The Late Night Horror Show (31 page)

Maybe. And maybe not.

And maybe she was just overthinking an admittedly intriguing question with no obvious answer while stalling for time. It was one thing to feel such anger that you felt compelled to exact bloody vengeance. It was another thing entirely to find yourself right at the precipice of that last moment of truth.
 

Everything was heightened in this moment. Her heart seemed to be going a million miles an hour. Hell, a
billion
. The gun felt steady in her hands, more or less, but other parts of her body were trembling. She felt weak in the knees. Her breath seemed horribly loud as it went rapidly in and out. Sweat rose on her brow and slid down her temples.

Another female voice, one she didn’t recognize, spoke up. “I’m bored, Heidi.”

Heidi snorted. “So?”

“So this dude’s done for. We should go get that hot chick Ashley stashed away in her room. She’ll be more fun than Jigsaw Face here.”

A brief, possibly contemplative silence.

Then a sigh from Heidi. “You got a point, bitch. Johnny can barely work up the strength to scream anymore.”

Rob chuckled. “That black-haired bitch will scream plenty, I bet, especially when you start threatening to cut her titties off.”

A laugh from Heidi. “Hell, that’ll be nothing. Wait till I actually
do
cut them off. She’ll be the loudest screamer we’ve had in a long time.”

“I do love a good screamer,” the other girl said.

“And I ain’t had fried titties for dinner in a long-ass time,” Rob added.

Even after all she had gone through so far, Lashon’s stomach churned at that statement. Just when she thought she had plumbed the farthest depths of this band of psychos’ sickness, yet another level of unthinkable depravity was uncovered.

“So go fetch the whore,” Heidi said, presumably addressing Rob. “I’ll open Johnny’s throat for him while you’re gone.”

If she had been waiting for her cue, there it was.

Now or never.

She wheeled around and stood framed in the archway, with the gun extended in front of her in one hand and the blood-smeared butcher’s knife clasped in the other. The faces of everyone in the kitchen turned her way in the same moment. Everyone including the man Heidi had called Johnny.
 

Lashon’s plan had been to start shooting right away. There was just no percentage in giving these people any time to react. But she found herself momentarily stunned into inaction at the sight of Johnny, whose hands had been nailed to a table. He was missing several fingers and the surface of the table was covered in blood. There was a scent of charred meat in the air and it was immediately apparent they had been cauterizing his wounds in order to extend his suffering.
 

As awful as all that was, however, it was what had been done to his face that shocked her into temporary insensibility. His lips had been cut entirely away, leaving his teeth and gums exposed in a hideous rictus grin. Lashon felt sick. No amount of plastic surgery was ever gonna make that look right again. His bulging eyes stared a silent plea at her—
Kill me.

They all stood there staring at each other for a frozen moment that seemed to go on forever. Lashon watched the expressions of the psychotic brothers and sisters slowly change from startled fright to anger as they took in her blood-soaked appearance. It appeared to hit them all in the same instant what must have happened. She had killed multiple members of their family. It was maybe the first time any of their many victims had gotten the upper hand.
 

She was surprised to perceive real grief intermingled with their anger. She had believed these monsters incapable of actual human feelings unrelated to the base pleasures of sadism, but it was there all right.

Good. Fuck them.

The blonde girl she had heard talking to Heidi let out a shriek of rage and came charging at her from the left, wielding a frying pan raised high above her head. Hot cooking oil splashed out of the pan and traced a sizzling trail down the length of the girl’s forearm. It had to hurt, but she appeared oblivious to the pain. Little lengths of blackened meat tumbled from the pan as well.

Fingers,
Lashon thought.

Those are Johnny’s missing fingers.

She swung the gun to her left and squeezed the trigger. The gun jerked hard in her hand, sending an unexpected shock of pain down her arm to her shoulder. But the bullet found its target, punching a hole through the girl’s throat and staggering her backward. Lashon corrected her aim and fired again. The next round went right between the girl’s eyes. Blood erupted from the back of her head just before she fell over dead. That left three of them. Heidi and the two guys. Big Rob and the slightly built guy who had posed as the boyfriend of “Mercedes” earlier in the evening.

“Get her!”

Heidi’s shrill scream spurred the men into action. Both came barreling at her full speed from opposite sides of the table. No time for thinking. Action time. Lashon aimed first at Rob, instinct telling her he was the bigger threat. She dropped the knife and gripped the gun’s butt with both hands as she fired three rounds through his chest. They staggered him, but he kept coming, reaching her and falling upon her as she fired a final round up through his chin. Blood and fragments of brain and bone rained down upon her as the weight of his corpse drove her back through the archway and down to the carpeted living room floor.
 

She heard Heidi screaming again as she struggled to get out from under the big body. Alarms went off in her head as she realized she had dropped the gun. She wrenched her head to the right and saw it on the floor within grabbing distance. She groped for it but an instant before she could snag it again it was scooped up by the sole surviving male member of the family.

He aimed the gun at her face.

So this is it,
she thought.
I’m gonna die now.

At least she had tried. She had gone down fighting rather than running off like a coward. And she had done a good thing by ridding this world of most of these goddamn psychopaths. She stared into the face of her probable killer and remembered the others had called him Blaine. Yet another alias, most likely.

“Don’t do it, Blaine.”

Okay, maybe not.

She saw Blaine’s hand shaking as tears leaked from his eyes. More genuine human emotion. Still so strange from the likes of someone so evil. Just seeing those tears made it all worth it. Even her own death. This prick
should
suffer, at least a little. His forefinger trembled on the trigger. His need to kill her was a palpable thing, an almost living presence there in the room with them.

