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I am trapped between two very large, very dangerous creatures, with only my baton to protect me. When the spider speaks, I see flashes of very sharp teeth. I clap my hand over my own mouth to stop myself from screaming. I don’t want to show any signs of fear or bring attention here. Either one of those things might trigger these beasts to attack.
“Okay. How many of you are there?” I mumble the question through my hand before moving it away from my mouth. I have to get a grip on something other than a cock.
They don’t answer the question at first. They are having some unspoken conversation with one another, and something in the way the moth’s antennae wriggle makes me think he is telling the spider to be cool. The spider does not look like he wants to be cool, even a little bit.
The moth turns his red eyes to me. They look less hauntingly intense right now. I realize that is because night is starting to surrender to day. We are not at sunrise yet, but the edges of the sky are starting to lighten a fraction.
“I want you to help me. Us. Our kind has managed to stay largely secret for decades, because we do not visit major cities and engage in heinous crimes there.”
“What is your kind, would you say, exactly?” That’s a sensible question. I wish I had a pad and paper so I could take some notes, but I have nothing.
“We call ourselves the Mutated.”
“Mutated. Okay. That makes sense. And, uh, you got any more information on how you came to be… thus?” I gesture my baton up and down the mothman’s body.
“Science did a lot of things in the forties.”
“That’s an understatement, and not very technical.”
“I don’t understand the processes myself. I am not a genetic scientist.”
“Fair.”
“What I do know is that the Manhattan Project was not the only piece of groundbreaking technology that allowed humanity to redefine the bounds of its power.”
“Okay, but you two are forty at most. You weren’t around in the forties.”
“We hatched more recently. That is true.”
“A detective and a mathematician. Aren’t we lucky,” the spider drawls, thoroughly unimpressed. He’s striking me as kind of an asshole. Then again, mothman over here was striking me as a murderer until very recently, so judgements are not easy to make when it comes to these things.
“Hatched,” I say. “As in, from an egg of some kind.”
“We have some human DNA spliced into the DNA of other animals. We are chimera in the strictest sense of the word, though many call us cryptid.”
“You have a preference for names?”
“I already told you my name is Justice. It is my name, and my calling. That is why I have been tasked with hunting down Rage. He is the mothman you are looking for.”
“Rage. Well. I’d call him messy fucking asshole. He leaves absolute carnage in his wake. The bodies we found have traumatized thousands of people.”
“You let thousands of people see them?” The spider cuts in, his voice full of rattly disapproval.
“People like to share pics. They end up on the internet when they’re gross or weird enough. So, probably, tens of thousands of people.”
“Your internet is a bane.”
“Also out of the same time period as you are, technically, no?”
“Not at all. The internet wasn’t conceived of until 1983. It’s brand new, in the grand scheme of things. The desperate salaciousness of the average human, not to mention their appetite for gore and cruelty, that is ancient.”
The spider is waxing philosophical. I don’t have time for it. I need to make it very clear the shit these two, or three, or however many there are, are in. I’m back in cop mode now, and that makes me feel much more in control.
“Here’s what you’ve done,” I tell Justice. “You’ve abducted a New York City Detective from her property, you’ve left two million lumens of flashlights burning on the roof of a residential area, and you’ve taken my gun. Give it back.”
He doesn’t give it back. I’m sure he secreted it about his person, and I am equally sure that he’s not going to let me search him. I could try to search him without his consent, but I am certain that getting into the pockets of a four-armed man creature is going to be more difficult than it first appeared.
“You tried to shoot me, which, if you’d done so, would have meant we could have both fallen to our deaths. You might be a detective, but your common sense under pressure leaves a lot to be desired.”
