A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0024

Chapter 24

The van was almost full, and Johnson had not stopped smiling for the better part of an hour.

He stood with his back to the rotten water of the harbor and watched his brothers work, watched the line of them passing crates hand to hand out of the black mouth of the warehouse and up into the belly of the little van, and the smile sat on his face the way a thing sits that a man has forgotten he is holding. It was not a smile for anyone. It was the private, helpless grin of a man who has wanted one thing his whole life and is finally standing inside the moment of having it. Every crate that crossed the threshold and thudded against the floor of the cargo hold was money he had not spent, power he had not paid for, a future he had been promised and had stopped believing in somewhere around his twentieth year. Each one was full of the same thing, oiled and racked and wrapped in greased paper, the dull blue-black shine of steel that did not care who carried it or why. Pistols. Short rifles. The squared, ugly, beautiful shapes of submachine guns nested in straw like eggs. It was an arsenal, and it was theirs, and the only thing Johnson could not work out, the single splinter under the whole golden afternoon, was the price.

Each crate that crossed the threshold and slammed against the cargo floor was money he hadn’t spent, power he hadn’t bought, a future that had been promised to him and which he had stopped believing in around the age of twenty. Each one was filled with the same thing, lubricated, organized, and wrapped in greasy paper, the matte dark blue sheen of steel that didn’t care who carried it or why. Pistols. Short rifles. The square, ugly, and beautiful shapes of submachine guns nestled in straw like eggs. It was an arsenal, and it was theirs, and the only thing Johnson couldn’t understand, the only sliver beneath that golden afternoon, was the price.

He still did not know what idiot had been moving this much hardware for the cost of nothing.

That was the part that kept turning over in him while he watched the work, a small itch under all that satisfaction. The man on the other end of the deal had wanted it gone. Not sold, gone, the way you want a body gone, and he had named a number so low that Johnson had spent the first ten minutes of the meeting waiting for the trap to spring, for the laugh, for the second number that was the real one. The laugh never came. The number had been the number. He had walked away from the table that night certain he had robbed a fool, and the certainty had felt so good that he had not let himself examine it too closely, because a man does not turn over the stone in his own garden if he is afraid of what lives under it, and Johnson had decided, with the easy greed of a man who has finally caught a break, that he was not afraid of anything anymore. Some sucker out there had sold the future of an entire district for the price of a used car. That was the city now. The city was coming apart, and when a city comes apart, the smart men do not weep over the cracks. They reach into them.

He had picked his own piece first, the way a man claims the best cut before the meat ever reaches the table.

It rode now against his hip under the loose tail of his shirt, an Uzi, compact and patient and heavier than it looked, and he could feel the cold geometry of it against the skin above his belt every time he shifted his weight. He had not fired it yet. He did not need to. It was enough, for now, to carry the weight of it and to know that it was there, that it was waiting, that the only thing standing between this dead metal and a living purpose was his own hand coming up and his own finger closing, and that the moment he chose to bridge that distance the whole arithmetic of these streets would change. He thought about that bridge a great deal. He thought about it the way other men thought about women, or God, or money, a low constant heat at the back of everything. He was not a man who wanted territory. He had told himself for years that he wanted territory, that he wanted respect, that he wanted the corner and the cut and the name spoken carefully, but standing here in the salt and diesel stink of the worst slip in the worst part of the port, watching the guns go into the van, Johnson was honest with himself for one clean second and admitted that what he wanted, what he had always wanted, was the war itself. The thing the guns were for. Not the having. The using.

He thought a lot about that bridge. He thought about it like other men thought about women, about God, or about money: a low, constant heat at the core of everything. He wasn’t a man who craved territory. For years, he’d told himself he wanted territory, that he wanted respect, that he wanted the corner, the shortcut, and the name pronounced carefully, but there, standing in the smell of salt and diesel of the worst dock, in the worst part of the harbor, watching the cannons being loaded onto the van, Johnson was honest with himself for a second and admitted that what he wanted, what he’d always wanted, was war itself. The purpose of the cannons. Not to possess them. To use them.

