5: Death-Tripping Balls
Dec. 16th, 2009 01:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonContinued from...
4:Walk into Hell with a joke on your lips
3:Strawberry Mansion
2:Crusty Pete
1:Enochian Acid & Other Distractions
Big Bob the Eunuch. A walking tower of a man, fortified with chiseled muscle and stone eyes narrowed into crenellations through which the bolts of his stare takes aim. Skin of burnt terracotta, as if tanned by the blaze of an inner sun. Bare chest exposed under an unbuttoned fur-lined brown corduroy coat just one size too small. Purple camo parachute pants tucked into scuffed up steel toed jack boots. Scalp shaved to a dull shine, as well as throat, brow and face. Smooth forehead with a tattooed purple circle, one baring an upside down triangle within its belly and coin wide circumference flanked by a pair of petal-wings. A Mardi Gras commando, dressed somewhere between Sanskrit pimp and rave thug chic.
Word is Bob was once one of the more powerful tantric magickians operating on the East Coast Current. Hung not by the inch but by the foot and blessed with that rarest gift to be found amongst magickians of any grade – a sense of humor. All was well on Planet Bob until the day he got caught dipping the lingam into some jail bait flavored yoni by his old lady. Naturally pissed his woman retaliated. Feigning all was forgiven at first, she lured him into bed under pretenses of some good hard makeup sex but instead had in mind one last grudge fuck to end all grudge fucks. She rode Bob’s Kundalini Express for a three day tour de force, fueled by equal doses of chemicals and electric anger. When the astral sea began to steam off their skin with a burnt ectoplasmic funk, when the masks of their god forms ignited into shrouds of flame and her final orgasm collapsed around them quiet as a black hole... Bob finally let go, unbeknownst that this would his last time.
Emerging from the thirty-seven hour coma his (by now) ex-wifey had left him in, Bob quickly discovered the fresh Ajna chakra inked into a third eye. He knew then that she was gone for good but it wouldn’t be until much later that he would realize that she had left more than just the tattoo as a Memento Mori of their relationship. That night when he failed to perform before one of his willing adepts the true nature of her absence began to reveal itself. Follow up attempts with different partners yielded the same result – girls, bois and whatever no different. Even manual over ride didn’t do shit. Next thing you know Bob is popping Viagra like it’s fucking candy and he still can’t perform the basic miracle of turning a worm into a serpent. The ex-wifey had laid down a seriously fucked-up hex on the man, a dose of that old blood-voodoo trouble from which there ain’t no cure. In the simplest of terms, she had arranged it so that Bob could only now get it up for one woman and one woman only… the one that ain’t coming back.
Kundalini neutered. Seeing red and blue balled 24-7. Wasn’t long before enforced chastity began to corrode away at the core of his self. In compensation muscle and disposition hardened into rigid steel. He quickly became consumed with a relentless violence. He picked fights frequently as possible. At first just with those stupid enough to give him shit about the third eye. Then just for looking at it. Eventually he began throwing down with anyone who might be able to put up a decent fight. The bigger the better. The damage exchange was only thing he could feel anymore. It wasn’t long before Bob (who dares you, just dares you to call him ‘The Eunuch’) was recruited as road agent and general attitude adjuster for Carlos the Chameleon.
Of course that’s just the word… but words do have power in the mouths of the wise.
Needless to say, in all the years Bob the Eunuch had served as the Chameleon’s implacable rook he has seen, if not committed, more than his fair share of unspeakably gruesome shit. Whether this was strictly business or pleasure, who can say? But standing there in that derelict apartment on the edge of the Strawberry Mansion district, he felt something stir in the distant waters of his memory, an old feeling, one he had almost forgotten the name of – horror.
Never-Know comes barreling in right behind Bob, magick bat in a two-handed grip and raised over his head ready to lumber jack some poor schmuck’s skull in. All momentum and no vision, NK almost goes down ass-first when he hits a puddle of greasy black fluid upon reaching the living room. It is only because of a lightning snatch of his front collar, from an otherwise motionless Bob, that NK is still standing.
“I’m good, I’m good… th’ hell is this shit, anyway?” NK straightens himself up with the stubborn petulance of an accident prone child. He balances himself on one foot while precariously investigating the bottom of his sole. It takes a few seconds for the surrounding details to squeeze into the narrow opening of his attention. Smell hits first. Putrefied meat freshly electrocuted and slathered in sour milk. Before anything else registers, NK is doubled over while violently regurgitating up a lunch of burgers and Strong Bow across his boots.
“You’re not helping, ‘Know.” Phil Fuck steps out from behind Bob like a shadow detaching itself from a mountain. The scene slaps at the eyes. Hits hard. Won’t let go even when you stop looking. He twists his face into a lop-sided snarl of disgust. With shaking hands he pulls out a cigarette, lights it up and steam vents out a long nicotine sigh.
“Alright, what are we looking at here?” Skinhead Dan enters the room with the air of a foreman interrupting an extended coffee break.
“Shiiit, Dan… you tell us?” Phil shrugs helplessly with another vent blast.
Dan squeezes past the three and takes in the scene with detached vision snapshots fired random. Zero emotion - it’s as if the horror and stench have no effect on him. The back of a modest sized TV sits on a rickety ass table before them. It provides the room’s sole illumination with a lime and gray static wash.
There are five of them total. Four guys, one girl. Three sitting upright on a couch plush against the left wall. The chick slouched over on the love seat facing opposite. The fifth collapsed slack in a recliner chair facing Dan. The first thing he notices is their exposed throats – each slit with a second grin. Swollen purple tongues, coated and bubbled with scabs, had been pulled through the slashes to dangle with unusual elongation across the upper sternum. Dan takes especial notice that their tips have been branded with what appears to be a miniature square. Next that their lips have been stitched shut… with what he’s guessing from the distance is fishing wire. Dan then makes a sartorial call based on the club gear and ill-fitting hoodies – House Heads. Finally he takes notice of the ice blue fingers wrapped around patient razors and jagged bouquets of broken glass bottles. Self-inflicted… but why?
Dan’s intuition tells him this is more than suicide, ritual or otherwise, he’s looking at. The asshole in the recliner being his first clue. His chest has been hollowed out, flaps of necrotic skin flank the chasm like twin flags. The rib cage has been split down the middle and pried open into a set of bone talons frozen in a yawn. Nested tight within this cavity, in place of organs, is what appears to be the apartment’s fuse box. It’s connected to a series of thick cords and multicolored wires that spill down the abdomen that vanish in a flow into the shadows at his feet. More wires seem to have been stitched into his splayed limbs lending the man the appearance that he has been ensnared by some vast electrical spider. Unlike the other four, his eye sockets have been plucked clean, offering only twin pools of black fluid that stare back at the stoic skin.
