Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (69 page)

“We’ve found a way out of here.”

“Out of where?  There is no here.”

Another voice spoke up.  This one was new, and far calmer and more reasonable than the others.  It was the kind of voice that wouldn’t shout to have itself
heard, but would rather wait for the others to have blown themselves out, and once all had vented, it would then step in with the truth.  “I thought that once, too.  I’ve since discovered otherwise.  We all have.  It took some time—as much as time can be said to be in this non-here—but we all came to accept it.”

“Who…who are you?  Who are any of you?”

“Names hardly matter here.  I was an officer of the law once.  A few of us were gangsters, pedophiles, the kind of people I used to go after.  But none of us are those things anymore.  None of it matters.  Neither does gender or race, creed or faith, now or then.  You’ve probably noticed that already.  All that matters here is motive.  Once you’ve stripped all those identifiers away—male and female, here and then—motive is all we have left.”

“I don’t…I don’t think I…”

“We don’t have much time to explain.  All I can tell you is that we’ve found a way out.  Or rather, we’ve found something that can take us out.  Back to the real world, where I know you want to go.  We all do.  It’s our motive.  Well,” the voice added, “it’s
one
of them.”

Here came another new voice, this one far more malevolent than the others.  “I think you know what the other motive is.”

Of course he did.  It was pretty much all he knew.  Like the other voice said, once you stripped away all physical and temporal identifiers, all one had left was a motive, a desire.  Indeed, he felt that all he
was
anymore was a single, unwavering desire.  “When do we kill him?” he asked.

The others seemed pleased with this.  He could sense it.  “We have to use the Other.  We’re his bridge, between this place and ours.  But there’s a catch. 
We have to join with him.  He needs that permission.  He requires our acceptance.  Understand?”  Somehow, it was the only thing Shcherbakov did understand.

“Of course,” he said.  “How do we start?”

“We already have.  He was just waiting on a few more.  Come closer.”  Somehow, he came closer to the other voices, the other others, and though he felt no physical connection to any of them, he did feel something that went far and beyond physicality.  “A little closer.”  He did as he was told.  “Just a little closer.”  He did so.

In a flash, he suddenly knew who he was, who he had been, and who all these people were.  “Zakhar?  Yevgeny, it’s you!  Mikhail!  Olga?  Dmitry? 
Cousins!
  Zverev!  And you…you’re…”  The former law enforcement officer was not familiar to him, and yet Shcherbakov knew him.  He knew them all so intimately, their greatest insecurities and their most hidden sexual desires, their habits and their prejudices, their idiosyncrasies and their fears.

As suddenly as he knew them, he didn’t know them at all.

Very soon, there was no him.  There was only them.  A single mind, going nowhere, existing nowhere.  It had been there for ten million eons and for only one second.  It had never been there, and it had always been there.  Something else merged with them.  Or, no,
swallowed
them.  Digested them.  All personalities fanned out, becoming a single particle each.  A solitary mind formed in a great sea of nothing.  This new thing formed and yet never formed.

How is it possible for something to come from nothing?
It thought.  The answer was immediately obviously. 
I think, therefore I am
.  The words of some other person, someone who existed back in that other world.

The solitary mind took in the voices of the others, let them fill its lungs, and rose.  It used their voices and souls and essences and thoughts and ideas to find familiar paths.  It crossed a great gulf over an uneasy swinging bridge, the rope and wooden planks so old it had become precarious.  If the solitary mind was careful, it might just make it across.

Millions of years passed, giving it plenty of time to consider.  It weighed the opinions of the many voices it had engulfed, consolidated them all and became them all.  It had to, if it wanted to find that passage back.

It took eons to
feel how the world worked.  It found that Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” that provided mass to all matter.  Now, it had the atoms, the foundation for its matter.  The next acceptable step was to create the three ingredients for life—that is, life as it was understood in this world—those being energy, water, and raw chemical materials.  Known forms of life here used two forms of energy: light and chemical.  Plants, algae, and some bacteria used photosynthesis, and were fond of light.  Animals were chemically-fueled things.

Raw chemical materials were next.  Hydrogen?  Check.  Carbon?  Check.  Nitrogen?  Check.  Oxygen?  Check.

Now, it needed only complex proteins and amino acids.

From nothing came something.  It had risen until it stood amid fire and dying things.  It had gained a biomass, something material to work with.  Though, the biomass was seriously malformed
, and would need constant work.  The two stalks it walked on were uniform, but the top handlers, or arms, were not.  One handler was a long, slithering thing, and the other was rather mundane.  In a moment, it pulled itself together, tensing its thoughts in concentration the way a biomass might tense its muscles.  The body became what it once was.

