A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0025

The two of them would live, which was, when Jack thought about it, the most generous thing anyone in this building was going to do for them all night.

He stood over them in the dark and took inventory the way the suit had taught him to take inventory, fast and without feeling, reading bodies the way other men read a clock. The one nearest the container wall was the worse of the pair. His face had swollen into a single shapeless thing on the left side, the eye lost somewhere under it, the gag of his own filthy sock still wired into his mouth, and his leg lay turned out from the hip at an angle that the body did not allow a living leg to hold, so that even unconscious, even gone, there was a wrongness to the shape of him that the eye kept refusing and coming back to.

The other one was cleaner. The jaw had come off its hinge under the heel that put him down, and it hung now a finger’s width out of true, the mouth open and soft, the man breathing through it in the slow wet way of someone who would wake in a few hours into a great deal of pain and a permanently rearranged face. Neither would die. Jack had been precise about that. Precision was the only thing he truly owned.

He had not pictured this. That was the thought that sat under the cold work of the assessment, small and almost amused. When he and Kevin had first stood in front of the whiteboard and started circling targets, he had imagined the early ones as small and stupid, corner boys and bag men, the soft bottom of the food chain, easy value for the rolls and not much risk. Arms. He had not let himself imagine that the first real haul would be a van loaded to the roof with oiled steel, a whole district’s worth of war wrapped in greased paper and waiting to be driven off into the next month of funerals. Kevin had found this.

Kevin, with his newspaper clippings and his old debts and his ugly gift for hearing the city talk to itself, had reached into the noise and pulled out something far larger than anything they had agreed to start with, and had presented it to Jack two nights ago with the particular shy pride of a man laying a kill at someone’s feet. Jack had told him it was too big. Kevin had grinned and said that was the point. Looking down now at the two ruined men and listening, beyond the black mouth of the warehouse, to the voices of the ones who did not yet know any of this had happened, Jack allowed himself the private admission that his friend had outdone himself, and that he was glad.

He hadn’t allowed himself to imagine that the first major seizure would be a van loaded to the roof with oiled steel, the equivalent of an entire war zone wrapped in greasy paper and waiting to be taken away for next month’s funerals. Kevin had found it. Kevin, with his newspaper clippings, his old debts, and his peculiar gift for hearing the town talk for itself, had plunged his hand into the noise and pulled out something far larger than anything they had initially agreed upon, and presented it to Jack two nights ago with the peculiar shy pride of a man laying prey at someone’s feet. Jack told it was too big. Kevin smiled and said that was the intention. Looking now at the two ruined men and hearing, beyond the dark mouth of the warehouse, the voices of those who still knew nothing of what had happened, Jack allowed himself to admit privately that his friend had outdone himself, and that he was happy for him.

The gun lay where it had spun when he tore it loose from the second man’s hand.

He crossed to it without hurry. The world held no inconvenience for him in here. The breaker was dead by his own arrangement and the whole interior was a flooded basement of black, the kind of black that made armed men brave and made them blind, and to Jack, behind the dark lenses that drank what little there was and gave it back to him sharpened and grey and complete, the warehouse was merely a quiet room he happened to be standing in. He bent and picked the weapon up off the greasy concrete.

An Uzi, compact and squat and heavier than its size promised, the twin of the one the first man had carried, the twin of the one that had hung at the leader’s hip while he smiled at his van. Jack turned it over once in his hands, dropped the magazine into his palm, and read it with his thumb. Full. Not a round spent. They had been so confident of the deal that they had loaded their new toys and not thought once that they might need them tonight, and now the work was done and the loading had only made his work easier.

A small thing moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, a thing the smile grew out of.

He seated the magazine, let the action carry it home, and turned toward the light.

Toward the great rolled-back door at the front of the warehouse, where the night stood in a pale rectangle and the salt and the diesel came in off the water, and through it, small and unaware, the rest of them.

He walked to it without weighing the walk, and the dark walked with him.

