When the Pumpkin Spice Comes Out

She was a damn near perfect avatar of Judy Collins, wise eyes and long gray hair. “You can escape, if you break into a Kentucky Starbucks at midnight after the pumpkin spice comes out.”

The human sacrifice part seemed…excessive. But student loan and other assorted debt kept its boot on my neck, what with me having achieved a doctoral degree in post-modern American folk culture. I piled that shit higher and deeper than anyone else, and ever since I’d run right into the razor wire wall of late capitalism. I wasn’t making it another year if I didn’t take drastic action. Maybe the world had me bleeding but I wasn’t going to stand to be bled out. Fuck all you, I wasn’t laying down to die.

Some smelly self-styled wizard of indeterminate gender sitting under a bridge spanning the Nolichucky River once told me magic was just not seeing what you were told was there. And they spoke truth. The laws of physics were clear: that little midget football cheerleader should not have fit in the grinder, even as industrial sized as it was. (The grinder, not the cheerleader.) She came out dry flakes, ready for steaming. Smelled a little like strawberry plastic.

Once I ejaculated on the cappuccino machine three times in thirty minutes, the control panel just shimmered away. Like the Judy Collins avatar promised, there glowed the blue brew button of salvation.

I brewed up the cheerleader and steamed up some breast milk --which hadn’t been so hard to find as I figured on -- closed my eyes, and threw it back from a demitasse cup.

Suddenly the air was sweet in my throat. When I opened my eyes it was to the perfect partly cloudy sky. I heard acoustic banjos and crows calling, and everyone I saw almost smiled, probably cause all their pants were perfectly cuffed.

“Hey,” said a girl who offered me a vape that smelled like hash, holy shit, actual hash oil. “You escaped.”

Reader, it’s true. I escaped.

I slept that night with the nameless hash girl in a village garret, the moonlight streaming past an eight pointed star window that didn’t mean nothing unless I decided it. I’d made my heaven, and forever more I slept like the righteous and the blameless. And you can join me if you sacrifice a representative of gross consumer culture in a Kentucky Starbucks after the pumpkin spice comes out.

***

BUY ME A COFFEE

Big Nick

Big Nick got no answer: not when he knocked, not when he shouted, not when he tried the door. He kicked it in. The wood shattered, so satisfying. Dogs tied behind the barn barked, then went quiet. The only sound was the Harley engine, ticking away heat.

Yesterday word came that Papaw was dying. The gang rallied round, Don saying, “Ain’t no way you go alone.”

He’d saved Don in the pen. Since then they weren’t hardly more than 10 feet away from each other all the time, but no.

“My shitshow, brother.” Don didn’t need to know him as Little Nick. Didn’t need to know about the childhood that broke him.

The whole house seemed empty. The dining room especially. No matter how many times it didn’t help, he’d always climbed under that table to hide. He was a kid, a brain-damaged kid. The lesions on the MRI got his sentence reduced.

He kicked the chairs out of the way, got on his hands and knees and went under that table for one last time. The rug under the table stunk of piss and mold. Maybe it would help, being under there as unstoppable, unpredictable monster Big Nick. Something sharp caught his shoulder, ripped at his vest. He rolled over on his back to see what it was.

It was a rib cage, heavy-duty stapled to the bottom of the table. Not man-sized. Not baby-sized. Something in the middle. Naked bones, how long had they been there? How had he never noticed them, sitting at dinner and kicking his feet, sneering, refusing food because he wasn’t gonna just sit there and wait for the beating. Fuck you, old man, Ima push you to it, not wait for it.

He reached up and snapped off one of the ribs.

“Who’s there?”

It was Mom standing in the dining room doorway. Weird, looking up again at her for the first time in twenty years. He crawled out and stood up and she had to crane her neck.

“It’s me.” That’s all he could get out of a tight throat. His free hand, the one without the bone, kept flexing in and out of a fist. His brain understood she was just as powerless as Little Nick, and his heart forgave her long ago. But his body, it wanted to snap her neck like she was the enemy. His body wanted to count her twitches as she died.

