Jordy shakes his head, which causes Bertrand to add, “Someone could be after him. He could tell us who, how many. Jordy, come on. We can’t just stand here.”
Jordy says, “I’ll head in the direction of the road till I’m a few yards past the wagon, then I’ll cut down around the back and come up on it from the other side. Bertrand, I want you to follow me, but stop directly behind the car, back up out of sight, and wait. Frasier, you come downhill on the passenger side. But you keep eyes on the woods behind me as I approach the vehicle. You see anything coming up on me from behind, shoot it dead. And nobody moves in until you see me close on the car.”
They nod, start to move. Frasier’s the smallest and the stealthiest, but they’re all doing their best to beat him in the light foot department tonight.
Once he’s safely past the car, Jordy starts downhill, Bertrand right on his tail. When they reach the service road’s fairly level ground, Bertrand falls back. Jordy keeps going, gun out, crouched, dodging low branches before he comes parallel to the station wagon in the cover of the trees east of the road.
No shadows dart from the wagon as he circles it from behind.
Frasier was right. The driver’s side door is gone. There’s not even a mangled piece of it left. It’s like the damn thing was torn right off the car. Once he’s away from the headlights’ glare, the wagon’s silhouette is easy to discern.
Something’s leaning on that damn horn, though. Something as heavy as a human body.
In a crouch, Jordy sweeps the woods behind him, then the stretch of pines off to his left that leads to the storage shed. The headlights give off enough of a glow that he can make out the general outline of each tree trunk. None of the shadows seems human. And he has to go by sight because that damn horn’s drowning out every other sound. It’s up to Frasier to keep him covered from his vantage point uphill.
Gun raised, Jordy starts toward the car. His skin prickles when he steps out from the trees, but there’s a deliciousness to the feeling as well. He’s approaching the chance to prove himself again after his screwups these past few days. Off to his right, he sees Bertrand coming up on the car from behind, and then he sees Frasier’s shadow coming downhill.
Then, finally, he sees what’s behind the wheel. He stops cold.
Because nothing is behind the wheel, and still the horn’s wailing.
Something, he realizes as he blinks, is in the wheel.
Something that looks either metal or plastic and is almost as slender as a pen. It’s been pushed through the center of the steering wheel as if the wheel’s rubber center was just a tub of butter. The amount of pressure required to do this would be formidable, but also precise in a way he’s having trouble understanding.
And that’s when the back end of the station wagon jumps several feet off the earth and flies backward.
Gunfire explodes.
Jordy realizes Bertrand just shot at the Volvo as it lurched toward him. But because he assumed it was being driven by someone, he didn’t calculate for the fact that the damn car was being dragged toward him by its back end by some invisible force, so his bullets went straight into its trunk and not through the back windshield as he’d hoped.
Jordy’s thinking of crazy defense contractor bullshit, of some kind of giant magnetic ray that can lift station wagons off the ground and send them flying through the air, because that’s the only damn thing that might explain whatever the hell he’s seeing.
He stumbles backward, far enough to see the Volvo slam into Bertrand’s chest—not his waist, his damn chest, because that’s how high off the ground the car is—then Bertrand goes down and suddenly the Volvo’s back tires crash back to the earth, and everything seems normal again. Until Bertrand’s dragged under the car.
Bang, bang, bang. Jordy’s not sure where these gunshots came from. Then he sees Frasier upslope. The little dude just fired three shots through the Volvo’s windshield. They’ve spiderwebbed the glass. But maybe Frasier can’t see what Jordy already saw—nobody’s behind the Volvo’s wheel.
Someone’s under the Volvo. Someone lifted it.
And now Bertrand’s under it.
And that someone’s under it with Bertrand.
