It was all wrong. Everything was all black and twisted. Her water dish had water in it, but it was rainwater that tasted like smoke. There was no food in her dish at all. That is when she knew Meatsmell was in trouble—he would not forget food time. If he had forgotten to feed Molly, who knew how long it had been since he had fed himself.
It was then that Molly had noticed that it was still raining on her as she stood over her bowls. This wasn’t right. The wind was still coming in, too. Where was the warmth and light and the endless food smells? She went looking for her bed but even it was cold and wet and strangely flat. She couldn’t get comfortable—she hated sleeping in the rain—and trotted around outside the house until she found the small entrance to the space under the floor where she sometimes went when she didn’t want to be bothered. It was nice and dry and shielded from the wind. She curled up on the dirt and drifted off, deciding that if Meatsmell came back soon she would let him sleep down here, too.
* * *
Light poured into the entrance to her sleeping spot and Molly instinctively moved to go somewhere darker. But then she realized Meatsmell still was not home and that he was probably somewhere scared and hungry and waiting for Molly to come get him.
Molly went on the hunt. Tracking Meatsmell would clearly begin with the last spot where she had seen him—at the little building down the road where he always bought his rolls of spicy meat. She set off down the street under the morning sun. She was disappointed to see that the humans had not settled down one bit after a night’s sleep—a lot of men who were all wearing the same clothes, with big coverings over their heads, were shouting at the other people who were all wearing different clothes, maybe telling them that they should all be wearing the same clothes, too. There was a terrible bang and Molly flinched. Noises that loud didn’t happen in the normal world, only people could make sounds like that. One of the different-clothed people fell over and they weren’t alive anymore.
Molly ran to get some distance from the shouting people, then turned one last time to get a look. She had noticed something curious and had to double-check. One of the people in the different-clothes crowd was not in fact people. He looked just like a person, but he was something else, just pretending to be one. It was the same for one of the same-clothes people, and she got the feeling the other same-clothes people did not realize this. This phenomenon was not new to Molly, but she always took note of it because it seemed to be the source of a lot of anxiety for Meatsmell and his friends.
Molly hurried down the street and arrived at the tiny spicy meat building. No one was there at this time in the morning, but the place was bursting with smells. Not just all of the exotic meat the place cooked in big heaping piles, but of people. Molly sniffed the ground, making a full circle of the hard, cold surface around the building. She picked up the scent of Meatsmell, and the angry man who was trying to hurt Meatsmell, and John.
She followed the scents right to the narrow door, now standing open. She sniffed her way into a little room full of items that were not food. She sniffed and sniffed, in an instant learning the long and dramatic story of a possum who had died nearby a few days ago, then someone stepped in the juices that leaked from his body, then they tracked it into this room. Then a cat slept in here not even one day ago.
Molly was so distracted by the drama of the tiny room’s floor that she failed to notice that the sun had gone away. She turned around and went back outside, only to realize she was no longer at the little building. She was now looking at a flat expanse of pavement exploding with fresh smells. Blood. Sweat. Smoke. Terror.
Molly had sniffed and sniffed, taking it all in, replaying through her nose the story of scared men killing other scared men.
There.
Meatsmell had been here. The scent led off toward where lots of the same-clothes men were gathered. Meatsmell was not among them. There was a fence that went both ways as far as Molly could see, and she sensed that Meatsmell was on the other side. So she just needed to find a way in. Shouldn’t be a problem. Molly went and found a sunny spot, and curled up and went to sleep.
* * *
It took a full week to find her way in. In that time she was chased by some of the same-clothes people, and other dogs, and was almost hit by cars more times than she could remember. But she made it, inside the big building full of terrible smells—layers upon layers of ancient sickness and slow death. Now she was curled up next to Meatsmell and it wasn’t raining on them and everything was back the way it was supposed to be. She fell into a deep sleep, inside this huge building full of anxious and tired people, many of whom she noticed were not really people.
4 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum
John had lost track of how many consecutive days he had woken up not knowing where he was. This place was full of people and echoes and creaky boards and mold. Someone was shouting at him to wake up. He sat up on the cot and the first thing he saw was one of the terrifying Darth Vader guys holding a machine gun. John thought, oh, right. It’s this bullshit still.
