“Get away from me!” the girl screamed, half sob, half insanity. She was, without a doubt, totally unhinged.
“Look,” Sunny said, “I just wanna talk about—”
A bronze merfolk statuette came whistling across the room at her, burying itself in the wall. “Go !” Arielle shrieked.
“Okay!” Sunny cried. “I’m leaving!” She backed out of the room and shut the door. Arielle didn’t follow her. Inside, Sunny heard Arielle start crying again. She was about to attempt a knock again when a phone rang. Beethoven’s 5th .
“No, I can’t go tonight,” Arielle muttered. “Mom’s grounded me until I get my Calculus grade up.”
There was a long pause, during which Arielle sniffled and started to recover. “No, look, he’s like the worst teacher ever and he’s sabotaging my scores—” Arielle hesitated. “I told you. I don’t know how he’s doing it, but it’s not me . It’s him .”
Another pause. “Drugs ? Candice?! I can’t believe you’d even say that!” There was a long pause. “Candice, what are you saying?” There was another pause, and Sunny had to struggle to hear Arielle whisper, “You’re my best friend. If not even my best friend believes me…” There was a gut-wrenching sob. “You know what? Screw you. Screw Mom, screw Dad, screw Dortez. I’m done with that class.”
It sounded…final. After a couple moments of listening to Arielle’s heart-wrenching sobbing, Sunny knocked on the door. The crying stopped suddenly. “Arielle?”
No answer. A couple from a nearby apartment stepped out into the hall, giving her an odd look before passing by and completely forgetting her.
Sunny stared at the number on the door. Room 5043. She pulled out the master keycard and swiped it. Swallowing unease and dread, she gingerly pushed it open.
Inside, a cool, humid jungle with glowing plant life greeted her. Goosebumps radiated up her arms as she watched the glowing sap drip from the foliage.
“Arielle?” she called, this time not stepping inside.
No one answered.
Okay, I am officially freaked out, Sunny thought. Which one was real and which was the hallucination? Sunny pulled the door shut, heart stuttering. She was about to wash her hands of it and walk away when she noticed there was a warm yellow light on under the door. A light that couldn’t possibly have been on in the cold, dark, glowing jungle. Further, she could hear Arielle quietly sobbing inside. After a moment, she knocked on the door.
The sobbing stopped. A few seconds later, Arielle yanked the door open, face red and puffy from crying.
“This better be importan—”
She hesitated when she saw Sunny. “Who the hell are you?” Then she gave Sunny the slow, languid perusal that her elder had given her only minutes before, her face twisting in a dismissive sneer. “I think you’re in the wrong building.”
Like mother, like daughter , Sunny thought with a grimace. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I think you’re right. I’ll go.”
“You do that,” the girl said. Then, without another word, she yanked the door shut. The light went dark again.
Is it me or is it this place? Sunny was so creeped out that she left the ghost-apartment and headed downstairs to collect the plant.
The only thing she couldn’t quantify was the plants. Did they exist or were they just another hallucination? Her gut was telling her they were real, despite the fact that neither Jimmy nor Len seemed to have seen them. They had some sort of weird effect on her Forgettability Field, but she hadn’t even been able to piece that together.
All Sunny knew, for sure, was that she had to stop Dortez before he drove Arielle—if she even existed—over the edge. That meant bagging herself an octopus.
Using money she had earmarked for last Friday’s rent, she went to a second-hand clothes store and outfitted herself in the toughest leather coat and chaps she could find—they were expensive, even used, but she couldn’t find Carhartts and figured she needed something that could ward off the creature’s barbs if she was going to survive her next encounter. At the same store, she got heavy-duty black combat boots and topped off the ensemble with a scuffed and worn orange hardhat and heavy leather work gloves.
She would have preferred the heavy canvas weave of Carhartts over denim and leather, but as a woman who alternated between size S and M, it was almost impossible to find actual heavy-duty work clothes in her size. Most of it—like the pink crap that Daphne had always bought—was tailored more for looks than for utility. Unfortunately, denim and leather was her next best bet.
When Sunny put it all on, however, she grimaced.
