Orphan of Mythcorp (14 page)

Right.

Around the corner of this flesh farm we
stopped at a holy-moly steel door that had been lurking behind a
purple curtain along with a guard sporting a handlebar mustache.
Kana craned her neck to see his face. “This one’s from the tussle
outside the Keen Edge. Used a Mesmer.”

Whoa. Were they tattling on me?

Handlebars cocked his head, peeped down at
me. “No one’s tried to pull a Mesmer here in five years. He don’t
look like no Morai. You wouldn’t be playing me again, would you be,
Kana? Cause I don’t care how strong you are or how much she likes
you, I’ll take you to Mina myself, say you been flaunting your
gifts.”

“
Flaunting? Wow,” Faustus piped up.
“That’s a big word, Carney. Have you been watching
Pinky and the Brain
cartoons
again?”

Carney’s left fist rocketed forward. Faustus
ducked just in time to avoid the blow, apparently deciding that it
was the perfect moment to tie his shoes. “Good thing I felt the
need to run the rabbit through its hole,” he smirked. “Attacking a
Ward is grounds for the Boo-Box.”

“
For the eighty-fifth time,” Kana said,
“it’s the Boubex. Stop quoting your blasted vids.”

I couldn’t be sure, but this seemed like a
routine; the whole scene had a recited quality to it. Handlebar
Carney snorted, thoroughly miffed. I wondered how many times he’d
endured their parody. Without another word, and while Faustus and
Kana traded smirks, Carney unlocked the monster door. “Enjoy Court.
I hope she finds you in contempt of the King so he sick’s his
Knights on you. I’d pay to watch them tear you limb from limb.
Those guys don’t mess around.”

The door slammed behind us. I could’ve sworn
it made a sound like DOOM!

Darkness. The sudden shift from
neon-brilliance to sleepy-time blackness hurt my peepers. I had a
million and one questions, starting with Knox, ending with the
Knights and Court, but it didn’t feel like the right time to ask
anything.

The sound of fluorescents flickering on
accompanied the shaky glow of light and the unveiling of what you
might call a dorm, a long room lined with beds and wooden dressers,
the carpeted floor colored by shirts and jeans of various hues.
Kana marched down the row straight ahead, stopped at a twin-sized
bed. She yanked on one of the larger drawers of the dresser
standing beside it and pulled out something gray.

I thought it might be a grody pair of socks,
or perhaps a stuffed animal. It was a squirrel. That’s right, she
pulled a raggedy squirrel out of her dresser. The thing looked
about five years into its eternal buggerment; patches of missing
hair, twisted limbs, tail all limp.

“
Hey,” Faustus shook the person
sleeping in the bed next to me. “Hey, waky-waky.”

The person grunted, farted, and then turned
over to face us. He squinted as he looked up at me. Baldy threw the
blanket off and sat up, feet on the carpet. He was naked save for a
pair of knee-length black socks, but he didn’t look all that nude
thanks to a fleece of black hair and a collection of black tattoos
slithering along the less hairy parts like a nest of anorexic
snakes.

He reminded me of Naked Charlie. For the
first time since entering Vera City, I realized that none of my
spooks had bothered me here. Curious.

Baldy procured a black cig, lit it with a
match. After tossing the spent match at Faustus’ feet, Baldy poured
himself a glass of whiskey from his side table. He looked at me the
whole time he was pouring, and didn’t spill a drop. Nodded at me. I
noticed that his peepers were different colors, blue right peeper,
green left. The green one winked.

“
Call me Ishmael,” he said in the
scratchy voice of a life-long smoker. “Don’t let the name fool you
though.” He drank without removing his cig.

Okay. With no idea how to respond, I let my
eyes wander over the room.

“
Where’s Waldo, Ish?” Faustus
asked.

Ishmael downed the last of his whiskey,
scratched his balls and burped. As an encore, he ate his cig.
“Gee,
Fau
, I don’t know. Let
me check.” Ishmael scanned the entire dorm, turned his gaze back to
Faustus, who rolled his peepers. “Well I don’t see Waldo, and
seeing as you just woke me up—” he let his words trail off,
lighting a second cancer stick. While taking a drag, he looked up
at me.

“
What did this one do? Piss in Miss
Crystal’s fountain? Looks like a pisser.”

