Ibenus (Valducan series) (2 page)

James turned from his radio, his thumb still on the button. "My God."

One of the baby voices abruptly cut off, followed by another. Then another.

Victoria's grip tightened on the gun. "James…we have to…"

"Yeah." James pocketed the radio and removed a stubby torch. He clicked the button, unleashing a brilliant white beam and shone it through the open door.

Victoria fished her keys from her pocket and removed a tiny LED light from the ring. She held it in the hand supporting the gun. It wasn't much, nothing compared to James' torch, but it was something.

A long hallway stretched nearly the length of the building before ending at an intersection. Empty bottles and crumpled papers littered the peeling linoleum tiles. Doors lined both sides. Most of them stood open. Others were missing entirely.

The last of the children's wails came from deep inside, high and terrified. It suddenly ceased and the building once again fell silent.

Victoria took the lead, only a step ahead of James, to her right. They scanned each room as they passed, their lights finding discarded mattresses and sleeping bags, but no occupants. It stank of piss, mildew, and stale cigarette smoke. Squatters had obviously lived here, but where were they?

Halfway to the split, the pungent, sweet stench of rotten meat assaulted Victoria's senses.

"Smells like dead cat," James grumbled, tucking his mouth in the crook of his elbow.

Victoria wished she could do the same but she needed both hands to steady the revolver. The stink worsened as they moved onward, but not because they were moving closer. It was growing stronger, as if someone had opened a broken and long-sealed refrigerator and now the reeking air was boiling out, desperate to escape. Tears welled in her eyes from the smell, but she pushed onward. She had to find those babies and the bastards who might have hurt them.

At the intersection, James shined his light up one branch, pausing momentarily on a discarded white sneaker that seemed completely out of place amongst the grime and filth.

Victoria motioned down the other hall, the direction of the smell. "This way."

James' light swung around and stopped on a black smoking shape a few steps away. It looked like some sort of insect or crab, split in half and its shell stripped away from the rubbery flesh. It sizzled and hissed. Victoria realized it wasn't black smoke rising from its surface but quickly dissipating vapor. Bile rose in her throat at that ungodly stench.

"What is that?" James asked from his elbow.

She shook her head, unwilling to open her mouth for fear of tasting it. Giving as wide a berth as the hallway allowed, Victoria stepped around the steaming black mess and continued on. They passed a dank stairwell, its walls emblazoned with orange and red spray-paint, and came to a wide lobby.

Four more fetid corpses littered this room, two crushed to a paste with awkwardly jutting spider legs. The stench was incredible. Dark steam curled through the beam of James' torch as he scanned the room, stopping on one of the ghastly black things splattered against the wall.

A loud thump sounded upstairs, like a ram hitting a door. James' light shot to the ceiling, finding nothing but cobwebs.

Another baby cry sounded. Distant. Terrified.

"Come on," Victoria said, barely moving her lips.

They crept up the stairs to the second floor. The baby's wails had ceased but it sounded like it had come from here. She shined her light up the stairwell, verifying it was empty, then stepped out into the hall. James followed behind, so close Victoria could hear his rapid breaths.

She started down the hallway when scratching sounded beyond a door to her right. The numbers had long since been pried off, but the missing space in the crackled paint read, '137.'

They shared a look. Victoria stood back, holding the gun, arms stretched before her. James leaned in, threw open the door, and shone his light into the darkened room.

Nothing.

A baby's coo came from the corner.

Something shuffled across the trash-strewn floor. Victoria's light went to the movement, finding a pale, waxy shape the size of a bread loaf. James's brilliant light fell upon it, revealing a chitinous insect. The creature's face resembled a porcelain china doll, its oily black eyes completely filling the sockets. A pair of segmented pincers twitched outward from its bristle-lined hole of a mouth.

It looked up at them and a shrill infant's sob issued from that hideous maw.

What…no…no…it's not real
. Victoria stepped back, struggling to grasp the thing before her.
It's not real.

A second cry issued from the room and a second baby-faced insect scuttled into the light's beam. It clacked its mandibles and sprang toward James.

"Gah!" He stumbled back, swinging the light away from the room as he batted the creature mid-air with his baton.

It hit the wall with a hard
thock
and fell to the floor, one of its legs broken.

The creature giggled and shuffled back onto its belly, the broken leg twitching awkwardly.

James screamed and kicked it. It hit the wall again, wailing its baby's cry. He stomped it over and over, crushing its plated armor, and squishing its guts out onto the filthy tiles.

More screams poured from inside. Victoria swung her light around to see the other insect charging toward James and a third one scurrying out from an open air vent.

She fired. The gun's booming report was louder than she would have thought possible. The round missed, kicking up shards of linoleum. Victoria pulled the trigger again, blasting the hideous thing nearly in half. Its legs and mandibles shuddered. Black ooze hissed out from the wound.

Her ears rang in a shrill hum.

The third creature was coming toward her, its mouth open in a scream Victoria could no longer hear. It crawled onto a broken sofa frame, readying to jump when she raised the gun and fired.

The creature fell back into the shadows, black ichor splattering onto the wall behind it.

Heart pounding, Victoria reached into the damnable room, grasped the door's handle and yanked it shut before any more of the monsters could appear. That awful rotted stench flooded the hall.

"What the hell? What the hell?" James blubbered, his voice barely audible above the muted hum. Sweat streaked his white face. His wide eyes were locked onto the smashed bug in undeniable terror.

The creature's pale shell blackened and evaporated into misty vapor, leaving the gooey meat to sag and shrivel.

"What the hell?" James repeated, shaking his head.

"We need to go," Victoria said.

James only stared at the dead thing.

"DC Kettington!"

He looked at her. A smear of black ooze spattered his chin.

"We need to go," she repeated.

James blinked, then nodded. "Yeah. Need to go."

Victoria started toward the stairs when James froze, his eyes locked on the hallway behind her. She spun to see a man's shape silhouetted against the far window. James' light came up, revealing the smaller of the two black-clad intruders. He held his strange, curved sword before him.

"Stop right there!" she ordered, raising the gun. "Police."

The masked man cocked his head.

"Put the weapon down!"

The man straightened. "Move!" He charged, swinging his sword.

Victoria fired. But the man was instantly on the other side of the hall, still closing in.

He swung. She fired again, but the man was now a full meter from where he should have been.

James screamed and slammed into Victoria from behind. The gun fired harmlessly into the wall as she pitched forward. Her foot slipped on a discarded bottle. A white-hot shock of pain exploded from her rolling ankle and she fell onto the gritty floor.

The sound of ripping fabric and an awful clicking, and James' screams silenced.

Teeth clenched, Victoria twisted around to see an enormous man-sized insectile creature on top of James. Its cluster of scythe-like mandibles clacked madly against each other. Two of its four arms ended in long, serrated points. It raised one and slashed down into James' shoulder.

He screamed again and bashed his baton against the monster's head to no effect. The beast rammed its blade-like arm straight down into James's chest. He coughed blood but continued to bat his stick against his attacker.

Victoria screamed. She raised the still smoking gun and pulled the trigger.

Click
.

Then the sword-wielding stranger was above her. The creature's head snapped towards him. Before it could move, the man slashed his blade into its back. Its chitinous shell split with a loud crack. The monster hissed and lashed one of its blade arms, slinging James' blood across the walls.

Dodging the wild swing, the stranger ripped the sword free. He vanished and was suddenly directly behind the monster, his weapon coming down into the back of its skull.

Cool blue flames burst from the monster's mouth.

"No!" Victoria cried as the burning monster collapsed on top of James. She reached for him and the stranger took a wary step away. Blue fire flickered along his golden brown sword.

"It won't burn him," he said. "But he does need an ambulance."

The strange fire spread over the creature's body but hadn't ignited James' clothes yet. He gasped weakly. The blood pooling beneath him was black in the spectral light.

One hand still on his sword, the stranger grabbed the dead monster by the shoulder and rolled it off James. The fire didn't seem to hurt him at all. The creature didn't appear to be burning either. There was no smoke. No heat.

Footsteps thundered up the hall. The second man, the big one, was racing toward them. He held a flanged medieval mace. "Are you all right?" he asked with the deepest voice Victoria had ever heard.

