Immortal Make

by Sean Cunningham

  He caught the scents of two more people approaching, one familiar and one strange. The familiar one was Asad, Rob’s cubicle neighbour. The other wore a perfume that reminded him of clean ocean air.

  “Julian.” Asad appeared in Rob’s field of view at the cubicle entrance. He wore a tie, though like most of the guys in the office he usually went without. “This is Zoe.”

  Julian’s gaze shifted to someone Rob couldn’t see. He got that uncomfortable look on his face he wore when meeting a new person, with the extra helping of awkwardness that came with the new person being female.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Julian said. He held out his hand.

  “Nice to meet you too.” The voice was husky, the tone warm. The accent was Mediterranean, but not so strong that Rob could place it. He saw an olive-toned hand clasp Julian’s and give it a firm shake.

  Asad tipped his head sideways. “And here’s Rob too, his partner in crime.”

  He looked up into a pair of eyes the colour of the changeable sea.

  When the silence stretched out and the brow above the eyes crinkled in concern, Julian said, “Believe it or not, you’re catching him at his best.”

  Rob blinked and grinned. “I won’t call you what you deserve, because there’s a lady present.” He stretched out his hand. She had a strong grip.

  “I’d hate to deny you your full range of expression,” Zoe said.

  “Nah, can’t have you thinking I’m a rough sort.”

  Asad put a hand on her shoulder to guide her away. “But you’ll learn soon enough, just like the rest of us.”

  “Nice to meet you both,” she said.

  “See you round,” Rob replied. He watched Asad lead her on, gesturing to his own desk as they passed it. She glanced back once. Right at him.

  Julian looked down at Rob. “Do you realise you’re leaning out of your cubicle like that?”

  He fell back into his chair, which skidded across the cubicle and bumped into the side. “She seemed all right.”

  “Yes, we all got the impression you thought so.”

  Rob laughed. He stretched his arms out to the side and clasped his hands behind his head. “Ah well, what can happen, me being what I am?”

  “Rob, my girlfriend is a vampire.”

  Rob hesitated. “Uh. Yeah.”

  “I need to get to my desk before Herbert comes back to nip at my heels. If you start to get wound up about something, call me over.”

  He started to turn away, but Rob lunged forward and grabbed his arm. “Wait. Doesn’t Alice being what she is make everything, you know, complicated?”

  Julian smiled. “Endlessly.” He hurried off to his desk.

  Rob sat back in his chair. Fatigue crept back from the corners of his mind. He took a long, deep breath and let it out, hoping straighten his brain out.

  When he realised he was trying to catch Zoe’s scent in the air, he shook himself. “Tell people how to reset their passwords, Rob.” He turned to his computer and switched it on.

  Chapter 3 – Rob and Julian

  The morning train was rocking past Ravenscourt Park Station when Julian realised he had forgotten to check the price on his head.

  He pulled out his phone, brought up a web browser and selected one of his bookmarks. The phone pinged its page request off to the nearest mobile tower. For a few moments, Julian watched the progress bar struggle for each tiny pixel, then he gave up and looked around the carriage.

  The Piccadilly Line had kept to its schedule so far that morning and the other passengers around him were merely too deep into his personal space, rather than crushed against him as they had all been yesterday. Rob leaned against the back of the carriage beside him, arms folded across his chest. He had boarded the train with a grin and hadn’t taken it off since.

  Julian checked the price on his head several times a week. If it went up, he wanted warning of the renewed interest that would follow. But the progress bar on his phone had made it only a quarter of the way across the screen. He glanced around to make sure no one was watching and drew a complex symbol on the screen of his phone with his finger.

  The metallic screech of the wheels on the tracks briefly dipped into a bass rumble. The lines of the Tube maps above the seats on the carriage wavered like reeds in a stream. Rob lifted his head and sniffed the air.

  The progress bar on his phone snapped across to the right. The bounty board web page loaded in a blink, optimised for mobile viewing.

  “Something up?” Rob asked.

