by Rob Thurman
“I thought so,” I complained, but not seriously or surprised. I’d have made the same choice.
That’s when the landlord shed his human skin. It was as if it was diseased and peeling away, but not like you’d think. Not human skin and flesh with a raw red meat beneath. It was more like a cocoon, with a milky fluid that coated bloodless gray-white pulpy tissue that had hidden under the human disguise. It bubbled, flowed, and hissed as it poured to the floor. It stank of all things venomous and poisonous. To the skin-walker, however, it was useless to him in this fight. It peeled away, wet and vile, taking his clothes, ravaged face, and thick hair with it. Out of it sprang, as predicted, a mountain lion—hallelujah it wasn’t the bear. That was an all night’s work if a bear was the outer layer, as then the next would be a mountain lion then . . . so on and so on.
Not that a mountain lion was five dollars, park your car, and done. The skin-walker kind were closer to skeletons than anything else—if twice the size of a true mountain lion’s dried carcass with bones twice as thick. You could hear weathered and molting fur-covered bones snap against one another as it moved. Every step sounded like a hundred breaking bones, but it didn’t show any pain. Its eyes were a solid milky white as if it had stared at the desert sun for a year and a day, never blinking, but it wasn’t blind. I had a years-old scar on my hip for assuming that.
It crouched and leaped over our heads before Cal could fire. I didn’t bother. If he had killed it, and he wouldn’t, it took more than bullets for the mountain lion, then its dead body would have still done the same as it was doing now. It was vomiting up, one after the other, six coyotes—if coyotes were demonic with glowing red eyes, legs three times as long, and twice as many teeth, four times as long, as any you’d see on a real one in the wild or urban-wild. They, too, were a framework of covered bone with every movement a cracking sound that made you wince with the echo of the snapping of your own broken bones if you had ever had any. I did. We all did. It wasn’t anything you wanted to hear again.
The coyotes in turn howled, a rasping death rattle wail nothing like a live, real coyote’s song, and then they humped their backs, lowered their heads, and retched forth snakes and spiders. Three devoted to snakes, the other three to spiders. The snakes were rattlers drawn by a schizophrenic, wildly enthusiastic homicidal mental patient—dark gray on dirty black, three or four times the normal size, and with fangs half the length of my forearm, made of cloudy quartz veined in bloodred poison pulsing eagerly to be injected into flesh, and that was okay. It was. Toxin with a mind of its own. Snakes, giant poisonous zombie-style snakes. That they didn’t slither sinuously, but moved as rapidly in a zigzag motion of sharp angles that was wholly unnatural, that wasn’t new. No problem. I’d dealt with them before.
But then there were the spiders.
They were tarantulas, five, six times . . . yeah, forget that. It was better that I didn’t estimate how much larger than normal they were. A good thing if I didn’t dwell on the rivers of venom dripping from their pincers onto the floor as soon as they hit it, or how the floor was melting as if acid had been poured on it. I’d been on one job a few years ago in which I was attacked by four or five German Shepherd–sized spiders whose bite would either erase your memories or paralyze you until you died of asphyxiation . . . and that was only day one. By the time it was all over, there’d been so many of the damn hairy, giant monsters from the depths of the darkest parts of your subconscious that I lost count, killed enough to be voted exterminator of the century, and didn’t want to see another one again. That was thanks to the amnesia. I went from “who am I?” and not checking under the bed for the bogeyman to “the world is full of evil, carnivorous monsters that used the bogeyman to floss their fangs and you kill them because the pay is better than the McDonald’s drive-through wage.” To add insult to injury, one of the spiders had also burst through a bathroom window while I was taking a piss and was armed with nothing but a maple-syrup covered fork.
I didn’t like spiders.
The coyotes bared their teeth and gave an encore of their strangled and starved cackle of a howl again, the same as if the dying could howl to show us how hungry, ecstatic, and eager they were to drag us with them into the endless dark. Their red eyes bled tears of viscous black, thick as tar, a mocking mourning of our fate.
They shook their oversize rattles—each one the size of a newborn baby’s skull—opened their mouths impossibly, flickered triple-forked tongues that should’ve been accompanied by a hissing enough to fill the apartment, but, unlike with the coyotes, we heard nothing. The rattles despite their whipping shake and the hissing, both, should’ve filled the air—but it didn’t. With each yee naaldlooshii I fought, the snakes were as silent as if they carried a death shroud of choking, airless vacuum around them. For all their motion and aggressive threats, the worst was they gave nothing but the hush of the grave. And their eyes, the polished white of bone as their scales were the gray and black of decomposing flesh, showed how the quiet of the dead and buried was worse and more hopeless than any warning sound, hiss, howl, or the sizzle of venom.
It was creepy as fuck the first time I fought a skin-walker. And it stayed creepy as fuck with each one that followed.
There was worse than creepy though. There was dull. I’d been there and seen it all before, but, much as I hated to admit it, skin-walkers were never dull. Better than Netflix and unlimited satellite, no lie.
“What the hell?” Cal wasn’t as enthused as he headed for higher ground, settling on top of the couch’s back. “I’ve never seen anything like this on the Nature Channel,” he said, sounding as betrayed as was possible at the fact. “Those lying motherfuckers.”
The skin-walker was now going to see that he thought I was Auphe, but I was going to fight as a human. There was no reason to not shrug off my jacket for easy and quick access to my weapons, all of them. If I didn’t have everything that counted in my life, the real one eight years out of reach, resting as a crushing weight on my shoulders, I would’ve laughed at Cal’s outrage. A real laugh. None of the fakes I’d handed out since I arrived.
“Just wait a few years until an eighty pound spider tries to kill you in a bathroom and your only weapon is a fork. Now that buried the Nature Channel. I couldn’t piss for an entire day after that.” I paused and glanced toward the kitchen sink. It wouldn’t do to leave anal-retentive Niko out of the fun. “Not in the bathroom anyway.” I couldn’t give away what was their future, but that was small and random enough not to be predicted or to matter if it was. And it was worth it to see the expression of distaste mixed with a touch of panic cross Cal’s face.
“I hate you,” he sniped. “I hate you so much.”
He fired again at the coyotes. His silencer wasn’t that great, less effective than a plastic soda bottle, which I’d used before in a pinch. It wasn’t his fault, hadn’t been mine either. At eighteen we hadn’t had the money or the materials to make better ones. Or the contacts from which to buy them. Not that it made a difference. In this neighborhood, you could fire an AR-15 converted to full-auto, and no one would call the cops. If anything, they might ask to borrow it like people borrowed a cup of sugar in ye olden days.
“Quit your bitching and I’ll get you enough of these scaly suckers to make you a pair of snakeskin boots,” I promised.
“I don’t think—wait.” He had tilted his head and was scrutinizing one closely from head to tail. The gray-and-black pattern was shaped more in ovals like a chain of skulls than a true rattlesnake’s linked diamonds. Skin-walkers were vain bastards. They had picked a theme, death, and stuck with it. “Zombie snake boots. That could be badass and scare the living— Damn it! Bad dogs!” He shot one of the coyotes in the face. That he hit it that easily was because it was in his face before he noticed.
Niko, who hadn’t waited for the coyotes to produce more if smaller nightmares, had gone straight through them to take on the mountain lion. He’d
impaled its mangy hide numerous times with no effect and had switched to slashing long, deep cuts in its stomach and chest. It was the same tactic he’d tried our first time with one . . . our other first time now. Or did it count as second thanks to this one? Did I care? No.
“Nik.” I ducked one spider that ended up sailing over my head, and dodged another two coming from my right, neck and hip height, pincers raining poison as they came. I allowed myself one atavistic shudder and then my head was back in the game. “Niko,” I repeated, loud enough to be heard over the snarling and snapping of coyote jaws. “You can’t disembowel it. Its intestines, organs, everything inside is petrified. Cut off its head.”
That was easier said than done. You would think by its appearance that you’d stumbled over a mountain lion who’d starved to death a month ago and had been mummified by dry air and the hot sun. By the way it maneuvered, you’d think something else instead. Such as it was a lion in its prime and that was before someone came along and shot it up with all the adrenaline that could be found in every hospital in the state. It came close to being as fast as a bullet with the addition of the sinuous movements of a cat on speed.
Nik threw himself backward in time for its talons to miss tearing off his face by the width of a hair. “Advice, Caliban, that would’ve been appreciated before the fashion discussion on footwear. Cal, I know it is a challenging task to simultaneously appear as if you don’t care what you wear yet your clothes all have to possess the look of ‘obtained from a maximum security prison’s Dumpster designated for the street clothing of deranged murderers,’ but try shooting more of the coyotes or you’ll be wearing pink Hello Kitty sweatshirts for the rest of your life.”
Cal was already firing three more shots at one coyote, but that didn’t stop him from wincing at the threat. Pink wasn’t as useful as black for hiding bloodstains. He winced again when the coyote he’d been aiming for suddenly was elsewhere, every bullet missing it by a large and nasty margin. The coyote, unimpressed and predator down to its unnatural bones, snapped frothing jaws at Cal and attacked again.
“Bad goddamn dogs,” Cal swore before firing six more rounds, hitting the coyote this time and two more out of the six that he had been targeting. That sounds like crappy shooting. It wasn’t. The coyotes ran and weaved with a speed just shy of not being able to see them move at all. Hitting half of what you aimed at was an accomplishment when by the time you pulled the trigger, and no matter how fast you did, they were long gone. Cal wasn’t aiming at the coyotes. He was aiming several feet from them in his best calculation of where they would be when the bullet left his gun.
He was leading his target as hunters did with fleeing animals. Hunters had it easier, as deer don’t move too quickly for anything but an afterimage to be seen. Deer also tended to run in a straight line, allowing the lead to be established, locked in and moving with the deer. The coyotes didn’t know what a straight line was and if they did, they were too smart to use it. Each was a wild corkscrew of motion all over the loft, making prediction close to impossible and proving Cal a damn good shot. I’d remembered being the same at eighteen, when I’d been him. Good to know the memory was true and not conceit.
Not that I’d give our ego that boost. “Where’d you get those fifteen-year-old piece of shit guns? ACME?”
“Funny, shithead. Real funny. Wile E . . . fuck!” Two more coyotes rushed him, one from his front right side and one from the back left. “Shitshitshit.” He threw one leg over the other side of the couch, now straddling it to make the attacks from either side rather than in front of and behind him. Firing again with five shots, he nailed the one coming at him from behind the couch. He missed the one coming from the front of it.
As he was taking his shots, I was dodging the strike of a snake, shooting one thirty-pound spider that had been fifteen feet away when it had crouched and jumped to fly through the air at a height high enough to hit me directly in the face—fuck no on that offer, thanks—and stomping on the bulbous body the size of a basketball of another spider to spray mucous green fluid up several inches past my knee. None of that stopped me from raising my other hand to fire half the clip at the coyote Cal had missed and was now in midleap with teeth that were inches from ripping out Cal’s throat. Half of my clip hit it in the hindquarters, spinning it one hundred and eighty degrees around where the other half of the fired rounds ended up as aimed—in its head.
I reloaded with a speed I hadn’t shown with the knife play at the bar. Knives were good, but guns were my true love. Cal didn’t thank me as that wasn’t in his nature. Mine either. That hadn’t changed, if most everything else had.
He did say ruefully, “Old Yeller made me cry when I was five. Scarred me for life. But now”—he tucked one gun under his arm, then dumped the empty clip on the other, replacing it with quick efficiency, not quick enough, but he’d get there—“I think I’m over it.”
He did a quick visual check on Nik, knowing precisely where to look. You kept track of your brother in a fight. It didn’t matter how overrun you were or if you were gutted and bleeding, you didn’t lose him. The mountain lion was standing tall on its back legs, blocking Niko’s katana with both upper paws. God, we’d faced—or I had—these things before, but not one this fast or deadly. I’d done the same check as Cal, if more quickly, and had lifted my now loaded guns, firing both. I’d put a bullet in each of the big cat’s eyes. It wouldn’t kill it, but it would give it something to think about. This one thought about swaying as sand poured in thick streams from now empty eye sockets before falling back down to all fours.
That’s when Niko took its head.
Cal had just gotten his guns loaded and half lifted. He knew exactly what would’ve happened to his brother if I hadn’t been there with years more experience. “Practice, you said?” he murmured, eyes fixed on Nik who was ankle deep in sand as it rushed out of the open throat. The eyes had been streams. The neck was a river. The body had collapsed and was slowly being buried.
Nik lightly kicked the head several feet away, with its jaws opening and closing but slower every time. “Is it dead?”
“Yeah.” I did a quick scan of the apartment to see if we’d missed any creepy-crawlies.
Ah.
Look at that.
I see you.
I did see, and the sight inspired a thought. Congrats for me.
“It’s dead,” I confirmed, holstering my Eagle, but holding on to my Sig. “They’re like the last person at a party. They’re out the door, but slow as shit to get that way.”
Cal dropped down to slouch onto the cushions with legs sprawled out in front of him as far as they could comfortably stretch. “You do this insanity all the time? On purpose. Fuck no. I’ll stick with being a bartender.”
His eyes were a little wild. I got it. More than that, I understood it. He’d had the foundation of his world shaken when that foundation had already been worn away over the years to the unreliability of spring ice on a thawing pond. He’d fought a monster half a minute after discovering that monster existed. It wasn’t one equal to the Auphe levels of malignancy, but the skin-walker was considerably closer to their level than any Wolf or vampire, the only other supernatural creatures he’d known of until today.
“That went better than I thought it would,” I said unconcernedly, because if anything pissed off Niko as my brother past and future, it was casual dismissal of danger to myself. The same would go for this Nik regarding his brother and make for a needed distraction. I groaned at the spreading sand that continued to spread. “Anyone see my jacket?” I kicked through the sand stained with blood, tasty and pulp-free arachnid juice, snake cuts, avoiding the multiple bodies.
“This, by the way”—I waved an arm around the skin-walker aboveground graveyard—“is your hint that you need to start hauling ass out to Jersey to buy Costco family-sized crates of heavy-duty garbage bags. You know what, go wild. Get a membership while you’
re there and as many twenty gallon jugs of bleach as you can fit in your car. Fortune favors the family-sized.”
Normally Niko was the first one to take good advice, but not this time. “Better?” He wasn’t coated in dust and blood by themselves, he was painted head to toe in disbelief. It showed that much more when he couldn’t stop repeating himself repeating me. Being stuck in a mental loop was a sight seldom seen in my brother whatever his age: preteen, teen, adult.
“Yep, better.” I cut him some slack. Your first skin-walker will leave you twitchy and jumping at shadows for days. “The next time will be, okay, not easier, but you’ll be prepared. That’s something.”
“That went better?” Niko wasn’t listening to me or he wasn’t hearing me, one of the two. He didn’t show much care about finding my jacket either. He stood, his shirt shredded, the claw marks on his chest livid and raw, but fortunately not actively bleeding. What had once been a braid had been torn into a loose tangled mess hanging everywhere in a way that made him look like an unsuccessfully homicidal Rapunzel, one that was popping steroid pills or had inexplicable high levels of testosterone. His hand was wrapped tight around the grip of his katana as if it were the only thing left between him and the abyss.
He looked at me—as much as he could do anything visually related in my direction, considering his condition. His head had turned toward me, making the looking assumption sound, although I saw at best mostly hair with the cold glitter of one eye visible through the strands. “This went better than you thought it would?”
My Nik would’ve been calmer. This was one more reminder out of too goddamn many that this wasn’t my Nik. This was a younger one and he’d not seen or faced anything like a skin-walker until now. He had known they were a truth and not a mythological fairy tale, which was one more shock on top of a time-traveling brother. This Nik had his reasons not to be all that calm. “Are you insane?” he demanded, short and snappish. That was good. Anger was one way to get him out of a rare mental rut.
