A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0037

Chapter 37

The tongue tore through the air with a hiss that belonged to nothing living, and Jack was no longer where she expected to find him. He leaped over her, still upside down, his body spinning on its axis at the peak of the jump, and from that inverted angle, with the backyard upside down before his eyes, he pulled the trigger. The shot pierced the night and opened a hole in Doug’s shoulder. The creature didn’t even register it. To her, it was a scratch, an inconvenience, and the flesh was already beginning to close up before Jack even touched the ground again, bending his knees to cushion the fall.

He couldn’t have won this alone. He’d known that from the moment he saw the man swallow the dog and grow. The calculation, the old calculation he made before entering any room, didn’t work in his favor at all. But the calculation had never worked in his favor in anything in his life, and there, for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t going in alone.

Kevin arrived first.

The boar’s shoulder collided with Doug’s chest with a sound like two walls hitting each other, and the impact ripped a tremor from the ground that Jack felt rise through the soles of his feet. The two grappled right there, in the middle of the lawn, two titans locked in a struggle of attrition that lacked technique, relying only on weight and fury. Kevin delivered a blow to Doug’s ribs, and Doug returned the favor, striking Kevin’s flank, neither of them taking a step back. The earth gave way beneath them. With each exchange, the lawn sank further, and in a few seconds a shallow crater opened up around their bodies, the grass torn up, the mud exposed and churned up as if something had been hastily buried there.

Jack understood his place in that situation immediately. He didn’t have the strength to engage in that exchange. What he did have was marksmanship, agility, and eyes that saw the world with a clarity none of those men on the ground would ever possess. So he retreated to the edge of the crater and did what he knew how to do. Support work. He no longer shot to kill, because killing Doug with bullets was impossible, and he had already wasted too much lead learning that. He shot to delay. He aimed at joints, tendons, folds, the places where a well-placed shot would take away strength from a limb long enough to make a difference.

Doug raised his good arm to deliver a straight punch to Kevin’s head, and it was in that instant, in the half-millimeter where his elbow was exposed and locked at the peak of the movement, that Jack found him. The bullet entered exactly at the joint, opening the bend of the elbow from the inside out, and Doug’s arm lost all force mid-blow, the punch dying in mid-air before reaching Kevin’s face. The creature roared, a sound that came from both mouths at the same time, the one on its face and the one on its belly, overlapping in a sick note. Kevin took advantage of the opening. His cross landed squarely on the side of Doug’s head and made the monster recoil two steps for the first time that night, its feet dragging in the mud.

There was a thought Jack had been pushing to the corner of his mind ever since he saw the thing swallow the dog and grow, and now, in the midst of the exchange, it was resurfacing. That man was there because of them. It was he and Kevin who had entered Doug’s apartment that first night, who had left the man unconscious on the floor without any idea of ​​what he carried inside him. It was waking up from that, thinking he was going to die alone, that Doug had awakened whatever that city had been planting in its armed men. They hadn’t created the monster. But they had opened the door for it, unknowingly, and the bill was now coming due with interest. Jack clenched his teeth and sent the thought back to the corner. Then he would tell himself. I would think about it later, if there was a later.

The tongue came again, creeping, and Jack let it pass under his own feet, leaping over it with the dagger already in his hand. At the height of his leap, he stabbed the thing’s flesh, and blood gushed onto the floor. The dagger bit where honest weapons hadn’t. It was the only blade there that truly wounded that body, and Jack used it with the calculated cowardice of someone who knows he can’t exchange blows head-on. He cut in passing, glancing, from behind, always moving away before the tongue or claws could reach him, opening wounds in Doug’s hide that took longer and longer to heal.

That was the first thing he really noticed. The wounds were taking a long time to heal.

