A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0035

Chapter 35

Jack heard everything, and what he heard never left his mind.

Huddled in the shadows of the hallway, his back pressed against the wall and his face a hand’s breadth from the doorframe, he let the men’s last words settle in the pit of his stomach, where a cold stone had already formed since Doug’s name had been mentioned. It wasn’t just the name that bothered him now. It was the image that was beginning to appear behind him, and the more Jack looked at that image, the less he liked what he saw. Rodrigo, from the north side, had fallen because someone on the other side had awakened something. The cartel responded with Doug, who awakened something else. In recent weeks, the entire city seemed to be giving birth to people capable of the impossible, and when he pieced together the accounts one by one, slowly, with the methodical calm of someone accustomed to counting people in a room before entering it, all the threads led to the same unsettling place. They weren’t doctors, or teachers, or the old man from the newspaper he’d seen a thousand times behind the counter. They were gang members. They were drug dealers, gang soldiers, people already scarred by the lives they led. Power wasn’t falling from the sky onto just anyone. It was falling, with a precision that was anything but random, precisely on those who already carried a weapon on their hip.

That wasn’t luck. Luck doesn’t choose teams. Luck doesn’t follow a pattern so clean that even a thief crouching in the dark could trace it from memory. There was a hand behind it, someone watering those seeds on purpose, and the thought chilled Jack more than any gun pointed in the next room, because he knew where a gun was, and he had no idea where that hand came from. It was at that moment, with this new certainty stuck in his throat, that he understood two things at once. The first was that he was too small for the size of what was approaching. The second was that he needed to get stronger, and faster, because the clock measuring it wasn’t marking his time. It was marking the time of the one who planted.

He reached for his gun and drew it slowly, without the slightest sound, feeling the familiar weight of the handle in his palm. For a second he considered the impossible. The table was there, a few meters away, covered in dust and stacked packages, forty, fifty thousand of which were top-quality materials according to the owners themselves, and there was a cold part of Jack that measured it as merchandise, that calculated what that material would do for his workshop, for his plans, for the distance between what he was and what he needed to become. He had come only to look. He had promised that to Kevin and to himself inside the van, and promises of that kind had never lasted long in his life. Seven men, he counted again, and he had the roof, the silence, the disguise, and the surprise. He had already done more with less. His hand tightened on the handle. His body leaned a millimeter forward, towards the dirty light that spilled into the corridor.

It was his ear that caught him.

A discreet crackle, then Kevin’s voice, low and controlled, close to the eardrum, the way his friend used to speak when he didn’t want to scare him but also didn’t have time to waste. “Jack. Are you listening?”

Jack breathed through his mouth, letting the air escape thinly between his teeth, and answered in a breath that the tissue near his throat muffled until it was almost nothing. “Hey. Speak.”

“We have company.” There was a very brief pause on the other end, the kind of pause Kevin made when he was choosing the right word so as not to sound more serious than necessary. “A car entering the neighborhood. Not one of those abandoned ones, it’s a good car, a car for people with money. It came slowly and took the back street, the parallel one. It didn’t pass me.”

“Did you see who was inside?”

“No. The glass was closed, and they cut through the adjacent road before reaching my line of sight. Luckily, they didn’t see me either.” Kevin breathed. “But it’s coming towards the house, Jack. I guarantee it.”

Jack stood motionless, and the instinct that had so often saved him from trouble spoke before reason, saying, in a tone he had learned not to ignore, that this night had just taken a turn for the worse. An expensive car in a neighborhood where even the lampposts had been deliberately broken wasn’t a resident returning home. It was someone from above. Someone those seven armed men weren’t expecting, because if they were expecting him, they wouldn’t be sniffing dust and bragging with the door unlocked. Every fiber of Jack’s being told him to retreat now, cross the kitchen back, go down the deck and disappear into the darkness of the yard before the thing, whatever it was, knocked on the door. That’s what his judgment dictated. But there was the table. There was the drawing he had just assembled in his head and the urge to close the frame, to see whose hand it was. And there was the cold stone that Doug’s name had left, and the feeling that leaving without understanding what was being plotted would be leaving halfway.

Then he made the wrong bet, the kind that seems right at the exact moment you make it. He pocketed the gun again, without cocking it, and stood there. Huddled in the darkness of the hallway, he retreated just enough so that not even a glimmer of light could reach him, and waited. “Keep an eye out,” he whispered to Kevin. “I want to see who it is.”

