Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

six: black sun

YOU CAN tell it’s not a good day when you get coldcocked, and then you regain consciousness and they’re still hitting you.

Two guys had my arms, one on either side of me. I couldn’t see them very well through the blood running down into my eyes, but I was pretty sure it was the two missionaries, because the guy in the black t-shirt currently punching my face was a new player in the game. He was a muscular, bald-headed thug a little shorter than me, with forearms like premium hams. Unlike the other two, he seemed like someone who hit people for money. Instead of just beating my face into hamburger, he was working the body as well, softening up my ribs (well, turning them into the bottom of a snack bag, to be precise) and then going back to the head every now and then just when I started to be able to think straight. He’d already opened cuts above my eyes, judging by all the blood, and my nose cartilage definitely felt bendy and wrong.

He paused when he saw me looking at him.

“Okay. Now we can get down to business.” Bald Thug looked like he might be local muscle. I couldn’t swear to it, but I thought I might even have seen him in Oyster Bill’s once or twice, on the ass-end of a Saturday night. He finished up with one last, solid punch into my breadbasket, doubling me up.

“How’m I . . . s’posed . . . talk?” I grunted, trying not to puke Javanese food all over my shoes.

“Shit, I don’t care whether you talk,” said B-Thug. “Just point. Where is it?”

Man, I was getting fucking tired of that question. I’d gone through a long stretch earlier in the year of being asked that by an animated corpse with a long knife. That had been about the feather. Since Eligor had taken the feather back, I was pretty sure this was about the horn. That worried me almost more than the beating, because there was no way anyone should know already that I was looking for it. So I played dumb. “Where’s what?”

He hit me again, a quick, straight right that split my lip and sent a generous dribble of blood down the front of my shirt. “Don’t bullshit me. Where’s the thing? Some important people want to know—now.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t have it.”

An open-handed shot from his left rocked me back. I couldn’t help wondering where my gun was: I’d dropped it when I first got hit and I couldn’t see it anywhere.

Who were these people, why did they want Eligor’s horn (if I was right about what they were hunting) and why did they think I had it? I was pretty certain they were all human, which meant they might be uninformed enough to think I really was holding out on them, and that was a scary thought. The young guys on either side of me, although hanging on to my arms with grim determination, didn’t look or act like pros, but Bald Thug definitely seemed capable of killing me, or at least killing this particular body. I really hate dying at the best of times, and at the moment I wasn’t absolutely certain that my bosses would give me a new body afterward.

I let myself go slack so that the two guys holding me had to pull harder to keep me upright. While I pretended to a moment’s grogginess—even more believable if they didn’t know I was angel-strong, because their muscle guy had absolutely knocked the crap out of me—I glanced at their positions on either side. As I did, I couldn’t help noticing that one of the missionary boys’ had an unusual tattoo on his wrist. I couldn’t make out the whole thing, but it was enough to catch my attention.

Then, as they set themselves to haul me up straight again, I smashed my foot down on the instep of the guy on my right, then back-kicked the other guy in the shin. Even as they both let go, howling in pain, I lunged forward and rammed my head right into Bald Thug’s gut. I drove him backward, doing my best to knee his face as he fell. I didn’t catch him solid anywhere, but I knocked the breath out of him long enough to throw myself onto the floor. I scrambled to the couch as fast as I could, because I could already hear B-Thug climbing to his feet behind me. If I’d been planning to make a run for it, I wouldn’t have made it. I wasn’t, though. I was just trying to get to my sofa gun.

What, you don’t have a sofa gun? I thought everyone did.

I kept mine under the cushions where they came together in the middle, a place nobody ever sat (mostly because I almost never had any visitors). It was my good old S&W five-shot revolver, a piece I’d semi-retired. It was about as reliable a gun as you can find, excellent for stashing in a couch against a sudden need. I yanked it out, rolled, and there was Bald Thug still a couple of feet away, stock still now and staring at the muzzle that I was pointing between his eyes.

