Dan stopped the car beside something oozing and bloody. The body – or the remains of one, at least – was splayed out beside some playground equipment, its insides missing, its eyes staring blankly Up There.
It was an adult. Dan knew that shouldn’t have really made it better, but it did.
“Is she dead?” Artur asked, craning his neck to peer out through the windshield.
“For her sake, I hope so,” Dan replied. He got out of the car and made a cursory check of the woman’s vitals, despite the lack of heart and lungs making the result a bit of a given.
She had a kind face, Dan noted. Even in death, even with it frozen in a mask of terror the way it was, she had a kind face.
Returning to the car, Dan pulled Mindy from beneath his seat. The gun was too big to fit into the riot armor’s hip holster, so Dan was just going to carry it. He suspected an opportunity to shoot something might well present itself fairly soon, so keeping the weapon out and ready made sense.
“Can I sit up now?” Ollie asked.
“Yeah. Go ahead,” Dan told her.
Ollie straightened and reached for her door handle. “But stay there,” Dan told her. “And I mean it this time. There are kids in there. If you come wandering in you might get them killed. Is that understood?”
To his surprise, Ollie didn’t protest. “OK,” she said. “Understood. Be careful.”
Dan nodded. “Artur, you’re with me. You can get places I can’t.”
“Ye can say that again,” said Artur, scurrying across the dash, jumping onto the driver’s seat, them trampolining up into the empty holster on Dan’s hip. “Sure, one time I climbed right up the pee-hole of…” He caught Ollie’s wide-eyed expression. “…a wildly inappropriate story,” he concluded.
Dan began to close the door, but Ollie leaned down and shouted through the narrowing gap. “What if someone comes? The Tribunal, I mean.”
“Sit tight. Don’t leave the car,” Dan said. “It’s blaster proof, and it’ll take them a while to activate the override that’ll open the doors. If you need to get out of here, use the hand.”
Ollie glanced down at her own hands. “Which one?”
“That one,” said Dan, pointing into the back. “The car’s locked to its prints. Press the fingertips against that panel and you can drive away.”
“Great. OK. That’s great,” she said. The door started to close again. “Wait!”
Dan raised the door. “What?”
“How do you drive?”
“You’ll figure it out. Don’t leave the car.”
Dan closed the door before she could ask anything else. After a quick glance back at the gates to make sure no other Tribunal squads were about to storm the place, he headed for the school’s open front door.
“Mindy, stun shot,” he instructed. The gun’s cylinder spun and illuminated. He had full charge, which was a nice change. Hopefully, he wouldn’t need it.
“Stun? Ye sure about that, Deadman?” Artur asked. “If we’re dealin’ with what ye think we’re dealin’ with, wouldn’t it be best to, ye know, blow it to bits? I mean, far be it from me to tell ye yer business, but that would seem sensible, wouldn’t it?”
“Can’t risk it,” Dan said, closing in on the door. “If I stun a kid, that’s one thing. If I disintegrate one…”
“Yeah. Yeah, fair point, well made,” Artur conceded. “So, we’ll just stun the bastard, then start layin’ boots into him.”
“Her,” Dan corrected.
“Ye what?”
“The report said the hostage taker is a woman.”
“I thought ye said it was yer monster man. The Inhabitant, or whatever he calls himself?”
“I did,” Dan said. “But that’s what the report said. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
The door wasn’t open all the way wide enough for him to fit through. Swapping Mindy to his left hand, he held the gun ready as he eased the door the rest of the way, revealing a hallway beyond.
Dan stepped through into a cacophony of color. The walls themselves were a dirty-yellow sort of white, with brown and black staining in the upper corners. Almost every available inch had been covered in charmingly amateurish artwork, though, showcasing a variety of textures, techniques and talent levels.
“Holy shoite, I don’t fancy yer demon-boy’s chances in this place,” whispered Artur. He gestured to a wall adorned with a selection of self-portraits. “I mean, look at the mugs on that lot. I’ve had nightmares that are less terrifying than some o’ those faces.”
