A Brotherhood of Crows.
Chapter 6

We reached George IV bridge as the rain began to ease. The pavement on either side was rammed with people, crossing from the pubs and bars of the Royal Mile to the clubs and venues around Bristo Square. Tobias and I pushed through the crowds. I’d long ago mastered the art of spotting gaps in crowded streets and slipping between them, trying to stay unobserved and speedy at the same time. Tobias hadn’t quite got the knack of it, but what he lacked in subtlety, he make up for with sharp elbows and a kick like a mule.

In the middle of the bridge, level with the old flag pole jutting out over Cowgate, I came to a halt. I pressed myself to the side of the bridge, to avoid being trampled by the noisy drunken club-goers, and called over my shoulder to Tobias. “It’s here.”

“Marvelous,” Tobias was a few paces behind me. He almost collided with a group young men making their shouty way towards the other end of the bridge. “Oi, watch it - wait, that shirt, those pants? Bleurgh. Don’t expect any tonight.” He barged past them, tutting over their fashion sense, “So, we’ve found ourselves a head. Lovely. Now what?”

“I’m not sure our plans were coherent enough to have a ‘now what’,” I leaned over the bridge, trying to get a better glimpse of the head. It hung in shadow, no wonder so many people had passed it without a second thought.

“So why leave it there?” Tobias asked.

“I dunno, do I look like a psychopath?” I was still thinking over the information the cat had given me, and more importantly, the grisy vision of the crow head speaking, so my tone was sharper than it needed to be.

Tobias considered this with his head on one side. “Well….you do look like hipster -”

“You’re never going to let that go, are you?”

“Are you ever going to shave?”

“Why do you care?”

“Why don’t you? I miss your chin. Arguably your best feature.”

I scowled at him. Tobias with both my closest friend and the biggest pain in the arse.

“You’re obsessed.”

“I can’t help it. Your chin was just so damn beautiful.”

“Are you hitting on me?”

“I’d rather fuck Hitler.”

“You always say nicest things.”

“Love you too, man.”

“It’s funny cos we live together.”

“Home sweet home.”

“Good, well you’re on washing up duty for the next week.”

“Like you ever wash up?”

“I’ve got more important shit to do.”

“Like making craft ale and waxing your moustache?”

“I don’t wax my moustache and the ale thing was one sodding time -!”

“Get a room!” shouted someone from a passing group of students.

Tobias and I glared at him, then at each other, then back at the severed head hanging from the flagpole.

“Shall we just solve this murder. -”

“Yeah, let’s do that, good idea -”

“Given that’s what we’re supposed to be doing -”

“You wouldn’t think we were professionals -”

“I’m so glad we had this chat. Shall I scan the head for clues, and you go and smoke pensively and look all dramatic in your coat?”

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s do that.”

“Good.” Tobias began tapping at his wrist unit. He wandered over to the edge of the bridge, and leaned out towards the flagpole. “So glad we had this little chat.”

I turned away and let him get on with it. I had been conscious, while we were bickering, that something was amiss. I couldn’t shake the horrible, primal feeling that we were being watched. While Tobias scanned and muttered over his reading, I surveyed the street, rain splashed and wavering with neon lights from the bars and clubs and all night takeaways. Nothing stood out as odd. I sighed, and realised that, without thinking about it, I had in fact rolled a cigarette, and was indeed standing pensively with my collar popped.

Damn you, Tobias.

I closed my eyes and slipped into Elsewhere. The crowds, the streaks of passing cars and the remains of the rain faded away to be replaced by the near silence and monochrome of that other place where I found myself, briefly, every time I blinked. Tobias became a shimmering shadow, intent on his work. Above me the sky had the smeared quality of running paint. A grey shape was slithering through the cloud - a late airship, perhaps carrying people to the border with England. I saw nothing out of place, but I could sense, feel something...there it was. A prick of colour in the constant black, white and grey...colour meant danger. In Elsewhere, my sixth sense, for want of a better phrase, took on a chromaticity.

