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Prologue: Wednesday Night

Death finds them on US Route 95.

They are leaving Las Vegas like thieves in the night. Leaving Las Vegas, like the song says, getting the hell out while they still can, before the city eats them alive. That’s how Milton Crenshaw thinks about their situation while driving his Pontiac Grand Am through the dark lonely highway, The vehicle is the sum total of his worldly possessions, other than the two bags of clothes in the trunk, the seventy-nine dollars in his wallet, and the fifty-two cents in his front left pocket. He’s angry and bitter, and spends most of the last minutes of his life trying to find someone to blame for his troubles.

On the passenger seat is Milton’s beloved, a recently-unemployed croupier by the unlikely name of Beverly T. Hill. While she plays with her puffed-up blonde pile of hair, done up in a style harkening back to her glory teenage days (Martin Luther King High, Class of ’81), Bev wonders if she’s doing the right thing, riding out into the sunset with a Class-A loser like Milton, who is fifteen years her junior and has the maturity of someone fifteen years younger than that. Thanks to Milton, she’s lost her job, her nice apartment in North Las Vegas, most of her stuff, her dignity and her self-respect. She should have known better than to go along with his harebrained scheme, but Milton is a smooth-talking, fairly good-looking guy, and when you’re fifty and your tits are heading south and your waistline is expanding a little more each year, when sleeping alone every night starts to feel unbearable, having someone like Milton means a heck of a lot. When a young stud is curled up under the sheets with you, whispering in your ear about a sure thing while his hand is working down there, doing the stuff you like just the way you like it, you throw reason and common sense out the window, at least that’s what you do if you’re Beverly Hill, who for a few wonderful days actually thought she’d end up with the handsome prince and the pot of gold, and instead ended up jobless and on the run, having been pointedly warned that staying in Las Vegas would not be at all good for her health, not after her and Milty’s clumsy attempt to rip off the casino. As it is, she knows they’re damn lucky to leave Las Vegas with all their fingers and toes intact. Casinos don’t do a lot of strong-arm stuff anymore, not since they went legit and kicked the Mafia out, but in some cases the gloves will come off and blood will start to flow. They were lucky to just get thrown out of town.

 Bev glances at her boyfriend. He hasn’t said much since their impromptu meeting with several big men in business suits in a utility room beneath the casino they’d tried to scam. After accepting their marching orders from the security people and packing up, they haven’t said much to each other. At least he hasn’t bailed out on her. Although she’s beginning to think she should be bailing out on him.

Milton’s eyes are on the road, the endless single-lane road leading him deeper into the night. His mind is back in Vegas, where he came so close to scoring a good fifty grand, if only Bev hadn’t fucked up. It’s really all her fault they got caught, and when they stop for the night – for the morning is more like it – at some fleabag roadside motel that Bev’s going to put on her credit card, he’s going to get some payback the old-fashioned way; he’s going to fuck it off her. Bev’s old, but she’s still got enough of her cheerleader good looks to get Milton off, and her tits aren’t perky but they’re big, and this time she’s going to agree to some rear-entry action, it’s the least she can do for him, after ruining his plans and getting them both kicked out of Vegas to boot. Sin City is ruined for him now. A previous mishap ruined Atlantic City for him as well. Now all he’s got left is Reno, and after that them Injun casinos, he guesses. If he can get Bev to fucking get on with the program, if…

Something runs across the road, right in front of him. Something big, and he hits the brakes hard as he screams, “Fuck!” He tries to swerve but is going too fast and he still hits whatever that is. All he manages to do is send the Gran Am into a spin right off the road, tires dragging through dirt and loose rocks until the car hits something else and comes to a sudden stop. The second impact sends Milton’s head crashing into the side window hard enough to crack the safety glass and make his vision blur. He dimly hears Bev’s shriek and wonders if this is it, if this is how his shitty life ends.

He’s not that lucky.

For a while it’s blissfully quiet; the only noises he can hear are Bev panting like a bitch in heat and the tick of the cooling engine. Something wet and sticky is running down the side of his head and face. Some of it gets in his mouth. Salty, vaguely metallic-smelling. His blood. He blinks, and that’s when the pain hits him. His head. It feels like his skull’s been split open, or at least he thinks that’s what it feels like.

Soon enough he’ll have a chance to know what the real thing feels like, but he doesn’t know that yet.

“You all right?” he asks Bev. Not because he gives two fucks how the aging big-tit bitch is feeling right now, but because he’s pretty sure that, if he doesn’t calm her down, she’s going to shriek again and if she does it’s going to pound fresh nails of agony into his battered head.

The panting stops. “Yeah, I think so.”

In fact, Beverly is just fine, Beverly’s got her seat belt on, and during the crazy few seconds when they hit something – some kind of animal, but there was something wrong with it – and the car went spinning into the night, she’s had what in the trade is known as a Moment of Clarity. She’s done with Milton, and as soon as they reach somewhere with a bus station in it she’s going to tell him to go fuck himself. If she maxes out her credit cards she can make it to Albuquerque, where her older sister lives, and the great thing about family is that they’ll take you in when nobody else will; she’s done with Vegas, with losers like Milton, with the whole crazy life. She’s going to swallow her pride and let Big Sis Yolanda help her get back on her feet and start acting her age, even if that means working at Walmart while trying to pick up some likely bachelor at the local Bingo game, or whatever. She’s done with this shit. “How about you?”

Milton touches his forehead and winces. “Bleeding,” he says.

“Let me see,” Beverly says, turning the ceiling light on and leaning over him. He lowers his head so she can examine the damage. “You might need stitches, Milt.”

“Fuck me. Just what I need. What the fuck did we hit, anyway?”

Her memory of what she saw comes back to her and sends a shot of ice down her back. The word on the tip of her tongue is scorpion, but that’s crazy, ‘cause no scorpion is that big.

“Coyote?” she says, and hopes that’s what it was. Hopes it really hard.

“I guess. Shit, let’s get the fuck out of here. I can get stitches when we get to Reno.” He tries to start the car. The engine sputters and coughs. He tries again, gives it more gas, tries again.

“You’re gonna flood it,” Beverly says.

Milton barely resists the urge to tell her to shut the fuck up. He tries one more time. For a moment, it looks like it’s going to catch, it’s going to start, and in his mind he pictures himself driving on, leaving this fucking desert behind. Reno beckons. A new con beckons. He yearns for sunlight and warmth, desperately wants to leave this seemingly endless night behind.

The engine coughs weakly, and dies.

“Fuck me,” Milton growls.

Beverly fumbles in her purse for her cell phone. Getting stuck in the desert is no joke. It’s pretty cold right now, this late at night, and October isn’t the worst time to be out in the sun, but it’s still not a good idea to linger here. Milton tries to open the door, and discovers the car is hemmed up against a big-ass boulder. “Goddammit,” he mutters. “You’re gonna need to let me out from your side, Bevs.”

“Wait, Milt, you need to put pressure on that cut, and I…”

“Let me the fuck out, Bevs. I need to check the engine, and see if we can get the fuck out of here. Move it.”

There is enough heat in the last sentence to get Beverly moving. Milton has never been mean before, not really mean, no more than guys usually are, at least. He’s never laid a hand on her, well, mostly never, and he’s usually nice, keeps the insults and put-downs to a bare minimum. This angry side of him scares her and reinforces her decision to leave him as soon as she can. She staggers out of the car and Milton follow her, grunting as if the effort to slide over to her side is a painful, difficult feat.

In the scant light provided by the moon and stars, Milton looks like shit, like a freshly-dug corpse come to life. He limps towards the front of the car, where only one headlight is still on, casting a pathetic pool of illumination onto the dark desert. As he makes his way towards the hood, he notices the front bumper is covered in… something. Some thick, gooey, dark green stuff, and just as he gets a good look at it the smell hits him, a chemical, acrid stench like burning tires and rotting flesh mixed together. “What the fuck?”

“What is it?” Bev asks behind him; she catches a whiff of the stuff a moment later and starts coughing uncontrollably. She backs away. “What is that?”

“Whatever the fuck I hit, I guess,” he says. “Except fucking coyotes don’t bleed green, do they?”

Bev doesn’t say anything. Just as well. The mood he’s in, bleeding and with a splitting headache while stranded in the middle of the fucking Nevada desert, he knows he won’t deal well with anything she has to say. All Milton wants to do is get the car started and get the hell out of here.

He lifts the hood and realizes it’s dark as fuck and he can’t see anything in there. He’s got a flashlight in the trunk, though, so he heads back there, and that’s when he hears it for the first time, the sound.

It’s not footsteps. It’s more like a clicking, no, a skittering noise out in the darkness. A series of hard taps on a hard surface, too many taps for something on two legs, or four.

“The fuck was that?” he says.

“What?”

“Listen,” he tells her, and she does, and for several seconds there’s nothing, which makes him feel like an idiot, but just as he’s about to say something, there it is again, the skittering sound, somewhere off down the road, cutting across it.

“Ohmygod,” Beverly gasps. Her mind flashes back to whatever it is they hit; she can’t picture it clearly, but her first impression was that it had too many legs. Too many, and just enough to make those clickety-clackety noises. “We’ve got to get out of here, Milt, please.”

“I know, all right?” Milton snaps back, opening the trunk. It’s full of useless shit, of course: her luggage, his shit, hastily crammed inside garbage bags, because he didn’t even own a suitcase, that’s how hard up he’d been. Once he’d had a nice set of Sampsonites, had also owned a gun, a .38 Smith & Wesson, both pawned away a while back. Milton really wishes he had that gun just about now, as he rummages through the trunk trying to find the flashlight so they don’t have to depend on the single headlight’s weak illumination.

“Milt,” Bev says; a whisper this time.

“What is it?”

“It’s coming closer.”

“Fuck.” He can’t find the flashlight, can’t even find the tire jack, which might do for a weapon, and he feels like he needs one, needs it badly.

