Velocity

Rusted Metal

Tom Riley, the brewery’s night watchman, was just arriving at work. There was a touch of corn snow in patches on the ground and Tom’s boots crunched as he headed down the backstairs to the employee’s entrance. It was Wednesday night and it was a cold one. The wind blew hard and had an icy edge to it that stabbed deep into your lungs. It was normal weather for mid-January-but not for the end of October.

Tom paused before the employee’s entrance to listen to the wind whipping the trees like an enraged master. The trees creaked and groaned under the assault, lashing and scratching at the brewery’s gray cinder block walls with leafless branches. He worked to force his key into the frozen lock with numb hands. Finally he succeeded and the door opened, immediately the comparative heat of the brewery’s interior washed over him like hot breath.

He stepped inside, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands. It was 11:30 pm precisely when he clocked in, and John Shepler, the night foreman, was waiting for him.

“Barely made it tonight, Riley,” Shepler remarked while knocking a cigarette out of his pack with an experienced flick of the wrist. Shepler was a thin-armed man in his late thirties who smoked and sweated constantly. He wasn’t supposed to leave until Tom was on duty and he always resented every extra minute that he was forced to wait. He leaned back against the bulletin board next to the time clock and lit up.

“But I made it, didn’t I?” Tom replied with a winning grin. Shepler didn’t smile back, so Tom added: “Sorry, it comes hard to get out of bed for the dead shift when you pass up fifty.” Shepler wasn’t supposed to smoke inside, but Riley was willing to let it go if it got the bastard out of the plant quicker.

Shepler still wasn’t smiling. He crossed his skinny arms and puffed on his menthol cigarette. He gazed at Tom with dull, piggy eyes. Tom wondered whether the foreman was only an obnoxious prick at the end of his shift, or if he was like this all evening long.

There was silence between them while Tom took his cap and gun belt out of his locker. He snapped his big, four-battery flashlight into place and checked the revolver. The pistol was supposed to be just for show, but Tom always kept a stash of spare cartridges in his breast pocket. When he was dressed he swung the locker shut. The unoiled hinges screamed in the silence of the closed brewery.

Shepler still hadn’t said anything. He drew deeply on his cigarette and gave a brief, rumbling cough. Tom hoped he would just put on his coat and go. Technically, the foreman outranked him, but now that he was pushing sixty Tom was past the days of licking boots. Especially for piss-ants like Shepler.

“There’s been a break-in downstairs. We think some kids did it.”

“Where?” Tom’s tone became serious. This sort of thing was his department. Inwardly he smiled, this explained why Shepler hadn’t left for home the moment Tom had arrived. Shepler shrugged a hunched pair of bony shoulders and took another puff before answering. Tom cinched up his gun belt impatiently and with a little more purpose than usual.

“They came in through a window-way in the back. I guess they busted up some cartons, took some stuff.” He took a faded bandana out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his brow. The brewery was always warm because of all the boilers and refrigeration units, but no one sweated as much as Shepler.

“Did you call the cops?”

“Nope, didn’t seem worth it. They didn’t get anything of value anyway. Just a pile of crap back there, everything from adding machines to antique bottle-cap presses. Hell, that stuff has been gathering dust back there for forty years or so.”

Tom nodded and rubbed his lower lip against his teeth. The stuff was probably valueless, except possibly as scrap. He recalled too, that Shepler had had a few run-ins with the law in his time and was never one to be too fond of alerting the police. He reflected silently that it was just as well, at least this way word of it would probably never reach high management and cause some college boy with nothing better to do to try to make a name for himself by “tightening up plant security”. Tom knew that any changes in the security system were likely to begin with the removal of old fossils like himself.

“Who discovered the break-in?” Tom asked.

“Nick Moore did. He said he was looking back there for empty crates, but I say he was looking for a quiet place to sit on his lazy ass and smoke dope. Anyway, he’s the one who found the broken window.”

Tom nodded and frowned down at his shoes while tucking his shirt in. Then he looked up at Shepler sharply. “Does anyone upstairs know about this yet?”

“Nope. And they ain’t going to, either.”

“Well, I think you ought to take me down there and show me where it happened.”

Shepler took a deep drag on his cigarette, as if it were his last. The tip flared orange then dimmed. He exhaled in a big smoke-filled sigh. “Alright,” he said resignedly.

