Limbus, Inc. Book II

by Brett J. Talley

  I got on top of him, my knees on his chest, and brought the butt of my gun down as hard as I could on the bridge of his nose. His screaming broke off clean. Blood erupted from the wound. The sight of all that blood silenced my rage for just a moment, long enough for me to holster my weapon. But when I looked Brandt in the eyes again, all I saw was a red haze covering the entire world. With every fiber of being I hated that man. I wanted him dead, and though he raised his hands to try to ward off the blows, he was powerless to stop me. Blood spattered across the floor, on the ceiling, on my clothes. Gouts of it splashed across my face, and still I couldn’t stop. I hit him over and over again. Over and over.

  But as I continued to rain punches down on his pulverized face, I heard somebody call my name.

  Gradually, the red haze bled away and my vision cleared.

  Only then did I see what I’d done.

  Brandt was a ruined mess. Bubbles popped on the surface of the blood pooling in his mouth. It looked like he was still breathing, but he wasn’t moving.

  I turned his face to one side so the blood could drain out without choking him. I wanted him dead, but I wasn’t ready to let him die.

  “Alan.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Officer Robinson was standing there, watching me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You found him. The job’s finished.”

  “It’s not finished.” My chest was heaving. My knuckles were beginning to burn where I’d torn them up on his teeth. “He killed my family.”

  “That’s right, he did. And me too.”

  I looked down at Brandt. His eyes were swollen shut and he was missing teeth.

  I let him drop to the floor.

  Seeing him now, a bloody wreck, my rage drained away. I didn’t feel anger, or pity, or remorse. I felt nothing but disgust for him now. I got to my feet and turned on Robinson. “He said I was one of those pig men. I’m not…one of them…am I?”

  “Always with the interesting questions.”

  “Tell me, dammit.”

  “Okay. To him, yeah, you are.”

  “But only to him?”

  “Maybe to others.”

  I thought about Fehrenbach and how frightened he’d been. “You mean like Fehrenbach?”

  Robinson nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Some people, when their minds are clouded by guilt, see only devils when they’re standing on death’s door. Others, those whose minds are at peace, see angels in the architecture.”

  “But I saw them too. Is that what they were, demons?”

  He nodded again.

  “And the fact that I saw them means what? That I had been at death’s door?” I felt like I was going to be sick. “Oh God.”

  “Do you still see them?” he asked.

  “Huh?” I looked around the basement. “No,” I said.

  “So, what’s changed?”

  I started to speak, but stopped short. There was no way I could answer his question. The feelings were too raw, the problem still too big to see.

  I glanced back at Brandt. He was coughing blood on the floor.

  “You said if I found anything illegal I could make whatever arrests I wanted.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You can even use my cuffs.”

  “I have my own.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Brandt groaned. I flipped him over and cuffed his hands behind his back. Then I helped him sit up against a metal shelf.

  Then I turned my attention back to Robinson.

  “So it was all for this? This was the job?”

  “Yes.”

  “What good happened here?”

  “You solved four murders.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You did this. You set all this up. Why did you hire me? Why go to all this trouble?”

  He laughed, but not to be mean. His expression was actually one of honest pity and sympathy, but this time, I didn’t hate him for it. I just felt lost, sick and confused.

  “You still don’t understand,” he said. “I didn’t hire you. Limbus didn’t hire you. We are an employment agency. We match the right job with the right person, but we don’t come up with the job. The client does that.”

  I was even more confused now. “The client?”

  He gestured with a nod at something behind me.

  I turned, and felt a fist squeeze around my heart. I gasped and nearly fell to the floor.

  Over by the stairs, halfway across the basement, holding my two children by the hand, was my wife. The air seemed to vibrate and hum like it was alive with electricity, and suddenly, I was drifting. I was moving through space. All around me were images of my life. They came in a flood, and not in any sort of order. Andrew on his bike as he took his first solo turn down the sidewalk. Me holding Sheryl’s hand as Nicole came into the world. Sheryl screaming in delight on a roller coaster. Her screams turning to terror as a red pickup spun out of control and smashed into her car door. Andrew lowering his chin to the table to watch a goldfish swimming in a bowl of water. Nicole at four years old singing to herself as she cut snowmen out of construction paper. Sheryl in my arms as we slow danced in the living room, an empty bottle of wine on the coffee table. Her brown hair spreading over a white pillow as she settled into the softness of it with a sigh and said, “Are you happy?”

  And then the images faded. The sense of flying was gone. I was left with my chest so full of love and joy and loneliness and pain that I thought for sure I’d burst open. I wanted to explode. I wanted to let it all go. But it was in me, and I couldn’t get it out.

  In answer to her question lingering behind the visions, I could only answer, “I was, then. Now it’s all hurt.”

  Sheryl was still standing at the foot of the stairs. Nicole and Andrew were smiling at me. The hand that held my heart in its grip refused to let go. I could barely breathe, but even still, I moved toward them.

  A gentle hand fell on my shoulder. “Alan, no.”

  I turned and saw Robinson looking at me sadly, shaking his head.

  “But…”

  “You can’t,” he said. “It’s not possible.”

