R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

I dropped the sheet on the floor, gazed at my palms and fingers. Hands are miraculous things. Placed thumb to thumb, they’re perfectly designed for wringing necks…

I gazed around for several moments, looking from this to that, just to be sure it would all be there if I needed it. In my skull.

Nazi, I decided. The room smelled like Nazi. I drove through the centre of the town. Dark business fronts. Stretches of deserted sidewalk, freckled with gum. The street lights crawled over the lip of my windshield. Shadow and light dropped like water across me. The gleam of my Volkswagen struck me as alien, made me feel as though I were the squishy insides of a bug.

Ruddick. Fawk. If it had been a city, I could have romanticized things. I could have waxed wise about the scum, squalor. I could have mythologized the ethos of the parasite, or even the out-and-out killer. Lots of people deserved to die in the city. Lots of people brought on what they suffered.

But Ruddick was a small town. There was no anonymity to round off the hard edges, no background clamour to lift the music out of human screams. Everything was stark, real.

With no cracks to fall between, the dead made themselves noticed.

The light of the Kwik-Pik fanned across the small asphalt parking lot. I parked next to the car I recognized from that first meeting, back when Molly and I were still knocking on doors. I sat and waited for the paying customers to leave. Then I cracked my door, breathed deep the oily smell of summer leaking from brick and concrete. For a moment Ruddick almost tasted like a city. My heels made no sound across the tarvey.

I pressed open the glass door.

I walked into the white-baked interior, floated past all the pretty plastic colours. I reached back and tugged my automatic from my belt, held it directly in front of me. Tim stared in abject horror.

“A guy pulls a gun,” I said. Track Twelve

Sometimes I see myself through the scope of a sniper’s rifle. Crosshairs parse me into sliding quadrants, pin me to the centre of the packed parking lot, the variety store foyer, the entrance to the motel office- whatever. I am oblivious. My gaze roams every angle except the one belonging to the lens.

Everything I do is soundless. Tim was only too happy to help me. He fairly fell over himself in his rush to betray his friends.

I was right about Nill and his techniques, the way he progressively implicated his recruits in various crimes, nurturing a sense of impunity even as he forged a sense of belonging-always invoking the false blood of gang-family ties. Tim was supposed to meet the others at the abandoned Hydradyne plant after his shift-to relieve one of the others if I failed to turn up in a timely fashion. God’s work never ends.

I told him this was precisely what he would do. Only forty minutes to go, as it turned out. The Kwik-Pik closed early on Sundays.

Another car pulled into the lot, so I took his cell and retreated to the magazine section, whiled away the time with Maxim, FHM, and finally the skin mags proper.

I was still staring at pussy when he locked up.

His Honda Civic was three years older than my Volkswagen Golf. Even still, I suffered a pang of shame driving a car in the same status range as that of a punk racist high school dropout.

Gave me second thoughts about poor Radulov.

I worked off my sense of material inadequacy by leaning forward and describing-in excruciating detail-the fates of those who had crossed me in the past. Two Baathists skinned in the desert. An unscrupulous coke dealer found hanged in his apartment. A mob hit man discovered in three different counties.

“You will wave hello,” I grated, “even though you’re shitting your pants in terror. You will smile, even though you’re shitting your pants in terror. You will do everything I tell you to do…” I reached forward to pinch his trachea. “Because if you fail, Dutchie my boy, you will die convulsing, you will gasp your final breath gnawing dirt. Do you copy?”

He blinked tears, blubbered something I understood as an affirmative. Tim drove down Highway 3-toward the Framer Compound, suggestively-before turning off on an unpaved service road. The little car rocked to the dip of parched potholes. Weeds and scrub scratched and brushed the fenders and underbody. Tim sat rigid, gazing out at the bobbing fan of illumination before him. Skeins of dried grasses. Tracks in the cool dust. Shadows in the dark.

We drove past an opened chain-link gate then turned down a slope. Sumac and other scrub fenced the lane. A wall of corrugated siding resolved out of the black, windowless and nondescript. Tim slowed, and I saw the gleam of a pickup truck and the hindquarters of another car flash through the headlights. He parked beside the two vehicles. I glimpsed a figure with a flashlight walking toward us. “Stay in the car until he comes,” I barked, pressing the muzzle of my gun against the side of his eye. “Leave it running…”

Then I slipped out into the night. The surrounding terrain leapt into view: swales of brownlands beginning a long regression to pre- Columbian forest. The factory’s main structure, I realized, was effectively shielded from the neighbouring subdivisions, which was why, no doubt, the Thirds had chosen it out of all the abandoned shells on offer in the industrial park. Tim had parked to the left of the pickup and car. I couldn’t duck in front of the Civic because of the headlights, and I couldn’t bolt behind because that was the figure’s direction of approach. My only alternative was to huddle in the overgrowth, risk the approaching flashlight. I fell prone behind a hump of grasses, peered between shredded threads…

“Heeeeey, Dutcheee-boy!” the figure called, kicking the dust tracks. Fucknut, I decided to call him.

He was one of the two guys from the picnic table. Junkie thin. Beard trimmed to the craggy contours of his face. Older, with a grey mullet dropping in strings around his shoulders. He looked like George Carlin at the wrong end of a hunger strike.

His flashlight swayed negligently, missed me altogether.

“Hey? Everything okay?” he said, sauntering around the Civic. “You remember to grab me a pack of Camels?”

He leaned into the driver’s-side window. “You forgot aga-” He heard my rush, but too late to do anything but grunt in abbreviated alarm. I clipped him as he turned, catching him on the notch in his orbital-just above his left eye. He dropped like a rolled carpet.

I retrieved the flashlight to inspect Tim. He sat there, as ashen as a heart attack, his hands clamped on the wheel. His Kwik-Pik name tag gleamed in the white.

“Drive home, Tim,” I said. “You weren’t made for this. You weren’t made to hate… “

There’s something about tears in flashlight illumination, the way they sparkle like rhinestones. Like something apparently precious.

“Do you understand?”

“Yuh,” he said, swallowing.

“Then go, kid. Get the hell out of here.” Surprise. We like it the way we like our pets-small and slavishly dependent.

Every heartbeat is an ambush, if you think about it. The key to success in combat is merely to remind your opponent of this fact at opportune times. To make weapons of his routines and his assumptions.

This was why I simply strolled toward the factory in the wake of Tim’s car, dandling the flashlight in an offhand manner. I suppose I could have done a bunch of Navy SEAL shit, diving and rolling through the shadows. But why take the scenic route?

I followed the side of the factory, kicking my feet through the weeds and grasses the same as Fucknut. I found myself glancing up along the looming plane of the wall-a relic of a time when I despised rooftops, I imagine. That’s the thing about war days: they never stop being yesterday.