Apocalypse Now Now Read online

  There’s a low creak, the caravan door opens and Esmé appears in the doorway like an angelic vision. Well, an angelic vision wearing a polo neck.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Esmé says to Ronin. Her voice is slightly flat and mechanical and I wonder whether she’s been drugged.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say hoarsely. ‘We’re here to rescue you.’

  She laughs and flicks her hair back. ‘Do I look like I need rescuing, Baxter?’

  A blond guy with a mullet and wearing a stonewashed denim jacket over a polo neck comes from inside and stands next to her. Together they look like a double-page spread in an eighties fashion mag. Ronin points Warchild at the guy’s chest.

  ‘On your knees,’ the bounty hunter says.

  ‘Tell this idiot to put the gun away,’ Esmé says acidly.

  ‘Lovely lady,’ Ronin says. ‘I see why you like her. Now down on your knees, boy. Don’t make me fire a warning shot into your gut.’

  Esmé descends the steel steps that lead down from the caravan door and stands in front of me. I want to touch her but her eyes look through me. ‘Tell him to put the gun away,’ she says, spitting out each word.

  ‘Just put it away,’ I say to Ronin.

  Ronin looks at Esmé and then at mullet boy and then slides Warchild back into her scabbard. ‘No sudden moves,’ he says pointing a thick finger at Esmé’s companion.

  ‘You’re safe now,’ I say gently, reaching out to take Esmé’s hand. She jerks her hand back like I’ve burnt her with a cigarette.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I say. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been here,’ she says. ‘With Niels.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I say. My forehead is throbbing unpleasantly again. ‘Let’s just get out of here,’ I say. ‘I’ll take you back to your family and we can talk about this. It’s been so crazy. You won’t believe the shit I’ve –’

  ‘I’m staying here,’ she says firmly. She reaches over and kisses Niels, wrapping her fingers into his mullet and mashing her lips against his for several seconds before pulling away. ‘I’m staying here,’ she repeats. ‘With Niels.’

  Wait just a goddamn second. Of all the possible scenarios I imagined this playing out, being ousted from a relationship by a guy with a mullet wasn’t one of them. My brain refuses to accept what’s just happened. It gets stuck in a loop replaying the kiss I’ve just witnessed.

  ‘Why?’ I say dumbly.

  Her face curls with contempt. ‘Because of you, you fucking cretin.’ She pushes me on the chest. ‘You’re not a good person, Baxter.’ She pushes me again. ‘You’re self-involved and manipulative and oh-so interested in your little porn business. It’s pathetic.’

  ‘I thought you liked that I’m entrepreneurial,’ I whisper. Don’t you fucking cry, Zevcenko. Not here, not in front of Esmé and mullet boy.

  ‘You hurt people, Baxter. If I mention you to somebody, anybody, they’ve got a story about how you sold them out or how you got them to do something they didn’t want to do. How long before you hurt me?’

  ‘It’s part of the business,’ I croak, tears welling up in my eyes.

  ‘You sell porn, for Christ’s sake,’ she says.

  ‘Is it the porn?’ I say. ‘The Spider is a small start-up. We’re flexible, we can branch into other industries.’ Jesus, what am I saying? Someone stop me before I commit the Spider to selling Amway.

  ‘You’re not going to change,’ Esmé says. ‘You’re a horrible excuse for a human being, Baxter. Just accept it.’

  Tears squeeze out of the edge of my eyes and roll down my face. I’m not sure whether they’re because I’m heartbroken or because I’m furious at myself for being stupid enough to think I was ‘in love’.

  I put my hand into my pocket and pull out Tomas’s tooth. ‘What about this?’ I shout to her. ‘What about the fucking eye carved onto your wall?’

  ‘What eye?’ she says with a laugh. ‘Are you feeling OK, Baxter? Are you sure the stress isn’t getting you? I always thought you’d fucking crack and go postal. Has it finally happened?’

  I feel that dark wave of rage and anger rising. My brain pounds against my forehead like a kick drum. ‘Fuck you,’ I whisper.

  ‘Sorry?’ Esmé says with a laugh. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ I shout, walking toward them.

  ‘What are you going to do, Baxter?’ Esmé says gleefully. ‘Beat us up? Kill us?’

