by Craig Thomas
“I know I might sound like doubting Thomas here, but the kid’s probably lying. Maybe this is just pure coincidence. What’d you think?”
“I think that’s irrelevant. Saving his life is what matters now.”
They had gained more distance on The Outcast, but Brian made sure they weren’t too close. And he was right. The bastard was driving the boy to his mother’s home.
******
Brian pulled to a stop about ninety yards away from Holly Smallwood’s house on Bran Street, parking the car diagonally at the center of the narrow pavement, an effort to make a passable if not most efficient roadblock.
Inside the house, all lights were out.
Craig turned around to look back the way they had come, looking this way and that. Watching. No signs of danger as far as he could tell. “How are we gonna work things out, Sheriff?” Not surprisingly, the little courage he had built recently began to melt away like a box of wax in the heat of the sun. Now that a bloody battle was about to begin, an intense chill rushed through him. “I mean, how are we—”
“Be damned if I know, Craig. But one thing I do know is, we’ve got to do something. And do it really quickly. Where’s my fucking thinking cap? I need it right now, you know? Hell, I’ve needed it all along.”
Brian’s statement didn’t demand an answer, but Craig nodded all the same. As he spoke, a little tremble found its way into his voice. “Yes, it’s about time.”
Light came on from one of the rooms in the left wing of the house.
“Put on your vest,” Brian said.
Craig did. He edged a little forward, towards the front of the cruiser, making an attempt to get a good glimpse of whomever was in the lit room.
Brian leaned forward and smacked him in the back of his neck. “God, make yourself small, Craig. You don’t have to go to the front of the car to see who’s in there. If you can’t see diddly from where I am standing here, then you can’t see it anywhere. Come on over here.” Craig moved closer. “See? This is the car’s highest point. The best spot for cover.”
From within the house, a woman screamed and began to cry. Apparently Holly. Her voice reached a crescendo, then fell to a barely audible sound. The light went off again.
“Oh, Jesus,” Craig gasped, his voice growing more tremulous by the passage of time. “Could he possibly have just killed her?”
An idea struck Brian. Not the best in the world, but the best his befuddled brain could come up with. He resorted to using the megaphone to warn The Outcast.
“This is Sheriff Brian Stack—with my deputies. We’re here to help—not to hurt you. I advise that you lay your weapons down peacefully and surrender willingly. We don’t have any desire to use force.” Brian wished he had a name to attach. But he would just have to keep it that simple, unless he was ready to hazard the idea of calling him The Outcast.
They shifted into a shooting position behind the safety of the car. Waiting for the door to open. Hoping to see the big guy emerge, sober at last with a blush of repentance coloring his face.
Time ticked.
Nothing happened.
Brian’s patience was speedily running out. He was thinking fast, and then un-thinking even faster those ideas he considered annoyingly impracticable.
Little did he know that the boy’s mysterious account would once again be his directions.
******
The Outcast, in his fury, threw Holly against the wall. She landed with a yelp of agony. Crumpled on the floor beside her son, she began to cry.
Robert was whimpering, too. This time, his tears weren’t shed because of the heinous acts The Outcast had made him witness over the course of time, but because of the throbbing fear he had for his own life—and his mother’s.
“You ungrateful brat,” The Outcast exploded, pointing in Robert’s direction. “You’ve betrayed me. I called you into the glorious fold; and when I turned around, what did you do? You snuck—yeah, you snuck up and stabbed me in the back. You revealed my place of abode.”
“Don’t hurt us,” Holly wept, pulling Robert closer to her, cradling him. “Whatever you want, please, don’t hurt us.”
