Enter the Janitor (The Cleaners) (Volume 1) (23 page)
Read Enter the Janitor (The Cleaners) (Volume 1) Online
Authors: Josh Vogt
“I don’t have to listen to this.” Patty pushed off the wall and headed for the cave entrance.
Sydney sighed as he watched her go. “A pity to see those so thoroughly indoctrinated that they refuse to hear any truth but that which they desperately cling to.”
“As if the same couldn’t be said of you, Mr. Oblivion-or-Bust.”
“Ah, but I once saw all this with a mindset similar to hers.”
“How?”
“I’ve been here before.” At her surprised expression, he clarified, “Not this exact spot, but another world, perhaps one of those we gaze upon even now. When I was a handyman with the Cleaners, we followed an
icarusk
as it tried to claw through the realms and destroyed it here.
“When I saw this sight for the first time, it almost broke me. To realize that no matter how much we fought, no matter what we sacrificed, no matter how many gallons of our life’s blood we spilled on the stones for the ungrateful bastards who pull our puppet strings—none of it is of any significance. So I spurned my former calling and refused to bow to Purity any longer. Every world eventually ends up here, lifeless and dark. So why fight? Why not hasten the inevitable?”
“You must not get invited to many parties,” Dani said.
“Depends on the venue.”
With Gnashy in tow, she left him gazing up at the dead worlds and walked out to where Patty slouched against the rock wall just outside the entrance. Patty didn’t acknowledge her arrival, and the two of them stared at the horizon for several minutes.
Gnashy’s heavy breathing wore on her patience, so she pulled it over to the other side of the entrance and pointed to the ground.
“Sit.”
Gnashy plopped to the earth, its back frond-wings quivering.
“Stay.”
Its head lifted, so the throat-eyes blinked up at her pleadingly.
“Mistress bring the gnash a snack?”
Dani hesitated, unsure what to promise the creature. It had proven helpful and placid so far, despite its fearsome appearance and questionable appetite.
“Maybe when we get back to the real world,” she said. “Do you like candy? I can probably scrounge up some.”
It nodded like a child that had been told it could have a free pony ride.
“Marrow is sweet candy.”
Suppressing a shudder, Dani went back and sat down beside Patty.
“Hi.”
The maid glanced at her and sneered. “Go away, Scum.”
“Hey, I didn’t say, ‘let me eat your firstborn child and use your bones as a toothpick.’ I said
hello
. Try again.”
Patty bowed her head. “What do you want?”
“That’s a little better. I just want to talk. You wouldn’t believe how much testosterone I’ve had to put up with ever since the Cleaners snatched me. Is there always this much pit-scratching and chest-bumping going on? Just don’t tell me the showers are co-ed back at HQ.”
The faintest of smiles twitched Patty’s lips.
“So.” Dani tucked her knees up to her chest. “How’d they recruit you?”
Patty spoke slowly at first, as if uncertain whether some joke was being played on her. “My family has always been part of the Cleaners. My brother is a plumber. I’ve got an older sister who’s a window washer. My parents are retired.”
“Lucky. Must be nice to have been raised for the job. Cuts down on the surprise when something jumps out of the toilet and tries to bite your butt cheeks.”
A dry laugh escaped the other woman, and Patty graced her with a sidelong look. “What about your family?”
Dani grimaced. “They apparently think I’m overseas, being the good little tuition investment I’ve always been. I’ll supposedly get to see them again when I finish my training.” She blew a raspberry. “As if that’s going to happen after this whole fiasco. I guess I should lower my hopes from getting my old life back to coming out alive and sane.”
“How’d they find you?”
“Burnt down and flooded my college library—at the same time. Neat trick, huh?”
That drew Patty’s full attention. Now that they weren’t trying to kill each other, Dani realized how close the two of them were in age. Patty couldn’t be more than two or three years older.
“You went to college?”
“Yeah. People do that sort of stuff when they aren’t mopping floors and squishing pipe monsters for a living. Didn’t you go?”
“Why bother with college when I already knew what I’m supposed to do with my life?”
“Supposed to or wanted to?”
“Is there a difference?”
“There should be.”
“Not for me.” Patty sighed. “You’re the real lucky one. You at least got to know what that kind of life is like. Don’t get me wrong, I love my work, but sometimes it’s hard when you can never escape it. With my whole family involved, it’s the only thing they talk about. All my boyfriends have been other Cleaners, which is never a good idea no matter what company you work for. Plus, I have to constantly lie to any friend I have outside the business about what I really do.”
