Power Trip - Act 4
Pearce woke up with a groan. Tom and Logan were looking down at him quizzically. He made a little noise of confusion, searching his throbbing brain for a memory of what happened. Then the image of the Slayer’s fist screaming towards his face explained it to him. “Ugh, oh yeah.”
Logan helped the vampire to his feet, Tom taking the opportunity to ignore the vampire completely and going back to cleaning dishes.
“What’s up with her?” Logan asked, a hint of concern slipping through. “She’s all hot and bothered then wham, I’m out like a light.
Pearce was about to shrug it off to ‘girl stuff’, then his hand slid into his pocket. It was gone. “Oooh.... Shit.”
Niki dropped into the sewer with a splash. The darker the hole, the bigger the rats. That was something Niki had noticed about New York City. Rats, in this case, being the blood-sucking undead. Indeed, in this pitch black sewer she could smell the general bigness of the bad guys.
A large thing moved towards her. It wasn’t looking at her, but cocking its head back and forth in the darkness, feeling the way the air moved about the newcomer. Smelling her presence. “It’s a person,” the thing hissed gleefully, its voice just audible and seeming to come from all around. “It’s a girl person!”
“Let’s have it then,” hissed another voice, coming from nowhere and yet from the other side of the sewer. “I want the leg parts. You know I like the leg parts.”
“Mm, I haven’t had a girl person in so long,” the first thing whispered, “I nearly forget what they taste like.”
“You’re all going to die,” whispered Niki in the same tone of voice, a vicious grin plastered on her face in the darkness. There was a dead pause for a long moment as the two things tried to sort out who was talking. “You’re going to die now,” the Slayer continued in a thin hissing voice.
“What kind of person did you say it was?” the second whisper asked politely.
There was an uncertain pause as the first thing sniffed and swayed back and forth, trying to discover what kind of girl person hadn’t yet fainted in terror. “It’s a girl person,” the first whisper confirmed. “Let’s kill it now,” it advised.
Niki leapt from the shallow water as the two things moved towards her. They made no noise through the water, but their motion was unmistakable. The stench of them grew with proximity, each with its own particular odor and their size seemed to increase to fill the whole of the sewer.
The Slayer was in the air only scant instants but the two sewer things had closed in on where she had been and when she began her descent, she landed on the first of the whisperers. Through her boots, it felt soft and gelatinous, but the thin wiry hairs sticking up were poking into her jeans and at her midriff under her white shirt. The whisperer she was standing on let out a hiss of distaste.
With the flash of an evil smile, Niki fell to her knees on the top of the thing and drove her flattened hand through the flesh. She reached through rubbery flesh up to her shoulder, but finally found one of its internal organs and let her nails do some damage.
The surface on which she rode began to buck and sway as the whisperer in the sewer felt its insides being torn apart. “It hurts, it hurts,” the whisperer hissed, spitting across the inside of the sewer. “Kill it, kill it.”
Niki had satisfactorily shredded what she could reach of the creature’s insides when a hand-like appendage grasped her around the waist and dropped her back into the water on the sewer floor. Before she knew it, the same hand-like thing was pressing her against the wall of the sewer, intent on crushing her. “Take off one of the leg parts. You know I like the leg parts.” Niki felt another hand-thing grasp her right leg and begin to pull.
With a vicious snarl, she brought her arms around the hand-thing pressing her against the wall, closing her arms like a noose, slicing with her bare hands the entire thick appendage. There was the sound of the second whisperer spitting and the other hand dropped off her leg.
“It stings, it stings,” the second whispered. “Kill it, kill it.”
Niki saw through the dark and ducked low as some sort of spine-covered tentacle swept through the air where her head had been. She dropped to the floor as it swept back, lower, and as it began to make another pass, she found its base where it sprouted from the jelly-like thing, and whirled it like a mace against its owner. She had only the spitting sound to tell her she had hit something vital. The things were gradually moving away from each other, increasing the space she had to work with in the sewer.
“Where are you going?” the first hissed. “Where are you going, where are you going, where are you going? Kill it, kill it, kill it.” Its whispers were urgent as Niki flogged its face with the spiked tentacle. The other thing in the sewer was quietly slinking back to its place in the darkness. A place where no girl persons could make it sting.
“Had enough?” Niki whispered sinisterly. She tightened her grip on the tentacle and tore it from its body. One hand still clutched the medallion tightly. The thrill was incredible. She reached out and felt her fingers brush across a smooth moist orb of some kind. An eye.
“I want no more, I want no more,” the thing hissed. “I will flee.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t offering to let you go. I just wanted to know how much more you could take.” Her fingers crushed the orb as a high pitched keening filled the sewer. An ooze covered her fingers as she pushed deeper and found the thing’s deepest organ. Then she was blinded.
The shaft of light stabbed down into the darkness from the opened manhole. The keening stopped and Niki squinted up into the light. Looking back, she found she was reaching out at nothing. The whisperer was gone, leaving nothing but the goo on her hands and its shorn tentacle on the sewer floor.
“Niki,” Pearce said with a deadly seriousness from the manhole above, “come up here... now.”
Niki sat sullenly tied to a chair in one of the back rooms of the Nail Biter. The medallion sat wrapped in a dish towel on the bar as Logan, Pearce and Tom whispered among themselves what to do with the power hungry Slayer.
Niki sighed inwardly. Slayer strength, Scotch, Stuff and that medallion had awoken the most primitive, primal self inside her she had ever conceived. It was a high that the hardest, purest narcotic couldn’t come close to. Killing made it better. Causing suffering made it sweeter. Feeling pain made it richer. Just existing was pure ecstacy. And now it was gone. Her mind concocted all sorts of reasons to get it back.
