Gulpswallow

March, 2024

Pullman Grier’s life was shit. And with that came a few enemies.

Elevators, firstly. Elevators and buses.

This particular elevator had been a gamble, but the stairs would have taken time. Time he did not have. Pressure was building. Muscles were shifting. The black panic bile rose in the back of his throat.

His fryer grease coating glistened in the flickering hallway lights as the door scraped open. One inch. Two. Wide enough to squeeze through. Pull choked back the bile and staggered from the dim, reeking lift.

Elevators, buses, his own rotting innards.

At the end of the squelching, almost alive carpet, his apartment door beckoned. He frantically ripped his keys from the pocket of his stained uniform pants, catching one of them on the seam just enough to tear it. A curse escaped his chapped lips as he flicked aside the irrelevant keys. Quote-unquote security door. Lockbox. One to the lock of a long-since stolen bike.

Elevators, buses, his own rotting innards, locks.

Maybe you should warn your current enemies that all your childhood enemies are de-

Deadbolt!

The lock snapped open, and he threw his bony shoulder against the sticking door. The red lightbulbs flared overhead. His belt buckle released. His bowels howled in anticipation. Pants and gotch fell to the floor, settling over wet shoes. The apartment door slammed behind him with a loud bang. At one in the morning, the neighbours would likely complain, but they could lick his cold-puckered scrotum.

Pants around his ankles, he hobbled towards the refuge of the rust-stained bathroom and sat on the toilet, still wearing his ragged winter coat.

An explosion wracked the tiny bachelor apartment.

Several flushes later, Pull half walked, half limped out of the bathroom, still clutching his abdomen. He paused, briefly considered returning, then plunked down on the office chair rescued from beside an alley dumpster. He placed his elbows on the nearby desk and his head in his hands.

Another gurgle evoked a grimace and a pained moan.

It’s stress… Probably, a parody of doctors past, most of whom had long since moved out of town, theorized in his head. You’re still a young man. About what? Thirty-five? Twenty-two?! Jesus. So… Maybe diet… Maybe? ... What’s that you say? What happened? Jesus Christ! Hey, Jenkins, come in here! Listen to what this fucked up kid thinks happened to him.

Yeah? This better be good; I’m up to my elbow in Mr. Herman.

Go ahead, kid.

Silence. Braying laughter.

Isn’t that the most fucked up thing you ever heard? Welp, I’m out of here, Jenkins. This podunk prairie shithole doesn’t pay me enough for this shit. Get out of here, kid. Relax a little. Your asshole will thank you.

Yeah. Herman’s practically comatose, and his asshole is spectacular.

Relax. Just relax. Easiest thing in the whole fucking hellscape of a world. Right?

Stripping off his grease-caked ‘Winnipeg’s #1 Fat Boy’ shirt to reveal protruding ribs along which ran a trio of parallel white scars, Pull looked around the dingy, peeling wallpaper and water-damaged walls underneath.

Relax. Right.

Find a girlfriend.

His stomach gurgled, and a new sputtering explosion ripped through the apartment.

Girlfriend. Right.

Find a hobby. Well, that was one he could put a big ol’ check mark beside, at least. One that wasn’t horribly expensive. One that eased his mind. What little of it that could be eased.

Pull slid the laptop on the desk closer.

Laptop was a bit of a misnomer. Laptop implied things like a screen and a battery. The Headless Mule, as he had named it, had none of the frills. Instead, it had a thrift-store TV-turned-monitor, a decade-old grimy mouse, and a seventy-dollar (used) price tag. And the previous owner had been willing to drop it off. Thank sweet, ever-loving Christ.

The machine woke slowly, bringing the Linux Lite desktop to life with a groggy yawn. The old Mule was extra sleepy tonight.

“Good boy,” Pull coaxed. “Yes, sometimes us pitiful humans need graphics.”

Several notifications slowly bubbled up as startup scripts ran. An update from a cryptid site he kept forgetting to unsubscribe from, a work schedule for the coming week, and a demand from his bank: Put more money in your account!

To relax, just add money.

And finally, the one he was waiting for.

“We got the wanker. Get on.”

Anticipation shivered up Pull’s back as he spied the handle sygard_the_mighty and its ‘Mentor’ flair. He tabbed over to the message boards. The case was titled ‘Last image of my daughter with her father.’ The page was full of pictures of a young woman, a kid really. Thin with dark skin and hair, smiling. Among the familiar images was a new one. A sun-drenched cafe and a happy couple. In the background, a man. Ruddy skin, greying beard, sunglasses.