His brothers worked, and the word in his head when he looked at them was exactly that one, brothers, and he meant it.

Twelve men, every one of them black, every one of them his, and that was not an accident and it was not small. The world out there had spent its whole long history teaching men like him that the hand on their shoulder belonged to someone who would sell them, and Johnson had built the one thing he had ever built well around the simple refusal of that lesson. They came up together or they did not come up. They watched each other’s backs because no one else on God’s earth was going to watch them, and if the war he wanted was coming, and it was coming, he wanted to walk into it shoulder to shoulder with the only men who had never once given him a reason to count his fingers after a handshake. He was, in his own way, a faithful man. He simply kept his faith in a small and bloody church.

And somewhere above him, in an office he had seen exactly twice, a man he answered to was waiting to hear that it was done.

That was the last piece of it, the thing that made the smile keep returning even when he told it to leave. He had been given a task, the first task that had ever felt like a test instead of an errand, and the task had been simple to say and impossible to do, get the guns, get all of them, get them quiet and get them cheap, and Johnson had done it. He had done it cleaner than anyone above him had any right to expect. He felt, standing there, the particular hunger of a loyal animal that has run down the thing its master pointed at and now waits, panting, for the hand to come down and the voice to say good, the recognition that would finally lift him out of the long gray middle of his life and set him somewhere that mattered. He had earned that. He could taste it. It tasted like the salt off the water and the oil off the crates, and he breathed it in and held it.

Then Tyrone slapped the side of the van and called out that it was done, and the spell of the afternoon broke.

“That’s the last of it, Johnson. We’re loaded.”

Johnson nodded and turned to send them rolling, and the turn was where the wrongness began, because his eyes did the arithmetic before his mind caught up to what it was counting. He had brought thirteen men down to this slip. He looked across the cooling, settling group of them now, the sweat-shined faces, the easy slouch of men who think the hard part is over, and his eyes ran the line the way they always ran a line, once, fast, an old habit from older days, and they came back short. He counted again, slower, touching each face with his gaze, and the second count agreed with the first and he did not like it any better for the agreement. Twelve. He had thirteen. He had twelve.

“Where’s Jeremias?”

The question went out into the slip and nobody answered it, and into the small silence that the question left behind came the sound that turned the whole afternoon over on its back.

It came from inside the warehouse, from the black behind the men, deep in the old structure they had emptied an hour ago. A flat, ringing impact, the sound of a body or a thing meeting metal hard, a container wall or a beam, a single struck note that hung in the dead air of the place. And under it, threaded through the dying ring of it, a second sound, worse than the first because it was alive. A muffled cry. The shape of a scream with something pressed over the mouth of it, a human voice trying to be a siren and being held down to a hum, the unmistakable sound of a man trying to be heard by people who are too close to save him.

The Uzi was in Johnson’s hands before he had decided to reach for it.

He had it up and leveled at the warehouse mouth and the safety was already gone, the bridge already crossed without any of the ceremony he had imagined for it, and he was aware, distantly, of the men around him scattering into a loose crouch, of hands going to waistbands, of the soft metallic chorus of his brothers arming themselves in the failing light. He counted them again because counting was the only thing his mind could do that felt like control. Twelve men, including himself. Twelve guns. One black mouth in the wall, and somewhere in the dark behind it, one of his own, screaming through a gag.

“What the hell is this?” His voice came out low and flat, the heat gone out of it, the smile a thing that had happened to some other man. “I thought you went through this place. I thought it was clean.”

Jamal answered, and there was a thinness in his voice that Johnson did not like. “We did, man. We turned it over before we loaded a single crate. Every container, every corner. There was nothing in there. There was nobody in there but us, the whole warehouse, I swear to God, it was empty.”

