Page 9 of Our Violent Ends
“You’re not curious?” she asked. “How didDimitriput a spy into the inner circle of the Scarlet Gang—”
“Maybe he is simply more intelligent than I am,” Roma interrupted dryly. “He knows how to sight when someone is a liar and can establishhislie first—”
Alisa stomped her feet. “Don’t mope!” she said.
“I am not moping!”
“Youmope,” Alisa insisted. She looked over her shoulder again, hearing a rustling on the third floor and waiting for whoever it was to retreat to their room before speaking again. “Another thing I thought you would want to know: Papa received a threat. Someone claims to have the ability to resurrect the monster.”
Roma lifted a single dark brow. This time, when he eased his jacket out of Alisa’s grip, she let go, seeing no point in accosting her brother any longer.
“The monster is dead, Alisa,” he said. “I’ll see you later, yes?”
Roma walked away, his saunter casual. He could have fooled anyone, in that tailored suit and cold stare. But Alisa saw his fingers tremble, saw the muscle in his jaw twitch when he bit down too hard to keep his expression steady.
He was still her brother. He wasn’t gone entirely.
Three
One cabaret in White Flower territory is particularly loud tonight.
Business at the Podsolnukh is usually booming anyway, tables full and raucous for the antics that the showgirls pull onstage, overspilling with people and alcohol bottles and every combination of the two. The only place that may compete with its noise and vigor is the fight club next door, the one tucked underneath an otherwise unassuming bar, unknown to the city if not for the constant stream of visitors.
When the door to the Podsolnukh opens at the exact stroke of midnight, a gust of the winter wind blows in, but not a soul in the establishment feels it. Out there, when the day breaks, they are garbage collectors and beggars and gangsters, barely scraping by. In here, crammed shoulder to shoulder at every table, they are invincible so long as the jazz continues playing, so long as the lights don’t drop, so long as the night lives on and on and on.
The visitor who entered at midnight sits down. He watches White Flowers throw coins into the air, frivolous with their unending excess, grabbing showgirls adorned in white like they are brides, not runaways from Moscow with smiles as cracked as their hands.
Everyone is here for the exact same reason. Some chance it with drunken stupor, pouring gasoline into their veins so that maybe, just maybe, something will ignight in an otherwise empty chest. Some are more roundabout, collecting and collecting and robbing drunk boys dry when they look the other way, a nimble finger dipping into a pocket and hooking out three crisp notes with her sharply filed nails. Maybe one day she can quit this place. Open her own little shop, put her name up on a sign.
Everyone in this room... they all want to feel something, make something, be something—be real, real, real and not just another cog driving the money and mania of this city.
Everyone except the visitor.
He takes a sip of his drink. Huángjiu—nothing too strong. He eyes the showgirl coming toward him. Young—fourteen, maybe fifteen. He smooths his tie down, loosening the knot.
Then he knocks his drink over, the smell of alcohol soaking his clothes, and hechanges.
The showgirl halts in her steps, her hands flying to her mouth. She is already drowsy from the shots she has taken with the patrons, and she almost thinks that she is imagining it, that she is mistaken under the low, flashing lights. But his shirt rips and then his spine grows tall, and it is no longer a man seated at the center of the Podsolnukh but a monster, hunched over and ghastly, green-blue muscles flexing at the ready.
“RUN!”the girl screams.“Chudovishche!”
It’s too late.
The insects come: they burst from the holes studded into the monster’s back, thousands of tiny, frantic critters, crawling onto the tables, the floors, over and under one another until they find sweaty skin and screaming mouths, until they burrow into eyes and noses and hair, sinking in deep and finding a nerve. The cabaret becomes enswathed in black, an ever-moving blanket of infection, and in seconds, the first succumbs, hands flying to throats and clutching, clutching, clutching, trying to squeeze the insects out.
Nails break into skin, skin splits for muscle, muscle parts for bone.
As soon as blood spurts from one victim, inner flesh exposed and veins pumping red, the next is already tearing before they have a moment to feel the visceral disgust that comes with being soaked in hot, sticky gore.
It takes one minute. One minute before the cabaret goes still: a battlefield of bodies on the floor, legs overlapped with awry arms. The dancing has stopped, the musicians are unmoving, but a tinny tune continues playing from a gramophone in the corner, pushing on even when not a body stirs any longer, all empty-eyed, staring blankly at the ceiling.
The monster straightens slowly. It breathes in—a ragged, heaving suck of air. Blood soaks the floorboards, dripping through the cracks to line the ground beneath the building.
Only this time the madness does not spread. This time the insects crawl out from their burrowed skin, vacating the corpses, and rather than skittering outward in search for another host, each of them returns to the monster, recedes back whence it came.
No longer is the madness a contagious matter. The madness strikes at will now, at the whims and mercy of whoever controls the monster. And as the monster takes in the last of its insects, it rolls its head in a slow circle, shrinking until he is merely a man again, undirtied by the scene around him, unsullied by his conscience.
Five minutes after midnight, the man walks out of the Podsolnukh.
