Demon Blues

The breakies call it Council Bullshit in the alleys, but the official name is Council Bluffs. I’m gonna call it the second thing because the breakies are morons. In the USA, back when there was a USA, it was across state borders, a little less prosperous than Omaha but still going strong -- and separate. Now it’s a festering wound, a fuckugly pimple on the Western Republic of America’s promising “Free Territory” program. For every lovely thing you could say about Omaha’s culture or its people or its economic growth, there sat Council Bluffs, sticking out, sickly red and oozing. Naturally, I woke up on the sidewalk, drooling on myself and without pants. I dunno how I got there.

The pants and underwear themselves were draped over the edge of a dumpster, and my ass hurt. I put two and two together and put my pants back on. Then I opened my billfold and noticed it didn’t have any goddamn bills in it. Either I was out there for leisure or I got robbed of my pay after the fun left me tuckered out. Great. Good to know.

Most of Council Bluffs these days is a single road to the big bridge, but there are soldiers holding big guns over there usually, and I didn’t want to get asked what I was doing out of the city after curfew. In that case, you take the mugging bridge.

When I’d gotten off the beaten path and took a shortcut through dry grass and down to the footbridge, I dug in my leather jacket and looked around me. There it was -- the knife Tuscany-Style Joe had made for me to plug into the end of my tail and swing around “if anyone gave me trouble”. I probably didn’t need it. Probably. Still, when you’re in the middle of a good place to get your shit kicked in, it’s a good idea to keep a little something between you and a gaggle of desperate breakies. Demons are scary if you run into ‘em, but in ‘04 I was powerless and easy to knock out.

The water of the Missouri pushed its way down south, bright as mud. The bridge was low enough that you probably couldn’t kill yourself by jumping off of it, but you could try drowning in the current if you’d like. Suicide for quitters, essentially. The sky kept its early morning hue of dusty yellow with the sun quivering through the atmosphere like a dying fluorescent bulb. Ordinarily, this is a beautiful morning, but right then, I had a pounding headache and a growling stomach. Even the bored snipers who kept an eye on the bridge and ignored rapes and theft were cramming their faces with some sort of sandwich or coffee or whatever. Get to the Vomitorium, I thought. The Vomitorium has my argidian leftovers. If Rachel or Denise haven’t eaten all the minilivers out of it yet. Bitches.

Now look: I’m not normally a “pick shit up you find on the floor” guy. If I see a Polaroid or a lost notebook on the ground, I leave it where it is for the rain and street sweepers to claim. Hell, usually I’d chuck it even further out of view (someone desperately looking for their college homework after I’d thrown it to the five winds guilted me out of doing that about five years back). Lucky for me, there was little for me to pick up -- it already sat smashed on the crumbling pavement. Still, it caught my eye. Maybe it was the rainbow of rotting oil and plastic baking in the clouded sun. Maybe the yellowing bits of plastic and metal scattered within the heap looked like something edible to my primal animal brain. Maybe I was just bored. But there it sat, right over the middle of the river, stomped by uncaring boots and left for the birds: an eight-track tape.

I got down on a squat. Haven’t seen one of these in a long time, I thought, probably. I looked it over, squinting to see the flaking label on the cover:

NONSTOP DISCO PARTY MIX - SHAKE YOUR GROOVE THANG, BABY!

Program 1:

Peaches & Herb - Shake Your Groove Th(a)ng(!)

Blondie - Heart of Glass

The Jacksons - Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)

Program 2:

Chic - Good Times

Lizzy Descloux - Fire

A Taste of Honey - Boogie Oogie Oogie

Program 3:

Lion - You’ve Got A Woman

Boney M - Daddy Cool

Hot Chocolate - Every 1’s a Winner

Program 4:

Bee Gees - Tragedy

ABBA - Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)

Anita Ward - Ring My Bell

And like Proust I was gone, blown somewhere else by the wind. Blown back to you.

***

“Damien Oswald Deuchars,” I repeated over the roar of the packed bar. “You can call me Damo.”

“Damo? What, are you Aussie or something?” You sat there, twirling the swizzle stick jabbed into your Harvey Wallbanger.

“Nah, it’s just easier than calling me Damien.”

“I see. And, what were you saying?”

I adjusted the jet black hair my disguise had conjured up for me (not that I could see it) and pressed on. “You said you had a band doing something interesting, what was it?”

“Hey, we were talking.”

Your friend, a guy with obscenely Caucasian skin and a bad fauxfro, scowled at me. In a club full of leisure suits, I was wearing a leather jacket and a striped shirt, while what little shirt surrounded his chest made way for a sea of wiry blond chesthairs. I looked like a thorny rose in a bouquet of daisies, but then again, so did the one I really wanted to talk to.  Tassels may have lined the undersides of your leather sleeves, but the Ramones tee underneath did the talking.

“I’m fine, David,” you said, shooing him off. David sulked off to the dancefloor and crowded around all whatever powder puff dandy in baby blue was playing Travolta that night. The air at Club Zanzibar felt waterlogged with sweat, both from people enjoying their time there dancing their asses off and white guys who had been banned from every other disco in Newark sweating that they were “in that part of town”. I looked like one of those white guys at the time, but for now, me and you had found common company.

“So, why are you so interested in my band?”

“Am I not allowed to be interested in what other people do?”

Your face scrunched up, somewhat annoyed. “You wanna play with us? Cause we’ve got four guys already.”

“No.”

“Then what? Wait -- don’t tell me-”

I figured it was going bad enough that I should give away the game by now. “I was gonna ask if you needed a manager.” You scoffed. “A manager? We can manage ourselves just fine. What would you even do -- drive us around? Tell us ‘stop doing drugs?’ Do drugs with us? On a salary?” 

You chuckled. The bartender handed me a fluffy duck; I picked it up and started to nurse its sickly pus yellow. “What we need is an A&R guy at our shows.”

I dug in my pockets. Keys, switchblade, wallet, Goetian psychocharm. All there. “Well, I may not be an A&R guy, but I know a few.”

“Oh really? Like who, Mr. Know-A-Few?”

Here we go. The bait. I coughed into my fist. “Seymour Stein.”

“Ex-cuse me?” Gotcha.

“Seymour Stein.”

“SEYMOUR FUCKIN’ STEIN?”

“Shshsh! C’mon, you don’t wanna get mobbed by everyone here.”

Your voice switched to a harsh whisper, like you weren’t used to keeping it down before. “Yeah, sorry, just- Seymour Stein? Bull-shit. How the hell do you know the HEAD of Sire Records?”

“I’m serious, man. His main A&R guy -- Steve Laswell -- he’s my best friend.” I reach into my wallet for the photo of me, Stolas, and Mr. Stein. Seymour’s got both his arms around us and a big smile on his face (he’d just signed Talking Heads here). I’m hamming it up for the camera; Stolas looks rather shocked to be photographed for someone who took a record executive’s soul. A lot of demons hold superstitions about cameras blowing their cover, but the camera’s always loved me. If I wasn’t functionally immortal, I’d have gotten into modeling with my psychocharm. My disguise looked a lot better than his; the poor guy has pimples on his pimples, even now.

“Goddamn.”

Exactly, I thought. “I can get him to get Seymour to come to one of your shows, and we’ll see if he signs you. All you gotta do is make me your manager. I’ll even work pro-bono until you get signed.”

Still, your face stayed cold. You looked down into the orange green swirl of liquor and orange juice beneath your lips. “I doubt it.”

“Why? You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t trust your friend, either. And I definitely don’t trust Seymour to sign us.”

“Why?”

You scowled, vaguely gesturing to your face. It was pretty plain to see, even in the twirling crystal lightshow above us, that you were black. (In the 70s, this was what they called “a hard sell.”) “If we were a disco act, maybe. But we don’t play disco, and even if we did, Sire doesn’t sign disco.”

“What about Dinosaur?”

“Dinosaur’s barely disco, Mister… Damo?” Your brain crossed its fingers, offering an attempt to remember my fucking name. I nodded. “And besides, we don’t play what they play.”

“Then what DO you play? Lemme come to a rehearsal so I can see what you got.”

You smiled. Why does he wanna know who we are so bad? How desperate can a guy get? is what I assume you were thinking. Instead, you said “what’s a punk like you doing in Club Zanzibar anyway?”

“I was gonna ask the same thing.”

“Contrary to popular belief,” you spoke after emptying the last of that godawful Wallbanger down your throat, “not every single one of us are dour little twats who poke safety pins through their ears and dissolve styrofoam in gasoline. Some of us like to have fun.”

I smiled, almost feeling my ears flatten. “Getting hit on by a bunch of pudgy gay guys is your idea of fun?”

“The music’s fun.” You sat silent for a little bit, probably drinking in the atmosphere. The chorus to the Bee Gee’s new single “Tragedy” began to trumpet out in Barry Gibb’s pinched-nose falsetto from the speakers. A gaggle of dancers of all shapes, sizes, and colors cut up the floor under gel lights and cocaine mist. So many of them would be going to the Lincoln right by us to sleep it off before working for enough cash to pay for their next night out. Some would leave this scruffy little spot, never to return, like exiles from a warring nation. After a bit, you spoke up again. “I assume you’re more discerning of who you take home?”

I was silent for a little bit. I didn’t know what he meant. Is this a pass? My eyes darted to you, trying to pick up if this was flirting or danger assessment. Should I take it? “Umm, I don’t usually take people home.”

“And why is that?”

“I live in my car.”

You held it in for a split second before doubling over in laughter. “Jee-zus, you live in your car?”

Something sticky was on the floor; I hoped to God it was my dignity. I kept my eyes fixed on it just in case I could scoop it back up and smear it on my face again. “It’s a nice car…”

“Well, stop by the abandoned Tanner garage in Weequahic sometime next Saturday. Joey Tanner’s our bassist, George Zerbinopolous is our drummer, and I, dearest Damo, am the guy on the axe. We’ll see if we can get you out of that car some time.”

“And what’s your name?”

“What’s your name?”

“What?”

***

“I said ‘what’s your name?’” I looked up, I was in Free Omaha again. In front of me stood a guy -- an aviari, specifically one of the ones with long beaks and long legs -- in a trenchcoat, a smile on the edges of his beak. He stared down patiently at me. Something about him rang a bell in my head. Then it clicked -- this guy’s a Psychopomp. I got to my feet, falling over myself despite his being half a head shorter than me.

“Uhh, Damosadeus, sir. Registration number 7429. Threat level: omega,” I sputtered as I dug in my pockets for my wallet.

“At ease, Damosadeus. The name’s Agent Don Jon. You may recognize me, we talked just about a week ago.”

Ohhh, this guy, went the dumb ass lil demon in the back of my head. “Oh, hey. You guys find Dukise?”

“We’re not at liberty to say.” Dead. Damn. He was a sweet kid, that Dukise. Didn’t deserve what happened to him at that sketchy ass bathhouse.

“Well, what brings you to the footbridge this fine morning, Agent?”

“I was actually looking for you.” My stomach twisted inside. I became very aware I was dangling a weapon from the end of my tail, and I held it stiff behind me in the naive hope that the Agent hadn’t somehow seen it. The coinflip of “arrested” and “solicited” somersaulted in my heart. Which side, which side? “W-why?”

“I wanted to get to know you a little better.”

Clink. “Solicited” -- I’ll take it.

“I see. Well, matter of fact, I wanted to get to know you a bit better too, Agent.” My tail twirled behind me, and I instinctively moved to put my hand on his shoulder.

“Wh-now wait-” Uh oh! Uh oh! Wrong side! Wrong side!

“Oh, sorry.”

“No no, I just mean- I want to get to know you better as a friend. Not as a, erm, client.”

“...How so?”

He ground his heel into the sun-bleached asphalt, almost sheepish. His eyes didn’t make a lick of contact with mine. “Was gonna say lunch? Noon perhaps?”

There’s four reactions people have to crises: fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. Were I in any other position, the first two options would have been available to get me out of the situation, but on a bridge over the Missouri all I could manage was the last one.

“Wh-why? Is this a date? Are you asking me out on a date?”

“I mean, I’m asking if you want to get lunch together.”

“This isn’t normally how this works.”

He cocked his head. “I’m not a client. I was hoping we could be friends. At the very least, I suppose you wouldn’t turn down a free lunch?”

No such thing, said the little Greek chorus in my noggin. The wind blew through the trees on the shore. You could hear the soldier’s trucks driving from the main WRDF base to the city proper. I shrugged. “Fine. Where?”

“There’s a little spot called Jacob’s Chuckwagon downtown, not that far north of Little Italy. You know it?”

“Yeah.” I passed by it whenever I was coming from Downtown back to the V. Immediately I suspected a stalker -- and a magic one at that. Still, a free meal shouldn’t be turned down when you’re a-starvin’. “You said noon?”

“Around then, yes.”

“I’ll be there.”

The agent smiled, and the feathers on the back of head flattened. “That’s wonderful to hear, Mr. Damosadeus. I look forward to getting to know you a little more.” He scooched past me and made his way down the bridge. I shot a glance behind me; for some reason, he was swinging his arms and whistling. Nobody does that on their way into Council Bluffs. He was either crazy or up to something. I looked at the glinting scopes keeping me under watch on the bridge, then turned my snout down at the mashed-up 8 track tape on the pavement, and like I was burying it at sea, nudged it through the grate and into the Missouri with a splash.

The rest of my journey home bored the hell out of me. Some soldiers waving their old M3 rifles around kept people moving, and other than a few treepores hanging succulently on the lamp-posts, there was relatively little clutter, sentient or otherwise. The WRDF did a good job of cleaning up Omaha -- sorry, FREE Omaha -- when they got here, gettin’ all the criminals and junkies out of the city at the points of a bulldozer bucket, including yours truly. Us lowlives then decided to settle everywhere outside of the glorious line they call the Benefactor’s Highway. Tuscany-Style Joe saw this as a prime business opportunity and proceeded to set up the Vomitorium in Little Italy.

Joe couldn’t really be called a pimp, either legally or behaviorally. With an offensively bald head and a dark tweed suit, he looked a bit more like a hotel manager, and this was because, for all the government knew, he was one. When he saw all the lot-lizards and rentboys getting chased off the street, he performed an act of benevolence and got us all off the streets and into our own rooms. Then, of course, he made those rooms available to the public, paid directly to us, and with a 60% service fee charged directly to him. A perfectly legal business and charity, bolstered by a thriving community of workers and citizens doing their duty. And of course, to make sure the guests played nice, a gaggle of men in suits with guns patrolled the hallways, making sure nobody had any plans involving suitcases and handsaws. They didn’t say a word to us -- they weren’t paid to speak.

Generally, Joe was alright. I’d only had one other pimp in the past, in Oglala, SD before the WRDF invaded and changed the name to Freedom Springs. (Indian names are discouraged ‘cause of the whole Nation of Iroquois thing.) That son of a bitch put cigarettes out on me and watched when I was with clients -- swear to god, he was a serial killer. One payday, I ended up beating his ass and running off with enough money to get me on a bus to Omaha before he could wake up. How Joe did it was kosher, or kosher enough. He wasn’t Jewish, or Italian for that matter. His last name was Collins.

The lobby itself stunk of perfume samples and stale naugahyde. Rachel X. saw me first. Thankfully, she was gnawing at one of those awful granola bars with the crumbs that go everywhere instead of my leftovers. “Mhfh, whewuhyoo?”

“Your mouth is full.” When isn’t it, went the little Greek choir, preparing itself for the cornball punchline.

“When isn’t it,” she said after a big sip of water and a giggle. Rachel was about 35(ish), 150(ish) lbs, and a star(ish). Her real last name was Pornpenn Van Nort, which was a name that started awful, eased up a bit, and then sunk down to the depths. The gods had been cruel to Pornpenn, and her parents proved even crueler, so she moved out of OKC at 17 to Free Omaha for a fresh start. Two years later, she was here, eating a granola bar in the lobby of a brothel. “Is the joke funnier,” I groaned, “the sixteenth fucking time I heard it this week, or is it still bad? Hmm.”

“Where were you? We lost you after last girls night!” Ah, yeah, girls night. That’s probably what I got up to -- stumbling home and offering a piece of strange, uninfected meat to anyone on the downlow who didn’t kick my chest in. I remember a bad taste in my mouth, one of unbrushed teeth and beer. I hate beer. The dick was probably okay; it was enough to make me limp half the way home.

“Probably out sleeping or fucking or something.”

“For free?”

“I guess.”

She shook her head, in that come on now way. I was one of the girls, which was odd, cause I generally preferred women to men. Maybe it was my customer base of repressed trade coming in for a risk-free test drive of their sexuality, or the fact that my Jersey accent came off as aggressively catty and gave me the airs of a gay best friend. Maybe it was because I could fuck up any john who got a little “carried away”, as Joe spun it. Then again, I was probably just good company. “Anyone touch my left-overs?”

“Don’t think so, Denise got set up with a client early this morning.”

“Which one?”

“Mr. Karva.”

“The galartan?”

“The OLD galartan. She’ll be fine.”

I thought about the last galartan I’d serviced. He was in his 40s and my calves ached for weeks after. I think I can take a bit more punishment than your average 40-something prostitute, being a demon and all. All you really do is cross your heart and then your fingers that she doesn’t slip a disc. I strolled into the “break room” in the lobby and found myself staring down a smashed microwave, its glass shield upchucked in front of it.

“The fuck happened in here?”

She came in, clucking her tongue. “While you were out, a couple-a officers came in here after midnight, drunk off their ass, telling Joe to give them a bachelor’s party.”

“We don’t do those.”

“I know. We told ‘em. They got mad and pushed past us looking for ‘all the strippers’ and got mad when they found an empty kitchenette. So now we gotta eat our food cold until Joe can get compensated by the base.”

“That where he is?”

She nodded, then made her exit. The fridge, thankfully, still held my argid-style noodles, filled with cream sauce and fried chicken livers. Fuck it, dive right in, eat’ em cold. The flesh was modeling clay in between my teeth, and I’d smeared cold white sauce all over my snout by the time I was done. My stomach accepted the food with a grumble. After that, Caroline walked in, holding a cupcake in a clear plastic shell.

“Mm, what flavor is it?”

She pushed her hair out of her eyes and cleared her throat. “Marble cake, apparently. With buttercream icing.”

“Yumb. Where’d you get it?”

“Joe gave me a coupon.”

