Wake up, he told himself, and smell the burning corpses of your dreams. McNihil lowered the weapon in his hands and looked up at the prowler standing before him.
The barfly had draped herself around the humanlike figure’s shoulders, clinging like erotic seaweed to a jagged shoreline rock. As though a wave had broken over the prowler and drawn away only a few seconds ago; the front of the figure’s dark jacket was shining wet, blood seeping from the hole torn through the upper chest.
As McNihil watched, and as the barfly smiled and watched him in turn, the male prowler reached up and hooked a forefinger in the bullet hole. The jacket’s fabric ripped away as easily as damp paper, exposing the pallid flesh beneath. No wonder, thought McNihil, it didn’t fall down…
Like a rock dropped into a gelatinous sea, the bullet hadn’t created a wound, but rather a rippling distortion, a faint bull’s-eye pattern that had spread over the prowler’s torso and faded. The bullet’s entry point had been transformed by the black-ink tattoos that had swarmed and inched their way from the prowler’s abdomen and back, like blind fish and bottom-feeding ocean creatures, attracted by a sudden food source. The hole itself, edged with a small wreath of pinkish erectile tissue, exuded a fluid clearer than blood, but just as viscid and blood-warm, glistening like silvery snail tracks in a moonlit garden. When the prowler’s fingertips stroked the soft rim of the swollen non-wound, a tiny brass sun rose in its depths, just south of the ridge of collarbone. Shining wet, the flat end of the tannhäuser’s bullet slid with minor grace from the hole, the surrounding pink-to-red tissue enfolding its steel-jacketed shaft. The prowler’s thumb and fingertip grasped the exposed end of the cylinder; the humanlike figure’s flat gaze shifted from where it had examined, chin tucked against throat, its adaptive flesh, up to McNihil’s eyes.
“You see?” The male prowler spoke, its voice unaltered by pain or shock. “It’s no big deal.” The gathering tattoos, black hearts and black flowers, the names of martyred saints, nibbled at his fingertips. “As long as you’re… ready for it.” Slowly, the prowler slid the wet bullet back and forth in its receptacle of softly lubricated flesh. The black holes of his eyes, apertures in the mask that concealed no other face, narrowed as though savoring the slight penetration, the caress of the nerve endings just beneath the surface of the skin. “Just like you’re ready.” The prowler withdrew the bullet, slick with transparent mucus, and held it up before himself. “Whether you like it or not.”
“You don’t,” murmured the smiling barfly, “have much of a choice.” Her bruised-looking eyelids had drawn down to an expression of postcoital satiety. “Do you?” The barfly peeled her languorous form away from the male prowler; she stepped forward and knelt down directly in front of McNihil. “Because… it’s all memory now. That’s what we deal in here. We don’t have any other merchandise… and we don’t need any.” She reached forward, past the tannhäuser in McNihil’s doubled grip, and placed her fingertips on his brow, as though in blessing. “It’s what you gave us. All of you; it’s what we were created for. You wanted memories, memories other than your own, memories of things that hadn’t happened to you, but that you wanted to have happen to you. All the pleasures of remembering and none of the risks.” The barfly stroked his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good deal, though. Maybe you gave us more than you got back in turn. Maybe you really didn’t get anything at all… and we got part of you.” She wasn’t smiling now; her voice had turned harsh and grating. “The ability to feel, and suffer… and remember. Everything that made you human, that made you different from the things you created… that’s what you gave us.” The barfly’s hand pressed harder against McNihil’s brow, as though her lacquered nails could pierce the wall of bone. “It wasn’t,” she whispered, “a good deal for us, either.”
He tried to push himself away from her, his spine indenting the padded surface behind him. “I’m sorry…” McNihil raised the tannhäuser between himself and the woman. “But I wasn’t the one… who did it…”
“No… you’re not.” The barfly gave a slow nod. “But you’re the one who’s here. So you’ll do.”
The bullet had dropped from the male prowler’s fingertips and rolled against the toe of McNihil’s boot. In the bullet’s wetly polished metal, he could see himself-his real face, the one without the mask that had been stitched on at the clinic; his face in that other world he’d left behind. That was what small, shining things had always done for him: mirror reflections that didn’t synch up with all the rest that his eyes saw. Just as though the bullet had left another hole, which let the other world leak through.
There’s more where that came from, thought McNihil. He placed the tannhäuser’s muzzle against the kneeling barfly’s forehead, the blond curve of her hair trailing across the barrel’s black metal. “You know… I’d do this…” He folded one finger across the weapon’s trigger. “If I weren’t such a nice guy…”
“But you are.” The barfly didn’t draw away from the cold circle resting just above her half-lidded eyes. “You’re too nice. That’s your problem.”
“Maybe.” McNihil lifted the tannhäuser from the woman’s head, angling the muzzle toward the bar’s low ceiling. “But I’m working on it.”
Her gaze followed the weapon’s new trajectory. “That’s not a good idea,” she warned.
“They’re my memories,” said McNihil. “At least they are now. So I can do what I want with them.”
“We can’t let you do that.” The male prowler, non-wound still exposed on his upper chest, stepped forward, reaching for the tannhäuser. “It’s not allowed-”
“But you must have.” McNihil squeezed the weapon tight in his fists. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. Or have happened-doesn’t matter which. I wouldn’t remember it happening.” He managed a smile of his own. “But I can see it plain as day.”
The tannhäuser roared again, as though it had suddenly recalled the second verse of its low-pitched aria. McNihil’s spine jolted as the recoil knocked him back; a blinding spark, the same color as the flash from the tannhäuser’s muzzle, jumped across the contacts inside his head.
“Watch out-”
He couldn’t tell which of them shouted that. The barfly had scrambled away from him as soon as he’d pulled the trigger, as though she was desperate for shelter. Any kind of shelter; McNihil’s eyes focused well enough that he could see where the bullet had struck the bar’s ceiling. Fierce light poured through the hole, the radiance filling his vision and piercing all the way to the back of his skull. The doors of the small dark rooms inside his head shattered and tore from their iron hinges.
Above him, the ceiling grew more luminous, heat pressing against his face like a new kiss. The annihilating light flooded in as the bullet hole ripped open wider, the ceiling giving way like the cheap fabric of the male prowler’s jacket. McNihil could no longer see that figure, or the barfly or any of the others. The tannhäuser grew too hot for him to keep in his hands; it fell and clattered away on the floor, pitching and tilting now with the sudden upheaval of the earth. His empty hands shielded his eyes, but with no effect; the light passed through red flesh and shadow bones, relentless.