by G A Chase
“Up until now, his attacks have been random. That’s been an advantage for him. I’m not sure you’re next, but from what I’ve seen, he’s perfected his technique enough to make a try at you. For the first time, that puts me one step ahead of him. I’ve been playing catchup since the beginning, and that’s a bad position to be in.”
“What would you have me do—run and hide?”
She pointed at a stack of blank paper. “Write down your week’s activities, including times and addresses. The more I know about you, the better I can protect you.”
Sere left the office with the neatly graphed page of Mr. Fisher’s activities folded up in her pocket and headed down toward the river. With the CPA on a predictable path and the people Sere cared about on the sidelines, she almost felt as if she had control of the situation. She didn’t need Joe’s edicts, however, to know the fallacy of such an instinct. People often thought they had the upper hand right up until the moment the knife went into their hearts.
The logical move—and the one she’d carefully laid out for Monty to assume—would be for her to hide in every available bush and spy on Mr. Fisher like some love-struck stalker. So long as Monty thought that was what she was doing, he’d be lying low, trying to find her before she ambushed him—a situation that would keep Mr. Fisher safe for the time being. However, it wasn’t a ruse that was likely to last long. Even with Monty operating on little more than a reptilian brain, he’d eventually figure out there wasn’t a threat lurking in the shadows. His second-guessing still puts me one step ahead. What I told Mr. Fisher wasn’t a lie.
The real tidbit of information was Mr. Fisher’s illness. Sere could draw on Jennifer if the need were great enough, but the emotional energy required to create the direct bond without the enhancement of Professor Yates’s equipment was like getting lost in an intense, prolonged orgasm—potentially addictive and psychically draining. If Monty was relying on that connection to his real, something had to be wrong. As Mr. Fisher’s illness was recent, Sere hoped Monty’s malady was more than just the buckshot. Whatever was causing Monty to draw on Mr. Fisher, he was behaving like a wounded animal. That made him vulnerable but also potentially more dangerous.
The breeze off the water invigorated Sere’s skin as she headed toward the professor’s lab. She needed her equipment if she was going back on the hunt. Playing the undercover female sleuth hadn’t come naturally. She was a woman of action, not conversation. The disguise had worked well enough. No cop had stopped her to question the resemblance to the drawing plastered on yesterday’s newscast, and Auntie Kendell and Uncle Myles hadn’t been burdened with the image of Sere as a badass motorcycle-riding demon hunter—though having to rescue her from a knife-wielding psycho probably wasn’t much better.
Sere stopped for a moment and squeezed her eyes shut. When they found me, I was the one with the blades. Same difference. She continued on. Every step put her closer to being out of the couple’s idea of street clothes and back in her riding leathers complete with shotgun. Though she’d only had the weapon with her for a short time, there was a reassurance at having the weight strapped to her back. Even if she wasn’t much good at pulling the trigger, the section of pipe and solid wood made for an impressive bludgeon.
She was still considering how much of the undercover city image she could shed when she opened the door to Professor Yates’s offices. The man was wildly disorganized, but the smashed equipment, disgorged file folders, and busted interior windows were enough evidence that his latest encounter had been more adversarial than collaborative.
“Professor Yates?” she called out, not really expecting an answer.
“He’s getting away out the back door, and he’s got your gun.” The old man gasped out the words.
Not this time. Sere pulled out the switchblade she’d taken off Thomas and raced down the hallway. The back door was just settling closed as she turned sideways and used her shoulder on it like a battering ram. Back out in the bright light of day, she could see that Monty had a good twenty-yard head start. She flipped open the blade, twisted her body, and launched the dagger with all of the momentum she could muster. It penetrated the left side of his back.
“Fuck you, Monty!” she yelled. He didn’t even slow down.
She still had her knife, but as it was stashed under the pant leg of her jeans, she would need to stop running to fish out the blade. With her gun in his hand, Monty was sprinting like a relay runner headed toward the finish line. She stood with fists clenched and watched him bolt onto the back of a passing streetcar.
Facts swirled around her like a swarm of annoying gnats. She’d landed a knife wound. That meant Monty was in worse shape and would be pulling harder against Mr. Fisher. But he had her gun, and that meant the shells could just as easily disrupt her connection to her real as his. Professor Yates…
“Shit!” She turned away from the retreating red streetcar and ran back into the building before the pneumatic dampener had a chance to shut the door. She fell to her knees beside the gangly gentleman gasping for air on the floor. Blood was oozing out of scattered holes in his chest. She put her hands over the wounds, unsure of what else to do. “Stay with me. I can’t lose you too.”
“He was far enough away that the pellets couldn’t penetrate very deep,” Professor Yates gasped. “Get me my phone so I can call for help.”
She kept her hand over the bloody holes while scanning his desk. “Got it.”
“See if you can find something to stop this bleeding.”
“Is that your polite way of reminding me your phone won’t work with me standing here? I’ll try the bathroom.” Blood again streamed out of his body when she took her hand away. She ran to the space that was as much a utility closet as a bathroom and pulled open every cabinet, searching for something to stem the rivers of blood escaping from the professor’s body.
She could hear his side of the conversation in the next room. “I’ve been shot. Bring the emergency kit. Don’t tell Kendell or Myles. Just get here quickly. Sere’s safe.”
As soon as she heard the phone land back on the desk, she rushed in with an armload of towels and rolls of duct tape. “Who did you call?”
“Polly. She’s been helping me out practically since the day we set up the virtual-reality overlay in your father’s hell.”
“You could have called the paramedics. That would have been safer.” She helped him to sit up against the side of the desk so she could wrap the terrycloth around his chest.
“Bullshit. You can’t be discovered. For the last two decades, this lab’s primary function has been to keep you whole. The medics would bring the cops, and they ask too many questions.”
She needed to keep him from going into shock. Though the pellets hadn’t punctured his lungs, he had lost a lot of blood. However, she also had a lot of questions and not a lot of time. “What did Monty want? And how the hell did he get past your security system?”
“He wants to be free of his real.” Professor Yates looked up at her with glazed eyes. “He’s not doing well. A person on the street wouldn’t notice anything unusual, but my computer monitoring system sees doppelgängers as they are, not as they appear.”
“I don’t understand.”
He pointed at the laptop that lay on its side across the room. “Boot that up, and open the most recent file.”
She pulled the tape tight across his chest. The once grungy-white towels were quickly turning dark red. He held the makeshift bandage in place while she crawled over to the computer and poked at the keys. So long as you don’t have an external connection, there’s no reason for you not to obey me. A video started playing of a man walking up to the front door of the receptionist’s office. When he looked up at the camera, Sere figured out what the professor had meant. “He doesn’t look like he has any skin.”
“Exactly.” The professor coughed hard but didn’t spit out any blood. “He must still have those rock pellets in him. Not that he’d be doing much better even if he hadn�
��t been shot. The longer he’s out of hell, the less complete his projection. His internal organs will all continue to function, but superficial aspects like skin and hair pigment will slowly fade. So far, only you and my equipment can detect the change, but eventually, others will notice too. And with those stones in him, the difference in his appearance will happen sooner rather than later.”
Sere enhanced the image. Muscles, veins, teeth, and eyes all looked unnaturally prominent. Only a light sheen of milky-white skin covered the surface. “He barely looks human. And you say I’ll be able to see this with my naked eyes?”
“You’re from the same dimension, so yes. People in this realm vary in their perceptions of reality. The more empathetic people are, the sooner they will notice the truth. As for my sensors, I don’t know why they didn’t alert me. Figuring out what went wrong will be my first chore once Polly gets me back on my feet.”
“And what about Montgomery Fisher?”
Professor Yates pointed at the screen. “He’ll see exactly what you see.”
Great. I drove the poor man to the brink of insanity, and now Monty is going to push him over the edge. She kept the knowledge to herself. The professor already had enough to deal with, being shot and all.
Polly rushed in the front door, carrying an overstuffed backpack. She pushed past Sere as if she weren’t even there and dropped the pack next to the professor. “What happened?”
“He got hold of Sere’s gun and shot me with that paranormal buckshot.”
Polly started pulling out equipment and medical supplies from the bag. “Good thing he shot you and not Sere.” She held up what looked like a steampunk electromagnet. “Do you think this thing will work on you?”
“It should. The energy it’ll pull won’t be mine but the pellets’. If anything, it should work better since my body is actively trying to reject the alternate-dimension foreign objects.”
Polly tossed Sere the end of the wire. “Plug that into a wall socket.”
Nice to see you too. The lack of a greeting on their first meeting in the same dimension, however, only increased Sere’s impression of the fortysomething band manager as a no-nonsense, as-hard-as-nails leader who could seemingly make things happen by sheer force of will.
She stuck the plug in the socket. “Good to go.”
The wand in Polly’s hand made zapping and popping sounds that didn’t sound safe. She lowered the flat end over the bloodstained towels and started running it like an iron over the surface.
“Damn,” the professor said. “Remind me to add a cooling coil to that thing. It feels like lightning bolts are being extracted from my flesh.”
“Hush up, old man,” Polly said. “This only takes care of the paranormal part of your injuries. You’ve still lost a lot of blood. You need to take it easy until we can get you to the hospital.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He settled back against the desk.
Polly ran the device over his chest and sides three times until she was satisfied the magnet had finished its work. “Help me unwrap him. With any luck, the pellets will be nestled in the fabric of the towels. They may be a little hot, so watch where you touch.”
“Right.” The duct tape Sere had so hastily wrapped around the towels combined with the professor’s blood to make for a sticky, gooey mess to remove. As Sere took off the saturated rags, Polly grabbed boxes of gauze and bandages from the bag.
“Once we get this bleeding under control, get your things, and hightail it out of here. I’ll have Kendell bring the band’s bus and drive us to the ER. We’ll say the professor had an experiment go sideways, creating an explosion. We can’t risk the authorities showing up here and somehow making a connection between this lab and the Swamp Strangler.”
Sere made a mental inventory of everything she’d left behind. “I understand. You take care of your own.”
