[Danger Days] The Wasteland - Chapter 15
Title: The Wasteland
Fandom: Danger Days
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Fun Ghoul/Party Poison, Kobra Kid/Party Poison
Summary: “Tell me about Kobra,” Ghoul said.
Master Post
Chapter 15
They discharged Ghoul from the clinic in the middle of the day, with practically no warning at all. The tired, punctual, untalkative doctor breezed into his room with a handful of papers, flipped through them once as if she had not yet had time to look over their contents, and then told him to get his things together.
She waited, wearily patient, for him to lace up his boots and replace his gunbelts. Ghoul hadn’t been back on his feet for long, and his joints were still slow and stiff. His mind, too, felt as if it had grown inflexible from disuse. Only that worried him. Ghoul knew from experience that his body was resilient, but he wasn’t so sure about his brain.
He picked up the radio and tucked it under his arm as if it were a book with an impressive title. It fit up flush against his body, and it was only then that Ghoul realized his pistol was missing.
“There was one more thing,” he said.
“Get it on your way out,” the doctor told him.
“Do I owe you anything?” he asked. “I don’t have money now, but-“
“Your brother paid already. You are free to go.”
Ghoul’s brows drew together in soft confusion, as if there were some word on the tip of his tongue, something he almost remembered.
“Listen. I don’t really remember what happened when I came here. I think you probably saved my life, though. You’re a really good doctor…”
“I’m not a doctor. I failed out of medical school in my third year,” she told him. “I didn’t like it very much. But I remembered a few things, and that was enough to get me a job here. All I did was provide you with antibiotics and a safe place to rest and recover. Anyone who wanted to live, even a little, would have.”
“Thanks anyway,” Ghoul said.
“Don’t let it happen again.” Coming from her, it sounded like an order, and Ghoul took it as one.
“Yes, ma’am.” He hesitated a moment more, feeling like there ought to be something else to say, some other way to thank her. Feeling as if he ought to feel something more.
“Was there anything else?” she said.
“No. I’m going.”
The doctor didn’t follow him out. She was already on her way to the next room. Ghoul found his way out eventually. The attendant at the front desk brought his pistol out from a locked cabinet, and only after Ghoul had it on his person did anyone pay him any attention at all. He felt himself watched, closely, not kindly, until he was outside.
Not until he noticed that no one was waiting for him did he realize he had not expected there to be. Poison would come by, later, when he felt like it, but Ghoul suddenly didn’t feel much like waiting for him. He knew that the others were holed up in a place on the beach, and he knew that it couldn’t be far if Poison was willing to humble himself with walking to the clinic every day.
Ghoul passed through a street of abandoned storefronts, and then he was on the boardwalk. The beach below him was bone white, the sand as fine as powder. There were a few women laying out in the sun, and a couple of little kids playing in the surf. They all wore denim cutoffs and tank tops instead of bathing suits. This place had been a resort town once, catering to travelers from Battery City. Not the wealthiest citizens, but to the comfortable, unassuming middleclass.
All that was over now. This place had moved on. Now it functioned as a refugee camp for expats and a refueling station for smugglers. The locals were still gratuitously used by and reluctantly tolerant of the voracious American locusts that swarmed across the border in search of cheap goods, or easy freedom, or truth, or peace. Ghoul put it together through half-remembered hearsay and intuition, but when he had finished assembling all the facts in order, he did not feel as if he were any closer to understanding this strange place in which he had awakened.
A girl on a bike came down the boardwalk towards him. Ghoul flagged her down. He spoke slowly, precisely, completing each word before dredging the next out of the depths of his memories. “Conoces a un americano con pelo rojo?”
“El niño rico?
“Huh?” Ghoul said.
She laughed. “The little rich boy, you mean? He drives a stupid car, right? One with a bug painted on the hood?”
“Oh.” Ghoul felt himself laughing too. “Yeah, that’s him.”
“Go down the beach a little. You’ll see a bunch of old vacation houses. I think he’s set up in one of those. You know, you should work on your Spanish if you’re planning on staying.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Ghoul said. “But I should probably work on it anyway.”
She looked at him as if she wanted to say more, but in the end she only told him, “Good luck finding your friend.”
Ghoul followed the boardwalk for another few blocks, until he spotted the Trans Am parked down on the beach. He followed the tire tracks - they were no longer fresh, no one had been out in the car for several days - down to one of the houses that crouched on the sand. There was a tall, lean figure out on the porch. He had a cigarette in his hand and a pair of huge sunglasses obscured most of his face. Ghoul had never seen him before, but somehow he knew that he was not in the wrong place. They had not met, but he looked exactly as Ghoul had imagined him.
Kobra watched him come up the path toward the house. Ghoul didn’t hurry, and so he had time to see that Kobra never once took a drag off his cigarette. It smoldered in his hand, as if he had forgotten all about it.
“Hey,” Ghoul said, when he was close enough to talk.
“Hey.”
Ghoul stopped at the foot of the two stairs that led up to the porch, and he waited. Kobra said nothing. He was so still that it didn’t seem like he breathed at all.
“Is Poison home?” Ghoul asked at last.
