Black Box Inc.

by Jake Bible

  “You good?” I asked Lassa. He shrugged.

  “Booze and mixers,” Harper said, her arms full of bags with clinking bottles inside. “I was thinking White Russians. It’s got Kahlua in it, which is coffee flavored. And vodka, which is vodka flavored.”

  “I’ll pass,” Sharon said. “That sounds like a digestive nightmare for me. I have some sheep blood in my mini fridge.”

  “Can we get this over with?” Lassa asked.

  “My sentiments exactly,” I said, although I knew his comment was for different reasons.

  I checked the time on my phone and saw we only had a few minutes before midnight. “Okay, how are we doing this?”

  “You will need to take this,” Sharon said, handing me a plastic bucket. She’d been preparing. “Go into the bathroom and do your business. Then come out and you can portion the urine into two cups.”

  “I don’t have hands,” Back Chase said. “I can’t drink the stuff on my own. I’ll need some help.”

  He sounded quite happy with himself over that detail. Little shit.

  “Is it too early?” I asked, eyeballing the bucket and then looking at Sharon. “Won’t the pee, uh, cool down?”

  “No, not that fast.”

  “What temperature is it coming out?” Harper asked.

  “Body temperature,” Sharon said. “Which would be different for each species, but for humans, body temperature is ninety-eight point six degrees.”

  “Fun fact,” Harper said.

  “Whoopee.” Lassa pulled up a chair. He was back to his shaved self, but not his lighthearted self. He plopped into the chair and glared at me like he was daring me to tell him he couldn’t sit.

  “Better get going,” Harper said as she took a position by the office’s front windows.

  “Funny,” I said and went back to the bathroom.

  I shut the door and looked at the bucket in my hands. I sighed.

  “Stage fright?” Back Chase asked.

  “No, no, nothing to do with this.” I proceeded to do what needed doing.

  I was back out in the office with a full bucket in hand and a minute to spare. Sharon handed me a measuring cup and set two mugs on my desk. My desk, specifically. I took off my shirt.

  “I drew short straw,” Lassa said, holding up a piece of a coffee stirrer. “Looks like I get to help the leech get his drink on.”

  “You act like this is some big inconvenience,” Back Chase said. “Except you aren’t the one that is about to die. Didn’t anyone think of that? I am willingly participating in my own demise. In a way, this is suicide.”

  He gasped.

  “Do you think I’ll be going to Hell?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s like Detroit,” I said.

  “Do what now?”

  “We need to hurry,” Sharon said.

  I dipped the measuring cup into the bucket twice and filled each mug with exactly one cup. I shivered and picked up my mug while Lassa picked up the other one. He didn’t say a word to me as I turned around so he could kneel down behind and feed the leech.

  “Three, two, one,” I said, then drank.

  The apple juice had not helped. Not one goddamn bit.

  I gagged when I was done, and I had to use every ounce of willpower not to vomit. If I was ever stranded in the woods, or stuck in a crevice with my arm trapped in rocks, there was no way I was surviving. Pee would never pass my lips again. Death first, for sure.

  “What’s happening back there?” I asked as I bent over, my hands on my knees, my head hanging loose on my neck. “Any change?”

  I think Lassa was going to answer, but my scream interrupted him. My entire back was on fire. I’d dealt with some agony over the past couple of weeks, minus the time in the coma, and what my body went through as Back Chase disengaged himself was the worst up to that point in my life.

  When I say disengaged, what I mean is that Back Chase ripped himself out of me. He literally clawed his way out of my back with his hands. Hands. Then his shoulders came out, followed by the rest of his body. He kicked loose and flopped onto the floor, a goo-covered, naked mess.

  “Goddamn!” I shouted as I fell onto my face.

  I didn’t even get a chance to put my arms out. I heard my nose crunch, but that pain was insignificant. I lay there, very aware that men had it easy if childbirth was anything like what I’d just gone through.

  “What the hell?” Lassa said as I slowly rolled over and sat up.

  No one offered to help me. I didn’t blame them. They were staring at the full-grown changeling that looked exactly like me. I was too.

  “That wasn’t fun,” Changeling Chase said.

  “Sharon?” I asked. “Is that supposed to happen?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sharon said. “I don’t know.” She backed up until she bumped into her desk, then turned around and found her phone. “Let me call Flip.”

  “Could I get a coat or something?” Changeling Chase asked. “It’s a bit nippy in here.”

  “Chase?” Harper asked. I slowly glanced at her and saw she had her goblin sickle in her hand. “Am I killing this thing or what?”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t,” Changeling Chase said.

