub-nosed revolver of some sort. By the time I’d rolled back towards the other side of the car, the noise had stopped again. I didn’t pause to think on it. I had a few moments while everyone was busy, while Frank was distracted, in which to enact a little insurance.

I crawled out from under the SUV and pushed up onto my feet. Moving slowly, I crept over to where Frank stood, holding the heavy gun down by my leg and angled away from me so if it went off I wouldn’t shoot myself. I’d fired a few guns in my time, when circumstances had forced me to, but they always seemed to vibrate in my hand like an unexploded bomb, waiting for one more little jerk or tremor to set them off. My heart was beating fast and my hands shook a little as I angled my way back towards the warehouse wall in shadows created by the amber streetlights I got myself lined up directly behind Frank’s pudgy, slump-shouldered form. Reminding myself not to get in too close where he could grab at me—Frank had gotten fat, but he was a scrapper, and knew how to fight—I crept forward until I was close enough to reach out and push the gun into the small of his back.

“Hi, Frank.”

I felt like an asshole. He went stiff and jerked his arms a little, then caught himself and went still, not turning around to look at me. I felt the moment draining away even as I arrived. I should have just shot him, I knew it. I told myself to just do it, to not stretch this out and let him think. But I couldn’t. I found myself frozen. I’d never just killed a man like that, cold, mechanical. I’d had a few moments where I knew I could have killed someone, but I’d warmed up to it, the violence boiling up and over and carrying me along until The Bumble or someone pulled me away, dragging me off. This was clinical and I found I didn’t have the belly for it.

“Jesus,” Frank said loudly over the roar of gunshots, turning his head finally to get me into his peripheral vision. In front of him, The Second Coming dashed behind the other rape van, dropping clips from his guns and crouching low, hunted by a dozen people but still looking like he was in charge. “You’re fucking supernatural, you know that?”

“Shut up,” I said. Ridiculous. I’d started the fucking conversation. Sweat rolled into my eyes and I thought I should just start beating him, get the blood flowing, and then I’d be able to do it. But I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel angry and strong, untouchable like I usually did when I got into the mood to hurt someone. I felt stupid and hollow.

As I watched The Second Coming, the original Alt James walked into my vision behind him, like my vision had blurred.

He was wearing full police riot gear: SWAT uniform, body armor, helmet with visor up. A semiautomatic rifle was slung over one shoulder, and he held an automatic in one hand. He didn’t hesitate or say anything; he walked up behind The Second Coming, put the auto to his head, and pulled the trigger. There was a brief geyser of red jetting from The Second Coming’s forehead, and then he crumpled to the ground. I stared in dumb shock; it was like one Stanley James had been plucked away, rubbed out of the picture, replaced by a new version.

I heard something behind me, and then the barrel of a gun was pressed into my back.

“Drop it, asshole,” Chino breathed into my ear, his breath smelling like cigarettes and hot dogs. “I don’ wanna have to shoot you, and miss out on knockin’ your teeth out, entienda?

Alt James looked over at us, and smiled, pointing his gun at Frank carefully. All the noise had suddenly stopped.

“What do you say, Mr. McKenna?” he shouted cheerfully. “How about a truce?”

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