We Sold Our Souls Read online

  Scottie’s jowls and chin trembled, and his eyes filled with tears. Kris made herself turn and walk to the steps. This had been a mistake. She never should have come.

  From, behind her, Scottie chanted, “You like drugs, you like brew. You won’t believe what I can do.”

  Kris froze. She turned back around, saw him sitting on the floor of his basement, trying not to cry, and something inside her unclenched. She said in rhythm, “Dead-end kids in the danger zone,” and dropped her voice an octave. “All of you are drunk or stoned.”

  Scottie laughed. Kris felt like she might cry. She’d found her best friend again, and he was broken.

  Right after Dürt Würk recorded All That Cremains they’d done a tour from Portland, down to San Diego, then over to Texas—six grueling weeks in the van. At first they’d listened to their regular tapes, but eventually they’d started digging around in the bottom of the tape crate and gotten religious about some of the weirder nuggets they found. One of them was the Runaways’ first album.

  The Runaways were a bunch of sneering seventies teenaged punkettes in black leather jackets and spandex tights and Kris had bought their album back in high school when she was trying to figure out what she liked. Outside of “Cherry Bomb” with its snarling bratitude it turned out she hadn’t much liked the Runaways. She’d thrown the tape in the tape crate without even thinking. Terry put it on while they drove across New Mexico and the whole band had gotten obsessed with “Dead End Justice,” the seven-minute epic that ended the B side. It featured a beat poetry interlude and climaxed with a high-camp rock opera between Joan Jett and Cherie Currie playing two girls sentenced to juvie for the crime of being too cool.

  They listened to it so many times the lyrics became Dürt Würk’s secret language. When they showed up at a venue full of grim skinheads, someone would growl, “You don’t sing and dance in juvie, honey.” When one of them jerked awake on the midnight drive to the next show and asked, “Where are we?” the response was inevitably, “You’re in a cheap run-down teenage jail, that’s where.”

  Now, Scottie sat in a faded lawn chair in his basement that smelled like armpits, and delivered the line they never quoted because it always sucked the fun out of the room.

  “On the planet sorrow,” he said, “there is no tomorrow.”

  Kris couldn’t think of anything to say. Water ran in the pipes in the walls. They were twenty years, a lot of lawsuits, and a car crash away from the good old days. It was a long way back home.

  “Come on,” Kris said, realizing Scottie needed her help more than she needed his. “Let’s get out of this place. It’s depressing. Let’s go to Gino’s. When’s the last time you had a really filthy Italian?”

  “I know I didn’t find everything he had in my walls,” Scottie said, shaking his head. “Now he knows you’re here.”

  Kris was desperate to get out of there, to be in the sunlight, away from this underground merch crypt.

  “Come on, Scottie,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

  “Terry did something to us, Kris,” Scottie said. “There’s a hole in the center of the world. And inside that hole…”

  Kris knew the rest of those lyrics because she’d written them for Troglodyte twenty-one years ago. In the Troglodyte mythology, there is a hole in the center of the world, and inside that hole is Black Iron Mountain, an underground empire of caverns and lava seas, ruled over by the Blind King who sees everything with the help of his Hundred Handed Eye. At the root of the mountain is the Wheel. Troglodyte was chained to the Wheel along with millions of others, which they turned pointlessly in a circle, watched eternally by the Hundred Handed Eye.

  No one in Dürt Würk ever spoke about this mythology except in lyrics they passed back and forth, expanding it, building on it, adding, subtracting, contradicting. It felt thick and lived, like a fairy tale, like something that existed before they sang about it. Troglodyte was chained to his wheel, and he couldn’t even dream of escape because he couldn’t visualize anything besides Black Iron Mountain. He lived in a prison as big as the world.

  “Terry’s a shithead,” Kris said. “But you can’t get obsessed with him. Look what that did to me. You—”

  A tinny version of some song interrupted her. Kris recognized the tune and the walls got closer. It was “Stand Strong” by Koffin.

