Miss Holly wasn’t particularly big, but there was something about the woman that told you that you really didn’t want to get on her bad side. She’d been a showgirl or some such back before she’d gotten into the life, but these days she was something fearsome that happened to look like she did. She’d squared off against the three trainees like a mountain lion sizing up three spikehorn bucks and deciding which one to eat first.
“Boys, boys, boy,” Miss Holly said. “That isn’t how things are done around here.”
The three trainees had the good sense to look ashamed. Well, the Tweedles did. Don looked like he might have had trouble standing up without the wall to help him.
“He started it, ma’am,” one of the Tweedles mumbled.
Miss Holly gave him a look that would have peeled paint. “One of him, and three of you, and you expect me to believe he started it?”
“He cheated,” Don wheezed.
That drew a bright, scornful laugh out of her. “What are you expecting out there? Marquess of Queensbury rules?” She eyed Don up and down and said, “You need a hospital?”
“No.”
“You better hope he doesn’t,” she said, gesturing toward me.
“Or what?” Don asked.
Holly gave him a smile that would have made a wise man uneasy. Too many teeth. “Don—it’s Don, right? You ever hear of the hot-crazy quotient?”
Don glanced at the Tweedles for support, but didn’t get much. “Uh. Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, Harbinger has what you might call a competent-asshole quotient,” she said. “Attempting to rough up the staff makes me think you might be on the wrong side of that quotient, from Earl’s point of view. What do you boys think? Do you want to get on the wrong side of that valuation in the boss’ eyes?”
The mention of Earl Harbinger had what my books would have called a salutary effect on the trainees. He’s that kind of fellow.
“No, ma’am,” they mumbled.
“Well then. Hit the showers.”
One of the Tweedles gave Don an arm, and the three of them shambled off toward the barracks.
Once they were gone, Miss Holly sighed. “Why is it always the good-looking ones who are assholes?” She turned to me and shook her head. “Dammit, Beauregard. Don’t you have anything better to do than get yourself beaten up?”
She gave me a hand up, and passed over a bandana. I cleaned off as best I could with it.
“What happened?” she asked me.
“Nothing to worry about now, Miss,” I said.
She lifted an eyebrow. “If I’d come down that hall five minutes later, they’d have kicked your guts out.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But you did come. And it’s over now.”
“Yeah? What happens the next time they run into you in a dark hallway?”
“Don’s the big dog in that pack, and I reckon he’ll remember he got some bruises, too,” I said. “Look. This wasn’t personal. This is how some folks are. They have to test the boundaries. Now they know how far they can push me.”
“They know?” Miss Holly asked. “Or you know.”
I had to smile at that, because she had a point. “Well…let’s say we are all gonna be more comfortable with one another now. Someone will buy someone a beer later. It will be fine.”
“Men,” Miss Holly said. “You going to be all right?”
I rubbed at the back of my head. There were bruises forming under the hair, and one eye was swollen shut, but an icepack and aspirin would help that some. I wasn’t going to be comfortable for a couple of days, that was certain. “Sure,” I said.
“You know, Earl isn’t going to appreciate hearing about you roughing up his trainees,” Holly said. “He does need them, you know.”
“Mister Earl is a good man,” I said. “He’ll understand.”
She shook her head and looked after the trainees. “Three of them and one of you. And you gave about as good as you got.”
“Well, Miss Holly,” I said. “I cheated.”
She snorted and put out a fist. I bumped it with mine. My knuckles were a lot more swollen and bruised and cut up and scarred than hers were.
“I’m looking for Fred. We’re still having a problem with rats. Have you seen him?”
I looked up and down the hallway. My fellow janitor was nowhere to be seen. Fred had a big belly but he didn’t have much of a stomach for fighting. “I see him, I’ll be sure to tell him, Miss Holly.”
“It’s just Holly,” she said.
“Please, Miss. I’m Southern.”
That reply drew a smile, and it made her look as fine as a frog’s hair split four ways. “Your first name is Sid, right?” she asked.
“Thucydides,” I said. “Sid to my friends. Which I reckon you are, after today.” I offered her the bandana back.
“Keep it,” she said. “You want to head to the infirmary, have them check you out?”
“Naw,” I said. “I got some more work to do.”
“Okay, tough guy,” she said and strode off. “Try not to pick a fight with Z before the end of the day.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. And I meant it.
Owen Zastava Pitt wasn’t the sort who needed to test boundaries.
I got back to work on the wall outlet—and found it lying on the floor.
Now that was strange. It should have been wired up. Maybe the wires had been so old that they’d broken off. I picked up the outlet and checked. It was an old one all right. All the fittings and screws were tarnished with age—except for the screws on the connections themselves, which were shiny where they had been loosened…recently.
I squinted. That old box hadn’t moved in years. And yet someone had undone those screws in the last few days.
From the inside of the wall.
I got the little flashlight out of my toolbox and peered into the opening in the wall. The wires weren’t there. Apparently, whoever had unscrewed them had taken them, too.
Huh.
Now that was damned peculiar.
* * *
A few days later, Mister Milo had dissected some damned thing and it was time to clean up, so Fred and I were on the scene.