Behind the recliner, written in red spray paint across the otherwise bare drywall, are a series of letters that he recognizes as belonging to the Enochian alphabet. It takes him a second to phonetically sound it out in his head correctly – “ORO-IBAH-AOZPI”. The words grinds and churns through his memory until they spit out a rough translation: “He who cries aloud in the Place of Desolation.”
“Alright, everybody out!” Dan orders, reaching instinctively for the magnum holstered within his bomber.
“Ac’shully Daaan… I don’t think we’re going anywhere.” Phil slurps the whisper while bobbing his chin towards the ceiling.
Above them, in the claustrophobic squeeze of the room, a series of arcane glyphs and sigils have been painted across the molding with the ceiling itself baring a wide binding circle from an unknown grimorie. Though individually foreign to both men’s understanding these symbols spell a clear message in their collective – they’re trapped.
Before anybody can react the set pops off and the room flickers into total black. A high pitched whine rises out of the dark followed immediately by a swarm of glass insects skittering over their ears. The noise does not abate but when the glow of the television crackles back into life, the corpse in the recliner is now standing upright – his ‘Columbian Necktie’ has crawled back into his throat and now slithers in the fetid air from between unstitched lips.
Dan’s .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum flashes out of the gloom, the barrel’s aim zooming in dead center on the corpse’s face, he begins to squeeze the trigger…
… when with a dismissive wave of the corpse, Dan’s pistol twists violently to the right in his grip, cracking and breaking several fingers a split second before the ‘Vest Buster’ bursts a shot harmlessly into the drywall. A second wave pulls the pistol back to the left and down at a sharp angle sending with it a splash crackle of snapping bone.
Dan drops to his knees, cradling his hand and screams the pain free from his body. The sound of it freezes the other three men in their place, who have never seen Dan wince much less wail. When they turn back around to face their opponent, they quickly realize that he is not alone. The other four carcasses have amassed themselves in the center of the room. Their tongues move like dangling serpents from the throat slashes while trailing motion blurs of purple and third degree burn red in their wake. Eyes of a milky white sheen widen in a terrible apprehension and sparkle in the static glow. Their heads tilt slightly to the left as one with blood wounds and empty eyes giving off more ‘trails’.
“Fuckin’ A…” Never-Know snickers, wiping the puke from his chin with the back of his sleeve and shooting the gang a nervous wink, “… acid zombies! Don’t s’pose we got a way outta here?”
“S’okay guys…” Dan growls through gritted teeth, trying to pry his shattered fingers free from the gun, “… Adam’s right outside, ‘member? He’s our key outta here.”
“Uh, yeah… about that…” Phil takes a last drag off his smoke surveying the creatures incredulously, “… y’might wanna go to plan b if y’got one.”
Dan looks around and realizes now that Carlos’ apprentice isn’t there. He sniffs at the air and under the reek he can smell the familiar odor of burnt orgone – the young metromancer tele-bolted his ass on out of there… and only just recently at that.
“I’mma fuckin’ kill ‘em!” Skinhead Dan vows beneath a sharp breath and in unison the five corpses approach the maniac squad.
***
Adam Last is riding the secret frequencies of the city. He has become a human Shulgin Analog, his consciousness an undiscovered designer drug, downloaded from the Strawberry Mansion district and hyperlinked towards an unknown destination. He has only recently learned the art of transferring himself from one location to another by this method. Often he needs an anchor, usually matching graffiti tags will do, or a commonly used map, but tonight he has ‘found’ a trail… a pattern in the cracks of the grid that will lead him directly to his quarry. Still he has to be cautious. He has not yet mastered the frequencies patterns of shift and slide. When he enters them he wills (actually un-wills) himself out of existence, becoming an unresolved possibility in order to emerge himself into their currents. Meaning it is quite easy for an earnest young adept to literally forget themselves out of reality in the ebb and flow, never to be seen again. The Missing. But there are also those adepts who possess the right alchemy of perseverance and imagination to navigate themselves through the fluctuations of the frequency; Schrödinger's cat-people prowling in and out of reality.
It isn’t easy… but adept wise Adam is managing to be the former and not the later.
In this state a slow relativity crawl of an hour has passed even though in ‘reality’ he has only been gone less than a second. Years of training will render the transfer instantaneous both relatively and subjectively, but for now he is a aggregation of thoughts focused into the sharpened edge of a self-referential totality, one with nowhere to go but to trickle into the future. Though he manages to keep his mind blank through this process… there is a nagging awareness gnawing at the corner of his being. An intuition really – an unshakable feeling that he is not alone in the frequency.
***
Bob the Eunuch and Never-Know step up into batting positions, forming the apex on their ‘V’ Phil Fuck positions himself directly in front of Skinhead Dan. Phil rolls up the sleeve on his right arm, baring a bony arm wrapped in a series of tribal weave tattoos flowing over the withered and pock marked veins. He squeezes the ball of a fist hard and begins mumbling a guttural chant. In response the tattoo weave floats off his pale skin and begins to expand in the air around his arm. The tribal patterns spiral around his forearm with their sharpened barbs coalescing into a sharpened ebony blade enveloping over his fist.
The first of the five corpses comes within swinging range, a rave girl with a tight t-shirt splattered with dry blood and dripping with an unidentified black viscous fluid. NK stomps forward driving his bat into the side of her temple. Her head snaps under the crack, rustle of shattered vertebrae and she staggers back a moment before her neck corrects itself and her head pops (literally) back into place. With a lurid deathshead grin she lunges forward into the opening provided by the swing’s momentum with each movement connected by a blur of phosphorescent trails. NK manages to fend off her grasping hands only to have the tongue dangling out of her slash extend out and wrap itself around his throat. NK tries retreating on instinct only to send them tumbling down in an obscene mockery of a lovers embrace.
Bob moves in to help his teammate only to find himself entangled in two sets of arms as two more corpses surge upon the man in a unified descent. He tries to swing at the nearest one, a pimply faced ginger kid whose tongue has wrapped itself around the base of Bob’s bat. Bob tries to backhand him with his free fist only to find his wrist wrapped with another tongue. The corpse kids wrap themselves around the big man and bury frenzied bites into shoulder and wrist.
