The Tiger, The Tutor, and The Delivery Girl- Pt. 10
Tags: Cyberpunk, Greek Mythology, Los Angeles, SciFi, Science Fiction

In the Hall of the Mountain King

The deep green foyer was lined in dark stained oak, hung with oil paintings of Zeus ravishing Leda, Venus casting Psyche into the Underworld, Hera turning her back on the lovesick Paris. Everywhere you looked, folks were being exploited by predatory higher powers.

It was so quiet in the stairwell, that I could feel my heart thundering in my ears as I descended. Some of the lights along the way were old, flickering, like huge lightning bugs — sending out senseless morse code. The marbled glass looked almost edible.

Jules and Kim ignored them completely, almost down the steps completely by now. They weren’t history buffs by any stretch, but useless facts about dead people were my bread and butter.

Though my sisters teased me about it endlessly, that was what my degree was going to be in, before I switched majors to Med. Part of me even hoped I’d be some touring, lecturing professor one day. I guess that was cute.

I only got as far as tutoring to bring extra money home. Had to raise my rates three times to keep up with how tight Maxim was squeezing us on some months. An old, impotent anger stoked in me for a second, remembering he was dead with some pleasure.

“Kim, I know this may be a bad time, but what exactly happened with Maxim?”

Kim turned on the stairs, her big, feline eyes low and dark. “There’s another thing we haven’t mentioned.”

“Kim, don’t tell the kid right here. Let him sit down first,” Eight shouted over my head before she could go on, shutting the hatch shut behind him.

My jaw tightened. Did anyone around here talk to me like I was an adult? The fact that I had to ask in the first place pissed me off. Better yet, did anyone here ever talk directly to me? Instead of over me?

“I think I can decide for myself,” I said, bristling.

“Well, I tried,” Eight said, moving past me on the stairs, unwilling to be there for whatever fallout was coming.

“Lyle, Maxim said some other stuff, too. Towards the end.” Kim’s voice was surprisingly quiet.

“Like what?”

“Kim,” Jules said, touching her shoulder.

“Lyle, Maxim said that mom and dad came to him a few years ago to pay off their debt in full. They’d actually had some good months during school season, so they wanted to be done with all of it.”

“Okay.”

Kim’s voice sounded strained now, not with sadness, but with anger, “Maxim apparently told them that there was still unpaid interest on the loan. Dad told him that he wasn’t going to be bullied anymore, and turned his back on Maxim.”

My throat got tight, and it made my head swim. I sat down on the steps, fumbling for my dosing pen, where the fuck had I put it? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Maxim had them mowed them down. He didn’t even do it himself. It was some asshole Lafayette.”

“Kim,” Jules said softly. “We don’t even know if that’s true. He would have said anything to make you angry.”

But Kim couldn’t stop herself when she was on a roll. “Maxim then charged us double for them supposedly skipping out on the loan. They never went anywhere. Or left us.”

“Lyle,” Jules said.

“Just stop babying me, Jules,” I sucked my teeth and got up, feeling my eyes prickle with the start of angry tears. I didn’t want either of them to see me when that happened, so I shunted past them on the stairs, pushing through the old steel door into the mansion proper.

Inside the foyer, Eight was unpacking his duffle bag like a soldier, laying out each plastic bag of supplies, toiletries, and ammo. The look on his face, though he didn’t meet my eyes, was a disappointed and sad one.

Did it bother me that I was handling this situation like a teenager storming off to his room? Maybe. Did I have a more graceful way of handling that we’d been fleeced after my parents died? Not really.

It’s not like we ever thought they would just abandon us. We just never really knew what happened.

You make your theories. You tell the cops your story. You wish for the best. That’s what most anyone below the poverty level could hope for in the slums of Malibu, when disappearing was just a part of living there.

The mansion bunker looked like a miniature German duchy. The deep green foyer was lined in dark stained oak, hung with oil paintings of Zeus ravishing Leda, Venus casting Psyche into the Underworld, Hera turning her back on the lovesick Paris. Everywhere you looked, folks were being exploited by predatory higher powers.

I shuddered. Nazis had such creepy taste.

I kept walking through the dankly lit halls, lights stuttering, past hundreds of these paintings. I wandered a bit, numbly, until I hit a heavy door in my way. I palmed the square doorknob and tested it gently.

The door swung open surprisingly easy for an old door so large. Though, it made sense for Eight to neglect the wallpaper and focus on the mechanics in the house. He was the kind of guy who liked things in working order.

I expected a dining room on the other side. A stairwell, even. What I didn’t expect was an indoor courtyard in the middle of the house. The cobblestone patio had been inlaid with a golden eagle, now in the process of being satisfyingly ripped up.

Yellow sodium light shone down through slatted white wood rafters, giving the patio the impression of a sun-smattered courtyard. Faux creeping ivy climbed up rotting arbors, dangling over concrete recreations of Grecian armless statues. Even here, a touch of the silver screen.

Eight had crafted an indoor greenhouse in the flower patch. Sewn together with transparent PolyTarp and a soldering gun, he’d created a pretty impressive structure in the middle of the courtyard. Even more impressive was the fact that he’d managed to run a line of the above-ground irrigation down here. I pressed up to the tarp and peeked inside, but couldn’t make out much, so I settled for sitting down on a rickety bench underneath the faux arbor.

I couldn’t believe how tired I was. Not physically, since all I’d done for the last few days was get driven around. But in my fucking soul. I wondered if it was going to be this complicated always. Racing from one catastrophe to the next, putting out Jules’ and Kim’s fires. Was this what family was all about? Descending into the Underworld just to pull them out, each time?

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9