by Sara Reinke
“My zu mu will die if she sees,” Mei whispered, and when the waiter brought her a Styrofoam box, she murmured thanks, rubbed fervently at her cheek to wipe away the tear, then began to scoop the rest of her breakfast hurriedly inside. “And my parents…they’ll never forgive me. They’ll be so ashamed of me, even more than they already are.”
She looked up at him, more tears spilled, her bottom lip trembling. “Please just help me get the camera. That’s all. Then I promise, I swear, Jason, I’ll leave you alone. I just…I need you to go with me, to stand outside while I get it. I don’t want you to shoot anyone. Just use your gun and scare them if they come around, like you did with Pops.”
She sniffled, mopping at her face again. “Please,” she said, and when he nodded, relief washed over her face in a visible wave.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After they arrived at an intersection facing a three-story apartment building painted a hideous shade of avocado green, Jason waited beside Mei as she stood uncertainly on the corner. Obviously, she was frightened. Her dark eyes darted about and she nibbled absently, anxiously on the side of her thumbnail. They were back in the skid row section of town again. Having taken the streetcars as far west as they could, they’d continued on foot until coming to a stop at the corner. Gone were the trappings of the more tourist-friendly boulevards and districts. There were no coffee shops or cafes, no novelty stores or fashion boutiques. Illegible graffiti scrawled in enormous, ballooning letters adorned nearby walls. The streets and sidewalks were crowded and dirty with litter. Apartment buildings listed together with dark, narrow alleys between them and rusted fire escapes framing them.
“That’s the place?” Jason asked with a nod toward the green building.
Mei nodded. “Yeah. Come on.”
Seeming to steel herself, she shoved her hands deeply into her parka pockets and scurried across the street. Carrying the gun tucked in his own coat pocket, Jason followed. Mei skirted around the side of the building, avoiding the front entrance and heading for the alley behind it.
“Now what?” he asked. She didn’t answer right away, simply ducked into the alley, leaving Jason to follow. He could feel fear radiating off her in cold waves, as if he stood directly in front of an oscillating air conditioner. He looked down and saw the irregular pool of his shadow stealing toward hers in slow, stealthy fingertips—the Eidolon, drawn to her fear.
Not now, he thought in dismay, even as his shadow slipped against Mei’s, melding into it, sending a ripple of pleasure through him that left him staggering into the wall, gasping for breath. Goddamn it, not now.
“Come on.” Mei brushed past him, heading for the back of the alley. As soon as she moved, her shadow abruptly parting from his, the rapport between them broke, leaving Jason to stumble dizzily in its wake.
“It’s ten o’clock now,” Mei murmured, looking up at the fire escape as she reached the alley’s end. “He’s usually out until ten-thirty, maybe eleven. He leaves the bedroom window open. We can get inside that way.”
For the first time, apparently, she noticed he hadn’t followed and she turned. “Jason,” she hissed, flapping her hand in frantic beckon. He limped toward her, trembling all over, seized with the terrible overwhelming coldness he always felt when the Eidolon stirred inside him.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked and he shook his head.
“Nothing.”
“Come on,” she said again. “We’ll have to climb up the fire escape.”
He blinked, snapping fully from his daze now. “What?” he asked, watching Mei clamber up onto a nearby Dumpster.
“I said we’ll have to climb.” Mei balanced precariously on the Dumpster rim, reaching up, straining to grab hold of the bottommost rung of the fire escape ladder. Hooking her fingers against it, she hopped down from the Dumpster and her slight weight was enough to lower the ladder with a scraping sound of rusty cogs and gears moving, metal grinding against metal.
“What about the door?” Jason asked, bewildered.
She spared him a glance. “What about it? I don’t have a key, so fat lot of good it’d do us.”
“No key?” he repeated, adding mentally, Terrific. “I thought you said you’d been living with this guy.”
Nimble as a monkey, Mei began climbing the ladder up to the next level. “Yeah, well, I also told you I dumped his ass. Now shut up and come on.”
