Run (22 page)

***

John watched what looked like a hundred holes blast through Tal’s already wrecked body.  The sheriff's face smacked wetly as low-caliber shots punched through it, his cheekbones slowly dissolving under the torrent of lead.  A shotgun blasted, and his right arm came off at the elbow.  Another, and his kneecap shattered. 

And still he lurched toward John, using his one wrecked leg like a broken crutch, wobbly and inefficient...but still moving slowly towards him.

John turned to the door.  It was locked, and he had no idea which was the right key.  Tal’s ring looked to hold about thirty.  He tried the first.  Nothing.

Behind him, he heard Tal’s body hit the ground.  He dared a look back, and saw that he - or rather, it, it had to be an it, no man, just a thing - was still crawling toward him, inch by inch, foot by foot. 

John tried more keys.  None of them worked.

Tal's face, no longer recognizable as belonging to his friend, leered up at him, a bloody pulp.  Two or three remaining teeth seemed to grin a mad, ghastly jack-o-lantern smile at him, loosely hanging from exposed jawbones and pulped flesh.

And John still hadn’t found the right key.

Bloody fingers - two left on one hand and four remaining on the other - reached out towards John, pinching open and shut convulsively.  John knew that if he fell next to Tal - no, it wasn’t Tal, it couldn’t be, this had to be something else - he wouldn’t get up again.

The broken fingers brushed against his leg, and John screamed.  A strange mewling sound, like that of a kitten being slowly tortured to death, came from Tal’s wrecked mouth, the Devil calling for John’s surrender.

John kicked convulsively, knocking the fingers away.  Disgust ran through his body like rats through a sewer, and he had to fight for control of his bowels.  Tal almost grabbed his kicking foot.

Then one of the keys turned.

John pushed the door open and ran.

***

Deirdre heard an alarm sound.

He must be going out through the emergency exit, she thought.

Silent and dark, she hurtled through the door to the prison, Malachi and Jenna only seconds behind her.  She turned the corner, and saw the sheriff, recognizable now only by his tattered remnants of uniform and the pieces of a badge that still clung tenaciously to his ruined torso.

He lay on the ground, scrabbling against the doorframe as the emergency exit swung slowly closed.  He left bloody smears wherever he touched, painting crimson swaths like impressionistic sunsets across the sidewalk with his body. 

The door shut, clicking against its metal frame.

The beast turned to them.

Deirdre looked calmly at it.  She felt no horror at this moment, nor fear.  The sheriff was just a thing, just one more obstacle standing between her and Heaven.  So she calmly reloaded her gun and did her best to destroy the thing and send it back to the devilish place where it was born.

Malachi and Jenna joined her attack, their own weapons blasting at the beast's body.

Slowly, shredded muscle pulling and pushing against shattered bits of bone and cartilage, the sheriff pulled itself around.  It began making its way toward them, its extremities ever-shrinking under their withering assault.  Yet still it pushed to them, scraping against the ground with ruined legs.

Deirdre knew it would never stop until it was dead.  When its arms and legs were gone, it would stay twitching, its trunk orienting on them.  That was why they had to be so careful: death was not the end.  It was just a horrifying change into something else.

The thing scraped toward them.

Malachi held up a fist, signaling them to stop.  Deirdre ceased fire instantly, immediately reloading her weapons in preparation for the next conflict.  Conflict was inevitable now, and would come more and more often as this longest of all nights - perhaps the beginning of an endless night for the human race - wore on.

Jenna kept firing, screaming at the tops of her lungs, yelling Todd’s name over and over.  Malachi pushed the barrel of her gun down, slapping her at the same time.  Jenna’s cries broke up jaggedly, hoarse, whispering gasps replacing them.

Malachi walked to the sheriff’s still-animated corpse.  He pulled out his needler, the implement he had used on Casey, and thumbed the button, triggering the spire’s extension from its small housing.  He jammed the spike into the base of the sheriff’s neck, hitting the button again. 

The sheriff’s body went rigid, wisps of smoke curling from it as what was left of its brainstem fried in a curdling pool of cerebrospinal fluid and blood.

He had looked human.