“Why didn’t-”

“Cause it’s my birthday.” Oh, shit. Yeah, birthday. Caroline was an ixchel, all forest green carapace and twitchy antennae. Their species lost a lot during the Rip, but one thing they always carried over, no matter which cargo cult they subscribed to, was their main holiday being each individual’s birthday. These were celebrated quietly, generally by taking the day off and resting. It then occurred to me why she had the cupcake.

“He scheduled you today, didn’t he?”

“Do you even have to ask?” She adjusted her wig, piled around her antennae and onto the shoulders of her specially fitted sundress. Caroline was a pretty recent addition to the Vomitorium, and she was an entie, and she was trans. The greatest proof of a divine power was combining so many struggles into one college dropout. “With who?” I ventured.

“The twins.” Oh, for fuck’s sake, Joe. I’d have asked for a tray of cupcakes if I had to deal with them, not just a measly coupon. Deep down, I could feel my maternal instincts kicking in. I cursed myself, swore to stomp it to death on the curb of my ribcage, but it won me over.

“I’ll do it.”

“Really?” She didn’t bother with any “no you don’t have to” or martyr-like little denials -- the twins were just that bad. If you get a chance to avoid them, you grab it. For a second, I really wished it was my birthday.

“When are they gonna be here?”

“2 PM.”

I waved her off. “Go take your day off. You deserve it.” No doubt she was going to be spending it on that little Gamestation or whatever she’d gotten as a tax write-off for the Vom. She deserved some idiot box time. I followed close behind her; as she went up the staircase, Denise limped past her.

“Where the hell were you, you damn mutt?”

“Council Bluffs.”

“Not even gonna ask.” The water cooler bubbled in the corner of the lobby; she got a little paper cone or three of water and sucked it down.

“How’s your galartan suitor treatin’ ya?”

Dirtier looks have been shot in duels. “He’s conked out. When you’re in your 60s, it happens.” She then pointed behind me. Security had let someone in -- a nervous argid, his eyes darting around the place. He was confused, but definitely not lost. “I-Is this the Vomitorium?”

I was on the clock. I sauntered over to the gentleman, looking for revulsion or disgust in his eyes. Instead, I found a little excitement. He’s here for me, whether he knows it or not.

“Sure is. Would you like a room?”

“Actually, I was-erm. I was just looking for…” He checked a little piece of paper in his paws, crumpled and grubby from sweat. “The b-bathroom?”

Ah, a quickie. Alright. I figure coaxing this twerp’s knot out is worth the $40. “I’ll show you the way.” I stretched my arms around his shoulders and leaned in close, grinning all Cheshire as we walked to the bathroom, and I slyly leaned him against the heavy wood swingdoor. I leaned close to whisper into his ears, and my fingers rolled delicately down to his haunch. “What brings you to such a tawdry place?”

“I-It’s my 18th birthday, and I was hoping to- um- y’know.”

Oop. Almost forgot myself. “Can I see your driver’s license?” A dull stare. “I’m not gonna ROB ya, it’s just to prevent anything particularly, erm, statutory.” We’d lost the Vom’s only other dude, Chuck, to a 10th grader who left out some key details. Chuck got sent to the Poisoned Coast to drill oil for touchin’ that kid and being a dumbass, and we almost got shut down. I felt a pang of relief as this new client handed his driver’s permit to me. In the photo was a guy with pimples on his face and braces over his teeth, and it was the same guy I was about to go down on against the bathroom door. The DOB on the permit said he was 18, the lil ridges on the card seemed legit when you scratched ‘em, and if it wasn’t -- well here’s my account, officer.

“What’s your name, kid?” The flighty ones love it when you call them “kid”. Puts them in a real Freudian mood.

“Stevia.” Gotta love them argid nature names. He looked cute enough to dip in coffee, that was for sure. I was thinking of saying something like “mind if I get a taste” as I unbuttoned his jeans. “But my friends call me Steve.”

***

“Steve?”

I heard a filtered, tired little groan on the other end of the receiver. “Yeah, yeah?”

“What’s the Seymour sitch? You still haven’t gotten back to me since a week and a half ago.”

“The Seymour sitch?”

“Have you asked him to sit in on Tranq yet? Their live show is in two days.”

I imagined he was on the other end of the line, rubbing sleep from his eyes just as soon as it’d settled snottily in his cracks. “What time is it?”

“It’s 2 AM -- did you ask?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Go ask.”

“I’m not gonna!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s 2 A fuckin M, what do you mean ‘why’?”

“Can you wake him up?”

“No.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both! He’s on barbiturates."

I sighed. Groaned. Bitched, more like it. “Fine. Then write on a piece of paper to tell him to sit in on us. Write on a post-it, or your hand, or the damn ceiling, but tell him.”

“Listen,” he said, taking on that classic Stolas know-it-all tone, “Damo. Even if Seymour sits in, he sits in on a million bands a day. He’s not gonna remember them ALL. You wanna get him to sign you? Cut a demo. Otherwise, you’re just gonna have to cross your fingers and hope he remembers you before he starts hiring other A&R reps to ignore you on his behalf, and takes ME out of the equation.” Clunk. I was left alone, with you next to me on the payphone outside the diner. We had a long walk home to the subway after this.

“What did he say?” you asked. You looked both tired and stressed, like you could throw up and pass out at the same time. I really didn’t wanna tell you it, but I owed it to you. “He says that we need to cut a demo.”

“B-but we’ve performed live! We have a following!” About twelve people, I kept to myself.

“Nobody in that following has a copy of your songs; we basically don’t exist. I… uh. I think he’s right. At the very least, we need to get something we can put in Seymour’s hands.”

You were quiet for a bit, maybe a bit sheepish. Maybe you knew I was right, and cursed yourself for your naivety. Maybe you were just mad you had another thing you had to get together to Make It. “Fine. I guess I could see if any of the guys have a Tascam handy.”

Joey managed to get one -- we didn’t know how, probably fuckin’ stole it -- and we set it up in the garage next weekend, when everyone managed to wrangle enough time off to practice. They weren’t exactly what I was expecting. I’d gotten used to groups that thrashed between three chords and made some sort of Buzzcocks-y or Sex Pistols-y noise, but Tranq had picked up one single from Gang of Four and ran with it. I asked if they knew ESG; they did not. I asked if they knew Liquid Liquid; they did not. I asked what they called it. They said they called it “mutant punk.” It’s odd -- you get one little inkling of an idea and you arrive at the same conclusion as everyone else.

“Alright, so what are we gonna do for our demo? We’ve got like three songs, and I’d say most of ‘em are pretty good.” George twirled his drumstick, fresh from warming up. He was bald by choice at 23, a natural blonde who simply liked blinding people with his head. He used coconut oil on stage specifically. It actually smelled quite nice.

“I dunno, I’d say we should do ‘Pink Pills’, then ‘Coupled in Health’, and then ‘Sixteen Speed Muzak’,” Joey said as he plugged in his bass. You kept your eyes fixated on the moths, beating their wings on the lights above the makeshift stage. “I dunno,” you started, “three’s not much. I think it at the very least needs something to tie it together.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. We’ll figure it out.”

We ran through it real quick. “Pink Pills” was ostensibly a song about quaaludes, and was partially about how much they sucked. Of course, you’d never done them, but I had, and I thought they made me too queasy. I was mostly an alcohol and cigs kind of guy anyway. “Coupled in Health” was about getting a VD from a WAC -- something George’s dad always talked about as the reason he stayed with George’s mom. (He had it rough at home.) “Sixteen Speed Muzak” focused on how boring it was to shop in a supermarket. All the tracks had this no wave-y guitar skrunk to it, something you were really good at. You heard Lou Reed used to tune all his guitar strings to one note, and you did that before realizing it sounded like shit and switched it to B-E-B-E-B-E. Most of the melody was carried by the basslines and George hitting them four-on-the-floors. It sounded like a heart attack dancing. For “Muzak”, you tremolo picked the bottom strings so it sounded like this crumbling drone, all brooding and terrifying, until the song dropped out and it was just that. I swear, you made the concrete floor shake with your Silvertone. After seven or eight tries, we got three perfect takes on each song. That just left what was missing.

“What about an instrumental,” I said.

“An instrumental?” You crossed your arms.

“Y’know, something we could riff on, get the crowd going with.”

Joey sneered. “We?” You knew I didn’t like playing on stage, and the others were ignorant to the fact that I actually could play guitar. I let you in on the little secret that I’d written the solo to “Shake Some Action” before the Groovies fired me. You didn’t believe me, but when we were lifting guitar picks I played it in the music store well enough to keep the teller’s eyes off of you.

“Not me specifically, but something catchy. Trancelike. We’ve only got three songs and we already gotta vamp them. We should just get a track we can jam over.” Then, I had an idea. I told them this, and ran to the closet where we locked all our instruments up. Inside, I found it and blew the cobwebs off -- a cowbell. I emerged from the closet playing it. You know the pattern. Tink tink toonk tinktinktinktink toonk. It’s the same pattern as Cugat’s “Brazil”. You smiled. I always took any opportunity to goof off like this, but for some reason, without a word, George started playing too. Joey jumps in. Bump. Rest. Doo dump. Rest rest. Bump. Rest. Doo dump. You came in with slashes of guitar, left to bleed and feedback on-stage. And soon enough we had it. It was cornball, sure, but it came out like magic. “What do you wanna name it,” you asked when we stopped.

“Name it?”

“You came up with it, man. Name it.”

“Shit. Uhh, what about… ‘Miss Vichy’?”

“What’s that mean?”

“You know, like Vichy France? The Nazis puppet state, the one Phillippe Petain ran?”

“Who the fuck is Philippe Petain?”

***

“I’ll tell you who Petain is,” I growled at the man across from me and Stolas at the card table. “He’s a geriatric fascist. He’s setting the French Army up for failure. He’s the reason Spain’s about to get raped by Francisco Franco. And he’s only tolerated because he’s a war hero.”

“Petain’s the reason you’re speaking French instead of German to me, hick American,” said the drunken stranger (in French).

“Petain’s the reason you’ll be speaking German regardless in two years,” I snapped back. At this point, Alain, the bartender up front, was trudging down the stairs. “Gentlemen,” he rasped, “if you don’t stop arguing, I’ll be forced to throw the lot of you out. With the Exposition, I’m already overwhelmed, and I don’t need you bringing the gendarmerie down on my establishment.”

“I was already leaving. Enjoy yourselves, you rotten devils.” He followed the bartender upstairs, his legs faltering on his way up before righting themselves. Stolas sighed.

“Must you always drive our drinking partners away like this?”

“They wouldn’t be very good drinking partners if we weren’t arguing. Otherwise, they’re just more damn alcoholics -- and fascist ones, at that.” I took a sip from my little absinthe glass, almost down to the reservoir. I paid Alain up top a decent wage to keep us stocked with the green stuff down here, much to his chagrin. “Of all the alcohols you could choose in an age of temperance, you choose the one I risk imprisonment to supply you with,” he’d say. I peered over Stolas’s shoulder.

“What are you reading?”

“A book on medicinal herbs in America.” His beak, a regular mouth to the passerby, tongued the solution in his cup. His eyes remained fixed on the pages, his head turning to scan each line. He told strangers he had nerve damage from The War, and they nodded and let him carry on strangely. As someone who was actually in The War, I tried not to take offense to this.

“How accurate is it?”

“Not very. For example, jimsonweed is listed as a potential asthma cure. In reality, it’s toxic and causes psychosis if one takes it.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Maybe to you, but if you’re having an asthma attack I think the last thing you want is to go mad, dearest Damo.”

I shrugged and stretched my arm over my comrade’s shoulders. “Why don’t you move to America if you love it so much?”

“The depression, Damo. No jobs there.”

“No jobs here, either. No souls to claim, and everything’s been so Catholicized that you can’t throw a stone through a window without hitting an exorcism.”

“Those don’t work on us.”

“Maybe not, but they’re bad for business.”

He shut the book, pivoting his head towards me. “What about you then, my friend? Why not stay in America? Why ditch the doughboys and live here, sitting on your ass and smoking opium?”

“This again- Stol, nothing happens in America. There’s no revolution, there’s no new ideas, there’s nothing but Apocalypse, temperance, and death. I joined to get out, dammit.”

“And according to you, a lot of things are going to happen here.”

“I’m backing a horse in the race. Communism isn’t dead here -- it’s alive in the streets.”

“It was alive in the streets of Germany too. How well did it go for them?”

I hate it when he’s right. I’ve known him for centuries, and I still hate it when he’s right. I planted a kiss on his cheek. “Fair enough, old boy. Want to settle up and go ambling? Maybe check out the fair?”

“I’d love nothing more.”

So we went out. The clouds covered the sun, and people clogged the streets like logs in a beaver dam, impassable and messy. Frenchmen weren’t the only people out and about; Spaniards, Russians, Canadians, all the great societies took to the road that summer, all abuzz over the marvel that was the ‘37 Expo. Anyone could see the crests of the wave from the bottom of the gutter, from beggar to billionaire. Our goal wasn’t the fair just yet, however -- it was the brothel a few blocks away, its madams hidden in plain sight on the Rue.

“You think we’ve got a good chance here?” I asked.

“Probably not. We never do.”

“Still, it’s fun to be in a room with desperate men, don’t you think?”

“I guess that’s so.”

We’d devoted a couple of our years in France trying to find a “soul client”, someone who was willing to give that sweet soul up freely to us without being pushed or shoved. Some argue the soul does not exist, as Stolas does. He tells me that there is no such thing as a soul, that the energy we extract is a willing surrender of one’s inherent energy. He says this presence gives us consciousness, and that death is a release of that back into the aether. I ask what the difference between this and the Christian idea of “the soul” is; he says “you don’t see souls walking around Heaven or Hell with us, do you?” We bickered, usually over absinthe, about where our consciousnesses go when we reincandesce and dumb existentialist questions like that. Then after a few noisy hours we’d pass out and find ourselves on the cobblestone streets, lying in front of modest buildings like La Lounge Rouge.

The inside was all frills and dated velvet curtains, the Moulin Rouge curled up to die indoors like some poisoned cockroach. Women fanned themselves, dressed as immodestly as one can with three layers of clothing. The air shimmered with the miasma of cheap department store perfume. Men slumped in chairs away from the love seats. The gazelles pranced fat and miserable. Usually, I worked my whims with the women and Stolas did likewise with the men, but we elected to switch it up. I picked a guy in a fashionable faux-beaver derby. I didn’t ask his name.

“Would you like to see something wonderful, friend?”

“‘Scuse me?” he said in English. I switched in response.

“Would you like to see something wonderful, partner?”

“Uh. Sure.”

“Follow me.”

I asked the marm in charge of the ladies to point me to the back alley. For a few francs, she obliged, and soon we were out by the foul-smelling trash and potshit. “Alright, are you gonna give me a run for my money, or-”

He’d perched a cigarette between his lips and fumbled for his lighter; with a snap of my fingers, I provided a light. His eyes watched the flame, pulsing harmlessly around my thumb. The bastard was dumbstruck.

“Wh-what are you?”

“I work miracles,” I said. “Would you like to see another?”

He nodded. With the tip of my pinky nail, I drew a line in the air between us. Something, not quite fire, not quite light, trailed behind it. Then, like someone’s teeth biting into the skin and flesh of a peach, it split. Inside the window it took a minute for your eyes to adjust, but soon the target saw a sky of black and brown space, bordered by something bright and swirling above.

“What is that?”

“That, my friend, is Jupiter as seen from Io. You’re the first person on Earth to see this,” I lied. He’d been the fifth person to see it that month, but nobody likes being the fifth person to see a glimpse of a gas giant. “I am a being of great power, my friend. If you give me your trust, then I could make it worth your while.”

“...No.”

I cocked my head. It might have looked odd with my human disguise in place. “You’re a demon,” he said, “and you want to mislead me from the path of God.” His face curled up in a frightened grimace. I closed the window; he’d lost his space privileges. The gig was up.

“You’re in a brothel. Do you think God turns a blind eye within its doors?”

“I am a weak man, but I am not so weak as to engage in cheap tricks from the Devil. I shall find absolution from whoremongering, but not from whoring out my soul.”

That old myth, I thought. I almost said it, too. “So if an angel descended from the heavens and offered you the stars, you’d take it?”

“I’d trust a servant of the Lord over the lies of such a foul beast.”

Now Mr. Derby was starting to get on my nerves. I reached in my jacket, feigning that I had a weapon inside, and snarled: “say, does your wife know where you are, friend?”

“Y-yes, actually. I was due to meet her today. Good day sir. Good day!” He almost dropped his hat on the sprint out of the alley. I chased him for a second before giving it up and letting him run home. He got to feel good about himself and give his wife the clap later tonight. Semper fidelis. Stolas stepped out into the alleyway. “I’m assuming no luck?”

I nodded. “And you?”

“Not a thing. I think the women here have a penchant for knowing when they’re being suckered. I think we’re cursed to wander the earth, mon ami.”

I sidled up to him and stretched my arm over his shoulders. “There’s worse fates, Stoppy.”

“I guess so.”

We heard the crowd, invisible from our little alcove in the alley, chatter and giggle as the fair proceeded. I looked into his eyes. To the ordinary human, he was a stout little Frenchman with mutton chops and glasses. To me? His blank yellow eyes plunged me into an ocean of gold, and looking at his pale blue feathers felt like staring at the sky in twilight. He was a beautiful prelude to the night, much like the dusk about us in Gay Paree.

“How about it?” I asked.

“...What if someone sees?”

“That’s half the fun, my dear.”

Beaks are hard to kiss. Stolas had a little less of a diameter, and could/does pass for one of those raptoroid aviari today, but it was still awkward to wrap your lips around the non-lips before touching your tongue to his. I abandoned that and started to kiss the down feathers of his neck. The feather tufts over his eyes shot up, his feathers slimming. I groped below, feeling his cock stiffen in those worn pleated trousers. He kept swiveling his head around, letting me kiss more of his neck and the chest feathers puffed out beneath his vest. I got on my knees, nuzzling that wet nose of mine against that throbbing length, nestled taut between thigh and undergarments. I gave it a kiss; the feathers of his neck stood straight up.

“May I, erm.” He motioned to grab my horns.

“Go right ahead, pal.”

As he grabbed my horns, I undid the top button and pulled down the zipper on his cheap trousers.

***

Pissing broke the seal after Stevia and I had blown each other for a good while and he’d left me in the bathroom with $40. Honest work, honest pay, and I didn’t even have to douche. I shook the ol’ dog off, flushed the toilet with the toe of my boot, and zipped back up.