They headed through the boiler rooms to Tom’s tiny office first to find a flashlight for Shepler to carry. There was no question of turning on the overhead fluorescents. The management was clear on that-no one was to waste the power it took to fire them up without some major reason. And that certainly did not include the convenience of a couple of night employees. By the time they had reached Tom’s office and crowded inside, Shepler was already puffing as if he had just run the hundred. Tom silently thanked himself again for never having taken up smoking and began rummaging behind his desk for the flashlight.

Shepler picked up a book laying open and face down on Tom’s desk. He read the cover and gave a barking cough into his closed fist. “You still read this shit, Riley?” he asked holding up the book.

Tom glanced up from behind his desk. The book was a copy of Jack Vance’s Maske: Thaery. The sight of his book in Shepler’s bony hand, moist from recent bouts of coughing, pulled Tom’s face into an immediate scowl. With an effort he contained himself. He noticed that Shepler had already managed to close the book and lose his place. His nostrils flared in annoyance.

“Didn’t know you were a literary critic, Shepler,” he remarked, letting loose on the sarcasm.

Shepler snorted, put the book down on the desk with a negligent toss and stepped out of the office into the hallway. He hitched up his drooping pants and said, “Don’t need to get all butt-hurt about it.”

John Shepler was a man who had better things to with his time than read books. Tom doubted that he read the text on his favorite porn sites. He found a suitable flashlight and a set of fresh batteries in his top desk drawer behind a box of extra-large paperclips. He locked up his office and handed the flashlight to Shepler, who took it without looking at him. Tom got out his own and they both headed toward the stairs in silence.

The break-in had occurred way in back of the dingiest, most cluttered portion of the brewery’s very dingy and highly cluttered basement. Tom was intent on the window the moment Shepler put his light on it. Leaving Shepler in a narrow aisle-way formed by towering stacks of moldering cartons, he climbed over a worn-out bottling machine caked with dust and grease.

When he reached the window he examined it closely. A cold gust of wind ruffled his hair and whistled over the opening. The window had been smashed alright. The reinforcing wire netting inside it had been torn through in the middle. As he examined the window his eyes narrowed and his lips drew taunt to one side. The glass seemed to be broken outward, rather than inward. The wire in the glass was twisted and left hanging outside the basement.

He quickly stooped and played his light on the small drift of snow that had leaked through to lie between the keys of broken IBM typewriters and on the stained cement floor beneath them.

“What is it?” Shepler asked.

Tom didn’t answer immediately. He brushed an open patch in the thin layer of snow on the floor. Delicately he probed the crunchy mixture of frozen air and water.

“There’s no broken glass here,” he said, speaking half to himself.

“What?”

“There’s no glass on the inside. We’ve had a break-out, not a break-in.”

“You sure, Riley?” Shepler asked, sniffing and wiping his hand on his sleeve. The basement was quite cold compared to the plant floor above. Tom stood, brushing off his knees, and examined the window further. His frown intensified. “This is too small.”

“What’s too small?”

“The hole. It’s too small for a man to squeeze through. Only a kid could do it. Only a small kid.”

“Well, so what? So we had a kid in the plant and he hid for a while and then broke his way out.”

Still frowning, Tom climbed back over the bottling machine and rejoined Shepler in the aisle-way. He took a good hard look around, playing the beam of the flashlight in a circle around them. The probing light revealed festoons of cobwebs and leaning stacks of forgotten office furniture, heavy machinery, newspapers and wire. A lone black rat dropped off the back of a typing chair and scrabbled back into the rolling hills of crates against the far wall. It was an industrial graveyard.

Shepler snatched up a half-crushed coke can from the pre-Coke Classic days and even the pre-diet days and tossed it at the scurrying rat. He missed badly.

“That’s odd,” muttered Tom, looking after the rat as it disappeared in a loose mound of junk.

“Sure is,” said Shepler, “I don’t usually miss that bad.”

“No. I mean the rat. That’s the first one I’ve seen down here. Would’ve expected a few more.”

Shepler snorted. “And you’re complainin’?”

Tom shook his head. Another small mystery. They were beginning to pile up and he didn’t like that. “Anyway, we’ve found where kid broke out, but what about where the kid got in?”

