cunt toward enemy [s3e3] winner

Lazur crosses the tarmac to the private plane. The mansion burns into the red evening, but only the smoke reaches the runway. The concrete under his feet, a blend of pulverized sand and tar, seems to go on forever in the dark.

✦

The plane is an older model. Vintage lounge seating, facing each other.

“Where’s Rubicon?”

Greenwich doesn’t answer and he gets a gruesome feeling in his stomach. Has it finally ended? Just like that.

A large suitcase is rolled between them and chained to a chair. Stainless steel, with a hole in it.

✦

The periodic suction of a saliva ejector. The blink of diagnostic lights, an exploded auxiliary anatomy packed inside. The case is a closed system, except for the air hole, and even that passes through a filter.

He can’t sleep. When he opens his eyes, a man is sitting across from him, boots kicked up on the suitcase. White hair, but only in his 30s, or maybe even 20s. Pale skin contrasts the dark skinsuit. Lean as Lazur, but with better muscle definition. In the suits, so much is hidden, but so much revealed.

The agent’s gun overflows his holster, a marble-textured Deagle with a Zionist grip. His smile is white as his hair. He points to Lazur’s bleached strands. “Another survivor. But I got the all-over treatment.”

Besides the hair, he doesn’t look that unusual. A few pink scars across his face and neck. A lick of blue in those gray eyes. It is only at certain angles that the light brings out something overexposed and Jeff the Killer in his albedo.

He wipes his hand on his thigh and extends it to Lazur.

“Offwhite.”

The longer Lazur hesitates, the wider that smile gets. He shakes the neoprene hand, tasting what the other man’s gun feels. There is a smell of gunpowder, so the man must have been on the other team, or leading it, from his manner.

Offwhite says, “Want to see something?”

“Sure.”

Offwhite takes out a glossy photo and places it on the suitcase between them, covering the breathing hole. The photo swells and falls with respiration.

It shows a small concrete room, empty except for a person. Something doesn’t look right. The person is flat as the photograph. That entire wall is a screen, like those video advertisements they have in malls. The figure is too handsome and polished, he thinks of a model for luxury watches.

Rubicon before the explosion, the blond playboy with the flawless complexion and perfect teeth, clothes tailored for his straight spine and lithe physique. It is shocking to see him that way, like looking at a completely different person.

“This is his cell. He’ll be staring at that perfect body until he dies.”

✦

Greenwich corners Lazur in the lavatory where he’s pissing out a dark stream. His piss is so hot it heats the tiny room up.

She says, you met him.

Yeah.

She whispers, “Offwhite was one of Zhyber Valhalla’s mercenaries. He was stationed in my region.”

“Why is he here?”

“He knows Cal’s operation.”

“But it bothers you.”

Her hot breath fills the single-occupancy space, burning from the furnace of death inside her. “We’ve come too far. But don’t trust him.”

Lazur finishes pissing, but he can’t wash his hands because Greenwich is hunched over the sink. He looks over her shoulder and she’s jerking off. Part of her wants to stop, but it’s like public indecency when you’re blackout drunk. The adrenaline haze is still on them, a comforting nostalgia that reminds Lazur of when he was deployed, eating shitting sleeping together. When he got back, he enjoyed his privacy at first. But now he can’t be alone with his thoughts. He needs to become part of something else, the machine of her desire—

It only takes a finger to pull her army green tank top up around her shoulders like a harness. Nipples like shotgun slugs, he looks at them in the dirty mirror and it makes him hard. She stinks like gunpowder and enhanced interrogation. She reaches back and grabs his hair and their lips cross, black hair merging in the mirror, and she says, I don’t kiss. She puts her fingers in his mouth and he sucks the sweat of each time she pulled the trigger, hot as semen in his mouth.

“Hit me,” she says. “I can take it.”

He hesitates, thinking of his mother. Thinking about—

“What’s wrong? Can’t do it without your little nuclear football?”

He slams her face into the mirror and grinds into her cargo pants ass, rolling anal bone and back pocket bullets. She’s still regaining weight, but her estrogenized fat deposits are the softest thing he’s felt in a long time. Her drool runs down the mirror and a dark strand of precum connects her skinny brown cock to the black hole of the drain.

