Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2)

by Chad Huskins

  All at once, that viscous, sentient liquid rush out from his throat like a vomit and knocked the shotgun away, just as its barrel exploded. The black liquid whipped all around him then, flopping across the ground like some amorphous fish, twisting and writhing and constantly changing shape as it groped at anything it found. A child trying to figure out its new environment.

  A voice. Inside his head and echoing inside his body between the walls of flesh and bone. “It’s him! Let us have him! This laughing man! We want to hear him laugh now! Yes, yes, yesssssssss!”

  Panting, gagging, he rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself up. He heard cracking all around. The wall to his right was caving in towards him. Then, he was lifted off his feet as that other world’s physics took him on a rollercoaster ride. His stomach rose in his throat, and he vomited while spinning through the air. Time slowed, then sped up, then slowed. The two realities were in a tug-of-war, and the breaker switches on this side were flipping back and forth, trying to deal with the overload.

  Still vomiting, still spinning in air, Spencer saw the Benelli coming towards him. It was spinning as slowly as he was. He reached out and snatched it, so slowly he might’ve been under water. Terror never rose in him. Only outrage existed, and a need to make it clear that he was no interdimensional fucknut’s bitch.

  Then, this world’s physics won out. Spencer, along with everything else inside the warehouse, suddenly fell to the floor again. He smashed his head against a plastic tote, rolled over, and fired reflexively at the salivating limb coming to taste him. The shot blew the thing in half, but it only quivered this time. There was an exultant sigh, like sexual satisfaction from the thing as it spilled and sputtered the black, viscous substance all around. White sludge still poured through the holes in the air it was coming through. The quantum foam, he thought, half delirious and staggering to his feet. Space-time foam, the foam at the foundation of the universe. Carl Sagan had talked about quantum foam; some shit suggested by John Wheeler, conceptualized as the foundation of the fabric of the universe. He cackled. Bet he didn’t mean it this literally!

  A rain of splinters from overhead. Spencer looked up. The ceiling was collapsing, but instead of falling, most of the splinters were going up, up, up into some kind of vortex, while a few fell like daggers all around him. Foam spilled out around the edges of this vortex. The universe is hemorrhaging, bleeding. That…didn’t entirely make sense to him, but then little around him did.

  “Spencer!”

  Now the voice was behind him. Blinking, feeling close to passing out, like when one hasn’t had enough oxygen, he turned and saw Kaley Dupré. She was near the door. The five kids were with her, including the one Spencer had clipped. But…but…something was wrong. His mind reeling, he couldn’t make out what. Then, he realized what it was. Something had hold of the little girl. One of the impossible limbs had her by the leg; it was another limb which had no logic, with jutting bits and dangling portions, even one piece that looked like a lower jaw. But, just as its bits and pieces were feeling out this world and testing its consistency, so too was that limb uncertain as to how to handle her.

  It would only occur to Spencer later how strange it was that the limb was able to hold her at all, since she was an apparition at this point.

  Grinning ear to ear, he darted over to her. Halfway there, he vomited again—bits of McDonald’s fries mixed with Zakhar’s tea. A lurching in reality’s fabric, perhaps, or maybe just the increasingly rancid odor. Who knows?

  It didn’t matter, because once he made it over to the impossible limb with the jaw-like structure dangling from its belly, he put a boot up to it, pinning the wretched mandible to the wall. “I told you,” he squealed with matchless delight, “nobody kills Kaley Dupré but me!” He fired, and this time he anticipated the living blood, and leapt back just as the limb angrily whipped Kaley from she stood at the door, through which the boy was carrying the wounded girl. Two of the other girls were pushing each other aside for the exit, as well, while the last girl, the one with the One Direction shirt, lay on the floor, limp and lifeless. Her head had been twisted off by the tentacle still slithering around and around her corpse, emitting a lustful noise.

  Spencer reached for Kaley’s arm, to pull her towards the door, but his hand passed right through her. “Best run, little girl!” He made for the door, hearing hyena-like laughter following him.

  “Spencer! Wait! He’s out there!”

