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uglymanchronicles · 5 years ago

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Ugly Man Chronicles: Reignition Book 1 Chapter 4: The Little Things

In which Evan learns a little more about magic and channels his inner Batman.

Evan idly spun a small tumbler of dark brown liquid in his palm as he stood shirtless in front of the mirror. As the ice clinked against the glass, he ran the fingers of his empty hand across his new scar. It was surprisingly round, slightly to the right of center and two inches above his navel. The edges were very slightly raised, which felt weird, but at least it hadn’t torn out his belly-button piercing. He wasn’t sure of the logistics of getting that re-pierced with super-fast healing. He turned his back to the mirror and peered over his shoulder.

“How the hell is the exit wound triangular when the entry wound is round?” he muttered to himself, taking a drink as he left the bathroom. He climbed up into his bed-loft and stretched out on the mattress, staring at the ceiling without really looking at it.

Do I want to know? Should I know? If I try to figure this out, do I run the risk of learning whatever it was I went to such lengths to forget?

He tipped back the rest of the bourbon and set the glass down on the nightstand. He reached into the drawer and pulled out a handful of small cell phones, shuffling through them like a man might sift through takeout menus. Eventually he settled on one and entered a number by muscle memory trained over more than two decades.

“Hi, Mom. It’s me. No, everything’s fine. It’s okay, all my calls are being bounced from a proxy sat–it’s fine. I’m in the southwest. Yeah, it’s dry here. It’s been pretty quiet. I’ve been working out a lot—you probably wouldn’t recognize me!”

Evan winced at the unintended implications of that statement. He was suddenly very aware of his own face and the question of how he was going to explain it to his family. He felt his jaw clench.

“What? Sorry, zoned out there a second. Oh yeah, I called because I had a question: what was the name of that family whose ranch we visited when I was nine? Yeah, the one where—yeah. No, it doesn’t hurt any more. Brighton? And what was the name of the boy who… Clifford? Cliff. They still send us Christmas cards? Really? Hey, could you email me one of those? It’s weird, but I swear I saw Cliff somewhere a few weeks ago and I just figured out where I knew him from. Yeah, small world!”

A few moments of small talk followed. “Okay, Mom, I’ll try to call more often. I know. Send me that picture, would you? Love you too. Say hi to Dad for me. Bye!”

The email arrived half an hour later. Evan pulled it up on his ‘real’ phone and smiled. It was a very charming picture. At its center was a huge mustachioed man, seated in an equally huge leather armchair in front of a cheery stone fireplace hung with numerous stockings. He was surrounded by family: a short, rosy-cheeked wife and several children of varying sizes. Standing just behind him, with his proudly-puffed-out chest straining his green and red sweater and his hair tamed with what must have been at least three handfuls of mousse, stood the man from Evan’s vision. There was no doubt in his mind.

Aw, hell, Evan thought, feeling his cheeks burn, he sure grew up cute.

————–

The next day didn’t prove as fruitful as the conversation with his mother had. Following the advice of the nice young… orc (it still felt strange to even think that) at the gas station, he’d travelled to Albuquerque in search of a pawn shop that might have some legitimate magical objects, or at least some leads on them. Unfortunately, he didn’t have many details to go on, and was forced to go from shop to shop. He found the stucco city and the sweeping desert charming, but a full day of digging through somebody’s dead aunt’s silver and other bric-a-brac while trying to drop inquires that didn’t make him sound like a lunatic, Evan was ready to give up. But one last shop remained on his circuit of stops for the day, so he found himself meekly entering Delman’s Jewelry & Pawn half an hour before their posted closing time. A perpetually-sunburned looking man in his early seventies—Mr. Delman, Evan presumed–watched him with a mixture of suspicion and annoyance as he walked towards the counter.

“Hey, uh, sorry to come in so close to closing time,” Evan said sheepishly, hoping that his makeup was still covering most of his questionably-survivable scars. The old man gave him a tired glare from behind quarter-inch-thick glasses. “I won’t be long,” Evan continued, feeling himself sweating even more than he had in the desert heat. “Do you have an, uh, antiques section?”

The old man cocked a fuzzy gray eyebrow and jerkily gestured further into the store. “Towards the back. Anything that ain’t junk is in the main cases, though.”

