“I… I vill tell you.”
“Thought you might say that.”
“But not here. It cannot be here.”
“It can, and it will,” said Dan. He leaned closer. “Where is she?”
Vextor swung with a rock that caught Dan just above the ear. “Son of a—” Dan hissed, but then the ground turned to quicksand beneath him and the sky started to loop.
He stabbed the sword at von Haff, but von Haff was no longer there. Shaking his head, Dan tried to clear the marshmallow gloop that seemed to be filling it, clogging up his thoughts and making his movements slow.
Where was he? He spun, sword raised. Where was he?
The crowd roared, and Dan turned again, lashing out with the blade.
No, not the crowd. Not this time. The bike.
Dan’s double vision began to clear in time for him to see Vextor go hurtling towards a section of the fence, clouds of smoke spewing from the bike’s twin exhausts.
The people on the other side of the fence laughed and whooped with excitement, then yelped and fled in panic when they realized the bike wasn’t going to stop. It toppled the temporary structure with a creak and a bang. There was a brief frenzy of howls, then the squishing sound of chain-link fence being forced into flesh by several hundred pounds of growling metal and the additional weight of the madman riding it.
Dan tossed the sword, grabbed his hat and coat, and ran towards the gap in the fence. The people buried under it were barely recognizable as people now, at all. Bits of them had been squeezed through the gaps in the fence, and nothing short of reincarnation was going to help them get back on their feet.
He fumbled in his coat pocket as he slid across the hood of the Exodus and tore open the door. The engine spluttered and coughed, but when he cursed at it and smashed his fist against the wheel, it decided it should probably just do what it was told, and the car rumbled begrudgingly into life.
The Exodus’s tires also raised their voice in protest as Dan crunched the car into gear and hit the gas. The Death Derby had been set up way on the southern outskirts of Down Here, between the city limits and the wall that partitioned off the Out There wastelands.
There was a road, of sorts, but it had as many holes as it had surface, and the Exodus’s suspension creaked and banged as Dan powered the car over the crest of a ridge, and down the slope on the other side.
Von Haff’s bike was a quarter of a mile ahead, but wobbling unsteadily. At first, Dan thought Vextor was avoiding the potholes, but as he started to close the gap, he realized the bike itself was doing most of the weaving. It must have been damaged during the arm-in-spokes incident. It wasn’t the only one. Dan flexed the fingers of his woman’s hand, but only the index finger and thumb responded.
The city rose up ahead, an outcrop of low, dirty warehouse buildings rising to become towers of metal and glass. A few of the buildings in the business district stabbed at the clouds, as if aspiring to the dizzy heights of Up There, floating above on its thousands of individual engines.
There was half a mile, maybe less, until von Haff hit a real road surface, which could only help speed him up. Dan forced the Exodus into a lower gear and the engine sputtered in defiance. He forced the pedal to the floor and tightened the grip of his right hand, compensating for the weakened left.
The potholes dragged the car from side to side, bouncing and shuddering Dan in the old leather seat, and threatening to tear the tires apart.
Vextor wasn’t faring a whole lot better. He wobbled like a kid on their first bicycle, and even from this distance, Dan could hear the sshik-sshik-sshik of rubbing metal with every revolution of the bike’s front wheel.
The Exodus hit a mound in the track, and was briefly airborne. It slammed down with a cacophony of squeaks, bangs and rattles, and Dan held his non-existent breath, waiting for the dash to illuminate with warning lights, and the engine to hand in its notice.
The car somehow kept going. “Good girl, good girl,” Dan cheered. It was the first time he had ever addressed his car directly, and he promised himself it would be the last.
Switching up a gear, Dan hammered the gas pedal again. The Exodus screamed with the effort, but the gap was closing. The bike’s back wheel was thundering along just fifteen or so feet ahead. Any second. Any second now…
Vextor turned in his seat. A blaster bolt punched a hole in Dan’s windshield, and obliterated the passenger seat headrest. Charred fabric and burning fluff filled the inside of the car. Through the cracks in the glass, Dan saw Vextor taking aim again. This time, it wasn’t a seat headrest in the line of fire, it was Dan’s head.