Over at the kitchen sink, I got myself an ice cold glass of somewhat filtered tap water, swished it around, and spat. People used to eat pineapple and chew zinc tablets to make their jizz taste better. They always fail to consider that cum is always going to taste like cum. I tipped the glass down my throat and chugged. Denise patted me on the back, almost making me choke.

“How’s the town vacuum?”

“Still bustin’ dust. N’ then some. What time is it?”

She checked her Casio watch. “11:43. AM.”

“Ah shit!” I tipped the glass into the sink and looked in the mirror to fix my hair. “I gotta go. I’ll be back at 2 to help out Caroline.”

She snorted. “Why? Got a hot date?”

“Actually, Denise, I do. With a friend. A friend date. Something of that sort.”

“Don’t give out anything for free.”

I tucked ten bucks from Stevia’s pay in her cleavage; she snatched it right out with a growl. “Of course. I’m a business, not a charity.”

Outside, the sky had shifted from the morning’s bright yellow to its hazy grey. The Rip kept shining above, blue and fiery in the sky. Construction workers banged away at the streets of the city with hammers and pickaxes. Before the WRDF willie-peed it to dust, they called New York City the city that never slept. If that was the case, Omaha was the city that never woke up. Nobody would shut up all the brand new buildings that the Benefactor built after both sides bombed the shit out of the city, but the catch was that none of it was ever finished and nothing was ever going to be finished. Even if they were, there was something somewhat off about the damn things. They were all too clean, too new, too fake. Outside of the city, you got a better idea of what the city was really like -- dusty, forgotten, and often cratered.

The shortcut to the diner was closed for construction, so I had to walk on the wide open highway up north. When the WRDF took over, they banned the cars to stop any vehicle bombings and cut all the funding for buses -- the only way to get around town was by paying $30 for a cab ride or using your own two feet. Luckily, the diner wasn’t a far walk, and the people of the city didn’t bunch up.

On the way there, I kept my eyes on the streets. Little Italy was safe compared to Council Bluffs, but there was always the chance one of those ex-cops could come out and shake you down. I’d heard they were trying to organize into something bigger, something dangerous. Caroline serviced one of them -- they’re like a motorcycle club, she said. I wondered how a motorcycle club was going to do anything when all the motorcycles were locked up in an impound outside of town. I pictured a guy in a leather vest pretending to crank his hog in the backseat of a taxi, and suppressed my giggles. Soon enough, after stepping over some gross looking slugs from the sarcyx world, I’d made it. The diner itself was a chrome capsule sitting under the stomachs of giants. The windows swarmed with the lunch rush, but inside I could still see him: Agent Don Jon, sipping a drink and looking straight ahead, seemingly five hours further into the day than I was.

I walked into the diner, and everything quieted down. Eyes stared me down, almost begging me to leave while I waited for someone brave enough to guide me to the table. To the right of me was a jukebox, full of every garbo pre-rip nostalgia grab craprock you could get on 7” -- the Eagles,  J. Geils, Bob Seger, Eric fuckin’ Clapton. Right now it was on the tweedle-dee first half of “Layla”, the only Clapton song that didn’t give me a headache. I told the waitress the deal and she led me over to him. “Shit howdy, you’re early,” I started.

“Actually, you just so happen to be two minutes late.”

“You keepin’ time?” He held up his watch, swinging it like a pendulum before buckling it to his wrist. Still, he was smiling. I sat myself down, coiling my tail up behind my back to fit on the booth. “Nice to see you, Damo.”

“Nice to see you too. Whatcha drinkin’ there?”

“Harvey Wallbanger. Want one?”

I looked at it for a second, then up at him. He drank things by dipping the tip of his beak into it and lapping attentively at it. “I’m good, those things are nasty. I would be down for a bijou if liqueurs are on the menu here.”

“Oh, they’re not. I just ordered a screwdriver and poured some Galliano on top.”

“...You’re shitting me.”

He took out a flask from his suit pocket, uncorked it, and waved it in my face, maybe hoping to waft some of it towards me. He didn’t need to bother -- I could smell that crap from miles away. “Fine, okay, I believe you. So, what did you want me here for, Detective?”

“Well, we’re friends, right?”

“Guess that’s so.”

He shifted back into the seat, the pleather creaking as he crossed one skinny leg over the other. “Well, if we’re friends, I wanna know more about you. Hold that thought though.” He turned to the waiter, a sarcyx with pen and pad in hand. The mask on the sarcyx’s head was some odd wooden thing, almost like a coyote’s snarl, pointed down and grinning wildly. Their thick hands didn’t deter them from flipping to a new page on the scratchpad. “Uh, I’d like a Sooper Dooper Pancake Special with my regular please, and boysenberry syrup if you got it.”

“We don’t.”

“Regular’s fine then.”

They scribbled down the order. Her eyes met me before her head could turn to do the same. “He with you?” she said with a jab of the pen.

“Well, why else would he be sitting here, Hanny? I don’t dine with randos.”

“Sorry sir, just -- y’know. Wanted to make sure you were alright.”

“Just take his order, friend. I’ll tip well, whatever he gets.”

They sucked their teeth (or did whatever sarcyxes did beneath the mask and coat to make that sound) and nodded to me. “What would you like, s-sir?”

I just realized I hadn’t checked the menu, so I gave it an awkward skim. Pretty much everything was the stereotypical diner food, with sandwiches and hashbrowns and all that. The jukebox switched to the tweedle-dum section of “Layla”. “Could I get some steak and eggs?”

“Over easy or sunny side up?”

“Which is the one where you flip it?”

“Over-easy it is. Would you like anything to drink?”

“A bloody mary’s fine.”

They slid the pad into their apron and did a little curtsey to the Agent before disappearing behind the chaos of sizzle and scream that filled the kitchen. “Don’t see a lot of them holdin’ down jobs here.”

“Lotta who?”

“Sarcyxes. They tend to stick together in houses or whatever. Or they’re part of that new RRAW chapter in the corner of town.”

“Well, someone’s gotta earn the money. I’m sure wherever the hell Asphodel is, they still have a concept of ‘paying rent’. Can’t be a masked hippie everywhere in life.” He tipped the last of the drink down his gizzard and cleared his throat. “So, about who you are.”

I clasped my hands on the table, bouncing my thigh restlessly. My stomach wasn’t agreeing with the chicken liver pasta or the semen in it. “Well, how much do you know about demons?”

“That’s the thing: barely anything. Or at least, barely anything that isn’t filtered through Reagan and company’s mouths. I figured I’d take a chance to do a little research and satiate some of my own personal curiosity, if you don’t mind my saying so.” He put his hands together, like a little gun, and reached across the table to point at me. “I wanna hear about your life. How it works. What you’ve gone through. I wanna know what made you you.”

“Does this have anything to do with a case?”

“Hell no. I’m on my lunch break.”

I sighed, adjusted my hair, and looked around me. Everyone was all caught up in their own personal conversations or clogging their arteries with whatever came out of the swing doors. “Fine. How far back do you want me to go?”

“As far as you remember.”

“Alright. It all started when I was born.”

***

Reincandescence is everything for a metahuman -- it’s more than death, it’s the continuation of life. Previously I was a demon known as Belial, the King of Failure. He was powerful, but not the way you’d think -- he was a sort of a Cassandra, if you take stock in the ancient Greek myths. Everything he did was (surprise) a failure, but he found a way to use this to his advantage. For instance, he supported the Crusades in the medieval ages so that each time they would fail and prevent Christians from taking the holy land and destroying Arabia, which allowed for the development of mathematics and science. He was on the ship with Leif Eriksson to Newfoundland, making sure the Vikings never meaningfully settled in Canada and bought the proto-Beothuk a couple hundred more years before the French fucked everything up. He threw the first stone at St. Stephen to make the first ever martyr -- something he regretted to this day when the seraphic ended up currying more favor with the Jesus types than we did. I will say we really tried with Islam. The Satanic Verses are actually probably the work of Amy or Oze or some other Goetic who was globetrotting at the time, but when drunk Belial said he’d given the group the idea. Definitely not Satan or Lucifer though. The former reincandesced before Muhammed was even born, and the latter is a snake, and has no arms. Not every demon is as pretty as I am -- although I wish I had two dicks like he does sometimes.

Metahumans have always existed alongside humans, and for a while we were a united front. Maybe you could call us the reason gods exist, or the reason for the boogeyman and other such bumps in the night. Then I guess around the dawn of the Roman Empire or so we split up. We think it was over Caesar, but then there was the whole Temple of Solomon affairs -- it’s all politics I slept through at school. Either way, we ended up fighting a war that lasted about a hundred years, and it all ended in a draw. We signed a treaty saying we stay off each other’s property and get that sweet sweet energy in our own ways. We also made sure we changed the colors of our eyes -- used to be all glowing white, but they went blue and we went yellow. (Red was a secondary choice but was thought to be hard to see through.)

Most metahumans look nothing like regular humans. Some say it’s because we have psionic energy warping our very forms and bending reality around us, but I say it’s just plain old magic. Some stuff is freaky beyond-universe crap, and some stuff is just magic spells. That’s the answer that helps me sleep at night. Belial had three heads, and they were all of one mind somehow. It didn’t make sense, but it didn’t have to because, guess what. It’s fuckin’ magic. Around the 1700s, he declared that he was bored of being the King of Failure, and wanted to reincarnate into something that would turn his legacy into one of success. He submitted an oath to the council, plunged a blade into his eyes, and faded into dust before the search for me was called. I remember none of this. I was in utero at this point.

My first memory was getting pulled out of my mother, Something Something Leeds, in New Jersey, 1735. I was the seventh son of the seventh son, blah blah blah, I flew out up through the chimney and lived as a cryptid for a while. You might have heard of me -- they turned me into the mascot for the town’s hockey team for a while, too. (Not me physically, an image of me. That looked nothing like me. Whatever. Drop it.) After a few years of eating people’s chickens and dogs for sustenance, a bunch of demons showed up to take me home. Home, of course, being Pandaemonium.

Pandaemonium is wherever a human sits, but so much different than you remember. When they walk into a room and can’t remember what they were there for, it’s most likely because they accidentally stumbled into Pandaemonium or Panseraphus and some poor demon or angel had to put them back on the plane of the mundane to avoid any issues. When you don’t, you get things like people seeing ghosts or sleep paralysis demons, or even worse -- having religious visions. The world is like, yet unlike. Metahumans live in the unlike.

My upbringing was in the somewhat cozy Unlike Pine Barrens. Here is where we learned to stop being feral children and started to learn manners. I somewhat miss biting off chicken heads, but my manners classes taught me to only do that in an emergency, such as when you want to freak out a bunch of other demons at a party. I was a “special case”, which meant that every other class ended with me getting sent to a counselor who would help me work through my issues by hitting me with a ruler and telling me “stop, stop, stop.” After a decade or so, I ended up passing the grade and getting to go onto further training. This is where I met Stolas and Raum.

Stolas was the nerd, Raum was the leader, and I was the scrappy little pitbull they could barely keep on a leash. We called ourselves Total Hellfire, and we were badass motherfuckers. We fought in the War of 1812, we circumnavigated the globe, Raum became the first non-Japanese person to learn karate (took a lot of unfortunate yellowface, but what can you do), we basically tore it up everywhere we went and then some. Then the fun all ends when Raum decides he wants to stop being friends with us and go do clerical work for Goetian Interests. He doesn’t even want to claim a soul for himself; he’s “fallen in love with humanity.” At the time I thought it was sappy, stupid, even a bit immature. Stolas and I went our separate ways and we continued to tear shit up across the globe. Then I joined World War 1, ended up in Paris, and deserted. Teamed up with Stolas again before- well, I’ll get to it later, but we went our separate ways. I fought for the French resistance, spent a couple of decades after the war hunting Nazis in West Germany, faked my death when Interpol started breathing down my neck, and went back to America just in time to get lost in the counterculture. I genuinely don’t remember most of what happened in the 60s -- it all washed away in the junkie wave of primo Golden Sunshine LSD that I scored in Haight-Ashbury.

The 70s came along, and the indescribable dream died. I joined the Flamin’ Groovies, then got kicked out of the Flamin’ Groovies. I had unreasonable amounts of bathhouse sex in New York, back when sex was clean and men and women were ugly. I spent as little time in unlike spaces as I could, even though I still thought myself so much better than these toys of flesh, these fruit flies in the wake of centuries old turtles, crawling their way across this lonely little planet.

Then I moved to New Jersey and met you. That’s when it all fell apart. That’s when I became a human.

***

“Holy shit,” you said. “I can’t believe we did it.” Stolas had brought over Seymour and Seymour had brought a contract backstage after the show. It was rare to get signed offa one 7” that you push onto people at a merch desk (which I did great work behind), but Seymour saw the sparkle in your eyes, I guess. Stolas probably helped him see that. Even as he was crossing his arms and evil eyeing me, it felt like you and him believed in us, all of us. Seymour stepped onto the stage afterwards and met us in the green room with a pen. As your manager, I got to put ink on it first, then you, then Joey and George. Just like that, one beautiful night in October, we were on Sire. The world was ours.

We went drinking together -- as if we did anything else -- and I hung on your arm, dancing to the godawful KISS disco single that had dropped a couple months back, and was made for retarded humpcatting. Of course, we followed suit on the dance floor until the bouncer told us to stick to the bar or sober-up and show some respect. “Sure man, sure” led to a few more turns of doing more pelvic thrusts until the club finally had enough and tossed us out onto the street. Joey and George had to fend for themselves in the neon jungle while we settled on a bench and tried our hardest not to throw up.

“Cripes,” you groaned. “Is it possible to get an instant hangover? Just sober up and start achin’?”

“I dunno. Maybe. I’ve never been hungover before.”

You looked at me with that don’t bullshit me stare. “Oh yeah?”

“Demons don’t get hung over.”

“And you’re a demon?”

“Yeah.” I looked him dead in the eyes. In ill judgement, I tried to sell it with a stare. Dogs barked, trashcans clanged, couples screamed in studio apartments. Then we broke out in laughter.

“God, I hope not, my mom would track me down just to kill me. Hell, she’d kill me if she knew what type of music I was making in the big city -- she’s crazy religious.”

“Really? What denomination?”

“Jehovah’s Witness.” You lit a cig and perched it in the corner of your mouth. Fire entered your lungs and came out like a chimney in the night sky. I did much the same. It felt like cream pouring into my soul, or whatever I had.

“Ahh, so you escaped a cult.”

“Ehh, I wouldn’t say that. There’s good people.”

“Everyone’s got good people, doesn’t make what they do any less fucked up. I mean, say what you will about the Mormons, but at least they let you go to the movies or celebrate your birthday without excommunicating you.”

“When’d you get into religion?”

“I read. I get out. I know more than you think, T. The Witnesses are nuts. Glad you got out.”

“Eh, don’t matter. Everyone damns you if you’re gay, no matter what you think’s in the sky. The Bhagavad Gita’s probably got something about stonin’ fags. That’s why I had to get the hell out of Ohio -- God doesn’t give two shits about Newark, it’s just men wrestling with off-duty angels. The only thing that matters is making it. And now I guess we made it.”

I leaned back onto the metal bars. “I guess we did.” I thought about a future we could have, one of thousands. I would work the mixing board after learning some engineering tricks, then we’d go new wave for a bit before coming back with a big return to roots in a couple decades time. The band would filter out over time but we’d still be together, you as the artist and me as the man pulling the ropes. We’d live together, love together, and in 50 or 60 years time we’d die together. Die together. Die. Together. Why was I thinking this? Why was I thinking this about you? Am I becoming human?

“What?”

“Huh?”

“You just said something about ‘becoming human’ or something. You ok?”

“Yeah yeah. Not buggin’ out or anything. Just, something to do with self worth I guess.”

“C’mon, Damo. We’re at the top of the world, man. If there was ever a time to grow a fuckin’ spine, it’s now.” I leaned over, my hands knit, and darted my ears back and forth. He didn’t know it. Or did he? Did he see through my disguise? Were you keeping up the facade? Was everyone playing a prank on me? I pictured a musket in my heart, unsheathed the rod, and tamped it down. Silence, please. I needed to plan.

“Wanna hear a joke?”

“By all means.” You got to the butt and flicked it; sparks showered the curb. You kept saying my jokes were bad or didn’t make sense, but I’d been saving the best one, from all my years of experience, for last.

“Alright, so a guy has the last name Rose. He has a daughter, and he’s one of those guys that loves naming his kids something stupid. He names her ‘Wild’ so she’s Wild Rose.”

“Uh huh.”

“He hopes she can marry someone else with a beautiful last name, like Diamond or Heart. Still, he’s forward thinking, so he lets her go out into the world and marry whoever she wants.”

“As you do.”

“He waits ten years. Finally, his daughter comes back from Germany, who she has been betrothed to. ‘He’s a nobleman! He’s owned the town so long it’s his surname!’ ‘My name is Albert Rose. I’m charmed to meet you!’ ‘Nice to meet you too,’ says Lord Jacob Fucking.”

You paused for a minute to think it over, and gave a complimentary giggle. “Where’d you hear that one?”

“The Somme,” I said without thinking.

“The river? In France?”

“Yeah. Yeah!”

“Whoever told you that joke should’ve been shot to death in a ditch.” He was, I thought. We sat quiet for a bit. Not a soul passed us by at this hour. The club still raged behind us, muffled and contained.

I didn’t even know I’d said it until it was out and done. “I think I love you.”

“Y-yeah?”

I wracked my brain, trying to decode the meanings of that one word. I didn’t know if it was fear or nervousness shaking it forth. “Yeah,” I offered.

“I love you too.”

“No, I mean. I love love you. I’m into you, man.”

“I know.”

I must have looked like an idiot. “For how long?”

“Since we met at Zanzibar, dummy.”

I hadn’t had this much fear in me since half a century ago. It would all be so easy if you just wanted to fuck me, to feel some part of me without knowing it was yours. To make love to a demon and say you lived to tell the tale. It would have been less agony to be fucked, to be treated like some novelty and told to strangers who would dismiss you with a wave of your hands. It stung to love you, because every move felt like tearing through some delicate meringue. There was always the chance of fucking up, rolling the car, blowing it all into smithereens. Right now, I felt the wheel fighting against the grip of my knuckles. “And y-you feel the sa-”

You didn’t ask permission, and you didn’t need to. Your lips met mine, purely, without fear, without stress, just a needful pucker meeting my own false lips. As I took the amulet out of my pocket and dropped it with a clatter on the ground, I could feel the tears well up in my eyes. I leaned back and looked at his face, the world clouding around him.

