by Matt Wallace
And that hits Dorsky harder and cuts him deeper than any insult or curse.
He knows how to be hated, even thrives on it.
He doesn’t know how to deal with so clearly and starkly disappointing someone.
Lena sees it, subtle as his reaction is. She sees it and wonders if the guy she’s been running for her life alongside isn’t the false front. She wonders if the misogynistic asshole Dorsky tries so hard to be is the façade, one he adopted coming up through the ranks as so many of them do.
Unfortunately there’s no time to sort through these complex interpersonal issues, because that’s when a window across the courtyard shatters and a lustful creature twice the size of any of the others they saw in the kitchen leaps down upon the cobbles.
“Shit,” Dorsky says as he takes in the size of it. “That’s gotta be Rollo.”
“It’s kind of an improvement.”
“Good. You fuck him. I’ll run.”
But they both run, turning and running in the same direction by chance more than anything else. Dorsky snatches up a dead potted plant on the run and hurls it through the nearest window. It’s elevated like the rest, and without missing a beat he slides across the dirt-covered courtyard floor on his knees, cutting them on broken glass and halting just under the eave.
He cups his hands and offers a boost to Lena, who steps onto them and hoists herself up, chipping away the glass shards protruding from the bottom of the window frame with her elbow. She hoists herself through, ignoring the half-dozen tiny cuts she receives, and immediately leans back out to help Dorsky climb after her.
They end up in a disused prewar corridor in the west wing of the building.
“There!” Dorsky shouts, pointing at a heavy steel door half-open a few yards up the hallway.
They can hear the Rollo-creature taking half the window frame apart as it claws its way back into the building, but their backs are already turned and disappearing up the corridor.
Three cartoon puppies materialize in front of them. They’re toddler versions of Droopy Hound, stacked on each other’s shoulders, forming a living totem pole. Each is idly strumming a miniature string instrument.
“Your-blood-will-paint-the-walls,” they sing-song in slow, droll unison. “Your-blood-will-paint-the-walls!”
Dorsky charges right through them without stopping, dispersing the cruel, ironic image.
He makes it to the door first, pulling it open and shoving his body through the crack at the same time. He reaches out and pulls an already sprinting Lena inside by the front of her smock.
They both slam the door shut behind them.
They’re in an impossibly narrow closet with a single, petrified mop leaning against one corner.
There’s no light.
Lena can feel her nose touching Dorsky’s chest, heaving with his labored breathing. She can feel that breath against her hair.
He reaches up instinctually and lightly grasps her shoulders. Lena immediately and more indignantly than anything else shakes him off.
Those are her instincts.
Rollo is throwing his reptilian body against the other side of the door over and over again, snarling loudly and wantonly.
Fortunately the door was fashioned at a time before the American manufacturing industry’s watchword became “disposable.”
It’s strong.
It holds.
Eventually the Rollo-creature’s barrage ceases, although they can hear it growling and stalking just outside the door.
“Well,” Dorsky whispers in the dark. “We’re really fucked now.”
“Pretty much.”
“You don’t sound overly concerned.”
“I’ve been under fire before.”
“Worse than this?”
“Different.”
“What was it like?”
“Scary the first time. Really fucking scary.”
“Of course. And the second time?”
“Still scary. But also . . . oddly comforting.”
“Comforting how?”
“ . . . I’d accepted the possibility of my own death, I guess. In a real way. Not in a bullshit, telling yourself you’re ready for what comes way.”
“So you were ready to die?”
“I was ready for it to be my choice. Fight or die. It felt simple. Clean. It wasn’t clean, obviously. Nothing over there was, but . . . in those moments. I don’t know.”
“And this? Here?”
“I mean, I’d rather not be fucked to death by a giant goddamn lizard, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
They share something that’s almost but not quite laughter.
Neither of them speaks for a while after that.
The snarling and heavy pacing outside has dissipated.
They can feel the heat from each other’s body, intensely. It should be unbearable there in such close quarters, but somehow they both find it comforting in that moment.
Dorsky’s hands find her shoulders again.
This time Lena doesn’t shake him off.
“If we’re going to die here,” Dorsky whispers into her hair, “I have two things I want to say to you.”
“Fine.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looks up at him, not really able to make out his features in the dark, but somehow able to read his face.
He means it.
“Okay,” she says evenly, or tries to. “What’s the second thing, then?”
Dorsky presses her against the wall and kisses her lips.
There’s surprise, and a fleeting montage in her head of every dick thing he’s said and done to her and Darren since they showed up at Sin du Jour.
But there’s also that heat, and his hands moving confidently and strongly over her body.
And the fact that he’s discovered the one instance in life during which Lena does not want to be firmly in control of the situation.
She kisses him back, fiercely, her hands reaching up and tangling hard in his sweat-dampened hair.
She tells the little voice insisting that this is a mistake she’ll regret later to shut the fuck up.
There may not be later.
By the time Dorsky rips open her smock Lena can no longer hear the little voice.
For the next twenty minutes she doesn’t think about anything, not the peril or her choices or the lethal monstrosities awaiting them outside this dark cloister they’ve found, anything except the tactile pleasure of her own body.
And despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Dorsky is shockingly committed to that pleasure.
The sounds with which they fill that tiny closet are as raw and animal and unbound as any guttural cry made by the creatures of pure lust that have besieged the building.
Those cries build for each of them to their own deep, brain-and-body-pulverizing crescendo.
Then they’re quiet save for ragged, staccato breaths.
Then, somehow, they do it all over again.
Lena loses all semblance of time; she only knows at some point she’s ready to find a shattering climax once again when a knocking at the big metallic door brings it all to a depressingly sudden halt.
Knocking.
Not thrashing, clawing, or pounding.
A very controlled, rhythmic, human request for entrance.
“Is somebody in there?” a voice calls from the other side.
It’s Little Dove.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Dorsky pants into the crook of her neck.
Lena just shakes her head.
“Seriously!” Little Dove persists. “Friend or fucked-up snake thing? Answer me!”
“We’re okay!” Lena calls out, hoarsely. “It’s Lena. And . . .”
“Dorsky,” he says sadly.
Silence from outside.
Then: “Oh.”
“Yeah,” they say in perfect unison.
“And you guys . . . are yourselves? Have you been yourselves . . . like, the whole time?”
>
Again, in unison: “Yeah.”
“Okay . . . well . . . you can come out now. If you want. My pop knows how to change everybody back.”
That actually causes Lena and Dorsky to separate and stare at the door.
“Seriously?” Lena asks.
“Yeah. He’s corralled most of them in one of his weird spirit ancestor force-field deals. Don’t ask. I’m going to get Boosha so she can help him mix up some kind of antidote.”
No one says anything after that for a time.
“Well,” Little Dove announces. “Glad you guys are okay. I’m going to go now. Weirdly, this is the most awkward I’ve felt all day.”
They hear her footfalls carry her away from the door.
A few moments later Dorsky obviously decides to just go for it: “So, do you want to . . . you know . . . keep going? Or—”
“Just get off me.”
“Right. Yeah. Good call. Sorry.”
They disengage themselves and begin groping for their clothes.
Lena has never been more grateful for an almost complete lack of light and vision.
AIN’T NO CUPCAKE
Unfortunately, any astral memo about White Horse’s sudden show of company solidarity doesn’t reach Nikki and the rest of the staff trapped in the library in time.
Fortunately, however, that event is preamble to the stuff of legend rather than tragedy.
Later, Pacific and Mr. Mirabal will refer to Nikki’s entrance atop the royal wedding cake as “a total hero moment.”
Much later than that, Nikki will secretly, although never vocally, agree with them.
The orgy in the reception hall has not lost its proverbial steam, although most of the creatures have lost interest in banging down the staging area doors.
Soon after they stop battering at them, those same doors are forced open by the massive bottom disc of a five-tiered, thirty-foot wedding cake.
Pacific and Mo are concealed inside the cake, pushing it along like a foot-powered stone vehicle from The Flintstones.
Prince Marek and Princess Bianca are poised sentinel-like atop the middle tier, manning opposite edges. They’re both armed with the nearly life-sized bride and groom statues that were made to top the cake (perhaps symbolically, perhaps ironically, or perhaps just randomly Bianca cradles the groom while Marek holds aloft the bride).
And standing tall on the cake’s summit, stripped to the tank top she wears beneath her smock and that smock now tied around her waist like flour-stained armor, is Nikki. She has bound her elaborately rolled hair in a classic car–emblazoned bandana. In each hand she holds a piping bag bulging with Boosha’s “temporary” lust-monster cure. There are half a dozen cooking syringes sheathed through her belt like daggers. The diamond archway topping the cake frames her, and its light dances over the weeping angel tattoo covering most of her right arm and shoulder, making it look like angelic war paint.
She is no less than a confection-armed Valkyrie.
It takes less than thirty seconds for the sight and scent of new flesh to draw the first throng of lustful creatures decimating the reception hall with their violent fornication. A dozen of them sink claws and fangs into the bottom tier of the cake, pulling their monstrous bulk over the first hurdle and scrambling up to the middle tier.
Prince Marek is the first one to make positive contact. He bats at the first transformed wedding guest to make it within striking distance, not swatting it away from the cake, but bashing it against the cake’s frame.
As he does, Nikki leans over the cake top and squeezes the piping bag in her right hand, spraying a cloud of green-brown dust directly over the middle tier.
There’s a moment of atom-thin tension during which time slows to a crawl. All three of them remove their focus from the oncoming horde to watch the tattered tuxedo-clad creature now sneezing violently amid a pestilence harvested from high-end appetizers and desserts.
The three of them watch.
And wait.
The hideous, fanged creature being bludgeoned by a four-foot plastic bride suddenly becomes Uncle Ted.
There’s relief communicated among all of them without words or a look, but none of them have time to rest on it.
“Baby, look out!” Marek yells at Bianca, and in the next moment they’re bludgeoning an entire row of lusting bipedal reptiles.
Nikki aims both piping bags and fills the air around the cake’s center with an antidote cloud.
Soon there’s a swell of half-dressed human bodies piled against the middle tier, moaning and sweat-covered and dazed to the point of immobility. Marek and Bianca are forced to climb and leap over them to bash the creatures now coming for the transformed. Nikki responds by hopping down three tiers in a row to cover them with more dust, dropping another wave of reverted wedding guests.
The final wave is now crashing through what remains of the tables and buffet to get at the bottom of the wedding cake. Several of them rage right into the now thick cloud of dust and are felled immediately, but more manage to break through it without absorbing enough of the compound to revert.
“I’m out!” Nikki yells, casting away the now empty bladders of the piping bags.
“What now?” Bianca shouts up the tiers as she bashes one of the remaining creatures across the back of its knees, toppling it.
In answer Nikki draws one of the syringes thrust in her belt and stabs it into the head of what turns out to be Bianca’s cousin Fabio.
Advancing farther down the cake, Nikki pulls two more syringes and drives them into the nearest frothing creatures, pressing the plunger with her thumbs and reverting them both into a pair of Bianca’s in-laws.
A fourth syringe is drawn and hurled seven feet across the bottom cake tier, where it sticks a monster in a bridesmaid’s gown, and Marek depresses the plunger by swinging his bride statue into it.
It’s an act so amazing Marek and Nikki both stop to acknowledge it by staring at each other, their eyes simultaneously asking, “Did that just fucking happen?”
There are only a few scant stragglers lingering in the background now. Nikki rallies Marek and Bianca, clambering over the writhing, sore bodies returned to human form.
“Take them down!” Nikki commands, syringes at the ready.
The goblin prince and princess systematically batter each remaining creature to the floor, where Nikki impales them.
Ironically, the final guest to be transformed crashed the wedding to hound for autographs.
Nikki holds her final syringe at the ready, suddenly aware there’s no one left to inject. Her panicked, adrenaline-pumped brain refuses to accept this at first, but turning and casting her gaze around multiple times confirms it.
“Is it over?” Bianca asks, panting, still clutching her now blood-smeared groom cake-topper.
“I think so,” Marek says, a mirror image of her.
They all look out over the battlefield of naked and half-naked bodies, every one of them alive and severely worse for the wear. Some of the first to revert have now collected their facilities and are trilling for help.
It’s an unsettling sight.
Then, somewhere beneath the din, a dull, repeating thud.
Someone knocking against the interior of the cake.
“Yo!” Pacific yells, muffled, from within. “I know we got ourselves in here, but I can’t remember how!”
Prince Marek, hunched over his bride topper like a crutch, actually smiles. “Those two should have their own sitcom.”
Nikki nods, becoming aware for the very first time that from the tops of the library stacks that have been pushed into the back of the space, the goblin guests are cheering wildly for them.
Not one of them has the capacity to laugh at that moment.
Except for Pacific and Mo, who can be heard giggling inside the cake, no doubt over something completely unrelated.
QUITTING TIME
“You have officially and irrevocably done lost your motherfucking mind,” Cindy insists.
“We’ve run out of options,” he says.
“Not trying to pass through a goddamn magical brick wall is an option. Waiting is an option. Those are two just off the top of my head.”
“Your angry, overtly masculine second-in-command has a point, Ritter,” Ryland chimes in from his lawn chair.
“Eat me, you lush!” Cindy snaps at him.
“Have you actually pulled this one off before, Ritt?” Bronko asks.
“I’ve seen it done.”
Cindy remains skeptical. “How many times?”
“Once.”
“Jesus.”
She stomps away from him.
“If you die does it mean we work for Cindy?” Moon asks. “Because if so, I quit.”
“You all work for me,” Bronko says. “So shut up, Moon.”
He steps close to Ritter, speaking for his ear alone. “Not that I don’t appreciate the effort here, but this seems a mite . . . reckless? Even for you. I mean, I’ve never known you not to hang your ass on a fence post, but you usually do it with more planning.”
Hara, painting the last few runes on Ritter’s calves, grunts his agreement.
“I’m out of plans,” is all Ritter says.
Bronko leans back and stares at Ritter’s stoic expression.
“All right, then.”
He steps back.
Hara stands, dropping the horsehair brush in the paint can he’s been using.
He nods down at Ritter.
His eyes are grave.
“No worries, big man.”
Hara remains dubious, but he stands aside.
They all gather behind Ritter, standing shoulder to shoulder, watching his bare, scrawled back intently.
Except for Ryland, of course. He continues to recline on his lawn chair.
He does, however, pour himself a seventh glass of wine.
Ritter inhales deeply several times, clenching and unclenching his fists.
He begins chanting inaudibly under his breath.
He stares lethally at the brick barricade where the service entrance should be and on some plane of existence still is.
He runs at the door.
Ritter stops four feet short of collision when the patch of enchanted brick abruptly disappears and in its place a door opens.
