by Mike Leon
“What then? They showed up on your iPad?”
“No. I have the hard copies. They were sent to my P.O. Box anonymously.”
“I must say, Eli. Some weirdo in a tin foil hat sends you some doctored Polaroids and suddenly you think there’s an alien agenda.”
“It’s not just the photos. There’s more. And they’re not alien. They’re from here. They’re from Thule, before it sank into the ocean when the Reptoids tried to raise their god, and were stopped by He-Who-Wanders-the-Earth.”
“You need a breath of fresh air, my friend.”
“I’m not off the rails here. This is real! Tomorrow I’m calling Walter Stedman, and I’m sending Kill Team Two to that warehouse in the picture.”
“Well, I won’t try to stop you,” the other man giggles. “But be prepared to be disappointed by what they find.”
“Care to make a wager?”
“You know what will calm your nerves? A finely rolled Cuban cigar. Join me for a smoke on the veranda?”
Thank God. They might finally be leaving. Megan came in here almost an hour ago and she’s been hiding under that desk most of the time. She came here for a bottle of Captain Morgan Long Island Iced Tea that she knows her dad would have in his liquor cabinet. He keeps the drinks Tori likes under lock and key so the bimbo won’t drink them when he’s away.
She came prepared to open the lock her father keeps on the cabinet. She spent most of the day thinking of the possible combinations and writing them on a piece of scratch paper. Her father is very sentimental and she guessed he would use something meaningful and easily remembered. His birthday, his wife’s birthday, his ex-wife’s birthday, the list went on for fifteen or twenty possibilities, which she was halfway through trying when she heard Eli coming down the hallway with someone. With no way out, she hid under the desk and hoped they wouldn’t see her. It worked.
She sees the legs in front of her move away. It’s some guy her dad works with. Megan recognizes the voice, but can’t quite put a face to it. She listens as the two men step away from the desk and walk through the doorway into the den. She hears the sliding door open onto the veranda and her father’s friend complains about the biting cold. Then the door slides shut and she’s alone in her father’s office.
Megan hurries out from under the desk. She must make her way out of here and back upstairs without being seen if she wants to avoid any trouble. The last time her father caught her stealing drinks, he wouldn’t let her go to Steve Fox’s party, and Steve made out with Nikki Ostermann. Nikki Ostermann is pure trash, and now Steve is with her because of that. What a slutbag.
She stands and makes her way for the door. Then Megan sees something that halts her in her tracks.
Her father left the liquor cabinet open. From the bottom shelf of the oak wood cabinet there in the corner of the office, the captain is winking at Megan. She can almost hear him goading her. She needs that bottle. She’s spending the night at Ashley Lucas’ house tomorrow and Susan Oliver will be there and that bitch always shows her up by bringing wine coolers. Not this time, bitch. Not this time.
Megan pokes her head around the door and looks out into the den. The glass sliding door that leads outside is just to the left of her and she sees nothing but the wooden planks of the veranda floor and the snow covered trees beyond.
She must move quickly. Megan tiptoes as swiftly as she can back to the liquor cabinet. She reaches in and snatches the half gone bottle of spiced rum without a sound. Then she’s back to the door. Again, she peers into the den, looking for her father and his companion. Again, she is greeted by the sight of the tree line, still and silent in the chill darkness outside.
She makes a break for it. Dashing from the office and into the small den, she keeps looking back at that door for any sign of movement. There is none.
“Hey,” a voice calls out. Megan turns and looks ahead just in time to smack face first into Alan, her father’s bodyguard. Alan is a tall man with broad shoulders and long legs. He’s hard to miss, but she wasn’t paying any attention to the rest of the room, just that door out to the veranda.
“Hey. What are you doing in here?” Alan says.
“I- I don’t,” Megan stammers. She wishes she had something smooth to say to cover this all up, but the words won’t come to her.
“Does your dad know you’re borrowing hard liquor from his office?”
“No,” Megan says.
