Tesser: A Dragon Among Us (A Reemergence Novel)

by Philbrook, Chris

  "Shit," Abe said. "How do we get down there?" He asked, his pistol held up at the ready. His hand is shaking. Not much. He's trying to be brave, but he's scared. He's a good kid.

  "We find the stairs," Spoon said, stating the obvious. He too held his firearm up and at the ready. They hadn't seen a daemon in several minutes. The sudden safety was starting to wear on them. The adrenaline fades, leaving the fear and anxiety behind. I suppose that's an error in design on my part.

  Mr. Doyle spoke up, adjusting his goggles, "There are no stairs. My ocular apparatus would've detected a secondary route if there were one. Its enchantment is strong enough to source out alternate routes. If we wish to find Matilde, we must find a way to make this lift work."

  "I think making the elevator work is beyond us, Mr. Doyle. What I can do is make the elevator shaft work for us," Tesser said.

  "I don't think I follow," Mr. Doyle said, lifting his goggles in an attempt to make Tesser's statement make more sense.

  This should amuse them. Tesser turned and jammed his fingers into the tiny gap between the elevator doors. The metal gave way under his superhuman strength, and he worked his way into the gap between the two sheets of steel. It groaned loudly against the power in his hands, but it was a failing sound. Tesser had his hands wedged in between the doors in just moments. He gritted his teeth and pulled the elevator door apart easily if not painlessly. On the other side was an empty elevator.

  "That helped," Abe said out of the corner of his mouth at an elevator that wouldn't work.

  "Patience, Abe. Garamos didn't build the Alps in a day."

  "Garamos built the Alps?" Spoon asked, looking over his shoulder at Tesser as the dragon walked into the elevator.

  "Look around. He built pretty much everything you see when you step outside. That or put the events into motion so they would build themselves," Tesser said as he stomped a foot down into the carpeted floor of the lift. Something metal cracked below.

  "Are you for real?" Abe asked.

  Tesser stopped and looked up, his foot coming down again, breaking the floor like a jackhammer. "I am for real. Garamos built everything, and every ounce of life you see came in some fashion from my work."

  "You made the platypus? I would love to hear your reasoning behind that," Abe said. Spoon snickered and nodded in agreement.

  "Gentlemen, let's not provoke our dragon friend as we are about to descend into our enemy's lair," Mr. Doyle said.

  Tesser hammered his foot down again, this time punching it right through the floor. There we go. Tesser knelt and used his hands to rip the floor up like it was no more than cardboard. Strips of carpet were tossed aside with wood and metal. Before long, a hole big enough for two men to fit through was made. Tesser leaned down into it, searching for something below.

  "It's a very long way down. A hundred feet at least. More. It smells like daemon shit."

  "How do we get down there?" Abe asked. "And what does daemon shit smell like?"

  "It smells like evil. Corruption most thorough. And lies. And to get down there, I just need to get a little creative. Spoon, you first." Tesser waved Spoon over and the ex-cop came over immediately. "We'll fall fast, but don't worry. Are you okay with falling?"

  "I'm a Rakkasan, Tesser. Falling from the sky on my enemies is what I did for a living," Spoon said with a smile.

  Very good. "We have much in common, Spoon. Stand here," Tesser said, pointing to the floor near the hole. He put his arms around Spoon at the chest as the man pointed his weapon downward, and the two stepped sideways into the hole. They plummeted in the dark for several seconds at full speed, then there was a tearing sound and a whoosh of air, and they suddenly slowed as if a parachute had deployed. Spoon looked over his shoulder as they drifted downward. Tesser had sprouted smaller dragon wings off his human back. His shirt was torn.

  "You can just grow wings at will?" Spoon asked as they descended down the shaft. He returned his attention to where they were about to land in case a threat appeared.

  "It is tougher to create a hybrid body like this. Taking on the form of something that already exists is easier."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. I suppose rules are rules, Spoon; even us dragons have to abide by some." The man and dragon touched down at the bottom of the vertical tunnel. The closed doors of the shaft bottom greeted them at chest height, speaking of a threat too frightening to talk about on the other side. "I'll be right back." Tesser launched into the air, and with a few flaps of his wings, he reached the hole in the floor of the elevator above.