Phil Fuck sidesteps around the combatants, ducks under the tongue-strike of a fourth creature and comes back up to deliver the blade of his weave-armor around the skull of the fifth – the one with the power-box heart. He almost connects too. That is until the corpse he dodge – natty blond dreads thick with clumps of human tissue – hops unto his back and takes a chomp out of his neck. Thankfully Phil’s got the collar up on his leather jacket and the corpse on his back manages only to break a couple of teeth for his troubles.
Shards of pain race through Dan’s brain to explode right behind the eyes. Still he manages to slip free his shattered grip on the pistol. The agony of this considerable effort lends him a momentary clarity. He realizes that he has been bleeding profusely through the nostrils, he can taste warm cooper and salt with a lick of the corner of his mouth. He’s not a hundred percent about the others, being as they are otherwise occupied, but he’s pretty sure they’ve got matching bleeds. A realization strikes him. He reaches inside his jacket for one of his special bullets awkwardly with his shattered fingers while cradling the pistol with his left hand. Meanwhile the corpse with the fuse-box heart approaches him through his downed men.
Bob feels the damage. It lights up his nervous system like a Christmas tree. A certain giddiness manifests underneath the torn flesh and muscle. A twelve petal green circle burns through his chest with a flaming six sided star boiling into a fresh scar on his flesh. With an inhuman burst of strength he manages to shake off his opponents, snapping their tongues off in the process. In a dead charge he races to reach the fifth corpse before it reaches Dan. Inches away from a tackle the corpse turns around and pimp swats Bob. The impact of the blow sends him flying into the wall, crashing hard and landing into the couch. It turns back around and continues advancing on Dan, who with shaking fingers has emptied out the chamber of his Magnum and is trying to load a single bullet.
With a raising of an upward turned palm, the fifth corpse snatches Dan around the neck just as the bullet chambers and lifts him off his knees to dangle mid-air.
NK is losing oxygen fast... and the fucking berserker bitch scratching at his face relentlessly isn’t helping.
Bob picks himself off the couch as the two corpses he escape descend back upon him. A third chakra appears on Bob now – a sixteen petal baby blue disk with an upside down triangle enclosing a smaller disk. Bob throws back his head and releases a monstrous roar – one that barks with a primal clap of thunder – and sends the two advancing creatures to go flying back into the loveseat.
Phil is staggering forward, side to side and backwards with the dread-cadaver digging at his face. Phil finally figures fuck it and drops backward. The corpse absorbs the impact and Phil rolls off and pounces back down – driving the weave-blade straight into the corpse’s open mouth.
A luminescent burst of light ignites off the blow – blinding Phil for a moment. When his vision returns he can see the hollow void where a face should be waft a foul green smoke that chokes at him. He gets back on his boots and goes to help Bob… only to have the faceless corpse grab him by the back of the neck and fling him face first into the wall.
NK in his frantic fight for life bucks at the mass of corpse bitch clawing at him mercilessly. What blows he manages to land have no effect despite the crunch of shattered nose bone and broken teeth it elicits. Yet in his efforts, he mindlessly kicks at the ground to purchase leverage and instead connects sole first with a cord – severing it in the violence of his throes.
Everything flickers around the combatants. The dead evaporate out of vision and Dan falls unceremoniously to the floor in a loud thud. The room is back to ‘normal’… with the five corpses still seated and the four road agents scattered around battling empty space. There is a monstrous headache boiling behind their skulls and each of the living are trickling a fresh stream of blood from their noses.
Then, with a slither and hiss, the severed cord reconnects itself. Melts together and as quick as it passed, the imagery of the last few minutes resumes – with all the corpses returned to their previous positions.
Dan raises his pistol in his left hand and takes aim. The fifth-corpse goes for another telekinetic wave of its hand but is instead tackled from behind by Bob and Phil, who have taken full advantage of their brief moment of liberty to cross the room. Bob grabs at the panel box and tries tearing free from the creature. As a result a massive current of electricity surges out of the corpse and sends both men flying backwards. When the creature turns around to face Dan it is instead looking down the long barrel of the Magnum…
“Lux the Light of the Cross, Bitch!” Dan growls and fires.
The muzzle burst is a flaming cross that emanates a series of concentric rings, each a magick seal of Solomon that shimmers in the air off the smoking barrel. A golden bullet races through the room, one engraved with a circle with a single dot in its center conveying the solar element. In its wake a trail of ochre and orange flames slice through the fifth corpse, it renders his body into a series of pond ripples… explodes through the television set behind it… flies across the room… and strikes deep into the recliner.
A tremendous EMP pulse wave erupts forth.
Everything goes black.
***
The Blitzkrieg Ball is in full swing. DJ Pan-Epic on the turntables. Dropping Slaughter-House, Dark Tribal and EBM with adroit authority. Packed floor. Filled with all manner of über-freaks, party-divas, nocturnites, old school coffin huggers, weekend shamen, tantric porn stars and wanna-be magickians (“K-holes” as they’re derisively called by the real deal). A sentient gallery of revelry and indulgence. In their stomping and swaying none realize that Adam has just appeared within their midst.
He steps off the floor, hood up and head down, an invisible stare wedging through the crowd. Across the spectrum his vision shifts into true sight. It doesn’t take him long to spot the eggshell blue aura beaconing over by the bathroom doors. A blink and see’s his target. A young man. Crew cut, skeletal thin and wearing the somber poker face of dealers everywhere – a stoic mask betrayed by merchant anxious eyes. Adam hangs back. Bides his time. Three songs pass, though barely distinguishable from each other, and some tweeker has approached the young man in not-so-casual conversation. The two men exchange nervous glances. Look right through the crowd before entering the Men’s Room.
Adam counts to three and follows, the weight of the Sigma 9VE double action 9mm heavy in his pocket.
He brushes past a few giggling kids on his way in. He pauses for a moment before the door, checks the room real quick. Confident that it’s just him and the two he followed he takes action to seal the door. He pulls out his black sharpie and scrawls a sigil over the bathroom door’s frame. A composite symbol made of the words – “NO ENTRANCE”. It won’t hold for long, not with this many people here, but it should buy him a few minutes by his reckoning. Then, quietly as possible, he walks past the urinals and stops just before reaching the stall housing the bathroom’s sole shitter. The dealer and the tweeker are huddled inside together playing an obvious round of let’s make a deal. Standing there he doesn’t even breathe. The weight of the pistol is starting to increase exponentially with each passing second , sinking deeper into his being and sucking his resolve in with it.
He debates the merit of doing what needs to be done against the full gravity of just what that means.