She’s waiting for him to speak again. Maybe he’ll be cool. Maybe she’ll be lucky and he won’t say anything to her old man at all. He might even let her go with the booze. He’ll say something about how he was her age once too. Fat chance. He’ll probably reprimand her and take the bottle away. He’ll tell her how he has to tell her father about this now because it’s his job. He’ll say she shouldn’t be drinking at her age anyway. He’ll say it’s what’s best for her.
Alan says none of those things. Instead, he lifts his gaze over her shoulder, to the same veranda door which so distracted Megan that she ran into him.
“What the hell?” he says.
Megan turns to see what he is looking at and she sees something so strange that it fails to be real at all. Her father dangles in front of the door, grasped tightly by what appears to be a giant hand. His legs flail madly from the bottom of the hand. His arms are wrapped inside the huge fingers with him. The hand turns, flipping him upside down. He screams as a huge black shadow descends on him and something splatters against the veranda door.
Megan still doesn’t understand what she just saw. She starts to ask Alan what is happening, but she is interrupted by his gun. Alan is shooting through the door with a little gun, a machine gun, and it is so loud that it feels like someone is stabbing knives into her ears.
Then Megan sees the thing in the light. She sees its monstrous hand crash through the glass sliding door and reach past her for Alan. It has scales like a dragon. It is a dragon. There’s a dragon here.
The bodyguard croaks out half a syllable as that huge hand squeezes around him. Megan hears the sound of a hundred bones snapping at once and she screams. The hand drops Alan’s body down against a glass coffee table in the den with a loud crack.
Then its face is in the door. Not a human face or even that of an imagined dragon. No. This is like the maw of some deep sea horror she saw in a text book once. It has pointed teeth the length of her arms. It is a wonder the monster can close its mouth without stabbing itself in the eyes. Those eyes burn red like hot coals in the dark. As Megan looks at them, she is paralyzed by fear. She hears the bottle of rum bump against the floor. She didn’t even know she dropped it.
“Hello there,” it says. It speaks. The thing can speak.
Megan runs. She doesn’t want to look at it anymore. She can’t see this. She can’t be here.
She stomps through the den and down the hallway toward the front of the house as fast as her legs can carry her. This can’t be happening. It’s just a nightmare. There’s no such thing as monsters. In a minute she’ll wake up. She’ll wake up and everything will be okay.
As Megan pushes through the double doors into the grand ballroom, the room, dark only a second ago, is illuminated by the elaborate silver chandelier that hangs over the dining room table in the center.
Her father’s most recent wife, Victoria, stands with her hand on the light switch next to the great cedar door across the room. Beside her is another of her father’s men, one she doesn’t know by name. He has a greying crew cut, and wears a run-of-the-mill Armani suit. Victoria is a tall voluptuous woman with shiny brunette hair. She wears a bright pink bubble hem dress under her heavy fur coat.
“Did I hear shooting?” Victoria says as she hangs the coat on a rack to the left of the door. “I’ll never understand men and their guns.”
“Tori,” Megan rasps. “There’s a monster.”
“A monster?” Tori says.
“We have to run! We have to go!”
“Slow down. You’re not making any sense.�
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“There’s a monster in there!”
“Did your father put you up to this? Is this why he left the banquet early?” And then Tori’s face scrunches up with anger. “Does he have a woman back there?”
“No! There’s a monster!”
Tori advances angrily toward Megan, her pink heels clicking loudly against the floor.
“I’ll cunt punt the whore,” Tori says. Then she yells past Megan, down the hallway toward the den. “Where is she?!”
And then they’re all draped in blackness. Megan hears the chirp of a smoke detector and the familiar sound of the heat kicking off as the power dies all throughout Van Duyn Manor.
“What’s this shit?” Tori growls.
“Hold tight,” says Tori’s bodyguard. Megan can’t see him, but she can hear him. She feels in the darkness until she finds the nearest wall. The wallpaper has a bumpy texture that surprises her. She never touches the walls, as Tori is constantly scolding her and all of the help for scuffing them up. “The emergency lights will kick on in a second.”
