by Tricia Owens
The thing in the pool glided along the bottom toward me. I kept my eyes on it as my urgency grew. The chair was now a long, thin pole. I set it down and quickly grabbed one of the rubber mats, meddling off a square of it and molding it around the middle of the pole.
The thing in the water expanded, looking nothing like a child or even a human. It was more like a panther, but with a wide, bulky head like a hammerhead shark’s. Two, bulbous eyes broke the surface of the water and stared at me with such naked hate that I almost whimpered.
I was afraid to turn my back on it as it surged through the shallower depths but I had to find an outlet. Yet this close to the water, there was none in sight for safety reasons. The hairs lifted on my arms. I heard the sound of water pouring off a large bulk. My heart threatened to burst as I listened to the violent churn as something rushed through the pool toward me. Water spattered my back—
With a cry, I thrust one end of the long pole up into the ceiling, smashing the bulb of a pot light and ramming the metal end into the socket. I yanked the other end of the pole into the water behind me.
I heard a zap and the lights in the ceiling exploded in a shower of sparks and smoke. Ducking beneath them, I turned my head to look back fearfully at the pool.
A vampire stood twitching in the shallow end, just five feet from me. It looked nothing like the Count, its features seeming unformed, as though its sculptor had given up midway through carving its face, realizing he was creating an abomination. The vampire was hairless and naked, revealing that it was female. Or was it? Even its sex wasn’t normal—the breasts small and placed too far apart on the chest, and between its legs sprouted a misshapen lump.
Its gender might have been indeterminate, but it was definitely a vampire, for in the midst of its electrocution it managed to bare its massively elongated fangs, and black eyes glared hate at me with an intensity I’d only experienced in the presence of the Count.
Unless…this was the Count.
I should have paid more attention in school. Could they shapeshift? Was this what the guest had warned me about, that the Count tended to linger in the pool area, perhaps regenerating in a strange way?
Suddenly, the vampire in the pool exploded out of the water, knocking my pole aside and killing the electrical current. With a shout, I fell back. I slipped on the copious water that spilled around me as the vampire leaped out of the pool. I slapped at my right holster, managed to get my fingers on my gun and meddle it—I thrust the stake up as the vampire crashed into me, driving the blunt metal tip through its shoulder.
Hot liquid spurted over my face. It tasted sour and acidic. I spit it out reflexively as the weight on me heaved off. I scrambled backward across the wet floor as the vampire staggered away from me, one hand clutching at the stake I’d driven into it.
The creature warped with liquid ease. Though it made no logical sense, I attributed a sense of evil to how its limbs melted and combined with its torso. The torso shrank down and merged with the hips while its legs shortened. The stake I’d stabbed into it hit the floor with a clatter. I yanked out my second gun and thrust it out as the thing melted down into a nightmare vision of a head atop a stumpy pair of legs and feet.
It turned color, the entire thing bleeding into a black blob like the one I’d seen in the video. The head melted down, merging into the neck, which in turn became part of the torso. I yelped as the shapeless thing on two feet scuttled across the floor to the door and threw itself against the glass, shattering it and leaving sparkling shards everywhere.
My body wanted to shiver in reaction, needing a physical outlet for the horror I’d just witnessed. Determined not to give in to the useless reaction, I climbed to my feet and crept to the door. Glass cracked beneath my boots as I stepped out into the hallway, my finger ready on the trigger of my gun. I wasn’t surprised to find the area empty.
With a house phone I called Housekeeping and informed them of the mess in the pool room. Back on the mezzanine level, I went straight to Elliott’s door and knocked, even though he was probably sleeping.
He answered the door quickly, though. He was shirtless and in a pair of boxer shorts, but it didn’t look like I’d wakened him. He looked me over with shock.
“What’s that on your face, Arrow? And why are you all wet?”
“Can I come in?” My jaw ached from clenching it to keep the shivers at bay.
“Of course!”