She twists, trying to face him, and he plants his combat boot on the toilet for traction and bangs her face back into the mirror and this time a trickle of blood comes with the saliva, aquiline nose bent even deeper, one nostril spurting, her tongue smeared across the dirty glass. Her cock shoots a black load into the sink, semen spilling like clotted blood and draining to the tail of the plane and evaporating into the sky and seeding the clouds and the rain is coming, always coming.

Lazur sits on the toilet and catches his breath, feeling his age under the adrenaline. His erection stabs inside the skinsuit, but it feels detached, a gun stuck between his legs, a knife warmed to body temperature.

Greenwich splashes her face, wiping it clean and tasting blood and enjoying it too much. She came away from that last fight wishing she’d been shot. Her veins are painfully taut. She needs leeches. Cumming is the next best thing.

“Thanks for having my back,” Lazur says suddenly. “It’s hard to, uh, know who I can trust.”

She lays her hand on his head. “You are my friend, Lazur.”

“Thank you. I…need one of those.”

“We were cast together on a tide of blood. But we will make it by the will of God.”

Tired smile. “I don’t really believe in that. Sorry.”

She turns and looks down at him, and he can see the caked blood in her nostrils. “If something very big is oppressing your mind, you need another big thing. Or it will consume you. You can’t fight it with your little logics, your therapies. It doesn’t matter if your truths are true, if they are too small.”

He slumps back on the toilet, arm across his eyes, aching in his balls and brain.

“Have you not felt evil heavy on your heart?”

“Every fucking day.”

“What is your heart?”

He hunches over, hand folded between his chest and knees, rubbing the aching thing inside. “I don’t…I don’t fucking…”

“You tell yourself you have these valves and this artery and your blood is red and you are growing old and PTSD has lowered your life expectancy by X years and what did those truths ever do for you?

You are afraid to trust. Because you learned how powerless you are. You need to check every detail and know you are safe. But you will never be safe. You are the mistletoe man.”

“Okay.”

“Are you living? Or worrying about living?”

“Worrying. Definitely worrying.”

“Some day, you will have to start living.”

“Yeah. I want that.”

“You need to feel it in your heart.”

“What do you feel?”

“I feel God in my heart, and God is what is big.”

They go to the galley section and squeeze into the corner, feeling safer in this tucked-away area, hidden from the windows and the night sky. They drink bottled water and eat oyster crackers, then she holds out a burning lighter and prays. A prayer from childhood.

My dreadful crimes have deadened my heart.
Please bring it to life.
I repent of my ills today.
I repent of my ills always.
If you cast me out, in whom will I take shelter?
If you repel me from your side, in whom shall I seek refuge?

Not the exact prayers of her god, but they convey the meaning like conductive wire. Lazur shuts his eyes and listens, calmed by her voice.

Deliver me through your mercy from the chastisement of the Fire,
the disgrace of shame when the good are set apart from the evil,
and forms are transformed, terrors terrify, the good-doers are brought near, the evildoers taken far, and every soul paid what it has earned.

✦

Carrion luggage. The suitcase thuds like a drum. His heart is inside, huge and diseased after all this fear. He feels so light without it.

The case says:
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY

He runs his hands across the smooth steel, coming to the rubber mouth of the air hole and the scent it breathes. Medicinal, filtered, just a trace of humidity. Boy humidifier. Cripple aerosol.

He wraps his legs around the case, squeezing tight. The hole is drooling and he unzips his suit, exposing his flesh to the stainless steel. We’ll see about that. His penis slips inside and the suction is incredible, motorized, relentless. He has to be careful not to press the garbage disposal button, he always hit it by mistake instead of the lights when he was coming downstairs for a glass of water and the grinding roar freaked him out for the rest of the night and his heart was so young and virginal then, he still slept normally and hadn’t been hooked up to the wires of the world and tortured by its electricity. He would masturbate to try to fall asleep and he is thrusting into the hole and it sucks wet and toothless but he can’t stop playing with the garbage disposal and the plane is rattling and the hole makes choking sounds, shrieking—

He wakes up, painfully hard. He looks around, then back at his crotch. Fortunately his penis is tucked downwards and his gun is laid across his lap.

Greenwich sits across from him, eyes shut. Lazur watches her for some time, then puts his hand over the suitcase’s air hole. The humidity tickles his palm and he recoils, heart pounding. He grips his gun and it tingles between his thighs. A flash hits his eyes, sharp as the pulverized glass that blew through his old workplace.

He shoots everyone on the plane, until he’s finally alone with the case. He sticks his gun into the hole and pulls the trigger and a backwash of blood chokes the barrel and splashes up his arm. The suitcase is a gurgling red fountain and it floods the aisles and he’s going to drown in the sky.