His mind is trying to stretch to accommodate this impossibility, but everything else inside him is fighting it. Then something spits out from under the station wagon, sliding through the dirt toward his feet. He jumps backward, fires, then realizes he’s been frightened by a mouse. Not literally, but close. The thing’s hand-size, a misshapen mass of metal. At first, he thinks it’s a piece of the car; then he recognizes the barrel of Bertrand’s gun, bent at a ninety-degree angle.
The Volvo rises into the air again. Much higher this time. And higher. The nose drops to the ground suddenly, but the back end keeps rising.
Too late, Frasier starts firing like mad, bullets punching through the Volvo’s upturned roof. Then the entire station wagon flies forward roof-first six feet, ten feet, and smashes into the trees Frasier’s crouching behind.
Thrown, he thinks against his will. Something just threw that damn car at Frasier.
Jordy’s so stunned he almost misses the patch of darkness rushing toward him. It’s darkness in the shape of a woman.
He lets out a scream that fills him with shame, then he runs like hell.
Branches scratch and claw at him.
He hears more gunfire behind him. Frasier. He must have been able to skitter backward away from the flying Volvo in time. The gunfire’s closer to him than the station wagon. Frasier’s pursuing whatever this thing is—demon, demon, demon, his mind screams. The brave little fucker lets out a warlike yell, and that’s when Jordy realizes he’s got a gun just like Frasier does, but he’s running like some dickless little shit, and so he spins, gun raised, ready to face the demon behind him.
He spins in time to see Frasier rocket backward through the air, over the road, cracking and snapping the branches with his back, until he lands against one with a sickening thud. When the little dude suddenly goes limp ten feet off the ground, Jordy realizes he didn’t land against it; the branch went straight through him, and that’s why he’s screaming.
Jordy fires once, twice into the darkness, convinced it’ll be useless but just as convinced he’s got to do something on behalf of his friend. His screaming, dying friend.
There’s a riot of snapping branches in the darkness. It’s coming toward him. These aren’t twigs or leaves crunching under foot; these are thick limbs and maybe even the trunks of small trees, and whatever’s coming for him, it’s breaking them like kindling as it claws its way through the dark.
The shed’s his best hope; the shed and its fuel and weapons and God knows what else he might be able to use to defend himself against this demon. If he has to give his life for this, maybe this is the moment, the moment when he and this demon bitch go down together in a marriage of flame, all so Milo and the others can get away.
He throws himself against the shed’s door, grabs the handle, then he’s ripped backward. He makes the mistake of holding on to the handle as hard as he can. His shoulder pops out of its socket. It feels like his entire torso’s caught fire. He lands face-first in the dirt. After the terror of the chase and now the fresh agony of his broken shoulder, the single tap of a foot against his lower back feels almost comical. Then the foot braces itself against his right side and pushes him over onto his back like a spatula.
Not a foot, he reminds himself. A hoof, a cloven hoof.
Jordy blinks madly, prepares himself to behold some of the grotesqueries of Revelations, the face of a true demon. Instead, he finds himself looking up into the eyes of a vaguely familiar woman with a plain, baby fat–padded face and straw-colored hair and an expression on her face that comes from some feeling between rage and focus for which he doesn’t have a name.
“Where is he?” she asks quietly.
Jordy laughs deliriously. His girlfriend. Prescott’s fucking girlfriend.
“Is he in there
?” she asks. “In the shed?”
Jordy wants to stop laughing, but for that he’d have to be breathing, and he can’t do that, either. Apparently, she takes the resulting struggle as an insult because she raises her right foot high, then brings it down into the earth several inches from his face. When she withdraws her foot from the crater it just made, the sole of her tennis shoe has a fissure running down its length, but wedged in the dirt is the misshapen mass that used to be his gun.
Studying him, she brings her foot to the center of his chest, gives the center of his rib cage a tiny little tap. “Where is he, Jordy?” she asks again.
“Got something!” the tech yells.
The microdrone crew’s van is speeding up the mountain road so fast Cole’s thrown one arm out to his side so he can brace himself against the inside of the sliding door. It’s the only way to keep from being knocked off the bench that runs the length of the cargo bay. The microdrone feeds are on three flat-screen computer monitors affixed to the bay’s only solid wall.