“I’m lucky?” Dani pointed at her bald head. “See this? This is from a bunch of Cleansers trying to turn me into a fire goddess. Before that I was attacked by giant lizards. I got sandblasted by a dust demon—”
“I think you mean dust devil.”
“Whatever. And before that, it was a blot monster in the women’s bathroom.”
“Blot-hound.”
“Whatever! I haven’t been at this job for a week and I already want to know what the retirement plan is like. You call that lucky?”
Patty scratched the back of her neck, looking confused. “But … after all you’ve done and seen, you still want to go back to your old life?”
Dani opened her mouth to say of course she wanted to go back. That she craved a normal life full of textbooks and tuition, of dorm rooms and feeding Tetris in between math lectures and study halls.
The words stalled in her throat. It would be peaceful, yes, though she might struggle with paranoia, knowing some of the things hiding beneath the kitchen floor or in the air ducts. And there’d be the constant struggle to control her powers. But somehow it all seemed so …
Boring?
“I dunno,” she said. “I still want to get a medical degree, but maybe—” She realized the other woman had started quietly crying. She took Patty’s near hand and gripped it. “Hey? What’s wrong?”
Patty wiped her face on her arm, smearing her tears. Then she flung a hand out at the dead world before them. “What if we’re stuck here forever, wandering some wasteland until we drop from hunger or thirst? I don’t want to die this way.”
“Hunger? The gnash knows hunger. You do not.”
Dani shushed the gnash. It muttered and crouched again while she leaned in to whisper.
“We’re going to make it out of here, okay? You’ll see. I bet you’ll even get a ton of overtime pay for this.”
“Nope. Overtime pay isn’t retroactive, and you wouldn’t believe how much paperwork you have to file just to get it approved in the first place.”
Dani narrowed her eyes. “What about unexpected emergencies or late-night jobs? We don’t get anything tossed our way for the extra effort?”
“All expected sacrifices for the good of the company.”
“Let me guess … the Ascendants don’t exactly play by the same rules.”
“Of course not. They’re salaried, not hourly, for one thing. Get to come and go as they please. Plus, one of my ex-boyfriends was in Accounting and showed me some of their expense budgets. You wouldn’t believe—”
Sydney shouted from within the cave. “Dani! Ben’s waking up.”
With a happy cry, Dani jumped to her feet. Patty’s hand slipped out of hers. The maid looked up, lips twisted with the effort of holding back further tears. Dani tried for a reassuring smile.
“Don’t worry. Things are already getting better. Come on.”
She called out, “Gnashy, heel!” as she ran back into the cave to where Stewart and Sydney knelt beside Ben.
The janitor groaned and shifted as if waking from a bad dream. His eyelids fluttered open. Dani tensed, worried that he might be suffering from something other than exhaustion, like internal bleeding. There’d be no way to treat that here.
He focused on her, looking confused for a moment. Then he smiled.
“Hey, princess.”
Dani released the breath she’d been holding. “Ben. Thank ***. I was getting worried.”
His gaze flicked over to Sydney and Stewart, who bowed and nodded respectively.
“What happened?” Ben asked. “Where are we?”
“We escaped the Recycling Center,” she said. “But we’re not exactly better off.” She explained Sydney’s breaking them into the Gutters and the dead end at the intersection. “We haven’t had time to figure out how to open it,” she concluded. “And we’ve got some others with us. I didn’t know what to do and wasn’t sure when you’d wake up and …”
He reached up and patted her shoulder. “Good to see you too.”
She smiled and squeezed his hand.
A scream rent the moment.
Hot panic burning through her, Dani dashed back outside. Her scream echoed the first.
Patty lay half a dozen yards away, eyes wide and lifeless. One arm had been torn off at the shoulder and thrown aside like a gnawed chicken wing. The rest of her had been slit from sternum to pelvis.
Gnashy raised its muzzle from her flayed torso. Teeth dripped crimson as it offered Dani a handful of kidney.
“Feed with the gnash? Sweet candy.”
***
Chapter Thirty-three
The trio of wing-like flaps on the gnash’s back had expanded into translucent bags, each filled with a miasma of fluids and scraps it sucked out of the dead maid.
Snacks for later,
a dark part of Dani’s mind whispered.
She stared, bug-eyed, while the gnash cocked its head as if confused by her hesitation to join in the meal. Only when it bent down for another bite did she snap out of her shock.
Horror, rage, and disbelief lit up her mind. She cried out in denial and spread her arms, sending her power grasping as far as it could reach. It latched onto dead stone and stirred air unmoved for eons. Her heart pounded treble pace, and the earth shook in time. Her breaths raced, and the air spun about.
The gnash rose into a crouch as it sensed the disturbed elements.