He shoots himself and falls on the case and his brains leak inside.

The irrational feeling passes. A last tremor of the chemical attack which infected his cardiac tissue.

He puts his hand on the case, hot and solid like an engine. This is real. A tangible piece knocked off the board. He is a materiel girl, and he is living in a materiel world.

✦

Greenwich grips her armrest, staring at the window. Nightclouds, glowing circuits of city lights, luminous planetary mold. She is thinking about the stainless steel mantrap. She stands up, needing to move freely, even if it’s an illusion on this metal cylinder suspended in the air, flying on auto-pilot, a missile with your choice of sparkling water or tomato juice.

An agent is watching an in-flight movie and everyone crowds around, drawn to the stimuli like moths of adrenaline. Someone connects their earbuds and maxes the volume, blasting the whole movie through two tiny pieces of plastic.

Let’s get this party started, the protagonist says in an extremely crunchy voice, shucking a shell from his gun. Fuck yeah, Lazur thinks. Let’s get this party started. What a great thing to say.

Tktktk turns into chkchkchk. The gun sounds so good. That man is carrying around a handful of loose parts. His gun is barely holding together!

Let’s get this party started, he says to Greenwich.

She smiles and grips the back of his head, digging into the aggro-soaked hair. He smiles too. Shit just got real, he says. What a cool thing to say.

Fuck yeah.

Let’s fucking go.

He sits on Rubicon’s bodycase and poses for the instant camera, which is old like the plane. The flash reminds him of a very different scenario. It feels so fucking good to win. He doesn’t know why he was so finicky about it before.

Something bangs into the plane and he falls off the case. The others rush to the windows and he watches them, paralyzed, trying to tell what’s going on from the sleek curvature of their spines. Some kind of sound is coming from their mouths but he can’t understand it.

He crawls up on a seat and the window is a skidmark of blood-soaked feathers. It flew into the engine, someone says. We got a fucking angel. Laughter.

✦

He returns to the suitcase. JG is there, inspecting the diagnostic panel. “We’re lucky we got the boy first.”

“Cal seems like more of a threat to me.”

“Oh, he’s a planner. But Rubicon is about as close as you can get to dying without being dead. He’s a shrine to violence. The lipstick loves him.”

“It seemed to love Cal pretty well.”

“Oh boy. You saw what a healthy man with Botox could do. That’s nothing. Cal’s a peashooter.” JG thumps the suitcase. “Now imagine what this little scar puppy is capable of.”

(the suitcase sits between them like a bomb. JG pats it gently, as if regretting his impulsive slap.)

“He could blow a hole in the sun.”

✦

Half an hour passes. JG has been sipping steadily from a little flask, and his smile is looser than usual. Lazur has to ask, “How did you get into this?”

“Oh, you know. Aptitude.”

“What did you mean about dry and wet universes?”

The smile disappears, but keeps trying to come back, nipping at the edges of JG’s mouth. “What if I told you this entire universe was a prison for something. And the God has left us behind.”

“Sure.”

“Maybe it believes if it tortures us badly enough, the God will do something. So a perfectly merciful being would have to eliminate all possibility of contacting it, or else it would be forced to listen to our prayers. So there’s no way out…”

“What do you mean, tortures us?”

“In the end, all it can do is watch. But not a lot of people can resist picking up a loaded gun.”

(between them, the filtered breathing of the suitcase)

“I thought there was a way out, once. Or maybe that was the way I came in. I’m not so sure anymore.

Someone made a four-way tunnel, like the shape of a cross. It was a shout that went four ways and we had just enough lipstick for it. But you should only go straight through, not left or right. And I can’t remember if I went the right way because time is so funny when you reach the middle.

We were destroyed and created in every moment of our being. Every shift of our glance. Little things we remembered might not be true the next second. The minutia of our lives changed like water. I saw her freckles like stars spinning through the sky. I’m sure I was confused. The air had something wrong with it.

I thought I could find it. But it wasn’t how I remember.

I want to try again. With the cosmetics department. If I can find the right words. The right place to stand. The one place in the universe…

Lazur says, am I dreaming?

✦

They land in a cold place. Military base surrounded by a glittering sea of ice, blue in the moonlight. Generators and prefab buildings surround a concrete structure. Greenwich draws on it with lipstick, a black sigil. She looks small against the clifflike base, snow sloping up in the dim light.

