The Monsters in Your Neighborhood (14 page)

16

The sewer system in New York was everything Alec had always assumed it would be in his very worst imaginings of such a place. He tried to hold his breath as Pat led them through the long, rounded corridors and past flooding rivers of awful, but it didn’t help.

“How do you control the smell?” he finally gasped as Pat came to a sealed round door.

With a swipe of a card, it opened and revealed a large, warmly lit room. In wonder, Drake, Alec, and Igor stepped inside. As Pat closed the door behind them, Alec looked around.

The place was very homey, despite its thick concrete walls and exposed industrial accoutrements. The furniture was nice, and there was a great computer setup that contained not just a laptop with Internet, spotty or not as Pat said, but a series of screens where the Cthulhu could monitor intruders in the surrounding tunnels. He even had art hung thoughtfully on the walls by a variety of modern artists.

“It does not smell in here,” Pat said, in answer to Alec’s question from a few moments before. “I have sealed it too tightly.”

“What is this place?” Igor asked.

Pat sighed as he let the hood of his cloak fall so his tentacled face could be seen.

“Once upon a time it was a monitoring station, but then they automated their system in a different way. I have changed the lock and keyed it to my pass card.”

“Why doesn’t the city ever find you here?” Drake asked, moving to examine Pat’s art.

Alec smiled. The two ancient monsters had something in common there, which was almost heartwarming.

Pat shrugged. “Well,
someone
may have hacked into their system and led them to believe this shaft has been completely sealed to, say, prevent vermin problems.”

“You hack?” Alec asked with a smile. “Me, too! We’ll have to compare notes sometime.”

“We will; I have heard from Natalie that you are a wonder.”

Alec’s smile grew. Good old Natalie, always praising him to the hills. She would stand by him . . . even if he destroyed everything around him against his will.

That smile fell in an instant and he paced to the monitors.

“You can relax,” Pat said. “No one comes down here. No one even knows it exists.”

Igor tapped his lip as he looked around. “Good lines, really nice taste in what you have. Actually, it reminds me of . . . what was that eighties show with the Terminator actress and Ron Perlman?”

Pat rolled his eyes. “Those shows are ridiculous. Let us not even talk about it.”

Alec paced away from the two of them to look at the cement wall. The back of his head itched. He didn’t know what that meant or if it was tied to the chip in his skull or what.

“Do not worry, Alec,” Pat soothed, as if he could read Alec’s thoughts. “We are going to take care of it.”

Alec turned to the kindly Cthulhu with as bright a smile as he could manage because he knew Pat meant well. He would have said something to that effect, too. Patted him on the arm, maybe. But before any of that warm and fuzzy friendship crap could take place, Igor let out a horrible, bloodcurdling scream.

Drake, Pat, and Alec spun toward him. Igor was thrashing about the room, slamming into the very furniture he’d been admiring a few moments before, slashing at pillows with long claws that had suddenly pushed out from his fingers. His face twisted, becoming red like the muscle was pulsing beneath the skin. His eyes bulged, his shoulder lifted, mimicking the hump he’d long ago had removed.

“What is going on?” Drake asked as the three of them backed away from Igor in surprise.

Alec shook his head. Igor was an assistant. It was what he had been made to be by Natalie’s father all those years ago. Twisted and warped into a monster like them, Igor couldn’t help but serve. And certainly Hyde, who had been friends with old man Frankenstein, had known that. Igor’s compulsions could be easily twisted, especially with help from some modern technology.

“I think it’s safe to say I’m not the only one with a chip in his head,” Alec said as Igor bull-rushed the three of them.

Drake immediately poofed into bat form as Alec dove to one side and Pat to the other. Igor smashed into the door behind them. He spun around and growled out an incomprehensible sound before he swung his arms again, slashing at the two remaining victims within his reach.

Alec dodged claws. Pat had moved farther away. Bat-Drake was dive-bombing Igor, fluttering around his head, the assistant swiping at him as well.