A father who had abducted his own daughter.

The pain in his guts eased almost instantly, replaced with tingling excitement.

“Our boy picked him up three hours ago.”

Pull tabbed over to the terminal output of the script Sygard had instructed him in writing. Social media image, no geo-data. Posted two hours before the script had found it. An asshole ship passing by a lighthouse.

“Geo-locators estimate Khyber. Maybe Afghanistan.” Sygard’s following message answered his question. “Sun is right. Restaurant menu is in Pashto. They’ll know for sure in a bit.”

A printout of the girl’s photo looked down at Pull from the Victory Wall above the Mule. Beside her, the two girls they had got out of Algeria six months prior.

“What can I do?” he typed carefully.

There was a pause before the next message blooped in. “The lads are having eyes at title deeds in the area. You got the new OCR script ready?”

Pull tabbed back to the terminal. Optical character recognition. Yes.

“List of A and A’s?”

Aliases and associates. Yes.

“Have at it. Some docs are practically prehistoric. Might take a while. Give the lads a chance to pin the area down.”

Pull added the PDF folder to the script. Instantly, the laptop slowed to a crawl. Lines of text staggered up the terminal window. Algorithms wrestled text from scanned documents, translated and searched for names. The cursor moved as if through syrup. Pull grumbled and adjusted the memory usage. It would take an additional half-hour, but allow for other tasks while he waited.

“Chug, chug, chug,” he wrote.

When it became clear that no reply was imminent, Pull sat in his underwear on his single bed, allowing his mind to drift.

People disappeared.

In the modern world of global positioning and constant video surveillance, it was something of a miracle that it happened at all. But it did. In most cases, the authorities were pretty on the ball (sure they were) and had the resources to handle it, but in others… Sometimes, cops shoved cases to the bottom of the pile. Some people might think it was good that a father could disappear into the wild places of civilization with his daughter. Marry her off to some old guy so you could join the country club; why not?

“Don’t make assumptions.” Pull checked himself.

Maybe old Dad was just fucking nuts. Maybe he and the girl had just gotten lost. Possible, but from the mother’s description, unlikely.

Regardless, Mom had nowhere else to turn, and where did a person turn for answers when they were utterly forsaken? Weirdos, dorks and assholes on the internet. The weirdos, dorks and assholes that made up Deep Eyes.

“You can always depend on the kindness of strangers,” Pull muttered to the screen before rising from the bed and trudging the two steps to the tiny kitchenette.

Bagels and apples lined the interior of his bulbless fridge. He retrieved one of each and the bottle of chewable vitamins from its place next to bottles of loperamide and psyllium. The Flintstones shapes would have cost more than the store brand, but as the store brand tasted like acidic chalk, he thought it might be worth it. His bank disagreed.

He froze midway through the turn back out of the kitchenette.

A ball of black and dun fur poked along the edge of the counters. Its filth-encrusted whiskers brushed against the unbroken moulding, flicking crumbs along the floor.

Mouse.

Pull felt the hair bristle on the back of his neck, heralding a memory long shoved into the depths of his festering stomach.

Fetch me the yums.

The thick, sickly thought oozed through his brain so quickly that he had to put an arm on the counter to steady himself. The apple fell from his nerveless hand, rolling next to the cracking wood of the cabinets. Sweat beaded on his brow, and his knees shook as he gasped for a breath that had suddenly become desperate to escape his lungs.

“Fuckfuckfuck,” he wheezed, trying to maintain what little strength remained in his legs.

The bagel rolled across the floor as Pull surrendered to the inevitable, sinking to his hands and knees. Crawling, he barely made it to the bathroom.

Fetch me my yums, fobbly boy. Fetch them now!

Fobbly. Over the last decade, he had excised much of the pidgin that had taken over his childhood. Still, some words refused to go, with so many ghosts attached that they would not be exorcised so easily.

“You’re dead,” he hissed.

Never dead iffin’ you find thoughts for me, boy.

He placed his elbows on his knees and his right hand on his brow as a spasm of pain, powerful enough to bring tears, ripped through his stomach.

“Ugggghhh. Fuuuuuck.” He fought the pidgin curses with good, upstanding English ones.