The Bone Triangle

by B. V. Larson

  We walked several blocks. Once we entered the Triangle proper, I knew where I was. The city was virtually empty. Only a few lights gleamed in high windows. I wondered if there were holdouts, refusing to accept the fate of their neighborhood and the inability of the authorities to take care of it. There were always a few diehards when disaster struck, people determined to ride it out.

  “I would have expected a panic by now,” I said, “and a lot of news stories.”

  “People are good at ignoring what they don’t want to think about. But there was a camera crew out here earlier. The brass wanted me to shut them down, but I just gave them directions into the middle of the Triangle instead.”

  I glanced at him, and he grinned back.

  “You wouldn’t really do that,” I said.

  “Nah. I’m joking!”

  I shook my head uncertainly. McKesson had a strange sense of humor. “It sounds like you’ve been lucky so far. Someone will get a video online of this thing soon, and the story will be out.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” he said, and stopped walking.

  I paused and looked around. We’d reached a corner that was just as empty of traffic as the rest. I craned my neck, and then I saw it. The opposite corner of the intersection was blackened with soot. The concrete walls had been heavily damaged, as if wrecking balls had taken out random sections of it. This was clearly the burned-out building he’d been talking about.

  “You think it will come back here for more?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. But we have help tonight, and we’re supposed to meet him here.”

  He walked over to a manhole and knelt beside it. The circular cover was an old steel type with a checkered top. I followed him and watched warily. I had an idea who he meant for us to meet.

  He lifted his hand toward me, palm up. His fingers made a grasping motion. “We’re in town now, hand it over.”

  I reluctantly took out his gun and laid it in his hand. It was loaded, and giving it to him was hard to do. I still didn’t trust him. But I didn’t think he’d brought me all the way out here just to blow me away. McKesson was more direct than that.

  He took the gun and tapped the steel barrel on the manhole cover. He tapped out a pattern of ringing blows, then scraped it over the surface three times. He repeated the process several times.

  “Morse code?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, but kept tapping and scraping. After a minute or two, he swore and leaned back. “Should have come by now or signaled back. I hope he didn’t get himself into trouble.”

  McKesson did it one more time, but in the middle of it stopped the signal. The manhole cover had changed. Instead of a rusty metal surface, it became an inky black pool of nothing. Out of this nothingness arose a familiar figure. A moment later, Gutter Jim stood in the middle of the street.

  “What took you so long?” McKesson complained.

  “You guys are way off target. It’s in the city now—it’s in one of the casinos.”

  “The Lucky Seven?” I asked.

  “Good guess. Come with me.”

  Gutter Jim slid from sight down into the manhole again. McKesson hurried after him. It was a strange sight to see; it was as if they were climbing down a ladder into a pond of black oil. When it was my turn, I made a face, then forced myself to put my foot down into that murk. I felt something solid, but it was moving downward and felt like an escalator taking my foot out from under me. I tried to recoil but found my foot was stuck and being sucked down. I went with it, heart pounding. It was either that, or I was going to have my leg pulled off and my body folded into the shape of that manhole. The force was irresistible, once the process had begun.

  I entered Gutter Jim’s domain. To my credit, I managed to do it without panicking.

  The underworld was cold and full of echoes. The walls were dark wet concrete and the ceiling was ribbed by pipes that dripped thick drops of water into my hair. Sometimes, the pipes hung low, and I found I had to duck in places as I hurried after the other two men.

  Gutter Jim and McKesson were almost out of sight around the next bend. I splashed after them, trotting. I wanted to shout, “Wait up!” but resisted. Call it a matter of pride.

  I caught up with them several twists and turns later. They stood over a shaft that went down at an angle. Gutter Jim was giving McKesson urgent instructions.

  “You have to go down to come up again,” he said. “This leads down to a cistern, the main one that feeds the casino.”

  “Why so deep?” McKesson asked doubtfully.

