24Second. Smooches, From Yours Truly.
They were two women in the midst of an assassination. Nothing extravagant.
They were partners, until the very end. Partners, friends, two halves of the same soul. That's what they had agreed on many years ago, in a pact signed with blood and saliva. They were one and the same. One incredibly skilled, artfully ravenous and painfully shrewd murderer.
The dilapidated ruins of an apartment building. Veronica Belmont blinked away the golden crust from her eye as she stared intently into the scope of a high-caliber sniper rifle. She dared not move an inch. Focused, yet distant. Idle thoughts fluttered through her brain. She smiled as she began to think about her first boyfriend – his pudgy face, his piercing greenish-purple eyes, and the dark and meandering scar that plagued the left side of his jaw. Beautiful.
The boy had been decidedly nameless and ageless and selfless, and Veronica had loved him in an endlessly passionate way that only strangers could. They'd both been stupid kids with unreachable goals, with pipedreams of eternal love and happiness and understanding. Wide eyes and baggy clothes. The old, bad days. Nostalgia punched her in the gut and took her breath away. The young lovers would pamper one another with gifts and friendship and genuine smiles, and they'd eat their lunches together, and they'd play childish games that involved kissing and tickling and prodding.
But most importantly, they'd trade skills. At age twelve, Veronica knew rifles like the back of her hand; the boy was an expert juggler and explosives enthusiast. He would play with C4 like a suicidal clown, tossing six or seven of the little bricks around in a mesmerizing arc as she watched, entranced. Rough times, back then. It had been an era where children learned everything they needed to know by the time they'd reached puberty. Everything they needed to survive.
But things were better now, or at least Veronica thought so. She lovingly slid her bandaged fingers against the cool metal of her rifle, staring out at the blustery desert.
Nobody knew how the landscape became the way it was, mainly due to the inconvenient fact that people didn't record history anymore. If something catastrophic or otherwise particularly noteworthy happened, it was only discussed until it was inevitably forgotten. A person's average attention span was roughly two days now, so horrific events like murder and destruction and genocide didn't really remain hot topics for long. Survival was key.
But things are better, Veronica thought. Of course they are.
"They're coming," a voice crackled in her ear. Her other half. Veronica's heart skipped a beat.
"How far off?"
"Just down the road, about one klick from my position. See 'em? Spidery looking little bastards, huh?"
Two miles away from the ruined apartments, a youngish girl stood in the middle of a dirt road, homemade binoculars pressed against her dusty assassin's face. Starved face, cheekbones like rough diamonds. Her dogtags read "Scarlett Lynn", but her real name was anyone's guess. A jerry-rigged headset – all mesh and wires and rusted batteries – dangled from her ear.
She spied upon a small convoy of arachnidesque monsters scuttling down the road; after a few moments, she spoke into her headset. "Yeah, that's definitely them. It won't be long now, Ronnie. Get your trigger finger ready."
Veronica grinned and cracked her knuckles, finding Scarlett and staring at her through the scope. The blonde little girl was easy enough to spot – thick binoculars, ruby-red lips, scrappy nomad gear and a white-gold mop of hair poking out from the edges of a ratty old army cap. Pretty but dangerous, like a rickety ferris wheel. "You got it, babe," said Veronica.
They were two halves of the same soul, and they knew exactly what they were doing. Sweet, delicious, organized murder.
The targets were nightmares, at least on the outside. A small group of creatures made their way down the road like deformed spiders, hobbling deftly on their seven legs. They moved slowly, but their slender, spidery legs were so jittery that they came across as blurs. Bodies like sewer rats, smiles like salesmen. Golden-grey pustules hung from their stomachs in clusters like sticky gold medals or shiny doubloons. They left a sickly green fog in their wake, as if poison gas was leaking from their pores.
The target could have been a school bus full of paraplegics, and Scarlet and Veronica would have murdered them all the same. They knew that the creatures would bleed, and that was all that really mattered to them. They didn't care where they came from, where they were going, what they were doing, or why they needed to die. They simply followed orders – enthusiastically.
