“Oh, yes you can…” Siobhán growls with a flash of malice Felix hopes is just to drive her point home. She’s damn scary when she wants to be.
Felix has to look down away from her intense gaze and he sees the camera next to his open hand on the platform floor. The piercing pain focuses him. He only grabbed the HDV-426 from his bag out of habit and to save the footage maybe but it hits him that he’s holding a peephole into bizarro-world.
“Let go, shit!” he whispers hard, insistent enough to convince her but not enough to make her more upset, ‘cause holy shit she’s terrifying right now.
Siobhán releases her death grip and Felix turns on the HDV-426 and pops open the little monitor screen from the side of the camera body. He presses the button on the lens and there’s that familiar static pop. The view clears and the screen shows the murky black platform. It’s tinged green from the gas but the vents are hard to see because the camera isn’t as clear as fully dosed eyes. Felix tilts the screen almost totally down then raises the camera to over shoulder level of the tree people and points it behind through the crowd toward the nasty creature. The camera catches the impression of the mucksack porker as it looks back and forth into the crowds of tentacle and bulb covered people from near the foot of the stairs they came down.
Siobhán whispers, “Clever boy.”
They creep through the forest of disgusted and confused normals, watching the porker for any evidence that it has seen them. They make it to one of the metallic columns about halfway down the platform and she pulls him up against it. He adjusts the little screen to be seen from hip level then presses the camera against the column and slides it around enough to watch the porker. Siobhán peeks around studies it on the screen too.
Siobhán says, “Blech… worse than I remembered. On the very short list of things I’m afraid of, porkers are almost at the top.”
“I’d hate to see what beats them.”
“Yeah you would.” She looks around the platform. “And here I am without my goddamned peacemakers…” She looks toward the tunnel. “Won’t matter in a minute though.”
The creature starts pouring itself into a slow stride down the platform as it looks around.
Felix feels like urinating on himself for a moment but fights it off. Okay, just keep your cool and the BART car will–
“–This is a service advisory message–‘All trains are delayed to clear some debris from the track– Be about five minutes to ten minutes–Sorry for the inconvenience’–”
Siobhán says, “Bullshit! We won’t last two minutes down here like this…” She looks around the normal platform then back at the muck man coming toward them through the weird darkness on the little camera screen. She says, “Okay, get low and keep going. We’ll sneak to the stairs, haul ass up out of here, and try to catch a cab or something.”
“What if there aren’t any?”
“Hell, we can roll a messenger for his bike. You can ride on the handlebars.” She grasps his shoulder again and says, “You got me into this… so whatever it takes, got it?”
“Alright, alright.”
Felix crouches and starts through the rest of the rush hour crowd. His shoulder hurts from her claws before and he shrugs for her to let go. He glares back at her too and something in his eyes makes her let go but she gently places her hand against his back so they stay in contact. Felix decides he can live with that and moves on.
Felix and Siobhán are almost to the stairs in the cover of confused strangers when Felix sees two men coming down them. It’s the weird, samey-looking homeless guys with the stuffed duffle bags and overcoats. They’re scanning the platform with their big fake looking eyes as they descend. They have dully glowing, plum-sized orbs stuck to their overcoat chests. Felix stops and rests on one knee. He looks at the men and back down the platform through the camera.
“Felix, I’m not fucking around. If we don’t get out of here–”
“Shhht!”
A high school-aged skater to their left notices them. He’s swigging off an open tallboy of cherry lime “Joose” in a brown bag and looking sideways at them. He finishes his pull and lightly slaps his two cronies on the chest and shoulder before loudly announcing, “Hey! Is someone looking for these two fuckin’ freaks?!” He points at Felix and Siobhán. His friends laugh and he continues, “They lookin’ hella shady, kid! Yo, check this isht right here!”