  “Bullshit. Let me go.”

  He held me with a grip I couldn’t break.

  “You can’t go with them. It’s not your time.”

  “But I want it to be. I can’t go on like this. I’ll put a bullet in my head right now if I can go with them.”

  “Do you really think she’d want that? Do you really believe she did this for that? You can go on, Alan. It’ll be hard, but you can. She understood that. She did this—all of this—for you. So you would understand.”

  I nearly fell over. Robinson caught me and held me up until I could find my legs again. I looked from Sheryl back to Robinson. I thought about Nicole’s picture, the one of the globe with the belt of stars, and it somehow seemed like a loophole to me, a fault in the logic that kept me from them.

  “Where did the picture come from?” I asked.

  “She did that,” he said, nodding towards my wife. “Put it there when you needed something to keep you going.”

  “Has she been watching me?”

  “We’re never far from the ones we love, Alan.”

  Sheryl smiled at me. In that smile I saw our life together, and it was glorious. I had loved her so completely that her absence nearly killed me. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how close to death I had come. Robinson had said I just might save a life. I had no idea he was talking about my own.

  Behind Sheryl and the kids, the stairs filled with sunlight. The light pouring down was so bright I had to shield my eyes. For a moment, Sheryl and the kids were silhouettes against its brilliance, and then the light overwhelmed my vision and everything turned white.

  When my eyes cleared, Sheryl and the kids were gone.

  “No,” I said. “Please, God, no.”

  I turned around, expecting to see at least Officer Robinson standing there, but he was gone
too. Only Thomas Brandt remained. He was the last piece of the puzzle in my hand, the last thing left for me to understand.

  I went to him, and I lifted him to his feet. He was punch drunk, and a heavy weight to navigate, but he came along willingly enough. I led him toward the stairs, and toward justice, but in my mind I was thinking about what Robinson had said.

  Limbus doesn’t always pay in cash, but they always pay very well.

  Third Interlude: Beyond the Veil

  Conrad didn’t wait for the story to melt into random symbols before he was on the net, looking for answers. He started by searching for Limbus, and he actually laughed out loud when the results came back to him. He had thought it was just a story, a work of fiction, and now he was sure.

  Limbus had been familiar from the beginning. Looking at the cover of the book by the same name, he knew why. He’d actually bought it, sometime in the year prior, but he’d never had the opportunity to read it. Life had intervened.

  So there it was. He had stumbled into some sort of viral marketing campaign. Nothing more than that.

  He could have left it there. Ignored the gaping holes in that theory. Brushed away the logical inconsistencies. Finished his beer and gone to bed. He could have done that, and maybe he should have. But that wasn’t the way he was wired.

  He’d been the kind of person other people sometimes hated. He was the one who would explain—some would say ruin—all the magic tricks. He did not believe in suspension of disbelief. Plot holes were his bane. And when it came to Limbus, he couldn’t just let it go. Whatever else could be said about it, hiding a viral campaign for a book this far down in the dark web where only he would find it made no sense. No sense at all.

  He closed out his browser and once again launched TOR, the internet submersible that would take him down into the depths where he needed to go. Here the task became more difficult. There was no search engine in the deep, no cheerful cartoons to mark the occasion of the day and guide his way. None that worked, anyway. Just vast, unordered information to wade through.

  He began trolling his ordinary haunts—TORchan, the Abyss, and of course, Iram. And in that mass of inane babbling and wild speculation, he was able to discern some truth. Most of the discussion was about the book. But there were the ones who said it was more than that.

  “Flame me if you want,” said one, “but Limbus is real. I’ve read the book, and it’s not far from reality. A buddy of mine found one of their cards and went to see them. They told him they had the perfect job for him. He took it and I never saw him again.”

  The poster got his wish. He was flamed, mocked into silence. But he was not alone. There were others who claimed to have seen the mark of Limbus, heard its name echoing throughout the world’s underground. Scrawled on bathroom walls, spray-painted across subway tunnel exits, written on paper that fluttered through bleak side-streets in the winter wind, printed on cheap business cards tacked to corkboard displays in darkened hallways. And always with the same question.

  “How lucky do you feel?”

  And it seemed those who answered that question weren’t that lucky at all. Story after story spoke of disappearances, vanishings, of things unexplained and unnumbered. But of course, none were told firsthand. No one on the boards had actually seen these things or personally experienced them. None of them had dealt with Limbus. They had only heard the whispers, the warnings, and the twice-told tales.

  The others cursed them. Called them fools and much worse, as the way of the dark net—and all the web it seemed—demanded. Some claimed they were liars. Others, agents of whatever publisher had decided to peddle these tales in the first place. Their protestations of truthfulness fell on deaf ears. The denizens of the dark web were willing to believe many things. But this particular conspiracy was not one of them.

  But Conrad, he was beginning to believe. He was beginning to believe very much. And as the fire continued to crackle and pop, as the wind picked up outside and shook the panes of glass in their frames, he felt the ordered world he’d always known melt away.

  He opened the impossible block of text again. He stared at it, wondered why it was there. He couldn’t imagine why they had picked him, and he needed to know more. There was another question, one as simple as Conrad now felt it was pointless. Conrad knew the questions were only for him.

  When it comes, no friend will take note of thy departure.

  All that breathe will share thy destiny.

  The gay will laugh,

  When thou art gone,

  the solemn brood of care plod on,

  and each one as before will chase his favorite phantom.

  While you descend…

  The cursor blinked, the sentence waiting to be finished, to be completed. Conrad put his fingers to the keys and typed.

  Into the grave.

  The text flashed and reformed, and for an instant, Conrad saw the image of books piled one upon another. And then more words, more sentences, another story.

  The Transmigration of Librarian Blaine Evans

  By

  Gary A. Braunbeck

  … and now there were bodies scattered on the ground in front of him as a result of the panic firing but Evans kept up his pace across the compound’s main yard, increased it even, because nothing slowed him, nothing tired him, nothing stopped him, not even the bullets strafing down at him from the security towers. There was less gunfire now than a minute ago, but that was only because they were getting ready to release the dogs. He’d expected that, and the gas too, only someone had gotten impatient and given the order to use the bombs too soon and the yard was now impenetrable with gas-clouds. Security guards were running this way and that, firing indiscriminately because they couldn’t see a damned thing, and that was good, that was very good, because Evans always came prepared, he’d put on his CX-47 mask, and could breathe easily, and that was really, really good.

  The sirens were getting louder, screaming like monsters, and that wasn’t so good, not so good at all because it was giving him a headache, but then a guard came out of the smoke, plowing off shot after shot; a second guard fired off a round and accidentally caught the other right smack in the knee, pulping it, and the guard did a flip, landed hard, tried to crawl, and Evans smiled behind his gasmask because no one crawled too damned far with a kneecap gone, so he pulled the Colt Python from out of his shoulder holster and just to be a good sport about things blew the guard’s head clean off his shoulders on the way past because, after all, what was the guy going to do with the rest of his life, having a knee all shot to hell like that?

  He rounded the last corner of the main yard and headed toward the gate now visible through the haze of gas and smoke and gunfire, but now there was the outline of another guard, one stupid hero guard, armed, one stupid hero guard armed with one mother of a semiautomatic rifle, and Evans charged toward him with all he had and Mr. Hero got off a couple of shots, one pretty close, one grazing Evans’s shoulder, but that didn’t stop him. He kept charging forward until he was close enough to make a fist of his right hand, a club of his arm, and one swing later, the guard was out cold on the ground and Evans grabbed up the rifle and spun around, switching it from semi-to full-automatic, and with one squeeze of the trigger began to hose the yard behind him.

  The scream of the sirens was nearly drowned out by those of the guards he was laying to their final rest on the hollow-points of bullets, and now things were good again, things were very good indeed, so Evans let fly with one last burst of gunfire and ran through the gate into the snow-covered street, running, running, running along the route he planned out months ago, running toward the frozen lake and the special box of supplies he’d planted there before breaking into the compound forty-seven minutes ago.

  He could hear them spilling out of the gates behind him, firing their warning shots, the idiots, but underneath the crackle of gunfire was the snarl of the dogs, so Evans picked up his speed and flew around a corner of the lake road and lo and behold, thank’ya J
ee-zus, here came a car straight toward him, and the driver saw what he was in for and hit the brakes and the car came to a shrieking, fishtailing halt in a cloud of snow and ice, but Evans didn’t have time to be polite or even wait to see if the driver’s side door was unlocked, so he just skidded up beside the car, blew out the window and most of the driver’s skull with the last bullet from the Python, tossed the body out into the snow, slammed closed the door, ripped the car into drive, and took off in a straight line right through the middle of the guards, cutting through them like a machete through foliage, clipping a couple, fender slamming two of them, then he whipped the car around, skidding for all it was worth, but the driver had been a conscientious one, yessir, because the snow tires were good ones, giving Evans traction to spare, so it was easy for him to plow through the rest of this first wave of guards and dogs, flattening several of both like pancakes before flooring the accelerator and heading on down the lake road.

  Six minutes later, he was deep in the woods surrounding the frozen lake, discarding his clothing and slipping into his specially modified wetsuit, inflating it, strapping on his air tank, checking the oxygen regulator, donning the underwater mask.

  The boots Evans wore were specifically designed for ice divers who, rather than chance the force of changing currents, chose to walk upside-down below the ice. Five-inch spikes covered the soles of each boot. Nothing short of a bomb blast could loosen their hold once they were entrenched.

  Evans activated the oxygen tank, put the regulator firmly into his mouth, swung the speargun strap around his chest, secured his quiver of spears to his person, and double-checked to make sure he had the disks he’d just stolen securely sealed in their protective case in his belt. His last pistol, a deadly Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum, was firmly held in a water-tight holster strapped to his thigh. There were those who would probably think Evans paranoid for taking a gun underwater with him, but years of experience and wounds had taught him to take nothing for granted.

  He had a gallery of scars from the rare occasions he’d forgotten that rule.

  Admittedly, he’d made a few slips the last couple of years, but nothing serious, nothing he’d told anyone about. Though he knew he might be getting too old for his particular line of work, he tried with all his still-considerable might to deny it.