I look like a dominatrix who’s been spending too much time flogging blockkers at a Dome Commission jobsite. Most of her wanted to take it all off right then and there and say ‘screw it’ and fight the monster in jeans and a tank top. She left it on, however, because she would need something to protect her from what she had planned that day.
Once she had protective clothes, she went looking for weaponry. She bought a sturdy commercial fishing net from a sportsman’s resale store, along with twelve of the largest-gauge shark hooks that she could find. Because she definitely couldn’t afford a katana, she bought a nice arm’s-length machete and paid the knife sharpener in the back to give it an edge. She bought a couple hunting knives—one big one for stabbing random tentacles and a smaller one for detail work like eyeball removal—and sheathed them to her belt. She didn’t have money for a shotgun without selling Bertha, so she settled for some bear mace.
Next, she bought a gas can and filled it with gasoline—she was chewing right through what little rent money she had saved—then bought a couple Super Soakers and loaded them up.
Finally, she went to a hardware store just outside the Dome and loaded two spools of heavy cable into the back of Bertha’s bed, then installed a large eye-bolt directly in the middle of the bed. She then spent the afternoon clamping the hooks to the cables with crimps.
Chapter 9: Round Two
The fourth day after getting piledrived by a tentacle monster, Sunny finally felt like she was ready to play ball. She went back to New Republic High decked out in her dominatrix look, complete with hardhat and gloves. She stayed just long enough to ascertain that Mr. Dortez was right back to making A-students miserable, then parked the truck in the no-parking zone out front. She knew she’d get another emissions ticket, but she figured that once she had the creature contained, it would be easier to get it to the DPS office on 42nd Avenue from the school at 34th than it would be to drag it all the way from Dortez’s apartment on 8th or his accounting office on 60th , or his therapy practice on 5th , and since an emissions ticket was only $250 and she was looking at a $100,000 bounty, she could afford it.
All right, you son of a bitch, Sunny thought, time to catch the BPI some calamari. She wasn’t sure, exactly, if the BPI really understood what they had gotten into by putting a bounty on Mr. Dortez, but she was going to do her best to deliver.
They might have some idea what he was, Sunny reasoned as she set up the net outside the school, drawing the attention—and then the dismissal—of people coming and going from the front door. There had, after all, been that thing that rampaged the Chugiak Dome. The Dome Police had been tracking it for weeks before it landed in the backyard of some former special ops guy who killed it with a chainsaw.
BPI had immediately swept in and confiscated the body, of course, but witnesses had insisted that it had been something completely unnatural. The official report, issued a few minutes after the BPI had sealed down the crime scene and scurried off with the body, had dubbed it a ‘rabid bear with mange’ that had managed to slip past the barricades and terrorize the Dome. She had seen the grainy images from witnesses’ cellphones, however, and as someone who had actually seen bears, Sunny and every other outdomer who had seen the papers had known it wasn’t a fucking bear. Bears weren’t that big, and they didn’t have scales or tails.
But the Domers had bought it.
Now, Sunny wondered if it was a continuing problem. Ev
er since the deposit of bankstone had been discovered out near Skwentna and Edward Banks put it to use powering the new republic, weird things had been happening. Sometimes the truly weird.
Like over the last year, Domers’ dreams had been getting so vivid that they were sometimes having trouble telling what was real and what wasn’t. An updomer with a flare gun had actually gone around shooting people in the head, saying it ‘didn’t matter anyway because it was all a dream.’ The weird part, however, was that nobody had tried to stop him, because they had believed him. He’d gone through an outdoor café shooting people in the heads with flares and they’d all just sat around and laughed and sipped their coffees.
The updomer had been downlisted and sent north to work the oil fields, and everyone who had witnessed his breakdown had been relocated outdome for a ‘soulsearching’ in the farming community of Palmer, since there wasn’t exactly a legal precedent for sitting in one place casually drinking lattes while a madman went from table to table shooting you and your friends in the head.
