Dark Screams, Volume 9

by Dark Screams- Volume 9 (retail) (epub)

  Slowly he looked from one edge of the office to the other, his calculating eyes taking in the interior terrain. Something caught his eye—my office door, I was sure—and his brows knitted tightly over his muzzle.

  While a dread understanding of his intent settled on me—my children were behind that door—a bath of light rose behind him, making a halo of his white mane. He spun, dropped. The sound of a truck or SUV pulling into the lot was at once a relief and terrifying. I hoped that the passengers of that vehicle had seen what was waiting for them and drove the hell away.

  Of course, these were the state troopers, finally come to pick up Douglas Sykes, and they weren’t the retreating type.

  7

  The state troopers were going to die, I knew that. But their fight would buy us some time. I dashed across the room to the holding area, listened at the door but heard nothing. It was a thick, reinforced slab; so while it didn’t exactly soundproof the room beyond, it came pretty damned close. I’d been grateful for that earlier, during Sykes’s rant, but now it was frustrating. I had no idea if the cell had held Sykes or not.

  Only one way to find out.

  I swung open the door. Ed lay on his back, his body jerking on the concrete floor. He wasn’t alive. His face was torn away, his eyes gone. Sykes had dragged him close to the cell and was in the process of gnawing on Ed’s leg. Seeing me, Sykes bolted upright. His long fingers wrapped around the bars, and he yanked hard. The bars didn’t so much as creak. It would hold.

  “Les, get over to the office door.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “We’ve only got a few minutes. I want to get everyone back to the holding area.”

  “We’ll be trapped back there,” Les said.

  “Look around, Buddy. We’re trapped here. Just do it.” Les looked uncertain, but he agreed and set off toward the door of my office. “Duke. Come on back here. We need to give the state boys some cover.”

  Duke did as he was told, but when he reached me, he didn’t look happy.

  “What’s this all about?” he asked. “We’re doing good out here. At least we know what we’re dealing with now.”

  “That’s the point,” I told him. “Now that I know what we’re dealing with, I see exactly how fucked up this whole situation is. Come on, the troopers won’t last long.”

  Already the sounds of shattering glass and gunfire drifted through the open window. Duke and I approached it, guns ready. A low cry, that of a wounded man, rolled in and I trembled. I kept my eyes peeled, searching the shrubs at the side of the building, making sure one of those things didn’t leap out and toss Duke or me into the night as they’d done with Bucky. The report of gunshots sounded outside. Men screamed.

  “Jesus, Bill,” Duke whispered.

  Then I was in a position to understand his curse. Two of the beasts crawled through the shattered windshield of the state patrol cruiser. Two more flanked the vehicle and attacked through the driver and passenger windows. A bright flare of gunfire lit up the car’s interior like a strobe light, briefly sending the squirming bodies of monsters into shadowed relief. The screams of men stopped.

  I backed up and turned away from the scene. In the doorway of my office, Les was hugging his wife. The three little girls peered out around him. Dru caught sight of the dead beasts littering the floor and screamed.

  “We gotta move,” I told Duke.

  “Here’s how this is going to work,” I said once I had everyone’s attention. “Duke is going to lead you back through the holding area to the last cell. I want you all to get inside and push back into the corner away from the bars.” I knelt down, looked at Dru and Gwen and Maggie Mayflower. “Girls, once Duke opens that door over there, I want you to close your eyes and don’t open them again until you’re where you’re supposed to be. Mr. and Mrs. Mayflower will make sure you’re okay.” I didn’t want any of them to see Sykes in his beast form, and I didn’t want them to see what that thing had done to Ed.

  My daughters nodded their heads, tears streaming down their cheeks. Maggie just bobbed her head once in a nervous expression of understanding.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  I stood with my back to them, keeping an eye on the window, the door and the entrance from the corridor. They moved quickly. I was grateful for that. Gwen screamed again. Apparently she had not shut her eyes. It must have been terrible for her, but there was no other choice. If Sykes couldn’t get out of his cell, then it was likely the others couldn’t get into one.

  At least that was my hope.

