Chapter One
One thousand two hundred sixty two times. That’s how many times I’ve thrown up. One thousand two hundred sixty two times.
It’s something you never get used to. It never becomes fun. It never even becomes tolerable. Vomiting always hurts, and it always burns, and afterwards your breath always smells terrible. Attempting to quell the urge usually results in misery, failure or a mixture of both.
Yet that’s exactly what I was trying to do. Not lose everything I’d eaten in the last two hours. A hot dog. Half a bacon cheeseburger. A Diet Coke.
That’s when I needed Jimmy. When I fell out of the Vision. Out of the future.
He sat at the slot machine next to mine, holding me up.
One thousand two hundred sixty three. . . no. Not this time. You don’t throw up in a casino. It’s a good way to get your ass kicked.
Coming out of the Vision felt like a terrible plane landing. I swallowed to force the mound of partially digested food back into my stomach. Jimmy knew not to move me until I was ready, and we had a few minutes to kill, anyway. Well, five, to be exact.
A cocktail waitress came by. I ordered a ginger-ale, thinking it might settle my stomach. Jimmy passed. He sounded nervous, which I could understand. Jimmy was smaller than me, and a hemophiliac to boot. Getting roughed up by a security guard was the last thing he needed. The cocktail waitress scribbled my order and left, though I doubted she’d be back.
I stood up, using the slot machine for support. Jimmy did his best to help.
“Careful,” he said. “We don’t need you puking all over the place.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Not too fast.”
“So, where we going, Chief?”
I hated it when he called me Chief. “To the left. Ten feet or so.”
We walked down the row of slots, slowly, until we reached what looked like the spot I’d seen in the Vision. “Here.”
Jimmy pulled out a handful of crumpled twenties; dirty, smelly bills that had likely passed through the hands of a thousand gamblers. We loaded up four machines. Triple bets on all four. An old lady walked by and gave us a dirty look, like anyone under the age of seventy shouldn’t be allowed to play more than one machine at a time.
Five minutes from my brush with regurgitation, right when it was supposed to happen, one of Jimmy’s machines lit up.
Three Bars.
Two hundred dollars.
Dammit.
“That’s not enough,” Jimmy said, stating the obvious. We only hit the slots once or twice a month. We’d need more than a measly couple of hundred dollars to make it to our next run.
Jimmy pushed the button on the machine to cash out. The fake DING! DING! DING! of imaginary coins filled the air as his voucher printed. I glanced around, hoping our waitress had, in fact, abandoned us.
The moment I fell back into the Vision I knew something wasn’t right.
The fog was too dark. Darker than the milky soup that normally greeted me when I made this journey. I wasn’t even certain if I was still in the casino. The clanking coins and screaming voices faded like they’d been pulled away on a rail car.
And the smell, it was terrible. I’d never smelled anything in the Vision – not the casino sweat, not the cigarette smoke that flowed through Vegas like a river, not the fumes of a thousand spilled drinks. Wherever I was, it smelled rotten, like old milk and dirty diapers.
I tried to pull out. Screw it. We could live cheap for the next couple of weeks. This wasn’t right.
But the Vision held me there, trapped. I grabbed for Jimmy’s arm, hoping I could pull myself from whatever mistake I’d fallen into. My hand closed around nothing more than damp air.
Muffled sounds surrounded me. A grunt, though I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal. I was afraid to speak, and even more afraid to move.
The unidentified noises echoed, bouncing off what sounded like a dozen heavy walls. I wondered if Jimmy was still beside me in the casino. I wondered if he knew something was wrong.
I took a nervous step forward, hoping the movement would pull me from the Vision. The ground was soft, mushy. Certainly not the tacky, paisley carpet of a casino. A deeper cloud of funk rose into the air as it slurped around the soles of my shoes.
The noises stopped. I froze, unsure of which way to go, and uncertain if I wanted to move at all.
A grunt penetrated the fog, followed by a quiet, feminine groan. Then silence again.
I could hear myself breathing. The sound of my heart echoed in my ears. I tried over and over to pull out of the Vision. Nothing.
“Hello?” I said. I don’t know why I said it, and I felt stupid as the word passed through my lips. No one could hear me. I wasn’t really there, after all. I was still in the casino, five minutes behind this stinky hole.
A quick shuffle, then steps sloshing away, deeper into the fog. More groans, still close by. I stepped towards the sound. Fear pressed into my gut, making me feel like I had to piss.
Walls floated into view. Real walls. Concrete, covered in swirls of graffiti. Something hung between them, swaying back and forth. It groaned.
I took another step. It was a girl. My age, maybe younger. She was hanging from the ceiling, her chained wrists looped over a giant meat hook. A perfect rectangle of shiny gray tape covered her mouth. Dragon tattoos marked both her arms, swooping to merge with dead veins that spiraled away from the seeping holes at her elbows. The veins of a user. Something I knew all too well.
The sloshing sound returned. A short form emerged from the fog, trundling up to the girl. It was a man, shorter than Jimmy, which was pretty damn short. The girl tried to scream, but nothing more than a muffled grunt escaped through the square of tape covering her mouth.
He ignored her bleats and grabbed her left foot, pulling it out of the muck. She tried to kick him. He gave her a sharp elbow in the stomach. She went limp, staring at him with eyes wider than should have been possible. He wedged her ankle between his pudgy arm and belly.
He looked so normal, like a bank teller, or the guy who’d worked at the post office for twenty years. His pants, pressed to the point that the creases rose from his thighs like long, little tents, were cuffed at the ankle, rolled up safely above the sloppy muck.
He pulled a pair of flat-nose pliers from his pocket, the same kind I’d spent long, painful seconds searching for as a child, my father yelling at me from beneath his car. This little guy’s pair was shiny and new, not covered in years of grease and rust like the pliers that spent most of their life in the bottom of my father’s tool box.
He grabbed her second toe. Not her big toe, but the one after it, which was longer in this girl’s case.
I knew what he was about to do, not because I could see the future, but because it seemed so obvious. A pair of pliers. Her foot. She knew too, based on the look on her face.
He examined the toe, rolling it between his fingers. “It’s just wrong,” he said. “But I can do better. I can make it right.”
He straightened the toe out. It popped. It might have felt good, were she not hanging from the ceiling with a crazed little banker looming over her foot.
He grabbed the toe with the pliers. She kicked him again, but the kick was weak and filled with hopelessness. He elbowed her once more and she went limp.
He shifted the pliers back and forth, aligning their wide, flat tips with her toe. He paused for a breath. He looked like he’d been planning this moment for years, since he was a pimply teenager jerking off to his dad’s hidden stash of girlie magazines.
That moment lasted forever. Five minutes through the end of time.
Then he squeezed the pliers, pulling up and away from her foot. Quickly. Methodically. The girl’s toe cracked like a string of Black Cats. Bones broke. Joints pulled apart. The corners of the little guy’s mouth curled up in a smile.
The girls screamed. I screamed with her. Then I fell.
