9/10th's of the Law pt.2
Dec. 16th, 2011 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonContinued from Pt.1
It’s all business when the bastards have left you with no choice.
Any other attitude boils down to either hyperbole or sentimentality and both will fuck up your night so bad there ain’t gonna be a tomorrow to follow. So, standing out there in the ass end of the hood and directly outside an abandoned office building with a ‘demonically’ possessed ghetto-punk locked inside its basement, Adam Last gets his shit together – stat.
An hour before dawn and from the corner of his eye, Adam spots ‘the boss’ hunkered in the dwindling shadows. Ronnie’s squat, broad silhouette leaning against the outline of his car with only the stoic faces and thick arms of his two pet goons flanking him illuminated in the crisp blue moonlight. He can feel the weight of Ronnie’s invisible glare on him. Ronnie, who called in a favor when he called Adam in to deal with the ‘possession situation’. Ronnie who can take ‘no’ for an answer so long as you can take a punch for a follow up question. Ronnie coked-up, pissed off and running short on patience.
It’s all business, he reminds himself with a snort, the rest is just bullshit and Adam clocks in.
He lights up a smoke and lets it dangle from the corner of his perpetual smirk. He throws up his hood so only the sharp, stubble flecked chin is visible in the cherry’s light. From a bottomless pocket within his jacket (one stitched with a hair plucked from the scalp of a slain magician), he produces a can of red spray paint. He rattles it vigorously, crouches down and proceeds to inscribe around himself a rough circle marked at four cardinal points with dripping sigils. Finished, he stands up, can in one hand he plucks the cigarette out with the other and pivots within the tight squeeze of the circle to face towards the sigil inscribed towards the east.
Adam takes a long drag off his cigarette, hissing a secret name through the ember and allowing it to slither down his throat, swelling up in the breast, coiling around the heart’s furnace, descending into the belly where it whirls in a coarse vortex. He holds back the name until his body begins to tremble under its fury, he takes the cigarette out of his mouth and with the ember’s tip carves quick an orange pentagram that shimmers into existence across the air in five frozen scratches of light. Finally he releases the name, as it takes flight on the wings of a whisper through a stream of smoke fired directly through the center of the pentagram. The name evaporates into a frequency, that hits well beyond the ears of anyone who could close enough to hear it but instantly echoes across a thousand dreams within a hundred mile radius.
Adam shakes off a series of twitches, pivots around clockwise towards the next sigil, repeats the process, again and then one more time, speaking a different name for the four sigils along the circumference, until he returns where he started. He throws out his arms wide into a beam before snapping them crossed against his chest.
“Before me, East Point!” He barks defiantly through the fence, over the parallel street, into the depths of the neighboring but equally decrepit factory, all the way out towards the silent tracks. “Behind me, West Side! On my right hand, South Side! On my left hand, Uptown! For before me burns the City’s Name and within me flows her Electric Blood!”
Yard dogs start barking from three streets down. The iron leviathan wail of a ghost trail barrels down from behind and ripples into the breath of the living city ahead. The circle ignites into a ring of inch high flames while the sigils around it begin to throb with a crimson glow before floating up off the ground, shifting from horizontal to vertical, while hovering in the air before him. A fierce gust of wind hits Adam full blast, sending his jacket flag-flapping behind him and yanking back his hood yet failing to rustle so much as a single fallen leaf outside his circle. His face lit up in the hues of the flickering flames around him, casting deep pools of shadows that shroud the eyes and from whose depths the constellations of a hundred skylines glitter.
Jacked into the pulse of Terminus, Adam’s consciousness expands to register the full roar of the city’s song.
Streams of raw information flood through the skull and quickly drown his senses beneath their cascade. He synchs into the vast dance of traffic signal lights to one another and the code that their silent rhythms reveal. Thoughts become flattened and hammered beneath multiplying layers of maps as memories are bombarded beneath the names of every street, avenue, road and boulevard throughout the Perimeter. A hornet drone of ghost conversations off countless cell phones and the jangle of conflicting radio frequencies crackle in his ears. Through the earth, his bones rattle with the relentless hum of an army of street lamps standing at attention and the steel dragon rattle of distant freights rumbling through the distance.
