Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (3 page)

He dove, hands over his head, through a downpour of books and junk. Something like a bowling ball smashed into his lower back, and it was raining jelly jars filled with pennies and marbles and jacks. He scrambled to his feet, gasping, and through tears of pain, he saw the boy just a few yards away, doubled over, laughing with his lips clamped shut.

David threw an encyclopedia, but the boy ducked it and shut a door to block David’s next shot with a shoeshine kit. David heard bolts slamming home on the other side.

David was locked out of his own room. He studied the door, trembling when he didn’t find the growth marks his mother had made with Magic Marker on the frame. The marks had been painted over. On the left side of the door, there were
new
growth marks in Dad’s writing. The last one, at age eleven, was smeared and faded. Above it, he wrote,
MY BOY
.

“You open this goddamned door!” David threw his shoulder into it.

Wood splintered and the boy gave a girlish shriek. “You break it, you buy it!”

David pounded the door like a speed-bag. “This is
my
room! You better let me in…”

“Or what? You left it, now it’s mine! Finders keepers,
douchebag
!” The boy’s whinnying laugh rose up and up into a squeal of ecstasy. He’d been waiting to do this, bred for it. Whatever he was, Dad had raised him to torment David, to hurt him, to—

What would he do next? David had him cornered. He could go and get someone, but the freak would leave, or burn the house down…

“Alright,” he shouted, stomping down the hall, “screw you, you little bastard. I’m gonna call the cops and the social workers, and you can go live in an orphanage, for all I care.”

Backtracking silently to the bedroom door, he practically hugged himself for his cleverness, but the boy was silent.

He heard a thump directly above his head, a scrape of something heavy being dragged, in the attic. So the little shit wanted to play hide and seek. David knew the house, too.

He went to the linen closet and got out the metal stepladder, quietly set it up beneath the trapdoor in the hall. He took a mop handle and, more or less balanced atop the ladder, jabbed it at the door. It flopped back and David cowered, but nothing dropped on him.

He planted his hands on the frame and jumped off the top rung just as the trapdoor slammed back down.

It cracked him squarely on the crown of his skull and he fell, hands still gripping the doorframe when the attic door smashed them.

For a moment, he hung there by his mangled fingers, his legs kicking the stepladder over, his screams ripping his larynx so blood sprayed from his lips.

Pure galvanic spasms launched David up and into the attic, where he flopped on the creaking floor. He sobbed and hugged his hands, frantic dying birds, against his chest. His vision was trashed. One eye saw only TV snow, lava flows and Jacuzzi bubbles. The boy—

“Gee, David, you look pretty bad.”

David looked up. The boy knelt on top of an antique mahogany wardrobe with a rusty red Craftsman toolbox held high over his head. David threw up his arms and rolled, but he was trapped between mildewed cardboard boxes of Dad’s junk. His hands rained blood in his eyes, so at least he didn’t see it coming.

Awake in a box, upright coffin, with no room to sit.

His hands throbbed like extra hearts. Most of his fingers were broken. His head felt like it had rocks and nails in it. His whole face was numb, and his tongue couldn’t find his teeth, but he could see again.

He knew the musty smell of Dad’s old Army locker. He used to hide in here and ogle the naked natives in
National Geographic
when Mom thought he was outside playing with friends, when he was the boy’s age.

Coldly, reasonably, he still very much wanted to kill the boy. His pains were nothing compared to the betrayal in flesh, the idea of this parasite slipping into the emptiness his father left in him, the place where most fathers, he imagined, build a man in their sons.

There was a slot cut out of the door, right at the height of his mouth. He slouched and peered out, winced away from bright white light.

“You hurt Dad a lot when you left, David. He blamed
himself
for the way you were. He
doubted
himself, David. That was his
nigredo
. Do you know what that means? It totally sucked, but he had to go through that crud to be reborn and commit to the Great Work.”

David tried to speak, but his head roared disapproval. He still couldn’t see the boy, but the flashlight beam bobbed just in front of the locker.