“Oh, Milt, it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s EEEHH!” The scream is loud and sudden and makes Milt stiffen and jump away from the open trunk, just in time to see something tackle Bev from behind while she’s trying to run away, something bigger than a coyote, and the trashing forms disappear behind the front of the car, and in the headlight’s glow he sees blood splashing out into the night.

“Jesus God,” he says, and runs.

For Beverly, the end is quick. A glimpse of something that can’t be real, a sudden crash, and she’s lying on the cold desert ground. She doesn’t want to see the thing that’s on her, so she closes her eyes, turns her head; the little child inside her insisting that if she doesn’t look at it, that means it’s not there. That feeling only lasts for the brief instant before it rips into her flesh. The pain is huge and overwhelming; shock mercifully takes over soon after, however, and she stops feeling anything.

I should have never been with Milt, she thinks, and dies.

Milton runs down the highway, runs faster than he ever has. Behind him, Bev screams once, briefly; the silence that follows acts like a spur, makes him go even faster, assholes and elbows time, because if she’s quiet that means she’s dead and that means whatever killed her has nothing better to do than to spring after him, and he wants no part of that, no, sir, no thanks, fuck that.

He runs in the dark, runs until his heart is about to explode out of his chest and his breath comes in jagged, desperate gasps, runs down the endless desert highway under the pitiless light of moon and stars, expecting the skittering noise to catch up with him, expecting at any moment to be hit from behind.

There is a light up ahead. Twin lights, blinking, hazards, not too far away. Seeing them should make him go faster, but instead Milt’s pace falters a bit, and a second later he trips and tumbles onto the harsh asphalt surface. He skins both elbows pretty badly, but he’s barely aware of the pain, or the blood now dripping down from his arms as he struggles desperately to get up.

All he cares about is the skittering sound he hears coming up behind him.

He staggers to his feet, stumbles forward, picks up the pace. A drunken walk becomes a jog, becomes a run again, and he’s much closer to the lights now, close enough to see the vehicle with the blinking hazards is an RV, a big Winnebago leaning drunkenly on the side of the road. All the tires on one side have been shredded.

Milton rushes to the side door, which is open. There is light coming from the inside, and he all but leaps in. “Help,” he croaks.

There’s nobody in the driver’s compartment. He glances toward the interior. It’s a mess, stuff strewn all over, bits of clothes and eating utensils and a smashed laptop computer. And blood, and guts, and the metallic scent of blood mixed in with the stench of shit, a slaughterhouse smell that reaches into his hindbrain and announces: Death is here.

Standing in the middle of it all, his back turned to Milton, is a child. A small child, no older than five or six, hunched down, wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

Milton has no breath left to scream or beg or question. He stares mutely as the child turns slowly to face him, and when Milton sees his face, his bladder lets go, along with his last shreds of sanity.

Where the child’s face should be there is only a mouth, a huge mouth with long serrated teeth, a mouth twisted in a happily murderous smile.

“Daddy,” the mouth says. The voice is nothing a child or anything human could ever produce.

Milton manages to jump out of the RV just in time for the skitter-thing to reach him.

Dying takes minutes.

Dying takes forever.

Excerpt from The Day Las Vegas Died, by V.C. Jennings

It’s hard to believe the one-year anniversary of the Las Vegas Event has come and gone while this book was still being written. Unless you’ve been in a coma, you have your own story, your own answer to the question: “Where were you during the Shadowfall?” What were you doing when the news started percolating, when you first realized something unusual – something terrible – was happening? When did you finally drop everything and stayed glued to your TV or computer screen, and spent the rest of your day watching news reports, Twitter feeds and YouTube uploads?

This book is an attempt – a likely futile attempt – to make sense of what happened. 

THURSDAY

ONE

Lorena de Kork wakes up with a start, covered in sweat, gasping for breath.

Just a dream. It was a just a dream.

The thought helps calm her down. Lorena shakes her head at her own foolishness and lays back down on her bed. She’s too old to let nightmares bother her; she’s had plenty over the years, courtesy of her job with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. This one was bad, though. It… Lorena tries to recall the horrifying images that frightened her awake, but she can’t. All she can remember are vague visions of shadows and screaming people. And blood. There’d been plenty of blood in the dream, she knows that much.

It’s the case she’s working on, that’s what's causing the dreams. It’s a bad one, the kind of thing even a Robbery-Homicide detective doesn’t see very often. The things she saw last night have stuck in her mind, that’s all. She glances at the rumpled left side of her bed, currently empty. Her live-in boyfriend Rusty would normally be there, sleeping late into mid-morning, but he didn’t come home last night. It’s not an unusual occurrence. Raymond ‘Rusty” Greene is a pro gambler who ekes out a meager living playing at assorted venues in Sin City. Not exactly an ideal boyfriend for a cop, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Rusty sometimes plays into the wee hours of the morning, and ends up crashing at a friend’s house. It’s probably a good thing he didn’t make it home last night: she might have elbowed him in the face while trashing around in her sleep.

Lorena glances at the alarm clock. Six thirty. She’s on second watch, so she’s not due at work until eleven, and she’d been looking forward to sleeping a few extra hours. She’s never going to get back to sleep, not after this. Might as well follow up on last night’s murder. Maybe drop by the coroner’s office and see if she can get a prelim report out of him. Anything’s better than spending the next couple of hours putzing around the apartment wondering where Rusty’s been.

After her shower, Lorena admires herself in the mirror. She’s nobody’s idea of the future Miss America, that’s for sure. She takes care of herself, mindful of her mother and grandmother, both of whom let themselves go and ballooned up to zeppelin-like proportions by middle-age, but she’s not model-skinny, or even actress-skinny. Her skin is light brown, her features a mixture befitting her Bantu and Boer ancestors, what people in the old country would have called ‘coloured,’ usually with a sneer in their face as they used the term. She keeps her hair short, almost crew-cut length, which many consider mannish and has led to a few whispered ‘lesbo’ comments from the less enlightened members of the LVMPD, of which there is a plentitude, unfortunately.

There’re pricks everywhere, but Vegas seems to have more than its fair share. Maybe it’s the climate. Lorena never thought she’d end up somewhere this arid again, not after her tour of the Sandbox, but here she is. Being former military police with a somewhat checkered career, including barely avoiding a dishonorable discharge after she put someone in the hospital with a broken knee and a dislocated shoulder (asshole had it coming to him, but he was connected), you went where the jobs were. She’d done a stint in L.A., which had sucked, then found an opening in Las Vegas, and she’d done fairly well there, all things considered. Dealing with pricks is just the price you pay, she supposes.

She leaves her little house in Green Valley and drives her Mazda Miata to the coroner’s office. The sporty two-seater was a gift from Rusty; he’d bought it a couple of years ago, after a winning streak that left him flush for a couple days before his luck turned, as it invariably does. His luck’s been turning a lot more often of late, she considers sourly as she drives. He’s taking more risks than he should, and she’s had to stake him a few too many times, not something she can really afford to do on a detective’s salary. He’s been sleeping away more often, too.

It is what it is. They’ve been living together almost three years, but Lorena suspects they won’t make it to their fourth anniversary. She knows how this kind of thing ends: fights, mutual recrimination, cheating, the nasty breakup followed by the awkwardness of retrieving their things from each other’s places. In this case, Rusty doesn’t have a place of his own. This breakup is also going to be an eviction.

Lorena weaves through traffic and tries to concentrate on work, on the body they found last night in one of the drainage tunnels that served as Las Vegas’ unofficial catacombs. Some homeless kid, probably no older than eighteen, maybe younger. It’s hard to tell with runaways; the streets age you quickly. It was harder to tell in this case, because someone had gutted the kid like a fish and then had carved several weird signs on the skin of his back. The body had been lying face down, his guts strewn around him like an octopus’ tentacles, his bare back covered with bloody graffiti. No wonder she’s been having nightmares.

Dr. Morgensten is on duty when she arrives to the coroner’s office on Pinto Lane. He’s short and balding and should lay off the donuts if he wants to live much longer than his current fifty-six years of age, but he’s a fairly cheerful man, given his line of work. “Morning, Corky,” he says when he sees her coming. With the last name de Kork, the nickname is inevitable. The funny thing is that her family’s original surname had been de Kock; her parents had wisely changed it upon moving to the US, thus saving their offspring from endless ridicule. “I take it you want the post’s report.”

“If you don’t mind, Doc. I’m not on duty till eleven, but I figured I’d get a jump on things.”

“Smart. It’s been a busy week.”

Lorena nods. Three murders and seven suicides since Monday; already a record and it’s not even the weekend yet. Either the moon’s full or somebody’s put something in the water. The press has started to notice something’s up, which means pretty soon there’s going to be reporters messing around her case. “So what’s the deal with our John Doe?”

“I think I should show you while I tell you, Corky. This one’s weird as hell.”

He leads her towards the cold storage where the bodies are kept. It’s not one of her favorite spots, but she’s been there often enough. Sometimes you have to look at the corpses a second time, not often, but more than often enough for her liking. “Do you want to wait for Joe to join us?” he asks her.

Lorena shakes her head. Her partner, Sergeant Joe Hahn, is likely still sound asleep, the lucky bastard, and he wouldn’t thank her for waking him up just so he can join her in some unpaid overtime. “I can tell him later.”

“Very well. To start with, we’ve identified the kid. Name’s Donald Lebowski, age seventeen, originally from Lincoln, Nebraska. A couple of arrests. Here’s his jacket,” he says, handing her his IPad; the department has gone full digital, Cloud storage, all that good shit. Lorena glances at the screen and checks out the kid’s criminal record. Mostly misdemeanors, one count of soliciting, one grand larceny arrest that didn’t go anywhere. Nothing that explains how Donny Lebowski ended up with his guts arranged like some sort of human starfish.

“COD?”