Faustus pulled a switchblade out of his jeans
and started flipping it around. A nervous tick? “What makes you so
sure he did something? Maybe he’s just a friend we’re showing
around.”

“
Ha and ha,” Ishmael laughed between
drags. “You two relics don’t have friends, ‘cept for that nasty old
rat. Hey Kana!” he stood. “When you’re done stroking your fur patch
you want to get this bag-o-bones to Mina? She probably heard you
coming. If she didn’t, then she certainly heard what I just thought
to her, so I suggest you hurry.” He spoke all this in a mellow
drawl.

Kana frittered over to us. For a tick there
she reminded me of Marie. “Where’s Waldo?” she asked the
gingersnap.

Faustus shrugged, nodded at Ishmael.
“Apparently no one knows.”

“
Frigging pissing spiders, you can
never find that guy. Fine. We’ll go in without him. Mina’s going to
be in some kind of mood, but maybe seeing as how Morgan here is
Kn—”

“
You’re right,” Faustus elbowed Kana,
“we
should
get going. What’s
wrong with you?” he asked me, noticing my little dance. He traded
looks with Kana. They both seemed confused, which made me
wonder:
Just how kooky are these two
kooks
? Everyone knows the pee-pee dance.

“
I got to piss, man,” and it was not
just that; I was flipping out of my gourd. Court and Mina and a man
named Ishmael who could’ve been Satan’s little brother. It felt
like I’d taken one really bad turn and fallen into some Stephen
King nightmare.

“
I’ll take him,” Ishmael laughed. He
led me across the room into a communal bathroom complete with a
couch. Like a nice old poof he accompanied me inside, taking the
next urinal over. In two ticks he was letting the old yellow water
stream, all the while puffing away on his black cig.

“
Whatever you did, slim,” taking a drag
“do not think about it in there. Think about puppies and hugs
because that chick . . . she’ll—” another long drag “—she’ll get in
your head, muck things up.”

Wow, that makes me feel
better
. “Can I bum a smoke?”

“
Oh, of course,” he drew the butt out
of his mouth, made to hand it over but instead slowly lowered it
into the urinal. “You can have a smoke—for a Jackson.”

“
Twenty bucks for one cig?”

He smacked a good laugh at that. “Nothing’s
free in Vera City, pal . . . except for that little piece of
advice. Well, maybe not even that.” He shook out the last drops and
did not flush. On his way out, Ishmael slapped me on the rump.
“Good luck. If you don’t get sentenced to the Boubex, come see me.
I might have a job for you, a real no-brainer. It pays in Smith’s
Brothers brandy.”

I tried to ignore the pain and the DT’s
wreaking havoc on my body and brain as we trekked down the hall to
Court. There, trembling and sweating, I was introduced to Mina
Harker.

“
I’ll get right down to the ruling,”
she said. “I see no cause for the Boubex.” She was a full on dish,
the biggest set of lovely’s I’d ever seen. “However,” she gave me a
cross look, “this young man
has
broken the Extra-Human Ability Restriction Act of 2016, and
as a non-citizen of Vera City, he doesn’t have immunity to the Act.
So he must be punished.” She was speaking not only to me and my
kooks, but to a shadowed man watching from a screen hanging
overhead. In the corner of the screen was that strange
sword-and-round-table symbol I’d seen earlier on the Keen Edge
booth.

“
Fifteen lashes with a cat-o-nine.”
Mina suggested to the man in the screen.

He nodded approval.

I swallowed back bile. The full-on shakes had
me in their grip now and sweat was pouring down my back. I’d have
sold my kidney for a fix at this point.

“
Seeing as Waldo is still missing,”
Mina continued to us, “would you perform the honors?”

Faustus nodded, and Mina faced the man in the
screen again. “Is my ruling satisfactory?”

Another nod.

And just like that, slam-bang, I was led away
to be punished for trying to save my life. Kana took my flannel and
undershirt while Faustus retrieved this long whip with bristles on
the end. Kana led me to a white wall smudged with reddish brown
streaks. Taking my wrist, she slipped my hands into cuffs linked to
a chain connected to the wall. “I’m sorry about this,” she
whispered, “but the King is always watching. We’re going to have to
make this real.”