As the targets came ever closer, Scarlett smiled the way a little kid might after stepping on a giant anthill. The smug, terrible smile of an immature god. She shoved her dirty finger into her mouth, pulled it out with a loud pop and held it high above her head. "The wind don't exist, sweetie. Fire away."
"Roger," said Veronica. Terrible smile. Steady fingers.
The creatures saw Scarlett, then. She shimmered in the liquid heat, a mirage that was unmistakably giving them the middle finger. They stopped and stared and grimaced. And then they lurched forward, a newfound bloodlust in their eyes.
Edward Alexander Topper stood in the middle of his living room, watching Vincent sleep. His smile was perpetual, and very green. It gleamed in the pitch-darkness.
Being a shadow was particularly difficult, especially for a person of Topper's age and wisdom and obscurity. The young hipsters were good at it – they were all effortless masters of the technique, the little bastards – but Topper still had trouble with it, even after sacrificing a batch of beautiful souls to a back-alley vendor. What a waste. What a rip-off.
"Word to the wise, Vincent," said Topper in a wispy, nonexistent, imaginary voice, "Never get old. Die young, my child. Die young, before you learn anything useful."
Topper was a broken shadow, an almost shadow – one that a child might see in a haunted house. He was solid and brooding and just there, and everyone expected him to be there. He had mass; he had personality. You might even be inclined to reach out and touch him, if you felt brave.
The young shadows – shadowalkers – frightened even Topper. They were sickeningly skilled and effortlessly nimble, and they could follow a man for decades without ever being noticed. They disappeared before the fastest eyes, becoming less than air. Whenever they willed it, they simply ceased to exist.
At that very moment, there were undoubtedly a few curious shadowalkers standing right beside him, but Topper paid them no mind. They never bothered him directly.
Something creaked down the stairs. A tiny something, with no more weight than a baby mouse. Topper swiftly turned to face it.
"Those eyes will pierce through the blackest darkness," he said to Lila. She stood at the foot of the stairs, her labcoat draped over her naked body like a cloak.
Twitchy grey eyes scanned the room, rested on Vincent. "Where are you? What are you doing to him?"
"Nothing fatal, my gifted child," Topper said, relaxing. The half-shadow suddenly became a solid silhouette, accented by a ratty top hat. "Just observing."
"Observing… well then," she said, almost to herself. "I think know whose brain you crawled out of, Topper."
"I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that," he said. "Say again?"
"Nothing, nothing. Just thought you might have been a scientist at one point or another. Scientists are inherent observers, y'know."
"Oh, I'm well-aware, my little buttercup. I know. But there's no room for doctors and scientists in today's society, not anymore. There was a little coup d'état way-back-when, and we've been living in real bleak darkness ever since, yep-o."
Topper materialized behind her, gripping her little shoulders.
"This place… ah, this place is not somewhere you'd want to be. I can tell," he said. "You're different."
"If you know so much," said Lila, twisting around to look at his eyeless face, "Then where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?" Her expression straddled the line between vague hopefulness and thick, savory sarcasm.
"It's all magic, kiddo. Parlor tricks. Smoke and mirrors."
"I had a feeling you'd say that," she said, sighing. "Hey, maybe I'm psychic. Maybe I'm channeling magic too."
"Never rule out the impossible, sweetheart," Topper said, twitching slightly. "You might…"
He trailed off. Something pulsed inside him a few times, but he settled down after a moment. Something was wrong. The wrong person was dying. He needed to leave, right now.
"What's wrong?" Lila asked.
"Getting old. Getting ancient. Things like to crawl around in there," he said, tapping his chest. "Terribly mischievous things, they are."
Lila was silent. She tried to search for Vincent in the darkness, just to have a little bit of comfort. She couldn't find him.
Topper's airy sarcasm suddenly dropped for a moment, and he became absolutely deadpan serious. "Have you ever considered that everything you've ever known has all been a wonderland of sorts? That you and I and everyone else are just products of another person's imagination?"