And wider… the electric ripple of lights, appliances, televisions, computers and engines flickering in and out of life with each breath he takes. Wider… the predawn trickle of traffic pounding within his heart. Wider… vision crushed across endless reflections cast by sky rise windows and broken bottles alike.
A jolt of panic hits, kick starts Adam out of the trance, a small ember of ‘I’ rises up from the depths of his being, catching a ride on the up drafts of whirling data consuming him from within. There the ember attaches itself to a stray memory drifting in the maelstrom, consumes it whole and grows.
Adam dangles upside down knotted in rope, wrists bound behind his back with one leg straightened and the other bent outwards at 90 degrees to form an inverted ‘4’. He is blindfolded, naked and maybe just a little drunk. He’s in Mistress Drown’s ‘play room’ and she stands directly before him – legs spread wide, with wet pussy grinding into his face as a hand clasped around the back of his head thrusts him forward into the heat. While Adam laps ferociously at the shores of her satisfaction, Mistress Drown traces idly with the gloved fingers of her free hand a ‘torture-sigil’ two inches below his navel, carving a sweet pain across his Svadisthana Chakra.
Adam can feel her fingers dig deeper into the back of his scalp while the blood rushes to his head and her need trickles warm up his cheeks and seep beneath the blindfold to sting his eyes. The pain she weaves with her fingers across his Chakra intoxicates with excruciating please and as his mistress begins to moan her approval…
… The Misfits’ ‘Horror Business’ starts chiming away from his cell phone, buried somewhere in the pile of his hastily discarded clothes. The ring’s assigned to Ronnie and at this hour he can rule out a social call.
“Don’t. You. Fucking. Dare…,” Mistress Drown growls.
“Houdini.”Adam mumbles the safe word into her crotch.
At the utterance of the word he phases out of reality, dipping into the city’s current for a split second and rematerializing out of the shadows in the corner of the basement, wrists unbound and the blindfold twirling around the axis of a finger. Adam digs out and answers the phone a second before it goes to voice mail. With a visibly pissed off Drown standing in the corner, he gets the 411 on the 911 along with his marching orders to make the scene ASAP.
Apologies muttered through the awkward one legged dance that is a man rushing to get dressed. Drown sighs, lights up a cigarette and approaches him.
“Emergency at the office?” she asks.
Adam snorts a laugh: “Something like that.”
“Yeah… just what is it that you do again?”
“Whatever my Mistress desires.” Adam courtesies and zips up his jeans.
“Well we wouldn’t be having this conversation if that were true now would we?”
“I know and I’m really sorry to have to fuck things up here. Seriously, you have no idea. But hey, while you might not know what I do… at least you know what I am.”
“Pfft… and what would that be exactly?”
“Yours.” Adam winks and shrugs into his leather jacket.
“Uh-huh.” Drown rolls her eyes and steps forward, laying a latex caress down Adam’s cheek, the back of her fingers drifting down his neck and curling around the throat. Where they pause…
… and with a poke of her forefinger, she jabs the Vishuddha Chakra just below Adam’s apple. A steel blue collar of light shimmers around his throat and locks with a luminous white flower.
“The hell’s this?” Adam clutches at the light as it fades between his fingers and sinks into the astral body tethered within the shell of his flesh.
“Just a little something to remind you, and any skanks you might run into, that you’re mine tonight. Bound in servitude to my pleasure and my pleasure alone. A binding lock to ensure you’re coming back here and finishing what you started. Remember that.”
Adam’s eyes blink open.
The present simmers back into view, the packed parking lot, the empty street, the abandoned factory, the squat house/office building, all emerging through memory’s fog and leaving Adam back on the shores of reality. Relatively. For one thing he’s in ritual space and colors throb around him with tacit significance while each motion leaves a trail of light in its wake. For another he can feel Terminus purr and circle and rub against his consciousness; hungry and affectionate at the same time – a vast tiger with the mating habits of a preying mantis.
He realizes something’s wrong. Logging into the City’s never this much of a bitch. It’s been awhile since he’s interfaced with her direct but for whatever reason this time was different. She was different. Angry. Feral. Sensual… and it’s then he realizes that she’s not different, he is. She could smell it on him, the fear and the bitterness sharpened against hard choices into a razor desperate courage.
