by Sara King
“Hey bud,” Slade said, taking Mickey’s quivering shoulder and giving it a squeeze, “I’m here, okay?”
Mickey didn’t tear his eyes off the front door of the ‘coffee shop.’ “Do we have to go in there?” His words came out as a whimper. “Can you do it out here in the sun?”
Slade squinted at the car-packed parking-lot outside the exit. He supposed he could do it in the sun, but then they always ran the chance that that pesky male kreenit would show itself, say, mid-Caesarian, drawn to the smell of T-cells and oxidizing iron. Besides, he needed to get some of that imaging equipment up and running to figure out just what the hell was going on with the poor girl, and, gee, it would be somewhat difficult to set up an MRI in the parking-lot.
“We’ve gotta go in,” Slade said. “It’s the only way I’m gonna figure out what’s wrong with her.”
Mickey grimaced. “There’s dead people in there.”
Slade sighed, frustrated that they were back to the same conversation for the hundredth time that day. “Look, I told you: Once they’re dead, they can’t hurt you. And, hell, sometimes they’re better off dead, you know what I mean?”
“Ten-F is sitting by the front door,” Mickey said. “She’s not happy. Twelve-A killed her. She wants to stab out his eyes.” He tore his eyes from the front door and frowned at Slade. “Yours, too.”
Slade cocked his head at Mickey, felt a brief creep-out factor that left his neck itching, then wrote it off as one of the many quirks of a man who had spent his life in a sanitized cage…and therefore probably couldn’t understand death. “Ten-F is probably dead at least a month,” Slade said. “She’s not going to stab out anyone’s eyes.”
“She’s going to try,” Mickey said, his eyes once more falling on the front door, low and a little to the left, in the shadow of an awning. Slade followed his friend’s gaze. Did he see something in the shadows?
A little tingle of goosebumps ran down Slade’s spine before he managed to get himself under control. Shaking himself, he turned and jabbed a finger into Mickey’s thin chest. “You’re creepy, you know that? Ten-F is dead. You told me she’s dead.” He poked him again. “You said Twelve-A killed her.”
Mickey frowned up at him. “He did.” As if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Slade frowned at Mickey, then at the front door. Peering at the cool green paint that was even then baking in the sun, he said, “No one is sitting by the door with scissors.”
“No,” Mickey said, frowning. “She’s got scalpels.”
Slade’s eyebrows went up and, when Mickey did not retract his statement, he was again faced with that weird, instinctive thrill of terror. And, unnervingly, this fear did not turn him on. “I…see.” He swallowed. “Uh.” He glanced back at the entrance, saw what he thought was movement, and felt goosebumps race over his skin like a million pricks of hypodermic needles.
“She’s afraid to leave the building, though,” Mickey said helpfully. “I don’t think she likes the sun.”
Slade categorized that under Good Things To Know and began to re-assess his need to do the surgery sixty feet underground, in the dark.
There’s nothing there, Slade thought. He scoured the darkness with his eyes. The flash of movement had to have been his imagination…right?
Damn, Slade realized, Mickey’s not the only one who doesn’t want to go into the lab… But then again, maybe that was the little twerp’s intent. Get his big friend all creeped out so the dumb lummox would do the surgery in the parking lot, not underground in his old stomping grounds. Slade perceived that Mickey was smart and devious enough for that, but he really didn’t get the feel that the kid was bullshitting him. And Slade had a very well-tuned bullshit detector.
Realizing he didn’t really have a choice if he wanted to help Twelve-B, Slade grunted and started down the hill.
“Wait, wait!” Mickey cried, running to catch him by an elbow. “You’re just going to walk past her?!”
Slade grimaced, then studied the front door for several long minutes. Was it just him or was that the creepy prickling feeling of being watched? Yeah, he was pretty sure that feeling wasn’t natural.
…or maybe it was just his nerves, making something up to satisfy his unsettled brain. Because Mickey was bullshitting him.