“That depends on who’s asking.” Kobra cocked a hand on his hip. He was so damn leggy he had to thrust his elbow way out from his body to do it. Ghoul supposed he thought it made him look tough, but he didn’t have to go around striking poses to prove that. You could see it in his face, even what little of it was visible beneath the frames of his glasses, he was plenty tough.
“I kind of think you already know who I am,” Ghoul said.
“I kind of think I do,” Kobra replied. “But you don’t look like I thought you would. Not that he ever let me get away with thinking much. He hardly talked about you at all; you could have been dead for all I knew. Though, come to think of it, I did see you once before. When I gave you my bed. I guess I didn’t remember you.”
Ghoul felt his expression tightening, shoring itself up. If Kobra was going to know anything about him, it at least wasn’t going to be because he read it in the lines of Ghoul’s face. “I’ve heard people say I’m not that memorable.”
“People say all kinds of things,” Kobra replied. “I don’t think they mean half of them, and the other half are all lies.”
In spite of himself, Ghoul laughed at that. “I guess. Look, I don’t know what you want. I think maybe you’re just trying to fuck with me. Can I see Poison or not?”
“Go on in,” Kobra said. He stepped aside, swinging one foot back and pivoting his entire body, like an actor on a stage. Ghoul came up the stairs, and as he went by him he felt the hot cinders of Kobra’s eyes, glaring at him from behind the lenses of his glasses. Kobra’s entire body seemed to be wound up in an attitude of alertness, a prelude to some swift and sudden movement. As if he might, at any moment, uncoil his long limbs, lash out and push Ghoul backwards down the stairs or thrust out a petty foot to trip him. Not out of any sense of premeditated meanness, but just to see if he could and to ascertain what Ghoul would do if he did.
But he did not move at all, save for his left hand, which flicked away the spent butt of his cigarette. When Ghoul was past him, he did not turn around to know for sure, but he thought he heard Kobra fumbling inside his leather jacket for a fresh smoke.
Poison was there when he went inside, seated in the broken chair with a table fan in his lap. The cover was off the fan and he had a screwdriver out and buried to its hilt in the electronic guts.
“Hey,” Ghoul said.
Poison looked up. A strange expression flickered across his face. “You’re here. Is something wrong?”
“No. Why?”
“You looked odd for a second. I don’t know…”
He put the fan down and came towards him. Ghoul let himself be kissed - a dry, perfunctory kiss - and then he said, “I guess I’m all right now. You knew I was coming back soon. Why didn’t you tell me about…”
He saw Poison’s gaze sway from his face, towards the door. When he found it empty, Kobra still outside, his eyes came back again. “Don’t worry about him.”
“Poison…”
“It’s fine. I told you.”
“I know, but you’re acting weird about it.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” Poison said.
“I guess you are. But if you’re hiding something important from me, I’m going to be mad. That’s the truth too.”
“Things changed while you were gone,” Poison said quietly. “I didn’t want them to, but they did. Do you want me to get rid of him? I will, if that’s what you want. He’s no one. No one that anyone would miss.”
“Jesus, Poison…”
“Tell me if that’s what you want.”
“No,” Ghoul said instantly, but he knew that he didn’t mean it. If Poison was so goddamn game to get his hands dirty, then let him do it. Maybe then, at last, they could have quiet…
Ghoul’s head swam, and he reached out blindly, his hand sliding down Poison’s chest, hissing against his leather jacket, until his fingers hooked in his belt. He pulled him close. Poison moved with a curious loose-jointed jerk. It was not quite natural, not quite normal, but it was sexy. There was a lump of ice in Ghoul’s throat, and when he tried to swallow around it, it felt like he was sucking on something jagged and inflexible.
He was already winded when he kissed Poison, and the kiss seemed to finish knocking the breath out of him completely. Poison’s hands came up, cupping the sides of Ghoul’s face. His skin was cool, dry, as if it had been powdered. It was the same, everything was the same as Ghoul remembered. But he no longer trusted his memories.
Then he felt Poison pulling away from him. Ghoul whimpered, made as if to lean after him, then stopped abruptly when he realized he was being watched.
“Hey,” said Kobra. His voice was tough, husky, sexless. It had undergone a profound change in the five or so minutes since Ghoul had left him on the porch, as if Kobra had smoked a lifetime’s worth of cigarettes and swallowed a lifetime’s worth of whiskey while he was out there alone.
Ghoul glanced over his shoulder. Kobra was slouched in the doorway, slouched inside his leather jacket. The fingers of one hand clutched the doorframe like claws.
“What do you want?” Poison said. His gaze flicked to Ghoul’s face, and something shifted behind his eyes. “Have you two met?”
“Yeah,” Ghoul said.
Kobra looked at him darkly, hatefully, but Ghoul didn’t get the feeling that it was a hate directed at him.
“I’m Kobra.”
“Huh?”
“I never told you. You didn’t ask.”
“Oh,” Ghoul said. “Sorry. I’m Fun Ghoul.”
“What the fuck do you want?” Poison snapped. Kobra’s eyes came up, and he hit Poison full in the face with the back loathing that swirled within. But it was not Poison he hated either.
“I need some cash,” he said. “I want to go pick up a few things.”
“You mean more tequila?”
