She didn’t get an error message, so she hoped it went through. After the photo, she typed, I have your tentacle monster. I want my bounty.
There was a long, tense moment where Sunny wondered if her note would go through, then the reply was, Where are you?
The moment of truth. Did she tell them and risk getting brought in herself? Or did she merely leave the monster tied to Bertha and walk away? Either way, they could figure out who she was with a little investigative sleuthing.
I’m on 34 th Avenue, Sunny typed. Bring an army.
I’ll be right there, was the response. The DPS office was, after all, only eight streets away.
Bring an army , Sunny repeated.
She got no response.
Out on the road, the thrashing had become so violent that she was surprised Bertha still had her tires. There was a definite rhythm to its motions, though. Forward, back, forward, back… Like it was trying to throw it…
Or push-start it.
Sunny narrowed her eyes, realizing the motion might be enough to get the engine started—if it didn’t break the crankshaft or rip the truck in half. She watched as the octopus screamed and twisted. Forward, back, forward, back…
It was trying to get the shark hooks to let it go, she realized. Two of its bigger tentacles had found the place where she’d attached them to the bed of her truck and it was yanking on them, flinging the truck back and forth as it tried to yank out the eye-bolts.
Forward, back, forward, back…
Fuck it.
Sunny dodged out of the crowd and lunged back into the driver’s seat. Big octopus arms came lashing out from under the truck, slapping at her legs through her chaps and denim, the spines gouging holes in the heavy work clothes and scraping rust and paint off the bed of her truck. Sunny slammed the door shut, took off the emergency brake, and put Bertha into second gear. With a sudden lack of resistance, the tentacle monster all but flung the truck down the street, and, with a few thousand pounds of monster momentum behind it, Sunny let out the clutch and immediately gave it some diesel.
Bertha sputtered to life.
Push-started by a forty-foot octopus. She’d have to add that to her resume. Even as the monster was clawing back down the cable, Sunny hit the gas and Bertha leapt gleefully forward with a heavy diesel roar. If there was one thing her big, clumsy, gas-guzzling truck was good at, it was hauling and pulling things.
And, even though her net was ripped to shit, the cables went tight, and the shark hooks held on.
Then, already feeling the slight fuzz of allergic reaction through the antihistamines, Sunny road-hauled a shrieking forty-foot tentacle-beast down 34th Avenue. The combination of Bertha’s roar and its scream was so loud that people ran out onto their balconies overhead to stare. Seeing the writhing ball in her rearview, Sunny had to give it a smug grin.
“Don’t worry!” she shouted to it. “I won’t eat you right away!”
She took a careening turn on C Street, watching through her mirror as the monster slammed into a newspaper dispenser and popped it loose of the bolts holding it to the curb.
“I’ll wait for a sushi party!” she shouted, as it tumbled over the newspaper machine and slammed into a wall.
Now that Sunny knew what D.P.S. stood for—Division of Paranormal Security—she knew the people at the address on 42nd Avenue were more likely to lock her in a cell of her own than give her a bonus, but this thing had gone after her nephew, and nobody fucked with Sunny Day’s family. She decided if they wanted to give her crap about it, she would just take it to Banks Tower at 36th and C and leave it for the Governor to explain to the cameras.
Sunny Day, monster-hunter, Sunny thought, grinning. She could see it now—her face in the papers, Governor Black handing her the reward money, the Dome Police coming to her for tips on how to catch bad guys, Gary getting a basement job as Sunny took his place…
It was a good image, and she was still grinning to herself when, on the middle of C Street, the tentacle beast grabbed the joint between truck bed and cab, and tore off the back half of her truck.
Bumper, bed, tailgate, everything above the axle sloughed away to bounce in the street. As Sunny was staring at that uncomprehendingly in her rearview, she saw the monster roll in a wadded ball into an alley, dragging her truck bed with it. She slammed on the brakes, which, without the weight of most of the truck bearing down on them, worked well enough that Sunny smacked into the steering wheel with her face.