“Thanks, I’ll have a quick look and be out of your hair in… no time,” Evan said, wincing when he realized the man was almost completely bald. A nicotine-stained scowl told him that he had damn well better make it quick.

Evan fished in his pockets for his notes as he walked down the aisles of the shop. Past him had been meticulous in his chronicling his knowledge of the supernatural, but whether or not he’d been right was of significant concern to his current self. Plus, there must have been some context missing—some mental highway that he hadn’t counted on getting demolished.

Look for very old ornate silver with more circular writing… modern work tends to be more jagged and on incomplete/scrap pieces of metal or ceramics… if it looks like any language you recognize it’s probably fake…don’t be fooled by Nordic runes, that’s just writing…

There!

Something caught his eye. A strange, looping symbol, barely visible on dull silver peeking out from between pewter and brass. Him even seeing it was sheer luck, let alone recognizing it for what it was. He gently pushed the intervening candlesticks and cutlery aside and picked the thing up.

It was an old-fashioned oil lamp, its glass missing and its wick lost to either time or use. It barely filled the palm of his hand and couldn’t have weighed more than a pound. Evan raised it to his eyes, then consulted the bundle of notes in his hand. Placing the lamp back the shelf, he began flipping through pages of hand-drawn symbols until familiarity sparked.

It was a spiraled, curling thing, almost imperceptibly crossed with short lines. Underneath it, he’d written: to seek, to look, to find, to discover?

He looked back at the lamp. He was almost certain that was one of the symbols etched onto its dull surface. He could barely make the others out, and so took the lamp into his hand again. He fished in his pocket for his handkerchief and raised it to the silver.

Then he froze.

Very slowly and deliberately, he placed the lamp back on the shelf, pulled out a notebook, and wrote Are genies real?, underlining it several times.

Movement caught the corner of his eye. Someone small had darted past the end of the aisle and was scurrying towards the back of the store. He could hear their shoes scuffling rapidly, and he could almost picture the person furtively looking around. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.

The footsteps started in his direction again. Evan quickly ducked behind the end of the shelf, hoping it would obscure his newfound bulk. The small figure went by again in a blur of black and… pink? He heard them slide to a stop, and there was a hurried whispered exchange of breathless voices. Then a very distinct metallic click. Evan felt his stomach drop.

Now there was a muffled commotion coming from the front of the store. He could hear Mr. Delman’s voice—he couldn’t make out the words yet, but the pawnbroker sounded tense. Evan crouched down and moved as quickly as he could towards the front of the store.

He stopped behind a rack of faded camouflage coveralls and peered towards the counter. Delman was standing with his hands raised to shoulder height almost lazily, his expression partly worried but mostly annoyed. Across the counter from him was the figure he’d seen earlier, a small person in a huge winter coat and a pink ski mask, standing next to a similar figure in a black ski mask. Black mask was holding a small pistol tightly in both hands at absolute arms’ length, the weapon shaking as they made stammered, hushed demands of an increasingly unimpressed Delman.

Shit.

I should do something. Is it really my business? It’s not going be all immortal assassins and pain monsters. It’s the things that impact lives that make a hero. The little things.

Alright. Get their attention, but don’t startle them.

Evan straightened up and stepped around the clothes rack, letting his hip bump against it as he did so. It rocked slightly, then tipped back in the other direction, making a quiet clatter as the hangers slid into each other and the feet touched down.

Delman was growling something at the black-hooded gunman and neither of them seemed to notice, but the pink-hatted robber jerked their head towards him and looked him right in the eye. Their eyes widened and Evan felt his lips curl into a snarl. Pink hat frantically slapped at black hat’s shoulder, seemingly struck dumb by Evan’s appearance.

“What? What?!”

Pink shrieked wordlessly and pointed in Evan’s direction. Black’s eyes widened under his mask and he began to turn towards Evan, swinging the gun around. Delman took the opportunity to drop behind the counter.

Perfect!

Evan summoned up his deepest, most menacing voice.

“What the HELL do you think you’re–“

Crack!

The gunshot was puny by gunshot standards, but it still echoed around the shop and rattled the dusty glass and china. Evan heard the bullet whiz over his head and lodge itself in the wall behind him. His body seized up for a second.

Oh holy fuck he’s shooting at me! He’s actually shooting—

KEEP MOVING.