“Who the fuck cares what I mean?”
Poison’s eyes narrowed. “We’re low on funds. We can’t afford to throw money away on every little whim that pops into your head.”
“Why didn’t you say so sooner? I know how to get more money.”
“I know you do,” Poison said. “And it may come to that yet.”
Kobra seemed to become very small and very rigid inside his leather jacket. “Sorry to bother you,” he muttered, and he went out without even slamming the door.
“Poison…” Ghoul said, but Poison had already pulled away from him. He took off his jacket and tossed it over the broken chair, and then he sat down and beckoned Ghoul after him.
“Is he coming back?” Ghoul asked. His joints creaked when he sat on the floor beside Poison, as if his time in the hospital had prematurely aged his body by thirty years.
“Who gives a shit?” Poison said.
“I do,” Ghoul whispered.
Poison’s lips curled. “Why? Are you jealous?”
“What?” He knew that he shouldn’t, that it was the wrong thing to do, but Ghoul laughed. It was too stupid not to. “Of course I’m not.”
“That’s a relief,” Poison said. He slumped back against the wall and pulled Ghoul over on top of him so that Ghoul was straddling his hips. Poison held him by the collar and didn’t let him up for a long time. Ghoul wasn’t sure how much he liked it at first, but when it became clear that Kobra really had left, and that Jet wasn’t about to come home and stumbled over them, he let himself get into it a little. He ran his hands up under Poison’s shirt and traced the familiar rangy lines of musculature.
Poison slid down the wall, dragging Ghoul after him. He didn’t seem to have anything particular in mind, and so Ghoul undid their belts just to have something to do with his hands.
“Yes,” Poison sighed. “Yes, Ghoul…”
Ghoul’s breath caught. Poison had never spoken to him quite like that before. Ghoul shook his hair back and slid down Poison’s body, pressing his face into the apex of his legs and breathing the sweaty, leathery smell of him through his jeans.
“Please… please…” Poison said. Ghoul glanced up at him, but his head was thrown back and his expression was hidden. He unzipped Poison’s jeans and eased his cock out and sucked him off while Poison whimpered and gasped and murmured above him. But he didn’t taste the same as Ghoul remembered.
Afterwards, Poison looked at him for a long time, his eyes strange and silent and colorless. Then he sat up and began to straighten his clothes.
“Tell me about Kobra,” Ghoul said.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“I mean, like, is he one of us? Or…?”
“One of us?” Poison said quietly. “I don’t know. I don’t know him that well.”
“He saved my life,” Ghoul said.
“Oh?”
“I’m starting to remember a little of what happened when I was really sick.”
Poison was quiet for a long time, and at first Ghoul thought that he did not mean to answer at all.
“He’s a Killjoy,” he said at last. “But that doesn’t make him exactly like us.”
***
Jet Star came back a little later, and he was surprised but not exactly thrilled to see Ghoul there. He rushed out at once and came back with about a hundred little shrimp tacos and some bottles of beer from a place down the street. Ghoul was starving, but he had a hard time eating. There was a knot of anxiety in his stomach. He kept looking between the two of them, trying to figure out if they liked it here, if they were happy. If they would stay.
It was almost dark when Kobra returned, carrying a paper sack with a bottle in it. He set the package down on the crate that stood in for a table and looked Ghoul square in the face with his flat black eyes and said, “Drink up.”
“Where’d you get that?” Poison said, making no move to touch the tequila.
“Ran into an old friend,” Kobra replied. He touched two fingers to his lips in an unconscious pantomime of smoking a cigarette. “It’s no one you’d know. But he said we could do a job for him. There’s money in it.”
“Shit, kid, I didn’t come down here to work,” Jet said.
“It’s nothing,” Kobra told them. “Easy money. We just have to deliver a package. He said he’ll even throw in a full tank of gas for us.”
“Deliver it to where?” Poison asked.
Kobra took another drag off his ghostly cigarette. “Salton.”
“No.”
“Why the fuck not?” Kobra snapped. “You said we need work. Now we have some.”
“I said we needed money,” Poison said. “Not work. Especially not that kind of work.”
“You know, it’s not even your car,” Kobra said. “It’s Jet’s. So he should decide what we’re going to use it for. I don’t know who the fuck elected you dictator for life of our little shitshow here, Poison, but-“
“No one did.” Poison stood up. “No one elected me anything. Because this isn’t a democracy.”
He went outside, brushing past Kobra who did not give a single inch to get out of his way, but once he was gone he sank down with a weary sigh. He fixed Ghoul with an accusatory glare. “He’d listen if you told him…”
“What makes you the fucking expert?” Ghoul said.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Shut up, both of you,” Jet said abruptly. “I mean it. I knew this would happen…”
“Sorry,” Ghoul muttered, but Kobra only laughed.
“He is right, though.” Jet softened a little. “I know you don’t want to hear it, kid, but we need the cash. And when you talk, Poison listens.”
“I don’t want…” Ghoul started to say, but stopped himself just in time. “I don’t think we should go back to the Zones. Not after everything that happened. After all the trouble we had just getting out.”
“Wasn’t no trouble,” Kobra said. “Not for me.”
