Kyle...was.
Was what? Was where? Who was Kyle? Why-
Pain shot across the detective’s cerebellum. His vision fractured, like he was staring through a kaleidoscope that was also made out of a smashed window. He could feel himself...but what WAS himself? His thoughts were jumbled together. Just delineating cause and effect was an enormous strain. Was he his thoughts? Or were his thoughts himself? He was still standing, but also lying down, floored by the metaphysical implication of his experience. His guts were heaving, but they had nothing to expel. Time slowed, reversed, sped up and snapped back in a bizarre parody of its natural progression
Around him, the world was splintering. He tried to hold it together. He could hear screaming, but he couldn’t tell who was doing it. It seemed to be coming from far away and right next to his ear. The splintered universe of his vision was getting closer, but simultaneously drawing away at the center as mirrored angles were splitting off into rotating polyhedral tesseracts that folded in on themselves, collapsing down corner by corner, even as they exploded in fresh geometry in the process. He was screaming; Kyle was screaming, but so was someone else. No; not just some-ONE. It was more than one. A legion, an infinity of voices that were his and not his.
Now he was falling. Plunging through a gaping chasm in the fabric of thought. The universe peeled back like yellowing wallpaper, shredding at the edges in a cascade of mandelbrot madness to reveal a horrible gray expanse that buzzed in his teeth like the static of an ancient TV. And there, behind the featureless gray, Kyle saw things squirming, things prowling, things watching in absolute, utter indifference, but also in total engrossment. They were vast; timeless; microscopic even as they breached the cosmic barriers of what small minds called ‘infinity’. His brain gibbered, scratching at walls of its own making as it tried to cage the concepts it beheld with simple language. But it was too much; far too much.
In the midst of his hurtling plunge upwards through the scales of perception, he felt eyes upon him; organs of thought brought to bear by vast minds that stretched the meaning of the term as understood by those who took it upon themselves to define the limits of the physical. The majority were indifferent, sparing barely a glance at his tiny spark of understanding as it fell screaming through the gray space outside the limits of rational thought. But there were others; others that stared on with intent; cruelty, patience, amusement, blind idiocy, primal hunger, even love. A greenish glow flashed by his consciousness as he fell, trailing the sound of callous laughter as it left him feeling like a minnow who’d just been pushed aside by a bored shark. Things followed in its wake, and he flailed with limbs he could not feel to extricate himself from their attention.
Somewhere, he heard Olridge shouting; shrieking, howling. He heard his mother, dead for nearly twenty years, call his name, but not with love. Fighting with all his might, he felt something drift through his memories like a liferaft; an image of one of the pages from the mysterious book. He latched onto it, picturing it in his head. As he did, the pain subsided; order emerged out of chaos. The nightmarish deformation of wholesome reality collapsed slowly down to a single, ultimate viewpoint; a keyhole through which he could see the world-
---
-and he was there, standing in the forensics lab. The walls were the same gray nu-crete just as he had left them, and not the gray that lurked between the cracks of time and space. The light was one color and not a thousand hues for which humans had no name and could not experience with rods and cones. All was sane; dull; prosaic; like if he had never left at all...
...but he had, hadn’t he?
As patterns of thought fell into place, Kyle KNEW, knew like he’d never known anything in his life, that he had just experienced...something; something for which there were no words in any language he had ever seen, read or heard of. Doubtless some had tried pathetically to grasp it, like a fish trying to understand the universe through the curve of it's bowl; privy only to the paucity of knowledge granted to it by it's brutally-limited environment and it's miniscule, biological faculties.
Hands shaking, he realized he was still holding Olridge’s shoulder, the echoes of his scream resounding from his own eardrums. The man was shaking under his grip.
“S-sorry.” Kyle began, “I didn’t-”
Olridge continued to tremble. There was something unnatural about it that made Kyle pause in his apology. He drew closer, suspicion gripping his heart. Then he smelled it: the dank, acid touch of urine, mixed with the stench of digested food and a coppery tang that overrode everything else. He could see red streams beginning to gush from the man’s ears, and pulled quickly, hoping to stop what he knew beyond a doubt was already a done deal. The seizing scientist sagged backwards, toppling to the ground with a thump, his eyes already glassing over, crimson streams pouring from his nose and froth forming on his lips. Kyle jerked his hand away, while his other lashed out to slap the lid of the box closed, it's contents still nestled within.
A touch; that was all it had taken. Once more, Kyle didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. In his brain, another mandala formed, his perceptions and assumptions directed along it like signals over a circuit board. He had touched the [EYE/MIRROR/COMPASS/FULCRUM]; the idea, for that was all it really was, smashed its way through his head like a square peg through a round hole, communicating more than everything at once and forcing his mind to compensate in response, compressing the concept into any word that would fit. It was all of these and none of them, and yet so much more even than that. He knew, somehow, that the first ten pages of the book had been meant to describe this, an effort to convey in some alien, adaptive mode of knowledge imprintation just what the...thing was, and what dangers it represented to any who would try to control it. He also knew he was only safe because he had read that much. Olridge hadn’t read ANY of the book...and had paid for it in the ultimate manner. His brain had tried to grasp the [TRUTH/ULTIMA/PATTERN/MOIETY] without the protective patterns of the book, and had been obliterated through sheer overload. Not even unconsciousness had been fast enough to save him from the raw onslaught of what the thing had shown him… or what it had offered him. He might as well have stuck his finger in a fusebox connected directly to a fusion reactor.