  I’m about to launch myself at them and their smug little smiles when a hand grabs my shoulder.

  ‘Come on, sparky,’ Ronin says. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  ‘Go with your little hobo crackhead friend,’ Esmé says.

  Ronin leads me back to the car and I slide in and slam the door.

  ‘Sorry, sparky,’ he says as he gets into the driver’s seat. ‘That was rough.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I say, trying to wipe away the tears that are pouring from my eyes. ‘What about the tooth?’ I repeat as he starts the car. ‘Tomas said that Mirth pulled it.’

  ‘If there’s anything I’ve learnt about the Hidden it’s that they’re oily, untrustworthy bastards. Our glowing friend would probably say anything to try to help himself.’

  Esmé puts her arm around her new lover and gives me a sarcastic little wave as we reverse. Mullet boy gives me the middle finger. I’m too tired to return it.

  ‘Doesn’t fucking make sense,’ I say.

  ‘Want to go and see the pythons?’ Ronin says as we drive through the park.

  I shrug. ‘Whatever.’

  Ronin pulls the car in next to a bamboo enclosure that has a sign saying ‘Snakes’ in neon yellow spray paint. Ronin gets out and then walks around to tap on my window. ‘Get out,’ he says. ‘We’re talking about this now. Leave it to linger and it’ll fester like a dirty sore.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I say. ‘I just want to go home.’

  ‘Get out,’ Ronin says.

  Lacking the ability to do anything but blindly obey, I open the door and walk into the enclosure with him.

  The guy in the dungarees is there with a bucket of dead vermin. There is a glass-fronted cage on one side of the enclosure. I can vaguely make out the shapes of snakes in one corner. ‘So you decided to come?’ the guy says, rubbing his throat.

  ‘You sold it so well we felt we couldn’t miss out,’ Ronin says.

  The guy grunts and walks to the back of the enclosure. Ronin fumbles around in his trench coat for a while and pulls out his wallet. He opens it, delicately slides a picture out with his fingertips and hands it to me. ‘Sue Severance,’ he says. ‘Smuggler, pirate and the love of my life.’ I look down at the picture. The woman in it is black with long dreadlocks tied back with a bright scarf. She is about forty years old, beautiful, but with a jagged scar that crosses her face. Her nose is slightly misshapen, like it has been broken more than once. She’s wearing a white low-cut vest and has a large tattoo of an anchor on her chest.

  ‘She’s pretty,’ I say.

  ‘Pretty fucking dangerous,’ he says with a laugh.

  ‘Do you still love her?’ I say. ‘Even though she tried to kill you?’

  He sighs. ‘Probably love her more because of it. I was a coward. I was terrified I would suck her down into the black hole with me.’

  ‘At least I don’t have to worry about that any more,’ I say bitterly.

  The dungaree guy appears in the cage. I peer through the glass and watch as he throws mice to the immobile snakes in the corner. They begin to move, slowly unwinding their bodies and sliding sluggishly toward the food.

  ‘You’ll bounce back,’ Ronin says.

  ‘Did you?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not really. But you’re young.’

  I shake my head. ‘I just don’t get it.’

  ‘Relationships don’t make sense,’ he says, punching me on the arm. ‘They’re like electronic goods with the instructions translat
ed from Chinese.’

  ‘You’re going to give me the relationship talk?’ I say.

  ‘Well, somebody clearly needs to,’ he says. ‘Didn’t your dad talk to you about this kinda shit?’

  ‘He tried,’ I say. ‘I resisted and he just gave up.’

  ‘Well, then he’s letting you play hopscotch in a minefield,’ Ronin says. ‘Relationships are about as easy to understand as particle physics – are they waves, are they particles? Hell, they’re both and trying to wrap your head around it will get you nowhere.’

  ‘Helpful,’ I say.

  ‘What I’m trying to say, smart-ass, is that you’re not exactly the first asshole in history to have his heart broken. This won’t be the last time either, although this one will always hurt a little, like a small bruise that never goes away.’

  ‘Right now it feels like a gaping wound from a nail gun.’

  ‘That passes eventually. What you need to do is get drunk. I know a place that’ll give you a hangover worse than any heartbreak.’

