The story so far: Sexcam worker Veronika has revealed herself as the serial killer known as “The Begrudger” who has assassinated a number of billionaire CEOs, triggering a huge wave of unrest in the city.
Her lover Detective Ronnie Hurtler, captured by the feared ‘Beyond’ Bill Simons and his elite unit, has confronted his boss Justine Jason and her accomplice Polly Caroon on board a private flight and brought them all down in a wild struggle.
Veronika and her friend Alicia have taken refuge with Alicia’s friends in the homeless community underground. But Beyond Bill still wants that billion-dollar bitcoin hoard they hlod and won’t stop until he’s laid his diamond hands on it…
Veronika’s blood goes cold for a moment and she halts in her tracks. The feeling passes quickly but Alicia’s already turned around to look at her, speaking in a low whisper. “What is it?”
The cold feeling flushes but she can tell something has changed. She shakes her head. “It’s nothing. Let’s keep going.”
Alicia peers over her shoulder. The corridor is dark, plaster-walled, claustrophobic. Alicia’s voice wavers, all the boldness gone: “Vron, are we really doing this? I mean, like, I support someone else doing it, like fuck this guy, but the two of us? Does it have to be me who does this? I literally just stopped being homeless, I don’t want to die – ”
“I’m doing it,” Veronika says. “You can go back if you want to, I know this is scary. But I’m doing it regardless. I have to.”
Alicia bites her lip, fiddles with the crossbow in her hand. How frustrating it has been for Veronika to watch her friend over and over refuse to claim agency over her own life. No one has ever given her the tools to do a thing like that. But Veronika can offer her something.
“It was scary for me at first, too, babe” she says, as they continue to push through the crawlspace. “With those rich fucks, of course I was scared. But you know how I moved past the fear?” She looks back. Alicia shakes her head. “First, I have to tuck myself away in this calm place. It’s an alcove in the back of my mind. It feels like…the deepest darkest blue. It keeps me safe. It keeps the fear from controlling me.”
Muffled voices can be heard through the walls. They don’t have very long. With the city crumbling all around them, and the high probability that Ronnie’s lack of culpability is soon to be discovered, things are going to have to move fast.
“Once you’re there,” Veronika says, “all you have to do is stay there. And anything that happens while you’re tucked away, that’s not really you. That’s someone else. Someone calm, collected, fearless. They know how to do what needs to be done, because someone has to do it.”
Alicia grips the crossbow harder, nods with a measure of confidence. “I saw that in some movie. They said: ‘Fear is the mind killer.’ I guess the trick is just letting it drift away and not stick to you.”
“Good,” Veronika says. “That’s it. Go to your deepest darkest blue. Let the fear wash away. Then watch that other thing take over.”
The other thing. What is that other thing?
It looks like this to you:
You blink, breathing slowly in the dark. The weapon in your hand is light and deadly. You’re used to doing this alone but this is a task which requires teamwork. The plan is almost complete. You move in tandem through the narrow space, move as one body, one breath, one apparatus of deliverance.
You are justice. You are divine.
The corridor makes sharp turns. Beams jut and wires dangle and you duck and step and maneuver through it all. You are the unstoppable force.
You reach the point of entry, the one you carefully mapped out from public records of this building’s layout. The wall panel before you comes off easily, as if someone has already loosened it. You shift it slowly, quietly. Ugly white light spills through the crack. You peer through.He sits at his desk talking to himself or maybe to an apparition no one else can see. By the closed door, two armed guards confer with the lint in their pockets. There are likely two more guards beyond the closed door. These two must be dealt with swiftly, quietly. You place the panel on the ground, leaving just enough space to aim through. You screw the silencer onto the muzzle of your gun and crouch. You aim at the guard on the left. Over your head, your other body aims at the guard on the right.
In this tandem blue, you move as one. Breathe in, finger on the trigger. Breathe out, squeeze. The bodies stiffen, then slump, then stumble toward the ground to sit in their own blood as it leaks from their dead brains. You’ve done an excellent job.
You were made for this.The man at his big important desk squints and huffs. “Hot biscuit!” he tries to exclaim but the air has left his chest in a panic. While he struggles to attune to this new reality where his guards are ragdolls bleeding out on the floor, you slip through the hole in the wall, one after the other. One of you slips the gag around his puckered, pruny mouth while the other binds his wrists behind his big, important chair before he can resist–not that he has the strength to. This is a skeleton waiting for the flesh to allow its emergence.
With the target safely packaged and prepped for travel you sit back on his desk and look down on his meager form. Even in panic, he stares at your chest, then at your companion. He is the puppet.
