14.
At night, the recycling plant slumbered. Faded bars of light, sheathed under plastic grills, cast a dim glow along vast galleries of stained concrete. Machines for sorting and shredding sat motionless; the rusted metal bulks let out faint rumbling sounds, small things scurrying inside the fat and twisting pipes. An ammonia smell clung to the air, strong enough to burn the back of my nose, like the night crew had poured out bucket after bucket of bleach and left it to dry.
Santiago and his partner flanked me as they marched me through the complex, each one taking hold of an arm. The slack-faced watchmen didn’t even look our way. They shambled along with their uneven, twitchy strides, heads swaying like their necks were on steel springs.
This place was a maze of faceless corridors. Emergency lighting cast long, angular shadows across bare stone and unmarked doors. Pipes ran along the walls, bulky and marred with tarnish, corrosion spreading like black mold at every welded seam. The farther we walked, the more patches I saw on the pipes, slabs of misshapen metal welded over blotches of rust.
There was something sick inside this place, an illness running behind its walls, through its pipes, and keeping it contained was a losing battle.
I was feeling sick, too, as the ammonia smell surrendered to the odor it was trying to conceal. It was the stench of roadkill on a sweltering summer day. Like someone had filled a bucket with rotten meat, poured in a gallon of sour milk, and mashed it together into an unholy meal. Bile rose in my throat and I swallowed it down, focusing on my breath.
I wasn’t the only one having a hard time. My escorts were looking green, lips tight, a few flecks of sweat glistening on Santiago’s mustache.
“Almost there,” he breathed. I wasn’t sure if he was telling us or reassuring himself.
Our final stop waited beyond an unmarked door clad in hammered metal sheeting. It was a vaulted chamber of bare concrete, long, dotted with a trio of pits. The holes were maybe ten feet across, smooth cylinders carved into the stone. A dirty yellow ring of paint surrounded each pit, and stenciled letters read Minimum Safe Clearance.
Beyond that, the room was spartan. By the door stood a card table, a couple of folding chairs, and a desk lamp that shed a puddle of hard white light. Santiago grabbed one of the chairs. It scraped, shrill, as he dragged it across the chamber. He plopped it down on the edge of the middle hole, right on the yellow clearance line.
They sat me down with my back to the pit.
“Go tell him,” Santiago said to his partner. The other man left, fast, not bothering to hide how badly he wanted to get out of this room. That made two of us. I started planning my exit strategy.
Santiago tossed my deck of cards, my wallet, and my phone onto the table. Out of reach, but once I got the cuffs off, a good two-second sprint would close the gap. A quick spark of magic to wake the cards up, and I’d have a weapon. That said, two seconds was less time than it would take for Santiago to draw his sidearm and shoot me dead.
I couldn’t be reckless. But with the air caked in that rancid, breath-stealing stench, and faint rustling sounds drifting up from the pit behind me, it took everything I had to keep my nerves in check. I focused on Santiago, trying to give my brain something to do besides worry.
“One question,” I said. “You a real cop, or is that uniform bogus?”
He started poking through my wallet. “Real as the cruiser I drove you in.”
“I’ve seen fake squad cars before.”
“So have I.” He plucked the cash from my wallet, a couple hundred in loose bills, and curled them around his index finger. “Hey, thanks for the donation.”
“You ever hear the phrase ‘adding insult to injury’?”
He shoved the cash into his pocket and flipped the wallet back onto the table.
“You’re about get a lot more than injured, pal.” He glanced my way. “Not by me. I’m just the babysitter.”
“Do you even know who you really work for?”
“Sure,” he said. “The winning team.”
“You used your boy Todd to murder over a dozen innocent kids. That what you call ‘winning’?”
Santiago rolled his eyes. “That’s what I call ‘overcomplicated,’ but I don’t give the orders around here. If it was up to me, you’d already be dead in a dumpster with two shots in your noggin. I like to keep things simple. But my boss has very specific plans to end your ass in a very specific way—don’t ask me why, it’s above my pay grade—and that meant luring you out and taking you alive and undamaged. Speaking of living, can I assume Todd’s not coming back to work?”
“He died slow,” I said. “Not as slow as you’re going to, though.”
“Look at me, I’m shaking.”
The metal door whistled open and Santiago jerked his spine straight like a soldier snapping to attention. His partner hadn’t come back. The new arrival, alone, rustled over the doorway on mismatched legs, one an inch or so shorter than the other. His entire shape was mismatched. Torso too squat, arms too long, a bulbous head oscillating on a spindly neck. He stepped into the light.
He was maybe sixty or so, wearing tufts of salt-and-pepper hair like a crown around his bald and wrinkled scalp. His amber eyes were moons set into his face, his chin a bony spear. He wore a three-piece suit, too big for his frame, and the sleeves dangled halfway down his narrow hands like he was a kid trying to wear his father’s jacket.
Santiago grabbed the other folding chair and rushed it over, setting it down about six feet from mine. Facing me. The man folded himself onto the seat. He curled his knees against his chest and perched there like a bird.
“Hello,” he chirped.
I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Or any of this. “Uh…hi,” I said.
“You can go now.”
He was staring at me, but seeing as nobody moved to get my handcuffs off, I figured he meant Santiago. So did Santiago. The cop gave a nervous little nod of his head as he scampered for the door.
