Nails in the Sky Read online

  “Hey Chuck.” He was midway through the deepest breath of his life already, as the next moment came together in a flash. All the pain. All the violence he’d brought about. There had to be a way out. He clenched his jaw, then hurled the man, face-first through the shattered railing. He followed immediately after, chasing Daedalus over the edge, into the street below—through the air. And the air, as he grabbed Daedalus’s legs, became instantly light around them.“Come fly with me.”

  Alex rocketed them into the building wall as they descended, awkwardly, flying with more force than he knew he had. His mouth fell open and he laughed out loud at this new control. He was scaring the shit out of himself, not because he knew how to fly, but because he knew, in that moment, he realised he had always known.

  Cracking out a shower of plaster and brick, the two figures fell, wrapped up in each other, a few metres onto the bonnet of a parked Mazda. They bounced off with a metallic clang that rang briefly up and down the street. The both touched down covered in dust and groaning on opposite sides of the vehicle.

  –

  Inside, Crink, Clark and the other members of Stone Cold Briefcase leapt frantically into a one-sided face-off against Koosh—a face-off that was not in their favour. Koosh was in his element here.

  Sidestepping every blow that came his way like someone watching a car chase they’ve seen hundreds of times before, Koosh was casual and a man who knew and liked his own odds. He was a ghost, and more fighter than all of them together. As Ronnie lay semi-conscious on the floor, Koosh grabbed his sister, pulling her close as he blocked an attack from Teddy.

  “Best be careful, son,” he snarled, jumping heavily onto the boy’s foot from two metres away. He sailed almost playfully through the air, April a ragdoll of skinny legs and hair under his arm. He was impossibly strong. He thrust his face and mouth against the singer’s cheek faster than he could process. In one fluid, ripping motion, he tore it away, a small, horrifying chunk of gushing, unidentifiable flesh between his teeth. He spat it at the floor mockingly as Teddy shrank to his knees, screaming into his palms, his face hidden, blood leaking everywhere. “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”

  Koosh heaved the screaming singer up from behind and dragged his squirming, kicking, howling form quickly off to the store room down the hall, with little April in an iron grip in his other hand. In the space of a half-dozen metres to the bathroom, he became more than the man who had help terrorise Crink out by the pool the night before. He became a nightmare on two legs. His strength, simple and brutal and locked, was a force of nature beyond muscles contracting and squeezing.

  He shut them in there, then returned seconds later with Ronnie slung over his shoulder. He locked the door again, sliding the bolt into place.

  He stepped backwards, and was greeted by Clark screaming and the legs of a wooden chair exploding into splinters over his back. He flailed sideways, narrowly deflecting Crink’s incoming foot. He bounced off the wall of the narrow passage and landed a stiff blow to the corner of Clark’s jaw. The fluorescent passage lights swung aggressively. Crink ran past, through the shadows, and fumbled with the chair at the locked door a second too long before Koosh kicked his feet out from under him. His head bounced off the wall, a new and disarming ringing in his ears, as his attacker spun to deliver a flurry of punches into Clark’s stomach.

  As Koosh swung another harsh kick into his ribs, the boy heaved and doubled over. Another brat down—he had this in the bag.

  –

  Outside, Alex and Chuck got to their feet next to the car, dazed and bleeding. “Smooth move back there, gorgeous.” Alex’s attacker coughed, mocking him. “That little tumble mostly just knocked my shoulder back into joint.”

  Alex launched over the car bonnet, headlong at Chuck, who swept him calmly under his arm and rolled out into the street.

  Alex bellowed, “We going to stand here and bullshit all night, convict?”

  They paused there, briefly, aglow in the ephemeral mist of their urban battleground. Alex took off again, a jump that was half muscle, half flight—a bullet of arms, hair, and the pain and frustration of inevitability.

  He took a running swipe at Daedalus, connecting this time, and sent him wheeling backwards. Chuck responded with a powerful right boot into Alex’s side. He grabbed his jacket tails and threw him into the door of a parked minivan. He crouched down low, an animal with his mouth open, there on the sidewalk, and screamed mass murder at the asphalt.

  Alex couldn’t let on, but he had never been so terrified in his entire life.