“Hey,” Ronnie speaks sliding off the hood of his car and lighting up a cigarette, “I don’t mean no disrespect or anything, but we ain’t exactly got all night here. So if you’re done with the poetry and staring off into space, we, by which I mean ‘you’, have some work to do.”
Adam huffs a light laugh and shakes his head sad. As is often the case, he forgets Ronnie and his crew can’t register magick on their senses. Instead he bobs his head towards his boss: “Lemme ask you somethin’ real quick?”
“What?”
“Who is she?” Adam nods to the derelict building. “‘Cause there’s no way we’re going through all this over some hood rat.”
“It doesn’t matter who she is, what matters is… ”
“… what matters is I know exactly who this person is to you because whatever’s inside her sure as shit will and won’t hesitate to use it against me.”
Ronnie silently glares at Adam through the shadows. The two goons to his side exchange knowing looks before glancing over at their boss, waiting for him to take them off the leash with a nod so they can deliver an ass beating, that by reckoning, is long overdue.
“C’mon, man.” Adam smiles diplomatically. “You wouldn’t send any of your boys into a scrap without all the necessary facts. All I’m asking is you don’t do me different.”
“Walk.” Ronnie snaps.
The two goons snicker and sneer at Adam.
“I mean you two assholes. Walk!” Ronnie slaps the goon on the left across the chest. “Give us a minute here, okay?”
The two goons snap back to stoic attention, about face and amble around the car at a respectful distance trying to look like their doing something.
Ronnie steps over to Adam, rubbing his shaved head in thought and fishes for words that don’t come easy.
“'Kay. What exactly you need to know here?”
“A name for a start.”
“Becky. Becky Hearse. You might know her from back in the day as the drummer for the Eagle Punches...”
“Before my time. So what’s the story with you two?”
Ronnie shoots Adam a stink eye through a bruised socket, bites the bottom of his lip and looks away. He mulls over punching someone, anyone, but instead has to settle with wrestling the question. “She’s no one…”
“C’mon, she’s gotta be someone dude otherwise...,” Adam sighs frustrated.
“If you’d fucking let me finish…”
“Sorry.”
“She’s no one now, okay… but she used to be, I mean she is... fuck, she’s the mother of my boy, alright?”
“What?”
“It’s a long story and I’m sorry man, but we ain’t got time to get into it right now. Know that what happened between us wasn’t pretty. What happened to her afterwards was even worse. Some of it my fault, but to be honest, most of it was hers. Now I may not have any love left for her, but I’m sure as shit not going to just walk away from the mother of my child with that... that, whatever the fuck that thing is you say's in her head. You understand what I'm sayin' here?”
“Yeah.”
"Then are there any other questions?"
"How long's she... uh, well had 'that thing' in her head?"
"Not long, a few hours ago. She rolled down here around 6ish with some gutter punks to party. Since I've cut her off intown she came here to East Point to score..."
"What?"
"H."
"Gotcha.Sorry go on."
"... anyway apparently she just started flipping the fuck out. Took a bottle to three of the fucks she was with and gutted them before they could register what was happening. The fourth guy managed to bolt out of there. Was too paranoid to call the law and instead called a friend for a ride out. It wasn't long until word got to me and I decided to have a look for myself."
"Which I'm guessing is how you got the shiner?" Adam bobs his chin at Ronnie's black eye.
"Are there any other fuckin' questions?"
Adam shakes his head.
“Good. Because right now, right fucking now, I need you to do whatever the hell it is you do and get in there and help her.”
“And if I can’t.”
“Not an option.”
“But…”
“This ain’t a fucking negotiation here, Adam. You asked for ‘necessary facts’ about the job and now you got 'em. Including the price of fucking it up. We clear?”
Adam nods. Ronnie spins around and stomps back to the hood of the car, flicking a cigarette out into the dark and whistling for his goons return. Adam can feel the City growling inside him, gnawing at his resolve. He shakes it off, lights a fresh smoke off the butt of the last and makes his way towards the situation.
Around his steps the burning circle flows across the pavement, ensuring that every move he takes remains within its hub while inside the weathered brick shell of the building something terrible waits patiently for his approach.
