Bogleech.com's 2015 Horror Write-off:
" Goo Girl "
Submitted by Huw Saunders
Grant steps out the front door of the block into the cold. He looks back at it longingly, looks up and thinks he just about picks out his window. He wraps his arms around himself in the classic junkie huddle. He himself does not take heroin. He doesn’t take much of anything any more. He just has a lot about.
Directly ahead of him, a man in black is sitting on a bench, in the miserable excuse for a park that lies between the tower blocks. Grant approaches, pulling his camel coat ever tighter around himself, and as he comes nearer, he clocks the shine of the other man’s wristwatch and New York shoes.
“So how’d you get my number?” asks Grant, taking a seat next to the man.
There is no response. The man sits there like the great stone face, barely moving. Grant’s hand shakes, he thinks of having a cigarette for the first time in months.
“Alright, you got me out here. You want to talk? Let’s fucking talk.”
The man brushes down his woollen coat with a sweep of his wrist, and stays quiet.
“Look, I don’t know who you are. But you want something. So what is it you want?”
The man turns his head to look Grant in the eye for the first time. “We don’t want a goddamn thing from you.”
“Fucking time wasters,” chuckles Grant.
“We know you, we know what you’re about. We don’t care. We’re not Mickey Mouse from Quantico. Now I’m going to say this once. By four pm today, you and all of your people need to get out of this block. Not even for much more than a few hours. Something will happen and you will have a perfect alibi. You will not be in our way, we will not be in your way.” The man rises to leave.
“So soon?” says Grant. “Come on, don’t leave me hanging. What’s this about? You from the water department, you finally gonna fix my shower?”
The man turns back to Grant. “Do you know what a bioconstruct is?”
Grant snickers. “Nah.”
“Good. Let us do our job, you’ll never have to. One way or the other, Grant, you will never hear from us again.”
What plays on Grant’s mind, as he walks back over the crooked paving slabs, is how utterly serious the man sounded. In the past, he has had various well-dressed feds making various implausible veiled threats to his face. The only difference, he thinks, is the sheer audacity of this one. And how the man got his phone, his personal phone.
He steps into the shade of the block’s lobby, where Jonnatton’s huge frame is waiting, observing. “What’s he say?” asks Jonnatton.
“He says,” begins Grant, then cuts himself off with a snarl. They go upstairs, and he pounds on some doors. “Hey, Frankie! Ibby! Big Mel! Jose! Get the fuck out here!” Now he takes his place at the head of the cold concrete stairs, to announce. “They’re coming for us. Four pm.”
“Why’d they tell you?”
“Trying to scare us into the open. I say we throw them a welcome party. Tell everyone you know to tool up. Set traps and shit. They put a foot wrong, I want them to be treading on a nail. Because they’re not just coming for us, they’re gonna trash our homes, beat up our friends and our families, you know it to be true. You know what it is the boy scouts say, don’t you?” He pauses for a moment, perversely enjoying his own performance. “Be prepared!”
As Jose returns to his apartment, he is surprised to find Jonnatton’s top boy, Dan the Dirk, following at his elbow.
“The fuck you want?” asks Jose, not unkindly. He has a migraine and a sickness coming on, not helped by discovering that war is about to break out.
“Oh, uh, you know that box of books I asked you to watch?” says Dan. They go into the apartment and Maria looks up in fright, nearly straining herself doing so. “Don’t worry, sweetie. Just getting a thing.”
Jose knocks his crumpled clothes aside to get at the distinctive red-and-white box Dan left him many months back. By now it is red-and-yellow. Dan receives it eagerly, then goes through it. From under a copy of The Short-Timers, he draws out a curved olive claymore mine.
“Hell yeah,” says Dan, grinning eerily, waving it over his head for a moment. “Talk about your rainy day. I’m gonna rig this shit in the stairwell.” He rushes out like a kid out of a toystore.
“You hear all that, out there?” asks Jose.
“Yeah,” says Maria, and runs a protective hand over her distended pregnant belly, sinking lower into the ratty armchair. She rubs her temples. “Narcos never change. Not even here.”
“We should get you outta here.”
“And I go where?” This leaves Jose speechless. He had pictured putting Maria in a cab and having her hole up safe in her sister-in-law’s house – but now he remembers Maria’s sister-in-law died last year. “Besides, they’ll grab me. Probably think that this” – she strokes her stomach again – “is all our contraband.”
This gives Jose a reminder. He reaches for the loaded syringe among the trash on the side table. Grant’s command had interrupted him near the end of the process – now he needs it more than ever, he does not want to face the end of the world sober.
He spikes himself, deposits the shot in his vein with a gasp of satisfaction. He looks at Maria with eyes full of love and gasps again, stumbling over the words saying “Oh shit, I’m sorry to – I mean, in front of you.”
“It’s cool,” says Maria briefly, trying to wave the thought away. She would rather not think about how it has been months since she felt that sheer liquid relief soothing every part of her. She definitely does not want to think about how if she just asked to chase some, Jose would probably concede it out of a desire to make her feel better.
“Hey, you want ends on this shot?” Jose asks the closed door to the back room they are sub-letting. They sit watching the door, waiting for a response.
“Nah,” comes Black Magic’s voice, after a few moments.
“Sounds like he has his own,” shrugs Maria. It is surprising to her, since in a few very low moments, she has gone rooting through Black Magic’s belongings – all his maps and city ordnance guides – in search of his stash. To her relief she found nothing.
“Oh, Magic, there’s…there’s, like, some shit going down,” adds Jose. “At four, they’re coming at four.”
“What’re they doing?” asks Black Magic. “Who are they?”
“We don’t know,” slurs Jose, falling backward in his chair. The springs are jabbing through the cloth into his ribs - it feels, to him, like a soapy massage.
Maria restlessly toys with her phone, tumbling through endless insane lies. One set of democratically elected people don’t like another set of democratically elected people. The city council wants to define their terms – are they talking about redistricting, or rezoning? Nobody seems to care how the building she lives in is going to turn into the last gunfight, the finale of a summer blockbuster.
Over the top of her phone, she spies movement. Black Magic sweeps out of his room, his longcoat not quite covering his wounded arm, which is still in a sling – how long has he had that? His arm was bust when he moved in, wasn’t it?
He walks straight out of the apartment without a word. Maria strains against her chair to get up and waddle after him, her curiosity aroused by how he has left the door open.
Maria steps out into the hall, and curses the cold artificial floors. Her shoes barely fit any more and she has taken to spending most of her time bare-toed. But she can hear the sound of Black Magic’s footfalls – going downstairs, toward the lobby.
She creeps after him, pausing near the top of the stairs. He walks up to the front doors. She wonders if he is simply going to the shop, or fleeing the block altogether, but then he stops, standing in front of the doors, examining them.
For a second, he hunches over, drawing in his good arm. Then he raises it, swipes his hand across the wall by the door. It leaves a smear of blood. He paints all the way around the doorway. Maria watches in such fascinated horror, she only just notices him turning back, and has to hurry back to the apartment, which just about kills her knees.
Jose hasn’t noticed. He is lost in the patterns of the stucco ceiling. Maria returns to her chair and falls back into wondering about him. They do get by – they have the income from the pushing, Jose’s work as a joiner, and Black Magic’s rent, but that is not the real issue. She has done her best to keep the heroin out of their baby, certainly, but she cannot keep the baby out of their heroin, particularly if she does take a celebratory post-natal shot like they planned with such glee – or worse, if the epidural simply sparks off the old habits…
Black Magic bangs in. Maria jumps, and he notices. “Checking the mail,” he says, giving his tight half a smile. When he is back in his room, Maria’s eyes narrow with suspicion. The rest of the world not caring about a gang battle is one thing – but he has to live here.
Now Maria tries to think of just what to do about that. She has never wanted to be one of those women who give birth in a holding cell. Perhaps, if she can rouse Jose, they can get out of the area early, take an early dinner and wait for everything to blow over. Just like her attempts to juggle pregnancy and the drug trade all blew over, just like she thought eight months and four days ago when she found out.
Eventually, she thinks, it is all going to happen, and then she has no idea what she will do about that. All the thoughts wear on her.
“ruffle ruffle ruffle talking about a bioconstruct,” Grant’s voice whispers through the corridor and around the door. Maria jumps again – it has distracted her from a fascinating article about a species of ant that lives inside tree branches, and plugs up its front door with its own ridiculous swollen head.
Bioconstruct? Couldn’t the word describe any living being? Jonnatton says “ruffle ruffle trying to scare ya,” sounding as though he’s standing by the door.
“ruffle ruffle ruffle principle of the thing!”
The word construct – and it nips at Maria’s head trying to think things through like this, but she powers on, her energy levels boundless compared to when she was a full-on fiend – it suggests, unless she’s wrong, something that has been constructed. Something created, intelligently designed or at least designed.
Even now, eight months off, she craves nothing so much as a nice relaxing shot.
“Remember when ruffle ruffle ruffle? We’re going to ruffle ruffle these ruffles just like that.”
She can already see what’s coming, or rather hear it, in her mind’s ear. It’s not like it’s rare in this block. First there comes the main doors opening, which tend to make at least some noise on their corroded hinges. Then there’s boots on concrete, moving fast and deliberate. Then those same boots are kicking in a door, then the shouting starts. Sometimes then the shooting starts, and it looks like that’s what they’ve got in store today.
The other week it happened to that poor kid down the hall – she was pregnant too. The crash of the wooden door splintering, even as the lock held. “Hands on your head! Step away from that hard drive!”
But she didn’t step away, she can’t have, because then there was that one shot that probably woke half the block, and then there was silence.
Maria can barely focus on the writing on her phone. She’s trembling with worry and she knows it. Jose sitting opposite her comatose and serene isn’t helping, just making her horribly jealous.
Crash
That was the main door to the block! Maria checks her phone, and tries not to curse. It is well before four pm, clearly Grant’s decision to be ready for a battle wasn’t received well.
There is shouting. Not even ruffles, it is far too loud and indistinct for that. And then there are gunshots, and then there is screaming.
Maria shoots to her feet. The bones of her legs grind together, but that is a distant consideration compared to sitting directly behind a door that would provide little to no ballistic protection. She toddles rapidly in the direction of the bathroom, hoping to hide in the more protective enamel of the tub – then she stops in the doorway, and looks helplessly back at Jose. She cannot carry two people at once.
“Not today,” Jose slurs, and turns over.
“Oh, come on,” says Maria, kneeling next to him as the sounds of pain outside just get louder and louder, “we have to get to safety, wake up, wake up for the love of-”
Black Magic bangs through the door of his room. He takes in the situation and does not pause before drawing his arm out of his sling. Maria’s stare of helpless gratitude turns to horror seeing it – it is so horribly broken and warped there is not even a hand left, just a mass of flesh that has turned an awful sickly colour.
With that revolting blob Black Magic scoops Jose out of the chair and over his shoulder. He strides through to the bathroom, and Maria follows gratefully. He deposits Jose carefully in the bath, the man’s head rolling into the puddle that tends to stick around.
“Get in the bath,” Black Magic orders Maria, and she does so instantly. “It’ll be alright.” He leaves, but as he shuts the door, something falls from his pocket.
Maria peeks over the side of the tub, and her eyes, already wide, spasm. Lying on the cracked tiles, as though sent by God to comfort her in her time of need, is a syringe full and bloated with sweet golden brown.
It sounds as though the shooting has stopped. The howls are still there, though, even louder. But this is not so bad, those howling guys are just out there doing their thing. It would be an affront to their individual agency to deny them that.
“Oh, rapture,” sighs Maria, curling tighter around Jose. The grimy tub and its visible water-line is as comforting and beautiful to her as some great historic walled garden. She is here with her love and their sweet, perfect child, who is probably far gone enough that one little shot won’t make any difference. She has with her all she could care about in the world.
There is the sound of flesh splitting. The bathroom wall is thick with pipes but the noise comes through with no problems. Maria presses her cheek to Jose’s shoulder. “ruffle ruffle gone mad!” says Grant’s voice, loud and clear.
“It’ll all be alright,” Maria breathes in Jose’s ear, even as Grant’s voice screams and a solid object smashes. “We’re alright here, and then, then we can get out. And then we can get clean, properly, and then we can be a real family.” Black Magic’s voice rings out above everything else, chanting in what sounds like Yiddish or Norwegian.
“Kill you all! ruffle ruffle kill you all!”
“I love you,” says Maria, tears streaming from her eyes, her heart is so full of joy. The chanting grows louder. Grant gives one last cry and then is suddenly silent.
As something explodes, the entire block feels as though it shakes and what sounds like every window on their floor is blown out at once, Maria very gently plants her lips on Jose’s unresponsive mouth.
The door to their apartment bangs open, the flimsy lock giving without much of a fight. Jose sits bolt upright, tearing himself out of Maria’s arms, and vomits a little bit over the side of the tub.
Jonnatton clatters into the bathroom, eyes wide and haunted, face covered with blood from a gash on his neck. He holds an empty pistol with which he gestures madly. “All is lost!” he crows. “It’s the end of the world!” He crumples forward, falling first to his knees then flat on his face. His back is torn up with thick bullet holes that still ooze gore and bile.
For a second there is silence, then comes the chanting again, creeping in louder through the open doors and echoing in the room. “This isn’t good,” groans Jose. “What happened – are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” says Maria, lying back in the tub and running a hand over her bump. “We’re both ok and that’s all that matters.”
“They come for us, haven’t they?” says Jose, breathless with terror. He is taking a dark turn, he sees the advancing tread and the jointed truncheons.
“We can just stay here,” says Maria, “until they get tired and they go away.”
For a second Jose’s face is frozen, and the continual chanting shivers on his bones. Then he says “Are you high?”
“It happened,” says Maria, not to justify herself but just to say why, “it all happened, and I had to make it go away.”
Jose presses his face to Maria so she will not see he has wept. He cannot possibly bear to think about what it does to a baby to have street-grade heroin in its veins, and reflects how Maria must feel carrying something inside her that is now, in some way, tainted and wrong. Part of this tangle and chaos all around them.
The chanting stops and leaves a deep silence. Out of a desire to force blood to his brain rather than anything else, to distract himself from these thoughts, Jose forces himself out of the bathtub and onto his feet. He starts forward, stepping over Jonnatton’s body with a vague idea of gauging the situation, then ahead of him Black Magic steps back into the apartment.
“What’s with your hand?” asks Jose, trying not to sound disgusted.
“This? This, this is nothing,” says Black Magic. “I got to go. Come with me, if you want to live.”
Jose carries Maria with her arm around his neck to the door. Just outside, Grant lies flat on his back, completely at peace, with his hands torn off and nowhere to be seen.
“Got everything,” says Black Magic, jogging up from behind and shoving folded papers into his pockets. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want kids mixed up in this,” and this he says almost apologetically.
“This can’t be down to you,” says Jose, stepping where Big Mel’s face used to be. He draws back his leg as though he has been stabbed.
“It’s not,” says Black Magic. “They started it.”
Ibby, who Jose used to ride around on bikes with, lies dead on the stairs with holes in his stomach. The black-armoured body of some kind of riot policeman is face-down next to him, and down in the lobby there are a dozen more like it, some missing their heads. Most of them are around the crumbling hole where the doors were.
They have only set foot on the pockmarked stairs when huge floodlights blind them through the hole. Maria squirms, tries to shield her eyes and settles for just turning her head away.
“Bioconstruct!” squeaks a loudspeaker. “Stay where you are!”
Black Magic begins to chant again, giving out strange grinding intonations and raising his hand and his weird appendage in the air. Jose begins to feel like he is on the point of being suddenly sick as he was in the bathroom.
The ground shakes. As more riot squads breach in through the front doors of the block, the floor itself starts to crack and splinter.
“Gott in himmel,” chokes Jose.
The writhing black mass comes up through the floor, and consumes all the poor innocents who brought guns and body armour to a very different kind of fight. As it punches its way upwards its skin is torn back, huge gaping wounds opening up its flanks and spilling out dust and fluff and liquid flesh. This does not slow it down, and in fact seems to make it more furious. In seconds, it is gone, tearing upward through the ceiling just as easily.
“Go! Go!” shouts Black Magic, charging down the stairs and putting himself in front of the hole as concrete and masonry falls all around him. For a moment, the floodlights are blocked out as, outside, the burrowing thing dives back into the ground effortless as a fish.
Jose slogs towards the hole in the floor, Maria’s feet just about moving with him. Then the stink of it hits him, before he even sees the darkness down there, and he reels back. Maria is still too far-gone to notice. He asks Black Magic “You want us to-”
“Your choice,” says Black Magic, the building crumbling around him. “I don’t really care.”
“But-” Jose cannot bear to even say it. He simply places one hand protectively over Maria’s belly.
“Look, let me black magic this for you. One way the three of you die, the other way the three of you might die.” He shrugs, grins. “My turn now, your turn later.” And he throws himself down the hole.
Jose still hesitates, even as the building groans and the floodlights focus again, on him this time. He throws a hand in front of his face, trying to think up against all this psychic pain.
“Fuck it,” he says, and he holds Maria in his arms, just like old times. Then he simply leans back, hoping he will take the impact of the fall. The ground vanishes from under him, the wind rushes through his hair, and the smell gets a whole lot worse very quickly.
There is no crushing impact. Instead they splash down into a pool that smells and tastes utterly foul. But it has not killed them, that’s the important thing.
Appendages that do not quite feel like hands take a firm grip under Jose’s shoulders, and haul him out of the filthy water.
Everything is damp here. Droplets fall rhythmically from the ceiling. Through the thick-headedness of rising withdrawal, Jose makes out Black Magic’s form, moving about in the dim light. He has stripped off his wet clothes, and darts back and forth, completely unconscious of being naked. His fine body gives Jose a number of feelings that he puts down to jealously.
Now and then, the light catches things on Black Magic’s body that do not look normal. Huge areas of his body have a different texture, they look unnaturally sleek and shiny. This is beyond scarring, beyond any skin condition. Something on his back pulses, swollen and purple but larger than any vein. And the scabbed holes on his shoulder remind Jose of nothing more than the various bullet holes he has seen recently.
Maria grumbles in her sleep, lying on his other side. He must turn his head and make sure she really is there – he does not believe life would really provide any respite from this parade of horrors.
“Thank God,” he says, suddenly exhausted, resting his head on her puffy breasts. “Oh, thank God.” For a second, his surroundings, the round, smoothed stones of the sewer pipe – for this, he realises, is what it is – become transformed into a cathedral, comforting him with all its cold serene majesty.
“We’re fine down here,” says Black Magic, suddenly looming out of the shadows and make Jose jump. “See, they can sense me. It’s like I call to them. I’d thought they wouldn’t be able to make me out up in the block, since there was no cell reception.” Jose nods unconsciously, distinctly remembering how he had to lean out the window to make a call. “But I got a good feeling about down here – and with a bit of luck, I left enough biomatter up there they’ll think that’s what they were feeling.”
“You killed all the boys,” says Jose. He doesn’t have the heart to make it accusatory. He got on fine with Grant’s outfit, he drank and smoked with them, but he never particularly liked them, or what they did. He is well aware of the hypocrisy and tends not to think about it.
“They tangled with a secret government agency,” says Black Magic gently. “I was just helping, really.”
“What agency?” Jose’s growing sickness has instantly translated this into paranoid fantasies. He cannot imagine the monster bureaucracy that would be bringing the hammer down on a mutant like Black Magic, that is the truly terrifying thing about it. Jose has routinely had to deal with the emigration services, with his having been born in Connecticut simply serving to confuse them, and provoke their wrath – he fears to think who it is after them now.
Black Magic hangs his head. “I don’t know. Trust me, I want to find out. They’re after me, I know that.” He swoops down, and Jose jumps again. He places a reassuring hand on Jose’s shoulder, and runs his other hand over Maria’s bump. “It’s fine. It’s kicking.”
“So why the fuck aren’t you running?” says Jose, startling even himself with his willingness to mouth off. “Why aren’t you getting the fuck out of Dodge, eh? What the fuck are you doing still round here?”
