Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (68 page)

Gasping for breath on the lobby floor of Tsarskiy Penthouses, Spencer saw other things. 
An image of Collin, giving him a wary look the next time they passed in the hallway, obviously having heard from Brian what really happened.

Presently, Spencer smiled. 
Those were the good ol’ days
. 
Good times, good times
.

Another breath, and he choked and gagged, then went into a coughing fit.  Spencer rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling.  Colorful stars still filled his world.  He blinked a few times, and forced himself to his feet.  On the ground not far away, his enemy stood up slowly.  His whip-hand was cut in half and gushing blood.  Spencer was aware of the war going on
behind him between the Great Worm and the Shannon Monster.  He looked there, and saw the other half of his enemy’s whip-hand coiled in one of her tentacles.  The Shannon Monster had heard his thoughts, and had come to his aid.

Having lost
so much blood, and now dizzy from injury and lack of air, Spencer had trouble focusing for a moment.  However, his eyes happened to land on a corpse being ripped apart by a hundred little meaty things with teeth.  The body was only recognizable by its clothing. 
Zverev
.  Beside him, a pistol lay on the ground.

Spencer staggered over, and kicked a couple of the meat-things away and bent to pick up the gun.  The bleeding stump of his enemy’s whip-hand snatched at his ankle, and lifted him into the air.  In
perfect English, his enemy screamed madly, “
From hell’s heart
…
I stabbeth thee!
”  He both laughed and wept, a face contorted with despair and insanity.

Hanging upside-down, Spencer aimed the pistol and fired at his enemy.  He fired until he was empty, which meant only three shots, but each one hit somewhere around the sternum.  The tentacle released Spencer almost at once, and
he landed hard on the marble floor.  His enemy went staggering backwards, landing beside another pillar and spitting up blood.  “Points deducted,” Spencer panted, rolling onto his side, “for quoting…
Moby Dick
.  Overrated…fucking…book.  An’ Ricardo Montalban…said it better in…in
The Wrath of Khan
.”

His enemy opened his mouth, like he was trying to speak.  He was still half laughing, half crying.  The eyes had gone wild at the unfairness and the bizarre climax to his life.

A horrendous roar.  The Great Worm had now smashed down on top of the Shannon Monster, pinning her.  The massive worm’s head bit down at the tangle of tentacles, and ripped two or three of them off.

Meanwhile, Spencer crawled over to his enemy, and sat on his chest, straddling him
, much as Brian and Collin had done to him when pinning him down.  He bent over and looked at him.  “Dmitry Ankundinov’s family.  Where are they?  Tell me where I can find them, and maybe I’ll call an ambulance.”  No answer.  The eyes were still glazed and lost.  “How about At-ta Biral?  Where do I find them?”  Any tiny bit of information would help.  With Vitaly Zverev dead, here was perhaps Spencer’s last chance to find someone who knew where the Ankundinovs had moved Dmitry’s family to.

But his enemy choked out more blood, mixed with the same kind of black bile
that was leaking from his whip-hand’s stump.

Spencer
took a moment to watch death spread over his enemy.  He savored it.  Finally he leaned in close, whispered into the Wolf’s ear.  “I did this to you.  Understand?  Know that before you go on to wherever you’re goin’. 
I
did this!”  He put his eyes in front of the dying man’s gaze.  “Look at me.  I did this.  I’m the one.”  Slowly, his enemy’s eyes rolled to the back of his head.

While the two monsters continued to clash at the far end of the lobby, Spencer quickly ran his hands through each of his enemy’s pockets.  He came up with a wallet,
a packet of Sobranie cigarettes, a silver lighter with a bear’s head on it, and a hotel keycard.  He rummaged through the wallet, found some rubles, a Visa card, IDs (probably fake) and a scrap of paper with two sets of initials and addresses on them: V.Z.R. and A.R.R.

