The Dark Ones (28 page)

He got back in the Caddy and drove away at high speed.

In a few minutes, he pulled into the lot of the Ransom SouthTrust bank. Considering that he’d just fled the scene of a hit-and-run, he felt remarkably calm. The incident had focused things for him. He had something crucial to take care of here. Lives really were at stake. Maybe a lot of them.

He got out of the Caddy and walked into the bank.

After several minutes of discussion, he showed the required proper identification and a bank official led him back to the safety-deposit boxes.

T
HIRTY-SEVEN

His sudden lunge startled her, causing her to jerk her hand up as she squeezed the trigger. The bullet slammed into the ceiling somewhere over his head. He got his hand around her slender wrist and gave it a savage twist. She cried out but somehow managed to hold on to the gun long enough to squeeze off another shot that also went astray. He kept twisting her hand even as he pulled her closer and grabbed her by the neck with his other hand. The gun finally shook loose and hit the floor with a heavy thunk. Mark turned her around and yanked her arm up hard behind her back. She thrashed and struggled against him, the fingers of her free hand extended and reaching for the fallen gun. But Mark had too strong a grip on her and she couldn’t reach it. Despite this, he kicked the gun across the floor for additional peace of mind.

A big shape filled the open front door.

Fiona cried out. “Jared! Help! Mark’s trying to rape me.”

She kept trying to twist out of his grip, but Mark held her firm. “She’s lying. She just tried to kill me.”

“Fuck you, Mark! He’s the liar. Why would I do that? He’s fucking crazy. Help me, you fat piece of shit.”

Jared came the rest of the way into the house and calmly shut the door and locked it. “A fat piece of shit I may be, but that’s about the only thing you said that sounds true. It’s funny . . . I could swear I heard something like gunshots a minute ago. The kind of thing you’d hear if, I dunno, somebody was trying to kill somebody else.”

Mark grunted. “Like I said—”

Fiona slammed a foot down on his instep. The sudden pain caused him to let go of her and she dove for the gun. Jared was in motion at nearly the same time, launching himself into the air a split second later. He crash-landed on top of her just as her hand was closing around the revolver’s handle, causing her to scream in sudden agony. Keeping her pinned beneath him, he crawled forward a little and seized the hand wrapped around the gun. He lifted it and slammed it against the floor repeatedly until she let go of it again. Fiona twisted her head and sank her teeth deep into the meaty flesh of his forearm. And now it was Jared’s turn to scream. She started to reach for the gun again, but Mark came hobbling over and scooped it up.

He moved back a safe distance and aimed the gun down at them. “Enough of this shit. Stop fighting, Fiona. It’s over.”

She went still and glared up at him. Her mouth was bloody. “Fuck you. You’re stupid. That’s what everybody thinks. They just won’t say it to your stupid face.”

Jared got to his feet and stared in disgust at the ragged wound on his arm. “You rotten little bitch. Look what you did. What’s wrong with you?”

She spit long strands of dyed-black hair out of her mouth. “You’re a pig. Pigs are for eating.”

She made oinking noises.

Mark shook his head. “I feel sorry for you.”

She stopped making the noises and glared at him again. “What?”

“You heard me. I feel sorry for you. You’re just trying to hurt us any way you can. But you’re still my friend and I want to help you.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“Tough shit. You’re getting it anyway.”

Her smile was bitter. “You can’t. No one can. You were right. I did kill my mom. My little sister, too.”

Jared’s eyes went wide. “Whoa? What?”

Fiona started sobbing and said nothing further on the subject. Mark and Jared stared at her in shocked silence for several moments. Both boys wore similar expressions of sick resignation. She was right. There really was no meaningful way they could help her now.

Jesus
.

“How could you do this, Fiona?” Mark asked.

She lifted her head and wailed at him:
“I told you why. There’s no other way! We have to die!”

She resumed her sobbing.

Jared held his wounded arm and scowled at her. “What the hell kind of fucked-up bullshit is that? You do know you’ve crossed a line, right? This isn’t just some regular fucking mistake kids make. You’re not gonna get to just say you’re sorry and have it all be better. There’s no coming back from this. You’re a murderer.”

