Absolute Unit Read online

  That’s the understatement of the year. Bill was nobody’s idea of a competent professional (his tombstone will probably say “Nobody Misses This Asshole”) but he never turned a standard-issue shakedown into a very public butchering. You might excuse dear Trent by saying it’s his first time, but there are no learning curves in real life. We know this better than most.

  The lady raises the knife over her head, muttering something lost in the honking and growling of cars. Traffic is stalled in both directions, drivers leaning out their open windows to scream at her (“Bitch, couldn’t you kill him on the fuckin’ sidewalk?”), but nobody makes a move to intervene. If she swings at Trent, perhaps we can use his right arm to block it, but this isn’t the movies. In a fight between bare flesh and a blade, the blade always wins.

  And then—salvation.

  It comes in the form of a faint honking that rises, louder and louder, and then a white mini-car with a pizza logo on the driver’s side door veers into the oncoming lane, moving as fast as its little engine will allow. The drivers in the stopped cars direct their ire at this new target (“Jackass, you’re in the wrong lane!”), but the lady with the knife never shifts her gaze from Trent, even when the mini-car plows into her from behind.

  The impact sends the lady flying against the parked cars to Trent’s left, where she smashes against a door and flops to the pavement, the knife skittering out of sight. The mini-car, its hood dented by the impact, skews to a rubber-scorching stop only inches from Trent’s stunned face. The driver’s window zips down, revealing a girl of roughly Trent’s age, her red hair chopped into spikes. She’s wearing a sleeveless black shirt her bare left shoulder tattooed with a winding black dragon.

  The girl yells: “Oh my God, did I kill her?”

  Trent looks at the lady, who is beginning to rise on shaky knees, her hand sweeping beneath a parked car for her knife. “Uh, no, I think she’s immortal or something . . . ”

  “Get in.” The girl revs the motor. “Cops here soon.”

  Trent limps to the passenger side, opens the door, and crawls in. The interior smells of pizza, and Trent’s stomach growls. The girl stands on the gas pedal and twists the wheel, steering us into the proper lane. The light at the next intersection is green, and we blast through it at a decent rate of speed for a vehicle with barely more power than an electric toothbrush.

  “Carrie,” Trent stutters. “I . . . I . . . ”

  “You’re welcome.” Carrie squints into the rearview mirror. “Didn’t want to kill that woman, but she looked like she was about to hurt you.”

  “She was.”

  “What the hell you get yourself into?”

  “I, uh.” Trent sighs. “There was just a, um, misunderstanding.” We wonder whether Trent remembers how we took control of his arms. If he believes that he has a medical condition of some sort, he might enter a hospital—and then our problems will multiply. We need to seize full control of his mind as soon as possible.

  “Okay. We can talk about it more later.” Carrie takes a right. “You want some pizza? You can take a slice from that top box.”

  We examine Carrie’s real estate. She appears quite fit, her muscles nicely defined as she works the wheel. The front of her shirt reads, Attention K-Mart Shoppers, which is a joke that eludes us, but she seems mentally together. Perhaps she would make a good home, if things don’t work out with Trent.

  The mini-car has no rear seat, only a narrow storage area stacked high with pizza boxes and black duffel bags. Trent opens the top box, revealing a pepperoni-and-mushroom pie, and peels away two slices, which he rolls into a messy tube before chowing down. We revel in the delicious tide of carbohydrates and fats.

  “Slow the heck down,” Carrie says. “You’ll choke.”

  Trent finishes swallowing. “Sorry. Long day. Needed the food.”

  “Well, take another slice or two if you want, but the rest of that’s my lunch and dinner. Customer rejected it, so I’m eating it.”

  “Why’d they reject it?” Trent licks the grease off his fingers. “Tastes pretty good.”

  “Yeah, but one of our cooks dropped some pubes in it, and the customer found one.”

  Trent gags.

  “I’m kidding.” Carrie chuckles. “Where’s your sense of humor, man?”

  “Long day,” Trent says, once he recovers.

  “As if I’d eat something with pubes on it. Who knows why the customer sent it back? Some of them are just assholes like that. All I can tell you is, it’s mine now.”

