“I see.” Dallas didn’t see at all, but it seemed like a safe thing to say.
“Well? Are you in or not?” Gurtz cocked his massive head.
It was only for ten days, nine if you didn’t count today. Two thousand dollars and a bonus could go a long way toward redemption of this mess he’d landed in. And the sooner he could get the nasty creature back where it came from, the sooner Charlotte would be freed. “In.”
“Excellent. I think my host needs a drink.” The figure went transparent and slid back into the young woman beside it. Charlotte ran her fingers through her hair. “Just sit there for a minute, and then we’ll talk.” She headed for the kitchen.
Dallas hoped Charlotte had something alcoholic, with a good bite. His fingers trembled, his mind in denial. It was unthinkable, but he’d seen what he’d seen.
“So you really are Marilyn Fairbanks.”
She returned with two glasses. “I was until last week. But don’t call me that, forget you heard that name. So you’ve decided to stay?”
Dallas sank into the rocker and gulped the gin and tonic Charlotte had given him. “Yeah, I have, but I’d like to hear this thing from your side… if you can tell it.” He wondered how much the alien presence controlled her thoughts and speech.
Charlotte settled into the couch cushions, pulling her feet up under her. “Gurtz came here through a portal of some sort, an interplanetary travel gate. He was on the run and made the gate somehow to escape from people who wanted to kill him.” She closed her eyes, as if to make sure she got the facts straight. “But the gate’s drifted. It opened in Coconut Grove, but it’s not there now. It was scent marked, but Buster couldn’t smell it anywhere around the original site. So last weekend, we drove all over town with the windows down so Buster could get a whiff of it.”
Charlotte shut her eyes again.
“Gurtz says to tell you he didn’t have time to anchor its coordinates before it spewed him out. After driving around all over creation, we came back to my apartment and that’s when Buster smelled him.” Charlotte’s wide dark eyes pinned Dallas.
“Him?” Dallas sipped at his ice-filled glass. He felt like rolling it across his forehead.
“The assassin. Another Gultranz. The whole place stank with his scent according to Gurtz.” Buster sneezed, as if he’d sensed what she was describing.
“Buster wouldn’t go past the gate, so I left him hiding in the ferns while I ran inside, threw some clothes in my gym bag, and locked the apartment up tight. Then we got in the car and I just started driving north, to get as far away as possible.”
“And you landed here.” Dallas hoped he sounded helpful, but he was well beyond any ability to reason.
“Well, I would have kept driving, but Buster alerted us on the gate somewhere around Aventura, in the mall parking lot. But it just turned out to be a trace of where it had been — it wasn’t actually there.”
Dallas nodded. “Pity.”
“So we headed into Hallandale, still following the trace, and decided we needed a base of operations. I saw the “for rent” sign in the yard here and called the number. The owner, a very sweet Latina, drove in from Sunny Isles to meet us. I told her I couldn’t rent under my real name because I was running from an abusive husband. She hugged me and said she knew exactly what I was going through.” Charlotte beamed a cheeky smile at Dallas. “You have no idea how far a sob story and cash up front will get you. I have the house, no questions asked, as long as the money’s paid.”
Dallas kept nodding. “Okay, now what?”
“Well, you need to stay here with us, till the job’s done. That way you and Buster can spend as much time looking as possible. There’s only one bedroom, but you can have the couch. It’s big and comfy.”
“Okay, I don’t mind.” It was light years better than sleeping in the park.
“I can drive you back to your current address so you can get necessities and stuff, then we’ll all be safe here. I think.”
Dallas took a breath. “I don’t currently have an address, and this is all I need.” He pushed the book bag with his toe.
“So,” said Charlotte. “You’re a homeless person.”
Dallas scowled. “It’s just temporary.”
Charlotte brightened. “That’s good, though. Less likely you can be tracked through a landlord or neighbors.”
Dallas had so many questions he hardly knew where to start, but there was one sticking up above the others. “If Buster can smell this hired killer just from his scent trail, can the assassin smell you, too?”
“No. He’ll be wearing a human body, so he can’t differentiate smells any better than you can.” Buster hopped up beside her and leaned against her shoulder. Cozy. Dallas thought his head might explode.
Instead he asked, “Why does what’s-his-name have to wear a borrowed body? Oxygen disagree with him?”
Charlotte gripped the cushions and shut her eyes. “He says it’s not pleasant, but he can process it. The problem’s with the density of the atmosphere. It’s too thin — prevents the Gultranz from fully materializing into the earth plane. They need to take on the shell of an earthbound creature to fully function. There are a lot of body templates. He could have taken on Buster as his template, but that would have been too limiting. ”
Dallas sucked in his breath, suddenly remembering a certain catalog he’d seen on the table in the Limbus reception room. “What happens if the alien’s ‘occupied’ earthsuit gets killed?”
“The Gultranz wearing it gets sucked through the nearest official gate and spewed back, hopefully intact, onto the homeworld.” Charlotte made an unpleasant face that Dallas was certain didn’t reflect just her own reaction.
“Won’t they catch you if you go back through the portal you made?”
Charlotte emitted a guttural noise that Dallas had never heard a human make. “Gurtz asks if you think he’s some novice who doesn’t know how to hide his own patch gate.”
“Well, you let it drift all over the greater Miami area like the Hindenburg. ”
Charlotte quivered and Buster growled in the back of his throat. She scratched him behind the ears, defusing the moment. Maybe Buster still had a desire to sink his teeth into that luminous greenish hide. Dallas winced. In spite of his terror, he was starting to empathize with them.
“How many miles do you think we have to walk before this gate thing drifts across our path?” He’d been mildly confident when he’d set out this morning, but now the task seemed enormously hopeless.
Charlotte was massaging Buster’s shoulders. “Do you have a driver’s license? I could let you drop me off at work and borrow my car.”
“I do, but I don’t have it on me.” Dallas’ cheeks flamed.
“Well, can you get it?”
Dallas imagined standing on the front steps of his parents’ house and asking his father to give his license back. “Doubtful,” he said.
“Well, then, we’ll just have to improvise.”
Dallas found himself warming to Charlotte. Here she was, possessed by an entity that was anyone’s worst nightmare, yet gamely making plans to move forward with an impossible task. He could learn a thing or two from her.
“We could catch the bus, or maybe a taxi,” he offered. “I’m good at thumbing rides. I could wear dark glasses and pretend he’s my seeing-eye dog.”
Charlotte/Gurtz eyed him. “You catch on fast. No wonder you’ve survived on the street with basically nothing. I like you.” She smiled and it was Dallas’ turn to shiver, remembering the rows of needle-sharp teeth.
Dallas drained his glass and rose to go place it in the sink of the tiny kitchen. He turned to Charlotte. “Why’d you place your dog walker ad with Limbus?”
She shrugged, looking at Buster. “It was the biggest display ad in the yellow pages for employment agencies. You can look it up if you want.”