“Jose, you know why.” Black Magic stands again, letting the shadows complement his toned body. “Imagine if someone took her from you. Or took the baby from you. Imagine what you’d do then.”
Jose sits up, mouth gleaming wetly as it opens in the shock of recognition. He had some vague ideas that Black Magic was planning to eat him alive, and wash him down with a heady cocktail of placenta and amniotic fluid. Immediately he feels guilty – knows that just because Black Magic is obviously not entirely human, that does not by definition make him inhuman.
“You’re tired,” says Black Magic. “You’re not wounded, but you’re sick.” And out of the dank sewer water bursts a thing constructed of the same smooth greenish-blackness that covers Black Magic’s body. It crawls along, the bulk of its body dragging behind him, but its movement seems natural, not laboured. Jose tries to shrink away, looking at the twisted mess that does not seem like any face he has ever seen – it looks insectoid, like its mouth is a cruel biting stinger. Then he realises it is holding a filled syringe in its mandibles.
“Thanks,” says Jose, taking the syringe, disoriented, but genuinely grateful. The thing inclines what might be its head, then scuttles back into the water.
Jose only needs a whisper of the syringe’s contents to set himself up nicely. Black Magic disposes of the rest with a moonlit smile. Jose begins to wonder if he is simply that accustomed to sweet, perfect Lady Poppy – or if whatever it is that has happened to Black Magic is done something to the opioid receptors in his brain.
“I will not see it happen again,” Black Magic keeps saying, voice surprisingly steady for all that he himself should be swaying and wobbling, as they walk along miles of echoing, raindropping sewer. Black Magic has his long coat on again – whether this makes him look more or less shadowy and shapeless is a question for the philosophers.
They are not having to gingerly carry Maria’s unconscious form again. Jose is grateful for this, struggling along as he is in clothes soaked with grime. At a word and a gesture from Black Magic, a bloated green thing emerged from the water and formed a living armchair for her. She sleeps peacefully sitting in it, though Jose still prefers not to turn his head and look back as it follows along after them.
“Some poor innocent pair of fiends,” Black Magic begins to expand. “Yeah, I know, you’re not innocent, she’s not innocent, nobody is. You like to let the needle fuck your arm, fine, you know, good. But let that be your thing, right, you deal with the good and the bad of it.” He looks up for the first time in a while – surfacing out of the private reveries provided by the reflections on the black water. “She still clean?”
“She took something,” says Jose. “When it all went off back there, she used, and, you know, fair enough. If you thought you were about to die…”
“She’s too far along for it to make much difference,” says Black Magic, the confidence in his voice disguising his woeful lack of family experience – at least, any experience of a human family. “Trust me. Believe me now, your kid will be fine.”
Jose notes that Black Magic clenches his fist as he says this, and wonders if this is him really giving so much of a shit, or if he is exercising his own neuroses. If there is some savage resentment at work here, over whoever it was that Black Magic lost, that has been curled in his head sharpening its teeth, and is about to burst out, roaring and spitting volatile fluid.
They come to a crusted metal stairwell in a side-nook of the sewer, and for a moment Jose is blinded – by light, genuine natural light coming in from above. Between this, and the unhealthy, greenish light in the sewer, it is the contrast been heaven and hell.
“I’ll be in touch,” says Black Magic, pulling a ring of keys from his pocket, squinting at them, and handing them to Jose along with a handful of filthy, greasy hundred-dollar bills. “Room 101. You never saw me, you never lived back there – ah, you know the drill. Keep an eye on the crack den across the way. And-” His fist flexes again, uncontrollably, as he looks back at Maria’s lolling head. “Keep her comfortable.”
He vanishes into the darkness. Maria’s chair spits her out upright, and it disappears to. Jose rushes forward, to support her before she keels over.
“We have to go now,” he says, into her ear, very gently.
She stretches, groans, and her eyes half-open. “Alright,” she says. “It’s nice down here. All cool, and quiet…why am I wet?”
As Jose begins to relive the process of their escape, struggling to think of a way to say it, Maria’s eyes flash open. It is all coming back to her, too. “Yeah – no, that really happened,” Jose establishes.
“Right,” says Maria. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
So, damp and sodden with who knows what, they climb those steel steps, one by one. Even wet through, the growing light is making them feel a little better, and the falling drops of water that jangle through the stairway are nothing compared to the deluge in the sewers.
Finally they emerge from the catacombs and the tangled metal steps. They take a moment, standing there beneath the grate, to smell the comparatively sweet air of the street above. And then there is a way up – not even locked – through a laundry room into the building proper. Another set of stairs confronts them, and there is a flash of physical pain in their heads when they see it. But they rise admirably to the challenge.
And then they are in a corridor, carpeted, even, nothing like their last home, and Jose is unlocking door 101 and the apartment is warm, dry, fully furnished and smells vaguely pleasant. They feel out of place, and sit down awkwardly, as though waiting for the dentist, shivering a little in their clothes.
It is only after some time has passed that they feel comfortable enough to strip down and draw a bath. The water runs hot and steaming, and the pipes make none of the ugly choking noises they have come to expect.
“Thank God and Satan too,” says Maria eventually, like one long sigh, as she soaps up her bump.
“I don’t know what the hell he is,” says Jose, who has gallantly taken the tap end of the bath to let Maria lie back properly. “Did he ever talk, at all? About what it was he did?”
“Not really. Mainly just stayed shut up in his room,” says Maria. “Never left for long.” And at night, they remember, they would sometimes hear him crying.
They cannot reconcile this new image of Black Magic with anything they know about the world, any science they thought they knew. Even as twisted as they are, they had never dared to dream of what they saw today. Every time Jose closes his eyes, he sees once more the image of a huge monstrosity muscling its way out of the solid concrete ground while its own skin tears and splits from the effort.
“I should have grabbed my stash,” says Jose, biting his own lip. The feeling of warm soapy water against the punctures in his arm has set him on edge. The heroin in his blood is far from wearing off, but he knows it will become a concern eventually. “You look like you’re still full-on rolling.”
“I am,” says Maria, head back, eyes closed, a smile twitching her mouth now and then. “Oh God, it feels good.”
“Probably because you were off it for so long.”
“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have – and I was doing so well.” Jose reaches out and clutches her hand.
“Think of it like a, a treat. A reward, for doing that well. Oh, look, it’s one slip, just one, don’t beat yourself up. Enjoy it.” He agonises over every flicker of her face, reading it as the guilt and self-hatred he knows all too well. Worst of all, he fears the rationale he has just slurred out is not helping.
Maria is elsewhere. She sees visions of creatures, horrifying bio-constructions all blackened flesh and shards of glass, that purr and curl around her legs.
Jose looks over the side of the tub, at the pile of their filthy, sodden clothes. “We need more clothes, too,” he sighs quietly, considering how awkward it would be to score heroin while naked.
“Ah, no,” says Maria, “I’m gonna stay in here for a couple of days.” Jose worries again for a moment, but his practiced eye concludes she is not in overdose territory – just really, really enjoying it.
“Somehow,” he says, rising from the bath in a storm of rushing water, “we need to get things, I don’t know, maybe we could call someone.” Leaving flat, sheeny puddles in his wake, he goes over to the cupboard. The blood begins to rush and he becomes dangerously lightheaded at the very moment he opens it to see it fully stocked with pristine, plush towels and robes.
As he towels off, through the open door he sees the keys and cash Black Magic gave them, left on a side table. It is only now that he wonders how, exactly, the money didn’t get damp as well when they all jumped down that hole.
Maria goes back on her word and gets out of the bath well before even a day has passed. Once she is asleep and dreaming in the bed – a huge bed, with no lumps or horsehair – Jose wraps one of the robes around himself and goes out to forage.
The apartment block looks surprisingly healthy from the outside. Nobody would ever guess it was built over the same sewers where Black Magic dwells. Even the crack den across the street doesn’t look too bad. It is an old garage whose shutter is rusted closed, with moss and hardy grasses growing up around its corners. There is some graffiti, mainly autographs, and no twitchy toughs hanging about outside – no suggestion of anything like Grant’s operation.
Keep an eye on it? Jose wonders about that. Grant, as a heroin dealer and maniac, had always held a bitter rivalry with the crack trade. He became particularly vocal on the subject after his wife was killed in action, prompting Jose, and most of the rest of the gang, to assume he was looking for some other source of ready fights.
It is, however, now Jose’s neighbourhood, not in the ‘I own these streets’ sense, but the benign, residential, less cool one. He concludes that he will keep a responsible eye on the place, call the police if necessary – and make sure to buy some long-sleeved shirts.
An all-night mart two blocks down the road provides both clothes and food. The clerk notices Jose’s robe and doesn’t bat an eyelid. The stinking hundred-dollar bills, on the other hand, go right under the verification machine, and come up clean, to the clerk’s mild surprise.
“You holding?” the clerk asks quietly. Jose says no, and asks if the clerk knows anybody. “Nobody’s answering their phones. I heard there was a gas explosion in their block.”
Jose thanks the clerk very much, and leaves quickly. His arms are full of bags, and he will be unable to play off a choke or laugh as sudden violent coughing. But when a little rain starts to fall, dampening his robe to a degree he no longer sees as significant, he cannot help himself, and laughs out loud there in the street.
The only thing that sobers him enough to stop is seeing the lights of a squad car zip by. The officers inside have no time for his manic laughter, as they are en route to an emergency budget meeting. So he remembers himself, and steps off towards his new home. He does not spare a thought for the black van that cruises carefully past him, whose inhabitants give him a long look before speeding away.
The key is stiff for a moment in the lock. His fears all well up and burst at once, rapidly convincing him that none of the day’s events were real. It all vanishes back into the depths of his subconscious the second the door opens.
He puts the keys, and the remaining cash, down on the same side table as before. Completely out of idle curiosity, he opens the drawer beneath its surface. Inside is a pack of medical-grade syringes, a spoon, a candle, a box of matches, and a big sachet of surprisingly pure-looking heroin.
For a moment, his hand poises itself over the open drawer, ready to reach out and take.
He slides it shut. It would be greedy, he reasons, as he is still riding the high from before. They have everything they need, and to his intense surprise, are completely safe. The thought cradles him, rocks him to sleep as he curls up in bed next to Maria.
Jose falls once more. He rushes through the air, and again feels the cold smell of the sewer curling up into his nostrils.
When he splashes down he bobs for a moment, like a cork, before sinking beneath the surface. He does not continue to sink, but hangs there, in the oily murky water, as though in a dream. He looks down, then up again, as his filled syringe floats casually up out of his breast pocket.
He lashes a hand out, struggling it through the water, and wraps it around the syringe. It does not feel physically real, it seems to actively resist his grip on it. But he takes hold of it, and through some labour of love, brings it back through the water and brings it to his arm.
His vein already bulges out. The marks along it are not disfigurations, not any more, not here, they are simple benign blemishes like freckles. The needle slips in easily. He readies himself to work the plunger, and send it home.
He falls again.
It feels more real this time. The drop lasts for longer, really giving him time to panic and break out in a cold sweat.
This time, when he hits the water, it is a foetus that falls from him. It has his face. He does not simply reach for it, he thrashes through the water after it, even as what little oxygen there is in his lungs escapes him in a cloud of bubbles.
Despite his best efforts he is losing it. It is being drawn further and further away, down into the darkness, by an umbilical cord wrapped all around with rusted bloody chains. Can he see that thing down below? Or is he just imagining some abyssal plughole, sucking all the light and warmth out of the world?
Jose wakes, and shivers. The cold sweat is real.
“What’s up?” murmurs Maria. Jose figures going from lying to upright must have woken her, too.
“It’s nothing,” he says, breath catching in his throat as for a second he feels the sewer water lap at his skin again.
“I had sex dreams,” she says, trying to roll over and rest her head on his chest, before having to give up in the attempt. “Hey, since we’re both awake?”
They had the debate, as Maria entered what they were reasonably sure was her third trimester, over whether they could still fuck. Attempting to type ‘pregnancy sex’ into the internet had brought up no pertinent information. Eventually they turned to Grant, in his capacity as lord of the manor, and he had – whilst laughing like a hyena – called up a contact of his, a doctor who had been struck off the medical register. The doctor gave them her blessing, there and then, and they had practically sprinted home.
Jose gets an erection quickly. Almost as much as Maria’s full, rounded body, it is her expression of absolute bliss that does this to him. There is also the fact that his habitual numbness is beginning to wear off.
As he goes through the motions, he knows he should be enjoying this as much as she is. However, he is just sober enough to be agonisingly aware that this, too, could be snatched away from him – could vanish in the dark waters.
He keeps going, feeling basically absent, more like a machine than anything. But when Maria yawns out an orgasm, from the look on her face now, he is practically forced to lean over her bump and kiss her. He comes too, not long after. And when he has rolled off her, still feeling the wet passion on his side of the bed, they are in each other’s arms and on the point of drifting off, when Maria mumbles “Black Magic.”
Jose does not get back to sleep.
When the sun comes up through the windows and the birds start to sing, nothing seems any brighter. Jose takes a light shot, just enough to get by, before setting off for work. His boss is surprised to see him, having assumed he perished in the gas explosion, or if not that then the subsequent collapse of the apartment block.
He has no way of knowing whether Maria was thinking of Black Magic during the entire act, or if the man simply popped into her head afterwards, in the way of priests and elderly relatives. He just knows he resents it. And more than this, he knows he is not really entitled to – Black Magic has given them food and drink and a place to live, and more importantly, continued life.
Yes, he concludes silently, at this point he would probably fuck Black Magic as well. How could he not?
By the time his shift ends he is already beginning to itch behind his eyeballs and under his fingernails. To his sincere disgust, he now has a slightly longer journey home, and by the time he gets back, his clothes are damp again, lashed with his cold sweat. But he pauses before retreating inside away from the world, stops for a moment to observe the crack den.
It still sits silent, a kind of anachronism sandwiched between two other small housing blocks. Jose notes that without Black Magic’s testimony, he would never have placed it as a crack hole. He has not seen a single person go inside or leave thus far. There is a faint, telltale whiff of crack on the wind, but that could be coming from anywhere.
He gives a laboured chuckle, at the fact that they will be starting their family opposite an honest-to-God crack den, and that this is a notable improvement on still being in Grant’s hell-block.
“Hey, you,” says Maria, beaming at him as he walks in. She is planted on the couch in front of a telenovella, head leant so far back it looks genuinely painful. But it is not her position that tells him a story, it is her hooded eyes, liquid with joy.
“Jesus Christ,” he says, nearly doubling over. Her expression flickers to alarm. “You used again?”
“What? No!”
And she is instantly, painfully aware Jose will not believe that for a second. Both of them have lived out that little exchange before, with parents, straight-edge friends, parish priests – the list is endless. They were invariably on the receiving end, and invariably lied.
Jose, for his part, only regrets that if Maria is telling the truth, he has no way of knowing.
“You look fucked,” he says.
Maria twists her head agonisingly, to look in the tasteful mirror, and must concede his point. It has worried her, actually. She initially thought she would pay a heavy price for her lapse, and the high would fade before long into the pains of the heroin leaving her system. Instead, it has not faded. She is only slightly more awake than she was upon initially taking the shot, which was almost a full day ago.
“I didn’t,” she says, as the chemical bliss and the seriousness of the situation tears her head in two different directions, “seriously. Look, check my arms.”
She draws back her sleeves. Jose sits down next to her, and runs his hand softly over the one puncture there, the product of yesterday’s slip.
“I wouldn’t do that to our kid,” she says, looking into his eyes, feeling his lifeblood pulse and surge through even that very minimal skin contact. “I mean, again.”
“You’re still dusty as hell, though.”
“I know. I don’t know what’s up with that.” Many is the time one of them has had to admit to the other that they truly do not know something. It never goes as badly as they worry it will.
“You’re still feeling it, then?” Maria nods. “What did you dream of?”
Her dark eyes do not flicker, but a smile grows over her mouth.
On the way home, Jose had imagined he would bang up the moment their front door was closed. He sits, open-mouthed, sober and only barely conscious of it.
Maria’s memory of the destruction of their former apartment block is understandably fragmented. But her recollection is not quite as cloudy as Jose had previously assumed. She talks at length about how falling down that hole was akin to returning to the waters of the womb. How the sewer was bright and buzzing with all kinds of micro-organisms, most of which were benign and friendly.
Jose has always thought her to be intelligent, on a par with him certainly, but he has never seen her like this. He has never experienced her opening her mouth and all these dream-images pouring out.
She speaks of seeing those things, the unknown and inexplicable things that swarm around Black Magic, waxing and waning with his chants. They had nothing to fear then, she explains, neither did she and Jose have anything to fear from them.
“’s all just life forms,” she concludes. Her head is still leaning dangerously, broken across the back of the couch. Jose wonders if it is the ceiling she sees, through her clouded eyes. “The ants in the grass, the things in the sewers, they’re there just doing their thing, they’re not so bad.”
“That’s from Drugstore Cowboy.”
Maria giggles, he is completely correct. At times, before now, she has become vaguely put out by people recognising where she has lifted her descriptions from. Now, she cannot imagine why. She sees this as the kind of intimate bond people pay many thousands of dollars attempting to recreate. Compared to this, fucking seems really quite impersonal.
Jose, his head reeling, rises from the couch and begins to cook up, to put the capper on the experience, as one stops to take a long breath after a period of exertion. He is in fact breathing heavily, all those pictures of words still spiralling tirelessly around his brain.
Maria leans on his shoulder, wanting to feel his body relax. The impact of her head threatens to send the contents of the spoon flying, but he is far too professional for that. He alters his grip and they stay suspended in place, like a baptismal font – an image, he reflects, that he is surprised Maria did not use earlier.
“Help me to the bathroom in a little while,” she says, the speech coming out as gentle warmth into his shoulder. “I can still walk, I’m just lazy.”
“Course,” says Jose, as he draws the cocktail – not too watery, not too heroiny – up into the needle, then sets it aside a moment to tap his vein out of hiding. At this stage, even a minor request like that is like knives on his eyeballs, and he resents this, he resents what the sickness does to him.
Everything is ready. Jose raises the hypodermic like a pen, ready to bring it down and make one decisive mark. At exactly this moment, Maria both kisses him on the cheek, and makes a lazy, lusty grab for his genitals. When he doesn’t feel the sting, he panics slightly and presses down on the plunger.
Maria rolls off him with a little sigh. The emptied syringe juts out of her arm like a broken bone.
Jose sits there for a moment, staring forward, at the technicolour characters of the telenovella arguing about an inheritance. He thinks to himself that he cannot possibly now deal with this sober – but of course, he had already made this decision.
He draws the needle out of Maria’s arm, and begins the process again. As he goes about it he notices a growing warmth, deep down inside. There is only a moment of elation and rapture before he realises Maria has pissed on the couch.
“My girlfriend’s taken an overdose.” The guilt wells up again, that was not panicked enough, not heartbroken enough, would not convince any paramedic to dash down with the magic syringe of Narcan and make it all better.
“Stay calm,” says the disembodied voice of vibrating copper. “Take a deep breath. Now first, get her on her side and into the recovery position, in case she pukes.”
“I’ve done that! Please, for fuck’s sake, send someone down!”
“You want to do this properly, or do you want her to die?”
Jose has never been spoken to like this over the phone. He has only ever seen it happen in films, and resolves to listen.
“Stand up. Take another breath. Now walk to the bathroom, and look in the cabinet over the sink. There’s Narcan on the bottom shelf.”
Gently and carefully, Jose lays the phone down on the table, and walks away. He goes to the bathroom and once more questions whether anything around him is real, before going back to Maria and administering relief. Her eyes open instantly, and she bats them at him.
“Did I fall asleep?” she asks, and squirms. “Did you just dose me with something?”
“Narcan,” says Jose, breathless, like he has bust down the door to deliver it.
“Oh shit,” says Maria, and breaks out giggling, “that’s right, you missed.” There is an ugly floral bruise, the colour of vomit, spreading on her arm where he skin-popped her, and she laughs at that, too.
Jose’s head reels again, only barely because of the drugs this time. She has not leapt to worrying about the baby this time – and neither has he. Narcan should have shut off the opioid receptors in her brain and completely reversed the effects of the shot, but she is clearly still rolling. Away with the fairies and the sprites, in some shaded mythical woodland pond.