The next five minutes passed with the heavy slowness that danger lends to time. The voices in the room continued, more relaxed now, the conversation about Doug and Rodrigo already dissolved in the beer and the next line someone was lining up on the table. And then, outside, the sound of tires tore through the silence of the dead neighborhood, a car braking softly in front of the house, the expensive engine dying with a discretion that contrasted sharply with everything around it. The change in the room was immediate. The voices stopped mid-sentence. The man who was laughing at something choked on his laughter. Jack risked another glance through the gap in the doorway and saw, in that exact second, seven postures change at once, shoulders rising, hands hanging in mid-air, the languor of numbness giving way to the rigidity of an animal that hears a branch break too close.

The man slumped in the armchair was the first to stir. He set the bottle down on the armrest, stood up slowly, and his question came out harsher than he probably intended. “Was any of you expecting someone?”

The bald man with the tear tattooed on his face, the one who spoke for everyone, shook his head only once. “No.”

The refusal weighed heavily in the room like a confirmation. No one had been warned, and in a place like that, in that line of work, not being warned of a visit was the closest thing to a sentence. Hands all moved at once. Glocks came off their waists, the old short-barreled .38 returned to the hand of the same man who had gone to the yard to silence the dog, and one of them, further back, quickly bent down and lifted a sawed-off shotgun from behind the sofa, shouldering it with the familiarity of someone who had pointed it at many people. The seven spread out across the room at angles that hadn’t been agreed upon aloud but that their bodies knew by heart, covering the door from different points, and the silence that settled there was so dense that Jack could hear his own breath against his teeth and had to thin his breath even more.

Footsteps outside. Unmistakable on the cracked asphalt, two pairs of them, unhurried, climbing the entrance steps with the calm of those who have nothing to fear in a house full of armed people. And then the sound that held everyone’s breath. Three knocks on the door, spaced out, dry, polite in a way that, in that context, sounded almost like mockery. Knock. Knock. Knock.

The man with the shotgun, crouched to the left of the door frame, with the barrel level at chest height for anyone entering, turned his head and gave a silent nod to the man in the armchair, telling him to go and see. The man frowned. It was clear he didn’t want to, that of everyone there, this was the last job he would willingly accept at that moment, but the hierarchy of that room was resolved in silences and glances, and he couldn’t refuse without losing something in front of the others. He swallowed hard, walked around the table with the Glock lowered along his leg, and approached the door sideways, leaning his body against the wall so as not to be in the line of fire should the wood start spitting lead from the outside in. He leaned slowly and pressed his eye against the peephole.

What he saw relieved and chilled him at the same time, in that exact order: relief first, chills right after. There were two men standing on the landing, and the first one, further ahead, the man recognized instantly, even though the lens distorted the outlines. Miguel. One of the boss’s direct henchmen, one of those you don’t summon and whose visit is never for the benefit of the recipient. The relief came from it not being the enemy. The chills came from it being Miguel. And it was the second man who completely stopped the man with the peephole breathing, because he hadn’t seen him in a long time, he had given him up for lost, or worse, and when the rumor spread that the guy had awakened powers, he imagined it would take much longer to cross paths with him again. Doug was half a step behind Miguel, his black jacket buttoned up, a cigarette burning slowly between his fingers, the ember rising and falling as he puffed without any hurry, his eyes fixed on the door as if he already knew he was being watched from inside.

The man turned his face away from the door and released the breath he had been holding. “It’s Miguel,” he said, and his voice lowered the rest of the room in a second. “Michael and Doug.” He unlocked and opened the door in a quick, almost hurried gesture, because those two were in a category that no one there dared leave outside. The barrels lowered one by one. The shotgun fell from the shoulder. The Glocks returned to their belts, and the air began to circulate through the room again, still heavy, still vigilant, as Miguel crossed the threshold with the tranquility of someone entering their own home, and Doug followed him in, carrying with him, without saying a word, something that made the room’s temperature drop again.

In the dark hallway, Jack felt his own heart pounding against his patched vest.

