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“I think this kind of is justice,” Tessie says, grinning. She doesn’t know his name. She just thinks I am crying out for the concept of the thing. This is what happens when you don’t communicate well with your partner.
“What are you doing?”The question raps from the darkness that has gathered around the shipping containers. It is night, and the monster has risen.
Not the one I want, though. Justice is not here. Instead, it is Order who speaks from the darkness.
“Tessie, you’re about to see something really fucking weird,” I tell her. “Put your phone away, and don’t freak out.”
I’m so glad to see her listen. We do not want pics of these creatures. I don’t want them being uploaded to the cloud somewhere and ending up hacked or just found when they’re trawled through by the half a dozen agencies free to sift through private data as and when they please.
“I knew you were trouble,” Order says, emerging from the darkness in a slow strolling gait. “I told Justice you’d be back. And that you’d be looking for trouble.”
“So you set a web trap for me?”
“The only way to be trapped by a web is to walk into it,” he growls, displeased. He’s getting closer now, and the rising moon is highlighting him in all his six-armed glory. He’s still wearing his sunglasses, the mirrored surfaces hiding what must be an absolute plethora of eyes. His jaw is hard and strong, clenched because he’s annoyed.
I can only imagine the way Tessie is reacting to seeing this strange man-creature emerging from the depths of the night. Each of his pairs of arms are engaged in a different activity. The lowest pair hang loose, the middle pair are rubbing together, in a way that strongly puts me in mind of a man about to indulge some punitive urges. The top two are clapping sarcastically as he approaches me, trussed up in what I have to assume is his butt silk.
“What the fuck,” Tessie breathes. Obigor has fallen silent. I glance over at him and see that he’s actually gone to sleep in her arms. It’s hard being an ancient tiny dog. You can only bark the alert for so long before you need a nap.
Order’s many eyes have not missed her. “You brought someone. With a sick, small animal and a limp.”
“Fuck off,” Tessie snaps. “He’s not sick. He’s just old.”
Order looks skyward. “Is every human in this city so rude?”
“Listen, buddy, you can insult me all you want, but Obigor is perfect and beyond reproach. Get it?” Tessie is strident, stern, and apparently completely unbothered by the strangeness of Order.
“What is wrong with your leg?” He walks around me, leaving me dangling awkwardly as a third wheel.
“Leave her alone!” I utter the order knowing that there’s no chance he’s going to listen to me.
As I expected, I am ignored.
“I was shot,” Tessie says, blunt as always. She doesn’t seem scared of him, though she has to be shitting herself. I see her rock back slightly, as if she’s thinking about taking a step away from him. She chooses not to though, and instead stands her ground as he comes to stand over her, his strange form looming over her and Obigor.
“Is someone going to get me the fuck out of here?” I raise my voice. I am starting to get impatient with my captivity.
“Detective?”
Finally, Justice arrives. And when I say arrives, I mean he squeezes out of the gap between the containers. He does not seem surprised to find me trapped in the web.
“Can you get me down, please?”
He ignores the request and instead asks me a question.
“Have you come with news?”
“I’ll tell you what I have to tell you when you let me down out of here. It’s an offense to set traps for officers of the law, by the way.”
Justice puts all four of his hands on his hips, or just above them, and peers down at me with narrowed red eyes. He seems taller than ever from this nearly inverted position.
I feel like I am in trouble, which makes no sense. I am the one who tells other people that they are in trouble. I do not get in trouble myself.
“You want the bad news, or the worse news?”
His eyes narrow even further in a serious way. “Tell me what has happened.”
“I found him, tased him, cuffed him, and then he flew away.”
