The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (4 page)

Fresno is always depressing, a mass of
consumerism, a growing tumor in the middle of a fertile crescent
that can out-produce all the other fertile crescents that have come
before. The land around it feeds millions with its rich
earth—there’s colors, of fruits and vegetables and cotton and nuts,
so much green you see it in your dreams—but inside the asphalt and
concrete maze there’s nothing but shades of gray, the splash of tan
to occasionally spice it up. Tract-homes, shopping malls, sidewalks
and street lamps. Nothing to do, no way to escape it. Just living
the same schedule day after day and trying to make yourself forget
you’re trapped in your little cage you pay to be trapped in and pay
to improve, got yourself a refinanced loan to redo the kitchen on.
You might not own it, but hey, bitch is pretty with those granite
countertops.

That’s Fresno.

In January the highs hit low fifties if
you’re especially lucky, mostly its forties day in and out, but
it’s not the temperature that’s depressing. Not the people covered
up head-to-toe, not the dead trees and yellow grasses. It’s that
there is more gray than ever before. Gray clouds hold from horizon
to horizon and they don’t even care enough about you to piss some
rain on top of your drooping head. They just linger, blotting out
the sun and stars. Most days you judge the time by what cloud looks
like it’s a little brighter than the others. That’s your best bet
for where the sun is at.

And the Fog. Capitalize the word. The Fog.
I’m convinced it’s a living god. People in the other parts of the
United States think they know fog, but they don’t. They know mist.
They know haze. They know the Fog’s little brothers. Fresno fog is
so thick some days you’re lucky to see the house next to yours when
you wake up in the morning. It lingers just like the clouds,
holding from what passes for dusk till well towards noon. Hours and
hours, blinded, a whole city living and functioning on sounds, eyes
trying to pierce into the gray wall. A city of half-a-million
people cut off from each other, alone. Exposed. Easy prey . . .
just like the hunters like it.

In one part of Fresno, a commercial district
among many commercial districts, there was a store pretending to be
something it wasn’t. That particular district was known for its
small shops, its artsy cliental, and for a burger joint that had
been open for over sixty years and was good enough to fight off
fast-food chains. The shop fit right in . . . unless you knew
better.

Sometimes to know a secret, you need to know
a secret exists in the first place.

King Henry’s Hidden Treasures
. It was
on the sign, a sign personally painted by the owner using toxic
lead-based paints but not painted with a brush. Another way is
quicker.

To the many old ladies and middle-aged
mothers who wandered in, it was an antique store. It was run by a
nice young man who owned the place, just him, six days a week, ten
to five, don’t go around lunch, he takes an hour off. He tries his
best to help you but he really doesn’t understand anything about
antiques, so be sure you know what you’re buying and research it
ahead of time. No impulse buys, girls!

His language was coarse, even vulgar, and he
had to stop himself from uttering a curse word every sentence when
the old ladies brought their grandchildren with them. He was good
with the children however, better than most expected when they
first got a look at him. He had a rack of comics and candy machines
at the front of the store, and would often slip in a free
comic—just for them—into grandma’s bags when she wasn’t looking,
with an accompanying conspiratorial wink.

He wasn’t tall, short actually, with
close-cut brown hair and common brown eyes. Not handsome, but men
don’t need to be handsome to be attractive. His arms were
well-muscled, his shoulders and chest stocky for as short as he
was. There were scars on his face and hands, especially around his
knuckles. He wore odd clothes, jeans and tennis-shoes but over a
white shirt he wore a brown coat of thick fabric, even in the
summer when the temperature was over one-hundred and his AC ran
full blast. He never took the brown coat off; it hung, unbuttoned,
always
.

There was a leashed quality about him, like
he held back a great many parts of himself. Smiles were tight, eyes
were hooded. What he showed was the edge of anger, and many women
wondered how much more was buried beneath and what had created it
and—if these women were young and hadn’t learned better—maybe if
they could fix it.

His name was King Henry Price and he’d
flashed his driver’s license more than a few times to prove it to
his customers.

