ACHE FOR A HEART

ACHE FOR A HEART
by Joe Coates

“There’s not much of a story to this,” the Reaper sitting in the driver’s seat of the van said, “but there might be a lesson in it. There was an industrial investigation that I worked where a guy got his arm caught in a lathe—a steel lathe.”

“Lathe?”

“Well, that’s what they claimed.”

“Right.”

“And we got there, and what it had done was it’d ripped the meat from the inside of his elbow to his wrist. Had torn that whole chunk of meat out. Right off the bone. Like a massive steak. And that was just sitting on the ground. Blood all through the filings and shavings and everything. And that was a bugger of a job because there was also oil in it. Blood and oil. But I ended up sorting that out, only… Well, I’d quoted them five-fifty, and they wouldn’t give me any more than two-hundred creds for the job.”

“Really?” the young woman occupying the passenger asked, incredulity slightly exaggerated, as any novitiates should be.

“Yeah.”

“There is a lesson there,” the young woman said.

“Yeah?” the driver asked.

“Oldest one there is.”

“Go on.”

“People,” the woman said, “are, invariably, cunts.”

The two Reapers—pay-per-hour detectives that the Last City grudgingly hired to solve its more heinous, embarrassing, or public murders—sat in silence for a moment. Both of them, the rangy veteran and the short, prickly greenhorn, stared out of the front of van, as the hydrogen fuel-cell engine idled almost silently, gazing at the grisly scene illuminated by the headlights.

“Kind of wish we hadn’t stopped off for ice-creams before we took the call,” the tall man said. “Seems a little fucked up now.”

“I needed a sugar hit,” the young woman replied defensively.

The driver looked at himself in the rear-view mirror, noting the bags forming under the bags under his eyes. He looked like he’d been punched. He felt like he’d been punched. His body ached for sleep even as his mind reviled the notion for the dreams it would bring. He fingered the little packet of Dwarven flake in his pocket. Straight from the subterranean labs in the Sawatch Range. Dwarves had been great miners, but they were even better chemists. He switched his tired, cynical gaze to his new partner.

Her dark hair, cut pragmatically short, spilled across her ice-chip eyes. She pushed it back out of the way, tucking a few of the longer strands behind her ears. On the back of her right hand a crooked line with an arrowhead at one end was tattooed. On the left, a simple arch with teeth on the underside of the curve had been inked.

One of the Nix, he noted.

“Still,” the man said, rubbing at his stubble-covered head with his spare hand. “Doesn’t strike the professional note, does it?”

It was that long, secret hour that preceded the dawn. The hour for black deeds and dark secrets, when the sun took a deep breath before it dragged its arse over the horizon and seared itself like a brand into the sullen underbellies of the clouds that hung over the high buildings. Late, or, technically, early, as it was in the Last City of Denver, the pavements were still crowded.

In the passenger seat of the stationary van, the young woman stared out of the window and into the door mirror, her face cut into opaque lines and hard, black plains by the neon lights reflected in the glass. Outside the acrylic-coated ballistic glass, the nocturnal denizens swirled and fluxed; amoeba running riot over the mother of all Petri dishes. She watched the streams of people passing the mouth of the cordoned off alleyway the van was parked in. She hated the crowds. Hated what they embodied, hated the secrets they hid. But she recognised she needed them too. There was nothing like a crowd to grate, like a knife along a whet stone, the frustration and rage at how your life had panned out.

For years, the politicians that had come and gone—often to gaol—had stuck to the tired line that the supernatural population of the city were really ‘one united community’, pulling together. Had slipped into that theme again and again like a favourite pair of worn, comfortable boots. Even after all the shit they had suffered; the dust storms, the warlock uprising, the caustic rains three months earlier, and, most recently, the plague of scarab beetles.

One united community.

A bunch of good old boys and girls putting the civil in civilisation.

Civilisation.

The woman in the back of the van had often heard tell of that unicorn, but she was yet to see it.

“What a mess,” the man called Noose, on account of the thick scar that ran around his throat, said. “I’ve seen some messes over the years, but this…”

“It’s up there, is it?” the young woman asked.

Noose considered that.

“Yeah, Mads,” he said eventually, “I’d say this is right up there at the top.”

They lapsed into silence again. Then, Noose cursed.

“What?” Mads asked.

Noose was rubbing at the front of his shock suit, the body armour that Reapers wore under their trademark long coats. It was constructed from five thin sheets of Kevlar, the middle layer of which was soaked with a special shear thickening fluid that hardened in the blink of an eye when it underwent an impact or sudden stress. Essentially, a shock suit moved like cloth, until it had to stop a slug or a shank or a spell, when it transformed into tungsten.

“Damn ice-cream is melting,” he said.

“Everyone knows you can’t muck around eating a Hero,” Mads said reproachfully, as she popped the last of her cone into her mouth. “There’s no savouring them. That’s why they’re so moreish.”

Noose touched the door-release panel. “Time we took a closer look anyway,” he said, as the door hissed upwards. He wrinkled his nose. “Fuck, I can smell the witchery from here.”

As the two Reapers exited the vehicle their boots crunched on the carpet of dead scarab beetles. Even to Mads’ inexperienced ears, it sounded like they were walking on bones. They gazed upwards.