“I mean, maybe we can just find something down here. Forget about Battery City and the Zones…”
Kobra laughed, unpleasant and humorless. It hissed out of him, almost as if he were in pain. “There haven’t been any jobs in this town since the tourists dried up, you goddamn naïve hick. If you think I’m going to break my back washing dishes or gutting fish down at the docks all day, then I’ve got news for you…”
“That’s enough,” Jet said, but Ghoul shook his head.
“It’s okay. It’s fine. Poison will do whatever the hell he wants, but I’ll talk to him if that’s what it takes to shut you up.”
He stood up to follow Poison outside, but then he realized that Poison was already there, standing in the half-open door and watching him with a curious expression. It was impossible to tell how long he’d been back, or what he had heard.
“There’s no need,” Poison said quietly. “I’ve reconsidered.”
Kobra laughed. “You were only gone for like three seconds.”
“Regardless,” Poison said sharply. “I have reconsidered. My first decision was based on certain antiquated notions I have. I’ve been trying to rid myself of them.”
“Whatever,” Kobra muttered. “At least something is finally going to happen.”
“Yes,” Poison said. “It is. I want to meet your contact tomorrow.” He glanced over Ghoul and Jet. “You don’t have to come. You two can stay out of this, if you’d rather.”
Ghoul did, very badly, want to keep out of it. But when he thought of Poison and Kobra driving alone through the vast, secret-keeping darkness of the wasteland, he felt sick. “I’ll ride along,” he said quietly.
Kobra snatched up the bottle of tequila from the table and broke the seal. “I guess we can all finally have that drink now,” he said. Jet brought some streaked and dirty glasses out of one of the cabinets, and Kobra poured generous shots for them. He didn’t stiff anybody, even if he wanted to.
They drank the first round down and Kobra went to pour the second, but Poison said, “Wait. Not until the news is over.”
He flipped the radio on and tuned in Dr. Death’s broadcast.
“That guy is such an asshole,” Kobra said. “With a reedy, asshole voice.”
“There might be something about the border crossing,” Poison told him.
The voice on the radio came through very clearly, the way it only did on clear nights. “A dream and a fear,” it said. “Perhaps that’s all life is. A dream and a fear.”
Ghoul had never paid much attention to Dr. Death’s rhetorical flourishes and proverbs and familiar quotations, but this time, he thought, he might be on to something. But the doctor was already talking again, a bluster of words, as if even he did not trust himself to say something that might mean anything at all.
“Bad news from the Zones, tumbleweeds: It looks like Jet Star and the Kobra Kid had a clap with an Exterminator that went all Costa Rica, and got themselves ghosted…”
There was more, but Ghoul didn’t catch it. At the mention of those names, his pulse had leapt into his ears, drowning everything out in a rush of blood. He heard Kobra laugh, his voice far away and distorted, as if he stood at the far end of a long, lightless tunnel.
“Dumb motherfuckers,” he sneered.
“Don’t,” Jet said. “Those poor kids…”
There might have been more, but Ghoul didn’t hear it. He was already on his feet, half-lunging half-stumbling out the front door and into the night. His hips struck the railing that encircled the porch, and he gripped it hard. Splinters dug into his palms, but he didn’t feel them, didn’t care. He kept listening for the coyotes out in the desert, but he could only hear the calls of the seabirds.
“It’s old news, you know,” Poison said quietly. He stepped out on the porch and let the door fall softly shut behind him. “His reports were always a few days behind.”
“I know,” Ghoul said. “But that means it would have happened right when Jet… when Ray… decided he wanted to be someone else. Only he wanted to be the same as that dead person. And I don’t know… I don’t know what that means…”
Poison slipped up behind him and put an arm around his waist, drawing Ghoul back against him. “It’s old news by now,” he whispered, putting his mouth right up against Ghoul’s ear, as if he could force the words inside him.
Ghoul turned in his arms, and leaned his forehead against Poison’s shoulder. “Tell me again who I am.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My name!” Ghoul said. “Tell me what it is. Tell me that you remember.”
“Your name is Fun Ghoul.”
“I didn’t mean that name.”
Poison’s chest rose and fell with a quiet sigh. He curled the fingers of one hand around the back of Ghoul’s neck and he said, “You know I don’t like this.”
“Never mind, then…”
But Poison tightened his grip, and said, very harshly and rapidly, “Your name’s Frank. Are you satisfied?”
Ghoul was quiet for a long time, because it seemed to him that question required some serious thought. “No,” he admitted at last. “I thought I would be, but-“
He leaned back suddenly, so he could see Poison’s face. A fringe of red hair had fallen out of place, and Ghoul reached out and pushed it back so he could see Poison’s eyes, but they were blank and guarded. Ghoul kissed him on the mouth.
“Can we just hang out here for a while?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you just, I don’t know, hold me or something?”
“Yes, I can do that,” Poison said.
After that, neither of them said much. Poison led him around to the side of the house where the light from the boardwalk didn’t penetrate, and Ghoul thought that he wanted to fool around. But all they did was sit on the sand with their backs up against the wall. Ghoul put his head on Poison’s shoulder; only after a long time like that did Poison finally relax.