The ibuprofen had dulled the pain in his shoulder to a tolerable degree, but as soon as he caught the fire escape ladder and tried to pull himself up, it stoked again, making him cry out quietly, hoarsely, and nearly lose his grip. He managed to haul himself clumsily up to the landing and knelt there, hanging his head, clutching his shoulder, shuddering for breath.
“You all right?” Above him, Mei paused, looking down at him in concern.
“Yeah,” Jason said breathlessly, nodding. “Just give me a minute.”
She began to move again, climbing up the fire escape, holding the railings on either side of her, her feet dropping quickly, quietly against the stairs. The aging frame creaked and groaned at every step and flakes of rust began tumbling down in copper-colored flurries.
As he began to climb again, moving slowly, hesitantly, she reached the top floor of the building and crouched outside a window. It had been left partially ajar to let in cool air, and she hooked her fingers beneath the weathered edge, grunting as she tried to open it.
“It’s stuck,” she called to him.
“Here.” By now, he’d finally reached the top and joined her beside the window. She moved aside as he squatted, giving the window sill a few light experimental hits with the side of his fist to loosen any stubborn paint. “I’ll get it.”
He clenched his teeth against sudden shocking pain as he shoved the window up. Sprinkles of chipped paint peppered down against his sleeves, and the old half-rotted wood groaned as it trudged begrudgingly on its tracks. It hurt enough to leave him light-headed, seeing little sparkles of light dancing across his line of sight, and he pressed the heel of his hand against his brow, sitting back hard against the fire escape landing.
“You all right?” she asked again, her dark eyes round and worried.
“Yeah,” he said, even though he wasn’t, and even though he was really wishing he’d grabbed the Percocets from Sam’s apartment the day before. “Go on. Hurry up.”
Mei ducked her head and crawled through the narrow opening into the apartment and he limped to his feet and followed. Once inside, she darted across the small room, picking her way through a mess of dirty clothes, empty pizza boxes and Chinese food containers, old beer bottles, soda cans and overflowing ashtrays.
“I thought you said you knew where the camera was,” he said after a few moments in which she tore noisily through the closet.
“I do,” she replied, still sifting and searching, throwing aside shoe boxes, clothes, a battered old baseball mitt. She’d periodically stuff things down into her coat pockets, but he couldn’t see what they were.
“Five minutes, that’s what you told me.”
“I know,” she said, but continued digging through a heap of clothes in the closet, not sparing him a glance. “I’m trying.”
“Ten minutes, tops,” he said, drawing her gaze.
“I said I’m trying! How do you expect me to find anything if you keep harping on me?” she snapped.
Jason bristled, turning back to the window, hoping the cold air would clear his mind, foggy now from anger as well as the pain in his shoulder. It’s my own damn fault, he thought. It’s not like she stuck a gun to my head and made me come with her. I could be on a bus for Seattle right now, but nope. It’s just like Eddie said, I’ve always got to be the goddamn hero.
He felt a pattering of paint chips against his hand, which still rested against the window sill, and then the window came crashing down, slamming into his fingers. The bones all splintered at the brutal impact and Jason cried out in
startled pain, trying reflexively, vainly, to jerk his hand away.
“Jason!” Mei exclaimed, and then her voice ripped up shrill octaves, a scream of sudden stark terror as the outermost wall of the apartment came to life, lunging forward in an abrupt surge of plaster and stone. Like the sewage creature in the darkened bathroom at Sully’s, the general shape was humanoid, but it towered above Jason at more than eight feet tall, its grotesque body formed out of steel beams and iron pipes for a rudimentary skeleton, wires, lumber and insulation fleshing it out. The window was its head. The glass in its wide panes shattered as the wooden frame wrenched loose of the wall and the jagged shards of remaining glass became teeth that it gnashed by moving the upper and lower sash, mimicking the opening and closing of a furious, gaping maw.
