Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (42 page)

Runny oil fell from the limbs.  Did the limbs belong to several separate creatures, or were they all from one monstrous thing, entering into their realm from all directions—ceiling, floor, and all four walls?  Kaley couldn’t make sense out of it. 
Then came the bodies of the Others, or perhaps several different portions of the same Other.

Kaley watched it calmly, almost dumbly.  “Uh, Spencer?” she
whispered.  At school, Lenny looked up at her.

“Who is it?  Who’s comin’?” he said, still peeking around the doorframe. 
Spencer looked at her.  “Talk to me, little girl!”  Kaley pointed up at the ceiling.  “What is it?  What the fuck are you—”  Then, he saw them.  He must have, because his next reaction was to aim at the ceiling, fire two shots, and dart out of the room.  The children screamed.  They all saw it now.  It came spilling into their universe unannounced, uninvited, and unimaginable.

Pandemonium erupted
.

Shcherbakov ducked by reflex, though the shots didn’t sound close.  They were coming from inside the dock house.  He moved from cover to cover, advancing on the front door, and slipped and fell on the viscera that had spilled out of a man blown nearly in half by a shotgun from point-blank range.

The Grey Wolf bit back a curse,
pushing himself away from the ruined corpse.  But just as he scrambled back onto his feet, every window of the dock house exploded, sending shards of glass lancing out at him, as a low, angry moan was exhaled from within, along with a wind so foul he gagged.

Nothing made him gag. 
He had peeled open men’s stomachs while they were still alive and rolled their intestines out on a spit.  He had cut a woman’s child out of her womb and kept her alive so she could watch him feed it to the dogs.  Nothing made him gag.  But now he could almost feel his stomach trying to force itself up into his mouth.

Shcherbakov
shut it all out, and with effort regained his composure.  He stood with gun steady in hand, and then stepped over the guts of the fallen man.  Ice and glass crunched underfoot.  Then, he froze.  The boards of the dock trembled, and all around him he heard loud, angry cracks in the ice.  Then, silence.  The wind finally returned, but it was coming from the open windows, and it was that same hot, pungent air that twisted his stomach.  First, the air blew against him, rushing out over the frozen docks.  But then it turned, and pulled back into the darkened building.  In and out, in and out, like the building was breathing.  The snowfall followed the air—now moving towards the dock house, now pushed away from it on wind so redolent he could not will himself to press forward.  He considered going back and waiting for backup.

What the hell could Pelletier be doing in there?

Another gunshot.  Now two more.  Now a fourth!  Definitely a shotgun.  And child-like shrieks of pain.  A fifth gunshot.

The ice cracked far below him, and then, unless his eyes deceived him, one of the dock house’s walls bent inwards, as if something was
pulling it in. 
Or sucking it in
.

The children ran, with only a second or two before the entire room collapsed in on itself.  Spencer had flung himself backwards, rolling halfway down the steps before firing up at Kaley.  Naturally, the Benelli’s shot, passed straight through her, but it tore through the arm of one of the girls, spinning her around as the thing came climbing out of the room.

“
Spencer!  Stop shooting!
” Kaley screamed.  But he hardly noticed her.  He wasn’t aiming for the kids, obviously, he was aiming for
it
.

The
thing had emerged from the walls, and from the air.  Spencer had fired before leaping free.  And now, it seemed to come from everywhere, with angles to its limbs that defied comprehension.  His mind made no sense out of it; it rejected all of it outright.  His survival instincts had kicked in.  Whatever it was, it was alive and therefore it could be killed.

So he fired.

Halfway down the steps, the very air around him was rent apart as more limbs tore their way into his world.  One snatched at him, reaching for his hair, his clothing, his face.  It was still emerging from that other place, from whatever Deep Kaley Dupré perceived it to be from.  It ripped through the air, and pores all along its limbs opened up to breathe.  A fetid odor washed into his nostrils and assaulted him.  It was unlike anything he’d smelled before.  It made his head spin, and he tumbled down the rest of the steps.  Nothing made sense.  Another world’s physics were clashing with this world’s, and a creature that couldn’t have evolved according to this world’s Laws was forcing itself on this reality.

The odor stung his eyes, and he couldn’t see.

So he fired.

“
Spencer!
”

He landed hard at the foot of the
stairs, staggered to his feet, growling and salivating.  Limbs tore out at him from the air, and where they did, a disgusting froth spilled through these gaping holes and boiled like acid as they spread across the floor.  One of the limbs was fighting to get through some sort of slimy, translucent bag, like an unborn child ripping through its amniotic sack.  The limbs folded impossibly in on themselves, shrinking and then swelling, pulsating and quivering, and reaching out to him.

So he fired.

Screams.  All around him, a cacophony was building.  The limbs opened their pores again and gave off the same offensive emanation as before.  A hot, heavy breath that smelled to Spencer like he’d shoved his head up the ass of a rotting elephant.  His eyes were still watering.  He could hardly see.

So he fired.

Angry and half mad, he staggered backwards as the thing came through from every direction.  As it did, the physics of the world altered.  Up became down.  Quite literally.  For a moment, Spencer was lifted off his feet and found himself falling towards the ceiling, but then the gravity of this world reasserted itself and he was slammed back to the hardwood floors.

“
Spencer!  Help us!
”

Crates fell every which way.  One slammed into him, knocking him sideways. 
He hit the floor sliding, and was then jerked suddenly off the ground as the creature’s limbs took another breath, and was pulled through the air towards one of those gaping, sludgy holes.  The Benelli was still in hand, thankfully cocked.  He pointed at the wicked limb fighting free of its amniotic sack, pulled the trigger.  It recoiled with an ear-piercing screech as the limb suddenly changed shape, forming a tentacle and slapping him down to the ground.

