The next thing I knew, I felt something dripping on my face and looked up. I must have blacked out for a moment because Rutland loomed over me; the liquid I felt was a foul mixture of spittle, bile, and vomit that was trickling out of his mouth. He didn’t seem quite as steady on his feet as he had a couple of minutes ago, and I wondered if whatever had taken control of Don was weakening. Unfortunately, the eight-inch-long knife in his hand was going to make that consideration a moot point.
I was beaten. There was no way that I could move another abused muscle, and I could hardly suck any air into my lungs. My eyes focused on the dull gray metal of the blade lowering inexorably toward me, and I thought of Olivia. Then my gaze was drawn upward, where something was gleaming. If the smoke hadn’t thrown the room into almost total darkness, I wouldn’t have noticed it, but it stood out like a beacon in the gloom. I should have been watching the sharp stealer of life descending, but instead I could only stare at the glowing lines slashed into the back of Don’s hand, like an H missing its left-hand branch. ┤
I heard a shout to my left; tearing my eyes away from the shining symbol, I saw a young woman, Chinese maybe, sobbing as she tried to drag a fallen coworker back toward the exit at the back of the store but making no headway against his bulk. I couldn’t let her courage be for nothing. I didn’t want to die. Screw this asshole.
With a snarl, the looming figure lunged, and I twisted to the side. I felt the knife grate against bone as it glanced off the top of my shoulder, drawing a deep cut and snapping off against the tile floor. Fire flared in my shoulder at the same time that flames burst up from the overheating oil, throwing my attacker into stark silhouette against the roiling smoke. I might have managed to avoid a killing blow, but I knew that unless there was a game changer, it was just a matter of time. I heard the glass at the front of the store shatter and hoped that even if the horror above me succeeded in finishing me off, at least some of the people in the restaurant might be rescued because I had distracted it.
Don’s weight came down on top of me, driving what little air I had left from my lungs. His shattered, jagged teeth showed pale in the darkness as smoke swirled only inches above his shock of gore-streaked white hair. He reached toward my throat again, but I’d anticipated that move, and my hands gripped his wrists and pushed outward. I shoved Rutland away, muscles groaning in protest, but even the slight man’s weight was too much, as he began to descend, inch by excruciating inch. I thought back to the last time I was in a similar situation, decided that I had nothing to lose, and closed my eyes.
I could hear Don’s teeth clacking inches from my face, but years of ignoring horrors in my dreams allowed me to dismiss them from my thoughts. Like the previous night in the young man’s dream, I imagined a corona of energy forming around me. Before I could even open my eyes, I felt a sweaty, toothed, madman’s bite clamp onto my throat, and I flinched involuntarily in expectation of the coming agony. Instead of the torture of rending flesh, renewed strength flowed into my battered body; once again, I’d somehow managed to project my nocturnal ability into the waking world!
“Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of whatever the hell you are has been approved!” I screamed in exultation, letting go of Don’s wrist and shifting my hips. With the infusion of power had also come years of muscle memory that I’d developed fighting nightmares. I easily locked my attacker up around the head and, with a heave, I bulldogged him down, switching positions and leaving him in a headlock underneath me. Unfortunately, my stinging eyes told me that I was going to be out of breathable air in just a few moments, so I screwed them shut against the fumes. Palpable waves of hatred coruscated out of Don’s jet-black eyes, and his body spasmed, bucking us both into the air again and again, as the creature below me thrashed in an effort to free itself. Rents opened in the thing’s skin and black goo oozed out; it seemed the supernatural strength that had been animating the homeless man was ripping him apart.
I held the snapping, thrashing creature down as I tried to think of what to do next. I felt good now, but just as the thing beneath me was wearing down, so was I. I knew that I had to act before my unexpected boon ran its course. Don’s body arched madly as the creature screeched in frustration, and my eyes opened involuntarily as I heard a sickening snap beneath me. The man’s head had twisted almost all the way around, his vertebrae shattering as he somehow managed to wriggle out of my grip, slithering across the floor like a dropped block of Spam and looking almost as revolting.