There was a patch of colour moving in the grey. I could feel it below me - not on the Bridge, or Elsewhere’s equivalent of the Bridge, but from one of the warren of cobbled streets that snaked from the underbelly of Edinburgh up to surface. Periodically, Elsewhere went through moments of translucence, the shadowed objects of this world became weaker, and I could see through and beyond. This happened now, and the colour, red, flared beneath me like cannon fire on a foggy night. Drawing closer.

I felt my hand drop to my side, and rest itself on the butt of my revolver, holstered on my thigh. It was a pointless thing to do. Firearms did not work in Elsewhere. You couldn’t shoot shadows, or put a bullet through smoke. Fighting the things I encountered in Elsewhere was an altogether different game.

Wait. There was something else. Closer than the rapidly approaching red. It flickered in and out of the grey - a patch of pure dark, moving with intent. This was a colour I had not seen before in Elsewhere - an approaching malevolent dark.

My eyes snapped open and I was back in the rain and the cold of Edinburgh.

“Trouble.” I hissed at Tobias.

“Huh?” He looked up from his scan.

“Trouble.” I repeated. I unclipped my holster, wrapping my fingers around the butt of my revolver. Its weight was reassuring. “We might have company.”

Tobias frowned but abandoned his scan. His hand dropped to his own hip holster - much thinner than mine, it contained his weapon on choice, a collapsable jo fighting staff. Folded down, it was was little more than a foot long; extended at the flick of a switch, it was five feet of solid wood, tipped on either end with iron. He held it pointing downwards, tightly against his side.

“Company?”

“Think about it,” I blinked furiously, trying to view both Elsewhere and reality at the same time, seeking that encroaching red- a hint here, a spark of scarlet there - “Why would they leave a head dangling there? A trophy? A calling card, or…?”

It dawned on Tobias. “It’s a trap.”

We both tensed, our weapons at the ready, ready to lash out, ready to defend against...precisely nothing. People continued to walk passed us. On the flagpole, the severed head continued to swing sadly.

Tobias shrugged. “Oh, well, so much for -”

And then a patch of living fire barrelled into him and sent him flying into oblivion.

My body moved of its own accord. I snapped into Elsewhere. Time moved more slowly there. Tobias, flung by the unseen force, became a shadow version of himself, flailing up and over the edge of the bridge at the force of the blow, smoky mouth open in a look of surprise. I lunged out with one arm, seized his as he fell. His wrist felt solid, even though here it was made of grey fog. My other hand drew my revolver, cocked back the hammer with a practised muscle reflex, and I opened my eyes: I was right on the edge of the bridge, one arm outstretched, clutching onto a yowling Tobias, the only thing between him and a low plunge back to Cowgate. My other arm, gun drawn, pointing at...at…

What stood before me, what had snuck up on us in the crowd, what had struck Tobias with such force as to almost send him plummeting to his doom, was not human. Humans don’t rise from a hunched over form and rise and rise and rise until they are a full head and shoulders taller than the fleeing people around it. Humans don’t have flesh punctured and pockmarked by metal shards and barbed wire, coursing the skin like horrific, metallic, external veins. Humans don’t have arms which hang, ape like, down to below their knees, and end in foot long rusted steel claws. Claws red with blood. Blood from a recent decapitation.

But most of all: human faces are stretched out by metal bars seemingly melted into greying, dead flesh, grafted to the bone. Human faces don’t have wide wolf like mouths filled with metal teeth, and humans don’t have, in the place of eyes, two burning fires roaring in empty, pussing sockets.

“Fuck.” I said. What else could I say?

The thing moved towards me, vulnerable, half my body holding Tobias away from certain death. My hand was shaking, and my aim would be wild with the revolver. Even at this range, I could not guarantee a killing shot. The arms were pulling back, like a prizefighter about to deliver a knockout blow, and the rain dripped from those wicked metal claws as they prepared to strike.

And then it screamed in pain and surprise as a crossbow bolt buried itself in the side of its neck.

*

Zularna reached George VI bridge, out of breath, crossbow still held low in one hand, hatchet in the other. As she leapt onto the slick pavement, she took in the scene: a screaming, fleeing crowd, the man she had seen earlier, the one with the flat cap, aiming a gun shakily as he tried to hold onto the arm of the teenager, dangling over the sheer drop down to Cowgate.

