Chapter Fourteen: I Like Big Guns And I Don’t Know Why

Cody opened one eye, then the other. Whoever had changed him, however he had changed him, had left his human color vision alone. Hearing seemed improved, though. He could hear somebody screaming swear words on the third floor, and some moaning and squeaking on the fourth.

The man-dog-wolf got up and stretched out, then walked through the apartment to the main living area. Kimiko the wind up robot or whatever was dusting, and had her old maid’s outfit on, even though it didn’t fit properly.

Part of him was tempted to try to take a look under the skirt, but he wasn’t exactly sure how she would react. He had a pretty good idea, though, and resisted temptation.

His attention turned to the couch, where Ace was sacked out. One arm was back under his head, the other seemed to be on some sort of gun. Some freaky magick machine gun, it looked like. Cody rapidly decided that waking up Ace should be a job for someone with more tact, skill, and body armor than a dog.

A little less sanity would probably be a useful trait, too.

***

Cody stood at the head of the stairs, thinking. In fact, he was thinking a lot harder than he had in over a month. Round doorknobs were, in the end, an obstacle. But not an insurmountable one. What the human fingers, palm, and thumb did — supply pressure on all sides of the doorknob — two paws could also do, with one or two false starts and some good balance.

Locks, on the other paw… locks were a problem. A key could be used, but with only paws it would just be another juggling act, a harder one. Without the key, it was not nearly as easy. Maybe impossible. Cody knew something about gaining unauthorized access, especially on the electronic front, but the only technique that he had ever been able to use to any benefit in the world of solid matter was buying padlocks of the same type as the padlock you wanted to open, then using the key from a lock using the same tumbler setting.

He’d read a lot of textfiles over the years, some of them about means of breaking and entering, but none of it had really stuck. He knew what a lockpick was, but he didn’t know how to pick locks. And since he didn’t have the fingers and opposable thumbs to use one anyway, it was moot.

So, getting into his apartment to wake up John “I’m Too Sexy For My Shirt” Reeso, get him to wake up Ace, and maybe get shot with whatever that thing used as ammo was out of the question.

Well, there was always knocking. Or at least yelling.

***

John Reeso, in addition to his many other characteristics, slept very lightly. People in the Underground who could not be jostled awake by a plane crash right on their house tended not to wake up for other, softer noises. Like venomous snakes hissing. Or the beeping/ticking of a timed explosive. Or that old standby, a weapon being cocked.

On the other hand, it didn’t do a guy any good to wake up when he hears people talking in the hallway, if they are just talking about going to get some cocaine. John had to be awake to tell if what he heard was worth waking up for to begin with. As a direct result, he woke up a lot.

Without the power to flush his brain of its own toxins with force of will, he probably would have gone stark raving psychotic from the effects of sleep deprivation years ago.

John thought about this as he stared at his breakfast, an egg. He had often pretended to be so deep in sleep that he could have something amputated without anesthesia of any sort. So far, only one lady had tried that.

Tried was the key word.

You could never be sure of your friends. That was a certainty. Your enemies, on the other hand… you could always count on them in a rough spot. Even if it was because they were the ones who made that spot rough. There was no need to keep your enemies closer than your friends; that kind of unbreakable trust and reliability was as close as people ever got.

John often wondered if maybe the screaming couples on Jerry Springer were happier than they appeared.

As he tapped the eggshell with a spoon, there was a distinctive, yet muffled, knocking coming from the door. He took a moment to grab his pistol from the counter and carefully edged up to the door. There was no peephole, but if an attacker could see him via infrared, or just hear his movements, then it wouldn’t take much firepower to go through the door.

Not that the walls here were much better, unless they were load bearing.

“Who eees eet?” he called out. The falsetto was blatantly male — a male who was wearing pants three sizes too tight, perhaps, but still male. It tended to throw people off. People thrown off their game were usually easy to defeat.

The door exploded inward as somebody put all of their muscle power and body weight behind one kick. A body followed, and in the hand attached to the arm on that body, there was a pistol.

John had more than enough time to notice that it was the same type of automatic pistol he owned before everything went red.

***

Ace’s eyes opened at the sound of the gunshot. He mentally backtracked a few moments, trying to fit in the noise with what he already knew, failed, tried again, failed again, and got up.

“Warning. Conflict detected. Weapon report signature matches: Firearm. Pistol. Automatic. Colt. Calibre 45. Capacity indeterminate. Modifications from base design likely. Proceed with caution.”

Ace stared at the mounted fish, then at the weapon in his hand. In half a second he had barged out of his own apartment in a blatant disregard for caution of any sort. The hall looked normal, which meant that it looked messy and chaotic. Some screaming, growling, and cursing led him up the hallway away from the stairs, to John’s door.

“Of course,” he mumbled to himself, and carefully looked around the corner.

Certain elements of the fracas caught his eye in a certain order. First, John seemed to be missing maybe half of his head, but he was still flailing around at some guy. This guy was the second element. He was screaming, had a gun, and was definitely bleeding profusely. And he was being bitten by Cody. That was the third part.