It’s all business when the bastards have left you with no choice.
Any other attitude boils down to either hyperbole or sentimentality and both will fuck up your night so bad there ain’t gonna be a tomorrow to follow. So, standing out there in the ass end of the hood and directly outside an abandoned office building with a ‘demonically’ possessed ghetto-punk locked inside its basement, Adam Last gets his shit together – stat.
An hour before dawn and from the corner of his eye, Adam spots ‘the boss’ hunkered in the dwindling shadows. Ronnie’s squat, broad silhouette leaning against the outline of his car with only the stoic faces and thick arms of his two pet goons flanking him illuminated in the crisp blue moonlight. He can feel the weight of Ronnie’s invisible glare on him. Ronnie, who called in a favor when he called Adam in to deal with the ‘possession situation’. Ronnie who can take ‘no’ for an answer so long as you can take a punch for a follow up question. Ronnie coked-up, pissed off and running short on patience.
It’s all business, he reminds himself with a snort, the rest is just bullshit and Adam clocks in.
He lights up a smoke and lets it dangle from the corner of his perpetual smirk. He throws up his hood so only the sharp, stubble flecked chin is visible in the cherry’s light. From a bottomless pocket within his jacket (one stitched with a hair plucked from the scalp of a slain magician), he produces a can of red spray paint. He rattles it vigorously, crouches down and proceeds to inscribe around himself a rough circle marked at four cardinal points with dripping sigils. Finished, he stands up, can in one hand he plucks the cigarette out with the other and pivots within the tight squeeze of the circle to face towards the sigil inscribed towards the east.
Adam takes a long drag off his cigarette, hissing a secret name through the ember and allowing it to slither down his throat, swelling up in the breast, coiling around the heart’s furnace, descending into the belly where it whirls in a coarse vortex. He holds back the name until his body begins to tremble under its fury, he takes the cigarette out of his mouth and with the ember’s tip carves quick an orange pentagram that shimmers into existence across the air in five frozen scratches of light. Finally he releases the name, as it takes flight on the wings of a whisper through a stream of smoke fired directly through the center of the pentagram. The name evaporates into a frequency, that hits well beyond the ears of anyone who could close enough to hear it but instantly echoes across a thousand dreams within a hundred mile radius.
Adam shakes off a series of twitches, pivots around clockwise towards the next sigil, repeats the process, again and then one more time, speaking a different name for the four sigils along the circumference, until he returns where he started. He throws out his arms wide into a beam before snapping them crossed against his chest.
“Before me, East Point!” He barks defiantly through the fence, over the parallel street, into the depths of the neighboring but equally decrepit factory, all the way out towards the silent tracks. “Behind me, West Side! On my right hand, South Side! On my left hand, Uptown! For before me burns the City’s Name and within me flows her Electric Blood!”
Yard dogs start barking from three streets down. The iron leviathan wail of a ghost trail barrels down from behind and ripples into the breath of the living city ahead. The circle ignites into a ring of inch high flames while the sigils around it begin to throb with a crimson glow before floating up off the ground, shifting from horizontal to vertical, while hovering in the air before him. A fierce gust of wind hits Adam full blast, sending his jacket flag-flapping behind him and yanking back his hood yet failing to rustle so much as a single fallen leaf outside his circle. His face lit up in the hues of the flickering flames around him, casting deep pools of shadows that shroud the eyes and from whose depths the constellations of a hundred skylines glitter.
Jacked into the pulse of Terminus, Adam’s consciousness expands to register the full roar of the city’s song.
Streams of raw information flood through the skull and quickly drown his senses beneath their cascade. He synchs into the vast dance of traffic signal lights to one another and the code that their silent rhythms reveal. Thoughts become flattened and hammered beneath multiplying layers of maps as memories are bombarded beneath the names of every street, avenue, road and boulevard throughout the Perimeter. A hornet drone of ghost conversations off countless cell phones and the jangle of conflicting radio frequencies crackle in his ears. Through the earth, his bones rattle with the relentless hum of an army of street lamps standing at attention and the steel dragon rattle of distant freights rumbling through the distance.
