The Music of Razors (27 page)

“It all started with that stupid card, remember? I lost Kristian’s stupid, shiny little card. Or more to the point,
you
lost it.”

“We got
swarmed.
”

“You could have held on
tighter
!”

“For the thousandth time, I didn’t know it was that important!”

“You lost it,” he reiterated, with forced calm. “And I flew back from Vancouver. I got to school a few days later—after the episode with Mother—and the first thing Kristian asks is, ‘Where is it?’ Not
How are you?
or
Are you okay?
or
How the fuck did you get to the other side of the Earth by breakfast?
but ‘Where is it?’ And I told him. I told him
everything.
And do you know what he did?”

Walter didn’t answer. He had been there. He had seen it.

“He beat the shit out of me, that’s what. My best friend kicked hell out of me, right there in front of all those people who were smiling and wanting to know what it was like and how I’d done it. All those people, who for one brief instant thought I might have been worth knowing, saw me reduced to a bleeding mess. Sure, some people said useful things like ‘stop it,’ but it didn’t mean anything. Kristian was the funny guy, Kristian had the friends. And when it became clear they had to choose between Kristian or me, I never had a fucking chance, did I? And that, Wally, is where the snowball started rolling.”

“If she dies, you killed her.”

“No, man, if she dies you killed her by choosing me.”

This time the lights were on. As usual, she crept toward the painted green front steps that led up to the front door, up past the scented clouds of jasmine and the warm and veiled rectangle of Suni’s bedroom window. The expected amber light flickered from inside.

A shadow moved against that light, and Hope froze.

Suni was speaking. “…I’ve had enough.” He said something else that was lost to her. Hope moved closer, straining to hear, watching Suni’s silhouette slink and slide from the window next to the stairs to the side one. “Yes I’ll do it. Give it a rest.” Another pause. “Because I don’t care. You know,” Suni was saying, “it’s release. It’s not a gaining, it’s a losing…a wonderful, wonderful losing…” His silhouette stopped moving, and all was quiet for a moment. She could see his head turn, listening to something. Did he know she was out here? “Well it certainly doesn’t feel that way,” he said. His silhouette disappeared downward as he sat on the bed.

Hope shrugged her pack higher onto her shoulder and slid under the rail. She nudged her head through the curtains and stepped down onto the carpeted floor. The zipper on the pack caught on the fabric of the curtain, catching her, leaving her dancing on one leg for a second—the other still up on the sill—as she freed herself. She unhooked the stitch from the zip, pulled the bag free, twisted, and drew her leg in.

“You usually knock first.”

Suni was sitting on his bed, naked. Instant impressions of cinnamon skin and the shape of a collarbone, before blood rose quickly to her face and she looked away. “Sorry,” she said, trying to find something to focus on. “I’ll let you get dressed.”

“Something happened tonight, I take it.”

“I guess.” She picked a spot of darker color on the bamboo slat blinds and focused on that. She didn’t want to say anything, explain anything, until it was over. Explanations would lead to conversation and debate, and then she might not have the nerve to do what she had come here for. “I heard you talking.” Offering him privacy gave her an excuse to turn her back and place the pack on the spare bed. She fished the ’scope out of her vest, and slipped it onto her hand, feeling the slight pressure change and the movement of air as it slid over her skin. “Is Walter here?”

She became aware of Suni standing behind her.

“You know, this is going to be extraordinarily dangerous.”

She blanked for a second, wondering what he meant…

There was a massive, blunt collision with the back of her head.

Her vision exploded with sourceless light as senses misfired. Her center of balance shifted and her feet shuffled backward to compensate. Her head went numb, then felt as if it were about to split. Her ears rang. She sank, knees thudding on carpet-cushioned concrete, before her body toppled forward. Her head struck the wooden baseboard, snapping her neck back on the way down to the carpeted floor. The interior of her skull became a blank space filled with oily color that once contained a mind.

Standing over Hope, Suni watched Walter explode outward, muscle ballooning like yeast. Oolric freaked, bristling fur doubling his size, hissing and spitting as he backed into the alcove. Walter’s growth hunched him forward, elongated him. A thick, rough gray coat sprouted, consuming the little-boy clothes he wore. His face, once rounded and made for smiling, stretched into a muzzle. Suni watched his shocked little sockets recede beneath the overhang of that prominent brow, and foot-long claws shoot from what had been his hands. He noticed two had been snapped off, and passingly wondered how and when that had happened.

Suni wondered why Hope hadn’t seen Walter yet. She obviously hadn’t seen him when she climbed in through the window. Maybe she really didn’t believe in any of this.

Walter took up almost a quarter of the room, smelling like damp dogs and a jungle tens of thousands years gone. Suni knew that the first chance Walter got he was going to seriously hurt him, maybe even kill him. In hindsight, Suni supposed, he should have gotten a knife or something before making Walter angry. He could still run upstairs and grab one—the big one his mother used on roasts would suit—but that meant leaving the room, and that meant being away from people who couldn’t see Wally. And that meant Walter would have him. The mathematics of the situation were engaging.

“Now what are you going to do?” he asked.

“You’ll be alone soon enough.”

“Not before I’m armed I won’t.” Suni looked to Walter’s sister, sprawled on her face and reaching for the bed leg like it was the only solid thing there was. She rolled over onto her back.

She had the ’scope on.

Suni saw it, smiled to himself, and straddled her.

The ’scope-hand was gripping the bed leg. Try as he might, using both hands, Suni couldn’t unlock her grip.

“Give me it…,” he coaxed, as if she were a recalcitrant child.

