Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (26 page)

Last party: strictly for the hardcore, the worms in the industry corpse. An abandoned dance club, unsuccessfully torched by the owners, so half the ceiling is open to the night sky. Every smile a silicone-bloated cocaine rictus, all the machismo of a Pamplona bull run, a Viking funeral. Free-floating menace like a giant severed power line rampant among the crowd. Sloane’s lieutenants move through it like Furies, ready to tear apart anyone who brings them down from their ecstasy of grief.

These guests, of all the people in His life, should be celebrating. Many of them lost money, lost face, and some lost their minds, in return for backing His career, and Sloane has taken steps to keep the mood ugly. Execs and agents and producers who loathe each other line opposing poles of the club; former rivals, ex-bandmates come to gloat and trade told-you-so’s, get into glaring and shoving matches with the Furies, and photographers bother everyone. Nobody seems to have noticed the drinks are spiked.

She walks in with him: in drag, now, he’d be recognized here. He shouldn’t be here at all, but he needs to see this to believe in it, to make it real. The world, the fans, had to be lied to, so He would believe, and follow
them
.

Video walls shower the room with His cockeyed glare, a wretched dubstep remix of one of the old singles shaking asbestos dust into thousand dollar hairdos. She steers him through the crowd to the steps leading up to the DJ’s bunker. She’s shocked, looking around, to see so many faces in the flesh that she’s only known as photographs on her own site. His enemies list, and so many of them looking morose, broken… bereaved. She pushes him faster, his sequined shoulders shaking with laughter.

The DJ is a chubby kid in pajamas, bobbing his head to the screeching submix in his headphones. He takes Sloane’s disk without looking at it and slots it in, cues it. She checks her watch. Five to midnight. This is the one part she couldn’t time out, exactly. She hopes her Furies can make it happen.

She goes to the laptop set up in one corner, toggles to the video feeds from the motel and the house on the hill. They’re all waiting. Waiting for her to open the door and take them all to Him. Her heart skips a beat, then it races. She slips on a headset. The DJ fades down the music, patches Sloane’s headset into the PA.

“This is His final message to the world, children. Follow it through the dark until you get to the other side. Your dreams and blood and bones are the seeds of the new world.” She looks at her watch, cues the DJ. “Follow the music—”

The last song fades in, rumbling, molten womb-sounds, contorting basso shudders resolving at long last into a convulsive, peristaltic rhythm, expelling the unborn song out into an undeserving world of horror.

On the screens, the parties react to it according to their respective natures.

The motel explodes in violent Jonestown pathos, bodies beating each other to slush. Crunching down on pills, foaming rabid death-rattlers forcing fistfuls of poison into the mouths of backsliders. She sees those piebald eyes tattooed on that pale white skin, but someone’s ripped it off the girl’s back, and waves it like a battle flag.

The house party subsides into mellow, Heaven’s Gate surrender. Bodies sink to the floor in clouds of lace and silk, Sylvie and her girlfriend guiding the living and posing the dead into artful tableaux before disrobing, feeding each other pills and sagging into a cold embrace.

And here, the bloody lightning-strike catharsis of Hitler’s bunker.

She can feel it. Even as she sees all the little lights fading out across town, she can feel more going out across the nation. In her heart, like the pull of an unknown homeland, she really believes she can feel their energy building on the other side.

“It’s time, children.”

The DJ turns the music up in the booth, but she can still hear it. Shooting, screaming, crying, bullets caroming off the cinderblock walls.

And then it’s very quiet. The DJ and the Furies take their own pills, now. Only Sloane and her companion are left.

She sucks on doubt. She wants to go to him and change his mind, now there’s just the two of them, and both their old lives swept away, and all this unclaimed power in the air. They could make a heaven for themselves right here, or just run away, and live this life for each other, and maybe even try to be happy.

But she looks into his eyes, drunk on revenge, glutted with love, and says, “They’re waiting for you. Your estate is prepared.”

“Thank you, darling Sloane, for all of this.” He takes the pill between his teeth and bites down.

Sloane looks away from his sick grin, because in the end, she sees more than she should have. She sees the sick, empty little thing behind the mask of talent that beguiled them all. She sees only a worm who wanted to be loved, whose morbid genius called out to other sick, damaged souls; who collapsed under the weight of their desperate worship, but was too chicken-shit to go out alone.

He pulls her close and clamps his mouth over hers, his kiss sloppy and cold and not like how she always dreamed it would be, at all. His tongue shudders and dies in her mouth. She feels the edge of his dissolving gel capsule at the back of her throat.

His lips slide away from his bleached teeth, but his eyes remain fixed on her, as she lays him down. A little light seems to leak out of his eyes, a glimpse of silver, and it’s all she needs to see.