“Official Cause of Death was exsanguination and shock. It took him a couple minutes to bleed to death after he was disemboweled. Nasty way to go.”

“There were no signs of struggle,” Lorena notes. “You’d think you’d put up more of a fight before you let someone open you up like that.”

“Indeed. And yet there was no evidence of ligature marks or any restraints. Tox screen hasn’t come back yet, but I figure he must have been drugged. Ah, here we are.” They pause in front of one of the horribly impersonal metal drawers. Doc Morgensten opens it and uncovers the body.

“You kept him lying on his stomach,” Lorena says.

“Well, we sewed him shut, but the interesting stuff was on his back. Saves us the trouble to turn him over, see?”

“I see.” The now bloodless cuts stand up starkly against the kid’s pale skin. Some look like letters of some kind, but if they are, they belong to no alphabet she’s familiar with. The others are symbols, also nothing she’s seen before. One looks a bit like a snail’s shell. And there’s one thing that catches her eye immediately. “All the symbols are…”

“Perfect,” Morgensten completes her thought. “Those circles and geometry forms are all straight lines and perfect curves, as if they’d used a ruler and drawing compass. And that spiral pattern is perfectly proportioned. It uses the Golden Ratio, as a matter of fact.”

“Golden Ratio?”

“A mathematical concept,” he says. “It appears in a lot of natural structures, like seashells. I did some measurements and the pattern is accurate down to the millimeter.”

“Not something you should be able to do by hand, then.”

“Not something you should be able to do on someone still alive and, presumably shuddering if not kicking and screaming,” Morgensten says. “The wounds on his back were all performed ante mortem. The kid was alive while the perp used something as sharp as a razor blade to cut those symbols on his skin. Perfect circles, exactly proportioned spirals, letters of calligraphic quality.”

“Who could do something like that?”

“A good tattoo artist maybe, if he’d practiced with a scalpel for a few years.”

“So we need to be on the lookout for a tattoo artist with experience in surgical instruments,” Lorena says.

“And who had access to some drug that subdued a fairly healthy seventeen year-old long enough to be used as a drawing board, and then gutted. When the tox screen comes back we’ll know more, but I figure you should get a good look at the symbols.”

“Why is that?”

“Because somebody who went through all that trouble is unlikely to do it only once, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Lorena admits. “I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this guy.”

* * *

Ten hours later, she curses herself for being right.

“It’s another bad one, Corky,” Joe Hahn tells her as she steps over the yellow tape surrounding the crime scene. Joe is a solid, medium-sized guy with graying hair and a bulldog face that normally features a wry smile. He’s not smiling now. Normally nothing fazes him, not even the fact he’s got the same name as a member of the band Linkin Park, which has led to much merriment amongst both cops and perps, but this case has fazed him, all right.

“That makes it two bad ones this week,” she comments. Two bad ones that she and her partner have caught. There’s been two other murders in the last couple of days, and they’re supposedly pretty bad as well.

“This one’s worse.” Joe leads her to the body at the end of the alley. The bottom of a bright red platform shoe pokes out from the shadows obscuring the rest of the corpse.

“Hooker?”

“Probably. Brace yourself,” Hahn says as he shines his flashlight onto the scene.

It’s bad.

“Fuck,” Lorena mutters. She tries not to swear too much – unbefitting of a lady, her mother always told her – but no other words can express her feelings right now

“They gutted her, just like the Lebowski kid,” Joe says unnecessarily, playing the light over the ghastly remains. “Same carvings, too.”

“Excet they did her front, not the back,” Lorena adds, trying to stay cool. She swallows a couple of times. “The carvings are on her face and chest instead of her back. Same signs and letters, from the looks of it.”

The wounds are horrible. The expression on the girl’s face – another teenager, probably about the same age as Donny Lebowski – is much worse. She looks like she was alive and aware for the entire thing.

The tox screen for Lebowski had come back clean. The kid hadn’t been drugged, which meant he’d apparently let someone carve him like some sort of art project for the insane. Calling it bizarre doesn’t do it justice.

“Any witnesses?”

“We’re canvassing the area, but so far nobody’s seen nothin’.” Hahn grimaces. “There should be a few working girls in this part of town, but they’ve made themselves scarce tonight. The whole place is kinda deserted, matter of fact.”

“Who can blame them?” Lorena says, kneeling over the body, careful not to disturb any evidence. “Who called it in?”

“Some tourist went into the alley to take a leak and saw her. Called 911 before he lost his shit and puked his guts out. EMTs had to sedate him when they arrived.”

Lorena pulls out her own flashlight, cursing the darkness. She glances up at the streetlights. Two of them are out, shrouding the alley in shadows. She shines the light on one of them, sees a charred spot where the streetlight’s lamp should be. “Check that out,” she says.

Hahn does. “Looks like it freaking exploded. Streetlights supposed to do that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Awful convenient, two broken streetlights right on the spot you murder somebody.”

“Yeah.” Lorena says. “If this is the same perp…”

“Yeah. Two bodies in two nights. Betcha there’s a third one tomorrow.”

“Unless we catch him.”

“Sure. We got no witnesses, fuck-all for motive other than somebody’s batshit crazy, a dead runaway and a dead hooker. We’ll clear this before breakfast.”

“Let’s see if the canvas turns up anything,” she says, but she knows it’s not going to, not in this neighborhood, just a few blocks off of the Strip. Everybody in the area’s passing through; nobody lingers here for long, except for the hookers and their clients, and they’ve all scampered away like cockroaches when the kitchen light is turned on.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Joe mutters, looking over her shoulder. “Watch out, Corky. Big Mackey’s here.”

Lorena turns around and sees an unmarked black Suburban coming to a stop at the end of the alley. The driver’s side door opens and out comes Lieutenant Harry “Big Mackey” Minnelli of Gang Crimes. Ever since The Shield came on the air, people noted enough similarities between Minnelli and the notoriously corrupt cop from the show, and the nickname stuck, although it takes a brave man to use it in front of him. Minnelli doesn’t look anything like Michael Chiklis, though: he’s tall and wiry and has a full head of gorgeous blonde hair. He also has his finger in a lot of pies all around town, a shady reputation and a knack for coming out of all kinds of shit smelling like a rose.

Big Mackey strolls over like he owns the world, and Lorena tenses up. There’s only one reason for the Gang Crimes dickhead to be here. “Say goodbye to the case, Hahn,” she says.

“Goodbye to the case, Hahn,” is Joe’s deadpan reply.

“Lieutenant, Sergeant,” Big Mackey says when he reaches the crime scene. He glances up and down at the corpse, then turns back to them.

“B… Lieutenant,” Lorena says, realizing she almost called the man by his nickname, a sign that the crime scene has disturbed her more than she realized. “What brings the Gang Crimes Bureau here?”

“This body’s ours,” Big Mackey says. “Third one this month. See those scribblings on the body?”

“They’re hard to miss,” Lorena says.

“It’s some sort of Mexican Voodoo shit. New gang in town, Los Santos. Big on the whole Santa Muerte shit.”

Lorena’s never worked in Gang Crimes, but she keeps her ear to the ground, and knows what’s what. Lots of Mexican gangs and the Cartels down south pay lip service to the cult of the Saint of Death. It’s a great way to intimidate people, the crack cocaine version of the opiate of the masses. The news doesn’t surprise her. Whoever did these murders isn’t posturing, though. This is the work of true believers.

Normally, she would put up a fight before letting Big Mackey take a case from her, but this time she just shrugs. “All yours, Lieutenant. Hope you catch the perps.”

Big Mackey grins. “We will. We’re also taking over the vic from Wednesday. Lebowski. Guess nobody’s fucking with his rug anymore.”

Lorena doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but she doesn’t care enough to ask. She walks off. Hahn catches up with her in a few hurried steps. “What the hell, Corky? You’re giving it up just like that?”

Lorena shrugs again. “What’s the point, Joe? Big Mackey’s got pull, and we don’t. He’s so far up the Deputy Chief’s ass he can see out of his mouth.”

“True enough,” Joe agrees.

“And you know what? After taking one look at that mess, I don’t want the case. I don’t want anything to do with the sick fuck that did those things to that girl. Or to that kid in the tunnels.”

“Okay,” Joes says. “I hear you, Corks. No sweat.”

Lorena can tell Hahn doesn’t like it, and truth is, neither does she. Having Big Mackie muscle them out of a case doesn’t sit well with her. On the other hand, those two names were going to sit on their board for a good while, and there’s a good chance more bodies will follow. Let Gang Crimes handle it. She’s not happy about it, but she doesn’t have to be. If she stops having those nightmares, it will be worth it.

As they walk towards their car, another newcomer parks his ride near the crime scene – a black civvie version of the Humvee that makes the Suburban look puny by comparison – and gets past the cops cordoning off the scene. It’s a big black guy, with a shaven head and the build of a linebacker. He’s wearing a tan suit, expensive, but too light-colored to belong to a Fed. Feds always wear dark colors. She hasn’t seen him before but she’s heard of someone fitting that description.

“Good evening, officers,” he says pleasantly, a friendly smile on his face. “I was hoping to have a word with you.”

A name clicks in Lorena’s head. “You’re Godoy, aren’t you? The consultant.” The ghost-chaser, she doesn’t say. Whenever something weird happens in Las Vegas, Dante Godoy’s name pops up. No wonder he’s here, sniffing for witches or what have you.

“Guilty as charged, Lieutenant de Kork,” Godoy says.

“You’ll have to speak with Lieutenant Minnelli. He’s taken over the case.”

Godoy’s smile vanishes when he hears the name. He clearly isn’t a fan of Big Mackey’s.

“Oh, goody,” he says. “That’s too bad. But listen, I have a bad feeling about all of this.”

“Wait till you see the body,” Hahn says. “Hope you didn’t have a big dinner.”

“If something weird happens, and you think you might need help, feel free to call me,” Godoy says, and hands Lorena and Hahn two business cards.

