by Tom Bont
“What are you afraid of, Speed?” Angela asked.
He glanced back and forth between them. “Those crazy dweller cult fuckers, that’s who!”
“Why are they after you?”
“Cause I tried to sell them an old textile mill.”
Angela let the surprise shine through on her face. Sometimes it paid to pretend you were behind the eight ball. It was easy when you really were. “You own a textile mill?”
“Yes. Well, not really. Won a property deed in a poker game. When the sale went through, turned out the property deed was forged.” He grimaced. “Let me tell you, those fuckers are not very forgiving.”
“I thought you were a wrench, not a confidence man. You’ve impressed me, Speed!”
Speed puffed his chest out. “I’m a businessman.”
Ego massages, free for the asking! Angela’s Interrogation Tome, page 5.
“What did they need a textile mill for?”
“Needed a place to perform some ritual. Something about the timing and opening the hole. They needed a place out of the way.”
Angela sat back in her chair and crossed her arms.
She grinned. “Do you think it’s all bunk?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged.
“Hmm.” Angela nodded. “So…where do you think they’re gonna have this ritual at?”
“I don’t know, Agent Hollingsworth,” he shook his head. “If I knew, I’d tell you.”
Speed jumped back when Danny stepped up. “How do you get this information?”
“I hear things.”
“Have you heard anything else?”
Speed shifted around on his knees and bit his lip. “Well,” he said, staring into Angela’s eyes, “I heard that your brother was helping them. And that they want you too. Something about twins.”
“Twins?!” Angela blurted out. “What about twins?!” She stood up and grabbed him by the collar. Her mouth went dry.
Danny took a step forward.
“I…I don’t know, Agent Hollingsworth! Honest! That’s all I know!”
She released his collar and frowned at Danny. Concern clouded his features. She stood quietly for a few moments as a chill scurried up her back. Danny’s heavy breathing was apparent.
She shook off the chill and reached for Speed’s arm. “Well, we’re going to put you in ‘protective custody,’” she said. “We don’t want some mean ol’ cultists to kill you, now do we?”
“Maybe that’s for the best,” he said. “I’m tired of hiding. Can I go to the bathroom first?”
Danny tilted his head to the side. “Yeah.” He stepped into the hallway. “Commander, will you check the bathroom, please?”
While Speed did his business, Danny huddled with Angela at the front door and away from the smell. “You think he’s telling the truth? About the ritual coming up soon? About them being after you?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I have absolutely no clue what I bring to the table.”
“Speed mentioned it. There’s no way he could have known you had a twin and that he was working with them. I think the intel’s good.”
“Yeah.” Angela pursed her lips and nodded reluctantly. “The doormen seem to like experimenting on them.” She looked down the hallway at the commander.
He shrugged his shoulders.
Angela yelled down the hallway. “Hurry up, Marion!” She leveled a sardonic at Danny.
No answer.
Danny rushed down the hallway and knocked on the door. “Pinch it off, Speed! Time to go!”
Still no answer other than Disturbed playing on a boom box.
They looked at each other and pulled their pistols.
“Speed! Open up!” Angela ordered as she wiggled the locked doorknob.
When silence echoed back at them, Danny kicked the door in.
Speed had pushed the toilet into a false wall. Disappearing into the spot where it should have been was a man-sized hole. They both peered over the edge. It dropped straight down about eight feet and turned north into a tunnel.
Danny took a sniff. “I don’t smell him over the sewage.”
“You fucking bowlegged crotch-scratching cockroach!” Angela yelled down the hole. “Keep looking over your shoulder for me, shithead!”
Danny stood back. “Wow. Somewhere there’s a sailor whose tattoo just blushed.”
After calls from local and state police asking why one of his agents was calling up and demanding a full man-hunt mobilization for Speed, Kent told Angela to take the day off. And more if she needed it.
The look in his eyes left no doubt it was a non-negotiable suggestion.