Eventually, Ghoul slept. Poison didn’t disturb him at all.
Fandom: Danger Days
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Fun Ghoul/Party Poison, Kobra Kid/Party Poison
Summary: “Tell me about Kobra,” Ghoul said.
Master Post
Chapter 15
They discharged Ghoul from the clinic in the middle of the day, with practically no warning at all. The tired, punctual, untalkative doctor breezed into his room with a handful of papers, flipped through them once as if she had not yet had time to look over their contents, and then told him to get his things together.
She waited, wearily patient, for him to lace up his boots and replace his gunbelts. Ghoul hadn’t been back on his feet for long, and his joints were still slow and stiff. His mind, too, felt as if it had grown inflexible from disuse. Only that worried him. Ghoul knew from experience that his body was resilient, but he wasn’t so sure about his brain.
He picked up the radio and tucked it under his arm as if it were a book with an impressive title. It fit up flush against his body, and it was only then that Ghoul realized his pistol was missing.
“There was one more thing,” he said.
“Get it on your way out,” the doctor told him.
“Do I owe you anything?” he asked. “I don’t have money now, but-“
“Your brother paid already. You are free to go.”
Ghoul’s brows drew together in soft confusion, as if there were some word on the tip of his tongue, something he almost remembered.
“Listen. I don’t really remember what happened when I came here. I think you probably saved my life, though. You’re a really good doctor…”
“I’m not a doctor. I failed out of medical school in my third year,” she told him. “I didn’t like it very much. But I remembered a few things, and that was enough to get me a job here. All I did was provide you with antibiotics and a safe place to rest and recover. Anyone who wanted to live, even a little, would have.”
“Thanks anyway,” Ghoul said.
“Don’t let it happen again.” Coming from her, it sounded like an order, and Ghoul took it as one.
“Yes, ma’am.” He hesitated a moment more, feeling like there ought to be something else to say, some other way to thank her. Feeling as if he ought to feel something more.
“Was there anything else?” she said.
“No. I’m going.”
The doctor didn’t follow him out. She was already on her way to the next room. Ghoul found his way out eventually. The attendant at the front desk brought his pistol out from a locked cabinet, and only after Ghoul had it on his person did anyone pay him any attention at all. He felt himself watched, closely, not kindly, until he was outside.
Not until he noticed that no one was waiting for him did he realize he had not expected there to be. Poison would come by, later, when he felt like it, but Ghoul suddenly didn’t feel much like waiting for him. He knew that the others were holed up in a place on the beach, and he knew that it couldn’t be far if Poison was willing to humble himself with walking to the clinic every day.
Ghoul passed through a street of abandoned storefronts, and then he was on the boardwalk. The beach below him was bone white, the sand as fine as powder. There were a few women laying out in the sun, and a couple of little kids playing in the surf. They all wore denim cutoffs and tank tops instead of bathing suits. This place had been a resort town once, catering to travelers from Battery City. Not the wealthiest citizens, but to the comfortable, unassuming middleclass.
All that was over now. This place had moved on. Now it functioned as a refugee camp for expats and a refueling station for smugglers. The locals were still gratuitously used by and reluctantly tolerant of the voracious American locusts that swarmed across the border in search of cheap goods, or easy freedom, or truth, or peace. Ghoul put it together through half-remembered hearsay and intuition, but when he had finished assembling all the facts in order, he did not feel as if he were any closer to understanding this strange place in which he had awakened.
A girl on a bike came down the boardwalk towards him. Ghoul flagged her down. He spoke slowly, precisely, completing each word before dredging the next out of the depths of his memories. “Conoces a un americano con pelo rojo?”
“El niño rico?
“Huh?” Ghoul said.
She laughed. “The little rich boy, you mean? He drives a stupid car, right? One with a bug painted on the hood?”
“Oh.” Ghoul felt himself laughing too. “Yeah, that’s him.”
“Go down the beach a little. You’ll see a bunch of old vacation houses. I think he’s set up in one of those. You know, you should work on your Spanish if you’re planning on staying.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Ghoul said. “But I should probably work on it anyway.”
She looked at him as if she wanted to say more, but in the end she only told him, “Good luck finding your friend.”
Ghoul followed the boardwalk for another few blocks, until he spotted the Trans Am parked down on the beach. He followed the tire tracks - they were no longer fresh, no one had been out in the car for several days - down to one of the houses that crouched on the sand. There was a tall, lean figure out on the porch. He had a cigarette in his hand and a pair of huge sunglasses obscured most of his face. Ghoul had never seen him before, but somehow he knew that he was not in the wrong place. They had not met, but he looked exactly as Ghoul had imagined him.
Kobra watched him come up the path toward the house. Ghoul didn’t hurry, and so he had time to see that Kobra never once took a drag off his cigarette. It smoldered in his hand, as if he had forgotten all about it.
“Hey,” Ghoul said, when he was close enough to talk.
“Hey.”
Ghoul stopped at the foot of the two stairs that led up to the porch, and he waited. Kobra said nothing. He was so still that it didn’t seem like he breathed at all.
“Is Poison home?” Ghoul asked at last.