“Oh, Jesus!” Mei screeched. When the window had torn away from the plaster, Jason’s hand was freed. He’d fallen to the floor and scrambled back now, plowing a path through dirty clothes and garbage, cradling his injured hand against his chest. His eyes were wide in stunned shock as the thing lumbered forward, ripping entire lengths of cable—ten, twenty, even thirty feet or more of coaxial—out of the walls in crooked, crumbling seams.
Mei screamed. “What is that? What the fuck is that thing?”
Whatever it is, it’s big, it’s pissed off, Jason thought, and it’s headed right for me.
He staggered to his feet, floundering across dunes of dirty clothes, stumbling over empty beer cans. The floorboards beneath him shuddered as one of the creature’s enormous legs—steel I-beams and ruptured concrete—smashed into the ground behind him. Metal screeched against metal, plaster grinded against stone, and then it reached for him, sending a lash of electrical conduits splayed like fingers outstretched and groping.
“Jason!” Mei wailed as the wires whipped about him, snapping taut around his throat, cutting his breath abruptly short and tangling about his legs. He crashed to the floor but had only a millisecond to gasp futilely before it hoisted him up, dangling him in the air, then flung him across the room. He slammed into the wall with enough force to crunch the drywall behind him, rattle his skull and knock whatever breath he had left clear out of his lungs. Dazed, he crumpled to the floor in a heap.
“Jason!” Mei cried again as he again felt the floor beneath him thrum.
Shit, Jason thought, limping to his feet. Leaning heavily against the wall, he stumbled out the bedroom door and into a narrow corridor. “Mei,” he cried. “Get out of here! Run!”
When he staggered into the living room, making a beeline for the apartment’s front door, he heard a loud, booming crash, as if a full-grown brontosaurus had crashed into the wall separating it from the bedroom. A shockwave shuddered through the floor and rippled through the walls, making the overhead light fixtures begin to swing violently back and forth, creaking in their moorings.
“Turn that goddamn music down,” he heard someone shouting, muffled, from the apartment below, followed by a rapping against the floor, as if someone took a broom handle to the ceiling. “I’m tired of all the racket you—”
There was more, but the sudden scraping sound as the living room wall split horizontally down the middle in a widening ragged line drowned it out. It looked like an enormous mouth tearing apart the wall, getting ready to open. Jason backpedaled, groping wildly for the door behind him. It was locked, a brass-plated, double-key dead bolt for which there was no key in sight, and Jason tugged helplessly at the door handle.
He turned and dived wildly for the nearest cover he could find, a flimsy card table laden with more garbage, as the cleft in the wall burst wide, sending a spray of shattered wood, flying nails, plaster chips, electrical outlet boxes and more vomiting across the room. Again, cables, wires and telephone lines came whipping out like frenzied snakes, slapping and writhing, spraying bright coronas of sparks in all directions. Water pipes in the wall splintered too, and frothy torrents of high-velocity spray spewed everywhere.
Jason yelped as a thick gray cable caught him by the ankle, wrapping suddenly, sharply, cutting into his skin. It jerked him out from beneath the table and he clawed for futile purchase against the shag carpeting, pawed at one of the table legs. Again, he was hoisted up into the air, this time dangling upside down, with the length of wire wrapping farther and farther along his leg, like a python twining him into its constricting embrace.
The world beneath him swung crazily back and forth, upside down and around again as he careened back and forth, twisting and struggling to free himself. The creature smashed him into a wall, dunking him almost directly into the heavy geyser rushing from a broken water pipe. Jason choked, sputtered and gagged under the white, churning flow, soaked and nearly drowning before being pulled away again.
He’d forgotten about the gun until it fell out of the back of his pants, tumbling into the large pond that had formed in the middle of the living room rug. He’d forgotten, too, about the Eidolon, until he felt it surge within him, a sudden cold darkness enveloping him. His body felt weightless, smokelike, formless, and in an instant, he found himself out of the wire’s tangled grasp and on his knees, within arm’s length of the gun. He reached for it, snatching it in hand just as he felt more cables slap at him, sliding around his shoulders, groping for purchase around his waist.