***

Don Jon handed me a tissue. “That’s rough, Damo. I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said, blowing into the rough paper. “It’s all ancient history now. Everything’s better than ever if you ask me.” I rolled my tongue around in my mouth, trying to get bits of steak gristle out between my fangs. My plate had a distinct lack of food where there was one, and the story was the same for my bloody mary. “At least better than before.”

“Yeah. I’d go crazy if that happened to me.”

“That exact thing?”

“Well, like you know. Not EVERY exact thing. I’d like to think I’d do a few things different.”

I cleared my throat. He’d licked all the yolk out of his sunny side eggs and fed himself all the little sausage bits, but he was still only halfway through the giant stack of chocolate chip pancakes before him. If I’d heard what he heard, I’d have lost my appetite. Nope. I figured this guy was great to have around crime scenes -- never had to worry about losing his lunch.

“You don’t think I’m a piece of shit?” Snuff snuff.

“You’re a living being doing your best on this bitch of an Earth. I can’t say I don’t see you differently, but you don’t come off any worse. Sometimes that’s just how it is.”

“I’m sorry. Uh, y-you can tell your story, if you’d like-” I thought for a second. “Wait, what time is it?”

He peeped the watch for a second, a mouthful of sweet pancake accompanying the words “Quarter past two.”

“Fuck. I’m-I’m sorry, I gotta go. I’ll be at Vomitorium if you need me.”

“Oh no, that’s fine. See you later?”

I was already halfway out the door, pushing past Hanny and in a full sprint down the highway. He probably thought I’d just dine n’ dashed. I felt bad, but right now there were two angry grunts in my room and a couple hundred dollars at stake.

I didn’t even notice him, I was in too much of a hurry. He was probably walking to the taxi depot with a fresh book donation, going who knows where. But I saw him.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, sir, I-”

The blue feathers shrunk. The yellow eyes spread wide. His psychographic amulet hung around his neck, but no matter what was stripped from me I could still see him.

“Stolas?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone by that name. Excuse me.” He kept gathering books, avoiding eye contact, taking whatever I tried to put on the pile so he could put it on there himself.

“Stolas, it’s me! It’s Damo!” I began to follow him.

“I don’t know you! I don’t know you! Taxi! Taxi!” He was just too fast for me. Some cab caught him and sped off, not even dodging the potholes in the road. I could see him jostling around in the cab as they went, his eartufts bent under its roof.

I pushed myself to my feet and sprinted in the opposite direction of the cab. There weren’t enough hours in the day to deal with this, especially now. I didn’t even clear it with security as I ran in.

“You’re thirty fucking minutes late,” Denise spat. I wondered why this got under her skin; I was almost always late, to most things. The problem was with her at this point. Now wasn’t the time for bickering though.

“Denise, I gotta go into your bathroom and use your douche.”

“What?”

“I can’t go in there, they’re gonna beat my ass if I shit on them and I didn’t have enough time to prep.”

“Well that’s not exactly my problem now, is it?”

“Denise, I swear to god, I’ve never done wrong by you. I’ll wash it. I will fucking boil the nozzle and scour the inside of the bulb with bleach, but please -- I promised Caroline.”

One of her typical groans. “Fine. For Caroline.”

“Thank you thank you thank you.”

The inside of her bathroom was lined with soaps and little bottles of old woman fragrances. I felt really bad having to squirt water from a bulb up my ass seven or eight times in her lovely toilet and then push out whatever shit nuggets were inside, like vandalism by fecal inches. I gave the bulb as best of a wash as I could and shoved it in my pocket. On the way out, I gave a quick nod to Caroline as she passed by. She hurried up and bounced down the stairs to the kitchen before I ducked into the room.The twins sat on my bed, one smoking a cigarette and the other in a full-blown scowl.

The twins weren’t really twins; at least, I didn’t think they were. They were two human WRDF officers, one blond and one brunette, both named Marvin Hyde. They’d been deployed to Free Omaha a year prior, and over the course of that year, they found they had only two things in common:

They liked shooting commie pinko scum, and;

They liked fucking trannies in the ass.

“Where’s the tranny,” grumbled one of them. It didn’t matter who, they were basically the same identical slab of meat. “We were scheduled for a tranny and your faggot ass is here instead.”

“Where is the transsexual,” the other one echoed. The first one did all the talking from here on out.

“She’s sick.”

“With what? If it’s GRIDS, you’re dead fucking meat.”

“She has a cold.”

“From GRIDS?”

“From getting sneezed on at the supermarket. She doesn’t have GRIDS.”

“And neither do you?”

“No. I’m clean.”

“Can you verify you’re clean?”

“I’m a demon, so I can verify I’m clean.”

Talky looked me up and down before getting up off the bed. “We ain’t faggots, is the thing.”

“Demons don’t have a concept of gender.” I threw up in my mouth a little having to say it, but I followed up with “It’s straighter than if you were doing it with Caroline.”

“‘Zat true?”

“Do I look like I can afford to lie to you?”

He kept eyeing me, breathing deep from his nose like some missing link turned white supremacist. Like a gunshot, his hand flew to my chin. I expected a punch. I got a firm squeeze, piloting my head left, then right, looking me over. His finger pulled the side of my snout up, exposing my teeth. He was analyzing me, grading me like a cut of beef. Something burned deep inside me, the impulse to headbutt him, break his nose, do something. He lets go; the flame sputters out.

“Guess not.” He pulled the wad of fifties out of his wallet and slammed it on the nearest dresser before grabbing me again.

They don’t give me enough time to prep, and they don’t use lube. Mr Talky leaned me up against a wall and held me by the neck as he shoved it in, calling me every slur in the crayon-scrawled picturebook of his mind as he thrusts. Faggot, fairy, tranny, queer, soulsucker, leech, even a couple of retards and treehuggers thrown in for good measure. He rubbed the scars on each of my shoulders, calling them punishment for being a rotten freak. He threw me on the bed after getting me nice and sore, dangling me by my ankles and keeping on powerfucking, the other twin stroking his cock for a few minutes before going in on the other end. It’s a spit roast. The thought of Caroline having to deal with these people got me sick to my stomach. The bed squeaked loudly, flimsily -- I had never been more aware of the price of my furniture than at this exact moment. Everything hurts, and I deserve every ounce of pain stretching me.

“You fucking like that? You fucking like that you sick fucking freak?”

The semen pulsed my back end, then hit the back of my throat. The quiet one had my arms held down, so I couldn’t reach my wrist and squeeze the pressure point. I just can’t stop gagging. The bile retches and rises. It all spurts out and onto him.

***

I emptied my guts on the pavement, turning away from you to spare you the sight. I don’t know why, but the first thing I think of saying is “sorry, I’m not sick, it’s the alcohol.”

“Um,” you said. “Um. Um.” I’m out of pukeland and back to reality after a few spits. Your eyes are darting left and right.

“So this- This is me. This is who loves you. This is the person you l-love. So, I figure, if you hate me now, then you have a good reason right? You have-”

“We need to get off the street.”

“N-now?”

“Now, there’s a car coming. In the alley. Go first.”

I vaulted over the bench, snagged the psychographic amulet, and swung my arms wildly as I entered yet another nasty little Newark alley, pressing myself up against a dumpster. My wings made it hard for me to flatten myself all the way. I heard the car, probably a sedan or something, tear up the street like velcro. You come stumbling after me.

“Okay, okay,” you started off. Your hands rubbed at your temples, and you’re pacing wildly. I’ve never seen you pace before, not even during recording our 7”. “What are you?”

“I’m a demon.”

“Guess I could have figured that out from context clues. What else are you? What’s your real name?”

“My real name is Damosadeus,” I said mechanically. It’s in our nature. “I’m a Goetian metahuman from Pandaemonium, although I guess demon is the more appropriate term here.” I wipe a little more spit-up off my snout.

“And you’re from, like, Hell?”

I shake my head. “Pandaemonium isn’t hell.”

“How?”

“Well, you’re not going there when you die.”

“No, I mean how did you do that? How did you hide so long?”

“It’s a psychographic disguise. Only demons and people who are bound by a soulpact can see through it when it’s active.”

You sighed and turned around. You breathed in, then out. It’s like yoga. I hear you murmuring to yourself, my ears picking up “can’t be” and “might as well”. Then you turn around.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I dig you, Damo. I really do. And if you’re a demon who wants my soul, I’ll still dig you. So fuck it. Let’s go crazy… together.” You offered me a hand, and without thinking, I took it. “Follow me,” you said. “We’re gonna have some fun.”

Our first stop was a liquor store. “Don’t wear that thing, amulet, whatever it is,” you said. There was this odd smile on your face, like you’d gone nutty. The cashier blinked a couple times, looking me up and down. He must have thought he was dreaming as he saw a near-seven foot tall dog thing with horns and wings demurely try to hide behind shelves of the store while you checked out a six-pack. Then, we went to take the bus. There was this old woman on there, screaming and grabbing her little toy dog with her to run off the bus. That was when I stopped caring and started having fun. The busdriver didn’t give as shit, saying “these kids and their fancy ass Halloween costumes.” Maybe that was what kept the cops from coming to get us as we danced around a playground at night, guzzling beers and screaming like Lost Boys. It was when I flapped my wings after being thrown off the merry-go-round that you popped the question, still shifting your weight to keep the wheel going.

“Can you fly with those things?”

“Of course I can fly with them, they’re wings.”

“Have you flown with those things?”

“A buncha times. Usually in the woods when people aren’t looking.” You hopped off and looked down at me, cheshire as fuck. I’d never seen your crooked teeth this much; it was like something had pushed you over the edge of caring. “No, absolutely not.”

“C’mon, you want my soul, dontcha? I figure you should put a little legwork in. Well, wingwork.”

“What if I drop you?”

“Well, then you lose the greatest record deal of your life and you have to start over. You won’t drop me.”

I sighed. “I’m Damo, fly me.”

We got to an empty football field, the gamelights still blazing, hopefully where nobody would see us. I hadn’t practiced flying with a passenger before, so I spent a few boozy minutes trying to figure out the best way to get you in the air.

“What if we both run at the same time, with you holding me while you flap your wings?”

“No way, we’d be tripping all over each other.”

“Buuut what if we ran side by side?”

“And leave you dangling?”

“Just pull me up close before we take off.”

We stood at the end of the field, hand in hand. When I was born this was an executable offense, and here I was about to drag you into this. I spread my wings, gauged the wind direction. The splayed phalanges on the back were red, and bat-like fur and leather stretched in between them. “3. 2. 1!”

I was a lot faster than you were, so it was hard to keep at your speed, but soon lift off was achieved. I picked you up by your arm, dangling, and mustered up as much strength as I could to pull you up into a hug. Your arms wrapped around me, and mine did yours. You screamed “don’t let go, Jesus fucking Christ, don’t let go!” as your fingers dug into my back.

I flew low, low enough to keep us both from freezing to death or hitting a plane. We weaved between buildings, avoiding helicopter spotlights, startling the people below. A part of you probably regretted it, but I could feel your heart, pressed to mine, and I don’t know how, but I could tell you felt safe with me. Fucking safe. For the first time in my life, someone who wasn’t another demon felt safe with me. I asked where you wanted to land, and you said the studio. So we did. We landed right outside the old garage, where the band had let me park my car and make my home, and let ourselves in.

The second the door slammed shut, you set your lips on me, lapping hungrily at my snout. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long,” you said. While cleaning out in the bathroom, you also said I was just a little bit hotter as a demon. “I think you’d be hot as a demon too.”

You walked out of the bathroom with your clothes tossed aside, half-erect. “Shut up and fuck me,” you replied.

After I’d tossed my leather jacket somewhere, you wrapped your arms around me and guided me to sit on the couch, grinding against my jeans. I felt you grow against the friction. My wings instinctively spread, my hands drifting across your shoulders and back as you kissed my neck, my cheek, and my snout some more. I rubbed my way down to your ass, spreading those soft cheeks wide, trying to get a sense of how hard to go on you. It felt unstretched, maybe not even trained. Fingers fumbled with my belt buckle and button before pulling them and my boxers off in one jerk. The slick felt icy on my length, but wedged between your ass it stays hard. I feel you shudder, feel you groan and stifle the pain as you lower yourself onto me. 

“F-fuuuck!”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, just keep going. Just h-haven’t caught for a while.”

He started to bounce as best as his knees would allow. I could feel him, pulsing, clenching, holding on tight. His fingers snuck under my shirt, and with a little difficulty getting it past my horns, tossed it off. They splayed out, feeling my chest, tussling the red fur, kneading at me. I needed this. I needed you. I needed to feel you around me, feel myself stretching you out and connecting with you like this. I could feel your length dribbling down and onto me, and as I hit the place, I held you close. I roared. It was really embarrassing for me to do, but I roared. I felt you shoot a load on my stomach when I did, so I guess it was worth it.

For a few minutes we laid on our sides in the afterglow, sticky and tired. I’d worn my wings out, and I think you’d worn your knees out as well. Then you said it:

“I want to give my soul to you.”

We sat in the relative silence of the garage, with the rumble of the air conditioning to keep us company. You said it again, “I want to give my soul to you. I want to be your ward, or whatever it is I’d be with you. I want to spend eternity with you.”

“Please don’t T-”

“No, no, I mean it. I want you to have it. You need it, right.”

“It’s… it’s how we get ahead in society, I guess.”

“Then you need my soul. And I need you. And if you always wanted it, then you should have it.”

“...are you sure?”

I felt him nod under my chin. “It’s my dream, I want it to end this way.”

Everything around me started to sink. The cushions felt like fabric that we kept sinking into, spinning into the night. My stomach twisted. “What do you mean?”

“It’s my dream. All of this -- it’s all a dream. I passed out at the club, and this is all a lucid dream. I’ve been controlling all of this since I managed to get myself semi-aware, and now I want the story to end this way. I give myself to you, and you take it and use it beautifully.”

My heart sank. It was real; it really did happen. In my arms, he believed he was in some sort of supernatural dream, one with demons and drinking and lovemaking and all that, and it was some beautiful, twisted-up little fairytale that would all be gone when he woke up. I don’t know why I didn’t correct him, why I didn’t shake him and tell him it was all real, that this was all really happening, and that what he was asking me to do was real. Maybe I just didn’t want it to end.

“Please.”

I stared straight ahead. I didn’t breathe. He probably felt it, the apprehension, but maybe he thought it was humility. That this beautiful creature who’d appeared and loved him and made him his future and fucked him was some gift from God, and he needed to give himself to it to prove it. Idiot. You fucking idiots. “Okay.”

My hand went over the back of his head, where the neck and the skull meet. I focused in deep. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Please. Stop. Take me back. Take me to the jocks beating me to a pulp for puking on their dicks. I don’t want to be here. Anywhere in my life but here. Don’t do this. I suck the psionic energy or soul or orgone from the back of his head please don’t do this please don’t please don’t you fucking idiot don’t do it he loves you tell him no you’re lying you’re lying you’re lying to him you’re hurting him stop stop stop stop stop. And then it’s done.

He thanked me for it all, for lying to him and fucking him and raping his soul and everything a rat like me could do to such a sweet thing. I removed myself when he fell asleep. The bathroom was cold, dirty, and yellow, in light and tiles. I looked in the bathroom mirror. I couldn’t stop smiling.

I took my fist and slammed it into my nose. Again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Blood spurted out.

***

“Alright, buddy, that’s enough. We’re gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“You’re kicking us out? This faggot puked on Officer Hyde over here, and you want us to leave?”

I clutched my stomach and rocked back and forth on the vomit covered bed. There was a pun to be made here, I was sure of it. The security guard, God only knows his name, snarled at the duo. “No, we want you to leave and pay.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.” It was the other one. His second statement of the day, most likely. “We aren’t,” replied the guard.

“Alright, then let’s show ‘em how the WRDF deals with scam artists,” Talky said, cracking his knuckles and neck.

“Go ahead,” the guard said with his pistol drawn.

The world’s least eventful stand-off happened for about three seconds. Talky went over to his pants, slid 'em on, and dug around in his pocket. He threw the wad at me, still writhing and coughing. “Ughhh,” I said, “I’m sawreee, I’m sawreeee.” I could feel blood mixing with the bile in the back of my throat. I’d thank God for an empty stomach, but I guess I had a weak gag reflex to thank for that.

“Never coming here again.”

I heard them thunder down the stairs. Talky shouted “she’s here? Aw come on!” when they passed Caroline in the hallway, no doubt eating lunch or getting some sun. I wanted to laugh, but the pain just wouldn’t stop. Beautiful, sweet pain -- not just in my stomach, or my nose, but in my back. Of all possible times, the wounds chose now to act up. I just kept rolling around in various fluids until I could get myself to a standing position. I grabbed all the sheets off of my bed and chucked it into the hamper in the corner of my bathroom; I might as well have thrown them away. Then I just got in the shower, turned it on cold, and sat next to the drain, letting it all wash off of me.

I stared up at the showerhead, watching the water pound down on me. My nose eventually quit bleeding. I kept thinking of Hitchcock’s Psycho, how that was the last thing that girl in the shower saw after she got stabbed to death. An uncaring nozzle, pouring rain down on her, all her life swirling down the drain. I knew a guy who was so scared he would get “Psycho”-d that he locked the bathroom door whenever he washed himself. He kept himself safe. I’d shower with a bucket and a mop if I could.

Clean was clean enough. I got out, dried myself off, and picked the money up off the floor. He’d paid the full $200, thank god -- although maybe he just didn’t have time to subtract the vomit tax with a gun in his face. I slid into a decently clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt; I think it was best if I waited to dryclean my jacket before putting it on.

“You okay?” said a familiar voice from my doorframe.

“Yes, Caroline.”

“You’re sure? They went pretty rough on you-”

“I’m fine Caroline. Please just enjoy your birthday, okay?”

She sighed, then ambled out. Denise took her place. “Goin off to waste your paycheck?”

“Oh, fuck off Denise.” Caroline did pink n’ blues, Rachel drank like Tallulah Bankhead, and I had my painkillers. Denise was the only teetotaler, and she made sure everyone knew it. 

“You know your heart’s eventually gonna give out on that shit. Don’t care how much punishment you can handle, it’s gonna happen.”

“So what?”

“So wh-” Her index and thumb went to pinch her forehead. “First off, if they find you overdosed in your room, we’d be losing a significant amount of income. And second off -- I fuckin’ care about you, Damo! I don’t wanna have to be the one to find you drowned in your own vomit, and I don’t want any of the other girls to have to find that either. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Like hell we are. The only time you’re my friend is when you need something, and vice versa. We’re neighbors at best.”

