Rain hammered Seattle. It flooded Madrona Park and drenched the man kneeling over the writhing body of his best friend. They were Hallowjacks, both of them, and they had chased the last of the Starving Men to this city where he had struck back.
Officer Sharon Conner, her police blues plastered to her brown curves, tentatively put her hand on the kneeling man’s shoulder. “My radio’s not working. We’re going to have to get your friend an ambulance and then you’re going to tell me what’s going on. What was that thing?”
Adam lifted his eyes to her but didn’t seem to see her. He was a wan and weary man with close-cropped sandy hair and a blunt face. “It’s too late. He’s a dead man. We need to get back from him now.” He rose, took her by the arm and led her away.
The prone man thrashed as his skin started to ripple and twist.
Sharon jerked away from him. “We can’t just… what’s happening to him?”
Adam’s voice was horse when he said, “The Starving Man opened up a hole in him, a vacuum that something from the Outer Corridor will fill. It will eat Val from the inside out and take his place in our world. And then you’ll have to pull that gun from your holster and kill him.”
Sharon looked like she wanted to shoot Adam instead and jerked him around to face her. “What are you talking about? Who are you people?”
Adam gazed into her with his purple-rimmed eyes. Her mind swam with waves of confusion and fear coalescing into hostility. So typical. She would be no help at all.
He scratched his head and smiled like a man struggling to hold on to his sanity. “I’m an antibody. I’m this world’s response to invading nightmares. I’ve got senses I don’t even have names for. That’s why I got tapped for the Hallowjacks.” He pointed at his friend, who had gone suddenly still. “He joined to keep an eye on me, like he always has since we were kids. And now he’s dead because of it. I get to tell his fiancé how he died and how I somehow didn’t see that coming. Isn’t that great?”
Sharon nodded and set her face like a mask. “Okay, then. I think you should come to the station with me and we’ll get this all sorted out. We’ll send a couple units to look for this guy you were fighting and-”
Adam scratched his head again, his compulsion whenever his nerves began to fray. “No! Just go home and hide under the bed. You guys aren’t equipped-”
Sharon placed a hand on her holster and tightened her grip on his arm. “You’re coming with me to the station.”
“The hell he is,” rasped a voice behind them.
They turned to see Val Hightower struggling to his feet under the punishing rain. Both Adam and Sharon gasped at the sight of him, the wax-white skin traced with livid blue veins, the freakishly sunken and severe lines of his face and the golden gleam of his eyes. It seemed to Adam as if someone had tried to sculpt a statue of his friend and decided halfway through to make a gargoyle instead. Only his shaggy blood-red hair was unchanged.
Adam found his voice. “You’re not Val.”
“It’s me, Adam,” answered the creature.
Adam closed his eyes and the presence of the creature bloomed in his consciousness like a tumor showing up on an x-ray. He almost threw up. “No. You’re just some abomination that used my friend as a womb.”
The creature smiled and his teeth were sharp and yellow. “More like as a blueprint. Me and the abomination… we’ve come to an understanding.”
***
Nine blocks away, Fred Benton slumped onto a ripped easy chair in his musty first floor apartment and wondered how much longer this could on. At first, “this” had been the unceasing rain. Then it had expanded to include his malfunctioning television which offered nothing but static for entertainment. But now it covered just about everything, just his whole life.
He was forty-six years old, the super in this building full of glowering ingrates and alone. His body was pear-shaped and sprouted hair from places that weren’t fashionable; somehow this meant that his lusts were creepy, though they’d be perfectly normal and welcome in a fitter, richer man. Carly from 3R had scowled at him with such disgust when she caught him looking at her legs. He wasn’t even going to say or do anything, God forbid.
“Yes, God is good at forbidding,” purred a voice behind him.
Fred jumped from his chair with an embarrassing screech and spun around with his fists clenched, ready to fight. The sight of his intruder, however, gave him pause. The man was wearing a dripping, bulky overcoat and dingy pants. His fingernails were long and curved and black as coal. His head was completely swathed in wet bandages and something about its shape seemed wrong.