“What … have … you … done?” With each word Dani yelled, gusts buffeted the gnash from all sides. It cowered, hands above its head while its throat-eyes squeezed shut.
“The gnash is sorry! The gnash hungered.”
“You killed her! Monster!”
Her curses turned into babbling as she let the magic build. It didn’t control her, but joined with her fury, both raising each other to new heights of power.
Her mistake. She’d tried to ignore the gnash’s true nature. Tried to pretend it was a pet, a toy, when it remained a blight on existence. A splotch to be scoured away. A disease to be cured.
The gnash turned and fell to all fours to lope away. Dani clenched her fists. Two crevices shuddered open beneath its feet. It wailed as it dropped in up to its knees. Another wave slammed the earth back together. The gnash keened and fell over, legs gone below the joints. It dragged itself forward, trailing white ooze.
Dani’s final cry shook the mountain. A car-sized chunk of obsidian shattered above her head. As it fell, the wind caught it up and spun the gleaming black shards into a whirlwind. This flew over and stopped above the gnash. Its spinning tightened and sped up until a cone of razor glass narrowed down to needlepoint a bare foot above the creature.
She reached out and visualized her power as a giant hand holding the spike.
She stabbed down.
The explosion tilted the horizon for a moment. Shards sliced her cheeks, forehead and scalp, but she didn’t care. The tremors beneath her feet didn’t fade for another minute.
Panting, Dani stared at where the gnash had been. Black rubble marred the formerly even horizon. Glass plinked against the mountain and pattered the dirt around her. She strained for a single glimpse of white, any remaining scrap of the beast to wipe away.
Footsteps tread soft behind her. The others had been calling her name all along, but she’d been so taken by the spell that she only heard them in retrospect.
A hand touched her shoulder.
“Dani?”
The strings of tension vibrating through her body snapped. She dropped to her knees and elbows. Her mouth pressed into the dirt as she wailed. The earth muffled her, but the cries reverberated through her mind and heart.
She’d killed someone. Patty was dead because of her. She might as well have gutted the woman herself.
Sobs wracked her. She hugged herself, trying to contain the grief tearing her apart from within.
Ben sat and pulled her head and shoulders into his lap. He stroked her hair as a father might, but said nothing. Eventually the hysterics ebbed and left all her thoughts and feelings hollow. Her vision swam with black and gray, the same colors that painted her soul.
As she let the swirl of numbness drag her down, a last whisper flitted through her mind.
I approve. Perhaps you have potential after all.
O O O
She woke with a start. Yet again, half of her mind tried to leap forward with the assumption that all the recent horrible events were just a bad dream. Then the other half caught up, choked her hope, and threw it into a cage until it learned to behave.
She lay on her back in the cave as grit dug into her scalp and neck. The endless display of dead worlds floated overhead. She watched it, hypnotized by the unnatural stillness. Not a single star winked. Not a single cloud scudded across the faces of the planets.
Shuffling made her turn her head. Ben sat at the cave threshold, a few feet away. Cross-legged, hands on his knees, he stared out at nothing in particular.
“Sydney and Stewart built a little cairn,” he said without looking her way. “We can go visit if you want.”
Dani expected tears, but only a dry burning came to her eyes. Aside from a twinge in her chest, she remained drained.
“I killed her, Ben.” Her voice matched the grayness of the world. She tasted ash … or perhaps that was what the air here tasted like and she hadn’t noticed until now.
“Ain’t what it looked like to me,” he said. “Looked more like she let fear get the better of her and tried to hightail it from a gnash. Once its huntin’ instinct got triggered, it went downhill from there.” He finally met her gaze. “You didn’t kill her, Dani.”
Her turn to look away. “I might as well have. If I hadn’t kept that beast around, she’d still be alive. She’d still be able to go back to her family. I’m a murderer.”
“Naw. You was just on a job where someone died. Big difference. Patty came here on Destin’s orders. She chose to tag along with you, if the others tell me right.”
Dani snorted. “I chose to bring the gnash with us. I chose to use it as a guide.”
“Cleaners are trained to deal with gnashes,” he said. “If she’d kept calm, it never woulda attacked.” When she didn’t respond, he sighed. “Not even a six-eyed oracle coulda said for sure how thing’s woulda ended up. You just gotta do whatcha think is right at the time and hope for the best. You ain’t ever gonna be prepared for everythin’. And when things get flushed, you gotta learn from the mistake and keep it from happenin’ again.”
