Read Enter the Janitor (The Cleaners) (Volume 1) Online
Authors: Josh Vogt
Chapter Thirty
Dani hollered for Sydney as Ben collapsed into her arms. He weighed far heavier than she’d expected, and she nearly sprained her back trying to keep him up. Sydney appeared and added his support. They laid the janitor flat. Ben looked pale and his breaths came shallow. His arms and legs twitched.
“What’s wrong with him?” Dani asked, crouched over him. Had the spell Stewart cast been too much? Had he suffered a heart attack or brain aneurysm?
“Wrong?” Sydney echoed. “He’s an aged man who took himself beyond his limits in this fool’s escapade. He needs a chance to recuperate.”
She looked up. “We need to get him out of here. Find a place for him to rest.”
He tilted his head to where the portal had vanished. “It seems the exit has been closed. Permanently.”
Dani stood and frowned at the wall. Stewart had gone back to picking through the garbage bag contents, while Sydney watched her expectantly.
“If all they wanted to do was trap us in here,” she said, “why’d they stick around to trade bruises?”
“That was the single way in and out of this portion of HQ,” Sydney said. “Closing such an established portal is not as simple as flipping a switch. It requires considerable strength; with the more practiced Ascendants off on their mission with Destin, my assumption is the ones we faced here were tasked to delay us until they could cut the connection.”
Dani swiped her hair back in frustration, only remembering her baldness when she touched bare skin. Great. Now she’d transferred whatever germs she’d picked up on her gloves to her head. She dropped her hand and glowered.
“Can’t you just break open a hole in one of these walls and keep busting through them until we get outside or into another section of the building?”
“Dani, Headquarters isn’t a cohesive structure. Didn’t Ben mention?”
“He said something about various entrances once, but didn’t elaborate.”
Sydney tapped fingertips. “Each stretch of offices, supply depots, and containment centers is a separate entity unto itself, confined within a pocket reality and connected through the window-watchers’ glassways. If we broke through far enough, we’d end up falling into the cracks between our realm and that of the Pantheons. The Gutters. Not a pleasant place to visit, assuming you survive the first step.”
“We can’t just sit here and wait until they come back. We need to think of something.”
“Let me know when you do.”
Ignoring her scowl, Sydney retrieved the white jacket Ben had torn off the Ascendant and held it up for inspection. His nose scrunched.
“Not exactly my style, but beggars mustn’t choose, and all that blather.” The white material faded to gray and turned tattered and threadbare. Sydney slipped into this and adjusted it about his shoulders. “Better. They do say the vagabond style is all the rage these days.”
Not a bad look, she silently admitted. With his close-cut hair, boyish features and mismatched clothes, he held the air of a down-on-his-luck street magician. She kept this opinion to herself. Didn’t want him to think she actually noticed his appearance.
She stomped over to one of the carts left behind in the evacuation. There, she retrieved wipes, all-purpose cleaner, and a sponge. So armed, she went to work restoring a semblance of personal sanitation. It was all she could do until they came up with a plan.
As she polished her scalp, she glared around. Wonderful. Trapped in a magical prison with hundreds of Scum creatures wanting to chew on her vital organs. This made studying for semester finals seem like a vacation.
Plastic and cloth rustled as Stewart sat next to her. She glanced at him. He didn’t look as silly without his newspaper jacket and plastic bowler hat, but he didn’t exactly boost her confidence, either. Maybe if he had one of those trash golems around …
“I don’t suppose you’ve got some whizmajig spell that can transport us back to your dump, huh?”
He tugged an ear. “Lass, if’n I did, you think I’d still be here, waitin’ for you to come pop me free?”
“Good point.”
“What’s you doin’ here, anyhoo? Thought you’d be far and away by now.”
She explained what had happened after they escaped the dump. She added everything Ben had told her about the hybrid Petty being born, plus Destin removing her and Ben so he could go after it himself. As she started in on the prison break, Stewart cut her off with a tongue-click of disapproval.
“What?” she asked.
He tilted his head to where Sydney stood, craning his neck to try and admire himself in the new jacket. “Now, lass, I’s not one to be judgin’ your pick o’ beaus, but—”
Dani tossed a used wipe back onto the cart. “I tell you all that and you’re worried about me hooking up with an overgrown brat?”
The floor shuddered. Stewart’s spine stiffened.
“Oh dear,” he said.
“What?” She snatched up a squeegee. “What’s wrong?”
Sydney hurried over. He and the trash mage exchanged a look, and the entropy mage grimaced.
