FIFTEEN

1977. New York City, New York. Carey.

“Oh, God,” the woman moaned. She writhed against her chair like an angry snake. “He’s close. Gus, baby, I can feel you.”

“This is some fucked-up shit right here,” Matt said. “I don’t know whether to stuff a dollar in her panties or run.”

“Let’s just go, okay?” Thing 1 was blinking hard. Trying to fight off the buzz she’d been nursing all day.

“Yes. I also say we should go. We should not stay, but go,” Wash said.

“This is bollocks, though, isn’t it?” Jezza was leaning into the kitchen and jabbing his scabby fingers at us. “You all know Scuffed Flannel. We been together for bloody weeks now! That’s practically married!”

“Oh, yeah? If you know her so well, where is she? Why didn’t she come in with us?” Thing 2 asked.

“Well, I don’t—” Jezza started, but I cut him off.

“What’s her goddamned name!?” I hollered. “How many fucking times do we need to do this?!”

He opened and closed his mouth a few times. A landed fish, looking around and wondering where all the water went.

“Wash, you grab one of her arms,” I said, gesturing to the faceless, giggling woman practically dry-humping our fridge. “I’ll grab the other. We’ll walk her out of here nice and calm. It’s dark enough now, nobody will see us. And if they do, we just tell anybody who asks she’s drunk. But I don’t think anyone is gonna ask. It’s like they don’t see her. We’ll head up to Jezza’s mom’s place and—”

“Like hell!” Jezza protested, but I could see even he was relieved at the prospect of leaving.

“You run ahead and find a pay phone,” I said to Jezza. “Tell your mom we’re having a slumber party or something.”

“A slumber p—? What the hell are you on about?”

“I love you, man. So don’t take this wrong, but your mom’s an idiot. You’re an idiot. Your whole family is idiots. When Randall OD’d last year and we had to crash at your place, we told her he had the flu. She made him fucking Rice Krispies squares. I don’t give a shit what you tell her, just let her know we’re coming.”

Jezza threw his hands up dramatically, but he didn’t argue.

“Matt.” I snapped my fingers in front of Matt’s hypnotized gaze. “Matt! Stop watching that girl pleasure our appliances and focus! You and Safety Pins have the most important jobs, so I need you to pay attention. Are you here with me?”

“Yeah,” Safety Pins said, biting her lip in concentration. “What do you need us to do?”

“I need you to carry the beer.”

Safety Pins looked a little offended, but Matt recognized the seriousness of his task.

“Thing 2, you run interference in front. Let us know if there are cops or something.”

She nodded at me and started heading for the door.

“All right, let’s go. Up.” Wash grabbed one of the gyrating woman’s arms, and I took the other. She licked me from wrist to elbow, then snapped at my ear with her teeth.

Between the two of us, we managed to get her up and into the living room. Thing 2 yanked the door open for us. She was still focused on the girl. She didn’t understand why we froze. She tilted her head a little when Wash’s eyes went wide. She started to protest when we lost our grip on the girl, who jogged happily toward the open door. It took Thing 2 a few seconds to get the message.

To turn and look into the hallway.

A skinny guy with track-marked arms and cultivated stubble slouched out there. He had long blond hair, high cheekbones, and sunken eyes. He looked like Iggy Pop, and he looked like he knew he looked like Iggy Pop. Like he’d been practicing for years just so he could look as much like Iggy as humanly possible while standing in this particular hallway at this specific time. He smiled at the woman when she leapt into his arms, grinding and pulsing against him. He laughed and motioned her aside, and she dutifully stepped behind one of the massive, oozing black piles that flanked him on either side.

Thing 2 tried to scream, but the tar man was already reaching for her. It was forcing its hand into her open mouth and right down her throat. She started thrashing. Her eyes rolled up into the back of her head. Smoke curled up from between her bubbling lips.

Wash leapt for her, but I grabbed his arm and shoved him backward over the couch. The other tar man was already stooping down to step through the open doorway. Wash would’ve barreled right into it. You don’t get to fight those things. You can’t will your way through the pain when they get a hold of you. My neck still screamed at the slightest breeze, If that had happened inside my throat…? No. Thing 2 was gone.