She was quiet for a second, maybe thinking of a way to defuse it. She gave up. “Know what? Maybe you’re right. Enjoy being dead, Damo.”

I walked past her, shoving a 50 in her face and growling “I will” on my way out the door.

You don’t buy drugs on the street anymore; the WRDF shot them all, hung druggies and dealers alike, burnt them to death with flamethrowers. The War on Drugs was won at the smoking end of a gun. Therefore, your average junkies had to get creative, as did their dealers. You couldn’t buy weed anymore, but you could buy sleeping pills if you were flush and DXM and DPH if you were on the street. You couldn’t buy cocaine, but you could buy caffeine powder and suck that off your thumb. You couldn’t buy heroin, but if you had a significant disability, such as a broken arm or chronic pain, you could buy some codeine, or even better, some hydrocodone. Ford-Godwin was more than willing to stock their corner stores with all of ‘em. On a good day, there would be enough for everyone. The line of tweakers only just reached the door, so the day was turning out so-so. Some of them were people genuinely trying to get medicine they needed, paying out the ass for it too, but most of us were loyal customers to the galartan woman in scrubs and a medical mask working the desk at Little Italy’s FG Drug Dispensary.

Sometimes the customers got mad if they didn’t have enough, mad enough to threaten to beat the woman to death with her own limbs. Of course, this meant them shutting the pharmacy down, which led to the people with enough money beating the impatient bozo any degree between “within an inch of their life” and “to death”. This encouraged a veteran’s culture of playing nice -- you give the nice lady a name (any name but your own, and not the one you used last week), a prescription, and the cash. She goes in the back and hands you your pills or drink or whatever. You leave, and do this in a week when you run out. When I got to the front of the line, I noticed her “slingin’ pills and payin’ bills” keychain. I had to struggle not to point it out.

“Dave Mitchner, hydrocodone.” I slid $100 on the counter. She lapped at the air from within her mask, wet in the middle with her spit.

“Hydro’s $150 now.” Her accent was thick; she’d been old enough to speak when the Rip took her here. I rolled my eyes and pushed the rest of the cash her way. I at least had $30 bucks of petty cash for the rest of the week. “Thank you, Mr. Mitchner.” 

She handed over the precious little capsules, rattling around like sleigh bells. I snatched ‘em and made my way out the door.

I floated, almost projected my way back inside and up the stairs. I’d started to get antsy, itchy without these things. They helped, helped the aching of the dual scars on my back, the wounds in the air outside my body. They quelled the signals, filled the brain with beautiful, cleansing static. They lifted me.

I sat down, leaning myself against the wall underneath my window. Curtains were drawn, the door was closed. If I threw up (unlikely seeing as I’d emptied my stomach contents an hour or so before) I wouldn’t be choking on it. I took about four pills, balanced 'em on my molars, and bit down. There was that bitter medicinal taste, the type all pills taste like, all chemical sugar, and a few minutes later, I was nowhere. I closed my eyes. Euphoria swallowed me.

***

I’d always hoped there was a place we go when we die that was nowhere. I always likened it to the place we go when we get put under for wisdom tooth extraction. When that happens, we’re happy, giggling, and blissful as we sail off into the space of nothing, then we wake up and part of us is gone. Death should be like that -- a giggly bliss we don’t wake up from. Death isn’t hydrocodone, but it’s close. I feel heat sweeping across my forehead. The colors behind my eyelids shake back and forth. It’s all so beige, like sand, or grass, burned by the sun. How I missed the sun. The bright days, the days before it all turned grey, before the sun became a pilot light against the blaze of the Rip above. I miss the blue skies.

Wait. No. I wanna stay here, I wanna float. Please don’t-

***

I’d missed them for a while. I wandered the desert, naked. I’d tried starving myself, jumping into fires of bombed out villages, trying to get people to attack me. It was pure suicide as life, living during the apocalypse in medias res. Maybe they regarded me as some psychotic monster, maybe they didn’t care. I sure didn’t. I just wanted death.

Custer was different. First off, it was in the middle of the Black Hills, where there had been forests. The sky was often red, but even without the Rip above, the forest fires coughing black smoke into the sky would have colored it that way anyhow. What didn’t terrify me was the fire; it was what had been left of Custer.

There were firebombings, napalm bombings, white phosphorus bombings -- those seemed to be mercies. Custer had been unlucky enough to be harboring enties during the time of mass killings, the time of eternal terror. The WRDF refused them the mercy of the bomb, and showed them the rage of fire. The neo-nazis passed around this thing called the Turner Diaries. Before I began to use it as toilet paper, I gave it a cursory read. They talked about something called the “Day of the Rope”, where every minority would be hung from lampposts. What sick mind, I thought, would see this as a victory?

The WRDF had proven me wrong. They’d run out of lampposts, so they went with the sides of buildings, the city’s non-terrestrials hung like Halloween decorations. Even those had run out. There were piles of tires, still burning with bodies stacked on top, all types of skeletons, snouts, charred scales, fur, and flesh, all twisted in agony. Finally, the humans of the town -- even the white, the male, the altogether American -- had been led to walls and shot against them, using the last of the American bullets to put the traitors to death.

Maybe you could call it self-destruction. Maybe you could call it a tragedy. But it happened. It really did happen. I laid down on the street, feeling the warmth of the fires around me. Pandaemonium was not Hell, because here was Hell, made by my precious mankind. Then, I found some clothes and finally put them on. In this burning grave, I gained the will to live again.

***

“Goodness. I still can’t believe it.” Stolas ground his beak, his head turning to scan every bit of the painting.

We looked Guernica up and down, all in black and white but still fiery and jittering with grotesque terror. The screaming horse, the people with their arms outstretched, the streetlight ablaze -- something twisted deep in my stomach.

“I’ve seen worse,” I lied. Maybe I’d served at the Somme, but not at the worst part of the Somme. I hadn’t seen mustard gas or shotguns, just craters and twisted barbed wire like the rest of my troop. Baby stuff. “Frankly, I’m surprised the government has enough time on its hands to give the Exposition a pavilion, much less funds.”

“Maybe this is the last gasp,” he replies, his hands in his pockets. There was so much apprehension in his voice. His feathers had slimmed down; he sat terrified beneath the work. “Lets get out of here.”

We left the Spanish pavilion and ambled about the fairgrounds. In other world expos, you got a good idea of the world around you, all the lovely little cultures dancing around. Here, it was all Europe, and all of Europe was all war all of the time. The Nazi and Soviet pavilions faced each other off, two workers against the swastika-laden eagle. “When do you think it’s gonna happen?”. He swiveled his head back to meet me -- I’m unsure how his disguise accounted for that.

“When what’s gonna happen?”

“The big war.”

I scoffed. “Probably in a few decades time. Things have a habit of staying still in history after some rat bastard shakes everything up. Right now, I’m not worried. I think we still got time.”

The feathers on the back of neck bristled, and his talons clenched. “And you really wanna take that chance?”

“Why not? I lived through the last war.”

“You deserted.”

“So I could live!” I paused for a second. “What are you getting at?”

His talons met my shoulders. I couldn’t avoid his eyes, staring straight into me. “Come with me.”

“Come with y- wait, you’re leaving? Where? When?”

“I’m going back to America. The boat ride’s next week, and I got you a ticket. Things are getting bad, and you need to get out of here-”

“So what? We can move into a shitty apartment in New York? Get branded a predator by every law agency in the country? Live with rats nibbling at our toes, eating dust soup?”

“Things are better now, there’s work, there’s Roosevelt’s social programs, he-”

Huff. “He’s a capitalist, Stolas.” I tempted fate using his real name, but nobody seemed to be listening. “He’d fight alongside Hitler if it gave him a chance to swing at the Soviets -- hell, fascism’s probably already on the way in with the America First business.”

“So you’d rather stay here and die?”

“I’m not gonna die. I’m gonna get a soul, and then I’ll be able to whip some Nazi ass if they ever cross France’s border. I’ll finally fuckin’ succeed at changing history, changing something.”

He couldn’t roll his eyes, but the sentiment was the same. “Get real, Damo. You think anyone’s gonna give their soul to you? You’re lousy at this. You’re a back-alley magician, all smoke and mirrors. You’re-you’re a locked box, I-” He stopped himself; I wanted to hear it.

“What is it? Say it, you swivel-headed freak.” I jabbed a finger at his breast.

“I don’t even know you well enough to trust you.”

“So why give me a ticket to America?”

“Because I love you.”

It couldn’t be real. He wasn’t saying it here, he wasn’t telling me this. “No you don’t. You don’t love me, you love my lips wrapped around your cock. You love the idea of a friend who can get you off and drink with you at the same time. We don’t love each other, and at the very least, I don’t love y-”

A shove. In a split second, I was on my ass, looking up at these eyes of gold, once pleading, now furious and full of tears.

***

“Hey.”

Oh no. Someone wanted to speak, and I had a sneaking suspicion I knew who. “Wuh.”

“It’s me.” Blue feathers, gold eyes. No idea how he got past the front desk, or if he was even here. Maybe I was in a dream, making things up.

“I’m sorry for running off like that, Damo. I just couldn’t deal with it, and I needed to wait a few hours to apologize.” He looked me over, all around the bed. I couldn’t speak, I was sunk in between the springs, queasy and in full-body fever orgasm. I could nod and shake my head. I nodded yes.

“I can see you’re, well, pre-occupied. I hope you don’t mind if I talk at you.”

“Nuh.” I shook my head no. I didn’t want him to talk at me, I wanted to go back to that sweet sweet nothing. I couldn’t take this nightmare marathon. He took it as a “no, I don’t mind” shake instead, crossing his legs on the floor.

“It’s, uh, been alright in the meantime. I’m sure it’s been rough for you. I knew you were here in Omaha when I moved -- you were on the demonic registry without any aliases -- I just assumed I’d never run into you.” He sighed. “We’re kind of worthless now, demons. They put us all on the registry, making sure we’re not in league with the Devil or whatever. Everywhere you look, Jesus is staring you down, even the ones who tried to help him. Nobody wants to give you your soul anymore. Nobody’s at the wheel anymore, angels or demons. History -- it’s rudderless, left to spin. It’s almost like we’re back at square one. It’s a little relaxing, right?”

“Nuh.”

He smiled. “I’ve got a job as a bookseller. Next to the military base. I... doubt you're surprised.”

“Yuh.”

“I’ve got a partner now. A boyfriend. He’s sweet.”

“Wuh?”

“He’s a herpetologist. He studies all the cool starship reptiles that were brought over from the aviari during the Rip. It’s dangerous work, seeing as they’re all venomous or poisonous, but he loves it. He, um. He knows I’m a demon too... and I don’t have his soul.”

Why did you come here now, of all times? Did he want a captive audience? A stress ball to squeeze the shit out of? I tried to shoo him away, but it came off as a weak, fuzzy wave, almost like a spasm. “He’s uh, he’s got cancer, too.” Ah. That’s the ticket. The demon blues -- knowing you’re gonna outlive every dalliance you have on Earth, and that the world you live in and the people you love are all gonna pass into the endless night of time. Knowing you can’t die. Knowing you can’t kill yourself, only reincandesce and reincandesce and have your consciousness scrubbed, reused, useful in perpetuity. We’re all old souls that just can’t fuckin’ die. He started sobbing. “God, it’s not fair. It’s not fair. Why do people have to love me? Why couldn’t we just love each other back then?”

He sat, leaned over for a second. I felt unconsciousness try to suck me back in, and I wanted to take the ride. He stood up to take his leave, then hit me with a parting shot.

“I really did love you. I hope someone out there still does.”

***

Clang clang clang -- someone at the garage door. I’m sitting against it, dressed up, while you still sleep on the couch. I’m thinking of what to do next. I can’t give that power back. Do I disappear? Do I stay with you and pretend nothing’s happened? The clanging happens again. As quietly as I possibly can, I lift the loud garage door. Sun blasts into the room, and Stolas ducks under. “Something’s happening. We need to get out of the city.”

“Keep your voice down -- what do you mean ‘something’s happening’? Can you be a bit more specific?”

“I don’t know, but we’re getting told that something’s going on and we need to get to Pandaemonium fast. Raum showed up and told me.”

“Raum? Wait, you saw Raum?”

“This morning. He told me to warn you.”

“Did he explain what ‘something meant’?” I knew he didn’t. Raum relished being mysterious and obtuse as shit.

“No. But I can feel it. Can’t you?”

Matter of fact, I did feel something. When I woke up, I swore it was hunger, but a leftover slice of pizza didn’t quell it, and neither did a cigarette outside. I noticed the sky was obscenely blue, much bluer than you thought you’d get in Newark. I also had other things on my mind.

“Listen, can we talk? In the office maybe?”

I guided him to the dusty glass cubicle without waiting for a response, then sat him down in a chair across from me.

“I think I messed up.”

“Messed up how?”

“I… I took his soul.”

“Well that’s good, isn’t it, that means he can come with us to Pandaemoni-” His voice stalled. Then, he wound his talons back and scratched me. “You fucking moron -- we have one, count it, one damnable rule -- full disclosure. They have to know what they’re getting into. You can’t just take soul energy without consent.”

“He asked me to!”

“Sober?”

“Kinda? He- he thought it was a dream. And he said he wanted to end the dream by giving me his soul.”

“God, I could kill you. I could fucking throttle you, but you’re gonna get throttled by the goddamn Goetian parliament already. You’re gonna get stripped.” He got up. “I-I have to report you. I have to.”

“Please, no! Can’t we just pretend it’s all fine?”

“No! He can see through the disguise because of your pact!”

“I-I can vanish, we don’t need to-”

“Sure, and then he’ll be able to see through the disguise of every demon on planet Earth. Imagine if he just walks around and sees some eight foot tall beast with two heads sticking out of its chest buying a newspaper -- the game’s up. We gotta report you and figure out how to restore his energy.”

I got up to meet him, blocking him at the door. “Please. Please, sweet Christ, please don’t do this. He’s fucking everything to me. Everything. You can’t take him away from me.”

“I’m sorry, Damo-”

“Maybe- maybe he won’t notice? Maybe there’s a chance he-”

“I notice,” you said. You leaned against the doorframe, naked as birth, eyes wide open. There it was, a weird dog thing with horns begging on its hands and knees to a six foot tall owl. Reality was shattered on the floor, scattered all around like confetti. “I was wondering,” you stuttered, “where the money in my wallet had gone.”

“Are you okay, sir?” He pushed past me and went to guide you over to the couch. I sat down, holding my horns in my hands.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I just feel a little lightheaded.”

“That’s part of it. Do you need anything?”

“I guess coffee would be nice.”

“We can get coffee later. Right now, we need to get you to Pandaemonium. We can explain everything once we’re in a safe location. After that, we’re gonna try to get you moved to another place. We’ve done this before, but it takes time.”

“What’s gonna happen to Damo?”

His eyes went from alarmed to kind. Maybe he’d seen it before, maybe he hadn’t; I just knew that his heart softened for a second. “I dunno. Executed, probably -- reincandesced, made into a different demon. I’m gonna try to argue for him, but it doesn’t look good.” Punching myself in the head wasn’t enough. I needed a knife. I needed to cut my eyes out, castrate myself, disembowel my rotten guts.

“Can I talk to him?”

“I mean, sure. If you want.”

I heard you get up. You’d picked your underwear off the floor, gotten yourself somewhat dressed, and tried making your hair look a bit more presentable. “Why, Damo?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“...Did you ever really love me? Or did you just want my soul?”

I shook my head. “I just wanted to make you happy.”

He was silent for a second, the sounds of the city waking up filtered through the walls and windows. “I really hope they go easy on you.” I didn’t. I hoped they stretched my guts over the Sun. I didn’t say anything. I just kept shaking my head.

“When do we have to go?”

“Now. Here, hold my hand and snap, we’ll be able to-”

More slamming on the garage door. “It’s Joe!” said Joe.

“And George,” George chimed in. “Let us in! Shit’s crazy out here!”

I fiddled in my pockets, made sure I had my amulet. Stolas already had his dangling around his neck, in Steve mode. You went over to the garage and lifted the door. “How’d you guys find me?”

Joe came in first, tucking into a breakfast burrito he’d no doubt just gotten. “You weren’t in your apartment, so we assumed you came to Damo’s place.” He turned to acknowledge Steve -- “what’s up?”

“Nothing, we’re fine,” he said from a gritted beak. “What’s going on?”

“It’s all over the news -- Brehznev’s plane went down.”

“What?” Stolas seemed a little tense.

“Yeah, everyone’s been celebrating. The leadership’s scrambling to appoint someone and everyone thinks they’re gonna pick Gorbachev. Meanwhile, half the country’s in revolution! I think the Cold War’s about to be over -- we’re just waiting for a statement from Carter.”

“October 16th, 1979 -- mark it in the history books,” George continued.

Stolas was silent for a second, looking around. “This isn’t right,” he started. “Something’s off. The whole world’s off.”

“Hey, did you want me to get you a breakfast burrito? There’s a two for one special at-”

When it happened, nobody really knew what it was. Some thought it was thunder, others thought it was a bomb. The consensus was that it was this loud roar, straight from the sky, something that shook everyone to the ground. Glass shattered, car alarms went off, and every bird tweeting and chirping and coo-cooing in the sky went silent.

When we’d all managed to scramble to our feet, we all naturally went outside to look at the sky. It’d gone grey. It wasn’t clouds covering it, the sky had simply lost all its color, or as if any possible moisture above had been turned to this impenetrable fog. Above it, stretched across the tops of the buildings, was a large, lightning-like tear in the sky, pure fire of sky blue. I could feel it humming, shaking, sucking light like a vacuum. It dwarfed the sun in the sky.

Joey dropped his burrito. His eyes went wide, like he was seeing something beyond what you could really see. Maybe it was time, or another world, or God, but something had transfixed him. When protestants picture the Rapture, they think of people vanishing or being lifted into the sky. The Rip was much more imaginative than that. Joey’s hair began to lift, and then, slowly, almost delicately, his body began to unravel. The inside of Joey, the parts not covered by skin and flesh, were sky blue as well. George tried to grab onto him, onto his poor friend being turned into ribbons, but all he found was air blowing him around. His form shifted. Over the horizon, over every building and out of every window, we could see the tips of millions of sky blue tendrils stretching to the tear in the sky, just like Joey, now just one string pointed at the sky. It was all over the world, the whole of the Earth turning into a teardrop, converging at one point, sucked up and into the vacuum above. The sky had become a blue, woven quilt.

