Team Rocket: Vincent & Violet

by konstantine.paradias

A story about the world of organized crime in Kanto

CHAPTER ONE:

Right now, I'm pressed against the door of some stinking motel room in Vermillion city, trying to talk some dumb-ass kid on the other side into not getting himself killed as quick as possible.

"Don't be an idiot, Azure" I tell the kid. He doesn't know it, but I can smell his fear from over here. He can't tell, but I know he's got two friends with him. Little pack of smart-asses, holed up in some seedy motel, pokeballs in hand. They probably think they can take us.

This is definitely not the way I thought I'd spend my Saturday morning.

"You take one step, man! Just one step and you're dead! I ain't leavin' til I get my money, you hear?" the kid shouts, near-hysterical. I can't see him, but I know that he's looking back to his buddies, seeking some moral support. I could just point my gun at the little seeing hole on the door right now and pull the trigger, kill him on the spot real quick and quiet.

But Mister Giovanni wanted this to be as messy as possible. Make an example of these runts he told me. Make sure people know it doesn't pay to fuck with Team Rocket.

"This wasn't the deal, kid. You were supposed to drop the pokemon off at the rendezvous point, then you'd get paid. You tried to cheat Mister Giovanni out his cut and that wasn't smart!" I tell him in my most reasonable, understanding tone. Behind me, Violet snickers. She's heard it before, usually before I bust some poor bastard's head in with a claw hammer.

"Hey, fuck Giovanni, man! And fuck you too, you lying bastard! No-one had told us we had to go up against one of the Elite Four in the first place! Nadia almost got killed!" the kid says and I know he's almost crying. The ones with him, the smart-asses in his posse aren't doing any better.

"Well, Nadia's gonna go through a hell of a lot worse if you don't open that door right now, you hear?" I tell the kid, as Violet moves closer to the door, cocking the gun in her hand silently. I know that he's tensing up right now, shaking. I can't see it, but I can smell the sweat just trickling down his face. He's about to break down, lash out, so I change my game:

"Come on, we can end this peacefully and you can fuck off back to Pallet Town and you can go breed Rattatas or whatever the hell it is you people do there for a living, huh?" as I'm talking, Violet's already crouching down in front of me, out of his field of vision. I'm taking a pokeball out of my jacket pocket, expanding it with a push of a button. A second touch and my Slyther materializes at the end of the hallway, near the fire escape.

"Lavender Town." the kid sobs. "I'm from Lavender Town. That's why I agreed to this job."

"That so?" I tell him, as I see my Slyther sneak along the walkway, away from my field of vision, moving to the motel room's window. It's only a matter of seconds before I never have to hear the kid's voice ever again. Violet raises the gun and point at the door to where the kid's chest must be. Then she grins up at me and points lower, aiming at his gut.

"They'd told me they wanted somebody who was used to handling this kind of shit we were going to work with, man. I was the only one who could take care of that thing those Silph bastards were experimenting on!" the kid thinks he's such hot shit, thinking that he's feeding me some terribly important bits of information, thinking that he's rendering himself immune by virtue of his unique skill set.

He probably thinks that if he keeps talking, he's going to tell me something I'd want to hear: inside corporate knowledge, the password to a Vermillion City bank account, the secret to turning lead into gold.

"How old are you, kid?"

"What?" he asks me, his little rant dead in its tracks. I can't see it, but I know my Slyther's perched near the window, waiting for my signal. He knows how I'm a sucker for dramatic resolutions.

"I said, how old are you?"

"I'm…eighteen. Just turned last month."

"Got laid yet?"

"I…um…"

"Come on, is that a yes or a no, you stuttering fuck?"

"I…no, no I haven't." the boy confesses and I point Violet's gun an inch lower.

"Damn shame."

Violet fires her gun and the bullet travels through the motel room's door, hitting the kid straight in the groin. His scream is muffled by the sound of crashing class, as my Slyther enters the room. The girl in the room, Nadia, she fumbles for a pokeball, screams out for one of her pets to come to her rescue. But my Slyther's greased lightning. There's a sound like tearing paper in slow motion, the buzzing of great membranous wings.

Violet kicks down the door and pops two shots at the dumb-ass who runs for the window, kneecapping him. She could kill him, but it would be nowhere near messy enough. My Slyther's hunched over Nadia and I can hear the sound of something soft coming loose, torn apart by needle-sharp teeth. On my feet, Azure's screaming, clutching at his ruined crotch. I put my boot on it and push down.

"The pokemon. Where is it." I speak softly but I know he can hear me over his own screaming. The kid fumbles for something in his jacket, tosses me a black-top pokeball that I stuff in my pocket.

"Please…ambulance…please…" he mutters as I watch Violet working her magic on the kneecapped little trainer writhing on the floor. Don't ask me how I know it, but he isn't going to be dead when she's done with him. That girl is a goddamn DaVinci with a straight-razor.

I whistle at my Slyther and warp him back into his pokeball. The wall opposite him has turned into a Jackson Pollock painting. I don't spare a look at the girl.

"I know people…I can pay you, I got money…please!" the kid screams and I know that I've just about had enough of him. My boot lifts from its place on his ruined crotch and smashes against his face once, twice, three times, until it's all just a big red wound at the end of his neck.

By the time I'm done, the kid's done twitching. The room smells like cordite, blood and undignified death. The red on violet's face matches her hair.

"Wanna grab some breakfast?" she asks me "I'm thinking waffles."

CHAPTER TWO:

The police sirens are spilling shifting rainbows on the waffle house's bare metal tables. Across the street, I can see the cops moving trolleys, carrying the nylon-wrapped grotesqueries we left behind. Something that's definitely not gum is making my boot soles cling to the linoleum floor.

"Ever told you about my dad?" I ask Violet, who's poring over the 12-page waffle menu, her tongue absent-mindedly tracing her lips. The way she looks now, all clean and hungry, I want her but I don't want her to like me.

"Mhm" she mutters, leafing through the menu. From across the street, I notice Officer Jenny clearing the path among the massed crowd. The way she looks all flustered, tired and sick of it all makes me feel like I'm looking into a mirror.

"He was a war veteran. Highly decorated, think he got a Silver Heart or something. He was fucked in the head, though" I tell her and she doesn't even glance up at me. She only taps at the menu once, licks her lips, then rings the waitress' buzzer.

"He wasn't always like that. He didn't use to scream himself to sleep before he left to fight the good fight. He didn't use to beat me either. Not when I hadn't earned it, anyway." Across the street, they're rolling out a gurney, with someone screaming riding on top of it. I hadn't noticed it in all the blood, but he's wearing designer clothes. Expensive stuff. Not something a regular hick-town trainer would wear.

"I'll have the raspberry triple-stack with a vanilla scoop" Violet tells the stone-faced waitress, aged before her time. Over her shoulder, there's a documentary showing baby Kangashkans shifting through the bleached pile of their mother's bones, trying them on. They look like ancient warriors, boys becoming men by virtue of their dead fathers.

"I was a very difficult kid for her to manage. Always used to get myself in all sorts of trouble. Didn't use to do it that much when dad was home. But after dad came back as a fucking basket case, I only got worse." I pour my heart out to her, even as she watches the Cubones shift through their dead parents' bones, looking for something to arm themselves with.

"He didn't drink, he didn't take drugs or smoke. He'd just lock himself in the basement and pump iron. Sometimes, my dad would just get in the car and drive all the way to Fuschia City and go hide in the Safari Zone. He'd let me come with and show me how to hide, how to set traps. None of the traps were made for pokemon, though" I tell Violet, as the waitress brings her the stack of waffles, soaked in syrup, coated in ice-cream. It looks downright obscene.

"He'd never talk when we were in the Safari Zone. He'd only show me how to do something and then we'd leave. Sometimes, I'd try and talk to him but he'd give me a look like I was blowing our cover. The only honest-to-God talks we'd have would be after he'd bust my lip for bullying some kid at the school. And even then he'd just shout at me before I could even get a word in." the sight of Violet wolfing down that monstrosity of a breakfast is making my stomach turn. On the TV screen, the Cubones are ganging up on a Snorlax. The behemoth lets out a roar as it tries to fight them off but its every action is too little, too late.

"Sometimes my mom would try and stop him when my dad would get carried away during one of our talks. He had never meant to hurt her, but she got a backhand every now and then, got herself a black eye that she had to make up some shit excuse for at work. The cops always went easy on him, though. No-one wanted people to stop thinking that he was a hero."

Across the street, Officer Jenny watches me. Don't ask me how I can tell, but she looks familiar. I resist the urge to flash her a smile, the kind us weary old cynics share between us. So I look back at the TV, at the Cubones quartering the Snorlax, divvying up dinner among them.

"So one day, he takes it too far. He's busy beating the everloving shit out of me because I got caught stealing some kid's lunch money at school and my mom gets in the way. He shoves her and she hits her head on a dumbbell, cracks her skull. So what I do, is I wait. I save up my money and I buy a pokeball. Then I go and catch an Oddish, the wild kind that lives just out of Viridian and pick the stun spores it grows on its body. I grind them up, put them in his coffee." I tell Violet, who's picking the sugar-soaked crumbs from her plate. Across the street, Officer Jenny has already left, following the ambulance carrying the body bags and the trainer with the ruined face.

"He drinks it, but it doesn't work the way it oughtta: see, I put too much so instead of it paralyzing him so I could scare him, it gives him brain damage. When my mom regains consciousness, she finds out that her husband, the war hero, is a goddamn vegetable."

Violet gets up, dusts herself.

"I'm going to the ladies' room real quick" she tells me and leaves me alone without a word, to stir my coffee and feel like scum.

The guy who sits across me and points a gun at my face would be doing me a favor if he pulled the trigger right now, really.

"You're a hard man to find, Vince" he tells me in his best tough-guy voice. I nod, bringing the cup of coffee to my lips, looking him over: stacked like a brick shithouse, holding the gun like a man who knows how to compensate for recoil, a face that only a mother could love.

He cocks his gun, pointing it half an inch higher. He's looking to get me right in the eye.

"Mister Fuji sends his regards" he says and I spill the hot black coffee in his face. He shoots blind but misses, even though I'm lunging at him right now, with Violet's fork in my hand.

The waitress screams as she sees me stick the fork right under his eye, impaling it in his cheek. The tough-guy tries to claw at my face, but I've already grabbed grab him by the hair; I smash his face against the bare-metal table, spilling red blots all over Violet's leftovers.

The way the tough-guy is right now, all bloodied and moaning, I could kill him in an instant, but I'm not gonna. He's a just a dumb-ass goon, sent to shake me rather than kill me. So I lean over his ear and I tell him:

"You tell Mister Fuji that he shouldn't send a flunkie to do a hitman's job"

I get up just as Violet's leaving the restroom, gun in hand.

"Who's this guy?"

"Never mind. We're getting the fuck out, right now." I tell her as I toss a twenty on the table, knowing that I'm gonna regret this later.

As we're getting in the car, speeding down the Vermillion Boulevard, Violet cracks a smile:

"Never thought you'd have to mess up a guy before you'd buy me breakfast."

The way Violet is right now, hair all tussled up, face all flustered, she looks prettier than a picture. She doesn't even spare me a glance as she's putting her clothes back on.

The way I am now, as I look myself in the mirror, I'm glad she doesn't.

