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The glow of the lights was visible for miles up and down the length of Route 66 -- flashing red and blue emergency services lights, the head-and-taillights of even more vehicles arriving from all directions called in by the first responders, the pre-existing glow of Clines Corners holosignage and the five acres of well-lit parking lots sprawling around it. Olivia Colomar spotted them as she sped across the desert flats from an oblique angle to avoid the police cordon up on the road itself, official radio chatter in one ear, mic snuggled up close against her lips as she spoke in a voice just a little louder than the hum of her vehicle’s engine. “I see it, chat, and I cannot believe my eyes.”
A flick of those eyes turned the exterior cameras in her rig on and commenced the livestream, the last minutes of her stealthy rush across the desert, scrub brush and dunes whipping past until she pulled up, sliding neatly into the shadow of a particularly robust mesquite bush. “What you’re seeing before me now is Clines Corners -- freshly renovated just this past year in properly retro fashion, come visit. The pumps aren’t only for show, they’re recharge pillars now, and the margaritas are as good as they ever were, I promise. The restaurant and souvenir shop are around back…as are the parking lots, where long-term parking for campers and short-term parking for cross-country travelers has been available for decades at this point. And also something…very much else.”
The “very much else” was huge, looming above the low-lying structure of the Corners itself in all its blue and gold big box store glory, and now occupied a fairly substantial chunk of the parking lots. From her present angle, she could see the hive of activity in front of the building’s entrance, at least two stories of windows and columns and sliding automatic doors of various sizes, emergency services vehicles and personnel and an absolute herd of people who were not, being tended to by the assorted paramedics and police.
“An IKEA.” Olivia breathed into her mic. “An actual, whole-ass IKEA. An IKEA that absolutely was not here twenty-four hours ago. Something weird has clearly happened here -- a dimensional incursion of some variety unless I miss my guess. I’m going to approach to get a better look at what’s going on.”
Chat absolutely exploded and she took the opportunity to skitter closer, abandoning the concealment of her helpful mesquite bush for the garishly lit chaos in the parking lots, straightening up and striding in as though she absolutely belonged there with such success that no one even attempted to stop much less question her. It probably helped that she’d thrown on a pair of khakis and a button-down in vaguely officialish tribal police green covered in patches and a shield and a name tag that would pass muster so long as they weren’t examined too closely, her absolutely non-regulation hair pulled up under an insignia'd ball cap. She did not, in fact, have any idea what her best guess would be in this situation: there was a literal fucking IKEA looming out of the dark in front of her, an IKEA surrounded in what looked like the crushed wreckage of at least a couple campers in addition to everything else. She ducked her head to avoid catching the eye of a tribal cop who's just broken out his traffic control wands and was using them to direct the newest arrivals, a handful of ambulances from the local communities. Olivia used the chance to follow them closer to the herd milling in front of the doors, jogging alongside and nodding in a crisply professional fashion to the people who cast glances at her.
It took all the crisp professionalism in her not to just stop and stare once she cleared the screen of emergency vehicles and even the chat, seeing what she saw through her cameras, slowed and stuttered to a halt for a long, long moment. At least a hundred people milled about, some clotted together in small groups, others in ones or twos, most being wrangled into clusters around the already positioned ambulances by the EMTs. All of them looked like they were suffering from some species of shock, expressions ranging from blank and traumatized to traumatized and twitchy about it. Quite a few sported the kind of hair that hadn’t seen the inside of a salon in months if not years, frizzy beards and bristling mustaches in desperate need of conditioning. Most of them were wearing…normalish clothes, albeit ones that had seen better days, tattered and much mended in some places, barely hanging together in others. Many were wearing garments that had obviously been juryrigged from textile home goods, towels and sheets and curtains and Olivia’s chat absolutely spoke for her when somebody said, “ What the actual and entire fuck.”
It wasn’t even a question. Olivia slipped back between the vehicles and pulled out her cell, typing without even glancing at the screen as she repositioned. Hammond, are you SEEING this?