“Down on your knees,” I told him. “Hands behind your head. Yeah, you’ve been here before, haven’t you?” I moved back a little so I could keep all three of them under the gun, but I kept talking to the pro. “I’m not going to punch you just because you punched me, Slappy—I’m not the vengeful type. But if you or either of your buddies move, I’ll immediately blow the whole middle part out of your face and then figure things out from there. Clear?”

Thug nodded, hands still behind his head, so it looked like he was doing yoga or something.

“Good.” I stared at him for a long second or two, then turned to his partners. “Okay, boys, pull up those sleeves. I want to see what’s on your wrists. No, the other wrist, shithead.”

As I suspected, they both had the tattoo, which I could now see in full:

“What the hell does that stand for?” I asked. Neither of them would meet my eye. “I strongly suggest somebody tells me what’s going on and who you three are before I get any more irritated.” Strangely, it wasn’t just the muscular pro who looked like he was going to keep his mouth shut, but both missionaries, too.

I turned to the one on my right. “Hey, I could shoot you in the balls. That might loosen you up a bit, unless you’re extra-brave.” I swiveled the gun to the other missionary. “Or I could shoot you both in the gut, and you could watch each other bleed to death, all the time thinking how much easier it would have been just to answer my questions—especially after you broke into my place and painted a fucking swastika on my wall, then beat the shit out of me.” But I noticed there was nothing on the wall now, as if my hallucination of it running away had been real. “Where did it go, anyway? Did you wipe it off?”

Weirdly, both the younger guys only looked more frightened when I mentioned this. The muscular, bald guy just shook his head. “They’re not going to talk,” he said. “They’re crazy. And you don’t have the stones to get anything out of me.”

I walked to the nearest missionary, the dark-haired one, and put the snout of my.38 up next to his eyeball. He was clearly nervous but held his water pretty well. “Is that true, kid? You’d really take a bullet instead of just having a friendly chat?” He only set his jaw. I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do with them. I couldn’t be sure one of them didn’t have a gun—shit, they probably all had guns—so I didn’t know how long before one of them did something dramatic and the serious shooting began. Not that things would go all that easy even if they were all unarmed.

The dark-haired guy, up close, may not have been the sort of mayhem machine that B-Thug was, but he and his blond partner both looked pretty fit, and they certainly weren’t panicking. They were both clean-shaven and had similar haircuts, trimmed high on the neck and sides, leaving nothing around their ears or the back of their heads but precise stubble. They looked military, but if so they must have been from the Northern Finnish Irregulars or something, because they didn’t have a square inch of tan between them. The pair looked like fanatics—and that was the problem. The more I watched them, the more I got the sense they weren’t going to tell me anything useful until the pain got very intense. After spending a long stretch in Hell, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, even to these deserving shit-stains. But what else could I do? Just shoot them? Yeah, and then have to get rid of three bodies in downtown St. Jude. I could have called the cops, but these guys weren’t ordinary criminals, and I might attract more attention than I wanted if I tried to have them arrested for burglary. Maybe I could have called the Compasses to see if anyone there wanted to help me find out who these guys were, but at the moment I was even less willing to share my private business with my co-workers than with the police. The more I thought about it, the more I could see only one practical solution.

While I still had the gun next to his eye, I quickly pat-searched the dark-haired guy, whom I decided to call “Timon,” and then did the same to his fair-haired partner, “Pumbaa.” To my surprise, neither had a gun or any other weapons to speak of, although one had a can of pepper spray in his pocket. I impounded it, then gestured the two of them toward the front door.

“Go, and just keep going. Get the fuck out of my place. I’m going to have a little chat here with your friend.” I waved the gun toward Bald Thug, who was watching with the cold, calculating eye of an ambush predator. “When I’m done, there won’t be much left of him, so don’t bother hanging around. And if I see either of you again ever, I won’t waste time with another of these informative chats. I’ll just blow your brains out.”

Timon and Pumbaa both looked at me, then at each other. It was obvious what they were thinking.

