Part II: Pistol Pink
I wake up and my head is throbbing and there’s a
tube coming out of my arm. I look around and see, yep, shitty little hospital
room. Probably Manhattan Catholic by the looks of the piss-yellow walls.
There’s a stupid looking guy in scrubs looking at a chart right outside the
open doorway.
“Hey,” I say to him. My voice is scratchy, like when
you wake up with a hangover and you were obviously yelling like a drunken idiot
the night before. He looks at me. It’s a look I recognize from dealing with
some scary people. He’s trying not to look pissed, because he knows his pissed
look scares people.
“Hey,” he says, “I’m Dr. Brown. How are you
feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a fucking truck,” I tell him.
“You didn’t,” he says, “You got jumped. An ambulance
rolled up while they were kicking the shit out of you, and apparently they
scattered like roaches.”
“Lucky me,” I say. I’m not normally this upbeat.
“Damn right,” says Dr. Brown. There was a pause. He
looked at me like I was annoying him.
“Well,” I say, trying not to sound annoyed, “am I
gonna live?”
“You’ll be fine,” he says, “you have a concussion,
some bruised ribs, broken nose. Your right hand has several fractures. One of
the assholes must have stomped it pretty good. No internal bleeding. Overall
I’d say you’re lucky. The ambulance driver said there were at least twenty of
them. Any idea who they were?”
Just
a cult that has the fucking Cloverfield Monster on speed-dial…
“No… Look, doctor, can I get out of here? I’ll leave
my insurance card with you.”
“That’ll be fine,” says Dr. Brown, “we need the bed
anyway. Lots of patients to admit.”
“From the Godzilla attack?”
“Fucking Godzilla attack.” He answers, shaking his
head like he still doesn’t believe it.
Dr. Brown pulls the IV out of my left arm. My right
arm is in a sling and my hand is wrapped in a plaster cast. While I get up I
ask him how long I’ve been in here.
“About 8 hours,” he says, “You should get a cab.
You’ve had some morphine, that was the IV, and the news says there are still
quite a few looters and riots going on.”
He sounds exhausted. I nod and wish I’d had more
morphine. My whole body is killing me.
“Thanks, doc,” I say to him. He nods and hurries to
another room. A skinny guy with an afro walks up to me with a wheelchair.
“Ready to go?” he says, smiling.
“I can walk,” I tell him.
“Gotta bring you out in a wheelchair. Hospital
rules.”
I don’t care enough to argue. The details of last
night are coming back to me now, and I have no fucking clue what I’m supposed
to do. I sit down, and the kid with the afro starts wheeling me toward an
elevator. I decide to talk to the guy to get my mind off things.
“Any cute nurses around here?” I ask him.
“Some might have been cute when they started working
here,” he answers, “back in the 70s.”
I don’t have an answer for this, so I keep my mouth
shut. When we get to the ground floor, he wheels me to a counter and lets go,
starts telling whoever it is that I’m checking out. Then he wheels me to the
front door. Once outside, the afternoon heat hits me and I feel the morphine
finally start to kick in.
“Thanks,” I say as I stand up. He’s already back
inside by the time I turn around.
People walking down the sidewalk seem more on edge
than usual, which is saying something for Manhattan. I see a teenager staring
at his cell phone walking toward me.
“Hey,” I say, “Where’s the monster?”
He looks up from the screen and says, “East Village”
and keeps walking.
I see the traffic is light, but not gone. A Ducati
Streetfighter zips by. I think the rider is a curvy girl in full leather with
pink hair peeking out from the helmet, but I’m starting to get goofy from the
morphine, so maybe not. More cars pass. Not even fucking Godzilla can stop this
city. I hail a cab and tell the driver to take me to the East Village.
“Can’t get close, man. Traffic over there is nuts.
Everyone trying to see the monster.”
“Just take me as close as you can without getting
stuck,” I tell him.
On the ride over I try to think about what happened,
but the morphine cloud is in full effect now that I’m in the back seat of the
cab, so I just watch the city. You’d never know something happened watching
from here. Maybe more sirens and ambulances. I realize I don’t have my cell
phone. Not a big deal. I needed a new one anyway.
The cab stops and I hand him a twenty, tell him to
keep the change. I start walking down the sidewalk, and see more and more
traffic. I follow the noise. As I make my way east, the traffic gets tighter
and the noise gets louder. I see several horseback cops. Tons of people with
cameras. That’s when I realize I have no fucking desire to see this thing. I’ve
seen plenty of it. I vaguely wonder what it has to do with goats, and then
decide what I really want is a drink. I saw a bar halfway down the last block,
so I double back.
The bar is half full. Perfect. I sit down and order
bourbon on the rocks. I don’t drink fast, but this first one was empty before I
knew it, so I order another. People were talking loudly about how Godzilla only
made it a few hours, it was way quicker in the movie. The thing was dead before
half the city woke up.