  It took less than five minutes to get the other two men down.

  Tesser's wings shrank and folded, eventually absorbing back into his flesh as if they had never existed. He tore free and dropped the shirt he'd been wearing. Abe and Mr. Doyle were in faint awe at the spectacle of transformative power. Tesser smiled. He addressed his allies.

  "I don't know what greets us on the other side of this door guys, but I do know Matty is down here, and I'm pretty sure Kaula is as well. Legion, the daemon who took Matty and my sister, he'll stop at nothing to prevent us from freeing them. His foothold on this plane depends on us failing. Dying."

  "Yes, yes, Tesser, on with it. There's no need to rally the insane to escape the asylum. We're already here and willing and I'm not getting any younger," Mr. Doyle said.

  Abe turned with a look on his face. "The fuck you say? You got ten years younger just this month using your damn magic wine glass."

  Mr. Doyle conceded the point with a guilty shrug and pulled his goggles back down.

  I love these people. "If anything happens, I want you all to know, I'll never forget you. I'll see to it you're remembered."

  "Said like a true immortal, Tesser. Skip the speech, rip this fucking door open, and let's kill these motherfuckers," Spoon said.

  "As you wish." Tesser skipped the subtlety of trying to wedge his fingers into the space and instead just punched the gap where the doors met. The metal folded warped out with a screech. He inserted his hands in the hole and ripped them apart, driving them into their recess and revealing a stark white hermetically sealed passage. At the end of the hall was a thick industrial door with no handle. A card reader was on the wall. To each side were glass walls behind which multiple heavily armed security personnel stood. They were daemons, the same as all the others.

  They fired.

  Tesser shoved the men back as the glass walls shattered and a wall of lead came at them. There was almost no place to hide in the cramped area if they stood, but if they went prone, there was some space. Spoon hit the deck immediately at the recessed bottom of the elevator shaft, and right as the bullets came crashing through, the other two men dropped as well. As soon as they hit the ground two grenades rolled through the door opening and into the area they'd taken cover in.

  "Fire in the hole!" Spoon yelled. He reached out and grabbed one grenade and flicked it over the lip of the elevator. Tesser saw the small explosive weapon and dropped on top of it, smothering the blast with his body. It went off with a wet WHUMP, but his body absorbed it. His already ruined shirt was now long gone, but the men survived. It was the smallest of prices to pay. In the hall, the second grenade went off, and the men heard a near simultaneous series of muffled explosions as some of the daemons were destroyed by the shrapnel.

  Abe was to his feet first somehow. "Telum!" He barked, pointing a tiny shard of sharpened wood at a staggered daemon. It was no more than a pencil really. Abe channeled a tremendous amount of magical power into the simple spell, and the wooden dart rocketed out from his hand trailing visible waves of force, and hit one of the daemons in the face. It exploded. "Holy fuck, it worked!" Abe said to his friends, grinning ear to ear.

  Returning gunfire made him drop to the floor.

  Tesser stood and stepped up from the lowered shaft bottom. His skin puckered where dozens of bullets struck him. If it caused him pain, his friends couldn't tell. He strode into the hallway right over the broken glass in his bare f
eet, ignoring that as easily as he ignored being shot and launched over the short wall to the one side of the room that still had guards remaining. Two strikes later and they too were nothing but a cloudy stain on the wall and ceiling.

  I am angry now. Tesser hopped back into the hall from the security booth and started to punch the heavy sealed door. The steel dented, and then caved in as he punched it repeatedly. The walls and floor shook from his anger. Blow after blow smashed into the door, destroying it, and with a soul-wrenching scream he kicked the door, blasting it apart. It was a scene of supreme hurt and savagery. On the other side of the door was an airlock space with lockers for sealed environmental suits.

  "Shit, Tesser, what'd that door do to you?" Abe asked.

  Tesser turned and the men saw the rage on his face.

  "I think that door called your mom fat," Abe said, pointing at the second door beyond. Tesser made a grin that had a few too many sharp teeth in it, and he turned and went after the second door. That one didn't last half as long as the first. What greeted them on the other side stopped Tesser cold.

  The smashed open door revealed a vast chamber as large as a small supermarket, and twice as high. It stank of the smell of cleaning solutions, medicines that tasted badly, and something dark and indescribable, like the scent of a person you hate, or the color of a sound that makes your skin crawl. Surrounded by a hundred of the non-descript daemon guards and a wall of plastic sheeting was the body of a massive purple dragon. It lay on its stomach, pipes filled with wretched bile masquerading as medicine pumping into it at multiple locations, its wings restrained, and its beautiful face covered by a mask that surely wasn't giving it just oxygen. The creature was comatose and pathetic. No dragon should ever be pathetic.

  Kaula. "LEGION!" Tesser bellowed. His rage consumed him. Before their eyes, the man-dragon shifted forms to another hybrid body. His legs extended, as did his arms and torso. His skin shifted from soft mammalian flesh to the hard scales of his true dragon form. His neck lengthened and his face elongated into a half dragon-half human's. His wings, the same as the ones he'd used to drift down the elevator shaft, were back. He was nearly ten feet tall. He was barely restrained fury given form.

  In the middle of the pack, a single familiar face walked forward. He wore a suit and a face that should've been far more afraid. Mr. Doyle, Abe, and Spoon took cover in the airlock room and watched as the two primordial forces met again.

  "Tesser, oh, Tesser. Why do we do this dance over and over? Every time we meet it seems it always ends up the same. How many hundreds of thousands of years has this been going on for? Aren’t you bored? When will you learn to play for the right team? Sign a contract. Become one with my side of the Veil. Imagine what we could achieve! Legion bound to a dragon. Two of the most powerful creatures in all of existence allied together! This is such a rotten, fleshy world anyway. It needs purging and it's all your fault. Let us help. Have a clear conscience over all your mistakes made with this world. Sign a contract with me. Last chance…" Mr. Host teased. The thumping above had stopped. Garamos' digging had been interrupted.

  Through a half-dragon throat, Tesser wordlessly snarled.

  "No? Well, don't say I didn't offer it to you. You should know, I've got a new contract," Mr. Host continued. "I think you'll find the terms quite unsuitable for the long term survival of life here on Earth." Mr. Host ripped off his suit and shirt, revealing a pasty white chest underneath. He had no nipples, belly button, or body hair. He looked like a malformed plastic toy, absent of humanity, but made to fit in and deceive. Like a tidal wave spreading out from his body the guards dropped their weapons, and ripped off their body armor and clothing the same as he. They too were featureless, almost made of clay. Then, like Tesser had, Mr. Host changed.

  His body warped darkened and twisted on itself, losing all semblance of humanity, becoming an amorphous blob of raw, dark reality. Looking at it brought back memories of nightmares long forgotten, of shapes under the bed, and eyes in the closet. Its black presence was madness made real. The rest of the daemon forms shifted into the same ooze, and soon after, they began to coalesce into fewer, larger daemonic forms. Each form was different, and they all matched Tesser's new body in size.

  One took the shape of a massive white spider, as large as a car. It bristled with twitching hairs that looked more like spikes and had fangs that glistened with acidic venom. All eight of its otherworldly eyes fixed on Tesser as the fangs rubbed together, emitting a strange vibration that made stomachs churn.

  Another molded multiple human bodies into the shape of many-legged worm creature. Each leg terminated in a small child's hand. The head was an infernal amalgam of five human jaws, arranged in a circle and all hinged to chew its prey to death. Ringing the outer jaws were a hundred human eyes, each staring with lidless, otherwordly malice.

  Seven other horrid forms stood in the room, but perhaps the worst was what Mr. Host became. He mocked Tesser. He became a white dragon in mirror image. His eyes were as black as the void he came from. The white dragon laughed.

  Tesser snarled and a war that would decide the fate of Earth began once more.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Spoon

  Spoon's mind came to an abrupt halt as the daemon things shifted forms in front of his eyes. He had managed to keep it moving, processing, planning even, after seeing the new dragon restrained and poisoned in the middle of the huge subterranean chamber. But when those… things changed into the forms they took, shucking the rules of reality, his mind couldn't take it anymore.

  In the back of his head where he hid away his fears, doubts, and the memories he never wanted to visit again, there was a dark stirring. There were voices.