“Whose bones are those?” He didn’t even think about it before asking, like the question hijacked his voice. “Under the table, whose bones?”

Mom’s eyes went wide. She looked exactly like she had when the state came to take him. Same hair. Same eyes. Same smooth face. Same dress.

Same muteness, too. She covered her stomach with her hands, and hunched.

“My brother?”

She shook her head, that same hacked short haircut standing up on end like she’d been struck by lightning.

“My sister?”

Another head shake, huge eyes looking at him, pleading.

The cramp hit his gut like a truck. His perspective changed from taller than Mom to everything bigger than he was again. Dizziness tossed him and he was staring at the rug under the table, the braided rags in shadow, and there was dripping. Drip, drip, drip. Blood dripping onto the rug.

Then he was back in his right mind, Mom collapsed on the floor. His voice sounded like his own, deep and cigarette raspy, but her body didn’t seem far enough down there on the floor, like he wasn’t his Big Nick height. “Where is he?”

Mom rolled her eyes up at the ceiling, one hand over her mouth as if she couldn’t make a sound or didn’t dare.

Two at a time he took the stairs, skidded to a stop when he ran into a wall of that smell. He’d blocked out that smell: kind of like aftershave but also like burning garbage. When he pushed open the door to Papaw’s study, he had to reach up for the knob.

Papaw stood in the center of a circle drawn in chalk on the floorboards. He was nineteen feet tall. His teeth were still yellow. Nick’s brain did the math: Pawpaw fought in the second world war, he didn’t have twenty more years left in him when the state took Nick away. Yellow teeth, no hair, no clothes, rigid hard on, all like he remembered. 

“Don’t know how you got away, boy, but I finally called you back.”

Little Nick screamed. He opened his jaw and filled his lungs and screamed, screamed, screamed, but then Don whispered in his head. “Come on, man, what’d we make you into?”

Don who’d always had his back in the federal pen, and Bailor who’d picked him up off the street after he ran away from foster home five. He’d lived with Bailor for nineteen years. Bailor in a wheelchair now, Sheila still with him but gone from tired and used up to gray and gristle. Kyle who taught him how to knife fight. Steve Q. who taught him how to run shakedowns on drug dens and hooker houses, how to beat the unwilling with wet towels cause it left no marks.

“We made you a badass,” Don whispered.

Big Nick stood. He unfolded all the way, until Papaw had to twist his neck to look up. Big Nick pulled out his pecker and peed on the circle marked on the floor, washing the chalk away.

Papaw said nothing as his jaw hung lower and his eyes got wider.

“You maybe didn’t know everything about everything, like you thought.” Nick stepped across the broken circle, grabbed Papaw by his neck, and stabbed him in the throat, in the liver, in the lungs, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam, with the broken rib.

***

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Dragon Lustre

Third crime scene without bodies. Just arterial spray and the same iridescent flakes.

“Dragon lustre. Byproduct of invisibility.”

Abby looked at the stranger crouched beside her. She thought of the witness who said they saw bodies jerking into the air and cracking like eggs. “How you catch a murder suspect that’s a dragon?”

The stranger smiled, big white teeth. “You don’t catch a dragon, you kill it. With me.” 

She took a card from inside her coat and gave it to Abby: Claudine Breakthorn, special advisor to the National Security Agency.

Abby stood up and right in front of her called in to confirm the credentials were authentic. They were. She showed Claudine Breakthorn, special advisor to the National Security Agency, her detective shield, and was unexpectedly charmed when she called and confirmed its authenticity. Right in front of her. At her own goddamned crime scene, CSI techs circling impatiently. 

“Let’s go dragon hunting then,” Abby snapped off her latex gloves. “Definitely need a drink for this.”

Halfway to the car, Abby’s partner Jake hollered, “Hey where we going?”

Abby didn’t look back. “Get a ride with a black and white.”

Behind the wheel she said, “I hate that guy.”

“He doesn’t look like he’s particularly enamored of you, either.”

“Nobody particularly is.”

***

“Don’t get ice. It isn’t always safe.”

“Good tip.”

