Errata: Twenty-First Episode - Assassins Do It From Behind

I heard the hiss as the vault door slid shut behind me. I found myself in a darkness so thick it was like somebody had painted over my eyes. There were a few moments while I stood there, listening to my breath scrape in and out, then several banks of recessed glowdomes came flickering on, exposing at last the Phase Vault’s modest dimensions.

The room was no bigger than a carport – four whitewashed stone walls and a low stone ceiling studded with lights. There was an old tea chest, two metal crates with their tops jemmied open, and, slumped in the far corner, a body.

As I spotted it I got a feeling like a thousand baby spiders scurrying up my back towards the nape of my neck. The stowaway trapped in my skull began to fizz and twitch. It was a guy, slumped, in a beige suit with wide lapels and a ribbon-red pencil tie and an onyx-black silk handkerchief that poked from the left breast pocket and shone like a puddle of oil. He wore a pair of circular lemon-tinted spectacles and his hair was short, grey-tipped and receding. The toecaps of his clay-brown shoes narrowed to rounded points. His feet were splayed. There was a piece of gum on his right sole.

I saw no signs of life but if this was a corpse it was a damn fresh one. Was this the big secret I’d burned so many calories chasing down? I came all this way for a body? I broke my nose for a body?

Maybe the guy had something in his pockets, a message, a passcard, half a candy bar, anything. This can’t be the gag – that’s there’s nothing, no answer, just a stiff in a small room and the slow dawn of failure like a spreading pee stain. I took a step towards the body. I took a second. I took a third.

The scene glitched.

I felt this crick in my neck and saw glowdomes set into the ceiling corners. I could see the Phase Vault door and a wall-mounted pressure pad alongside it. A guy was standing in the middle of the room with his face all busted, shirt stained with a burgundy beard. He clutched at his scalp, staggered back against the wall.

I recognised the bastard.

He slid down the wall until he was sitting, filthy with perspiration and dried blood, each breath a rasp-rattle struggle. The guy tore open his collar, hacked until his mouth was full then hocked a red-black jellyfish onto the floor, where it broke and dried. At last his rheumy eyes, which had been rolled back in his head, focused on a point in front of him, and he turned to look at me. Blinked. His ruined face creased into a scowl.

He took a sucking breath. ‘Jenkins – you fucking asshole.’ He spoke with a lisp. I knew his voice like something from a dream. He reached up, touched the crag of his cheekbones, grimaced. ‘What the creeping fuck have you done to my nose?’ He spread his arms. ‘What happened to my muscle tone? Where’s my goddamn body?’

I wasn’t in such great shape myself. I tried to move my legs and tendons seizured with effort. I tried to speak but my throat was dry as a carpenter’s hands and my tongue was a lump of cured meat.

I wanted to ask him: ‘Did I just turn over two pages of the script at once? Who are you? Why am I lying on the floor?’

The guy squeezed his eyes shut. ‘My fucking nose. You just couldn’t accept your fate, could you Jenkins? You had to go and make things tough.’ He planted his palms against the floor and started lifting himself back up onto his feet. ‘Means more work for you, more work for me. Total waste of time. That’s what I get for wrestling with a pig I guess. I mean, do you have the slightest conception of what these last few months have been like for me? Can you even conceive of how it might feel, camping out on the bleak peninsulas of my own brain estate while some daffy upstart tracks his muddy boots all over my antique rug and leaves coffee rings on my mahogany davenport? You know, I don’t have to hate the people I kill – in fact, too much rage kind of blunts my edge. Each target’s like a wife to me – they’re the centre of my life, till death do us part. But you…’ He was standing now, and he wagged an index finger down at me. ‘You did not fulfil your part of the contract. I’m the assassin, you’re the target – we both have clearly defined roles, and lists of permissible behaviours within those roles. If I put weeks of my time into tracking a man down and pushing a screwdriver through his heart he should at least have the manners to die bleeding. You’re a taker, Jenkins.’ He scratched at a tacky gash on his chin then spat another clotted mass onto the floor. ‘I’ve pumped so much into this relationship – can you see that? I’ve worked to fit this hit around your lifestyle but it’s never enough. The venue’s not right, you’re not in the mood… you know, sometimes I feel like you’re taking this whole scenario for granted. I offer you the goddamn privilege of getting whacked by the best goddamn assassin in the Planes, and you throw it back in my face. How am I meant to react, huh? Just answer me that. I wanted to keep this prompt and businesslike, you know, but you just had to go and make it personal.’ He leant forward, clutching at his breastbone like he was loosening an invisible tie. ‘You stole my body, Jenkins. You have sinned against me and you have sinned against my reputation. Don’t misunderstand – sure, I despise you, but this is still business. I would’ve been happy to see this out as a vanilla whack but I can’t let these infractions go unpunished. How would it look if Klaus Firework didn’t seek very brutal, very public retribution in reply to both the crimes committed against him and those you committed in his name? Building a premium brand takes spadework. A great hitman should be predictable as a butter knife. I turn cash to corpses – that’s my schtick, right? Surprising acts of clemency aren’t the way to a bigger client base.’ He straightened, adjusted the greasy tufts of hair tucked behind either ear. ‘This isn’t an apology – it’s an explanation. Right now you’re facing fifty millennia worth of unbroken anguished sentience, bits of your soul ripped out and leased to daemonic perverts – you know the type, all crotch-hot at the thought of licking a self-aware pram from handle to shivering wheel-trim. I want you to understand – no, to appreciate – that you visited this plague upon yourself. Klaus Firework is equitable to the absolute. I’d mete out this measure of ill fortune – and more than this measure – to any punk who offended as grievously as you have. Vengeance is mine, motherfucker.’

