An Ugly Rumpus

Previously: Our gals meet their contact Estra Maxie at a malignant tavern called the Embers. They learn that the little job is delivering a film canister to a corporate brothel while the big job is delivering a tiny envelope to a deadly ship where—oh wait hang on, everything’s interrupted by the arrival of some kind of gassy projectile.

— 47 —

Batya springs into a rough approximation of a preparatory stance and tries to evaluate the situation. The gas grenade is currently rolling across the snooker table, exhaling green smoke. A couple pool players are swatting at it.

In the haze, she can make out one guy—short, sinewy, just her type—making a beeline toward them. He’s wearing a gas mask which makes her think he’s worth paying attention to.

“That our dog?” she asks.

“Aye,” Estra Maxie says. “You should leave. Now.”

“There a back door in this dump?” Mina says, doing her usual which is putting Bat between herself and oncoming danger.

“There’s a back room,” Estra says. “And then a secret back room behind that where you have to flip a secret switch to get in.”

“Do you know where the secret switch is?”

“It’s a secret.”

Bat gestures at her sister. “Gimme something I can throw.”

Mina hands her a mostly empty bottle of a Snakehair concoction called Juniper Moonrise. Bat finishes it off, scans the crowd, and finds her target, which is not Gas Mask, who is quickly closing the gap between them, but rather a swollen, red-faced patron by the bar. She hurls the bottle and it smashes against his face and he cries out and immediately socks the guy next to him. There’s the sound of a dozen barstools scraping against the floor, and then every single person gets up and starts brawling. It takes literally three seconds for the entire place to descend into a riotous bar fight, complete with incoherent caterwauling, fists thudding into bellies, cue sticks being thwacked against heads, a dude being thrown into the already-broken jukebox.

Thing about the Embers is it’s always three seconds away from uncut mayhem, every sot in there just waiting around for any valid excuse to grind someone’s rye-soaked jowls into the peanut shells that litter the floor.

Bat sees Estra Maxie throw an ashtray at Gas Mask’s gas mask, distracting him, so she grabs Mina’s hand and drags her toward the front door. They’re almost at it when there’s a very loud boom, definitely one of the top five loudest booms Bat’s ever heard. It knocks her down and briefly twists her innards out of order. It resets her brain so she has to relearn basic functions like seeing and thinking and distinguishing human faces from other shapes. Finally she coughs the sound out of her body, where it’s taken up residence in her various cavities, then spies Blue Eye atop the bar, using a ramrod to reload her flintlock musket. “That one was a warning,” she says. “Y’all don’t simmer, I start taking aim.”

Bat picks up her sister and briefly considers jumping through the front window—a move she’s always wanted to try—but the glass looks warped and ancient, and the fact that it’s still intact in a place like this means it’s a lot more solid than she is, and so, with a twinge of regret, she decides to exit through the swinging doors like a civilian.

They veer off the docks at the first opportunity, weaving along the edge of a canal running inland. Their path is abruptly blocked by a gang of young hoodlums—very young, like seven or eight years of age—in matching tam o’ shanters.

“You gots Lamprey property,” one of them says, Lamprey being the most unimaginative and low-quality brothel in town. “Give it.” He shows them his tiny grubby fist in a threatening manner.

“Step aside, pee-wee,” Mina says. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“I do,” Bat says.

“Same,” the head urchin says, taking out a slingshot.

“Uh oh,” Bat says. “If your aim is good and the wind is right I might get a welt and start bawling.”

He snaps his fingers and one of his cohorts hands him what looks like a squishy aggie marble. He says, “Keep jawin and I’ll shoot one a these down ya gullet. And it won’t taste too good coz we filled it fulla…what’s in this one, Becky?”

“An emetic of my own design,” a pipsqueak in spectacles says. “According to my calculations, your insides shall turn to a mucilaginous paste and exit your body through any opening it can find with zero point zero hesitation.”

“What if I keep my mouth closed?” Bat says.