And then it exploded.

The former body of Yuri Shcherbakov went in every direction, as if he had swallowed a grenade.  After the explosion, something else stood where the body had been.  The cocoon was gone, the incubator of the mortal coil and its material brain had been dispensed, and the Interloper took its first breath in a new home.  The fires burned hotter—its presence was like an accelerant, though its body was cold.  Always so cold.

The Interloper was uneasy at first.  No longer straddling the line between worlds,
it had dispatched its many pieces in order to fit each individual piece through a crevice, had absorbed the minds of others that had lived in this reality so that it could understand how they coped with it, how they identified and oriented themselves with things like gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, and identity.  It culled these forces together, and made itself an object.  A creature.

The Interloper coalesced into a kind of shape that this universe tried to understand.  A few things were lost in translation, but overall, it had earned its uneasy spot in this reality. 
Its form and face shifted, it was sometimes male and sometimes female, and occasionally both.  Taking a few tentative steps, the Interloper figured out balance.  Even as Tsarskiy Penthouses burned and crumbled all around it, it tested its environment.  It did so patiently, never rushing.

After all,
in this world, not only was their time, but there was plenty of it.

That night, all over Chelyabinsk, there was an increase in reports of strange maladies.  In years to come, experts in various medical and scientific fields would come to refer to the series of bizarre events on this night as “the Chelyabinsk Event.”

Women would report waking up in the middle of the night with terrible stomach cramps, dozens of them bleeding profusely from their privates.  Two women nearly bled to death before reaching the hospital, which was still covered in police officers searching for a foreign fugitive.  What made it even more alarming was the fact that, with most of the women, the men and boys th
ey lived with reported violent, painful orgasms that didn’t stop for hours.  Blood came out as ejaculate.  One late-night walker came waddling into a hospital holding his reddening crotch, and passed out for four days before waking up.

Many people would report an earthquake.  Many others reported hearing whispers, but none of those people had ever suffered from schizophrenia.  One healthy young tollbooth attendant and an equally healthy waitress at a late-night diner suddenly went blind, and both of them without any previous symptoms or ocular complications.  Some of the more mundane symptoms were just incredibly painful morning sicknesses for various pregnant women throughout the city; although, the fact that it happened to so many in one night, with one woman
requiring a C-section, caused some alarm.  Also, more than 2,000 people would report having brain-splitting migraines that night, most of them with no previous history of migraines.

Was it something to do with the storm?  The water?  Pollution had been a worry in the city
for more than two decades.

Other phenomena had nothing to do with medical science.  A twenty-year-old building collapsed in the business district, for instance, a building that had been built
with new innovations and designed specifically for hard Russian winds and winters.  Snow and winds alone shouldn’t have done it, and there were no explosions or residue left by fire.  It would remain completely unexplained.

A 2003 Toyota Highlander was found driven halfway through the second storey of a high-rise.  No one knew how it got there.  No one had seen it flung by wind or by crane.  Indeed, no crane capable of
lifting the vehicle was present for dozens of blocks around.

A woman would be found buried halfway in concrete, as if she’d sunk beneath it like quicksand.  Only her right arm and half her face were visible; her arm reaching up, as if for help.  This particular oddity would actually open a case; the investigators believed it was some sort of vicious killing, perhaps a message sent by the Mafia.  The prevailing theory would be that, somehow, the mob had dug that area of concrete up, poured it full of fresh concrete, then put the woman in it and made her stay in it, perhaps at gunpoint, while the freezing weather somehow snap-froze her in place.

Another woman would be found dismembered and half-eaten, with elongated bloody footprints leading away from her corpse and into a nearby park.  Trackers would search for three days and find nothing.  The investigators would make plaster moldings of the teeth marks left on the woman’s remains—not a single zoologist would be able to identify the animal they belonged to.

Power went out almost everywhere.  The grids went into a tizzy, and no one could trace the source of the problems.
 

The next day, a meteor entered the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, moving more than 40,000 miles per hour, and exploding with energy thirty times stronger than the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  It injured over a thousand people, and collapsed the roofs of a major factory.  This event would eclipse all others in Chelyabinsk that night, drawing attention away from these other phenomena.