Fiona rolled over and sat up. Mark moved back a couple steps, keeping the gun’s barrel carefully aimed at her chest. “No sudden moves.”

She wiped moisture from her eyes and laughed.
“No sudden moves,”
she said, pitching her voice deeper in a mockery of machismo. “Tough guy. You sound like you’re on a stupid cop show.”

She got shakily to her feet and started toward the front door.

“Hey. Hold up.”

“Fuck you.”

“You can’t leave.”

“Watch me.”

Jared moved to intercept her, putting himself between Fiona and the door. “No way. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Get out of the way.”

“No.”

She threw herself at him, clawing at his eyes with her fingernails.

Mark groaned. “Jesus Christ.”

Jared wound up a fist and sent a hard blow crashing across her jaw. She took a few rapid staggering steps backward and tumbled to the floor again. She rolled onto her back with a moan, but she didn’t get back up. She looked woozy, on the verge of unconsciousness. Jared’s face was bloody from where her nails had torn into his flesh. “The bitch does not give up. Goddamn.”

Mark nodded. “Yeah. I don’t know what to do with her.”

Jared pushed away from the door. “I do.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

He scooped up the semiconscious girl in his arms and carried her into the kitchen. Mark followed him and watched him dump her in one of the chairs by the kitchen table. Her head drooped forward when he let go of her, but she didn’t fall out of the chair.

Jared moved away from her then, crossing the kitchen to the door by the pantry. “Gonna check the garage for some shit. She comes to and tries that running-away shit again, do what I did and knock her ass out. I know she’s a girl and all, but the time for playing nice is over. You got that, right?”

Mark gave a terse nod. “Yeah. Go on.”

Jared disappeared into the garage.

Mark unloaded the gun and set it on the kitchen counter, well out of Fiona’s reach should she regain full consciousness. He just didn’t feel comfortable holding it. He didn’t relish the idea of forcing her to stay put via physical force, but pointing a loaded gun at a live human being made his stomach churn. He felt better with the bullets in his hip pocket.

Fiona was awake now and smiling at him. “Where did Jared go?”

“He’s looking for something.”

“He really walloped me.”

“Yeah.”

“We should leave while he’s gone.”

Mark frowned. “What?”

She began to stand.

Shit
.

“Sit down, Fiona.”

She got fully to her feet and took a few shaky steps toward him. One side of her face was swelling slightly from where Jared had struck her. “We should go off together. You were right. This is a stupid thing I was doing. I see that now. But we really don’t belong here, Mark. In Ransom.” She was close now, almost within touching distance. “Let’s go. Right now. I’ll be better to you than Natasha ever was, I promise.”

The door to the pantry opened and slammed shut again.

Jared grimaced as he came into the kitchen. “Goddamn.”

He grabbed her by an arm, steered her back to the chair, and forced her to sit again. Then he removed the thick coil of old rope slung over his shoulder and went to work tying her to the chair. When he was finished, he stood and glared at her. “There. That’s one problem solved.”

Mark’s expression was grim. “For now. We still need to figure out what to do with her.”

Fiona laughed. “You could untie me and take turns with me. It’ll be just like that night, except nothing will be forcing us.” She licked her lips. “Come on. You know you wanna.”

Jared said, “I’ll look for a gag. Be right back.”

He walked out of the kitchen again.

Mark went to the fridge and grabbed a beer. He drank it down. It helped only a little. He suspected there weren’t enough beers in the world to make this situation any better.

But he kept knocking them back anyway.

What else was there to do?

T
HIRTY-EIGHT

The McGregor house had become a hive of Satanic activity by early evening. Throughout the day, various members of the growing Congregation of Andras took turns venturing out and retrieving more neighbors. Methods of retrieval varied. Carrie and Greg bagged their catches through a combination of force and terror. Most of the people they brought in arrived bloodied and battered. One of them, a woman in her early thirties who’d lived alone in a Tudor-style home two houses down, expired soon after being dragged through the front door. Other luring methods included seduction and feigned medical emergencies. Ella alone brought in several men and women apparently incapable of resisting the temptation of her newly youthful and ripe flesh. Most of the new arrivals reacted with horror upon entering the house. Most tried to flee. A few got a look at all the squirming, copulating naked flesh and joined right in, apparently not bothered by the ample evidence of carnage amid all the writhing bodies. The ones who tried to get out were unsuccessful. Andras reached into their hearts and minds. He soothed and seduced them. Many of these became his most eager converts. A few he saved for play. For his own dark amusement and as a way to stoke the fires of degradation burning in the souls of his acolytes.