She nodded at Faustus before walking out of
sight.

I wasn’t ready. Pain arrived whiz-bang, even
before I heard the whistle of the nine-cat-whip thingy. I
staggered, would’ve fallen if my hands hadn’t been chained up. The
second strike to my back tore a scream right out of me.

By the fifteenth blow I was ready to call it
a life. I’d never felt such agony; my back was crawling with snakes
of pain, as if someone had drawn lines on it with gasoline and then
struck a match. I was barely aware of Kana when she undid my cuffs.
I fell into her strong arms; smelled cinnamon. And then blackness
took me.

I awoke inside the sun. That’s what it felt
like anyway, neon lights beaming at me from the ceiling and walls.
A few ticks after my peepers adjusted, I puked all over the floor.
I was hungry, thirsty, beaten and sleepy. Starting to wish the
government had listened to the Zoners and kept us in the Home.

“
Here, drink this,” Faustus handed me a
bottle. The plastic jug was hot pink, reflecting the lights around
it as if designed to piss me off.

“
Where are we?”

“
At the back door,” he answered,
looking out through a filmed-over window, a circular affair like
the portholes in ships. “Well, that was awkward back there,
huh?”

I inhaled, bit back a curse. “Why didn’t they
beat the piss out of you and Kana? I’m not the one slaughtered
those people. And you guys used extra-human abilities, I’m sure of
it.”

He shrugged, continued looking through the
window. “We’re Wards. Which mean we’re kind of like the GI Joes of
Vera City. We’re paid to keep the peace—by bringing the violence.
In case you were wondering, yeah, we’re Mythicons. But they don’t
much care about that here. Not with the bang up job we do. This
city is always on the verge of war. The King and his Knights—”

“
I don’t care about the politics of
your stupid mini-city. Just let me out.”

Faustus sighed, played with his switchblade.
“Come over here and take a look.”

I obeyed. He pointed at the streaks of fire
falling from the sky outside the dirty window. “Brimstorm. We have
to wait.”

Brimstorms: a weather phenomenon that occurs
roughly every two weeks, and only ever in Philicity. Burning chunks
of star stuff plummet from the heavens, burning all in their path.
At the Home Mr. Bors had called it ‘A relic from the horrific
events of the Mythcorp War’. Now that I thought about it, ‘relic’
was just how Ishmael had referred to Kana and Faustus.

I plopped my rump back down on the wooden
bench. Downed the last of the water from the neon bottle. “How long
have I been here?”

“
Fifty-seven years.”

“
What!”

The gingersnot took a moment to get his
laughter under control. “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself. I was just
quoting Paul Reiser from
Aliens
. You were out for two and a half
days.”

“
That’s still hard to believe.” Holy
crow. I started freaking out, pacing, rubbing my busted knee and
generally trying to jump out of my stinking sweating skin. Every
time my shirt ruffled against my back, pain flared. Faustus sat me
back down and I laid it out for him. My theories about Ash and
Sanson and why I’d left the school probably came out a smidge
garbled, what with my jittering voice and constant
cursing.

“
You sound like him, Knox, I mean.”
Faustus dug into his pocket, came up with a Werther’s Original
candy, smiled. “They get you every time, don’t they, George?” He
seemed to be talking to either the candy, or himself, and I doubted
the candy was laced with doojee, so I l didn’t snatch
it.

“
Don’t worry,” he said, “when this lets
up I’ll take you to a friend. He’s a major league prick, but he’s
also brilliant. Picture Einstein raised by Hippies. He’ll give you
some answers.”

“
Why can’t you?” I massaged my right
knee; a half-ruse to keep it from shaking. “At least tell me about
Knox. What was he like?”

Faustus whispered: “There are a
thousand-and-one camera’s in this city, and just as many snitches.
The Knights are like robocops. They may accept us as Mythicons and
Wards, but there are limits to what they’ll tolerate. And blabbing
on about the War and about Mythcorp and the people associated with
them to some teen is not something they’ll just overlook.”

He snatched his blade back from where he’d
secreted it in his pocket, fiddled with it. “Dex will help you . .
. probably.”

My peepers opened wide as I raised my noggin.
“Dex . . . you mean the guy on Twenty-First Street?”