by Hults, Matt
A tall American Indian man with the muscled arms of a comic book superhero stood behind the counter. He’d been tallying the purchases of another female customer prior to Penelope’s entrance and now froze in mid-acceptance of a twenty dollar bill. Both he and the woman stared at her with tense expressions, and Penelope tried to imagine what they were seeing: a sweaty girl with dirt-scuffed clothes and purple hair, shouting with each breath.
“Who’s chasing you?” the clerk asked. He handed the customer her change, allowing her to leave.
The woman made a quick exit, and Penelope pointed past her to where the van had pulled to a stop outside the parking lot’s entry. Its headlights went dark.
“That man’s trying to kill me,” she said. “He’s been following me for over an hour, and he just rammed my car off the road.”
Three other people perused the aisles of merchandise: another employee stocking shelves, and two middle-aged men looking at fishing poles. Each regarded her with expressions of uncertain curiosity.
“Damn, are you okay?” the clerk asked. He wore a dark blue, short-sleeve shirt with a red stripe down the left side and the name “Bird” embroidered in white over the right breast pocket.
“I’m fine,” Penelope cried. “Just get the cops here to arrest that asshole!”
Bird picked up a phone from beneath the counter and set it beside the register. He glanced from her to the doors. “Do you know who he is?”
“Not a clue,” Penelope replied. “He’s wearing some kind of mask.”
Bird faced the massive front windows as he dialed. “Well, he’s watching us, whoever he is. Hopefully the sheriff will get here quick enough to catch the guy.”
Penelope thanked him in a confident tone but had to hug herself to keep from shaking. Taking deep breaths, she leaned against the glass countertop and tried to relax. In the display case directly below, her reflection stared back in the polished blades of a dozen enormous hunting knives.
She straightened up.
Bird put the phone to his ear and a concerned look crossed his face. Placing the handset back in its cradle, he faced the cold storage lockers along the back wall of the store and called to the other employee. “Hey, Jason, come watch the register a sec.”
The lanky, red-haired kid trotted over. “What’s up?”
“The phone’s dead,” Bird told him.
Penelope faced him.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got a cell phone,” he assured her. “Regular lines have been up and down half a dozen times since Friday night’s thunderstorm.” He briefed Jason on the situation and told the kid to keep watch on the van. “Use the binoculars; see if you can get a license plate number. Oh, and log the counter time on the surveillance cameras,” he added, pointing to a set of security monitors. “The Sheriff will want to look at the tape. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He turned and strode toward the back corner of the store. Penelope glanced from Bird to Jason and back, then hurried after the towering tribesman. She crossed between aisles of camping equipment, following him into a small office. She reached him in time to see the man searching through a gym bag alongside the manager’s desk.
“Thanks again for all your help,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”
He nodded. “Glad to do it.”
She wanted to sit tight, believe everything was going to be okay, but one question still undermined her resolve. “What if he comes after me?” she asked.
Bird eyed her, still hunting for the phone. “Not to worry,” he replied. “We’d see him on those.” He gestured to what looked like several portable TVs immediately to her left.
Stepping farther inside the office, she spotted four monitors similar to the pair out by the registers. Along with the two cameras keeping watch on the interior of the store and the fueling area outside, an additional pair provided wide shots of the property. She spotted the van in the upper right corner of the third screen.
“So what if we do see him coming?” she prodded. “What if he comes into the store?”
The large man smiled. He leaned across the desk and produced a short-barrel revolver from one of the drawers. “One problem. Six solutions.”
She tried to emulate his level of confidence but only managed a strained grin.
He found his cell phone and flipped it open. “I doubt it’ll come to that,” he reassured her, dialing the sheriff’s office. “He hasn’t even gotten out of the—”
He trailed off in mid-sentence, staring at the phone.
“What about the phone lines, though?” she asked, again turning to the security monitors. “What if they’re not down because of the storm? What if he cut them? That would mean he’s already out there?”
Before Bird could answer, the black and white images on the screens dissolved into static. One by one, they all went out.
Penelope spun, mouth open, but stopped short at the look on Bird’s face.
She froze. “What? What’s wrong?”
“Jason is dead,” he whispered, still staring at the cell phone. “That’s what the display on my phone says: Jason is dead.”
The lights went out. Everything went black.
The windowless office became a cocoon of darkness.
“What the hell?” one of the men asked from the main room.
Glass shattered at the front of the store, chased by a piercing scream that choked off abruptly.
“Crap,” another man shouted, his profanity punctuated by the noise of several fishing poles crashing to the floor.
Penelope’s hands swept the wall beside her, searching for the way out. Bird edged past her in the dark and shoved through the door. His massive silhouette charged toward the counter, and she raced to catch up to him.
Battery-powered flood lamps mounted in the back corners of the room provided some relief from the darkness, but their orange light also helped to enhance the shadows between the aisles and those gathered in the checkout area.
“Hey, what’s going on?” one of the men in the fishing section demanded. “What the hell was that noise? I’m blind as a bat’s ass over here.”
The two men had been separated from the rest of the store behind tall racks of fishing poles and nets. Now, in the blackout, she couldn’t see them at all.