“Window!” I yelled, and Matt and Safety Pins went scrambling for it. Jezza was already on the other side, rattling down the stairs of the fire escape.

He may be a drunk, a poser, and a coward, but you cannot fault that boy’s survival instincts.

Thing 1 wasn’t moving. She just stood and stared from the kitchen, trying to process. I moved to grab for her, but Wash had gotten to his feet and looked like he might go for Thing 2 again. I lowered a shoulder and charged. I caught him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and pushing us both toward the open window.

“Grab him!” I said.

Matt reached an arm in, looped it around Wash’s waist, and dragged him through the open window. I turned back to find Thing 1. She was frozen, making a broken little humming sound. She was watching Thing 2’s face split open and run down the tar man’s forearm. She was so transfixed, she didn’t even see the other one. The one that was almost on her. I looked around for something to throw, and found nothing.

Stupid. Panic makes you stupid.

I reached into my pocket, snapped my Zippo to life, and whipped it underhand across the room. It went end over end. I could see it, magnified, like it was right in front of me. That tiny flame, flickering in and out of life: It took up my whole world. With each flip it would gutter out, then flare back to life. It was six inches from the tar man’s chest and burning strong, when a set of long bony fingers plucked it out of the air.

The Iggy Pop–looking motherfucker caught the lighter, snapped it shut, and pocketed it in one fluid motion. He smiled at me and snaked one skinny arm around Thing 1’s shoulders. She was a statue. Still keening and staring at the rapidly widening crimson puddle where her best friend used to be.

“You’re Carey, right?” the skinny guy said to me in a voice like broken bottles. “Been hearing a lot about you.”

“You Gus?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, just gestured at his own body like Take it all in.

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” I told him.

I wished I had something more clever, or at least more convincing, but hell—you try being six beers deep while you watch your friend get melted. Doesn’t do any favors for your wit.

Gus laughed, low and braying, with a touch of a wheeze at the end. Iggy laughed just like that. I talked to him at Max’s once after a show. I mean, he laughed exactly like that: It was a pitch-perfect reproduction. Could have been a recording. Gus snapped the laugh off clean. He straightened up, losing the junkie slouch, and instantly lost every ounce of sleazy charm. His eyes went wide and unblinking. His neck jerked painfully at an inhuman angle.

“I do not think you can do that,” Gus said, and his voice was still water. Deep and flat and unfathomable. “It will be interesting to watch you try.”

He gestured and one of the tar men stepped forward. The brass gears in its face clicked together and whirred. That nauseating, balance-shattering whine started building. I dove backward through the open window. I hit my head on the iron railing of the fire escape and went somersaulting painfully down the steep, sharp stairs. I crashed into the landing and my vision swam. I fought it back. I could hear the noise growing, even from here. I didn’t have time to take the ladder the rest of the way down to the ground, but we were only on the second floor and I’d fallen half that already. I vaulted over the railing without looking.

I landed sideways across Jezza’s shoulders. He started to call me an asshole, paused, began correcting it to “arsehole,” and then just gave up entirely. He was looking at me with searching desperation. So was Safety Pins. So was everybody.

They stood quietly for a moment. The only sound was the distant but building metallic whir.

“Well, fucking run!” I told them.

They scattered like kids who’d just hit a baseball through a window. Safety Pins and Matt hauled ass up the street, toward the corner store. Toward people.

Smart.

Jezza and a still-in-shock Wash hobbled the other way, toward the alley. Toward the filthy, darkened alleyway.

Less smart.

I thought for a second and decided on the alley. If Daisy was still there—if nobody had stolen her or thrown her away since I last stashed her—we might need her. I sprinted down the block and ducked around the corner, hoping to get out of sight before Gus got to the window.

I was too hopped-up on adrenaline to feel it, but I knew I was in a bad way. I’d likely have some wicked bruises. Probably busted a rib. I wheezed painfully, but tried to keep it quiet. Like Gus could hear me from a second-story window a block away.

Shit, I don’t know—why couldn’t he?

I nearly pissed myself when a raspy voice in the darkness said: “Only six.”

“Bloody hell!” Jezza yelped.

“Only six now,” Sammy Six repeated loudly. “You can count them one two three four five six, it always lands on six.”

“Sammy!” I grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Six standing, six angels, six steps. Carey, you’re not the six. I’m not the six. We’re not the six! Sixty sixty six! You can’t choose your friends. Choose me. Please choose me. Somebody’s gotta choose the old guy—”

I shook him but it just seemed to rattle him more. He grew louder. Frantic.

“It’s all there! It’s a codebook! Watch the sixes: Ezekiel 16:6—‘And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, live.’”

“Sammy, listen man.” I let him go and held my hands up in front of his face so he could see I wouldn’t shake him anymore. “Some serious shit is going down. Just hold it together for a minute, just be quiet—just for a minute—and I will give you all the money I have in the world.”

He looked at me skeptically, whispering multiples of six to himself.

“Here”—I held my wallet out to him—“this is everything I got on this planet. Take it. I got a feeling I won’t be needing it much longer, anyway, and you can maybe get a roof over your head or something. All you have to do is leave, okay? Just take it and go. Get out of here. Now.”

“No.” He slapped at his head. “Made a mistake. I took too much away. I forgot too much. There’s a reason why not. “

“There’s no reason why not, Sammy. You can take it. It’s fine. Please, for the love of jumping Christ, take the wallet and get the fuck away from us so I don’t have to knock you out.”

Sammy took the wallet like it was communion. He was equal parts reverent and dubious. He wasn’t used to lucky breaks and he didn’t understand charity like this. He had no way to process his good fortune. He looked inside.

“All you got in the world is twenty bucks?” he said, already wandering off.

“Bollocks!” Jezza’s eyes were rolling around in his head like loose marbles.

“They have killed her,” Wash said, then looked to me. “Is that right?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I don’t think Thing 2 made it through that.”

“So we should kill them,” Wash said, then looked to me again. “Is that right?”

“Bloody bally bollocks!” Jezza slapped at Wash’s arm. “Bollocks to that, to them, and to you! B-boll-b … bullshit! Fuck this!”

Jezza’s faux accent dropped away. He seemed smaller without it.

“We don’t even know what those things were! How could we possibly hurt something like that?”

“They were tar men,” Wash answered.

“And tar will burn,” I supplied. “Why do you think I bought everybody those lighters?”

I put a hand on Jezza’s bony shoulder. He was five and a half feet on a good day, a hundred pounds on a bad one. He was shivering and wild-eyed and sweating.

“No way. I’m done,” he said. “I just want to go to shows and fuck girls and maybe throw a beer can at a cop car if shit gets crazy. How the hell did this happen? How is this insanity on us?”

“It wasn’t,” I said, “but now it is. You saw it, Jezza. They killed Thing 2. They took Thing 1. They know our names and where we live. They’re fucking targeting us!”

“But why?!” Jezza screeched. I closed the distance between us quickly and clamped a hand over his mouth.

“Quiet. I don’t know if they can hear us or if they’re even still after us, but keep it down until we get mobile.”

“Why?” Jezza asked again, softer. “Why us? We’re fucking nobody. We’re nothing. We’re the pieces of shit that pieces of shit shit out.”

“That is probably why,” Wash mused. “Vanessa—Thing 2—she ran away from her home last fall. She crashes at the place of whatever guy she is with at the time. I don’t even know her last name. How am I going to file a police report about this? Who even knows she was here?”

Me and Jezza stared at Wash like he’d just grown wings.

“What?” he asked.

“The fuck did that insight come from, buddy?”

“It makes sense, is all,” Wash said.

