The hell-engine exploded in a burst of emerald fire, hurling soot and scrap metal in all directions. Jack and Holmes dove behind the husk of their discarded APC, wincing as the chassis rang with a dozen ragged impacts.

"London Bridge is falling down," Jack chanted, his laughter jiggling the Masonic charms on his coat.

"I'm afraid," Holmes said, glancing around the edge of the vehicle, "that you must speak in the past tense."

He glanced up and down the street, his keen eyes scanning for any sign of trouble. There was nothing; the only thing that moved was the half-severed leg of an Eisenkommando, swaying in the unnatural wind.

"Nothing," the great detective said, hunkering down against the APC. "Tepes must be gathering his forces for a defensive."

"We've got him on the run." Jack's grin was a knife blade in the dark.

"Have I mentioned how pleased I am," Holmes said, as he loaded another syringe into his rifle, "at how aristocratic your accent is?"

"Afraid I was street-trash?" Jack asked, pulling out his whetstone.

"No." Holmes clapped the brass-sheathed weapon shut. "Watson was convinced you'd been educated in America."

They darted out from behind the vehicle, running with speed and caution up the scrap-choked street. They rounded the gutted remains of a spider-tank, its spear-tipped legs embedded in the concrete wall of a law office, and stopped in their tracks. There, just over a mound of rust and rubble, was the Gothic dome of the Reichstag.

"There we are," Jack said, licking at his teeth. "Our goal at last."

Holmes shook his head. "No." He gestured across the way, to a building with a more squat, triangular roof. "The Reich held their meetings in the Krolloper. That's where Tepes and his children will be."

"Is it?"

Their muscles went rigid as they turned. Behind them, amassed in a perfect triangle, stood ten tall, gaunt men, dressed in the somber black uniform of the Schutzstaffel. At the fore of the group stood a man with pale skin, cool grey eyes, and just the hint of an arrogant smirk about his lips.

"The Great Detective," he said, with an almost parodic German accent. "What a pleasure it is to make your acquaintance. I am--"

"Lord Ruthven," Holmes interjected. "English nobleman, vampire, and both friend and nemesis of the late, lamented John Polidori."

Ruthven's face was a mask of ice. "You know of me."

"I make it my business to know all the famous faces among the undead, and not even your attempt at a Germanic accent could hope to mask an Oxford education." Holmes stiffened his back, regarding the lead vampire with disdain. "Polidori did a brave thing in unmasking you."

Ruthven's smirk broadened. "So educated. Too bad that will not save you."

Holmes returned the look of insouciance. "Servants of the Count, then? A curious position for a man of English nobility."

"I am no man," Ruthven growled, disgusted.

"Tell me," Holmes said, unperturbed, "why is it you wear SS uniforms, when Tepes has so thoroughly crushed the Reich? Is it some sort of trophy?"

"Ever the great deductive mind," Ruthven sneered. "I will enjoy feasting upon it. Achtu--"

He raised his hand, and paused, mouth contorted in horror. The air echoed with the cold shiver of a well-sharpened blade.

Behind Ruthven, one of the uniformed vampires took two slow, uneven steps to the right, staring at the ground in slack-jawed confusion. A thin band of black appeared at his neck, expanding until his entire skull rolled off his shoulders, leaving him to collapse in a heap of bones and ash.

"Himmel!" shouted one of the vampires.

Ruthven stared at the remains of his minion, already blowing about to mix with the oil and grease of the fallen machines. He looked over the group of vampires at Jack, crouched down in a fighting position, grinning as he brandished two iron knives.

"It is a well-known fact," Holmes pontificated, "that a vampire is best killed by a wooden stake through the heart. But lesser-known is the original story Stoker penned, stating that the way to kill one of the Nosferatu is to plunge an iron stake into his heart, and then remove his head."

Ruthven turned toward the detective, mouth agape.

"Another fact," Holmes said, "and lesser-known still--is that you are not the only ones Dracula has cursed."

There was another blur, and a second of the vampires collapsed, spurting ashes and screams.

"Go, Holmes!" Jack shouted, spinning his knives. "I've got these Huns under control!"

Holmes turned toward the Reichstag, silhouetted against the full moon. With a look of dark sympathy for Jack, and a look of disgust for himself, he dropped his hands to the ground and started forward, wincing as his body warped into that of a wolf.