Even though the horror inhabiting Don’s body was once again free, it had actually done me a service by definitively killing its host. I’d harbored a slim hope of somehow incapacitating the creature and then trying to find some way to help Don, but even though I'm not a doctor, there was absolutely no way that he could survive having his head screwed on backward, so I saw a way to solve all of my immediate problems at the same time.
I took a deep breath of good air from floor level and then charged at the thing animating Don. It expected me to run, and when I didn’t, it froze for a second. That second was all the time that I needed. I grabbed Rutland, hooking my biceps beneath his armpits, and brought us chest to chest. I couldn’t see anything except the flames shooting into the air from the fryer as deep-black smoke kept pouring off, but I could feel the body in front of me tearing itself apart in an effort to break free. Broken teeth raked the side of my face and spittle ran down my chin, so I threw in a satisfying head butt for good measure. Screw. This. Asshole.
I planted my right foot and twisted, throwing the relatively light man backward in a classic double underarm suplex…directly into the vat of smoking, flaming oil. I was deafened by the sound of sizzling meat as I held Don down, and he flailed wildly, raking ineffectually at my eyes. If I had stopped to wonder whether the creature was feeling any of the damage that I was doing to it, I would have received a definitive, satisfying answer as his mouth opened wide and a scream of rage and agony exploded out.
When I saw his mouth split open, I was ready to be assaulted by the same kind of debilitating pain that had knocked most of the patrons unconscious. However, if I hadn’t been sure before how much the creature had weakened, I now knew that it was almost spent, because the effect of the desperate scream was nothing more than a brief pressure behind my eyelids—a bit like an ice cream headache.
Any thought of ice cream was scoured from my mind when I smelled the stench of burning hair and frying meat, but my plan was working; the flames were being smothered under Don’s body. The creature continued thrashing, and drops of hot oil peppered my arms and face as I held him down. Black eyes locked onto mine, and I felt a cold, alien hatred that had no place in our world pressing against the edges of my mind. I concentrated on my goal and kept pressing until, with a final hiss from between shredded lips, the damned thing finally went limp. Then, lungs burning for air, I held him another ten seconds for good measure and dropped to the floor, exhausted. Now that there wasn’t anyone trying to murder me, it was relatively easy to reach over and unplug the fryer.
I figured at this point that it probably wasn’t a very good idea for someone that was under police suspicion to be found next to a corpse, so I crawled out of the building, aiming for the back entrance that I’d seen the Chinese woman dragging her coworker toward. Taking a page out of her book, I grabbed the foot of the young man with the head wound and began dragging him outside. In front of me, the door was open, and as smoke poured out, light poured in, and I was able to use my ebbing strength to haul the pair of us to freedom.
Leaving the man propped against a stack of cardboard boxes, I stood up and felt waves of exhaustion washing over me. Putting hands on hips and bending over, I sucked in lungfuls of clean air, and then I straightened up, shuffling one foot forward in the first step of “the happy dance” as I celebrated being alive. Suddenly, something smashed into my legs, and I fell, tucked my arms in, and rolled to the side. I came up to my feet, arm cocked in anticipation of throwing a wicked jab—and p
ulled up short. The Chinese girl from the restaurant stood in front of me.
“Please…my friends are still inside.” Her tears left pale trails through the soot covering her face, and her eyes were desperate fields of white in the blackness surrounding them. I could hear a siren in the distance drawing closer, but I realized that no matter how I felt, I didn’t know whether or not the restaurant was safe. I had to go back in.
***Kelly***
Kelly sat at her computer, fingers laboriously skimming over the keyboard and pecking out a few letters at a time. Cursing, she went back to practicing her touch-typing while waiting for the web crawler to finish pulling together the results of her search. It was obvious that she once must have known how to type properly; there was no way that a computer science major and the daughter of a secretary could possibly have survived while punching out one letter at a time.
