Tether

by Jeremy Robinson

  I raise my hands. “I get it. You’ll take us to pound town.”

  Garcia’s forehead is wrinkled on one side. She has a habit of raising a single eyebrow when she questions something, which she’s been doing a lot of since we met. Her eyebrow raises again, on cue, this time with a laugh. “Pound town?”

  “Yeah…like, the town where you get beat down. Something like that. People say it. I didn’t make it up.”

  “I know.” She laughs again and steps aside, letting me past her. “Pound town isn’t a place; it’s rough sex.” She pats my shoulder. “And you’re not my type.”

  Embarrassment burns my face like I’ve been in the sun too long, but the plane’s luxurious interior distracts me from my faux pas. There are eight plush, leather seats, four to a side. The chairs face each other, like four dining tables for two at a restaurant, except the tables here fold down, and the seats recline. Behind the seating section is a small kitchen and a wet bar, all of it built from shiny, red mahogany.

  “Do I smell mint?” Bjorn asks, leaning back in his chair, enjoying the ample leg room.

  Reggie sits across from him. “Helps calm the mind. There’s a sprig of it in your ash tray.”

  Bjorn opens the ashtray built into his armrest, and sure enough, there’s a little branch of mint leaves pressed inside, turning a stench receptacle into an air freshener. I make my way past them and sit in the back, across from Rain, who is already buckled in and looking out the window at the view…which is currently the inside of the hangar.

  Garcia takes a seat across the aisle from Bjorn, from where she can look both Reggie and me in the eyes, and easily stop anyone heading for the door. She buckles up, tilts her head down, and closes her eyes.

  When the engines whine to life and Captain Handsome announces that we’re underway, I decide to do the same.

  To my utter shock, I wake up at 30,000 feet.

  Even though I didn’t sleep a wink last night, and I’ve been running for my life, adrenaline waxing and waning, all while dealing with Morgan’s death, I didn’t expect to sleep without an Ambien or two. I nearly cheer, ‘I’m doing it,’ like a four-year-old learning to use the potty. If Morgan’s watching, I know she’s proud.

  When I look up, it’s Rain who’s watching me, her blue eyes impossible to read. “How long has it been?”

  I’m expecting to hear something that ends with, ‘minutes.’

  “Almost three hours,” she says.

  “Three hours? We must nearly be there.”

  “That’s what the pilot just said. I think he woke you up.”

  I look out the window. The view is gray. I’m about to ask if it’s a storm when lightning rips through distant clouds, flinching me away from the window. I haven’t been a fan of flying in storms since the Twilight Zone episode with Captain Kirk and a plane-eating gremlin. I close the shade and pretend the storm doesn’t exist.

  I close my eyes for a moment, trying to calm myself. When my eyes snap open again, Rain’s gaze is waiting for me. She already knows what I’m going to ask. “Is this…”

  “Could be,” she says. “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you feel them?”

  “I’ve been feeling them for the last hour,” she says, and she lifts her hand. Slowly, it starts to glow. Then she balls a fist and the light fades. “But it’s definitely getting stronger.”

  “Any sense of why they’re here?” I ask.

  “You’ll have to ask them,” she says.

  I smile, until I realize she wasn’t joking. Unable to even respond to that idea, I turn to Garcia. Is she still sleeping? I wonder, but then she opens her eyes and lifts her chin at me like a bro, saying ‘Sup?’ Reggie and Bjorn are talking, voices quiet. Sounds like science stuff. I’m pretty sure Garcia was listening to them the whole time.

  “We’re making our approach now,” the pilot says over the intercom, and the plane begins a rapid descent, leaving my stomach a few hundred feet above us. Wind and rain lash the jet, shaking us like a mixed drink, and then spewing us out into the lower atmosphere.

  Rain looks out her window, eyes widening slowly.

  At first, I think she’s starting to glow, but then I realize the light is coming from outside.

  “Holy Ereshkigal…” Bjorn says, face pressed to glass.

  I lift my shade to find a massive, swirling storm similar to what first appeared in Cambridge. Lightning arcs across the sky above Chicago. The clouds are so thick it looks like night, the city cast in a wavering blue glow.

