"You're speaking gibberish, Hack."
"He means he's become an Other," Swift said.
It spooked me for a second because he had been silent so long.
Hack's eyes, the way he just ripped reality a new one and hurled bolts of lightning like it was nothing, it was all beginning to add up. It was insane, it shouldn't actually be possible, and it kind of scared the hell out of me, but it made sense.
"Not entirely, I'm still me. I'm still Hack, Tommy. But I'm a lot more than that now, too."
"How?" My brain was whirring so fast it was a tremendous effort just to form that question.
"Boy this is a conversation for another time. Unless I'm remembering wrong, we got a book to find and an Armageddon to stop," Hack said, and yeah, he was totally right. As much as I wanted to know more about how he'd changed it would have to wait.
"You're right. Devlin said the creature Grannok was working with usually hangs out underground, in the sewers. He called it Flesh-Thing," I said and sat back around.
Hack and Swift made simultaneous noises of disgust when I said the name, and we rumbled back out onto the street.
"Why do I feel like everybody knows more than I do?" I asked, as much to Hack and Swift as myself.
"I haven't heard that name in years. I thought the stupid thing had finally died," Hack said.
"Me too," Swift said.
That figured. But if this Flesh-Thing individual made its home in the local sewer system, I knew exactly how to find it. The incident with the Broken Circle may have been a harrowing, disgusting nightmare but I met the most interesting, and unlikely, of allies. He knew every stinking inch of Hanford's dubious underground guts, and commanded an army of millions. My favorite part, though, was that he worked relatively cheap.
"Swift, take us to the closest liquor store."
"I really don't think now's the time to get hammered," Swift said.
"Not for me. We're going to visit royalty, and it's only proper to bring gifts."
"Royalty? What're you playing at, boy?" Hack said from the back seat.
"We're going to see the one true King of the Roaches, Uncle Satan."
Chapter Ten
At the local Stop-N-Rob, I convinced Swift to pay for the most expensive bottle of hooch the grandly mustachioed proprietor had behind the counter. I swore it was for the good of the cause, necessary to the continued existence of Creation at large.
"So, I just blew sixty dollars on a bottle of liquor, and we're going to go give it to some bum under the freeway?" Swift said as we pulled out of the lot and headed towards the freeway.
"Not just any bum, the King of the Roaches." I said, cradling the bottle in my lap.
"And this guy can help us?" Hack asked.
"Who do you think it was that actually destroyed the Broken Circle? This guy's no joke. For real."
It was Uncle Satan who tipped me off to the Broken Circle's true motives, and who led his filthy legions into battle against them. I just tracked them down and let him at them. He wasn't an Other, but I don't quite think he was a mage, either.
All I knew was that he was completely, literally, bugshit insane.
We made our way past Downtown, heading south. We went beyond the shops and suburbia, passing by the giant skeletons of old factories and smoky little bars. There was a strip mall where all the store's names were in different languages and just beyond it the freeway overpass. The thing was a massive concrete and asphalt gateway arching over the road. On the other side was a third-world reenactment of the Wild West. The property value plummeted as soon as you passed under the shadow of the freeway, there were sections of town out here that the police refused to go near, and with good reason. The local human tribes dominated.
South of the freeway was the one section of town where I feared the humans more than the Others. Life was deplorably cheap, and any number of criminal activities could be seen occurring in broad daylight. The Others were a distinct presence of their own, though. The wild ones, the angry ones, the Others who had trouble blending into the populous on the other side of the freeway. Most of them stayed away from the streets during the day, thankfully.
"Take a right up here then go ahead and park. Uncle Satan's usually giving sermons at the tent city around now," I said and Swift pulled off onto a side road, coming alongside a stretch of empty dirt, a vacant lot under the shadow of the freeway, where some of the city's social detritus had built their own ramshackle community.
