Nocturnal (86 page)

Something punched him in the back, pushed his chest into the tree. Chameleon started to pull away, but found that he could not — he was stuck.

Then the pain hit.

It
burned
!

He squeezed the tree, as if hugging it might take away his pain.

The girls’ footsteps quickened, faded away — they had run.

He opened his eyes to look at the dog again. Now it sat on its haunches. The growling stopped, but its head remained low, its eyes fixed on Chameleon.

More footsteps, heavier footsteps …

ba-da-bum-bummmm

Family! He was saved!

“Help me!” Chameleon whispered. He couldn’t see who was there. “I … I can’t move and this dog is bugging me. My chest really hurts. I don’t feel so good.”

The footsteps came closer, from behind and to the right. Chameleon turned to look — a man in black, his face covered by a fabric mask painted with a white skull-smile. Chameleon saw green eyes through the mask’s little eye-slits.

“You’ve been a busy boy,” the man in black said. The skull-smile didn’t move when he talked. That looked weird.

Chameleon felt cold. Sleepy.

“Crap,” the man said. “Emma, I think I nicked his heart. I really have to work on this bow-and-arrow business.”

That was where Chameleon felt the burning, in his chest. “You nicked my heart? I’ll heal up, right?”

The skull-smile shook his head. “Not this time. You’re gonna die, right here, right now.”

“Die? Like … like
prey
dies? No,
please
, I don’t want to die!”

“
Please?
So polite. Did any of your loving couples beg you to let them live?”

The man took a step closer. Chameleon reached with his right hand, hoping to grab the man’s throat, but the man stepped back effortlessly. Moonlight flashed off metal. Chameleon felt something hit his right hand, just past the wrist.

Then he felt a new pain and heard something hit the ground.

Chameleon looked down to see a hand on the grass, a hand with skin that looked an
awful
lot like tree bark. He raised his wrist, now a stump gushing blood. Chameleon stared at the stump, disbelieving — it couldn’t be real, couldn’t be happening.

The man shook something near Chameleon’s face.

It was a string of twelve severed hands, six pairs wired together from Chameleon’s victims, all the pairs then wired together in a long chain. The hands at the bottom were blackened, shriveled, crawling with maggots. The ones in the middle were almost as bad. The ones at the top were still fresh — he’d taken those just last night.

“I found your collection,” the man in black said. “You killed six people.”

“Help me, please! They aren’t people, they’re prey! You know this, brother!”

The skull-smile man nodded. The metal flashed again. Chameleon felt a burning sting on his left wrist. The man bent to pick something up.

Then, the man in black held up Chameleon’s severed hands for Chameleon to see.

Chameleon’s
hands
. “Oh, no.” His eyes slowly closed. So cold. So sleepy.

Another flash of pain, this time in his right cheek.

“Stay with me,” the man said. “You can’t check out yet.”

This man, he was
family
. Family was everything!

“Who are you? Why won’t you save me?”

“Think of me as the nasty uncle you didn’t invite to the family Christmas.”

Man in black
. Chameleon thought back to the night Savior was shot. A man in black had done that. But that man hadn’t worn a mask, so it couldn’t be the same person.

Something tickled Chameleon’s face. He blinked awake — had he gone to sleep? He saw what was tickling his face: the dead, cold fingers of his keepsakes touching his rough skin. It was like the hands of his victims reaching out from hell, grabbing him, pulling him down. Some of the maggots fell free, bounced off Chameleon’s face and fell to the ground below.

“I was going to torture you, find another way into your tunnels,” the man in black said. “Or maybe you guys have a new home, I don’t know. I figure you have about fifteen seconds or so. Any chance you can tell me where Sly lives?”

Chameleon had to focus, but he shook his head. When he did, the dead fingers caressed his cheeks even more. Chameleon thought of Hillary. Beautiful New Mommy Hillary, all safe in her chamber, her body growing bigger every day.

“I won’t tell you.”

A heavy sigh from behind the mask. “I figured as much. Well, it looks like your time is up. But as you go, know this. I’m going to find your home. I’m going to find your family. I’m going to kill them one by one. All the eyes, all the teeth. But you can keep the hands.”

Chameleon felt colder than ever. His eyes closed.

The last thing he felt was the dead fingers of his victims caressing his face.

While I always strive for as much accuracy as possible in these books, I was forced to modify some aspects of the policies and procedures of the San Francisco Police Department and the Medical Examiner’s Office in order to create a more streamlined tale. Remember, folks: this is a story about a race of monsters lurking beneath the streets of San Francisco — it’s quite possible I made up a detail or two.

The buried ships of San Francisco, however, are real. The discovery of gold in 1848 generated a migration to the Bay Area, resulting in over six hundred ships being abandoned in the bay. As the city expanded, many of those abandoned ships were buried. Special thanks to Ron Fillion for his map of the buried ships and the historical information available at
http://​www.sfgenealogy.com/​sf/​history/​hgshp1.htm
.

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