“I don’t think Ben expected them to go this far. Nothing we can do to stop it now. Do you have any protective measures in that bag of tricks?”
Stewart plunged a hand into the trash bag, concentration etched on his face.
“What’s happening?” Dani asked.
“Consider it a dead man’s switch in case a portion of HQ is compromised,” Sydney said. “Or, say, if a janitor decides to start freeing Corrupt prisoners.”
Stewart held up a ball of crumpled bubble wrap.
Sydney nodded. “That’ll do.”
The trash mage bent over the plastic clump and began muttering as he traced sigils around it. Dani jabbed the squeegee at Sydney’s chest.
“Tell me—”
He tapped the edge, and the tool crumbled into nothingness. “They’re going to collapse this portion of HQ.”
The blood drained from her face. “Collapse?”
“The entirety of the Recycling Center will implode, purging everything and everyone it contains. The option remains for us to break out into the Gutters. I suggest we take it.”
“But you said—”
“When presented with the complete certainty of a horrible death and the mere possibility of a horrible death, which would you choose?” He pointed to Ben. “You and Stewart carry the old man. I’ll need both hands to open the way. Unless you wish to leave him behind.”
Dani tried to stare him down. Even with Carl still threatening to decapitate him, how could she trust what he said? For all she knew, he could take them back to the Cleansers, or deliver them to the urmoch to be eaten alive.
His gaze didn’t waver, and finally she huffed and waved for Stewart to join her by Ben.
“I got his arms,” she said. “You get his feet.”
They hauled the janitor up between them. Sweat beaded Dani’s forehead as they trudged over to Sydney, who had moved to the wall where the portal had been. He rapped on it as if testing for studs behind the stone.
Another tremor shook the chamber. Stewart squawked and almost dropped Ben’s feet. As Dani struggled to compensate, she looked to Sydney, wondering why he hadn’t opened the way out yet. Then she noticed the thin line of his mouth, the twitch of a cheek, and the slightest tremble to his hands.
He was frightened. And for someone who could erase objects and people from existence with a touch, realizing he feared what waited in the Gutters unsettled Dani more than anything.
Then he placed his hands on the wall and closed his eyes. The wall disintegrated into a square hole. Wind howled into their faces, bringing with it scents of mulch, ice, and another sharp smell that, oddly, made Dani remember visiting elephants at a zoo as a child.
Darkness waited beyond.
Sydney’s smile wavered, then firmed as he turned to her and extended a hand. “Trust me.”
She stepped up beside him, Ben a heavy weight on her shoulders. A horrendous metallic shrieking started behind them, along with an eruption of heat that struck her back.
Sydney shouted, “Jump!”
They leapt through. The moment she crossed the threshold, Ben’s weight vanished. An odd momentum caught her and spun her around. Stewart, Sydney, and Ben fell alongside her, flailing in the void. The light of the Recycling Center dwindled fast, but the opening remained large enough for her to see what came next.
As the pocket reality containing the Recycling Center shrank and twisted in on itself. Dani’s eyes strained to make sense of the warped dimensions.
The walls rippled like waves, picking up fragments of the collapsing chamber and flinging it all toward the hole Sydney had created. Dani realized that normally it would’ve all shrunk into a homogenous, lifeless mass, but they’d given some of it a way to escape the pressure.
A last twist and scrunch, as if a giant fist clenched around it. Glittering debris and bodies spewed into the space overhead and fell after them. The light winked out.
They plummeted into darkness.
***
Chapter Thirty-one
Dani didn’t feel the ground when she hit. With a loud pop, the fall just ceased, as if the laws of inertia and momentum had wandered off to check the pantry for a snack. She lay on a gritty surface which felt neither hot nor cold. Its rough texture scraped her cheek as she stirred, fearing a broken neck, snapped knees, or other hideous injury.
A quick self-analysis proved her body responded as she commanded it. She had her share of aches and bruises from the brawl in the Recycling Center, but otherwise her arms and legs moved fine, and she could think clearly. But what about the others?
Fingers dug into gray dirt as she gathered herself.
Dirt?
She jerked upright, but dust stung her eyes and made them water. Her hands trembled as she fought the urge to knuckle at the pain. It would just grind the particles in more. Possible eye and skin infections shot through her mind.
Conjunctivitis. Septic shock.
Her breaths quickened as panic stirred.
Cellulitis. Gangrene. Osteomye—
She mentally snapped at herself.
Stop already. You just fell through some interdimensional hole and you’re worried about infections? Do you really think that’s what’s important right now?
You sure about this?
the jittery part of herself asked.
