“How do you like being dead?”
“I was going to ask you that question.”
“Bit of a reversal for you, Mr. Null?”
“I can’t say it was unexpected, since I expect exactly nothing.”
“Then nothing I do is going to disappoint you.”
“I am never disappointed.”
“Want some light?”
“I really don’t care.”
“Light then.”
The space burst into view.
It was a sparse, gray concrete basement it the bottom of a building somewhere in greater Boston; ancient but sandblasted clean. Null couldn’t see who was talking to him—the light in his eyes was blinding. He didn’t squint, but all he could see was a hot, yellow, distorted star.
“Better now?” A self-satisfied voice—high, thin and reedy.
“Compared to what? I can’t see you and I can’t make out much about this room with the light in my eyes.”
“That’s a shame. Too bad. I like it that way, so we’ll keep it that way.”
“I have no choice since I can’t make out where I am, and you have me strapped down.”
“I heard it wasn’t a good idea to leave too much to chance with you.”
“You heard right.”
“Want to know why you’re not dead?”
“I thought I was dead already.”
“For a dead man, you’re droll in your own way, aren’t you, Mr. Null?”
“I’m not really known for my sense of humor.”
“Funny, yet true!” The voice was almost gleeful.
“I only do one thing—just one thing.” Cool, unexcited, breathing easily despite open cuts on his scarred face, bruises, contusions—a deep purple hematoma on his left ribcage.
“Perhaps I can teach you some new tricks?”
“I don’t think so. My one trick will do. It’s all I need, if I ever needed anything at all.”
“You don’t sound like any of this bothers you at all.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“If you don’t mind.”
“You should get to the point whether I mind or not—either kill me or let me go. Otherwise, this is a waste of your time and mine.”
“Since you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter, does it? I can use my time anyway I like.”
“You can. So what?”
“So this, Mr. Null!”
There was a period of silence interrupted solely by the sound of a rattling from Null’s throat followed by gurgling. Labored breathing soon replaced that.
“How was that, Mr. Null?” The high, reedy, smug voice echoed.
Null spat. “How was what?”
“You’re joking.”
“I really don’t know what’s funny or not anymore. I have to depend on others for that. You found it funny?
“You’re a problem, Mr. Null, not a solution.”
“That’s my starting position, Mr.—you have me at a disadvantage.”
“I don’t understand it. I was sure it was just a myth.”
“People tell stories for amusement. They exaggerate the fine details.”
“Amusement. I like that.”
In response, Null started coughing, and heaving, bucking up in place from the board onto which he was strapped down spread eagled by leather and steel. His chest was bare and electric lead wires coiled out from nearly every region of his body and his pantlegs. He involuntarily arched his back up hard, so that his ribcage shone, sweaty and defined. Foam gathered from his mouth and dolloped down to the floor. A network of purple, red and purple scars swelled in high relief in the extreme lighting.
When his eyes were finally able to focus, Null saw a tall man dressed in black shirt and khakis with a paunch and a slack jaw, middle-aged with jet black hair obviously dyed, adjusting horn-rimmed glasses. The man stood before Null, eying him critically.
He ran a finger over Null’s chest.
“Looks pretty much like you’ve been tortured before. Quite a bit, it seems. Doesn’t really seem to have done any good, does it?”
Null was still panting but was otherwise calm and unfazed. “No, I suppose it didn’t.”
“Funny to the end.”
“I always seem to be the last one to get the joke.”
“I suppose if I took another finger, maybe took your testicles, hamstrung your other leg, stuck a drill in parts of you, it wouldn’t really much matter, would it?”
“You’re welcome to try, but I doubt it would do either of us any good.”
“I can see that. You took quite a bit of voltage, but it doesn’t seem to have bothered you even a little bit.”
“Not that I noticed.”
“If I gave you more, it would’ve stopped your heart and that would be that.”
“Why didn’t you? Obviously, you’re going to kill me.”
“Obviously.”
“It’s a good thing I don’t get bored.”
“Don’t you want to know why?”
“I know why. By the way, I never got your name.”
“And you’ll never get it. They call me “The Expert.” That’s all you need to know.”
“Well, so-called Expert, you failed completely.”
The man threw up his hands and yelled, “I know it! It’s so obvious and it’s a god damned tragedy!”
“It can’t be the first time.”
“It might as well be.”
“Whatever you say. You might as well go ahead and kill me now.”
“Fuck! I can’t do that now! Not yet.”
“A dilemma, isn’t it?”
“You think you’re fucking smart, don’t you?”
“I don’t have to think it.”
