But none of that bothered Luke in the slightest.
The “shaman” had taken a long drag from an unfiltered cigarette and then stubbed it out under his boot. He reached into one of many pockets and took out a piece of paper.
“The incantation,” he said, and handed it to Luke. It was literally pen and ink on the back of a cigarette packet. “You have to recite that without pause or alteration over the bullet, after you’ve carved it. Do it each time if you make more than one. Then anoint the bullet in one drop of the shooter’s blood. Don’t screw it up—the bullet is useless without the incantation—the words are what give it power. Without them, it’ll just bounce off the mother fucker.”
Luke nodded as if he understood this, and maybe he did. He’d had to take the lead since they’d seen Carol again and had been the one to trawl the net and talk to the crazies who live on the fringe. Now he claimed to understand the shit that they’d seen in the last month or so. Garry just followed him around like a ghost, having no idea what to do but follow his brother-in-law.
“Conviction, dude. That’s the key. You believe the incantation, it will believe in you.”
“I hear you,” Luke put the incantation in his wallet, sliding it between a couple of credit cards as if this was where such things always belonged.
“You got my money?”
Luke certainly did. He lifted the duffel and slammed it down on the counter. The shaman unzipped it and looked at the paper bundles packaged neatly inside. The proceeds from selling the house, the bright future that Garry and Carol had mapped for themselves now cashed out, the last of it handed over to a painted goon dressed up in the remains of half a cow.
Garry winced to see it go. Luke never batted an eyelid. He was invested in this, he had mourned his sister hard but he’d come out fighting, had really found his calling in vengeance.
“I ain’t gonna count it—I’ll take it on trust.”
“So you fucking should,” Garry said softly.
The shaman glared, as much as he could through pierced eyelids.
“That’s cool,” Luke said, putting a calming hand on Garry’s arm. “Give me the rest of it.” He licked his lips in anticipation, just like a junkie…
The shaman reached into his voluminous coat and produced a bundle of rags, which he delicately placed upon the counter. It looked like something you’d expect some grease-monkey to keep his lunch wrapped in. The shaman pinched two corners of the rag and pulled it back carefully, showing them what was inside.
“To make the bullet, you have to kill a man with this dagger. Then use it to carve a bone into a bullet. It has to be this dagger, both to kill and to carve. You understand?”
“Uh-huh.” Luke picked up the dagger, twisting it in his hands and kissing it with loving eyes.
“Remember, this is powerful magic. You need to approach the task with due reverence.”
“You got three hundred G’s in that bag right there. That reverent enough for you?” Gerry’s words were all but spit at the shaman.
“Hey man, you want to fight the demons, you gotta pay the price…” This was perhaps the first thing the shaman had said that made any sense to Garry.
Garry looked at his brother-in-law. Luke was simply captivated by the weapon’s dark beauty.
“Never a truer word,” he said.
Now…
The motel was off the freeway but there was still a lot of traffic, both on the road and the sidewalk. Garry needed to get further away from the bright lights and the fast food outlets, onto the back streets where it was dark and the people didn’t talk to each other save to carry out their hidden agendas.
It didn’t take him long to lose himself. The bright lights faded and the underbelly beckoned; there were back bars here, seedy places where nobody went unless they had no better option, alleyways where the business of the streets was conducted in private, away from prying eyes.
It was perfect. Garry couldn’t have found a better place to procure bone. He walked as close to the shadows as he could, avoiding the glances from suspicious eyes, low people looking for trade, or keeping watch while others went about theirs.
Just a few months ago Garry’s blood would have run cold if he had been forced to walk these streets. He was a suburbanite, used to the comfort of well-lit sidewalks, neighborhood watches and dog walkers. That man didn’t belong here; he would have stood out like a gazelle that had stumbled into the middle of a hungry pride of lions.
That Garry didn’t exist anymore. Most of him had died with Carol, the rest when Luke was gunned down. He walked these streets now as a hunter, and there was nothing that could scare him after the horror he had already lived through.
He found what he was looking for. The man was in a recessed doorway, a boarded up alcove that might once have been the entrance to a store. He wore a hood over his head with trousers hanging low—the kind of look Garry and Carol used to laugh about. Used to say that if they had a kid and he dressed like that…
If they’d had a kid.
Hell, this one was little more than a boy himself. He could have been twelve years old and wouldn’t have looked big for his age. He carried himself with false confidence, but didn’t quite sell it. He watched Garry approach and shuffled back into the shadows. It smelt of piss and worse in the doorway.
“Yo, whatcha need?” he said.
“What’ve you got?”
“I got whatever you need,” He opened his jacket up, had extra pockets stitched into the lining in which to keep his wares which he displayed with the pride of a shopkeeper.
It was almost too perfect an opportunity.
“You’ve definitely got what I need,” Garry said, wrapping his hand tightly around the dagger before he thrust it up, using the jacket to cover the action if anyone had happened to look into the shadows.
