“Hey, is that a short-range radio?” I asked.
“What?”
“I asked if it was short-range. It looks short-range, but I don’t know a lot about radios. We’re pretty deep underground, though. Who are you going to talk to?”
“I’m gonna call the office and tell them we got an intruder, and they should send the police,” he said. “Does that work for you?”
“Well no, it doesn’t. I’m just wondering if you’re calling another part of the facility without realizing it. Because you said we’re alone.”
“Yeah well, maybe I lied about that.”
I didn’t think he had lied. I thought this was the first time it occurred to him he might be communicating with another part of the same facility. I might have been bluffing too; I’m not exactly an expert in radios, but the last time I used a walkie-talkie, it didn’t have the kind of range I’d expect from a cell phone. Maybe that’s not true any longer, though.
“Hey, this is Ted, over,” he said, into the radio. “I have a…”
He didn’t finish the sentence, because something particularly engrossing had just appeared in the tank, over my left shoulder. It was startling enough that he dropped the radio and put both hands on the gun.
“What in the fucking hell is that?”
I turned to look.
The missile-head-shaped body type was the first thing to notice. That came before the face, and the enormous mouth, and the human-like arms. It was staring out at the source of light, its black eyes unfocused, like there was a film on them.
A healthy one would have broken out of this tank long before now. This one was clearly sick.
“That’s a merman,” I said. “And he’s a long way from home.”
15
“A merman, like a guy mermaid? The fuck, you think I’m that dumb?”
Ted did not appear to be interested in taking seriously the evidence being provided by his eyes.
“He’s right there,” I said. “What do you think you’re looking at?”
“I do not know, but I’m rejecting merman out of hand, mister, because they’re not real.”
There was a Sherlock Holmes aphorism that seemed appropriate in this situation, but Ted didn’t look like he was ready to hear it.
“Forget it,” he said. “Leave the gun on the floor and step back from…Jesus, whatever that thing is.”
“I understand. I would have felt the same way a few months ago, but I’ve met one since.”
Not that this wasn’t a shock for me too. Mermen are incredibly strong, can absolutely travel on land, and have a shriek that would probably put a crack in the containment glass. You didn’t keep one in a fish tank. The fact that they were, meant…well, I didn’t know what it meant.
I chanced another look over my shoulder. The merman’s eyes, which had sought out the light a second ago, were already closing. In addition to being sick, I wondered if they were drugging him. If so, that would require regular maintenance.
Actually, everything in the room implied routine visits, or the subject in the tank would have starved to death by now. Either Ted was lying about there being the occasional staffer, or his shift didn’t intersect with theirs.
Or, there was another entrance. We were underground, but maybe there was a tunnel somewhere.
If I was the kind of person who thought positively about a large pharmaceutical company like Holitix, I’d conclude that the merman in the tank had the same disease as everyone else, and the employees of this lab were trying to cure him. On the island, I saw a mermaid suffering from the same condition, so it was a plausible explanation.
It was unsustainably improbable, though, because all anyone had to do was head downtown to find plenty of individuals suffering from the same malady, and none of them required special living conditions.
But maybe I wasn’t thinking this through. Maybe they needed a live merman in order to come up with a cure.
There was another explanation, though, and since I was not the kind of person who thought positively about Holitix, that was the one I gravitated toward.
“Just step away from the gun and have a seat at that desk there,” Ted said.
“You don’t want to talk about this?”
“No. Look, it’s one in the morning, I’m late for my rounds and overdue for a cup of coffee. I’m not gonna stand here in a room I ain’t supposed to be standing in, debating an armed invader over the existence of mermaids. And another thing: I recognize you. Adam, right? I saw your face on the TV.”
“Then you know I’m armed and dangerous.”
“Well yeah, but it didn’t say anything about a sword.”
“Nobody would have believed them.”
“Right. Are you gonna sit, or am I gonna shoot you?”
I sighed.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m pretty sure yours isn’t even loaded, but we can pretend.”
“Don’t worry, it’s loaded. I was army, my friend, I know my way around a gun. That chair there.”
I sat down.
I didn’t really want to kill Ted. I didn’t even want to hurt him. My plan had been to find a room with a door that locked, and put him in it until I finished looking over the place. The problem had been that none of the rooms we’d come upon so far could be locked in such a manner. I had confidence I could lock one so that someone on the outside couldn’t get in, but none of them seemed to be designed so that a person on the inside couldn’t get out. I expected this was normal for office buildings, which didn’t habitually design places to physically trap employees.
He was definitely pushing his luck, though. I couldn’t have him reach whoever picked up the other end of that radio and tell them I was in the building. I can do a lot of things, but evading all the police in the Chicago area in ten acres of woods wasn’t one of them. Not long-term. Given I’d killed a cop a day earlier, they would be especially motivated to keep looking, too.
Ted seemed to have some respect for how dangerous I was supposed to be, because after I sat he crouched down to try and find the radio he’d dropped on the floor, while also not taking his eyes off of me. It would have been funnier without the loaded (presumably) gun in his hand, but he was searching the wrong part of the floor by about two feet.
“You want me to help with that?” I asked.
“Shut up.”
“I could do hot/cold.”
“I said shut up.”
The work stations in this lab hadn’t been cleaned out; I was sitting at a desk that would have looked at home in just about any medical facility, with a computer monitor and keyboard, various decorative knickknacks, generic motivational sayings printed up and taped to the cubicle wall, and a desk calendar. There was no evidence of a computer, but the wires to the monitor ran behind the desk and onto the floor, so maybe it was elsewhere. There was also a bunch of pens being held in a coffee mug that had the Holitix logo on it, a stack of computer printouts, and…a paperweight holding the printouts in place.
It was a round, polished rock with a flat bottom to keep it from rolling away, about the size of a shot-put.
The gun was five feet away. I could reach it if I threw myself to the ground, but there was a risk Ted could get off a shot in the time it took. He’d probably miss me, but there were plenty of things in this room it would be bad to hit with a bullet. However, if Ted was momentarily distracted, or otherwise incapacitated, even if it was for just a second or two, I could get to the gun.
Then I’d have to shoot him, which again, I didn’t want to do, but I was running out of alternatives.
What I needed was for Ted to take his eyes off of me for a second, which I figured he’d have to do eventually if he wanted to get his hands on the radio.
But then he stood again, and the radio was in his hands, and it looked as if I’d missed my moment.
Then the merman made a sound.
It wasn’t a huge sound, not compared to what they’re capable of. Just sort of a low moan. Since Ted was busy refusi
ng to believe the merman was there, he jumped at the noise.
That was my window. I grabbed the paperweight and threw it.
I was aiming for his chest. A goblin would have been accurate enough to knock the gun out of his hands, but since I wasn’t one, it made more sense to target the largest part of his body instead.
Ted recovered from the shock of the merman’s vocalization in time to notice the projectile, but not in time to avoid it completely. It hit his right shoulder. He nearly dropped his gun, but didn’t. I still had the time to dive to mine, roll a few feet, and come up on one knee with the gun to bear.
The next thing that would have happened, if this were a movie, was that he and I would fire our guns at the same time and see who was the better shot. But Ted was near the door, and evidently didn’t watch the same movies I did. He decided to get out of the room altogether before I had a chance to get off a shot.
I actually did have a chance, but I didn’t take it. I couldn’t decide on a kill shot or one to wound, and that hesitation ended up meaning I didn’t fire at all.
I couldn’t let him get away, though, so I was going to have to figure out which one it was going to be before the next opportunity arose. He couldn’t get away, and he couldn’t radio anybody, or if he did, I couldn’t be on the bottom floor of the lab when one of those things happened, because there was only one exit.
I slipped the Beretta into my pocket and ran to the door. Maybe, I thought, I could tackle him or something. He probably wasn’t a fast runner.
I reached the hallway, and very quickly had to come to grips with an entirely different situation.
For starters, Ted didn’t have to be tackled, because he was already dead. It was a little gruesome, actually; the first thing I saw in the hallway was Ted’s back, with the pointy end of a sword stuck through it, at around the spot where his heart would be.
He crashed to the floor, next to the gun he never got to use and the radio he probably shouldn’t have.
There was a goblin on the other side of the body. He and a second goblin were blocking the way to the stairwell. On the left, towards the mystery door at the far end of the room—a door which was now ajar— were three more goblins. All of them had their swords out.
“Hi, guys,” I greeted. My hand had already slipped into the bag around my shoulder. “Pretty good security on this floor. Where’d you even come from? The ceiling? Or, wait, a secret tunnel. There’s gotta be one, right?”
“You’re trespassing,” the one who killed Ted said. He spoke quietly, in the same tone of voice you’d use to tell someone their fly was open.
“That’s true,” I said, “but at least I didn’t kill the help.”
“That’s exactly what you did, with that sword on your back. Where is the other one?”
“Other who?”
“You aren’t traveling alone. Your imp is in the hospital; where is your goblin girlfriend?”
“You’re suspiciously well-informed for a security team that’s happened upon an intruder.”
“We’ll look for her later,” one of the ones to my left said. “He’s the important one.”
“I’m flattered,” I said. “Since I’m so important, I don’t suppose you guys feel like attacking one at a time? Just to be sporting.”
Without so much as an en garde, the nearest one leapt over Ted, his sword in an overhand swing coming down hard. Since the three on my left also charged, I took this to be a no.
I drew my sword to parry the overhead attack, but only with one hand, which was frankly not the way to handle this sort of thing. Goblins are too strong and fast, and while this one had completely sold out by leaving his feet, if the sword was all I was equipped with, the correct response was to put both hands on the haft and counter power with power. But, I only used my right, and did my best to force him sideways. Meanwhile, my left hand was seeking out the Mossberg in my shoulder bag.
This was a nifty-looking short-barrel shotgun I fell in love with, despite not knowing such a thing existed prior to my meeting with the gun merchant. (Also, it was likely I remained annoyed at having left behind Rick’s gun, and decided to rectify that.)
In my day, you took a shotgun, sawed down the barrel, and voila. Now, gun manufacturers made them that way.
Design-wise, it was almost perfectly contrary to the natural direction of hand-held weaponry, in that it was exceedingly inaccurate, and so became drastically less useful the further away the target stood. I didn’t think this one had a chance to hurt anybody at more than thirty feet, basically, which you couldn’t say about most other kinds of guns. You might wound them from that far, but you wouldn’t stop them altogether.
It reminded me of the old blunderbuss, even though they weren’t used in the way I just described, and didn’t have as wide a blast range. Actually, it reminded me of every gun before properly-designed rifles came into existence: inaccurate, but loud.
I didn’t bother to draw the shotgun from the bag; I just pointed the correct end in the appropriate direction and pulled the trigger. It blew a hole through the vinyl and knocked over everyone charging from the left side of the hallway. Anyone not killed outright by shot lost the use of their ears temporarily, myself included.
The sword blow wasn’t easy to parry, meanwhile, because he was strong, and had put his entire body weight behind the attack. (It wasn’t, I should add, a smart attack. Goblins are only a little stronger than humans, but they’re a lot faster. A strength move was the wrong play.) Despite the recoil from the shotgun and the fact that I only had my right arm to blunt his swing, I successfully diverted him into the wall to my right.
Quickly, I assessed the damage from the gunshot.
The blast killed the nearest goblin outright, but it looked like the other two, while down, were only wounded, which was extremely disappointing.
Meanwhile, the second one to my right was completely uninjured, and in my blind spot.
I didn’t hear her attack because I couldn’t hear anything at all, so I guess it was fair to say I felt her attack. It was probably just experienced anticipation. Whatever you want to call it, I ducked from a swing meant to take my head off, turned around and emptied the second barrel into her chest.
Bits of goblin sprayed all over what had been white walls, and the vinyl bag was smoking. As it was still attached to a strap around my neck, I didn’t feel like exploring an answer to the question, can a vinyl bag catch fire. Also, I didn’t have time to reload the gun inside, so I discarded the whole thing.
Then, the one I’d parried into the wall came at me again. I barely blocked the attack, this time pushing him to my left. He was fast, and strong, and not nearly as groggy as I was, evidently, but his full-force attacks were frankly getting annoying; I felt like a matador.
He was also shouting something, but I couldn’t hear what.
I figured it out soon enough. He was just keeping me busy, while one of the two wounded ones to my left regained his feet so as to throw sharp things at my head. Thankfully, he was as rattled by the shotgun blasts as I was: the first one missed, albeit not by much.
I needed some distance between me and the dude throwing things, so I started to backpedal from the swordsman. (To my right, where the corridor was clear except for shotgunned goblin parts.) This put the swordsman at the seeming advantage of having to pursue me, but it was really just to make it harder for knife guy to get a clean shot.
After about five steps I stopped, ducked, and turned my shoulder into the swordsman’s groin, flipped him over my head, and dropped straight to the ground. A knife flew where neither of us were standing anymore. Meanwhile, I’d drawn the Beretta.
The knife-thrower was tough to pick out at first, in the assorted goblin bits lining that side of the room, but from his perspective it probably looked like I disappeared too, given I was lying on the ground and partly hidden by Ted’s robust corpse.
I spotted him before he spotted me, and fired twice. The first one hit him in the forehead. The secon
d missed but by then it didn’t matter.
The swordsman was up again by then. Thankfully, my hearing was coming back so I knew where he was, and rolled away before he buried his sword in my back.
And, this is why you bring a gun to a sword fight. I shot him in the face.
Then the hallway was silent. I really hoped the reason was that everybody other than me was dead, and not that my hearing was still too off to pick up the sound of someone moving.
I got to my feet slowly, and looked down the hall. I had a clean path to the staircase if I wanted it, but something felt off.
By the time I realized that the issue was that I was missing a goblin, the arrow had already been loosed.
He was hiding under the body of the one I’d shot in the forehead, at the far end of the hall. He’d been wounded, but not killed, by the first shotgun blast. The spot I had last seen him lying in was no longer occupied; I should have caught this right away.
I thoroughly deserved getting hit by that arrow, is what I’m saying.
It wasn’t lethal, but it sure didn’t tickle. I think I must have twisted a bit at the last second, because it struck me in the torso to the left of my heart, took off a layer of skin and skipped off my ribcage. The flak jacket was unquestionably of assistance in preventing more serious damage.
It got stuck in the jacket, though, which was less than ideal. But, it must have looked like it was stuck in me, and not my clothes, because the archer got brazen. He shed his cover and stood to take more careful aim. I was on my knees—I didn’t recall falling to them, but that was the position I was in nonetheless—and presenting a decent target.
I raised my gun and got off a shot at the same time he loosed his arrow. Honestly, I don’t know if he was aiming for it or not—if he was, it was a hell of a shot—but he hit the gun with the arrow. My shot was already going wide, but I wasn’t going to be taking another one because now the Beretta was ten feet behind me.
I took a second to make sure none of my fingers were back there with it. (They weren’t.)
“Wow, that was impressive,” I said.
Immortal From Hell Page 29