Angela didn’t know what to do with nearly a whole day to herself. She was on paid leave, but unable to investigate anything. Heather was at work. Her parents were in Houston visiting her Uncle Bill.
“Hot tea and a book,” she grumbled. “Yeah, I’d much rather do that than go shoot a bad guy.” She flopped face down on the couch. “Not.”
Her phone rang, and she snatched it up. “Hollingsworth! What?”
“Oh, wow,” the friendly voice said. “A two-word greeting today.”
“Randy?” She sat up and pulled her feet under her. “Hi! Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I, um, wanted to…I wanted to see how the book was coming along.” He paused. “Sounds like you’re busy though.”
“Actually, I’m not. That’s the problem.”
“Good!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got you all to myself.”
“I guess you do!” She giggled.
The hell with it!
She giggled again. “The book’s exciting!”
That time, he giggled. “Exciting? Lovecraft?”
“Yeah, Lovecraft.” Giggle.
Oh, Lord, what have I gotten myself into?
Tiffany yelled in the background. “Dad, ask her!”
Her heart fluttered. “Ask me what?”
Randy took a deep breath. “Would you be interested in, well, seeing, you know, a movie? The Necronomicon is playing at the dollar theater.”
“A movie?”
“And dinner!” Tiffany shouted in the background.
“Only if you take me to dinner first,” Angela said, her mood shooting for orbit as Speed all but disappeared from her thoughts.
“And dinner,” he added. His voice got distant. “I can handle it, Tif!”
“Dinner and a movie!” Angela cooed. “Hmm. A real date. I haven’t been on one of those since—”
Angela’s door crashed in. Four men in black ski masks ran through the doorway and across the dining room. She jumped up and glanced with chagrin at her pistol. Five running steps around the couch and to the breakfast bar stood between her and dead bad guys.
She lifted her phone to her face. “Randy, call Danny!” She took a step backwards and yelled into the phone, “Four of you to take down little ol’ me? Ski season ain’t for another few months!”
The adrenaline pumping through her veins slowed everything down. The carpeting massaged the soles of feet.
The men no longer ran. They seemed to be walking as they moved into the living room.
She turned away from them and shoved her phone down her pants.
Maybe they won’t raid the cash register.
She took one step around her couch as she grabbed two pillows. Threw them at her closest attacker.
“Ha! A couple of throw pillows, jerkwad!”
Her assailant spent two heartbeats ducking instinctively. She used those beats to dash farther around the couch. Towards her pistol.
The carpet jumped up towards her face.
That’s weird!
Her arms refused to protect her from it. It hit her in the nose.
Shit! Taser!
A black bag slipped over her head. Four sets of arms each grabbed a limb.
Ew, an octopus.
Wait! Fish smell.
She yelled, “They ate fish!” but all she managed was “Furbble” and a stream of drool.
A muffled voice. “You didn’t think we forgot about you, did you?”
A sharp pain in her upper arm.
The world went even darker.
*clink. *clank. *brrzzap*
Drills. Yeah. Drills. That’s it. Drilling my head. They’re turning me into Frankenstein’s Monster. To hell with the Bride shit. Even God screwed up the first time. That’s why he made woman. We’re perfect. Except for that stinking chocolate addiction. And Italian food. Damn, I love Italian food. And cowboys.
Angela fluttered her eyelids a couple of times. When the light didn’t scorch her brain, she left them open. She tried to raise her hand to wipe the hair out of her face. Both arms were tied down. Tightly. Legs, too. She shook her hair out of her face instead and looked around. The last time she’d been in a lab like this, it had been a dusty barn. Or a moldy, church basement. This place was high-tech….
Other than the metal gurney I’m strapped into.
Linoleum floors. White walls. Fluorescent ceiling lights. One door in the far corner. She couldn’t see if one was behind her. An IV tube dangled from her hand, neatly taped.
They’ve stepped up their game. This is bad.
She pulled against her restraints again. Flat screen monitors hung along the walls as well as some new-fangled, transparent models.
