Skullcrack City Read online

  “A nightmarish yet hilarious journey that begins in the ugly world of toxic mortgages and progresses to the slightly uglier world of brain-eating monsters lurking in dark alleys. You’re in for an entirely unpredictable ride, the tale spinning ludicrously out of control as the hero uncovers layer after grotesque layer of a vast macabre conspiracy. Skullcrack City is original, utterly insane, and a shitload of fun.”

  —DAVID WONG, author of John Dies at the End

  “Skullcrack City messes with your mind the way William Burroughs or a bellyful of hallucinogens will do. I’m a longtime fan of Johnson. A master of derangement, he’s been bringing it for years. This time, though, it’s different. He’s burst into the clear and is taking seven-league-strides across the literary landscape.”

  —LAIRD BARRON, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

  “A dazzling writer.”

  —CHUCK PALAHNIUK,

  NY Times Bestselling author of Fight Club

  “Jeremy Robert Johnson is dancing to a way different drummer. He loves language, he loves the edge, and he loves us people. This is entertainment...and literature.”

  —JACK KETCHUM, author of The Girl Next Door

  “I don’t know if Mr. Johnson sold his soul to the devil to give him this gift for nightmare imagery, but by god, this guy can write. Johnson excels at pathology and perversity. A confirmed weirdo and authentic writer of uncommon emotional depth who deserves to be watched.”

  —CEMETERY DANCE

  “What makes JRJ’s work stand out from his contemporaries’ is the strange sense of empathy—in that regard he is not unlike David Foster Wallace’s wicked and perhaps deranged younger brother. Sometimes the horror is so understated that it’s deadly. JRJ has the ability to balance sheer humanity with sheer grotesquerie.”

  —21C MAGAZINE

  “The guy’s a genius. Reminds me of William Gibson—the dark interest in altered states of consciousness, the unrelentingly furious forward movement, and the same kind of unlimited imagination.”

  —BEN LOORY, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

  “Waaaay out at the deep end of the collective unconscious—where even the bravest of brain cells fear to tread—Jeremy Robert Johnson performs stand-up comedy for the gods. And their laughter is a marvelous, terrible thing. He’s the kind of post-Lovecraftian genius berserker who makes the Great Old Ones new again. As with Clive Barker, there is no glorious mutational eruption that Johnson can’t nail directly through your gawping mind’s eye.”

  —JOHN SKIPP, NY Times Bestselling author of Spore (w/ Cody Goodfellow) and The Bridge (w/Craig Spector)

  Lazy Fascist Press

  PO Box 10065

  Portland, OR 97296

  www.lazyfascistpress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62105-171-8

  Copyright © 2015 by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Cover Copyright © 2015 by Jeff Soto

  Cover and interior design by Cameron Pierce

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  Printed in the USA.

  To Jessica,

  for your wisdom, courage, love,

  and occasional total restructuring of reality into a new, more beautiful form.

  “It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind…is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.”

  —Raymond Chandler

  “The human mind will not be confined to any limits.”

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  “It’s a lovely day to go Blitzkrieg, isn’t it?”

  —El-P

  Yes, that is your body on the ground. On behalf of everyone involved in your murder, we’d like to apologize.

  If you need a moment to mourn, we totally understand. But global revolutions don’t really allow down time. Will it help you move on if you realize you’re not really dead?

  It’s confusing at first. We know. Because the person you thought you were is right there on the floor, a body growing cold. This place is tidy so the blowflies won’t get a shot at you, but the bacteria and mites have already heard the dinner bell. The You Buffet is wide open.

  And, yeah, within 48 hours the net will be flooded with obit’s and R.I.P.’s. grieving the loss of a great scientific mind. “Nobel-Winning Physicist Henry Trasp Dead at 91.” Book sales for Our Galaxy, Our Mind will soar. Old Charlie Rose interviews will resurface on public media. Colleagues will post heartfelt essays about how you changed everything, forever. You know the drill.

  If it’s any consolation, you barely felt a thing. A pin prick, the flutter-panic of a heart shutting down under just the right dose of remifentanil. Maybe the surface vibration of the drills and saws as we created the bone flap.

  We wish that we’d been so lucky. This trauma was some low hum lullaby next to what happened to us.

  Hell, we even sutured your dura and scalp back into place. Your relatives won’t be shocked. It’s not like one of those gorilla-jawed skullcrackers got hold of you. Goddamn do they make a mess of the human head….

  Sorry, Henry. That’s not the point. We can’t worry about them at present.

  The more important fact is that you’re free now. No more wheelchair. No more retina-twitch typing rendered as robo-speech. Think of this in hermit crab terms: you’ve shed a too-small shell and upgraded to a conch condo. But your consciousness is a little soft in here. Too used to human limitations. We’ll help you grow.

  It’s a delicate process. We lost a few minds before yours, but you’ll be integrated slowly. No blowouts. The last thing we need is one more charred genius.

  We’ll be working in the background, Henry, uploading You. Your theories. The precise interlocking memories which led you to believe you existed. Once you’re in here the corridors of our knowledge will be open to you. But travel lightly. There are atrocities inside us. War criminals have very vivid memories. Not all scientists worked with theory. Some worked with flesh.

