Club Monstrosity (2 page)

“I’ve never known him to be quiet for more than five minutes,” Natalie pointed out. “Maybe he had an audition.”

Drake nodded. “He was rambling on about that the other night when he called my new smartphone. What do they call it? An Ephone? Aphone? Some vowel-phone combination . . .”

Natalie turned on the man beside her with a blank stare. “You have a cell,
a six-hundred-dollar cell
, but you think sparkling vampires are real?”

Kai bit back a laugh. “Okay, we’ll just assume he isn’t here, because if he is, ignoring him will drive him crazy.”

Alec let out a burst of laughter. “I like that idea.”

Kai tilted her head. “And I guess we
are
back to me for introductions. So, I’m Kai. I am a mummy, reincarnated by some idiot archaeologists in 1922.”

“That makes you the oldest and the youngest of our group,” Alec pointed out, just as he did at every meeting.

And just like at every meeting, Kai pursed her lips in annoyance and continued, “It’s been . . . I guess 1940 since I was last revealed to anyone, though there were some close calls in the nineties. Stupid mummy movies . . .”

She shook her head and adjusted her suit jacket. Natalie blushed as she caught a glimpse of the white gauze Kai always wore beneath her clothes. She’d once admitted it was a way to keep moisturizer trapped against the dry skin, but Natalie always felt like she was seeing her underwear whenever she caught a glimpse of it.

“Hello, Kai,” half the group droned, while the other half was distracted by other things.

Kai sighed. “Great, so that’s done. Now, does anyone have anything they want to talk about?”

“Ellis might be at an audition, which explains his absence,” Linda whimpered. “But what about Bob?”

Natalie stared at Kai. Yeah, what about Bob? Blob.
The Blob.
She was kind of wondering that herself.

Hyde snickered. “Perhaps he got stuck on a subway car. Literally. Fat ass.”

Natalie folded her arms. Hyde was a nasty bastard and she refused to encourage him. “Look, the guy might be big, but he’s
never
missed a meeting in all the years we’ve been doing this. Plus, he runs Overeaters Anonymous in the room after us. I can’t picture him skipping out on two meetings without some kind of notification for
someone
. It’s just not in his nature. You know he takes this shit super-seriously.”

“Unlike
some
of us,” Kai said with a pointed glare for Natalie. “All this talk and speculation won’t do us any good until we actually know what’s going on. Has anyone called him?”

Linda nodded her head quickly. “Oh, yes. Every day. He didn’t answer this morning.”

Natalie blinked. “You call Blob
every day
?”

Linda’s green eyes narrowed at Natalie’s tone. “Lay off the attitude, Zombie Girl. I
like
to check in.”

“Shit.” Alec chuckled. “That might explain it right there. Maybe he just needed a vacation from Linda.”

Kai ignored them all. “
Whatever
the reason for his absence, can someone do a welfare check on Blob tonight?”

Silence hung heavy over the group. They might meet a couple times a week, brainstorm on how to stay hidden, and keep each other informed about things that might be of interest to the modern monster . . . but none of them had ever been all that big on actually helping each other.

Kai shook her head in disbelief. “Seriously, no one is willing to do this? Drake, you live near him, don’t you?”

“He’s just a few blocks from me.” Drake nodded. When Kai gave him an expectant stare, he sighed heavily. “Fine, I’ll stop by.”

“Great, thank you. Are there any other issues?” Kai asked, though by her terse tone and tapping foot, it was clear she was done with all of this.

Alec ignored her signals and waved his hand low at his side. From his grin, Natalie couldn’t help but think he was doing it on purpose just to piss Kai off.

“Yeah,” he said when Kai pointed at him with annoyance. “One. So I actually just got another warning from my nighttime delivery job.”

Drake shook his head. “Young man, you are only drawing attention to yourself.”

Kai nodded in agreement. “For once, Drake isn’t wrong. Were you caught stealing razors from shipments
again
?”

Alec shrugged sheepishly. “Look, you have no idea. I have to shave three times a day to keep from being wolfed out all the damn time. And when it’s this close to a full moon? Forget about it. It’s more like six times a day. And each shave is, like, three or four heavy-duty razors.”

