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“I’ll tell the chief we need more aerial combat training” I say, yes, sarcastically. “Ever occur to you that I was willing to die to ensure that I got a monster off the streets?”
The spider lets out a rasping dark laugh of derision. “So you brought back a hero. Every two seconds she’s going to be sacrificing herself for something else or this or that. I am going back to bed. Be quiet out here. I need my sleep.” He gives me a harsh look before smushing himself back into what really seems like a space that should be far too small for him.
“What’s his name?”
“Order.”
“Order, alright, okay. So these are the sorts of names people get when they join cults. Who is hatching you out and giving you these names?”
“I am not at liberty to say. My kind depends on staying secret. If it were to come to the attention of the general public… we would be destroyed. My brothers and sisters yet to be born would be wiped from existence. I will not allow that to happen. My life beyond this investigation must remain secret to you.”
Challenge accepted.
“Once the sun comes up, I must hide for the day,” Justice says. “But you can work during the daylight hours to apprehend my brother. He will likewise be hiding.”
“Where would your brother be hiding during the day, you think? And why is he killing people?”’
“Why not? He is tired of being a freak in the dark. He claims he is powerful, and he wants to show the world.”
“He could do that on any cell camera and dance-based social media site.”
“He prefers murder as a means of self-expression.”
“You understand that if I apprehend him — and I will be apprehending him, he will go through the human justice system. Your little secret will be out. One way or another, the existence of mothmen is going to become common knowledge.”
His jaw clenches and his eyes narrow. Night is swiftly becoming day, and in this ever brightening light, his eyes are starting to look a much more wholesome and far less intimidating brown.
“I am trying to help you save lives in the city. He will kill again in a matter of days, and another innocent will have lost their life for no good reason if we do not intervene. Work with me, detective.”
“I’m going to do what I can, but just so you know, this case has been taken by the FBI. They’re coming in a matter of days too. At that point it will officially be federal and out of my hands.”
“That cannot happen.”
Now I have two oversized, growly males telling me I have to fix this problem.
“I will come and see you tonight,” he says. “I know where to find you.”
“I might not be home.”
“I’ll find you,” he repeats. “Good night, detective.”
“Wait.”
He stops just before disappearing into the same crack in the containers the spider, Order, slipped into.
“My gun, please. If I lose it, I will be in deep shit, and you don’t need me filling out endless paperwork instead of looking for Rage.”
He pulls my gun out of a pocket in his pants and hands it back to me. “Be careful,” he says. “Rage has no respect for life or the law. He has become unstoppable, convinced only that he deserves his vengeance against the world that created and then rejected us.”
“I don’t think we rejected you. People are very understanding and respectful of a lot of things these days. Maybe you should try coming out of the shadows.”
“That is not permitted,” he says. “We cannot show people how tenuous and conditional their humanity is, how close they are to beasts, and how a few shifting molecules can change what they are from the inside out. People like to feel certain in their own existence. They like to know what kind of animal they are. We threaten that.”
He speaks eloquently, but I have the feeling that the words coming out of his mouth aren’t really his. If they’ve never come in contact with people before, at least on a wide scale, then they don’t really know how they would be received at all.
“Who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