"Yeah," the swordsman said.

The big man looked down at Victoria. Instinct told her to look away. The men might kill her if they thought she could ID them. But the brief glimpse at his masked face revealed that he was black.

"Who are they?" he asked. That accent? French?

"Police." He tore open James' bloodied shirt and winced. "This one's banged up bad."

The big man growled rather than grunted his agreement. "We need to go."

"Yeah. Hey," he said to Victoria.

She looked at him.

"You hold this here," he said, motioning to the ball of torn shirt he pressed against James' chest. "In one minute, call 999."

James moaned.

"Who are you?" Victoria asked, reaching a tentative hand for the rag. Hot blood squelched between her fingers.

The swordsman rose. "Tell them whatever you wish but the truth. No one will believe you."

"Come on," the Frenchman urged. "Let's go."

"Who are you?" Victoria repeated. Tears of fear and rage welled in her eyes.

The big man was already headed down the stairs. The swordsman started after but looked back at her. "I'm sorry this happened to you both." Then he was gone.

Chapter Two

Two weeks ago:

"What have we here?" Victoria leaned in toward her monitor, trying to make out the magnified, pixelated shape. She saw a scarecrow with a stag's head, but only because the description called it that. To her, it looked like a strange tree. Why did all sighting photographs have to be so damned dark? She sipped her lukewarm tea and copied the image, saving it to her 'Monsters' file under the name, 'Wendigo?'

The phone beside her erupted into Phantom of the Opera, giving her a start. Victoria eyed it, wishing it to disappear. Only one person had that ringtone.

The caller ID only verified what she knew.
Shit. Sunday already
?

Victoria straightened in her seat, cleared her throat, smiled fakely, and picked it up. "Hi, Mum."

"Victoria, how are you going?" Mother asked in an overly-cheerful manner.

"Oh, I'm doing much better. Everything's…" She scanned the filthy flat, every surface cluttered with food wrappers, dirty dishes, loosely arranged rainbows of Post-it Notes, tissues, dirty clothes, and unpaid bills. "…great."

"Wonderful. And…therapy is going well?"

There it was, straight for the throat. No small talk, no skirting it, just the principal concern: 'Are you still mad?'.

"Well," Victoria said, forcing the smile to remain. Mother could always hear a frown. "We've made a lot of progress. Doctor Abbington believes the trauma of my attack and DC Kettington's death caused only a temporary hallucination. But he still wants to make sure my recovery is complete, you know."

"Good, good. That's wonderful dear. So…CID will take you back soon?"

"Looks promising." She ran her fingers through her blonde, uncombed hair.

"Wonderful, dear. I'm so happy to hear that. It's been so terribly hard for you, I know. Soon it can just return to normal."

Normal
, she thought with a bitter smile. "I can't wait. Listen, Mum, this is a bad time. I was just about to head out?"

"Oh. Plans?"

"Yes, I'm meeting a friend."

"A man friend?" Mother asked with that leading edge. Now that the first business was done she could begin her normal nagging. Mother seemed to believe that Victoria being single at twenty-five was the single greatest tragedy since Margaret Thatcher's resignation.

"That is none of your concern," Victoria said. If she was going to lie she figured she might as well go for it. "But, as a matter of fact, yes. And…I'm running late."

"Best not to leave him waiting," Mother said, a delighted spark in her tone.

"I won't. I'll talk to you next week, Mum."

"And you can tell me all about him."

"I will. Love you."

"I love you too, dear."

Victoria clicked the phone off and released a tired sigh. Eventually she'd have to explain that CID had let her go. While they might have been able to look beyond her entering the building without calling it in, an action that resulted in James' death, her fantastic story of baby-faced monsters and giant insects had made it unsalvageable. By the time anyone had arrived, the dead bugs had become rats and a small dog that had been missing for the previous week. The burning monster had turned into an Oliver Grey, a truck driver who had also been missing for nearly a month. There was of course no trace of the knife that been used to kill DC Kettington or the blade used in the death of Mister Grey. Then there was the illegal firearm that, even though she had claimed was found at the scene, contained James' fingerprints on the brass casings. Once it was all put together, the conclusion was that Victoria's career was over.