It was her job to kill things.
Addison would want her to have it.
She would do things for them if they let her have it.
–She would give them money.
—She would give them sex.
—–She would give them a chance to use the medallion itself...
Not now. Not yet. She needed it now. Maybe later. Maybe then.
Her mind raced, dredging up more and more reasons for them to let her loose, to let her have it. If she still had it, she wouldn’t care about these cords. She could break through steel. She could break through... She wanted it. She. Need.
Logan shook his head. “She doesn’t look good. I don’t think we can risk untying her... for a while.”
“We can’t keep here forever,” Pearce cautioned.
“No, you certainly can’t,” Tom agreed. “I want your psycho Slayer out of my bar by closing time.” They both shot the barkeep a look.
“Let me talk some sense into her,” Logan said amicably. “She’s been addicted to worse than a medallion.”
“She still is,” muttered the vampire.
Logan shrugged at the comment and made his way to the back of the bar and the room in which he himself had been held captive only weeks ago. Opening the door, he found Niki sweating in the chair in the center of the room.
“Knicks,” he said gently. “I want you to tell me exactly—”
“Fuck me,” she said suddenly. There was a pause and Logan cocked his head uncertainly.
“Beg your pardon?”
“I want you to shove your—”
“Okay,” Logan said, turning on his heel and marching straight out of the room, catching the last of the sentence to inspire his imagination. The door closed firmly. The man marched back to the bar and plunked himself down beside the vampire. “I would like a drink please,” Kilpatrick said politely to Tom. “She,” he said to Pearce, “needs to get over some other addictions first.”
Pearce rolled his eyes and made his way to the back room. “You obviously have no experience with interventions,” he called over his shoulder. Upon opening the door, he took in the sight of the shivering, sweating Slayer tied to the chair in the center of the room, looking very small.
“Please,” she whispered. “Just give it back. I won’t do anything wrong, I promise.” She sounded small and weak, her voice thin and desperate. As the vampire approached, she scrunched her eyes closed and tried to curl up on herself.
“Why do you want it so badly?” Pearce asked, leaning in close so that he could speak as quietly as she.
“Because I want it,” she whimpered.
“What makes you better when you have it?” he asked, leaning in closer and speaking even more quietly.
“I’m a better Slayer,” she mouthed, her eyes tightly shut to block out everything but what he was saying. Her blood was ice cold. Her muscles were weak and she could only feel their existence at all if she contracted herself completely. Give it back, give it back, give it back...
“I’ll give it back,” Pearce whispered almost inaudibly into her ear, “if you can take it from me.” He took her hand firmly and pressed his own hand into it, interlacing their fingers to give her hand a tight squeeze. Her eyes opened at his proposition.
Pearce released her hand and drew the long black blindfold from his back pocket. Her eyes widened. “If you can take it, you can have it,” he admitted, “because you think it will make you a better fighter.” He drew the blindfold over her face and tied it securely behind her head.
Reaching down to the cords which tied her to the chair, he quickly undid them. Instantly she leapt to her feet and assumed a defensive stance, her clenched fists white and trembling. She lashed out, swinging through the air as the pounding of her heart told her where the vampire might be.
Pearce side stepped the blows easily. Lashing out silently, he struck her right shoulder, sending her skidding to one side. She threw a kick in his general direction, but he was no longer there. With a vicious punch, he jabbed her kidney and had her doubled over, at which point he drove his elbow into her spine.
With a cry of pain, she fell to the floor and curled herself into a protective ball, her clenched fists covering her eyes. Shivers racked her body and she whimpered.
Pearce slowly knelt by the ball of Slayer. “Niki,” he said gently, touching her shoulder and feeling her cringe in the dim light. “Niki, do you still want it?”
“Yes, please,” she begged. “Give it to me, I’ll... I’ll be a better fighter, just give it to me.”
“Niki, it won’t make you a better fighter–”
“Yes it will, it has, it does, it—”
“Knicks,” he said forcefully. “It’s been in your right hand the whole time.” Whether she heard him or not was unclear. The Slayer began to shiver uncontrollably.
Three days later Logan wrapped the silver medallion in a dish towel and placed it at the bottom of the drawer of odds and ends in Niki’s kitchen. She would never look there. Even if she did. It didn’t have any magical powers. They all knew that now.
Wherever Nancy Hatt had gone, not even Tom’s contacts could find her, but she had apparently been out to dupe them all: With a great deal of research, Pearce had been led back to the conclusion that the medallion was nothing but an ancient silver ward against evil and Niki’s problems were rooted solidly in simple substance abuse.
Logan walked from the kitchen to the doorway of the Slayer’s bedroom where he could see Niki sleeping quietly. Stuff, as she had been told many times before, was derived from the toxin secreted by a particularly nasty demon. Years of use had eventually led her to a dependence and tolerance of it and a sudden, if accidental, overdose at the Nail Biter led her to believe the medallion had supernatural powers.
Pearce had reluctantly been forced to accept that her display of force in the alley was entirely psychologically induced from the belief that the medallion had made her super powerful. The Stuff had done the rest.
Supervised recovery would take several days, so Logan and Pearce were taking turns, day and night, watching over her. Logan sipped his coffee and plunked himself down on the couch in front of the television. He had no idea how he was going to explain this to his firm, and he felt a little disturbed that it bothered him less and less that he missed work. He sipped his coffee again and prepared for the day.
Pearce stood amid the trashed bookshelves and shattered furniture of his condo. He was slowly shaking his head from side to side in fury. Each and every one of his girls was gone. He fumed. “Son of a—”
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