Jose goes for the phone again. “Look,” he says, “I should have asked this before, but are expectant mothers cool to take Narcan? And how’d you know we had Narcan?”
“She’s fine. The kid’s fine.” The line goes dead. Experimentally, Jose puts the phone down on its cradle, then picks it up, and the line is still dead. There was one very obvious conclusion for him to come to there, and he can hardly blame Black Magic for not wanting the bother of keeping up with a phone bill.
“I’m good,” says Maria, eyes half-closed, and gives another laugh. “Oh man, you fucked up bad. You got me right in the arm.” She squirms again. “What am I sitting in?”
They draw another bath. Jose sponges Maria clean, to her cooing delight.
The next day, Jose does not shoot up before work. He figures it hardly goes by like a beautiful dream anyway. He loathes every minute of it so heartily, that when he cuts his finger badly, it barely even registers to him.
Grudgingly, he has made the private decision that no kind of father can juggle a baby and a needle, and is attempting to cut down. Only after work, and then not too much, decrease the dose incrementally. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, he thinks.
On the way home, his pace is quick, he is half-dreaming, mind not on the street under his shoes but in some private reverie of just him and a syringe – and Maria too, obviously. He walks along the front of their block, in the shadow of the crack den, and is almost home and dry, almost through the front doors when a broad-shouldered fed steps out of the shadows. He mentally prepares himself to get on the ground with his hands on his head.
“You live here, sir?” asks the fed, maintaining a respectful distance. This wrong-foots Jose, and his gaze spins, up and down the man’s tailored-suited body, over his New York shoes.
“Yeah,” says Jose. “Just moved in, the other – month.”
The fed nods. “Have you seen anything strange? Unusual? Comings and goings at weird times?”
“Nothing in particular, but then, I’ve been going to bed earlier.”
“Any smells or odours?”
“It’s a crack spot across the road,” says Jose, pointing. “But I expect you’re not so bothered about that.”
“People seem to think so,” says the fed with a sigh. “Sure, it’s low rent. Crack means powder cocaine, and powder cocaine means money flowing down to the cartels and propping up all their rivers of blood. So yeah, I am a little bothered about that.”
“Ah, you’d rather the baseheads weren’t all sequestered in the one place, then?”
“Don’t pragmatise with me, you fiend,” comes the reply, and Jose flinches back. “You’ve seen nobody hanging about who doesn’t look quite right? Nobody with eyes that seem to look right through you?” Jose shakes his head urgently. “How about this guy?”
And the fed holds up his phone, which displays a picture of Black Magic.
“No sir,” breathes Jose.
“Right. Well, if you do see him around, bear in mind he’s armed and dangerous, and infectious.” The fed reaches inside his coat, and draws out a business card. “You see him, call me. Soon as possible.”
When Jose gets inside, he doesn’t even look at Maria before he has chemically scrubbed the fed’s aura of threat from his hindbrain. Then he lolls there on the couch, unable and unwilling to support his own head, limbs sprawled out essentially independent of him.
He turns his head. Maria does too, and beams at him. She is sitting next to him in much the same position. “You went to work?” she slurs, still smiling away, showing all her teeth.
“Jesus Christ,” says Jose, as it all mounts up on top of him, and reaches fumbling for the phone. He calls emergency services, though imagines that any number would do. “Black Magic?”
“Speaking.”
“How’d you even rig this, anyway?”
For Maria, Jose’s voice rapidly fades into the same white noise she hears coming in waves from the phone. She still feels the body high, the numbness, and she is happy that he is home. But she is not as happy as she might be.
The fact she is still intensely, dangerously high has been playing on her mind all day, it is definitely not normal. But what troubles her more is how it will make her a liability – a bad partner and a bad parent. She has been on the couch too long and is beginning to sink. All the while, she has the weird psychoactive clarity that at some point, inevitably, she will have to battle through this sluggishness. Take care of the child, take care of Jose, take care of herself.
For a moment, she considers how much easier everything might be if the baby was not there in her belly, or if she were to get rid of it. Even against her perpetual buzz, having thought that feels like nothing so much as Chinese water torture.
And yet, as she sits there contemplating, there is another rush like blood across her brain, and it feels SO FUCKING GOOD
“She’s still on motherfucking Mars! I’ve had some pure shit in my time and it has never, never lasted that long! And don’t even ask me if she’s relapsed. I can’t deal with this, we got a baby on the way and there’s some vicious fed poking around-”
“Just one of them?” says Black Magic. “Ok, cool. They’re onto something but they’re not sure of it. Listen, Jose, have you ever taken crack?”
“No!” says Jose.
“Oh, well, uh – would you like to?”
Jose breathes loudly, through his nose, down the line.
“I need someone inside that shack over the street. To scope it out, test the waters. I got a theory about the place.”
“Fuck off. Would I like to take crack? Would you like to suck my crack? Jesus fucking Christ. Is this why you saved us? So I’d have to help you with this? Can’t you just call up something from underground and wipe the place off the face of the earth?”
Black Magic’s throaty laughter sounds from the phone. “Never gotten used to being asked things like that. Nah, God willing I could, but that wouldn’t do it. What I’m after, from that place, is intelligence. I need to know what exactly’s going on here.”
And Jose cannot respond, for he has nothing but sympathy for that. Despite everything, Black Magic, it seems, is much like himself. Simply wanting to make sense of this tangled nightmare he has found himself in.
The next day Jose takes crack.
He has not smoked in some time. He kicked the cigs at some point over the course of becoming a full-blown, accredited dope fiend.
The door of the den opens to his rattling knocks, after he is done with work. A fiend-cum-supplier greets him warmly. There is a cover charge, which he instinctively thinks of as classy, but after some thought realises is just right for this scene. People sprawl in badly lit corners, intoxicated and helpless, while the latest hits of the day play eternally on someone’s high-priced phone.
He takes the pipe, sees the vapours conjured up inside, and tokes hard. It strikes his lungs, leaving stinging burning patches, but it cannot penetrate his severe numbness. He does not cough, he takes the dose like a veteran head, and feels the rush. It is doing things to his brain chemistry but it is not the high he wants, not even close, and inside he is crying out for the needle’s tender kiss.
“You guys see that cunt fed poking about?” he asks, after the initial swell has passed. It is clumsy, he feels, he is not just testing the waters but dropping a hook in it and waggling it around.
“Ah, that motherfucker,” says the prostitute sitting next to him. “Fucking dicks, man. They need to bite the fucking bullet and legalise it before they waste any more of our taxes.”
“This one time,” pipes up an aspiring stockbroker from the opposite corner of the room, “I got arrested just for taking a piss. Can you imagine that? For taking a simple piss.”
The discussion wears on, and quickly becomes a catalogue of grievances against the state. As a former rocket scientist expands upon his resentment of the water department, two city workers wearing the obligatory brown uniforms walk in. Jose reacts, but sees that nobody else does. The city workers go to a door in the back, a solid-looking thing, not dilapidated like the rest of the room.
He nudges the prostitute. “The fuck are they?”
“There’s a substation in the back, I think,” says the prostitute, before lighting up again.
As the city workers, or whoever they are, pass through the door, Jose sees the pale light of computer screens from the other side. Barely a minute has passed before they are leaving again, with one now holding an empty cat-carrying cage. They do not spare the crack den’s clientele a glance.
Jose hangs out, feeling the rushes over his body, not-really listening to a public schoolteacher talk about their plan to commit the perfect murder. He goes to pick at a discoloured spot on the chair, and cuts that finger as well.
Eventually the sun begins to go down, not making much difference to the dim room. It is around now that the city workers return, and now their cage is shaking from inside, giving off noises of distress – even the lounging heads sit up and take notice. Jose gets a single glimpse through the bars on the front, and sees black patches, unhealthy-looking, around areas of exposed flesh, with a pair of mismatched eyes staring back at him.
The city workers rush the cage through that door and slam it shut behind them, and then the room is silent again. Jose forces himself up, and steals over to the door. It is impressively soundproofed, but holding his head by the keyhole, he just about makes out a voice saying “…nothing new. Just another class 2 bioconstruct. All the same hallmarks – the flesh, the traces of heroin.”
Jose staggers away from the door, and flops back down in his seat. “They must be animal control, then,” says the prostitute idly. Jose has felt the effects dying down anyway, but now, recognising one of Black Magic’s things, he feels dangerously sober. His first instinct is to shoot to his feet and leave, but all the dread possibilities – mainly, the idea the feds know he is working for Black Magic, and will come and destroy him – are paralysing. So he reaches for the pipe and fouls his throat again.
“Man, you smell,” says Maria as Jose stumbles through the door. It isn’t remotely judgemental, just an idle comment. He is in no mood for anything of the sort. She is half-napping on the couch, her legs splayed out in a way that is the opposite of ladylike, and he tells her so, before taking up the phone and calling emergency services.
“They got one of your things, your…bioconstructs,” begins Jose. The words fade out to white for Maria, who has genuinely been quite stung, his comment has cut straight through her persistent chemical walls. Ladylike? She got this pregnant and fat, and is still expected to be ladylike? What more do they want from her?
It is too much effort, she thinks, so grimly it shocks her a little. Such is life – too much is asked of people, for too little of a reward. And then comes another thought, this one does not scare her with its depression but its sheer atavism, and it is that perhaps death is not such a bad alternative. After all, as a mother it will hardly be her life any more. The child will consume ever-larger amounts of her resources, she will probably still have to carry the damned thing from time to time and it will ruin her knees even worse than it already has.
“I didn’t want to be right about that place,” says Black Magic, his voice now creeping out of the phone as though he’s there in the room. “Alright. This makes things a lot simpler. Oh, check your mail.”
At that very second, the letterbox rattles. Jose walks suspiciously over to it, and picks up a damp sandwich bag containing ten thousand dollars. It is less bills than he might have imagined – just a hundred hundreds. He sits down, holding the bag protectively on his lap, not caring that it will appear he has wet himself.
“Now, I had a plan to get the place infiltrated.” Yeah, thinks Jose, throw so much money at me it would override any sort of moral or practical hesitancy I had around taking crack. “I had cooked up a special shot. I put my blood and sweat into it. The plan was to simply get it into the crack den, and wait for somebody to take it.”
Suddenly Maria is paying complete attention, her face twisting and turning ashy.
“Sadly it seems to have gone missing. The idea was, when someone took it-”
What? What, Black Magic?
“Well, to be honest I’m not sure. It would have done something to them, at least. The same sort of thing that happened to me. And then, I thought to myself, they’d be a lot more willing to cooperate. So then, they could do the ground work for me.”
Maria opens her mouth, wanting to protest vocally. Instead her lunch comes splashing out half-digested. Jose panics, the phone becomes just a box of noises. She recovers quickly and grabs at him, grabs out for help, her bloodshot eyes staring into his.
“The shot,” she says, and as she does, the first rush comes on again. “When it all went off in the block. When I just needed to feel better, that was the one, it fell out of his pocket, that’s what I took.”
She vomits again. Her conscious mind somehow breaks through to the level of her immune system, convinces it to purge her body of anything in its pipelines, and as she crumples forward, landing face-first in the puddle of her sick, her bladder releases and a dark spot spreads over her clothes.
Jose throws the phone aside, and strains to turn her over. She fell on her belly, and he places a hand on it, not caring about the various fluids. He hopes, desperately, to feel a writhe from inside, but there is nothing, only the heat of her panic and fear.
Chemical-smelling sweat bleeds out through his pores as he hauls Maria down the corridor and into the basement, into the filthy tower stairwell that leads back to the sewer. He can feel it, in his heart, as he burns off the rest of the crack. At any moment his dopamine receptors will run dry and this false energy will cut out.
Gently, easily, he brings her down each set of metal steps, all the while glancing at her lolling head – and pleading that she will be alright. That none of these ghouls have infected her. Have infected the baby.
All the while, the sickness cries out in pain from his opioid receptors. He is struck by how badly this might get. That the suits that somehow detected Black Magic could now pick them up as well, if Maria really has been infected, changed into something awful.
This in mind, there is no thought of calling an ambulance and informing the authorities, even if he could have. He is living in a world, after all, where all the traditional power structures have been discredited. The state would have them both over a barrel, the church and the community would no longer burn them alive but probably would hand them to the state. And prayer? He might as well whistle. No, he knows that there is only one option left, and he has many issues with it but it is the only possible answer available.
“Black Magic!” he cries out, desperately, down God-knows how many more dripping, rusty flights. If they are being tracked, he thinks instantly, they’ll probably hear that, echoing in case they didn’t get it the first time.
He imagines leaving Maria on these grimy stairs, retiring upstairs to their warm and pleasant-smelling apartment to take a hit, and then returning before she even knows. The disgust at himself is so viscerally intense he nearly vomits himself, and he continues downwards. Lifting her body, their family in his arms and then easing them down the next little way. As he breathes heavily, trying to keep his own machinery going, he begins to cough, huge grating barks that echo in the narrow staircase.
What will happen to her, he wonders, the thoughts tearing at his brain. Will she become one of those shadowed creatures, the bioconstructs he heard tell of – but then, everyone would be a bioconstruct of some kind, surely?
He cries out again, listening to his voice sink and vanish down into the darkness. Two more flights down, the bottom looks no closer at all, and now he is truly pouring sweat, his hair is sticking to his forehead and itching like a million maggots having a taste of his flesh.
Finally he must collapse. The world is agony, all swirling around him while he lays across these steps, motionless and paralysed. Maria is warm next to him, the only bit of comfort he has left. She may be caked in her various fluids, but she breathes softly and normally, like she is simply asleep instead of being warped from within.
He lets his head fall back and looks up at the flight above. The dripping water hits his face, as torturous as it is, the sensation is still nicely refreshing. Then Maria very softly says “If I turn,” and he jumps, jumps to attention, crouches over her ready to give all the care he can. Her eyes are still closed, but he figures that would be too much effort for her at this point.
“If I turn, into one of those things, will you still love me?”
It leaves him speechless. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that he wouldn’t, and now worries it was a little shortsighted. Will they have to live in a sewer? Will she fly around at night, drinking garbage-water?
Her eyes open. One is dangerously dilated, the other is normal. Both are beginning to cry. “Please,” she says, “please still love me. I don’t know what else I can do.”
And as she yearns out loud, feels her internal dams bursting and crashing against the monolith of her fading consciousness, it is then that they both hear dull footsteps coming up the stairs from below.
Jose comes to on the couch.
He thinks for a moment he has fallen in a drug-related stupor, and that he has been put to bed by whatever higher power he may rely upon, whichever caring influence is in his life to be called upon.
He hears Maria groan in pain, through in the bedroom. His body is screaming at him with a million horrible voices, the two main rivals being his dope-sickness and his crack come-down. Every single one of them demands he stay here, for lack of effort, lay here and suffer. None of this stops him rising to his feet like an oiled machine and staggering through the door to the bedroom.
The air is hot inside, like the stormy season on some luxurious Caribbean island. Maria lies on her sick-bed, sprawled and moaning, but not with pain, not through her persistent doped-up state, moaning out of discomfort. She knows something is not as it should be.
“I’m here, I’m here, it’s alright – what’s up?”
“It’s coming,” she says, fixing him with her frazzled gaze. A part of him thinks of the stories and the things man should not know, that a forbidden thing is on its way ready to tear apart reality as they know it. “The baby’s coming, it’s happening.”
He takes her hand. “You sons of bitches,” he slurs, not to her, to the room at large, to the emptiness. “You couldn’t stay and help us out on this?”
“You saw them? I saw them,” she says, breathily, feverish and her face turning red and sweaty with the heat. “They’re not like us, I could tell. But they were. I don’t know, it’s not clear.”
“Ah, they, they got us here, they got us safe, you’re doing ok. That’s the important thing.” This is coming, of course, from his self-loathing at not keeping Maria safe himself. “They’re, they can’t be so bad. Decent, overall, you know, they know what’s important. With what we’ve seen, they’re not so bad, they’re just things, really, pretty much like you and me.”
“Now you’re doing Drugstore Cowboy,” she laughs, before jerking violently, nearly doubling up as she tries to breath.
“Please be ok,” he says quietly as she spasms and wheezes.
“I’m good,” she says, once she has her breath back, “I’m on top of the world, right here.”
Based on Jose’s remaining knowledge of physics, this is technically correct. He fights off the urge to piss-shiver, and given his stupor is pleasantly surprised to note he has not soiled himself.
Maria does one brief whisper of a smile, that tears at his heart, before her waters break. The scent of amniotic fluid fills the room, and Jose realises what he kept smelling on the maternity wing.
“I will be right back,” he says, to Maria’s closed eyelids, her heaving chest and her sweating neck.
He takes an extended bathroom break, as he does in work now and then whilst still working through a stinking hangover or sick patch. As indeed he has done consistently these past few days as he tries to cut down on the heroin, and has felt the backlash rising up out of the depths at him. On the plus side, he is now shitting freely.
There was no hope of him getting in today, at any rate. He sits on the couch, savouring this moment of brief freedom, and then sets about making himself a shot. Even the process of doing this passes surprisingly quickly, and he pauses once more with the needle slipped inside his arm, wondering if it will all be like work from now on.
He takes the shot. His walls are down, given his attempt to withdraw gradually, and it strikes his brain the kind of blow that would decide any conflict on the battlefield.
Everything is bliss once again. He is everyone, he is no-one, just riding the freak waves along the highways and vistas of the freak kingdom. He will soon be the perfect family man, and if their first-born turns out to be a monstrosity, well, those weird constructions in the sewer can raise it as their own, and teach it their ways…
He does not entirely trust his legs, and forces himself up on his hands before running unsteadily back to the bedroom.
Maria has taken a grip on the bedclothes that would probably sustain her if she were hanging off the edge of a glacier. Still she makes no sound other than low growls, the non-specific complaint of something not being quite right inside.
“I think you have to push,” he says as he takes her hand again, and thinks involuntarily of the act of pushing down on the plunger before feeling that transcendant feeling lifting you up from below.
“I can’t push,” she says, face shining, limbs powerless. “Not now.”
“Please, baby,” he says, speaking to both of them.
“It’ll be alright,” she says, nodding and nearly gone. “You don’t need to worry. There is life, all around us and inside us, life like we never imagined. You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it.”
“Why’d you ever take that shot?” he sighs, all of this resonating with the whole bleak story he’s started to remember ever since waking up.
“Why’d you?” she asks, and as the question rises from those cracked lips they begin to twist, just a little, into a smile.
They laugh together, but then Jose jumps in fright. He looks down, at where he held her hand, and sees deep grooves in her flesh, marks left by his fingers.
“That’s not normal,” he says weakly. She holds up that hand, to observe it for herself, and nods, mumbling agreement. “How’s it feel?”
She stares at the indentations in her hand, mouthing silently, then blinks and says “Normal.”
A buzzer sounds in the main room of their apartment. Someone is at the front door of the block, and is after them. They cannot think of who it might be and so put it out of their minds.
“I can see them now,” says Maria, breathing heavier by the second, face turning redder, “like light. They’re all around, I think.”
Jose stares into her shining eyes, wondering what’s going on inside them. He repositions himself on the bed, and puts his hand down on a saturated area of the duvet. Instantly he realises the major obstacle to her actually delivering the baby, and lifts her legs to strip off her soaked clothes and underwear.
It feels odd doing this in such a different context, he reflects, peeling the fabric off her skin. This vague confusion is not helped when Maria breathes hard and says “Oh, doctor,” in absolute bliss.
“Come on,” he says, although a little flattered, “this, this definitely isn’t the time for that.”
“This kid will have a loving family,” she says firmly. It brings tears to his eyes.
“Alright, first things first,” and he hikes up her shirt as well, to take a look at her belly. He nearly chokes when it seems to expand and distend further before his eyes. And when he sees veins lighting up dark red across it, with every wracking breath she takes, he puts it safely down to heroin and stress. It will be fine, he tells himself, and wonders whether he should tell her that, or ask her if it will.