You and I couldn’t stop staring. George was screaming, clutching his head, his brain unable to handle what was happening. “Oh no,” said Stolas, “oh no no no no.”

When the tendrils receded from the Rip, the shape of Joey had become something larger, broader. Whatever replaced Joey, took his spot, was a galartan woman. She was scared. She wanted to know where her child was, where her airship was, what was going on. She couldn’t speak a world of English, or any earthly language for that matter. She shook George, who ran off and down the lane. Now was my time. Now was the time to get out of here.

“C’mon,” I said, grabbing you by the hand. You didn’t fight me; I didn’t know if you were too stunned or actually wanted to escape, but we got to the car. I gunned it; Stolas chased us for a few seconds, before gradually turning into a blue dot in the horizon and blipping out of sight.

“What’s going on?” you asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t fucking know.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

I slammed the dashboard. “I DON’T! FUCKING! KNOW! TYLER!” The car went quiet. I kept my eyes fixed on the road, not on the madness cramming the sidewalks or occasionally wandering into the streets. The city began to scream, millions of voices panicking and weeping. Jet planes roared overhead. Churches burnt. People prayed on the streets. The world was disintegrating right under our tires, and we kept driving.

“Can we stop at my mom’s first?”

“Isn’t she in Ohio?”

“It’s far from the city. We could get there. See if she made it.”

“Made it? What do you mean, made it?”

“Well, this is the Rapture, isn’t it? It’d be to see if she’s one of the 144,000.”

I held my tongue for a bit. Then it came out: “I don’t think this is the Rapture.”

“And how are you so sure?”

“God takes. He doesn’t replace.” I took a deep breath in. “Okay. We’ll go to Ohio.”

The highways were crammed with cars, so we took country roads west until we couldn’t see city lights anymore. In the forest, we could see smoke, lit by flames of the city, rising over the treetops. The radio filled up with static, with only military murmurs breaking through, impossible to decode. The chaos didn’t reach the forest as the grey day turned to the abyss of night.

“I’m sorry,” I say to you. You don’t even acknowledge me. You keep staring out of the passenger seat. Trees rush by.

Then the trouble started; an impromptu military checkpoint. Four men in a jeep, brandishing black rifles and waving us down to stop. Two of them, a sergeant and a private, flanked the front seats. I rolled down my window.

“Evening, officer.”

“It’s Sergeant. Where the hell do you think you’re going? Martial law’s been declared, and you’re out past curfew.”

I gulped. Shit. Shit shit shit. “Oh, well, we were out visiting friends in New York, but on our way back to Ohio, all the radio stations went silent. We figured something was wrong so we started to drive back home. I-Is something going on?”

He scowled. “Whole hell of a lot’s goin’ on, son. License and registration from the both of ya, please.” I motioned you to hand over your wallet, and you did so. I handed them to the sergeant, who tossed them to the private. “Jacobsen,” he asked, “does everything look up to date?”

Pvt. Jacobsen pocketed them. “Looks like it.” Something felt wrong. The sergeant leveled his rifle at us. “Why dontcha get out of the car for us, sonny? You and the boy.”

“Damo-” You looked at me, fear gripping you. They’re just gonna search us, I thought. “It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay.”

So we listened. The jeep’s floodlights had us caught, our hands up and our shadows stretching out over the two-lane blacktop behind us. The two men trained their rifles on us.

“Jacobsen, would you happen to know what make of car this is?”

“Pontiac Firebird, Sgt. Blackburn.”

“Would you happen to know how much it goes for on the market?” Jacobsen gave an answer, somewhere in the range of six figures, I can’t remember. It clicked. “You’re robbing us?”

“It’s more expropriation. You understand; it’s for the good of the country,” the sergeant said. “Awful sorry to interrupt your trip.”

“No. No! I have to see my mom, I have to see if she’s okay.” You were shaking, holding back tears. “We’ll never make it on foot, please, we’ll do anything.”

“Sir, calm down.” Jacobsen kept his rifle trained on you, his hands shaking.

“Damo, do something, please. We have to see if she’s okay.”

“Ty, please calm down. We’re gonna be okay, just take a deep breath.”

“Civilian is becoming hostile, Sergeant, what do I do?”

“Hold your ground, Private. Let’s not make a situation worse than it is.”

You took a step forward. “You can’t do this! I need to see my mo-”

It was louder than the Rip. Everything rang, my eyes looking straight down at the jeep. The sergeant clutched his ears, and even though I couldn’t hear what he was saying, he was reprimanding the private for something. My eyes couldn’t move. I couldn’t steal a glance. Deep down, I knew I shouldn’t. My head fought with my neck, craning itself slowly to see what they had done.

There wasn’t a “you” anymore -- you’d become an “it”. They’d done it with the twitch of a finger, and taken everything that could make you identifiable, your smile, your thoughts, your dreams. All of it was dissected, spread over the back of the car while it slumped forward. This “it” that was a “you” had a name -- Tyler Biggs Jr. -- and it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone anymore. Look:

Tyler Biggs Jr. was born in Akron, Ohio to a devout family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Tyler Biggs Jr. got a high school diploma but didn’t bother with college, leaving his mother a note and taking a Greyhound to NYC. The first movie Tyler Biggs Jr. saw was Star Wars on the day it hit theaters. Tyler Briggs Jr. tried to make it in NYC but the rent was still too high and he found that despite the organized crime and filth, he still liked Newark a lot more. Tyler Briggs Jr. started a band with his former roommate and that former roommate’s cousin, called Tranq. Tyler Briggs Jr. had his first gay experience in a bathroom in Grand Central Station, reaching under the stalls to satiate some prurient interest he had. Tyler Briggs Jr. met a man named Damien O. Deuchars, who would take over management of the band and helped get them signed. Tyler Briggs Jr. was seduced by Mr. Deuchars, who then revealed himself as a demon and stole the man’s soul when the both of them were drunk. Tyler Briggs Jr. was being robbed by a troop of rogue soldiers when one failed to practice trigger discipline and accidentally fired a burst of 5.56x45mm ammo directly through his skull. It took exactly ten seconds for the neurons in Tyler Briggs Jr.’s skull to shut off and die when scattered all over the roof of Mr. Deuchars’s Pontiac Firebird. See? It all means nothing. Because it isn’t you anymore, it’s a bleeding, gurgling corpse sliding down the door of the passenger seat. That’s when I lost you, and gained a corpse in my soul. Five men stood on the road and waited to see what happened next.

I ripped the amulet off. The first thing I did was grab the barrel of the sergeants rifle, which fired off a few shots as I sank my teeth into his throat, feeling the blood uncontrollably pulse out of his jugular vein, all painting his nice and clean uniform, which worsened as I pulled his windpipe free and spat it out. One. 

Private Blackburn fired a few shots into my back, lodging lead in my hide, and as the other two without names followed suit, I circled the car and grabbed the young soldier by his throat; I jabbed my claws into his eyes, jelly and blood bursting out, and tore his head off, his screams growing higher and higher as his vocal cords separated before snapping and cutting him off with a strangled yelp. Two. 

The one on the right ran down the road, but the one on the left stood his ground, firing shot after shot to little effect, and when I finally caught up with him, I could see the fear in his eyes start to darken as I slammed his head in the door of the jeep until everything went squish. Three. 

I started to flap my wings and run down the road, hooking him through the shoulders, flying him higher and higher, with his voice apologizing over and over as we went higher and higher, yards and yard and yards above the treetops before it quickly dwindled on a straight-down journey to the ground, culminating in a bloody thud. Four. 

I took one more look at the world around me -- saw the cities burning on the East coast, heard the planes screaming as they fell from the air and carved fiery roads of death in the forest, smelled the ozone filling the air with the presence of the Rip, felt the wind biting at my fingers and toes, tasted the blood rising in my throat as I started to choke -- and stopped flapping my wings, then started plummeting, plummeting, plummeting. Five.

Well, it would have been five.

I read about a woman, Russian I think, who fell thousands of feet after an airliner broke up with her in the middle of it. The debris she was caught on slowed her descent enough so that she survived. Every bone in her body was broken, and she had to be put in a coma, but she lived. When you consider her case, it makes sense I lived, just with most of the bones in my body shattered. Stolas found me, saw what happened, and took me to Pandaemonium. I spent about a year or two in the hospital and heard what was going on from a nurse who didn’t know how much of a failure I’d really been. She took pity on me in my full body cast and read me the news. I’d heard Reagan assassinated Carter and split the country up. I’d heard the East Coast went communist, and that they were bombing the shit out of each other. I’d heard the non-terrestrials who came here were getting slaughtered left and right, even though it seemed to most of the demons she was friends with that they were friendly and just confused. I’d heard kids were being born with strange powers, powers like ours, powers that let them set things on fire and see the future and the dead and all that. She was a nice lady. She had a Jersey accent like me; it reminded me of home.

When I’d healed up Stolas came and got me, took me to Sioux Falls where they did all the deliberation. He said he was gonna be my lawyer, but all he did was tell the truth. I didn’t offer any defense, and when they asked me how I would plead, I told them I was guilty. What else was I gonna do? Waste the Goetian Council’s time? Play Roxy from Chicago and do a song and dance routine? Fuck no. I told them I wanted to die. I wanted to reincandesce, have someone better than me try again. "Take me out of the game," I said. They said this back:

“Damosadeus, although we understand your request, we also understand that this is your desired request. The role of the Goetian punishment system, sir, is not to grant what the demon being punished wants, but what they need. We believe you have used your powers for ill, and thus, we have decided that the best course of action is to strip you of your demonic qualities. This includes severing of your wings, your tail-spade, and the removal of most, if not all, of your powers. If you were to approach death, you would be brought before us and have the council decide whether or not we were too harsh in your judgement. Only then, only then shall we consider allowing you to reincandesce. You are no longer welcome in Pandaemonium. You are no longer Goetian. You are no longer a metahuman. From now on out, you are other.”

They brought the wing guillotine out, the first time they’d done so since the 1600s. They stuck my wings in. I didn’t even bother fighting them. I looked at the council, trying to spot my friends. Poor Stolas, stickin’ up for an idiot like me when he didn’t need to. He knew it was best for me. I scanned the jury of peers for Raum, and sure enough, there he was, his black feathers sticking out in the parade of garish colors and looks dominating the seats. He looked sad, but not too surprised. 

I closed my eyes, and the blade roared into contact with my flesh. I woke up in the bombed ruins of Sioux Falls, naked and alone.

For a little bit I just sat there. I didn’t exist in reality; I existed in a space that came after. Maybe I’d died, I thought. Maybe this was hell. But no, sure enough, an argid came up the road, pushing a shopping cart full of canned food and bullet boxes. She looked old, and tired. I couldn’t do anything. I felt like a baby, screaming as the sawbones docs looked at me with horror, too scared to spank the fluid out of my lungs. So I screamed. I cried. I screamed until my throat was sore. The argid stopped to look at me, pity in her eyes. She stepped away, hobbled over with her cane, and put her hand on my shoulder.

“Is okay,” she said in broken English. “Jesus love you.”

I shook my head. No. No he didn’t fucking love me. When had Jesus ever loved me? But she just kept smiling, and pet me on the head. “Good kitty. Do good.” She took her cane, went back to her cart, and kept pushing her cart. I kept crying until she was gone from sight. Then, once the sun had begun to set, I stood up. I couldn’t cry anymore. I had to keep moving. I couldn’t commit suicide, not so soon -- they’d know I was trying to get reincandesced. Maybe someone would want to kill me.

I gathered myself and started to walk down the road. Days later I found Custer.

***

After Custer, when I decided I wanted to live again, I tried offering my services as a durable creature to the various mercenary groups that propped up. I did pretty well with them, and met a lot of interesting characters, but my refusal to use guns was always a bit of a damper on business.

“What are you doing, geezer,” they’d ask, “are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“Not anymore,” I’d say. Then I’d have to move on to the next company. Eventually that business dried up as the military started to re-establish itself as more than a perpetual non-terrestrial death squad. They stopped killing enties and started helping to “assimilate” them (read: scrub the culture from their hides); then General Moz came over from whatever was remaining of the UK and combined them with the police force. “One army, one people, one nation,” Reagan said. “We’re gonna bring back blue skies.” 20 years on and that second part still hasn’t happened. Maybe he’s still working on it.

Eventually I started doing escort work. GRIDS hit the gay community hard, and as it turns out, a risk-free cumdump is high value in your pimp’s roster of whores to monger. I made more money working corners than I ever did slitting throats, and I’m proud of it. Except on days like now. Days which I’d rather be dreaming.

I have this recurring dream -- it’s stupid, kinda embarrassing -- but I get out of bed, my bed in the Vom, and start singing. I can’t remember how the song goes, but it’s this big number with piano, just galloping and galloping. When I burst out of my room, all the girls of the Vom would play piano and bass and bongos and drums, and I’d run outside; everyone’s dancing and doing all their regular routines in fast-forward motion. I’m running down the road, my arms spread, and Stolas is behind me; so is Raum, so is you-not-you Mr. Tyler Biggs Jr., with your head beautiful and whole, and you’re all smiling at me, for me. This time around at the end of the high, I was having the dream again, but Agent Don Jon and the woman he took with him to interview me the other day was there, following close behind, and a few other people I didn’t recognize, and they were all harmonizing with me as we ran out of the city and through Council Bluffs as I took flight without wings. I remember only one line, sung as my feet lifted off of the ground:

“Like Charlamagne on the midnight bus, I have no idea where I’m going, here I come!”

Belial tried to get Charlamagne to lose by fighting with him in 1066. Then the star came down to Earth, and the world changed forever. It was the only time he ever succeeded at doing anything, and he only knew after the fact. I wanna do that. I wanna stick my ears up, catch the wind carrying victory cries, and ask with a pure heart, “wait, did we win?”

***

“Hey.”

Wasn’t Caroline or Denise. It was a man’s voice; the Agent’s. Don Jon. I was sober, and lying properly on the mattress, on my side. “Hi,” I said. Sleep seeped out of every crack in my voice. I got myself upright -- the sun was down outside. “What month is it?”

“Still May,” he said. “How’s it going, friend?” That damn smile kept holding the corners of his mouth up, like thumbtacks. “S’going alright. Got high. You gonna call the cops on me?”

“I am the cops. They look like legal drugs to me.” He sat next to me, leaning up against the wall by my side. “Just stopping by. I figured you wanted to hear more about me, now that you’ve got the time. I hope you don’t mind.”

“The schedule's clear.”

“Well, I was born in 1981, around when the whole psionic baby thing started kicking off. My parents were Russian, and they moved to America when I was three because everything behind the Iron Curtain was exploding. Mom and dad didn’t know I was psionic until they found out how good I was at baseball. You like baseball?”

“Hate it. It’s boring as fuck.”

“Me too, but I was good at it. I really liked chess a lot more, but you get long legs and a predilection for deja vu, and it makes your BPA go wild.” He chuckled, then looked me over. He was just a few inches shorter than I was, but sitting on the bed he was much taller. Maybe it was our posture?

“Then when I’m 13, my parents tell me during my bar mitzvah that I’m gonna be going to be going to the Springs t-”

“You’re Jewish?”

“They converted real early. Anyway, they tell me I’m going to the Springs. There’s a new study of psionic capabilities going on and I’m gonna be part of it. I…” He trailed off, his smile fading. “I can’t tell you what they did to me there. It wasn’t okay, I can tell you that much. I got out, started doing military training for the Psychopomps, and graduated summa cum laude.”

“Wow.”

“Not wow. That’s barely a life. I don’t even have a name anymore, that’s how little of a life it is.”

I leaned in close. “Well, what is your name?”

“...Simon. Simon Hillberg.” He looks into my eyes, almost spellbound.

“That’s a nice n-”

He kisses me. Because of course he does. Of course this is what this was for. A service. I want to kill him. I want to pluck his fucking feathers and cook him alive and eat his entrails and sodomize the cartoon rotisserie chicken he leaves behind and eat that too and burn his bones to ashes and burn this goddamn hotel to the ground and kill everyone I see in Free Omaha. But then I don’t. Instead, I kiss him back and fuck him.

It was nice. Nothing to write home about. He kept a big dick inside that cloaca, surrounded by really soft feathers. I felt nostalgic. He told me he had never done anything like this with a man before, and I accepted it, and believed it to boot. There was this earnestness in his heart I couldn’t help but find a little cute, but still, he wouldn’t stop saying how he loved me and how beautiful I was. I’d heard it all before.

One day I’m gonna leave this town. I’ll do it on a bus, or I’ll get busted and thrown in prison for a few years, or I’ll finally get my own car, get a job you can do without getting arrested, and start living for myself. No matter what, I’m getting out of Free Omaha. That’s what everyone wants. But right then, in the arms of a Psychopomp and a bottle of hydrocodone rocking back and forth on its side, I had to play the hand dealt to me. Just keep playing the hands, and sooner or later, you’ll get a flush.

Of course we all know what happens next -- truce between WRA and the Nation of Iroquois on the East Coast, then a “mass crackdown” on whatever terrorist group planted the bomb. Coulda been RRAW, coulda been LUnA, coulda even been some lone wolf entie who stole the W66 if you ask the Nazi pubs. Y’ask me, I think Iroquois did it to try to scare other towns down south out of signing up with the Free Territory deal they were gonna offer, but the official party line on all sides is a shrug and a “I didn’t do it” shaped mumble. That was fine by me. Didn’t really bring anyone back, or bring back my neighbor’s son, or my boss’s uncle, or the family that lived across from us and was sellin’ every piece of furniture they had to move there. Ashes are ashes, and there was a lot of em in the ruins. At least the city didn’t have any more traffic.

Anyway: the platform. They sent messages out to the WRDF; no luck, line was busy. They sent out brief bootleg transmissions to the news, and even after running the stories they still couldn’t get a lick of help. Finally, two months in, they got together all the table cloths in the platform, stapled them together, and wrote “WE’RE DYING PLEASE HELP” in big dayglo paint letters. A few cargo ships saw that and donned the suits, dropping off survival supplies on board. Half the crew was unaccounted for, probably dead. When they got to shore the WRDF threw the captain in jail and took away his commercial license. Couple days later he necked himself. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Mexico’s news TV circuit was actually closer to the platform than the Republic or Iroquois was, and they actually started following what was going on through a telescope. WRDF couldn’t stop ‘em from doing it, although they could stop them from broadcasting it above the border. Still, you’d see adult bookstores getting a lot of traffic from people interested in the Platform, and they’d be checking out Mexican recordings of it more often than they would the porno. Key among them was the wife; she’d be nursing Benny and watching the static view.