He knew that face. Not from the mouths of the men who had just pronounced the name, but from before, long before, from the photographs he had seen scattered around the apartment on the first night of everything, the night he and Kevin took the shipment that cost Doug almost his life. It was the same man from the photos. And at the same time, it wasn’t. The body remained the same, with nothing apparently out of place, no excessive muscles, no marks, no deformities that the clothes didn’t hide. The change was elsewhere, in a place that took Jack a moment to locate and that, when he did, made the hairs on his arm stand on end beneath the fabric. It was the face. Doug’s face was wrong in a way that nothing physical could explain, empty in a way that the face of a living person doesn’t usually become, without the slightest tremor of muscle that betrays that there is someone behind it responding to the world. It was the inexpressiveness of a mask, but a mask that breathes.

Miguel didn’t waste time with greetings. He glanced at the table, the stacked packages, the dust scattered on the wood, and read in the dirt on the tabletop exactly what those men had been doing before he knocked on the door. He said nothing about it. He didn’t need to. His gaze had already said it all.

The bald man with the tear, who never knew how to keep his mouth shut, offered a crooked smile and was the first to speak, trying to restore some of the control the room had lost with the arrival of the two men. “So, Miguel. To what do we owe the honor of your visit?”

Miguel turned his head towards him very slowly. “Don’t try anything funny, Diego. Nobody here can stand your silly jokes anymore.”

Diego nodded and his smile faded. He knew how to read the moment, and this was no joke. Miguel took a step to the edge of the table, rested both fists on the wood, and when he spoke again, his voice had the dry tone of someone relaying an order from above that didn’t allow for any argument.

“The boss is preparing the response. They took our supplier out of the game, and we’re not going to swallow this with our arms crossed. We’re going to take something that belongs to them, of the same size, and exchange it with bullets if necessary.” He scanned the room, checking if the message was getting through. “Everyone’s on standby. The boss wants all the men ready.”

Diego frowned. It wasn’t fear that appeared on his face, it was calculation, the calculation of someone who’s seen how these things end and doesn’t like the consequences. “And when will that be?”

“Next Sunday.”

Diego let the silence last a moment before raising the only objection that mattered, and he raised it deliberately slowly, so that no one could later say he hadn’t warned them. “Well, I think it’s good to remember that, from what they’ve said, they apparently have a metahuman on their side.”

“And we have it too,” Miguel interrupted without hesitation. There was a hint of barely contained pride in his voice, the borrowed pride of someone who doesn’t have the power but is close to those who do. “And I guarantee you that ours is just as good as theirs. It might even be better.” He straightened his back. “So that’s it. Everyone on standby. Nobody disappears, nobody hesitates. When the boss calls, you have to be there…”

Doug cut Miguel off abruptly, and the way he did it, without a word, just with his presence, was enough for every man in the room to feel again that diffuse discomfort that had entered with him. It was like sharing air with something that shouldn’t be breathing the same air. Doug turned his face to the ceiling. He closed his eyes. He filled his chest with a long, drawn-out breath, his lungs pulling in the stale air of the room as if searching for something in it that no one else there was capable of feeling, and when he released that air and opened his eyes again, they were no longer the same.

They were black. Completely black, from corner to corner, without white, without irises, two open black pits in the middle of that empty face. Doug opened his mouth to speak, and the whole room noticed, in a collective shiver that no one could disguise, what was inside. His teeth had changed. They were sharp rows, overlapping, turned inwards, teeth that no human mouth has and that every shark’s mouth knows. And he turned that face, those eyes, that mouth, towards the exact direction of the corridor where the light didn’t reach, to the precise point of darkness where Jack was huddled, and the voice that came out of him was raspy from the back of his throat, too deep for the man’s size.

“We are not alone.”

Miguel drew his weapon in one swift motion and pointed it toward the corridor, and the other seven followed him instantly, all the pipes in the room spinning at once toward the darkness, nine cannons leveled in the pitch black where Jack breathed. He knew he had to move. His whole body knew. And yet, for a fraction of a second that proved costly, his eyes couldn’t tear themselves away from the man in the center of the room, from those black eyes, from that open mouth from which a tongue began to slip out, long and wet, stretching out in a way no tongue should.

“Kevin.” Jack said the name in a whisper, already bending his knees. “I need backup. Now.”

He jumped. His hands and feet found the ceiling and gripped it, pinning his body upside down against the grimy ceiling, and it was in that exact second, in the space of a single heartbeat, that the place where he had been crouching ceased to exist. The entire room opened fire. The hallway became a strobe-like flash of gunfire, the roar of the weapons building into a single din, and the wall against which Jack had been leaning just moments before received the full barrage, the plaster exploding into dust and splinters, shards flying, the floor where his feet had been tearing into holes. One second. It had been the margin between him and death. If he had hesitated one more second with his eyes fixed on that tongue, he would have been sprawled across the wall with the rest of the plaster.

