“You win!” The tremor that I put in my voice wasn’t at all feigned, and as I wrapped my fingers around Dana’s, I fought to keep my vision clear. If this was going to work, I was only going to get one shot at it. If I screwed up, I wouldn’t be around to know that it had failed, so at least there was a silver lining. My sword fell to the vinyl floor of the bus with a clatter.
I’d worried that Ena wouldn’t keep her word, but her sales background ensured that her word was worth something. I was pretty sure that if there was any room for her to wiggle, she would, but a straight offer was sacrosanct in her eyes, and with a wave of her hand, the bus came to a stop.
“Go where we planned. I’ll meet you there.” I looked at my wife and tried to drink in her face and essence. This was at least the third time in the last week that I’d parted from her with a reasonable expectation that we might not meet again, but apparently practice didn’t make perfect because each time was harder than the one before. While a creature from dark myth and its twisted mistress looked on, our lips brushed for a moment, and I tasted the salt of her tears. Or maybe they were mine.
“Good luck, and I love you.” Dana’s parting shot wasn’t eloquent, but big ideas don’t require big words. She stepped into the storm and disappeared from view almost immediately. I turned to face my enemies. The insane woman at the back of the bus waved her hand again, and the five remaining victims rose to their feet obediently as the bus started to move. They plodded mechanically toward me. I smiled. Ena frowned.
The Uxbridge Road runs for just a shade under thirteen miles, passing through some of the most diverse parts of London, from the shopping hub and 1912 Olympics venue at White City through the leafy suburbs of Ealing and then cutting through multicultural Southall, industrial Hayes, and finally all the way out to the terminus of the Piccadilly line at Uxbridge. However, the feature that I was most interested in was in Hanwell, at Saint Bernard’s hospital in particular.
If people have heard of Saint Bernard’s Hospital at all, then usually it’s in connection with Hanwell Asylum, the first purpose-built insane asylum in the country and at one time the largest in the world, on whose grounds Saint Bernard’s is situated and from which the modern facility evolved. However, researchers in a specific subject, as well as local residents, will also be aware of the hospital’s ownership of the Corsellis collection. The Corsellis collection is an enormous assemblage of brains, housing over six thousand specimens. But these aren’t just any brains—in large part, they are from the mad, the damaged, and the diseased. It was this combination of the asylum and the collection that had inspired my plan, and with the storm raging, it was clear, obvious even, how I would put it in motion.
“Hey, Ena—have you ever seen Frankenstein?” I shuffled a few steps backward to put space between me and the oncoming thralls. Ena’s forehead crinkled with confusion. “What about Night of the Living Dead?” I continued. I didn’t wait for her to respond. Instead, I fixed my eyes on Kelly and remembered.
I remembered Don’s manic need to save himself, I recalled Phil’s loss of self and life, I pictured the brave staff at Saint Mary’s going back for their injured colleague and perishing, I saw the anonymous victim in the puca’s nightmare realm who had died to give me this chance to triumph, and finally I thought of the woman on the bus extinguished in front of me moments ago. As each one flashed past my mind’s eye in rapid succession, my pulse quickened and shoulders hunched, making my whole body shake with barely suppressed rage.
With an effort of will, I managed to stay still as multiple pairs of hands wrapped around my upper arms, hoisting me off the ground and bringing me toward the nightmare creature that intended to make me its new meat puppet.
Twice before when I’d been in desperate need, I had unleashed devastating blasts of mystical energy from my willpower and emotion, instead of basing them on a memory like I’d been doing since I was five years old. When I’d blasted Tara to bloody shreds and left the puca a smoking ruin, I’d been amazed that it had worked and even more impressed with the effect.
Those attacks formed of raw willpower and emotion had drained me completely. Nothing I had done before had more than scratched the puca, yet those attacks had been so effective that it was like the difference between wielding a sword instead of a sword’s shadow. Now, I was going to try something even harder.