  Julian shrugged and waggled his phone. Rob donned his grin again.

  The train began its descent into Hammersmith Station. Julian reached for one of the train’s blue bars with one hand while he scrolled down the web page with the thumb of his other. He went past A and into B.

  And then reached C. Without seeing his name.

  Julian blinked, scrolled back and forth and even reloaded the page – the wide data line he’d opened was still active, so it downloaded quickly.

  His name had been removed from the list.

  The train stopped and Julian would have been shoved off his feet by the tide of disembarking passengers if Rob hadn’t grabbed his arm to steady him. They moved down the platform to a place where the crowd was willing, if grudgingly so, to part around them as it rushed towards the stairs.

  “What’s happened?”

  Julian shook his head. “The price on my head is gone.”

  Rob’s brow wrinkled. “Don’t tell me you liked having a price on your head?”

  “What? No, of course not. But I’m not dead. What happened to it?”

  “Have you ever noticed how suspicious you get when something good happens?” He clapped Julian on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s try to get to work on time. Or Herbert will be sad.”

  Still troubled, Julian put his phone away. The bounty had been posted on the board since before he’d returned to London. Only one person had ever tried to collect on it, but given the trouble he’d kept getting into with Rob recently, he had assumed once things calmed down he’d have other hunters on his trail.

  “Have you been checking that all this time?” Rob asked as they climbed the station stairs.

  “Of course. A few times a week.”

  “Maybe now it’s gone you can find a new hobby.” They reached the top and moved along the hallway towards the gates. “Noticed anything today?”

  “Aside from a mysterious lack of death threats?”

  Rob grinned. “I got a good night’s sleep last night. I feel pretty damned good. I’d even go so far as to say I feel roughly human.”

  “That’s what you get for playing with your own sword instead of mine.”

  Rob spluttered with laughter and punched him in the shoulder. Julian grunted as he was thrust into the person on his left. Clutching his numb arm, he winced an apology at a scowling man with a briefcase.

  Some of the ticket gates were out of order. Their progress slowed to a crawl. Julian tried not to kick the shoes of the person ahead of him and hoped the person behind him would show the same courtesy.

  “I’ve been thinking about that last nightmare you had, by the way,” Julian said, still trying to rub some life back into his shoulder.

  “What about it? I don’t even remember what it was about.”

  “You told me once you had a dream about the future.”

  Rob shrugged. “Maybe. I dreamed of some of those squid-huggers just before we bumped into them in Bromley-by-Bow. Could have been a coincidence. The dream wasn’t much on useful detail, you know?”

  “Prescient dreams, warnings about the future to put you on guard, they could be part of your package.”

  Rob hunched his shoulders and dropped his voice to a carrying whisper. “Should you be saying this stuff in the middle of a crowd?”

  “This is London. Anyone who hears us will just think we’re nutters.” Ahead, a man talking into his phone found out the hard way that his Oyster card had no more money on it. The line ground to a
halt as he flipped his card over and tried it again. “What if you were trying to have a warning dream, but the psychic residue of my sword was still in your system, so you had a nightmare instead?”

  Rob still looked as though he’d like to slink away in embarrassment. He had spent so long in London trying to conceal what he was, and that was before he found out he was more than just a werewolf. “Sounds-great-let’s-talk-about-it-later.”

  Julian and Rob joined side-by-side queues and reached the ticket gates at the same time. A tap of their cards and the gates opened with a beep and a clunk. They stepped across the threshold.

  Reality changed.

  It drenched Julian’s senses, pulled him hard to the side like a flooding river bursting its banks. Julian stumbled into a commuter and recoiled at the wrongness of the hard-angular body he felt beneath the black coated.

  He straightened and looked into what should have been a face. Instead all he saw was a wide, circular maw ringed with needle-like teeth. The lips of its mouth rippled, making its teeth flex like fingers.

  He noticed it carried a briefcase in its hand, just like the man who had been beside him earlier.