Once inside, I went straight to his bathroom. I grimaced at my reflection in the mirror. Black liquid—the thing’s blood—had crusted on my face. I scrubbed it off harshly and rinsed my mouth out with water and the mouthwash that Elliott quickly handed me, as if recognizing my revulsion.
“You ran into that thing,” he said from behind me as he watched me clean up.
“How much do you know about vampires?” I asked him as I dried my face with a towel.
“Well, er, the usual, I guess.”
“Can they shapeshift?”
“I’ve never heard of that happening.”
I dropped the towel and turned around to face him. “That doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”
Elliott shut his eyes. He’d figured it out. “The Count attacked you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Why it’s only now that he’s begun taking on this shape…it doesn’t make sense. Then again, Dr. Day checked in, and that could have been a catalyst.” I didn’t want to say it but I had to: “I want you to stay away from him until I know for certain what’s going on.”
Elliott opened bleak, gray eyes. “He wouldn’t hurt me.”
“You’d bet your life on that?”
With a devastated expression, Elliott shook his head.
“I’ll get to the bottom of this,” I promised, feeling badly for him. But I couldn’t promise that what I learned would be what he wanted to hear.
Chapter 9
Before the attack and after speaking with Nathaniel, I’d intended on leaving the hotel. However, I’d lost the initiative and only wanted to lock myself in my room and calm down. The strange encounter in the pool room had unnerved me, made me feel even slightly ill, so I crawled into bed and watched TV until I fell asleep. But not before meddling the door to my room to merge with the carpet below it.
In the morning, I felt groggy. I probably needed more sleep, but I couldn’t lie around in bed all day while shapeshifting monsters roamed the halls. I needed answers, and I needed them to be unbiased. That meant leaving the hotel.
Trying to locate the Center for Living Resistance was sometimes an exercise in patience. I wasn’t a patient person. I cursed Wolfgang as I squinted yet again against the sun and drove my scooter in a seemingly endless loop through the streets of Victory City in search of his RV.
My cursing took on a new, urgent tenor when the police car pulled into the lane behind me.
I tried to drive naturally, but I was all too aware of my scooter’s meddled license plate that wouldn’t register in any database. Sure enough, I heard the blip blip of a warning siren and lights flashed briefly in my side mirrors.
I was glad for my helmet, which hid the color and length of my hair, but that was only a temporary defense. If I let the police pull me over they would demand to look at my ID and magic certificate card, which I of course didn’t possess. I could either tell them the truth, resulting in them arresting me for murder and illegally performing IMT, or I could lie, in which they’d probably take me in so they could learn my true identity. And then they’d arrest me for murder and illegally performing IMT.
So I took the other option.
I fled.
It was a decision I made in an instant. My teeth rattled as the front wheel of my scooter bounced up onto the sidewalk. Once both wheels were up, I gunned the throttle. The concrete was empty of pedestrians but I still had to careen around trash cans and bus stops, my heart pounding in my ears all the while, drowning out the voice on the speaker that ordered me to stop.
It was too late for stopping. The sober t
ruth struck me that I could never stop, not until I’d exposed every last lie of the government. Even if that took years. Even if I fought until the end of my life, having known only frustration and fury, I could never stop.
For the briefest of moments, despair struck me through the heart. Last night, in Nathaniel’s presence, I’d felt invincible. An encounter with a shapeshifting vampire-monster had cured me of that fantasy. I was far from invincible. In fact, I was more vulnerable than most people walking around the city, and it was all because of my poor choices and a stubborn streak that did more harm than good. I wished I were normal. I wished I could shut my mind down and accept what I was told, go with the flow and be blissful in my ignorance as everyone around me seemed to be. Then I wouldn’t be stuck working in the Sinistera. Then I wouldn’t be fighting off creatures.
Then you would be fine with Grandma being a near vegetable.
Hell, no.