She tries to spit it out, tries to vomit, but her face goes numb and only a stream of drool oozes from her drooping lips. She goes to leave, skidding on blood, tripping on lead-shredded bodies. Bleary, she can’t see the door. She falls, but never hits the floor.

Awake in a forest. Quicksilver mist and electrified dew crackle on wrought-iron leaves and barbed-wire lawns. She picks her way through tar pits of liquid shadow and slithering, singing blades, amazed that in the afterlife, she can still feel pain, oh, like never before.

She staggers out of the razorblade trees to find His mansion sprawling out over both horizons, and the moon has His face, and all their prayers are answered at last, night without end, Amen.

And all of them are there, waiting for her.

Like any spoiled birthday boy, He awoke and unwrapped and broke all his presents, and is already bored. He stands on a balcony, all black curling horns and exquisite tentacles caressing the flayed remains of His slaves, sculpting and fusing the choice bits into a new and tantalizing toy, a voluptuous mountain of turgid, squirting teats and pouting, slobbering cunts. At its apex, the gargantuan torso ends in a stump, the protruding vertebrae carved into an empty throne of tattooed flesh.

In this private heaven created by their blind, suicidal worship, He has become what they always wanted Him to be, and now He is remaking them into what He always needed.

He shows her the crown she will wear forever, and the hammer and nails to put it on, and when He pulls its strings, His leviathan bride bows low to accept her as its head.

The sea of discarded human scraps parts for Sloane as she wades through it to kneel before Him, and she has to hide her smile, because He thinks this is His dream, and the game they are about to play will have to last forever.

“There’s one more thing you got to know about the dump,” said Igor Blasco, “if you want to be a
real
garbage man.”

Rope Lipton looked over the rusty iron drums in the bed of the pickup truck as he and Igor covered them with a tarp. Shit had already eaten its way out of two of them, and where it dripped off the tailgate, the oily gravel sizzled and danced. He had been here a year, and in the last month, when he’d got off some sort of secret probation, he’d started to learn how the dump really worked. He’d learned so much, already, that he never wanted to know.

“Like what?” he asked, backing away from the truck as soon as the tarp was lashed down. His mask sucked up against his mouth when he tried to breathe, and the air sweated toxins that he could feel dissolving into his blinking, dripping eyes.

“Where we take the
bad
shit, sport, the shit nobody ever wants found.” Igor always called him tiger and sport, and worse whenever Rope’s back was turned, but he couldn’t find a better job after he got out of jail.

Rope should have known better, but he was intrigued. He’d caught bits of rumor about some sort of secret place in the dump, something only Igor knew about, and this morning, perhaps in reward for lying to the OSHA inspector yesterday, Rope was about to be let in on it.

Most likely, it was merely something highly illegal, dangerous and stupid, but the tones of those hushed, black-lunged whispers in the break room—the way Chuy, the old Mexican bulldozer operator, crossed himself and kissed the weird amulet under his flannel shirt when someone brought it up—hinted at much more than just a hole in the ground.

They climbed into the truck. Igor fired up the enormous engine, threw it into gear and set out of the compound, into the sulfur-green glow of a junkyard sunrise.

They were at Collection Center 3, the furthest outpost of civilization in the dump. Furious seagulls circled over the shifting tides of trash, battling for the freshest jetsam from the armada of trucks disgorging their bagged and loose garbage in discrete pyramids. The pickers sorted recyclables out of the mounds, and the bulldozers rearranged the landscape into stratified terraces. Rope knew that if he dug in the same spot long enough, he’d find his own fossilized diapers and petrified newspapers from the day he was born.

The dump was the last and largest within the city limits, servicing the daily waste disposal needs of about two million consumers. Though they had filled in the last of the box canyons and graded off the last knobby coastal hills, you couldn’t see the surrounding city from anywhere inside—kind of like at Disneyland, and not just because of the sickly miasma of methane and nitrogen bleeding out of the overripe ocean of waste.

They reached the back gate, and Igor gave Rope the keys to unlock it. Rope took a while to find the right key to the big rusty padlock, and it got harder to concentrate when he looked through the fence. This part of the dump was different, and what he’d seen so far made him unwilling to go again.

He got the lock off and held the gate open for Igor to drive through. When he climbed up on the stepladder to the cab, Igor punched it. Rope’s boots, slick with slime, spun out from under him. He hung onto the mirror and slithered in the open window. He didn’t want to be outside.

The trash was older here, and piled higher, in precarious rolling hills and frozen tidal waves that shifted with the slightest stirring of the sickly wind. Hazardous shit—industrial and military junk, misplaced medical waste, stagnant ponds of scummy not-water, all but glowing in the shadows, clotted with pickled rat carcasses.