I heard Pam pass the phone, her hand over the receiver muffling whatever she was saying. A groggy voice, an older man, picked up the phone on his end. “Laytham? Wayne, here. How can I help you, son?”
“I’m sorry as hell to trouble you, sir, but I need your help to track down and bag a critter that killed two civilians during an investigation I’m into out here in L.A. Your line’s secure, right?” I heard an odd digital tone, like a MIDI with hiccups, and then Wayne’s voice again.
“It is, and so is yours, just to make sure,” Wayne said. “Tell me everything.”
So I did. In a strange way, it felt like a confession to a priest. If I managed to stay alive long enough, maybe one day, I’d grow up to be Wayne English. It was doubtful I’d live that long, and I’d given up on the notion of someone beside me to love, a child, a home like Wayne or Grinner had. I’d pissed away every opportunity the universe had tried to give me to be happy. I’d die alone, no love, no nothing, like a meteor that flares to ash in the sky, a bright second of beautiful destruction, then gone, forgotten. It was a fair fate. I had my chances, but my ego, and my ambition, and my fear always made sure I passed them by. Life is choices and trades, you gain and you lose. It was too late in the game to whine about it now, especially when you had cheated as much as I had.
Wayne was one of the few people on earth with the power and the experiences to get me sometimes, and I was thankful for him being in this world. I was thankful enough to try to stay far away from him and Pam but like I said, he was the only one who could tell me if I was right or not about what I was dealing with. I described in very esoteric terms the resonance of the creature’s departure and how it had retreated not to an outside realm, but to the interior of the mindscape, the Akashic, Wayne’s turf.
“Oh,” Wayne said. “That’s not good.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I described the type of shredding that had been done to Elextra, to the room as I slipped the picture of Crystal back in my pocket.
“Damn,” Wayne said. “That sounds exactly like Crash Cart or Rib Spreader; did you get a look at it, did it look metallic? Surgical? Did it have wheels instead of legs?”
“I’m not sure, Wayne,” I said. “Its shadow didn’t look human at all. You sound pretty certain it’s one of them. It is, isn’t it? I thought you and the other Acidmancers destroyed all of them in the Helter Skelter War?”
“I thought we did,” Wayne said. I felt ice, and perhaps fear, settle in his voice. “I truly thought we did. I lost so many dear friends fighting them, purging them from the zeitgeist, from the Akashic record. I’m sorry, son, I agree with you. I wish I didn’t. It sounds like one of the Nightmare tulpa.”
I felt fear shrink my balls too. These things were legendary, powerful, evil given form. “There’s only supposed to be one man who could call them up, build them in his bug-house-crazy skull,” I said.
“Yes,” Wayne said grimly, “Manson.”
EIGHTEEN
I’ve spent enough time in prisons, on both sides of the cage, to understand that when you walk through those seemingly normal doors, past offices and break rooms, checkpoints and metal detectors, you are stepping into a parallel universe. You pass beyond the veneer of the civilized, normal, safe world into a realm beyond sunlight and mercy, into the forge. The greatest thing to fear on the inside, guard or con, is yourself, what you will do, what you’re capable of just to breathe another day, to survive until you make it back to that other soft world or die trying.
Most of the people in prison are there because they fucked up, not out of some great inherent moral failing, more like a sick comedy of errors. They were just tired, drunk, angry, bitter, or broke at the wrong place at the wrong time. They fucked up, usually in a split second. They made a choice, and it was usually the wrong one. Then there are the folks who are inside due to no fault of their own, but because the gatekeepers fucked up. Innocent people fall through the cracks in a clattering, overloaded system that struggles to maintain a facade of safety and order, a system made up of fallible mortals who are overworked, underpaid, stressed, jaded, distrusting, and, sometimes, racist.
Then you have the smallest percentage of the population inside, the ones that you hope never get out, never breathe free air, the monsters. I was meeting an old monster today.
Wayne English had been unable to make it out to L.A. in the rapidly dwindling time I now had to wrap up this caper before my former associates in the “august body” of the Nightwise came for me and kicked my ass out of town. He had tag-teamed with Grinner to produce an airtight cover for me as some kind of shadowy federal agent from some nebulous organization. I think Grinner insisted the acronym for the make-believe agency be “A.S.S.” So, now, here I was, in the bowels of Corcoran State Prison,
