The Blue Blazes (7 page)

Someone taps him on his helmet. It’s Boise – young kid from Jersey who when he was first asked where he was from said
Boise
instead of
Joisey
because he’s a nervous kid who stammers when he talks, but he’s also a hard worker and that’s all that matters to Davey. Boise says, “I hear a pig comin’ down the tunnel, Davey.”

Davey tilts his head. Gets away from the boys chipping and hauling blown rock.

Sure enough, he hears it–

The
chug chug chug
of a powered mine cart.

Now who the hell would that be? All his boys are here.

Some fucko from the EPA? Or Home-Sec? Bah.

He gives the tunnel a good look. Feels the Blue crackling at the edges of his vision – he’s looking for anything that belongs to this place, that shines of the Great Below. At least half his crew are Blazing at any given time. They take shifts. Half on, half off to cool down, ease off the powder. Some of them end up addicts. When they go that way, Davey puts them through his own personal treatment program. Which isn’t a fun program to go through, but he can’t have shaky hands playing with dynamite.

He doesn’t see squat down the tunnel.

Davey turns back to the crew. Whoops and twirls his hand like he’s got a fake lasso to get their attention. Men in hardhats with grime-streaked cheeks and goggles stand against the backdrop of a forbidding stone wall that will need to be blasted – others off to the side pouring concrete that will eventually get made into the walls of the tunnel proper.

Davey yells to them in his muddy one-generation-removed Irish accent:

“Any of you boys know who might be comin’ down the tunnel? Dutch–” He points to an old stoop-backed Hog with a scar across the bridge of his bent nose. Dutch is the radio-man. “Any news from above?”

Dutch starts to shake his head, but then his eyes go wide.

The other men start to yell and point–

One reaches alongside a mine cart and Davey sees a shotgun coming up–

Another grabs for a pick-ax.

Davey turns. Almost falls.

Sees something he’s never seen before and it’s coming at him fast–

It appears out of nothing – like a car riding through a heat haze on a long desert highway that seems to drive out of the vapor. All black. A shifting shape – like a kite, a bird, a flying
puddle of dark oil
. Big, too, big as a tarp.

He catches sight of shiny eyes, eyes like polished buttons.

And fingers, too. And teeth. Both like knives. Long knives. Hunting knives.

It casts fear in Davey’s heart. Turns to run, to find a weapon – but these boots aren’t meant for running. The toe of one boot catches the bulging heel of the other and Davey Morgan pitches forward.

The ripple of fabric is right on him. So is the clatter of knife-teeth and blade-claws. He hits the ground. Shoulder taking the brunt. Pain. Like a baseball through a window:
ksshhh
. The monster is upon him. Covering him. All light is extinguished. A horrible thought crosses Davey’s mind: I’m too old for this now. I’m too old and too slow and I’ve let fear creep in like black mold and now it’s all over.

He hears a shotgun boom. Men yelling, though they sound so distant…

He can’t breathe. The creature sounds like fabric but feels like liquid. Davey tries to swing a fist, but it’s like thrashing around underwater – a slow-motion freakout.

He sees those eyes. Just the eyes. Gleaming buttons. Coins in black water.

Then knives plunge out of the liquid and into his chest.

Then into his head.

But the pain is strange – hardly a pain at all, not in the physical sense. It’s like a spear punching a hole through his thoughts, through his mind. What he feels instead is something far deeper and ultimately worse than physical pain:

Grief and guilt holding hands, la la la. In his mind, memories burst bright like fireworks:
pop pop pop
. His first day as a shaper on the bench at the Sandhog office, feeling the pinprick stick of shame as he secretly hopes some poor Hog breaks his foot so that Davey has a shot down below; him losing his virginity with a Bronx whore on a dirty afghan on a mattress that smells like beer and cigarettes; the day his daughter Cassie was born and he was down here working; the day his wife died from an aneurysm and once more he was down here in the dark while she flopped around on the kitchen floor like a fish trying to find water. Image after image, memory after memory, too-bright and too-loud fireworks launching into the sky of his mind before fading anew. All of it feels bad, sour, like a kind of
mind poison
– every memory robed in rotten ribbon, a mummy’s gauze, dusty and cursed.

Then one image stays fixed in his mind: blueprints and blasting plans for Water Tunnel #3, a yellow notebook with scribbles sitting under his left hand, a cold Coors Light in his right, the can sweating–

Cassie walks into the room. He says, “Hey, lollipop–”

He hears a sound. A familiar voice. A familiar
roar
.