  “Sorry,” Scottie said, as he unzipped his fanny pack and pulled out his phone.

  That’s when Kris knew something was seriously wrong.

  Scottie’s phone was wrapped in tin foil.

  He carefully unwrapped it, placed the sheet of foil on the floor, and answered.

  “Hello?” he said. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

  He flicked his eyes over to Kris. His shoulders slumped and his face went slack.

  “Okay,” he said, and hung up. He put his phone on the ground next to the foil.

  “Please, Scottie,” Kris said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Scottie unzipped his fanny pack again, rooted around inside it like a sad kangaroo, and pulled out a small gadget the color of pencil lead and cradled it in his hands. It was a gun.

  “I’m sorry, Kris,” he said. “Terry told me I have to kill you now.”

  CALLER (East of the Rockies): …the Monarch Mind Control program operated by the illuminati. They invaded my life and turned me into a Piloted Person using psychic driving techniques. They manipulate their slaves with certain wavelengths. Different songs on the radio make me violent.

  PAUL GIBSON: What about school shootings? Could those be MKUltra sleeper assassins being activated?

  CALLER (East of the Rockies): Britney Spears is a programmed Beta alter with kitten sex slave programming. You can see an alien intelligence peering out of her eyes on MTV’s For the Record. She’s not a real person anymore.

  —KIXW-AM “Resistance America AM”

  May 12, 2019

  here’s no point fighting,” Scottie said to the gun in his paw. “Terry always gets what he wants.”

  Kris’s throat was lined with something dry and gummy. “That wasn’t Terry on the phone,” she croaked.

  “It was Black Iron Mountain,” Scottie told his lap. “They speak with the same voice. You called it, Kris. Way back on Troglodyte. There is a hole in the center of the world, and inside that hole is Black Iron Mountain.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Kris said.

  Kris had always assumed that if she encountered a gun in real life, she would be strong. If some punk pulled a piece, she’d smack their wrist to the side and disarm them, point their own weapon back in their face. But right now, her hands and feet were freezing cold and her mouth was numb and all her little strategies stood revealed as wishful thinking.

  “I wrote it down for you,” Scottie said, and his eyes were the same color as the gun. “Because I have a hard time keeping everything straight.”

  Scottie squeezed his eyes shut and twisted his face into a silent scream of pain.

  “They put a concentration camp inside my brain,” he said.

  He relaxed his face, pulled the gun off his knuckle, and placed it awkwardly in his lap, kneading his temples with his fingertips. If Kris were a warrior, now was when she’d kick his lawn chair backward, immobilize him, take his weapon. Instead she stood there and tried to reason with him, like a victim.

  “You don’t need the gun, Scottie,” she managed. “We’re friends.”

  “They turn me on like a radio,” he moaned, “and the song won’t stop until somebody drops. I’m never going to reach the Blue Door, but one of us has to. Do you know what Troglodyte is?”

  He opened his eyes, picked up his gun, and smiled.

  “Troglodyte is a bullet fired from the past,” Scottie said. “You made the weapon we needed years before you knew we needed it. Why can’t I think of things like that?”

  Kris couldn’t c
ome up with a plan. She couldn’t think of anything beyond the next second. Her brain short-circuited. Upstairs, feet stomped across the living room floor, and she wanted to shout for help, but any loud sound might make him pull the trigger. Her mouth had been too dry before, but now it was too wet.

  “Please, Scottie,” Kris whispered. “Nothing you’re saying makes any sense.”

  Scottie began digging around in his fanny pack. “I wrote it all down,” he said. “It’s in here somewhere.”

  This time, Kris moved. She made herself take a step backward, then another step, then another. The farther she got from the gun, the clearer her thinking became, and now she had a plan. She needed to get upstairs and get everyone out of the house.

  “He canceled Troglodyte and buried it deep,” Scottie said, looking up, and Kris froze. “And now it’s just the five of us who know what it means. Terry wants it to just be him. You can’t fight something if you don’t even know its name. Jeez, I swear, it’s around here somewhere.”