The movies! Randy! Crap! I hope he’s not pissed. Ha! I hope he called Danny.
A doorman walked into her view, it’s tri-fold mouth closed and squelchy skin roiling over wiry muscles. Oh, fuck! Her heart rate jumped. It ignored her and disappeared from her view.
Dozens of men and women were busy typing in commands on the computer keyboards arranged in a circular NASA control center layout. She sat in the middle. She strained her neck to look around. One other gurney sat close. Empty.
“Hey, Ang,” Chris’s voice called from her side.
“Chris?” she exclaimed as he stepped into her view, wearing jeans and an AC/DC t-shirt. “Fuck! Really?” She looked at his arms, at the fresh track marks. “Shit! You’re shooting up again?”
The smile on his face vanished. He crossed his arms to hide the needle scabs and stared at his feet. Still, her FBI agent’s analytical eye told her he was relaxed. Confident, even.
“Dammit, Chris!” she said, shaking her head and pursing her lips. “I’d heard you were messed up with these fuckers, but I didn’t believe it!”
He looked up at her with glassy eyes and dilated pupils. “Wow, man! You knew?”
“Of course, I knew, you little shit! You left your fingerprints all over the math book. Doesn’t make it any less surprising to see your ass walking around here like you own the place.”
He blinked a few times and looked over to a doorman monitoring a security camera feed. He spoke a few sentences in some foreign language, and it responded back with an apparent negative.
A chill rattled her shoulders at the sight of its mouth rolling open. “Lithuanian?” she asked, trying to keep sane.
“Yeah. Older dialect though. Really old. Ancient, in fact.” He indicated the doorman with a dull wave of his arm. “It’s their native language.”
“Chris, how the fuck did you get mixed up with these guys?”
He shrugged. “They found me. One of their guys works at the FBI.”
Drones in the FBI?
“He read a report about the time I translated that notebook for you. They offered me a chance to redeem myself.”
“Redeem yourself?”
“Yeah. I read those reports, your notes, my psych evals.” He worked hard to stare at her with a steady eye. “Your concerns about me.”
Angela did her best to maintain a neutral expression.
Must be someone high up to have of access to that information.
“I don’t understand the science,” he said, “but…” He stopped for a moment and looked around in short, jerky movements. “Wow! I’m sorry, Ang, are you thirsty?”
“Yeah, a little. Headache, too.” She wasn’t lying. Her head throbbed with her heartbeat.
“I’ll be right back.” He rushed away, stumbling once, as a man came up and checked her blood pressure.
“Agent Hollingsworth,” the man said. “I’m Dr. Connors. You should know the Forsaken Dweller asked for you specifically. You’ve kept it entertained since your encounter with Lilith.”
“Me?” Conrad Sabine and the picture of her and Heather with the writing on the back came to mind. “Why is he interested in me?”
“You are the only human to have put all the pieces together.” Connors looked over his shoulder. “And with a twin brother? Oh, we simply had to have him, too.”
“Wait,” Angela said. “You recruited him because of me?”
Dr. Connors smiled and collected his tools. “Recruit implies a concerted effort. Once he found out he could have all the heroin he wanted, he begged to work for us.”
“You sonuvabitch!” Angela growled. “He was clean!”
“Now, now, Agent Hollingsworth,” Dr. Connors cooed. “There’s no reason to get upset. We’ve given him purpose and a chance at redemption. Something you couldn’t do.”
Angela struggled against the restraints as Connors walked off behind her.
A few moments later, Chris showed up with a glass of water and a folding straw. He pushed a button on the side, and the gurney rotated to a near-vertical position. “Sorry, I can’t let you go. Here.” He held up two aspirin. “Open up.”
She took the proffered pills with just enough water to swallow them and sate her thirst; who knew when she’d get to pee again? Being strapped to a gurney was no way to experience the pleasure of a full bladder. “Chris, why are you mixed up with these guys?”
“It’s my chance to do good. Like you.