She glances at it. Dante A. Godoy, Special Consultant. A phone number and e-mail address underneath. Pretty plain and uninformative. She does him the courtesy of not tearing it up and throwing it in his face and instead stuffs it in her pants pocket. Hahn treats his more respectfully and actually takes out his wallet and sticks the card in it.

“Good night.”

“What’s the deal with that guy?” Lorena asks Hahn as they walk away. He’s been around longer and has better connections than she does.

“Haven’t worked with him, lucky me, but word is, he’s the straight goods, Corky. Everybody’s tight-lipped about him, even after you get a few drinks in ‘em, but I hear he’s helped clear some tough cases. Those missing tourists at the Bellagio last year, remember them? And that magician who burst into flames couple years back.”

“I thought the magician thing was an accident. And the missing tourists are still missing.”

“That’s what’s in the official reports. But both of those cases got closed. Unofficial-like, but closed.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Lorena says, glancing down the alley. Godoy and Big Mackey are getting into it, and it doesn’t look like a friendly conversation.

“If Godoy’s involved, I’m real glad we’re not on the case anymore,” Hahn concludes. “I don’t like the weird stuff. Upsets my digestion.”

“Yeah. We can only hope the weekend doesn’t get any worse.”

Those words will haunt her in the days to come.

* * *

Shift’s over. She gets home late, and sees that Rusty’s black Camaro’s in the driveway.

He’s sprawled on the living room’s couch when she walks in. Rusty’s a handsome guy, although his looks have begun to fade since his forty-sixth birthday, a couple years ago. His hair’s still deep red, although a careful application of men’s hair dye is responsible for that, and he looks a bit like a cross between David Caruso and Burt Reynolds. She only knows who Burt Reynolds is because he loves the actor’s movies, a shitty Vegas movie called Heat in particular.

Rusty’s wearing the same black button-down shirt and black jeans he had on last time she saw him, over twenty-four hours ago. His eyes are bloodshot: too little sleep and too much booze, she guesses.

“Hey, babe.”

“Hey yourself,” she says. There used to be a time when ‘babe’ didn’t grate on her ears, but that time’s been gone for a while now. She sits next to him and a quick whiff tells her he hasn’t showered since she saw him, either, and that he’s been hitting the booze pretty hard. At least he doesn’t smell like sex, so he wasn’t romping around on her, just gambling and drinking. Gambling’s his job; drinking on the job’s not a good idea.

“Missed ya.” He even sounds sincere when he says the words. Maybe he is.

“What’s new?” she asks him casually after they exchange perfunctory kisses. He tries to make it a bit less perfunctory but she doesn’t feel like swapping spit when his mouth is sure to taste like sour liquor and the long-dead remains of hot tamales.

“Had a good run, ‘till some dickhead from Cali pulled a straight flush out of his ass,” he says. “Still, I walked away with five.”

Five means five hundred. If it had been five grand he’d be trumpeting the news and would look a lot happier than he does. Five hundred means he’s barely recouped his stake. Five hundred means he’s going to be short for his share of the bills. Again.

He notices the slight narrowing of her eyes. If nothing else, he’s damn good at reading faces. “I know, but I’ve got a good game lined up tomorrow. Bunch of tourists. Wannabe high rollers. Easy pickings.”

Sure. Because you’re going to be the only shark swimming in those waters. There’d be other sharks, and they might find him to be easy pickings. Rusty is good, no mistake about it, but he isn’t quite as good as he thinks he is, and he’s not improving with age.

She says none of this. She’s not ready to have the Talk, not yet. She’s tired, and seeing the dead girl’s face has left her drained and depressed, and what she wants is for him to take a shower and make love to her and help her forget her day.

He sees some of that in her face, and he flashes her a sympathetic smile. “Hard day at work, uh?”

She nods. “Nasty.” She doesn’t say anything more, because over the years she’s found that he really doesn’t want to hear about any of it.

The smile becomes brighter. “Want me to kiss it and make it better?”

She’s trying to figure out a diplomatic way to tell him to clean up first when she sees movement out of the corner of her eye.

Rusty’s eyes widen; he’s seen it too. “What the fuck?”

She twists around and catches a glimpse of something scurrying around the corner, right into her bedroom. Too big to be a bug, whatever it is. “What the hell was that?”

“Mouse, maybe?”

“Too big. More like a rat,” Lorena says, and the idea of a freaking rat in her home infuriates her. “Goddammit, Rusty! I told you to stop leaving food lying around!”

“We’ve never had rats in the house, Lorie,” he replies in a reasonable tone as he gets to his feet. “Maybe it’s a stray pet chinchilla, or something.”

“Whatever it is, we’ve got to get it out of here.”

“Hey, you’re the cop. Aren’t you going to arrest it, read it its rights or something?”

“You’re the one with the dick and the balls. Get in there and get rid of it.”

“I’m going, I’m going.” He looks around for a weapon and settles on a rolled-up copy of People magazine. He walks into the bedroom, and Lorena resignedly follows him, because, let’s face it, if she wants something done right, she’s going to have to do it herself.

The bedroom looks just like the last time she saw it. Unmade bed, pillows and sheets strewn everywhere, Rusty’s dirty clothes in a pile on a corner, her dirty clothes in a hamper on another corner. They do their laundry separately, mainly because they don’t want to look at each other’s skid marks and period spots; they’re not that chummy yet, even after three years.

Something is rustling about in the hamper. “There it is,” she says.

“That’s a big mouse. Big rat, even,” Rusty says dubiously. “You got your gun, Lorie?”

“I’m not going to fire my weapon on some vermin, okay? Just poke it; I’ll open the door and we’ll scare it out of the house.”

More rustling under the clothes, and something else: a low, chittering sound, with a buzzing undertone to it she’s never heard from an animal before.

“What the fuck?” Rusty says again. “Maybe you should get something, a pot or pan or something, in case we need to trap it.”

“I don’t want to trap it, Rusty. I want it out.”

“It doesn’t sound right, okay? It might be sick. It might be rabid.”

He’s right. Whatever is rummaging through her dirty clothes doesn’t sound right. Lorena realizes she’s scared of whatever that is. You’re a damn police officer, she chides herself. You’re acting like a pathetic little hausfrau confronting a mouse.

“Hold on,” she says, and rushes to the closet, which fortunately is on the other side of the room from her clothes hamper. From it she retrieves something better than a rolled-up People magazine: a telescoping baton Joe Hahn got her last Christmas, and a golf club an old ex-boyfriend left behind. “Here.” She hands Rusty the golf club.

He holds it gingerly over his head, ready to strike. “Okay. You poke it, and I swing for the fences.”

“Don’t you dare miss and hit me,” she hisses at him, and he gives her a hurt glare. She’s gone and offended his male ego, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to deal with whatever is in the hamper.

“Just do it,” he says.

She flicks the baton and it extends to its full length. She pokes the hamper with it, and the chittering stops. For a moment, it’s as if nothing is going on; no movement, no noise, and she feels tempted to just forget the whole thing and pretend nothing’s happened.

Instead, she gives it another poke, a much stronger one.

It comes out, buzzing and keening, and they both scream like little children discovering the bogeyman in the closet is real.

“Jesus fuck!” Rusty shouts and staggers away.

Lorena reacts with the instinctive revulsion of someone finding a scorpion crawling up on their skin. She slashes at the scrambling blood-red thing that leaps out with the baton, and she hits it. The solid impact travels up her arm, shocking her with how heavy it is, and she screams again.

It’s a spider, a blood-red spider the size of a cat, but it’s got too many legs, at least a dozen of them, hairy like a tarantula’s, and a sinuous twisting body like a snake, and a head that is more like a fly’s than anything else, if a fly had a head the size of a golf ball, and a snout, as long as her little finger. The baton hits it in mid-air and sends it crashing against her dresser, where it scrambles on its many legs, keening and buzzing through it all like some sort of machine.

“AAAH!” Rusty shouts, his eyes wild, and swings the club with all his might.

And misses. The dresser’s top cracks under the impact, and the thing gathers itself for a jump, its long body coiled like a spring.

It leaps at Lorena, its hairy legs reaching for her.

“NO!” she screams, batting it away with a two-handed swing. Another hit, and the monster, what else to call it, the monster is freakishly heavy, it feels like hitting a flat iron, but the impact sends it flying against her bedroom window; glass shatters and the monster disappears into the darkness, its keening diminishing in volume until it’s gone.

“What the fuck?” Rusty whimpers. “What the fuck, what the fuck?”

“Forget what the fuck?” Lorena snaps. “The window! What if it comes back?”

The thought of whatever that was coming back through the shattered window makes them spring into action. First, they cover the hole with trash bags and duct tape. They glance at the makeshift cover, then at each other. More scrambling follows, for tools and materials. They sacrifice a couple of book shelves and board up the window, nailing it shut.

What about the other windows? A glass pane isn’t going to stop it if it wants to come back! She has an impulse, a strong one, to board up every window, every opening in the house.

Reason reasserts itself at about the same time her pulse stops racing. Now that it’s out of sight, the impossibility of it all begins to cast doubt on the whole experience.

“What was that?” Rusty says after he hammers the last nail into place. That window is as safe as they can make it; the critter, whatever the hell it was, would have an easier time chewing through one of the walls. “Scorpion, maybe?”

“I don’t know,” she says. They hold each other, and she doesn’t care that he’s sweating heavily and stinking a lot worse than he did when she got home. “I just don’t know.”

“It’s a mutation, is what it is,” he says. “Fucking nuke tests out in the desert, what, like twenty miles away from the city? They were exploding nukes for like twenty years out there. Who knows what the fuck is breeding over there?”

“I guess,” she says.

“Mutant cockroach-scorpion hybrid, is what that was.” Now that Rusty’s found an explanation, he grabs ahold of it like a drowning man reaching for a piece of flotsam. “Jesus Christ, that’s the most fucked up shit I’ve seen.”