He took the mountain of scrap with no difficulty, nimble paws finding the blunt and solid parts of the mass. He ran despite the noises of the melee behind him, taking heart at each sadistic jeer from his erstwhile partner. Within seconds the sounds were blunted by the heap, and he was touching down on the cracked pavement of the Königsplatz. He took a moment to catch his breath, and steeled himself for the all-body shudder of the transformation back into a man. It came without difficulty, leaving Holmes whole and clothed, but with a dark frown smeared across his face. He dismissed his troubling thoughts with a shudder, and set about checking his brass-sheathed rifle, examining it for dents and warps.

It was the sound of a stray pebble that brought him to his feet. The great detective wheeled about, listening for another sound, anything that would give him a direction. But the next sound was a blast of steam, and it was close, within twenty feet--and directly behind him.

It was one of the Teufelspinnen, the man-sized iron spiders that had laid waste to Hitler's bunker. It careened down the slope at speed, stopping an arm's length from Holmes with its sponson-mounted camera flashing at full tilt. Holmes winced as he thought of his image, left indelible on that film. He watched the Teufelspinne with grim determination, and let his lighting-quick finger cock back the rifle's hammer.

Another flash; another burst of steam; a second machine had landed in the plaza to Holmes' left, its camera also going. He tried to back up, and heard the clanking of yet another Teufelspinne coming in for a flank. He bit his lip, his fingers quivering as he fought back the urge to swear.

More spinning, more clanking, until there were five in all, their cameras throwing out a plastic din of shutters flapping open and closed. They stood for a full minute, observing but not moving, watching the detective trying to decide where to strike.

"So this is it," Holmes said, crooking his finger through the trigger. "Well...let's see how many of you fall with me..."

There was a great whine as the machine-creatures shut up their steam valves; then, with a final, decisive clap, all their cameras came to a halt, and they went ricketing back up the hillsides, scuttling along with full heads of smoke and steam trailing behind them.

Holmes did not waste a moment in confusion; he brought the rifle up to his shoulder, and started a slow, careful spin at the center of the plaza. He felt the muscles in his hand shake, but dared not snatch up one of his syringes for relief. At last, as the twinge began to wrack his patience, there came the expected sound: a great, apocalyptic grinding, the rattling sound of tank treads put into full, horrible motion. Holmes spun toward the noise, and watched as one of the Reich's most horrific inventions lurched to a halt at the top of the hill.

It stood ten feet tall at the shoulder, its legs replaced by tank treads and a pair of heavy machine-guns. Its body was once a reflective silver, now reduced to brown and grey by years of dust and combat. It had four arms, each ending in some new and ghastly device for shredding and burning, and atop it all, as the final atrocity, was a human head. Holmes ducked into the shadow of the Krolloper, steadying his rifle as he took aim at the human head. What he saw, squinting there in the smog-choked darkness, brought ice to his veins.

"No..."

He spun, ducking behind a pillar just as the machine sprayed the front of the opera house with bullets.

"Hello, dear Holmes!" the head shouted mockingly. "It's been a long time!"

Holmes sat with his back pressed to the pillar, sucking in long, dread-filled breaths.

"A little present from your friends in the Eisenreich!" the machine called. "We thought you'd want to finish this!"

The head had been thin and athletic when he'd seen it, with a great, bushy mustache. Its skin was a rich, special kind of brown--the brown of a military man who had served in Afghanistan.

"Why do you hide, Holmes?!" jeered the machine. "Don't you want to see your old friend Watson?! I would think this would be...elementary."

The ice in Holmes' blood dissolved. He rose to his feet, and cocked back the hammer on his rifle. "I know Watson better than any man," he yelled, his voice echoing across the plaza. "And I know that you, creature, are not Watson!"

"What are you saying?! It's me, old boy! It's me!"

Holmes let out a high, bitter laugh. "And there you've failed, hellspawn. You have his face, you have his voice, but you lack his memory. You've fallen into the trap set by Doyle. Watson and I shared many in-jokes...but I never told him anything was elementary."

There was a long, pendulous silence. Then, with a great burst of steam, the creature masked as Watson let out an inhuman screech, and the Königplatz rang with the sound of the machine rocketing toward Holmes.

The great detective watched the statuary on the front of the Krolloper, counting to himself as it was blocked out by the machine's massive shadow. Fifteen feet...ten feet...five...

He leapt out from behind the pillar, vaulting across to the next one. As he moved, he let fly two rounds from the rifle, and flinched with satisfaction as he heard them strike flesh. The creature let out another salvo of machine-gun fire, but it struck only concrete and doors.

"What..." Watson's voice was thick and slow. The plaza shuddered as one of the mechanical limbs dropped to the ground, useless. "What have you done..."