And wider… the electric ripple of lights, appliances, televisions, computers and engines flickering in and out of life with each breath he takes. Wider… the predawn trickle of traffic pounding within his heart. Wider… vision crushed across endless reflections cast by sky rise windows and broken bottles alike.
A jolt of panic hits, kick starts Adam out of the trance, a small ember of ‘I’ rises up from the depths of his being, catching a ride on the up drafts of whirling data consuming him from within. There the ember attaches itself to a stray memory drifting in the maelstrom, consumes it whole and grows.
Adam dangles upside down knotted in rope, wrists bound behind his back with one leg straightened and the other bent outwards at 90 degrees to form an inverted ‘4’. He is blindfolded, naked and maybe just a little drunk. He’s in Mistress Drown’s ‘play room’ and she stands directly before him – legs spread wide, with wet pussy grinding into his face as a hand clasped around the back of his head thrusts him forward into the heat. While Adam laps ferociously at the shores of her satisfaction, Mistress Drown traces idly with the gloved fingers of her free hand a ‘torture-sigil’ two inches below his navel, carving a sweet pain across his Svadisthana Chakra.
Adam can feel her fingers dig deeper into the back of his scalp while the blood rushes to his head and her need trickles warm up his cheeks and seep beneath the blindfold to sting his eyes. The pain she weaves with her fingers across his Chakra intoxicates with excruciating please and as his mistress begins to moan her approval…
… The Misfits’ ‘Horror Business’ starts chiming away from his cell phone, buried somewhere in the pile of his hastily discarded clothes. The ring’s assigned to Ronnie and at this hour he can rule out a social call.
“Don’t. You. Fucking. Dare…,” Mistress Drown growls.
“Houdini.”Adam mumbles the safe word into her crotch.
At the utterance of the word he phases out of reality, dipping into the city’s current for a split second and rematerializing out of the shadows in the corner of the basement, wrists unbound and the blindfold twirling around the axis of a finger. Adam digs out and answers the phone a second before it goes to voice mail. With a visibly pissed off Drown standing in the corner, he gets the 411 on the 911 along with his marching orders to make the scene ASAP.
Apologies muttered through the awkward one legged dance that is a man rushing to get dressed. Drown sighs, lights up a cigarette and approaches him.
“Emergency at the office?” she asks.
Adam snorts a laugh: “Something like that.”
“Yeah… just what is it that you do again?”
“Whatever my Mistress desires.” Adam courtesies and zips up his jeans.
“Well we wouldn’t be having this conversation if that were true now would we?”
“I know and I’m really sorry to have to fuck things up here. Seriously, you have no idea. But hey, while you might not know what I do… at least you know what I am.”
“Pfft… and what would that be exactly?”
“Yours.” Adam winks and shrugs into his leather jacket.
“Uh-huh.” Drown rolls her eyes and steps forward, laying a latex caress down Adam’s cheek, the back of her fingers drifting down his neck and curling around the throat. Where they pause…
… and with a poke of her forefinger, she jabs the Vishuddha Chakra just below Adam’s apple. A steel blue collar of light shimmers around his throat and locks with a luminous white flower.
“The hell’s this?” Adam clutches at the light as it fades between his fingers and sinks into the astral body tethered within the shell of his flesh.
“Just a little something to remind you, and any skanks you might run into, that you’re mine tonight. Bound in servitude to my pleasure and my pleasure alone. A binding lock to ensure you’re coming back here and finishing what you started. Remember that.”
Adam’s eyes blink open.
The present simmers back into view, the packed parking lot, the empty street, the abandoned factory, the squat house/office building, all emerging through memory’s fog and leaving Adam back on the shores of reality. Relatively. For one thing he’s in ritual space and colors throb around him with tacit significance while each motion leaves a trail of light in its wake. For another he can feel Terminus purr and circle and rub against his consciousness; hungry and affectionate at the same time – a vast tiger with the mating habits of a preying mantis.
He realizes something’s wrong. Logging into the City’s never this much of a bitch. It’s been awhile since he’s interfaced with her direct but for whatever reason this time was different. She was different. Angry. Feral. Sensual… and it’s then he realizes that she’s not different, he is. She could smell it on him, the fear and the bitterness sharpened against hard choices into a razor desperate courage.
