Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  “Him?” Dallas sipped at his ice-filled glass. He felt like rolling it across his forehead.

  “The assassin. Another Gultranz. The whole place stank with his scent according to Gurtz.” Buster sneezed, as if he’d sensed what she was describing.

  “Buster wouldn’t go past the gate, so I left him hiding in the ferns while I ran inside, threw some clothes in my gym bag, and locked the apartment up tight. Then we got in the car and I just started driving north, to get as far away as possible.”

  “And you landed here.” Dallas hoped he sounded helpful, but he was well beyond any ability to reason.

  “Well, I would have kept driving, but Buster alerted us on the gate somewhere around Aventura, in the mall parking lot. But it just turned out to be a trace of where it had been—it wasn’t actually there.”

  Dallas nodded. “Pity.”

  “So we headed into Hallandale, still following the trace, and decided we needed a base of operations. I saw the “for rent” sign in the yard here and called the number. The owner, a very sweet Latina, drove in from Sunny Isles to meet us. I told her I couldn’t rent under my real name because I was running from an abusive husband. She hugged me and said she knew exactly what I was going through.” Charlotte beamed a cheeky smile at Dallas. “You have no idea how far a sob story and cash up front will get you. I have the house, no questions asked, as long as the money’s paid.”

  Dallas kept nodding. “Okay, now what?”

  “Well, you need to stay here with us, till the job’s done. That way you and Buster can spend as much time looking as possible. There’s only one bedroom, but you can have the couch. It’s big and comfy.”

  “Okay, I don’t mind.” It was light years better than sleeping in the park.

  “I can drive you back to your current address so you can get necessities and stuff, then we’ll all be safe here. I think.”

  Dallas took a breath. “I don’t currently have an address, and this is all I need.” He pushed the book bag with his toe.

  “So,” said Charlotte. “You’re a homeless person.”

  Dallas scowled. “It’s just temporary.”

  Charlotte brightened. “That’s good, though. Less likely you can be tracked through a landlord or neighbors.”

  Dallas had so many questions he hardly knew where to start, but there was one sticking up above the others. “If Buster can smell this hired killer just from his scent trail, can the assassin smell you, too?”

  “No. He’ll be wearing a human body, so he can’t differentiate smells any better than you can.” Buster hopped up beside her and leaned against her shoulder. Cozy. Dallas thought his head might explode.

  Instead he asked, “Why does what’s-his-name have to wear a borrowed body? Oxygen disagree with him?”

  Charlotte gripped the cushions and shut her eyes. “He says it’s not pleasant, but he can process it. The problem’s with the density of the atmosphere. It’s too thin—prevents the Gultranz from fully materializing into the earth plane. They need to take on the shell of an earthbound creature to fully function. There are a lot of body templates. He could have taken on Buster as his template, but that would have been too limiting. ”

  Dallas sucked in his breath, suddenly remembering a certain catalog he’d seen on the table in the Limbus reception room. “What happens if the alien’s ‘occupied’ earthsuit gets killed?”

  “The Gultranz wearing it gets sucked through the nearest official gate and spewed back, hopefully intact, onto the homeworld.” Charlotte made an unpleasant face that Dallas was certain didn’t reflect just her own reaction.

  “Won’t they catch you if you go back through the portal you made?”

  Charlotte emitted a guttural noise that Dallas had never heard a human make. “Gurtz asks if you think he’s some novice who doesn’t know how to hide his own patch gate.”

  “Well, you let it drift all over the greater Miami area like the Hindenburg . . ”

  Charlotte quivered and Buster growled in the back of his throat. She scratched him behind the ears, defusing the moment. Maybe Buster still had a desire to sink his teeth into that luminous greenish hide. Dallas winced. In spite of his terror, he was starting to empathize with them.

  “How many miles do you think we have to walk before this gate thing drifts across our path?” He’d been mildly confident when he’d set out this morning, but now the task seemed enormously hopeless.

  Charlotte was massaging Buster’s shoulders. “Do you have a driver’s license? I could let you drop me off at work and borrow my car.”

  “I do, but I don’t have it on me.” Dallas’ cheeks flamed.

