Hound of Eden Omnibus

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Chet!” There was a brief blue glow, and the Man’s fist hit an invisible barrier at full strength instead of soft flesh. The force of the blow rippled through me like a wave, and his knuckles broke with an audible wet crunch, but he didn’t make a sound. Over his shoulder, I saw his partner aim and steady a rifle that shimmered with heat haze. He couldn’t get a steady bead on my core while the two of us struggled our way up and out onto the stage.

  I kneed the Man in the groin twice, fast and hard, peeled his fingers off me and shoved him away. Then I ran—first for the lectern, which I kicked off behind me to slow them down—and then for the edge of the pulpit. Bullets tore a line through the floor; I leapt and rolled just as the heavy wooden lectern flew over my head, flung by someone with inhuman strength—and speed. I’d barely turned from my roll when the now-disarmed Man in Black pounced me. We wrestled on the floor, but he got control of my left wrist. I couldn’t stop myself from yelling as he twisted my hand and got on top of me, his fist descending toward my face.

  “Tzai-!” I only got half the word out before the blow snapped my face to the side, but the charge was there. I drove my knuckles up into the Man’s chest from underneath with my remaining strength. The spike of condensed matter pierced him just under the sternum and up into his chest. He coughed a gout of white liquid onto my face and neck as I fumbled inside his suit jacket, hoping and praying for a side-arm. GOD was not here tonight, apparently: I couldn’t find a pistol, and the last of the MiB was advancing, silent and focused as he sighted along the barrel at my face.

  “RRRRARRGH!” Pastor Christopher, his shirt torn, his handsome face wild and red—came up from the other side of the stage with a vase. He swung with everything he had as the Man jumped, breaking it over his arm as he blocked it to the side. I wriggled out from under the bubbling corpse and lunged out, grabbing two stake-sized pieces of broken wood. The first I threw, giving Christopher the chance to tackle the guy from behind while he fought to get his bearings. The second I hung onto as I charged up into the pulpit. I knocked the gun aside and stabbed him in the side of his throat, both hands wrapped around the spike of wood.

  The Man’s pupils flooded black. He clawed at the stake and pulled it free in a pressurized spray of chalky blood. His finger twitched on the trigger of his rifle just before his eyes rolled and he swooned to the ground, limbs jerking.

  “Oh good God.” Christopher was pale and sweaty, his skin the color of milk. He stumbled away from the body, unsure what to do with his hands. “Oh Jesus. Oh my God, he’s dead.”

  “Looks like it.” I put a shoe down on the back of the Man’s neck and stomped just to make sure. The flesh was too soft to be HuMan. It felt like stepping on a piece of tilapia.

  The pastor watched me with flat, haunted eyes. “Rex? That’s your name, right? You’re… You were here about the children.”

  I turned to face him, and for the first time since the fight started, I saw him. It was like a punch to the gut. Christopher was sharp-featured, an angular, mobile face made for broad, dimpled smiles. Narrow straight nose, deep-set eyes... no matter how much I told myself he didn’t look like Vassily, I saw his reflection in the priest’s drowning blue eyes. “Yes. That’s the one.”

  He looked like he was about to cry. “I... thank you. You saved my life.”

  “Maybe. That depends on whether or not they called for backup.” I crouched down and turned my back so that I didn’t stare, pulling the assault rifle from the evaporating pool of sludge. “Can you use a gun?”

  He shook his head rapidly. “No... No, I-I can’t, I mean I-”

  “It’s alright.” I pushed the safety switch from ‘Semi’ to ‘Safe’ and slung the gun over my shoulder, ransacking the MiB’s empty suit for ammo. “Find a place to hide. I’ll scope the building. Do you have security?”

  “Y-Yes, of course. I don’t know what happened to them. They should have been… oh God, no. What if they killed them?”

  Then they killed them. I came up with a spare clip and shook it clean. The blood and goo didn’t seem to stick to anything: it rolled off like mercury, beading before evaporating with a strange metallic odor. Christopher watched me, hands wringing the edge of his shirt.

  “Go, now. Hide. I’ll keep you safe.” The cartridge slid home with a satisfying snap.

