Mirrors, p.14
Mirrors, page 14
Greyson pushed the door and felt it move back and away from him. There were stairs down into the darkness, the mouth of the abyss itself yawing open to swallow his soul, except that whoever might want it was already too late for that.
He flashed the light down and revealed nothing but steps and a hallway disappearing in the direction of the towers.
A deep sigh of accomplishment felt appropriate. Everything until now had been pure speculation. The unlocked door meant a crime had occurred. Was occurring.
Awaited them.
Greyson picked up the nerve scrambler and stood gracefully. Rachel was armed, so he stuffed his into the holster for now and stepped down under the half-open hatch.
He nodded to Rachel and she joined him. Inside, Greyson closed the hatch and twisted the handle to spoof the lock closing.
It would never do for Valdis to get this close and smell a trap.
“Anybody likely to be down here?” Rachel murmured, watching the darkness with a flashlight she had attached underbarrel to her nerve scrambler.
Point. Shoot.
Greyson was suddenly in a Central American jungle again for a moment before he snapped himself hard back to the present tense.
“Anybody that would try their luck runs into a Phrenic, more likely than not,” Greyson replied as he started down the steps. “That’s only a problem once, so we’ll assume we have the place to ourselves.”
He checked his watch. Midnight.
Assuming Zaborra stayed true to schedule, he would be delivering for another hour or so, and then driving here to eat his own takeout meal and sleep.
Zaborra? No, Valdis.
Yes, Valdis.
Weird.
Down the stairs into the gullet of the galaxy’s angriest whale.
The corridors down here had probably been sealed up when the corporation finally got too broke to afford the extra groundskeepers, as there wasn’t much trash or graffiti. Kids had broken in a few times, but there were easier places to tag closer to bus stops, so the remoteness of this campus had actually protected it for the most part.
Greyson imagined the most that local cops had to worry about was folks steaming up windows of their cars in the parking lot behind him. As long as they kept their doors locked, he didn’t imagine the other hunter would bother them. Too much effort, since he had a better gig right now.
Still, the déjà vu was so hard it was like he was riding on rails as he went up the hallway. After about one hundred feet, every third light fixture was working, throwing enough illumination he could put his light away.
Rachel still had a spotlight of death preceding her, but that was her choice.
Concrete floors and walls, like the builders had dropped in a rectangular sewer pipe in sections and then either cut out the spots they wanted to add lights, or skipped the full section and did a three-sided piece instead. He didn’t care enough to go look up the architectural designs later.
Both of them walked in utter silence along a trail worn in the little bit of dust. Greyson could taste the stillness of the air, since there were no blowers down here to move it around. You would get heating and cooling cycles to push it back and forth a little, but that just meant the grit hung where you could chew it when you breathed through your mouth.
Not bad enough for a flu mask, but not all that pleasant. Like being in a desert as the air finally settled from a sand storm.
Dream memory led him to a door. One of those access tunnels for Maintenance to do stuff behind the scenes, like a Hollywood set. He twisted the knob carefully, felt it give under his hand, so he nodded to Rachel and pushed it open.
Cop Magic. That was the story he would stick with. Déjà vu would likely get her to asking uncomfortable questions and she’d end up shooting him.
Not yet, little lady. You can kill me later, after we take Zaborra down. Not until then.
Greyson shook his head in confusion, unable to suppress the strange voices whispering in the back of his brain. They’d gotten worse over the last week, like precognition warning him that all this was coming, but that wasn’t going to stop him from doing his job.
The room beyond was just another hallway, more or less. Wider in this section, where gardeners and cleaners could store gear. Nobody had ever bothered to steal a mop in a bucket, or a garden rake.
Greyson nodded as precognition held true and moved him deeper, glancing back occasionally to make sure his mirror image was still there. She’d get the kill, not him. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but somehow Greyson knew he’d freeze when it came time to shoot Valdis.
It would be like killing himself.