“What the hell kind of monster is this, do you think?” Fred asked me as we got to work with the mops and buckets.
“A messy one,” I said. The strands of the mop were sticking to some kind of thick, tacky ichor that had drained onto the floor around the operating table. I tried pulling it away and the strands just ripped away from the mop.
The corpse was a sort of sickly gray color, speckled with flecks of purple. There were several dozen tapered tentacle-looking limbs, sort of flopping everywhere, and two pairs of heavy crablike claws that poked out from beneath a shell that swirled and humped without any apparent pattern. It must have weighed half a ton if it was an ounce. I knew because I’d loaded it onto the reinforced autopsy table with a forklift that morning.
And it smelled. It smelled like rotten compost mixed with dead fish sitting in the back of a car on an August afternoon.
“What’s the PUFF on something like that, you think?” Fred asked.
“Gotta be over twenty thousand,” I said. I poked a series of gouge marks on the shell with the end of my broom. “See there? Bulletproof.”
Fred snorted and nodded toward the shredded mess where the thing’s head had once been. “Not everywhere.”
“I heard Pitt was right underneath it before he started pulling the trigger,” I said. “Can’t imagine that’s going to be a popular tactic for the teams.”
“They think killing things is hard work,” Fred spat. He wrenched his mop, grunting, until he managed to rip it free of the ichor. He eyed the half-ruined mop head and sighed. “They should try this part of the job.”
I grunted and nodded. “Cook it away, you think?”
“Probably just make us have to chisel it off again, but it’s worth a try. I’ll get the flamer.”
Fred hurried off toward the supply shed, and
I started clearing everything out of the immediate area around the autopsy table. Mister Milo was more or less the senior technician, which at MHI means that he worked with a lot of experimental guns and ammunition. It would be a little awkward to set a few barrels of propellant on fire while we were trying to clean the place up. I was getting cases shut away in storage closets when I heard a sound behind me.
I’d only caught a little hint of it out of the corner of my eye, but it looked like the thing on the table had moved.
Standard training seminars in other companies mean you learn about team building and sexual harassment and five-year plans. At MHI, you get drilled on how to survive a spectrum of weird things that might happen which your average corporate HQ just don’t got to worry about.
And part of that training is specifically what to do if you think something just might, might be an active hostile.
You run like the dickens and find someone with big guns to shoot it until it isn’t active no more.
I went for the door like a shot and as I did, something came flying off the table and right at me. It wasn’t much bigger than one of those little handbag dogs you see people with sometimes, but it was moving fast, faster than I could much see. I just got an impression of something reddish smeared with black, with eyes like tiny burning coals and teeth too numerous and too large for its mouth.
It hit me like a medicine ball thrown by a real big guy—it was too dense and heavy for its size, too. I was already trying to fall out of the way, so it hit me hard enough to knock me the rest of the way down and knock half the wind out of me before skittering off my chest and hitting the wall of the workshop. It rang the metal wall like a great big bell and left a dent in it the size of a bowling ball—and I got a good look at it for the first time.
It was built long and low and wide, like some kind of desert lizard. Its head was too damned big, something between a tiny alligator and a pit bull, and its front legs were about twice as big as the back ones and equipped with a couple of talons each that left deep scratches in the steel wall as it thrashed its way to its feet, focused on me, and let out a furious hiss.
Well.
I ain’t much afraid of a fight, but I ain’t a damned fool, either. I didn’t wait around to give it a chance to come at me again. It might have been little, but it was quick, and it was armed well enough to cut steel. I figured it wouldn’t have much problem with my coveralls, or the flesh beneath. I was on my feet and running before it had fully gotten its balance back, out the door, into the sunlight, and smack into Fred.
We both went down and I felt a sudden hot pain in my leg. Fred was carrying the flamer, which was basically an insecticide sprayer we’d rigged up with more flammable fuel and a propane pilot light. That’s what had burnt my leg. I seized the flamer from him and hoped he’d taken the time to pressurize it before lugging it up. I turned the wand to the door of the workshop and squeezed the handle.
Fred had gotten it ready. Flame washed out into the doorway.
The critter, whatever it was, must have hit the fire because it let out the most godawful scream I’ve ever heard—high-pitched enough to make my fillings ache. I kept the spray of fire aimed at the door until the screaming stopped, and then I kept it there for a few moments more.
By the time I let up and lowered the wand, there were a couple of tufts of dried grass and weeds on either side of the workshop door that were burning, but the critter, whatever it was, was gone.
“What the hell, Sid!” Fred stammered. “What the hell was that?”
I shook my head and rubbed at my chest, where the thing had hit me. I had a feeling that I had gotten real lucky. Like, if that little critter had gotten its claws into me, it would have just buzzsawed its way right on through.
And there would still be the original mess to clean up, sure as anything.
Some days, this job is just one damned thing after another.
* * *
“Sid,” Mister Pitt said a while later, in his office. “We swept the entire workshop, but we didn’t find anything.”
I sat across from him. Mister Owen Pitt had his own office and it was surprisingly small and surprisingly neat. Pitt didn’t exactly look like a small, neat guy. He was about my age, right around mid-twenties, and one of the bigger, meaner looking cusses I’d seen in a life thick with big, mean cusses. He was educated, too. Accountant for the organization—and he could handle a shotgun like Fritz Kreisler could play a fiddle.