There were real tents, but most of it was a combination of salvaged cloth, timber, and sheet metal. People in heaps of cast-off clothing milled about, some pushing loaded down carts with their entire lives inside. Not many people know it, they never take the time to, but most of a city's homeless are wise to the ways of the Other Side. The faceless and nameless make easy prey for those Others that would feed on them, so they traded centuries of gathered lore to defend themselves. Its why so many of them behaved so strangely, or collected odd trinkets and talismans, though some did that because they were just legitimately disturbed.
"This looks like a happening spot," Swift looked out at the tent-city.
"You'd be surprised the kind of stuff you can find here."
I stuffed the bottle of booze into my bag and got out of the car. This time of day there weren't too many of the usual bums about; most of them were at their posts in front of various stores and other places, panhandling or rooting around for cast-away treasures.
Swift and Hack followed me as I made my way through the field. We caught a fair number of looks and were given a wide amount of space; the folks here weren't really used to visitors and were a tightknit group at the best of times. I spotted a pack of people standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle, listening to a man at their center whose throaty baritone cut over the noise of the freeway.
"Canst thou feel the earth tremble and stir? Canst thou hear the ugly sleeping things as they cry out beneath it? The time is coming I tell thee, and there's not a man alive who can stop it. Old, terrible things awaken. Find shelter, find harbor, find a great big box to crawl into."
He was a great big bear of a man, dark piggy eyes hidden in a mass of wiry hair and a beard with a potato of a nose growing out of. The beard moved, the astute observer could see many-legged things crawling through its dark curls, there was something that was probably once an enormous bathrobe wrapped around his bulk. He stopped speaking when my group and I walked up, and every eye in his congregation turned to us.
"The Grey-Man comes, grave friend and deposer of false monarchs. Dost thou see, my brothers and sisters? What else but grim tidings wouldst carry him forth from his darksome abode? Speak Grey-Man; share thy words of stinking doom."
"What the fuck is his problem?" Hack said under his breath.
I glared at Hack before stepping forward and brought the brown-wrapped bottle out from my bag. Yeah, the whole situation was patently ridiculous but needs must and all that. I cleared my throat, and lifted the bottle.
"Oh one true King of the Roaches, I come before you a mongrel seeking succor. Take mercy, may this gift please you and your court."
Something flashed in Uncle Satan's eyes when he spotted the bottle; he made a quiet, hungry noise in the back of this throat. One of the bag-people in the crowd darted forward and snatched the bottle; it got passed from hand to hand until it landed in the ham-hock paws of Uncle Satan. He stripped the bag off of it, turned it over in his hands and swirled it around, eyeing the amber liquid lustily. He popped the cap off, upending the bottle into his mouth. The things in his beard writhed when some of the liquor splashed out while Uncle Satan took several long, gulping swallows.
"It is good. The Grey-Man's gift is good! We shall hear his troubles and offer what council we may," Uncle Satan said after he had drunk his fill, and passed off the bottle to the nearest vagrant.
The whole thing was like being in a bizarre, drug-fueled RennFaire. If I could get away with making a terrible reality-TV show about my life and the irreparab
ly damaged characters in it, I'd be a millionaire.
"Great king, I come before you seeking answers about a creature most vile, a creature the Others know as Flesh-Thing. I have been told it lives beneath the ground in the stone-bound rivers that carry away man's filth, the home of many of your children."
Uncle Satan held out his hand and from the sleeve of his robe the single most gigantic cockroach I had ever seen crawled out and stood in his palm. He held it up in front of his face and mumbled quietly to it, and it waggled its antenna at him. They went on like that for a time, the giant and the bug, then the roach disappeared back up his sleeve and Uncle Satan turned back to me.
"Indeed we do know this Flesh-Thing of which you speak, Grey-Man. Long and long it has hidden in the darkness below, but my children tell me it has risen in recent nights and goes about on mysterious errands," Uncle Satan said.
"And your children know where the Flesh-Thing goes to ground?" I asked.
"They shall show you the very hole the filthy worm last crawled from, Grey-Man. Good hunting, and should you meet your end may it not be with girlish screams," Uncle Satan said with a magnanimously raised hand.