However, some would comment on how it appeared that one massive disturbance or curse had been laid on the city of Chelyabinsk.  One litigious priest would get into hot water for suggesting it was punishment to the people of Chelyabinsk, God’s retribution for the people and police turning a blind eye to the problems the city suffered.  “It’s our penance,” he would say repeatedly on TV for the following months.  “Our penance for exploiting our fellow man, and not helping him.  Our penance for suffering no empathy.”

Many similar accounts would be reported in Cartersville,
Georgia, on the exact same day that the elementary school burned to the ground, killing two teachers and one custodian.  Interestingly, not many people would ever connect the two Events, just a handful of dedicated conspiracy theorists.  The closest the two Events would ever come to being connected would be in a book written about the Chelyabinsk Event, where the Cartersville phenomenon would be mentioned in a footnote.

Shannon
Dupré and Leon Hulsey would find passage back to the U.S. on a boat.  They would get their stories straight, for the real story could never be believed.  Shannon would say she had been abducted by members of the
vory v zakone
, and that would afford her and her mother witness protection—while it would be assumed the
vory
still had young Kaley Dupré, as well, and that would make news:
INVASION OF FOREIGN CRIMINAL SYNDICATES
.  The story would become a flashpoint, one of those watershed moments like 9/11 that put the word “terrorism” on everybody’s lips.  Now, the hot words were “organized crime.”

Leon Hulsey,
missing an eye and having had too much darkness disclosed to him, especially after listening to Shannon on their boat ride across the Atlantic, felt his grip on reality slip.  He would go home, pack his things, and simply disappear for a while.  He was headed to Canada months later, thinking about fishing along the Annapolis River, when his cell phone rang, and he had his first introduction with Detective-Inspector Aurélie Rideau.

But that’s getting a little ahead.

17

Roughly 4,000 miles away, a phone call had roused
Shakib Rahman from his sleep. Well, not exactly sleep.  He couldn’t sleep much these days.  Insomnia had been a constant companion of his for the better part of a decade now.  Still, when he shut his eyes, he entered a calm, meditative state which he liked even better than sleep.  It helped to consolidate his thoughts.  His father had taught him that.  Running through “small orbit” exercises and channeling energy through his body’s chakra points.

Rahman took deep, deep breaths, and as he released each one he summoned energy to a region of his body.  Some called it
chi
, some called it the spirit.  Whatever it was, Rahman was able to sense it right between his eyes.  And as he exhaled, he moved that tingling sensation down through his tongue, which touched the roof of his mouth, keeping the pathway open to the middle of his sternum, where he let the energy “cook.”  Then, he passed it into his belly, just three inches behind the belly button, where some Chinese healers believed the soul resided.

Rahman listened to the phone ring as he moved the energy
through his lower groin, up to the tailbone, then to the middle of his spine, then around to the nape of his neck, and then on to the top of the head before resting between his eyes again.  This was called the “third eye” and, according to his father, it needed to have its energy restored in this way in order to maintain clear and wise thinking.

The phone rang some more.  He finally opened his eyes.  When he sat up,
he flipped on the lamp by the bed, and then noticed he had an erection.  He nudged the girl in the bed beside him.  He forgot her name, but she was young and fresh.  A real bargain from his people across the sea.  When she woke up, she knew her job.  She stood up and slinked around the bed, knelt in front of him, and took him in her mouth.

Rahman put one hand on her head, and answered one of the eight cell phones resting on the nightstand with the other.
  “Slow,” he told her.  “Like how I told you before.”  He put the phone to his ear.  “Yes?”

“We have a problem.”  It was Hamid, and his voice, always grave, was especially so now.

“What is it?”

“Our people in Moscow and Chelyabinsk are talking.  They’re saying lots of networks have been compromised.”

“How so?”  To the girl in his lap, he whispered, “I said, slow down.”

Hamid cleared his throat.  “Many of their people were killed tonight.  An unknown number.  There were several hits.”

“By who?  Local competition?”

“No, they’re saying it was an outsider.  An American, acting alone.”

Rahman considered that.  “The docks?”

“Completely destroyed and now being overrun by police.  I’ve been told they’re trying to keep the information found there out of the hands of Interpol and other agencies, but our Russian
friends don’t sound confident.  Interpol is making them feel pressure from the international community.”

He nodded.  “What else?”

“They think Zverev may be dead.”

At this, Rahman closed his eyes and sighed heavily.  He ran through small orbit again.  It took about three breaths, then he said, “Cut all ties.  No more communication with the Russian families for the time being.”

“You were scheduled to move there next month.”

“I know, but obviously they aren’t as safe as I thought.  I’ll stay here until I find other arrangements.”