“Okay, look,” Slade said, as Twelve-B continued to doze—and drool—against his back, “if you’re saying this stuff just to creep me out and allow us to stay outside in the sunshine, it’s really not a good idea to freak out your friend’s surgeon-to-be, okay? You ever heard what happens to people when their doctors’ hands shake?”
Mickey gave him an irritated look. “Dude. You’re not the only one who’s freaked out, big guy. You think I want that bitch coming at me with knives?”
That loveable L.A. street-rat coming through again. Slade had a moment of scientific interest, wondering if Mickey’s personality changed each time he ‘tugged out’ a victim, then decided he had more pressing things to think about. Like a psychicly-gifted smear of mental residue standing at the entrance with a couple of scalpels.
Then he decided that there would be no better time than the present to further his scientific knowledge of a field heretofore unexplored by science. “All right, Mickey,” he said, eying the front door. “Is she looking at us? Or just wandering around aimlessly? Does she see us?”
“Oh yeah,” Mickey snorted. “She sees you. She’s dragging her scalpels over her throat and looking at you.”
“A ghost?!” Slade cried, flicking his hand at the door in disgust. “Seriously? I’m looking at a fucking ghost?” The irony was not lost on him.
Mickey frowned up at him. “Sam—”
“Don’t call me that,” Slade said. “Idiots call me that.” He made a frustrated sound and walked in a circle, Twelve-B still slumped unconscious over his back, needing the peanut gallery to be silent so he could think.
But how did one think about things as irrational as ghosts? He walked three revolutions before he came back to face Mickey, jabbed a finger into Mickey’s chest, and growled, “We need to get in there. Tell me how we’re getting in there.”
Mickey peered up at him. “You’re the genius.”
Oooh. That…bastard. “Genius,” Slade gritted, “relates to outwitting bad guys, highly successful thievery, and making exquisite soufflés. Ghosts and soul-eating vortexes do not apply.”
“I thought you said she couldn’t hurt us,” Mickey accused.
“Well, fuck!” Slade cried. “How the hell would I know?! Everybody’s heard about levitating beds and floating kitchen knives. Seems to me like your dead friends would be a lot more likely to pull that kind of shit while dead.”
Mickey glanced back at the front door for a long moment, brow knitted in what Slade thought to be concentration. Then, “There’s others inside.”
Slade was not pleased. He rammed a finger back into Mickey’s thin chest. “This isn’t funny. Tell me how we’re going to get past a group of dead people who could potentially control our minds and make our heads spin 360 degrees.”
“Uh.” Mickey cocked his head at the entrance. “You think they could do that?”
“Can they?” Slade demanded.
“I don’t know…” Mickey said reluctantly. “They weren’t here earlier. I think they’re terrified of Codgson.”
“And what’s Codgson look like?” Slade demanded immediately, grasping at his very first usable lead.
“Ten-F is a telepath,” Mickey said. “They’re not like Huouyt—you can’t just slap a piece of paper over your face and make them think you’re somebody else.”
“Goddamn it,” Slade muttered. Not only had he been forced to accept that there could be such a thing as ghosts—real ghosts—he was now about fifty percent sure that levitating scalpels were in his near future. He thought about that a moment, then said, “All right. Could you go tug her…uh…out?”
“Tug her out of what?” Mickey asked, frowning up at him.
�
��Existence!” Slade snapped. The idea of floating scalpels was really disturbing. He’d watched way too many horror shows during those long years of boredom. Hell, this was the first time he’d been honestly unnerved in, oh, forever.
Mickey made a face. “I’d have to tug her into me, and she’s crazy. Even crazier than you.”
“Would she be able to stab us in the back with scalpels if she was in you?” Slade retorted.
“No,” Mickey replied. “But I wouldn’t like her.”
“Okay,” Slade growled, “can you use your eerie voodoo powers to just make her vanish, maybe?”
“I can pull her into me or let her go,” Mickey said. “I don’t want her in me, and she’s not in me, so I can’t let her go.”
A muscle in Slade’s neck twitched. “How about you pull her into you and then let her go, once we’re finished doing what we need to do?”
Mickey gave him a look that made it clear he thought Slade had consumed bat shit for breakfast that morning. “Then she’d be right back to where she is now.”
Slade peered at the young man for several minutes, then narrowed his eyes, feeling ridiculous that he was having an argument with a science experiment about, essentially, what was the best way to kill a ghost. Thus, he had to mutter through his teeth when he said, “What’s the best way to kill her?”
Mickey stared at him like he was deeply, irreversibly stupid. “She’s already dead.”
Slade thought about that a moment, then gingerly put Twelve-B down against the tire of an empty SUV. Then he straightened and took a deep breath, looking at the darkened interior of the open door.
“What are you doing?” Mickey asked, frowning up at him, then at the door.
“God hates a coward,” Slade said, steeling himself. He started towards the entrance.
About halfway there, a bout of weird, hysterical female laughter hit his mind like a gong on all sides. Slade grunted and stumbled, holding his head to his hands. Okay, so maybe Mickey’s Creepy Ghost Theory was having more merit…
He forced himself to stumble forward, not about to be scared off by his imagination and an incorporeal being. He was a scientist.
He got maybe twelve feet from the door before Mickey grabbed him and yanked his head down just in time for something to lodge in the windshield of the van beside them. Seeing the entire pane of glass explode from some unknown force, Slade screamed and crab-crawled backwards. Keeping pace with his face, the metal side of the van near his head began to rend open under some invisible talon, curls of steel peeling back under the pressure. All the while, a woman cackled in his head, kind of like she was screaming and laughing at the same time.
“Come on!” Mickey cried, from behind him. “She doesn’t like the sun!”
Realizing the only thing separating him from a raging poltergeist with a surgeon fetish was a thin band of shadow from an overhead awning, Slade scrambled backwards until his ass was sitting on Mickey’s feet. “Fuck me fuck me is she gone?” he babbled, his heart pounding in ragged arcs of adrenaline.
“No, she’s watching us,” Mickey said softly, staring at something near the door.
From his new vantage on the ground, Slade was able to see the bodies of what looked like two Humans near the entrance, previously hidden by the bulk of a Mercedes-Benz. Unlike most post-Judgement Humans, though, these were wearing clean combat gear and carrying very expensive-looking alien guns.
At least, the combat gear had been clean, before something sharp had ripped them apart and spread Human body parts everywhere. Slade stared at the exposed zora of two dead Huouyt, then swallowed.
“Well, looks like my creepy friends found your creepy friends,” Slade managed.
“They are not my friends,” Mickey said.
Slade glanced back at the entrance to the lab. Though he saw nothing, his eyes flickered back to the scalpel-marks lining the side of the otherwise brand-new van. “So, uh, what now?”
Mickey yanked his feet out from under his ass and peered up at him. “You’re the—”
“Genius, yes,” Slade muttered. “I get that. But you can see her, where I apparently can’t, and you have the Portal-o-Death attached to your palm.”
“I’m not pulling her in,” Mickey said stubbornly. “She’s crazy.”
“What about linking to her?” Slade demanded. “Could you do that?”
“Ew!” Mickey cried. “She’s dead! And crazy!”
Slade dragged a hand down his face, then peered at Mickey, then at the entrance to the lab, then at the drooling experiment. They’d fed her enough drugs to keep her knocked out cold for another six, maybe eight hours, but he had no idea how bad her condition was until he could get her to a lab. She could, after all, be bleeding internally, and he would have no idea until blood started putting pressure on her diaphragm and she simply stopped breathing.
“You know,” Slade growled, shoving a hand at the entrance to the lab, “this is like those damn video games I would play as a kid. Except a hell of a lot less cool.”
“I always wanted to play a video game,” Mickey replied. “The guy from L.A. played a lot of them. He thought they were better than real life.”
“I believed the same thing before I met you,” Slade said, again looking at the scalpel-marks in the car, then at the pieces of Huouyt scattered on the ground on the other side of the dusty Mercedes, “but Life just got a lot more interesting.” He swallowed and turned back to Mickey. “You realize if we go in there we’re dead, right?”
Mickey emphatically nodded.
“But we have to go in there, if we’re gonna help Twelve-B,” Slade growled. “All the medical clinics are demolished and this shithole town doesn’t have a hospital.”
Mickey winced and glanced back at the entrance.
Slade frowned at the shadows that were being cast around them from the midday sun, then at the entrance to the lab. “Why doesn’t she like the sun? Ghosts prefer darkness or something?”
“Twelve-A showed us the sun before we escaped, to counter Ten-F’s crazy,” Mickey said. “And when Ten-F went nuts, Twelve-A axed her.”
Slade frowned. “So she associates the sun with the mental badass who killed her?”
Mickey grimaced. “I dunno. I wouldn’t really call him a badass. More of a pansy, actually.”
“But he killed her.”
“Well, yeah.”
Slade felt his monumental mental cogs starting to turn. Cocking his head, he stood up, went to the nearest car—a nice BMW—and started kicking the drivers’ side mirror until it popped off in a snap of complaining metal and plastic. Slade picked it up, then tilted it to catch the sunlight, which he then bounced off the entrance to the lab.
“She’s backing up!” Mickey cried. “She’s going inside!”
Slade lowered the mirror, frowning. He busted out the window of a huge pickup truck, reached inside, and popped the hood. Shoving the hood out of the way, he eyed the guts of the engine inside. Mickey came over to stand beside him, climbing up onto the front grill to get a better look.
“What are we doing?” Mickey asked quietly.
“We, my dear replacement lackey,” Slade said, eying the car battery bolted to the frame, “are going to build ourselves a flashlight. Hold this up for me.” He gestured to the hood of the truck.
Mickey frowned at the hood, then at him. “What, with my hand?”
“Yes, with your hand,” Slade said, exasperated. “What else would you hold it up with? Your head?”
Giving him a funny look, Mickey dragged a metal rod from its resting-spot in the front of the frame, swiveled it up, and stuck the crooked end of the rod into a hole on the underside of the hood. Slade stared at it, then at the groove it had come out of.
“You didn’t do a lot of mechanics, did you?” Mickey asked, giving him that Time To Patronize The Crazy Person look again.
“Remember the dumpster,” Slade muttered.
“But seriously?” Mickey demanded. “The hood lift?”
“Dad did all the mechanics and he liked my brother better,” Slade muttered. “And I was making enough money by the time I was fourteen that I could pay people to waste their time on my car.”
“So what you’re saying is I probably know more about this car than you,” Mickey replied.
Slade gave him an irritated look. “I know everything about how it works, right down to the precise mathematical calculations on the combustion that makes the pistons drive the engine.”
“But you didn’t know about the hood lift.”
Slade narrowed his eyes. “I’ll be right back. I’ve gotta find a wrench.”
“Sure it isn’t a ratchet you’re looking for?” Mickey said, grinning. Then, when Slade just scowled at him, “What about a hammer?”
Slade glared and turned, went around the truck, opened up the crew-cab, and went looking for a wrench.
#
Rat’s stomach was starting to complain again by the time she reached the shore of the reservoir and began looking for a likely place for a group of Huouyt to drop a ship. Tyson, the stubborn furg that he was, had insisted on heading east to find the Guild and execute the Huouyt who had taken his place. Before parting ways, they had come up with the codephrases ‘fairy princess,’ ‘booted badass,’ and ‘mad scientist,’ for when they met again.
Trekking over the mountain with her, however, hadn’t really been an option in his condition. As it was, Rat had been carrying three guns, hiking rough terrain, hadn’t had anything to eat in over a day, and was starting to feel the effects. She had a jar of peanut-butter in her backpack, but she’d been afraid to open it, having seen kreenit signs everywhere on her hike to the reservoir. A big one.
Thankfully, she didn’t have to wait for her quarry long. About twenty minutes after she arrived at the edge of the reservoir, she watched a group of Huouyt carry a couple Human corpses to the edge of the water, probably a couple ninth-lengths from where she squatted on a slope overlooking the dam. While one of the five stood guard, they paused to take off their Human clothes, stuffed them into waterproof backpacks, and slipped into the chillingly deep blue water pulling the corpses with them.