“Your life’s course is set, Fred,” said the figure and despite his appearance, his voice was beautiful, gentle, the voice of a kind king. “You will continue on this way until the day you die because you don’t hunger enough to change it.” There was a scent in the air, like lilac.
Against all reason, Fred felt his fear and anger passing, his hands unclenching. Yes, the stranger shouldn’t have just come into his apartment but he didn’t seem dangerous. “How do you know me?”
The stranger cocked his head. “I could taste your sadness in the rain. You could have been so much more if someone had just believed in you.”
Fred’s breath caught in his throat. These words seemed like the most compassionate thing anyone had ever said to him and he shook his head with disbelief when his eyes began to swim. “I, uh, I’ve done the best I could.”
The figure took a step forward and stretched out a hand imploringly. “But it hasn’t made you happy. This isn’t who you were meant to be, Fred. Is it? Tell me now!”
Fred Benton’s hands started to tremble as a passion ignited in him that made all his life up to this point seem a gray dream. He gasped, “No! I need more than this! Help me!”
“Of course,” said the Starving Man and he rushed forward to embrace him.
***
“This is it. This is the highlight of my life,” said Val Hightower as he stood back to appreciate his handiwork.
Sharon lay sputtering at his feet, her wrists handcuffed together behind her back. “Let me go this instant! You’re assaulting a police officer. You’ll do serious time for this!”
“Beats dying in an apocalypse,” Val shrugged. He heaved her up and deposited her in the backseat of her cruiser. “There. Nice and dry till your pals come or the world gets turned inside out.” He walked back over to where he had fallen, found his black knit cap, wrung the water from it and put it on.
Adam watched all of this impassively but when Val approached him, he flinched back.
Val snarled in anger, a feral sound that seemed to startle him as much as Adam. He held out his gleaming white hands. “Adam, I’m trying to keep myself together and I need your help, okay? If I think about what’s happened to me then I’m gonna lose it so why don’t you be my backup for a change?” He realized he was shouting and stopped. Then he smiled. “Look, I just wrestled a cop to the ground and slapped her own handcuffs on her. Doesn’t that sound like something I would do?”
Adam searched that ghastly distortion of his friend’s smiling face, trying to block out his other senses and see the man he knew. He said, “You’re…messing with my reception. Stay a few yards behind me so I can track him okay?”
“Sure.”
Adam lifted his head to the dark, gray sky and let the city wash over him. He moaned as a terrible weight settled on him; this cold deluge had made the moods of thousands melancholy. He hated being in cities. Then he felt a poisonous ripple pass through him, and another.
He lifted a shaking hand and pointed. “That way. Not far. He’s really going to town.”
“You want to go back and get the car?” asked Val, but Adam was already running. Val took another long look at his strange new hands and fled after him.
They raced through mostly deserted streets, appeared just vague shadows in the storm to those passing in the safety of their cars. They splashed through intersections and the pools of sickly light cast by streetlamps until Adam stumbled to a stop outside a six-story brick building. The front door was half off its hinges. He pointed again, wordlessly, and they stepped into a darkened lobby.
“Why are the lights off?” Adam muttered to himself and turned to Val. “Do you still have the skewer?”
Val searched the inner pockets of his trench-coat for the serrated, steel quill, one of six the Relentless had worn pinned through her flank and had used to punish her wild hounds, the Starving Men. He found it, hissed in pain and dropped it to the floor.
“It burned me.” He looked to Adam imploringly. “When the other ‘Jacks catch up with us, you’ll tell them I’m still me, right? You know what Bridger’s going to say and Hale might agree with him. They’ll want to… You’ll tell them, won’t you?”
Adam opened his mouth and for long seconds nothing came out. Then they both jumped at a skittering sound in the shadows over their heads. Adam pulled a penlight from his pocket and pointed it upwards, revealing a nightmare set loose on the waking world. A grinning, round face framed in golden curls peered down at them from the ceiling. The child’s chubby body changed at the waist into pulpy coil of muscle from which a thousand centipede legs sprouted. It waved cheerfully and then undulated halfway down the wall where it paused, clenched its fists and launched itself at them.
