Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  Rigel’s expression revealed nothing. “Just try to complete the task before the expiration date.”

  Dallas caught the Metro line to The Grove and walked to Marilyn’s address. He’d seen trendy places like this smallish but cool apartment complex where upwardly mobile singles gravitated. That gave him hope that Ms. Fairbanks was at least good for the promised compensation. People who lived in places like this were hip, mostly in their twenties and thirties, stylish. educated. Dallas banished the bile that threatened his meager lunch and focused instead on the contract fee. Two thousand dollars for ten days’ work came out to what … two hundred dollars a day for simple dog walking? There had to be a catch, but he intended to get his hands on the money before whatever it was kicked in.

  Bounded on three sides by crepe myrtles and tamarinds interspersed among tall palms knee-deep in ferns, the property of Jacaranda Apartments gave the illusion of being surrounded by tropical jungle. Four tan stucco buildings rose three levels, each with a Spanish style red tile roof. A high wall of the same stucco buffered the apartments from the street. Spilling out of weathered planters on both sides of a head-high iron-grille gate, a profusion of multicolored crotons led into a small courtyard. Dallas could imagine the marketing copy: “Providing that little touch of the Alhambra right here in the heart of The Grove.” A pool-sized terracotta fountain anchored the central patio with brick walkways leading to four pods that comprised the complex. He found building C, which appeared to have two apartments per level, and climbed the wide staircase with its black filigree railing to the third level. Ms. Fairbanks’ apartment, number C-6, was on the left. He looked down on the lovely courtyard dozing in the sun and tried to imagine living in a place like this. He couldn’t see it. Sad to say, he couldn’t see himself living anywhere.

  He reached the appointed door, painted black like the ironwork along the staircase. Putting his book bag down, he positioned himself directly in front of the peephole and pressed the buzzer. More waiting. It seemed most of his day had been spent waiting on someone—it was getting tedious. Impatient, he knocked a few times. At that moment, someone came up the staircase and unlocked the door to C-5. A nice-looking young man a little older than Dallas. Perfect haircut, perfectly matched navy shirt and khaki shorts, new deck shoes. Perfect smile, like a GQ model.

  “I don’t think anybody’s home,” he said to Dallas.

  “What? But I was supposed to meet …” His thoughts went into freefall.

  “Maybe they moved out. Apartment’s been dark for a couple of days.”

  “Moved?” No other words came into his brain.

  “Pretty sure. Sorry, man, looks like you got jilted.”

  “What? No, that’s not—”

  GQ guy smiled again. “Not what?”

  Dallas stared at him blankly. He could feel the stupid settling in, the armadillo-in-the-headlights fog of incomprehension leaking out of his ears.

  “Do you know her name, the person who moved out?”

  The guy screwed his mouth up, thinking. “Marilyn? Like the actress. I think she had a dog, terrier maybe?” He grinned and Dallas’ stomach flipped. There was something there …

  “Say, you look a little unsteady. It’s really hot. Want to come in for a drink? Something with ice in it?”

  Dallas was sweating. Was the guy hitting on him? Not that he minded, but that was absolutely not on today’s agenda. “No, sorry. I’m late for an appointment. Just thought I’d stop by before …” Before he lost his mind?

  Marilyn Fairbanks’ neighbor shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He flashed another smile and went inside, closing the door quietly behind him. Dallas waited, then tried the buzzer to C-6 again. Knocked, tried the door handle. Nobody home. He consulted the card.

  “Shit!” The address had changed. “Will you cretins make up your mind already?!” He was so tempted to tear up the cursed card and throw the pieces in the fountain, but he’d signed a contract and somebody was going to pay him to do the work. Where was it this time? “For fuck’s sake!” The address was just about as far away from Coconut Grove as you could get, way out in Hallandale, at least half an hour’s drive north. He considered his funds. Of the $40 his mother had given him, he’d spent a good chunk of it to get here. He’d have to thumb a ride to this new address if he wanted to have money to eat on for the next couple of days. If he managed to see this job to its conclusion with a yappy dog flapping at the end of a leash, he would damn well make sure that bonus paid for all his trouble.

