Broken Monsters (37 page)

The gunshots
hurt. Searing pain. The body is alight with it. The shreds of Clayton that still live are moaning and gibbering.
He
wants to run. The dream can't let him, not yet.

The Police is ruining everything. It needs to complete its design, it needs everyone to see the phoenix, its most perfect piece. It needs to be alive for the door to open.

The time is now. Dream is wild in the factory, the Wanderer and the Daughter brought it in with them, and the Messenger has unleashed the seeds, spreading it across the Internet, a thousand screens, a hundred thousand, and the dream will grow and it will live on, its legacy, even if it dies now.

But it doesn't want to die. It's afraid of the darkness. Which is why it twists its arm out, lashing across the floor, so easy to reshape reality now that people have seen and believed. It grabs the Police and pulls her down. It only wants to make her stop hurting it, to get the gun away. It only wants to live.

She fires and dreams explode across the room, birds of dark glass and whirling papers, possessed, all their imaginings set free, and it wants to laugh and scream in delight. Finally!

The next bullet tears into Clayton's head. Too fast. It should have been able to stop it cold, transmogrify it into a bud exploding open into a flower or a dragonfly or a fish. But it wasn't paying attention, and now it is too late.

Clayton's head jerks back as the hot metal drives through his forehead, shredding its way through the gray-pink tissue with its secret folds and the thoughts that spark in the meat, and bursting out the back, pulling the flesh and blood and bits of bone with it—and all of Clayton.

The man's thoughts that have haunted it are gone in a flash, like tearing a page from a notebook. It feels Clayton slip away and it whimpers in terror, because it cannot follow him, and everything it feared of death is true. It's loosed, but still trapped in this world, only now it is alone. It can't find a form. It seethes and roils above the body that once sheltered it, and the whole room goes mad around it.

The Police is getting up, staggering toward her Daughter, who is running toward her, the big man moving to help them.

The Messenger is still filming—and everything his lens sees becomes more alive, more real. A window to the world, when it has been obsessed with doors. And maybe there is still a chance to rise from the ashes.

It reaches out with everything it has left and pulls the strings, and in the center of the maze, Marcus Jones steps away from his pillar and starts making his way toward them.

Layla knows
somehow that her mom can't see it. The man's limp arm twisting around on itself, becoming a black tentacle that snakes across the room while Gabriella is looking at her with heart-stopping love and relief. She doesn't see how it snags her around the ankle and yanks her off her feet.

Her mom fires her gun, and Layla covers her ears. It's like a fire-cracker going off inside her head. The window shatters, but the glass shards turn into crows, fluttering around the room. Jonno shrieks and swipes at the birds and then slams himself back against the wall, jabbing at his phone.

But even as the killer is dragging her mom across the floor, he's looking directly at her, at Layla.

“You can feel it,” he says.

“No,” she whispers. “Fuck off.” But she can. This is what she does. Imagines other people. Steps into other roles. She
can
see it—all the tumult inside him. The dreams building up until they're eating him alive.

And then her mom blows Clayton's head off. Brain matter and blood and bits of skull splatter the pillar, but something else comes spilling out of the ruin of his head as Clayton slumps to the ground—a great cloud, like gray candy floss condensing in the air.

Everything is going nuts. There are newspapers and crows fluttering around the room.

“Holy shit, holy shit!” Jonno yells, still filming. She sees how his phone makes the cloud bigger and darker and it makes her think about how the old gods needed people's faith to make them powerful.

Gabi is climbing to her feet, uncertainly, holding her head, looking for her daughter.

“Mom, I'm here.” She runs to her, TK following, and tucks herself up under her arm. TK does the same, although he has to stoop.

Her mother can't stop touching her face. “Layla, I thought he was going to kill you. I thought you were dead already.”

“Come on, Mom, keep moving. You're goddamn Detroit PD, and you shot the bad guy. He's dead. Everything is fine now.”

Only it's not, not really, because she can see the storm building above their heads and feel the wild thoughts that dance through it like lightning.

“It's looking for somewhere to go!” she shouts to TK, because Gabi doesn't understand, she sags between them, shock or concussion, closing her eyes against the shit that is happening around them, paint flaking off the floor and lifting into the air, whirring into tornadoes of color. The garbage bags are dragging across the floor and something is lumping its slow way through the newspaper tunnels behind them.

