Battle of the Network Zombies (14 page)

Tuesday
9:00–10:00
P.M.
Fae or Fairy?

Montserrat’s room was identical to ours. A small seating area was set apart from the bed by a bureau holding up a pair of crystal lamps, a stuffed mink or ferret leaning up against one. In our room, the space between the lamps contained a large bowl of fruit—I suspected this was some sort of joke. Like we could just reach out and eat a mango. Someone was an asshole. Mama had something else in that spot.

“Look at this shit right here.” I waved Wendy over. “Get a good shot of this.”

The voodoo woman turned the bureau into a makeshift altar to her love. Johnny Birch’s photo sat dead center, surrounded by candles of various lengths, a wooden bowl with what looked like a raw egg in tomato sauce—though it totally could have been blood—a garland of chicken bones and various little statues, and linen bags tied off with thin cords.

“Crazy.” Wendy sang the word, eyes wide with mock peril.

“Absolutely. But it must have some purpose.”

“Well, those are called gris-gris bags. I saw them in a movie.”

“Oh yeah? Which one?” I pressed.

“I don’t know, something with Kate Hudson and lots of humidity.”

I skimmed the surface of the altar with my fingertips. They came back red. The belly of her welcome harp seal was likewise rouged. I went to the door and knelt down next to a line of the same chalky substance drawn in front of Mama Montserrat’s door.

I rushed to Birch’s suite, Wendy hot on my heels.

“What are we looking for?”

“Anything that could help us figure this out. Scott told me I need to really tear the place apart because there’s bound to be something there. Has to be. If you totally throw away the idea that the door was locked.”

“It’s true. That’s a big problem. I haven’t stopped thinking that he killed himself. But then you throw in the envelope and the way he died. It’s just too weird.”

“Too weird,” I repeated. Kneeling on the floor in front of the open door. “Look.”

Wendy knelt next to me the camera focusing in on another line of the red powder. This one was broken in two spots, like someone had cut across it with their fingers.

“What do you think it means?”

“Well, it’s on both of their thresholds, so either something that bonds them, or protects them, or binds them, maybe.”

“That narrows it down.”

I ignored her sarcasm and stepped inside the room, intent on discovering something this time, some for real clue that might lead us to an answer. Mama Montserrat for sure played a part, but why? Why would she kill the star of her show? Didn’t make sense.

I rummaged through drawers of underwear and socks. Johnny seemed to be stocking up for the apocalypse. Either that, or he shit himself with regularity. The closet held his clothes, nothing in the pockets. The nightstand didn’t even have an alarm clock on it. I scanned through the porn titles.

Jacked Up 2, Double Fisted, Frosty Fuckers 5: Ice Orgy, Pooper Scooper
. Each movie seemed more perverse than the last. The only thing the films—and I use that term very loosely—had in common were an absence of anything that seemed like normal sex. Not that it was surprising in the slightest that Johnny was into kink. The opposite, in fact. I’d almost half-expected even more disgusting stuff, though the pictures on the scat DVD did make my evening quarry back up into my mouth a bit.

“What are we missing?”

Wendy shook her head. She panned the camera over all the surfaces, before returning to center me in the frame.

I knelt beside the heaps of ash, hesitating a moment before slipping my fingers into the remains. Sure, I’m not the most sensitive sort, but I did know the guy and it seemed weird to disturb his ashes. That said, it kind of reminded me of spa scrub, granular and gritty. Occasionally, I’d come across larger pieces, like finding sea glass in sand. As I ran my fingers through what would have been Johnny’s waist, I found a little lump.

Once extracted and brushed off, it was clear that Mama had been involved in the murder. How else could the little thing have survived the fire and completely unmarred? I held it out to Wendy.

“Look what I found.”

“A gris-gris,” she whispered.

“It’s the clencher.”

“Now we just have to find her. She was talking about Ether the other night.”

A stretch, since everyone was talking about Ether, Ricardo’s newest engineering marvel slash night spot, but what were our options, really?

I pulled the cab out the front gate and turned left toward the main artery back into downtown. Thankfully the rain stopped its torrent and the radio was blissfully silent. Baljeet’s final curse, may have been just that. One could hope.

“Um, Amanda?” Wendy asked, not looking away from the screen on her iPhone.

“Yes?”

“Who are those guys in the backseat?”

