Technomancer

by B. V. Larson

  I thought about McKesson. He always seemed to know where and when something was going to happen.

  “You want me to stay for—whatever happens?” I asked.

  “Up to you. I’m not going anywhere.” McKesson checked his watch again as he puffed on his cigarette.

  “Will it come after dark?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. These events usually do.”

  Just what kind of detective was this guy? Who the hell did this kind of work? I knew he always seemed to show up at events, as he called them. But how did he learn about them so quickly? And how come he was alone, with no army of police backing him up?

  I followed his gaze out toward the Spring Mountains. The rocky range ran along the west side of Las Vegas to the California border.

  I glanced back at McKesson. The man was a black hole of information. He sucked it all up, and gave back as little as possible. If we were just going to stand there anyway, staring at the mountains, I decided to start guessing and see if I could figure out some of his secrets.

  “Can I see that watch?” I asked, putting out my hand.

  McKesson ignored my hand. “No,” he said.

  “Is that real gold? Not many people wear watches these days, you know. I just use my cell phone when I want to know the time.”

  He glanced at me with unfriendly eyes and took one last drag on his cigarette before stamping it out on the porch. “Maybe you should start walking after all,” he said.

  “Don’t want me around anymore, huh?”

  “You can stay, if you want to see what happens next. But I’d prefer it if you were quiet. I’m trying to think, here.”

  “Why did you bring me in the first place?”

  “To verify that one of the Gray Men had taken a shot at you at the convenience store. You identified the finger. That’s why I brought you. Now I’m convinced.”

  The Gray Men, I thought. I didn’t like the sound of them. I especially didn’t like the indication that there were a number of them around. After all, they appeared to want me dead.

  McKesson checked his watch yet again, and I glanced at it sidelong. I tried to read the dial, but couldn’t. I frowned. Both the hands were pointing in the same direction. The big minute hand was directly on top of the smaller hour hand. I frowned further as I noticed even the second hand was piled up on top of the other two. All three hands pointed at the mansion behind us.

  “I get it,” I said. “The watch points toward these events—maybe before they happen? That’s how you always get there first, isn’t it?”

  McKesson flashed me a dangerous look. When he spoke, it was in a lower, more menacing voice than I’d heard from him since we’d first met at my burned-down house. “Don’t even go there, Draith. People kill for their objects. Even to keep the details secret.”

  I realized he was probably just another rogue with a weak object, like me. “OK, OK,” I said, backing down. “So, what do we do next?”

  “We go back down to the cellar and wait for something to happen.”

  By the time the vortex showed up, I’d almost forgotten why we were down there. It was about one hour shy of midnight, and I’d consumed most of a bottle of very expensive French wine. McKesson had taken only a single glass. He sat at the bottom of the stairs like a bulldog whose master had died on him. He didn’t budge, but kept eyeing the scorch mark and the finger that lay nearby. The hands of his old gold watch kept shivering and pointing toward the spot, and he seemed to have a lot of faith in that watch.

  I’d found him a poor conversationalist over the preceding hours. He seemed to have had series of broken relationships, and he’d given up on women except for the occasional casual hookup when he felt the urge. He drank, smoked, and used recreational drugs now and then—but not while working. Because the man had only one focus in his life: his investigative work. He’d doggedly followed these freaky events around the metro area for the last couple of years. Each month, they’d gotten more dramatic and disturbing. Somehow, he’d gotten himself assigned to handling these impossible cases. After sitting in this spooky, echoing mansion for hours, I could see why no one else wanted the job.

  I’d investigated the various vintages during the long hours and marveled at the expensive bottles. Most of the racks were empty, but there were a large number of dusty bottles still present.

  The anomaly didn’t take shape exactly over the scorch mark; instead, it appeared atop the Gray Man’s severed finger. It didn’t look like a swirl of dust as I’d expected. It was more of a bending of light and mind. It reminded me of a heat shimmer on a desert highway, seen close-up.

  “Whoa,” I said, taking a step backward among the wine racks. “There’s something happening, Detective.”

  His gun was already out. I followed his lead and drew my .32 automatic.

  The vortex was much closer to the stairway—a good five feet closer—than either of us had expected. Part of the stairway was, in fact, merged with the twisting of space, if that’s what it was. More than anything else, this fact worried me. I felt my heart pound as I realized there was no way out of this cellar if things went badly. The only way past was to walk through the edge of the warped region. I could tell that if I ran up the stairs, I would be forced to touch the border of that blurred area. I had no intention of doing so.

  “Is something coming out?” I shouted, although the vortex really didn’t make that much noise. There was as odd sound…a susurration like that of a distant train or a breeze moving through the treetops of a forest.

  McKesson peered into the blurred region. “I see something,” he said. “It’s growing bigger—closer.”

  I stared into the space and I could see what he was talking about. Something loomed inside that region. I realized we were looking through the vortex into another place. The image was still blurred, as if seen through churning water or rippling smoke. A shadow approached. I wondered about the scene I was peering at. Was it a city street on the other side? I couldn’t tell.

