Part 22
The Following Afternoon.
“My witness is the empty sky,” Kerouac shouts, taking another tense step toward me. He’s not the real Jack Kerouac, he’s a Scrubber. They are supernatural assassins used by the Piscean Knights. Scrubbers appear as dead authors. There are nine, but this is only the second I’ve battled. He is called Sax, and is known for his cruelty.
I chamber a round. My first Scrubber was Duke, who appears as Hunter S. Thompson. He attacked me in Ethiopia while I was searching for the Ark of the Covenant. I barely escaped with my life, and lost all my cameras and footage.
“Don't use the phone,” says the Scrubber. “People are never ready to answer it.” It’s right on top of me now, eyes fixed, gun locked on where my head should be. If I so much as move, be it to shoot or surrender, he’ll send my brains sailing over the forest floor. Why the fuck hasn’t Nepotism done anything yet? What if he’s dead? I could be out here alone. Fighting my way out or turning myself in would be certain death against certain death.
Sax lets his gun go slack, grinning a grin drunk on victory. “I woke up as the sun was reddening,” he drawled. I’m desperate for any motion that could signal Nepotism’s life. “That was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all.” Wind blows branches, and I’m deceived by a rustle of leaves, but I can’t find Nepotism anywhere.
“Nepotism!” I shout. “Where the fuck are you?”
Kerouac continued, “I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” He closes the distance between us. From the sound maybe four feet. “If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.”
My body jerks as he shoots me.
The blood covers my glasses, so I can’t see a thing, but I feel it splatter my chest in the split second before I die. It’s warm and wet and soaks into my shirt with the same consistency as water. I’m appalled at the sheer amount of blood issuing forth from my blasted skull. It’s in my hair, on my face, on my chest, and it doesn’t even hurt at all. I always figured this would be a faster way to die. My blood is black.
I put an exploratory finger on the back of my head. There’s no smoking hole, no jagged crater of bone and brain, no tacky fragments of my meniscus. I move my hand to the top of my head to see if he was shooting downward, but no, despite there being a hell of a lot of blood, I can’t find any hole that it’s issuing from.
I wipe my glasses and look up when Kerouac leans over me, weakly grabbing the roots to keep himself upright. There is a hole in his chest I can see through.
The color drains from Sax’s ruddy face and the skin and muscle ooze away from the bone, turning a shiny black. The skull is liquefying before it is even entirely defleshed. The entire body is melting into the same black ooze that covers my body. As the Scrubber seeps into the forest floor, it reveals Nepotism Baldwin twenty feet back, hand-cannon aimed now at me.
“It’s about fucking time,” I shout.
He holsters his weapon. “I had to get in position.”
“You got this shit all over me.”
He shrugs. “What do you think I was getting in position for?”
All trace of the Scrubber is gone but for what is running down my face and soaking in my shirt. “He didn’t stay dead the last time,” I say. “We should probably get going.”
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