Kyle knew. He knew that what lay in the box was not meant for petty human hands. He knew that if misused, it could reweave the fabric of reality like a cheap recycled shirt. He knew that the patterns he’d seen were meant to unfold over time in the reader’s head, but had been triggered early by the sight of the...thing in untrained hands. He knew everything, at least up until the page he’d stopped on. The pattern shaping his thoughts stopped short, leaving him gasping like a fish, mind grasping and straining at the blank space yet to be filled.
“H-holy fucking shit!” he swore to himself, “Holy sh-shit! Oh shit!” He staggered back and pressed himself to the wall, the knowledge triggering an instinctive surge of adrenaline. He remembered reading somewhere an autobiography of a nuclear physicist, back in the days of atomic weapons. The man had described what it had been like to ride up in an elevator of a testing tower with the assembled chassis of one of those early fissile weapons; what it had been like to share room-space with an object whose power, at the time, blasted the very concept of normality and safety to radioactive ash.
“By the time of that test, we’d all been part of others; all of us.” the man had written, “We’d seen the fireballs through our goggles, felt the heat on our faces. We knew it couldn’t go off, not without the signal from command. But we knew that in the same way a soldier knows a gun can’t kill someone without the pull of a trigger. Even inert, even lifeless, that great block of machinery we rode up with still felt wrong. It was like sharing an elevator with Death himself.”
Kyle sucked in a long, slow breath.
“What the hell did you get in the mail, Nate!?” he whispered to himself, “What the fuck were they thinking!?” In his head, his thoughts raced, frantic to determine a course of action, even as his fear paralyzed his limbs like ice-water. He had to get this thing out of here. He had to put it somewhere that it wouldn’t hurt anyone else. His eyes flicked to the body of Olridge, who was twitching less and less as the neurons of his overloaded brain gave up the ghost and shut down for good. That was another issue; how was he going to explain this!? How could he possibly explain it?! Nobody in their right mind would believe him, and if he hadn’t seen the mandalas of the book, he wouldn’t believe him either. This was an out-of-context problem, for which he and the system he’d operated in all his life was not prepared.
It was about then that the screaming reached his ears. At first Kyle had briefly thought that it was himself, screaming inside his own head. The echoes of that chorus of howling, the prime human reaction to the ultimate revelation, were still echoing around his skull. It wasn’t until the sounds of violence and crashing furniture joined in that the ice in his veins thawed and he moved to act. Something was going on in the station; something loud and violent enough that it could reach even here in the lab with it's largely sound-proof construction. He had to move. Had to get out and get away. But he had to take care of the box.
His brain raced, spurred on by fear. What could he do? He couldn’t just leave the equivalent of a lump of plutonium lying around, especially next to a dead body. He had to take precautions. He might not know everything about the thing inside the unassuming wooden container, but until he could finish reading the book, he had to make sure it didn’t hurt anyone else. Finally an idea struck him, brought on by a distant memory of bomb defusal training grown blurry with age. Moving with the speed of fear, he rushed frantically around the room, yanking open drawers and cabinets until he found one with a tape dispenser. It was scotch tape; hardly suitable given what he had in mind, but it would have to do.
As the chaos outside continued he yanked a strip of the adhesive material out and attached it to the top of the box, doing his best to prevent the latch (which had snapped back into place when he’d closed it) from coming undone while he worked. With manic haste, he encircled the box with layer upon layer of sticky white plastic, stopping only when a particularly loud crash from somewhere above his head suggested that he was running out of time. He fumbled with the dispenser, cutting his thumb on the razor meant to slice it before he managed to cut the tape and finish his work. He used another strip to cover the wound, hands shaking as he did. He knew whatever was going on outside demanded his immediate attention, but at the same time, he refused to leave what amounted to a live nuclear weapon unattended...or at least not without taking precautions.
There was an abrupt shriek from somewhere less than forty feet away, though somehow it sounded much further and much closer at the same time. Kyle finished his work and thrust the box back into the evidence locker, then slammed the lid. He snatched up the book from where it had fallen, checking to ensure none of Olridge’s blood had gotten on it, before subsequently slipping it into his pocket and hurrying for the door. He’d get into trouble for removing evidence from the lab without approval, but between Olridge’s dead body and the sounds coming from outside, he had the feeling that it was unlikely to become an issue any time soon. It was a problem for later; right now, he just had to figure out what was going on.
---
The entrance to the forensics lab was separated from the main station by a small vestibule stocked with gear designed to minimize contamination. As soon as he was through the initial door and inside, Kyle jammed his thumb against the reader until it acknowledged his identity, then jerked open the secondary portal and lunged into the space beyond, nearly slipping on the dust-covers still stretched over his shoes. The space beyond was far darker than it should have been. More than that, it felt unfamiliar and out of place. For all his deductive skills, it took Kyle a moment to notice exactly why this was. When he did, his knees began to shake, as if they had abruptly turned to jelly.
“That’s...no...it’s…” he gibbered, gripping the wall for support. His jaw worked as if chewing the air, his mind unable to come to terms with his situation.