“Oh God,” she says, and lurches forward, like she’s moving to get up – but she cannot possibly conquer her own belly. “It’s coming, it’s moving, it’s…” She opens her mouth, and Jose braces for the scream, the gut sound of the agony of his loved one, before she flops down backwards. “Actually…you know, actually, I think it’ll be ok.”
He finally exhales properly, in a shower of relief and gratitude, and leans over to kiss her on the forehead. As he does, she takes his hand, and slips it under her shirt, onto her breast.
He attempts to raise his head, and finds himself resisted, unable to pull away, some force holding his lips in place. At the same time, as he squeezes her breast he finds it yielding further than it normally would, and his stomach churns at the sudden thought his fingers might somehow tear right through her flesh and meet in the middle.
As he panics he yanks his head free, with surprisingly little effort. He withdraws his hand, feeling the same suction there, and sees a blob of flesh-coloured liquid drip from his fingers and land on Maria’s belly, where it is absorbed seamlessly.
“You see that too?” he asks, afraid to touch her again but wanting to so very dearly.
There is a crash that shakes the room. Both of them instinctually recognise it as the front door of the block.
At this point, all Maria wants is to get the baby out of her womb, and hold it in her arms, and get to being a mother rather than waddling around looking ridiculous. It is a far cry from her childhood dreams of space travel or other rocket-based fields, but it is, she thinks, a fairly noble aim. And this world, this horrible world with its pitched battles and terrible screaming voices will not even let her have that. It weighs on her heavier than the baby ever has, and she makes the conscious decision fuck it, just fuck it.
The next crash is the door to their apartment. Jose looks back at her, shaking with fear. She is smiling again, and she gives a little sigh, and melts into the bed.
It happens too fast for Jose to fully process. One second she is there, the next there is a fading, fleshy humanoid shape, and then she is gone. Now a reedy cry fills the room. Among the clothes, all that remains of Maria, there is a baby, their baby, whole and unhurt. Its umbilical cord trails over the bed like a feeding worm, still attached to the placenta.
Jose lays a hand protectively over it, no barrier of skin and womb this time. It grasps his thumb, and he begins to sob, and is still doing it when the door to the bedroom is smashed off its hinges.
“Stand up. Hands on your head.”
Everything in him yearns to sweep the baby up in his arms. But even though he is well past the point of making any sudden move, he knows the bar to ‘sudden move’ is down in the depths right now – and then, of course, they will both end up shot. So he complies, even though he should be fathering.
He can practically feel the gun barrels probing his back, probably the back of his head at this range. And he recognises the voice, it is the same one that interrogated him about Black Magic, the fed.
“What are you reading?”
“The levels just shot right down, sir,” crackles a slightly distorted voice that Jose instantly pictures as coming through a gas mask. “Right about when we came in. I’d say he flushed it, but-” and now he can almost see the shrug.
“Check the infant.”
“You don’t touch that fucking kid,” says Jose, turning around and getting a submachine gun waved in his face.
“Don’t make me use this,” snaps and pops the voice from behind the empty eyes of the mask.
“I would advise you cooperate,” says the fed, standing easily and filling the doorway. “You’re looking at twenty to life for aiding and abetting. A lot less paperwork in killing you now.”
A second gas-masked thug appears from behind the first, and holds out a phone with two antennae over the baby. “No readings, sir,” they chatter. “Infant’s completely normal.”
Jose stares goggle-eyed, the words ringing in his ears like church bells. He is stunned to the point he cannot even make a move, sudden or otherwise. Could this be some mad hallucination? It’s a little too perfect after all, these are the guys trying to root out Black Magic’s contagion, they must be able to diagnose it right.
“Something’s up with the scanner,” says the second goon, now turning the thing around in all directions. “It’s not giving a clear reading. Keeps getting hits, then losing them.”
“But the baby’s fine, right?” says Jose, moving forward just enough to provoke the first goon into jabbing him sharply in the stomach with their gun’s muzzle.
Now the fed starts forward, pulling a little silver pistol from inside his immaculate lapels. “We know you had contact with org one, what you know as Black Magic,” he says. “You may cooperate immediately or not at all.” And he swings his gun out to his side, aiming low, at the bawling form on the bed.
Jose instantly prays he will not hear that crying stop. “He’s down in the sewer,” he says. “There’s a way down across the hall.”
“Good man,” says the fed, lowering the pistol, only a flicker on his face betraying his awareness of having threatened a newborn. “You, stay here, watch him – we’ll have to take him in for questioning.”
The fed and one of the goons leave. The other goon trains their gun on Jose, moving to stand between him and the door. This is good, thinks Jose, this is slightly better odds. Were he not so high and scared, he is confident he could get out of this somehow. Reason out some way of defeating, neutralising, or evading the threat.
Maria floats in a sightless, soundless void, and it is bliss. It is even more pleasurable and delectable than heroin, or even that tainted shot that fell from Black Magic’s pocket what seems like eons ago. It is utter peace and tranquillity, her pulse, if she still had one, would be beating to the same rhythm as the universe itself.
There is no pain here. If there was it would be the good kind of pain, benign, kinky, sexy pain. The kind of thing she could explore, completely safe from the gnawing demands of the world, and if it turned out she was into it, great, and if not that would be ok too.
But this sets her mind off, racing as it is through this incredible state of being, thinking of Jose, and of their baby. She knows she must in fact pull herself together, and as she does this her vision returns, clear, sharp and overwhelming. She sees and rationalises the threat, and comes to a quick conclusion.
Jose, past the length of the black gunmetal, and the trained, trialed person aiming it at him, sees puddles of discoloured flesh emerge on the walls, and the floor, and the ceiling. A million little particles all form up together, to the point they have some muscle mass and real, mechanical strength, and then under their own will, they hurl themselves, spurting off the wall straight at the goon.
The first impact splashes across their gun, leaving a thick layer on it, and they have barely begun to react before another lands on their head, covering the gas-mask’s eyeholes and then adhering around their throat. Even having splattered, there is enough matter there to choke the goon into unconsciousness, and they drop the gun, scraping at their own neck while creaking out “Oh, man! Not cool!” before collapsing.
Jose is already flinching away with his whole body, scrambling up onto the bed, gathering the baby up in his arms, placenta and all, and going for the window. Yet as he goes to boot it out, he hesitates, part instinct to not shower his child with broken glass, and part a distinct hunch that nothing smells wrong here, that what he has just seen is not an alien intruder.
The pools of flesh all flow into one, which grows upward like a termite colony and rapidly takes on hominid form. Like all the pieces of a magic eye suddenly fitting together, Maria is standing there naked. For a moment her face is horribly warped, eyes tiny, skin colourless and grimy, and her mouth yawning open like an abyssal void – but then she is back, and she stumbles forward, arms wobbling dangerously as she leans on the bed.
She stands straight, as if she is attempting to balance, and presses her hands together in a few different ways. “I think I’ve got myself under control,” she says.
Jose wants to rush over, seize her in a hug and never, ever let go, but figures this would probably split her in half – and if it didn’t, the baby would probably asphyxiate between them. Instead, he raises his arms, smiling weakly, and watches Maria’s eyes go liquid.
Very gently, she takes the baby, and holds it to her breast. Whilst it is occupied, she takes the umbilical cord in her other hand, and for a moment her fingertips freeze into razor-edges. The cord is cut, and the placenta falls to the ground. Neither Jose nor Maria care, it is not like having a wad of flesh on the carpet is so very unpleasant.
Though she wishes time could stop then, and they could live that perfect moment forever, Maria’s eyes slide over to the unconscious goon on the floor. “We need to move again,” she says, gently placing the baby on the bed and gathering up her clothes.
“Yeah,” says Jose shakily, now starting to feel the hit again. “We’ve got the money, we can take that and just get out of here.” He realises it may not be that simple, and the fed may have seized the money as criminal assets – but when they go through to the front room, it is still there, in its bag between the cushions of the couch. Clearly the fed was coming for them and them alone.
Jose takes the lead, peeks around the apartment door. He would have liked to do so fearlessly, but is distinctly aware the fed will likely have brought more than two gunmen. Nonetheless, he looks out, and to his surprise the coast is clear. They go down the corridor, he and his beautiful young family, and they are close to the front door when they hear a sound from below, something falling and jangling down steel steps, the noise getting fainter with every impact.
“Do, do you think they can kill him?” wonders Maria. The question is laced with the undertone of whether they could kill her – and now she has attacked one of their goons, they certainly have cause. But more likely, they would take her alive, as without that they couldn’t subject her to any fates worse than death.
“I won’t let them get you,” says Jose.
One of the goons’ altered, unreal voices cries out “Movement!”
Several automatic guns go off at once, and after Jose and Maria have instinctually ducked down, they are straight out the double doors of the block, needing no more prompting.
They are partway across the street, not quite running but moving fast, when Jose realises that despite his finer impulses of leaving it all behind, there is still a healthy stash of heroin in the apartment. At the same time, Maria says “What if they find us again? I’m not living in the sewer.”
“We might not have a choice.” And at this she sighs a little, silently accepting it into the list things they have never had a choice about.
They turn back to the apartment block, hesitant at exactly how they will get down to the safety of the sewer. Maria says “Fuck that, we’re not going through a battle,” only moments before Black Magic shoves his way out of the front doors, throwing them both open with dark blood running down his face and neck.
“You two should have run,” he says, smiling a terrible smile. “Should have gotten out of this.”
“If they can detect us, where exactly you suggest we run to?” says Jose. “And if you say the sewers I’ll take that fucked-up hand right off your arm.” He instantly regrets this as more figures emerge from the block – fractured humanoids with glossy skin of greenish-black, and bare, open flesh visible at their elbows and necks.
“Ah, so you’re about to suggest somewhere else? Well, that’s a relief,” says Black Magic, smile growing thinner. “Now, if you want to talk like people for a second, we have five minutes before more of those bastards turn up and try to murder us all. We can get you out of here. We have a kind of an underground railway setup, but you’ll have to do exactly as I say.”
“Fine,” say Jose and Maria at once.
“Spread out,” Black Magic says to his creatures, with a wave of his normal hand, and they take up strategic positions at both ends of the street. Some wield tangled bits of rebar, others are just about holding submachine guns they presumably stole from the goons. Black Magic walks straight forward, for the crack den.
A twenty-year veteran of the fire service goes over the crumbs on his shirt, tries to differentiate the base from the bread, and fills his pipe again. As he attempts to light up, his Zippo on the point of giving up the ghost, their host says “I think the feds are onto us.”
“What? How do you know?” asks the firefighter, pipe still quivering in front of his mouth.
“’cause one of them came by, and showed me his ID, and said I should just keep my fucking head down.”
Two quick explosions take out the side door’s hinges, solid little slugs tearing them apart, and the door falls unceremoniously inwards, landing on a mechanic’s toes. Black Magic fills the doorway with shadow, and he says “Get out” in the terrible booming voice that comes with being a public enemy.
The den’s clientele have no wish to do anything but obey, yet none of them fancies the odds on trying to squeeze past him out the door. Instead, they huddle further into their corners.
Black Magic’s shoulders sag – he had thought that voice would get things done. Still, he proceeds into the crack den, and to the electronically locked door at the back. He raises his altered hand and blasts the lock, not even denting it.
Jose and Maria follow him hesitantly inside, and he turns to them, furious. “Open it,” he orders Maria.
“Say what now?”
“You can do it,” he says curtly, stepping aside to loom intimidatingly over a dangerously high travelling salesman.
Maria steps up to the door, mind spinning. She knows he is right and must somehow know that he is right, she can do things now, strange and terrible things. But she has hardly mastered them to this degree.
She puts her hand on the lock, and lets it relax into a flat adhesive mass. This, she grants, is step one, but what comes next? Before it all seemed so natural, so reflexive. As though she merely had to think it, and it would happen.
In her mind’s eye she sees the lock alone, rotating in a theoretical void, She turns all her effort into snaking tendrils of her own biomass through tiny openings, taking hold of the slug of copper that holds the door fast, and through the intricate pain she seizes it and forces it in the other direction. Under her warped hand, the door is pulled open. From inside wafts the unmistakable smell of turning flesh.
“Shit,” says Jose, “you can do it!” Black Magic scoffs at that, and sweeps between them, through the door. A second later he gives a howl of pain that sends the baseheads running for the exit, and sets the baby off crying again.
Jose and Maria follow him through the door. This room is cleaner than the ante-chamber, it looks like it was hospital-sterile not too long ago. Black Magic is kneeling next to a table with a split garbage bag on it. Strewn from the split is all manner of waste – jars, packets, chicken-bones and gobs of meat – but the bag itself is moving, writhing around and making pained little peeps. It is secured in place with surgical straps and duct-tape, but it looks out at them with humanoid, liquid eyes. They look between it and their baby, and shudder.
Black Magic stands abruptly, and turns his warped hand on the bag. There is another bang, and the bag’s pain ceases as its innards are splashed over the back wall. He turns to Jose and Maria, eyes fractured and crazy for a moment, so much that his twisted hand seems normal.
“Pray you never have to do that,” he says through his teeth. “Come on.” He goes over to the other side of the room, where a standard computer terminal sits on a plasticky table, and whips out a greasy flash drive, plugging it in with his good hand. “One of you, run a search, and grab all the files that mention Suzanne Planchette.”
Jose sits down at the terminal. The password, thankfully, is ‘swordfish’ and is written on a sticky note. A preliminary search reveals hundreds, almost thousands of documents. He begins transferring them onto the flash drive, and the terminal gives him a countdown. “How long did we have?” he asks, just before they hear powerful engines outside.
The den’s fiends, screaming again, run back inside, and Maria scolds them “I’m trying to get him to sleep!”
“Close that door!” adds Black Magic.
As an aspiring spoons player toes the door shut, gunfire erupts outside and they all duck down. This is not the occasional pops and bursts of state forces making a raid on the apartment block. No, this is the constant machine-gun tempo of a pitched battle.
“Stay back,” says Black Magic to Maria, gesturing her further inside the reinforced room, and aiming his bloated hand at the doorway.
“I don’t like this,” says Maria, sliding to the floor, curling around the screeching baby, just about supporting herself on Jose’s legs. “It’s just like before.”
“We survived before,” says Jose, the blinking transfer bar making his face flash while, in another window, he subtly searches for any records that include their names. The combination of heroin slowing his reactions and the constant distraction of gunfire makes him pour with sweat. And when the screams start outside, and Black Magic’s eyes roll back in his head, Jose and Maria start to shake.
Outside, the gas-masked state forces pincer in on the street. Most of them have enough stimulants coursing over their brains to find this a fun, challenging day out. Urban warfare is one thing, but when any shadow might turn out to be a monstrosity with a shovel, that’ll really put you through your paces.
One of their number pushes up the road, taking shelter behind an olive-green dumpster. From here, they have a bead on the glistening bioconstruct that is providing most of the covering fire for the other side. They blow it apart in a shower of shell casings and fish skeletons.
“Move up!” says their commanding officer. “Light ‘em up!”
“Smoking!” replies one of their underlings, before turning their underbarrel flamethrower through a shattered window, onto a nest of black plastic things that had taken cover in the apartment block. Inside, Black Magic reels, shuddering and flinching as aspects of his consciousness stop looking out through rudimentary eyes, seeing fire and pain and then nothing.
“Move up!” they cry again. Fifteen people advance stolidly, firing off hundreds of rounds between them, trying to aim for the bioconstructs and not at their allies at the other end of the street. A manhole cover grinds aside, and one of the advancing troops is seized and consumed by a million little tendrils, but it cannot stop their spearhead.
As the battle for the other end of the street tips their way as well, with the remaining bioconstructs drawing fire from both sides, the troops progress onto stage two, and begin homing in on the crack den, which they actually do know as a substation of some sort.
A bullet pierces the door of the den, letting a shaft of light into the gloom inside. “Hold that fucking door!” Black Magic orders the fiends, stepping forward. They converge on the door, on the point of buffering it when another rattle of fire penetrates the door. Those it doesn’t kill, it knocks to the ground.
“It’s nearly done,” says Jose in a tiny voice, looking out at Black Magic, sprawling amongst the ash and the cigarette-ends on the filthy rug. Maria is still leaning on Jose’s legs. She could almost be asleep, but more likely has mentally checked out.
The door, bullet-ridden as it is, is kicked in quite easily. For a moment, the shadow of the first goon fills the passage, before five of them pour in and hold their guns on Black Magic.
“Do not move,” one of them whirrs.
Then, from the back room, the computer gives off a chime like that of a hyper-modernist doorbell. The goons spin their guns up to face it. Jose, feeling as though he is sweating bullets but well aware he isn’t, not quite yet, admits “It’s done.”
“Get away from that,” says one of the goons, starting forward, their heavy boot catching Black Magic’s flank and turning him over. His outstretched normal hand arcs up then comes down, landing in a pile of over-filled trash bags with a squelch.
Maria opens her eyes just in time to see the twisted wall of black plastic sweep all those savage goons back out the front door. The sheer force of its expansion breaks their limbs like matchsticks, before it consumes and assimilates them. The remaining goons outside back away, but far too late – the advancing biomass has already hit the dumpster, with much the same effect as pouring water on an oil-fire. Huge branches of polymer and pulsing, living flesh string themselves up and down the length of the street, even reaching and crushing the goons’ abandoned vehicles.
Black Magic staggers back inside, his coat torn, blood trickling out of his sleeve and dripping from his fingers. “It’s done,” repeats Jose, holding up the flash drive.
“You better have taken that out right, or there’ll be hell to pay,” says Black Magic.
The baby is quiet now, or at least quieter, just staring vacantly out at the world and burbling instead of its mouth being open in one eternal scream. Jose can still feel the cold sweat on his skin, but it is not quite as intense and visceral as when there were people coming to kill him. He wonders if the baby did not have essentially the same thought process. He wonders how Maria feels about it, if she can sweat any more.
The curdled slop of flesh and biomass laps at their ankles as they cross the street. Black Magic pauses by a tattered green-black skin, and bows his head, speaking silent prayers. Maria is staring at the back of his head – there is no symbiotic thought running between them like a spiderweb, but nonetheless she can almost see his soul.
“But you think she’s still alive, right?” she says. Black Magic almost jumps. “This girl Planchette. You’re trying to find her.”
Black Magic turns, and full-on faces Maria, even knowing she has the same eerie powers she takes a step back. Without shouting, he says “They took her. And I will find her.”
“This is really a whole new side of you,” says Jose, gently bouncing the baby in his arms.
“Oh, like you thought I was made of stone. Now, I’ll need you to come with me. Maria, your liquefaction or whatever should come in handy. Plus, who knows, maybe the kid was changed and it’s not quite showing yet-”
For Maria, it is practically instinctual. The tiniest patch of skin on her leg ripples and melds with the slurry covering the street. It rises like a tidal wave and crashes down on Black Magic, surrounding him and seizing him in a great gelatinous fist.
“Fuck you,” says Maria, “we’re not coming with you, we’re not doing shit you say, and if the next words out of your mouth aren’t ‘okay, that’s fine’ I’ll break all your legs.”
Black Magic struggles inside the pulsing mass, and eventually manages to free his mouth. “Okay. That’s fine. You two fuck off and get hunted down like rabid dogs – I said okay that’s fine!” he adds quickly, as he feels a distinct pressure starting to bend his legs the wrong way.
Jose, however, has been thinking, going down the kind of endlessly pessimistic spiral that only comes with feeling a hit start to fade, and knowing exactly what comes next. “Maria,” he says quietly, a cautious hand on her shoulder, “the bastard’s right. They will find us, and then you’ll have to watch me die trying to stop them from taking you.”
“For fuck’s sake, Jose,” says Maria, screwing her eyes shut, trying to hold in the tears. “I don’t want to live in the sewers.”
“Well, I don’t want to even more. I don’t have strange and terrible powers. But, compared to this?” Behind him, a stray patch of concentrated gastric acid busily eats through a lamp-post at the base. At that moment, it corrodes enough of the metal to send the thing toppling down with a squelch. “It’s probably not so bad, once you get used to it.”
“That’s his world down there, though, he’s got his people, we’d have to live like they do.”
“Live free or die,” chokes Black Magic, his intonation deep and operatic.
Maria’s shoulders slump. The flesh-wall retreats, placing Black Magic gently on the ground. Then, as one, they go for the door of the apartment block and for the steps down into the world below.
Directly ahead of him, a man in black is sitting on a bench, in the miserable excuse for a park that lies between the tower blocks. Grant approaches, pulling his camel coat ever tighter around himself, and as he comes nearer, he clocks the shine of the other man’s wristwatch and New York shoes.
“So how’d you get my number?” asks Grant, taking a seat next to the man.
There is no response. The man sits there like the great stone face, barely moving. Grant’s hand shakes, he thinks of having a cigarette for the first time in months.
“Alright, you got me out here. You want to talk? Let’s fucking talk.”
The man brushes down his woollen coat with a sweep of his wrist, and stays quiet.
“Look, I don’t know who you are. But you want something. So what is it you want?”
The man turns his head to look Grant in the eye for the first time. “We don’t want a goddamn thing from you.”
“Fucking time wasters,” chuckles Grant.
“We know you, we know what you’re about. We don’t care. We’re not Mickey Mouse from Quantico. Now I’m going to say this once. By four pm today, you and all of your people need to get out of this block. Not even for much more than a few hours. Something will happen and you will have a perfect alibi. You will not be in our way, we will not be in your way.” The man rises to leave.
“So soon?” says Grant. “Come on, don’t leave me hanging. What’s this about? You from the water department, you finally gonna fix my shower?”
The man turns back to Grant. “Do you know what a bioconstruct is?”
Grant snickers. “Nah.”
“Good. Let us do our job, you’ll never have to. One way or the other, Grant, you will never hear from us again.”
What plays on Grant’s mind, as he walks back over the crooked paving slabs, is how utterly serious the man sounded. In the past, he has had various well-dressed feds making various implausible veiled threats to his face. The only difference, he thinks, is the sheer audacity of this one. And how the man got his phone, his personal phone.
He steps into the shade of the block’s lobby, where Jonnatton’s huge frame is waiting, observing. “What’s he say?” asks Jonnatton.
“He says,” begins Grant, then cuts himself off with a snarl. They go upstairs, and he pounds on some doors. “Hey, Frankie! Ibby! Big Mel! Jose! Get the fuck out here!” Now he takes his place at the head of the cold concrete stairs, to announce. “They’re coming for us. Four pm.”
“Why’d they tell you?”
“Trying to scare us into the open. I say we throw them a welcome party. Tell everyone you know to tool up. Set traps and shit. They put a foot wrong, I want them to be treading on a nail. Because they’re not just coming for us, they’re gonna trash our homes, beat up our friends and our families, you know it to be true. You know what it is the boy scouts say, don’t you?” He pauses for a moment, perversely enjoying his own performance. “Be prepared!”
As Jose returns to his apartment, he is surprised to find Jonnatton’s top boy, Dan the Dirk, following at his elbow.
“The fuck you want?” asks Jose, not unkindly. He has a migraine and a sickness coming on, not helped by discovering that war is about to break out.
“Oh, uh, you know that box of books I asked you to watch?” says Dan. They go into the apartment and Maria looks up in fright, nearly straining herself doing so. “Don’t worry, sweetie. Just getting a thing.”
Jose knocks his crumpled clothes aside to get at the distinctive red-and-white box Dan left him many months back. By now it is red-and-yellow. Dan receives it eagerly, then goes through it. From under a copy of The Short-Timers, he draws out a curved olive claymore mine.
“Hell yeah,” says Dan, grinning eerily, waving it over his head for a moment. “Talk about your rainy day. I’m gonna rig this shit in the stairwell.” He rushes out like a kid out of a toystore.
“You hear all that, out there?” asks Jose.
“Yeah,” says Maria, and runs a protective hand over her distended pregnant belly, sinking lower into the ratty armchair. She rubs her temples. “Narcos never change. Not even here.”
“We should get you outta here.”
“And I go where?” This leaves Jose speechless. He had pictured putting Maria in a cab and having her hole up safe in her sister-in-law’s house – but now he remembers Maria’s sister-in-law died last year. “Besides, they’ll grab me. Probably think that this” – she strokes her stomach again – “is all our contraband.”
This gives Jose a reminder. He reaches for the loaded syringe among the trash on the side table. Grant’s command had interrupted him near the end of the process – now he needs it more than ever, he does not want to face the end of the world sober.
He spikes himself, deposits the shot in his vein with a gasp of satisfaction. He looks at Maria with eyes full of love and gasps again, stumbling over the words saying “Oh shit, I’m sorry to – I mean, in front of you.”
“It’s cool,” says Maria briefly, trying to wave the thought away. She would rather not think about how it has been months since she felt that sheer liquid relief soothing every part of her. She definitely does not want to think about how if she just asked to chase some, Jose would probably concede it out of a desire to make her feel better.
“Hey, you want ends on this shot?” Jose asks the closed door to the back room they are sub-letting. They sit watching the door, waiting for a response.
“Nah,” comes Black Magic’s voice, after a few moments.
“Sounds like he has his own,” shrugs Maria. It is surprising to her, since in a few very low moments, she has gone rooting through Black Magic’s belongings – all his maps and city ordnance guides – in search of his stash. To her relief she found nothing.
“Oh, Magic, there’s…there’s, like, some shit going down,” adds Jose. “At four, they’re coming at four.”
“What’re they doing?” asks Black Magic. “Who are they?”
“We don’t know,” slurs Jose, falling backward in his chair. The springs are jabbing through the cloth into his ribs - it feels, to him, like a soapy massage.
Maria restlessly toys with her phone, tumbling through endless insane lies. One set of democratically elected people don’t like another set of democratically elected people. The city council wants to define their terms – are they talking about redistricting, or rezoning? Nobody seems to care how the building she lives in is going to turn into the last gunfight, the finale of a summer blockbuster.
Over the top of her phone, she spies movement. Black Magic sweeps out of his room, his longcoat not quite covering his wounded arm, which is still in a sling – how long has he had that? His arm was bust when he moved in, wasn’t it?
He walks straight out of the apartment without a word. Maria strains against her chair to get up and waddle after him, her curiosity aroused by how he has left the door open.
Maria steps out into the hall, and curses the cold artificial floors. Her shoes barely fit any more and she has taken to spending most of her time bare-toed. But she can hear the sound of Black Magic’s footfalls – going downstairs, toward the lobby.
She creeps after him, pausing near the top of the stairs. He walks up to the front doors. She wonders if he is simply going to the shop, or fleeing the block altogether, but then he stops, standing in front of the doors, examining them.
For a second, he hunches over, drawing in his good arm. Then he raises it, swipes his hand across the wall by the door. It leaves a smear of blood. He paints all the way around the doorway. Maria watches in such fascinated horror, she only just notices him turning back, and has to hurry back to the apartment, which just about kills her knees.
Jose hasn’t noticed. He is lost in the patterns of the stucco ceiling. Maria returns to her chair and falls back into wondering about him. They do get by – they have the income from the pushing, Jose’s work as a joiner, and Black Magic’s rent, but that is not the real issue. She has done her best to keep the heroin out of their baby, certainly, but she cannot keep the baby out of their heroin, particularly if she does take a celebratory post-natal shot like they planned with such glee – or worse, if the epidural simply sparks off the old habits…
Black Magic bangs in. Maria jumps, and he notices. “Checking the mail,” he says, giving his tight half a smile. When he is back in his room, Maria’s eyes narrow with suspicion. The rest of the world not caring about a gang battle is one thing – but he has to live here.
Now Maria tries to think of just what to do about that. She has never wanted to be one of those women who give birth in a holding cell. Perhaps, if she can rouse Jose, they can get out of the area early, take an early dinner and wait for everything to blow over. Just like her attempts to juggle pregnancy and the drug trade all blew over, just like she thought eight months and four days ago when she found out.
Eventually, she thinks, it is all going to happen, and then she has no idea what she will do about that. All the thoughts wear on her.
“ruffle ruffle ruffle talking about a bioconstruct,” Grant’s voice whispers through the corridor and around the door. Maria jumps again – it has distracted her from a fascinating article about a species of ant that lives inside tree branches, and plugs up its front door with its own ridiculous swollen head.
Bioconstruct? Couldn’t the word describe any living being? Jonnatton says “ruffle ruffle trying to scare ya,” sounding as though he’s standing by the door.
“ruffle ruffle ruffle principle of the thing!”
The word construct – and it nips at Maria’s head trying to think things through like this, but she powers on, her energy levels boundless compared to when she was a full-on fiend – it suggests, unless she’s wrong, something that has been constructed. Something created, intelligently designed or at least designed.
Even now, eight months off, she craves nothing so much as a nice relaxing shot.
“Remember when ruffle ruffle ruffle? We’re going to ruffle ruffle these ruffles just like that.”
She can already see what’s coming, or rather hear it, in her mind’s ear. It’s not like it’s rare in this block. First there comes the main doors opening, which tend to make at least some noise on their corroded hinges. Then there’s boots on concrete, moving fast and deliberate. Then those same boots are kicking in a door, then the shouting starts. Sometimes then the shooting starts, and it looks like that’s what they’ve got in store today.
The other week it happened to that poor kid down the hall – she was pregnant too. The crash of the wooden door splintering, even as the lock held. “Hands on your head! Step away from that hard drive!”
But she didn’t step away, she can’t have, because then there was that one shot that probably woke half the block, and then there was silence.
Maria can barely focus on the writing on her phone. She’s trembling with worry and she knows it. Jose sitting opposite her comatose and serene isn’t helping, just making her horribly jealous.
Crash
That was the main door to the block! Maria checks her phone, and tries not to curse. It is well before four pm, clearly Grant’s decision to be ready for a battle wasn’t received well.
There is shouting. Not even ruffles, it is far too loud and indistinct for that. And then there are gunshots, and then there is screaming.
Maria shoots to her feet. The bones of her legs grind together, but that is a distant consideration compared to sitting directly behind a door that would provide little to no ballistic protection. She toddles rapidly in the direction of the bathroom, hoping to hide in the more protective enamel of the tub – then she stops in the doorway, and looks helplessly back at Jose. She cannot carry two people at once.
“Not today,” Jose slurs, and turns over.
“Oh, come on,” says Maria, kneeling next to him as the sounds of pain outside just get louder and louder, “we have to get to safety, wake up, wake up for the love of-”
Black Magic bangs through the door of his room. He takes in the situation and does not pause before drawing his arm out of his sling. Maria’s stare of helpless gratitude turns to horror seeing it – it is so horribly broken and warped there is not even a hand left, just a mass of flesh that has turned an awful sickly colour.
With that revolting blob Black Magic scoops Jose out of the chair and over his shoulder. He strides through to the bathroom, and Maria follows gratefully. He deposits Jose carefully in the bath, the man’s head rolling into the puddle that tends to stick around.
“Get in the bath,” Black Magic orders Maria, and she does so instantly. “It’ll be alright.” He leaves, but as he shuts the door, something falls from his pocket.
Maria peeks over the side of the tub, and her eyes, already wide, spasm. Lying on the cracked tiles, as though sent by God to comfort her in her time of need, is a syringe full and bloated with sweet golden brown.
It sounds as though the shooting has stopped. The howls are still there, though, even louder. But this is not so bad, those howling guys are just out there doing their thing. It would be an affront to their individual agency to deny them that.
“Oh, rapture,” sighs Maria, curling tighter around Jose. The grimy tub and its visible water-line is as comforting and beautiful to her as some great historic walled garden. She is here with her love and their sweet, perfect child, who is probably far gone enough that one little shot won’t make any difference. She has with her all she could care about in the world.
There is the sound of flesh splitting. The bathroom wall is thick with pipes but the noise comes through with no problems. Maria presses her cheek to Jose’s shoulder. “ruffle ruffle gone mad!” says Grant’s voice, loud and clear.
“It’ll all be alright,” Maria breathes in Jose’s ear, even as Grant’s voice screams and a solid object smashes. “We’re alright here, and then, then we can get out. And then we can get clean, properly, and then we can be a real family.” Black Magic’s voice rings out above everything else, chanting in what sounds like Yiddish or Norwegian.
“Kill you all! ruffle ruffle kill you all!”
“I love you,” says Maria, tears streaming from her eyes, her heart is so full of joy. The chanting grows louder. Grant gives one last cry and then is suddenly silent.
As something explodes, the entire block feels as though it shakes and what sounds like every window on their floor is blown out at once, Maria very gently plants her lips on Jose’s unresponsive mouth.
The door to their apartment bangs open, the flimsy lock giving without much of a fight. Jose sits bolt upright, tearing himself out of Maria’s arms, and vomits a little bit over the side of the tub.
Jonnatton clatters into the bathroom, eyes wide and haunted, face covered with blood from a gash on his neck. He holds an empty pistol with which he gestures madly. “All is lost!” he crows. “It’s the end of the world!” He crumples forward, falling first to his knees then flat on his face. His back is torn up with thick bullet holes that still ooze gore and bile.
For a second there is silence, then comes the chanting again, creeping in louder through the open doors and echoing in the room. “This isn’t good,” groans Jose. “What happened – are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” says Maria, lying back in the tub and running a hand over her bump. “We’re both ok and that’s all that matters.”
“They come for us, haven’t they?” says Jose, breathless with terror. He is taking a dark turn, he sees the advancing tread and the jointed truncheons.
“We can just stay here,” says Maria, “until they get tired and they go away.”
For a second Jose’s face is frozen, and the continual chanting shivers on his bones. Then he says “Are you high?”
“It happened,” says Maria, not to justify herself but just to say why, “it all happened, and I had to make it go away.”
Jose presses his face to Maria so she will not see he has wept. He cannot possibly bear to think about what it does to a baby to have street-grade heroin in its veins, and reflects how Maria must feel carrying something inside her that is now, in some way, tainted and wrong. Part of this tangle and chaos all around them.
The chanting stops and leaves a deep silence. Out of a desire to force blood to his brain rather than anything else, to distract himself from these thoughts, Jose forces himself out of the bathtub and onto his feet. He starts forward, stepping over Jonnatton’s body with a vague idea of gauging the situation, then ahead of him Black Magic steps back into the apartment.
“What’s with your hand?” asks Jose, trying not to sound disgusted.
“This? This, this is nothing,” says Black Magic. “I got to go. Come with me, if you want to live.”
Jose carries Maria with her arm around his neck to the door. Just outside, Grant lies flat on his back, completely at peace, with his hands torn off and nowhere to be seen.
“Got everything,” says Black Magic, jogging up from behind and shoving folded papers into his pockets. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want kids mixed up in this,” and this he says almost apologetically.
“This can’t be down to you,” says Jose, stepping where Big Mel’s face used to be. He draws back his leg as though he has been stabbed.
“It’s not,” says Black Magic. “They started it.”
Ibby, who Jose used to ride around on bikes with, lies dead on the stairs with holes in his stomach. The black-armoured body of some kind of riot policeman is face-down next to him, and down in the lobby there are a dozen more like it, some missing their heads. Most of them are around the crumbling hole where the doors were.
They have only set foot on the pockmarked stairs when huge floodlights blind them through the hole. Maria squirms, tries to shield her eyes and settles for just turning her head away.
“Bioconstruct!” squeaks a loudspeaker. “Stay where you are!”
Black Magic begins to chant again, giving out strange grinding intonations and raising his hand and his weird appendage in the air. Jose begins to feel like he is on the point of being suddenly sick as he was in the bathroom.
The ground shakes. As more riot squads breach in through the front doors of the block, the floor itself starts to crack and splinter.
“Gott in himmel,” chokes Jose.
The writhing black mass comes up through the floor, and consumes all the poor innocents who brought guns and body armour to a very different kind of fight. As it punches its way upwards its skin is torn back, huge gaping wounds opening up its flanks and spilling out dust and fluff and liquid flesh. This does not slow it down, and in fact seems to make it more furious. In seconds, it is gone, tearing upward through the ceiling just as easily.
“Go! Go!” shouts Black Magic, charging down the stairs and putting himself in front of the hole as concrete and masonry falls all around him. For a moment, the floodlights are blocked out as, outside, the burrowing thing dives back into the ground effortless as a fish.
Jose slogs towards the hole in the floor, Maria’s feet just about moving with him. Then the stink of it hits him, before he even sees the darkness down there, and he reels back. Maria is still too far-gone to notice. He asks Black Magic “You want us to-”
“Your choice,” says Black Magic, the building crumbling around him. “I don’t really care.”
“But-” Jose cannot bear to even say it. He simply places one hand protectively over Maria’s belly.
“Look, let me black magic this for you. One way the three of you die, the other way the three of you might die.” He shrugs, grins. “My turn now, your turn later.” And he throws himself down the hole.
Jose still hesitates, even as the building groans and the floodlights focus again, on him this time. He throws a hand in front of his face, trying to think up against all this psychic pain.
“Fuck it,” he says, and he holds Maria in his arms, just like old times. Then he simply leans back, hoping he will take the impact of the fall. The ground vanishes from under him, the wind rushes through his hair, and the smell gets a whole lot worse very quickly.
There is no crushing impact. Instead they splash down into a pool that smells and tastes utterly foul. But it has not killed them, that’s the important thing.
Appendages that do not quite feel like hands take a firm grip under Jose’s shoulders, and haul him out of the filthy water.
Everything is damp here. Droplets fall rhythmically from the ceiling. Through the thick-headedness of rising withdrawal, Jose makes out Black Magic’s form, moving about in the dim light. He has stripped off his wet clothes, and darts back and forth, completely unconscious of being naked. His fine body gives Jose a number of feelings that he puts down to jealously.
Now and then, the light catches things on Black Magic’s body that do not look normal. Huge areas of his body have a different texture, they look unnaturally sleek and shiny. This is beyond scarring, beyond any skin condition. Something on his back pulses, swollen and purple but larger than any vein. And the scabbed holes on his shoulder remind Jose of nothing more than the various bullet holes he has seen recently.
Maria grumbles in her sleep, lying on his other side. He must turn his head and make sure she really is there – he does not believe life would really provide any respite from this parade of horrors.
“Thank God,” he says, suddenly exhausted, resting his head on her puffy breasts. “Oh, thank God.” For a second, his surroundings, the round, smoothed stones of the sewer pipe – for this, he realises, is what it is – become transformed into a cathedral, comforting him with all its cold serene majesty.
“We’re fine down here,” says Black Magic, suddenly looming out of the shadows and make Jose jump. “See, they can sense me. It’s like I call to them. I’d thought they wouldn’t be able to make me out up in the block, since there was no cell reception.” Jose nods unconsciously, distinctly remembering how he had to lean out the window to make a call. “But I got a good feeling about down here – and with a bit of luck, I left enough biomatter up there they’ll think that’s what they were feeling.”
“You killed all the boys,” says Jose. He doesn’t have the heart to make it accusatory. He got on fine with Grant’s outfit, he drank and smoked with them, but he never particularly liked them, or what they did. He is well aware of the hypocrisy and tends not to think about it.
“They tangled with a secret government agency,” says Black Magic gently. “I was just helping, really.”
“What agency?” Jose’s growing sickness has instantly translated this into paranoid fantasies. He cannot imagine the monster bureaucracy that would be bringing the hammer down on a mutant like Black Magic, that is the truly terrifying thing about it. Jose has routinely had to deal with the emigration services, with his having been born in Connecticut simply serving to confuse them, and provoke their wrath – he fears to think who it is after them now.
Black Magic hangs his head. “I don’t know. Trust me, I want to find out. They’re after me, I know that.” He swoops down, and Jose jumps again. He places a reassuring hand on Jose’s shoulder, and runs his other hand over Maria’s bump. “It’s fine. It’s kicking.”
“So why the fuck aren’t you running?” says Jose, startling even himself with his willingness to mouth off. “Why aren’t you getting the fuck out of Dodge, eh? What the fuck are you doing still round here?”
“Jose, you know why.” Black Magic stands again, letting the shadows complement his toned body. “Imagine if someone took her from you. Or took the baby from you. Imagine what you’d do then.”
