by Nina Post
“May I help you?” The hygienist said in a condescending tone―a tone that won her a buffet coupon at the 12th Annual Dental Office Support Staff Association’s Condescending Tone Contest.
Kelly put her hand on the chair next to Af’s leg. “Af, I need your help.” Then, upon a closer look, “You know that you could walk out of here right now like this” ―she raised her arms straight out in front of her and took on a blank, slack-jawed expression―“and people would think it’s the end of days.” She dropped her arms. “Wait, is it the end of days?”
Af made a sound that resembled “izzdayureer?”
“No, that’s not why I’m here. Do you think I’m the type of girl who gets hysterical over something like the end of days and seeks comfort from a former―”
Af widened his eyes.
She caught herself. “A former polymer engineer?”
The periodontist angled his head into the room from the corner. “I’m the periodontist. Can I help you?”
She stepped back from the chair. “You’ve got a problem with your floors, doc.” She pressed the toe of her boot against the wood slats.
“My floors? What do you mean?” The periodontist came around to the other side of the chair, concerned.
“See how there’s give under here, how they sag when you press your shoe on them?” She put some of her weight on her right foot and showed him how the slats were bending compared to the other sections nearby. “I noticed areas like this one in the hall. The laminate floor material is too thin and the padding is too thick. After a while, gaps will form around the slats.”
The periodontist seemed on the verge of tears, giving her a frisson of pleasure.
“This office looks new,” she said, “so if I were you, I would call the GC and have him redo it while it’s still under warranty. And if the GC won’t cooperate, get another flooring person in to check it out, and plan on bringing your lawyer to the party, too.”
“Oh my.” The periodontist rubbed the back of his head and frowned.
Af smiled on the one side of his face for the second time since Kelly came in.
“Okay, Mr. Smith,” the hygienist said, as she had Af rinse into a paper cup attached to a suction. “Don’t chew anything until the numbness wears off, or you could bite your lips, tongue or cheek.”
“Does Mr. Smith look like an imbecile to you?” Kelly asked. “Why would he want to chew anything, anyway?”
The hygienist went on in a rote monotone as though she hadn’t spoken.
“Don’t drink hot or cold liquids. You won’t be able to tell how hot or cold they are.”
“His coma score is actually higher than three,” Kelly said from beside the window, arms crossed.
The hygienist kept going. “Take the antibiotic after breakfast and dinner, on a full stomach. The bottle will instruct you to take it on an empty stomach, but eat something beforehand. I like angel.”
“Mr. Smith is not in the habit of taking instructions from bottles or any other inanimate object,” Kelly said in an absentminded tone while looking out the window at a construction site. A moment later, she realized what the hygienist said. She turned her head toward the chair in time to see the hygienist’s head split in two and a crack erupt down her torso.
“I knew it,” Af said in a slurred voice, then rolled out of the chair and onto the floor.
The halves of the hygienist’s shell fell to the shoddy wooden floors with a thud. The frazzled periodontist slapped his hands to his mouth in horror and keened a little. She knew he was reacting to the floor damage, not to his employee revealing herself as a giant crab-like creature with overlapping plates and seven pairs of segmented legs that terminated in gleaming, super-size dental tools.
The hygienist grew more than ten feet tall in a lightning-fast succession of molts as her exoskeleton split off and regrew with a sound like aluminum foil being crushed into a ball.
The drop-ceiling tiles cracked over the hygienist’s head, which itself had four segmented arms over the mouth. Her tailfan twitched and knocked over a large piece of equipment by the chair that housed the water scaler.
“My floors! My ceiling! Everything’s falling apart,” the periodontist said from the hallway.
“Your floors were a lost cause,” she yelled over the commotion. “Next time, get some engineered hardwood, a competent GC, and a human support staff who don’t morph into giant crab things.”
This was the second time in a week she had to deal with demons working under a human facade. She didn’t like that trend.