  Under any normal circumstances, he would have asked her what she meant, but, operating off instinct, and knowing that the girl’s hunches were usually correct, Spencer dove for cover as soon as he exited the warehouse. He hit the ice and slid behind a parked forklift.

  The shot was silent, hissing through the air and ricocheting off the forklift and into the frozen planks. He cocked the Benelli and fired over the top. Click! Empty. He reached into his pockets and grabbed a handful of shells, started reloading just as another shot rang out. Then, to his left about ten yards, one of the impossible limbs came flopping out of a shattered window like a limp dick. It defied all earthly geometry, and split in half, then folded back in on itself, eating itself, then vomited itself back out before it became a many-pronged whip, like a cat o’ nine tails, slapping at the planks and sticking to them. They yanked once, twice, and then tore the planks from the dock, sending shards of ice and splinters at Spencer.

  “This night has been brought to you by the letter F, for fucked up!” He barely got the words out before he vomited again. He laughed with bits of Big Mac and beans spewing out of his mouth and nose. Beans? he thought insanely. When the fuck did I eat beans?

  Another shot hissed and panged off the forklift. Silencer. Pro. Spencer loaded the final shell, cocked it, and fired over the forklift’s driver’s seat without looking. He cocked again, and fired once more without looking. Then, he bolted for a stack of wooden pallets. Another bullet tore through the wood, ripped through the side of his jacket, but never touched him.

  More of the cackling hyena-like laughter behind him. He didn’t even have to look to know the lecherous things were right at his heels.

  Shcherbakov had missed three times, and each time his anger ratcheted up twofold. He’d chosen suitable cover, knowing the shotgun’s power. But he believed his quarry was on the run, so now he moved out from behind the large metal shipping container along a row of stacked plastic totes, all tied down and bundled together to protect against tipping from the wind.

  The wind—the real wind, not just the gale coming out of the building—had returned. It came back with sudden force, like it was offended at being delayed, and nearly took him off his feet. The snowfall became heavier, then lightened up, then became heavier and with blades of ice smacking against him like hailstones. These rapid changes of weather happened in about the span of ten seconds.

  “Ruuuuuuuun!” someone screamed. It sounded like a child. A girl. “Run! Don’t stop! Don’t look back, just run!”

  Shcherbakov knelt in the lee of the crates, and was worried about the unknown whereabouts of the man he’d seen running from behind the forklift. He heard footsteps, many tiny feet moving rapidly behind another row of crates nearby. Someone was still screaming for them to run. And…there was laughter. Or some kind of hee-hawing, like from a donkey, or a hyena, even, or a mix between the two.

  Then, all at once, he saw movement in the snowfall. Not twenty feet from him, a man darted out from behind a stack of crates and around a series of steel barrels. Shcherbakov rose a foot, took quick aim, and fired three shots in a row. The running man fired a wild shot in his direction. A crate exploded next to Shcherbakov, spilling out coffee beans—the beans, doubtless, meant to throw search dogs off the scent of heroin or cocaine or whatever was being smuggled inside.

  Shcherbakov moved to another row of crates for cover. Just behind him, though, something tittered. He turned just in time to see something slap up against the crates where he’d been standing a moment earlier. In the blizzard, it looked kind o
f like an inky-black octopus tentacle, but was probably only some kind of power line or cable or spare rope blown around by the wind. He turned from it and tried to find his target. The snowfall became only more powerful, the wind more intense. Very soon, he became disoriented, and didn’t know which way was—

  Boom!

  The shotgun couldn’t have been fired from more than ten feet away. The wooden crates a foot in front of him exploded. A long splinter stabbed into the right side of his face, and Shcherbakov yelped and dropped to his belly for cover.

  “Comrade!” came the call on the wind. “Whoever ya are, if you’re smart, you’ll get the fuck outta here an’ let bygones be fuckin’ bygones!”

  The Grey Wolf stood and fired twice in the direction of the voice, then ducked again for cover.

  “Ha-ha! So fuckin’ be it! It’s yer funeral!” Another blast. “I leave you in the prurient presence of Russia’s latest immigrants!” Another loud belch from the shotgun. Then, on the wind, “Prurient! That means to be lustful, dickwipe!”

