Metro (4 page)

Yeah, this is a pretty amazing town.

Mark hovers just below the surface of it all, knowing that one day he will be immortal, just like all the other starving artists know it. That's the only reason to live in a town like this if you're a writer or a filmmaker or a guitar player. The promise of immortality.

That's what he'll tell you if you ask him about it.

He'll tell you lots of things.

Very few of which are actually true.

But not many people want to know the
real
Mark Jones anyway. They only know him as the tortured-genius drug dealer hermit of the Kingdom, with his thick chin beard and shaven head, short and pear-shaped, full of secrets in his longing face, genuine love-me-now puppy-dog eyes drooping above a crazed smile that belongs on a lunatic running the asylum. Big arms and muscular legs, always exposed because he wears designer cargo shorts year-round, even in winter. He's almost a foot shorter than Jollie, but he seems a lot taller when you talk to him. He turned forty almost a year ago and he doesn't look a day over twenty-seven. His youth lives in his blood and his passion. Not a single wrinkle on his face. And that always turns her on. He's written six unsold novels, all science fiction with a red-hot poker up its ass—
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
meets
Natural Born Killers
. Grungy, greasy, nutty as a mutant fruitcake, sopped through with attitude and a worldview gleaned from a steady diet of classic gangster flicks, books by Harlan Ellison, and experiences he's not told anyone about—not even Jollie. One of his manuscripts struck home and sold. A book called
Countdown to Extinction
. (He's a big Megadeth fan.) It didn't have to make him rich, just had to keep him moving, keep him in the game. He holds on to the dream, like everyone else. But he holds harder. And he's searched all his life for a kindred spirit. Someone he can really talk to. Someone who understands things.

Someone like Jollie, of course.

He's fallen in love with her, and that wasn't supposed to happen. When a guy like him falls in love, it's bad news.

Especially in a town like this.

Mark doesn't know about what's been going on lately between Jollie and Andy, but he's suspected for months.

That might have been why he finally asked her to come away with him the other night. Why he told her he was getting some long-overdue royalty money from the book he sold years ago (
Countdown
has since been reprinted five times, a real underground hit, more or less) . . . and he wanted to make a clean break from the madness of the Kingdom. Maybe head out for California. Start fresh somewhere in a different town of artists and protestors. She asked if Andy should come with them, and he said no. He said that he was done with all this craziness, all the lovers and ladies at all hours, the drug dealers and half-pimps, all those dumbass throwaway super rockers with green hair.

There's a place we can start over, Jollie. We can go there together, you and I. Please marry me.

And he was really serious this time.

She knew, because he showed her the ring.

The ring he only told her stories about when they were stoned—the silly little piece of ten-cent plastic he got from a gumball machine when he was sixteen. The childish trinket he's kept on his Super Cool Stuff Shelf for years, waiting for the right lady to give it to. He gave it to her then, and she'd had no idea what to say. She still doesn't. She still hasn't answered him. This wasn't in the plan. It wasn't supposed to happen.

But he can deal with it.

He still has time.

There's blood on his hands, but the blood washes clean.

He'll have just a few minutes
to make her understand.

33 minutes and COUNTING . . .

“I
can't do this,” Jollie says, and she pulls away from Spider-Girl.

The Boy Prince knows what it means, but he pretends not to.

Jollie backs away and tells them to have fun, and they act like confused mice, hovering in deep space. Jollie thinks they look like they were made for each other. She has no idea in this moment who she, herself, was made for. No idea at all.

Mark. I'm so sorry.

She reaches the door and forgets it's locked, tries to open it, and thinks she's trapped for just a half second. Laughs at herself and remembers.

And then there's a knock at the door.

And Mark's voice.

“Jollie? Are you in there? I have to talk to you.”

“Yay, party favors,” Andy says to the blonde, perking right up. “Looks like our man is on time, after all.”

“Oh poop,” Spider-Girl says. “I was just getting used to waiting.”

Andy smiles. “We can wait some more later, if you want to.”

“Maaaaybe.”

Jollie's heart has already jumped into her mouth, her buzz nearly ruined as Mark's voice comes again, through the door:

“Jollie? Open up, okay?”

He sounds really upset.

Jollie turns to the crazy kids on her waterbed and sighs hard. “Look, you two stay in here. I have to talk to him alone first.”