The periodontist crouched behind the x-ray machine and cried.
“Also, your sprinklers aren’t up to code, so when you continue your barbaric services―”
“That’s what I said,” Af said in a slurred voice.
“―in a new office, get the fire department’s consulting services during build-out, okay? Jerk.”
A sucking cup on the end of one of the hygienist-monster’s fourteen legs caught her hair and a sickle cut Af across the left shoulder. Another arm shank sprayed the dental assistant across the knees with a stream of water.
Kelly pulled her hair from the suction cup, picked up the tiny assistant, hoisted her onto her back, and carried her through the office, setting her down in the waiting room by the coffee machine. The assistant yanked open the door and ran screaming down the hallway.
“You’re welcome!”
Af impaled a piece of the hygienist’s abdomen with a super-sized bottle of mouthwash, and yellowish, bubbling pus oozed out of the hole in one of the sausage-like sections of its belly.
Af and Kelly guarded themselves behind the reclined patient chair and threw anything they could find from the cabinets behind them.
“At least she finished your treatment,” she said.
“They didn’t, but I think I’ll look for another option with a new periodontist who wasn’t trained during Scotland’s witch trials. Perhaps there have been advances in the field since then.” Af lobbed a package of tissues at the hygienist, who struggled to maneuver out of the space in the corner by the window.
“Ahm, this seems to be an ineffectual defense.” Af held up a bottle of mouthwash.
“I didn’t think I needed an RPG case to visit you at the periodontist,” she said. “How did you manage to leave Amenity Tower, anyway?” She peeked around the chair at the hygienist demon. “Never mind―just fill me in after we get out of here.”
The hygienist lunged at the periodontist with hairy snapping jaws and legs ending in drill heads and probes. He screamed as the hygienist gouged and flayed with dental excavators and chisels before spewing caustic digestive juices that bound the doctor in a corrosive, sticky web.
After some sniffing, the hygienist devoured the web-bound periodontist in five bites.
“He doesn’t have to worry about his floors anymore.” She waited until the blood-engorged hygienist faced toward the window as it tried to slither out from behind the chair. Time to end this now and clean up fast before someone investigated because of the noise or the window.
She ran to the back of the chair and pushed a cart into the hygienist and crushed it against the wall, leaving yellow smears. The hygienist regurgitated blackened chunks.
“What is that?” Af curled his lip in disgust.
One of the hygienist’s shanks landed on the cart, which set off a dental laser.
She yanked the fire extinguisher off a nearby wall. “At least the doctor, and I use that word loosely, had some fire compliance.” She pulled the pin and aimed it at the hygienist.
Af shielded his eyes.
The hygienist looked like a crustacean dipped in marshmallow fondue, its flailing legs flicking off white blobs. Kelly took advantage of the hygienist’s lack of sight and frantically glanced over the selection of knives on a tray table.
“They’re tiny, yet somehow more menacing,” she muttered. She grabbed a knife and sprang onto the chair, using both hands to thrust the knife between the hygienist’s ey
es.
Finally, the hygienist went still. An unmoving, smoking husk. She prodded it and waited. She hit it upside the head with the lamp and waited. Stabbed it in the thorax and waited.
When she was pretty sure it was permanently out of commission, she dropped the knife and pushed the lamp out of the way.
“Any other appointments today?” Kelly jumped off the chair, then staggered back, astonished.
Af took up the entire high-ceilinged room with his massive, hulking, blood-red, black-winged, ram-horned form.
“I really didn’t like this experience,” he said in a voice like a Ferrari engine. He furled and unfurled the tips of his leathery wings. “I don’t think I can do this anymore. This human thing. Maybe I should stay like this.”
She tried to calm herself down enough to speak, and ignore the hammering in her chest. “It kind of sucks, doesn’t it?”
He snorted fire and rolled his huge black eyes. “Kind of? Listen, thanks for killing that thing. Sorry I didn’t change, you know, beforehand.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “It worked out all right.”