That was the part the men outside would never be able to explain to anyone afterward, in the unlikely event that anyone ever believed enough of the rest to ask. The suit did not glow and did not shimmer and did nothing a watching eye could name. It simply refused the light. It took the spill of the streetlamps and the wash of the half-moon and let none of it land, so that a tall man walking straight toward an open doorway with a submachine gun in his hand registered, to the eyes beyond the threshold, as nothing at all, as a slightly deeper fold in a darkness already absolute. Jack stopped a stride back from the line where the floor of the warehouse gave way to the cracked concrete of the yard, stood inside the last of the shadow as if behind a one-way glass, and looked out at the men who were going to be his.

He counted eleven.

They were strung in a ragged arc across the yard between him and the little van, and every one of them had a gun up, and every one of those guns was pointed at the black doorway, at him, at a thing they could not see and had decided to be afraid of. They had heard the fight. Of course they had heard it, the struck-metal note of Jamal meeting the container wall, the short ugly music of a man being taken apart in the dark, and it had pulled them around off the van and brought their weapons up, and now they stood in the open and shouted into the warehouse the name of a man who was never going to answer them. They wanted to know if Jamal was all right. They called it into the dark over and over, in voices that had started angry and were sliding, with each unanswered second, toward something thinner.

Jack looked at them and felt, instead of fear, a flat professional contempt that he recognized as the suit’s and had stopped trying to separate from his own.

Not one of them had taken cover. Eleven armed men, their friend screaming and then not screaming somewhere in front of them, and they stood there in the open mouth of the yard in a loose line like men waiting for a bus, chests and faces and the whole soft fronts of them turned toward the threat, lit up by their own streetlamps, offering themselves. If he had wanted them dead he could have given them to the dark in under five seconds. The geometry of it assembled itself in his head without his asking, the order he would take them in, the sweep, the way the line would fold from the center out before the ends understood enough to run, and the Uzi in his hands was exactly the tool for that arithmetic, full, patient, accurate past anything its makers had imagined now that his hands were the ones holding it. Five seconds. Maybe four.

He thought about it the way you think about a door you have decided not to walk through.

Because there was the other arithmetic, the longer one, the one Kevin would have called the boring kind and Jack thought of simply as the truth. A man who began his work by hosing down eleven people in a harbor lot became, that same night, a particular kind of name. He became a thing the city assigned task forces to and the surviving gangs swore blood against and the cold bright people from above came down to investigate, because mass death drew attention the way nothing else did, and attention was the one currency Jack and Kevin could not afford to spend. There was no future in which the first sentence ever written about him was the sentence about the night he killed eleven men in the open. He had a great many things he intended to become. A reason for grieving mothers and federal eyes was not one of them. The dead made noise. The living, if you arranged them correctly, made a story too strange to be believed, and a story too strange to be believed was the best silence money could not buy.

So he would not kill them. He would do something worse to the inside of them, and let them carry it out into the world themselves.

He raised the Uzi.

The motion was small and the suit made it perfect. He did not aim it the way a man aims, did not square his shoulders or close an eye or hunt the sights; the weapon came up and the targets were simply already chosen, eleven men and, between them, twelve guns, because two of them, greedy with their new arsenal, had filled both hands, a pistol and a long gun apiece, and the suit counted barrels and not bodies. Twelve dark muzzles pointed at him across the yard. Twelve specific points hung in the grey of his vision like marks on a page he had been given all the time in the world to read. He let his wrist do it. One flat unhurried sweep, left to right, the barrel tracking across the arc of them while his finger kept the work going underneath, and the night came apart.

The burst lasted under two seconds and inside it lived twelve separate exact events.

Each round found a weapon. Not a hand, not a wrist, not the meat behind, the weapon, the steel itself, struck at the receiver or the cylinder or the slide so that the gun did not merely fall but came apart, burst out of the grip that held it in a spray of springs and sheared metal and ruined geometry, twelve small detonations of function walking down the line in the time it takes to exhale. A pistol leapt out of a man’s fist with its slide folded backward.

A long gun’s receiver opened like a struck fruit. The submachine guns, those ugly beautiful shapes the leader had been so proud of an hour before, came undone in their owners’ hands and rained down across the concrete in pieces, and then it was over, and the yard rang with the after-silence that follows close gunfire, and eleven men stood holding nothing, their hands still curled around shapes that were no longer there, their faces beginning, slowly, to understand.