“Same here.”

“It’s probably dead. We whacked it good, didn’t we? Me with the club, and you with your ninja stick.”

He’d missed it clean, but she doesn’t press the issue. His male ego must be pretty tattered already. And right now she needs the comfort of having his arms around her. She wants her Mom and Pop to hold her and tell her everything is okay, but since they aren’t around Rusty will have to do.

“It’s probably dead,” Rusty repeats the words like a mantra. “It’s probably dead, but maybe we should call Animal Control or something, don’t you think, babe?”

“Not this late at night, but yeah, I’ll call them in the morning. I know a couple people there.”

“Good. I mean, it’s probably dead, and there’s probably only one of them, but best to be safe, right?”

“Right.”

They keep the lights on, and they get precious little sleep.

TWO

“They be goin’ crazy all over the ‘hood, ese.”

Oscar “Chico” Leon nods. He’s driving the car, an old Crown Vic he’s pimped up himself, working out of his uncle’s garage, a little place in the barrio where lots of missing cars go in, never to be seen again. The Crown Vic’s roomy enough to fit all five of them: his best friend Ruben up front, Machete and the two newbies in the back. The two fresh fish don’t have street names yet, and Chico can’t be bothered to learn their government names; until they earn a spot in the Guerreros, the Warriors, they are known simply as Pendejito and Cabroncito, respectively – Little Pube and Little Fucker.

“Never seen so many people tripping like that,” Ruben continues before taking another sip of his Corona, and Chico has to nod again. Things have been more fucked up than usual lately.

“It’s those Santos de la mierda,” Machete says from the back seat. Machete isn’t very smart, but this time he’s hit it right on the head. Chico likes the big fucker crowding the two newbies in the back seat, although he wishes the guero hadn’t taken up that nickname from that fucking dumbass movie. Sure, he had killed somebody with a machete a while back, but when the movie came out he just had to take the name and now it’s Machete this and Machete that, non-stop. He even talks about himself like that.

“Machete don’t like those putos,” Machete adds.

“It’s all bullshit,” Chico tells his friends. He’s something of an intellectual among the Guerreros, having finished high school with a B- average. Accusations of him “acting white” were met with extreme violence, so nobody questions his cojones anymore, not unless they want to lose theirs. “The Santos de la Muerte are just a bunch of crazy-ass Mejicanos trying to scare everybody with their fairy tale bullshit.”

“People still be tripping,” Ruben says.

“The Santos be throwing maldiciones y maleficios,” says one of the newbies. “Devil magic.”

“Shut the fuck up, Pendejito.”

“I’m Cabroncito,” the newb protests weakly.

“You’re Pendejito Numero Dos now,” Chico growls, and the fresh fish wisely stays quiet. “When I wanna know what you’re thinking, I’ll squeeze your head till it pops. You hear me, pinche puto?”

Pendejito Number Two nods. Chico turns back to Ruben as he slows down. They’re watching the hood, on the lookout for prey or rival gang bangers. And, in the last couple of days, crazies. Of late, a few people have been tripping badly and acting like they got rabies or something. The crazies are bad for business, so word’s come down they need to be taken out as soon as they spot them.

“Somebody’s pushing some bad shit, that’s what’s going down,” he explains. “Somebody be putting rocket fuel on their blow or their coke, is all. When we find the motherfucker doing that, we’re going to do him Cartel style.”

“Machete gonna chop off some heads,” Machete says proudly; his gold teeth glitter as he smiles.

“Yeah, you’ll get the chance when we find the fuckers.” Problem is, none of the crazies have been able to tell the Guerreros where to find the pusher selling the bad shit. Chico knows they’re going to have to start thinking like cops to find the fuckers causing trouble in the ‘hood. Chico hates cops, and doesn’t want to think like a cop. Cops are just a bigger gang with better guns; like all gangs, they divide the world into two groups: their people, and everyone else. Chico’s people are the Guerreros, a small local gang that protects and controls a few blocks of the shittier part of Vegas. And Chico’s people are in trouble.

He and his crew have handled four crazies in the last week. They’ve got nothing in common. One was a woman in her thirties with eight kids and a craving for H, who one morning decided to run around the street completely naked, screaming and trying to bite and claw at people. Cops took her away. The other two were local kids, both of them probies for the Guerreros who spent their days watching out for Five-O; they’d gone loco and torn into each other with their nails and teeth. By the time Chico and his friends got there and broke the fight up, one was bleeding out and the other wouldn’t stop trying to bite, so they’d had to bust his skull open with a baseball bat. Those two were buried deep, out by the desert. Last one was just some white dude who’d wandered into the barrio from who knew where, loping around on his hands and knees like a dog, foaming at the mouth. Nobody had wasted any time trying to help him: another bunch of Warriors had put him down like the mad dog he was. Shot him five times before he stopped kicking, and after that it was another trip to the desert, another secret burial.

If this keeps up they may run out of desert.

His musings get interrupted when he spots somebody running erratically down the street. “Got another loco,” he calls out.

It’s an old man in wife beaters and boxer shorts, stumbling around barefoot, clawing at something on his back. “He don’t look like he be tripping,” Ruben says. “He looks like…” He trails off, because he’s got no clue what this looks like. Neither does Chico.

The Crown Vic comes to a stop a dozen feet away from the old man, who’s stopped running. He’s spinning around in circles, trying to pull something that’s holding on to him from behind. Something dark that looks like a monkey, maybe. Blood is running down the old man’s back, and as Chico and his gang watch from the car, a fresh spatter flies off into the air, glistening red in the streetlights. A spray of crimson droplets hits the Crown Vic’s windshield.

“Fuck,” Ruben says,

A decision crystalizes in Chico’s mind. “Let’s kill that bitch.”

They get out. Chico and Ruben have gats on them, but they leave them tucked in their waistbands for now and go for their knives. Ruben’s pearl-handled switchblade comes out; Chico is partial to a big combat knife his uncle Ruiz gave him for his fifteenth birthday. Machete pulls out his namesake, of course. The newbies got nothing but their hands and feet; they don’t get to carry until they prove themselves.

The old man has gone down. The monkey on his back is biting his neck, is eating chunks out of his neck and shoulders. It’s not a monkey, Chico realizes as they get closer, weapons drawn. It’s like a crab or a scorpion, its skin slick and shiny like it’s made of dark green vinyl, except for the bits spattered with the old man’s blood.

“Chinga tu madre!” Machete screams, and takes a swing at the giant scorpion-monkey.

“Wait…” Chico starts to say. They’re trying to help the old man…

The machete goes Chop! as it lands, hitting the monkey-thing and cutting a chunk off of it, before sinking deep in the old man’s neck.

… not kill him.

No time to yell at Machete. The monkey-scorpion-thing jumps off the collapsing old man, right at Machete. He manages to interpose an arm and the critter latches onto it and starts biting, and now Machete’s screaming like a stuck pig.

“Ay, chingada! Get it off of me! Get it the fuck off!”

Ruben starts to slash at the monkey-thing, but Chico shoulders him aside. If they start cutting into it, they’re going to hurt Machete just like he hurt the old man. Instead, fighting the urge to just run away, Chico reaches out with his empty left hand and grabs the monkey-scorpion.

It’s hot, warmer than a living thing should be, it feels more like grabbing an enchilada right off the oven, and he feels his fingers start to burn, but he doesn’t let go. The thing’s hot skin feels like plastic, smooth except for rough ridges running down its back, and it’s hard to keep his hold on it, but he manages to pull it away from Machete, just an inch or two. Its skinny legs are still holding onto flesh, but now Chico has a clear shot, and he sticks the monkey-fuck with his combat knife, right where its face should be, only instead of a face it’s got a big plunger-shaped sucker surrounded by tiny teeth or thorns. The tip of the knife goes into its sucker-mouth with a popping sound and plunges deep into spongy flesh; the monkey-thing makes a noise for the first time: it sounds like steam howling from a boiling kettle. Chico stabs it again and again, and he almost cuts into the hand holding it with his frantic attacks, but nothing matters except killing it. He’s never seen something that had to be killed before, that fucking demanded to be killed.

It lets go of Machete at last, its multiple legs trying to grab Chico; it’s got six legs, long thin legs with claws at their ends, and they swing all the way around. Chico lets go just before they sink into him, sends the monkey-fuck to the ground with a final slash of his knife. It tries to scurry away, but they’ve got it surrounded and they all know what to do with an enemy that’s lying on the ground.

They stomp the shit out of it.

It’s tough, they all can feel how tough it is through the soles of their shoes. Machete’s got heavy combat boots, and he weighs in at two-thirty, and he’s fucking pissed, so he does the most damage. They keep stomping on it, and some of its legs come off, and there is this light green milky stuff leaking out of it, but it doesn’t die, it keeps trying to claw and bite, and it gets one of the fresh fish on the leg, a long cut that goes right through his jeans and into his leg. The fresh fish falls on his ass, screeching and holding his bleeding leg, and the monkey-thing leaps for him.

Machete catches it, and this time it’s nothing but net, a two-handed swing with his blade that crunches into the thing and cuts it in two. The pieces hit the pavement and finally stop moving.

“Motherfucking Chupacabra!” Machete shouts.

The gang watches with wide eyes as the two pieces of the Chupacabra – that’s what it’s got to be, right? – start smoking and shrinking. What’s left looks a bit like the crushed remains of an ordinary cockroach.

“Jesus, Jose y Maria,” the unhurt Pendejito says, crossing himself.

“What the fuck happened to the Chupacabra?” Ruben says.

“The fuck am I supposed to know?” Chico snaps. He’s still breathing heavily, and only he knows how close he came to shitting himself when he grabbed the fucking thing, and he’s got to act like he doesn’t give a fuck or they’re going to think he’s chickenshit. “It’s dead, and I don’t give a fuck if it was the Chupacabra or Hell’s roadkill, it’s fucking dead and that’s all that matters.” He points at the old man lying by their feet. “Check up on the viejo, willya?” He’s pretty sure the poor old man is dead, thanks to fucking Machete.

