CHAPTER 48
Starting at the roof of the apartment building next to the LaCroix and moving in concentric circles outward, a raw, frigid wind blew through the city. At its head was a man in black with a ragged cross over his left breast and acid tears in his eyes.
Matt had never used the flickering the way he did now. He never fully entered it, but skimmed along its edge, shadow to shadow, neither in one place nor the other. With grinding teeth and tear-blurred vision Matt became shadow, and tore through the city with a speed close to flight.
He searched. As he searched, from time to time he repeated a few words to himself, and the pain grew worse with each repetition.
Not again. Not again. Not like Glory.
Twice he came upon people in the commission of crimes, and both times he acted swiftly and harshly before flickering away.
The first was a young man with a bandanna pulled down over his eyebrows, using a sheath knife to threaten a middle-aged woman behind a rundown clapboard house. It looked as if she’d come outside to empty her garbage. The woman heard a sigh, saw the hint of movement, then the thug with the knife wrenched away from her and did a twisted, frenzied dance as Matt’s quarterstaff worked him over. The thug collapsed to the grass-covered dirt like a marionette with its strings cut, both legs and one arm folded the wrong way. A film of ice rushed over his skin and the grass around him as Matt vanished. The woman, screaming now, ran back inside her house and slammed and locked the door.
The second was a blonde, tanned, muscular frat boy trying to force himself on a teenage girl in his car, which was parked out of sight in a drainage canal below a freeway overpass. The girl, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, screamed and thrashed against him as he pawed at her breasts and tried to jam one hand between her legs.
She’d managed to get her door open and put one foot on the ground when the frat boy got tired of her resistance, balled up his fist, and punched her in the jaw. She screamed louder and tried to kick him—and stopped dead still when she looked over his shoulder and saw a looming black shape outside the car.
The driver’s side door jerked open and the frat boy vanished through it, and while the girl tried to regain her balance and clear her head she heard a number of sharp, violent impacts. Clambering out of the car, she looked over the roof in time to see the black shape deliver four devastating kicks to the frat boy’s crotch. When the boy thudded to the ground, landing partly in and partly out of the car, his eyelashes and eyebrows bore a thin frost and the blood on his face had frozen.
The girl stared into the darkness for a few seconds. Then she straightened her clothes, fished her cell out of her purse, and dialed 911. Her date groaned loudly and threw up his dinner.
For more than forty minutes Matt’s search continued, and storm clouds had begun to gather overhead when he saw a glimmer of something white disappear through a metal door at the side of a low brick building. With a tiny rush of recognition Matt realized he was at the television studio where he’d made his unannounced guest appearance on the Good Morning Sheree show.
Somewhat familiar with the building’s layout, he flickered into the lobby and pressed against one wall, deep in the shadows.
From the lobby the building split into two hallways which ran its length, one on the north side and one on the south. Between the corridors, studios took up most of the building’s floor space, while small offices lined the outer edges. The door he’d seen something disappear through was halfway down the southern hall, between two offices, and let out onto the parking lot. Matt drew the Glock, flickered into the shadows, and emerged on the other side of the locked glass doors separating the lobby from the hallways.
He identified the steady background hum as air conditioning, which ran even though the temperature outside couldn’t have been more than sixty. The building’s interior felt like a freezer, still and morgue-silent. Matt soundlessly edged his way to the corner of the southern hallway, started to peer around it. Paused.
Reaching into a shadow, Matt carefully pulled a small dentist’s mirror to him from the basement. Moving slowly so as not to create any sudden flashes that might register on Simon Grove’s peripheral vision, he extended the mirror past the corner’s edge and got a full view of the corridor.
A studio door gracefully clicked shut.
Something flashed in the opening just before the lock engaged; something that might have been the hem of a long gray coat. My gray coat, Matt thought, surprised to find a trace of indignation piled on top of everything else. Can’t believe the bastard went through my closet.
In a series of flickers Matt moved down the hallway until he stood outside the door. He opened another small portal to the basement, replaced the mirror, and put his hand cautiously on the doorknob.
He knew it was some kind of trap. It had to be. Simon was playing with him, leading him on. But he was here, now, and Matt couldn’t let him escape, trap or not.
