I can’t take in anything. I feel strange, panicky. The faces around me, the colors of the lights and bright yellow walls seem to warp and shift. I wonder if it’s the cocktail of drugs I’m taking: uppers to get through the night; stanozolol to maintain my size, my intensity. I feel like I’m tripping.
A girl wearing only a black bra-top and set of tiny shorts walking up the stairs towards me catches me glancing at her. “You want a fucking picture?” She is gone before I can respond, before I can even take offense at her insult. She passes me later, smirking over her shoulder, knowing her allure, as she heads downstairs, tight, arrogant ass rolling beneath the black leather.
“You’re not naive, David.” I jump at the voice in my ear; Lucs has sidled up beside me while I’ve momentarily closed my eyes. He stares out over the drinkers, eyes reflective and distant, silent for a moment. I follow his gaze. “Look at these weak cockroaches,” he finally says quietly. “Most of them can’t even string two words together; fill them with alcohol and they become zombies, mindless scum.”
“And that justifies killing them?”
He turns to me, as if contemplating this for the first time. “This is the way it’s always been. You know that. There has always been those like us willing to seek the truth, to unlock the darkness inside.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Think about it, David. Think of how you feel about them. How you feel about your
“What do you know about my girlfriend—” I start to demand, having never told them about Lisa. Then he touches my shoulder.
Sudden pain along my chest and arms, as if I’d done a heavy workout, the muscles burning and flaring. I want to recoil but the muscles on my arms and chest ripple in sympathy. I shudder as a wave of pain surges through me; like something opening out inside.
Just like I felt after beating the gangster. Jesus. I’d forgotten that, suppressed that weird feeling as I’d knelt on the cobblestones.
I break his grip and back away, spooked, mouth groping for a reaction. I grab my chest but the pain has just as quickly receded.
Lucs stares at me as I back down the stairs. What the fuck was that? What’s wrong with me? He watches me go.
I stumble downstairs, knocking patrons out of the way as if they aren’t there. The radio bucks in my hand but I don’t hear what’s said. Lucs perhaps, telling the others. One of the doormen—that asshole Peteris who hated me from the moment I arrived, as if I didn’t deserve to be here—appears from the foyer near the front door and stands waiting for me. I double back, heading for the back. I traverse the edge of the dancefloor, trying to keep out of sight of the other security perched like gargoyles on their posts.
I reach the Stage unharmed and burst through the double doors into the muted corridor to rest panting against a damp wall, waiting for my smoke-stained eyes and nose and throat to clear. My pulse throbs in my head, keeping complicit time with the music rumbling through the walls.
The one hanging light casts weird shifting sprays of illumination down the corridor. I touch my chest again, recalling that strange pain. I must be going insane, too many late nights, the shock of seeing someone killed. Maybe it’s the drugs finally getting to me.
Yet Lucs’ words nag at the back of my brain.
I force them from my mind. All that matters is getting out of here and I push off the wall and head for the back door.
I round a corner. Too late realize I’m not alone.
A figure is coming towards me, filling the narrow space. When I see the size of the guy I instinctively put one foot back, planting myself.
Gabe. He’s big—bigger even than me—and in the tight corridor he almost scrapes the roof with his head. I tense and wait for him. Then I glimpse over his shoulder another darkened figure bent over something on the ground, something framed by yellow—it is blond hair, it is a woman. Tight black shorts. Bra-top.
There’s blood on her neck.
As I stare at it my vision narrows, focusing solely on its dark stain.
I forget about Gabe, about the club, about the patron being killed.
Pulsing sounds in my ears, strong, blotting out everything else. Spit fills my mouth. I can smell the blood. It floods my senses. My head spins at the thought of reaching out and touching it, feeling its dark slick against my skin, of
I imagine Lisa before me.
I tear my gaze away to look at the hunched-over figure, but the shifting light edging past Gabe’s head and shoulders and underneath his arms warps everything and it seems the figure’s face is somehow stretched and lupine.
“Thought you were a patron,” Gabe says, breaking through my concentration. “Just as well.” He points at the blackening egg on my temple. “You got hit before.”
Disarmed, I raise my hand to my head slowly and feel the lump. My refined senses dissipate, leaving me feeling washed out and empty. I must be going insane. I look at the other security—it is Raph, his brother—but his face is normal. For a moment I’d thought …
“You can’t let that happen again,” Gabe’s saying. “They must fear us.”
I stare at him then look at the girl.
“She overstayed her welcome,” Gabe explains.
Raph hauls the black-shorts girl up underneath her arms and drags her to the back door. But there is blood on the wall behind, splattered like the blood on Raph’s cheek. He waits for Gabe to go down the stairwell and open the door and, as I stand watching, the girl’s head lolls to one side on a too-pliable neck and her mouth, split at the corners as if punctured by something, gapes open, drooling a line of spittle onto her top. Raph sees me looking at her face and stares back openly. He reads something in my eyes that satisfies him and dismisses me, dragging the girl outside.
“You should get back to your post,” Gabe says.
I hesitate, looking towards the back door. Instead I nod and head back into the club.
When I return upstairs Lucs is still on the stairs. I don’t ask how he knew I’d return. He doesn’t say anything for a while, then: “You okay?” I nod. He stares at me for a moment, then nods also. “I’ll check back soon.” He leaves.
I try to watch the crowd but I’m too fucked up, the scene in the corridor still whirling through my mind. In need of air I head up to the top bar to stand beneath the air-conditioning vent jutting from the roof, savoring its cool whisper over my sweating, fevered face.
I open my eyes and see Kelly standing at the bar, the one bargirl I actually liked and would speak to on occasion. But looking now at her tanned shoulders and the tight lycra top hugging her breasts only makes me think of Lisa, remembering the jut of her breasts above the bedclothes when I came home from work, the feel of her skin against me.
We’d met while I was still at the Terminal trying to work as many hours as I could to cover the rent. Some guy had been hassling Lisa in the nearby street as I was heading home for the night and for a moment I’d seen my father looming over my mom and I’d intervened without thinking. The guy—some crazy ex—had trash-talked to save face but when I advanced on him he soon disappeared. Lisa and I started going out soon afterwards. She used to call me her “protector.” Things went well for a while and she even moved in, but then it all began to change. She started complaining about my temper affecting the relationship. Or how I was spending too much time in the gym, only concerned with putting on size. How I talked about the scumbag patrons I had to put up with every night, the contempt in my voice never far. How I had no plans for the future, as if working my ass off night after night meant nothing. She started spending more time at the dance studio for what I thought was an upcoming show: her first. I tried giving her space to prepare. But after she found out I beat that guy and was now working at one of the big clubs in the Meatpacking District without telling her, I returned home one night to find all her stuff gone. She hadn’t even left a note. And then I found out about Paul. The other lead. Some lean-limbed, shaggy-haired dancer she must’ve been fucking for months—she’d mentioned him once or twice but I didn’t read anything into it, didn’t want to seem jealous. I didn’t know the bitch was about to leave me. I eventually found her new apartment and I’d pass