And the man she had been tracking: he had thrown off his long coat, and stood tall, far too tall, arms outstretched, what looked like steak knives attached to his fingers, ready to strike a killing blow.

Zularna didn’t hesitate. She dropped to one knee, held her crossbow at arms length, used her left hand to steady her aim, and loosed the bolt.

Zularna never ever missed. She had spent enough time firing bolts on the firing range given over to the University Archery club; she knew that she could hit a bullseye at one hundred paces, one handed, even when her balance was off. What her fellow bowmen didn’t know was that she had, in her bedroom, an image of a cross section of the human body, showing her the exact position of the vital organs and the arteries that pumped blood out from the cage around the heart. When she was targeting those distant straw bales at the range, she would mentally picture which part of the body she was aiming at, adjusting in her shot for wind, weight of the bolt, the angle of fire, and if the target was stationary or fleeing. The torso was the biggest target. A bolt there would slow someone, but a more effective shot would be the achilles tendons, hamstringing her prey as he fled, allowing her to move in and finish the job with her hatchet - a fate she saved for the worst kind of rapists and wife-beaters. But for a quick kill, a shot to the carotid artery, just below the ear, was best. If the target didn’t choke on the bolt lodged in their neck, they would bleed out in a matter of minutes.

The bolt struck home. The man (was it even a man?) jerked back but didn’t fall. It’s hand, bedecked with knives (or were they claws) flew up to its neck- moving firmly, not the spasming movements she’d seen in those trying vainly to remove a killing bolt - and plucked it out. It fell to the ground with a clatter that seemed to resound of the screaming of fleeing passersby.

A cold hand of fear pressed itself against Zularna’s chest. This had never happened before. Frankly, her hands fumbled to reload, to lose another bolt, but the creature has turned now, and was charging towards her. Its arms, long, wiry, and tearing free from the remains of its clothes, dragged along the ground, ape-like, as it advanced.

And at last, she saw its face. Long, stretched, as if someone had taken the flesh of a human head and stretched it fiendishly over the skull of a horse, and then filled its mouth with rusted metal teeth.

For the first time in her life, Zularna turned and fled.

*

The creature staggered from the bolt, but did not fall. It bellowed in pain (its mouth opening horrifically wide, crocodile like) and one of its steel clawed hands flew to its neck. I looked in the direction of the shot and saw, at the other end of the bridge, a figure, dressed from head to toe in black, a balaclava obscuring their face, holding a crossbow. I didn’t need to see them clearly to know that the shooter had not expected the creature to still be standing.

With a roar, the creature ripped the bolt free from its flesh. It fell to earth. It must have been a foot long, and tipped with a wicked head. A bolt like that should have gone straight through its neck and kept going, tunneling through skin and muscle and exploding out the other side. A shot like that should have killed.

All of this happened in a few seconds. The creature, its eyes fire, its clothes hanging off its metal pocked skin, turned towards the shooter and began to charge. Its proportions were no longer human - the arms ending it steel claws were now so long they dragged on the floor like the knuckles of an ape.

I came to my senses. I brought my revolver to bear directly between the creature’s massive shoulders, and fired. Twice.

My revolver uses .44 calibre bullets. For those you not au fait with your firearms, those are the biggest, heaviest rounds a handgun could use. The next size up were shotgun shells. A round like that would stop pretty much anything in its tracks. I’d seen my shots leave fist shaped dents in concrete walls.

My gun roared in my hand. With one arm still holding Tobias (“What’s going on! What the fuck! What hit me?”) I wasn’t ready for the kick-back and staggered slightly. My shot hit the thing square in the back. I heard the unmistakable crack of metal ricocheting off metal. It didn’t even slow in its tracks.

That thing is growing armour, a panicked part of me said. It was true. With every step, its flesh continued to split, like the skin on an overripe piece of fruit. Steel shards and spikes burst forth like unholy shoots. Whatever it was was growing and mutating with every single step.

And I unless I did something, it would kill the crossbow shooter, Tobias, me, and a whole bunch of others beside.

I grunted and yanked hard - Tobias came over the rails, and collapsed on the pavement, wheezing.

“Are you alright?” I yelled at him.

“What? Yes? No? What? Why did -” he spluttered.

“No time - get up, we need to get after it!”

“After what, after - oh fuck!”

I set off at a run, with Tobias stumbling to his feet a few metres behind. The creature was was picking up pace - it realised that its huge steel clawed hands could help its gait and was now running, bent over, on its feet and knuckles, after the fleeing crossbow shooter. The crowds of partygoers, who had until a few minutes before been happily wandering between the pubs on either side of the bridge, were screaming and scattering. Some fell to the ground, others fled into the road, narrowly avoiding cars that swerved and crashed into one another. Others crushed into each other on the pavement, bunched up together, and fell in a heap, cowering as the creature advanced. It vaulted over a crowd of people, and suddenly they were between me and it, and it was speeding up.

“Out of the way!” I screamed at them. They screamed back. A giant razor clawed ape was one thing, but they weren’t up for taking orders for a revolver wielding madman in a hat. I tried to push through, but the crowd pushed back, trying to get as far away as possible from the creature.

“Fuck it!” I roared. “Tobias, down!”

Behind me, Tobias skidded to a halt and hit the deck. I raised my revolver to my mouth, and whispered into the cylinder: “Stunners.”

The .44 rounds I use aren’t normal bullets. They are something of Tobias’s design, called SmartRounds. On their own, the bullets looked nondescript, but using some method of Unnatural Science (which I don’t even pretend to understand), Tobias had coded each bullet to respond to voice command, and rearrange its molecules, restructuring itself on an atomic level to become a different kind of bullet. A word could make the rounds incendiary, turn them into frag rounds, or sharpened, armour piercing shots.

Or, in this case, something for non-lethal crowd control.

I saw the round in the chamber glow blue. I aimed about a metre above the crowds’ head, fired, and ducked.

Stunner rounds were based on police pacifying grenades. A pacifier could be fired above a crowd, detonate harmlessly, but then release a sudden sonic shock wave two metres in every direction, enough to instantly render everyone unconscious. To avoid its effects, you fired on up, ducked, and hoped to god you’d guessed the fallout altitude correctly.

There was a dull phut, a boom, and then the sound of multiple bodies hitting the ground. I leapt up. The mass of people had fallen to earth, as if suddenly sent to sleep. They would be fine, barring a few headaches, and our way was clear. The creature was reaching North Bridge, and the fleeing shooter was just ahead.

As we ran, I brought my revolver back up to my mouth and whispered “Killers,”

Somehow I didn’t think stunners would do it for this thing.

*

Zularna’s heart drummed furiously in her chest as she ran. Her breath was ragged and pain was shooting up her side. Stop panicking. Stay cool. You can escape she told herself, but every glance over her shoulder showed her the man the thing getting closer, running on its knuckles. It was roaring as it ran, a roar that could not have come from human vocal chords, and its eyes burned like furnaces.

She cut onto the Mound, stumbling as she slid down the hill. Waverly. She had to get to Waverly. In Waverly was her locker, and in her locker with explosive tipped bolts. She had never had call to use them before, but that thing had shrugged off her normal bolt as if she’d been firing toothpicks.

She heard gunfire behind her. Firing at her, or firing at it? Did it matter? She kept her focus on her breathing, dodging and ducking around people, vaulting obstacles, her head snapping back and forth as, horrifyingly, the thing kept pace with her. It’s eyes flashed like stoked furnaces. She hit Waverly Bridge, almost fell, rolled and dived down the road that led into the depths of the station. A security guard stepped out of the checkpoint before the main station entrance, and she saw his hand going to his nightstick. Of course - I still have my crossbow and hatchet in my hands. He can see I’m armed, fuck! She didn’t have time to stop. As he opened his mouth to challenge her, she barrelled into him, shoulder first, and knocked him aside, and ran past. She saw another guard go for his gun, and thrust out the back of her hatchet. It caught the guard in the stomach, winding him and sending him to the ground with a thud.

Behind her, a crash. She half turned and saw the creature had collided with a taxi. The car had crumpled at the impact and flipped almost on one side. The creature hadn’t slowed even an inch.

Zularna fled into the bowels of Waverly station.