Ruben does. “He’s done, mano.” Chico walks on over and takes a look. Machete cut the poor fucker pretty bad, but the old man was probably done anyway. There’s spots where the monkey-thing was chewing on him that show bone, and splintered bone at that. At the end, the Chupacabra had been eating pieces of the old man’s spine. “Fuck.”

“Yo, I’m cut pretty bad, ese,” Machete says. He’s no whiner, so if he says it’s bad, it’s fucking bad.

They take a look. The Chupacabra’s slashed open his forearm all the way to the bone, and taken a couple chunks of flesh clean off. If it’d gotten one of the big blood vessels, Machete would probably be dead, too.

“Think I’m gonna need stitches?”

“You’re gonna need a fucking new arm, guey,” Ruben says. “We gotta take you to the doctor.”

The Warriors have their own doctor, a Guatemalan who couldn’t get a license in the US but who services people who can’t or won’t go to the free clinic. That’s where they’ve got to go, Chico decides.

“How’s the Pendejito?”

They’ve forgotten about the fresh fish, mostly because he’s gone quiet. He’s lying on the street, and he isn’t moving. Ruben and the other fish check on him. “He fucking bled out, Chico,” Ruben says. “Fucking Chupacabra got him in the big vein on the leg.”

Dios mio, Chico thinks. The critter was smaller than a dog and it killed two men in a few seconds. He looks into the night, into the poorly lit streets of his neighborhood. First the crazies, and now this. What if there are more of them out there?

What the fuck do they do if there are more of them out there?

THREE

Nobody’s supposed to die in the Champagne Room.

Sure, GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS isn’t Cheetah’s or Crazy Horse; it’s a more than slightly run-down strip club a little bit off the beaten path, a place for the budget-conscious connoisseur of the sins of the flesh, a place with a small crowd of loyal regulars, where every dancer knows your name, if you show up often enough and drop enough coin, that is. Things get rowdy once in a while, and yes, some old guy had a heart attack once, and the paramedics had to wheel him out, and yes, he died in the hospital, but the general consensus is that he died happy. Other than that unfortunate incident, nobody’s ever come close to dying in GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS, unless one counts la petit mort, because, yes, gents, there is sex in the Champagne Room, if you hook up with the right girl, say the right things, and don’t act like a cop. Sex, yes. Death, big no-no.

Until that Thursday night, that is. That turns out to be Suzie Hamed’s worst night of her life. Until Friday rolls around, that is, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Her Thursday night starts normally enough. Thursday afternoon, really. Suzie’s pulling a triple shift, beginning at four p.m., when you can hear crickets chirping over the crappy music the early shift DJ likes to inflict on the customers, and she is planning to stay at her post, well, her pole, until six a.m., when the last few hardy souls still in the club at closing time venture out into the morning sunlight, dazed and confused but hopefully happy to have been there. Management usually frowns upon girls doing more than two shifts a night – working fourteen hours does nothing good for a girl’s demeanor and deportment – but Suzie has an arrangement with Management, in particular one Randolph P. Uberhaven, co-owner and schedule supervisor. Said arrangement is worked out at around three thirty p.m., while Mr. Uberhaven sits by his desk and Suzie kneels under said desk. The whole thing is rather distasteful, but Suzie has many obligations, and working a triple today and tomorrow is the only way she’s going to meet them.

Afterwards, she goes to the girls’ restroom, brushes her teeth and rinses thoroughly with the mint-flavored mouthwash she’s had the foresight to bring along. There is enough self-esteem left in her to make her look at her reflection in the mirror, look herself in the eye, and hope for a way out of this. Hope is a flighty thing, however, and a long series of disappointments has rendered it largely extinct. Right now, the only thing she can realistically hope for is to gather two thousand bucks in two nights so she can pay the vig for her little brother before some very nasty people do some very nasty things to him. Little Hamid – yes, her parents named her brother Hamid Hamed, just one of their many crimes against humanity – styles himself a hustler, and is a pathetic loser whose only saving grace is having a sister who has enough disposable income to bail him out, time after time.

Suzie – nee Suhaimah – was left with the unenviable task of raising her brother at age twenty, back when she was a premed at Pomona College, after her parents ended up on the receiving end of an eighteen-wheeler whose driver was short on sleep and high on coke. One thing led to another, as the saying goes. If she ever had the inclination, Suzie could map out the long series of bad choices and worse luck that had landed her here, seven years after her cell phone had rung and ushered in the worst day of her life. It all had been a series of instances of one damn thing leading to another.

She doesn’t have the inclination to dwell on the past, however. What she does have is a hankering for the same white powder that indirectly turned her into an orphan, and luckily for her she’s got it. A couple bumps later, she’s ready to go change into one of her outfits – naughty schoolgirl – and start hustling.

The first five hours aren’t good at all. A lot of regulars have decided to stay home that evening, and it’s deader than usual. Suzie smiles, dances, offers a handjob to a vacationer from Oklahoma but can’t reach an agreement on the price, gets a few guys to buy her drinks and a couple table dances, and, when she counts her money during a short break at nine p.m., finds herself with a whole sixty bucks to her name. “Just fucking great,” she mutters before going back to work.

By nine forty-five, she thinks her luck has changed.

The customer isn’t a regular. White, mid-fifties, wearing a nice suit, not bad-looking if you like them beefy and with thinning hair on top. He arrives alone, sits by the stage just as Suzie starts her set, and he becomes fixated on her right from the start. Does she remind him of his wife or daughter or somebody he fucked while fighting in Iraq or selling farm machinery in Kansas? She doesn’t know, and doesn’t care. What she cares about is the pile of fives and tens – not singles – he starts tossing on the stage. She crawls over to him, and he flashes her a fifty, which she lets him place beneath her thong string. His fingers linger on her skin a little longer than the club rules allow, but she gives him a smile and a little ass wiggle anyway, because the dude’s dropped over a hundred and fifty bucks on the stage and from the looks of it there’s plenty more where that came from.

Looking back, she knows she should have been suspicious right then and there. High rollers like that don’t come to GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS; they end up at the Sapphire or one of the other highfaluting places. There’s only one reason for someone to flash that kind of wad in a place like this: he’s looking for something he won’t get at one of the fancier clubs. Suzie’s too worried about making bank, though, so after her set is over she sits down with Mr. Beefy.

“What’s your real name?” he asks her after the first couple drinks. They always ask that, trying to manufacture some sort of personal connection with the dancers they’ve come to ogle, paw and grope. She doesn’t get it.

Suzie’s coke-bright eyes and well-practiced smile conceal the contempt she feels for Mr. Beefy. “My name’s Colleen.” She’s told that lie so often sometimes she thinks it is her real name.

“You don’t look like a Colleen.” She doesn’t; she’s short and olive-skinned with black curly hair and brown eyes, with curves you don’t see among most Caucasian gals.

“My mother was Irish. I know I don’t look it. I got my complexion from my dad. He was from Palestine.” That part is true.

“Interesting,” he says, and puts his hand over hers. “I guess you’re not a practicing Muslim,” he adds, and chuckles at his own joke.

“I’m not anything.” Truth again. Her father had turned his back on his religion and his family long before Suzie had been born, which explained why, when he died, nobody was interested in helping her and her brother out. “Religion is just another way to part fools with their money,” she comments. That’s a mistake; if you’re smart, you don’t offer opinions on anything like religion and politics, because there’s a good chance you’re going to piss off the customer.

The guy just chuckles again. “You got that right, Colleen.” He’s caressing her hand with his thumb, a circular motion on her skin which kinda creeps her out, but she doesn’t pull away. She lets so many people do stuff she doesn’t like to her, it’s become a habit. “Just about every religion is a lie, with one exception.” Suzie braces herself for a sermon, but the customer sort of drifts off, deep in thought.

“Wanna go somewhere a little more private, baby?” she asks him after a while. Time is money.

He smiles at her. “Read my mind.”

The club’s Champagne Room isn’t very fancy. It’s on the second floor, a chamber with six partitions. On a good night there’s maybe four girls up there at any given time, but right now they’ve got the whole place to themselves, besides Jose, the big Mexican bouncer who watches over the room and collects the two hundred dollar fee, of which she’ll only see eighty bucks. At this club, you make your money at the Champers Room from tips. From the way Mr. Beefy’s looking at her, she’s got a sick feeling she’s going to earn her tips the hard way.

Stripping isn’t for the faint of heart. During her short but checkered career, Suzie’s been punched – nose, mouth, stomach, one each – slapped several times, dragged by the hair, five of those, in two cases by fellow dancers, and spat on a surprising and depressing number of times. She’s been followed to the parking lot, and a couple of times all the way home. She can’t remember how many times customers have tried to stick assorted appendages in assorted orifices without so much as a by-your-leave. That kind of shit doesn’t happen every day, but it happens, and something about this guy makes her feel one of those times is at hand.

She still goes up with him. A bad feeling isn’t a good enough reason to turn her back on the possibility of a big payday, not when her brother’s continued health is at stake.

 They head towards the farthest booth and sit on the plastic-lined couch; she doesn’t like the way her mostly-bare butt sticks to the Champers Room’s furniture, but she understands it makes it easier to hose it off afterwards.

“You’ve got six songs, baby, starting with the next one after this,” she tells him, snuggling close under his arm.

He puts a hand on her breast, and she gently pushes it away. “Not yet, baby. And if you want to touch, it’s going to be a little extra, okay?”

“I’m good for it,” he says. The hand that just was on her left boob dips into a pocket and comes back holding a fistful of fifties. He hands it over to her; three hundred, maybe more, she gleans at a glance; she puts the money away and lets him go to town on her tits; she’s let people do far more for far less.