  ‘Can we stop at the Haven first?’ I say. ‘I want to ask Tomas why he lied. He seemed so genuine.’

  Ronin snorts. ‘That shiny hustler was just trying to save his own skin. But it’s not a bad idea. I can even provide the motivation for him to talk, if you want.’

  I barely notice us driving back to the Haven farm. All I can think of is Esmé sticking her tongue down another guy’s throat. If Niels is what I got dumped for, I clearly need to re-evaluate my self-image.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ Ronin says as we pull into the Haven’s driveway. He points to where a thin trail of translucent blood glimmers on the cobblestones. ‘You’re not going to listen if I say “stay here”, are you?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Well then, stay behind me,’ he says.

  The farmhouse door is a ruin of glass and wood splinters. Ronin keeps the shotgun in front of him as we step carefully into the house. The old battered kettle is upturned and chairs have been smashed. A long jagged rip is slashed into the wall, and there’s blood, red blood; a small pool on the floor and a smear across the pink wallpaper. ‘Fuck,’ Ronin says.

  Tomas’s room is untouched. Perhaps he was downstairs with Pat or perhaps he just didn’t offer the attackers any resistance. We walk downstairs and out to the barn. The doors have been ripped apart and are standing open like a gaping mouth.

  Inside, Pat’s menagerie has been destroyed. Toni Montana is lying on the floor with his head twisted at an unnatural angle. The Nevri, one of its heads ripped from its body, is wriggling limply in the corner. ‘Sleepytime,’ the remaining head hisses. The tokoloshe runs from underneath the table and latches onto my leg. It begins to hump it manically. ‘Fukfukfuk,’ it shouts, pumping its hips into my jeans. I shake my leg but that only seems to make it grip onto me harder. I have to resort to kicking the little horned maniac across the room. It hits a wall hard and then gets up and begins to hump a chair leg.

  ‘Shit,’ Ronin says, kicking one of the cages. ‘I’m a goddamn idiot. I shouldn’t have left them here alone.’

  ‘Klipspringer,’ I say, suddenly remembering the bok-boy. I run out the barn and into the alley between the buildings. Klipspringer’s door is open.

  ‘Bok-boy!’ I call. ‘Hey, Klipspringer!’ There’s no answer.

  Dread crawls over my stomach like a thick grey leech. Surely they wouldn’t have killed that little punk? I look into his room. It’s dark and I can’t see anybody through the mass of junk.

  ‘Hey, bok-boy!’ I call.

  ‘Wherethoseuglythingsgo?’ Klipspringer says, peeking his head out from behind a castle made of ice-cream sticks.

  ‘You dumb-ass,’ I say, clutching my heart. ‘You almost gave me a goddamn heart attack.’

  ‘Ha,’ Klipspringer says, jumping up. ‘Those ugly birdbirds are too dumb to catch Klipspringer.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, grabbing him and putting an arm around his shoulders, ‘they are.’

  ‘Let go, Big One,’ Klipspringer says, unconvincingly trying to shrug my arm off. He’s shivering and there’s a wild, terrified look in his eyes. ‘You going to find the nice PatPat and the glowing man?’ he asks plaintively.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yeah, we are.’

  ‘You’re not,’ Ronin says from the doorway. ‘You’ve found your girlfriend. Go home and forget all this shit exists. That’s what I would do if I could.’

  He’s right. My mission is complete. I found Esmé and she hates me. More than that, she’s right about me. I’m not a good person. I realise that now. I manipulate people. I use people and I hurt people. Like Mikey Markowitz and NPCs like Courtney Adams. Like Esmé.

  MetroBax: It’s true. We only do things if they benefit us.

  BizBax: And the problem with that is …?

  MetroBax: Pat doesn’t deserve this.

  BizBax: Let’s face it, nobody really deserves to be Crow meat. That’s just how it happens sometimes. Seriously, there are easier ways to assuage your middle-class guilt. Like stopping pirating music. Or recycling.

  MetroBax: We feel things now. There’s no going back. We’re going to help Ronin find Pat.

  BizBax: All I wanted was to be the adolescent porn king of South Africa. Was that really too much to ask?

  ‘Please get her back, Big One,’ Klipspringer says to me. ‘You have to.’

  ‘You need help, Ronin, you don’t even know where they are,’ I say.

