Broken Monsters (35 page)

Layla clutches
the pet carrier to her chest. It's dark and she trips on the uneven floor. Blood pours down the side of her face. She has tried to feel the wound on her temple, but even brushing her fingers against it threatens to bring the darkness swarming up again.

If she stands still, the blood runs down her arm and drip-drip-drips on the floor. It freaks her out, so she keeps moving, even though she doesn't know where she's going. Story of her life, she thinks and chokes down a sob. If she starts crying again, she won't be able to stop, and it will knock her to the ground and she won't be able to get up.

She doesn't remember how she got here or even where here is, but the pet carrier is something she can hold on to, a prop to prop her up. She is a fierce young woman protecting her cat. Never mind that the wire door is open and NyanCat is not inside. She is on a quest to
find
her cat, then. And her mother.

Like a video game.

There is a sign on the wall, but the words keep moving when she tries to read them. They're naughty words. They're not even trying to look like words anymore. They have ambitions beyond their abilities. This is definitely going to be on the exam. The words rearrange themselves. EMBSLSYA. BEMSALYS. MBYSSAEL. SESYLAMB. LESSYBAM. YSLASBEM.

Inside, someone is waiting for her, a huge lumpen man, sitting in front of a massive control panel, complete with screens, jabbing at dials and gauges. It's VelvetBoy, she realizes, swollen into morbid obesity, his skin yellow and waxy, but she recognizes his features under the fat, the nice-guy face he doesn't deserve. He squints at her and then looks pointedly at the cage.

“You want to lock someone up?” he says, turning back to his panel. “Or you want to play games?”

“It's for my cat,” Layla says. “Have you seen her?”

VelvetBoy cackles. “Oh I've seen a shitload of pussy. All the pussy you can gobble. Pussy buffet.” The screens are all playing videos of little girls. Little girls jumping rope, trying to walk in Mommy's oversize shoes, running with a kite, sitting on a fence, playing guitar, blowing a dandelion, licking an ice cream, licking other things. Layla looks away.

“What are you doing here?” she says, angry with him.

“What are you doing here?” he echoes in a singsong voice.

“I was driving,” she remembers.

“Lost your car. Lost your pussycat. Lost your marbles. At least I only lost my wallet. And my heart. Have you seen it?” He pats himself down, as if looking for his keys in a forgotten pocket. “Oh there it is.” He points at the screens, which are now showing penises, an infinite variety of penises, except for one screen where a teenage girl is lying on damp grass kissing a boy who has his hand under her dress.

“Slut,” he says. “Dirty little whore. You wanted it. You all want it. Taking sexy little pictures in your sexy little panties on your phones, putting yourselves out there. On the Internet for all of us to enjoy. We've got the whole private world in here.” He rubs his distended stomach. “I may have overindulged myself,” he smirks and she realizes he's rubbing somewhere below his stomach, and looks away.

The screens start displaying selfies. Bathroom mirrors and bedrooms, girls pouting and posing, in their underwear or naked, laughing, serious, scared-looking, all of them trying it on for size.

“No,” Layla says. “It's not for you.”

“Of course it is. It's what we've taught you. Come here. Sit on my lap. I'll give you a ride.” He reaches for her with his fat arms and she shoves him as hard as she can in the chest. It sends the roller chair shooting across the room until it catches on an uneven bit of flooring and tips over, spilling him onto the ground. He lies there, drowning in fat, laughing. “We can play rough, sweetheart. I can teach you to think
that
was your idea too.”

“Fuck you!” She throws the cage at him, and turns and runs. “Mom! Mom, where are you?”

“Dead whore!” he shouts after her. “You're all dead whores inside!”

She clatters down a flight of stairs into a narrow corridor with a trench running down the middle and robotic manufacturing arms bending over it at uneven angles. She steps into the channel—there's light on the other side, if she can make her way through.

“Mom! Where are you? I need you!” Layla yells. Her voice echoes through the cavernous space, bounces back to her so she can hear just how small and frightened she sounds.

At the sound, the robot arms twitch and all around her, they start jerking to life, shifting on their swivel bases, turning their heads in her direction, curious.

“Leave me alone,” she says, angrily, ducking as one of the arms reaches out for her, a pincer claw grasping blindly. But then another swivels out and grabs at her chest, the metal tips raking over her jacket.

VelvetBoy's voice crackles through the intercom as the robot arms dip and lunge at her, tipped with pincers and whining drill bits and fizzing, sparking welding torches. “Honk-honk!” he giggles. “Honk-honk!'

“Mom!” Layla screams. She drops flat in the trench and puts her hands over her head, waiting to die, for a drill bit to bite through her skull. It doesn't come and she peers over her shoulder to see that the bottom of the channel is just out of the range of the mechanical arms' articulation.

