Part 84
Later, not long before the concert.
“I never told those kids to split,” I say. “They were poets! They drank wine and snapped their fingers to clap! And I never told them to turn violent.” I shove my finger in Mephis’s face. “But I sure as shit didn’t back down when it came time to fight.”
Goat chuckles. “Yeah, we all saw the pictures of you fucking up a Starbucks.”
Nigel laughs.
I tower over Goat. “You can talk to me when you’ve got pubes,” I say.
“Can we focus on the task at hand?” Nepotism asks. “Didn’t we come here to find an Alarm Clock?”
Behind Nigel the darkness oozes and molds into a spindly body in a Hawaiian shirt, and fisherman’s hat pulled down to the brim of its aviator shades. “A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance,” says the fully-formed monster. It chomps down hard on its cigarette with each word, grabbing Nigel by the neck.
I saw Hunter’s body burned on a pyre and then fired out of a cannon over the mountains, so I know this thing must be Duke, the Scrubber who chased me up Lake Tana in Ethiopia to a wooden temple that housed the Ark of the Covenant.
Duke lifts Nigel off the ground. The boy’s eyes are wide with terror, fingers clawing at Duke’s hand. Duke gives one violent shake and ends Nigel’s struggles with a sickening ‘crack.’ “Commie pinko pieces of shit!” Duke cries, casting Nigel aside.
The Scrubber takes an assault rifle from behind its back and fires one-handed. Bullets blow apart styrofoam all around. Kara cries out and falls, spasming like a fish. Another slug burns my cheek as I dive in to cover her. Nepotism is on his knees in a second, fumbling with the case. Mephis Tyr stands over Nepotism firing his giant gun. Duke avoids each blast with his jerky, erratic gait.
“It’s a Scrubber!” Nepotism shouts, concealing himself behind a foam column.
Kara has stopped moving beneath me, but I can’t see or find any wounds, and there is not much blood on the floor around her.
Duke looks in my direction and smiles, lifting the rifle to its shoulder. “If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it,” it says around its cigarette. “or else you're going to be locked up.” The voice is a mumble, extending its hand to shake. There is deception in the mask of its face, and I’m already diving to the left when Duke lowers the rifle again and lets loose another burst of rounds.
The Scrubber laughs maniacally. I draw one nickle-plated handgun from my armpit and shoot up into Duke’s stomach at the same time a shot from Tyr strikes Duke in the chest. The Scrubber falls on its back, but he is back up like nothing happened, and I can’t see a wound through the holes in its Hawaiian shirt. I empty my pistol, but Duke shows no reaction if I hit it or not. Useless, I hurl the weapon as well, striking Duke in the collar bone.
Duke is bearing down on me. I fall back in a crouch and try to avoid, but the Scrubber is too fast, pummeling me about the head. I’m on my feet, backpedaling, stumbling over my own feet. Duke smashes me in the face with the butt of his rifle and I go down. Every person and motion is shadows in the sludge. A few flashes of muzzle fire and bodies jumping around me yelling words I can’t hear. I’m being dragged, and the air shudders with a pressure change. There is no sound any more, and I can make out Nepotism looking down on me. I hear a voice, and see his lips move, but it takes a long time for me to synch up the two. The lights go out.
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