Kevin landed another cross, and this time Doug’s head snapped sideways with the force of the blow, blood splattering in an arc across the churned-up lawn. And yet the creature wouldn’t fall. It wouldn’t stop. It always came back, always rose again, its neck finding its axis like a spring-loaded doll that no one could unscrew. Kevin did a clean backflip, dodging the tongue that came for his legs, and as he touched the ground he reached out and snatched a shotgun from the hands of one of the fallen men. A heavy, old-fashioned lever-action Winchester. He cocked the lever with a sharp movement, aimed at Doug’s back, and unloaded the shot into the creature’s neck point-blank. The monster-man froze. For an instant, his entire body was paralyzed, as if something inside had lost its edge, and Kevin didn’t waste the moment. He brought his hands together above his head, raised his enormous arms to their limit, and delivered a hammer blow to Doug’s skull, burying it in the crater floor. The impact made the entire yard shake. Somewhere inside the house, something came loose from the ceiling and plummeted down.

For a second, Jack thought it was over.

He didn’t have it. Doug rose from the crater with the slowness of someone struggling, but he rose, and the tongue whipped Kevin’s body backward before he could stop it. The boar was thrown three meters and landed on its back, tearing a furrow in the grass, and rose again with a deep growl, shaking its head. The man on the other side also rose. Always rising.

But this time Jack saw it. He had been observing precisely for that reason, and he saw clearly what he had been waiting to see. The wounds were healing more slowly. The open shoulder remained open. The blood on the back of his neck didn’t stop flowing instantly. The regeneration was still there, but there was a limit, and Jack was beginning to understand where that limit was. That thing wasn’t a bottomless pit. It was a body using up something it had stored, and what it had stored was running out.

The problem was that Doug understood this better than anyone.

Jack saw him turn his twisted neck toward the fallen men. Two of them lay unconscious near the edge of the crater, their chests rising and falling, alive. And Jack knew, with the cold certainty of someone who had seen it happen once that very night, exactly what Doug was going to do. He was going to eat. He was going to swallow one of his own companions and reclaim everything Kevin and Jack had taken from him in the last few minutes, and perhaps become something even worse in the process.

“Don’t let him get near you!” Jack shouted, his voice cutting through the noise from the yard.

Kevin was already in motion. Two enormous strides placed him between Doug and the nearest man, and his arms closed around the creature’s torso from behind, pinning it in place before it could take a second step. Jack ran to the other side. He grabbed the unconscious man by the armpits and dragged him away, then returned for the second man, pulling him across the torn-up lawn to the side of the house, out of reach of that mouth. He didn’t do it out of pity. He did it because that man was fuel, and Jack wasn’t going to add fuel to the fire he was trying to put out. He pulled a roll of tape from his inside suit pocket and bound both men’s wrists tightly, immobilizing them, before running back to the crater.

Deprived of food, Doug turned against whoever was holding him with all the fury he had left. His tongue flicked upwards, whipping Kevin’s head back, and the two locked in an exchange that was no longer a fight, only destruction. One struck and the other retaliated, without guard, without defense, just attack after attack, two bodies absorbing what no body should absorb. It was a contest of pure endurance, and Jack knew the boar had endurance to spare. Kevin was covered in lacerations, blood running from the flank where Doug had torn him earlier, the vest Jack had hand-sewn hanging in strips on one side. But he endured. That body was made to endure, and while Doug faded away, Kevin only grew more furious.

Jack joined the dance.

He ran behind Doug while Kevin held him face-to-face, and began to slash. The dagger opened the creature’s hide in different directions, quick, opportunistic blows that Jack delivered and retreated from in the same movement, using the supernatural agility that the suit gave him to escape both the tongue and the claws of the limbs that tried to reach him. He was a coward, and he knew he was a coward, and he had no interest in being anything else. He slashed, retreated, returned from another angle, and with each cut the wound took a little longer to close than the previous one. Kevin punched Doug’s head from the other side, and the head returned, always returned, but each time slower, each time from further away, the skull struggling to find its own axis.

The three were locked in a choreography of death. Doug was losing blood from a dozen wounds that wouldn’t close. The bones Kevin broke took a long time to heal, and some simply didn’t heal at all. The creature struck with less force with each exchange, its tongue no longer possessing the whip-like vigor it had at the beginning, dragging itself more than shooting.