Across the side of the warehouse—spread across it—were the remnants of the beautiful, taught body of a goldskin; a she-elf. She’d been encased in some kind of caustic goo. It had solidified around her, gluing her on display, whilst simultaneously dissolving her. In places, organs glistened wetly, trembling. Chunks of flesh were missing from her thighs. The white points of her ribcage and collar bones gleamed in the second-hand light entering the alley from the street.

“What,” Mads said, looking up at the warehouse wall and the quivering, spasming, moaning she-elf spread across it, “could do something like that?”

“Whatever it is,” Noose said, “it was hungry.”

+++

The Song rose from the depths of his confused and pain-racked mind the moment he laid his eyes on the goldskin. It couldn’t have come at a less opportune time really, but then the universe was a callous thing with a wicked sense of humour and he’d long since decided to hate it rather than try to understand it.

For a moment, the hunger writhed in him, caught in the white-hot space between the hammer and the powder, between who he’d been and what he was. The gentle strumming pull of The Song that only he could hear, that he both hated and loved, that heralded the eon-old dance between predator and prey, welled in his chest and groin.

The fact that she was a goldskin, and the dance forbidden by the oldest Laws, left him suddenly feeling more like the belly of the beast than the knife that was to plunge into it.

He remembered, back when he’d first started working the conjurations into himself, before the addiction had taken hold, when The Song had been like a kind of prayer. Like a hallowed obsecration that he’d been able to summon in the atmosphere. It had brought him power. Freedom. And then a terrible, insatiable hunger. Remembering that, as he felt the acid glands in his throat swelling in anticipation, mirrored by the heat in his crotch, made him ache for his heart like some tin man.

Hunched in his oversized hoody, he was invisible in the crowd. He’d always been invisible, even when he was on his own. That had been the problem.

He picked up his pace and shoved the she-elf into the gaping sable mouth of the alleyway before she even knew he was there.  She struggled and lashed out with a dagger of glass, but his once feeble muscles were teak-hard now. Engorged with the bloodlust coursing through his changed, deformed flesh.

As the dagger broke against his malformed bicep, he pondered on what a marvellous self-fulfilling prophecy the world had become. Theirs was a society that gave its disillusioned people all kinds of reasons to be discontented, but at least it then manufactured, advertised and handed them the perfect drugs to take that discontent away.

That was what had set him apart. He had crafted his own antidote to the horror that was his insignificant life. He had found a way to matter.

The goldskin lashed out with a spinning kick, but he was already out of the way before her boot passed through the space his face had been occupying only a second before. He hit her then, a soft blow that left red blood smeared across her face in the parody of a smile.

The Song thrilled in him as he felt the bones of her sternum crack under his next blow. He sent her flying down the alley. A spray of dead beetles went up as she skidded across the concrete on her back.

The Song built to a crescendo inside of him as his mutated jaw extended, revealing a tongueless mouth.

The she-elf screamed then, as the acid boiled from his throat and blasted her off her feet, pinning her to the wall of the warehouse. Rendering. Burning.

Later, as he began to feed on her bubbling, still-living flesh, Leto tried humming The Song, but it had already left him.

+++

Looking over her shoulder down the length of the alley, Mads could see a fifteen-foot tall mechanised aug now parked in its mouth, manned by one of the private security personnel. It was a mean-looking piece of gear that’d been designed for civil construction projects, but had quickly found a more lucrative home in the private security sector. Nothing dispersed a riot like a half dozen badge-wearing thugs piloting augs, each of which was capable of tearing a car in half.

“You’ve got a look of fiery intensity in your eye, Noose,” she said, trying to keep things light in spite of what was in front of them.

“A urinary tract infection has fiery intensity,” he replied sourly.

Mads pulled a face.

“The elf ain’t dead,” Noose said, distaste etching his words. “Ain’t got long, though.”

“No,” Mads said. “No, I’d say as far as this goldskin’s fate goes, the writhing is on the wall.”

Noose looked across the hood of the van at his new partner. Then he tossed his ice-cream cone aside and shook his head.

“Have some decency, why don’t you?” the lanky man said, wrapping his long coat around his skinny frame, concealing his shock suit and the cryopistol he had hanging on his belt.

“Decency?” Mads scoffed. “In this city? And how do you go about judging that? With what instrument do you measure it?”

“We’re the fucking instruments,” Noose snapped.

He looked up at the jellied mass that had once been an elf, spread across the wall of the warehouse like discarded pâté. It had stopped twitching and rasping. Finally.

“She’s dead,” he sighed.

“Immortal my arse,” Mads sniffed.

“That’s what scares the shit out of me,” Noose said. “Now, let’s go to work.”

Fiction © Copyright Joe Coates
Base Image by ntnvnc from Pixabay

Joe Coates is a professional ghostwriter living in New Zealand with his better half and two sons. He writes mainly fantasy and sci-fi for business, but grimdark and horror for pleasure. When he’s not not writing novels for other people to put their names on, he’s traveling, snowboarding, hanging out with his family, and eating more triple-chocolate ice-cream than is probably prudent—if he’s very lucky, all at the same time.