in his pocket for a moment, he thunked down a dime, then pushed himself away from the meter like a boat casting off.
And then he saw it, a single white presence. Dressed as a postman, the nephilim strode down the sidewalk, as unaware of its stalkers as the surrounding pedestrians were of the true form of the postman. Jethro squinted past the brightness enough to make out that the nephilim was a middle aged black woman. Her forward-leaning gait, combined with the uniform of a postal worker, lent an inculcated officiousness that deterred people from bothering her.
Jethro began to giggle.
“J-Dog, this is Asylum. Cut out the chatter,” the voice came through his earpiece.
Jethro continued to giggle.
“J-Dog, have you spotted a target?”
Jethro managed to enunciate despite his drug-induced jubilance enough so that they knew he'd seen one.
“I think he’s crazy,” a voice said.
“That may be, but that crackerhead hasn’t failed us yet. Return to Asylum, Jethro.” And to the others Asylum said, “Establish triple canopy surveillance. I want to know everyone she touches and everywhere she goes.”
“So you really think she’s one of them?” asked a voice.
“Definitely. You should get ready, because if we’re lucky we’ll find their hive before nightfall.”
“Then I’ll finally get to see one?”
“Just like in the fucking Bible.”
***
Jethro had been seeing them for months, now. He’d thought they were his own personal versions of pink elephants. He'd never known they were real until the day he was scooped up in the government net.
Nearly two dozen of his fellow crackheads were blindfolded and taken to an underground classroom. He reasoned it had to be the abandoned Skunkworks. Not far from Ventura, the old top-secret military installation was the crucible from which the SR–71 spy plane had been born.
Twenty-one wooden chairs filled the room. Twenty faced forward in four rows of five. A single empty chair had been placed in the front of the classroom facing the rear. Upon each of the twenty chairs sat an addict in different stages of withdrawal. They’d been held in separate cells for at least forty-eight hours, so some were already shaking uncontrollably, yellow bile seeping from between cracked lips as they herked and jerked against the chains that bound them.
Jethro felt his teeth growing. His heart beat tom-toms through his eyes. He'd been focusing on the smell of his index finger for an hour and swore it reminded him of cotton candy.
Glancing at the others in the room depressed Jethro. Part of him wanted to be away from these rejects. Gaunt faces. Malnourished bodies. Ruined and rank clothing. But then another, less kind part of his Samaritan psyche reminded him that he looked just like them. When he was high he could trick himself into believing that everything was cool. But he wasn't high now. He was sober and ashamed to be among them.
He began to notice a sulfur smell. It took a few moments, but he finally detected the narrow ribbon of brimstone circling the empty chair in the front. The smell and the brimstone reminded him of a movie he'd done with Dirk Dong and Mulva Darling where he and Dirk had been traveling exorcists and Mulva was a poor misunderstood succubus. She'd been trapped in a circle of brimstone and it was up to them to save her soul. And as was the norm in his chosen profession, salvation came from fucking, front, back, top, bottom and sideways.
Before he could return to the mystery of the brimstone, his attention was stolen when a fight broke out between a Filipino He-She and a man Jethro recognized as having once been a fellow actor. Sean was his first name, but he'd gone by the name Snake Foreskin, his oddly thin and impossibly long member propelling him through celluloid hits like Escape from New Jack Off City and Escape from Lost Ambulance. Sean had been what they'd termed a geek in the industry. For the most part he'd done intros and extros like on the set of Ali Baba and the Forty Knees, the film had opened with him blowing on a flute like a snake charmer, his penis rising as a nearly invisible monofilament line pulled it into the air as if it were alive and hypnotized by the music. But now the He-She had Snake's head in both hands, bouncing it off the floor as he-she screamed over and over, "You no touchee me!"
Government men in black jumpsuits, helmets with face shields and rubber gloves rushed into the room and