"Need to use the bathroom" she says and leaves me alone, rushing to cover herself. I don't even try to sneak a peek at her. I know that, by the time we go out of that door and into the street, it'll be as if all this never happened, like the time before and the time before that.

The TV's droning on in the background, showing footage of two trainers clashing in the middle of a stadium, shouting orders at their pokemon soldiers like tiny little generals, all grit and no muscle. A Charizard spits fire on the hard earth of the stadium, fusing sand into glass and I still can't get my mind off Violet.

The secret motto of Team Rocket is: the world's your oyster, as long as you don't fuck your partner. There's no rule against it of course; no one's going to throw the book at you or slip you a severance pay check or make you go through some bullshit workplace etiquette seminar.

What they're going to do, is they're going to nod, smile, pat you on the back and then send a guy with a Machamp over to break your legs. Then, assuming that no one starts suspecting you squealed to the cops while you were in the hospital, recovering from your grievous injury (where you have to swear it was because of something that happened on your day job, the one you keep to keep the cops and the IRS off your back) they welcome you back and you get reassigned to some gruff sociopath who hates himself worse than he hates you and try to stay on his good side for the rest of your life.

I should know, I've been assigned a couple of kids exactly like that. None of them made it through the month.

On the TV screen, the Charizard's taken flight over the stadium, tangled with a Dragonair that the other trainer popped from out of his pokeball. The sound's turned all the way down, but I can hear the beasts roaring inside my head as loud and clear as I can hear Violet running the shower in the next room.

Putting on my shirt, I miss the split-second when the Charizard sinks its teeth into the Dragonair's neck. Thehe cameras zoom in into the sight, as the dragons whip their tails in the air, looking to capture the precious moment when a friendly bout becomes a bloodsport. Something rains down on the audience and I know it tastes like old nickels. In the next room, Violet cusses and I can tell she's just broken a nail.

When she gets out, she's pouting at the sight of her broken nail like a teenage girl. On the TV screen, the dragons smash down into the ground, all blood and torn scales. Reluctantly, I switch off the TV.

"I broke a nail" Violet says and I'm smiling before I can stop myself.

We're heading for the elevator, when I realize how much I just want to reach over and take a whiff from her hair. As the doors slide open, I reach out my hand and try to hold hers, but she's already stepped inside. I don't dare look at her in the mirror, because I know exactly the kind of look that she's giving me.

"Got any plans?" she asks me and I want to tell her: I'm going to go home, check up on my mother then go meet the boss and give him that pokeball we got off that trainer kid. Then I'm gonna get some shut-eye, drive to Pewter town and go there to scare the living shit out of Mister Fuji, that old fuck. Hey, wanna come with me? We can go visit the Science Museum or something afterwards.

I just nod no instead.

"Okay" she says and my heart sinks all the way down to my stomach.

She doesn't say a word all the way back to her place. When she opens the door, I turn and flash a smile, in the vain hope that she might smile back; she's already gotten out of the car by then.

"See you Monday?" she says and I'm about to say something halfway intelligent, but she's already shut the door and walks away. I don't stick around to watch her go into her house. I just gun it for the interstate, shaking all over, gritting my teeth.

Could be I'm just mad at myself. Could be I'm mad at Violet. But right now, I feel like I really need to ruin somebody's life just so I can maybe feel a little better about myself. Going down the interstate, I pass my exit and head for Lavender Town instead. In my pocket, my cellphone rings and I know exactly who's calling me. Against my better judgment, I don't pick up.

I'm doing 60, thinking: you know exactly how guys like you end up when they fuck with Team Rocket regulations, don't you? I'm thinking in my dad's voice, knowing that this is going to get me madder. In my pocket, my cellphone's rumbling and growling like an attention-starved kitten.

The speedometer's reading 80, as my dad in my head (the life-support hardware still hooked up his nostrils and into his mouth) says: go back to Giovanni, you dumb piece of shit. Go back to him, hand him the pokeball, go see your mom. You owe her that much, at least.

Inside my pocket, the cellphone stops ringing and I know I've just made a couple of very important people very angry. The thought of those old fucks going mad makes me feel better, but not by much.

I barely make the Lavender Town turn on 70, the tires screeching like mating Spearows, when the dad in my head (the cardiograph in backseat beeping a steady beeeep) says: try not to get yourself killed, for her sake. I might not have been much, but at least I had the decency to do that.

"Fuck you old man" I mumble, doing 60 as I enter Lavender Boulevard, the Pokemon Tower looming over me like a tombstone fit for titans. My dad, his life-support equipment, his voice (my voice) are dispelled. I'm all alone now, me and my spite, clenching my fingers round the steering wheel so hard it makes my knuckles ache.

I'm so mad at myself, at Mr. Fuji, at Violet, at the whole wide fucking world that I don't notice the Snorlax in the middle of the road until I've crashed into it.

"Please wake up"

Get into your car, do 60 on the interstate on a sunny day when the roads are empty. Make sure you're mad as all hell and that you're not really pay attention. Take a wrong turn, miss a sign, crash into a wall that's sprung up into the middle of the goddamn road just because it felt like it.

"Please, please she's coming…please wake up…"

Crashing into a Snorlax feels like one of those made-up crashes in TV dramas. None of it is staged, but none of it feels as if it's actually happening. When you smash into its blubbery belly there's just this push that makes the front of your car crumple like folding origami paper. You see its skin wave, fur bobbing up and down, suspended on a sea of fat and it looks almost cartoonish. You think of a tiny mouse, jumping up and down on a fat cat's belly and you might just have time to crack a smile.

"Get up. Get up. Get up…"

Then there comes the mighty push, as your car's speed is reduced to zero in no time flat and those 60 miles an hour turn into a steam hammer that's as big as the damn world and smash at the back of your head. If you're wearing a seatbelt it's biting into your chest and shoulders, probably cracking a rib as it struggles to keep you in place, leaving a blue-black snake trail across your chest The blubbery fur of the Snorlax splits and the whimsy is dispelled, as your two-ton vehicle runs through it, ripping through its skin, smashing through its ribs as it goes.

There's something on my face, something covering my nose and mouth, making it hard to breathe. Takes me a while to realize that what I'm struggling to breathe through is fact plain old oxygen. I try to sit up and white-hot pain explodes in my chest, runs across my entire body like a current.

If you're not wearing a seatbelt, then you're ejected through the windshield, smashing through plated glass. Perhaps you have time to register the cuts on your face and arms, but what you notice is how your car is now floating in mid-air, surrounded by powdered glass and Snorlax blood. To a romantic, it looks like a snowglobe from Hell. There's a buzzing noise and you know it's your blood pumping in your head, mixed with the slowed down dying roar of the great big beast. In freefall, the road seems to stretch out toward eternity, all the way to the horizon, disappearing into the sun.

And then you crash onto the asphalt and you don't think any more.

Clenching my teeth, I struggle to breathe again and get up slowly. Something grinds against my chest. Something heavy sits across my left arm. My legs feel like ice in a martini glass, a crushed mass that dreams of solidity. Something's whistling behind my eyeballs and I know that it's the sound of my own breathing.

If you were doing 60 and you're extremely lucky, then you might just land on your side against the asphalt. This way, you'll get your arm crushed and maybe risk breaking half your ribs but you will still be able to walk away from this. If you're just a regular old bastard having a bad day, God might see it fit that you land on your feet. This will turn your knees into powder and crack your spine. You won't be able to walk again, but at least you'll still be alive.

If you're me, then you're going to land on your head. Maybe your body will cushion the fall and you'll end up rolling against the asphalt, crushing every bone in your body. Your brain might also get knocked around and barely held from spilling out by sheer damn luck and the fact that you landed against some bushes.

"Mister? Can you get up, mister?"

I look beside me and all I see is a tiny little mouth and a pair of black-on-black eyes, suspended in a cloud of cotton candy. The way it moves, the sounds it makes, they sound like words but I know they can't be words. It wiggles a pair of tiny and fingerless appendages that I know they can't be arms.

"Please mister, she's coming…"

The important part is: you weren't doing 70, or they'd be hosing you off the road by now.

"You need to get out of here, mister. You need to get up!" the tiny mouth says and the black on-black eyes plead and the little limbs wiggle. The Chansey pushes something into my fist, hard and round, then clenches my fingers around it. I look around and I see that I'm in a surgery room. I can't smell anything through the mask, but I imagine the smell of disinfectant, antibiotics and old people. There's a gurney beside me, covered in cloth.

With your tiny, addled, stupid little monkey brain you're thinking: at least you got picked up by somebody who had the decency to send you to the hospital.

And then you realize that no hospital in its right mind would ever employ a fucking Chansey in the first place.

"She's here." The Chansey says before it bolts out the staff exit and the surgery room door bursts open. I turn around and all I see is a grinning face, moon-white with holes for eyes, streaked with green. There's crazy in those eyes, a kind of crazy I've seen before in a mirror on a Monday morning.

There's a smile that belongs on a wolf, starved for weeks.

"Oh. You're awake" says Nurse Joey.

***
The first thing Violet does, every time after Vincent drops her off home, is to run straight into her bathroom and run a very hot shower. She washes her hair at least four times and scrubs herself until her skin is red and almost raw, so she will get his scent off her.

Sometimes, when she has shared a motel room with Vincent, she will scrub her skin so hard that it will almost bleed. She will brush her teeth until her gums turn furnace red and she'll use plenty of mouth wash.

When Violet's certain that Vincent's smell has been eliminated by virtue of lavender oil and shea butter, she will put her uniform in the washer and then clean and sharpen her straight razor.

There's a certain art to keeping your razor nice and clean her uncle would tell her (who knew a lot about razors even though he had never been a barber himself) It's an art that entails respect and a hint of reverence, both to your tool, as well as to your job.

What you need to do, when you're done cleaning the gunk her uncle would say, his tree bark-brown eyes running across the length of the blade is make sure the blade don't grow. Blades grow, when you use them too much or when you don't take care of them. Like people, they get long in the tooth. They don't get the job done.

And Violet would nod, the little tomboy, barely eight summers old, leaning over her uncle as he opened one of the desk drawers. Her uncle would produce a length of cured leather, coated in a thick red paste. Her uncle would blow on it, drag his thumb across it until it was tight and uncreased. He'd then place the straight razor's flat side against the surface and drag it across carefully, an inch at a time, listening in to the sweet sound of steel on leather.

People sometimes use fancy means to get things sharpened. They'll use Muck acids or some expensive wetting stone that they'll brag to their buddies about her uncle would say, smiling knowingly, as he looked at the blade, the tiny identations and irregularities on its surface magically smoothed out with a single pass of the blade. Then they're going to shave off their beards, thinking they're the toughest men in town.

But if it's hurting people you're looking to do, he'd tell Violet as he'd inspect the blade under the halogen light you need only leather and a steady hand.

When Violet's straight razor edge is so clean it could be downright virginal, she clips her nails (puts them in a jar), puts on her Sunday best and brews herself a cup of tea. She doesn't know how she knows it yet, but she can feel the phone about to go off, the electrons rubbing against each other in the air around it.

When it does ring, she does not even need to check for caller ID. She picks it up, doing her best babe-in-the-woods impression.

"Why hello, Boss."

The voice that responds from the speakers makes her think of Vincent's smell, a bed of roses by comparison. She can't see it, but she knows there's a pearly-white smile that belongs on a skull on the other side of the telephone line.

"Where the hell is your partner?" ask Mister Giovanni, his tone all rusted nails and powdered glass.

***

I find myself looking into a pair of eyes that just radiate madness, my body crushed and impotent, trying to come up with something halfway intelligent to say and all I can think of is:

"Why aren't I in a hospital?"

"Because hospitals can't make you better, silly." Nurse Joey says in that sickly-sweet way you imagine bogeymen talk, all spiders and ants and crawling things.

"I need to get to a hospital. I need to-"

"Shhh. Mommy's going to make it all better now." She says and I see her turn a spigot just outside my field of vision. I can't tell, but I know that something's changed in the gas that's pumped into my mask. It smells heavier now, its scent laced with a touch of rusted pennies.

With a motion, she removes the cloth from the top of her gurney and I look at the shining, bare-metal treasures underneath. I'm no doctor, but I know that these are only made for cutting. I look at her trembling fingers and I know that she's not exactly surgeon material.

Then I see the face looking up at me from the germ-proof plastic wrapping and my testicles recede all the way up to my lungs.

Holes for eyes, wafer-thin lips, a hint of red hair, just waiting to get wrapped around sinew and muscle and bone. I think of delicate fingers twisting, changing, cutting until it finally fits.

"Mommy's going to make you right."

I try to fight back, but everything feels like a nightmare. Every motion slow, clumsy, every thought trailing across my mind slower than a slug. My tongue feels bloated and clumsy in my mouth, my heartbeat slowing down to a crawl. Nurse Joey pushes against my chest, forcing me to lay down and she feels stronger than my father, when I was six and he was bigger than God.

Nurse Joey picks something from the tray and holds it up to the light. From my point of view, held up against the white-hot bulb, it looks more like a lesion on the face of the sun. The way it glints, it reminds me of an old fat cat disappearing into the foliage, leaving behind it only a grin that's all teeth and malice.

"Soon you're going to be pretty, Sammy. Pretty like a picture." Nurse Joey says and the scream in my throat just won't come out, choked by the gas and the pain. She brings the scalpel closer and I can feel it dragging across the side of my face. My nerves scream at me for a second and then fall silent. I see it, but I can imagine red seeping across the white of the sheets. I struggle against her uselessly.

"Stop wiggling around, Sammy or I'm going to mess it up. You aren't going to be pretty, if I mess it up…" Nurse Joey says and I clench my fists. The hard black marble in my hand, left behind by the Chansey, inflates in my hand and my addled brain starts putting two and two together at what seems like a geological pace.

Mustering all my strength, fueled by terror, I mutter:

"Mommy? Where's dad?"

Nurse Joey stops dead in her tracks, the red trail on the side of my face halting, still shedding red. I can't see her, but I know the kind of look she's giving me: one full of venom, quietly bubbling inside her chest. I think of bitter old fairy tale witches, whose magic mirror has ran out of lies and has showed them the truth instead.

"Daddy won't be coming, sweetheart. Mommy made sure." Nurse Joey says, her voice a distant, malevolent sound. The pokeball in my hand is slippery, my fingers barely holding on to it as I seek the release switch.

"But I want to see dad" I say and she's suddenly over me, her face twisted in anger, her eyes wider than saucers, mad and terrible.

"Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up, you little shit!" she's screaming, as I bring the pokeball in my hand down on her head, smashing it against her eye as hard as I can, pressing the release switch. Nurse Joey stumbles back, rolling on the floor. I hear the pokeball releasing as it clatters into the floor. Something coalesces from thin air.

I try to rip the mask off my face, but my hands are numb and useless. I try to roll off the slab, but my body won't react. Only thing I can do is turn my head and try not to drift off to sleep.

I close my eyes for a second and when I open them, there something black and terrible, like smoke with the consistency of human flesh, pouring into the room.

I blink and I see Nurse Joey screaming, the red in her hair cascading off her, replaced by white.

I doze off for a moment and my ears are filled with the sound of screaming.

I look up for a moment and I see red specks of meat, caught between razor-sharp teeth.

I see a pair of eyes that bore into my soul.

Something hisses, another thing screams, gurgles, fall silent and finally, mercifully, the gas knocks me out.

Violet listens to the Boss' voice rambling on, with the receiver held an inch for her face. She always does it, when he calls. It's not a matter of personal hygiene: it's more of a matter of preventing contamination: of stopping that rusted nail voice from scraping against her brain.

Outside, a little boy is playing with his pokemon toys, crashing them against each other, preparing himself for trainerhood.

The Boss rambles on and on about big things, important things. He talks about 'jobs' and 'word on the street' he talks about his 'man over in Lavender' in a manner that he's certain it makes him sound threatening. He spits some half-hearted threat about her 'not keeping tabs on her partner'. The idea of Violet taking a fall for Vincent's sake loosens her tongue some.

Next door, the little boy goes over the fence, to roll around in the tall grass of his neighbours' back yard, left untended for weeks.

"Think it's got something to do with the guy in the diner."

"Who's that?"

"Vincent messed up a guy in the diner we went to. After the job? He had a gun."

"And you tell me this now?"

"Think the guy was a hitman. Wasn't such hot stuff though, if Vincent could mess him up."

The little boy stumbles on an old, rotted fruit cellar door. It doesn't hold his weight. He tumbles down into the dark before he can make a sound. The sound echoes like thunder underneath Violet's floorboards.

The Boss sighs from the other end of the line and Violet can almost hear the gears in his skull grind together, piecing the information. She thinks of connections being made between bits of gossip, overheard recordings from phone taps. She thinks of the Boss holding a stethoscope against a wafer-thin wall of the room where Vincent's life is set on display, turning gibberish into a coherent story.

Violet thinks of Vincent finding himself in a world of trouble, so she helps the Boss on his way. She thinks of the boy in the cellar, all quiet, all ugly.

"Vincent mentioned a Mister Fuji."

There's a moment of silence. Violet thinks of the gears in the Boss' head stopping, a tiny bell ringing somewhere out of sight. The thought of it makes her smile. The boss says:

"Thanks, doll." and hangs up.

Violet stands completely silent, listening in to the call tone, the Boss' voice lingering in her ear. Her lips curl up, her eyes narrow. She looks at her face in the mirror and she watches the frown grow more pronounced, harder.

Easy there, doll. Don't you move a muscle something slithers up from a dark place in the furthest reaches of her brain, in the dank, damp place where secrets nest.

She clenches her teeth and her lips pull back as she clutches the receiver hard enough to turn her knuckles bone-white.

Papa's gonna make it all better now the things hisses.

Violet smashes her fist at the mirror, shattering the glass, reducing the hate into a maelstrom of eyes and mouths, cheeks orbiting them like distant planets. She looks at the munsell-red blot in the center of it and the thing in her head, it rattles its tail, whispering:

Papa's gonna make you all pretty.

The Boss tries Violet's home a couple more times that day, but there's no call tone. The receiver has never been set back into place. He tries her mobile phone number, tries to get her to come over to Lavender town, help sort the mess out. No answer. Then, the Boss gets two of his men to go over to her house and try to get her, but they come back empty-handed.

Come Monday, Violet's back to work, all prim and proper. The little boy never gets back home. They never find the little bundle that Violet's buried beneath the tall grass in her back yard either.

When I open my eyes, all I can see is half a dozen halogen suns, staring down at me. The gas mask is off my face, but I can still feel the anesthetic hissing against my lips. My tongue feels like a dead thing, weakly flopping around inside my mouth.

"It's okay, you can get up now" the Chansey's voice comes from my right. It sounds distant and ridiculous, like a cartoon cricket.

I turn and look at the pink little ball with the black-on-black eyes nudging me. The tips of her extremities send pinpricks across my arm. Something inside me feels loose; something moves the wrong way as I try to get up.

As soon as I'm off the slab and my feet touch the ground, my knees turn to jelly and I flop to the floor. It's coated in something that smells like tarnished copper and antiseptic, but I decide not to dwell on it.

"Take it easy now, you're still weak." The Chansey says, as it drags my sorry ass off the floor and puts me on its back. Under the soft, pink exterior I can feel a set of muscles flex and the next moment, the Chansey's dragging me out of the surgery room effortlessly, like I'm a ragdoll.

"She's gone now. She went away. And the other thing, it went away too." The Chancey says as it drags me through a long, white corridor framed by empty cages. I'm barely conscious, but I can tell that there's more to this room that just straw bedding on the cages and the artificial scent of pine cones.

There's fear here. There's sweat and waste and the smell of tiny, hurt things that have been abandoned. There used to be discarded things here, which knew they'd been tossed in the trash. The Chansey drags me past that corridor, to a small room, furnished with nothing but a bed and a nightstand.

"You need a hospital." it says, leading me through a door into the Pokemon Center proper. "I don't know how to fix people." Little shit thinks it's helping, when in fact it's just about to get me killed.

I try to speak, but something wells up in my mouth and dribbles through my lips. The Chansey stops short of the doors to the street, putting me down.

"No hospital" I mutter between mouthfuls of blood. "Please."

The doors creak open. The sound of a car speeding past the Pokemon Center thunders inside the waiting room. The Chansey leans over me, as it's fidgeting for something in its egg pouch. I watch as it produces a dog eared leather wallet that it places in my breast pocket.

"There should be enough in here. I think." it says, as it sets my pokeball belt across my chest.

"No hospital." I let out, as the Chansey drags me out into the sidewalk, through the empty street and leaves me in an alley by a trash bin. The entire time I try to fight back, but my hands are just dead weight at my sides.

You're killing me. I try to warn it. The Chansey only looks at me and smiles.

"They're going to be here in no time." It says as it makes its way back to the Pokemon Center. Somewhere in the distance, an ambulance's siren is closing in.

You're giving me to Mister Fuji on a silver platter, you stupid bastard I try to warn it, as the red cross at the side of the vehicle blocks it form view.

It's only as I'm being carted into the ambulance and to the hospital, with an IV needle in my arm that my mind clears and I'm able to process the information of what happened back there. I think of the thing I'd glimpsed crawling out of the pokeball:

"What the hell was that?" I say then make sure to stay quiet, at least until I get to see an attorney.

"Thanks, doll." says the man with the voice full of rusted nails. With a snap of his fingers, he conjures a wet handkerchief from one of his flunkie's pockets, wiping the blood from his hands. He does it with long, careful strokes; over and under his fingers, his joints, his fingernails.

When he's done, his hands look clean, almost virginal. Only then does he place them on the desk's top, carefully, for fear of staining the polished oak wood. Absent-mindedly, he straightens the cuff of his jacket. He looks uncreased, brand-new, proper.

Had it not been for the blood spatter on his chin, you almost wouldn't be able to tell that he was just done beating the man tied on the desk chair opposite from him to within an inch of his life just a couple minutes ago.

The man with the 5,000 dollar suit and the solid silver brooch on his jacket looks at the man on the desk chair, his face now a uniform red gash, punctuated by a single eye and a mouth sporting only half its teeth and says:

"I'm sorry, Brendan, but something came up. I'm afraid we're going to have to cut this short. Gus and George, escort this man outside."

"Yes Boss, Mister Giovanni." They say, as the man leaves the room. Brandon lets out a few pitiful screams, begs through split lips and a bloated tongue. The thunder of a gunshot across the hallways puts a stop to it the very next instant.

Stupid bloody Viridian city thugs Giovanni think, as he passes by one of his men, hard at work leafing through a smut magazine with his back leaning against the door. He shoots up straight as an arrow soon as he sees him, of course. Does his best to present a salute, even.

"Evenin' Boss."

Never could get things done right. Shoulda listened to Pa on that one Giovanni considered, as he was making his way up a flight of stairs, under the harsh glare of halogen lamps. He remembered how much his father had hated those:

Too bright for their own sake. Too cold. No character in them, you know? His father would complain over dinner, looking for some inadequacy in the modern world that would assuage his fears of growing older. He'd been a construction worker, his father; union man, honest, hard-working. But he couldn't handle progress worth a damn, though. Giovanni hadn't learned much from his father, except for two things:

You keep what you build with your own two hands and never trust a Viridian man to do a proper job. He'd followed the first one to the letter: made himself a fortune, turned himself from a construction worker's son into a millionaire by the sweat of his own brow. But he had let Viridian men into Team Rocket. How bad could they be? Giovanni had thought.

And then Vince happened.

As Giovanni exits the stairway (hidden behind a tool storage) and enters his private elevator, the thought of the black-topped pokeball and the mess in Viridian City and the prospect of his grunt having somehow ended up in police custody sends shivers up his spine. His man won't squeal, of course. But the pokeball will reveal its secrets, under scrutiny.

As the elevators dings, announcing that he has arrived in the study room, Giovanni sees his personal guard scrambling about, playing at vigilance. The second he puts his foot down on the thick carpeting, the study room phone rings, shrilly. He freezes, mid-step.

The phone rings once again before it's picked up. There's the pitter-patter of tiny feet across marble tiling, wooden boards, Johto rugs, before his secretary reaches the hallway and presents him with the receiver. She mouths a name, but Giovanni already knows it.

"Mister Fuji." Giovanni says and he can't stop himself from gritting his teeth.

"I know where your boy is."

CHAPTER THREE

I wake up screaming, thinking of chalk-white covered in bits of red hair, matted with blood. I try to reach out, to touch my face and trace its shape, make sure it is still my own, but I can't move my hands.

Something's wrapped round my wrists, cold and unyielding, biting into the skin. I know they are cuffs, but the scared little monkey in my skull won't acknowledge them. Instead, it claws and screeches, pissing itself in the process.

Something touches my shoulder, soft and warm and I daren't open my eyes for fear of looking into Joey's eyes and seeing a madly grinning reflection of my own face there. I try to scream, but my throat's closed up and dry. My tongue's a lolling, dead thing that flaps around behind my teeth.

"Stop struggling" a voice speaks, millennia-old and unfathomably kind. I want to believe that I'm dead and that I somehow got into Heaven. I keep telling myself: the ambulance crashed and you got your head smashed against the grating. The nurse messed up while they were bringing you here, pumped you full of too much sedative and your heart stopped. The driver took a wrong turn and you got ejected out into the street and got run over by a car.

"It's okay, you're safe" says the voice and my delusion begins to peel away, in layers. The voice is no longer angelic; it sounds bitter and so, so tired. The hand that's resting on my shoulder is calloused and its grip is rough, intended to hurt me so I'll wake up. I keep telling myself: please God, let me be in Hell. Let me open my eyes and see them shove me in a furnace and burn me until I'm little more than a crisp. Let me see them shovel dirt on my face. Let me be in a coffin six feet under with nobody around that can hear me screaming.

Because I know that if I wake up and I'm still alive after all this, then I am worse than dead: I am just garbage with an opinion.

I open my eyes and she's standing over me, grinning a shit-eating grin. Her eyes are like orbs of turquoise, veined with black.

"Easy now. We've cuffed you." Officer Jenny says, her tone of voice the one Persians use to address cornered Ratatas. "You're in the hospital. You're going to be fine."

"I want my lawyer" I mumble.

"You'll get your lawyer." Officer Jenny says, pressing her thumb down on my shoulder, pinching a nerve. Numbness begins creeping down my right arm.

"I ain't talking until I get my lawyer." I say, putting on my best tough-guy impression.

"What were you doing in Lavender town, Vincent?" she says, pressing down harder, rendering my right arm completely useless.

"I got rights."

"You were my first bust, Vincent. When I got on the force? You probably don't remember me."

Something in me slides off its usual place and plops into my stomach. Were I standing up, my knees would have probably given way.

"You'd been charged with battery. Beaten some trainer half to death. You got off because your lawyer had passed it off as self-defense. He said the trainer had set his Hitmonlee on you. That you'd had every right to bash his skull in with a crowbar."

His name was Troy. I want to tell her. And he'd thought he could pull a fast one on me. I want to lie to her, but I just can't. She's staring into my soul right now, peeling away at the lies and the denial and seeing the violent little scumbag that pulls the strings.

"I remember the look you gave me, when you left that courtroom. Like you were the smartest man in Kanto. You'd looked at me like I was garbage, Vincent. I bet you felt like a solid gold bomb, didn't you?" Officer Jenny says, letting go of my arm. "And back in Vermillion, earlier today, when I was carting that poor kid with the mangled face to the hospital, I saw you. You'd known who I was, didn't you?"

I only nod.

"I can hurt you, Vincent. I can beat the living shit out of you right now" Officer Jenny says, taking a canister of pepper spray and setting it on my bedside table. "Or I can just spray this whole can of mace in your eyes until they burn out. And no-one would stop me. And since there's no official report by any doctors, no one would be able to prove I'd done it to you."

I try to move, but there's only the clanking of cufflinks on the side of my bed. Jenny knows I'm scared out of my skin but doesn't seem to acknowledge it.

"I could destroy you, Vincent. But I'd rather see you carted out of prison, shanked by one of your buddies." She says, getting up. "Oh, who am I kidding?"

The nightstick's in her hand before I even know it, crashing down on my chest, knocking the wind right out of me. The second hit gets me in the stomach and I retch bile. Jenny's about to smack me in the eye, when the screams start.

"What the hell's going on?"

Somewhere in the distance, someone begins screaming: a staccato tone, with a dash of panic. Something roars, scared and oh so familiar. Glass crashes and I know the shape of the arm that's crashed through it as if it was a wet tissue.

"SSSNNNOOORRRLLLAAAXXX!" it roars and I know that things can't possibly get any worse.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sun is good on Snorlax skin. Feels almost as good as rain. Grey ground good for Snorlax. Hot on warm day, cold on cold day. Brood-Mother tell Snorlax 'not-go'. So Snorlax wits until Brood-Mother sleeps, then go to grey ground and sleep. Sleep is good. Sleep is deep.

Some time, not-Snorlax fly into ear and clean. Other time, not-Snorlax walk in fur, eat lice, so Snorlax can sleep. But sometime, not-Snorlax come to wake Snorlax. Make Snorlax sight-red, smell-red, feel-red. Some time, not-Snorlax go away.

Fifteen minutes ago:

"I need a forensic examination on this sash, real quick: standard procedure, dust for prints and give me a check on the contents of the pokeballs."

"I'm not sure I can proceed without a warrant, Officer."

"Just got off the phone with Judge Mandy. Just gotta wait for the fax, is all."

"Still, I'd rather-"

This time, not-Snorlax that roars crashed in Snorlax as it slept. Fast and big, hurt Snorlax, broke bone and hurt bad. Snorlax see-red, smell-red but feel no thing. Not-Snorlax crashed and made no sound. Not-life. Snorlax see-not, smell-not, feel-not. Then Snorlax sleep long sleep on grey ground, floating with no-weight, no-feel.

"The owner of this sash is a suspect of a double homicide and severe battery of three 18-year-old trainers, murdered in cold blood. If I don't get these prints and identify these pokemon, then his lawyer is going to be here and he is going to walk away."

"Please, Officer Jenny you have to understand; I can't just-"

"One of the trainers was called Judy. That man had his Scyther-the Scyther that's in one of those pokeballs-gnaw her face off. She died on her way to the hospital. The other boy, the one who had his face mangled, they say they can't help him. That no manner of plastic surgery could salvage his face, but they could at least attach him a new pair of eyelids."

"Give me five minutes."

When Snorlax feel again, pain gone. Bone gone. Red gone. Only fear left. Fear and not-Snorlax. Tiny not-Snorlax, pink not-Snorlax, not-claw not-Snorlax. It make Snorlax go into black ball. But black ball empty and cramped. Not-warm, not-cool, only ticking. Snorlax scared and push out, but out there is nothing.

Five minutes ago:

"No, I have never seen anything like it. It's a black-top pokeball. No, the reader doesn't give me anything, all I get is this scrambled data, like it's glitched or something. What's that? No, I know the reader's working fine, I just used it on three of them and it got me readings just fine.

Out is only white-black wall that hiss. Out is only buzzing and loud noise. In is only ticking. Snorlax scared.

"Is it a what? No, It can't be a Ditto, man, Dittos can't shift when they're stuck in stasis. I'm thinking it's protected, you know? Like the ones from Johto, those silver-topped ones? Like it's a prototype or something. Hahaha, no I don't think there's a Mew in it.

"You think I ought to open it? I don't know if that's a good idea, man; there's some pretty nasty things in there. You can what? Are you sure about that? Okay, so where's the override switch? Oh, I just gotta press the button and hold it down, huh? And you're sure this will recall the pokemon? You positive, right? Cause if I end up dead and mangled, I'm coming back to haunt you! Oh, you're such a dork, dude! Okay, need to go, check this out real quick. See you man!"

Snorlax tired.

Click.

Snorlax mad.

"Out you come. One, Two, three, four…woah!"

"SSSNNNOOORRRLLLAAAXXX!"

"Oh no, God no, get back in the pokeball, get back in the-"

Splat

CHAPTER FIVE

Something breaks, two rooms over; someone screams, their voice reaching the horrified staccato where genders meet, as they are faced with imminent death. Jenny looks at me, gringing, the nightstick stopped mid-swing.

"Dear God, what is that?"

"You need to get me out of here." I tell Officer Jenny, as she fumbles with her radio.

"Dispatch, there appears to be a disturbance in Lavender town Hospital, need immediate backup."

"You have to cut me loose, please." I plead, as a garbled response is emitted from the speakers.

"Ten-Four" Officer Jenny responds.

"Don't leave me here, don't leave me here, DON'T YOU DARE LEAVE ME HERE TO DIE!" I scream at Officer Jenny, who goes out into the hallway, her hand on her pokeball sash, leaving me to fend for myself, strapped on a hospital bed with my body broken, beaten and without any means to protect myself.

Something smashes against the wall, two rooms over. I find myself thinking of plaster and smashed tiling, reduced to dust, peppering coarse fur. I think of a face that looks slightly human, distorted by fear and rage, spotted with blood that's not entirely its own.

Need to get to my pokemon. Need to defend myself before that thing comes over and chews my damn face off.

I try to move my left hand, but it's cuffed. My right hand's in a cast, my broken fingers wriggling uselessly. If I can get my hand free, then I can undo the belt that's wrapped round my waist, keeping me down. I got one good leg left, so I can hobble down to Acquisitions, get my pokemon, give myself a fighting chance.

Why I bother even considering going up against a Snorlax gone berserk is beyond me, at this point.