  “Come on, hero! Infinite fucking power, and the best you can do is kick and bite like some little bitch on her way back from the stylist? Flight? Who the fuck—”

  Alex pushed off the van behind him and took off, an electric shape too quick for sight. He flew on pure instinct, faster than he could think, feeling an understanding of what he was doing like he’d been doing it since birth. Like walking, he flew, and it was a part of him. The air around them cracked, a heartrending bang that issued a transformation from air and static into lightning.

  He was a desperate lightning bolt of energy, a blur of arms and legs, aimed square at the chest of his aggressor.

  –

  Koosh left Clark at the foot of the stage, panting as he smiled down at the boy. “There ain’t no room here for half measures, son. Ah, but you’ll learn that in time. I guarantee ya, you’ll all learn.”

  Koosh only felt the crackle of the house stun gun, which Chandré kept behind the bar, against his neck for a second, before he collapsed to the floor.

  –

  “Yeah yeah, dreadylocks. We get it,” Crink said, limping with the black plastic square still clicking in his hand toward where Clark lay, groaning.

  He lifted his arm over his shoulder, hoisting the boy up by his belt. “Come on, Skittle head. Alex’ll kill me if he sees you like this.”

  “Kid’s going to have to take a number.” They turned to find Koosh standing there—fresh and breathing normally, bathed in the spotlights. “Nice move, sidekick,” he said, clapping slowly, and motioning towards the dark, far corner of the room. “Really, bravo to you. But, see, you’ve only got half your payload with you.”

  Crink breathed the name, “Sheila,” through gritted teeth.

  “She’s back there, man, waiting. Only, see, now I know exactly what toys you’re playing with. And, as long as we’re both bringing toys to the party...” Koosh extracted his blade from the sheath at his side.

  Crink adjusted his shoulder under Clark’s arm and saw Koosh narrow his eyes. “With all that weight on your shoulder, you think you’re fast enough, dead man?”

  –

  Outside in the street, Chuck was introducing steel-toed boots to the side of Alex’s skull.

  “Get up and fight me, hero.”

  Alex choked out the words, “You know, I’m trying to, but you keep interrupting me,” as he rolled into a puddle. This was not going as well as he’d hoped.

  Chuck grabbed him by the neck and rammed his knee into his face. He pulled him up again, there in the streetlight, and brought their faces together. “Keep joking, birdie. It makes it better for me.” He threw him up by his neck, sending him flying through the air into a stop sign. The metal buckled between his shoulder blades, and the post bent backwards under him. Fire rushed through his veins, and he cried out, though what pain he was feeling now was unclear. It had all sort of become the same thing.

  “Fight me!” Daedalus screamed, as the Port Elizabeth wind howled around them. The air became icy and a steady whistle of offshore wind started up all around them.

  Alex shook off the impact, the warped sign and post holding him up now as he focused his eyesight and his rage on the man in the street. “Gladly.” He slingshot off from his improvised steel holster, jetting in a straight line through the air to connect with Daedalus’s ribcage, driving him dozens of feet into the air with his shoulder. They became a wrestling mass of energy, flash
ing on and off through the sky, now a solid twenty-five feet up—eight metres above a street that didn’t exist, on a planet long dead.

  “That’s it, boy! Give it everything you’ve got!”

  “Eat a dick, convict.”

  Daedalus freed an arm from Alex’s grip, driving a vicious elbow into the side of his neck. They separated in mid air.

  The world went quiet around them as Daedalus fell, flailing slowly and plummeting back through the air groundwards. Alex hovered opposite the window of the apartment, for a second, then two, then three. He watched his attacker tumble and fall. He watched as the man trying to kill him hurtled, for what seemed like years, towards his conclusion—solution, in slow motion, dropping like a dive stick in a swimming pool. He could end this all now by just doing what he wanted to do and staying right here.

  Daedalus had spun around in time to see the ground rushing up towards him, but was rammed away, seconds from his death, snatched out of the air. Alex didn’t so much lift him away from the ground as grab him by the back of his belt, and fling him across the street into the rear wheel of a parked forklift.

  He touched down lightly in the middle of the street, catching his breath as the man across from him heaved silently next to the pavement. “Stay down, Daedalus!”

