Piercing the Veil

by Guy Riessen

  “You with me, buddy? C’mon, dude, we gotta move,” Howard said as his hand slipped under Derrick’s arm and around his back.

  “Hey, whaddya know, it’s Howard,” Derrick coughed out. His eyes refused to focus.

  Howard lifted Derrick. “I gotcha, buddy,” he said. Derrick’s pant leg felt a little wet and sticky. “Don’t touch the leg, dude,” Howard said as he hoisted Derrick up easily into a fireman’s carry. Howard gripped one leg, but Derrick looked down and saw his other leg was bent at an odd angle, and he reached to brush off a hunk of white Styrofoam that was stuck to his pants.

  “Something’s on my pants, H. Styrofoam.”

  "That’s your femur, buddy. You're in shock so you’re not feeling it. No worries, I'm gonna get you outta here."

  “Femur? My leg bone ...?” Derrick said as he craned his neck around to see his leg. His brain suddenly recognized what his eyes were seeing. Bone, white and clotted with red, had torn through his black fatigue pants which were now glistening with his blood in the light of the bouncing flashlight beam. He felt the room twist at an odd angle, bending and spinning. He fought down his rising gorge and looked purposefully away from his injury and into the dust-choked room.

  Through the gloom he could see ...

  “Holy crap, H! What the hell?” Derrick looked into the shattered room where something huge filled much of the space.

  That ‘something’ was moving.

  “Time to blow this joint,” Howard said as he turned and ran down the hallway, his footfalls heavy. The creaking joists threatening to send them through the floor at any second.

  Derrick groaned. “‘Joint,’ huh? I see what you did there.”

  He reached down to Howard’s waist and pulled the 9mm from its holster. He turned his head back and watched the door frame bulge then burst outward into the hallway. Through air choked with plaster dust, Derrick could see the grotesque torn arms of the creature pushing through the gaping hole where the door used to be. A huge eyeless face pressed out and turned toward them.

  The jagged antlers on each side of the skull, multipronged and twisted as though sprouted from a giant diseased stag, ripped through the wall above the door as it turned to face them. Globs of putrid flesh were pulling loose and sloughing from the featureless skull. Its mouth dropped open.

  Unhinged, Derrick thought, like one of those snakes that swallow eggs whole.

  The teeth inside looked cracked, splintered and chalky, like a limestone sculpture that someone had taken a hammer to. A sickly yellow light filled its gaping maw.

  It roared, and Derrick could feel the sound, deep in his gut. The urge to vomit was almost undeniable. Mostly subsonic, his brain identified. He knew the military had nonlethal weapons that used subsonic waves to incapacitate enemy soldiers, but he’d personally never heard or felt anything in the field that used subsonics.

  Howard stumbled under the sickening assault of sound.

  Derrick raised the pistol and fired left-handed down the hall. The thing had pulled most of its bulk through the burst doorway and it filled the entire passage. Its neck was bent, and its head sat at a crazy angle with one antler dragging a splintering gouge out of the slats and plaster. Its arms and legs folded over each other as it moved and twisted its limbs into the hall.

  Derrick fired again. With the thing’s mass filling the entire hallway, he couldn’t miss.

  If he wasn’t Derrick.

  He fired off two shots. Hallway floorboards splintered, then more plaster dust puffed into the hall from the hole in the wall. “Dang it!” he shouted.

  “Line it up, D. Both hands. Shoot on the exhale.” Howard huffed between breaths as he came to the stairway leading to the first floor.

  Derrick cradled the base of the grip with his other hand and lined up the shot.

  “Booyah!” His third and fourth shots hit home. Bullet holes punched through the creature’s skeletal torso and face. The holes looked tiny, but a thick black fluid gushed from the wounds. The creature roared again and wiped at the splintered holes with one claw. Derrick’s view disappeared as he was carried down the stairs, but he could still hear the thing dragging and pushing itself down the hallway.

  “Ah crap, Howard, the Pulsar!” Derrick shouted when he realized both hands were holding the gun, and neither was holding his EMP device.