The guns fired until they had nothing left to shoot. One by one, the magazines emptied, the bolts locked open, the hammer of the .38 began to bang falsely with a dry, hollow click that suddenly became the loudest sound in the house. Gunpowder smoke rose through the hallway, and it was in this sudden silence, broken only by the ringing in their own ears, that Miguel raised his hand and ordered everyone to stop. They waited. Eyes scanning the darkness and the damage, searching for a body that wasn’t there.

Doug smiled. It was the first thing resembling an expression that had crossed his face all night, and it was worse than the lack of one.

“He’s still there.”

And then he opened his jacket. The movement was simple, almost casual, both hands pulling the black leather flaps to the sides, and underneath there was no shirt, just the bare skin of his torso. What happened next was the most disturbing thing Jack had ever seen in his life, and he, from the ceiling, hanging upside down, could do nothing but watch for the first few seconds. Doug’s stomach began to open. Not tear, not bleed, just open, the flesh splitting vertically as if there had always been a seam there waiting to give way, and from the folds of this opening teeth began to emerge, large, sharp, the same ones from the mouth above, sprouting from the edges of that fissure like a second jaw. His entire torso rose, his spine arching backward in a way that human spines don’t bend, and from the new mouth opened in the middle of his body a tongue began to slide out.

It grew. It grew past a meter, then two, then three, wrapping itself once around Doug’s own body like a living rope, glistening with mucus, thick as an arm at the base and tapering to a blunt end that groped through the air. Four meters. Five. The seven original men in the house, the same ones who minutes before had toasted their own good fortune at having a metahuman on their side, recoiled from the table, stumbling over each other, each one’s face contorted by the same horror, because it’s one thing to hear about a monster on the other side and quite another to discover that the monster on this side shares the room with you. Diego leaned against the wall with the empty Glock still in his hand, forgotten, and none of them dared to approach.

The tongue shot down the hallway. It entered the darkness like a whip, and there it began to destroy everything. It struck the walls and opened craters in the plaster, swept the floor and ripped it to pieces, climbed and burst against the ceiling, raining debris, going back and forth, lashing every inch of that narrow space with a blind and furious force that reduced the wood to splinters and the concrete to dust. It was looking for a body. But it couldn’t find one, because the body was no longer there. Jack had read the beginning of the transformation on Doug’s face an instant before it happened, and instinct, faster than thought, had already detached him from the ceiling and thrown him back. When the tongue tore through the hallway, he was already retreating through the kitchen, low, fast, sliding between the sink and the filthy countertop, and he crouched in a blind corner with his gun drawn and pointed back at the passage through which that thing would come. I knew, with the bad clarity of someone who recognizes their own disadvantage, that running wouldn’t help. Something in those dark eyes, in that mouth in the middle of his torso, told him that he wouldn’t go far enough to make a difference.

From the living room, Miguel’s voice cut through the noise of the destruction. “Reload. You and you.” Jack didn’t see who he was pointing at, but he heard the rest. “Get out and surround the house. Don’t let that son of a bitch escape through the back.”

Footsteps spread out. The rhythm of the movement changed, men splitting up, some heading for the front door, and Jack, crouched in the darkness of the kitchen with five bullets in the magazine and nothing else, with a five-meter tongue on one side and two armed men coming out to surround him from the other, had a single practical thought amidst all that, clear and dry like a joke that no one would laugh at. He should have brought a bigger gun.

He took another step back, then another, feeling the surroundings behind him more than seeing, until his shoulders touched the cold wood of the back door. His free hand found the doorknob. And it was at that instant, before he could turn it, that something struck him.

It came too fast for any eye to follow, and if it weren’t for the reflection that wasn’t his, the reflection that the suit lent to his body in an instant that the mind couldn’t control, it would have hit his neck or head. Jack’s arms rose on their own and closed their guard at the exact millisecond. The impact caught his forearms and it was like being run over. The force ripped his feet from the ground, threw him backward, and the back door couldn’t hold. The wood shattered at the hinges and Jack went through the opening along with the wreckage, flew across the deck, landed awkwardly in the tall grass of the backyard and rolled across the ground until he stopped on his back, all the air leaving his lungs at once.