Jekyll tilted his head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why don’t you just buy them?”

Alec glared at him and the teasing in his tone and on his face faded to something a bit darker. Not Hyde dark, but a little monstrous nonetheless. “Not all of us have family money,
Doctor
. We don’t all live on Park Avenue and wear thousand-dollar suits.”

“Three thousand,” Hyde said with a thin smile as he smoothed the fine line of the suit he currently wore.

“Hyde,” Jekyll said softly, without looking at Hyde. “You know that isn’t true.”

Hyde shrugged. “Only because you’re cheap. Honestly, a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit is hardly fit for peasants, brother.”

“You think too much about money. Among other things.” Jekyll rolled his eyes, then shook his head apologetically, as if to imply they all knew Hyde. And they did.

“Whatever.” Alec shrugged. “I make, like, fifteen an hour at my job—”

“Fifteen hundred?” Jekyll interrupted with wide eyes as Hyde snorted in amusement at his brother’s inexperience when it came to normal people.

Alec stared for a moment, then slowly shook his head. “No, numbnuts, fifteen dollars. U.S. currency, a ten and a five. Shit, you are clueless. What that means is that I don’t have the cash to pay for that kind of expenditure.”

Natalie shook her head. “But Alec, if you lose your job because you’re caught stealing too many times, you won’t have any money at all. Plus, I’m sure the amount of razors you take has to seem super-weird. Don’t you worry they might get nosy if they start the paperwork to let you go—ask too many questions about why you need that many razors? It draws attention to you in a way that could be dangerous.”

He grinned at her, crooked and utterly charming. “I’m not sure I’m going to lose anything, sweetheart. This is my third warning and there’s been no consequence so far.”

Drake tilted his head. “How do you manage that if they keep catching you in the act?”

Alec laughed. “Female supervisor.”

Kai rolled her eyes. “So did you bring this up to brainstorm ideas on how you can manage to get razors
and
keep your job, or did you bring it up to brag about all the tail you get?”

“Both?” Alec said with a shrug.

“Eh,” Kai groaned. “You’re on your own, jackass. Anyone else have something to say?”

Linda raised her hand and the group as a whole sighed. There weren’t many movies about Swamp Dwellers. The closest one had been
Creature from the Black Lagoon,
and in that feature the monster didn’t talk and he/she (that part wasn’t really clear . . . ) was always portrayed as a bit of a badass. A thing that could get things done, even when they were totally evil things.

Linda . . . not so much. In fact, she was living proof of what everyone in the room already knew: authors of books and directors of movies got their lives so consistently
wrong
. Those hacks took a fraction of truth and then exploited and twisted it beyond recognition.

So Linda, unlike her movie counterpart, was timid, needy, and . . . well, flaky. Kind of like cooked fish. A joke Linda did not find funny in the slightest, so Natalie kept it to herself.

“Seriously, Linda?” Kai asked. “Really?”

Linda’s hand came down slowly and she slouched in her chair. “I like Blob better.”

To be honest, so did Natalie. He was the calming influence on a grouchy bunch of freaks. They didn’t argue as much when he led the proceedings. Hell, sometimes they even had a breakthrough, not that any of them would admit that if asked. Poor Blob had been trying to get someone to acknowledge a breakthrough for years.

Kai shrugged. “Well, maybe he’ll be back where he belongs on Wednesday, okay? And then you can tell us all about your cats and your neighbors you don’t like and whatever other tedium constitutes your day. Until then, why don’t we break this up for the night?”

Although Linda still looked pissed, the rest of the group appeared as relieved as Natalie felt. After all, they shared a common bond of what they were, but other than that, she felt very little connection to these people . . . er, things. And she had to go to work anyway. The medical examiner’s office waited for no man, or beast. Not in New York.

Everyone gathered their things and Jekyll and Hyde ducked into the bathroom to perform their creepy ritual. No one waited for them. Instead they trailed out onto the street in a disorganized and silent group. No chitchat. No offers to share a cab or walk to the subway station.