*

Tobias was flagging. Poor kid. That blow had at very least winded him, if not worse. I couldn’t stop. I fired off another round. It went wide over the creature’s head, shattering a street lamp. Bastard thing didn’t even slow down.

What was I trying to do? Kill it? Track it? Distract it from the person with the crossbow, who, for some reason or another, had saved my skin with that shot? How the hell was I to know? Everything was speed and gunfire and screams.

“It’s heading for the station!” Tobias bellowed behind me. He was starting to fall farther behind, clutching at his ribs and grimacing.

I put on an extra burst of speed. The creature had turned the corner on the mound and was pounding down the hill. I vaulted the fence by the Bank of Scotland, landed in a heap, and slid, on my back, down the steep incline. That caught me up by a few metres. It was on Waverley Bridge now. I tried to line up for another shot but there were too many people around. A rouge shot her might well kill someone. My muscles ached but I kept running.

Ahead of me, a sickening crash. The creature had run straight into a taxi turning out of the station, nearly flipping the damn thing over. Glass shattered and metal buckled. That thing must weigh half a ton by now, and it hadn’t even lost its balance.

Down into the station entrance - I saw something - two unconscious guards, and the creature disappearing into the station. Alarms sounding, people fleeing and crying out, and a heavy steel grate suddenly descending.

“They’re shutting the blast doors!”

The blast doors on Waverly and every other station were someone’s bright idea. If you find a bomb in the station, why not seal off all the entrances, so if it explodes no one will get hurt. Great idea, if there was any way to open the blast doors from the inside. There wasn’t. Once you were in, you were stuck, and if you happened to be trapped inside with a bomb, or, in this case, a horrible metal and skin freakshow made of bits of old ape and scrap metal, you were basically fucked.

The doors were coming down fast. I put on an extra burst of speed, throw myself down, rolled and skidded inside just as the door slammed shut, plunging me, and the station, into total darkness.

The darkness was another side effect of a stupid idea. Hey, so we’re sealing off the station with blast doors - let’s cut the power inside so the nasty terrorists can’t break into the electronics and hack their way out. Great idea - except it meant that everyone inside was trapped in darkness. The blast doors shut out any natural light, and so I found myself, sprawled in a heap, in the inky black.

Of course, unlike most people, crushing darkness didn’t bother me. I had a way of seeing that other people didn’t. I closed my eyes and slipped into Elsewhere. The absence of light had no impact on that world of shadows, always trapped in the grey of a foggy evening. Around me, shadows moved and shifted. A few civilians, who hadn’t been lucky enough to escape the station before they’d locked it down, stumbling about blindly, arms out, trying to find the nearest wall. The monochrome shapes of shops and platforms rose up out of the miasmic air. I saw no colour. The thing must have moved on. I stood, glanced down at the ghost of my revolver (still had a few rounds left) and began to move, slowly, carefully, through Elsewhere’s Waverley.

Waverley station is a warren of crisscrossed walkways and platforms. Like everything else in this city, it had been begun on the ground and built up, each generation adding more concourses and more waiting rooms, and more twisting turning passages that seems to lead round and round in circles, your platform in sight but never within reach as you raced, futily, to get the train before the doors slammed shut and it shot out of the station as if fired from a gun. The addition of the airship station on top of the railway station had further complicated things. Resident joked about getting lost for days in Waverley’s great, maze-like belly. I avoided the place as much as I could. During rush hour, it seems as if the city’s whole population crammed itself into these tunnels and fanned out over these platforms, squashing into each other and bashing each other with suitcases and sweating and swearing. A nightmare for the claustrophobe and the misanthrope alike.

I inched my way along in Elsewhere, then became aware of a buzzing on my pocket. I open my eyes, fumbled in my pockets in the gloom, then tapped the button on the side of my phone which linked it to my earpiece. “Talk to me,”

“What now?” Tobias sounded weary, but alright, “There’s a time and a place for that. Mine, later? I say mine, but we do live in like the same building -”

“By your feeble come on, may I assume,” I raised up my revolver and tried to let my eyes adjust to the gloom. A few of the shops had emergency backup generators, and a thin red line punctured the dark here and there. “That you’re ok?”

