The Dark Ones (31 page)

Earlier in the evening
. . .

It had been a long day for the Ransom Police Department and no one was feeling the stress more than Detective Matt Shannon. Fifteen years on the force and he’d never seen a day like this. It was just one thing after a goddamn other. First it was the discovery of the butchered bodies of two young men in a ditch near the outskirts of town. Those poor bastards. Local boys, born and raised. Some sick fuck had hacked them to pieces. One of them was missing a head. Then there was the relatively minor nuisance of dealing with the snooty parents of the spoiled rich brats who’d started the brawl at the bowling alley. A bunch of entitled, elitist assholes. But important assholes. And their brats wouldn’t get much more than a slap on the wrist, if that. Next up had been the main event, the torching of the nursing home. Arson, no doubt about it. Some unidentified accelerant had been used, something nasty that burned hot and fast, leaving nothing behind but a pile of charred, smoking remains. It was the first mass casualty event in many a moon in Ransom, and easily the worst in the town’s history.

And now this.

A cop was dead. Not a good cop, to be honest about it. Officer Decker had been the kind of belligerent asshole who gave all cops a bad name. A number of complaints had been logged against him in the ten months he’d been on the force. In truth, Shannon had been looking for a reason to terminate him. Well, it didn’t matter anymore. The dumb thug had been run down by a group of joyriding kids.

He watched the surveillance video from Decker’s cruiser again. It was numbingly familiar by now. The whoop of the siren. The old Cadillac pulling over and the cruiser pulling in behind it. Then Decker acting like an asshole, pulling his piece on a routine traffic stop. Screaming like a fucking idiot. Then . . . here comes the truck. Splat. Decker’s dead. The guy gets out of the car, gives his weird speech, takes off.

Shannon knew the guy. Long ago, they’d been friends.

He sighed. “Clay . . . what happened to you, man?”

He was still debating what to do about Clayton Campbell when he heard the shouting from the squad room. He came out of his office, banging the door open. He understood that everyone was stressed and tempers were short, but these men had to start acting like professionals. “What the fuck is—”

A cop with a gun in his hand wheeled toward Shannon at the sound of his voice. He felt the impact of the bullet before his ears registered the report of the gun. He staggered backward against the door frame and looked down to see blood pumping from a wound in his gut. Another shot punched through his shoulder. Then there were more shots. The squad room descended into chaos. Two cops in full uniform were firing at other cops. The rest of Shannon’s men had been caught by surprise and were scrambling for cover. Several of them took hits and went down. Someone at last managed to return fire and one of the assailants went down. Shannon began to slide down the door frame as the strength left his knees. He fumbled for his sidearm as his butt hit the floor. The remaining assailant, an officer named Barton, saw him going for his gun and came striding toward him.

Barton aimed his gun at the center of Shannon’s face. “Andras says hi.”

Shannon could only watch as Barton’s finger began to squeeze the trigger.

It was the last thing he ever saw.

Andras was standing on the roof of the shed at the back of the yard, where the rear of the property was bordered by woods. Natasha stared up at him, admiring the dramatic figure he cut as he stood there with his hands on his hips, the dark outline of his body visible against the barren limbs of the trees, the silvery white moon over his head. Multiple sets of hands gripped different parts of her body, raising her off the ground, toward the roof of the shed. She gripped the edge of the roof when it was within grabbing distance and hauled herself up to stand next to her groom. He pulled her into an embrace and kissed her passionately, making her knees buckle. There had been a time when kissing Mark had made her weak in the knees, but that had been nothing compared to this.

Andras broke off the kiss and grinned.

He turned away from her and moved to the edge of the roof. He pumped a fist into the air and let out a war cry. The sea of tangled bodies below shifted and separated at the sound of their leader’s exhortation. They stood and staggered toward the shed, getting as close as they could, pressing up against one another. Andras pumped his fist again and let out another whoop. The people on the ground mimicked him. They sounded and looked like some primitive tribe preparing for battle. They worked themselves into a frenzy as Andras pumped his fist again and again. Then he waved a hand, motioning for them to be quiet. A reverent hush fell.

