by Matt Wallace
The bare threads of the hole left by the bullet in his executioner’s hood are smoking.
Eventually, the man tips over onto his side, and when he hits the floor, it’s like a spell has been broken. Lena blinks and leaps to her feet, turning toward her front door in panic.
Allensworth hasn’t moved a muscle. He’s still standing at her door in his absurd jogging suit, holding Bruno’s leash patiently. The Rottweiler remains calmly heeled at his master’s side, his tongue hanging out placidly.
Not even Allensworth’s expression has changed.
Lena presses her palms together around the pistol’s combat grips, sighting the bridge of Allensworth’s nose through the weapon’s crosshairs. Her finger tests the resistance of the trigger, finds it almost aching to be squeezed.
“Give me one reason I shouldn’t blow your fucking head off right now,” she says in a ragged voice.
There’s blood in the corner of her mouth and the entire left side of her face is swollen and purple. Her body feels newborn in its pain and uncertainty. She feels like a completely different person in that moment, and it both frightens and compels her.
Allensworth sighs. “I can’t think of a thing. But you aren’t going to kill me, Miss Tarr.”
“Ask your friend on my floor here about that.”
“Oh, he wasn’t a friend. He was barely a person. More like lunchmeat that received a massive upgrade. But I take your point. Also, it smells delightful in here. Is that bacon and eggs?”
Very slowly, and with his eyes never leaving hers, Allensworth crouches down and reaches for Bruno’s collar.
The sights of Lena’s pistol follow him the whole way.
He holds up one hand in a placating gesture while his other, still moving very slowly and meticulously, disconnects the end of the leash from the Rottweiler’s collar.
Allensworth stands, lowering his hands and clasping them in front of him around Bruno’s leash.
“If you don’t think I’ll shoot you, you better believe I’ll cap your fucking dog,” Lena assures him.
He nods. “Oh, I’m quite certain of that. But I’m afraid it’s of little consequence. Bruno, verwandeln!”
The last word is spoken with a fury and a passion that seem completely alien on Allensworth’s lips.
Bruno, meanwhile, leaps to all fours, his teeth bared in a growl as his entire body begins to shake, almost vibrating.
Lena shifts the pistol’s sights from Allensworth to the canine and pulls the trigger.
The round strikes Bruno in the chest.
The Rottweiler doesn’t seem to notice.
That’s when she realizes Bruno has begun to grow. His fur and skin are stretching and forming new musculature right before her eyes. He rears back on two legs and she watches as all four of his limbs expand and begin to reform into those of a biped. His snout and skull both double in size as well.
Allensworth carefully steps away from the door.
Lena fires two more times, both rounds hitting the creature center mass, neither shot having any more effect than the last. In fact, as Bruno continues to evolve, the slugs are pushed back through the holes they’ve torn in its body. Lena actually sees and hears the smashed bits of metal hit her floor.
She didn’t think it possible after almost a year of working at Sin du Jour, but in that moment, she’s more unnerved than she’s ever been in her life.
When he apparently finishes, Bruno is well over six feet tall and must weigh four hundred pounds of thoroughly ripped muscle, claws, and fangs. If there were a Mr. Universe contest for canines, Bruno would’ve already been embroiled in a steroid scandal. He growls an entire baritone chorus of Rottweilers at her from the doorway.
Lena empties the pistol’s entire magazine into the hellhound’s body to no avail. She drops the spent weapon with a scream of frustration and anger and fear. It’s too much, all of it, and it’s crashing down atop her like a toxic wave.
When the beast finally leaps for her, Lena can’t even command her legs to run.
HOME SECURITY
“You don’t look much like Ritter,” Bronko flatly states.
“Different moms,” Marcus explains. “Mine was the pretty one.”
Standing off to the side in Sin du Jour’s lobby with Hara and Moon, Cindy can’t help but let out a short laugh, cut even shorter by the diamond-hard eyes Bronko flashes her.
He looks back at Marcus. “Well. If Ritter says you can do the job, then you can do the job, I suppose.”
“I promise if I make anything awful happen, it’ll only happen to me,” Marcus assures him, solemnly.
“Good ’nuff. Some kinda magical field protects this whole building here, part of the security system. In case of emergency, it automatically locks the place down. The problem is it’s not under our direct control. It’d be real easy to use it to trap us all in here if the folks who do control it are of a mind. And they may be of a mind soon.”
Marcus nods. “I also heard something about the entity that’s been embedded in the system, some kind of dog?”
“Droopy Hound, from the Banjo Bear Gang,” Moon says around a mouthful of mini powdered donuts he’s eating from a family-sized bag. “That old cartoon from the sixties.”
“Right. It must be some kind of spirit or demon taking the form of a cartoon character,” Marcus reasons. “Which is a new one on me, but I’ve seen protection charms like it before. It’s a simple matter of entrapping some nasty entity. Once it’s in your thrall, you can program it like a computer to do or not do whatever you want. Not an easy process, but effective.”
“Well, ideally, I’d like to put the whole system, including the damn cartoon dog, under our control. It’d be mighty useful. But worst case, I want it disabled so it can’t be used against anyone in this building. And by disabled I mean shit-canned in totality beyond all repair.”
“I understand,” Marcus tells him, trying to stifle his amusement at Bronko’s colorful language.
“I’ll show ’im where to start,” Cindy offers.
Bronko nods, and Cindy leads Marcus and Hara out of the lobby.
Moon lingers, fisting his oversized bag of sugary snacks.
“Aren’t you goin’ with ’em?” Bronko asks Moon.
He blinks up at Bronko incredulously. “To do what?”
“I dunno, maybe earn your keep around here?”
“I’m a specialist, boss,” Moon insists in a mock-hurt tone.
“Well, when there’s nothin’ for you to eat, which near as I can figure is ninety percent of the time, you’re as useless as tits on a bull.”
Moon tries to summon feelings of offense, but they simply aren’t there.
“Yeah, all right, fair,” he says.
“I’ll tell ya what, boy. Ryland ain’t got nothin’ on just now either. And near as I can tell, Cindy and Ritter find his company even less appealing than yours when the need arises. How about you go take some alchemist lessons from him? Your team could use the skill set in the field when you aren’t eatin’ the ass of a unicorn or whatever.”
“You’re serious?”
“Dead serious, less’n you’re of a mind to take a pay cut.”
Moon nearly chokes on his last powdered donut, coughing up crumbs. “I have . . . a . . . very expensive . . . video game . . . habit.”
“Then hotfoot your ass to Ryland’s trailer and tell him I said you both need to busy yourself in your off-hours here.”
Moon recovers from the bout of donut asphyxia. He opens his mouth to protest, but Bronko’s expression seems to polarize whatever words he had planned.
“All right,” he relents. “I always hated school, but fine.”
“Good boy,” Bronko placates him.
After Moon has skulked off, sullen the whole way, Bronko takes out his phone and checks the time.
“Where the hell is Tarr?” he mutters to himself.
* * *
The running pipes all around them sound like the veins of the world as Marcu
s and Cindy slog in rubber hip waders and fresh-air masks through three feet of mostly water and partly things they’ve silently agreed not to discuss in the moment.
“ . . . so Ritter yells at me through the door, ‘Marc, she’s a banshee! Get out of there!’ And I’m like, “Dude, we’re kinda naked. I know! Go away!’”
Cindy laughs until she snorts, and at least fifty percent of the effort is based purely on the merit of Marcus’s story.
He’s walking two feet ahead of her in the narrow confines of the brick tunnel. They’re at least a dozen feet beneath the lowest level of Sin du Jour. Marcus is guided by a small stone effigy of an anteater-like creature held in his right hand. The effigy’s eyes are amber jewels blinking steadily in the dark. As they wade through the muck, he passes the anteater’s snout along each wall, scanning the arch above, and even the foul viscous pooling fluid around their thighs.
It’s the effigy that has led them into the bowels of the building, through a space that must’ve once been a cistern in the days before modern plumbing.
“It’s hard as hell to be that funny and charming in a sewer tunnel,” she says. “I give you a lot of credit.”
“I notice you threw ‘charming’ in there.”
“I should’ve tacked on ‘perceptive’ too, huh?”
Marcus abruptly halts. He’s holding the anteater beside a patch of brick to his left, and its jeweled eyes have gone from blinking steadily to flashing rapidly.
“This must be it,” Marcus says.
He feels along the section of wall, rapping his knuckles against it here and there experimentally. He returns the effigy to its surface, measuring the target area by the intensity of the eyes’ flashing as he sweeps it, first from right to left, then up and down.
“Figure four feet across, starting here,” he says, marking the area with a piece of bright blue chalk.
Cindy unzips a black OTS bag slung from her shoulder, removing a power drill with a long, thick, gleaming diamond bit. Firing it up, she begins piercing a dozen deep holes in the brick in a manhole-sized circular pattern. She finishes by drilling one extra hole in the dead center of the others she’s fashioned.
“Is the blast going to go in or out?” Marcus asks, waving away the billowing clouds of brick dust.
“Neither,” she answers with a grin, stashing the power drill.
Cindy removes a handful of cylindrical charges from her bag. She attaches wires to their ends and begins fitting one cylinder in each hole she’s drilled, save that last hole in the center of the circle, which she leaves empty.
“Give it ’bout five feet clearance, just to be safe,” she instructs him.
Marcus nods, and they both back away from her handiwork, Cindy moving down the tunnel and Marcus moving up until he’s placed the appropriate amount of space between him and the blast zone.
“Clear!” she hollers a moment later before detonating the charges from a device in her bag.
It sounds as if the brick is being crunched between the jaws of some gargantuan steel-toothed creature. Dust spews in gunshot tendrils from the dozen holes Cindy drilled in the wall, filling the tunnel. There are shards of debris as well, but the wall itself remains mostly intact; rather than one large hole, she’s simply blown a dozen small ones in the sewer.
Marcus slogs back towards the epicenter as the dust begins to waft up both ends of the tunnel. He watches Cindy remove a two-foot aluminum rod from her bag, which she extends to four feet at the push of a button. She wipes one gloved hand over the perfectly round hole at the center of the blasted burrows she’s made in the brick. She begins fitting the rod through that center hole.
When she’s fed it most of the way, Cindy presses another button on the shaft. There’s a metallic clanking sound on the other side of the wall.
“Help me,” she says.
Marcus steps forward and the two of them grip the end of the rod tightly.
“Pull!” she commands.
Together they pry the manhole-sized section of bricks away from the rest of the wall, stepping aside and letting it drop into the mostly water, ignoring what splashes onto their clothing and the pungent stains left in its wake. Cindy retrieves her rod and collapses it, stashing it in the bag and trading it for a flashlight.
The space beyond the hole is a dry, cell-sized chamber. It is empty save for one object, a small stone crypt no bigger than an ice chest, sitting in the middle of the space. There are several arcane runes carved upon its heavy lid.
“That’s it,” Marcus proclaims. “That’s the core.”
“Are you sure?”
“Unless there’s more than one conscripted supernatural entity bound down here.”
“I mean, with this place, that’s entirely possible.”
“Trust me,” Marcus says with a grin that reminds Cindy less of the real Ritter and more of one she’s often fantasized about.
She hates the way it makes her feel, especially because she entirely enjoys the way it makes her feel.
Marcus begins climbing through the hole and into the chamber without another word. Cindy follows, watching him as he kneels beside the crypt and wipes away the dust over the runes, cleaning out the seams of the lid with his fingers and thumb.
“What happens now?” Cindy asks.
Marcus reaches inside his coveralls and produces what looks like a small ivory horn.
“It’s just like pouring gas through a funnel,” he assures her.
He pulls out an automatic knife with his other hand and deploys the blade. Marcus begins carving into the body of the horn. Cindy squints into the light of her aluminum torch. She sees that he’s carving some of the same runes that mark the lid of the crypt into the white surface of the horn, along with other runes she doesn’t recognize.
“I’m creating a conduit between the crypt here and our new vessel upstairs,” he explains. “By making this horn an extension of the spell protecting the crypt, we’ll be able to pop the lid, and instead of releasing whatever energy’s inside, it’ll be drawn into the horn and then funneled automatically to our vessel.”
“Where’d you get this stuff?” Cindy asks. “The horn and the crypt-finder and whatnot.”
“Ritter,” Marcus answers tonelessly. “A purloined relic for every occasion, my brother has.”
Marcus folds the blade back into his knife and returns it to his pocket.
“All right,” he says. “Pop the lid.”
Cindy nods, pulling out a stubby crowbar. She steps forward and crouches low, deftly fitting the flat end of the tool into the seam between the lid of the crypt and its body.
She hesitates.
“Now, you’re sure about this here?” she asks him.
Marcus grins again. “Would you ask my brother that?”
“No, but I know him.”
“Well, I’m here and he’s not. How about you get to know me?”
“All right, then.”
Cindy grips the crowbar tightly with both hands and presses her weight down atop it. The creaking of a thousand brittle bones fills the chamber and the lid gives way, just a crack, but it’s enough to instantly and oppressively shift the air pressure in the small space and fill it with queer green light.
“Is this shit radioactive or something?” she asks in alarm.
Before Marcus can answer, the entire lid is blown clear of the crypt, shattering against the chamber ceiling and raining gravel down over them. An invisible force knocks Marcus off his haunches, the horn in his hands slamming him in the chest as he hits the ground.
Three stories above their heads, Hara is waiting in a secure room with a vintage 1966 Magnavox Magna-Color floor model television set procured by Marcus.
The stoic giant looks down as the antiquated piece of technology seems to leap half a foot from the ground. Once it settles, the TV begins visibly shaking as if an earthquake has seized the entire building. Hara and the rest of the room, however, are still as a graveyard. There’s no power cord attached to the television s
et, and even if there were, there’s no outlet in the disused storage room to welcome it.
Fortunately, Hara isn’t the type to be unsettled, not even by a thing like the fifty-year-old TV’s screen suddenly sparking back to life.
The sagging, ink-rendered features of Droopy Hound’s face fill the screen. The animated character snaps his gaze from side to side, up and down, an expression of confusion and rage showing through his comical jowls. His head begins bouncing around the screen like a ping-pong ball in an old video game, but to no avail. A decidedly un-cartoon-like growl spits dust through the TV’s speakers.
Droopy Hound eventually gives up, his image steadying into a wide shot of the moping dog standing in the middle of the screen in his trademark expressionless, sagging pose. He’s wearing the uniform of an English bobby, no doubt a reference to some long-forgotten skit from his weekly cartoon show.
Several minutes later, there’s a pounding at the steel door.
“Everything secure?” Cindy calls from the other side.
Rather than answer, Hara crosses the room and unlocks the heavy door from the inside, pulling it open for them.
Marcus and Cindy have ditched their hip waders, face masks, and other gear. Marcus stops short as soon as he spots Droopy waiting for them in the retro TV’s screen. He slaps one hand across the other and lets out a triumphant holler.
“Hot damn! That’s what I call one righteous magic hack, ladies and germs! It’s Miller time!”
“Not yet, hot shot,” Cindy reminds him.
“Right, yeah.” Marcus clears his throat, assuming a more “responsible adult” stance. “But I mean, c’mon, you gotta admit we kicked a little ass. Big man, ya feel me?”
Hara just grunts.
“You feel me,” Marcus maintains.
He walks over to the television set and hunkers down in front of the screen.
“For a moment, I was free,” Droopy Hound says in his nasally, depressed voice.