Val tackled Adam, who was frozen in horror, and the centipede-thing sailed over them, gracefully landed with a quick series of taps on the floor and whirled around for another attack. Val leapt to his feet and as he did so, felt something begin to rise from the still, black pool at the bottom of his mind, the primeval shape of his predator and passenger. He let it rise and felt his jaw distend to grotesque proportion and heard himself roar to rattle the windows.
The centipede-thing quailed and bolted out the front door, disappearing into the downpour. Val turned and gazed down at Adam, grinning so hard and wide he was drooling, and found himself wondering what Adam’s eyes would taste like. He stumbled back away from his friend and shook his head wildly, again and again, until the dark shape sunk back down below his mind. The moment passed and Val decided to pretend it hadn’t even happened.
“Up and at ’em, Adam Ashe,” he said, helping his friend to his feet.
“You never get sick of that line, do you?” Adam spied the skewer and picked it up. “Let’s finish this before it gets worse.”
Val jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That little freak just escaped into the city.”
“We can’t worry about that now. The important thing is to stop the Starving Man from letting any more things through. If he can poke enough little pinpricks through the barrier all close together, it’ll reach a critical mass and rip open a nice big hole to the Outer Corridors. We won’t be able to handle that.”
“Alright. Where in the building is he?”
“I don’t know. Too much poison in this building. We just have to search.”
Adam cautiously began to climb the darkened stairway, wincing every time a step creaked. When they reached the second floor landing, Adam silently motioned for Val to continue up to the third. Val shrugged, the stealthy approach seemed a little pointless to him after the ruckus in the lobby, and stomped up the stairs.
He paused, hearing piano music from above him, and followed it up to the fifth floor. He noticed the door of 5B was ajar and bloody footprints, or hoofprints from the look of them, led from there to a broken window at the end of the hall. It was going to be a bad night in Seattle.
Val followed the music to 5D. He took a breath, slowly opened the door and saw the Starving Man and a heavy, middle-aged woman in a loose bathrobe. They were both sitting at a spare black piano, their backs to him. The Starving Man’s head rose suddenly and his fingers stopped dancing across the keys.
“Oh, don’t stop playing,” the woman pleaded gently, putting a hand on his arm. “You’re better than I ever was.”
He bowed slightly to her and said, “I would love to, Alicia, but someone has come for me.” He turned himself around on the bench and swept his gaze over Val appraisingly. “Hm. You again. How unusual.”
“Who is this?” asked the woman. She had turned to look at him and now clutched the Starving Man in fear.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he reassured her, gently patting her arm with his talons. “This is just a young man I helped earlier. Deep down, he was very jealous of his friend’s gift and was sure he could use it better. He wanted to be special, like we all do. So I made him special.” He turned his strange head and unblinking gaze back to Val. “But he really should have been hollowed out by now. How remarkable that he hasn’t.”
Val took a step forward, into the room. He knew he should call to Adam but he wanted to explain first, needed to explain first. “I’m a Hallowjack. We walk the borders and stop invaders for a living. The thing you let inside me wants to live above all else. If it keeps me alive, my friends won’t be able to kill it without killing me.”
“Remarkable,” repeated the Starving Man. “You must have a powerful will to make such a creature recognize reason. Still, I’d wager it would rather listen to me.”
But before he could say another word and destroy the truce that was sparing Val’s life, the Hallowjack clamped his hands over his ears and bellowed Adam’s name at the top of his lungs over and over again.
“Time to say goodbye, Alicia,” muttered the Starving Man as he ripped open her bathrobe, revealing a hugely swollen belly mottled with dark green blemishes. As Val kept hollering and Adam’s footsteps began thumping up the stairway, he leaned forward and whispered one last word in Alicia Renfro’s ear. A new orifice appeared on her belly, flicked open like the lid of an eye, and disgorged a swarm of fat winged insects, scarlet-bodied and clicking.