  The creature made a gurgling sound and strode away. More humanoid creatures streamed through the gates. Each had the same huge mouth where there face should be and each was dressed in a black coat. They brushed past him as though rushing off to office jobs.

  “Oh fucking what the fuck?” he heard Rob say.

  Rob was behind him. One arm was raised in a defensive position, the other was clapped to his nose. His eyes were wild with horror above his fingers.

  “We’ve just stepped out of normal space-time,” Julian said. “The gates were a trap.”

  “They’ve got no faces, Julian.” Rob hunted around him, as though trying to find a direction free of the creatures in which to run. “No faces. They’ve got no eyes and I can feel them looking at me!”

  “Yes, quite something isn’t it?”

  “You said the gates–” In a single bound, he vaulted back over the ticket gates and crashed down into the oncoming tide of faceless creatures on the other side. They hissed and gurgled at him, but much like London commuters, they didn’t let him stop them from pushing onwards.

  “That’s not going to work,” Julian said. “Worth a try though.”

  He tried to judge their situation. Hammersmith was one of the more modern-looking Tube stations. As with the platforms below, the ticket gates were in a high-ceilinged space. Beyond was a wide corridor lined with shops, sloping gently up towards the street entrance. Faceless creatures came up the train platforms below, funnelled through the gates and merged with the foot traffic coming up from the shops. Other faceless creatures came down from the street and went through gates and back to the platforms, or stood in lines at the ticket machines.

  Julian cut through the flow of malformed commuters and peered at the ticket machines. He watched a thing with the body of an attractive woman feed coins stamped with moving, screaming faces into the machine. It gabbled at the female creature and spat out a card with writhing, centipede legs around its edges. The woman-thing turned towards the gates and brushed past him. As the next faceless creature stepped up to the ticket machine, Julian noticed the screen showed a close-up of an eye. It jerked back and forth, examining the person buying a ticket. Its pupil was not a circle, but a star with so many points Julian couldn’t count them.

  He turned back in time to see Rob vault the ticket gates again and barge through the crowd, using his supernatural strength without a care for whether or not he hurt the creatures around him. His face was twisted in disgust.

  “You said this is a trap?” he asked.

  “I expect so. We come this way every day, so it would be easy to set one for us here. We’re in a chaos zone, a conceptual space halfway outside the real. We’ve been in these before.”

  “Yeah, you mean that flooded place over in Bromley-by-Bow. And the time before that, in the motorway stop.” Rob kept opening and closing his hands. His fingernails weren’t claws yet, but Julian doubted they were far from becoming so. “So this is those squid-huggers, yeah? Same lot?”

  “Yes. At a guess, I’d say they don’t approve of the way we keep beating them.”

  Rob grinned. Julian saw his eye-teeth were longer than they should have been.

  A portly man in a uniform ambled towards them from near the gates. His jacket was adorned with an eye where the Transport for London logo was usually placed. As he approached, more eyes opened on his jacket and rolled towards them.

  He had a face, but his eyes were milky white and he carried his head under one arm. His neck ended in dozens of tiny, waving tentacles. More hung from the underside of his head.

  “Excuse me sir,” the man said. His voice came from the head under his arm. His lips moved out of synch with his words. “May I please see your–”

  Rob lunged and snatched the head from under the station attendant’s arm. He wound up and hurled it as hard as he could back into the station concourse. Its wail dopplered off into the distance. Rob grabbed the man’s body by the belt and collar, lifted, swung in a circle and heaved it after the head. The body cleared the faceless crowd, some of whom appeared to glance up with their toothy maws. None of them turned from their efforts to get through the gate.

  “Nice arc,” Julian said.

  Rob thrust his right arm out, twisted the catch of his iron wrist-chain and pulled it off. He handed it to Julian, who took it without comment. Rob’s features hardened with anger and his nails began to lengthen.

  “I’m tired of this lot.” Rob yanked his jacket off and pushed that into Julian’s arms too. “You know how late we’re going to be for work now? You think Herbert will buy ‘attacked by monsters from outside the universe’ any more than he did ‘delays on the Piccadilly Line’?”

