Upgunned (36 page)

“Is it a bird, or is it a
bird
-bird?”

“This is a bird,” Tripp said, showing me his middle finger.

*   *   *

The first session of Salon photos exceeded my hopes beyond dreams. I had some teaser shots into the bosses at Serpentine Clothing, and early word was that they were ecstatic. Having surpassed the introductory awkwardness of the initial shoot, now I was able to go back with a plan. I knew precisely how I wanted to pose Erik, to light Mejandra, to flatter Kleck and Klia, and to immortalize Davanna. This time, they would all be included—the hypercephalic Lyle, the cyclopean Uno, the Visible Man that was Tabanga.

Kleck was trusting this financial gambit to my good offices … because even the darkside lure of the Salon was risky and unreliable, when it came to paying bills. Strict confidentiality. Each member of the Salon owned his or her own image rights and I was the sole designated sublicensor. Kleck appointed me as the deal-maker, the business face of the Salon in this venture. I had done nothing to earn his respect, except maybe not call him a dwarf. Perhaps Lyle had read my intentions and whispered in Kleck's ear.

Empathy was another matter altogether. I was a rank tyro until Davanna schooled me. She had been able to see inside me from the first.

Even for people who have slept with thousands of other people, the memorable moments, the personal bests and frissons, or the rarest-of-all instances of unadulterated romantic fulfillment, cook down to about sixty seconds of flashback images, the kind you store in your personal file until you die.

Being inside Davanna was a once-in-a-lifetime jolt I could never have anticipated, or prepared for, and could never replicate. It ruined me for all other partners forever. And I knew this, as it happened.

It separated me from everything.

In the outside world, people fretted about whether black was back in or not. They invested time in worrying about how to spice up their fall neutrals with bold splashes of color, or must-own handbags that cost more than a car. The age-old Republican versus Democrat circle jerk was still considered to be news, which reminded me of Poe's pendulum—no matter which way it swings, it's always moving down, and eventually it slices you in two. Nobody thought it odd that airport security had become, in itself, terrorism. Everybody was kept at a high pitch of panic about finance, and if that wasn't enough to fog your thinking, there were so many glittering distractions available for purchase that it was a miracle the average citizen remembered to put on clothes before venturing out into the daily fray.

The classic film beauty Gene Tierney had a great line in a movie no one remembers (
That Wonderful Urge
): “The great reading public isn't interested in normal human beings. They want freaks served up with all the trimmings.” In her case, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As a steady diet of stomach acid, the freakside had drawbacks normal people would never know.

And now I was serving up the freaks myself. Just as they were using me in return.

The great reading public wanted hyperbolic adjectives and earthy blow-by-blow particulars when it came to sex—that is, mere sexual coupling. This was not that. This was something else, something other. I was only inside of her for a few seconds. In that time she learned everything about me she needed to know, because she was a true empath. In turn she permitted me to see within her, just as profoundly. The contact was electric. It exploded time.

There were myriads of inadequate ways to express it. Hyperbole.

She said she wanted to know about me. With her wings spread, she lowered herself onto me. That was our only point of contact. I could not touch or caress or grab—that would leave marks; that's how sensitive she was. Her translucent flesh caught the light and scattered the spectrum in new ways. I could feel her inside of me, at the same moment I experienced the weird hallucination of looking out through her eyes. At me.

Whatever she saw did not alarm her. That was my deepest fear, to be rendered completely naked in front of another mind, with no succoring darkness in which to hide. She saw me, and I saw her seeing, and the fact that she was not repelled (or taken aback at some sinister motive I had tried to conceal), flooded through me in an amplified echo. This was more than reassurance or safety or love. It was something akin to joy, hard to identify because I had so little experience with joy.

“Oh,”
she said as I felt myself gripped. As in:
I see now; it is clear; I get it
. I would never find out what that revelation was …

… because that was when the door to the room was kicked rudely open. Gunshots. I felt the bullets punch through me. The pain folded me up into a fetal ball, and abruptly, I was free of her. Her blood misted my face. She fell toward me. The room seemed abruptly devoid of oxygen.

