Breeds 2 (30 page)

The third man in the tactical line got tossed screaming over the wall and into the pit.

The fourth officer had his head torqued to one side with a scream and a crackling of kindle, dropping him in a heap.

The fifth and sixth fired their weapons into the attacker’s rushing form, the automatic chatter drowning out their collective shouts. Tracer fire lasered through the dark. The mall killer swatted them both aside with savage force. One officer flew through the glass pane of a sandwich shop, smashing the window in a twinkling cascade. The other operator flipped over the wall surrounding the escalator pit and disappeared from sight.

From there, all cohesion in the unit collapsed.

Team members yelled and screamed as the monstrous entity in the shape of a man ripped through their ranks with all the speed of a tumbling line of dominos. Some fired their weapons, the curt burst like drum machines caught in a screeching of guitars. Ejectors pissed away brass casings in shiny arcs. One female had her head gripped and smashed clean through a nearby table, leaving the helmet’s outline in the fiberglass surface. A male officer had his jaw nearly flayed from his face with one slap. Another male officer fired a burst at the attacker’s bare shoulders, missed, and was grabbed by his neck and crotch and pitched into the remaining team.

The sounds of combat reached Decker from a very distant place as he struggled to regain his senses. His helmet and goggles had been knocked aside, skewing his vision. Outlines disappeared in sprays, like figures struggling on a ship sailing through rough seas. A gargled cry brought Decker back online. He quickly righted his helmet and located his MP5. He untangled himself from the table and chairs, and rose with his weapon braced against his shoulder.

The tac-leader flinched at the carnage surrounding him.

Seconds, he couldn’t have been down for anything more than five or six, yet his entire team lay sprinkled around the food court in spectral images. Arms and legs had been snapped backwards. Bodies twitched. Groans and bloody coughs spritzed the air. One officer dragged himself along the floor, leaving a lengthy streak that slowly filled in behind him. The man was giggling, faint but wheezing, shaking his head as if clutched by an insane joke. He pulled himself another foot, actually nuzzling a discarded shotgun, before becoming still.

Decker scanned the level, seeing another tac-member lying boots up and halfway through a sandwich shop’s display case. He forced himself to ignore her, ignore the fallen, because he had to, because the killer lurked within the food court.

A moan, low and sobbing, spun Decker around on his feet. He aimed in the escalators’ direction and moved the waist-high partition, gun first, and peered down. Some twenty feet below stood the half-naked mall killer, crouching over one of two fallen officers. The figure tore at his victim’s face and pulled things out in viscous arcs.

The team leader fired, opening up from the second level’s edge, lighting the dark.

The burst cut across the mall killer’s bare back. Fleshy pieces spattered against the floor. The half-naked man roared and jumped out of sight. Decker ceased firing and fumbled at his vest. He swapped out magazines and hastily loaded in a fresh one.

“Command—One,” he spoke into his mic. “The team is down. The whole team is down. I’m—”

He stopped and tapped his headset. No response. He reached for his mic and realized it was no longer on his helmet, but hanging below his jaw and presently inoperable.
Shit
. Decker scrambled to the nearest officer, a woman named Tessa Bell. He examined her for a moment, deciding what to do. He lowered his face to hers and plied back her mic so that he could speak into it.

“Command—One. The whole team is down. I’m the last. Over.”

No response.

Sweet Jesus
, Decker grumped,
where the hell did the brass buy these shitty headsets
?

“Repeat, team is down and I’m last man standing. Target has been hit. Repeat, target has been hit. I’m going after him. Send first responders in through the food court’s entrance. Officers are in need of immediate medical attention. Decker out.”

In the mobile command center parked at the center of a line of police cruisers, Sergeant Potter experienced a lance of anxiety. He gawked in disbelief at the banks of computer monitors. The screens were transmitting but showing nothing, while the mics had stopped entirely after a clearly heard
light him up
.

Then a maelstrom of shit as gunfire erupted through the speakers, followed by a bout of death metal screaming, and then…

Then nothing.

As if the entire tac-team had been swallowed whole.

Potter slapped the shoulder of one of his operators.