  Shcherbakov rose, fired off five more shots, then he was empty. Without thinking, he dropped a clip, reached to his gunbelt, retrieved another one, tapped it into place and racked it. He proceeded forward through the blizzard, spinning once to look behind him when he heard more laughter and a pallet being knocked over.

  Laughter. Laughter all around him. Somewhere in all the white, he could hear metal banging against metal, and the groans and screeches of heavy metal crates being dragged across wood and steel. What lamps were on around the dock now went out. Darkness and churning white snow. It piled around his feet, felt like it was crawling up him, even up around his knees, groping at him…

  There came a loud howling noise now. Not hyena laughter, but clearly howling. He thought he heard heavy panting, like from a dog running quickly. He heard snarling, and barking, a pack of animals in a terrible fight.

  The night had become sheer madness, and he couldn’t be certain he wasn’t imagining some of this.

  The right side of Shcherbakov’s face was bleeding. He reached up to touch where the splinter had sliced him, and ran in the direction he’d last heard the man shouting from. He was aware of his cell phone buzzing in his pocket, but he would not answer it. Something was chasing him. On some animalistic level, he understood that.

  “Kaley!” shouted Ms. Hurgess. “Kaley, honey, what’s the matter?” The poor woman was frightened out of her mind. She’d doubtless dealt with a good many troubled students before—Kaley could sense it in her, that sympathy ready to kick in, that kind heart ready to reach out to her—but the woman had never seen a girl behaving like Kaley was now, of that she was certain.

  Kaley had repeatedly screamed Spencer’s name, had told him to stop shooting, and had cried out to the children to run. Inside Ms. Hurgess’s classroom, everyone had stopped what they were doing and turned to look at her. Most of them knew what Kaley had been through—well, they knew the official story, anyway—and over the last couple months she had caught snippets of conversations between them, whispers of her decaying grip on reality. She was the quiet weirdo, who occasionally broke out into tears for no reason. They knew. They all knew. They just didn’t know the whole story. They didn’t know, for instance, that while the world was ending on the docks at a port in Chelyabinsk, right here in this room the waters were churning faster and faster, that there were Others here too, searching for a gate like the one they found on those distant docks.

  Some of the students barely held back laughter. All they knew was that Kaley was the creepy little freak who sometimes wore clothes so out-of-date they could have been used on That 70’s Show, and that she had a younger sister that had been raped and that for some reason her vaginal infection could be occasionally funny.

  “Kaley?” said Ms. Burgess. “What’s happening, sweetie? Do you need…are you on any medication? Do you need me to go and fetch it from the nurse?”

  Just then, there was a loud, irritating noise that made Kaley jump. It was a moment before she realized it was the bell. Thirty minutes had already passed. It was time to break for lunch.

  Laquanda was smiling. She could hardly wait to inform Nancy of this latest development in the great Kaley Dupré Soap Opera. It would add so much ammunition to their daily game, especially at lunchtime, when they were reunited and their powers combined once more to annoy not only Kaley, but dozens of other overweight, pimple-faced, poor, and otherwise misfortunate students.

  The kids were all moving slowly, a couple of them just heading out the door to lunch, most of them not taking their eyes off of Kaley and Ms. Hurgess, the latter of which was extending an arm. The art teacher touched her shoulder, and said, “Kaley, sweetheart, I can take you up to the—”

  “I’m not crazy,” she said, turning to face Ms. Hurgess. Meanwhile, in that other world, she was racing beside the three surviving girls and the boy, racing up a hill in a freezing, angry blizzard. The boy was crying, but carrying the bleeding girl in his hand like a champion. He wouldn’t relent, wouldn’t be turned back by wind or the steepness of the hill. Like Sam carrying Frodo up Mount Doom, she thought absently. So brave. So brave.

  She addressed Ms. Hurgess even as she wondered what they were going to do once at the top of the hill. They still have to get through a razor-wire fence. “I’m not crazy, I just…I sometimes doze off, that’s all. I just kind of…I dunno. I think I need something to eat. I’m…it’s lunchtime, right?”