“Igor, listen, listen, you’re in there,” Alec said between dodges of fang and claw. “You have to control this.”

But even as he said it, he knew it was bullshit. He hadn’t been able to control it, even a little, when he had been triggered. Whatever was real or good about Igor was currently turned off. He could kill them all and not even remember it once he came to his senses.

“Alec, Natalie said to hit you in the head,” Pat shouted. The sound of the Cthulhu’s voice turned Igor’s rage on him.

The little man dove, grabbing on to Pat’s cloak and tearing it free to reveal the full twisted nature of Pat’s body, from the long tail that unfurled around his legs to his wings, which extended as he was attacked, to the tentacles that swung down to the middle of his bare chest.

“How will that help us?” Alec asked, trying not to stare. It was almost impossible when seeing a monster in his full form.

“Idiot,” Drake said as Pat sidestepped the still-swinging Igor. “Hit
him
in the head.”

Alec looked around for some way to do just that, but before he could find anything heavy, but not
too
heavy, Igor reached into his pocket and withdrew a tiny device. A device engraved with
A.

“He’s got a remote—
my
remote!” Alec burst out as he dove for Igor and the little man dodged him. “
Hit him, hit him, hit him!
”

Everything seemed to slip into slow motion as Igor moved his fat finger toward the controller button. Alec reached out, knowing he was out of range for a strike, knowing he could do nothing.

And then there was a clang as Pat smacked Igor in the head with a decorative metal vase. Hard. Hard enough that Igor’s eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed facedown on the stone floor, the controller clattering to the ground next to his still body.

Alec snatched it up, cradling the device like it was a newborn lamb (wait, wolves ate lambs; a newborn something else) before he placed it gently in his front pocket and turned toward the still-motionless Igor. Drake poofed back into human form and stared with him.

“Did I . . . did I kill him?” Pat whispered, sliding to the floor next to Igor. “I sometimes forget my strength.”

Alec looked up into the very sad, very sorry eyes of the Cthulhu and reached out to offer that comforting pat on his arm he hadn’t been able to deliver before.

“It’s okay,” Alec reassured him. “He’s a monster, I’m sure he’s fine.”

“He is so small, though,” Pat worried, wringing his hands.

It was Drake who dropped down next to the assistant. “Let me check on him, but be ready to strike him again if he wakes up and remains out of control.”

Pat swallowed hard, but nodded, and his tentacles waved around his face. Alec leaned down alongside Drake. Faintly he heard Igor’s wheezing breath. He smiled at Pat.

“He’s alive. Do you have any rope down here?”

The Cthulhu nodded slowly. “Yes, but why?”

“I think we’d better tie him up just in case he wakes up in the same foul mood. So that you don’t have to smack him again.”

Pat seemed to ponder that a moment and then nodded. “A good point. I will fetch my rope.”

He turned and flapped his unfurled wings. Alec stared as Pat lifted from the floor and soared quite beautifully into a back room.

“The gift of flight is a magnificent thing, isn’t it?” Drake asked, drawing Alec’s attention away from Pat.

Alec nodded. Most of their monster powers were so brutish, but this one was something else.

“It really is. You two are lucky. Now let me get this one.”

Alec bent and swept Igor up into his arms. He carried him to a couch next to the entryway. As he settled the smaller man onto the cushions, Igor groaned.

Alec stiffened, ready to defend himself, but when Igor opened his eyes they were no longer red and rabid. He blinked.

“Owwwwww, my head,” he drawled in that silly Southern accent.

“Yeah, Pat whacked you good. Do you remember anything?” Alec said.

Igor squeezed his eyes shut. “We were talking, and then . . . nothing. What happened?”

Drake pursed his lips. “It seems that the Van Helsings or Hyde or both got ahold of you at some point and implanted you with a chip. Then
someone
activated it.”

Pat slipped into the room, a length of rope in his hand, but Alec shook his head slightly and the Cthulhu demurely stuck it behind his back.