“You’d be doing the world a favor,” the head urchin says, fitting the orb into the slingshot’s pocket and stretching it back and closing one eye. “But I can also peg this baby right through your guts and it’ll have the same effect.”

“Worse, even,” Becky says. “It’ll provide yet another orifice for your bowels to pass through.”

“You kids need to put your energy into something more productive,” Mina says. “Like getting the hell out of our way.”

“Give us the blue movie and no one gets deuces wild,” the head urchin says.

Bat is briefly distracted by blue movie and wonders what exactly is on the film canister in her pocket, then says, “You should know that I will snap the necks of a bunch of little kids,” and immediately regrets it and is about to apologize when two more gas grenades tumble into the midst of this confab and the children cry out and Bat takes her sister by the arm and leaps right into the canal—and immediately regrets that, too.

That close to the harbor, the “water” in the canals is mostly diesel runoff and rum-saturated urine. Bat tries to remember her breath-holding techniques but no dice, it all goes out the window as soon as she swallows a pint of that brackish stank and almost perishes right then and there.

Mina, not briefed beforehand on the plan to jump in the canal, is panicking, limbs flailing, trying to hold onto Bat or anything, really. Then she hits her head against one of the pontoons-for-hire that transport passengers through the waterways. Bat links arms with her sister and grabs onto the boat and they’re dragged toward the trio of arched stone bridges that connect the stevedore hood to the Pine Sap district.

They’re just past the second bridge when Gas Mask leaps down onto the pontoon. The gondolier—that’s what the pontoon drivers loftily call themselves—is all too accustomed to these kinds of shenanigans and starts punching Gas Mask in a kidney. But Gas Mask is not your usual drunken tourist trying to hitch a free ride: he kicks the gondolier overboard almost without thinking about it.

But that gives Bat a couple seconds to weigh her options, and she decides to climb up into the boat and give Gas Mask what for, the specifics of what for TBD. Gas Mask, however, as Bat is learning, is fast and persistent and irritating, and snags the hip pocket of her slacks—he saw where she stashed the item?—and rips it clean off. The film canister clatters to the bottom of the boat. They both scramble for it and are engaging in an ugly rumpus when Mina emerges from the slimy flammable water and brings the full force of her elbows down on Gas Mask’s head. Admittedly, her full force isn’t very forceful, but it’s enough to briefly addle him and give Bat the chance to—and this is not a maneuver she enjoys, at all, but it’s useful in times like this when her hands are incapacitated and the anatomy is within reach—the chance to chomp down hard on Gas Mask’s nuts.

He drops to his knees, his pained mewling muffled through the mask. OK maybe Bat enjoys it a little, anyway it’s now a simple matter to heave him overboard near where the gondolier is angrily dog-paddling. Mina takes the wheel and guns the pontoon out of there, skimming up the canal.

Bat says, “Mina, you get the Nice Job Award,” and then picks up the canister and notices she’s now wearing a watch for the first time in her life. Upon closer examination it turns out to be a thin strip of black plastic with a swollen bulge on top, securely tied to her wrist and cutting off her circulation. “The heck?” she says.

“What?” Mina says, wild-eyed, trying to mentally map out an efficient route to White Clinic HQ.

“I think he put a thing on me while we were rassling.” She takes out her stiletto and starts sawing at the plastic when the bulge pops open, exhaling yet more of that green gas right into Bat’s face. She upchucks her breakfast—the potent cocktail crafted by Agnes the accountant—and claws at her streaming eyes. Mina screams some vowels and aims the boat toward a little stairway in the side of the canal wall and crashes into it. She drags Bat—a real otorhinolaryngological fireworks display at this point—off the pontoon and up to street level, dragging her toward a piazza called Nagini Square, a popular seagull hangout with a fountain featuring, appropriately enough, a venom-spitting sea serpent.

A young couple is seated at an outdoor cafe, enjoying a light brunch, their fingers intertwining as the young gentleman says, “This might sound crazy but—” and is knocked out of his chair by Mina.