I glimpsed their reflections in the rearview mirror, one straightening his tie hopefully, the other digging in his nose for some spectral booger. “I’m calling them Lumpy and Pie-hole.”

“Those aren’t our names,” Lumpy grunted.

Wendy just nodded, her interest transferred to the image on her little screen. “Abuelita’s opening the box!”

“Ooh.” I’m not saying I’m a bad driver, but I did watch the entire scene unfold. I’m a talented multi-tasker, in case you weren’t aware.

The two ghosts pushed through the back of the seat to get a better look, faces nestling in next to Wendy’s cheeks. Her blond pigtails hung into the center of their transparent skulls like handles on a bizarre pair of Harijuku girl handbags. Lumpy and Pie-hole’s eyes narrowed with interest, then confusion.

“What the hell is she doing?” Wendy enlarged the image as much as she could.

The bead stringer sat on the couch, pensively pulling what looked like a metal paint can from the UPS box. She sat it on the coffee table and disposed of the box, returning with a soupspoon and prying open the tin lid. Abuelita chewed her nails and stared into the opening, sinking back onto the couch. It seemed to be emitting a pulsing glow.

“Wha’s in there, an asteroid?” Pie-hole mimicked the immigrant’s nervous habit and stuck his phantom nails between his equally ineffective teeth.

She leaned over the can, held the spoon like a prison shank and stabbed it inside, withdrawing a massive glob of glowing white paste and plopping it into her mouth. There were a couple of close calls where Abuelita seemed to be heaving, but ultimately she choked down the mouthful.

“It’s like toothpaste, or something.”

“I think it’s gravy.”

“Nah,” I said. “Too thick.”

She dropped the spoon on the table and leaned back on the couch, rubbing her stomach, kneading at it like dough. Her movements slowed until, finally, her head rocked to the side, her mouth open and drooling.

“Okay, that was weird,” I said, returning my attention to the road.

Where Ranier Avenue escapes the sea of crack houses, whores working out of shadowy bus shelters and gang-infested Vietnamese billiard halls and turns into Boren Avenue, an equally shady area of public housing and under maintained rentals, I started noticing the headlights of a car, weaving into oncoming traffic and then darting back into the lane behind me.

As we crossed the intersection, the car revved up beside me, the passenger window descended and the driver—a middle-aged Indian woman, bendi maniacally applied above her right eyebrow and mouth slashed into a growl—shook her fist in my direction.

“I lojacked you, bitch!” she shouted as I rolled down the cab’s window.

“Oh shit!” Lumpy and Pie-hole screamed in unison.

“Baljeet?” The name shook loose from my lips like a sob.

“Damn right, you white devil. I told you Baljeet’s coming to kill you. You misunderestimate Baljeet.” She lifted a long curved machete, fatter at the tip than the rest of the blade. To accentuate her threat, the psychotic dispatcher twisted her wheel and slammed her car into the side of ours.

The impact sent my hip colliding with the doorframe—yep, that hip. I heard it pop before I lost balance in my hips. Clinging to the steering wheel, I hit the gas and pressed past Baljeet’s swerving deathmobile, Wendy and the boys screaming in terror like virgins at a sacrifice—not that any of them would have to worry about that.
⁶³

Baljeet escalated and as we rounded Madison, she slammed into the back bumper. The cab spun in the intersection, my leg ground in the socket. Pain sluiced straight up my spine and I screamed, more than a little bit.

I regained my sense of surroundings to the tune of Wendy yelling, “Go! Go! Go!”

Baljeet’s car barreled toward us, the woman ranting madly inside as though we could hear her. I floored the accelerator and we barreled over Capitol Hill, toward the freeway overpass. The two ghosts faced out the back window.

“Is she still coming?” I asked.

The cars and buildings were blurring around us. I looked down at the speedometer and hit the brake. Sixty downtown was a death wish. Baljeet’s car clipped us as she sped past to prove my point—the car shimmied as paint and metal grated. The other cab swerved a bit, and I thought she might just ease past the garbage truck idling at the stoplight. But without braking at all, Baljeet plowed into the mass of steel at full speed. The cab collapsed on itself. Glass shattered across the street in all directions and the cab’s trunk drove straight through to the engine, coming to rest underneath the hulking truck’s bumper. The top of the cab crimped like a used soda can.

