Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within

by L. J. Hachmeister

  Human skulls are fragile right there.

  His broke.

  I left the body behind me and rose, moving forward, toward the kitchen. My entire left side was on fire. I withdrew the knife and held it loosely in my left hand. An effort that required me to grit my teeth caused my spilled blood to seep back into the wounds and for the flesh around them to seethe and tighten and begin to go to work closing them. In five minutes, you wouldn’t know I’d ever been stabbed.

  Until then, though, I was going to be in agony, and there wasn’t time to slow down.

  “Grey,” came Viti’s voice over the earbud. She sounded calm. “Flashlights just came on in the basement. At least two. I’m coming in behind you.”

  I didn’t answer. Viti had been the survivor of a training program whose members had, as the culmination of their training, been assigned to murder one another. She had a gift. She would be fine.

  My concern was the kids.

  The kitchen door opened, and the guard there appeared, a small flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  “What the fuck?” he blurted. “What happened?”

  “He pissed himself when the lights went out,” I said in a contemptuous tone.

  The third guard lowered his gun a little and began to answer, but doing so had cast the light down over my bloodstained shirt. His eyes widened as he realized something was wrong.

  I threw the knife at his head. It didn’t hit him point first or anything like in the movies. But it was still a pound of steel, and I threw it hard. He went down, stunned, and I drove myself forward swiftly enough to be on him before he hit the floor. I got a hand on his pistol and twisted it aside. He fired a couple of rounds and I was able to aim them at the fridge. I slammed the gun against the floor until his fingers broke and then I clubbed him to death with it. It made a mess.

  Like I said. Professional monster.

  His flashlight rolled across the room and left the light shining upon the two kids. They were wearing big t-shirts and nothing else. They had slid out of their chairs and were doing their best to hide under the table.

  “Hi guys,” I said. “English?”

  They both stared at me.

  “Do you speak Spanish?” I asked, also in Spanish.

  They nodded at me. They didn’t look terrified. They looked like feral cats might: wary and searching for a means of escape. Too much had already happened to them for them to react the way kids were supposed to react.

  I wished there’d been time to kill those bastards a little more slowly.

  “You guys want to get out of here?” I asked.

  They looked at each other. One was a boy, one was a girl. The girl looked back at me and nodded.

  “Your accent is funny,” she said.

  “I learned a long time ago,” I answered.

  Boots pounded on stairs. A door in the hall flew open and three men came up out of the basement, half-dressed, fresh from sleep, guns in hand.

  At the far end of the house, something went “clackclackclackclackclackclack.”

  All three men dropped bonelessly to the floor. Their bodies died swiftly, each with a pair of small, neat holes in their skulls. A little .22 round has enough velocity to penetrate the human skull at close range if you know where to shoot, but not enough energy to leave it again. They just bounce around on the inside for a while.

  Viti appeared from the shadows behind them, ejecting a partially-full magazine from a Colt Woodsman that had been fitted with a silencer. The girl isn’t right—but she can shoot like no human I’ve ever known. She slipped a fresh magazine in and said, “We don’t have much time.”

  There was a whirring sound from out behind the house, like a lawnmower, and the lights came back up.

  “Good work,” I said. “Get these two to the car. I’m going upstairs for the others.”

  Viti turned the gun on the kids, who flinched.

  “Viti!” I said. “They’re kids!”

  “That only makes them smaller targets,” she said. Her voice assumed an authoritative tone and she spoke in rough, clear Spanish. “You two. Come quietly or I’ll shoot you.”

  Both kids looked back at me with wide eyes.

  “We’re good guys,” I explained to them.

  “We are not good guys,” Viti protested in English. “We just talked about this. Why must you make it so confusing?”

  I didn’t have time to argue. I eyed her, wincing at the pain in my side and said, annoyed, “Just go with her, kids. Do what she says, and you’ll be fine. Viti, we’re going to talk about this later. And they go in the back seat, not the trunk.”

  Viti made an exasperated sound and seized the fallen flashlight. “Fine.” She waggled the gun. “Move it.”

  The kids moved it. My secretary marched them out of their slavery at gunpoint.

  “Monster LLC. We aren’t pretty, but we get results,” I muttered.

  “We should put that on the business cards,” Viti said primly into my earbud.

  “Little too much truth in advertising,” I replied, and headed for the stairs up to where the monitor room and the… dormitory, I supposed, waited for me.

  I went up the stairs with my weight on my toes, and my toes at the very edges of the stairs, near the walls to hopefully minimize any creaks. I went fast. Stairways are great places to get shot, and I didn’t feel like doing that. I fully expected the fourth guard to pop up and start riddling me with bullets—but I got up clean.

  The upstairs consisted of a couple of client rooms, the security room, a bathroom and a locked and barred door to the dormitory.

  The dormitory door had been unbarred, but was still closed.

  The door to the monitor room was open. I checked. The room was empty.

  I checked the monitors. The room’s computers were just completing their reboot. They’d be recording again in a few more seconds, but since Viti had gotten clear and I was wearing a dead gangster’s face, I didn’t care much.

  An electronic voice abruptly came over one of the PC’s speakers in English. “Hey, asshole.”

  I frowned and checked my back before checking the source of the sound.

  The monitor screen had come up again, and I stared at camera inside the kid’s dormitory, where the fourth guard had evidently just gone. He now stood in the center of the room, facing the camera.

  He was pouring gasoline from a plastic jerry can over the beds of the sleeping children. Even as I watched, he threw the empty container aside, scooped a Zippo out of his pocket, struck it alight and held it up. “Hey, asshole! Can you hear me yet? There’s an intercom icon in the bottom corner of camera feed. Click it.”

  I did that and said, “I see you.”

  “Just watched your partner take those kids out,” he said. “You’re going to go join her. Get in that piece of crap car and drive away. I’m going to watch you from the window.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked.

  “Do not fuck with me!” screamed the guard, spraying it more than saying it. “You think I’m afraid to die?! I will burn these little assholes alive if you fuck with me!”

  I thought he was panicky, desperate, violent, and would think no more of burning those children alive than stepping on an ant. Also, he was smart enough to know when he was in trouble. That didn’t add up to a very good situation for those kids.

  But he had used three sentences when one would have done. He was a talker. I could work with that. “You’re a tough guy, huh?” I asked.

  That set him off. He started screaming at the camera again. The soundproofing in that room was pretty good. I couldn’t hear a thing that wasn’t coming through the monitor.

  I let him shriek and eyed his position in the room. Then I turned and walked briskly down the hall into one of the client rooms that had an adjoining wall. I eyed the room, touched a spot on the wall, then moved to where I’d have the most lead-up room, keeping my hand lined up with the invisible point I’d designated, while he continued cursing at me through the mon
itor down the hall.

  Then I triggered an adrenaline rush. One of the fun things about being a shapeshifter is that I’ve got conscious control over all kinds of things that are usually autonomic.

  And as I did, I triggered another change.

  Time seemed to slow. The room, even lit only from the hallway and the monitor room, grew almost unbearably bright. My heart rate jumped, causing my vision to almost throb with each beat. My body temperature went up to over a hundred and ten Fahrenheit almost instantly.

  And I changed.

  I drew mass from the immaterial world, my body twisting and bending and swelling. Though it might have taken, at most, a second of real time, subjectively I had a really bad afternoon. Pain seared through my body as my mind told it what to do. Clothing ripped and tore. Muscles swole and shifted and knotted into vicious cramps. Tendons stretched and screamed. Ligaments twisted, warped, and stretched into new shapes. Skin stretched and tore and healed again, then erupted into a furious, agonizing rash of itching sensation as it erupted in hair.

  It’s the hands and feet and face that always hurt the most to change around. I don’t know, maybe because they’re just so specialized, so unlike those of other creatures—so human. The way my jaw had to dislocate was never any fun, but there had to be room for all the teeth. My skull shifted, my back cramped in a series of rippling pops. My hands stretched, the knuckles screaming and swelling and popping as my nails twisted and rolled and solidified into raking claws.

  It’s not just my face I can change around. Didn’t I mention? Animals. Monsters. Just about anything I can imagine. Monster LLC. Hire one monster, get every monster. You won’t find bargains like this at Wal-Mart.

  God I love animal bodies. There’s a sensation of pure joy in movement that you just can’t get as a human being. You guys really are kind of pitiful, in the physical department. The kind of power that animal bodies offer, the speed, the coordination—there’s just no comparison.

  Hey, you know how a nine-hundred-pound Bengal tiger gets into a locked room?

  Any damned way it wants to.

  I went through the drywall and insulation between the two rooms with about as much effort as a dancer popping out of a cake.

  I roared as I came, a coughing explosion of pure sound that hit the guard like a club. He staggered, his knees loosened by the roar, his expression dazed.

  A single swipe of one sledgehammer paw struck the Zippo out of his hand and out through one of the room’s barred windows.

  Most of his hand went with it. The guard went down screaming.

  Threatening to burn kids.

  I came down on top of him, held him down, and started raking with my rear claws. It wasn’t a death of a thousand cuts. He was gone before I’d given him a hundred, hundred and twenty, tops.

  I spent most of my time in a humanoid form; usually, it’s the most convenient for my lifestyle. Going back into it, at this point, felt something like a stretched rubber band snapping back into its usual loosened state. Steam and ectoplasm bubbled off of me, all the extra mass sloughing off into a clear gelatin that would evaporate more rapidly than any water, and I stood up out of it, snatching a gasoline-soaked blanket off one of the beds and wrapping it around me as I did. No sense traumatizing the kids any more.

  It took me a little talking, but I got them to follow me out of the house. I got them packed into Viti’s car. I’d ride in the trunk.

  Then I paused and looked back at the house.

  “Head for the office,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  Viti frowned and said, “Don’t take much time. They’ll have backup here in another minute.”

  “I won’t,” I promised. “There’s something else we need to do to finish this.”

  Viti tilted her head.

  “I’m going to have some homework for you.”

  Viti smiled.

  The next day, Marcone, with his big dumb Einherjaren bodyguard, was eating breakfast at an expensive sidewalk bistro in the Gold Coast when I called the number he’d given me.

  He picked up a cell phone from the table and answered. “Marcone.”

  “Grey,” I said. “Job’s done.”

  “I saw, on the news,” he said. “You were rather thorough.”

  “You approve?”

  “I do.”

  “Then you’re going to love this,” I said, and sent him several pictures.

  From another bistro across the street, wearing a very different face and body, I watched Marcone look at the images.

  There were six pictures: Three high powered attorneys, one corporate executive, a city councilman and a notorious religious-political activist. Each picture was identical: a look-down at a dead body with small, neat bullet holes in the temples. On the chest of each body was a computer printed photograph of the deceased, engaged in acts of brutality with one of the children.

  Marcone studied the pictures for a long moment. His expression never changed. Then he picked up the phone again.

  “Where did you get the pictures?”

  “Surveillance feed at the brothel,” I said.

  “Those people were assets.”

  “Those people were a market base waiting for a supplier,” I said. “As long as they were around, you’d have this problem again and again.”

  Marcone’s face was stony. After a few beats he said, “This could be considered an attack upon my interests, Mr. Grey.”

  I peered at him for a second, and then I chuckled. “Hah. You didn’t know they were pedophiles, did you? Or they wouldn’t have been working for you in the first place.”

  “Yet they were mine. Their loss represents considerable effort that must now be re-invested.”

  “I suggest you look at this as a glass half-full,” I replied. “You didn’t lose anything but liabilities. Your rivals had already compromised them with the photographs. Probably what they had in mind all along. I just saved you years of headaches and information leaks.”

  “You are playing with fire, Mr. Grey.”

  “Nobody should do that,” I said. “That omelet looks tasty. But grapefruit juice?”

  Marcone’s face went blank. His eyes swept up and down the street.

  “See you around, Baron,” I drawled.

  I finished my coffee, left the burner phone on the table, rose, and walked away.

  I was just one more random face among millions. Marcone’s eyes didn’t track me.

  How could they?

  I got into the office, where we’d kept the kids overnight, on inflatable mattresses. There wasn’t much floor left in the entry, where Viti’s desk was. She was sitting behind it, looking exhausted.

  I could hear the kids in my office, speaking Spanish excitedly. My office has a big TV, for when I feel like watching the news, which is seldom, and an X-Box for when I’m thinking hard about important professional things, which is constantly. My work ethic in that arena is second to none. The kids were in there, following in my footsteps.

  “Grey,” Viti said, as I entered. “This is hell. I will resign. I’m not kidding.”

  “I wasn’t planning on keeping them,” I said.

  She reached for the phone. “I can call the authorities.”

  “Yeah, after what they’ve been through, we’ll hand them to the government.” I shook my head. “We can do better for them than that, I think.” Then I grinned. I had an old paper-style Rolodex. I got into it, opened it to the right card and said, to Viti, “There. Call.”

  Viti frowned at the number. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  “You kidding,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”

  She exhaled, eyeing me. Then she said, “Why do you help them, Grey?”

  “To pay the Rent,” I said.

  She frowned. “No. You’re already ahead for the year.”

  I frowned back. Then I said, “Do you remember being young? Feeling helpless?”

  Someone who didn’t know her well, meaning anyone but me, would not have noticed the dar
kness that slid into the backs of her eyes. “Yes.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Seems like the kind of thing it would be fun to stop.”

  Her brows beetled. “Vengeance?”

  “When I was young,” I said, “they took a lot of things away from me. Maybe when I help those kids, I take something back.”

  Viti shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Stick with me,” I said. “With any luck, someday you will.” I put my hand on the table next to hers, close enough to feel the heat of her skin without actually touching her and said, “You’re doing fine.”

  She nodded uncertainly and offered me a small smile. I nodded at her. Then I went into the office to play video games with the kids until the cavalry arrived.

  I heard Viti make the call.

  “Monster LLC calling for Harry Dresden,” she said. “Please tell him that there are children who need his help.”

  BIO

  Jim Butcher is the author of the Dresden Files, the Codex Alera, and a new steampunk series, the Cinder Spires. His resume includes a laundry list of skills which were useful a couple of centuries ago, and he plays guitar quite badly. An avid gamer, he plays tabletop games in varying systems, a variety of video games on PC and console, and LARPs whenever he can make time for it. Jim currently resides mostly inside his own head, but his head can generally be found in his home town of Independence, Missouri.

  Jim goes by the moniker Longshot in a number of online locales. He came by this name in the early 1990’s when he decided he would become a published author. Usually only 3 in 1000 who make such an attempt actually manage to become published; of those, only 1 in 10 make enough money to call it a living. The sale of a second series was the breakthrough that let him beat the long odds against attaining a career as a novelist.

  All the same, he refuses to change his nickname.

  LINKS

  Author Website: http://www.jim-butcher.com/jim