Evan surged forward, as close to a run as a menacing stomp could be. Black’s hands were shaking so violently now that the next bullet punched into the floor near his own feet. Pink screamed again, ducking behind Black.

“DROP THE DAMN GUN!” Evan roared. He was less than three yards from the pair now.

Crackcrackcrack!

Three hammer-blows struck Evan in the gut. He doubled over, gasping… except he didn’t. The pain was there, but the reflexes that normally accompanied an injury—those instincts to grab for the wound, to run from the source of the pain—were completely absent. His body knew it had been attacked, but it somehow didn’t interpret it as anything to get too worked up about. In fact, he could already feel the bullets being pushed out of his belly by his rapid healing. He stopped for a moment, looking on as the three flattened stubs of lead clattered to the floor, then looked up with his face twisted into a snarl of fury.

He could actually hear Black wet himself.

Evan rushed forward, swinging his arm in a huge arc. His initial intent had been to knock the gun away, but the swing caught Black hard in the chest, lifting him off his feet and throwing him back into Pink. Both would-be robbers hit the wall and fell in a scrambling, blubbering heap.

Evan turned to the sound of a shotgun cocking. “Thanks for the assist, kid,” Delman said, a mean twinkle in his eye. “I’ll take it from here.”

———

Evan flipped the “OPEN” sign to “CLOSED" and switched off the lights as Mr. Delman had instructed. His shoulders sagged and he sighed heavily. Even through the closed office door, he could hear Delman’s outraged voice. When they had forced the foiled robbers into the office and pulled off the masks, they had been met with a boy and a girl whose combined ages wouldn’t have added up to Evan’s. Delman’s face had gone strangely blank, and he’d asked Evan if he could close up the storefront for him. As soon as the door closed behind him, the yelling had started. Now he stood a couple feet away from the door, awkwardly shifting his weight as he wondered if he should go back in.

Perhaps to delay that decision for a few moments, Evan picked up the boy’s revolver from where he’d placed it after Delman had herded the kids out of the room. It was a cheap, flimsy-feeling thing, a typical .22 caliber Saturday Night Special. Evan swung the chamber open and dumped the casings and unspent cartridge into his palm. Not exactly powerful bullets, but…

He reached under his shirt and felt his stomach. There were no scars, no bruises. Hell, he wasn’t even sore. But the holes in his shirt were proof enough that he’d taken three bullets at point-blank range and hadn’t even had the wind knocked out of him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t felt them hit him—it had hurt, but… it just didn’t matter. It was like his body instinctively knew that, given his freakish healing capabilities, the shots didn’t actually pose a threat to him. He looked down at the tattoo on his left arm, absently clenching and un-clenching his fist.

I pulled something out of that pain monster, he thought. I took something from it. Can I take powers from other things? Is that what the ritual did?

His train of thought was broken by more yelling, but it wasn’t Delman this time. It was the kid with the black hat. “What the hell was we supposed to do?!” It sounded like he was crying.

Evan turned the knob and cracked the door open. “Store’s, uh, closed up, sir,” he said, poking his head into the office. “Doesn’t look like anyone heard the shots. Or, at least, nobody called the cops.”

“Thanks, kid,” Delman said, sounding more tired and sad than angry or anxious. “Look, maybe come back tomorrow and see if you can find what you were looking for, I–“

“You know them,” Evan said. It wasn’t a question, because he didn’t need to ask. The shotgun was nowhere to be seen and the kids were sitting on folding chairs, unrestrained. The boy staring at his lap, his face quivering as he fought back tears. The girl—his sister, Evan assumed from the resemblance—was fixing him with a look of angry defiance that only a pre-teen could muster.

Delman sighed and threw up his hands. “I sponsor their friggin’ little league teams! Of course I know ‘em,” he muttered. “Samson and Raquel Nelson. Their momma died late last year. Pancreatic cancer. They got an older brother who’s been lookin’ after ‘em, but he’s fallen in with a bad crowd lately–”

“Ain’t like he had a choice!” Samson spluttered, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Landlord’s been jackin’ up rent every month and charging us for every bullshit–“

“Samson Quincy Nelson, if I hear you use that kinda language again I will show you the back of my hand so hard you’ll see it when you close your eyes, do you understand me?”

Samson burst into tears. Delman went red in the face and ran his hand across his scalp, mumbling to himself. Evan held his arm out between them, looking Delman in the eye with a resolute expression on his face. Delman seemed to understand his intention and, after a sigh and shrug, he made a “be my guest” gesture towards the kids.

