Broken Monsters (36 page)

Gabi dismisses
the second floor at a glance. Another sprawling space filled with garbage and bricks, but no indication of people. The third floor is a maze of offices, the windows smashed in between, stains across the floor. But when she emerges onto the fourth floor, she's confronted with a wall of newspapers piled high to the ceiling, hardened with damp, like papier-mâché. She's seen rat's nests like this. There is a narrow track between the walls of paper, just wide enough to walk through. It turns sharply to the left. This is madness. How long has he been doing this? How many bodies
are
there? Somewhere ahead, she can make out muffled voices. Male. Not her daughter. Maybe Marcus. There
might
be another entrance. She's seen enough of the factory to establish that there's a (nonfunctioning) elevator on the other side of the building, and there may be another stairwell close to it. But there's no time for that, and there is no sign of Layla.

She tries the radio again because routine is all she has right now. “Dispatch. I'm on the fourth floor. Could be fifth, depending where you start from. There's a wall of newspapers like a maze. Suspect is somewhere beyond it. I'm going in. Suspect may have my daughter hostage, or she may be hiding somewhere in the building.” Please let her be hiding. Let her be safe.

The radio crackles back uselessly.

She wipes her hand on her pants, sweaty, even in the cold, readjusts her grip on the gun and moves along the tunnel of congealed paper, working her way through as it branches, forcing her to choose a path. She tries to follow the voices, but the paper swallows up the sound. It smells terrible, acrid and wet rot. The walls rustle and sometimes bulge out as if there are things scuttling between them, or trying to dig their way through. Rats and cockroaches. She keeps right. Right, right, right, please get it right.

Something swoops over her head, a flash of white, dry and rustling. She ducks instinctively and it takes everything she has not to open fire on the pages fluttering past. Loose pages in the wind. That's all. Get a hold of yourself, she thinks angrily, pushing away the thought that there's no wind.

She turns left again and comes to the center of the maze—and finds Marcus.

She only knows him by his name tag.

He is wired to one of the big industrial pillars, his arms outstretched in benediction, wearing a spiky halo of beams as if in a medieval painting, gold wires stuck into his scalp. One palm has been painted with a sheaf of barley. The other has a sun. Religious symbols, she remembers from one of Layla's school projects. Life and death and rebirth. There are wooden angel wings attached to his back, painted to look like flames, red and yellow, and a giant clay egg split open at his feet as if he has hatched out of it, amid a messy nest of kindling.

She focuses on these details because she can't bear to look at his face. Where his face should be. Her chest is so tight she can hardly breathe.

Oh, Sparkles.

His face is gone, sheared clean off, and in the center, where his nose and mouth and eyes should be, is an ornately carved wooden door embedded in his skull, with tiny gold hinges. She can't open it. She won't.

She doesn't want to know what might be inside.

She nearly succumbs to the guilt that takes her down at the knees. But she has to find Layla. Her terror for her daughter is a dark engine propelling her forward, even past this.

I'll come back for you, Marcus, she promises, and reels back into the labyrinth.

Jonno has
his back against the wall, holding his phone out in front of him like it's a weapon. Maybe it is.

“I'm filming this! You can't hurt me because the whole fucking world will see it. It'll be evidence. It's live, do you understand? It's streaming. People can see this right now, and they're phoning the police
right now
.” Assuming this is even getting out of the building. He glances at his signal. Yep. 4G. Two bars. Going out live—and he's alive. So far.

“I didn't understand. I thought it would be enough. I thought I could do it on my own.” The man looks down at his callused palms, the thick fingers. “With these hands, with the tools Clayton had, the things he knew. It didn't work.”

“What the actual fuck are you talking about? You killed people and turned them into freak shows.” Easy, Jonno thinks, don't get him riled. Next thing you know, he turns you into a freak show too.

The Amazing Heartless Man.
Did you forget your dead girlfriend? How her tattoo came to life and ripped her to pieces? Hope you got
that
on camera.