  No response, except for the heavy exhaling of air from both men’s lungs. Daeadlus started to get to his feet, turned away so Alex couldn’t see his face. He was shaking—Alex looked at his own hands and found that he was shaking too,

  “I’m not playing, Daedalus.” He focused back on the psychopath, now taking laboured steps towards him, clutching his own arm as a thin rivulet of spittle dangled from his chin. “Stay the fuck down and leave my family alone.”

  Chuck Daedalus was smiling, his laboured breathing becoming heavier, the noise transforming in the iced night air into steady, mocking laughter. He took another step, his feet seemingly too heavy for him to pick up.

  “Daedalus!”

  “Heroes,” he said, taking one more step out into the street between them and unsheathing his knife. “Always a last-second solution you can set your watch by. But tell me, Alex—”

  Chuck took another step. Alex crouched into a fight stance, then instantly winced from a sharp pain in his side. He didn’t understand. He reached over to his side and felt it again—a pain, accompanied by a sticky wetness. He brought a bloodstained hand up from his stomach and realised what had happened.

  Chuck had stabbed him. He hadn’t even felt it happen, but now a knife wound, five centimetres across pumped a dark stream out from under his shirt.

  “What the hell you think you know about a fight anyway?”

  Daedalus smiled then took a quick step out into the street towards Alex, where he was instantly struck down by the front grille on a ’94 Exxa rental car. The car slammed on brakes and stopped rapidly. He did not stop as rapidly, his head bouncing off the side of the vehicle. His unconscious body rolled off into the shop wall behind him. The driver of the car took a second to look over the dashboard at the man she had just ploughed into, then opened the door and got out. In the streetlight, Alex recognised Julie Franko instantly, even from a distance, and with blood in his eyes.

  She ran immediately over to him. “Oh my god, you’re bleeding! Oh my god, you’re bleeding!”

  “I think you’re exaggerating.”

  “But...but you’re bleeding, Alex!”

  “What’re you doing here, Jules? It’s not safe.”

  “Obviously. Crink called me from the road, though. Outside Nanaga. He told me you were in trouble. Some whacko going after your family. So I skipped my flight.”

  “You came for me.”

  “Again. Obviously.” She smiled.

  –

  Back inside the club, Koosh knocked the Taser from Crink’s grip, following up with a knee to his solar plexus. His knife flashed terribly as he moved, coming close enough that Crink didn’t know if he was lucky he wasn’t already stabbed, or if this insane person was just messing with him before he really hurt him. Crink crumpled to the linoleum, Clark falling down next to him.

  “You know, I’m two hundred years old,” Koosh said, picking up the Taser and juggling it from hand to hand.

  “I know, I’ve been meaning to send a card.”

  He landed a boot to Crink’s ribs, smiling. “We’re imprinted onto a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Many of the souls I’ve met over the course of my life, they seemed to think of it as some kind of curse. Like we were damned to live, the hostages of a cautionary tale. But it’s not like that, boytjie. It’s a testament, to people like us, to the light we shone. We’ve carved permanent notches in space and time, you and I. And Sheila.”

  “What?”

  “Oh Little Charlie Cranston, you just don’t get it, do you?” Koosh got down on his haunches next to Crink’s face and slapped him. “You see, like your little Ozzie bitch, I have a gift too.” He pressed the knife tip, deadly and cold, lightly against Crink’s eyelid and whispered: “I can see you. I know where you’ve been, Crinky.”

  “It was nineteen ninety-eight, and you’d just got back from shopping with your family. Mom was inside putting the groceries away. It was hot inside that car when you decided to put your head out the window.”

  Crink turned away from Koosh’s gaze, spat out a glob of something he didn’t recognise and was sure should be inside of him, not all over the floor. He was shaking. “You’re full of shit.”

  “I know all about you, man. It’s like reading a book, for me. A late bloomer, and kind of dense. You’re afraid now, brother. That’s okay. There’s a time in every Imprint’s life when he or she has to accept the reality of what’s happened.” Koosh stood up again, kicking Crink twice in the stomach for good measure before he carried on. “But it is true you died, little Charlie Cranston. That much, you can be sure of.”