The puca leaned over me, Kelly’s body pulsing and throbbing disgustingly as the thing inside of it prepared to exit. I almost choked on the sickly-sweet scent of decay wafting from the creature. Ena leaned close, her pert nose and full lips seeming incongruous on a face that displayed an expression of pure hunger.
“Any more cryptic last words, smart-ass?” she said, running a red tongue over white teeth. I don’t think she was expecting anything other than pants-shitting terror or black despair from me.
As Kelly’s jaw dislocated with a sickening crack, I looked Ena directly in the eye and shouted, “It’s alive!” releasing a measure of the anger inside of me while simultaneously picturing the classic scene from Frankenstein where the monster is brought to life. I gasped and my ribs heaved as a pulse of green light erupted from my chest and shot into the air.
I grew up in the United States tornado alley, so I know thunderstorms. Nevertheless, even I was impressed by the size of the bolt that tore the sky at that moment. Just as I had hoped and just as I had planned, the jagged coruscation of electricity crashed directly into Saint Bernard’s Hospital. The puca froze, and then its head jerked around like a hound that had just caught scent of its prey. Ena waved her hands in the air to no effect and then started pointing directly at me.
“What the hell are you doing, you stupid damned freak?” Ena’s voice was shrill as she addressed the being that had been dancing to her tune for so long. It didn’t take any notice of her but instead took a shuddering step toward the doors. The bus slowed to a stop. “What did you do?” she demanded, continuing to point at me. I just smiled a shit-eating grin that stretched my face so wide that the muscles hurt. She grabbed Kelly’s arm and tried to physically manhandle the creature into position.
I’d held on to part of my anger, and I added the wild, triumphant joy that I felt at seeing my plan working. But I knew I had to work fast; at the back of my mind, I could already feel exhaustion starting to nibble at the edges of my concentration. I opened my mouth and bellowed a single word until I was hoarse, forcing Ena to clap her hands to her ears.
“Brains!” There have been hundreds of zombie movies put out over the last fifteen years with that single cry threading through them like a hymn to the gods of pop culture. With the puca literally animating a corpse and that much of the collective unconscious of the city to tap into, the effect was impressive and instantaneous. The hands that had been wrapped around me went suddenly slack and, anticipating the reaction, I used that momentary lapse to twist, slipping out of my trench coat and escaping. I rolled backward and grabbed my discarded gladius.
The puca didn’t go slack but instead bounded forward, smashing through the door of the bus in an explosion of safety glass and tearing metal that was so loud it rivaled the still-rolling thunder of my lightning strike. I knew where it was going, and I only hoped that my threat earlier in the day had been heeded, and thus the hospital would be well guarded with the patients secured.
“ You!” Ena’s throat-tearingly furious scream made me snap my head back around to her. Hands shaking and teeth bared, she pulled a pistol out of her pocket, and I vaguely wondered where everyone kept getting weapons in gun-free England. The tiredness that had been nibbling at me a few moments ago started taking gulping chunks out of my concentration, and I had to blink furiously to focus on the gun-wielding woman stalking toward me. I briefly regretted losing my trench coat, but I was sure that even with it, I wouldn’t have had the mental faculties left to stop a bullet—if that was even possible in the real world.
My knees felt weak, and I could feel my mind shutting down as Ena tried to push past the limply
standing slaves-to-the-puca’s-will, who had been my captors just a few moments before. She shouldered past the first couple, raising her pistol and sighting down it as she side-stepped to get a clear shot. My vision came back into focus just as one of the thralls grabbed her shoulder in one meaty hand, spinning Ena into the side of the bus with a clang. The pistol barked, jolting me back into temporary alertness with a noise that made me press my hands to my ears as the pressure wave rocked the interior of the enclosed space.
Luckily for me, that was the only pain that the weapon caused, because the bullet went wide, blowing a small hole in the floor. Ena turned with a snarl on the thing that held on to her, a Caucasian or light-skinned Turkish man in his thirties who had at least six inches and a hundred pounds on the redhead. “Let go of me, you witless peasant, and grab him!” she commanded, wrenching at her arm and already dismissing him to take aim at me again. Thus, she didn’t see the placid, unthinking expression on the man’s face disappear, replaced with a look of hatred, rage, and above all—hunger.
She jerked the trigger again, but I rolled aside and plastic shrapnel pelted me as her shot gouged another smoking crater in the floor. My roll probably wouldn’t have been necessary, though, because the man’s other arm pistoned out, wrapping around Ena’s waist and driving her toward the ground. Her cry of frustration as she thumped into the floor was like a dinner bell, and the other five black-eyed victims of her avarice snapped into motion, their heads whipping around to stare for an instant before they piled on top of her, grabbing any bit that wasn’t already in something else’s grip. The scream changed from one of frustration to one of pain as the first man’s teeth sank into pale, lovely flesh.
I levered myself up, back burning and ribs sending daggers of pain. I cleared my throat and spit out a thick gobbet of blood. That seemed…bad, as did the continuing trouble I was having focusing my eyes. There was a thump next to me, and I started as the fat woman who had been driving tried in vain to hammer her way through the plexiglass of the driver’s compartment to reach me. Luckily, it seemed that when my efforts to fire its hunger had disrupted its bond to Ena, the creature’s ability to reason had faltered, so the puca’s slave couldn’t figure out how to turn the handle.
I reached up and twisted the emergency handle to open the doors, and as I entered into the storm-swept blackness, the screams emanating from the pile of bodies on the floor abruptly cut off.
CHAPTER 50 2145–2200, Thursday, August 6, 2015
***Julian***
I expected to be drenched again as soon as I got out of the bus, but instead it appeared that the heavens-shattering bolt of lightning had taken as much out of the storm as it had taken out of me, so what hit me wasn’t much more than a light spray and a gentle wind. Far to the west, the clouds were breaking up, and a swath of gloaming still lingered in the sky. It was only a bit after nine thirty.
I blearily hoped that the wild cannibals (not going to use the Z-word) in the bus couldn’t find their way out, but the streets still seemed deserted in any case. In the distance, I could hear sirens and used their sound as much as anything to guide me back toward the hospital. We’d traveled only around three hundred yards down the road after dropping off Dana, but what should have been an easy journey slowed to a crawl as I fought superlative amounts of weariness while stumbling down the road half awake.
My plan required me to get back to the hospital now and attack the puca while it was distracted and vulnerable. Everything had been going so well. I had expected the tiredness and planned for it. I just had to…I had to…I had to…sit down. The last thought that I had before the bill for violating Newton’s laws came due was to wonder who was setting off firecrackers so long after the Fourth of July.
***
An explosion of pain in my chest, like someone had filled my veins with acid, jolted me into consciousness, and I was up and on my feet before I even knew where I was. A hand grabbed my arm, and I reflexively lashed out, feeling my open palm clumsily connect with the top of someone’s head. There was a gasp and a sob. I knew that voice…everything snapped back into focus as my heart hammered at a million miles an hour.
I hurried over to Dana, who was on her knees on the sidewalk, clutching a scary-big adrenaline needle in her shaking hand. “Christ—I’m sorry. I thought you were…I don’t know what I thought you were. I’m sorry, Dana, I’m so sorry,” I said, my voice trembling along with the rest of my body. She shook her head and waved my words away as I helped her to her feet.
“Don’t apologize to me. Take this.” She handed me my gladius, which I hadn’t even realized was missing. “And get to the hospital. There were a bunch of gunshots a few minutes ago, but they’ve stopped now. If you still think you can do something, then you need to go now.” There was a sudden flare of pain on my back as the growths there writhed and dug in, and my knees wobbled badly. That couldn’t be good.
“I need to go. Thank you. Go somewhere safe now,” I said.
She gave me the look that statement deserved and shook her head. “I’ve just taken two twelve-hour flights, been shot at, saved your stupid ass twice, and spent the last ten minutes digging through a garbage can for an adrenaline needle that I then had to shove in your chest. I’m not leaving you now.” I really didn’t deserve this woman.
“Okay, come on,” I said, capitulating a bit too easily and squeezing her hand tight, like one of those machine at carnivals that measures how hard you can grip something. With the drug singing through my veins, I didn’t even notice the pain of my many wounds, which had verged on debilitating before, but I could still feel the mental exhaustion hovering on the periphery of my awareness like a vulture watching a man take his last drink of water and knowing that it’s only a matter of time before its prey will go down. I ran.
The sirens that I had heard hadn’t been purely from ambulances, and as the hospital came into view, I spotted two police cruisers and a high-sided police van parked in front of its entrance with their lights flashing. And blood. Even from twenty-five yards away, I saw the red fluid splattered on the building’s glass double doors, and my heart sank. I had hoped that the police would have put their efforts into securing patients, not on active resistance. I’d have to weep for them later, though.
I didn’t slow down as I hurdled over the first of half a dozen bodies, but then I noticed that the creature hadn’t bothered to do anything with the officer’s dropped weapons, so I took the time to search for something appropriate. I heard Dana retching behind me and remembered that not everyone had spent their sleeping hours for the last twenty-five years dealing with the worst carnage that mankind could imagine.
In the end, it cost me about thirty seconds to search, but in exchange for the delay, my wife and I were well armed. I had a Remington 870 shotgun, and Dana had picked up a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun. We’d also each grabbed nine-millimeter model 1911 pistols in some generic make. We’d considered going for the fallen officers’ Met vests too but didn’t want any more delay than necessary.
We were just about to go into the building when someone behind me rasped, “Help me…” We turned and both realized that, presumably in its haste to reach its goal, the puca had left one of the officers alive. I almost kept going, regretting every second that elapsed with the creature rampaging through the hospital. A stern look from my wife helped me choose differently.
The man’s arm was bent at an awkward angle, and it looked like a good chunk of his shoulder had simply been torn away. I read “Moore” on his name patch, and he groaned as I got under his good arm, but with Dana holding the door, he managed to get his feet underneath him enough that we could stumble inside. Once inside, the scene was less horrible and, with the puca’s passing and a patient to treat, the well-oiled machinery of the emergency room came to life. Within seconds, a couple of nurses and an orderly had appeared, crawling out from behind a gouged and splintered reception desk, and were taking the policeman from me. He slumped gratefully into a wheelchair.
“Moore, how many were there?” I demanded.
His eyes fluttered without opening, but his mouth moved and a barely audible “ten” escaped his lips. At that same instant, a growl escaped someone else’s lips, and I turned back to the glass-doored entrance and saw that unwelcome guests had arrived. The passengers on the bus had battered their way out, and it looked like some of their friends had joined them, drawn like pale shadows of the puca to the same feast. A quick count made at least a dozen brain-craving, black-eyed cannibals trying to hammer their way into the building through the fragile glass barrier. Maybe creating a horde of zombies (okay, I'll admit it) hadn’t been such a great idea.
My plan seemed to be unraveling by the second. I’d been responsible for the deaths of the police at the door, and there was a monster on the loose in the hospital, but at least I was pretty sure about where it was going, and its path shouldn’t take it through many of the patient wings of the building. Conversely, it was pretty obvious that the new arrivals were just as hungry for brains as their master, but were interested in much more immediate means of acquisition.
“Dana, Detective Badger is set up in the wrong spot. The puca won’t even go there on its way to the collection. Get these people out of here and then get help. I think that if I can stop it, they’ll be free, so try not to hurt them. Too much,” I said. Her brows furrowed, and she opened her mouth to argue, but the people in the emergency room were all on the verge of panic, looking toward the only two armed people for directions. A wave of dizziness hit me, and I knew that the effects of the adrenaline weren’t going to last much longer. I fought not to show it, and Dana reluctantly nodded her head.
Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1) Page 33