by Garon Whited
While they continued to argue, I finished cleaning up. Fangs out? Check. Claws sharp? Check. Plan? Plan? What plan? I’m making this up as I go.
I dove in through the missing window like a shadow. The first two guys I came to were the quieter ones; I pounded their heads into the desk hard enough to make a cracking sound—possibly the desk—and crushing the lamp. The third guy, Mr. Voice-and-Diction, reached for a gun. I grabbed him, swung him around between myself and the remaining gunman. He took a breath, presumably to scream, and I chopped him in the throat to shut him up. He clutched at his throat, trying to gag while he choked to death.
The last guy, standing over Mark, pulled out a small cannon disguised as a pistol. He shouted at me to freeze. I looked at him over my dying shield’s shoulder. He couldn’t get a clear shot, but he had the oversized weapon in both hands, aiming. I lashed out with dark, psychic tendrils, engulfing the gun and twisting it in a single, sudden jolt.
That peculiar effect I once noticed when striking at Keria happened again. Instead of a thousand tiny, threadlike tendrils, what reached out seemed more a braided, twisted rope of tendrils—a tentacle of dark spiritual essence, hungry and powerful.
The cannon wrenched violently from his grip, spinning sideways to embed itself in the wall. I made a note to be more careful while my now-disarmed adversary stared at his bleeding hands. Fortunately, the blood dripped normally. It was hard to see it crawled in my direction after it hit the floor.
I tossed my meat shield over one shoulder and moved. Suddenly, I was right in front of the former gunman, faster than his stunned brain could register. I grabbed the frightened inquisitor by the throat with my left hand and lifted him off his feet. It’s not as bad as people think; the victim instinctively grabs at the arm and takes some of the weight. If you do it right, they can hang there for several minutes before losing consciousness.
I added some gravel to my voice, mindful that Mark watched all this, wide-eyed. He probably couldn’t see too well; he certainly didn’t recognize the monster as his neighbor down the street.
“Do you have any children?” I asked, loud enough for Mark to hear me clearly. “Any who would miss you, that is?”
“Hell, yes! Four daughters and a son!”
I could see his soul and I recognized the lie for what it was.
“You’re lying,” I snarled. Then, for Mark’s benefit, I grabbed my victim by the face, jammed my hand in his mouth, down his throat, and clawed my way to his heart.
If you ever find yourself attempting this, be aware: It’s harder to do than it sounds. There are tons of problems with making it look like a cool move rather than just a gory process. First off, the guy doesn’t hold still while you do it. He jerks around and flails like a seizure victim. You have to get a grip on him and hold him still, and that’s not easy with a six-foot sack of meat. Second, when he dies, he goes limp, so you have to hold him up if you want a good visual; if you lay him down, it’s just awkward surgery.
It didn’t help that I goofed by using my right hand. The heart is on the left side, so with the guy facing me, his heart was on my right. Going through the mouth and down the neck to reach the heart is a long trip. You’ll be in past your elbow for sure. Oh, sure, there are big arteries you can follow once you rip your way down through the throat, but you’ve got to force your way through a chest full of meat to get there. Going through the neck was the hard way. If I wanted the easy way, I should have gone up under the ribs.
To fix this and other problems, I turned him around to wrap my left arm around him from behind and support him. This also changed my angle of attack for my right hand and let me get down into his torso more easily.
This is the part where I pull out the still-beating organ and toss off a one-liner, right? Nope. Dragging a heart out is tricky, to say the least. It’s not designed to come out; human bodies aren’t modular. That’s why it takes so long to train a surgeon. You can get most of the heart, though. That’s doable, but it takes some time and work with sharp fingernails to cut all around it. Even then, you’re not pulling out a still-beating, intact organ.
Let’s face it. It’s not going to happen. All I removed was a mangled lump of meat. Well, it was my first try. I’ll do better next time, but I’m not sure it’s possible to pull it off—or out—with cool move style.