They sat in the dingy shadows of the back corner booth, where a UV sweep would find urine and fluids but sure as shit no detergent or tonic water.

“The world,” Claudine said, “is much more horrible than you know.”

Abby had pulled dead children out of drainage pipes. She’d dressed in a Hazmat suit to sort body parts found in a basement. “Dragons.”

“Dragons are just one of the secret bad things.”

“And they eat people.”

“All of the secret bad things eat people. And we only call them dragons because we don’t have a more accessible term.”

For whatever reason, that statement made the whole thing eerily more believable. Abby took a long, thoughtful drink.

“How long this been going on?”

“Twelve years, seven months, six days.”

She sounded so tired. “How long you been hunting dragons?”

“Sixteen days, twenty hours, and –” Claudine consulted her watch – “fifty three minutes.”

“A newbie.”

Now Claudine drank, long and deep. “You only get one shot at it.”

Back on the street it had started to snow. Ridiculously huge flakes floating down, no wind. Back behind the wheel, Abby asked, “So how do we do this dragon hunting shit?”

“With bait.” Claudine lunged across the front seat to stab a hypodermic needle into Abby’s neck. She got in a glancing closed fist punch on the other woman’s chin before consciousness spun away.

***

It came back slowly, and blurry. She was outside. The air smelled fresh. But she smelled funny.

“I know it stinks, sorry.”

Claudine’s voice came from behind her. Abby cracked her eyes open. Her left wrist and her left ankle were cuffed to a sign post. She looked up to read chin up station, stick figure hanging. Claudine had taken her to the Orange Way jogging trail, fifteen miles away from the bar. It was twilight. Hours had passed. 

Something cold and slimy dripped from Abby’s hair to her neck. “What the fuck is that?”

“Used fry grease from McDonalds. Dragons cannot resist it.” 

Abby heard steps and Claudine hunched down in front of her. She blinked back tears. “I’m so fucking scared.” 

Abby didn’t comprehend any of this, just stared.

Claudine kissed her, hard and quick, her hands clenching Abby’s jacket, lips clinging. Then she pulled away, breathed deep and retreated to the tree line. She started to undress.  

Abby heard a whooshing sound. She looked around and up, straight at the moon. Snowflakes swirled unnaturally, twenty feet away and thirty feet up. She looked at Claudine, who was now naked. A barely healed surgical wound ran from her clavicle to her pelvis, almost like an autopsy incision.

Another whoosh, much closer, displacing more falling snow. Abby heard a deep growl that rattled in her breastbone, caught a whiff of something so much more putrid than fry grease.

With a wild scream Claudine took a running leap. She launched herself into the empty air. Abby heard a flesh-on-flesh impact. Claudine hung suspended for a moment, then lurched wildly. She clenched her jaw, and exploded.

The pressure wave hit Abby square in the chest, knocked her back, pushing her to the limits of the cuffs. Her shoulder and hip sockets caught fire and her elbow dislocated. Viscera came down harder than the snow, steaming smears of red and white and green and yellow. She screamed and screamed until she finally realized she was the only noise in the park. Her ears rang and she luminesced. The trail stones, the grass, the leaves on the closest trees – they all glowed.

She heard running booted feet. A strange man in an environmental suit spoke to her through his respirator. “We’re going to need to know everything you know.”

“Dragon lustre,” she said, her voice hoarse from screaming. “A byproduct of invisibility. You’re going to turn me into a bad thing IED, too.”

“Yes, yes we are.”

***

BUY ME A COFFEE

Steal Your Soul Out of Your Anus

"I collect modern lore." She licks salt from around the rim of a plastic margarita glass. The stem is a multi-colored cactus. "Like if you boop Ryan Reynolds, he smiles, then his front teeth become leprechaun soccer players who steal your soul right out of your anus."

In the taxi, I chewed up one of those canary-colored pills Major Bluesky gave me as a come-on (call me for more any time) so I am not sure if she said that, or if I hallucinated it. I raise my eyebrows.

“He has to be wearing his glasses, though, or it doesn’t work.”

No hallucination. Wow. “If I boop you, what will you steal right out of my anus?”

