“Right,” McClary said, nodding. “EMP jammer.”
“Or whatever the hell it is.”
McClary spoke on his radio to ask the patrol officer, Tom Gravino, if he had a visual. Gravino confirmed and gave his location: traveling south on Queen’s Boulevard.
“I’m on West Ellis Pike,” McClary said. “I’ll cut him off.”
McClary tapped his brake and swerved around cars in the last two intersections before Queen’s Boulevard. The cruiser roared onto the boulevard, making a wide right turn, and moments later Bobby spotted the speeding white plumber’s van. Several blocks behind, another police cruiser raced in pursuit, Gravino’s Crown Vic.
“Got him,” McClary said, flashing a satisfied grin.
The van swerved right, jumping a curb on the west side of the highway and barreled across a vacant parking lot. Then the driver made a sharp right and headed back north up the alley behind the shopping center.
“Gravino, take the north entrance,” McClary barked into his microphone. “I’ll block the south. Over.”
McClary floored the accelerator, cutting across three lanes of traffic before hitting an entrance ramp into the parking lot. With his left hand braced on the dashboard and his right gripping the upper window frame, Bobby held on throughout the bumpy ride, trying not to think of everything that could go wrong in a high-speed pursuit when the odds were stacked in favor of the other guy.
“There’s no outlet from that alley until the other side of the shopping center,” McClary said. “He’s trapped between us.”
One side of the alley was lined with the backs of strip mall stores, one abutting the next at varying heights. The other side consisted of a long eight-foot high retaining wall topped by a ten-foot chain-link fence.
Calls from other units crackled over the radio. They were seconds away. Bobby had a bad feeling his fate would be decided before they arrived.
They saw the rear of the van as the driver raced north on a slight incline, toward Gravino’s cruiser. The alley was wide enough for a semi to back into the loading docks behind a few of the larger stores in the strip mall; enough space for two cars to pass side by side. But Gravino wouldn’t allow that to happen. For the next few moments, Gravino and the driver in the van were engaged in a game of chicken—a game that was fair only if both drivers had to worry about the outcome of a collision.
At the last moment, Gravino slammed on his brakes and spun his wheel hard to the left to present the broadside of his cruiser to the front of the van.
The van never slowed, never veered.
The collision sounded like an explosion. The van crushed the passenger side of the cop car and pushed the cruiser twenty feet backward. The back wheels of the van rose two feet off the ground, before slamming down.
A split-second after the initial impact, a woman’s body came flying out through the van’s windshield, slamming into the lightbar on the hood of the cruiser and partially dislodging it, before rolling limply down the rear window.
The rear doors of the van swung open and Bobby saw a blur of movement inside, somebody bending over, lifting something.
“Look out!”
A man’s body sailed through the air toward McClary’s approaching cruiser.
“What the hell!?” McClary exclaimed.
He slammed on his brakes and tried to veer to the right.
The large corpse—Bobby realized it must be the plumber’s body, with a ring of dried blood around his chest—crashed into the windshield. The safety glass crumpled with a thousand fractures and the lifeless body pressed down on the dashboard.
McClary’s evasive action steered the car down a loading bay ramp where it slammed into the concrete wall. As Bobby suspected, no airbags deployed as he was flung against the seatbelt’s shoulder strap. Only after he fell back against the seat did he release the breath he had been holding. His hands trembled as he unbuckled the seat belt. In the instant before the impact, he had convinced himself the seatbelt would fail as well.
With the cruiser’s front end crumpled, Bobby’s door screeched as he forced it open. McClary’s door seemed jammed as well, but his side window had shattered, so bracing himself against the window frame, he hoisted himself through. Bobby squeezed through the tight space he had made and circled around to the back of the cruiser.
They had lost less than thirty seconds, but they were too late to save Gravino.
At the top of the ramp, with McClary a step behind him, Bobby saw the tall figure in the bowler hat walking toward the smashed police cruiser, an iron-tipped cane clutched in his right hand. There was no mistaking who he was, even if Bobby hadn’t figured out exactly what he was.