“Damn him,” Igor said as he flopped back on the couch and rubbed his head. “I told him, don’t try that shit on me. I told him I was done being a guinea pig.”

“Told him? Told
who
?” Pat asked.

Igor worried his lip. “Well, that’s the thing . . .” He sighed. “Um, we’re going to have to talk about me and Hyde.”

“You and Hyde what?” Alec asked, his voice elevating with the question.

Igor flinched, but said, “Look, don’t hit me again, okay?”

Alec leaned back. “It depends on what you’re going to say next, so just spill it.”

“Um, I wasn’t just meeting up with Hyde and Jekyll. I was helping them.
Assisting
them. And I assisted Hyde with some of his research into this chip idea of his.”

Drake paced away, cursing beneath his breath, and even Pat let out a low groan.

“When?” Alec asked through clenched teeth.

“A few months ago,” Igor said, flinching as he awaited Alec’s blow.

Alec wanted to deliver it, too. Instead he just stared at Igor, digesting the fact that it seemed like betrayal was around every monstrous corner.

Pat leaned forward and his dark eyes were bright with anger and as hard as Alec’s. “Little hunchback, I was feeling so guilt-stricken about hurting you, but I think you had better start talking . . . from the beginning . . . before I hit you again, this time harder.”

Igor sighed and put his hands behind his head as a makeshift pillow. “Well, it all started in the fall in Atlanta. Have you ever been to Atlanta in the fall? It’s pretty nice . . .”

Hyde shouted something to Linda in a language Natalie didn’t understand, but she had no doubt it wasn’t good. Especially when the other woman fired her pistol at Natalie as Hyde returned to reading the ancient
Book of the Dead
. She dove behind a couch for protection as bullets hit the walls behind her.

Rehu screamed as Hyde’s reading became more forceful and the mummy’s back arched at an impossible angle. Natalie covered her mouth in shock and horror as a strange black smoky wisp began to exit Rehu’s mouth and curl upward toward the ceiling.

“His essence!” Kai bellowed, waving her arms through it like she could make it go back into his mouth.

Natalie shook her head. This wasn’t going to happen. Not to one more person she . . . well,
liked
might have been going too far . . .

She jumped to her feet and dove for Hyde. She hit his legs with both her arms and he toppled backward, the book flying end over end into the air before it hit a table, bounced, and slid a good five feet across the shiny wooden floor.

She rose up to strike him, to crush him as she loomed over him, when there was a click of the pistol being cocked and the heavy press of it against the back of her skull.

“Linda, I swear to God, if you shoot me I’m going to tear your ears off and not sew them back on,” she muttered.

But it was all talk. If Linda shot
her
in the head, she’d need a new brain to live. And a new brain meant she’d truly die. Natalie would be nothing more than a sewn-together heap of a body.

“That doesn’t really inspire me not to shoot you,” Linda said. “And I don’t
have
ears, I’m a lizard, stupid.”

Natalie glanced over her shoulder. Linda didn’t sound nearly as zoned out as she had a few minutes before. And when she locked eyes with Natalie, she didn’t stare through her.

“Linda?” she whispered.

“It does, however, inspire me to wait and do this first,” the Swamp Dweller said. Then she nudged the gun a little so that it aimed at Hyde instead.

“You asshole,” Linda said. “You put a chip in me?”

Hyde stared at her, hatred in his eyes. “I got tired of bedding you, pig.”

Linda pursed her lips hard and then she shot him. In the shoulder. But shot him nonetheless.

Hyde jerked with the pain. “Damn it!”

“Is Rehu okay?” Linda asked without looking at Kai or Rehu. No, she kept her gaze on her boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend, if all the pistol-firing was any indication.

“No, you fucking crazy bitch,” Kai sobbed. “He’s dying. Hyde weakened him with that spell and now the bullet has actually done damage, probably permanent.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shoot him, Hyde made me do it with that chip.” Linda shook her head. “He made me do it. When I hit my head after Natalie tackled him, I started waking up. If I shot Rehu, I didn’t mean to!”