  “There are five floors of basement under the Lucky Seven. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

  “I knew about the counting rooms, but—”

  “There’s more to it than that. They have a big pumping station down there. It’s a wellhead that provides most of the Strip with its water supply.”

  “A well in the desert?”

  “There’s water almost everywhere—if you dig deeply enough to find it. Anyway, slide down there and find the access ladder. You’ll be in pretty deep at that point, but you can come up inside the building.”

  “Why can’t we go out in the street and walk into the building?”

  Gutter Jim laughed unpleasantly. “You missed the festivities the last time it took out a building full of people. If you’re on the ground floor, you’re part of the buffet. It’s catching everyone and sucking them down with its tentacles into its pocket world.”

  “Wait a second, it has more than one tentacle now?” I asked.

  “It always did, I’m sure. Either that, or it’s invited along a crowd of its closest relatives. The Beast has opened up paths in the basement and extended tentacles up into the floors above. Your mission is to find one of those rips and slip inside—without being caught and eaten.”

  I stared at him. I was liking this “mission” less every second. “What the hell are we supposed to do then?”

  “Kill it, of course.”

  I reached down and touched the fanny pack that still rode on my belt. The contents were soft and lumpy. Could the liver poison something so huge? I didn’t want to go in there and accomplish nothing more than to piss it off.

  “Can’t we just attack the tentacles?”

  “Sure, but so far that hasn’t done much—other than make it angry.”

  McKesson stood at the entrance to the slanting hole and stared down. He didn’t look any happier than I did, but he did appear to be more determined. “This thing has got to be stopped. People are dying out there, Draith. Are you in or out?”

  “After you,” I said. McKesson was all business now. There was an invader in the middle of town, and it had never been worse. I felt the same call to arms he did, but I was feeling a little more cautious.

  McKesson grimaced as he put both feet into the pipe and slid down. He vanished into the slimy hole with surprising speed. I heard a tiny splash from below.

  I looked up at Gutter Jim, who seemed to be amused. “Is this a sewer or fresh water?”

  “The water’s sweet. Now get in there and kill that thing for me, Draith. I know you can do it.”

  I stopped and frowned. I wanted to ask him why he couldn’t go after this monster himself. I already knew the answer, of course: members of the Community rarely risked their own skins.

  “Draith,” McKesson called up to me from the pipe. His voice was oddly distorted. “Come on. Don’t chicken out on me now.”

  I got into the pipe and looked at Gutter Jim. There was a strange light in his eye. He was eager to see me go down that chute. “If I pull this off, you owe me one,” I told him.

  “You’re demanding payment?” asked Jim in surprise. “I don’t know whether to laugh or fly into a rage.”

  “Do whichever suits you,” I said, “but I’m doing you a favor and I’ll be asking for something in return.” Then I slid down the pipe into blackness.

  Behind me, Gutter Jim decided what his response would be. He laughed loudly, and the sound of his m
irth chased me all the way down that long, slippery pipe to the bottom.

  I splashed into a pool of inky black water. It came up over my ankles and made my shoes feel heavy. I stood up and banged my head on the curved concrete roof. McKesson turned a flashlight on me and smirked.

  “Only the best duty for us rogues, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  From the pipe behind me, laughter still burbled.

  McKesson gestured up toward Gutter Jim. “You must have really pissed him off,” he said. “He only laughs like that when he’s mad.”

  “At least someone is laughing down here.”

  We pressed on under larger pipes. The ceiling was low and the shaft upward was easy enough to find. Unfortunately, there was no ladder in sight.

  “I’ll leg you up to the wheel,” McKesson said.

  He was heavier than I was, so it only made sense. I didn’t enjoy the ride, but I managed to stand on his laced fingers and twist open the portal overhead. It was rusty and squeaked as the wheel moved. After a minute or so of struggling, we had it open.

  “I take it I’m going up there first?” I said in a hushed voice, staring into the dim light above.

  “Just get up there.”