Jose sits up, mouth gleaming wetly as it opens in the shock of recognition. He had some vague ideas that Black Magic was planning to eat him alive, and wash him down with a heady cocktail of placenta and amniotic fluid. Immediately he feels guilty – knows that just because Black Magic is obviously not entirely human, that does not by definition make him inhuman.
“You’re tired,” says Black Magic. “You’re not wounded, but you’re sick.” And out of the dank sewer water bursts a thing constructed of the same smooth greenish-blackness that covers Black Magic’s body. It crawls along, the bulk of its body dragging behind him, but its movement seems natural, not laboured. Jose tries to shrink away, looking at the twisted mess that does not seem like any face he has ever seen – it looks insectoid, like its mouth is a cruel biting stinger. Then he realises it is holding a filled syringe in its mandibles.
“Thanks,” says Jose, taking the syringe, disoriented, but genuinely grateful. The thing inclines what might be its head, then scuttles back into the water.
Jose only needs a whisper of the syringe’s contents to set himself up nicely. Black Magic disposes of the rest with a moonlit smile. Jose begins to wonder if he is simply that accustomed to sweet, perfect Lady Poppy – or if whatever it is that has happened to Black Magic is done something to the opioid receptors in his brain.
“I will not see it happen again,” Black Magic keeps saying, voice surprisingly steady for all that he himself should be swaying and wobbling, as they walk along miles of echoing, raindropping sewer. Black Magic has his long coat on again – whether this makes him look more or less shadowy and shapeless is a question for the philosophers.
They are not having to gingerly carry Maria’s unconscious form again. Jose is grateful for this, struggling along as he is in clothes soaked with grime. At a word and a gesture from Black Magic, a bloated green thing emerged from the water and formed a living armchair for her. She sleeps peacefully sitting in it, though Jose still prefers not to turn his head and look back as it follows along after them.
“Some poor innocent pair of fiends,” Black Magic begins to expand. “Yeah, I know, you’re not innocent, she’s not innocent, nobody is. You like to let the needle fuck your arm, fine, you know, good. But let that be your thing, right, you deal with the good and the bad of it.” He looks up for the first time in a while – surfacing out of the private reveries provided by the reflections on the black water. “She still clean?”
“She took something,” says Jose. “When it all went off back there, she used, and, you know, fair enough. If you thought you were about to die…”
“She’s too far along for it to make much difference,” says Black Magic, the confidence in his voice disguising his woeful lack of family experience – at least, any experience of a human family. “Trust me. Believe me now, your kid will be fine.”
Jose notes that Black Magic clenches his fist as he says this, and wonders if this is him really giving so much of a shit, or if he is exercising his own neuroses. If there is some savage resentment at work here, over whoever it was that Black Magic lost, that has been curled in his head sharpening its teeth, and is about to burst out, roaring and spitting volatile fluid.
They come to a crusted metal stairwell in a side-nook of the sewer, and for a moment Jose is blinded – by light, genuine natural light coming in from above. Between this, and the unhealthy, greenish light in the sewer, it is the contrast been heaven and hell.
“I’ll be in touch,” says Black Magic, pulling a ring of keys from his pocket, squinting at them, and handing them to Jose along with a handful of filthy, greasy hundred-dollar bills. “Room 101. You never saw me, you never lived back there – ah, you know the drill. Keep an eye on the crack den across the way. And-” His fist flexes again, uncontrollably, as he looks back at Maria’s lolling head. “Keep her comfortable.”
He vanishes into the darkness. Maria’s chair spits her out upright, and it disappears to. Jose rushes forward, to support her before she keels over.
“We have to go now,” he says, into her ear, very gently.
She stretches, groans, and her eyes half-open. “Alright,” she says. “It’s nice down here. All cool, and quiet…why am I wet?”
As Jose begins to relive the process of their escape, struggling to think of a way to say it, Maria’s eyes flash open. It is all coming back to her, too. “Yeah – no, that really happened,” Jose establishes.
“Right,” says Maria. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
So, damp and sodden with who knows what, they climb those steel steps, one by one. Even wet through, the growing light is making them feel a little better, and the falling drops of water that jangle through the stairway are nothing compared to the deluge in the sewers.
Finally they emerge from the catacombs and the tangled metal steps. They take a moment, standing there beneath the grate, to smell the comparatively sweet air of the street above. And then there is a way up – not even locked – through a laundry room into the building proper. Another set of stairs confronts them, and there is a flash of physical pain in their heads when they see it. But they rise admirably to the challenge.
And then they are in a corridor, carpeted, even, nothing like their last home, and Jose is unlocking door 101 and the apartment is warm, dry, fully furnished and smells vaguely pleasant. They feel out of place, and sit down awkwardly, as though waiting for the dentist, shivering a little in their clothes.
It is only after some time has passed that they feel comfortable enough to strip down and draw a bath. The water runs hot and steaming, and the pipes make none of the ugly choking noises they have come to expect.
“Thank God and Satan too,” says Maria eventually, like one long sigh, as she soaps up her bump.
“I don’t know what the hell he is,” says Jose, who has gallantly taken the tap end of the bath to let Maria lie back properly. “Did he ever talk, at all? About what it was he did?”
“Not really. Mainly just stayed shut up in his room,” says Maria. “Never left for long.” And at night, they remember, they would sometimes hear him crying.
They cannot reconcile this new image of Black Magic with anything they know about the world, any science they thought they knew. Even as twisted as they are, they had never dared to dream of what they saw today. Every time Jose closes his eyes, he sees once more the image of a huge monstrosity muscling its way out of the solid concrete ground while its own skin tears and splits from the effort.
“I should have grabbed my stash,” says Jose, biting his own lip. The feeling of warm soapy water against the punctures in his arm has set him on edge. The heroin in his blood is far from wearing off, but he knows it will become a concern eventually. “You look like you’re still full-on rolling.”
“I am,” says Maria, head back, eyes closed, a smile twitching her mouth now and then. “Oh God, it feels good.”
“Probably because you were off it for so long.”
“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have – and I was doing so well.” Jose reaches out and clutches her hand.
“Think of it like a, a treat. A reward, for doing that well. Oh, look, it’s one slip, just one, don’t beat yourself up. Enjoy it.” He agonises over every flicker of her face, reading it as the guilt and self-hatred he knows all too well. Worst of all, he fears the rationale he has just slurred out is not helping.
Maria is elsewhere. She sees visions of creatures, horrifying bio-constructions all blackened flesh and shards of glass, that purr and curl around her legs.
Jose looks over the side of the tub, at the pile of their filthy, sodden clothes. “We need more clothes, too,” he sighs quietly, considering how awkward it would be to score heroin while naked.
“Ah, no,” says Maria, “I’m gonna stay in here for a couple of days.” Jose worries again for a moment, but his practiced eye concludes she is not in overdose territory – just really, really enjoying it.
“Somehow,” he says, rising from the bath in a storm of rushing water, “we need to get things, I don’t know, maybe we could call someone.” Leaving flat, sheeny puddles in his wake, he goes over to the cupboard. The blood begins to rush and he becomes dangerously lightheaded at the very moment he opens it to see it fully stocked with pristine, plush towels and robes.
As he towels off, through the open door he sees the keys and cash Black Magic gave them, left on a side table. It is only now that he wonders how, exactly, the money didn’t get damp as well when they all jumped down that hole.
Maria goes back on her word and gets out of the bath well before even a day has passed. Once she is asleep and dreaming in the bed – a huge bed, with no lumps or horsehair – Jose wraps one of the robes around himself and goes out to forage.
The apartment block looks surprisingly healthy from the outside. Nobody would ever guess it was built over the same sewers where Black Magic dwells. Even the crack den across the street doesn’t look too bad. It is an old garage whose shutter is rusted closed, with moss and hardy grasses growing up around its corners. There is some graffiti, mainly autographs, and no twitchy toughs hanging about outside – no suggestion of anything like Grant’s operation.
Keep an eye on it? Jose wonders about that. Grant, as a heroin dealer and maniac, had always held a bitter rivalry with the crack trade. He became particularly vocal on the subject after his wife was killed in action, prompting Jose, and most of the rest of the gang, to assume he was looking for some other source of ready fights.
It is, however, now Jose’s neighbourhood, not in the ‘I own these streets’ sense, but the benign, residential, less cool one. He concludes that he will keep a responsible eye on the place, call the police if necessary – and make sure to buy some long-sleeved shirts.
An all-night mart two blocks down the road provides both clothes and food. The clerk notices Jose’s robe and doesn’t bat an eyelid. The stinking hundred-dollar bills, on the other hand, go right under the verification machine, and come up clean, to the clerk’s mild surprise.
“You holding?” the clerk asks quietly. Jose says no, and asks if the clerk knows anybody. “Nobody’s answering their phones. I heard there was a gas explosion in their block.”
Jose thanks the clerk very much, and leaves quickly. His arms are full of bags, and he will be unable to play off a choke or laugh as sudden violent coughing. But when a little rain starts to fall, dampening his robe to a degree he no longer sees as significant, he cannot help himself, and laughs out loud there in the street.
The only thing that sobers him enough to stop is seeing the lights of a squad car zip by. The officers inside have no time for his manic laughter, as they are en route to an emergency budget meeting. So he remembers himself, and steps off towards his new home. He does not spare a thought for the black van that cruises carefully past him, whose inhabitants give him a long look before speeding away.
The key is stiff for a moment in the lock. His fears all well up and burst at once, rapidly convincing him that none of the day’s events were real. It all vanishes back into the depths of his subconscious the second the door opens.
He puts the keys, and the remaining cash, down on the same side table as before. Completely out of idle curiosity, he opens the drawer beneath its surface. Inside is a pack of medical-grade syringes, a spoon, a candle, a box of matches, and a big sachet of surprisingly pure-looking heroin.
For a moment, his hand poises itself over the open drawer, ready to reach out and take.
He slides it shut. It would be greedy, he reasons, as he is still riding the high from before. They have everything they need, and to his intense surprise, are completely safe. The thought cradles him, rocks him to sleep as he curls up in bed next to Maria.
Jose falls once more. He rushes through the air, and again feels the cold smell of the sewer curling up into his nostrils.
When he splashes down he bobs for a moment, like a cork, before sinking beneath the surface. He does not continue to sink, but hangs there, in the oily murky water, as though in a dream. He looks down, then up again, as his filled syringe floats casually up out of his breast pocket.
He lashes a hand out, struggling it through the water, and wraps it around the syringe. It does not feel physically real, it seems to actively resist his grip on it. But he takes hold of it, and through some labour of love, brings it back through the water and brings it to his arm.
His vein already bulges out. The marks along it are not disfigurations, not any more, not here, they are simple benign blemishes like freckles. The needle slips in easily. He readies himself to work the plunger, and send it home.
He falls again.
It feels more real this time. The drop lasts for longer, really giving him time to panic and break out in a cold sweat.
This time, when he hits the water, it is a foetus that falls from him. It has his face. He does not simply reach for it, he thrashes through the water after it, even as what little oxygen there is in his lungs escapes him in a cloud of bubbles.
Despite his best efforts he is losing it. It is being drawn further and further away, down into the darkness, by an umbilical cord wrapped all around with rusted bloody chains. Can he see that thing down below? Or is he just imagining some abyssal plughole, sucking all the light and warmth out of the world?
Jose wakes, and shivers. The cold sweat is real.
“What’s up?” murmurs Maria. Jose figures going from lying to upright must have woken her, too.
“It’s nothing,” he says, breath catching in his throat as for a second he feels the sewer water lap at his skin again.
“I had sex dreams,” she says, trying to roll over and rest her head on his chest, before having to give up in the attempt. “Hey, since we’re both awake?”
They had the debate, as Maria entered what they were reasonably sure was her third trimester, over whether they could still fuck. Attempting to type ‘pregnancy sex’ into the internet had brought up no pertinent information. Eventually they turned to Grant, in his capacity as lord of the manor, and he had – whilst laughing like a hyena – called up a contact of his, a doctor who had been struck off the medical register. The doctor gave them her blessing, there and then, and they had practically sprinted home.
Jose gets an erection quickly. Almost as much as Maria’s full, rounded body, it is her expression of absolute bliss that does this to him. There is also the fact that his habitual numbness is beginning to wear off.
As he goes through the motions, he knows he should be enjoying this as much as she is. However, he is just sober enough to be agonisingly aware that this, too, could be snatched away from him – could vanish in the dark waters.
He keeps going, feeling basically absent, more like a machine than anything. But when Maria yawns out an orgasm, from the look on her face now, he is practically forced to lean over her bump and kiss her. He comes too, not long after. And when he has rolled off her, still feeling the wet passion on his side of the bed, they are in each other’s arms and on the point of drifting off, when Maria mumbles “Black Magic.”
Jose does not get back to sleep.
When the sun comes up through the windows and the birds start to sing, nothing seems any brighter. Jose takes a light shot, just enough to get by, before setting off for work. His boss is surprised to see him, having assumed he perished in the gas explosion, or if not that then the subsequent collapse of the apartment block.
He has no way of knowing whether Maria was thinking of Black Magic during the entire act, or if the man simply popped into her head afterwards, in the way of priests and elderly relatives. He just knows he resents it. And more than this, he knows he is not really entitled to – Black Magic has given them food and drink and a place to live, and more importantly, continued life.
Yes, he concludes silently, at this point he would probably fuck Black Magic as well. How could he not?
By the time his shift ends he is already beginning to itch behind his eyeballs and under his fingernails. To his sincere disgust, he now has a slightly longer journey home, and by the time he gets back, his clothes are damp again, lashed with his cold sweat. But he pauses before retreating inside away from the world, stops for a moment to observe the crack den.
It still sits silent, a kind of anachronism sandwiched between two other small housing blocks. Jose notes that without Black Magic’s testimony, he would never have placed it as a crack hole. He has not seen a single person go inside or leave thus far. There is a faint, telltale whiff of crack on the wind, but that could be coming from anywhere.
He gives a laboured chuckle, at the fact that they will be starting their family opposite an honest-to-God crack den, and that this is a notable improvement on still being in Grant’s hell-block.
“Hey, you,” says Maria, beaming at him as he walks in. She is planted on the couch in front of a telenovella, head leant so far back it looks genuinely painful. But it is not her position that tells him a story, it is her hooded eyes, liquid with joy.
“Jesus Christ,” he says, nearly doubling over. Her expression flickers to alarm. “You used again?”
“What? No!”
And she is instantly, painfully aware Jose will not believe that for a second. Both of them have lived out that little exchange before, with parents, straight-edge friends, parish priests – the list is endless. They were invariably on the receiving end, and invariably lied.
Jose, for his part, only regrets that if Maria is telling the truth, he has no way of knowing.
“You look fucked,” he says.
Maria twists her head agonisingly, to look in the tasteful mirror, and must concede his point. It has worried her, actually. She initially thought she would pay a heavy price for her lapse, and the high would fade before long into the pains of the heroin leaving her system. Instead, it has not faded. She is only slightly more awake than she was upon initially taking the shot, which was almost a full day ago.
“I didn’t,” she says, as the chemical bliss and the seriousness of the situation tears her head in two different directions, “seriously. Look, check my arms.”
She draws back her sleeves. Jose sits down next to her, and runs his hand softly over the one puncture there, the product of yesterday’s slip.
“I wouldn’t do that to our kid,” she says, looking into his eyes, feeling his lifeblood pulse and surge through even that very minimal skin contact. “I mean, again.”
“You’re still dusty as hell, though.”
“I know. I don’t know what’s up with that.” Many is the time one of them has had to admit to the other that they truly do not know something. It never goes as badly as they worry it will.
“You’re still feeling it, then?” Maria nods. “What did you dream of?”
Her dark eyes do not flicker, but a smile grows over her mouth.
On the way home, Jose had imagined he would bang up the moment their front door was closed. He sits, open-mouthed, sober and only barely conscious of it.
Maria’s memory of the destruction of their former apartment block is understandably fragmented. But her recollection is not quite as cloudy as Jose had previously assumed. She talks at length about how falling down that hole was akin to returning to the waters of the womb. How the sewer was bright and buzzing with all kinds of micro-organisms, most of which were benign and friendly.
Jose has always thought her to be intelligent, on a par with him certainly, but he has never seen her like this. He has never experienced her opening her mouth and all these dream-images pouring out.
She speaks of seeing those things, the unknown and inexplicable things that swarm around Black Magic, waxing and waning with his chants. They had nothing to fear then, she explains, neither did she and Jose have anything to fear from them.
“’s all just life forms,” she concludes. Her head is still leaning dangerously, broken across the back of the couch. Jose wonders if it is the ceiling she sees, through her clouded eyes. “The ants in the grass, the things in the sewers, they’re there just doing their thing, they’re not so bad.”
“That’s from Drugstore Cowboy.”
Maria giggles, he is completely correct. At times, before now, she has become vaguely put out by people recognising where she has lifted her descriptions from. Now, she cannot imagine why. She sees this as the kind of intimate bond people pay many thousands of dollars attempting to recreate. Compared to this, fucking seems really quite impersonal.
Jose, his head reeling, rises from the couch and begins to cook up, to put the capper on the experience, as one stops to take a long breath after a period of exertion. He is in fact breathing heavily, all those pictures of words still spiralling tirelessly around his brain.
Maria leans on his shoulder, wanting to feel his body relax. The impact of her head threatens to send the contents of the spoon flying, but he is far too professional for that. He alters his grip and they stay suspended in place, like a baptismal font – an image, he reflects, that he is surprised Maria did not use earlier.
“Help me to the bathroom in a little while,” she says, the speech coming out as gentle warmth into his shoulder. “I can still walk, I’m just lazy.”
“Course,” says Jose, as he draws the cocktail – not too watery, not too heroiny – up into the needle, then sets it aside a moment to tap his vein out of hiding. At this stage, even a minor request like that is like knives on his eyeballs, and he resents this, he resents what the sickness does to him.
Everything is ready. Jose raises the hypodermic like a pen, ready to bring it down and make one decisive mark. At exactly this moment, Maria both kisses him on the cheek, and makes a lazy, lusty grab for his genitals. When he doesn’t feel the sting, he panics slightly and presses down on the plunger.
Maria rolls off him with a little sigh. The emptied syringe juts out of her arm like a broken bone.
Jose sits there for a moment, staring forward, at the technicolour characters of the telenovella arguing about an inheritance. He thinks to himself that he cannot possibly now deal with this sober – but of course, he had already made this decision.
He draws the needle out of Maria’s arm, and begins the process again. As he goes about it he notices a growing warmth, deep down inside. There is only a moment of elation and rapture before he realises Maria has pissed on the couch.
“My girlfriend’s taken an overdose.” The guilt wells up again, that was not panicked enough, not heartbroken enough, would not convince any paramedic to dash down with the magic syringe of Narcan and make it all better.
“Stay calm,” says the disembodied voice of vibrating copper. “Take a deep breath. Now first, get her on her side and into the recovery position, in case she pukes.”
“I’ve done that! Please, for fuck’s sake, send someone down!”
“You want to do this properly, or do you want her to die?”
Jose has never been spoken to like this over the phone. He has only ever seen it happen in films, and resolves to listen.
“Stand up. Take another breath. Now walk to the bathroom, and look in the cabinet over the sink. There’s Narcan on the bottom shelf.”
Gently and carefully, Jose lays the phone down on the table, and walks away. He goes to the bathroom and once more questions whether anything around him is real, before going back to Maria and administering relief. Her eyes open instantly, and she bats them at him.
“Did I fall asleep?” she asks, and squirms. “Did you just dose me with something?”
“Narcan,” says Jose, breathless, like he has bust down the door to deliver it.
“Oh shit,” says Maria, and breaks out giggling, “that’s right, you missed.” There is an ugly floral bruise, the colour of vomit, spreading on her arm where he skin-popped her, and she laughs at that, too.
Jose’s head reels again, only barely because of the drugs this time. She has not leapt to worrying about the baby this time – and neither has he. Narcan should have shut off the opioid receptors in her brain and completely reversed the effects of the shot, but she is clearly still rolling. Away with the fairies and the sprites, in some shaded mythical woodland pond.