 Jonno turns in a half circle, his mouth open, filming everything he can. Crows made of black glass circle over a dead woman with her chest torn open, and Layla doesn't want to look too closely at her, because she thinks she is definitely real and definitely dead.

She just wants to get out of here alive.

But the birds land on the woman's chest and peck at her skin.

“No,” Jonno shouts and runs at them waving his arms. “No, get away from her!” Layla looks back and sees how the birds become misshapen feathery smears as they near the ceiling. The moment they're out of the camera's depth of field, they go out of focus.

“It's the phone,” Layla says. “He's streaming it.”

“I told him not to,” Gabi says. “I'm going to kill that knucklehead punk,” but it's all bluster, because she can barely stand.

“The old gods,” Layla says.

“What?” TK snaps. He can see it too. The wildness around them.

“You have to see to believe. The phone is making it worse, stronger, whatever. I have to stop him.”

She shifts her mom's weight onto TK, slips out from under her arm, and sprints toward Jonno, scooping up a half-brick from the ground. Which means she does not see the broken thing stagger out of the maze behind her, plywood angel wings hanging lopsided from its shoulders and a door lodged in its face.

Jonno doesn't
know what to focus on. There's so much happening. The dead man with the gunk pouring out of his head, like a mushroom cloud. That's not normal, right? He's pretty damn sure that's not normal. His phone keeps beeping with new messages. Nineteen missed calls. They'll have to wait. And he should try to figure out how to turn off incoming calls, because it's got to be draining his battery.

Stop fiddling. Film this shit.
Even his troll is on his side for once. He wonders if he should be adding commentary.

“I'm Jonno Haim,” he says, “and shit. Look, this is real. This is happening. All of this is real.” He pans across the room and sees the birds on Jen. “No! No, get away from her!” He runs at them, waving his arms, still filming, always filming. They take off from her body, losing substance as they flutter into the air above him. “Bastards!”

Concentrate. The detective. The dead guy. The volcano coming from his head.

“I'm trying!” Jonno shouts in frustration and then the kid, out of nowhere, smashes a piece of brick down on his wrist.

“Ow, fuck! What the hell did you—?” He's dropped the phone. “No, I need that. Cut it out. It's not a game.”

“I know,” she says and stomps down on it with all her weight. The screen splinters. But it's still working. She's what, all of a hundred and ten pounds? It's almost funny. He
almost
laughs, but he's too busy fighting her for it.

She raises up the brick, like Abraham in the Bible about to sacrifice Isaac, and he's God, and he won't let her, because he realizes
this
is his baby.

He punches her in the face and she falls back, dropping the brick. He snatches up his phone and turns just in time to see it. The most wondrous thing on earth.

A black angel steps out into the room with a door embedded in its face.

Jonno turns the camera on it and its wings erupt into flame, the halo flares into spikes of light, and the door begins to glow as if all of heaven is on the other side, shining through the cracks.

The angel reaches up his hand to touch his own cheek, in awe. His fingers reach up blindly for the handle, and close on the golden doorknob.

“Come on,
stay with me,” TK says, half-carrying the cop, semiconscious, delirious. Not so out of it that she sees what
he
sees, maybe she's too sensible. But never mind all that, he is
not
going to see some other kid lose their momma to a monster.

“No, Layla!” the woman in his arms calls out, struggling. “Lay, come back here.” She thrashes at TK. “Don't let her go.”

“Easy there,” he says.

But when the idiot with the phone punches her daughter in the face, she reaches for her gun. Can't say he blames her.

But then none of that matters, because the source of the shuffling reveals itself. Some
thing
steps out of the labyrinth, ablaze, and even the cop sees it, and makes a sound in her throat.

Gabi sees Marcus shambling out from the passage of crusted newspapers toward them. She sees him burst into flame and reach for the door in his face, and she raises her gun to put him out of his agony. Then she wavers. She can't believe he's still alive. She should have checked when she found him. They need to get him to a hospital.

“Mom!” Layla yells, getting to her feet on the other side of the room. “The phone. Get the phone. You have to stop Jonno filming! You have to trust me.”

And she does. Against every damn instinct. She turns, away from the fiery angel-monster, and trains her gun on Jonno instead at the exact moment a tidal wave of furniture crashes over him.

The chairs come when TK calls them, a whole bunch of them. Some of them once belonged to him, the killer, but not anymore. They swarm across the floor,
tik-tak, tik-tak,
and smash Jonno off his feet, battering him to the ground.