  Ms. Hurgess rubbed her back. “Yes, sweetheart. Yeah, you go and get something to eat. But…are you sure you don’t need anything? Everything’s all right?”

  “I’m fine, Ms. Burgess, thank you for asking.” Kaley was the last one out the door.

  Four steps down the hall, she heard someone call her name. “Kaley Dupré!” She knew that voice. She would know it anywhere. Kaley stopped in her tracks, slowly turned to face Principal Manning, who was coming up to her and looking more concerned than angry. “Kaley, got a question for you. Have you seen Mrs. Cartwright?” Images of her being twisted into pieces, of her body splitting and being pulled down into the Deep. “I spoke with some of the students of your first-period class, they said you left class for a bit and never returned, and that Mrs. Cartwright went to check on you but never returned.”

  “I, uh…” Kaley looked at Mr. Manning, and simultaneously watched the boy lugging the bleeding, weeping girl up the frigid slope. The other two girls were running ahead, becoming lost in the whipping white eddies. “I had…woman issues. Forgot my tampons at home, and the girls bathroom was out of them, so—”

  The principal put his hands in a slow-your-roll gesture. “That’s fine, that’s fine, I’m not mad or judging, I just need to know if you’ve seen her. She didn’t turn up for her second- or third-period classes at all. Nobody’s seen her. You didn’t see her when she came looking for you?”

  “No, sir.”

  Manning nodded, and sighed. “All right, well, thank you. And Kaley?” he said, as she started away. “You hang in there.” He gave her what he probably believed was a reassuring smile. “You hear me? You hang in there.”

  Beside Kaley, the wounded girl was screaming something in Russian. It sounded like she was dying.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  Something shot past Spencer’s feet, burrowing under the snow like a groundhog on speed. He aimed the Benelli at the ground and fired. A geyser of black blood shot into the air and danced and played with its new surroundings, then immediately started groping around on the snow. He was starting to think of the impossible limbs as vessels, advanced scouts, or like a kind of vehicle sent out on reconnaissance missions. Whenever he blasted one of the limbs open, the “drivers” inside came spewing out.

  Hyenas laughed just a few feet behind him. Black tendrils moved everywhere in the storm, some of them lancing out and stabbing into the ground all around him before tearing free and pulling up chunks of earth and ice and snow.

  There were other sound
s, too. Sounds that were more familiar to him. Dogs howling, a few of them snarling somewhere in that blizzard, just out of sight, like they were fighting one another. Spencer had once spent a summer living with a man named Tyrone Davis who trained search dogs for police, as well as for search and rescue units. Spencer had sometimes helped him for extra cash. There had been one alpha male, a monster German Shepherd named Toby, that had been a problem from day one. One night, Tyrone had accidentally left Toby’s cage unlocked, and Spencer would never forget the sounds that monster had made while tearing through the beta males. It was the same sound he heard all around him.

  Here and there, Spencer thought he caught sight of reflective, pale-yellow eyes bouncing around in the snow, following him. He continued running, firing off two shots around him just for good measure. The world had become nearly incomprehensible, and when things became incromprehensible, Spencer shot at them.

  Lost and climbing, Spencer abruptly smacked his face into the fence before he realized how far he’d gone. Somewhere, he heard Kaley Dupré shouting. Others were screaming. He ran along the fence, looking down for the hole he’d crawled through…then something flapped at his face. He turned to fire at it, but it was only some kind of tarp, dangling from the top of the fence. Or, no, not a tarp, someone’s jacket. Not questioning it, he threw the Benelli over the fence and launched himself up and over the top. The jacket wasn’t a hundred percent effective—some of the razor wire snagged his left pant leg, tearing through it as he fell to the other side. His right palm also got sliced, but he wouldn’t notice either until he paused to get his bearings down the road.

  “Spencer!”

  He snatched up the shotgun and looked over his shoulder. He saw the little girl farther up the fence line. The other children had their fingers clutched around the chain-link wire, shaking it and looking for a way through even as Kaley passed right through it. “Bus is leavin’, kiddo!” he hollered, bolting for the Subaru. A little ways beyond, he saw a dark-green Lada Priora parked along the road. “This is the last helicopter outta Vietnam—”