Shepler looked at him and sighed. The sigh turned into a hacking cough that shook his hunching body. He cleared his throat, then hawked and spat into a nearby carton. “I suppose we should search the place for it,” he admitted grudgingly. With Tom and his flashlight in the lead, they carefully made their way further back into the basement. When they got near the back wall the going became more difficult. They soon found spaces between towering piles of cartons and heavy old-fashioned machinery that they could not easily squeeze past.

“This is bullshit,” Shepler complained while trying to pull his shirt loose from a protruding segment of pipe. His elbows jostled a pryamid of boxes and sent a 7up bottle that had been left on top of them down to the cement floor with a crash. Shards of clear green glass sprayed a set of metal bookshelves, clattering and tinkling.

“Look, you stay here and guide me,” suggested Tom. “I want to have a look at what is behind that boiler over there.” He gestured toward the west wall with his flashlight.

“Sure,” Shepler muttered, continuing to tug at his shirt and sweat. When he had freed himself, he sat down with a grunt onto a crate and lit up another cigarette. He sucked on it heavily, wheezed and blew out a gust of smoke with a satisfied sigh.

Tom frowned and considered reminding him of the dangers involved in smoking around old equipment, but then reconsidered. It wasn’t worth it, Shepler would only glare at him with those half-shut piggy eyes of his and continue smoking anyway. He turned to pick his way toward the boiler.

As he came closer he became more sure, and when he finally crested a pile of worn out machinery he was certain. Yes, there was something behind the boiler, some kind of opening. An alcove in the basement wall, perhaps. His flashlight showed the opening as just a black patch in the wall behind the boiler. You could only see it from a certain angle. Tom stood up straighter and shined his light back the way he had come. He gauged it to be 200 yards back to the stairs in the other room. You couldn’t even begin to see that far. The basement was piled clear to the ceiling with junk. He wondered how they had gotten through fire inspections all these years. He suspected pay-offs or brother-in-laws. It was always one or the other.

He turned and made his way around the boiler to shine his light into the blackness behind it. What he saw there made him gasp and draw back.

“What did’ja find?” asked Shepler. Tom smiled at the quaver in his voice.

But the hole behind the boiler made his smile slide away to nothing. It was more than an alcove. It was a room. A forgotten room at the back of this ancient graveyard of brewery junk.

“Found some kind of room back here,” he said back over his shoulder. His voice was hushed. Unlike the stacks and piles of trash in the main room of the basement, this room was nearly empty of debris. A freezing hand tickled his stomach and gave a playful squeeze. How long had it been since anyone had been back here? Twenty years? Since the war? Before that? He knew that the building had been around for a long time and had been a warehouse before it had been a brewery and had been a chemical plant originally, about a million years ago.

He leaned in through the narrow crack between the boiler and the basement wall to get a better look. He saw something. He saw something glitter like eyes then disappear-and then he was falling.

The stack of rotting paper he had been standing on gave way and he half-fell, half-slid into the chamber behind the dead boiler. His flashlight struck the cement floor and everything when black. Only splotchy after-images crawled across his vision like purple slugs. He groped for his flashlight, found it and shook it in desperation. Nothing.

Suddenly, he was afraid. He was caught up by a black fear near to panic. His mouth dried and his heart pounded like a revving engine before a race. He had not felt such fear since his childhood and it was like an old enemy, an old bully, long since left and forgotten, but now returned to taunt him again. It giggled and capered in his mind for a few moments, free to have its way with him, to do its worst. He thought about his heart, whether it could take this kind of shock and that brought on yet another pounding flight of panic.

And then the lights came back on. His flashlight blazed into life again and he swung it around him, eyes wide, mouth open and panting. He gripped the flashlight like a pistol, holding it up in both hands. He found himself sitting on a damp floor in a large room. Alone. There were no eyes. Nothing.

“Tom!” he heard Shepler calling to him. “Tom! What the hell are you doing back there? Where’d you go, man?” Shepler’s voice was girlishly high. He fell into another hacking, coughing fit.

Tom played his powerful beam around the room. There was little to see. A pile of old magazines and a few dozen old pop bottles. Near the opening sat a legless chair, looking old and helpless, like a cripple begging at the city gate.

Then he found a coffee can and a carton of Lucky Strikes. He knew the brand. It was Shepler’s. He never smoked anything else.

He heaved a big sigh. He had discovered Shepler’s hideout. His secret smoking den. It did stink, now that he thought about it, like cigarettes down here. The smell of stale butts was overpowering.