Rustling and scraping, the boy built a tower of junk at the foot of the locker, climbed it and peeked at David. “His soul was reborn, and he learned the Secrets, like the Philosopher’s Stone. But you’re so dumb…”

“I know what it is,” David mumbled. “Dad made gold, and got to live forever?” His own voice struck him funny, until he laughed. The words sounded mushy, and hot red spit dribbled down his chin.

“Not even half-right,
David
,” the boy sneered, and through all his pains, David got a chill. The gestures, the tone in which the boy lectured him, were vintage Warren Mueller. He looked closer, and his chill became frostbite. “Alchemists used code words—the Stone is power to change things. Dead matter into life. Base metal into gold.”

In the light, the boy looked like David when he was young, but sharper, traits exaggerated, as if in caricature. He thought of old family photos of his own father as a boy, and saw the resemblance, but it was still too skewed.

And now he saw injuries, scrapes, cuts, bruises and even bent limbs, crudely bandaged or ignored, for they healed badly, the flesh remolded over the injuries like clay. The features, up close, had a pathetic crudity to them, as if they were shaped by a loving, but unskilled, god.

“What do you want?”

“He could have made gold or lived forever if he wanted to, but instead, Dad made me. He wanted a real boy, to try again, but he had to use some of you to make me real.”

“What did he use? I haven’t been here! I never knew—”

“You never asked! You never cared! He loved you, but you wouldn’t listen, so he made me out of what you left behind.”

The boy opened his hand and showed him eleven tiny green-black stubs. “Your baby teeth,” the boy whispered.

Almost peevish, David moaned, “Those were mine. He had no right.”

“He made me with these, so I grew like a normal boy, but they’re no good, anymore, and without him, I can’t grow up. But then you came…”

“What?”

The boy smiled now, and David recoiled from the stench. In his gray gums, six big white permanent teeth, like a horse’s in that tiny, underslung jaw. David’s teeth.

David probed with his tongue, dumbly thrilling to the fire drill agony of holes where his front and canine teeth had been.

The boy held up pliers and an ether rag. “I need the rest of them. You had your chance, you had everything, and you blew it. I only want what’s fair…”

David screamed and threw himself backwards. The locker rocked a few inches and hit a ceiling beam. David stampeded back and forth until the locker tipped over on the tower of junk and pinned the boy to the floor.

Through the slot, they lay nose to nose. The boy squawked and coughed up gouts of something like petroleum jelly. The pliers wiggled against his shoulder. Ether fumes softened the rough edges, so David felt only what he wanted to as he bit into the boy’s face with his remaining teeth. “You want these teeth? Have ‘em, kid, fucking have ‘em!”

David wept and broke the rest of his fingers without denting the locker, thinking about the empty urn, and Mom’s cancerous private parts in a jar.

Dad never threw anything away.

David rolled with the locker as something flipped it over and unbolted it.

Screaming,
“You’re not my mother! You’re not my mom!”
he tried to jump out, but she caught him and showed him that, as usual, he was only half right.

The sun beat down just as hard on both sides of the San Ysidro crossing, but something in the dirty sky ate the warm yellow light before it fell on Tijuana. Arid, ionized Santa Ana winds held the coastal breezes at bay and basted the traffic in dust, smog and sweat. In the No. 9 Lane of the Primary Inspection Zone of the San Ysidro Port Of Entry, US Customs Inspector Burt Gillis snorted a line and offered a prayer, to God and science and any Orishas who might be listening, to bless and protect him from the Santero.

For those waiting to cross into the United States, it was going to be a very long Memorial Day. For Gillis, it felt as if it would last the rest of his life. He had not slept in nearly forty-eight hours, but did not want the day to end, because he knew what the darkness would bring. The Great Night was coming.

From the iron-fenced compound of the primary inspection pits, Gillis watched the tar-paper and plywood shanties of Colonia Libertad, the most godforsaken slum district in Tijuana, pressing on the border like an invading refugee army in the last days of a siege. Whenever his attention wasn’t demanded elsewhere, he stared at it until his eyes wanted to cry blood, combing the brown shadows for some sign of the one who would be crossing tonight, the one he had to stop.