They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (24 page)

I stopped and shaded my eyes and checked the sky for the flier again. Still nothing, but the guy would drop too low sometime, he would, and I would light his ass up. I got back to walking bef
ore he took another shot at me.

"
Why can't anybody read me?
" I asked loudly. "What did you do to me? I can't be read, I got Rosie telling me I do cold shit, what the hell did you do?"

I stopped to take a piss, shouting, "Don't shoot my ass," at the sky.
That cold crap had to be bullshit.
I zipped up and kept walking, concentrating
on squelching the heat of the desert air around me
. Then I
pushed further than just toning down the heat and thought cold.
The biting Ohio winter
. That fucking wind that whipped up Three Rivers at the snow games. Cold. Cold. Ice fishing. I kept those thoughts going. Wasn't long before I could see my breath.

I stopped walking and watched the steam curling ou
t of my mouth in a desert.

"Aw, fuck me."

A fucking bullet came down next to me and made my ass jump.

"
Goddammit, I'm walking!
"

Fuck, Red's big-ass shoes were giving me blisters. I shoved my hands in his pockets.
I was an idiot.
"See, she was right, you asshole. Rosie knew what she was talking about. You can do ice. You don't know shit about shit."
How the fuck could I have not known I could do that?

After t
en minutes of playing with ice, I came across what passed for a road in nowhere: a set of heavy tire tracks worn into the dirt that stretched the way I was
supposed to go
. The road had been marked around the dips and slopes with those little neon orange marker flags
they use in road construction.

"Got yourself a transport road, Trace. What're you transporting out here?"

P
ieces and chunks of teleported floors
were all over the place
. A
lot
of them. I wasn't the first to make this walk. And judging by the burn marks, the weird shapes molded into the sand, the cracks in the
ground
and shattered rocks,
a shitload of the people that came in
were Post-Humans
like me
.

"Fucking great."

T
he hot breeze shifted, and the smell of garbage and rot hit me like a punch in the face. I walked with my hand over my mouth and nose to try and block it as best I could.

I heard the buzzing of the flies before I saw them. There were two bodies laid out in the sun that the sand tried to cover and the flies tried to dig back out. One of them was female, young and Asian in a dirty dress way too big for her. The other was a husky Mexican with a thick black mustache and a Harley-Davidson t-shirt. Their eyes
had been eaten out by animals that
had moved on to the tips of their fingers and toes and up their
arms and legs. J
ust like Charlene said had happened to Will. The
n the
animals had g
one for the soft stomachs.

"Fucking shit," I
muttered
, trying to breathe through my mouth so I didn't smell it
as much
.

The girl's face was a swollen mess.
She had b
ruises shaped like fingerprints all over her neck and throat
, which hung open to the world,
torn, not cut. Somebody had branded her chest with 'LUPO
.
'
It
looked like each letter had been dug into her skin
, like
with a fingernail. The Mexican guy had the word 'SUCKS' cut into his forehead
, but they were smoother, like a knife. S
omebody had used
the fucking guy
to ruin Lupo's tag.

A fountain of dirt kicked up from the ground next to me from a shot.

I looked up a
gain. Still didn't see anybody.

There were five more Asian girls left alongside the road, all branded with LUPO. They stared up at the sky with nothing in their sockets to see with. After I passed the fift
h one, the smell wasn't as bad.

A hand-painted wooden sign
beside the
road
sa
id 'Your New Life - 4 mi/10km.'

I bu
rned it
to shit.
"Fuck you, Trace." I got back to practicing my fire.

On the horizon, light reflected off of something
in the sand a football field long. The smell of alcohol came on the breeze.
It turned out to
be a glittering field of glass with l
iquor and beer bottles of every color and brand broken to pieces across the desert floor like a paused fireworks show. A Wild Turkey bottle came sailing out of the sky and exploded like a mortar. It was a party dumping ground, probably lifters throwing thei
r empties as far as they could.

In the middle of the glass firing range was a rock half the size of fucking Delaware. A chain h
ad been wrapped around it twice, and
the ends of it came together on the wrists and waist of a middle-aged barfly-looking scuzzy motherfucker
.
He
sat against the rock, no
shirt on, just a pair of shorts half-way off his ass. Nasty lumps
were on both his legs where broken bones were trying to push out of the
dark, sunburned skin.
He had a
pile of shit five feet
away
from him, probably the length of the slack in the chain.

The guy didn't move.
He was fucking dead.
His eyeless face seemed to follow me as I walked past. Someone had spray-painted 'COULDN'T SHUT THE FUCK UP' on the rock above hi
m.

A keg
landed and
thr
ew
a shower of b
roken glass
into the air
.

I didn't stop walking.
"T
his shit isn't you is it, Trace,
"
I muttered to myself.

What the fuck had I been dragged into? Fucking weird shit in that bunker, serial killer shit,
science shit, notebooks, hard drives,
Posters out the ass. What the fuck was this all for? I got snatched out of fucking SCEIA custody in Washington, DC. They were gonna notice.