As he watched, the bleeding screaming man brought his gun around and shot at Cody. Cody let go and scrambled out of the line of fire, but he seemed unharmed. Still, you couldn’t let men run around decrepit apartment buildings shooting men turned into wolves. Soon they’d start shooting ducks turned into astronauts. And then it was just a hop, skip, and jump to total anarchy.

With that non sequitor in mind, Ace calmly walked into the room, grabbed the intruder by the collar of his shirt and pressed his gun up against the intruder’s temple.

“Hi.”

The trigger was pulled, and white vapor began spewing out of the barrel. There was a sound like cracking glass. The man’s screams, previously made out of pain and rage, had some terror mixed in for flavor. Ace let up on the trigger and swung at the man’s temple with the butt of the pistol grip. This was accompanied by the sound of a lightbulb imploding, and the intruder went limp.

Well, except for the twitching of extremities.

Ace looked at John, who was holding his head with one hand. Tissue seemed to be foaming and swelling around the missing parts of his head, regrowing perhaps. His other hand was covered in blood. Probably not his. Ace looked down at the attacker and noticed some blood soaking through the man’s nice shirt, around where the intestines would be.

For that matter…

Ace looked at the man’s head. Around where he had held the gun, everything was hard and glass like. Ace carefully touched one shard. It was icy cold.

Yep, it was a freeze-ray allright. Although Ace was troubled by the fact that there wasn’t a corresponding frozen spot on the other side of the head, or a patch of frost on one of John’s walls. Maybe there was a range adjustment he had missed.

“Sometemms I het meh job. Het het het.”

“Why are you speaking like that?”

“Helf meh brans ezn megekil flux. Feck uf.”

***

John looked inside the drill machine. All the mechanics seemed to be under the parts of the drill. Probably so more stuff could be kept in the main body.

“Buried treasure is supposed to consist of gold and jewels, or ancient tomes of forbidden knowledge. Or at the very least, some really, really old booze that ages well. But all this has is a carbine that freezes people’s heads and a robot spider. I am tempted to complain to my congressman.”

Ace ignored John’s simulated petulance and examined the man’s pockets. Moving the body across the hallway would have posed a problem in a better neighborhood, but as it was, it seemed unlikely they’d even have to worry about removing blood stains. Well, except to keep Kimiko from getting frustrated with cleaning them-

“Uh oh.”

“Scorpion in his pocket?”

“Looks like this guy was a cop. Or a detective. Or something.”

“Let me see.”

John walked over and peered at the man’s inside jacket pocket. There was definitely a badge there. Leaning down, John moved his lips silently, then shook his head.

“Nope. Not a cop.”

“How can you tell?”

“That badge is supposed to belong to one officer Rick Stanz. I know this because he ended up arresting me two or three times for breaking and enterring. He shows up around here every now and then if there’s something the city as a whole is worried about.”

“And this isn’t him?”

“Rick is black. This guy is white. The difference is subtle, but a layman can spot it with practice.”

“I guess that’s one way to tell.”

John tapped his chin a few times, then shook his head.

“That’s NOT a way to tell?”

“If this guy has Rick’s badge, either Rick was promoted to a position with a new badge, or this guy stole it. Maybe killed Rick to get it. In any event, he’s no cop. There’s things cops do.”

“Like what? Eat donuts?”

“They follow rules. Procedures. Either in spirit, to try to do the best job they can, or to the letter, to try to keep that job against uneven odds. I am fairly sure that if this guy was a cop, that he would not shoot at me unprovoked. And even if he decided to do that, he would either announce his presence and fire at the same time, or when he fired, go for an extremity shot.”

John held up his gun. “A cop who sees a guy with a gun in his hand is more liable to shoot, especially to kill. This is true. But I suspect based on his behavior, especially the kicking in the door and opening fire immediately, that he was going to shoot before he even knew if I was armed or not.”

“So what’s with the badge?”

“Probably social engineering. Hold up a badge and say you’re investigating something and it somehow vindicates the eavesdropping, spying, gossipping parts of people. They’ll talk your ears off.”

“Allright then… why’d he come after you?”

“Could be any number of reasons. There’s at least five people I know for sure who want me dead. Maybe the number’s gone up.”

***

It takes a certain type of person to drink beer when a dead body attracts flies nearby. Hunters can do it after hunting game animals, but the ability doesn’t normally apply to the human dead. For related reasons, it’s not a skill that is advertised by those who have it.

As such, Ace wasn’t aware he could treat death with such a cavalier attitude until he tried, with beers from John’s fridge.

“CODY! Beer! Get it while it’s lukewarm!”

Ace thought he could hear the sounds of gargling from the bathroom. Or yelling. Or both. John had already drained one bottle of beer and was looking through the empty glass like a telescope, muttering something under his breath.

“Arr. Arrrrr. Land Ho. Alternatively, Land Whore. Shiver me buffalo wings… Hey, I remembered something last night I forgot to tell you until I remembered it again just now.”

“Are you drunk?”

“That is a side issue. When Mitch and Doc Vague and I were chasing you down, we had some guy named Doubting Thomas along for the ride. I think I mentioned him a while back? He might know something that could help you. He said he was able to recognize your clockworking style. Maybe he could trace it to whoever trained you or something.”