Before he realizes it the tweeker pops out of the stall, too fucked-up to notice or care about the kid standing outside their stall and quickly vanishes. Without allowing himself to think about what he’s doing, Adam steps before the stall with the 9 brandished before him like a wand.
Inside the young dealer obliviously counts out a series of fives, tens and twenties from one hand to another.
“Doctor Ellis Dee?” Adam asks fully aware of the answer already. A sheen of sweat fresh on the brow and the fluorescent light of the bathroom seeping through the cover of his hood.
The ‘Doctor’ ignores him and continues to count his money, the fluctuation of sums mouthed quietly under his breath.
Adam pulls back the trigger, hoping to gain the man’s attention.
“Yeah, I hear ya…” the man finishes counting his money, pockets it without haste and then finally looks up at Adam with bored lifeless eyes, “… now ya gonna pull that trigger or y’jes wasting both our time?”
Adam doesn’t respond. It’s scarier than he thought it would be. His extended arm begins to buckle under the gravity of the situation. The barrel wavers. Sweat stings his eyes.
“Yeah, I thought so.” the man squeezes through the slight opening between Adam, the pistol and the stall’s walls. He stops suddenly and goes for a back swing on Adam, sending him flinching back instinctively. The blow stops as suddenly as it begun and the Doctor chuckles to himself amused.
He notices the sigil on the door and shakes his head dismissively – “This you?”
Adam doesn’t answer. He’s lowered the gun to his side and just helplessly watches the man with sad exposed eyes.
“Nice one…” the Doctor whistles approvingly, “mind if I use it?”
Silence.
The Doctor turns to the sink. Turns on the water. Washes his hands methodically.
“It’s not easy is it? Not like in the movies and all that shit.” The Doctor chuckles to himself at some passing rumination, “You know your friends are dead by now, right? I mean if that helps any. Of course killing me’s gonna come too late… I’ve just sold my last sheet.”
“I wasn’t s’posed to kill you.” Adam mumbles, the words blurring into something between explanation and apology.
“Yeah?” The Doctor chuckles again turning off the faucets and turning to face the young metromancer, “So what are you doing here then?”
“Buying me time.” A third voice comes from the mirror over the sink with a silk accent.
The Doctor turns around and see’s not his reflection standing there but someone else – a gaunt man with a deep tan and tragic eyes who resembles vaguely a Hispanic Nick Cave. Adam instantly recognizes his mentor – Carlos the Chameleon. The young Doctor seems baffled by this presence. So much so that he’s failed to realize the man in the mirror is holding a pistol leveled at him.
“I’m sorry.” Adam whispers looking away.
The Doctor goes to say something but as the first word forms in his mouth –
BANG!
Carlos steps out of the mirror as the now bullet trepanated Doctor falls to floor.
“So… where are Dan and the others?” Carlos holsters the pistol in a green suede jacket, steps gingerly over the ex-Doctor and primps himself in the mirror.
In response his apprentice remains silent and refuses to meet his eyes.
***
Dan floats out of an abyssal black out.
Sparks are cracking and dripping somewhere in the room, offering a faint bluish light by which to navigate his emerging senses. NK and Bob the Eunuch hover over him. Bob seems impassive and has not even applied a rudimentary bandaging to his wounds. NK looks worried, nervous.
“Relax, ‘Know… I’m fine.” Dan says accepting Bob’s hand up and steadies himself to his feet. Memory rolls fast forward on Dan. They walked into a trap. Something between a paranormal ‘Fear Cage’ and a classic binding spell. But they all seem to be…
“It’s Phil, Man... I don’t think he’s doing too good.” NK gulps and nods over towards the crumbled narcomage wrapped in a veil of rising magenta steam.
***
Outside of Saint Christopher’s Hospital, Dan and Carlos are smoking in the designated area just beyond where the ambulances unload the night’s casualties into the ER.
Neither man has spoken since leaving the ICU.
“So?” Dan finally breaks the silence.
“So?” Carlos shrugs.
“The hell was that all about?”
“The good doctor was selling Enochian acid under the misguided belief that he was allowing people the privilege of being possessed, albeit briefly, by angels. Or at least so I’ve been told. What he didn’t realize was what Enochian actually is… a sentient language system, an Ur-tongue if you will, that interacts with the human nervous system to allow ultraterrestials to appear within our reality matrix under the guise of angels.”
“So did we stop this fucking clown or what?”
“Yes and no… there can be no denying that a major gateway has been opened, but gateways have been opened before… to hell, heaven and beyond… and it wasn’t the end of the world then and it ain’t the end of the world now. All it means is that a few renegade spirits are out there in the system. A complication, but not a game ender. We’ll deal with them as they come.”
“What about him?” Dan nods towards the hospital.
“He’ll live.”
“More than he deserves…”
“Dan, please…”
“Naw, fuck that shit man… your boy jumped ship on us. He jumped ship and got one of us killed. As far as I’m concerned a few broken bones and bruises don’t even the score. Not by a long shot.”
“Phil knew the risks… as did you all. But Adam’s young and overeager. He saw an opportunity and made a call. If he hadn’t the Doctor might’ve been able to finish his work and a few loose angels could’ve turned into a celestial apocalypse.”
“Yeah… well let me ask you this, Carlos.” Dan lights up another cigarette with his bandaged hand. He’s been on the wagon for over two years prior to this day and seems to be making up for lost time with a vengeance, “Would you have done the same? Would you have abandoned us knowing there was a trap waiting?”
“Now?” Carlos shrugs and smiles weakly, “No. But at his age? With his experiences… who could say I, or you for that matter, would have done any different?”
Dan doesn’t like this answer very much, telling Carlos so with a look rather than words.
“He has potential, Dan. He’s one of the strongest metromancers I’ve ever met. If he could just get his shit together his power would easily rival ours...”
“Yeah… or get the rest of us killed.” Dan turns his back on the Chameleon and begins walking away. The only time he has ever done this. Over his shoulder he barks - “You better be right about him, Carlos. Not just for your sake but for all of us… right now he’s just a coward, but cowards have a way of turning real mean, real fast. Remember that.”
Carlos says nothing as he watches his red right hand man turn around the corner and disappear.
Inside the ICU Adam surfs a morphine wave over the whirling currents of pain and agony. A small morsel of consciousness remains hooked on a barb of lingering guilt . In one day he’s gotten two men killed and himself hospitalized. He knows vaguely the others will never trust him fully again. Doesn’t blame them either. Still, beneath the self-loathing a terrible confidence has begun to emerge. He had survived where others had not and in this a lesson had been learned. One set of boundaries had been breached and another set before him.
Without doubt he knows he will cross those as well.
4:Walk into Hell with a joke on your lips
3:Strawberry Mansion
2:Crusty Pete
1:Enochian Acid & Other Distractions
Big Bob the Eunuch. A walking tower of a man, fortified with chiseled muscle and stone eyes narrowed into crenellations through which the bolts of his stare takes aim. Skin of burnt terracotta, as if tanned by the blaze of an inner sun. Bare chest exposed under an unbuttoned fur-lined brown corduroy coat just one size too small. Purple camo parachute pants tucked into scuffed up steel toed jack boots. Scalp shaved to a dull shine, as well as throat, brow and face. Smooth forehead with a tattooed purple circle, one baring an upside down triangle within its belly and coin wide circumference flanked by a pair of petal-wings. A Mardi Gras commando, dressed somewhere between Sanskrit pimp and rave thug chic.
Word is Bob was once one of the more powerful tantric magickians operating on the East Coast Current. Hung not by the inch but by the foot and blessed with that rarest gift to be found amongst magickians of any grade – a sense of humor. All was well on Planet Bob until the day he got caught dipping the lingam into some jail bait flavored yoni by his old lady. Naturally pissed his woman retaliated. Feigning all was forgiven at first, she lured him into bed under pretenses of some good hard makeup sex but instead had in mind one last grudge fuck to end all grudge fucks. She rode Bob’s Kundalini Express for a three day tour de force, fueled by equal doses of chemicals and electric anger. When the astral sea began to steam off their skin with a burnt ectoplasmic funk, when the masks of their god forms ignited into shrouds of flame and her final orgasm collapsed around them quiet as a black hole... Bob finally let go, unbeknownst that this would his last time.
Emerging from the thirty-seven hour coma his (by now) ex-wifey had left him in, Bob quickly discovered the fresh Ajna chakra inked into a third eye. He knew then that she was gone for good but it wouldn’t be until much later that he would realize that she had left more than just the tattoo as a Memento Mori of their relationship. That night when he failed to perform before one of his willing adepts the true nature of her absence began to reveal itself. Follow up attempts with different partners yielded the same result – girls, bois and whatever no different. Even manual over ride didn’t do shit. Next thing you know Bob is popping Viagra like it’s fucking candy and he still can’t perform the basic miracle of turning a worm into a serpent. The ex-wifey had laid down a seriously fucked-up hex on the man, a dose of that old blood-voodoo trouble from which there ain’t no cure. In the simplest of terms, she had arranged it so that Bob could only now get it up for one woman and one woman only… the one that ain’t coming back.
Kundalini neutered. Seeing red and blue balled 24-7. Wasn’t long before enforced chastity began to corrode away at the core of his self. In compensation muscle and disposition hardened into rigid steel. He quickly became consumed with a relentless violence. He picked fights frequently as possible. At first just with those stupid enough to give him shit about the third eye. Then just for looking at it. Eventually he began throwing down with anyone who might be able to put up a decent fight. The bigger the better. The damage exchange was only thing he could feel anymore. It wasn’t long before Bob (who dares you, just dares you to call him ‘The Eunuch’) was recruited as road agent and general attitude adjuster for Carlos the Chameleon.
Of course that’s just the word… but words do have power in the mouths of the wise.
Needless to say, in all the years Bob the Eunuch had served as the Chameleon’s implacable rook he has seen, if not committed, more than his fair share of unspeakably gruesome shit. Whether this was strictly business or pleasure, who can say? But standing there in that derelict apartment on the edge of the Strawberry Mansion district, he felt something stir in the distant waters of his memory, an old feeling, one he had almost forgotten the name of – horror.
Never-Know comes barreling in right behind Bob, magick bat in a two-handed grip and raised over his head ready to lumber jack some poor schmuck’s skull in. All momentum and no vision, NK almost goes down ass-first when he hits a puddle of greasy black fluid upon reaching the living room. It is only because of a lightning snatch of his front collar, from an otherwise motionless Bob, that NK is still standing.
“I’m good, I’m good… th’ hell is this shit, anyway?” NK straightens himself up with the stubborn petulance of an accident prone child. He balances himself on one foot while precariously investigating the bottom of his sole. It takes a few seconds for the surrounding details to squeeze into the narrow opening of his attention. Smell hits first. Putrefied meat freshly electrocuted and slathered in sour milk. Before anything else registers, NK is doubled over while violently regurgitating up a lunch of burgers and Strong Bow across his boots.
“You’re not helping, ‘Know.” Phil Fuck steps out from behind Bob like a shadow detaching itself from a mountain. The scene slaps at the eyes. Hits hard. Won’t let go even when you stop looking. He twists his face into a lop-sided snarl of disgust. With shaking hands he pulls out a cigarette, lights it up and steam vents out a long nicotine sigh.
“Alright, what are we looking at here?” Skinhead Dan enters the room with the air of a foreman interrupting an extended coffee break.
“Shiiit, Dan… you tell us?” Phil shrugs helplessly with another vent blast.
Dan squeezes past the three and takes in the scene with detached vision snapshots fired random. Zero emotion - it’s as if the horror and stench have no effect on him. The back of a modest sized TV sits on a rickety ass table before them. It provides the room’s sole illumination with a lime and gray static wash.
There are five of them total. Four guys, one girl. Three sitting upright on a couch plush against the left wall. The chick slouched over on the love seat facing opposite. The fifth collapsed slack in a recliner chair facing Dan. The first thing he notices is their exposed throats – each slit with a second grin. Swollen purple tongues, coated and bubbled with scabs, had been pulled through the slashes to dangle with unusual elongation across the upper sternum. Dan takes especial notice that their tips have been branded with what appears to be a miniature square. Next that their lips have been stitched shut… with what he’s guessing from the distance is fishing wire. Dan then makes a sartorial call based on the club gear and ill-fitting hoodies – House Heads. Finally he takes notice of the ice blue fingers wrapped around patient razors and jagged bouquets of broken glass bottles. Self-inflicted… but why?
Dan’s intuition tells him this is more than suicide, ritual or otherwise, he’s looking at. The asshole in the recliner being his first clue. His chest has been hollowed out, flaps of necrotic skin flank the chasm like twin flags. The rib cage has been split down the middle and pried open into a set of bone talons frozen in a yawn. Nested tight within this cavity, in place of organs, is what appears to be the apartment’s fuse box. It’s connected to a series of thick cords and multicolored wires that spill down the abdomen that vanish in a flow into the shadows at his feet. More wires seem to have been stitched into his splayed limbs lending the man the appearance that he has been ensnared by some vast electrical spider. Unlike the other four, his eye sockets have been plucked clean, offering only twin pools of black fluid that stare back at the stoic skin.
