Concrete Underground by Moxie Mezcal (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

And what the fuck kind of name is Saint Anthony?"

"It's a nick name," Max explained. "He's had it for years, on account of him being such a devout Catholic."

"Yeah, I bet," I scoffed.

"Saint" Anthony stared me down like he was two seconds from kicking the holy fucking shit out of me.

Max clapped his hands together to get the attention of the entire room. "Everybody upstairs. Curtain time in ten minutes."

"We're going back to the art show?" I asked.

"No," Max replied. "I mean all the way upstairs."

8. Everyone Needs a Good Scare, Now and Then

I stood on top of the warehouse's roof, watching about three dozen of the city's best and brightest stand around and freeze their asses off. And, truth be told, I was enjoying the spectacle, even though it meant I was freezing my own off right along with them.

The anemic, refugee-thin heiresses shivering in their barely-there party dresses. The effete dot-com executives in thousand-dollar "distressed" jeans trying to look unaffected by the cold that's cracking their lips and shriveling their dicks. It warmed my spiteful, jealous little heart.

Columbine was busy circulating through the crowd, handing out sheets of paper, one a head. When she finished, she came over to sit with me on the parapet.

"What's this all about?" I asked as I grabbed one of the leftover sheets off the stack on her lap.

"This is tonight's game," she explained. "Scavenger hunt."

I looked down at the paper in my hands, which contained a list of items neatly printed in three evenly-spaced columns. The items were pretty far out there, things like an albino, a monkey's paw, a transgender prostitute, an original Matisse, a three-legged dog, a pickled punk, an ounce of heroin, and a human spleen.

"Scavenger hunt?" I repeated skeptically.

"Yeah. You have to try to find as many of the things on this list as you can and bring them back."

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, I understand the concept of a scavenger hunt. I'm just wondering why a group of grown adults - the city's richest and most powerful bright young things, no less - would spend their Saturday night on one."

I heard footsteps behind me on the parapet, and then a new voice joined our conversation. "Imagine you were filthy rich, richer than any human being has any right to be. You can literally do and have anything you want. You've traveled the world, had the dirtiest sex imaginable, imbibed the filthiest narcotics. What would you do for kicks when you grow tired of the same old thrills?"

I craned my head to the right and saw Max standing atop the parapet, hovering over my head. He grinned like a deranged Japanese oni, the cold night air turning his breath visible as it streamed out of his nostrils.

"All right, kids, listen up!" he called out to everyone on the rooftop. "We're going to get started. I trust you've all had a chance to look over the list for tonight's game. I see a few new faces, so let me bring you all up to speed.

"The object is simple - whoever brings back the most items from your list by sunrise is the winner, and whoever brings back the least is the loser. Aside from that, there are no rules. Steal, lie, cheat, break and enter, wander around the bad parts of town, work your connections, get your assistants out of bed, cash in all your favors."

"So, what exactly do you get for winning?" I interjected.

He dug a small red metal box from his pants pocket. It was rectangular in shape, no more than five inches long and two high. "The winner gets what's inside this box,"

"And what's that?" I pressed.

"I swear to you, we didn't script this," Max said as an aside to his audience. A few light chuckles rippled through the crowd. "To find that out, D, I guess you'll just have to win."

"I guess so," I replied. "And what if I lose?"

Max turned to smile at me once more, but this time he didn't offer any further explanation.

"Weatherman says the sun rises just after seven. You have five hours give-or-take, children. I suggest you get moving."

As everyone else cleared off the roof, Max put a hand on my shoulder, indicating that he wanted me to stick around. I noticed Saint Anthony and Lily were also not moving to leave - Anthony's hand gripping her wrist tightly, her head hung sullenly.

Max paced back and forth along the parapet while his eyes darted back and forth among the three of us, that grin of his still fixed in place. This went on for several minutes, even after the last of the other guests had left. The three of us just stood there in the cold and waited for Max to do something. I was miserable, Anthony didn't even seem to notice the weather, Lily was shivering so hard I thought her bones were going to shake right out of their sockets, and Max looked like he was savoring every second of it.

Eventually, I decided I was sick of listening to Lily's teeth chatter, so I slipped off my jacket and offered it to her.

"No!" Max yelled. "Everyone will remain dressed exactly the way they are."

I held out the jacket to Lily again, but she refused it, keeping her worried gaze fixed on her employer.