She cut right, looking for a way to wiggle in closer and hear what was going on, hooked her foot under something , swore, slammed her hip into it, and barely caught herself before she went down. It was a trolley -- one of the big IKEA warehouse trolleys, loaded with flatpack furniture, several bags full of throw pillows, a couple more loaded with bed linens and towels, and a couple thermal bags that could contain nothing but frozen meatballs. Said trolley was parked behind a genuinely ancient pickup truck -- a truck with actual rubber wheels and a gas tank and the bed of which was already stacked with several large packages extending out onto the lowered tailgate.
“I’m sorry, ma’am -- I didn’t think when I parked the trolley and -- oh, goddamn, it’s you. ”
“ Me? ” Olivia just barely managed not to screech. “It’s YOU. ”
Cole Cassidy dropped down out of the back of his ancient dubiously legal truck and glared at her. “What are you doin’ here? You ain’t any kind of…” His gaze swept over her from boot-tips to hat and his expression grew a fraction flintier. “ Law enforcement professional. ”
Olivia opened her mouth and had to throttle the urge to go for maximum petty -- Neither are you! -- because that wouldn’t help, at all. “I could ask the same of you. What the Hell is going on here? That freaking big box store wasn’t here this time yesterday! ”
“Well, look who doesn’t know everythin’ for a change.” The asshole had the audacity to look amused. “Sure of that, are you?”
“Yes, yes I am absolutely sure of that.” Olivia replied tersely. “What --”
He held up a hand -- a hand, she could not help but notice, was grubby with more than dust and warehouse grease pencil. “Wait right there. What day is it?”
“Are you fucking with me right now?” And when he offered her a flat-eyed look in reply. “Okay, fine. It’s exactly 11:32 PM on Tuesday, May --”
“ Tuesday! ” A second voice yelped from the truck bed and Cole Cassidy, Ranger Cassidy, NPS Southwest’s borderline pet cryptid winced.
“ Yeah, ” Cassidy sighed and stepped back to offer his companion a hand down. “Sorry, darlin’. Tuesdays are officially cursed.”
“You’re that college student!” Olivia yelped and pointed and the individual in question, all milk-white hair and golden eyes -- he had golden eyes, she couldn’t believe it -- and weird abstract tattoos tilted his head and regarded her quizzically. “The one involved in that thing at the Children’s Museum in December!”
“I actually was not involved in that, though some of my students were.” The unearthly creature straightening himself up and dusting himself off before her replied. “Hanzo Shimada. And you are?”
“The one who wrote that muckrakin’ article about Deadlock Gorge,” Ranger Unamused informed him in an undertone.
“Olivia Colomar, reporter with Paranormal New Mexico .” She offered her hand and he accepted it and he. Had. Claws. Actual fucking claws. And he was very careful with them too as he shook her hand, firm and professional.
“I see. And you are, I assume, here because of…” Those otherworldly eyes flicked in the direction of the store. “That?”
“What else?” Olivia asked, without a single trace of irony.
“Hm.” Goldeneyes McMFA Student glanced over his shoulder at the ranger, who had yet to cease glowering at her. Were his eyes glowing red? No, that had to be a reflection from all the police lights. “Beloved, I think we should at least give a statement. If nothing else, it will allow us to pre-empt unwholesome speculation.”
“...Okay, you have a point.” The ranger allowed after a moment in which some form of communication passed between them that visibly melted his stony demeanor. Or at least that's what it seemed like. Maybe he just couldn’t say no to his boyfriend’s huge, glistening, fucking golden eyes.
“Excellent. We will, however, only be giving his interview to you , Miss Colomar, and not to your viewers.” The cameras all popped and fizzled at once and the chat, running up the inside of her glasses froze, and all of her external internet feeds dropped one by one. “That is my condition.” And he smiled and he had fangs and Olivia took a half-step backward before she remembered she was a reporter, dammit, and this was the kind of story she lived for.