Scott’s riding up front with the driver.
They’ve kept the microdrone cloud as high above the mountain road as they can, searching for any light source, and now they’ve got a hit.
“It’s some kind of light source, and it’s pointing skyward,” the tech says, pointing to the screen.
Cole leans forward. “A signal?”
“Let me descend,” the tech says, “but I’m not promising I can avoid the trees.”
“I heard you the first dozen times,” Cole says.
The tech seizes the tiny control stick next to him. The microdrones operate like a swarm, bouncing off each other’s electromagnetic waves in a way that allows them to flock together and move as a unit without needing one operator for every tiny little drone. They provide hundreds of different feeds, which are processed through a central computer that amalgamates them into three different angles that are relatively easy to monitor, albeit with some occasional headache-inducing distortion.
“Uh-oh,” the tech says.
That’s when Cole sees what the light source is—the headlights of Charley’s Volvo. And they’re pointing directly skyward. Which is not good. But they’re also shifting to one side.
The entire car is slipping loose from whatever’s holding it up at a ninety-degree angle. Cole figures it’s trees. They’re probably breaking under its weight.
As the microdrones descend, the Volvo goes over sideways, landing on one side, headlights vertically stacked, blasting light onto two men with frighteningly large guns who are running directly toward the spot where Charley stands over a prone, fallen man.
One of the running men raises what looks like a shotgun.
“Give me that,” Cole says, then he gently closes his hand around the control stick.
There’s a sound like a single clap of thunder.
The demon bitch is blown sideways.
Ears ringing, Jordy lifts his head off the dirt, sees Manuel Lloya lowering his sawed-off shotgun as he races toward them up the road. Ralph Peters is next to him, armed with an AR-15 on a chest strap. They’re supposed to be guarding Milo’s workshop. But Greg Burton’s not with them, so maybe he stayed behind. The guys must have come speeding downhill on the ATVs when they heard all hell break loose. Now, they’re running directly under the spot where Frasier’s pinned to a tree trunk ten feet in the air. They don’t notice the poor son of a bitch. Maybe because he’s not screaming anymore.
Jordy goes to call out to them, to warn them this creature’s not what they think she is. But just then, the tree branches above both men explode, as if a flock of invisible birds just took flight from them all at once.
Manuel Lloya freezes, spins, and raises his shotgun to the sky. Then his body jerks in a dozen different places. His shotgun is thrust to the dirt at his feet by an invisible force. Then he hits the dirt, too, ass-first, like he just needed to take a little break. The rest of him collapses with dead weight and when his head rolls back, Jordy can see pieces of his face are missing. Ralph Peters is still on his feet, but his AR-15 hangs loosely from the sling at his chest, and he’s staring dumbfounded at the shredded flesh on his palms as he spins in place. When he turns in Jordy’s direction, one leg bends under him. As he goes down, Jordy can see that one of the man’s eyes is missing and arterial spray’s also pumping wildly from his neck.
Then Jordy’s would-be rescuers are just two bleeding corpses.
Three, if you count Frasier dangling from the tree branches overhead.
All three computer screens go dark, then they’re filled by bright-blue squares and the white words Transmission Interruption, which bathe the cargo bay in a sudden wash of blinding light. Cole thought maybe one or two of the drones might survive, but apparently they’re all shattered or have embedded themselves inside a human body. At least they’re not offering live close-ups of broken bones and spleens.
Cole releases the control stick and sits back on the bench. The two techs are doing their best not to look at him, but the screens before them are so bright now, they’re going to have to eventually, if only to protect their eyes.
“There,” he says, “that should help.”
“But now we can’t see anything,” one of the techs finally says.
“Neither can they.”
Jordy knows he shouldn’t be surprised when the demon gets to her feet.