“That sounds like an idea. You remember anything interesting from back then?”

John tapped the beer bottle against his teeth, in an absent minded way.

“…actually I do. I think Thomas said that the guys that used your style never had any apprentices. We originally thought you were just a guy who found some old clockworker’s secret lab.”

Ace blinked. “I consider myself pretty good at this stuff, now that I’ve remembered the stuff that I do. If I just found this lab one day, I must have been like five or six. Either that or I’m a really fast learner.”

“It’s been known to happen. Mitch turned into an unpredictable menace in less than half a year. Granted, it’s not common at-”

“…well? Not common at what? College? This time of year?”

John was looking at the corpse, so Ace’s eyes followed his. “Tell me I’m not seeing things.”

“You’re not seeing things, John. That really is a dead body there.”

“Look closer.”

Ace shrugged and moved closer to the body. It didn’t take long to notice what John had noticed.

“This guy isn’t the same guy we fought and killed earlier.”

“Oh yes he was. He was just wearing a different FACE, and now it’s finally started wearing off.”

The man’s skin, facial structure, overall body morphology, and especially the condition of his skin had changed. He had become somewhat younger, leaner, and faint scars had appeared criss crossing his face. John kicked the part of the head that had previously been frozen.

“I know this man, though I use the term loosely. He is, or rather was, a rookie.”

“Ah. A baseball player. Should have known.”

“I mean he was a rookie at magick. MY magick. He had some serious attitude problems. One time he came around to bother me at work at the hospital, trying to tell me what was what. I kindly set him straight with a hot plate, a paperclip, and a balloon.”

“…the hot plate I get. Same with the paperclip. The balloon scares me though. I don’t know why.”

“Problem wasn’t so much the magick, but that had to be linked somehow. You know, people who are all ego but no confidence?”

“…can’t say I do.”

“They want to be badass because they know they aren’t. They think they should be, that they can be, but they aren’t for some reason. And they hate it when other people realize they are, essentially, less than nothing. The really bad cases get paranoid. If you’ve ever fought with bullies, either playground or police or whatever, you know the type, except the succesful bullies actually have some badass moments under their belts. Kinda reassures them, so they aren’t so driven to prove themselves.”

“Okay, bullies I understand.”

“Most everyone does. Yeah, this guy has been a pain in the ass, and his death gives me no small amount of satisfaction. I dare say, this is cause for a party! No, a celebration!”

“I refuse to take any sort of oath of celebracy. Not that I want kids, but… it’s the principle. Of the thing.”

“Heheh. NOW who’s the drunk guy? Seriously. You, me, Mitch, Drew, everybody. We’ll go to this mexican place with ultra hot sauce for the chips. You’ll love it. I’m buying.”

“You had me when you said you were b-”

“HOLY HELL!”

Ace spun and looked at Cody, who was looking at the corpse, who in turn was looking at the ceiling, to the extent that a dead body can look at anything at all.

“It’s him! The motherfucker who turned me into a wolf!”

“Say what?” John scratched his head. “He turned… you… into a wolf?”

“Yes! It’s him! I’d recognize him anywhere!”

John looked at Cody, then at the corpse, then at Ace, then back to Cody, then Ace again.

“He’s not one of your machines??”

Ace stared back at John. “…no WONDER you didn’t freak out when he was talking. You thought he was a clockwork-”

“Exactly! Holy shit, I… that was… dammit, I haven’t been this wrong about something since that disaster with the chocolate easter eggs…”

Ace was surprised, and not a little disturbed, to see that John was visibly shaken by the revelation that Cody was not a machine.

Cody, in the meantime, lifted up his leg and proceeded to urinate on the corpse. “Vengeance is mine! Sort of! Man, I wish he was till alive so I could bite him all over again!”

Ace shrugged absent mindedly. “Go ahead. I’m sure he won’t mind.”

“After the body’s been pissed on? Maybe YOU wouldn’t mind that, but I have STANDARDS.”

Ace opened his mouth for a witty retort, but what came out was something different. “John, if you can stop your mind reeling, can you use YOUR power to undo what THAT guy did to Cody?”

“Wha? …oh. Yeah. Maybe. Worth a shot. He seems to be whole… I don’t think he went all out just to fuck with somebody… And I’d hate to see Dick’s work outlive him.”

“Well, the work of dicks should be short lived and a fleeting shadow in the moonlight.”

“That’s his name, I mean. Richard ‘Dick’ Townsey.”

“Are you denying that he acted like a giant penis?”

“No, just clarifying.”

“Okay… hey wait a minute. You’ve been arrested a few times, right?”

“Yep.”

“And they let you work at the hospital?”

“I’m a janitor, remember? They’re not letting me handle the organ transplants or drugs. They’re not that stupid. More’s the pity, really. From what I could get for one bottle of painkillers, I could afford to buy a penguin of my very own.”

“…that scares me worse than the balloon.”

“Look, I’m just gonna teach him to play poker!”

“Stop it! Stop talking!”