“God damn that thing,” she swore to the empty apartment as her fingers slipped again. She knew that every time that they called forth…whatever it was…to seal their business deals, it would demand a price. The price was always commensurate with the number of people that they needed to “persuade,” always affected the main summoner most powerfully, and never could be guessed ahead of time. This time, apparently, the goddamn thing had decided that it would be funny to leave her barely able to do her job. I remember everything, you asshole, and I’m going to remember how to do this too.
Before Kelly could continue pounding down that avenue of thought any farther, she was interrupted by her speakers giving off a loud, “Bazinga!” indicating that her custom web crawler had finished indexing the topic that she had fed to it, and now she’d be able to quickly search out all of the information on her targets. She’d used the program a few days before to help her look into Julian Adler’s past. However, when she was lying in bed with Mark this morning (yummy!), a niggling strand of curiosity had started unraveling in her mind. She’d looked into Julian’s past because his searches for OMG’s former clients had tripped the search rank alerts that she’d set up to catch snoopers. However, what she hadn’t actually looked into was what Julian had found—until now. Kelly’s fingers began to type in her first custom search, starting with the obvious: O-M-G.
An hour later, Kelly’s hands were shaking as she picked up the phone to place the first call to one of her partners. She knew that the firm didn’t get much repeat business, and now she understood why. She’d never been happy with using their secret weapon, but the other girls hadn’t been as well off, and they needed so badly to succeed and succeed quickly that she’d agreed to help them. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get through the coming conversation without being sick from self-loathing at what she’d done. Hoping to reach both of the other women at the same time, she dialed the private office number, and it was answered on the fourth ring. The small redhead began to talk before the other women could even say hello.
“Oh God, what have we done! They’re all dead or locked up!” The hysteria in her voice was evident even to her own ears, so Kelly took a shuddering breath in an attempt to calm down and explain her previous statement. Before she could begin her explanation, the line went dead. A few seconds later, her phone beeped with an incoming text message from a private number. Her hands shook as she read the four words on the screen.
“Of course they are.”
CHAPTER 21 1200–1425, Monday, August 3, 2015
***Julian***
“Where the hell am I?” I said, giving immediate voice to the first thought that crossed my mind as I once again woke from the strange (for me) experience of dreamless sleep. Light trickled in from slats in the venetian window blinds on the opposite side of the small room. Sweaty hair was plastered to my head, but I seemed to be clean, with no smell of smoke from the night before. Oh—and I was naked.
I didn’t know how I’d gotten here, but I remembered seeing the suspicious-looking guy in the Man U jersey just before I passed out, so I moved slowly toward the door to check whether or not it was locked, spotting my phone sitting on a cheap nightstand next to a basic white shirt and black trousers. Opening my phone, I was shocked to see that it was a few minutes past noon, which meant that not only was I late for work, but I’d also been out cold for nearly sixteen hours. The shock of that revelation kicked my brain into high gear, and I pulled up a map on my phone, which told me that I was only a few hundred yards away from where I’d passed out. I also saw eight missed calls from Dana. I typed out a quick text message, telling her that there had been problems the night before, but that I was okay now and expecting to be home around five. I didn’t listen to any of the messages, as I could only imagine that she would not be amused.
I needed to try to figure out what was going on, and I needed to make some calls. I was late for work, but I still had nearly three hours to make a relatively short tube journey across zone one for the meeting with OMG. While I was getting ready, I spotted my wallet; when I picked it up, a note fluttered out.
Julian—You passed out after the restaurant. Some guy wanted to get the police, but I appreciated what you did. I called some friends, and they brought you to my uncle’s flat above the family’s store. He’s away on business. Your clothes were ruined after what we did together. I need to see what is going on at work soon, so I just grabbed some of the trousers he left behind and a friend’s work shirt. There’s some breakfast bars in the kitchen.