“It was there,” I said.
He lifted both hands. “We found the marks on the wall. I believe you.” He rubbed a hand back over his hair and sighed. “Milo thinks it might have been some kind of parasite in the mirelurk.”
I smiled slightly. “Mirelurk, huh?”
“I killed it, I name it,” Pitt said. “We’ll have everyone keep their eyes open, but we’re dry. Maybe it crawled off and died.”
“Maybe,” I said. I straightened my coverall a little and said, “You didn’t call me in here to tell me nothing got found.”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably and said, “Yeah. Look, Sid. Some things have come up missing.”
I frowned for a minute and then said, “I’m not a thief.”
“It’s just that,” he began.
I stood up and said, louder, “I’m not a thief.”
Pitt rocked back in his chair and his eyebrows went up. “Sid,” he said, in a level tone, “you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re a buck fifty. Maybe.”
“So?”
“So I’d break you in two,” Pitt said.
“Unless I got lucky, yeah,” I said. “You call me a thief again and I guess we’ll see.”
“Christ, Scrappy,” Pitt said. “Take it down a notch. I’m not calling you a thief.”
I felt a little bit foolish. I took a deep breath and then I sat down. “Sorry.”
“And I thought I walked in here with a chip on my shoulder,” Pitt said.
I was quiet for a minute and then said, “Me and big guys haven’t gotten along. Sorry.”
“Sure,” Pitt said, and exhaled. “I guess Holly is right about you.”
I tilted my head at him. “Miss Holly said something?”
“She said you were the wrong kind of stupid to be the thief. That it wasn’t how you’d do it.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll allow that I can be powerful stupid at times.”
“You and me both,” Pitt said. “Thing is, some things have gone missing all over. Food from the commissary, a computer from the locker room, some varmint ammo from Milo’s workshop, a couple of supplies from the infirmary, some sheet metal from the metal shop. There are only three people in the whole place with keys to all of them—Earl, you, and Fred.”
I grunted. “Maybe it isn’t Mister Harbinger.”
“Maybe not,” Pitt agreed.
“Fred isn’t a thief,” I said. “He works slow and he maybe isn’t too bright. But he isn’t the kind.”
Pitt spread his hands. “Sure. I can go with that. It’s not even that much money involved. And I’m not accusing anyone of anything yet. But we have to know what’s going on. You know?”
I subsided a little and said, “Guess you gotta do your job.”
“Yeah,” Pitt said. “Exactly. Which is running numbers and killing monsters and not necessarily in that order. So I’m doing what all good middle management does. I’m sharing the grief. This is your problem now.”
“What?”
“You’re around. You’re capable. Find out what’s going on. Let me know what you learn.”
I grunted, warily. “I can keep my eyes open, I guess.”
“Good,” Pitt said. He looked at me for a minute and said, “Trainees worked you over pretty good.”
“Had worse,” I said.
He eyed me. “Where?”
“Cash fights.”
“MMA?” he asked.
“Warehouses mostly,” I said.
He snorted. “How’d you end up here?”
&n
bsp; “Took the wrong money. Wound up in a cage match with a goddamned zombie.”
Pitt puffed out a breath. “Unarmed?”
I nodded.
“You went bareknuckles with a zombie and won?”
“Well,” I said, squinting. “I cheated. I wasn’t supposed to walk out, but Earl was there. Offered me a job after. Seemed like I’d taken my fight career as far as it was going to go.”
Besides, I hadn’t had anyone to be with or anywhere else to be. I guess Harbinger picks up quite a few strays.
“So now you make minor repairs and clean up messes,” Pitt said.
“Not as exciting,” I said, “but there’s more time to read.” I stood up and asked, “Anything else?”
“Oh. Dorcas said something about rats again.”
I pursed my lips.
Huh.
“Fred’s on it,” I said.
“Fine,” Pitt said. “Good job surviving today. Find out what’s going on. Try to stay out of trouble for a while.”
“Will do,” I said.
* * *
The next morning, I came out of my quarters, a single-room miniature apartment in the subbasement of the HQ building…and found Don’s dead body.
The trainee had fallen on his side and curled into a fetal position—or at least that’s what I thought he’d done until I got out my flashlight. Once I had, I could see that I’d been right about everything except which way he had curled. His body had bent backward in such mortal agony that it looked like maybe he’d broken his own spine. He was lying in a pool of congealing blood, thick and black and sticky like some kind of terrible pudding.
From the throat down, he looked like sausage fresh from a grinder, covered in so many wounds that it was hard to tell when flesh ended and shredded clothing began. It was eerie to see his handsome, horrified face on top of those injuries, clean and neat except for where a bit of tissue had been stuck to a shaving nick.
The smell was intense. My stomach heaved. But I hunkered on my heels and looked at him, because finding a dead man that you’d quarreled with a few days before seemed to be the sort of situation where you’d want to know as much as possible before going on about your day.
The wounds were fine, fine things, like someone with X-acto knives for fingers had just gone to town on him.
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