He rose with the same force with which he had fallen. His body ached, his forearms throbbed where the thing had hit, but he was already standing with his gun raised and pointed at the house, his back to the darkness of the yard, searching for where the blow had come from. And he saw it. Not in the destroyed doorway, not at a man’s height, but on the ground. A few meters from him, the yard’s earth rose in a rapidly advancing ridge, and from it the tongue projected outward, throwing clods and roots to the sides. Right behind, breaking through the lawn in the same way, splitting the soil as if it were water, Doug emerged, and Jack immediately pieced together what had happened. The tongue hadn’t come down the hallway behind him. It had plunged into the kitchen floor, traveled underground, and struck him from behind, traversing the entire yard’s subsoil to hurl him out of the house. It wasn’t just long. It was stronger, and went further, than anything he had imagined when he saw the first tip of it slip out of his mouth.

Footsteps came from both sides of the house at the same time. From the left came Diego, the tattooed tear clearly visible in the dim light escaping from the windows, his gun already reloaded and pointed. From the right came the man who had spent the night sprawled in the armchair with his beer, now wide awake, the barrel level against Jack’s chest. The two closed the angle. And through the broken door, stepping on the shards of his own entrance, Doug advanced into the yard with the rest of the men following behind him, their tongues still hanging out, partly wrapped around their bodies, partly dragging on the ground. Miguel appeared beside him, and it was Miguel who spoke first, with a smile of someone who had found something better than he expected.

“Well, well, well.” He savored each word. “What do we have here? I never imagined finding an intruder on a night like this.”

Jack had his gun pointed directly at Doug, not Miguel, because his instinct had decided on its own which of the two was the real problem. The disguise had vanished the instant the tongue hit him, and he knew it, he knew he was now exposed, a tall, thin man in dark clothes cornered in the yard by people who killed for less. Even so, he raised the corner of his mouth, because the other option was to let fear show, and he answered Miguel with the studied lightness of someone who still pretends to be in control of something.

“Ah, I was just passing through, you know how it is.” He shrugged, without lowering his weapon. “Walking around the neighborhood. On a hot night like this, a bit of fresh air is always nice.”

And in his head, far from words, he kept repeating one thing, like someone pressing a button that doesn’t respond. Kevin , come closer. I need help .

Miguel opened his mouth to retort to the joke, but didn’t get to. Doug cut him off, and when Doug spoke, nobody competed for air. “Do I know you?”

Jack shook his head, keeping his voice at the same warm tone. “No. We’ve never met.”

Doug stepped forward. His dark eyes didn’t blink. “No,” he said slowly. “We do know each other.” Then he tilted his head and did something that made Jack’s hair stand on end. He inhaled. He sniffed the air, long and deep, like an animal reading a trail, and when he spoke again there was a new, sick certainty in his voice. “I recognize that smell. It’s the same smell I had when I woke up in my apartment, on the floor, thinking I was dead.” His tongue twitched against the ground, tapping lightly, anxiously. “You’re the thief.”

“I’ve never seen you in my life,” Jack said, without letting the gun tremble. “And I certainly don’t know where you live.”

“Don’t lie to me!” The scream came out torn, and his tongue followed, whipping the ground with a violence that opened three deep furrows in the earth, sending clods flying meters away. For a moment, the empty thing that was Doug let out something that was almost pain. “I would never forget that smell. Never. When I woke up, I thought I was going to die there, alone, without understanding anything. If it weren’t for my changes, where would I be now, huh? Where?”

Jack kept the barrel firmly pointed at the chest of that man who was no longer quite a man, and exhaled slowly through his nose, because it was the only part of him that still obeyed. “Good,” he said. “Sometimes you’re just unlucky, aren’t you?”

Doug laughed. The laughter came from both mouths at the same time, the one on top and the one in the middle of his torso, overlapping in a sound that was anything but human, and his tongue retracted a hand’s breadth, like a snake about to strike.

“You’re going to be my dinner tonight.”

Jack felt a cold bead of sweat trickle down his spine beneath his suit as his eyes darted from Doug to the pipes to the left, to the right, ahead, recounting, out of sheer habit, the entire predicament he’d gotten himself into. The question lingering in his mind wasn’t whether he’d manage to get out of that yard. It was another, simpler, and far worse question, and he didn’t have the slightest answer to it.

What kind of creature had this man turned into?