Gravino was out of the ruined police car, his gun in a two-handed grip pointed at the imposing figure, who strode forward as if unconcerned. “Stop! Or I’ll shoot!”
Quick as a striking cobra, the cane batted aside the gun. To Gravino’s credit, he held onto his handgun, but before he could bring it to bear again, the tall man thrust the cane forward, like a fencer lunging with the tip of an epee.
The cane pierced Gravino’s throat with so much force that it shattered his spine, the iron tip bursting through the nape of his neck. Then, as if sensing Bobby and McClary behind him, the tall man grabbed Gravino’s belt with his left hand and effortlessly hurled him bodily over his head toward them.
As soon as the cane tip pulled free of Gravino’s throat, blood spurted and gurgled from the opening. For a few moments, Gravino’s heart kept beating as his body tumbled through the air. McClary broke to the left, while Bobby ducked to the right. Both men had their guns drawn, but their target loped away from them.
Several police cruisers arrived as reinforcements, three at the north end of the alley and two more from the south. Without warning, McClary fired several rounds at the retreating figure. None seemed to connect. Bobby tracked the man, arms extended, his gun in a double-handed grip, waiting for the right moment and wishing he had a rifle instead.
The tall man veered to the right and leapt onto the closed lid of a dark Dumpster. As he turned toward a utility pole braced against the back wall of a store, Bobby fired three quick shots. At the second shot, the tall man jerked and Bobby believed he had found his mark. The bowler hat, already askew, tumbled off the man’s head.
“D’you see that?” McClary asked, stunned, as they ran to close the distance to their target.
“Yup.”
“How is that possible?”
“Bad genes,” Bobby said, and instantly regretted it.
The tall man scooped up his bowler from the Dumpster lid and jammed it on his head again, slipped his cane through his belt, and leapt toward the utility pole. With inhuman strength and speed, he climbed the pole, hand over hand, and reached the roof even as McClary and Bobby emptied their magazines at the ascending target.
McClary spoke into the microphone clipped to his epaulet. “Officer down! Perp’s on the roof! Armed and extremely dangerous! Move units to the front of the shopping plaza. Now! Go! Go!”
The last police car at each end of the alley reversed course to circle around to the front. Bobby looked back at McClary’s cruiser, Gravino’s, and the van. All vehicles disabled. If they’d had an opportunity to stop him, they had missed it. The odds were in his favor, always in his favor. And Bobby now seriously doubted conventional ammo would slow him down, let alone put him down.
Nevertheless, Bobby broke into a sprint, or what passed for a sprint at his age, to the alley’s north entrance. All three police cruisers had backed out now. McClary ran beside him, his breathing not nearly as labored as Bobby’s. Reports on McClary’s radio came back negative, one after another. Nobody had spotted the fugitive.
“I hit him at least twice,” McClary said. “You?”
“Four, easy,” Bobby said, matter-of-fact. “Three in a row while he climbed that pole like a damned monkey.”
“What the hell is he?”
“Don’t know,” Bobby said honestly as they reac
hed the entrance and turned toward the front of the plaza.
“But that—what I saw—on his head,” McClary said. “It was, right?”
Bobby nodded. “Horns.”
“Jesus!”
They stopped in front of the first store. Police cruisers roamed the vast empty parking lot like sharks hoping for chum. One patrol officer trained his car’s spotlight toward the store windows as he drove slowly past each business.
Too much glare, Bobby thought. Never see a damn thing in there.
McClary stared at Bobby. “You’re not nearly as freaked out as I am.”
“No,” Bobby admitted. He peered into the night, hoping to catch some movement. Streetlights provided enough illumination to prevent the tall man from hiding anywhere outside the plaza. Maybe he had doubled back, once they abandoned the alley. The way he climbed the utility pole, he’d have no problem scaling the chain-link fence above the retaining wall.
Bobby shook his head. “We lost him.”
“Not yet,” McClary said. Squeezing the radio microphone again, he deployed the cruisers in a widening grid. Two stayed at the shopping plaza—if the search failed, he and Bobby would need a ride back to the police station.