"It was not hard to deduce that the Reich's Höllemachinen were powered by living flesh at their centers. And from that, I was able to create the perfect weapon."

Holmes spun out from behind the pillar, glaring balefully into the monster's face. Sticking out from its flesh, glassy and wet, were two long hypodermic syringes.

"What have you done to me..." Watson's face drooled.

"Cocaine," Holmes announced. "In a seven-percent solution."

He cocked back the hammer, exposing another gleaming needle. The creature's eyes widened with fear.

"The ass-kicking is afoot."

Send.

Light another cigarette. Stare at the GMail interface.

Send.

Run your hands through your hair. Choke. Dig your fingernails into the couch cushions.

Send.

Mitchell sat on his floor, back against the couch, and let his eyes drift across a sea of light and sound. The coffee table in front of him was a soup of cables and monitors and heat-sinks; every machine he owned, everything that might offer even the slightest aid in his search, had been gathered up and brought into the living room. When he'd first turned them all on, he'd blown a fuse; all he wanted, as he picked the lock on the fuse-box, was for her to be there to laugh at him for this.

Put out your cigarette. Bite your own finger.

Send.

Five messages in as many minutes, and a dozen before that, each more transparent than the last; if somehow she was still alive, still surviving, he was going to get the longest string of insults in the history of mankind. And then possibly a thump on the arm.

He'd even take hate at this point; a torch may burn, but it still sheds light.

Hate...he clicked back over to her email. Three text files: "Dead," "Missing," "What the Fuck" (Mitchell wanted to hug her for that, her own stamp on an old idea; his arms ached, and he double-clicked hard enough to shake the mouse). Three files; three possibilities; not a happy choice among them.

"I'm counting on you to figure things out. You're my fail safe. Don't let me down."

Something fluttered in his chest as he read it over again. He hadn't dared to hope when he'd first gotten it; this was an old plan she'd forgotten, the email had been lost in the tangle of spam-catchers and bounced IPs, the messages were clearly out of date and no longer relevant--but no. There it was.

He minimized the window, and swung his attention over the riot of scripts and sub-routines devouring his cycles. Spiders, web searches, a thousand shattered password gates and seven life sentences' worth of trespassing, falsified identities, and outright piracy, all focused on the idea that somewhere, somehow, there would be a blurred image of her. He'd know it by the shade of her hair, the slow, purposeful walk; the way she kept her hands in her jacket pockets, guarding them like some buried treasure. If he couldn't find her, he'd find her killer, and then...

...then he and Phineas would have cause to speak again.

Mitchell detested murder as a rule, human, vampire, or otherwise. And it wasn't as though Mika didn't invite enmity (she had, after all, almost gained his more than once). But if they could have seen her when she was alone with him...if they had ever found a chink in her well-sharpened armor...

He shook his head, and went back to the emails. He opened the "Dead" file once more, and gave it a scan that softened every tension line from his face.

"I love you, anyway, that's all I wanted to say."

Touch the screen. Close your eyes.

Print.

The time for death would come later. For now, she wanted him to live; and that point, at least, proved that they were capable of reaching a consensus.

He took her letter into his bedroom, brushing a finger along the page before he folded it up.

"If there's anything that seems like it would make you feel better, well, keep it."

He tossed the letter onto the bed, next to the hat and the gloves. Black canvas, brown leather. He picked up one of the gloves, and with a bloodless look of embarrassment, ran it across his cheek.

"It's going to be okay," he whispered.

The gloves went into the box atop the letter, and the hat on top of them; onto the top of the box, he taped a single picture, a blurred profile of red hair and pale skin, the background a warm haze of shadows. No-one else could see it, but he knew that when he took it, she was giving someone her small, razor-tipped smile.

"I hope you can find someone you trust enough to finish the work."

The box went into his closet, next to a long-box full of X-Men comics. For that, he would really get thumped.

Would have gotten. Would have.

"I know you're going to be really upset about this, me being dead and all, and I'm not going to be able to make it okay for you again."

He stared up at the box, eyes rimmed with tears.

"You already have, Mika." A half-smile hooked across his face. "You already have."

Close the door. Sit down. Write a note to yourself so you never forget.

Send.

Silver Key comes on like mescaline--four hours of scrabbling at every stray thought wondering if that's the hallucination talking, and then right as you're sharpening your Bowie knife and thinking about jugular for breakfast it hits your third eye like a mack truck, leaves you flattened out on the ground seeing dead people and thinking with all your heart that you can walk through walls.

