Core of Stone

by King, R. L.

  “You are, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  Stone blinked again, trying to focus on the man’s face. “You look…familiar, but I can’t quite…”

  The man chuckled. “Name’s Malcolm. Not sure you ever knew that, though. You took my chair for a ride, few months back. Scared the livin’ fuck outta me.”

  And then he remembered. His mind went back to when he and Jason and Verity had tracked down the Las Vegas Forgotten, trying to enlist their help locating and dealing with the portal. He’d levitated Malcolm as a demonstration of his magical abilities when their leader had asked for proof. “Sorry about that.”

  Malcolm waved him off. “No problem, man. It was kinda fun, once I got over bein’ scared. Maybe you do it again sometime.”

  Stone didn’t answer that. “Why did you bring me here?” he asked. “How did you find me?” He ran a hand through his tangled hair. He really needed a shower.

  “Been followin’ you for most of the night, after you left downtown.”

  He frowned, replaying Malcolm’s words to make sure he’d heard them correctly. “Following me? Why? How did you know—?”

  “—it was you? Easy. Not many guys who look like you around. When you add the accent and the fact you was handin’ out quarters like candy, you got noticed.”

  “Quarters?”

  “Twenty-five buck chips. That don’t happen much ’round downtown. Maybe up at the Strip some high roller might do it to show off, but not down here. They usually save ’em for the hookers, y’know?”

  Stone tried to picture the faces of the beggars he’d given the chips to, but he hadn’t been paying attention at the time. “You were—”

  “Not me.” Malcolm shook his head. “I usually only go topside during the day. Safer, y’know? But we got eyes and ears all over Vegas. Stuff gets back to us.”

  Stone sat up the rest of the way, cross-legged on the edge of the pallet, and finished the bottle of water. “You were there, though, with the others who came after me.”

  “Yeah. Once we saw the Evil messin’ with ya, we figured we should step in. Don’t know if they know who you are, and you didn’t look like you was in any shape to handle ’em.”

  That was an understatement. The Evil wouldn’t have killed him, especially if they had recognized him from the last time he’d been in Vegas. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. They lived on fear and despair and anger, so they’d almost certainly have grabbed him and tried to keep him prisoner so they could continue feeding from him. The thought made him shudder—without his magic, that could have been a very long time. “Thank you,” he said. “All of you.”

  Malcolm snorted. “Yeah, yeah. Ain’t like we ain’t got—whatcha call ’em—ulterior motivations.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You feelin’ like gettin’ up? Got some folks who want to talk to you.”

  Stone, intrigued, stood slowly and tested his balance. It appeared it would hold, at least for now. The effects of the alcohol had mostly worn off, leaving him with a headache, a general vague sense of unwellness, and some pulled muscles from being tossed into the table in the bar, but other than that things weren’t as bad as he feared. “Let’s go,” he said, bending to slip his boots on and grab his overcoat. “I certainly owe you that much.”

  Malcolm led him out of the room, which was really more of an alcove, and into a dimly lit concrete tunnel about eight feet in diameter. Cracks and water stains lined its walls in the flickering light of Malcolm’s lantern, and colorful graffiti was everywhere.

  “This is the Underground, yes?” Stone asked. This part of it seemed to have been cleaned up, with fewer drifts of trash along its edges. Currently, there was no water on the floor; it made sense, since it was still summer. The flash floods the tunnels had been built to help manage sometimes came in summer too, but more likely in fall or winter.

  “Yeah. It’s not far. C’mon.”

  Stone followed Malcolm as he turned left, up a smaller tunnel, then right into a smaller one still. Stone wasn’t moving too fast yet, but Malcolm wasn’t either, so this didn’t cause any difficulty.

  The latter tunnel eventually opened into a cavernous room, nearly thirty feet on a side, with a concrete ceiling stretching several feet higher than the low ones in the other areas they’d passed through. Stone paused in the doorway to take the place in before entering fully: it had been subdivided into smaller groupings, with clusters of castoff furniture, plastic milk crates, and the ever-present wooden pallets to keep everything off the ground in case of seeping water. Several raggedly-dressed people, both men and women, looked up as Malcolm and Stone entered, then went back to their conversations.

  Malcolm led him to the far side of the room, to a group of chairs and sofas tucked away in a back corner. As they approached, a man stood to greet them.

  “Still not dressed for the place, I see,” he said. His deep voice sounded gruff, but one corner of his mouth turned up. He looked down at Stone’s feet. “Got some decent boots, at least. It’s a start.”

  “Hello, Luke,” Stone said. “Not like I had much of a choice, did I?”

  “Hey, if you’d rather we left you up there…” The Forgotten group’s leader stepped forward and gripped Stone’s hand. Possibly Mexican or Native American—Stone couldn’t tell, and Luke had never volunteered the information—he was even taller than Stone, with broad shoulders and the kind of solid gut athletes get when they age. He still wore what looked like the same leather jacket Stone remembered him in from last time.

  “What kinda idiot you have to be, to get that drunk by yourself in that part of Vegas?” he asked. “You forget what it’s like around here?”

  “Didn’t really care, to be honest.”

  Luke looked at him oddly, but didn’t ask. “Have a seat,” he said, waving him toward one of the mismatched plaid recliners clustered around a table made of a door laid across two milk crates.

  Stone sat. Malcolm lowered himself into the chair next to him. Two more Forgotten that Stone didn’t recognize, a man and a woman, rounded out the group.

  “Er—” he said, looking at each of them in turn, “—it’s not that I’m not grateful for the rescue, but why did you bring me down here instead of putting me in a cab back to my hotel? Malcolm here said you wanted to talk to me about something.”

  “We’ll get to that,” Luke said. “Never thought I’d see you again. Where’s your two friends?”

  “Home,” Stone said.

  “So you’re not here for business.”

  “I am, but not their business.”

  Luke digested that. “You find that thing you were lookin’ for before? Thing you said the Evil were comin’ from?”

  Stone nodded. “We did. And we took care of it.”

  “That right?”

  “Yes.”

  “See?” He made a contemptuous noise in the back of his throat. “That’s why we couldn’t help you. Vegas is still fuckin’ crawlin’ with Evil. Ain’t nothing changed.”

  “But it has,” Stone said softly. “A lot has changed, actually.”

  “How so?” His lip twisted in disgust. “Just last week, one o’ our scouts got murdered by those fuckin’ bastards. They hung him up in a public park one night and tortured him to death. And you know who came to help him? Fuckin’ nobody, that’s who. ’Cause the cops are mostly all Evil, too, and everybody else is scared shitless.”

  “It’s true,” Malcolm said, more soberly. “It don’t happen often ’cause we’re careful, but it happens. And you’re sayin’ this is after you did what you went to do.”

  “So what’s changed?” Luke demanded.

  “The Evil’s leaders are gone,” Stone said. “And they’re not coming back.”

  “Well, ain’t that great,” Luke said. He didn’t sound impressed. “When did that happen?”


  “A week or so ago. Did you hear about what happened at Burning Man?”

  Luke snorted. “Whadda I care if a bunch of rich hippie assholes get killed?”

  “You should,” Stone said. “That was the end of the top-level Evil. Could have been a lot worse than it was.”

  “So what’s that mean to us?” the female Forgotten, a chubby Latina woman in an oversized army jacket, asked.

  “Not a fuckin’ thing,” Luke said.

  “Charming as ever, I see.” Stone started to rise. “Listen: as I said, I’m grateful for the help, but if all you’ve brought me down here for is to rant at me about how terrible things are for you—I’ll be honest and say I don’t care much at present. I’ve got my own problems to deal with.”

  Luke didn’t seem to take offense at Stone’s words; in fact, he looked at him with a bit more respect. “Siddown,” he said. “Sorry. I got a lot on my mind right now. That’s what I wanted to talk to ya about.”

  Stone sat back down. “Go on,” he said. “I—”

  “Luke!” The call was loud, frightened, and came from across the room.

  Everyone looked in that direction. A woman hurried toward them, threading her way between the groupings of furniture. She skidded to a stop in front of Luke’s group, panting. She looked like she’d been crying.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Luke demanded.

  “It’s Griff,” she said. “He ain’t come back from scavengin’. He was s’posed to be back hours ago.” She sagged and braced herself against the nearest chair. “Luke, I think that thing got ’im.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Luke leaped to his feet as Stone looked on in shocked confusion. “Fuck!” the Forgotten leader snapped. “Why the hell’d he go out that far?” he asked the sobbing woman. “He knows better.”

  “He didn’t,” she wailed. She swiped a dirty sleeve across her face and paused a moment to get herself under control. “He didn’t,” she repeated, more calmly, but still with a hitch in her voice. “He was only goin’ out as far as the Ogden tunnels. He goes out there all the time.”

  “It’s gettin’ closer,” Malcolm said, eyes widening.

  “We gotta move,” the other Forgotten man, the one who hadn’t spoken yet, said. “C’mon, Luke, you know it’s true. I know nobody likes it, but that thing’s pickin’ us off.”

  “He’s right,” the Latina woman said. “We don’t move, ain’t gonna be none of us left soon.”

  “What’s going on?” Stone asked. “The Evil?”

  Luke shook his head. He nodded toward the Latina woman and the other man. “You guys take Peg. Get ’er somethin’, help ’er out. We gotta talk.”

  The two did as requested, gently taking the sniffling woman’s arms and guiding her off toward another group on the other side of the room.

  When they were gone, Luke turned back around in his chair to face Stone. “Evil don’t come down here,” he said. “They know better.”

  “So, what, then?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about—how come we brought you down here. We’re hoping maybe there’s somethin’ you can do to help us.”

  “Tell me,” Stone said, with no idea why he’d said it—except that wasn’t true. Despite the fact that he had no way to help himself right now, let alone anyone else, the loss of his magic had done nothing to curb his curiosity.

  “Somethin’s shown up down here,” Malcolm said. “Somethin’ big, and it’s killin’ us.”

  Stone stared. “What kind of something?”

  “We don’t know,” Luke said. “Nobody’s seen it and come back to tell about it. Closest we got is a couple of our guys were out scavengin’ a month or so ago and got attacked. One of ’em managed to run and get back to another group. All he said before he died was ‘some kinda huge monster.’”

  “Come on,” Stone said, shaking his head. “Monsters in the sewers? What, giant alligators? That’s absurd.”

  “It ain’t absurd when it’s already killed ten of our people,” Luke growled.

  “It’s pushin’ us back,” Malcolm added. “Comin’ closer to where we’re set up. If it grabbed Griff and he was where he was s’posed to be, that means it’s hittin’ right on the edge of our turf.”

  “I thought you lot had control down here,” Stone said. “Seemed like it when we were here before.”

  “Only parts,” Luke said. “The Underground’s huge. It runs under most of the city. It ain’t just us down here, but before this we all respected each other’s space, y’know?”

  “So all you have is one man’s word about this so-called ‘monster’?” Stone asked. “That’s not much to go on. How do you know it’s not just one of your neighbors deciding to be a bit less neighborly? Or perhaps someone new has moved into the neighborhood.”

  “We thought o’ that,” Malcolm said. “The others down here, they don’t like us much. Think we’re freaks. But they scared of us, ’cause of what we can do. Ain’t nobody can sneak up on us or get the jump on us down here. Couple of ’em came to talk to us couple weeks ago. This thing been pickin’ them off, too. They thought it might be us.”

  “Sounds like it is sneaking up on you, though, doesn’t it?” Stone asked. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be losing people. Why don’t you send out a larger party to track it down?”

  “We’ve tried that too,” Luke said. “C’mon, man, give us some fuckin’ credit. This is our home, all we got. We protect what’s ours.”

  “So what happened when you did?”

  “Didn’t find anything. Not a damn sign.”