McClary turned to Bobby, hands on his belt. “So what was that? Genetic mutation? Some kind of circus freak?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” Bobby said, and almost believed he would. “Whatever it is, it ain’t normal.”
“Not by a long shot,” McClary declared. Then, quieter, he said, “Maybe I’ve read too much Stephen King, but I’m starting to doubt it was even human.”
“Certainly a possibility.”
“What? If I were you, I’d be calling me crazy.”
Bobby smiled. “No,” he said, “I wouldn’t—and neither will they.”
The blue Monte Carlo swung into the lot, veered toward the storefront and pulled up to the curb in front of Bobby. Dean climbed out of the driver’s side a moment after Sam exited the passenger side.
One of the two remaining cruisers swooped in with a short siren blast.
“They’re with me,” Bobby informed McClary. “My specialists: Tom and John Smith.”
McClary waved off the support, then spoke into his radio. “Hernandez, wait around back with the bodies. Call an ambulance and notify the county coroner.”
“B—Agent Willis, you okay?” Sam asked, catching himself just in time. “The cell phone was useless.”
“But we remembered Roy’s police scanner,” Dean finished. “Followed the chatter here.”
“Tom, John,” Bobby said, “this is Sergeant McClary, Laurel Hill P.D. Friend of Roy’s. Supervised Lucas Dempsey. Already explained you’re specialists I’ve worked with previously.”
They shook hands and McClary seemed to take their measure. Bobby was confident McClary had no reason to doubt him after what they had been through.
“Got our work cut out for us, boys,” Bobby said. “Sumbitch shrugged off bullets like they were paintball pellets.”
“Specialists,” McClary said to the Winchesters. “So you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before.”
“Um, what sort of thing, exactly?” Sam asked, looking from McClary to Bobby and back again, wondering if McClary had peeked at their hunter playbook or read a few chapters.
“Leaps buildings in a single bound,” McClary said. “Throws human bodies around like beach balls at a summer concert. Has a pair of horns growing out of his head. That sort of thing.”
“Oh,” Sam said, and cleared his throat. “Then yes, more or less.”
McClary’s radio crackled to life.
“Sergeant, I’m behind the shopping plaza,” Hernandez said, “and we have a problem.”
“Speak.”
“I found two bodies.”
“Two?”
“Yes, sir,” Hernandez said. “Gravino is missing.”
Nineteen
“Balls,” Bobby exclaimed for the third time since he and the Winchesters had returned to Roy’s cabin from the shopping center by way of the police station. Bobby wanted his car on hand in case they needed to split up.
“Stop kicking yourself, Bobby,” Sam said. “You couldn’t know.”
“An obvious ploy,” Bobby said. “Gets the cavalry to chase his shadow and doubles back. Hell, I had a hunch and didn’t follow it. Now Gravino’s body’s missing.”
McClary had stayed at the crime scene, upset with himself as well, but he had caught Bobby’s arm before he left with Sam and Dean and whispered fiercely, “We need to talk. Off the record. After I’m done with the official paperwork.”
Bobby had nodded and gripped the man’s shoulder. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“You’re sure the cop was dead?” Dean asked.
“Course I’m sure, ya idjit,” Bobby said, irritated. But Dean could tell Bobby’s anger was directed inward. “Horned sumbitch skewered his throat with that cane.”
“Even if you had gone back,” Sam reasoned, “you couldn’t have stopped him. You said so yourself. You shot him four times, McClary hit him twice.”
“Why take a corpse?” Dean asked. “Why that corpse?”
Bobby glared at him for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Fresher.”
“For food?” Sam wondered.
“Maybe,” Dean said, shrugging. “Maybe it animates corpses.”
“Hasn’t played that tune so far,” Bobby said, considering.
“The point is,” Dean continued, “we don’t know. We can’t guess where this thing will strike next, or why, because we don’t know what the hell it is.”
“Dean’s right,” Bobby said. “We’re twisting in the wind.”
“I guess we can rule out the Leviathan at least,” Sam said.
“For a bright side,” Bobby observed, “that ain’t sayin’ much.”
“We know he creates bad luck, causes accidents,” Sam said.