My name's Micah Butynski. I can fly and spit fire.

I'm in this dump masquerading as a goth club because of my editor, a fat sack of cynicism and education that calls itself Jack Bellows. He heard about the Skag craze developing in the city--"some new drug", he called it, as if that summed up everything I could possibly need to know--and decided that this would be the perfect article for One Bullet Left, the latest exclamation point on his loud insistence that the world is a piece of shit covered in smaller, smellier shit.

Don't blame me for that metaphor. He put it in my brain.

Normally I probably wouldn't do a drug story--much as I love Hunter S. Thompson I don't want to find myself sitting on a ranch with a gun to my head, wondering where I fucked up and let all the pain into my muscles--but Skag interested me, because I'd encountered it two years ago, when I'd first started my internship. I first heard about it from a buddy named Muppet--Max, actually, but he had that wild pink hair that you insisted had to have been skinned from some innocent felt scalp. Muppet started as a psychology major and ended up as a screaming lunatic on the streets of San Francisco, giving the Bushman a run for his money. He claimed he could tell which people were secretly giant insects wearing human skin, but he needed to stay high to find them. I personally blame Heroes for teaching drug addicts that sometimes it's a justifiable sacrifice.

Skag apparently comes in pill form--the more literate users refer to it as Devil's Aspirin, though for most people it appears to be expressed as a specific series of gaps in your stream of drool. According to my editor's source, who chose not to be named but I insist on calling Henry, it started as a street drug and wound up skirling its way up into the heads of the would-be cognoscenti, finally ending up, as do all decent drugs gone wrong, at raves. It's a hallucinogen, supposedly chemically similar to DMT or whatever the crap is that the South American shamans chew, but what interests me isn't its effects, but its culture.

First of all, Skag users are, uniformly, from what I can tell, clean of all other substances. They don't drink, they don't smoke, they don't even take painkillers (if you believe Muppet and Henry anyway, who each have diatribes about aspirin that will make your pubic hairs curl). Last I checked, even heroin users smoke up after a good dose, and that shit is supposed to be 100% pure heaven, if you can get past the quick-dry cement. Second, Skag users seem to attribute to the drug a kind of level-headed form of reverence--not the crazy, anarchic attitude about LSD that so many hippies seem to muster up, or the insistence by pot smokers that "herb" is the golden key to world peace, but a sort of healthy respect for it as a potent tool (that's the word that grabbed my attention).

But more than any of that Skag is the one drug I have ever encountered whose pushers are elitist; they sell to people they know and people those people know, but they never seem to go beyond second remove, and according to what rumors I could piece together even some of those people don't get it, if the drug dealer doesn't like the cut of their gib. Seriously, who the fuck puts drug addicts through an interview process? If it hadn't been for that, I probably wouldn't have tried it; but it's the classic human response--if you try to censor it, someone will do their level best to bring it into the public light.

Which brings me to the King of Clubs. I normally wouldn't diss one of the more famous clubs in Mountain View, but seriously, it's a dump. 50 square feet of cavernous black and tables that look like they fled from a diner does not constitute a goth club, no matter how much Beborn Beton you play. Henry said that Skag is hard to get ahold of if you don't already know a dealer, but Muppet insisted that he had no trouble finding it. Of course, Muppet insisted on a lot of things, so I put the pressure on Henry and got him to tell me that of the three or four people dealing quality Skag (apparently some people are passing off Vicodin dipped in LSD as the real stuff), the one most open to new clientele was a guy down in Mountain View who called himself Little Buddy. Apparently "Big Papa" and "Rusty Razors" were both already under copyright, and he was forced to go with the name of a pullstring doll. Little Buddy mostly deals out of his house, but once a month he goes to the King of Clubs and gathers new people for an interview. Luckily for me, I own a leather trench-coat and a powerful sense of irony.

I find Little Buddy through a series of pointed fingers and smirks; everybody from the obese bouncer to the scraggle-haired bartender seems to find my desire to talk to this guy uproariously funny, right up until I talk to a Kindergoth girl with hair like a melted Popsicle and the kind of hollow eyes you usually see on hookers. They're green, I think, but it's hard to tell under the glaze of sorrow.

"You don't want to talk to Little Buddy," she insists, chewing on her thumbnail. Is that supposed to be calculated to disarm me?

"I think I do, actually," I say--shout, rather. So far, everyone but her has been a bitch to hear over the pulsing industrial noise-belches that they're calling music. But for some reason, she comes through clear as a bell.