A peculiar noise began, a cacophony of clicking and rustling. Uncle Satan raised his arms, the clicking growing louder, and hundreds of cockroaches of all shapes and sizes flooded out from his beard and hair and robes, he actually shrank as they departed him, like it was the bugs that made up his mass. They swirled in the air and darted about, a brown dervish. The roughly man-sized horde of roaches spilled onto the ground and shot off in a moving, clicking, living carpet.
"Thank you, good king. There's going to be another bottle for you in your future, if there is a future." I actually bowed.
The much smaller Uncle Satan gave a tip of his bushy head and turned to duck into his tent, robes hanging off his stick of a frame. Things were working out, and it looked like there was a distinct possibility I would be getting paid today. I took off after the roaches, Swift and Hack trailing behind. Despite the various aches and pains in my body and an irritating limp, I kept up with them as they scuttled away. The swarm made its way across the field and cut across the street towards a main thoroughfare and onto another side street.
To the casual observer it probably looked like three grown men were power walking behind a brown carpet that sped along the ground, which is exactly what it was. I caught a few drivers goggling at us as they passed by, and we even got a few honks. Just another day in the life and unfortunately not even close to the weirdest thing I'd ever done in public. They were leading us to a dairy feed distribution plant, a great big expanse of packing sheds and truck stalls and a complex of mobile trailers acting as offices. There didn't seem to be anyone around, and the cockroaches crawled under the rolling chain-link gates to the high fence that surrounded it.
"Don't suppose you got the key in that fancy man-purse of yours do you?" Hack said.
"No, no I do not."
Swift stepped forward without a word, took the edge of the gate in his hands, and shoved. The wheels ground back and sparked across their tracks, from somewhere down the way the mechanism that was supposed to move it made a cracking and grinding sound of protest as it flew open.
"That also works. Good man. Angel. Whatever the hell you are," I said to Swift as we walked through the gate.
The cockroaches had moved ahead, I could see them as a dark spot on the ground making its way to one of the empty truck stalls. We caught up and saw the roaches had formed a circle around a drainage grate sunk into the center of the concrete pad. I could just barely hear the sound of running water coming from below, and the cockroaches had all turned to look down the hole, their antenna pointing down into it.
"I think it's safe to assume it's down there." I looked at the edge of the grate where the concrete met the metal and saw that the edges were cracked and crumbled, the grate itself sitting slightly askew. Something had moved it, "Swift, if you don't mind."
Swift stooped and slipped his fingers in-between the metal and the concrete, and with what looked like a deceptively gentle motion flipped the industrial grate off. It clanged down on the ground and the smell of mildew and sewage wafted up. Hack poked his head over the hole and looked down, eyes casting blue light down and revealing a set of metal rungs that descended into the darkness.
"Lightning hurling, spontaneous healing, and flashlight eyes; that's pretty impressive old man. Got any other tricks?" I asked and snugged the strap of my bag on my shoulder.
"Like you wouldn't believe, boy."
"Age before beauty."
Hack made a grumble but began climbing down the hole. It must have been pretty damn deep because after a minute all I could see was a blue glow sinking into gloom. I went next and Swift took up the rear, sliding the grate back into place. The sound of running water and the smells grew stronger the deeper we went, and I heard Hack call out from somewhere below.
"Well, it's definitely a sewer."
My feet hit bottom and I looked around, my eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkness. Wherever Hack looked, his eyes threw dim blue spotlights and I could see we were standing on a small shelf of a walkway next to a swiftly running stream of sewage inside a massive concrete pipe.
"Definitely a shit hole," Swift said when he got to the bottom of the rungs.
I rummaged through my bag and got out a candle and matches and lit the candle. It didn't give off as much light as Hack's eyes, but it was brighter and less weird. The pipe stretched out in front of and behind us into the distance, the water running downstream roughly somewhere to the south so I started in that direction. There was a gentle incline to the walkway that carried us further and further under the earth. Part of my brain kept reminding me this was, quite probably, a very bad idea. I had no idea what Flesh-Thing was capable of.