Some kind
of oil spilled from the tentacle’s wound, and it poured over Spencer.  The substance had a life of its own.  Moving and creeping around him, searching for ways through his clothing, then into his ears and into his mouth.  He would not let them have the satisfaction of taking him, and he would not go back to prison. 
Any
prison.  Certainly not the Prisoner’s prison.  Laughing, choking, dying, he put the Benelli to his mouth and pulled the trigger.

All at once, that viscous, sentient liquid
rush out from his throat like a vomit and knocked the shotgun away, just as its barrel exploded.  The black liquid whipped all around him then, flopping across the ground like some amorphous fish, twisting and writhing and constantly changing shape as it groped at anything it found.  A child trying to figure out its new environment.

A voice.  Inside his head and echoing inside his body between the walls of flesh and bone.  “
It’s him!  Let us have him!  This laughing man!  We want to hear him laugh now!  Yes, yes, yesssssssss!
”

Panting, gagging, he rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself up.  He heard cracking all around.  The wall to his right was caving in towards him.  Then, he was lifted off his feet as that other world’s physics took him on a rollercoaster ride.  His stomach rose in his throat, and he vomited while spinning through the air.  Time slowed, then sped up, then slowed.  The two realities were in a tug-of-war, and the breaker switches on this side were flipping back and forth, trying to deal with the overload.

Still vomiting, still spinning in air, Spencer saw the Benelli coming towards him.  It was spinning as slowly as he was.  He reached out and snatched it, so slowly he might’ve been under water.  Terror never rose in him.  Only outrage existed, and a need to make it clear that he was no interdimensional fucknut’s bitch.

Then, this world’s physics won out.  Spencer, along with everything else inside the warehouse, suddenly fe
ll to the floor again.  He smashed his head against a plastic tote, rolled over, and fired reflexively at the salivating limb coming to taste him.  The shot blew the thing in half, but it only quivered this time.  There was an exultant sigh, like sexual satisfaction from the thing as it spilled and sputtered the black, viscous substance all around.  White sludge still poured through the holes in the air it was coming through. 
The quantum foam
, he thought, half delirious and staggering to his feet. 
Space-time foam, the foam at the foundation of the universe
.  Carl Sagan had talked about quantum foam; some shit suggested by John Wheeler, conceptualized as the foundation of the fabric of the universe.  He cackled. 
Bet he didn’t mean it
this
literally!

A rain of splinters from overhead.  Spencer looked up.  The ceiling was collapsing, but instead of falling, most of the splinters were going up, up, up into some kind of vortex
, while a few fell like daggers all around him.  Foam spilled out around the edges of this vortex. 
The universe is hemorrhaging, bleeding
.  That…didn’t entirely make sense to him, but then little around him did.

“
Spencer!
”

Now the voice was behind him.  Blinking, feeling close to passing out, like when one hasn’t had enough oxygen, he turned and saw Kaley
Dupré.  She was near the door.  The five kids were with her, including the one Spencer had clipped.  But…but…something was wrong.  His mind reeling, he couldn’t make out what.  Then, he realized what it was.  Something had hold of the little girl.  One of the impossible limbs had her by the leg; it was another limb which had no logic, with jutting bits and dangling portions, even one piece that looked like a lower jaw.  But, just as its bits and pieces were feeling out this world and testing its consistency, so too was that limb uncertain as to how to handle her.

It would only occur to Spencer later how strange it was that the limb was able to hold her at all, since she was an apparition at this point.

Grinning ear to ear, he darted over to her.  Halfway there, he vomited again—bits of McDonald’s fries mixed with Zakhar’s tea.  A lurching in reality’s fabric, perhaps, or maybe just the increasingly rancid odor.  Who knows?

It didn’t matter, because once he made it over to the impossible limb with the jaw-like structure
dangling from its belly, he put a boot up to it, pinning the wretched mandible to the wall.  “I told you,” he squealed with matchless delight, “nobody kills Kaley Dupré but me!”  He fired, and this time he anticipated the living blood, and leapt back just as the limb angrily whipped Kaley from she stood at the door, through which the boy was carrying the wounded girl.  Two of the other girls were pushing each other aside for the exit, as well, while the last girl, the one with the One Direction shirt, lay on the floor, limp and lifeless.  Her head had been twisted off by the tentacle still slithering around and around her corpse, emitting a lustful noise.

Spencer reached for Kaley’s arm, to pull her towards the door, but his hand passed right through her.  “Best run, little girl!”  He made for the door, hearing hyena-like laughter following him.

“Spencer!  Wait!  He’s out there!”

Under any normal circumstances, he would have asked her what she meant, but, operating off instinct, and knowing that the girl’s hunches were usually correct,
Spencer dove for cover as soon as he exited the warehouse.  He hit the ice and slid behind a parked forklift.

The
shot was silent, hissing through the air and ricocheting off the forklift and into the frozen planks.  He cocked the Benelli and fired over the top. 
Click!
  Empty.  He reached into his pockets and grabbed a handful of shells, started reloading just as another shot rang out.  Then, to his left about ten yards, one of the impossible limbs came flopping out of a shattered window like a limp dick.  It defied all earthly geometry, and split in half, then folded back in on itself, eating itself, then vomited itself back out before it became a many-pronged whip, like a cat o’ nine tails, slapping at the planks and sticking to them.  They yanked once, twice, and then tore the planks from the dock, sending shards of ice and splinters at Spencer.

“This night has bee
n brought to you by the letter F, for
fucked up
!”  He barely got the words out before he vomited again.  He laughed with bits of Big Mac and beans spewing out of his mouth and nose. 
Beans?
he thought insanely.
  When the fuck did I eat beans?