“Whatcha doin’?” I’d ask.

“Platform,” she’d say with a nod towards the tube.

“Well, what are they doing?”

“I think it’s some sort of greenhouse? They took out all the windowpanes of the dorms, it looks like, and it’s all getting stacked on top of the helipad in a curve, see?”

“Neat,” I’d say. It was pretty neat. I guess that’s why a lot of people got into it. It was a bit like watching an antfarm, but there were a bunch of thinkin’ living beings on board who you could give stories to. People had book clubs, they talked about it at work. It was more interesting than whatever either side was showing on TV or what public domain movies your local pirate stations had. Then the race war broke out.

Species war, actually -- probably more accurate to say. We started getting tapes showing explosions on board, sabotage, and gunshots. Next tape showed a bunch of enties and humans hanging on either side of the structure from cables. This was when both sides collectively decided to put the kibosh on any further transmissions. Having one of the tapes got you 50 years; sellin’ em got you life. As you can see, everyone forgot about it real quickly because the government told them no. I’ve got about six at home -- wait, you’re not a cop, are ya? No? Alright, yeah, I’ve got like six at home, including a race war one, if you’re interested.

Anyhow, my wife was still in the Platform circles, y’know. Bless her heart, she still believed. She actually had me do some dirty talk in the bed where I pretended to be an escaped entie, like one of those galartans, from the platform comin’ to ravish her and- wait wait, no sorry. Didn’t mean to get gross there, come back. Promise, I’ll get back on track. So she found out from her friends down south that they were still broadcasting, but they were about to finish cause the public was getting tired of it. But, right before they switched the cameras off, she found out the guys on board were fixing up the radio tower, fiddling with it and climbing on it. Apparently they’d also made up and stopped killing each other for being enties or humans. Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, heh. So she comes up to me and says “Tommy” -- name’s Tommy by the way, sorry if I forgot to introduce myself -- she says “Tommy, didn’t you used to do the pirate radio thing?”

“Yeah but I wasn’t like, an active listener, babe.”

“Still, you know how it works,” she said, “so you could probably set it up for us and you can listen to it with me and Ben.” Now I didn’t wanna do it; whatever the hell they were broadcasting, I didn’t wanna have my kid exposed to it at two years old. But still, I love her, so I set it up, dig it out of the basement and we get to listening.

Turns out they’re mostly playing old rock music from the 70s. The captain, long dead, had a whole record collection in his cabin that the crew expropriated when they dangled him off the edge on a noose. I was a kid back then but it’s still stuff I recognize -- Springsteen, Beatles, the Who -- and they were really fond of the Who, I’ll tell you. I think they played “I Can See For Miles” on the top of every hour. Sometimes it’d get interrupted by a bandwidth interruption but then I guess someone from the station would hit the transmitter box and they’d get right back on air. Nah, the music wasn’t interesting. What was interesting was what came in between.

He called himself “Bug-Eyed Jones”. Course, he had a real name, but the media didn’t seem eager to report it, so forgive me if it’s spaced my mind. Before the platform he’d apparently been a 40-something ixchel who got a job in Porto Rico doing codetalking for the leatherheads they had wrecking shit on the ground. He got outta that and into putting himself in harm’s way for Ford-Godwin’s oil enterprise. Normally these ixchel, all antennae and pincers, got a great face for radio, but as it figures, he had a great voice for it too. I actually remember the intro he’d do, hold on -- ahem:

“G-g-gooood evening neutron wasteland! This! Is! Dead! Seagull! Radiooo! It’s the top of the hour, cock o’ the rock, and I bet you’re all dying to hear the latest in castaway newsflashes from yours truly, Bug-Eyed Jones. If anyone’s still persisting in that radioactive hellhole, we’ve got quite a show for you tonight, and we’ll try to keep it easy for you sleazies. Up next it’s-” Then he’d say like, whoever was next. They really did like playin’ all the solo Beatles projects, like Wings and Lennon’s stuff. Those were the golden days. Then it started to turn.

See, either Bug-Eyed had a screw loose or he was the only sane person in a gang of madmen, cause a lot of the time what he was saying wouldn’t make a lick of sense. He’d go on and on about how “psychic looms from above hold the good ship derelict together” and “the dumbkopfs in Fuhrer Reagan’s cabinet wanna keep us from realizing he’s gettin’ puppeted around on morphine strings”. Over six years they went from a rock station to a conspiracy station with rock interludes. The audience shifted from rockers to spacers and whatever druggie the government couldn’t kill or throw in the prison pits. The wife and I weren’t those things, but we were big fans once we put lil’ Benny to bed. The government didn’t want us paying attention; you couldn’t gather more than four at a time on the edges of the Poisoned Coast without getting raided for “suspected chaos sowing”. The armycops couldn’t figure out that it was easier to hide audio than video -- they don’t make headphones for your eyeballs, after all.

Then one day, about six years in, it started getting spooky. Bug-Eyed Jones introduced the Crystal Ball segment. People were pretty sure he didn’t have a crystal ball, but every so often he’d bring in a guy with an accent who claimed to be having visions called the Great Zucchini, or Zook for short. He was a young guy in his 20s when he got stranded, probably born post-Rip, and nhee tolked lieke thees -- Andy Kaufman, geddit? We were pretty sure it was a put on, but the visions weren’t. “Nigh wheel preedeekt zat zhe bus of Ford-Godween vill sell zee city of Oh-mah-haw to zhe Vestern Reepublik in a veek’s time.” One week later: boom, Free Omaha. “Nigh wheel preedeekt zat zhe Ee-row-kvoy vill bak owt ov peese tocks unteel zhe Reepublik stopps fanding zhe LUnA tairror groop.” Soon all the left-wing rags got pictures from the East Coast pinks showing WRDF trucks outside suspected LUnA camps. It was uncanny. Authorities thought someone on the inside was leaking info to the platform, but it hadn’t been able to receive messages since Houston blew up. My soldier friends heard all this scuttlebutt about them wanting to launch a missile at the platform. “Let’s watch the Great Zook predict his way out of a high explosive homing rocket.” Plans only really began to set into place when they predicted when and why Reagan was gonna die a day before it happened.

“Dee Fyoorurr Raygun vill die from Alz-high-murrs, after yeerz of bean puppeted rount by heez underlinks een hees cabbynut.”

“Wow, Zook, what a story?”

“Ees no storey. Ees true. Raygun hess bean unayble to speek for two yeerz, and bedreedden for zhe lazt yeer. Heez gubbermind will kollapz a weegh after ant let zhe oppy sishun pardy indo bower.”

“Well, only time will tell, Zook. Now, who’s ready for some Petty, Poisoned Coast? It’s ‘Breakdown’ by the golden boy himself.”

Pres died right after. In the chaos of VP Gates eatin’ crow on stage and the special elections getting called, the secret wing of the DF started making all that off-base chatter concrete. You could tell cause all the guys in the bars were suddenly real quiet. Somehow, Dead Seagull Radio could tell.

I wasn’t sure if Zook had found it out or if it was just the general vibe that they’d gone too far, but after that broadcast, Dead Seagull went off the air for months. Then one day, I was buying cigs after work when all of a sudden the clerk took off his headphones.

“Dead Seagull Radio’s back.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Not wow.”

“Not wow?”

“They’re telling people to kill themselves.”

You’re familiar with it. “Bug-Eyed Jonestown” was the name the media circus gave it. He got on air, in a much more dire mood than usual, and told the public that the station was going down, down down down into the sea. He said it’s the last broadcast and it’s gonna play on loop, and I’ve got the pirate receiver in my truck speeding home to the wife, sweet Beth and Ben at home, hoping that the worst hadn’t come to pass. Thank GOD he was sick at home with the mumps and the wife was taking a nap instead of listening to Dead Seagull, but a lot of people weren’t so lucky. He said that the best way to resist a tyrannical nation that destroyed all that was good in the world was to destroy the nation itself, and a nation without its people is no nation at all. He told men to find their old service weapons and use em on their families before turning it backwards. He said anyone without a gun could usually sit in the garage with their car running. Housewives, swallow any pills you can find; children, play in traffic.

“We’re already dead on board if you’re hearing this. We managed to cook up a big batch of thorazine and everyone’s been taking it with the last of the sargasso wine. It’s been a good ten years of service, but we all figured we weren’t getting off this thing alive. Zook, sweetheart. What's your last prediction?”

“Not a prediction, a revelation, Jonesy.”

“Go ahead, dear.”

Either he’d dropped the accent or it wasn’t Zook reading it. (I favor the latter.) “They blew Houston up. People of the Poisoned Coast, the WRA destroyed your homes, forced you to flee, and they did it on the behalf of a dead man: Furher Reagan. He blew it up to bring the nations together, because in that faltering little brain, he knew it was the only way he could win against the Nation of Iroquois. Take your revenge and give them no nations to war with.” A swig, then a yelp. He’s probably dead in seconds.

“And you know he’s right, folks. You know he’s right. Dead Seagull Radio. Signing off.” Bang. Start transmission over. Like 70 people had died on the mainland, most of them lying in their homes with trashbags over their heads to lessen the mess for the clean up guys. Bug-Eyed wanted to leave as little mess as possible so more people could have homes quicker and alleviate “the coming market crash.” What a humanitarian. Nobody got a good number on how many were on the platform, but most people reckon it was a few dozen left after a decade.

When the missile came it was a relief. It’d just been looping over and over again for months before the WRDF decided to destroy the platform for doing the world’s first audio terror attack. Of course, blowing up the oil platform meant causing a bunch of the oil to leak out and clog up the coasts, and god knows how many more fish it killed, but that’s beyond my parlance. I worked the platforms, not the maps. Anyhow, the bodies washed up on shore in the Yucatan somehow. Mexico didn’t wanna give ‘em to the WRDF, and there was this whole kerfuffle until the guy at the morgue got caught cremating everyone after hours. They just sorta dropped it and spread the ashes on land, far from the sea.

The door creaked open. An older argid woman, with the face of a raccoon and a long, lemurlike tail, reared her head through the crack. The tips of her ears turned gray a while ago, and her general stance had shifted into that of a toad over time; she stared the duo down, two aviari with uniforms and guns, and scowled.

“I’m assuming you’ve got a warrant?”

Don Jon gestured to his partner. St. Vrain dug in his jacket and pulled out the envelope. Jon ogled the hobbling woman, puzzled about why she trusted them enough to open the door before asking for a warrant. She must be new here, he thought. Any worker here longer than three months knows we’d have our foot in the door the second the knob was turned otherwise. He could have done it, key word here being could. Don didn’t operate that way. Scalpels, not swords.

“Looks real. Is it?” She turned to St. Vrain.

“Yes it is, ma’am. You’re not in trouble, we’re just doing some further investigation.”

She sighed. “Alright, come in. Don’t touch anything.”

The agent chuckled: “I mean, it’s a search warrant, we kinda have to-”

“Then don’t touch anyone, you hear me?”

“Can do, ma’am.”

If the outside, faded and slumped, looked bad, the inside looked deceivingly better. Bunks lined the walls, empty of workers. Here, every species you could take account for on Earth populated the stained spring mattresses at night, and filled the silage and chemical plants in the daytime. The sheets were probably lice-free, in the way that playing slots probably might win you a thousand dollars on the first pull. Don didn’t feel like leaning in close to check. It wasn’t what he was here for anyhow.

He pulled his PDA — a CIVET pad, issued specifically for law enforcement—out of his jacket and clicked it on. The little machine whirred and buzzed as it flickered to life. “Lieutenant, could you maybe watch the door for us? Make sure nobody interrupts the interview?” St. Vrain nodded and marched over to the door, standing watch. The old argid glowered. “You really know how to make a lady feel welcome in her own place of business.”

“It’s just a few questions, ma’am. You’re not in trouble.” He didn’t look up, flicking the machine over to the “notes” section of the program. The mechanical keyboard was in shorthand, punched into the documents with one thumb; for anyone who didn’t know the language, a pen for scribbling in indecipherable pixels was available. Jon started clicking away, making note of what had already been said.

“Because the damn army cops showing up to my door twice in a week is such a good sign of that.” She limped over to a card table and snagged a chair, dragging it behind her with a grating roar. “Lemme siddown, I’m tired as all get out.”

“Fair enough, ma’am. First question: what is your name?”

“Well, what’s yours, agent?” She crossed her arms and leaned back. The agent was beginning to realize letting her get the chair was a mistake. It wasn’t for exhaustion, it was for reinforcement.

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“I’d like to know the name of the bastard bothering me on such a lovely day.”

He sighed. “My name is Agent Don Jon. I’m a Psychopomp, and I operate in the industrial zone and the Bluffs.”

She chortled, rough and dusty. “That your real name, Donnie boy?” He smiled back, depriving her of the joy that the brief mockery gave her. Don Jon was used to being the butt of the joke because of the name the Springs gave him. Being in on it took the wind out of people’s sails pretty quickly. Her own smile gave way to a familiar scowl.

“No, ma’am, it isn’t. Now, what’s your name?”

“Wisteria Bushtail. Female, argid, 68, whatever you got us putting on the ID cards.”

“I see. Next question: what have you heard about the recent disappearances in the industrial area?” He looked up from his CIVET and observed her reaction. If she reacted, he couldn’t tell; she slouched, but stayed still and emotionless as a statue. “Haven’t heard anything,” she said, “and disappearances, dear, ain’t nothin new.”

“How so?”

She shook her head, sizing him up. “C’mon, agent, this is your job. Rolling Thunder Deathwish, RRAW, even LUnA if they get desperate — anyone’s fair game for ransom and killin’. I bet you a quarter of the people in this town are missing at any given time before popping back up.”

The smile faded. “Ma’am, all the people who have gone missing have been staying at your bunkhouse. We don’t want to insinuate anything, but at least four people have gone missing. They all worked nearby, and all their drinking buddies said they set up shop here. It’s suspicious, is all.” Her shoulders shrugged, but her body didn’t move. “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Dozens of people come and go every day here, agent. Forgive the cliche, but looking for four people in a bunkhouse is like trying to find a needle in a threadstack.”

“Haystack.”

“Pardon me?”

“It’s haystack, ma’am.”

A scoff. “We talking about missing people or metaphors here? I thought your kind was supposed to be professional, scientific?” Ah, yes, the old fashioned speciesism. A less tolerant person would have bit back, told this burrowhead to check if she had any threadstacks down there in the goddamn dirt, you baby-eating, plant-fellating varmint. Not Don Jon. Reforms meant penalizing people for using language like that, and penalties were taken out of his salary. Plus, it was just plain rude, and set a bad example. The lieutenant was watching a professional at work.

“Alright, ma’am, one last question: would you happen to know a Davis McIntyre? He slept here, went missing a few weeks ago, and his family’s worried sick.”

She grumbled, grating her orthopedic boots on the wooden floor. “For cryin’ out loud, I already told you. I don’t keep track of the people who come and go here.”

“You don’t even have a logbook?”

“What’s the point of a logbook? People work here for six months tops, then move to some other Free City. Free Omaha, Free Topeka, Free Okaysee if they’re suicidal. I bet you half the people in this shithole at night aren’t gonna be here the next day.” Shithole, Jon typed in the CIVET. “Bet you double half of them are gonna leave the Gap o’ Lead altogether. Been here since the Rip, and lemme tell ya, ain’t nobody ever stays in this city except the people who wanna suck it dry. Makes you miss the Old Realm.”

The Old Realms, that dying source of nostalgia, had been the banner of militants and most of the first non-terrestrials, the ones who got torn from their old dimensions or planets or whatever it was during the ‘79 Rip and got stuck here.

“Y’know my mom used to fight for the Old Realms with an aviari group. Course, this was in the former Soviets — she had to give it up if she wanted to get here with my dad and me.”

“She a commie? Hidin’ from the ollies?” She said this with a sneer. He ignored it.

“Nope, Jewish. Failed European countries and Judaism don’t really mix, as it turns out — even if you're a convert. I think the giant bird person thing was also a contributing factor.”

“Rough for her, I guess. Are we done here? Can we skip to the part where you trash the place and leave me to clean it up for the rest of the day?” She got back up to drag the chair all the way back to the card table, slowly, loudly, like words through clenched teeth. “I’d like to get back to picking nits out of people’s beds, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, ma’am.” He motioned for St. Vrain to unblock the door and follow him.

The room was poorly lit, which made looking for any evidence of missing persons all the more difficult. You had to strain to see if there were any scraps of paper or diaries under the bed. Coming here, St. Vrain had some qualms about having to break into people’s footlockers, but it looked like he needn’t worry — nobody here could afford a footlocker, much less afford to lock one. Everything they owned, they kept under their pillows.

“I got a flask of…” Don Jon unscrewed the silver top and shot his tongue briefly inside. “What used to be gin. Now I guess it’s nothin’.” He tipped his head back and coaxed the few remaining drops of juniper and sin into his open beak.

St. Vrain was a bit better equipped to see in the low light; aviari had a variety of breeds and forms, and one of these forms looked a lot like the barn owls on Earth. As a result, the lieutenant could see a bit better in the dark — although he still kept his sunglasses on, clutched tight above his nostrils. An odd tic, Jon was meaning to discuss it with the guy later, although it seemed not to affect his vision as much as the former thought. He reached into a pillowcase. “Think I found something papery.”

“A letter?”

He pulled it free of the cheap fabric. “Nope.” A dirty magazine sat splayed in his hands, “Draconics Gone Wild.” The centerfold rolled out, a buff woman covered in scales from tail to snout standing with pudenda spread over the camera. It crackled in the lieutenant’s hands. He dropped it, reeling. “Cripes,” he muttered.

“Watch your language, young man. We don’t take the name of the lord in vain here.”

“I said ‘cripes’, lady.”

“It’s close enough,” she spat. She sat on a bunk — presumably her own — and watched the two men poke and prod around the bunkhouse, coming up empty handed with anything that could possibly assist them with the case. She took no joy in it, rocking back and forth on the uncomfortable springs. She looked bored out of her mind. After crawling on their hands and knees for the better part of an hour around the bunks, the men gave up.

“Would you happen to have a lost and found here?”

“Sure, people lose things and other people find ‘em.” That meant no.

“What about other floors?”

“Nope. It’s just this one.”