“This conceals us from the outside. As long as it is unbroken, Calendula cannot see or enter.”

✦

Lazur is drawn to a bonfire. Offwhite sits with his men, rotating a stick with something on it like burning Play-doh. He and his men look drunk, but there are no bottles. A sweet smell, like some kind of old lady dessert, mixed with other cloying nursing home smells. He needs to visit his mother.

Offwhite leans in to inhale. He’s burning C4 like s’mores over the fire. His men are C4-holed, laughing, or staring dead silent.

“Want some, technician?”

Lazur doesn’t particularly want to recreationally inhale plastic explosive fumes, but he doesn’t want to come off as a pussy, either. He takes a sniff and a squirrely nausea hits him. The ice starts to tilt, and the moon is the blinding headlight of a sinking car.

Offwhite tears off a wad of C4, chewing it like bubble gum. He offers Lazur a pinch.

“I’ve been trying to cut back.”

“Come on.”

“Nah…”

“Come on.”

Lazur walks away, so drunk on C4 he trips over a passed out agent, then nearly slips in their vomit. Laughter comes from the fire, distorted by the explosive fumes in his bloodstream.

✦

He comes to the edge of the base, a sheer drop into the frozen sea. The sky is deep cobalt and the snow is pale blue, the fairytale of a distant planet. A generator rattles nearby.

He unzips from the neck, spilling out his PTSD-corroded heart, the stale smell of trapped fear and unshot loads. The nasty high of the C4 becomes sweeter in the cool and purifying night air.

I’ve been taking such small breaths. I’ve been cheated out of every third drop of my blood. My chest is caved in and miserable. I’ve been living like shit for so long. I need something big to fill it up.

I’m a winner.

I’m a fucking winner.

An explosion of sparks and he jerks away, foot hitting the edge of the cliff with a crunch of ice, sleet spilling over. He sees the cables now, dark snakes amid the snow. A quickly-rigged electrical system, sustaining this corpse of a base. He walks between the prefab buildings and all he sees now is the exposed wiring and dripping condensation.

His heart won’t shut up.

Something is missing.

He thinks of the bird flying so free until it was sucked into a plane turbine, hit by something it couldn’t even comprehend. His fingers flutter across phantom wires: The bedroom of a future terrorist. Spokes spinning on a knocked-over wheelchair. Piss bursting under his boot. A mansion on fire. A cracked watch.

An old watch breaks, it shows the time it broke at. An LED breaks, the time dives under, waiting to resurface.

Crayons with bitemarks.

He takes a lipstick from his pocket and unscrews it and the heat is a gentle summer breeze, not the desert furnace he was expecting. He holds it up and moonlight fills the waxy teeth marks. He fumbles for another stick, checking that too. Bitten to a stub.

He sprints across the dim snow and the radiant heart of the base seems to be traveling away from him. Then he is in the light and the laughter, halogen lamps concentrated like showtime on the suitcase, gleaming steel and snap snap snap of the clasps and Rubicon’s body is folded inside, a teratoid fetus, baby cryptid limbs. An IV in his arm. Tubes in his mouth and nose and between his legs. Plastic explosives Barbie full of wires.

The boy looks so peaceful like this, drool coating his chin. Then he opens his eyes, blue irises stretched like rags over his pupils, and whites crusted with blood at the edges. He slips from the case, something pythonlike about the way he drapes across the ground. He grabs his feeding tube, but he doesn’t pull it out. He just stares.

Lazur comes closer and bumps into JG, who turns, a glint on his gold frames. “The man of the hour. Can I have a minute?”

Drymouthed and caught in the crush of rubbernecking agents gathered around Rubicon’s permanent car crash. “I…”

“That was really good work today. There was actually something I wanted to mention, if we could find somewhere more private. Something you need to know.”

Lazur grabs the man’s shoulder. Over it, he sees Rubicon push the feeding tube down his throat, that hyperskinny stomach heaving. Then, like siphoning gasoline, the tube pops out and the boy pukes black oil. The qatran spills through jagged teeth and the holes in his cheeks, and his lips are black, and his smile is black, and he opens his mouth and—

His mouth is full of pennies. Boiled rust stings his eyes. His lashes are hummingbirds.

There is a shadow on the wall. The outline of his body surrounded by blood. A alley cat caught in a red spotlight.

Hey, baby.