“Okay, no livestream. I am going to record this for accuracy purposes when I write the story.” Olivia whipped out her phone, activated the vocorder, and held it where they could both see it. “Hit me.”
“By all means. It began,” Hanzo Shimada said silkily, “with our new compound needing furniture…”
***
It had taken five months but the end was now in sight. Five months in which Hana and Jamie had identified and fixed every fault in the compound’s wiring, renewed the old solar panels with a modern array and batteries, and set the entire place up with a wireless internet mesh that would be the envy of the average corporate campus. Five months in which Rein and Roadie tested the quality of the water still sitting in the subterranean cistern and decided the whole thing needed to be purged, sanitized, resealed, and refilled, the filtration, catchment, and recycling systems torn out and replaced completely. Five months spent getting in contact with the children and grandchildren of the former owners, packing up and shipping out long-believed-lost family heirlooms to their rightful owners, then sacking up and trashing anything too dry-rotted, dust-mite infiltrated, or otherwise threadbare to be salvaged. Five months of chasing spiders and scorpions and snakes out of the corners in which they’d built up hidey holes, sweeping old bird nests out of chimneys and preventing new ones from being made, polishing hardwood floors and mopping tiled ones, dusting latilla’d ceilings, washing windows, refreshing paint, replanting the xeriscaped courtyard garden.
But now it was almost done. Everyone had chosen their bedrooms and workrooms, the communal living areas were already decorated and mostly furnished, the new appliances plugged in and ready to go. The new mattresses were scheduled for delivery and that left, really, only one thing left to worry about.
“Storage,” Hanzo Shimada said, gazing upon all that they’d wrought in the last handful of months, mostly with satisfaction.
“Storage?” Cole echoed, handing him a bottle of citrus salt lick, ice cold and delicious, from the big house’s brand newish and clearly functioning refrigerator.
“Yes. We are rather short on it.” He popped the lid and drank deeply. “I do not begrudge the former owners the return of their antique dressers and wardrobes and cedar chests, but this compound was built presuming they would be the primary forms of storage. There is a distinct paucity of alternatives.”
“He means there’s no closets. Like, none. Well, okay, almost none.” Hana added as she waddled past lugging a bucket of rocks to help Zen with the xeriscaping project. “I will not, however, be storing my clothes or my system components or my clothes in the same closet where we found all those old cleaning supplies and a million mummified wolf spiders. N E V E R. ”
“You perceive the issue.” Hanzo paused. “I will also not be storing anything that I might actually want to wear again in that closet. Singular.”
“Do they have to be great pieces that fully match everything else, or just to get y’all through until you can find better?” Cole asked, looking up from his phone. “Because if not, there’s options.”
“Oh?”
***
“Wait. Are you telling me you came out here looking for this place? ”
“Yes.”
“Kinda?”
Ranger Cassidy and Unearthly Grad Student Shimada exchanged a glance. Shimada responded, “We were looking for a big box store. This just happened to be the one we found. ”
“And by found he means it appeared out of the desert like a mirage -- we were actually headed toward Clovis when we set out -- they have a couple home stores there and, well, it’s far enough away that you wouldn’t be paying Santa Fe prices for furniture.” Cassidy added.
A collective shudder ran through the entire group, and Olivia could not find it in herself to resist. She was, after all, still paying off the cost of her bedroom set. “Okay so…this place. Right here in the middle of Clines Corners.”
“I admit I didn’t remember hearing about Cline’s sellin’ off any of its acreage but…” Cassidy shrugged. “It was right there! In broad daylight! And it looked completely normal when we pulled in!”
“And mostly normal when we went inside, as well. Bins of those little angle wrenches, notepads and pencils to write down order numbers, the floor maps! Everything was perfectly normal except…” Shimada’s voice trailed off and his gaze grew distant.
“Except?” Olivia prodded because there was nothing worse than dead air on a recording.
