Chapter [???] Byron meets Alexei

⦿ Early Awakening Era: Brooklyn, 2018

Johnny made a blurting sound and tried to grab the string around his throat, but it was too thin. The string was drawing a red crease into Johnny’s skin.

While Johnny kicked and masticated, the man patiently kept his grip. He turned his icy eyes toward Byron. “Better not to watch, little one.” Then he looked toward the door to the kitchen. “Kid has briefcase. Stuff should be in it.”

A second man stepped up to the booth. He had a long nose and eyes like a viper. “Let’s go into kitchen with that case full of stuff, little boy. This is not a place for you.” He gestured toward the kitchen door.

Byron couldn’t stop staring at Johnny. Blood was running down Johnny throat. The light was disappearing from Johnny’s eyes.

“Let’s go,” Snakeyes repeated, lifting Byron out of the booth and pushing him through the swinging door to the kitchen.

Byron looked down at his hands, where he held the briefcase numbly. He looked to his right where the back door lay open. In front of it was a steel counter. The arm of a woman splayed out on the floor was peaking out from behind the counter, enveloped in a pool of red.

Snakeyes crouched beneath him, and turned Byron’s chin away. “Don’t worry about her. She’s taking nap. Very sleepy woman. Now put briefcase in front of me and we look at what’s inside together.”

Byron saw a flash through the porthole of the kitchen door as a pop went off in the dining room.

“Pizdets!” barked Snakeyes as he darted to push his back against the wall beside the door to the dining room. He took a pistol out and pointed it toward the entrance. “Don’t move, little boy. Stay where you are. It will all be all right.”

A face appeared in the porthole window. The first thing Byron noticed were the electric blue eyes, cold and calculating, yet full of a startling vitality. They assessed Byron calmly and then glanced around the kitchen. Above these eyes, the face was topped by a shock of blond hair, much of it spiking out as if its owner had touched a live wire. A permanent smirk seemed fixed into the mouth, as if to communicate a confidence that could only come from immortality. These features suddenly snapped together into a young man of about 16 or 17 as his gaze demanded Byron’s attention.

An understanding flowed between the two. With the slightest motion, Byron gestured his head toward where Snakeyes lay in wait. The face disappeared from the porthole.

A minute later it reappeared at the back door behind a gun aimed at Snakeyes. Byron closed his eyes at the loud pop. When he opened them, Snakeyes lay on the ground. The young man tucked his pistol and walked straight up to Byron. For a moment they stood there silently as the rain poured outside. The back door swung open and shut again, blown by the wind. The young man’s muscle-bound chest moved up and down as he breathed.

“I’m Alexei. Vasily won’t be making your appointment today,” he said with an American accent only the slightest bit tinged by Russian. To verify his affiliation, Alexei pulled the neck of his shirt down to reveal a tattoo of a nude woman with an apple in one hand, strangling the life out a snake with the other.

In his mind, Byron saw Johnny’s throat strangled by the man in the striped tracksuit. Byron’s head could not stop trembling in a little nod. The edges of his awareness were shrinking. The room and this new person took on a virtual quality, one of unreality. The silver countertops, the knives on the wall, and Alexei’s face were flattening, desaturating. It was as if the -ness of their thingness was fading into mist.

Stay here, boy, said a voice in Byron’s head. This night is not yet over. Return, return, to the world of meat and metal. In the inner space, the one inside held a patch of fur to Byron’s field of smell. Byron breathed in its ethereal musk and fell back into the room. The one inside disappeared. In his wake the knives and countertops regained their depth and weight.

Byron’s eyes refocused on the young man in front of him. “Where is Vasily?” he asked.

“Thanks to your uncle, Vasily is dead.”

“What?”

Alexei looked Byron’s shaking form up and down again. “You’re not cut out for this. How old are you?”

“Old enough for you to tell me what’s happening.” In his mind, Byron saw Johnny’s eyes go lifeless, over and over.

“You get drugs from us. You agree to sell them only in certain designated neighborhoods. Your uncle is selling them outside of those neighborhoods. He is selling them in the neighborhoods of our former competitors. This has broken our truce with them.” Alexei’s eyes burned at him, as if Alexei had noticed something new in his face. “Understand? Now briefcase on the table please.”

Byron numbly complied.

Alexei continued staring at him. “I need the combination.”

“2-1-0, 3-1-2.”

Alexei adjusted the dials and sprung open the lock. Inside were stacks of $100 bills with rubber bands around them.