Blood blows from his nose in wet shivers, like a maned wolf trying to clear dirt from its snout.

That smell?

Now you know what I smelled.

When you ruined my life.

Lazur spits out a cervical mouthful of bloody mucus. Something hard is stuck in his throat and he tries to cough it out, but it catches like a thumbtack, and he is forced to swallow the tooth. Is it his, or the man he was talking to? He can’t tell himself apart from the vibrating continuum of gore that drips from every surface.

You know, Laz, if I didn’t know any better. I would think you were kind of fruity. The way guys are busting on your face.

He tries to speak but retches instead, saliva pink and hairy. Blood weeps down the wall, filling the outline of his body.

Oh, Laz. You silly bomb sniffing dog.

Amplified by the lipstick, every word is unbearable pressure in Lazur’s skull. Throaty, throbbing, raping his ears with tongues of blood.

I knew the only way I could catch you. Is with me.

“I knew. I knew.” Lazur repeats stupidly, as if he could still stop it, as if he could apply the solution and everything would snap back. Then the air in the room sucks back to Rubicon’s gleeful face spattered with red syrup and dark chocolate, and Lazur’s heartbeat is all he can hear.

He skids across the floor like a drunk ice skater on a rink of melting blood. He hits the door and falls through and the explosion kicks him into the snow, and everything is angels.

✦

He sees Offwhite laying behind a chunk of concrete, the white man dipped in red. At first he thinks the agent is dead, then he sees the lips moving, whispering terse codes into a satellite phone. A star winks in the sky.

The smoke blows itself into a ring around the base, cleared by a shout. The star goes out. The satellite phone stops working.

A rain of fireworks. They don’t fade, they get bigger. The debris of the satellite howls down, punching through the ice and sending up hissing jets of arctic sea. A cosmic burst of shrapnel, one of God’s grenades.

✦

Red emergency lights paint the melting ice, and Lazur can’t tell the water from blood. He spits out another mouthful of JG’s liquefied flesh, blinking against the salt and iron torturing his eyeballs.

Rubicon has to be dehydrated from eating the hot wax. Maybe it will kill him. Either way, that voice will stop leaping across the base. Just have to survive until then, find a place to hide, or run to the next strip of land before the connecting ice melts—

Lazur’s gun jerks in his holster and drags him toward the voice, his boots slipping on thaw, frictionless. He unstraps just before he gets pulled into the steaming pit at the center of the base, and his gun flies into the vapor.

Bullets spiral around the epicenter, clips lining up like dominoes, grenades like deathly fruit, plastic explosives like bars of rancid butter, and clear liquid like water trapped in the words, swirling like the formation of a new and hateful cosmos.

STOP HIDING

STOP HIDING

STOP

The universe explodes.

✦

He runs past smoking slabs of concrete. Agents lay on the ground, foaming like salted bondage slugs. One of them is still standing, a brown-haired woman in a gas mask, looking for someone, she finds them and unzips the suit, exposing a sweating chest with a dark bra. Then she falls over.

Lazur goes to her and she’s saying something but he can’t understand through the drool she’s choking on. He tries to clear her airway, then starts to feel a deep wrongness.

He staggers away from her, away from everything, clawing into the night. Every time the wind blows, he feels worse. The air smells like the nursing home, a certain room he passed where a life had ended and not yet been entirely sanitized. It smells like almonds over vomit and feces. And then he can barely smell anything.

Rubicon purrs through the fatal atmosphere. You know what you have to do, Laz.

You have to take your clothes off.

The skinsuit clings to him, sweaty and nightmarish, his limbs jerking out and forcing him to wrestle himself. He falls on his side, one arm crushed under him, the other yanking at the zipper until his chest is exposed, glistening with red light, and then he peels it down his convulsing legs.

He crawls through the rubble, trying to avoid the toxic chill of the wind. The skinsuit is stuck around his ankles and his shadow is so heavy. He comes to a body crushed under concrete and he thinks, this is me. I am looking at myself. I never got the suit off. But this agent wears a gun harness, or they did until Rubicon’s voice tried to rip it off. Meltwater flows over their face, washing away the blood and granting them a serenity denied the other corpses. The gun dangles, barrel trickling. It’s clean, he can touch it—

He reaches for the gun and his fingers spasm, vibrating in place. Tears fill his eyes and overflow. His throat is a skipping record trying to play oxygen.

The air is gone, one note jamming on his brain, Rubicon.