  “Well, can you get it?”

  Dallas imagined standing on the front steps of his parents’ house and asking his father to give his license back. “Doubtful,” he said.

  “Well, then, we’ll just have to improvise.”

  Dallas found himself warming to Charlotte. Here she was, possessed by an entity that was anyone’s worst nightmare, yet gamely making plans to move forward with an impossible task. He could learn a thing or two from her.

  “We could catch the bus, or maybe a taxi,” he offered. “I’m good at thumbing rides. I could wear dark glasses and pretend he’s my seeing-eye dog.”

  Charlotte/Gurtz eyed him. “You catch on fast. No wonder you’ve survived on the street with basically nothing. I like you.” She smiled and it was Dallas’ turn to shiver, remembering the rows of needle-sharp teeth.

  Dallas drained his glass and rose to go place it in the sink of the tiny kitchen. He turned to Charlotte. “Why’d you place your dog walker ad with Limbus?”

  She shrugged, looking at Buster. “It was the biggest display ad in the yellow pages for employment agencies. You can look it up if you want.”

  “No, that’s okay.” He didn’t need to consult the yellow pages—he knew there wouldn’t be any such ad. Charlotte—Marilyn—had seen what was meant only for her. Like she said, he caught on fast.

  *

  Dallas took Buster out on the leash and spent the next several days trying to follow the very faint trace of the drifting gate, wandering through neighborhoods in Miramar, Miami Gardens, and Opa-Locka. By Tuesday, Dallas tried skirting the Miami River along a jogging/skating path that gave him a good view of Miami Beach across the water. They’d been out walking for nearly an hour, with Buster catching occasional whiffs of spots where the gate had lingered and moved on.

  Suddenly Buster took off at a run, dragging Dallas after him. The leash was wrenched with a slap out of his fingers. “Hey!”

  Buster disappeared down a residential street, across a back yard, and into a copse of willow. Dallas caught up with him in seconds. “What the hell—” The dog cowered between his feet, teeth bared and snarling.

  Dallas swallowed hard. Buster must have smelled something dangerous, something deadly. Dallas grabbed the leash. “C’mon, I know the neighborhood.” Of course he did. His parents lived in it.

  He ran across yards, between houses, and ended up in a small wooded park, its circular boundary marked by chest-high holly hedges. In the center of the park grew half a dozen centennial oaks with branches so wide you could stand on them. In the tallest tree, a weathered clubhouse hid among its upper forks, a few climbing slats still nailed to its gnarled trunk.

  Dallas huffed, grabbing the dog around the middle and wedging it up under his arm. He jumped and caught the highest slat, scrabbling with his feet onto the lowest fork, and worked his way up into the canopy of dark green leaves. The tree house had no door, and Dallas flung himself and Buster through the entrance and onto the rough plywood flooring. He lay gasping, listening for pursuit but heard nothing. Finally Dallas sat up and took stock of their refuge. It looked remarkably the way it had when he’d played in it as a kid.

  Buster was peering down through the doorway at the ground below, snarling.

  Dallas pulled up his T-shirt and wiped sweat out of his eyes. He chanced a look out the door just in time to spo
t a jogger coming into the park. In tank top and shorts, he looked harmless enough. Buster was shaking all over, pressed against Dallas’ leg. The dog emitted a low growl but Dallas grabbed his snout. “Shhh!” He flattened himself against the floorboards and took another furtive look.

  The jogger had stopped on the sidewalk leading into the park and stood wiping his face. Perfectly normal behavior for a runner. Nothing to see. Until he walked slowly to the center of the small grassy area near the oaks and stood perfectly still, head raised slightly, as if listening. He faced east, then west, with a questing behavior much like a bird dog seeking its prey after the fowl has plunged out of sight into the reeds of a marsh. Dallas crouched against the wall of the tree house, hardly daring to breathe. Against him, Buster shivered in silent terror. Dallas had no doubt the jogger was someone, or something, to be feared.

  The stranger below took his own sweet time, but eventually moved on across the park and back out to the street. Dallas let his breath out and then called Charlotte.

  “I think we narrowly missed your friend,” he said in a whisper. “If Buster hadn’t taken off like a streak I don’t know what would have happened.”

  “Be very careful coming home,” she warned. “We can’t have you leading anyone to the house.”

  “Roger that.” Dallas disconnected the call.

  He sat in silence for awhile, just listening to the breeze off the river rustling the tops of the oaks and palms. Occasionally Buster sniffed the breeze, but he seemed to no longer find any threat hiding there.

  Buster walked to the door, his dog nails clicking on the boards of the tree house. Dallas picked him up. “If you don’t smell the guy anymore let’s get out of here.” The first thing he wanted to do when they got home was get some better details about the assassin, something he’d failed to do when Gurtz’s situation was first explained to him.

  Charlotte called around five-thirty to say she was on her way and would bring Cuban take-out home with her.

  A brief thunderstorm broke overhead and rained just enough to make everything steamy. Dallas and Buster sat on the back deck, listening to rain drip off the trees and shrubbery, while legions of frogs sang their rain-conjuring songs. The sound of Charlotte’s Grand Cherokee pulling up under the carport some time later brought him back to the fact that his stomach was chewing on itself. He went inside and found Charlotte unloading Cuban sandwiches onto the kitchen table. “Help yourself,” she said.

  Dallas took a wrapped sandwich from the bag and sat down across the room, as far away from her as he could get. They ate in silence until Charlotte got up and poured herself a glass of burgundy.

  “You’re awfully quiet.”

  “Just thinking.”

  Charlotte put down her glass. “That was a close call you had today.”

  “No shit.”

  More silence. Finally Charlotte got up and stretched. She headed out into the living room and Dallas followed.

  “Can I…talk to Gurtz? I mean, physically?” He could feel the blood beating a tattoo against his temples.

  Charlotte cocked her head. “All right, but you have to promise you won’t run out the door.”

  “I won’t run.” Since that first terrifying day, the alien hadn’t showed itself outside its host, in the interest of keeping him employed, Dallas assumed. Now that he felt reasonably sure Gurtz wasn’t about to abduct him for medical experiments on some distant planet, he wanted to see, as clearly as possible, the creature he was contracted to help and ask those nagging questions.

  Gurtz slowly lifted out of Charlotte’s body. Dallas was shaking but kept his eyes riveted to the ungainly form partially coalescing in front of him. Seven feet tall, for sure, maybe more. Dallas was holding his breath. There was the moray eel head, which he now saw had two slightly protruding perfectly round eyes with a tiny red pupil in the center. The eyes seemed to move independently of each other, one giving Dallas the once over and the other angled toward the doorway, like a chameleon he’d once kept in a terrarium back in his college days. But Gurtz wasn’t a chameleon, or an eel. What had he called himself? Gultranz.

  The Gultranz sorcerer stepped away from his host, who remained frozen in mid-step, and Dallas took a good look. Although partially transparent, it was still a terrifying sight. The alien was bipedal but also had a long thick tail that it leaned back on for balance. Dallas licked his dry lips. He’d seen a kangaroo do that once at the Miami Zoo. The creature’s skin was luminescing greens and blues and ochres. From the front of the mouth, a cluster of prominent upper and lower serrated teeth jutted at a bucktoothed angle. As the hinged jaw moved, Dallas saw double rows of triangular shredding teeth. Sharp as razors, he was willing to bet. A flesh eater.

  “You don’t look much like a Little Grey,” Dallas croaked out.

  “What’s that?” Gurtz’s voice was raspier than he remembered.

  “You know, Little Greys, alien abductions… medical experiments?”

  “Is that a DC comic? I might like it.” The Gultranz stood to his full height and stretched his long thin arms out from his sides, flexing his three-fingered hands as if unwinding the kinks. Dallas noted uneasily the suckerlike pads on each digit. The creature took a step forward.

  “Don’t!” Dallas skipped backwards.

  “Seen enough? I can’t hold this form too long outside the host.”

  “Yes! Please go back in.” He was hyperventilating.

  Charlotte shuddered and settled stiffly onto the couch. “Gurtz wants to know your story.”

  “Me? I don’t have a story. I’m your basic loser, a nobody.”

  Charlotte’s dark eyes went wide, looking at him with such fixation it felt like a trowel scraping at his brains.

  “I see a lot going on in there, but I don’t see stupid,” Charlotte/Gurtz said. “How’s a smarter than average guy like you end up homeless?”

  “Long unpleasant story involving a lot of money spent on an education I failed to get.”

  “Studying what?”

  “I was an English major.”

  “Mm. Sympathies.”

  “Noted.” Dallas sighed deeply. “I’m what’s known in this world as a slacker.”

  “Looks like we have something in common, then.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We’re both in trouble with somebody over money. Isn’t that always the way it goes …”

  “What happens if you miss your gate?”

  “I’ll be stuck here.”

  “And if your host dies?” Dallas had every intention of keeping Charlotte alive, but he had to ask.

  “My essence gets sucked into the nearest official gate. If I survive the transfer in one piece, I’ll probably be executed.”

  But Dallas’ mind was on another track. “What happens if the assassin catches us?”

  “It won’t be nice. Body parts, yours and ours.”

  “What’s he armed with?”

  “A splitter, most likely—a stealth weapon, highly portable and deadly. You think a Japanese katana’s sharp? Phhht. A splitter’s particle beam cuts through anything with substance, boulders, steel, meteorites, you name it. Small neat handle, fits in the palm of your hand, beam opens up as wide or as narrow as you want, depending on what you need to cut.”

  Dallas shivered. “I still don’t get it. That recruiter guy said this job was tailor made for me. But you need somebody from the Avengers or the Justice League, not a college dropout.”

  “You’re doing okay so far. Charlotte likes you. Buster likes you. ”

  He had to admit that had been the nicest part of the job—besides the money, which he received in cash at the end of each day. It felt good, being praised by someone smart and successful, which Charlotte obviously was.

  Dallas cleared his throat. “How come you’re so familiar with the way things work here on Earth? You seem pretty savvy to me for a non-native.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes and hugged her chest, her voice husky. “It’s on my regular route. I�
��ve been coming here for a long time.”

  Dallas felt a chill creeping over his skin despite the ninety-plus heat. “For what?”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that.”

  “I want to talk about it now.”

  “I told you─I’m a Masterclass Spellcaster.”

  Dallas was persistent. “Casting spells on what?”

  “Body templates. I figure out the design and make the prototypes with all their thousands of variations. I have to use originals to work from, to get the details right.”

  Dallas wasn’t liking where this was headed. He felt his guts tighten. “How do you get those originals?”

  Charlotte had pulled herself into a near-fetal position. “Slaves. I work with the Slave Traders Guild to get body types … and do a little refurbishing for them on the side. There. Happy you asked?”

  Dallas scrambled toward the door. “I knew it! You lied to me.”

  “How do you figure that? You were yammering about little grey guys and medical experiments. This is about commerce.”

  “But a slave means abduction! And ‘refurbishing’ means torture, I assume.” Dallas was freaking, heart pounding against his ribs.

  “Offworld slaves have to be refurbished before they can be used. I take away their breathing apparatus and embed a little methane converter at the base of the throat. Eliminates their ability to talk, but they can’t speak our language anyway, so no loss. I’m good at what I do. Better than most of my competitors, which doesn’t make them happy,” Gurtz conceded.

  “But that’s inhumane, it’s horrible! You’re despicable!” He suddenly realized he had Charlotte by the throat, squeezing tighter with each shout. The Gultranz lifted partway out of the woman’s body and unfurled one of its long skinny digits. It touched Dallas on the forehead and he fell back as if he’d been tazed. A mild electric shock ran through his body, just like the time he’d stuck a fork in a toaster as a kid to get at a piece of trapped toast.

  “I don’t want to harm you, but I will defend myself. You were trying to attack my host and I can’t allow that. Be assured that if I could fully manifest, you’d be dead now.” The husky voice had changed in pitch. Dallas had sort of gotten used to the timbre of that unnatural voice filtered through human vocal cords, but right now the voice had an edge that frightened him to his core. The Gultranz settled back into its host and glared at Dallas with an expression that could have meant anything from fuck you, earthling, to you poor stupid sod with the brain of a flea.