  Enough. His ego still desires. He needs purpose.

  You’re right. Henry deserves to know why he’s here.

  The truth, Henry, is this: humankind is on its way out and our world is coming to an end.

  We’d like to speed up that process, and we need your help. It’s a symbiotic set-up and if you do your job properly, there’s a reward beyond even your imagining.

  We’ve got a two state drive to the next acquisition. Does that euphemism make you more comfortable? You’re still thinking of murder as a crime.

  It’s not. Not anymore. Not in this new world.

  You’ll understand once you’ve heard our story.

  Before there was an Us, before the skullcrackers roamed the city, long before we had this machine attached to our back, and way, way before we realized it was a really great idea to murder you, there was just Me.

  My name was S.P. Doyle, and I was a subhuman parasite buried deep in the flesh of a dark god.

  Hey, you guessed it.

  I was a banker.

  Please forgive me.

  No one chooses to become a banker. It just happens, like cancer, and then you try to live with it for as long as you can.

  After thirteen years in the industry, I was damn near terminal. With each step up the corporate ladder I received a slightly smaller laptop, a slightly-harder-to-adjust office chair. To compensate they offered fr
ee donuts and coffee cards. Weekends off. 401K vesting. Medical insurance that I had to have because they were turning me into a half-blind hunchback with diabetes.

  The illusion of safety and security kept me hooked, but every two or three years the veil would be pulled aside and some egregious fraud or pyramid scheme would nearly topple the bank. Then, after a series of Fire-Day Friday culling events, our stock would get low enough to bait some bigger finance fish to swallow us whole.

  It felt good to survive those Fridays, but—just in case it was your turn on the chopping block that week—you kept your photos and desk plants in a cardboard box so you could easily escape the cubicle village before you started to shake from the shock of termination.

  I never understood the folks who sat outside the bank and cried on the curb. To me, that was like a cow lowing and brushing against the steel doors of a slaughterhouse from which it had been released.

  I collected promotional mugs for all eight of the banks which collapsed beneath me. I lined them up in each new cubicle like heads on poles outside of a cannibal village. My resume was a graveyard of once powerful institutions. I felt like a jungle vet and had the ugly stories to go with the vibe.

  If you’re a young man and they put you in a tie and a cheap dress shirt and some khakis and tell you you’re doing a great job, you might buy the propaganda. You might have to, so any of it can matter. So you can survive Fire-Day Friday.

  They told me I was a man on the move. An asset to the corporation. I believed them.

  I foreclosed on a family farm even after the eighty-year-old matriarch brought me a bag of free cucumbers and begged me not to take what had been in her family for generations.

  I shredded files which showed our northernmost office had been issuing racially-based loan denials for years. They’d even created an inter-office spreadsheet to track and remove the applications. Rest assured we deleted any knowledge of “nowaynigger.xls” to the depth of our hard drives. I heard they sent Dale Pritchard to the actual branch to destroy their systems with thermite.

  I filed customer letters promising suicide—“You have given me no other choices.”—in our newest batch of collapsing mortgage portfolios. After a while these notes got backed up and we had a Sunday pizza party to file them down.

  I forgot to mention all the free pizza.

  The banks were experts in the kind of stimulus which dulled desire. They never paid anything near the scale of what the upper echelon and stockholders were raking in, but they made sure you had enough money for a commute vehicle and junk food and internet so fast you could run five porn browsers at once. They’d offer you discounted smart phones so you’d never have to spend too much time thinking.

  Thirteen years.

  I should have known better.

  After all that time, all that casual corruption and money-mongering on display, I should have been wise enough to refuse their last offer: a position as Primary Compliance Officer.

  They wanted me to preach civility to a pack of wolverines. Sure, they were upright and drove whatever the newest BMW was, but still…fucking wolverines.

  I’d been a steadfast grunt for so long they had me pegged as a Company Man. “Think you can keep these cowboys in order, Doyle?” And then they winked. They winked. Like Santa Claus in Just Our Secret mode.

  The role and its implications were clear. Keep the files clean for the Feds. Give our bank the appearance of utmost propriety. And never, ever get in the way of our money.

  I used to believe there was a part of the human brain we couldn’t quite excise, and its sole purpose was to encourage self-destruction. Someday, I thought, the guys working on the BRAIN Initiative would push aside a contour in the gray matter and find a pulsing, jet-black spot. They’d insert a probe into the patient’s head to press the nodule and the patient’s immediate response would be to shout out, “FUCK IT! WHY NOT?”

  It’s this spot which I blamed for my entry into the banking field in the first place.

  I met a beautiful girl, but she was crazy—ferret-owning, new-piercing-every-week, irrational, knife-toting, porno-contortionist crazy.

  FUCK IT! WHY NOT?

  She asked me to move in with her six days after we’d met.

  FUCK IT! WHY NOT?

  She said, “You don’t make enough money at the newsstand. You should quit and get a job at that bank across the street. They have money.”

  FUCK IT! WHY NOT?

