Excerpt: The Life of a Raw Fish at the Edge of Reason

The window rolled silently up as the cop car pulled back into the street, and Spitzy turned to look at Sushi again. Sushi stared uneasily back at her, wondering about her suddenly odd expression.
“What is it?”
Spitzy looked at her steadily for a moment, her expression the same curiously indecipherable one Sushi remembered seeing on her friend’s parents when they had been caught repainting her bedroom with Marie Destroyer’s camouflage paints when she was twelve. Somehow, it was even more disconcerting on Spitzy’s petite face than on her father’s more impassive, professional Rambo style one.
“Sushi, you might want to watch what you do around Hatsue.” Spitzy said seriously, her voice low as she grabbed Sushi’s arm to pull her across the intersection. Sushi had forgotten about the changing light in her unnerves about her friend’s expression. “Hatsue is, well…” Spitzy sighed.
Sushi frowned. “Hatsue’s what?”
“She’s not as picky about her friends as she probably should be right now.” Spitzy said reluctantly. “She hangs out with everyone, and that means she’s been in more than one place where she probably shouldn’t have been, so the police have been kinda… watching her.”
Sushi felt her eyes bugging out. “Hatsue?” She couldn’t believe this. Yes, her sister was social and did seem to be everywhere in the Edge’s forsaken social life, but surely she wasn’t doing anything illegal. As benign as her father was toward the actions of his children, Sushi knew without a doubt that he would not hesitate to kill if he discovered one of his children participating in crimes. And for that matter, Sushi suspected that Tsukune would probably drop her perfect manner and commit outright fratricide on the sibling that dared ruin her perfect family image.
“You’re shitting me. Hatsue can’t be…”
“You’re not listening.” Spitzy said impatiently. “Shut up, will you? I didn’t say she was doing anything illegal. I just said that she’s been spotted at a lot of the places where fights have been breaking out with the Exterminators and such. And sometimes with known sympathizers, or with extremists. The police don’t know where her allegiances lie right now, but she’s always there at these things.”
Sushi shook her head. “Look, I know I haven’t been around for a while, but there’s no reason for them to be worried about Hatsue. She’s just a party girl. If I took her back t the city she’d probably be boinking the mayor within a week.”
Spitzy gave an exasperated sigh. “Sushi!” She said plaintively. “This isn’t the city, and the mayor has no interest in your sister.”
“Thank God.” Sushi muttered.
“I’m being serious here. Watch out with Hatsue. I know you’re living with her and all, but be careful. They weren’t kidding when they said the Exterminators were getting more dangerous. There’s been outright attacks on Enclave members the past few years –that’s why they finally decided to let Joey and a few others become cops on a trial basis. They’re hoping that seeing one of their own on the force will encourage the Enclave members in town to stay, and that he might get some of the fence sitters to shift over away from the Exterminators. Nobody wants another Tina Marsup.”
“Tina Marsup?” Sushi said blankly. Spitzy looked at her incredulously.
“What rock have you been hiding under?”
Sushi was getting annoyed again. “None. I read the papers, but I’ve only been here a few months, and no one talks to me any more. My own family doesn’t even talk to me anymore.” She added bitterly. She was getting a very uneasy feeling now that she had somehow stumbled into a movie plot, one with hundreds of intrigues going on and all interacting with each other and she was the clueless tourist that somehow got sucked into it.
It was turning into High School all over again.
God she hated the Edge!
Spitzy shot furtive looks to either side of them, checking for eavesdroppers as she slowed. Sushi resisted the urge to roll her eyes at her friend’s melodrama. She was almost certain that Spitzy was playing things up to wind her, but one the other hand…
What had else had been going on if her family had not told her about her own sister, and things like the Shattered Mug were becoming more commonplace? What else had not reached her ears that she should have known about except for her now strange outsider/insider status, and had been deemed too dangerous to make the papers?
“Tina Marsup was from the Enclave, one of the early surrogate kids.” Spitzy said lowly, pulling her to the side under an overhang in front of a small clothing store. The green fabric cast an odd tinge to her friend’s intent face and left her gray eyes in shadow, making her appear even more like some sort of ethereal pixie or descendant of a wood nymph.
“She was about Pan’s age, he said he knew her at school. No one knows exactly what happened, but apparently she started dating around outside the Enclave, and a few of her boyfriends’ parent were not exactly… friendly to her. Pan said she had a taste for Exterminator member’s sons, but nobody knows for sure. But after she graduated, she got a job at the paper in the newsroom, editing news releases and such, and being a good girl she stopped dating and decided to work as a surrogate to help her family out. You know, rather than bring a shifty newcomer in keep it all in the family sort of thing.”