Straightening from the wheel, Sunny prodded her bloody nose. Not broken, but damn close. She grabbed a wadded-up oil rag from the floorboard and held it to her face as she opened the driver’s door.
Leaving Bertha running, Sunny jumped from the cab and approached the alley where the creature had disappeared. Immediately, she saw the disembodied blue truck bed, now motionless in the street. In the alley, a man in chef’s garb emerged from the back of a restaurant with trash bags in his hand. He paused, raising a brow at the truck bed.
“That yours?” he asked.
“You should probably go back inside,” she whispered. Sunny carefully slid around Bertha’s bed to get a look at what was on the other side.
The cables disappeared down a manhole, into the sewers. They had gone slack. She tentatively reached out and tugged one. No resistance whatsoever.
A minute later, a text, I’m at 34 th Ave. Where are you?
Sunny laughed—more desperation than anything else—and didn’t respond.
“This your truck?” the chef repeated. Like he wanted her to pick it up and take it home.
“Shhh.” Sunny tiptoed over to the manhole where the cables disappeared and squatted to peer into the darkness beyond. The shark hooks glinted in the reflected sunlight, empty.
“Better get it outta my alley,” the man warned.
Sunny spun to glare at him. “Dude, I said be quie—”
A massive tentacle snatched her off the asphalt, bashed her against the sides of the manhole, and dragged her into the darkness.
A moment later, Sunny found herself dragged underwater. Deep underwater. It was ice cold and it caught inside her leather almost immediately, leaving it bulky and heavy around her body, and she couldn’t tell which way was up. All around her, she heard a roar of air and water as something was thrashing the water, the pounding current pulverizing her from all sides.
Almost as soon as she was fully submerged, Sunny felt the monster release her. She immediately started to flail at the water, trying to right herself in the roaring chaos around her. The rush on all sides rolled her like a lotto ball, giving her no purchase on anything, no solid surface with which to orient herself.
I didn’t know there was so much water in the sewers , she thought as she flailed in vain to get purchase on anything at all. Though she knew she was just a few feet under the streets of North Anchorage, it almost seemed to her like she was suddenly struggling for her life in the middle of Niagara Falls. She couldn’t feel the bottom or sides of the sewer system, though she could hear water pounding all around her. As she struggled, she caught a glimpse of a ring of sunlight above her, through what seemed like several feet of water. Deciding to aim for the light, she struggled through the pounding cascade to find her way up, knowing her next breath might be her last.
Sunny broke the surface just as her lungs were cramping. Waterfall, she realized, seeing the torrent cascading down dark rock walls. How the hell did I get stuck in a waterfa— She sucked in a brief lungful of air as she went down again, the waterlogged leather and boots dragging her back to the bottom. Sunny ditched the jacket, tried in vain to remove her laced-up work boots, and struggled to get back to the surface before her burning lungs forced her to take in water.
The second time she surfaced, she was farther from the churning falls and managed to find purchase with her feet, at first just touches of her toes to the rocky bottom, then more regular footholds as she swam farther from the falls, towards the river draining from the rock bowl. Then, crawling to
the edge of the pool, she pulled herself out of the water and up a gravel embankment.
Her lungs felt like they were being squeezed in a fiery fist, her vision was going dim again, and she’d lost half of her emergency supplies in the jacket. When she looked down at her ankle, it was bleeding through the heavy work pants from the stinging grip the monster had used to haul her into the sewers. Vision dimming, she yanked the fabric up to examine the damage to her leg.
The skin was puffy and white, and there was a ragged tear in the skin of her ankle dangerously close to the vein, but Sunny was relatively sure she wasn’t going to bleed to death. Air, at this point, was her biggest priority.
With cold, numb hands, she unzipped her fanny pack and found the albuterol. She took several puffs and fell backwards onto the gravel bank, just focusing on her breathing. Her IV bag was gone with the jacket, and the EpiPen would only dull the effects temporarily. She’d already dosed herself up with Benadryl, so the reaction wasn’t as bad, but there were still several minutes where Sunny teetered on the edge of passing out.
Once she was relatively sure she wasn’t going to lose consciousness, Sunny forced herself up on her elbows to take stock of where she was.