She reached for his throat with her other hand and he tucked it under his knee, pinning it. She whimpered a little, gritted her teeth.

“Suni…no…”

“Give me it…”

“You don’t want it…you’re messed up…”

He pressed his knee down harder.

Walter came at him, roaring. With hands on the ’scope Suni reflexively snapped his head around just as a great paw came sweeping in on an arc for his head.

Suni didn’t feel a thing. The swing stopped dead as Walter’s claws struck the immovable surface of his face, wrenching joints in Walter’s arm. Suni knew what happened when real people ran into Walter, so he reached out and batted the monster away.

Walter flew back, unable to offer any resistance whatsoever, and slammed into the indestructible angles of Suni’s makeshift clothes rack. The blades of hanging shirts bit into his back and he fell to the ground, stunned.

“Stee-rike…,” Suni murmured.

Suni turned back to Hope. She was looking at him like he was the strangest thing.

One minute he was wrestling her for the ’scope, the next he gasped and stopped short, swinging at nothing.

“Stee-rike…” And then he was shifting her vest aside, raising her shirt. “Give me it…” Like he didn’t really care if she did or not.

Swinging at nothing…

Suni’s hands found her breasts. “Extraordinarily dangerous…”

She yanked her arm out from under his knee, burning the underside against the carpet, and swung her nails at his face. He saw it coming and took it anyway. No blood, but she dug up skin, and if it hurt he didn’t show it. All she got from him was a look of disappointment, as if it hadn’t hurt enough. She dug her nails in, his mouth hot and damp against her palm. He took her hand away and said, “We never fucked.” A smile broke across his face and cast his eyes to the other side of the room, laughing. “But you know that.”

He was looking at Wally.

Walter picked himself up, rising from the floor like a groaning machine, great breaths venting from flaring nostrils, muscles and ten-dons bunching.

From the other end of the room he could hear Suni laughing and Hope’s quickening breath. He could smell the same fear she had when their father had done the thing that had gotten him killed. Something remarkably similar to what Suni was doing now. And once again there was nothing Walter could do. Walter knew then—more than he ever had—that Hope had to take care of herself, and that his time was long since over. He could never help her. If anything he’d made things much, much worse.

Staying here, witnessing this, was killing him.

He loved her. He loved her because she was his sister, and because that’s what every part of his ancient self was made for. It was his calling, his fate, his purpose.

He could almost see her eyes go dead, looking to someplace a thousand miles away, up in the sky, as she switched herself off and took herself away until Suni did whatever he had to do.

Hope had begun to cry, as she had on the nights her father had been at his worst. As Suni’s hands roamed. As she found herself revisited by the worst parts of her father in the shape of the best friend she ever had.

From deep inside Walter something said
give up,
told him there was nothing more to be done; plied him with thoughts of nighttime woodland, of being something massive and four-legged sprinting and weaving through the massive trunks of oak and fir…

Strength slipped away, claws loosened, sight dimmed…. thoughts of pine needles soft under the pads of his paws, the heavy coat upon his back undulating in time to the perfect rhythm of forelegs-through-backlegs, of vision bobbing close to the ground, hugging the subtle and sudden curve of the land, flying jaws homing in on warm prey…

The voice inside himself was growing, telling him it was all right to forget, to move on.

It told him the moon was waiting for a song.

The sound of her was fading. He held on to Hope’s memory as he sank, holding on to her for as long as he could, willing himself to remember but feeling himself forget, sinking deeper and deeper into unbecoming…

As the darkness came to claim Walter, Hope looked right at him, saw him, and said his name.

And a twelve-foot grinning sardonicus reached out for Suni with a paw the size of his head.

With one hand clamped to her ’scope-wrist, the other on a breast, Suni was laughing when a translucent shadow twice the size of a fridge enveloped his face and hurled him through a closed window. He took half the blinds with him.

Hope watched the wraith—howling like an exultant animal—leap off the floor, over her, onto the bed, and out through the shattered frame, after Suni.

She’d seen him. She’d seen…something. Walter. Walter was going to kill Suni.

She got to her feet and scrambled for the window. She didn’t notice the glass cutting her knees and if she had she wouldn’t have cared.

Suni had a second or two before Walter hit the ground beside him. In that moment—as he stared at the stars and felt himself bleeding all over his mother’s lawn—he remembered that he hadn’t planned his last words to be “Oh shit.”

It didn’t especially matter, he supposed. His back and sides were gashed and he could see blood on the window’s jagged teeth. Parts of the blind were lying in the garden bed. He could hear the neighbors, voices raised like someone had kicked the henhouse. He could see his hand and forearm, wet and slick and lacerated from where he had shielded his face against the glass. The stars were out. He could hear the crickets in the hedge.

“Black bugs blood,” he mumbled, and laughed.

And now here came Walter, hulking, furry thing that he was. Yesterday Suni had something like a last speech prepared for when this time came. He had thought at the time that perhaps he would go to school and beat the vice principal to death with a lamp, and maybe throw Kristian off a building before killing himself somehow. Tell them all exactly how it was. But now he found he didn’t much care. This life had become a repetitive activity he had tired of. Nothing mattered. Everything was relative and nothing meant anything so what was the point? You only did one thing to compare it with another and revel or mope in the resultant contrast, which in turn…oh fuck it. He was sick of even thinking about it.

So he lay there, bleeding, and waited for Walter to nail him to the ground.

Itwashimitwashimitwashimitwashim…

She had climbed to her feet and onto the bed, glass crunching beneath her, so stunned she almost slashed her hands on the shattered window.

There was a mirage-hulk, a roaring shadow, standing in the garden.

“Oh get on with it,” Suni said.