  “Bill,” Les called. He stood in the doorway, clutching the door. The rest of them were in the holding area. “Come on.”

  Giving the window one last look, I hurried to the door, feeling a sense of near relief. We could defend our location back there without surprises. I entered the holding area, closed the door and secured the deadbolt with my key. At my back, Les kept his gun trained on the beast in the first cell.

  “That’s it,” I told him. “Let’s go.”

  Les turned away from the cell, nodded at me. He should have kept his eyes on Sykes.

  A muscular arm shout out between the bars and grabbed the barrel of Les’s gun, yanking hard, throwing the man off balance. Les’s foot slipped in a pool of Ed’s blood, sending him into an erratic dance as he tried to keep his footing, but his ankle caught on Ed’s arm, and he fell back, hitting the bars of Sykes’s cell hard. I lunged for him, my only thought to get him away from there. Les scrambled to get distance between himself and the cage, but it was too late. Sykes reached through the bars, grabbed Les’s shoulders, and lifted him up.

  Viv Mayflower and the girls were screaming. Duke ran from the back of the room toward us. Les was pale, dripping with sweat, his eyes as wide as a lunatic’s.

  I lifted my shotgun, but Sykes used Les’s body as a shield. His swollen, canine face peeked out over my friend’s shoulder. Duke stopped at the adjoining cell, unlocked it, slid inside to get a better bead on Sykes.

  Before he could get a shot off, Sykes wrapped his hands around Les’s face, one gripping his brow and cheeks, the other low on his mouth and jaw. He yanked with all of his force, tearing away Les’s jaw and snapping his neck. Les stared at me, eyes cloudy, not yet dead. A tear ran down his cheek, traced over his upper lip, and then dripped to his chest. He no longer had a chin to impede its progress. Then Sykes released him and Les fell to the floor like a sack of flour.

  I fired wildly into Sykes’s cell, as did Duke. The beast bounded, leapt, hitting the wall with his feet and hands only to spring across the cell, land on the cot and roll away. Back on his feet, he jumped nearly to the ceiling, spun and kicked out, launching himself from the cell wall across the chamber. We must have fired a dozen rounds into that cell, a confined space and at close range, and neither one of us managed to seriously wound the son of a bitch.

  As a man, Sykes had wanted me to put a bullet in his head. The beast of him was desperate to survive.

  A thunder rolled up in the holding area as strong fists landed on the door. The pack slammed at its surface with so much force it felt as if the building was shaking around us. Already, the hinges were creaking, working loose from the jamb.

  “Bill,” Duke shouted, “there’s nothing else we can do.”

  But he was wrong. There was something I could do.

  With all of my strength, I dragged Les’s remains away from the bars. Gently, I placed him against the wall. Though I didn’t know I was crying, one of my tears fell on his chest to stain his shirt. I touched his brow. A second tear fell. With less care, I yanked at Ed’s leg, freed his foot from the bars and slid him across the corridor to join Les.

  “Bill!” Duke insisted.

  “Get back there with the others. I’m not done with this fucker yet.”

  Seething and barely able to think straight, I walked up to the bars. The beast crouched on the cot, panting, tongue lolling. I slid my key into the lock of Sykes’s cell and turned it. Then I pulled the door o
pen a crack and ran faster than I ever had in my life.

  Sykes launched himself, slamming into the metal bars, sending them crashing back against the cell. In the corridor behind me, I heard his throaty growl, but I didn’t turn back. I sprinted toward Duke, who stood, eyes wide with shock, holding open the last door for me.

  I dove into the cell like a Yankee needing home plate, slid across the concrete into the pile of people in the corner. Behind me, Duke slammed the cell door and leaped back.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he bellowed.

  Behind him, Sykes reached through the bars, swatting the air, reaching for whatever he could get his hands on, but soon enough, his attention was drawn to the clatter at the other end of the room. His hunters were nearly through the door.

