Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

He glares at it, wondering if he can blow it to pieces. But nothing. He remembers Elisa saying that she could will herself into the wolf form; she just needed to really want to kill someone. And so Billy thinks of all the reasons why he wants to kill Anton Cirrus. He thinks of Anton Cirrus firing bullets into Jørgen, leaving him to bleed to death on the floor of a Starbucks. He thinks of Anton Cirrus’s stupid write-up. The storehouse of tired forms and stale devices. Billy grimaces.

Come on, Lucifer , he thinks. Make me a goddamn monster .

Nothing. He stands there with his fists clenched for a long second. He releases them.

He contemplates just using the intercom and seeing if someone will buzz him in.

And then he thinks: Fuck this . He returns to the van and pops open the back.

He rummages until he finds a tire iron.

The glass in the door is treated with some kind of safety film, so the first blow just spiderwebs it, albeit with a satisfying crunch. Nobody’s around to see this except a few Honduran guys pushing a wheeled cart stacked with a half-dozen Igloo coolers. They give Billy a look for all of about half a second before they write him off as part of the scenery: just another insane white dude. It’s a classification that Billy can live with.

He takes four more swings and the sheet of pulverized glass begins to crumple, detaching from the doorframe along one side. Enough that Billy can get a shoulder into the gap and push his way through.

He climbs the stairs, the tire iron dangling at his side, and as he climbs he imagines taking that piece of reassuringly weighty metal and swinging it at Cirrus’s skull, imagines the shudder it would make when it connects.

But you don’t do that , he thinks. You don’t just kill people .

Shut up , he tells himself. You can kill these people .

And that ends the debate for the moment, because he’s on the second floor landing and he’s kicking the door open, and right behind it is Anton Cirrus with a gun, pointed directly at Billy’s face.

“You’re trespassing,” Anton says.

“Call the fucking cops,” Billy says.

“I could,” Anton says, looking Billy up and down. “You’d go to jail. You killed a man. You’re covered in blood.”

“Like you’re so clean,” Billy says. “You shot my fucking roommate. I have a witness. You want to call the cops? Go ahead. I would love to see what happens.” Given the lack of subtlety of his entrance, he’s a little surprised that the cops aren’t here already.

“Drop the tire iron,” Anton says.

When someone has a gun in your face, you feel compelled to do what they say. And so he does it.

“Get inside,” Anton says.

And Billy enters the Bladed Hyacinth offices, basically a single room, dark at this hour, lit only by the light of Macintosh Thunderbolt displays running Cupertino-bred screen savers. The room contains six fancy Aeron chairs, each one stationed at a desk with a MacBook and a surprising amount of jumbled paper. On one desk, Billy notes, is also Anton’s duffel bag.

“Face the wall,” Anton says. “Hands up.” The wall that faces the door is all bookshelves, loaded with literary magazines and proof copies of novels, and Billy dutifully reaches out and gets a grip on the edge of a shelf at eye level.

“So, what, you’re just going to shoot me now?”

“Maybe,” Anton says, pressing the barrel of the gun behind Billy’s ear.

“Anton,” Billy says. “That’s not going to help you. You can kill me. You can kill my friends. But you can’t kill Lucifer. You can’t kill him, you can’t hide from him, and you can’t stop him. You already lost. All you should be thinking about is how to minimize your losses.”

“And how do you recommend I do that?”

“Give me the Neko,” Billy says. “Give me the Neko and I walk out of here. You never see me again. You shot my friend, but you know what? Give me the Neko and I’ll just look past that. We’ll call it even. I won’t tell the cops. You get to keep your shitty little literary empire; you get to keep your book contract; you get to basically go on being yourself , which seems to be something you enjoy. All you have to do is hand over the Neko.”

“Do you know what the Neko is ?” Anton says.

“Some piece of bullshit,” Billy says. “Why do you want it, anyway? You can’t get the sixth seal off it and even if you could—”

“Billy, it’s a perpetual motion machine . Get your mind around that for a second. What that would mean for the people who discover it. How much people would pay for it.”

“Look,” Billy says. “I don’t give a shit about the thing. I just want it to go away. Deep down, you want the same thing. I mean, honestly, do you really have some fantasy where you’re the guy who breaks the laws of physics once and for all?”

“Deep down inside?” Anton says. “You know what I believe deep down inside? I believe I’m intended for great things.”

“Yeah, you know what? I believed that, too. But you know what? All our ambition? It made us do goddamn stupid shit. We each picked a side. We picked sides because we came across people who we thought could help us, who could provide us with some advantage. And now, we both committed felonies tonight and are both pretty much ready to commit another one, which should be an indication to both of us that we were pretty goddamn stupid to have picked the side that we picked. Look, Anton, we’re in the same damn boat. Just two fucking writers who are trying to figure it out and maybe made some bad choices along the way. We shouldn’t be fighting. We should be friends.”

“But Billy,” Anton says. “I can’t be your friend.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a terrible writer.”

Billy sighs. He may or may not be a terrible writer, but he still doesn’t seem to have kick-ass rhetorical skills. Time for a different strategy. “Okay,” he says. “You want to fight? Let’s fight.”

“It’s hardly fair,” Anton says. “You can turn into a wolf.”

“A hell-wolf,” Billy clarifies. “You have a gun to my head, though, which I think kinda evens the odds. But let’s do this differently. Let’s do this old-school. Old-school literary fistfight. Hemingway vs. Stevens.”

Anton pauses. “Mailer vs. Vidal,” he says finally. He lowers the gun. Billy tentatively turns around, looks into Anton’s face.

“Ridgeway vs. Cirrus,” Billy says. “That’s what I’m talking about. You make me cry uncle and I leave here empty-handed. I’ll tell Lucifer that I couldn’t beat you, and you, you get a head start. But if I win—”

“You won’t win,” Anton says. He sticks the gun down into the waistband at the back of his pants and shoves Billy in the chest.

Billy takes the impact hard, stumbles back against the bookshelves. Anton’s hands come up, get a grip on Billy’s head. He presses his thumbs into Billy’s face, as though he were violently shaping a wet lump of clay. Billy snaps his teeth, hoping that flashing his canines might send a message: keep your fingers out of my orifices. But to no real avail: Anton carries on with his attempt to use his heavy hands to smear Billy’s features down to nothingness.

Billy shoots his arm up between Anton’s, gets a grip on Anton’s ear. He pulls, and Anton grimaces. He tightens his grip and lets himself drop down to his knees, banging one savagely on an outlet strip. Anton, not wanting to lose his ear, goes down right along with him, and the two of them thrash on the floor for a minute, each trying to get a better grip on the other.

Billy rolls over onto his back, and then realizes this was a mistake: it allows Anton to press him down, planting one hand on his sternum, the other directly on his belly — Billy groans as Anton squashes his liver, or stomach, or whatever soft organs are down there, unprotected by bones. Anton uses Billy to push himself back into an upright position, and, once risen, he begins to kick Billy with his square-toed Fluevogs. Through the pain, Billy wonders whether it hurts worse to be kicked with square-toed shoes than with the normal kind. This thought is disrupted when Anton kicks Billy in the chin, splitting it open, sending a shower of stars through his skull. One more blow like that and he’ll be unconscious.