Skullcrack City (20 page)

“Ms. A., I’ve got to get in contact with my mom right away. She’s already headed into town.”

“You spoke with her?”

“Just messages back and forth.”

“And you’re one hundred percent certain that the voice on the phone was hers?”

“Of course…wait…what are you saying?”
But I knew. My brain wouldn’t let me think it any sooner. If the Vakhtang got to her, they could have turned her into a mimic. It would be a great way to gain access to me, maybe even to Ms. A.’s compound.
“It definitely sounded like my mom. The cadence, the inflections, everything. Nothing she said sounded suspect, but I think she’s definitely being followed, and her phone is making a ton of clicking noises.”

“That’s understandable. That’s good. I can tell I’ve upset you, but it’s a necessity that we stay aware of all possibilities. Dara, did you have a clear path home?”

“Considering the nests we stirred up, surprisingly clear.”

“Hmmm.” Ms. A. turned and walked toward a thin unfinished hallway, pushing aside the beads strung across the entrance. “Let’s grab the short burst radio and see if we can’t guide mom to a safe zone.”

“But won’t her phone still be tapped?”

“Of course. She’ll have to acquire an interim phone. And even if she makes it to a safe house without being tracked, we’re going to have to cover her head and treat her with the sacrament.”

“You’re going to bag her and shoot her up with perphenadol?”

“We aren’t protecting proprietary fast food recipes here. This compound is one of the last few American outposts working against the Vakhtang. We are admitting your mother as a great kindness, and with great risk.”

We neared the end of the hallway and a single steel door with three locked deadbolts and a key code entry box.

“I meant to ask you, Ms. A. If their cult or gang or whatever is called the Vakhtang, what are we called?”

“We have no name. Something named is more easily defined, infiltrated, and broken. Our desire is to function outside of any rigid structure—to simply exist, in as low-profile a way as is possible, as a counterbalance, until the blessed day when we are no longer needed.”

“So Lazer Crew is off the table?”

“I can hear the wavering in your voice, and I do not mind your humor. If it helps you survive, then it has value. But I need a moment to track down the radio, please.”

She entered a long string of numbers and the steel door unlatched. Here, finally, were the accoutrements I’d expected in her office. Heads in jars (their all-black, unblinking eyes staring back at me), perfect steel cubes emanating a low red light, a six-legged rat in a wire cage, rows of hanging herbs, surgical supplies floating in a thin purple gel. A glass case filled with iridescent scarabs denuding a too-fresh lamb’s head. An entire wall dedicated to guns, ammunition, scopes, and grenades. And to our right, a six-tiered rack of shiny silver devices, their metal carrying the same sheen I’d seen on the slingshot Dara had used to launch a cell bomb.

I looked over at Dara to find her quiet and distracted. I’d forced her to think about Cassie. Now she couldn’t stop.

Ms. A. hunkered down by the second shelf from the floor and pushed aside an object which had altogether too many electric wires and elongated probes.

“Here we are.” She pulled out a small rectangular receiver with two dials and a CB-style communicator hooked onto the side. She blew years of dust from the top and then nodded her head. “This old thing ought to work perfectly. We should be able to transmit from the main room. Shall we?”

She turned and headed out of the storage zone. I followed far enough behind to grab something which had caught my eye.

I’d always wanted brass knuckles. I’d never punched anyone, but they seemed like they were exactly what you’d need if you did have to go in swinging. The fact that this pair was bright silver and filed under a tag reading “Core Purge” made them even cooler.

They fit perfectly, and felt warm when I slid them into my back pocket.

Back through the rattling bead curtain, around a corner, up a flight of stairs, and we’d made it to what Ms. A. was referring to as the main room. The coolness of the space told me we were still underground, but Ms. A. gestured toward a rectangular gap in the concrete at the center of the chamber. She set the radio beneath the gap, then hopped on a stool so she could reach a red button submerged into the concrete ceiling. Two steel grates separated and thin moonlight poured into the corridor above our heads, illuminating a fine lace of copper circuits covering the walls.

“We can amplify and reach out from here.”

I looked back and noticed Dara hadn’t entered the room. I walked back to where we’d come in and heard a quiet moaning at the base of the staircase. Dara was seated with her head in her hands. I hurried down to her.