The dagger was old and the metal stained, but it slid into flesh as if it was finding its way home. Garry put his other arm around the kid’s neck, pulled him down further onto the blade. He didn’t cry out, there was a wet gargle from deep in his throat and he thrashed against Garry briefly as he fought for survival. But the life bled from him quickly, and Garry let his grip loosen, although he kept the boy upright as he pulled the blade out. Blood splashed onto the floor, but in the dark you wouldn’t notice it amongst all the other filth.
Garry let the body sag into a sitting position. He shut the coat, hid the wounds he’d inflicted. Then he used the dagger one more time, to take the fingers from the boy’s dead hands.
Garry thought of it as just gathering raw material.
Three Weeks Ago…
He hadn’t paid close enough attention to Luke. He’d been lost in his own world of hurt, the memory of Carol always, visions tainted by that sight of her skinless body bleeding over the kitchen floor, muscles and sinews in the face that had been so beautiful in life stretched into an eternal scream. No matter where his memory took him, that image was at the end of the line, swallowing everything else. He couldn’t lose it, so after a while, he’d given up trying.
Luke had been the steady one, or so he’d thought.
Luke had been the one who’d spotted Carol that day, even though it had then seemed impossible. He had called Garry up and begged him to come, promised on the soul of everything he’d ever held dear that he wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t insane, he had absolutely seen his sister on the street, she had walked past him without recognition, hadn’t reacted when he’d called her name. But he’d followed her anyway, had confronted her in broad daylight outside a bakery that she and Garry had once shopped at regularly, and Luke had looked into her eyes and seen the monster that was living inside her. She had fled, but Luke had followed and saw where she was hiding, where she had made her nest.
Garry had come, almost blind from the tears that would not stop coming since he’d found her corpse. Angry at his brother-in-law, furious that he would do this, would let loose whatever lunacy had manifested in his grief. But at the same time he was hopeful, st
upidly insanely hopeful that maybe Luke was right—that Carol was still walking around happy in her own skin, that it had all been some calamitous mistake, that the thing that he had found flayed and tortured in the kitchen wasn’t her at all, that she was still his Carol, and that everything could be okay after all.
So he had gone with Luke, had followed him to the vacant duplex with the boarded doors that he’d watched Carol slip into. And inside they had found another body, another skinless victim of something they simply couldn’t comprehend. And draped over a chair as if it was a prom dress that would never be worn again was Carol’s skin. It had taken her off and changed into something more comfortable.
And the two of them made a promise to each other right then that they would hunt that thing to the ends of the earth.
Luke had done all the research, had lost himself online for days on end, had trawled the back streets poking in dusty, forgotten stores that sold the idea of a world beyond this one that most people refused to buy. He had wanted the name of the thing they hunted, wanted to know it, to understand it as well as kill it. And he found that it had many names, names that it seemed to slip in and out of as easily as it did the skins of its victims.
It had been Luke who had found the shaman. He had insisted that they purchase the dagger at all costs, that they do with it exactly what they had been told; that they make the bullets that could kill the thing that had briefly worn the woman they loved.
Since he had seen his wife’s skin hanging on the chair, nothing really made any kind of sense to Garry, but he went along with Luke all the way, listened as Luke went into great detail about the thing’s probable path across the states, at the reports of other victims, other skinned innocents through the decades. Luke thought he could see patterns to the thing’s progress. Perhaps he did. But Luke was also quite mad. Garry had slowly begun to accept the madness that their lives had become; Luke had embraced it and pushed beyond its boundaries.
It was that embrace that had made him sloppy. They both knew that they would need to kill another human being—they understood the weight of that. They would have to take a life, but they justified it by telling each other that life would not be wasted, that their victim’s death would give them the tools they needed to save others; to stop the thing from skinning its way across the country. By killing one they could save who knew how many. Garry was convinced, but then he would have done pretty much anything to avenge his wife.
But Luke, Luke had plans.
“We gotta kill someone, Garry, and I know exactly who it is we’re going to kill.”
It was around that time that Garry started to realise there was a whole other pain throbbing in Luke’s heart. He had lost his sister, and that had stung, but the person that had really hurt him was still walking around quite happy in her own sweet skin. Luke was already grieving when Carol was murdered, that event had just pushed him that little closer to his edge. And now he was going to try and heal both wounds with a single thrust of a three hundred thousand dollar weapon.
Garry had gone along with it because in all honesty he didn’t care either way. He wanted to kill the beast, wanted to try and heal his pain by destroying the thing that had caused it, and if it meant that another had to die, he didn’t really give a shit. He just didn’t think it was a particularly good idea.
“They’ll know it was you, Luke. You lived with her for a year. You still have a set of key—they’ll be down on us within the hour. If we’re gonna hunt the skinner, we gotta go under the radar, keep nice and quiet while we creep up on the fucker. You do this and your face is going to be on every newspaper in the state.”
“Fuck it, Garry. I’m helping you here, and this is my price. This is the way I get my own closure, okay? I use one bitch to kill another, and I avenge my sister in the process. You want to take the dagger and do it all yourself, you go right on ahead.”
But Garry didn’t want to fight about it. He went with Luke to the apartment Luke had once shared with Laura, had the knife ready to pass to him when the time was right to slay her and steal her bones for the carving. They’re first surprise was that she had changed the locks, but Luke didn’t let that alter his plan. He simply kicked the lock out of the door and strolled into the apartment as if he still owned her, calling her name as if it were a joke to him.
