Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  They piled into their vehicles and took off. Nail waited a moment, waved one time at Anna, and rolled out after them. Two sets of taillights disappeared around the corner, then a third.

  “You ready?” Anna asked. She didn’t know that she was ready herself, but as the ostensible leader of this mess, she had to either pretend to be or straight-up call the whole thing off.

  “Let’s get this shit over with,” Genevieve said.

  They stepped out of the alley. Contrary to ten years’ habit from breaking into homes and other buildings, Anna cast a nervous look up the street. Still nobody.

  “Come on,” she said. With Genevieve close behind, she headed across the street. The floodlights around the old meat-processing plant had long since gone dark, and the streetlights out front had been destroyed. Approaching the building was like descending into a black cave with light and life receding at every step. Anna imagined she could smell the ancient stink of blood and offal, and never mind that the plant must have been closed for nearly a decade. That shit would never go away, not completely. She had a grim suspicion that that was part of why Van Horn and company had chosen this spot to settle in.

  They reached the big double doors without incident. The nearest streetlight might as well have been some outer planet for all the light it cast here. Everything was reduced to simple shapes in grayscale, clearest at the edges of vision or where occluding the distant yellow spots along the sidewalk.

  Genevieve walked in front of the door, the black of her clothing barely distinct against the lighter gray of the doors. She moved to one side, mumbling under her breath and making passes in the air with her hands. She paused, fiddled with something Anna couldn’t see, and then tossed a burning scrap of paper into the air. Anna flinched and glanced down the street, but nothing moved. When she turned back, Gen was studying patterns in the smoke as the paper fluttered to the ground. After it burned up, she moved to the other door and repeated the whole process. Then she looked up and shrugged. “Clean,” she whispered. “I think.”

  Anna waited, listening intently. This street was eerily quiet, the only sound a distant roar of traffic that reminded her of a radio tuned to static. She couldn’t see the highway from here, though. Just had to assume it still existed out there, and she wasn’t trapped in a quiet bubble in a world that had turned to raw noise.

  She shook her head. Thinking all kinds of weird things tonight. She turned her attention back to the plant. A light tug on the door got her nowhere. Either it was locked, or somebody had barred it from the inside. She got out her lock picks and prayed for the former.

  A moment later, she pulled the door open.

  Nobody sent up the alarm. Anna and Genevieve went in, pulling the door shut behind them. Anna got out a pair of the night-vision goggles they’d used on the last gig and held them to her face. Everything here was a roughly uniform temperature, and nothing human-sized showed up in the goggles. She put them away and got out a flashlight.

  Most of the building’s interior was an open space, a vast floor under high ceilings like some kind of gruesome meat-processing cathedral. Small holes dotted the floor where equipment had once been secured, but most of it was gone now. A few bulky conglomerations of angle iron and metal piping still loomed here and there, apparently too big to move and too inconvenient to disassemble and sell for scrap. Along the outer edges of the floor were several walled-off areas that had presumably once held offices, meeting rooms, and bathrooms.

  “Room to room?” Genevieve asked.

  “Yeah.” It didn’t look as though the entourage was sleeping on the open floor, which was a good thing. That meant Van Horn might have a room, which in turn meant they might be able to get to him without eleven of his closest friends getting involved.

  She opened the nearest door. The smell boiling out of it made her eyes water, and Genevieve gagged and covered her mouth and nose with her hand. “Aw, Jesus.”

  Anna shone the flashlight into the room, got a quick look, and shut the door. “That would be the latrine,” she whispered.

  “My God.”

  They kept moving. The next room was entirely empty except for a bedroll stuffed into a corner. Anna moved the beam of the flashlight over the floor. Spotless. Nothing in here, except—

  “Whoa.”

  She shone the light on the far wall and walked closer. The entire wall had been covered in arcane-looking glyphs and symbols, written in red ballpoint pen, with letters about as tall as those you’d see on notebook paper.

  “What the hell is this?” Anna asked.

  Genevieve came close, inspecting the writing. “Gibberish. I mean, it looks like some kind of heavy-duty crazy-ass sorcery, but I don’t recognize any of this. It’s meaningless, I think.”

  That sounded good, but as Anna backed up, from certain angles it looked as though the words crowded together or spread out in the beam of her flashlight, making dark and light spots, and Anna could swear the patterns were depicting a face in there, screaming.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  The next few rooms weren’t much better. One had a pile of blankets, like a nest, with thousands of toothpick-sized splinters of wood scattered everywhere around it. Part of a wooden chair lay on the floor, and it was obvious that it was the source of at least some of the splinters, as if somebody with a mean nervous habit had spent hours picking the chair apart. Judging by the amount, they’d gone through the whole dining set before getting to that last chair. Anna pretended not to see the dry dots of spattered blood on the floor, or the rust-dark ends of many of the toothpicks, though she thought she’d be seeing them in her dreams later. They found another room they couldn’t even walk in—the floor was covered inches deep with the morbid latticework of tiny animal skeletons, thousands of them. A fourth room contained two bedrolls, a pair of beat-up tennis shoes, and two sets of clothing, a man’s suit and a woman’s summer dress, laid out flat against the wall and pinned there like dead butterflies.

  “This place is like a museum for the creepy,” Genevieve said.

  Anna didn’t say anything.

  The next room was near the middle of the row, and relief washed over Anna as she opened the door. “Van Horn’s,” she said. “Got to be.”

  “If only because it looks like an actual human being might sleep here, yeah.”

  It was more than that, though. There was a rust-stained mattress on the floor, a couple of candles and a dog-eared copy of a coverless paperback sitting on a small crate, and a hook on the wall from which a ratty pin-striped suit hung. “Must be his spare,” Anna said, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “He’s warded this room,” Genevieve said, pointing at the glyphs on the lintel and the walls. “To keep people from finding him.”

  “Apparently, it ain’t working.”

  They didn’t bother with the rest of the rooms, just took a quick look around to fix the layout in Anna’s mind and make sure there was nothing they’d overlooked. The search turned up a side door that was much closer to Van Horn’s room than the front door. On the way out, Anna blocked the latch and put a rock in front of the door on the outside to keep it from swinging open. Easy, quiet way back in.

  Anna checked her watch. Eleven o’clock. Time to settle in and wait for Nail.

  * * *

  Headlights lit the street, jolting Anna from half sleep into wakefulness. She’d been dreaming, she thought. Dreaming of the screaming face in the room they’d found in the processing plant. In her dream, it had been as though the face were trapped behind the words rather than made of them, pleading with her to let it out, and she’d found herself wishing she’d done something. Punched a hole in the plasterboard. Scratched some words out. Something. She sat up and peered out of the alley.

  Van Horn and his entourage parked and got out. There was considerably less revelry this time than on previous nights. Anna checked her watch. Twelve thirty. They were early, too. They didn’t make much fuss as they disappeared back into the building, and they
didn’t dawdle, either.

  Wonder what happened.

  Nail rolled up a few minutes later, and Anna and Genevieve got up to meet him.

  “What’s going on?” Anna asked.

  “Van Horn is spooked. Jumping at shadows since last night. I swear, a car door slams and he jumps about four feet. Can’t say I blame him—I swear, somebody besides me was following him at some point. I think some of his creeps are spoiling for a fight, but Van Horn won’t have it. They stopped at a couple places—nobody I know—and didn’t stay long before he just called it a night.”

  “Anybody follow him here?”

  “Besides me? I don’t think so. Won’t be too many more outings like this, though, and you bet your ass somebody will.”

  “So we take him tonight, then,” Anna said.

  “Guess so.”

  She gave him a quick rundown on their trip inside, and then an argument broke out about who would go in. They went back and forth for the better part of an hour about this before Anna finally offered a grudging agreement. Nail was clearly the best equipped for this kind of bullshit, and he would need Genevieve to scope out the area in case Van Horn had laid any traps of a magical nature. Anna couldn’t replace either of them. She tried to convince them that they should all go together, but that didn’t fly, either. If Van Horn slipped out the front, or worse, Van Horn’s new enemies showed up, they needed somebody on lookout. Nail also insisted that if things went bad, it would be helpful to have somebody who wasn’t pinned down with everyone else. Or somebody who could get help.

  “This sucks,” Anna said, but in the end she agreed.

  They waited until well after the time of Van Horn’s usual return, hoping things would settle down by then. Anna shredded half a pack of cigarettes into a pile of brown and white curls by the curb and dozed intermittently.

  Around four in the morning, Nail pulled three headsets out of his satchel and passed them out, keeping one for himself. Anna clipped the radio to her belt and made sure the earpiece was secure. “Check.”

  “Read you,” Nail said, his voice doubling up in the earpiece and from in front of her.

  Genevieve nodded. “Me, too.”

  “All right,” Anna said. “Be careful.”

  “No sweat. We’ll be out in five.” They crossed the street and approached the front of the building. Anna stopped at the front. Nail took his gun from his waistband and, without further ceremony, crept around the side. Genevieve cast a quick grin Anna’s way and followed.

  I fucking hate this, Anna thought.

  She waited. A stray dog sniffed the alley across the way, but nobody else was out. The tenements were locked down, blinds drawn, only a couple with light leaking through. The neighborhood had a quiet, grim feel to it, and Anna wondered if the presence of Van Horn and company had cast a pall over the street, or if it had always been like this. It took a certain level of poverty and desperation to live in the constant stink of a meat-processing plant. She imagined a lot of old people here. Sixty-year-old men in long coats the color of mud puddles, sour-faced and carrying groceries in sagging plastic bags. Apartments rancid with the smell of cat piss. Busybodies watching windows but never exchanging words with one another.

  The dog, a mangy thing from what looked like the bloodline of a really ugly strain of German shepherd, lay down next to a bulging black trash bag and curled up to sleep. Nothing else moved. Anna watched the dog, then turned her attention back to the meat-processing plant’s door behind her, then glanced back down the street. She fought the urge to tap her foot. How long had it been? Nail and Genevieve had to be close by now, right? They knew the room. There was nothing complicated about it. Why was this taking so long?

  No sound from the radio. No sound from anywhere, save the distant river of traffic. Anna leaned against the building’s front door, pressing her ear to the steel. She imagined Nail edging past the gantrylike structures of metal, Genevieve close behind, each step an agonizing exercise in patience and dread as they crept toward Van Horn’s room. Faint light coming from the small, smashed-out windows high in the walls would throw distorted yellow-orange rectangles on the ceiling above, providing only the weakest illumination.

  Surely the entourage didn’t keep a watch of any kind, or there would have been a shout before now. And it was unthinkable that they could have taken Nail by surprise, taken him down fast enough to keep him from getting off a few shots. Silence was good, Anna thought. Silence meant no trouble.

  Wishful thinking, she chided herself. If only Karyn were here. Karyn would know. She probably would have known from the second that Genevieve and Nail entered the building whether or not this was a good idea, whether it would work out, or whether they were in serious danger. She’d know when to rush in, too. She’d know that before it happened. Give them a head start, a vital edge.

  Well, she’s not here. All we’ve got is me, a radio, and a stolen handgun. The thought was indescribably depressing.

  “Shit!” Nail’s voice through the radio was a rough whisper, and Anna jumped, startled. “Need help in here, A. Van Horn’s room. Fast but quiet.”

  The words were almost a relief. She could do something now, anyway, rather than just sit here and worry. Even worry about what she might find was pushed aside by the need to act. If there had been something she needed to know, Nail would have told her. “Roger.”

  She turned the rusted door handle. It made the faintest of squeaks, a slight click, and then she pulled the door open and slipped inside.

