Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  “Rain . . .”

  “You should have some antiseptic,” Rain said, but she hurried to cover the wounds, her eyes flashing guiltily to Sheila’s. The first pass was too tight, sending a bolt of pain up Sheila’s arm. Again, there was that intense double sensation—insane, electric pain, combined with a near-orgasmic rush of pleasure. She shuddered.

  As Rain worked, the others edged by them, single file through the alley, following the gray thing. Sheila looked after them. She hoped none of them would do anything stupid.

  “Maybe antibiotics, too,” Rain added. She finished winding the bandages around and rummaged in her purse. She came up with a handful of oversize bobby pins, which she used to secure the bandages in place.

  “I’ll be fine. It looks good,” Sheila said. “You really were a nurse, huh?”

  Rain nodded.

  “I had tenure,” Sheila said. “It was really important to me. I can’t remember why.”

  “I can’t remember lots of things. No, that’s not really true. I can remember most things. I can’t remember feelings. Sometimes I wish they’d warned me about that, but mostly I don’t care.” She rubbed her arms. “I was going to be a healer. That’s what he told me.”

  “Mendelsohn?”

  “Belial.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “You must have believed him, too.”

  “No. It was Mendelsohn who got to me. Nate. We met at a fund-raiser, if you can believe that. I drank too much, and next thing I knew, it was four in the morning and he was showing me the most amazing things. Creatures I’d never seen before. I was going to be famous. Discover a hundred new species.”

  “Did you?”

  “I lost interest. Other things seem more important now.” Like her constant hunger, and the constant need for stimulus. Even now, she felt an urge to jam the stumps of her ruined fingers into the wall. Not a strong urge, not enough to actually do it, but it was there, nagging at her.

  A droplet of blood trickled from the corner of Rain’s eye. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and stared at the dark smear.

  “We’ll find Belial,” Sheila said, and she put her arm around the other woman. “We’ll find him, and he’ll make it right.”

  “I don’t—”

  A shriek of car tires came from ahead, followed by a shout and the report of a gun. Sheila broke into a run, the syllables of a chant already forming in her mind, flowing out through her throat and lips.

  She burst from the mouth of the alley, skidding on grime from a ruptured trash bag. Before her, the Chosen had been scattered. A silver car, the same one she’d seen earlier and dismissed, had screamed to a stop, cocked in the street with black arcs of smoking rubber laid down behind it, and the Chosen lay to the left and the right. Raul clutched a bleeding arm, and Deanna sprawled in the gutter to the right of the car, and to the left, Maurice and Antawn scrambled over each other to get up from where they’d fallen. Between them and the car, Don, the former banker who’d fallen in with the Chosen, sat on the curb wearing a look of stupid surprise.

  The back doors of the car were open, the stunted wings of an insect that evolution had rendered flightless, and a man sprang out from each side.

  Don lurched to a standing position, his right foot flopping on the end of his ankle, just as one of the men from the car reached him.

  Sheila recognized the man. Not one of those who’d taken Van Horn, but another, from the group that had shot at them outside the run-down dance club over a week ago.

  Rain rushed forward. The driver, a woman, fired her gun through the open passenger-side window. Some vestige of survival of instinct dropped Rain to a crouch, and she covered her head.

  Sheila’s voice rose as the chant took hold of her. One of the men, the one who’d grabbed Don, looked up with big, frightened eyes. He was young, Sheila now noticed. A college kid, maybe, not too dissimilar from the grad students she’d taught. He probably didn’t need to shave more than once a week.

  The last words of the incantation fell from Sheila’s lips.

  With a deafening scream, a gale wind tore through the alley behind her. It swept up dirt, fragments of pavement, paper cups, aluminum cans, even a trash can. It shredded the trash bag and pulled its contents out, then blasted forward, dividing into two as it swept around Sheila, leaving her untouched. Her hair didn’t even ruffle.

  Debris pelted the car. One of the back doors swung violently, clipping the man who was fighting Don in the chin. He swore and shoved it away. Don gave him a feeble, ineffectual swat.