Evan stepped forward and crouched down putting him at roughly eye level with the adolescents. “Hey, guys, it sounds like…”

Ptu.

Evan had to hand it to the girl; she could spit with surprising accuracy. The sudden shock of a ball of saliva and phlegm in his eye made Evan overbalance and topple gracelessly back onto his ass. Delman erupted again as Evan wiped his eye. Raquel screamed back, and the room filled with the cacophonous voices of a crotchety old man and a preteen girl with nothing to lose. Once his eye was clear, Evan looked back up and saw Samson staring at him. He met the boy’s eyes which were brimming with tears, but also seemed to have the light of realization dawning in them.

“How come you ain’t dead?” he asked quietly. Delman and Raquel both stopped mid-scream, looked at the boy, then looked at Evan. “I know I shot you. I shot you ‘least three times.”

Evan pushed himself up again, getting back to his feet. His fingers absently toyed with the holes in his shirt. “Well,” he said after a moment, “the reason I’m not dead is…”

He faltered. He didn’t really know himself. He knew he healed fast but he didn’t know why. Should he explain that?

No. The three faces watching him, wrought with worry, pain, and fear, told him the answer. He straightened up and put his hands on his hips, tilting his chin up and smiling what he hoped was an inspiring smile.

“The reason I’m not dead is because I’m a superhero.”

"That’s bullshit,” Raquel muttered. "Ain’t no such thing as superheroes.“

Evan held up a hand to cut off Delman’s incoming tirade about profanity. "Then why am I not dead?”

“I don’t know, you must be wearing armor or–”

Evan lifted up his shirt slightly, patting his bare stomach. "All beef. Try again.“

"You flexed really hard right when they hit, then.”

Evan laughed. “Even if that were right–and possible–how could I get the timing right?”

Raquel looked away, jaw clenched in defeat. "…if you were a superhero.“

Evan beamed. "Exactly! And what do superheroes do?”

“…fight bad guys? Save people?”

“Right! And it sounds like you guys need help. So tell me how I can help you.”

So they told him, with Delman filling in some of the blanks. About how their older brother, Jamal, had dropped out of college to take care of his younger siblings after their mother had gotten sick. About how he’d been working a factory job to provide for them. About how the bills for their mother’s medical and funerary expenses had been too much. About how he’d started selling meth for a gang called the Five-Tens to make ends meet. About how he’d had to dump ten grand worth of product to avoid getting caught by the cops. About how the gang had broken both his pinky fingers–the titular five and ten from their name–to teach him a lesson. About how they told him if he didn’t pay for the missing product in two weeks, they’d do worse. About how that was twelve days ago. About how they knew that Mr.Delman had a lot of cash on hand. About where Jamal kept his gun.

About how the gang hid out in an incomplete housing development in a sparsely-populated suburb.

By the time the story was done, Evan had made his decision. "Mr. Delman, how much cash do you have in the shop?“

"Why the hell are you asking that?”

Evan reached into his jacket and Delman looked like he was about to go for the shotgun again before Evan pulled his wallet from an inner pocket. "Because I’m going to need to make a purchase with a lot of cash back,“ he said, handing Delman a solid black card. He turned to the kids. "Go home. Get your brother and pack up everything you’ll need for a couple weeks. I’ll be sending some people along to get you somewhere safe for a while.”

A few minutes later, the would-be robbers had left, still somewhat bewildered. Delman was packing stacks of bills into an attache case while Evan made a few phone calls. After they were both done, Delman handed the case to Evan. "What the hell are you going to do, exactly?“

"What a superhero does.”

——-

It was nearly midnight, and a heavyset man was making his way up the street through a small village’s worth of incomplete houses. His panting, stumbling gait was bringing him towards a house that was still half-covered by tarps and scaffolding, like most of its neighbors. This particular house was unique in the pitch-dark development, however, due to the light leaking from the cracks and creases in its incomplete walls. The man stopped at the end of its driveway and stood bent double for nearly two minutes; after catching at least some of his breath, he made his way up the driveway, muttering and panting and wiping his forehead. When he reached the front door, he stopped for breath again, then straightened up and ran a hand through the sparse strands of hair left on his head. Then he knocked.