Andras stalked the front edge of the roof as he spoke. “Greetings to all my new friends and comrades. I say this because you are not simply servants. You are not here to simply grovel at my feet and seek approval. You are soldiers in a division of Satan’s army now, the most glorious army ever assembled!” The crowd went wild at this proclamation. Andras quieted them again with another wave of his hand. “A long time ago some men in this town summoned and used me to their own selfish ends.
Me!
A grand marquis of hell!” Some boos rang out. “And when they were through with me, they imprisoned me for decades.” The booing grew louder. “Those men are dead, but the community they helped build still stands. Tonight I declare war on that community. Tonight each and every one of you will help me tear it all down. Are you ready to fight for me?”

The crowd erupted again. Only
crowd
wasn’t the right term for this gathering anymore. And it wasn’t an army, despite what Andras said. It wasn’t organized enough for that. This was a mob. A craftily conceived weapon of mass destruction. And it was about to go off. Natasha peered over the edge of the roof and felt a growing excitement as she watched the ranks of wildly jostling bodies and flailing limbs.

Andras smiled.

The time was at hand.

He stepped to the very edge of the roof and thrust a hand outward.
“Go forth and kill! Destroy! Fight! Burn it all to the ground! Show
no
mercy! Go! GO! GO!”

The mob unleashed one last great cheer.

And then the exodus began.

Natasha slipped an arm around Andras’s back as she watched the throngs of mostly naked people scale the high fence and run away screaming into the night. A lot of people in Wheaton Hills were about to die.
Good
. It was what they deserved, every one of them. She had always known Ransom was a rotten place. Andras had only affirmed that conviction.

In the distance, new sounds.

A gunshot.

The tinkling of breaking glass.

Screams.

Natasha pressed her face against Andras’s throat. “Make love to me. Please.”

Andras smiled and kissed her.

The distant screams continued to resonate in the night.

In a few moments, Natasha was screaming, too.

F
ORTY-ONE

Somewhere in the night a dog started barking. It was a big dog sound. Kent listened closely, straining to identify the direction of the sound. It was hard to tell. A lot of families in Wheaton Hills had dogs, and a lot of them stayed outside in fenced backyards at night. On occasion, one of them would get to barking in the wee hours. Often other dogs would join in, filling the night with a chorus of canine voices. It was just doggy chatter and it would usually wind down soon enough.

But not tonight.

The barking escalated in volume and became more agitated. Other dogs began to respond. The sound went on and on, with no sign of relenting. Some of the animals seemed more frantic than others, growling or emitting a series of rapid yips and barks. Kent suspected they were reacting to the party happening a couple streets over at the McGregor place. He’d received several texts about it from Brett Hogan earlier, but those had ceased hours ago. Maybe Brett had crashed the party. It didn’t seem likely, but stranger things had happened.

Kent didn’t really care one way or the other. He’d been trying to sleep for hours, but too many memories from what had easily been the most humiliating twenty-four hours of his life kept taunting him. All that bullshit with the cops for starters, with their questions and insinuations, which was made worse by Brett’s stupid admission of their role in provoking Kevin Cooper and his friends. Then there was the ass-beating he’d taken from Cooper. Today there’d been some not-so-subtle threats from Moose via text. The big football thug’s ego was smarting. Normally threats of physical violence from a guy like that would scare him shitless, but right now he didn’t care. None of it compared to the grief he’d taken from his father. Cal Hickerson was ashamed of his son on multiple levels. He was a coward for persuading someone like Moose to fight his battles for him. He was a fool for trashing his heretofore spotless reputation and possibly tarnishing his chances of getting into one of the more elite Southern universities. At least his mother had expressed some concern for his physical well-being, but even she had chastised him for his lack of judgment and common sense.

Kent slapped a palm against the mattress.

The goddamn dogs just would not let up. If anything, their barking was becoming more frenzied. Then he heard a sound stranger by far than the manic animal sounds. The sound itself wasn’t strange. It was crystal clear and immediately identifiable. The strange thing was hearing it at this late hour. He glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand.