“What do you mean ‘do good?’”
He put the cup down and pulled up a chair. His face fell, and he chewed his inner lip. “You’ve always been the smart one. The good one. Everything you touch turns to gold. Me? Everything I touch turns to shit.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“No, Ang. Look at how many children you saved working for the FBI.” He stared down at his feet. “You’re as close to being a superhero as anyone I know. Mom, Dad, I know they’re disappointed in me. And that’s just with the stuff they know about.” He raised his gaze back up to her. “If they knew all my shit that you’d hid from them?” He shook his head. “I didn’t realize I was such a burden on you until I read those evals.”
Angela let him talk and occasionally glanced over his shoulder to the security station and studied the camera screen.
“You were right to send me to jail.” A tear rolled down his cheek. “What kind of son beats the shit out of his dad?”
She wished she had a piece of gum. “You’re better now. That therapy did you good.” She wiggled against her restraints. “You’ve had a little setback. We can fix it. Let me free. We can still go home. Mom and Dad are worried about you. You missed Dad’s birthday, you know. Double-decker, chocolate sour cream cake.”
“I’m not going home until I’ve fixed myself.” He waved his arm in an arc, indicating the lab. “That’s what all this is.”
“What is?”
“It’s a grand experiment. They’re going to merge us. Make us one.”
She gasped, and her mouth fell open. “What?”
“They have this serum, see. I get the serum. It changes me somehow. Then I infect you, like with a scratch. We become truly identical at that point. More than clones, they say. Then—” he pointed to the large postmodern Frankenstein-type Tesla coils mounted around the gurneys “—they hit us with some electricity. Then we’ll be one.”
Angela leaned forward as much as the restraints let her as four drones rolled up pallets with flesh pods on them. They weren’t pulsing like the other ones from Hallsville, but they were larger and more robust. Their blue veins bulged out along their sides like a plaster cast of the Mississippi Valley. Her skin tingled at their sight. “Why
would you want to do that, Chris?”
Chris shrugged. “We’ve always been better together. This is my chance to make right everything I’ve done fucked up.” He looked back at the floor. “This’ll be the last time you gotta help me.”
Angela clenched her fists. A junkie will believe anything you tell him if it means a guaranteed fix. “Chris, it doesn’t work that way!”
He stood up in a flash. “We were one once.” He pointed his finger at her. “A mistake of nature split us apart in the womb. We’re only setting things back.”
“No…I don’t think you understand. You aren’t thinking straight. It’s the drugs, Chris!” She looked around the room. “Think! All of this? It’s not for you or for me. They’re trying to destroy Earth.”
“No, they ain’t.” Chris gave a slight, half-smirk and subtly wiggled his head, not quite a shake. “You can’t destroy a planet.” He gazed at the flesh pods out of the corner of his eye. “Not really.”
A shred of doubt. “The Forsaken Dweller? I’m sure you read about it in that book, right?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“What do you think it is?”
“Oh! He’s someone they’re bringing in from a parallel dimension. He controls the process.” He laughed. “Forgot to mention him.”
“No, Chris,” she said in a near whisper. “The Forsaken Dweller is the universe. It’s going to convert Earth into energy like black tar heroin on a spoon and suck it up like a syringe.”
“What?”
“That’s right! They need our blood for the ritual, to open the portal—” she looked around “—probably right here in this fucking room.” His eyes met hers. She knew he was having second thoughts. Twins can’t lie to each other. His drugged mind was foggy, though. “We sent that large book from the warehouse to experts. They’ve verified the math.”
Chris licked his lips and looked around. “No, way! An intelligent universe? Woah! Now that’s a trip!”
Two men in white lab coats walked up to Chris. “We’re ready to start the procedure, Mr. Hollingsworth.” One of them set a shiny, metallic case down on the table.
One of them stepped around to her side. He held a syringe up and pressed the plunger until a clear fluid shot out. “This is the catalyst, Agent Hollingsworth.”