Dream Stalkers

by Tim Waggoner

  Jinx walked over to the Warden, took one of the collars, and closed it around his neck. His skin, which had been so white it nearly gleamed under the room’s fluorescent lights, became duller, as if an internal energy source had been shut off. Mordacity stepped forward, took a collar, and put it on as well, with a similar effect.

  Jinx looked at Bloodshedder, who was still growling.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “These collars are designed so that only humans can remove them. Russell or Audra can take them off us whenever we want.”

  Bloodshedder didn’t look entirely convinced, but she stopped growling.

  Bruzer stepped toward her. His white-furred head sniffed the air harder than usual, and his tan head’s growling had softened so it was barely audible.

  “Allow me,” Bruzer said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. He knelt down and put the negator collar on Bloodshedder as if he were gifting her with a piece of jewelry. Bloodshedder looked confused, but she wagged her spiked tail a couple times. Once the collar was on her, her teeth seemed smaller and less sharp, as did her claws and tail spikes. Bruzer smiled at her before straightening, but, when he turned to the rest of us, his smile was gone and he was all business again.

  “Follow me, stay close, and ignore the inmates,” he said.

  His main head regarded us with a level gaze, but his secondary head was looking at the door and growling again, already on guard.

  Two heads, I thought.

  I’d seen Warden Bruzer dozens of times over the years, so why should seeing his two heads bother me now? I’d seen plenty of freakier-looking Incubi since I’d first come to Nod. A guy with a pair of dog heads didn’t come near to making the list of the weirdest things I’d seen here. But I couldn’t keep from staring at the Warden’s heads and thinking there was something wrong – really wrong – with them.

  Bruzer noticed me staring.

  “Is something amiss, Officer Hawthorne?” he asked.

  You’re supposed to have three heads. I wanted to say it, almost did, but I forced myself to stay silent. I had no memory of his ever having a third head, and yet I knew he had. It was white, and it always smelled the air, I thought, like it was trying to sniff out trouble. I almost remembered this, but not quite. It was like I remembered that I should’ve remembered, if that makes any sense.

  “No, Warden. Everything’s fine.”

  Bruzer eyed me for several more seconds, as if he sensed I wasn’t telling the truth. But, in the end, he let the matter go and headed for the door.

  Russell looked as if he wanted to say something but wasn’t sure if he should. He kept his mouth shut, though, and we all followed Bruzer into the corridor.

  Three heads, I told myself. Three. It was almost as if I was trying to memorize the fact, as though I was worried I was in danger of forgetting it. Something made me look at my hands, then. Their skin was smooth and unbroken, but, despite their healthy appearance, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with them too, that they shouldn’t be this way. I had no idea what was happening. Maybe after all these years, Jinx’s insanity was finally starting to wear off on me. Or maybe it was because of our Blending. Switching bodies back and forth was bound to take a toll on a person’s mind. But I didn’t think that was it. Whatever was happening was real, and I seemed to be the only one who was aware of it. Except maybe for Russell. The way he’d looked at me after I’d noticed Bruzer was missing a head made me think that he at least suspected something was wrong.

  I decided to keep my mouth shut about the situation for the time being. I had no way to prove what I perceived was real, and I feared that if I said anything, Bruzer would slap me in a cell next to Nathaniel’s and throw away the key. Maybe if I could get Russell alone, I could ask him if he’d noticed anything peculiar lately and see what he said. Until then, I would keep my eyes and ears open and pay close attention to everything and everyone around me. When the next change… No, that was the wrong word. Subtraction, maybe. Or better yet, excision. When the next excision occurred, I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it.

  I wondered how many excisions I couldn’t remember and how many more might’ve occurred and might be occurring at that very moment without my knowledge. Being unarmed in a prison filled with criminals, quite a few of which I’d helped put away, was nowhere near as frightening as the thought that I could no longer trust reality, even Nod’s distorted version of it.