“Hey,” Ronnie speaks sliding off the hood of his car and lighting up a cigarette, “I don’t mean no disrespect or anything, but we ain’t exactly got all night here. So if you’re done with the poetry and staring off into space, we, by which I mean ‘you’, have some work to do.”
Adam huffs a light laugh and shakes his head sad. As is often the case, he forgets Ronnie and his crew can’t register magick on their senses. Instead he bobs his head towards his boss: “Lemme ask you somethin’ real quick?”
“What?”
“Who is she?” Adam nods to the derelict building. “‘Cause there’s no way we’re going through all this over some hood rat.”
“It doesn’t matter who she is, what matters is… ”
“… what matters is I know exactly who this person is to you because whatever’s inside her sure as shit will and won’t hesitate to use it against me.”
Ronnie silently glares at Adam through the shadows. The two goons to his side exchange knowing looks before glancing over at their boss, waiting for him to take them off the leash with a nod so they can deliver an ass beating, that by reckoning, is long overdue.
“C’mon, man.” Adam smiles diplomatically. “You wouldn’t send any of your boys into a scrap without all the necessary facts. All I’m asking is you don’t do me different.”
“Walk.” Ronnie snaps.
The two goons snicker and sneer at Adam.
“I mean you two assholes. Walk!” Ronnie slaps the goon on the left across the chest. “Give us a minute here, okay?”
The two goons snap back to stoic attention, about face and amble around the car at a respectful distance trying to look like their doing something.
Ronnie steps over to Adam, rubbing his shaved head in thought and fishes for words that don’t come easy.
“'Kay. What exactly you need to know here?”
“A name for a start.”
“Becky. Becky Hearse. You might know her from back in the day as the drummer for the Eagle Punches...”
“Before my time. So what’s the story with you two?”
Ronnie shoots Adam a stink eye through a bruised socket, bites the bottom of his lip and looks away. He mulls over punching someone, anyone, but instead has to settle with wrestling the question. “She’s no one…”
“C’mon, she’s gotta be someone dude otherwise...,” Adam sighs frustrated.
“If you’d fucking let me finish…”
“Sorry.”
“She’s no one now, okay… but she used to be, I mean she is... fuck, she’s the mother of my boy, alright?”
“What?”
“It’s a long story and I’m sorry man, but we ain’t got time to get into it right now. Know that what happened between us wasn’t pretty. What happened to her afterwards was even worse. Some of it my fault, but to be honest, most of it was hers. Now I may not have any love left for her, but I’m sure as shit not going to just walk away from the mother of my child with that... that, whatever the fuck that thing is you say's in her head. You understand what I'm sayin' here?”
“Yeah.”
"Then are there any other questions?"
"How long's she... uh, well had 'that thing' in her head?"
"Not long, a few hours ago. She rolled down here around 6ish with some gutter punks to party. Since I've cut her off intown she came here to East Point to score..."
"What?"
"H."
"Gotcha.Sorry go on."
"... anyway apparently she just started flipping the fuck out. Took a bottle to three of the fucks she was with and gutted them before they could register what was happening. The fourth guy managed to bolt out of there. Was too paranoid to call the law and instead called a friend for a ride out. It wasn't long until word got to me and I decided to have a look for myself."
"Which I'm guessing is how you got the shiner?" Adam bobs his chin at Ronnie's black eye.
"Are there any other fuckin' questions?"
Adam shakes his head.
“Good. Because right now, right fucking now, I need you to do whatever the hell it is you do and get in there and help her.”
“And if I can’t.”
“Not an option.”
“But…”
“This ain’t a fucking negotiation here, Adam. You asked for ‘necessary facts’ about the job and now you got 'em. Including the price of fucking it up. We clear?”
Adam nods. Ronnie spins around and stomps back to the hood of the car, flicking a cigarette out into the dark and whistling for his goons return. Adam can feel the City growling inside him, gnawing at his resolve. He shakes it off, lights a fresh smoke off the butt of the last and makes his way towards the situation.
Around his steps the burning circle flows across the pavement, ensuring that every move he takes remains within its hub while inside the weathered brick shell of the building something terrible waits patiently for his approach.