Polly turned on her with an animal ferocity. “You’re included in that family. If the cops start messing with this equipment, you’re the one who will be in the most danger. I’m only being abrupt with you because I know you can take it.”
Sere swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I should have realized.”
“Go easy on the girl, Pol,” Professor Yates said. “You can’t expect her to understand every human interaction.”
“Before I go,” Sere said, “I need to know what Monty wanted, what he took, and what I’m up against.”
Professor Yates struggled to sit upright against the desk. “He came in the back door like Frankenstein’s monster, smashing equipment and demanding answers about his existence. He grabbed your gun and started aiming it around the room like he wanted to burn this whole place down but didn’t know where to start. Along with losing skin pigment, he’s apparently also losing nerve endings. Pain didn’t seem to register at all.”
“That would explain why the knife I buried in his back didn’t slow him down,” Sere said.
“He’ll feel it later once the adrenaline wears off,” the professor said. “His brain can only process so many stimulations at once—rage being his current dominant expression. I tried reasoning with him the way I would with a toddler throwing a tantrum, but in spite of his questions, he clearly wasn’t looking for answers.”
“I talked with Joe about Monty’s possible motivations. We came to the conclusion he wants to kill his real and take over that life. If he’s losing what little mental capacity he had, however, I’m beginning to wonder if that’s still his intention.”
“I doubt intention has anything to do with it at this point. If you hadn’t busted in, I have no doubt he would have killed me and torched this lab. He sees everyone else walking around independent of my equipment and figures he should be able to as well.”
Polly double-checked her work in stopping the bleeding. “Wouldn’t that just destroy him, though?”
“He doesn’t see us as providing for his existence.” Professor Yates nodded toward his equipment. “To him, this is more like the electronic walls of his hell prison. Now that he’s escaped the physical realm, he believes his continued suffering is the result of our efforts and his real.”
Sere had hoped there was some part of Monty she could reason with, but more and more, it seemed he really was just a dangerous bug to be squashed. And the damn demonic cockroach was getting away. “Is there any other way to safely destroy him other than the marble shotgun pellets? Because they don’t seem to be as effective as I’d like.”
“We don’t have time for this shit,” Polly said. “I need to get the professor to the hospital. I love you, Sere. Now, for your own good, get the hell out of here, and don’t look back.”
Polly was right. The longer it took for Sere to gather the pieces of the puzzle, the longer the professor would have to suffer. It seemed every person she came in contact with, she put in danger. As desperate as she was to get changed, getting out of the lab had to be her first priority. She headed to the back room, where she’d seen her belongings and where Monty had stolen her single-barreled shotgun.
Her snakes hissed and rattled when she threw her saddlebags over her shoulder. “I missed you guys too.” She scooped up the backpack filled with shotgun shells that lay open on its side. There was no way to know how many boxes Monty had absconded with, but he clearly had more shells than just what she’d left loaded in the gun. Her bedroll still had an inner firmness, indicating she at least still had the four-barreled blaster.
“I suppose I should be happy we’re now equally armed, but honor be damned. I’d just as soon shoot the son of a bitch in the back and be done with it. Honorable confrontations only extend to adversaries with souls. I wouldn’t build a human-sized robot just so some mosquito could crawl in and face me on equal terms.”
Her snakes rattled their objection.
“Higher-functioning animals have souls. Insects do not. Monty is nothing more than a hell cockroach with a gun. I’ll stomp him out the first opportunity I get.”
Satisfied that she’d gathered up everything that m
ight connect Professor Yates to her—and thereby to the Swamp Strangler—Sere hopped on the Triton and walked it to the back door. Before heading out, she yelled over her shoulder, “See you both when this is over. I’m trusting you to take care of those we love, Polly.”
“Ride hard and ride fast, girl.”
11
Sere kick-started the Triton. Time was against her. Again, she was riding into battle without being properly outfitted for what was to come. The loose jeans and flappy cotton shirt weren’t ideal riding attire, and they’d be even more of a hindrance when it came to a fight. Her boots were still in her bags with the snakes, which meant her knife was strapped to her leg—not exactly easily accessible. Monty, however, wouldn’t be just sitting around, waiting for her to get changed.
Not that he was in optimum fighting condition, either. Between the rock pellets and separation from hell, his translucency was going to make it impossible for him to step into Mr. Fisher’s life. His plan had been doomed from the start, but now even he had to see the futility of it. With the new knife wound to contend with, Monty would be sucking on Mr. Fisher’s life force like a college kid on spring break draining a cheap daiquiri. Sere had to assume the doppelgänger would still have his sights set on killing the old man, but his intentions would be based on pure anger and frustration with no possibility of real victory. As a cornered, wounded animal with nothing to lose and hopped up on human energy, Monty would be more dangerous than ever.
Sere took a hard left under the freeway overpass onto Saint Charles Avenue. From the itinerary Mr. Fisher had provided, the CPA should be home for lunch. She swerved between cars, potholes, and pedestrians, wondering if Monty would confront the man at home or wait outside until he left for work. Either way, the murderer was once again a step ahead.