“Climb up its arse and make it wish it’d never been born?”
Dan winced. “I was going to say, ‘keep an eye on it,’ but whatever you think works best.”
* * *
The alley outside the club was dark and mostly deserted, aside from three lads whose bravado and curiosity had got the better of them. They flinched and shuffled backwards when Dan emerged, before realizing he wasn’t one of the monsters.
“What’s going on? What’s happening in there?” asked one of them. He was well-built and athletic-looking, and the way the others cowered behind him clearly marked him as the leader. “We left our coats inside. Is it safe to go get them?”
“Your coats are gone boys,” Dan told them. “Go back in there, you’re dead. That clear?”
All three of them nodded, the two behind more enthusiastically than the one in front. Dan stopped beside them, keeping to the shadows to avoid scaring them off quite yet. “You see anyone come running out of here?”
“Uh, everyone came running out.”
“Oh. Yeah. I mean was anyone running in slow motion?”
The front guy’s eyes widened in surprise. “Yeah! You saw him too? That shizz was crazy.”
“Which way?” Dan asked.
“He went that way, then hung a left at the end,” one of the guys in the back replied, pointing along the alleyway. “Pretty sure you can’t miss him.”
“You sure we can’t get our coats?” the one in front asked.
Dan stepped from the shadows, revealing the full horror of his face. “Trust me, boys. Run,” he growled, baring his teeth. They were in surprisingly good condition compared to the rest of him, although the men were too terrified to notice.
With a few yelps and a lot of scuffling, the lads retreated, clearing the way for Dan to go after Rooso.
Reaching the end of the alley, he emerged onto a street that swam in the blue glow of the enormous city engines hanging in the sky miles overhead. Up There was where the wealthy and well-to-do of the planet Parloo lived. Down Here was home to everyone else - the dregs, the has-beens and the never-weres.
Cars were parked along both sides of the street. Most of them were sleek hover vehicles – second-hand, of course – but there were a few old ground-huggers in there, too, in various states of disrepair.
One in particular, a battered and rust-covered Jonta Exodus, stood out as being in particularly bad shape. Dan’s mouth turned downwards in disgust when he saw it. Which was unfortunate, as it was his car.
Rooso was midway along the sidewalk between Dan and the Exodus. His arms and legs pumped as he powered himself forwards. As he was doing so at just one tenth his normal speed, though, he was fleeing at substantially less than the average walking pace.
“I told you to stay where you were, Rooso,” Dan called, striding after him and immediately starting to close the gap.
Having heard the chipmunk-like chirp of Dan’s voice, Rooso began to turn his head. This took some time, and Dan was almost on him when he finally achieved it.
“Making me come after you is not helping you endear yourself to me. I want you to know that,” Dan said, then Mindy emitted a series of bleeps to announce the slowdown effect wearing off, and Rooso hurtled into full speed.
Dan lunged, grabbing for Rooso with his one arm, but Rooso darted beyond his reach, crying out in triumph. “Ha! Can’t catch me now!” he hollered, then his eyes went wide in horror as he saw Dan slide Mindy from her holster and take aim.
“Mindy. Stun shot,” Dan barked. The cylinder spun, but the lights remained dark, other than the blinking red ‘Out of Charge’ LED above the grip.
“Ah… fonk it,” Dan grunted. He broke into a lumbering run, but he’d be the first to admit he wasn’t built for speed. Rooso was younger, faster, and driven by a terror that writhed in his gut like a sea serpent. He quickly began to pull away.
Several bounding steps along the street, Rooso looked back over his shoulder and laughed when he saw Dan falling behind. He still hadn’t faced front again when the passenger door of the Exodus opened dead ahead of him.
He hit it at speed. So much speed, in fact, that the door bent all the way outwards on its hinges, the metal screeching as the door’s working were buckled out of shape.
“Oh… come on,” Dan groaned. “My fonking car.”
If the damage to the car was bad, though, the damage to Rooso was even worse. He flipped over the buckling door, performed a full forward somersault in the air, then landed on his face, his legs bending backwards behind him until they almost touched the ground.
