That left…what? She still wasn’t sure how Dortez had avoided those shark hooks. And something Daphne had said in jest was bothering her. What if Dortez was using what was essentially a bag of holding? How did you catch something that could slip into an interdimensional hidey-hole at will?
You take away its hidey-hole, she thought.
But how? She still believed it had something to do with those strange glowing plants that only she could see. First the plants at Arielle’s apartment—where Dortez was spending his nights—then the ones at Thunderbird Falls, where Sunny had mysteriously popped into existence after being dragged into the sewers…
She was pretty sure that after a week of no-shows she had been blacklisted for future Dome Commission projects, and just showing up for work as a blockker again could get her busted and down-ranked. She could try outdomer odd jobs, but they usually paid in barter—except the hippies outside the Palmer Dome, who often paid in food. She needed this to work.
She reclined in Tommy’s truck and tried to ignore the awkward, narrow butt-groove Tommy had left there. She missed Bertha already.
Sunny grimaced and checked the time.
8:45. The DPS agent had told her to stay put, that he would come to her. Maybe it was time for her to break down and see what he knew? She didn’t particularly favor the idea of parlaying with a law enforcement officer that could remember her name and face, but she doubted he was going to try to smear her into the pavement with a twenty-foot arm studded with injectable anaphylaxis. Then again, he’d probably try to tell her to stop hunting it and that she wasn’t qualified for the reward.
Screw that.
Her phone rang again, then beeped. Another voicemail. When she checked, it was from Tommy. “I’m outside. Open the goddamn door. I can see you in there, man.”
Sunny winced. Had Tommy stayed behind to murder whoever returned to the apartment after stealing his truck? He really did like his truck…
The longer she thought about it, the more convinced she was that that was the only reason Tommy would linger at the scene of his crime. And Tommy had gone to jail for violence more times than she could count. She supposed she could probably be considered an accessory to murder if it took place in her apartment and she was found driving Tommy’s truck with all of her worldly belongings inside it.
Besides, if she went back and had a nice civil chat with the DPS agent, maybe she could convince him it was all a misunderstanding, help Tommy unload her stuff, and get some sleep in a real bed for the first time that week before she had to pack it all up again the next morning. Granted, it was now a rain-soaked bed, but at this point, it didn’t matter.
It wasn’t the most adventurous plan she’d come up with in the last week, but after having Adventure bitchslap her to the ground twice in the same time frame, Sunny was finding herself just wanting a goddamn nap. Call her a coward, but she wanted to sleep in her own bedroom one last night before she was evicted, not cramped on the front seat of a tobacco-reeking pickup out on some lonely highway because she was undertaking some vain attempt to teach Tommy a lesson.
She thought again of the broken window, of all the stuff she’d have to unload on her front lawn because she couldn’t stand the thought of trying to carry it all inside in the middle of the night just to carry it out again tomorrow, and she grudgingly put the truck back into gear. She just hoped the light drizzle didn’t turn into a full-on storm. That would be the icing on the fucking cake.
It was about midnight when Sunny finally returned to her driveway. Immediately, she noticed that the door to her apartment was standing open. The entire building was dark.
Parked on the lawn in front of the house was a black, tinted floater with the license plate BPI-7784. A few hundred feet away, parked on the curb like a forgotten skeleton, was her mangled Ford F-350, missing its bed, bumper, and license plate. Someone had smashed the windows. Nice.
Imagining Tommy with his beloved baseball bat, Sunny sighed deeply and backed the truck up to her front door. Sitting there facing the road, she saw a strange floater parked up the street, almost out of sight behind some willow bushes. It was brand new, and looked expensive. She frowned, wondering if one of the neighbors was having friends over…
Then, switching off the ignition, she paused to listen.
The entire block was silent but for the sound of late-night birds. She could hear no signs of life coming from any of the units, not even Janelle’s usual blaring heavy metal.
The silence gave her a cold wash of goosebumps. The building was never this silent.
Nervous, Sunny picked up her phone and dialed Tommy. Only a single ring before it went to voicemail, with his usual, ‘You know who this is. If it’s important, leave a message. If not, fuck off.’
Frustrated, Sunny called again. It went to voicemail. This time, Sunny relented and left a message. “Look, asshole. I’ve got your truck outside. Found it backed to my front door filled with my stuff and figured you needed a lesson in taking what doesn’t belong to you. Come get it.” She hung up and repeated the message as a text. Then she waited.
Nothing.
Sunny really didn’t like the feeling she was getting. A solid wave of unease was working its way out of her stomach and into her arms and throat. She rang Tommy again. “Look, I know you’re in there,” she told the voicemail. “Did you attack that BPI agent?!” Or had it gone the other way? What if the BPI agent had shot him, thinking it was Sunny? He’d seemed like a pretty nice guy—pushy and wrong , but nice enough—but Sunny knew from experience that looks could be deceiving… Had Khaz actually come here to kill her?
Though her instincts were telling her this was an excellent time to drive away, she reluctantly got out of the truck. “Hello?”
She glanced around, saw nothing moving, and gingerly followed the trail up the walk.
“Tommy?” she whispered. “Please tell me you didn’t kill anyone.”
Blood had been smeared across the front porch leading up to the open door. Sunny glanced up. The neighbors were silent. Not a single light was on. More doors, she noticed, were open. Across the street, same thing. The whole block was quiet and dark, doors open.
Fuck me, she thought in horror. Oh fuck me.
A BPI raid? Was everyone in custody? Then Sunny noticed the streak of red—still glistening in the midnight sun—that started in the driveway under Tommy’s truck and disappeared up the stone steps and into her apartment.
That’s not good, she thought, swallowing. Last she heard, the BPI didn’t murder people…
Fighting a rising surge of dread, Sunny took shelter to one side of the entrance and gingerly pushed the door open.
It stopped against a foot.
Not a corpse. A foot . Truncated at the ankle. A well-used everyman’s work boot that ended in ragged meat. Tommy’s ragged meat.
“Oh shit, shit!” she cried, backpedaling until she was out standing in the street.
A completely silent, dark street. Of all seven of the 6-plexes lining it, not a single light was on.
Then she realized—if Khaz could find her via her abandoned truck and cell phone, then Dortez could have found her that way. Shark hooks would be hard to forget, and they’d led straight back to Bertha…
Which could lead Dortez to the rest of her family.
She decided right then she was out of her league and she needed to call the DPS officer. Fuck it.
She dialed his number, and a phone started to ring in the bushes near her house before she heard a curse and the sound was cut. Sunny frowned and lowered her phone. Gingerly, she said, “Khaz?”
In that moment, her apartment shuddered and the front door blew outward with a spray of splinters. A deflated, baglike Mr. Dortez—sans head, but that sweater was utterly unmistakable—came barreling out of the front of her apartment on a wave of moving tentacles.
“Die, worm!” the creature snarled, its black, beaklike mouth at the center of its chest yawning wide to swallow her.
From t
he bushes nearby came a massive flash of light, one that made the sidewalk crumble and bounced the back end of Tommy’s truck several feet towards the street. Following that, lightning slammed repeatedly into the concrete between Sunny and the monster, making Tentacle-Dortez howl and veer towards the bushes, instead. It hit them in a mass of writhing muscle and started shredding the foliage in a massacre of twigs and leaves. Someone started to scream, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t the tentacle creature.
Sunny clambered into the cab of the Chevy and turned the ignition, making the vehicle roar to life. She hit the gas and, spilling a good quarter of her earthly possessions onto the sidewalk with the Gs she pulled getting onto the street, Sunny made a break for the highway.
Later, once her heart had stopped pounding and she could think straight, she pulled off the highway and, with shaking fingers, called Tommy again.
Please let him be in the hospital, Sunny thought. Some crazy accident, nothing to do with me…
One-ring voicemail again.
