Flex (10 page)

He stumbled to the window to watch the outlook in the backyard break free. Trees in the shallow soil on the mountain’s slope tumbled downwards into the river below. The water would be choked with dead wood, the surviving animals waking to a whole new environment.

Valentine grasped the windowsill, smiling in crazed wonderment – at him, at the last rumbles of dirt cascading down the hill, of the trees shaking like thrash-metal fans in the pit.

There was no pressure.

He’d rerouted the flux somewhere else.

Valentine scrabbled on the floor, grabbed a clear chunk of Flex between two fingers, peered through it. Paul could see a distorted ripple of Valentine’s eye, the Flex transparent as water.

“This is clear,” she said in a hushed tone. She shook the crystal to verify its existence. “
Clear
, Paul. B1-grade. I’m no expert, but… this is legendary. Top quality. Nobody’s made this since the 1950s.” She scrubbed tears from her eyes. “This will fix all my problems.”

“You could have done it yourself …”

She did a double take. “Are you kidding? I’ve never made Flex, Paul. Failed every time. But you! That was
awesome
!”

He couldn’t have heard her right. She was responsible for his daughter’s condition. She was the murderer. That’s why he’d sought her out. But she…

“…you’ve never made Flex?”

…you’re not Anathema?

Valentine capered around the room joyously, pumping her fist, the dance of the innocent. “I told you I was no expert, Paul. But you? You’re the Flex-fucking-
master
! Clear Flex is the holy grail of ’mancy. And you can keep making it for as long as you want because
you can redirect the blowback
!”

She shook his shoulders. “Do you understand, Paul?
You are the King of Flex
!”

Paul stared at her for a few moments, uncom-prehending. Then he thought about Imani and Kit, thirsting for ’mancers’ blood. He thought about SMASH, reducing all this glorious variety to a single grim purpose. He thought about Samaritan Mutual, hunting ’mancers to remove this glory from the world.

This is what I was born for
, he thought dizzily, and his laughter was wild as magic.

J
immy sat in the Starbucks
, an Adidas bag stuffed full of handguns at his feet. He finished his hot cocoa, wiped whipped cream off of his bristled mustache, then craned his neck around in hopes of seeing the woman who’d answered his ad.

He looked down at the note that had appeared in his PO box this morning – no stamp, no return address. Written in dried blood was an encouraging message:

You want to know if you can do it. I know you never have. Meet me at the Starbucks around the corner.

Bring your guns
.

His hands shook in anticipation, so he used one to squeeze the other, then realized he was holding hands with himself. Jimmy usually touched his boys when he got nervous. He had a Colt stashed under the mattress, a Desert Eagle on top of the fridge, a Barrett semiautomatic duct-taped under the kitchen table. Whenever he got jittery, he’d take them out and clean them. There was something soothing about their weight filling his hand.

It’s not that Jimmy Lutz wanted to shoot a burglar, mind you; he just wanted to know he could
do
it if he had to. He spent all his free evenings down at the Bullet Hole Shooting Range, a rusted tin shack that had been cited on numerous occasions for negligent discharges. He bought the custom targets, the old ones with Osama bin Laden’s face – and each time he squeezed off a shot, he wondered:
Could I look a terrorist in the eyes and kill him
?

He wasn’t willing to
start
a fight. That would have been dishonorable. The only person who’d ever swung at him was his Dad, and Jimmy wouldn’t have
touched
a medaled Gulf War veteran like Dad, nossir. But Dad had all those tales of knifing Iraqis in the desert, leaving Jimmy feeling… untested. Fallow, like the wilted lettuce at Whole Foods he cleared out – a big wad of rotting potential.

The guys at the Bullet Hole were burly men in leather vests. All of
them
had a tale about kicking some guy’s ass, and that reality swelled within them, filled them with something indefinable. People
noticed
them. People didn’t interrupt when they told stories. Whereas Jimmy had been waving at the waitress for fifteen minutes, wanting another cup of cocoa.

