My teeth creaked. I stumbled back against the wall, hands burning inside my gloves. They itched like they were covered in dirt and slime, blood, fluids. Dirty dirty dirty.
"Why weren't you there, Alexi?" The body's stiff, slug-thick lips twisted. The tongue moved, rasping each word into the echoing darkness of the attic, and in the torch beam, I saw a convulsive ripple pass through its limbs.
"No." I stepped back, behind the threshold, slapping at the wall to find the light switch. “This is a trap.”
"You weren't there, Alexi." It spoke in her voice now, breathy and fragile, ripping it from my memory. "Why did you leave me here with him?"
I strained against the illusion, popping my teeth. The taste of blood flooded my mouth. My fingers hit something small and hard. They were shaking so bad that I slipped across the light switch before I caught it and flipped it up. Light flooded the room – and a cloud of black motes, finer than flies but larger than dust – burst from the hanged man's mouth and flew straight at my face as two shambling figures lurched from the unnaturally thick shadows and began to limp towards me.
I threw the knife up as the cloud swarmed me and staggered forwards, trying to break through the cloud and away. Pinhead-sized bugs landed on my exposed skin and began to drill and dig, shrieking like rusty machinery. I covered my face with my arms and tripped into the dresser beside the bed, spinning crazily, and burst through the door in the bedroom into an ensuite bathroom, clawing and scraping at my cheeks and scalp. The knife drew cold lines through my own flesh: it was all that kept the black screeching motes from boring in all the way.
The bugs fled from the touch of the blade with the deafening flicker of metallic wings, coming back to jab at my eyes, my nose, my lips. The things were gathering at my mouth, trying to prise it open. Clawing and fighting the urge to cry out, I hit something at knee-height, tumbled, and fell heavily into a bathtub. A flailing hand struck something. The faucet?
I fumbled for it again, blind, flesh burning as things began to wriggle under the skin of my scalp. A flood of water struck me in the face, washing away blood and a crowd of screaming, furious insects. The water turned hot, and the wail built to an ear-shattering pitch as they pulled themselves free from my head and withdrew like angry hornets.
The stench of a slaughterhouse broke through the rushing water: the reek of rotten meat and the clinging odor of chlorine mingled into a violet smell so powerful that my vision pulsed with the color, nauseating and unnatural and dead. Sputtering, I forced my eyes open and flushed them with hot water, turning blindly towards the door on instinct. Through the fog and mist, a pig’s head swam into view. It was slack-jawed and flopped weirdly to one side, the liquefying remains of its eyes streaked down its sagging, rotten jowls. The head was roughly stitched to the swollen, mutilated corpse of a child rendered sexless by a thick line of stitches from collarbone to crotch. A wave of toxic air blew into the bathroom in its wake.
Jesus fucking Christ. I retched, choking on bile and pressing back against the wall as lizard brain took the wheel. In one smooth motion, I pulled the pistol from my sopping jacket, aimed, and plugged three rounds into the nightmare before it reached the tub. It careened into the bathroom sink, scattering toiletries and chintzy statuettes to the floor. Bottles and cans rolled towards the bathtub, drowned out by the bark of the silenced rounds as I fired two more shots through the spray. Gelatinous, rotten blood blew backwards from the corpse, splattering the wall and a second ghoul crowding in behind it, this one with the head of a goat. The second dead child reached for me with skeletal hands turned to claws as it tripped over its brother and righted itself on the way forward.
The cloud of insects was still in here. They swarmed for the splattered mess on the mirror, congregating on it like wasps on honey as Goathead swiped at me through the water. The claws missed my groin by an inch as I scrambled to one side and emptied the clip point-blank into its skull. Six bullets were enough to blow it back and put it down, thrashing and jerking on the floor, but it they didn’t kill it. Tumorous masses bubbled up from the entry and exit wounds. They fleshed out and then erupted into more black bugs.
They were some kind of Morphorde. DOGs, demons. Shit. Shit shit shit, I’d used the gun!