  “Thing’s corporeal, D.” Howard grunted with each step down the staircase. “Black ooze came out when I shot it.”

  “Yeah, I saw it bleed that stuff too,” Derrick hissed when one step made his leg bounce against Howard’s back. “But I’ve got a theory ...”

  “Right on, dude,” Howard said, concentrating on navigating the narrow landing at the bottom.

  “But I need the Pulsar.”

  “Yeah, it was in your hand. I stuffed it in your pocket. Dunno how you held on to it, but you did ...”

  Rocking slightly left and right on Howard’s shoulders, Derrick slapped at his pockets and felt the hard, rectangular box. He scrabbled for it, his hands digging for the pocket opening.

  “Howard, I think you just saved us, man! Go around the corner.” Howard was already pulling them around a corner where brick mixed with the slatted foundation for the plaster.

  Clawed hands grabbed at the walls at the top of the stairs, its face, streaked with black gore, twisted around the corner and its empty eyeless face turning as if to stare at Derrick.

  “Stop,” Derrick said to Howard the moment they cleared the corner and the giant creature disappeared from view.

  Howard didn’t question Derrick. They’d been partners long enough that trust was implicit. Howard halted, his breath hammering.

  Derrick reached back with one hand and Howard took the pistol from it. With his other hand, he lifted the Pulsar, pointing the tube down the hall to the base of the steps. His hand hovered over the big red button.

  “Need me to set you down?” Howard asked.

  The sounds of the creature splintering the banister and dragging itself down the steps grew louder, shattered balustrades skittered into the hallway with other bits of random wood and dust.

  “No way, man. But, get ready to book it if this doesn’t work.”

  “‘Book it?’”

  “Shut it. Just turn a little to the left, so I’m facing the stairs head-on ... here we go!”

  A giant clawed fist, blackened with grave dirt and black ooze, shedding what little flesh remained from its massive bones, slapped onto the floor at the bottom of the steps. Its fingernails were yellow, jagged, and caked with wet dirt as if it had just clawed itself out of its earthen tomb.

  Derrick waited one more beat and just as the thing’s eyeless face cocked around the corner, he slammed his palm onto the button.

  It made a soft, and very anticlimactic, “click.”

  He felt Howard draw in a breath, and his shoulder muscles bunched beneath Derrick’s body as every fiber readied for the sprint to the front door.

  “Yeah!” Derrick shouted, slapping Howard’s back.

  “What?” Howard spun halfway to look, swinging Derrick’s head perilously close to the wall. Derrick turned his head to keep the creature in sight. His hand was still pressing the big red button even though his brain knew that the Pulsar only had one charge.

  They both watched as fine blue lines scattered across the creature’s shedding skin and exposed bone. The lines spread and writhed, growing longer and thicker. As they widened, parts of the creature chunked off and splattered to the floor in pools of dark fluid, yellow fat, and blackened flesh.

  “Holy ...” Howard breathed out.

  “I know, right?”

  As more pieces slapped wetly to the floor, the chunks of flesh already on the ground sizzled and dissolved. In seconds, the hallway was empty but for the two of them and a bizarre scene of old gore. Instead of the reek of blood, the area was awash in the smell of rich loam, of potting soil poured fresh from a garden store bag. The flesh and black fluid clumped and crumbled, leaving dry bones
jumbled across the hallway floor, jutting at odd angles in lumps and mounds. Way too many bones for a single creature from what Derrick could see. Bones laying in, and sticking out of, piles of rich, dark, earth.

  “Wow. Your Pulsar is aces, D. Corporeal means guns or nothing ... and bullets weren’t doing shit. Dunno how you knew that’d work,” Howard said.

  “That’s because I’m smarter than you, buddy,” Derrick growled through pain-gritted teeth. His leg was beginning to roar with agony.

  Derrick indicated he wanted to be set down for a few minutes and he hissed as his leg shifted and his vision faded to gray around the edges.

  Howard dusted his hands against his pants. “Yeah right. Anytime you wanna throw down number of PhDs, you just pipe up, chucklehead.” He flipped open a steel case he pulled from a med kit Velcro’d to his shoulder strap. He pulled out an autoject-syringe and jabbed it into Derrick’s thigh about 8 inches up from where the jagged white bone poked through his pants.