  Teresa hung up the phone and frowned.

  “Kill him. Now,” she said. “Or the creature will kill Chase. He is no longer under Daphne’s control.”

  “No shit,” Changeling Chase said and jumped to his feet. “There can be only one me.”

  He leapt at me, but never got more than a foot in the air. Lassa’s hand whipped out and caught him by the throat, lifting him up high.

  “Does Chase have to be the one to kill him?” Lassa asked as the changeling flailed at him.

  “No,” Sharon said. “He simply has to die or he will continue to try to kill Chase any chance he gets.”

  Snap.

  Changeling Chase went limp in Lassa’s grip. He let the body drop to the floor. We stared at the changeling corpse for a couple of minutes.

  Then, “Who wants White Russians?” Harper asked, putting the goblin sickle down on her desk.

  “I’ll take one,” I said. “Lassa?”

  Lassa was still staring at the changeling corpse.

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll have one,” he said. His tone had changed. “I blame everything on this guy.”

  “The blame rests on Daphne,” I said. “But I get what you mean.”

  Lassa nodded and picked the body up.

  “Be right back,” he said and left the office with the corpse draped over one shoulder, sack of potatoes-style.

  Harper mixed drinks while he was gone, and we waited. Lassa was back soon, a smile on his face.

  “Call the cops and tell them we have another changeling for them,” he said. “The corpse will be in the dumpster.”

  “I’ll call them tomorrow,” Sharon said. “I’d rather not deal with that tonight.”

  “They’d only interrupt our wake,” I said.

  I eyed Lassa, looking for the pout I expected to hit his face, but he only nodded.

  Harper gave us our drinks, Sharon having fetched her sheep blood from the mini fridge she kept by her desk, and we lifted the glasses up.

  “Travis,” I said. “He was one shifty son of a bitch, but he was our friend.”

  We drank our drinks down, and Harper made more. We lifted the glasses again.

  “He saved lives,” Harper said. “Without him, those changelings would have succeeded.”

  We drank, and Harper refilled.

  “I don’t think I can hold more blood,” Sharon said, a little burp escaping her lips. “Sorry.”

  “It’s the thought that counts,” I said.

  We raised our glasses again.

&
nbsp; “Travis was special,” Lassa said. “You know me, I can’t be exclusive if my life depends on it. Travis knew that and he never expected anything from me. We had fun when he was around. When he wasn’t, I still got to be me. He was smart, funny, and damn good-looking. Especially in his real form.”

  “Real form?” I said. “You got to see his real form?”

  “Kind of had to,” Lassa said.

  “I thought you’d never seen his real form,” I said and looked at Harper. “Didn’t he once say he never saw Travis’s real form?”

  “I don’t know,” Harper said. “Lassa says lots of things about his love life. I tune most of that shit out.”

  “You do?” Lassa asked.

  “If I didn’t, then I’d be wasting like half my life listening to you and your sexual conquests,” Harper said. “You remember that sorceress from Toledo you spent the weekend with a couple of years ago?”

  “Delilah,” Lassa said and smiled. “That was magic.”

  “You didn’t stop talking about her for half a month,” Harper said. “I tried to change the subject, but you’d find some way to bring the conversation back to her and all the new techniques she taught you.”

  “Dude, she was gifted,” Lassa said, lost in the memory. “Oh, man, what she could do with her pinky toe alone. Blow. Your. Mind.”

  And like that, Lassa was back. All he needed was to kill a changeling and remember some sex-filled weekend he had with a sorceress. Gotta love yetis.

  “You gonna finish your toast?” I asked him, knowing I wasn’t breaking the mood.

  “Yeah, shit, right,” Lassa said and lifted his glass again. “To Travis. He wasn’t as good of a lover as Delilah was, but he was a great friend.”

  We drained our glasses once more.

  Sharon cleared her throat to give her toast, but we were suddenly interrupted by a whole hell of a lot of laughing. Sharon cried out, Harper pulled her goblin sickle again, and Lassa held up his fists. I had Dim rods ready.

  “You guys,” Travis said as he walked out from the darkest corner of the office. “That was so sweet.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Dude . . .”

  “Travis? You’re alive?” I asked, voicing the one question I knew was on everyone’s mind.

  “No,” Travis said. “Very much dead. Ghost even. Turns out I still have a life debt to pay and I don’t get to rest until said debt is paid.”

  “But . . . But . . .” Lassa stuttered.

  “You paid the debt,” Harper said. “That was half the fucking point of all that shit!”