He is correct. And in a second, when the flood lights affixed over the doors do come on, the monster is already there with them. Megan is leaning against, not a wall, but a scaly foot the size of a small car. Its head brushes the ceiling even in the grand ballroom. At first, the others don’t see it. The thing is so big it completely blocks the flood light over Megan’s head.
Tori never sees the hand coming for her. It just picks her up from the floor like a child picking up a Barbie doll and raises her towards its mouth. She does see the mouth coming. She screams. She screams and she screams and she screams, but no amount of screaming can stop her from being drawn into that nightmare maw head first. The last scream comes to an abrupt end as the jagged teeth snap shut around her neck and her squirming, flailing body goes limp. The monster raises her dying body above its head like an upturned beer bottle as gallons of blood pump and pour from the stump of Tori’s neck into his mouth. Megan can hear it going down. Glug. Glug. Glug.
“Mmmm,” the monster says. “Refreshing.”
There is something in the monster’s voice, something in it that, even masked under the rumbling bass tones, she recognizes. It sounds like the man her father was talking to.
The crew cut man has already drawn a gun just like Alan did, and he is shooting at the monster just like Alan did, but the gun is a small toy to the giant monstrosity he is shooting. The monster laughs at him.
“I’ll save this for later,” it says, placing Victoria’s headless corpse in the many criss-crossed silver bars and arms of the chandelier. His motion sets the chandelier swinging and Tori’s body drools bright red blood down on the table and floor as it swings to and fro.
“Run!” the bodyguard yells as he reloads his little gun.
Megan runs. She doesn’t want to see any more of this. She doesn’t care what happens. She just wants to get away. Escape is all that matters.
She runs back down the hallway from which she came, sharing the space with the monster’s impossibly long tail all the way down the hall and back into the den. It finally comes to a point just before the door leading out onto the veranda. Megan skips across the broken glass and through the shattered door without opening it. She closes her eyes outside. She doesn’t want to see what remains of her father.
She misjudges the step down from the veranda and stumbles into the yard, but she rolls and recovers quickly. The freezing snow bites at her bare feet as she runs through the yard for the trees.
In the woods, it is worse. Broken twigs stab at her numb feet as she runs blindly through the dark. She dares look back at the house only once before she loses sight of it in the dense forest. She sees the dark shape of the monster as it steps down onto the snow from the veranda. Then, in a blink, the shape is small, the size of a man.
“Little girl, come back,” calls this shape of a man. “It’s okay. The monster’s gone now.”
As he comes across the open yard toward the trees, Megan can see his shadow, black against the white snow, cast there by one of the flood lights over the veranda door. That shadow is humongous.
“Come back, honey. Everything is okay now.”
Then she hears another voice.
“Girl,” says Sid Hansen. He is scowling back at the monster, a big black gun in his hands. “Run!”
This doesn’t make sense. He’s not supposed to be here at all…
THE BAD MAN
Sid Hansen takes one glance at the inside of the cavernous maw enveloping him; a hundred stiletto teeth each the length of his arm – and he steps to his left as the bladed jaws snap shut, missing him by a few measly centimeters. He draws his KA-BAR and leaps straight up to drive the knife into the giant reptoid’s right eye.
Sobek rears up and howls into the air, pulling at the big knife with two taloned fingers, the way a man would pick at a splinter. The creature is quite tall, having to duck to avoid hitting the ceiling of the Graveyard armory. It has limbs like a man, legs and arms. These arms are proportioned like human arms, not overly massive like Blood Drinker’s. It has a tail that stretches behind it, and swats down a shelf full of assault weapons in its throws of pain. The monster’s scream shakes the very foundation of the building.
Sid stands his ground. He picks up the M4 he had been cleaning and snaps a loaded magazine into it. There is never a loaded magazine far from hand here.
“Girl,” he yells back to Megan Van Duyn, the sniffling child behind him. “Run!”
