Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“How odd,” Lucifer says, when the whine has subsided. An expression of concern crosses his face. “Normally that — goes differently.”

He leans out into the hallway.

There is the sound of automatic weapons fire.

Lucifer is blown back into the room; blood gouts from his chest and from a wound in his throat. A great wet plum-colored stain spreads across the tattered front of the tuxedo shirt. Billy, Jørgen, and Elisa all leap away, horrified. Lucifer stumbles backward, gets tripped up by the desk chair and goes crashing down. Someone screams. Billy realizes that it’s him.

Lucifer clamps a hand over the breached artery in his neck, and struggles to speak.

“Ultimately,” he says, “should someone choose to write my story, I hope that author will take the time to mention that my entire existence really was characterized by my being profoundly, uniquely misunderstood.” This descends into a jag of morbid coughing; blood surges from his mouth in three great waves and then he’s still.

Standing in the doorway are two bearded commando-looking dudes, dressed in gray fatigues webbed with meshes of black nylon, holding stubby automatic weapons at their waists. The older one — his beard almost entirely gray — enters the room and prods Lucifer with his boot. The guys smells like hot machine oil and pipe tobacco, a particular type of sweet Virginia tobacco that hits Billy square in the sensorium and unlocks, of all things, a strong memory of childhood. It’s the smell of home.

And that’s finally the thing that allows Billy to recognize the bearded commando, allows him to realize that he knows him quite well, has in fact known him for his entire life, even though he never expected to see him in this kind of outfit, or in this kind of context.

“Dad?” Billy blurts.

“Put your clothes on, son,” says Keith Ridgeway, Billy’s father. “We’re getting out of here.”

CIRCUMSTANCES ADOLESCENT FEELINGS • GEOMETRY • RELEASING THE CLUTCH • LIFE IN WISCONSIN • BATSHIT INSANITY • FINALLY YOU GET TO FULL STOP • CHINESE FOOD VS. THE VOID • CAN I GET AN AMEN? • A FACT ABOUT OCEANS

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Billy says, looking into the face of his father. “You’re not — I mean are you really—?” He’s suffering a surge of astonishment at seeing his father here, standing over the bullet-riddled corpse of the Devil himself, and he can’t quite shape it into the form of a question. Just the sight of his bookish father holding a gun : just that alone is a shock to his system.

“Billy,” Keith says. He takes a pair of his familiar technocratish glasses out of a Velcro pouch lashed up under his armpit, rubs them with the hem of his combat jacket, and dons them. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

“I’m not all right,” Billy says. He feels a little truculent, saying it, ’cause clearly his dad is here to rescue him, and maybe this is the part where he can begin to relax, just lie back and be shunted to safety, but right now all Billy can think is that he has been lied to his entire life, and that kind of crowds out any major feelings of gratitude that he might otherwise be enjoying.

“I understand,” Keith says. His eyes, magnified by the wide lenses of his glasses, look sad, although Billy finds himself doubting the sentiment. “I am sure some of the occurrences of the last week have been — disorienting.” And then the sadness gives way to intensity, a completely unfamiliar blast of goddamn derring-do or something, and he turns to look at the other commando, a tall, thin man with a West African cast to his features. “Jean,” he barks, “get me a reading on these three.”

“Already on it,” says the other commando, Jean, who has slung his weapon over his shoulder and is poking at some kind of gadget that looks a little like a plastic model of a thighbone. Like Billy’s dad, this guy is all done up in paramilitary gear, and he looks like a soldier, his face grease-smeared and sooty, but Billy can’t help but wonder whether he has a double identity as a high school principal or a pastry chef or something normal.

The gadget in Jean’s hand is flashing red.

“They’ve been changed,” Jean says. “It’s hard to tell how recently. We’re glitching hard here — this tech was not really cleared for cross-planar function—”

“Are you talking about the wolf thing?” Billy says. “ ’Cause you could just, you know, ask us .”

At the word wolf , a look of deep remorse settles into Keith’s face. “I’m sorry, son,” he says. “This is not the way that I’d hoped you’d learn about your unfortunate circumstance—”

“My unfortunate circumstance ?” Billy shouts, finally having had enough. “Missing your bus is an unfortunate circumstance. Throwing up in a cab is an unfortunate circumstance. Being a goddamn sex-demon wolf thing whose whole life is a lie is a fucking existential nightmare .”

“You know, Billy,” Keith snaps, his voice suddenly flinty with annoyance, “maybe you’d have a little bit more information about this situation if you’d just picked up your phone sometime in the last month .”

“If I’d picked up my — You’re really going to put this on me? You knew about all this wolf shit for thirty years and you never told me; I go a couple of weeks without calling you back and it’s my fault that everything goes to Hell?”

Elisa jumps in. “Listen,” she says. “You two. Watching you bicker is very illuminating — every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as we know? — but I could have sworn that somebody mentioned something about getting out of here , and it seems to me that if we can do that—? Then maybe we should do that.” She taps a finger on the doorframe once, firmly.

Jean looks at Billy. “She’s right,” he says. “Get your clothes on. Your dad will explain everything when we’re all back safe.”

Billy, kind of past caring who sees his ass, drops the sheet, kicks off his shoes, and grudgingly works his legs into the orange jumpsuit. “Safe,” he says, as he struggles with the zipper. “Can we really even be safe ? We’re talking about going on the run from the Devil. I kinda doubt that bullets kill him. He’s going to come back, and he’s going to be pissed. Where can we run?”

“We’re going to go to the Manhattan headquarters of a group that can help us,” Keith says. “They call themselves the Right-Hand Path.”

“No way,” Billy says, shaking his head in vigorous denial. “Not those guys.”

“Not those guys?”

“Yeah,” Billy says. “I met them, they’re assholes.” He feels a cold wave of dread swell in his gut. “Oh my God, are you one of them?”

“Not formally, no,” Keith says. “But they’re — allies. They have the resources that we’ll need, and they’re open to our using them. From their HQ we should be able to hide you from Lucifer, and once he’s lost your trail I’ll take you all with me back to Ohio; I can reestablish your wards there. That should effectively mean the end of your collective wolf problem. So. Come on.”

Billy looks at the ring of faces. Maybe they’re right. Maybe he should just go. Maybe he just got off on the wrong foot with the Right-Hand Path; maybe they really are decent guys. He thinks for a moment about how it would feel to have his life back, to be safely removed from the grand design of Lucifer’s plan, the full extent of which he still may not know. It sounds good, and yet he balks. He wonders, though, how much of his resistance is just willful perversity. He doesn’t want to do what his dad is telling him to do: But how much of that is just because he’s being told to do it by his dad ? Has he just straight-up backslid to being a sulky adolescent?