White. White walls, white tile floor, white ceiling covered in rectangular fluorescent white lights. The only sounds in the hospital room were the low whirring of the overhead fan, and the monitoring equipment and ventilator Chelsea was hooked up to, unconscious and unresponsive under the soft bed sheet. An oxygen mask was fitted over her face, transparent, and Mason could see the chalky white pallor of her drained lips through it. He had fooled himself into thinking he saw her flutter her eyelashes too many times by now to ascribe any real hope to the idea that she would rouse soon, and all he found himself able to do was sit in his chair, hunched over, hands clasped together and fingers laced in his lap. His sunglasses were slipping. The mask was slipping. He was in the company of the attending nurse, and a suit from the Institute who had come with as security. Their credentials of course silenced any further questioning, and although it jeopardized secrecy to have any links that could tie Chelsea back to the clandestine organization, Mason bitterly thought that she wouldn’t be answering any interview questions for a while either. Beneath the lenses, his eyes were moist, a few tears trying to well up from the cracks in his facade of stoicism.
“Could you give us the room, please?” he asked the nurse and bodyguard gruffly.
The machines monitoring Chelsea’s vitals droned on, an incessant beeping punctuating the end of his couched demand like the buzz of an angry bee. The nurse uncomfortably shifted and pretended to check her clipboard, then parted from Mason’s presence. The suit had raised a finger and begun to open his lips to protest, but even under the sunglasses, he could sense Mason’s compelling glare, and held his tongue. He dutifully nodded with a gesture that was almost a respectful bow, then vacated the premises. A folding door with see-through glass, but curtains to cover it, slid shut. The ICU room accommodations were a bit nicer here than in coach, where only thin paper curtains and a loose honor system gave the patients any semblance of privacy. And yet, that privacy would go unappreciated so long as Chelsea’s eyes remained closed.
How could this have happened? On the night Mason gave her the day off, no less. She had wanted to stay by his side and continue working. No, that was an excuse. She wanted to be by his side because she wanted to be with him, to help him however she could. He knew that, and he sent her away like a chambermaid. And some feral in a gutter attacked her and left her for dead facedown in the cold gravel. It was utterly unforgivable. As Mason balled up his fists, knuckles straining white, he wasn’t sure if this sentiment was directed at the beast who had committed the assault, or at himself for pushing her into its line of sight. He was a fool to think that he and his staff were exempt from the perils afflicting the city. While on the clock and in control of vast secret technologies and government resources, he was confident in his own abilities and the security of his sect against monsters in the dark, but outside, he realized now, they were as vulnerable as anyone else.
The counterattack had to be taken up a notch. The ferals would learn that this was a contact sport. No more.
“No more.” Mason said under his breath.
He removed his sunglasses and looked at Chelsea, his surprisingly youthful face finally letting a single tear stream down his cheek. He went to her side and sat on the edge of her bed, taking a brittle, anorexic hand in his. He had to be careful not to dislodge the innumerable IV tubes that were feeding her with fluids and chemicals to preserve her life. Her red blood cell count had begun to replenish itself, but her breathing was still shallow, as if her very stamina had been yanked right out of her being. If they hadn’t found her when they had,
Mason shook his head, and dried the tear streak on the back of his sleeve.
“Fight it, girl. You’re a part of the Institute, I know this isn’t enough to kill you. I need you at my side to protect this city. There’s a shining future for Station Bay, and you and I both have a place in it. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how dark it might seem now. I was never much of a poet back in school, but that’s the best I got. Hold onto it. When you wake up, you can give me some critiques. I can look over some of your old high school writings, and read some of those crappy paperbacks you wolf down all the time. We can do whatever you want. Just promise me you’re going to open your eyes again. That’s an order.” Mason said.
After a few long minutes, he folded her hand back on her chest, and stood, straightening his tie and replacing his sunglasses on his face.
“In the meantime, I’m going to make those monsters pay. When you wake up, there will be nothing left to be afraid of. I promise you that.” Mason said.
He hit the buzzer to notify the medical staff of his pending departure, took a final glance over his shoulder at his comatose subordinate, and then went on his way. His cellphone gave an unending busy signal. It continued long into the parking lot, when he could be sure that his depth in the bowels of Station Bay Hospital had not merely blocked his reception, and he screwed up his face in confused frustration.
“Come on, pick up, Mary. Where are you at a time like this?” he spoke aloud of Chelsea’s partner.
His right hand was in a coma, and his left hand was MIA. He had alienated the board, and the old geezers were no doubt already trying to figure out how to remove Mason from the project, and the city if they could help it. It didn’t matter that he was the one holding the gates of Hell closed, he had shown teeth, and the old dogs who had long ago had their own fangs fall out would not tolerate being made fools of. The Tracer system was failing him, and thanks to a couple brats and some inopportune fog leaks, information on the invasions was beginning to spread. Bit by bit, Mason’s resources were being taken away, and the situation was strangling him. He could feel the noose, hot and itchy, tightening around his neck in the collar of his suit. His stomach was in knots, and his fists were trembling in a subdued rage. Above all else, the good Director hated feeling powerless.
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When he found Chelsea’s assailant - or assailants - he would return that despair.
With interest.
