Emergence Read online

  “The Truth?” I deliberately gave inflection to the words to suggest a proper noun. I grammar like that.

  “Yes,” White said. “The truth about the world we live in. Watch.”

  With another button push, the lights dimmed and the screen lit up. I found myself watching things. Terrible things. I thought it was a horror film, one of those ‘found footage’ pieces of crap that are everywhere today due to the low production cost for potential high return.

  After a few seconds of white noise and static, what looked like a warehouse sprang into view. I recognized the viewpoint as a helmet cam, like one of those Go-Pro things. The feed was color.

  The place looked like your normal industrial-area warehouse; blank concrete walls, cheap metal roof, pipes down the outside of the building to defray costs as much as possible. The only windows were high up, to make it harder to break into. A normal warehouse. Nothing to distinguish it from a thousand others in any city in the country. I saw the point-of-view moving as the guy who wore the cam looked around at other guys wearing black tactical gear with no markings or ranks visible. Not SWAT, that’s for sure. SWAT are covered in insignia, with their acronym on the back of everything. These guys looked like Special Forces, some black op group with little to no government oversight. The rifles they held strengthened that idea: HK416A5 assault rifles with full rail targeting and laser-pointer systems. Weren’t normal for anyone that didn’t have a damn good budget and access to the best weapons around. The short-stroke gas piston system, unique to Heckler and Koch, removed most of the problems of the M16 and M4 rifles that were once the backbone of infantrymen and Special Forces everywhere. Nice rifles used by very serious groups, always military or law enforcement, and the ones I saw weren’t the civilian version, either.

  The camera moved forward as the men received some signal to breach the warehouse. There was no sound. I saw the way they stacked near the doors though, waiting for the guy with a breaching charge on the end of broomstick. Low tech, and used a thousand times by the military community in every war the last thirty years.

  I saw the puff of smoke and dust as the charges blasted the door locks. The stacked teams went through the doors into the warehouse. The view switched to a pale, washed-out green as the camera switched to light-enhancement night vision, and saw the men do the same, pulling down state-of-the-art Quad-Eye panoramic night vision goggles (PNVGs) that had been strapped on their helmets. These things were some of the best NVG tech I’d seen. I’d heard rumors of newer stuff, but if they were true, it hadn’t hit the market or the military yet. I had friends enough in the know to keep me up-to-date with all this shit.

  I watched the screen, seeing the stacks of pallets that filled the warehouse, making it hard to see anything or anyone that might be lying in wait for the attackers. These guys had a hard job. Nothing worse than a warehouse full of pallets for potential bad guys to hide in. They could be anywhere.

  I watched the men spread out, using a mixture of hand signals and a radio command channel that I couldn’t hear. The guy who wore the camera was behind two others, and both of them suddenly disappeared; they didn’t move out of sight, they just disappeared. One minute there, the next, gone.

  The vision froze for a second, and then rewound. I looked over at White. He was holding the remote control. I looked back at the screen as it moved forward, a lot slower than before. I watched closely and this time I saw what happened. Both men were grabbed and dragged upward so fast it confused the eye at normal speed. White rewound it once more, and I watched again. Again they were hauled up, but the strangest thing was, there was no sign of anyone grabbing them. It was as though they were taken by invisible aliens. It reminded me of a tacky Hong Kong martial arts film with wire-work ninjas.

  White left it playing this time, ramped back up to normal speed. I watched the panic as the team reformed. I watched as more and more of them disappeared up into the unknown. Eventually, the remaining six—I think there were fourteen in the original assault group—worked out what was happening and started aiming their H&Ks upward. I got a full view of something I never would have believed yesterday, but after this morning’s little fracas I’d believe just about anything. If I’d seen an alien hovering over them in a mini Marvin the Martian flying saucer, I wouldn’t have doubted for a second. What I saw now, on that screen, was unbelievable, yet just as compellingly-believable.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t human, but some kind of fucking gargoyle/dragon hybrid thing. Pure white body like a marble statue, with smooth tight scales and glowing white eyes. It was like something straight out of a Dungeons & Dragons manual, only goddamn real. Too fucking much, for any other day. Today, I just wanted some popcorn to munch on while I slowly lost my mind. I prayed it was all special effects, yet deep down I knew it wasn’t. This whole scene was too complex to be a practical joke. No-one I knew was rich or twisted enough to pull this off.