  It took three separate rides to get out to Hallandale, but Dallas was beyond determined at this point in the game. And that’s what it was, a huge honking game of gotcha orchestrated by whoever was pulling the strings of his fate these days. He walked down 9th Street, a long narrow residential strip of asphalt with sporadic sidewalks, looking for the house number on the card. Where had he gone wrong? He’d done alright in high school, had friends, made decent grades, aced his English classes. What had been the turning point into his current downward slide? It was hard to pinpoint … a subtle shift in attitude where he’d realized that all the blather he listened to in class was just that, and the knowledge that nobody, not even his most favorite professors, had a lock on the truth. It had all seemed so pointless.

  Dogs barked at him from behind chainlink fences and big-wheel pickup trucks rolled past, sound systems thumping. Broken sections of sidewalk with weeds pushing through the cracks dotted long stretches where he had to walk along the shoulder of the road, careful not to get run over. He passed rows of concrete block houses baking in the sun, interspersed by a few partially wooded lots with slightly better houses set off from the road. Not the best part of town, for sure. Quite a come down, in fact, for Ms. Fairbanks. Had she lost her job and been forced to move? Why this far away? Sweating, he checked the house numbers on the mailboxes. Another block to go.

  The little frame house under the live oaks was so well camouflaged by a dense privet hedge he’d walked right past it before he realized X marked the spot. He backtracked and went up the overgrown walk, stopped at the front steps, and checked the card once more, daring it to do what it did. The address was still correct, but the contractor’s name was different: Charlotte Birch. Dallas refused to be fazed. Fine. Marilyn Fairbanks had been abducted by aliens and her dog now belonged to someone named Birch. Whatever.

  He knocked on the door with a little more force than normal. By now he was in a completely no-nonsense mood—get in there and get the job done. When there was no response within twenty seconds he banged again. The front door opened a crack and a tall slender woman with dark hair cut in a stylish bob peeked out at him.

  “I’m here about the dog,” he said abruptly. “The dog walking job?” He tried to sound upbeat.

  “Oh.” The door opened a little wider. “Come in,” said the woman who might be Marilyn, or Charlotte. She was barefoot and wore cutoff jeans and a tank top. Her attractive face had a haunted look, something hollow around the eyes and the tight, thin set of her mouth that telegraphed unease. Maybe she had an illness. Dallas followed her down a short hallway, wondering what her story was.

  A very small dog, a terrier of some sort by the look of its pricked-up ears and sharp face, sat on its haunches in the middle of the living room. An ordinary looking dog, mostly white with caramel splotched ears, it stood up and wagged its docked tail. A Jack Russell, Dallas decided.

  “This is Buster,” said the woman, gesturing toward the terrier. “I’m …Charlotte.”

  Dallas nodded. “Dallas Hamilton. I was sent by the Limbus agency. To walk your dog for ten days,” he added, just so there was no mistake about the job.

  “That’s a relief,” she said and plopped down into the shapeless cushions of an old sofa. Buster jumped up beside her, his flank pressed against her thigh. Charlotte crossed one long shapely leg over the other. “Well, Mr. Hamilton, please have a seat.”

  Dallas perched on a weathered rocking chair that had probably been dragged in from the back deck,
which he could see through glass doors that faced a small fenced back yard.

  “Here’s the situation,” said Charlotte. “I work for an ad agency in downtown Miami, and often I’m not home until dark. That leaves Buster here by himself all day.”

  “Sure,” Dallas offered, “he gets bored.”

  “While I’m at work, I want someone reliable to walk him every day, wherever he wants to go.”

  Dallas tried to look as dependable as humanly possible.

  Charlotte continued. “There’s a city ordinance that dogs must be on a leash if you want to walk them. Unleashed strays get picked up snap! We can’t have that. I rescued him from the pound and he’s not going back because of somebody’s carelessness. Understood?”

  “Yes, absolutely. I’ll be the best dog walker you ever met.” Dallas felt like an idiot, but he so needed the money. “When did you want me to start?” She didn’t look like she was headed off to work at a Brickell Avenue office in that outfit.

  “Today.” Charlotte got up and retrieved a braided leash with a loop on one end and a clip on the other. “I want you to do a test run. If it works out and Buster likes you, then your first day on the clock is today. Sound fair?” Charlotte was pretty no-nonsense herself.

  “No problem.” Dallas wondered if she had a map of the neighborhood for him to follow. “Um, how long do you want me to be out with him?”

  “Just around the block for today.”

  She clipped the leash to a ring on Buster’s collar. “Do you have a cell phone, Mr. Hamilton?”

  “Just Dallas, please, and no, I don’t.”

  She looked at him with that “loser” expression he’d seen too many times recently. “Well, you can carry mine while I’m at work, in case you need to contact me. The neighborhood’s old, not too dangerous. It’s all mostly rentals like this one. Just watch for cars where there’s no sidewalk and make sure Buster doesn’t get too hot.”

  “Got it.”

  “There’s one more thing,” she said, standing up. Her hand shook as she gave him the leash. “I need to show you something.”

  Before Dallas could breathe “holy shit,” Charlotte’s body began to stretch taller and go slightly blurred. Within seconds, a creature about seven feet tall with a head that mostly resembled a moray eel stepped out of Charlotte’s rigid body and stood over him. It had long thin arms, terminating in agile three-fingered appendages. Its skin was leathery looking and kept changing colors, first dull brown and now luminescent green. The figure was semi-transparent, as if it were not able to fully materialize—sort of wavery, like looking through water. The rows of needle-sharp teeth resolved themselves into the semblance of a human smile.

  “Charlotte is not quite alone.” The voice was husky, strained sounding, like someone getting over laryngitis.

  Dallas dropped the leash and scrambled away. He’d never felt such terror in all his scant twenty-one years.

  The not-human voice spoke again. “I regret somewhat having to use her this way, but there wasn’t much of a choice when I came through the gate. She was the only body available.”

  Dallas bolted for the door.

  “Don’t run. I need your help.” The horrible voice took on a wheedling tone. “I don’t intend to eat you, if that’s what you’re thinking. There are worlds beyond worlds that you don’t even have a clue about. Your world’s pretty tame, far as it goes, which is why I’m hiding out here.”

  “Hiding out?” Dallas’ voice broke and he tried again. “Why?” Images from The War of the Worlds flooded his numbed brain.

  “Well, that’s the thing. I need to get offworld, but I can’t find the gate.”

  Dallas blanched. There was that word. Gate. Gate expires … “This job isn’t about dog walking, is it?”

  The alien shook its ugly head. “No, friend, it isn’t.”

  “T-then what am I supposed to be doing?”

  “You and Buster here have to help me search for the gate so I can get out of here, which will be impossible after May thirty-first. That’s when the gate expires, goes offline for good. It was a quickie patch job, just meant to get a body in and out in a hurry. So, you know, timeline’s a little tight.”

  Dallas swallowed. He hated to ask. “What … who’s after you?”

  “Not sure. Somebody hired through Limbus, I think. Assassin job most likely.”

  Dallas’ knees went shaky. “But that doesn’t make sense! Why would a company hire someone—me—and then turn around and contract a hit on the client I’m supposed to be working for?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  Dallas was having none of it. “And now that we’re talking about this so-called Limbo Ink or whatever it is, how come Charlotte set up this job through them? And by the way, who’s Charlotte, or Marilyn, anyway? HUH?” Dallas realized he was shouting. At an alien.

  The creature whispered in its raspy not-human voice. “She’s a human friend, with money.”

  Dallas didn’t think Charlotte had bought into the “friend” part too much. If anything, she seemed in a state of controlled terror. His hand firmly on the doorknob, he took in the scene: Charlotte and her dog still as statues with an alien being towering between them, talking to him, fixing him with its round yellow eyes.

  “What, exactly, are you wanted for on your homeworld?”

  “Little of this, little of that, whole lot of the other.”

  “You won’t tell me, will you?”

  “It’s really better if you don’t know.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “You couldn’t pronounce it. Charlotte calls me Gurtz.”

  The creature said a word that sounded like a blender going off, somewhere between a gulp and a hiss. Gultranz. “That is my species. We’re friendly toward humans, in a number of ways.”

  Dallas shuddered, wondering how Gurtz had revealed himself to Charlotte. “Did you ask Charlotte’s permission, before you took over her body?”

  “Unfortunately, there wasn’t time. She took it pretty well, all things considered. She’s maybe a tad more adventurous than you.”

  “What’s her reward for helping you?”

  Gurtz was coy. “Adventurous, like I said. I might come visit her again, under better circumstances.”

  Dallas was sticky with sweat.

  “So, you’re like a shapeshifter. A body jumper. Could you take me over?” He gripped the doorknob.

  “It’s not that simple, and no, I can’t jump from body to body. Took a clever bit of spellcrafting to get me into the human template. But it’s been a good disguise, so far.”

  Dallas swallowed. “It said on the contract that I was hired to work for somebody named Marilyn Fairbanks but when I went to her address, she’d supposedly moved out, according to her neighbor at the apartments where Limbus told me she lived. Did I get any part of that right?”

  Gurtz gave him a long silent look. “We had to make a quick change of plans. Once we found out about the assassin, it became necessary for Marilyn to go into hiding, just to be sure of my safety. Hence the name and address change.”

  “What did you mean by human template?”

  “Once I take on a basic body template, homo sapiens in this case, I can slip into an available package, like Charlotte. Simple, for a spellcaster of my experience.”

  Dallas kept his mouth shut. His brain was in overdrive.

  Actually, he was trying to work out what qualified him for such a dangerous job. He was about the least likely person one would want on their side in this kind of situation. He remembered the “life-threatening” part of the Qualifications list and knew with a certainty he should have turned down Rigel’s contract and gotten the hell out. One of his not-so-good choices.

  “How come her dog hasn’t gone apeshit? He should be reacting to you but he’s not.”

  “I had to tamper a little with its canine instincts, I’m afraid. Buster is highly protective of Charlotte, so it was necessary to imprint myself on his mind as well, in order t
o keep him from attacking me. I also imprinted the smell of the gate, so he could help me search.”

  “I see.” Dallas didn’t see at all, but it seemed like a safe thing to say.

  “Well? Are you in or not?” Gurtz cocked his massive head.

  It was only for ten days, nine if you didn’t count today. Two thousand dollars and a bonus could go a long way toward redemption of this mess he’d landed in. And the sooner he could get the nasty creature back where it came from, the sooner Charlotte would be freed. “In.”

  “Excellent. I think my host needs a drink.” The figure went transparent and slid back into the young woman beside it. Charlotte ran her fingers through her hair. “Just sit there for a minute, and then we’ll talk.” She headed for the kitchen.

  Dallas hoped Charlotte had something alcoholic, with a good bite. His fingers trembled, his mind in denial. It was unthinkable, but he’d seen what he’d seen.

  “So you really are Marilyn Fairbanks.”

  She returned with two glasses. “I was until last week. But don’t call me that, forget you heard that name. So you’ve decided to stay?”

  Dallas sank into the rocker and gulped the gin and tonic Charlotte had given him. “Yeah, I have, but I’d like to hear this thing from your side … if you can tell it.” He wondered how much the alien presence controlled her thoughts and speech.

  Charlotte settled into the couch cushions, pulling her feet up under her. “Gurtz came here through a portal of some sort, an interplanetary travel gate. He was on the run and made the gate somehow to escape from people who wanted to kill him.” She closed her eyes, as if to make sure she got the facts straight. “But the gate’s drifted. It opened in Coconut Grove, but it’s not there now. It was scent marked, but Buster couldn’t smell it anywhere around the original site. So last weekend, we drove all over town with the windows down so Buster could get a whiff of it.”

  Charlotte shut her eyes again.

  “Gurtz says to tell you he didn’t have time to anchor its coordinates before it spewed him out. After driving around all over creation, we came back to my apartment and that’s when Buster smelled him.” Charlotte’s wide dark eyes pinned Dallas.