by M. K. Gibson
//AFFIRMATIVE//
I heard and felt a groan beneath me. I patted around behind me as I rolled to the side.
“Grimm? You OK, bud?”
“It would appear so. However, please cease pawing at my groin.”
Oops.
“Sorry. I can’t see. The light from the blast fried my eyes for the moment.”
“Understood,” Grimm said as he stood and helped me to my feet. “I do not believe that bomb was meant to kill us.”
“I must still be half deaf. I swear you just said that that bomb wasn’t meant to kill us. That big-ass boom that we just survived,” I said, still gripping Grimm’s arm. My sight was mostly just blurred outlines and odd shapes. There was a Han Solo joke there somewhere that I was too pissed off or concussed to think up.
“If it was meant to kill us, the explosion would have been bigger, with more fragmentation. Unless . . .”
I followed Grimm’s line of thinking. Shit. “The bomb was meant to destroy the contents of the vault and any trace of who had robbed it initially. Knocking us on our asses was just a happy side effect. Motherfucker wanted me to get here! Just to watch any chance of finding out and tracking him literally blow up in our faces!”
“It would appear so. It would seem our trip here is now pointless.”
I thought about it. Heh. Good thing I am extra paranoid. “Not exactly. Get me to the vault. There may still be something I can do,” I told Grimm. I couldn’t see him clearly, but I made out an indifferent shrug. He began guiding me to the vault entrance when I heard something . . . off.
I stopped abruptly, listening.
“What is the matter?”
“Shh!” I told Grimm.
“Do not ‘Shh’ me. Why did you stop?”
“How about ‘Would you kindly shut the fuck up’ then? Something’s out there,” I said.
My hearing, like all my senses, is extremely acute, enhanced by the Collective to superhuman levels. But they aren’t on all the time. Otherwise I’d be deaf or bleeding from the nose constantly. The Collective responds to my command and dials up what I need. And occasionally, like this time, the Collective will pick up on something and tune me in.
Grimm remained silent. I listened and heard burrowing sounds coming from the muck piles. If I didn’t know any better, it sounded like some of the Lesser Deep.
“What is that?” Grimm asked.
I turned and looked about, but my eyes were still jacked up and blurry. I tried hard to focus and I could somewhat make out a shambling shape, digging itself free from the garbage piles. Then another. And another.
“What is it? What do you see?” I asked Grimm.
“Lesser Deep. Minor Ones. About the size of large dogs. Appear to be all eyes, tentacles, and teeth, and they are circling us. But they look different.”
“How?”
Grimm seemed concerned. “They look . . . altered. Surgically. Technologically. Their eyes have been gouged out and sewn shut and bits of tech are protruding from them.”
“Searchers?” I asked, and I heard Grimm grunt in the affirmative. Searchers were multi-eyed little bastards the size of Rottweilers. They moved on part tentacles and part insect legs with a venomous whipping tail. They were mostly scouts that looked for fresh meat and signaled their bigger, and nastier, brothers.
“But the Deep Ones don’t get altered. That’s never been. An occasional demon, sure. But not them,” I said.
“Apparently things have changed,” Grimm disagreed.
That broke every natural law that we knew of the Deep Ones. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t much. The only things we really knew of them was gleaned from Lovecraft and from what we discovered on our own. Hell, we made up our own names for them. Ol’ H.P. did his best to interpret the sounds he heard in his head during his possessed states, but no sound a human could make could duplicate them.
But I could not believe that they would allow themselves to be enhanced. Not by human hands. They were simply pure hate. Hate for all things living. And ever since G-Day, that meant humans and demons alike. Sure they’d tried to influence us from time to time. Mostly to kill one another in every demented way you’ve ever read in a Lovecraft story. But to ally themselves with anyone long enough for augmentation? That had never been done.
The Bible said that when God created the world, he came over the face of the Deep and created Light. We believe that was what drove them back into the dark places of the world.
The oceans.
The mountains.
The light was our only protection from them. Our salvation. Our last gift from God.