  Trent helps himself to another slice, but not before examining every inch of it for anything that looks like pubic hair. “You got a lot of deliveries?”

  “Just one, but it’s for a party. Hence the big stack. Then I got a few other deliveries, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I know. How’s Big Jim doing?”

  “Good, except he’s freaked out about legalization. It might put him right out of business.”

  “He could always go legit.”

  “Nah. How’s this for irony: once they legalize the bud, all the legit companies are going to hire people without criminal records. Which means many of these folks who grew up in the weed business, know its ins and outs, the growing and harvesting—well, they’re totally screwed.”

  “Yeah, that sucks.”

  “What’s new with you?”

  “Well, my uncle almost got killed by a cop this morning, and I was there.”

  She jerks the wheel, almost sending us into the oncoming lane. “Wait, what?”

  “It’s crazy. Some cop kidnapped him, and they were driving around—I was following them in a car—and then the car crashed, and the cop died. My uncle’s in the hospital.”

  “Gee, lot to unpack there. First, why did the cop kidnap him?”

  Trent shrugs. “No idea. I mean, my uncle takes bribes on his restaurant inspections. But that’s not something that people get kidnapped over, right?”

  “People will kidnap someone for a buck-ninety and a can of Coke.”

  “Well, my uncle’s in some kind of coma, so it’s not like I can ask him about it. And now I got all these cops asking me questions like I know something.”

  Carrie eases up on the gas. “Cops?”

  “Yeah, these detectives. Don’t worry, Miss Paranoid, they’re not following me around.”

  “As if you’re hard to spot.” She waggles her eyebrows.

  Trent brushes at his leopard-print jacket, notices the tear around the pocket, and groans. “I’m a peacock,” he says. “Like Prince, like Bowie.”

  “Of course,” she deadpans.

  “Hey, you went for it.”

  “What can I say, I like a dude who looks like he’s wearing my grandma’s clothes.”

  “You’re so funny.” For the first time in hours, we feel all of Trent’s muscles relaxing. He settles back in his seat, with a rush of neurotransmitters that suggests he’s finding some kind of inner peace. And why not? A small car that smells heavenly of pizza, a beautiful girl at the wheel who clearly likes him despite his messy impulses—what’s not to like? I’m rooting for them to make out, which might offer a cleaner, more powerful dose of oxytocin (these young bodies, so wondrous!) than whatever Bill managed to achieve with Janine.

  While Trent relaxes, we work our way along his spinal cord, shooting out more tendrils into the blazing tree of his nervous system. The sweetest prize is his cerebellum, tucked behind its fortress of bone, which we have no idea how to penetrate. At least we’re on the verge of controlling both legs in full.

  “Hold on.” Carrie taps her phone, nestled in a plastic holster clipped to the dashboard. It awakens, revealing a map peppered with glowing red buttons. “Saving your ass pulled me off-schedule. I got to deliver those pizzas, okay? It’s just up the avenue.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can help me carry them in.”

  “Give me half the tip?”

  She laughs. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Hey, half
the labor, half the work.”

  “I just saved your life.” She winces. “I hit an old lady. You get that? I hurt someone. And yeah, I know she was trying to kill you, but still, that doesn’t make what I did any better.”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry.”

  “You better be, you ungrateful putz. Plus, I’m going to get so much shit when they see I dented this delivery car. It’s not like I own it.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Fine, apology accepted. I mean, what are friends for, right?”

  They settle into silence for another few blocks. On either side of us, the stores and houses fall away as we pass through a wasteland: empty lots behind sagging chain-link fences, factories reduced to red-brick shells. Why don’t humans care about their homes?

  Trent drums his fingers on his knees. “Can I get a ride to my house after this?”

  “Sure. In the meantime, here we are.” Carrie maneuvers the mini-car into a sliver of parking space in front of an enormous warehouse, its black windows peering at us like the empty sockets of an old skull.

  “Who has a party in there?” Trent asks.

  “I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of hipster music bullshit.” Killing the motor, she exits the vehicle and opens the rear hatch. “You going to help me or what?”