“Understood.”

“Now, tell me about this American.  What do we know?  Is he law enforcement?”

“No.  He’s a nobody, really.  A car thief and a con artist, and apparently he had some grudge with the families before.”

Rahman felt himself about to climax.  He gripped the girl by her hair and made her slow down.  “Any family?  Any points where we can apply pressure?”

“We’ve already looked into it, as have the families, and the man has
some
.  But he’s also a wanted criminal in the U.S., and their FBI Most Wanted list says that he’s a psychopath.  Clinically diagnosed.  He escaped prison maybe a year ago, suspected of killing his prison shrink, and he’s been on a killing spree ever since.”  Hamid sounded disappointed.  “In this case, I don’t think applying pressure to his family will change anything.  He’s one of
those
.”

A rabid beast, he meant, with no soul or family ties like a human ought to have. 
“Maybe not, but do it anyway.”

“As you say.”

“And Hamid?” Rahman added.  “Zverev wasn’t a friend, but he was a business partner.  We must have loyalty and professionalism when dealing with our partners.  We must show solidarity with the rest of The Court in this moment.  So find this man—what’s his name?”

“Palmer or Pellemer, or something like that.”

“Find this Palmer or whoever.  Use whatever means.  Contact our people in all regions, make sure they’re aware of this man.  Have them all check the FBI’s website, memorize his face.  I want to make him famous.  If we can get our people in the media to run stories about him, do it.  Find him.  Find him and feed him his scrotum.”

“Of course,” said Hamid.  “Blood and fealty.”

“Blood and fealty,” Rahman returned, and hung up.

He sat in silence for a time, almost forgetting the girl in his lap.  When he stood up, she followed him, staying bent over and with her mouth wrapped around him.  She k
new better than to let his cock slip free.  He walked over to the balcony and opened the glass doors, and let her walk out backwards.  He stood in the cool wind.  Four thousand miles away, his Russian colleagues were experiencing a blizzard and subzero temperatures, meanwhile here in Dhaka, it was a brisk 6
8
°
F.  The blazing city lights announced to the world the megacity’s life and verve.

Standing naked on a high-rise in the most luxuriant district in the city,
Shakib Rahman looked out over his kingdom, and saw that it was good.  To have ascended from the slums that were so far away he couldn’t even see them from this view, he knew his father would be proud.  Even his father hadn’t dreamed of rising this high.

The woman was
still sucking him.  Rahman closed his eyes, and ran through small orbit.  He used it to enhance his climax.  After his
chi
had taken several trips around his body, he finally focused it down his penis, out the tip, and into her mouth.  He gripped her face in his fists and curled his toes.  He thrusted violently into her throat, and he knew she wouldn’t pull away.  She had seen what he’d done to her sister when she did such.  Noseless, legless, she now begged on a street corner in Bokra Zela, the same slum district Rahman had escaped.

When she was finished, Rahman made her keep him in her mouth, sucking and cleaning him off, as he gazed out over his domain.  Hamid and others thought he was trying to run from Bangladesh, his homeland, to hide in other countries.  The truth was, this city was his fortress.  It was one of the largest cities in the world, a vast sea of dark alleys,
winding highways, packed districts and towering skyscrapers, and as long as he stayed in here, stuck close to his friends, family, and allies, no one could touch him.

However, things did get hot from time to time, and so Rahman and Hamid had devised a plan to bounce between cities for a time, around and around the world until authorities no longer knew where he was.  Such plans could wait until he had this sorted out.  He didn’t imagine it would take long.  This
man Palmer couldn’t be that difficult to find.

When the woman was finished cleaning him off, Rahman pulled her head away, and held her face in his hands, forcing her to look up at him.  “Say it.”

She wiped her mouth.  “The past is dead.”

“What else?”

“Blood and fealty,” she said.  “For you.”

He nodded and gave her an approving
smile.  “Blood and fealty.”

Three blocks from the towering inferno, Spencer stood in an alley, freezing.  He could see the smoke rising in front of the moon, which had finally decided to peek bravely through the clouds.  The snow was letting up.  Behind him, Detective Leon Hulsey had passed out again.  Shannon was standing over him, keeping a bundle of stained red cloth pressed to his empty eye socket.  The girl’s tentacles had receded back into her throat like she was sucking noodles.  It had happened almost as soon as they exited Tsarskiy Penthouses, her tentacles becoming weak, dropping Hulsey completely as they diminished in size, and vanished inside her.  Shannon had passed out, and for a moment Spencer had tried to figure out how he would carry both of them, until the wee girl gasped and sat up straight, as if waking from a bad dream.

