Without dropping from the ceiling, the writhing sacks break apart and begin whipping and thrashing around. Sujit tucks and rolls as one obsidian talon-tipped appendage slices the air over the spot he had just occupied.
Wahrheit and Sujit fire up at the nightmarish muckmen, dodging the deadly whips and blades of squirming black flesh and obsidian. As the first two muckmen are sucked into nothingness in a shower of organs, rotting bones, and filth, more dark spots and straining pupae appear. Wahrheit and Sujit dispatch their targets expertly as they writhe out of the ceiling only to be sucked away leaving a nasty mess but the spots keep appearing.
Siobhàn growls, “Oh fuck this noise…” as she stands. In warping, liquid strides, she hurries down to the BART tunnel on the left.
Felix begs, “Wher- -re you goi-?!” trying to compete with the gunfire and failing.
The shots are louder than he would have thought, having only really heard automatic fire in movies. It rattles through his skull and it feels like his bowels are shuddering. His hand is shaking too, which makes the Mayor click and clack a little when he can hear it.
He looks back up the stairwell and sees that the porkers are climbing and rolling down every surface of it, descending quickly now and wailing as they come. He’s overwhelmed by the futility of this fight for a moment and almost drops his pistol.
Felix fights off paralysis and yells, “Wahrheit! They’re comin- -own the stairs!”
“How many?!”
“I- -on’t kno- -dozens?” Felix responds.
“Dozens?! Did you say dozens?!” Now Wahrheit sounds scared.
Siobhàn exclaims, “They’re go- -get you kil- -own here! We need to ke- -unning!”
She pulls her silky bandana off her neck and drapes it over her glowing orb, dousing its light. By the movement of her dim silhouette it looks like she ties the bandana off below the orb to secure it.
The darkness down the platform says, “Trust me, Felix.”
Felix looks back up at the howling madness coming down the stairwell and raises the Mayor, which is heavier now with the mods and his arm waivers a bit. I can probably get one or two before they eat me…
“Felix!” Siobhàn’s voice booms from the darkness by the tunnel mouth.
He looks back toward her but doesn’t lower his big pistol.
“I need yo- -rust me,” the featureless female silhouette says. There’s that vulnerable Irish girl again? The movement of her mouth and jaw are all he can make out in the dark as his eyes adjust and it reminds Felix of a dream he had what seems like years ago now.
“Felix, please…”
“Okay, sure,” he says like she asked him to pass the dinner rolls.
She grabs the metal barrier that blocks the tunnel access path and smoothly swings herself around it like she’s hanging onto a merry-go-round bar. Then she’s out of sight and Felix hears her soft but strong steps padding quickly down the access path away from this nightmare.
Felix looks back up the stairwell and sees a living wall of psychedelic eyes, undulating black flesh, and flashing obsidian teeth and talon-blades. The 3-D fractal abstractions pouring out of the blue, red, and green sets of eyes become blinding white when they overlap from all the grotesque, almost obscene slapping and slithering.
For a long moment he just watches, detached and fascinated…
Then the smell hits him and his fear returns and he can’t get to the tunnel mouth fast enough. He runs for it, unable to force a look back out of overpowering fear there’s impossibly a monster already behind him. As he’s climbing around the metal gate, he sees Wahrheit and Sujit spin toward the stairwell and start firing at the living wave of horror spilling out of it.
Sujit fans his two auto-pistols, tearing into the disgorging mass of layered muckmen, subtracting dense chunks, but nowhere near enough. A neglected muckman pupae spills out of the ceiling behind the two men, slapping a mess of tentacles and glop around Sujit’s upper torso- He’s still firing as it sinks talons between his ribs, lifts him off the platform and pulls him into one of its larger toothy mouths. As it bites into his head and shoulder, another pupae that’s dropped out of the ceiling latches onto Sujit’s legs, pulling them into its own mouths as it tugs his abdomen apart with tentacles and warped appendages. Sujit’s entrails tumble out as his spine detaches.