“That depends on who’s asking.” Kobra cocked a hand on his hip. He was so damn leggy he had to thrust his elbow way out from his body to do it. Ghoul supposed he thought it made him look tough, but he didn’t have to go around striking poses to prove that. You could see it in his face, even what little of it was visible beneath the frames of his glasses, he was plenty tough.
“I kind of think you already know who I am,” Ghoul said.
“I kind of think I do,” Kobra replied. “But you don’t look like I thought you would. Not that he ever let me get away with thinking much. He hardly talked about you at all; you could have been dead for all I knew. Though, come to think of it, I did see you once before. When I gave you my bed. I guess I didn’t remember you.”
Ghoul felt his expression tightening, shoring itself up. If Kobra was going to know anything about him, it at least wasn’t going to be because he read it in the lines of Ghoul’s face. “I’ve heard people say I’m not that memorable.”
“People say all kinds of things,” Kobra replied. “I don’t think they mean half of them, and the other half are all lies.”
In spite of himself, Ghoul laughed at that. “I guess. Look, I don’t know what you want. I think maybe you’re just trying to fuck with me. Can I see Poison or not?”
“Go on in,” Kobra said. He stepped aside, swinging one foot back and pivoting his entire body, like an actor on a stage. Ghoul came up the stairs, and as he went by him he felt the hot cinders of Kobra’s eyes, glaring at him from behind the lenses of his glasses. Kobra’s entire body seemed to be wound up in an attitude of alertness, a prelude to some swift and sudden movement. As if he might, at any moment, uncoil his long limbs, lash out and push Ghoul backwards down the stairs or thrust out a petty foot to trip him. Not out of any sense of premeditated meanness, but just to see if he could and to ascertain what Ghoul would do if he did.
But he did not move at all, save for his left hand, which flicked away the spent butt of his cigarette. When Ghoul was past him, he did not turn around to know for sure, but he thought he heard Kobra fumbling inside his leather jacket for a fresh smoke.
Poison was there when he went inside, seated in the broken chair with a table fan in his lap. The cover was off the fan and he had a screwdriver out and buried to its hilt in the electronic guts.
“Hey,” Ghoul said.
Poison looked up. A strange expression flickered across his face. “You’re here. Is something wrong?”
“No. Why?”
“You looked odd for a second. I don’t know…”
He put the fan down and came towards him. Ghoul let himself be kissed - a dry, perfunctory kiss - and then he said, “I guess I’m all right now. You knew I was coming back soon. Why didn’t you tell me about…”
He saw Poison’s gaze sway from his face, towards the door. When he found it empty, Kobra still outside, his eyes came back again. “Don’t worry about him.”
“Poison…”
“It’s fine. I told you.”
“I know, but you’re acting weird about it.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” Poison said.
“I guess you are. But if you’re hiding something important from me, I’m going to be mad. That’s the truth too.”
“Things changed while you were gone,” Poison said quietly. “I didn’t want them to, but they did. Do you want me to get rid of him? I will, if that’s what you want. He’s no one. No one that anyone would miss.”
“Jesus, Poison…”
“Tell me if that’s what you want.”
“No,” Ghoul said instantly, but he knew that he didn’t mean it. If Poison was so goddamn game to get his hands dirty, then let him do it. Maybe then, at last, they could have quiet…
Ghoul’s head swam, and he reached out blindly, his hand sliding down Poison’s chest, hissing against his leather jacket, until his fingers hooked in his belt. He pulled him close. Poison moved with a curious loose-jointed jerk. It was not quite natural, not quite normal, but it was sexy. There was a lump of ice in Ghoul’s throat, and when he tried to swallow around it, it felt like he was sucking on something jagged and inflexible.
He was already winded when he kissed Poison, and the kiss seemed to finish knocking the breath out of him completely. Poison’s hands came up, cupping the sides of Ghoul’s face. His skin was cool, dry, as if it had been powdered. It was the same, everything was the same as Ghoul remembered. But he no longer trusted his memories.
Then he felt Poison pulling away from him. Ghoul whimpered, made as if to lean after him, then stopped abruptly when he realized he was being watched.
“Hey,” said Kobra. His voice was tough, husky, sexless. It had undergone a profound change in the five or so minutes since Ghoul had left him on the porch, as if Kobra had smoked a lifetime’s worth of cigarettes and swallowed a lifetime’s worth of whiskey while he was out there alone.
Ghoul glanced over his shoulder. Kobra was slouched in the doorway, slouched inside his leather jacket. The fingers of one hand clutched the doorframe like claws.
“What do you want?” Poison said. His gaze flicked to Ghoul’s face, and something shifted behind his eyes. “Have you two met?”
“Yeah,” Ghoul said.
Kobra looked at him darkly, hatefully, but Ghoul didn’t get the feeling that it was a hate directed at him.
“I’m Kobra.”
“Huh?”
“I never told you. You didn’t ask.”
“Oh,” Ghoul said. “Sorry. I’m Fun Ghoul.”
“What the fuck do you want?” Poison snapped. Kobra’s eyes came up, and he hit Poison full in the face with the back loathing that swirled within. But it was not Poison he hated either.
“I need some cash,” he said. “I want to go pick up a few things.”
“You mean more tequila?”
“Who the fuck cares what I mean?”