He was in an apartment. It was dusty; rank with the smells of an occupant who never quite found the time to clean everything at once, and who therefore resorted to cleaning one space at a time on a rotating schedule. It was meagerly furnished too, with an aesthetic that could not be called ‘spartan’ only because it had a dusty, patched-up ottoman on one wall to supplement the fold-down bed. Taken out of context, it was hardly a menacing space. For Kyle though, it was the equivalent of stepping out of one nightmare and into another.
It was his apartment; specifically it was his apartment from Sioux City. He knew it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. Moving like a man swimming through molasses, Kyle stepped further into the insane anachronism plucked from his past. With every step, a growing dread slithered through his thoughts, telling him there was more that he wasn’t seeing; details that he was missing. There, on the ottoman; the stack of consolidated bills he’d received like clockwork every month. And there, the stack of dishes in the sink...he had eaten well that evening; takeout from a Vietnamese joint. He could see the empty bowl he had used at the top of the stack, even from here.
“Oh...oh god…” he whimpered. It wasn’t just his apartment. He could tell now, by the details etched into his subconscious, which sprang to the fore with every correlating parallel his eyes fell upon. It was his apartment, as it had been one day before that fateful night that had...had…
The sound of snarling broke through his thoughts. It sounded like an angry dog mixed with a pig shrieking. The door of his old closet cracked abruptly as something slammed into it from the other side. Kyle turned, the noise breaking through his traumatic recall. There was an explosion of splinters as the door gave way. Without pausing to look for the cause, Kyle dashed for the only other exit, located across the space from him. In real life, it would’ve led to his bathroom. Somehow though, against all reason, he knew that would not be the case anymore. Snarls echoed around the room as he yanked the door open; bestial sounds that had little if anything in common with humanity. That they had a sliver of familiarity was all that compelled Kyle to make the mistake of looking back.
It looked...almost human. Almost. But there was something wrong with it. It's skin was diseased and it's figure more akin to that of a badly-drawn stick-figure. It was something out of the uncanny valley, and that was the only label the detective bothered to assign it before slamming the door behind him as it crashed fully into the out-of-place apartment. Part of him expected it all to be like a hallucination. As soon as he closed the door, the room and monster would be gone, and he would be in the Hobbs police headquarters. And to an extent that’s what happened. As he turned around, he found himself back where he expected...but in the wrong context.
“What the...oh god. Oh fucking hell-” he swore.
He was in Hobbs P.D., but instead of standing in the main part of the forensics department, he was in the break-room, standing by the broom closet. Light was shining in the windows that wasn’t sunlight. And there were figures sitting in all the seats; blurry shapes that looked human, but which were too insubstantial to identify. They didn’t move as he scanned over them in a panic. They just sat there, like after-images from a bomb blast caught in three dimensions. It took a moment for the detective’s thoughts to clear up enough that this fact could be registered. It took several more for him to grasp that the snarling he’d heard was no longer audible. Moving like a man no longer sure of the ground beneath his feet, Kyle turned back and gently cracked open the door he’d just slammed, trying hard to ignore the strange blur-people behind him. The door opened easily...but not onto the apartment.
“Oh Jesus Christ…” Kyle swore to himself, as he stared out onto a barren white desert of gray rocks and black, endless sky, occupied by two celestial bodies that should not have been anywhere near each other. This is not happening, Kyle said to himself mentally. I am not staring out onto the surface of Earth’s moon, while in orbit of Jupiter. That would just be silly.
He closed the door. Then he opened it again.
For a moment he felt relief. A series of automated cleaning bots filled charging docks on the walls, along with items for more manual mess-removal on shelves along the back. All was right with the world.
Then a red spot formed on the back wall. Slowly, crimson streamers began to drizzle down from it, like blood from a wound. It trickled onto the floor and began to spread. Kyle slammed the door shut before he could see more.
“What the fuck is going oooonnnn!!” he screamed. In his head, he felt thoughts reaching for a space in the incomplete pattern left by the book. Fine then; he’d read it. The world might be coming to an end, but he’d be damned if he didn’t know why before it happened. Outside the break room, there came the abrupt sound of a shotgun blast, followed by an electronic squeal like an exploding vocoder. Kyle’s hand paused half-way to his pocket. Then again, perhaps now wasn’t the best time. All the same, he still couldn’t remain stationary. Guns meant problems; big ones too. Hobbs P.D. had a minimum-firearms policy, an after-effect of the widespread policing procedure overhauls of the last ten years. Everyone wore tasers, but the use of actual guns required authorization from central dispatch. To deploy special weapons required even more, so if someone was using a shotgun, things had to be very, very bad...or very strange. Right now, Kyle wasn’t sure there was much of a difference.
Moving carefully, he tip-toed around the human after-images, trying to ignore the way that they seemed to move in the corners of his vision, moving with streaking patterns from their seats to swap places like some optical illusion. Eventually the detective reached the door and hauled on it, praying it wouldn’t send him somewhere even worse. To his incredible delight, it brought him back to sanity, and opened onto the main office of the Hobbs P.D.
To his inexpressible terror, this was not an improvement.
The main office was a scene of carnage from some over-the-top mid-century action film. The open plan of the office with it's low-set cubicle walls meant that Kyle had a full view of the devastation incurred by the chaos he’d been hearing. Holes in fabric barriers and bent metal frames had replaced the formerly neat outlining barriers between the workspaces. The main AC unit that served the whole space had somehow come free from the moorings securing it to the open girders above, leaving canted precariously towards the ground. There was blood too, albeit not as much as Kyle might’ve feared. A splash of crimson colored one of the gray desks in the far corner, along with a suggestion of a fallen body. And all of this was outlined by the emergency floodlights, whose stark beams of illumination combined with the flicker of several still somehow-operational overhead bulbs to distressing effect.
Kyle didn’t bother looking more closely at the scene. The resounding boom of the shotgun he’d heard earlier served to focus his thoughts and direct his gaze in a hurried search for the exits. Spotting a green sign to his left, still powered thanks to independent batteries, he made a dash for it. Something crashed through the mangled wall of a cubicle to block his path. It had a hunched posture and a glistening, slimy appearance that made the light play off it in an unpleasant manner.
Before it could turn towards him, Kyle threw himself sideways at it, not bothering to consider the consequences of touching it, and rolled across it's back. He hit the ground beyond with a thump, feeling his already sweaty shirt now damp with whatever coated the thing, which was thrashing from side to side as if unsure of where he was. Tentacles flailed; long ropy cords of flaccid muscle that slashed through the air like whips, and a guttural, mucus-filled exhalation echoed off the walls as the detective found his feet and dashed on, diving through the exit and hoping he wouldn’t face further dislocation.
To his great relief, he found himself in the main lobby of the station. The front doors were separated from the main work area by a wall of desks and bulletproof glass frontage, not that it did much to help against intruders who were already inside the station itself. As he again scanned frantically for help, he was just in time to see a familiar head of curly hair and pair of brown eyes duck back behind an overturned desk.
“Judy!” he cried, “Judy! Where’s Andrew!? Is the armory-” Before he could finish, the shotgun boomed again, followed by a man’s scream and the rattle of automatic weapons. The blood drained from Kyle’s face at that. There were no automatic weapons in the armory, not that he knew of at least. That meant whoever was firing was not police. Without stopping, he vaulted over the desk and nearly into the lap of the shrieking receptionist.
“Judy!” he hissed, grabbing her wrist before she could hit him, “Judy, where’s Andrew! Where’s the chief?”
“I-I don’t kn-know!” the woman stammered, obviously never having expected her day to end up like this. “Th-there was this weird l-light and then everyone was screaming!”
Kyle frowned, before the boom of the shotgun and a series of inhuman howls heralded the fresh crashing of furniture in the main office. The half-Korean shook himself, sweat dripping down his dark-skinned forehead into his eyes. Still holding the receptionist’s hand he peeked over the desk. Figures were moving in the doorway. As he watched, someone made a break for the front door of the station, passing by the open portal. A thick, green pseudopod lashed out, aiming for his leg and tripping him. Luckily that was all it managed, and the man took cover behind a different piece of furniture rather than push his luck.
“Fuck.” Kyle swore. His mind, still trying to handle everything that was going on, adjusted it's priorities on the fly. It didn’t take a genius or even having read the entirety of the mysterious book for him to work out that Olridge’s ill-planned interaction with the thing in the box was responsible for all of this. What had that letter from Nate’s apartment said?
“A dreamer without knowledge will walk in dark places…”
“What?” Judy whimpered, looking at him like he was crazy. Kyle realized he’d said the line out loud. Fighting to remember his training, he focused on her.
“Whatever’s going on here, it’s not directed at us...least I don’t think it is. I think we’re just caught in the middle.” he said hurriedly, trying to sound reassuring.
“Hey, hey!” hissed a voice nearby. Kyle turned and saw another familiar face poking out from under a desk a dozen feet away.
“What is it Brahm?” snapped the detective, making the slight Indian man recoil slightly. Kyle quickly reigned in his temper and tried again though, struggling to keep his voice soft. “What?”
“You’re looking for Andy?” the man inquired in his musical accent. Kyle shook his head.
“I need whoever has access to the armory. I don’t have my personal badge-comm on me at the moment and I need a gun!”
“What do you mean you don’t have it on you!?” Brahm replied, now looking just as annoyed as Kyle, before a fresh rattle of weapons fire cut off his irritated response. He shook his head, face pale. “Look, Nahum has a passkey! He’s on armory duty this month. What the fucking hell is going on!?”
The last question was tacked onto the statement with an almost accusatory tone, but Kyle ignored it. He had bigger problems.
“Find an empty room or some place with nu-crete walls. Better yet, get outside if you can. There’s an emergency exit through the back, if it’s not blocked. Get away from here, then try to regroup. You know the drills.” Kyle said, then rose, moving towards a set of stairs set at the rear of the lobby, which led up to the second floor and the armory. The building’s planners had assumed that anyone entering the building with malicious intent would come through the front, and thus high ground would be favorable to any defenders. Of course, Kyle seriously doubted they had really thought anyone would try something so bold out in the Projects, but then it was hardly their fault for not factoring a breakdown of reality (or whatever was going on) into the equation.
“What about you?” Judy asked. Kyle looked over at her.
“I’m going to get a gun. After that...I don’t know. There’s something in the lab I need to take care of.”
“Hey!” hissed Brahm from his spot, causing the detective’s gaze to whip around with an annoyed glare.
“What!?”
“Good luck!” the man replied, just as the popping of pistol fire cut through the air and the clatter of falling metal blended together with a series of shrieks that sounded like they’d been pulled from a nature documentary on primates. Kyle couldn’t keep a small sardonic smirk from creeping across his face the well-wishes, so instead he hid it by creeping towards the stairs.
“Alright;” he said when he was within ten feet or so, “one...two...THREE!”
---
Amazingly, Kyle managed to make it to the first landing unmolested, albeit just in time. Beneath him, he could already hear the sounds of fighting spilling out into the main lobby. Sparing a thought for Judy and the rest, he prayed to whoever was listening that they’d get out before things got even more crazy than they already were. Of course, there was no guarantee that the emergency exit he’d told them to go for wouldn’t drop them into deep space, so his hopes were not exactly high. He told himself it was all he could do, and pushed on, taking the remaining steps three at a time until the double doors of the upper level were in front of him.
He hesitated only for a moment, his thoughts about the newfound untrustworthiness of doors freezing his limbs in place, until a fresh bout of screaming, bleating and gunfire from downstairs convinced him there was no other option. Throwing caution to the wind, he barged through, nearly colliding with someone in the dark space beyond. There was a yelp of surprise, and it took Kyle a moment to realize it had not come from him.
“Sorry!” the detective gasped, but didn’t bother to say more. Instead he ignored the offended sounds and frightened demands of his erstwhile obstacle and hurried on, dashing past rows of darkened offices lit only by slits of gray light through the adjustable integrated blinds of their windows. Some of the offices had people in them, but Kyle didn’t stop to look. Instead he kept running, grateful that the mayhem seemed at least partially contained to the lower floors. With the danger now temporarily behind him however, he felt his mental defenses waver, threatening to unleash the river of questions dammed up inside by the need to confront the present hazards of his situation.
Was Nat okay? Was Nate? Where was everyone? What was going on? How was this even possible? Were there even any rules? Who had been shooting downstairs? How was the building doing this!? How did he get out!?! What would he do once he was armed?!? The torrent of unknowns threatened to drown him as he ran on, struggling to cope with the madness surrounding him. He almost tripped over his own feet, and slowed down in an effort to catch his breath.
“Take it easy man.” he muttered to himself, “Take it easy.” However, no matter how much he said it, he felt the tension in his body growing, while the questions continued to pour in. How had he ended up in that room after leaving the lab? How was he going to get out of here? What good was one gun going to do against whatever was going on in the main office? The cracks in his mental bastions multiplied by the second, and it was only when he reached the hallway to the part of the building where Nahum’s office resided that the deluge was temporarily blotted out by a fresh dose of madness.
The hall itself looked perfectly normal, except for the fact that what should’ve been an even floor was now a descending slope at about sixty degrees. It wasn’t as though the hallway was damaged; it was simply...mirrored. It was like looking at two images of the same space, branching off from each other where they met the edge of a pool of water; one above, and one below. It didn’t help that the lights in the paired passages were still bright and active, in complete contradiction of the outages Kyle had seen affecting the rest of the building so far. The detective’s brain struggled to even make sense of the geometry involved. His spatial awareness told him it should not be possible, that there simply wasn’t enough room in the building for this, but his eyes didn’t care. A foul smell wafted down both halls, and a doubled audial commotion of people in panic-mode rang down the length of each. For a moment, Kyle froze, unsure of what to do. He looked left, then right, hoping the ergonomic signs that had led him this far would provide an alternate route. No such luck.
“Fucking Christ, what is wrong with this day!?” he snarled under his breath. He halted in his plan to further vent his frustration however when he noticed a figure lying at the edge of the light on the far end of the ‘lower’ hallway. Before he could voice a call of concern though, the roughly person-shaped blotch of shadow split, revealing itself as two separate entities, one of which was standing up. As it straightened and stepped back, it revealed the still motionless form beneath it as Nahum, his neck at an odd angle between the base of the wall and the floor, with his chest marked by what looked like puncture wounds of the sort you got when someone tried to use a steel rebar to reinforce your ribcage.
“Shit-” Kyle hissed between clenched teeth before his gaze was again distracted. The looming shadow turned around, and the detective felt his neck-hairs prick up in an extremely uncomfortable manner as the stranger’s face was revealed. There was only a second or two for Kyle to take in the details of that visage, but what he saw left him unsettled for reasons he couldn’t rightly name. The best his frazzled brain could come up with was that it was his eyes. They flickered with amusement in the low illumination at the end of the passage like emeralds in candle-light, full of mischief that was further enhanced by the slight uptick of his lips in one corner, giving him a smirk that bespoke wry humor and dark intent.
“Is this yours?”