I gritted my teeth and bent low over the handlebars so I could reach the engine of my scooter with my fingertips. I accelerated even while I meddled the engine, willing molecules to create larger and faster valves and pistons, meddling trickery where there hadn’t been any. I'd learned every part of my scooter for maintenance reasons and because as an IMT specialist, I needed to know how everything around me worked and to make me more marketable. Turned out marketability equaled criminality. I was glad of that foresight now as I re-worked the basic functions of the machine into something extraordinary.
It was a matter of seconds before my suped-up, meddled engine blasted me down the sidewalk at speeds its designers never intended. There could be no doubt in the minds of the officers behind me that I'd just used massive amounts of IMT. They would have proof of it on their dashcam. They couldn’t afford to allow me to escape now.
But I’d do my best to try.
I cut back onto the street when a bus stop full of waiting riders loomed ahead. The sound of the police car accelerating made the sweat pour freely down my spine. Suped-up bike or no, I couldn’t outrun their more powerful engine.
So I made a choice.
I leaned sideways and down, extending my left hand. Though I tried to be careful, there was no way to avoid it as the asphalt tore the skin off my fingertips. I cried out even as I meddled furiously, directing the road to rise up and reform into small, pointed cones of asphalt. The car behind me hit the field of cones and bounced out of control. The sound of crushed metal and burning rubber made me grin as I clutched my torn-up fingers to my chest.
When I glanced back in my side view mirror, it was to see the police car, its front bumper dented and hanging crookedly, pulling into the oncoming lane and maneuvering around the raised cones in the road. Back in the lane behind me and on smooth road once again, it gunned after me. I didn’t need to guess how determined the officers inside it would now be to catch up with me.
I yanked the steering wheel hard to the right, skidding into a turn that aimed me at a covered pedestrian mall. My scooter bounced violently over the curb and onto the pedestrian lane. I bolted straight for it, hearing as I did so the police car accelerating to the next block in order to cut me off. Their car was ineffective here. To catch me, the officers would have to pursue me on foot. There was a parking lot up ahead where they could get out of their vehicle and do just that, so I needed to pass it before they reached it.
I raced between the stores at dangerous speeds, slaloming around the handful of pedestrians out for a good deal, my heart still pounding because I was running from the police. I didn’t think I would ever grow used to it despite how many times I’d done it.
Since this was an upscale mall, there were advertising booths set up in the center of the mall every fifty yards or so, covered with ads on the outside and holding Telepathic Projectionists inside who subtly worked their magic over the façade of whatever shop they’d been hired by, making it more appealing to shoppers.
I pulled too close to one such booth and scraped the outer signage off with the handle of my scooter. The shoe store to my right, which had appeared brightly lit in primary colors, temporarily flickered stony gray and industrial as the TP specialist I’d startled lost their grip on the reality they were projecting over it.
I could have used a different reality, myself. Blue and red lights flashed between the shops up ahead. I grimaced. The police had reached the parking lot in plenty of time to cut me off. I saw a metal chain fly out from behind the shops: a spike strip meant to puncture the tires of my scooter. With a yell, I hooked a sharp U-turn, nearly losing control of my scooter as the wheels lost their grip.
White smoke ghosted up from the skid marks I’d left and the stench of burned rubber seared my nostrils. But I’d managed to turn around. Mentally yelling go, go, go, I zoomed back the other direction for several yards before I turned sharply to the left and threaded through the narrow space between competing shoe stores. After dodging a Dumpster and several stacked pallets, my scooter emerged into the quiet alley behind the shops—
Where I nearly ran smack dab into the broadside of the Center for Living Resistance.
I barked out a laugh, like a madwoman, and jumped off my scooter. With my hands on the chassis of my scooter, I meddled again, this time bending steel and rubber. Gasoline, lubricant, and other fluids poured onto the concrete as I meddled my green scooter into a bicycle with fat, yellow tubing and a cruiser seat. I even added a basket. Breathing hard, I carried the bike to the back of the RV and used metal from the bicycle to fuse it to the RV in a way that it appeared the bicycle hung from a normal bike rack.