  “Yeah, no, we can skip that,” Derrick said, leaning back against the wall as the warmth spread through his thigh, “Like I said, I was just going on the data Professor Watkins fed us.”

  Howard nodded, then said, “Shirt up.”

  Derrick lifted his shirt and Howard pulled a Sharpie pen from the case and scrawled “MOP 10mg” on Derrick’s stomach.

  Derrick leaned forward a little and said, "Got a bag in the pocket at the back of my belt. Be a bud and scoop up some of that dirt and some bone samples.”

  Derrick looked expectantly at Howard. Howard stared back. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Be a bud? C’mon, I at least acknowledged your ‘joint’ reference. Really, nothing?”

  “Nope.”

  Derrick sighed. “Well, bag some dirt and bones, anyway. Mary'll kill us if we didn't bring her some of that junk." Derrick waved in the direction of the dirt and bones littering the hallway. “She’ll do that looking over the glasses thing.”

  “Shit, yeah, with that don’t-you-know-your-fucking-job arched eyebrow ... fuck that, gimme a bag.”

  Howard grabbed a black garbage bag from Derrick’s utility belt pocket and went over to the pile of dirt and bones. He pulled a disposable glove from his own pants pocket, put it on and scooped some of the dirt into the garbage bag.

  “Jeez, Derrick, this shit’s crazy,” Howard said as he pulled some bones out and slid them into the bag with the dirt. “There’s at least seven femurs right here. You see what part of the creature this was when you Pulsar’d it?”

  Howard looked back. Derrick’s eyes were half-lidded, he was feeling fuzzy and Howard’s voice was gently drifting over to him. “Hmm? I think that’s the face there next to you. See the teeth?”

  “No, there aren’t any teeth here. That’s what I mean—the bones don’t make sense. Just jagged ends of mostly what looks like arm bones—humeri,” Howard said, then held up another pair of bones. “These look like a radius and ulna, yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s like the thing was made of the wrong bones.” Derrick could feel his head slipping down. “That kinda makes sense though, right? How the teeth looked, you know? They were all jagged and broken. The whole thing was way too big to be a human cadaver, right?”

  “Yeah, I know. I figured it was Mythos, once we knew it was corporeal.” Howard was digging through the dirt, pulling bones out and looking at them. Some he tossed into the bag.

  “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Mythos. That close, for something that big to come through ... I woulda felt the tear. Let’s get outta here, H. I’m hopped up on adrenalin and morphine now, so we should move while I can’t feel my leg. We need to get back to the bus and get on the radio. Sarah’s gotta get Sweeps out here with a larger EMP, if she can. There could be ...” his voice hitched. “Could be ... more ...” Derrick’s voice dwindled off.

  “More?” Howard started, looking up from the garbage bag where he was scooping in some dirt.

  “Shhh.” Derrick held up his hand. “I think I heard something,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HOWARD AND DERRICK stared down the shadowy hallway. They looked in each direction. There were the four doors that opened to the middle of the passage, the one between here and the kitchen that led to the food storage room, the other that led to the basement, then the two empty bedroom doors on the right.

  Howard twisted the bag and pulled a zip tie from his pocket. He pointed toward the stairs they had just come down and looked at Derrick.

  Derrick shook his head indicating the sound had not come from there. Instead, he hooked a thumb toward the front room to show he thought they should get out of the house.

  Howard nodded and moved back to Derrick, setting the bag next to him. He reached a hand to hoist Derrick up again when there was a distinctive sound both Howard and Derrick recognized as a submachinegun bolt being pulled back.

  “Mac-Ten,” Derrick whispered. The adrenaline rushing through his system cleared some of the morphine haze.

  “Shit,” Howard said quietly, motioning Derrick to drop flat. He backed away and moved to the other side of the hallway, so Derrick wouldn’t be in the line of fire. Derrick let his body slide down and rolled his torso, staying as flat as possible. His broken leg stuck out at an odd angle. He tried to not look at the leg bone, or the blood that continued to seep into his fatigues.

