K Jeter - Noir

Another flower threaded its black stem through McNihil’s skull. One that he was going to let remain unopened, rather than forcing the hothouse blossom of revealed conspiracies. That was a particular garden path he didn’t want to go down, at least not at the moment: the possibility that whatever was going on with the prowlers wasn’t something outside the original design parameters… but inside. If they were becoming human, in whole or part, soaking up their owners’ thoughts, minds, maybe even souls-maybe that was just what they were designed to do.

Those considerations tumbled through the murk inside McNihil’s head, as though his fingertips were reading tactile Morse code on the tannhäuser’s checked grip. I’ll think about ’em later -he seized the weapon and dragged it out of his jacket.

“Oh, great,” said the male prowler standing nearby. “Now look-he’s packing.” An anxious hubbub rose from the others at the little tables scattered through the bar. “Somebody should’ve taken that thing away from him.”

“But you didn’t,” said McNihil. His legs still didn’t seem to be functioning, as though some link down his spine had been snapped by the barfly’s kiss. He managed to push himself up on one elbow, raising the tannhäuser in the other hand. “Lucky for me.” The gun wobbled as he swung its pendulumlike weight toward each of the hovering onlookers in turn. “Sorry… it’s not in your plans…”

“It’s your own that you’re connecting up.” The barfly looked down at him with mingled contempt and pity. “You came here to do a job-to get that job done and over with-and we’re just trying to help you out, pal.” The tough-girl persona from the old movies firmed up around her like a suit of armor, one made of cheap silky stuff molded to her ribs and hinged down the seams of her smoky-dark stockings. “Come on-that’s why you came here in the first place. Because you knew that we could do that for you.” Her smile held legions of superior wisdom. “Because you know that this is the door in.”

“I changed my mind.” McNihil flopped back against the bar’s padded flank. He held the tannhäuser in both hands, trying to steady it. The implications about the prowlers-what they were, what they’d become-had gone spiraling out, despite his intent not to think about that. “I gotta fall back… and punt. I thought… I knew what was going on. Or at least part of it.” The weapon had started sweating in his tight grip. “Plus what… I was going to do about it.” The conceptual territory had shifted beneath his feet, as though the edges of one of the tectonic plates underlying the Gloss had broken through the asphalt and concrete, totally rearranging the map he’d stood on. “So it’s been nice, but…” A little tingling sensation had returned to McNihil’s legs; he made a tentative effort at getting them beneath himself. “I think I better be running along…”

“I don’t think so,” announced the barfly. Contempt outweighed pity in her gaze. “You shouldn’t make appointments you don’t plan on keeping. There’s somebody waiting for you.”

“Somebody important.” The male prowler loomed ominously above McNihil. Behind the prowler, the others had left their places at the bar’s small tables and had assembled in rough, anonymous formation; the crowd of extras had morphed into an ugly mob scene, their muttering anger directed at the figure sprawled between the stools. “Somebody…”-the prowler’s flat voice ratchetted down into a growl-“somebody you’ve needed to meet for a long time.”

The words inside McNihil’s head, the few that had been left after the power surge of the barfly’s kiss, were replaced by quick, overriding panic. In instinctive self-defense, he raised his clasped hands up in front of his chest, the tannhäuser cranking into position as though on an invisible hoist line.

“Don’t be stupid.” The barfly shook her head in disgust. “That’s not going to help.”

McNihil let the tannhäuser take the initiative, whatever small mind it had inside its works substituting for his own exhausted one. The weapon spoke in true operatic fashion, a Wagnerian basso roar hitting the bar’s walls as an orange gout of flame spat out of the muzzle.

“You dumb shit.” In the fuzzy mists beyond him, the voice that spoke sounded like the male prowler who’d been getting so ugly with him. He’s still standing? wondered McNihil. “There’s a time,” said the voice, “and a place for everything. This ain’t it.”

With the back of his head against the padding, McNihil opened his eyes as wide as possible, the furrows of his brow enough to bring the bar’s contents into a discernible order. Only roughly so: between the aftereffects of the barfly’s kiss, the engorged memories popping out from each other like an infinite series of Chinese boxes, and the still-echoing wallop of the tannhäuser, the things inside his head felt marginally connected, if at all, the synapses as ragged and wet as used tissue paper. The world of ancient movies encoded inside McNihil’s eyes went soft and transparent, like a molecule-thick permeable membrane letting in the other behind it, the more-or-less real one. The gearing of his brain revved into a bone-held fever, trying to sort out the overlapping data and reassemble them into a coherent whole.

McNihil pressed his clenched hands, weighted with the tannhäuser, against his eyes, trying to shield himself from the chaotic stimulus rush. Even through his eyelids he could see what had been the bar, the dark hole both comfortable and threatening, with its diamond-padded door and leatherette-topped seats, the neon cocktail sign sizzling in the night air beyond, the rain slowly leaking down the stairs from the wet streets and sidewalks jeweled with the moon’s shattering reflection… and over and mingled with that a bleak metal warehouse, industrial end-of-millennium chic, all exposed bolts and scrubbed-bare sheet steel, black anaconda cables looped over the girders and crawling around the space’s litter-thick perimeter. Seeing even that much put a miasma of chemical sweat and twitching O.D. vomitus into McNihil’s nostrils, the smell of grim fun aftermath. Places like this were why he’d left one world for another, the annihilating real for the endurable gone.

Wake up , he told himself, and smell the burning corpses of your dreams . McNihil lowered the weapon in his hands and looked up at the prowler standing before him.

The barfly had draped herself around the humanlike figure’s shoulders, clinging like erotic seaweed to a jagged shoreline rock. As though a wave had broken over the prowler and drawn away only a few seconds ago; the front of the figure’s dark jacket was shining wet, blood seeping from the hole torn through the upper chest.

As McNihil watched, and as the barfly smiled and watched him in turn, the male prowler reached up and hooked a forefinger in the bullet hole. The jacket’s fabric ripped away as easily as damp paper, exposing the pallid flesh beneath. No wonder , thought McNihil, it didn’t fall down …

Like a rock dropped into a gelatinous sea, the bullet hadn’t created a wound, but rather a rippling distortion, a faint bull’s-eye pattern that had spread over the prowler’s torso and faded. The bullet’s entry point had been transformed by the black-ink tattoos that had swarmed and inched their way from the prowler’s abdomen and back, like blind fish and bottom-feeding ocean creatures, attracted by a sudden food source. The hole itself, edged with a small wreath of pinkish erectile tissue, exuded a fluid clearer than blood, but just as viscid and blood-warm, glistening like silvery snail tracks in a moonlit garden. When the prowler’s fingertips stroked the soft rim of the swollen non-wound, a tiny brass sun rose in its depths, just south of the ridge of collarbone. Shining wet, the flat end of the tannhäuser’s bullet slid with minor grace from the hole, the surrounding pink-to-red tissue enfolding its steel-jacketed shaft. The prowler’s thumb and fingertip grasped the exposed end of the cylinder; the humanlike figure’s flat gaze shifted from where it had examined, chin tucked against throat, its adaptive flesh, up to McNihil’s eyes.