“I’ve never called myself a marksman,” Dan replied.
“Well now we know why, because ye’re a useless bastard who can’t aim for shoite.”
Ollie turned away from the ocean and raised her hands. “I’ll get it,” she said, but Dan and Artur quickly shouted her down.
“Peaches, no!”
“Don’t do it!”
Keeping her hands raised, Ollie looked back over her shoulder at them. “Why not?”
“Because ye’re not exactly renowned for yer levels of control,” Artur said. “And we’re in a tiny fecking boat in a big fecking ocean that’s positively hoachin’ with monsters. Like it or not, we’re in the hands of Hopeless Joe here.”
Dan jabbed a finger at Artur, then at Ollie. “You. Shut up. You. Drive. Get us out of here.”
“What? No!” Ollie spluttered. “What about Finn?”
“What about him? He’s dead,” said Dan. He winced a little as he said the words, but there was no time to soften the blow. “We aren’t. Not yet.”
“Well, technically some of us—” Artur began, but a flurry of sudden movement from all around the boat silenced him.
Eight long, probing tendrils like the one that had snatched Finn away snaked up over the sides and squirmed along the deck. Ollie screamed and jumped clear as one brushed against the back of her thigh. Dan stamped on it and tried to keep it pinned beneath his boot, but it wriggled free and grabbed for his ankle.
“Deadman! Shoot them!” Artur yelped, smashing a small but surprisingly powerful right hook into the side of one of the snake-like appendages.
“If I shoot them, we’ll sink!” Dan barked, stamping down on the tendril trying to grab his ankle.
“Stun them, ye daft bollocks!”
“Shizz. Right. Mindy, Stun Shot,” Dan commanded. The gun’s chamber began to spin, but then a tendril snared him around the wrist and yanked sharply, sending the weapon clattering across the deck.
Dan pulled against his fleshy bonds, but they tightened sharply, cutting into his wrist and ankle. He hit the deck hard, both tendrils fighting to pull him in opposite directions, and both winning. He felt old sutures in his back and stomach pop. The fonking things were literally going to tear him apart.
With a roar, he heaved against the one wrapped around his wrist and heard the sickening krick of snapping bone. Congealed black blood flobbed out of the opening wound and spattered on the deck, then the hand landed in it with a stomach-churning splat.
Bending, Dan grabbed the thing around his ankle with his one remaining hand and heaved it into what he hoped was the right position.
“Mindy, fire!”
Mindy kicked and slid further along the deck. The stun shot screamed through the air and hit the tendril close to where Dan had grabbed it. He felt the jolt of the impact through his mostly lifeless nerves, but the monster took the worst of it. It roared that foghorn roar again, and the snake-like appendages all released their various grips and thrashed around as if they were on fire.
The creature itself thrashed beneath the yacht, rocking it up into the air. “Ah, fonk!” Dan groaned as he watched Mindy flip up over the edge, then heard the splosh of the gun hitting the churning waters below.
“Great. Now what?” Artur cried.
Dan puffed out his cheeks. “All I’ve got is ‘I told you this was a bad idea,’” he said. “And that feels kind of petty.”
Ollie looked up at the monster.
She looked at her hands.
“Now?” she asked.
Artur and Dan exchanged a look. They both shrugged. “At this point, Peaches, I don’t see what harm it could possibly—”
The sea-monster screamed. It was a piercing, high-pitched drone that was quite unlike the foghorn sound. That sound had been an angry one. This sound was made up of desperation and terror and pain.
Its head swung wildly atop its long neck. A previously unseen tail curled up from the ocean a few hundred feet ahead of the boat, then slapped against the water with an ear-splitting thack.
Dan and Ollie staggered toward the listing edge of the ship, but caught the railing before they could be flipped overboard.
From there, they were staring almost straight down into the ocean beneath them. They could make out the curved belly of the beast, but there was something else moving around down there, too. Something much smaller, but with substantially more pointy bits.
“Is that…? Is that the toilet thing?” Ollie whispered.