  When Trent joins her, she loads his extended arms with four of the seven pizzas. “Quick in and out,” she says, taking the other three boxes and slamming the hatch closed with her elbow. “Let’s go.”

  They approach an unmarked metal door, and Carrie shifts her boxes so she can knock. The faint thump of footsteps, followed by the slamming of heavy locks. The door opens, revealing a towering figure in a pink bunny costume, six-foot-five and three hundred pounds. His black plastic eyes study us for an eternity before he says, in a surprisingly baritone voice:

  “Oh my God, is that the food? Come on in!”

  11.

  Pink Bunny turns, waving for us to follow him down a narrow corridor lit by construction lights jury-rigged along the ceiling. The spooky glow makes the graffiti sprayed on the concrete walls look like blood splatters. Trent mutters something under his breath about turning back, until Carrie plants a boot against his rear and shoves him into the building.

  “This is bad,” Trent hisses.

  “This is the job,” she whispers. “Believe it or not, I’ve seen weirder.”

  Stopping in front of another metal door at the end of the hallway, Pink Bunny bends over and punches a ten-digit code into a small keypad embedded in the doorframe. As he does, we notice that the costume’s waist has a zipper that runs all the way around. That certainly makes sense. How else could he go to the bathroom without taking the whole costume off?

  Carrie wrinkles her nose. “What’s that smell?”

  We sense it via a thin strand we plugged into Trent’s olfactory nerve: a faint floral scent, mixed with a whiff of poop. And beneath that, something else organic we can’t quite place. We thought we had covered the entirety of the wonderful world of smells, thanks to Bill’s regular tours of the city’s scummiest restaurants, yet the identity of this newest fragrance eludes us.

  Pink Bunny opens the door.

  Trent drops his boxes. Tomato sauce and warm grease squirt from beneath the cardboard lids and spatter his shoes, but he never looks down.

  Carrie, who managed to maintain her composure after running down an old lady with a mini-car, is so stunned by the sight that her mouth flops open. At least she manages to hold onto her own pizzas.

  Beyond the door, bright studio lights shine off plastic sheeting spread on a concrete floor. Standing on that sheeting is a rainbow of oversized figures dressed in cartoon animal costumes—foxes and turtles and a white unicorn and three more rabbits with oversized heads.

  None wear pants.

  They stand in a ragged circle around a prone chipmunk, its animal head pulled off to reveal a swarthy, fleshy face: eyes closed, lips blue, the forehead slick with sweat. For some reason, he seems familiar. A friend of Bill, perhaps?

  A fox spies us in the doorway and screams: “Who the hell are they?”

  Her eyes wide, Carrie lifts her boxes and says: “Pizza delivery?”

  The unicorn points at the prone man. “We need an ambulance.”

  “I leave for two seconds . . . ” Pink Bunny stomps a furry foot. “What happened?”

  “Dunno.” The unicorn waves plush hooves. “Steve was, ah, with a toy, I think the Mounty Pounder, and then maybe his heart or something . . . ”

  “No names!” Angry Fox stomps for the door. “They can’t be here! Can’t see this!”

  “It’s okay.” Carrie bends and places the pizza at her feet. “We’ll just get paid and be, ah, on our way . . . ”

  “Fine, fine, calm the fuck down.” Yanking off his three-fingered paw, Pink Bunny jams a wrinkly hand into a hidden pouch in his costume’s chest. “Look, pizza people, you didn’t see any of this, okay? Total silence.” Neon-pink condoms, a chicken nugget, and a small bag of pills spill from the pocket as he roots around, his hand finally appearing with a moist wad of twenty-dollar bills. “Here. For your trouble.”

  Trent steps forward to take the money, grimacing as he does so. From this new angle, we have a better view of the prone man under the harsh lights. We know who he is, because he’s swung through Bill’s office in the bowels of the bureaucracy, always trailed by a chattering entourage of press people and dull functionaries.

  The man wheezing his last on that unhygienic sheet of plastic is the Mayor.

  As Bill might have said: Hell’s bells.