  The door about halfway down the hallway toward the front room squealed open on dry hinges.

  Derrick pulled the bag of dirt and bones over and slid it in front of him and tried to flatten his head down behind it.

  Howard brought his rifle up and backed up to the basement door, aiming down the hallway, Derrick knew he couldn’t miss at that range.

  The barrel of the SMG poked just past the door frame and ripped at full-auto. Derrick tried to flatten himself even more. Howard fired one shot. The round smashed into the exposed barrel, slamming it into the door jamb. The gun clattered to the floor.

  Derrick tried to draw his own 9mm from its holster and realized Howard still had it tucked in his belt. Howard moved quickly toward the open door and fired again. Again, the bullet struck the submachine gun, bouncing it against the door as it was pulled back into the room by the strap.

  Howard was moving now, watching the edge of the door for the slightest motion. Derrick was lying flat, but he had his pistol trained on the doorway.

  Howard glanced back, slid his 9mm across the floor to Derrick, and made the hand signal indicating he wanted suppressing fire on the doorway. Even though Derrick was far from the best shot—OK he was the worst shot—on the team, he could lay down bullets just fine if he didn’t have to hit anything specific.

  Derrick nodded and fired toward the doorway, one shot after another. He was feeling proud to see the wooden frame splinter since that was what he was actually aiming at.

  There was a “tink” from inside the room and Howard halted his quick approach.

  Grenade pins went “tink.”

  He backed up to put himself between the doorway and Derrick.

  White smoke billowed out from the room.

  “Damn!” Howard shouted. He moved at a run, rifle up.

  There was the sound of shattering glass.

  Howard peeked around the corner into the room. The hallway was rapidly filling with smoke. He ducked back again, then moved into the room low, the thick smoke would obscure him just as well as anyone in the room.

  “Target’s out the window!” Howard shouted from inside the room. Derrick heard Howard yell a command to stop followed by another shot.

  The hallway went quiet except for the sputtering hiss from the smoke grenade.

  Then there was a low creak from the floorboards behind him.

  Ah crap! Derrick tried to roll himself around and pull his pistol up.

  A figure ran at a low crouch, right up to him, holding a ... what the hell? There wasn’t a gun in the figure’s hand, instead it looked like the albuterol Derrick took for his asthma when he had a
n “attack.” The figure was wearing all black with a sweatshirt hood pulled up over his head. In the shadows of the hood, the figure’s face looked insectoid. The creature held the aspirator toward him and he heard it puff twice.

  Derrick held his breath but must have been a little too late because the entire hallway suddenly tilted and bent at a weird angle. The figure leaned in close and Derrick realized it wasn’t an insect face in the hood, it was a gas mask.

  “Well that’s good anyway, I don’t really need another monster,” he muttered, slurring heavily. His voice went low and flat, and his breathing slowed as everything went black.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHEN DERRICK WOKE UP, he wished he hadn’t. A flood of absolute agony washed from his right thigh through his entire body. It felt like someone was trying to pierce his leg with a red-hot poker. His eyes were squeezed shut even as his consciousness returned, like he’d been grimacing in his sleep.

  He counted to ten, then ran through primes to one hundred, followed by the first twenty numbers from the Fibonacci sequence. Then he quickly went over the layout and contents of the house he and Howard were in, right down to the red color of the rotten fabric in the room where the giant zombie creature manifested.

  Wait.

  Where’s H?

  He cracked his eyes open.

  The room was dark. He was drenched in sweat, and there was a chill in the air that made his skin feel clammy. He concentrated on keeping his breathing even, pretending to be asleep. Through his slitted eyelids, he stared up at a flat wooden plank ceiling. It looked like he was lying near a wall. Listening, he couldn’t hear anything, so he slowly turned his head toward what he thought was the center of the room. At the slight movement, his head pounded, and a wave of vertiginous nausea swept over him, like the worst hangover he’d ever had. There didn’t appear to be anyone in the room with him, so he took deep, but quiet breaths, closed his eyes and waited for the feeling to pass.