“Yeah, you could try it,” I told them. “But I promise I’ll blow at least one sucking hole in each of you before you get near me. You may be some kind of fanatics, but no matter what you think, you’re not superheroes. You go anywhere other than out that door, and you’ll be carrying your intestines with you.”

They didn’t turn fast enough for me, so I pepper-sprayed them both lightly in the face and shoved them out the door with my foot as they gagged and gasped. As I turned my attention back to Bald Thug, I heard them stumbling in the hall and then clattering down the stairwell, still choking and cursing.

B-Thug stared at me as the noise of their exit slowly died away. He shook his head. “Big play. But you’re not going to get anything more out of me, so you might as well just shoot.”

“Look, chummy, I let them go because you’re right—they’re obviously crazy. The kind who’d rather be martyrs. But you’re not.” I stepped a little closer, still not getting too near him; I never let my gun waver from the center of his torso. The.38 was loaded with some of my gunsmith friend Orban’s special handloads, good for a close-up weapon with a short barrel. They’d make a mess of him if he tried to jump me. “I’m betting you’re just earning some money. You’re a pro—you’ve got no loyalty to those guys.”

He actually smiled. It was weird to see, since it obviously didn’t mean the same thing as when an ordinary person smiled. “Don’t lecture me. You don’t know shit about me—or about them.” His mouth twisted. “You have no fucking idea who they work for, or what those people can do. They are into some totally sick shit, and it’s all real. I would rather have you shoot me any day than have them come after me for talking out of school.”

At that moment, I heard footsteps in the hallway outside. When the door suddenly swung open I was already turning toward it, certain that the Happiness Twins had nerved themselves to come back and try again.

Sam stood in the open doorway, confusion on his big, familiar face, waving his hand vigorously to fan away the last of the pepper spray.

“Hey, B, my eyes are burning—” was all he had time to say, then Bald Thug swept my legs right out from under me with some kind of kick, dropped me on my ass like it was the first day of karate practice. Then he was up and running. He hit Sam like a fullback on a dive play, and even though my buddy was taller and at least the same weight, he was staggered by the sudden impact and fell back into the hallway. B-Thug was out the door past him and down the hall while Sam was still trying to pull his gun, and although I got up and made the doorway a second or so later, B-Thug was already in the stairwell, so I had to let him go. If I missed him I might wind up putting a bullet into one of my neighbors’ apartments, or even into one of my actual neighbors.

Not that they were going to be my neighbors much longer, I felt pretty sure—some tenant must have called the police by now. Even in this part of Jude, indoor gunshots were unusual. Sorry, Temuel, but it looked like I was about to be driven out of another shitty apartment by work-related mayhem, whether the folk Upstairs liked it or not.

“What the genuine fuck . . . ?” said Sam. He grabbed me and kept me from collapsing. I seemed to be dribbling blood everywhere.

“Oh, yeah.” I paused to listen. Our Bald Thug was not a small man, and I could hear him caroming down the stairs like a two-hundred-fifty pound pachinko ball. “Yeah, you definitely took the words right out of my mouth, Sammy-boy.”

• • •

Sam opened the windows to ease the lingering sting of the pepper spray, then kindly filled a towel with some ice for me. Since I didn’t have a towel big enough to cover all the bruised areas, I concentrated on my face. While I lay on the couch, revolver still in hand in case any of my new friends came back, Sam scavenged the pantry for something non-alcoholic to drink and finally found one of the warm cans of Vernors that I kept around just for him.

When he popped the tab, tiny little bubbles flew out the hole like angry wasps. Sam took a long swig. “Ah,” he said. “The Scotch Bonnet pepper of ginger ales. Nice fit with your new air-freshener.” He pulled up a chair beside the couch and handed me my Belgian-made.45. “Found it on the kitchen floor. Somebody probably kicked it out of the way.”

I gave him a quick rundown on what had just happened, along with the rest of the recent news, including the Spook Train ride I’d been on even before I’d found B-Thug and friends in my apartment, scratchings and spiders and disembodied monkey-paws. “Which reminds me,” I said as I finished. I didn’t want to come off all suspicious with my only real friend, but the timing of his arrival had been strange. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was in town, and since I missed the lunch . . .” He got distracted by the design of the missionaries’ tattoos that I’d scrawled on the back of a Chinese delivery menu so I wouldn’t forget. “This is the ink they had, huh? Never seen it. Looks kind of Eastern—Indian, maybe.”

“Yeah, but they sounded like local junior college students, and they were dressed like the kind of guys who travel in black helicopters.”

“You always meet the most interesting people, B. Then they try to kill you.” Sam frowned at the drawing. “We should look this up online.”

“If I knew what it was called, I would. But since I don’t, I have other ways to get information.” I took a picture of the drawing and emailed it to my friend George, aka Fatback, researcher par excellence. “Shit,” I said, catching a glimpse of the clock. “He won’t even be human for hours.”

“Don’t be a hater. You and I haven’t been human for years.”

“You know what I mean.” My main researcher happens to be a were-hog, which isn’t all that common, whatever some single women may tell you. “While he has pig-brain, he’s not going to be able to do anything.”

“We can wait. What were you planning to do this evening, anyway, sport? Your face looks like ground beef, and from the way you’re breathing you’ve got a couple of cracked ribs, too. I recommend you settle back, hold that ice against the meatloaf on the front of your head, and let me bring in something to eat.” He held up the menu with the tattoo scrawl. “How about Happy Buddha?”

“I just had Asian food,” I said. I felt my jaw and groaned. “But you get what you want. I think it’s going to be nothing but broth for me until at least tomorrow.”

• • •

At about eleven I realized I couldn’t remember a single thing Sam had said in the last half an hour. I needed to crash so badly I couldn’t hold my head up. I told Sam he didn’t have to watch me all night.

“Naw, I’m staying. What if those assholes come back, B?”

“Fine,” I said. “But I’m not moving off this couch because all my bones are broken. You can sleep on my bed.”

He got up to examine the tangle of not-washed-lately sheets. “Never mind. I’ll sleep in my car downstairs.”

“Don’t be such a pussy. Just pull that stuff off and get my sleeping bag out of the closet. Or there’s even some clean sheets and blankets in there, I think.” Actually, I wasn’t too sure of that at all.

“Yeah, I’ll take the sleeping bag. Can’t be any worse than some of the places I’ve slept.” He leaned in through the bedroom doorway and called out, “Don’t take that as a challenge, you weird organisms that live here in Bobby’s filthy room.”

“Fuck you, Sammy.” I sank back into the couch and pulled the blankets up, but I wasn’t ready to relax. I really wanted a drink, but I wasn’t going to ask my teetotal buddy to pour it for me, even though he would have. I got up and staggered across to the cabinet where the vodka bottle was and brought it back to the couch. “Don’t wake me up for anything short of Judgement Day.”

But I didn’t get to sleep anywhere near that long. Sometime between eleven and midnight my phone rang.

“Hi, Mr. Dollar? It’s me, Edie. You said to call. I hope it’s not too late.”

By now my entire skull felt like a flower pot that had been dropped from a third story balcony, so I just said, “No, ’s fine.”

“Okay, that’s good. Doctor Gustibus says he’ll talk to you.”

“Who?” I wasn’t entirely awake.

“Doctor Gustibus? You know, the guy I was working for at Islanders Hall? He says he’ll talk to you if you want. At his house. I’ll give you the directions if you have a pen.”

Sam was snoring contentedly in my room, so I got up and walked my throbbing head around until I found something to write with. “Shoot.”

When Edie had finished and hung up, I stared blearily at the scrap of paper to be sure it made some kind of sense, then I put it in my wallet and slid back into dreams of marching columns of Disney cartoon characters, who each stopped to punch me in the head before goose-stepping past. There were a lot of them.

Man, that was a long night.