Beyond it, the room. Stone-walled, cement-floored, windowless. Speakers nested in every corner. Cupboards and tables and pegboards busy with curious tools. The air thick with the stink of mildew and bready gas. The door auto-locks behind him.
Sarin paid for the security system and this subbasement, what she likes to call The Dungeon. She waits for him here and snatches away the plate he offers. She can’t seem to crack the Coke quickly enough to guzzle. She rips open the candy bar. “All this excitement,” she says, around a bite. “I’ve worked up an appetite.” Her voice is boastful, but he can see the strain in her face, the black circles beneath her eyes offsetting the paleness of her skin. Her blood sugar is low. Normally she needs a transfusion every few hours to feel like herself, but they’ve been busy. A fly lands on her sandwich and she shoos it away, and it joins the dozens of others dirtying the air. They come from him.
He sits in a massive chair made from ash and situated in the center of the floor. He is manacled in place at the wrists and ankles. The wood is old, scarred. His hair is long and orange, and sweaty strands of it cling to his cheeks. One of his eyes is bruised and swollen. His shoulder is gun shot, a weeping red mound purpled along the edges. He smells faintly of sulfur. He is shirtless, revealing his hairless sack of a belly and the pale breasts that rest atop it. His pants are damp from where he pissed himself. His wallet revealed his name was Cheston—and a quick Internet search uncovered his web-hosting service as well an old article in Reed College’s newspaper about the Disciplinary Committee hearing that concerned his involvement in a music and video piracy network. But none of that matters because he is no longer the same person.
?
Late last night, in the tunnels below Portland, at The Oubliette, behind the bar, they pushed through the red door and discovered they were too late. For Babs. The owner of the club was already dead.
His office was brick-floored. Roots and coax cables and Christmas lights threaded from the ceiling. Modems and routers and hard drives blinked with blue and green light. One wall was lined with file cabinets. The other with screens that streamed footage of the prostitutes he employed. Every john was unknowingly recorded by a hidden camera, the video stored here for later blackmail and extortion.
Manila envelopes and brown shipping boxes were stacked everywhere. Babs dealt some on the streets, but these days he got almost all his play online, shipping Molly and H and oxy off in boxes of jelly beans to mask the smell. All paid for with bitcoins on the Dark Net. He told Sarin repeatedly that the Internet was the future—for life, for commerce, for entertainment, for crime and for justice, for the balance—and she always shrugged and said, “Old dog, new tricks.”
“You’re going to get left behind, girl,” he said. “You’re going to be extinct before you know it.”
But now he was the one on the floor, dead, the blood still pumping out of him, steaming in the chill air. He wore a neon-yellow tracksuit. The jacket had slid up to reveal the swollen brown wedge of his belly. Cheston hunched over him. One of his hands clenched the remains of Babs’s torn-out throat.
Juniper closed the door, muffling the noise of the bar behind them.
Cheston’s eyes jogged between them and settled on Sarin. “You.” He stood and wiped his hand on his polo shirt with a red smear. “I remember you.”
She answered with a gunshot.
?
Now, in the basement of the shelter, Sarin focuses on her sandwich, tucking a lettuce leaf into her mouth mid-chew, following this up with a handful of grapes, washing it all down with a fizzy gulp of soda.
Cheston says nothing, but his breathing is like its own conversation, ragged and guttural, like a bear after a hard run.
Juniper walks over to a workbench stacked with hammers and saws and pliers. He selects a ten-foot length of chain that he loops around his knuckles. He does not carry the rest, but drags it across the floor with a clank and rattle. “Tell us your name.”
“Cheston.”
“Cheston is the body. Tell us the name beneath the name.”
“Guess.”
“Baal.”
“No.”
“Eligos.”
“No.”
“Astaroth.”
“Guess, guess, guess, and keep guessing. Guess until your throat is sore. The Zero Day will come before then.”
“Zero Day? What the hell is Zero Day?”
No response.
“Why did you kill Babs?”
“Because that fat bitch was in my way.”
“In your way how? Why are you here?”
When Cheston doesn’t respond, Juniper says again, “Why are you here?”
“I go where I want.”
Sarin speaks up now, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Not here. Not in my city.”
“Your city?” Cheston laughs and the laugh becomes a cough. He hacks up a few flies. They ooze down his chest, sleeved in a yellowish drool that they crawl from. They tremble their wings dry before taking flight, joining the others that hover in the air like a black net. “Your city. If it ever was yours, it won’t be much longer.”
“Because of Zero Day? What will happen then? Why are you here, what do you want?”
“Everything wants the same thing. To feast. To fuck.” Cheston’s eyes are bloodshot and dilated, ringed red and bullet-hole black. He is smiling, but not for long. “To grow.”
Juniper withdraws from his breast pocket two foam earplugs. He tucks them into place and makes sure Sarin has done the same. He sees Cheston’s mouth move with the words: “Wait. Don’t do—”
Then Juniper gathers the chain and pivots quickly, hoisting it and lashing out an arm so that the metal untangles—striking Cheston’s shoulder, then wrapping around the chair’s back, before swinging around the other side to bite his chest. It’s more than the pain of impact. It’s the iron. The iron burns.
Cheston throws back his head and screams. Even with the earplugs in, it is a disturbingly harsh sound, like someone blowing through a gashed tuba. The chain falls away, and his skin blisters and weeps where the links touched his skin.
“Why are you here?” Juniper asks again, and when he receives no answer, he gathers the chain and circles Cheston, draping it over his shoulders, mashing it into his face, cramming it down his pants. The screams are so powerful he can feel them, like a terrible wind, and dust falls from the ceiling and the lights ebb and a hairline crack creeps along the concrete floor.
Sarin continues to eat through all of this. She shakes the Coke can empty and cleans the plate of every crumb with a licked thumb.
Juniper removes the chain, letting it puddle on the floor before the chair, and then plucks out the earplugs. He knows pain will never be enough, not for the answers he seeks, but pain readies the way for emotional frailty. He will begin with an appeal to vanity. “You’re weak. It was easy to find you and it’s easy to hurt you. Of course you’re not Baal. Of course you’re not Astaroth. You’re a name no one knows. You’re an errand boy, aren’t you? What are you here for, slave?”