Time froze for Kyle as the sly-looking figure held up a lanyard with an attached plastic rectangle. He jiggled it slightly, as if mocking Kyle, before stepping sideways and out of view. As soon he was gone, Kyle felt the tension in him uncoil in a singular lunge forwards, sending him slipping and stumbling down the lower passage, with whatever doubts he had about the safety of the insane architecture dissolving into the bright red curtain of anger suddenly draped over his thoughts. Up until then, he’d been scared and confused. Now though, he had an object of malevolence to focus on, As he hurtled closer, he saw Nahum’s corpse still had it’s taser poking out from an under-arm holster. He skidded to a halt at the hall’s end and crouched, planning to use it on the emerald-eyed little troll who had made off with the officer’s access card for the armory. He’d teach that little shit to-
A boot came out of the corner of his vision and hit him in the chest, catapulting him onto his back and sending the taser flying out of his grip. He also felt something slide out of his pocket and hit the floor as he landed, caught trying too late to twist aside and roll with the blow. The edges of his vision blurred red, memories of men with baseball bats wearing cheap AR goggles clouding his consciousness, but he retained enough self control to roll to the left as a second kick flew at him. His ribs ached, but there was no broken-glass grinding sensation to suggest any of them had broken, which was a plus. He rolled again, then lashed out with one arm to catch the incoming foot. Then he pulled.
There was a gurgling muffled shriek of frustration followed by the thump of an overbalanced body. Hands scrambled against carpeting as victim and attacker sought to right themselves. As luck would have it, they managed to break even, coming face to face in a half-crouch. Kyle stared in bewilderment at the face of his ambusher, even as he raised his fists into a fighting stance, too late to react to the mad tackle that was launched in response.
“MRRGGhFFFRGGR!!” screamed Spencer through the gauze and foam in his jaw. Apparently the pain in his face was not enough to keep him docile, given the ferocity with which he assaulted Kyle. He swung at the detective’s head with a clumsy right hook, but Kyle arched his back with no small effort and managed to upset the swing and the brutish trouble-maker in one swift motion. He flopped forwards, his knees now on the detective’s chest, and Kyle put in a kidney shot to encourage some sideways motion. The man bellowed with fury, but rolled off, before rolling again to avoid an elbow from Kyle aimed at his head.
“How the fffuck did you get out of your cell!!?” snarled the detective, panting. The tackle had nearly knocked the wind out of him. It was pure luck he’d been able to resist the worst of the impact. Spencer was an uncoordinated thug, but he had to have at least an extra ten or fifteen pounds of raw muscle on him by comparison, which gave him the upper hand in a brawl. Kyle countered by moving to grapple, as both combatants rose again. Someone shouted from nearby in one of the darkened offices, but neither looked away. Spencer feinted for another lunge, but then dodged right, leaping for the taser. Kyle was ready though and kicked at the back of his knee. The man toppled with a strangled howl, and the detective was on him in a flash, locking his left side in an armbar.
“You have the right to remain silent-” Kyle began, tightening the pressure on the joint in lieu of handcuffs.
“SHHGG UMFFFF, FRRGGR!!” screamed the other man through his clogged mouth. His free hand switched between trying to lash backwards at Kyle and scrabbling for the grip of the taser.
“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law!” Kyle continued, looking back now that his opponent was partially subdued. The hallway was empty, bearing no sign of the mysterious trouble-maker who had absconded with the passcard. Well, shit.
Abruptly there was another shout, followed by a scream from the opposite direction. Kyle whipped his head around in time to see a door burst open on one side of the passage and expel a man in a dress shirt with three growing red lines across the front. He fell back, crashing into the opposite wall, just as the frame of the door bulged and something crashed through, shrugging its way past the warped aperture like it was made of bubblegum. In the flickering lights, the detective saw the glint of metal, but also the rubbery, glistening texture of torn and warped flesh. A heavy clanking accompanied the thing’s movements, like some industrial-age machine on the move, combined with the repulsive sound of shredding skin. It reached out an arm, or was it a gun? In the chaos of fear, Kyle couldn’t tell the difference. It was all one sickly abomination, distorted and incomplete, yet horribly alive.
There was a flash and a boom like a cannon firing. Plaster, dust and nu-crete flew everywhere. More doors opened ahead and behind as people began to flee their offices. Kyle lurched back up, loosening his grip on Spencer lest he be trampled. Then he spotted the book, lying open, pages fanned out and suspended in the middle of the hall. He rushed to retrieve it, but as soon as his fingers closed on it, a hand caught the back of his belt and jerked. Spencer, bending his body like a hooked salmon, had resumed his attack.. Kyle gripped the book like a lifeline, keeping it shut for fear of damaging it, while trying to use the other to push the mad hooligan off him.
“Fuck off!” he shouted, before fingers closed on his windpipe. In panic he swung the hand with the book at Spencer, but as it turned out, he didn’t need to. One of the fleeing officers punched Spencer in the side of the head and tried to drag him off, before another boom and crash of masonry caused him to resume his flight. Spencer yowled and fell sideways, crashing into a door and knocking it open. Kyle managed to regain his feet just in time to see the abomination lurch forwards, a fleshy flapping noise accompanying the metallic clank of it's footsteps.