The church was on an iffier end of the street where there were no doormen at the apartment buildings. To Natalie’s mind, that made it the perfect place to be mugged, so as she half-assed waved to the others and trudged toward the station, she kept a wary eye out for people. She was made of various parts from dead people, convicts mostly, which she tried not to think about (thanks a lot, “Dad”). Whoever had “donated” her ears to the project had had exceptionally good hearing in life. Natalie used that to her advantage in the city, where danger did occasionally lurk, though admittedly not as much in the last fifteen years when the city had been “cleaned up.” (Translation: freaks were
not
welcome.)

In the distance she heard a woman arguing with a man, probably over a purse. Part of Natalie thought about heading in that direction, of using her super-Frankenstein’s-Monster strength to be a hero.

But she’d learned the hard way that a hero’s path didn’t really get a person anywhere. Hell, she’d been chased out of a German village a century ago by people brandishing pitchforks and torches because she’d tried to help a child. And afterward? The brat had turned on her and started screaming and running.

She shivered. Not again. Nope, not in this life.

So instead of putting on her superhero cape (which she just knew would be far more stylish than Drake’s Dracula cape), Natalie walked down the steps into the train station and off to work with the dead. None of
them
talked, none of
them
caused her any problems whatsoever.

2

“You’re late.”

Natalie sighed as she pulled her lab coat from her locker and replaced it with her purse before she turned to face Medical Examiner Gretchen Grimes.

“But then again, it is
you,
” Grimes said with a smile that softened her severe face slightly, and Natalie’s former sigh turned into a breath of relief. No being reamed out today, apparently.

Grimes wasn’t a bad egg, really, but she was totally unpredictable. Sometimes she was Natalie’s best-friend boss, asking about Natalie’s apartment or her roommate . . . hell, she’d even asked her to join a book club.

And then there were the other times when she could be the bitchy supervisor right out of a stereotypical television show. Natalie felt like she was rolling the dice each time she came to work, and she
hated
gambling.

“Sorry, the subway was running late,” Natalie said.

Grimes nodded as if she totally understood, even though Natalie knew the woman
always
took cabs and thought the subway was scary. Sheesh, if only she knew there was a monster in her office.

On second thought, not such a great idea, since Grimes knew how to dissect bodies. She’d probably have a field day with Natalie’s hodgepodge of parts. Kind of like dear old Dad had.

“So what’s on the agenda tonight?” Natalie asked to clear her mind.

“We’ve got an interesting body downstairs waiting for autopsy,” Grimes said as they walked toward the elevator together.

“Oh God,
interesting
?” Natalie repeated, and her stomach dropped in anticipation.

Interesting
was never a good word, not if one was an autopsy assistant. That meant murder or melting or spontaneous combustion or something equally gruesome and high-profile. She preferred the run-of-the-mill heart attack or stroke. In those cases, they cracked open the body, did a quick verification, and that was that. There was no heavy paperwork, no cops with questions, no testifying before a jury of anyone’s peers or getting interviewed by reporters. Natalie hated that shit.

Grimes, on the other hand, lived for it.

She was always looking for something that was going to get her in front of a jury, giving “expert” testimony about something wacked out or murderous. On court days, she would practically quiver with excitement and hold sessions in the break room afterward to share all the details with other scientists and office workers who wanted to kiss her ass in the hopes of a promotion. That had never been Natalie’s MO.

“This guy was beaten to death by a mob,” Grimes said as they entered the big metal service elevator.

The lift smelled faintly of death, though the scent didn’t bother Natalie. After all, it was the same smell she tried to cover up on herself almost every day. That was the main reason she’d taken this job in the first place. If anyone ever made the faux pas of pointing out her faint odor, she could say, “Autopsy assistant in the ME office, City of New York.”

That normally shut people up or got them asking questions about autopsies or the latest high-profile murder case, and
not
noticing the scars she worked so hard to cover up. She wore turtlenecks in the summer. Enough said.

Of course, there were times when she wondered at the irony of the situation. After all, her “dad” had been a bit obsessed with death himself. He would have
loved
her job. Like Grimes, he would have drooled over the weird deaths and spent hours analyzing broken limbs and exploded livers (that had actually happened . . . once).