Then, of course, there was the group of supposed prehistoric bats that had somehow—miraculously—taken up residence inside the Forscythe Building on the south side of the Anchorage Dome, and had been dealt with by law enforcement officers. No pictures had been published, but multiple eye witnesses had said the bats were twice the size of a human, and there had been ‘hundreds’ of them. One of the day workers she’d been chatting with on a blocking run had told her he’d seen them, and BPI had been swarming the area with automatic weapons and actually pacified the things before a single supposed Fish and Game agent showed up with his fancy black-windowed floater and declared the things to be a hereto-unknown species of bat. Right.
So, whatever she was dealing with, Sunny reasoned, it was probably on the BPI radar, they just kept the weird stuff too close to their chest to admit it was a tentacle monster on a Wanted poster. As she clipped hook-tipped tethers to Bertha, she wondered how many other things had gone down recently that the government was keeping under wraps. The chainsaw massacre in the Chugiak Dome had been pretty public and gruesome, and even though the BPI had confiscated the best video—which it still hadn’t released—a few shorter ones had gotten uploaded before BPI had stepped in.
Which meant the BPI was probably going to deny whatever happened here today, shrug off her promised reward, and she needed video to show the world. To that end, she taped her phone to the back of her truck cab, pointed at the building. Then, as classes were being let out and Sunny was finishing up with the net, she hit RECORD. She knew there were plenty of fervent conspiracy groups out there demanding the truth of what was going on in the Domes, and if the BPI didn’t want to pay out, she might just give it to them.
She sat there on Bertha’s tailgate for ten minutes before Dortez arrived, right on time. Plain, pale, weasely-looking. He had already changed into his postal clerk uniform and was breaking from the flow of students to cross the street to the post office when Sunny struck.
“Hey!” she cried, jogging towards him, out over the net lining the street. “Man, am I glad to see you!”
He gave her a look down his nose like he was smelling bad cheese, missing the shark hooks in her hand. “And you are?”
“Oh, it’s okay, you probably don’t remember me,” Sunny said, coming to a stop about twenty-five feet away. “I wanted to show you that road hazard over there.” She pointed. He looked. She yanked the bear spray from her belt and, as he turned back to continue his route to the post office, she blasted him with it. “Enjoy capsaicin , you anaphylactic sushi roll.”
This time, he visibly hesitated in slipping from the Dortez-shell, like someone trying to hold down a cough, but after she blasted the little tentacle-tips that momentarily protruded from his chest—and hopefully the beaked ‘face’ contained within—he erupted into a shrieking wall of tentacles right there on the middle of 34th Avenue, thrashing on the granite road, where she kept blasting him with the bear spray from a good twenty-five feet.
People stopped to scream and stare. Dozens got out their cameras and hit record. A few got hit by the lingering cloud of bear spray and started gagging and stumbling away. Sunny emptied the entire can on Dortez and, as the monstrosity writhed and moaned and shrieked on the street, she grabbed her shark hooks—their lines attached to the bolt in the back of Bertha’s bed—and heaved them into the fray.
Like clockwork, the palm-sized hooks found their targets in the flailing tentacles, the barbs sank into flesh, and the whole creature became a writhing mass of cables tethered to the back of her truck.
Now for Phase Two, she thought, hitting the winch in Bertha’s bed. The heavy fishing net cinched shut over her quarry, further restraining it. It must have realized it was in trouble because it started to shriek, cables dancing as a thousand pounds of muscle jerked and thrashed on them. As people all around her were staring at the flailing monster in horror, Sunny jumped into her pickup cab and, triumphant, turned the ignition.
…and the damn thing wouldn’t start.
New battery , she thought, stupidly. Bertha needed a new battery.
“Oh come on !” she screamed, slamming Bertha’s steering wheel with both palms. She glanced in the rearview. The monster was flailing on the ground behind her pickup, and there wasn’t a gas-powered car in four miles to give her a jump, because nobody poor enough to drive a diesel vehicle was stupid enough to risk an emissions ticket. “Fuck.”
The monster, meanwhile, had started to shred the net. Like papier-fucking-mâché. Even the steel cables were looking strained as it thrashed like a wild thing.