And then it’s all over.

 

The goblins hang on him like boat anchors. He doesn’t have time to care. Mookie runs. The Blue gives him speed. Puts power in his legs. The Pig churns ahead of him around the bend of the tunnel. Gobbos bite. Claw. He feels blood wet his shirt.

He leaps for the Pig. Grabs hold. Barely. Legs dragging behind him. Gobbo hanging off the legs.

The pig rounds the curve. There. Ahead Davey. Lying underneath the black thing, the reaper’s cloak, men leaping on top of the monster – the monster flinging them off like they’re straw-stuffed poppets.

They’re not Mookie.

The pig lurches forward–

Mookie clambers up over it, toward the front of the cart–

It crashes into the deadstop. Mookie uses the momentum to leap.

He tackles the shadow-thing. Goblins screeching behind him. One gob catches a shotgun blast to the dome – buckshot peels back its scalp like the skin of an orange. A Sandhog’s six-shooter punches a hole in the other.

Mookie wrestles with the reaper-cloak. He pulls it off Davey Morgan – but it has weight and energy like Mookie can’t believe and before he knows it the thing has him pinned. Bullets cut through the shadow and disappear inside it – the shadow-thing continues its assault unfazed. Knife fingers stick through Mookie’s breastbone like the flesh isn’t even there – he feels them cutting apart not his heart but rather, his soul –

Nora. Jess. Grampop. Pop. Worthless. Dumb. Bad Dad.
 

Ugly thoughts like tentacles reach up, coil around him, threaten to drag him down.

No
. No time for this.

He roars. Lifts his head. Opens his mouth.

And bites for one of the only exposed features he can find.

He bites off one of its shiny eyes. Spits it out.

Light shines through the hole – a bloom of illumination like a sunbeam through morning mist. And then the thing keens, a high-pitched tone before diving off Mookie and through the floor. Like a wraith without substance, its flesh unreal.

 

7

 

A union within a union. A guild within a guild. Local 147-and-a-half. The men of the Sandhogs know about it, though they’ve little idea what it actually is. They think it’s some manner of “inner circle” composed of veterans of the Sandhog life who help shape policy and who know all the tricks. They know tricks, yes. They know a great deal. They’re the ones who know what’s really down there. The night the Sandhog demolition crew blew a hole in prehistoric rock and opened up a cave into a forgotten gobbo temple, the men there on that crew were the first. The ones that lived formed the pact. They wrote the charter. In union speak, everyone there bought the buck. Any Sandhog who sees something he’s not supposed to see, they rope him in. Though some find themselves invited, too. Tested by the others. Strong, smart, tough, and a little deranged: these are the traits that those men need. These are the traits necessary to stand between the safety and sanctity of the world above and the named and unnamed monsters of the Great Below.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

The reaper-cloak gone, the gobbos dead, gun barrels swing toward Mookie.

Davey stands. Shaking. Flinty eyes casting about, trying to find a slippery grip on the world. The man – older now than Mookie is – looks rattled. He brushes it off, finally levels his stare at Mookie. “Mookie Pearl, as I live and breathe.”

“Davey Morgan.”

“Been a long fucking while, Pearl.”
Loooong fookin’ wall
.

“It has.”

Morgan shows his palms, lowers them – and as he does, the rest of the Sandhogs, a dozen or so men, lower their guns, axes, hammers.

“You bring these monsters to my doorstep?”

“Maybe. I dunno.”

Davey steps up to Mookie. His bushy caterpillar eyebrows arch. He clucks his tongue, then seems to make some internal decision.

Mookie knows it’s coming long before it hits – the old man telegraphs the punch so far in advance he might as well have sent message by way of an old limping donkey. Just the same, Mookie takes the hit. It’s owed to him.

But just to be sure, he growls:

“You get that one. But you won’t get a second.”

Davey cocks his fist back again.

The hand trembles.

Mookie gently shakes his head.
Don’t
.

Davey’s fist uncurls and he waves Mookie off. “Ain’t worth breaking my hand on your ugly underbitten jaw, Pearl.” He takes a bit of snuff from a Skor can, stuffs it between gum and lip. The other Sandhogs start to back away – they can sense the body language of their crew chief. They slowly move back to work, always keeping one eye on Mookie – a stranger in this place. “Fuck are you doin’ down here anyway?”

“On a job.”