  Goddamn. I hate chimerics.

  On the video, the guys were shitting themselves, screaming in abject terror, opening up with their assault rifles, seemingly to no effect. Bullets bounced off the pale body as though it were made of stone. It leered down at the soldiers, flashing dagger-like teeth. Then it spread wings that had been folded up against its back.

  I watched the rest of the slaughter in more silence. The viewpoint changed as men died, obviously switching between soldiers. White hadn’t said a word, either, but I heard his breathing deepen a little as he watched the deaths of what I assumed were his men. The last I saw, the blood had spread so thickly over the lens of one helmet-cam that it was nearly impossible to see anything.

  Finally, the screen went dark.

  “Thoughts?” asked White, his voice displaying no sign of any upset at what we had watched.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s so fucked up that I can’t even say how fucked up it is. The government’s been telling folks chimerics are under control. All registered and catalogued and exhaustively interviewed by trained personnel. Looking at this, I’d tend to disagree. That thing is chimeric, right?”

  “Sort of,” he answered.

  “What do you mean ‘sort of’? Either you’re normal or chimeric. There’s no ‘sort of,’ far as I know.”

  “Most of those who’ve manifested in recent decades have been law-abiding for the most part. Then there are…the monsters.”

  “Monsters?”

  White nodded at the now-darkened screen. “What else would you call it?”

  “Fair enough. I’ve seen some strange ones, sure.”

  He stood up and walked over to tap on the door. It opened to reveal Dumb and Dumber still standing there. “Some refreshments, please,” said White. “We may be here for some time. Mister Stoner hasn’t tried to escape or hit me yet, so he may be a keeper.”

  Dumber nodded and walked out of view.

  “I can hear you, you know,” I said, “and there’s still time for me to crack your skull.” At that, Dumb glared at me for a second before White shut the door on him. I wasn’t intimidated. I could take out White and those two goons without breaking a sweat.

  “I know you can hear me,” said White. “I just wanted you to know that the last three guys who’ve sat in that chair have lost it well before this point of the conversation.”

  “And…?” I said. “Did they? Leave?”

  “Let’s just say they’re not here,” White said.

  “You don’t have to appear so broken up about it.”

  White laughed. “No-one’s going to miss you, either. Oh, I know about your past, your little community of Special Forces buddies, but one word from me and they’ll forget you ever existed.”

  That statement actually worried me a little. I’d gone to great lengths to hide who I used to be. I thought I’d done okay, by anyone’s standards, but obviously these guys had a long reach.

  “The thing is,” continued White, “the world’s a very different place to what you thought it was. It’s our job to
make sure that stays on a need-to-know basis.” He paused as the door opened and Dumber came in, pushing a trolley that held covered plates and a percolator filled with what looked like rich, black coffee.

  Good. I sure as hell needed a caffeine fix. I might prefer flat whites, but at this stage, after the morning I’d had, I’d suck year-old coffee powder through a leper’s sock and still go back for seconds.

  I went to stand, but the guard pushed the trolley right next to me and pulled the metal cover-trays off heaped plates of food. Crispy bacon, steaming eggs

  scrambled just how I like to throw them up, grilled onion, and toasted Turkish bread. These guys knew way too much about me for comfort. That didn’t stop me from grabbing a plate and heaping it full of food. I was ravenous, and I wasn’t really sure how long I’d been out cold from the gas. It could have been yesterday since I last ate. Felt like it.

  After I was full enough to actually breathe between bites, I drained my second cup of coffee and wiped my mouth with a napkin.

