Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (28 page)

Igor grunted, but he didn’t answer for a while. “You know, when you lose your keys or your wallet, and you tear the house apart, but they’re nowhere? Not lost, not stolen, but just gone?”

Rope shook himself out of a trance and nodded.

“That’s where they go.”

Rope just nodded again. It made sense. “Who is the Loser, boss?”

Igor shoved him. “Go get the fucking barrels loaded, peckerwood.”

Rope gratefully turned away and went back outside. He stuck the shotgun outside first, then followed it out to the back of the truck. The barrels were on the lift gate, and he got one on the dolly and levered it back into the bunker without incident.

Igor held the cage door open, and pointed at the hole like a gracious host showing the way to the toilet. Rope edged the dolly up to the mouth of the cage, but balked. Igor tore the handles out of his weak grip and stood the dolly up with a jerk so the barrel tipped over and into the hole.

It never hit the floor, but beyond that, Rope could not say for certain where it went. It did not make a sound. It didn’t disintegrate or implode. It just dropped out of sight.

Rope leaned forward without meaning to, out over the edge of the hole before Igor hauled him back by the collar of his jumpsuit.

A sudden blast of wind hit his back, and despite Igor’s grip, he got dizzy and stumbled as the air sucked at him, whistling through the jumbled maze of Igor’s collection, like the mouth of a sleeping giant startled awake by the poison pill they’d fed it, and gasping all the air out of the room.

Rope threw himself back and turned to see Igor waddling the dolly outside, and ran after him. He leaned against piles of junk until he reached the door, when the wind abruptly died off and he jumped a step forward like he’d been on an express elevator that suddenly stopped.

Outside, the seagulls wheeled over the bunker in a halo of ominous intent. They were completely silent, not diving or fighting over scraps, but just tracing circles in the air above the tin-shingled roof. The drooling meat-trees stooped and snaked their groping, ropy tentacles among the scattered piles of lost stuff, slowly but unmistakably converging on the bunker.

Something hooted and howled in the yellow mist, sounding not very far away at all.

Rope rushed the next barrel onto the dolly, hardly noticing when his gloved fingers broke through the corroded lid.

A shadow swept over the truck and startled Rope into dropping the shotgun. A huge, shapeless blob of a body wobbled out of the mist on barbed black crab legs, two stories tall. Tumors like overripe cauliflower D-cup teats drooped from its blistered form, a blubbery cluster of buttocks that expelled spastic gouts of toxic diarrhea, though he could see no mouths for taking anything in.

He backed away from the truck as the hideous thing stilted by, spraying the truck with bright orange shit that ate the paint off the hood.

Fuck this. Looking back over his shoulder at the open door, Rope sidled away from the truck, keeping it between him and the open bunker door, so he could still hear Igor cursing and moving shit around without being seen.

He got closer, and his eyes popped out as they roved over the Loser’s collection.

Like Igor’s, it was clearly a museum of lost objects, but the Loser’s was, if less esoteric, far more portable. Rope noticed the prevalence of umbrellas, books, jackets, laptops, grocery bags, phones, hats, glasses and dentures, all deliberately arranged and stacked, as if to form some image when seen from the air.

Stranger items abounded, like suits of armor, knives and bullets and white powder in bags with EVIDENCE stickers, mason jars with blobs of jelly still wriggling inside. He wondered why Igor never plundered it, because there was a fortune here; and then he wondered how it all looked so clean, when it rained only last week. The Loser collected his loot from the streets of the city, and smuggled it into the dump, where it sat…

Rope noticed an ugly doll, pale and bony, shriveled until it could sit in his palm, shrouded in a bed of grimy kids’ jackets. It was breathing.

A crack baby or a boozehead’s kid, probably left behind on a bus bench by a raving addict chasing a fix. The baby looked as if it was only napping, though the coats it lay wrapped in were all years out of style.

A look over the shoulder, and he grabbed an iPod and dropped it in his pocket. He had no idea how the damned things worked, but he’d heard of kids getting killed for them back east.

He poked around the piles until a gnarly black cockroach the size of a cat scuttled out from a camera bag and nipped at his hand. Hissing, it tore his glove off and shredded it in rusty mandibles as he ran away.

Rope jogged the loaded dolly back inside and down the narrow avenue to the hole. As he worked, he found himself floored at how he’d just accepted all this shit. It naturally made sense to him, the lost stuff and the hole and the living trash, because he was trash, himself.

Abandoned at birth at a county hospital, raised in foster homes until age thirteen, and juvenile halls and labor camps since then, he knew how people shied away from him like he was made of shit. He knew how such rejection made him feel inside, so if that ugly feeling in extreme concentrate could make the dump come alive, then that, too, was nature. And if the lost stuff, collected here in sufficient mass, could open a door to the Bermuda Triangle or the Twilight Zone, then there were probably better uses for it than dumping toxic waste. Rope’s unscientific mind buzzed with theories and propositions.

Rope’s unsupervised body walked the dolly into a pile of junk. The barrel tipped and its contents sloshed out over the rotten lip. Rope reflexively grabbed for the lid, but it broke off in his hand. The barrel slid off the dolly’s skids. Rope could just watch it happen, see it reflected in Igor’s face as he, too, watched in helpless disbelief.

The barrel rocked on its rim, but came to rest standing upright. Only a gallon or so of the milky yellow contents slopped out on the nearest pile of junk.

Igor gingerly rolled the barrel onto the skids and shoved Rope out of the way. “Get the backup dolly by the door, and don’t be so fucking clumsy.”

