"Splicer." he murmurs in her ear. Her moment of terror is gone, replaced with hot blinding rage. How dare he! "This one's different from the others. Best we get a move on." He pulls his hand away and edges around her toward the door.
"Don't touch me." she spits after him, which turns out to be a mistake.
There's a clatter from further in. "I know I heard it that time!" something cries. An impossibly long neck snakes over to where Elizabeth had been standing. She's backed into the shadows now, and the head on top of the neck squints around to try and find her. Its eyes are large and unfocused and streaked with blood. The rest of its face is hardly any better. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice-" The head chuckles lowly. "-and I'll make you wish you were never born. How's that sound?"
DeWitt and Elizabeth are hardly moving, hardly breathing. DeWitt thinks about reaching for his gun, but the head is between him and Elizabeth. If it moves, he might lose any chance he has for answers. He reaches into his pocket and slowly pulls out the wrench, lining it up with the creature's skull before he lashes out. The long neck and head droop down to the floor. Elizabeth lets out the breath she's been holding. "What is that?" she asks.
"Don't know. Not sure as I care to either." DeWitt holds out a hand and beckons to her. "Let's get the hell out of here 'fore it wakes up."
She disregards his outstretched hand and steps over the neck. "I suppose there's no sense asking if you got what we came for." she says as she exits the store.
"I'd just laid eyes on the vacuum cleaner when I heard that thing talkin' to itself. Didn't have time to grab it then, but I might now. Wait here." He hurries off to the right.
Elizabeth looks through the window at the deformed outline. What she can see of it is still motionless on the ground. "I don't think I've ever seen splicing turn out like this." she murmurs. "It could be one of those 'spiders' getting greedy. Maybe SportBoost?" She runs through the list of Plasmids that she knows about, unwilling to 'look up' any more through the Sea of Doors. "Or Houdini. It might explain why his genes seem to have gotten confused the way they do."
"Or maybe all of the above." DeWitt says, holding the vacuum cleaner under one arm. "No sign of the other things y' wanted." he adds.
"Then let's head back to the men's department for the belt." she says, and turns on her heel.
He catches up after he bars the door with a spare bit of plywood. "What exactly is all this junk gonna do?" he asks.
As they make their way back through the Pavilion, Elizabeth explains. "The body of the vacuum cleaner will serve as the body of the device, obviously."
"Obviously."
"The hooks from the Pneumo Bot are what will enable us to hold onto the light fixtures. The handle of the vacuum cleaner will trigger the magnet once we find the wire and tape. The belt, the brackets and the bolts act as an arm-rest. And you might have seen me using some other tools down below to help get the metal into shape, a metal cutter, drill and pliers, but there seem to be plenty of those around on workbenches and such."
DeWitt shakes his head in disbelief. "There anything you can't do?" he asks, half-jokingly.
"I never learned how to cook. I had a...friend...of the family who...took care of that." She had seen an echo of him in the deep-sea welder outside Market Street. Constants and variables. "Besides that? I never learned how to fire a gun, as I already told you. I'm not sure I want to learn either."
DeWitt sets their new supplies down upon the Home Delivery counter. "It's lookin' like it's kill or be killed down here. Might be worth reevaluatin'." He hesitates a moment, then draws his Mauser out and places it next to the pile. "Gimme a shout if y' need anythin'."
Elizabeth hurriedly starts work on whatever she can to prepare for the other parts. She won't allow herself to think about how much trust he has begun to put in her, nor of how she will use that trust during what is to come.