  “You appear to have enjoyed that,” said White, who’d stayed silent the entire time I’d been eating. “Now it’s time to talk, Mister Stoner.”

  “I thought that was what we’d been doing,” I said. “I must have imagined it.”

  “Serious, Mister Stoner. Serious. I need your help, and you need mine.”

  THREE

  An hour later, I was still just as confused, and a lot more pissed. I was ready to tear a hole in the two goons outside, anyone else in the building, the idiot in the van who’d started all this, and pretty much the whole damn world.

  According to White, there was an echelon of chimerics that had an international supervillain organization no-one was aware of, and it was his job to make sure they stayed down in their holes, not coming up for air, and not causing too much trouble.

  “You can make a difference,” he’d said. “You need our help,” he’d said. “We’re at war, and you’ve been dragged into it,” he’d said.

  “I don’t give a fuck about your war. I just want to make a few bucks and live a quiet life.”

  “Too late for that.” White lifted the remote and activated the screen again. It showed a street view, as though from a dash-cam.

  “Great. More slasher flicks.”

  “Shh.”

  As I watched, the viewpoint swung around a corner and I recognized where it was going. The mall. My mall. Where I’d been this morning when all this shit had started.

  As the view hit our parking lot, I saw my car, I saw the van, and I saw myself standing over a guy on the ground, my leg bleeding. The image froze there.

  “This is the moment your life irrevocably changed,” said White. “This is the moment you left the normal world and entered my world.”

  “I don’t get what you mean,” I said. “That’s the moment I kicked some ass, and then you guys came along and kidnapped me.”

  “Ah, but is that all that really happened?” asked White. “Was that just a psycho you took down, or was there more to it?”

  “A meth-head who can fight a bit better than most. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.”

  “Not true,” said White. “There’s more to it than that. Much more.” He pressed another button on the remote, and the view zoomed in on the outstretched arm of the creep I’d fought. I looked. The fingers seemed weird. As the scene closed in more and more, I could see what was different. His fingers ended in what looked like claws. Not just long, sharp fingernails, but solid, honest-to-god claws, like a bear or a cat or something. White was right. The guy was a chimeric.

  I said, “I still don’t see what it has to do with me. He’s down, game over. Then you guys came along.”

  “Just watch,” said White, “and learn.”

  He panned the view up and to the right, and then zoomed in even more. I saw a car, two heads up in the front seat. The nearest window was down, and the guy was holding a video camera, filming me and the fight. I could only see one of his eyes, but it sure wasn’t normal. It had the same red I’d seen in the eyes of the creep I’d taken down. More zoom, and I could see it wasn’t a glow. The guy’s iris was definitely bright red.

  “Someone’s fucked with your feed. That’s just some local jock grabbing footage for his YouTube channel. Besides, I can take care of myself.”

  “I can guarantee this footage is not corrupted.”

  I rolled my eyes. “All right, well, the Pope shits in the woods, too.”

  “I see that I’ll have to give you some time to come to your senses.” He stood up. “Follow me.” He walked to the door and opened it. I followed. He gestured at me to walk back out to the corridor.

  “Take the red door,” said White from behind me. “Take note of where we are, as well. You will want to find your way back here.”

  I ignored him and left through the red door.

  FOUR

  I stepped out into blazing sunlight. Once my eyes adjusted, I found myself outside in what looked like a run-down warehouse in an abandoned industrial area. Not what I’d expected. It was one hell of a weird-ass place on the inside, so I thought the outside would be some gleaming ultra-modern building. Nope. Plain as a two-dollar whore.

  I took a good look, just in case White was right. Grey steel, from top to bottom. Louvered windows, wooden doors that, from the outside, looked weak and flimsy but were likely steel-cored.

  I checked my phone. The GPS showed I was in Motor Hills’ Eastside. A rough neighborhood. The industrial area had hundreds of warehouses, busy, abandoned, and everything in between. Nice camouflage. Hidden in plain sight. I made a note of the address, just in case, then turned and made my way toward the nearest bus route.

