The oblivion turret trains itself on the Bentley as Felix guides it around the falling vehicle chunks and there’s a long moment in his mind where he considers just letting it blank him out to avoid the risk of anymore pain or worry…
,.’,.,’,.,.’,.,.’,’–
…which is all but immediately followed by a cold fury and the overwhelming sentiment, “I still want some answers and you ain’t shit, motherfucker!”
Felix jams the accelerator down all the way, steers horribly with his burning right arm, and tries to get the Mayor out of its big pocket again.
The blue strobe starts again but Felix keeps going. As he gets closer, the light strobes between blue and red in what has to be a last warning signal.
Felix decides to swerve at the last second and doesn’t let himself think about what’s going to happen if that doesn’t work. He almost has his big pistol free but it’s hooking on the edge of the pocket.
Not again! Fuck–FUCK!
The mechanical eyes start to strobe all red and Felix realizes that the turret will just follow him if he swerves.
So this is it then…
Tendrils of energy that look like silhouetted electrical arcs build on the ball and cylindrical length of turret barrel and Felix thinks about his mother and father with him at the beach when he was about seven years old and wishes he was there.
Stupid, right? Can’t help it…
He wants to play with his bucket in the wet sand just out of reach of the frothy tides and chase crabs near a set of man-placed concrete rocks that were covered in mollusks and anemones. The clouds were fluffy and huge as they crept over the coast and it rained for a month after that, but that time at the beach just before the storm is the only thing he’s ever been able to think of as perfect. Simple, pure happiness he has never felt since and the last thing he thinks about is what his life would be like if things had continued like that.
Actually, it’s the last thing he thinks before the crackling black turret buckles a bit and fires wide, missing everything but the rear driver panel of a southbound car. It buckles a bit more and sags before falling off the bottom of the flying platform onto the bridge.
Felix’s eyes catch some movement and are drawn to the rearview mirror and he sees Audrey standing atop a slow-moving minivan in her weird stealth suit with her silent pistol still aimed at where the turret was. Then the vintage funeral goer projection seems to fold around then into her and she’s gone from view.
The red-eyed Porker on the vehicle wails and detaches what has to be a large nothing-beam rifle from next to its seat with a few oily, malformed tentacles, plunks a thick cable into a socket somewhere, and aims down at the Bentley to finish the job.
A dark object falling from a couple struts up on the bridge tower registers in Felix’s upper peripheral vision but he’s more concerned with the business end of the beam gun aimed right at him in the driver’s seat. His eyes flick up out of habit, though, and he sees–GRIEVES!
He’s thrown himself out of the south tower from somewhere up high and he’s falling toward the floating Porker mobile like a grotesque flying squirrel. His head, face, and hands are burning dark and sketching out from whipping distortions and he’s falling fast enough that the glitching follows Grieves down like the tail of a comet.
The Porker fires but Felix swerves and the beam subtracts the passenger mirror and part of the windshield on that side, leaving overlapping circular cutouts in the glass and metal.
Before the Porker can fire again, Grieves lands strangely on the flying platform’s front half–He lets himself phase mostly through it but his hands solidify at the last moment and grab the rotor shroud, using his weight to pull the vehicle’s front end down and the Porker has to let itself roll down partially into a blob to keep from falling off. It keeps a hold of its beam gun with a few of its thinner warped appendages but isn’t in a position to use it at the moment.
Grieves pulls himself up through the vehicle and stands on the self-leveling front end in a hunched ready stance. The Porker whips up into a fury, sending rain cascading all around as it breaks apart and takes its first few swipes at Grieves. The obsidian-taloned tentacles fail to connect as they pass harmlessly through Grieves and he just pushes the big sack of swirling muck back into its seat, taunting it like this is a slapstick movie. Dammit, Grieves! This isn’t playtime!
The Porker’s eyes lock on Felix quickly approaching the area of road below its vehicle and it roll-climb-pours itself off in time to plop down onto the hood. Grieves drops down onto it and starts to wrestle with it.
Felix can barely see around Grieves and the wailing blob of teeth, eyes, and whipping tentacles but he tries to fling it off by driving even faster and swerving back and forth. It’s moored itself into the hood with a few dedicated talon-tentacles it has pierced the hood with and it isn’t going anywhere. The swerving does clear his view some on each side for an instant each time, so that’s something. He steers by inexperienced instinct and memories of the quick flashes he sees of the crawling car and truck patterns on the drenched bridge ahead. As he swerves, he hears Siobhán’s vacant body shifting back and forth in the bucket seat against the seatbelt tension.
Felix thinks about stopping but, even though he’s confused by Audrey’s apparent reluctance to let him die horribly from an instantaneous lack of existence, he isn’t keen to see what else is on her mind so he sticks with trying to haul ass away and use his only means of defense at the moment.
The Mayor comes out of his pocket finally with a last twist and pull, and he presses the priming button. There’s a blow-off valve spurt and a hiss.