She crawls along on her stomach, agonizingly slowly, with the arms plunging up and down, up and down, whirring and screaming and sizzling only inches above her. But then she reaches the end of the trench and there is nowhere to go and the robotic arms seem to know it, pecking down relentlessly. She lies there trying to work out how many seconds she has between the mechanisms rearing up like cobras, and striking down again.

She launches herself up and out, tumbling across the floor, but one of the welding torches catches her shoulder. She howls in agony. The smell of her blistered skin is exactly like bacon and she knows, sacred food group or not, that she's never going to be able to eat it again.

Layla stands up, unsteadily, watching the arms fall silent in a ripple down the assembly line. Her arm is on fire. Don't touch it, she thinks. Third-degree burns and infections. She has to get help. She has to get out of here.

“Oh please don't go, we hate you so,” VelvetBoy mocks from up in his control room. She can see his fat face staring down at her through the greasy window.

Layla turns her back on him and stumbles deeper into the factory, toward the sound of water splashing.

Gabi emerges
through the door onto a walkway above the sprawling factory floor. The narrow band of windows that run just under the ceiling are crusted with gunk, creating a grubby fuzz of light that fails to penetrate the gloom below.

She takes shuffling steps, testing the walkway for rot, feeling her way through the half-dusk, wary of walking into something with sharp edges, one hand on her gun, the radio on her belt humming with useless static. She's turned the volume down, low enough so she can hear it, but not so much that it will give away her position.

Her eyes are starting to adjust, so that she can make out the armatures of the assembly pit, gap-toothed, because the scrappers have taken everything they can, and destroyed what they couldn't. The remaining robot arms are canted at crazy angles on their heavy stands, wiring dangling like guts, leaning over the rails that run down the center of the pit, waiting in vain for the husks of cars that will never come through here again.

A trick of the light makes it look as if the remaining robot arms are moving; the heads swiveling to watch her.

Clayton could be anywhere in here—eight stories of automotive ruin. Not quite the thirty-five acres of the Packard Plant, but it's still going to be a bitch. But hey, when you don't have a yellow brick road, Gabi figures, you can probably follow the disturbing art.

The factory would be creepy as fuck on a good day, weirder still with all the old furniture that doesn't belong, as if he's playing house. But it's worse, much worse, with the horrible artwork everywhere. Like Luke's basement full of dead baby dolls. Except there may really be a corpse in one of these, with their distorted faces and corkscrew necks. Like the woman with the melting features or the effigy of Jesus strung up on the railing, looking down, his clockwork mouth opening and closing like he's muttering a prayer. Evidence Tech is going to have a field day.

She takes a rusty staircase up to the mezzanine level. The metal steps ring out under her boots, echoing across the floor, as if the whole damn building wants to give her away. She cringes, but hey, reciprocity. If every sound travels and she can't hear the bad guys, it means they're not on this floor.

She moves cautiously deeper into the building, up a set of stairs and past a control room where a fat figure made of discolored beeswax lies on the floor, wedged into a swivel office chair facing a wall of screens and buttons, graffitied and smashed up. The wax has set badly, in drips that ooze over the edge of the seat. Or maybe it's intentional. The fat effigy has exaggerated hollows for eyes, like someone gouged out the wax with their fingers, and old toys embedded in its yellow flesh. He's reaching for the controls with one flabby arm, joined to the body with webbing, like a frog's foot. It's disgusting.

She passes offices with filing cabinets overturned and trashed computers, the floor buried under cardboard boxes, vomiting files and paper. A scattering of neon highlighter markers stand out, like pink and green and blue plastic cockroaches among the junk. There's so much trash, it doesn't seem possible that it could all be indigenous to the plant.

Someone has taken the time to systematically kick down the urinals in the men's bathroom and smash the porcelain to bits. When everything else is fucked-up, mere destruction isn't enough. You gotta step up your game to total obliteration, she thinks.

She backtracks, and ends up in an office overlooking the factory floor. But across on the other side of the factory, she can make out the familiar sweep of blue and red police lights, visible through an open loading door.

Always late to the damn party, she mutters in her head, but she can't help grinning. She's already strategizing routes. She'll take a team upstairs. It makes sense that he'd go up. She hopes Boyd's been able to get hold of the building blueprints.

“Hey assholes,” she calls down, as she bounds down the stairs toward the car. “Don't shoot, it's me.”

But there's something terribly wrong here. It's not the cavalry and it's not a loading door that's letting in the white glaze of daylight.

It's her Crown Vic, smashed straight through the wall. The hood is crumpled, the windshield a blue splintered map. The driver's door is hanging open, a nasty crack running down the window. A smear of red across the glass. Her heart free-falls.

“Layla!” Gabi holsters her gun and sprints to the car, twisting her ankle on one of the fragments of bricks from the ruined wall. Inanimate revenge.