Felix watches the porker on the display screen. Most of its eyes lock on the skater then examine the area where he’s pointing. Nonono…
Siobhán says, “Shut up, dickhead,” and takes a small, round pebble or bb out of the coin pocket of her jeans. She curls her index finger behind the inner tip of her thumb with the bb in-between and lightly flicks it at the lower third of the bag-covered Joose can below the jerky skater’s hand. It goes through the bag and can and Felix hears it hit the other side of the can interior as it stops. The clear-ish pink fluid drains out of the hole in the can, soaking the bag and streaming down onto the expensive looking shoes the skater is wearing.
The skater exclaims, “What the fuck?!” and hobbles about trying stop the flow. He doesn’t seem smart enough to figure out Siobhán is responsible but Felix is damn sure she wouldn’t care if he did. The troll was successful, though.
The porker stops about twenty feet down and stares through the crowd between Felix, Siobhán, and itself.
Siobhán sees this on the little screen too and just says, “Damn.” It’s hard to make out fully on the video screen, but the diseased organ and amorphous limb surface undulates and writhes more intensely. Parts of it break and split open revealing what look like misshapen, asymmetric chasms of jagged, obsidian teeth between the eyes. It lets out a wail from all of the openings and its whole form rolls and whips around atop two asymmetrical base limbs like it’s trying to start up a few hula-hoops at once. That mostly comes through on the little playback speaker in the camera body but Felix can still hear some of it reverberating off the platform walls like it’s huge and far away.
The creature breaks apart again and different-sized parts of it become long, eye-covered appendages like pulsing, obsidian-bladed whips which swipe through the air with the sound of a heavy scythe going through thick grass.
The wail is now a shrill, maddening howl and Felix can’t handle it. It’s getting so loud the playback speaker is blowing and it’s almost deafening. Felix keeps the camera locked on the creature as he stands and turns toward it and tries to pull the Mayor out of his waistband. Instead, the hammer hooks on the bottom of his dragon jacket and the heavy pistol drops to the platform floor with a metallic thunk.
The mucksack’s gyrating and pulsing slows and the whipping of the tentacles and thicker, eye-covered appendages in its chaotic storm of psychedelic madness calms enough that it’s almost human-shaped again. It watches Felix fumble to pick up the gun with its more lively eyes.
It doesn’t really express emotion but in a distant part of his mind he decides it’s curious and/or amused by his clumsy display. I hope it laughs to itself while it’s eating me and chokes on my fucking liver! A group of commuters shriek and yell at the sight of the pistol and others look to see why. Like an ocean parting, the frightened rush hour crowds shrink away and bunch together near the platform edges.
The muck man forms something like a twisted arm out of matte-black organ and sinew slop and digs the end of it into stormy ocean of its main current trunk. Then it pulls it back out, producing a plum-sized sphere not unlike the one the weird hobos have on their coats. Wait, where did they go? Doesn’t matter now–
The straining filth tentacle closes around the sphere and Felix hears a little click. Then the muck man releases its grasp on the sphere and drops it. Before it can hit the ground, it starts spinning so fast that it hovers in place and glows brighter as it picks up more and more speed. Felix doesn’t care to see what the sphere is for and starts to raise the pistol to make the point moot.
Siobhán yells, “No, Felix!” and lunges
toward him fast enough that her hood falls back, almost freeing her two big braids. She grasps his jacket collar and pulls him toward the stairs like he weighs a fifth of what he does and her braids whip free and are flung around like the legs of a gymnast performing an aerial. His feet leave the ground and she hauls him through the air almost parallel to the ground lengthwise.
Felix is so focused on survival that he doesn’t really think about how Siobhán is seemingly defying gravity or how he’s achieved liftoff. He just struggles to train the camera and pistol back on the muck man in its darkness but all he can see as the viewing angle of the little screen changes is it whipping back up into a murderous fury and the bloodcurdling wailing is blowing the speaker again.
The whirling muck man starts toward them taking steps from one malformed pseudo-leg to the other. As Siobhán pulls Felix along with her long, powerful strides, he desperately tries to aim between his own legs and feet which are floating in front of his pistol and camera at the moment for some reason.
