The Weirdness (26 page)

Today’s Saturday: she doesn’t work; Billy does. Except he probably got fired today. He feels a momentary pang for his life as it
was, wishes, for just a single self-pitying second, that none of this had ever happened, and that he was just at work, with Anil, making sandwiches, the same way he’s done every Saturday for the past year and a half.

And the light assembles itself into an image, like a melting film in reverse. Only it’s not the image of the cell in the basement of the Right-Hand Path headquarters. It’s the image of the kitchen at the sandwich shop. Anil is there, working, his hands dipping deftly into steel bins of cut onions and shredded lettuce. And Billy is there. He can kind of see himself from the outside for a second before he realizes that, no, really: he’s actually, physically there. Not in the light. In his body. In this kitchen.

“Son of a bitch!” Billy says, presented with one more piece of conclusive evidence about his inability to focus on a goddamn thing for more than one goddamn second. He pounds his fists against his temples, once, solidly, as though attempting to physically drive some sense into his skull.

Anil jumps.

“Billy?” he says, blinking. “What the fuck? Where have you
been
? Everyone has been
freaking out
worried about you.”

“Really?” Billy says, a little flattered at this unexpected piece of news.

“Yes!” Anil says. “Well, everyone except Giorgos, he’s pissed at you and he says you’re fired. But everyone else! You seemed so
out of it
at the reading, and then you fucking wandered off—we thought you might have gone into some kind of fugue state. I expected to hear from you in six months, saying
I live in Wisconsin now. I run a dairy farm with my wife, who is kind, and simple
. You can imagine our dismay.”

Billy tries it. “Dismay?” he asks, seeking confirmation.

“Sure,” Anil says.

“Even Denver? Would you characterize her reaction as—dismayed?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Anil says. “
Denver
thought we should
call the cops
and get them looking for you. I’m happy to say that saner heads prevailed, but, yes, dismay; I would say that that describes it.”

Billy takes a moment to enjoy this, but only a moment, and then panic pulls the rug out from under it.

“I fucked up, Anil,” he says. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

“News flash, Billy,” Anil says, “you
are
supposed to be here. You were supposed to be here
five and a half hours ago
. I’ve been doing this fucking shift by myself. In conclusion: I’m glad you’re alive, but you remain a major-league asshole. Put some fucking gloves on and help me with these tickets.”

Not certain exactly what else to do, Billy puts on a pair of gloves, and takes his station. He’s sliced exactly one baguette in half before he pauses.

“I can’t stay here, Anil. He can find me here. He found me in the fucking middle-of-nowhere
Ohio
; he can find me here.”

“Oh, Billy,” Anil says, arranging roasted red peppers on top of a slice of Gorgonzola, “I
have
missed you. You make no fucking sense whatsoever. Bread. Slice it. While you’re doing that, you can explain what it is you’re on about.”

The extra adrenaline pinging around in his bloodstream makes him a little spasmodic, but Billy picks up his knife again and does his best, mangling a ciabatta roll. “I’m talking about the Devil,” he tries.

“Still?” Anil says. “Didn’t we decide that was a joke?”

“It’s no
joke
,” says Billy, plaintively.

Anil claps the top on the sandwich he’s making, plates it, puts it on the counter, slaps the bell.

“This may be one of those begin-at-the-beginning type of situations,” he says, finally.

“I’ll explain it,” Billy says. “But quickly. And then I have to get out of here. I’m supposed to meet some people and they’re going to be pissed that I’m
here
instead of
there
.”

“Well,” Anil says, “yes, that sounds like a situation you might find yourself in.”

“Ugh,” says Billy, trying to review what Anil knows and what he doesn’t. “I guess one important thing for you to know is that—that reading last night? It didn’t just end with me wandering off. It ended up in like—a riot.”

“A riot?”

“A scrum. A stampede. You don’t remember because some asshole fucked with your memory.”

“I
did
wake up this morning with a
wicked
bruise that I couldn’t explain,” Anil says, although he seems unconvinced.

“But at least you didn’t get Tased,” Billy says, and then he just launches in, explaining about the Tasing, about the Right-Hand Path, about Ollard’s tower, about the Neko, about the wards, about being a wolf, about his dad. It takes him fifteen minutes and the whole time he is assembling and plating sandwiches at ferocious speed, even though he probably isn’t getting paid. Somehow he also manages to gobble down half a pound of roast beef.