Twelve shots. Twelve guns. Not one of them touched.

For a long beat nobody moved at all. The men stared at their own emptied hands, then at the broken metal scattered glinting at their feet, then up at the black doorway, and the anger that had carried them this far drained out through the soles of their shoes and left behind it the first cold tide of something else. And into that silence, deliberate and unhurried, came the sound of footsteps. Not running. Walking. An even, patient tread crossing the warehouse floor toward the light, growing, taking its time, and the men out in the yard went very still and watched the dark for the thing that owned it.

The light took him a piece at a time, the way the suit let it.

First a foot, settling onto the concrete just inside the rectangle of moon and lamplight, a polished black shoe where they had expected a boot or nothing at all. Then the long line of a leg, the dark fabric resolving out of the deeper dark behind it. Then the rest, the torso, the loose easy set of the shoulders, the gun held low and idle at the end of one arm, and last the face, lifting into the light, and the men in the yard got their look at the thing that had unmade their friend and their weapons, and it was the wrongness of it that undid them more than anything yet. They had braced for a monster. What came out of the dark was a boy.

Tall, far too tall, narrow as a blade, pale in a way that had nothing of the sun in it, with fair hair and a smooth unmarked face and a pair of dark lenses across the eyes that gave back the lamplight in two flat coins, and over the whole of it, dropped onto the mouth like an afterthought, a small and genuinely pleasant smile. Something built like a fashion advertisement had walked out of the place where Jamal had screamed. One of the dead man’s own Uzis hung in his hand.

The boy looked them over, eleven men and not one weapon between them, and spoke into the quiet in a voice that was almost kind.

“You want to do this the easy way,” he said, “or the hard way?”

For most of them the question simply did not land, because most of them had gone somewhere behind their own eyes, into the flat grey place the body retreats to when it has met something the mind has no shelf for. They stood and stared and felt, without being able to name it, the pressure that came off the slim figure in the doorway, a wrongness in the air around him like the drop before a storm, and it pressed them down and held them where they stood and made the idea of moving feel like the idea of stepping off a roof.

But not all of them had gone away. One of them was still entirely present, and that one was the largest of them, and the one with the most to lose.

Johnson came off the line with a sound that was not a word.

It tore out of him low and animal, the roar of a big man who has felt the floor of his whole life tilt and has decided, in the absence of anything else to do, to put his body through the thing that tilted it. He was the nearest to the door and he closed the distance fast, faster than a man his size had any business moving, all of that weight and all of that fury driving straight at the slim shape in the threshold, and for one instant the geometry of it looked like the oldest and surest thing in the world. He was enormous. The boy was a reed. There was no version of physics in the watching men’s bones where the reed survived the meeting.

The reed did not appear to do very much at all.

Johnson came into range, and the boy’s leg came up, and Johnson’s head snapped backward as though it had run into a low beam at full sprint. That was all the eye could honestly report. A foot, rising, faster than the watching could follow, and then the leader’s chin going up and his head going back and the whole onrushing mass of him stopping its forward argument and beginning, all at once, a different and unwilling journey. His body turned in the air.

The momentum he had built charging across the yard did not vanish; it was caught and folded and handed back to him, redirected clean through his own center of gravity, and Johnson left his feet and went backward, away from the door, retracing in half a second and flat on the air the entire path he had taken to get there, and came down on the concrete on the back of his skull and his shoulders with a sound that the yard felt through its feet, and did not get up, and did not move, and did not, the men slowly realized, look as though he intended to do either again soon. The face he had thrown forward was already swelling where the foot had met it. He had been put out before he finished falling.

The momentum he had built up running across the courtyard didn’t disappear; it was captured, absorbed, and returned to him, redirected through his own center of gravity, and Johnson left his feet behind, stepping away from the door, retracing in half a second and in the air the entire path he had traveled to get there, and fell onto the concrete with the back of his skull and shoulders with a sound that the courtyard felt with its feet, and he didn’t get up, didn’t move, and, the men slowly realized, didn’t seem to intend to do either again anytime soon. The face he had projected forward was already swollen where his foot had struck him. He passed out before he had even finished falling.