  Bringing down the shuteye operation no longer seemed as important as it had a few minutes ago, but I decided I’d keep working the case, at least until I could figure out a way to prove to the others that something far more sinister was happening around us. Until then, I’d fall back on something Nathaniel had taught me long ago. When in doubt, focus on the job at hand.

  “Tell me, Warden, do you have any problem with shuteye in Deadlock?” I asked.

  Bruzer didn’t bother looking over his shoulder as he answered.

  “A certain amount of illegal drugs find their way into the hands of our prisoners,” he said. “We do the best we can to keep them out and to find and confiscate them when they get in. But we’re shorthanded here, and, to be brutally honest, if some jump juice or tinglies slip by us, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”

  “But no shuteye?” I persisted.

  Bruzer didn’t respond right away. By this point, we’d reached the end of the corridor and come to a metal door with a guard standing next to it. The words General Population were painted on the door in white capital letters. Bruzer nodded and the guard pushed a button on a panel next to the door. There was a loud clank! as the lock disengaged, and then the guard opened the door for us. We stepped through and into another corridor, where two guards were waiting for us, trancers out and ready for trouble. They wore full body armor and helmets with visors down. They had numbers on their uniforms just below their necks, as all the guards in Deadlock did. 5587 and 6323 were to be our escorts for this visit. The guards took up a position behind us, and we continued forward until we reached a set of stairs that led to yet another corridor.

  Deadlock has no outside exercise yard, for obvious reasons. Fully powered Incubi would have a hell of a time trying to survive an attack by an army of Darkuns, but Incubi whose powers were suppressed by negator collars? They’d be slaughtered within seconds. So Deadlock has an inside exercise yard with a basketball half-court, a running track, a weightlifting area, and general space for walking and socializing. The corridor we were in now was a story higher than the yard and had thick bars through which the prisoners below could be observed or, if necessary, shot at. The inmate uniforms are plain long-sleeved shirts, pants, and slip-on-shoes, much like what any prisoners on Earth might wear. The big difference is that Deadlock’s inmate uniforms are white, almost blindingly so, and they fluoresce in darkness, making escape attempts even more difficult.

  Most of the prisoners were primarily humanoid, but there were quite a few who resembled animals of various types, along with assorted monsters, creatures, and distorted things that were absolutely unclassifiable beyond the simple one-word description of nightmare. The smell drifting up from the exercise yard made me think of a zoo where the animals had not only never been bathed, but were allowed to roll in their own dung.

  A dozen guards ringed the yard, staying close to the walls as they watched the prisoners. They’d move in to take care of any trouble that might arise, but otherwise they kept their distance. They wanted to avoid tempting any of the prisoners to try to steal their weapons. Incubi, collared or not, are chaotic as hell, and they’d snatch a guard’s weapons in a heartbeat just to see if they could get away with it.

  As we walked down the corridor, we were visible to the prisoners, and it wasn’t long before we were recognized.

  “Mordacity!” one of the prisoners shouted. “You suck!”

  “No, he doesn’t!” someone else shouted. “He don’t have any lips!”

  “I see that prison wit hasn’t improved since the last time
I was here,” Mordacity said.

  “Jinx!” someone called out. “When I get out of here, I’m going to hunt you down, rip off your head, and shit down your neck!”

  Jinx stopped and walked over to the barred window.

  “Who said that?” he demanded.

  One of the inmates raised her hand. She had large bulging insect eyes and rigid straw-blonde hair that stuck straight up like the bristles on a broom. Like all the other prisoners, she wore a silver negator collar.

  “You and your bitch partner arrested me for indecent exposure!” she shouted.

  Russell looked at me.

  “She didn’t take her clothes off,” I explained. “She removed other people’s skin. All of it.”

  “Okay then,” Jinx said, “it’s a date!” He blew the woman a kiss.

  The other Incubi in the yard laughed and Bug-Eyes let out a string of invectives and flipped Jinx a double bird.

  Jinx turned away from the window and rejoined us.

  “I was joking,” he said. “I only have eyes for Trauma Doll.”

  He reached for his jacket pocket, but, of course, he wasn’t wearing his uniform.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You were going to show me actual eyes you’ve been saving for her.”

  He nodded, and then looked thoughtful. “I wonder if she’d like a pair of giant bug eyes instead.”

  Bruzer started forward again, and, again, we followed. We walked the length of the exercise yard and then reached another metal door with another armed guard standing in front of it. The guard punched a code on the key panel, the door opened, we stepped through, and then the door shut behind us. The guard on the other side gave the Warden a nod and stepped aside to let us pass. We continued on like this for a while until we reached a corridor with steel doors on both sides. The doors were unmarked, and I knew from previous experience that they weren’t cells, but that’s all I knew. Bruzer had never told Jinx and me what this area of the prison was for. I’d tried getting some of the guards to tell me on previous visits, but none of them would talk. I’d never seen anyone else in this corridor before, but now a pair of guards big enough to be the Hulk’s older brothers were walking toward us from the opposite direction. Between them, locked in a pair of silver manacles, was a creature that looked like a powerfully muscled humanoid wolf, with thick black fur, yellow eyes, sharp fangs, and wicked-looking claws. The wolf was unclothed, and I could see that his legs were bent like a canine’s.

  Bloodshedder growled upon seeing the wolf-creature, and Jinx wrinkled his nose.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know what that thing is,” he said, “but it’s not an Incubus.”

  The wolf-creature fixed its yellow-eyed gaze on Bloodshedder and returned her growl, but then one of the guards cuffed him on the side of the head, and he quieted, although, from the way the prisoner glared at the guard, I knew the wolf would’ve attempted to tear him limb from limb if he hadn’t been manacled.

  As we drew closer, I smelled the stink of burning hair, and when I looked at the wolf-creature’s wrists, I saw that they had been burned where the silver touched them, as if the prisoner was highly allergic to the metal. I then noticed that the creature wasn’t wearing a negator collar.

  I looked to Bruzer for an explanation.

  “It’s a Lyke,” he said. “It doesn’t belong in Nod. We have an extradition treaty with the dimension where it does belong, however.”

  The guards stopped before one of the doors, and, while one of them keyed in an entry code on the wall panel, the other drew what looked like an ordinary 9mm handgun and pressed the muzzle to the wolf-creature’s head.

  “The gun is loaded with silver bullets,” Bruzer explained.

  Russell’s eyebrows raised.

  “Are you saying it’s a werewolf?”

  “Lyke,” Bruzer corrected.

  The door opened and the guard that had entered the code stepped into the room. He drew his own 9mm and aimed it at the “Lyke” while the second guard shoved the creature inside, keeping his gun pressed to its head the entire time.

  “Don’t close the door,” Bruzer ordered the guards. “We’d like to observe.”

  The guards did as he ordered, and, when we reached the open doorway, we stopped and peered inside. The room was empty, save for a large oval mirror with a fancy gold frame hanging from the far wall. The mirror’s surface was a glossy black, and, although I wasn’t sure, I thought I detected shadowy eddies and swirls within the darkness.

  The guards marched the Lyke to the mirror, and, without preamble, they grabbed hold of the creature’s arms and shoved him toward it. Instead of colliding with the mirror, the Lyke passed through it, entering the blackness and being swallowed by it.

  “It’s a Door,” Russell said.

  “Not exactly,” Mordacity said. “But similar.”

  The guards trained their guns on the mirror and backed up slowly, keeping their weapons pointed at the dark glass, as if they feared something might come charging out of it. But nothing did, and, when they returned to the corridor, one of them pulled the door closed, and the locks automatically engaged.

  “Good work,” Bruzer said.

  The guards acknowledged the Warden’s praise with nods, and then walked past us, going the way we’d just come from.

  I looked to Mordacity.

  “You know about that other dimension?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t know about all of them.”