“Except there were no employees that we could find. Not at the information booths, not in the halls. It struck us as odd.” A wry smile crossed his almost impossibly handsome face. “We realized something was really not right when we saw the first bloodstains. It was not even a clearance section. And then when we noticed that the employees coming toward us were a pack of faceless monstrosities with sharpened Löftesrik butter knives for fingers.”
“Pretty sure they were Mopsig butter knives, darlin’.”
“Really? The shape was --”
“CAN WE GET ON WITH THE STORY, PLEASE?”
***
“ RUN!”
Cole Cassidy was not the sort of person who insisted on going strapped everywhere he went -- mostly because, contrary to the paranoid fantasies of many, life below the Red Line wasn’t more likely to require random gunplay than life above it and partly because the loads he generally carried wouldn’t be much help in a standard lead-throwing situation. Today, as he ran through the halls of an IKEA where something had gone clearly, horribly wrong, he actively regretted that restraint. Fortunately, he still had two advantages, even without his own best weapon.
The first was a trolley they’d found abandoned near a service kiosk that, loaded down with improvised weapons of several varieties, functioned as an ideal battering ram for knocking down and running over faceless, howling monstrosities clad in IKEA employee shirts, individually and in small packs. He found they were, despite their horrifying aspect and legitimately stabby hands, quite satisfyingly crunchable when slammed into something and then stomped underfoot.
The second was Hanzo, who combined the supernatural physical capabilities of an okami demigod with the finely honed combat abilities favored by his only-barely-not-a-Yakuza-clan family and the ingenuity of a cash-strapped MFA student. He had, from somewhere, produced a roll of duct tape that he’d used to make himself an astonishingly sturdy sword out of curtain rods and similarly applied his talents to their buckets of indiscriminately chosen flatware, with which he was deadly at a hundred paces.
So, frankly, when Hanzo yelled run , he absolutely ran and only glanced back when he heard the sounds of combat cease, to find his lover loping after him, leaving devastation in his wake.
“Where to, darlin’?” Cole asked, pulling their trolley into the shadow of the staircase leading up to the second floor showrooms.
“Not that way.” Hanzo replied dryly. “I saw no exits when I was up in the ceiling supports. Only…more halls. More, I think, than it should be possible for this building to hold.” He paused. “Even the doors that we entered by are no longer there.”
“Well…shit.” Cole leaned back against the staircase’s structural support. “You hurt?”
“Scratches. Not even deep ones.” Hanzo hunkered down next to him but didn’t set down his sword. “We need to find somewhere safe to assess the situation. Do you have any bars of connection?”
“Nope. You?”
Hanzo shook his head. “We are going to need water, food -- a lockable door --”
“Psst. Hey. ” The voice echoed down from above and brought them both back to their feet. Peering down through the glass partitions lining the staircase was a youngish woman, no more than twentysomething, gesturing at them urgently. “C’mon, up here. Leave the trolley and hurry . We can’t leave the security barrier open for long!”
Cole glanced at Hanzo and, together, they heaved themselves to their feet and hurried up the stairs in the direction of the showcase floor. The young woman waited for them at the top of the staircase -- and immediately next to what looked, for all the world, like a barbican constructed of repurposed product shelves and flatpack furniture, bristling with sharpened chair legs and lengths of metal reinforcement, currently standing open just enough to allow them entrance. “Unless you can be sure you don’t have any monster bits stuck in that sword, you’re going to need to leave it outside. I’m sorry, but --”
Hanzo dropped it without argument. “I can make another. Lead on.”
She blinked, nonplussed. “Okay then, let’s --”
From somewhere unpleasantly nearby, a horrible ululation rose: a hunting call.
“Let’s hurry!” She gestured them ahead of her and they went through the gap single-file, finding on the other side two husky young men waiting to close and lock the gate behind them.
“Gate one closed and secure!” The call came from above -- from, it was clearly obvious, a sort of overhead observation platform, likewise cleverly improvised. Ahead of them a second gate stood open enough to let them through, likewise closed, locked, and announced secure once they were through.
Beyond that lay, for want of a better term, a small town. It was, quite obviously, still the Bedrooms Shop -- but the internal structures had been rearranged to provide actual living space for the dozen or so people waiting to receive them with varying levels of nervous tension, some of them armed with improvised weapons of their own, kept leveled and ready to stab.
“Easy there, folks.” Cole raised his hands and Hanzo did the same. “We’re --”
“Oh for fuck’s sake put your spears down and let them get inside.” A voice boomed from above, accompanied by heavy footsteps coming down a not-yet-visible set of stairs.
A ripple went through the crowd, the guards lowered their spears with obvious reluctance, and a giant of a man came around the corner, for whom they parted like Moses with the Red Sea. He was six-five if he was an inch, clad in a fuzzed out high-and-tight, a much-patched black tee shirt and a pair of desert camo BDU trousers tucked into boots still polished to a high shine and Cole knew, the instant that they locked eyes, that he was a Marine. He found himself, completely involuntarily, coming to attention and only barely resisted the urge to salute. “Sir!”
“Heh.” The very clearly a sir huffed, visibly amused, and offered his hand. “At ease…” His gaze flicked over them both, “Rangers?”
“NPS Special Operations,” The handshake was firm and brisk, professional, and Cole felt some of the tension leak out of his spine. “And I’d surely love to know what the Hell is goin’ on here.”
That broke the logjam of jitters and apprehension and the welcoming party gave way to others -- who ushered them deeper inside the little sanctuary they’d built, with its hardened walls and defensive structures, its places to sit and its places to cook and wash and sleep. A medic came bustling up with water and a fully stocked first aid kit to tend their legitimately pretty minor scratches and a minutes after that they were taken into what was obviously the commissary, sat at a table and provided with food -- real food, tortilla wraps stuffed with chicken and vegetables with chips on the side and tea to drink.
It became obvious that there were, in fact, way more than a dozen people in what was clearly a fortified strong-point that had required significant effort to construct and maintain. They came and went about their business, casting curious glances on occasion, some of them dressed in ordinary if rather heavily patched clothing, some in garments obviously made from home textiles, stitched together from sheets, most of them. Many looked like they hadn’t had a proper haircut, or shave, in at the very least months.
“All good?” The Sergeant asked.
“Your hospitality is…extremely gracious given the circumstances.” Hanzo replied. “Now… what is this place? ”
“Near as we can tell?” The Sergeant gestured some of the others over, and still more came of their own accord, pulling up folding chairs and carrying a few futons over to make more sitting room. “It’s an IKEA. An IKEA that exists primarily to trap people inside it.”
“Elaborate?” Cole asked, after a moment of ringing silence.
“Well, just to use myself as an example,” the Sergeant gestured expressively, “I’ve been here eighteen months. Came in to pick up some furniture that my daughter ordered for her off-campus apartment that, for some reason, couldn’t be delivered. Doors closed behind me, and I never found them again.”
“ Eighteen months? ” Hanzo echoed, stunned.
“Five years,” Someone else in the group said quietly.
“Two weeks.”
“Three and a half months.”
“Most of us have been here a good long time.” The Sergeant continued grimly. “There are exits to this place. We’ve all seen them. But they’re never in the same place all the time and getting to them? Well. That’s the rub. You have to hope you can get to them before it gets dark. Or else…”
As though to underscore that statement, the ululating hunting howls rose again, echoing through the walls.
“Yeah, them.” Cole flicked a glance around the group. “What the Hell are they?”
“Honestly, none of us really know. Employees? Jailers? A little bit of both?” The Sergeant grimaced. “Contrary to what y’all experienced when you came in, they’re usually not aggressive during the day -- something’s got ‘em het up, no idea what. Most days they just sort of mill around the halls and sometimes gather up at the information kiosks but they mostly ignore you if you ignore them. At night, when the building turns down the lights? At night they hunt , and you’d best have someplace safe to hunker down if you don’t want to end up a stain on the floor.”