Only later did I sort out impressions, as though decompressing a complicated file. She divined my reason for exploiting the Salon had changed from usury and my desire for escape from the shadow of Clavius to endorsement and a strange, protective desire to
assist
these invisible people who existed behind their bizarre exteriors. It would have been so easy to be like Mason Stone, to smile with veneered teeth to conceal a deeper sneer, to coast through it all for kicks. The Salon was as socially disenfranchised as I had become, in my new identity. My freak was Elias McCabe, and my aberrations were all on the inside.

She fell forward onto me, almost featherweight, no longer concerned with bruises or marks, and before gravity tore us apart, I felt her die inside.

Sex. Violence. Strength. Contest. What we all use to sell, well, everything, including our own fake ideals of ourselves.

It took a heartbeat and a half for me to realize the bullets had not ripped through me, but through her while our psyches were conjoined.

A thousand things told me the silhouette in the doorway was Gun Guy, back for one more. His stance. His movement. He was so halated in an aura of violence and malignancy that he seemed to leave faint blue vapor trails.

The bloodspray on me had come mostly from a heavy-duty slug exiting her perfect, unique face. Her outside died a moment after her inside.

Then Erik chomped Gun Guy's shoulder from behind with his frightening mouth. I was still on the floor.

They fought, briefly, all snarls and gasps. Erik snapped and missed by an eyelash—his definitive kill timing was off. Gun Guy grabbed his arm and howled, wounded. All in spinning shadows. A stray gunshot obliterated one of the hydroponic lamps used for Davanna's comfort. It spark-arced into a cloud of phosphorescent shrapnel with a bright flash, and suddenly I was blind.

More gunshots, and the unmistakable sound of Erik hitting the polished floor. Another sound—which I now recognized as a clip change, a reload.

Then Gun Guy collected me, as others crowded the entry, time-lapse brave in the face of killing weaponry.

“Hi, Elias, old buddy,” he said through clenched teeth.

I was rousted off the floor. The hot muzzle of a pistol cooked a tiny circle into my cheek.
Ssssssss
. The hammer was already back.

“I want my gun.”

I told him the Kimber was not here. I was ready for him to click me off.

A wave of even greater rage from Gun Guy, like the door of a hot oven opening and closing.

“Then you're going to take me to it. Or every one of your little sideshow fuck toys is going to die while you watch.”

Boom
—gunshot.
That's all, folks
.

But it was not the gun at my head that had gone off. Gun Guy had two. I heard Klia cry out. Fast shuffle of movement.

“Believe it,” said Gun Guy. “There's no time-out. No countdown. You take me to it. Now.”

I heard Kleck sputtering in grief. “Please don't hurt us any more!”

“He got bit.” Mejandra's voice, talking about Gun Guy.

“He's still got all the guns.” Mason Stone's voice. “Back out of the doorway. Clear the way for whatever this nut bag wants.”

“What I
want
isn't
here
, you dinky fuck!”

Nobody ever called Mason Stone a dinky fuck to his face. Except …

I feverishly hoped nobody said, “Now just calm down,” to this man.

*   *   *

The barter was implicit. My life for those in the Salon.

Gun Guy grabbed my head and banged my face into the brick wall outside. Three times. A tooth chipped. I felt my nose try to skew.

He kept muttering “asshole,” over and over, while he did it.

“‘Julian Hightower?' That's ultracute. That's mega-adorable. That's cost me too fucking much, amigo. Your little butt-buddy in the office? The pasty boy with the video camera? He sold you out. Welcome to Hollywood, sailor. The only reason you're still breathing is my gun. I want it back, you worthless piece of shit.”

To keep me malleable, Gun Guy had only permitted me to wear my shirt and trousers. I was barefoot and could feel broken glass and tetanus-laced frags embedding the soles of my feet in the alleyway behind the hotel. My face felt coated in hastily smeared dry blood and terror sweat. Pulsing pain in my cheek, from my fresh branding.

“Did you kill Arly, too?” I asked. My lip had sprouted a fresh bleed.