The Expert sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of him, holding his chin in his hand. His face was drawn, and his glasses were crooked.
“Mr. Null, a lot of people want you dead.”
“You’re obviously a people pleaser, So go ahead and kill me then.” Spoken in a monotone, zero ironic inflection.
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I do. I think that might actually be funny, but I don’t really have enough of a sense of humor to produce a laugh.”
“You may not be smart, but you have a smart mouth.”
“You’re the Expert—you ought to know.”
“You’ve cost some powerful people a great deal of money, not to mention putting their livelihood in jeopardy. They got your cute little messages, and they took them to heart.”
“I thought I killed them all.”
The Expert glared at him, his pallid cheeks reddening. “You’ll never kill them all.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“You’re not listening, Mr. Null. A consortium of investors—the principals, if you want to call them that—paid me a shitload of money to take care of you.”
“Do you ever get to the point?”
The Expert popped up abruptly from the dusty concrete floor and slapped Null across the face open handed. Null retained a stone-faced blankness to his expression.
“You’re an annoying fuck, do you know that?”
“Perhaps that’s why I don’t have many friends.”
The Expert took a deep breath, gathering his patience. “We’re being recorded. This whole thing is going to get streamed to the entire consortium of Hebe Group, and I’m not showing them what they need to see.”
“Can I guess what this is?”
“Just shut the fuck up!” the Expert shouted shrilly. “The need to see you die in agony—you have to be tortured up pretty, be presented in agony beyond description. They want you begging for death, which I would deny you as I continued to inflict more pain. Finally, after I convince you that I’ll let you live and your torment is at an end, I blow your face off with my Magnum—one careful round should do the job.” The Expert paused and swallowed hard so that his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “That’s not going to happen, is it?”
“Not a chance.”
“You wouldn’t just play along with me, would you? Fake it for me.”
“What do you think?”
The Expert began to pace, massaging his chin with his hand as he did. “If I used your machete to chop you up into pieces, body part by body part—no anesthetic of course—you wouldn’t break a sweat, would you?”
“They still owe you the money, don’t they? You just got a taste up front, but the balance has yet to be remitted, hasn’t it? You need the confirmation of torture and my corpse to seal the deal, and you just can’t provide it.”
“I could kill you and fake it.”
“Lots of time and trouble with no guarantee of a result.”
“I should just kill you for pleasure.”
“Sure. Except that we both know the pleasure that you get is from the money at the end, not the killing itself.”
The Expert kicked his boot toe at the dust on the concrete basement floor. “God damn it!” he cried in near falsetto. “I’m going to get fucked this time.” He then spoke sotto voce as if only addressing himself: “This has never happened before—this just never happens. How am I going to get my fucking money?”
“Okay, Expert, where do we go from here? You going to keep me here all day, kill me or what? Because this conversation seems nothing more than another one of your failed attempts at torture.”
The Expert made a face and ignored that question. “So, it’s true what they say on the street. You don’t care about anything. Nothing and no one. I can’t even go after someone you love or care about because you love and care about no one and nothing. Maybe you care something about the little kiddies, but there’s really no opening for me there either. Hebe Group is already torturing and killing them.”
Null’s breathing became more labored and his eyes narrowed at that remark, but the expert didn’t notice.
“And physical pain just doesn’t hack it at all. You’ve been tortured so much you don’t even feel it or if you do, you do a brilliant job of hiding it. You didn’t even piss or shit yourself the two times I nearly electrocuted you. The other times you literally slept through it. I don’t know how you did that, and I’m deadly smart.”
“So where do we go from here, Mr. Expert?”
The Expert adopted a thoughtful expression, gazed upwards. “It seems killing you won’t get me to my financial goal. This is true because you still have value. Perhaps the niggers in your little gang, the Gangsta Boyz, will pay heavy to have their leader returned to them intact?”
“You have a better chance asking them to help you kill me. Maybe they’ll pay you something for that. It won’t be much, though. Stingy bastards.”
“No honor among thieves?”
“What’s honor got to do with anything?”
“Okay, so you’re pretty adept at killing. You have a high body count to your credit and no legal prosecutions pending.” He clasped a hand on Null’s shoulder. “You could come work for me. Between the two of us, we could clean up. Who cares about the petty fucking job?”
“Do you really think I need the money?”
“That’s another valid point. You don’t. That meth business you’ve got going is putting you knee deep in the cheddar, isn’t it? Not too hard to manage either, since it allows you plenty of time to go off on the little escapades that brought you here.”
“I’m not complaining.”
Steely-eyed with a saturnine expression on his face, the Expert spoke as if delivering a body blow. “I want half.”