  He pushed himself up out of his lawn chair and for a second the gun pointed directly at Kris, its barrel a black hole so big it swallowed the world. Then Scottie had his back to her, rummaging through papers by his bed. Kris took a deep breath and turned her back to Scottie, put her foot on the stairs, and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. She took one step, then the next, then the next. The stairs didn’t creak, Scottie didn’t turn around, and in seconds she was at the top, out of sight. Quietly, she turned the deadbolt, slowly she slid the chain, and then her fingers went numb.

  The padlock was snapped shut.

  She pulled on it, praying it would pop open, but it held. From the other side of the door, she heard the muffled soundtrack from the cartoon in the living room. Sick on adrenaline, veins full of bees, she looked down and saw Scottie standing at the bottom of the stairs, the gun tiny in his enormous paw.

  “I found it,” Scottie said, holding out a white envelope. Then he cocked his head. “Where are you going?”

  “Scottie,” Kris said, her voice weak. “Please.”

  She pressed herself to the door, as far away from him as she could go.

  “Come down,” Scottie said.

  “Please,” Kris begged.

  “Now!” he shouted, launching himself up the stairs.

  Kris begged and flailed her arms, but he grabbed her by the collar and dragged her back downstairs.

  “ ‘My Master’s Eye,’ ” he said, as she tried to cling to the wall. “ ‘Beneath the Wheel.’ ‘Little Sounds from Underground.’ ”

  He listed Troglodyte tracks in a loud, flat voice. Beneath all the chub, he still had the muscles of the guy who used to lug their amps onstage every night. He tossed Kris onto the concrete floor, then lowered himself into his lawn chair, and turned the gun over in his hand, considering it for a minute before resting it in his lap.

  “Joan, I’m getting tired,” Scottie said.

  Kris realized he was still, grotesquely, quoting “Dead End Justice.”

  “I’ve run out of fire,” he said.

  Scottie and Kris locked eyes. The sound trapped inside Kris’s throat escaped her mouth as a sob.

  “I can’t…” Scottie began, and took a great, shuddering breath. “I can’t go any farther.”

  His look made it clear that it was Kris’s turn. She didn’t think she could do it, but she didn’t have any free will. Scottie had the gun.

  “But Cherie,” Kris said, her voice cracking, “you must try harder.”

  Scottie Rocket smiled at her through the spit and snot sheeting down his face. He looked relieved that a long day was finally done.

  “You have to watch out for the UPS trucks,” he told her.

  “Scottie,” she said. “Don’t.”

  “They told me I had to kill someone,” he said. “They didn’t say who.”

  In one motion, he raised the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  The loudest sound Kris had ever heard exploded every air molecule at once, slapped the walls of the basement, reactivated her tinnitus. She caught a glimpse of the brightest red she’d ever seen leaping through the air and clawing toward the boxes of merch, then she squeezed her eyes shut and covered her head with her arms because she didn’t want to see that. It got quiet again except for the relentless high E whining in her left ear. She could hear something wet trying to breathe. It got the hiccups, then stopped.

  Running footsteps overhead, then a tentative knock on the basement door.

  “Scott?” Angela called down, voice muffled. “Scott!”

  Through the whine in her left ear Kris heard the knocking become pounding, then rattling as Angela twisted the knob and shook the door in its frame. The padlock. She needed keys.

  The rattling continued as Kris crawled to the body of her best friend and went through his pockets. She felt his skin already cooling through the denim as she pulled out his keys. When she turned to crawl away, her hand brushed something white on the floor and she picked that up, too. Scottie’s envelope.

  Crawling step by step, a huge weight pressing her to the floor, she finally made it to the top of the stairs and popped the padlock. The door burst open and Angela shoved her backward, but Kris grabbed both sides of the doorframe and pushed herself up and out, shoving Angela back into the kitchen, slamming the basement door behind her.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  They stood in the sunny kitchen, Angela frozen in front of Kris, Martin in the doorway, eyes moving between his mom and this strange woman covered in white dust, red smudges on her hands.

