A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0036

Chapter 36

Jack stared at that grotesque figure with the cold calm of someone who had already counted the exits and discovered there were none. The entire yard had become a trap set by armed men, and he was in the center of it, alone, with Doug in front and the rest of the gang scattered in the angles that the bodies had memorized without needing to coordinate aloud. Behind him, the dog that minutes before had been barking at nothing had now retreated to the back of the doghouse, huddled against the wood, its snout buried between its paws. The animal no longer made a sound. It sensed, in the way only animals sense, that what stood in the middle of the lawn was not a man, and that the best thing to do in the face of it was to disappear.

Jack didn’t have that luxury.

His left hand remained pointing the pistol at Doug, steady, without trembling, while his right hand slowly moved along the sleeve of his suit, finding the dagger’s handle where he had left it wedged. His fingers closed on the metal without his arm betraying the movement. He knew that talking wouldn’t get him out of there. He also knew that running was a fantasy, because the tongue waiting in that man’s mouth reached further than any leg. All that remained was what always remained in the worst corners of his own life, only now with tools he didn’t have before. All that remained was conflict.

They were the same men. Jack recognized the voices even without seeing their faces properly, the same men who minutes before had been laughing in the room while rattling off one name after another on the dirty table—Rodrigo’s, the boss’s, Doug’s own—telling secrets that weren’t theirs, like showing off their cards. Snitches. People who survived by betraying others, thinking it was clever, and who now found themselves on the wrong side of the crosshairs, with no idea who had come to collect. There was a cold part of Jack that looked at that group and felt no pity whatsoever. If that night was going downhill anyway, then let it go downhill taking with it the men who had helped build that downhill path.

Jack’s eyes locked on Doug’s, deliberately fixed there, because that’s where a normal man would look. But everything that mattered happened at the edge of his vision, in the wide, clear field of view that the suit returned to the dark world, and it was there that he measured the seven, the weapons, the footsteps, the gap in the fence, the angle of each barrel. When he fired, he fired without warning. The shot came from the pistol on his left with near-impossible precision, and the bullet struck Doug right in the middle of his forehead, throwing his head back with a sharp jerk.

The man did not fall.

His head slowly snapped back into place, like a spring-loaded doll finding its axis, and in that same second the yard exploded in flames. The men opened all their weapons on Jack at once, the gunshots overlapping in a single thunderclap, the lawn spitting dirt around his feet. And that’s when Jack’s body did what his mind wouldn’t dare command. He leaped, spun in the air, bent his spine in an arc that returned each shot to empty space, and passed through that curtain of lead without a single bullet touching him. At the peak of his leap, with his wrist making a movement that lasted less than a blink, he fired three shots. Three different men, three shoulders and chests met without hesitation, three bodies thrown back before Jack’s feet even touched the ground again.

“Cover!” Miguel shouted, his voice tearing through the noise with the desperation of someone who had just realized the intruder was no ordinary man. “Get cover, damn it!”

Those who were still standing threw themselves behind whatever was closest: porch pillars, car carcasses, the corner of the house. Doug didn’t look for anything. He leaped at Jack, hunger etched in both eyes, and his tongue shot forward like a whip tearing flesh. Jack had been expecting it. The instant the tongue came, the dagger slipped from his sleeve into his palm, the hilt meeting his fingers at the perfect moment, and with a single, fluid cut he severed the tip of that thing. A piece of the tongue fell onto the lawn, still writhing. The dagger wasn’t store-bought steel. It had come from a world where blades obeyed different laws, and it bit what honest weapons couldn’t.

Doug roared, and the roar came from both mouths at once, the one on his face and the one on his torso, overlapping in a note that didn’t belong to anything living. Jack didn’t wait for the echo. He’d already seen the tongue begin to regenerate, the flesh growing back with that sickening speed that ignored everything he knew about bodies. He couldn’t win this by cutting. But he could buy seconds, and seconds were the only currency he had.