Andras walked through the house, surveying it all with demonic delight. So much time had passed since he’d last enjoyed so rich a feast of twisted human souls. The heady stew of corruption and suffering was an intoxicating tribute to the mission Satan had assigned him after his fall.

That mission was simple.

He was the Killer of Men. The bringer of death and sorrow and suffering.

For so long he’d been chained in that place, locked beyond the reach of his master. Imprisoned by men. It was galling. The specific men responsible were, unfortunately, dead. But no matter. He would visit his vengeance upon the people of this pathetic village instead.

The main event was still ahead, but his revenge was already under way.

In the garage, some of the men held down a struggling nude woman while Frederick revved up the chain saw and lowered the whirring blade to one of her breasts. Her ululating screams formed a kind of wild music in concert with the buzz of the chain saw as the blade bit into her nipple and chewed.

In the kitchen, Carrie chopped off a young man’s hand with a meat cleaver and laughed hysterically as his flailing wrist stump sprayed blood everywhere. She and Greg then cauterized the wound by wrestling the man over to the stove to apply the stump to one of the red-hot burners. The sizzle of burning flesh filled the air with a delicious, stomach-rumbling aroma.

In the living room, a mass of writhing bodies. A lot of moist, smacking sounds. Kissing, slurping, sucking, grunts, moans, and screams. An orgy of quivering flesh. Much of the sex was consensual, but not all. There were whimpers and pleas for mercy as men and women not under Andras’s spell were repeatedly violated with cocks and fingers and fists and various inanimate objects.

In the backyard, Flauros, housed in his virile new body, was preaching the gospel of Satan to a group of eager young converts. The people in this group would serve as some of Andras’s most vicious soldiers in the battle ahead.

The walls inside the house had been redecorated. There were pentagrams everywhere, most drawn with freshly spilled blood. They all knew the pentagram. But there were other symbols as well, the ones he’d shown them through visions. Here was a four-horned goat inside a pentagramlike symbol. Over there on the front door was another variation on the pentagram, with the point down and a lightning bolt in the middle. On a foyer wall was a detailed rendering of Andras himself astride a huge black wolf, the head of a foe clutched in one of his hands, his sword held aloft in his other hand. The symbols were a necessary element in the conversion of the house. This was no longer a home. It was a black church. A place of dark worship.

Congregation of Andras.

Church of Satan.

On the stairs were more fornicating humans. A man taking a woman from behind near the bottom of the staircase. Farther up the stairs, Lydia Bell sat with her ass on the edge of one of the steps, with Ella McGregor kneeling between her splayed legs. Suzie was perched on the step directly behind Lydia. Suzie’s arms encircled her former rival, her hands sliding over the front of her body, groping and kneading her breasts and occasionally dipping between her legs. They all turned glazed expressions his way as he passed them on his way up the staircase. They moaned and reached for him, their desire for him so intense it sounded like anguish. The moment he was gone they resumed plying one another’s bodies in desperate search of some elusive, final release, a release that remained always tantalizingly out of reach. Playing with their libidos, ratcheting up the normal desires they already possessed to an almost unbearable state of constant need, remained one of the most effective ways of manipulating and controlling humans. It worked just as well today with these ostensibly more civilized peoples as it had thousands of years ago with their primitive ancestors.

Up here was another example.

Yet another pentagram adorned the closed bedroom door. Andras opened the door and entered a room still filled with the artifacts of a young boy’s interrupted life. Derek’s electric guitar and band posters were all still in place. Andras closed and locked the door behind him. The room was Andras’s sanctuary. All but one of his acolytes were forbidden from entering.