He gets her sitting on his lap, and that’s when she starts worrying. He’s looking hungrily at her, and he’s grabbing her boobs and her ass like he just came back from a long sea voyage, but as soon her butt’s on his lap she can tell the guy’s got no wood. None. By this point it should feel like he’s packing heat down there. His eyes say Yes, but his dick says No Way, Jose. What the hell?

“You’re so alive,” he whispers to her, getting right in her face. The hand on her chest moves away from her tits and comes to rest over her heart. “I can feel it, right here, your life force. I saw it as soon as I set eyes on you. I knew you were the one for me.”

“Anything you say, baby. Song’s started. Don’t you want me to dance for you?” She’s getting apprehensive – if the guy’s got no rocks to get off, what the fuck does he want with her?

“Yes,” he says, letting go of her and leaning back. “Dance for me, Colleen.”

Weirdo, she thinks, but goes to work. Takes off her top, lets him get a good view of her goodies, and starts grinding dick. Except he’s still limp like a wet noodle. As she wiggles around, she finally finds something hard down there, except it’s not his dick.

It’s something in his pocket. It could be a harmonica, it could be a cell phone, but some instinct tells her it’s neither of those.

It’s a folding knife.

She freezes up for a second. “What’s wrong, Colleen?” Mr. Beefy asks her, and his tone is different now, tighter, and his dick is still limp but he sounds excited. “You are mine tonight, sweetie.”

Suzie starts to get up, but the guy’s faster than she is. He grabs her, pulls her back towards him, and clamps a hand over her mouth. Out by the entrance, Jose is too engrossed in the romance novel he’s reading to notice the sounds of struggle over the music coming from downstairs.

“The stars told me to find you,” he whispers in her ear as she struggles in his grip. He’s twisted her left arm behind her back, and the pain makes her scream, but his other hand stifles the sound. “I need your life. Tonight we sing and call down the New Gods.”

Okay, then.

Any second now, crazy dude is going to reach for the blade in his pocket and cut her throat or stab her in the kidney while they play Beautiful People downstairs. The thing is, Suzie’s not the kind of girl who lets some asshole cut her up because the voices in his head told him to. Early in her career, she discovered that, when the shit hits the fan, she’s really not too bothered about the idea of hurting people if she has to. As soon as he starts talking about the New Gods, she smashes the back of her head against his face, and is rewarded by the satisfying crunch of his nose caving in under the impact. His whispers turn into a grunt of pain, and the grip on her arm weakens enough she can break free, even as she uses her other arm to drive an elbow into his gut while she bites the hand over her mouth, and it’s not a playful nip, either, she chews into the fucker like it’s a fried chicken leg.

The crazy guy doesn’t curse or scream. He’s growling now, growling like a dog or a wolf, and the sound scares her worse than the thought of the knife in his pocket. She’s not in a good position for a fight, with her back to him, still sitting on his lap. He pulls his hand off of her mouth, leaving behind some skin in her teeth, and shifts his grip to her throat, and now he’s holding her by the neck while he reaches for his knife with his other hand.

She tries to pry his fingers off her throat, but he’s strong, too strong. She can’t breathe, and the pressure on her trachea is painful, unbearable. Her legs kick out until she feels her feet touch the little table by the sofa, the table that’s solidly screwed into the floor. She uses it to propel herself backwards and smash him in the face with the back of her skull yet again, this time with the strength of her legs behind the head-butt. Suzie feels his teeth cut into her scalp even as they break under the impact, but it’s worth it; the blow relaxes his grip just enough she can finally leap off his lap and stumble out of the room, barely navigating her way on her platform shoes.

“Hey, no rough stuff!” That’s Jose, dropping his Harlequin Romance as he finally realizes something’s going down. She staggers into him and falls to her knees, hugging one of his legs, coughing uncontrollably, trying to warn him but unable to do so. “Watch it, ese,” Jose tells the crazy bastard, who’s gotten up and followed her out. Suzie looks up just in time to see him slash at Jose with his knife; it’s a freaking pig sticker, and when the blade hits Jose’s outstretched hand, two fingers go flying off; a burst of blood follows the severed digits.

Jose screams. Blood rains down on her head.

Next one’s for me. Everything feels crystal clear, everything seems to move in slow motion. Jose’s index finger bounces off the floor at the crazy dickhead’s feet. Said crazy dickhead is raising the knife, and she knows he’s going to cut her with it, going to take her life in the name of his New Gods.

Well, fuck that noise.

One of her many boyfriends was a wannabe MMA fighter. He’d taught her a few things. How to make a fist, for one. How to land said fist pretty hard and fast, for another.

She’s at just the right spot to punch the crazy fucker in the balls, so she does. She doesn’t go for a straight punch, but more like an underhand volleyball serve, swinging up, and catches the guy right where it counts. Something goes pop in there.

He might not be able to get it up, but he doesn’t like getting his balls crushed any more than the next guy, and his knife-slashing comes to an abrupt halt as he bends over like a samurai greeting the Emperor of Japan. Ignoring Jose’s screaming and bleeding above and behind her, Suzie uses the opportunity to cock one leg back and drive her platform shoe right into the bastard’s groin, on the grounds that two ball-crushing blows are better than one.

The crazy fucker isn’t growling anymore. He falls to his knees, so he’s at eye level with her, and whimpers. Something changes in his eyes. For a second, he looks at her as if he’s seeing her for the first time, as if he has no clue what the fuck he’s doing there, kneeling in the Champagne Room of a third-rate strip club with a knife in his hand and a matching set of ruptured testicles.

 He whimpers one more time, and drops dead at Suzie’s feet.

That’s when she joins Jose in screaming as loudly as humanly possible.

* * *

The aftermath is a mess.

More screaming and shouting; the music stops, and the main lights go on, revealing the club’s squalid reality, previously hidden by the darkness and the colorful but dim lamps. Mr. Uberhaven is pissed off, but he leads the hunt for Jose’s fingers and gets them put on ice while Suzie’s best friend in the club, a fellow dancer by the name of Trixie (her real name; her parents clearly helped set her on the path to the pole), got her downstairs away from the dead guy.

Suzie was in shock, but not enough in shock not to grab her purse with her money. She was too much in shock to go through the dead fucker’s pockets, unfortunately, so somebody else got the rest of his wad. By the time the cops showed up, the corpse was missing his wallet, two rings he’d had on his left hand, his watch, smart phone and, amazingly enough, two gold teeth that somehow got pulled off his mouth in the seven minutes it took the first responders to show up. That’s how they roll at GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS.

The cops arrive and Suzie ends up in handcuffs while they sort things out. Luckily there is a camera on overwatch in the Champagne Room; not in the cubicles, for obvious reasons, but on the corridor linking the rooms, and Mr. Uberhaven plays the footage showing the crazy asshole chasing Suzie and performing elective hand surgery on poor Jose. The cops take the cuffs off of her, take her statement and let her go.

They ask her if she wants to go to the ER, but she says she’s okay. Her hand is a little bruised where she cold-cocked the bastard, and she’s got a nasty scalp cut that might or might not need stitches, but it’s not worth taking her uninsured ass to the ER. She gets sent home, though, which sucks. She’s only made a bit over five hundred bucks, fifteen hundred short of her goal, to keep her little brother from ending up in the ER with something a lot worse than a bruised hand and a scalp cut.

She calls Hamid and has him pick her up. Her brother arrives half an hour later in his shitty Chevy Impala, which is the best he could afford to buy when his previous ride gave up the ghost. “How did it go?” he asks her as she gets in.

She tells him. “That sucks.” Not very demonstrative or expressive, Hamid is. “You okay?”

“Yeah. The back of my head’s stopped bleeding, so I’ll live. Uberhaven sent me home, though, and I made maybe half what I needed to.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I’ve got something lined up that should get me straight and leave me with enough cash to pay you back what I already owe you.”

By her tally, Hamid owes her a little over twelve grand, not counting the two thousand he was hoping she’d lend him before Saturday. “What is it?” She knows it can’t be anything legal; there’s nothing legit that Hamid can do to make two grand in two days, let alone fourteen thousand.

Sure enough, he looks away from her. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Whatever it is, don’t do it, Hammie. I’ll get you the money by Saturday.” It’s not impossible; she’s pulled in fifteen hundred in one night before. Not lately, though. Her best night this year was nine hundred and change, and her average is a lot less than that. And she’s almost out of coke, which isn’t free. Getting two thousand in two nights had been iffy at best; doing it in a night and a half is going to take a miracle, and she’s gotten a miracle already, walking out of a run-in with a knife-wielding maniac with nothing worse than minor cuts and bruises. In her experience – luckily second-hand for the most part – when knives come out people get cut, a lot.

“I’ve got it covered, sis. Just… What the fuck!” Hamid hits the brakes and only the safety belt keeps Suzie from smashing into the windshield.

“What? What?” Her heart is racing again. She really can’t take any more shocks tonight.

“Something ran in front of the car. Like a dog, I think.”

Suzie looks around as Hamid drives on and catches a glimpse of something disappearing around a corner. It might have been a dog or a cat or a big-ass rat, but she’s sure it’s got too many legs to be any of those. “Weird,” she says.

“What?”

“Nothing. I think I saw whatever it was. Looked deformed or something.”

“Lots of weird shit going on tonight. When I came out to get you, I saw some huge bats flittering around. Like the size of bald eagles or something.”

“Weird,” Suzie repeats.

She has no idea.

FOUR

Excerpt from The Day Las Vegas Died, by V.C. Jennings

Transcript: Jorge Melendez

(Mr. Melendez’s interview is presented here verbatim)

My name is Jorge Cesar Melendez Padroz. You killed my father. Prepare to die. (laughter) Sorry, couldn’t resist. The laughter, it helps me. It is laugh or it is scream, and believe me, you don’t want the screams. I worked security at the Bellagio, so I had a first row, no, a front row seat to the whole thing. And the first thing I want to say, it started long before that Friday and Saturday. It is like a jigsaw puzzle, the first few pieces, they don’t mean anything until you put lots more other pieces together, si? But now, I look back, and I see what those first few pieces were. They were signs, like before a hurricane, you start to get the winds, and the dogs and the birds, they know what is going to happen. There were many signs something bad was coming.

