Move Under Ground, Nick Mamatas [reading rainbow books .txt] 📗

Maybe exterminating an insectoid shoggoth with bug spray wasn’t absurd. Perhaps the rational was finally beginning to reassert itself. “Or maybe,” Bill said, “it’s a trap. To make sure we traveled to New York. All your other cross-country trips just petered out, after all.” It was absurd to travel to New York now—every face belonged to Neal. He melted in and out of the expressions of the people we hurried past, his visage slipping around the back of heads, nestling in hairdos and flowing over sweating red necks to stare at us. Sometimes he was gloating, his eyes burning with a nameless evil, other times his face was plaintive and biblical, like some prophet watching his ancient city reduced to rubble by his angry loverboy God.

“Sympathetic magic. Sometimes it is Neal, sometimes his doppelgangers, animated by horrible marionette magics.” Bill was on his back, in the train yard, speaking through raspy gasps. What was really absurd was our attempt to escape Chicago. It’s just twelve hours on a flatout night run to Manhattan, but we couldn’t lift a car to save our lives. Maybe it was Neal at work, his great criminal mind finally turned to the service of keeping cars where they were parked, rather than liberating them. Hangers, slide hammers, nothing worked. Some of the sweetest rides were under guard, cultists snoozing within, crumpled in the front seats, fogging up the windows. We didn’t have any money for gas anyway. It was absurd, almost as absurd as trying to hop the rail with William S. Burroughs in tow.

Here is how it worked, or didn’t work. A train growled up to life, and slowly squealed down the tracks. We waited behind some crates, looking for an inviting train car, and then ran for it. I matched speeds, flung myself into the gap, and scrambled onto the car. Then I turned back to see wheezing Bill, arms flailing, trying to keep up. “Jack, Jack!” he called out to me. “Can’t do it!” I jumped off the train and tumbled back onto the gravel of the yard. Bill finally made it up to me, swayed dramatically, and then crumpled to his knees. We did that ‘til about two o’clock in the morning, for train after train.

The leaving trains were getting scarcer so I took to grabbing Bill by the collar and the back of his pants and running him up to the train. The idea was to throw him aboard and then jump after him, but we either got our legs tangled and the two of us just collapsed into a dusty heap while the train pulled away triumphantly, or otherwise I mistimed the throw and ended up tossing him against the side of the train car rather than through the gaping open door of one. Then he’d bounce off, seeing stars, and fall into me, arms and legs akimbo. So that’s why Bill was on his back, explaining the metaphysics of Neal’s kidnapping and Cthulhoid physiology to me. The concussions of enlightenment, there’s nothing like them in the world anymore. I threw Bill up against another hulking turtle of a train car, but by dawn he wasn’t getting any smarter. “Good Neal, or evil Neal? Which one are you even trying to save … or to destroy? There’s a battle in each of us, you know. Reason versus madness, base matter and dreamy illusion, perception and memory. He’s transcended the real now, you know. We can’t go to New York to save Neal, for he is all around us, sitting naked on our forks with every bite of meat—” Eventually he nodded off.

The flats heated up quickly under the sun. We hid under a tarp as the few night shift guards sauntered out and were replaced by an army of foremen, Pinkertoon goons (real goons with black pebble eyes and arms as long as apes’) and freight haulers. I briefly considered sauntering on up to a gang of workers and blending in, then hopping a freight, but I was sporting a few too many bruises for that, and Bill had even more, plus his wrinkled pimp suit. “Just act natural,” I could tell him, and I knew he’d blow our cover in a minute with some obnoxious rant or mouthful of vomit landing on the wrong goose-stepping boot.

It was Neal who found us. Some thug of a man, more fireplug than primate, shuffled up to our hiding place backwards, and on the back of his head was Neal’s face. The worker’s hand ducked behind his back and wiggled its fingers at us, like a television ma�tre d’ looking for a few bucks in exchange for a decent table. I made to move but Bill put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re still a mark for that character, you know? You don’t know whether this mugwump might lead you—right to the slaughterhouse as likely as anything. Are you ready to be Vienna Beef, eh? The mark inside is the mark you can’t beat, Jack. Neal knows it, now the damn mugwumps know it.”

“We can stay here ‘til we get caught by someone who doesn’t even pretend to be friendly,” I reasoned. Then I laughed out loud. It was horrible. Bill and I were every movie serial hero and sidekick. “It’s a trap!” some underfed faggot actor cries (his voice cracks professionally, so the rubes who paid their two bits for a picture show will think he’s a kid), but the square-jawed protagonist can only squint into the distance and declare, “That’s a chance I have to take.” Cut to titles, then on to the newsreel. Denver is now the West Coast, millions lost beyond the sea, their souls imprisoned on old R’lyeh. Sounds like something Neal would crib for his book. So I went and Bill followed, muttering and wiping dust from his knees. Was this the feature, or just the cartoon?

We were led to a distant corner of the yard, Neal’s plaintive face stamped into the hair of the shuffling fellow we followed. He brought us to a funnel flow tank car, the sort of thing you might use to transport kaolin clay slurry, molten sulfur or the horrid ichor of the earth’s very bowels, and in his weird backwards way gestured for us to climb and see if we couldn’t squeeze in through the top valves.

Even if the car were empty now (Bill rapped on the side of it experimentally, but didn’t come to any conclusions) it could be filled at any stop. We’d be alone in the dark, huddled together, probably bruised and battered from rolling around all over the slanted belly of the tank, when corn syrup or even hot asphalt pours in. We might not even be awake for it. But Neal, oh Neal … I looked at what I could see of his eyes, which weren’t much as they were just molded hair on the back of some mugwump head. Would he really betray me so utterly? Wanderlust is what led him to dump me down in Mexico years ago; he ran off, following women and his muse while I broiled alive with a fever on a stained cot. And from that expression, even obscured by the media of skull and hair, I knew this was the real deal Neal, not just some haunted chimerstry. But, he did drive off and leave Nelson to die, when was it—a week ago? two?

I left him to die too, didn’t I? I hadn’t even thought about him since then, and now he’s not just dead, he’s deep under the burgeoning Pacific in Cthulhu’s dark embrace. Trust this Neal doppelganger; damn, I was barely sure I was human myself at that moment. Luckily, in the next moment, a growling pickup truck pulled up and idled. Bill rushed up to it and grabbed the driver by the ears and started yanking, while I grabbed the body. Neal’s face shimmered and shifted into a horrible tusked boar, but I kept low as a barbed prehensile tongue spilled forth from the boar head. The human slab of man