Just the two of us now.
“I’m being terribly rude,” he said. “My name is Elmer Donaghy. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Faust.”
“Call me Dan. So…this is your place.”
“The business I’ve been entrusted with, yes.” His twitchy fingertips snatched at the air. “Of course, it’s a front, but that doesn’t mean we don’t deliver quality performance! I’m very insistent on things being run properly. Your city’s refuse is in good hands here. You could say that I…refuse to cut corners.”
He giggled at his own joke. Great. The psycho had a sense of humor.
“You’ve been a lovely competitor,” he added. “Tell me, I’m curious. This little contest of wits…in your mind, did you frame it as a chess metaphor or a more physical battle, like a boxing match?”
“Chess,” I said. No reason to lie.
He smacked his palms together, a merry little golf clap, then hugged his knees tight.
“I thought you might. We’re a good match. And I’m not much inclined toward the martial arts, I’m afraid.” He held out his arms to his sides. His oversize coat draped over him like a bedsheet on a scarecrow. “I realize I don’t look like much. You must be disappointed. You have to understand that where I come from, nine out of ten children die before their third birthday. I was the runt of my litter, but I survived. ‘Healthy’ is a very relative word.”
“Where’s that? Somewhere in the third world?”
“Not your third world,” he said with a smile. “You are aware there are more worlds, in the literal sense, than this, yes?”
I was aware, all right. Twenty years ago, a black-budget science team inside Ausar Biomedical carried out a string of interdimensional incursions. They didn’t like what they found. From what one of the survivors told me, they’d opened windows onto plenty of other Earths, parallel to ours, and most of the locals were anything but friendly.
They’d also found a place that looked a hell of a lot like the Garden of Eden. Abandoned, choked with cancerous and cannibalistic horrors, and toxic to human life. That survivor I interviewed realized the experiments were going too far; he tried to stop his former partners and managed to unleash something even worse in the process. He opened a crack in the prison world where the Enemy had been banished, and set the bastard loose.
“So how does a guy from a parallel Earth end up on this one?” I asked.
“Talent.” Elmer giggled again. “As a young man I was banished from my village. I had a natural affinity for the occult arts, and I was foolish, too eager. Well, that, and my early experiments mostly centered around stealing the other children’s health to sustain my own. I was present at one too many crib deaths, and rosy-cheeked when our village was suffering crop rot and drought.”
“You’re lucky they just banished you.”
“Oh, far from it. Burning me at the stake would have been a more merciful punishment. I was cast into the wastes of a poisoned, afflicted world, without food or water. Soon I came upon the bones of a city, infested with the insatiable vermin we called ‘gravers’—the wilding dead. But they had what I needed to live, and my spirit was not so broken as my body. I found that by coating myself in the rotten viscera of corpses and working a few charms, I could pass among them unscathed. With more practice, more experience, I could tame their animal minds and make them obey me.”
“Did you teach ’em to roll over and shake hands?” I asked. “I suppose ‘play dead’ wasn’t an option.”
“I taught them, and they taught me. I was all alone in a kingdom of death. More of a playground, really. I immersed myself in decay as a survival tactic at first, but soon I understood the true beauty of rot. Decomposition is part of the cycle of nature, every bit as essential as growth. And one comes from the other. Did you know, with proper cultivation and care, certain flowers can actually grow upon corpses? It’s wondrous to behold.”
“I’m starting to see why they put you in charge of a garbage plant.”
He grinned, wide, showing off yellowed and broken teeth.
“I wore a ceremonial robe made of human skin, my face smeared with a dead man’s entrails, as I led the charge upon my former home. I punished the villagers for casting me out, then added their reanimated bodies to my ranks. We preyed on merchant caravans after that, mostly. A winning tactic until I ransacked a pilgrim train. They were escorting a safe filled with strange artifacts, including a knife made of a metal I’d never seen before. No wonder, as it turned out. It wasn’t from my world. And then, on the dark of the moon, its owners came to reclaim their stolen property.”
“The Network,” I said. I had reason to believe the organization’s reach stretched across parallel worlds. Now I had the proof.
Which didn’t mean a thing if I died here tonight. Behind my back, my fingers slowly eased toward my belt, and the hidden handcuff key.
“Indeed,” Elmer said. “They could have killed me out of hand, but my work impressed them. I never stopped experimenting, you see. Occult transmutations to reshape life—and death—into new and more useful forms. The Network saw value in my designs. You’re already familiar with one of them, I believe.”
“Am I?”
In response, he nodded at the air just above my left shoulder. I held my breath, tasting the chamber’s stench, as I squirmed in the chair and looked behind me.
The pit at my back, with the legs of my chair perched on the edge of its yellow-painted rim, offered a sheer drop into a pool of rotting garbage. Trash bags had burst at the bottom, moldy food and waste spilling from their glossy black skin, mingling with heaps of wet cardboard boxes and smears of rancid grease.
A sheet of cardboard moved. Lifting, just a little, as a mottled brown cockroach the size of my fist squirmed out from underneath. Its mandibles twitched at the air, as if it could sense me watching it.
It let out a rattling, wet hiss and squirmed back under cover. More hisses rose up, joining the roach chorus, as the entire pit of garbage began to quiver and move.