Poison’s eyes narrowed. “We’re low on funds. We can’t afford to throw money away on every little whim that pops into your head.”
“Why didn’t you say so sooner? I know how to get more money.”
“I know you do,” Poison said. “And it may come to that yet.”
Kobra seemed to become very small and very rigid inside his leather jacket. “Sorry to bother you,” he muttered, and he went out without even slamming the door.
“Poison…” Ghoul said, but Poison had already pulled away from him. He took off his jacket and tossed it over the broken chair, and then he sat down and beckoned Ghoul after him.
“Is he coming back?” Ghoul asked. His joints creaked when he sat on the floor beside Poison, as if his time in the hospital had prematurely aged his body by thirty years.
“Who gives a shit?” Poison said.
“I do,” Ghoul whispered.
Poison’s lips curled. “Why? Are you jealous?”
“What?” He knew that he shouldn’t, that it was the wrong thing to do, but Ghoul laughed. It was too stupid not to. “Of course I’m not.”
“That’s a relief,” Poison said. He slumped back against the wall and pulled Ghoul over on top of him so that Ghoul was straddling his hips. Poison held him by the collar and didn’t let him up for a long time. Ghoul wasn’t sure how much he liked it at first, but when it became clear that Kobra really had left, and that Jet wasn’t about to come home and stumbled over them, he let himself get into it a little. He ran his hands up under Poison’s shirt and traced the familiar rangy lines of musculature.
Poison slid down the wall, dragging Ghoul after him. He didn’t seem to have anything particular in mind, and so Ghoul undid their belts just to have something to do with his hands.
“Yes,” Poison sighed. “Yes, Ghoul…”
Ghoul’s breath caught. Poison had never spoken to him quite like that before. Ghoul shook his hair back and slid down Poison’s body, pressing his face into the apex of his legs and breathing the sweaty, leathery smell of him through his jeans.
“Please… please…” Poison said. Ghoul glanced up at him, but his head was thrown back and his expression was hidden. He unzipped Poison’s jeans and eased his cock out and sucked him off while Poison whimpered and gasped and murmured above him. But he didn’t taste the same as Ghoul remembered.
Afterwards, Poison looked at him for a long time, his eyes strange and silent and colorless. Then he sat up and began to straighten his clothes.
“Tell me about Kobra,” Ghoul said.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“I mean, like, is he one of us? Or…?”
“One of us?” Poison said quietly. “I don’t know. I don’t know him that well.”
“He saved my life,” Ghoul said.
“Oh?”
“I’m starting to remember a little of what happened when I was really sick.”
Poison was quiet for a long time, and at first Ghoul thought that he did not mean to answer at all.
“He’s a Killjoy,” he said at last. “But that doesn’t make him exactly like us.”
***
Jet Star came back a little later, and he was surprised but not exactly thrilled to see Ghoul there. He rushed out at once and came back with about a hundred little shrimp tacos and some bottles of beer from a place down the street. Ghoul was starving, but he had a hard time eating. There was a knot of anxiety in his stomach. He kept looking between the two of them, trying to figure out if they liked it here, if they were happy. If they would stay.
It was almost dark when Kobra returned, carrying a paper sack with a bottle in it. He set the package down on the crate that stood in for a table and looked Ghoul square in the face with his flat black eyes and said, “Drink up.”
“Where’d you get that?” Poison said, making no move to touch the tequila.
“Ran into an old friend,” Kobra replied. He touched two fingers to his lips in an unconscious pantomime of smoking a cigarette. “It’s no one you’d know. But he said we could do a job for him. There’s money in it.”
“Shit, kid, I didn’t come down here to work,” Jet said.
“It’s nothing,” Kobra told them. “Easy money. We just have to deliver a package. He said he’ll even throw in a full tank of gas for us.”
“Deliver it to where?” Poison asked.
Kobra took another drag off his ghostly cigarette. “Salton.”
“No.”
“Why the fuck not?” Kobra snapped. “You said we need work. Now we have some.”
“I said we needed money,” Poison said. “Not work. Especially not that kind of work.”
“You know, it’s not even your car,” Kobra said. “It’s Jet’s. So he should decide what we’re going to use it for. I don’t know who the fuck elected you dictator for life of our little shitshow here, Poison, but-“
“No one did.” Poison stood up. “No one elected me anything. Because this isn’t a democracy.”
He went outside, brushing past Kobra who did not give a single inch to get out of his way, but once he was gone he sank down with a weary sigh. He fixed Ghoul with an accusatory glare. “He’d listen if you told him…”
“What makes you the fucking expert?” Ghoul said.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Shut up, both of you,” Jet said abruptly. “I mean it. I knew this would happen…”
“Sorry,” Ghoul muttered, but Kobra only laughed.
“He is right, though.” Jet softened a little. “I know you don’t want to hear it, kid, but we need the cash. And when you talk, Poison listens.”
“I don’t want…” Ghoul started to say, but stopped himself just in time. “I don’t think we should go back to the Zones. Not after everything that happened. After all the trouble we had just getting out.”
“Wasn’t no trouble,” Kobra said. “Not for me.”