  “What did you do?” Angela asked.

  “He—” Kris started, but the words were too big for her throat. “Call 911.”

  “Martin,” Angela said, not moving, not taking her eyes off Kris. “Go in the front room and turn off that TV.”

  “Mom?” he asked, voice quavering.

  “Go!” she barked.

  He went. Still watching Kris, Angela stepped to the wall phone and pressed three buttons.

  “This is Angela Borzek,” she said, and gave her address, slow and calm. “We have a gunshot wound here, I’m not sure what happened, but we need the police and an ambulance. Right away.”

  She hung up.

  “Are you sure?” she asked Kris.

  “I’m sorry,” Kris said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re sorry,” Angela said, and looked for somewhere to sit, but she was blind and lost and spun in place.

  Kris took her arm, careful to only touch the fabric of Angela’s sweatshirt. “Come on,” she said.

  Angela yanked her arm away. “I have to see,” she said.

  Kris stepped in front of her. “No. You don’t.”

  The doorbell rang, loud chimes, and they both froze.

  “Martin!” Angela called. “Wait for me.”

  She stepped into the front hall as Martin called back, “It’s not the police, Mom. It’s UPS.”

  The front door opened and then air slapped the walls of the house, a dry snap-pop, exactly like the sound Kris had heard in the basement.

  “Wait,” Angela said to someone Kris couldn’t see, and then the noise cracked out again and Angela fell backward into the kitchen, the back of her skull hitting the floor tiles with a sound like a coconut. Her right eye oozed a slug of black liquid down the side of her face.

  Footsteps started down the hall, and Kris backed up, considered the basement door, then saw the pantry door and slipped inside, sliding it shut behind her. She sank to the floor and hugged her knees tight. Through the louvers she saw two men in brown UPS uniforms standing over Angela. Kris thought about Ursula, somewhere in the house, changing into her soccer shorts, looking for her shin guards. These guys didn’t know she was home.

  Upstairs, a toilet flushed.

  One of the men left th
e room. Kris heard him on the stairs. The flushing sound got louder as the bathroom door opened, then a sharp snap-pop cut through the air, and there was a sound like a sack of laundry falling over.

  Kris breathed as quietly as she could. She wanted to live so bad.

  The first UPS man walked the perimeter of the kitchen. He paused at the back door, then stopped in front of the pantry. Kris could see the brown laces in his shoes.

  The other UPS man returned to the kitchen, the man at the pantry door turned, and together they went downstairs. The kitchen got quiet. Kris smelled the stink of a struck match. There were footsteps coming up the stairs and one of the UPS men walked past carrying Scottie’s box of Ziploc bags. Kris heard him go down the hallway and out the front door.

  She had to go before the other one came upstairs. Quietly, she rattled the pantry door back on its tracks, stepped out, and closed it behind her. Gun smoke swirled in the sunlight. Angela lay on her back, still staring up at the ceiling with one eye, the other eye weeping onto the tiles beneath her head. Her upper lip was pulled up, showing slightly bucked teeth.

  The sound of feet coming up the basement stairs pushed Kris through the back door, and out into the warm air and the faraway sound of kids playing basketball. She sprinted around the side of the house, away from the boxy, brown UPS truck parked in Scottie’s driveway. Another UPS truck passed her and the driver parked in front of Scottie’s house and got out.

  Kris reached her dad’s car and pulled away while she was still closing her door, driving straight past Scottie’s house where the UPS driver stood on the porch. He looked up from his tablet as she sped by.

  Scottie had been right about the UPS trucks. But who would believe her? No one. Where could she go? Nowhere. If she told anyone, they’d say she did it. Or something. She didn’t know. What else had Scottie been right about? She couldn’t think. What Scottie had done, what had happened in his house, to his family—it was a big black mountain pressing her down. She would never get out from beneath its weight. It was too much. All she knew was that Scottie Rocket was right. Terry was going to kill them all.