Because I’m just getting started on this list. Got some nice necrotizing skin disease we could fixate on.
If she’d been exposed to anything, there was no undoing it. She could have a hissy fit or she could put on her big girl panties and deal with the situation at hand.
She took a slow breath, and this time the exhale came out calmer. Right. Perhaps it was time to figure out where her companions had gotten off to.
Blinking away the dirt, she tried to make sense of where she’d landed. The sky was a black, starless expanse dropping to a colorless horizon. Craters pockmarked the ground around her, with stark shadows and gray boulders reminding her of photos she’d seen of the moon’s surface.
“Anyone?” Her call came out hoarse—probably from all the screaming she did during the fall.
Someone moved by her side. A pale hand reached for her. Dani almost took it, until tattooed wings quivered in her peripheral vision.
The gnash—whatever a gnash was—had been thrown free in the collapse of the Recycling Center, and lay in its chains a few feet away. The iron bands had tangled around its legs and neck, but one arm had gotten loose, and it used this to drag itself toward her. Its albino form almost shone in contrast to the surrounding bleakness.
“Come to the gnash, pretty thing
,” it said.
“The gnash will protect you.”
She crab-crawled a few feet away, then stood on shaky legs. “I’d rather not get eaten,” she said, holding a hand to her chest.
“The gnash does not eat helpless little girls.”
She swallowed. “What does the gnash eat?”
“Little girls who fight back. The gnash savors the clawing and screaming and kicking and—”
“Well, I’m not going to fight right now, okay? So, no munching.”
Its throat-eyes brimmed with yellow tears.
“No fighting for the gnash? No fleeing?”
She turned her back on the creature to scan the area for the others. A hand settled on her shoulder. She screamed, spun, and punched with all her strength. Knuckles connected with a flat stomach.
Sydney gasped and fell back, clutching his abdomen.
Dani stood over him, fists shaking. “Don’t do that!”
He managed a weak smile. “I deserved that. Bad manners to sneak up on a lady.”
“Be glad I didn’t break your nose. Where are we?”
With a hand twirl, he invited her to look for herself. Concrete slabs, shattered tiles and rebar lay all about, either half-buried in the colorless earth or forming miniature craters of their own. Stewart sat dejectedly on a pile of cinder blocks, with Ben’s sprawled form at his feet. The janitor remained unconscious. Neither looked hurt by however far they’d fallen, nor had any of the following debris proven deadly.
Her gaze shifted to the surrounding landscape and her breath caught as she realized the scope of the place.
They stood at the base of a low range of ashen mountain peaks. A stretch of gray earth ran a few hundred feet out from the mountain roots until it broke off into the jagged edge of a ravine. Dani tracked the length of the canyon, which ran out of sight in both directions and appeared to have no opposing edge—simply a place where the world fell away into nothingness.
Okay. We aren’t going that way.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“I believe you’re repeating yourself,” Sydney said as he stood.
“Yeah. You didn’t answer, so I asked again.”
He patted dust off his shoulders, which improved the state of his jacket not at all. “We’re in the Gutters. A realm of dead worlds and little else. Closest thing you’ll come to Limbo outside of some questionable religious beliefs.”
She snorted, and then glanced at him in suspicion. A decent joke and a straight answer all at once? What prompted that?
“But where in the Gutters? Where do we go from here?”
“Unfortunately, your first question doesn’t have a real answer. The Gutters aren’t a place you can map out. There are intersections between this realm and ours, but I’m unfamiliar with the one we came through. As for the second, I didn’t have the luxury of planning much beyond keeping us from being impacted into our own bowels.”
Dani adjusted her gloves as she tried to figure out the best course of action. With Ben still out of commission and Sydney being anything but optimistic, it looked like she needed to take the lead.
“We obviously can’t stay here,” she said. “We need to move. Try and find some shelter, maybe see if we can scrounge up anything to eat and drink.” Not that she’d trust anything unless it was boiled for a few hours.
Giardia. Dracunculiasis. Bilhar—
“Shut up,” she growled under her breath. “Not helping.”
Sydney frowned, perhaps thinking the mutter aimed at him. “When I say this is a realm of dead worlds, I mean it in the utmost sense. Nothing grows here. No water either. The only living things you’ll encounter in the Gutters are trapped here, passing through, or hiding out—and you rarely want to meet up with something that considers this realm a decent hiding place.”
“Speaking of encountering things,” she said, “we’ve got another problem. Something came through with us. Calls itself a gnash.”
Sydney looked over at where the creature lay in its bonds. “Indeed.”
“So, uh, what exactly is it?”