Sujit is devoured between the two nightmare creatures in the most obscene, stomach-turning version of the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp Felix has ever witnessed.
Felix collapses onto the narrow service path then hauls himself up and runs as fast as he can.
30
Felix secures the Mayor in the large left pocket of his jacket and fumbles with the torn t-shirt wrapped around his neck as he runs, in an attempt the cover up the glowing orb on his chest. The shirt is thin so it dims the light some but won’t douse it. The sphere gives off an eerie pale green glow now from the shirt as he runs down the service path and the pistol swings back and forth in the drooping left front of his jacket.
He hears wailing and gunfire and screaming behind him in the tunnel or back in Powell Station and because of that and the adrenaline pumping through him, he can’t hear Siobhàn running ahead at all. He can’t see her either but he imagines her lovely form running just up a ways.
There’s a booming sound behind like a good-sized explosion and the tunnel shakes and groans and the gunfire and screaming stop. Felix slows to a jog and looks back. He shuffles to a stop and listens. There’s nothing but silence in the complete darkness past his green glow at first, then he hears sliding or shuffling down the tunnel that he can’t make out. And I’m lit like a fucking Christmas tree right now!
Felix starts running again and tries to pry the sphere off his chest so he can tuck it under his jacket. He expects it to feel hot or at least warm but it’s actually a little cold. He twists it and it pops off of his chest. He’s careful not to drop it because he has to assume that would suck him back into normal time, and that would get me killed!
He lets it suck onto him and closes the green torn shirt and his jacket over it. He starts popping the buttons to keep the jacket closed, which gets rid of most of the light and keeps his pistol from swinging so much.
It’s a mostly straight shot from Powell to Civic Center but Felix manages to catch the edge of a slight curve in the narrow service path and stumbles before falling down onto his hands and knees hard. His palms are raw and wet as he rubs them together.
The path and tunnel to his right start to vibrate and shudder and there’s a rising hum. Time to go!
Felix looks back down the tunnel, hoping his eyes can adjust now that the glow isn’t a problem. He puts his hand on the tunnel wall to steady himself as he starts to get up. As he’s rising up, the wall feels different. It moves and changes against his palm and between his fingers and they’re too wet now.
He pulls his jacket near the top and the buttons pop as it opens, bathing the tunnel wall, his right arm, and hand in the green glow.
The wall is covered in eyes. Dead and grey and red and orange. Amorphous black blobs of organs, sinew, arteries, muscles, and bulbous, malformed bones flutter and pulse and squirm out of the wall in a swirling storm of oily, flashing muck.
Felix has never seen one of these things so close and he’s entranced by it even if the better part of him is screaming to run.
The eyes between his fingers loll and dart around moving his fingers a bit then the part his hand is on swells obscenely and breaks open, revealing those translucent, glinting black teeth.
As Felix finally pulls his hand back, the newly opened chasm of teeth tries to keep it, bulging out and slamming together with the sound of metal and glass crushing and grinding together in a high-speed car wreck.
Felix jolts back and throws himself off the service path and lands hard, his tailbone connecting with the closer rail.
“Gahnnn!”
He grits his teeth together to focus through the pain and goes for his pistol. It was great a
moment ago that his pocket fit the whole pistol but that’s a problem now. With his hands shaking and his mind going from watching the huge, swirling mass of psychedelic organ slop and eerie lightning suck and pull itself out of the tunnel wall, Felix is finding it extremely difficult to get his hand into the big pocket. The fabric is cheap and smooth and bunches together like it doesn’t want him to retrieve his gun.
The porker is out of the wall now and looms over him, large enough that it has to alter its form to conform to the upper curve of the tunnel. Parts of it break off but it keeps the talons and blades tucked in and it wraps thin tendrils formed out of the larger appendages around his feet and legs. The process of it breaking apart mixed with its rancid casket butter and vomit-feces stink almost turns Felix’s stomach.
Felix finally gets his left hand into his pocket and tugs and fights with the Mayor until he has it out of the pocket. He struggles to see through tears that the porker’s proximity and stench are bringing on. He swings the gun up and steadies it as best he can one-handed then tries to squeeze the trigger but it won’t move.