Again, it felt as though he melted, becoming something transparent and diaphanous, the pressure and friction of the cables against him disappearing. The living room faded to black before his eyes. As if he’d only blinked, all at once, it was bright again, his body restored and solid once more, and he was back in the bedroom, standing beside the ruined window that had been their point of entry.
“Where…where did you…?” He heard Mei hiccup, and he turned to find her in the closet, crouched on her knees. Her face was ashen, her eyes enormous with terror and shock, and she blinked at him, openmouthed, like a startled fish. “Where did you come from?” she whimpered. “What…what just—”
The creature reappeared in front of them, no less than three feet away, erupting out of the floor in a sudden mountain of splintered wood, fetid clothes and garbage. Mei shrieked, recoiling toward the back of the closet, kicking her feet wildly.
He still had the gun in his hand. Jason realized this as if snapping out of a reverie. As the creature lunged at him, rudimentary arms fashioned out of clothes and cross-beams outstretched, he raised the pistol, thumbing off the safety in the same, frantic movement. Without even bothering to aim, he pulled the trigger.
The bullet flew wide and Mei screamed again, throwing her hands over her face as an outcropping of broken wood, drywall, concrete and debris shot out of the wall. Thick as a man’s arm and capped with the ragged remnants of a cinderblock, it plowed into Jason like a runaway freight train, knocking him sideways, sending him crashing to the floor. The gun fell from his hand, skittering across the floor, and he crawled after it, straining to reach it, blood pouring from his nose, his ears ringing from the blow.
The creature reconfigured itself again, resuming its humanoid shape. Hunched over and lurching, with no discernablediscernible head or hands, it swung the spindly pendulums of its arms at him in broad, swooshing arcs. Wailing like a fire bell, Mei darted out of the closet, trying to get out of its way and across the room. Her movement attracted its attention, however. It turned and began to follow her, steel legs smashing into the floor, leaving indelible dents splintered into the wood. Mei tripped and fell, landing hard on her belly. When a length of electrical wire snapped out, coiling smartly around her ankle, jerking her backward, she shrieked again, shrill with terror.
“Mei, no!” Jason grabbed the gun. “Let her go, you son of a bitch!”
Clasping the Beretta in both hands, struggling to draw a clean aim, he squeezed the trigger. The slug punched deeply into the segment of drywall comprising the creature’s chest. As it did, it fell apart—glass, steel, plaster, wood and stone—crashing to the floor with a thunderous din. Mei tumbled with it, yelping as she hit the ground, then again as he
r hands darted over her head to shield herself from the raining debris.
As the last reverberating aftershocks faded, the dust settled in a hissing rain and a strange and heavy silence fell upon the room, broken only by the soft, frightened sounds of Mei mewling and a distant siren, like a police car or ambulance, from somewhere outside. Jason waited for it to come again, still clutching the gun against his palms, swinging the muzzle back and forth to match the darting path of his gaze.
Did I get it? His heart raced. His breaths escaped in short, staccato gasps. He tasted blood in his mouth, lots of it, and when he turned his head to spit, he glanced down at himself, realizing he was covered in plaster dust.
Did I get it? he thought again, stumbling to his feet, still keeping the gun trained ahead of him. He laughed, a hoarse, scraping, shaky sound, finally lowering the gun, letting it dangle in one hand. With the other, he forked his fingers through his hair, wincing to feel the caked and crusted grit and dust. “I got it,” he said.
“What was it?” Mei whispered. He reached for her, holding out his hand in beckon, and she rushed to his side, shying against him, her fingers hooking fiercely against the waistband of his jeans. “Oh, God, Jason, what the fuck was that thing?”
The bedroom now boasted an expansive hole in the wall, leading to the living room, that hadn’t been there upon their arrival. It awarded them an unobstructed view of the apartment’s front door so that when it flew open suddenly, unexpectedly, Mei screamed again.
A young man stood in the doorway, his eyes round and stunned, his hand frozen in front of him, a key ring dangling from his fingers. Short and lean, with dark, short-cropped hair frosted white and spiked around his head, he blinked between the disemboweled apartment and the two people standing in the middle of it.