Jose goes for the phone again. “Look,” he says, “I should have asked this before, but are expectant mothers cool to take Narcan? And how’d you know we had Narcan?”
“She’s fine. The kid’s fine.” The line goes dead. Experimentally, Jose puts the phone down on its cradle, then picks it up, and the line is still dead. There was one very obvious conclusion for him to come to there, and he can hardly blame Black Magic for not wanting the bother of keeping up with a phone bill.
“I’m good,” says Maria, eyes half-closed, and gives another laugh. “Oh man, you fucked up bad. You got me right in the arm.” She squirms again. “What am I sitting in?”
They draw another bath. Jose sponges Maria clean, to her cooing delight.
The next day, Jose does not shoot up before work. He figures it hardly goes by like a beautiful dream anyway. He loathes every minute of it so heartily, that when he cuts his finger badly, it barely even registers to him.
Grudgingly, he has made the private decision that no kind of father can juggle a baby and a needle, and is attempting to cut down. Only after work, and then not too much, decrease the dose incrementally. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, he thinks.
On the way home, his pace is quick, he is half-dreaming, mind not on the street under his shoes but in some private reverie of just him and a syringe – and Maria too, obviously. He walks along the front of their block, in the shadow of the crack den, and is almost home and dry, almost through the front doors when a broad-shouldered fed steps out of the shadows. He mentally prepares himself to get on the ground with his hands on his head.
“You live here, sir?” asks the fed, maintaining a respectful distance. This wrong-foots Jose, and his gaze spins, up and down the man’s tailored-suited body, over his New York shoes.
“Yeah,” says Jose. “Just moved in, the other – month.”
The fed nods. “Have you seen anything strange? Unusual? Comings and goings at weird times?”
“Nothing in particular, but then, I’ve been going to bed earlier.”
“Any smells or odours?”
“It’s a crack spot across the road,” says Jose, pointing. “But I expect you’re not so bothered about that.”
“People seem to think so,” says the fed with a sigh. “Sure, it’s low rent. Crack means powder cocaine, and powder cocaine means money flowing down to the cartels and propping up all their rivers of blood. So yeah, I am a little bothered about that.”
“Ah, you’d rather the baseheads weren’t all sequestered in the one place, then?”
“Don’t pragmatise with me, you fiend,” comes the reply, and Jose flinches back. “You’ve seen nobody hanging about who doesn’t look quite right? Nobody with eyes that seem to look right through you?” Jose shakes his head urgently. “How about this guy?”
And the fed holds up his phone, which displays a picture of Black Magic.
“No sir,” breathes Jose.
“Right. Well, if you do see him around, bear in mind he’s armed and dangerous, and infectious.” The fed reaches inside his coat, and draws out a business card. “You see him, call me. Soon as possible.”
When Jose gets inside, he doesn’t even look at Maria before he has chemically scrubbed the fed’s aura of threat from his hindbrain. Then he lolls there on the couch, unable and unwilling to support his own head, limbs sprawled out essentially independent of him.
He turns his head. Maria does too, and beams at him. She is sitting next to him in much the same position. “You went to work?” she slurs, still smiling away, showing all her teeth.
“Jesus Christ,” says Jose, as it all mounts up on top of him, and reaches fumbling for the phone. He calls emergency services, though imagines that any number would do. “Black Magic?”
“Speaking.”
“How’d you even rig this, anyway?”
For Maria, Jose’s voice rapidly fades into the same white noise she hears coming in waves from the phone. She still feels the body high, the numbness, and she is happy that he is home. But she is not as happy as she might be.
The fact she is still intensely, dangerously high has been playing on her mind all day, it is definitely not normal. But what troubles her more is how it will make her a liability – a bad partner and a bad parent. She has been on the couch too long and is beginning to sink. All the while, she has the weird psychoactive clarity that at some point, inevitably, she will have to battle through this sluggishness. Take care of the child, take care of Jose, take care of herself.
For a moment, she considers how much easier everything might be if the baby was not there in her belly, or if she were to get rid of it. Even against her perpetual buzz, having thought that feels like nothing so much as Chinese water torture.
And yet, as she sits there contemplating, there is another rush like blood across her brain, and it feels SO FUCKING GOOD
“She’s still on motherfucking Mars! I’ve had some pure shit in my time and it has never, never lasted that long! And don’t even ask me if she’s relapsed. I can’t deal with this, we got a baby on the way and there’s some vicious fed poking around-”
“Just one of them?” says Black Magic. “Ok, cool. They’re onto something but they’re not sure of it. Listen, Jose, have you ever taken crack?”
“No!” says Jose.
“Oh, well, uh – would you like to?”
Jose breathes loudly, through his nose, down the line.
“I need someone inside that shack over the street. To scope it out, test the waters. I got a theory about the place.”
“Fuck off. Would I like to take crack? Would you like to suck my crack? Jesus fucking Christ. Is this why you saved us? So I’d have to help you with this? Can’t you just call up something from underground and wipe the place off the face of the earth?”
Black Magic’s throaty laughter sounds from the phone. “Never gotten used to being asked things like that. Nah, God willing I could, but that wouldn’t do it. What I’m after, from that place, is intelligence. I need to know what exactly’s going on here.”
And Jose cannot respond, for he has nothing but sympathy for that. Despite everything, Black Magic, it seems, is much like himself. Simply wanting to make sense of this tangled nightmare he has found himself in.
The next day Jose takes crack.
He has not smoked in some time. He kicked the cigs at some point over the course of becoming a full-blown, accredited dope fiend.
The door of the den opens to his rattling knocks, after he is done with work. A fiend-cum-supplier greets him warmly. There is a cover charge, which he instinctively thinks of as classy, but after some thought realises is just right for this scene. People sprawl in badly lit corners, intoxicated and helpless, while the latest hits of the day play eternally on someone’s high-priced phone.
He takes the pipe, sees the vapours conjured up inside, and tokes hard. It strikes his lungs, leaving stinging burning patches, but it cannot penetrate his severe numbness. He does not cough, he takes the dose like a veteran head, and feels the rush. It is doing things to his brain chemistry but it is not the high he wants, not even close, and inside he is crying out for the needle’s tender kiss.
“You guys see that cunt fed poking about?” he asks, after the initial swell has passed. It is clumsy, he feels, he is not just testing the waters but dropping a hook in it and waggling it around.
“Ah, that motherfucker,” says the prostitute sitting next to him. “Fucking dicks, man. They need to bite the fucking bullet and legalise it before they waste any more of our taxes.”
“This one time,” pipes up an aspiring stockbroker from the opposite corner of the room, “I got arrested just for taking a piss. Can you imagine that? For taking a simple piss.”
The discussion wears on, and quickly becomes a catalogue of grievances against the state. As a former rocket scientist expands upon his resentment of the water department, two city workers wearing the obligatory brown uniforms walk in. Jose reacts, but sees that nobody else does. The city workers go to a door in the back, a solid-looking thing, not dilapidated like the rest of the room.
He nudges the prostitute. “The fuck are they?”
“There’s a substation in the back, I think,” says the prostitute, before lighting up again.
As the city workers, or whoever they are, pass through the door, Jose sees the pale light of computer screens from the other side. Barely a minute has passed before they are leaving again, with one now holding an empty cat-carrying cage. They do not spare the crack den’s clientele a glance.
Jose hangs out, feeling the rushes over his body, not-really listening to a public schoolteacher talk about their plan to commit the perfect murder. He goes to pick at a discoloured spot on the chair, and cuts that finger as well.
Eventually the sun begins to go down, not making much difference to the dim room. It is around now that the city workers return, and now their cage is shaking from inside, giving off noises of distress – even the lounging heads sit up and take notice. Jose gets a single glimpse through the bars on the front, and sees black patches, unhealthy-looking, around areas of exposed flesh, with a pair of mismatched eyes staring back at him.
The city workers rush the cage through that door and slam it shut behind them, and then the room is silent again. Jose forces himself up, and steals over to the door. It is impressively soundproofed, but holding his head by the keyhole, he just about makes out a voice saying “…nothing new. Just another class 2 bioconstruct. All the same hallmarks – the flesh, the traces of heroin.”
Jose staggers away from the door, and flops back down in his seat. “They must be animal control, then,” says the prostitute idly. Jose has felt the effects dying down anyway, but now, recognising one of Black Magic’s things, he feels dangerously sober. His first instinct is to shoot to his feet and leave, but all the dread possibilities – mainly, the idea the feds know he is working for Black Magic, and will come and destroy him – are paralysing. So he reaches for the pipe and fouls his throat again.
“Man, you smell,” says Maria as Jose stumbles through the door. It isn’t remotely judgemental, just an idle comment. He is in no mood for anything of the sort. She is half-napping on the couch, her legs splayed out in a way that is the opposite of ladylike, and he tells her so, before taking up the phone and calling emergency services.
“They got one of your things, your…bioconstructs,” begins Jose. The words fade out to white for Maria, who has genuinely been quite stung, his comment has cut straight through her persistent chemical walls. Ladylike? She got this pregnant and fat, and is still expected to be ladylike? What more do they want from her?
It is too much effort, she thinks, so grimly it shocks her a little. Such is life – too much is asked of people, for too little of a reward. And then comes another thought, this one does not scare her with its depression but its sheer atavism, and it is that perhaps death is not such a bad alternative. After all, as a mother it will hardly be her life any more. The child will consume ever-larger amounts of her resources, she will probably still have to carry the damned thing from time to time and it will ruin her knees even worse than it already has.
“I didn’t want to be right about that place,” says Black Magic, his voice now creeping out of the phone as though he’s there in the room. “Alright. This makes things a lot simpler. Oh, check your mail.”
At that very second, the letterbox rattles. Jose walks suspiciously over to it, and picks up a damp sandwich bag containing ten thousand dollars. It is less bills than he might have imagined – just a hundred hundreds. He sits down, holding the bag protectively on his lap, not caring that it will appear he has wet himself.
“Now, I had a plan to get the place infiltrated.” Yeah, thinks Jose, throw so much money at me it would override any sort of moral or practical hesitancy I had around taking crack. “I had cooked up a special shot. I put my blood and sweat into it. The plan was to simply get it into the crack den, and wait for somebody to take it.”
Suddenly Maria is paying complete attention, her face twisting and turning ashy.
“Sadly it seems to have gone missing. The idea was, when someone took it-”
What? What, Black Magic?
“Well, to be honest I’m not sure. It would have done something to them, at least. The same sort of thing that happened to me. And then, I thought to myself, they’d be a lot more willing to cooperate. So then, they could do the ground work for me.”
Maria opens her mouth, wanting to protest vocally. Instead her lunch comes splashing out half-digested. Jose panics, the phone becomes just a box of noises. She recovers quickly and grabs at him, grabs out for help, her bloodshot eyes staring into his.
“The shot,” she says, and as she does, the first rush comes on again. “When it all went off in the block. When I just needed to feel better, that was the one, it fell out of his pocket, that’s what I took.”
She vomits again. Her conscious mind somehow breaks through to the level of her immune system, convinces it to purge her body of anything in its pipelines, and as she crumples forward, landing face-first in the puddle of her sick, her bladder releases and a dark spot spreads over her clothes.
Jose throws the phone aside, and strains to turn her over. She fell on her belly, and he places a hand on it, not caring about the various fluids. He hopes, desperately, to feel a writhe from inside, but there is nothing, only the heat of her panic and fear.
Chemical-smelling sweat bleeds out through his pores as he hauls Maria down the corridor and into the basement, into the filthy tower stairwell that leads back to the sewer. He can feel it, in his heart, as he burns off the rest of the crack. At any moment his dopamine receptors will run dry and this false energy will cut out.
Gently, easily, he brings her down each set of metal steps, all the while glancing at her lolling head – and pleading that she will be alright. That none of these ghouls have infected her. Have infected the baby.
All the while, the sickness cries out in pain from his opioid receptors. He is struck by how badly this might get. That the suits that somehow detected Black Magic could now pick them up as well, if Maria really has been infected, changed into something awful.
This in mind, there is no thought of calling an ambulance and informing the authorities, even if he could have. He is living in a world, after all, where all the traditional power structures have been discredited. The state would have them both over a barrel, the church and the community would no longer burn them alive but probably would hand them to the state. And prayer? He might as well whistle. No, he knows that there is only one option left, and he has many issues with it but it is the only possible answer available.
“Black Magic!” he cries out, desperately, down God-knows how many more dripping, rusty flights. If they are being tracked, he thinks instantly, they’ll probably hear that, echoing in case they didn’t get it the first time.
He imagines leaving Maria on these grimy stairs, retiring upstairs to their warm and pleasant-smelling apartment to take a hit, and then returning before she even knows. The disgust at himself is so viscerally intense he nearly vomits himself, and he continues downwards. Lifting her body, their family in his arms and then easing them down the next little way. As he breathes heavily, trying to keep his own machinery going, he begins to cough, huge grating barks that echo in the narrow staircase.
What will happen to her, he wonders, the thoughts tearing at his brain. Will she become one of those shadowed creatures, the bioconstructs he heard tell of – but then, everyone would be a bioconstruct of some kind, surely?
He cries out again, listening to his voice sink and vanish down into the darkness. Two more flights down, the bottom looks no closer at all, and now he is truly pouring sweat, his hair is sticking to his forehead and itching like a million maggots having a taste of his flesh.
Finally he must collapse. The world is agony, all swirling around him while he lays across these steps, motionless and paralysed. Maria is warm next to him, the only bit of comfort he has left. She may be caked in her various fluids, but she breathes softly and normally, like she is simply asleep instead of being warped from within.
He lets his head fall back and looks up at the flight above. The dripping water hits his face, as torturous as it is, the sensation is still nicely refreshing. Then Maria very softly says “If I turn,” and he jumps, jumps to attention, crouches over her ready to give all the care he can. Her eyes are still closed, but he figures that would be too much effort for her at this point.
“If I turn, into one of those things, will you still love me?”
It leaves him speechless. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that he wouldn’t, and now worries it was a little shortsighted. Will they have to live in a sewer? Will she fly around at night, drinking garbage-water?
Her eyes open. One is dangerously dilated, the other is normal. Both are beginning to cry. “Please,” she says, “please still love me. I don’t know what else I can do.”
And as she yearns out loud, feels her internal dams bursting and crashing against the monolith of her fading consciousness, it is then that they both hear dull footsteps coming up the stairs from below.
Jose comes to on the couch.
He thinks for a moment he has fallen in a drug-related stupor, and that he has been put to bed by whatever higher power he may rely upon, whichever caring influence is in his life to be called upon.
He hears Maria groan in pain, through in the bedroom. His body is screaming at him with a million horrible voices, the two main rivals being his dope-sickness and his crack come-down. Every single one of them demands he stay here, for lack of effort, lay here and suffer. None of this stops him rising to his feet like an oiled machine and staggering through the door to the bedroom.
The air is hot inside, like the stormy season on some luxurious Caribbean island. Maria lies on her sick-bed, sprawled and moaning, but not with pain, not through her persistent doped-up state, moaning out of discomfort. She knows something is not as it should be.
“I’m here, I’m here, it’s alright – what’s up?”
“It’s coming,” she says, fixing him with her frazzled gaze. A part of him thinks of the stories and the things man should not know, that a forbidden thing is on its way ready to tear apart reality as they know it. “The baby’s coming, it’s happening.”
He takes her hand. “You sons of bitches,” he slurs, not to her, to the room at large, to the emptiness. “You couldn’t stay and help us out on this?”
“You saw them? I saw them,” she says, breathily, feverish and her face turning red and sweaty with the heat. “They’re not like us, I could tell. But they were. I don’t know, it’s not clear.”
“Ah, they, they got us here, they got us safe, you’re doing ok. That’s the important thing.” This is coming, of course, from his self-loathing at not keeping Maria safe himself. “They’re, they can’t be so bad. Decent, overall, you know, they know what’s important. With what we’ve seen, they’re not so bad, they’re just things, really, pretty much like you and me.”
“Now you’re doing Drugstore Cowboy,” she laughs, before jerking violently, nearly doubling up as she tries to breath.
“Please be ok,” he says quietly as she spasms and wheezes.
“I’m good,” she says, once she has her breath back, “I’m on top of the world, right here.”
Based on Jose’s remaining knowledge of physics, this is technically correct. He fights off the urge to piss-shiver, and given his stupor is pleasantly surprised to note he has not soiled himself.
Maria does one brief whisper of a smile, that tears at his heart, before her waters break. The scent of amniotic fluid fills the room, and Jose realises what he kept smelling on the maternity wing.
“I will be right back,” he says, to Maria’s closed eyelids, her heaving chest and her sweating neck.
He takes an extended bathroom break, as he does in work now and then whilst still working through a stinking hangover or sick patch. As indeed he has done consistently these past few days as he tries to cut down on the heroin, and has felt the backlash rising up out of the depths at him. On the plus side, he is now shitting freely.
There was no hope of him getting in today, at any rate. He sits on the couch, savouring this moment of brief freedom, and then sets about making himself a shot. Even the process of doing this passes surprisingly quickly, and he pauses once more with the needle slipped inside his arm, wondering if it will all be like work from now on.
He takes the shot. His walls are down, given his attempt to withdraw gradually, and it strikes his brain the kind of blow that would decide any conflict on the battlefield.
Everything is bliss once again. He is everyone, he is no-one, just riding the freak waves along the highways and vistas of the freak kingdom. He will soon be the perfect family man, and if their first-born turns out to be a monstrosity, well, those weird constructions in the sewer can raise it as their own, and teach it their ways…
He does not entirely trust his legs, and forces himself up on his hands before running unsteadily back to the bedroom.
Maria has taken a grip on the bedclothes that would probably sustain her if she were hanging off the edge of a glacier. Still she makes no sound other than low growls, the non-specific complaint of something not being quite right inside.
“I think you have to push,” he says as he takes her hand again, and thinks involuntarily of the act of pushing down on the plunger before feeling that transcendant feeling lifting you up from below.
“I can’t push,” she says, face shining, limbs powerless. “Not now.”
“Please, baby,” he says, speaking to both of them.
“It’ll be alright,” she says, nodding and nearly gone. “You don’t need to worry. There is life, all around us and inside us, life like we never imagined. You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it.”
“Why’d you ever take that shot?” he sighs, all of this resonating with the whole bleak story he’s started to remember ever since waking up.
“Why’d you?” she asks, and as the question rises from those cracked lips they begin to twist, just a little, into a smile.
They laugh together, but then Jose jumps in fright. He looks down, at where he held her hand, and sees deep grooves in her flesh, marks left by his fingers.
“That’s not normal,” he says weakly. She holds up that hand, to observe it for herself, and nods, mumbling agreement. “How’s it feel?”
She stares at the indentations in her hand, mouthing silently, then blinks and says “Normal.”
A buzzer sounds in the main room of their apartment. Someone is at the front door of the block, and is after them. They cannot think of who it might be and so put it out of their minds.
“I can see them now,” says Maria, breathing heavier by the second, face turning redder, “like light. They’re all around, I think.”
Jose stares into her shining eyes, wondering what’s going on inside them. He repositions himself on the bed, and puts his hand down on a saturated area of the duvet. Instantly he realises the major obstacle to her actually delivering the baby, and lifts her legs to strip off her soaked clothes and underwear.
It feels odd doing this in such a different context, he reflects, peeling the fabric off her skin. This vague confusion is not helped when Maria breathes hard and says “Oh, doctor,” in absolute bliss.
“Come on,” he says, although a little flattered, “this, this definitely isn’t the time for that.”
“This kid will have a loving family,” she says firmly. It brings tears to his eyes.
“Alright, first things first,” and he hikes up her shirt as well, to take a look at her belly. He nearly chokes when it seems to expand and distend further before his eyes. And when he sees veins lighting up dark red across it, with every wracking breath she takes, he puts it safely down to heroin and stress. It will be fine, he tells himself, and wonders whether he should tell her that, or ask her if it will.
“Oh God,” she says, and lurches forward, like she’s moving to get up – but she cannot possibly conquer her own belly. “It’s coming, it’s moving, it’s…” She opens her mouth, and Jose braces for the scream, the gut sound of the agony of his loved one, before she flops down backwards. “Actually…you know, actually, I think it’ll be ok.”