Behind the recliner, written in red spray paint across the otherwise bare drywall, are a series of letters that he recognizes as belonging to the Enochian alphabet. It takes him a second to phonetically sound it out in his head correctly – “ORO-IBAH-AOZPI”. The words grinds and churns through his memory until they spit out a rough translation: “He who cries aloud in the Place of Desolation.”
“Alright, everybody out!” Dan orders, reaching instinctively for the magnum holstered within his bomber.
“Ac’shully Daaan… I don’t think we’re going anywhere.” Phil slurps the whisper while bobbing his chin towards the ceiling.
Above them, in the claustrophobic squeeze of the room, a series of arcane glyphs and sigils have been painted across the molding with the ceiling itself baring a wide binding circle from an unknown grimorie. Though individually foreign to both men’s understanding these symbols spell a clear message in their collective – they’re trapped.
Before anybody can react the set pops off and the room flickers into total black. A high pitched whine rises out of the dark followed immediately by a swarm of glass insects skittering over their ears. The noise does not abate but when the glow of the television crackles back into life, the corpse in the recliner is now standing upright – his ‘Columbian Necktie’ has crawled back into his throat and now slithers in the fetid air from between unstitched lips.
Dan’s .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum flashes out of the gloom, the barrel’s aim zooming in dead center on the corpse’s face, he begins to squeeze the trigger…
… when with a dismissive wave of the corpse, Dan’s pistol twists violently to the right in his grip, cracking and breaking several fingers a split second before the ‘Vest Buster’ bursts a shot harmlessly into the drywall. A second wave pulls the pistol back to the left and down at a sharp angle sending with it a splash crackle of snapping bone.
Dan drops to his knees, cradling his hand and screams the pain free from his body. The sound of it freezes the other three men in their place, who have never seen Dan wince much less wail. When they turn back around to face their opponent, they quickly realize that he is not alone. The other four carcasses have amassed themselves in the center of the room. Their tongues move like dangling serpents from the throat slashes while trailing motion blurs of purple and third degree burn red in their wake. Eyes of a milky white sheen widen in a terrible apprehension and sparkle in the static glow. Their heads tilt slightly to the left as one with blood wounds and empty eyes giving off more ‘trails’.
“Fuckin’ A…” Never-Know snickers, wiping the puke from his chin with the back of his sleeve and shooting the gang a nervous wink, “… acid zombies! Don’t s’pose we got a way outta here?”
“S’okay guys…” Dan growls through gritted teeth, trying to pry his shattered fingers free from the gun, “… Adam’s right outside, ‘member? He’s our key outta here.”
“Uh, yeah… about that…” Phil takes a last drag off his smoke surveying the creatures incredulously, “… y’might wanna go to plan b if y’got one.”
Dan looks around and realizes now that Carlos’ apprentice isn’t there. He sniffs at the air and under the reek he can smell the familiar odor of burnt orgone – the young metromancer tele-bolted his ass on out of there… and only just recently at that.
“I’mma fuckin’ kill ‘em!” Skinhead Dan vows beneath a sharp breath and in unison the five corpses approach the maniac squad.
Adam Last is riding the secret frequencies of the city. He has become a human Shulgin Analog, his consciousness an undiscovered designer drug, downloaded from the Strawberry Mansion district and hyperlinked towards an unknown destination. He has only recently learned the art of transferring himself from one location to another by this method. Often he needs an anchor, usually matching graffiti tags will do, or a commonly used map, but tonight he has ‘found’ a trail… a pattern in the cracks of the grid that will lead him directly to his quarry. Still he has to be cautious. He has not yet mastered the frequencies patterns of shift and slide. When he enters them he wills (actually un-wills) himself out of existence, becoming an unresolved possibility in order to emerge himself into their currents. Meaning it is quite easy for an earnest young adept to literally forget themselves out of reality in the ebb and flow, never to be seen again. The Missing. But there are also those adepts who possess the right alchemy of perseverance and imagination to navigate themselves through the fluctuations of the frequency; Schrödinger's cat-people prowling in and out of reality.
It isn’t easy… but adept wise Adam is managing to be the former and not the later.
In this state a slow relativity crawl of an hour has passed even though in ‘reality’ he has only been gone less than a second. Years of training will render the transfer instantaneous both relatively and subjectively, but for now he is a aggregation of thoughts focused into the sharpened edge of a self-referential totality, one with nowhere to go but to trickle into the future. Though he manages to keep his mind blank through this process… there is a nagging awareness gnawing at the corner of his being. An intuition really – an unshakable feeling that he is not alone in the frequency.
Bob the Eunuch and Never-Know step up into batting positions, forming the apex on their ‘V’ Phil Fuck positions himself directly in front of Skinhead Dan. Phil rolls up the sleeve on his right arm, baring a bony arm wrapped in a series of tribal weave tattoos flowing over the withered and pock marked veins. He squeezes the ball of a fist hard and begins mumbling a guttural chant. In response the tattoo weave floats off his pale skin and begins to expand in the air around his arm. The tribal patterns spiral around his forearm with their sharpened barbs coalescing into a sharpened ebony blade enveloping over his fist.
The first of the five corpses comes within swinging range, a rave girl with a tight t-shirt splattered with dry blood and dripping with an unidentified black viscous fluid. NK stomps forward driving his bat into the side of her temple. Her head snaps under the crack, rustle of shattered vertebrae and she staggers back a moment before her neck corrects itself and her head pops (literally) back into place. With a lurid deathshead grin she lunges forward into the opening provided by the swing’s momentum with each movement connected by a blur of phosphorescent trails. NK manages to fend off her grasping hands only to have the tongue dangling out of her slash extend out and wrap itself around his throat. NK tries retreating on instinct only to send them tumbling down in an obscene mockery of a lovers embrace.
Bob moves in to help his teammate only to find himself entangled in two sets of arms as two more corpses surge upon the man in a unified descent. He tries to swing at the nearest one, a pimply faced ginger kid whose tongue has wrapped itself around the base of Bob’s bat. Bob tries to backhand him with his free fist only to find his wrist wrapped with another tongue. The corpse kids wrap themselves around the big man and bury frenzied bites into shoulder and wrist.