She chews at her thumb some more, staring at the floor. "You really don't want to talk to Little Buddy."

"I'm telling you, I do."

She pops the thumb out of her mouth, and stares at me like I'm on the verge of growing a second head (Oh, irony of ironies). "What do you want?"

I look around, sneer at the grinning bartender, and lean in close to answer. "An interview."

She cocks her eyebrow, and looks down at my coat. "Notepad," she says, with a nod toward the wire spiral sticking out of my pocket. "You a journalist?"

"Yes. But not tonight." I could barely repress the urge to wink or do a special knock of some kind.

She looks around again, and with a heavy sigh, slips down off her stool. "I'll go find him."

She walks off with a gait like a defeated army, a heavy and loping tromp that suggests whatever fucked her over did it long and did it bad. I can't help but feel angry around people like that--at the injustice of it, sure, but mostly at the fact that she neither had the guts to suck it up and heal or the kinds of friends who would smack her at the right angle to make her try. She disappears through a beaded curtain (Jesus, when does Richard Roundtree come out to the tune of Isaac Hayes?), and I see nary a shadow from inside.

I sit and pick my nails, order an appletini from the greasy boy behind the bar, and spend my time wondering how he could possibly think hair that long and that dead was a good idea. After the drink is half-gone and I've decided the rest can't possibly be an improvement, I slap an extra one on the bar with some mumbled dig about a few more minutes of bartending school, and stalk on over to the beaded curtain. If Little Buddy has decided to wait me out, it's time to go Thompson on him.

On the way in, I throw my notepad in the trash; we all have our little rituals.

The beaded curtain leads to some kind of access hall, wood panels unpainted except for a decade of dirty graffiti. I go around one corner, then another, and nearly gash my femoral artery on a cable spool covered in black candles. I start to consider maybe shouting out a hello, but for some reason I feel like that might be a sin. Don't want to do anything to piss off Little Buddy.

The room shows up about three seconds after I'm convinced I must have walked into some sort of sewer access tunnel, an abrupt ending to a kinky and cramped thirty feet of passageway. Inside, happy as a clam and choking on smoke that can't possibly be anything but cancerous, I find Little Buddy. He's a chubby guy, with the kind of potbelly that suggests he got into the absinthe and Jagermeister more than the dancing; he does nothing to minimize it, tucking his truck stop t-shirt into his cargo pants and draping on a leather trench-coat that emphasizes its protrusion. If his Mohawk was impressive before, it's just sort of a sad afterthought now--too high and kinky to be anything but comical, and too dark to not call attention to his sun-deprived cocoa-butter skin or the nicks and scars along his scalp. I can see why my editor thought this was such a hot lead.

"Little Buddy?"

He covers his eyes as he takes another long draught of smoke; he's using whatever it is out of some kind of clockwork-accented hookah, humming with fans and whistles that must be hilarious when you're stoned. So much for Skag users being otherwise substance-free. In the metaphorical sense, anyway. He exhales thunderously after a few aggravating seconds, and pulls his hand off his eyes. There is something decidedly off about his face.

"Yeah. That's me."

"Hi," I say, trying to pack as much venom as possible into one syllable. "I'm Mik."

He chuckles at me. "You spell it with a 'K', don't you?"

I flare up, my handshake tighter than it should be. What the fuck is this guy's damage? "I think it has to be spelled with a 'K'."

He shakes his head. "I mean without no C. I'm Little Buddy. You can call me Little Buddy."

Hi-fucking-larious. I'm on the verge of telling this guy he can eat my ass with a spoon, or possibly something far more witty and devastating, when he douses the smolder in the space-hookah and stands up. "So, you want some Skag?"

"Yeah," I say, with slightly more respect. I can feel the spit getting ready to go into this guy's eye. "What hoops do I have to jump through? Do I need to snatch the pebble from your hand or anythi--"

"Here." And with that, he dumped six little tinfoil balls into my hand. All I can do is stare.

"I thought--"

"You passed muster already," he replied, looking at a spot somewhere over my head.

"Passed muster?"

He gave me a shrug and a manic grin, and tapped me on the shoulder. "Take two your first time. You want some vodka to wash those down?"

What else could I do, my dear readers?

I will bare what few weaknesses I have here and admit that I was hoping for something more impressive. With all of the hype Skag has been getting among the drug crowd, I was figuring Little Buddy would be some No Limit-cover pimp, strutting around in bulletproof gold chains and dispensing raw Skag powder with the help of a few hookers. Or failing that, I imagined some sort of special room he takes all his successful interviewees to, a place specifically designed for you to hunker down and scope out the beetle people. At the very least I thought there'd be a special glass or spoon.