“Well, congratulations,” Anil says, finally, when he’s through. “You and I have been friends for a long time, but that is, without exception, the most batshit insane line of batshit insanity that I’ve ever heard fall out of your mouth.”

“It sounds bad, I know.”

“Well, the good news is that it makes a good story. I think you found your second act.”

“Yeah, but—what happens in the third act? I think it might be that we all burn and die.”

“Burning and dying is bad,” says Anil, blithely.

“Yeah, I know,” Billy says.

“So what’s your plan?”

“I don’t know,” Billy says. “I’m totally confused. I mean—I look at my dad, and I’m like,
You’re my dad, I love you
, right?
I trust you, you seem to know what’s going on, I should just throw in with you and maybe it’ll all be okay
. But then I think about it and I’m like
Well wait a second, you’re not really my dad at all. Plus you lied to me for a long time—remind me why I should be trusting you now?
But I sure as shit don’t trust the Devil either—I mean, he’s the
Devil
. He’s
evil
. Right?”

“Um,” Anil says. “Not my particular mythic system, remember?”

“Come on, Anil. Tell me what you think.”

“What do
I
think?
I
think you’ve had a psychotic break,” Anil says, and then there’s a fire in the kitchen.

It’s Lucifer, manifesting himself. For all the times he’s popped up, this is the first time Billy’s actually seen him appear out of nowhere. Turns out that when it happens, it’s accompanied by a huge burst of hellfire. Towering blue plumes
fwump
into existence like someone’s fired up a gas burner the size of Venus’s half shell. That has ramifications in the space of a tiny New York City kitchen. Fist-sized whorls of flame peel off from the edge of the efflorescent bloom and spin toward Anil. They land on his black work shirt, send tendrils out into the blend of fibers, seeking whatever can be consumed.

“Ahh, fuck—” Anil says. He swats at his sleeves but the flames course away, greedily surge across the back of his shirt, transforming it, in the span of a second, into a curtain of fire.

“Extinguisher!” Billy shouts. The mandated one is right there, mounted on the wall, behind Anil. Billy can’t get to it. Both Anil and Lucifer are in the goddamn way.

“Anil! Extinguisher!”

The flames cling to Anil’s back, lick at the locks of slightly greasy hair that peek out from under Anil’s work-mandated hairnet.
Oh, Anil
, Billy thinks,
fuck the extinguisher; just stop, drop, and roll; every goddamn kid in America knows that that’s what you do
, but Anil either doesn’t know that or he’s forgotten in a moment of panic, and Billy estimates that Anil has maybe two more seconds before the fire eats into his undershirt and then begins to do something bad to the skin underneath.

And that’s when something funny happens with time.

It reminds Billy of watching Denver edit video on her Mac, trying to decide where to make a cut. Things on the monitor happen at the normal speed until she adjusts some slider which slows everything down at some rate which exponentially curves very pleasingly until finally she gets to full stop, the point at which flowing experience has become a single soundless image, a thing to reflect upon, a moment about which to make a decision. It’s just like that. Anil frozen in space, his hand a good eight inches from the extinguisher; the unflickering flames silent on his back, still, looking delicate yet tangible, like an array of frozen orchids, a thing that could be lifted safely away from him and crumbled to dust.

“So,” says Lucifer. “This is an interesting moment.” He has his hand held up in the air, two fingers together against his thumb, as
though he were holding something tiny and valuable, a diamond, a precious mote, some invisible speck. He’s also still wearing the tuxedo shirt he had on earlier, bloody and tattered.

“Help him,” Billy says, for it turns out that Billy can still speak, somehow, through the stasis. He isn’t entirely sure whether his lips are moving. “You can help him, can’t you?”

“I could,” Lucifer says. He looks at Anil with a look that seems, to Billy, to be inappropriately dispassionate, given the circumstances.

“Look, you asshole,” Billy says. “He’s my friend. He has nothing to do with any of this, and you set him
on fire
.”

“Yes, well, that was an accident,” Lucifer says.

“Then you
apologize
, and you
fix it
,” Billy says.

