Anton Strout - Dead Waters

“ Want to tell you?” he said with a nervous laugh. “No. You’ve seen what Elyse, Darryl, and Heavy Mike can do. I think I have more to fear in retribution from them than I do from you.”

“We still beat them,” I said.

“They still got away,” the student countered.

I really couldn’t argue with that, but I didn’t have to. Connor already had him by the front of his bloodied shirt.

“Make no mistake,” he said. “Your friends ran like cowards. Trust me when I say you have more to fear from us.”

The kid finally looked scared, but he also looked a little pale in general.

“Maybe we should get him to a hospital,” I said. “He is bleeding, after all.”

Connor looked down at the gash on the boy’s side where Elyse had cut him. He reached into his inside coat pocket, pulling out a Departmental favorite when it came to combat in the field, a tiny wound-up piece of cloth that looked like a human digit and bore a sectional crook in two places along it.

“What the hell is that?” the student asked.

“Mummy Fingers,” I said.

Connor nodded. He placed it against the student’s wound, and at contact, it unfurled itself, running its bandage back and forth over the spot until it staunched the flow of blood. The student squirmed as he watched it wide-eyed, and then looked up once it was fully settled into place.

“Who are you people anyway?” he asked.

I collapsed my bat down and slipped it back into its holster at my hip. “We’re the good guys,” I said.

“All right,” Connor said, grabbing the student by the rope still tangled around him and heading back toward the door we came in. “He’ll live, but he’s coming with us.”

The dazed student stumbled along after Connor, slamming into desks and knocking over chairs as he went. “I’d move faster if I were, you know, untied,” he said.

“What’s your name again?” Connor said.

“Trent,” the student said.

“Okay. . . well, then, Trent,” Connor said, “ shut up .”

Trent turned and looked at me as Connor dragged him off again. “Is he always this way?” he asked, fear in his eyes.

“No,” I said, following after them. “Sometimes he’s actually mean.”

By the time we hit the street, we had untied Trent, but Connor and I rode on either side of him once we had hailed a cab, the Inspectre riding up front. When we pulled up outside the Lovecraft Café, Trent looked confused. The Inspectre got out of the front seat of the cab and held the back door open as we pulled the student out.

“You’re taking me out for coffee?” he said.

“Inside,” Connor said, shoving him toward the coffeehouse doors. Once through the doors, the Inspectre went over to one of the big comfy chairs and collapsed into it.

“Sir?” I asked. “Are you okay? You look a little pale.”

“Just winded,” he said. “See to our young prisoner, won’t you?”

“As long as you’re okay . . .”

“Trust me,” he said. “Besides, if I expire, at least I’ll be doing it in a comfy chair, which is quite preferable to death at the hands of those tiny Harpies and skeletons.”

As the Inspectre flagged down a waitress, we left him and escorted Trent back through the movie theater, which was still not operational since Mason Redfield’s reincarnation. We kept going and entered the door marked H.P. at the back right corner, but as soon as we entered our secret offices, Trent stopped in his tracks.

“What the hell. . . ?” he said, but words left him as I watched him trying to take in the bustle of activity back here. He looked up and noticed the warding runes carved into the walls of the main bull pen.

“You guys aren’t normal police, are you?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “The normal police vacillate between laughing at us and fearing us. It’s frustrating.”

“Come on,” Connor said, grabbing him by the shirt. He pulled at Trent and the boy started walking again, still taking in everything around him as we went.

“Are you, like, Men in Black?” he asked, addressing me.

“No,” I said. “They’re fictional. You know how I know that?”

Trent shook his head.

“Because they have a huge budget and unlimited resources.”

The three of us continued walking back through the bull pen before passing through the curtain that sectioned off most of Other Division from the main work area. We were approaching our partners desk when Trent started to get back some of his focus.

“I think maybe I should call my dad,” he said. “He’s a lawyer.”

“Sit down and shut up,” Connor said, throwing the kid down onto the extra chair at our desks.

“Ow,” he said. “I thought you said you were supposed to be the good guys.”

“So?” Connor asked, sitting down at his desk. “Doesn’t mean were the gentle guys, now, does it? So, let’s get back to what you were talking about earlier. You mentioned there was a problem with your little operation over at NYU.”

Trent shook his head. “Problem?” he asked, trying to feign ignorance. “What problem?”

“Knock it off,” I said. “You’re not that convincing an actor.”

Trent looked hurt. “In all fairness, I am only a first-year. They won’t even let me pick a specific school of acting until much later on.”

Connor leaned down over him. “There’s not going to be a later on if you’re thrown out of NYU or stuck in jail, is that clear?”

Trent ran his fingers nervously through his hair. “Okay, okay. . .” he said. “You know, come to think of it, I do remember what we were talking about earlier.”

“How surprising,” Connor said, standing back up.

“So what do you want to know?” Trent asked.

“Why don’t you start with what you meant when you said there was a problem with those. . . things that came after us?”

Trent settled back into the chair, looking sheepish. “Those creatures that were attacking you,” Trent said. “They were a part of an ongoing experiment that the professor had started when he was alive. It was all part of what he called the next level of cinematic achievement—interactive films.”

“So you were finding ways to bring things to life using film,” I said.

“Yeah,” Trent said, “but despite all of the professor’s efforts, anything he animated didn’t last very long. Whatever he created would disappear back to nothingness after a short time, liquefy. He died before he could find a way to stabilize it.”

“Even so, how was he able to do even that much?” I asked.

Trent shook his head. “I don’t know. The other students didn’t really let me in on everything. Said it was because I was new . . .”

“Or maybe they wanted you for something more sinister,” I said. “Maybe they needed a little something human to get things stabilized.”

“What do you mean?” Trent asked.

“When Elyse cut you, your blood seemed to spark things off,” I said.

Trent looked down at his bandage. A little bit of the blood had soaked through to the surface, forming a tiny circle on the top of it. “Don’t remind me.”

“You said that those manifestations weren’t permanent,” I continued. “That they’d run out of steam and dissolve away.”

Trent nodded. “That seemed to be a very vexing point to Elyse, the professor, and the others,” he said.

“You know what I think?” Connor asked, and then pressed on without waiting for an answer from anyone. “I think Mason Redfield found a way to make the manifestations permanent, only he didn’t share it with you all. I think he figured out that it would take a full-on blood sacrifice.”