Dan glanced at a strip of paper pinned up beneath a couple of the portraits. “They were drawn by three-year-olds,” he pointed out. “I doubt they’re all that accurate.”
“I feckin’ hope not,” said Artur. “Sure, half of them look like they’ve melted, and that one’s eating his own eyes.”
“Quiet,” said Dan. “Listen.”
Artur listened.
“What am I supposed to be hearing?”
“Anything,” said Dan.
Artur listened again. “Well, I can’t.”
“That’s my point,” Dan said.
Artur looked up from inside the holster. “Shoite. Ye don’t think we’re too late, do ye?”
Dan gestured to another open door at the opposite end of the hall. Thirty drawings, all different, plastered the walls around it. They showed tall, shimmering buildings, blossoming trees, smiling faces. According to the studiously hand-written note beside the display, the drawings showed the kids’ ideas of what Up There might look like. Dan didn’t really notice any of that, though. All he noticed was the bloody handprint on the drawing nearest the door.
It was small enough to be an older child’s, he thought, but large enough to belong to a slightly-built adult. As Dan approached the door, he saw spots of blood leading like a trail into the corridor beyond.
Like the hallway, the corridor was deserted. More drawings and paintings and cut-out creations lined the walls, broken up only by five doors – two on one side, three on the other. The spattering of blood spots led into the first room, then crossed to the second. The trail continued to zig-zag along the corridor until it reached the final door. It didn’t come out again. Whatever was leaving the trail had visited each of the classrooms in turn, and as Dan approached the first of the open doors, he found himself holding a breath that hadn’t been planning to go anywhere anyway.
“Careful now,” Artur whispered. He’d clambered up onto Dan’s shoulder without him noticing, and the sudden voice in his ear almost made Dan jump out of his skin.
“Don’t do that,” Dan hissed.
“Oh, man-up, ye big eejit,” Artur told him, then he ducked inside the visor of Dan’s riot helmet and watched through the glass as Dan edged the classroom door all the way open and swept his gun across the chaos inside.
There was more blood on the floor, but it was smeared, as if something had been dragged through it. A row of desks had been knocked over, and most of the chairs now lay on their backs. A bright yellow bean bag was stained partly orange with blood, and most of its foam beads had spilled out of a wide split along the seam.
Several datapads lay smashed on a carpeted area near the entrance. Dan saw a child-sized footprint on one broken screen, the shoe tread pointing towards the door. There was a spot of blood on top of the print, suggesting whatever had been dripping the stuff had followed behind the child.
Dan tried to do his detective step-by-step replay thing again. Monster comes in, trashes the place, kids run away, monster leaves. That was about as far as he could get, and he had no idea how accurate even that was.
He checked the next couple of room, spending less time at each than the one before. The final door was where the action was going to be, he knew, and he couldn’t put it off any longer. Noops’s ill-fitting boots creaked softly as Dan crept towards the last door, Mindy held in both hands, his finger hovering lightly on the trigger.
“Go,” Dan whispered.
Artur immediat
ely ducked out from beneath the visor, slid down Dan’s back, and scampered across the floor until he reached the door. He peeked through the gap between the door and the frame, then held up a hand for Dan to stop. The hand remained raised for several seconds while Artur tried to figure out what was going on inside the classroom, then became a shrug when he realized he couldn’t.
Moving quickly and quietly, he reached the other end of the door, listened at the edge for a moment, then peeked around the corner.
“Oh bolloc—” he ejected, before a hand slapped down on him and dragged him into the room.
“Shizz,” Dan spat. He stormed into the room, Mindy held in front of him.
“Wait, Deadman, don’t shoot!” Artur yelped. He was clutched like a toy in the hand of a short, pudgy child with tightly-cropped silver hair and a slack, virtually lifeless expression.
Forty or more other kids of various shapes and sizes stood to a sort of relaxed attention all around the room, their eyes glassy, their mouths open, their arms hanging limply by their sides.