  “Okay... okay, thank you.” He nodded jerkily, backing away at a jog across the stage.

  Me, my cat, and my new assault rifle marched off up the stairs and outside. At the end of the hallway leading down to the first floor, I found the first security guard crumpled against the wall, blood fanning from the back of his skull up to the ceiling. The closer I got to reception, the more bodies I found. I breathed through my mouth, as quietly as I could, and tried to block out the smell as I slid through the door that led into the mezzanine.

  The lobby of the Church had been converted into a one-stop shop for the religiously challenged. The majority of the mezzanine was taken up with an open-plan bookstore, while off to one side was a room with a big screen TV playing reels of Pastor Zachariah Goswin, the Church’s founder, being interviewed on Oprah and preaching at stadiums. A glass railing looked out over the lobby, which was joined to the mezzanine by two sweeping flights of stairs at either end.

  The foyer was dark, the air vibrating with tension so thick I could have cut it. I crept out from the door, hiding behind shelves of books and racks of pamphlets with the only sound being my own harsh, bated breaths. I looked out into the room with the Sight, tuning into the stillness and straining to sense any disturbance. There was one dead guard on the left-hand stairwell. Two more had been laid out for transport and disposal behind the reception desk.

  As I waited for movement, Binah hung close to me to the point where it became obvious that no one else was there. After several tense minutes, she chirruped and arched her body against my shins with a long, lazy yawn.

  “Mmph.” I dropped the muzzle of the rifle, waiting for the jump-scare. The mezzanine and the ground floor were totally still. Outside, several of the cars had gone: the black town cars I’d noticed while crossing the street. There were security camera monitors at reception. All four screens were blank. “Looks like they decided whatever they were here for wasn’t worth it. What a waste of life.”

  “Mrraow,” Binah replied helpfully.

  I picked my way back to the chapel hall, and called from the back of the room. “Okay, pastor. It’s over.”

  For a few minutes, nothing stirred. Eventually, the curtains at the back of the pulpit stage shifted, and I saw him there, crouched with a clip of bullets in one shaking hand. “Rex?”

  I thumped down the stairs, wincing on every step. The combat high was starting to wear off, and with it came pain and bone-deep, profound exhaustion.

  “My god. You’re covered in blood.” Christopher was still pale, his face sweaty, hands trembling as I drew up and sat down, leaning on the rifle. “You’re injured. We-we have to get you to the hospital.”

  “Huh?” Everything was hurting so bad it took me a moment to work out what he was talking about. “No, no hospital.”

  “You’re bleeding.” He came to me and took my wrist with careful, nervous hands, gently pulling my arm out from my side. I hadn’t realized I’d been guarding it.

  “I lost a lot of blood on the way here,” I said. “Long story. I can’t go to the hospital. Is there somewhere I can get a shower?”

  “Y-Yes, of course. One in the First Aid Room, one in the staff locker room.” He was still shaking, but crouched down to help me up. My joints were stiffening up with pain. “Come on. Slowly now.”

  He looped an arm around my waist and one under my shoulders, and helped me get to my feet. He knew the place better than me, and took me out past the back of the stage, through a hall cluttered with production equipment under plastic and lighting on wheel-in rails, and into an elevator. I kept the assault rifle braced in against my side, just in case, but there was no one left to disturb us en route to the firs
t aid room. The only sounds were us, and Binah’s anxious meowing following us down the hall.

  Chapter 15

  We stumbled into a clean white room. It was well-appointed: hospital trolley bed, shelves of medical supplies, a bathroom with sink, shower, and wheelchair. I broke away from him, looking over the cabinet. The world was spinning slowly and persistently to the right. “Need sugar. Go get me a can of Coke. Something sweet.”

  Christopher ran a hand back through his sweaty hair, squeezing it back along his skull. “Okay, alright. S-Stay here, we have Coke. You aren’t going to bleed to death, are you?”

  “Not if I can help it.” There was a slur in my voice, but I was able to find what I needed. Dressings, alcohol, saline, antibiotic ointment, bandages, tweezers.

  “Thank God.” Christopher practically bolted from the room.

