The Weirdness(74)

“Anil! Extinguisher!”

The flames cling to Anil’s back, lick at the locks of slightly greasy hair that peek out from under Anil’s work-mandated hairnet. Oh, Anil, Billy thinks, fuck the extinguisher; just stop, drop, and roll; every goddamn kid in America knows that that’s what you do, but Anil either doesn’t know that or he’s forgotten in a moment of panic, and Billy estimates that Anil has maybe two more seconds before the fire eats into his undershirt and then begins to do something bad to the skin underneath.

And that’s when something funny happens with time.

It reminds Billy of watching Denver edit video on her Mac, trying to decide where to make a cut. Things on the monitor happen at the normal speed until she adjusts some slider which slows everything down at some rate which exponentially curves very pleasingly until finally she gets to full stop, the point at which flowing experience has become a single soundless image, a thing to reflect upon, a moment about which to make a decision. It’s just like that. Anil frozen in space, his hand a good eight inches from the extinguisher; the unflickering flames silent on his back, still, looking delicate yet tangible, like an array of frozen orchids, a thing that could be lifted safely away from him and crumbled to dust.

“So,” says Lucifer. “This is an interesting moment.” He has his hand held up in the air, two fingers together against his thumb, as though he were holding something tiny and valuable, a diamond, a precious mote, some invisible speck. He’s also still wearing the tuxedo shirt he had on earlier, bloody and tattered.

“Help him,” Billy says, for it turns out that Billy can still speak, somehow, through the stasis. He isn’t entirely sure whether his lips are moving. “You can help him, can’t you?”

“I could,” Lucifer says. He looks at Anil with a look that seems, to Billy, to be inappropriately dispassionate, given the circumstances.

“Look, you asshole,” Billy says. “He’s my friend. He has nothing to do with any of this, and you set him on fire.”

“Yes, well, that was an accident,” Lucifer says.

“Then you apologize, and you fix it,” Billy says.

“It was an accident,” Lucifer says, “but the situation as it now stands provides me with a certain degree of leverage. Leverage in its crudest form—a regrettable form, it must be acknowledged—but leverage nonetheless. We are short on time, Billy Ridgeway, and this requires me to use perhaps more direct means of impelling you than I have in the past.”

Billy sputters. “What—” he says, “what is it that you want?”

“The same thing I’ve always wanted, Billy,” Lucifer says. “I want us to be allies against a common enemy.”

“But we are.”

“Are we?” Lucifer says. He uses his free hand to gesture down at his bloody shirt. “We were all together, all together again after so long, making a plan that would make the best use of the short time this entire planet has remaining, and then some distasteful people intruded upon our conversation and gunned me down. Like an animal. And then you left with those people. You left with those people and hid, leaving me to waste valuable time and resources in order to find you yet again. You’ll forgive me, Billy, if this leads me to cast some aspersions upon where your allegiances truly lie.”

“Okay,” says Billy. “I admit that it looks bad when you put it that way. But honestly? Those people? I was arguing with them. I argued with my own dad that we should work with you.”

“Well, you’ll have to forgive me for not noticing that,” Lucifer says. “I was, as you’ll recall, dead at the time.”

“So, look,” Billy says, beginning to panic at the thought that he may not be able to convince Lucifer that they’re on the same side. At the thought that Lucifer may burn Anil alive as a way of demonstrating the extent of his leverage. “You want to get this thing with Ollard done? Let’s do it. I’m ready. I’ll help.”

“I’m afraid I can’t trust you on that point any longer, Billy,” Lucifer says. “You’ve proven to be very reluctant, and I’ve come to believe that it would be in your character to lie, now, to protect your friend, only to change your mind and abandon our mission at some later point if you thought that it would confer you some more immediate advantage.”

“Yeah, but, I wouldn’t,” Billy says.

“I think you would,” Lucifer says. “And we no longer have the time it would require for me to chase you down again. I need to understand that you are fully committed to our task. I can no longer enjoy the luxury of doubt on this front.”