He turned the knob. All he needed was the tiniest of openings, just a glimpse into the studio, and he could flicker inside, reach a point of safety.
The knob worked smoothly, and the latch slowly disengaged. Matt pulled, gently, gently, and the door left the frame, millimeter by millimeter. He only needed one crack, just a hair wide, and his night vision would take care of the rest. He could take the room.
Another millimeter. And another—
— and the door exploded outward. The knob tore out of his hand and cracked him in the shoulder, and Simon crouched there with a needle-toothed grin that nearly split his head in half. A long, forked tongue flicked out at Matt, and Simon’s finger-tendrils rushed forward, snaked around him like demonic worms, entangling both his arms. Simon swiveled at his hips and hauled Matt completely off his feet.
Matt fired the Glock, fired again but hit nothing. Keeping the pistol pointed away from him, Simon brought Matt’s wrist down on his knee. The gun clattered away. Through the rush of pain Matt couldn’t tell if his wrist was broken or not.
Simon let out an ungodly hiss next to Matt’s ear and heaved. His arms still trapped, Matt tried to twist away, but Simon’s strength was immense. He whipped Matt over his head as if he were a rag doll and hammered him into the concrete floor.
Matt’s left leg snapped halfway between his foot and his knee, and the splintered bone tried to punch through the Vylar leg of his trousers. All the air left Matt's lungs as he screamed, and he jerked and pulled at his mask convulsively. He unzipped it and got it off his face less than a second before he vomited, his stomach spasming painfully. He kept control of his bladder, but only just.
Silence then. The tendrils withdrew.
It took Matt a few seconds to realize Simon had moved away. Gasping at the pain, Matt tried to orient himself. He lay in the middle of the concrete floor of Studio 2, according to the sign above the exit. No lamps burned, and his night vision still worked, though brilliant red flashes filled the edges of it. The pain in his leg overwhelmed him, and he vomited again, and wondered if the sensation he felt swiftly approaching was shock. He tried to concentrate, tried to flicker away—
—and the room flooded with blinding white light. The flickering shut off with a painful shearing sensation, and his night vision fled in ragged neon tatters. Matt shielded his eyes and squinted. A dozen spotlights on portable stands surrounded the roughly circular area where he lay.
Simon Grove stepped into his field of vision, hands and face normal, wearing an expression of smug contempt. “Bet you weren’t expecting this,” he said. He sounded very young.
Matt tried to steady his breathing as he lay on the cold concrete. The flickering, the teleportation, had never been cut off like that before, and he felt as if the outer layer of his brain had been roughly peeled away. He tried to get his good leg under him, but the room wouldn’t stop spinning, and he collapsed again.
Simon said, “I’m not stupid. It only took so many times watching you walk in one shadow and out another.” He cracked his knuckles and slowly walked forward. Matt searched around him for the Glock but couldn’t see it. When he looked back up, Simon stood over him, grin widening again. “By the way, I really like this coat.”
“Simon,” Matt said, and Simon kicked him viciously in the ribs.
Everything went black for a moment. Matt drew a stabbing breath. “Simon, listen to me.”
“Screw that.” Simon pulled the lapel of the duster forward, displayed the black-edged hole Matt’s bullet had punched through it. Still squinting, Matt thought he could see dead white, puckered flesh through the hole in the fabric.
Simon said, “You’ve been a severe pain in the ass.”
He circled Matt, and kicked him in the ribs again. Matt felt a couple of them snap. “Brenda didn’t want you hurt, y’know. Not at first, anyway. She just wanted to use you. Take possession of you before Vessler and his goons got to you. She thought you were too powerful and dangerous not to be on her side.”
Needle teeth began to grow out of Simon’s gums.
“But I don’t think you’re so powerful, and I sure as hell don’t think you’re so dangerous. What I do think...is you really piss me off.” He reached down with his right hand, the fingers suddenly extended and writhing. The intense light rendered a network of fine blue veins visible in each one.
The tendrils encircled Matt’s head, flicked his mask the rest of the way off, and Matt knew he was about to die. One tendril mashed his eyes closed, and he saw...
His father, blasted and dead in the kitchen chair.
Glory in her hospital bed, head swathed in white and tubes snaking out of her nose and mouth.
Diedra, torn and broken, bleeding in his arms.
“This is going to hurt,” Simon breathed in his ear, and began draining him.
Matt felt the blood leave his body through the skin of his face and neck and scalp, and tried to scream, but Simon’s tendrils held his mouth shut. Simon knelt on Matt’s chest, and the toe of one of his shoes dug into Matt’s broken leg. Matt squirmed and thrashed, but the movements grew weaker with each heartbeat. Every rhythmic pump channeled his blood into Simon Grove’s body. Every contraction brought the end closer.
One unknown. One tiny glitch can change all the rules, make it into a different game.
He wasn’t thinking about Simon Grove when he first said those words, on the night the Redeemer was born. He’d intended to be the unknown factor himself: Matt Sinclair, out to change the world, to make it into a new game. And for just a short while there he’d succeeded.
Simon changed it again, though. Made even newer rules, took away the fairness. Did more than just stack the odds in his favor; Simon fixed the whole match.
I never had a chance at this. Connections felt as if they were shorting out and dying in his brain. I couldn’t have planned for it. I couldn’t prepare. He thought fleetingly of what his father would look like when he met him again.
The tendril over Matt’s eyes slipped a fraction of an inch, and Matt’s right eye opened. Simon had his head thrown back, and at that moment the blood emerged from the pores of Simon's skin and rained down on Matt in a hot, sticky shower. The coat hung loosely on Simon, soon to be soaked through and ruined, an expensive gray death shroud.
Matt’s eye widened, and one of the blood vessels in it burst as Simon drank deeply.
There, in the folds of the coat just beneath Simon’s armpit, lay a deep, inviting pool of darkness.
And Matt’s right arm remained free.
He couldn’t concentrate well enough to go for anything specific. He’d have to take the first thing he put his hand on and hope for the best. Matt reached into the darkness through a rapidly dimming burgundy haze.
# # #
Simon Grove realized something had gone wrong when an intense burst of cold blossomed against his left side. He would have slapped at it, but to do that he’d have had to let go of Matt Sinclair, and he didn’t want to, so he simply looked down...
...to see Sinclair holding an impossibly huge gun in his right hand, and as Simon’s eyes widened and bulged, Sinclair cocked the hammer back with his thumb, and Simon just got both hands free of Sinclair’s head when Sinclair shoved the gun into Simon’s stomach and fired.
# # #
The .44 Magnum’s recoil drove the gun backward. Matt’s hand, still holding the gun, slammed into his mouth and split his upper lip, but the blast took Simon off his chest and tumbled him into one of the portable spotlights. Matt took a deep breath and tried to open his left eye, but it was gummed shut with blood and he had to pull it open with his fingers.
Matt fought his way up to his one good knee, crying out from the pain in his left leg. Black waves rolled across his vision. He didn’t think it would have hurt any worse if his leg had been ripped completely off.
Simon rolled over and got to his feet, angrily tore away the raincoat. A hole went straight through his midsection, but as Matt watched, strands of tissue began to stretch across the gap and weave themselves back together. Simon looked down at the wound and smiled. “I’m getting better at that,” he said, mostly to himself. Then, to Matt: “Doesn’t look like guns do much good, does it?”
Matt emptied the pistol into him.
The rounds took Simon in the stomach and chest, opened up gaping bloody wounds and blasted him backward into the wall of the studio. The last two bullets Matt planted squarely in the centers of Simon’s thighs, pulverizing the femurs.
The younger man’s body distorted wildly as he flopped forward onto the concrete. As Matt watched, Simon’s skin began to take on a lizard-like, scaly texture, and small, hooked barbs emerged all over it, but Simon remained motionless and blood spread out from him in a puddle across the floor.
Matt held still, stared and bit his lip as the pain in his leg redoubled. He took the time to crawl over to one of the spotlights, which he turned off, allowing him to open another portal to the basement.
Behind him, Simon twitched.
The pool of blood halted its advance, shimmered and pulsed, and began oozing its way back across the floor. Simon’s fingers writhed out, found the blood, and thirstily reabsorbed it.
Matt turned around and saw what was happening. His insides went sort of loose, and tears unrelated to sadness started from his eyes.
Convulsively Simon began flailing his way across the floor toward Matt, pulling with his grossly extended fingers and pushing with his pelvis, since his leg muscles no longer had anchors. Matt watched, horrified.
He thought Simon tried to speak, but the younger man’s mouth yawed grotesquely wide and couldn’t form words. His eyes had turned solid white and light poured out of them. They left faint trails in the air when he moved. As Simon drew closer, Matt saw that the finger-tendrils had hardened to points, each one with a razor-sharp, back-swept blade at the end. Blood burst from Simon again, not just from the wounds but from his skin itself, and he seemed to be covered in wet red lacquer as he writhed closer and closer.
Matt finished reloading the Magnum and waited.
Simon Grove’s body had lost most of the features which define human beings. The blood on his skin moved, rippled and danced like tiny red flames.
It didn’t need to end like this. There was so much to say, so many questions to ask. So many experiences to share. All the information and knowledge they could have accumulated together, gone, all gone, shoved into the trash. Pointlessly.
Simon hitched forward another few inches.
Matt thought of Diedra.
When Simon reached him and reared upright, Matt shot him point-blank through the bridge of his nose. The back half of Simon’s head blew completely apart and sprayed across the far wall of the studio. His body spasmed, crumpled backward and landed with a wet, spongy smack on the concrete.
Matt watched him, expecting all the scales and tendrils and barbs and other accouterments to shrink or withdraw, like in the movies, the way they always did on monsters when they died, so that Simon Grove could be found in the morning and identified. So his perverse truth could be kept a secret.
It didn’t happen. The corpse on the floor in front of him, especially now that it was dead, didn’t seem even remotely human, didn’t seem ever to have been human. Simon’s eyes went dark and closed, and when Matt shambled forward and lifted one eyelid, the eyeball he saw was blank, like a burned-out light bulb. No pulse beat in the neck.
All the blood, both on Simon’s skin and the floor around him, abruptly congealed and turned a rank brown.
Matt painfully stood up and tried to think of something fitting to say, like a big movie hero, but couldn’t.
Without crying out too much, he thought, Matt maneuvered himself over behind an unused, slightly battered writing desk that had once served as a prop in a children’s program called “KidzNews.” He figured it would provide shadow enough. He knew he’d have to come back very soon to dispose of Simon’s body, but he also knew that if he didn’t get medical attention sooner than that he stood a good chance of dying. He’d vomited twice more, and the room had a good spin on it now that showed no signs of slowing down. His left boot, he was pretty sure, was filled to the top with blood.
He had just pulled his good leg under the desk when the studio door burst open. Matt froze and stared out through the space between the desktop and the modesty panel.
Six men in white quarantine suits rushed into the room, two of them carrying a stretcher. They swiftly hoisted Simon’s ruined body onto the stretcher and carried him out the door. Three of the remaining four produced cleaning materials and began mopping up the brown, crusted blood. One of them started working on the wall that had received most of Simon’s brain and, as Matt watched, sick and horrified, the man began picking bits of gray matter off the wall and dropping them into a clear plastic bag.
A seventh man stayed back near the door, leaning against a wall and watching. He carried a cane with a silver head.
Just then one of the men cleaning the floor noticed the thin, smeared blood trail leading to the desk. He jerked his head up and stared straight at Matt, who needed no further prodding and flickered away.
AUTHOR'S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENTS SECTION.
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1 comments:
I'm glad, at this point, that the book is so close to being done, because I've gotten ridiculously bad at keeping to the posting schedule. That being said, I REALLY like this encounter. Part of me thinks it took the whole book for me to hit my stride as far as describing action.
Upon re-reading this, I discovered that I had ripped off some of the imagery from this chapter for the third ALEX UNLIMITED book, "TRUE CHEMISTRY." At one point, Alex Benno is using her own supernormal ability when it, too, gets interrupted, and I went with the same kind of shearing, brain-ripping thing that Matt Sinclair experienced.
Of course, when I wrote "TRUE CHEMISTRY," I didn't think REDEEMER'S LAW was ever going to see the light of day, so I don't feel TOO bad for ripping myself off.
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