“Listen to you.
Job
. This is a job, Pearl. The Sandhogs know the work.” Davey spits and the tobacco juice splashes against the gray back of a dead gobbo. “So, spill it. Whaddya looking for this time?”

“Looking for Death’s Head.”

Davey ill-stifles a bark of a laugh. “Right. You’re smarter than that. Or I thought you were – maybe I’ve been overestimating you all this time.”

“I know it’s a dead-end, but they told me to look so I’m looking.”

Suddenly, Davey switches tracks. “How’s the wife, the kid?”

Mookie knows what he’s doing. Davey’s sizing him up. Why, Mookie’s not sure. Maybe he really knows something.

“Been apart from the wife. Years now.”

“I think I remember hearing that. Your kid?”

“She’s fine.”

Davey smiles. “You’re lying. You got a bad tell, Pearl.” He taps his jaw. “You get tight right here. Muscles bunch up. Like the lie doesn’t want to come out and you have to
force
out of your mouth.”

“Fine. My daughter hates my guts.”

Another laugh from Davey. “Mine hates me, too. Cassie.”

“I remember her.” Their girls went to junior high together.

“Cassie’s a good kid. Wants to be a Hog.”

“They let women in now?”

“They do, at that. Oh, I scoffed at first too but some of these broads swing a hammer or hang wire-net better than a lot of the fat bastards that work on other crews. That fella over there–” Davey points to a Hog’s broad back in a reflective vest and slicker. “That’s no fella. That’s Honolulu. Samoan girl. Tireless worker. Doesn’t sleep.” Davey shrugs. “Just the same, Cassie can’t be a Sandhog. I won’t let her. It’s too crazy down here.”

As if for proof, he nudges a goblin corpse with a boot.

“You know what that thing was?” Mookie asked.

“The shadowy fucker? No. Never seen one. Came right for me, though.”

“It did.” Mookie sniffs. “Why’d it do that, you figure?”

“Fuck if I know.” Davey shifts from foot to foot, shoves his tongue in his cheek pocket. “What are you saying, Pearlie-boy?”

“I’m saying it went right over my head. Like it was coming for you.”

“You’re the one that brought this thing to my boys. Don’t go pointing fingers at me, ’less you want another jab to the chops–”

“What’d it come for, Davey?”

Davey’s hands curl into fists. “Fuck off, you asking me questions like that. Like I answer to you.”

“If they came once they’ll come again.”

“Let ’em come. I’ll be more ready next time.”

One of the Hogs behind Davey comes up. Mookie knows him from way back. Dutch, the radio guy. Not as old as Davey, but older than he was. Someone who’s been around. He sets a long-fingered hand on Davey’s shoulder and peers over a nose broken long ago by an errant pick-ax. Mookie hears the man mutter: “Just give it to him. Not doing us any good, is it?”

“Give me what?”

“I’m not giving it to this big bastard–” Davey, suddenly cagey, narrows his eyes and looks Mookie up and down. “Fine. You know what? Fuck it.”
Fook it
.

Davey fishes in his overalls underneath his slicker, withdraws something that looks like a little jeweled tea ball. Fake jewels. Just a trinket. Hangs on a small chain. He tosses it to Mookie. “I found a vein of it way down. About two years back one of my guys, Goosey, got taken down past the Shallows, into the Tangle. I went after him, found this in the wall of a dead-end passage, next to a thread of rose quartz. I didn’t think it was anything but…”

Mookie flips the cheap little latch.

Inside, powder the color of blood. Bright and fresh. Like something spilled out of a throat-slit calf and dried to a flaky dust.

Holy crow. “This is Vermilion?”

“Uh-huh. I can’t vouch for the other colors, but now we know that Red and Blue are the real deal. Oakes maybe got something right.”

If Red is real…

Then maybe Death’s Head is, too.

“How do you know? You try it?”

“Once,” Davey says. “And never again.”

“Bad?”

“Never been out of control like that before. Way beyond what the Blue does for you. They call it the Red Rage for a reason.” Davey shudders. “Felt like it… took something from me, too. Can’t say what. Years of my life, maybe. So, fine. Take it. You can carry that burden. I don’t want it anymore.”

Mookie looks down at the little ball of red powder before snapping it closed again. No idea what he’ll ever do with this or what good it will be. Barter, maybe. Not that he wants some Mole Man jacked up on the Red Rage, but if it gets him closer to the Death’s Head, so be it.