And of course that would be the perfect time for my eyes to get worse.
“I must have fried my eyes worse than I thought,” I told Grimm. “Everything seems to be getting darker. The bomb take out the sun lights?”
“It is not your eyes. It is actually growing darker.”
“In the middle of the day?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Any chance there is an eclipse?” I asked hopefully, but I knew the answer.
“None,” Grimm responded.
“So, on the ultimate scale of badness, Wes Anderson movies, how fucked are we? Bottle Rocket? Steve Zissou?”
“The Searchers are emitting darkness from their implants. They are literally making it darker. Negating the sun lamps and enhancing existing shadows.”
Damn. “We’re Moonrise Kingdom fucked.”
“Apparently.”
“Any idea how?” I asked.
“I am not the technomancer. You tell me.”
I wracked my brain for a moment. Then I had a thought. Damn, I wished my eyesight was back.
“The darkness. Does it look like nightfall, or does it look, ‘dim’?”
“Dim. Why?”
“Photonic Inhibitor then. Old DARPA gear from the first war.” PI’s pre-dated cloakers in the next step of tactical espionage and warfare. They never fully succeeded as you can’t really dispel light, but you can shift it. Hence cloakers, which bent light, making the item or person invisible.
“I do not believe that is the important part,” Grimm said.
“What do you mean?”
“Because if you follow this to its ultimate conclusion, the only reason to make it dark is so that something worse can come up and move about during the day.”
That was when I heard the sounds. Sounds of earth being ripped and shredded followed by a large nasal snuffling sound.
Oh shit. “Threshers. Fuck, oh fuck, I hear them coming. Quick, get us to the vault door!”
“What about the bomb? Will there not be a fire in the vault?” Grimm asked. Bastard sounded chill as always.
“Fire suppression unit. Now guide me there, we need cover now. I’d rather burn than be caught in the open by Threshers.” I could hear the snuffling sound getting louder.
Rather than guiding me in an awkward stumble, Grimm just picked me up and threw me over his shoulder like I was a child. I frequently forgot how strong he was. At a full run, he sprinted to the vault door and leaped over a Searcher. I can only assume he did because I felt us go up suddenly, and then we landed so hard that my balls retreated into my own body.
I felt us go down the stairs of my vault. I could smell the residual plastique explosives from the bomb and the halon from the suppression unit. Grimm dropped me inside the vault at the base of the stairs.
“Are you OK?” Grimm asked, his face close to mine. My aching balls aside, I told him I was.
My eyes were clearing. The collective was hard at work repairing my fried retinas. I made out Grimm’s face, his widow’s peak of jet-black hair tied back in a ponytail, the battered old gaucho stetson hat he wore and his metallic gray eyes. But more importantly, I saw the Searcher that followed us down the stairs and the Thresher behind it walking freely in the cloud of darkness from the Searcher’s tech.
Threshers were horrid abominations. Taller than a man, the pale-fleshed hunched-over humanoid sniffed the
air, looking for us. It had scythe-like reverse-jointed bone for its back legs, four tentacle-like forearms, complete with suckers and claws, designed for grabbing an opponent while a second set of stunted, sharp, abdomen bone-bladed arms rent them alive. Hence “Threshers.” The head was a misshapen mass of teeth, antennae, and a large nasal opening. Threshers have no perceptible eyes. They perceive the world from their heightened smell and hearing.
“Down!” I yelled, pulling Grimm’s head aside as I drew my blaster and fired over Grimm’s shoulder. Two rounds in the Thresher and another two in the Searcher.
“Your eyes. Better, I assume?”
“Yeah. Instead of a big dark blur, I see a big light blur.”
Ha! There’s the Han Solo joke. Still got it.
“You can let go of my head now,” Grimm said, as I realized I was still holding it. I made two quick kiss-kiss gestures and let him up. More of the Lesser Deep were trying to come down the stairs into the vault. I fired off a few more shots to keep them out.
Grimm stood up and moved to the vault entrance. He murmured something I could not remember and spread his arms, manifesting a translucent barrier made up of his own will and sealing off the vault.