“Hurt? You speak of hurt. I’d love to tell you what hurt means, but you wouldn’t understand. Too dumb to get it. But that part is irrelevant. What’s important for you to know right now is that you’ll be the appeasement, the appeasement to the gods. My gods.” Casting a disdainful glance at Robert, as if to say, I’m not so sure if you’re worthy of receiving blessings from my gods anymore, he brought out a rope. To Holly: “Your otherwise useless blood will still be useful in one way. As for him ...” He pointed his sturdy forefinger at Robert. “As for him, maybe he could be good again, maybe not. But that’ll be between him and the gods. If they wish to—”
His words were punctuated by someone else’s.
Sheriff Brian Stark was saying something outside.
The Outcast thought if everything had gone as planned, if the boy hadn’t become a little turncoat overnight and messed everything up, that man making noise outside now ought to have been dead long before this stage was reached. He listened to the Sheriff’s rambling about him surrendering willingly, but then ignored him. He went on doing what he had set to do.
“Who are ...” Holly began, stuttering. “What are you, for goodness sake? What do you want from us?” Holly knew this chimp-man had a voice too human to be a monster of any kind. Scary-sounding, yes; evil, for sure. But human nonetheless. Yet, she affected confusion.
Unfurling the rope, he said, “I’m The Outcast, who’ll soon start his reign. What I want from you is, you’ll die by the hands of your own son. We both want it from you—perhaps he has never revealed this to you. I never expected him to, especially at the time when I trusted him.”
“Please, don’t hurt me.”
“But this has been predestined,” The Outcast continued, not seeming to hear or understand any of Holly’s plea. “Long before you were even conceived, it had been written.”
“No,” Holly was saying amidst her tears, shaking her head vigorously, as if by doing so, she would will the nightmarish occurrence away. “You can’t do that. No, you just can’t do—”
There was a heavy slap to her left cheek. At the impact, she began to see stars. She tasted warm blood while she watched the blurry figure of the man who had just called himself The Outcast reach out to tie her. She resisted, but the force against her was too huge.
When he finished tying her, he brought out a knife, grabbed and hauled Robert towards him. “You don’t mess this up, traitor,” he said through his chimp’s clenched teeth. Or else, the price will be too costly for you to pay.” He handed the knife to the boy, and stepped back a couple of steps, his special robe for the occasion rippling as he moved. “Now! Do it. There’s no time.”
Robert trembled. Didn’t move, couldn’t move.
“Go on now or—”
Crackles.
Sheriff Brian Stack on the megaphone again.
Stack was spitting out something The Outcast just couldn’t stomach. Something really derogatory. The Outcast had to stop the fool from tarnishing his glorious name.
He grabbed his assault rifle, and with the speed of light, he burst out through the front door.
******
Brian’s patience was speedily running out and he needed to do something.
After he had made a call out to the criminal inside and nothing had happened, and after he had jettisoned a multitude of worthless thoughts, a fresh idea struck him.
He went back inside the cruiser, fetched Robert’s diary, and came back out. All along, Craig was just watching, seeming to be thrown completely by every single step Brian was taking.
“What’s the next plan?” Craig asked.
“I think I just recall something the boy wrote down,” Brian said, flipping the pages. Craig moved closer. “Right here ... it says ‘I’m the one cast out by the contemptuous haters, but who’s about to reign. The enemies shall be taken u
nawares and put to shame. Taken unawares because they will never know my plans about the rituals—especially the last one, in which The Outkast’s little True Blood will sacrifice his beloved.’”
“Outcast with a “k,” huh?”
“That’s the way the kid writes—in his own fashion.”
“Interesting fashion, I must say. And I could have sworn this came from an adult as opposed to a boy who’s hardly a teenager.”
“Me, too.”
“So, who’s the True Blood and who’s the beloved?”
“Robert Smallwood is the True Blood. And if I put two and two together, I’d say his mother is the beloved.”
“I see,” Craig said. “And what are you gonna do with this?”
“I’ll shout it out to him.”
“The Outcast?”
“That’s right. I figure since someone has known his secret, he might be furious at accepting the reality. I don’t know. It might work. It mightn’t. But we’ve gotta try something, because time is running out. If he doesn’t come out, then I don’t know what else to think of other than go get him,” Brian said, as if he was talking about picking up a kid after school hours, or about something as leisurely as getting one’s dog back from the kennels after returning home from summer vacation in the Bahamas. “And I want you to get ready, Craig. I hate to tell you this, but—”
“It might get really bloody,” Craig finished.
Brian nodded, and patted Craig on the shoulder.
He picked up the megaphone once again. “This is a last call for you to relinquish all of your arms and come outside with your hands up in the air. Do it of your own accord. Do not try to resist or pull a fast one, as doing so will only complicate your situation. You’re an outcast—The Outcast—and you’ve attained that status by way of violence. This community does—and will—not tolerate such. No sane and peace-seeking community would. And every route of escape that you might think for yourself has been blocked. Your resources have been exhausted.”
Brian found himself sliding down a long verbal chute, polished and ultra-slippery, and he just couldn’t stop yapping on and on. He only had a moment’s qualm if the approach he had chosen was the best one. He didn’t know. All he knew was, right now, he was doing a darn good job playing it by ear.
“And your delusional plan to bring the boy into your dark scheme has been uncovered, which means it has no potency anymore. It’s a complete failure. It won’t work. You need to give it up while you still have a chance to do so. It’s your call to choose between the desire to be helped and the desire to be destroyed. You need to—”
And the front entrance door to Holly Smallwood’s home flew open. Even as it did, swinging violently inward and letting the huge shape fill the portal, a bullet clanked against the front bumper of the cruiser. A second clunked against the metallic side of the megaphone, denting it before ricocheting off.
Caught flat-footed, Brian yelped and tossed the megaphone aside. He staggered backwards two steps, recollected his composure, grabbed his gun with both hands, and quickly assumed a shooter’s stance behind the shelter of the cruiser.
Allan was right. The man that burst out through the door wasn’t, in the real sense of the word, a man. Better to put him in the same class with the Unknown. Seeing his face illuminated by the light outside the house, Brian thought The Outcast was a monster. He was, indeed, an it.
Almost as soon as The Outcast had launched his first assault, Craig opened fire in return, chipping off the building sidings, the porch step railings, and even the jamb and lintel of the doorway through which the terror embodiment had materialized. None of his shots hit his big target, mostly because of the duck-and-shoot exercise he was doing from behind the cover of the car, but also because of his clingy fidgetiness.
At first, The Outcast didn’t appear wary of being hit. He just came running at them, yelling unintelligibility all along, his hands spitting fire as he advanced, until the enemy bullets started flying past around him—thanks to Craig’s effort, which, although didn’t exactly hit a home run, slowed the big monster down a bit.
Brian thought this killer of men might be a raving lunatic, but he wasn’t absolutely dead to the fear of death, after all.
As The Outcast sidestepped and then moved back a little towards the porch steps, all in an attempt to evade the slugs that were flying around and panting to tear his flesh open, Brian took aim. He shot.
And his attempt paid off in spate.
The bullet snagged at the bastard’s left hand, ripping the flesh open at last, shattering the metacarpal bones, and forcing him to drop the weight of his assault rifle entirely on the other unscathed hand. That unbalanced him—the ferocious pain that traveled along the length of his left arm and the abruptness upon which it rode. Shocked, agonized, he growled and began to lift his gun up, determined to let the battle continue, determined to spill the impure blood of the enemies and make the gods delighted.
But Brian wouldn’t let him. Hell, it wasn’t the time to pass up a golden opportunity. He had already followed up with a second shot that zoomed across until it struck The Outcast’s right hand, wreaking an even greater havoc than the first.
At last, The Outcast dropped the gun, spinning like a top. With an aggressive show of his sharp simian teeth, he shrieked at the men. Turning around, he ran back up the porch steps. All along, even while he was dancing around in throes, and then making a beeline for the entrance door into the house, the two officers never ceased fire. Yet, no bullets touched him—besides the two from Brian’s shots. Despite his huge size, for some reason, he seemed to be an uneasy target. It appeared there was some sort of magical aura around him that helped repel harm.