“Dishonesty is always the best policy,” Andy says, smiling.

“Look, just
shut up
,” Jollie says, glaring.

Now, Mark starts banging on the door.

“I can hear you guys in there—
open up, goddammit
!”

“Yeah, I'll be right out!”

And she freezes Andy with a laser-ice look.
You just stay right on that waterbed and don't fucking move.

Jollie opens the door and slides out into the smoky hall with Mark. Only opens the door a few inches, so he can't see the kids in her room. She forgets all about her smartphone back there on the desk—which is strange, because she's never very far from that thing. But Mark isn't paying attention to her phone. Mark doesn't even have time to see Jollie's face before he grabs her by the hand and pulls her to his room at the end of the hall, unlocks the door, and slams it behind them. It's a series of fast blurs. Tracers and feelings. Shocked amazement and weird tangles of love and shame. Jollie can hardly understand what's happening, even when they are alone together and Mark pulls her close and kisses her. He tastes like home and hearth. She wraps her arms around him and they mash into each other, melt into each other, and she wants to say she is sorry, wants to tell him so many things, but all those things explode in her breast and evacuate in a low sigh and he is so close,
so close
 . . .

And a million lifetimes later, they untangle.

Mark is looking right in her eyes.

She can tell he's on Xanax because of the red in there.

His eyes always look that way when he's on downers.

But the dope doesn't hide the terrible, serious look on his face.

“I'm sorry,” she says, because she thinks he's angry with her—thinks he knows about her and Andy. She thinks someone told him about the three of them sneaking off together. Thinks she's finally busted.

But that's not what he says at all.

“Something really heavy has just happened, Jollie. There was no avoiding it. So you have to come with me
right now
 . . .”

He looks right in her eyes, deeper than he's ever looked before.

“. . . or you'll never see me again.”

And she finally notices that there is blood on his face.

30 minutes and COUNTING . . .

“I
t all happened so fast,” Jackie chokes out, holding his insides in with both hands, as the bad lieutenant hovers over him. “He turned into a . . . he moved so quick . . . I think . . . I'm dying . . .”

He remembers the bright flash of the first muzzleblast like a white-hot strobe in his face, the instant panic that shocks up his spine, the dull fleshy slap of the bullet in
Daddy's chest, the smile frozen on Daddy's face, still left over from the three seconds before, when Daddy was looking right at Mark and telling him how lucky he was.

The bad lieutenant gets in closer to Jackie and says something Jackie can't understand, but he knows it's the same question.

Jackie holds his insides in.

Jackie cries because it really hurts.

Jackie is bleeding from six gunshot wounds.

Jackie shouldn't even be alive.

He remembers what happened after that first flash only in a series of weird broken images: The second
shot, to Razzle's face—Daddy's face—so fast after the last one that it's like machine-gun fire. The automatic pistol whizzing around in Mark's hand, a wide arc of fire taking out the two big guys on either side of Daddy, who's stumbling backward now like a s
top-motion puppet, groping for his gun while his malfunctioning fingers and hands and arms twitch in weird chain-reaction fits and starts. The two big guys sprout crimson eyes in the center of their
foreheads. Reports so loud in the tiny space that it makes him deaf. Jackie's own hand, reaching for the pistol in his waistband—the worst place to keep a gun, nudged under your belt, in the small of your back. His hand, not quite freezing but not exactly moving either, as the next shot hacks a ch
unk of his shoulder off and sends him flat against the wall. The quick, painful, gooey sensation of shit evacuating from his bowels. The fr
ont of his pants hosed with piss. A fist punching him in the stomach, which turns out to be another bullet. Freeze frames of everything that happens, with glowing, white-hot light around the edges, like jammed bits of celluloid slagging bad in the gate of an exploding projector.
Someone screaming:
Shoot the motherfucker kill him scum DIE BASTARD
 . . .

“Who did it, Jackie? Who hit us tonight?”

The bad lieutenant's voice is clear now, and the inside of the ambulance almost solidifies again, narrow and dark, like a closet full of strange, indefinable
stuff.
There are tubes running in and out of Jackie. A man wearing red and white is pulling Jackie's hands away from his guts, holding something painful on his neck, like a great weight that makes his insides gurgle and pop, with fluid boiling in a weird gag reflex at the deep end of his tongue. He feels the fresh, bleeding gash left by the third bullet, which was the one that cut his throat as it came and went, still making it almost impossible to talk.

But he tries anyway:

“All so fast . . . so many flashes . . .
he was so goddamn fast
 . . .”

“Who was it? Who was crazy enough to hit us? Tell me!”

The sting of the bad lieutenant's voice hits him harder than the next wave of pain. He can tell it's Jake Mudd now—the man his father always laughed at while he paid him off to watchdog his deals. That's how Mudd got the bad-lieutenant tag in the first place. One of his dad's terrible jokes that stuck. Daddy also liked making fun of Harvey Keitel for playing Judas in that weird God movie with his bizarre half-Brooklyn accent:
I do not like you, Jesus, because you make crosses.
It almost makes Jackie laugh, but the pain rises again and chokes him again, Mudd's voice stabbing his ear again:

“Tell me who it was!”

Jackie knows he's dead if he tells.

Jackie knows he's dead if he doesn't tell.

Jackie's just dead, period.

He remembers that third bullet coming in like a mad bee, hitting him just below the chin. The tiny wound opening near his larynx, sending blood down his throat
, human shrapnel choking him hard, making him forget about the gun in his waistband. More strobes. More flashes. The whole room gone crazy now. Everyone falling down dead before they even know what's happening. Five guys, his father's best
friends, his dirty extended family of assholes, all ripped to hell in terrible freeze frames. Blood splattering across a hanging light fixture. The walls painted sickeningly in oozing, glowing, gory re
d.
And in the center of it all
 . . .

“So fast . . . he moved . . . so fast . . .”

His life, coming in on fast-forward now.

Twenty-five years, working for his father.

My life, on fast-forward . . .

Jackie-Boy Schaeffer was born into the world through pain, and he can still actually
remember
being born. Nobody ever believes him when he says that, but it's damn true. His mind is a steel trap and a vast computer bank. He was three years old when he learned how to work a Mac computer, three and a half when he built a website for his father, four years old when he realized his father was a drug dealer and a killer. Five years old when he realized his importance in Daddy's machine, and that Daddy's way of loving him was to treat him like an adult, make him part of it, feed him pills that made his senses sharp and his dreams hot and awful. Jackie never went to school. Never met kids his own age. But he was—
is
—brilliant beyond belief. A prodigy. The years fell off the calendar and the money rolled in. He was ten years old when he realized he'd probably never get laid. He wanted to be an
adult
in the way that puppy dogs want to be human. For five years, he operated the family business, set up the dope runs, cataloged the cash, measured pounds of white stuff and black stuff and green stuff. He spied on people who spied on him. He developed a sixth sense for police tails and eyes in the sky. He knew everything about how it worked by the time he was seventeen. He met the Monster Squad and they terrified him. Eddie Darling and Darian Stanwell, the worst of the worst.

But that's just the way it is, kid.

Be a man. Or at least pretend.

That's Daddy talking, even now, as the life runs from him . . .

He was still just a kid when he met Mark Jones for the first time. The first thing Jackie talked about with Mark was how cool it was that someone made a movie out of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. He read Mark's weird monster stories and thought instantly that his writing was passionate and transcendent, and it plugged into a deep longing and isolation that they've both experienced within themselves for most of their lives—that solitary brilliance that keeps them from being like
other people
, even when you have your own scene finally, when the party never ends, when enough good dope hurls you through the mists of revelation after revelation about the way things really are, and about the true faces people wear in dark corners. This is real, this is
right
, this is something burned in his soul and consecrated by the passing of time, the sweet strains of music that never ends, the wild laughter of friends that never go away, coming at him now in his memory like sweet bullets and hard fists, making him so happy, then leaving him hard, faster now, like the deep canyons of understanding and camaraderie forged in the wee hours of the Kingdom, when all saints search for a reason to exist and a kindred spirit, Jollie on her political soapbox at five in the morning, making Jackie fall in love with her for the ten-millionth time with that thing she does, Andy strumming his guitar and telling him all you need is love, and Mark is always there, always the brilliant, sad master of the Kingdom, his best friend . . .
his one true love
 . . .
deep down where it matters the most
. . .