  The other man braced himself against the wind, put his head down, and walked into the gale, presumably coming around to help his friend. A rock blew through the car’s back window, spraying pebbles of glass across his face.

  Beyond the fray, the gray thing turned. Despite its featurelessness, Sheila got a clear vibe off it: it was annoyed. It turned, unseen, and began to slide back across the street toward her.

  The second guy reached Don and helped heave him toward the backseat of the car. More kidnappers? Why didn’t they just kill him?

  Ten or fifteen feet behind the men, the gray thing reared up, exposing a mouth that gaped along almost the whole length of its underside, ringed with fleshy tendrils. Sheila stared. It no longer resembled a slug so much as some kind of hellish Venus flytrap. More tendrils shot out of the mouth, long ones, that slashed through the air and grabbed the second guy’s head, arm, throat. His scream was cut short as the tendrils wrapped his face and jaw and he was yanked backward. He slipped, fell, and was pulled headfirst toward the monster.

  Through some superhuman effort, the other guy had managed to grab Don in an unwieldy bear hug and throw both himself and Don in the back of the car.

  The driver looked back out the destroyed rear window at the gray thing, shouted, and floored the accelerator.

  The car sped off just as the gray thing stuffed its captive inside itself. Sheila watched with something like her old avid interest as the gray thing flopped back down to the pavement, hiding its mouth again. The muffled screams from within its body went on for almost a minute, presumably about the time its dinner ran out of air.

  Slowly, the Chosen got their bearings again and picked themselves up from the pavement.

  “Are you all right?” Sheila asked Rain, vaguely surprised to find she sort of cared about the answer.

  Rain nodded and stood.

  The gray thing rippled along its length, and a hideous crunching and crackling sound came from inside it. Sheila hadn’t seen any teeth in that yawning hole, but perhaps they were retractable. Or maybe it just squeezed very hard. The thought made Sheila feel sick to her stomach, but it gave her a thrill at the same time, one that shot through the center of her body and made her shudder with joy.

  Rain surveyed the remaining Chosen, then met Sheila’s eyes. There was fear, however muted, written in the wrinkles in her brow and the set of her mouth.

  “Only seven left,” Rain said.

  Chapter 14

  “This place is fucking wrong,” Genevieve said.

  Anna nodded. “This whole street is fucking wrong.” She was standing at the second-floor window of a house two lots down and across the street from the Gorow place, looking out through the sheer curtain. It was only about nine at night, but the street below was abnormally dark. Most of the streetlights were dead gray spheres, and lights illuminated only a handful of windows down the entire street. It might be thought a neighborhood with an unusually early bedtime, if so many of the houses hadn’t been abandoned.

  After her and Nail’s initial concerns about the difficulties inherent in performing recon on one of the only occupied houses on the street, they’d hit on a great solution—steal a house. The mass abandonment actually made the surveillance job easier than it would have been otherwise. The house they were in now was empty of occupants, staged with inoffensive furniture by the real estate agent who, if Anna was any judge of these things, would be waiting a long, long time for h
er commission. This room looked like a kid’s bedroom, painted in a cheery blue that had faded to dull gray with the waning of the day, and equipped with an immaculately made-up single bed. A framed poster of a cartoon rocket hung on the wall, which looked like an act of anachronistic desperation. See? This is a great room for children! Please, please, please buy this house! Were kids even into that stuff these days?

  Anna and Genevieve had broken into the place hours ago, right in broad daylight. The security system was either broken or off, and it had taken Anna all of six seconds to jimmy the lock on the back door. To anybody watching, it might not have been obvious that she wasn’t using a key. Not that anybody was watching. Even without the For Sale signs, you could tell the empty houses on the street because they were the ones with their curtains open. Any house with people still living in it had the curtains shut tight, probably because the occupants didn’t want to look out at the street.

  Nonetheless, that was what Anna was here for, so she sat in the darkness with Genevieve, watching. It wasn’t just the empty houses, dead lawns, and overall air of desolation that was wrong with this nice neighborhood. The rhythms were all off, too. People got up at weird times, wandered out of their houses, and went back in. One guy had started mowing his dead-as-shit lawn fifteen minutes ago in the dark, churning up the bodies of dead locusts. He went at it for about ten minutes, then left the riding mower in the middle of the lawn, still running, and went inside. Hadn’t come back out yet.

  Also, the squirrels were out at night. She’d only seen one at first, standing under one of the few functioning streetlights, nibbling at something in its paws. She hadn’t immediately registered anything explicitly wrong with that, but it gave her this undefined sense of unease. Then she realized she’d never once seen a squirrel by streetlight. Not ever. Now that she looked around, she could see a dozen of them from here, dark spots moving erratically across the street or up the sidewalk.

  The whole scene reminded her of a painting she’d seen one time in school. She couldn’t remember the artist’s name, but the name of the painting had stuck with her. The Empire of Lights, she was pretty sure. A normal house on a dark street, the porch light on, all of it painted in immaculate detail. You could imagine yourself on that street, maybe coming home after a late night partying or something. Yet the sky was bright blue, daytime sky, complete with puffy white clouds. It had given her nightmares.

  “Anything in your stash of secret dark knowledge to account for this?” Anna asked.

  “No, but it’s not a very big stash. At a guess, I’d say it’s probably safe to assume that the source of all evil is on this street.”

  “In that house,” Anna said. “Unless there’s another house on this street with some terrible occult shit in it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Probably it’s the thing Sobell wants us to steal. That’s how this kind of thing works, isn’t it?”

  Genevieve turned her face away. “I don’t really know.”

  She’d been preoccupied ever since meeting Sobell, and more so since catching up with Tran earlier that day. Supposed to get any new info, more occult junk from Sobell, and she’d returned hangdog and bleary. Jumpy, too. It wasn’t like her. “This job bothering you? Like, more than the kidnapping one?” Anna immediately wished she hadn’t added that last.

  “Hey, come on. I wasn’t happy about the kidnapping thing, either. I told you that.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” She wasn’t quite sure that was true, but she left it at that. “Seriously, though. You seem . . . nervous.”

  Genevieve turned and gave her a deadpan stare. “We’re breaking and entering on a street that looks like, I dunno. Fucking Roanoke or something. Why wouldn’t I be nervous?”

  “This stuff doesn’t usually bother you.”

  “Well, it bothers me today.” She sat on the bed, mussing up the picture-perfect setting. “We just going to squat in this house until the time comes? What if they come back to show it?”

  “Yeah, because what nice couple with a ten-year-old wouldn’t fall in love with this neighborhood, right? Relax, huh? Nobody’s coming.” She put a hand on Genevieve’s shoulder, but it felt perfunctory even to her. She supposed that Genevieve wasn’t the only one who was preoccupied these days.

  Genevieve made a noncommittal noise that sounded vaguely like agreement, covered Anna’s hand for half a second with her own, then lapsed into silence.

  Anna said nothing. This place bugged her, too, but it wasn’t that bad. If she was on edge, it was because of every other damn thing. Karyn was getting worse instead of better, and the only lead she had on that was a certifiable nutcase. She still wasn’t sleeping, still enjoying dreams of the final showdown after the Mendelsohn job interwoven with Tommy’s bloody end. Oh, and they had some dude kidnapped and stashed in a condemned building. It was too much.

  She’d stay here until morning, trade up with Nail back at the school, then do another eight hours of combined guard/babysitting duty. Then, when Genevieve got back and spelled her, it would be time to hit up a couple of contacts she knew. No point in putting all her eggs in Guy’s weird basket, especially now that two-thirds of every day was accounted for with shit she absolutely had to do. Any progress on Karyn’s situation would be paid for with lost sleep, hour for hour. She supposed that was the upside of not sleeping worth a damn anymore.

  Genevieve put her boots up on the bedspread and watched out the window. Anna sat closer to the window, in a chair she’d appropriated from the downstairs dining room. They waited, watching.

  Time passed. Thirty minutes, an hour. Anna zoned out in front of the window, half-hypnotized by the still scene. When the movement across the way finally registered, she wondered how long she’d been seeing it.

  “Check it out!” she said, turning to Genevieve.

  Gen looked up suddenly, and Anna got the strong sense that she hadn’t been paying attention at all. She hid something in her palm, quickly, but not so fast Anna didn’t see it.

  “What’s that?” Anna asked.

  Genevieve opened her hand real quick. A small, round object, like a tiny, striped brown button rested in her palm. “Just a . . .” She shrugged. It looked about as casual as a kid caught shoplifting porn. “Magic stuff.”

  Whatever.

  “Look,” Anna said, pointing out the window.

  There was a car rolling along the back alley with its lights off. She saw it for just a few seconds as it moved into the open space between one house’s fence and the next house. Details were impossible to make out from here—all she could tell was that it was a sedan, not a truck, creeping along the alley. Then it was gone, behind the house.

  “Is somebody already on this job?” Genevieve whispered.

  Anna thought back to the bloody footprints she’d seen the day before. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.” Coming for help, maybe?

  On the other side of the house, there was only a thin sliver of alley visible between the house and the fence around the Gorow place. The vehicle rolled quickly through it, then was gone.

  “Keep watching,” Anna said. “I’m gonna go check it out.”

  “Wait—” Genevieve began, but Anna was already in the hall. She descended the stairs three at a time and dashed out the back door a few moments later. She took the alley on this side of the street, past two houses, then three, then four. A raccoon hissed at her from a toppled trash can, and she thought that goddamn dissonant bird from earlier shrieked a two-tone warning, but she kept going. At the end of the street, where Ash cut over, she stopped.

  She checked down the street. To her right, across Ash, the streetlights were humming and even now lights shone from windows and the flickering blue glare of television played on shutters. To her left, the dead zone. From here it was even more striking, and the handful of lights, rather than sticking out even more clearly against the darkness, seemed muted and somehow stifled.

  There was nobody in the street, though. She crossed and headed to t
he alley. The house on the end of the street was another fenced-in deal, so she crept around and stopped at the edge.

  She peered around the corner. It was impossible to see anything from here, with the trees hanging down and the trash cans in the way.

  Screw it, she thought, and she slipped into the alley. One house down, then two. She looked from her peripheral vision. Nothing seemed to be moving down there.

  She started again, past another house and another couple of trash cans. Car doors opened, then slammed. Then a voice cried out, “I’ll kill you!”

  She ducked down. She was two houses away now, pressed against a chain-link fence that must have been grandfathered in against the wishes of the neighborhood homeowners’ association. She made it to the edge of another board fence and peeked around.

  “You’re dead!” the voice shouted again.

  There were three people. A blond woman and a white guy in a suit shoved a third along. A smear of dash light splashed across the third guy’s face, and Anna’s breath caught. It was the lawyer guy, the one who’d almost bought it by pissing off Van Horn and the entourage several nights ago. He was wild-eyed and furious, swearing and spitting, but for one terrible second she thought his eyes locked on hers. Then the woman shoved him, hard, and he stumbled and smashed into the fence.

  Anna pressed back against the fence, willing herself not to hyperventilate. What the hell?

  The sound of hinges creaking. More shouting. Then the gate slamming shut.

  There were more fading sounds of struggle, and then another door, and the house swallowed the whole mess.

  Chapter 15

  It took a moment for Anna’s eyes to adjust to the inside of the building, and it took another full minute to find Guy in the sea of sport coats and blazers. The place was a trendy café downtown, a seething sea of lawyers and private equity douche bags splattered in the middle of a collection of bullshit contemporary abstract art in what she guessed were supposed to be soothing earth tones. She and Karyn had had a fair amount of upscale clients—most of them, actually—but this kind of place always put her back up. It was all she could do not to bare her teeth as she picked her way between the tables toward Guy.