Sushi nodded, wondering about the back story. It really didn’t seem all that odd, and somewhat similar to her own if you ignored the fact Tina was apparently a mutant. And a surrogate mother. Sushi had no real desire to volunteer for that duty any time soon, not while she was single and going places in her career.
Well, sort of going places. Gullibility wasn’t exactly the place to get ahead as an accountant.
“Well, about five months after she got pregnant, she didn’t show up for work. Mr. Nork called the Enclave to find out what was up, and they told him that she’d left on time that morning. The gate guards were the last people to see her alive, and they said that she hadn’t stopped or anything that they could see or mentioned going anywhere but work. She was missing for three days, and there was this massive hunt and everything…
“They found her in the middle of the woods outside of town on the east side over by Nadaville. She’d…” Spitzy trailed of, shuddering a little, and when she looked at Sushi again the older woman felt her blood run cold. Spitzy had never had the issues with death that most people did –how could she with her parents and what had happened to her youngest brother? It was part of the reason her family was so close to one another. They knew that at any moment they could be parted, and they made damn certain that they never parted with bad words no matter how upset they were with each other. But the look on Spitzy’s face just now…
“She’d been gutted Jack the Ripper Style.” Spitzy said lowly, swallowing and shooting another glace around them. There was no one in sight, not even inside the shop, so apparently this was acceptable. Sushi shuddered, her frozen blood moving sluggishly enough now that it felt like glaciers. “Her throat was cut, and her chest bisected, and her heart was found hanging from a nearby tree with her intestines used as the rope. They cut out her uterus too, and it was sliced open and the baby was found on stump next to her body, a knife driven through it’s heart. And written on the ground around them, there was a message in her blood.”
Sushi stared in horror at her friend., trying to wrap her mind around what Spitzy was saying. An actual murder in the Edge? To that degree? And no way report to the actual authorities because the victim wasn’t technically human… and a Jack the Ripper impersonator? What the HELL?
“What?” She whispered weakly, the sound barely escaping her throat. This had to be an elaborate prank. This kind of stuff didn’t happen in Gullibility. In the city maybe, but not in the quiet little country town that most people laughed at and ignored because of its goofy name.
“Uh huh.” Spitzy nodded solemnly, her voice bleak. “They wrote it in her own blood, and the coroner said it was pretty iron rich, so a lot of it had come from her while she was still alive because it hadn’t coagulated yet.”
Sushi swallowed. This had to a be a movie, she prayed. A movie, or a bad reality show she was being secretly filmed for and hadn’t realized it. Any second now Spitzy was going to laugh at her and shout Surprise!
But she didn’t, and her friend kept speaking. “They wrote ‘Go back to Hell or meet this fate. No more devil spawn on our earth corrupting our children. The Apocalypse has begun.’”
“The Apocalypse?” Sushi said incredulously. This was ridiculous.
And corny, even for the Edge.
Spitzy grimaced. “Yeah. But it was signed with the symbol for the Exterminators. The entire town went ballistic, Sushi. The police tried to figure out who did it, but there weren’t any clues to follow. Even the knife in the baby was untraceable, and there were no footprints that they could find, and the crime scene was clean except for Tina and the baby. Later we found out that the second day the newspaper had received a letter saying that if they wanted to keep their employees alive and working that they shouldn’t have hired the ‘devil’s corrupting spawn.’ There wasn’t a signature and no fingerprints or anything. And then all of the other businesses who had Enclave members working there started getting letters too, and no one could figure out where they were coming from. And then they just stopped.”
Spitzy stopped speaking then, her gaze somewhere else. Sushi couldn’t figure out what why she had stopped there. Where was the rest of the story –or the film crew watching them, if she was waiting for a cue?
“Well, who did it?” She demanded.
Sptzy shook her head. “We still don’t know. The police arrested a few of her old boyfriends or their fathers for related stuff, but they couldn’t get anything related to her to stick because most of the Enclave members don’t officially exist. And ever since then it has been getting really ugly. Stuff like the Shattered Mug isn’t all that unusual anymore, and there’s been talk of restricting the Enclave members to the Enclave until they find her murderer and figure out who’s behind this once and for all. The town board decided to try integrating more Enclave into public positions, and it seems to be helping, but only so far as making the Enclave members who didn’t decide to go back to the Enclave feel a little safer. Even then there’s a lot of grumbling about the lack of justice for Enclave members with any kind of problem, and half the Enclave thinks that the reason no one’s been arrested for Tina’s murder is because the police don’t want to have to try and prosecute someone for the murder of an Enclave member and “second class citizen.” That’s why they’re so interested in Hatsue right now, Sushi. Your sis had been seen at just about every incident since before Tina was found, whether she sticks around for the police or not. No one knows what side she’s on.”