“A place like this, for instance?” Cole asked. “How many are there? How many people are there?”
“Somewhere north of a hundred, last time we checked, spread across a half-dozen secure zones -- there’s one in Outdoors, one in Living Rooms, one in the Food Court, a couple three in the warehouse section. Used to be one in Home Office but, well, they didn’t properly secure their barrier one night and when we went to check on them it was a mess. ” The Sergeant replied. “We’ve got some secure passages that link up to the restrooms -- neutral ground for everybody -- and we trade back and forth for necessities. Stuff’s always getting replenished, though nobody’s ever seen how. At least we don’t have to worry about dying of thirst or starvation.”
“Cell Phones? Connections to the outside?”
A susurrus ran through the group as they all held up their cellphones.
“No bars. Haven’t had any in…years at this point.”
“We’ve got chargers and most of us have some music and movies and books downloaded, so we don’t completely die of boredom.”
“Not that spending our lives trying not to be mauled to death by the worst service employees on Earth is boring. ”
“So,” Cole said, his mouth horribly dry, “We’re trapped.”
“Pretty much.” The Sergeant clapped a hand to his shoulder. “I know it’s a lot to take in. You’ll both acclimate given time. Right now, I’d like to get these two set up with a sleeping space and then we should get back into our daily routine, folks --”
A general murmur of agreement ran through the group and the Sergeant rose, gesturing them into the care of a grandmotherly woman clad in a dress fashioned from Vallasån bath towels, who showed them to an alcove containing a bed (“This one should be big enough for both of you, unless you’d prefer separate -- oh, good for you, you make a lovely couple, you do”), a lamp and a pair of chairs. Wordlessly, the both plugged their phones into the charge slots in the base of the lamp and, together, stared blankly at the lack of bars.
“I’m not sure why I thought that would work,” Cole admitted. “Gabe is going to lose his fuckin’ mind.”
“ Genji is going to lose his mind,” Hanzo agreed grimly. “You realize we must do something about this, yes? We cannot just…stay here. Or leave these people here when we go.”
“Yeah, I know that. But we also can’t go off half-cocked -- not with more’n a hundred people’s lives at risk. We need a plan. A good plan.”
***
“So what was the plan?”
“....”
“....”
“Oh, come on.”
***
It took three day-night cycles for Cole and Hanzo to get a feel for the place, its people, and its daily rhythms. Everyday duties inside the enclave were parceled out for the most part on a first-come, first-tasked basis, from food prep to mending to general cleaning. The sturdier, and faster, residents were given the more potentially dangerous jobs: day and night sentry shifts on the overhead platforms, courier-and-escort duty between the various strongholds, scouting-and-mapping parties sent out to see if the building had grown any more.
(“Grown?”
“Yeah, the place is…kinda bigger inside than it is outside, from what we can tell. By a lot -- maybe as much as two or three ordinary IKEAs. And it seems to get bigger every time it picks up new people, so…”)
Cole volunteered to go out with the scouting parties, most of whom were experienced hands when it came to their work, and had the chance to encounter other such parties, with whom they freely exchanged information up to allowing him to take pictures of their maps, as well. Hanzo volunteered for sentry duty, quick and agile as he was on both the platforms and the ceiling supports, to which he climbed after “dark,” the best to track the packs of employees as they began their own nightly prowling. On the morning of the fourth cycle, he dropped down into their quarters having spent the night confirming some of their suspicions. Cole handed him a cup of coffee and a Danish, and Hanzo passed him a tightly folded map, to which they both applied themselves in silence for a moment.
“So they hunker down en masse near where the doors have appeared in the past, and little packs peel off to hunt in the aisles,” Cole sipped his own coffee thoughtfully. “By night, at any rate.”