On the other hand, successful or not, it’s gory and terrifying, especially to anyone tied to a chair and observing at close range. That was the point.
Sometimes I wonder how I look to people. Am I sinister and frightening, or just some goofball in a bad vampire costume? It would be nice to be able to see myself through other people’s eyes. At that precise moment, though, I was pretty sure I nailed the horrific, bloodsucking, demonic Thing look.
I bit the heart and sucked the remaining blood out of it, standing so Mark had a good profile view. He didn’t need to know it soaked into my skin as fast as I could drink it. Again, I was going for a visual. In moments, the heart was bone-dry; even the bloodstains vanished. I dropped the dried heart to the floor and crushed it underfoot. I turned to Mark.
He stared at me with his good eye wide open. Even the bad eye was visible, despite the swelling.
I moved close to him, almost nose-to-nose. I let my tongue slide out, coiling upward to trace lightly over the bloodstains along the side of his face. He shuddered at the cold, moist touch. I reached into his soul with dark tendrils to give his spirit an added chill.
Tasting his blood and touching his soul, I felt his existence. A thousand images flashed through my consciousness in an instant—a montage of moments, photoflashes of events. A mélange of feelings, thoughts, hopes, dreams, desires, regrets. For an indefinable moment, I knew Marcus Zama Spotznitz, all the good, all the bad, and all he ever was.
I withdrew my tendrils and my tongue, leaving him to finish his shudder. And leaving me alone again, unique, separate from everyone and everything.
That was new. Have I always been able to do that? I can see the colors and patterns of a spirit, of a soul, and see the good and evil, the brightness and the stains. I can swallow a soul and gain some of its knowledge and power. But I’ve never tried to… to taste it without eating it. It seems strange, like licking a steak instead of biting it.
Weird.
On the other hand, I knew Mark infinitely better than I did before. Nothing concrete, nothing definite, but something about him… now he was familiar to me. If we lived for ten years on a deserted island, never speaking a word to each other, I might know him then as I knew him now. I had an indefinable sense of him as a person, rather than facts about his life.
Now, how to approach this?
Still looking him in the eye at a range of inches, I ran a fingertalon along his jaw, from ear to chin, just barely drawing blood. It focused his attention better than cigarette burns and bruises had.
“The food-man had no children to save him. Do you?” I asked, gravel-voiced.
He nodded for all he was worth, hands clamped to the chair arms, back pressing against the chair until it threatened to snap.
“You are telling the truth,” I sighed, trying to sound regretful. I stood up straight. Mark visibly relaxed when the monster wasn’t in his face anymore. “Do they know what you do?” I asked. “Would your offspring be proud of their father?”
He stared at me with his one good eye and I watched his soul sink the same way icebergs don’t.
“If their father died tonight, would they mourn?” I pressed. “Are you worthy of your whelps?”
He looked away, looked down. Shame and anger warred for dominance in his heart and I could see it, see why he sometimes hit when he should hug. He wasn’t evil. He wasn’t even mean. He was ashamed and he didn’t know how to deal with that shame. There was so much more—there is always more—but I could see how his shame drove him to violence, which added to his shame, and enhanced the vicious cycle.
I wrapped cold hands around his wrists, clamping them to the arms of the chair an
d dragging his attention back to me. I got nose to nose with him again so all he could see were the black, featureless orbs I have where humans keep their eyes. I wondered if he could smell blood on my breath. Probably not, given the way it sinks in. Feeling my breath at room temperature, though—that’s subtly creepy, right?
“A child needs to be proud of a father,” I grated. “Sometimes, children need that pride more than food. And fathers need the love of their children in the same way. So you are free to go—your life belongs to someone else, not to me.” I grinned at him, deliberately displaying all my teeth. “At least, not tonight.”
I used fingertalons to snip the plastic ties holding him to the chair. He pulled the gag out of his mouth while I snipped through the ones around his ankles.
“What about Ortiz?” he asked, hoarsely. “I can’t leave him here.”
