“You need to talk about it?”
“Nope,” Sunny said. “Just wanna take the fucker out.”
“All right. Just keep me updated. I’ll start setting up your alibi.” Her sister hung up.
Sunny found herself grinning, again feeling the closeness she’d once had with her identical twin. Then she thought of Gary saddling her sister with six kids, with Number 7 on the way, and her face tightened. If Daphne hadn’t spent the first fifteen years of her life playing with dolls and cooing over kids, Sunny probably would have put a slug between his eyes when he knocked her sister up on summer break on their fifteenth birthday. Instead, Sunny had found Gary—who was four years older—and had ziptied him to a spruce tree on a cliff overlooking the Matanuska River and left him there until the Troopers could come get him down. Her dad, a biologist who happened to have some contacts in Fish & Game, had made sure that had taken a couple days.
When he’d been allowed to come down off the cliff, he’d been shivering, babbling incoherently, and sunburned to hell. Ever since, Gary Gables had displayed a strong fear of two things—excessive heights and Sunny Day. Daphne, on the other hand, hadn’t talked to her for a year. It had been the first time they’d ever fought.
Grimacing, Sunny turned Bertha around. This wasn’t Gary. This was an overgrown squid, and it had tried to squish her. Like a bug. Like a pest .
After everything she had been through, that was the last straw.
It pissed her off even more than Daphne confessing that she’d finally managed to convince a boy to get her pregnant. It was triggering something inside her, sparking a long-buried sense of pride. It thought it was smarter than her.
She didn’t have enough money to make rent anyway, so why not use what she had to stock up on monster-killing supplies? After all, who said guns wouldn’t work on this thing?
Or tasers, for that matter? Or fire? Or bear spray? Or fucking katanas? She could go right down the damned list until something stuck, and her target would be none the wiser.
Sunny took a really long look at the bruises on her face, remembering the monster’s disdainful sneer. “You think you’re somehow going to contribute great things to society caking your fingernails in rock dust…” Like she was the shit on the bottom of his shoe. Like she was no more interesting or important than a roach . Her decision hardened like a knot within her.
Fuck this guy. Fuck him so hard.
She returned to the outdomer parking garage, took the ticket from Brent and opened up her phone, looking for information on mollusks. She started taking notes.
Soft bodies. Vulnerable to drying out. Many used a shell to protect their vital organs from predators. Some, like cuttlefish and octopus, were very good at hiding. Creepily good, in fact. Somehow an eight-armed creature the size of a cat could make itself look like a waving stand of seaweed in under twenty seconds.
So, good at hiding and only vulnerable outside its shell.
Unfortunately, she discovered that tranquilizing mollusks wasn’t really a thing. Worse, they were flexible, squishy, malleable, and strong, so cages usually didn’t hold them for long. Even closed aquariums presented challenges to keeping them contained.
That sucked for someone wanting to capture one alive.
Assuming, of course, that a tentacle monster was even remotely similar to an octopus, which she knew was probably not the best assumption to make.
Still, she had to have a starting point.
The first thing Sunny did was sneak into the closest hospital, Dena’ina North Regional, and raid a med closet for some heavy-duty antihistamines, then grab a handful of EpiPens, steroids, and albuterol from another ambulance that she made into an emergency kit and wore in a fanny pack around her waist. Then, the next morning, doped to the gills on Benadryl, she decided to do some recon.
Chapter 8: Reconnaissance
For two more days, Sunny followed Dortez, learning everything she could about her target.
Which, unfortunately, wasn’t much.
He was eye-wateringly predictable. Each day, he kept to the same routine. First the high-school teaching job, then the Alyeska Postal Service, then the therapist, then the accountant, then his home. Daphne, thankfully, kept Jake from returning to class, and, over the next two days, Sunny kept her interactions with Dortez brief, instead questioning everyone around him about what they knew about him.