Silence again. Laborious breathing in the darkness.
"My wonderful child… what happens when that person wakes up?"
Lila gulped, but kept her wits. "We've got twenty minutes to figure that out, Topper."
"Of course we do, Miss StReTCH Pod."
She suddenly had the urge to go back upstairs, and she told him so.
"Sleep well," he said. And then: "What would you like to dream about, sweetheart?"
Lila paused mid-step. Not thinking. Just breathing. "Vincent," she mumbled. She walked back up to her closet.
Topper tapped his wrinkled grey finger against his heart, coughing up a tiny glob of yellowish goo as he did so. He waited for a moment, then changed his mind and tapped his teeth. "Nightmares are fun too, my darling."
Scarlett slowly slid a razor-sharp machete from its sheath on her thigh. Everything else she owned was dusty and rusty and stolen, but this was hers – this was her birthright. She kept it clean and sharp and shined it so that it gleamed like the sun. The creatures faltered a bit when they spotted the shining metal, but kept moving forward.
Her smile became twisted and perverse as images of slaughter popped into her head. Beautiful gore, aestheticized violence. "C'mon," she muttered, "Show me a little bit of skin."
They came within twenty feet of her, and they stopped. A cloud of brownish-grey dust exploded behind them.
"Assassin," the leader said, his voice like rusted hunks of machinery. "Saboteur… amateur."
Scarlett had some difficulty stifling her giggles. "Keep telling yourself that."
She winked at them, and – without missing a beat – the leader's head popped open like a piñata. His fuzzy arachnid face seemed to implode as his features buckled in on themselves; dark greenish-red gore made a mesmerizing Rorschach pattern in the dusty air, accented by crumpled skull fragments and pulpy bits of brain matter. He collapsed to the ground, twitched in agony, gurgled and died.
Veronica ejected the smoking round and prepared for another headshot.
Scarlett became a blur, waving her machete around with the excitement of a little boy and the precision of a neurosurgeon – spider limbs went flying this way and that, ribs and sternums cracked and bent, chests exploded in torrents of gore and heads went rolling down the road like errant marbles. She ducked and spun and lunged and laughed as she tore apart the creatures with an embarrassing degree of ease. Veronica didn't blink, picking off limbless stragglers and sniping the monsters that Scarlett couldn't hit.
It was a bloodbath, just like always. A beautiful portrait of body parts and glinting steel. A dusty blonde blur orchestrated the pulse, dictating crescendos and jabbing her bladed baton at all the right spots.
Perhaps what happened then was fate, and nothing else. Perhaps it was a fluke. A conspiracy. Veronica never figured it out.
Her rifle jammed. It was brand new and expensive and she kept it extraordinarily clean, and it jammed. She let out a string of curses and fiddled with the stuck casing until it clicked free; she shoved her eye back into the scope just in time to watch something spidery scuttling behind Scarlett…
"Watchitwatchitwatchit!" Veronica screamed two seconds too late. A long and disturbingly hairy leg slid into Scarlet's chest, stopping her in her tracks. It jutted out of Scarlett's gut for a moment, lifting her three feet off the ground in triumph. She didn't scream. She yelled.
It was a primordial and disgusting yell; a movie-star yell; the yawning, groaning, massive yell of a terrified titan. She yelled for a good fifteen seconds, and Veronica yelled with her. And it was sort of… funny.
"HUAH! UHH!" She began, a good one-two punch of shock and awe. No pain yet, no anger.
"HHHUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!" Scarlett yelled, raising her machete in the air and flailing it around randomly, slicing air. It was clean and focused and classic, underpinned with a slight gurgle of blood. She was suddenly pissed off, flabbergasted that anyone would even think about stabbing her – how dare they?
