The Loop

Camilla Pérez had always been a good shot. She’d served one tour in Afghanistan as an army sniper, and even though they didn’t officially track confirmed kills anymore, she’d kept her own tally. She knew she was good with a rifle. And she knew she was good with plain old hand-eye coordination. But this … this was something else.

She leapt off the edge of the roof, fully trusting in her newfound teammate, Kayla, to open a portal in time to catch her and put her on the ground gracefully, and she flung two small stones as she fell, a wicked smile lighting up her face as both stones found their marks. The larger of the two Novak monsters howled with pain and rage as its eye was pierced by a jagged stone. The other one turned its head just in time to avoid the same fate, but still ended up getting the side of its face shredded.

As she had expected, a portal opened and closed seamlessly around her, depositing her at ground level. She experienced a brief sense of disorientation as her body went from horizontal to vertical in an instant, and gravity tossed her guts and the fluid in her inner ears around. Thankfully the two monsters were still fixated on where she had been—one of them even started scaling the wall to the roof—to notice where she was.

“Yoohoo!” she shouted, picking up two more stones from the gravel pathway at her feet. The smaller monster—the one that still had two good eyes—turned toward her voice. Eyes or no, they were both still operating mostly by their other senses, as Felipe was doing all he could to keep them blind. The larger one continued climbing the building, no doubt smelling that there were others up there.

She made a snap judgment and launched both her makeshift projectiles at the one climbing the building instead of the one that was now charging her head on. The two stones hit the climbing beast’s clawed hands and caused it to lose its grip, but only for a moment. It slipped back a few feet before catching itself and resuming its ascent.

“Shit,” she swore.

The smaller beast was closing the distance between them quickly and she could only hope that Kayla was keeping an eye on her, ready to act when she needed help. She stepped backward and still saw the beast heading straight at her. She tried again and found herself on the other side of the courtyard, staring at the monster’s back as the portal in front of her collapsed. The monster was charging straight at the spot where she’d been moments before, and its massive claws closed on thin air. She launched two stones at its back. One impacted and sank shallowly into flesh. The other struck what appeared to be some sort of armored scale and fell to the ground, useless.

Were those armored plates there from the start? she asked herself.

As if in answer to her question, she heard Ricky speaking next to her. “They’re growing and mutating even while we fight them. I saw something very much like this recently, that night at the shelter. I think I know where these two got their powers, and it wasn’t from an orb. At least not directly.”

She looked to her left and saw him standing there, just on the other side of a portal. She could have stepped back through to the relative safety of the roof. Instead she stood her ground and watched the monster she had only narrowly avoided being pulverized by as it spun around and faced her once again.

“That’s great, Ricky,” she said. “But have you got any info that can help me take this bitch down?”

As far as she could tell, the one she was facing down had been Sammy not too long ago. The two looked so much alike now that it was hard to be certain, but this one was still a bit smaller and, despite its monstrous, almost reptilian features, remained more feminine somehow.

“Stand by. I’ll see what my brain can come up with.”

“El Cerebro,” she muttered.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

As the beast considered her, apparently wary of charging her blindly again, there was a shout way off to her right. She and monster-Sammy both turned to look for its source.

“Come here, you stupid fucker. Yeah, that’s right. You want some of this?”

It was Sean Murphy, somehow still in the fight, and holding what appeared to be a Tommygun.

She hit the deck just as he started unloading. Bullets flew over her head, and she heard a few pained moans from the beast, but she also heard it charging again, and not toward her this time.

That fuckin’ idiot. He’s gonna get himself killed.

That she had been planning on watching the Murphys and the Novaks duke it out not long ago wasn’t lost on her, but at least in that fantasy, they had been evenly matched, and the good guys were ready to step in before things got too crazy. This was a slaughter.

When the bullets finally stopped flying, she chanced a glance toward their source. She saw the beast lying still in a pile of rubble, its chest was heaving up and down and crimson speckled the grass around its body like splashes of paint from a shaken brush. Nearby she saw a Murphy lying motionless, covered in even more blood than the beast. It wasn’t Sean.

“You bastard!” cried Sean, running to his son’s side and collapsing to his knees. “You goddamn bastards. You took my boy from me.” His voice was choked, full of too much anguish to be considered enraged.