Jonno flails against the furniture. Death by Ikea, he thinks before the hard wooden edge of a seat catches him on the forehead and knocks him out.

The phone goes skeltering across the floor and bounces off the leg of a chair, skidding toward her. Layla snatches it up and hits the stop button on the video app. The live feed cuts off.

Everything collapses, just like that.

The birds fall out of the air and shatter like so much glass, the whirling papers fall, the chairs stop moving and Marcus slumps, no longer ablaze, his fingers slipping from the door handle, his knees collapsing. No longer an angel, just a terrible mistake.

“What are you doing?” Gabi shouts at her, swinging her gun back to Marcus, slowly slipping to the ground.

Layla looks up at the dark cloud that has swollen to fill the entire room, hanging low under the ceiling. She can feel what's inside it, the hope and despair crackling through like static.

“You really didn't know,” she says. She is furious that anything could be so fucking stupid, so naïve. But this is what she does. Finds the empathy to step into even the most hideous roles.

She knows what it needs.

Layla turns the camera back on, pinch-flicks her finger over the screen to zoom in on Marcus's face and holds it there, long enough, just long enough for him to raise his head, for his chest to heave, for his fingers to reach for the door. The light behind it is shining again, a brilliant border. He closes his hand on the handle. The catch clicks. The door starts to swing open, just a crack. There is a blaze of gold and darkness whirling to meet it—the storm rush of the black clouds sweeping through the door. Away.

“Shoot the door, Mom,” Layla says. “It's not Marcus anymore. It's not anything.”

Gabi squeezes the trigger. Her aim is true.

Layla hits stop.

She presses delete.

“Layla!” Gabi
grabs her by the shoulders, turns her around, examines her for damage. A deep cut on a raised welt on her temple, already scabbing up, dried blood in her hair. Black and blistered skin on her shoulder, burned right through her jacket. Big eyes, dilated, shock that hasn't set in yet, because she's furious.

“You're okay,” Gabi says. It's as much a command as a question. Layla nods and then the anger drops out of her, like the phone from her hand, and she starts shaking, her hands over her eyes.

“Oh God.”

“It's okay. Come on, sugarbean, we're getting out of here.” She can't look back at Marcus. What is left of Marcus. Eighteen years on the force and she has never killed someone. And now…

Her daughter looks up wildly at the black smoke pouring over them, “I thought it was gone.”

“It's all the newspaper. It's caught on fire. We have to get out.”

TK is pulling chairs off Jonno, unconscious beneath them. He yanks him up by his arm and swings him over his shoulder in a fireman's lift.

“What about Marcus?” Layla says.

“Like you said, he's not there anymore, baby. We have to worry about the living.” Even Jonno, although she would dearly love to leave him here. “We have to find a way out.” Gabi scans for exits. The broken windows open to a twenty-foot drop. The fire escape has been ripped away and hangs dangling from the brick. She knows for sure that there is an elevator shaft on the other side, which means there will be another staircase, probably.

Layla swabs at her eyes with the heels of her palms. “Mom. I know a way.”

She reaches for her hand. Gabi can't remember the last time they held hands. Her daughter leads her to a bricked-up section of wall that juts into the room. It might hold cabling or it might be a vent. There's one of the damn chalk doors drawn on it.

“Oh, beanie, no. That's not…” Gabi can't stand it. This might be the last nudge over the edge.

But then she realizes that this one is drawn over an
actual
door. Layla shoves down on the bar handle and it pulls open onto a ladder leading down. There's light from above—a hatch open somewhere high above them.

“It'll be okay, Mom.”

“No, we don't know where it goes.”

“Trust me.” Layla's face is bright and open, her eyes shining. She's never looked more sure of herself.

She surrenders to the certainty of the young woman, suddenly a stranger, as if all the potential in her has come into bloom.

“All right,” Gabi says, gruff. “All right. But I'm going first.”

She rattles the ladder as hard as she can. It's built solid. She steps down onto it and shoves away, with all her weight. It doesn't budge.

It's an old chimney. She can see patches of light below them, where bushes have pushed their way in between the brickwork. They might have to fight their way past the branches, but at least they'll be out.

“All right,” she calls up.

Layla steps onto the ladder above her.

There's water running down the bricks on the inside and moss growing in the cracks, with tiny purple flowers blossoming in defiance of the cold.

They make their way down, all of them, one step at a time, closer and closer to daylight.