by Anton Strout
“Where’s Darryl?” I asked.
Connor looked away. “He might have escaped.”
“Might have?”
Connor got testy. “It was a little hard keeping track of everyone, what with the chaos of fighting Harpies and rescuing you.”
“You weren’t rescuing me,” I said.
“On, no?” he said, haughtiness in his voice. “So you could have lived with yourself watching the kid here get his eyes gouged out, then?”
I didn’t bother responding and continued untying the student. I undid the final knots, before a thought hit me. “Where’s the Inspectre?”
We both looked around but we couldn’t see the Inspectre anywhere. “Crap,” I said, but Connor held a finger up to silence me.
Off near where we had come in came the sounds of struggle, even though we couldn’t see much from where we stood. We hurried our way through the maze of stored stuff while the student finished untangling himself from the coil of ropes encasing him.
Following the sounds, we came across the Inspectre, flat on his back on the floor. He was still clutching his sword cane, but every other inch of him was wrapped up in a writhing sea of movie snakes and sea serpent models, including a mutant octopus-looking thing that had full control of him from the waist down. Muffled cries for help came from behind either a tentacle or snake section that ran across his face. I couldn’t tell which.
Without wasting a second, Connor and I made quick work liberating the Inspectre from his monstrous little captors. I pulled the tentacle from around his head, ripping it in two before throwing it off into the surrounding darkness.
“Are you all right, sir?” I asked.
The moment he was free, the Inspectre scrabbled around on the floor until he could get up on his knees.
“What, what?” he said, somewhat flustered. “Yes, yes, of course I’m all right.” He found his sword and sheathed it back into the hollow of his cane, and then used it to help himself up. I moved to help him, but he brushed me away.
“It would appear,” he continued, “that my fencing skills were a bit lacking, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. “You routinely clean my clock in the F.O.G. training room.”
Connor chimed in, “I’m sure it’s not easy trying to fence miniature sea creatures.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is,” the Inspectre said, shaking his head. He stroked his mustache, and then stopped, pulling away with something pinched between his fingers. “There are scales in my mustache.”
Something caught Connor’s attention back in the center of the room, and he turned.
The student was attempting to lift himself up onto the desks and pull himself along the tops of them while trying to kick his legs free from all the rope. Connor reached the open circle and grabbed one of the dangling ends. “Not so fast,” he said. He pulled the student back toward him like he had just roped a steer at a rodeo. “Going somewhere?”
“N-no,” the student said, looking a little crazed. “I was just trying to get free of all this.”
“Uh-huh,” Connor said, not letting go of the rope.
“I was,” the student said, still sounding uncertain. “What? You think I was trying to escape with the rest of those guys?”
“Trying, yes,” Connor said. “Succeeding, no.”
The sounds of several Harpy cries came from out in the darkness along with the sounds of a few chairs falling off the tops of desks.
I lifted up my bat and readied it. The Inspectre unsheathed his sword from the cane and looked around.
The student looked at me with recognition. “You again,” the student said. “The guy from the bar who followed us to our studio the other day.”
“That’s me,” I said, looking around the room for more enemies.
“Relax,” the student said. “I don’t think you have to worry. Those things won’t last long. They lose their juice faster than a laptop battery. That’s part of the problem.”
“What problem?” I asked.
The student stopped fussing with the ropes and went silent. He must have forgotten who he was talking to and clammed up when he remembered. He shut his mouth and shook his head.
“What problem?” Connor repeated.
“I don’t think I should say anything more,” he said.
Connor stepped closer to him. “Oh, I think it’s in your best interest if you do,” he said.
“They were going to kill me,” he said, still in shock.
“I might kill you, too,” Connor said. “Making me destroy all of this classic memorabilia.”
“What?” the student said, snapping out of it. He looked over at the Inspectre. “You look old enough to be in charge here. This one isn’t really going to kill me, is he?”
“Don’t look at me, young man,” the Inspectre said. “At least not for sympathy. Your friends were the ones who unleashed those things on us, after all.”
“They aren’t my friends,” the student said. “They had me tied up.”
The doubtful look on the Inspectre’s face got a little doubtier.
“Okay, fine,” the student said, looking away. “They were my friends, but not after today.”
Connor walked back over to him. “You want to tell us what they were about to do with you, then?”
“Want to tell you?” he said with a nervous laugh. “No. You’ve seen what Elyse, Darryl, and Heavy Mike can do. I think I have more to fear in retribution from them than I do from you.”
“We still beat them,” I said.
“They still got away,” the student countered.
I really couldn’t argue with that, but I didn’t have to. Connor already had him by the front of his bloodied shirt.
“Make no mistake,” he said. “Your friends ran like cowards. Trust me when I say you have more to fear from us.”
The kid finally looked scared, but he also looked a little pale in general.
“Maybe we should get him to a hospital,” I said. “He is bleeding, after all.”
Connor looked down at the gash on the boy’s side where Elyse had cut him. He reached into his inside coat pocket, pulling out a Departmental favorite when it came to combat in the field, a tiny wound-up piece of cloth that looked like a human digit and bore a sectional crook in two places along it.
“What the hell is that?” the student asked.
“Mummy Fingers,” I said.
Connor nodded. He placed it against the student’s wound, and at contact, it unfurled itself, running its bandage back and forth over the spot until it staunched the flow of blood. The student squirmed as he watched it wide-eyed, and then looked up once it was fully settled into place.
“Who are you people anyway?” he asked.
I collapsed my bat down and slipped it back into its holster at my hip. “We’re the good guys,” I said.
“All right,” Connor said, grabbing the student by the rope still tangled around him and heading back toward the door we came in. “He’ll live, but he’s coming with us.”
The dazed student stumbled along after Connor, slamming into desks and knocking over chairs as he went. “I’d move faster if I were, you know, untied,” he said.
“What’s your name again?” Connor said.
“Trent,” the student said.
“Okay… well, then, Trent,” Connor said, “shut up.”
Trent turned and looked at me as Connor dragged him off again. “Is he always this way?” he asked, fear in his eyes.
“No,” I said, following after them. “Sometimes he’s actually mean.”
24
By the time we hit the street, we had untied Trent, but Connor and I rode on either side of him once we had hailed a cab, the Inspectre riding up front. When we pulled up outside the Lovecraft Café, Trent looked confused. The Inspectre got out of the front seat of the cab and held the back door open as we pulled the student out.
“You’re taking me out for coffee?” he said.
&n
bsp; “Inside,” Connor said, shoving him toward the coffeehouse doors. Once through the doors, the Inspectre went over to one of the big comfy chairs and collapsed into it.
“Sir?” I asked. “Are you okay? You look a little pale.”
“Just winded,” he said. “See to our young prisoner, won’t you?”
“As long as you’re okay …”
“Trust me,” he said. “Besides, if I expire, at least I’ll be doing it in a comfy chair, which is quite preferable to death at the hands of those tiny Harpies and skeletons.”
As the Inspectre flagged down a waitress, we left him and escorted Trent back through the movie theater, which was still not operational since Mason Redfield’s reincarnation. We kept going and entered the door marked H.P. at the back right corner, but as soon as we entered our secret offices, Trent stopped in his tracks.
“What the hell… ?” he said, but words left him as I watched him trying to take in the bustle of activity back here. He looked up and noticed the warding runes carved into the walls of the main bull pen.
“You guys aren’t normal police, are you?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “The normal police vacillate between laughing at us and fearing us. It’s frustrating.”
“Come on,” Connor said, grabbing him by the shirt. He pulled at Trent and the boy started walking again, still taking in everything around him as we went.
“Are you, like, Men in Black?” he asked, addressing me.
“No,” I said. “They’re fictional. You know how I know that?”
Trent shook his head.
“Because they have a huge budget and unlimited resources.”
The three of us continued walking back through the bull pen before passing through the curtain that sectioned off most of Other Division from the main work area. We were approaching our partners desk when Trent started to get back some of his focus.
“I think maybe I should call my dad,” he said. “He’s a lawyer.”
“Sit down and shut up,” Connor said, throwing the kid down onto the extra chair at our desks.
“Ow,” he said. “I thought you said you were supposed to be the good guys.”
“So?” Connor asked, sitting down at his desk. “Doesn’t mean were the gentle guys, now, does it? So, let’s get back to what you were talking about earlier. You mentioned there was a problem with your little operation over at NYU.”
Trent shook his head. “Problem?” he asked, trying to feign ignorance. “What problem?”
“Knock it off,” I said. “You’re not that convincing an actor.”
Trent looked hurt. “In all fairness, I am only a first-year. They won’t even let me pick a specific school of acting until much later on.”
Connor leaned down over him. “There’s not going to be a later on if you’re thrown out of NYU or stuck in jail, is that clear?”
Trent ran his fingers nervously through his hair. “Okay, okay…” he said. “You know, come to think of it, I do remember what we were talking about earlier.”
“How surprising,” Connor said, standing back up.
“So what do you want to know?” Trent asked.
“Why don’t you start with what you meant when you said there was a problem with those… things that came after us?”
Trent settled back into the chair, looking sheepish. “Those creatures that were attacking you,” Trent said. “They were a part of an ongoing experiment that the professor had started when he was alive. It was all part of what he called the next level of cinematic achievement—interactive films.”
“So you were finding ways to bring things to life using film,” I said.
“Yeah,” Trent said, “but despite all of the professor’s efforts, anything he animated didn’t last very long. Whatever he created would disappear back to nothingness after a short time, liquefy. He died before he could find a way to stabilize it.”
“Even so, how was he able to do even that much?” I asked.
Trent shook his head. “I don’t know. The other students didn’t really let me in on everything. Said it was because I was new …”
“Or maybe they wanted you for something more sinister,” I said. “Maybe they needed a little something human to get things stabilized.”