"Hope you know what you're doing, Tommy," Hack said.
"You and me both."
We passed a couple places where other pipes crossed over the one we followed and every great once in a while a spot where light would shine down from high above through a grate or manhole. I gave shifting spectrums a try and wished I had sooner. On the Other Side the walls of the pipe were covered here and there with patches of glowing script and pictograms. Alien and curling, a language I had never seen before.
"You guys seeing this? The writing?" I stopped walking to get a closer look at some of it.
Hack and Swift stood beside me, Swift the ever vigilant keeping his eyes roaming back and forth around the tunnel.
He still had his sunglasses on.
"Yeah. Bunch of gibberish," Hack said.
"No. Just a language you've never heard of. That no one who's been alive for a very, very long time has ever heard of," Swift said.
"That's unnecessarily cryptic. Care to enlighten the class?" I turned to face Swift. He looked at me, at the wall where the writing was, back to me. I couldn't help but notice he looked decidedly unhappy.
"All right, but you're not going to like it. It says, 'And Vorkyzzx the Archduke of the Extinction Harvest shall awaken, the blood of the God-Spear shall be shattered, and all Creation will be swallowed by darkness. I have seen this; I know this.'"
Chapter Eleven
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" I said loudly enough to make my voice echo around the pipe.
"It means we need to hurry it up and find that damn book is what it means," Hack said.
"The rest of the writing all says pretty much the same thing," Swift said.
Maybe when this was all said and done, and I got a nice fat check from Devlin for ensuring the continued existence of everything I'd retire the snooping around in the unnatural gig. Get a job at a library, or a museum, maybe see what college was like, I'd heard it's never too late to start; something that had a more consistent mortality rate, and less opportunity for coming face-to-face with inhuman assholes intent on ending the world.
"That about settles it. We find Flesh-Thing, or Ugly-Bastard or whatever the hell it
s name is and we get the book out of him. Then the two of you obliterate his slimy ass. I'm tired of this shit already." I trudged down the pipe.
We finally ended up in some kind of junction area, the pipe emptying out into a great whirling pool of sewage in the center of a large room. The whirlpool was loud, I couldn't hear Hack or Swift behind me anymore, and my candle's light guttered feebly before giving up all together. The only light left came from the twin blue spotlights of Hack's eyes as he swiveled his head around the chamber and the dimly glowing ancient script spread randomly across the walls.
"You see anything?" I asked.
"Yeah there's a door just across the way, looks open," Hack said.
He stared and pointed his eyes straight across the chamber, revealing the door in question. It was set into brick work that looked old, really damn old, faded and crumbling, probably the first generation of sewer in the city. Framed by thick steel was the rectangular slab of the door itself, made of a flat grey metal with a heavy-duty wheel and latch in the center. It was currently slightly ajar, revealing a sliver of black behind it.
Swift took the lead and edged around the walkway to the door. He peeked in, pushed the door open, and disappeared inside. Hack went in after him and lit up the situation before I followed. It looked like the small room used to be a maintenance closet; shelves of rotted and dusty tools and cabinets lined the walls. The rear wall was raw stone, the naked earth the tunnel itself was running through, and it had another, smaller, roughly hewn tunnel cutting into it.
"A tunnel that leads, shockingly, to another tunnel. That's original. Hack stick your head in there, tell me what you see." I gave Hack a gentle shove in the direction of the dark and totally not creepy tunnel.
"You go stick your head in it."
I was about to say something clever when a noise came from the hole, a scraping and wheezing. Hack moved closer and looked down the tunnel, illuminating the outline of a figure. It was a misshapen lump on the ground, inching itself forward. It carried with it a terrible stench like a weaponized version of the sewer's own stink, concentrated and thick. There was a heaviness to it, and a hint of burning. It came into the light, lifting its head, and I recognized the pale, lumpy creature.
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