The first sign I saw was a week before. One of the high rollers, they find him dead in his room. The man, he scratches, no, he claws his own throat open. Nobody could figure it out how he did, he should have been dead before he did, but he rips own throat open, then uses blood to write on the bathroom mirror. My friend Ramon, he read the writing. It says “They are everywhere. They are waiting.” And below that, “They are getting in.” That is all. Nobody knew what it meant, but I do know now. We all know, even the government with their talk of terrorists and poison gas, they know.

There were other signs. More fights than ever before, those days before it happened. People weren’t being right in the head. Angry and scared all the time. Then, a lot more suicides. We had one in the Bellagio on Tuesday, then another on Wednesday. Not as bad as the first one, the man who opens his own throat, no, but bad. One jumps out a window in the fourteenth floor. Through a window; it’s not supposed to open but this man, a regular from Texas, he runs through the plate glass. Two other people get hurt badly by the falling glass, and he almost lands on somebody else. The other is a woman who is in Vegas with her friends, and she just hangs herself. Hangs herself from the shower rod in her room, and draws a bunch of eyes on the mirror with her lipstick. El mal de ojo, that’s what they call it in El Salvador: the Evil Eye.

Many people, they felt the bad stuff that was coming, and they left. In my neighborhood, four, five families left a few days before it happened. Packed their things, walked away from their jobs, took their kids out of school, everything. Just drove off. Nobody said why they did, but a few tried to tell everybody they should leave, too. Very few listened.

They were blessed, those ones. The rest of us, we got fucked. Chingados. (laughter) I got to laugh, or I start screaming.

FIVE

Bradley Bertrand needs this vacation very badly.

For one, he’s been working like a maniac, too freaking close to twenty-four-seven for far too long, all to make sure that Duty Kills III: Call of Killing is released in time for Christmas, and that it is released bug-free, or at least bug-light. His gig as a developer (one of about two hundred) for ArticWind Games is a dream come true, but even dreams have little hidden clauses that can spoil the fun sometimes, and one of them is having to all but kill yourself when some dickhead in Marketing decides when a game release should happen, rather than the designers charged with actually putting together the damn thing. He’s had jobs before, mostly boring corporate crap that didn’t involve gaming, which he loves, but never one this demanding. As a result, Bradley is exhausted, physically and mentally; the last couple of months have been spent in a haze of frantic work, fueled by the massive imbibing of Monster Energy drinks and Five-Hour Energy chasers. All in the name of making the long-awaited sequel to the king of all first-person shooters come out in time.

Which leads to the ‘for another’ bit.

He thinks he’s losing his mind.

And not in ways that one could put down as part and parcel of busting one’s ass like one has never busted ass before. He’s been exhausted before, and yeah, sometimes if you caffeinate yourself enough you start having hallucinations and hearing things.

But nothing like what he’s been experiencing.

He’s freaking seeing dead people. His dead father, to be precise.

“Ground control to Major Weirdo. Come back, Major Weirdo,” Corey says behind him, startling the crap out of him.

Bradley shakes his head. He’s been standing still and staring at the wall for… he doesn’t know for how long.

“You okay, bro?” Corey asks him. “Didn’t mean to scare you, but you weren’t moving or anything.”

“Yeah, sorry. I’m still out of it.”

“Well, snap out of it. It’s over, man. Duty Kills went gold two days ago, remember? Vacations and bonuses for everyone.”

Bradley remembers. The funny part was, he’d kept on working despite seeing his dead father appear out of nowhere again and again. A youthful version of his father, not the cancer-ravaged thing he’d become in the last months of his life; it’s Bradley’s dad when Bradley had been four or five and still believed that his parental units were living gods who knew everything, and whose approval was not just the most important thing, it was the only thing, in the immortal words of some dude his dad loved to quote.

Dad has been popping up lately, saying nothing, just staring intently at Bradley for several seconds before disappearing between eye blinks.

The first time it happened, Bradley had screamed like a little girl and pissed himself.

Pretty embarrassing, since he’d been in the office’s coffee room at the time. He’d ended up pretending he’d spilled a soda on himself and changed into some sweat pants he’d kept around on the off-chance he might start using the company’s gym sometime in the foreseeable future. The whole thing had been equal parts embarrassing and disturbing.

There’d been another six or seven incidents over the last few weeks. You’d think he’d start to get used to them after a while, but you’d be wrong.

“I’m fine,” Bradley tells Corey, knowing he’s lying, to himself no less than to his bud and roommate. He and Corey and Logan share a two-bedroom house because housing prices in Irvine are insane, and what Bradley thought was a lavish salary would be barely enough to cover rent and utilities in a one-bedroom apartment. They converted the house’s den into a third bedroom, and saved enough dough to actually have a disposable income. His roommates and co-workers are okay, but he still doesn’t feel comfortable sharing his current problems with them.

“You better be fine bro. This is the weekend where we get you laid.”

“I’m not hooking up with a hooker in Vegas, Corey,” Bradley says. In a way, he’s glad to deal with Corey’s bullshit instead of obsessing over his ghost problem, but in another it’s just annoying. Dude thinks he’s a younger, more charming version of a Zach Galifianakis movie character, and he looks the part, being overweight and sporting your proverbial unkempt longish hair and bushy beard growing a good ways down his neck, but he’s not funny like the real Mr. Galifianakis, he’s just a douchy guy with a medley of social and cleanliness problems. Just by way of example, even from the other side of the bedroom, Bradley can tell Corey’s skimped on the deodorant again. For a while there, Corey became convinced deodorant gave you cancer, something he read in some obnoxious web site or another, and he gave up on the stuff. Eventually Bradley and Logan talked him out of it, but he still didn’t use it as much as he should.

“Don’t worry, bro. The hooker’s on me. I got a freaking huge bonus coming my way, and what I don’t blow in the slots I’m gonna spend on having a slut blow you.” Dude must have worked on that line for a while. No way he came out with it on the fly.

“No hookers or I’m not going.”

“The hell you aren’t! The hotel’s non-refundable, bro. I’m just kidding about the hookers, okay? We’ll just have a tame, plain old fashioned good time in Vegas.”

“And we’re not going to recreate The Hangover, either. No funny pills in the drinks, no crazy shit. I’m still coming off the caffeine binge of the last eight months.”

“I hear you. We’ll just blow off some steam. Are strip clubs okay, or are you too good for a lap dance or three?”

“Strip clubs are fine.” Not really; Bradley hasn’t enjoyed any of his forays into strip clubs, all three of them. He’s come out of the places with a lot less money than he brought in, as well as drunk and suffering from a combination of horniness and depression. But he’ll go, drink himself into a stupor, get his obligatory table dance, and move on; easier to go along than to fight it. He’s looking forward to a little judicious gambling, catching some shows, eating, drinking and being merry, and, most importantly, not staring at a computer screen while desperately trying to get things done faster than they can be humanly done.

Now if he can only stop seeing his dead father, everything will be fine.

“Well, stop staring at the walls and finish packing; we’re leaving early. This three-day weekend is going to be legend, wait for it…”

Corey can’t pull off Galifianakis, and he most certainly can’t pull off Neil Patrick Harris. “Fine, whatever.”

“Chillax, bro. Anyway, I just wanted to remind you we’re leaving early, so don’t stay up too late.”

“Sure, Mom.”

“You’re in a mood. Hope you don’t keep that up when we’re in Vegas.”

Corey leaves. Bradley sighs and shakes his head. He is in a mood. Normally Corey doesn’t get under his skin like this. He can only hope this long weekend will help get his chi or karma or whatever back into balance. He’s mostly been a laid back, mellow kind of fellow, never getting riled up over anything. Until now.

He turns to his closet, planning to get his packing done, and there he is, standing right in front of him.

Dearly departed Dad.

You’d think multiple exposures would make the sight less disturbing, but you’d be wrong yet again. He looks so real, so solid. This close up, he can see the pores on his skin, can smell the deeply familiar scent of Brut aftershave over sweat. His father was a sweater; heat or a heavy meal or just getting riled up over anything and he’d start perspiring like a maniac. And he’s sweating now, sweating and staring right at Bradley, his eyes wide and fixed on him, his face expressionless.

Bradley doesn’t scream or wet himself; he’s past those reactions levels, at least. A part of him wants to reach out and try to touch the ghost, but he’s sure that if he touches it and feels something solid, he’ll completely, utterly lose his shit, forever and ever amen.

“What do you want?” he hears himself whispering. “What do you want from me?”

Ghost Dad doesn’t say anything, just stands there for several seconds. This is the longest the hallucination or apparition or whatever has stuck around.

Something starts tingling inside Bradley’s head. Is he having a stroke or an aneurysm?

The apparition nods once, and the expression on its face changes. It doesn’t quite smile, which fits, because his father hadn’t been big on smiles, but it looks satisfied somehow.

An eye blink later, it’s gone again.

Bradley all but collapses onto his bed. His heart is pounding against his chest. Either he’s gone crazy, or the world’s gone crazy. Either way, it’s not good.

Maybe he should skip the vacation and see somebody. A shrink, or a witch doctor. Anybody.

He dismisses the idea as quickly as he thinks of it. For one, they did book nonrefundable hotel rooms in order to save few bucks. For another, he can go to a shrink next week, assuming the vacay doesn’t put an end to the hallucinations. So, no, he’s going to Vegas, where he will chillax and maybe return to normal.

He can’t wait.

 

This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Copyright @ 2015 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact cjcarella@cjcarella.com