“Okay, Shepler. I found your stash back here.”

“What are you talking about?” came the answer, muffled.

“Cut the shit. Why didn’t you just tell me this was your hideout? Don’t tell me it was anyone else, either. These are your brand.”

There was silence for a few long seconds. Tom approached the magazine pile and took one off the top. He read the faded date on the cover: May, 1916. It all but crumbled to dust at his touch. Rotted by the dampness, he thought. He noticed that it was damp down here, and remembered that this side of the brewery was closest to the lake. Water seeped through the ground to make the walls sweat.

“No one will take your word over mine,” said Shepler. “Just drop it and do your job.”

Tom nodded. It was Shepler’s shrine, alright. He was surprised he didn’t have a mass of ancient girlie mags back here. But there were no modern magazines. Just cigarette butts, thousands of them. He ran the flashlight over the white-gray mass of them. Many of them looked chewed. The man must be desperate to smoke.

He looked back at the magazines. 1916. That was before his grandpa had been born. And he was an old man. 1916 was a long time ago. That chill, that natural fear we all have of the ancient, of rotting tombs and dark, closed-in spaces, hit him all at once. The chill hit like a second wave from his earlier panic. The skin on the back of his neck and his scrotum crawled. Cold sweat formed beads under his arms and matted the hair that covered his forehead.

That was when Shepler screamed. It was a high-pitched, womanish scream. A cry of sheer terror, that any man would have been embarrassed to have attributed to him. The scream was followed by scrabbling noises and what sounded like a man gagging.

“John? John!” yelled Tom as he climbed back out of the alcove and struggled to slide between the boiler and the wall. There was no answer. The boiler, the junk, everything seemed to be fighting to hold him back. He grunted and ripped his pants on a twisted metal obstacle and felt a trickle of blood run down his right leg to wet the top of his socks.

His flashlight played wildly on the ceiling of the brewery basement. And then he was out. The vast cavern of the basement seemed airy and open after the alcove he had left behind. He swung the beam in an arc to cover the area that Shepler should have been in. He breathed hard and sniffed. His nose had started running because of the dust and exertion. Shepler was nowhere in sight.

“John, answer me.”

Nothing. With hands that trembled slightly, Tom immediately followed the emergency code that he had worked out during his long hours of reading fiction in a dark factory. He loaded his pistol with the live rounds from his breast pocket and to his credit he didn’t drop any. Then he switched his flashlight to his left hand and gripped his revolver firmly with his right. He immediately found comfort and a feeling of power in the weight of the weapon.

He set his jawline and straightened his spine, then warily moved toward the spot that he had left Shepler. Before he found Shepler himself, he found his blood. His right foot stepped into a puddle of it and Tom nearly slipped. He managed to catch himself before pitching forward into a carton of sharp-looking worn-out spindles. Then he brought his beam down and splashed the bright light onto the corpse that had lain so silent and still that he had nearly walked past it.

Shepler’s throat had been ripped out. Strings of bloody flesh dangled down his chest and his eyes were wide open and staring, lifeless.

Tom’s reactions were numerous and immediate. Horror and grief shook him. Mortal alarm caused him to turn quickly around, scanning for the killer. Up, down and in a circle around him. His gun barrel followed his flashlight, tracking the circle of brilliance around the room like a skeet-shooter tracking a disk across the sky. Then disgust caught up with him. A sudden bolt of nausea hit him and a stiff rod of vomit pushed up against the back of his throat. He controlled himself however, and once he was certain that the attacker was not in the immediate vicinity, he forced himself to examine the body more closely.

It was difficult to think. His mind was yelling a dozen things at him all at once. He must run. He must fight. He must somehow save Shepler, somehow bring him back to life. Would the cops think he had done it? Was he soon to be killed himself?

Examining the torn up body was enough to shock anyone into catatonia. Not only was Shepler’s (his name is John, dammit. I should have called him John more often) throat open and exposed, but he could see now that his chest and belly had been lacerated as well. Tom didn’t like the way the brilliant beam made Shepler seem so large and over-real in the dark basement. It was disrespectful to the dead to expose them in such a harsh white glare. He considered reaching up and closing Shepler’s dead eyes, but couldn’t quite do it. Let some detective do it later, he figured.

He played the beam on his hands and his heart swelled a bit with instinctive pride. There were bits of flesh, the flesh of the killer, in John’s fingers and caught underneath his nails. The killer had not gone unscathed.