Af stepped toward the window, caving in the floor, and crashed through the wall, reminding her of the old Kool-Aid ad. She watched, incredulous, as Af tackled a construction crane and swung it around to the window. He flew back and gripped the side of the building. His body rumbled, and radiated both heat and cold.
He blinked at her. “I just wanted to let you know that you won’t be in any danger from me.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
He extended a giant, muscular arm and presented a pitch-black claw in a delicate gesture. She shook it, marveling at the weight and sharpness of it, and then he was off. The building trembled in his wake.
elly looted the samples drawer, scooping up floss, toothpaste, and a handful of toothbrushes before heading out. In the reception area, a man stirred sugar into a coffee and read Billing Fraud Weekly. “This coffee is actually kind of decent,” he said.
“Now what?” She was running on energy reserves and feeling like she lost something dear to her.
He held out a hand and put the magazine on the serving table. “Is that any way to greet Af’s ferryman?”
She raised her eyebrows at him in a gesture that said ‘And?’
He bowed at the waist. “Owing to my services, Af was able to temporarily leave the prison to which he’s bound and entertain the hilariously preposterous notion of mortality, here in this dank, shabby warren. I am a very expensive loophole.”
“You’re some kind of hole.”
He flashed her a licentious smirk. “You’re delicious. I want to soak you up like water through the dragon’s blood tree.”
“Whatever that means, but… gross.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and glanced at the magazine’s feature story: “115 Ways to Overbill.” Number one was obvious: invoice for services the patient didn’t actually receive.
She wondered if Af would be receiving a bill for the full appointment, even though it ended rather abruptly. Then she remembered that the periodontist had been eaten alive by his employee, and probably wouldn’t be catching up on billing anytime soon, but she’d have to call and make sure.
“Look.” She put the magazine on the table and crossed her arms over her chest. “I just disposed of a dental hygienist-turned-giant-monster-mite, and Af just reverted, or turned, or transitioned, or fell off the wagon or whatever the hell you call what he did. I’m not in the mood for you.”
She guzzled the coffee then tossed the paper cup and grabbed the door handle. “Why are you still here? That was your cue to leave, in case you’re oblivious to body language.”
“Af invoked me to accompany him on a time-limited trip, to and from his destination. He reserved my time.”
“As you might have noticed, Af isn’t here anymore. So you can go.”
“Can I come with you?”
“No. Go home, or back to the river, or whereever you came from.”
As they went out the door, the ferryman’s hand lingered on her shoulder. She reached up and touched his hand. He smiled. She twisted his finger to the edge of breaking. He gritted his teeth and made a muffled groan.
“I like you,” he said, still in pain.
“Never touch me.”
The streets around the periodontist’s office jutted out at odd angles like an enormous creature tried to emerge from underneath the pavement.
Pothole City’s emergency warning siren whooped in undulating scales. A sea of Exchange workers in vests of red, gold, blue, and other colors poured out of the giant smoky carport, and ran wild in the streets, climbing over cars and into windows, seizing other workers in a berserker rage. Bankers and money managers streamed out of buildings, stabbing other bankers with their metal pens.
The ever-efficient Pothole City Streets & Sanitation snow removal trucks, some of them tiny plows, methodically drove through the streets and scooped up some of the lunatics.
Kelly ducked into an alley and took out her phone. A shabby poster for Sharktic covered the entire alley wall.
“Ooh, I heard about that movie,” the ferryman said. “A mutant arctic shark terrorizes a cruise ship in Greenland. Or maybe it was Norway. Anyway, we should go see it together.” He grasped her shoulder, enthused.
“What are you doing here?”
“I need protection!”
She shook him off and turned away, tapping a number on her phone. She waited while it rang, then left a message.
“Murray, I’ve left you so many messages that you probably won’t even get to this one. But listen, we’re near the Exchange and your traders are losing it.” She clicked the phone shut and deflected a slobbering, pinstripe-suited, stapler-wielding banker with a solid kick to the groin.