  He grimaces. He knows I’m right. With Tone gone he doesn’t have anyone he can call. He could go tearing through the supernatural underworld but it probably wouldn’t do much good. He’s on his own and I’m all he has. I’m going to do the right thing, whatever that’s worth.

  ‘Can you help?’ he says finally. ‘Do what you did at the Flesh Palace?’

  It’s a good question. That thing I did back at the Palace was only because a giant Crow was choking the life out of me. I’m not really sure I can repeat it.

  ‘Can you control it?’ Ronin says.

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t even know what it is.’

  Ronin walks into Klipspringer’s room and clears a bunch of action figures from an old wooden chest and sits on it. ‘OK, let me tell you about magic,’ he says. ‘It’s none of this New Age bullshit. No positive thinking and create your own reality and Law of Vibration or whatever.’

  He holds two fingers out like he’s holding a gun. ‘If you want to alter the stubborn, belligerent fucking bastard of physics, you have to punch it in the face, put its nipples in a clamp and then twist until it agrees to your demands.’ He arches an eyebrow and a flame curls from his outstretched fingers. ‘Magic is S&M without a safe-word,’ he says. ‘All that Kabbalah, mysticism, Daoism, mantra, tantra, yantra are all just elaborate ways of forcing the world to conform to your motherfucking bad-ass intentions.’ He looks at me intently. ‘Try.’

  I nod and close my eyes. It’s my intention to see where Pat is. How would I focus on that? I picture typing it into the search bar in the browser of my mind. My forehead begins to throb. OK, that’s something. But I need to focus more. I picture myself floating up and out of my body like I did in the Flesh Palace. I slowly begin to feel myself sliding out. Not easily this time, more like I’m trying to squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out.

  I begin to rise and see Ronin and Klipspringer looking at my stationary form. OK, good. It all seems to be going OK. I look around but there’s no girl to guide me. I try to focus my attention on Pat. I picture her old, kindly face framed by her jangling earrings. My forehead begins to throb harder. I hold the image in my mind and let the rest of my attention drift. There’s a quick flash, an image of something, but I’m not sure what.

  I refocus my attention. There’s another flash. It’s the attic in the Haven. I see Pat talking to Tomas. She touches his shoulder and then bends down to affix a bracelet around his ankle. She lifts a small GPS unit from the bed and turns it on and then smiles at Tomas. The vision fractures and light pours in from all
directions. I try to open my eyes but they’re stuck together. I scream and clutch at my forehead as something begins to gnaw hungrily through my brain.

  The magistrate and I are going to have a baby. He is a kind man, not handsome, but kind to me. I understand that we can’t be married. In this world I’m a servant and he is the master. I hope that my father would understand. It has been two years since I’ve come here and the magistrate’s affections have been difficult to ignore. He gives me presents and makes sure I’m treated well.

  ‘You are a pretty girl,’ he says to me. He runs a scarred hand through his grey hair. ‘Have you had any more dreams?’ he says with a smile. I shake my head. ‘Ah, what a pity,’ he says touching my face. ‘I’m something of a student of dreams and yours seem so interesting.’ I’ve never told him any of my dreams but he seems insistent that I have them.

  ‘You’re going to have my child,’ he says with a smile and touches my growing belly. ‘A child that will have the blood of a Siener in it. I hoped to learn more about your people and their gifts.’

  I smile and try to look dumb. ‘I can’t do what my uncle and father could do,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, come, child,’ he says. ‘You’re being modest. Perhaps if I tell you my secret, you’ll tell me yours? Come.’

  He turns to walk down the long corridor that runs down the middle of the house. I follow him. We enter his study and he turns to lock the door behind us. The room is sparse and simple. I have never been in here but I expected it to be more impressive; something that befits an important man like the magistrate. It doesn’t look like he spends much time here.

  He doesn’t sit down but rather bends over to pull open a cellar door that is set into the floor. He smiles at me. ‘After you,’ he says, gesturing toward the stone steps that descend into the darkness.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I say.

  ‘To my secret,’ he says.

  I step forward and he hands me a candle – the flame sputtering and flickering like my heart. I step down into the darkness, holding the candle in front of me like a charm against evil. I can feel the magistrate close behind me.