“I think so. Yeah, maybe,” Dan replied. “Although, I don’t know. Does it look different to you?”
“Not really.”
“Smaller? I think it’s smaller?” He shrugged. “Or maybe not, I don’t know.”
Bubbles of blood broke on the surface, obscuring the view of what was happening below. From the way the monster was screaming, though, it clearly wasn’t having a very good time.
“Wait, what’s happening?” asked Artur.
“The thing from the sewers. I think it’s down there,” Dan said. “I think it’s fighting the big guy.”
“So… what are ye saying? It’s helping us?”
“I doubt it’s deliberate. Wasn’t exactly acting like it wanted to be friends last time.”
“How the feck did it find us? I mean, in an ocean this size, what are the chances of it just turning up? Ye think it was following us the whole time?”
Dan contemplated this. It was not a comforting thought. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
The sea-creature’s wailing stopped abruptly. The head flopped limply back and slapped against the ocean surface.
It bobbed there for a while like flotsam, then the neck sank out of sight, pulling the rest of the thing down with it.
Silence followed. The boat’s engines had cut out at some point, and the yacht now rested in the water rather than hovering atop it, waves lapping at the hull. The whole scene felt disconcertingly peaceful, considering what had come before.
“Is it gone?” Ollie whispered.
“It is,” Dan confirmed. “Don’t know about the thing from the sewers.”
“Holy shoite, Deadman, if that pointy bastard can murder a giant sea monster in thirty seconds, there’s no saying what else it can do. We can’t let it back into the city. I mean, I hate pretty much everyone living there, but even I reckon we need to put a stop to its nonsense.”
Something broke the surface on the other side of the boat before Dan could respond. Yelping, Ollie raised both her hands, then she quickly lowered them again when she saw the head bobbing there, blond-hair plastered to its face.
“Finn!”
“Well I’ll be. Would ye look at that,” said Artur. “Deadman, ye’d best give the lad a hand. Not literally, mind. Ye don’t exactly have them to spare at the moment.”
Dan and Ollie both reached down and helped drag Finn up and into the boat. He slipped down onto the deck, coughing and wheezing and, nobody could help but notice, completely naked.
“He’s got no clothes on,” Artur pointed out, on the off-chance that anyone had missed this. Finn’s whole body was crisscrossed with scratches and cuts, and bruises were beginning to form on his… well, everywhere, really. However he’d gotten free, it hadn’t been easy.
“Hey, look!” said Ollie, gazing at him in wonder. “He’s got one of those things, too!”
She reached for Finn’s crotch. “Blimminy-blimminy—”
Dan caught her by the wrist and eased her hand away. “Uh, let’s not do that,” he told her.
“Oh,” said Ollie, looking disappointed. “But it’s fun.”
“I’m sure ye’ll have plenty of opportunities for fun later, Peaches,” Artur told her. “But for now…” He looked around at the ocean, then back at the skyscrapers of Down Here in the distance. “…how about we feck the feck off out of here before anything else rears its ugly head?”
“Good call,” said Dan. He held up one hand and one rotten stump. “But someone else is going to have to drive.”
&nb
sp; COMMISSIONER USAKT POLANI entered his office, locked the door, then slumped into his chair and grimaced in the general direction of the ceiling.
He took a moment to appreciate the cool cocoon of darkness. His window had been broken recently and had been temporarily barricaded until it could be repaired.
At least, that was the theory, but the darkness it had brought had been so soothing, so welcoming, that Polani had decided to keep the shutter in place. He didn’t need to see the city to know what a cesspool it was, and the constant glow of those damn Up There engines had been annoying him for years.
He pushed all other thoughts away and let the darkness envelop him. For the first time that day, no one was asking him questions, boring him with protocol, or requesting additional resources. The Tribunal was stretched to the point of transparency, and with Krone establishing an outpost here, he didn’t like the way the wind was blowing.
The Tribunal ruled Down Here, and he ruled the Tribunal. On the ground, at least. He had a boss, of course – everyone had a boss – but to all intents and purposes the buck stopped with him. If Krone was going to station troops here, then that might all be about to change.