That would pass a visual inspection. The motor fluids pooled on the ground were a problem, though. I didn’t have time to turn them into gases. I had to hope that it appeared as though they’d leaked from beneath the RV.
I ran to the side door of the Center and leaped up the stairs. Wolfgang, who had been adjusting one of his beloved wall displays, fell back in shock as I burst inside.
“Shhh,” I told him with a finger pressed to my lips. I pulled the door shut behind me and we waited.
I hadn’t gained as large a lead as I’d thought. Within seconds we heard the police arrive. Wolfgang and I stood in the quiet of the RV, listening at the squawk of radios as the cops canvassed the area. I clutched my damaged fingers against my palm, willing them to heal faster.
“What’s this?” one of them asked.
Tensing as I pictured the owner of that voice staring down at all the gas and oil on the ground, I wasn’t prepared for what he said next.
“This looks like propaganda, to me.”
And that was when I realized I’d made a terrible mistake in jumping into Wolfgang’s RV.
Our eyes met. His were rounded with confusion and a touch of fear. Mine probably reflected my deep regret.
The aluminum door shook beneath the pounding of a fist.
“Police! Open up!”
“Wolfie, I’m sorry,” I choked out.
He looked from me to the door. His chubby face slowly hardened. “It’s okay, Arrow. I expected them to find me eventually.”
“But not like this,” I said, sickened and angry with myself for such a stupid decision. “This is my fault.”
“All of this—” he motioned at the wall of displays, “—has always been me.”
He was being kind, but the truth of our situation wasn’t kind.
The cop banged on the door again, causing the high-sitting RV to tremble. “Open up! Police!”
“We can’t fight,” I told Wolfgang, because with him you never knew. He could be introverted and studious when he was investigating something, or he could become rabid with passion while arguing. “Resistance in this case would be the worst thing we could do.”
I worried when I couldn’t read his face as he stomped to the door. “We’ll see.”
“Wolfie, I’m serious.”
He ignored me to fling open the door. “What do you want? The Center is closed.”
“Back up. We want to take a look inside.”
>
Wolfgang hesitated only a second before he did as bid. He stood beside me, near the front seats, as the two police officers climbed inside.
“Ho-ly shit,” the brown-haired one said once he saw the first display on the wall. He looked at Wolfgang and me as though we were insane. “These are yours?”
“It’s private property,” Wolfgang said. “I have the right to display whatever I want in private.”
“Nice try, but this is some sort of public resistance,” said the second officer, a redhead with dark freckles. He placed one hand on his gun as he pointed at Wolfgang and me with the other. “You two stay right where you are. Don’t move a muscle.”
“We’re looking at multiple counts of breaking the War Misinformation Act,” his partner declared as he slowly walked along the wall of displays. “My god, this is the work of real anarchists.” He shot an accusing look at us. “Looks like we uncovered a couple of Deniers.”
“If you mean people who refuse to deny the truth of what happened, then you’re right on the money,” I said. I couldn’t help adding, “Must be nice living in a fantasy world where the government actually works for the people.”
Wolfgang snorted, but the redhaired cop didn’t find my statement amusing.
“You two are the reason this city can’t move on,” he told us with his brows drawn low over his eyes. “You’re trying to stir up rebellion with this garbage. It’s a crime.” He smirked. “But it’s alright. You two are going to be rebelling from inside a jail pretty soon.”
“Are you kidding me?” the brown-haired officer blurted. He was halfway down the wall of displays. He pointed at the one he currently stood before. “Jared, you gotta take a look at this. This is dangerous stuff. Forget about being kooks. These two are actively encouraging treason.”
“I can’t leave them,” his partner argued.
“A fat guy and a girl? They’re not getting far if they run.”
The red-haired officer thrust a finger at us. “You move, and we’ll shoot. Anarchists are criminals in the eyes of the justice system.”