He took me out to the bar, and ordered a "Silver Key Special", whatever the hell he thought that was; it looked, from my brief glimpse of the bartender's ninjitsu pouring technique it looked like vodka and Blue Curacao, which struck me as about as tasty as your average bottle of hydrogen peroxide. But Little Buddy was insistent I take it, so I took it, and did my best to get all my eye rolling out of the way before we got back to his little room. I was so anxious that the trip seemed to take no time at all; when we got there, all I could do for a minute was stare at the pills of Skag. There weren't even gel-caps--whoever was packaging this stuff had skill and resources.

"Are you going to take it or frame it?" he finally asked.

I shrug, and with a deep breath, I down the pills. They're bitter as hell, acid in my mouth; I slug back the Silver Key Special, and find that, for whatever reason, it actually tastes alright this way. Little Buddy motions me to a chair, and I sit down to wait for my first Skag trip to start.

"How did you find out about me?"

I shrug again. I do a lot of that these days. "One of my--my boss's sources." I yawn so wide I feel my jaws seize; is this stuff a sedative? "He said you were the most open minded of the, the Skag dealers."

"Sources?" His hand moves to the hookah, and raw adrenalin lights my veins on fire. "You're a journalist?"

Figuring I have nothing to gain by lying anymore, and too preoccupied with my head swimming to think up a good one, I go ahead and nod. I wonder if that's the Skag keeping me calm?

Little Buddy snickers at this. "A journalist, huh? Who you write for?"

"One Bullet Left." I shake my head. "You've never read it."

His eyebrows twitch upward. "Wonder what you'll have to say about me."

I give him a drunken attempt at a wry grin. Is one toxic martini-imitation enough to get me drunk now? "I like your Mohawk."

"Wasn't my choice."

"Huh?"

He flicks a lighter over the hookah, and gives himself a nice big lungful. Whatever he's lighting, I now realize, smells absolutely terrible, and the smoke is the exact color of the old witch's hair from Snow White…for some reason, this is uproariously funny.

I ask him a few more questions, lifestyles, background, the sort of five-W things that I was taught in high school journalism. I don't remember any of his answers; I remember admitting to him that I absolutely hated journalism, and that most of my class periods were spent wondering if there was a way to saw that mole off Mrs. Trimonte's arm. After a shared chuckle about the American school system (a favorite topic), I give in and ask the burning question:

"When is this going to start working?"

Little Buddy gives me a long, serious look, and absolutely loses his shit. He seems to think this is hilarious; he rolls back into his dingy armchair and lets peals of laughter come up out of his stomach. I laugh along with him, until he starts pointing and cackling, his round goateed face folding back in on itself and showing the weight gain. He continues until I get to the breaking point and finally ask him just what the fuck is so god-damn funny.

"Your eyes," he says, and holds up a broken mirror.

I glare at him, ready to give him some choice dietary suggestions, and with knitted brow I look into the mirror shard. All my insults die in my throat.

My eyes are made of purple neon fire.

I look up at him, just in time to see him split into three rainbow-colored columns of smoke.

Skag is expensive to produce--some rare Australian herb or spider semen or something--so it's not uncommon for dealers to cut it with speed. This, I think, somewhere in the back of the chunk of prehistoric rock my brain has become, might explain why my instinct is to now cave in my knucklebones on this guy's face. Little Buddy grins at me from within one of the pillars, and the little Kindergoth from another, and there is the glacial, paralytic, world-reordering moment where I absolutely, certainly understand.

"What's the matter?" Little Buddy asks, his voice echoing up from the bottom of a well.

I stare for a whole, really parsing this out, letting it sink into my brain. If this is a Skag high, I want to make sure I have every single detail ready and waiting when I get back to my Macintosh.

"You alright over there?" he teases, and the Kindergoth grins at me with that glossy, poisoned-cherry lipstick.

That's enough cogitating on the matter. I run away.

I come crashing into walls and cutting the hell out of my knees and elbows in the corridor. The wooden slats are wider and older this time around, with a ruin of old nails and cellophane all over the floor, and in between the planks are weird fingers of pure black smoke that is insistent on grabbing at the wood. The only thing holding them back, I know for no apparent reason, is the iron hobnails driven into the walls…

I come spilling out into the main room, disrupting whatever pointless driveling the people at the bar were doing, and zero in on the front door and cold air beyond. I'm rattling off the usual excuses to them--tripped, saw a shadow--and the usual excuses to me--clear your head, go sit down, chill out, it's just a drug, it's just a drug.