  The approaching shadow loomed larger. If that shadow was a creature, it was massive, the size of a great white shark. Cold concrete pressed against my back. I held my gun in both hands. I wished now I’d called Holly and asked her to return and pick me up. I should never have stayed here.

  The shadow slowed, and as I watched, it spit out more shadows from its sides. Four of them—no, it was at least six. It took a moment for me to register what I must be seeing. Realization came with a tiny fraction of relief. I wasn’t witnessing a monster spawning young. The original looming shadow was a truck or tank. It wasn’t a single living thing. But it had been full of smaller shapes, and now they approached us in a rush.

  Without hesitation, they began to step through into our world. It took them several seconds to make the crossing. I stared as they grew ever more distinct. At first, I thought they were human, but as the figures stopped rippling like open flame they coalesced into what I now knew to be Gray Men.

  McKesson fired first. He didn’t cry out a warning or a challenge. He didn’t say anything at all. The first Gray Man didn’t even get his weapon up, which appeared to be a strange, shotgun-like device. There was a stock and a handle at his end, and a muzzle that pointed in our general direction. But unlike a shotgun, the device had a circular disk of dark metal built into the middle of it and a bulb at the business end instead of an open barrel. I was reminded of an old-fashioned Thompson submachine gun. Whatever it was, he handled it like a weapon.

  McKesson put three rounds in him. The Gray Man never even pulled the trigger. He sagged down and I almost felt sorry for him, ambushed like that. I wondered right then, for the first time, if I was helping to start a strange new war.

  “Shoot them the second they look solid,” McKesson shouted at me. “It takes them a bit to get their bodies to operate properly after they come through.”

  The second and third came through together, but these guys knew the score, I could tell. They had their weapons up and were firing even as they unblurred
and formed into solid masses before my eyes. Gouts of blue light flashed out—no, it wasn’t light, exactly. It was some kind of ice-cold plasma. It was as if they fired glowing, smoky gushes of frozen flame. The shelf full of wine bottles beside me came apart at the touch of this released energy. Century-old bottles were frozen solid, but others that were only touched by the plasma popped and drenched me in freezing wine. The smoky cold liquid burned my head and back. I howled in pain.

  McKesson returned fire, and I joined him. The stairway took another hit from the blue plasma, splintering the wooden steps and icing them over instantly. The Gray Men weren’t able to aim properly the moment they stepped through, but they damn sure could pull their triggers.

  We cut the two down in a fusillade of shots. I fired four times, putting two rounds into each of the alien men. My cheeks and back were burning in streaks from the supercooled wine. Broken green glass rested on my head and my scalp was cut under my hair. I didn’t dare do so much as reach up and wipe away the blood. We were in a fight for our lives, and there were a number of dark shapes still on the other side.

  But then the Gray Men stopped coming for a while. Instead, they hung back in a growing cluster. They regarded us. I wondered briefly how they saw us, how we might look to them from their side. Three shadows on the far side stared at us, two defenders on the home front. They knew we had the advantage. If I could have heard their thoughts, I was sure they weren’t wishing us well.

  “Can they shoot through?”

  “Neither side can,” McKesson said. “Only slow-moving objects can pass through.”

  “What if they push a bomb into the room with us?”

  “Then we’re screwed,” he said.

  I swallowed but kept my gun trained on the shimmering forms. “What are they doing?”

  “Probably hoping we’ll come through to their side.”

  After a minute or so of hesitation, they must have decided we weren’t dumb enough to walk into their weapons. They merged again with the big, dark blur, which I was now convinced was some kind of vehicle. For a second, I thought they might try to crash through the opening and pile out of it on our side—but they didn’t. They drove away and disappeared.

  McKesson got up from his crouch, holding his pistol out in front of him. He walked forward cautiously to the three bodies that were piled up and bleeding on the concrete floor. I noticed for the first time that although their blood was indeed red, it was darker than our blood. Almost black. It seemed thicker too, like a tarry substance. I supposed my own blood might look like that after it had lain there and dried to a thick and sticky puddle.

  He gave each of the Gray Men a hard kick in the ribs. One stirred, but was clearly helpless. He aimed his pistol at its head.

  “Don’t,” I said. “We need them alive, don’t we? Questions? Information? The government has to get involved in this, right?”

  McKesson glanced at me and snorted, as if I still didn’t get it. But he didn’t shoot the wounded enemy. Instead, he kicked away the weapon in the man’s spurred hands, knocking it back into the twisting space from which it had come. It slid over the concrete, then with a transition of sound, slid away into another place.

  “Help me out,” he said, bending down and grunting as he picked up one of the bodies.

  I stepped forward, disgusted and breathing hard. “What are we going to do with them?”

  “We’re tossing them back onto their side.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it. Trust me. There’s no point questioning any of them.”

  I decided after all I’d seen I had to trust him. I helped him, and we picked up each of the men, one at a time, and gave them the old heave-ho back into their world. We did the same with their weapons. When we were done, I saw the twisted space fade, becoming solid again. The floor was even and smooth and no longer rippled like a mountain stream.

  “Why the hell did we do that?” I asked. “Is it some kind of honor thing with them?”

  “We did that to get rid of the evidence.”

