They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Read online

  And that's when I saw Doland's creature twisting and ripping the shit out of Tracey's black Hummer.

  Tracey showed up beside me. "Oh, fuck me," she yelled when she saw the creature, her voice going up a damn octave. "God damn Jesus Christ! Fuck! Kill it!"

  I shook my head, trying to catch a second wind. "Fuck that. I'm not--"

  The giant turned and looked at us. Its eyes were red from crying, and he had food caked on his cheeks and neck. Some kind of lesions, some infected, peppered his body, and a red rash covered his thighs and upper lip beneath his nose.

  The sound of an explosion came from deep within the bunker.

  "Ws that Splode of the fail-safe?" I asked, making no moves that might set the surprised giant off.

  "All your fucking fault," Tracey muttered, pulling out her phone and fingering screens while the thing screamed at us and chucked pieces of Hummer our way. In another second he was gone, the Hummer was gone, and the ground twenty feet around where the truck had been was smooth as glass. A loud sucking sound pulled us forward then an explosive burst of air knocked us to the ground.

  "Fuck you!" Tracey yelled up at the dark sky. She cupped her hands over her mouth and called out "Rosie!" but trailed off and fell to her knees. It was her turn to throw up from exertion. She collapsed to the ground, shaking, with a weak "Fuck."

  "Will?!" I shouted.

  Then white light hit my eyes and blinded me.

  It took a couple of seconds for me to realize that I hadn't been fried by the fail-safe and that I didn't smell sand anymore. I was back in my blood-sprayed apartment. The silence was deafening.

  I was back. Alone and out of breath with Run ALC's corpse.

  Chapter 11

  Scorched Earth

  I immediately grabbed my cell phone.

  The last number called was Tracey's, and I mashed the button to call it while I went into my bedroom and shut the door so I could act like there wasn't a body getting colder in the other room. The call rang and went to voicemail. I punched in Will's number next, and his phone did the same. I called Tracey's back and left her a message while I stripped off the bloody, dark fiberglass.

  "Hey, call me back as soon as you get this. I've got a job for you over here. If you talk to Will, tell him to call me."

  I balled the suit up and carried it into the bathroom, leaving a trail of blood droplets in the bedroom carpet. With a heave that made my ribs scream in pain, I threw it into the bathtub with a loud, wet thud. I spun the clear plastic knob for the hot water and watched the steaming tap pour out onto the suit from the showerhead before I cursed a blue streak and turned the hot water off and put on the cold instead because the fucking suit wasn't supposed to be washed in fucking cold water or it would be fucking ruined.

  I tried Will's number again. The water in the tub turned brownish-pink as it poured over the suit. No answer from Will, so I left a message. "Hey, call me when you get this." I sat on my toilet in my underwear, trying to catch my breath. My hands shook; every little noise or creak made me jump. Another trip into the bedroom, and I grabbed my cell phone charger and a fresh pack of cigarettes. I plugged the phone in and set it on the edge of the sink, watching it and waiting for somebody to call. I didn't know which felt more like a dream: the body dead on my floor or the shit that had just happened in North Dakota.

  I called Will again. No answer.

  Slapping the pack of cigarettes against my palm about killed my ribs, and the pack slipped out of my hand into the bathtub. I scrounged another pack from my dresser along with an elastic bandage that I tried wrapping around my ribcage. But it wasn't long enough and after fifteen minutes of trying to make the damn thing work, I just set it on fire, threw it in the bathtub and called it a, "Fucking piece of shit-ass motherfucker."

  I checked my phone. Still no calls.

  I finally got a fucking cigarette lit in my lips and breathed in nicotine. My lungs were still fucked up from the gas, though, so I coughed and saw stars again.

  "Fucking shit." God, it hurt to cough.

  I shut my eyes and tried to clear my head and concentrate on the smell of the cigarette smoke. I still had a body and a murder scene in my living room, though. I punched the wall and ripped the toilet paper holder off in frustration. I took the lid off the toilet tank and smashed the mirror with it, then broke the lid on the side of the tub.

  I grabbed my phone and got online.

