Charlotte’s expression shifted, the rasping voice emerging. “Who do you think sent the assassin after me? It’s a government hit, to stop me from upsetting the way the Gultranz have done things for eons.”
Dallas stood beside the bed, trying to gather his thoughts. He didn’t believe the alien’s sob story for a bleeding second, but Charlotte was right about one thing. They had to find the gate.
Thursday morning, the thirty-first of May, dawned gray and storm-tossed. Rain whipped through the trees and pounded the roof of the house snug under the live oaks. Dallas fed Buster and found a change of clothes for Charlotte. Their plan was simple: focus on the area south of Brickell, moving toward Coconut Grove where the gate had opened.
“He said the gate expires today. Does that mean we have all day or just part of it?”
Charlotte had shrugged in her hospital bed. “Who knows? It could be expiring right now, for all we know.”
“That should give the hospital staff a thrill.” Dallas had to forcibly suppress the image of the Gultranz sorcerer being sucked out of its human shell before some astonished personal care assistant’s bleary early-morning eyes.
“Then we need to get moving.”
“This is a terrible idea.” Dallas pushed the wheelchair through the automatic double doors and out onto the hospital parking deck. The SUV sat in a loading zone near the wheelchair ramp. Charlotte gripped the arms of the chair with white knuckles and said nothing. He knew she was in pain, but she’d been adamant. There was no choice.
He eased her up into the passenger seat and left the wheelchair on the walk beside the driveway. Trying to go over the speed bumps as carefully as possible, Dallas wound their way out of the parking garage and into morning traffic, heading south.
Dallas was just pulling into a South Miami Wal-Mart to gas up when the urge to go hit him. There was no ignoring it, and he couldn’t expect to hold it for hours of driving if that’s how long it took. Cursing his uncooperative plumbing that ran on its own timetable instead of the one he and Charlotte had devised, Dallas reluctantly parked out front.
“I won’t be a minute, I promise.” Charlotte nodded and closed her eyes, her arms wrapped around her midsection, as Dallas got out of the SUV. “You protect her, got it?” he said to Buster who sat alert on the back seat.
Inside, he quickly found the men’s room and stepped past the freestanding signage — CUIDADO! PISO MOJADO — warning him the floor was freshly swabbed. Pushing the door open, he was met with an overpowering Lysol aroma that had scoured away any piss smell left by guys who couldn’t aim their stream into the small porcelain urinal. There were two stalls with doors, both unoccupied. Dallas selected the nearest one, locked the stall door, pushed his jeans to his ankles, and sat down.
At that moment, he heard the restroom door open. Footsteps came slowly into the room, passed the first stall, and stopped outside the one where he sat. He stopped breathing. Unable to see the shoes of whoever was obviously standing outside his compartment, he sat still as a fawn hidden in the tall grass with hyenas on the prowl. Then he heard the shrill dentist’s drill whine and the stall door sheared away. It fell sideways with a shocking clatter.
GQ model guy was as nattily dressed as ever. The handsome face winked at Dallas. “Nice view.” Then the inhabiting Gultranz lifted partway out of the body, revealing its hideous toothed snout. It was similar to Gurtz, only this one’s skin was shiny black like obsidian, no colors playing over its surface. The pinpoint pupils of its eyes flared yellow. It held the splitter, about the size and shape of an iPhone, loosely in its left hand.
“I'll ask once. Where have you hidden the traitor?” The voice rasped at Dallas’s eardrums like an industrial file.
Aiming low, Dallas launched himself at the human host’s ankles, toppling them both. The assassin crashed forward into the stall framework, unfurling its Gultranz fingers out toward him. The splitter went flying, hit the far wall, fired… and cut the Gultranz assassin in half just as he was getting up. Intestines and other body parts spilled over the restroom tiles in a wet squelch right over the drain hole in the middle of the floor. Blood dripped through, joining the sudsy slosh of urine and cleaning fluids. Dallas rolled away from the carnage and scrambled to his feet. Its host shell dead, the military Gultranz exited the body as if it were the object of a taffy pull, stretched, extruded, and thinned until with a howl it tore and shredded and finally disappeared. Dallas leaned over the sink and lost his breakfast as the human shell’s head eyed him, its startled expression frozen on the generically handsome face.
Turning on the faucet, Dallas splashed cold water over his face, staving off the ringing in his ears that suggested he might be about to pass out. Straightening up, he saw the splatter-spray of red across his bare thighs and chest. It made the T-shirt look kind of tie-dyed. Dallas retched again, but there was nothing left to yark up. He peeled the shirt off and stuffed it in the trash receptacle beside the sink. Wetting a handful of paper towels, he washed off his arms and legs and pulled up his jeans. A red splotch painted the left side at the hip, but there was nothing he could do about that.
Dallas looked around for the splitter and found it against the wall under the urinal. With trembling fingers, he picked it up by its edges and went back to the doorless stall. Maneuvering around the lower half of the assassin’s shell without stepping in the mess, he slid the weapon into the water of the toilet bowl and flushed, cowering in case it went off again. When nothing happened, he let his breath out and watched the water swirl and gurgle, sucking the splitter down but not all the way. He could still see the top of it in the neck of the toilet. He flushed again and pushed it with the tip of his finger. As the water drained, it slipped out of sight with a scrape and the toilet completed its flush as if nothing peculiar had been shoved down its throat.
Dallas got out of the restroom as fast as possible without drawing attention to himself, even in his shirtless condition. That was part of why he’d been hired, right? Mr. Invisible. He was beginning to sense a larger connectivity, leading from the Limbus agency to this moment playing out in grisly perfection in a South Miami shopping strip. Any rational person would’ve packed it in right there, but now he felt more determined than ever to see the game through to the end. He made his way back to the Cherokee and collapsed into the driver’s seat.
Charlotte stared at him. “Dallas, what the hell…?”
“Met your ex-neighbor again.” He saw the panic in her eyes. “He’s dead, lucky accident. Got anything I can wear?” He felt like he was babbling.
“Look in my gym bag, back seat.”
Dallas found the bag and extracted a Yoga shirt decorated with the slogan When in Doubt, Just Breathe. He sighed and pulled it on over his head — he was in no position to be picky. He fastened his seatbelt with shaking hands. Cranking the engine, he cut across the parking lot and headed for the highway.
As rain lashed the windshield, Dallas drove the speed limit along the South Dixie Highway toward Coconut Grove, aiming for the place where Gurtz had come out of the gate. The Gultranz hovered in semi-transparent form over Charlotte’s body, looking like an ailing reptile pulled from a tank that’d never been cleaned.
When they reached Coconut Grove, Dallas drove to the grounds of the old Plymouth Congregational Church and stopped. Built in the 1800s and picturesquely ivy covered, it was a peaceful photo-op on any tourist’s walking tour of the Grove. It was here, in front of this very landmark, that the portal from another world had opened in the middle of the night.