Sydney chuckled. “A gnash is a manifestation of Corrupt hunger. So long as you don’t tempt it with what it wants, it will remain relatively docile. Show fear or attempt to run, however, and it will attack.”
The creature screeched through its nail-teeth.
“The gnash knows this place. The safe places. The hungry places. Do not leave the gnash alone.”
It looked up at them, and Dani had the impression it was trying to make puppy eyes. The fact that its eyes were situated along its throat made the attempt all the more disturbing.
She went over and crouched by the gnash, though not too close. “You know where we are?”
“The gnash travels far,”
it said.
“The gnash knows the darkness of this realm-not-realm as well as the void always in the gnash’s stomach. Places to go between and back and forward. Will none feed the gnash?”
“You’re talking about intersections. Ways we can get back to our realm.”
“Yes. Gnash knows. One is near, but the gnash’s legs are weak from hunger. Give the gnash strength to walk, and it will show the path.”
It reached for her with its free hand, but she stood and returned to Sydney, who looked at her with alarm.
“Dani? Surely you don’t mean to—”
She snapped a hand up. “I don’t plan on moping around here until we starve or die of thirst. He’s not my first pick for a tour guide, but unless you’re lying about not knowing where we are, we don’t have many other options.”
His voice lowered. “I’ve dealt with such creatures before. Given the first opportunity, you’ll be halfway down its maw before you can scream.”
“Only if I tempt it first, like you said. And if it turns violent, I’m sure you can protect me.” She smiled at the liquid band dimpling his neck. “Carl isn’t going to decapitate you for killing Scum.”
“Therein lies … a problem.” Sydney cleared his throat. Despite the surrounding gloom, Dani thought he flushed. “Entropy does not exist within this place. Many of the natural laws do not apply here.”
Her brows rose. “You’re powerless?”
He made a shushing motion. “In essence. Until Ben awakes, we are reliant on you and any muckwork he,” he pointed an elbow at Stewart, “can summon. Can we keep from shouting that fact?”
She briefly shut her eyes. No wonder he’d feared entering this place. If it nullified his ability, he must be feeling vulnerable, something she doubted his ego suffered well. While a small part of her gloated at this, she also knew they might need his skill, the gnash being one of many unknown threats.
Dani woke her power just enough to search the area for elements she could whip into a disaster.
“Okay.” She opened her eyes. “There’s air here, and I can sense earth, so my powers aren’t out of the question. But so long as the gnash doesn’t know you can’t hurt it, you can still act like a threat. Now go get that beast freed enough to walk, but leave the chains on its neck.”
Sydney peered at her. “You’ve changed since we first met.”
He bowed and, to Dani’s pleasant surprise, went to do as told without further argument. Mulling over what he meant by her having changed, she joined Stewart in his vigil by Ben.
“Sorry for the mess,” she said. “I’d say something about frying pans and fires, but it’d just sound stupid.”
Stewart squinted up at her. “Lass, if you hadn’t come along, I’d be smaller’n a pea’s spit right about now. I owes you my life.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” she said. “Good thing is, I think we might have a way out of here.”
He sucked through his teeth as he nodded. “Nasty place, the Gutters. Heard o’ it. Never thought I’s be seein’ it with me own eyes.”
She eyed the garbage bag he’d somehow held on to during their tumble. “Anything else useful in there?”
Stewart rummaged through the bag. “Aha.” He held up a used matchbook. “This may help.”
A wave of his hand, and the matchbook vanished. Dani wondered what this was supposed to accomplish until she took a second look at his hand. His fingers had become five giant matches. He struck the thumb-match off the ground and it blazed to life. This returned some color to their faces and clothes, but didn’t illuminate anything more than a few yards away.
Sydney came over with the gnash trailing him on a chain leash. It looked mournful as it hunched along, as if expecting a swat on the nose for peeing on the carpet. Dani stood between it and Ben, making sure it didn’t get any ideas about snacking on what it might assume was a helpless victim. She took the chain from the mage and tried to not think too hard about what the other end connected to. Like the blot-hound, this creature made her think of an oversized germ, a virus given monstrous proportions that needed to be destroyed. For now, though, it might prove useful.
“You can carry Ben,” she told Sydney.
He sighed. “From prisoner to pack mule. Have I not suffered enough?”
“I’ll let you know when you have.” A rattle of the leash brought the gnash’s attention to her. “Take us to the nearest intersection. No funny business.”
The gnash’s throat-eyes glistened.
“Hunger is never funny.”
It trotted toward the gray mountains and pulled her behind.
***