Dan’s first thought was, Well, that’s him dead, but then Rooso toppled sideways in a chorus of sobs and wails, blood oozing from a number of cuts, grazes and just plain missing parts in his face.
A young woman with purple-pink skin and long dark hair jumped from the Exodus, her fists raised in a way that suggested she’d never raised them before, and didn’t really know what to do with them now that she had. Her name was Ollie, and she was… well, she was complicated.
“I told you to wait in the car,” Dan grunted as he passed her.
Ollie yelped and spun, throwing a punch in his direction. It thudded harmlessly off his chin, and Ollie immediately dropped her hands to her sides again. “Sorry! Sorry, didn’t mean to… Did that…? Accident. Total accident.” She smiled, swallowed, frowned and looked down at her feet, more or less all at the same time. “Uh, I did wait in the car.”
Dan looked from her to the car and back again. He did this very deliberately, hoping it would convey his point, but Ollie didn’t seem to grasp what he was getting at.
“You’re not in the car,” Dan finally said. “You’re on the sidewalk.”
“Oh. Oh. Right,” said Ollie. She hopped into the car, reached for the door handle, and pulled the door closed. As the door no longer lined up with the opening, it sprung outwards again, hitting the sobbing Rooso on the top of the head just as he tried to get up.
“Sorry! My fault!” Ollie said, then she caught Dan’s glare and decided it was probably wise to stop talking. She caught the door on its bounce back and this time just held it closed.
Stooping, Dan grabbed Rooso by the front of his jacket and hoisted him to his feet. Then he hoisted him a little higher, so only his toes were scraping the ground. “Where did you get the device?” he demanded.
“I’ll n-never tell you!” Rooso whimpered.
Dan’s eyebrows lowered, just a fraction.
“OK, OK! Don’t hurt me! I got it from the Yaroh. They’re a gang who—”
“I know who they are,” Dan said. He gave Rooso a shake. “Where?”
“H-House of Fruit.”
Dan had a list of places that the Yaroh and their kind operated from. Dingy back rooms in dingy old bars, usually. ‘House of Fruit’ was a new one on him.
“The health food place on Ninth Avenue?”
Rooso nodded enthusiastically, flicking spots of blood into the air from the many wounds on his face. “Yeah! Yeah, that’s right. On Ninth. They made me take it, I swear. I d-didn’t have a choice!”
Dan nodded. “I thought you might say that.”
“Right! Yes! So y-you believe me?” Rooso whimpered.
“No. That’s just what they all say.”
He dropped Rooso suddenly, and something in one of the sniveling villain’s knees went crack. He fell, clutching it, and landed in a sprawling heap on the sidewalk.
Dan gestured to Ollie. “Go into the glove box,” he told her.
Her eyes widened, then darted left to right. “What?”
“The glove box. The little handle on the dash in front of you. Open it up.”
“Oh, glove box! Sorry. I thought you said ‘love box’. And I was like, ‘what’s a love box, and how do I—?’”
“Just open the fonking glove box,” Dan grunted.
Ollie opened the glove box. Several tools, a small blaster pistol with a broken handle, and a variety of gadgets that looked decidedly home-ma
de spilled out.
“Why do they call it a glove box?” she wondered.
Dan ignored her and pointed in through the window at something that looked like a copper banana. “Give me that.”
Ollie picked the thing up off the floor and turned it over in her hand. “What is it?” she asked, but then it was snatched away by Dan, and he was advancing on the guy currently sobbing on the tarmac.
“You’re welcome,” she said to his back.
“You know what I hate about people like you, Rooso?” Dan asked. He unfolded the banana until it resembled a large horse shoe. Two short metal prongs extended from the end like flick knife blades. “You don’t do your homework.”
Rooso tore his eyes from his rapidly-swelling knee and looked up. “Wh-what?”
“The device you were sold is an Etherian Coalesciser. It connects to a very specific Malwhere dimension. It doesn’t have a name, not officially, but some early Etherian texts refer to it as ‘Rokkan Nanosh’ which roughly translates as ‘hidden death.’ Maybe ‘secret death,’ depending on who you ask.”