"Look at this thing," Max declared, stamping his foot on the parapet. "Ridiculous." His eyes returned to us just long enough to make sure he had our full attention. "What purpose does it serve? Think about it. Would it really be so dangerous to have just a plain flat edge? Is this little bit of wall going to actually save lives?"

I shrugged.

Max continued, "And if someone is actually dumb enough to fall off the side of a building, are we as a species really better off with that person alive and procreating? So much of our energy is expended styrofoam-padding and sterilizing our existences to protect us from ourselves, from our own humanity.

"We realize just how hopeless and fatalistic our human condition is, how we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. So we try to trick ourselves into a false sense of security by dreaming up phantom perils, harmless straw men that we can build a wall around or bury under concrete and feel like we have control over our destinies.

"We pass more laws, we arm more cops, we build more prisons, and we lock up more of our neighbors in the name of our own freedom. Our fear of death drives us to poison ourselves with 'medicines' that at best only postpone the inevitable. And to what end? We still die of cancer, we still get sick - sometimes as side effects of the very drugs we take to keep us well. We still crash cars. We still make war. So where has all this gotten us as a species?"

"It's gotten me freezing my nuts off on a roof like a dumbass, wondering what the hell you're talking about," I offered.

"I'm talking about changing the rules of the game, D," Max replied. "If you don't make peace with your own mortality, you'll never know what it's like to truly be alive. The indigenous people who originally lived in this valley had a tradition of the vision quest - going out into the wilderness with nothing, surviving by your own wits, proving your worth as a human being and discovering who you really are in the fundamental core of your soul. But we've paved over the wilderness and blanketed the starry sky with GPS satellites. How many times have you actually stared your own death in the face, D?"

He paused more for effect than to actually give me a chance to answer, then launched right back into it.

"We as a society have made it too easy on ourselves, and it has made us fat and dumb and unimaginative. We sit in our offices and watch our TVs and plan for retirement and take out insurance policies and go on sad little stage-managed vacations, just not anywhere too dangerous or dirty, and we make sure we are all wearing our government-approved safety helmets and carrying our health plan cards in case something goes wrong. All that mad, innovative passion that elevated us above all other forms of life has been allowed to atrophy. We have stopped natural selection from purifying the species because deep in our heart of hearts, we are all terrified that we won't make the cut.

"Changing the rules of the game is the only way to survive, to prevent being overtaken by a hungrier, more inventive competitor. We need to rediscover the exhilaration of painting ourselves into a corner that we don't know we'll get out of, of having our mettle tested with everything on the line. We need to remember how to feel the joy of the truly uncertain outcome. We need to gaze into the abyss."

"I still don't understand what that has to do with what we were talking about."

"D, you wanted to know why I asked Lily to admit those e-mails were true, and I am telling you. You also asked me why a bunch of spoiled rich kids would waste their Saturday night on some dumbass scavenger hunt, and I'm telling you that, too. Everyone needs a good scare put into them now and then. Including the Highwater Society. Including me."

I thought back to his reaction to my article - how he acted like it was some kind of joke, something to amuse him. Like a game.

"Why don't you tell Anthony and Lily about that funny thing you read in the paper?" Max asked, shaking me out of my own thoughts.

"Alright, well it was--" I started.

But Max interrupted me, his eyes growing big and wild, "No, tell them about it from up here."

He extended his hand to help me up onto the parapet. It was just shy of a foot wide. I looked over the side and saw how high up were were, which was about the equivalent of a three-story building. I was suddenly very fucking aware of my own mortality.

"Don't worry, it's perfectly safe up here," Max said. "And we're not even that high up, anyways. There's a chance you might not even die if you fell. So anyways, you were saying."

I turned to address Anthony and Lily, "You know that article you two were looking at last night? The one about the woman found in a ditch? I know that he--" I pointed at Max "--moved her there after he found her in his private jet at Hastings Airfield."

Saint Anthony stepped toward me with an open look of astonishment on his face. "How the fuck could you possibly know that?"

"Good question. D seems to know a lot of things he shouldn't, these days," Max shot back. Though he seemed to be addressing Anthony, his gaze was fixed on Lily. "Between that and certain e-mails he published in his paper, it seems someone is providing with quite a bit of privileged information."

"He was also there on Thursday night, when I went to find Cobb," Anthony added. I perked