“Shizz,” he grimaced, jerking the wheel just as von Haff let fly with another blast. It screamed past the car and punched a hole in the ground a handful of feet behind it.
The Exodus was now just behind and to the left of the bike, which forced Vextor to shift around in his seat to take aim again. They were close to the city now. Very close.
Dan slammed on his brakes just before Vextor could fire. The man on the bike sneered in victory, then turned to face front just as his bike hit the metal gate that marked the city limits.
Just as his brother had been before him, he was launched, screaming, over the handlebars. There was a thunk and a long drawn-out grinding noise as Vextor landed in the road and continued along it on his tusks, then he crunched into the side of a shipping container and stopped with a bone-shattering degree of abruptness.
Vextor coughed, and something damp and coppery filled his mouth. He got his hands beneath him and, arms shaking, raised himself to his knees, baring his teeth against the pain it brought.
“Oh no, you don’t.”
Von Haff looked up to find a boot coming down. It connected with the side of his head. There was a flash of white, a burst of pain, then everything in Vextor’s world sunk into a deep, oily black.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Artur walked slowly backwards down the length of the page, reading as he went. The fact he had to do this meant he had fallen behind the others as they’d all worked their way through the case files. He also wasn’t really big on – or very good at – reading, so that didn’t exactly help, either.
“Anyone found anything out yet?” he asked, once he’d finished the page he was on. He had developed a technique for changing pages, which involved half-jumping, half-sliding forwards until the top sheet of the pile moved enough for him to be able to step onto the sheet below, then he would catch the edge of the top page and slide it onto the increasingly haphazard stack of read pages on the table beside him.
“Not a lot,” Nedran confessed. “I can’t help looking at those wounds, though.”
“Well, that should be cause for concern, ye feckin’ pervert,” Artur replied. “Ye’re meant to be reading, so ye are, not ogling the pictures.”
“What? No! Not like that,” Ned spluttered. “Please! I meant… Why do that? Why cut a child open and forcibly push their organs aside like that?”
“Can we have less o’ the detail?” Artur said, wincing. “I’d rather not think about it, to be honest.”
He looked down the new sheet he was standing on. It showed a family photo of one of the Nonas, sticking her tongue out at whichever friend or parent was behind the camera.
“Sure, there are some real sick scumbags in the world.”
“What if…?” Ollie began, but the sentence just sort of petered out there.
Nedran watched her across the table, eyebrows raised. “What if… What?”
“Hmm? Oh. Yes. Sorry,” said Ollie. “I don’t know about any of this stuff, not like you do, but I was just thinking… What if they weren’t children? What if they weren’t people?”
Artur and Nedran exchanged a glance. “Ye what?” asked Artur. “What are they, then? Puppets?”
“No, I mean, they are children, people, you know, whatever,” said Ollie. “As far as I know, anyway. But what if the reports weren’t about people? What if they were about…”
She looked around the workshop, then down at her chair. With some difficulty, she wriggled a padded circle of fabric out from beneath her. “These?”
“What if someone had filed murder reports about cushions?” said Artur.
“Yes!”
Neither Artur nor Nedran said anything for a while, as they both seemed to consider this.
“Has she lost her feckin’ mind, d’you think?” Artur asked, eventually.
Ned smiled in a way that was more sympathetic than anything else. “You should take a rest,” he told Ollie. “This sort of thing, it isn’t... It shouldn’t be something you have to get involved in. The stress of it can do funny things to people.”
“No!” Ollie protested. “I meant, what if someone took one of these…”
“A cushion,” said Artur.
“Right. What if someone took a cushion, cut it open, and moved all the inside parts around,” Ollie continued. “What would you think then?”
“I’d think they’d ruined a perfectly good cushion,” said Artur.
Nedran stood up from his stool. “That they were looking for something.”