Holding up the horse shoe, Dan watched as the ends of each metal prong began to glow. He gave a nod of satisfaction as energy crackled between them, joining the tips together with a fizzing line of blue.
“Wh-what is that thing?” Rooso asked.
Dan ignored the question. “That portal that opened? Wasn’t anything hidden or secret about that, right? I mean, that was fully out there and on display. You know why?” He didn’t give Rooso time to answer. “Because that’s a side effect of that device you used, not the purpose.”
The sound of Rooso’s sobbing took on a note of confusion. “What?”
“If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that you can’t trust the Yaroh,” Dan continued. “I mean, I’m sure there are a hundred lessons to be learned here, but that should be your main takeaway. But, to be honest, I wouldn’t bother committing it to memory. See, you’re going to be dead in the next twenty seconds.”
Rooso let out a strangled shriek of panic. “What? N-no! Please, don’t. Please!”
“Sorry, kid,” Dan said, and the expression on his face suggested he genuinely was. “Technically speaking, you’ve been dead since you pressed that button.”
He lunged forwards, thrusting the horse shoe device at Rooso’s head so the prongs were either side of his temples, and the energy was crackling through his brain.
The effect was instantaneous. His skull exploded, and the end of his neck became a heaving mass of oily shapes, all attempting to exist in the same place at the same time. A face appeared within it all, its hollow eye sockets glaring hatred out at the world, its mouth unfolding and contorting until the whole thing appeared to be swallowing itself.
There was a whispered scream that bypassed the ears and jabbed at the brain like angry toothpicks, and then the shape became vapor, and the headless Rooso slumped backwards onto the sidewalk.
Ollie leaned out through the open window of the Exodus. For a while, she said nothing, just peered down at the body on the ground, blood pooling around the gristly neck stump.
“Is he dead?” she finally asked.
Dan folded the horse shoe back into a banana. “He has no head,” he pointed out.
“Right. Right,” said Ollie, nodding slowly. “So… is that a ‘yes’?”
“Yes. He’s dead,” Dan confirmed, tossing the device through the window and into her lap. “If we’re lucky, the portal has closed, too. Wait there, I’ll go check.”
He moved to step over Rooso’s body, then stopped. Looking down, he sized up the corpse’s left arm, then glanced at his own empty sleeve flapping loosely at his side. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Pop the trunk.”
* * *
When Dan returned to the alleyway, the first thing he saw were the lads he’d tried to scare off earlier. Evidently, it hadn’t worked, as they were still there. Shame, really, because if they’d listened to him, their glistening innards might not now be painting the walls and pooling on the uneven stone slabs underfoot.
“Ah… shizz,” Dan muttered, stepping around a foot-long strip of skin and hair as he hurried towards the club’s front door. He barreled through, raising his voice as he called out: “Artur! Artur, where are you?”
The portal was gone. That was good news, at least. There were no Malwhere monsters roaming around, which was also positive, but the distinct lack of Artur made Dan uneasy. He’d assumed one of the monsters had ripped apart the guys outside, but it wasn’t unknown for Artur to lose his temper in the wee small hours of the night, and multiple violent homicides were not unheard of when someone really got on his bad side.
“Artur?” Dan called, his voice echoing around the pin-drop silent club.
“Sure, what’s all the hollerin’ about?” came a voice from over by the bar. Artur clambered up from behind it, pulling a bottle of gloopy brown liquid behind him. “I’m right here.”
Dan’s relief lasted only a second or two, before anger swooped in to replace it. “I told you to watch the portal.”
“I did! But sure, it was just hanging there minding its own business, so I thought I’d go fetch myself a refreshment or two. I had it all in hand, though, and was aware of what was going on at all times,” he said, then he raised his eyes towards where the portal had been, and his mouth became a little circle of surprise in his beard. “Oh. It’s gone. When did that happen?”
“Five minutes ago, when I closed it,” Dan said. “Something got out, Artur. Something else came through.”
“It must have been very quick,” Artur said. “Or I’m sure I’d have noticed.”