It is, trust me, not just a drug.

I caught the bartender staring at me as I found an agreeable stance with which to handle the floor; he tipped me off with the huge ring of meteoric fire mounted on his brow. The way he was staring, you'd think I'd come wandering out into the front room holding Little Buddy's severed head in one hand and a weed whacker in the other.

(There was the possibility, I admitted for a moment, that I had. When I thought about it I could feel the warm blood chilling on my forearms.)

I could feel his stare in my guts; I normally might have wondered about that, possibly written some scrawled poetry, but at the moment I was too busy convincing myself I hadn't just taken drugs offered to me by three pillars of bong smoke. I saunter up to the bar, oblivious to the pain in my innards, and order a Bloody Mary. It's amazing what you can pull off if you indulge in a little propriety.

Except that's not what happens: I slap my hands on the bar like it just fucked my wife, and give the bartender the most awful rabid-animal stare I can manage, which with my beard and Jew-fro probably looks more like a peeved hamster.

"What the fuck are you staring at?!" I suppose I could have been more cliché…

He sets up a pint glass to fill, never taking his eyes off me, never even twitching a facial muscle.

"Don't go outside."

I might've been chilled if my brain wasn't a howling animal thrashing inside my skull. I just stand and seethe and wonder if caving this guy's skull in might douse that goddamn tooth-drilling eye he's got crouching on it. I could get over the bar in about two seconds, and the only person in the bar with any muscle tone on them is busy flailing around on what passes for a dance floor--

"Mik?"

I spin. The goth girl is standing there, sandwiched in her tower of green smoke. It looks like something out of an Ed Wood movie.

"What? What?" I can't tell if I'm echoing or repeating myself.

"Come back," she says, and her voice is chocolate syrup. I feel my eyelids roll shut and my mind go crawling back to the womb.

"Come back to my room," she says, and my feet start to move, until a gravelly, cynical voice adds, without a pause, "that way I can smoke you."

"I love my bones!" I scream, as I rocket out the door. Literary references in the face of mortal danger; there's an album name in that somewhere…

I come out the door to another sense of being stared at, but this one's difference, less intrusive and more caressing, like the sultry scan of a new lover. I wheel toward the feeling, just aroused enough for it to piss me off, fists cocked like a kid's impression of a prizefighter. I know I have about one second to react before Gothy McCannibal comes out the door with her friend the Eye of Sauron, but I lose that loaded moment in staring at the tattoo, going "Uh-wow," and sitting down hard on my ass.

I am dimly aware of rainwater soaking through my underpants, and the warm murmur of concern coming from the bar, but they're both distant and unwanted memories compared to the tattoo. It's just thin, hieroglyphic lines in the shape of a man with a bird's head, but it's more than that. Sitting there stoned and gasping, staring at the perfect curves and angles, wondering where the point of that beak actually ends, I realize that this man has stolen a piece of skin from a god.

What kind of bullshit am I spouting?

"The exact right kind of bullshit," the tattoo's owner croaks.

Grey hair, matted back with plenty of gel and absolutely no thought, and a craggy face that could either seduce you or void your bowels depending on its mood. Big pianist's hands, ruined from hard work that I can't imagine was legal, and the kind of corded muscles that come from a lifetime of running things down and ending their waking days with your fists. His head wears the same ring of fire as the guy behind the bar, but rendered in a neon lime hue that lit up the pupils of his eyes. His face makes me want to spit acid.

"What the fuck is your--"

The tattooed man reaches out, and presses his thumb into the air--I can think of no better words. The resultant green flash blinds me, leaves me feeling like I was just spun unrestrained on a merry-go-round. I gag, but I won't let the gorge rise any higher than it is--no way am I vomiting in a club parking lot with a skull full of designer drugs.

"Holy shit," the tattooed man says, and the part that makes me snap is that he sounds surprised.

"Holy shit?!" I yell, grateful that it doesn't sound like a gargle. "What the fuck did you expect to happ--"

That's when his ring of fire slings itself off his head and straight at my face. I hear somebody about a block away shout the brazen question "Who are you?!"

"No you don't!"

The other ring of fire comes rocketing out of nowhere and crashes straight into the green one, leaving them both to thrash and wrestle on the ground. I swear I can hear them shouting, little munchkin screams and curses that make me want to throw up just so I can remember I'm not sober.

"What…" I scrabble back along the ground. "What the hell?"

