The Monsters in Your Neighborhood

by Jesse Petersen

  “How will that help us?” Alec asked, trying not to stare. It was almost impossible when seeing a monster in his full form.

  “Idiot,” Drake said as Pat sidestepped the still-swinging Igor. “Hit him in the head.”

  Alec looked around for some way to do just that, but before he could find anything heavy, but not too heavy, Igor reached into his pocket and withdrew a tiny device. A device engraved with A.

  “He’s got a remote—my remote!” Alec burst out as he dove for Igor and the little man dodged him. “Hit him, hit him, hit him!”

  Everything seemed to slip into slow motion as Igor moved his fat finger toward the controller button. Alec reached out, knowing he was out of range for a strike, knowing he could do nothing.

  And then there was a clang as Pat smacked Igor in the head with a decorative metal vase. Hard. Hard enough that Igor’s eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed facedown on the stone floor, the controller clattering to the ground next to his still body.

  Alec snatched it up, cradling the device like it was a newborn lamb (wait, wolves ate lambs; a newborn something else) before he placed it gently in his front pocket and turned toward the still-motionless Igor. Drake poofed back into human form and stared with him.

  “Did I . . . did I kill him?” Pat whispered, sliding to the floor next to Igor. “I sometimes forget my strength.”

  Alec looked up into the very sad, very sorry eyes of the Cthulhu and reached out to offer that comforting pat on his arm he hadn’t been able to deliver before.

  “It’s okay,” Alec reassured him. “He’s a monster, I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “He is so small, though,” Pat worried, wringing his hands.

  It was Drake who dropped down next to the assistant. “Let me check on him, but be ready to strike him again if he wakes up and remains out of control.”

  Pat swallowed hard, but nodded, and his tentacles waved around his face. Alec leaned down alongside Drake. Faintly he heard Igor’s wheezing breath. He smiled at Pat.

  “He’s alive. Do you have any rope down here?”

  The Cthulhu nodded slowly. “Yes, but why?”

  “I think we’d better tie him up just in case he wakes up in the same foul mood. So that you don’t have to smack him again.”

  Pat seemed to ponder that a moment and then nodded. “A good point. I will fetch my rope.”

  He turned and flapped his unfurled wings. Alec stared as Pat lifted from the floor and soared quite beautifully into a back room.

  “The gift of flight is a magnificent thing, isn’t it?” Drake asked, drawing Alec’s attention away from Pat.

  Alec nodded. Most of their monster powers were so brutish, but this one was something else.

  “It really is. You two are lucky. Now let me get this one.”

  Alec bent and swept Igor up into his arms. He carried him to a couch next to the entryway. As he settled the smaller man onto the cushions, Igor groaned.

  Alec stiffened, ready to defend himself, but when Igor opened his eyes they were no longer red and rabid. He blinked.

  “Owwwwww, my head,” he drawled in that silly Southern accent.

  “Yeah, Pat whacked you good. Do you remember anything?” Alec said.

  Igor squeezed his eyes shut. “We were talking, and then . . . nothing. What happened?”

  Drake pursed his lips. “It seems that the Van Helsings or Hyde or both got ahold of you at some point and implanted you with a chip. Then someone activated it.”

  Pat slipped into the room, a length of rope in his hand, but Alec shook his head slightly and the Cthulhu demurely stuck it behind his back.

  “Damn him,” Igor said as he flopped back on the couch and rubbed his head. “I told him, don’t try that shit on me. I told him I was done being a guinea pig.”

  “Told him? Told who?” Pat asked.

  Igor worried his lip. “Well, that’s the thing . . .” He sighed. “Um, we’re going to have to talk about me and Hyde.”

  “You and Hyde what?” Alec asked, his voice elevating with the question.

  Igor flinched, but said, “Look, don’t hit me again, okay?”

  Alec leaned back. “It depends on what you’re going to say next, so just spill it.”

  “Um, I wasn’t just meeting up with Hyde and Jekyll. I was helping them. Assisting them. And I assisted Hyde with some of his research into this chip idea of his.”

  Drake paced away, cursing beneath his breath, and even Pat let out a low groan.

  “When?” Alec asked through clenched teeth.

  “A few months ago,” Igor said, flinching as he awaited Alec’s blow.

  Alec wanted to deliver it, too. Instead he just stared at Igor, digesting the fact that it seemed like betrayal was around every monstrous corner.

  Pat leaned forward and his dark eyes were bright with anger and as hard as Alec’s. “Little hunchback, I was feeling so guilt-stricken about hurting you, but I think you had better start talking . . . from the beginning . . . before I hit you again, this time harder.”

  Igor sighed and put his hands behind his head as a makeshift pillow. “Well, it all started in the fall in Atlanta. Have you ever been to Atlanta in the fall? It’s pretty nice . . .”

  Hyde shouted something to Linda in a language Natalie didn’t understand, but she had no doubt it wasn’t good. Especially when the other woman fired her pistol at Natalie as Hyde returned to reading the ancient Book of the Dead. She dove behind a couch for protection as bullets hit the walls behind her.

  Rehu screamed as Hyde’s reading became more forceful and the mummy’s back arched at an impossible angle. Natalie covered her mouth in shock and horror as a strange black smoky wisp began to exit Rehu’s mouth and curl upward toward the ceiling.

  “His essence!” Kai bellowed, waving her arms through it like she could make it go back into his mouth.

  Natalie shook her head. This wasn’t going to happen. Not to one more person she . . . well, liked might have been going too far . . .

  She jumped to her feet and dove for Hyde. She hit his legs with both her arms and he toppled backward, the book flying end over end into the air before it hit a table, bounced, and slid a good five feet across the shiny wooden floor.

  She rose up to strike him, to crush him as she loomed over him, when there was a click of the pistol being cocked and the heavy press of it against the back of her skull.

  “Linda, I swear to God, if you shoot me I’m going to tear your ears off and not sew them back on,” she muttered.

  But it was all talk. If Linda shot her in the head, she’d need a new brain to live. And a new brain meant she’d truly die. Natalie would be nothing more than a sewn-together heap of a body.

  “That doesn’t really inspire me not to shoot you,” Linda said. “And I don’t have ears, I’m a lizard, stupid.”

  Natalie glanced over her shoulder. Linda didn’t sound nearly as zoned out as she had a few minutes before. And when she locked eyes with Natalie, she didn’t stare through her.

  “Linda?” she whispered.

  “It does, however, inspire me to wait and do this first,” the Swamp Dweller said. Then she nudged the gun a little so that it aimed at Hyde instead.

  “You asshole,” Linda said. “You put a chip in me?”

  Hyde stared at her, hatred in his eyes. “I got tired of bedding you, pig.”

  Linda pursed her lips hard and then she shot him. In the shoulder. But shot him nonetheless.

  Hyde jerked with the pain. “Damn it!”

  “Is Rehu okay?” Linda asked without looking at Kai or Rehu. No, she kept her gaze on her boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend, if all the pistol-firing was any indication.

  “No, you fucking crazy bitch,” Kai sobbed. “He’s dying. Hyde weakened him with that spell and now the bullet has actually done damage, probably permanent.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shoot him, Hyde made me do it with that chip.” Linda shook her head. “He made me do it. When I h
it my head after Natalie tackled him, I started waking up. If I shot Rehu, I didn’t mean to!”

  Kai grunted, but she was so focused on her love that she had no response for Linda. Linda’s eyes filled with tears and Natalie touched her arm.

  “You didn’t mean to. I know it and Kai will know it, too, once she’s rational. But you’ve got to keep it together, girl. Please!”

  She nodded and took a deep breath. “I will.”

  “ ‘Keep it together’? Please, you can’t do anything right.” Hyde snickered as he held a handkerchief over the wound in his shoulder. “Idiot.”

  Linda’s eyes narrowed and she fired the gun again, this time hitting Hyde in his opposite shoulder.

  “Fuck!” he howled in pain.

  “Jeez, don’t mess with the scorned woman and all that,” Natalie said as she got off of Hyde. “Hold him, Linda. And please don’t shoot him anymore. At least for now.”