I just get my third drink when I hear a few
cat-calls and whistles. A girl must be walking in. I’m starting to get dizzy
from the morpine/bourbon combo so I don’t even bother. My eyes are half shut. I
hear a feminine, almost child-like voice next to me order water. I want to turn
to look but by now I’m in a fog. Opiates and alcohol and whatever-the-fuck
happened this morning have me paralyzed.
“Did you see the monster?” the bartender asks her.
“Yes,” she says, “it’s big and it’s dead.”
She sounds annoyed.
“…just a fucking statue…” I mutter to myself.
“What did you say?” says the girl.
“It was just a statue,” I say, staring at my glass
and realizing I sound like a lunatic, “just clay and goats and a witch-doctor.”
I see a black arm shoot across my field of vision
just before hands on both my shoulders spin my violently to my right. I felt
like I was going to fall off my stool, but the hands were strong and kept me in
my place. I look up.
What I see is some kind of anime cartoon. I see two
huge eyes, so dark that the irises look black. Eyes so big they almost don’t
look real. The face is pale with a small nose and mouth, framed in medium
length hot pink hair. She’s wearing a tight leather jacket and leather pants,
and on the bar next to her is a motorcycle helmet.
“Why did you call it a statue?” she asks me.
“Because it was a statue.” The morphine and booze
nixed any hope of me coming up with a better answer.
She lifts me up off the barstool like I weigh
nothing, and says, “You’re coming with me,” and pulls me in front of her, then
prods me toward the exit before I can even process what’s happening.
As we’re walking out, I hear a guy say something
along the lines of, “hey honey,” so I glance back. The guy reaches out to slap
the manga-biker’s ass. Before he does, her hand shoots down and grabs his
wrist. She holds it for a split second, then, in a blur, she pulls it back and
drops down, sweeping her leg around and kicking out the legs of the chair the
guy is sitting on. He comes down hard on the bar floor, the beer he was holding
dumps out on his chest and face. By the time the he hits the ground, the
anime-biker-ninja is back up and prodding me out the door. The whole thing took
about four seconds.
She leads me outside where the Ducati I saw earlier
is parked. She gets on the front and tells me to get on.
“I don’t think I want to…” I say weakly, thinking of
how falling off a motorcycle, drunk, driven by a pink-haired ninja would feel
on my skull and my ego.
“I won’t hurt you,” she answers, “now get on.”
I pause for a minute and think about the past 24
hours and that I might be going insane. Fuck it, if I’m going insane, there are
worse ways to do it than on a Ducati with a hot ninja. I get on behind her. The
seat is small, but she’s pretty tiny, so we both fit. I wrap my arms around her
waist very carefully, thinking of the guy in the bar who is probably just now
getting off the floor.
She doesn’t say a word and drives us several blocks
away and pulls in between two cars, parking diagonally so her bike will fit
where no car would. I get off the bike and look up at the building we’re parked
in front of. There’s a white façade on a brick building, a black awning with
white letters that say “Larchmont”.
She pulls me in the door, ignores the desk clerk,
and we start up some stairs. We get to a room; she uses an actual key, not a
slide card, to open the door. She pushes me inside. It’s a small room, but not
cramped. There’s not a door for a bathroom. She motions me toward a chair by a
desk, and locks the door behind us.
“Why did you call it a statue?” she asks me.
By now, my mind is a little less of a drug-addled
train-wreck, but also double weighed-down by exhaustion. I look at the bed and
imagine sprawling out and sleeping for days. I look up at the girl.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” I say, “it was a
statue that turned into… no, because it was still a statue. The monster came from
the statue.” I say, realizing as it came out that it didn’t make even a little
sense.
“I know it was a statue,” she tells me, “but how did
you know it was a statue?”
“Well,” I say, deciding to start from the beginning,
“it started when this group of wackos started predicting the end of the world…”
As I explain to the petite, pink-haired, anime-biker-ninja
about the goat sacrifices, the witch-doctor priest, the clay sculpture, the
kiln, and waking up to see the giant monster on TV, and shooting the statue
with a handgun, and waking up to a doctor that looks like a cave-man, I start
to look around the room.
An enormous geographical map of the world covered
the entire wall. Covering the map was chaos. There were newspaper clippings,
pages torn from books, writing in a dozen different languages, dozens of
photographs. Every single item tacked to the map had a string tacked on,
connecting it with something else, or directed toward a city or town or
landmark, circled or highlighted or with something written below. It looked
like a paranoid-conspiracy-theorist’s wet dream.
On another wall, there is one of those racks of
three Japanese katanas, with a short sword on top, a medium-length one below,
and a full-length sword on the bottom. So she is a ninja. Cool.
As I wrap it up, she stares at me for just a second,
mutters something like, “Sobek,” then gets up and starts studying the world
map. First she looks at Africa, and then follows a string to New York. Then a
comforting thought hits me. Maybe I’m not going insane. Maybe it’s the rest of
the world that’s going nuts. Either way, a nice, white, padded cell wouldn’t be
the worst place to be right now. Maybe I can check myself into Bellevue…
“So, what’s your name?” I ask.
