James Hynes: Kings of Infinite Space

“Goddammit!” shouted Callie, and she ran through the barrage of ring binders and pen cups and hard hats into Rick’s office; Paul was a half step behind her. The pale men on either side rushed after them, and Paul slammed the door in their faces. But it didn’t have a lock, so he dropped his scissors and planted his back against the door, digging his heels into the carpet. The bright security lights in the corners of the courtyard filled Rick’s office with a harsh, bleaching light, throwing the stark shadows of the dying oak’s branches across the walls and desk and carpet. Paul saw Preston in the courtyard below, prowling the deck on the balls of his feet, holding his semiautomatic pistol at his shoulder in a two-handed grip. When he saw Callie and Paul through the window, he waved them towards the courtyard and shouted something. Callie dropped her stapler, snatched up the chair next to the little table, and slung it as hard as she could against the window. But the window didn’t break, it only thrummed, making the office hum with a deep bass note like the inside of a bell. At the same moment Paul felt a steady, almost irresistible pressure against the door at his back.

“Hurry!” he cried, and Callie shouted wordlessly and whanged the chair against the window again. Still nothing happened; the bass thrumming only deepened. Callie hadn’t even chipped the glass. She roared in frustration, hurling the chair over her head at the glass. It bounded back at her, and she batted it aside, then she slid over Rick’s desktop on her hip. She tried to lift his high-backed office chair, but it twisted from her grasp and crashed to the floor.

The soles of Paul’s feet burned across the carpet. Over his shoulder he saw pale fingers curled around the edge of the door, and the chant came through, “Are we not men? Are we not men?”

“Callie!” cried Paul, and Callie cast about frantically and grabbed Rick’s computer monitor with both hands, yanking it out to the limit of its connecting cords, then with a mighty effort wrenching it free, the cords flailing wildly like snakes. Paul whined with exertion and dug his toes into the carpet, and Callie hoisted the monitor over her head with both hands like a caveman flinging a boulder and heaved it at the doorway. But the shot went wild, and Paul ducked as the monitor crashed against the edge of the door and then landed with a crunch in the middle of the floor. He was propelled forward onto his knees, and the door slammed open against the wall.

“Are we not men?” chanted the mob of pale faces in the harsh light, but right in front, wedged together in the doorway, were Colonel and Olivia Haddock. Colonel’s tie was loose, his shirt front streaked with grime and damp, his forearm wrapped in a towel that was soaked with blood. His eyes were wild and his chest heaved; one shoulder was crushed against the doorjamb, the other arm propped across the door, blocking Olivia. Her eyes were cold and furious; the tiara was gone and her hair awry. Her red velvet homecoming gown was ruined, soaked and stained, clinging to her like wet terry cloth. She clawed at Colonel’s arm, trying to get into the room, while behind them the faces of the pale men bobbed and swayed.

“You got one last chance, Professor,” gasped Colonel. He stared at Paul almost as if he couldn’t see him, and Paul scrambled to his feet, dancing around the shattered monitor in the center of the office. Callie snatched Rick’s desk lamp off the desk, yanked its plug out of the power strip, and began to hammer at the glass behind the desk with the weighted base of the lamp, grunting with each blow. Paul glanced back and saw Preston below in the courtyard pointing his pistol at the window with one hand, and waving Paul and Callie away with the other.

“Get back!” Paul heard him shout, but then Preston glanced up and leaped aside at the last minute as a pale man landed plop on the deck from above. From opposite sides of the glass, Paul, Callie, and Preston saw pale men scuttling along the roofline of the courtyard, beyond the glare of the security lights. Several had already made the leap down to the deck, and Preston grasped his weapon with both hands, jerking it from side to side as he was backed up against the trunk of the dying oak by three crouching pale men. Another pale man had leaped into the upper branches of the tree, and he swung like a spider downward, limb by limb, hand over hand, towards Preston.

“Paul, you got. . ten seconds. . to kill her,” panted Colonel, his arm trembling under the pressure of Olivia and the pale homeless men behind him. “I can’t. . hold them. . any longer.”

Olivia’s mouth was cursing silently, spittle flying from her lips. Some of the homeless men were already reaching over Colonel’s head or trying to crawl between his legs. Over his own head Paul heard the sickening creak of the ceiling, and he saw bulges moving from panel to panel. One of the panels over the desk started to slide away.

Paul snatched Rick’s phone off the desk and yanked the cord free in one go. He twirled the handset at the end of its cord like a bola, glancing from the door to the ceiling. Callie put her back into the corner of the two windows and squeezed the neck of the lamp. Paul met her gaze for an instant. “I love you,” he almost said, but he didn’t think she’d want to hear it just at the moment. Instead, he turned towards the door, swinging the handset faster. “Come and get me,” he said.

Colonel shook his head. “You’re a fool,” he said, and slowly relaxed his arm. Olivia crouched, gathering her sodden skirt in one hand. Pale hands reached above and around Colonel and Olivia. Boy G’s savagely smiling face appeared in the gap over the desk.

Then everyone — Colonel, Olivia, the pale men in the doorway, Boy G, even Callie and Paul — was frozen in place by a long, murderous hiss. The temperature in the room dropped drastically, as if an arctic wind had blown through, and the skin of Paul’s arm started out in goose pimples. Standing on the corner of Rick’s desk, hissing evilly at the doorway, was Charlotte, her black jaws wide, her ears back. Her fur bristled, and her tail stood erect. Her back arched like a cardboard Halloween cutout.

Colonel and Olivia recoiled in the doorway, and the pale men behind them shrank back, moaning in unison, a long, diminuendo “Ohhhhhhhhhhh!” Charlotte lifted her black gaze to the ceiling and hissed again, and Boy G’s face retreated into the darkness.

“What the hell is that?” gasped Callie.

Paul stared at Charlotte in wonderment. He’d never seen her outside of his residence before. He forgot to swing the handset, and it clattered to the carpet at the end of the cord.

“That’s my cat,” he said.

In the electric silence Charlotte relaxed her spine and curled slowly around herself, trotting towards the other end of the desk. She hissed at Paul as she passed, though not as murderously, more in the spirit of “What are you looking at?” Then, as the freezing cold prickled the skin of everyone in the room, she leapt at the window overlooking the courtyard.

The window disintegrated — the whole window, all at once — and an infinity of tiny, blunt fragments like windshield glass sagged away from the frame and cascaded in a glissando through the branches of the tree to the courtyard deck below. Charlotte leaped straight through the glittering waterfall of glass and landed lightly on a large limb of the tree just below the window. The humid air of a warm Texas evening flooded through the wide gap, and Charlotte glanced back at Paul and gave him a curt little mrow like a command, then started down the limb towards the trunk.

Paul dropped the phone and lunged over the desk for Callie. He grabbed her by the wrist and practically flung her out the open window. She shrieked, but the limb caught her in the midriff and she clutched it with both arms. Paul followed an instant later, knocking himself nearly breathless, and the two of them swung for a moment by their fingers and then dropped the three or four feet to the deck, prancing on tiptoe among the atomized glass.