Adam ran to Val, calling, “I’m coming! Did you find him? Holy sh-!” The cloud of insects exploded out into the hallway, engulfing both flailing men. The nature of the insects caused a sensory overload in Adam so complete that he didn’t even feel the third figure slam him aside or hear the footfalls pounding up the stairs as the Starving Man made his escape.
Nor was he aware of Val heaving him up over his shoulder and giving chase to their quarry. Val took the stairs two at a time, amazed at both his new strength and the fact that he wasn’t revolted by the bugs still clinging to his face or the one squirming in his mouth. He shook the former off, bit down on the latter and burst through the door to the roof just in time to see the Starving Man make an amazing leap to the next building over.
The rain, now lessened to a cold drizzle, brought Adam out of his fugue. “What-what are we doing?”
Val set him down and helped steady him on his feet. “Bastard just made a helluva jump.”
They both gingerly approached the streaming edge of the roof and saw that the building next door was a full two stories shorter. They watched the Starving Man kick the roof door in and disappear inside.
Val backed up a few steps. “I think I can make it. You go back down to the street and get in that way. We’ll sandwich him between us.”
Adam squinted at him. “Are you insane? You’re going to break a leg or something.”
“Naw, I’ll just land on my head,” answered Val and launched himself into the weeping sky.
The world wobbled around him in dizzy anticipation of his landing and then all in a rush he met the concrete roof with a terrific splash, sliding several yards in stunned numbness. He lay still for several seconds, waiting for the pain to come. It did, but not nearly as much as should have and it faded far too quickly.
He pushed himself up to his hands and knees and gasped when he saw his reflection in the rippling water. It was the first time he had seen his face since falling to the Starving Man and the sight filled him with a despair that crowded all other thoughts out of his mind. He had known it was bad but had been telling himself that there would be some cure, some kind of fix for him, after their enemy was beaten. But that was a lie.
He knelt there in the rain, trying to remember exactly what his face had looked like before and failing, trying to be afraid of what he saw and failing.
***
The last thing Adam wanted to do was make a detour back to apartment 5D on his way out of the building but he had to. The skewer was missing and he suspected he had dropped it when they had gotten swarmed. Sure enough, it was lying there on the black tile floor in the rectangle of light cast by 5D’s open door. The swarm was nowhere to be seen.
His skin crawling, Adam knelt and retrieved the skewer while casting a quick glance into the apartment. A glimpse of Alicia Renfro’s deflated shell of limp flesh, sprawling forlornly across the piano bench, was enough to convince him to abandon stealth and beat feet down the stairs and out the lobby. He was never so glad to walk out into a storm.
He jumped at the sound of gunshots and peered through the quickening rain to find their source. He could make out what appeared to be a police cruiser at the end of the block and two shapes, one human, one an asymmetrical shuffling mass. This was a disaster.
More bullets flew as Adam approached the second building’s front door, a metal frame around glass through which he saw only darkness. He tried it, found it locked, then spotted the business listings next to it. Not an apartment building then and if their luck held, maybe nobody was working late.
But their luck didn’t hold. Something hulking swept out of the darkness and shattered the door on impact. Adam sailed backwards in a shower of broken glass and raindrops, slapping the back of his head against the sidewalk. Spots danced in front of his eyes and obscured the creature looming over at him. When they cleared, he saw oily gray skin stretched over mountainous muscle mass, a jagged plate of bone mounted on an enormous skull from which a dozen tiny black eyes blinked at him, all that was once human about this man utterly lost.
Out of the corner of his eye, Adam spotted where the skewer had landed just eight feet away and lunged for it. He snatched it up and stabbed at the creature. But the thing was unnaturally fast and caught him by the wrist, breaking it with ease and throwing Adam back to the ground. Adam clutched his arm in agony and watched helplessly as the creature picked up the skewer, grunted in surprise and pain, and hurled it away. It disappeared into the sky and Adam groaned.