Then again, he probably would have lost the job in ten minutes for stealing body parts or, worse, reincarnating someone with the shredded wires of a coffeemaker and the help of a thunderstorm.

“Natalie?” Grimes asked, and her tone was a bit terse.

Natalie snapped back to the present and nodded.

“A mob?” she asked with a look for her boss. She had a bit of a history with mobs herself, back
in
history. She wanted to keep it that way. “Wow, that hardly ever happens anymore.”

“Yup, those clean-up-the-city movements really changed our jobs.” Grimes sighed almost wistfully. “Not that you’re old enough to really remember that.”

Natalie swallowed back a snort. Grimes looked older than Natalie by at least ten years, though in reality Natalie had a good two centuries-plus on her; she just had the monster aging factor on her side. Her boss had a thin face and long, straight black hair that was actually a bit reminiscent of Cher . . . or the Addams Family (yet another show that got it wrong about monsters, but at least it had given them a smidgen of humanity).

She remembered the Civil War (though she hadn’t been stateside for it). The crackdown on crime in New York hardly registered on her radar. In another hundred years, she wouldn’t remember it at all. Assuming she didn’t encounter her own mob in the interim.

“Yeah, but everyone knows what it used to be like. I’ve read some of the old reports. It was pretty ugly here not that long ago,” Natalie said. “Normally these kinds of things only happen now when it’s New Year’s or the Nets win a championship.”

Grimes nodded. “Aw, yeah, that case two New Years ago. I’d forgotten that. That was a good one.”

Natalie tried not to shudder. Morbid.

“Where did this happen?” she asked.

Grimes shook her head and there was an actual delighted gleam in her eyes. Shit, she really had to believe this case was going to make her more famous than she already was.

Natalie had a theory that Grimes was hoping some writer would fashion a plucky heroine after her and suddenly there would be a television show or movie starring Angelina Jolie or Olivia Wilde or something.
Grimes!
Or
Death Grime
. Or
Grimey, M.E.

“It didn’t happen where you might guess,” Grimes teased as she passed her key card through the reader at the door to the morgue. It swung open automatically and the two of them walked into the cold, sterile room. “The beating happened on the Upper East Side.”

Natalie didn’t mask her disbelief. “You’re kidding me! The worst that happens up there are white-collar crimes, maybe the occasional mugging.”

Grimes nodded. “And the occasional murder-for-hire. Remember that case in ’08.”

Natalie paused as nostalgia flooded her. Maybe she was a little morbid, too. “Oh yeah, the Swansons and their War of the Roses. But a mob beating couldn’t be a murder-for-hire. That just doesn’t make sense. Maybe . . . drugs?”

“
Nope.
The cops say they don’t suspect drug involvement, although of course we’ll run the usual tests,” Grimes said with a shrug. “It’s all part of the big, fat mystery.”

Natalie blinked in confusion. “That
is
weird. Do they have any theories about what made a mob attack this poor person?”

“
That’s
what makes the case so interesting,” Grimes said.

She walked over to one of the refrigerated drawers that held the bodies and opened it. As she slid the sheet-covered body out, she said, “The cops have several eyewitness statements that say our victim was
invisible
before the mob attacked him. That he only became visible
after
he was killed.”

Natalie’s ears began to ring and her vision blurred for just the slightest second. She fought to keep her face calm and nonreactive.

“Invisible?” she repeated. Her voice seemed pretty calm to her own ears, though a little shrill. “Wh-what does that mean exactly?”

Grimes shrugged. “According to the report, the guy was just clothes draped over nothingness. He had no hands, no face, just . . . nothing.”

Natalie clenched her hands into and out of fists at her sides. “That’s crazy talk. The cops have to be wrong about the lack of drug involvement. Sounds like the
witnesses
were on something.”

“Nope,” Grimes said. “None of the witnesses appeared to have any kind of impairment, beyond being freaked out about the whole mob-beats-guy-to-death thing. Oh, and the invisible-guy thing.”

Natalie nodded because it was expected, but inside her head, her mind was screaming about Ellis. He had been missing at the meeting. Her brain spun around on invisible dead men and mobs and news coverage and about twenty other thoughts that crowded and echoed in her head, none of them good.