“You might as well kill me and take it all, if you can.”
“But you know I can’t without your help. You die and it all falls apart. I don’t see the Gangsta Boyz working for me.”
“I don’t see that either.”
The expert leveled a hard punch directly into Null’s abdomen, which produced a quick jag of coughing and gagging and then nothing at all.
“What am I going to do with you, Zombie fuck? You’re not even worth anything dead.”
“Let me loose, and I’ll solve all your problems.”
“Yeah, I just bet you would.”
“I only do one thing, Expert, just one thing.”
“I’ve heard that about you, Mr. Null. Just one thing. Well, you’re not doing it now, but you can be sure it’ll be done to you later.”
“So what if it is?”
“You don’t care?”
“Dead is dead.”
“Yeah, you took about two hundred volts. Twice. You should be dead, or at least fucked up.”
Null stared at him, eyes as dead and empty as those of a shark.
“Okay, so you’re fucked up. But you don’t seem much more fucked up than you were when me and my friends first zapped you back at the playhouse. Even then, you went down hard. Took a few knocks on the head and a pentothal shot in the neck to get you to be all compliant.”
“I don’t remember getting here, and I don’t know where here is.”
The Expert chuckled. “You’re a piece of work, Mr. Null. You know you’re going to die, but you want to focus on all the niceties. It’s hard to believe you caused these Hebe people so much grief.”
“They’re almost gone, Expert. I took out some key personnel, from the top down.”
“You forgot sideways, because that’s where it’s all going. Who do you think was going to pay me for this shit job you just fucked up for me?”
“I assumed it was Hebe’s head muscle, Legere.”
“I’ve heard the name. Never met the gentleman. Maybe he knows about our little soiree here today, maybe he doesn’t. Anyway, they farmed it out to me—wanted you done extra-sick, which is entirely my jam. I just have to figure a way to do it.”
“Just like life, even the dead can surprise you.”
The Expert smiled and shook his head, produced a shiny new switchblade from his pocket, popped the blade and waved it before Null, who didn’t even blink. “It relaxes me to do a little cutting while I think about ways to totally mess with a subject, Mr. Null. I take it you won’t even scream for me. Yes?”
“I can hum you a tune, if it’ll make you feel any better about it.”
“Brazen to the end. You’re a ballsy fuck, I’ll give you that.”
“Not yours to give or take, Expert. When you’re done with me, someone else will simply take my place. It’s inevitable. I’m the destiny of hatred and abuse—period. By trying to escape me, you just wind up confronted by me. I’m your appointment in Samarra.”
“An old wives’ tale, Mr. Null, and you’re not death.”
“But I’ll do until the real thing comes along.”
“Sure, you will, Mr. Null,” he chortled, grinning. “I guess you’re just going to have to be more fun than profit. At least I can kill you. I’ll get some money out of the deal yet.”
With a failed effort at grace, the Expert sliced an X neatly and deeply into Null’s chest. The blood immediately trickled down. His breathing was calm and even. The sound of it echoed through the basement.
The Expert admired this, shook his head and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times. “Oh, Mr. Null,” he said quietly.
Null’s eyes widened enough so the Expert took notice. “What a surprise,” he said flatly. “You really have to believe me when I tell you how nice it is to see you, Janis.”
The Expert put the knife away, clapped his hands thrice. “Bravo! Really, Mr. Null, isn’t that just a bit cliché? Trying to make me think there’s someone behind me? And when I turn to look, what then? Going to fire bullets at me with your mind? Those restraints are good and tight, pally. You won’t be getting out by distracting me. And I’m not distracted.”
“But I could always distract you,” said Janis, blasé and cheerless, who was, in fact, standing behind him. The Expert spun about, made a bird-like sound at the sight of her and was stopped cold, zooming in on her Pico Lavender Beretta, modified at the barrel to take thirty-two caliber shots. She didn’t cock it. She didn’t have to—one fine squeeze of the trigger and the Expert would be rendered defunct.
“How the fuck—?”
“You replaced me, genius, that’s how the fuck.”
“Nifty little semi-automatic you have there. Cute.” The Expert was bucking himself up, realizing he was trembling and sweating bullets at the brow.
“Cute enough to make your chest a memory and split your head wide open while I’m at it.”
“No need to be surly.”
“Mr. Null,” she said with a sigh, “you do have a knack for getting yourself into some compromising situations, don’t you?”
“And you seem to have a knack for getting me out of them.”
“Someone has to look out for your scrawny ass.”
“Like I said, Expert, even the dead can surprise you.”