Pighead was struggling to sit up as I dropped the pistol and got out of the bath, went to the window and smashed it with the end of my knife, shattering it and admitted a blast of cold, sweet air. The sound drew the attention of the DOG-bugs. They broke away from their meal with an angry screech, a dark arrow of spined bodies that flew at my face through the cooling water.
I swept off the counter beside me and threw whatever came to hand, cursing myself all the while. I’d forgotten that DOGs were vulnerable to eggs. EGGS. I’d forgotten to bring the one stupid thing that would save my life, and it was going to be my last and only mistake.
Chapter 24
The enlarged swarm passed around everything hurled and sprayed at it. Soap, shampoo, a can of hairspray. I picked up a featureless brown bottle and pulled the cork out, intending to throw it and whatever was inside of it. A sharp green odor cut through the putrefaction of the air, and the swarm turned away with a scream of fury, wings slicing at the skin of my guarding forearm as they curved around and then started back towards me.
It was peppermint oil. I swigged a mouthful of it and spat it as a mist as the spear of bodies closed in a second time. The DOGs screeched like a rusty drill burrowing through sheet metal. The flock symmetry of the swarm dissolved as tiny bodies tumbled against my face like gravel and bounced lifelessly to the floor. The stuff burned my nose and eyes, but I spat again, sputtering and coughing, and sure enough, they continued to fall. The bugs whirled in the air like sparrows and blew through the en suite door, fleeing to the fetid safety of the bedroom.
Pighead took me at waist height, charging like a bull. It slammed into me with heedless strength, bouncing me off the wall. Black peg teeth sunk into my belly and gripped skin, worrying at me while I stabbed down at its head. The knife punched its rot-softened skull like soggy cardboard. It didn’t slow in the slightest, squealing and thrashing until I poured the oil into the wounds. The teeth released as the dead thing reeled away. Its entire head collapsed into reeking black sludge.
I shoved it away and it toppled backwards, limbs jerking as nameless slime oozed across the floor. The smell burned the air and dulled the light and I threw up, right there on the spot. There was nothing in my stomach but acid and peppermint oil, and it burned my already-inflamed mouth like fire. Through a film of tears, I saw Goathead trying to get to its feet. The bullets had blown its head back, exposing the severed human neck underneath, but it hadn’t killed it.
Coughing, choking on fumes and struggling against the retching, I dumped the rest of the bottle onto it as it staggered at me. There wasn’t much peppermint oil left. It kept on coming for a few seconds, while I kicked it away and stomped, crushing it underfoot until the spastic limbs fell still.
GOD, what else could I use in here? I scanned the clutter on the counter for anything else I had to destroy the DOGs, the insects. My scalp was still crawling and stinging, and my brain couldn’t help but associate the sensation with larvae pulsing under my skin. I searched through bottles with my nose, keeping one eye on the bathroom door and my knife in hand. Yellow smells, sharp and muddy smells… I found a pump bottle of tea-tree oil in a small first aid kit. It had a similar sharp green smell as the peppermint, so I dumped the lot of it over my head, rubbing it over the burning wounds. I didn’t even feel the pain, too desperate to care. Nothing crawled out and plopped onto the counter. I leaned in to stare in the broken mirror, clawing at my face, my scalp and mouth until I was sure nothing had burrowed in or reproduced in my body. The wounds were angry and bleeding, but they didn’t bulge or wriggle.
I stumbled along the wall, holding my breath, and only gasped for air once I was out beyond the reach of the fetid stench from the bathroom. The bedroom stunk like an abandoned abattoir, but it was
leagues better than the stench of those… things? Zombies? I had no fucking idea what they were. All I knew is that children had been murdered to create them. My stomach trembled, my throat hurt, and my breath wheezed as I fought for composure, for insight, for anything other than visions of dead children. Dripping water and tea-tree oil and blood, I stared around the room, and really saw it for the first time.
The body hung there, motionless and mottled, his head grotesquely swollen. Moris was dressed for bed. The corpse hummed like an angry hive, bristling with the small wet sounds of chewing mandibles. The dresser on the other side of the room had been smashed open, the drawer flung at the walk-in wardrobe on the other side of the room. The shattered wood was half embedded in the door. Whatever had come in here was too strong for my blood.