He ran within range instead of fleeing from him, and used Doug’s lowered head as a stepping stone. His foot touched the man’s skull and pushed, and Jack leaped over him in a clean jump, and at the peak of his flight aimed not at any target, but at the back wall of the house. The bullet hit the concrete at a calculated angle, ricocheted, and found one of the men huddled behind a pillar, the man who thought himself safe falling sideways, not understanding where the shot had come from. Jack landed behind Doug, bent his knees to absorb the fall, and before the monster-man could turn, he plunged the dagger behind his knee, severing the tendons with a cut close to the bone.

The tongue snapped back, this time not like a whip, but like a battering ram, coming straight and thick to crush. Jack lunged backward, his body tracing a sequence of leaps in the air that no six-foot-nine man should be able to perform, somersaults linked together with borrowed lightness, his feet barely touching the ground between each one. When he stopped, three feet away, he saw Doug on his knees, his arms sinking into the earth, howling as the severed tendons stitched themselves back together under his skin.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Miguel rising from behind a carcass, his gun rising toward him. Jack didn’t turn his head. He didn’t need to. The entire map of the yard was laid out within him, each body in its place, and he simply raised the pistol to the line his line of sight gave him and fired. The bullet struck Miguel’s shoulder and threw him back to the ground, the gun slipping from his fingers.

Doug’s tongue came out again, and Jack let it slip under his own feet, leaping over it toward the balcony where two men were still using the parapet for cover. He landed between them. The first barely had time to aim his shotgun before Jack dodged the barrel and brought the hilt of his dagger down on the man’s temple, a sharp blow that knocked the man unconscious before his body even registered the impact. Jack twirled the pistol in his hand in a short motion, returned it to its holster, and snatched the rifle from the fallen man’s limp fingers, all in one swift movement, without missing a beat.

The tongue was already coming after him. It struck the pillars supporting the porch roof and shattered all three at once, the entire structure collapsing onto the balcony with a crash of broken wood and falling tiles. But Jack had left long before the first pillar gave way. He was already back on the lawn, rifle raised in one hand, and fired. The weapon was a high-caliber; it recoiled against his wrist with a force that would have dislocated the shoulder of an ordinary man, and the shot ripped open Doug’s shoulder in a blur of flesh and blood thrown into the air. Even so, the man remained standing. Jack emptied the rifle’s entire load into him, shot after shot, Doug’s body shaking with each impact, nothing on that face registering real pain. Frustrated, Jack threw the empty gun away and dodged the tongue again, which was already reaching for his feet.

From the rubble of the balcony, Miguel emerged, dragging the wounded body, a second man climbing beside him, the leader’s shoulder bleeding while his good hand still gripped the pistol. He aimed and fired at Jack, and Jack ducked at just the right moment, the bullet passing close to the top of his head. It was in that half-second, in that fraction of a second when he bent over to escape the shot, that Doug finally hit what he had been trying to. His tongue wrapped around Jack’s ankles and pulled. The world turned. He was hoisted into the air and thrown against the ground with all the force of that monstrous body, and his lungs emptied at once, the air escaping in a gust that hurt even his ribs. The suit absorbed what would have broken a man without it. There were no broken bones, no serious damage. But there was the daze, the blurred vision, the sudden struggle to pull back air that seemed to have escaped his chest on purpose. For a second the entire yard lost focus, the sound of the gunshots muffled as if he had sunk in water, and the sharp edge of vision that the suit always gave him blurred into the shadows. Jack tried to roll to the side, and his body responded with a half-second delay, half a second that, in a yard full of weapons, was the exact distance between continuing to breathe and stopping. It was in that instant of weakness that everything almost ended.

Miguel saw the opening. The remaining men regrouped around him, their guns lowering towards Jack’s fallen body, their fingers finding the triggers. One more second and the yard would have emptied him of all the lead it still had.

The second one never arrived.