He shook his head as though he still had not figured out why himself. “No, actually.”

He shanghaied me into a characterless rental car. Strapped me in, commanded me to sit on my hands. He was going to take his time killing me, once he had resolved the issue of the MIA Kimber. Pressed to the wall, I knew I would rather be dead fast than dead slow. If I antagonized him the right way, just pushed him a teeny bit, he'd spread my brains and leave me for roadkill, mission accomplished, bye-bye Elias.

But.

I knew something Gun Guy did not. Yet. Kleck and I had discussed it, during the first photo session, when I was finding ways to light Erik's crocodilian teeth so they would pop properly in a photo.

“His bite is mildly venomous, as you may have surmised,” Kleck said.

I had tried not to react unseemly.
“Mildly?”

“A little cocktail of amino acids in his saliva which activates as a threat response,” said Kleck.

“It's in my spit,” said Erik.

I told him to hold still.

“We did a bit of research and found out that it's called a ‘denmotoxin,'” Kleck went on, happy to wax erudite. “Characteristic of chewing reptiles lacking front fangs for hypodermic delivery.”

“Like a coral snake,” I said. It was the most poisonous snake in the continental United States … and the most innocuous-looking. Colorful. Small. Tempting. They had to clamp on to you and chew to get the venom in.

“The denmotoxin in the Southeast Asian mangrove snake evolved to favor birds, which were the snake's principal diet. Perhaps that explains why Erik likes chicken so much.”

“I like rumaki better,” said Erik.

I told him to hold still again. “So … it's still venom, though, right?”

“Yes,” said Kleck. “Although you'd need significantly more of it to incapacitate a mammal.”

“Erik, is it harmful?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Erik said from the back of his throat, knowing that if he moved I'd tell him to hold still again. The lower register of his voice was creepy all by itself.

“Besides the pain of the bite, you'd experience nausea and vertigo,” said Kleck. “If you're sensitive, you might go into anaphylactic shock or stop breathing. Of course, there's a difference between a relatively mild snakebite and Erik. His biology is different.”

“Have you ever bitten anyone, Erik?”

Erik's gaze darted to Kleck. Kleck's sharp focus went soft. “Once,” Kleck said distantly. “It did not go well.”

That was my hole card secret weapon there in the car with Gun Guy, who had sustained a full-contact bite wound all around his upper right shoulder. Blood had blossomed freely through his shirt and he was doing his best to hang tough and ignore it. But I already noticed him favoring that arm.

“Man, you did well,” Gun Guy said, almost conversationally. “You played well. Ran me ragged. But you've
got
to be as sick of this as I am.”

“You killed my friends.” We were headed for the Lincoln Tunnel.

“You don't
have
any friends, sport. Your friends all despise you.”

“Not Joey.” It still hurt to say his name. About everybody else I'd known, he was basically right.

“That shithead with all the tats? Metal in his face? You probably warned him to stay away from your loft. He went back there anyway, to shoot some porn film, when he knew you'd be gone.”

“I wish he hadn't.”

The tunnel lights zoomed at warp speed, curving over the windshield. It was the middle of the night; the best time for the tunnel.

“You'd better start getting specific about direction,” my captor said.

The only destination I had to give was the location of Cap Weatherwax's truck. If Cap himself was not there, a Fire When Ready sentry would be on duty. Probably ex-military, like Cap. They did not deserve to die. Neither did the crew members who might be loitering around the other trucks as production was wrapped for the company move.

All beyond my control.

Yet Gun Guy had strong-armed Arly Zahoryin and
not
killed him. He had broken his pattern. Perhaps there was enough of a gap there to save Cap or Cap's men.

It was so late that I hoped personnel was at a minimum. I had no other place to be.

*   *   *

What little I knew of Burke did not extend to whether that was his first or last name. He was just “Burke,” a vaguely Middle Eastern–looking fellow who I gathered had logged trigger time with Israeli Special Forces, in another reality. Curly black hair, eternal five o'clock shadow, decisive hawklike eyes, quick to grin.