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothing. Just a hell of a headache. Long day, you know?”

She tried to stand, but her legs buckled underneath her.

I yelled to Ms. A. “Something’s wrong.”

I heard her flip flops slapping the concrete as she rushed to us.

“Stand back. Give her some room.”

Ms. A. lifted up Dara’s head, barely kept it from lolling back down. She held a hand to Dara’s forehead, then held that same hand a few inches from Dara’s face and closed her eyes.

What was this? How could I help?

“What can I do?”

Ms. A.’s eyes opened and her face snapped to mine. “You can shut your goddamned mouth.”

I’d never heard Ms. A. break from her Good Witch composure. Something was very wrong.

Ms. A. had her hand back in front of Dara’s face, her own eyes closed, sweat beading on her forehead from exertion.

“I can’t close it down. She’s looping. What happened out there? Why is she transmitting? She’s been able to block them out for years.”

“I don’t know.”

Cassie. We’d talked about their realm. Her overdose. She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Ms. A. lifted Dara’s eye patch. Something swirled beneath the hardened black surface of her eye.

“Was anyone following you?”

“No. Dara said we were in the clear.”

“Would anyone have known where you were going?”

“Toro. He knew we were headed to the clinic to see Shinori. Damn it. We should have found a way to intercept Shinori outside of his work.”

“It’s too late now. They could have set up there in advance. If they sent a full surge broadcast with a wave cannon it would have brought the fluid inside her jellied eye back into sync. And I believe she was thinking about Cassandra…We are left with only one choice, and we must move quickly.”

I grabbed supplies, as best I could, from Ms. A.’s instructions, though the scarabs were far harder to round up than I’d anticipated. And when I secured the superior rectus forceps and what appeared to be a child-sized scalpel, I realized we were about to remove Dara’s ruined eye.

You can feel scorching hot inside, and still find yourself coated in a cold sweat. I was no doctor. I didn’t know any of Ms. A.’s rituals. How were the two of us going to pull this off without killing Dara?

I was the one who asked her about Cassie. But I didn’t shoot her with a wave cannon. I didn’t even know what that was.

I shook it off
.
There could be only purpose now. Dara was the only living person, other than my mother, who even knew my real name. She wasn’t going to die like this.

I made my way back to the base of the stairs to see Ms. A. had dragged Dara’s limp body ten yards down the hall. I caught up and set the supply bag on the ground and grabbed Dara’s feet. We got her next to the cot in one of Ms. A.’s makeshift surgical spaces.

“On three. One, two, three!”

We lifted Dara beneath her hips and her shoulders and flopped her deadweight onto the stretcher. Ms. A. opened Dara’s shirt. We felt a wave of heat lift from her torso.

“We don’t have long. Grab the supply bag.”

It was unsettling to notice that Ms. A.’s attention was constantly being drawn to the doorway of the O.R. I did my best to hand her the items she needed and to wipe the sweat from her forehead. I brushed Dara’s matted hair back from her face and applied a cool washcloth to her brow and a wide blue ice pack to her chest.

Ms. A. cycled through the ritual, running a perphenadol spike, applying the scarabs, pushing her hands against some invisible resistance above Dara’s eye. I joined Ms. A. in her ceremonial chanting, an incantation of light and blood that I found I’d memorized without trying.

We couldn’t bring down Dara’s temp. Her blood pressure soared, her vascular system a topographic map across her skin.

Ms. A. said, “I have no choice. We cannot wait any longer to perform the enucleation. Please bring me the satchel.”

I brought her the closest thing I could find to what she’d requested, less a satchel than a marble bag made from bright silver chainmail with a fold-over steel latch on top.

Ms. A. opened the latch and sat the bag on the tray next to her. Then she grabbed the forceps and asked me to pick up a tiny scalpel.

“We’ve always been concerned that an x-ray might activate Dara’s eye in some way we couldn’t predict, so I’m not sure whether or not her optic nerve is still attached. If it is, I’ll need you to sever it as quickly as you possibly can. But first, I need you to make an incision in my thumb.”

“What? If you bleed on her that’s an infection risk.”

“No, it’s our only chance of confusing the jelly into thinking it’s still in contact with flesh while we move it.”