Jon dug his hands in the pockets of his coat. They held nothing but loose bullets, lint, and dinner mints he sucked on when he needed a sugar fix. He took a deep breath. “Drat. Alright then.” He drew the pistol from his coat and fired a shot in the air. Dust rattled down from the rafters where the bullet made impact into hard wood.

“What the hell are you do-”

He leveled the gun at her head. “Tell us if there’s another floor or I’ll blow your goddamn brains out, witch.” The lieutenant stepped over to block the door again. Wisteria’s hands trembled. Things were getting serious for her and fast. “Okay, okay, fine! Th-there’s a basement. You access it from the outside window, down the fire escape! Just please don’t touch the cross-”

Agent Don Jon breathed out slowly from his mouth. His gun was in his holster. No bullets riddled the roof. He felt the same change, same lint, same dinner mints in his hands. Everything was right with the world.

“Drat, alright then. C’mon, lieutenant, let’s go.”

“Roger.” The two filed out of the room, with Catherine following close so she could shut the door behind them. They strolled to the bus stop.

“So, are we heading back to the station to put the case on ice, or-”

Don Jon doubled over, exhausted. A migraine washed over his temples, flooding it with pressure and sleep. “Drops, please.”

Without hesitation, St. Vrain pulled the container from his pockets and deposited a couple of psionic gumdrops into the agent’s waiting claw. He popped them onto his tongue, mashing them up against the roof of his beak. His body recoiled at the taste, equal parts zinc-like chemical burn and fecund scent. The migraine faded. The lieutenant rested his hand on the agent’s back, patting him gently as the heart began to catch up to the mind.

“What did you see?”

“Threatened her. Used my service weapon. Coaxed a basement out of her. Apparently you can get in through the fire escape-” He coughed, snottily and rough. “Pardon. There’s a fire escape around the back we can get into.”

St. Vrain cocked his head. “You think she’s been kidnapping people?”

“I dunno, Jerome. I just know she’s hiding something. And basements are great hiding places when you don’t know they exist.”

***

She’d dozed off on a cot from the looks of it, with her shape tossing and turning under sheets as seen through the window. The two huddled together in a crouch. It was hell on St. Vrain’s knees, but Don Jon’s longer legs didn’t even register an ache. The two followed her shape moving in restless sleep around each window, before finally coming to the back of the house.

“Where’s the damn fire escape?” Don craned his neck around, searching for a hole in the ground or some sort of hatch. No such luck. The back half of the bunkhouse was cluttered with felled tree branches, scattered car parts, and an entire damn windmill, lying on its side.

St. Vrain scratched the top of his facial disk, trying to figure something out too. “Maybe it’s under the junk?”

“She’s an old woman, lieutenant. I don’t think she’s lifting all this.”

It hit St. Vrain the second he stepped forward. “Agent, come feel this,” he whispered harshly. The lieutenant fell to his knees, his hands on the grass. Jon did much the same.

“What am I feeling, Jerry?”

“You ever play sports, sir?”

“Chess club count?”

He fought the urge to roll his eyes. He lost. “Look around you.”

Dead grass covered the lawn like yellowing stubble. Weeds shot up like whisps of balding hair, rebelling against its barren fate. “She doesn’t seem to be into yardwork, so what?”

“Except this one spot?”

Jon looked down, running his hands through the blades of supposed Kentucky blue. It clicked. Dead leaves and trash bags covered the edges of the plastic grass. This lawn hadn’t gathered debris on purpose — someone had decorated it. The duo stepped back, grabbed the heavy sheet of astroturf, and pulled it up. There it sat, a concrete block and a wooden hatch, wedged in the dry ground.

“Shit howdy,” Don Jon said while setting the sheet on the ground beside them. “Good work, officer.”

St. Vrain carried a utility prybar with him in case any doors or windows needed forcing. There was no need; the door rattled open the second he pushed down. Nothing locked it or kept it closed except for Earth’s closest friend, gravity. Behind it was an inky blackness, a hole emptied of visuals and sound. All that the eyes maintained for company was a rusty emergency ladder stretching a foot into the abyss before vanishing. St. Vrain fiddled with his belt and handed Don Jon a flashlight. He held the other in his hand, lightweight and flimsy, before joining the agent in scanning the floor with yellowing beams. Without so much as a “Geronimo”, Don Jon slid down into the basement.

At first it looked normal. Buckets of paint, neglected and dried out, stacked up like skyscrapers against the stone wall. Between them, cobwebs stretched abandoned by their weavers. There were piles of broken furniture, old mattresses, discarded sacks that held ghosts of long devoured potatoes and beans. A ladder, presumably leading up to an exit hidden under the main level, leaned against an alcove. This was the only place where shafts of light from between floorboards decorated the basement; everywhere else was absent. Don Jon heard St. Vrain land behind him with a thump.

“You good, bud?”

He brushed himself off, having landed on his side and coated himself in the bituminous dust of the cellar. “I’m gonna need to do laundry, but other than that, peachy.”

Jon’s beam met the lieutenant, but his face wasn’t what caused the agent to jump. It was the face behind him. “Jesus Christ!”

In a flash, St. Vrain drew his gun and swiveled, expecting company. In a way, Don Jon was right. It was, in fact, Jesus Christ. A whole wall of Him, in fact. His face was sown into several samplers lining the walls in beautiful threadwork. He collected himself and joined the lieutenant in illuminating the dark wall.

After the Rip, a lot of enties lost faith in their deities and began to take stock in the ones surrounding them. They’d join the regular religions as part of the congregation, much like Don Jon’s parents, but some of them had their own takes on the divine of Earth. The Church of the Brazen Beetle as founded by the bug-like ixchel was the biggest still kicking around, taking Christ’s crucifixion and putting him in a boiling brass beetle instead, miraculously emerging after three days. The Abraxian Draconics were flagellants who beat their scales bloody in service of inciting war between angels and demons. Whatever religious beliefs the sarxyces hid behind their empty-eyed masks seemed to be compatible with any religion they liked, as they’d often wrap themselves in crucifixes and shinto symbolism as amulets adorning their robes and coats.

The Argid Orthodoxy was different. Argid Orthodoxy supposed that all events that took place in the Bible took place in their realm, and that the Rip was their form of judgement. Those who ended up on Earth after that day believed themselves to have been cast into Hell, and sought to perform near-pagan rituals to return to glory and the heaven promised to them. The religion maintained a dwindling clergy of old folks, violent militants, and edgy teenagers who snorted glue behind the school dumpster. Having images of the Argid Christ, his snout wet and ears glowing, in one’s home was a sure sign of holiness and redemption, along with crosses encrusting the walls like barnacles. Down here, St. Vrain and Jon were met with nothing but His holy gaze.

“Gives me the creeps,” whispered the agent. St. Vrain nodded to no one in particular. “Alright, let’s look for evidence. Clothes, letters, signs of struggle, so on.”

Lots of things littered the ground — empty bottles of wine, torn up paintings of Argid Christ, snack cake wrappers licked clean of frosting — so searching was difficult. The dirt stained Don’s tan claws a dirty black, and the same for the knees of his service pants. Finally, his hands brushed over something, something he thought felt like a pebble before. He brought it close to his eyes, shining a light on it. St. Vrain shuffled over to see. Pinched between talons was a human tooth. Breath stopped moving between the two.

“Alright, should we call for back-up?” The lieutenant reached for his radio.

“Now hold on, buddy. What kind of person leaves a single tooth?”

St. Vrain looked anxious to call it in, get some more people down here before something bad happened. “Maybe it got knocked out during a fight?”

“Maybe,” he cooed, “but if I was planning on taking a body to another location, I’d make damn sure I have everything, and I’d remember knocking out a tooth. No, this tooth means that there’s a body nearby. Keep looking.”

“Ok, sure.” Exasperated, he holstered his walkie-talkie and kept scanning the room.

One more pass over the wall of Christ stirred something queer in Don Jon’s gizzard. All the crosses, the arms equidistant and the center braced with a smaller set, were all parallel, pointing up and down. Except for one. One sat right next to a worn down, dirty visage of the Lord at boot level. A human Lord.

He walked over, his eyes fixed on the painting, and turned the cross right-side up. The image fell to the floor, kicking up dust. He already knew what it was, but he could hear St. Vrain groan under his breath as the dark cloud cleared. Another dark hole for them to crawl in and die. Jon took no joy in it either — at 6-foot-something he was basically spelunking indoors at all times — but it was hard on St. Vrain.

“You don’t gotta go in there if you don’t want Jerome. Just stand watch and make sure nobody comes down here. If they do-”

“Shoot ‘em?” He drew his pistol again, undoing the safety.

“I mean, ask questions first, but yeah, then shoot ‘em.”

St. Vrain turned his back to the wall and kept his eyes trained on the ladders down. Meanwhile, Don Jon stripped himself of his coat and clip on tie, set it on the ground beside him, and began to wiggle into the burrow.

Don Jon didn’t take stock in species-based traits, but he did take stock in one thing: argids can fit their fat little bodies into a Pringles can if need be. Thankfully, this was not a Pringles can he was crawling into, but it spread a bit tighter than your average playground tube. His shoes pushed him further into the dirty burrow, his elbows getting him further. It must have been six, ten, twenty feet before it remembered to open up, the sides of the walls finally making distance from the flashlight clenched in the agent’s beak.

When there was finally enough room to squat instead of crawl, he tried to get his bearings. The ground around him was warm, and felt like it was humming. Maybe I’m under another house’s water heater, he thought, or a power station. Hell, maybe it’s just the Earth. The cavern sloped upwards, a construction feat that would impress the agent under any other circumstance other than this.

Something made a noise.

“Mrhrhrmm. Mrhhrrmmr! MRHRHRM!”

It didn’t sound pleasant. Reflexively, he almost went for his pistol, before looking around him. One bullet might collapse the whole thing.

“RHHRHRMRMRH!”

It was getting the louder the closer he got to the top of the slope. The stomach turned, the mind reeled, he braced for the worst.

He still wasn’t prepared.

It was a human male at some point. There was a human face, with a cheap sex toy ball gag wrapped around its head, spittle and teethmarks around the clown nose-like bit. Don Jon assumed it had human brains, and human thoughts. Everything else was out the window. A draconic arm had been stitched where original had grown on the left, and an argid arm sat similar on the right. they seemed sown on crooked. For the legs, he expected more species, an action figure mix and match. How naive. That was where the arms went. Of course, there were other legs attached — an ixchel leg stapled loosely to a knee here, a human palm splayed and grafted on the other. Neither were in very good health, with the knee palm having rotted to the point of dangling from its owner. Then his chest, dear God, his chest. Tails, claws, ears, genitals, anything that could be sown onto a thing was sown on.

Everything left over was behind the poor man, composting. There were a lot more than five missing people.

On the dirty sleeping bag he writhed and moaned, banging his head against the dirt floor. Don Jon tried to suppress the tide, tried to batten down the puke building in his throat, the panic of seeing such a thing and seeing it move. He tried to look at something else in the room, something not dominated by threadwork and rot. An electric lantern. An IV stand. A golden cross hanging from a nail. Everything around them: Hell, Hell, Hell.

Finally, he got close enough to reach. The man stopped thrashing and screaming wordlessly through his gag as Don Jon began to undo the buckle.

“The king the king?”

“What?”

“Be you the king of all of the holy most Argid greatness, shown of which I am to be the new son of, never before living before now on this Earth and bringing us out of Hell’s judgement, the king the king the-”

“Slow down, please. I’m with the WRDF. I’m here to help you.”

He didn’t obey. He went faster, bellowing and growling in a voice ragged from screaming. “Please, please so thirsty, bring the liquid, bring the liquid to make my limbs so whole and filled when I become the most of all yes to reach and grab all of mankind, so thirsty, so thirsty…”

He looked around, dazed. He knew the guy wanted water, but there weren't any bottles or jugs of it lying around exactly. Then, he looked at the IV bag again, hanging from its stand. Saline. Dear God, he’s delirious. It was all that was down here. He took the bag off the stand and squirted a bit of it into his mouth, just enough to wet his lips.

“Thank you, oh thank you,” he stammered, “Mother was dutiful and penitent and forgot to water the vessel in, the vessel thanks you for the vessel secures a place for your sinner self in the true afterlife, an escape from Hell, yes, an escape from Hell with me and Mother, yes!” He began laughing, then screaming, then laughing again. All Don Jon could do was sit and watch.

“Are you…” The bile rose in his throat as he began to ask. How can you be professional? “Are you Davis McIntyre?”

“Bad name! Bad naaaame! Mother mustn’t hear that name or she adds more dutifuls upon the vessel! The vessel must be saved!” He writhed and pleaded. “Please don’t say that name, good sir, that name makes Mother add more dutifuls upon the body, and I already have so many, please don’t say that name, thirsty, so thirsty…”

He yammered on, rolling his head in circles. His limbs splayed along and rolled on the bed like petrified spider limbs, dangling in the air as if it had been freshly killed. Don Jon took the response as a yes. Sitting cross-legged on the packed down dirt, he pointed his flashlight down the slope, then back to McIntyre, thirsty thirsty McIntyre. He wouldn’t fit. He’d amassed too many limbs.

“I’m… I’m gonna come back for you.” He left out the word “try” in the response. And “with an excavator”. And “also dynamite”.

“You are saved my friend! You are saved with me and Mother! So thirsty, so thirsty…”

He slid down the hill, stopping before slamming his head on the shrinking cavern. Back through the little tunnel.

His parents were so worried when they went to the station. They’d let him get a job cause he was 18 and he wanted a moped to ride around town. They thought he’d been kidnapped and robbed. They thought he’d been killed. Jon had to tell them the truth. He tried not to think about it, and it didn’t work. It was just thoughts of his splayed, surgically tortured body writhing in pain, or attempting to walk out of the hole, or riding on a moped. Actually, that last one was pretty funny. He chuckled for a second. Then he wanted to die when he realized what he was chuckling at. Sick fucking world. Sick fucking people.

He breathed in the stale air of the basement like gulps of wine when he was out. St. Vrain looked him over. “What’s wrong? Bodies?”

He coughed. “Worse.’

“What’s worse than a dead body?”

“W-wanna find out? Call for back-up.” He stifled a gag and stayed on his knees for a second before wobbling upright. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. If you see the bunkhouse owner, kill her.”

The ladder to the yard, rusted as it was, thankfully held both of the men’s weights as they pulled themselves out into the light. Jon had never been so glad to see the eternally cloudy sky.

“We got a 21-3, unknown but dangerous, send back-up to 2873 Washington Street-”

“Excuse me!” A wiry voice hollered at them. Don Jon drew his pistol and bore down on the source — a balding man in a bad dress shirt and tie. “Who are you people? What are you doing to my property’s yard?”

“Sir,” Don Jon started, “please stand back, we’ve got a situation here, and- wait, your property?”

“Yes, my property. I’m the owner of this bunkhouse and I demand to know what you people are doing on it before operating hours.”

Shit. Shit shit shit. It took the agent a lot of willpower not to say it out loud. The last thing the situation needed now was more panic.

“Shit,” said St. Vrain. “Uh, sir, we’ve uncovered something potentially illegal inside your basement.”

“What?”

“There’s some fucked up shit in your basement, sir! I’m gonna need you to stand back.” His hands were shaking as he raised his voice, tone cracking. It was all shaking and trying not to flip out. Sirens were blaring in the distance, and they sounded too far away.

“I wanna talk to your superior officers, dammit, who- wait, who the hell are you?”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Wisteria, swinging the sharp end of a pickaxe into his skull.

He fell to the ground, the lights turned off by a ripped cord. They opened fire, but it was too late; for an old woman she was quick, and already in the bunkhouse with the door locked. Don Jon jumped down the hatch with Jerome behind him, just as Wisteria slid down the ladder.

“You’re surrounded, hands up.” Kill her. “Don’t make me do anything I’m gonna regret.” Do something. Do something so I can take you to your God and have him damn you to the real Hell, you sick bitch.

“Please just put down the pickaxe. The cops are on their way.” St. Vrain’s voice kept calming and heavy, sopping up the rage and disgust from his charge. Deep down, the lieutenant knew this was why he was here — to stop the righteous psionic anger from kicking in. Breathe, he tried thinking to him, hoping in some way he could read those thoughts. Breathe, Donnie. She isn’t worth it.

Don Jon breathes in. She charges at them. He fires twice at her heart. St. Vrain fires once at her knees and misses. She runs forward and tripping, embeds the pickaxe in Lt. St. Vrain’s head, killing him instantly. Two people are dead when they don’t need to be. There’s a pang in the agent’s heart, realizing this is the worst possible thing to do. This is the way to infinite suffering. He makes a one-second plan. Don Jon breathes out, and everything is okay again.

She charges at them. Don tackles St. Vrain. Turning, Jon plants a .45 ACP round, hollow point, in her geriatric knees. She slips and stabs the pickaxe into the wall. She realizes this is her chance. Before anyone gets a bead on her again, she tears the axe from the wall and slams it into the tunnel roof above her, scurrying away.

The tunnel collapses. Everyone is alive.

“You saved my life, sir.”

“Don’t think anything of it, Jerome.” He looked at the tunnel, then back to St. Vrain. “And my name is Simon.”

“What?”

“My name is Simon. Don’t call me that in front of the other officers, please.”

“...can do, Simon.”

***

It took about an hour for the rest of the WRDF to show up, and by the time they did, they needed to call in an excavator, which took another hour. It took an hour for Don Jon to tell everyone what was down there, two hours for them to find the tunnel, and the rest of daylight to tear the roof off of Wisteria’s cavern. By the time they got there, she and Dave were gone. Her vessel had been forced through a freshly dug hole, and they lost her under the power station proper. All the remaining corpses were bagged up, and everyone went home.

There was a cover up, of course. The people who believed Jon supported it because you just can’t tell people that their son was turned into a being of rotting arms and legs by a woman underground. They’d either sue you for lying or commit ritual suicide. They found a body, a John Doe who’d been in the morgue for a while, and brought in a plastic surgeon from Denver to do up his face. He looked almost like the man in the cave, but not really. “That’s bloating,” they told Mr. and Mrs. McIntyre, “it’s natural.”

Everyone mostly got on with their lives. Jerome St. Vrain stayed Agent Don Jon’s watchman. They got to be on a first name basis with one another; maybe not professional, but admirable in its own little way. Don got a transfer to Boystown in the west, “for heroism”.

Deep down, he knew why he was transferred. Nothing would make him patrol that area ever again. Not knowing what he knew. Every step he took, he’d hear the echo of hollow ground beneath him. He’d be haunted by a cry under his feet.: