J.L. Doty - Dead Among Us 01 - When Dead Ain’t Dead Enough (22 page)

Joe abruptly stopped the pacing, turned and crossed the distance between them, plowed his fist into Paul’s solar plexus. Paul gasped and couldn’t breathe for the longest time as his diaphragm contracted with uncontrollable spasms. Joe stood over him smiling and enjoying the show. “But I don’t have to hit you in the head, do I?”

It only took a couple more blows for Joe to send Paul to a pain-wracked place halfway to unconsciousness. But then the blows stopped, and slowly Paul’s awareness crawled back from that place and returned to the chair in which he was tied in the little circle of light. Joe stood over him. “I want Mr. Karpov to be happy with me, so tell me what you’re going to tell him when he gets back.”

Paul struggled to speak. “I don’t have anything to tell you. I don’t know anything.”

Joe stared at him with his narrow little eyes for the longest moment. “Let’s try something new, and we’ll see if you hold to that story.”

Joe turned on his heel and stepped out of the circle of light into the darkness. Paul heard the click of a light switch, and the room filled with the harsh glare of fluorescent lights hanging overhead. A kitchenette consisting of a sink and cupboards and a kitchen counter lined one wall. Several cafeteria tables and chairs were folded up and leaning against the far wall, and the only feature on the wall between the kitchenette and the folded tables was a lone door.

Joe grabbed the back of Paul’s chair, leaned it over onto its two hind legs with Paul still bound to it, and dragged him across the floor to the kitchenette. Joe opened a cupboard, pulled out a length of electrical extension cord and plugged it into an outlet on the countertop. He rummaged around inside the cupboard, swore some sort of Russian oath, then retrieved an old electric food processor. He plugged the food processor into the end of the extension cord and carefully placed it on the floor beside Paul’s chair. It was filthy, encrusted with some sort of dried, brown stain, its blades pitted with specs of rust and more of the brown stain. Joe smiled at Paul and said, “I wish the others were here. We like to bet on how many joints it takes to get a man to talk. Never seen anyone go past the second joint.”

Paul’s stomach climbed up into his throat and he almost vomited at the thought of the mutilation Joe had in mind for him. “I told you I don’t know anything,” he pleaded. “Ask me anything. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

Joe Stalin shook his head sadly. “But you said you don’t know anything. Let’s see how much you don’t know after the first joint.”

Joe hit the switch on the food processor; the blades inside it wound up to speed with an irritating whine and he let it race for a few seconds, clearly enjoying the sound.

Belinda stood in a shadow outside the cheap tenement where Karpov kept his headquarters. She watched Karpov and his thugs drag the young woman out, her hands and feet still bound. They tossed her into the back seat of a car, and two thugs climbed in on either side of her. Karpov climbed into another car with more of his thugs and the two cars sped away.

She hadn’t seen the young man. That meant he was still inside, and she was quite certain only a few of Karpov’s thugs remained to guard him, all relatively weak practitioners.

She decided to wait for a bit. Following the flurry of activity surrounding Karpov’s exit, his thugs would be alert and attentive, but give them a little time and the boredom of waiting would set in. And she knew the effect she had on men, especially bored young men with too much testosterone and not enough brains. This should be fairly easy.

She waited a good thirty minutes and was just about to drop her shadow spell and cross the street openly, when she sensed something approaching from up the street so she hesitated. It had triggered one of her spells, a passive charm meant to alert her to the presence of anyone capable of wielding arcane forces, passive and so almost impossible to detect. But the capabilities of whoever was approaching were at the limit of her ability to sense, so he was either quite weak, or so powerful he could mask his arcane abilities from her rather considerable powers.

Not
he
, she thought when the woman came into view. She’d heard of the Druid and had no qualms admitting the older woman outclassed her completely, so now was not the time to act. She held her shadows and watched silently as the Druid spelled the front door and entered the building without incident.

Joe Stalin rummaged in a countertop drawer, retrieved a pair of wire cutters, leaned down and gripped the zip-tie holding Paul’s right wrist. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, Paul seated with Joe bent over his right arm and reaching down to his wrist. Paul struggled frantically, tried to shake and jerk his hand back and forth, anything to delay this maniac.

“Hold still,” Joe growled, and elbowed Paul in the chest. While Paul gasped for air Joe reached down and cut the zip-tie binding his right hand, and suddenly Paul had an opening. With Joe bent over beside him he raised his right fist and punched upward as hard as he could and connected with Joe’s larynx. Joe dropped the wire cutters and stumbled backward, overcome by a fit of uncontrollable gagging and coughing. Paul stretched his right hand toward the wire cutters on the floor, but couldn’t reach them. He rocked the chair from side to side, trying to tumble it toward the cutters, but Joe’s paw slammed into the side of his head and he almost lost consciousness.

The room tilted sickeningly as Joe leaned down in front of him almost nose to nose. Joe had to shout to be heard above the whine of the food processor. “You going to pay for that, mother fucker.”

Paul head-butted him, caught him square in the nose with his forehead, heard something crunch and got the satisfaction of seeing Joe stagger backward with his hands covering his nose, blood streaming freely between his fingers. Joe pulled his hands away from his face, looked at the blood on his hands and roared.

Paul still had only his right hand free, so Joe wisely stepped to Paul’s left to get behind him. Paul swung his right hand wildly, hoping to catch Joe in the balls, but Joe caught his wrist easily and bent his arm painfully behind his back. Joe leaned in close to Paul’s ear, blood dripping freely onto Paul’s shoulder. “Now we see how smart you are, fuck head.”

Even if he’d been untied and unfettered Paul would’ve been no match for Joe’s brute strength. Joe slowly brought Paul’s wrist around to the food processor on the floor beside him, and while Paul was no weakling, his resistance only managed to turn the struggle into a slow dance toward the inevitable, Joe holding his wrist with both hands as Paul jerked it side to side and back and forth, anything to make it difficult for Joe to shove his hand into the whirring blades of the food processor.

They ended up with Paul sitting up in the chair leaning to his left away from the food processor, his right arm extended straight down only a hand’s breadth above the whining blades, Joe bent over beside him with both his hands gripped like a vise around Paul’s wrist. It became a silent tug of war that Paul was slowly losing.

He tried not to think about the excruciating pain that awaited him, could think only of Joe’s hands gripping his wrist, and the odd connection he felt where Joe’s skin contacted his. He sensed the potential for Joe’s animal strength, sensed the bearish life-force within the man, and with his shoulder close to popping out of its socket, he recalled how, when the demon in the hospital had fed on Katherine, she’d been seriously weakened. He didn’t think he could suck energy or life or whatever it was out of Joe like the demon had sucked out of Katherine, but he thought he might weaken Joe in the same way, to extinguish a bit of what made Joe alive, and with that thought he mentally touched the core of Joe’s soul.

Joe groaned, swooned, and his hands slipped off Paul’s wrist, and with his own weight leaning so heavily downward, his own left hand plunged into the screaming blades of the food processor. The timbre of the machine’s whine dropped an octave; it sputtered erratically and sprayed blood all over Joe and Paul and the room. Joe screamed hysterically and rolled away from the machine, weakly clutching his maimed left hand, blood spurting from a severed vein there.

The wire cutters were still out of reach on Paul’s left, so while Joe lay on the floor moaning weakly, Paul rocked his chair side to side. With each rock the chair leaned a little farther to one side, then the other, though Paul had to be careful to fall toward the cutters, not away from them. Joe rolled onto his back and struggled to climb to his feet just as the chair balanced precariously on its two right legs and hung there for an eternity. But as it rocked back toward the left Paul shifted all his weight into it and the chair went over.

Paul’s shoulder slammed into the concrete floor, but he ignored the pain and reached over his head. His fingertips barely touched the cutters, and he scrabbled at them as Joe made it to his hands and knees. With his fingertips flicking at them, the wire cutters moved a fraction of an inch toward him, and he had them. He cut the zip-ties on his ankles and left hand, rolled away from the chair and struggled to his feet.