Phil Fuck sidesteps around the combatants, ducks under the tongue-strike of a fourth creature and comes back up to deliver the blade of his weave-armor around the skull of the fifth – the one with the power-box heart. He almost connects too. That is until the corpse he dodge – natty blond dreads thick with clumps of human tissue – hops unto his back and takes a chomp out of his neck. Thankfully Phil’s got the collar up on his leather jacket and the corpse on his back manages only to break a couple of teeth for his troubles.
Shards of pain race through Dan’s brain to explode right behind the eyes. Still he manages to slip free his shattered grip on the pistol. The agony of this considerable effort lends him a momentary clarity. He realizes that he has been bleeding profusely through the nostrils, he can taste warm cooper and salt with a lick of the corner of his mouth. He’s not a hundred percent about the others, being as they are otherwise occupied, but he’s pretty sure they’ve got matching bleeds. A realization strikes him. He reaches inside his jacket for one of his special bullets awkwardly with his shattered fingers while cradling the pistol with his left hand. Meanwhile the corpse with the fuse-box heart approaches him through his downed men.
Bob feels the damage. It lights up his nervous system like a Christmas tree. A certain giddiness manifests underneath the torn flesh and muscle. A twelve petal green circle burns through his chest with a flaming six sided star boiling into a fresh scar on his flesh. With an inhuman burst of strength he manages to shake off his opponents, snapping their tongues off in the process. In a dead charge he races to reach the fifth corpse before it reaches Dan. Inches away from a tackle the corpse turns around and pimp swats Bob. The impact of the blow sends him flying into the wall, crashing hard and landing into the couch. It turns back around and continues advancing on Dan, who with shaking fingers has emptied out the chamber of his Magnum and is trying to load a single bullet.
With a raising of an upward turned palm, the fifth corpse snatches Dan around the neck just as the bullet chambers and lifts him off his knees to dangle mid-air.
NK is losing oxygen fast... and the fucking berserker bitch scratching at his face relentlessly isn’t helping.
Bob picks himself off the couch as the two corpses he escape descend back upon him. A third chakra appears on Bob now – a sixteen petal baby blue disk with an upside down triangle enclosing a smaller disk. Bob throws back his head and releases a monstrous roar – one that barks with a primal clap of thunder – and sends the two advancing creatures to go flying back into the loveseat.
Phil is staggering forward, side to side and backwards with the dread-cadaver digging at his face. Phil finally figures fuck it and drops backward. The corpse absorbs the impact and Phil rolls off and pounces back down – driving the weave-blade straight into the corpse’s open mouth.
A luminescent burst of light ignites off the blow – blinding Phil for a moment. When his vision returns he can see the hollow void where a face should be waft a foul green smoke that chokes at him. He gets back on his boots and goes to help Bob… only to have the faceless corpse grab him by the back of the neck and fling him face first into the wall.
NK in his frantic fight for life bucks at the mass of corpse bitch clawing at him mercilessly. What blows he manages to land have no effect despite the crunch of shattered nose bone and broken teeth it elicits. Yet in his efforts, he mindlessly kicks at the ground to purchase leverage and instead connects sole first with a cord – severing it in the violence of his throes.
Everything flickers around the combatants. The dead evaporate out of vision and Dan falls unceremoniously to the floor in a loud thud. The room is back to ‘normal’… with the five corpses still seated and the four road agents scattered around battling empty space. There is a monstrous headache boiling behind their skulls and each of the living are trickling a fresh stream of blood from their noses.
Then, with a slither and hiss, the severed cord reconnects itself. Melts together and as quick as it passed, the imagery of the last few minutes resumes – with all the corpses returned to their previous positions.
Dan raises his pistol in his left hand and takes aim. The fifth-corpse goes for another telekinetic wave of its hand but is instead tackled from behind by Bob and Phil, who have taken full advantage of their brief moment of liberty to cross the room. Bob grabs at the panel box and tries tearing free from the creature. As a result a massive current of electricity surges out of the corpse and sends both men flying backwards. When the creature turns around to face Dan it is instead looking down the long barrel of the Magnum…
“Lux the Light of the Cross, Bitch!” Dan growls and fires.
The muzzle burst is a flaming cross that emanates a series of concentric rings, each a magick seal of Solomon that shimmers in the air off the smoking barrel. A golden bullet races through the room, one engraved with a circle with a single dot in its center conveying the solar element. In its wake a trail of ochre and orange flames slice through the fifth corpse, it renders his body into a series of pond ripples… explodes through the television set behind it… flies across the room… and strikes deep into the recliner.
A tremendous EMP pulse wave erupts forth.
Everything goes black.
The Blitzkrieg Ball is in full swing. DJ Pan-Epic on the turntables. Dropping Slaughter-House, Dark Tribal and EBM with adroit authority. Packed floor. Filled with all manner of über-freaks, party-divas, nocturnites, old school coffin huggers, weekend shamen, tantric porn stars and wanna-be magickians (“K-holes” as they’re derisively called by the real deal). A sentient gallery of revelry and indulgence. In their stomping and swaying none realize that Adam has just appeared within their midst.
He steps off the floor, hood up and head down, an invisible stare wedging through the crowd. Across the spectrum his vision shifts into true sight. It doesn’t take him long to spot the eggshell blue aura beaconing over by the bathroom doors. A blink and see’s his target. A young man. Crew cut, skeletal thin and wearing the somber poker face of dealers everywhere – a stoic mask betrayed by merchant anxious eyes. Adam hangs back. Bides his time. Three songs pass, though barely distinguishable from each other, and some tweeker has approached the young man in not-so-casual conversation. The two men exchange nervous glances. Look right through the crowd before entering the Men’s Room.
Adam counts to three and follows, the weight of the Sigma 9VE double action 9mm heavy in his pocket.
He brushes past a few giggling kids on his way in. He pauses for a moment before the door, checks the room real quick. Confident that it’s just him and the two he followed he takes action to seal the door. He pulls out his black sharpie and scrawls a sigil over the bathroom door’s frame. A composite symbol made of the words – “NO ENTRANCE”. It won’t hold for long, not with this many people here, but it should buy him a few minutes by his reckoning. Then, quietly as possible, he walks past the urinals and stops just before reaching the stall housing the bathroom’s sole shitter. The dealer and the tweeker are huddled inside together playing an obvious round of let’s make a deal. Standing there he doesn’t even breathe. The weight of the pistol is starting to increase exponentially with each passing second , sinking deeper into his being and sucking his resolve in with it.
He debates the merit of doing what needs to be done against the full gravity of just what that means.