  I was thinking GOD didn’t have a whole lot to do with any of this. While he was gone, I had a quick shower and put my pants back on, then returned to the bed. I had to focus on my hands to stop them shuddering as I uncapped the bottle of isopropyl. The clean, harsh smell stung my nose—and made my stomach growl. I had the passing urge to swig it as I splashed alcohol into the little plastic tray. “Goddammit, Yen, not now. You have to be fucking kidding me.”

  It wasn’t. I tried to reach back to Kutkha, searching for connection to something other than overwhelming need, but it was like groping at a distant shadow through a field of white noise. The dizzying urge to drink the hospital-grade alcohol only grew stronger as I set up the swabs and gauze, and the agitated, panicky sensation I’d felt when Sergei had hijacked me returned—only this time, it was the Yen, not my old Pakhun.[11]

  I startled as Christopher returned with an arm full of cans and bottles. He’d brought three sodas… and half a bottle of brandy. “Here, I have-”

  I snatched a can from him, cracked it, and threw back half with three long swallows. It seared my mouth and jerked me back to wakefulness. I held it back out. “Brandy.”

  His eyes widened. “Coke and brandy isn’t a very good-”

  “Please.” Even saying the word made me feel sick.

  Christopher flashed a watery smile as he obeyed, topping up the can with acrid spirits. He took a heavy seat at the other end of the bed and drank straight from the bottle.

  The agitation only grew as I sipped at the can and shuddered with distaste. If self-loathing had a flavor, it was cheap brandy and coke, but the first mouthful went down with the same intense, frantic relief I’d felt at Strange Kitty. “So what happened? Start from the beginning.”

  He glanced at me as I began to clean the nastiest of the cuts, the bullet graze, swallowed, and looked away. “I... Okay, well. It’s Sunday, biggest day of the week. I was just closing up after finishing all my paperwork for Father Zach, turning the lights out, and... I guess they broke in through the front, somehow. I heard shooting only when they were close, because those guns hardly make any noise. I ran back to my office—I keep a small pistol in there, just in case—but they took the elevator and I barely made it back down to the chapel.”

  “They were targeting you, specifically?”

  “I... I don’t know,” he replied. “Why would they be trying to kill me?”

  “My hunch is that it’s something to do with the kidnapping last month,” I said, taking a swig off the can. The sugary-sour stuff did, at least, shut the Yen right up. The dangerous urge to drink the isopropyl vanished, subsumed by the need for more caffeine, more sugar, and definitely more brandy. “Is there anything here they’d want?”

  Christopher got a strange look on his face: eyes distant, mouth slightly open. Then he shook his head, rubbed his face with a shaking hand, and took another pull off the bottle. “Oh, the kidnapping. Of course. Lord be praised you were here, Rex, or I’d be dead. But... why were you here?”

  “Good old-fashioned sanctuary,” I said, patting the freshly bleeding wound. Drinking and self-surgery really weren’t a good combination, but I had little choice. “I was being pursued by something bad. Had to get across the river, and given that the old story about vampires seemed to be true, I wondered if the story about the undead hating hallowed ground would also bear out.”

  “Vampires?” Christopher blanched.

  “Don’t worry. Babushka’s story seems to be holding up so far.” I fumbled a piece of cotton wool, and had to sit back and close my eyes for a few seconds as the room spun.

  “Here. Let me do that.” Christopher leaned forward, the bed squeaking under his weight.

  It occurred to me that I was shirtless when I felt him touch my skin. I flinched away on the first contact, but he persisted, taking up the gauze with soft, cool hands and getting to work. The alcohol took the edge off my skin sensitivity, so I had another swig off the can while he dabbed away, and tried to ease down.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, were you a soldier?” He asked tentatively.

  “Of a sort.”

  “You certainly act like one.”

  “I had a good amount of training. Unofficial, but thorough.”

  “I wish I’d had the chance to learn how to fight when I was younger,” he said, wistfully. “Would have saved me a lot of trouble growing up.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes knowing a little of something as a kid makes the adults in your life beat you harder.”

  Christopher smiled, but it wasn’t a happy expression. “Sounds like someone speaking from experience.”