“You know,” she said to the ferryman, “I thought Murray had an easy job. I had to switch disguises and skill sets multiple times a day, while all he had to do was go out once in a while and stop one of his invokers from doing something stupid. Kind of like a family lawyer. But he was doing more than I realized.”
Each of the SPs had probably been doing more than she realized, given the current circumstances.
The ferryman cowered into the alcove, holding his arm in front of his face and jabbing his keys into the air with his eyes closed. “Can we keep going, please?” Something sprayed him with blood and a thick chartreuse-colored substance, and the ferryman screamed.
She tucked her phone in her pocket. “Hold on, I see a falafel stand.” As she gave a cart vendor cash for a paper boat of falafel, a dark-suited finance worker ran screaming out of a bank and barreled straight toward them wielding an overstuffed black binder.
“Hold short.” She stopped the ferryman with the back of her hand and gave him the falafel boat for safekeeping. The ferryman touched her hand. She yanked her hand away and smacked him on the chest.
The finance worker raised the binder and brought it down from over his head, and she pushed the ferryman, pivoted on her heel, and shoved the ferryman to the gutter as the binder thwocked her on the back and knocked the breath out of her.
As the banker’s momentum carried him forward, she tripped his left foot. A city bus lumbered up to the nearby bus stop, brakes squealing. A full-wrap ad covered the side of the bus, depicting a cockatrice posing with a wife and two well-groomed cockatrice children: Cockatrice Food Delivery & Catering — A Family Business. No Biting, Or Your Delivery Is Free!
Af landed on the bus, crushing the top of it down to the sides. He smiled and pointed at the cockatrice ad. “We’re using him as a vendor. I love the anchovy and poisonous egg pizza.”
He gripped the corner of the bus, shattering the windows with the tips of his black claws, and locked eyes with her. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?” He batted off a vulture-headed water bug the size of a mature St. Bernard.
“Nah, we’re good here. Just enjoying the day.”
Af flew off again.
&nbs
p; “Thanks for visiting,” she muttered.
She pushed the ferryman to get him started down the sidewalk again.
“What’s the big hurry? Let me take you to a movie.”
“I need to get back to Amenity Tower, invertebrate.”
“Why, is there an amenity you like?”
“I don’t use the amenities. I have to find the SPs, see if maybe I can prevent the building from being destroyed, and have some words with my handler.”
“But you have time for falafel.”
“First, that vendor was fast, and second, do you want me to pass out from hunger along the way? Unlike you, I run on calories from food.”
Even though the financial workers were mostly confined to the area around the Exchange, every other kind of worker overran the streets, from professors in bow ties to kitchen workers in white aprons to insurance workers in blue collared shirts, all losing their minds.
White earthworms, bigger than oil pipelines, crawled up the Bank of Pothole City Hotel and Corporate Center, and amassed on the east side of the huge building, where they proceeded to gnaw on the exterior.
Kelly and the ferryman ran from cover to cover, into alleys and under store canopies. The ferryman panted. “Can we”―he swallowed, and panted again―“Can we hide out somewhere, like that off-track betting place I saw down the street?”
“Keep moving, don’t look anyone in the eye, and look crazy. If someone gets in your way or touches you or speaks to you or even gets too close to you, snarl at them like you’re the alpha wolf and they’re the beta who approached the carcass before you did.”
Then the flying leeches came, in flocks that sounded like an old steel fan. A densely packed flock swooped down so close that she felt their wings beating against her.
“Get it off me! Get it off!” The ferryman frantically pulled at her arm, signaling to his back. One of the leeches adhered to the ferryman’s upper back and beat its veiny wings on his shoulders.
“It’ll fall off on its own in about an hour.”
“An hour?” The ferryman’s voice had raised in pitch. “This isn’t exactly a normal leech. How do you know it’s not killing me right now?”