Jack scanned her body as he scanned a room before entering. The boar gripped Doug again from behind, and the creature tried to break free with a strength it no longer possessed, its feet slipping in the soaked mud. Jack seized the moment when it was motionless to plunge the dagger behind Doug’s knee, into the same tendon he had cut hours before, and this time the leg gave way and wouldn’t spring back. The monster collapsed onto one knee. It still tried to raise its tongue to reach Jack’s face, and the tongue rose halfway and tumbled down, lacking the fuel to reach its target. Kevin held it back. Jack retreated. The creature was slowly dying before him, and there was a part of him, cold and ancient, that merely registered the advance with the satisfaction of someone who sees an account finally settled.

Until the very last roar.

Kevin broke free from the embrace, took a half-step back to gain space, and delivered a direct punch to Doug’s chest with everything his body had. The fist crushed the creature’s ribcage inward, and the blow sent it flying across the yard in an uncontrolled flight until it collided with a tree trunk on the edge of the property. The entire tree trembled from the impact, and a shower of leaves fell slowly onto the fallen body.

This time, Doug didn’t get up.

The tongue that moments before had moved with vigor and force fell limply beside the body, shaken only by a few spasms, as if still trying to resist on its own after everything else had already given up. Doug’s open eyes, black from corner to corner all night, began to lighten. The black gradually receded from the edges, returning the white, returning the iris, returning something that perhaps had been human before all this, if it could still be called human. The wounds remained open, and the body continued to erode into the mud, with nothing left to rebuild itself.

Jack and Kevin stood there, panting, watching the scene. They were both drenched in sweat and exhausted in a way Jack couldn’t remember ever having felt before. They had wasted a lot of time on this. That creature seemed tireless, seemingly indestructible, and they had pushed themselves to the limit of everything they knew how to do to get to this point. Jack’s hair dripped onto his forehead, stuck to his skin with sweat, his mask lost somewhere in the fight he hadn’t even registered. Kevin’s broad chest rose and fell like a bellows, his nostrils flared, his body covered in cuts he didn’t even seem to notice.

The two had fought side-by-side before. They had a chalkboard at the base, half-jokingly, with their victory records scribbled in chalk. But Kevin had never been so tired. He had never been pushed so close to his own wall. He exhaled slowly through his nostrils, without saying anything, because he didn’t have the breath to speak.

Jack approached the body.

And something unbelievable was happening there. Before his very eyes, Doug was beginning to revert to what he had been. The dog-like features were slowly receding, the dark fur disappearing back into the skin, the snout shrinking, the second jaw retracting until it vanished. The face was reorganizing itself into what it once was, though swollen and misshapen, deformed by the beating he had received. The mouth on his belly closed with a wet sound, slowly, the tongue retracting inside until no gap remained. What remained in the mud, in the end, was just a man. A man completely torn apart by the confrontation, unrecognizable beneath his own blood, but a man, and nothing more.

Kevin approached and stopped beside Jack. He looked at what remained on the ground and asked, his voice hoarse with exhaustion.

“Is he dead?”

Jack didn’t answer right away. He stared at that swollen face and recognized it, even disfigured. It was the same man he’d seen sleeping on the floor of his own apartment that first night, unaware that he was being robbed, unaware of what would happen next. There, beneath the blood, was no monster. There was only a suburban drug dealer who had lost a shipment and almost his own skin, and who had found, at the worst moment of his life, the wrong power to cling to. Jack didn’t feel guilt, not exactly. He felt the dry weight of something understood, the certainty that it hadn’t started in that backyard, and that what had started in that backyard was still far from over.

“I don’t know,” Jack finally said. He looked at the man for a moment, at his bruised chest that barely moved, and added in a low voice, “But I hope this will solve it.”

He pulled out his Glock. He pointed it at the body on the ground and emptied the magazine into it. Shot to the heart, shot to the lung, shot to the head, one after the other, without haste or pause, until the gun jammed empty in his hand. It wasn’t cruelty. It was safety. He’d seen that man get back up too many times to trust in silence, and as long as there was a chance of things returning, Jack was going to use it.

Kevin lowered his eyes to the body and said, his voice slurring.

“Left.”

“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “Really, mate. Sinister.”

The two turned away from the abomination on the ground and returned to the house, leaving the ruined yard behind. The old back door was gone. It was completely destroyed, and part of the roof had collapsed over the opening, filling the passage with broken wood and shattered tiles. Jack assessed the wreckage and gave up.

“Let’s go out,” he said, turning toward the side of the house. “All this commotion is going to bring the police.”

Kevin nodded, too tired to comment. He had never been so tired in his entire life.

“Before anything else,” Jack added, “we need to get at least something out of this. So that this trip wasn’t in vain.”

Kevin nodded again. The two walked around the side of the house, stepping over the unconscious men Jack had made sure to drag to a safe corner and tie up, their wrists immobilized with tape. Some were groaning softly. None were in a condition to do anything. Jack passed by them slowly and without pity, and entered through the front door.

The room greeted them as before. The table in the center was still there, covered in dust and stacked packages, the merchandise that had started it all. Jack went to the next room and found an empty bag tossed in a corner. He returned with it and opened it on the table.

“Look for something else around the house,” she told Kevin, starting to fill her bag with packages. “You have the best nose.”

Kevin nodded and went upstairs, sniffing loudly as he ascended, the rasping sound escaping from his wide nostrils. Jack stayed in the living room, gathering up what was on the table, listening to his friend’s heavy footsteps crossing the upper floor. It wasn’t long before the footsteps returned up the stairs, and Kevin came down carrying two more bags, both heavy.

“Money?” Jack asked, without looking up.

“No,” said Kevin. “More drugs.”

Jack paused for a moment, thinking. “They must have exchanged the money recently,” he said, more to himself than to Kevin. “They emptied the till.” He shrugged and closed his bag again. “It’s fine. We can still use this.”

The two nodded and crossed the room toward the door. And it was then, before they reached the exit, that the light shifted in the gaps of the curtains. Red, blue, red, blue, sweeping across the walls of the room at regular intervals. In the distance, but rapidly approaching from the street, came the lights that Jack had foreseen since the first roar.

“Now,” said Jack.

The two ran out. They crossed the gate, ran across the front lawn, and reached the van parked on the dark corner, throwing their bags out the back doors before even closing them properly. Kevin jumped into the driver’s seat and turned the key, and the van sped off, leaving the neighborhood behind seconds before the first police car turned the corner. The lights faded in the rearview mirror, and soon night swallowed them up again.

Today’s mission is over. That was the only coherent thought Jack could form, leaning against the passenger seat with the empty Glock still in his hand, the sweat drying cold on his skin. His heart was still racing, and it took him a while to understand why.

He had felt fear. Real fear, the kind that tightens your throat and chills your spine, from the beginning to the end of the night. That thing had almost killed him more than once. And yet, deep down, beneath the fear and the exhaustion and the horror of seeing a man turn into a monster and then back again, there was something else he struggled to admit. He had liked it. Not the death, not the blood, but the conflict itself, the way fear transformed into something else in his hands when there was nowhere to run. His whole life he had run away. He had shrugged, lowered his head, and disappeared from every problem he could, and had made that his way of existing. And there, leaning against the seat of a van full of stolen drugs, exhausted and trembling, he discovered himself, against all the logic of what he had always been, strangely alive.

He was changing. He no longer had any doubt about that.

And there was something else the night had left inside him, heavier than exhaustion. Doug wasn’t a coincidence. He was the second man in a few weeks that Jack had seen something impossible awaken, and both were exactly the kind of people who already carried a gun on their hip before carrying any power. That didn’t just fall from the sky on anyone. It fell with precision. Someone was deliberately watering those seeds around the city, and the clock that measured the time of it didn’t mark Jack’s time. It marked the time of the one who planted. He had barely won that night, exhausted, relying on luck and his friend by his side, and it wouldn’t be enough next time. I needed to get stronger. Faster. And I needed to understand, before it was too late, whose hand was behind all this.

The van drove off into the night, taking the two men and the stolen cargo away from the red and blue lights, and Jack closed his eyes and let his heart slow down, knowing that this had only been the beginning of something much bigger than himself.