Sid raises the carbine, clicking the fire selector to rock and roll mode, and fires into the monster’s exposed throat. Bullets clank against steely scales and some throw sparks. Sobek finally plucks out the knife and flings it at Sid amidst this, but Sid catches the knife, his left hand leaving the carbine’s foregrip for only a shot or two. The magazine empties and Sid drops the carbine on the floor. He is going to need a bigger gun.
The Van Duyn girl has not yet run from the room. She still stands motionless, staring up at the huge beast. Sid watches as the monster’s bleeding eye wound seals itself and the eye, seconds ago deflated and leaking fluid, becomes a round and undamaged black orb again.
“I suppose now the jig is up,” Sobek says. “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of this. I only dreamed of salvation for my people, but you tyrants couldn’t have it. You couldn’t have it!”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” Sid shouts up at the monster.
“I’m talking about the extinction of my kind! I won’t let you destroy us!”
Fuck this. Sid scoops up the Van Duyn girl on his dash to the double doors, and throws her over his shoulder. He bashes through the doors and into the basement hallway. He feels the tip of one of Sobek’s talons graze against his shoulder as he runs down the hall. The monster’s arm fills up most of the hallway, but Sid is out of its reach after twenty feet. He takes a corner and stops to look back.
Elkan Rothschild, the man, not the monster, comes through the double doors hobbling on a shattered leg. The broken figure drags himself down the hallway toward Sid and the girl.
“It drives me insane. I was ahead of Walter every single step. The bastard is way out in Colorado, a hundred feet underground! I misdirected him without a single difficulty, and here I am, thwarted by chance!”
“The bad man,” the girl says. “It’s the bad man.”
Sid sets her down, but she wobbles like she won’t stand on her own. He holds her by her arm. Behind them are the doors leading into the stairwell that goes to the front lobby.
“You have to stop this,” he says. “You won’t survive this if you behave like a crippled baby.”
“The bad man,” the girl says again.
Sid slaps her across the face.
“Run. Run now. Do you understand?”
She nods. He sets her down on her feet and she stands. He pushes her away and she runs through the doors leading into the stairwell.
Sid turns the corner to face Rothschild.
>
“Why would he hide her here?” Rothschild asks. “Why? How could I not know? This building is crawling with people! I HAVE AGENTS HERE! WHY DIDN’T THEY REPORT TO ME?”
“I already told you, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“I know! Because you’re stupid! Look at you! The new Kill Team One, Walter says. He’s a fool. You’re barely out of diapers! And you’re so dumb. Sooooo dumb.” Elkan mocks Sid’s deep, raspy voice, “Mr. Rothschild, is killing people wrong, Mr. Rothschild? I just don’t know!”
Sid is uncertain what to do here. He turned the corner with the intention of fighting Rothschild, maybe to kill him, maybe to test him. The hallway is cramped and made from poured concrete and steel beams. The monster won’t fit here, only Elkan. Still, he can’t be sure what tricks Sobek might be hiding. The creature may be able to change only parts of his body, or even smash through the walls containing him. Maybe he would just grow to enormous size and crush Sid down here against the wall – if he can’t become some other form altogether, one that would fit comfortably in the hall.
“You know we found the French girl in the hotel ventilation shaft,” Rothschild says, suddenly taking a much more serious tone. “Is that what shook your confidence, you blubbering angsty vagina? You’re pathetic! We boiled that slut’s flesh from her bones. I think I’ll boil you the same way.”
Sid makes a tactical withdrawal.
He turns and bolts through the double doors behind the Van Duyn girl. He can hear her still stomping up the steps above. Sid is much faster than the girl, and taking the steps three at a time, he has caught up to her in seconds. He reaches her just as the door to the first floor swings open and an operator wearing black tactical gear burst through pointing a submachine gun at them.
“Hey!” the man shouts. “What are you doing? What was that noise?”
Sid surveys the operator’s equipment; MP5, Colt 1911, five magazines for the subgun, two grenades…
Sid snatches an M67 fragmentation grenade dangling from the soldier’s vest, simultaneously pulling the pin. He tosses the grenade over his shoulder and down the stairwell.