As for ‘Mary’, her phone would never be answered again. It was bricked, rubbish at the bottom of the bay. Her unconscious form floated, half sprawled over a piece of driftwood bobbing up and down in the bay that she had managed to scramble partially onto to save herself from drowning before passing out. Her body was still wet, and how much was seawater versus how much was a cold sweat was difficult to distinguish. Her disguised power suit clung to her body. If it weren’t for the circumstances of her pose, and her very recent brush with death, any seagoing voyeur would be mistaken for thinking she was posing in a sexy dress, on account of the way it clung to and outlined her form. But, on closer inspection, it was anything but titillating. The suit, malfunctioning from the impact of being thrown across the city, and then being short circuited by seawater now that its waterproof protections were disabled, was even now running a low electric current through Holly’s body. It twitched her nerves and made her twist and turn a little side to side, quietly spasming and seizing for hours. The muscle fibers, neural proteins, and assorted sinews, ligaments, and bone marrows of many murdered ferals was woven together beneath the gilded skin of the suit, and a combination of the brush with the Faceless Man, and this cataclysmic malfunction, had reawakened in those remnants a dark, primal wrath, and hunger for retribution. The resentment of those slain lived on in the outfit stitched together from their death, and the unit began to compress and strangle Holly inside. Her veins bulged and glowed faintly where the essence of the beasts had begun to penetrate into her body, the inside of the suit piercing and injecting her beneath the skin and into her blood vessels like the microscopic barbs of stinging jellyfish.
Like the basilisk’s rattle before them - inanimate, organic, having been tied to a living thing, but now something that could be called a mere object - the countless animal proteins coursing through Holly’s jittering body carried their memory, and their psychic mass, with them. In such an intimate binding, their demand for justice wrapped around Holly’s heart with the reviving force of a defibrillator. Whispers pulsed in her ears as her heart began to pound, and her eyes shot open, the pupils narrowed to feline slits. Like Chikita before her, Holly was - for the moment - changed by the influence of magical beasts she had taken into her body. But, upon regaining her senses and awareness - enough to remember what had happened, and quake with fury toward the Faceless Man - Holly was able to calm herself and recognize two basic distinctions from her melding versus Chikita’s. While Chikita had deliberately sought out ferals to kill and absorb, Holly had become one with them by virtue of dumb luck, a freak accident born of the unpredictability of prototype biosuits. The second contrast was that, while Chikita clearly harbored unrelenting murderous fury toward the Faceless Man for whatever reason, her vengeance was her own. The ferals whose souls she took were a means to an end, and she did not carry their weight on her shoulders. They could watch from inside her being as she pursued her revenge, but, no mistakes be made, it was not their battle to win.
Holly, however disaffected she may have been previously - wearing masks upon masks since she had been stranded in this strange alien world, forced to pose as countless different roles like an actor upon a stage in the fleeting hope of reclaiming a part of herself long stolen, whose phantom ache still gave her migraines, Holly who never confused workplace alliances with friendship, or the assumed responsibility and care for students under her teacher persona for affection - the emotionless and distant Holly now shared one desire in common with the psychometric memories entombed in her clothes - she wanted the Faceless Man’s head, if he even had one, on a pike. Not just for herself, or to reclaim her third eye. Now that she felt the grudge of the beings set up like bowling pins for the organization she attached herself to to be knocked down, the only reconciliation she could make, and the only relief from her guilt she could find, would be to defeat the Faceless Man - together with the souls whose memories she had inherited.
And while Mason and Holly silently made their vows to enact justice - both on whomever they believed to be the sum of all the world’s evils for now - and while Chikita pursued her own long standing revenge in the guts of Station Bay, deep within the clammy dark, guided only by the blue glow of Yukihana’s ghostly light - there was one more who harbored a thirst for revenge. Not very far from Chikita now, not very far away at all, gestating under the bubbling tar, the jester named Luchesi assumed a petrified fetal position as all layers of his being were dissected and stripped away, and the rhythm he followed, the directive he had marched to since becoming the Checkered Slasher, emboldened itself and grew like a cancer to consume him from the inside out. Within his metamorphosis, all was made clear.
Cuppy. Freyja. And of course, my dear Richie. I know your names and faces now. I will chase you to the ends of the earth and tear you to pieces, and you will burn with the rest of this savage jungle of a city. Father, how I wish you were here so that I could kill you twice. Heaven knows I’ve gutted you over and over again in my dreams too many times to count. When I look at the weak little humans, and hesitation stays my hand, I picture you, you standing over my beaten, broken mother. You showed me how to murder. I truly am my father’s son. I see your brutish face, and it becomes crystal clear, and so effortless. Dregs, miserable louts degenerated from a beautiful lie called society. None of you are real. None of you are worthy. None of you hold authority over me, court jester for all the demons in Hell, and all the angels in Heaven. By my claws you will all die.
A trickle of bubbles floated up to the surface of the sea of Black Rain.
When I hatch, I will be so much more than a man. When I stroll the Backyards of the cosmos again, it will not be as your choirboy, Dark Lord. You too will be tatters at my feet. Then, when I have taken all you have taught me and used it to destroy you, only then will you have my thanks, my Master. You must have known when you took me in, from the moment you looked into my clouded, haunted eyes and saw the monster waiting inside, that raising your hand to strike me was the worst mistake you could have possibly made. Your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell.