Wired Bone: Chapter Six (Patreon)

Chapter Six

“Well,” said Crane. “Shit.”

That summarized the situation pretty well, in Luke's opinion.

Devonte Crane was a man in his forties. Black-skinned, bald and clean shaven at all times. He was tall and lithe, though the few occasions that Lucas had seen him shirtless had shown a rather impressive musculature that came from years of exercise.

At that moment, he’d been wearing a loose shirt under a jean jacket with its sleeves rolled up, grey work jeans and brown work boots. All his clothes had grease stains, and a rag stuck out of his left back pocket, which Lucas could see as he paced around.

Lucas was sitting at Crane’s office, located in the back room of an auto repair shop.

The garage was a wide building that usually had a dozen or so cars being worked on at any time. This amount of activity helped to disguise the fact that most of Crane’s revenue came from taking apart other people’s cars and selling the parts.

Lucas’ mother had been aware of this since it was something of an open secret among the people of Gibson Heights, where Crane lived. Among the neighbors with reputable jobs, it was also rumored that Crane had a connection to the Blackfish family.

She had ordered Lucas to never interact with Crane because of this.

Naturally, when he was ten years old and had come to the decision that he needed to work to help out at home, Lucas had gone straight to Crane’s apartment to knock on his door over and over until he gave him an in.

Crane had refused at first, slamming the door on Lucas’ face. Then Lucas had knocked again, and Crane had repeated his action.

This went on until Crane stopped answering the door, at which point Lucas had sat outside his door until Crane invited him in for coffee and they talked.

It had been a fairly normal talk. Not very interesting, nothing about it stuck out in Lucas’ memory.

But Crane had accepted, so Lucas must’ve said somethingright.

From there, joining a gang had been shockingly anti-climactic. Crane made some calls, taught Lucas a few things, and then Lucas had to spend a fraction of his day going from school to The House and either guarding the stash, handing out vials and baggies or taking money.

He had been bored.

He wished he were bored now.

His hands felt sweaty and clammy. He’d been wringing them for a while, and every so often while talking he’d taken to scratching the back of them until the skin was red and raw, and Crane had had to pause the explanation to get him to stop.

His eyes wandered around the room without stopping. They caught on the mirror to the right of Crane’s desk, and consequentially, on his own reflection.

Lucas was fairly short for his age, though his mother had assured him that she’d gotten her first growth spurt fairly late as well. Due to Victoria’s efforts, he wasn’t as malnourished as other kids from the proto-arc, but he was still skinny enough that he could grab the underside of his ribcage when he sucked in his gut.

He was something called “morocho” in Spanish, meaning he was ethnically white while still having light brown skin and dark hair. Said dark tone of skin did little to hide bruises he’d gotten from slamming into things, slipping while traversing the improvised paths of Gibson Heights, or rowdy customers while on hand-outs.

Speaking of hair, his was pitch black, thick and soft, long enough to cover his ears. Due to twelve years of rejecting hairbrushes, it was an untamed mess that went in every direction and gave him a vaguely electrocuted look. His eyes were black as well.

Between the oversized hoodie and how dirty his clothes were, he looked mildly feral.

The expression on his face took away from it.

He looked scared.

He swallowed, breathed deep as Victoria had taught him, then let it out slowly.

He checked with the mirror again. Back to a more neutral expression.

Good.

He looked to Crane, who was still pacing, and asked, “What do I do?”

Crane stopped walking and looked at him, before sighing and walking around the desk. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a small flask, which he opened and took a pull from.

“… I can get you out of this,” said Crane.

Lucas blinked.

“It…” Crane drifted off, then sighed. “Okay, when I do this you’re gonna have to leave the gang. In fact, it’d probably be best if you just avoided the little gang of pissants altogether.”

Slowly, Lucas’ eyebrows drifted together into a frown.

Crane kept talking, not noticing. “I’ll talk to some people, maybe make sure someone else takes care of the hit. You said it was… some brat named Jake?”

“Yeah.”

“No last name?”

“Will didn’t seem to know it,” Lucas mumbled, mind going a mile per minute. “But—”

“That’s annoying, how are we supposed to find him in the first place?”

“He’s hanging out with two friends — an Asian kid and a Samoyed Chimera. And he’s wearing an orange hoodie. Listen, Crane—"

“Well, that’ll make him easy to find,” Crane snorted. “Hanging out with a Chimera in Santo Ataúd? How stupid can someone—”

“Crane!” Lucas shouted.

Crane immediately stopped and looked at him, surprised at him for raising his voice.

More hesitantly, Lucas continued, “I… I don’t want to leave the gang.”

Crane blinked at him, then his brow furrowed to match Lucas’.

“Kid,” he said. “This ain’t just going out and shooting bottles on a rooftop, alright? The fuckwit is asking you to take out a human being.”

“He also said I should take out his friends if he’s still with them,” Lucas muttered.

“Oh, well that makes everything fucking peachy, doesn’t it?!” Crane snapped.

Lucas flinched. Seeing this made Crane wince, and he took a deep breath.

Slowly, he put down the flask and walked around the desk.

A parenting guide he’d discreetly bought and kept hidden in his desk had advised against talking down to children literally and figuratively, so he knelt down in front of Lucas and tried to speak like he would to a peer.

“Kid— Lucas,” he said, grabbing one of his shoulders and trying to make eye contact. Luke’s eyes wandered to the side, but Crane let it go to keep talking, “To do this, to carry out a hit, that’s… it’s going to change you. Forever.”

“I know.”

“No, you think you know,” Crane immediately countered, before wincing and trying again, “And… I mean that it’s one thing to hear about it and another to actually do it. Remember how I told you that you were going to break your arm and it was going to hurt, and then you jumped out of that window and you broke your leg and it hurt way worse than anything you imagined?”

Slowly, Lucas nodded.

“When I tell you that killing someone is going to change you, you can’t possibly understand how it will.”

Lucas started scratching the backside of his hand again, until Crane gently stopped him. Instead, he started tapping his foot, which Crane thankfully allowed.

“I… I don’t…” Lucas’ lips pressed together tight and he breathed out through his nose.

“Take your time,” said Crane. “Think.”

Lucas did so.

On the one hand: murder.

He wasn’t stupid, or evil, or anything that could keep him from understanding that murder was bad. He went to church with Victoria, he’d known neighbor kids that died from getting caught in shootouts or catching an illness and had seen how their deaths affected their parents and friends.

He understood death the way one understood a frequent acquaintance. It was cessation, short and simple. Everything someone could be, everything someone was, everything someone had been, everything someone could have been. Every potential and actual version of someone. Every piece of the cosmos of quantic possibility that was any given human being.

All of that, erased. Vanished. Made inexistent.

If nothing else was a sin, murder was. It was the act of depriving the world of one of its most precious resources. It was the act of wiping out one of God’s children before their time.

It was evil. There would be no excuse made that said it wasn’t. Even when purging a complete monster from the Earth, the best it could be called was a necessary evil.

So, with all that in mind, why was he hesitating?

Because on the other hand: poverty.

If he didn’t kill Jake Whatever and possiblyhis two friends, he had to leave the gang.

If he left the gang, he stopped making money. If he stopped making money, he couldn’t help his mother anymore. He was relegated back to the role of being a leech upon her finances, making her pay for him and John.

Shit, John!

It wasn’t like they could just leave him alone with his parents, but how was Victoria going to feed two children?! He couldn’t just let her deal with that! He couldn’t abandon John!

And… and he’d gotten used to having money. He wasn’t rich, but he was a little better off than a lot of people around him.

Was it selfish? Father Esposito had made it clear in multiple sermons that one life was not worth anything more than another, no matter how many sins weighed down on one or another. There was only how much one individual valued one life or another, and that was a mortal fallacy.

But Lucas was mortal. So? Did he value the comfort of himself, his mother and John more than he valued the lives of three other people?

And, even if they didn’t matter that much… was he willing to do that to himself? To change, like Crane said?

Try as he might, he couldn’t get past the question.

So, he looked to Crane and asked, “Is… is it more important that my mom, John and I are comfortable and safe, or that I stay unchanged?”

Crane looked down, then back to him. Luke forced himself to meet his eyes for a moment.

“I think… that nobody can make that choice for you,” he said, like one would admit defeat. “I think that’s a limit everyone makes for themselves. But… this is what being a soldier is.”

Lucas closed his eyes and considered the question.

