Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  “You could do more damage if it’s a posterior dislocation—”

  “Help out or get out,” Ryder said.

  “Fine.” Oliver blew out a breath and scrubbed his hands through his hair, pacing. Jude came in with one of our big med kits, the tackle-box kind used by our EMTs.

  “Painkiller?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Ryder and I said in unison.

  Jude unwrapped a syringe and jammed it into a vial of oxycodone.

  “At least let me do the injection.” Oliver sighed and took the syringe from Jude. “I’ve done it outside of class.”

  I closed my eyes as the needle punctured my skin. When it slipped back, Ryder carried me into the family room and helped me lie on the floor. Jude pulled pillows off the couch and tossed them to Ryder, who tucked one between my body and injured arm, and one under my knees.

  Oliver hovered on the edge of the room.

  “Get her something to bite down on,” Ryder said. Jude disappeared and came back a few seconds later with a rolled-up hand towel. He placed it between my teeth.

  “Are the meds kicking in yet?” Ryder asked.

  “Just do it.” The towel muffled my words.

  Ryder nodded at Jude, who secured my left side by pressing his palm into my clavicle. Ryder took my right hand. Every touch, every moment felt like he’d pushed a live drill into my shoulder. I gritted my teeth and balled my good fist, bracing myself.

  “Look at me,” Jude said, turning my face to his with a gloved finger. “Remember the time we climbed Half Dome with Damian and your old man, and how on the first night the sunset turned all of Yosemite gold?”

  I let Jude divert my attention, closing my eyes and remembering the silence of a sunset seen at three thousand feet up. Ryder lifted my arm with both hands and bent it into a ninety-degree angle over my chest.

  “You said it was the most peaceful thing you’d ever seen—”

  “Breathe in, Micheline,” Ryder said.

  I drew a breath. Ryder rotated my shoulder inward. Muscle and ligaments and bone ground against one another. The towel deadened my whimper.

  Jude put a little more pressure on my good shoulder. “And you, me, and Outback here sat on a cot up in the air. You punched me because I sprayed my Coke on you—”

  Ryder gripped my hand tight, then turned my arm back out. He put a little pressure on my elbow, then a little more. The pain spiked. A pop! detonated in my body, agony impaling my arm. Jude kept me pinned. I bucked, shrieking into the towel, tears leaking through my closed lids.

  “It’s back in the socket,” Ryder said, running his fingers over my shoulder.

  “First try, too. Lucky,” Jude said, taking the towel out of my mouth. My jaw ached from clamping so hard. “You okay?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice. The words wouldn’t come anyway, not with a pain-soused brain and the nausea turning my stomach into a trampoline. I’d only had a few injuries that hurt so much: a flesh wound from some shrapnel, a compound fracture in my shin, and a bad concussion.

  “Find her a blanket, will you?” Ryder asked the boys, pulling me into his arms. I dug the nails of my good hand into his shoulder. Jude hopped to his feet and left the room. Oliver excused himself, saying he’d check on the frame in Dad’s study.

  “You okay?” Ryder asked.

  I leaned my head against his chest—the world didn’t spin so much when I could focus on his heartbeat. “I’m fine.” I think. My pain retreated by degrees. But when I started to push away, Ryder held me tighter.

  “Captain Kennedy and I popped a shoulder in for Travis once. The bloke bawled like a littlie.” He rested his chin on the top of my head. “You’re even tougher than him, just remember that it’s not weak to need a soft place to fall sometimes.”

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  He brushed my bangs out of my eyes, his fingers lingering over the bruise on my cheekbone. “Do you ever think about just—”

  Jude interrupted with Mom’s old afghan. She knitted it herself, and I’d curled up with the blanket more times than I could count. Ryder slipped his arms under me, stood and set me on the couch, carefully. I tried to read the rest of what he meant to say in his expression, in the way he tucked the afghan around me, but he’d gone all stone-faced and left me clueless.

  “Well, that’s the last time we play Ouija, Princess.” Jude set the med kit down on the floor beside Ryder.

  “Ouija?” Ryder asked, taking out some rubbing alcohol and swabs. “What the hell were you using one of those things for?”