“Excuse me,” Jimmy coughed–

“When you kill,” said a low female voice, “you become more real.”

The woman’s face was haggard, ex-military for sure, a gaunt beauty ravaged by harsh truths. She had dreadlocked hair with tiny bones knotted in it. She slid into the seat across from him with a rangy grace, a compelling confidence that Jimmy envied.

“You wrote this,” she said, sliding across a
Soldier of Fortune
magazine folded open to his a
d:

MERCENARY FOR HIRE

15 YRS. SHOOTING EXPERIENCE.

Low costs, high reliability.

Interesting jobs our specialty.

PO Box 356

“You no longer masturbate,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “Instead, you read the replies. Over and over again.”

Jimmy swallowed back shame. He’d run that ad for a year now – and stored the responses in a shoebox underneath his bed, next to his favorite Glock. He’d memorized them all – rebel-killing in Argentina, bodyguarding services in Kuwait, a cryptic invitation to resolve “a situation” in Ontario. Even though the window to reply was long past, he kept rereading them, imagining what would happen if he’d said yes, then jetted off to a foreign country to finally put his Desert Eagle to use.

His fantasies were long, involved, and bloody. Sometimes, he died. Sometimes, he killed. But in every case, he knew exactly who he was by the end of it, a fate better than this cowardly tension.

Jimmy swallowed the last of his cocoa to calm himself, coughed up gritty dregs. “It’s okay,” she said, squeezing his hand. “I have a situation. You’re the man it calls for.”

She smiled, revealing rotted teeth – no, not rotted.
Filed
. A primal savagery radiated off that smile, a woman who’d clawed raw hearts from still-warm rib cages.

“What you need,” she said, pushing a paper sack across the table towards him, “is ancient rituals.”

He looked in the bag. It held a smoky crystalline mass, dull green like jade, bristling with flylike hairs.

“Peyote.” Her eyes gleamed like a cat’s. “A proper warrior’s ritual. In the days of old, when boys were not sure they could be men, and when tribes could not afford to let a boy live, they gave them this. It keyed them into the universe’s flow – and when they ventured out to kill for the first time, their spears were
sure
. As will yours be.”

“I – I don’t have spears…”

A sneer. “No. You have those. Talentless tools that erase the distinction between a warrior and a wet-eared child.”

“So… I shouldn’t use my…” He swallowed, not quite willing to say it in public, then nudged the bag at his feet. “Those?”

“Go into the bathroom. Eat the peyote. You’ll see.”

Jimmy almost fainted when he got up, the room spinning as he realized he might know what he’d be capable of when people tried to kill him. Even if that was just crying and shitting his pants, well, the question would still be answered.

He looked down at the bag. He’d always thought peyote was a mushroom or something, not a crystal, but… he’d never done drugs. He’d never done anything wild. He’d barely lived.

He gulped the peyote.

By the time he emerged, his fingers jittered. The woman stood by the bathroom, his bag in her hands – and he felt a fierce possessiveness until she draped it around his shoulders like a queen giving her prince a boon.

“I’m–” His tongue was gummy. The world was reforming around him, changing into pathways and potentials. He remembered the guys at the Bullet Hole talking about the Perfect Action, that one pristine karate chop you strove for in every practice session and got maybe twice in a life time.

Every step he took was the perfect action.

He walked across the coffee shop, amazed; each step fell exactly where it
should
be. He danced between the waitresses, his body flowing along the ley lines in the air…

If he drew his gun, he would shoot pure; the very universe itself would wrap fingers around his wrists to guide his aim. “It has to be someone who has it coming,” he told her.

The woman cocked her head. “Can you not feel it?”

It was as though she’d twisted a radio dial, bringing a broadcast into focus. Jimmy fought to keep his hot cocoa down; this ominous dread was like being forced to stay paralytically still while a knife-wielding maniac built a house of ten thousand cards on your belly. It was like suffocating beneath a million butterflies – a snowstorm of tiny infractions.

The wrongness saturated New York, emanating from that direction.