Then things get weird.
As Felix perceives it, there’s a flash in the core of the glowing plum hovering above the floor behind the advancing porker and for just a sliver of a moment it feels to him like he’s slowing down and the creature is speeding up unnaturally. What he can see of it on the video screen becomes even more blurred and vague than normal.
Before he can even panic all the way, Felix slaps down on the floor of the platform on his butt and it feels like someone has pulled down his ripped shirt mask and is holding something to his face. His pistol clatters down onto the platform next to him. He can barely see and everything is blurry and pulsing. He struggles and can just make out that it’s the smaller of the weird Peter Lorre-looking hobos and he’s wearing what looks like a clear plastic dust mask with rotating valves over the nose and mouth and short cylinders jutting at downward angles off each side of the jawline. Is that what’s on my face?
Something bright is on Felix’s chest. He looks down and sees one of the spheres like the hobos have. It’s blurring but the insides look like spherical clock parts whirring into and around and through each other like a little impossibly intricate and complex machine.
There’s a beep and he feels the breath come out of him so he struggles more. Felix feels pressure on and then in his neck and realizes the small hobo is injecting something into him. By his third heartbeat, Felix can breathe again and whatever the hobo shot into him has dropped the cloak of the inky blackness back down onto everything and Felix sees the fearsome porker whirling in the platform-wide green gas and can hear its wail with his own ears again. It’s advancing and almost right on them.
Ten feet maybe.
All of the movement in Felix’s vision takes on surreal, warping properties. As the smaller hobo moves to put away his syringe, his form takes on the shape of all the space it fills as it moves. When the movement is finished, the warping catches up and it looks almost normal until he moves again. The shot in Felix’s neck has brought back his high and he jokes in his mind, I bet there’s some Futurists back in the day who would’ve killed to see this…
Through Felix’s flailing and this disorienting effect, he sees the larger hobo step in front of them and throw his overcoat open toward the creature. He primes and raises a metal, cloth, and flesh blob from in his chest which reveals itself after a moment of stillness to be a Bergmann submachine gun with a long box magazine jutting out to the left perpendicular to the gun’s length. It has modifications installed from over the ejection port and down the top and left side of the gun terminating at a left angle to the top of the body in a rotating sphere filled with concentric separated bulbs of glowing blue and green fluid bubbling and rolling around like boiling mercury inside.
The hobo aims it toward the lunging muck man and yells, “Dich mutter huret in der stadt, sheisskerl!” which warbles and twists like the sound equivalent of the warping movement.
The hobo squeezes the Bergmann trigger and the muzzle and breach flash a brilliant indigo as blinding white rounds sear the air like tracers then shred into the trunk and whipping stalks of the charging monster.
As the casings leave the ejector, they become glowing strips of solid light until they vanish a few feet from the gun and the trail catches up and it all blinks out. The oil-in-water blue and green fluids are boiling now and an exhaust port burps dark steam out and back over the hobo’s shoulder in time with the bursts.
The smaller hobo stands, steps toward the creature, and produces two machine-organic limbs, which catch up and become long barrel Luger artillery pistols with circular snail drums, smaller modifications, ampules, and exhaust ports. With a downward crook of his blobbing hands, he snaps the modified ends of the pistol grip bases into what would have to be recoil dampening rigs that disappear up his sleeves then raises them and fires full-auto into the wailing blue-eyed mucksack. Felix sees what look like the dampening cylinders punching the inside of the smaller man’s coat sleeves near the elbows with each shot.
As the rounds tear and shred into and through the thick, oily nastiness that makes up the porker, the holes left behind start to suck and rip the creature into itself.
The creature’s wails take a turn toward pained and fearful as the psychedelic black sludge which holds it together is pulled into the negative space, leaving piles and puddles of partially digested and corroded organs, deformed teeth, warped bones, limbs, eyes, and fluids sprayed and slapped all over the platform.
The creature’s eyes go grey and dead again and its wailing cuts out abruptly as the last of the muck is sucked away into the air over the glistening, sickening parts left behind.
The thick darkness just vanishes when the last bit of muck is gone but the green gas and spinning hover ball remain.
The hobos stop firing their smoking weapons but scan the area before lowering them back into their open coats. The larger one turns around and becomes a moving Duchamp painting in Felix’s mind for a moment before catching up with himself as he stops and examines Felix on the floor. He keeps his right hand on the Bergmann rifle-style grip with his index finger resting across the outside of the trigger guard and tucks the butt of the wooden stock into nook where his upper arm and chest meet.
The man’s big, fake blue eyes and roughly cropped blond hair poking out from under a dark grey knit cap look even more fake at the moment. He thinks for a moment then chuckles and says, “What was it you said? ‘Scientists would say sure… Philosophers would say who knows…’ and what? I’ve been trying to tell that one to Sujit and I can never remember the last part.”
Felix just looks at him in a daze.
The hobo says, “Oh, sorry. The hot shot’s got you looped a bit.” He takes off his mask, sticks a gloved finger down his throat, and retches a small black ball into his hand. It looks like an obsidian bouncy ball.
As soon as the ball leaves his mouth, the kind-of-fake looking blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin become roughly cropped, coarse black hair where he must have cut off his dreadlocks, dark skin, and rich brown eyes. The gap between his chops has filled in and become an unkempt salt and pepper beard. He puts the clear mask back on without taking a breath and exhales into it.
“Wahr– …heit?” Felix manages through a mild nausea on the back end of the high and his utter confusion.
Wahrheit tucks the little ball into a coat pocket and makes a “thumbs up” gesture with his hand.
He jokes, “Got it in one.”
29
Felix is not convinced this man is Wahrheit but he decides to keep that close to his chest. Nauseated, he partially burps out, “What’s… what’s going on?”
“Not much now that the cavalry showed up, am I right?”
The smaller man who must be Sujit snorts an acknowledgement of Wahrheit’s joke through his artificial Peter Lorre stomach ball face. These guys seem pretty soused themselves.
Wahrheit looks past Felix and asks, “Who’s the frail?”
Felix looks to where Wahrheit’s gaze is
falling and sees Siobhàn. She looks like a statue for a moment then he realizes that she’s just moving incredibly slowly. There is definite movement but it only seems noticeable because she was moving so quickly. Or still is, I guess? This is too much…
He looks around the platform and notices that the rush hour commuters are practically frozen in place. The faster movement is progressing but you have to pay attention to see it.
“Felix, I need your attention! Who is this woman to you? How do you know her?”
“I… I met her at a party. She works at a fish supply shop. She has a really weird apartment in the same place in Chinatown. That’s pretty much what I know.”
“Is she kosher? Can we trust her?”
Felix is still unsure who he can trust at all but he says, “I think so… Not positive, I guess.”
Wahrheit narrows his eyes at Felix then looks back at Siobhàn and considers. He cautiously crosses to Siobhàn’s slow-running form. Felix notices that her expression is changing ever so slowly into a mask of confusion and her head is turning almost imperceptibly. Has she noticed I’m not at the end of her arm anymore?
Wahrheit opens his slung duffle bag and takes out another of the clear masks and an ancient looking syringe from out of a velvet lined case. He takes a few steps around her like he’s looking for the best spot.
Blond-blue Sujit says a few phrases in what Felix decides is Thai and Wahrheit grunts like a long-married husband, seeming to convey an “I know, I know.”
“What did he say?” Felix asks.
“Uh…” he says as he calculates. “He told me to be careful.”
“Why?”
“Well, what you have here is a wolf among sharks… or a shark among wolves. Either way, she’s out of her element but still deadly as hell.”
A Tear in the Veil Page 39