12:24
AM
.

What the fuck?

He’d known it was late, but this was ridiculous. It had to be someone playing a prank. The obvious suspect was Mark Bell or one of his friends.

The doorbell rang again.

Next he heard someone yelling from the other end of the house. His father, understandably pissed at being roused from sleep by the unwelcome late caller. Kent threw his sheets back, sat up, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He heard another sound from somewhere outside the house, the expected prankster giggling. Kent sat and listened as his father’s shouts grew louder as he moved toward the center of the house. Something was off here. Middle-of-the-night doorbell pranks actually weren’t Bell’s style at all. And simple pranksters wouldn’t hang around and wait for someone to actually come to the door.

Cal Hickerson yelled some more:
“Yeah, keep laughing, assholes! We’ll see who’s laughing in a goddamn minute!”

More giggling.

Kent didn’t know what spurred him to act. He wasn’t a brave person. But some deep-down instinct told him his father was in mortal danger and suddenly he was in motion. Dressed only in boxer shorts, he got to his feet and hurried out of the room. He dashed through the house and arrived in the foyer at the exact moment his father opened the door.

The door exploded inward, kicked by someone on the other side.

His father staggered backward as a slender young woman with shoulder-length chestnut curls came into the house followed by three other grinning strangers. The woman was clad in tight jeans and a black T-shirt with a Bible quote on the front. Her companions, two young men and a middle-aged woman, weren’t wearing any clothes. Their nude bodies were covered in blood. Kent gaped at them, unable to fully process what he was seeing. People didn’t do things like this in Wheaton Hills. You couldn’t just run around naked outside. And what was up with all that blood?

The slender young woman had a gun.

She aimed it at Cal Hickerson and squeezed the trigger. A bullet tore out a chunk of his skull amid a spray of red. He dropped dead to the floor. A scream came from somewhere else in the house. His mom. His father’s murderer turned her attention on him, flashing a radiant smile that would have been lovely under other circumstances. “Hey there, baby.”

She stalked closer to him and aimed the gun at his face.

Remembering what the gun had done to his father’s head, Kent raised shaking hands. The girl laughed and whipped the gun across his face, spinning him to the floor. The others scampered off to find his mother. They were going to kill her. He had no doubt of that. Despair engulfed him. Both of his parents gone. His own life was moments away from ending. There was only one hope, that they be reunited in heaven. Kent was a Christian and did believe in God and the afterlife. But his mortal body remained a slave to instinct. It wanted to live. But there was nothing he could do. He was a coward. His father had been right about that. He had no realistic hope of disarming this woman and escaping this situation. It simply wasn’t within him to fight back.

“Open your eyes.”

He heard his mother scream again, a sound that suddenly cut off.

The woman kicked him. “I said open your fucking eyes, little man. Don’t make me say it again.”

Kent whimpered. “N-no.”

“No? Did you seriously just tell me no?”

Kent’s only answer was another whimper.

Then he felt her weight on him as she straddled him and jammed the gun’s barrel up under his chin. “One more time, cocksucker. Open your eyes.”

He couldn’t help it then. The solid, unyielding pressure of the cold barrel impelled him to obedience. His eyes fluttered open and he stared up at the woman’s leering face. “Please . . .”

She smiled. “Please . . . what?”

He sniffed. “Please don’t kill me.”

She laughed. “Okay.”

His heart gave a great lurch. Part of him knew it was foolish to hope, but he did anyway: “Really?”

Her smile became radiant again. It was the kind of smile meant for yearbook photos, which just made it more unsettling. “Sure, baby. You just have to do one thing for me.”

“Oh, here it comes.”

Kent froze. Someone else had come through the open front door. Someone he knew.

He let his head swivel slowly to the right. “Brett?”

His best friend giggled. “Yep.”

Like the people who’d gone after his mother, Brett was naked and covered in blood. He was carrying a large baseball bat. The fat end was also soaked with blood. Whatever was happening here, Brett was a part of it. Kent struggled in vain to comprehend. He couldn’t understand how someone like Brett, a good Christian boy, could wind up like . . . this.