The creature cackled like a crow and kicked Adam in the ribs hard enough to send him hydroplaning into the street. It sauntered after him and raised its foot for another kick, when two shots rang out and two wounds blossomed on its chest.
It turned and blinked at Adam’s savior, a skinny middle-aged cop trying hard to keep his trembling hands from dropping his gun. The creature snorted furiously, an explosion of water and mucus, leveled its massive head at the man and charged. The police officer sent three bullets into the creature’s leg, one directly into its knee, and it tumbled down with a splash and a snarl of frustration. The cop edged closer to it, aimed at the back of its neck and fired four times. It went still.
The officer couldn’t take his eye off the corpse as he sidled over to Adam and spoke with the tremor of impending madness. “Sir, are you alright? Do you know what’s going on here? There are-are monsters all over the place.”
“This chaos is just a passing storm, Officer Penn,” said the most wonderful voice either man had ever heard. The Starving Man stood in the shattered doorway. “You wear that badge because you are the rock we cling to in passing storms. Isn’t that what you swore as a boy that day in Denver when you saw a good man ruined by injustice? Be steady now and hear what I have to say.”
The officer gaped at the strange figure, no longer feeling the rain, and slowly lowered his gun.
“But let me first deal with you, Adam Ashe,” said the last hound of the Relentless. “Weary man, find the strength inside yourself to rise one last time.”
And despite his bleeding cuts and scraps, his aching head and broken ribs, Adam forced himself to his feet. Something important was about to happen, something he had waited for his entire life and the pain seemed unimportant, transient.
Unbearably blue eyes burned between the dark folds of the Starving Man’s dirty bandages. “What must it be like to see things as they really are? What must it be like to see past the lies they build their entire world out of, to hear nothing but mindless hypocrisy, to be robbed of belief and intrigue and comfort?”
Adam said, faintly, “It’s like being locked in a room full of mannequins, like I’m the only thing that’s real. I want… I want out.”
“Of course,” answered the Starving Man with outstretched arms.
But before Adam could throw away his very soul, Val lunged from the broken doorway and tackled the Starving Man from behind, driving both of them into the flooded gutter. Adam and the cop watched, confused and clouded, as the two thrashed savagely in the water. The struggle ended when Val caught his enemy in a choke hold and tore the bandages from his head.
What Adam and the cop saw then made them both cringe in horror and the yearning that had ignited within them like a twin pair of suns suddenly dwindled and retreated to whatever hidden places they kept it.
For long moments, the only sound was the Starving Man’s oddly childlike sobbing. Val let him go and he dropped limply to the pavement and covered his head with his hands.
“Something on the roof got me thinking,” Val said, “about how these guys always have their heads covered. In every bit of history we have on them, they’re always wearing a helmet or a mask or something.”
“Don’t look at me!” bleated the Starving Man and now his voice was wheezing and phlegmatic and nothing like it was before.
Val grinned wickedly as he jerked him upright and forced his hands away from his face. The hound struggled but ineffectually. Adam realized he was noticeably thinner. The three men stared at the creature as his body began a slow collapse, his flesh pulling in and withering. It was a sight that could only fill them with pity but they did not stop. He wasted away before their eyes, yipping and weeping.
In his last moments, when he was reduced to a skeleton covered by a parchment of skin and his every breath was a ragged expulsion of air, the Starving Man said, “My kind will win in the end. This world was built for despair. Heartbreak here is...” And then he died.
Adam looked at Val, who watched the rain wash the remains of the being who had remade him, and wondered what he was feeling. It used to be that his extra senses could give him some idea but his friend was now eclipsed by something polluted. He asked himself if he could he take it on faith that Val was still really in there?
Officer Penn was also staring at Val, his brow furrowed by disgust and suspicion. “What about you?” he asked. “What the hell are you?”
“Pay attention,” snapped Adam, “he’s one of us.” And even if he didn’t really mean it, just the fact that he said it meant something.