“What the fuck happened?” she said aloud, but if any of her team heard her, they didn’t respond.

What she heard instead was a scream from the roof. She looked up and saw that the larger monster had crested the edge, and while she couldn’t see her team, she knew they were up there, facing it down. But Kayla can get them all to safety, right? she thought.

So why wasn’t she doing it?

She watched as the monster got fully over the lip of the roof and extended itself to its full height—it must have been ten feet high by then—and she heard another scream.

She’s frozen, she thought. Kayla’s never been in a situation like this before and she’s freezing up. She saw it in rookie cops all the time, and she’d seen it with newbies when she was in the shit in Afghanistan, too. Even with all the training that cops and soldiers had to go through before they ever found themselves in a traumatic, violent, and confrontational situation, they still froze up as often as not the first time it was real. Some never stopped freezing up.

And Kayla hadn’t had any training to prepare for something like this at all.

“Fuck,” she muttered, gathering up as many stones as she could and beginning to unleash them at the monster’s back as she ran for the building where her team was held up. She didn’t know fully what she intended to do when she got there, since, unlike the monster she was facing, she didn’t have massive claws on her hands and feet to help her scale a wall. She threw every stone she had at the creature on the roof as she ran, and maybe one in five actually did some damage. But that wasn’t enough, and the monster was clearly too clever to be dissuaded from its mission.

“Fucking fuck,” she said again, as if the repetition of the words could give them more power, could help her fly up to the roof and slay the monster somehow.

“Turn around!” shouted Ricky from the rooftop. This close to the edge of the building she was just able to make his words out clearly.

She looked behind her and stopped running, her momentum carrying her a few steps farther than she had intended. The small monster—Sammy—was turning back into a human; a weak, vulnerable human. She was apparently uninjured. Sean Murphy was too engrossed in sobbing over the body of his dead son to notice.

She pulled her pistol from its holster and ran toward the girl. She hadn’t planned on using the pistol at all—it was at once too deadly and too quaint in the face of her new power—but it was exactly the tool for the job now at hand.

It wasn’t very cop-like to take hostages—in fact, it was antithetical to everything that she stood for as a detective—but sometimes the bad option is the only one left.

She grabbed the woman’s limp body, feeling it stir beneath her, and shoved the muzzle of her gun under Sammy’s throat.

“Hey, shitface! If you care about your sister’s life, you’ll get down off that roof right now!” She hoped her voice carried, or else that the thing that the leader of the Novak gang had become had better hearing than an ordinary human. At first, it didn’t turn, and when it finally did, it wore a look of such utter menace and rage that she almost dropped the girl she was holding, threw away her gun, and fled.

Almost.

The thing on the roof didn’t retrace its steps, scaling down the wall as it had ascended. Instead, it leapt straight from the top of the building to ground level, its legs bending to absorb most of the impact as the concrete walkway beneath it cracked visibly. The sheer noise of it was nearly enough to strip away what was left of her nerves.

It advanced, and as it did so it worked its jaw up and down, as if it was already chewing its prize before it was even caught. Camilla pressed the muzzle harder into the throat of her hostage, whose eyelids were now starting to flutter. It was harder than she had imagined it would be to hold up a limp body for this long. Part of her was almost happy that the girl was waking up, if only so that she could support some of her own weight. She still weighed more than a normal person, and Camilla noticed that the regression in her transformation seemed to have stalled. She was almost human now, but she wasn’t getting any closer.

“Back the fuck off or I swear to god, I’ll put a bullet in her brain.”

The creature before her stopped in its tracks, still working its jaw. It’s trying to talk, she realized.

“Don’t,” it finally managed to croak. “Leave her.” Its voice was all rocks grinding and molten metal bubbling and sand sifting.

“So you can speak. I wondered if you didn’t have to give that up in exchange for … whatever this is,” said Ricky, appearing at Camilla’s shoulder.

“Took you long enough.” Camilla pitched her voice low so that only Ricky would hear her.

“Had to calm Kayla down. That took some doing.”

She noticed that neither Kayla nor Felipe had joined them at ground level.

“So what’s the plan now?” she asked, her voice loud enough now that the monster could listen in. “Because it seems to me like we’re in a bit of a predicament. You came here for the boy, for Felipe … Well, guess what? You can’t have him.”