“Holy crap. Look at that, would ya?” Lumpy slipped through the front seat and onto the hood of the taxi. “Cut her right in two.”

I inched forward. Lumpy was right. Baljeet’s torso, severed just below the breastbone, jettisoned through the windshield and slid down the closed bin of the truck, arms twitching and leaving a brownish smear.

The ghosts didn’t take the presence of viscera well at all. Pie-hole hung out the window, spewing great big mouthfuls of ectoplasm onto the street. Lumpy moaned and covered his eyes, threatening to puke himself.

I glanced over at Wendy, who simply shrugged and went back to her surveillance of Abuelita.

“I guess I don’t have to worry about Baljeet anymore.” Nor did she look particularly appetizing amidst the Hefty bags, though you probably weren’t interested in hearing that.
⁶⁴
There is something to be said about presentation—you eat with your eyes, after all.

I wriggled my pelvis around and somewhere in the melee, my leg popped back into place, thank God. Still it was sore as fuck. I dreaded the inevitable limp, made all the more obvious when amplified by a pair of peek-toe stilettos.

“I’m gonna need a little help when we get out at Ether,” I said.

“Why, did you poop yourself?”

Pie-hole and Lumpy let loose with an explosion of laughter, the dwarf sniffing the air and the other holding his nose dramatically, each laughing riotously at the other’s mockery.

“No. I didn’t poop myself; that’s your modus operandi. I just have a little issue with my hip.”

Ether filled an empty space between new construction on 1st Avenue. On the left, some high-end boutique hotel sat atop a churrascaria, on the right, shops with clearance signs in the windows instead of merchandise held up a new—and completely unoccupied—condo complex.

When I say
empty space,
I mean it.

Ricardo enlisted the help of some psychotic banshee architect to design the place, a tribute to the club owner’s love of breezy minimalism, modern furniture and the shoegazing music of the 90s. Ether was neither visible, nor accessible to anyone, not without a guide. The bouncer, as it were, lounged on a bench tapping fat ashes directly into a smoldering trashcan, smoke drifting from it in thin curls of accusation. A crumpled fedora cast a mysterious shadow, hanging like a veil to a spot just past his nose. He wore a long wool coat, wrapped around him like a robe, and his legs were casually crossed at the ankle.

Wendy helped me hobble over.

“Are you the guy?” I asked.

The cigar shifted from one side of his mouth to the other. “The guy?” The man’s voice was as graveled and pained as bare feet on aggregate. He sniffed in our direction. “Somethin’ smells wrong.”

A growl muffled inside Wendy.

“Of course that ain’t the guy!” An androgynous creature in an odd combination of hotpants and combat boots sashayed in from a darkened alley. A moment later, a businessman squirreled his way out of the same place, buttoning up his shirt, head darting side to side pathetically. “I’m the guy, dolls!”

The fairy—I’m making an assumption here, based on both his highly effete aura, and slight elfish nature—flopped down next to the gruff gentleman like a rag doll, draping his arm around the other’s shoulders congenially. “The name’s Max, but I go by Maxey.” The man struggled to pull away, a look of disgust revealed as his fedora fell.

Maxey giggled at his response, reached over and flicked his ear like you would your little brother. I expected some sort of violent retaliation. After all, if someone flicked my ear, I’d at the very least sock them in the head—after I picked up my ear and forced Wendy to glue it back on, of course.
⁶⁵
Instead, his face sagged and his body went slack like the flick sent a stream of heroin straight to his brain.

“That’s better.” He lifted his hips and slipped one of his legs underneath him in a single hop. “Grumpy can just sit there and think about his mean behavior, while we talk about fun stuff.”

“Like Ether?”

“Exactly like Ether. What could be more fun to talk about. Have you been? Oh my God, it’s so awesome. And the cover’s only twenty-five bucks each, can you believe it?”

I turned to Wendy and blinked innocently.

“Don’t look at me,” she said and pointed the camera at me. “I’m the crew. Remember?”

“Here’s the thing, Maxey.”

“Mmm-hmm.” He clasped his hands and brought both index fingers to a point, playing with his lower lip while he listened.

“We’re filming segments for the new Johnny Birch reality show and I’m certain Ricardo would just adore having Ether featured. Plus, we know him really well. He even created this fabulous zombie you see here.” I gestured to Wendy, who did a quick pose, twirling a pigtail like she was winding up a clockwork.