Shit.
‘All right, fine,’ he said. ‘You can do it at my place. One condition.’
Ajeet pumped his fist. ‘Name it, bossman.’
‘First thing Monday, all you guys have to email McLaren and tell him in writing what a super team-building exercise this was. And how the whole thing was my idea.’
By four o’clock, Ben had a headache that started at the base of his skull, vined up around his ears, burrowed in through his temples, and attached itself to his eyeballs. At four fifty-nine, he packed up his stuff and endured a hero’s farewell from Ajeet and his other workmates in First Floor IT. At seven minutes past five, he turned around and went all the way back to lock his workstation – one of McLaren’s numerous bullet points. Finally, at five thirteen, he said goodnight to Gary at the security desk.
‘You have a good night, Benjamin,’ Gary said, then snapped his fingers. ‘Almost forgot. There was somebody here asking for you.’
‘Me?’ Ben didn’t mind stepping out of the stream of quitting-time foot traffic. He liked Gary, a retired EMT and former barman who had continued to work part-time into his seventies. Gary told great stories and could greet every person in the building by name. From memory. He said he liked the exercise. ‘When was this?’
‘Around two this afternoon,’ Gary said. ‘I tried to leave you a message, but your voice mail was full. Email too.’
Crap. Two more of McLaren’s bullet points. ‘Was her name Christine?’
‘It was a him, and he wouldn’t give me his name. I sent him packin’.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Come on around, I’ll show you.’
Ben stepped through the hinged counter into the control area. He looked over Gary’s shoulder at the monitor bank. Gary pecked out a time code on his keyboard, twiddled the cue knob on the deck, then pointed to the lobby feed, which now displayed a frame of frozen video.
On screen, a young man stood on the other side of the desk, gesticulating to a three-hours-younger version of Gary. The stranger – probably mid-twenties, somewhere around Jeeter’s age – wore white canvas sneakers, cuffed jeans, and a messenger bag cross-slung on one shoulder. His dark curly hair poked out from beneath a White Sox cap.
‘Hmm,’ Ben said.
‘Friend of yours?’
‘Nope.’ He didn’t mention to Gary that he’d seen this guy exactly three times in his life: once this morning, at Caribou Coffee; again at the sandwich place where he’d picked up a meatball sub for lunch; and once on this monitor right now.
‘Didn’t think so,’ Gary said. ‘He tried to leave some kind of package for you. Fat chance, buddy, that’s what I told him. Not without a name and some ID. Besides, he seemed a little off to me.’
‘Off like how?’
‘Like kind of an asshole. Pardon my French.’
‘That sounds about right today, actually.’
‘And kind of jittery.’
Whatever. Ben was too tired to think about it. ‘Maybe I’ll see him at coffee in the morning.’
‘What’s that now?’
‘Nothing.’ He clapped Gary on the shoulder and headed along his way. ‘Thanks again, Gare. You’re a hero.’
‘Fly low, fella.’
‘I try.’
Ben pushed out through the revolving doors and into the crisp October evening. The days were getting shorter, midtown leaves starting to change, and he could taste the faintest hint of wood smoke on the breeze. He took deep breaths through the nose as he walked to his car, letting the autumn air clear out the inside of his head. He pressed on through the bustling main lot, cutting a diagonal line toward the farthest corner, feeling lighter with each step he took away from the building. Soon he became a lone figure crossing the asphalt.
By the time he reached his new car – a used Chevy Corsica with 189,000 miles on the odometer and an ‘I ♥ My Granddogs’ bumper sticker shaped like a chew bone on the trunk lid – Ben was thinking, See, life isn’t so bad.
Then he noticed the note tucked under the driver’s side windshield wiper:
YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER.
(over)
Ben snatched the paper, which had been torn sloppily from a narrow-ruled legal pad. The handwriting was a hurried scrawl from a pen clearly running out of ink. He flipped the page over and read the second message on the back:
NOT A JOKE!
CALL 708-555-5108
Ben looked up and scanned the parking lot. He looked at the page again, front and back. To nobody in particular, he called out, ‘You couldn’t have fit all that on the same side?’
This time last season, Lance Baxter and Arnie Dillon had gone in together on a deluxe tree stand from Cabela’s for the purpose of bow-hunting whitetail deer. The unit featured fold-out seating, a full 360-degree canopy in forest camo, integrated heating coils powered by a deep-cycle marine battery, and whisper-quiet cooling fans powered by the sun. They’d installed the whole magnificent shebang in a grove of old oak timber along a brushy creek bottom on Arnie’s neighbor’s land. It was a secluded, peaceful, off-the-track spot, which could be accessed any time of day simply by calling in sick to the nuclear power plant in Brownville, where Lance and Arnie had worked together for years.
Which was exactly what Lance and Arnie had done today – the kind of clear, glowing fall day made in God’s own workshop for taking an October buck or, short of that, spending a weekday afternoon getting shitfaced up a tree.