Johnson stared at the dark and the dark stared back, patient, and he believed Jamal, and that was the trouble. He believed his men had searched, and he believed the warehouse had been empty, and he believed, with a certainty that crawled up the back of his neck on small cold feet, that something was in there now anyway, and that it had wanted to be found, because a thing that did not want to be found did not make a man scream where his brothers could hear it.

“Yeah,” Johnson said softly. “Well. It ain’t what it looks like.”

He moved the barrel of the Uzi a few inches, a small economical gesture, and put it on Jamal.

“Go look.”

Jamal looked at him for a long second, and then he nodded, the way a man nods when he has understood that there is no version of the next minute where he gets to say no. He drew his own piece, an Uzi the twin of Johnson’s, and held it low across his body, and he stepped out of the loose ring of his brothers and walked toward the warehouse mouth with the slow, deliberate care of a man crossing ice. Johnson watched him go. Behind him, in the slip, the men were silent.

“Lights,” Johnson called over his shoulder to the men by the van, not loud, his eyes never leaving the dark that was swallowing Jamal one step at a time. “Get the lights on in there.”

There was a pause, the small busy sounds of someone working a switch, and then Tyrone’s voice came back, careful and confused. “Breaker’s dead, man. Whole panel’s out. It was fine an hour ago.”

Inside, Jamal heard it, and it was the sentence that took the last of the strength out of his legs.

He stopped between two of the old shipping containers, the flashlight from his free hand throwing a single pale cone across rust and cobweb and the long greasy floor, and he stood there and let Tyrone’s words settle into him and turn cold. They had used this warehouse for months. The breaker had never so much as flickered, not in the wet of winter, not in the heat, not once. It was the one reliable thing in a building where nothing else was reliable. And now, tonight, on the one night it mattered, the panel had gone dark by itself, and Jamal was not a superstitious man, Jamal prided himself on not being a superstitious man, but he stood in the cooling dark with his flashlight shaking very slightly in his hand and he understood, in the part of a person that knows things before the rest catches up, that nothing about this had broken on its own. Things did not break on their own. They were broken, by hands, for reasons, and he was standing inside the reason.

He found Jeremias around the side of the third container.

For a moment Jamal’s mind refused the shape of him, because the shape was wrong, folded in on itself against the corrugated steel in a way a sitting man does not fold. Then the cone of light steadied and the picture assembled itself and it was worse than the refusal. Jeremias was on the ground with his back against the metal and his wrists bound in front of him with what was not rope, what caught the light wrong, thin and copper-bright where the insulation had been stripped away, lengths of bare electrical wire twisted brutally tight around the skin until the hands beyond them had gone a swollen, lightless color. His feet were bare. Someone had taken his boots and his socks, and then put one of the socks back, balled and filthy, jammed into his mouth and held there by another twist of wire, so that the screaming Jamal had heard from the slip had only ever been able to come out as that muffled, drowning hum. The left side of his face was not a face anymore. It had swollen into a single smooth purple mass that had closed the eye entirely and pulled the mouth out of true around the gag. One of his legs lay turned out from the hip at an angle that legs do not turn, the foot pointing wrong, and Jeremias was not trying to stand, was plainly past the question of standing, and the one eye that still worked was open very wide and fixed and full of a thing Jamal had never seen in it before in all the years he had known the man.

His feet were bare. Someone had taken off his boots and socks, then put one of the socks back on, rolled up and filthy, stuffed into his mouth and held there by another twisted thread, so that the scream Jamal had heard from the slip could only come out as that muffled, suffocating buzz. The left side of his face was no longer a face. The eye had swollen, turning into a smooth, purple mass that completely covered it and distorted the mouth around the gag. One of his legs was turned outwards, at an angle where legs don’t turn, the foot pointing the wrong way, and Jeremiah wasn’t trying to get up, clearly unable to stand anymore, and the only eye that still worked was wide open, fixed and full of something Jamal had never seen before in all the years he had known the man.

“Jeremias.” Jamal dropped to a knee, the flashlight swinging, his own voice a hoarse whisper. “Brother. Oh God. Who did this to you? What happened?”

But Jeremias was not looking at him. The wide working eye was not on Jamal’s face at all. It had gone past him, over his shoulder, into the deeper dark behind, and it held there, and it would not move, and the meaning of where a dying man chooses to point his last attention is a meaning that needs no words.

Jamal felt it land on the back of his own neck like a change in the air.

It was the oldest fear there is, the one that has no name because it is older than names, the thing every animal carries from the first night it ever spent outside the circle of a fire. The dark behind you. The knowing, without seeing, without sound, that the dark behind you has a shape in it and the shape is looking at you. Jamal knelt there with his brother bleeding in front of him and he did not want to turn around, and the not wanting was itself the proof, because he understood with a child’s clean terror that the fear was only a fear so long as he did not look, that the instant he turned and confirmed it he would convert the dread into a fact he could not undo. For one long breath he stayed exactly as he was, frozen over Jeremias, and the only sound in the whole world was his own heart and the small wet hum of the man trying to warn him.

Then he stood, and he brought the Uzi around, and he thumbed the safety off, and he turned to face the shadows, because he was a man, and a man turns.

What stood in the dark behind him stopped the blood in his body.

It was a man, and it was too tall to be a man, taller than Jamal and Jamal was not a small man, well over six feet, narrow and still, dressed in a dark suit that fit it the way water fits a glass. The skin above the collar was pale, bloodless, almost luminous in the spill of the dropped flashlight, the white of something that does not go out in the sun because it does not go into the sun. It was simply standing there. It had been standing there, watching him kneel, watching him understand, and now that he had turned to face it, it looked at him with the unhurried attention of a thing that has all the time it could ever want, and the last clear thought Jamal had time to form was that he had been wrong, that the warehouse had not been empty when they searched it, that this had been here the whole time, inside the dark with them, choosing.

Jamal screamed and brought the gun up to fire, and the man moved, and the moving was the thing his mind could not hold.

There was no run-up to it, no shift of weight to warn him, nothing a body is supposed to do before it crosses distance. One instant the pale man was a still shape three meters off and the next it was inside Jamal’s reach, and a foot came up out of the dark in a flat hard arc and caught the gun hand at the wrist, and the Uzi tore loose and went spinning away into the black with the muzzle never having fired. The man did not stop. It rose off the floor entirely, turned in the air in a way that the eye refused, a full pivot of the whole body with the heel coming around at the height of Jamal’s head, and the impact took him under the jaw and shut his scream off in his own throat like a hand closing a tap. White light went through the inside of his skull. He felt himself coming apart at the knees. And still the man flowed, landing soundless and dropping at once into a low spin close to the ground, one leg sweeping out flat and fast, and it took both of Jamal’s legs out from under him at the ankle so that the floor came up and met the back of his head with a sound he felt more than heard, and the world tipped and rang and would not hold still.

He rose completely off the ground, spun in the air in a way the eyes refused to comprehend, a full-body rotation with his heel at Jamal’s head, and the impact struck him below the chin, muffling his scream in his own throat like a hand closing a tap. A white light shot through the inside of his skull. He felt his body shatter at the knees. And the man continued to flow, landing silently and immediately plunging into a low spin close to the ground, one leg extended swiftly and precisely, causing both of Jamal’s legs to give way beneath him, so that the ground rose and struck the back of his head with a sound he felt more than heard, and the world spun, resonated, and never stopped.

He tried to get up. There was a weight on him before he had finished the thought, a knee in his chest, the pale man crouched over him out of nowhere, close enough now that Jamal could see the face, and the face was smiling. White, even, perfect teeth in the dark. Not a sneer and not a grin. A small, satisfied, almost gentle smile, the smile of a man finishing a piece of work that pleases him. Jamal lifted his head off the concrete in one last animal effort, and the man’s arm came down, the point of the elbow dropping with the whole weight of that long body behind it, and it met Jamal above the temple, and the lights of him went out all at once.

The last thing he knew, going down into the black, was not a blow and not a sound.

It was the smile.