He could hear surprised and irritated voices behind the door for a few moments. He leaned forward and examined himself in the reflexion in the door’s peephole. Sunburned, pockmarked complexion; wide, bulbous nose; jowly jawline seamlessly flowing into a flabby neck. He grinned, his surprisingly perfect teeth the only mismatch in his otherwise sloppy appearance.

The light in the peephole vanished. "The fuck’re you?“

The man held up the silver case handcuffed to his wrist. "Lorenzo the Bagman. I gots a delivery for who'ver’s in charge here.”

“Open the case,” the voice behind the door responded after a moment.

Lorenzo fiddled with the case’s lock for a moment, then cracked it open an inch and held it up. Green bills shone in the faint light. “Good enough?”

Another moment of silence. The door opened a crack and the barrel of a gun peeked out. "Slowly. Hands where we can see ‘em.“

Lorenzo squeezed his considerable bulk through the door, feeling the barrel of the shoddy SMG poking into his back. The voice that had been giving him instructions seemed to belong to the kid behind him–probably barely out of high school (if that), but hard-edged and mean-looking. "Frisk 'im,” he said to his companion, an equally sketchy-looking young man armed with an equally crappy-looking gun.

“Why do I gotta frisk his fat ass?”

“'cuz I’m the one keepin’ the gun on him, ain’t I?”

“Christ, what is this, amateur hour?” Lorenzo interjected, sneering, “if I was here to wreck the place, you think I’d be stupid enough to do with a buncha money cuffed to me? Fuck’s sake,” he spat, and grinned inwardly as the two punks looked away in embarrassment. “Just take me to yer leader so I can get outta this dump. Jesus Mary n’ Joseph, back in my day, a hideout meant something.”

The two young men met each other’s gaze as Lorenzo continued to mutter about declining standards in organized crime. The one behind Lorenzo spoke first.

“Let’s take him to VizzyJ.”

“The hell kinda name is 'VizzyJ’?” Lorenzo asked incredulously as he was prodded forward.

“Stands for 'Visceral Jay’.”

“Okay, not bad, but what’s the J stand for?”

“I just told you–'Jay’.”

“Yeah, but what’s it stand for?”

“Christ, don’ you ever shut up, old man?”

They continued to bicker as Lorenzo was lead through the half-finished house and up the stairs. They passed rooms outfitted with mishmashes of furniture, equipped for various criminal enterprises or simply squatter-grade habitation. Lorenzo spotted mattresses, worn armchairs, a jury-rigged marijuana grow room, piles of miscellaneous loot, and, inexplicably, a large cage holding what appeared at a glance to be a sizable feral hog. As they passed, other occupants of the building called out and a few even fell in behind the three; by the time they had reached the the third floor, with Lorenzo panting and muttering all the way, they had acquired a procession of half a dozen curious gangsters.

One of the original escorts rapped on a door–one of the few doorways in the house that had an actual door in it–and slipped through a few moments later. Lorenzo could overhear him talking to someone whose voice was so deep it was only audible as a deep rumble through the door. The goon stuck his head back through the door.

“Bring 'im in.”

Lorenzo was pushed through the door into an actual finished room–probably originally intended to be the master bedroom of the house. The floor under his feet was plushly carpeted, moonlight shone through a skylight in the sloped ceiling, tasteful paintings of exotic landscapes and foliage adorned the walls, and an ornamental fountain in the shape of a koi bubbled tranquilly away in the corner. The centerpiece of the room was a large mahogany desk holding a huge leather-bound ledger in which a man of equally prodigous size was writing with a gold-filagreed pen. Lorenzo gave a low whistle.

“Now, see? This is what I’m talking about!” he said emphatically, pointing at the men he’d been chastising earlier, “this is how it’s done! Tasteful, but modern. This guy knows how it’s done.”

The man behind the desk chuckled, not looking up from the ledger. "I’m glad you approve. Too many people these days don’t appreciate subtlety,“ he said, finishing a line and very deliberately putting the cap back on the pen. He stood up, brushing the creases out of his black-and-red pinstripe jacket. He finally looked Lorenzo in the eye, and the bagman could see in his sharp, dark eyes the gleam of barely-restrained hunger. A look of pure ambition.

”'Lorenzo the Bagman’, huh,“ Visceral Jay said, stepping out from behind the desk. "I like that. You don’t hear that word very often any more. It’s old school,” he said, looking Lorenzo up and down.