“So, do you want to see what the Invisible Man looks like?” Grimes asked with glee.

Natalie hesitated. She sort of
knew
what Ellis looked like. Sure, he was invisible, but like in his old movies and book, he could cover up that fact through all kinds of creative means. He always said a modern world made being invisible less . . . see-through.

In the early spring, fall, and winter, he used scarves, hats, and sunglasses to disguise his monstrous qualities. When sunglasses drew too much attention, like at night, he had a large collection of full-coverage eye contacts to choose from.

But in the summer, when it was boiling hot and sweaty, he couldn’t get away with wearing his usual disguises. Not only would he have been uncomfortable, but a man in a calf-length trench coat, hat, and sunglasses, swathed in a scarf, would have probably alerted Homeland Security.

Instead, he used his training as an actor and covered his invisible skin with makeup to create whatever appearance he wanted. Once he’d even been black, despite being told how truly inappropriate that little stunt was . . .

But there was one “face” he wore often enough that Natalie had always thought it might just be his own.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Then do the honors,” Grimes said. “And get the gurney while I scrub up.”

Her boss turned away to prepare herself for the actual autopsy, which was just as well. If the guy under this sheet really was Ellis, Natalie was going to have a hard time covering her reaction.

There was a container of gloves attached to the wall and she grabbed a pair and tugged them on before she slowly grabbed the edge of the sheet. Taking a deep breath, she yanked it back.

The white fabric pulled away, revealing a face swollen by the beating. Even under the massive bruising, though, she could see it was a face she both knew and didn’t know.

“Oh no,” she whispered. Tears stung her eyes and forced her to blink to keep them at bay. “Oh, Ellis.”

She stared down at him, finally fully revealed in death in a way he could never manage in life. One of his eyes had been swollen shut, but the other was open and blank, staring at nothingness.

“His eyes were green,” she said with another sad sigh. “I always wondered what color they really were.”

“Did you say something?” Grimes asked, suddenly at her elbow like she was a medical-examining ninja or something.

Natalie started. She could
not
let her boss know she knew their “patient.” That would only lead to questions. And it would mean getting taken off the case because of personal involvement, and that meant she wouldn’t know what the hell was going on.

For self-preservation, she
had
to know.

“Sorry, I was just commenting on the bruising around the eyes,” she croaked. “Looks like more than just fists caused this.”

She turned away, gathering her composure with a few deep breaths as she walked across to the gurney and came back to transport Ellis’s broken body to the examination table.

“Good catch,” Grimes said with a wide grin she hid as she slid her mask up. “There were
several
baseball bats involved.”

Natalie flinched, but continued to shift Ellis’s body (monster strength came in handy at these times). Once he was fully on the gurney, she rolled him a few feet over to her boss, who waited at the exam table. A few more quick motions, and Ellis was laid out for autopsy. Once again, Natalie blinked to keep her eyes clear before she started breaking the seals on the sterilized equipment they would use to perform their gruesome task.

“All right, let’s get to it,” Grimes said as she clapped her hands together with glee that was way beyond what the situation required. “I want to see what made the Invisible Man tick, don’t you?”

Natalie closed her eyes briefly. No, she did not. But she had no other choice.

Natalie stood at the big metal sink, letting hot water scald her hands as she stared straight ahead of her at nothingness.

When she’d first taken the job at the ME’s office, autopsies had been hard on her. Cutting up bodies had been a bit too reminiscent of her own slice-and-dice past.

Over time she had managed to move past discomfort and become numb to the grossness (most of the time) and weirdness of being a human butcher. After all, her job had a purpose, unlike her father’s experiments. What she did helped families get closure and brought criminals to justice.

Of course, she’d never autopsied someone she knew before. Now all of her initial reactions to the process returned in force. Her stomach hurt and she just wanted to go home and shower for about a week.

“So have you ever read the book
The Invisible Man
?” Grimes asked as she tugged bloody gloves off her hands, tossed them in the medical waste container, and moved in beside Natalie at the big sink to scrub up.