He can't think about that now. He can't even look at her. He can't, or he will lose his shit, and he is hanging on by a very fine thread as it is. Calm down. Think veteran war reporter. This is Charlie Manson right here, and he has the exclusive, and he just needs to hold it together until the cops come.

Clayton looks terribly sad. “They weren't supposed to die. Nothing should die. They were supposed to
change
.”

“So the kid you cut in half was supposed to become a happy little deer and go skipping around the forest?”

“Yes,” Clayton says with the simple conviction of the believer. Jonno laughs, a high-pitched sound he cuts off in his throat because it's such a giveaway of how fucking terrified he is. He's dealing with a madman. An actual madman. Which means he has to keep him talking, because he is totally unpredictable. Jesus. Put that on your CV. Career highlights: playing Scheherazade to a serial killer.

Jonno takes a breath, clutching his own wrist to stop his hand from shaking. He goes for smooth, gets choked instead. “Please explain it to me. I want to understand.” He can't stop himself from adding, “Just don't hurt me.”

“I opened them up to let the dreams out, and then I made them into the dreams they wanted. That should have been enough.”

“But it wasn't.”

“Everything is so
physical
. I wanted to get at the meaning. You can feel it, can't you? Underneath.”

“Yes. Of course.” He's hardly going to disagree.

“There are places that are borders. Where something was but isn't anymore, and other things can surface.”

Jonno keeps his eyes on the screen so that he is not tempted to let his gaze slide away to Jen. It's easier. The distance through the lens. One step removed.

“It's all coming through. It's because of you.”

“What?” Jonno rubs his chest, suddenly afraid his own ribcage is about to burst open. He doesn't even have any tattoos, he thinks wildly.

“Art needs an audience,” the killer says, as if he's the first guy to ever think of this. “It's like a fire. It needs to catch in the imagination if it wants to live.” He looks almost happy. “Can't you see?”

“Why don't you tell me about it?” Jonno manages, not seeing at all. Trying, in fact, not to see anything outside that glowing square in his hand.

Oh but you have an inkling, don't you, boychick? About giving him exactly what he wants.

Clayton points to the camera phone. “
They
see.”

Jonno staggers. Who would have thought two little words could have such weight?

“The police hid the bodies,” Clayton continues. “They knew what would happen if they let people see.”

“What would happen?”

“It would spread. The world would break. It would be remade. But no one saw.”

“Until I put the videos online.” He should turn the camera off. Right now. Cut him off cold. But won't that make him mad, and even more likely to chop him up and turn him into a chandelier? Serial killers like attention. Just keep giving him attention. Even if that makes you an accomplice to his fucked-up fantasies. Isn't that just what mainstream media does? At least he's also getting a confession. He's helping. Plus he's keeping himself alive.

“I've seen other doors around the city. I didn't draw them,” Clayton marvels. “But they're there.”

“I did a report on it. It's become a thing. You're a global trendsetter. You're like the Banksy of serial killers!” Keep it together. “So is something going to come through all those doors?”

“You did. And so did she. But they're just cracks in the surface.” He smiles at him, with love, Jonno thinks, horrified. “I know what you dream.”

“Is that so?” he squeaks.

This is the part where he cuts off your head and makes it into a lovely hat.

“It's all exposed, the currents that run through the world.” Clayton kneels down next to Jen, forcing Jonno to bring her into frame. He can't look away. Staring into the abyss.

“If you kill me, I can't film it,” he says, weakly.

“I'm going to give you what you want.” Clayton reaches into his pocket, then stretches out a hand to Jonno. There's something in it. Oh no. No.

“What
is
that?” Jonno screams. “I don't
want
that.”

“It's what you dream. Clayton dreamed it, too,” the killer says, offering it to him.

It's a baby's shoe. A little red sneaker, with a Spiderman decal. The size of a lime. “A legacy.”

Gabriella can
hear voices through the newspaper maze, as she twists away from Marcus toward the other side.

“Get it away from me!” she hears Jonno yell. Close. Very close. “Please. I don't want it.”