Penelope hurried onward. She caught up to Bird, finding him backed against a pyramid of stacked windshield washer bottles directly across from the registers.
“We shouldn’t go out the front,” she started to say, but fell silent when she saw his eyes had gone wide and his mouth had dropped open.
Penelope turned, afraid the man had reacted to someone who’d approached from behind her, but saw no one at the empty checkout island or near—
The display case.
The glass lay shattered across the floor, the metallic framing blasted out of shape.
All the knives were missing.
Then she noticed the blood. It sprinkled out of the darkness like some hellish rain, splattering the floor in the center of the clerks’ work area. Shivering with fear, acting out of instinct rather than on command, Penelope looked up, tracing the liquid path back to its origin. She found Jason’s gutted body stuck to the ceiling, pinned in place with the stolen knives. The corpse remained half-hidden from view by overhead storage racks of cigarettes and lottery tickets, but she saw enough of him to know that his belly had been slit open and emptied.
Penelope opened her mouth to scream but the sound failed to come.
“Would one of you answer us,” a customer shouted.
She faced the voice to see the two men standing in the light at the end of one of the aisles, followed by the silhouette of a third man dressed in a fisherman’s vest, waders, and fatigue hat. He stepped into view behind the two customers, walking out of a display of set-up camping equipment. Lost in shadow, the person’s face hid within an ovoid patch of darkness.
But there was no one else in the store. Which means—
“Look out,” Bird shouted, voicing th
e words already screaming in Penelope’s mind.
The men stopped, unaware that the figure had just lifted a double-bladed ax from a wall-mounted hanger.
“Run,” Bird hollered at the men. He lunged in front of Penelope and opened fire with the handgun. Dark chunks exploded off the assailant’s upper body, but the wounds didn’t stop him. He raised the ax over his head.
The tool came down on the skull of the closest man—
Thwack!
—spraying gore, driving him to the floor.
The second man threw himself away from the gunfire, ducking behind a display barrel of foil-wrapped Glow Sticks. Bird ejected the spent cartridges and the man scrambled to find better shelter. Trapped between Bird and the ax-wielding maniac, he clambered up the six-foot-high steel shelves dividing his aisle and the next. The sheet metal bent under his weight, spilling an avalanche of merchandise, but didn’t slow his ascent.
He reached the top when the first tent stake hit him.
They came out of nowhere. A dozen of them.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
One after the other they plunged into his back like arrows fired from the shadows. Three more caught him in the head, casting him off the shelves and over the other side.
Bird cursed, thumbing fresh rounds into the revolver.
Penelope stood paralyzed by the sight. The shape at the end of the aisle advance toward her, moving with purpose. Bird grabbed her arm and hauled her after him.
“Come on!” He pulled her through the main doors, into the humid summer night. “My truck’s on the side of the building,” he said, locking the handgun’s cylinder in place. “It’s the blue one. The doors are—”
He fell to his knees with a shout, taking Penelope down with him. Three medium size knives jutted from his hip and side.
“Oh, shit, no,” she shrieked, trying to help him up.
She wrapped her arms around his midsection, struggling to lift his bulk. He gained one leg. Then the other. And five more knives jabbed into his shoulder and back, causing him to howl in pain. He collapsed.
Penelope pulled at his shirt, tears streaming down her face. “Get up.”
She looked to the store. The figure emerged from the doorway.
“Get up, Bird. Get up. He’s coming!”
The man had fallen silent, but his grip tightened on her arm. Pulling himself to a half-kneeling position, he pressed the handgun and truck keys into her hands. “Go. Hurry … Go.”
The words were still fresh from his lips when two more blades sunk into his flesh, entering his neck and the side of his head. His heavy body went slack and slipped out of her grasp.
Penelope staggered backwards, her gaze locked on the dead Indian. Five minutes ago he’d been an average guy doing his job. Now he was gone. She’d only known him by part of his name, but he’d helped her. Hell, he’d saved her life a moment ago. He didn’t deserve it, she thought. None of them deserved it.
Screaming, tears spilling down her face, Penelope pivoted away from Bird’s lifeless body.
She raised the revolver and opened fire on his killer.
Each shot jarred her arms to the bone. The recoil threatened to send the gun flying from her grasp, but she tensed her muscles and forced herself to hold the weapon level. At such close range—less than twenty feet away—the bullets pierced the killer’s body and punched into the walls of the building behind him.
Then, in a horrifying moment of heightened perception, she saw several sparks leap off a metallic cage of propane tanks near—
The building exploded.
CHAPTER 6
Melissa could smell the bodies all the way from the roadside, thirty yards from the house. Even here in the country, surrounded by sprawling green fields of soybeans and corn, the vast open space and gentle morning breeze did nothing to dilute the stench in the air.
She turned off the county road and onto the property’s dirt driveway, pulling to a stop behind the two Corcoran squad cars already on the scene.
She got out of the car and found herself in the shadow of a tank-like man who identified himself as Officer Davis. Melissa put the man at six-foot-four from the soles of his shoes to the top of his crew cut blonde hair. Despite his formidable size, a sickly pallor dominated his facial complexion. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead.