He finally exhales properly, in a shower of relief and gratitude, and leans over to kiss her on the forehead. As he does, she takes his hand, and slips it under her shirt, onto her breast.
He attempts to raise his head, and finds himself resisted, unable to pull away, some force holding his lips in place. At the same time, as he squeezes her breast he finds it yielding further than it normally would, and his stomach churns at the sudden thought his fingers might somehow tear right through her flesh and meet in the middle.
As he panics he yanks his head free, with surprisingly little effort. He withdraws his hand, feeling the same suction there, and sees a blob of flesh-coloured liquid drip from his fingers and land on Maria’s belly, where it is absorbed seamlessly.
“You see that too?” he asks, afraid to touch her again but wanting to so very dearly.
There is a crash that shakes the room. Both of them instinctually recognise it as the front door of the block.
At this point, all Maria wants is to get the baby out of her womb, and hold it in her arms, and get to being a mother rather than waddling around looking ridiculous. It is a far cry from her childhood dreams of space travel or other rocket-based fields, but it is, she thinks, a fairly noble aim. And this world, this horrible world with its pitched battles and terrible screaming voices will not even let her have that. It weighs on her heavier than the baby ever has, and she makes the conscious decision fuck it, just fuck it.
The next crash is the door to their apartment. Jose looks back at her, shaking with fear. She is smiling again, and she gives a little sigh, and melts into the bed.
It happens too fast for Jose to fully process. One second she is there, the next there is a fading, fleshy humanoid shape, and then she is gone. Now a reedy cry fills the room. Among the clothes, all that remains of Maria, there is a baby, their baby, whole and unhurt. Its umbilical cord trails over the bed like a feeding worm, still attached to the placenta.
Jose lays a hand protectively over it, no barrier of skin and womb this time. It grasps his thumb, and he begins to sob, and is still doing it when the door to the bedroom is smashed off its hinges.
“Stand up. Hands on your head.”
Everything in him yearns to sweep the baby up in his arms. But even though he is well past the point of making any sudden move, he knows the bar to ‘sudden move’ is down in the depths right now – and then, of course, they will both end up shot. So he complies, even though he should be fathering.
He can practically feel the gun barrels probing his back, probably the back of his head at this range. And he recognises the voice, it is the same one that interrogated him about Black Magic, the fed.
“What are you reading?”
“The levels just shot right down, sir,” crackles a slightly distorted voice that Jose instantly pictures as coming through a gas mask. “Right about when we came in. I’d say he flushed it, but-” and now he can almost see the shrug.
“Check the infant.”
“You don’t touch that fucking kid,” says Jose, turning around and getting a submachine gun waved in his face.
“Don’t make me use this,” snaps and pops the voice from behind the empty eyes of the mask.
“I would advise you cooperate,” says the fed, standing easily and filling the doorway. “You’re looking at twenty to life for aiding and abetting. A lot less paperwork in killing you now.”
A second gas-masked thug appears from behind the first, and holds out a phone with two antennae over the baby. “No readings, sir,” they chatter. “Infant’s completely normal.”
Jose stares goggle-eyed, the words ringing in his ears like church bells. He is stunned to the point he cannot even make a move, sudden or otherwise. Could this be some mad hallucination? It’s a little too perfect after all, these are the guys trying to root out Black Magic’s contagion, they must be able to diagnose it right.
“Something’s up with the scanner,” says the second goon, now turning the thing around in all directions. “It’s not giving a clear reading. Keeps getting hits, then losing them.”
“But the baby’s fine, right?” says Jose, moving forward just enough to provoke the first goon into jabbing him sharply in the stomach with their gun’s muzzle.
Now the fed starts forward, pulling a little silver pistol from inside his immaculate lapels. “We know you had contact with org one, what you know as Black Magic,” he says. “You may cooperate immediately or not at all.” And he swings his gun out to his side, aiming low, at the bawling form on the bed.
Jose instantly prays he will not hear that crying stop. “He’s down in the sewer,” he says. “There’s a way down across the hall.”
“Good man,” says the fed, lowering the pistol, only a flicker on his face betraying his awareness of having threatened a newborn. “You, stay here, watch him – we’ll have to take him in for questioning.”
The fed and one of the goons leave. The other goon trains their gun on Jose, moving to stand between him and the door. This is good, thinks Jose, this is slightly better odds. Were he not so high and scared, he is confident he could get out of this somehow. Reason out some way of defeating, neutralising, or evading the threat.
Maria floats in a sightless, soundless void, and it is bliss. It is even more pleasurable and delectable than heroin, or even that tainted shot that fell from Black Magic’s pocket what seems like eons ago. It is utter peace and tranquillity, her pulse, if she still had one, would be beating to the same rhythm as the universe itself.
There is no pain here. If there was it would be the good kind of pain, benign, kinky, sexy pain. The kind of thing she could explore, completely safe from the gnawing demands of the world, and if it turned out she was into it, great, and if not that would be ok too.
But this sets her mind off, racing as it is through this incredible state of being, thinking of Jose, and of their baby. She knows she must in fact pull herself together, and as she does this her vision returns, clear, sharp and overwhelming. She sees and rationalises the threat, and comes to a quick conclusion.
Jose, past the length of the black gunmetal, and the trained, trialed person aiming it at him, sees puddles of discoloured flesh emerge on the walls, and the floor, and the ceiling. A million little particles all form up together, to the point they have some muscle mass and real, mechanical strength, and then under their own will, they hurl themselves, spurting off the wall straight at the goon.
The first impact splashes across their gun, leaving a thick layer on it, and they have barely begun to react before another lands on their head, covering the gas-mask’s eyeholes and then adhering around their throat. Even having splattered, there is enough matter there to choke the goon into unconsciousness, and they drop the gun, scraping at their own neck while creaking out “Oh, man! Not cool!” before collapsing.
Jose is already flinching away with his whole body, scrambling up onto the bed, gathering the baby up in his arms, placenta and all, and going for the window. Yet as he goes to boot it out, he hesitates, part instinct to not shower his child with broken glass, and part a distinct hunch that nothing smells wrong here, that what he has just seen is not an alien intruder.
The pools of flesh all flow into one, which grows upward like a termite colony and rapidly takes on hominid form. Like all the pieces of a magic eye suddenly fitting together, Maria is standing there naked. For a moment her face is horribly warped, eyes tiny, skin colourless and grimy, and her mouth yawning open like an abyssal void – but then she is back, and she stumbles forward, arms wobbling dangerously as she leans on the bed.
She stands straight, as if she is attempting to balance, and presses her hands together in a few different ways. “I think I’ve got myself under control,” she says.
Jose wants to rush over, seize her in a hug and never, ever let go, but figures this would probably split her in half – and if it didn’t, the baby would probably asphyxiate between them. Instead, he raises his arms, smiling weakly, and watches Maria’s eyes go liquid.
Very gently, she takes the baby, and holds it to her breast. Whilst it is occupied, she takes the umbilical cord in her other hand, and for a moment her fingertips freeze into razor-edges. The cord is cut, and the placenta falls to the ground. Neither Jose nor Maria care, it is not like having a wad of flesh on the carpet is so very unpleasant.
Though she wishes time could stop then, and they could live that perfect moment forever, Maria’s eyes slide over to the unconscious goon on the floor. “We need to move again,” she says, gently placing the baby on the bed and gathering up her clothes.
“Yeah,” says Jose shakily, now starting to feel the hit again. “We’ve got the money, we can take that and just get out of here.” He realises it may not be that simple, and the fed may have seized the money as criminal assets – but when they go through to the front room, it is still there, in its bag between the cushions of the couch. Clearly the fed was coming for them and them alone.
Jose takes the lead, peeks around the apartment door. He would have liked to do so fearlessly, but is distinctly aware the fed will likely have brought more than two gunmen. Nonetheless, he looks out, and to his surprise the coast is clear. They go down the corridor, he and his beautiful young family, and they are close to the front door when they hear a sound from below, something falling and jangling down steel steps, the noise getting fainter with every impact.
“Do, do you think they can kill him?” wonders Maria. The question is laced with the undertone of whether they could kill her – and now she has attacked one of their goons, they certainly have cause. But more likely, they would take her alive, as without that they couldn’t subject her to any fates worse than death.
“I won’t let them get you,” says Jose.
One of the goons’ altered, unreal voices cries out “Movement!”
Several automatic guns go off at once, and after Jose and Maria have instinctually ducked down, they are straight out the double doors of the block, needing no more prompting.
They are partway across the street, not quite running but moving fast, when Jose realises that despite his finer impulses of leaving it all behind, there is still a healthy stash of heroin in the apartment. At the same time, Maria says “What if they find us again? I’m not living in the sewer.”
“We might not have a choice.” And at this she sighs a little, silently accepting it into the list things they have never had a choice about.
They turn back to the apartment block, hesitant at exactly how they will get down to the safety of the sewer. Maria says “Fuck that, we’re not going through a battle,” only moments before Black Magic shoves his way out of the front doors, throwing them both open with dark blood running down his face and neck.
“You two should have run,” he says, smiling a terrible smile. “Should have gotten out of this.”
“If they can detect us, where exactly you suggest we run to?” says Jose. “And if you say the sewers I’ll take that fucked-up hand right off your arm.” He instantly regrets this as more figures emerge from the block – fractured humanoids with glossy skin of greenish-black, and bare, open flesh visible at their elbows and necks.
“Ah, so you’re about to suggest somewhere else? Well, that’s a relief,” says Black Magic, smile growing thinner. “Now, if you want to talk like people for a second, we have five minutes before more of those bastards turn up and try to murder us all. We can get you out of here. We have a kind of an underground railway setup, but you’ll have to do exactly as I say.”
“Fine,” say Jose and Maria at once.
“Spread out,” Black Magic says to his creatures, with a wave of his normal hand, and they take up strategic positions at both ends of the street. Some wield tangled bits of rebar, others are just about holding submachine guns they presumably stole from the goons. Black Magic walks straight forward, for the crack den.
A twenty-year veteran of the fire service goes over the crumbs on his shirt, tries to differentiate the base from the bread, and fills his pipe again. As he attempts to light up, his Zippo on the point of giving up the ghost, their host says “I think the feds are onto us.”
“What? How do you know?” asks the firefighter, pipe still quivering in front of his mouth.
“’cause one of them came by, and showed me his ID, and said I should just keep my fucking head down.”
Two quick explosions take out the side door’s hinges, solid little slugs tearing them apart, and the door falls unceremoniously inwards, landing on a mechanic’s toes. Black Magic fills the doorway with shadow, and he says “Get out” in the terrible booming voice that comes with being a public enemy.
The den’s clientele have no wish to do anything but obey, yet none of them fancies the odds on trying to squeeze past him out the door. Instead, they huddle further into their corners.
Black Magic’s shoulders sag – he had thought that voice would get things done. Still, he proceeds into the crack den, and to the electronically locked door at the back. He raises his altered hand and blasts the lock, not even denting it.
Jose and Maria follow him hesitantly inside, and he turns to them, furious. “Open it,” he orders Maria.
“Say what now?”
“You can do it,” he says curtly, stepping aside to loom intimidatingly over a dangerously high travelling salesman.
Maria steps up to the door, mind spinning. She knows he is right and must somehow know that he is right, she can do things now, strange and terrible things. But she has hardly mastered them to this degree.
She puts her hand on the lock, and lets it relax into a flat adhesive mass. This, she grants, is step one, but what comes next? Before it all seemed so natural, so reflexive. As though she merely had to think it, and it would happen.
In her mind’s eye she sees the lock alone, rotating in a theoretical void, She turns all her effort into snaking tendrils of her own biomass through tiny openings, taking hold of the slug of copper that holds the door fast, and through the intricate pain she seizes it and forces it in the other direction. Under her warped hand, the door is pulled open. From inside wafts the unmistakable smell of turning flesh.
“Shit,” says Jose, “you can do it!” Black Magic scoffs at that, and sweeps between them, through the door. A second later he gives a howl of pain that sends the baseheads running for the exit, and sets the baby off crying again.
Jose and Maria follow him through the door. This room is cleaner than the ante-chamber, it looks like it was hospital-sterile not too long ago. Black Magic is kneeling next to a table with a split garbage bag on it. Strewn from the split is all manner of waste – jars, packets, chicken-bones and gobs of meat – but the bag itself is moving, writhing around and making pained little peeps. It is secured in place with surgical straps and duct-tape, but it looks out at them with humanoid, liquid eyes. They look between it and their baby, and shudder.
Black Magic stands abruptly, and turns his warped hand on the bag. There is another bang, and the bag’s pain ceases as its innards are splashed over the back wall. He turns to Jose and Maria, eyes fractured and crazy for a moment, so much that his twisted hand seems normal.
“Pray you never have to do that,” he says through his teeth. “Come on.” He goes over to the other side of the room, where a standard computer terminal sits on a plasticky table, and whips out a greasy flash drive, plugging it in with his good hand. “One of you, run a search, and grab all the files that mention Suzanne Planchette.”
Jose sits down at the terminal. The password, thankfully, is ‘swordfish’ and is written on a sticky note. A preliminary search reveals hundreds, almost thousands of documents. He begins transferring them onto the flash drive, and the terminal gives him a countdown. “How long did we have?” he asks, just before they hear powerful engines outside.
The den’s fiends, screaming again, run back inside, and Maria scolds them “I’m trying to get him to sleep!”
“Close that door!” adds Black Magic.
As an aspiring spoons player toes the door shut, gunfire erupts outside and they all duck down. This is not the occasional pops and bursts of state forces making a raid on the apartment block. No, this is the constant machine-gun tempo of a pitched battle.
“Stay back,” says Black Magic to Maria, gesturing her further inside the reinforced room, and aiming his bloated hand at the doorway.
“I don’t like this,” says Maria, sliding to the floor, curling around the screeching baby, just about supporting herself on Jose’s legs. “It’s just like before.”
“We survived before,” says Jose, the blinking transfer bar making his face flash while, in another window, he subtly searches for any records that include their names. The combination of heroin slowing his reactions and the constant distraction of gunfire makes him pour with sweat. And when the screams start outside, and Black Magic’s eyes roll back in his head, Jose and Maria start to shake.
Outside, the gas-masked state forces pincer in on the street. Most of them have enough stimulants coursing over their brains to find this a fun, challenging day out. Urban warfare is one thing, but when any shadow might turn out to be a monstrosity with a shovel, that’ll really put you through your paces.
One of their number pushes up the road, taking shelter behind an olive-green dumpster. From here, they have a bead on the glistening bioconstruct that is providing most of the covering fire for the other side. They blow it apart in a shower of shell casings and fish skeletons.
“Move up!” says their commanding officer. “Light ‘em up!”
“Smoking!” replies one of their underlings, before turning their underbarrel flamethrower through a shattered window, onto a nest of black plastic things that had taken cover in the apartment block. Inside, Black Magic reels, shuddering and flinching as aspects of his consciousness stop looking out through rudimentary eyes, seeing fire and pain and then nothing.
“Move up!” they cry again. Fifteen people advance stolidly, firing off hundreds of rounds between them, trying to aim for the bioconstructs and not at their allies at the other end of the street. A manhole cover grinds aside, and one of the advancing troops is seized and consumed by a million little tendrils, but it cannot stop their spearhead.
As the battle for the other end of the street tips their way as well, with the remaining bioconstructs drawing fire from both sides, the troops progress onto stage two, and begin homing in on the crack den, which they actually do know as a substation of some sort.
A bullet pierces the door of the den, letting a shaft of light into the gloom inside. “Hold that fucking door!” Black Magic orders the fiends, stepping forward. They converge on the door, on the point of buffering it when another rattle of fire penetrates the door. Those it doesn’t kill, it knocks to the ground.
“It’s nearly done,” says Jose in a tiny voice, looking out at Black Magic, sprawling amongst the ash and the cigarette-ends on the filthy rug. Maria is still leaning on Jose’s legs. She could almost be asleep, but more likely has mentally checked out.
The door, bullet-ridden as it is, is kicked in quite easily. For a moment, the shadow of the first goon fills the passage, before five of them pour in and hold their guns on Black Magic.
“Do not move,” one of them whirrs.
Then, from the back room, the computer gives off a chime like that of a hyper-modernist doorbell. The goons spin their guns up to face it. Jose, feeling as though he is sweating bullets but well aware he isn’t, not quite yet, admits “It’s done.”
“Get away from that,” says one of the goons, starting forward, their heavy boot catching Black Magic’s flank and turning him over. His outstretched normal hand arcs up then comes down, landing in a pile of over-filled trash bags with a squelch.
Maria opens her eyes just in time to see the twisted wall of black plastic sweep all those savage goons back out the front door. The sheer force of its expansion breaks their limbs like matchsticks, before it consumes and assimilates them. The remaining goons outside back away, but far too late – the advancing biomass has already hit the dumpster, with much the same effect as pouring water on an oil-fire. Huge branches of polymer and pulsing, living flesh string themselves up and down the length of the street, even reaching and crushing the goons’ abandoned vehicles.
Black Magic staggers back inside, his coat torn, blood trickling out of his sleeve and dripping from his fingers. “It’s done,” repeats Jose, holding up the flash drive.
“You better have taken that out right, or there’ll be hell to pay,” says Black Magic.
The baby is quiet now, or at least quieter, just staring vacantly out at the world and burbling instead of its mouth being open in one eternal scream. Jose can still feel the cold sweat on his skin, but it is not quite as intense and visceral as when there were people coming to kill him. He wonders if the baby did not have essentially the same thought process. He wonders how Maria feels about it, if she can sweat any more.
The curdled slop of flesh and biomass laps at their ankles as they cross the street. Black Magic pauses by a tattered green-black skin, and bows his head, speaking silent prayers. Maria is staring at the back of his head – there is no symbiotic thought running between them like a spiderweb, but nonetheless she can almost see his soul.
“But you think she’s still alive, right?” she says. Black Magic almost jumps. “This girl Planchette. You’re trying to find her.”
Black Magic turns, and full-on faces Maria, even knowing she has the same eerie powers she takes a step back. Without shouting, he says “They took her. And I will find her.”
“This is really a whole new side of you,” says Jose, gently bouncing the baby in his arms.
“Oh, like you thought I was made of stone. Now, I’ll need you to come with me. Maria, your liquefaction or whatever should come in handy. Plus, who knows, maybe the kid was changed and it’s not quite showing yet-”
For Maria, it is practically instinctual. The tiniest patch of skin on her leg ripples and melds with the slurry covering the street. It rises like a tidal wave and crashes down on Black Magic, surrounding him and seizing him in a great gelatinous fist.
“Fuck you,” says Maria, “we’re not coming with you, we’re not doing shit you say, and if the next words out of your mouth aren’t ‘okay, that’s fine’ I’ll break all your legs.”
Black Magic struggles inside the pulsing mass, and eventually manages to free his mouth. “Okay. That’s fine. You two fuck off and get hunted down like rabid dogs – I said okay that’s fine!” he adds quickly, as he feels a distinct pressure starting to bend his legs the wrong way.
Jose, however, has been thinking, going down the kind of endlessly pessimistic spiral that only comes with feeling a hit start to fade, and knowing exactly what comes next. “Maria,” he says quietly, a cautious hand on her shoulder, “the bastard’s right. They will find us, and then you’ll have to watch me die trying to stop them from taking you.”
“For fuck’s sake, Jose,” says Maria, screwing her eyes shut, trying to hold in the tears. “I don’t want to live in the sewers.”
“Well, I don’t want to even more. I don’t have strange and terrible powers. But, compared to this?” Behind him, a stray patch of concentrated gastric acid busily eats through a lamp-post at the base. At that moment, it corrodes enough of the metal to send the thing toppling down with a squelch. “It’s probably not so bad, once you get used to it.”
“That’s his world down there, though, he’s got his people, we’d have to live like they do.”
“Live free or die,” chokes Black Magic, his intonation deep and operatic.
Maria’s shoulders slump. The flesh-wall retreats, placing Black Magic gently on the ground. Then, as one, they go for the door of the apartment block and for the steps down into the world below.