A few words, necessarily formal ones, solemnize the occasion. Not for him but for you:“Mayor Borstenheim,” you say, and for a moment you and your fearless vessel are one and there is truly nothing to be afraid of. Even though your voice sounds faintly ridiculous, it is still resolute.
“You have committed no short list of treasons against the city you were tasked with improving. For the evil you have allowed, aided and abetted, you will be revealed for what you are. Your humiliation will be eternal.”
“You’re not the usual girl they send me,” he says. “But you ain’t half bad neither, the both of you. Now where’s that little sweetie-pie got to?”Zipties to wrists and ankles, duct tape across his weakly babbling mouth. Veronika takes him by the arms and Alicia by the legs. He weighs little, this man, he’s a wraith of dissipation. Maybe sin isn’t such a great burden as they say, but something that takes off the pounds.
The portage has begun. They heave him through the wall, and the wallpanel is replaced before the blood even spills beneath the mayor’s office door. When the guards bust through and find their brethren lifeless on the floor, the mayor will already be halfway to city hall’s ground floor through the inner arteries of the old building. But they won’t be stopping at ground floor.
They go down, down, down with their hostage. Maintenance ducts give way to service walkways, then subterranean corridors. They loop nylon cord under his armpits and lower him gently through a hatchway. Now they’re in the main city sewer.
Beneath the city he will meet the ones he has wronged and those outcasts will see how the hand of justice moves. They will see the master plan come to its beautiful end.
Those who dwell up on the surface don’t consciously believe that those who live down below really exist. Even when the turmoil that rages up above quietens for a moment and there’s nothing burning, nothing about to explode, and in the momentary silence someone turns to someone else and says: “You know, they say there’s a whole tribe of homeless down in the tunnels?” — even then, it’s impossible to believe that they’re really there. Better to consign them to the fairytales along with goblins and trolls. Those bright eyes glinting out at you in the tunnels beneath your feet.
Looking at the mayor lying on a mattress in the corner of Charlie’s chamber — the utility room third on the left leading off the second staircase that rises from the subway tunnels to the sewer main outlet — Veronika wonders if this grand design of hers has really gone the way it ought to have. It all seemed clearer as a scheme with its many strands, a great web with her as queen spider in the center, but now with an ailing geriatric in a damp underground tunnel, somehow it lacks that definition. All told, taking the mayor captive has not turned out to be the apex of a complex edifice of white-hot righteous fury that she’d imagined. It’s actually a fucking let-down.
Charlie McGurk the ex-IRA Irish mobster had moved down into the tunnels when the cops and the SWAT stormtroopers started raiding the homeless encampments. They said it was to combat crime, but there was little crime emanating from these places. Instead the unleashed violence of body-armored officers laying into tents full of migrant kids with batons responded to a deeper and wholly unspoken impulse from the city fathers.
But when the cops’ bodycam footage was posted on social media, only then was it spoken at last. The comments and captions so full of joy at the blood spilling and the children weeping, the jaunty music posted as soundtracks, the supercuts of Best Baton Swipes. All of this made apparent what was really behind the campaign.
Charlie finds life much easier in the tunnels. Where he can’t wheel, he swings, from rope handles hung from the structures above, wheelchair strapped to his waist. He’s found a true home here, far from the green hills and the smoky docks of Derry town.
In the weeks since he moved here, he’s become something like the boss of the tunnel folk, even though they don’t really have a boss. He’s the one who pops up most often to the surface to chat with the homeless and pick up recruits from those who seem most robust and centered. Alicia has stayed in touch with Charlie through texts every day since she left the underpass box shelter. Though she undoubtedly has her flaws, she’s nothing if not a loyal friend, as Veronika’s since found out.
Alicia knows the story behind the story of the tunnel people. When life up on the city’s surface became too violent, too scorched with everyday enmities and too enshittified to bear, Charlie withdrew down here to create a refuge of normality. Now Veronika and Alicia have followed them below.
Things aren’t too bad down here, all told: there are shelves of beans and cans of coffee, a gas stove and a running water compartment that serves as a bathroom. In this little space are gas lanterns, wind-up gramophones with scratchy records, and a haven of serenity. Out beyond there’s the darkness, the subterranean echo and the trickle of brown water in the mid distance. And then there’s the rats, the beady gazes and the little scufflings of tiny nails. But it could be worse.
Up on the surface, high above their cavernous dark, there’s the oppressive sense that a world above this one is pressing down, hot and angry and out of control. Beyond Bill Simon’s Special Corruption and Crimes stormtroopers, along with a full alphabet stew of agencies whose initials nobody has even heard of before, are scorching the ground all across the city. It’s not even clear that anyone in particular is in charge any longer; rather a generalized will to scourge has been set free to rampage through the streets.