He felt like he was standing on a cliff.

He chose to take a step forward.

0 * + * 0

Crane’s personal car was a pitch-black classic muscle car from about thirty years ago, which meant shortly after the founding of Third York. He’d found it rusted and abandoned in a dump, and had painstakingly put it back together through careful and nearly obsessive care.

It was somewhat boxy, though its soft edges gave it kind of a sleek look. The panelling was discreetly armoured, the windows were bulletproof, it had two white lights at the front and every notable piece of metal on it was silver and polished, except for a line of red-painted metal across its side.

It had heat vents on top of the engine and at the sides, plus expandable landing pads at the bottom, where the wheels on pre-war vehicles were, which could be manipulated to better park the car, almost like a walker. The roof was also retractable, though Crane had switched it for a hardtop since making it a cloth roof had been, in his words, “king champion of stupid corporate ideas”.

The engine itself had been missing when Crane found it, but he’d put together a new one from loose parts taken from his business and the designs of someone that had been very well paid and extremely threatened to not cut corners. The first time he’d tried, Crane had cut off one of his pinkies and told him to try again.

The engineer learned not to underestimate Crane’s capacity to go over his math at that point.

He later learned to live with eight fingers when he underestimated Crane’s capacity to have someone trustworthy check his work.

After that, he seemed to give up. Or at the very least, the engine had yet to explode.

When Lucas met Crane two years back, the car had been almost finished. He had actually helped get the interior done, handing tools and holding stuff down so Crane could cut the grey felt for the interior and place the black leather seats[1].

It had been fun. He usually smiled when he thought back to those days of two autumns past, where he sipped at his first cup of coffee while Crane explained what he’d done.

That was probably the reason for why Lucas was thinking of that stupid crap instead of what he was about to do.

Unfortunately, Crane brought him back to the present when he said, “I think it’s around here. Be ready.”

Lucas drew in a sharp breath. He sank into his seat, reaching under his shirt to pull out the pistol. He held it in both hands, which he placed between his knees as he bent over. Then he took the safety off, put it down the back of his pants and started wringing his hands instead.

He felt vaguely nauseous, a pressure at the top of his stomach which did not vanish through swallowing. He breathed in through the nose, slow and deep. He swallowed again. The pressure failed to leave.

Crane had figured out the general location of Jake Whatever through making a few phone calls to other local businesses with which he had a good rapport and asking if anyone had seen a Samoyed Chimera hanging around with two other kids.

The question had gone around with all the speed a prejudiced community could manage. The immigrants that populated Santo Ataúd had been forced to travel through several kilometers of Dark Science, and as far as they were concerned, Chimeras were only an extension of those warped times.

They weren’t precisely run out of town by the locals, but you’d be catching a lot of odd looks for marrying or even befriending one. And a lot of things happened in the dark.

Everyone heard of someone stumbling onto a Chimera corpse. You never heard of someone seeing one being made.

Now he would know, apparently.

Lucas heard Crane’s grip tighten on the wheel.

There wasn’t a moment of deduction, he immediately realized what had happened.

He looked up, and saw white fur and an orange glow under an orange street light at the corner.

“Stay low,” Crane ordered.

Lucas sank deeper into the seat.

They passed next to the three young men. One Asian and wearing a leather jacket, one black with his hair in cornrows and wearing an orange hoodie and one Samoyed Chimera wearing loose linen clothes, with two gold earrings in his right triangular ear. He had a cane umbrella leaning beside him against the wall[2].

Lucas kind of expected them to turn around and yell at them for plotting to kill them, in a moment of bizarre, unrealistic paranoia. He expected them to immediately realize what was going on, what would happen to them. It was strange to realize they were completely unaware of what was going to happen to them. Would it be like that for him?

Was Lucas going to have any idea of what would happen before he died?

Crane drove past them without accelerating, slowing down or performing any change, even in his expression. The trio of victims-to-be ignored them as they went past, minus an appreciative look from the Asian kid at Crane’s car.

They went forward one block, turned the corner, then parked shortly after the turn. The landing pads unfolded from under the car and slowly skootched over to place the car between two other vehicles.