And then she realized that she had been impaled. She realized that something was sticking out of her, she was bleeding from the mouth, and that something was mortally wrong with her insides. "HHHHHUUUUUAAHAAHGRAHLLLLUUAGH – AHHHHGAHHH – LLEEEAHAHHHHHHHH"
And it lasted for years upon years upon years, blood spritzing past her lips like a fancy fountain. She flailed around desperately, an angry cockroach caught on a sharp stick. She finally brought the machete down, severing the long, bloody spider leg and sending her twisting into the dirt. Veronica was able to stop shaking long enough to yank the trigger and snipe the bastard responsible.
That's it – they were all dead. The targets were nothing but assorted gore and broken body parts, except one that she had pegged in the stomach; it squirmed on its back, helpless, trying to stop the massive amount of blood that was gushing forth. But Scarlett was still bleeding too; she forced herself to her feet, raising her machete high into the air and bringing it down on the already-dead creature that wounded her. "Miserable! Fucking! Demon!"
It was painful to watch. Veronica's soul ached as she felt it slipping away from her. Scarlett took a few painful steps, and then started to yell again. Something coherent this time.
"Kill me!" Scarlett yelled over and over again, wailing in agony and rage. The hole in her stomach sagged as a small torrent of blood splattered to the ground. She hacked up a few mouthfuls of gore, and then collapsed; her head slammed against the dirt road and the homemade headset snapped into three pieces.
Static crackled in Veronica's ear for a moment, and then silence. She muttered a string of curses, but kept her wits about her. Through her scope, she watched as Scarlett fiddled with the bloody, broken microphone. The last of the spidery creatures roared an echoey roar as it flailed around in the dirt, hugging its gaping gunshot wound with a few long, desperate legs. Veronica quickly ejected the round and sent another flying through the creature's skull. It stopped squirming.
Her heart caught in her throat. Scarlett was still down there, screaming in pain, begging Veronica to murder her. And Veronica couldn't bring herself to do it.
An uncomfortably loud creak rang through the run-down apartment building. I'm not alone, she realized a second too late.
Someone tapped her shoulder. Bang, you're dead.
A few seconds passed and Veronica was still alive. She hesitated a bit, and then decided to turn around and face the person. Or creature – you never could be sure these days. She expected an angry seven-legged demon to rip her guts out…
And there he stood – a wrinkled, grinning, slender old magician wearing a sweaty hoodie and a dusty old top hat. Just like always.
"Topper? Topper! Fuckin' Etch!" Veronica squealed; she gave him a hug and planted a kiss on his wrinkly gray cheek. "I'd recognize that nasty old hat anywhere. What the hell are you doing here? How did you—"
"Will you not ask me how I've been?" Topper said, gently but menacingly. "It's been a while."
Veronica hesitated; Scarlett's agonized moaning was still ringing in her ear. "No problem. How've you been, Etch-a-Sketch?"
Topper shuddered, almost unnoticeably. Etch-a-Sketch. Repugnant nickname.
"Never worse, my flower. There's a soul nearby that needs eating, yep-o. Not exactly a soul I thought I'd come across anytime soon," he added, smirking.
The realization hit Veronica like a brick. Scarlett was going to die, no matter what. The crown prince of all soul eaters was already here, knife and fork in hand. Topper may as well have been the Grim Reaper.
"Yeah, Etch," said Veronica, expertly masking her sorrow. "Me neither. Sad day, huh?"
"Tragic day, my beautiful muse. The kind of day that'll scar you for life. Give you a little twitch, eh?"
She thought for a long time. "You gotta have me confused with someone else, Etch. Nervous tics ain't my thing. But hey, there ain't a whole lot to be that sad and mournful about, right? I mean, I sorta had this idea that when Scarlett died, she'd get taken care of by a bored shadowalker or something. But you, Etch? That's fantastic! I'm sure she would have been excited off her rocker if she knew that you would be the one to gulp her down, huh?"
"Scarlett is a girl with a… hard-to-digest soul, to say the very least. She is going to fester in my poor gut for eons, I'm afraid."
"Oh, poor Etch. But hey, you're the expert right? Gotta do what ya' gotta do, huh?"