Farther in, back into the less pretty sections of the warren. Past a pair of long-dead bathrooms that had showers for the workers to clean up after their shift. No lights, so they had to rely on pocket flashes to see things, but the dust and grime in there, plus the spider webs, assured Greyson that his target wasn’t here, or hiding things in this space.
Deeper.
They hadn’t stored lawn mowing gear down here. The company had always hired that out, and generally it was a group of Hispanic groundskeepers that would bring a flatbed trailer. Hardest working, most reliable folks on the planet, then or now.
But they could store other things in this basement. Salt for the winter snows. Spare fuel for the backpack blowers that screamed like ban sidhes. Parts. Whatever might be useful.
There was a door.
Satan himself awaited Greyson just on the other side of that barrier. He felt his heart start to finally pound with the mad energy of endgame.
The Hunt.
Thirty years later and his drill sergeant, the second one after he had been accepted into the killing corps, came back to him clear as yesterday.
Breathe deeply. Focus on the killing, and ignore everything else unless it impacts on your calculations for survival. Keep moving. Keep killing. They are more afraid of you are than you are of them.
The only fear you will acknowledge is that of failure.
Yes, Sergeant, he screamed in his head, back on that training ground.
Greyson pushed the door open on perfectly silent hinges and aimed his nerve scrambler at the well-lit emptiness beyond.
Nobody jumped out. None of them would ever move again.
Greyson stepped into the well-lit room and re-holstered his nerve scrambler. The pocket flash went in a moment later and the hand came out with a short stiletto he used more as a tool than a blade.
This was the first place he’d seen down here where every fixture was on. Greyson assumed an alien generator of some sort, since there wasn’t the hum or smell of an old-fashioned human one burning fuel.
The room itself was rectangular. Ceilings that felt low only because the room itself was so deep. That same concrete on all sides, unpainted gray that had stained over the decades and been scuffed with rust from metal shelves moved around.
More metal racks stood in long rows parallel to the room and perpendicular to Greyson standing at the high end. Four rows of them. Junk had been pushed to the back end of the room to make space towards the front.
Ethen counted the bodies on them. Seven, so a new one in the last ten days.
Thank God he had buried Greyson Leigh’s body in a place nobody would ever find it. He could just see Rachel recognizing her dead partner in that group and putting the nerve scrambler to the back of his head.
Kelly Anne Nazarian was there, naked like the rest and deflated to a poor reflection of what she had been, except for the fake breasts added later and made out of silicon.
Valdis Pandev was as well.
An accountant Zaborra had taken when they first arrived and needed to change forms into something human in a hurry. The man’s wife, who had briefly continued on as Ethen’s mask.
Until Zaborra had sent him after Dominguez, and, failing that, Greyson Leigh.
Rachel moved past his frozen self and inspected the corpses.
“Who are these others?” she asked, after identifying the same two Ethen knew.
“Probably on our printout,” Greyson whispered back. “That’s what Phrenic do.”
Rachel lifted Kelly’s corpse just enough to confirm how little the woman weighed. She took pictures of all of them with her handheld and logged them for later. Other crimes to solve tomorrow.
Greyson closed the door behind him and moved deeper into the room, cop eyes catching all the details and cataloging them for value. There was a desk against the left wall, where a supervisor might have once filled out paperwork, perhaps. Two filing cabinets next to it that had once held critical business records, before mice or something had nested inside and eaten everything.
He could smell the ammonia of their pee from here, even with the drawer closed.
Valdis wouldn’t notice it. Greyson Leigh had always had a nose like a blood hound.
Trash in the can next to the desk showed where Valdis ate his dinner in the middle of the night. There was no place to refrigerate things, so he would sleep until mid-morning and then head out for fuel and coffee.
If you weren’t paying rent or for a lazy girlfriend, your expenses went way down, since a Phrenic metabolism generally ran slower than human. Plus, if Valdis had killed recently, he’d be slowly digesting that person’s blood and life.
Still, the man had a tendency towards Chinese food rather than Italian. Good to know.
Rachel joined him, taking more pictures of things.
“Got one that looks fresher than the others,” she said.
Greyson let her lead him to the newest corpse. Four days dead, give or take, but he didn’t know how he knew that.
Punk kid, maybe twenty years old from the thin face and wispy beard that hadn’t grown in yet. Tattoos on neck, hands, and a bunch of other places normally covered with clothes. Nose that had been broken at least twice and not reset correctly either time.
A bully’s face, even twisted in horror and frozen in death.
“This one looks less something,” Rachel offered as they studied the young man.
“The most recently killed,” Greyson said definitively. “Hasn’t been completely drained yet, like Kelly or the others. He’s still feeding on him. See the marks around the eyes?”
She nodded as Greyson touched the spots with the knife.
“Face tentacles go in through the orbital socket, but don’t dislodge the eyeball,” he noted clinically. “Leaves this kind of mark. I’d call it bruising, but that’s not blood accumulated under the skin. Rather, it’s digestive fluid that has worked its way in and is slowly dissolving the flesh.”
“Yuck,” she muttered.
“From the description, your killer had just started to do this to Dominguez when you surprised him,” Greyson continued. “That’s why it was hovering over his face like they had just kissed. They had, in a disgusting, kinky way. But he was starting to feed.”
“I thought you didn’t like Dominguez,” she said abruptly. “Why are you so angry about it?”
“Cop-killer, Rachel,” Greyson turned to look at her now. “Lowest of the low because they’re going after the people who protect others. Even if Carlos was a worthless shit for the most part. He was still a cop.”
“Oh…” she started to say.
Ethen heard the noise before Greyson or Rachel did. Caught the door opening out of the corner of Greyson’s eyes, still silent as a tomb.
Saw Valdis standing there, home way too early, with a white paper bag slowly leaking steam from sealed containers.
Greyson Leigh’s biological reflexes were better than either Phrenic’s, but he wasn’t here anymore. Just a guy pretending to look like Greyson. Sound like him.
Think like him.
Greyson would have been able to draw and shoot in time, but Ethen didn’t have those skills.
Zaborra reacted in utter shock so brief that Ethen might have imagined it. Valdis dropped his dinner and reached into his jacket.
Greyson had been standing too close to Rachel, smelling her hair again. She wasn’t tall enough to see over his shoulder and his body blocked her from watching the scene unfold, or she might have saved him.
Ethen shoved her hard with the fist holding the knife as Valdis pulled out a nerve scrambler and started to point it this way. Greyson reached for his as well, trying to dodge before Zaborra fired.
High noon.
Rachel stumbled and banged her head on one of the metal shelves before going down. Hopefully, he hadn’t just killed her in his rush to get her away from the bolt that was about to kill him.
Valdis aimed almost as fast as Greyson did, because the cop still had that slightest edge, having somehow expected everything to go down this way.
Greyson threw himself to the side as Valdis fired. Pulled his own trigger before he had the target lined up.
Greyson Leigh felt the nerve scrambler take hold of his soul and dip it in acid. Every inch of skin was on fire. Distantly, he saw Valdis go to one knee, a hand holding the door frame, so maybe Greyson had given as well as he had gotten.
Except Greyson fell onto his face now, thrashing on the floor and Valdis had maybe gotten enough of the door in the way to block the bolt from killing him.
Still, both men had lost their pistols when they lost their minds.
Ethen screamed. Greyson didn’t, but he was like that. Calm, cool, tough. Everything Ethen had only ever dreamed of being.
Distantly, he heard Rachel stir. She had also dropped her nerve scrambler. Maybe a shelf unit had fallen on her. He wasn’t sure what he had heard as he tried to save her life. If he hadn’t just killed them both.
Ethen felt his body tear into pieces. His legs stopped being his and thrashed mindlessly. His arms did the same.
Somewhere, his heart stopped beating, and he was seconds from reverting to the base form that Rachel would find.
Hopefully, she would eventually forgive him.
Ethen’s screams faded, but that was him losing control over his own meat, as well as his mind. Darkness closing in.
As he watched, Greyson Leigh turned around in their mind and faced him for the first time since the night Ethen had killed the man.
This wasn’t the face in the mirror anymore. This was the best cop the Hunter Bureau had, just standing there, studying him with a dark, angry face.
Waiting for him to die.
Ethen wailed like a hungry child, because Zaborra would kill him, kill Rachel, and get away.
Ethen had failed.
“I can save us,” Greyson said suddenly. “But you have to let me. You have to let go, Ethen.”
Ethen stopped screaming. Stopped breathing.
Old nightmares washed up corpses and lost dreams onto the beach of his mind.
Deathwalker.
“No,” Greyson shook his head. “I can’t survive without you. But you won’t live without me. Let go, and I can save us from Zaborra. I can save Rachel, and you’ll get all the credit.”
“You will,” Ethen tried to say, but his mind was shutting down. “I’m pretending to be you, because you’re a better man than I am.”
“Today, perhaps,” Greyson nodded. “Tomorrow is your chance to change that. Just let go, Ethen.”
Deathwalker, the greatest monsters of legend. Zombies feeding mindlessly until they failed.
But Ethen had no choice. He could die, or he could surrender.
He could simply stop being Ethen Boli, but hadn’t that been his plan already? Try to continue to live as a better man than he had ever imagined he could be.
Do it, he whispered as the darkness engulfed him.
Greyson awoke from a nightmare so intense, so real, that he feared he might never close his eyes to sleep again.
Less than a second had passed. His nerve scrambler was still bouncing away from him where it had hit the concrete floor. Rachel was still falling, but she might already be out cold from where his push had been too wrong for her to recover.
And Zaborra was on one knee in the doorway, screaming just as mindlessly as Greyson had a moment ago. But that was the fear talking as Zaborra’s eyes focused on him standing up and snarling.
Deathwalker, stepping out of the mist to come for your soul, you son of a bitch.
A nerve scrambler was spinning like a child’s top between them on the cold, gray floor. Greyson staggered towards it as madness finally settled back into the eyes of a Baltic criminal.
Valdis squeezed the door frame and pulled himself upright. He spun drunkenly and lurched into motion away, trying to escape.
The man had a car out there. If Zaborra could just get far enough away, the nerve scrambler would lose its lethal kiss and the man could get into the metal safety of a rolling Faraday cage.
And then go find another victim and vanish forever, now that his former partner had turned on him.
Greyson took two steps and got painfully down on his knees to grab the gun, like the golden egg a magical goose had laid.
His hands didn’t want to work right, but that was because they weren’t really his hands. Weren’t his eyes. Wasn’t even really his soul.
Ethen wasn’t dead, but was no longer the dominant personality in here. Greyson could hear echoes of others that had died and been taken, but he didn’t have time to deal with all the theological implications right now.
Grab the gun. Okay, good.
He managed to get upright and fell towards the door, relying on Ethen’s reflexes to keep the legs moving. Zaborra had vanished, but Greyson could still hear him, feet slapping heavily as if every stride was a challenge.
A race between two killers, both falling-down-drunk. It would be funny if it wasn’t so damned deadly.
Out into the larger hall, hearing the outer door slam.
Greyson focused on all the things that old Drill Sergeant had pounded into him.
“They cannot defeat you, Leigh,” the man had snarled one day. “They can only kill you, and that’s ultimately a recognition of failure on their part. Remember that.”
Yes, Sergeant, Greyson snarled back at the old man’s ghost.
His legs still didn’t want to work, but that was because they were really Ethen’s legs, and he still had to get used to them.
Into the hallway, he listened both ways, looked both ways.
