Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  Dallas sat with his forehead on his knees and tried to rearrange his scrambled brains. Part of him just wanted things to go back to the way they were before he’d ever heard of Limbus Inc., but that was helpless loser thinking. He was sick of being a loser.

  He pushed his hair out of his eyes and gave her eye contact, not confrontational, but not backing down either. “Understood. I signed a contract. So, I agree to put my personal problems with your occupation aside for now, and I will see this job through to the end.” So you can leave and get the hell off my world. Gurtz probably understood that part, too.

  Charlotte leaned back against the cushions. “Alright. Just so we understand each other.” She shivered visibly and gave Dallas that haunted look. “Sorry about that.” Her normal voice was back.

  Dallas let his breath out. He didn’t know if he’d won or lost, but he understood he’d had a narrow escape, his second of the day. He continued to sit on the floor, watching the light fade and listening to sounds of traffic along the street outside. The naked reality that “aliens are among us” had come crashing down with a vengeance. To be honest, the whole job experience had felt like some surreal prolonged cosplay event until tonight. This was no pop culture dress-up-like-monsters weekend, and his rational mind had ground to a halt.

  Dallas felt the anger leak out of him, like an oversized gasbag punctured and wilting. He closed his eyes, too wrung out to think.

  He felt her hand on his shoulder, a barely-there squeeze.

  “Sleep on it. We’ll talk more tomorrow. I just want you to know, Dallas, that I think you’re a fine person.” With that, she entered the bedroom and shut the door.

  Dallas curled up on the couch and willed himself not to think about the kinds of dreams she must have been having.

  *

  When Dallas woke, Charlotte had already gone to work. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, feeling fogged over. Buster was stretched out near the glass doors, watching him. He wasn’t sure how he felt this morning, but the thought that he’d lain asleep under the same roof as a creature whose race harvested humans for slaves and worse gave him goosebumps.

  “Today’s the twenty-ninth,” he said to Buster. “What’s the game plan?” Dallas ran his hands through his hair. “You know what? I think we’re going at this all wrong. Chasing the gate but never quite catching it isn’t working.” It was like a game of quantum tag. All these little contiguous events looked random when you stared at them head on, but under the surface they felt deliberate, controlled, planned. What he really wanted was to see the bigger flowchart. And then the light went on in his head. He called Charlotte at work.

  “I think we need to go back to the place where the gate came in and,” he wasn’t sure how to describe what his brain saw as a strategy, “cut it off at the pass, so to speak.”

  “Not bad,” she said. “I could see that.”

  “It’s fractal. My strategy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Dallas tried to explain. “When you’re down in a little eddy current of a fractal arm, you can’t see the larger pattern it belongs to. You may not even be aware there is a larger pattern. All you get are those little separate details of the hook-curve you’re meandering around in. So, Gurtz’s gate is oscillating on some pattern of its own. We just need to see it. We know the farthest out it went was Hallandale, and then it started heading back south.”

  “Gurtz says he thinks you’re onto something.” Charlotte’s voice sounded hopeful.

  *

  Dallas and Buster spent the morning combing neighborhoods near the airport with no results, eventually working their way south toward downtown Miami. By mid-afternoon, footsore and overheated, they met Charlotte for food at a Calle Ocho sidewalk café in Little Havana that Dallas liked to frequent when he was a student at FIU and had spending money. Charlotte treated them to pork-stuffed tostones rellenos and tres leches cake. With good food in his stomach and a sea breeze drying his sweaty face, Dallas felt better. He poured ice water from his glass into the empty salsa bowl and put it down for Buster, who noisily lapped it up, ice and all.

  “I dunno, maybe I was wrong about the gate coming back. It made perfect sense to me this morning.” He watched a couple of old-timers playing chess at a table nearby. Beyond them, a young black girl with very green eyes stared at Dallas. It was a pain in the ass to have to be suspicious of everybody around them, but if the assassin was in a human body, he could be stalking them right now and they wouldn’t even know it.

  “What do you think, keep heading south toward Coconut Grove?”

  Charlotte drove them back to the financial district around Brickell Avenue and parked in the company lot. They wandered among the glass and steel towers for a block or two when Buster suddenly yelped in surprise. He took off trotting, Dallas and Charlotte running to catch up. “After him! Down that street!”

  They ran flat out, Buster catching the scent and then losing it.

  “It’s here, I know it!” Charlotte gasped, as Dallas leaned against the side of an office building, trying to catch his breath. “It’s circling southward, like you guessed.”

  They chased the trail of the drifting gate down to Bicentennial Park. It occurred to Dallas that if the damned thing sailed out over open water, they were SOL. Besides which, the sun would be setting before long—a few street lights were starting to come on, and the Art Deco magenta pylon lights along the split lanes of the MacArthur Causeway cast rippling ribbons of color across the bay all the way to Watson Island.

  Dallas was about to give Gurtz some grief for being such a half-assed sorcerer when he heard Charlotte mutter under her breath. “Oh shit.”

  In Dallas’s current experience, he knew exactly what that meant.

  “Where?”

  “Can’t course the direction exactly, but Gurtz says his scent is strong near the causeway.” Buster was trembling and growling, his nostrils blown wide.

  Behind them, a lone figure came up the cracked sidewalk. Dallas retreated onto the causeway’s pedestrian corridor. The stranger advanced, walking steadily. Dallas quickened his pace. “Hoof it. I don’t like his looks.”

  They headed over the causeway at a trot. The incline wasn’t overly steep, just enough to prevent them from seeing beyond the top of the bridge. Dallas took a quick look over his shoulder. The guy behind them was still there, but not gaining on them. They’d nearly crested the bridge when another figure came into view, walking toward them from the other direction. A nice looking guy, hands in his khakis, he came quickly along the walkway. As they passed he nodded and smiled, a familiar face. Instantly a thin whine like a dentist’s drill erupted as the man stooped and slashed at Charlotte, the splitter shearing across ribs and belly. Without hesitating, Dallas grabbed her and did the unthinkable. He jumped.

  It took longer to hit the water than he would’ve thought, but maybe time dilated when you were in shock. Clutching Charlotte’s body tightly to his chest, they hit the water hard and sank for terrifying seconds as everything went cold and black. Silently giving thanks to all those high school swim meets that had pushed his aquatic skills to the limit, Dallas crested the surface quietly, trying to spread as few ripples as possible. He was drifting under the causeway, close to one of the gigantic pylons and some yards nearer land than the point from which he’d jumped. He was a strong swimmer and under normal circumstances wouldn’t have given a second thought about swimming the distance to the shoreline ramp where the causeway met land, but holding a mortally wounded friend made it a wholly different game. He had no problem swimming laps in the clear, chlorinated pool at his high school, but navigating the dark turbulent waters of Biscayne Bay at dusk ranked right up there with his most favorite nightmares. Buster’s snout broke the surface not far from them.

  Like a light switch flipped on, he suddenly remembered where he’d see the assassin—Charlotte’s, Marilyn’s, apartment—the friendly next door neighbor. He should’ve known. But he hadn’t quite got the hang of being on the run back t
hen, so he hadn’t been suspicious enough. He shuddered to think that he might have actually gone into the guy’s apartment for drinks … and body parts? He shoved those thoughts aside and concentrated on staying alive.

  A powerboat bore down on them, so close he could see the pilot’s face in the glare of the pylon display lights, his head tilted back chugging a beer and oblivious to anything in the water he might run over. Dallas had always considered the nighttime show that defined the MacArthur decorative lighting project as uselessly garish as the rest of Miami Beach, but tonight it kept him from floundering around in complete darkness. The wake from the cigar boat washed him up against the horizontal concrete span between two pylons. Spluttering, he held Charlotte’s head above the waterline and bit down on the pain as barnacles encrusting the pylon raked his back and shoulder. Buster whimpered and treaded water beside them.

