Chapter 2 #2
Bob lets out a volley of barks, as if daring the smoke-person to come toward us.
Oh hell no. I try to clamp Bob’s muzzle shut, but it’s too late, and the smoke-person turns its head in our direction.
Its features keep shifting, dissolving, and reforming like oil on water, but its eyes burn into my own.
The smoke-person tilts its head.
It smiles.
Pain explodes behind my eyes. I curl my entire body around Bob and cover my ears with both hands. I can’t see anything. Then I’m seeing two parking lots at once, one laid over the other like a double-exposed photograph.
The world smashes into one in time to see the smoke-person rushing toward me.
I pick up Bob and begin to scramble away, but Tall Guy steps in front of me, readying the crowbar in his hands.
Old Man adjusts a dial on the shop vac. The hum gets louder. The surrounding air shimmers and distorts. Smoke tendrils lash out, reaching for the unconscious man, for me, for anything to grab onto.
Tall Guy blocks the tendril with his crowbar. The smoke-person compresses, spiraling downward in a funnel of angry smoke, and the jar swallows it whole.
Tall Guy slams the lid on. The scrape of metal screwing into glass is the most normal thing I’ve heard in the last five minutes, and it almost makes me laugh. Except I think if I start laughing, I won’t be able to stop.
Old Man turns off the shop vac, and detaches the pipe from the base of the jar. Inside the jar, the smoke undulates, pressing against the glass like it might smash its way out.
“Got him,” Tall Guy says, like he just finished taking out the trash. “That was easy.”
Easy?
My brain is trying to process what I just saw, reaching for explanations. Carbon monoxide poisoning? Hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply? Undiagnosed brain tumor?
I lower Bob onto the asphalt between my legs, keeping my hands on either side of his shoulders.
The man who attacked me lies on the ground a few feet away.
He looks normal now. As normal as a man wearing business casual clothes can look while sleeping on the ground in the middle of a parking lot.
The rope that almost ended me is coiled beside him like a dead snake.
There was something inside him. Something that came out of his mouth.
Something that’s now trapped in a jar.
What the actual fucking fuck is that thing?
Old Man moves past me, his boots crunching on scattered salt as he kneels beside Slimeball’s unconscious body. I watch him tilt the man’s head to the side and press his fingers to the guy’s neck.
“He’s not regaining consciousness,” Old Man announces, like we’re in an episode of ER and not a Walmart parking lot where I just watched smoke pour out of someone’s mouth. “We need to get him to a hospital.”
Tall Guy pulls his goggles up onto his forehead. Pink rings circle his eyes where the goggles pressed into his skin.
He walks toward me.
Bob wriggles out of my arms and lunges at the guy with his teeth bared, and I catch him just in time. I can barely keep hold of him as he tries to get free, making a gnawing, gurgling vocalization for a few seconds before he breaks into a coughing fit. I think he pukes a drop of bile.
Tall Guy crouches in front of me, keeping his hands open as he looks down at Bob.
“It’s okay,” he tells Bob. “I’m not going to hurt your mom.”
Bob does a full-body shake, then bares his teeth.
Tall Guy lifts his eyes to me. “How badly are you hurt?”
My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Tall Guy’s eyes are too green to be real, like someone Photoshopped them onto his face. I catch some details: black hair falling across his forehead, pale skin flushed red from the cold, shoulders so broad they block out the streetlights behind him.
“We’ll take you to a hospital,” he says, reaching for me. “Come on, let’s get you up.”
The hand coming toward me flips a switch in my nervous system.
I swing.
My fist connects with his jaw hard enough that the impact reverberates up my arm. Pain explodes across my knuckles, but he barely moves. Just rocks back on his heels, touching his jaw with the back of his hand. Oh no no no.
“I’m—” The word scrapes against my throat like I’m coughing up a shard of glass. I try to swallow it. Bob coils, ready to spring for the guy’s throat, and I hold him down just in time. “You just—And my brain—Are you okay?”
Tall Guy touches his jaw, working it side to side. Then his mouth sets in a hard line. Yep, he’s pissed. “You’re an angry thing, aren’t you?”
‘Thing’ rubs me wrong, but I’m in no position to argue with him, given I just punched him in the face like some feral parking lot creature.
I haven’t punched someone since ninth grade, when I overheard a girl at school spreading a rumor that I was the one who killed my family. I had to move foster homes after that.
“Goodness, it appears you’ve found someone who shares your temperament,” Old Man says.
Tall Guy cuts him a glare, then turns his attention back to me. “We’re not the ones who tried to kill you.”
“Yeah, well, you’re also the ones reenacting a scene from The Exorcist in a public parking lot, so forgive me if my threat assessment is a little broken right now.”
The words are supposed to sound tough, but my voice cracks halfway through. His eyes soften.
“You need to see a doctor,” he says.
“I need you to stay over there.” I pick up Bob and push myself onto my feet, staggering backward across the one empty parking space separating me from my car.
Tall Guy steps forward, but I hold my arm out as if there’s even a chance I could hold off a guy who wrestled a grown man to the ground. “Just—what was that thing?”
“The man?” he asks, standing up. He’s got to be six-four, maybe six-five, and I have to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact, which I’m not used to doing for any guy.
“The thing that came out of his mouth.” I grip my temples, pressing in because saying I’m lightheaded doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The parking lot is doing this slow spin, and my throat is telling me to shut up, each word scraping out like I’m paying for it in blood, but I need to know: “What was it?”
He exchanges a look with Old Man.
Old Man pulls his goggles onto his head, revealing matching suction rings around his eyes. “You saw the entity take form?”
I nod, confused.
“How long have you been able to see the dead?” Old Man asks.
“The dead?”
“Ghosts,” Old Man says. “Spirits.”
Ghosts aren’t real. I nearly say it, but that smoke-person was real. The weird substance was real. There’s still a glob of it on my boots.
Old Man’s eyes are bright with excitement, like I’m a bar of gold he just found lying on the side of the road.
I don’t like the way he’s looking at me.
It’s the same way journalists did when they’d ambush me outside my high school.
At least I know what reporters see when they look at me: a good story. But this guy?
These cosplayers may have saved my life, but that doesn’t mean they’re good people, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean I should stick around to find out.
Old Man takes a step toward me. “Please, if you could simply—”
“Thank you for saving my life,” I say, tripping over my feet away from them. “But I need to go.”
Old Man begins to say something else, but I’m already moving toward my car. I hold Bob with one arm as I scramble into the driver’s seat, ripping the covering from the windshield. I speed past them both, tear onto the road, and floor it until they become nothing but specks in my rear-view mirror.