8: Dharmacakra
Jimmy Casianos had looked into the eyes of Divinity, and She smiled back a starlet. The snow had bit his skin far worse than the fire at his front ever could, greedy satanic flames lashing the Juneau Lodge to splinters. But these even were Nothing before Her - the inferno merely a cast for the flesh pink nimbus of Her brilliance, the nihilism of the Alaskan winter only a willed counterpoint to Her radiance.
"You want to know what a hero is Jimmy?" Her thumbs were hooked through the belt loop of her designer jeans, her eyes roamed the stars with a cocaine edge, and him, crawling knees thick in tundra sludge. "They're God's bastards, Jim." As she crouched in the heavy snow. Her mouth twisted in a curious moue, a riddlemaster, eyes met. "From how I understand it, the Boys upstairs spent most of their time getting ****-faced on nectar and ambrosia and finding holes to sodomize and the time they weren't, well, they were slumming downtown. And the Greeks, for all their democratic spirit, Jimmy, didn't pay child support. I won't get into the psychological implications of that sort of upbringing because I figure that babble's mostly bull**** anyway. Gods are for the birds, Jimmy. What the world really needs is people who can listen. Can you listen, Jimmy?" He chattered. That was good enough. "And let me just say, Jimmy. I'm very sorry about that bullet Vinnie put in you.
very sorry." She stroked a cigarette to life, lifted to her feet. "But you should survive that. Some people will come through and..." words trailed with the smoke. "There's something mean coming, Jimmy. All I'm asking you to do is survive it. Can you do that?" But now her back was turned, her body retreating towards the blindness of the fire. "Good. You'll know the bad guys. It's just like a horror flick."
So now he sits, lotus on a cot narrower than him, in the dingy basement of the school. A joint dangles from one hand, in the other a copy of
Leviathan (2001) starring the cherubic starlet Andrea Portecue and directed by art film maniac genius Vincent Croft. It wasn't a bad flick really. It had a minute and a half topless scene. Buddy'd probably call it "a terrifying masterpiece of grotesquery that reinvents the genre of horror films entirely." Truth is, Buddy's kind of a tool. But the blurb on the back of the DVD's a little screwy.
And shall rise upon the Naught Land the great God-Beast
To raze our cities and culture despoil.
To raise a new land from progress and toil
For Its Skins shall be our lodging Its Flesh our feast.
Huh.
-------------
Dylan's thick fingertips strum Rachel's side under the thick wool of her coat. They're coiled like lovers but dressed like winos, grasping in a world so withdrawn from Jimmy, the hazy aroma is the only bridge in the dark. He whispers against her ear, she against his neck.
"I just.... Buddy's so sweet and and--" Wet lips quiver on flesh.
He shifts beneath her, hands retreating back into the dark, tapping the shadows encircling their cot. "Jesus, Rach... You'd rather he know the truth? You know these **** suckers want us dead, Rachel. They killed Scott and... For God's sake, that guy Croft brutalized you like something out of a Polanski film! If 'rogue billionaire' Carrington hadn't showed, they'd have roasted you like a turkey by now and be eating cranberry sauce out of your cu--"
She reels up like a viper, eyes fire. Her palm leaves his cheek ruddy. "You're a real piece of ****, Dylan!" From her periphery, the cherry still glows on Jimmy's roach. Her eyes snap after, her voice dropping to a hiss. "I'm sick of telling lies. I'm sick of people dying for me." On her feet, she snatches the pack of Camels he'd been fumbling for. She lights her own, stuffs the rest in her pocket, snarls back. "I'm serious. **** yourself." And the shadows swallow her.
Dylan's fingers reach under the mattress, closing tight over steel. Lightless, he trains the pistol on the sound of her footsteps, stalking her body in his blind sights until the pale door to the outside opens, then closes behind her.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
--------
"---just feels like we walked right into David Cronenberg's first reality show."
Shelly and Buddy cross the school's campus, leaning together against the wind and the snow. They are saddled with cafeteria goods.
"Anyway, I'd say it's more like Shamblers from Shoggoth."
Her nose scrunches, brow an arc. "That's more Lovecroft?"