“You feel it, don’t you? You must kill him. Or he will chain us with paper…”

This peyote promised freedom, meat, blood – promised a world where the clever survived and the incapable died…

“Of all my weapons, you come closest to understanding why he must die,” she whispered. But Jimmy was already running, each step perfect, chasing this awfulness to its source…

Jimmy cruised to a halt before a bunch of shabby tenements and shuttered liquor stores. A chain link fence protected a mostly vacant lot with a couple of rusting cars balanced on piles of old brick.

What interested him was the sidewalk.

The sidewalk stretched before a cracked stoop, though the three surly teenaged Hispanic kids noticed nothing untoward about it. They drank forties in crumpled paper bags, escaping the summer heat. Their guns were jammed into baggy jeans.

Their guns were of no interest. They could not touch him. What was fascinating, like a dissected toad pinned to the street, was the sidewalk etchings.

Most sidewalks had scratches; you noticed that when you hung your head as often as Jimmy did. But the scratches here, concealed beneath layers of gum and piss stains…

…they were inscriptions. In old-fashioned script. Like the Constitution.

Fine, miniscule words, spelled out in cracks, surrounded the building – enclosing the tenement in that death-by-papercut sickness the girl had tuned him into. Jimmy got on his knees to scrutinize it…

“Fuckin’ drunk.” One of the kids flicked a cigarette towards him; the rest laughed. The paper trail enclosed them, too. They guarded this strange power, coveting it.

Jimmy brushed the still-lit cigarette butt out of the way to read what he could:

… the seller hereby confirms the goods failed to conform to the implied contract, and the buyer went to great lengths to shield the seller from the true consequences of selling for the first time, leading to the definition of this hematite-trapped non-Euclidean warping potency as a nonconforming good. Whereas also that the original protectorate clause was voided…

His eyes skidded away in revulsion. The sickness was pent inside like a demon in a circle–

He tugged the Desert Eagle out and fired. The kid’s head exploded.

Jimmy felt no surprise. That bullet had been traveling to its target since the beginning of time, all the heavy elements in a cloud of hydrogen condensing into metals mixed in the earth to be drawn out by factories and carried to him by trucks then delivered to him by the woman at Starbucks. His trigger pull was merely the last stage of an exotic bullet-delivery scheme that had been set in motion with the first vibration of the universe.

The second and third bullets were
even more
perfect, one clipping the second kid’s carotid artery, the other plunging through the third’s eye.

He examined the dying men as though they were a strange art; a calm feeling of perfection pervaded his body. Though a weird congestion tickled his temples.

Jimmy felt a strong urge to step aside. A fusillade of bullets from above ricocheted off the pavement where he’d stood. More kids, enthralled by the magic, firing out of the windows at him.

He scooped up the bag and danced into the building. Entering the tenement felt like pushing into a pile of shredded documents; red tape bound his reflexes. Jimmy could feel the building saturated with this–

–
bureaucromancy
. The word floated through his head as if someone had gently pushed it in – and the mail here always arrived on time, bills were paid dutifully, a leakage of laws filtering through the building like a prism. Things were more
orderly
here.

Which made it hard to lose himself in the violence. The shots came easy; it was as though the bullets told him where to fire. The bullets punched through doors, exploded into bodyguards rousing themselves to action. Men charged out of doorways and straight into his muzzle; he slaughtered ten, twenty, thirty of these penny-ante thugs.

But each death squeezed itching guilt into his brain: the legal struggles as family members squabbled over possessions, grim coroners signing death certificates, shutoff notifications to cell phones. Jimmy wanted to lose himself in the carnage – some number kept ticking in his head, telling him he needed to kill two hundred and fifty-six people or this was worth
nothing
–

No. That was too many. The peyote demonstrated how easy killing was: fire through that door, and the bullet would cut down an innocent man whose biggest crime was rising from his couch to get another beer.

Those people didn’t deserve to die. He fired only in self-defense, pulling back. And the more he resisted, the more that strange pressure closed in around him.