The worst of it was, the cretins living here would probably celebrate the Tribunal’s demise. They’d see Krone’s army as the cavalry swooping in to deliver them all from evil.
Fonk, were they in for a surprise.
“On,” Polani commanded, leaning closer to his desk.
Nothing happened. He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Lights on.”
The darkness remained. It felt different now. Less cocooning, more smothering.
It was then that he noticed the odor. Years of chain-smoking had dampened his sense of smell to the point of it being pretty much non-existent, but this stench had such a kick to it that it somehow found its way through.
Wrenching open his desk drawer, Polani grabbed for his gun. A boot was driven hard against the drawer’s front, and Polani cried out as it slammed on his hand, crushing his fingers.
“Ow! Kroysh! What the fonk?”
A rough hand clamped over his mouth from behind. A voice like crunching gravel spoke quietly in his ear.
“Shout like that again and this time it’ll be you going through the window, not me. Do you understand?”
Polani nodded. “Mm-hm.”
Dan withdrew his hand and stepped around to the other side of the desk. His night vision was significantly better than most people’s, and he could see Polani gawping blindly into the darkness.
“Ripley…” the commissioner began.
“Ripley’s dead. You killed him, remember?” Dan grunted. “Name’s Deadman now.”
“Deadman. Right. Right,” said Polani. Despite the fact his hand was now twice the size it should be and he couldn’t see a thing, he was doing his best to appear in control of the situation. Impressive, given how shizz-scared he must be.
“You hacked my lighting system,” he said. “Impressive. The whole system’s protected or encrypted or, or… firewalled, or whatever it is the nerds downstairs do. It’s supposed to be tamper-proof.”
“Nothing’s tamper proof,” Dan said. He deposited something on the desk with a soft clunk. It took Polani several seconds to make out the shape in the darkness. He flinched, mistaking it for a hand-grenade, then he realized what it really was.
It was a light bulb.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Polani said. “All that tech and you can just pull the bulb? Oh, man, we need you back working with us!”
“Stop talking,” Dan warned. His tone made it clear that this wasn’t a request, and while the commissioner wasn’t accustomed to taking orders, he took this one. “That thing that came out of the water yesterday. What are you doing about it?”
Polani looked blankly in the direction of Dan’s voice. “What thing?”
“Big, black and pointy,” Dan said. “Killed some people at a dock in one of the eastern sectors. Smashed up some property.”
The commissioner shrugged. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Dan’s one remaining fist clenched. “Then maybe I can jog your memory.”
“Cut the shizz, Ripley,” Polani said. “You know what it’s like out there. You know what we have to deal with every fonking day.”
“What about the mall massacre? Any more on that yet? Or haven’t you heard about that one, either?” Dan asked. “I mean, all that oppression and subjugation must keep you busy.”
“Oh, fonk you, you self-righteous shizznod!” Polani spat. “You might not remember, but we keep this city safe! Is it necessary to sometimes cross lines to do so? Yes. Yes, it fonking is. But if we don’t, then the job doesn’t get done.”
“The job isn’t getting done,” Dan pointed out. “A monster came out of the ocean, slaughtered a whole bunch of people, and you know nothing about it.”
“Someone will! It’s not my job to know every last little detail about what’s going on in the city, it’s my job to make sure it all keeps running, whatever that takes,” Polani argued. “But will there be a report somewhere about it? Sure. Filed alongside the reports on the hundred thousand other things that happened in the past twenty-six hours.”
His eyes were growing more accustomed to the lack of light now, and he leaned in Deadman’s direction. “We broke up a people trafficking ring bringing sex workers in from the void systems. Eighty kids went missing city-wide. We found forty-three of them, thirty-two of them still alive. We caught an arsonist trying to burn down a hospital, executed sixteen suspected rapists, and got an old lady’s pet coosk down from a tree. So, don’t you sneak in here and try to tell me the job isn’t getting done!”
