Prey For Us Sinners/Part 2
Part 2
Madison Malholtra  |
Lunchmeat  |
Julie Skels  |
Duncan Slade  | |
There is a monster living under the floorboards of Julie’s mind.
"Miss, can I take your order?"
Most people have a monster. Somewhere. Rooting around in the crawlspaces. But these are mostly anemic things. Underfed and unheeded. Monsters without a voice.
Julie’s monster was bigger. It had grown massive, gorging on the calamity of her youth. It had burst from the foundations long ago. Moved in. A squatter that no officer, or landlord, or court-appointed psychiatrist could remove.
"Excuse me, miss?"
It protected her. She had no formal combat training but Julie had survived Sanhok because when the monster told her what to do, she listened. It had gotten her through that bloodbath. Told her who to trust and who to kill. And when it told her to kill the men in the bunker – the guards and the technicians and that silly bearded man with the burrito – she didn’t hesitate.
One of the doctors who cared for Julie during her time in the psych ward – this was almost a decade ago – had started writing a paper on her. He hypothesized that she was experiencing a kind of "fractured personality". That in a way, she wasn’t insane at all. No, she was "hyper-sane", demonstrating a survival technique designed to help her endure a world of violence.
She liked the idea. She would have liked to have read that paper. But the doctor had gotten too comfortable and sat next to her and told the orderlies she didn’t need those cuffs. And then the monster told her what to do.
The doctor never got to finish that paper.
For years, Julie lived at the mercy of her monster. Forever its co-pilot without hands on the wheel. But something happened in Sanhok. Impossibly, the ocean of blood and carnage of that one day seemed to quiet the thing under the floorboards. The monster that had emerged in her teen years in Bucharest was, it would seem, satiated. She could feel it, laying in her soul-cellar, bloated and lazy.
It just had stopped talking. It hadn’t said a word since they had made it off Thailand. Since they had pulled the thing out of her skull. Things were… oddly silent.
And Julie wasn’t entirely sure what to do with this newfound freedom.
"Um, sorry, are you okay?"
How long had Julie been standing in the fast-food line? How much had she remembered quietly in her head, and how much had she said out loud? No way to know.
She took a breath and listened. Waited for the monster to tell her to climb over the counter. To yell and spit at the woman in the paper hat. People hated to be spit on.
But the monster was silent and so Julie instead offered a friendly smile, flashing the new dental prosthetics that replaced the teeth she lost. Chrome with a mirrored shine. She had wanted fangs, but Mal had the cash and she refused to pay if Julie got fangs.
Outside in the chilled air, Julie took a moment to bask in the glow of the restaurant’s neon sign. She and her comrades had hopped countries and continents – they’d been moving so fast and so often that she would often wake and forget where she was – but this neon sign, this symbol of gluttony and commerce remained a constant. It was comforting.
"We should go," Mal said, gesturing back to the van. Julie nodded, silently filing into the van with her bag of food.
Two hours later, just South of Scotland, she still hadn’t touched the food.
"You need to eat something," Mal said.
"It hurts to eat," Julie muttered, examining her chrome teeth in the passenger side mirror. That was true. That it hurt. But she also wasn’t hungry.
"Suck on a French fry or something."
Julie didn’t feel like arguing. She placed a fry between her lips. She closed her eyes. Pretending it was a finger. It tasted of skin.
"I took you to that dentist so you could blend in better," grumbled Mal, clearly not pleased with the chrome veneers.
Julie took her fries and unceremoniously crawled into the back of the van. She scrabbled over the middle seats, burying her knee in a sleeping Duncan’s gut.
"Watch it!"
She scrambled into the far back, where Lunchmeat slept on his side on the floor. She slid in behind him, wrapping her legs around his waist. At a slight 5’4", she made an odd but fierce big spoon to his bulk.
Focusing on the motion of the vehicle, she felt something like contentment. She watched him sleep. She listened to his breathing.
No, not his breathing. It was the monster’s breathing. The thing was sleeping too. For how long, she didn’t know. Maybe it would wake. Maybe it would tell her to scoop out the soft flesh of his face with her new shiny teeth.
Maybe. But for now, the monster was silent.
"We’re here," said Mal.
Here was Aberdeen, Scotland. Last known location of Sir Gabriel Loughran, apparently the winner of a Battleground in two thousand and eight. Vikendi. That’s what they had to work on. That was it.
And that’s all they would ever learn about Sir Loughran.
They broke into his modest home. The rooms were well-cleaned and well-kept. Nothing out of place. No sign of forced entry aside from the window Lunchmeat had smashed.