The men stared at the place where their leader had been standing, and then at the place where he now lay, three full meters apart, and a new and worse understanding moved through them.

They knew Johnson. They knew the weight of him, the slab of him, the way he filled a doorway and shifted a room when he entered it. They had seen him pick men up and put them through things. And the boy in the door, who looked as if a strong handshake might fold him, who had the build of someone who modeled clothes rather than someone who broke people, had taken all of that mass and all of that speed and flung it backward across the yard like a child being rid of a ball, and had done it without seeming to brace, without seeming to strain, without seeming to particularly care. It was the not caring that finished them. A man straining to throw another man was still a man. The thing in the doorway had spent no effort at all, and the absence of effort told them, more plainly than any blow could have, the true size of the distance between what they were and what he was.

He lifted the Uzi again, lazily, and let it drift across them.

“The easy way,” he said, exactly as pleasantly as before, “or the hard way.”

And this time the question landed, because this time there was nothing left in any of them to keep it out. A few broke anyway. The body does what the body does, and three or four of them flinched into a crouch and turned as if to run for the cover of the van, the containers, the dark, anywhere, and got two steps into the impulse before the truth of it caught them. There was no cover. There was no distance. He had taken twelve guns out of the air in under two seconds at this same range, and he had put Johnson down without rising onto his toes, and every one of them understood in the same cold instant that the only reason they were still breathing was that the thing in the doorway had not yet decided otherwise, and that the smallest wrong motion would be the deciding. To run was to be executed. To reach was to be executed. They were not men with options. They were animals in a pen who had just been shown the gate and the gun, and the merciful thing, the only thing, was to be still.

He had taken down twelve guns in less than two seconds at that same distance, and had brought down Johnson without even getting up, and each of them understood in that same cold instant that the only reason they were still breathing was because the thing at the door hadn’t yet decided otherwise, and that the slightest false move would be decisive. To run was to be executed. To try to reach was to be executed. They were not men with options. They were animals in an enclosure to whom the gate and the gun had just been shown, and the merciful thing, the only thing, was to remain silent.

The hands went up. All of them, eleven pairs minus the leader’s, lifted into the lamplight, palms out, fingers spread, and the men behind the hands were sweating in the cool harbor air, the cold sweat of pure animal fear, slicking their faces and darkening their collars, their breath coming fast and shallow. Some of them were very young. Jack noted that without it changing anything.

“Good,” he said. The smile widened by a degree, no more. “Very good.” He let the moment hold, let them feel the obedience settle into them and learn the shape of itself. “Now. Down. On your knees, all of you.”

They went down.

There was no resistance left to overcome and so there was no pause; the whole ragged line of them folded to the concrete at once, knees cracking onto the cold ground, hands staying up or lacing behind heads without being told, the posture of surrender finding them out of some shared memory none of them could have placed. They knelt in the lot with their backs to the van and the water and faced the slim dark figure who had walked out of the place where their friends had gone quiet, and they waited, because waiting was the only verb left to them.

Behind them, beyond the chain-link and the rolled gate that closed the yard off from the road, an engine slowed.

The kneeling men heard it before they could place it, the change in pitch as a car came off the street and rolled up to the outer gate, the soft complaint of its springs as it stopped, and then the engine dying. They could not turn to look. Turning was moving, and moving was the thing they had been so thoroughly taught not to do, and so they knelt with their backs to it and listened, and the listening was its own particular torture, because a man who cannot see the new thing arriving builds it in the dark behind his eyes, and what they built was already very bad before the sounds gave them anything real to be afraid of.

The gate rattled. Not unlocked, not eased; taken. A grind of metal as the long bar of it was dragged back along its track by something that did not bother to be gentle, and then the wider groan of the gate rolling open, and then the footsteps.

The footsteps were wrong.