Two spacemen surged forward and lifted John off his cot and took him roughly out of the gym and into an old shower room covered in ancient chipped tiles held together by mildew. John half expected to see a dozen naked men in black space helmets snapping towels at each other. Instead he found himself alone, the long-dry shower room now piled high with boxes of rubber gloves and syringes and trash bags and every other thing. He was alone for ten minutes, until he was joined by—
“Detective Falconer! Shouldn’t you be wearing a space suit?”
Falconer was wearing his street clothes—jeans, a black turtleneck and an empty shoulder holster under his armpit. Cowboy boots. Little bit of beard stubble. John wondered if the guy would walk from one end of the street to the other without winding up covered in bitches.
Falconer said, “A suit wouldn’t help, would it?”
“Might buy you a few seconds. Where’s Amy?”
“Who?”
“Dave’s girlfriend? Redhead. Only one hand? They snatched her up. Both of us. But I think she got away, they don’t seem to know where she is. I don’t know if she’s in town, or…”
“Didn’t see her.”
“What about Dave?”
“I can ask but they won’t tell me either way.”
“Because you don’t work for the CDC.”
“Does this shit look like the CDC to you? You see what those guys were wearing? What they were packing? No, they’re not CDC and I’m not one of them. I’m being processed for infected, just like you. I turned myself in. I got them to let me talk to you because I said you might have information, but when we’re done, both of us will get tossed over the fence down at the hospital. And it sounds like nobody comes back out of there.”
“You turned yourself in? Great plan you had there, detective.”
“I am really trying to restrain myself here. Do you understand? This all happened because of you two shitbirds.”
“Man, fuck you. I don’t think Dave made it out. Did you know that? I’m pretty sure he got his brains blown out when everything went bad. Or if not, they got him after shit went to hell. Either way…”
“Well, I’m sorry if that’s true. But I can say that I don’t know that to be true, either. Some people were killed in that first round of riots but I never heard that he was among them.”
John shrugged.
“But, none of this is my main point.” Falconer moved to a spot where he could see the gym from where he was standing. Making sure nobody was close enough to listen.
“My point is, I’ve seen everything I need to see in here. So I figure that instead of rotting in their quarantine, I might as well get to the bottom of this and save the world.”
John stood up. “Now you’re talking.”
“Don’t get excited. If I think you can help me, I’ll get you out of here, too. But you have to prove you can help me first.”
John sat. “Okay, fine. Want me to show you some karate or…”
“I watched both of you go into a door at a taco stand and not come back out. Where did you go?”
“To a construction site outside of town.”
“How?”
“Magic door. No, seriously. Don’t get mad. The door is magic. It’s not my fault.”
“But it didn’t work for me. And if the illegal aliens they got manning the grill at that place go through the back door, they’re not gonna wind up outside town.”
“Correct. Neither will most other people. Me and Dave can do it, so can some other people around town. They’re the ones who built the doors. We just stumbled across them.”
“‘Doors.’ There’s more than one?”
“Yeah, they’re all over.”
“And who are these people who put them there?”
“We’d love to find out. They’re very well funded, and very powerful and they dabble in weird shit. They’re also almost certainly the people responsible for this outbreak. Which as Dave tried to explain to you, is the work of invisible monsters. I think that Tennet guy is with them. He has that vibe.”
“A few days into this situation, CDC, military, everybody pulls out and this new agency—REPER—sweeps in. They got all the right equipment and all the right training for this exact thing. And nobody has heard of them before.”
John shrugged as if to say, “Sounds about right.”
“These guys, the ones you say are behind this, do they do anything else, other than build magical doors and monsters? I’m having a little bit of trouble figuring out how they make money off that.”
“Dave thinks the monster stuff is a side effect, an accident. He thinks they’re experimenting under the table with the door stuff, quantum teleportation or wormholes or however they do it, and that when they started dicking around with the fabric of space-time and dimensions and so on, weird shit started leaking through. From, you know. Other dimensions or wherever they come from. But the stuff that came through, don’t think of it as just animals that run around biting people. Some of it is intelligent. Superintelligent, maybe. Dark shapes, like ghosts.”