The side fence, the one right behind Doug, snapped from end to end as if a load had exploded beneath it, the planks flying off in a crash of shattered wood. And through the gaping hole, coming from the darkness of the neighboring property at the speed of a runaway vehicle, a wild boar the size of a jeep crashed into Doug. The impact caught the monster-man sideways and ripped him off the ground like a car rips a pedestrian, the beast’s tusks embedded deep in his side. The boar didn’t stop. It swept across the yard, dragging Doug through the dirt, ripped open the opposite fence with the weight of both of them, and vanished into the darkness of the other property, taking the creature with it, Doug’s roar fading into the distance.

With his tongue ripped from his ankles, Jack’s feet were free.

He rose in the same motion, but not like a man rises. He spun, supported by one hand, his body rolling on the ground in a step more akin to dance than fighting, and the rotation took his torso out of the line of fire that the men, recovered from their shock, were blindly unleashing. At the peak of the spin, upside down and with his free hand, Jack drew the Glock from its holster and fired. The bullet found Miguel again, now in the other shoulder, and knocked him down again. The next two shots didn’t seek flesh. They sought the weapons of the other two men still standing, crushing the metal against their hands, leaving them disarmed before they could understand what had happened.

Jack completed the turn and stood up. The dagger returned to his hand, drawn from inside the robes where he had kept it while handling the Glock, and for a moment the yard was strangely quiet, only the groans of the wounded and the distant sound of something large crashing against something on the other side of the broken fence.

He stared at the hole through which the boar and Doug had disappeared. The sound coming from there wasn’t good. It was the sound of one collision after another, of bodies hitting obstacles, and Jack knew exactly what that meant, because he knew the amount of force Kevin put into a charge and he knew Doug had withstood everything he himself had unleashed without falling.

A movement to the left caught his attention. One of the men, wounded, was crawling across the lawn toward a shotgun lying a few feet away, his hand outstretched for the handle. Jack closed the distance in three strides and delivered a kick to the man’s head, knocking him out before his fingers could touch the gun. He bent down, picked up the shotgun from the ground, and turned his gaze to the broken fence.

That’s where the answer came from.

A dark mass, a ball of reddish fur the size of a shrunken man, was hurled through the hole and crossed the entire yard in the air, bursting through the fence on the opposite side, next to Jack, opening a third hole in the wood. Jack followed the flight with his eyes and his stomach clenched. He swung the shotgun in the direction from where the mass had come, and through there, through the hole in the fence, Doug was returning.

What returned could hardly be called a body. An arm hung inert beside him, dislocated, the white bone piercing the flesh and protruding. The neck was twisted at an awkward angle, as if it had broken and the owner hadn’t noticed. One eye was missing. And the entire jaw was missing, the mandible torn from his face, leaving the lower part of his face in a bloody, impossible void. It was the image of a man who had faced a train head-on and survived only to ask for another to come. And even so, he walked. Even so, he came.

Jack pointed the shotgun and opened fire.

Doug raised his tongue in front of his body and made it into a shield, the flesh flattening and absorbing the lead shot after shot, receiving in place of his chest everything that Jack poured out. Jack emptied the entire weapon against that wall of living muscle, and when the last shot left and the hammer of the shotgun hit empty space, Doug vanished the shield. The tongue retracted, and behind it reappeared that shattered face, the single eye fixed on Jack with a bottomless fury.

He took a step forward.

And it stopped.

From the back of the yard came a small, fragile sound, totally out of place in that scene. A dog’s cry. The animal, chained up and hidden in its doghouse, had let out a frightened whimper, and the sound pierced the air, making Doug turn his crooked neck in that direction.

Jack couldn’t see any expression on that face. There was no jaw to smile, no half of the face to read. And yet, just by the eyes, just by the way that broken head tilted toward the animal, Jack knew with icy certainty that the man was smiling.

Doug moved too fast. He crossed the yard in a blur, smashed the doghouse with his good arm, and ripped the body of the large dog from inside, which struggled against its chain. Then, with that one arm that still obeyed him, he lifted the animal and threw it against the open mouth in his own trunk. The gash in his stomach gaped open in a way no mouth should, and swallowed the dog whole in one gulp. Blood splattered across the lawn as the mouth closed. And then he began to chew, in a wet, grotesque sound that rose through the yard and made Jack himself feel his stomach churn.