“Get me the Feds.”

After attempting to radio in, Decker pulled back from Tess and studied her green-glowing features. He slapped her cheeks. She didn’t respond so he lowered his cheek to her mouth and waited for a breath.

Nothing.

Anger welled up inside the team leader. He stood, bolted to the low wall encircling the escalators, and looked down to the first floor. Nothing moved. Nothing so much as breathed but he had to confirm the kill. He saw the shots ripping across the lower half of his target’s back, blowing out a kidney. The mall killer was probably directly beneath him, bleeding out facedown on the tiles.

Decker ran to the escalator and descended two steps at a time, his footfalls ringing out in the dark. The gloomy body of Rich Duran appeared on the metal stairs, his face a loose portrait of peace. Decker checked on the officer and confirmed his death, since his head plied almost flush to his left shoulder. The team leader crouched and proceeded cautiously, reaching the base of the escalator and the last officer the mall killer had been working over before Decker had shot him. Mel Thompson, an eight-year police veteran. The team leader turned away from the ruined face whose eye sockets resembled the holes of a very messy bowling ball.

Decker swept his gun right to left, lingering on the potted plants and overturned benches decorating the first floor. A gym was just to his right while a mountain bike shop was across from it. He stopped and listened, his senses fully returning.

The stink of blood swamped his nose and a second later, he spotted a blood trail. A grim look of intent hardened Decker’s features. He moved around metal benches and large pots, avoiding the brush of plastic plants, and snuck along the inky blots. The mall had returned to its tomb-like silence, as if aware the hunt was still in progress. That suited Decker just fine. This wasn’t a sand-blasted wasteland with pebbles underfoot. He held his MP5 firm against his shoulder and stared down the sights.

The oil spots led into the gym.

Decker crossed the floor, keeping low, and made like a floating phantom as he proceeded inside the sports club. Benches. Rows of free weights, from little wrist burners resembling doggy chew toys to huge plated pork barrels no mortal could ever possibly lift. A jungle of exercise machines and cycles assembled on a rubber-like material that covered the floor. Decker had no trouble seeing the ghoulish markers spattered across the surface. He moved between multiple shoulder press machines, addressing his angles, when a muffled slap from deeper within the gym froze the team leader in place.

Decker stayed in place for several fleeting seconds, wondering if his attacker was about to charge again. If he was, he’d have a clear field of fire. When nothing appeared, he unlocked himself and huffed along the blood trail toward an open hall at the center’s rear.

The word POOL was stenciled in big black lettering upon a closed door.

Decker placed his back against the door and pushed against it, immediately greeted by thick humidity. He entered, gun barrel first, the goggles rendering the Olympic-sized pool in a stygian hue, the waters shifting uneasily like a sinister cauldron just beginning to boil.

Decker checked behind the door and scanned the chamber’s vast interior. White porcelain armored the room, brightening the goggles’ vision. A foam kickboard, shaped like a headstone and longing for a name, rode the water’s dying ripples.

The blood trail continued into the men’s changing room at the pool’s far end. Decker took a breath and tiptoed to the entrance without an echo, a ghost of vengeance aiming to blow the head off his quarry. There was no door to the changing room, just a twisted passage that switched back. Decker placed his shoulder to one corner, leaned ahead to see around the next, and darted forward to what he suspected was the last. The blood splotches were notably smaller here.

The mall killer stepped into view just as Decker turned the corner. The beast shoved Decker’s weapon upward just as his finger tightened on the trigger and the MP5 blurted out one loud verse, blowing holes in the ceiling and making it snow chunks. The mall killer grabbed Decker by his tactical vest and lifted, crashing his head against a ceiling beam. The half-naked form then whipped the tac-leader against one wall and then another like a mat being beaten free of dust.

The beating stopped and a hand clamped down on Decker’s throat, hard enough to open his eyes, and powerful enough to crush the officer’s windpipe like a drinking straw. Decker heard the crinkling of his trachea a microsecond before mind-freezing pain. In his dying vision, the decorated police sergeant noted the killer’s face elongating once more into that strange goblin mask.