I look for something I can use to pick the cuffs, something I can bend and jam into the lock, to pry them open. Like an idiot, I'm praying that maybe Officer Jenny dropped one of her hairpins as she was busy beating the living shit out of me.

Somewhere in the distance, someone screams something out, a name perhaps, drowned out by the Snorlax's roar. There's a gunshot that rings out across the entire floor. Fat lot of good a 9mm is going to against a beast this size.

It's sheer terror that makes me come face to face with the only viable option:

My IV drip needle.

Oh God.

Don't ask how, but I get it off. It involves a hell of a lot more pain that it should. When I'm done, the back of my hand is like a big red, dripping stain. I jam the needle in the tight space between the handle and the mattress and bend it. The cuff's biting into my wrist the entire time, sending jolts of electricity up my arm. When the tip's properly bent, I put the needle in my mouth and jam it in the lock.

"SSSNNNOOORRLLAAAXX!"

I drop the needle and scream, as I watch it slip off the cuffs and slip out of the bed. Thankfully, the IV tube keeps it in place, but just barely out of my reach. I try to lean over and grab it with my teeth, but it wriggles away from me at the last second every time. Gritting my teeth, I reach out my cuffed hand, as far as I can. The steel bites deeper into my wrist than before. I bite my lower lip and groan against the pain. Finally, the damn thing's in my hands. I lean down and work the tip back into the cuffs, until finally, there's the familiar ka-click, sweet and eloquent like a chorus of angels.

Something hollow and metallic bounces around in the corridor, making a sound like radio-drama thunder as I'm undoing the last of my restraints. I take my first tentative steps on the floor, checking my balance: not in any condition to run, but good enough to make it to the ground floor, past reception and into Acquisitions. I've never been in the Lavender town Hospital, but if you've been in my line of work long enough, you get to know the standard layout of every hospital just the same.

Soon as I got my pokemon, I can put a fight. And if I can't then maybe I can buy me some time; get the hell out of Lavender town, go to Mister Giovanni, hand him his black-topped pokeball and act all innocent-like. Push comes to shove, I can always just promise him hits. That oughtta get on his good side.

The corridor smells like wet fur and blood and the way things smell the very second they're dead. The Snorlax has its back turned to me, busying itself with something that I'm thankful that I can't see. I hear crunching noises that I know are going to haunt me for the rest of my life. Fighting my urge to start hopping away in terror, I start hobbling as quiet as I can, making my way to the staircase.

I'm nearly scot-free, when the elevator door dings and some poor idiot security guard comes out of there, waving his tazer around as if it's a proper gun. He looks at me and goes

"The hell is going on here?"

The security guard and I barely have time to scream, as the 600-pound Snorlax comes crashing down on us.

CHAPTER SIX

Mister Fuji's schedule, June 6th:

-Morning gymnastics (9:00 am) CANCELLED

-Breakfast with Mayor (11:00 am)

-Meeting with Lavender Town Gravediggers Association, on the preservation of the Pokemon Tower (13:00 pm) CANCELLED

-Staff Interview (15:00 pm) CANCELLED

-Notify Giovanni

-Find Vincent

-Get the black pokeball.

-Arrange for evidence disposal for meeting with Team Rocket, ASAP.

The acquisition of Vincent and the black-topped pokeball, of course, had been arranged beforehand, the second Mister Fuji had been notified that a member of Team Rocket whom he was very much familiar with had just been carried to the Lavender Town hospital.

Two men were sent to pick up Vincent, with four more as backup. While Mister Fuji had known that Vincent was little more than a black-hearted thug, he was not going to eschew caution for the sake of expediency. Vincent may not have been much of a killer, but he was definitely tenacious enough to find a way to escape his grasp.

Mister Fuji had known (through a nurse who had been in his employ at a younger age) that Vincent had suffered severe trauma and that he had been found in an alley, possibly left there to die. Mister Fuji wanted to make sure that his condition was in no way critical; while he did not wish to suffer Vincent to live any longer than he ought to, he didn't want him dead, either. A dead member of Team Rocket in his town, after all, could lead to some unecessary Fuji was halfway through folding his origami crane, when his phone rang. With spider-like grace, his assistant picked it up for him and brought it to his ear.

"Yes?" Mister Fuji asked and waited for a moment until the man on the other side of the line had ceased babbling. "What did you say? A what in the hospital? Well, that wouldn't be too hard for you to deal with." Again, the babbling, now slowly degenerating to whimpering. "Have you secured the target?" A crease, halfway forming the wing of the paper-crane, straight as an arrow and then…

HHssss

"How is he gone? He is wounded. Let me speak to Darryl. Ah, I see." Mister Fuji said, as he looked at the paper crane, his wing torn, hanging by the side of its body by a mere thread. "How many of you are left? Well, I guess you will have to do. Find him, break his legs, smash his arms and bring him here. And make sure you have the black pokeball with you. Notify me as soon as you've got him."

The crane was crumbled into a tiny little ball the second Mister Fuji's assistant set the receiver back on the hook. He hadn't noticed, of course. There was only white fire in his mind, now. A fire that burned slowly, unwavering, boiling the inside of his brain and sending gusts of chill wind down his spine. His expression remained unchanged, of course; endlessly patient, almost unreadable.

"Get me the Gravediggers association." Mister Fuji told his assistant, as he began creasing a new sheet of paper, the shape in his mind wholly unlike that of a crane. "I need to call in a few favors."

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Snorlax comes at us like a great flesh-train, covered in fur, roaring, swiping its claws madly. Something smashes across my face like a bag of bricks. My right eye sees only the back of the Snorlax, coated in a Magenta film, as I am thrown out of the emergency exit and tumble down a flight of stairs.

My back of the head strikes a railing, causing my brain to rebound against the inside of my skull. The pain radiates outward and is lost in the background of terror that my body's become, all shattered bone and lacerated flesh. I get up and try to walk down another flight of stairs, when my legs give way. The flight of stairs becomes a maelstrom of grey and blue. A big old EXIT sign seems to beckon.

This way, Vincent, it says, glowing balefully, its brilliance burning into my tearing eyes. Just a little bit further. Its voice is calm, reassuring, downright Faustian. Safety in exchange for my soul. A warm, remote place where there will be no blood, no broken bone, no terror; just contentment. And all you have to do I reach out and open that door, Vince old-buddy. Reach out and touch us, no faith required, Vince old-pal.

I've opened the door, oblivious to the gust of wind on my face, when the Snorlax roars from atop two flights of stairs. I open my eyes and suddenly look down on a three-story fall into an abandoned parking lot. The monkey in my brain screeches, digs its claws into my hind brain and pulls.

Giddy-up, you bastard, Giddy-up you piece of trash!

Running down two entire flights of stairs, I'm half-stumbling, half-dragging my weight down. I pass by a woman in white and see for a moment, Nurse Joey's mad moon-face, so I punch her before I can stop myself. Through the blood pouring down from her broken nose and her bruised eye, I make out the face of a 30-simething woman, her looks faded before their time. "I'm sorry!" I shout back at her "Took you for somebody else!"

Her face is crushed under the Snorlax's rolling bulk as it smashes her against the door and it keeps coming back to her. From the fire exit below me, a huddled, screaming mass of people, patients, hospital staff, spill out, their cool and preparedness forgotten in the face of danger. Pushing past them, my fist connects with the face of an orderly, who stumbles back and causes an avalanche of bodies on the stairs. I leave them for the Snorlax (and hopefully God) to sort out.

The security team bursts through the emergency exit, screaming commands at each other, waving tasers and nightsticks around, as if those will do them any good. Might as well have gone up against the Snorlax armed with folding chairs and water guns.

"Secure the perimeter, 3-2-2"

"Go-go-go!"

"Oh my God, oh God, please help, it's a massacre! A massacre!" I scream out and the histrionics that are tinging my voice are a bit too sincere.

"Please get out of the way, sir!"

"Someone get an evac team here, stat! We need-"

"SSNNNOOORRRLLAAAXX!"

By the time the emergency exit has turned into a bundle of fur, hair and Kevlar patches, scored by the screams of the dying, I've already run out to the ground floor and making my way to Acquisitions. The thought of running out the door to the driveway and hoping into the passenger seat of the first poor son of a bitch that's in my way doesn't even cross my mind.

I'm hard at work, considering the implications of my new-found morality, as I burst into Acquisitions and look at the mess of machinery, filing cabinets and the thing with hamburger-helper for a face writhing on the floor. Grabbing a swivel chair, I smash it against the window three times futilely, before my legs give way and it crashes through the plated glass.

The caste protects my legs somewhat, but my toes turn into confetti the second I step on them. The pain is a tiny little trill, compared to the symphony of agony that's taking place in my body at this moment. Looking around, I see rows and rows of pokeballs set on shelves. No time to make them out. Picking up the hems of my patient's robe, I start shoveling them down and make my way out. Maybe these will hold.

On the way out, I notice the black pokeball, opened and devoid of content. My mind flashes back to the gout of flesh with the consistency of smoke that had poured out of it oh so long ago. As I bent over and add it to the pile, I think of chalk-white teeth, snapping shut over Nurse-Joey's jugular.

The Snorlax has burst out of the emergency exit and into the ground floor the moment I'm out of Acquisitions. It's mad-eyed, covered in blood, like something out of a fairy-tale. It tenses up the moment it sees me and unhinges a row of seats with a swipe of its calw, the second it sees me. It's mad and in pain and it's just found the bastard that's made it this way.

"Save me, you bastards!" I scream, as I pour down the pokeballs and let them clatter. Grabbing frantically for them, Pressing the release switches, I watch as the spectrum of red fills my field of vision, coalescing into distinguishable forms. There's a Scyther in there (not mine), a Pinsir (I call him Freddy), a pair of Eggsecutes, some Butterfries. A Jigglypuff rolls out, sweet and doe-eyed. Three Clefairies, terrified bu battle-ready. A Pikachu, which begins spewing electricity the second it's released. A Beedril buzzes madly.

I'm halfway through the pile when I realize that this was a pretty damn terrible idea. The Pokemon tumble onto each other, claw and bite and tear into one another. A half-dozen polywags spit jets of water and are struck by psychic Psyduck waves, released during their mad cackling. A Mankey runs up to the Snorlax and decks it on the skull, before it swiped away and thrust onto the wall, cracking the plaster.

Not once during all this time, do I stop to think that maybe what I am doing is a terrible, terrible idea. I just keep pressing buttons, release switches, screaming out:

"Kill it! Kill it! One of you shits just kill it!"

Something coalesces out of the maelstrom and swells out, begins to grow. The second it materializes, its skull crashes through the ceiling. Its tail (big as an ox) swipes at the air, sending pokemon and office stationery flying. It screams and sounds like a hundred leather gloves running across a thousand bass strings.

"GYYAAARADDOOOS!"

CHAPTER EIGHT

Excerpt from the Kanto pioneers Encyclopaedia of Wondrous Beasts, on Gyarados (then known as the Great Sea Vane):

A beast of considerable size and near limitless ferocity, the Great Sea Vane is truly proof of not only the existence of God, but of his wrath and disappointment of mankind. As long as a longship and covered in scales that can deflect even the heaviest harpoon tips, the Great Sea Vane is ever hungry, ever wrathful.

With a whip of its tail, it sends waves in the open sea, capable of sinking ships and with a roar, it unleashes from its gut the fire that burns within, reducing even the greatest ships and the best crews into fine dust that's left to sink in the ocean and pecked by the tiny fishes.