  I struggled and grunted, but finally managed to pull myself up out of that wet hole. The pump house was noisy and warm. The heavy steel machinery buzzed and churned. Every pipe was painted gray or green, and the paint had peeled off the big rivets at the junctions.

  I rolled away from the hole and breathed for a minute. McKesson hissed up at me, insisting I hurry up and get him out.

  I grinned and almost shut the door on him. It would have served him right for a dozen things he’d done to me, but I didn’t do it. Instead, I found a skinny ladder with worn metal rungs and slid it down the hole. He came up a moment later and looked around, frowning.

  “It’s empty,” he said.

  “Just the pumps and us.”

  Above us, then, we heard something new. A huge grating sound. A tremor went through the concrete walls. I could feel it best in my feet, the vibrations transmitted right through my shoes.

  “What the hell was that?” McKesson whispered. “Feels like the whole building is coming down.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “But something big definitely moved. Maybe a support gave out. Or maybe the Beast just squeezed and popped a few walls like buttons.”

  McKesson looked at me with wide eyes. I rarely saw real fear in the man, but this was one of those times. I didn’t like it. I preferred the aloof, iron-man McKesson who scoffed at every form of death.

  He grabbed hold of himself as the tremors stopped. “This way,” he said, all business again. We headed for the only door in evidence. The door was steel, with a normal doorknob. McKesson tried it.

  “Naturally, it’s locked,” he said. He waved me forward. “We need some magic here.”

  I slipped on my shades and twisted the knob. It moved freely in my hand—but the door was still stuck. After a moment, I caught on.

  “It’s not locked,” I told him. “The building has shifted and put weight on it. The door is stuck.”

  We both worked on it for a minute or two, but a single doorknob didn’t give us any leverage. McKesson pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the lock, but I stopped him.

  “It won’t do any good. And a ricochet could kill us.”

  “What then?”

  I rummaged in my backpack of tricks. I pulled out the bottle. I adjusted my shades and told McKesson to hide behind the pump housing. He did so, and the bottle began to glow as green gasses pooled inside.

  I let it burn the door. In close quarters, it wasn’t a good experience. A gush of heat and plasma blew back into my face. It felt as if I’d just opened an oven or a door that led into a flaming room. My eyebrows were singed, as a dragon’s breath of heat and light flared and backwashed over me.

  The door didn’t go down instantly; it took about two seconds of beaming. But then it sagged and melted like a candle in a fire. I put away the bottle and McKesson came out of hiding.

  “That’s a new trick,” he said, impressed. “And a good one, too.”

  Together, we kicked out the slag remains of the steel door. It went down with a crash. We peered into a corridor full of steel pipes and chips of concrete.

  “The walls are breaking up in spots,” I said. Even as I pointed this out, the building shook again. A tremendous noise came over us, like that of a passing freight train. We ducked—it was impossible not to. When it passed, our faces were grim and coated in gray dust.

  We didn’t cower this time; instead we moved faster. I thought we were going to have only minutes before the monster that assaulted this building brought it down completely.

  We found a flight of steps at the end of the corridor and took them upward. We appeared to be at the bottom floor of the basement. We went up another floor and halted upon finding our first victim.

  A wide-shouldered man in coveralls sat on the steps. He was in shock, and his right hand was missing. He held the wrist clamped with his remaining hand. His face was white and his eyes were ringed in concrete dust.

  It seemed clear to me he was the janitor or a superintendent. I asked him his name, but he didn’t answer. He just looked at us in confusion.

  “Come on, no time,” McKesson said, pressing past the janitor. “We’ll help him by stopping the Beast. Let’s see what’s at the top.”

  “Don’t go up there,” croaked the man on the steps, speaking at last.

  I looked at him. “What’s up there?”

  “Something big. It took my hand off. I don’t know where it went.” I kept staring at the pool of blood that had soaked into his coveralls. It was difficult to look away from his missing hand. He seemed hazy and strangely calm about the whole thing, but I couldn’t help wondering what bizarre mouth was chewing on his missing appendage.