“He’s such an asshole,” a teacher’s assistant confided to Sunny in the staff breakroom Sunny’s first day back. “He doesn’t even care that he’s driving kids over the edge. I tried to confront him about it, but he just laughed at me and said that was the best part.” The woman was red-faced and visibly shaking. “He’s killing those kids and it’s gonna be our fault!” Two days later, that teacher wasn’t on break at her normal time. When Sunny asked what had happened, one of the other teachers shrugged and said she had committed suicide in her apartment.
Sunny spent the entire rest of the day prickled with goosebumps, feeling like she had a target painted on her back. She spent that evening tracking down the most recent suicide numbers in North Anchorage. The coveted North Anchorage Dome, she discovered, had a reasonably low suicide rate amongst Ordinaries, Desirables, and Necessaries—the only social classes that had been documented. Until, that was, the start of the year.
Out of the four and a half million people who lived in the North Dome, the yearly average of suicides for the last ten years had been three hundred and twenty deaths, give or take fifteen. In the first quarter of 2018, however, the North Dome had seen over six hundred and eleven suicides.
“Holy shit,” Sunny whispered, reading that statistic several times. If she was reading it correctly , suicide rates of 2018 were up seven hundred and sixty percent from the previous years. Seven and a half times the normal rate. A projected twenty-four hundred people if the rate carried through the rest of the year, rather than the average of three hundred.
Could she really lay that at the tentacle monster’s feet, though? She knew of five confirmed suicides tied to Gabriel Dortez. That was a far cry from six hundred.
Still, the facts were worrisome. She wondered what kind of drugs he was using on them to push them over the edge. Then, thinking of the phone call to China, she wondered if it just sheer emotional and psychological manipulation. Either way, the effects were grisly and evident, and she had to do something soon.
Unfortunately, she had no fucking idea how to take down a massive octopus that seemed to be hiding what had to be thousands of pounds of tentacles inside the skin of a man. Following him wasn’t helping, because all he did, day in and day out, was make people miserable. She found no additional clues, no means of pinpointing his motive or techniques, let alone his strengths or weaknesses.
Outside Dortez’s class on the second day, after receiving a threatening call from her landlord telling her she’d missed rent that month and she had two days to pay up—with a hundred dollar late fee, of course—she ran into Arielle Westerly yet again. The girl was once more sitting with her knees to her chest against the wall, sobbing. Her once-starched shirt was rumpled and stained, and her fingernails were dirty, her skirt was frayed, and her hair a snarled rat’s nest.
A little concerned by how disheveled the girl looked, Sunny sat down beside her. “Everything all right?”
“I got another F,” Arielle whimpered. “I won’t make it into Valdez Academy now. They won’t take anyone who’s flunked a class.” The girl’s mascara was running into two huge tear-streaks down her face, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. In fact, she looked almost…dead.
“Hey, it’s gonna be okay,” Sunny insisted. “One class can’t stop you. You’ll make it.”
Arielle gave her a little look of hope. “Really?”
“Really,” Sunny said. “I would know. I got a F in English, but Valdez still took me to train as an EMT.” Granted, her English teacher at the time had been a close relative of Gary Sister-Fucking Gables and Sunny had refused to take the woman’s class after she�
�d called her a juvenile delinquent and tried to get her thrown into the McLaughlin Youth Center for tying Gary to a tree. Sunny had egged her floater, retaken the class with another teacher, aced it, and later explained herself to the entrance panel, to some raised eyebrows by her evaluators.
Arielle looked her over curiously. “I thought you were a student here.”
Sunny supposed she should feel flattered she could be mistaken for a kid at thirty-three. At five-four and a hundred and twenty-six pounds at last weigh-in, she guessed she still had the physique of youth, though it was more due to a lack of food than a defiance of age.
“I’m an investigator with the BPI,” Sunny said. “Checking on Dortez. There’s been some…complaints.”
Arielle’s eyes widened as if that were the best news she’d heard all year. “Could you do something about him?” She quickly glanced over her shoulder at the door, then leaned closer. “I mean, there’s really something wrong with that guy. Nobody believes me, though. They think I’m just overreacting because of the grade.”