  "You'll never amount to shit, Hank," Spoon's dad told him once from the recesses of his mind. Spoon could hear his voice in his ears as clear as day, almost as if he were in the room with them, telling him again. The judgment was palpable, and Spoon felt small.

  I don't have to take this. He fought back. "Fuck off, Dad. Worthless drunk. You died years ago. I made my peace with you. I need to get my shit together right now or my friends are gonna die," Spoon said. No one seemed to hear him. Abe and Mr. Doyle were faced forward, staring at the monsters. Is time even moving right now?

  "Why weren't you laying down more cover fire?" Spoon's fire team leader asked him harshly, pointing a finger at him. Spoon could feel the familiar, crusty, sweaty fatigues rubbing against his skin, and could feel the weight of his US Army-issued body armor and helmet again. He could taste the dust of Afghanistan on his tongue. His heart raced. He could see two worlds overlapping, intermingling.

  "I was. I… What are you talking about, Sarge? I was…" Spoon's mind struggled to realize he was hallucinating. He could hear the hammer beat of a Browning fifty laying down suppressing fire in the background, but he knew there was none. He was in Massachusetts, in the bowels of the basement from Hell. It was actually a worse place than a firefight in Shah-i-Kot valley.

  "You're gonna catch a court martial, you lazy, Irish fuck. I told them about you. Worthless piece of Yankee shit. You can't trust no one from the North!" The Sergeant hollered in his ear. It seemed like his Tennessee accent grew stronger as he got angrier at Spoon. The Sergeant was spitting in fury.

  With no regard for sense, Spoon stepped back and raised his weapon, pointing it at the NCO in his mind. He slipped his finger down and rubbed it against the trigger, ready to end the Sergeant's tirade. In his mind, he saw the gravel-voiced, dirty-faced soldier of the 101st look back at him in shock, but a small piece of rationality appeared and he saw Abe's face instead.

  What the fuck am I doing?

  "You are about to shoot your friend in the face," a soft feminine voice said over the din of two battles, one real, one false. Her voice was like a calm falling on him, as if a soft snow had settled on him, quieting the world.

  "Who are you? Why are you in my head?" Spoon asked two realities, his finger coming off the trigger.

  "I'm th
e big purple dragon in front of you, Henry, and if you don't listen to my voice, you're going to shoot your friend and then be killed by Legion. There won't be enough left of you and your friends to have a funeral. You must listen and listen hard."

  For some reason, I trust her. "What do I do?"

  "Look up. Not with your mind, but with your eyes, the ones you haven't blinked with, the eyes that feel dry. Focus on that dryness. Feel the reality."

  Jesus, she's right. Spoon felt the scratchy surface of his eyeballs and blinked. Each time his lids opened, the view changed. Afghanistan. Massachusetts. A dirty, gunpowder-soaked battlefield on the side of a cold mountain. A subterranean lair filled with nightmares. A half dozen blinks and his eyes locked into the real world. He was looking down at Abe, frozen, cowering and confused as Spoon pointed his weapon at him. Just to Spoon's left Mr. Doyle was calmly shooting his 1911 out of the doorway at the giant spider monster, oblivious to what was happening just behind him.

  "Spoon, what the fuck are you doing?" Abe asked loudly, his voice shaking. He has another one of those magic sticks in his hand. One word and I'd have been killed.

  "I don't know. Something came over me. A… darkness. Hallucinations. I saw and heard my father, and then my Sergeant yelling at me, and I was about to shoot him, but then it was you, and then I heard… Kaula. Kaula, are you still there?"

  She was gone.

  "Spoon, you're fucking crazy. Shoot the monsters, not your friends. And Kaula's asleep man. She's right fucking there. Get yourself together. Fight against it. Use your will, not just your trigger finger." Abe stood, suddenly brave and wise. He wore it well. He turned and pointed out the door at the spider monster that was stalking towards them, each spiked foot hitting the floor oddly making the same sound of an aluminum bat smacking into a phone pole. "Telum!" he shouted out, and the same wave of force burst from his fingertips. It might've even been more powerful. The wooden missile screamed out over the shoulder of the elder wizard and struck the spider's foremost leg at a joint, bursting it from the main body and hitting the floor like a side of beef. The spider body reeled in pain, but it pressed forward.