  Julian opened his satchel, folded Rob’s jacket and slid it inside. “I admit I find that unlikely.”

  Rob followed his jacket with his shirt, then pulled his shoes off. “I moved to London to have a damned job and a damned life and damned friends and a few drinks and the pub after work. Not this crap. I’ve had it with this crap.”

  Julian took Rob’s smelly shoes in a finger-tip grip. He took a plastic shopping bag from his satchel and wrapped the shoes in that before putting them in his satchel. Just because it was bigger on the inside didn’t mean it couldn’t be stunk out.

  Rob pulled his belt off. “And they think they can just do this to anyone they like. You and me, we can handle ourselves. What if they pulled this on some poor regular bugger?” He yanked his trousers down and Julian lifted his gaze to the ceiling. “There ought to be someone around to stop this. There ought to be people who keep everyone else safe.”

  Posters had been glued high on the wall over the ticket gates. Julian didn’t remember seeing them up there before and so far the chaos zone was a twisted version of the real Hammersmith station, a copy without additions. The three-by-three grid of posters all showed a portrait of a man’s face. He had a thick, dark moustache and an eye-patch. His one eye stared down at Julian and Rob with grave resolve.

  Julian used Rob’s trousers to catch his boxers, wrapped them both in a bundle and pushed them into his satchel. He continued studying the posters while listening to the crackling sound of Rob’s bones rearranging and the roar of pain that went with them.

  Rob lifted his head and bayed. “Feeling better?” Julian asked.

  “Yeah.” Rob lowered his muzzle, rolled his shoulders, spread his clawed fingers wide and wrinkled his nose. “It smells worse, but I feel better.” He looked around at the faceless commuters. “I’d have thought they’d jump us. How do you think this will work?”

  “No two zones ever work the same way. We just have to improvise.”

  Rob bared his fangs. “Making it up as I go along is my usual plan. Let’s go outside and see what’s what.”

  They joined the flow of faceless commuters. Rob growled at them, but only rece
ived what Julian took to be surly stares in return. He pulled his power gauntlet from his satchel as they left the station and strapped it onto his left hand. The flux crystal in the back gleamed with stored power, but it wouldn’t be able to draw more from the chaos zone and would deplete quickly if they were attacked.

  Out on the street, the sky was low with grey clouds that roiled as though filled with writhing creatures. A man in a bright yellow jacket tried to hand Julian a free magazine. The man’s face was a crude wooden mask nailed to his skull as though by someone wielding a hammer for the first time. On the magazine cover, a woman in a Lycra exercise outfit banged on it like it was a locked window, screaming at him silently.

  “The cars are going the wrong way,” Rob said.

  The cars rounding the corner where they usually crossed of a morning went left-to-right along a one-way street. These cars – irregular things of gun-black metal – went right-to-left.

  “Think this place is trying to give us a hint?” Rob asked.

  “It seems likely.” More posters of the one-eyed man regarded them from high on the buildings that overlook the road.

  They followed the street, round the bulk of the station building. Faceless men and women in black coats strode past them in both directions and Julian did his best to walk in a straight line, rather than dodge amongst them. The single eye of the man on the billboard followed their progress from a modern office block across the street. Julian was sure there were usually windows where the billboard now hung.

  “We’re being followed by fog,” Rob asked.

  Already the intersection in front of the Underground entrance was hard to see, and the buildings beyond it were reduced to vague shapes. “I think the chaos zone deconstructs itself after we pass through–”

  A faceless man reading from his phone bumped into Julian’s shoulder. Then an overweight man, his coat shifting as though it contained a knot of restless snakes, hit him on the other side. The creatures were bumping into Rob as well, though they just bounced off him.

  Julian smirked. “Move along please?”

  Rob stiff-armed one of the creatures and sent it flying into a clutch of its fellows. They collapsed in a tangle of body-parts. Julian noticed their limbs gave up the pretence of humanity when they fell, bending the wrong way and in too many places.