“Why not?” I asked. I was surprised he said anything at all. I expected him to bolt from the room as quickly as he was freed. It takes guts to quiz the inhuman monster that recently considered eating you.
“He’s my friend.”
“Perhaps you need better friends,” I suggested. He looked at me, chose to look right into what I use for eyes, and that takes even more guts.
“He’s my friend,” he repeated, stubbornly.
Damn him. I’m going to have to respect him now. I still don’t like him, but… he’s arguing with a monstrous creature of the night for the life of his friend. How can I not respect him? How can I not agree?
“His life is important to you?”
“Yes.”
“I give it to you. Do with it what you will.”
I cut Ortiz loose and helped stand him up, walk him around. He seemed to come to his senses. His gaze switched back and forth between me and Mark. A quick communication between them in facial expression and body language told Ortiz to shut up and talk later.
They hobbled out the door together, Ortiz staggering with one arm around Mark’s shoulders. I steered them back the way I came, toward the party zone, avoiding the stairs to the packaging floor.
The factory workers didn’t notice the scuffle—or considered it none of their business when thumps and shouts came from the upstairs office. To be fair, the machines made quite a bit of noise and their protective gear probably included sound muffling. Nobody was coming up to bother me, so I looted the corpses and the two unconscious bodies. Mr. Erudite had quite a bit of money on him, actually, which made me wonder if he was important. His ID gave me his name, but no ideas about his occupation, aside from the obvious.
I went ahead and drained everybody. Blood feeds the physical form, souls feed the spirit. Neither should be wasted. I also did some dismembering and other ripping. It helped get the blood out of the bodies and left a clear impression something horrific happened. It would help distract anyone who might wonder about the who or what or why, and maybe keep them from looking too closely at two low-grade nobodies who escaped in the confusion.
Then, while putting an eyeless head in a desk’s file drawer, I realized this wasn’t going to work. Maybe it was all the members of the criminal classes I’d been eating; I tend to have a vague sense of familiarity for things my meals knew well. If I’d sat down all my digested gangsters and mobsters and thugs to quiz them—assuming they would cooperate—they could have told me plainly what I was starting to suspect.
This whole incident might be viewed as some sort of particularly grisly mob hit, or something. Some competitor trying to make a statement, maybe. That would increase tensions and potentially start a war. With Mark as a soldier on one side or another, he—and Gary—would likely suffer for it.
Crap.
The only way to make this go away was to make it all go away, to make it vanish. If it could be disguised as an accident, or left open to doubt… yes, a competitor would want it to be obvious, to send a message. If it could have been an accident, then it would probably be considered an accident. This assumed, of course, there wasn’t an active conflict among organized crime currently going on in the well-known criminal metropolis of Oklahoma City. Yeah, it seemed a good bet.
I wished heartily for Firebrand. Ah, well.
After stuffing loot in a bag, I chased after Mark and Ortiz. They were doing okay, going slowly due to wounds and darkness.
“This way,” I whispered.
“Are you…?”
“This way,” I repeated. They glanced at each other, then followed the sound of my voice. I led them to the door and showed them out over the unconscious guard. I stuffed my accumulated cash in Mark’s jacket pocket.
“Who are you?” Ortiz asked. That was a good question. It deserved a memorable answer.
I resisted the urge to answer, “I’m Batman.” It wasn’t easy. Instead, I asked him a question.
“Are you afraid of the dark, Ortiz?”
“No,” he whimpered. I leaned close and smiled, mouth open slightly to emphasize the fangs. He could also see the rest of my teeth clearly. They’re not sharklike. Their sharpness is along the outer edges, making them sharp like knives are sharp, not like fangs. Those edges aren’t perfectly flat, though; what pointiness they have is, for the most part, extremely subtle. It takes a dentist to notice… or getting up close and personal, which we were. It adds considerably to the impression of being an inhuman monster—which I am.
I ran a sharp fingernail along the side of his face, drawing a thin line of blood to match the one on Mark’s face.