  “No.”

  “Your momma was so sad the day you died.”

  “Fuck you, asshole, I lived.”

  “Well, technically, none of us lived, you idiot. That’s the whole point. But you, you just couldn’t even die right.”

  After another boot to his ribs, Crink coughed another splatter onto the black-and-white tiles. This one was dark, almost black, and he knew exactly what it was. His shoulders slumped and he craned his neck away from his attacker, as if trying to will him away by not looking at him.

  “But death is full of second chances, sunshine,” Koosh cooed.

  –

  Downstairs on the pavement with Julie, Alex van der Haar stumbled. “Shit, Alex, you need to get to a hospital.”

  “Agreed, but there’s no time for that right now.”

  “Uh, no, it’s the hospital. There’s always time to go to the hospital, Alex. You’re thinking about ‘losers’. There’s no time for losers.”

  “Julie, you’re babbling.”

  “’Cause we are the champions...”

  “Julie, listen!”

  “No, Alex, listen to what? You’re being fucking crazy! This man cut you open. You need to get help or you will die here on the pavement, and I hate giving your mom bad news.”

  Alex coughed out a laugh. “I love you, Julie.”

  Jules responded with a shuffle. “I know, honey. I—”

  “I hate to interject when you kids are about to get all Dawson’s Creek on me,” came a broken voice from the other side of Jules’s car. They whipped around, laying eyes on the dented bumper, still awkwardly mounting the pavement. A hand emerged from next to the front right wheel, dragging Daedalus’s bloodied face and body behind it. He lay on his back in the flickering yellow hazard lights of the car, and spoke calmly up into the clear air. “But I’m pretty sure your friend upstairs is getting an education in internal bleeding.”

  Alex hesitated a moment, regarding the man on the floor like a rabid dog. He needed to put him down. Then he heard a scream from upstairs and took off, bounding for the club doors as Chuck laughed from his new home on the pavement
. “Give the Imprint my regards, won’t you?”

  The stairwell up to the Checkerboard nightclub was a narrow, two-storey affair, like many of the duplex buildings in the area. Alex, grunting like a pig, had lugged amplifiers up these stairs for his brother’s band many times.

  Tonight, he flew up those old stairs, only vaguely aware of Jules coming up behind him as he emerged behind Koosh and launched into a heavy tackle, sending them both to the floor, struggling and cursing.

  Alex got up and ran two steps over to his brother then Koosh grabbed his leg and pulled the world out from under him. He responded by driving his knee into his attacker’s face. The tiles beneath them were smeared with blood, as Koosh, then Alex, then Koosh again landed a series of blows and the two of them tumbled to the floor. Some punches were awkward and misdirected—mostly Alex’s. Others filled the air with the dank slap of meat landing on a granite countertop.

  Koosh, now on top, sprang to his feet and lifted Alex up by his underarms, hurling him at the wall by the entrance stairs. He slumped against the brickwork, winded and disorientated, as Koosh produced an ancient blade from a rucksack near the stage.

  “Just for the record, man, in case you ever wondered: there really is no god. This? It’s all just one big, pathetic dream.”

  Crink’s voice shouted in from somewhere unseen, as he had clearly crawled to safety by this point: “How many fucking knives do you people own? Jesus, every ten seconds with you people and the knives.”

  Alex’s vision filled with bright spots as he gasped against the wall. Blood pumped in his ears. He could only just hear Koosh say, breathlessly, “Funny. Sticking you with this thing seem almost redundant, you know?”

  The room went quiet. The volume on the world shifted all the way down, as Alex rasped there. Koosh sighed. “Fuck it. Mama always said I was an underachiever.” The skinny murderer ran at Alex, his knife a steely death sentence gleaming in the spotlights. He didn’t scream, or make much of any noise.

  Alex kicked off of the ground in a split second, his back still firm against the wall. The bleeding wound in his side roared like a fire, but none of that mattered. His foot met the side of Koosh’s head, swung at a blurring speed from his side as he braced himself against the wall with his arms. It was reflexive, like fingers on piano keys after years of practice. Remembered without thinking. Something simply in his nature. All along—a killer.