“Shit!” Sunny hung up and slammed her hand against the fuzzy steering wheel. Reluctantly, she dialed the DPS agent again. No answer.
“Shit,” Sunny whispered, remembering the BPI car outside her apartment, knowing she’d probably just witnessed the death of a government official, and it was probably her fault. Technically, she was supposed to find someone and report it. She couldn’t, however, bring herself to make the call.
Dortez had found her, and it had only taken him a day. If he could find her, then he could find her family…
And, now that she was thinking about it, the DMV had been one of the establishments marked as ‘attractive’ workplaces for Gabriel Dortez in the DPS’s short dossier. She had thought that was a strange thing to mention and dismissed it, but now it made more sense—they probably suspected he’d held a job with the DMV but hadn’t been able to locate it.
Great. Fucking great. She’d given her name, photo, and address to Dortez on a platter.
Which meant, she realized with a sudden cold certainty, she had nowhere to run that the supernatural squid couldn’t find her. All it would take would be one particularly stubborn cop who insisted on putting her in cuffs before looking away and boom , she’d be a sitting duck in some jail cell somewhere.
Which meant she couldn’t run. Which meant she had to catch him and bring him in.
With shaking hands, she dialed Daphne. Her sister picked up on the fourth ring. “Sunny?” She sounded groggy. Sunny checked…it was almost 1:30am.
“Sis, we got a problem,” Sunny said. “Big problem. You and Gary need to get the kids and get out of your house. Now. Tell him you need to be put into witness protection or something.”
She heard Daphne sit up on the bed, and Gary’s question behind her. “Nothing, love,” Daphne said, before she whispered to Sunny, “What happened?”
“I think that sick freak murdered everyone on my road,” Sunny said. “Then he got a BPI agent who was trying to bring me in. I think he’s dying in a bush outside my house.”
“Wait… Murdered everyone on your road ?”
“Whole cul-de-sac,” Sunny blurted. “Daphne, he knows what I look like. He’s gonna have access to my next-of-kin.”
There was a long pause, then Daphne said, “Sunny, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying Dortez was lying in wait for me at my apartment, and I escaped, so he’s probably after you next!”
“Jesus, you’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Dead serious.”
“And people are dead?”
“I didn’t see any bodies, but I did see a truncated foot, and my medical assessment is that whoever lost it probably didn’t survive.”
“Sunny, you need to call the cops,” Daphne said.
“Haven’t you been listening ?!” Sunny shouted, unreasonably angry. “The DP can’t do anything about this, Daphne! It’s a goddamn dimension-shifting tentacle monster .”
“What about that guy who killed the bear with the chainsaw? Maybe he could help…”
“No,” Sunny growled. “I’m going to deal with it. But I need you to get the hell out of the Domes. Go stay with a friend or something. Better yet, pick a random cabin in the woods and squat in it for a few days. Don’t let anyone inside until I’ve dealt with this bastard.”
“Sunny, you’re not sounding rational,” Daphne said. “I’m sure the BPI has a division for this sort of thing…”
“Yeah, and it just killed their chief!” Sunny retorted. “Seriously. Just do as I tell you. Get out of the Domes. Tell Gary you’ve got a family emergency up North or something.”
“We don’t have any family up north.”
“Daphne !”
“Fine!” Daphne cried. “Jeez, okay. I’m going.”
“Out of the Domes,” Sunny insisted. “You’ve probably got about forty minutes before Dortez can get to you. Be on the road in thirty, okay?”
“Gary’s not gonna like this…”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what Gary wants right now, Daphne. Do you?”
Daphne hesitated. “People are actually dead?”
Sunny thought back to the darkened street. “I think so, yeah,” she said softly.
Daphne’s reply was a whisper. “Jesus. What are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna kill it,” Sunny said. “Just like the BPI should have done from the beginning.”
Daphne fell into the rationalizing tone of voice she always used when she was about to try talking Sunny out of something. “Now look, sis…”
“I’m killing it. Protect your kids. I don’t give a shit about the fat fuck.” Sunny hung up.
Daphne called back, but Sunny ignored it because she was already on the phone with her father. He didn’t answer, but that wasn’t unusual. “Hey Dad,” she said, as his voicemail picked up, “it’s me. Look, you’re in danger. This is hard to explain, but I got involved with a guy who turned out to be a serial killer, and the Dome Police can’t do anything about it. He knows where you live, and he’s really bad news. I need you to go on a vacation for a few days. Maybe go hang out in your Homer cabin—”
Her father’s return call interrupted her voicemail. Her father, who was an insomniac, obviously hadn’t been sleeping. “Sunny?” She could almost hear the papers crinkling on his desk as he worked on whatever his current research project was. “It’s late…why are you up?”
Funny story… She knew for a fact that her atheist, nothing-outside-the-box dad would not believe that she was being stalked by a giant interdimensional squid. Hell, he had been one of the ones to sign off on the ‘Bear With Mange’ story after the chainsaw massacre on that retired special forces master sergeant’s front lawn. Both she and Daphne had tried to poke holes in the flimsy government bear argument while waiting for food to be served at a family dinner afterwards, and it had resulted in all of them leaving pissed off and hungry.
“Uh, Dad, I have a friend that just bought an octopus and she’s heard they’re really delicate and she’s wondering if there’s anything she should be worried about introducing to the tank that could be deadly poisonous to it…”
“Copper,” her dad said immediately.
Sunny frowned. “What do you mean, copper?”
“Copper kills invertebrates. It affects their blood’s ability to move oxygen in their circulatory system. The hemocyanin binding effect is hobbled by copper.”
“Like, what, stab it with a copper rod and it dies?” Sunny asked, thinking of silver and vampires.
Her father was silent for a very long time, and she could just see his freckled blond eyebrow go up. Then he said, “Assuming the idea is to keep the octopus alive , I was actually thinking of the common copper medications that are used to kill unwanted algae, snails, and ectoparasites. If she uses one of those in her water, any invertebrates in the tank will be toast.”
Now there was an idea… “And an octopus is…an invertebrate?”
Her father was silent so long she thought
he’d hung up on her. “Yes, Sunny. An octopus is an invertebrate.” He cursed. “I knew you should have spent more time in school.”
“You know what, Dad?” she growled. “Screw you. I saved eight hundred and sixteen people over my life. What have you saved?”
“The entire spawning salmon population north of the Kahiltna, which includes every river, stream, and lake on the northern Yentna river system, upon which the entire northern half of the Matanuska-Susitna ecosystem depends.”
She grimaced. There was that. Back when bankstone had been discovered, foreigners had almost destroyed the salmon spawns with their mining, bulldozing the riverbeds to get access to more gravel. He’d been one of the scientists who had brought a petition to Edward Banks to curb the unregulated prospecting of bankstone. A year later, in 1991, a law passed saying the Alaskan government owned all bankstone, and private prospecting was banned. People were pissed, and Sunny’s dad had gotten death threats for almost a decade afterwards.
“That’s lame,” Sunny said. “I knew you would use that.”
“I’m busy, Sunny,” her father said. “Did you really call me to talk about octopi at one-thirty in the morning?”
Sunny grimaced, because she had. “Actually, Dad, I’m in a bit of a pickle.”
“When are you not?” He sounded exhausted and harried, like he wanted to get off the phone.
“I’m being stalked by a serial killer,” Sunny said. “He said he’s going after my family next. He already killed everyone on my block.”
“That’s nice, Sunny.”
Sunny froze, stunned. “You don’t believe me?”
She heard him yawn. “Actually, no. I think you’re probably broke and hungry and you’re gonna finish up this conversation with a calculatedly off-handed plea for cash.”
Bristling, Sunny demanded, “When was the last time I did that?”
“Last year, about this same time of night, now that I think about it.”
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 19