The dream element hadn’t lifted.  Spencer
looked around, still feeling as though he was stumbling through someone else’s hallucination.  He stumbled over to his other two Versions, gave each body a brief inspection, wondering if he had landed in the right body, or if he was now existing in a copy, and figured it was all the same before staggering off.

There
was a loud, cracking sound.  Spencer looked up, saw the Shannon Monster reaching out the remainder of her tentacles and digging them into the walls, then pulling them forward.  Great chunks of marble and stone came crashing down, smashing the Great Worm’s head.  Yet it still fought, gushing blood onto the floor even as some of the Shannon Monster’s tentacles found their way into the opening.  They burrowed down, into the midsection, and some of them tore into the woman still connecting the two sections of worm.  After much jerking and pulling, the Shannon Monster tore this woman apart, separating the two halves.  The Great Worm spilled its guts, and yet still fought on.

Spencer leapt for the same couch still floating in the air.  It held his weight, and below him a sea of gore flowed over the bodies of
the Wolf and Zverev.  The ceiling began to collapse, and from it, came classroom desks, and hall lockers, and a banner saying
CES PROMOTES EXCELLENCE
.  Spencer waited for the gore to finish washing out the door, and then dropped down, splashing in ankle-deep viscera.

The door was only ten feet away.  He turned and ran for it, but something snatched at each of his limbs and lifted him off the ground.  The Shannon Monster.  It had him, and held him suspended in the air for a few seconds while he listened to the lobby collapse.  A fire had started somewhere, he could smell it.

More tentacles curled around him.  He watched as Shannon herself slowly descended, hanging lifelessly in front of him, the tentacles pouring out of her elongated mouth still controlling her.  Yet, there seemed to be some kind of brain to this massive organism, so he imagined little Shannon Dupré was in there somewhere.

Spencer hung his head, laughing.  “What a motherfuckin’ day, huh?”
  Another wall collapsed behind him somewhere, but he couldn’t turn to see which one.  Titanic forces were at work inside this building, just as they had been at the Ruffa Docks, and look how that turned out.  “Listen, I know you’re…well, a little upset.  But let’s be reasonable.  This place is set to fall apart, an’ if we don’t wanna be buried under the rubble, we need to get outta here, ASAP.  Savvy?”  The Shannon Monster didn’t move, and remained silent.  “Be smart now.  Be like your big sister, and listen to ol’ Uncle Spencer, even if you don’t like what he has to say.”

More crumbling behind him.  Spencer could feel heat, and heard flames snapping and popping.

“Whattaya say?  We have a deal?”

The Shannon Monster seemed to consider what to do with him.  Then, after a moment, it began to move.

Leon stirred.  He knew
he was missing his left eye (it had leapt out of his face and crawled away), and he knew something had a hold of him.  His mind was reeling.  Convinced it had all been a dream, he was horrified and stunned to find that something from his dream was in front of him, right before his waking eyes.  He was lifted from the floor by cold, wet hands.  Hanging from above him, dangling from things forced down her throat, was, unfeasibly, Shannon Dupré.

The
other item that made him recoil was that, on his left side, helping him to his feet, was Spencer Pelletier.  By reflex, Leon tried to pull away and go for his sidearm, but neither worked very well; the former because he was so weak, the latter because he was no longer armed.

Leon’s memory was sketchy.  There had been things chasing him out of the elevator.  He remembered Kaley…little Kaley
Dupré.  Sinking?  No, that had to be the dream, too.  Or something.  Smoke inhalation.  Yes…yes, there had been something wrong at CES, and there was a fire or something like that in the library.

His foot touched something, and he slipped.  Pelletier caught him, pulled him back up.  Leon looked at his feet.  He’d slipped on some bit of peeled flesh, and writhing bits of entrails.

“What…wh-what…?”

“Yeah,” said Pelletier.  “
I know.  Fuck ‘to be or not to be.’ 
What?
  That’s the fucking question, right?”