Behind the wall of children, a woman in business attire was on her knees, her face buried in the torso of what Dan guessed was a teacher. She was facing away from the door and didn’t appear to have noticed him, but all those kids standing between Dan and her meant he couldn’t risk taking a shot.
Instead, he put a finger to the visor of his helmet and ushered the kid holding Artur towards the door. The boy didn’t move at first, but then his mouth opened and a voice that wasn’t his – couldn’t be his – emerged.
“It’s useless,” he said in a scratchy whisper that oozed wickedness. “They’re mine now.”
Another child continued in the same voice – a girl this time, over on Dan’s right. “They’re all mine.”
“Who are you?” Dan asked.
Several of the children all whispered the word, one after another.
“Aranok.”
“Aranok.”
“Aranok.”
Artur cleared his throat. “I reckon she’s probably called ‘Aranok’,” he said. “Though don’t ask me how I know. Intuition, maybe.”
He wriggled a little to indicate his arms were pinned to his sides. “By the way, for a stubby little fat lad, this kid’s got one helluva grip. Sure, if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was trying to squeeze me till me head popped off.”
“The Inhabitant,” Dan said, the name now making a lot more sense. “You’re controlling them.”
This time, the children all spoke as one, the same voice emerging from them all at the exact same moment. “I am them. I am inside their heads. I am inside your head, too.”
The woman, who had continued gnawing away at the inside of the teacher’s body, turned her face in Dan’s direction. Even through the mask of blood, he recognized her. She was the woman from those family photographs back in the apartment Noops had sent him to.
“Freeze,” she said in that same scratchy male voice.
Dan froze, his gun still held in front of him.
“Deadman?” said Artur. “Deadman? Ye alright there, Deadman? Deadman? Are ye alright there?”
“Silence,” said Aranok through the boy holding Artur. Artur’s mouth continued to move, but no sound emerged.
At the back of the room, the woman stood up, revealing just how awash with blood and gore she really was. Her face, neck, hair and hands were all caked with the stuff, and unless her dry-cleaner was some kind of miracle worker, that suit was almost certainly ruined.
Her movements were slow and jerky, like she was still getting used to having legs. She shuffled back and forth behind the wall of kids, blood dripping from her chin, nose and fingertips.
“What do you want?” Dan asked, his voice hissing through his clenched teeth.
“What everyone wants,” she replied, before the children explained further.
“Power.”
“Power.”
“Power.”
“To rule this place,” she concluded.
Dan managed a snort. “Ain’t much here worth ruling.”
“All here,” Aranok said. The woman’s arms jerked upwards. “The world. The stars. The everything.”
“Well, she’s ambitious, I’ll give her that,” said Artur. “Hey! Check it out, I can talk again.”
“Silence,” said the boy.
“Aw, ye nasty…” Artur began, then his volume dropped to zero.
The woman had to be Aranok’s principal host. He’d somehow come through to this dimension, taken over her body, then used it to kill her husband and son. The organ-eating had to be about the demon building its strength, so if it was still hungry it hadn’t yet reached full power.
The bad news was that there were an army of kids between Dan and the demon.
There was good news, too, but he wasn’t quite ready to share that yet.
“There is power here,” Aranok said, the host’s legs jerking unevenly as he lurched it back and forth. “Close by, but not you. Outside. Such raw, untapped power. I must have it.”
She fixed her gaze on Dan, and he suddenly felt like lots of tiny fingers were rifling through his brain. “Who? Where? Tell me.”
“OK,” Dan grunted. “But can I tell you something else first?”
The woman cocked her head. “Tell me what?”
Dan’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not really frozen,” he said. “Mindy, Brown Noise.”
As the cylinder spun, Dan lowered the gun towards the kids and squeezed off a couple of shots. The two children who found themselves on the receiving end blinked their lifeless eyes in surprise as the contents of their bowels noisily evacuated into their underwear.
Sweeping the gun across the sea of upturned faces, he fired several more times. The room erupted into a chorus of parps and squelches, and Aranok stumbled backwards in his stolen skin.
“What is this?” the demon demanded.
“Figured you were still getting used to the whole physical form thing,” Dan said, blasting another kid with a bolt of Brown Noise. A stream of hot, steaming effluent splattered down the girl’s legs and out through the bottom of a pants leg. “Thought I’d give you a crash course in some of the… more visceral aspects.”
Three of the affected kids clutched their stomachs and began to wail, their slack-jawed expressions becoming a range of horrified ones. At the back of the class, Aranok’s host clutched her stomach and staggered, a moan of demonic distress bursting from her lips.
Several of the kids who Dan hadn’t forced to spectacularly shizz themselves began to blink rapidly. The smell hit them like a physical blow, making them recoil in disgust.
“Ew, there’s poop!” yelped one girl, which immediately kicked off a chorus of squeals from some of the other kids. “There’s poop everywhere!”
“I can’t stop!” hollered a boy, doubling over as a gush of brown liquid erupted right through the seat of his pants. “I can’t make it stop!”
The squealing intensified. A bigger girl made a break for the door, the neck of her school uniform pulled up over her nose and mouth to block out the smell. Emboldened by this, several other kids raced to join her, wailing, dry-heaving and occasionally sliding in puddles of shizz as they made their escape.
The kid who had been holding Artur released his grip. As Artur fell to the floor, he relished the sensation of freedom, relieved that he no longer felt like his intestines were about to be squeezed out through his face. Then he plopped into a waist-high pile of runny feces, which really put a dampener on the moment.
Dan stepped aside to let the kids past. The route to the demon was clear now. Time to end this.
“Mindy, stun shot,” he commanded. Maybe he could still save the woman. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe this could all work out.
He took aim, but as he squeezed the trigger he felt those probing fingers through his brain again. His arm jerked upwards, and the bolt screamed harmlessly over the demon-host’s head.
Well, not ‘harmlessly’ exactly.
; An ancient metal pipe running along the top of the wall exploded. There was a roar like some great wild beast. Dan, Artur and the woman all looked up as the ceiling above her collapsed and a large metal filing cabinet dropped through from the floor above, killing her instantly.
Dan stood there for several seconds, gun still raised, watching the now mostly-headless corpse twitching on the floor. He didn’t even look down when a shizz-sodden Artur waddled over to stand beside him.
“Ye know what?” Artur said, squelching in his pleather leggings. “That actually went quite a lot better than I expected. Sure, a lot of sweet, innocent children will likely have their arses hanging in tatters thanks to ye shootin’ them, and whatnot, but all things considered? I call that a result!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They collected Ollie from the car, retrieved Dan’s own clothes from where he’d wedged them under the driver’s seat, then snuck off via the school’s back gate while the Tribunal clean-up squads were contending with the army of fast-moving, shizz-spraying infants.
They found a public bathroom a few blocks away and, after scoping the place out for a while, Dan and Artur risked venturing inside. It was better than most other public bathrooms in that the water was working, two of the six cubicles had doors, and there wasn’t a predatory sex-pest lurking in any of the corners. In Down Here terms, this was bordering on decadence.
Dan changed out of the Tribunal gear while Artur rinsed himself off in the sink. The water alternated between icy cold and blisteringly hot, so much of the time was spent hovering right at the edge of the rust-colored flow, ready to jump clear whenever the temperature started playing silly buggers.
Once he’d finished changing, Dan held Artur under the hand-drier for a while. The warm air turned Artur’s hair and beard so fluffy they appeared to double in size. This amused Ollie no end when they finally emerged from the bathroom.
“Artur! You’re all…” She puffed out her cheeks as big as they’d go. “Seriously! You’re like…” She blew her cheeks out again, but this time added in some hand gestures to indicate her face wasn’t really doing the scale of Artur’s beard justice.
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