  “As long as Daphne is still a possible threat, then I’m not off the hook,” Travis said. “Plus, Chase went and saved me again by having that Vic guy fix me up. Double debt. Gonna be a ghost for a long while. Yay.”

  We all stood there, stunned, but not for long. At least not the standing part.

  I fell to my hands and knees, and the worst cramps ever twisted my stomach into knots.

  “Chase? What’s wrong?” Sharon cried as she hurried to my side and knelt next to me. “Should I call someone?”

  “Get back,” I said.

  “No, let me help,” Sharon said. “What should I do? Who should I call?”

  She was in a panic, but what I needed her to do was to “Get back!”

  My mouth opened, and out came those White Russians. Sharon should have gotten back.

  “Oh, well, I don’t think this is coming out of these pants,” she said as she stood up and tried to brush off the collateral splatter. “No. Most certainly not coming out.”

  And there it was. The Dim key. The way I was getting Iris back sat there in a pool of my sick.

  “Can I get a napkin?” I asked. “Maybe a towel?”

  Never drinking White Russians again.

  30

  THE OFFICE DIDN’T have the space we needed, so we regrouped at the loft. The original scene of the crime. All that mattered was that we had enough room for the Dim box I was going to recall and a little privacy.

  The location was also a fitting end to it all, especially with Travis there, despite his new ghostly existence. A broken circle was about to close.

  The crime-scene tape had been long since removed. Either by one of the neighbors walking past to their lofts or by the landlord so he could get in and clean up.

  When we opened the door, which wasn’t a problem for Harper since she had the key, we had our answer. The place smelled of bleach and cleansers. And paint. In one corner was a ladder up against the wall with a folded tarp underneath, set on an industrial five-gallon bucket of a generic off-white that everyone in the country would recognize without knowing they did.

  “Didn’t waste much time, did they?” Harper grumbled. “I wasn’t that behind on rent. Assholes.”

  “You’ve been gone for weeks,” Sharon said. “They waited as long as they could.”

  “Okay, let’s get started,” I said.

  “Let’s?” Harper asked as she walked over to the kitchen counter and hoisted her ass up onto it. “This is all you, Chase. We’re here as moral support.”

  I almost asked her if the moral support was for me or Iris. I knew that the woman was going to be in horrible shape when we opened the box, either mentally, physically, or both. Never before had I had such a feeling of suffocating dread as I had when I contemplated opening that goddamn box.

  “Chase? Dude,” Lassa said. He was right by my side, and I appreciated that. “Now or never, man.”

  “He’s right,” Travis said as he entertained himself by waving his ghostly hand through the kitchen cabinet doors over and over. “Like a Band-Aid.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said and fished the key out of my pocket.

  The key stank. No two ways about that. Lassa took a couple steps away from me, but I knew he could still smell it from where he was.

  I took a minute to study the key, to get a feel for its energy. The more familiar I was with the vibe of a key, the easier it was to pull the box from the Dim. A rush job was no fun and could actually take longer than if I spent a moment with the key in my hands, just feeling.

  Then I held my hand out and pulled the box to me.

  The Dim opened up and bam! A very large black box that was all swirling smoke landed hard on the wood floors. The box was about the size of a shipping container, but the loft was big enough that there was still plenty of room to walk around it if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. I was frozen in place, terrified of what I would find in there.

  What if she was dead?

  She wasn’t dead. Not even close. I found that out the hard way when I finally sucked up the courage to activate the key, and the Dim dissipated in a big poof of black.

  There she was, sitting in an armchair, a paperback across her leg, a mug of something in her hand. Her eyes were wide, and she was staring right at me, but like she couldn’t see me. Then her eyes focused and narrowed.

  “You motherfucker,” she snarled. “You motherfucker!”

  She shot out of that chair and hurled the mug at my head. I barely had time to duck and stand back up before she was on me. Her fists were wailing against my head, and I saw stars after a really good hit. I stumbled back, trying to retreat from her fury, but she kept up the attack, raining down blow after blow.

  “Hold on, now, Iris,” Lassa said calmly as he came up behind her and grabbed both of her hands as they were raised to strike me in unison. “Let’s not kill the guy, okay?”

  “Thanks,” I gasped as I leaned my back against the wall. “Hey, Iris.”

  “Hey, Iris?” she gasped, her chest heaving from the exertion of my beatdown. “Hey, Iris!”

  “You’re mad, but I can explain,” I said.

  “You don’t need
to explain!” Iris said, yanking a hand free from Lassa and pointing at the little setup she’d been trapped in for two weeks and a couple days. “I know why I was in there!”

  She then pointed at Travis and blinked.