Chapter 12: The Scalejaw Lurker
Chapter 12: The Delivery Truck Had Opinions
The thing that came around the end of aisle six was not a rat.
It moved like damaged heavy machinery, and the linoleum popped under its weight. Dull grey-green plates overlapped from its skull to its flanks like roof tiles. Its head was longer than my arm. It had shoulders. Monsters were not supposed to have shoulders.
I flattened myself lower behind the checkout counter.
That’s not a scavenger. That’s a delivery truck with opinions.
Liora’s hand closed on my wrist and pulled, and we went down together behind the dead register in a slow, careful, entirely undignified crouch. Her ears had gone flat against her hair. That was the part that scared me. Her loose shoulders and crooked mouth pretended at calm. Her ears had already reached a verdict.
The blue window remained in the corner of my vision, static and stupid.
[Manifestation Remaining: 14:06]
Fourteen minutes. Then she would be gone, and I would be a Level 3 man with a kitchen knife in a building with that.
"Scalejaw Lurker," Liora breathed, close enough to my ear that I felt the shape of the words more than heard them. "Bottom-feeder. Eats what other things kill. It was sleeping under the floor drains, and we woke it up with dinner. Same family as things back home—armour’s a shell, not skin. My knives go into that about as far as they’d go into a car door." Her tail slid across the tile and hooked around my ankle. Anchoring herself, maybe. Or me.
The Lurker stopped at the two Ash Rat corpses and put its snout down. The sound of it breathing filled the store—enormous bellows-work, wet at the edges. Its nostrils were slits set high on the muzzle, and they flexed with every pull.
[Scalejaw Lurker—Level 6]
Level 6. I was Level 3, and Liora’s manifested body was Level 3 too.
Six is only twice three, which sounds fine until you remember that a bus is only twice a car.
It ate one rat in two casual bites, and my stomach turned over.
"Blood, heat, movement, smell," Liora murmured. "That’s how it hunts. Four senses, all of them better than yours, none of them good in the dark corners. It knows this place. It’s been living here." Her fingers tapped my forearm, quick and thoughtless, counting something. "Adrian. I need you to think out loud. You’re the one who’s been walking this store for an hour. What’s in it?"
She had twenty-one levels of technique crammed into a Level 3 body. Earth was still foreign to her, and she was asking me for the map.
The System offered nothing. It never did. It displayed a number and waited for me to either survive or stop being one.
So I thought out loud.
"Aisle seven’s the narrowest. Freezer wall at the end—glass doors, dead, but the frames are steel. There’s a pallet rack past that, by the stockroom door, already half collapsed. Second tier’s bowed. Two retaining straps and one of them’s snapped." My mouth tasted like copper and dust. "Bottled water and tinned tomatoes. Hundreds of kilos."
Her ears came up half a centimetre. "Good boy. What else?"
"Cooking oil in aisle four, the big plastic jugs. Fire extinguisher by the stockroom door—red, horn on it, the cold kind. Carts at the front." My hands had started shaking again, the way they did whenever I stopped moving. "And that." I nodded at the remaining Ash Rat, lying twelve feet from a monster that had just eaten its brother.
Liora looked at the corpse. Then at the rack. Then at me, and her grin arrived, sharp and delighted and completely fake around the edges.
"Oh," she said. "I like you."
The plan took ninety seconds. I knew the building; she knew how to weaponise it.
I dragged the second Ash Rat by its back legs down the length of aisle seven—a sentence I would have paid money to un-live—and left it directly under the bowed tier of the pallet rack, trailing a wet stripe that I hoped smelled better to the Lurker than I did. Then I punctured a four-litre jug of cooking oil and walked backwards down the last third of the aisle, letting it glug across the linoleum in front of the freezer doors until the smell of cheap rapeseed hung over everything like a memory of a kitchen.
Liora went up the shelving opposite. She didn’t climb it so much as consult with it—two steps, a hand, a knee, and she was four metres up with her tail counterweighting her over the drop, one knife reversed along her forearm. She cut the sound retaining strap most of the way through before she settled. She wanted one draw to finish it.
I got behind the end cap at the aisle mouth and hit the metal shelf twice with the flat of my knife.
The Lurker came.
It did not lumber. That was the assumption I’d built the whole plan around without noticing, and it nearly killed me in the first two seconds. It went from standing to full speed in one convulsion of its hindquarters and covered the aisle before I had my shoulder behind the end cap, and the wind of it slammed the shelf into my ribs and knocked every thought out of my head.
Then it stopped over the corpse and lowered its head, and I remembered how to exist.
Liora drew her knife along the strap.
The strap parted with a sound like a whip. The bowed tier folded, the pallets went, and half a tonne of bottled water and tinned tomatoes came down on the Scalejaw Lurker’s back and hips in one enormous grinding avalanche.
The floor jumped. Bottles burst. A tin can punched through the ceiling tile above me and vanished into the dark.
The Lurker screamed—a flat reptile sound—and its rear leg folded beneath the pallet edge. For one stupid instant, triumph hit me.
We did it. We actually—
It stood up.
It stood up the way a car jack stands up, slow and unstoppable. The rack frame across its spine bent. The plates on its back did not break. We had dropped half a tonne of groceries onto a creature built by nature to have half a tonne of things dropped on it.
Its tail came around as it turned.
Liora was already moving—she’d started before the rack finished falling, because she was better at this than I would ever be—but she was moving through the space the tail was going to occupy, and the tail was faster.
It caught her across the hip and threw her into the freezer doors.
Glass went. Steel frame did not. She hit the frame, and she made a sound I hadn’t heard from her before, small and surprised, and she came down into the broken glass on her side with her left leg opened along the outside of the thigh from a shard or a plate edge or the frame itself; I never found out which.
No. No, no, no—
[Manifestation Remaining: 09:11]
She got up. That was the horrifying part—under two seconds, knife still in her hand, weight already on her right leg, blood running into her boot, her face doing something bright and vicious that was not remotely a smile.
But she couldn’t sprint. I saw it in the first step. Hip and thigh together had taken her mobility, and mobility was the only reason a three-level body had lasted this long.
The Lurker put its ruined rear leg down, took the weight, and turned toward her. Not toward me. Toward the blood.
There is a version of me that stayed behind the end cap. I’ve thought about him a fair amount since. He’s alive in some other branch of the world, probably, and he doesn’t sleep well.
I grabbed the loaded shopping cart parked at the aisle mouth—forty kilos of tinned goods, bad wheels, a handle worn smooth by a thousand people who’d had ordinary lives—and put everything I had into it.
"HEY!"
The cart hit the Lurker’s flank at the hip, on the injured side, and did approximately as much damage as a strong shove. But it hit the injured side, and it was loud, and the wheels shrieked, and something in the creature’s small, terrible brain reprioritised.
It stopped advancing on Liora.
Good. The distraction worked.
The Lurker turned its head and looked at me.
Unfortunately, I had not considered what came after that; I am dead...