I gave him a skeptical glare and went back to rummaging through the trash cans as quietly as possible. I had stowed Daisy here a while back. It was always an adventure, going to find her: I never knew if this was the time she’d be gone. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a big deal: I didn’t pay a dime for the motorcycle in the first place. I found it knocked over beside a Dumpster in Queens while looking for a place to crash after some shitty house show. I used her seat for a pillow to sleep it off for a few hours. When I woke up, I pulled the little lever on her left handlebar and coasted her downhill for about a mile. It was four in the morning, and only a handful of cars were on the street. After the road leveled out, I pushed her for a bit, thinking I could sell her for scrap or something, but I was tired and still hungover-drunk, so I laid her in a drainage ditch and walked home. Two weeks later I was back in the neighborhood trying to score pot, and I checked in on her, just out of curiosity. She was still there. I couldn’t feel my legs anyway, so I pushed her back to my friend Boxer’s place. He was always fucking with old cars and shit. I gave him the rest of my bag to get her running again. Only took him a few hours. He gave me a crash course in how to work her, which turned out more literal than he probably intended. I rode the bike all the way home at ten miles an hour, my rashed-up legs held out to the sides like training wheels.

I never knew when I’d need Daisy, and I didn’t want to get too attached, so I just hid her as best I could when I was done, and left the keys in the ignition. If somebody took her, well, they probably needed her. Just like I did once. But nobody ever took her. She wasn’t much, and I didn’t know fuck-all about riding her, but nobody else seemed to want Daisy. So I guess she was mine.

And every once in a while, like right now—peeking out from behind a busted mattress frame, her handlebars draped in old noodles, smelling like somebody peed on her wheels—she was the most beautiful fucking thing in the world.

I wrestled her out from her hidey-hole and wheeled her to the end of the alleyway, where Wash stood staring at his feet, and Jezza shivered into his own crossed arms.

“What the fuck is that?” Jezza asked.

“This is Daisy,” I answered, “and I’ll thank you not to speak to a lady like that.”

“She smells of urine and chow mein,” Wash said.

“Most of my ladies do.” I grinned.

Jezza laughed a little. His death grip on his own elbows loosened.

“What are you gonna do, chase them down?”

“Shit, of course not.”

Jezza looked relieved.

“We’re going to chase them down,” I finished.

He gaped like a dirt farmer at a carnival.

Wash nodded once and wordlessly mounted up behind me. He patted the extremely small patch of seat remaining to his rear. Jezza shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

“Jezza.” I looked at him levelly and tried to keep my voice as somber and even as possible. “Scuffed Flannel came around with you first. In a way, you brought them to us. You owe for that. She never tried to take you, so I guess she was just here to keep tabs on us. But then there was the brunette at the bus stop. She was trying to take you. That means they obviously know who you are, and they want you. Do you think they’re going to just leave you alone now? Ask yourself: Where are you gonna go? Who’s going to help you? What are you gonna do?”

Jezza’s face grew darker with every question.

“Doesn’t look like you have answers to those questions,” I continued, “so try this one: What would Johnny Rotten do?”

He laughed at first, then thought about it. He shrugged, shook the cold out of his shoulders, and straightened up.

“Shite,” he said, the accent finally returning in all its ridiculous glory. “What’s the bloody holdup, then?”

He threw a leg over the seat and tucked in behind Wash. I kicked the bike over once, twice, three times, four.

“Uh…” Jezza said uncertainly, “you’re kind of ruining the moment here, mate.”

Five. Six. Come on, baby, god damn it.

“There’s a red button with an x here,” Wash supplied, pointing to the handlebar. “Do you want me to push it?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” I replied. “I don’t think this has a self-destruct.”

He pushed it. I kicked again, and Daisy blared into life like an angry drunk getting splashed with cold water.

I eased us out into the street. The bike jumped with every gear shift, wobbled with every turn, and nearly stalled every time I tried to brake, but eventually I got us the half block back to our apartment building. Wash had his arms wrapped tightly about my midsection. Jezza had his encircled all the way around Wash and was grabbing onto my shoulders. His fingernails were digging into my flesh through my jacket.