“Siri,” she says. I wait for her to finish talking
to her iPhone, but she doesn’t say anything else. Then I realize she was
answering me.
“You’re name is Siri?” I ask, “Like the iPhone.”
She spins around and snaps, “It was my name first!”
It was almost petulant. Like a little girl whining
about the injustice.
“How…” I start, “How old are you, Siri?”
She cocks an eyebrow and keeps staring at me. The
longer she looks at me, the more I realize how young she looks. Fuck, she’s
just a kid.
“I’m nineteen,” she says, finally, “why do you want
to know?”
I put my hands up, palms out. “Just curious,” I say.
She stares at me for a few more seconds, shrugs, and
turns back to her map. After a minute or so of silence, I realize that I have
absolutely zero patience for this bullshit. I want to go back to Jersey City,
pass out on my bed for two days, then finish writing my report. Now that I
think about it, maybe I’ll turn this report into a book. Can’t be more
ridiculous that some of the books that will come out on this thing.
“Look, Siri,” I say, “I think I need to be getting
home. I’m exhausted and I’m sure my car is still blocking traffic somewhere over
in the Meatpacking District.”
“You can’t go home,” she tells me, with no further
explanation.
“Siri, why can’t I go home?” I say, expecting my
iPhone to answer, then remembering I couldn’t find it after leaving the
hospital.
“Because you seriously screwed up a lot of people’s
plans,” she says, “and they’re not going to be happy about it.”
“Wait, okay, whose plans?”
“Well, the cult of Sobek for one,” she says, “You
killed their demon.”
“So…” my head is starting to hurt, “so you know
about these people?”
“Not really,” she says.
“Okay, so the cult of…”
“Sobek.”
“Right,” I say, “Sobek. So who else?”
“Well, there’s the Fortuna Corporation. I’m pretty
sure they were involved in this thing somehow. And then there’s Legion. He’s
probably extremely pissed right now. Like, ready to rain down fire on you. That
kind of pissed.”
“Um…” My head is throbbing now, “who is Legion?”
“He’s a Duke of Hell,” says Siri.
Okay, I was right. The world is definitely going
crazy.
“So,” I say, “a duke of hell is waiting for me at my
apartment?”
“Doubtful,” she answers, “he won’t be able to
manifest this quickly, and it’s likely he’ll want to be closer to the action.”
“Maybe it’s just me,” I say, “but it doesn’t get
much closer to the action than Manhattan during a Godzilla rampage.”
“It was Sobek, not Godzilla.”
“Oh, right,” I mutter, “a Sobek rampage then.”
“Anyway, it’s probably the Fortuna Corporation that
will have guys at your apartment.” Siri says absentmindedly, still looking at
the map.
“And Fortuna Corporation is…?”
She spins away from the wall to look at me. The look
of hate on her face is shocking, especially because it makes her look even more
like an anime cartoon.
“The bad guys.” She says.
---
I wake up on the floor at 5:30 and turn on the TV to
make sure there’s no Godzilla attack going on. There isn’t, there’s just lots
of coverage of the last one. I finally got to see the thing falling. I didn’t
think it was so light out when that happened. The thing fell so hard, I’m
surprised more buildings didn’t fall when it hit the ground.
Siri is still asleep on the bed. I think I’ve had
enough of this nonsense. I put on my shoes quietly, tiptoe to the door, and
undo the latch. It sounds like a hammer in the quiet room, even with the TV on.
I start to twist the doorknob, and then here the actual sound of a hammer. I
turn around.
Siri is pointing a gun at me. It’s a small
semi-automatic pistol, and I swear to God, the entire thing is pink. She is
pointing a pink gun at me.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Good morning,” she says back, still pointing the
gun at me, “Are you leaving?”
“No, just going to the bathroom,” I say. The hotel
room doesn’t have a bathroom. Just a men’s room and a ladies’ room at the end
of the hall.
“Oh,” she says, lowering the gun, “okay.”
I walk out of the room and head directly down the
stairs. I walk out the front door and hear a “twang” sound above me. I look up,
and the flagpole coming of the building is vibrating. Then I hear a thump in
front of me. I look forward. Siri is crouching, ninja style, with a samurai
sword out, on top of a car parked in front of the hotel. There’s a hipster guy
with a leashed dog on the sidewalk, staring at her.
“Um,” I say after a beat, “hi Siri.”
“Go back into the hotel,” she says.
I look back up at the flagpole. It’s still
vibrating. I see the open third story window that… Siri… jumped… out of? This
is getting ridiculous.
I look back at Siri, see the glint of the
streetlight on the katana, see the passive look on her face.
“You got it,” I say, giving her thumbs up. I turn
back around, and head into the hotel.
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