FUCKFUCKFUCK!
WhatdidWahrheitjustsayaboutthisfuckinggun?!
The thumb thing!
But before Felix can press the button that releases what must be a safety to ensure the mods are primed, the porker has wrapped more of the thin muck tendrils around his arms and wrenches the Mayor arm away from its aimed position.
The nasty creature holds Felix in place as it forms a rough arm-like appendage, plunges it into its main trunk, and produces a different kind of sphere. It shares the Swiss watch interior but it’s larger and has multiple adjustable translucent dials on the outer surface that directly alter the shapes of the intricate watch part formation in the sphere as the porker moves them.
Felix is transfixed by what seem like impossible configurations of the intricate, shifting machinery in the sphere and there are balls of deep black energy forming at junctions of the whirring, rotating blobs of delicate looking metal.
In between pulses of distorting strangeness which cause them to glow and warp, Felix can see that the wheels, balances, gears, springs, pinions, regulators, rollers, and other less recognizable parts are polished hematite black, shiny cobalt blue, and bone white and as he examines them, he decides he’s not sure if they’re metal at all.
The porker must be satisfied with its adjustments because it stops tinkering with the sphere and holds it in place as it wraps more tendrils of glistening muck around Felix.
Felix struggles against the slithering bonds but despite their organic treacle and crude oil appearance, they’re as strong as thick braided steel cable. He fights with all he can muster but he’s barely moving the pulsing tendrils, which hold him as more latch around him.
His fear and frustration have him on the verge of tears but he knows he can’t give up. He fights a profound terror that wants him to give in. It’s trying to overwhelm him like the black threads and tendrils and it’s going to succeed.
“Leave the kid alone, Fritz!” Wahrheit yells from the darkness down the service path before firing his Bergmann and lighting up the tunnel brilliant indigo as the blinding white rounds burn through the air into the porker.
A burst hits the sphere it’s holding, knocking it out of the creature’s reach and sending it through the air before it hits the floor of the tunnel and bounces back and forth between the train tracks as it rolls away to Civic Center Station.
Wahrheit empties his magazine into the vile monster with a thick mechanical click and thunk as the muck is sucked into the entry and exit wounds the searing white rounds created in the porker’s disgusting body. Rotting fluids and body parts cascade down onto Felix as the creature howls in fear and agony. The tendrils binding Felix detach and shrink up into the larger appendages, which are collapsing into piles of organic detritus, as the maddening nastiness holding them together is forcefully subtracted.
Wahrheit noisily collects a mouthful of mucus, takes off his filter mask, and spits the mucus on the last concentration of muck just before it’s sucked away into the air above the mess on Felix and the tunnel floor. Wahrheit puts his mask back on and grunts.
Felix flings the dissolving filth and organs off as he rolls over and tries to haul himself up. He slips in a pool of the cast off fluids and lands in it on his right hand and knees. He tenses his left arm and keeps the Mayor just above the surface.
Soft white, blue, and green light appears and mingles with Felix’s light as Wahrheit removes an opaque woven shroud from the sphere on his chest and another from the glowing fluid bulb on the Bergmann. He tucks the sphere cover into a pocket on his plaid thrift store pants but the flap that was over the Bergmann mods is attached to it with straps and Wahrheit drapes it down off the stock.
Felix notices that Wahrheit is covered in blood spray and spatter and his face is laced with streaks of it. It looks fresh and human– Sujit…
The humor Wahrheit’s eyes and face usually exhibit is completely gone. Wahrheit hops down off the service path and crosses to Felix. He grabs Felix’s left arm and heaves him to his feet with much less effort than Felix would have expected.
Felix starts to say, “Sorry about Suj–”
“Shut up. We need to move.”
Wahrheit roughly pushes Felix in front of himself, guiding him toward Civic Center station between the tracks. Felix slips and almost falls again but recovers like a determined rookie ice skater and trudges forward.
There’s a ruckus in the darkened station up ahead and what sounds like a distorted PA system.