“It was an accident,” Lucifer says, “but the situation as it now stands provides me with a certain degree of
leverage
. Leverage in its crudest form—a regrettable form, it must be acknowledged—but leverage nonetheless. We are short on time, Billy Ridgeway, and this requires me to use perhaps more direct means of impelling you than I have in the past.”

Billy sputters. “What—” he says, “what is it that you want?”

“The same thing I’ve always wanted, Billy,” Lucifer says. “I want us to be allies against a common enemy.”

“But we are.”

“Are we?” Lucifer says. He uses his free hand to gesture down at his bloody shirt. “We were all together, all together again after so long, making a plan that would make the best use of the short time this entire planet has remaining, and then some distasteful people intruded upon our conversation and gunned me down. Like an animal. And then you left with those people. You left with those people and hid, leaving me to waste valuable time and
resources in order to find you yet again. You’ll forgive me, Billy, if this leads me to cast some aspersions upon where your allegiances truly lie.”

“Okay,” says Billy. “I admit that it looks bad when you put it that way. But honestly? Those people? I was
arguing
with them. I argued with
my own dad
that we should work with you.”

“Well, you’ll have to forgive me for not noticing that,” Lucifer says. “I was, as you’ll recall, dead at the time.”

“So, look,” Billy says, beginning to panic at the thought that he may not be able to convince Lucifer that they’re on the same side. At the thought that Lucifer may burn Anil alive as a way of demonstrating the extent of his leverage. “You want to get this thing with Ollard done? Let’s do it. I’m ready. I’ll help.”

“I’m afraid I can’t trust you on that point any longer, Billy,” Lucifer says. “You’ve proven to be very reluctant, and I’ve come to believe that it would be in your character to lie, now, to protect your friend, only to change your mind and abandon our mission at some later point if you thought that it would confer you some more immediate advantage.”

“Yeah, but, I wouldn’t,” Billy says.

“I think you would,” Lucifer says. “And we no longer have the time it would require for me to chase you down again. I need to understand that you are fully committed to our task. I can no longer enjoy the luxury of doubt on this front.”

“It’s not like
I
can trust you,” Billy says. “You fucking double-crossed me!”

“Billy,” says Lucifer. “I never lied to you.”

“You didn’t tell me things,” Billy says. “You left things out. Important things! You made—lies of omission.”

“Those aren’t really lies, though, are they?” Lucifer says. “I
mean,
lie of omission
, you hear the phrase. But they’re not really real, are they?”

“Real enough,” Billy says.

“Regardless,” Lucifer says.

“Okay, fine. You want full commitment from me, you got it. Just tell me—tell me what I have to do to get you to believe me. There has to be something.”

“Actually,” Lucifer says. “There is.”

“Tell me.”

“You can kneel before me,” Lucifer says.

“Uhhh, yeah?” Billy says, wrinkling up his nose involuntarily.

“Yes. You can kneel before me and swear your undying fealty.”

“Fealty?” Billy says. The word just sounds bad. Not the kind of word that sounds like he’s agreeing to do one little thing for the Devil, one little thing and then it’s over, he walks away in the morning. It sounds particularly bad when you pair it with that other word,
undying. Undying fealty
makes it pretty much sound like if he swears this oath he’s going to spend the rest of his life floating in the void, or pacing an endless circuit in the infernal hotel, or something else equally bad. Billy’s smart enough to know that this sucks way worse than the deal the Devil originally offered him—and he never formally accepted even
that
deal, so he sure as shit doesn’t plan to accept this one. In fact, his first instinct is to look Lucifer straight in the face and say
Go fuck yourself
.

Lucifer, perhaps anticipating this, continues: “If you kneel before me and swear your undying fealty, we can get back to the work that awaits us, and I will remove your friend from the hellfire that imperils him. Or you can refuse me. If you refuse me, I will depart, leaving you and your friend to cope with the flame on your own.
He’s close to that extinguisher. Reasonably close. He’ll be fine. Probably he will be fine.”

Billy remembers the guy at the Fairlane, the guy who burned his face off. The brother of the owner. He didn’t die. One of the prep cooks hit him with a blast from the extinguisher within maybe five seconds after the explosion but a lot of damage had already been done. Billy remembers what the guy’s lips looked like as the EMTs loaded him onto the stretcher. What the guy’s eyelids looked like. He remembers the guy screaming.