  “Come on.” Carrie grips Trent’s jacket, pulling him toward the front door. “We need to go. Right now.”

  Trent almost slips in a pool of pizza grease but recovers before he can face-plant, which is a good thing because the weirdos in the furry animal costumes march toward them, crowding into the hallway. Carrie is already at the front door, fumbling with the knob, which refuses to turn, only it’s nothing except rust on the bolt and when she twists again, hard, the door flies open, blessed sunlight bursting through.

  Carrie unlocks the passenger door of the mini-car and throws herself across the seats, followed by Trent. He barely manages to pull his feet inside before she twists the key, hits the gas, and veers into the road, almost sideswiping a delivery van. As he slams his door, Trent glances out the rear window. Angry Fox appears in the warehouse doorway, sans pants and flopping meatily, black plastic eyes gleaming in the sun.

  Angry Fox makes a pistol sign with his big white paw and mimes firing off a shot at the departing car.

  12.

  The mini-car’s engine whines more shrilly than usual, and Carrie white-knuckles the wheel. “Something’s wrong,” she says, pumping the brakes. “This crap-bucket’s going sludgy on me.”

  “Maybe when you hit that old lady, you damaged something,” Trent says. “Car this size, I’m surprised you didn’t bounce right off.”

  “It’s fuel-efficient, okay? Big Jim likes to save money.” She smacks the dashboard, a move that miraculously convinces the mini-car to fix its attitude. The engine settles back to a high-pitched purr, and she relaxes her grip on the wheel. Trent spins the radio dial, settling on a station pounding out last century Bristol trip-hop with a beat that sounds like robots morosely fucking.

  “When I’m driven around, I prefer a Rolls-Royce.” He grins, bobbing his head to the music, loving this chance to dig into her. “Luxury rides like that are truly on my level.”

  “In order for anyone to reach your level, they’d have to take a boat to the Mariana Trench, strap some concrete blocks to their feet, and jump in.” Winking at him, she lowers the radio’s volume.

  “You’ve used that joke before,” he says.

  “Hey, when I haven’t seen you in three months, I can recycle my best bits. That’s fair, right?” She snorts. “Especially since you still have most of my manga.”

  “Three months is enough time to think of new bits.”


  “I’m driving. I make the rules.”

  “Fine. Can we talk about what happened back there?” He cranes his head to check the mini-car’s side mirror, as if a big man in a fuzzy pink costume is potentially in pursuit.

  “Sure, it was weird, but not the weirdest thing I’ve seen out here.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry to say that an orgy with animal costumes is just a typical Tuesday. That’s why I like to carry a jumbo bottle of hand sanitizer in the car. It’s in the glove compartment, if you need some.”

  “That one guy on the floor, though, he looked like he was having a heart attack or something.”

  Trent has no idea “that one guy” was the Mayor. If the Mayor dies, scary people will no doubt try to cover up the circumstances of his last minutes, which means Trent and Carrie might end up dead in a shallow ditch. If the Mayor manages to survive, that won’t change things—the potential for public embarrassment will still mean scary people, bullets, unmarked graves. Either way, we are all hosed unless we can figure something out.

  “Maybe.” Carrie offers a big, theatrical shrug. “And I hate to seem like I don’t care, but I don’t care. Those folks have phones. They can call an ambulance. I just deliver the pizza.”

  “And I just want to forget this crap ever happened. Where to now? Maybe we can get a beer or something?” I can taste the bitterness of his longing. These two, they must have been together forever.

  “You don’t have anywhere to be?”

  “Nah. At some point I want to go back to the hospital, see how my uncle’s doing. And I guess I should show up at school tomorrow, not that anyone’s going to notice me gone.”

  “Yeah, beer’s fine. I got to drop off the car, clock out, okay?”

  “Works for me.”

  Beyond the windows, the industrial area gives way to a strip of used-car lots and fast-food restaurants. The traffic in the mini-car’s lane thickens. I push through Trent’s lower spine, into areas we never fully explored with Bill. Unlike our former home, Trent’s deeper regions are pink and firm and free of unexpected growths, making it easier to navigate by the highways of his arteries and vessels.