Joe couldn’t seem to get any further than his hands and knees, so Paul kicked him in the ribs and he collapsed, lay on his side and curled into a fetal position next to the whining food processor, groaning weakly. Paul unplugged the food processor and the extension cord. Joe was too weak to resist as Paul used a length of the cord as a tourniquet to stop the blood spurting from Joe’s hand. He didn’t deserve Paul’s help, but he was too weak to help himself and Paul couldn’t just leave him there to bleed to death.

Paul worked quickly, knowing there must be more of Karpov’s thugs nearby, counting on the fact they’d expect to hear screams coming from this room and wouldn’t know the difference between Joe’s and Paul’s.

“Fucking demon,” Joe said weakly as Paul finished and stood. “You fed on me. You’re a fucking demon.”

Paul spotted his shoulder holster on the countertop. The Sig was empty, so he slid one of his spare clips into it and ratcheted the slide. He couldn’t wear the holster on the street because he didn’t have his coat to conceal it, so he wrapped it in a dishtowel he found on the countertop nearby. He arranged the dishtowel carefully so he could easily pull or replace the Sig in the holster without the need to unwrap it, then hugged the bundle tightly under his left armpit.

He killed the lights in the room, then opened the door slowly. It let out into a large, dimly lit space with bulky crates stacked haphazardly, a warehouse of some kind. With the Sig in his right hand Paul slipped out of the room and into the shadows behind a stack of crates.

He heard someone approaching, though whoever it was moved cautiously, darting from one shadow to the next. So he crouched down low and held his breath. Whoever it was passed Paul’s hiding place and a moment later he heard the door to the room open slowly, then close again. He moved quietly to another stack of crates, hoping he’d chosen the right direction and was headed for the front of the warehouse.

He found an exit there, though nearby two of Karpov’s men were seated at an old folding table, their heads slumped to the table and their eyes closed, a deck of cards piled on the table between them. He kept the gun pointed in their direction as he crept past them, but neither moved in the slightest. He opened the door a crack and scanned the street. It was empty so he stepped out onto the sidewalk, decocked the Sig and shoved it into the holster hidden in the dishtowel. He moved quickly up the street.

Colleen had no trouble spelling the two guards just inside the entrance to Karpov’s tenement. After all they were just hired help, neither of them a practitioner. But just as their heads slumped to the table something happened at the back of the warehouse that triggered one of her protection spells, though it didn’t flare fully to life but remained quiescent and ready. At the same moment a horrible scream, muffled by the intervening walls, broke the silence. It had felt almost like a demon attack, but not really, for if it had been a demon attack her protection spell would’ve come fully to life.

She stepped into a nearby shadow and waited for whatever might come next. In all her years she hadn’t felt anything like that, and she didn’t want to go stumbling blindly into some unknown danger. She waited that way for a couple of minutes, but since the place remained eerily quiet, she moved cautiously toward the back of the warehouse. She found a lone door built into the wall there and as she was about to open it she thought she sensed someone else moving in the dark of the warehouse behind her. But the instant passed quickly, though she decided to keep an eye on her back-trail. She opened the door carefully.

The room was dark, though she could hear someone groaning piteously within. She pulled a fire spell long enough to find the light switch, and flicked on a bank of fluorescent lights hanging overhead.

The young Russian with the square face was lying on his side on the floor next so some sort of kitchen appliance. Blood had spattered all over him and in a wide circle about him. Blood also covered his chin and it appeared his nose had been broken. He was clutching a bloody hand to his chest, and around his arm someone had tied a length of electrical cord as a tourniquet. His hand appeared to be badly mutilated, and Colleen actually felt a little pity for the sociopath.

She squatted down next to him and asked, “What happened?”

He opened his eyes, and it took several seconds for him to focus on her. “Your friend’s a fucking demon,” he said weakly. “He fed on me. Fucker fed on me. Fucking demon.”

That strange sensation she’d felt earlier, the arcane flow that had partially triggered her protection spell, it could have been a demon feeding. But Colleen couldn’t escape the fact that it should’ve triggered the spell fully.