Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

eyed his watch, which was back on his wrist again. I’d missed my chance to bring it back to Jenna. I wasn’t sure how I could manage to steal it now without killing the man. The more time I spent with him, the less I wanted to do that. McKesson was anything but a friend, but he was dedicated to patrolling these strange phenomena, and I wasn’t sure his methods were the wrong ones. Did our world really want to know what he was doing and why? Physicists didn’t like being wrong any more than the rest of us. If I went around talking about these vortexes, even with some evidence, I was unlikely to be met with enthusiasm and praise. Sometimes people just believed what they wanted to believe.
    “Damn,” McKesson said, stopping in the breezeway.
    I walked up behind him and saw what he was talking about. Holly’s landlady lay sprawled on the concrete. He stooped over her, checking her neck for a pulse.
    “Is she alive?” I asked.
    He shook his head.
    “You think it was the Gray Men?”
    “Nah,” he said. “No marks on her. Heart attack, most likely. She was the nosy type. She probably followed us and saw us walk into thin air in the alley. The shock must have killed her.”
    He bent down with a grunt and attempted some halfhearted CPR. He pushed down rhythmically on the landlady’s sequin-covered shirt. It rasped under the touch of his hands. She showed no signs of reviving. I was glad I wasn’t the one in medical trouble. McKesson wasn’t the nurturing type.
    “We’ve got to call an ambulance,” I said.
    McKesson gave a heavy sigh. “Yeah, but I’ll be filling out paperwork until Tuesday if I do it. You call it in, will you?”
    I grimaced but pulled out my throwaway phone and made the anonymous emergency call. McKesson gave up after a few minutes of CPR. He shooed away passersby, which were few, by flashing his badge and telling them help was on the way.
    “You haven’t asked me yet why I did it,” I said.
    “Did what?”
    “Threw your watch in there.”
    “Oh, that,” he chuckled. “I know why you did it. You couldn’t stand it any longer. A man like you—you’re a bundle of curiosity. You’ve been investigating these things for years, and like the proverbial cat, you aren’t going to stop until you’re dead. Of course you wanted to see what was on the other side.”
    “What was it like for you? The first time you stepped out of our world?”
    “Bad. I wandered into a bad place while checking out a murder. I was assigned to homicide originally, you know. But when I got back home, I became a department of one. Now I’m in charge of investigating freaky stuff like this. I don’t have an official title or assignment. Everyone at the department knows they are supposed to call me when some really weird shit happens. It used to be once a month, maybe. Lately, it’s been happening every day.”
    “Bad how?” I asked.
    “What?”
    “The world you walked into first. You said it was bad. What was it like?”
    McKesson stopped and looked at me with guarded eyes. “All glaring, blue-white light. Like heaven maybe, except hot and uncomfortable. I think I might have gone mad out there, if I’d stayed much longer. The ground was reflective, like ground glass or diamond dust.”
    “Sounds enchanting.”
    He snorted. “It might have been with goggles and a gallon of sunscreen. What was really upsetting was the rip itself. It wasn’t in the same location on the other side, you see. That happens sometimes. I had to travel for miles across—I don’t even know how to describe it. The place was like an endless beach of blinding tiny mirrors. I came back with a severe sunburn. Radiation burns, the docs told me. My own primary care physician reported me to some Department of Energy people, suspecting I’d been playing with unshielded uranium or a similar substance. Maybe they still think that. I’ll get skin cancer in another decade, they told me. Sometimes, when I wake up, I taste metal in my mouth and my bones ache…and I know why.”
    I hadn’t considered the possibility of a radiation dose. I decided to change the topic.
    “What about these Gray Men?” I asked. “They’re coming through at will now, killing people in weird ways. Have they always been able to do that?”
    “That’s all new. Usually, we get some kind of beast wandering through—not people like us.”
    “Beast? You mean like a monster?”
    McKesson shook his head. “No rubber suits. Just their idea of animals, I