For the latter task, they were well-provisioned. Lance had personally retrofitted the tree stand with a hinged floor panel that opened on a collapsible beer cooler. This year, Arnie had done him one better, inventing his own two-liter gravity system that dispensed rye whiskey with the turn of a thumbscrew.
So they weren’t exactly at their sharpest when Lance almost shot the stranger.
‘Hold hold hold!’ Arnie hissed, gripping Lance’s string hand a split second before Lance let fly.
At that same moment, what had sounded like a real bruiser of a buck crashing through the underbrush – a twelve-pointer easy, maybe better – turned out to be a man.
A large man.
A large man built like a Chiefs middle linebacker. Covered head to toe in mud. Flecked all over with leaves and twigs.
‘Holy shit,’ Lance breathed. Fingers trembling, heart pounding in his throat, he took a deep breath and lowered his brand-new compound bow. ‘Holy shit, holy shit.’
Arnie gave a nervous chuckle, patting him on the arm. ‘You’re OK.’
‘Holy shit, that was close.’
‘Sure as hell sobered me up.’
From above, they watched the guy trudge out of the brush and plod into the small clearing beneath their tree. Right into their kill zone.
‘That’s some camo,’ Arnie said.
Lance was still shaking all over. ‘Boy, that was goddamned close.’
Arnie cupped his hands around his mouth and called to the ground. ‘Hey, idiot! Private property! Wanna know how close you just came to getting your dumb ass killed?’
When the guy looked up at them, Lance’s heart skipped a thud.
The mud-covered man had no face. Only a pair of bright, eerie, green eyes.
Arnie recoiled beside him, saying, ‘What the sh—’
Before he could finish the thought, the mud-covered man lumbered over, hugged the ladder attached to their stand, and reared back with an almighty powerful heave. There came a bright, wrenching sound of metal on wood.
The next thing Lance knew, he and Arnie were falling. They hollered and grabbed each other all the way down, crashing to the forest floor in a splintering, tumbling, bone-rattling jumble.
The next few moments after that flickered past in a blur.
First, Lance regained consciousness in a rubble of planks, braces, and camouflage netting. He could smell the sharp tang of spilled whiskey. He could hear ruptured beer cans foaming into the leaf bed beneath him.
Next, he became aware of somebody screaming. He
recognized that the somebody was Arnie Dillon, twenty feet away.
While Lance struggled to disentangle himself from the wreckage of their mangled hunting stand, he stared at his best bud, who was down on one knee, bow at the ready, an arrow nocked and drawn.
Over him loomed the mud man.
The mud man lurched forward. Arnie screamed again and let loose.
Lance heard the arrow whicker through the air and strike home with a heavy, wet-sounding splud. It was a kill shot, he could see that immediately; the arrow stuck out of the stranger’s chest just off the center line. If Arnie hadn’t drilled this crazy stranger bang through the heart, this crazy stranger didn’t have one. That, Lance thought with a mixture of horror and pride, was just how good Arnie was with that bow of his, even sailing three sheets to the wind.
And now they were going to have a dead body to explain after all.
He was sort of surprised that the arrow hadn’t ripped completely through the dude, though. Especially at such close range. He was even more surprised when the mystery man underneath all that mud didn’t fall down. Or even stumble.
He’s cranked out of his mind on something. It was the only explanation Lance could think of for the pure bull strength it must have taken to pull a whole damned tree stand out of a whole damned tree with nothing but a pair of arms, never mind the fact that the berserk sonofabitch was somehow still standing upright on two sturdy-looking legs.
But then the green-eyed mud man did something that no amount of drug-induced amplitude could have explained:
He sucked the arrow the rest of the way into his chest cavity.
Just like that.
Lance watched in disbelief as the exposed length of arrow shaft slowly shortened, finally disappearing with a moist smack, fletching and all.
Meanwhile, Arnie looked up at his attacker, his face twisted in panic. He struggled to nock another arrow.
But he wasn’t nearly fast enough. In one barbaric, unstoppable motion, the stranger swept Arnie’s bow aside, stooped, and took Arnie’s head in both … hands? They were certainly hand-like appendages. But not like any human hands that Lance Baxter had ever seen. More like rock formations.
When they pressed together, Arnie Dillon’s head split open in a pulpy splurt of brain and bone. Lance saw colors – a great mist of red, globs of gray, gleaming shards of white – as he watched his friend’s skull collapse like an overripe pumpkin.
Arnie’s dead body fell amidst the leaf litter, limp as a rag. Lance heard more screaming.
This time the voice was his own.
Then the mud man turned toward him.
Lance doubled his efforts to get himself the hell out of there. But his boot was trapped, and he was stuck fast. He could feel faint tremors in the ground beneath him as the mud man tromped his way.
Those sons of bitches, he thought bitterly. They lied to us. A few years ago, when the river flooded, and the power plant had to close, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had wandered around in spaceman suits every day for a month, everybody had sworn to high heaven that there hadn’t been a leak. Full containment, no cause for alarm. Back to business, everybody.