Jimmy loped up to the third floor in a carnage daze, fighting to retain his grace; this odd pressure clogged his reflexes. Was it guilt? Guilt over the dead men?

The blood on him itched as it congealed. So did this bureaucromancy. It saddled him with responsibility.

He had to cut this unnatural order off at the source.

He kicked in a door. Inside a grimy apartment was the source of all this paper potency: a scrawny white guy handcuffed to a radiator.

The white guy looked up slowly, as if afraid to hope. His leg stump was stark against the stained tile floor, his wrist bloody from escape attempts.

Wait, it wasn’t his wrist – the dude’s left arm had a thin wound that looked like it’d been bleeding forever. He sat in a pool of crusted blood.

The source of all this horror sported a haggard castaway’s beard, a button-down shirt stained with weeks of sweat. Not much of a threat.

Jimmy paused. Was the irritation the man… or the green Rubbermaid bin on the table, heaped with clear crystal? The crystals shivered like Mexican jumping beans. He reached out to pick one up.

A spotted brown hand grabbed his wrist.

His interceptor was an ugly, dark-skinned sonuvabitch with a big nose and weird pockmarks all over his face – but he wore a perfect cream-colored suit, as if he hoped an excess of style would distract from his deformities.

The dude grinned. As if to confirm Jimmy’s suspicions about style, the man’s teeth were sapphire-plated. They still looked moldy.

“I am Gunza,” he said, cocking his head, a terrible green light flashing in those teeth. He popped a crystal from the Rubbermaid bin into his mouth and chewed it; the crystals sparked between Gunza’s teeth, like Wint-O-Green mints in the dark. His teeth glowed with green malice.

Jimmy lifted the gun, hunting for the perfect shot–

–except it wasn’t there. Just the congestion.

Gunza took the barrel of Jimmy’s Colt .45 between his palms and placed it lovingly against his forehead, a prayer begging for bullets. “You can shoot when you’re filled with ’mancy.” His voice drove the surety from Jimmy’s heart. “But can you shoot when it’s just me and you? Can you look me in the eye and fire, Jimmy Lutz?”

How did he know my name?
Jimmy thought, panicked. The legless guy on the floor gestured for Jimmy to get out, but Jimmy barely noticed: those teeth, those crystalline glowing teeth.

Jimmy’s mouth dried up. The peyote’s potency dribbled away between his legs. Those teeth belonged to someone who
could
murder trivially. They terrified Jimmy, because he’d never wanted to be like that.

When it was clear Jimmy could not shoot, Gunza slapped the barrel away with a scornful laugh.

“An empty sperm,” Gunza said. “A genetic sinkhole.” He turned away, and Jimmy felt himself fading from view as Gunza took a red plastic canister of gasoline and splashed it around the room.

“We’re gonna die in a fire,” Gunza told the guy on the floor. “Then we’re gonna go somewhere remote. No inspectors. No SMASH. And I’m gonna set up a lab, and you’ll be my Flex bitch.”

“Listen to me,” Jimmy whispered. The gun, which seemed to have aimed itself a few moments ago, quivered in his hand.

“I’m not doing that.” The man on the floor retreated, pressing his back against the radiator. “That’s not happening.”

“I said
listen to me
!” Jimmy screamed.

Gunza set the room ablaze.

Jimmy pulled the trigger, feeling like he shouldn’t shoot someone in the back, his Dad would never have shot an Iraqi in the back – so he pulled the gun to the side at the last minute, because the truth was he
couldn’t
kill, not without the peyote. He imagined all the families weeping at funerals; he’d murdered men in cold blood and it hadn’t made him real, it made him pathetic, terrible, soulless–

–he’d never considered what would happen if he killed someone and it turned out he wasn’t a killer–

The gun exploded in Jimmy’s hands, a catastrophic misfire, the bullet spiraling up and back to punch through his forehead.

The last sight Jimmy Lutz saw was Gunza stepping forward to do something unspeakable to the poor bastard chained to the radiator.