  Run ALC had a listing in the Post-Human Database. Name: Angelo Luis Cabrera. From Escondido, California. Wanted in New Mexico, Arizona and California for drug running, and in California for Assault with Enhanced Biological Processes. I scrolled down the page past his biography and stopped.

  Suspected to have a son in the Escondido area.

  The motherfucker had a kid.

  "God dammit," I said to the broken mirror.

  Next I searched for any news on Wilmont Avenue. The names of four of the dead had been released with one name being withheld at the family's request. Matthew Phillips - 22-years-old, Jackson Clark - 17, Tyneesha Allen - 34, Macy Sterling - 23.

  Sterling was a mother of three. Jesus fucking God. I put the phone down and made sure it was still charging. Checked my missed calls. Nobody had called.

  There were still a few Lortabs will hadn't stolen from the medicine cabinet, so I swallowed a couple of them. I just needed a few minutes to get my head together.

  I called Will again. No answer.

  "Okay. Fuck. Okay." I sucked on the cigarette.

  Red had removed him from the scene, flew him off somewhere so he didn't have to fight him and could focus on the rest of us. And Red seemed like he knew the fail-safe was about to go off and what it would do. So when me and Tracey 'ported out, he would have gotten out even with just one hand. And, of course, he would have grabbed Will from wherever he had stashed him.

  I rubbed my eyes. Will was in fucking custody.

  I had told Tracey not to involve him.

  Now it was Lee's arrest all over again. Will had a head full of our names. No way Tracey would just let that go.

  I thought I heard something in the living room.

  I turned off the water from the showerhead. The knob squealed loud as shit.

  I kept a loaded .44 between my nightstand and the bed, and I bolted for it from the bathroom. With it in hand, my thumb on the hammer, I tore ass to the living room.

  Nobody was there. Including Run ALC.

  "What the fuck?"

  The living room still smelled like burnt meat in a sweaty truck stop bathroom and looked like a can of paint had exploded, but there was no body. Angelo and his bag of crap were gone, and so was the carpet that had been underneath them.

  Tracey.

  On the coffee table sat a stack of hundreds with a note on top:

  I'm so sorry about the way things went. You did such a huge favor for us, and I want you to know how much I appreciate it. The client is happy, so I'm happy. I'll spread the word that you are OUT, I swear. Das Biest never resurfaced. This money I'm leaving is your share and Will's share. Please give it to him when you see him. I don't know what happened in your apartment, but I'll take this mess off your hands no charge. Just don't tell my clients :)

  "When I see him?" I said out loud. Did she not fucking know he got arrested?

  Maybe she didn't know.

  I got my phone and sat down in my recliner and called Tracey again. It rang once then went to voicemail. The bitch had rejected my call. I called Will again. No answer.

  I was fucking exhausted, and my eyes were still bleary, but I couldn't just sit around. I had to move. I quick-dried my suit with heat and hoped it wasn't ruined. It went into its trunk and the trunk went into my truck behind the driver's seat along with my forty-four. The hundreds Tracey had left went into my suitcase to finance the road trip I was about to take. I threw some clothes and other shit in the suitcase with the money, zipped it up and slammed the cracked apartment door against the broken frame on my way out. My truck left a patch of
rubber in the parking lot. It was nearly sunrise; I had time before people started getting up and around.

  I went straight to Will's apartment complex, taking a three-block detour around Wilmont Avenue. The Lortabs and cigarettes were helping, but I still pounding the dashboard and steering wheel helped keep me from burning everything I saw.

  I parked my truck into a space at the back of the complex parking lot, away from the security lighting. I watched Will's door with my side mirror, smoking and stifling the coughs from what the fucking gas had done to my lungs. 'I searched Harper Township North Dakota' on my phone, but nothing came up in the news. I glanced back up at Will's door, then searched his name; nothing on him came up either. I ground out my second cigarette. No sign of cops or agents or Feds or anybody else around his place. Balls or bra time.

  With a free hat I had gotten from a waste treatment company pulled low over my face, I shoved my forty-four into the back of my pants and went into Will's apartment with his spare key, rubber gloves and a box of black garbage bags.