Heidi moved into view to stand next to him. She wrapped a hand gently around his own and eased the gun’s barrel away from Lashon’s face.

A strangled sob tore out of his throat.
“She has to die!”

“I know, I know,” Heidi said in a soothing tone. “Shush now, baby.” She stroked the back of his hand in an oddly intimate way, considering they were brother and sister. “She
will
die. I promise you that.” And now one of the wickedest, most insidious grins Lashon had ever seen curved the girl’s mouth. “But I’ve got something special in mind for this murdering cunt.”

Blaine choked back another sob. “Y-you do?”

“I do, baby. I do.” The wattage of that insane smile cranked higher still. “We’ll deal with her down in the cellar. Now roll that slab of dead beef off her.”

Blaine did as instructed and Lashon sucked in a great, gasping breath as the weight of the corpse was removed. But this instinctive physical relief was short-lived as Heidi squatted on her haunches to leer down at her.

“I bet you feel pretty good about yourself, huh? Going all kill crazy like that on my family. Bet you feel all fucking
badass
.” She dropped to her knees and leaned even closer. “Yeah, you do, I can tell. But let me tell you something, bitch. That’s all gonna go away once you’re hanging from a meat hook in the cellar.”

Blaine did a strange thing then.

He giggled.

He sounded like a demented little girl. For some reason, Lashon found this as disturbing as any of the admittedly unnerving things Heidi had told her.

Oh fuck. Maybe I made a mistake after all…

Heidi stood up. “Give me that.” She pried the gun from Blaine’s dangling hand. “Now drag this whore down to the cellar.”

Blaine grabbed Lashon by the ankles. A moment later he was dragging her through the archway, back into the kitchen. She clawed for purchase on the floor, her fingernails skidding over the grooves between the tiles as she futilely sought to impede Blaine’s progress. Next, she tried kicking her feet free from his hands, but this effort proved just as ineffective. She heard Johnny voice some unintelligible sound of protest as Blaine dragged her across the floor. It earned him a slap across his ruined face from Heidi.

She screamed at him,
“Shut up, you fucking Frankenstein!”

And then she laughed.

Lashon lifted her head and saw that she and Blaine were headed toward a closed door in a far corner of the kitchen.

The cellar door.

And, beyond it, the meat hook Heidi had promised was waiting for her.

Lashon’s eyes filled with tears as Heidi hurried past her and opened the door for Blaine, who dragged her through it onto a wooden landing. He jerked her to her feet and positioned her at the edge of the landing.

Then she screamed as he threw her down invisible stairs.

Down into a deep, deep darkness.

The next thing she was aware of was pain.

A lot of it.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The sound of many sirens approaching fast kept getting louder, but thus far no flashing lights had appeared in the wide four-lane street beyond the club’s large parking lot. That would be changing any moment now. Monroe hoped like hell their escape window would remain open long enough to get gone from this place before that happened.

He followed Melissa at a fast trot through the parking lot, banging his hip more than once as they wove between the long rows of parked cars. The black Rolls Royce Phantom was parked diagonally across two spaces at the far end of the last row of cars, which abutted a concrete divider separating the dance club’s lot from the parking lot of a small strip mall. As they neared the car, Melissa put on a burst of impressive speed, becoming a barely visible blur zipping through the night.

When she became visible again, she was standing next to the driver’s side door. Monroe heard a tinkling of safety glass as she punched a fist through the window, reached deep inside with both hands, and pulled the screaming, bleeding chauffeur back out through the window. Monroe figured she would spend at least a moment grilling the traitorous human servant for information regarding details of the assault on the mansion. They would need to know in advance as much as possible about what was happening in order to formulate an at least remotely viable counterassault plan.

But Melissa had a different agenda, apparently.

She slammed the pleading chauffeur against the side of the vehicle and used a fist again to punch a hole through something—this time straight through the man’s abdomen, which yielded to the blow with shocking ease. She dug around in his abdominal cavity for a moment as his screams rose to higher and higher registers. Then her bloody fist—wrapped around a length of intestine—emerged
 
from the gaping hole in his gut. She pulled at it and pulled at it like a woman unraveling a spool of thread. That was gruesome enough, but she wasn’t finished yet. She looped the man’s guts around his neck twice and then shoved the end of the length of guts into his mouth.

Monroe’s mouth hung open as he watched this bit of insanely over-the-top depravity.

God…damn…

This all happened in a space of seconds. She looked like a demon at work. Monroe supposed she was a demon of sorts. Which kind of made him one, too.

She tossed the chauffer’s corpse aside and looked at Monroe. “What are you staring at? Let’s get out of here.”

Monroe closed his mouth. “Right. Of course.”

They got in the car. The keys were still in the ignition. Melissa cranked the engine to life, put the car in reverse, and punched the gas. The car lurched twice as its front and then back wheels bounced over the chauffeur’s body. Melissa’s face was a mask of intense concentration as she shifted gears again and put the gas pedal to the floor. The Phantom’s tires squealed loudly as they patched out with the car’s front end aimed at the sidewalk. The Rolls Royce bounced over the curb and onto the street, earning blasts from the horns of several angry motorists as they crossed the lanes of moving traffic. Melissa paid it all no mind as she cranked the wheel hard to the left and got them pointed in a more or less straight direction again.

They were speeding away as Monroe glanced at the mirror on his side and saw the first flashing lights appear in the distance. He gulped. There were a lot of them. He looked away from the mirror and saw more flashing lights approaching from the other direction. Melissa never slowed down as she blew by them all. Monroe clutched the door handle in a death grip as the Phantom’s speed soared to felony-level recklessness.