“I am the Dark,” I whispered. Then I turned away and vanished into the shadows of the factory side, throwing over my shoulder into the echoes: “Remember the reason you are alive.”
I closed the door, locking them out of the drug factory.
I went back to the office to wait a half hour. Then I killed everyone on that side of the place and burned it. It went up quickly; a lot of their supplies were flammable. I spent a few minutes persuading people to evacuate the dance party—they needed a head start before the flames spread—but firing a gun into the DJ’s equipment gets immediate attention.
I don’t think anyone was actually trampled, but a few were injured. I did my best to help them out the door.
Tuesday, October 19th
It’s a good thing I carry makeup. Getting home without a lot of funny looks could have been problematic without it. Sure, it’s just a clamshell thing with some skin-tone stuff, but it’s a lifesaver. Pity about the mirror being defective; I had to guess, as usual. I don’t think I did too badly. Nobody pointed and screamed.
I made it home before dawn. After the sun came up, I called another cab for my overdue grocery run.
The cabs have complimentary video while you’re being ferried around. I think it’s an excuse to bombard the passenger with advertising. In between the ads, though, sometimes there’s something interesting.
According to the news, an illegal rave club caught fire. It reported over a dozen bodies in the blaze. That tallied pretty well with the body count I got. Still, the news—or lack of it—told me the drug lab fire was being covered up. Someone had clout with the local law enforcement, or the political machine releasing statements to the press. I suppose it might have been kept quiet for some legitimate police reason, but I thought it more likely someone paid to keep it quiet and unofficial. Either way, I was glad I burned most of the evidence.
I also picked up another makeup kit and more first aid supplies, as well as some extra extension cords. I would have added to my bucket collection, but the Four already moved Luke’s drum kit into the hayloft. It’s not too elaborate, but they’re real drums, so I now have my buckets back.
I remembered to pick up a jar of foam earplugs.
Seeing Mark’s face last night reminded me I have surprisingly little in the way of mundane supplies. Aside from Luke’s splinter, I don’t recall the last time I applied peroxide or a band-aid, to say nothing of gauze or stitches. It’s not like I can casually grab flesh and weld it together anymore; around here, that takes real effort.
It’s good to have a disaster kit. You never know. I also ordered some stuff online—flashlights, glow sticks, space blankets, vacuum-packed food, packets of water, all that survivalist stuff. It’s possible I’ll never need it, but you have that sort of thing on hand because of the other possibility—or I might have houseguests who would.
I also checked the guns; they had no markings on them, so keeping them was illegal and selling them slightly more so. There were also none of the newfangled cellular locator chips, which was hardly surprising in illegal firearms. They wound up in a locked box in the attic pending resale some weekend.
My ingots of various elements arrived today, much to my delight. Now I can start making a coil to fit them and experiment with the potential to warp spacetime.
Wednesday, October 20th
I spent the morning downstairs with a bowling bag and the unearthed Sinister Sphere. All the accumulated energy from the basement power circle went into a spell to further contain and suppress it. My biggest issue was what sort of spell to put on the thing. My idea was to improve containment on the Orb of Disaster in such a way that it couldn’t be detected and, more importantly, couldn’t reach out to persuade some sucker to pick it up.
My initial idea to contain it was a reversed Ascension Sphere. It wouldn’t be all that hard, really—simply reverse two sequences of symbols and the whole thing will suck in power from both directions to reinforce its own spell structure. Inside, it’ll drain all the power almost immediately; outside, it’ll act like an Ascension Sphere. Whatever is inside it, though, won’t have any power to work with.
My problem was I didn’t understand the basic method of glassy containment. Was it a dynamic containment, constantly using power to keep the Thing inside? If so, a reversed Ascension Sphere would destroy the spells holding it and release the Thing inside. Was it a physical sort of embedded trap? If it’s bound in some way to the physical structure of the glass, I should reverse an Ascension Sphere and starve the Thing inside of power.