  “I can’t make any promises,” Linda growled.

  Natalie shook her head as she rushed to Kai’s side. Rehu was ashen gray and hardly breathing. His eyes were blank and dead and his skin was beginning to flake, turn dusty.

  “What will happen?” she whispered.

  “Best-case scenario, he turns back into a true mummified corpse that can’t be reincarnated for a hundred years,” Kai said, and she was crying even though her dry mummified body wouldn’t let more than one tear escape her eyes. It rolled down her pale skin and dripped off onto Rehu’s hand. His ailing body absorbed it immediately.

  “Worst-case?” Natalie asked.

  “He dissolves into dust,” Kai admitted, her voice choked with emotion.

  “What about the book?” Linda asked, without taking her eyes or her gun off of Hyde. “Does it have any spells to help him?”

  Kai jumped up and grabbed the book. “There was a rumor,” she said as she flipped through pages. “A whisper about a spell. But I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  She turned pages, skimming their words and shaking her head. Over and over she did the same until finally she stopped. “Here!”

  She showed Natalie the page, but it was a bunch of gobbledygook to her. “Don’t read Demotic Egyptian, sorry,” she said.

  Kai rolled her eyes. “I need you to hold the book for me while I perform the ritual, Natalie. I have to get something, be right back.”

  Kai leapt up and ran down the hallway toward the penthouse kitchen.

  “It won’t work,” Hyde sneered when she was gone.

  “Linda, do not shoot him again,” Natalie snapped when she saw the other woman move.

  Linda sighed. “Are you sure? He really deserves it.”

  “I have questions for him, then you can vent whatever scorned-woman rage you have, I promise.”

  “Good,” Linda muttered. “Guess where I’m shooting next, asshole.”

  Kai returned, bearing a huge, sharp knife in her hand.

  “Whoa, what is that for?”

  “He needs my blood to merge with the dust of his,” she explained. “Now hold the book and let me read.”

  “Can I ask Hyde questions while you do it?” Natalie asked.

  Kai shrugged. “I don’t care. Once I start reading, it shouldn’t matter what else is happening.”

  Natalie watched as Kai lifted Rehu’s head into her lap and began to read from the book. Kai’s eyes changed, becoming slits of sparkling silvery light as ancient words rolled from her lips like a waterfall. She was entirely in her own world at that point, and as the rhythm of her speech filled the room, Natalie glared at Hyde.

  “Okay, asshole, what did you mean when you said you triggered Igor?”

  Hyde was bleeding and Natalie knew he was in pain, but at her question he gave a smug smile and his eyes filled with bright joy. He loved this. He loved creating grief and fear and confusion. Because he truly was a monster.

  “You want me to give you a movie monologue?” He chuckled. “I didn’t think you were so driven by cliché, Natalie.”

  Natalie glared at him. “I can just have Linda shoot your knee next.”

  “That wasn’t where I was thinking,” Linda growled.

  “Yeah, well, save that for last,” Natalie advised. “Let him anticipate it.”

  Hyde shook his head, but there was no fear in his eyes. “There’s no need to shoot me; I would enjoy shattering your belief in another monster. I found Igor again shortly after Jekyll’s death. He cannot help but assist; your father put that compulsion into him as much as he put other things when he turned him into a monster.”

  “And you used that,” Natalie spat.

  Hyde smiled. “He began helping me with some research. But he asked a lot of questions, had a lot of concerns, so one night I simply used him as a test subject. And it worked. I realized if there was another monster running around, a Creature like you, you might reach out to Igor. Take him in and trust him so that he would have access to you. And doesn’t it make the fact that he’ll trigger Alec and destroy everything you care about all the more painful, Natalie? To know that was done by someone you . . . like?”

  Natalie felt like she was going to vomit. “You sadistic bastard,” she whispered.

  His smile broadened. “Yes, it’s utterly perfect.”

  “Did he know?” Natalie asked, forcing herself not to do something stupid like cry. “Was he lying to me the whole time while he waited to get triggered by you and become the ultimate servant?”

  “He knew that I was working on a project that was against you. He never knew about his chip,” Hyde conceded. “But everyone lies, Natalie.”