Tracey had gone beyond a Kansas City. She was in over her
fucking
head.

About the time I started thinking I was being tricked into walking myself to death,
I came to a
plywood and corrugated aluminum shack
. A canopy had been set up next to it
to shade
an old
wooden table with four rickety old
chairs. Enough bottles to stock
a
biker
bar
were
arranged on the table in rows by height, all t
he labels facing me
, all of them unopened
.

Three Mexicans stood in the shade around the table: a rail-thin middle-aged man with a heavy mustache in a striped button-up shirt and cowboy boots; a beefy woman with long black hair and bad teeth; and a little girl about elementary school age that looked just like the man, had to be his daughter.

When they saw me coming, they took seats at the table, both adults at the ends and the little girl across
from the chair they left empty.

"Hot one, isn't it?" the Father asked in English with no trace of an accent. The other two chuckled.

"Can I stop walking now or am I gonna get shot?"

The Father clicked his tongue and nodded. "You can."

"Where am I?" I asked.

"You're in the right place, a little later than we expected. You took your time, huh?"

"Well, getting shot at slows me down." Apparently,
we
were gonna act like all this
shit
was normal or something.

"Really. It's supposed to do the opposite.
Where'd you get those clothes?"

I glanced down at the jersey and shrugged. "Just appeared out there."

"Huh. Shoes, too?"

"Yeah. It was like a miracle."

The Father knocked his knuckles on the table. "I'll be damned. We're just gonna have to call you Moses, I guess. Moses, this here," h
e pointed to the little girl, "I
s Mr. Earle, you can call me Uncle Bob and across the table from me there is Prairie Dog."

The other two laughed. The Mother said, "Cut it out with that crap." She stuck her hand out to me to shake. "Come sit down, holy man. Name's Two-Stroke."

The Father and little girl groaned. The little girl said, "Ahhhh, there it is. How long you been waitin' to drop that one, you
wily
fuckin' kyke?"

"
Quarter
kyke you mincing little twat. And I told you I was going to," the Mother said with her hand still out to me.

I sat down in the empty chair but didn't shake her hand. None of them had accents. The voices matched th
e bodies, but the words didn't.

The Father went on, "I'm sure you've noticed things right here at this table don't quite add up?"

"Yeah. You guys have taken these people over," I replied.

"Absolutely right, Moses. These are psychic proxies for this little get-together. It's a one-way connection just for communication. It's hot as hell out here, so I let the beaners do it because they're built for it. That means anything you do to these bodies will solely be suffered on their heads and not ours. That make sense?"

The little girl chime
d
in, "So stand down and use your words."

"But don't use words that have the letters f, d or l in them," the Mother said, getting more laughs from the other two.

The little girl nodded, "Yeah, or this conversation's fucking
done
."

I wiped the sweat off my face. "What? What the fuck is this? Is Tracey here?"

The Father shook his head, "Do you know who we are?"

"Yeah," I shot back. "You're a bunch'a guys that're scared to meet me yourselves." I stared down the little girl. "
Which you fucking should be."

She stuck her tongue out and gave me the finger.

I gave her two back. "You also got money to burn because you
use psychics like toilet paper.
"

The Father shook his head and moved his hand across the tops of the liquor bottles. "Just the one. Best of th
e bunch, really. Psycho Silvy."

He dropped that name like it was nothing and came up with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue and set it on the table in front of me.

"You want a drink before we get down to it?"

A Conversation with Assholes

I took five swallows of the Johnny Walker and set the bottle down. Then I went for the bottle of Everclear
they had
on the table.

"Let's do some real drinking," I said, breaking the seal and up-ending it.
B
urned like a motherfucker, but I had walked into a surprise dick-measuring contest, and I had to put on a show. I wasn't gonna let t
his be Missouri all over again.

I passed the bottle to the Father. "Your turn."

He smiled. "What the hell. Won't be my hangover." He took a couple of swallows and tried to stifle coughing on it as best he could and passed the bottle to the little girl.

"Try the Basil Hayden," the Mother told me. "That's the smoothest whiskey you'll drink."

The Father pushed a pack of my brand of smokes to me. I slapped it against my palm with a "Thanks" and lit one from it.

The little girl passed the bottle of Everclear straigh
t to the Mother, who sipped it.

The Father felt at the two chest pockets on his button-up an
d drew out a pack of cigarillos. He held one out to me. "You mind?"
I flared
it
up
for him.

With the taste of smoke and alcohol filling my mouth I could almost imagine being at the bar down the road from the factory when I shut my eyes. Felt like coming home, that alcohol-fueled fire burning warm in my stomach. I took a deep breath and took another drink of Johnny Walker.
Just needed some music to go along with it.
The shit heads at the t
able had to ruin it by talking.

"If you listen hard enough, yo
u can hear your liver screaming,
"
the little girl said.