  Gwen and Dru wrapped their arms around me, buried their faces in my shoulders. Sykes grabbed the door and yanked, throwing all of his weight into it, but the steel didn’t budge. Panicked, he turned away, ran halfway down the hall toward the door, then back. At the wall, in front of our cell, he fell to his knees and started beating on the floor. His force was so intense that he split his hands, leaving smudges of blood on the concrete. He scrabbled at the place with his nails. Pushed his head down and tried to gnaw his way into the floor. He was trying to dig his way out.

  The door to the holding area came down and the pack filled the opening. The alpha entered first, his head high and regal. He looked down at the two bodies against the wall, checked the open cell on his left. Once he was certain of his surroundings, he set his attention on Sykes. They looked at each other for several moments, both loathing the image filling their eyes. The alpha moved first. He ran forward with such speed, I could barely track him. Sykes left behind his foolish escape plan. He crouched and then launched himself from the floor. He met the alpha in midair. They collided and dropped to the concrete, the alpha landing hard on Sykes’s chest. Clawed hands swatted the air. The alpha slashed and punched, while Sykes tried to protect himself from the blows. But the alpha had the superior position, slashing wounds in Sykes’s shoulders and neck, landing fists on his brow and cheek and throat. With a garbled cry, Sykes’s arms fell limp to the concrete floor.

  The alpha leapt from the battered body. Sykes whimpered, and the pack was on him in a second.

  I pushed my daughters’ faces deeper into my shoulders so they wouldn’t see what was to come. Even for a monster, the death was grisly.

  The pack gnawed through Sykes’s limbs, taking bits and pieces in their mouths, spitting them on the floor as if disgusted with the taste of him. Once his legs were gone below the knee and his arms snapped and shredded at the shoulder, Sykes’s could do nothing but rock back and forth on the floor, bellowing his pain. The smallest of the beasts, the Asian child, I thought, crept forward on hands and knees, slid between Sykes’s flailing leg stumps and bit down hard, enclosing his genitalia with teeth and ripping the flesh free with a single jerk of its head. The alpha shifted his position and drove his fingers into Sykes belly, ripping it open with a flick of his wrist. Then, this striking male was done with the source of his torment. He stood upright, chest out, looking down on the remains of his pack as they finished with Sykes.

  Duke rose up with his shotgun, but I told him to wait. If destroying Sykes did not satisfy the pack, we could take up the fight. For now, they were distracted, their rage focused elsewhere. I saw no need to bring it back down on us.

  They scratched and chewed at the torso, reducing the body to bone and mush. Heavy hands turned organs to pulp and muscle to shreds of dripping meat. The pack continued until nothing about Sykes was remotely identifiable, and still they worked the refuse of him. It was as if they expected to find a prize in the tissue, in the blood. But what they sought eluded them.

  I understood, or thought I did.

  They believed his destruction would free them from the nightmares, the violence, the uncontrollable transformations that pushed their humanity into subservience. It didn’t happen. No miracle accompanied Sykes’s murder. They entered this place, creatures torn between logic and compulsion. They would leave similarly afflicted, only with more faces to add to their scrapbooks of guilt.

  The alpha turned to me, his muzzled face wrinkling with hate, his teeth bared in a feral display of rage.

  The realization was upon him. His life was not changed, would never change. The bit of humanity trapped within the beast felt the disappointment, the crushing hopelessness. The beast only felt the pain. He roared at the ceiling. The sound could not be called a howl. It was too thick. Too garbled and tremulous. Too human.

  —

  The stench of Sykes’s death—his mangled and opened bowels, his shredded bladder, pooling blood—rose thick in the holding area. Behind me, Viv Mayflower and her daughter sobbed over Les’s murder. My daughters trembled, their breath hitching and panting, as if they’d recently completed a long run. Duke towered over us, his shotgun ready at his side.

  In the corridor on the other side of the bars, the alpha turned to face us, his miserable voice now silent but his chest heaving with fury. Those eyes. His calculating eyes moved back and forth with slow regard, his gaze creeping over each of us. Pausing. Moving on to the next. I eased out of my daughters’ grasp, sent them back to join Viv and Maggie. I lifted my own shotgun from the floor and stood up, shoulder to shoulder with Duke.

  “He comin’ in here?” Duke asked.