  She turned her face, blocking him out for a moment as she stared at Kai and Rehu. Kai’s face was almost glowing now, a light that wrapped around the couple as she spoke in a voice that was no longer her own. The black essence that had begun to stream away from Rehu now tangled in ribbons around him, around her, and she raised a hand. With the knife, she slashed across her own palm.

  Natalie flinched. The cut was deep, and she imagined the pain was pretty intense, but Kai didn’t react at all. Her blood began to pour from her palm, dripping toward Rehu. With each droplet, some of the black smoky life force he had lost curled into her blood, turning it midnight-black, as well, as it fell onto Rehu’s open mouth.

  Rehu cried out again, but this time not in pain. His breathing became deeper and his flesh stopped flaking. Slowly, as Kai’s blood merged with his life force, the color returned to his cheeks and the brightness to his eyes. The bullet popped out of the small hole in his forehead and bounced across the floor as the wound sealed, becoming nothing more than a big, ugly bruise.

  Kai read the final words of the spell and then slipped forward across his chest, her breath coming in pants and her own flesh pale. The golden light around them faded and, slowly, Rehu sat up.

  “Kai,” he said, lifting her up against him with more effort than it should have taken the ancient mummy. “Kai, what is it?”

  Kai looked up at him, and her voice was weak as she whispered, “I performed the Life Binding Spell.”

  His eyes went wide. “There are consequences to that, Kai.”

  “But you’re alive. The consequences are not important.”

  He looked like he wanted to say more, but then he caught a glimpse of Hyde, bleeding on the floor. He laid Kai to the side gently and got up.

  “I’m going to rip you limb from limb, animal,” he said, but he wobbled on his feet.

  “You won’t do anything,” Hyde said as he struggled to get up himself.

  “Stop,” Linda ordered Hyde, poking the gun at him. “You already know I’ll shoot you.”

  Hyde chuckled. “But you won’t kill me, because you’re too weak. So before anyone else does, I’ll have to say good-bye.”

  He swept one leg out and caught Natalie off guard by hitting her straight across the ankles. She flipped off her feet and hard onto her ass, knocking the wind from her lungs and smashing her teeth together.

  Rehu lunged for him, but in his wea
kened state he was no match for Hyde. Hyde pushed him off like he might a child and moved for the window. He swung up and hit his feet against the glass like a ninja, sending it shattering outward and spiraling down toward the street. As he vanished into the night, Linda fired off a shot, but he was gone.

  Natalie rushed to her feet and she and Linda raced to the window to look out. Hyde hadn’t gone down, so she leaned out to look up. There he was, disappearing up onto the roof.

  “Damn it, so he can King Kong up the side of a building,” Natalie said.

  She moved back into the room and found Kai helping Rehu to his feet. They both looked a lot worse for wear.

  “You can’t do things like that, idiot,” Kai scolded him. “You’ll be mortal for at least twenty-four hours.”

  “So will you,” he panted. “Shit, I’m tired. Being mortal sucks.”

  “Wait, what you did makes you mortal? Human?” Natalie asked.

  “Yeah,” Kai said with a shake of her head. “We’ll be vulnerable until this time tomorrow.”

  “And that’s not the worst of it,” Rehu said with a groan as he rotated his shoulder gingerly. “But we should talk about it while we’re making our escape. This penthouse might be soundproofed against all Linda’s pistol-firing, but Hyde breaking a window and shattering glass down below likely alerted someone to the trouble. So let’s go.”

  Natalie shook off all her questions. “Yes, of course.”

  Linda slipped the pistol into the back of her waistband and reached out to support Rehu. He flinched away with a hiss.

  “Okay, you’re pissed, and you have every right to be.” Linda grabbed him even as he resisted. “But you need me, so we can discuss how I’m going to be punished by the group later.”

  They left the apartment and Linda guided them toward a service elevator at the end of the hall. As they entered it and Linda depressed the button for the underground level where they could find a sewer entrance, Natalie looked at the Swamp Dweller, impressed.

  “You know, you ended up having some spark after all. Gun in your waistband and whatnot.”