  I rested the back of my good hand on my forehead. “I needed to track the ghost, quick and dirty. So I thought I’d use a Ouija planchette and a map of the city.”

  “That doesn’t explain how you dislocated your arm.” Ryder started to clean the black ash off my skin and swab my cuts with alcohol.

  “The map’s frame is silver-plated,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the alcohol’s scent. “Something reached through the silver and grabbed me by the arm. We need to seal the frame’s surface with rubber, just in case.”

  “Already done,” Oliver said, walking in and rattling an empty can of rubberized paint. “I found some in the basement. There’s miasma ash all over the desk. How’s that possible, Micheline?”

  “It shouldn’t be.” I pushed up on my good arm and gave my head a few seconds to screw itself on straight. Ryder placed a gauze pad over my scratches and started to wrap it in tape. “I’ve heard stories of people being pulled into the Obscura via an unsealed antimirror, fairy tale stuff.”

  “We’re not talking about antimirrors,” Oliver said. “This was a silver-plated picture frame.”

  “Look, I don’t understand it either, okay?” I said. Oliver held my gaze for a few seconds, perhaps trying to dissect the situation or at least try to make sense of it. He hated anything that defied logic, anything he couldn’t measure, weigh, or sample. Ghosts. Human emotions. God. When I couldn’t give him an answer, he cleared his throat and turned aside.

  “So did it work?” Ryder asked, ripping the tape off and securing my bandage.

  “Did what work?” I asked.

  “The Ouija board,” he said. “Were you able to track the bastard?”

  “I … saw things while I had my hand on the planchette,” I said, shifting my weight and ignoring my shoulder’s complaints. “There’s an abandoned skyscraper downtown, kind of retro, with these big bird statues along the roof.”

  Oliver perked. “That sounds like the old Pacific Bell Building.”

  “South of Market Street?” Ryder asked.

  Oliver nodded. “By the Museum of Modern Art. It’s been abandoned for decades.”

  “Prime real estate for the dead,” Jude said.

  “You’re sure that’s where the ghost was?” Ryder asked, looking to me.

  “Positive,” I said.

  Ryder glanced at his watch. “Let’s be ready to move out by two hundred hours. Rest up, we don’t know what we’re going to find out there.”

  The boys power-napped, then prepped their hunting packs and cleaned their guns. Oliver pulled up the PacBell Building’s blueprints online and found several points of entry, plus a connection to the city’s sewers. I rested my shoulder, letting the drugs sink into my system and kill off the pain. Jude brought me my camera and bags, and I refreshed my camera’s film and repacked my supplies. Ryder fetched spare film canisters and fresh lens cloths from the basement for me, too.

  Thoughts of the basement led me straight back to Luca. If we found our ghost at the PacBell Building tonight, it meant his information was solid. But why should a ghost care whether I lived or died? Did the miasma belong to him, and had he only advised me to use the Ouija planchette so he could try to hurt me? Could he possibly be our perpetrator, our captor, our would-be killer?

  The answers depended, in part, on what lurked in the PacBell Building. I shivered and pulled Mom’s afghan tighter. If the dead could reach into this world, could the living step into theirs? I’d
never heard of a real, living human being passing into the Obscura. It didn’t seem possible—but then again, my arm shouldn’t have sunk a foot deep in a silver frame, either.

  After an hour or so, I tested my shoulder. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt, particularly if I lifted my arm high. But I could rotate my arm and wrist, grip, and flex my elbow without too much pain. Was pretty sure I could shoot, but I really didn’t want to know what I’d feel like when the oxycodone wore off.

  I went up to my old room for a jacket and my handgun—no way would I go into an abandoned skyscraper unarmed, especially as the ghost might not be the only monster lurking inside. I’d avoided my room since arriving except to dump my backpack at the door. Stepping inside, I faced a three-dimensional snapshot of the girl I’d been. The pictures on the walls made me heartsick, photos of my family and me, of the boys and me. I’d been less neat back then—large, capped lenses acted as paperweights, standing beside a battalion of film cans and an army of bullets. An enlargement of my first National Geographic Magazine cover hung over my desk, a shot of a ghost dripping through a ceiling, hands reaching for my lens. The image made me famous for more than my last name.