  An hour later I was walking up the path to my front door. I stopped. The door was open; only an inch, but that’s an inch more than it should have been. My senses flared as I checked around for any sign of being watched. Nothing. Nothing I could see, anyway, but whoever the fuck was inside were in for a shock.

  I edged up to the door, stood to the side, and eased it open with one hand. If someone decided to shoot first and rob later, I was to the side of where most people would aim. The door lightly tapped into the wall. No-one behind it. I stood for a second, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light. The hall looked normal. Nobody in sight, and nothing disturbed on the bench just inside.

  “Hey, mister?”

  The voice from behind caught me off guard. I spun and put my back against the side of the small porch, out of the way of attack from inside the house…and from the little girl staring innocently at me.

  Nice one, doofus, I thought. “What the hell? Get outta here, girl. Now.”

  “Well, that’s no way to talk to a little girl,” she said, smiling. Curly red hair, blue eyes, and razor sharp teeth.

  Little Orphan Annie with real bite.

  While I was taking this in something leaped from inside the open doorway and slammed into my side. I managed to stay on my feet as whatever-it-was clawed at my arm and ribs. I spun and slammed into the wall next to my front door, making sure to cushion the impact with my unwanted pal.

  Whatever-it-was squealed and fell away from me. My arm hurt, but my ribs were fine. Thank fuck for anti-stab vests. I barely had time to gather my wits when something hit me from the opposite side. I grabbed Little Orphan Annie by her skinny throat and threw her onto the other…kid?

  Kids, for fucksake!

  They both fell into a wriggling pile. I staggered past them and into the house, slamming and bolting the door with them still on the porch.

  What just happened? Attacked by kids? Two little girls with Major League dental issues?

  My head spun. I had to be hallucinating. They both looked exactly the fucking same. Like twins. Or more like clones. Damn, my head hurt, and not just from the trauma of today.

  As I tried to pull my shit together, I realized the first one to ambush me had come from inside the house. That’s when I heard a growl as another
small body struck the backs of my knees, taking me down faster than a chainsaw to a tent-pole.

  I fell, reacting without any further thought, as I reached down, grabbed the third attacker by both sides of the head and tried to twist it off. I didn’t manage to remove it, but the sound of cracking bones and the sudden limpness convinced me that I’d killed it. I threw it off me and saw it was another young girl, eight or nine years old, dressed as a Girl Guide. She looked exactly the same as the others outside. Fucking triplets, or some sort of chimeric?

  I threw up in my mouth a little. I could handle killing, sure, but kids, for Christ’s sake.

  The door shuddered behind me. The pair outside obviously wanted in on the action.

  “I don’t want any fucking cookies, all right?” I yelled, suppressing a giggle at the same time. I was going insane. If I started laughing, I wouldn’t stop until they closed the door on the padded cell.

  I turned and ran into the lounge, stepping over the body in the hall. It lay on its back, mouth open in a grimace. Fuck. A little girl. With jagged teeth. Like the ones outside my door. Fucking monsters. Fucking chimerics. Likely the shape-shifting kind.

  “Yoo-hoo, mister! Come play with us,” one of the things crooned through the door. “We’re bored. We want to play.”

  “Yeah, I’m kind of busy now,” I yelled while I grabbed the Glock 17 I kept locked and loaded under my couch’s cushions. “Go play somewhere else, you little freaks!”

  “We’re waiting for youuuuu…” the voice called back. “Dornasian sent us to play, and he’ll be very angry if we don’t.”

  Dornasian? I thought. What the fuck is a Dornasian? I checked the mag and chamber of my emergency pistol. I’m pretty fucking sure this classified as one.

  The door slammed open.

  “Here we coooome… ready or not.” Giggles. Then silence. No footsteps. No movement. I racked the slide on the Glock, checking again that I had a round ready to go. I moved to the other side of the couch, putting it between me and the door.