“I want to train you,” the old Harris said, “but the Council disapproves. They don’t want me to apprentice a woman, especially a white woman.”
“Where’s the ambulance?” Sunny asked, stupidly. She knew it wasn’t her brightest moment, but she was still calculating the number of bullet wounds in the girl’s body. Had it been fifty-two? Fifty-three? That ragged chunk that was missing from her back could have hidden a dozen entry points…
What kind of sick assholes shoot a kid in the back?
“Focus .” Harris snapped his fingers, and suddenly Sunny was looking down at feet sticking out from behind a couch. She frowned. Those boots looked familiar…
“I can train you, but only from here,” Harris warned. “They said we can’t train in person unless you’re initiated, but they won’t let me initiate you.”
They were familiar. “Why is she wearing my boots?” Sunny asked, squinting at the drunk woman hunkered behind the couch.
The old Harris paused, squinting at her, then glanced at the boots. “I’m not sure you understand.”
“Damn right I understand. Some tramp stole my boots when I was asleep, then got too drunk to toddle off. Those were expensive .” She squatted to pry them from the tramp’s feet.
Old Harris squatted in front of her, blocking her view of the boot-stealing wench. “My name is Tadzi. I am a shaman with the Eklutna tribe. I want to train you, but I can only do it in your dreams. The Council won’t allow me to give you a trial of initiation because you’re a girl. I tried, but they’re…stubborn.”
“I worked hard for these boots,” Sunny grunted as she worked around him. “I’m gonna kick her ass when she wakes up.” For some reason, the boots were really hard to remove. The laces didn’t want to be undone.
“Do you live in Alyeska?” Harris said. “How old are you?”
Damn these boots! Sunny got irritated as he kept getting in her face, trying to peer around him to undo the laces.
“Huh. You’re still asleep.” The old Harris gave her a really long look, then stood. “I’m very sorry for this.”
“Why?” Sunny snorted as she worked. “It’s not like you stole my boots.”
An intricately-carved fish bonker appeared in the old native man’s hand. Just as Sunny was starting to process that, he swung it at the side of her head with all the force of a rail car, knocking her completely off of her feet and into a wilderness filled with bugs flitting across a pond, their tiny bodies silhouetted in the dying light of a late summer day.
Sunny fell over in the grass, dazed and seeing sparkles in her narrowed field of vision. The old native guy stepped forward so he was looming over her. “Good morning. I’m Tadzi. I’m the shaman of the Eklutna tribe.”
Sunny’s reply was a low groan.
“I’m a dreamer and I want to train you.”
“You hit me, you cheesy rotting toe jam.” She felt like her mind had exploded and she was seeing the shards floating around her in tiny particles.
“You weren’t listening.” He placidly cocked his head down at her. “Are you listening now?”
Eying the club still in his hand, Sunny nodded slowly.
Tucking the fish bonker under his belt, the native man—who really wasn’t Harris, she was realizing now—peered down at her. “I want to train you, but we have to do it in secret.”
“Fuck that hurt.” Groaning, Sunny tenderly prodded at her scalp.
The shaman squatted in front of her. “Are you listening?”
“You’re a shaman.” He was wearing traditional leather shirt and leggings.
“Good,” Tadzi said, “what else?”
“Your name is Tadzi.”
He nodded. “And you’re a woman.” He hesitated, still looking unsure. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Sunny said, sitting up with a wince.
“How old?”
That seemed like a dumb question. “How old do I look?”
“It doesn’t matter how old you look,” Tadzi said. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-three,” Sunny said. “Born on the summer solstice.”
Tadzi let out a slight gasp, making Sunny squint. “How old are you ?” she prodded.
“Where do you live?” Tadzi said. “Is it near Eklutna? I think I can feel you north, but sometimes you’re west, too.”
“I thought they didn’t want us to meet.” Whoever ‘they’ was. Sunny was still a little startled that she was so lucid in a dream.
“Screw them. Where do you work?”
“I work for the Dome Commission.” She squinted at him. “What about you?”
Tadzi sounded excited. “Then you’re close.”