  “Hold on,” he whispered. “I won’t let them kill us.”

  The distant drone of the Miami Coast Guard’s small search and rescue vessel got louder and filled the space near the bridge as a searchlight played over the water. Within seconds, it caught him in the eyes.

  A radio crackled. “Yeah, we found them. Pulling alongside now.”

  Dallas counted the seconds as the rescue boat idled closer. A crew member leaned over the side and tossed him an inflated ring like a giant peppermint lifesaver. “Are you all right? Can you grab on?” Dallas hooked his free arm over the ring and felt the tug as he was pulled in toward the boat.

  “Got a couple of 911 calls from people who saw you go off the bridge. That’s a sixty-foot drop or so. You fall or get pushed?”

  Dallas was shaking so hard he could barely get the words out. “W-whack job up there slashed my friend. She’s bleeding to death, n-need a doctor.”

  It didn’t take seconds for the Coast Guard rescue crew to assess the situation. The guy at the helm made another call on his radio, while the crew helped Dallas, Charlotte, and Buster aboard. The man who seemed to be in charge turned to Dallas. “Closest 24/7 emergency service is a few miles upriver. I just put in a call—the ambulance’ll be waiting for us at the dock.”

  He shook out a blanket and wrapped it around Charlotte. “People are crazy, you know?”

  “D-did you spot anybody up on the bridge, near the top?” Dallas’ teeth clacked together, mostly from the adrenaline shock of jumping and dropping such a long way down. Who would’ve thought the water would be so cold this late in May?

  “No, but we alerted the police. They’ll catch him before he can get off the causeway. Who would want to hurt someone like that? It’s inhuman, ain’t it?”

  Dallas kept his mouth shut and held Charlotte to his chest. His shirt was wet with blood, his and hers…the wound looked bad. He just hoped the Gultranz wouldn’t pull out of his damaged host and show himself. There’d be no explaining that.

  The ambulance was ready for them at the dock with lights flashing. Two cop cars parked beside it added to the light show. Charlotte was carefully loaded onto the gurney and whisked away as Dallas gave his statement to the officers. There was no way he could explain that his employer had just been slashed by the weapon of an offworld assassin, but he gave them as good a description of the guy as he could remember. Not that it would do them any good if they found him.

  The police car trailed the ambulance to the hospital, and Dallas got out almost before it came to a stop at the emergency entrance.

  “If you think of anything else useful, call me. I’ll take your little buddy here to Mojo’s. It’s an animal boarding service nearby. You can collect him when you’re done with the doctors.” The officer wrote a phone number on the back of a card and pressed it into Dallas’s hand.

  “I really appreciate it. More than you can imagine.” Dallas stuck the card in his pocket next to the dreaded Limbus card and ran up the steps of the hospital, his thoughts in freefall.

  *

  “Your girlfriend’s one lucky lady.” The doctor came into the waiting room where Dallas was hunkered down in his bloody clothes. “She lost a lot of blood, but we got her stabilized and put back together. She’s lucky—the cut missed her heart and lungs.”

  Dallas had gotten over his shakes and now simply felt numb. “She’s going to live, right?”

  “I think she’ll make it. We’ll know more in the morning.” Dallas nodded. He was prepared to spend the night in the waiting room, because as the doc said, there was nothing more to do now but wait. He was getting good at that. But those barnacle scrapes were starting to hurt like hell. He pulled the shirt away from his back and grimaced. The doc gave him a look and sent him off to a treatment room. After what seemed like hours, a young RN knocked at the door and came in, only mildly appalled at his blood-soaked appearance. As an emergency nurse, she’d probably seen worse. Efficiently peeling off his shirt, she swabbed his scrapes with a light touch, taping gauze over the worst ones. She also found his story fascinating, at least the part of it he was willing to share. “You jumped off the MacArthur Causeway? The section with all the party lights?”

  He closed his eyes, trying to decompress. “Yep.” The only act of heroism he’d ever performed was going to be fuel for many nightmares to come.

  “Done. I hope that feels better.” She patted him on the shoulder.

  “Much. Funny, it didn’t start hurting until I got in the police car.” He wondered what his parents would have thought of the stunt he’d just pulled—an idle thought because it was a chapter in their son’s life they weren’t ever going to hear about. He considered his bloody shirt. “You wouldn’t happen to have a spare T-shirt lying around, would you?”

  The RN smiled and patted his shoulder again. “I think I can find you something.”

  Engulfed in an oversized Miami Hurricanes green and orange tee, Dallas caught what sleep he could in the waiting room, but by early morning he was prowling the maze of hospital corridors looking for the cafeteria. He couldn’t help giving anyone who got too close to him a second look because who knew how many assassins had been sent to collect their bounty on the outlaw Gurtz. He wolfed eggs, sausage, and black coffee, and then went to the Central Registry to find where Charlotte was recovering. He found her in a tiny private room on the third floor. A transfusion blood bag suspended on a pole near the bedside dripped dark red slowly through the I-V line taped to her arm. He was shocked at how pale she was, lying still in the white sheets.

  “Hey,” he said softly, coming into the room and shutting the door.

  Charlotte turned her head. “Dallas. You’re safe. I was worried.”

  “I’m fine, it’s you we need to be worried about. How do you feel?”

  “Drugged up. The nurse told me I’ve had four units of blood.” She cast her eyes up at the drip bag. “It must have been a mess. I don’t remember much after the assassin showed up on the bridge. I recall falling and being in the water, but nothing after that until early this morning. How bad is it?”

  “The doc says you’ll make a full recovery. Police are looking for the slasher, but a lot of good that will do. It might be better if they don’t find him.”

  “Where’s Buster?”

  “Boarding at a nearby vet. The cop assigned to your case took him there.”

  Charlotte looked relieved. “I knew you were the right one the day you showed up on our doorstep. Just a gut-level instinct. A smart guy who’s basically good at heart.”

  Dallas felt his ears heating up. “How could you know that about me?”

  Charlotte laughed and then flinched. “I work all day among people whose job it is to dress up the worst products in the best possible package. We make our living telling lies, big and small, for commerce. Sincerity is rare in my line of work, so when I meet someone who has it in spades, I can’t help but notice.”

  “I almost chickened out, you know. A couple of times.”

  Charlotte smiled. “Doesn’t matter. You’re still here, and so am I, thanks to you. You saved my life without thinking.”


  “I’m not a hero. I was scared shitless … still am.”

  Charlotte frowned. “You sell yourself short and I don’t know why. But you’ve proved yourself to me. I couldn’t be more grateful.”

  Dallas swallowed and asked the question he dreaded. “Is Gurtz still there?”

  Charlotte nodded. “He’s not enjoying the sensation of human pain any more than I am.”

  “Good.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes. “We have one day left before the gate shuts down. Somehow I have to get out of here and go looking with you.”

  “No way. I’m not letting you risk your life for him.”

  “You’d rather have him stuck in my body for good?”

  Dallas shuddered. “No! But I don’t see how—”

  “We’ll figure something out. We have to.” Charlotte hesitated, then added, “Gurtz needs to survive.”

  “Why? If he died you’d be free! He’s an alien, for chrissakes.” Dallas could feel his blood pressure spiking.

  “I know, but it’s not the whole story.” Charlotte frowned, whether from pain or frustration he couldn’t tell. “He corrects the horrible mistakes made by others not as skilled as him. The truth is he’s on the run for being the instigator of a dissident group trying to create better treatment and conditions for offworld slaves.”

  “And you believe this?” Dallas didn’t even try to conceal his incredulity.

  “I want to.”

  “Why, exactly?”

  Charlotte turned toward him. “There’s a movement to change the way the Slave Guild operates, and Gurtz is at the heart of it. He knows he can’t wipe out an institution that’s been around for millennia, but he thinks he can at least change the way slaves are treated. He’s trying to establish rights for them.”