When we rounded the corner, Gus was standing in the middle of the street with an impatient smirk, his low-slung jeans cocked perversely on his hips. He lifted a single bony finger and curled it. Then he laughed that Iggy rasp and hopped into the back of a nondescript white van. I got a look inside, just before he slammed the doors shut. Thing 1 was kneeling on the floor, one side of her face swollen and red. A girl it took me a while to recognize as Scuffed Flannel was whispering something vicious at her from the bench seat. Thing 1 flinched with every syllable.

I squeezed the lever and twisted the grippy thing, but I must have done it in the wrong order, because Daisy just lurched and stalled. The van was moving now, easing away.

“Carey, get a move on!” Jezza said.

“We should try to catch that van,” Wash reiterated.

A few kicks and the bike spasmed into life again. With much twisting and lever pulling, I got her moving. The van took a wild, swaying right turn up ahead, nearly clipping a fire hydrant. I urged Daisy on, but her load must have been too heavy. I could feel the bottom of the seat scraping against the rear wheel with every bump. I pushed the foot lever on the left, and she got louder, which I assumed would mean faster, so I pushed on the one on the right, but she began to slow.

I tried to remember what Boxer taught me about riding that first day, but I had tuned out as soon as he got to “Twist this grip and ease this lever out to go. Pull this lever in to stop.” I pretty much only used Daisy to get home when I was too drunk to walk very far. I never got her much above a casual jogging speed. Why would I need to?

But now I was a swearing flurry of feet and hands, trying to coax any amount of power out of the neglected little motorcycle. And then trying to get all that power right back out of her because we were going into this turn way too fast.

Upward of twenty miles per hour.

I got this awful feeling we were going to hit that fire hydrant. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I tried to point the bars away, but the more evasive maneuvers I took, the more inevitably we careened in that direction.

“We are heading for that fire hydrant,” Wash observed.

“I fucking know!” I snapped, wrestling with the bars.

I held the brake in, and we slammed to a stop inches from the sidewalk. Wash’s nose collided painfully with the back of my skull. I turned the wheel and gave Daisy some throttle, but it was no use: We were too close to the curb and too heavy to get over it. I tried to push us back, but we were pointed slightly downhill and I couldn’t get any leverage.

“Get off!” I yelled.

“What the bloody hell?”

“We’re not there yet,” Wash said. “We still have to chase them.”

“I know! There’s no reverse. You have to get off so I can turn the bike around. Hurry the hell up; they’re getting away!”

I heard Jezza eat shit while trying to dismount, but Wash managed it a bit more gracefully. I heaved back on the bars with all my strength and got the bike moving for a few inches, but then the worn soles of my Chucks slipped on the pavement and I fell over sideways.

Daisy went down right on top of me.

Jezza had the audacity to laugh.

“Help, you cunt!”

“Bloody hell, Carey.” Jezza grabbed the seat and tried to hoist Daisy up. “This is the worst motorcycle chase in history.”

“There is no way we are catching up to them now,” Wash snapped.

The bulk of the bike’s weight was off me, so I scuttled out from under it and went about helping Jezza get her upright again. We heard a mechanical whine from the next block up and stared numbly as the white van reversed into the street. The rear doors opened and Gus poked his head out.

“What’s the holdup, man? Are you guys coming or what?”

Jezza held up a backward peace sign and spat on the street.

“Fuck you!” I screamed. “You try driving this piece of shit! It’s like riding a goddamned sausage!”

Gus laughed and slammed the doors. The van idled impatiently a few hundred feet away. Wash started running for it, but it pulled away when he got close.

“It’s just waiting there,” he hollered, “down the next block.”

I hefted, shoved, and wiggled Daisy straight again, then motioned for Jezza to hop on behind me. A few kicks to get her going and we wobbled up to Wash. He threw a leg over the back, grabbed onto Jezza, and we were moving. I had to come to a near-full stop at every corner, putting both feet down and waddling the bike into the turns, but it didn’t seem to matter. The van politely waited for us at every intersection.

We weren’t chasing them down. They were leading us like a big white duck guiding her clumsy, angry ducklings.