She’d come out of the bedroom shaking in fear, a terrified creature that had endured more than her share of pain from the man who had once lived here. She screamed in defiant fury and shot at him with the gun he’d bought for her when they lived together, bought so that she could defend herself if anyone broke in…
He was dead before the irony occurred to him.
The last shot to hit him did so square between the eyes, and the last that Garry saw of his brother in law was his brains splashing against the peeling wallpaper of the apartment before he fled, the dagger still safely concealed in his pocket.
Now
Garry stopped to eat in a fast food restaurant. It said a lot about his ever-dwindling frame of mind that he had no idea which chain it was—he simply ordered the first thing he saw on the lurid menu and vacantly chewed away on the resultant product without interest. It had been a long time since he had eaten food as anything other than a biological necessity. At one time, he and Carol had been quite the foodies. They had liked Japanese cuisine, or at least she had liked it and he had pretended so as not to appear a philistine. Now he could have chewed through the packaging and not noticed the difference.
What he did notice was the kid sitting on the table opposite, and that the kid had noticed him. Garry watched him watching, the kid’s meal toy that had given him five minutes of pleasure now forgotten, more fries lying on the table than in the boy’s belly. He was looking at Garry with intensity, and then down to his feet? He whispered something to his mother, a woman who was juggling two other kids and juggling them badly if the chaos was anything to go by. He tugged her pullover to make sure he had her attention and the woman finally looked over at him, apologetically at first, then with something else in her eyes. Concern? Fear?
Garry looked down at his pants. The bottom of the right leg was splattered with blood all the way up past the calf. Shit, he hadn’t even thought to check. Had been too focused on carving the bone, making sure he shaped it right, that it fit nicely in the chamber of the converted gun, that it would fire when he needed it and not just blow up in his face. He’d washed the remains of the kid off his hands and changed his shirt to one that wasn’t damp with blood, but he hadn’t even considered the pants.
He swallowed a mouthful of barely chewed burger, thought about saying something to put the woman’s mind at rest. But she was gathering up her rowdy clan, not waiting or willing to take the risk.
Garry slipped away to the men’s room, taking his pack with him. It was a small room with only a lemon fresh urinal and two cubicles. He dived into one and locked the world away with some relief. He used the water from the toilet bowl to wash out the blood. It wouldn’t be enough, the stains were too deep: so he took the pants off and screwed them into a ball tight enough to shove them behind the cistern. He changed into fresh jeans, decided to put on another top as well just to be safe. The woman had looked at him closely enough to remember his face. If he was wearing different clothes, it might confuse the issue if anyone else remembered him.
He left the cubicle, stood before the mirror that dominated the other wall and splashed cold water on his face. The door opened and another man wandered into the restroom, stood at the other basin, ran cold water over his hands, washed them with some intensity. Garry slipped a look into the mirror, had a glance at his unwelcome companion.
It was Lee Walker.
Or at least the monster that lived inside Lee Walker’s skin. The two of them shared a moment of complicated recognition as they looked at each other’s reflection. In that mirror Garry saw for the first time the thing’s real face, the face that twisted and writhed beneath the stolen skin, sending ripples across its su
rface as it tried to hide.
He reached for the gun in his jacket pocket, but the jacket was on the floor on top of his pack. If he hadn’t taken it off to change he might have been able to gun the monster down, but now the monster had time to lash out, a hooting animal sound echoing from its real throat. It caught Garry in the ribs, sent him tumbling over the pack and across the cold tile floor. The wind had been knocked from him, and before he had the chance to recover, the thing had leapt onto him, sitting astride his chest. The power of the demon that wore Lee Walker’s skin was far too strong for Garry to resist, the pressure of its hidden body pressing against him, crushing.
A hand grabbed his chin, pulled his face upward. The demon lowered its face, mouth opening wide, wider, too wide and Garry saw it moving under the skin, ready to come out and play.
Garry stretched his fingers the final agonizing inch and took hold of the jacket. As he pulled it closer with his fingertips, the demon began to crawl out of Lee Walker’s dead mouth, unfold itself from the prison of skin it was forced to walk in. This was what Carol would have seen before she died, the last thing her disbelieving eyes would have viewed before everything became red; two chitinous legs clicked down onto the tiles on either side of Garry’s head, steadying it as the savage head of the demon forced its way through Lee Walker’s mouth like some obscene parody of birth. It seemed as if the thing was comprised mainly of teeth.
All the better to eat you with…
Garry wrapped his fingers around the gun and wrenched it up to the demon’s head. The silver barrel reflected in its many black eyes and for just a moment it paused…
“This is for Carol, you son of a bitch!” he fired.
The bone bullet exploded from the gun and hit the demon in the center of what passed for its face. Its head snapped back, its grip on Garry relented.
Then the head came back up and the bone bullet was pushed out onto Garry’s chest, hot from the barrel.
The demon laughed.
“Hey man, you want to fight demons, you gotta pay the price,” it said in the Shaman’s voice. And then it set about Garry.
Use Enough Gun (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 3) Page 33