His shop was a normal antique store. It had
old books and records, old furniture, clocks and gadgets, glassware
and utensils. His biggest section was his teapots. Women loved
teapots. It wasn’t a busy store, one or two customers at a time and
the customers preferred to be left alone. King Henry spent all his
time at his register, doodling and drawing, running figures and
making strange diagrams the ladies couldn’t understand. It was a
normal antique store.

But then . . . that’s all bullshit.

First of all . . .
fuck teapots
.

Second of all . . . I give the kids a free
comic because what kind of horrible grandma takes their poor kid
into an antique store? They deserve something for the psychological
damage that’s being done. A free comic is the least I can do.

Third . . . it was an Artificer shop. The
only free-owned Artificer shop, unconnected with the Guild of
Artificers, in the entire United States. The price I paid to get
freedom was to give it up. Ceinwyn Dale owned my soul since I was
fourteen, now she owned my future as well.

My future

was worth about a million dollars, that’s
what I owed her for paying the upfront of building and stocking the
place. I told myself I’d actually pay her off one day. That I
wasn’t just kidding myself with this experiment outside the Guild
structure. That I’d show those cocksuckers they were wrong.

I’d been graduated from the Asylum for about
a year and a half, the shop had been running for a full year, and I
still bled cash every month. The antiques selling like deep-fried
crap didn’t help, but they weren’t my big problem.

The problem is: anima is expensive.

The Asylum pumped out hundreds of mancers a
year, but anima’s still worth its weight in gold. Anima, vials to
hold the anima, materials for the artifacts, designing the
artifacts, experimentations to make sure the artifacts did what
they were supposed to do—it all costs a ton in cash.

And then when I finally had myself something
to sell . . . either for cash or a straight-up anima trade, I had
to find a mancer willing to cross the Guild. The Guild agreed to
let me do my own thing when I told them to back off shortly after
graduating but they didn’t agree they wouldn’t bury me in shit.
Even in the normal world, people don’t like crossing a union
picket-line; now imagine that the picket-line is set up by another
corporation and the other corporation is the only game in town. You
going to bet on little ol’ King Henry Price all alone or on
Wal-Mart’s huge stores with a billion Chinese kids behind them
pumping out product?

A year in and I had eight loyal customers,
all of them under thirty save for Ceinwyn. I’d gone to school with
four of them. That left three I’d actually won over.

Only because the Guild wouldn’t make them
what they wanted. That’s the thing with the Guild. It ain’t
flexible. It makes what it makes and it has always made it for
hundreds of years. And it’s going to cost. Well . . . at least
until I try to sell something similar, then there’s a blowout sale.
Guild cocksuckers know the game, let me tell you.

Only they have a weakness.

That’s my one out. My one advantage. I could
experiment. I could make something new. It’s the reason why I was
doing it. The status quo’s going to blow a hole in the world’s gut,
so someone has to change the way things work. That’s me. No, sir,
I’m not vain or nothing . . . no delusions of grandeur on my part.
I just know the Price that’s coming due. Someone better start
trying to pay the bitch back early before we go bankrupt, so why
not me?

[CLICK]

It was your usual gray day in January when
the so-called exploits of King Henry Price began. I met with my
most loyal customer over an experimentation we had conceived
between the pair of us. A lot of hard work looking like it might
finally pay off some. It was later in the afternoon, the Fog held
at bay by pieces of sun escaping from the layer of cloud. Even that
wasn’t a relief. The light was so weak it was just sad, like a
retarded kid raising his hand to answer a question. You knew the
happy wasn’t going to last long.

Two old ladies were in the shop—one at my
clock wall and another trying to break a ninety-year-old
school-desk by swinging the hatch up and down,
up and down
,
the non-lubricated metal squeaking in protest. Getting louder and
louder each swing. No means
no
, lady. If I fiddled with a
woman screaming like that, I’d be in jail.

When my real customer came in, the old
ladies marked the door opening and closing—a different noise than
the desk, something more like a
swoosh
. Their eyes went wide
at the sight of him, their hands reflexively finding their purses
to make sure they were zipped shut. Racist little old ladies I’ll
tell ya, probably still used the word ‘
colored
’ if not
worse.