“Close to Eklutna ?” Sunny demanded, remembering the Eklutna Wall. “Not really.”
Tadzi waved that off. “What’s your name? Address? If I wanted to come meet you, where would I—”
Suddenly, it felt as if the world around them squeezed and there was an ominous feeling that Sunny couldn’t quite pin down, almost as if the world itself was watching her. Tadzi looked up startledly.
“You are the last of your line and you were told not to pursue this woman,” a man’s voice boomed.
Tadzi cursed. “I have to go. I’m in Eklutna village if you want to meet. There’s a secret tunnel out of the Dome under the Mirror Lake Par—”
Something grabbed Tadzi and wrenched, and Sunny was left alone. She briefly saw shapes moving at the edges of her vision, almost like shadows behind a curtain. She heard arguing, but couldn’t make it out. Then the scene shifted suddenly. After a couple disorienting moments, she found herself in the back of an ambulance…
“Get a tourniquet on her arm, Harris!” Sunny shouted.
Chapter 6: Bagging a Bounty
When Sunny opened her eyes, she was crammed behind a couch. Groaning, she began wedging herself back up the wall and into the light. Through the crack behind the couch, she saw sun streaming through an open window, upon which, painted backwards in green brushstrokes, were the words,
Dr. Gabriel Dortez, PhD, MS, NCC, CCMHC
Knik Counseling
Specializing in resolving depression and suicidal thoughts.
Sliding scale, government allocations accepted.
1-907-555-1505
With a start, she remembered the night before. Gabriel Dortez, serial killer and clam enthusiast.
He was going to kill me, Sunny realized with a start. Kill her…or something worse. She stopped moving behind the couch, holding still against the wall, listening. Was he still there? Had he noticed she was gone? Was he looking for her?
She listened to silence for several minutes before slowly sitting up against the wall, heart pounding. She wondered what he had injected her with and for what reason—she had the worst dry mouth of her life, and her temples were being hit with sledgehammers. The speed at which the paralysis had hit her had been terrifying. In her nine years as an EMT, she hadn’t heard of anything so potent.
For that matter, how long had she been asleep? Sun was streaming through the windows, lighting up the waiting area in cheerful mauve and creams. She realized with a mingled rush of horror and shame that she smelled her own piss. She began to wonder if, rather than a few hours, as she had assumed, it had instead been days . The thought of being trapped, unconscious, behind the man’s couch as he went about his nightly routine made her physically ill.
Realizing how close she had come to becoming just another victim, she swallowed. Her hands started to tremble. She found herself getting nauseous.
She was dealing with a serial killer. One the BPI didn’t want to get their hands dirty dealing with. That was…disturbing. A friend of Edward Banks, maybe? Some politician’s kid? One of those hippies from the farming collectives?
Whoever he was, he obviously wanted access to vulnerable people—the teenagers, the stressed, the financially precarious, the mentally unstable. Sunny thought again of her nephew Jake, sitting at his desk, listening to Gabriel Dortez belittle his class with that
sneer of disdain on his face. She remembered the A-students and their suicide pact.
Finally, she recalled the smug way Gabriel had watched her stumble away after he’d drugged her. He’d had the calm collection of a man who had killed dozens of times. A ten CC injection, she concluded, probably wasn’t the only way this asshole had murdered people.
Pissed off—and worried about her nephew—she decided to do something about it. Whoever he was, however rich or famous, he wasn’t going to drive any more kids to suicide pacts if he was sitting in a cell in a BPI detention facility.
Sunny wedged herself the rest of the way from behind the couch and, checking to make sure she was alone, peeked outside. Sun beat down on the asphalt, perfectly slanted between two skyscrapers to light up the road. People were coming and going on the busy street.
Then she looked behind her at the empty office.
It was time, she decided, to add a little burglary and vandalism to her already-lengthy rap sheet. She walked into his office, casually knocking a pretty gilded coral to the floor as she passed. It shattered on the hardwood boards. Oops .
She went to his desk first and opened it, looking for cash. She wasn’t disappointed. There was a drawer full of cash, but most of it appeared to be Mexican or Guatemalan, arranged in bundles of pesos or quetzals.
A little weird , she thought. She took a small wad of Alyeskan twenties—a hundred and sixty bucks—as payment for him being a serial killer creep, then closed the drawer and went over to the corner where he’d gotten that syringe.
The small table there had a drawer, inside which were seven neatly-arranged vials of clear liquid, a single syringe, a rag, and a larger tan bottle. None of the drugs were marked, but Sunny could guess what they did. She grabbed them all, threw them into her pocket, and broke a few more shells on her way back to the front room.
She left the door wide open on her way out. Let the serial killer think someone snuck in and stole his murder kit, she thought. He’s lucky I don’t set this place on fire.
She dumped out the drugs on the sidewalk and threw the empty containers in a trash bin several blocks down the street. Then, still a bit shaky from her brush with death, Sunny went looking for something to eat.
He’s going down, she thought, remembering his bone-chillingly smug tone as she stumbled away in terror. He’s going down hard.
After a brief stop at a café to think and cool off over drip coffee—the only caffeinated beverage where she could justify the expense—Sunny decided the simplest route to a clean catch and a hundred grand was to just hit him over the head when he wasn’t paying attention. And, since he had tried to murder her, who the hell cared if she hit him a little too hard and he died? His students certainly wouldn’t cry for him, and the BPI seemed willing to accept dead bodies as part of its bounty scheme.
She returned to Bertha and drove to the E. Banks Bridge, where she crossed the Cook Inlet. She drove through the rich outdome bedroom district, and pulled off onto a side road that bypassed all the mansions in Point MacKenzie and led to the forest. There, she got out of her truck, took her hatchet into the woods, and cut herself a solid hunk of alder. It was what she, her sister, and her dad had always used as a salmon bonker—solid, heavy, and predictable. Good for braining things that needed it. Then, after carving herself a nice grip for her new club, she went hunting.
She decided to ambush the piece of shit in the alley outside his accounting business, since that seemed to be the least public place at the least public time in his regular routine. So, around thirty minutes to midnight, she was waiting for him in the darkness, a package of zip ties in her back pocket, her makeshift blackjack in her hand.
The hunter had just become the hunted. It felt good, in a way.
Waiting, however, was something Sunny had never been good at. She started to fidget at eleven forty. She got out her phone and started playing a mindless Tetris game at eleven forty-five. At eleven forty-nine, she forced herself to put her phone away.
Somewhere nearby, maybe just a street away, she heard the wail of sirens. She started to fidget again.
Then she heard him, a skinny weasel of a guy shuffling in the dim light of midnight, heading from the public rail, through the back alley, to his front door. Classic serial killer, right down to the big, nerdy glasses. As he closed the distance to her in the alley, Sunny called out to him.
“Hey, I’m late for a party and I really need to get upstairs…”
He glanced at her, made a face, and said, “It’s past curfew for blockkers. Get out of the Dome—you’re stinking up our airspace.”
Sunny smiled at him. “Can you look over there, please?”
He looked. He forgot she was there. He kept moving.
Hellloooo a hundred grand… She stepped behind him and whacked him over the head with the homemade blackjack. He stiffened and started to fall forward. She grinned and started reaching for her zip ties.
Easy peasy.
Then Mr. Dortez spun on her with a deep, echoing roar like the sound that came out of a rhino’s lungs. His head was missing, deflated like a punctured beach ball, something undulating underneath.
Though Sunny saw that, her conscious mind was unable to digest and process it. Thus, she was still blinking at Dortez’s deflated head when the man’s chest opened up, displaying circular layers of black teeth leading to a triangular black beak at their center, like something straight out of a Star Wars desert death-pit.
…holy shit…
The black beak, which was bigger than her torso, opened and blasted her with a thousand-decibel shriek that sounded like it came from the lovechild of a T-Rex and Ripley’s alien. As she was cocking her head uncomprehendingly at that, Dortez’s arms elongated, and he exploded into a massive, twelve-foot ball of writhing tentacles.
“You dare?!” the black-toothed hole screamed at her from the middle of its chest. And then, as she was staring up at it in uncomprehending horror, one of those massive, spiny tentacles bitchslapped her to the ground.
Sunny hit the concrete hard, her world jolting from the impact.
“Who sent you?!” the monster screamed, slamming a heavy tentacle into her from above, pinning her. “How many this time? Was one team not enough?! Should I make it two before you leave me alone?! Ten ?! Shall I hunt down the governor and make my displeasure clear? Or perhaps I should exterminate every single leader your pathetic country has until you take the hint?”
The slimy tentacle beast—it had grown another ten feet, oozing out of the man like a mollusk would climb out of a shell—became an enraged wall of moving muscle looming over her that stank of ocean fish and glistened with slime. “How many ?!”
Sunny’s mouth was open in mute horror. She tried sliding backwards along the ground, but the massive, writhing thing caught up with her, climbed over her…
In that moment, Sunny realized she was going to die. She wondered what had happened to her mother, trapped on the other side of the border. She wondered if her sister was going to slow down on the kids, or if Gary was going to keep knocking her up until menopause. She wondered if her nephew Jake, who had always been the studious, straight-laced member of Daphne’s chaotic gaggle, was going to graduate high school…or find himself in a death-pact with another A-student.
“You must be one of the survivors.” The tentacle monster’s sneer seemed way too snobby for what was essentially a beaked asshole with legs. “What is this…revenge for your fallen brethren?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sunny babbled as it crushed her. “I saw a flier.”
“What flier?!” the thing roared into her face.
“From the BPI!” Sunny cried. “There’s a bounty on your head.”
“You’re…not DPS?” the thing’s chest chuckled at her. Now that it wasn’t making the T-Rex scream, it actually sounded more like a university professor discussing crayon art with a very slow fourth-grader. “No, wait. Let me guess. You’re a hard-luck case, just some blockker that’
s desperate for money that the DPS dragged off the streets to do its dirty work after I destroyed its entire division for daring to attack me. You are innocent in all this. You learned your lesson and you promise never to go hunting things you don’t understand ever again—you just want to go back to your peaceful old life. You think you’re somehow going to contribute great things to society caking your fingernails in rock dust for the next twenty years, and now you’re going to beg me to let you live, during which I will listen carefully, nod at all the right moments, then eat you because I’m hungry and I don’t give a twisted rat’s scrotum about the inane twiddlings of yet another primitive ape mindlessly navigating its mundane, utterly pointless maze.”
Sunny realized he was totally serious, and that pissed her off. “I don’t talk to calamari.”
The creature shrieked like she’d hit it with a nerve agent. “You…disgusting…creature !”
One of the tentacles picked her up by the foot and, like an orangutan flinging a Chihuahua, casually threw her to one side. She hit the foliage-covered wall of a nearby building with the impact of a neutron bomb.
Sunny slumped to the street in a cascade of broken plant matter, mouth open, feeling pulverized. She waited for the next blow, knowing it would be her last.
It never came.
When she managed to orient herself enough to lift her head, she saw that the tentacle monster had slipped back into Shell-of-Dortez and was placidly continuing to his apartment. Tentacles were even then knotting into a ball, re-forming what looked to be Mr. Dortez’s head. Had he thought he killed her?
Then Dortez turned and frowned at her. “Who are you and why are you loitering outside my office?”
Sunny made a sound that was a cross between a sob and a scream, and forced herself into a seated position.
“Go find somewhere else to get drunk, blockker,” Dortez snapped. “Before I call the police.”
Sunny couldn’t move.
Eyes narrowing, Dortez left his front step and walked back towards her. He got down into a crouch and grabbed her lolling head by the chin. Sweetly, into her face, he said, “If you had any idea who you were dealing with, you would run back to whatever crack den you came from just as quickly as you can.” He looked her over slowly, languidly. Then he made a face. “But I don’t care for spoiled goods.” He released her violently. “Go. Before I arrange your disappearance.”
Sunny with a Chance of Monsters: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (Sunny Day, Paranormal Badass) Page 9