  And then it’s thirteen years later, twelve since that girl put a knife through the thumb/forefinger junction-meat of my left hand during a one-sided break-up, and there’s a smiling wolverine in a dark blue suit asking me if I can keep the cowboys in order.

  FUCK IT! WHY NOT?

  And that same part of my brain, that inky tumor of bad impulse that had led me on Hexadrine blowouts and bottle-draining binges, threw me a flash image of the weeping grandmother whose farm I’d taken on behalf of these bastards. I pictured her bag of cucumbers and how we’d just left it to rot on our lunchroom table. And I swear I thought, with great earnestness, “I’m going to clean up this bank. And if I can’t, I’m going to take it down from the inside.”

  Now if you go back to the prior statements and change “clean up this bank” to “fall into a state of deep acquiescent hopelessness followed by fits of drug-addled paranoia” and “take it down from the inside” to “place my life in immediate danger by stealing a serious chunk of money using a weakness in their general ledger database” you’d end up much closer to the truth.

  Hindsight can rob you like that. Turn your pride to hubris, force to foible.

  But I had moxie that day. I accepted the gig, started to dig. Took to typing as quickly and loudly as possible and yelling, “I’m in!” when accessing basic programs. Made me feel like a hacker. Made me feel something.

  My wages bumped upward in an appreciable way. Bought my first real suits. Quadrupled my coffee intake, amped my anxiety and sleeplessness. Paranoia helped me see patterns: intersecting clients, brokers, financiers. COLLUSION. GRIFT. THOSE BLOODSUCKERS.

  I wasn’t sure what percent of any of my theories were legit, but based on prior experience, they sure as shit were up to something. And I knew I would find it.

  I was upgraded to an office. A wraparound desk, cherry oak with a glass top. A contained space I filled with caffeinated hyperventilation exhaust.

  My new laptop had a seven inch screen—the better to hunch into. My head the dot in the mouth of the world’s slowest chomping Pac-Man. Screen radiation drying my eyes.

  Once I had a door I could close to the rest of the office, I integrated my own offline database: pad and pen. The notebook that would bring down their house of lies, or, if reviewed by a state-licensed psychotherapist, have me institutionalized.

  I kept my emails obsequious. Every word you type is accessible to your higher ups. The content of your emails is corporate property. They had systems reading correspondence, testing tone and syntax to predict future malfeasance. The tiny microphone dots next to the webcam lens were also bio-analysis ports taking in exhalations—you consent to drug testing on day one.

  Hindsight might interrupt here with a pertinent question: Why didn’t I notice the camera mounted in my office’s lighting ballast? And why wouldn’t I assume that such a camera might be able to train in on hand-written content and translate that into digital text?

  Well, Hindsight, have you ever heard of the term Busy Idiot? Have you seen the footage of the caffeine-injected spider whose web was riddled with massive holes?

  I’d been on the job three weeks. I spent hours in my office chair just wiggling and worrying and mapping conspiracy. I was easily as effective in the position as, say, a barely sentient Jell-O sculpture of me.

  I made a wall of files around myself and peeked over suspiciously. I only came out of my hole on Free Pizza Fridays (which is what banks do with their Fridays when they’re not liquidating staff).

  For all of my digging, even after a weekend search of file
s about to be shipped off to the archives, I’d found nothing. Had the bank gone clean? What portfolio had I neglected? Which massive risk were we pretending didn’t exist?

  The lights were on in the bank. The sign outside the entrance said, “OPEN.” We had to be lying about something.

  Worse—my compliance reports received kudos from upper management. I was telling them what they wanted to hear. All was well. Profits were up for the quarter.

  I’d cleaned up nothing. I’d maintained the status quo. I’d always been a cog in this machine, but now I was a component in the vocal apparatus of the beast, telling our future victims, “Don’t worry. These cowboys are all in line. Nice, law-abiding batch here, only want to help you reach your dreams. They’re nothing like that last group who rolled through town with branding irons and rape-trusses and shotguns. These are the good guys.”

  Cue new waves of rolling cold-sweat anxiety. Cue the 3:00am wake-up gone chronic. Cue the real kind of deep insomnia which allows the Bad Idea Bundle in my brain to think something like:

  Maybe I’d be more focused if I bought some Hexadrine.

  FUCK IT! WHY NOT?

  But there were plenty of WHY NOTS when it came to Hexadrine, and I already knew them intimately:

  1. Hexadrine (aka Hex, Hexadrizzle, Silvertops, Pounder, etc.) is a Street Drug the way getting stabbed in the face is a Street Game or the desiccated body of a plague rat is a Street Snack. This wasn’t some 6-alpha-chloro-androst-beta synthetic with euphoric/stimulant benefits at abuse dosage. After developing a reputation for fuck-uppery not seen since the heyday of bath salts, FDA approval for Hex was never, ever pending.

  2. Hex was firmly entrenched as a Schedule One controlled substance, based solely on anecdotal evidence about physiological effects. The real ingredients in Hex eluded government chemists because the real ingredients kept changing. Hex’s ability to render the same effects despite the wildly divergent pill-to-pill chemical make-up gave scientists the worst paroxysms of confused anger since we discovered matter slowing its velocity in outer space. Which brings us to WHY NOT #3.