But what caught my eye and held it were the symbols eked out in blood – or red paint that looked like blood – over the headboard of the bed. The number 13, drawn above two interlocking rings with eight spokes each. Underneath them, was the signature from Lily and Dru’s house. ‘Soldier 557’.
I passed my hand back over my head, staring at it foggily. Circles were a figure of completion, each one representing one whole. Two of something. Eight plus eight was sixteen. Two-eight-eight? No… two-sixteen. The corpse twitched as the bugs continued to feed. I couldn’t stay here.
I slammed the door behind me and coated the knob and lock with oil, keeping the tiny bottle close to my nose. With the knife ready, I thundered down the stairs and back into the abandoned den. I’d come here to find evidence. I needed to take something away, anything at all.
Falkovich’s office was a large room offside the den. Compared to the rest of the house, it was spotless – or it had been before someone had trashed it. The plants inside were dead, shriveled to nothing. Filing cabinets were overturned. His answering machine was torn from the wall, the cassette missing from inside. Only one thing had been left intact on the desk: a personal computer with a built-in screen. The person – or people – who trashed the office had pushed it to the edge of the desk, but hadn’t smashed it up.
Gingerly, I approached. I’d never touched a computer in my life. I knew what they were, vaguely, because I’d seen them in use in offices and warehouses. As far as I understood, they were interactive machines that stored documents, documents which might incriminate Falkovich. So why had it been left here, undamaged?
The first rule of electronics was to find a way to turn it on. After a protracted search, I flipped a switch and then pushed in a power button. The interface lit up and began to rumble and mutter to itself. I hung back warily, checking over my shoulder for the swarm, and nearly jumped out of my skin when the entire computer honked loudly, then ground in the way that some munitions did just before they exploded. I was already out the door by the time it had finished. When nothing happened, I peered back inside in time to see a company logo flash up, a picture that transitioned to a blank black void with a flickering cursor. I jumped again as the machine beeped and spooled text out down the screen of its own accord, and then loaded another image with four distinct panels. They read: Information, Microsoft Works, Your Software, and IBM DOS.
The most complex piece of technology I’d ever owned was a radio. Cautiously, I slipped back into the room and touched the Information heading on the screen, but nothing happened. Crestfallen, I looked over the keyboard and lit on the click-and-pointer to the side of it. I tried touching that to see if could be used to look at the Information doubtlessly stored on the computer, but accidentally hit a button. I suddenly found myself in ‘Your Software’, which was nothing but a confusing jumble of lists and pictures of manilla folders. I was officially out of my depth.
There had to be someone who knew how to access the information on this machine, but it wasn’t me. The thing I could do was take it with me. I tore the cables from the wall and hefted up, then took it outside to the car. It was tempting to leave it at that and drive away, but I steeled myself and went back into the house to continue the search. My eyes watered as I walked back into the sensory assault of dog piss, dead bodies and rotten food. Underneath that, there was the faint skin-ruffling reek of human desperation.
It was only once I closed the back door that I noticed that the swing was within the arc of another door set flush with the wall. They were on acute angles to one another, and set so close together that I hadn’t noticed it when I’d first entered the house. The back door had to be shut for this one to be accessible. I tested the handle. It was locked, but nothing that I couldn’t open. After a few minutes and a few taps with the knife hilt against the bump key, I turned the lock and pushed the door in to reveal a flight of stairs leading down. An earthy, musty stench rolled out into the sourness of the kitchen: very human smells of sweat, feces, and rotting food.
I braced the entry open with a bag of trash, stomach turning, then stripped off my wet jacket and then my shirt. I tied the wet tee around my face, pushing the knot around the back, and kept the knife down low on the way down. I didn’t want to be caught in nothing but a wifebeater, but if I didn’t have something over my nose and mouth, I was going to puke again.
There was a light switch which snapped when flipped, lighting a dim yellow bulb at the bottom of the stairs. The staircase was narrow, damp and squeaky. Underlying the hollow clomping of my boots was a heavy silence that hung in the dead air, until my foot turned a particularly creaky board and I heard something gasp from much further down. The sound quickly cut.
