-- DAN
CHAPTER 19
Matt caught up with the mugger underneath a small stone bridge leading out of the park. Harsh streetlights illuminated the bridge, but cast thick black shadows beneath it. Matt saw the eyes first, brilliant white pinpoints set in onyx, and thought, Those are eyes? The rest of the man became visible slowly in the darkness.
He was young, early twenties maybe, and strikingly handsome. Matt blinked, even more unsure of what he thought he’d seen under the tree. He paused with the Glock held before him in both hands as the mugger watched him. The guy was crouched down just beneath the road, wedged into the corner formed by the bridge and the embankment.
He made no threatening moves, just crouched, one hand raised, touching a massive archway stone. Matt approached slowly, still with two hands on the Glock, and the young man cringed away from it.
Matt called out, “What’s your name?”
The mugger said, “Simon,” and immediately seemed distressed for having said it. “Please ... I’m sorry, about...I didn’t...”
He trailed off, uncertain and—what? Scared?
Matt stood like a statue. Somewhere a clock struck, the first of eleven chimes, and Matt replayed the horror show he thought he’d witnessed in the darkness under the tree. It couldn’t have been real.
Just then they both heard the rumble of an approaching truck on the road over the bridge, headed out of the park. Simon tensed, telegraphing. Matt lowered the gun, took a quick step forward. “Wait a minute!”
As the truck passed overhead Simon moved, fluid as an animal, and swung himself up and onto the bridge. By the time Matt scrambled up the embankment and vaulted over the guardrails into the flat white light of the street lamps, the truck, and Simon along with it, were rapidly becoming a distant pair of taillights, about to blend smoothly into the midtown traffic.
Another vehicle swept past Matt, made his shirt flap against him. He shoved the pistol into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back and pulled his shirt out to cover it; he never took his eyes from the truck’s taillights, and saw them come to a stop in a line of cars at an intersection a few hundred yards away, where the park surrendered to the city’s concrete.
Matt sprinted toward the truck.
If it hadn’t stopped at the red light he would have lost it, and wouldn’t have tried what he attempted now. As it was...some of the city’s traffic signals took a long time to change, and this looked like one of those times. The light probably wouldn’t hold the truck long enough to reach it on foot—but then, Matt had other options.
He tried to think clearly as he ran along the side of the road. He’d had only the chase through the park for a warm-up, but his breathing came deep and unlabored as his arms and legs pumped rhythmically.
The truck still sat at the light, waiting for him.
The mugger—Simon—could easily jump off the truck and disappear into the streets before Matt could get there, but Matt didn’t think he’d do that. For one thing, he’d be jumping down into moderately heavy traffic, and for another the truck was a good, easy way to put distance between himself and the scene of the mugging. So Matt ran, and hoped Simon would stay put.
He squinted and tried to make out the details of the vehicle. It was bright yellow, formerly a Penske, with the black letters overpainted by a slightly different shade of yellow. A private citizen, most likely, hauling who knew what. Matt watched for silhouettes poking up from the truck’s roof, afraid the mugger would be on the lookout for him. There wasn’t much he could do about it, running out in the open, and the farther into town he and the truck moved, the fewer chances he’d have to flicker out and emerge anywhere useful. Plenty of shadow-filled nooks and niches presented themselves, but the pedestrian traffic thickened, and someone might see him.
He didn’t have time to get the suit, much less stop to put it on, but he wasn’t crazy about someone seeing his face while he ran through the streets packing a gun.
The light changed, and the truck rolled slowly forward, Matt still a hundred yards away. The grassy shoulder of the road abruptly changed to concrete sidewalk, and his Rockports slapped against the hard surface.
The truck turned a corner, and a ball of ice started forming in Matt’s stomach as he realized he was about to lose track of it. He looked around desperately as he ran, not slowing down, and finally saw a chance: a wide ledge ran around the third story of a squat, cube-shaped building on the corner where the truck had turned, and street lights below it cast deep shadows between the ledge and the side of the building. The nearest pedestrian was easily sixty feet away, and Matt plunged off the sidewalk into the darkness beneath a magnolia tree.
The tips of several branches brittled and died as he disappeared beneath them.
Emerging onto the ledge, the metal of the gun freezing cold against the skin of his back, Matt saw the truck stopped at another red light. Hastily he reached into the shadows, back to the basement, and pulled his mask and gloves to him. It only took a few seconds to slip them on.
From his new vantage point he had a clear view down onto the street.
Simon still perched spread-eagled on top of the former Penske – and Matt gasped. Simon’s fingers had elongated, become more like tentacles than actual digits, and clamped onto the forward corners of the truck’s cargo compartment.
The light flicked to green, but pedestrians still moved in the cross-walk in front of the truck, and the driver leaned on his horn. Matt saw one of the pedestrians flip off the driver before skittering out of the way. The truck accelerated. He found another jumping point on the roof of a six-story building three blocks away, and flickered away from the ledge, leaving only a thin film of ice on the bricks behind him.
The truck moved deeper into the city, and Matt followed, flickering from one pool of shadow to another, always in sight of it. Simon stayed on its roof until it slowed and came to a creaking halt outside a lower-class apartment building. Matt watched as Simon flung himself from the roof of the vehicle to the side of the building, then bounded onto the rooftop of a nearby shop. Matt couldn’t believe it. The two leaps together totaled about fifty feet.
But the leaps, those patently impossible leaps, proved the point Matt hadn’t quite allowed himself to accept yet. The fingers could have been a trick, some sort of weird gloves, and the teeth might just have been a mask or an oral prosthesis. But no kind of cosmetics allowed their wearer to deny freaking gravity. Simon, the young man who’d attacked the girl in the park, wasn’t human—at least, not any more human than Matt himself. A kinship was there, a connection of some kind. Matt felt the certainty of it in his bone marrow. He had to catch up with the young man, contain him if necessary, but above all he had to talk to him. Had to.
The truck’s doors opened, and two college kids got out and went around to the back, unaware of the ride they’d provided. Matt pulled the gun from his waistband. He could see the roof Simon had jumped onto, several sections of it covered with inky shadows, thrown by both the low wall that ran around its edge and by two huge air conditioning units that stood twenty feet apart, like sentries. With a sigh and a burst of cold, Matt was there.
He kept perfectly still for long moments, listening. Then he edged around an air conditioner housing and found himself facing an open door, a wrecked lock hanging from its hasp, stairs beyond it leading down into the building. Simon was inside, Matt could feel it, and he knew if he didn’t follow immediately he’d lose the young man. He eyed the ruined lock. Had Simon found a crowbar somewhere? ...Or had he destroyed the lock with natural strength? With a sinking feeling Matt hoped it wasn’t that second option.
The rooftop lay in icy silence. Matt went to the stairs and flickered down, into the darkness.
He found himself at one end of a short hallway, polished hardwood floors partially covered with plush green carpet. Five heavy wooden doors opened off the hall. The two on his right stood open, and Matt peered into square rooms filled with expensive office furniture. Set into the north walls of both rooms were ornate, non-functional fireplaces, smooth concrete filling in where flames had once provided heat, and Matt realized the building had once been a hotel.
A glass door closed off the far end of the hallway. Through the door was a landing, with stairs going down to the right. He could see another glass door on the far side of the landing, and beyond that another hallway, a mirror-image of the one in which he now stood.
The doors around him, according to the plaques on the walls next to them, led to the offices of a realtor. He squinted, saw a similar plaque affixed to the door on the far side of the landing, bearing the name of a brokerage firm.
The building felt lifeless. No air currents moved. The offices had no doubt closed down and emptied at five o’clock. He could see deadbolt locks on the nearer glass door, engaged at both the floor and the ceiling.
So. Two doors open, three more shut, maybe locked. Simon had come through the door from the roof with no problem, but he’d left the lock mangled when he did; yet nothing here appeared to be disturbed. Matt tightened his grip on the gun and again wished he’d had time to get the whole suit.
He hadn’t spent much time actively looking, but in the past seven years he’d met no one else like himself, no one else who could do things no human should be able to do—until tonight, when the skinny, pale young man named Simon did things that made Matt’s mind ache. He gripped the pistol more tightly and regulated his breathing.
One of two possibilities: Simon came down the stairs, went into one of the two rooms with the open doors, and immediately left through a window. If the windows opened. It wouldn’t surprise him to find them painted shut. Or, Simon came down the stairs, got into one of the other rooms, closed the door behind him, and decided to wait.
Which didn’t make any sense. Simon wouldn’t have known Matt had followed him at all, much less that he had trailed him here, to this specific building. Simon had no reason to wait. He’d be long gone by now.
Unless he’d seen Matt following him.
Or unless he could feel Matt’s presence, as Matt thought he could feel Simon’s.
The windows in the open rooms, as Matt had suspected, were painted shut. The building was old enough not to have any closets, and the desks he’d seen faced the walls, their knee-holes exposed and hiding nothing. If Simon were here, he’d have to be in one of the three other rooms.
Matt approached the first door cautiously.
He closed his hand around the knob, still breathing slowly and deeply, turned it, stepped to one side of the doorway and pushed the door away from him, gun held firmly in his right fist.
Nothing flew out at him.
For an instant Matt flashed on the girl in the park, lying behind the tree. Her skin had glistened, wet with black blood. Matt hadn’t seen any knife. But those fingers ...
Swiftly now, Matt pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped through it, his arms extended and gun held forward, finger on the trigger.
He held an empty bathroom at gunpoint.
His shoulders slumped a little, and he smiled under the mask.
The next door he tried was about ten feet down the hall, and also opened when he turned the knob. He didn’t know if the realtor simply wasn’t too concerned with people breaking in, trusting in the locks at the ends of the hallway, or if Simon had somehow managed to disengage this lock without destroying it.
Matt opened the door in the same way he’d opened the one to the bathroom, and paused in the doorway with his gun covering the contents of the room. Two desks and a copier didn’t present much of a threat. He couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or relieved.
The third door was also unlocked, but opened onto a room smaller than the others he’d seen. Set into the far end of the wall to Matt’s left was another door, more than likely to an inner office. Several shafts of yellow-orange light from the downtown street lamps sliced through the darkness of the room, casting distorted window-shaped patches across the carpet and furniture. This is the last place he could be. If he’s not behind that door I’ve been wasting my time.
He didn’t want to take the chance of having the floor squeal under his feet as he approached the last door, and the shafts of light from outside illuminated only a small portion of the room. Matt crossed the floor with a small flicker. He emerged right beside the door, and the cool air from his jump touched his skin just as he heard the gasp from behind him.
Whirling, Matt saw Simon tucked into the corner above the door to the hallway like a fat, grotesque spider. Simon’s arms reached back behind him and his toes touched the lintel of the doorframe. Simon let go of whatever he’d been holding onto and dropped to the floor.
“Oh my God,” Simon breathed. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
Matt realized two things at once: one, Simon had seen him teleport. Two, the kid was terrified of him.
Simon scrambled backward, out the door, without taking his eyes off Matt.
As Matt watched, Simon’s eyes shifted and changed, warping back and forth between normal blue and the solid-black-with-white-pinpoints Matt had first seen in the park. Simon’s jaw hung open, and Matt squinted. It was distending again, with a greasy popping sound.
“Oh my God, get away from me, get away from me!” Simon screeched, and bolted away toward the door to the roof. Matt instantly flickered into the hallway. Behind him the antique window pane cracked with the sudden cold.
Simon only had a few feet to go before he reached the door, but another flicker brought Matt to the foot of the stairs, blocking Simon’s path. Matt said, “Wait,” and was going to say, “I just want to talk to you,” but Simon screeched again and wheeled, barreled headlong toward the glass door at the other end.
Flicker, and Matt was there, in front of him again. He held up his gloved hands, the gun tucked back in his waistband again, and said, “Stop, man, I’m not going to hurt you!” Simon’s eyes looked like saucers by now, and Matt realized he wasn’t going to stop just before Simon rammed into him, sending them both through the glass door and onto the carpet at the head of the staircase.
Matt did have the presence of mind to twist around so that Simon went through the glass first. Simon screamed as what must have felt like a thousand bees stung his back and shoulders. He screamed louder when Matt landed on top of him and unintentionally ground in the glass.
Simon exploded off the floor, shoved Matt away from him and scrambled toward the stairs. Matt’s head cracked hard against the stock broker’s doorframe. His eyes filled with involuntary tears.
Matt shouted, “Stop, would you?” and reached out and grabbed Simon’s right ankle. Simon fell forward, his hands flailed out into the empty space at the top of the stairs, and he slammed into the first step. His breath whooshed out of him. He curled on his side, jerked his foot out of Matt’s grip and started wheezing. Matt sat up just as Simon swiveled his head around and glared at him, his eyes solid black and filled with hate even as he struggled to breathe.
Matt said, “For crying out loud, man, I don’t want to hurt you, would you just stop for a second and listen to me?”
Matt’s vision blurred slightly from both the pain in his head and from the tears, and he didn’t realize what was happening until the last instant. From somewhere Simon produced a knife, or something like a knife, and lunged up with it clutched in both hands. Matt yelped and rolled out of the way as the blade punched through the carpet and wooden flooring where he’d been half-lying.
Simon screeched again, ripped the knife out of the floor, and threw himself at Matt. Knife? The thing looked more like some kind of sword. Matt made it to his feet and sidestepped Simon’s rush; he planted a foot on Simon’s butt and shoved. That sent Simon through the second glass door. Simon’s head connected with a huge oak desk right outside the stock broker’s office and produced a sickening crack that coincided with a deafening alarm. The broker’s office did have a security system.
That would mean police response in a matter of minutes, and while Matt’s vision rapidly cleared, the thumping in his head grew worse. Simon jumped up out of the shower of broken glass and raised the knife over his head. For a second, less than a second, Matt got an eyeful of Simon’s weapon: it looked for all the world like a unicorn horn, and spiraled down from a broad base to a needle-sharp tip.
In the next instant Matt realized he couldn’t tell where the horn-thing ended and Simon’s hands began.
Still making an ear-splitting racket, Simon turned and charged the length of the broker’s-office hallway, headed straight for a huge picture window at the far end. He dove head-first through it and plunged out of sight below in a shower of glass shards.
Just before he jumped, Matt saw him pull his arms apart, and the horn weapon unraveled, separated into long, tendril-like fingers.
Matt’s eyes tried to bug out of his skull.
He ran to the window and looked out cautiously. Several pedestrians stopped on the sidewalk below to peer up at the noise, but Simon was nowhere to be seen. Glittering electric blue lights and sirens swerved around a corner, approaching swiftly, and Matt retreated into the shadows.
# # #
Red and white emergency lights strobed through the trees as Matt walked back out of the woods and into the clearing. An ambulance approached, driving carefully on the brick walkways. Diedra sat next to the jogger. She’d draped the girl’s torn sweatshirt over her, and kept a knot of curious passers-by from crowding in too closely. Diedra looked up as Matt shouldered his way through.
“Are you okay? Where have you been? What happened to the guy?”
Matt squatted on his haunches. “I chased after him, but couldn’t catch him. I’m fine. Is she okay?”
Diedra’s eyes looked hollow. “I don’t know. She’s breathing all right, and her pulse is steady, but I think she’s in shock. And she’s lost some blood.” She gestured with one finger, traced a curving path up her arm. “From here. These marks.” Matt looked where she was pointing, and his stomach clenched tight.
Simon had covered the girl’s right forearm with deep purple bruises that shone slickly with blood in the diffused light from the walkway lamps. The bruises encircled her arm, wrapping around it again and again, starting at her wrist and winding up past the elbow. Matt hissed involuntarily as he saw the same marks around her neck, like a high collar.
“She was strangled?”
Diedra shook her head.
“I don’t think so! I can’t tell what the hell happened here! There’s bleeding, but I don’t think she has any cuts or wounds!”
The ambulance arrived. Matt rocked back on his heels, stood and got out of the way as two paramedics rushed toward the girl. The onlookers scattered. Diedra answered several terse questions, then moved aside as the paramedics loaded the girl into the ambulance. Matt stayed apart from them since he knew he’d only get in the way. He felt too distracted to be of much use in any case.
Weird fingers aside...the thought of someone losing blood without being cut made his flesh crawl.
Diedra’s touch on his arm startled him.
“Listen, Matt, I’m going to ride along with them in the ambulance. Come with me?”
“Ah, no, no, uh, listen, I’m—uh, I’m going to go back and get the car. To, uh, so, y’know...” He was babbling, and knew it, and wondered how much of it was an act. As Diedra watched him her eyebrows bunched together.
“Are you okay? Did that guy hurt you?”
“No, no, I’m fine, really! I’ll just, um, call you later, or you can call me. Can you get home from the hospital okay?”
“Yeah, no problem, I can take a cab, I guess.” He could see the thought in her eyes: he’s lost his mind.
“Okay, well, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then?” He backed away, headed toward the trees.
# # #
Diedra watched him go for a moment before she yelled after him. “Hey, wait a minute! You’re going to have to talk to the police!” But he was already gone.
She climbed aboard the ambulance, and before the doors closed, the paramedic riding in back asked, “Where’s your friend going?”
She chewed her lower lip for a second.
“I think he’s going to go change clothes.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
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1 comments:
It's been a long weekend, so I'm just going to let it suffice to say that A) I'm really happy wih this section, and B) I sort of feel like this where the book finally kicks into high gear.
I wouldn't expect much "down time" from here on out.
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