“Bruised but alive. Nothing broken,” A pause. There was the sound of Tobias tapping on his wrist unit. “Just one overwhelming question though?”

“What was that thing?” I suggested, “why did it lay a trap for us? And how do we kill it?”

“I was just going to go for ‘what the fuck is this shit, mate’? But that’ll do.”

I began, hesitantly, to climb some stairs. Unable to talk on the phone and be in Elsewhere at the same time (the last time I’d tried that, the call had cut out, and Tobias, who didn’t know about Elsewhere, had told me he’d heard muttering in a voice that wasn’t mine), I was moving blind.

“Can you break in?” I asked.

“On it. The security system has locked down pretty tight but I should be able to hack it,” Tobias, I could tell, was frowning over his wrist unit as he talked.

“Any sign of the law?”

“Nothing yet - got a hack on the police channels, though. Lot of 999 calls. People think it’s an escaped animal from the zoo or some shit. Mostly just people out here worried about those trapped inside.”

They weren’t the only ones. Whatever I was now trapped in here with had a taste for murder, and I had counted at least a dozen civilians, panicking in the dark. Another body was the last thing we needed.

“How are you for ammo?” S~ᴇaʀᴄh the FɪndNovᴇl.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

I hefted my revolver. I had been using it for long enough to know how many rounds I had left by the weight alone. “I’d say ten? Then we’re down to steel and I think that thing has the edge on me when it comes to pointy metal things.”

“Huh huh, edge,”

“That was unintentional,”

“Really? Your best line of the night,”

“Shut up. You joining me here or what?”

“Ok, sit tight. I’ll be in as soon as I can.”

I killed the call. I had reached the top of one of the walkways. Here, there was light. A long line of strip lamps lit the pathway, that seemed to run the length of the station, and only some of them had cut out when the power went down. The few that remained cast naked, stark light and left deep, forbidding pools of shadow. Perfect place for an ambush. I thought. The walkway was punctuated here and there by thick pillars, which would provide some cover if I needed it. Long range attacks weren’t what worried me. It was more the threat of that thing hanging from the ceiling, dropping down on me suddenly in a blaze of teeth and claws.

I was about to close my eyes to check things out in Elsewhere when I saw a movement at the other end of the walkway. My body moved of its own accord. I dropped to one knee as something shot over my head, and fired into the gloom. The sound of the shot thundered around the main concourse, echoing and reverberating and shattering the silence.

I stayed very still. No further movement. I reach up and realised something was missing. My hat. Gingerly, I turned.

My beloved flat cap had been shot clean off my head and was impaled on the wall behind me. By a crossbow bolt.

Ah, I thought. Forgot you’re here too…

Should I maybe call out? Say hello? Whoever was out there had an itchy trigger finger, and by the looks of that hat shot, they were perfectly capable of giving my head some additional ventilation at one hundred paces.

Fuck it. “Hello!” I called into the gloom. “Hello!”

No reply.

“You missed?” I said, then realised the stupidity of what I’d just said. If they hadn’t

missed, my conversation would probably be more along the lines of “aaaarrgghh the pain.” “But I’m afraid you killed my hat.”

Nothing. But I swore I heard someone snigger.

“I liked that hat,” I went on, getting into the swing of things now, “Got it in Armstrong’s. Only £20. Now, normally, I’d like to get to know you before you blow holes in my headgear, but this is exceptional circumstances, so why don’t we try again. I’m Elijah?”

Again silence. Clearly a better shot than conversationalist.

“Look, I think you and I are after the same...um...thing,” I tried a different tact. “So instead of wasting ammo on each others fashion sense, how about we team up and nail this bastard to the wall…?” More silence, “Look, I’m tired and I need a fag and my housemate and I have like a whole season of The Wire on the DVR so if we could just -”

“Fuck off.”

A voice, at last. A woman’s voice. Crossbow maniac is a woman. Cool. I mentally revised my internal sexist assumptions.

Another movement in the gloom. I tensed and raised the revolver again. Someone - she - stepped out into the light of one of the lamps. All in black, a balaclava concealing her whole face. The crossbow, a rather nifty looking collapsable job, was in one hand, already primed for another shot, I saw, and in the other was a wickedly curved hatchet.