"I have to know!" the tattooed man yells. "I have to taste--"

"Not on my watch!" the bartender shouts. He's got a crown of spikes now, and wings made out of children's finger-bones. I know, somewhere in the back of my brain, that those are the manifestation of the power he's calling down, but admitting that entails admitting that he's calling down a power and my subconscious isn't just trying to tell me something.

It is, it really is; it's just not telling me anything I want to hear.

"What are you?"

A smile catches that tattooed man's face. "We're just like you." And he turns toward the bartender, and shouts something that I know was a language, but was composed entirely of ragged shrieks of hate. He raises his arms, and the night explodes with a dozen black birds, rocketing toward the bartender with hatred in their ruby eyes. But that's okay, because the bartender has just turned into a pillar of stone wrapped in snakes.

I scream, but no noise comes out. It all gets trapped in the headphones the tattooed man is wearing around his neck.

A woman runs up to me, surrounded by a haze of thick, caustic smoke, and tries to wrap her arms around me. I turn around and try to swear at her, and am again blinded as my mouth erupts in a gout of fire. She shrieks, and I'm off down the street, blacklit trees swinging and reeling past me as I shout for my car like it's some kind of dog.

The next thing I clearly understand is the dashboard glowing in front of me, and the piercing electric beep of my car telling me that I need to close my door. I'm in a parking lot at a gas station, one foot out my driver's door, munching on the bottom half of a Snickers bar. I hate Snickers bars, but then, I also hate Cheetos and Funyuns, and the rustling plastic on the floor of my car suggests that both of those happened sometime in the recent past. My mouth feels like it's freshly mowed, and I can't figure out what about Skag could possibly have inspired this.

Except possibly the desire for normality.

I grab the bottle of Coke from my drink holder, the island of sanity in the junk food morass that has invaded my vehicle, and I spew brown mist all over my windshield as I taste the unexpected septic wash of Jack Daniels. I mixed that in the parking lot? Yep--airline bottle. Down there by the wheel well. Good thing only washed-out college kids work gas stations at this hour. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was laughing at myself, and the part that was laughing was also telling me that I could fly. I'm still not sure about the fire.

I drive in a direction I pray is home, watching the signs on the highway above for guidance, and the rearview mirror for balls of green fire.

Why did I run? You must be asking that by now. Why did I run from Little Buddy?

Skag is a hallucinogen, sure, but it's also a cognitive focus--OCD in a magic little pill. And in that moment when the invisible lightning first washed over me, I saw what was in Little Buddy's hookah, and I understood what the Skag was doing. My brain, with a little chemical assistance, was forcing me to read the world's sentences backwards to check for errors. And what I saw was something that could give the entire planet a denial of service attack.

Little Buddy was the girl at the bar. She--or he, whoever came first, or rather, lived through it all--had found some way to turn him, themselves, into the other. I was guessing, judging by the jars sitting over Little Buddy's head, that there were about six or seven of these disguises, each for an occasion. Me trying to get an interview was, in some way, the interview itself. That didn't bother me, or rather, it did bother me, a whole ever-loving hell of a lot, but what really got me was how he was doing it. I'd just suspected it in the room, but when the Kindergoth tried to hug me the stink finally put the exclamation point on the revelation, and I'm really glad I didn't start puking right there.

Little Buddy was smoking powdered bone.

I'm writing this at my desk in my editor's apartment, converted at no small cost in bitching into the offices of One Bullet Left. There's nothing but booze in the refrigerator, and the cartons from old Chinese food stink with the ballistic reek of rotten garlic. Lana, the pretty but inefficient secretary, is stamping her fist on the stapler at precise four-second intervals. I've timed it.

My editor read the first two pages over my shoulder, and Lana checked out the title and awarded it a giggle. They're both very excited, though Lana is too busy dodging bill collectors to really express it, and I can't help but wonder if they're expecting what comes next.

I looked through a door last night, and I saw something that we just haven't seen before. Not since we started burning people for being weird. Not since we decided that magic meant top hats and cleverly hidden planks of wood. What I saw was…well, it was exactly the kind of thing that put Hunter S. Thompson in that red convertible. And I didn't need any expense account for this trip: I've got four more pills.

Skag is just the tip of an iceberg; only time will tell how deep this labyrinth wends. (I won't call it a rabbit hole. I won't call it a rabbit hole.) Tomorrow, I'm popping the Skag again, and I'm asking questions of the first man to show me a ball of fire on his brow.

My name is Micah Butynski. I'm the world's first Occult Journalist.