“What do you mean?” Trent asked.
“When Elyse cut you, your blood seemed to spark things off,” I said.
Trent looked down at his bandage. A little bit of the blood had soaked through to the surface, forming a tiny circle on the top of it. “Don’t remind me.”
“You said that those manifestations weren’t permanent,” I continued. “That they’d run out of steam and dissolve away.”
Trent nodded. “That seemed to be a very vexing point to Elyse, the professor, and the others,” he said.
“You know what I think?” Connor asked, and then pressed on without waiting for an answer from anyone. “I think Mason Redfield found a way to make the manifestations permanent, only he didn’t share it with you all. I think he figured out that it would take a full-on blood sacrifice.”
“But once he figured it out, he kept quiet and only used it on himself,” I said. “Which means that really was him we were fighting the other day.”
“Wait,” Trent said, leaning forward. “Are you saying the professor’s alive?”
Connor looked at him, watching his face. “You mean you really don’t know?”
The color drained out of Trent’s face. “No… I mean, we knew he wanted to try and get the whole process to work on humans, but it had never succeeded. When he died, we thought that might be the end of it until Elyse talked us all into continuing on his work. But he’s alive?”
“Reborn,” I said. “Much younger, too.”
“Wow,” Trent said, suddenly looking more thrilled than terrified. “Forgive me, but from the practical science aspect of it, it’s impressive, isn’t it? How did he get it to work?”
Connor gave him a grim smile. “You remember what we said about your blood sparking up those movie creatures earlier?”
“Yeah …”
“Have you seen your pal George lately?” Connor asked.
“Oh,” Trent said. He sat there in silence as the realization took hold of him.
“So you’re saying you didn’t know this was Professor Redfield’s plan?” I asked.
Trent shook his head. “We were all going to get rich together making films—that’s it, as far as I knew. Think about it. If you could take a bank robbing movie and reproduce the contents of a bank vault…Well, it wasn’t like we were actually hurting anyone, right?”
“I think you’re underestimating the power of greed,” Connor said. “You know what I think? I think your fellow students had a better idea of what the professor was up to and I think they kept you in the dark. You were getting played, kid.”
“But why?” he asked. “Why would they do that?”
“I think the professor taught them something very fundamental about magic,” I said.
Trent looked at me, his face searching for understanding in mine. “And what is that?”
“Magic has a price,” I said, “and for something like Mason Redfield being reborn, that price is high. You want to achieve the impossible, there’s going to be a big price tag on that. This one was written in human blood.”
Trent was practically shaking in his seat, his eyes nervous. “I don’t want to die,” he said.
“We don’t want you to die, either,” Connor said. “If you help us, we’ll do our best to keep that from happening.”
Trent nodded, but didn’t speak.
“Good,” I said. I got up from my desk and stepped out into the aisle outside our work area. “Come with us, then.”
Trent stood and followed me, with Connor sticking close behind him. Trent seemed resigned to his fate, but I didn’t put it past him to try to make a run for it if we gave him an opportunity to. I headed upstairs, straight for Allorah Daniels’s office where Director Wesker was working alongsi
de her. Jane sat exhausted with a ring of empty water glasses in front of her.
“We come bearing gifts,” I said. “Yet again.”
The three of them turned to look at us, all of them scrutinizing the stranger with us.
“And who is this?” Wesker demanded.
“This,” Connor said, slapping the student on the back hard enough to drive him forward, “is Trent. He’s our best chance at figuring out what our mad professor was really up to.”
“I’m starting to wonder if the water woman killed him so he could be reborn,” I said. “He had to die to be reborn, right? What kind of deal did Mason Redfield strike with her?”
Trent spotted the coil of film sitting on the laboratory workbench. “May I?” he asked.
Allorah waved him over but gave him a look that was stern warning not to mess with her.
Trent walked over with tentative steps and waited for her to hand the piece of film over, and then held it up to the light to examine it.
“Recognize it?” I asked.
Trent looked uncertain. “I’m not sure,” he said, and then his expression changed. “Wait…I do know this. I worked on it.”
“You did?” I asked.
Trent nodded.
Connor went over to him. “What is it you did for the professor, exactly?”
“I dabble in computers,” he said. “Mostly film editing. The professor had asked me to mash up some of these old monster movies with some old footage of him from his early twenties. He said it would help my skills at composite editing once he mastered the magic technique.”
“It did more than that,” Wesker said. “It helped him come back to life.”
Trent handed the film back to Wesker and stepped back. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know that’s what he was planning …”
Jane walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. Trent flinched.
“What about this?” she asked. She spun around and pulled her hair aside, showing him the tattoo between her shoulder blades in the dip of her tank top. “Can you tell me about this symbol?”
Trent examined it for a moment, but then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I haven’t seen that before. What is it?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Jane said, frowning.