  It was darker in here, but not much. The windows let in some light that the building had blocked from Anna’s view, and flickering orange light spilled out from under one of the doors a ways down. Van Horn’s room. Anna pulled out her gun, trying to ignore the cold sweat that beaded up on her forehead and between her shoulder blades. The last time she’d used a pistol—no, that didn’t bear thinking about. Not right now. Her dreams would remind her later anyway, and she’d probably wake Genevieve up screaming again.

  In the low light, Anna saw nobody. There was just the distant flickering, and a dozen or so closed doors. She prayed they stayed closed. The nine held only fifteen rounds, and, she realized, she hadn’t even thought to chamber one before coming in. Fifteen bullets seemed like a lot, but she knew better. Even if every shot hit, it could take four or five shots to stop somebody, if they were angry or psycho enough, and she thought Van Horn’s entourage might top out the scales in both categories. What happens to the missing ones? The others eat them, of course. Of course.

  She moved forward, feet stepping lightly on the concrete floor. Grit crunched softly at each step. Still, nobody heard, or at least nobody came out to have a look.

  Anna wrinkled her nose as she passed the closed door to the latrine. A few steps more, and she was out of the front hallway area into the cavern of the building proper. Crosshatched shadows suggested the metal grid twenty or so feet ahead of her, and she thought briefly about going the long way around it, using it as a form of half-assed cover while she circled around to Van Horn’s room. It was too sparse, though, and there were doors over on the other side, anyway.

  She kept moving. Passed one door to her right. Rhythmic grunting and moaning noises issued from behind it—at least three different voices, maybe four. That was good. If only everyone were in there. She passed another door. Now that her eyes had adjusted, she saw that a faint light seeped out from under that one, too. A woman’s voice droned beyond, nonsense syllables repeated at short intervals.

  Two more doors, neither with any sound or light emerging from behind them, and Anna reached Van Horn’s room. The door was closed, but not quite all the way. She pushed it open.

  Van Horn stood in the corner of the room. He wasn’t whistling now, and his smirk was gone. Anna had mistaken him for a hale fiftysomething, but up close the lines on his face and the stark shadows cast by the candles made him look more like seventy. His scraggly white goatee jumped out against the red blotches on his face, and sweat poured down th
e sides of his face. Probably that had something to do with the pistol Nail was pointing at his head.

  Genevieve lay on the floor, unmoving.

  Anna ducked into the room, shut the door behind her, and rushed to Genevieve.

  “She’s breathing,” Nail said. He kept his voice low, but it was impossible to miss the rage in it. If Anna had been Van Horn, she’d be sweating, too. “Don’t know much more than that.”

  Breathing, yeah. Anna checked her pulse, too, and that seemed okay. Maybe a little fast, Anna thought, but what did she know about this paramedic shit?

  “Come on, babe, get up,” Anna said. She shook Genevieve’s shoulder to no effect. “We gotta go.”

  “That’s, ah, not going to work,” Van Horn put in.

  “What did you do?” Nail asked.

  “I didn’t do anything. She entered my sanctum sanctorum without an invitation.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not going to work? She’s going to wake up, right?” Anna was surprised at how easy it was to keep the panic out of her voice. Mostly because anger was rapidly overtaking it. “Because if not, this kidnapping is going to turn into a murder, I swear, and—” And Sobell can go fuck himself, she nearly added, before good sense returned. Jesus, where is my head today?

  “No murder!” Van Horn said.

  “Keep your voice down,” Nail said.

  Van Horn’s mouth twisted into a rictus, a parody of an attempt at a reassuring grin. “You’re not here to kill me?” Nobody answered, but he continued, his voice just above a whisper. “In that case, let’s just put murder aside, huh? Just, heh, put it over there in the cabinet, so to speak, and close the door. Let’s, uh, let’s keep that door shut, all right?”

  Genevieve’s breathing was even. Eyes open a slit with the whites visible, in the same mildly eerie way they were most of the time when she slept. No blood. No sign of injury. Anna looked back to Van Horn. “Talk.”