Joseph D'Lacey - Snake Eyes

“Good job, Spider.”

Johnson had been practising at home.

Fury took a couple of tokes and closed his eyes. Johnson did the same and leaned back against the badly painted wall of the corridor. The pulse of the music still found its way down this artery—sclerosed though it was with human detritus—but it was muffled. Every few moments the door would open into the bar and someone would arrive or leave for the toilets or the drugs. The music would gain in strength and then soften again as the door closed. Johnson drifted on the smoke. His body vibrated with music and vapour until he felt insubstantial and had to open his eyes to make sure he hadn’t physically come apart. Any more Mist and he would be losing control.

“I’ll send the next one out.” He said.

Fury didn’t reply but Johnson saw his slight nod of the head. He wondered very briefly and with divine clarity, what the problem was with reality that so many people felt they had to alter their perception of it in order to be happy. The lucidity of the thought left just as quickly when no answer came.

On the other side of the door, the throng of ecstatic revellers rippled as if it was a single organism. Pushing through it, the sense of isolation settled onto him once more. He did not know the mind of the organism; he was too trapped in his own.

He changed direction and made for the bar where they placed a pint and a shot for him. He finished each in a single movement before squeezing back to the table.

“Next.”

Dorff struggled to his feet to continue the rota.

Johnson woke two days later to the sound of his door buzzer. Whoever was outside the apartment sounded very keen to get in. As he rolled out of bed, still wearing the same clothes he’d had on in McLaughlin’s, he noticed the walls of his bedroom had been shattered as if by an earthquake. Cracks spread out from the corners in every direction.

He rubbed his eyes, trying to wipe the hallucination from his vision, knowing it was some kind of perceptual mistake. Looking again he saw vines spreading across his bedroom walls like a system of veins. The shoots seemed to have given up on reaching towards the centre of the room and instead were gripping the walls like ivy; he could see where rows of cilia along the body of each tributary had bitten into the fibreboard walls. Fury and the guys in the bar must have been telling the truth, at least partially.

The buzzer sounded again and again as Johnson struggled to orientate himself.

“Okay, okay.”

By the front door he checked the monitor. Outside were Fury and a woman he didn’t recognise. He could see Fury putting the whole weight of his body behind each press of the buzzer. He didn’t look happy.

“Fury. What can I do for you?”

Fury stopped assaulting the buzzer and looked up at one of the four monitors.

“Where you been, Spider?”

“Asleep. What do you want?”

There was a pause while Fury considered the question. In the couple of seconds it took for him to think of something, Johnson noticed the proliferation of vines around the doorway and on his ceiling. Some of the vines were trailing downward a little. Reaching out.

“I want to know why two Sooth dealers have disappeared since you came around. I want to know who the fuck you really are, Spider.”

“What dealers? What are talking about?”

“Let us in, Spider. We just want to talk.”

Johnson knew there was going to be a problem now. If he didn’t let them in it was going to be a much worse problem. He felt a vine brush his arm and he slapped it away.

“Sure thing. Look out for the vines, though. I seem to have a weed problem.”

He buzzed them into the security chamber and the view changed. The scanners showed they were heavily armed. If they came in with so much firepower and there was a difference of opinion, he’d be severely outgunned.

“Would you mind depositing your weapons in the safe, guys? I don’t like armed discussions.”

He watched as they removed all their projectile firing weapons.

“Blades too, guys.”

“Listen, Spider, how do we know you don’t have a fucking arsenal pointed at us the moment we walk through your door?”

“What does it matter? We’re just talking, right?”

“Right.”

“Who’s that you got with you, by the way?”

Fury’s accomplice looked at the monitor.

“Name’s Elina. I’m Fury’s backup.”

Johnson looked at her for a long time, feeling in that moment that he had known her for a very long time. Images of a city in a valley came to him, snapshots of a family and a feeling off loss, a sense of being adrift beyond the comfort of any shore. None of it made any sense but the woman fascinated him.

Johnson wiped his eyes once again and shook his head. He had to straighten out quick. He hoped he had the presence of mind to fend off their questions and alleviate any suspicion but he knew that once a finger had been pointed it would be impossible to make any more progress. When they were gone he would call JHD to request evac and transfer.

“You gonna make us stand out here all fucking night, Spider?”

“Night? What time is it?”

“Just open the door, will you?”

He buzzed them the rest of the way in and stood back. Fury came in first followed by the woman. He didn’t wait for the offer of a drink or a seat. Instead he held out his hand and when they clasped in a shake he punched Johnson across the chin with his left fist, pulled him in close with his clasping right hand and brought his knee into Johnson’s solar plexus. Johnson was hurt but he been expecting the pain.

As he recovered from the first two blows, he stayed doubled over and hung onto Fury’s handshake, feinting a lunge towards him. As Fury resisted the advance, he reversed his direction and hauled him backwards before letting go. Fury, totally off balance, careened across the room and slammed, half falling, into the wall between the two windows of the apartment’s main room.

Johnson stood to face him, watching as Fury withdrew a polythene razor strip from the seam in his leather trousers. The strip was so thin it was almost transparent but in the hands of an expert it could open fatal cuts to the neck or blind its victim. Something about the woman made him ignore her presence to concentrate on Fury, but he’d gone against both instinct and training to do so.

He was bewildered when he felt the plastic garrote bite into his neck and only managed to get the fingers of one hand between the sharp thread and the meat of his throat. Why had he trusted the woman? Meanwhile, Fury approached, lifting and dropping his razor strip, snapping it in the unhealthy air of the room. With each act of violence the vines surrounding them shuddered and contracted as if they too had been struck or seized.

Johnson felt the garrote cutting through the skin of his fingers. With Fury almost in striking distance he made to pull away from Elina and then used her moment of resistance to push her backwards towards the wall. She fell for the move just as Fury had and couldn’t fight the motion. The impact against the wall was strong, knocking the wind from her lungs as if she’d fallen a similar distance. Her grip loosened and Johnson, with his back still to her, used his elbows to hammer into her ribs and abdomen. Elina went down.

A second later he felt the sting of Fury’s razor strip across his bare left shoulder. The attack had missed his face but the cut parted his skin as if it were silk, slicing half an inch deep. As Fury raised the strip for the next cut, Johnson noticed the vines reaching away from the walls towards him. He felt a touch on his back and thought at first it was Elina. Glancing back, he saw a thick finger of creeper trying to gain a purchase on him.