“I’m Detective Humble,” she said. “Hennepin County Homicide.”
After floundering for a response, Davis merely nodded.
“First body?” Melissa asked, giving the man time to recover.
“Yes, Ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“What can you tell me so far?”
“There’re, ah, two victims,” Davis said, leading her toward the farmhouse. “Mel and Florence Patterson, ages sixty-five and sixty-two. We found their IDs inside. One of’em’s in the house, the other’s in the garage.”
“Who found them?”
“Xcel Energy employee,” Davis answered. He pointed past the squad cars, to a white pickup truck with the power company’s logo on the door. “Guy’s name is Kevin Porter. He was doing scheduled maintenance both here in Corcoran and down the road in Loretto. He said he’d finished checking the transformer back near the road when he noticed the service pole feeding the house was down. He didn’t have a report on it, so he figured the people who owned the place were out of town and didn’t know their power was out. When he came up the driveway to have a better look at the damage, that’s when he saw the garage.”
The officer gestured to the large detached garage. The white aluminum door buckled outward at the center, as if someone had tried to drive out without raising it.
“That’s nothing compared to what’s inside,” Davis added in a whisper.
They approached the two-story home and ascended the front steps into the cooler shadows under the covered porch. Davis led her around the building’s front half, passing a cedar log bench swing and decorative bouquets made of dried cornstalks and sunflowers. He stopped at a side entrance to point out the first signs of destruction amidst the pristine yellow paintjob on the walls and the white trim of the doorway. Melissa crouched down to examine the splinters of wood that jutted from the doorjamb and strike plate like a vertical row of needle-sharp teeth.
She looked at the officer. “This door was kicked out.”
“From the inside,” Davis agreed.
He opened the door for Melissa and the smell of decay intensified to an almost unbearable level. Davis took a step back.
“It’s bad,” he warned her.
She glanced at him, knowing her small frame and youthful appearance often made other officers—male officers—feel inclined to treat her like a rookie on the first day of the job. But when she noted the unfeigned look of repulsion on his face, she strode inside without comment.
The door opened onto a true farmhouse kitchen, one that boasted two big ovens and a gas range that looked large enough to serve in any major restaurant. Copper pots and iron pans hung in neat order on ceiling racks over a central cooking island, and the dinner table looked like a marvelous solid oak work of art from a previous century.
Beyond those items the pleasantries stopped.
At the far end of the kitchen, between the counter and the ovens, Mrs. Patterson’s corpse hung on the wall like one of the knickknacks on the porch.
Melissa stopped in her tracks, gazing in disbelief.
The woman’s corpse had been nailed in place with every cooking utensil imaginable, pinning her back to the wall, arms outstretched. Knives, forks, tongs, skewers, corkscrews—even wooden cooking spoons pierced the body; their straight handles had been thrust into the eye sockets. The air hummed with flies.
“You ever seen anything so horrible?” the officer asked, now staring out the window rather than look at the deceased.
“Not like this, no.”
“We got us a real problem here, don’t we?”
Melissa didn’t answer. Instead, she moved closer to the body.
“Decomp has to
be three or four days old,” she said, swatting at flies that darted for her face. She knew the coroner’s examination would determine if anything had happened to Mrs. Patterson prior to being stapled to the wall, but it seemed likely the bizarre crucifixion would prove to be a posthumous act, done as a deranged display by the killer. Then again, she knew anyone capable of taking a life was also capable of unthinkable cruelty.
Suddenly, something caught her eye, a mark half-hidden behind the hair drooping over the dead woman’s face. Melissa pulled a pen from her pocket and pushed the strands aside.
“Oh, shit,” she thought aloud.
Her comment jolted Officer Davis from his thoughts, and he turned his back on the blooming countryside out the window. “What is it, Ma’am?”
She stepped back to allow him a view of several incisions on the woman’s forehead. Maggots squirmed under the skin, but she knew it was the marking itself that caused the cop’s expression to pale in awe.
Melissa now knew that this would be an even stranger case than it already seemed. She’d found two overlapping twin Ks, the horrifying signature of serial kidnapper and mass-murderer Kale Kane. She knew the mark well. The maniac’s freakish signature that had become synonymous throughout the state—maybe even the country by now—with fear, malevolence, lunacy, and death.
“Oh, Jesus,” Davis whispered. “We got a copycat.”
Melissa looked out the kitchen door at the sound of approaching vehicles. The coroner van and the crime scene investigators had arrived.
“We don’t know it’s a copycat,” she warned.
“How many will this one kill?” he whispered, still staring at the corpse.
Melissa ignored the officer’s comment and edged past him, exiting the kitchen to go meet the forensics team leader. Outside, the rising sun’s heat did little to dissuade the shiver that ran through her.
CHAPTER 7
Dad, do we have to do this?” Mallory asked.
She looked at the gathering of strangers in the parking lot of Loretto’s Church of Saints Peter and Paul. “We don’t know anyone here, and people keep looking at us. I feel like an oddball or something. Besides, this is a Catholic church, and we’re not even Catholics.”