But that magical shell—or whatever it was—could be cracked.
It had indeed been cracked. Once.
He had almost disappeared through the doorway when he changed his mind and swiveled around, his black robe billowing in the process.
“Coming back for us?” Craig shouted, not making any effort to conceal his amazement at the unparalleled foolhardiness demonstrated by the robed monster.
“Let it come back. It works in our favor,” Brian hollered back. “Position yourself. Focus. Fire!”
But he didn’t come back for them. He came back for his rifle. Grabbing it with awkwardness from the ground, he turned around and raced back towards the entrance. He had made it to the steps, climbed the first and second. Before he could make it past the third, a bullet sank into his left calf; another lodged in the thigh of his second leg. He tripped, collapsed on the porch floor, and the rifle flew away from his feeble hands onto the ground below.
This time, rather than going back to pick up his treasured weapon, he crawled inside as fast as he could.
Chapter 22
“Hold your fire,” Brian yelled over the rat-a-tat of the gunshots.
“Okay.” Craig edged closer. “The bastard’s gonna bleed to death. Pretty soon. What’s next, Sheriff?” There was a token of jubilation adorning the texture of his voice. A sense of victory, Brian assumed. Of the awareness that this war was, after all, coming to an end—praise God on His High Throne in the heavenly places, and thank all His good angels. If life in general is a bitch, then duty call in the world of a cop is a demon. But the intense experience was about to blow over, and he would live to see the joy of another day—and the beauty of many more to come. His breath rushed out in jerky streams, warming up Brian’s cheek.
Brian was busy slamming fresh magazines into his guns. “You do the same as I do, and do it really fast, ’cause we’re going inside there.”
Craig’s jaw dropped. Frantically, he set his hands to work, reloading his guns, his eyes glued to his boss. Brian could almost hear him say, Hey, I thought we’re done here? Well, why don’t you please pick up the megaphone and work your miracle one more time? Call the big fella out for an alfresco breakfast and let’s finalize the business deal in the open. I love transparency.
Brian spoke before Craig
could say a word. “It might be bleeding, but it’d do anything to kill the mother and her son—if they’re not dead yet. No hesitation for us, Craig. No turning tail. I don’t know what it is, but if it can bleed, it can be killed.”
“It’s probably got Allan’s and Dwayne’s firearms,” Craig observed glumly.
“It definitely has their guns. I’m aware of that. Allan didn’t lose his guns to the trees—he lost them to the monster. But we’ve got to put an end to this whole shit, kid. It’s been drawn out for too long. And this isn’t the time to give up. We’ve gone so far.” He ran towards the steps, gun trained ahead of him, not looking back to check if his deputy was still part of the struggle, or if he had indeed turned tail. “Craig, we’ve gone so fucking far.”
******
With all the lights out downstairs, The Outcast slid into a corner near the foot of the sink in the kitchen. He couldn’t see much of anything, but his intrinsic acuity advised him it had nothing to do with the absence of light.
He had dissipated so much blood in so little time.
Right now, with his vision losing its sharpness, every inch of his body throbbed with acute ache, and the pain intensified at the thought of the boy.
The boy. The traitor. The wolf in sheep’s clothing.
How could he not have smelled it—the foul odor that had lain beneath the veneer of true blood all along?
His downfall had come from the one he’d wrongly loved. From the one he’d thought belonged to him.
When he had crawled back inside the house, with gunshots roaring behind him, he’d observed that the boy and his mother had vanished from where he’d left them. The boy had cut his mother loose.
An urge to scream overwhelmed The Outcast. He reined it in. He mustn’t scream, because he must reign—even without the boy.
He mustn’t scream, but rather think deeply of his next move.