Spencer had lugged Hulsey in a fireman’s carry.  They slipped out a side entrance and ran around to the back. 
They exited an emergency door, and Spencer found his Acura exactly where he’d left it.

They were now in a narrow alley between two small tenements, sheltered from the wind and each of them dealing with what they had seen in their own way.
  Spencer was thinking back on the multiple versions he’d become, wondering at the power of the little girl sitting behind him.  It was one thing to alter herself enough that tentacles came vomiting out of her, but it was another thing to split a person’s consciousness between three separate bodies.  If Shannon was able to do these things, what else might she be able to do?

Spencer had taken out one of the Sobranies he’d lifted from his enemy’s corpse, and lit it using his
bear’s-head lighter.  He sucked in the sweet, sweet smoke, savored it, and blew it out.  He looked behind him.  Shannon was knelt over Hulsey, who was moving his lips, and speaking madly about “can’t find Emerson” or some such nonsense.  “Let him be,” he told her, looking back at the climbing smoke in the distance.  “He’ll make it.”

Sniffling, she looked up at him.  “H-how do you kn-know?”

“He’s got the grit.”

“Wh-what’s that?”

“Moxy. 
Cojones
.  Means he’s tough.”

Shannon sniffled some more.  “It don’t matter how big or tough he is, he
’s missing an eye and he got hit by—”

“Didn’t say
big
, said
tough
.  Difference.”  Spencer took another toke, and listened to the sirens screaming off in the distance.  “Toughness doesn’t come from size.  Toughness…it’s in here.”  Touched his head.  “An’ here.”  Touched his chest.  “It’s what yer sister has.  Or had.  She probably didn’t make it too long in that other world.  Probably mince meat by now, like everybody in that building.”  Even as he said it, he didn’t believe it.  Kaley Dupré was his to kill, his and his alone; he felt it was a law of the universe, one of those that Sir Isaac Newton had left undiscovered.

“Why…?”  Such a tiny little whisper, so pathetic.

Spencer turned to look at her.  Shannon had buried her head in her hands.  “Why what, little girl?”

“Wh-why does this…k-keep happening…to us?”

“Why does it happen to anybody?  Everybody gets shit on.  That’s a law.”  Another one Newton had missed, no doubt.  “The universe ain’t benign, but she ain’t malign, either.  Savvy?  The universe don’t even know you’re fuckin’ here.  Pray all ya want, cry all ya want, nobody’s listenin’.”

“Th-the…universe…what…?”

“The universe is dark and cold.  Those are natural.  Light and warmth,
those
are the anomalies.  One day, the suns will all burn out.  No more stars, no more lights.  Perfect zero temperatures.  Eternal darkness an’ cold.  We’re headin’ back to it.  In the end, the darkness and the cold always win.”

Shannon looked up at him.  “Th-then why…er…how does any of it matter?”

“Huh.  A profound question for a little nigglet like you.”  He reached to his waistline to adjust the pistol he’d taken off Zverev.  It was empty, but even an empty gun had its uses.  “Maybe when you’re old enough, you’ll get it. 
If
you survive that long without your sister, that is.”

“Kaley…why did she…?”

Spencer took another drag of his Sobranie. 
Damn
, but that was a good cig.  You could say what you wanted about the Russians, but they knew their tobacco.  “Yer sister did what she did to protect you.  Now, ya need to hold onto that if we’re gonna—”

“But why?!” the little girl cried.

“Why
what
?”

“Why would she do that…throw herself in front of me when that man tried to shoot me, and then just…just…jump into the Deep?!  Why would she do it, when she knows that there’s no way to win, no
way to keep the darkness away?  I couldn’t keep the darkness away.  It took me over and…it…it
won
!  Why would she even bother if she knew—”

“Because she believes in somethin’, you stupid little twat!” he shouted.  Spencer loomed over her.  “Because she gets tired of that truth.  That undeniable little fact that one day, the darkness wins.”  Then, he laughed at
her, laughed at the dumb expression on her face, mixed with so much fear.  “But not today, god damn it,” he chortled.  “Not today.  It’s gotta catch ya first, that darkness.  Those men with their guns and their knives and their networks and their cell phones and their security cameras.  They gotta catch ya first.  And those monsters, those Others?  Them, too.  They gotta
catch
you.  You could lay down, you could just succumb, but that’d make it too easy for ’em, and they’ll never remember ya.”