I looked at Ms. A.’s near-panicked face, then down to the beetles latched in to Dara’s chest. Ms. A. was right—this was neither the time nor place to enforce traditional medical standards.

Ms. A. pulled the latex covering from her left thumb and put it just above Dara’s eye. I placed the scalpel against the pad of her finger, but hesitated.

“She’s dying, Doyle. I don’t know if we can stop her from being subsumed.”

I pushed in, and after a second’s resistance the scalpel slid right through to the bone. I pulled back from the shock of it and almost flayed Ms. A.’s thumb wide open. She inhaled sharply, but held her stand steady. Dark blood pooled over the obsidian surface of Dara’s eye. Ms. A. pushed down with the forceps in her other hand, moving them past Dara’s eyelids as delicately as she could. Once she had purchase on the underside of the eye, she looked to me.

“I’m going to pull up now. If anything at all is holding that eye to Dara’s head, you slash right through it without pause. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” Sweat dripped from my forehead to Dara’s bare skin. My whole body shook with each heartbeat.

Ms. A. said, “And…pulling…now!”

The black eye held there for a moment, and then there was a burbling, sucking sound as the orb moved upward and Ms. A.’s pooled blood rushed down to fill Dara’s eye socket. I did my best to watch the underside of the eye through the blood and when Ms. A. didn’t seem to be able to lift any further I placed my face right down by Dara’s and felt her shallow breath and slid the scalpel down into the thin space between the eye and the socket beneath, and I rotated my wrist to sever whatever held strong.

Lubricated by Ms. A.’s blood, the eye slid free of Dara’s face without a sound. The thinnest vine of twitching blackness—like a severed spider’s leg—clung to its base. A light drift of smoke rose from Dara’s empty socket, something purified in blood.

Ms. A. reached over with her free hand and opened the small chain-mail bag on the surgical tray and gingerly placed the eye inside. She flipped the fold-over latch and secured the steel pins and only then did I see her stop to inhale.

Ms. A. and I worked to clean Dara’s wound and be certain she was comfortable. The way her eyelids flopped inward was unsettling. She’d definitely want a glass eye, or maybe even a functional implant, once she was well. She wouldn’t even have to wear the patch anymore. In the meantime, we taped sterile gauze over the socket.

“She’s stabilizing, and I don’t sense any further transmissions coming from this thing.” She held the silver bag at arm’s length like it was worm-riddled dog shit. “To be sure, I’d like to place this in another containment device for storage until we can be rid of it.”

“‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it away,’ huh?”

“Christian?”

“No, but I tried to read the Bible in my early twenties. Too many pages of people begetting each other, so I skimmed for the trippy parts. Do you need me to join you?”

“No, you stay with Dara.” And when she said it I realized that was exactly what I wanted to do, and I looked down to find I was already holding Dara’s hand.

The explosion came from the hallway moments later.

Smoke and the smell of burning flesh rolled through the door in filthy plumes. Concrete chips skittered across the ground.

Ms. A.

I thought the eye had exploded as she’d feared it might, but then I heard men’s voices.

“Clear?”

“Clear. Mostly. It’s kind of a mess.”

“Shit, man. Try to save a couple to take back to council and we won’t get busted for jumping the gun.”

“Agreed. Just remember, the one-eyed bitch is mine. I’m not feeding her to the council.”

The first I didn’t recognize. The latter was Toro.

Even with our scramblers on, they could have followed Dara’s signal right to our doorstep. That’s why Ms. A. kept checking the entrance during surgery.

I remembered the pistol tucked into the back of my jeans, pulled it, flipped off the safety.

Killing is easy for them. But it shouldn’t be for us.

Did I have any choice? I could hear their footsteps in the hall. I pushed Dara’s stretcher across the room and tucked it into the corner closest to the entrance. She mumbled something at the disturbance.

“You hear that?” Toro said.

“Yeah. Third door on the left.”

And now I knew they had their guns trained on our room. There had to be a way to regain the element of surprise. I scanned the space. There was some kind of gas tank in the corner, but I didn’t know what I could do with that. Open the valve? Maybe that poisons everybody. Throw it into the hallway and hope I can pull off a trick shot? Even if I could, what’s to say the explosion wouldn’t engulf us all?