Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

Billy rolls onto his stomach, crawls under the nearest desk, drags himself through the maze of Bladed Hyacinth’s cable management system. Anton tries to lunge down, grab his ankles, drag him back out, but Billy’s fear has given him the advantage of speed. He comes out the far side and keeps crawling, heads under a second desk. He gets tangled in a dangling curtain of wires but he needs to keep putting distance between Anton and himself, so he continues to advance, tugging one of the big monitors off the desk. It crashes down onto the small of his back, and he gives up a yip of pain.

But. He has the space that he needs now. Just a few feet, but that buys him the time to get back to a standing position, to strike his best imitation of a fighting stance.

Anton Cirrus lumbers toward him, slowly, clumsily, all six chairs in the place somehow in his way.

Billy makes a fist. He tries to remember whether he’s supposed to put his thumb on the inside or on the outside. Which way keeps you from breaking your thumb? You put it on the inside, right, so it’s protected by the other fingers? Or is it the other fingers that crush it and pulverize it if you do it that way?

In the end, he isn’t even sure which one he opts for. The second Anton’s head bobs into punching range Billy just pops out at it as hard as he can, fueling the jab with as much animal ferocity as he can muster, with all his frustration and anger — at Anton, at Lucifer, at himself, at the extent of all he’s lost, at just the whole grand stupidity of his life now. He thinks he’s aiming for Anton’s chin but he miscalculates a little bit and gets him instead right in the throat.

Anton gurgles. His eyes bulge. He performs the arrested fish-gulp you perform when you try to take a breath and fail. He does it again and then he crumples down, grips the edge of a desk with both hands to keep himself from collapsing completely.

Billy steps back, bumps into the wall of bookshelves, and gets the bright idea that the grand finale here is to grab one of the bookshelves and topple it, burying Anton underneath. It would just look so cool. He turns, gets a pretty good grip on two shelves, and pulls, but it turns out the thing is maybe bolted to the wall or something? Or maybe the shelves in here were just built into the wall directly? He stands on his tiptoes to try to get a better look and when he comes back down, having learned nothing, Anton Cirrus jams the barrel of the gun into the back of Billy’s jawline.

Billy puts his hands up without being asked.

“Uh,” he says, breathing hard. “You’re not supposed to use the gun, remember? That was the whole point of this exercise.”

“Fuck you,” says Anton, his voice coming out all pinched and strangulated-sounding. “Walk.”

“Where are we going?” Billy asks, as Anton directs him out the door.

“What,” Anton says. “You think I’m just going to shoot you here in my office? Spray your brains into my bookshelves? No. I’m going to take you out and shoot you on the goddamn street and watch you die in the gutter.”

“Oh,” Billy says.

But at that moment he spots someone pushing into the stairwell through the broken glass of the street entrance. A cop? He’d really like to see a cop right about now.

But it’s not a cop. It’s Denver, with her video camera in its shoulder-mount, its red LED blinking blithely at him.

“Hey, fuckstick,” Denver shouts up at Anton, from the bottom of the stairwell. “Drop the gun.”

Anton Cirrus looks down at Denver. “Who the hell are you?” he croaks.

“Let me tell you,” Denver says. “I’m the one who’s getting really good high-definition footage of you committing assault with a deadly weapon.”

The pause that this gives Anton is palpable. He takes the gun away from Billy’s head and hesitates. And that’s the moment. Billy turns, and grabs Anton’s shoulders, and throws him down the stairs.

The gun discharges harmlessly into the ceiling and Billy thinks, just for a moment, of Chekhov. Anton goes down the stairs, all the way down, more or less on his face, banging his elbows and knees against the walls. Denver films his entire descent until he’s lying in a heap at her feet. The gun skitters to a halt next to her, and she pops a folding screwdriver off her belt, deftly lifts it by its trigger guard, and makes it vanish into some holsterlike compartment on her belt.

Billy gathers up the tire iron and the duffel bag, and hurries down the stairs to meet her. Cirrus is conscious, but dazed, and for one final time Billy contemplates smashing his skull open, reducing his human intelligence into insensate muck. But no. Instead he steps over Cirrus, and he and Denver hurry out onto the street.

“The Ghoul called me,” she says. “He told me you were coming here. I thought I’d see if — if you were in trouble.”

“I thought you were still pissed at me,” Billy says.

“I am,” Denver says. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t show up. That’s what I keep saying.”

Billy pauses, and he lets this sink in, and he says, “Thank you.”

Then he looks both ways for Lucifer, but there’s no sign of him; the two hours aren’t quite up yet. There are no NYPD personnel in sight, either, even though the sidewalk is covered with clear signs of forced entry. The only official on the scene is a Traffic Enforcement Agent, busy printing a ticket for the Trusty Econoline Van.

“Fuck,” Billy says. “Can’t she see that the hazards are on? That means back in a minute !” But Denver puts her hand on his shoulder, steers him away from the van, directing him instead toward a yellow cab, idling at the curb. Billy stops when he sees it.

“I told them that I’d get you, and take you to see them,” Denver says.

“Who?” Billy says.

“The Ghoul. Anil. They just want to see you, Billy.” She speaks cautiously, as though he may be insane.

Billy winces. He’d already pretty much assumed that after this afternoon he’d never see any of them again, and while he is still far from coming to terms with that there was at least a way in which he thought it would be easier , emotionally. He’s never really liked long goodbyes and the idea of sitting with them, knowing that it’s the final time, seems grueling.

He contemplates running. But then he remembers last night, at Barometer, just sitting there and laughing and enjoying everyone’s company. He remembers feeling, even if it was only for fifteen minutes, like everything in his life was going to be okay. He’d like to have that experience one final time. A last toast together before Lucifer sucks him down to Hell. Sad, but it would give him a thing to hold on to, an image he could take with him down to the void. And he sees no prohibition against it; it doesn’t appear to violate his vow, as long as he comes when Lucifer calls. So he lets Denver steer him into the cab, and off they go, into the night.

They put the gun and the tire iron in the duffel bag, along with the Neko, which floats serenely in the bubble of its shining final seal, and then Billy tries to fill Denver in on everything that’s happened, but she has pieces of the story from Anil and the Ghoul, and she ends up shushing him so she can tend to his wound. He’s grateful for that, because it allows him to not have to figure out what to do when he gets to the part of the story where he and Elisa fuck one another.

He leans his head back and lets Denver press a tissue against his chin, watches the streetlights recede through the cab’s rear windshield. It’ll be sad, to say goodbye to all this. This world, with all its weirdness. He will, in the end, miss it.

After the blood seems to have been stanched, he wonders if he can get away with leaning in for a kiss. He can.