Limbus, Inc., Book III

by Jonathan Maberry

  Manson rose from the grass, close enough to kiss. Gleaming and bruised from their battle. She carried a metal cylinder in her left hand. The cylinder drifted from gray to blue to pink as sunrays played over its surface.

  “Your eyes change color too. Right now they are yellow. I see the elk and the wolf in you. The saber-toothed cat. The Neanderthal and Australopithecus. If I stared deep enough, maybe I’d see the serpent flick its tongue.” The wind did not ruffle her hair. Her body flickered like a badly edited film image on a screen; an actress superimposed on an army of stunt doubles. The fluctuations were rapid—a centimeter too tall, then too short; hair parted differently; a softening of the jaw; a darkening of the eye; scars expanding and retreating like a time-lapse of rivers and tributaries in motion.

  He inhaled, seeking some fingernail hold on the situation.

  She said, “You have flawless genetic memory. You live, you die, you reincarnate and the pattern of your soul corrupts the newborn host and overwrites its developing personality with memories of a creature that has existed for eons. Qualifies you as an immortal, huh? Sweet deal. By the time you reach sexual maturity in the fresh body, you possess the wisdom and experience of the ages. Somewhere along the line two bad things happened—you learned to shapeshift into animals. Then you went rabid.”

  “Don’t make it sound so negative.” He stepped back. The bison herd took heed and lumbered toward the hills. “There were many of us, once. An old hominid taught me to make tools and wear the skins of animals, and how to think like one. Not a hell of a stretch that early in our evolution. And not much of a step from empathizing with beasts to transfiguring into beasts. The code resides in everyone.”

  “Yet you require a talisman.”

  “Yes, or a fetish. A tooth, a pelt, a scale. My own will, my own immunity to superstition, is insufficient to overcome the need for a psychological crutch. Damned frustrating.”

  “You’re lucky. The moon doesn’t control your biology. You aren’t under a curse.”

  “More of a curse than you might believe,” he said. “As to curses…You’re with the government.”

  “No. I represent Limbus at the moment.”

  “I’m unfamiliar with them. Cloak and dagger, tentacles in every pie, does that fit?”

  “Good enough. Jane was an asset, once upon a time. They wiped her memory, implanted a post-hypnotic suggestion or two, and set her in your path. They’ve run variations of the operation on an infinite loop.”

  “Why would this Limbus organization set her in my path?”

  Manson raised an eyebrow. “Come on, Creely. This isn’t quantum physics.”

  “Matter, antimatter. Limbus theorizes we might react in proximity. She’s asleep and they want me to awaken her.”

  “You’re her baby, so to speak. You and your proto-human genes. It’ll work with the right version, the true version.”

  Why the hell would your masters do this?”

  “They wish nature to take its course.”

  “It did. Red of tooth and claw.”

  “Mother Nature is keen on redundancies. We’ve a spare.”

  “I don’t want to be the way I am.” He stabbed his spear into the earth and watched the retreating bison. “I had a love. Several loves. Children. Brothers and sisters. Comrades. Foes. Their ghosts dwell here, always.” He tapped his temple. “Eternity is…You haven’t the capacity to grasp eternity. It warps your mind.”

  “Ask me if I care. You’re a predator. Me too. Professional courtesy, yeah. Sympathy? Fuck off.”

  Creely wiped the tear from his cheek. “Then what do you care about?”

  “The extinction of sapient beings.” Manson raised the cylinder. “This was found in a cave three hundred years from today. Analysis says someone left it there during the late Hellenic. We’re guessing an extraterrestrial intelligence. One or two of them have humanity’s best interests at heart.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “Chamber music, laugh tracks, football scores, your vital statistics and Jane’s. A death ray, a ruby ray. The record of everything.”

  “Lying around in a cave three centuries from today. Which means, it’s in that cave as we speak. Waiting for you to dig up. Time travel paradoxes are fun. Where’s the cave?”

  “Doesn’t matter where because everywhere is kinda the same. Reality isn’t a line, it’s a blizzard of glass shards whirling at tachyon velocity through a void. Problem is, the void narrows to a bottleneck. Those fragments merge, Creely. I’ve seen the end point. Annihilation.”

  “Must be a relief to have an endgame. To see an end. I can’t even suicide out—reincarnation is a bitch.”

  “Yeah, about that…The cycles are longer, yeah? Barring violent death, middle-age drags on and on for you.”

  Creely freed the spear. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Limbus noticed. Your aging process has arrested. What would happen if you actually became an immortal, full stop? Say you inhabited a single body for millennia? No soft reset, no interruption in the power curve?”

  “I’d go comatose from boredom.”

  “Your humanity, whatever shred you possess, would erode until only the monstrous or the alien held sway. The statistics demonstrate your appetite for blood has increased, that at some point it will be exponential.”

  “Sounds…ominous.” Possibilities infiltrated his bland resolve.

  “Here’s the kicker. What if you learned to wear the shape of alien predators? You’re already near the terrestrial apex. We can’t have any of it, Creely. Not here, not in any continuum. Killing you isn’t the best solution since you’ll simply reconstitute and begin the cycle again, warier and smarter. There’s one option. We’ll feed you to something that will hold your squirming flesh in its stomach acid for a thousand years. Then your future self will receive the same treatment.”

  “Are you mad enough to gamble on controlling her? She’s the beginning and the end. She’ll eat the world alive.”

  “And shit it back out. In twenty millennia, or twenty thousand, whoever comes along next will have a chance to do a better job than we did. And at least they’ll look like us. The choice between an occasionally destructive deity who wants to be left alone in slumber versus a god who might assume the form of an alien monster and divide humanity into hunting preserves is pretty clear.”

  He tucked the haft of the spear under his armpit and oriented the tip toward her navel. He scrunched his features and subtly rounded his spine. His ankle turned and bent. He said in a soft accent, “Come now, miss. You wouldn’t hit a guy with a clubfoot?” The spearhead was already traveling.

  Manson didn’t flinch as Stone Age obsidian pierced her stomach and kept going. “While we were having this fascinating conversation, an extraction team has entered your home and made preparations to whisk you away on an all-expenses-paid trip to hell. Thanks for a lovely evening.”

  She snapped her fingers. The cylinder incandesced and its flash buried the sun under a tidal wave of blackness.

  Epilogue: Doomsday Variations

  KRAKATOA (ALPHA CONTINUUM) RECORDING 8:

  I almost don’t recognize Jane. The true Jane, whom I had escaped once not long before the end of the world as we knew it. I’d thought myself clever, as a wolf who slips a snare or outruns a hunter often does.

  She materializes from the blurry background and strides toward me dressed in rags of a long bygone era. She isn’t covered in blood, her belly isn’t round to bursting, but the scouts aren’t returning; not in this life. Her expression is beautiful and dreadful as the goddess our ancestors carved into stone by torchlight. She’s awake again. She begins to change and not in the trivial manner that I warp flesh and bones to mimic the wild beasts. Her transformation is primordial.

  Burton and the rest waste their last seconds on this miserable chunk of rock by opening fire with antipersonnel guns and rockets. I run. This old man can pick them up and put them down faster than any other man alive.

  I tear free
of my suit as I sprint toward the beach. It’s the wrong way to go. Alas, under these circumstances, there’s only bad and worse. I’m mildly surprised she doesn’t catch me until I hear a gabble of confused voices over the hand radio, then cries of terror, and silence. Clad in skivvies and a necklace of hawk talons, I leap from a cliff and sail high above the ocean. From this vantage I discern the dark bulk of the Krakatoa sinking into the depths. The submarine is perpendicular and trailing white froth as oxygen boils from a sundered hull. The hull groans as it is crushed within the threshing coils of a leviathan.

  The atmosphere is impossible to breathe for long. I’m already laboring when a bullet from the direction of shore knocks me from the sky. Manson, of course, sealing the deal. She’s not the kind to leave this to chance.

  Jane waits, gauging the trajectory of my body as it reverts to that of a man mid-air. She stretches five miles long. Her sinuous girth reflects a rainbow pattern where the sun illuminates its scales. Her scales cannot be burnt or pierced by any weapon. The poison in her fangs is deadly enough to annihilate the entire population of Earth at its peak. She’s older than everything except the muck at the bottom of the sea; her guts roil with a special acid that preserves living prey in indefinite agony. She is my opposite, or I am hers. She feeds and sleeps. She possesses not an inkling of mortal cruelty, although her capacity for vengeance is significant.

  I fall to a hellish fate. I’m not even a bite-sized morsel in the scheme of her appetite. Hardly worth the effort to part those titanic jaws. She takes it, though…

  END RECORDING

  Epilogue: Call Us

  Malone sat in his unmarked cruiser, parked across the street from the Trillium Brewery. It was one of a dozen that had opened during the microbrewer boom that had followed a recent change in state law. And like so many, it had taken as its name a local landmark. God, it had been so simple, and the people behind this were either arrogant enough to think they could do something so hideous and never get caught or they were too stupid to think that hard about it. Given that the crew entering the back of the building looked like they’d come from a frat party, he figured the latter.

  He had no backup. In case things went sideways, he’d mailed his theory to Williams. Fact was, he didn’t have all that much to go on, just a hunch that he knew was true and the obvious coincidences that couldn’t be denied. Like just happening to find that beer in the Czech Republic. The brewery was successful, but there were cities in Alabama you still couldn’t get its stuff. No, that had all been planned, of course. Just one more hoop to jump through, one more turn in the maze that Limbus had forced him down like a rat.

  But no one would believe that, especially since IA was ready to collar him for stealing the drug money. He had nothing to lose and, after the last story he’d read, nothing to live for either. Might as well do one good thing before the world fell apart, for what it was worth. He slid another shell into the shotgun that sat on his lap.

  He waited till night had fallen. Somehow he knew that everyone involved in the girl’s death was inside. He also knew that they were planning their next kill. Couldn’t say how he knew it, but he did. He’d never been more sure of anything before in his life. After all, this was the climax of the story, his story, and it would be a hell of a dud if he crashed a belated office Christmas party.

  Under the cover of darkness he slipped out of his car, concealing the shotgun in the long coat he wore. Nothing conspicuous, given the chill that still hung in the air. But there was no one to see him, no one to notice as he crouched behind a dumpster, and checked to see that the safety was off and the clip in his Beretta was full. He didn’t have a search warrant. He wasn’t arresting anyone tonight.

  He followed the wall, staying in the shadows, clambering onto an overturned box so he could see inside the windows. They were there, gathered in a circle of a dozen lit candles, black robes fluttering dangerously close to the open flames. He didn’t see another girl. He figured that would come later.

  Malone took a single moment to pause, to reflect on what he was about to do. He searched his heart, stared deep into his own soul. There was no doubt there, no question. He was no longer a cop. If they worshipped the devil, he was an avenging angel.

  The door was unlocked, but he kicked it down anyway. He didn’t let the shock register on their faces before he started firing. Booms echoed through the warehouse, covering the screams of men as they fell. They were armed only with daggers, and Malone grinned as he thought of the old gangland proverb. His next shotgun blast shattered a blade and a 20-something’s face. He fired until the barrel steamed and the chamber was empty. He threw the gun aside and slid his 9 mm from its holster.

  He shot them in the chest if they faced him. The ones who ran, he shot them in the back. And when one held up his hands to surrender, he put a bullet through his right eye. By the time the gun clicked empty, he thought he’d killed them all.

  But he was wrong.

  The last of them slipped out from behind a large metal tub. Unlike the rest, his robe was red. Malone turned to face him. He looked down at his gun, and then threw it aside. So this was it.

  “You’re the leader I guess.” Malone made a show of gazing around the carnage he had created. “Pretty shitty leader if you ask me.”

  The man said nothing. He reached down and drew a long, curved blade from a leather sheath that hung at his side.

  “That what you used to kill her? That what you used to carve her up? Well I ain’t a little girl. You’ll find me harder to cut.”

  He raised the blade, took a step forward. Malone tensed, ready for the final fight of his life. Two hands appeared around the robed figure’s head, fingers long and slender, nails painted bright red. They rested on the man’s cheeks, held there for a single instant, and then withdrew. His eyes bulged and he collapsed to the floor. And she was standing behind him, pulling on her gloves.

  She wore a tailored skirt-suit with a red blouse that matched her nails and made her eyes shine. When she looked up from the body to him, he involuntarily took a step backwards.

  “Don’t worry, detective. I have no intentions of touching you.”

  “It’s you,” he said.

  “I am myself, that is true.”

  She stepped over the body and walked towards him, stopping only slightly more than an arm’s length away, for his benefit.

  “I admire your work,” she said. “Though a little bit messier than I’m used to I must say. I prefer my killing up close and personal. But perhaps this is more fitting for them, given what they did and how they did it.”

  “You had them kill the girl. I know that now.”

  The woman arched an eyebrow, and it made Malone a little sick to see that it was in approval.

  “You know, I had my doubts about you. I figured you would imagine that we let it happen, but not that we were responsible. I’ll never learn, I guess. Never doubt the recruiters, that’s what they always say. Particularly Hawthorne. He’s quite adept at this. Though to be clear, it’s not entirely true that we had them kill her. It’s more that we knew they needed a victim and we directed them to her. They were children, playing with something so old and so ancient that their minds could never truly conceive of it. So don’t feel bad. They were dead already.”

  “But why?”

  She cocked her head to the side. “After all you’ve learned, you can’t imagine?”

  Malone felt as though he was balancing on a knife’s edge, and that even the slightest breeze would make him fall. “She was part of something. Or she would have been.”

  The woman nodded. “What if I told you, that girl’s child would have a child who would write a book that a man would read, inspiring him to bring down a holocaust on mankind unlike any we have ever seen?”

  “I’d believe it,” Malone said.

  “Yes you would, and that is why you are here.”

  “So the last story,” Malone said, “it doesn’t have to be that way? It can change?”

&
nbsp; “It probably has to be that way somewhere, in some reality. But we can make our own reality here. And that is what we do, detective. We keep the balance. We intervene, when we must and when we can. We are not God. And like God, we do not promise to prevent all evil. In fact, on occasion we are the ones doing the evil. Sometimes for the greater good. Sometimes for greater profit. We do have bottom lines to meet, after all. But we cannot do it alone. We need people. People like you who have played their hand against chips that never fell their way. People who are at the end of their rope, with only enough left to hang themselves. People who’ve never been lucky before, but feel lucky now. How lucky do you feel, detective? Because here’s the thing, if you weren’t out of a job before,” she said, spreading her arms wide as if taking in all the death he had brought, “you certainly are now. But we have a solution for that. After all, we are Limbus…

  “And we employ.”

  About the Authors

  Brett J. Talley is the Bram Stoker Award nominated author of That Which Should Not Be, The Void, and He Who Walks In Shadow. His work has been featured in the shared-world anthology, Limbus, Inc., and he is the editor of Limbus, Inc. Vols. II & III. He is also a lawyer, speechwriter, and an avid fan of the Alabama Crimson Tide. He makes his internet home on his website, www.brettjtalley.com.

  Keith R.A. DeCandido is appalled to realize that he’s been writing fiction professionally for 22 years, which means he’s a veteran. That’s just weird. He’s written for more than two dozen different licensed universes, several other shared-worlds, and several universes of his own devising. His most recent licensed work includes the Marvel’s Tales of Asgard trilogy (including novels starring Thor, Sif, and the Warriors Three), the Stargate SG-1 novel Kali’s Wrath, the Heroes Reborn novella Save the Cheerleader, Destroy the World, and short stories in the anthologies The X-Files: Trust No One and Nights of the Living Dead. Previous shared-world forays include Jonathan Maberry’s V-Wars, Steven Savile’s Viral, and Aaron Rosenberg and David Niall Wilson’s Tales from the Scattered Earth. His own universes include the fantasy/police procedural Dragon Precinct and its various sequels in novel and short story form; a cycle of urban fantasy short stories set in Key West, Florida involving scuba diving, Norse gods, rock music, and beer drinking (most recently appearing in the online zines Story of the Month Club and Buzzy Mag, and the JournalStone anthology Out of Tune); Super City Police Department, stories about cops in a city filled with superheroes (most recently the serialized novella Avenging Amethyst); and “The Adventures of Bram Gold,” urban fantasy tales about a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx who fights monsters, starting with the 2016 release A Furnace Sealed. In 2009, Keith received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, which means he never needs to achieve anything ever again. He has been doing rewatches of shows in the Star Trek and Stargate franchises, as well as the 1966 Batman, for Tor.com since 2011. Keith is also a freelance editor, a second-degree black belt in karate, a veteran podcaster, a member of the Liars Club, an avid baseball fan, and probably some other stuff that he can’t remember due to the lack of sleep. Find out less at his cheerfully retro web site at DeCandido.net.