I mean, what do you say to that?

‘You quit that, Jenkins! Don’t come over all innocent with your look of stricken perplexity – you recognise the door I’m knocking on here. You did this to me!’ He thrust his hands towards his smashy visage. ‘Don’t pretend you can’t remember! Amnesia? Forget about it! You want a recap? I’ll give you a goddamn recap! I’ll exposit you so deep into the earth they’ll drill for you twenty million years from now and use your remains as fuel!’ Again I tried to rise but the guy snapped alert. ‘Don’t you move a grotesquely atrophied muscle! I’m about to monologue at length and you, my close personal long-time friend, are going to lie there and listen. Sure, your lettuce-limp habits have left me useless as a marzipan sombrero but I can still own your lily ass if it comes to the puncha-puncha.’

I croaked out a sentence: ‘Never more baffled than now.’

‘Make yourself comfortable.’ He dragged the tea chest till it was next to the door and sat down on top of it. ‘Now here’s a story. Late night at the Grand-Mal Tavern I bust into the backroom and finally cornered the guy that I’d been trying to track down for weeks.’ He gunned an index finger at me. ‘That was you, Jenkins. A real shark, my employer said – don’t misunderestimate his tenacity. I thought I had all my bases covered but as I closed in you pulled out your sucker punch – a possession attempt. Of course I had countermeasures hardwired into my cortex but when the psionic surge hit me it was off the scale. The circuit breaker blew and laid your body out cold, but you’d already hopped freight cars. I was stuck as a passenger in my own body while you stumbled round bloody and confused. Sure I tried to steer you but you were too damn stupid to follow orders. Understand – I saw, heard, smelt, felt, tasted everything. Everything. Do you know what it’s like to traipse around with volition but no control? No? I’ll tell you – it’s a kind of sculpted-meat hell.

‘When you jumped Planes and visited the Fleshbroker Brahmini Jones, I managed to kick you loose for a couple of minutes. Laws are flimsy close to Underspace, especially in that half-breed’s uncanny den. While you were gone I spoke to Jones with my own mouth, gave him the skinny and we made a deal – after you’d led him to the Phase Vault he’d have you recaptured, destroy your vacant body, and hire a NanoExorcist to oust your consciousness from my skull. In return I’d do a hit for him. He wanted me to take out a Tetradaemon called Parish, I didn’t ask why and he didn’t say – just your standard tit-for-tat grudge-whack, no doubt.

‘Do you even remember why you’re in here? Did your brain get cabbaged on the journey back? You know who owns the Phase Vault, right? Sooner or later R and D winds up eating itself. They’re afraid of you, Jenkins. Everyone wants to siphon off a piece of your power without ending up one of its victims. As long as you exist you’re a threat to interphase security. But you’re just a receptacle. You can’t wield your strength, only bleed it off like a battery. Is it all coming back now, Jenkins? Are the mists clearing, you little rat?

‘What? What? You wipe that blank expression off your face! Do you still refuse to remember?’ And he strode towards me his arms outstretched like forklift prongs. He grabbed me by the flaps of the throat and lifted. I rose easily, my body as light as a bamboo coat-stand. ‘Come then! Perhaps the generator needs a couple of kicks before it starts.’ With his left hand he dragged me across the room by my neck-scruff while with his right he high-fived the pressure pad that opened the vault door.

The door slid back on billowing black smoke which spilled into the room like a vast expanding jelly. He made some Solicitor passes I’d never seen before and a sudden punchy gale surged out from behind us, breaking through the smog like someone blowing on powder-paint. He thrust me through the doorway, out into sheer empty air.

And there the city was. I heard the gunfire almost straightaway – the ack-ack-ack, dukkha-dukkha, call and response like treefrogs in heat and as the sooty clouds parted there were little buildings and the vicious bloom of street fires and dainty explosions that thrived like mushrooms. Out across the eastern wastes the sun was a rust-orange hemisphere hurling light and etching long knifey shadows. Somewhere far beneath my swaying feet the compacted remnants of City Hall smouldered and seethed like a jungle tar pit.

‘Do you see it yet, Jenkins? Or did I waste my time chasing a hoaxer?’ He rattled me like a charity tin. Then I saw.

Errata’s lies fell away and I saw it, I really saw it, babies’ hunchbacked futures spooning pap into pucker-gums, buildings going up toughing it out for a few decades then collapsing back in on themselves like failed sponge cakes, the booms and weapon fire that had always been there, the final detonation of the Slow Bomb’s ApocaLypstick core, moiling depression and legions of the wilfully blind, people who slammed their storm screens against the world and nestled fearful, desperate in shelters built entirely from denial, folks who knew they were being lied to but chose to believe just the same. Truth has no obligation to set you free. You don’t get to pick snowboards over shackles just because today’s reality’s the wrong flavour – that’s not how truth works. It is what it is, and if you push towards it, you have to understand that it might mean salvation and it might mean losing something you can never get back and if you’re falling out the belly of a plane then that’s your truth right now and if you choose to ignore it because you know you’ve got no parachute and there’s nothing you can do then fine, nobody can blame you, because the truth is grossly overrated and sometimes it’s all you can do to imagine you’re safe, the future’s good, and this raspberry sundae will last forever.