He shouldn’t be surprised to see the lacerations along her right cheek and jaw healing right before his eyes. The wounds should be oozing blood, but instead they’re closing up, and what blood they’ve spilled is left behind in a drying smear along her jaw.
But it’s her eyes that get to him. Eyes as focused and alert as someone who’s just had their third cup of morning coffee and is ready to tackle the day. It’s not the expression of someone who was just blown sideways by a shot from one of the most powerful guns there is, a blast that turned the right shoulder on her shirt to black shreds.
As if recovering from a light shove, she regains her balance.
There’s a strange whirring sound in the dirt a few feet away. Something hand-size and metallic is spinning in circles, like a mad fly with a broken wing. But it’s some kind of machine. A small, bug-like machine unlike any he’s ever laid eyes on before. The sight makes him think of godless films like The Matrix, of tears in the fabric of reality that recognize no distinction between heaven and hell, and he soothes himself by telling him those are the very type of things a demon like this bitch would want him to see. First she’ll snap his bones; then she’ll take his faith.
It’s one of those things, he realizes, one of those things that came out of the sky and tore my guys to shreds.
The demon’s standing over him again. Once again, her foot’s centered over his chest.
“Where is Luke Prescott?” she asks.
“If you’re gonna take my soul, you’re gonna have to break it first, bitch.”
“OK.”
The pain is so sudden and total at first he doesn’t realize where it’s coming from. Then, when she once more centers her foot over his chest, he realizes she just shattered his right knee with what in a normal world would have been a light tap.
“Fuck you in hell, cunt,” he groans. “Fuck you in hell.”
He’s prepared for it this time, at least as much as anyone can be prepared for pain so bad it sends sounds from your throat like your tonsils are being torn out. When he stops gasping and wheezing and letting out guttural groans, he sees the demon’s face inches from his. The bitch isn’t even sweating.
“I am running out of patience with you, you pathetic, caveman piece of shit. And you have a lot of bones in your body for me to play with. So tell me where your sick friend took my boyfriend or I will break you again and again while the only thing you can do is watch and scream.”
“Fuck you, you—”
Real quick, one after the other, like she’s snapping twigs, she breaks both of his ankles in a two-handed grip. He smells his own piss before h
e feels it wetting his underwear. Shit, too, it smells like. Everything. He’s lost all semblance of anything anyone might call control. His mind gropes for words to express his agony, but there aren’t any. The pain is so total and complete, he feels skinless, like a raw nerve writhing in the dirt, and then he realizes his screams are organizing into words against his will.
One word, over and over again.
Limekilns. Limekilns. Limekilns.
It’s possible she’s flying, but she doubts it. She’s just going faster uphill than any human can because there’s barely anything in her path that can stop her. Some of the redwood trunks slow her down a little, but mostly her shoulders gouge chunks from the ones she fails to avoid.
She’s tempted to try some running leaps, but those usually end with her feet cratered in the earth, which might slow her down or throw her off-balance. Instead, she keeps her arms thrust out in front of her so that the branches and the occasional tree limb break across her chest as if they’re light snowdrifts and her body’s a locomotive.
These men have cut a crude uphill trail, probably for use by the two ATVs she saw parked just uphill from the clearing. She’s not sure where else the little trail could go except the old ruined limekilns, but even though they’re isolated and overgrown and there’s no clear trail there from 293, they’re listed on a bunch of hiking maps and outdoor adventure blogs. So whatever torture shop this Milo has managed to set up there has to be either highly portable or temporary. No way would he leave equipment or evidence behind to be discovered by some intrepid backpackers during the day. And that’s good, because it means his fortification will be flimsy at best. By her current standards, at least.
When she smells smoke, she goes still.
There’s a small lantern glowing through the trees up ahead. She almost missed it. And that’s because someone’s turning it off, someone who probably heard her approach. The thing must be electric; it doesn’t gutter as it fades.
Blood Echo Page 26