The late day streets are mostly empty and easy to navigate, but there are still a million people living in the city, and another million in the congested suburbs surrounding downtown. As with any city in the U.S., the appearance of six-hundred-foot-tall Riesegeists will exact a massive toll on life, not to mention terrorizing the nation, and the rest of the world.
We haven’t tuned in the outside world. I don’t know if people know the truth about Boston—they must by now—and I don’t know how much footage has snuck out of Chicago and onto the web. But as we turn past a dark IHOP, its parking lot empty, I think people are staying huddled around their TVs, waiting for the latest news about the two decimated cities.
Are we still terror suspects? I wonder.
Do people have any idea about what’s going on?
I look out the window, looking at apartment building windows as we pass. Most are dark, shades drawn.
They’ve left, I hope. With two attacks on U.S. cities, maybe people are hitting the road and getting out of town?
There’s no way to know for sure.
Feeling as internally prepared as I can be, I turn to Reggie, who has returned to the back seat, and ask, “So, who was that guy with the white hair?”
“I’m not sure what his official title is,” she says, “but he’s the man in charge. Name’s Frank.”
“He goes by his first name?”
“Mr. Frank,” she says. “It’s his last name. I believe his first name is Matthew, but I never heard anyone call him that. His full name was on my NDA. He’s not worth concerning yourself with now.”
“Why not?”
She looks at me like I’ve just pooped out a baby dragon. “Because Garcia ran him over.”
My stomach twists with the realization that I have yet to tell anyone that Mr. Frank not only survived being hit, but walked away from it.
Reggie’s forehead creases like an aerial view of a World War I battlefield crisscrossed by trenches. “What?”
“He’s not dead,” I say.
“Impossible.”
“I’m telling you, he got up and brushed it off.” I replay the image of Mr. Frank spinning through the air, striking the plane, plummeting back down, and then casually standing back up. “He wasn’t even hurt.”
Reggie holds her breath for a moment, and then lets it out as a long, slow, “Shhhiiiiiittttt.”
That’s not a good ‘shit.’ Or even a mild ‘shit’, or a ‘shit’ that says, ‘We’re all going to die.’ That’s a ‘I know something horrible, and I might have had something to do with it’ shit.
“What did you do?”
“It was a hypothesis,” she says.
In the front seat, Bjorn’s head rises at the word.
“What hypothesis?”
Bjorn’s head cranes around. “What hypothesis?”
The guilt in Reggie’s eyes tells me the hypothesis was Bjorn’s, and that Reggie gave it to SpecTek.
“I’m sorry,” she says to Bjorn. “I thought it was bunk. I never thought it would work.”
“Thought what would work?” Rain asks, leaning around me. The tension in the car has attracted everyone’s attention, and once again, Reggie is in the hot seat.
Reggie’s mulls over the question, and then to herself says, “I knew his hair looked grayer. And his eyes. The blue.” She leans forward and looks at Rain. “You used to be a brunette with brown eyes and a somewhat darker complexion, thanks to an American Indian mother.”
I can’t help but stare at Rain, mentally dyeing her hair, her eyes, and her skin in shades of brown. It’s only then that her high cheekbone structure hints at her genealogy.
“What the hell did you do to her?” Garcia asks.
“She was touched by death,” Bjorn says, “But left alive.”
“In the same way it affected Mr. Frank,” I surmise.
“Not exactly,” Reggie said. “Not if what you said is true.”
“Because he’s dead,” Bjorn says. “Still.”
“That’s why getting hit by the car didn’t kill him,” Reggie adds. “Probably.”
“I’m not a fan of probably,” Garcia says. “Or of bullshit, so this better be legit.”
Reggie clears her throat. “No one knew how it would affect the human body—”
“Or mind,” Bjorn adds.
“So,” I say, “You made a zombie.”
“Closer to a vampire,” Bjorn says. “Without the need to suck blood. In essence, his body has been fused with the supernatural energy that surrounds us, drawing power from it. Drawing life.”
“Like The Force?” I ask.
“The dark side,” Bjorn says. “Something like that.”
“Doesn’t sound like Spectral Duality,” I note.
“It’s not,” he says, sounding grim. “My work on Supernatural Fusion predates that of Spectral Duality. It was never published. Never shown to anyone.” He turns to Reggie. “We weren’t really a Tinder match, were we? After I turned them down, SpecTek sent you to steal my work.”
Reggie says nothing. The tenuously placed bandage on their relationship is being slowly torn off.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Bjorn asks.
Reggie’s mouth parts, but then her eyes go wide and she sits up straight. “We’re nearly there.”
“Where?” I ask. We didn’t have a specific destination in mind. Rain has been guiding us.
“The lab,” she says, leaning to look down a right-turn street as we pass. “It’s just a block that way.”
“Then they’ll be coming through here, right?” Garcia asks. “Maybe we should—”
“Keep going,” Rain says. She points. “There. Across the bridge.”
I follow her finger forward and to the left, across the Colorado River to what looks like a massive Big Top tent with the top cleaved off.
I’ve been there…
I can’t remember the name, mostly because there is a mishmash of buildings built around circular patterns, all of them involving the arts to some degree or another. I attended an outdoor concert there during South by Southwest. Electronica. I think most people enjoyed it more than me because they were high. The music was okay, but the true highlight of that night was fried chicken strips in a bacon cone. Pure magic.
And now, it seems, the site will be host to dark magic. Or science gone awry that looks like magic. I’m pretty sure they’re the same thing—science and magic.
A scent catches in my nose, instantly recognizable, transporting me back in time. Night-blooming jasmine. Morgan grew it in our first apartment. Come night, the whole place would smell of the fragrant flower. I loved the scent, but when we got busy with work, our mildly green thumbs turned brown, and the plant died. But I have identified that smell with Morgan ever since.
“She’s close,” Rain says, when she catches me looking around, and up. “You can feel her?”
I grin. “Smell her.”
“What does she smell like?” Then she holds up a hand. “Wait. Night-blooming jasmine?”
The others are staring at us, but I don’t care. “That’s her.”
“Or we drove by a plant,” Reggie says, somehow still managing to be a skeptic.
“So, ahh,” Garcia says, as we cross the bridge over the Colorado, “we’re almost there. I get that you two want to make like AT&T to reach out and touch someone, but the rest of us aren’t exactly immune from soul sucking kaiju-ghosts—”
“Or being crushed,” Bjorn adds.
“Right,” Garcia says, “So…”
Reggie leans forward. “Plan B.”
“What’s plan B?” Garcia asks, and I’m glad she does, because I don’t know what it is either.
“If they’re here for SpecTek,” she says. “We remove SpecTek. Maybe that’s all it will take?”
Garcia glances back. “What do you mean, ‘Remove SpecTek?’”
“I mean,” she says. “We blow it up…if no one is inside, of course.”
It makes sense in a
ghost-movie kind of way, assuming the Riesegeists are seeking out the SpecTek labs out of a sense of revenge. Removing their target could free them from whatever is binding them to the mortal plane. Then again, these aren’t normal ghosts. They might just stick around and destroy stuff. And with SpecTek being gone, that will make Rain the one and only thing attracting them.
Fun…
Garcia raises a thumbs up above her head. “If we’re spotted, I don’t think my job will be waiting for me when I get home, but if we can stop these things, and keep SpecTek from making more, count me in.”
Bjorn nods, an eager gleam in his eyes. “Hell, yes.”
Garcia pulls to a stop beside a building whose architecture is hard to describe aside from modern, round, and concrete. The top of it is a giant circle, like Xena’s chakram, and within it, a rectangular building with multicolored windows. “First stop,” Garcia says, and reads the sign beside us, “The Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Center for the Performing Arts. Geez, that’s a freakin’ mouthful.”
I point to a second sign that simply reads, Long Center.
“That makes more sense,” she says with a grin. “Now, get out.”
Rain and I hop out of the car. While Rain strikes out for the staircase leading up under the giant disc, I turn back to the others.
Garcia reaches out her hand. “If I don’t get to see you again…” I shake her hand. “You’re a brave man.” And when I give her my version of her skeptical eyebrow, she gets serious. “Braver than me.”
Coming from Garcia, that’s a high compliment, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s certainly not how I’ve felt the past few years. But I am about to face down a horde of spirit monsters. So, I guess I’ve made progress.
“Saul,” Reggie says. “I’m sorry. Truly.”
She’s near tears. Like Garcia, she’s somewhat convinced that this will be our last goodbye.
I take her hands in mine and squeeze. “Just…make sure they can’t do this again.”
She nods.
“And thanks,” I say. “For being a good friend.”
Her tears slip free as she sits back, unable to speak in the face of forgiveness. Part of me feels angry at her still—and at Morgan—but showing someone grace feels good.
“Bjorn,” I say, giving him a wave. “It’s been weird.”
“Nice knowing you,” he says.
I take a step back from the car, glancing up as a shadow falls over us and the temperature drops by a few degrees. The storm is coalescing above. The setting sun is still sneaking beneath the clouds, casting them in fiery light, but soon, it will be gone and only darkness will remain…and not the kind that inspires me.
Tires squeal as Garcia does half a donut and speeds off the way they came.
Alone for a minute, I breathe in deeply, hunting for the smell of night-blooming jasmine. Detecting only the acrid odor of burned rubber, I turn and run after Rain, catching up with her at the top of the stairs. She’s moving quick. No time to catch my breath as I match her pace.
“How much longer?” I ask, when we leave the building behind and step out into a large, empty field. There’s no one around. No reason to be here. This is good, I think. This will work.
And then my eyes turn up, as something massive flickers into reality for a moment. Something bigger and scarier and more horrific than anything I’ve seen before. And while I don’t understand what it is, I know who it was before…
Rain’s daughter.
41
“What the…” I crane my head up, following the tangle of glowing tendrils. In some ways they’re reminiscent of Brute’s hair, but the mass of wriggling limbs support the weight of a body a thousand feet in the air.
Far above, the swirling clouds flash with blue light. Mixed with the blazing orange of a low-hanging sunrise, the view is, for a moment, beautiful. And then the others resolve out of the ether.
Brute. Dragonfish. Dalí.
They look almost small compared to… I don’t know her name. I decide on ‘Storm’ to compliment her mother’s current moniker.
Brute wades through the Colorado. When his body slips into the mortal plane, water gushes out into the city.
Dragonfish undulates in the sky, its massive wings beating only occasionally as it flies lazy circles around Storm.
They’re on the move together, but what is their relationship? Are the former human adults protecting the larger, but younger soul? Or are they simply moving together, mindlessly toward SpecTek, like a horde of zombies toward a honking horn?
Dalí lets out a roar, its long legs sweeping forward as its bulbous body wriggles about. Its spiny fins, front to back, undulate. Almost calmly. A distant building crumbles. Billowing dust and debris fill the air around its lower limbs. Drawing the kaiju to the park surrounding the river will help minimize the destruction, but these massive creatures can’t really be contained. Not completely.
Not by us, and not by SpecTek. Even if they have the means, it’s a power no one on Earth should have. If we can stop that from happening, we will.
Storm’s body is segmented, like an insect larva, but glowing white. The creature is covered in little mouths, each of them snapping at the air with big, blunt teeth. But they’re not really little, I realize. Each mouth is probably large enough to consume a bus. Storm has no eyes to speak of. No hints of having been human, or a little girl. Brilliant blue light flashes from its underside, slipping out through gaps in its tendril limbs as they wriggle forward.
“Are you ready?” Rain asks.
I turn toward her. “Not remotely.”
She reaches her hand out, and I take hold of it. Her hand is small, warm and clammy inside mine.
“Neither am I,” she confesses.
I understand her trepidation. Never mind the ‘Holy shit, we’re going to be killed by kaiju-ghosts’ aspect any sane person would feel in our situation. But we’ve both got personal connections to these monsters now. Me—the wife I’ll never forget. Rain—the daughter she can’t remember.
She laces her fingers with mine. “Don’t let go.”
“No matter what,” I say. “To hell and back. We’re in this together.”
“I’d like to think we would have been friends,” she says. “Before. But…I don’t think you would have liked me.”
“You remember?”
She shakes her head. “But the things I can do. What people have said about me, about…” She looks up at Storm. “About her.”
“I’m calling her Storm.”
Rain grins. “About Storm. I don’t think I was a good person.”
“Maybe,” I say. Tip-toeing around the person that Rain used to be won’t do her any good. She might have been a master assassin with hundreds of deaths on her hands. But that person is gone, stripped away by the power of death itself. “You’re a good person now.”
“You sure about that?” she asks.
“I know what it feels like to look the worst of the worst in the eyes,” I say, staring into her light blue eyes, where traces of light are starting to flicker. “You’re not one of them.
Her hand squeezes mine. I squeeze back.
“You’re a good friend.” Her eyes flare to life, forcing my gaze forward. She can’t hold back the light much longer.
We stand, hand in hand, for a silent moment. In the distance, screaming. Buildings crumble. Water crashes. Sirens wail. The people who decided to remain in the city are now regretting their choice. Across the river, cars speed down the street, headed toward the setting sun and safety.
In front of us, the Riesegeists loom larger, their glowing bodies slipping in and out of reality, the lightshow above growing violent behind a swirl of dark clouds. A cool wind whips against us, carrying the scent of night-blooming jasmine.
“Morgan’s with us,” I say.
Rain’s fingers adjust and clamp down on my hand. “Then let’s say hello.”
Star-like brilliance explodes from Rain, illuminating the grass around us in sta
rk white.
Dragonfish is the first to react, flinching in mid-flight and turning its googly-eyed stare straight at us. With a twist of its coiling body, it redirects its flight path in our direction. Moving up and down, the creature’s body slides in and out of the world, strobing toward us.
I don’t think the Riesegeists need to eat. They’re dead, after all. And I don’t know if they have any memory of eating, but Dragonfish—and the person it used to be—opens its underbite jaw, intent on swallowing us whole.
To the left, Dalí flinches away from Rain’s light, tumbling over its own long limbs like a drunk giraffe. It levels entire neighborhoods as it attempts to stay upright. A massive explosion rocks into the sky beneath it. The fireball offsets Rain’s brilliance for a moment. The light took a fraction of a second to reach us. The shockwave is still coming. I brace myself just in time.
The boom draws a shout of pain, and the shockwave feels like a slap to the chest from a sasquatch.
I manage to stand my ground and remain upright, but Brute follows up the explosion with a trumpeting roar and a stomp of his powerful, flaking forearms. The ground trembles as water explodes from the Colorado River, rushing up over the concrete banks. I’m driven to one knee by the volume of its roar, but Rain doesn’t bow to it, or let me go.
“Here we go,” she says, and I look up just in time to see Dragonfish’s sharp-toothed maw snap shut around us.
I expect to feel the sudden, almost painless transition to death, but then I’m inside Dragonfish’s body, still alive, still thinking, still standing. The monster’s spectral form moves through us as it arcs back up into the air.
Rain disappears in a nuclear blossom of light.
This is it. Time to say, “Hello!”
Nothing.
“What is your name?” I shout into the ghost.
“What do you want?”
A loud, angry scream billows around me. It’s not coming from the monster’s mouth, and I doubt anyone other than me can hear it.
This is the voice of its soul. Pain and suffering. Anguish. Rage. Despair.
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