They came across the yard from behind the kneeling line, and they were not the footsteps of a man. They were too heavy and they were spaced too wide and they struck the concrete with a flat hard double-knock, a percussion with weight behind it, the sound of something large moving at a pace that on a smaller creature would have been an easy trot. It was the sound a heavy animal makes coming across hard ground, a draft horse let loose in a yard, each impact carrying a mass that the men could feel arriving through their kneecaps before they heard it land. It came up behind them and it came alongside them and it passed them, close, near enough that one or two of them felt the air of its passing and smelled it, a thick warm animal musk that did not belong in any version of the night they understood, and they kept their eyes fixed forward on the boy in the doorway and prayed in whatever way frightened men pray that the thing going by would keep going by.

It did. It crossed the last of the yard and stopped beside the slim figure, and now the kneeling men could see it, or could see the back of it, and the back of it was enough.

It stood over two meters. It stood well over two meters, so that the tall boy beside it came up only to the broad shelf of its shoulder, and those shoulders were a yard across and bare, because the thing wore no shirt, had no use for one, its whole vast back exposed to the lamplight in a landscape of muscle that moved under the skin as it settled, slabs and ropes and the deep groove of the spine running down the center of it. And it was furred. Not clothed, furred, a coarse dense pelt the color of rust and old iron, of a red gone dark, lying thick across the shoulders and down the great arms, the same red, more than one of them would think later in the parts of themselves that survived this, as a certain kind of beard. A heavy voice came out of it, so low it was felt as much as heard, a sound that started somewhere below the floor.

“I didn’t think it would be this easy,” it said.

The boy answered it without turning, in the dry idle tone of a man finishing a conversation he had been having all week. “Maybe these ones are just genuinely this stupid.”

“Maybe.” The vast head moved, considering. “Maybe not. Even idiots are dangerous when you hand them heavy enough guns.” The voice rolled out flat and unhurried over the kneeling men, who had stopped breathing in any rhythm at all. “Though I’ll grant you. These particular ones don’t seem to add up to much of a risk.”

And then it turned, to look at them, and they saw the rest.

The body had been wrong from the back, too large and too furred and too bare, but a man can hold the shape of a very large furred man in his mind if he must. The body from the front broke that mercy. The arms were ringed in the same rust-dark pelt, thick and shaggy down to hands that were too big, the fingers too blunt, dark and hard at the tips where nails should have been; and behind it, the kneeling men now saw, a tail, an actual tail, lashing once, slow, against the back of one tree-trunk leg. They had time to register the tail and to have their minds refuse it before their eyes finished the climb and arrived at the face, and the face ended every argument any of them had left.

It was not a face. It was a head, and the head was the head of a boar.

A long heavy snout pushed forward where a man’s mouth and nose should have been, the broad wet disc of it flexing as it breathed, taking the men in by scent. From the lower jaw two tusks rose, pale and curved and thicker than a thumb, catching the lamplight at their points. Small dark eyes sat back under a heavy ridge, and they were not animal eyes, that was the unbearable part, there was something in them that watched and weighed and understood, an intelligence looking out from behind the beast’s mask, and the men knelt in the harbor lot and felt the bottom go out of the world.

Cold went down through every one of them at once, a deep gelid wave that started at the neck and poured down the spine and pooled in the gut, the body’s own verdict on a thing it had no defense against. This was not a costume and it was not a trick of the dark. They had all of them seen, on the news, in the grainy phone footage the channels played and replayed, the others, the changed ones, the people who were no longer only people, the ones the anchors called metahumans in the careful voice they used for things the city could not control.

The men had watched that footage from couches and bar stools and thought it a problem that happened to other neighborhoods. Now one of those things stood three feet away in their own yard with their friends bleeding in the dark behind it, and beside it stood the slim pale boy who threw grown men like toys, and the two of them were talking to each other the way ordinary people talk, easy, bored, domestic, and that ordinariness was the most terrible thing of all. The men felt, in the most literal way their bodies could manage the sensation, their souls trying to leave them. Several were openly shaking. One had begun, without seeming to know it, to weep.

The men had seen those images of couches and bar stools and thought it was a problem that happened in other neighborhoods. Now, one of those things was a meter away, in their backyard, with its friends bleeding in the darkness behind it, and next to it was the thin, pale boy who tossed grown men around like toys, and the two of them talked like ordinary people talk, easily, bored, domestically, and this normality was the most terrifying thing of all. The men felt, in the most literal way their bodies allowed, their souls trying to leave them. Several were visibly trembling. One of them had started to cry, seemingly without realizing it.

The boy spoke again, still to the beast, still in that mild unbothered voice.

“Did you bring what I asked for?”

“Of course.” The boar-headed thing reached one enormous hand down into a pocket, and the gesture was almost funny, the size of the hand and the smallness of the pocket, except that nothing in the yard could find its way to laughter. The hand came out full. It threw, underhand and casual, and a fistful of dark plastic scattered across the concrete at the kneeling men’s knees, and they flinched from it as though it might bite. Cable ties. A long handful of heavy black cable ties, the industrial kind, hissing as they spilled and settled.

The beast’s voice came down over them, and it had changed, lost its conversational ease, gone direct and close.

“Tie yourselves to each other,” it said. “Wrist to wrist. And make it tight.” A pause, deliberate, while the men stared at the plastic and did not understand and were afraid to understand. “Because if it’s loose,” the thing went on, lower still, “I’ll have to come and fix it.” And as it said this the long tongue came out, broad and pink and wet, and dragged slowly across the pale curve of one tusk and back, an animal cleaning itself, an animal tasting the air ahead of a meal, and the meaning of it needed no translation. Every man kneeling there understood, in the oldest and least arguable part of himself, that he was in the presence of a predator, and that the predator had just told him what he was for if he disappointed it.

They scrambled to obey.

There was a horrible undignified haste to it, men shuffling on their knees toward one another, reaching for the scattered ties with hands that would barely close, fitting the loops over each other’s wrists and dragging them down hard, harder than they needed to, the plastic biting into skin, each of them desperate to be visibly, provably, undeniably bound, so that the thing with the tongue would have no reason to come and check. They worked down the line in pairs and chains, wrist lashed to wrist, the whole kneeling crew stitching itself together with shaking fingers, and the only sounds were the zip and ratchet of the ties pulling closed and the wet ragged breathing of frightened men.

It came at last to the end of the line, and to the leader.

Johnson still had not moved. He lay where Jack had thrown him, out cold, his ruined face turned up to the lamplight, and the last man in the chain, his own wrist already bound on the other side to the man beside him, leaned across with the final tie and, fumbling, looped it around the unconscious leader’s thick wrist and his own and pulled it tight, binding himself to the slack dead weight of the man he had followed into this yard. It was the last knot the crew could tie for itself.

The boar-man crossed the short distance to them, and the men shrank from its coming, and it bent, and with one more tie from somewhere in that enormous hand it bound the last free wrist of the last man at the end, sealing the chain, joining the whole of them into one thing that could not rise and could not scatter and could not run. It checked the ties once, working down the line, two blunt fingers hooking under each loop and tugging, and found them all, in the men’s terror, bitten cruelly deep. It seemed satisfied.

Then it straightened to its full towering height above them and pointed one thick finger toward the inner wall of the yard, the blank concrete face of the warehouse where no door was and no light fell.

“Over there,” it said. “All of you. Against the wall, on your knees, faces to it. And if any one of you so much as leans the wrong way.” The small dark eyes moved across them, unhurried, reading each face in turn. “I’ll know.”

They went. Bound together at the wrist, dragging their unconscious leader between them, they shuffled on their knees across the cold concrete to the inner wall and arranged themselves along it in a single broken row, every face turned in to the blank grey surface a hand’s breadth away, every back exposed to the yard and to the two figures standing in it and to whatever the two figures chose to do next. They knelt and they faced the wall and they did not lean and they did not turn and they barely breathed, eleven men and their fallen leader, fixed in place by nothing but the certain knowledge of the thing standing behind them, the thing that had told them it would know, and that they believed without the smallest fragment of doubt.

Behind them, in the lot, the boy and the beast turned back to the van full of guns, and went to work.