Thank you,
Li Na
On the back was a mobile number, which I entered into my phone before sticking the note back in my wallet. Before returning to sit on the bed, I went to the kitchen and grabbed a breakfast bar. Besides the meeting with OMG, I knew that there were other important things that needed my attention, and now was the only chance I was going to get before I went back into the lion’s den.
First, I had confirmation that OMG was the source of the weirdness that had been plaguing me. Given what happened every night when I went to sleep, I probably should have been more accepting of this kind of explanation. I guessed the second beating had gotten the concept through my thick skull, and any residual doubts had evaporated with Don’s words. It was clear that somehow, someway, OMG were tied to a black-eyed horror like something straight out of the darkest dreams, something that had uttered ear-shattering screams and forced two seemingly good men into committing terrible acts of violence.
Second, I didn’t feel like crap. Sure, I still had some bumps and bruises, but I actually looked better now than I had on Sunday morning, which should have been impossible given that I’d been hammered like…like a thing that’s been hammered a lot the previous evening.
Third (and possibly related to second), I had once again manifested powers that I’d previously only been able to use in the Dreamscape. The first time, fighting Phil, I’d created my favorite nightmare-slaying weapon from thin air. This time, I’d called up supernatural reserves of strength that had also seemingly protected me from, and perhaps even healed the worst of, the damage from yesterday’s attack. It probably wasn’t a coincidence, but both times that I’d flipped reality the bird had been followed by overwhelming exhaustion accompanied by dreamless sleep.
Fourth, it seemed like I might somehow be catalyzing these attacks. Janice had been acting strangely around me, Phil’s attack had only occurred once he got near me, and Don had been dealing with these issues for over a year with only relatively minor incidents until he sat across a table from me. As Ian Fleming wrote: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” And there was no doubt that whatever lay behind this was my enemy.
Finally, and most disturbingly, the creature recognized me. Or at least it recognized that there was something different about me: something that it didn’t like and that it actively wanted to get its hands (tentacles? claws?) on.
It felt good to put my thoughts in order, but it didn’t necessarily help me get ready for my meeting with OMG. To do that, I’d at least need to be able to get in the office door. I didn�
�t have my work pass or phone, so I shot a quick text to Toscan, asking him to let them know that I’d be in shortly and to arrange a temporary pass for me. I’d just hit send, finished my breakfast bar, and was ready to head out shopping for suitable work clothes, but I got a text back from Dana before I could turn the doorknob.
WTF! Come home now, I was so worried that I called the cops! What were you doing out all night? COME HOME NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s almost never a good sign when your wife takes the time to type over a dozen exclamation points. It’s even worse when you know that you can’t obey. Feeling guilty but ignoring the message for the moment, I headed out the door of the small, one-bedroom apartment.
Making a mental note to see whether or not the news had anything useful to say about the bedlam at Leicester Square, I pushed through the crowds of tourists, popped into a store, and picked up some basic office wear, grabbing a Metro as I got on the tube. I was unsurprised to see a picture of the scene of chaos from the previous evening plastered across the front page of the paper, and the headline read, “Burger Kings of Chaos Tears Apart Leicester Square—One Man Dead.” The article went on to recount how the police were investigating the possibility of some sort of gas leak knocking out the people in the store. That theory also explained the subsequent fire, which was put out with only minor damage and a single casualty, but there was no mention of the fact that Don’s body had been half-submerged in a deep fryer. What was a bit of a surprise was the mention that there had been disturbances outside the restaurant following the arrival of the emergency services. The paper chalked it up to opportunistic looters. I wasn’t so sure.
After a couple of changes, I got out of the train at Paddington and immediately gave Toscan a call. I had nearly an hour to spare, and not only would I need him to sign me into the building, but I wanted to find out what he could tell me about what was going on in the office. He answered on the fifth ring. “Hey, buddy—how’re you feeling? Man, I heard what happened to you! I got your text; I'm amazed that you’re already going back to work! I’d have stayed off for a week after that crap. Phil never seemed like a bad guy to me,” Toscan said in his usual loquacious manner.
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