But no indicator of God's cruelty is made more obvious in the Great Sea Vane than its terrible jaws. Perpetually hanging open, equipped with rows of hidden teeth, the Great Sea Vane grabs sailors with the tip of its lower incisors and reels them in, where he chews on bone and flesh with its crooked teeth, spilling gore down its belly.

For all the ferocity and severity of the wounds bestowed, the position of the Vane's teeth is such that no wound is ever truly fatal, ensuring that the sailor bleeds out long before succumbing to his wounds. It is a cruel death, unfitting even the vilest of heretics.

The ground floor of the hospital is a warzone, a constant explosion of powdered glass, toned by the alto intrusions of screams, framed by a polka dot of blood, fur and the occasional set of scales.

Something dribbles down from my left ear but I'm too scared to check. It feels warm as it's drying on the side of my head. I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's a deep shade of red. I'm praying to God it's not clear, because clear would mean that either my eardrums have burst, or that my brain's leaking out.

Then again, it doesn't feel like my brains are leaking out. Though it might have been a welcome change, under the circumstances.

The pokemon that I let out of their pokeballs are either wounded or screaming, looking for cover. Their bodies are covered in cuts and bruises, eyes are put out. I see a Pidgey, uselessly flapping its wing on the linoleum floor, its hollow bones probably reduced to dust. I catch sight of my Scyther, if only for a moment as it retreats to a distant ceiling corner, behind-first. I try to call for it, but the pokeballs slip out of my hands before I even know it. I look at my hands, shaking uselessly and I'm thinking:

What's wrong, Vincent? You pussying out on me?

I chance a look above my front-desk cover: the sounds of battle have died down, even against the constant buzzing in my ears. I see the Snorlax and the Gyarados grappling, locked in combat, their jaws and claws looking for an opening that will give them the advantage. The Snorlax's face is a mask of hate, painted red. There's a great gash where its left eye ought to be, oozing blood and clear jelly. Its belly is a mess of jagged teeth marks and torn fur. Its claws are dug deep into the Gyarados' skull, digging into the flesh, looking for a hold in the bone underneath.

The Gyarados is spilling fish-blood, as it clenches its tail around the Snorlax. Their muscles shift like continents, grinding against each other. Every now and then, something pops. Perhaps a rib, or the spine. I can't see the Gyarados' face, but I can tell that it's missing an ear, ripped clean off.

Something inside me snaps at the sight, turning an unknown switch: I find myself thinking about the people; hospital staff, doctors, Officer Jenny (mostly Officer Jenny). I look around at the mess on the ground floor and I'm thinking:

I don't see any of them. They ought to be okay.

It takes a lot out of a man to pretend to not see the things that are definitely not pokemon, lying broken on the floor. Looking back, I wonder if I perhaps chose not to acknowledge the mess of broken hospital beds that rained down from the first floor when the Gyarados smashed its head against the ceiling.

The black pokeball's sitting on my lap. If you ask me, I think it's following me. I hold on to it, just in case. I take a deep breath, pretend that I'm praying to God, trusting my survival to a higher power and then bolt out of cover.

SAomething roars behind me. Something breaks. I'm running through the smashed plate-glass doors, cutting my feet to bloody ribbons and I daren't look back. A black, unmarked van screeches to a halt in front of me. The men in black suits burst out; I notice the origami crane death-squad brooches and scream at them:

"Shoot me, shoot me, for God's sake, shoot me!"

But the sawed-off shotguns on their hands don't rise up to meet me. They swivel past me, at whatever it is that's speeding behind me. I hear the tolling of church bells, as one of them shoves me in the passenger seat. As we're speeding away, I notice the driver's face sideview into a Noh Mask of sheer, unadulterated terror, after chancing a look at the sideview mirror. He keeps mumbling for a while, then falls silent.

"You're Mister Fuji's men, aren't you?" I ask him, clenching the black pokeball in my hands so hard it hurts. The driver just nods, the Noh Mask unphazed, unshifting.

"Thank you." I weep tears of joy. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

CHAPTER NINE

Vermillion City:

"Joey? Joey, are you awake?" came the soft voice from behind the curtain of bandages around the trainer's face. The pain had somehow subsided now, but his left eye was still aching. He kept trying to close it, but the red-haired woman with the straight razor had taken his eyelid.

"Um." said Joey, whose legs felt like they'd been hollowed out and stuffed with thumb-tacks, his every flinch a moment of constant agony, after the hollow-point bullets had shattered his kneecaps in a million pieces.

"Joey, it's dad. I need you to look at something, Joey. I need you to take a look at a man and tell me if he's the one who hurt you, okay?"

"Um" said Joey, his tongue lolling around uselessly, sometimes slipping out of the gash where his left cheeks used to be. He'd bite on it sometimes, as he struggled with the feeding tube and he'd cry like a baby, bawling his eyes out for hours.

The bandage was moved barely an inch, but Joey's eyes hurt so, so much under the glare of the phosphorescent lights. Someone placed a screen in front of his face, showing him grainy, security-camera shots of a man dressed in a hospital patient's outfit, screaming. A swipe of familiar fingers later, the man was throwing pokeballs, screaming. It took Joey exactly a second to put the face together, to match it with the horrors of the day before.

"Uuuuh!" Joey moaned, as the face of the man clicked into place. The man with the Scyther that ate Nadia, the man with the red-haired woman who smashed his best friend's face in, the man who made his face into a big red pulp. His bladder let go and Joey soiled himself, but he was too scared to care.

"I want this son of a bitch found, I want every bone in his body broken and then dragged here so my boy can pull the trigger as he's begging for his life. Understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"But first, let's give him a little something to hate himself over, really clinch the deal. Does this piece of garbage have any family?"

"Just his mother, in Saffron City. Declared an invalid from the state for the past ten years. Psychological reasons."

"Have her killed. Send him her tongue, or a finger. I'll leave that up to you."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

En Route to Lavender Town:

"What do you mean, she's not home?"

The man jabbers something through the speaker that doesn't help to alleviate Mister Giovanni's nerves. After Saturday's mess, having to spend his Sunday negotiating the trade of an invaluable asset with one of the most dangerous men in Kanto with one of his men on the line is nothing short of a waking nightmare.

"Then find her! Find her and bring her here, understood?"

He's cut off the line before the man is done talking. With Violet missing, he loses any leverage he might need to make Vincent just that little bit non-compliant, to make him perhaps bite his lip, to keep himself from spilling his gut when Mister Fuji breaks out the pliers.

"Can't this thing go any faster?" Mister Giovanni barks at the driver.

"Can't risk it, sir. There's a Snorlax that's gone on a rampage near Lavender town, might be making its way to the Freeway again."

"If we crash into it, then I'm gonna drag myself out of the wreckage just so I can kill your family. Understood?"

"Yes, sir, Mister Giovanni."

"Good man."

The driver steps on the gas and Giovanni prays to the God of his father that perhaps Vincent hasn't spilled his guts out yet. That maybe, just maybe, this won't be a disaster.

Then he thinks of Mister Fuji, clicking his pliers mockingly and knows that he's only fooling himself.

Lavender Town:

The red nurse was not enough for Ghost, not even close. By the time it had swallowed its bones, the fire in its belly had returned. There was a Chansey in the Pokemon Center, but that was too feisty and barely edible. Ghost only ate the softest parts, left the screaming meat behind.

Ghost waited for a while, until the sun went down. It burned Ghost's skin and it hated it, so it waited. But the hunger make its belly rumble, set its brain on fire. From somewhere in the distant, Ghost caught a whiff of blood, the sounds of battle. It dared the sun, creeping along the shadows of the buildings.

Ghost found the wrecked building that wrote Hospital on the front. It was falling apart. Blood was congealing on the driveway, the parking lot. There was meat strewn all over, some of it even breathing. Ghost waited until the sounds were done. It didn't feel like it was up for a fight, so it only crept closer and drew the broken bodies to it. One bite, two bites, three bites, gulp and they were gone.

The Snorlax lasted longer and the Gyarados still whipped it with its tail, as Ghost swallowed it, head first. Mashing it between its teeth, its stopped. Ghost should have been filled, but it knew there was more. It couldn't risk going without a meal again.

It like the woman in blue best. The one who kicked at it and shot it in vain. Ghost loved its meat with a hint of fear.

CHAPTER TEN

Saffron City, Six Hours Ago:

Her name had been Amanda, though no-one had ever called her that in years. She found herself struggling to remember that, as she lay on the wall-to-wall carpet on her side, her left cheek slowly turning a very vivid shade of purple from where the masked man's shotgun butt had struck her.

Amanda, she thought. Amanda Kunder. Not Mandy, or Mimi, or Mrs S she thought to herself, as one of the masked men grabbed her by the ankle and started dragging her across the carpet. Something inside her mouth felt loose and she tried moving her tongue, trying to push it out of the way. A trickle of spit and blood dribbled out of her lips.

Not Mom, or Mommy, or Ma. Amanda Kunder her name came to her again and again in waves, tearing at the great nothing wall that seemed to have blocked the highway of memory leading to her past. She saw her name written on great big billboards, stenciled in pink with faded-gold borders, the way you imagined your own name looked, when spoken by your parents on the day you were born, or by your husband as he lifted the veil from your eyes and leaned down for the kiss, or the way your baby boy spoke it for the very first time to the super-market cashier when he got lost.

It's a pretty name, isn't it? Spoke the voice of her husband-to-be from decades away, as they stood ankle-deep in sand on some far-away beach on Cinnabar Island. He wore khaki shorts, his tanned skin market by pale strips where he'd worn his flak-jacket. She wore a flower-print sundress, her skin a perfect toffee color. The thought of him smiling at her made the sight of her molars slipping out on her lips, resting on the carpet like ivory islands almost bearable.

Vincent's not the name of my father, said the father of her children. It's perfect, as they looked down at the little creature sleeping soundly in the crib. Amanda couldn't help but think of the child looking up at her with eyes that oozed malevolence, great evil thought lurking in its tiny skull, mid-formation. She thought of the baby smiling that tired old smile that he gave her every time he saw her when he was all grown up and she became a shut-in, haunted by the EKG metronome beeping beside her comatose husband.

The thought of it hurt her more than the masked man hurt her, when he pressed something flat and cold on her head and sawed her ear off. Amanda cried, but the burning sensation of her flesh being sheared off her scalp had barely registered. She focused on another far more painful thing, instead: the boy's voice, as he kissed her on the forehead, muttering his good old aphorism: Love you, Ma right before he shut the door behind him, forgetting about her for weeks at a time.

Amanda hurt, but being alive and forgotten hurt her so much more. When she looked up with her good eye at the lightless depths of the masked man's shotgun barrels, she had known she was ready for the crash and the flash that would end it all. What she wasn't ready for, was the wet sensation that splashed across her back and the side of her head and her limbs and the carpet around her. It smelled like the half-ignited discharge of her husband's military-lighter.

At that moment, Amanda realized that this was what Hell must smell like.

"Please, no…" she managed to weep, before she heard the sound of a match being struck. She saw trhe tiny point of light descending at a nightmarish pace on the puddle around her, saw the masked man running away, his mercy-shotgun moving away from her. Amanda reached out to grab the match and watched as it sent flames licking up her hands, over her nightgown and her eyes. She screamed and the flames rode along her tongue and down her throat.