Before he realizes it the tweeker pops out of the stall, too fucked-up to notice or care about the kid standing outside their stall and quickly vanishes. Without allowing himself to think about what he’s doing, Adam steps before the stall with the 9 brandished before him like a wand.
Inside the young dealer obliviously counts out a series of fives, tens and twenties from one hand to another.
“Doctor Ellis Dee?” Adam asks fully aware of the answer already. A sheen of sweat fresh on the brow and the fluorescent light of the bathroom seeping through the cover of his hood.
The ‘Doctor’ ignores him and continues to count his money, the fluctuation of sums mouthed quietly under his breath.
Adam pulls back the trigger, hoping to gain the man’s attention.
“Yeah, I hear ya…” the man finishes counting his money, pockets it without haste and then finally looks up at Adam with bored lifeless eyes, “… now ya gonna pull that trigger or y’jes wasting both our time?”
Adam doesn’t respond. It’s scarier than he thought it would be. His extended arm begins to buckle under the gravity of the situation. The barrel wavers. Sweat stings his eyes.
“Yeah, I thought so.” the man squeezes through the slight opening between Adam, the pistol and the stall’s walls. He stops suddenly and goes for a back swing on Adam, sending him flinching back instinctively. The blow stops as suddenly as it begun and the Doctor chuckles to himself amused.
He notices the sigil on the door and shakes his head dismissively – “This you?”
Adam doesn’t answer. He’s lowered the gun to his side and just helplessly watches the man with sad exposed eyes.
“Nice one…” the Doctor whistles approvingly, “mind if I use it?”
Silence.
The Doctor turns to the sink. Turns on the water. Washes his hands methodically.
“It’s not easy is it? Not like in the movies and all that shit.” The Doctor chuckles to himself at some passing rumination, “You know your friends are dead by now, right? I mean if that helps any. Of course killing me’s gonna come too late… I’ve just sold my last sheet.”
“I wasn’t s’posed to kill you.” Adam mumbles, the words blurring into something between explanation and apology.
“Yeah?” The Doctor chuckles again turning off the faucets and turning to face the young metromancer, “So what are you doing here then?”
“Buying me time.” A third voice comes from the mirror over the sink with a silk accent.
The Doctor turns around and see’s not his reflection standing there but someone else – a gaunt man with a deep tan and tragic eyes who resembles vaguely a Hispanic Nick Cave. Adam instantly recognizes his mentor – Carlos the Chameleon. The young Doctor seems baffled by this presence. So much so that he’s failed to realize the man in the mirror is holding a pistol leveled at him.
“I’m sorry.” Adam whispers looking away.
The Doctor goes to say something but as the first word forms in his mouth –
BANG!
Carlos steps out of the mirror as the now bullet trepanated Doctor falls to floor.
“So… where are Dan and the others?” Carlos holsters the pistol in a green suede jacket, steps gingerly over the ex-Doctor and primps himself in the mirror.
In response his apprentice remains silent and refuses to meet his eyes.
Dan floats out of an abyssal black out.
Sparks are cracking and dripping somewhere in the room, offering a faint bluish light by which to navigate his emerging senses. NK and Bob the Eunuch hover over him. Bob seems impassive and has not even applied a rudimentary bandaging to his wounds. NK looks worried, nervous.
“Relax, ‘Know… I’m fine.” Dan says accepting Bob’s hand up and steadies himself to his feet. Memory rolls fast forward on Dan. They walked into a trap. Something between a paranormal ‘Fear Cage’ and a classic binding spell. But they all seem to be…
“It’s Phil, Man... I don’t think he’s doing too good.” NK gulps and nods over towards the crumbled narcomage wrapped in a veil of rising magenta steam.
Outside of Saint Christopher’s Hospital, Dan and Carlos are smoking in the designated area just beyond where the ambulances unload the night’s casualties into the ER.
Neither man has spoken since leaving the ICU.
“So?” Dan finally breaks the silence.
“So?” Carlos shrugs.
“The hell was that all about?”
“The good doctor was selling Enochian acid under the misguided belief that he was allowing people the privilege of being possessed, albeit briefly, by angels. Or at least so I’ve been told. What he didn’t realize was what Enochian actually is… a sentient language system, an Ur-tongue if you will, that interacts with the human nervous system to allow ultraterrestials to appear within our reality matrix under the guise of angels.”
“So did we stop this fucking clown or what?”
“Yes and no… there can be no denying that a major gateway has been opened, but gateways have been opened before… to hell, heaven and beyond… and it wasn’t the end of the world then and it ain’t the end of the world now. All it means is that a few renegade spirits are out there in the system. A complication, but not a game ender. We’ll deal with them as they come.”
“What about him?” Dan nods towards the hospital.
“He’ll live.”
“More than he deserves…”
“Dan, please…”
“Naw, fuck that shit man… your boy jumped ship on us. He jumped ship and got one of us killed. As far as I’m concerned a few broken bones and bruises don’t even the score. Not by a long shot.”
“Phil knew the risks… as did you all. But Adam’s young and overeager. He saw an opportunity and made a call. If he hadn’t the Doctor might’ve been able to finish his work and a few loose angels could’ve turned into a celestial apocalypse.”
“Yeah… well let me ask you this, Carlos.” Dan lights up another cigarette with his bandaged hand. He’s been on the wagon for over two years prior to this day and seems to be making up for lost time with a vengeance, “Would you have done the same? Would you have abandoned us knowing there was a trap waiting?”
“Now?” Carlos shrugs and smiles weakly, “No. But at his age? With his experiences… who could say I, or you for that matter, would have done any different?”
Dan doesn’t like this answer very much, telling Carlos so with a look rather than words.
“He has potential, Dan. He’s one of the strongest metromancers I’ve ever met. If he could just get his shit together his power would easily rival ours...”
“Yeah… or get the rest of us killed.” Dan turns his back on the Chameleon and begins walking away. The only time he has ever done this. Over his shoulder he barks - “You better be right about him, Carlos. Not just for your sake but for all of us… right now he’s just a coward, but cowards have a way of turning real mean, real fast. Remember that.”
Carlos says nothing as he watches his red right hand man turn around the corner and disappear.
Inside the ICU Adam surfs a morphine wave over the whirling currents of pain and agony. A small morsel of consciousness remains hooked on a barb of lingering guilt . In one day he’s gotten two men killed and himself hospitalized. He knows vaguely the others will never trust him fully again. Doesn’t blame them either. Still, beneath the self-loathing a terrible confidence has begun to emerge. He had survived where others had not and in this a lesson had been learned. One set of boundaries had been breached and another set before him.
Without doubt he knows he will cross those as well.