Days pass. A day, two days, three. People trickle in from the city above with news of an overspreading tumult. When they catch a signal on their cells, they watch news clips. Search for missing mayor. Terrorist plot suspected. City fathers mobilize emergency civil defense plan. Curfew decreed for the following districts.
Veronika spends most of her time looking after the mayor, who burbles gently about his mamma and tries to grab at her tits. She’s feeding him pap and taking time to clean up carefully after his accidents. Expended a couple of supermarket maxi-packs of babywipes on him so far, and Charlie tells her that ass-wipe material is becoming harder to find up above.
Partly it’s the loss of Ronnie, who they say dropped out of the sky three nights ago like some broken angel. Partly it’s the realization that the mayor, the imagined villainous center of all the nightmare web of oppression, isn’t some devious spider calculating five moves in advance and sensing faint twitches of dissent on his gossamer thread. Instead he’s a dwindling husk of a man, pretty much just as lacking in agency as she herself is. He reminds her of her mother, her mother’s mother. The grim realization that there really isn’t a villain in her story spirals her into a depression where she’s still left cleaning an old man’s ass-crack.
So it is that when the dwellers underground pass Veronika word of a skulking ogre coming to get her, a hunched troll in galoshes and a faded plastic mackintosh shuffling through the tunnels, she’s glad that someone at last has decided something. Not deciding was too exhausting to be sustained for very long. Now Beyond Bill has decided for them.
BLACKOUT
Who’s that? Nobody. Some scratchcard luckout sucker parading his loserness, coughing hoarse as a crow. Nothing to worry about. Beyond Bill Simons flashlights his way decisively through the mainline sewer. He’s traded his slippers for galoshes, guttapercha booties to wade through the sloshing wastewater. Every step he takes alone and unprotected by his agents in this benighted drain makes him madder.
He’s forsaken his SCC SWAT guys because this task is for him alone. Alone now, because only he — big bad Beyond Bill — has the key. More tactically-clad bodies would mean more loot to share out, more mouths to stop with wads of cash or to silence with bullets. But it’s all his now. The rich pickings held by the intersex dame and her-his-her crypto stash. Traced at last to this place after leaning on some hoboes from the park. Such a fucking amateur, thinking to play games with the big boys.
He rages and gnashes his teeth the deeper he goes into the tunnels. It’s a fairytale step too far, an outrage to his ogrish ways, to dare to pull him into this place, and he resents it. This nighttime world of slosh, this stinking netherland. Beyond Bill pulls up his trousercuffs, readies his revolver, and shuffles on slowly through the wastewater.
BLACKOUT
They send her word that he’s approaching, the old angry man. ‘The Bad Apple’ they call him, though Charlie McGurk calls him ‘The Big Filth’ and she recalls the name Ronnie called him, Beyond Bill, the one from her bedroom that night. Behind her in the cubbyhole lit by gaslight is the old sad man, the mayor. Nothing big about him. She crouches down to look him in the eye and finds those eyes lost, pale white and rheumy.
“You don’t even know who or what you are, do you?” Veronika sighs.
“I remember these baths being so much warmer,” he replies. “Waitress, could you ask them to turn up the heat, please?”
Veronika pats him on his papery face. He really is like a baby in so many ways, but a baby with a tarnished and terrible soul beneath his infantile babbling. No agency to speak of, a husk of empty authority jabbering away in the darkness. She wishes he was aware, but it is how it is. She takes him by the hand and helps him to his feet.
“Mayor Bimmie Borstenheim,” Veronika says. “You have sunk this once great city into a pit of poverty and violence. The people you were tasked with serving and protecting wander the streets homeless and lost with nothing to tie them to this world. So will be your fate as well. Go on,” she gestures into the expansive dark, “this place is no longer your home. Walk until you find something worth remembering.”
The mayor blinks and blubbers. He’s likely not understood a word of what she’s said, but the words were for herself more than anything else. This place isn’t her home anymore either. If the people take back the city–good. If not–someone is always willing to fight. Veronika has done her part.
The mayor wraps his arms around his own meager frame and shuffles off into the dark, speaking and sputtering to something not there. Maybe he speaks to something long lost. Maybe he speaks not to his past but his future. You’ll never know.