For a moment, everything was silent but the rasping of Polani’s breathing.
“I thought coosks were illegal within the city limits?” Dan muttered.
“They are,” Polani said. “We shot it.”
“Right. Of course you did. And the old lady?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of specific individual cases,” the commissioner replied, stiffening slightly. “But she was a criminal. She had it coming.”
“You know who didn’t have it coming? Those people by the docks,” Dan said. “And that thing that killed them? It could come back and kill a whole lot more.”
“We don’t operate on ‘could.’ We haven’t got the manpower to worry about ‘might do’ or ‘maybe’ or even ‘there’s a very good fonking chance.’” Polani explained. “We are stretched, Ripley. We are paper thin out there. I’ve got enough to worry about without adding sea-monsters to the mix.”
“It’s not a sea-monster. It’s something else. Some off-world entity. A hunter, maybe. Whatever it is, it’s built for killing. And I think it might be testing itself. Finding out what it can do.”
“Well, since you seem to know so much about it, why don’t you deal with it?” the commissioner retorted. “I mean, that’s what you do now, right? Help freaks. Fight monsters or demons or whatever the fonk we’re calling them this week. That’s what you’ve been doing with yourself since…”
He made an up-and-down gesture in Dan’s direction. “Whatever this is. You’re so concerned about the son-of-a-bedge, you deal with it.”
Lunging, Dan caught Polani by the back of his fleshy neck. His grip tightened as he prepared to smash the commissioner’s face against the desktop, but he wrestled with his rage and managed to bring it under control.
“OK,” he said, his hand still clutching Polani’s neck, the pressure making it clear he could cause him tremendous discomfort at any moment.
“OK what?” Polani whispered.
“I’ll deal with it. I’ll stop it before it can kill anyone else.”
Dan leaned in a little closer, his smell making the commissioner flinch visibly. “But I’m going to need some resources.”
“What? What are you talking about? I can’t give you—”
His head met the desk. Once. Twice. Dan pinned it there, his fingers splayed against
the side of the commissioner’s face like the legs of some giant spider.
“An office. Not here, one of the old safehouses will do. Doesn’t have to be fancy.”
“But—”
Dan leaned his weight on Polani’s head until either the desk or the commissioner’s skull gave out a worrying creak. “I’ll need some kind of boat. Preferably armored. And guns. I want guns.”
“F-fine. OK, fine. I’ll authorize it. I’ll authorize it.”
“Good,” said Dan, releasing his grip. “Also…” He held up the blackened stump of his wrist. “I’m going to need you to let me into the morgue.”
FOURTEEN
“FINALLY!” cried Artur as Dan slumped into the driver’s seat of the Exodus. “I thought ye were never coming back out.”
“Took a little longer than I expected,” Dan said, firing up the car’s engine.
“A little longer? Sure, me fecking beard has a beard, I’ve been waiting here so long. Still, at least ye came out the front door this time and didn’t just plunge from the top floor window. That’s an improvement.” Artur peered at Dan’s hip. “By the way, is that a severed hand in yer pocket?”
“Yeah.”
“Or are ye just pleased to see me?”
“I already said yes, so that joke doesn’t work.”
“I’ll be the fecking judge o’ that, thanks very much,” said Artur.
“I got us an office. We can go there now, and Ollie can stitch on the…”
His voice trailed off as he noticed for the first time the empty chair beside him. Behind him, too.
“Where’s Ollie? Where did they go?”
“I wondered how long it’d take yer keen detective instincts to kick in there,” Artur said. “It’s fine. They’ve just gone for a walk, that’s all.”
“A walk? What do you mean ‘a walk’?”
Artur mimed with his fingers. “I mean a walk. Ye know. Like that.” He brought up the other hand and copied the finger-movements of the first. “Only there’s two of them, so like that. And then I suppose they’ll be all…”
He smooshed his fingers together in various positions and began a series of increasingly high-pitched moans. “Oh baby! Oh yes, just like that! Just like that! Now faster! Don’t—”
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