“Fuck!” he swore, and turned to run, before noticing the sign next to the door Spencer had fallen through. It was a stairwell. Kyle opened his mouth to laugh, but stopped when he looked back up the hall. In the midst of the insane light-show, the nightmare machine thing was lumbering down the hall. Office dwellers fled in either direction from it, forcing Kyle to push up against the wall to dodge them. The monster swiped at one of them with the jerky motions of a thing that combined all the worst qualities of zombie and robot, limbs snapping into position with clicks and grunts of pain. As it entered into the glow of one of one of the emergency flood-lamps, Kyle saw it's milky rotten eyes swivel about in it's dessicated face. He felt it as they settled on him, sensing somehow that it was looking for-
“Uhhhrrrgg…” it moaned, raising it's cannon-arm. Kyle’s eyes widened.
“Oh shit!” the detective swore, and threw himself after Spencer.
---
Spencer Mills had been having a bad day so far. For starters, he’d woken up with a murderous hangover, a fact compounded by the reality that he’d run out of oxy-pills he used to take the edge off in such situations. In hindsight, maybe going drinking with the boys before a work-day hadn’t been the best plan. It was just a mercy that the auto sales lot where he worked had cancelled his schedule for the day, allowing him to hit the drugstore without worrying about getting yelled at by his anal-retentive manager. Of course that hadn’t stopped the bastard from sending him a scathing work performance review, which of course just had to be the second thing to turn up in his inbox when he’d checked. The third thing had been an arrogant retort from that whore Martinez stating the next time he made a pass at her, she’d report him for workplace harassment. He’d sneered at all three messages, gnashed his teeth, then set out to get some fresh happy-pills from the nearest Rite Aid when he’d seen that fucking twink in the basketball court.
It had only gotten shittier from there.
Even now, he wasn’t sure what had compelled him to stop and get out of the car. Perhaps it was just curiosity, or more likely the idea of petty revenge on someone who knew that bitch dyke that had gotten him thrown in the drunk tank three months back. Yeah, probably the latter, truth be told. Spencer didn’t have the best memory for a lot of things, but when it came to people who had screwed him over, he had perfect fucking recall. The guy was in obvious pain, and he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to rub salt in the fucking wound even if it was just verbally. Then he’d...done something. Exactly what, he had no idea, but whatever it had been, it’d fucking hurt like hell and cost him most of his pearly whites. Enraged, fuelled by agony and spite, he’d gone for his .45, which he kept under the seat of his auto in case of emergencies. Even with his gums spitting gore and blood down the front of his shirt, he’d sworn he’d destroy the little shit if it was the last thing he did.
As it turned out the world had other ideas, and he’d been cornered by two cops before ever catching up to the freak. Even in his pained, furious and still hungover state, Spencer hadn’t been crazy enough to take on two uniforms. The blues might not be as trigger-happy as they were in his granddad’s day, but the law still came down on you extra-heavy if you killed one of them. From there, he’d been ferried to a cell at HQ, still fuming even as wounds were treated. He knew they’d probably throw the book at him for the unregistered gun, but his pal Dempsey had gotten him out of worse spots before. All he had to do was wait, then find out where that skinny fuck lived and teach him a lesson.
But once more, like a sugar-crazed gremlin, the universe had thrown a wrench into his plans. Not long after the detective had left the cell block, the lights had gone out, seemingly in the entire building. Screaming had followed; panicked, irrational screaming of the sort he hadn’t heard since his youth in Springfield, and he’d rattled the bars, demanding as best he could with his foam-packed face to be let out. Ironically it had worked, the bars sliding aside to admit him with a groaning whir of hidden electric motors. Stranger still, nobody had opposed him as he’d exited the cell block, which was completely open, with both gates of the entry vestibule swung wide to admit him.
Neither of the other two people in the cell block had dared move to follow, so he’d left them there. Little did he suspect he’d come to envy them their cowardice when the first door he’d opened had nearly dropped him into an endless black void. From there it’d only gotten stranger. It seemed like the whole station had turned into a nightmare funhouse, populated with a mix of normal people and...other things. He’d done his best to avoid both and try to find an exit, but by the time he’d seen that bastard Kyle, he’d been ready to lose hope. His aim in attacking had been to get a hold of the taser the detective had been reaching for, in the hopes he could use it to force someone to lead him to a way out.
Once again, though, things had not gone according to plan. Groaning, growling and spitting with rage, he pulled himself off the concrete floor of the room that had occupied the far side of the door he’d fallen through. At first he was worried the room was spinning, but after a few moments realized it was just his head. Somebody had punched him, exacerbating the pain in his skull yet again. It had already felt like there was a drum solo going on between his ears. Now there was bass to go with it in the form of fresh bruises above his right ear. Spencer swore, spraying bloody spittle out of the gauze and bleed-foam protecting his ruined gums. Just as he did, the door he’d come through swung open with a crash, catapulting his erstwhile target through in a shower of dust and debris.
“FFGGH!!” he shouted, raising a hand to protect his eyes, his other slipping and smacking into a metal object set atop the table. It was about the size and shape of an old toolbox, complete with a handle that made it almost viable as a swinging weapon...almost. Thinking with his fists, Spencer grabbed the container as the detective groaned and pushed himself upright. For a moment he fumbled, unsure of how to employ his new instrument of revenge; then his target coughed and threw forethought to the wind and charged.