Sometimes things happen that are completely random. They set off chains of events which lead you across worlds, throw you on the front line of battles you didn’t even know you exists, and cut a pencil thin beam of light across the darkness of your soul. Chaos theory. Tobias tried to explain it to me one time - the beating of a butterfly’s wings cause a storm that God himself cannot stop. Random chance. Unexpected events. Catastrophic consequences. And in this case, leading me to where I am now. Falling into oblivion in the wreckage of an airship. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Some things happen and you never know where they will lead you.

In this case, I blinked.

Normally, when I blink in front of another person, they become a shadowy form of themselves, wisps and eddies of smoke forming the approximation of a person, translucent and of no consequence in that grey world I called Elsewhere. Normally, I blink, register that spectre of a person, that other side of them they cannot see, and return to reality. Normally, I blink and that’s that.

But this time, when I blinked, I saw something I’d never seen in Elsewhere before.

I saw another person.

She stood in exactly the same pose as the woman in black. But she wore red. The deepest, richest shade of vermillion I had ever seen. Her hair was the same colour and flowed like liquid over her shoulders, cascading around her collarbones, and framing a face, a face with a knowing smile, and very, very bright eyes. Eyes that fixed upon me now, pinned me where I stood, skewered by their gaze.

“Well.” The woman said, “So it’s not just me,”

I opened my eyes. I was shaking. Another person in Elsewhere. There’s someone else, it’s not just me.

“What -?” I began to say.

It was stupid of us, really. We shouldn’t have been so exposed. The creature had been hiding in the shadows overhead. It leapt with a roar, caught the woman in a tackle, and bowled both of them over the walkway and down to the concourse below.

*

It hit Zularna like a tidal wave.

One second, she was on her feet, advancing on the masked man with the revolver, then she was in the air, with a great mass crushing into her, and her ears filled with an inhuman roar. She was plummeting to the ground, and somehow, in a fit of instinct over taking consciousness, she managed to push herself loose from the grip of those huge arms, and force the creature under herself.

It crashed to earth on the main concourse. She landed on top of it (thankfully missing the spikes rearing out of its spine) rolled, and came to the ground in a heap. She was dazed. Her side, where she’d been hit in that tackle, was agony. Her vision blurred from the pain and the adrenaline rush. Her hands, leaden, scrambled for the crossbow, the hatchet, anything before the creature got back on its feet -

And then it was on her. A huge, clawed hand planted itself on her chest, crushing her into the ground and pinning her the ground. It was almost naked now, its clothes shredded away, and metal coursed through it’s skin, bursting out in spikes and diving back in. Gears clicked at its joints, and it stank of dead flesh, oil, and blood. And its face, that horrible, stretched out mockery of a human face, with eyes that burned in empty, pussing sockets. Zularna looked up into those eyes, far behind a row of tombstone dagger teeth, and saw Hell.

She was trapped. Its weight was on her, and she thought her ribs would break and she would die then and there. Its other arm was raised, ready to rake her with those steel claws, a single blow that would reduce her to shreds of skin and meat.

Then a loud echoing crack. The creature roared in pain as a chunk of its flesh was blown clean off the raised arm. It howled and turned, as another shot tore away a piece of its shoulder.

Blearily, through the pain, Zularna heard a voice shouting: “Here! Over here!”

Elijah was walking towards them. Smoke rose from the barrel of his revolver. As the creature looked up, he dropped it to his hip and fired three shots, cocking back the hammer with his left hand as the gun snarled and bucked in his right. Three ragged, bloody holes opened in the creature’s torso and it screamed in pain and shock.

Then came the unmistakable hollow clack of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

*

Bollocks.

I was out and the thing was still standing. I’d fired at the only exposed patches of skin I could see, around the chest and arms. I should, should have used frag rounds, or incendiaries, but that thing had the woman pinned underneath it and was moving in the for the killing blow.

No time. Now no ammo.

“Hey!” I heard myself still screaming, “Over here! Over here, you motherfucker!”