  Stone narrowed his eyes. “So you’re telling me there’s some kind of giant monster down here killing your people, but you found nothing? No blood, no scales, no droppings? No—sorry—leftovers? Bones? Nothing?” He shook his head. “That’s not the way monsters work.”

  “We think it’s got a place somewhere,” Malcolm said. “Like a lair. We just ain’t found it yet. We think it’s takin’ the people it grabs back there to…you know…”

  “So you’ve found no sign of any of your missing people? They just disappear?”

  Luke nodded.

  Stone frowned. Something wasn’t adding up. “I still don’t buy it. You’ve got one dying man’s word that it’s a monster, no other witnesses, and no evidence there’s any monster here. Are you sure these people didn’t just take off for greener pastures? Perhaps they stumbled upon something they didn’t want to share?”

  “There ain’t no greener pastures in Vegas,” Luke growled. “You don’t get it, do you?” He leaned forward in his chair, gripping the shredded armrests. “You live in a different world, man. You do, even if you didn’t have the mojo. I heard about you—how they found you last night. Throwin’ around quarters like some kinda idiot. No wonder you got noticed.”

  “It’s true,” Malcolm said. Once again, his tone was more evenhanded than Luke’s. “Guys like you don’t have a clue what it’s like down here. Havin’ to watch out for the Evil all the time we’re topside, but we gotta go up there to beg or get jobs or whatever, so we can’t just stay down here where it’s safe.”

  “Where it used to be safe,” Luke said bitterly. He faced Stone again. “Listen—I know after last time maybe you ain’t too inclined to help us. Yeah, we turned you down when you asked us for help. But we had a damn good reason.” He leaned back, looking suddenly tired. “Even if you’re right—maybe some of ’em found a stash of cash or drugs or chips somebody hid down here for safekeepin’—none of us are stupid. How easy would it be for one of us to get out even if we did?”

  Stone had to admit he was right. This group of Forgotten were more like the ones he and his friends had met in West Virginia—sort of “high functioning” Forgotten instead of a loose affiliation of people with varying degrees of mental issues—but they were still essentially a street gang full of homeless people. If o
ne of them turned up flashing a wad of cash or trying to sell a stash of scavenged drugs, especially with the Evil everywhere, they’d disappear in a way that didn’t need to involve monsters. And all of them would know that.

  “So…” Stone said, “what do you want me to do about it?” He was already fairly sure he knew the answer, and it sent an uncomfortable chill up his spine.

  “Help us find it,” Luke said. “Help us deal with it.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  “You got the mojo,” Luke said, like it was obvious and Stone was a moron for not seeing it. “You could track it down. Deal with it when you do.”

  “What makes you think so?” Stone asked. “All you saw me do was levitate Malcolm here and put a light spell on my hand. What makes you think I’m some kind of magical warrior?”

  “You guys wouldn’ta come down here if you couldn’t defend yourselves,” Luke said. “And last we saw you, you were plannin’ to go after the Evil to take out that portal thing o’ theirs. So either you’re more of an idiot than I thought you were back then, or else you got ways of handlin’ a fight.”

  Stone didn’t expect him to make those kinds of connections. His respect for the Forgotten leader went up a notch or two. But that still didn’t change the way things were. He stood up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t help you.”

  Luke and Malcolm both stared at him. “What you mean, you can’t help?” Malcolm asked.

  “I can’t,” Stone said. “I’m sorry. I truly wish I could, but I can’t. I wish you the best of luck with your monster, and I hope you can find it and sort it out. But would it be possible for someone to show me to where I can get a cab back to my hotel?”

  Luke and Malcolm exchanged glances. Luke’s eyes narrowed. “This is about before, isn’t it?” he asked, his voice lowering dangerously. “We wouldn’t help you, so now you won’t help us?”

  Stone shook his head. “I’m not lying to you: if I could help you, I would. But I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Malcolm asked. “You can use the magic. You can—I don’t know—track it down or somethin’. Maybe find its lair. Once you do that, we can all—”