“I might be able to,” Sunny acknowledged. “I need more observation time to compile my report.”
That seemed to piss Arielle off. “Why?! He’s faking my test scores! You’ve sat through his classes! He got Bobby and Drake to hang themselves. What more do you need to see? He’s praising the jocks who don’t do their homework while he’s calling kids like me losers and blockbait.”
Sunny tensed at ‘blockbait’. “Not all blockkers are stupid.”
Arielle snorted. “They wouldn’t be blockkers if they were smart.” Said with the full faith and confidence of a privileged Desirable teenager. Sunny made a face, thinking maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that Arielle was getting her glass house kicked in.
Then she thought of the four teenagers who had killed themselves and immediately felt bad. She decided she needed to bring Dortez down soon, and whatever she did, she needed to do it quick before he could hurt any more kids.
As soon as Dortez left his class, Sunny tailed him until he left the building to cross 34th Avenue. Once she watched him walk into the RAPS office for his daily dose of harassing would-be package shippers, she jogged down to Bertha, which had received a $250 emissions ticket in her absence, then she drove to the northern edge of the Dome and parked in an outdomer lot and walked to the cushy apartment complex on 8th Avenue to spare herself another ticket.
She stopped at the huge polished granite columns outside the front doors to the Northern Aurora apartment complex. She had once lived in a place like this. Luxuriously large spaces, big windows, custom-shaped stone baths and kitchen countertops, stone floors and private balconies. She’d actually lived in this same building for a few months, while living with Harris.
Remembering that brought back a flood of acrid memories, unbidden.
“Why the fuck are you never home? Are you cheating on me?”
“Yeah, uh, you were due to be back to work last week and you never showed up. We had to hire someone else.”
“What little girl? There was no little girl. The whole thing was a phony call.”
“Machine guns? No, you guys just hit a patch of water and hydroplaned in the rain. Tumbled you around pretty good. Sgt. Gilles actually had to have lead shrapnel removed. He’s still got it on his desk.”
Never mind the fact that nothing in a goddamn ambulance was made of lead. Sunny remembered the thunking of gunfire, remembered watching officer Gilles go down, remembered the sledgehammer-feel of a bullet to her own shoulder.
She wondered if Harris had found another girlfriend. After their breakup, he had publicly called into question whether or not she was even in the ambulance during the accident, and all her benefits had been revoked. Having her injuries ruled a self-inflicted gunshot wound while she had been playing hookie from her job had not gone over well, and the government had decided not to pay for her medical fees due to ‘gross civic negligence’ and ‘irresponsible, unprofessional behavior unbefitting a Class A citizen’.
Bitterly, she went inside and found the front desk.
“Yes?” a perfectly-tanned lady in Domers’ perpetual summer clothes asked pleasantly, before getting a good look at Sunny. Once she did get a good look, she made a face. “We already have a repairman on staff.” If she remembered Sunny, she didn’t show it.
Sunny, who had actually interacted with the woman on a daily basis three years ago, made a pleasant face to hide how much that hurt. “Actually, I need to talk to you about an apartment.”
The woman’s dubious look twisted into a grimace. “Yes, well… Before we get into anything, I really think you might find yourself more comfortable elsewhere.”
Sunny, who hadn’t been able to afford accommodations at an expensive, snobby, gaudy place like one of the vast apartment complexes on 8th Avenue for three entire years, now, nonetheless felt her hackles raise. “Why?”
The woman was cruel as she smiled. “We have a very…high…standard for our residents. This is the Aurora, after all. Not…” the woman gestured at Sunny’s dusty clothes disdainfully, “…a medieval coal mine.”
Sunny glanced down at her scruffy clothes, once again feeling that rage building inside her. She was wearing her everyday work clothes, the best stuff she owned. Granted, she had slept in it stretched out across Bertha’s oil-stained front seat the last six days, but she was reasonably sure it didn’t stink, and all the bloodstains were low on the leg, barely noticeable…
“You really should go somewhere else before I call in security,” the woman said, smiling through her teeth, with absolutely no concept of how much she was hurting Sunny with those words.