  I stared at him. “What the hell for? Shouldn’t we be calling Washington or something? Does the Pentagon know about this?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. The Community handles those decisions, and I handle what they don’t want to touch.”

  McKesson walked to the rows of wine bottles. He picked out a dusty green bottle of burgundy and broke the top off with the butt of his gun. He lifted the bottle and tipped it, letting it flow into his face without touching his lips to the jagged glass. He guzzled the wine, pouring it from the broken neck down his throat. When he was done, he tossed the bottle down and let it smash on the floor.

  As he did this, I watched the blurred region of space fade to nothing. There wasn’t much left on the floor of the cellar. Just a big puddle of alien blood, much of it frozen.

  The finger was still there, however, at the edge of the blood puddle. I thought I had a new theory on how that finger had gotten there. Perhaps the previous tenants had come down here with their knives and their odd sacrifices. Maybe when the Gray Men had come through, the cultists had used one of their knives to remove an invader’s finger. I had to wonder if the cultists had been taken captive to the far side for their troubles. What had I gotten myself into?

  “We have to tell somebody about this,” I said, staring at the scene in disbelief.

  “What do you think my job is, you idiot?” McKesson snarled at me. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I don’t investigate these things—I cover them up!”

  McKesson climbed up the damaged stairs, leaving me in the cellar. “I’m calling in backup from my car,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere. We’ll have to make an official statement.”

  “Official statement? You mean a work of fiction, don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. He left me staring at the mess in the cellar. Half the wine racks and a section of the stairway were wrecked. The cellar was full of a strange stink—a mixed smell of blood, wine, and expended gunpowder.

  I picked up one of the bottles, noticing that it was cracked and the contents had leaked out. I picked up a second bottle, which was intact. At first I’d been hunting for another drink, but after I saw the dates on the bottles, I lost my nerve. These bottles must have cost a thousand dollars each. Shaking my head, I walked to the center of what had, moments ago, been a desperate gun battle. I still had a bottle in each hand, but was uncertain what I planned to do with them.

  There was the finger, still lying on the floor. I realized that it was the only solid piece of physical evidence proving the Gray Men had ever been here. One look at that finger would convince anyone it hadn’t come from a normal human hand. The fingernail was purplish with an iridescent shine to it, like a pearl. The shark’s-tooth spur on the joint was the same unusual color. I supposed the Gray Men grew these spurs the way we grew fingernails and toenails.

  I paused, staring at the dead, alien finger. An idea slowly formed in my mind. I didn’t like the idea very much, but I acted upon it anyway.

  I gazed up the stairs toward where McKesson had disappeared. Then I looked down at the finger again. It was the only solid piece of proof left—but McKesson was sure to make it vanish before the night was over. They would spray down the concrete and wash away the syrupy blood. The finger would go into a jar or a bottle and vanish somewhere on the way to police headquarters.

  I stooped quickly and used a broken bottle as a scoop. I chased it with the intact bottle, and after a few moments that made me grimace, I had shoved the thing into the broken bottle. I straightened and it fell against the glass with a tiny thump.

  I mounted the stairs with the finger resting in the broken glass bottle. I heard McKesson walking back toward me. I thought of a hundred excuses, but I felt sure he wouldn’t fall for any of them. I needed a hiding place for my prize, and I needed it fast. I thought about just dumping the finger into my pocket, but he might well search me if he noticed it was missing. I had to make him believe it had vanis
hed in midst of all the action. I looked around, and saw that the stairs themselves might work. I found a split area of wood and slid the broken bottle inside. It clinked once, then lay quiet.

  I marched up the stairs with the other bottle in hand.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  “It’s a souvenir,” I said, grinning.

  He snorted and led the way back up. I followed him. He never searched me, but he didn’t leave me alone in the cellar either. I figured I would have to come back for it at a later date. Uniforms arrived and worked on the place. They weren’t taking pictures and bagging things, they were cleaning up. They eyed me unhappily.

  After a half hour I was released. I used my cell to call a cab, which drove me to a gun shop first so I could confirm what I thought was likely—I had a gun permit already, and it applied to any weapon. I still needed more ammo, though, after the encounter with the Gray Men, and I picked up enough for an entire war. I wasn’t taking any chances.

  Then I had the cab drop me off at the Lucky Seven so I could check up on Jenna Townsend. I still had the intact wine bottle with me. I took the elevator up and tapped on Jenna’s door. I had to tap a second time. Finally, the door clicked open a crack. She regarded me from the crack with a single, critical eye.

  “Are you drunk?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “You smell like a gallon of cheap wine.”

  “I’m offended,” I said. “It’s very expensive wine.” I held the bottle up for her inspection.

  “Chateau Ausone?” she asked. “Bottled in nineteen twenty-six? Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s the real deal.”

  She let me in after that. She was wearing a tank top and jersey-knit shorts. I admired her while she gathered two clean glasses from the bathroom. I opened the bottle and poured carefully.

  “Was it insanely expensive?” she asked.

  “The wine?” I asked, shrugging. “It was on sale.”

  Jenna shook her pretty head disbelievingly, but she took her glass. I tried mine and found it tart but drinkable.