  “All?”

  And then it hit me. There were – I counted quickly – twenty unmarked doors in this corridor.

  “You mean all these doors lead to other dimensions?” I asked.

  Bruzer nodded his main head. He used to have three, I reminded myself, although it was getting harder for me to believe it.

  “This is the Extradition Department,” he said. “The Shadow Watch keeps the existence of other dimensions a highly guarded secret. Can you imagine what would happen if Incubi learned there were others planes of existence for them to cause havoc in?”

  “If that’s the case,” I said, “then why the hell did you let us look into the room? More specifically, why did you let him?” I hooked a thumb at Jinx.

  The Warden turned both of his heads to look at my partner. Jinx was grinning even wider than he had the Christmas I’d gotten him the pop-up edition of History’s Bloodiest Serial Killers.

  Bruzer’s second head whined.

  “I hadn’t considered that,” he admitted. He sounded as if he needed a good stiff drink or ten.

  I turned to Russell. “Did you know about these other dimensions?”

  “My employers have hinted at other levels of existence, but they’ve never told me anything specific about them.”

  I looked at the door again. Twenty different dimensions… I have a hard enough time keeping two straight.

  Ten

  It took another ten minutes to reach Deadlock’s medical facility, designated by the oh-so-imaginative name Medical. It looks like an Earth hospital for the most part, only with armed guards in full body armor and reinforced steel doors with multiple heavy-duty locks. Healing an injured Incubus should, in theory, be simple. All you have to do is remove the negator collar and let the Maelstrom energies which suffused Nod go to work. Unfortunately, once they were powered up, prisoners invariably attempted escape. So the collars stay on, and Incubi have to heal the torturously slow way that we mere mortals do.

  The staff here were medical-themed nightmares, just like at the Sick House. No shortage of that type in Nod. There were few humans on staff, though. Even collared Incubi can be dangerous to humans – especially when those Incubi are convicted criminals – so non-collared Incubi have a definite safety edge when working here.

  A doctor was standing outside Nathaniel’s door waiting for us. There was nothing to indicate this was Nathaniel’s room, though. His name wasn’t on the door, and there wasn’t even a number. But, although it had been
years since I’d last come to visit my former mentor, I had no trouble remembering which room was his. The guilt that I’d been working so hard to keep at bay hit me full force and, without realizing I was doing so, I reached out for Jinx’s hand. I thought Jinx might taunt me, maybe ask me if we were going steady now. But he remained silent and gently squeezed my hand in a show of support. Mild dizziness swept over me, and for an instant I was looking through Jinx’s eyes, but then the dizziness passed and I was in my own body again. I let go of Jinx’s hand. Menendez had told us to remain physically close to one another so we could get used to resisting the Blending effect, but I figured there was no point in tempting fate, especially before we went in to see Nathaniel.

  The doctor was a humanoid woman with sickly yellow skin and grossly exaggerated features: huge watery eyes, elephantine ears, a bulbous potato-like nose, and a wide gash of a mouth filled with crooked teeth. She was bald and a pair of bony protuberances shaped like caducei grew from her head. She laughed softly as we approached, a nasally heh-heh-heh that was as disturbing as it was annoying. As we drew closer, I was able to make out the letters on her nametag: Dr Tittering. The name was appropriate, I thought. I didn’t remember seeing her before, though. Maybe she was new, or at least new to me. It had been a while since my last visit.

  She acknowledged Bruzer with a nod.

  “Warden.”

  I waited to see if she would say anything about his… For an instant, I couldn’t remember what the rest of the thought was, but then it came back to me. About his missing head. But she said nothing, and, if her body language was any indication, she saw nothing out of the ordinary with Bruzer.

  Doctor Tittering introduced herself and came forward to shake our hands. She continued giggling softly as she took my hand, and I found the touch of her cold, clammy flesh unpleasant. The last time I was so instantly and profoundly disturbed by an Incubus was when I met Penis-Head Harry.