Sushi stared at her friend. Nothing. No laughter in her eyes, nothing but absolute dead seriousness in her voice. No film crew appearing from nowhere, no distant giggles on the wind. And in the back of her mind, she knew that despite Spitzy’s tendency to enjoy life, this wasn’t the kind of joke her friend went in for.
It must have actually happened.
Holy Shit.
The Edge wasn’t just the edge of reason anymore. It was now officially actually fucking crazy. There was no doubt about it. Jack the Ripper Style murders of Enclave members? Mysterious letters and threats written in the victims’ blood –no, not a threat, but a declaration of war?
And her sisters -not just Hatsue, but Tsukune as well she assumed since her perfect sister was a surrogate at the Enclave- stuck in the middle of the mess?
No wonder her mother hadn’t invited Tsukune to dinner since Sushi arrived, even if she did want the two of them to resolve their differences.
“They don’t have any idea who did it?” She said at last, thinking she was going to have to go to the library and check on the old papers there. There was no way they would have been able to keep that quiet, even if certain… details weren’t included. It wasn’t the kind of thing that she could safely ask most people about on the street, that was for sure, and given the two officers’ reaction to her… Dammit. She couldn’t even ask her family. It was going to have to be Spitzy or Pan. With Hatsue under suspicion and Tsukune at the Enclave, her family would probably be completely closemouthed about the issue, and her dad would have been conferencing closely with the police as a member of the fighting families…
Shit. No wonder the officers knew about her. She was willing to bet they knew her father personally. For all his laid back and wise demeanor, her father would never take a threat to his family sitting down. And no wonder her mother hadn’t pressed the issue of having Hatsue visit for dinner –although that might not actually be true, since Hatsue had always been like Sushi in the desire to go her own way, even though that way had meant staying in Gullibility. Her mother probably had pressed Hatsue to come to dinner more often, as a way to keep track of her daughter –and Hatsue had either found a way to worm out of it or refuse.
“No idea.” Spitzy said sadly, shaking her head. “I mean, everyone has their theories, but no proof. Some people even think that it was done by the Enclave as a way to punish Tina for dating outside the Enclave and to make her an example, and that’s a bunch of hooey” Sushi rolled her eyes as Spitzy grimaced. “Something else though –you might want to be careful what you say. You’ve been kinda exempt from all the suspicion since you were out of town, but this whole thing has made your family… unpopular.”
“Unpopular?” Sushi said flatly. “We never were popular to begin with. You know the heck I had to put up with at school!”
“No!” Spitzy grabbed her arm, yanking her down a little to emphasize her point. “Not like that. I mean, sure. The fighting families have always been a little unpopular. Anybody who is trained to kill you forty ways with nothing but their eyebrow is going to be looked at suspiciously. Duh. It doesn’t matter if it’s the city or the Edge for that to happen. No, I’m talking about Tsukune.”
“Tsukune?” Sushi said incredulously. “Miss Perfect is unpopular?”
Spitzy laughed a little, to Sushi’s relief releasing her arm so she could stand up straight again. “I forgot about that nickname… Yes. There are a lot of people who think she should have stayed with her own kind and married before having kids. She was the one all the guys wanted, you know that. And she threw it away to fornicate with rodents?” Spitzy impersonated Sushi’s old Pastor with a startling accuracy, mimicking his whiney voice nearly perfectly. Sushi let out a short bark of laughter, grateful that her parents had stopped taking her to that church when she was eleven after the man had made some comment against ‘mixing races’ –a bad move when part of your congregation was the descendent of three or four types of immigrants. He’d died years ago, but he made great mockery when trying to make a point.
“Jeez…” Sushi muttered. “It used to be such a quiet little hick town. What the hell happened to this place while I was gone?”
“Life.” Spitzy said succinctly. “And don’t even get me started about the smuggling rings or the fairy drug market.”
Sushi blinked. “The what?!”
“Oooh!” Spitzy said suddenly, ignoring her question as her mood and short attention span swung instantly to other, less serious but more pressing matters. “Look! They’re on sale!”
Sushi let herself be dragged into the music store, watching with a sort of distant incredulity as she tried to sort out what her friend had just told her in relation to the rest of what she knew about the craziness of the Edge, and watching her friend coo over the improbable CD cover boasting a hockey team in operatic combat with a cartoon dragon monster wearing only the jersey half of their hockey gear.