“Yes. By day they appear genuinely without thought or direction.” Hanzo rubbed grit out of his eyes. “But, I have only seen doors appear -- in the distance -- during the day.”
“Hm.” Cole leaned over and pressed a kiss to his temple. “Get some rest, darlin’. I’m going to go talk to the Sarge.”
Cole found the Sarge with a group of the enclave’s most skilled crafters, putting together some more spears and a handful of the curtain rod swords that Hanzo had put together, only even sturdier, with cross-piece braces and everything. “Can I have a word with you, Sarge?”
“Surely.” He rose, dusted off his hands. “Six more of each.”
A murmur of agreement ran through the group and the Sarge gestured for him to follow to one of the commissary tables. “What’s up?”
They settled, and Cole pulled the map out of his back pocket, spread it out in front of them. “You remember when I told you that I was a Special Operations Ranger?”
“Yep. Admittedly, I wondered what that meant, all things considered.” The Sarge ran a hand over the map. “Looks like you two have been busy.”
“We have.” Cole caught his eye and smiled. “Briefly? NPS Special Ops covers situations like this. I’m the one who gets the call when a bunch of innocent folks need to be rescued from, well, an IKEA that exists to trap them.”
“And this is your plan to do that?” The Sarge tapped the map.
“Yup.”
“Tell me.”
And so he did. And then he did the same with the leaders of the other enclaves, during the gathering called in the Food Court, where he went over the plan, fielded questions and concerns, and took suggestions. They as a group refined the plan over the next three day-night cycles as they addressed legitimate concerns (“We’ll put the old folks and the young’uns and anyone who can’t move fast on command on trolleys. Put together a group of folks to push.”) and suggestions (“The folks over in Warehouse went over the plans for the cattle chute with a fine-toothed comb and found some places where they can reinforce it with disassembled product storage racks. Honestly, it’s better than my idea.”) and soothed nervous energy as construction began (“Trust me…this is gonna work.”). The actual construction process took the most part of another four day-night cycles while the teams were organized: the runners, who’d draw the attention of the employee hunting packs; the pushers, who’d make sure everyone else got herded out okay; the fighters, who’d do the majority of the hardest work. In between, everyone gathered materials and made all the weapons they could stockpile. (Out of the corner of his eye, he was vaguely aware of Hanzo scheming on something with the Warehouse enclave. He made a mental note to ask what was up but then they both immediately became so busy that it completely left his mind.)
They put the plan into motion at dawn of the next day cycle, getting the trolleys staged and the people who’d ride and travel with them moved into secure positions, moving the cattle chute into place and securing it, positioning the runners where they’d need to be to start the evening’s entertainment, and the fighters where they’d need to be to continue it.
Hanzo went with the runners and Cole pulled him aside before he left, into their pleasant little nest of beds and chairs and cushions, kissed him long and soft and deep. “Be careful out there, darlin’.”
“Always.” Hanzo ran hands up his spine and into his hair. “Take no more risks than you must.”
“Heh. You’re one to say that.” One last kiss and then they parted, with Cole taking his place at the top of the cattle chute, surrounded by spears and perfume oil Molotov cocktails and nervous people waiting for the night cycle to start, in the meantime passing around sandwiches and sodas and words of encouragement. At a quarter of ten, the lights flashed their fifteen minute warning and the first of the howls rose. Folks skittered to their final assigned positions. Slowly, oh so slowly, the lights overhead dimmed down to twilight.
The first of the employees’ hunting howls went up shortly thereafter, echoing through the halls, followed closely by the yips and yells and hollers of the runners as they deliberately drew attention. Around him, the warriors tensed up, made sure their weapons were ready to go and the knotted sheet ropes they’d use to pull up the runners were firmly attached. Fifteen minutes passed and the howls and yips grew closer and closer, joined with the sound of feet pounding and heels squeaking on the floor tiling, and then the first runners were inside the chute. Ropes dropped and the first runners were pulled up, gasping for breath. “They’re right behind us. Like. All of them.”