“Makes bad situations worse,” Dean added, “spreads sickness.”
“Sickness?” Bobby asked. “You tied him to the outbreaks?”
Sam filled him in on the preschool owner’s account of a tall man with a bowler and a cane handing a ball back to the young boy who became Patient Zero.
“McClary and I were in the emergency room,” Bobby said. “Place was overflowing, like a plague ward. Heard talk among the staff about four cases of West Nile virus, for Pete’s sake. So, accidents, disasters, illness, disease. Look hard enough, bet we find reports of crop failure.”
“Any suspects come to mind?” Sam asked as he plugged the laptop into a phone jack to use Roy’s dial-up internet service. He winced as if in pain as the modem squawked and dinged its way to a slow connection.
Bobby frowned. “My collection of lore’s locked in a storage unit. Puts me at a disadvantage. Let’s run it down … Even if I hadn’t seen the damn thing, we’re a few hours from the Jersey coast, so rule out merpeople or sirens.”
“‘Merpeople’?” Dean asked.
“Lured sailors to their destruction,” Bobby said. “Bad omens. Foretold disaster, but some believed they also caused it.”
“A duwende?” Sam suggested, skimming an article. “They can cause bad luck.”
“Too small,” Bobby said. “We’re looking for something triple-XL.”
“Same deal with the mothman,” Sam said. “Its appearance supposedly foretold disasters, including the ’67 Silver Bridge collapse at rush hour. Forty-six people died. Maybe he does more than predict disasters.”
“Mothman had large wings,” Bobby said. “Explains the moniker. This guy had horns, not wings, unless he had a pair tucked under his suit …”
“And why climb when you can fly?” Dean pointed out.
“No mention of weapons, either,” Bobby said. “This thing swung its cane like a sword… or a club. Carries it in plain sight.”
“A club,” Sam said thoughtfully, “bound in iron…” He clicked a few keys, read quickly and looked up at them. “I know what it is.”
“D
on’t keep us in suspense,” Bobby said.
“It’s a creature from Japanese folklore,” Sam said. “An oni. Humanoid, gigantic, described as an ogre or troll, two horns growing out of its head, sometimes an odd number of eyes or fingers, carries an iron club—a kanabo. Sounds like very bad news. It’s described as invincible, causes diseases and disaster, is associated with bad luck, misfortune, and known to consume human flesh.”
“Gravino,” Bobby said. “Fresh meat.”
“So we’ve got an oni on our hands,” Dean said. “And it’s invincible.”
“Need an invincibility loophole,” Bobby said.
“Any tips on how to gank it?” Dean asked.
Sam frowned, scrolled around, and clicked another link. “There’s something here about a demon gate, warding off the oni.”
“Horse left that barn,” Bobby said. “I recall something about a ceremony to expel an oni.”
“The oni-yahari ceremony,” Sam said, and raised his eyebrows, “involves villagers throwing soybeans out of their homes and chanting ‘Oni go out, blessings come in.’”
“All the earmarks of whistling past a graveyard,” Bobby said, disgusted.
“Right,” Dean agreed. “I am not fighting this thing with a bag of beans. We’ve gotta find something else.”
Tora walked along the produce aisle, ostensibly checking bundles of carrots, heads of lettuce and assorted apples, but his attention was focused on the young woman with dark brown hair ten paces ahead of him. Five minutes before, the oni had followed her into Robertson’s Market. From her navy blue skirt suit, he assumed she had an office job, one with some responsibility, as she had apparently worked late on a Friday and had yet to change into more casual clothes. She wore no engagement ring or wedding band and, rather than pushing a shopping cart and stocking up for a family, she carried a plastic basket containing a few small items. She was young and appeared healthy enough for his plans—and without the attachment of a spouse or family who might report her missing before the oni had time to finish the ritual. Unless she worked weekends as well, her coworkers would not note her absence until it was too late.
He had no intention of buying anything from the market and he walked the aisles primarily to assess the woman, but he couldn’t resist nurturing strains of salmonella, e-coli and listeria, increasing their potency and resistance to antibiotics while spreading them to every surface and each item he touched.
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