She shoves down the obese airbag in the front seat, fighting the deflating fabric in the hope of finding her daughter underneath. But she's forced to concede that there's no one there. The cat in her cage is gone, too.

An incessant low humming breaks through her panic. Her phone, in her pocket, set to vibrate. There's no possible way it could be her daughter. But she can hope. That's what parents do. Hope.

“Layla?” she says, frantic.

Fragments of noise come through, garbled. “-ersado? Weh—”

“Where the fuck are
you,
Bob? Why aren't you here yet? Fucking get here!” She disconnects and starts running back upstairs. He would go higher. For his grand exhibition. Isn't that what this is about? Why he hauled all his awful statues and this shitty old furniture over here?

Layla, she thinks. Layla, Layla, Layla.

Layla steps
out onto the catwalk above a flooded basement, with unidentifiable bits of old machinery protruding like shipwrecks, and slashes of sunlight from the broken windows like tiger stripes on the dark water. The splashing is coming from a big black man, his face drawn in terror, running from a pack of mad dogs that are bounding through the water behind him, baying and howling.

“Here!” she yells. And he looks up, startled, and trips, landing hard on his knee. It's her fault, she thinks. He turns, fast, yanking pepper spray out of his pocket, but the dogs are on him, knocking him down onto his back, in the water.

He comes up, gasping. “Get off!” he yells, kicking at one of the dogs. He maces the second dog at the same time and it jolts back, as if electrocuted, whining and plunging its nose into the water.

But three dogs is too many, even for a big guy like him. The third sinks its teeth into his wrist and, with a shout of pain, he drops the canister into the water. The dog worries at him, teeth ripping through muscle, its head distends with the movement, stretching like putty, a blur of muzzle and teeth.

This is not real, she thinks, and then: real enough, the agony in her shoulder reminds her. But it is
also
a dream, she thinks. A simulation is running in your brain, and you can control dreams if you try, if you're aware you're dreaming. Exactly like a video game. If only she had a power-up, a cluster bomb or a special move. What the hell. She has failed to summon her mother, but she remembers the cage and her cat, who might be in here somewhere, wandering lost.

She leans over the railing and shouts for NyanCat. The sound echoes and the dogs raise their heads as one to look at her, mechanical, like the robot arms.

But on the surface of the water, the sun slashes swirl and rearrange themselves into new symmetries, and then something explodes from the dark. A tiger. No, a cat, lithe and enormous. The dreamcat lashes out, burning bright, claws and teeth and fury. No toying with grasshoppers now. This is savage, ancient war.

“Run!” Layla yells down to the man and he does, not looking back at the howling, shrieking, ripping behind him. She climbs down the steps to where they have broken off, a yard above his head, and hooks her arm around the railing, ignoring the hot white pain in her shoulder, reaching her hand out. “Climb up!”

Behind him, the dreamcat shreds two of the dogs like paper, leaving red ribbons drifting on the water. The final animal turns and bolts, tail between its legs, but not fast enough. The cat pounces on its back, claws gouging into its yellow flank for purchase. The dog struggles on for a few more steps and then collapses, plunging both of them into the dark water that closes over their heads.

The man grasps her hand, his palm clammy and ice-cold. He's careful to only use her for leverage, grabbing on to the edge of the step with his other hand, his legs kicking, until he gets one knee up, and hauls himself onto the stair alongside her.

The water thrashes for a while and finally stills into uneasy ripples. A red ribbon drifts up and starts spreading across the surface.

The man sits with his back up against the railing, panting and soaked through and bleeding. “Jesus,” he huffs. “Jesus Christ.”

“Did you see that?” Layla asks him. The ribbons on the dark water are fraying, hard to see now.

“I didn't see nothing,” he says, not looking back. “Not one thing. Are you real?”

“Are you?” she challenges.

“I think so. Bleeding enough to be. You're not in such great shape yourself.” His teeth are chattering like the clacker you give the kid in music class who can't play a real instrument.

“We have to get out of here. You have to get warm. You're going to get hypothermia.”

“Nah. I got to find the man who did this. He killed my friend. He does something to you, maybe when he touches you. It makes you sick in the head. Makes you see shit.”

“The Detroit Monster?”

“That's what they call him. I'm TK.”

“Layla.” It's weird to be shaking hands, but hey, maybe it means they don't have to talk about dogs and dreamcats. “Is this the Fleischer Plant?”

“Yeah.”

“Then my mom's here. We have to find her. She's a homicide detective.”

“That so? 'Bout fucking time. Excuse my French.”

“I'm fluent in French.”

“Detective brought her little girl along?”

“No, she sent me away. But I found one of the bodies, before. So…maybe, proximity? That's how he drugs you? Like a gas.”

“Maybe.” He makes a decision. “We have to get you out. Find your mom and the other cops. Then I'll come back and rip his head off myself.” But Layla can see it's only bluster. He's as shit-scared as she is.