Seeing that, Sunny decided it was time for Plan B. Ignoring the crowd of spectators, she climbed through her open cab window to the pickup bed, and, as the truck jostled back and forth from the monster tethered to the back, she peeled her cell phone off the cab and ended the recording. Then she found the picture she’d taken of the Wanted poster and called the little number at the bottom. Even if she couldn’t bring the monster to them, she’d caught it, so she should get credit , right?
As the phone rang, she nervously watched the tentacle monster thrash like a worm on the end of a hook. It was inching closer to the truck in its struggles, basically reeling itself in.
“Department of Paranormal Security, this is Khaz speaking.”
Sunny froze. She knew that voice. She knew that voice waaaaay too well.
D.P.S. Department of Paranormal Security. Obi-wan. The guy who wanted to lock her up for an as-yet-to-be-determined bounty. The one who paid said bounties.
Fuck. Fuck !
There was a pause. Then, “Caller ID says your name is Sunny. If you’ve run across something you can’t explain, Sunny, it’s okay to talk. I’ll listen.”
Caller ID. Fuuuuuuuuuuck her. She hung up quickly and decided it was time for Plan C. She called her sister. It took Daphne even longer to answer, and Khaz called back twice in the middle of it.
Shit, Sunny thought, realizing he had her phone number, which meant he could track her. Shit, shit! Soon he’d know where she lived, what she drove…
As soon as her sister picked up, she blurted out, “Daphne, I’m stuck on 34th Avenue and I need a jump before Emissions sees me.”
“Oh for the love of Christ, Sunny…” Daphne growled. “You know you’re not supposed to take that Frankenstein lovechild into the Domes. It pollutes the air we breathe.”
“What happened to ‘I’ll bring my shovel’, sis ?!” The tentacle monster was actually starting to drag itself toward the truck, now, making slimy lines across the pavement as its soft body grabbed the cable and pulled.
Daphne immediately changed her tune. “You mean you’re still after Dortez? It’s been several days—I figured you gave up!”
The tentacles were reaching over the edge of the truck bed, now, and Sunny yanked her machete out of its holster and hacked at them with one hand while keeping Daphne pressed to her ear with the other. “Have you ever known me to give up on anything , sis?!”
<
br /> “Well, as a matter of fact, no…”
“Fuck!” Sunny screamed. “Hurry, goddamn it!”
“I have kids I have to look out for,” Daphne retorted. “I can’t just leave my home at the drop of a hat because you’re trying to avoid getting a ticket!”
“It’s not just a ticket,” Sunny cried. “I’m about to die !”
“Okay,” Daphne said, going into practical mode. “I’ve still gotta change the baby. Just use your voodoo on him and make him look the other direction until I can get there.”
Yep, it was definitely sliding under Bertha like a hermit-crab.
“Believe me, the baby can wait for a few minutes,” Sunny said, watching the bulk of the creature disappear under her vehicle, dragging cables like silvery snakes behind it.
“It’s shit , Sunny,” Daphne snapped. “You want my baby to wallow in its own shit so I can come jumpstart your car?”
Because she knew Daphne probably wouldn’t show up if she told her, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve got a forty-foot Cthulhu tearing at Bertha’s undercarriage,’ Sunny just cried, “Yes!”
Daphne made a huge sound of disapproval. “When you’re a mother, you’ll understand. Give me thirty minutes.” Then she hung up.
One of the allergen-spiked tentacle tips had found the tailgate. Sunny danced backwards. She started to dial Daphne again, but another call from Khaz interrupted her. The tentacle that had been prying at the tailgate ripped it off and slapped her with it. The phone went flying through the window, into the front of the truck, and Sunny fell to her knees, just barely missing the second, harder, swipe to the head.
Sunny ducked through the window as the tentacle was pulling back for a third swing, grabbed the phone off the seat, and scooted out the side door to join the hundreds of gawking teenagers on the sidewalk. She watched Bertha roll and jerk and bounce as the monster tore at the truck like a possessed thing.
Because she was completely out of options, Sunny took a picture of the tentacle monster clawing at the back of her truck and sent it to the number at the DPS address, hoping it could receive texts.
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 14