It turned to face me. Bloody. Part living part machine. What it was or why it had left a trail of destruction across half a city, I didn’t know. I just wanted it away from her. The second I lost its attention, it would bring those claws down on her and she’d be dead.

The only other person in the world who might know what Elsewhere really was.

“Come and get me!” I bellowed.

I spread out arms by my side, and clicked a little switch sticking out of each sleeve. Where Tobias has his wrist unit, I had something else entirely. My Katai Blades snapped out from their sheaths in the gauntlets I wore strapped to my forearms. Each one was a foot long blade. I gripped the straps on each blade, flexing them as I flexed my arms. I put one foot forward, raised the blades, and stood ready. Come on. Come at me.

It began to charge. It was hurt, and it was angry, and it was coming towards me like a freight train. In a head on attack, it would probably knock me to the ground, crush me down and shred me with its claws. Or at least it would if I didn’t time what I was about to do right to the very second.

Closer. Closer. It covered huge distances with each stride of its loping run. Now just leap at me. Please God leap at me or she and I and a whole bunch of other people are utterly, utterly fucked.

I saw its legs coil, and saw it leap. Now.

I closed my eyes.

Time moves more slowly in Elsewhere. That was something that this creature - here, a fiery mass of snarling rage - could not have known, as it sailed towards me, slowly, almost somberly. I stepped to one side, and opened my eyes. My fingers found the right switch on the inside of my gauntlet.

My revolver was empty. The double barrelled derringer, kept in a wrist holster on the inside of my right gauntlet, on the other hand, wasn’t. Its ammo had nowhere near the stopping power of a .44, but at this range, it didn’t need to.

Both barrels hit the creature’s head as its jaws closed on the space I had occupied a second before. The top part of its skull caved in and was wrenched away. Blood spattered the ground. The creature crashed to the ground, its body still trying to move even though its brains had been blown through its skull. I swung my Katai blades in a downward arc on what remained of the head. Again. Again. Again. It spasmed once, then fell still.

For the first time in a long time, I breathed out. My legs gave way and I crashed down to the floor next to the creature. All the pain and exhaustion hit me at once. Everything was going to hurt in the morning.

I patted my pockets down, and found my tobacco pouch, and, low and behold, a cigarette which past Elijah had kindly rolled. Well done, past Elijah. I fumbled about for my lighter, and found to my horror it wasn’t in my coat pocket. It must have fallen out somewhere on the mad run between George IV and here. Bugger. I looked around in the dim light for some source of fire, then noticed the dead thing’s eyes. The furnaces were dying, but there was a little life left.

“Sorry about this,” I apologised, and lit my cigarette in the dead things eye socket.

There was a sudden thrum and the lights came back to life. In the stark new light, I heard the sound of running footsteps.

“Eli!” Tobias came skidding to a stop next to me. “Sorry about that, bloody security systems are really hard to hack - oh my God, that is disgusting!” he starred in horror at the dead creature. “Also, did you just stick your cigarette in its eye?”

“It’s been one of those days.” I inhaled deeply. “You ok?”

“Fine - mate, what -?”

“ - Happened? Fuck knows. I need a beer, a bath and to be attack hugged by duvets. Not that fussed about the order.”

As the lights came back on, people began to emerge from their hiding places. A few gathered at the fringes of the concourse, gazing at the man, the teenager, and the unearthly horror that lay dead next to them. The air reeked of the corpse and of gunsmoke. My cigarette was positively perfume in comparison.

Except something was missing. The woman. In the rush of finally taking down the creature, I’d almost forgotten about her. When I looked to where she had been, she was gone. I felt hollow. I knew nothing about her. Not her name, her age, or why she’d been stalking the same quarry as me armed with crossbow and hatchet. But what I had known about her, and was robbed of now, cut deeply.

She might have had answers to the question that had haunted me for almost eight years.

What is Elsewhere?

More sounds now. Sirens. The sound of distant running and shouting. Tobias’s ears pricked up. “Police?”

“Sounds like.”

“Shall we make ourselves scarce?”

“Plan.”

And so we fled into the night, with many more questions than answers, leaving behind a smouldering cigarette, and the corpse of what had once been a man.

Sᴇarch the FindNovel.net website on G𝘰𝘰gle to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.