“Quick and quiet,” Wahrheit whispers as he ejects his spent magazine and tucks it in his duffle bag.
Felix looks back and watches Wahrheit release and adjust a modified variable feed slot and mechanism on his submachine gun. Wahrheit takes a dripping snail drum magazine out of what Felix sees is the blood soaked left pocket of his overcoat, whips it and stops his arm to fling the excess blood off, then slots it into the feeder on the Bergmann. He chambers the first round and crooks his arm, pointing the gun at the ceiling of the tunnel as they quickly advance.
As they hurry up the tunnel, Felix’s foot connects with a hard ball and it rolls forward several feet. He closes the distance and picks up the sphere the porker was prepping to use. It’s gone into a standby mode of some kind and the glowing and movement inside it are almost imperceptible.
Wahrheit reaches around Felix and takes the sphere out of his hands. He grumbles, “The way this is going, we might need this,” and squirrels it away into his trusty duffle bag.
They keep moving and the distorted PA sounds are met with yelled rebuttals from somewhere down the platform. Felix is pretty sure he’s never heard the language they are arguing in even though it’s not totally clear yet. As they get closer, Felix decides the language is completely alien to this planet. It isn’t any of these things really, but the sound of it is like Korean by way of Farsi and a dash of Zulu popping and clicking?
Felix asks, “What are they saying?”
Wahrheit whispers, “Can’t make it all out. Not great with Junction pidgin, but it’s something about deportation and a lot of curses and sarcasm in response.”
Just before they reach tunnel opening into the Civic Center station and platform area, Wahrheit grabs Felix’s shoulder to stop him and steps ahead of him. He secures the flap back over the glowing fluid bulbs on the Bergmann, snuffing the light, then takes the other shroud out of his silly old pants and covers the sphere on his chest. He fishes in his duffle bag and takes out another shroud and hands it back to Felix, who places it over his sphere and unbuttons his jacket.
“Stay on me.”
Wahrheit crouches and uses the waist-high station platform as cover, sneaking along its length through the dark in the depression for the train tracks. Felix follows closely. Wahrheit stops about every ten feet to pop the top half of his head up above the level of the platform and scan it for signs of what’s happening. It reminds Felix of Grieves popping his se
e-through head out of inanimate objects and surfaces. Where is he off to anyway?
The forest of silhouetted rush hour commuters in this station is more naturally grouped, being completely oblivious to the troubles down the tunnel and the amorphous beasts lurking all around them.
The support pillars on this platform are square instead of round and there is just one row of them which runs down the center of the platform.
Wahrheit pops up again and stops. Felix cautiously pops the top of his head up too and sees bright blue light beaming through the green dumb-dumb gas all around and the limbs and trunks of the dark forest. Wahrheit tucks his head down again and shuffles down several more feet before popping up again. Felix follows and takes another look too.
The source of the distorted “PA” and what now sound like alternating angry and playful responses becomes clear:
There is a phalanx ten across and three deep of the spooky cosmonaut/swat suit wearing Controllers with their black mirror egg helmets and padded riot shields on the platform. One of the bomb disposal-naut Fat Boys looms behind them. Instead of the gas gun the one had in the east bay alleyway, Felix notices that this one has something like a big net gun. The “Monster Cops” are flanked by ranks of almost unmoving silhouette tree people as if they somehow shifted them cleanly out of the way to create their phalanx. That was nice of them?
In the ceiling above the monster cops is the source of the blue light, a biomechanical camera and speaker array which is hard to see clearly because it is densely layered with 3-D fractals similar to the ones over the porker’s myriad eyes. Its form is an asymmetrical, bulbous shape like maybe a huge mutant pear with Swiss watch eyes. The speakers are nothing more than shiny, opalescent plates in its surface with concentric circles of tiny holes in them and the blue pours out of three big spot lights on articulated arms, two jutting off the bottom at different angles and one near the top of the horizontal pear shape. Felix chooses to think of it as an “Observer”.
A Tear in the Veil Page 41