“Alright,” muttered Crane, looking over his shoulder as if to check if they would suddenly appear around the corner. When they didn’t, he looked to Lucas and said, “Alright, you just walk up behind them like you’re going to go past, you take out your gun as fast as you can like we practiced, and you shoot them dead. Aim for center mass unless they’re close enough you can make the shot, understand?”

Lucas nodded.

“… it’s not too late to back off, kid,” said Crane.

“I know,” said Lucas.

He opened the door.

“Walk around the block before returning. Cops probably won’t come ‘round ‘til morning, but better safe than sorry.”

“Okay.”

He walked out.

Lucas had heard John mention that he never knew how to walk or breathe normally when he tried to.

Lucas did know. He paid attention to things like that, it was a necessity when all the things that people with typical brains did so naturally only happened with considerable effort. He never really understood what it was that he did so oddly or not, so he just kept an eye on everything and copied the common denominators.

He put on his hood, put his hands in his pockets and walked around the corner with his head low.

Any outside observer would have simply seen a kid out late, nothing unusual in Santo Ataúd. Withdrawn, trying not to attract attention from older kids.

He crossed the street, slowly reaching the stop sign that Jake Whatever was leaning against.

As he slowed his walk, their attention remained in the conversation between themselves. Casually, not too fast but not too slow, he reached under the back of his hoodie and under his shirt, pulled out the pistol, aimed and…

(The briefest moment. The slightest hesitation. Something should have gone wrong by now.)

Lucas DeRose pulled the trigger.

The world failed to end. His mind failed to shatter. The Heavens failed to cast judgement.

There was no change from one moment to the next. The body simply failed to be a person and fell to the ground.

In less than a second, a loud pop heralded that a life had ended.

Where was the horror? Was it in the remains of Jake’s mind, spread across the corner? Blood splattered the stop sign, the corpse’s friends, and Lucas’ face.

For a moment, they stood there, staring at each other over the warm body.

A single second that seemed to stretch on in a bizarre kind of awkwardness. Lucas briefly thought of the time his mom had caught him sneaking a peek at the adult magazines on Joel El Kioskero’s stand, an awkward sort of ‘oops’ feeling.

The two started to run in two different directions. One turned the corner and the other ran straight towards the corner Crane had turned.

Lucas’ heartbeat did not rise as he walked back to the edge of the corner and took aim. The one that had turned the corner was running in a straight line, so it was a simple matter to aim the gun, making a straight line from the rear sight to the front sight aimed to the head.

He pulled the trigger. The body fell instantaneously, the forward momentum making it skid a little across pavement sidewalk before stopping.

He turned to look to the one running towards Crane’s car. It was the Chimera. He’d turned at the sound of the second gunshot, still running ahead, and had started running serpentine to be a harder target.

Lucas had practiced with moving targets, having one of his friends throw glass bottles to shoot them out of the air because Crane had said those were harder. The arcs were predictable, but so was one person running from side to side. It was a simple matter of aiming where the target would be.

More movement would be annoying and he wanted this to be over soon. He noted where the lower spine was, aimed straight ahead and waited for the Chimera to be in position before pulling the trigger.

Engineering was the subtle science of getting the most effect for the least effort. Seven point five pounds of force put a lead slug through a young man’s spine, permanently ending his ability to walk and sealing his fate.

The Samoyed Chimera fell, his momentum making him break his nose against the pavement as he fell to the side. To his credit, he kept trying to escape, desperately crawling away, cracking elongated nails on the floor.

Lucas walked forward. His breathing felt heavy, his heart thudded against his ribcage, he could hear blood rushing in his ears. Why wasn’t anything happening? Why was he still walking around? Why hadn’t he been stopped? Shouldn’t he have been stopped? Had the world gone insane?

He stopped next to the Chimera. The blood was leaking from his back and staining the floor, making a small trail along where the Chimera crawled. Lucas watched with some interest as enormous effort was made to gain small centimeters of false safety, even after he’d walked up to him.

He felt as if he should say something. What was he going to say? What could he say?

… oh.

Lucas cleared his throat, whispered “Sorry”, then aimed and pulled the trigger.