Artur frowned. “I thought we already knew that, didn’t we? Deadman reckoned whoever took the girls is looking for one in particular.”
Ned shook his head. “Not looking for the girl. Looking for something inside the girl.”
“Inside?” said Artur. “What, like a spleen, or something?”
“No, no organs were removed, just pushed aside. He was looking for something else. Something that shouldn’t be there.” Ned looked across at Ollie. “Well done. You figured it out.”
Ollie looked down at the cushion in her hands. “Wait, what? Figured what out? What’s happening?”
“You figured out whoever killed the girls was looking for something inside one of them,” said Ned.
“Did I?” Ollie asked, surprised by this news. She looked down at the cushion again, then cuddled into it and beamed. “Hey, go me!”
Artur puffed out his cheeks, although they were so small nobody really noticed. “Bit of a stretch, like, ain’t it? Why would a little girl have something stashed up in her guts? Unless… Unless it was stashed. What if some sick fecker put something there, then came back for it later?”
“Only he’s not sure which girl he used,” said Nedran, his voice climbing in pitch. “He knows her first name and her date of birth, but that’s all.”
“So he starts picking them off, one by one,” Artur finished. “Working his way through them, until he finds the right one! The old fella’s right, peaches, you’re a genius.”
“Am I?” Ollie asked. “Is that good?”
Before Artur could respond, there came a series of metallic thuds from the door.
“Shh, not so loud,” Nedran whispered, bustling over to the workshop entrance. He caught the leather strap at the bottom of the door and rolled it slowly upwards, trying to keep the noise to a minimum. “How many times have I told you, Dan? If you’re coming and going at this hour, you have to learn to be more…”
The thing standing on the other side of the door was not Dan Deadman. It was not, in fact, a man of any description, dead or otherwise. At least, not to begin with.
At first glance, it appeared to be a number of different things at the same time. Ned saw glimpses of eyes and teeth and fat, squirming tentacles. He saw flashes of faces, some human-looking, most not.
And then worse. He saw not just what this thing was, but what it had done. He saw pain and hatred and fear and hurt. He saw other things, too. Things he would never be able to bring himself to admit he’d seen. Things he wished he could unsee. Please, someone, let him unsee them.
As the high-speed slideshow of horror whirred like a flick-book through his head, Nedran staggered backwards, a tide of nausea flooding over him, and a raw, primal sound bursting on his lips.
And then, the thing was a man. A naked man, albeit with a perfectly smooth, featureless groin, and precisely zero going on on the nipple front.
He spoke with not one voice, but billions. Hearing him talk was like being in an auditorium where everyone was whispering the same words at the same time, and in a tone that suggested they all thoroughly despised each other.
“May I come in?” he asked, and then, without appearing to move, he was inside the workshop, just a foot or two in front of Nedran.
“Friend of yours, Neddy?” Artur asked. “Sure, why don’t you introduce us?”
Ned shook his head, and kept shaking it, like he didn’t know how to stop. “He’s not… I don’t… I’ve never seen him before.”
The thing that was not a man looked from Ned to Artur, then around at the workshop. His eyes passed over Ollie completely. She stood on the other side of the table, the cushion clutched protectively in front of her, her pendant glowing brighter than ever behind it.
The man was oddly generic-looking, like the avatar of a video game before the player customized it. He was not short, but not particularly tall, either. He was slim, with muscles that were defined, but only loosely. His eyes and hair were matching shades of brown, his face clean-shaven, and the rest of him completely hairless.
His hands and feet were the only anomalies, being half again as large as they should be, so they looked cumbersome and out of place.
“Where is she?” he asked, and Ned felt his skin try to crawl from his flesh in revulsion at the sound.
“Uh, what? Who?”
The man took a step closer. Ned tried to take a step back, but his legs had become dead weight, and were refusing to respond.
“Where is she?”
“What’s he on about?” asked Artur. He squinted up at the newcomer. “What ye on about, ye big bollocks? Or ye big no-bollocks, as the case seems to be. Who’re ye after?”