My customer is black, about six-foot-four
and weighed three-hundred pounds. Not muscle . . . you don’t get
much muscle sitting on a couch playing video games and they were
T-Bone’s primary pastime. T-Bone. Guy hated when I called him that
shit, but how could I not tease him with it? It’s so opposite from
his actual makeup. He was so middle class he couldn’t even
pretend
to be gangster. His parents wouldn’t even let him
watch those movies growing up.

Tyson Bonnie . . . as he told the story . .
. was born to a teenage unwed mother and placed under adoption to a
pair of mid-30s professionals who had tried plenty but couldn’t
have kids themselves. This is how he ended up with a white mother
who’s a registered nurse and an Asian father who’s an accountant .
. . and not even a mob accountant, not even a scumbag corporate
accountant, a
family
accountant. Before the Asylum got their
claws in Tyson Bonnie he was spoiled upper-middle class—real middle
class, not the fake, on paper kind the politicians made up to cook
the stats—going to the best school a shithole like Fresno could
offer. At fourteen, a smiling woman came for him and Tyson Bonnie’s
old life ended.

Now he’s the only other Ultra in Fresno
besides me. When the pool of your peers is so small, you don’t have
any choice but to be friends. Sure, there were other mancers;
Intras doing their thing, but it’s not the same.

We were at the Asylum together, but our
paths never crossed that I noticed. He’s four years older than me,
which means he was well into his graduate work by the time I became
particularly infamous. An electromancer, a Stormcaller.
Electro-anima and someone who knows a thing or two about currents
and batteries . . .

Which led us to the box I pulled up from
under my register and put on the countertop. “T-Bone,” I
greeted.

“King Henry, how many times do I have to
tell you to stop?” he asked from far above me. Just once I’d like
to be friends with someone who’s shorter than me.

The old ladies left without buying anything
while I honorably distracted the big black guy that so didn’t care
about them. “How many times I got to ask you to come by after hours
when I’m actually doing Mancy stuff?”

He glanced around the empty store, raised
too middle class to realize he caused it. “Yup, you’re real busy.
Want me to come back in an hour when things quiet down?”

I flipped the box lid open. I hadn’t made
the box. Bought it at a dollar-store for cheap. Thousands of
dollars worth of anima construction protected by a dollar box. I
liked that.

Inside was a place for two rings among cheap
fabric stapled to the wood. One ring was already missing—it sat on
my right ring finger.

It felt heavier than a normal ring and
wasn’t a perfect loop. I’d thought about silver, but went with
copper, which is cheaper and less likely to be stolen. The copper
was coated with an insulation rubber beside the skin to protect
against feedback current. The face of the ring was a large circle,
a line of copper carefully manipulated into my initials. KHP.
T-Bone’s was simply TB. Guess that made him unhealthy.

He picked his up, looking at it, studying
the initials, then weighing it in his palm. Damn thing looked small
against so much palm. “It works?”

“Just like you came up with and I
designed.”

“Not off Mancy?”

“The Mancy is just the containment. Think of
it as a reactor.”

“But just electricity? Not
electro-anima?”

“Shit, T-Bone, you’re talking about step
number one-hundred and five, we’re on
two
.”

“I know . . . I just . . . get into this
stuff. It’s the coolest part of my week talking theory with someone
who understands it.” He put on the ring, flashing his hand into a
fist that didn’t look like it had a lot of practice being in the
shape. “And stop calling me that.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I put the box back under the
counter. “Takes about two hours to full charge using static
electricity, quicker if you find a piece of carpet and start
rubbing your arm against it. Theoretically you could attach it to a
power-pad but I wouldn’t recommend it—too much power too quick
might blow the containment field.”

“Wow, King Henry,” T-Bone said, his face all
lit up as he swung a lazy punch across his chest that was far too
much arm and not enough body torque. “This is awesome. It’s just
how I imagined it.”