“Looks good,” said Alexei. He shut the briefcase. “Sorry about your frien—“ Suddenly Alexei ’s eyes went sharp. He tackled Byron to the ground as a shot rang out.

“Perhot’ podzalupnaya!” Snakeyes was on his feet, his left hang clutching a bleeding wound, his right aiming wildly with his gun.

Byron and Alexei crouched behind a metal counter. A bullet rang off of its side.

“Damn.” Alexei’s gun was on the ground beside him. He picked it up with his right hand and fired a couple of shots around the corner of the counter, causing Snakeyes to duck. Then he stared down at the fresh bullethole in his left arm and grimaced in pain.

He turned to Byron, strangely composed. “I’m a lefty.” He nodded at the bleeding hole in his left arm and then at the pistol in his right hand. “You know how to use one of these?”

Byron shook his head. “Only rifles.”

Behind them, Snakeyes was yelling Russian into a cell phone.

“Not good,” said Alexei. “Hm, a puzzle. We have 5 or 6 minutes to get out of here.”

“Can’t you call your people?”

Alexei smiled. “I do these things on my own.”

Alexei glanced over the counter and fell back quickly as a bullet sparked off the surface. Snakeyes was slowly flanking them.

Slif….  called Byron across his mind.

Ah, this is what it’s like to live, is it not?

Please, Slif. I’m afraid.

It’s out of our hands, boy. He’s from a land too far away, too far away to know our power. You’ll need to go a myth deeper. Summon Him.

But…he demands too much.

If he didn’t, it wouldn’t work. It’s either Him or a bullet through the brain, and you’re our favorite host. We wouldn’t want that to happen. Sing for him. We’ll help you.

Byron felt his vocal cords relax. His eyes closed. He breathed in; wind swept through his lungs like a gale. His mouth opened wide and a rich moan erupted into the room. It was a moan that spoke of eras beyond the rise and fall of civilizations, of a religion of ochre and bone older than the first men, too old to be coming from the lungs of a boy. The moan rose, then descended.

Snakeyes froze like a rabbit in the presence of a vast predator. His eyes went wide. The saliva coating his tongue thickened. The sounds of the kitchen dampened and in their place, he heard the wind and the rain from beyond the swinging back door. 

Byron who was no longer Byron lifted himself atop the metal counter. Alexei and Snakeyes gaped at him. From above, Byron stretched his arms to either side, as if all creation were his to claim. He fixed Snakeyes in his gaze, continuing to moan.

The wind and rain seemed to grow louder. The back door swung open once more. The darkness from beyond the doorframe seemed to take on form. It stepped forward, a figure out of dreams and visions. 

Alexei followed Snakeye’s gaze and rubbed his eyes at what he seemed to see. For one moment, the darkness beyond the door resolved into something wet and wooly, thick-framed with the horns of a bull, staff in one hand. For another moment, he thought he saw a wolf in a man’s robe. A name welled upward from deep in his unconscious, left there from an unremembered proximity to two undergrads at a beach cafe who spoke reverentially of Slavic mythology: Veles, Lord of Beasts. But when he blinked, there was nothing but the darkness beyond the door and the sound of rain.

Snakeyes stood petrified as he saw the figure push the door aside with long, sinuous limbs. Was it really there? He rubbed his eyes. The figure faded…and then returned. It’s head, the skull of a stag, turned toward him and seemed to stare with the hollows of its eye-sockets. His grandmother’s voice named this being from long-forgotten nightmares, the lord of the forest who would kidnap him if he strayed off too far.

He repeated it, breathlessly: “…Leshy!”

He had strayed off too far. Suddenly Snakeyes was aware of his flesh and his organs. We was aware of the way one could trip from a foothill to be impaled by the branch of a fallen tree. For the first time in his life, he understood the finality of death, the way his body would rot into nothing, leaving nothing of mind behind.

The remaining mote of awareness that was Byron felt behind him not Leshy, but a blue-skinned man. His eyes were white, unpupiled. Great antlers sprung from his shaggy hair. A boar and a wolf huffed and growled beside him, braced to lunge. It was Cernunnos, the horned god. He had come to return a soul to the dirt.

Alexei came to his senses, steadied the gun with his right hand, and aimed it at Snakeye’s horror-struck eyes. Snakeyes’s head snapped back, and then he was no more.

Alexei walked around the counter and planted a second bullet between the eyebrows for good measure. Then he spat on the lifeless matter beneath him.

When he turned, something in the body of a boy still stood above him, watching him with eyes millions of years old.