Her fingers clutched the soil. “Is that what Patty was? A learning experience? Is this part of employee orientation? Learn to Lose Someone 101—”
His flinch clipped off her words. The look in his eyes told her he knew exactly how she felt. She knew attacking him to be unfair, that he was only trying to help, but it didn’t matter; she needed to vent and he provided the only target. Neither met the other’s eyes for a few minutes. Then Dani pushed herself up to lean against the cave wall. Black pebbles drizzled off her outfit.
“So that’s it?” She didn’t bother disguising the bitterness in her voice. “I rationalize it all and move on?”
He smiled sadly. “There ain’t never just a ‘that’s it.’ I ain’t gonna promise you won’t see her face in your dreams or hear that scream when you wake up. Everyone in the Cleaners has their share of ghosts. We’ve all been part of a team that got their turds tossed on a griddle. It’s part of the business. Part of the job. It’s rough and nobody likes it, but you can’t beat yourself bloody when it happens.
“And …” He mimed sucking his thumb. “… if you let this make you curl up and cry for momma the rest of your life, there’s gonna be more folks out there who’ll end up like Patty ’cause you ain’t there to protect ’em.”
That snapped her eyes to his. “What?”
His face and voice took on a harder cast. “Time to grow up a little, princess. You wanna be a doctor, right?”
She nodded, confused about what that had to do with this. Was he saying she should’ve had the medical skills to save the other woman?
“When you get that fancy diploma—and you’re gonna—you’ll have all sorts of smarty-pants know-how that I ain’t even gonna try to pretend I understand. Fancy surgeries and amputatin’ heads and stickin’ leeches on people to suck out their bad humors. Whatever. But what if you just sat around and whenever a patient came to you, you sent them packin’? You don’t treat them ’cause you’re too scared of failing?”
“That’s not fair, Ben. Setting bones and performing surgery isn’t the same as hunting down monsters and scrubbing mystical toilets.”
His brows rose. “Ain’t it? Corruption’s just another disease muckin’ up the place. You got the power to clean some of it away and keep a lot of other folks from worryin’ about it. No matter whatcha do, you’re gonna have lotsa lives in your hands. Being the smart girl you are, you’re gonna do the best you can, but sooner or later, someone’ll bite it—and there ain’t nothin’ you’ll be able to do. Either it’ll be old age or a truck smackin’ ’em down in the middle of the street. Sometimes folks just give up and let go.
“You can’t make folks choose to live safe. You can’t squeeze life into the box you built for it. Look at us here, right now. You think I scheduled this into my calendar to build up some extra vacation time?”
“Oh, so we get vacation days, but not overtime pay?”
His brow rose. “Who toldja that?”
“Patty … she … just before …” Dani waved a hand randomly, not able to complete the sentence.
Ben’s demeanor softened, but lost none of the conviction. “Blame’s a nasty game to start playin’. It can go on forever. You blame yourself now. Sure. But how far back you gonna go? Is Patty’s death my fault ’cause I didn’t get us out of the Recycling Bin? Destin’s for tossin’ you my way as an apprentice? Your parents’ for givin’ birth to you? See where I’m goin’?”
She scowled. She hated how pat he made it sound when the twin vipers of regret and self-pity twisted inside her. She hadn’t even known Patty for more than a few hours, and on opposite teams for most of that time. How could her death hit so hard?
“You are so full of crap,” she said. “Telling me all this when you aren’t even over your wife’s death.”
She expected him to snipe back. She wanted the attack, a way to battle out the tension building within her. Instead, he closed his eyes and his shoulders drooped.
“You got that right,” he said. “I ain’t over it. Plenty of excuses I could use. I never got the chance to say goodbye. No body. No funeral. I got stuck in quarantine most of it, gettin’ poked and prodded.” His eyes opened, glistening slightly. “But I ain’t there now, if you notice. I picked my mop and bucket back up and went to work again. Maybe if there’d been some closure, I coulda let it go, but I ain’t ever had that kinda luck.” He stood, joints clicking to match his winces. “The truth is, I don’t wantcha to give up ’cause I need you with me.”
She stared up at him. “Why? I’ve been nothing but trouble since you got stuck with me.”
“I can’t do this on my own, Dani. And you’re the only one I trust here.”
“What about Stewart?”
Ben bumped a shoulder. “That codger will do what he has to to get through this, but he’ll scamper at the first chance. I need someone I can depend on.”
Dani rubbed the back of her neck as she tried to pacify the emotions head-butting each other in her stomach.
“Promise this isn’t about me being a stand-in for Karen.”
“Hate to wound you, kiddo, but don’t imagine for a second that you’d ever replace her.” He offered a hand. “Whaddya say? Help this old fart finish the job?”
Dani gripped it and hauled herself up.
***