The effort ended. Blood leaked from the hole, staining Lucas’ pants and the white fur covering the Chimera’s body. How did he stay clean? He must go through shampoo by the kilo. Must have. He must have gone through shampoo by the kilo. He was dead. Why was Lucas thinking about shampoo when he was dead? Three people were dead. He’d killed three people and he wasn’t feeling anything. Was he broken? Had he been broken all along? He had just killed three people. Three people were dead. He’d stained his soul. There was a place in hell for him now. If his mom knew then she would never love him again. How could she know? She would, she always figured things out. How could he hide something like this? How did anyone hide this? Three people were dead. Three people would never breathe again. Three people would never talk, eat, piss, shit, blink, look, laugh, cry, hate, love, walk, run, swim, joke, comfort, move, live again.

He drew in a sharp breath.

He had to walk around the block.

He turned around and walked. He put the warm gun down the back of his pants after putting the safety on, then he walked off, casually.

His hood had stayed on the entire time. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. Lucas pulled the hood back, then put it back on when he realized he didn’t want anyone seeing his face.

He didn’t want anyone seeing his face ever again. Why wasn’t he feeling anything? There were thoughts, but they felt like he was hearing them, not feeling them. Everything was a thousand miles away.

He walked around the block.

0 * + * 0

Crane had parked the car at a gas stop. At some point, they’d wiped the gun clean and dropped it down a storm drain a dozen blocks away. Now they were at a gas stop. Stuff had happened in the middle. Lucas couldn’t remember it.

“Luke,” said Crane.

Lucas turned to look at him.

Crane handed him a couple of bills and tilted his head towards the gas pump, saying, “Can you fill ‘er up to half tank? I gotta buy some stuff.”

Lucas nodded and took the money.

Crane stepped out, and Lucas imitated him. He went around the car, tapping the landing gear with his foot on the way, then he grabbed the hose thingy that he didn’t know what it was called and put it in the tank.

It was auto-service, right? He looked around, no one was yelling at him for doing their job. He pressed the trigger on the muzzle and watched the small red dial on the back of it start ticking up.

He felt hollow. Less than sad or angry. Far from happy, thankfully, so he might not be a complete lost cause.

It was like he was seeing someone else fill the tank. Like a movie from the underground cinema they’d set up a year ago during winter. He hoped they did that again. Why was he thinking about the cinema? Because he didn’t want to think about what he’d done. So, was he upset about it? He didn’t feel upset.

Wait, how long had he been putting gas in? Crap, he was way past half a tank!

Lucas released the trigger and stared at the accusing number on it.

He messed it up. He had just killed three people and now he couldn’t even fill half a tank right.

Lucas felt a powerful stab of self-loathing fill his lungs and wrap around his heart. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to have a heartbeat. Why was he such a useless freaking monster? Why wasn’t he crying, even though he wanted to? Why was he broken? Why couldn’t he be normal? Why did he have to kill them?

He didn’t have to kill them, some awful part of his brain that never let him take a break noted. He chose to kill them.

That’s what made him a monster.

“Kid?”

Lucas looked up. His expression was flat and neutral.

Crane watched him with some concern, holding a small plastic bag. “You good?”

“… I messed up,” Lucas whispered. “I filled it to sixty-four percent instead of fifty. I’m sorry, I wasted your money, I—”

“Lucas, it’s fine.”

“But I—”

“You didn’t mess up anything.”

That was patently untrue. But he accepted the comment for the assurance it was, if nothing else.

“Pay it and get in,” said Crane, sitting on the driver’s seat.

Lucas did as much. The plastic bag rested between the two of them once he got in, holding a small plastic bottle of rum, a pack of Dromedary-brand smokes, and a cone of ice-cream that Lucas had liked the last time he tried it.

He ignored them to hand Crane the change the gas pump had spat.

“Keep it.”

He pocketed it.

The car turned on, started hovering and drove off. Lucas grabbed the ice-cream cone, Crane grabbed the box of smokes.

Streetlights passed by them, briefly filling the car with orange light.

When Crane managed to put a cigarette between his lips with one hand, Lucas turned on the car lighter and offered it for Crane to lean in and light it, as they’d done many times before. They’d gone on car rides before, it’d been fun. Music, talking, Crane teaching Lucas about driving and soldiering.

Would he remember this particular ride every time they did so from now on? Would this night stain everything else he ever did?

Why didn’t he feel different? He just felt… confused.

“… Crane?” he said, in between bites of ice-cream.