“Oh shit, not here agai-OOF!” The detective swore as the short side of the evidence locker slammed into his ribs, hurling him against the door they’d both entered by, overwhelming it's pneumatic hinge and pushing it the rest of the way shut just as a shadow filled the gap near the frame. Spencer pushed, hoping to crack some ribs. He was so angry he could barely think. The universe wanted to screw with him? Fine! He’d teach it a lesson, just like everyone else who’d ever messed with him. Kyle wheezed, and the salesman drew back his weapon to thrust again. Then pain shot through his ankle and he stumbled sideways.
“Fuck!” the detective spat, “Stay down, asshole!!” Spencer didn’t stay down. He swung at Kyle’s head, trying to use the obtuse container like a baseball bat. He missed, and the box crashed into the wall, slipping from his grip. The box fell, tumbling open as it did and spilling its contents across the floor, apparently having been left unlatched. “Sonuva...should’ve used a padlOCK!”
Kyle swiped again, his enemy yelling with frustration as he sprayed blood and foam with his own enraged curses. He’d grabbed the first thing to hand from the metal case’s contents; some sort of wooden box wrapped in tape. The sight of it seemed to frighten his opponent, and he leaned into his onslaught, bringing the new weapon down again and again overhand, bashing against his foe’s upraised arms. One of his hands was still clutching that weird book, the one with the pictures Spencer had briefly glimpsed during their tussle in the hallway. The detective held onto it in a vice-grip, refusing to let go even to defend himself from Spencer’s attack.
“FFRRG YFFFFF!!!” Spencer shrieked, swinging one more time. There was a crack as something fractured, and Kyle yelled. Before the enraged salesman could savor his triumph though, the door abruptly gave way behind the detective, falling backwards out of it's frame, hinges snapping and pneumatic lever tearing free as man and metal collapsed and slid down a series of steps, coming to rest on fog-smothered pavement.
“Fucking sonuva-, you BASTARD!” the detective swore, clutching his forearm even as he still gripped the book. His eyes were red, though that might’ve been from the wound where the corner of the box had nicked his temple. Spencer didn’t stop to make sense of the situation. Instead he did what his anger told him to: he lunged-
-right onto something soft. It took a moment of tangling limbs and tearing cloth before Spencer realized that once again, reality had screwed him. He was lying on a bed; his own to be exact. The sheets stank of stale sweat and booze, and were patterned with a mess of colors, the better to hide the stains he’d never been able to remove. Said bed was located in the same apartment he’d left that morning, with the door at the foot of the bed standing open. Through the tiny window in the cramped space, gray light spilled onto the darkened chamber. Spencer’s head whipped back and forth, eyes wide with anger and fear.
“Whh...hff? Sff...thh fff!?!”
No answers came to his question, which was just as well because he wasn’t sure what he’d been trying to ask. He stood up cautiously, taking in the tiny bedroom. The blank walls, the lone chest of drawers, the little bed; all was just as it had been that morning, minus the ripped sheets. Spencer didn’t understand. He knew it hadn’t been a dream; that could not have been a hallucination. His aching jaw and ringing skull attested to that much. Slowly, his gaze drifted to a lump under the tattered and wrinkled cloth, now half-hidden under a cast-aside pillow.
“Hfff…” was all he had to say. Well, if the universe had already gone insane, then there was no rule that said he had to adhere to the arbitrary rules of society. So he’d assaulted a police officer. It wouldn’t be the first time, or even the second. What was it his stupid therapist was always telling him? “Go with the flow and you’ll be rewarded?” Something like that. To be honest he never paid attention during their sessions. He only went because it was court-mandated. He grabbed the strange object he’d battered Kyle with and held it up in the dim light of the window-slit. It looked valuable, what with the polished wood and silver insets. There was an engraving on the top too under all the tape. Definitely worth pawning if he could find a-
He paused, both because he realized that if things were already going to hell out there, then there wasn’t going to be much in the way of a market for his ill-gotten goods, and because of words written on one of the strips of tape encircling the box.
“Mmf drff yff? Thff ffck?” he mumbled to himself, wincing as his jaw spiked with pain. He’d need to go get some meds for that later. If the police station was representative of the reality taking shape out there, he could probably just take the damn things with no one the wiser.
A brief fit of nervousness prompted him to limp out of his bedroom and across the tiny living space beyond to his front door. When it operated as advertised, revealing only the empty hall beyond, he breathed a small sigh of relief. Well, maybe it was just the police station after all. He’d find out in a bit. But first he was going to slice the tape off this stupid thing and find out what was inside. If someone was going to be juvenile enough to dare him to open it, then he was going to do what came naturally and show them who was boss. Though he did feel curious about where they’d gotten the green ink. That had to have been expensive given how much the stuff cost these days...
He snorted, then swore as his sinuses sprayed bloody phlegm. Fuck, that hurt. Yeah, he’d look inside this stupid thing; then it was off to get pain pills. And after that...after that he’d see. Take a look around the town, see what was up while the blues dealt with whatever the fuck was wrong with their headquarters. Maybe he’d even get a chance to pay back that fucking skinny twerp if he could find him. Idly, a line from an old film he’d seen with his father, back when the old shit had still pretended like he cared about him. “Life’s like a box of chocolates. Ya never know what you’re gonna get.” He sneered at the tape-wrapped box, then went to his kitchenette to find a knife.
Yeah...perhaps today wouldn’t be completely awful after all.