Police, fire trucks, and ambulances descended on the scene.  Fire was licking out of various windows on the bottom, third, fourth, sixth, and twentieth floors.  Part of the wall on the east side had collapsed inward, like the building wanted to implode.  There was an explosion at the back, and tremendous flames were pushed out, along with billowing black smoke.  One worker in his red blazer came crawling out on his hands.  He was missing both his legs.  Some teenagers passing by had caught it on their cell phones, and the video was uploaded to the Internet within five minutes, receiving more than one million hits in the first twenty-four hours.

The fire trucks were getting set up, and the on-site commander was just finishing divvying up the duties, when the eighteenth and nineteenth floors both exploded.  Shattered glas
s rained all over the streets as the commander shouted into his radio for all gas lines on the block to be shut off.

The snow came in harder, and a few people even commented on how it seemed that all of the falling flakes were moving sideways.  A couple of people commented that the snow was moving towards the Tsarskiy Penthouse
s building, but the phenomenon would be mostly ignored due to the gripping, fiery scene.

Another late-night worker was blown clear, and the body landed on top of one of the fire trucks, smashing the cab.  The body was a tangled mess, missing its eyes, its lower jaw, and the fingers on the left hand. 
A couple of the onlookers that gathered would later claim that one of the fingers landed near them, and that they saw it scuttling away like a rat, but it would be chalked up to crowd hysteria.

Also from the explosions, strangely, came school lockers and desks, a couple of flaming math books written in English, and a Cartersville Purple Hurricanes T-shirt.  A small child would find this on the side of the street a week later, when some of the snow had melted, and would walk away with it.  The phenomenon would not be reported.

The firefighters searched for an adequate fire hydrant to tap into, but the water of every single one was frozen.  They had some water inside their trucks, but not nearly enough to deal with the kind of inferno the penthouses were set to become.  They had little choice but to establish a perimeter, keep everybody safely back, pour what water they could onto it, and watch the building burn.

“Wake up,” said a voice so soft he almost missed it.

For a moment, he didn’t know who he was.  As a matter of fact, he didn’t know anything at all.  He wasn’t even sure he was a he.  Maybe…she was a she?

“Wake up,” said another voice.  This voice was a bit more forceful than the last, and a little intimidating.

Was he/she fearful of this new voice?  How did he/she feel about the first voice?  Was there a correct or incorrect way to feel?  Where was he/she?

Hey…that was a good question.  Where was this?  Was this a where?  Was this a this?

Then, an onslaught of voices.
  Though he/she had no ears to hear them with, he/she no less heard them.  It also struck him/her that it was neither English nor Russian, but some other kind of language.  Still, no matter the words, it all meant the same.

“Don’t be afraid—”

“You’re among friends now—”

“—have allies—”

“—never doubt that we are here to serve—”

“—you scratch my back, I scratch—”

“Don’t be afraid, Yuri—”

“It’s not as bad as it seems.”

“—no, no, not nearly as bad—”

“—only the beginning of something wonderful—”

“Do you feel alone?”

“Give him some room!”

“Wake up, Yuri!”

“Easy, though.  Don’t rush into—”

Those childish fears came back again, though Shcherbakov felt that whatever form he was in now, they could no longer hurt him.  He knew that there was no more material world for him.  He had died—he also now knew he was a he, or had been a he—and now he wasn’t really anything except a revenant, some thin, pale spark of his former self dissolving into the ether and half remembering what he had been.

“Oh…god…”  He could not tremble.  He no longer had a body to tremble with.  But there was definitely fear.  It permeated every corner of what was left of his mind, saturated every node of the Him.

“We were afraid once, too,” another voice assured him.  “But we don’t have to be afraid anymore.  You have to accept it.  Once you do, we can move forward.”

He said, “Move
forward with what?”  At least, he thought he said that.  He certainly meant to say it.  This no-place seemed to transcend words, though.