Deirdre holstered her weapons and followed as Malachi reentered the front office.  They pulled the door shut behind them, secreting themselves from prying eyes.  She glanced out the glass window inset in the door and saw no one on the street.

"Will anyone come about the noise?" she asked. 

He shook his head.  "The whole town is probably closeted up in their houses.  If the
Controllers
," he spit out the word like a venomous mass, "stay true to form, the whole town is going into lock-down."

"So people won’t come out, but we’ll have to be careful," she said, more for Jenna's benefit than for anything.  The young woman looked as though she was hanging over an edge, the thin twine that was her sanity acting as her only slight support.

Malachi nodded and looked like he was going to say something more, when a scream jerked his gaze to the prison door.  Deirdre looked there, too, and saw Jenna, her finger pointing into the office, terror leaving ghost trails across her face.

"He’s moving!" she shrieked.

Deirdre looked over and saw that, sure enough, Todd was twitching.  The twitches, she knew, would rapidly become spasms as the brain rerouted its impulses through different parts of the body.  Within seconds, nerves would be regenerated, control reestablished, and life would begin.  But not life as they knew it.  It would be a different, frightening life with a malevolent will.

Malachi quickly walked to Todd, jammed his still-extended needler at the dead man’s eye, and triggered the switch.

The needle hummed, puncturing Todd’s eye like a giant proboscis.  The illusion was furthered when Todd’s eye seemed to deflate.  Deirdre was startled for a moment until she realized that the needle wasn’t sucking up the viscous fluids of Todd’s eye.  Rather, the intense electrical charge that the needler funneled through the spire was cooking the eye matter, burning it to a small lump of ash that sat at the hollow of Todd’s eye socket.

As always, Deirdre couldn’t pull her gaze away from the grisly demise of the creature.  It was a child of Satan, most assuredly.  Soulless, inhuman, yet so hard to kill.  Only a direct hit on its brain stem or using the needler to fry its entire brain could stop it.

Sometimes, not even that.

She shook her head.  Humanity was at the brink.

At last, Todd’s body went limp, rigid muscles relaxing, this time forever.

"He wasn’t - I mean, he didn’t –"  Jenna was babbling in the doorway, her body shaking almost as convulsively as Todd’s had just a moment before.

Malachi was across the room in a flash, pocketing his needler.  His hands now free, he slapped Jenna. 

"No, he wasn’t," he said.  "He wasn’t human."

***

Malachi’s hand stung from slapping Jenna.  But he didn’t stop there.  He grabbed the girl, curling his strong hands tightly around her upper arms.  He shook her, banging her against either side of the doorframe. 

Jenna cried out, the pain he inflicted apparently piercing the haze of fear and hurt that she felt.

"He wasn’t human," Malachi said again, and those words seemed to hurt her worse than the slap or the pummeling.  He moved in closer to her, pulling her to him, switching his grip, cradling her head now with his hands, pulling her face to his.  "He wasn’t human," he whispered.

"But I loved him," whispered Jenna.  "I thought he was real."

"Believe not all signs, my child.  For Satan shall have power.  Yea, even enough to deceive the very elect."

Jenna sobbed and fell against Malachi, weeping out her pain against him, as was her privilege.  He was the Father, the Brother, the High Priest, the Comforter.

She pressed into him, and Malachi pressed himself into her, molding his body to hers as he whispered words of comfort.  She was pleasant to look upon, unscarred and unscathed by the deadly landscape of their true home, but he was starting to think he shouldn’t have let her come along.  She was too flighty, too hysterical.  He much preferred the silent and deadly manner of Deirdre. 

He pushed even closer to her.  His lips found her ear, and he said, "If you don’t shape up I’ll kill you without honor."

He felt her body stiffen in his arms as fear ran through her.  It excited him, and a dull heat spread from his loins through his chest and burned dully in his heart.  If he did have to kill her, he knew he would use her first, making her pleasure him in every way possible before sending her on to the next life of reward...or of pain and damnation.  The choice of which realm she would inhabit in that next existence would be solely his, and that knowledge aroused him even further.

He felt
alive
.

He pulled away, looking into her eyes.  The fear was still there, but she was getting it under control, he saw.  Good.

DOM#67A

LOSTON, COLORADO

AD 1999

8:10 PM MONDAY

Fran went to the door, smoothing her hair self-consciously.  The bracelet Nathan had given her got caught in her hair, though, and she only ended up messing it badly.

Great.

John was late, more than an hour late, and she wasn’t very pleased with that, but even so, she couldn’t help but be happy that he’d arrived.  She wanted to look her best.

She planned to tease him a bit, of course, couldn’t let him off the hook
too
easy, but then she would quickly move to the more important business of having a good time with him.

She opened the door, and the teases died on her lips as she saw the barrel of a gun, inches away from her face.

"May I come in?" asked John.

She nodded, stunned, stepping back to allow him entry.  He walked through the door, keeping the gun trained on her, dead center.  He carried it like he knew what he was doing, and she had no doubt that he’d put a bullet in her head if she so much as sneezed.

"John," she managed.  "What’s going on?"

"I was kind of hoping you’d be able to tell
me
."

"I don’t...."  The presence of the gun unnerved her.  It seemed to grow larger before her eyes, the bore enveloping more and more space, quickly becoming a black hole that sucked everything into it.

She flicked her eyes to John’s face, and thought she saw a trace of sympathy flash across his visage.  Then it disappeared, replaced by a cold, methodical calculation.

"Sorry about the gun.  I hope it’s not necessary."

"Necessary?  John, for God’s sake, what’s going on?"

"I saw this guy when I was a kid.  And then almost twenty years later, in Iraq.  And he hadn’t changed a bit.  Not one hair any grayer.  I was going to talk to him, but before I got the chance, he was killed.  Blown up in a helicopter."

"What does this –"

"And then I saw him again a few days ago.  Very alive and still the same.  After thirty years, still the same."

John stopped and waited, peering intently into Fran’s eyes.  She looked back at him, not exactly sure what was going on, and noticed for the first time how disheveled he looked.  His clothes hung loosely on him, and his shirt was torn, a great rent that began somewhere on his lower back and continued around to his belly. 

Blood stained his hands.  Lots of blood.  More was scattered across his shirt and some had dried on his knees, as though he had knelt in a pool of it.

She didn’t know what to say so she waited.  A moment later John lowered his gun.  She exhaled, suddenly aware that she had been holding her breath since he entered.

"Sorry," he said.  He stuck the gun in the waist of his pants.  "Every other person I’ve told that to has gone nuts and tried to kill me."

The words, "Are you insane?" almost popped out of Fran’s mouth.  But then she looked at John, looked at his face and his eyes that held no madness.  Fear, yes.  Confusion, definitely.  But they were clear of the clouds of darkness that she had seen before.

She had seen madness before, the night that Nathan died.  In the eyes of the two men who had come for her, she had seen evil and madness.  John’s eyes held neither.  So she bit back her question and exchanged it with another:

"Would you mind telling me what exactly is going on?"

***

Malachi watched as Deirdre looked through the papers that now littered the police station.  They had spent the first five minutes after John escaped looking for clues of his whereabouts or anything else they might find useful.  The search proved to be fairly easy; the sheriff’s papers were all filed methodically and each paper was triple-indexed as though it were the most important document ever produced.

"I found his address," she said.

"No good," he responded.  "He’d stay away from there.  He’s gone to the girl."

He glanced over at Jenna, who sat next to Todd’s body, holding his hand. 

"I can’t find her name in the town register," said Deirdre.

"Of course not.  They wouldn’t be that stupid." 

Next to Todd, Jenna pulled out a small book.  She opened it and began reading.  "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow –"

Malachi’s short laugh cut her off.  "You can’t pray over a thing like that.  Not over such a monster."

Jenna’s face bleached.  She looked at Malachi, shock dulling her gaze.  "I didn’t know.  I didn’t know."  She was silent a moment, then gulped and her eyes cleared a bit as she asked, "What about me?"

"What
about
you?"

"Am I...," she nodded at Todd’s body, unable to say the words. 

Malachi laughed again.  It was a cold sound, as devoid of warmth as a glacial cave.  He brought out his gun, pointing it at Jenna.  "Do you want to find out?"  She waited a moment, then shook her head.  "Good.  Because we need you.  Now get over here and help us find that devilspawn of a girl.  Help us find Fran."