The creature took a step toward her, almost lunging before catching itself, its snout sniffing the air and its eyes trained on its sister.

“Don’t,” it said again.

As she watched, she could see the cracks forming in between its armored plates, splitting one plate into two, two into four. The cracks grew and yet more plates pushed out through them. It was still in the process of growing larger, meaner, less human. It resembled some sort of fantastical bipedal, wingless dragon now. Its neck was elongated, its legs and trunk were thick with muscle and scale, and its teeth were like shark’s teeth, massive and yellow and razor-sharp.

“If you don’t want me to kill her, you’ll keep your distance. And then we can talk like … Well, I’d say ‘like human beings’, but I’m not sure if that applies.”

Much to her surprise, the creature barked out a single, wordless exclamation that could have been a laugh.

“I … like … you,” it croaked.

“Yeah, in a different life maybe we could have been on the same side.” She looked the beast up and down. “Then again, maybe not.”

“We’re not eager to see anyone else get hurt here tonight,” said her partner. “If you let us leave, we’ll leave your sister here.”

“What?” she hissed at him. “You can’t be serious. You’re not actually thinking of letting them go? Do I need to remind you that even when they’re not giant monsters, they’re still the wanted leaders of a criminal organization?”

He ignored her completely.

“Do we have a deal?” he asked.

The creature appeared to consider, or at least that’s how Camilla interpreted the look on its utterly alien face.

Finally, it nodded.

Camilla was ready to protest again, but before she had the chance, Ricky had her by the shoulder and was pulling her through a portal. They didn’t end up back on the rooftop they had been on, but instead found themselves in a small playground across the street from an abandoned house, almost two blocks down from the apartment complex they’d been in moments before. Kayla, Ricky, and Felipe were standing over a man she didn’t recognize—a vagrant, by the look of him.

“Who the fuck is this guy?”

“This is my old pal, Gary,” said Ricky. “As soon as I saw that the Novaks were looking a little different, I suspected his involvement, and if my grasp on his power is accurate—and it probably is—I knew he wouldn’t be far away. I would have tried to fill you in a little more quickly, but you went ahead and threw yourself off a roof before I got a chance.”

“Fair point, but why are we here? And why do we have him?”

“You didn’t really think I was going to let the Novak siblings just walk away, did you?” The look on his face was infuriating. So smug. “They’ll have to come back to Gary here to have their transformation permanently undone. Then we’ll arrest all three of them.”

Camilla didn’t bother to ask how he could possibly know any of what he apparently knew about this man or his power. It didn’t seem worth the boring explanation. The other two weren’t even watching them; it seemed they’d already mentally checked out.

“What about Sean Murphy?” she asked, not quite convinced of Ricky’s plan to deal with the Novaks, but too exhausted to push the point.

Before Ricky could answer, Gary interrupted: “Why the hell would I agree to help you, sheriff?”

“Sheriff?” Camilla said, breaking into an ironic smile.

“Don’t ask,” Ricky said, shooting her an annoyed look. “You’ll cooperate with us, Gary, because if you don’t, I’ll make sure you go away for a very, very long time, instead of getting a slap on the wrist. After all, you didn’t actually hurt anyone, did you? You just turned other people into monsters and let them do the work. How much did the Novaks pay you for their transformation, by the way?”

The man, Gary, just shrugged, a wicked grin plastered on his face.

“What about Sean Murphy?” she asked again ignoring the exchange between the two men.

“Sean’s gone. I imagine he’ll be mourning his son for a while. His business took a pretty big hit tonight.”

“And after his bereavement is over?” Camilla shot a worried glance at Felipe. The boy noticed her looking and turned his eyes to the ground.

“We’ll deal with that when it comes. For right now, we need to get out of sight before the Novaks get here. Gary, don’t try anything funny. We’ll be watching.”

They made their way to the other end of the playground, and Camilla noticed that Felipe kept chancing glances at the rundown, abandoned house across the street.

“You know this neighborhood?” she asked him, trying to distract him from worrying about the few criminals in the city that were still out to get him, and the one who probably hated him more than ever right now.

“I … I grew up in that house. Back when I still had a family, parents, you know?”

She nodded. She didn’t really know what it was like to have a family; she’d grown up in foster homes, and while she’d never had any of the nightmare experiences she’d heard of other foster kids having, she’d never really been close with any of the people who looked after her, either. But still, she nodded, and that seemed to be enough for Felipe to continue.

“How the hell did I get from there to here? Every moment, every choice, they all seemed so straightforward at the time, but … Looking back, I guess it just doesn’t make much sense. Nothing makes sense, you know?”

This time she nodded more emphatically. This time she could agree very strongly with his statement.

“I know what you mean, kid,” said Kayla, pushing into him from the side and putting an arm on his shoulder. “I keep feeling like I’m going to wake up from a dream at any minute, and my waking brain will go, ‘what the fuck was that all about?’”

Felipe actually grinned, if only for a moment. Camilla caught it, looked up at Kayla and saw that the other woman had noticed, too. They smiled at each other. Maybe she isn’t so bad, she thought.

They stopped when they reached a small cluster of trees and bushes, and they turned back to where Gary stood alone, waiting for the two monsters he’d created to return.

“So who is this guy, really, and how does his power work?”

“He is—or was—a regular at the shelter,” Kayla supplied. “He’s the one who came in and attacked the place the other night, although maybe you haven’t heard about that yet?”

Camilla shot an angry glance at her partner. “No,” she said. “Ricky neglected to mention that he was attacked; I only heard some of what happened from other officers.”

“When was I supposed to tell you about it, Pérez? When I was busy chasing down a lead about that priest for you? When I found an orb that gave me powers and was almost immediately drawn into this crazy shit?”

She sighed. “Fair enough.”

“Anyway, as Kayla said, he’s a homeless man who used to spend a lot of nights at the shelter. He got kicked out once for getting a little too handsy with other guests. I was the one who kicked him out, and I guess he held a grudge, because he came back the other night, with two people he’d turned into those creatures with him, and ordered them to kill me.”

“But those ones weren’t … I mean, they didn’t act like the Novaks,” said Kayla. “They seemed dumb, mindless. They didn’t seem like they had control over themselves.”

“He said something about working on perfecting his power. I think that was part of it. He can tune the degree of transformation as he sees fit, and he can leave them with more or less of their minds or wills intact. He had to see the two in action at the shelter to gain an idea of how it worked, and I doubt they were the first or the last he experimented on before the Novaks, but obviously he’s getting better, feeling confident enough to sell his services online.”

“You said you thought he had to be nearby,” said Felipe, showing an interest in the conversation for the first time. “So they must have brought him with them when they came to meet me. Then they left him in the park and made their way down the street by car, with their transformation already underway?”

“Sounds right,” said Ricky, nodding appreciatively.

“What would have happened if they’d gotten too far away?”

“I think they would have turned back into humans, but I can’t know that for certain. It’s possible that he holds some sort of power over them where they couldn’t get too far away even if they wanted to. It’s possible that they would die if they tried.”

Camilla shivered, and saw her reaction mirrored in the others. This power shit was quickly getting too crazy to keep up with.

As they watched, a truck pulled up to the curb, and two monstrous figures—one significantly closer to being a human than the other—emerged from the covered tailgate. They approached Gary cautiously, but he didn’t look the least bit concerned.

“You see that?” she asked her partner. “He must have some degree of control over them, or else he’d be shitting his pants with them that close.”

Ricky only nodded. Of course he couldn’t give her any feedback when she made a solid observation. That would mean admitting they were equals as far as their investigative prowess went. She had her own satisfaction though, in picking up on and pointing out something he might have missed.

They watched as Gary held his hand out to the two creatures, and parts of their bodies started to flake away, turning into something that looked like dust. Layers and layers peeled away like that, until both of them were back to looking like ordinary people.

Ricky pointed and started running. Camilla was right behind him.

“Get on your knees!” he shouted. “Hands on top of your heads!” He had his gun out and was pointing it at them, his badge held in his other hand. Camilla kept both her hands on her gun as she stayed a few steps behind him. She could have been just as dangerous with a stone held in her hand, but they didn’t know that, and a stone didn’t look as threatening as a gun.

To their credit, none of the three made any attempt to resist. They dropped to their knees and laced their fingers behind their heads, and within minutes they were cuffed and it was over.

“Call it in,” Ricky told her.

“What the fuck am I even supposed to say?” she asked. But she didn’t wait for a response before she was dialing the number for the station.