"Lovecraft"
"Whatever. All scary interstellar monsters aside---and I mean it, all scary intersteller monsters aside for real, I don't want to be talking about that---it's still weird. I mean, we have Ms. Scream Queen who's apparently decided she wants to trade places with the movie monster. And then, surprise! Here's Samuel Carrington for sweeps! And we all know he's evil, because he's an old white media tycoon --- except --- no way! He's
friends with Dylan Che Guevara. Didn't Carrington make that really pandering green power cartoon?"
"You mean Admiral Ecoman and the Gaia Guardians."
"You are just a wealth of nerd knowledge, aren't you, Bud?"
"I know comic books too."
"Yeah, well. We're just damn lucky to have you on our side. Imagine the possibilities for evil--"
"I paint little inch high figurines of wizards and ogres too."
She gives a chapped smile. "It's endearing, really. Nothing's more charming than a guy who's dining room table sports the Battle of Middle-Earth. But there's too much of a charmingly inoffensive thing."
"So what you're saying is..."
"I'm saying I don't want to hear about Doctor Who or Battlestar Galactica or.... I want to talk about something normal."
So they walk in silence.
"Dylan scares the **** out of me." Finally.
"Look, I've worked with the guy for a little while, and he's intense, but that's just how he is. Passionate ecological poet and everything that entails..." Buddy's gloved hand rubs at the back of his neck, his eyes sidelonging to catch hers briefly, and the diplomacy cracks, the grin goes sheepish. "Yeah. He scares me too."
"He tells us all these horror stories about these monsters and Doomsday and all that ****, and how we're the only ones left to take care of it, but he doesn't really have us doing anything. 'Fortify our position' or whatever, but we don't take any sort of action to take care of this thing or even escape from this place. It's like he's waiting for something, but what the hell could he be waiting for?"
"The end of the world?"
"JAMES!"
Her bundle hits the snow, and before Buddy even registers, she's flinging into her brother's arms. His skull shifts like a rotten melon, the frayed slashes along his arms making gloves of his forearms - stripped to a vest, no worries of the cold anymore, every weekend's a Weekend at Bernie's - but for this moment it doesn't matter. That grin is his. Dopey like a sheep dog and, all due respects to the dead, socially imbecilic. L7.
"How are you---?"
"---please shut up and listen to me for once---"
"Freeze!" as in one fluid motion, Buddy flicks the gun from free the rear of his belt - real cool. straight gangster. He is Guy Ritchie's wet dream - and promptly sends it fumbling through the air. It hits snow.
"Shel. We were raised to be spectators. For Its rise."
"We?" Buddy, reconsidering his blind grasp for the weapon. He should just grab the girl and---
"---Eighth Spoke, they call themselves. New New Left funded on the wealth of their forebearers. Say we're just the hub on a greater wheel. Turning, turning, and when that last spoke turns the finish line, marked with a playing card maybe... eco-terrorist cultists. The symbolism, it's everywhere. Televised. What do you think Carr--"
"---DEAD BLACK ZOMBIE!" screams Shelly. Abraham grins white over James' shoulder.
"Holy ****, Shel. I'd be more worried about the corpse you're--" Mid-sentence Buddy knows, it's worthless. He lunges
"--cool. He's my bodyguard."
Flesh hits flesh, bone hits bone, frame hits frame. A crack shatters the sky, and they tumble. James stumbles and is gone from Buddy's Vertigo Vision. Twice more the sky crackles and Shelly's frame wracks the packed snow. Buddy atop Shelly, blue from bruise and cold, snow-water soaking already through her thick layers, and that gun of Buddy's a useless hunk of flesh feet away. It's over. The first shot was Rachel's, hit James somewhere inconsequential, because he's gone. And the second two, the revolver crack. This was Carrington, a Sam Eliot swagger as he steps to examine his mark - two entrance wounds where Abraham's eyes were.
The pistol trembles in Rachel's hand, cigarette bouncing obliviously where it's clung to her dry lip. "The **** do we do with that?"
"That, we dissect." Dylan's eyes gleam hyena yellow from the doorway.
NEXT UP: DOUBLEHEX!
Have fun, buddy.