“Good work,” Cole stepped aside so they could retreat down the backside of the chute and take up their positions with the rest of the folks down below. The last of the runners soon joined them and not a moment too soon as the chute echoed with the hunting howls of the employees, their bodies slamming into the metal-reinforced walls, claws scrabbling for purchase. At the far end of the chute, the call went up: “ They’re all in! Closing the gates!”
A shudder ran through the structure of the chute as the heavy metal and wooden gates slammed down, sealing the structure, preventing the employees from escaping.
“ NOW. ” From above, missiles rained down on the employees trapped in the cattle chute: spears tipped in broken metal and carefully knapped shards of glass and knives with their handles hammered off, glass vessels full of flammable perfume oil that shattered on contact and covered the floor in pools of slippery liquid and shards of glass.
Below, the employees howled -- but not their hunting howls, cries of pain and confusion, at the things they considered their prey suddenly growing claws and fight of their own. Some tried to scrabble up the walls of the chute but there were plenty of spears and swords up top to force them back down into the churning mass of flailing limbs and bodies. Some tried to force their way back through the gate only to find it closed tight without even the slightest hint of flex and with more weapons ready to force them away from it. The howls took on a hint of desperation and, yes, fear .
And that was what Cole was waiting for. “ Light ‘em up! ”
All around the perimeter lighters flared and strips of oil soaked cloth caught, dropped into the trap below, and the perfume oil went up with an audible rush and a sudden flare of light. The howls of fear turned into screeches of unambiguous terror and then --
“ The doors! The doors are there! The doors are open!”
“Go! GO! ” Cole shouted. “Pushers first, then runners, we’ll bring up the rear!”
Merchandise trolleys holding the IKEA’s senior and minor prisoners rattled out of their staging area and streamed through the doors out into the parking lot beyond, followed closely by the runners. By then, the chute itself was starting to catch, flames licking up the sides in plumes of foul-smelling smoke redolent of something like burning flesh. “Fighters, let’s go!”
“You heard the man, move like you’ve got a purpose!” The Sarge bellowed from his position midway down the chute, and the fighters scrambled to the floor, and from there out the doors.
Cole held back until the last of them were through -- and then stopped and held the door, as Hanzo ran past, pushing a merchandise trolley of his own, one loaded down with…actual merchandise. “Really, hon? Really?”
“I came for furniture, I am leaving with furniture.” Hanzo replied.
“Those are meatballs. Bags and bags of meatballs.” Cole pointed out as he let the door swish shut behind him.
“And also screw this place , that’s why.”
***
“So, what you're saying,” Olivia said contemplatively, “is that you -- you two -- saved all those people. From a people-eating IKEA.”
“Well, not really.” Cole replied and helped Hanzo heft the last of their stuff into the back of the pickup truck. “They rescued themselves. We just gave them the confidence to come up with a plan and execute it.”
“You realize just how completely full of shit that sounds, don’t you, Ranger Cassidy.”
“Was that question? Because it really didn’t sound like one, Ms. Colomar.”
Olivia opened her mouth to say something, anything in response to that only to be interrupted by a sudden, almost impossibly loud POP! of imploding air as the IKEA, which had been sitting there all dejected up to that point, abruptly ceased to exist. Just… vanished , leaving behind an empty void that a tremendous rush of air and dust and bits of demolished travel trailers rolled into fill, casting a cloud of the same skyward.
For a long, long moment, no one said or did anything. Olivia’s cameras came back online and all she could do was stare, Cole and Hanzo leaned into each other and stared, the police and EMTs and the former prisoners of the people-eating IKEA all stared.
Then, Hanzo cleared his throat. “Honestly, we do need to be going. We are the gods alone know how many actual days overdue from our shopping trip and we still have to put all this furniture together. Shall we, beloved?”
“Of course, darlin’. Say howdy to Hammond for me, Ms. Colomar. This is Paranormal New Mexico, signin’ off.”