Then he caught sight of what the flesh looked like, and his mind chilled. It was definitely not human. It was brownish and peeling, and there was no blood on it. It looked more like the brown mottled leather that a snake sheds than human skin.

Suddenly, Tom’s head cleared. He understood now. Before he hadn’t been sure what was going on. But now he knew. He was in a battle. He was at war, and his life was at stake. It was time to take a hike and let the big boys handle things from here on in.

He looked back toward the distant basement door. The span between where he stood over Shepler’s body and the door seemed to telescope into infinity. Would he make it back without being torn to (hamburger) shreds by whatever had attacked Shepler?

He thought of those magazines back there (1916) and a stiffness crept over his muscles. This new fear was a paralytic thing that turned the sweat on his face and drenching his fruit-of-the-loom undershirt and J.C. Penny’s briefs into a slimy slick envelope.

He took his first step toward the door, feeling the discomfort of moist clinging clothing and wondering if he would make it out of the brewery tonight. His feet dragged forward through his second and third steps. He swallowed, the dryness of his throat making it painful.

May 1916. Just how long ago was that? Had this been a brewery then or a warehouse? Or had it been a chemical plant?

Yes, he thought as his legs dragged after one another, his soaked underwear shifting and bunching around his crotch, 1916, World War One. This had been the basement of a chemical plant when that magazine had been first bought.

He made it as far as the next big chamber of the basement, the room where most of the IBM equipment and cobwebbed bottle-cap machines stood silent guard. As he entered the room, walking under the wide arched opening with his gun extended, he looked to the sides and up. Most people might not have looked up, but Tom Riley had read more science fiction and horror than most people, and had seen every bad movie on those topics Hollywood had bothered to produce.

What always finished people in most movies was the unexpected. When facing an unknown monster, actors almost never looked in unexpected directions, and that was precisely where such attacks came from. So, instead of looking ahead at the door, he beamed his flashlight upward. This unusual move extended his lifespan a few minutes further.

A thing was up there, gazing down at him. No doubt, it was just such a thing that had killed the skinny, chain-smoking Shepler. It looked like a bat, sort-of, or maybe more like a spider with leathery wings.

He squeezed off a shot almost before he had his gun up. It went wide, but did make a loud report that rang through the basement. The thing reacted, dropping from the ceiling and fluttering away like a fleshy, flying leaf. It rippled in the air as it flew, unlike any animal he’d ever seen. Then, finally, he knew what it really reminded him of. It looked like a loach, from the Great Lakes. Gruesome things that attached themselves to fish and suckled with teeth. This thing, however, was a flying loach. Not the normal swimming variety. Perhaps it was a different breed of loach. Something that had come in from the early cold this year.

He ran. He might have been screaming now, he couldn’t be sure. The wetness in his pants was at least one part piss now, he was pretty sure about that. He was pretty sure too, that this plant had made some very special chemicals in its day, back at the start of the last century. Maybe they had made mustard gas here, or worse things. Secret things. Things that might have warped a creature from the lake. Maybe something had come up to the lakeshore outside and soaked up the chemicals they had spilled into the soil down here.

In truth, he hardly cared why the thing that chased him existed. It was good enough to know it was there, it was real, and it was deadly.

He hated to turn his back on a flying loach but he couldn’t run backward in this place. He’d be down in a heap in about eight seconds, like a woman in a fifties monster movie, if he tried to back out of here.

He ran, with his left hand holding the flashlight over the back of his neck. He didn’t want to make it easy on the little monster by blowing his own fool head off, so he kept his pistol aimed downward.

It came at him again as he reached the last big chamber. The stairs were in sight now. It got his flashlight hand, probably while trying to get to his neck. He screamed and dropped his light. It flashed out with a tinkle of broken glass.

He felt the grinding teeth sink into the back of his hand. He felt it suckle, with a tiny fluttering tongue. He shook it off, and it didn’t go easily, taking a chunk of skin with it.

He almost went down in the dark, but made it to the stairs and scrambled up them. He locked himself into his office and called emergency. As he wrapped his hand in a spare white shirt he kept in his office, he watched it soak through and turn bright red in moments.

He wondered if this would make the news. If it did, he expected a cover-up would turn the chemically-warped freak into an unknown assailant. A pay-off or a brother-in-law would keep the brewery open. They always did.