“Yeah?”

“It… it was easy.”

Crane looked at him out of the corner of his eye, but said nothing.

“I thought I would feel sick, or that it would be really hard, but I just… pointed and pulled. And that was it.”

“…”

“How… how is this going to change me?”

“It’s going to change you because now you know how easy it is.”

“Oh.”

“And it’s only going to get easier.”

“… oh.”

They stopped at a red light. The cone tasted like ash in Lucas’ mouth.

He threw it out of the window.

Crane said nothing.

Impulsively, Lucas grabbed the small plastic bottle of rum and opened it, only to hold it millimeters away from his lips. He looked to Crane nervously.

Crane looked back, but said nothing.

Lucas took a small sip. He barely managed not to cough it up, and instead he recapped the bottle and abandoned it between them.

He looked to the cigarettes next. He grabbed another one and turned on the car lighter once more.

“It’s a filthy habit,” Crane noted.

“You do it.”

“I’m not a role model.”

“… it’s a little late for that, sir.”

Crane sighed, but did not argue.

The car lighter emitted a small noise and Lucas pulled it out. The light changed to green. He brought it to the tip of the cigarette hanging off of his lips, then put the lighter back in its hole.

Slowly, he took a small drag of nicotine smoke, then pulled the cigarette out of his lips and inhaled some fresh air to go with it.

His lung warmed, then they burned. He barely managed not to cough, and instead slowly breathed real air to manage the feeling.

A hazy, weightless sensation spread through his bronchus.

It was grounding.

His mind had felt like hostile territory, and the feeling briefly slowed it down.

He took another, deeper drag. This one did make him cough, but he didn’t give up on the cancer stick.

The car ride stretched. Lucas’ mind started to slow down as his grey matter was blissfully suspended in a cloud of nicotine smoke. His lungs ached, but the pain was tolerable if it meant that for a second, there was something filling him.

Anything to get away from the hollow feeling he’d had after seeing the body drop.

Crane stopped the car in front of Gibson Height’s entrance, then looked at Lucas. He’d wiped the blood off the boy’s face, but his shirt and pants were another matter.

“Um… maybe don’t go to your mother looking like that.”

Lucas looked down at himself, then nodded. “I’ll stay with John.”

Crane nodded. “Well, um…”

They stayed there in silence for a moment.

After half a minute, Crane killed the engine and parked the car.

They stayed there in silence, now missing the purring of the engine.

“I… nobody had some magic piece of advice for me, after my first hit,” said Crane. “Nothing I could or want to repeat to you.”

Lucas watched him silently.

“I guess the only thing I’ve got to say is that… what you found today, how easy it is? That doesn’t mean it’s always the right answer. It’s just the quick one. Being a soldier, you’re gonna get told to do this and that, and that’s fine, but… some people don’t deserve it.”

“Nobody deserves it,” Lucas noted.

“A lot of people do, little man,” Crane promised. “For all we know, those three chuckle-fucks today were some of them.”

Lucas blinked.

“What I mean to say is that… being a soldier, you’re ready to die. It’s all in the game, soldiers killing soldiers. It’s fair, you understand? But people outside of it…

“Before the war, when a Ranger was a soldier — a real soldier — and they put down a civilian, it was a war crime. It was an act so foul that even in the middle of the horror of war, they still called it a crime and a sin. You see where I’m going with this?”

Lucas slowly nodded.

Crane continued, “People in the game are playing by the rules of the game. But putting someone else under those rules is unforgivable. You’re a man now, and you’re gonna get treated like one.

“So, if you do it, I’ll put a bullet in your head myself.”

The oath hung in the air between them for a moment.

“… promise?”

“Promise.”

Lucas hugged Crane, then quickly left the car.

His hands shook the entire way to John’s place. The box of cigarettes was held in a tight grip.

[1] It should be noted that while Crane’s choices in coloring showed a basic understanding of color coordination, at least in the sense that he understood how black goes with black, it did not show much capacity for foresight. Being all black, the car could not be left outside on a sunny day, or it would have more in common with an oven than any kind of vehicle.

[2] Most Chimeras in temperate zones carried around umbrellas or parasols. Either to avoid the smell of wet fur from sudden rain, or to avoid heat stroke when covered in six centimeters of fur during summer.