"No one touch anything," Duncan said, sternly. He said it to the room – but Julie knew he was talking to her.
She stole a bottle of pills and a pair of socks that didn’t fit her. Aside from that she touched nothing else.
They waited a week. A good old-fashioned stakeout fueled by coffee and kebab. In the end, all of them sick of eating and sleeping in the van, tired of pissing in the bushes and listening to Duncan talk in his sleep, they decided to move on.
And so, the hunt.
Haven hadn’t revealed answers, but it had given them their next clue: a list of 16 names pulled from a hard drive or a data disk or was it both? Julie found it difficult to follow. She was used to letting the monster tell her what to do but now she had to settle for Mal. And Mal wasn’t the explaining type.
"It’s not complicated," Mal had said. "These are clearly winners of the Battlegrounds. If we want answers – if we want this guy they call The Russian – well, this is how we find him..."
Duncan had seemed convinced. Lunchmeat had seemed convinced. Even Eddie Denim, the strange man with the guns who looked at her funny, had agreed it was a good plan. And so Julie went along with them. Nodding when she had to. Posing for the fake passport photo. Helping Mal purchase guns in some damp basement in South London.
The first few ticks off the list were nothing but disappointment. The ghost, sir Loughran. Then the next one was already dead. Pancreatic Cancer.
"How in the name of fuck do you survive the Battlegrounds only to die of cancer?" Lunchmeat asked, before punching a dumpster.
Their moods had soured again. Mal cursed a lot. Duncan angrily cleaned everyone’s weapons. Lunchmeat broke shit. He never said it, but she knew he wished they had stayed in the States. At Eddie’s ranch. He had been happy there.
During the night drives, Julie fancied the dark pavement flowing under the van to be the River Styx and the yellow lines blurring by to be screaming souls. Closing one eye and reaching out from the front passenger seat, she made a game of catching them in her hand.
They found Ludvig Magnusson hanging by a rope in his manor on the border of Finland. He’d been dead at least a week.
The man had killed himself. Or it had been made to look like he killed himself. Julie couldn’t tell.
Staring at the body, Julie closed her eyes and listened. Was her co-pilot in there? Whispering so low she just couldn’t hear it over the white noise. Was it hungry? Maybe just for a little nibble.
Nothing.
She pressed her hand against the hanging corpse. The body swung gently. The rope creaked. Mal shot her a look – what the fuck are you doing don’t touch that are you crazy?
She didn’t take anything this time but she found a short nail – maybe just under 4cm – that was jutting out from an old cabinet. She tried to pull it free and when it wouldn’t give she pinched with her fingers and pried and pried until her fingers started to bleed.
Every petrol station looked the same, an interdimensional purgatory that they dipped into. They would refuel the car. Mal and Duncan and Lunchmeat would argue about what to do next. Sometimes there would be threats. Sometimes there would be ice cream.
Mostly she would wait and listen.
In Bremen, she followed a middle-aged man into the restroom. No one saw her do it. No one noticed she was gone. While the man relieved himself at the urinal, Julie stood silently behind him and dared the monster to talk.
The monster said nothing.
She waited for the man to finish up, zipping himself and moving to the filthy sink before she slipped out unseen.
They found what they were looking for in France.
It was a small vineyard. Julie thought it looked fake. Like American mini-golf or something from a video game. Little tangles of vines waiting for Spring.
"Is that her?" asked Lunchmeat.
"I think so," said Mal.
The woman was in her 40’s, dark hair tinseled with silver. She was walking amongst the rows of grapevines with a little girl. The girl was waving her hands, talking excitedly. Julie couldn’t make out what she was saying.
They eventually came to a small wooden table. They laid out lunch.
No guards. No guns. Just a woman and her daughter and cheese sandwiches.
They marched down through the vineyard. Careful but not particularly cautious. The woman heard them approaching. She looked confused for only a moment. Then recognition set in. Julie watched as the woman leaned in and whispered to her daughter.
Mal put her hand on the pistol attached to her belt as the little girl ran back to the nearby farmhouse. Would Mal shoot a little girl? Julie didn’t think so. Unless…
"You’ve no need to worry," the woman said, locking eyes with Mal.
"You’re Anaïs Duprey?" asked Mal.
"I am," she replied. "And I know who you are."
"You do?"
She nodded. "Are you here to kill me?"
"That depends," Duncan interjected.
Anais nodded. Back at the farmhouse, her daughter emerged with a bottle of red wine and several glasses.
"Have a seat. This is a special vintage..."