Davey says suddenly, “You could come back, you know. To the guild. To the 147 ½. Once a Hog, always a Hog. Turn yourself around. Get away from that crowd you work with. Do some good down here. I got a place on my crew. Young fella, West Indian, name of Jamie that we called Cheeto, he caught a mean burn on his legs from the lye in the concrete and he’s out for a good long while – and you know, a man a mile and all.”

Mookie shuts him down. “No. I’m good where I’m at.”

“Course you are.” Davey scowls. “Whatever. Fine. Go on out of here, then. We’ve got work to do.”

“Can I take the pig?”

“You could use the walk.”

Mookie growls. “Later, Morgan.”

“Fuck you,
Mikey
.”

 

Nora’s on her way to meet a Trogbody called Kortz – she doesn’t know him, but what she does know is that soon the shit is really going to hit the fan and that means she’s going to need someone to protect her. The Trogs are good at that. Loyal to a fault. Thick body, thick skull. Dumb as the rocks they’re made of, most times.

Reminds her of her father.

But then, as she’s crossing the street to hit the subway, the text comes in.

Nobody’s gonna b home come ovr <3
 

She smiles. Texts back:
No guards?
 

The reply:
No guards all clear
 

She texts back:

OMW
 

And then she is truly on her way.

 

It’s almost midnight when Mookie emerges, born out of the dark. Night in New York is never dark, not really; the sun may set, but the lights are always on. Traffic lights, streetlights, headlights, lights from many windows and many doors. All of it painting the sky in a rusty glow, an orange-brown smear that sometimes stands punctuated with pockets of other color – a blue wash from the tip of a skyscraper, a purple spotlight from some new club opening up. Muddy watercolors.

Even if all those lights went out, it’d still be brighter than the spaces beneath.

And so when Mookie once again rises into the world, he’s once more forced to narrow his eyes. Soon his brow hurts from squinting.

Sometimes he thinks: maybe I belong down there.

He knows he’s gotta call Casimir. Tell the kid something.

Should’ve never taken this job, Mookie thinks. Should’ve never told that kid I’d have a
look
.
Because even if the Red is real, the Purple probably ain’t. And if it
is
, Mookie’s no closer to finding it – which means the old man is going to die and this coltish kid is going to end up as Boss. Worse, he’s going to blame Mookie for failing him.

Damned in all directions.

All that sits in his gut like a ten-pound barbell. The Red, the Blue, the search for Death’s Hand, the changing of the guard. It’s all too much for Mookie. He looks at his phone – again that thought: you better call Casimir, get it over with – and then swiftly pockets it. He’ll call the kid later. For now, he cleaves to comfort: his stomach growls like a starving bear.

He’ll put off the call. Just for tonight.
Time to murder some food. Not literally. Not this time. To do that – to go select a hog (a real hog, not a Sandhog), he’s gotta take a trip out of the city to one of the farms. Maybe Butter Moon, where Charlie Predwick raises beautiful Berkshire hogs, or maybe Red Bridge Farm, where Maeby and Mark Cunningham have a pen of wild Mangalitsa – close enough to boar that the pork is wild, gamy, musky. For now, that’s not an option. He’s in the city and he’s got work to do, so he figures it’s off to see Karyn.

Karyn McClaskey – little hipster chick inked from wrists to neck to ankles. Butcher. The girl loves all parts of the pork, especially the strange parts. Ears and face-meats, guts and gonads. She’ll even cook the tail. Braise it in beer. Then bread it. Then fry it.

His stomach does happy somersaults just thinking about it.

Last time Mookie checked, she’s dating one of the Get-Em-Girls, too. Not his place to judge. (Though Karyn’s always picked the crazy girls.)

A trip to Karyn’s will be good. He needs something to distract him. He’s still riding the tail-end of the Blazes. Makes him feel buzzy and bee-stung. An antenna drawing in too much noise, not enough signal. When that dark shadow-thing attacked him, it poked holes inside him, holes he can’t seem to plug up, holes through which gush visions of Nora and Jess, images of cancer and shadow.

Mookie comes up out of a metal cellar door in a West side alley, and his phone suddenly goes full tilt like a juggled pinball machine. It buzzes and lights up once, twice, again and again.

He’s got ten new messages.

They’re all from Werth. The old goat has the patience of a coked-up mosquito.

Mookie sighs, then thumbs redial without listening to the messages.

“Fuck, Mook, where you been?” That’s how Werth answers.

“Downstairs. I got something. We thought it wasn’t real, but I got–”

“No time for that. Later. Something bad has happened.”

“What?”

“Someone murdered Casimir Zoladski.”