A former EMT who had saved hundreds of lives, dressed in her best earthly possessions, speaking politely and with intelligence…and the lady had looked down her nose at her as if she were an unwashed hobo. Maybe, Sunny thought, fighting her fury, the lady needed to spend a couple days working the blocks and battling mosquitoes and negative temperatures outside the Dome and realize just how removed from being a real Alaskan she and her short shorts and perfectly tanned skin really were.
“I’m an EMT,” Sunny said. “I was on call nearby and I got an emergency dispatch that a man in room 5043 is in the middle of an acute fæcal encephalopathy with the potential for a full rectocranial obstruction, and that it’s probably already spread to other people in this facility. The closest ambulance is at least ten minutes away. You’ve gotta get me into that room before that man dies and more people are affected. You, for instance, are showing some of the signs.”
The woman’s eyes widened a little. “What signs?”
“Of being a shit for brains with your head up your ass,” Sunny said, beaming. Then, over the woman’s head, “Oh my gawd, please tell me you guys got her expression on camera!”
The woman turned hurriedly, because in Sunny’s experience there was no greater way to get a person’s attention than to mention they were being filmed.
When the woman turned back with a blank expression, Sunny rushed forward as if she were out of breath. “I’m an on-call EMT and I just got a call we have an acute fæcal encephalopathy happening right now in room 5043. The ambulance is ten minutes away—I have to get up there and save that man’s life right now.”
The woman looked her over with a grimace. “You’re dressed like a blockker.”
“I’m usually stationed at a worksite over on Fourth, tourniqueting crushed limbs and stuff. Come on!”
The woman grimaced and started to glance uncertainly at her phone. Before she could look completely away, Sunny snapped her fingers and said, “We don’t have time for you to make a phone call. There’s a man dying up there. Gabriel Dortez, Room 5043. Acute faecal encephalopathy. I need the key.”
Very reluctantly, the woman entered an access code and pulled a special master card from her desk and stood up. “I’m really not supposed to do this, but if he’s hurt…”
“He’s not hurt, he’s dying .” She gave the woman—she remembered her nam
e was Sandy—a critical look. “You do know what an acute fæcal encephalopathy is, don’t you?”
“Of course I know what that is,” Sandy said, getting a little indignant. “Come on.” She started to the door to her office and the elevators beyond. Sunny snagged the key from her as she went by and stuffed it into her pocket.
The woman slowed and turned back. “Hey!”
“Did you see that guy?!” Sunny cried, pointing behind the woman. “He just took your keycard!”
The woman turned, forgot what she was doing, and started meandering back to her desk. Sunny slipped back out of the office and headed to the elevator. The key worked on the elevator, which required an access card for all floors 7 and higher. She got off of the fiftieth floor, found room 43, and let herself inside the darkened room.
Sunny got a little tingle of unease as she stepped across the threshold, her arms going up in goosebumps almost as soon as she was fully within the monster’s abode.
The place was dark, cool, and moist, approximately the same conditions she expected to be the preferred habitat of a slug. It smelled of fungi and the walls were tacked with massive sheets of clear plastic. Sunny counted eleven humidifiers working in various corners of the rooms. Aluminum foil had been stretched over the windows overlooking the city, blocking out the midnight sun. Plants that had a slight purple glow to the edges of their leaves dominated the low-light interior.
The apartment itself was a three bedroom, but the kitchen had been gutted and replaced with a waterfall. No cooking implements of any sort. The living room was covered in slippery rocks and moss. And in the very back, filling up an entire bedroom, she stumbled upon a huge pool of water that glowed softly blue in the darkness, like a hot tub except surrounded by dozens of pots of lush, blue-rimmed plants that reminded her of one of her sister’s philodendrons.
It was the philodendrons themselves that Sunny was pretty sure were causing the water to luminesce, for the fine edges of their leaves were alight in a cerulean glow. As she watched, a drop from a leaf fell into the pool, causing a concentrated burst of blue light before it diffused into the rest of the water.
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