  McKesson checked his gun for the tenth time. “We’ll be careful.”

  I followed him up. We took the steps two at a time. We couldn’t have been more than a few floors below the lobby. We slowed down and stopped talking. We could both feel it—and smell it. A dead-fish odor filled the stairwell.

  When we finally met up with the Beast, we weren’t disappointed. The tentacle was huge, much bigger than anything I’d seen before. It was pink and gray, mottled with brown and black spots. The underside of it churned with suckers.

  “It’s so big!” McKesson whispered. “It must be five feet thick.”

  I didn’t think it could hear us, but I whispered, too. “Do you think we can get past it?”

  It wasn’t moving much. We were clearly near the root of it, and the business end was several floors above. It started in the access doorway that led to the floor we’d just reached, one level below the lobby. The tentacle led up the steps like a vine into the floors above. I was sure it was reaching higher and higher in the building, looking for fresh game. Like a man with his arm shoved through a mail slot, it groped blindly, feeling its way.

  Hugging the outer wall, we walked up a few more steps.

  “Put your poisonous hunk of meat on it,” McKesson told me.

  “Rostok said not to. He said to kill the Beast, I had to reach the core.”

  “So? Kill a tentacle and make it pull back.”

  I shook my head. I wanted more than a piece of it. I wanted to kill the whole thing. I wanted to hunt this monster, the same way it had been hunting citizens in my town for weeks. I’d seen so many good people die, and I didn’t want to see any more of it. Jacqueline’s face came to my mind, and my resolve increased, overcoming my fear. I figured if I did try to poison it and it lost a limb, it might retract and hide again, injured but not finished. Right now, I had the element of surprise. It didn’t know I posed a serious threat. If I revealed myself now, catching it off guard later would be all the harder.

  We moved to where we could see the access door. It was thoroughly choked by the tentacle. The door itself was off its hinges,
lying on the landing. The oblong doorway didn’t fit the tentacle very well, being a round peg rammed through a rectangular opening. The tentacle ran with dark liquids that must have been blood where it had been forced through. The casing around the doorway was twisted, and the concrete blocks had been broken out in spots, like chipped teeth.

  “There’s no way to get past it,” McKesson said. “The gaps are too narrow. If it shifts, it would crush us.”

  I assessed the situation and agreed with him. Without declaring the retreat formally, we both turned and ran down the steps.

  Perhaps it was this movement that alerted the creature to our presence. Or maybe those suckers could taste our scent in the air. I’ll never be sure.

  But the Beast noticed us then and decided we were prey.

  At any given time before today, I’d only seen a single tentacle. I’d wrongly assumed the Beast was limited in this regard. When it sensed us creeping around at the root of its thickest appendage, however, it sent another one snaking after us.

  It didn’t come down from above, squeezing past the hugely thick one that reached up into the guts of the building. Instead, the second appendage came from the floors below. Our first clue was the dismal cry of the janitor.

  We rushed down just in time to see him being dragged away by one ankle. He still held his severed wrist with his remaining hand. His head bounced on the concrete steps as the Beast pulled him down, and his eyes were so big and round they looked like boiled eggs.

  This tentacle was no thicker around than a telephone pole—thin and weak in comparison to the one we’d met upstairs. McKesson’s pistol was out and it cracked loudly. He was a good shot, and the tentacle burst open. It twitched, but didn’t stop in its grim mission. A dark slick of alien blood wet the steps, greasing the way for the helpless victim.

  “Close your eyes!” I shouted at the janitor.

  He squeezed them shut, but his mouth remained open. He howled in pain and fear as the tentacle whipped him around a switchback, banging him against the handrails made of steel tubing. McKesson threw me a surprised look, but lifted his sleeve over his eyes when he saw me pull out the bottle and direct it toward the tentacle purposefully.