  I hope they got the people out, I think.

  Before I can ask Rain what’s happening, the plane tips to the right and makes a sharp turn. Reggie stands in the cockpit door, clinging to its frame.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Garcia says. She’s angry, but also confused by what she’s seeing outside. She wasn’t at ground zero for what happened last night, and we haven’t mentioned the whole ghost-kaiju thing yet. Probably should have, but I think we’d have lost all credibility with her, and we might have found ourselves being arrested instead of helped.

  “Getting a closer look!” Reggie says, as the plane swoops in toward the city, breaking who knows how many laws. These pilots must be paid a shit-ton of money to pull a stunt like this, I think, and I wonder how long it will take the Air Force to shoot us out of the sky.

  We’re just a few hundred feet above the ground, as we fly past the city’s outskirts, avoiding the downtown and the buildings that tower above us.

  “Get this plane out of the city!” Garcia draws her handgun. “Now!”

  Reggie steps out of the cockpit, hands raised. “This might be our only chance to—”

  Garcia aims the handgun at Reggie. “Now.”

  Reggie is about to argue her case again, when Bjorn does it for her. “What…the…fuck…”

  Bjorn wasn’t with us last night either. He might believe what Reggie tells him, but he hasn’t seen it. Hasn’t lived it. Survived it. Then I turn and look out the window again, and I share in Bjorn’s horror. “Oh… Oh, God.”

  Please let the city be evacuated…

  I turn to Rain, whose now-luminous face is staring out the window. “There are three of them.”

  27

  Chicago is screwed.

  As we swing out over Lake Michigan, its choppy surface reflecting and fracturing the lightning above, the three spectral monsters come into view. Mostly. They shimmer in and out of reality, as they turn their attention toward the city’s core.

  Brute is among them, its long arms swinging. From a distance it appears to be moving slowly, but it’s a trick of perspective. Each step moves the creature a hundred feet forward, destroying everything in its path. So far, that’s mostly residential buildings, but it won’t be long before skyscrapers are tumbling.

  The second specter is like something out of a Salvador Dalí painting. Its three-hundred-foot-long, spindly legs swing over rooftops, each step carefully placed like a hunting crane. The creature’s body, what I can see of it, is bulbous, like a hundred-foot-tall and long marshmallow that’s been puffed up with air and then left in the sun too long. It’s fringed with fans of stretched flesh over spines, like a Dimetrodon’s back. The fans wave in unison, like they’re helping the slender legs keep its immense weight off the ground. I can’t see a face—just a mangled mass of bulging, twitching flesh.

  They’re not real, I think.

  They’re the stuff of nightmares. Impossible creatures not confined by the laws of physics, and yet fully capable of interacting with the physical world.

  And the third is the worst of them all. Its long, eel-like, translucent body, extreme underbite, transparent needle-teeth, and harsh, bug-eyed stare reminds me of a black dragonfish. Lines of bright dots and luminous stripes flare away from its jaws, undulating as it moves. Hundreds of short, stiff appendages dangle from its underside, wriggling as the body moves. It’s like God handed over control of its design to H.R. Giger. But this thing isn’t swimming through the ocean depth
s. It’s cutting a path through the sky, held aloft by six-paddle shaped wings, each trailing luminous strands of hair. Its four-hundred-foot-long, undulating body, unhindered by the structures on the ground, will reach the inner city first.

  But why?

  What are they after?

  Rain grunts, her inner light flaring against her will.

  “They’re angry,” she says. “And lost.”

  Not exactly answers, but it’s a thin foundation upon which to fling guesses. My personal theory is that SpecTek pulled these things from some other dimension of reality and into our own. But since they connect with Rain in the same way as human spirits, that suggests they’re made up of the same supernatural stuff. A supernatural dimension.

  Only two come to mind, and if anyone in the history of religion got it right, these things aren’t from Heaven.

  “They’re demons,” I whisper.

  Rain turns her glowing eyes to me. I think she’s going to argue, but then she sags a bit and says, “Could be.”

  Demons brought to Earth…by my wife. Lovely.

  But what about Wisp?

  While it destroyed a few buildings and sucked up a bunch of souls, that all appeared inadvertent. And Wisp protected us. Protected Rain, whose connection to the creatures is undeniable.

  I seem to recall the Bible being full of angels telling people not to be afraid, of being almost monstrous in appearance to human eyes. If the others are demons, maybe Wisp is an angel ripped from the Heavenly realm?

  Ridiculous, I think. Everything about all of this is just stupid.

  But there they are: three behemoths about to destroy a major U.S. city.

  “What the hell is this?” Garcia asks. She raps on the window with her knuckles. “Are these display screens?”

  “They’re not screens,” Reggie says. “And you’re not hallucinating.”

  “This is what happened in Boston,” I say.

  “Bullshit,” she says, and then whispers, “This can’t be real.”

  “I didn’t believe you,” Bjorn says. “I went along with it, but I didn’t really believe you.” He turns to Reggie. “I’m sorry, it’s just so…”

  “Fucking horrible,” Garcia says, the toughness in her melting away.

  I turn my eyes back to the view, heart breaking when I see wispy pulses of light moving up through Brute’s arms, as they sweep through buildings. I have no idea if Garcia’s terror threat had any effect, but there are clearly a lot of people still in the city. Maybe even millions.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. It’s not like three million people can flee a city in a few hours, and there’s no guarantee that the FBI believed there was a credible threat.

  What I do know is that a lot of people are dying, and… “We need to do something.”

  “Do what?” Bjorn asks.

  I turn to Reggie. “How brave are your pilots?”

  “Money makes people brave,” she says, and then she must realize what I’m thinking, because her tone quickly shifts. “Wait. No. No way.”

  “We can’t let all those people die.” I motion toward Brute, stomping along the lake’s edge, a few long strides from reaching the first skyscraper. Unlike Boston, whose downtown is somewhat condensed, Chicago is a vast and sprawling collection of massive towers carved in two by the Chicago River. If all three monsters reach downtown, the destruction will be unthinkable: Hiroshima times ten.

  “This is as close as we get,” Reggie says. “It’s not our job to protect—”

  “But it’s mine,” Garcia says, stepping back from the window. She holds out her gun. “And bullets can inspire bravery, even when money can’t.” She looks to me. “What are you thinking?”

  “You with me?” I ask Rain.

  “You know I am,” she says, and I’m struck by how strongly I feel for her. Not in any kind of romantic way—my heart is broken, not philanderous. It’s like I’ve known her my whole life, like we share some kind of guiding force. Like we’re connected. Twins or something.

  “We need to get closer,” I say. “So they know we’re here.”

  “And then?” Garcia asks.

  “They’ll follow us,” I say. “We can lead them out into the lake.”

  “Why would they—”

  Rain interrupts Garcia’s question by releasing her control over the effect that spectral proximity has on her body. The plane lights up like we’re having a photoshoot.

  “God damn,” Garcia says, fishing out a pair of sunglasses and putting them on. “What…what are you?”

  “Wish I knew,” Rain says.

  “Tell the pilots to take us through the city,” Garcia says.

  “Through the…” Reggie is aghast.

  “A Death Star trench run,” I say. “Right up the river. Out the back and right, around toward Brute and out to the lake. Hopefully Dragonfish will follow us, without flying into anything.”

  “You’re…you’re naming them?” Bjorn asks.

  I quickly point out the three kaiju, one at a time. “Brute. Dalí. Dragonfish.”

  “Dalí?” he asks, and then he looks out the window again. “Oh, I see it.”

  “The fourth is Wisp.”

  “There are four?” Garcia leans down to look out the window.

  “Wisp was in Boston. It’s not here.” I turn to Reg. “We need to do this now.”

  Reggie takes a steadying breath, while Garcia’s gun grip tightens. One of them will give the order. I’m relieved when Reggie heads up to the cockpit. Raised voices filter back to us, and then Reggie returns looking dismayed. “I think you’re going to have to ask them,” she says to Garcia.

  Gun in hand, Garcia storms the cockpit. This time, the plane banks toward the city almost immediately. Rain and I head for the front of the plane. I pause as I pass Reggie. “Sorry.”

  “I think we’ll all be sorry soon,” she says, followed by, “Give it a rest. At least they’re trying. What have you done?”

  “Better buckle up,” I say, and I note that Bjorn is already buckled up and is praying to whatever shrubbery might help us. Then I remember he’s a sham of a warlock. I’m not sure who he’d be praying to, but I hope he/she/it is listening.

  When I reach the cockpit, I find Captain Handsome at gun point, and a far less good looking and much younger pilot with a wild look in his eyes controlling the plane. The cockpit is a modern marvel full of screens and sensor displays that are so user friendly I understand most of what I’m seeing—including a multi-spectrum view of the city and the surrounding landscape that displays information the human eye might not see, allowing the pilots to fly in pitch darkness.

  What’s not on the screens is Dalí. The towering, twisted thing, straddling the Chicago River at the city’s far end, flares in and out of reality with every long step it takes. But on the screens, it doesn’t exist. Whatever sensors the plane is utilizing to create its Predator view of the world—infrared, thermal, ultraviolet—the kaiju creatures are invisible to them.

  “Where do you want to go?” the young pilot asks.

  “Low and fast,” I say. “Get us close, but try not to hit them.”

  “This is going to be awesome,” he says with a grin, throttling forward and taking us to just a hundred feet above the ground. Alarms flash and chirp as we descend. The pilot flips a switch, silencing them. The plane rockets down the river, twisting and turning with its bends, framed by mirrored skyscrapers that reflect our luminous passage. I see my reflection in the buildings, looking out the cockpit window. The distance to my mirrored self shifts with every building we pass.

  As we approach, Dalí lets out a shrill, chirping roar. I don’t see an orifice from which the sound could be made, but it’s loud enough to hurt my ears, even through the plane’s hull.

  It knows she’s here, I think, glancing back at Rain. She’s gripping the door frame, eyes clenched shut. “They’re coming,” she manages to say through grinding teeth.

  To the left, Dragonfish swerves its way through the
city. It narrowly misses some buildings and clips others. I’m not sure it, or even Brute, is trying to destroy the city, or trying to purposefully consume people’s souls. Those things are just a byproduct of their size, and their desire to reach a goal—in this case SpecTek’s Chicago lab, and now...Rain’s beacon.

  When Dragonfish peels the top three floors off a thirty-story building, I cringe, but is the destruction born from malice?

  They’re confused, I think. Desperate.

  Instead of outright fearing them, which is reasonable, I find myself pitying the creatures.

  “Look out!” Rain says, her voice a mix of pain and concern.

  She’s sensing what we have yet to see: Dalí’s mantis-like arms, which I hadn’t seen flash into reality until now, are as long as its legs. The appendages slice down from the lightning-painted sky.

  “Hold on!” our young pilot shouts, banking hard to the right and pulling back. G-forces fling me against the wall and hold me there, as we bank away from the river and down a street lined with towering buildings.

  For a fraction of a second, I think we’re clear.

  Then Rain shouts, “Back!” Her glowing hands lock onto Garcia and me, yanking us out of the cockpit. I fall atop my female companions, my view of our two pilots perfectly framed by the cockpit doorway, as a blade of pure light cuts straight through the plane, doing no physical damage.

  Again, I feel a momentary sense of relief. Dalí wasn’t fully in our world when it attacked.

  Then both pilots flop over in their seats, their souls sucked away.

  28

  “Umm,” I manage to say.

  It’s a wholly inadequate expression for the hysterical fear consuming me. But I’m numbed by shock. Unable to speak or move.

  Until someone tells me what to do.

  “Take the controls!” Rain shouts, shoving me from behind.

  “I don’t know how to fly a plane,” I complain, even as I throw myself back into the cockpit.

  “Just keep us flying straight,” she says. “If we get close to the ground, pull back.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple,” I say, leaning over Captain Handsome’s flaccid corpse and taking hold of his control stick. When the pilots died, the plane was flying straight down the street, level to the ground. With the controls relinquished, the best private plane money can buy stayed on course.