Scarlett was still screaming. Veronica could hear it – she was way, way out of earshot but she could still hear it echoing in her soul. It made her stomach churn.
"You must do your job too, madam," said Topper, tilting his masked head toward the window. Veronica's breath became shallow as she realized what she had to do. She took a few uneasy steps back to her post, tears suddenly streaming down her face. Topper stared her down with his grin, paralyzing her. She crouched down and cursed softly as she realized that she was sobbing uncontrollably. Salty snot and tears and drool dribbled down her chin as she whimpered like a helpless newborn. Get up Scarlett, she begged as she stared at her bleeding soul mate through her scope. But she didn't get up.
Scarlett dug her reddened nails into the dirt one last time, coughing up blood. The bastards had split her lungs; there was no hope now. She took a deep breath, rolled onto her stomach, and then looked right at Veronica and winked.
"You feel that heartbeat, Ronnie?" She said, well aware that her headset was demolished. "You still feel my heart beating against your ear?"
"Of course," said Veronica. "It's my favorite song in the whole world."
Terrible smile.
Bang. You're dead.
Topper offered to teleport, which Veronica sternly turned down. "Fuck you, I know how to walk," she said. "I haven't given up on being human just yet."
"Shame," said Topper.
The desert wasn't cruel to them. The wind idly nudged a few sand dunes, the clover snakes took a nap, and the sun hid behind a sudden, solitary cloud. The world became draped in a veil of apathy.
They reached the site. The already-rotting corpses of the spiderlike creatures were strewn here and there, accented by blown-off limbs and messy bloodsplatter. It stank, and Veronica had to resist the urge to hold her nose. Don't show weakness in front of Etch-A-Sketch.
She found Scarlett soon enough. A pretty, slender little body haphazardly angled and drenched in blood. A few hunks of blonde hair fluttered in the breeze, but aside from that her head was completely gone. Blown to pieces, popped like a zit – a tough whitehead with tough insides finally taken down with a high-power, telescopic, bolt-action needle. Veronica wanted to perform a religious sign or tribute, but she didn't know any.
"There she goes," Topper said in a way that was both deeply reverent and completely vulgar. "My little strawberry pudding pop."
He strode over to her body, dragging his feet in the dirt and grinning that horrible grin of his. A light awakened in his face as he came closer and closer to Scarlett's mangled remains; he seemed to smile wider than he usually did.
He started to kneel, but then remembered Veronica.
"Miss Belmont, my darling… you might want to step away. Close your fragile eyes, protect your tender stomach, eh? This isn't something you want to see."
She crossed her arms and twisted her stance, defiant. "I want to know what you're going to see, Etch. I want to know what she's doing to you."
Topper turned toward Veronica for a moment, his grin a sickly shade of green. "Yep-o then, kid. Yep-o."
He took an uncharacteristically deep breath, then removed his top hat and loosened his hood. A handful of small, anxious worms fell from his head as he did this. Veronica flinched as the hood slipped from his face, revealing his disfigured eye sockets and his full head of disgusting red hair. Even after all these years, she still couldn't help flinching.
He fell to his knees and approached Scarlett's body, his brownish millipede tongue flicking in and out. He wheezed and groaned and chuckled as he ran his wrinkled grey fingers along her mutilated skull. He began to shiver feverishly. And then he began to speak.
The words spewed from his mouth without much pause and with such fluidity that Veronica could hardly believe that he was the only one talking. Each sentence locked into the next like a brand-new puzzle piece. And it was all about Scarlett.
"Scarlett has a mind like a child.
She knows what's best for her, and nobody else.
She is slow and clumsy. And thorough.
She has eyes that fester like a day-old corpse.
She lies every time she opens her mouth.
She weaves personal tales of intrigue and sodomy and passes them off as truth.
She eats people alive, in the dead of night, when nobody is looking.
She keeps a collection of human phalanges on a wire in her closet.
She hopes to craft them into piano keys one day.
She loves the piano as much as she loves to murder.
She loves to murder.
She. Loves. To. Murder.