Amanda Kunder died and went to Hell. But she wasn't alone on her way down that day.

Lavender Town, Mister Fuji's safehouse, Four Hours Ago :

I've spilled my guts out fifteen minutes ago, the second I hear the sound of Mister Fuji's pliers behind my back. I've handed him the black-topped pokeball by the time they've wheeled me over in this sub-basement. I've looked so hard and so desperately at the one-way glass panel on the wall that I'm no longer sick at the sight of my naked, beaten body.

Mister Fuji sighs, putting the pliers back in their gold-plated case and rubs his temples. It doesn't sink in that he's tired of the sound of my boive, until he says:

"Shut up, Vincent."

My mouth clamps shut halfway through outlining the details on a black-market tournament pokemon exchange. It doesn't hit me that he's heard what he's wanted to hear and that I probably sound like a beaten dog until about a minute later.

"Your boss is coming over to negotiate a trade for you, don't you know? He's probably hoping that you haven't spilled your guts or handed the pokeball over to me yet. He's probably thinking you're a brave man, too, to risk coming over to my turf so he can haul your sorry behind out of the fire."

I keep quiet, biting the inside of my cheek. The thought of Mister Giovanni pissed, of his eyes staring me down until I'm barely an inch tall is enough to make my heart sink all the way down to my legs, but I should deal with it when (and if) that comes up. Mister Fuji reaches back into his chest of wonders, ruffling through his tools. He says:

"There really is no reason for me to keep you alive any longer, Vincent. There's nothing stopping me from, say, taking this here needle" Mister Fuji produces a long needle with a vicious tip, placing it level with my line of sight "And shoving it through your eye and into your brain."

My mouth floods with the dull, metallic taste of absolute fear. The monkey in my head starts screaming, clawing at my hind-brain, trying to get my hands moving, my eyelids closing, my teeth snapping at the needle. It's trying to ignite my instincts of self-preservation but I know better than that. I know people like Mister Fuji (hell, I am one): this is what they want, more than anything. This is what feeds those fear-junkies. The terror.

Should I shed a single tear right now, this will be all he needs to drive that thing into my brain. It won't take much. Just a shudder or a single pleading word.

"But then again, that would be too good for you, wouldn't it, Vincent?" Mister Fuji says, placing the needle back in his chest of wonders. "Maybe I should just beat you to an inch of your life and hand you over to your boss like a screaming, bubbling bundle. Maybe he'll finish the job, then." Mister Fuji produces a cigar from his breast pocket and lights it up, puffing the acrid smoke into my face in great puffs. "Or maybe he won't and he'll leave you on the curb, to die off on your own. Sounds like something he'd do to a lowly little snitch, doesn't it?"

I don't nod or utter a single word. My eyes seek out his as he comes into view and stay locked there. My addled little brain tells me that if I don't speak, if I don't show any fear, if I don't make a single peep, then he'll leave me alone and maybe the boss will put a bullet in my brain and that will be all, folks.

I'm all big and brave and stoic, until Mister Fuji puts the cigar out in a place just out of my line of sight and the pain comes up at me in waves and I'm screaming myself hoarse, with my nostrils filled with the scent of overcooked pork and burnt hairs. Mister Fuji grinds the cigar down hard and then pulls it back, flicking the ash and then lighting it up again. I look down at the burnt mess between my legs and vomit.

"Lance's father is a very good friend of mine. You know Lance, right? Elite-Four Lance? Dragon-Breath Lance?" Mister Fuji says, pulling up a chair and sitting in front of me, blowing puffs of smoke into my face between words. "We used to do business with his father. Helped him get off the ground with pokemon import, some work with Sylph Corporation, funded the Master-Ball design. This pays for Lance's tutoring and his studies and his career as a member of the Elite four. So when Lance is all grown up and he comes over to visit with a baby in his arms, he tells me:

" 'Uncle Fuji, this is my boy. Me and the wife, we know how much we owe you and we want you to be his grandfather. Will you, Uncle Fuji?'

"And I say yes, because I am a lonely bastard and I am tired of life and of hurting and taking and I just wanted to give, so I call the kid Joey and I'm there for him for 10 birthdays, taking him on my lap even when he's too old for my knees to bear him. And then Joey decides to become a pokemon trainer, because children are brave and stupid that way and leaves home without coming to me. 'I love you, Godfather Fuji, he says, but I need to do this on my own'."

Mister Fuji stops talking, noticing how I have been faking unconsciousness. He tugs me back by the hair, looks at my pretend-vacant expression and whips something around my forehead, strapping it tight. He puts something in my mouth, clenching my teeth around it and then punches me hard in the chest, again and again and again. I open my eyes but I can't scream, so I only struggle not to choke on my spit.

"You better pay attention, or I'll be putting this right in your eye" he says, dangling the cigar in front of my face, the heat from its tip searing my eyelashes. "So Joey goes off on his big adventure without even so much as a by-your-leave and he finds himself a couple friends from all over the place and one of those friends, a kid named Azure, he gets chummed, wouldn't you know. He gets chummy with Team Rocket. And Team Rocket wants something from Sylph. A black-topped pokeball. Joey never finds out what they wanted with it. He just goes and gets it, like a fool he is. He even locks horns with his dad for it, wouldn't you know."

Things begin clicking into place, inside my mind. The little scared monkey looks at the pieces of the puzzle falling into place and now it's so terrified it can't even muster the guts to scream and claw.

"Joey thinks he's so smart, so tough, untouchable. He and his buddies beat Lance, who's there for the testing. They come right after the pokeball's caught the thing Sylph has been testing it on, so they don't know how much it costs or what's in it. So lance comes over and he tells me:

" 'Uncle Fuji, your godson stole the black pokeball for Team Rocket, with the ting inside it. We need to find him.'

"And so we do, two days later, his face cut up and his kneecaps blown off, screaming and pissing himself on a hospital bed at the sight of you and your little sicko girlfriend. And he tells me 'Uncle Fuji, I want this man to hurt, but I don't want you getting your hands bloodied. I just want you to find this piece of garbage and I want you to give him something from me and then you can do what you like with him.' And so I do, because I love Lance more than I'd love my own children."

Mister Fuji reaches out and wheels a little tray beside him. He takes from it a carton box that's soaked through and open it, without ceremony. He holds it up to my face and I see a bloodied little ear. There's a pearl earring on it that I try my best not to recognize and I fail, so I start bawling like a baby.

"Her name was Amanda. That was a lovely name. Guess I'll leave you to it." Mister Fuji says, placing the box with my mother's ear on my lap and walking out of the room, locking the door behind him.

The face that looks back at me from the one-way mirror is crying its eyes out, screaming for hours.

Lavender Town, moving up to the pokemon tower, three hours ago:

Ghost's belly is on fire, but so are its limbs and its hide. The air around it is tearing clumps off its skin, making it shed down on the paved roads, across the alleys, making parts of it visible. The few that see them notice the things that beat inside Ghost, things that whirl and twirl and whirr madly and sometimes their hair turns white and other times they fall on the street where they stand. Ghost doesn't care for them, even though it's so awfully hungry and their terror makes its mouth water, because the hurt overcomes all other sensations.

Ghosts just wants to go home, through the split on top of the Pokemon Tower, into the place of not-white, not-shape that drags him down and poisons him. Ghost hated this place, with its terrible pull and its heat and the cold and the staring faces. He hated the boxes and he heated the screaming, even though the food was nice and scared, just the way Ghost liked it.

Ghost stumbled once, as a piece of it tumbled down the road and splatted against a house. It crawled, trying to reach its mass, but the pull of the world held it down until it choked and died. Ghost pressed on, swimming through the thick not-water, desperately seeking the split, spiraling up the tower to the top, its claws splintering the brickwork into dust where they struck the surface. Ghost wanted to go home, because it was scared it might die.

Ghost had forgotten about death, inside the place that looked like the screaming sea of white-hot nothing he'd come from. It had been small but Ghost swam around it as if it were vast, waving its myriad pseudopods inside the milky-silky stuff. It had grown hungry and it had slept and it had waited and then it had been let out into the pulling place and it had feasted on the red-headed woman that wasn't scared of it, but relieved.

It had been an unsatisfactory meal for Ghost, that one.

Ghost reached the top of the Tower and looked for the split, where it had fallen through, oh-so-long ago, before the silk-clad solid things with their rigid limbs had caged it and prodded it and tore it apart and then shoved it in the small space-like-home. It sniffed at the air and it howled at the skies, but did not find the split. It waved its limbs around, seeking purchase, but found none; above there was only endless blue-white, not-home.

Ghost screamed a mournful cry, that sounded to the solid, rigid things below like the sound of tiny things being crushed beneath a wheel and snarled: Ghost was going to die, unless it found compromise. It had to reach the little-space, to find refuge and feed and wait for the split to appear again. Straining its predatorial mind, it thought of a sphere with a black upper-half, the one that had somehow fit him and fixed on its presence.

Unfurling wings that it had created from its mass with a thought, Ghost followed the invisible trail toward it, shedding bits of it along the way. It would replenish them, of course. He'd make sure the rigid things would pay dearly for this, before he was gone.

Lavender Town, Mister Fuji's safehouse, now:

I've cried myself hoarse an hour ago and now I'm standing in a lobby, being served tea, dressed in a fine silk suit that makes my bloodied face look so much worse in comparison. Mister Giovanni is sitting across from me, not even sparing me a look, trying his best not to smash the delicate teacup in his hands on the table. Mister Fuji is standing beside me, smiling a fed-leopard smile.

You wouldn't be able to tell right away, but we're just animals, thinking ourselves men.

Mister Giovanni puts the teacup down hard and says:

"We need the pokeball, Mister Fuji. And our man, of course."

"You can have him for free. But the pokeball? Now that's out of the question."

"You took the damn thing from one of my men, pried it from him after torture and now you have the audacity to-"

"I didn't pry anything from your man under pain of anything, Mister Giovanni. Vincent plain old gave the thing to me, once I brought him over. Kept sobbing 'thank you, thank you' the entire time."

The boss shoots me a glance that could stop a charging Onyx dead in its tracks.

"You can't possibly think I'll just give you what you want, do you Fuji? You know this is going to turn ugly fast unless you work with me."

"I got the law on my side and I got the goods, too. What could you possibly threaten me with?"

"We could start with Lance, for once. He's going to be having a very hard time next week, unless we reach a compromise."

Mister Fuji's teacup had been smashed into his hands the very next second. His expression remained unchanged, even as he began to bleed through his clenched fingers.

"You do not want to go there, Giovanni. It's a dark, terrible path the one you're looking to tread."

"Then give me the pokeball and let's try to reach an agreement. Money isn't going to be a problem here."

"Money?" snarled Mister Fuji, picking bits of china from his palm. "You think this is about money, you dog? You think I give a damn about your stinking cash or that I even give a damn about your muscle? You think there's anything in the world that you can do to make up for what this piece of garbage did?" he said, pointing at me the way people must have used to point at lepers before a stoning.

"You can keep Vincent, Fuji. I'm only here for the pokeball."

"No you're not. This conference is over."

"Don't you turn your back on me!"

"Escort the gentleman and his detail out."

"I'm giving you one damn chance here, Fuji!"