Lorenzo did the same. Visceral Jay was a huge man, at least six-foot-four, with close-cropped hair and a matching beard, creating the illusion of his entire head being permanently wreathed in shadows. His suit was clearly tailored to his considerable size, which Lorenzo could tell was not just for show–his fingers were partially obscured by several sizable rings, but a clear smattering of pale scar tissue stood out on his knuckles against his dark skin. He carried himself with an air of quiet menace, like a man who knows he has nothing to prove because he knows his own strength.

“My boys tell me you’ve got something for me, Mr. Lorenzo,” Jay said after a moment.

“Right,” Lorenzo said, holding up the case. He glanced towards the desk. "You mind?“

"Be my guest.”

Lorenzo set the case down and opened it. "This is to settle, uh…“ he looked down at something written on the back of his hand. "Jamal Nelson’s account. Ten grand for lost merchandise, plus two grand for your trouble.”

Jay picked up a bundle of bills and thumbed through it. "Very good. Where’d the money come from?“

"Not my job to ask. I just deliver. You know how it is.”

Jay chuckled again, setting the bills back down. "Didn’t have the spine to show up on his own, huh?“

"Sounds like you kinda put the fear of God in him. 'sall the same to me. If everyone had balls I wouldn’t have a job. Either way, you get your money. Can I tell 'im you’re square?”

Jay walked back around his desk and sat down, staring into space over steepled fingers for a long moment.

“…no.”

Lorenzo stiffened. “Come again?”

“Mr. Nelson still owes me for the opportunities I afforded him. And I cannot abide his use of a washed-up proxy to avoid looking me in the eye. Respect is everything in this world. I’m sure a man of your obvious tenure can appreciate that.”

Lorenzo narrowed his beady eyes. "You don’t want to do this,“ he said, softly.

"You’re right, I don’t,” Jay agreed, nodding with pursed lips. "Vikkers, Gerome–take Mr. Lorenzo downstairs and dispose of him.“

Lorenzo snapped the case closed as his original hosts grabbed his arms. "You kill me, you don’t get the combination to the lock.”

“Oh, we’ll have plenty of time to work that out once we’ve sawn your wrist off,” Jay said, with a hint of a smirk.

“You fuck with it and the dye packs go off!”

“Again, we can afford to be careful. This concludes our business, bagman. Get it done,” Jay said to his men.

“Yo J, can we use the Executive?” one of Lorenzo’s captors asked, his voice brimming with almost childlike excitement.

Jay rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he sighed, reaching into his desk drawer. He laid a huge handgun on the desk. Its barrel was engraved with subtle vine-like etching and its grip was set with pearl plates. Despite himself, Lorenzo whistled.

“Now that’s classy. None of that gold-plated shit. Real businesslike.”

“I appreciate your evaluation of my taste, Mr. Lorenzo,” Jay said, irritation beginning to creep into his voice. "Get rid of this jackass!“

——–

"Oh my fucking God, again?”

A man in a clearly secondhand hazmat suit groaned as Lorenzo was forced down the stairs into the house’s basement.

“Nobody asked you, geek,” one of the gangsters sneered.

“Well, maybe they fucking should have! The last time you guys killed someone down here, the bullet went through him and broke half my glass! You’re lucky you didn’t burn the damn house down!”

Lorenzo crinkled his nose against the chemical reek. The basement was full of tables covered in complicated arrays of beakers, flasks, and tubes. Numerous buckets with very important-looking warning labels were stacked along the walls. A handful of other people in similar garb to the complaining man were bustling about, measuring, pouring, mixing, bagging.

Lorenzo sneered. “You cook in your damn hideout? Are you all fucking stupid? Like I said–fuckin’ amatuer hour.”

The chemist threw up his hands. "Don’t look at me, pal. We’re all basically independent contractors down here.“

"Also: shut up.” The 'Executive’ cracked off the back of Lorenzo’s head, making him stumble forward.

“Dumbass, don’t hit him with that! You fuck it up and J’ll feed it to you!”

“God, what’re you, my mother? You’re just jealous.”