Magic.
The way he explained it to me, he had a “near death experience” once when he was young. Coming back to the land of the living gave him a new perspective on the world. Under the tutelage of Ricky, an angelic being, AKA freaking Loki, and lord knows how many other aliases, Grimm learned how to manipulate reality, to shape it to his will using ancient laws and his own soul.
Motherfreaking magic.
“Gimme a second man, just hold the shield,” I told Grimm.
“And here I was thinking it would be a pleasant experience to allow Deep Ones to run rampant in an underground, enclosed space,” Grimm retorted.
“Why don’t you leave the humor to me, old man? I don’t want you to pull something,” I quipped with gritted teeth as I bent down and reached behind the vault’s security system terminal.
The holo-panel was busted and fried from the explosion. Looked like whoever set the bomb off utilized shaped charges to destroy the vault’s contents and used the above-ground access panel as the detonator. Smart.
The explosion of noise and light, aside from destroying my stuff and hiding the thief’s trail, pissed off the local Deep Ones. They came to kill the cause of that disturbance. Which was us. Well, not actually; we didn’t plant the bomb. But good luck explaining that to tentacled bug monsters.
I ripped out several of the control wires and began a quick and dirty hotwire job in an attempt to seal off the vault doors and keep the Deep Ones out. More and more Threshers and Searchers were piling up against Grimm’s shield. The pale creatures writhed and snarled, slamming their tentacled and clawed appendages against the barrier over and over. Grimm held them for now. But I saw him give up an inch of ground. Then another.
He was strong, very strong. But this was simple physics. Enhanced strength alone didn’t mean you had enough mass to stop insane, ravenous monsters that do not possess a sense of self-preservation. Soon they would flood the stairwell, crushing themselves in the process—but sooner or later they would get in and kill us both.
Unless I got the goddamn doors to shut. I worked faster, but only the emergency lights were available and it was hard to see. The only real light coming in was from the doorway, and that was being blocked by our would-be killers and their anti-photonic tech.
“Any progress?” Grimm grunted. The Deep Ones were wailing in a simultaneous high- and low-pitched whine, attracting more of their kind. The sound was maddening, making it hard to concentrate.
“None whatsoever,” I half yelled in frustration.
“Do you even know what you are doing?” Grimm asked, not trying to hide the contempt in his voice.
“No! I’m just jiggling wires because I saw it in a movie and thought it would look cool!” I yelled back at him. “The blast took out the main power supply. The only juice in this soon-to-be-our-tomb is in the emergency lights. But I’m a walking battery. So if I can get this done, then I can get the door closed! Now shut the fuck up and let me work!”
Damn, it was getting harder to think clearly. That damn noise. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to rip Grimm’s head off for being such a condescending douche. From the way he was looking at me, I could tell the feeling was mutual.
I needed to get power to this damn terminal to shut the hatch and then punch Grimm in his smug face. I activated the hard-light camera in my left tech bracer, creating outlet ports with a connection to my bracers. I inserted the wires and immediately felt the drain on my internal energy supply. T’s work on my system was indeed improved. The drain was minimal and I only needed a few seconds to get enough juice to power it up. With my other bracer I opened a holo-terminal and accessed the hatch controls. The ground-level hatch shut and the emergency blast door at the base of the stairs slid into place.
The room was blessedly silent.
Grimm released his shield and sagged to the ground. He had obviously exerted himself, augmenting his strength and mass with his magic, and was near exhaustion. He lay on his back with his hands over his face, panting.
Good. That would make killing him all that much easier.
I slowly began creeping up on him. I had this gory thought that made me chuckle. I wondered if I could gouge out his eyes, gut him, and stuff his intestines in his eye sockets.
But while he was alive.
I popped the eighteen-inch retractable blades in my bracers and lunged at Grimm while he was lying on the floor. I wondered what his blood would taste like.
