Nocturnal

The Rumpus Room

Pookie’s heart seemed to bounce all over his chest, enough to make him wonder if left-arm pain wasn’t next, followed by his ticker giving him the bird and just shutting down in protest.

He slid his phone back in his pocket, then tilted his head toward the gunshot victim. “Congratulations, Terminator. You just terminated a stuffed bear.”

“Fuck you,” Bryan said. “And that’s not a bear.”

Their flashlight beams played off the target of Bryan’s gunfire. It was big, and it was stuffed, as evidenced by the dry strands of dark orange fur floating in their flashlight beams … but Bryan was right about one thing — it wasn’t a bear.

Bears don’t have opposable thumbs.

Bears don’t have four eyes.

It had rear legs the size of oil barrels, and long front arms that hung down to the ground. It would have walked half upright, gorilla style. Two bullets had hit the body — one in the shoulder and one in the thigh — ripping off chunks of orange fur and exposing a white, Styrofoam-like material beneath. Bryan’s third shot had shattered one of the glass eyes. Two eyes to the right of the squished nose, two to the left — the eyes were so fucked up, so out there, that they almost made you miss the mouth full of pointy, inch-long teeth.

Pookie reached out a finger and poked the thing, just to make sure it was, indeed, truly dead. The fur felt dry, stiff and brittle.

“This is messed up,” he said. “Erickson makes giant jackalopes?”

Bryan picked up his shell casings and put them in his pocket. “What’s a jackalope?” He moved to the wall inside the door, sliding hands searching for a light switch.

“Half jackrabbit, half antelope,” Pookie said. “It’s fake taxidermy, a rabbit with antelope horns. People with nothing better to do put different animals together to make weird shit. Erickson is doing something like that.”

Pookie heard the click of a heavy switch. The room filled with light.

The bear-thing wasn’t alone.

“Dude,” Pookie said, “this is pretty fucked-up right here.”

Jebediah Erickson’s collection of fake taxidermy lined the room’s walls. A dozen creatures, each as monstrous as Ol’ Four Eyes. And standing between some of those creatures, five more that didn’t look fake, and were even more nightmarish because of their familiarity.

He had stuffed people.

Bryan walked up to one. “I don’t know much about taxidermy, but this guy looks real.”

Pookie walked over to join Bryan. A man, holding a crowbar. A few strands of hair clung to the crowbar’s nail-pulling edge. Blue glass eyes stared out from the dead face, each looking in a slightly different direction. He wore tan slacks, brown loafers and a white shirt with a blue Izod sweater vest. His brittle blond hair was feathered in a style straight out of the ’80s.

Bryan pointed to a white fleck glued to the edge of the crowbar. “Piece of a tooth?”

Pookie leaned forward to look. “Yeah. A kid’s tooth, I think.”

If this was real, which Pookie doubted, the taxidermist was a long ways from getting his union certification. The man’s skin looked taut and leathery. He wore a smile, but Pookie couldn’t be sure if that was from the too-tight skin or the “artist’s” sense of humor.

Bryan reached out and gently poked the stuffed man’s right ear — it was tilted, barely attached. “Can you get DNA info out of something that’s been stuffed?”

Pookie shrugged. “No idea. You thinking this is a Zed?”

Bryan nodded. “Too bad we can’t test it.”

“We can,” Pookie said. “Robin has one of those RapScan doohickeys at her apartment. It’s worth a shot.” Pookie reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a small evidence envelope. He held it up. “You gotta do the honors.”

“Pussy,” Bryan said as he took the envelope. He gently pulled the ear off the man and slid it inside. The envelope went into his pocket.

He turned, then pointed down and to the right. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

He was pointing at a little black girl, stiff and rigid, forever frozen in her final pose. She held a knife in her left hand and a fork in her right. Her skin had started to split on the left forearm, pulling away from the white foam material underneath.

Bryan tilted his head back and sniffed at the air. He turned in place and sniffed again, his nose wrinkling.

“Pooks, you smell that?”

Pookie sniffed. The faint odor of ammonia? That, and some other things he couldn’t name. “Yeah, I do. You find the source, I’ll get some shots of these things.”

Pookie pulled out his phone and snapped pictures: the little girl; the crowbar-man; the other stuffed people; a massive, muscular five-hundred-pound thing that looked an awful lot like a predatory human-beetle hybrid; a woman in a summer dress who was normal save for skin covered with inch-long scales that glimmered soft, rainbow reflections of the lights above; a black-furred thing on all fours that was about as big as a German shepherd, but with sharp, foot-long pincers instead of jaws.

“Pooks, come check this out.”

Bryan was at the back of the room, staring through an open door. Pookie joined him, looking in at a ten-foot-by-twenty-foot room made of old, ill-fitting bricks. In the middle sat a stainless-steel workbench. Metal workshop shelves full of boxes and pull-out drawers lined the walls. A closed, old-style bank vault door — complete with a spinning wheel-lock — took up the entire far wall.

On the center of the workbench sat a rig holding an unstrung bow. One end of the bench had a polished steel rack holding twenty-four gleaming arrowheads in four neat rows of six. The bench’s other end held a custom gun rack loaded with two matched handguns and a blocky, rifle-sized weapon.

“He’s got two five-sevens,” Bryan said, pointing to the Fabrique Nationale pistols. “Serious shit.”

Pookie nodded, memories of the rooftop gun-battle flashing through his mind — those were the same pistols the archer had fired at him. Pookie again realized how lucky he had been; the FNs’ powerful 5.7-by-28-millimeter cartridge could punch through typical Kevlar body armor, then tumble through the body behind that armor. The bullet’s tumbling action would open up a wound channel far larger than the bullet’s diameter.

Bryan reached out and pointed at two empty spots in the handgun rack. “Space for four FNs, only two here. Assume he’s got at least one on him.”

“Awesome,” Pookie said. “Let’s hope he doesn’t get home anytime soon.”

Bryan’s gloved hands lifted the larger weapon out of the rack. It sort of looked like an M-16 juiced up on steroids — a thick, composite stock, a flat-black body topped by a rail-handle, a long magazine curved slightly forward, and a midlength barrel.

“USAS-12,” Bryan said. “Semiauto shotgun. Ten shots in five seconds. File under avoid.”

“Consider it filed.”

Pookie examined the shelves and drawers. He saw dozens of boxes of ammo for both the five-sevens and for the shotgun — someone was ready to party.

Bryan opened a metal cabinet on the other side of the room. Inside it hung two dark green cloaks. “Maybe Erickson is too old to be the vigilante, but this is definitely the vigilante’s home base.” He shut the cabinet. “But what’s with all the fake creatures?”

Pookie shrugged. “Maybe it’s a hobby. A way to kill time when he’s not killing people.”

Bryan sniffed again. He turned to the old bank-vault door, then walked slowly toward it.

Pookie sniffed as well. “More ammonia?”

Bryan shook his head. “It’s not just chemicals. I smell something else.”

His gloved hands reached out and started turning the heavy wheel.