  A little Matchbox car sat on my nightstand, the last birthday gift I’d gotten from Fletcher. I squeezed it tight, remembering his peanut butter smile and Eskimo kisses. Just for a second, no longer, or else the tears would hit. I tucked the car into my camera bag, for luck.

  I took Dad’s Colt out of my backpack, curling my fingers around the grip. My arm shook when I aimed it, the sights lined up with a picture of Dad’s head. No way could I count on my right arm to handle the recoil of a .45 caliber bullet. The gun felt okay in my left hand, although it’d been a few months since I’d shot southpaw. My reflexes would be rusty, but my muscles would remember. Adrenaline would curl my finger around the trigger and hit fast-forward on the whole world. My breath would hitch, giving me four seconds of perfect silence to squeeze the trigger.

  Slipping on an old holster, I secured the gun on my left hip, my camera on my right, and slung my camera bag under the small of my back. My monopod waited in Jude’s truck.

  A knock at the door made me jump. “Come in,” I said, straightening my holsters and bag in the mirror.

  Ryder slipped inside. “You feeling okay?”

  “For now.” I jounced my shoulders and winced. He tossed me a comm unit and I caught it left-handed.

  “Ollie’s got them wired to work closed-circuit,” Ryder said as I clipped it over my ear. “They won’t relay anything we say to headquarters.”

  “Good.” I took an older hunting jacket out of my closet. It still fit—I hadn’t grown at all since Mom’s death, at least not physically. I straightened it over my gear and joined Ryder in the hall. “Let’s do this.”

  SATURDAY, 2:18 A.M.

  THE PACIFIC BELL BUILDING rose twenty-six stories over the street, her top floors disappearing into the night fog. Ryder parked in a back lot behind the Museum of Modern Art, where our vehicles would be virtually unseen between the staggering skyscrapers. The motorcycle’s headlight bounded off kids striking a deal with bills and baggies—they slunk away when Ryder stepped off the bike and glared at them. Guess they didn’t care much for the lockdown.

  Jude and Oliver pulled up beside us.

  “Ready?” Ryder asked. He checked the clips in his handguns while I scanned the building’s granite flanks.

  “Lock and load,” I said.

  Jude got out, twirling a butterfly knife around his knuckles, trying to look relaxed. Did he realize he was whistling “Rock-a-bye, Baby”? Oliver stayed in the truck, his laptop perched on his knees. He gave me a nod—he wouldn’t be hunting until his wound healed up.

  “Do we have the right place?” Jude asked, closing his knife. He craned his neck to take in the building’s height and whistled.

  “Looks like it,” I said, scanning the building’s tall flanks for evidence of ghostlight. One hunt, one exorcism, and I’d break these chains and save us from this nightmare.

  Jude hopped into the bed of his truck and took an M16 assault rifle out of the big locker in back. I cocked my head. “What’s with the rifle?”

  “Security blanket,” he said.

  “Don’t give that thing to a baby.”

  “I thought your old man gave you bullets to use as pacifiers.” Jude handed a second rifle to Ryder, followed by a slender parachute kit worn underneath a reaper’s standard hunting pack.

  “Whoa, whoa, what’s with the crash kit?” I frowned as Jude slipped on one and clipped it across his chest and abdomen. “Do you plan on jumping out of a window or something?”

  “Never hurts to be prepared,” Ryder said, settling his pack on his back. “I ever tell you I like the way you think, Drake?”

  “Only when it involves a gun,” Jude said. “Never when it involves a girl.”

  Ryder shouldered his M16’s strap. “Never like the way you think about girls.”

  “Hey, man, I’ve got to pick up your slack,” Jude said, jumping out of the truck’s bed. “You’ve become a friggin’ nun to the Church of Helsing.”

  Ryder shot him a dark look and cuffed him hard on the arm. Jude laughed. There were unspoken rules to their brotherhood I’d never hope to understand.

  “This isn’t social hour, people,” Oliver said into the comms. “Let’s get moving.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Jude muttered, handing both Ryder and me climbing harnesses. “I’ve only got two crash kits, so you’ll have to double up if it comes to a jump.”