“Who’s there?” I stepped off onto the floor. Even with the damp rag around my face, it was hard going. Medieval gibbets probably smelled like this. “Come out, and no one needs to get hurt!”
There was no reply. With the knife held ready, eyes fixed ahead on the darkness, I patted the wall beside me for more switches. When I found them, the whole room lit up with flickering fluorescent strips that clunked to life, every other one dim or dead. It was enough to see what was causing the smell.
Cells. Rows and rows of cells, like the kind they keep dogs in at the pound. There was a camp bed at one end of the room with a gym mat laid on top in place of a real mattress. The center of the basement was cleared to make room for an ornate magic circle drawn in permanent black marker. The focus of the circle was an autopsy tray on a plain steel frame, and that was all. No blood. No tools. Just stark, clean metal.
I looked up. The basement ceiling was heavily insulated with exposed fiberglass batts. There was a bracket for fitting a surgical lamp, but no lamp was in evidence. My bet was that they borrowed and returned the equipment for whatever they did down here. The circle was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a triple ring executed with the same precision as the designs left with the body upstairs. The ring around the outside was the containment layer. Just inside of that, smaller circles had been interspersed around the ring like stations, each one emblazoned with an unfamiliar sigil: a squiggle something like an insect’s leg. They in turn were linked by the inner ring. The central design under the table was not geometric – or more accurately, it was not symmetrically geometric. The lines were precisely ruled, but the vaguely-star shaped design was off-center, with uneven points. There was scrawled writing inside and around the whole thing, alien and unintelligible. I was staring at it, trying to make individual words out, when a small whimper punctured the thick silence.
Slowly, I turned in the direction of the sound. It had come from the pen closest to the bed. I drew up beside to the door, flexing my fingers around the hilt of the knife, and glanced around through the wire.
It was the girl from the video. The one with the waist-length mop of red curls.
“Bozhe moi.” I uttered the oath before I could contain myself, coming around to stand before her. She shrank back until she was pressed to the far wall of her cell, legs drawn up, her cheek pressed against her hands. Her eyes were huge with animal terror. She was bound to a ring bolt by a heavy black collar and chain.
Over all the years I’d worked for Sergei, Rodion a
nd Lev, I’d done and seen my share of horrors. I’d broken wards that sucked the life out of people, made a man spontaneously combust, and knocked my father’s brains out with a hammer. But when this girl looked up at me with nothing but feral, exhausted certainty, I knew that this was the limit. This was the line that I’d draw in stone, and anyone on the other side of that line was fair game for the rest of my life.
“Josie?” I dropped my hand and pulled the shirt away from my face, letting it hang around my neck. “You’re Josie, aren’t you?”
Her stare did not waver. She didn’t nod, or even blink, but a tremor passed through her thin limbs.
“It’s going to be okay.” I spoke to her the way I would a stray animal, checking behind me in case something had decided to use her as bait and set me up. “Just… hold on a couple more minutes.”
I sheathed the knife and ran my hands over the door, searching for a bolt, something to pull across or flip up. There was nothing that sophisticated. The gates were padlocked and chained shut. The keys weren’t downstairs, but after rummaging around near the bed, I found a cardboard box with tools, including a pair of rusty boltcutters – for emergencies, I guessed. It took every bit of remaining strength I had to snap the lock on the doors. Josie pressed in closer to the wall, clinging to it with her hands.
I crouched down at the entry to the cell, and held my shirt out to her. “My name’s Alexi,” I said, slowly. “Some people sent me to help you. Do you know the Twin Tigers? The people who ride the motorcycles?”
After a moment, Josie nodded, a single jerk of her head. Her breathing was quick, like a small bird.
“I will come in here, and I will cut that chain off. Here… cover yourself with this.” I motioned with the shirt again.
Slowly, she reached out and took it. She didn’t put it on: she hugged it to her chest as I went inside, rolling her eyes to track my position as I cut her free. The collar was fixed in place with a screw that was too tight to get out with my fingers. We’d have to deal with it at Strange Kitty.
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