  I emptied his closet and dug out his stash of weed, pills including my fucking painkillers, and his bong and threw them on the pile of his porn. Seemed like a shame to burn all of it, but I would be damned before I let the Feds find anything they could use to pin more charges on him. He had a shitload of weed and bags, too. The fucker had been dealing without telling me. As for the porn, I wasn't going to let his mom, Pat, find it when she cleaned out her baby boy's place. It would have killed her.

  In his stash, I found what I needed if I was going to actually maybe succeed in finding Tracey before she did anything. Will had kept trying to convince me to try the shit for months, but I never would. He would be sad he missed it. I made a cup of coffee for the road, grabbed the loaded garbage bags, locked his door and threw everything in my truck.

  On my way out of town, I concentrated on my apartment complex. I knew where the sprinklers were in the three different apartment layouts, so I melted the pellets to blast 300 PSI of city water in the apartments adjacent to mine, then lit the my place ablaze. They would never find Run ALC's blood. I'd get hit with an arson charge for the apartment at most.

  On the highway, I headed east. I would have to pull over and get some sleep and burn Will's stuff at some point, but I wanted to be way the hell out of town before that. The map on my phone said I could reach where I was headed in a matter of hours.

  Because thanks to that shitty-ass psychic bullet, I had the home address of somebody who could find anybody, including a teleporter, anywhere on the goddamn planet: Rosemary the remote sensor.

  Chapter 12

  Psychic in the Upside Down House

  "Holy shit. Will, you bastard," I swore over and over again in my truck, in the dark, on the side of a road outside Gaithersburg, Maryland. I sat in the dark, in a black, itchy ski mask, waiting, waiting for the dashboard clock to count me down to go time, tripping my fucking balls off on acid.

  The drive to Rosemary's place was only a matter of hours. I stopped in Wheeling, West Virginia to sleep and buy the rest of what I needed for my psychedelic adventure from a gun store. Less than twenty-four hours since I had burned my life down, I sat in my truck, my loaded forty-four in my lap, watching everything come to life like God had been replaced by Walt Disney.

  The dash clock said 2:20 AM. The 'AM' was stupid, I decided. You don't say it 'am' two o' clock, you say it 'is' two o' clock. Am just didn't make any sense. Am. Am. Ay-um. Ay-yuh-um. Ayem. Like 'Amen.' Wait. The clock said 2:21 AM.

  "What the fuck?" I said to no one. I could have sworn to God it said 2:20 AM. Right, 'cause I was just saying it 'am' 2:20. My hands rediscovered the gun in my lap. Shit, was the safety on? I checked it, and it was. Okay. I set the gun straight in my lap. Then straightened it again. It kept moving. I straightened it again. I took a deep breath.

  2:22 AM.

  When the fuck did that happen? It just said 2:21 AM. The clock must have been broken. It was all fucked up.

  I checked my cell phone. It said 2:20 AM. I fucking knew it. Goddamn dashboard clock.

  Rosemary lived way the hell outside of Gaithersburg in a fat, two-storey columned house on several acres of land. A white Escalade sat parked in the circular driveway in front of the house. She lived away from town, which was pretty much what I had expected since most mind readers didn't have an off switch for what they could do. They had to find a way to shut everybody up and earplugs didn't block that shit. Pills and booze helped, but everybody had to grow out of that sometime.

  Another thing about mind-readers, and this formed the whole foundation of my plan, was when it came to drugs they were the biggest mooches on earth. They just got high off somebody else getting high. Partying with Psycho Silvy had taught me that. That crazy bitch stayed wasted off her ass for three days in Amsterdam without taking a damn thing by going into everybody else's stoned minds. And not only did she stay wasted for free, but she didn't have to deal with any of the side effects.

  So I sat there ready to bust in on Rosemary while she slept, with what I hoped was enough thought-clouding LSD to make anything she happened to pull out of my head while she slept just seem like part of a dream or whatever. Perfect plan. I was going to beat a fucking psychic, and I would keep beating her until she told me where to find Tracey.

  But goddammit, I shouldn't have taken the second tab after I thought the first one wasn't working. Hooooly shit.

  At 2:30, I got out of the truck slowly. Go time. I tucked the pistol into the front of my jeans. The hinge on the driver's side door squealed so loud I thought I might go deaf. I spent a while digging around for the WD-40 I kept in the cab so I could spray the hinge down and not wake up everybody for miles. I emptied the entire can on the hinge, then accidentally dropped the can. It rolled into a ditch. But fuck looking for it, I had like two more cans under the backseat. And the fucking night was alive.

  Insects and animals crept in the old trees, and I could hear their footsteps. The stars above were intense and thick. Bright as hell, too. Why were they so damn bright? Was it Rosemary? Did she know I was coming? I huddled beside one of the front tires and waited, watching the star beams that looked hot enough to burn even me. When I finally decided they were just, y'know, fucking stars, I got back to my feet. Then I checked the bed of my truck to make sure Run ALC's body wasn't in one of the black bags full of Will's stuff. 2:48.

  Barbed wire fence ran the length of Rosemary's property. It was easy to get through even though each wire moved like a worm. By 3:20, I had finally made it up to the house after almost emptying my gun into eighteen different things in the woods that scared the shit out of me. I had to stop for five solid minutes because I couldn't stop laughing after I said, "Don't move, fucko," to a possum. It played dead, and I lost it laughing my ass off. Funniest thing I had ever seen.

  I had to navigate through a maze of dying potted plants on the walk up to her back door. I made it without falling and found what I had expected at the door, too. It was wired to an alarm system. Easy fix. The wires only tripped if you opened the door, and Das Biest didn't need to do that. A slow as hell, controlled heat melted the glass, wood veneer and plastic into a bubbling, running, stinking, smoking mess that ran down into a puddle at the threshold like a slow-motion waterfall. I killed the heat when there was a big enough hole in the door for me to step through. And after I decided the hole wasn't a mouth that was going to eat me.

  I didn't breathe as I stepped into the kitchen.

  Inside, the place was a pig sty decorated like a five-star hotel but kept like a frat house. I clicked on my flashlight and had my fucking mind blown. The beam was like a light saber in my hand, tracing fading light all over the place. I covered my mouth as I laughed at how trippy it was. I spent a good amount of time slicing through the dirty pots, pans, paper plates and wadded paper towels all over the kitchen. In my head, I made the noises that went with every slice.

  Then a black-eyed monster caught my eye that I nearly shot back to hell. Actually,
I tried to kill it with my light-saber first, then went for the gun in my waistband. But it was just a mirror looking back at me. What I was looking at was supposed to be me, but it was all fucked-up and evil looking. Horns grew out of its head, the chin stretched out and was pointed. Blood ran down from its head. I reached for it, and it reached for me with a hand like a praying mantis.

  In the fifties some hard-powered jackass who called himself 'John Atoms,' who was really some fucked-up WWII vet from New Jersey named Percy Gallagher, said he once stumbled into another dimension where everybody was the opposite of how they were here. He said he fought the genius dictator of the American Fifth Reich of Science, who was his own evil twin, and he got help from the good versions of Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler. Scientists grilled him to try and figure out how he had done it and all that since the whole damn thing sounded retarded but nobody wanted to say that because it was back when people still trusted Posters because the only other thing to do instead of trust them was to lay in bed every night scared shitless at what they could do.

  Four months later when John Atoms when out of his fucking mind and killed the presidents of three South American countries and tried to launch all the nukes the US had at Spain, his stories of the backward dimension, hanging out with white aliens living in a black hole in the center of the Earth, and time-traveling to help the Union in the Civil War pretty much got him labeled a nut job and some other US Government Posters killed the shit out of him when he wouldn't go into custody quietly. They said he had been a communist, too.

  But I had always wondered, especially when stoned, if maybe there could have been another dimension with an opposite me. A me that practiced and didn't piss off Coach Farley and went to college on a basketball scholarship. A me who couldn't kill a man or turn a city block to ash by thinking about it. A me with enough sense to know how to keep his best friend out of trouble.

  I pulled my squirming phone out of my pocket without taking my eyes off my devil-twin. 4:00. Another twenty minutes killed looking at the thing in the mirror and trying to see around the edges into its world. Jesus Christ, I had to get this shit done.