  “Joy.” I stepped into the harness and buckled it around my waist. Ryder gave the harness a tug and nodded to me.

  “The building’s mostly clear,” Oliver said, briefing us. “The GPS diagnostic reports a second electrical anomaly within the building, similar to the one we saw last night.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Top floor.”

  I grabbed my monopod off the truck’s backseat and slung the shoulder strap over my chest on a bias. Hunting packs interfered with my camera bag and monopod, so I didn’t carry one. “Does the building have power, Oliver?”

  “Yes, it’s owned by a local architectural firm.”

  Great. I didn’t want the ghost feeding off the building’s energy in the midst of a fight. “Where are the breakers?”

  “The transformers are in the subbasement,” he said. “The satellites can’t scan anything underground, so watch your backs.”

  “Right.” Ryder pointed at the building with a jerk of his thumb. “Let’s go.”

  The building’s outlying windows stood three feet off the ground. Without any ceremony, Ryder broke one with a crowbar, reached in, and pulled it open.

  “Smash and go,” Jude said, hoisting himself in first. “I love indie jobs.”

  I crawled inside next, pausing to let my eyes adjust to the low light inside. The temperature hovered at refrigerator-cold. Breath spilled off my lips like cigarette smoke and goose bumps rose along my arms and legs. The air coagulated on my teeth, dense with the smell of death and decay. No matter how many times I’d run into the smell of rotten flesh, I’d never gotten used to it.

  “Must be the right place,” Ryder said as he came in. The darkness devoured his voice. “Smells like something died in here.”

  We passed through a large, empty room with exposed beams for ribs, to find ourselves in an aged Art Deco lobby. The black marble floors and gilded walls wore layers of graffiti and grime. Skeletons of old chandeliers clung to a copper ceiling embossed with phoenixes and deer. Human refuse piled in the corners—broken chairs, old typewriters, even a man’s shoe. Everything looked normal, at least by abandoned-building standards.

  “Would you look at this place?” Jude said, running his flashlight over the walls.

  “Let’s start by blowing the transformers in the basement,” I said, moving into the lobby. I touched my comm. “Oliver, where should we look for stairs?”

  “There’s a stairwell straight
ahead,” Oliver said. “It’s just past the elevators, and it spans the height of the main tower from subbasement to the top floor.”

  I came abreast of the elevators and pointed my flashlight down the hall, scattering shadows. The eight brass units stood closed, except one on the far right-hand side. A large bone propped open the elevator door, one I hoped wasn’t human.

  “We got trouble,” I said, walking toward the mess. Bloody handprints covered the walls and floor, leading straight into the elevator shaft. Most of the prints weren’t strictly human, either, with eight fingers and too many knuckles.

  The boys followed me down to the last elevator.

  “Fire the decorator,” Jude said.

  “Ollie, you’re sure you aren’t reading any necros in the building?” Ryder asked.

  “The floors are clear,” Oliver said. “Why?”

  “Just a bit of blood in here,” Ryder replied casually, as if recommending a brand of toilet paper. Only a reaper could make the macabre sound mundane. Off-comm, Ryder said, “We’ve got something in the basement.”

  “Looks like it.” Jude knelt down, touching the blood on the floor and rubbing it between his thumb and index finger. With his extrasensory perception, Jude could touch blood and “see” any memories it contained. I wouldn’t touch the stuff if my life depended on it; if Jude got it in his bloodstream, he’d go another round with the H-three antinecrotics. “This is fresh within the last hour, and it’s human. The guy was still alive when this stuff came out of him.”

  “Necros usually kill their prey straight off,” Ryder said.

  “Not this time,” Jude said, flicking the blood off his fingers.

  Walking up to the open shaft, I examined the bone. The ends had big, bulbous knobs like a femur, and it was streaked with dry gore and sinews. Inside the elevator shaft, the smell of bile and rot rose to eye-watering proportions, so I covered my nose with my hand to get close. Beyond the doors, a platform of warped planks balanced on the shaft’s metal skeleton. The walls and pipes wore the rusted spatter marks of old gore.