She giggles. “You don’t have an anus. See?”

And right there in the gallery, she whips up my kilt and uses the mirror app on her phone to show me that holy shit I am all smooth skin and a dusting of hair back there. I prod with my fingers and no, that’s a hallucination. I still have an anus.

“That’s not even funny.”

She grins. “I’m fucking laughing.”

Nobody in the gallery has reacted to my lower nudity, or the exploration of my bum. In fact, their mouths are moving but all I can hear is the shuffle of heels on marble and the swirl of liquor in plastic glasses. The lights go all wonky and blink at me in a pattern I can’t decode, like a planchette rolling drunk around a blank Ouija board.

“You wanna do something fun?” The girl is licking the rim of her margarita glass but the salt is gone and the edge has gone sharp. Blood rolls across her lips. “I can make my skin all melt off.”

Very loudly I exclaim “I am not having fun anymore” like Major Bluesky told me to in case the trip goes bad. I leave the bleeding girl and aim for the bathroom, but the silent crowd suddenly squares up like a marching band, all facing me down. Their eyes are closed and they seem to be chewing. I can hear wet squishy sounds and I realize they are all dropping blood on the floor and nobody has a thumb on their left hand. They pinwheel in perfect time to reveal Ryan Reynolds smiling at me. He is wearing his glasses.

I clench my anus.

***

BUY ME A COFFEE

Ferine & Slyborg

For an old-fashioned iron key -- no jewels, no secret runes, just rust -- Ferine had almost lost her head. Scythe traps weren’t standard issue security for the Antiquities Guild, so the key had to be something special. Probably worth more than she was being paid to steal it. She tucked into a simple salto and landed square in the alley behind the Guild museum. 

She sensed she wasn’t alone in the alley two breaths before the shadow stretched down the broken bricks. Unnaturally flat head, six segmented tails ending in hooked barbs. Fuck.

“You’ll have to out–bid my buyer,” she called into the now-undead darkness. “What will you give me for it?”

The six tails flicked. Dust sifted from the walls around them. An echoing rumble of a voice said, “Imperator does not bargain.” 

If she ran backwards, she’d run into a seven foot chain-link fence. She might not climb it faster than whatever Imperator called up could reach her. Up was a bigger chance. Could she make the leap from atop the dumpster to the ornamental railing two stories up? Assuming it wasn’t rusted to shit? 

What the hell did that key unlock that the back-breaker of the undead would come into real time to steal it from her?

“Waste of time, Shadow King.” It was flattery: he styled himself with that title. But she wasn’t above flattery. She was above nothing, if it helped her survive. “I’ll just end up stealing it back, and you’ll feel bad about yourself. Think of your self-esteem.”

“Trust me, she can wound your pride.”

Ferine didn’t turn, didn’t need to. She’d recognize that voice in a football arena, a howling wolf pack, anywhere. “I told you, we aren’t partners anymore.”

Slyborg chuckled. “You tell me that six or seven times a month. Up and over?”

Ferine walked back slowly until her shoulder touched the cold, hard exoskeleton. Slyborg’s hands closed around her waist. She crouched for the vault.

Imperator’s tails flicked one after another, like a piano glissando. A silvery mist rose up from the pavement. A sickly white hand breached the mist. Then another. And another. 

A dexcanthrus. Imperator had summoned a dexcanthrus. 

“Oh man,” whispered Slyborg.

“Fuck me.”

“Later, baby.”

Ferine jumped into Slyborg’s throw, slinging her body back towards the chain link fence. She closed her fists on the jagged top, the razor wire pricking through her gloves, and threw herself sideways. The sickly white hand on the toad-tongue arm missed her by inches. The unwashed sock smell broke in raindrops over her, blurring her vision it was so strong. 

She landed on the other side of the fence, in the courtyard of the museum’s receiving area. She didn’t land square, rolling backwards three revolutions before she got her feet under her. Crouched low on the pavement she watched the motion in the air glittering like snowflakes, her synesthesia allowing her to track Slyborg even when he cloaked. The dexcanthrus grabbed the fence in six places and wrenched it up. Slyborg screamed. The cloaking held. She didn’t see him, just his blood spraying into the air and splattering against the brick wall.