  “Long experience.” I closed my eyes again, swaying a little. My nose was throbbing, but the pain was receding under the influence of liquor. “Returning to the immediate situation. Seen any UFOs lately? That’s the usual reason the Men in Black show up.”

  “Men in Black? No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “Any involvement with the Government at all?” I handed Christopher the tube of wound cream and the bandage.

  “No, not really. The supernatural outreach program is in review... but since we learned what happened to the Wolf Grove children, it’s been quite subdued.” He began to dabble cream on my arm, lips pursed. “But... there is one thing. You’re a… well… a warlock, aren’t you?”

  “Warlocks are what the Vigiles call us,” The sensation of his fingers made me shudder. “I prefer ‘magus’.”

  “Well, there has been one thing happening to me that’s strange,” he said. “Recently I’ve been... I don’t know how to describe it, other than I’ve been losing time.”

  Losing time was a common side effect of contact with the Men in Black. Curiosity piqued, I lifted my head, better to hear him. “Go on. When? How?”

  “At night, usually.” Christopher sounded nervous again, fingers trembling. “I didn’t think anything of it because of my history. I told you about that, didn’t I?”

  He had, in a candid way that made me think he still had some serious boundary issues. Abused as a child, taken into sexual slavery by a trafficker who forcibly addicted him to heroin, used and abused until his teens, until he ran away. Then something about having worked as a street hustler, before being picked up by Pastor Zach. Christopher still had a hole right through him that he thought he’d filled with the Bible, like most addicts who’d found relief through religion. “Yes. You did.”

  “Do you know what dissociation is?”

  “It’s when your emotions retreat back behind a wall of nothing,” I said.

  He made a soft sound of agreement. “When I was young, I deliberately built that wall. I called it ‘going to my room’. It was a way to detach, something I did to survive, and it took years and years of therapy to unlearn. I still do it, but not as badly. Until a couple of months ago. It was after I came back from the mother church meeting in Chicago. The night of the 17th of August.”

  “Specific date,” I replied. The brandy had settled over me like a heavy blanket, my skin humming pleasantly under Christopher’s gentle hands as he bandaged my arm.

  “Yes. I remember it because it was the last date I recall
ed before I blacked out,” he said. “I woke up in an alley, sprawled out in a heap of trash bags. Trash was everywhere. It smelled awful. I thought I’d been mugged, so I gathered my luggage and went to hospital. Nothing was wrong. I found my wallet, everything. But it was the 19th. I’d lost two whole days.”

  I grunted. That fit the stories I’d heard about Men in Black and the abductions they were associated with. “Go on.”

  “It’s been happening ever since.” Christopher slid off the bed, moving around me to get a look at my other injuries. “Once or twice a week, I’ll wake up somewhere I don’t remember going. Sometimes I’m... dressed strangely.”

  I cracked an eye open to look at him. “Strangely how?”

  To my surprise, he flushed. “Sometimes nothing at all. Sometimes in... well... in other people’s clothing. It doesn’t seem to matter what gender. I’ll have a mix of things on, like someone who had no idea how to dress a person had dressed me while I was asleep. Shorts, raincoats, dressing gowns, underwear I don’t recognize. I woke up with one high heel on once. Just one. I haven’t known what to say or who to go to, but you seem to know a lot about strange things and... I’m afraid. After tonight, I’m, I don’t know what to think. And… there was something else.”

  “Go on.”

  “My eyes,” he said, looking at me. “They didn’t use to be this color. They changed while I was blacked out. If you look at my old photos, they weren’t this color at all.”

  The back of my neck prickled with some half-formed instinct. I regarded him with what I hoped was an authoritative, serious look. “It’s possible that you were abducted. In the paranormal investigations sense of ‘abduction’.”

  He recoiled a little, a weird half-smile playing over his mouth. “Abducted? What, by aliens?”

  “More likely it was by whoever fields the goons who were trying to kill you tonight.” I scrutinized him, and momentarily, found myself wishing that Angkor had been here. I had enjoyed working with him, watching him fight, watching him perform magic. He could have scanned Christopher for implants or something, helped me figure shit out. We’d worked together like oiled parts in the same machine the few times we’d faced shit like this, but now…