“Hit the bricks,” she says, and the young lady is about to protest but sees something in Mina’s eyes—pure evil—that convinces her to flee instead, her beau right behind her. Mina pushes Bat into the newly vacant seat, picks up a glass of ice water, and flings it into her face.

Bat gasps and sputters, then nods. “Thanks.” She rubs her eyes and hawks something horrendous onto the ground and slicks the hair out of her face. “Why does everyone want me to puke out my ass?”

“It’s these kids and their science,” Mina says, panting. “Do you have the item?”

“Oh no!” Bat says, patting her various pockets in an attempt at comedy. “Of course I do.” She flips the film canister onto the little bistro table, then takes a bite of the young lady’s half-eaten toast.

Mina takes the young gentleman’s glass of rosé and knocks it back. “We should go. The Clinic’s three minutes if we run, and I’m too tired to run.”

“Look at my pants,” Bat says.

“No thanks.”

“Everything’s all ripped up. I feel like a hobo.”

A moist-looking waiter drifts by, tray held aloft. “Hey guys, how’s everything tasting?” he says, then notices Bat’s face. “Oh dear, did you have an allergic reaction to the salmon?”

“Never mind what I had a—” and she stops, and she looks at the waiter’s pelvic region—just a passing glance, nothing pervy, we all do it—and sees a bite mark there, a distinctive bite mark she’s seen hundreds of times because she’s bitten people hundreds of times. “Wait…”

The waiter doesn’t wait but instead snatches the canister and runs off. Bat says, “Shucks!” (her swears tend to be charmingly genteel when she’s genuinely surprised) and knocks over the salmon and the table and her sister in her haste to get up and chase after the now-unmasked Gas Mask.

Bat’s glad to see he’s running a little awkwardly due to his groin injury. She catches up midway across the square, shoving him into the fountain where he hits his head against the stone serpent. The canister flies off like a discus. She trips over her own feet and skins her knees along the concrete—more irreparable damage to her suit—but rallies and is up and ready to poke her fingers into any sensitive spot she can find when she sees the barrel of a gun.

“Freeze,” Gas Mask says, the statue spitting a never-ending stream of water onto his bleeding forehead.

She freezes and says, “A gun? Bo-ring.”

“You’re boring,” he says.

“You don’t need a gun. I liked that you had a theme. You make those smoke bombs yourself?”

“Yeah.” His smile is kind of self-effacing and Bat is disgusted to find him blandly handsome.

“Am I going to die?” she asks.

“Nah, you’ll just want to stay near a toilet.”

“Will do,” and now Bat’s stalled long enough for Mina to sneak up behind Gas Mask for a second surprise attack, but she’s so out of breath he hears her coming and splashes penny-flavored fountain water in her face and aims the gun at her and—

Bat sees the gun pointed at her sister and something shudders in her mind. She goes into a kind of fugue state. It’s not quite her berserker mode, where four steel walls fall from the heavens and slam into the earth, imprisoning her and her target in a cage where the only escape is death. No, this is the opposite, an opening up instead of a shutting down. All possible futures are splayed wide before her, sung by a cacophony of voices. And then there’s a winnowing down of those futures, with one voice singing louder than the others. It transmits a subsonic tone! / That impacts the nervous system! the voice sings. The effects vary from person to person! / I only use it when I’ve run out of ideas!

Bat, out of ideas, reaches into one of her more obscure coat pockets and takes out Margaret’s tuning fork and bangs it against the serpent and it makes a disappointingly hollow little ting. But then three things happen:

1. Bat smells strawberries.
2. Mina starts laughing uncontrollably.
3. Gas Mask screams a scream of pure terror, unhinged, animalistic, and almost breaks his own legs scrambling out of the fountain and running away.

“This isn’t funny at all,” Mina says. “Why am I laughing?”

“I don’t know,” Bat says. “I think I’m having a stroke?”

Mina guffaws.

“Stop laughing, go get the item, we’re going. Stop laughing.”

+++

This has been Chapter 47 of Chokeville, a novel by Josh Fireland.

Next up: Untainted by Syphilis