Ferine unleashed her senses, let it all come rushing at her. The blood squealed like high peals of trumpets. She heard Slyborg spinning through the air, ice breaking. She leaped to where she sensed he would hit. The dead weight of his body slamming into hers tasted like ashes.

Slyborg uncloaked. He had razor-wire slashes across his legs. The exoskeleton had shattered on his left thigh, way too close to the femoral.

“Slow that thing down!” Ferine got her hands under his armpits and started tugging.

Energy crackled uncertainly across Slyborg’s chest, then solidified in his hands and he threw hot bolts like lightning. The alley lit up blinding white. 

Ferine turned her head, closed her eyes, let her other senses guide her. She set her feet and pulled, wrenching Slyborg’s body and that goddamn exoskeleton. It was supposed to be weightless. He was so full of shit.

“I’ll hold it off as long as I can.” There was a wheeze in Slyborg’s voice. “Just go.”

Ferine kicked open the warehouse mandoor. “Crawl, you bastard.”

Slyborg pulled himself across the threshold, leaking blood onto the concrete. Ferine blocked him from the dexcanthrus as it climbed the ruined fence, a dozen arms and hands wheeling around a clenched fist of flesh, pulsing in time with its circulation and respiration. 

Calling up a goddamn dexcanthrus for that crap key? It had to be worth a thousand times more than she was being paid.

She took both disruptor grenades from her belt. It was all the firepower she had. She wasn’t planning on a street fight with an undead assassination construct. This was supposed to be a simple smash and grab.

She whirled and flung the grenades, diving into the warehouse door a half-second too late. The shock waves hit her legs, pain rocking her like cymbals, her scream tasting like blood in her mouth.

Slyborg was on his feet somehow, but toppled on her when he tried to help her up. Her leg muscles were still convulsing. 

“Get on.” He rolled onto his stomach. She latched her arms around his shoulders. 

He fired the jets in his ankles. The damage to the exoskeleton must’ve cocked the stabilizers. They bounced onto the top of a huge front loader and skidded to the edge of the cab, barely stopping in time.

“Did you get it? Did you smoke it?” Slyborg spat blood.

Ferine flipped onto her back, then onto her knees. Her leg muscles still quivered, but she managed. Slyborg raised up on his elbow, peering around her. 

Bricks still fell outside, toppling with thunks. Dust swirled across the windows of the loading doors. 

“If you didn’t get it, we gotta be ready.” Slyborg ripped open the exoskeleton’s chest panel. 

“What the fuck, man?” Ferine split her attention: loading door windows and Slyborg’s fingers ejecting tiny tools, messing with his insides. She had nothing left except running, and she wasn’t running without him. 

The exoskeleton covering Slyborg’s right arm shifted with a click. “Take it.”

They’d talked about this a long time ago. She’d wanted her own exo. He’d confessed to just how inhuman he’d become to wear it. His skeletal structure wasn’t anything like hers anymore. 

She pulled the exo arm away from him. He wore a red undershirt. She saw a sliver of his real flesh around his wrist.

“You said this would kill me.” Slid the cold exo up her own arm.

“I just said that because I didn’t want you to have an exo. I’m an asshole.”

“You said it was like 95% sure to kill me, and 66% likely to rip me apart.” 

“That thing sure as hell will rip us both apart, if it’s still coming. So.”

Ferine braced herself. 

“I’ll spin up as much juice as I got left. Don’t miss. I’ll give you a three count.”

A three count before he fired a beam from his chest at the exo arm she was not biologically prepared to wear, so she could launch the energy at the dexcanthrus. Probably killing her. Maybe killing them both. But there was a chance. She’d take it.

“You can still run,” Slyborg said.

She didn’t even bother to answer him. Didn’t even bother calling him a motherfucker.

A stringy white hand came out of the swirling dust, slapped flat against the loading door window. It shattered the glass.

“Three.”

“I love you.”

“Two.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, say it back.”

“One.”

***

BUY ME A COFFEE