“And nobody’s found the piles of dead monster bodies.” He gives me a sideways little smile, and it ticks me off. “Look, even after seeing those marks on Ron, I’m not buying this. Something’s off. You guys could be playing a prank on me, or, no offense, you could be some kind of wannabe cult leader.”
Ron sits down on the ground, taking a break from wall-kicking to let her feet heal. She looks over at us, probably wondering how our conversation is going.
Tedrin nods toward her. “Here before your eyes is evidence of something very special. Why be such a skeptic?”
The question strikes me as stupid. I struggle for a moment to say so in a nice way, and then give up and shrug my shoulders up to my ears. “Because?”
He watches me, and I can see calculations going on behind his eyes. Not the kind behind mine; those tend to involve probability and poking holes in my own knowledge. His give me a chill, and I worry that he’s a master of that one thing I can’t get my head around — that he’s figured out How People Work.
“If monsters really exist,” I say slowly, trying to ignore how insane this sounds, “I want to see them.”
He nods a little. “She said you would.” He raises his voice, “Veronica! That’s enough!”
She gets up from the dust, grabs her socks and sneakers and t-shirt, and heads our way. “I’ve barely worked up a sweat!”
He shrugs. “You won’t.”
She’s smiles at me as she wrestles back into her shirt. “You okay?”
I must look a little green. I swallow hard and nod. “Are you?”
She laughs. “Never been better.”
“You have needles in your . . . your hands, and feet, and stomach, and . . .” I trail off uncomfortably.
“It doesn’t hurt, and it’s worth the weird appearance.” She holds up a fist. “Let’s see somebody try to rob the convenience store now!”
“Except it burned down.” I glance at Tedrin. “How’d that happen, anyway?”
He shrugs. “The monster must have knocked something over, and before I could do anything, the place was up in flames. I got Veronica away just in time.”
I look to her, but she shrugs. If Tedrin’s telling the truth, she would have been d— unconscious at the time. I file that away for later. “I want to see one of these things,” I tell her.
Ron presses her lips together for a moment. “It’s dangerous. I’m still learning, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to protect you.”
Tedrin waves a hand smoothly. “I’m sure I can cover the both of you. Besides,” and he gives me one more appraising look, “there’s no fun if there’s no danger.”
I clamber down from the wall and lead the way out of the quarry. “A little adventure might be nice. We can take my car.” I look around the cracked wasteland that once served as a parking lot. “I guess you guys walked here?”
“No car, and Tedrin doesn’t drive.”
“Ah, probably too dangerous for him.”
Ron gives me a warning look — ‘stop bickering with my new frieeeeeeend! gosh!’ — and runs around the front of the car to claim shotgun. I slide in, buckle up, and start the engine.
Tedrin piles into the back seat and, to my irritation, doesn’t put on his seat belt. He notices that I noticed, and he grins at me in the rear view mirror. “Not much of a daredevil, yourself, are you?”
“Daredevils get traffic tickets.” I drive carefully out of the parking lot and through the ‘gate’ — there are potholes deep enough to lose a tire in, and this old car barely holds onto four as it is — and pull out onto the road back into town. “Where am I heading?”
Ron gives me directions to a warehouse block north of here, on the east side. “Judging from the notices on the doors, the whole area’s been abandoned since the recession hit.”
I make a disgusted noise. “If it turns out that us becoming the new Detroit has made us a haven for freaky space monsters, I’m gonna, I dunno, start a march or something.”
Tedrin leans forward between the seats and watches me drive. “Are you a college student?”
“Nope.”
“You’re smart enough to be one.”
My eyebrows shoot up into my hairline. “Oh?”
“I’ve heard they’re quick to reject people, though, even if they appear smart.”
My eyebrows come back down. “I never applied?”
“Didn’t think you could make it?”
“I wasn’t inter—” And then I get it. “Is this negging? Are you negging me?”
He blinks at me in the rear-view mirror. “What’s that?”
“Jesus. You know how to pick ‘em, Ron.”
She presses her lips together into a line. “I didn’t pick anybody.”
“Riiiiight. You were dying in an alley and he picked you.”
She throws up her hands. “I knew you wouldn’t believe— Did I not call that?””
“You did,” Tedrin chimes in.
I grit my teeth. “I believe you’ve introduced me to some creepy guy who just tried negging me.”
Tedrin gives me another innocent look. “Creepy?”
Ron raises her hands in surrender. “Guys, can we not fight? Ted, quit doing whatever you were doing. And you, quit jumping up his ass.”
We drive in silence for a few minutes, then come to a stop at a traffic light. I notice that I’m tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, and take it as a sign I need to relax. After a deep, cleansing breath, “Are we cool, Tedrin?”
He’s been staring out the window; he looks up at me, surprised. “Oh, of course. Any friend of Veronica’s is a friend of mine.” I notice that he’s buckled his seatbelt.
I’m a little reassured, but there’s still that dog barking in my head, the You’re Being Too Nice To This Person dog. Then again, for the past year it’s been snuffling at me whenever Ron is around, so I’ve learned to ignore it.
“What’s your story, anyway?” I ask him. “You from around here?”
“Since as long as I can remember.”
“And how’d you get started in the, uh, what’s that trope thing you call it, Ron?”
“The masquerade,” she mutters, embarrassed.
Tedrin thinks carefully for half a block. “It’s hazy, but . . . A long time ago, I was attacked, like Veronica was. The monster’s blood must have entered my wounds. When I bled out and died, its blood became a part of me. I awoke as you see me.”
Something clicks, and as always, I wonder if it should have clicked sooner. “And you put your blood into Ron’s wounds.”
“Not, as you guessed, by biting her neck.”
My hands are suddenly slick with sweat on the steering wheel. “You’re Patient Zero for some kind of blood-borne symbiote, and you’ve infected Ron.”
She gives me a scandalized look. “When you put it that way, it sounds like he did something bad saving my life!”
“Okay, no matter what, no one call 9-1-1. You two would be in a CDC lab before you could say ‘Captain Trips’. Hell, forget CDC, maybe DARPA.” I give Ron a sideways look. “Unless you’ve been considering a career in super-soldiering.”
Tedrin leans forward between the seats again, face serious. “There is a reason I’m not on CNN telling people about these monsters. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a lab, and I’m sure you don’t want that for Veronica.”
It hits me, what I just said: ‘No one call 9-1-1.’ I’ve effectively been sworn to secrecy, and no one even had to bribe or threaten me. It’s kind of brilliant, and I wonder if it was deliberate.
“I’ll hold off calling CNN,” I mutter, and wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans.
He smiles at Ron. “You have a good friend here. How long have you two known each other?”
He asked me the same thing, and Ron gives the same answer: “Since middle school or so. I was the one who watched all the cool movies, and she was the one who read all the textbooks. I helped her fit in and she helped me pass Biology.”
“W
ere you troublemakers?”
I start to say ‘no’, but Ron laughs. “It was always me starting trouble and her coming in behind and fixing it.”
Now that I can agree with. “It’s a personality flaw I’ve been working hard to fix.”
Tedrin turns his smile on me. “Her tendency to start trouble, or your need to fix it?”
“Yes.”
They laugh as if I’ve said something cute, and then Tedrin points through the windshield at a bunch of ugly warehouses up ahead. “We’re here.”
It’s sunset as I pull up to a ragged chain link fence. Tedrin jumps out before I’m even in ‘park’; Ron and I follow as soon as the vehicle has come to a complete stop. Weeds stick up from cracks in the asphalt; my junker car looks right at home.
I squint at the fence. “Do you guys have a way through?”
Tedrin rubs his chin for a moment. “It looks like I’ll have to throw you over.”
Ron rolls her eyes and starts walking down the length of the fence. “There’s a break over here.”
Tedrin stuffs his hands into his jeans pockets and follows. “You’re no fun.”
Our open sesame is a long, uneven tear in the chain links; whoever used it last has shoved the two edges together, so that you could walk right past it if you weren’t paying attention. Ron pulls the edges apart and easily bends the metal so that it gapes open, tall enough that she and I can duck through. Tedrin, tall as he is, has to get down almost on hands and knees to squeeze through. He looks so goofy doing it that I start to feel a little better; maybe all the creepy vibes I’ve been getting are puff.
The fence surrounds an entire block of identical warehouse buildings that repeat into the distance; we’re standing in one of the main driveways that run between them. There are long shadows everywhere; I bring out my phone and turn on the flashlight function. I shine it down the alleys around us and see various combinations of wrecked and rusting equipment, scrap metal, piles of old wood . . . and, about fifty feet down the fence from where we came in, a weird shimmering in the dark. I squint and start toward it, though I already know it’s probably just a piece of old plastic sheeting.
In the corner of my eye, Tedrin stands straight and dusts imaginary dirt from his hands, and then goes very still. I can almost see his ears pricking up. He doesn’t move a muscle, just stares down the row of warehouses.
His consternation is enough to stop me in my tracks. “You hear something?” I whisper.
Ron looks from him to me. “I can’t hear anything,” she whispers. “But he’s been doing this a lot longer than I have.”
He abruptly snaps out of it. “Stay together,” he snarls at us, and then he vanishes.
I stare at where he isn’t. “Buh?”
Ron grabs my hand and squeezes. “You heard him. Stay with me.” She’s looking around like we’re in a war zone and somebody just yelled ‘sniper’.
We stand there for a few minutes, not saying a word, just listening. The sun sets, and the shadowed places start to outnumber the lit. There are no lamps on the buildings, or if there are, their power was cut years ago. My phone’s flashlight creates a glowing pool at our feet; I keep checking its battery nervously.
I’m about to suggest we go back to the car when we’re startled by an awful roar of noise from three warehouses down. It sounds like a bear, an elephant, a deranged murderer, and a circular saw formed a barbershop quartet, started stabbing themselves, and harmonized their screams.
My mouth pops open and begins pouring forth a pearl-string of curses, starting with the mundane and quickly delving into the imaginary. It takes me a second to realize that Ron is pulling me toward the cacophony, and I pull back violently on her hand. “—Christing motherf— Ron, we can’t go in there!”
She bares her teeth at me over her shoulder, though in a grin or grimace, I can’t tell. “You wanted to see one, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know it’d sound like—” And my brain grinds to a halt trying to think of another barbershop quartet metaphor. She takes the opportunity to start pulling me forward again, and I don’t protest.
We reach the front of the warehouse and I look all over the huge front doors for a way to open them, thinking the noise came from inside. Ron disappears around the corner, then calls my name. As I follow her down the alley, I hear terrifying noises ahead.
When I raise the light, I find Tedrin standing at the far end of the alley, facing away from us. He’s holding his hands away from his sides; they drip with some kind of black ichor. He turns his head at an unnatural angle to look back at us, and a shudder explodes up and down my back. His irises are constricted, surrounded by white; he looks like a spooked horse, except that he’s grinning ear to ear, exposing rows of sharp teeth. It might be the liquid clinging to his fingertips, but his hands look elongated and sharp.
Ron doesn’t seem to notice; she jogs down the alley to him and looks at what’s lying on the ground at his feet. “Holy— Are you okay?”
I approach more slowly and find her wiping off his hands with the edge of her t-shirt. When he looks at me again, his eyes are normal; his expression is that same calm cool from the quarry.
“You wanted to see one,” he purrs, and darts his eyes toward the back of the alley. “Go ahead.”
I step around the two of them and hold up my phone to light the way. As my brain begins to process what my eyes are reporting, my skin goes cold.
Ten feet down, the alley hits a dead end. Almost the entire space is taken up with a mass of shiny black needles. At first I have trouble telling what I’m looking at, other than that it’s the size of a rhino. But as it moves, it begins to take shape. It’s a four-legged creature lying on its side, its belly facing us, its stumpy legs sagging. They end in blunt pads of sanded darkness, not as slick and threatening as the rest of it.
As I pan my light over it, I see its side rising and falling with rapid, panicked breath. So many animals come to mind — its coat sticks up and back like that of a porcupine, and there’s a high ridge coming up off the back of its head like a triceratops. Its face, or what I can see through rivers of black ooze, is strangely equine. It has no tail that I can see; its rump makes me think of a bear.
It’s bleeding from great wounds in its neck. As I approach one step closer every few seconds, it regards me with a wide, jet-black eye. It breathes, and seems to understand that there’s nothing more it can do. It is at our mercy.
I kneel in front of its head and reach out with a hand, but Ron sucks in a sharp gasp. “Watch out. Even when they’re not actively trying to kill you, their bodies are made of razor wire.”
I pull my hand back for a moment, then look around. There’s a foot-long piece of scrap metal half-buried in the gravel at our feet; I pick it up and move it slowly toward the thing’s face. When it doesn’t fight back, I carefully pry it into the ridges around its lips and begin to pull open its mouth.
“What the hell are you doing?” Tedrin mumbles tiredly. “Want to stick your head between its jaws?”
I raise my light a little, to see around the piece of metal, into the monster’s mouth. Its teeth are formed of the same black needle material. But instead of fangs, they form blunt squares, some of them dripping with green. I’m repulsed at first, and then take a sniff, and the smells that blast me are all I need.
“This is an herbivore,” I mumble.
They go quiet, and then Ron is kneeling next to me. “Really?”
I point the light at various parts of its body. “Huge size, not ideal for a predator. Protective spines all over its body, like it’s used to being hunted. Blunt paws, maybe used for digging up roots. And its teeth are blunt, too, and it has plant matter in its mouth. Here, smell its breath; it doesn’t smell like it eats meat.”
“Uh, I’m not going to smell its breath.”
“You’ve smelled a cat’s breath, right? Or a dog’s? This smells more like a horse’s, or a cow’s. The enzymes are completely— Well, assuming it even has enzymes—”
Tedrin sits down on my other side and snaps his fingers in front of my face, as if to get my attention. I flinch away from them, not wanting the black ichor to drip onto me, not wanting those inhumanly-long fingers near me.
“What difference does it make?” he asks quietly.
I glance at Ron, who’s examining the creature in fascination, then look Tedrin square in the face. “Did it attack you?”
“I got the jump on it.” There’s no pride in his voice now; he knows where I’m going with this.
“Have you ever seen this kind attack someone? Is it the same kind that attacked Ron?”
He says nothing, just watches me.
Slowly, despite a sudden feeling of doom, I manage to go back to watching the poor dying animal. “You attacked a harmless herbivore.” My voice is shaking. “Like teenagers who kill stray dogs.”
I can’t look at him. I expect him to argue, or insult me, or even attack me.
He sits there, watching me.
Ron gets up and tugs on my sleeve. “Come on. Ted, can you . . . put it out of its misery?”
I get to my feet, knees popping, and follow Ron out of the alley. I feel dazed, as if someone’s struck me over the head. As we reach the front of the warehouse, I lean forward and vomit.
Ron puts a hand on my back and rubs up and down comfortingly. “You okay?”
I spit a few times, until the bile taste starts to leave my mouth, and wipe my lips with the back of my hand. “They’re just animals. Even if they look like some kind of Lovecraft arts-and-crafts project, they suffer.” I look back into the alley, but can’t see or hear what Tedrin is doing. “And he did that,” I whisper, pointing. “Ron, do you realize—”
She holds up her hands. “I know where you’re going with th—”
“No, no, listen to me. This guy isn’t a Juggalo, or a con artist, or a married man, or— He’s not like the other guys. He’s four thousand times worse. You have found an honest-to-God serial killer in-the-making.”
She rolls her eyes. “He is not— Look. You’ve known him for maybe an hour, and in that time, you’ve been let in on the masquerade, and you’ve seen him, yes, mistakenly kill a harmless creature. But you haven’t been able to just sit down and talk to him, and you haven’t seen how helpful he can be, and—”
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