  “No,” I said. “He may try, but he is not coming in here.”

  The rest of the pack gathered over the remains of Douglas Sykes, muzzles and teeth and fingers dripping with his fluids and adorned with shreds of his meat. They were looking to the alpha, who was still looking at us. He gazed at Duke, then at me. Paused, staring deep into my eyes, seeing what I couldn’t imagine. Fear? Anger? Some odd and muted sense of pity? He shifted his gaze away to look at the woman and girls behind me.

  Then the large and striking male with the shock of white hair lowered his head, and he stepped back. With a flick of his head, the rest of the pack retreated through the bent and broken door.

  He followed a moment later.

  “Shit,” Duke said, his shoulders drooping. His whole body seemed to shrink, and the nose of his shotgun touched the concrete floor. He lurched forward, craning his neck to peer along the corridor into the office beyond.

  “Get away from the bars,” I told him.

  He thought about it for a second, then returned to my side.

  “You think they’re coming back?”

  “No,” I said. I figured they got what they came for, and a good deal more. They’d achieved no release from the murder of Sykes; there was nothing else for them here except maybe a skull full of buckshot. That’s the way I figured it. “But I’ve been wrong a lot today. Let’s not take a chance that I’m wrong again.”

  So Duke and I crouched down. I sat my butt on the floor, and my girls were on me a moment later.

  “I wanna go home,” Dru cried in my ear.

  Gwen just held me tightly; her tiny arm a tight collar on my neck.

  And we remained that way, close and scared, until morning came.

  8

  I was startled out of an uneasy sleep by my daughter. Dru stood over me, poking at my shoulder with her tiny index finger.

  “I have to go potty,” she whispered, looking around in embarrassment, her cheeks flushed red.

  My eyes were gummy, so I blinked away the blurred edges. Daylight poured into the holding area through the glazed glass and the broken pane in the first cell where Sykes had spent his last night.

  “Okay, honey,” I said.

  I was still on edge, not quite ready to believe that sunlight necessarily meant safety. After all, there was no real reason to believe in any aspects of the legends I’d heard about growing up. No full moon. No crouched and hairy bodies. No silver weapons. Who could say if night meant any more to these creatures than rain or snow.

  Duke grumbled when I tried to wake him, then he shot upright, slapping
around on the floor for his shotgun. He saw that it was my hand shaking him and relaxed, wiping his eyes and letting loose a sustained groan.

  “I’m clocking overtime,” he mumbled. He got to his feet and scrubbed at his scalp with his fingers. Stretched, looked around.

  In the back corner, Viv Mayflower was awake, staring with glassy eyes at us. Her daughter, Maggie, was asleep, using Viv’s ample left breast as a pillow. Gwen was also asleep, curled up in a tight ball on the floor.

  “Are we heading out?” Duke asked.

  “Yeah, soon. Look, I’m going to check up front, make sure things are clear. When I give the word, I want you to carry Dru on back to the restroom. She needs to use the facilities.”

  “Daddy,” Dru gasped, her cheeks blazing red.

  “Sorry, honey,” I said with a smile. I was relieved that she could be embarrassed, something so simple, after the night she had endured. “Duke, I want you to lock the cell door behind you. I don’t want those kids waking up and wandering through that mess in the hall.”

  “Got it,” Duke said with a nod.

  I unlocked the cell door, muscles tensed. In the corridor, I looked down at the ruins of Douglas Sykes, bits of white and pink showing through a sludge of red and black and brown. My stomach turned, but I kept walking, keeping close to the bars to avoid the bulk of the gore. When I reached the first cell, I closed the door. Out of reflex I looked over at the far wall at the remains of Les Mayflower, mostly hidden by Ed’s body. Something cold dropped from my throat into my stomach and I stood taller, cocked the shotgun and walked into the office.

  The body of an old woman with sagging skin was sprawled across a desk; a young woman, possibly Hispanic, perhaps Native American and missing an arm, lay on the floor in the corner. Both were motionless. I stepped through the low swinging door that separated the office from the reception area. Two more bodies. Both men. Both naked. Their faces and the backs of their heads blown away.