CHAPTER TEN

Show, Don’t Tell

 

THE SEPTA BUS stinks like the worst smells of humanity. Body odor and stale urine. Foot odor. Spilled beer. The vinegar tang of goulash. The sour stench of kim chi—Cason knows it’s kim chi because, sure enough, there’s some barefoot Korean guy with a Tupperware container in his lap digging into it with a spoon and shoving fermented cabbage in his mouth with great gooey slurps.

Sitting next to Cason is the man known as Cicatrix—sitting so close that you might almost suggest he was cuddling up, though the gun under the tented newspaper pressed into Cason’s ribs defies that definition.

Cason watches him. The man’s foam-slick tongue wets lips made only of scar tissue. His finger—a crooked twig, puffy with cracked calluses—probes the crater in his head that was once an ear but is now just a hole. He’s trying to figure out how old the man is. Older than him, surely. Late 40s? Early 50s? Older still? The maimed face offers too few clues—all buried beneath criss-crossing furrows of scar tissue. Scar tissue that Cason can now see continues well beyond his face—down his neck, around his arms, each finger laced with a mesh of old slices and gashes.

The man jabs Cason in the ribs with the gun.

“You like staring at me?”

“Not really.”

“I dunno about that. Way you and everybody else on this bus is watching me I half expect some of you to hike down your shorts and start diddling yourselves. Maybe I should put up a website. Charge people for the peep.” All the man’s consonants are hissed and whispered as they come out of his ruined mouth—some are lost entirely, dropped into a dark hole and forever forgotten.

Cason blinks raw, red eyes. Sniffs. His nose is still crusted with mucus—the so-called Cicatrix didn’t give him time to clean up. He just grabbed a newspaper and a crumpled paper bag and used the gun to politely urge Cason onto the bus.

“What the hell was in that canister, anyway?”

“Tiger piss and pickle juice,” the man growls. “Whaddya think it was? Pepper spray. Capsaicin. My own special brew. I used a couple of those ghost chilis—the, ahhh, naga booty whatevers. Stuff’s so potent it’ll eat the chrome off a bumper.” His bloodshot eyes roll around in their lidless sockets and point toward Cason. “Speakawhich, seems like it worked as designed. You look like you shoved your face in a bee-hive. Your face is almost as ugly as mine, and I look like a human garbage fire.”

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck me. Such a nice Kenzo boy.”

So he knows more about me than I do about him. “Where we going, anyway? Heading south, but why? Where? Thought you were going to tell me what’s going on.”

“I said show you. Showing’s always so much better than telling. You rather hear about an elephant butt-fucking a pony, or you rather see it?”

Cason’s twisted face gives him the answer.

“Bad choice, maybe. Point is, I tell you what I tell you, even after all you’ve seen, you probably won’t believe me. But if I show you, you’ll get it lickety-split.” The freak fishes in his pocket, pulls out a plastic bottle of unlabeled eyedrops, pops a few in each eye. “Gotta moisten the old jeepers-creepers, you know.”

“Fine. Whatever. Where we headed? Might as well tell me, because I’ll see when we get there.”

“North of the airport. Eastwick.”

Eastwick’s a shithole. So much of the city is. Run-down houses. Some flooded and damp—that whole area’s on a marshy plain. Then there’s the dump sites: the area’s the closest thing you can get to ‘rural’ living inside the city margins, with tracts of open land here and there. Companies have been using that land to dump trash and chemicals and medical waste. Burying it sometimes; other times, maybe not so much with the burying and more with the ‘leaving it out in the open.’

“And what’s in the bag?”

“You’ll see. Why spoil the fun?”

 

 

THE BUS LEAVES them in a cloud of fumes.

“Walk,” Cicatrix says.

They move to cross an empty parking lot, leaving road traffic behind. They head toward a sidestreet lined with grungy townhomes.

The freak stays behind. Gun still hidden under the newspaper, bag tucked under his armpit. Cason starts to think that he can take him. He has to move fast—no move is faster than a bullet, but that’s not the point. The point is to disarm. Or point the gun elsewhere. He just needs opportunity. But when?

“So. Cicatrix. Quite a name.”

“Not a name. More like a... nom de plume. A CB handle.”

“Got a real name?”

“Steve. Bob. Delbert. John Jacob Jingle-titties.”

Cason shrugs. “I’ll just call you Trixie, then.”

“No, I don’t think you will.”

“Sure thing, Trixie.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“No problem, Trix. Hey, I dated a girl named Trixie once. Had a dog named Trixie, too—cutest little poopsy-doodle poodle.”

“I swear to—you know I have a gun, right?”

“Trixie’s a good gun moll name. I bet you tuck it in your garter belt—”

“Frank!” the freak yells. Spit flecking the back of Cason’s neck. “My name’s Frank, mmkay? Frank Polcyn. Now, I know what you’re thinking, Cason Cole. You’re thinking now’d be a real good time to do some of your fancy ninja fu-fu shit and kick the gun out of my hand or twist my wrist or whatever wily bullshit you got up your sleeves. You do, you’ll never know. You’ll never know why your boss was some kind of freaky seduction magnet. You’ll never know how I unzippered him like a fucking Members Only jacket. You’ll never know why your wife and son turned on you.”

Cason stops. Fingers tightening into fists.

He’s frazzled. He’s waving his hands around like a drowning man.

And he’s right. Now’s a good time for that fancy ninja fu-fu shit.

Frank the freak.

His fists relax.

“I need to know,” he says, voice low and quiet. “You promise to show me?”

“I promise. But first you gotta walk.”

Cason walks.

 

 

THREE BLOCKS UP and one over, they arrive at their destination. It’s a single house with white siding, sandwiched between two sets of brown townhomes—the world’s ugliest ice cream sandwich. The siding on the house is green with striations of mold and mildew. Gutters hang, broken. Latticework under the front porch reveals gleaming eyes: cats or raccoons or possums, Cason doesn’t know.

Broken walkway stones lead to the front steps, which are themselves just cinder blocks with boards laid across them.

The wind shifts and a smell comes from the house. Something wild and gamy. Olfactory memory is strange—Cason knows it reminds him of something, but he’s not sure what. He knows he remembers it, but he can’t put his finger on the memory itself.

“Go up and knock,” Frank says.

“Whose house is this?”

“I said go up and go knock. Unless you want me to knock you on the head with the butt of this .45, pal.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Frank mimics, his voice a nasally, raspy whine. “You want in on this adventure, then you gotta knock to be let in.”

Cason hesitates, but finally walks up on the wobbly two-by-fours across the cinderblocks and steps up to the porch. Beneath the creaking wood, he hears the animals shuffle and skitter. Again that smell hits him: musky, earthy, wild.

It’s then he realizes what it reminds him of.

The primate house. At the zoo.

Sweat and fur and piss and shit. All wrapped up in a blanket of animal musk.

Cason walks up. Sees a mailbox stuffed with mail. Number on the box and a name: ARTHUR MESSING. The mail is piled up and tumbling over the edge. Junk, mostly—coupons and menus and other mailers. Some bills, by the look of it. All cascading from the box to the porch floor like a paper waterfall interrupted.

“Knock.”

Cason sighs. Lifts his hand, raps on the door.

The house shudders with approaching footsteps.

foom

foom

foom

FOOM

FOOM

The door opens.

That heady monkey smell really hits Cason now, a punch to the nose as a massive dude answers the door—giant, not like Tundu, who’s big all around, but giant in the way a cave troll is giant. Long legs, long arms, but a short torso and a head the size and shape of a small watermelon. The man’s hair is a wild thatch of brown and gray, his mouth a mess of crooked teeth, the nose a smushed piggy snout. Dirt on his cheeks, under his nails, across his yellow chompers.

The guy starts to ask “Who the hell are—”

But he doesn’t get to finish the question.