Chapter Eight
You Can’t Spell “Slaughter” without “Laughter”
The man known as Father Grimm saw his friend and ally lunge for him, blades extended. Grimm saw not only the look in Salem’s eyes, but the color as well. It was interesting, he deemed, that in the moment before his companion was about to eviscerate him, he distinctly noted the shade of his eyes. The lightrunner’s normal hazel had been replaced by a milky, pale white.
How peculiar.
Salem’s blades came in fast and without hesitance. Grimm deemed it prudent to no longer be at his current location.
Grimm threw his legs back and rolled out of the way before Salem could connect. He came to his feet and produced his fighting knives from within his robes. This was most awkward. Grimm did not wish to fight his friend. However, he also did not wish to be disemboweled.
The immortal met Salem’s blades with his knives and turned them away at the last second. Salem’s attacks came faster and faster still. His cybernetic enhancements pushed his abilities far beyond what a human could do, even surpassing some demons.
With a hedged a smile, the ancient being acknowledged that it had been a long, long time since he had been considered human.
Grimm matched Salem’s attacks with perfect defense, with blinding speed and precision. Grimm knew that if need be, he could augment his already formidable skills with his magic.
Upon returning to the living world, before he was known as Father Grimm, his perspective was altered. He saw the world as it was. He understood Reality. Under the tutelage of the archangel Lucifer, the entity now known as Mr. Rictus, or commonly, Ricky, Grimm was able to manipulate reality in ways that would seem amazing to others. Like magic. To him, it was simply an exercise of will. Commonplace. Rictus’s knowledge was vast and Grimm was an eager student.
“Salem, can you understand me?” Grimm asked as he dodged and parried another attack. From Salem’s mad eyes and his constant giggling, it was apparent he could not.
The Deep Ones. Their keening influenced the living. Forced them into madness. Into psychotic rage and delirium.
Grimm had long since made himself immune to their influence. Sadly, young Salem had not been properly warded. Grimm blamed himself for that. He had not anticipated encounters with The Deep this soon.
It was time to rectify that. But fi
rst, there was the matter of the mad cyborg.
Salem was a dangerous man. There was more to him than just his speed and strength. His cunning and adaptability were matched by his wit and insufferable appreciation of his own voice and humor. That aside, he was a powerful ally.
But Grimm was better. He was . . . magical, after all.
Salem came in with dual swiping attacks designed to open Grimm’s bowels. Grimm moved back quickly, avoiding the attack. As Salem’s momentum carried him forward, Grimm dropped his blades, shot his left hand forward, and caught Salem’s throat. With his right hand, Grimm mimed a gun and placed the two-fingered barrel on Salem’s forehead.
“Sleep,” Grimm commanded. Salem’s knees buckled as he dropped, and Grimm guided him gently to the floor.
“Now,” Grimm addressed his unconscious friend, “we have work to do.”
Grimm laid Salem in a comfortable position while he took out a small pouch from within his robes. After checking its contents, Grimm spoke again.
“I speak now to Salem’s Collective. I am aware you perceive and record everything. What I am about to do will cause no major pain to Salem. However, the results are to be lasting. If you heal or remove what it is I am about to do, then Salem, and thereby you, will continue to be susceptible to the influence of the Deep Ones. Do you understand?”
A moment went by in silence. Grimm’s face soured. Again, he addressed the Collective.
“Salem once told me that you, the Collective, cannot make direct contact with Salem unless he initiates contact, or unless his life, or an ally’s, is in mortal danger. This is one of those situations. The creatures outside that door will find a way in. Their presence will ensure Salem’s madness will continue. I will not kill him. However, if Salem were to escape this place under said influence, someone will. Now, please let me know you are agreeable to my condition.”
Salem remained unconscious. However, his right hand formed a thumbs-up gesture.
“Good,” Grimm said. “Let us begin.”
************************
Damn, I hurt all over. I felt hung over, beaten, ran over, beaten again, forced to listen to Taylor Swift, beaten a third time for good measure, and kicked in the taint for listening to Taylor Swift. I guess the point I’m trying to make is, I felt rather uncomfortable.