She was, to all appearances, reclining at the edge of a waterfall, her legs still submerged in the icy water of a river pool.
She wasn’t trapped in some sewer cesspool or sitting under a culvert on the shore of the Cook Inlet or swimming in some sewage treatment plant. Somehow, she had ended up in a natural river system with a natural rock formation carved by thousands of years of running water. How that was possible, though, defied all logic. There were no river systems near 8th Avenue…
Then she recognized the place and her startled mind did a double-take.
This is Thunderbird Falls , she thought. It was the same waterfall in the mountains she had hiked to with her parents only a few days before her mom got trapped on the wrong side of the border when the Canadians invaded in ’93 and again with her father to study spawning salmon before the Four Bridges Rebellion of ’97 got it sealed away from the public.
Then it hit her.
Away from the public .
Sunny scrambled up the embankment to look around. Seeing the same rock walls, the same mossy crevices, her heart sank. Thunderbird Falls and everyone in the area had been sealed away from the Domes by a thirty foot Fabriglas wall, a sort of rogue state in the middle of Alyeska, Edward Banks’s solution to a brief revolt by fellow Alaskans.
What was worse, Thunderbird Falls was thirty miles and two domes away from where the tentacle beast had dragged her into the sewers in the North Dome. Logically, there was no way she could be sitting at Thunderbird Falls. Sunny wiped icy water out of her face with her goosebumped arm, trying to figure out if she was hallucinating again.
She took a good look at the ancient, water-smoothed rock walls, felt the misty breeze blowing from the falls, smelled the native cottonwood and birch as their springtime leaves started to unfurl… If it was a hallucination, it was a very good one.
But if it wasn’t a hallucination, she was screwed. Really screwed. There was no road back to Anchorage—the people north of the Chugiak Dome had been condemned, their habitations sealed from civilization, trapped between the Knik River to the north and the mountains to the south and east. After the Four Bridges revolt, it had been a total lockdown—not even reporters were allowed in to document their living conditions. To the Domes, the people out here were dead.
Now that her startled mind was able to process where she was, Sunny was beginning to notice that there was something different about the falls since the last time she’d been there. It felt…colder…and not all of that could be attributed to the fact it was mid-May. It was a soul-deep cold, one that hit her bones before her skin. And the pool seemed to luminesce, despite the glaring sunlight overhead.
Then Sunny saw the glowing philodendrons lining the rock walls, carefully planted into cracks and crevices in the stone bowl surrounding the falls. Like luminescent fairies’ tears dribbling from the leaves, the psychoactive drug was diffusing into the raging water beneath.
She crawled the rest of the way up onto the gravel embankment to get away from the water. So she was drugged…or teleported. She didn’t like either option. A week ago, she automatically would have assumed it was the former, but after seeing a forty-foot tentacle beast crawl out of the ribcage of a man, she really wasn’t going to rule anything out.
She unlaced her boots and dumped the water out, trying to process how she could have gone from getting grabbed by an overgrown octopus in the middle of North Anchorage to floundering in Thunderbird Falls thirty miles north. The sun was still high in the sky, pretty much where she’d left it, so as far as she could tell, she wasn’t missing time and could probably assume it was the same day.
Once her boots were empty, she went down to the shallows and fished out her waterlogged jacket and its medical supplies, then spread them out on the gravel bank to bake in the sun. Thunderbird Falls, like Eklutna, wasn’t inside a dome, so it still had undiluted sunlight and natural breezes to dry her. The swelling in her leg eventually went down and her lungs recovered, but aside from the puffiness subsiding, she’d seen absolutely no change in the clarity or intensity of the hallucination. After waiting several hours and feeling the sun start to cool, she decided that she needed to approach the situation from a new perspective.
Unless something proved it to her otherwise, she had to assume she was somehow actually physically in the condemned area north of Chugiak. And now, if she was going to stop that piece of shit octopus from killing anyone else, she needed to somehow traverse the thirty foot walls, three domes, and thirty miles separating her from North Anchorage.
That, she knew, was going to be a problem, since a lot of trees in Alaska didn’t even grow to be thirty feet, and there were armed military patrols across the top of the Eklutna Wall to keep people out.
Which meant she either needed to figure out how she got dumped in Thunderbird and reverse the process, or learn some really good ninja wall-climbing techniques.
Though she knew it was a long shot, Sunny stripped down and, leaving her slightly-damp clothes piled in the sun, swam out into the middle of the icy pool. Fighting the current and the roiling water of the falls, she groped for a dimensional gate back to the sewers under North Anchorage.
Aside from one brief moment where it felt like a slimy log brushed her leg, she found nothing at all in the water except rock walls and gravel bottom. By the time she finally convinced herself there was nothing there to find, her limbs were numb with cold and her body was on the verge of hypothermia. Struggling with defeat, she pulled her damp clothes back on with the sinking feeling that her next few days were really going to suck. As far as Daphne knew, Dortez had won and her twin sister was now buried in a ditch somewhere, and unless Sunny could get the word out, no one would ever know differently.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have a phone—she’d left it in Bertha—and even if she did, there wasn’t service this side of the Dome. Fighting a growing lump of dread, Sunny decided to hike back to the road. With roads came people, and with people came options. Maybe someone had a HAM radio or something that they’d be willing to trade for an EpiPen. Maybe. And then maybe Gary was a ‘sweet man’ with a ‘big heart’.
She shuddered.
The asphalt of the road—which hadn’t been repaired since the Stone Rush Quake of ’97—looked like it had been rototilled, the tilted, car-sized chunks barely distinguishable under the overgrowth. Thick stands of fireweed, dandelions, irises, and willow trees grew through the cracks, making it essentially impassable by anything that ran on petroleum. Even the footpaths were overgrown, probably because most everyone was dead.
After the 9.4 magnitude quake in May of 1997, the government had chosen not to rebuild the four bridges crossing the delta formed by the Knik and Matanuska rivers, instead finishing the E. Banks Bridge straight across the Cook Inlet. This had left the thousand
s of people who lived in Thunderbird Falls, Eklutna village, and the surrounding areas struggling to find enough food to eat, since direct supplies from Palmer had been cut off, and any food imports now had to be trucked the long way around through four separate Domes—and pay Dome tax on each—before they got to Eklutna.
The community saw a three hundred percent increase in food prices after the earthquake, and they simply weren’t able to feed themselves. Most had fled for the safety and plenty of the cities when offered refuge in government apartments in exchange for relinquishing title on their land. Those who had stayed had done so out of sheer stubborn tenacity—or the admirable unwillingness to give up their ancestral home for government handouts—but even they hadn’t been able to manage a winter without food. Their ‘revolt’ had been more of a protest calling to rebuild the four bridges severing them from Palmer than an actual coordinated attack, mainly an attempt to raise awareness to the food shortages. Five protesters had been killed by government pacifiers, however, and the protests had devolved into a riot, which had escalated into a war that other Domers had started to get behind. After all, the Dome taxes were widely unpopular.
Banks’s solution to the Four Bridges Revolt had been simple—if the rebels around Eklutna didn’t like paying Dome tax, then they didn’t have to…if they could live without the rest of civilization to support them. Back then, Sunny, along with most of the rest of Alyeska, had thought that was a good solution.
Now that she was out here, however, trapped on the other side of the wall, seeing the empty, collapsed houses and the broken-down cars being eaten by brush, with the abandoned feel of the place seeping into her from all directions, Sunny was starting to wonder.
At the junction of the highway and the road to Thunderbird, Sunny stopped to look for smoke from the native village of Eklutna. She could just barely see the remnants of some small wooden houses through the trees and overgrown plants.
But no smoke. Despite protests from the powerful Native Council that the wall would isolate and destroy the 800-year-old village of Eklutna, Banks had sealed the northern exits of the Chugiak Dome and had built a Fabriglas barrier between the edge of the Dome and the inlet, and another that extended east over the mountains, sealing Eklutna in with the rebels.
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 15