“I mean, maybe we can just find something down here. Forget about Battery City and the Zones…”
Kobra laughed, unpleasant and humorless. It hissed out of him, almost as if he were in pain. “There haven’t been any jobs in this town since the tourists dried up, you goddamn naïve hick. If you think I’m going to break my back washing dishes or gutting fish down at the docks all day, then I’ve got news for you…”
“That’s enough,” Jet said, but Ghoul shook his head.
“It’s okay. It’s fine. Poison will do whatever the hell he wants, but I’ll talk to him if that’s what it takes to shut you up.”
He stood up to follow Poison outside, but then he realized that Poison was already there, standing in the half-open door and watching him with a curious expression. It was impossible to tell how long he’d been back, or what he had heard.
“There’s no need,” Poison said quietly. “I’ve reconsidered.”
Kobra laughed. “You were only gone for like three seconds.”
“Regardless,” Poison said sharply. “I have reconsidered. My first decision was based on certain antiquated notions I have. I’ve been trying to rid myself of them.”
“Whatever,” Kobra muttered. “At least something is finally going to happen.”
“Yes,” Poison said. “It is. I want to meet your contact tomorrow.” He glanced over Ghoul and Jet. “You don’t have to come. You two can stay out of this, if you’d rather.”
Ghoul did, very badly, want to keep out of it. But when he thought of Poison and Kobra driving alone through the vast, secret-keeping darkness of the wasteland, he felt sick. “I’ll ride along,” he said quietly.
Kobra snatched up the bottle of tequila from the table and broke the seal. “I guess we can all finally have that drink now,” he said. Jet brought some streaked and dirty glasses out of one of the cabinets, and Kobra poured generous shots for them. He didn’t stiff anybody, even if he wanted to.
They drank the first round down and Kobra went to pour the second, but Poison said, “Wait. Not until the news is over.”
He flipped the radio on and tuned in Dr. Death’s broadcast.
“That guy is such an asshole,” Kobra said. “With a reedy, asshole voice.”
“There might be something about the border crossing,” Poison told him.
The voice on the radio came through very clearly, the way it only did on clear nights. “A dream and a fear,” it said. “Perhaps that’s all life is. A dream and a fear.”
Ghoul had never paid much attention to Dr. Death’s rhetorical flourishes and proverbs and familiar quotations, but this time, he thought, he might be on to something. But the doctor was already talking again, a bluster of words, as if even he did not trust himself to say something that might mean anything at all.
“Bad news from the Zones, tumbleweeds: It looks like Jet Star and the Kobra Kid had a clap with an Exterminator that went all Costa Rica, and got themselves ghosted…”
There was more, but Ghoul didn’t catch it. At the mention of those names, his pulse had leapt into his ears, drowning everything out in a rush of blood. He heard Kobra laugh, his voice far away and distorted, as if he stood at the far end of a long, lightless tunnel.
“Dumb motherfuckers,” he sneered.
“Don’t,” Jet said. “Those poor kids…”
There might have been more, but Ghoul didn’t hear it. He was already on his feet, half-lunging half-stumbling out the front door and into the night. His hips struck the railing that encircled the porch, and he gripped it hard. Splinters dug into his palms, but he didn’t feel them, didn’t care. He kept listening for the coyotes out in the desert, but he could only hear the calls of the seabirds.
“It’s old news, you know,” Poison said quietly. He stepped out on the porch and let the door fall softly shut behind him. “His reports were always a few days behind.”
“I know,” Ghoul said. “But that means it would have happened right when Jet… when Ray… decided he wanted to be someone else. Only he wanted to be the same as that dead person. And I don’t know… I don’t know what that means…”
Poison slipped up behind him and put an arm around his waist, drawing Ghoul back against him. “It’s old news by now,” he whispered, putting his mouth right up against Ghoul’s ear, as if he could force the words inside him.
Ghoul turned in his arms, and leaned his forehead against Poison’s shoulder. “Tell me again who I am.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My name!” Ghoul said. “Tell me what it is. Tell me that you remember.”
“Your name is Fun Ghoul.”
“I didn’t mean that name.”
Poison’s chest rose and fell with a quiet sigh. He curled the fingers of one hand around the back of Ghoul’s neck and he said, “You know I don’t like this.”
“Never mind, then…”
But Poison tightened his grip, and said, very harshly and rapidly, “Your name’s Frank. Are you satisfied?”
Ghoul was quiet for a long time, because it seemed to him that question required some serious thought. “No,” he admitted at last. “I thought I would be, but-“
He leaned back suddenly, so he could see Poison’s face. A fringe of red hair had fallen out of place, and Ghoul reached out and pushed it back so he could see Poison’s eyes, but they were blank and guarded. Ghoul kissed him on the mouth.
“Can we just hang out here for a while?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you just, I don’t know, hold me or something?”
“Yes, I can do that,” Poison said.
After that, neither of them said much. Poison led him around to the side of the house where the light from the boardwalk didn’t penetrate, and Ghoul thought that he wanted to fool around. But all they did was sit on the sand with their backs up against the wall. Ghoul put his head on Poison’s shoulder; only after a long time like that did Poison finally relax.
Eventually, Ghoul slept. Poison didn’t disturb him at all.