“It’s been closed for five minutes!” Dan snapped. “You didn’t notice that.”
“Well, I only turned me back five minutes and five seconds ago. Ye know, give or take,” Artur protested. “Anyway, after what I went through, I reckon I deserve a drink, don’t you? I mean, look at me.” He gestured down at himself. The long, floral-patterned outfit he wore was thick with purple gunge. “This dress is feckin’ ruined, and I’ll be scrubbing monster out of me beard for months.”
Dan buried his face in his hand. “One job. You had one fonking job.”
“Ah, relax, Deadman. Ye worry too much,” Artur said. He picked up a glass with both hands and clinked it against the bottle. “Now, are ye having one? I’m buying.”
“You mean you’re stealing.”
“Well, if ye’re going to get all technical about it, I formally withdraw the offer.”
“The car,” said Dan, turning on his heels. From somewhere in the distance there came the squeal of approaching sirens. The Tribunal. Great. Just what he needed. “And leave the bottle.”
2.
“Hold still,” Ollie said.
“I am holding still.”
“Well hold stiller.”
She chewed the tip of her tongue as she forced the needle in through Dan’s flesh, then out through what had until recently been Rooso’s. Dan had done most of the actual hacking and sawing part himself, but when it came to stitching Rooso’s amputated arm to Dan’s shoulder, the detective – in every sense – needed Ollie to give him a hand.
“Is this really appropriate for the kitchen table?” Artur asked. He’d found a change of clothes – an off the shoulder cocktail dress that exposed a full half-inch of back hair, and too much thigh for Dan’s liking – and was now sitting on the filing cabinet, clutching a drinking straw and working his way through the bottle of booze. “Ye know, hygiene issues, or what have ye?”
“It isn’t the kitchen table. It’s the office table,” Dan pointed out.
“But since we don’t have a kitchen, it’s also the kitchen table, dining table, shagging table – in fact, it’s every table we might otherwise have had, were it not for the fact that we now live in a single feckin’ room.”
“I know, but… Wait. ‘Shagging table’?”
“Ye don’t want to know, Deadman,” Artur told him. “Trust me, it’s for the best
if ye put the old detective instincts on hold as far as that’s concerned.”
“Hold still,” Ollie said again.
Dan muttered something below his breath, but tried not to move.
“So, do ye still reckon something came through yer sky hole?”
“Malwhere portal. And yes,” Dan said. “Unless those guys dismembered themselves.”
Ollie stopped sewing. “Do you think they might have?”
Dan glanced to the ceiling and sighed. “No. No, I do not.”
“Oh.” Ollie shrugged. “Where I come from, they might have.”
“Well thank the Good Lord we don’t come from where you come from, peaches,” Artur said.
“I’ll go out when this is done,” Dan said, nodding towards his shoulder and earning himself another complaint from Ollie. “See if I can pick up a trail.”
Artur took another sip of his drink, then burped. For the size of him, it was impressively loud. “Ah, I wouldn’t bother, Deadman. What’s one more monster roaming around the place? Sure, we’ve our own problems to contend with. Namely, the fecking enormous hole in the wall next door.”
Dan resisted the urge to look over at the inner office door, knowing Ollie would only moan at him again. The wind was whistling through the gap at the bottom, as it had been since the window and part of the wall had been torn inwards by an Igneon debt collector a few nights before, instantly rendering half the office space uninhabitable.
The landlord was demanding twelve grand for repairs, and while Artur had kindly offered to ‘kick the living shoite out of him,’ Dan didn’t particularly want half an office, so was keen to get the place fixed up.
He’d recently completed work on an actual paying case, but the money from that wouldn’t cover the cost, let alone leave him anything for the actual rent. Today’s monster hunt had been a pro-bono, good of the city type deals. No-one would even know what he’d done, let alone reward him handsomely for all his hard work and effort.
“And ye’re sure ye don’t have any money stashed away?” Artur asked. “Like in a secret safe, maybe.”
“You live in my secret safe,” Dan pointed out.
Space Team: A Lot of Weird Space Shizz: Collected Short Stories Page 2