“Oh yeah, that’s it. And–”

“Will you just fucking shoot me already?” Lorenzo interrupted. "This is frickin’ torture.“

”Fine.“

The two stooges shoved Lorenzo through the maze of tables to an alcove in far corner of the basement. It looked to be an unfinished shower–that was about the only explanation for the drain in the floor. The explanation for the reddish-brown stains around it was much more obvious, given the circumstances.

One of the thugs kicked Lorenzo in the back of the leg, causing him to drop to his knees. He then cocked back the hammer of The Executive and pressed the barrel to the back of Lorenzo’s head, about an inch to the right of his left ear.

"You don’t want to do this,” Lorenzo repeated, his voice strangely calm.

“I’m pretty su–” BLAM.

Lorenzo toppled forward onto the concrete, his body spasming slightly.

“Hah, you got too exicted and shot off early! Lemme guess, that’s never happened to you before?”

“Man, shut the fuck up and get the hacksaw. Let’s get that case offa him.”

“Fuck you, you do it. You got to do the fun part so you gotta do the work.”

“Fuck you! That was still–what the hell?”

The gangsters looked back at Lorenzo’s body. The wound where the bullet entered seemed to have peeled back the skin of his balding head, and several strands of long brown hair had popped out of the hole.

“What the…”

Lorenzo’s arms tucked under him and he pushed himself back to his knees. The gunman and his accomplice screamed as the Bagman got to his feet. Lorenzo slowly turned to face them, the exit wound in his face already closing up and being replaced with brown-red skin as his pale, flabby flesh seemed to slough off his head.

“No way, man, no fuckin’ way!”

“What is this?”

“This,” Evan growled, glaring at the two through his regrowing eye as he pulled latex away from his face, “is why you didn’t want to do that.”

———–

Mr. Delman looked up as a bell signaled the entrance of a customer.

“Well hey, if it isn’t Mr. Superhero! Sounds like you had a busy night!”

Evan covered his mouth as he yawned. "Yeah. Didn’t really get a chance to sleep.“

"So the Nelsons called me and said they were on their way out of town. That your doing?”

“Yeah. Hired some movers and security to get them up to Colorado. Slipped them enough cash for a couple months while Jamal’s fingers heal. Figured that should keep them off the Five-Tens’ radar for a while.”

“Something tells me they ain’t gonna be an issue for a while,” Delman said, turning the computer monitor on the counter to face Evan. It displayed a headline: FIRE IN HOUSING DEVELOPMENT REVEALS GANG HIDEOUT; POLICE MAKE MULTIPLE ARRESTS.

“I didn’t mean to burn it down,” Evan said, awkwardly scratching the back of his head. “That’s what happens when you run a crappy meth lab out of your basement.”

Delman raised an eyebrow at him.

“…and someone gets thrown into it,” Evan finished sheepishly.

“It ain’t in the papers, but I heard that despite all them punks gettin’ out alive, each and every one of them had their fingers or wrists broken,” Delman said, conversationally. "Wonder why.“

”'cuz it’s hard to fire a gun when you can’t even wipe your own ass,“ Evan said, bluntly. "Otherwise they might try to hunt down the Nelsons.”

Delman slapped his palms on the counter, his face reddening. "How the hell did you manage that, kid? The cops grabbed over twenty of those shits. How’d you get out alive?“

"I didn’t exactly come out unscathed,” Evan said, pulling off his sunglasses. His left eye was surrounded in a many-pointed star of scar tissue. His eyebrow had been finished off by the exit wound. "This one’s going to be hard to hide.“

"Shit,” Delman hissed through his teeth. "Still, if that’s the worst you got…“

"It’s the only one that stuck, thankfully. Visceral Jay lived up to his name, though. He damn near gutted me before his knife got stuck in my arm.”

“I heard he fell out of the third-story window.”

“Now that’s simply not true,” Evan said, “I knocked him against the wall and kicked him until he went through it.”

Delman snorted. “Well… I can’t say I endorse it, but… couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. So what brought you back here?”

“Oh yeah, be right back.” Evan strode towards the back of the shop, returning with the silver lamp. “Can you tell me anything about this?”

“I don’t keep tra–“ Delman cut himself off. A very deliberate silence fell over the shop as he stared down at the lamp with a look of intense concentration.

“Do you know anything about it?” Evan asked quietly.

Delman slowly looked up at Evan, though he seemed to be looking at his scars more than his face as a whole. Then he locked eyes with Evan and fixed him with a steely, unblinking gaze for an uncomfortable length of time. After Evan felt his cheeks start to burn and his eyes begin to water, Delman held up a finger and slowly walked into his office.