"And make sure he gets his dog, as well. Won't have him trailing blood all over my carpet."

Someone reached to grab Mister Giovanni's shoulder, but by that time his gun was out. Mister Fuji's as well. I hit the floor and rolled under the table, listening to the sound of guns cocking all around me.

"You're outgunned, outnumbered and out of your damn mind, Giovanni, thinking you can pull this off in my turf."

"And you're mad, if you think I'll let you walk away with what's mine."

"Put your gun down and I swear this won't turn ugly, Giovanni. Put it down and-"

Someone fires his gun. His finger pulls back the trigger perhaps a fraction of an inch more than it should, or he just can't stand the pressure, or he just sees a shot and takes it. There's a smell of cordite and a body drops to the floor. And then there's thunder and brimstone that's over in ten seconds, leaving behind it only a din that chokes out sound and numbs the skin.

I get up out of cover and see the writhing, bleeding mass. Outside, there's thunder even though it's a sunny Sunday afternoon. Something punches a series of holes on the floor and sends plaster dust down on the carpet. Everything's gone to Hell in a handbasket and it's time for me to go.

The black-topped pokeball is on the table, next to the yawning wound that was the left side of Mister Fuji's face. I deflate it and stick it my pocket. Something grabs my ankle on my way out.

"Don't you leave me here, you piece of garbage!" screams Mister Giovanni, his hand clamped over the wound that's staining his hundred-dollar shit red. "Don't you lave me here to die!"

"I can't here you!" I lie and run out of the doors. The minute the men in the black suits run upstairs, flecked in red and wreathed in cordite, I begin to limp and scream at them:

"They killed Mister Fuji! Oh God, oh God, oh God!"

I ran the hell out, stopping only to make sure that Mister Giovanni's voice can't be heard when the roar of machine-gun fire has ended. Outside, in the parking lot, shots are still fired and stray bullets smash the windows of parked cars. Finding Mister Giovanni's limo, I slip on the driver's seat the second I've cleared the driver off it. He mutters something, but I can't quite hear it.

By the time they notice the limo's sped out of the parking lot, I'm gunning for Vermillion City. Speeding through the Freeway, the tatters of my life flapping madly behind me, I realize that the only person I could stand to see before all this is over, to know the truth and see the real me, is Violet.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I pass by the exit for Saffron City and know where the column of smoke is coming from. The windows are up and the AC is on full-blast, but I can make out each smell.

There's the smell like overcooked pork, char-broiled on oaken floorboards that my father put in himself. There's the crackling, firework-smell of peeling wallpaper, the printed daisies wilting and blackening, their petals closing in on themselves in reverse bloom.

Even as I speed down the interstate, I know that now the entire conflagration smells like burning wool. I can almost see the curtains swallowed up the fire, make out its criss-cross climb up the stairs. Somewhere in the distance, the kitchen window is bursting open. Fire is lapping at the fridge door and eating away at the oven door, lapping up at the gas stove.

In the room I grew up in, the sports team posters are wrinkling up, curling up toward the ceiling. The smoke pouring through the floorboards makes it look like it's coalescing into being from a child's thoughts. My sheets billow up by the hot air. On their shelves, my books shudder, shiver, creak and then combust. The bathroom mirror grows foggy, dark, cracks. The flames are now flowing across the gas canister set under the stove. The CAUTION sign is popping, burning, growing dark. There's a hiss, a whine and then…

And then my house is gone. Then my mom is gone and all I'm left with is my sorry old behind and this car. Thank god it's a good car.

Stepping down on the gas, watching the speedometer's needle go way past 70, the world around me deceptively slowing down into a crawl, it's only then that I notice I've got the box with me. The severed ear's still inside, stuck to the cardboard by the blood.

You'd think a man would never be able to look at his own mother's severed ear and be able to hold his lunch down. You'd think a son's heart would break into a million tiny pieces every time he looked at it and want to dig for himself a big old hole in the ground and stay there forever. At the very least, you'd thought he wouldn't be able to even look at it twice.

You'd think that a man would have to some sort of monster, some animal that thinks itself a man, to be able to look at it and shrug. You'd have to be lower than a rat to just open the limo's window and throw it out. You'd have to be some filthy piece of garbage to just keep going and never look back after that, hoping that when you told the woman you love what you did, what you're really like, she'd even want you.

But for Violet, I know that I could never go without her knowing who I really am: without showing her the naked reality of Vincent behind all the bravado and the muscle and the coldness.

There's a shadow above me on the asphalt that spreads in front of the limo. Something that looks like Death's wings unfurl against the setting sun and for a moment it feels like I'm looking down an oracle's mouth, about to peek at the manner of my death. There's a little voice inside me that whispers:

I hope it hurts, you bastard. I hope you go screaming.

But unlike all the other million times I've heard it, I can't seem to quite shrug it off.

Above, Ghost glides on the air, fighting against the pull of the world, the box with the small home inside. It glides down but as it speeds up, Ghost has to beat its wings again, catch up to it. Reaching out a pseudopod, it grapples with the top, willing itself to grow tiny mouths, clamping on the metal with its teeth. Something screeches and Ghost is hoping that the box is alive, that it can tear at it and eat it because the wind has been shearing off bits of it for a long time now and its belly burns.

Ghost leans down on the box, opening its vicious mouth to bite into it, when suddenly it turns, as if it has realized the danger. Ghost is reeled away, dragged across the grey-hot-hard ground. One of its wings flies clean off, breaking into a million pieces as it leaves its body. Ghost tries to scream, but only blood comes out.

It clicks its teeth and rakes at the top. The box starts swerving suddenly, trying to throw it off, but Ghost knows better. It knows how to grapple and claw and hurt, raking at the black top and tearing at the hard-flexible skin.

Below, the small hard thing starts screaming.

The top of the limo flies off screaming, glass flying off its frame. I listen to its sound as it tumbles down the street, cracking and thrashing. Above and behind me, the air seems to shimmer and distort, the sky becoming a bloated little growth against the blubbery shape that whips its limbs madly.

I scream in turn, as I make out the outline of what looks like a full set of walrus-teeth, long and pointed. I see the flash of an eye, the color of something impossible, indescribable.

Death's come fo you Vincent and it's all teeth and claws and a big hungry belly, like you knew you deserved the tiny voice says and I'm too terrified to shrug it off.

Violet's house is just around the corner, so turn, going almost 80, swerving so hard that I send a garbage can flying across the street. Behind me, something grasps as my shoulder and I hear the sound of fabric (no, not fabric, fabric doesn't sound so much like popping buble wrap). I scream out as I try to get the car steady, but I only end up turning and smashing into a fence, stopping against the front of a house. The shimmering thing crashes through the porch window, but I'm held in place by my seatbelt. As I feel it bite into my shoulder, a million needles dig deep into me, against the bone. There's a blotted patch of red where my shoulder used to be. My left hand feels numb, useless.

I crawl outside, as the shimmering blob wreaks havoc in the house. The screams join my own in disharmony:

"Viollleeett!"

I scream but I know she hasn't heard me. Her house is just over the fence. I'm holding the black pokeball now, deflating it from my belt for God Knows what reason. Maybe I think I can use it to negotiate with the cops. Maybe I can sell it and live my days off in a private island.

Maybe I can just go to Hell like I deserve. Been a long time coming, this one I think and my voice sounds so much like the accusing thing that has been haunting me since forever.

I'm standing on Violet's doorstep, kicking at her door as the shimmering things rolls out and tears up what's left of the limo.

"Viollleeettt!"

I scream again, kicking at the door until the lock gives way. I keep screaming her name, my voice going hoarse. If she's gone, if I don't see her before I die, then this all might have been for-

"What the hell is going on?" Violet screams, her dress covered in red, same as me and I'm running to her on my busted leg and I try to catch her as I'm tripping on the carpet, but I only end up falling on my hurt shoulder. The synthetic fibers of the carpet feel like liquid fire against my arm.

"Violet, I'm sorry, you gotte know this, I'm sorry baby…"

"Vincent? What happened to you? What's all this screaming?" she leans down to look through her door, when I grab her by the dress and pull her downto me, kissing her.

"Violet, I'm sorry baby, but the Boss is dead, Mister Fuji is dead and my mom, they killed my mom, Violet, I'm so sorry I think I'm dying Violet…

The way she's acting now, she's not trying to get out of my grip. It's not that she doesn't care what happened to me, she's just frozen stiff with worry. The look on her face, that's fear, not disgust.

Keep telling yourself that.

"Get off me!" Violet screams. Something flicks across my face and a finger falls clean off. Violet screams at the blood and at me until I finally let go, but the pain doesn't register.

Behind me, there is a sound like a paper ship crumbling. I don't need to look back to know that the shimmering thing is standing behind me. Violet lets out a howl at the sight of it. I think she can see it.

"Please baby close your eyes, please it just wants me, it's Death and it's come for me please…" I'm babbling now, as I feel the shimmering limbs wrap around my ankles and pull me across the carpet. I start babbling:

"Violet, don't let me go, don't let me go, don't let me go, baby, catch me, catch me!"

I'm scooped up by what feels like great lumps of jello and then I sink against what feels like the world's biggest water-matress. This wouldn't have been a half-bad death, if theeeth were slightly sharper, though.

It takes a long time before it's chewed me to death.

FINALE

Violet is looking at Vincent as he's crushed, then ground, then chewed for what seems like forever, his body and his clothes turning into a pulp, his eyeballs popping one at a time, his insides turning and tumbling into jelly. He's screaming well past the point that a man should have kept screaming.

The blood and the meat get sucked into the shimmering thing and for a moment, Violet can see it clearer than before: a pathetic creature that looks so much like a blob, shedding tentacles and claws and mouths with every bite. It shivers, vomits and collapses, spilling some of Vincent and the black-topped pokeball on the floor.

Violet looks at it, as the thing tries to grab it pitifully. She kicks it out of its way, into the deepest recesses of the living room. The amorphous mass looks up at her with three pairs of eyes that seem to radiate misery and then, finally, with a great lurch and a greater heave, it dissolved into the murky protoplasm it had come from.

Except for a tiny claw, which crawled across the floor a little way and jumped up to the back of Violet's head as she turned, clamping into her flesh and boring into her skull.

The cops came, the cops went, then Sylph came, then Sylph went and no-one pushed the woman with her pretty red-hair-turned white or checked her basement or her things. When Violet went to work, come Monday, there was commotion and there were stern, solemn faces that thought big thoughts and spoke big words but none were addressed to violet, poor old Violet, who had seen Vincent (that bastard Vincent) died so horribly right in front of her.

No-one questioned why she wouldn't talk or the strange way she acted when she looked at someone or the way she was around mirrors, because they knew that she'd gone through so much, the poor thing.

And still no word was spoken of the black-topped pokeball, no sign of which was found and which was declared way more trouble than it was worth. After all, Team Rocket had a war with Mister Fuji's syndicate in their hands and couldn't waste their time looking for overpriced baubles.

And so Team Rocket fought on and fought hard and welcomed Violet back when she returned, even though she wouldn't always recognize the sound of her own name and would blink in an odd manner or sometimes pronounce the words wrong.

The important part was that she was back, safe and sound and that this whole ugly business had been left behind them.

Despite the pull and the burning and the pain and the strain of thinking and forming words, Ghost knew that he would manage, until he could go back home.

This was a good place to live, for the time being.