She wears ruby red lipstick to match the gurgling screams of her victims.
She is likeable only to those that like her. That is entirely limited to you, Veronica.
She does not sleep. Ever.
She uses a machete to cut through just about everything, most notably faces.
She has lethal fingernails that shine brighter than a child's smirk.
She has a voice like stained glass.
She can destroy any mental barrier, except yours.
And above all… she is a piece… of…"
Topper trailed off there, and a glob of yellowish slime trickled down his chin.
"What's the matter, Etch?"
He didn't respond. The magic seemed to drain itself from his body, and he stopped shivering. He rose and turned to face Veronica, a horrified grin on his face. "She is… a piece of… your soul."
She wasn't quite sure why, but Veronica felt her heart pounding in her throat; she spent a few moments coaxing it back down, trying her hardest not to advertise her condition to Topper. She failed.
"Why so anxious, my beautiful child?" Topper said, quickly draping the hood over his eye sockets and pulling it tightly closed. He picked up his top hat and played with it as he took a few steps toward Veronica. "A soul is a wonderful thing to have extracted."
If he's going to eat Scarlett, he needs to finish the job. "Edward," said Veronica, slowly drawing her rifle towards him. "Step away, Edward."
"What happened to 'Etch'?" Topper asked, disgusted by the name. He kept walking towards her.
"Etch-a-Sketch? That guy disappeared. Ran off to Egypt in a fit of tears, or at least that's what the story is. Tragic tale," she said, pointing the five-foot rifle right into his face. One shot, one messy kill. Blood and skull and grey matter. "Funny guy. Did you know him?"
"I wholeheartedly admit that I didn't, sweetums."
"Shame. He sure will be missed."
She backed up a few feet, and he followed her. They did a little waltz through the burning minefield of spidery corpses, walking around in a wide arc, stepping over body parts, staring one another down. Topper's grin never faded.
"You must realize that in order to harvest the rest of Scarlett's precious little soul," he said, "you're going to have to be sleeping the long, long sleep."
"I'm well aware of that, Edward." Veronica's finger tensed on the trigger.
A long slender rod, crafted out of sharp hunks of amber, slid from Topper's sleeve. He twirled it around a few times, admiring its beauty. And it was beautiful; the rich brown crystal sparkled in the desert sun, nearly blinding Veronica. Topper twirled the mysterious rod a few more times, then slammed it into the dirt and used it as a cane. The razor-sharp crystal tore into his flesh, and thin trickles of scarlet began to decorate one end.
"You are a gargantuan hypocrite, my child," he said. "The world turns in a very, very meticulous pattern. There is so much bustling, magical life here – right where you're standing. Look underneath your shoe, and you'll find thriving villages. Check the palm of your hand and you'll stumble across a civilization or two. Reach deep within yourself and observe the wrinkles of your brain. You might just discover your own private wonderland. So much life… yet the planet will keep turning, and turning, and turning, none the wiser. You mean absolutely nothing. Your soul means absolutely nothing. Scarlett. Me – your friendly neighborhood Etch-A-Sketch. That pudgy boyfriend that became your first kill. What was his name?"
"Carradine," Veronica said through clenched teeth. She remembered, finally.
"All the same. You are the worthless, unnecessary pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. To think that souls should be linked in such a way that they're completely inseparable… that's just suicide. You people will all die sometime, my flower… and you just sped up the process. But that's the way these things are. You will be born, you will be eaten. End of story. Burn, puzzle pieces, burn."
Veronica was paralyzed. The rifle slowly fell from her grip and toppled into the dirt. Topper clicked his wormy tongue and took a few steps toward her.
He pressed the crystalline club against her cheek, gently and adoringly.
"Don't you just love that amber gleam, sweetheart? Just stunning! It truly brings out your eyes."
It did. Veronica grimaced and fell to her knees.
Without a second thought, Topper hefted the club above his head with the grace and fluidity of a master butcher. He smiled grimly and swung it into the girl's temple.
"And your brains."