He had already seen too much that night. But what came next was worse.

With each bite, something about Doug changed. The broken arm began to twist back into place, the bone retracting into the flesh, the joint finding its socket. The nose grew back, reforming from the middle of the face. The jaw returned, the mandible sprouting from nowhere, closing over the teeth. And then, beneath that one, a second jaw formed, longer, narrower, the front of the face lengthening into a snout. Dark fur broke through the skin and covered the entire body. Behind him, sprouting from the base of the spine, a tail emerged. What was already horrible only worsened, and what had once still held the silhouette of a man now resembled a wolf standing on two legs, too tall, too wrong, growling low in a deep voice that vibrated on the ground.

Jack understood then that he had underestimated everything. The man’s power wasn’t just regeneration or stretching his tongue. It was transformation. It was swallowing and growing, becoming something new with each prey he devoured, and there was no way to know where it would end. A farm trafficker who had lost a shipment and almost his own skin had transformed, in a few weeks, into this, and Jack couldn’t shake the chilling thought that it had been he and Kevin, that first night, who had cornered Doug and opened the door. The seed that someone had been watering around town had fallen on that man too, and it had fallen because they both had unknowingly pushed it towards him. What stood before Jack now wasn’t just an enemy. It was an old score coming back to be paid with interest.

Doug’s stomach stopped chewing and opened again, and his tongue slipped out once more, now thicker, slithering between the hairs. Jack had dropped the empty shotgun. His hand was already on the pistol, the barrel rising towards that new monster, and the other gripped the dagger’s handle. He planted his feet firmly on the ground and took a deep breath, ready for the confrontation he knew he might not win.

But this time he wasn’t alone.

Heavy footsteps approached from the right, making the grass tremble with each step. And beside Jack, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, rose a figure over two meters tall. Broad, muscular chest, prominent belly, arms covered in thick reddish fur, and in place of a face the head of a boar, tusks protruding curved from its mouth, small, fierce eyes fixed on the creature ahead. Kevin had returned.

He hadn’t returned in one piece. Blood was running down the side of his torso, where Doug must have retaliated, and the patched vest Jack had hand-sewn hung torn on one side, one of the straps snapped. Kevin’s breath came out heavy through his wide nostrils, his chest rising and falling like a bellows. This had already cost them both dearly.

Jack’s eyes scanned the thing ahead, reading the new body the way he always read a room before entering it. The legs had changed articulation, bent backward like an animal’s, ready to leap. The arms had gained claws. The tongue was still there, protruding from the stomach’s pit, but now there were also two jaws, and Jack knew that meant a second weapon where before there had only been one. Each prey the monster swallowed made it something worse, and the calculation Jack made in his head didn’t add up in their favor. But the calculation had never added up in his favor in anything in his life, and yet he remained there, breathing.

“I thought you were going to take a nap,” said Jack, without taking his eyes off Doug.

Kevin’s voice came out deeper than usual, spreading through the yard in a tone that seemed to come from the very heart of the earth. “I wasn’t going to leave the party just for you.”

Jack felt the corner of his mouth curl up. “Then let’s dance.”

And it was in that instant, with the monster growling ahead and his enormous friend breathing beside him, that he perceived something within himself that he didn’t immediately recognize. Jack had never been one to fight. His whole life he had done the opposite, shrugged his shoulders, lowered his head, run from every problem he could, turning avoidance into a way of existing. It had always been easier to disappear than to confront. And yet, standing there, cornered in a suburban backyard facing something that devoured dogs to transform itself, with armed men groaning on the ground and the whole night still to come, he found himself, against all logic of what he had always been, strangely animated.

He couldn’t help but smile. It was just another new feeling among so many that had been appearing in recent months, sprouting from places inside him he didn’t even know existed, and each one, in its own way, was a small discovery. This one, in particular, with his heart pounding and fear transforming into something else in his hands, was truly incredible, he thought.

And then language came.

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