The man lowered his head. His eyes met Artur’s, and something seemed to pass between them. Artur stumbled backwards, his squinting scowl falling away into something less vitriolic. “Aw, feck. Ye’re him. Ain’t ye?”
“H-he’s who?” asked Nedran.
“Now, don’t go getting yer knickers in a twist here, Neddy. That there’s Kalaechai, the Malwhere Lord.”
“O-oh,” Nedran stammered. “That probably explains why I’ve s-soiled myself.”
“Right behind ye, big man. Right behind ye.”
“Where is she?”
Ned’s legs were still refusing to move, but he managed to turn his top half. He looked directly across the table at Ollie. She was frozen in fear, her whole body shaking, her breath coming in squeaky little gasps. The glow of her necklace shone around the edges of the cushion now, casting it into silhouette.
She was right there, and yet this thing – this Kalaechai – apparently couldn’t see her. Nedran looked deep into her wide, terrified eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He faced front again.
“I don’t know who you’re looking for.”
Something hit him. It was hard and invisible, and lifted him off his feet. There was no time to brace himself before he hit the operating table, and both he and it crashed to the floor in a tangle of limbs and metal.
“Nedran!” hollered a broadly female voice from somewhere in the house. “Is that you? Keep the noise down! I’m trying to sleep!”
“S-sorry, dear,” Nedran whispered, but not loud enough for her to hear.
Kalaechai advanced, plodding forwards with a lurching, awkward gait, as if he were being operated by someone on a 'come and have a go' introduction to puppeteering course.
“Hey, steady now,” urged Artur. “Let's talk about this. No need to get violent. Sure, laying boots in never really solved anything, did it?”
Ned struggled against the upturned table, trying to untangle his arm from the folding mechanism. He almost had it when something hit him again. His nose exploded and he flipped backwards. His arm, still trapped in the table, snapped, and the only thing that stopped Ned screaming was his deeply ingrained instinct not to disturb his wife.
/> “Aw, come on now,” pleaded Artur, then his voice became a growl. “Leave him alone. Ye want to start shoite with someone? Sure, I'm standing right here. Come and have a go if ye think ye're—”
The same invisible force struck Artur like a golf club striking a ball. He rocketed upwards and backwards, hit the underside of a cabinet, bounced off a wall, and dropped into a metal sink with an echoey clang.
Kalaechai shambled another step closer to Nedran. Ned was shaking violently, his mangled arm still trapped in the workings of the operating table. He stared at it, frowning, as if he couldn't quite understand what he was seeing.
“Where is she?” asked Kalaechai.
“Wait!” said Ollie. “Don't. Stop. Please. I'm here. I'm here. I’m right here.”
Kalaechai didn't turn, or do anything to suggest he’d heard her.
“Where is she?”
Ollie looked down at the pendant, which was growing so brightly it hurt her eyes. She grabbed the necklace and pulled, trying to yank it off, but a jolt of energy surged through her, forcing her to release her grip. “No, stop. You have to stop!” she said, taking the chain in both hands and trying to snap it. This time, the energy surge arched her back and brought her to her knees.
She watched between the legs of the table as Kalaechai took another lurching step closer to Nedran.
Ned tore his eyes from his arm and forced himself to look at the approaching Malwhere Lord. The human-mask was still in place, but it seemed to shift and squirm, as if everything else Ned had seen was trying to force its way out.
“P-please,” Ned begged. “Stop.”
“Where is she?” Kalaechai asked. There was no anger or urgency to his voice, just that same tone of whispered contempt as before.
He stopped approaching, and bent his legs backwards at the knees, lowering himself into some twisted, nightmarish version of a squat.
“Please. I'm here!” Ollie said, but the words were barely a croak, and when she tried to stand, the pendant forced her back down.
The skin on Kalaechai's face heaved as if alive, and Nedran threw up, just a little, onto the floor. He felt slightly better because of it, but only slightly, and not for long.
Dial D for Deadman: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 1) Page 15