After a few long moments of the faint sound of metal drawers squeaking and paper rustling, Delman returned. He was holding what seemed to be a homemade book of some sort, mismatched pages held together between two cardboard covers. He carried it gingerly, as if it were something unsavory, like roadkill. It fell from fingertips with a flat whap onto the counter.

“One of my part-timers was working the register. I had a dentist appointment that day,” Delman said, pursing his lips and staring pointedly at the book, “and apparently some man with one eye came in with that thing,” he pointed to the lamp, “and wanted to sell it. Said he didn’t need it any more. My clerk tells him he’ll need to get it appraised and everything, but the man says he’ll take whatever he thinks it’s worth. Apparently the one-eyed guy thought ten bucks was enough, and he left this… book, saying it ‘went with it’, took then ten and left. My clerk just threw the book in my office for me to look at later. And I did.”

Here Delman paused, pinching the bridge of his nose as if he felt a headache coming on.

“Most of it I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Most of it’s written in languages I’ve never seen. But there’s this picture of the lamp and I recognized the text with it. It was written in Hebrew, and y'know, I know people in the community and so I took it down to the temple one day to see if anyone can translate it. Rabbi says he’ll see if he can find time and I leave it at that. A couple weeks later he shows up here and practically throws the damn thing at me. Looks like all the blood just drained out of him. Says it’s obscene, unholy. Unthinkable shit. It took some doing, but I managed to get him to explain.

“Apparently, a direct translation of the thing was just gibberish. Just random sounds, no real words. But when you read it out loud, it phonetically sounds like Spanish. So he got a friend of his to help him translate that, and…”

Delman paused again. Evan was gripping the countertop so hard that he felt it creak under his fingers.

“It was instructions for working the lamp, but… you don’t want it, kid. It’s sick.”

“Please, Mr. Delman. You’ve seen what I’m capable of. I’m at the very start of something big. I just need some kind of direction, some kind of hint. I need to learn more about this whole new world I’ve stumbled in to. If this will help me, I’ll pay whatever you ask.”

“It ain’t me you gotta worry about payin’, kid!” Delman snapped. “That thing… you gotta bleed for it. Literally.”

Evan actually chuckled with relief. “That’s all? I’ve got blood to spare!”

“Yeah, well, be that as it may, that ain’t all it takes. I’m sure you noticed it ain’t got a wick. You gotta make your own.” Delman pressed his knuckles into the countertop, and leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “Outta your own skin.”

“How does it burn, then? Do you have to dry it out or something?”

“The hell is wrong with you? That’s what you’re focusing on here?”

“I had a .45 caliber bullet blow my eye out from the inside five hours ago and I can see out of it just fine,” Evan said, looking down at his arms and turning them over as though appraising them. “My flesh seems to be something of a renewable resource.”

“I ain’t even gonna ask about that, not worth knowin’,” Delman said, half-heartedly throwing up his hands. “Fine. You want it, it’s yours.”

“What does it do?”

Delman puffed out his cheeks and slowly exhaled the air, running his hand along his scalp. "It’s called the Guiding Light. If you write down something you’re looking for–in more of your own blood–on the wick–again, out of your own skin, can’t stress that enough–and light it, the flame’ll point you in its direction of its best interpretation of what you wrote. But this magic shit has a mind of its own, so God knows what that’ll be, plus you gotta write the what it down in these symbols,” he added, slapping the book with the back of his hand, “so accuracy might be something of an issue.”

Evan inhaled deeply and grinned. "It’s perfect.“

Delman groaned, but began to wrap up the lamp in packing paper regardless. Once he handed the items to Evan in a bag, he spoke again. "I gotta ask, kid–who are you?”

Evan thought back to the night before, when a beaten and bloody Visceral Jay had asked the same question, his panicked face lit by the flames that were rapidly engulfing the building.

“I’m the necessary evil.”

Punch.

“I’m what’s coming to you.”

Kick.

“I’m the bad thing that happens to bad people!”

Smash.

“I’M…”

Evan grinned at Mr. Delman, his eyes sparkling with manic energy. "I’m the Ugly Man.“

#my writing #ugly man chronicles #ugly man chronicles: reignition #chapter #urban fantasy

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