Lengthening fangs enveloped Decker’s mouth.

Bailey—as he inherently realized was his name, or a step closer to his true identity—held his prey against the wall as he chomped and chewed through cheeks and crackling bone, pausing to spit out meddlesome teeth. The man tasted good, as did they all, but there was something missing. This one had hurt Bailey, which made him angry, angry enough to punish his attacker. And as he consumed great wet chunks, Bailey was aware of his wounds closing, healing, zipping up as if they’d never existed.
Meat
, he realized, meat did this. But his mind attempted to reveal there was even better meat to be had, flesh that would make him even stronger. Faster.

Bailey knew he was missing a vital element. With his expanding mental capacity, deep-rooted instincts, and a bottomless well of memories teasing him with its knowledge, Bailey suspected it was only a matter of time before… what? He didn’t know exactly, but he knew his newfound strength and energy were a clue to greater things. He was
meant
for greater things, a higher purpose, and he sensed a…
history
rich in such hunts. Yet as hard as he tried to glean more from his subconscious, the farther he pushed away those tantalizing fragments of true self and purpose.

He released the dead man, letting the husk drop with a thud.

More
, the impulse filled his mind and chest and lured him from the changing room. The face of Haley appeared in his mind, the woman who’d helped him for the past few days. Perhaps good things would happen to him if he ate her? What she’d done for him, her efforts to help, meant nothing to Bailey. He realized he needed no one.

He only needed meat. And perhaps time. All would return to him in time.

His mouth and hands dripped as he walked along the pool.

There was meat nearby, in the shape of men and women. He could smell them.

He wondered how they would taste.

Muffled gunfire erupted on the far side of the Martin and MacDonald shopping center, turning the heads of the wardens gathered around Kirk’s weathered old pickup. The reports split the cold peace of the night, but Kirk knew there was a developing war zone inside the mall, an enclosed arena they’d have to enter if they were going to kill Bailey.

“Shots fired,” Sam Mausler said, listening.

“How many entrances does this place have?” Carma didn’t look in the mall’s direction. She was on her phone, scouring the internet for floorplans.

“Uh,” Kirk wasn’t sure. “There’s a back way. A back alley with loading bays. Right over there and below us. Big open space with its back against the hill there. Only one way in.”

“Cops got that all covered by now,” Ken Cyler said. “Especially the back alley.”

“Probably a way to the roof,” Janice said, studying the topside of the structure. “Might be a ladder.”

“We’ll deal with the police when we have to,” Carma muttered, the indifference in her tone alarming Kirk. “Most people are gathered around the main entrances anyway, looking for a show. We won’t have to worry about them. All right. I have floor plans. It’s a big place. Kirk will be key. We’ll start from the back alley and look for a way in. Maybe there’s a ladder to the roof. We take out anyone in our way and find our way inside. We change and hunt Bailey down. All clear?”

Heads nodded. Kirk looked around. Morris still hadn’t reported in and refused to answer his phone.

Carma read his mind. “Morris is on his own and will answer to me once this is over.”

“Now, when you say deal with the police…” Kirk started, but Carma stopped him with a look.

“Subdue them. Try not to kill them.”

“Thanks.”

“Everyone clear on that?” the pack leader asked.

Everyone was.

“Then let’s go. The dance is waiting.”

With that, Carma led them through the dark gridlock of parked vehicles, avoiding the mass of onlookers facing the mall where the police blazed spotlights at the main doors. The wardens traveled along the blacked-out periphery of the parking lot, moving to the shopping center’s loading area. Lanes leading into the zone had been blocked by police barricades, but beyond that were pockets of darkness along a lengthy wall. Carma stopped on a grassy hill overlooking the loading area, a high protective fence at her back that hid flowing traffic. Kirk pointed to that particular section of wall dotted by dumpsters. Parked not fifty meters away were a trio of squad cars, cordoning the area off. There quite possibly was another barricade on the other end, but that didn’t concern the pack leader.

“Sam,” Carma said. “You and Bryce take care of that.”

The pair of
weres
nodded and started down the hillside.