The Porker is holding full-blown distortion swirl, prism-cutout face, and shark eyes Grieves up and away with a few weird appendage growths like an older brother keeping a sibling from landing a blow with his superior reach. It presses itself against the windshield and part of the roof and they start to warp and bubble where it’s trying to pass through into the car interior. Between its variably tinged and aware reddish eyes, several of its many mouths flap open and form flat against the vibrating, rain-slick glass and gape open, revealing those rows of nasty transparent obsidian teeth like a pack of warped, bloodthirsty lampreys. A thin black tendril squirms its way in naturally through the first bullet hole Audrey made and it writhes against the sizzling inner surface of the windshield like a squid tentacle.
Grieves phases through the nightmare spawn, turning as he does and he ends up in the dashboard inside the car facing the creature on the hood and windshield. He grabs blobs of teeth and eyes in two big bunches and phases out of the interior of the car, pulling himself out through the solid matter of the glass. When he’s done, his back is on the windshield and the Porker is held away from it as much as Grieves can manage. Grieves has to keep phasing different parts of himself in and out to avoid the mouths and talons striking out for him while keeping it at bay. Felix tries to aim the Mayor through the windshield but the Bentley rakes and crunches against another vehicle on the bridge and his first shot goes wide. Seeing that Felix has what he assumes is the one type of weapon that can hurt it, the Porker tries to pull away. Grieves switches tactics and tries to keep the creature on the hood, phasing himself down into the engine compartment and pulling the big monster down with him.
Felix primes again and fires through the windshield and this time his aim is true enough. The triple aught buck equation rounds blast out of the chamber, igniting the colored fluids somewhere inside and flaring up to that blinding white as they come out of the barrel and go through the windshield into the Porker’s closest blob of gnashing madness.
The muck is blown out through the back of the Porker in three places in a surprisingly wide spread then starts sucking back in, pulling and twisting it into the nothing around the path the big pellets made through the creature’s body. The Porker wails but isn’t done for yet.
Grieves can’t see from his straining position down in the engine compartment and he holds onto one blob section too lon
g. The closest tooth chasm closes into the nasty mess and reopens around Grieves’s sleeved hand and arm, slamming closed on it and sending his weird glowing blood spraying out all over. The Porker wrenches the mouth that has Grieves’s arm completely closed, ripping, breaking, and slicing Grieves’s forearm off about four inches down from the elbow. Grieves howls in pain and his cries are muffled but reverberate through the body of the car.
Felix primes the Mayor and fires then primes and fires again. The nine wounds suck the Porker into itself as it wails. The eyes go grey as whatever force it is that takes control of the creatures leaves this one. What’s left of the oily, foetid muck slumps down and, as the black sludge is sucked away, pickled organs and unnaturally warped bones slide down the hood and fall to the bridge surface speeding by below.
Grieves arches back up and begins searching through the last of the muck for his arm. He finds it but it’s already half sucked into one of the nothingmaker wounds. He seems to be trying to phase it by touch but it just keeps disappearing into the gap. He pulls at it until all he’s holding is the pinky then he’s forced to let go as it’s sucked in too. Grieves turns and leers back at Felix through the windshield with an expression that seems to mix triumph and sadness.
With the creature mostly gone and Grieves’s desperate struggle for his appendage finished, Felix looks past them and finally notices that he’s driving them straight into the first curve just past the bridge at about ninety miles per hour. With the weak left arm at the end of his burning shoulder and his Mayor filled left hand, Felix tries to steer them away from the curve but overcorrects and they veer between two cars toward the metal barrier at the foot of the western walkway and grind against it. Felix panics and slams on the brakes. The crunching slide only dissipates some of their forward momentum and hitting the brakes causes the Bentley to hydroplane almost straight toward the eastern walkway at over sixty miles per hour.
Grieves reaches his intact arm in through the windshield and tries to phase Felix like he did in the warehouse. It’s not working right and Grieves looks up at Felix and rambles something apologetic. He phases through the car and Felix watches in the mirror as Grieves ends up in a trot across the wet bridge behind the sliding car, waving toward the Bentley before grabbing the glowing stump poking out from his torn coat sleeve at the end of his other elbow.
Thanks for trying?
Felix looks back down at the quickly approaching curved walkway and has just enough time to think, Oh, this is gonna suuuuck–
The Bentley hits the base of the walkway at an angle and the front end of the passenger side starts to crumple but something about the objects being in different time streams causes a kind of shuddering vibration and extra resistance. The rear end was already kicking up but the resistance amplifies it and the silly pink car is thrown up over the walkway and flips end-over-end as it flies off the last curved stretch of bridge.
Felix is sucked back against his seat due to the Bentley’s vertical rotation and a twirling the angle caused and he can only wonder if he will vomit, pass out, or die on impact first. My money’s on dying instantly, for the record. Mercifully(depending on who you ask and their existential comfort at that moment), the Bentley slams upright into the hill just down from Vista Point, an outlook spot near the bridge to the northeast, at about a hundred and ten degree angle to its slope.
The engine compartment and front end crumple safely enough in theory but the particular way they do at this off angle causes Felix’s left femur to crack on impact; he doesn’t know that yet, though, because the airbags inflated and knocked him out cold.
33
Rain crawls down from the sky to pour on the resting Bentley, then bursts when the vibes of the two streams collide. Rain drops fall slowly like clear molasses through the bullet holes Audrey made in the windshield and passenger window and burst on Siobhán’s body.