Cason’s head explodes—or at least that’s how it feels. Frank sticks the gun up over Cason’s shoulder and pulls the trigger. The gunshot is everything: noise and fury and stink, and the massive man’s head snaps back and his body topples backward like a redwood felled with dynamite. The floor shakes as he hits.

Fuck, Cason thinks. He can’t hear anything. Only the pulsating shriek in his ear. He staggers forward into the house, shoved by Frank.

Cason didn’t ask for this. Didn’t ask to be in on a murder. Bad enough what happened to his boss—but he thought today would give him context, not just another dead body to deal with.

He snaps. Yanks Frank into the house by his gun-hand. Slams him into a wall lined with ugly mural wallpaper meant to look like a pine forest—a framed painting, of a couple of deer sipping lake water in the shadow of mountains, tumbles off the wall and shatters. Frank yelps—the gun goes off again, this time the bullet whining against an old iron heating grate—Cason pulls his arm taut and kicks hard up into Frank’s solar plexus.

The freak ooomphs as Cason twists the gun out.

Then brings the flat of the gun hard against the bastard’s head.

The Cicatrix goes down—a still, unmoving, scar-flesh lump. The bag under his arm now a crumpled-up package smashed beneath his hip.

“Jesus,” Cason says, panting. In his ear: the deafening whine.

He thinks: just leave, just go—run—you were never here.

But the guy could be okay. Well—not okay. Nobody’s okay after getting shot in the head. But some people survive it, right? The head’s made of harder stuff than people realize. Bullet maybe rides the skull to the back. Or shoots a part-the-seas path through the two halves of the brain and goes clear out the back without blowing out any vital circuitry.

Cason kneels over the giant.

Oh, shit.

Multiple problems strike Cason as notable.

First, the bullet. It’s half-flattened against the wrinkled flesh of the man’s brow—a squashed mushroom of lead.

Second, the man’s eyes are open. And blinking. And looking at Cason.

Third, and most troubling: the man is not a man.

He’s changed.

His piggish snout is now an actual pig snout. His mouth is a thresher bar of crooked needle tusks sticking out over the top and bottom lip, criss-crossing like briar barbs. His face is a pelt of hair to match the snarl upon his head.

Yellow eyes.

Leathery flesh.

Breath that’d make a vulture choke on its own puke.

A low rumble rises in the beast-man’s chest. Cason can’t hear it but he can feel it. The creature says something—the words lost to the roar in Cason’s ears—just before the monster lifts Cason up like he’s the father and Cason’s a newborn baby.

Of course, this father doesn’t mind throwing his infant into the ceiling.

Cason slams into popcorn ceiling—then the floor rushes up to greet him and punch the air clean out of his lungs. The monster man is already up, standing over Cason.

Again he’s trying to say something—foul mouth moving, teeth gnashing together, but Cason can’t hear it.

And again the monster tosses Cason like he’s a ragdoll. Into one wall. Then the other. Then the door. Then back to the floor.

The giant beast-man—fur now bristling through his greasy gray shirt and around the margins of his baggy shorts—squats over Cason like an animal squatting over his kill. He roars words, this time words that Cason can hear as they barrel through his temporary deafness:

“—he should have never created man. Man ruins everything. Have you seen? Have you looked outside? You spread your filth everywhere you go. All that you touch is poison and sickness. Kishelemùkonk moved mountains to prove you should exist, but he was wrong. The Great Spirit was wrong!”

The monster forms a wrecking ball with both his hands and raises them high above Cason’s head—

But then pauses.

Draws a long, deep, snorting sniff.

The beast-man’s yellow eyes narrow.

“But you are not all-man, are you? You are a child of the Beast, too.”

Cason tries to say something—anything—but his words come out a breathless squeak. Then, from behind the giant, a voice.

“Hey, skunk-ape.”

The beast wheels.

Cason catches sight of Frank standing there, facing down the monster. Frank lobs something—the brown bag—toward the giant.

The giant, reflexively, catches it.

The bomb goes off.