"What's up?" Ray asked as he approached.
"You haven't heard?" the one without sunglasses asked.
"Heard what?"
"There's an intruder in the perimeter," the Shark said. "One of the sentries patrolling outside was cold-cocked."
"That right?" Ray asked. He smiled at the one in the sunglasses, who looked back stonily.
"Who are you, anyway?" the talkative Shark asked. "Did you come in with the new detachment last night?"
Ray shook his head "Nope. Got here later than that."
Ray waited. The one in the sunglasses caught on first. He tried to bring his rifle up, but Ray grabbed it by the barrel and ripped it out of his hands. He swung the butt hard, catching the Shark flush on the chin. The guard shot backward, banged his head on the wall, and slid down to the floor.
Ray pointed the rifle casually at the other sentry. "You going to open that," he said, gesturing at the door with the gun barrel, "or do I blast it down through you?"
The sentry looked as if he didn't know if he wanted to be afraid or pissed. "You wouldn't."
Ray took a step forward and jabbed the rifle barrel into the sentry's stomach. "Don't bet your life on it, moron. My name is Billy Ray. They call me Carnifex. And I'm a wild carder, motherfucker."
"All right," the guard said, his voice quavering. Slowly he reached for the key chain at his side, selected a key, and put it in the lock. "This okay, huh?"
"Yup," Ray said, and clipped him on the back of the head with the rifle barrel. This was getting monotonous, Ray thought. The Sharks really needed to hire a better class of goon. He slung the rifle, then reached down and grabbed one of the sentries by the collar, the other by the pants leg, and dragged them inside. He tossed the rifle and closed the door behind him. He looked around.
"What the hell is this?" he asked aloud.
It was a laboratory, something Ray wasn't all that familiar with. He recognized glass flasks and test tubes, stainless steel sinks and scarred wooden workbenches, but that was about it. He had no idea about the autoclaves, incubators, freezers, and the electron microscope. The room was clean, orderly, very white and antiseptic-looking. Ray approved. But there was no sign of the jokers.
As Ray looked around with a frown on his face, the door in the back wall opened and a woman wearing a white lab coat entered the room. She was intent on reading her notebook, and almost bumped into Ray.
She looked up, startled. "You shouldn't be here."
Ray smiled. "Should you?"
"What? What are you talking about?"
Ray pointed at the door through which she just came. "What's in there?"
"Are you insane?" She tried to go by Ray. "I'm getting Mr. Johnson."
Ray grabbed her arm, swung her around. "I'm sure we'll meet soon. In the meantime I want you to tell me about the jokers you brought here last week."
She looked indignant and tried to pull away, but quickly realized the futility of that. Her indignation turned to fear. "Who are you? You're not one of the regular - " She noticed the unconscious sentries lying on the floor. "Oh."
"Very observant," Ray said. "You must be a real rocket scientist." His grip tightened. "Who are you?"
"I'm not - " for an instant she seemed defiant, then Ray squeezed hard enough to bruise her arm. She winced and made an instinctive, abortive move to pull away.
"You are," Ray said. He put his face close to hers. "I've had it with this pussy-footing shit. I'm going to get some answers soon or I'm going to start breaking things. And you're right at hand, babe."
"My name is Michelle," she said quickly. "Michelle Poynter."
"Poynter." Ray thought for a second. "Oh. You're Faneuil's assistant."
"Yes. How did you know?"
"Your boss is in a cell singing like a fucking canary."
"You're from the government?"
"Yeah. And you're under arrest. Now where's those jokers? In there?"
He dragged her with him as he went through the door and into another room that was as big as the lab, or would have been if it wasn't partitioned off into half a dozen small cells, furnished only with rack-like beds, stainless steel sinks, and lidless toilets. They were separated from the main room by a glass wall rather than metal bars. There was nothing in the main room besides a desk and matching swivel chair.
Some of the cells were empty. Some weren't.
Ray looked angrily at Poynter. Subconsciously his grip tightened so hard that she went limp from pain. "What is this shit?" Ray hissed in a low, shocked voice.
Four of the cells had occupants. It was hard to say if most of the prisoners were alive. One was sprawled in a heap between his bed and the glass wall that separated his cell from the rest of the room. He lay in a pool of black, coagulated blood. He wasn't moving. Two lay in their narrow beds. One was covered to his chin - Ray thought he was male, though he couldn't be sure - by a sheet stained with blotches of blood and other, less identifiable fluids. The man's eyes were open, but he stared at the ceiling as if he were sightless. He seemed to be crying tears of blood. The other joker lay on her side, naked, her sheet twisted into a stained lump around her feet. Her skin was covered with pulpy, purple bruises, her eyes were fixed with the classic thousand-year stare, looking off into eternity. The fourth stood in front of her cell's glass wall. She was just a kid, maybe twelve years old. Her face was that of a zombie with a fixed expression and sunken, staring eyes. Suddenly, though, she focused on Ray. She put the palms of her hands flat against the wall of glass. As Ray watched, the skin on both palms broke and blood oozed from the tears. She slowly sank to the floor, leaving two smears like bloody snail-ooze on the glass. Ray couldn't hear her because of the wall between them, but he could read her bruised and pulpy lips.
"Help me," he thought he saw her say. Or perhaps it was, "Kill me."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Jay Ackroyd was making love to his wife when the hunchback appeared in his bedroom.
Hastet was on top, rocking faster and faster as she built toward her climax, Jay was underneath, lost in her and the moment, watching her face, the way her breasts moved as she rode him, listening to the sounds she made, feeling her wetness as she slid up and down on him.
Then her eyes opened wide and she screamed, and for a moment Jay thought she was coming, until she scrambled off him, clutching up a tangled sheet to hide herself. "Jay," she said in a choked voice, staring past him.
Jay had been pretty close to coming himself; the sudden disengagement left him a little unsteady. It took him a moment to get his breath back and look over to where his wife was staring, and even then he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Street light filtered through the shades, but otherwise the room was dark, all shapes and shadows, and in that dimness it looked for all the world as if a headless hunchback was standing in the corner.
Jay leaned over and turned on the bedside lamp.
A headless hunchback was standing in the corner.
"Oh, great," Jay said, disgusted. His erection was gone by then, and his balls hurt. "This is going to be one of those nights, isn't it?" he said to no one in particular.
Hastet held the sheet against her breasts and looked at Jay suspiciously. "Another one of your friends?" She'd been on Earth long enough to realize that her husband knew some peculiar people.
"Quasiman," Jay said. "Not exactly a friend, but I know him. He lives down at Our Lady of Perpetual Misery."
"What's he doing in my bedroom?" Hastet hissed in annoyance.
Jay shrugged. "Nothing much, at the moment." The hunchback was standing by the wall, his hands clenching and unclenching slowly with the rhythm of his breath. He didn't seem to have noticed that his head was gone. Or maybe he had, it was hard to tell.
Jay got out of bed and pulled on his pants. Whatever the hell this was about, he didn't want to deal with it naked.
Hastet took it all in stride, more or less. That was one of the things Jay loved about her. "Where's his head?" she asked.