Felix comes to looking up through shattered safety glass at gouges and tracks that the Bentley must have made as it slid down the hill it landed on. The deflated airbag is on his lap. The car ended up about thirty feet down from the impact point facing up the hill and slightly askew with the driver’s seat just a bit more downhill than the passenger’s. At least we didn’t roll down–
“AGH–NK!” Felix shifts in his seat and discovers that his leg is broken. He keeps it still until the sharper pain goes away but the pounding ache isn’t going anywhere unless shock kicks in. Won’t that be fun?
Between the broken leg and strangely shot shoulder, Felix isn’t feeling so hot. He turns gingerly to his left and sees the gap they sailed across then chuckles through his pain at their magnificent twisty-twirl–
Shuffling and loud sounds not unlike thick logs popping in a campfire grab Felix’s attention from the passenger seat.
Siobhán is moving.
It doesn’t seem deliberate. Her body jerks and shakes as if in a palsy and the movements get stronger for a moment with each pop from her head, neck, and chest. Other than that, she still looks dead. The blood, bone bits, and brain matter on Siobhán, Felix, and a great deal of the car interior are buzzing and popping.
Okay, that’s it. I’m officially done playing now.
After one especially loud pop reforms the shape of her head back to what it was before Audrey’s bullets had their way with it, Siobhán moans long and low. Her head lolls around weakly atop her neck and she seems to be looking around but the fake blue eyes move at slightly different times and angles. Then her face goes slack like her nerves are messed up before tightening back up and forming into a grimace. After a little flopping, she succeeds in bringing her hands to her face and head and moaning like a maimed animal. There are cracking sounds in her neck and chest and a last pop from somewhere in her head and she whines and cries in agony. Her eyes flutter open and they’re synched again but she looks confused. She pulls her hands away and looks at them then realizes what the problem is and pulls the clear mask off her face. She clumsily sticks a couple fingers down her throat then retches into her mouth and spits some fluid and the black ball at the cracked windshield.
She appears as herself again as the ball ricochets off the cracked glass, falls to the rain-slick dashboard, rolls down it, and drops down onto Felix’s broken leg.
It hurts but not enough to distract him from this horror show.
Siobhán looks over and down a bit at him and Felix sees that the weird contact lens that was over her right eye has come out. A brilliant, emerald green eye peers at him along with its translucent, reflective companion on her left. The piercing black pupil is… pulsing?
Siobhán struggles to say, “You mmade iht? That’sh grand.”
Her whole body tenses up and she cringes hard before going slack against the seatbelt and sighing.
Siobhán murmurs, “Oooh, I’m gonnah need sho mush dilaudid thish time…” then closes her eyes and tries to breathe through what must be excruciating pain.
That’s when it all clicks for Felix that he’s witnessed this process once before. Felix exclaims, “You’re one of them!”
Siobhán winces and raises her hand, “Shh-sht. Q-Quieter, pleash…”
As Felix tries to shift away from her without moving his leg too much he yells, “Fuck you! Fuck! Yooooooouuuuu! How’s that for quiet?!”
Siobhán’s eyes snap open and the right one explodes, pulling that side of her face into a warped, melting organic mess of solarized psychedelia. In a flash the only part of her head that’s not a part of the swirling pulse is her left, contact-covered eye.
She grabs Felix by the throat with her left hand in an upside-down grip but not hard enough to choke him. She strains a bit against the seatbelt to bring her right hand down and puts her fingers against his clear mask, then pulls it off and tries to put two fingers in his mouth but he closes it tight. He can feel her prying his lips and teeth apart with her superior strength and he can’t do anything about it. He tries to shirk her arms off too and has no luck. Siobhán’s fingers start to enter his mouth.
“IF YOU BITE ME, I’LL HURT YOU,” she says calmly in that shrill yet booming way, and he knows she’s not bluffing. She has recovered her motor skills quicker than Audrey did and seems able to recover from the crazy-face flare-ups faster too. It’s still a weird, distorting mess, but Felix can make out her face in it already.
Siobhán forces her fingers to the back of Felix’s throat and he gags. She keeps doing that until Felix hurls out his own black, nasty stomach ball onto the deflated airbag then the tilted zebra floor. Felix hears a clink right after it’s out of his sight under the seat and figures it hit the other stomach ball.
Siobhán lets go of his throat and shakes her other fingers off then wrenches the rear-view mirror off the shattered windshield, making a hole and letting in more clear molasses. She puts the mirror in his hands and raises them to his eye level. “You are ‘Them’, Felix.”
Felix glares at her and tries again to struggle out of her grasp.
Siobhán yells, “LOOK AT IT!” and the car vibrates hard around them.
He won’t look so she grabs his chin and gently but powerfully forces his face toward the mirror. Felix tries to fight her hand but feels his jaw trying to pop out and relents. He keeps his eyes on her, though, as his last act of defiance.
Siobhán’s intensity lessens and she says, “No more games, Felix.” She gives a little nod and eye roll toward the mirror.
A Tear in the Veil Page 45