“I know you do,” Clayton says. She recognizes his voice from the brief video clip.

She pokes her head out, just enough to get a glance at the room. The labyrinth opens onto a pillared space, fractured light leaking around the edges of blackened windows. She takes in three figures. The killer, the blogger, a woman with braids prone on the ground—the pretty DJ who is never going to bring the house down again, by the way her chest is ripped open. Bags of garbage, newspaper stacks, like columns. They're looking the other way from her, which gives her another second to take it in. Entrances, exits, anyone else in the room. Where the hell is Layla?

Jonno Haim is hunched over himself, wielding his cell phone at Clayton Broom like it's a cross against a vampire.

Gabi steps out, her gun steady in both hands. “Detroit Police!” she says in a voice that brooks no argument. “Stay where you are. Where is my daughter?”

Clayton turns to her and for a moment, just a moment, his whole face distorts. When she was ten years old, her father, the big fisherman, showed her the quickest way to kill an octopus. You reach in and you turn it inside out, just like that. Clayton's face does that—inverts itself.

“All the dreamers are here,” he says.

She shoots him.

The bullet rips through his shoulder and spins Clayton into one of the pillars of newspaper. He sags against it, blood soaking into the paper.

“I'm going to ask you again. Where the fuck is my daughter?”

Jonno scrambles to his feet, closing his hand tight on whatever it is he's holding. He swings the phone in her direction. “You're here. Thank God, you're here.”

“Are you
filming
this?” Gabi yells at him, keeping her gun trained on Clayton, who has his head down, gripping his arm, still facing the other direction. “What is wrong with you?”

“I have to,” he whines. “He made me. The eyeballs.”

“Don't get in my way and stop filming,” she snaps at the idiot blogger. “Clayton! Where is my daughter? I'll shoot you again. I'll keep shooting you until I run out of ammo. But not one wound will be fatal. You will be in agony, but you won't die. I'll keep you here until you tell me.”

Something flickers in his eyes. Fear. Finally. “I don't know,” he says, teeth gritted against the pain. “I think she might be here. She's one of the open ones. I can't control what they've brought with them.”

“Not good enough.” She is not thinking about the words, about
opening
,
about what that might mean.

Jonno steps back to get both of them in the frame, she realizes. “Cut it out!” she screams at him, and it takes everything in her not to shoot him in the shoulder too, if only to make him stop filming.

Clayton turns slowly from the pillar, his injured arm dangling. His face is back to normal. If it was ever otherwise. His skin is gray and saggy, his shorn white hair sticking up, but he looks at her with hope. “Shoot me. Let it out. I've tried to hold it in so long, but it doesn't belong to me. Nothing belongs to any of us.”

“Mom, watch out!” Layla yelps and Gabi turns to see her daughter and a big man, shivering and bleeding, emerging from the newspaper maze, clinging to each other. The relief knocks the breath out of her. Alive.

And then she feels someone—Clayton—grab her ankle. Somehow, in that split second, he has crossed the room and caught hold of her. She fires, but the bullet goes wide, skimming one of the pillars and punching through the blacked-out window. It explodes in a spray of glass, which isn't right, she thinks with odd detachment, a bullet should punch through the glass, leave a perfect splintered hole. But then he yanks her right off her feet. The back of her head hits the concrete with the bright smack of a well-hit baseball. She gasps with pain, black stars behind her eyes.

All her bones go limp and she realizes she's let go of the gun. She twists to grab at it as he drags her across the floor and manages to snag it with a fingertip. She sees her daughter moving. “No, Layla! Run. Run as fast as you can. Get out!” Maybe she only thinks the words because her daughter is not running.

“You can feel it,” Clayton says, not to her, but to Layla. “It's open in you.”

Gabi fumbles at her Smith & Wesson, gets a grip on the barrel and turns it around so she's got the handle. She flips onto her back and braces her elbows against her ribs, and as he hauls her in, like the goddamn catch of the day, she levels the gun and blows his fucking brains out. Which is when everything
really
goes to hell.