With that taken care of, this grand plan deflated, there’s only one enemy left worth fighting and a thirst for blood in Veronika’s mouth. He’s the reason Ronnie’s big gut is sinking down to the ocean floor for the fishes to nibble to bits. If there’s no grand villain, at least she can have a fairytale ogre to claim as her nemesis and adversary. The old ritual, the mystery of death, renewal and succession, sort of demands it. He comes nearer and she is prepared.
There’s a niche. There’s always a niche for someone like Veronika. High in the walls, overlooking the only approach, the tunnel with the swarming rats which channel through below, swimming to where it’s warmer.
Veronika waits now, overlooking the place with some outside signal to the wifi where Alicia guards her laptop, transmitting to the blockchain and beckoning to the newcomer.
BLACKOUT
This fucking amateur. Veronika so-called, though Bill Simons knows his real name. Playing with the big boys, heedless of risk. He-she-it “Veronika” has upset the apple cart, swiped the goodies, corrupted a good policeman, brought both him and his boss to a sticky end. Made a goddamn fool of Bill and the most elite law enforcement unit in the city, nay, the whole country.
Beyond Bill sploshes his galoshes through the waste runoff where the gaslight flickers, ignoring the column of rats swimming steadily the other way. He finds his arm has tired and the revolver is now drooping. Flashlight pointing along the barrel at the brown running water. He brings the gun smartly up to ready position, notes that his wrist is wearied. No matter. He’s close to where the ladyboy lurks now.
A thud, and the sting travels up his left leg to where his brain can register it as pain, as real pain. He howls and swings round, training the revolver into the corners of the tunnel. But there’s a crawling on his leg. He looks down: rats teeming across where the bolt stands in his left thigh. Some strange smell from the end of it, a red mess of something. And his own blood flowing free.
Another thudding pain, in the right shoulder. The rats swarm up around him, encloud his face in their warm familiar bodies, poking noses in his eyesockets and nostrils, scrabbling in his fine gray hair and tangling it with their little claws, gnawing at something , eating at his wounds, and now… now he’s afraid.
Bill breaks then, yells, the limbic panic now screaming through his discomfort, screaming to him to run from this place. But small bodies leap into his mouth and stop it.
He doesn’t know this city the way he once thought. He’s not its master any more. He’s lost in the warm busy swarm of gray-brown bodies and his yells are muffled.
The city’s forsaken him. It’s hungry for his bones.
He falls to his knees to be claimed. The rats do their work.
BLACKOUT
The man’s yelling is directly below where you squat. You need to see, so you light up your cellphone and point it down.
Your crossbow is ready with the third bolt, only a small dose of meat smeared on it. You find that you are calm again despite all that’s happening.There he is, your designated target. He has two of the meat-baited crossbow bolts in him, thigh and shoulder. There are the rats, a coat of them all across him where he lies and screams. He yells out loud and it resounds off stone walls. A rat crawls into his throat and gags his screaming. The swarm of them thickens about him.You shoot the third bolt into the mass, just because it’s what you were planning to do. The bolt lands in his head and a clutch of the rats fall off, leaving a gap where his face can be seen. His eye gone, a fresh pink glisten of flesh and a gurgle of pain from an occluded throat.
“Motherfucker,” you spit at him. “Fuckin’ amateur.”Then the swarm of the rats surges up again over him. You switch off the cellphone light and listen in the dark to the scratching and the thick gurgle. The water runs beneath it, the stream of water carrying away the waste.
When you look again, before you climb down from your niche, there’s just a ragged plastic raincoat and a scatter of bones and gristle. His revolver lies in the guttering next to the runoff channel. You toe at it gently and it splashes into the water.Back at the cubbyhole, Alicia is still there, squatting at the table with your laptop. She’s running the crypto transfer back and forth on the blockchain, opening and closing accounts.
She’s swirling all the money through those back channels, seeing what stirs and what submerges. There’s probably enough sheer money in that swirl to slay the beast one day, or at least enough to make a start in forging the weapon that will do it. Enough in any case to disappear.
You tell her she can stop now. You tell her there’s a way out of this place, out through the main sewer, out onto the gravelly beach beside the harbor.
You tell her that everyone who wants to make her suffer is gone. And for now it might even be true.
END OF CHAPTER 12 - rat king dispersion -
Amateur finishes here…
Sounds
Lambrini Girls - “Bad Apple”
Not just bad apples, it's a whole rotten tree
999 means 'know your rights'
Protest, demos, unionize
Fight the law that fights you harder
Bite the red right hand that feeds you
Curtis Mayfield - “Little Child Runnin’ Wild”
Where is the mayor
Who'll make all things fair?
He lives outside
Our polluted air
Justice 🐀 I’m craving beyond burger
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