As Igor rolled the barrel away, Rope went to obey, but froze and looked at the wall of junk that he’d smashed into. Crusty old ice chests, stacked chest-high and sealed with duct tape. The splatter from the barrel bubbled and ate its way into the bottom ice chest, a blue Igloo the size of an Army footlocker. He recoiled from curling fumes of burning plastic, but the smell from within was worse, far worse than anything he’d ever smelled in his life.

Igor dumped the leaky barrel into the hole, and the wind ripped the smell away. Rope leaned into the cage as the alien vacuum sucked at him like someone pushing from behind as a subway train approaches, a sudden jerk that caught him by surprise, though his hands were anchored in the chicken wire.

Up close, the void was full of things, if you looked long enough. His eyes got really tricky with the visuals, furry worms of fluorescent light mating to form more complex shapes, deeper meaning. Faces—a man and a woman stared out at him, tortured grief and confusion etched into their careworn faces. Though he’d never seen them, Rope knew who they were.

He wasn’t thrown away; he was lost.

Somehow, he’d gotten separated at birth from the people who loved him, and tumbled through a hole into this world of dumps within dumps and meat-trees and ass-crab monsters. The real world was on the other side; the one where he was mourned and missed, the one where he’d always belonged. All he had to do to get there, was let go…

The Loser rides the eastbound 27, heading for the Kearny Mesa business loop and the public dump entrance on Convoy, when something touches him, like ice chips sprinkling down his back.

A tiny thread of the web he builds is being pulled apart. The vibrations travel through the magnetic ley lines of the city’s highways and jolt him like a drowsy spider, at the trembling of ensnared prey.

He tries to still his inner noise and see deeper, but he knows all the other riders are staring at him, and the world goes dead black, all gone and good riddance.

He cannot even see the lost things in the bags at his feet or in his many pockets, but he sees a light, the light he has been searching for all his life, and he knows that this is what he is for. He stares into it, and it is like all the light of the sun poured down a thread into his eyes, but he stares into it, and he cannot believe he has been so blind.

The light shoots out from the terminus of all his many routes, from the one place his invisibility has not allowed him to enter.

He will go there now.

He was going there already, but now, he actually
wants
to go, and this alien volition presents a paradox his mind has not been able to grasp for some time, and with
that
unwelcome intrusion of the notion that he might also have a past, the Loser starts to try to remember it.

He tugs the cord as they straggle down the frontage road along the 52, a mile from the recycling center at Convoy Court, but now there is no time. He drags all his bags up to the front and sees that the mechanism driving this bus is filled with boiling water and shrieking seahorses.

He tries to plead with it in its native language to stop and let him off, but it won’t relent, and extrudes a white-hot electrode to herd him back to his seat.

They are passing so close to the light that even when he averts his eyes, he can barely see the driver through the glare as he lashes out with his armload of overloaded canvas shopping bags. The mechanism collapses on itself, and the Loser is left to his own devices to get the door open.

The other passengers are hysterical, trying to tackle him and hold him for the police, screaming into cell phones and taking pictures, but he sees none of it. Weightless, he floats out of their grip and out of the bus, bounding across the road and vaulting over the fence, buoyed up by the swinging bags loaded with all the lost things he has found. And these, too, glow ever brighter as their potential resonates with the offerings he has assembled to find what he lost and forgot, but now has found.

The rest of the barrels went pretty quickly after that, with a minimum of spillage. Each time, the wind ripped more fiercely at them, and sucked a few flimsy items up against the cage.

Igor was nervous, but unusually cheerful, even offering Rope a stingy bump of his white stuff. Rope snorted it and soaked up the electrical buzz, his spine coming alive and sinking envenomed fangs into his hindbrain. “So who’s the loser you said to kill?”

His boss’s good mood went all to shit in a breath. “He’s
the
fuckin’ Loser, that’s all.” He wheezed like someone was squeezing him, but the speed took hold and the words spat off his hyperactive tongue. “He’s nothing, but you gotta watch out for him. Gray… like shadows on a rainy day. He can hide so a fuckin’ Cu Chi tunnel rat couldn’t find him in his own fuckin’ pants.”

“But who is he?”

“The craziest fuckin’ bum there ever was. Been bringin’ shit here for almost eight years. He made that hole open up.”

“Why?”

“He’s fuckin’ crazy, how the hell should I know? Maybe he wants to jump in there, and suck the whole world in after him. Whatever, you just gotta know that you don’t never touch the Loser’s shit. And you fuckin’-A gotta keep him away from the cage.”

Rope swallowed hard before asking, “You ever try to sell any of that shit, out there?”

Igor looked him up and down and spat on the floor, like Rope had cursed him. “Fuck, let’s get the hell out of here, what’re you fuckin’ around for, think I’m gonna blow you?”

Rope looked back at the hole, hungry and restless in its cage. “He brought all that other shit out here, right?” It sucked the words out of his mouth, so his own ears never heard them. It vibrated with all kinds of new and insidious patterns, now his vision was tweaked. He wanted to get closer, but the light shut off, and he tripped over something in the dark.

“Get the fuck out here, now! No skin off my ass, you wanna die, but I ain’t waitin’!”

Using the dwindling ribbon of light seeping through the door as a compass, Rope tried to navigate the room without letting panic overtake him, but it was no use. He kneed something that sent him dancing into piles and stacks of sharp, filthy, fragile blackness. He screamed and put his bare hand in something that sizzled where his fingers touched it, and he smelled that dead smell again.

Rope practically flew to the door, but the boss blocked the way and elbowed him back inside and followed him, slammed the door and threw all the bolts. “Goddamit, he’s here.”

Rope fumbled at the walls for the light switch. “What does he want?”