But Lance Baxter was looking at the obvious proof to the contrary right in front of him: some kind of horrible, killer mud mutant, thundering closer by the moment.
The sons of bitches lied to us all!
With one final, terrified shriek, he pulled back with every last ounce of his strength, throwing all his body weight against his leg. There came a flash of blinding, white-hot pain as his ankle snapped inside his eight-inch Danner boot. He’d gotten these boots the same day he’d upgraded his bow. Even through the agony, he thought: And I was worried about blisters.
Then a dark shadow fell over everything. The god-awful, foul-smelling mud mutant stood over him, framed by fiery trees and dusky sky, blotting out the low red sun.
As the thing drew back its block-like fist, Lance noticed something odd protruding from the spot where a normal man’s knuckles would have been. He had just enough time to identify the small object he spotted there: a HellRazor broadhead arrow tip, still attached to the shaft.
Somehow, impossibly, the arrowhead – its triple blades sharp enough to shave with – now stuck out of the mud man from an entirely different spot than where it had gone in. And pointing in the opposite direction, too.
Hey, Lance thought. That’s Arnie’s.
Then the blocky fist pistoned toward his face.
There was no telling what other things Lance might have thought, or believed, or eventually refuted to the authorities – not to mention his foreman at the nuke station – had the HellRazor not lived up to its legendary penetrating and lacerating capabilities on its way through his prefrontal cortex. But one fact remained, with or without Lance Baxter’s ongoing input: Arnie Dillon always had sworn by the things.
TWO
The next time he needed to set aside his entire life to fulfill a generations-old family duty to protect a complete stranger from a supernatural kill monster, Reuben Wasserman thought, he wouldn’t do it in a lime-green Dodge Challenger with black racing stripes.
It was impossible to go unnoticed in the thing, for one reason, which was at least half the point of owning a car like this in the first place. It was also the reason why Reuben was sitting in an Arby’s parking lot, a full city block off-site, spying on a guy named Ben Middleton through a pair of high-powered binoculars. Corporate security at Middleton’s workplace had rousted Reuben a second time after he’d been ejected from the building; the old-timer behind the front desk must have called out the golf cart patrol. Now they had the Challenger on their radar.
Which was fine. Reuben Wasserman didn’t want any trouble. All he wanted, really, was to get this over with and go back home to his girlfriend, Claire; his parakeet, Van Damme; his Volcano vaporizer; and his MBA thesis, which he was set to defend in five short weeks.
If only he knew what the hell he was supposed to be doing, or how he was supposed to go about doing it.
Through the binocs, Reuben watched Middleton grab the note from under his windshield wiper. He watched Middleton flip the page over, look all around the parking lot, then holler something at the sky.
The guy had a fitting last name, Reuben thought. He wasn’t skinny, wasn’t fat, stood more or less average height. Had the kind of basic look about him that Claire would have called ‘Goy 1.0.’ Middleton with a capital Middle.
Rueben watched the way he crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it into his car, as if a strange note warning him about his personal safety were no more or less irksome than a parking ticket. Then Middleton got in behind the wheel, backed out of his lone spot in the hinterlands, and headed for the exit.
Rueben lowered the binoculars. He looked unhopefully at his phone in the dash cradle. It continued not ringing. He watched Middleton turn out into the street, fart a gray cloud from his tailpipe, and bimble away.
Now what?
Reuben sighed and fired up the Challenger.
Eli would have known what to do. Eli wouldn’t have wasted all this time following Middleton from a distance, trying to work up his nerve. You wouldn’t have seen some beet-faced rent-a-cop chasing Eli around a parking lot in a golf cart.
Eli had been the first-born. He’d been older, tougher, calmer, and wiser. This was supposed to have been his job.
If I don’t come home, promise me you’ll take this seriously. That was what Eli had said to him, the night before he’d shipped out to the Gulf. Promise me, Rubes.
Of course Rueben had promised. More than a hundred and fifty years’ worth of Wassermans had passed this idiotic responsibility down to their first-born sons, and not one of them had ever been called upon. Not one! Not since great-great-great-great-granddad Silas – the big schlemiel who’d cocked the whole thing up in the first place. Reuben hadn’t really believed the old stories anyway, not since he’d been nine or so, and besides: of course his big bro would come home. This was Eli he’d bee
n talking to.
Eli, who hadn’t come home after all.
And so, all these years later, here was Rueben: in Omaha, Nebraska, of all places. Trying to remember if they’d said anything in Hebrew school about how many lengths you were supposed to stay back in a hot green muscle car when you were tailing a guy whose days, probably, were numbered anyway.
He hoped Claire was remembering to feed the bird.
‘Oh – hey,’ Christine said as she opened the front door. She’d either come in from a run or was heading out for one: trainers, leggings, a fitted zip-up, her hair pulled back in a colorful band. ‘You just missed him.’
‘Who, Tony?’ Her new husband. ‘That’s OK. We’re playing eighteen at the club tomorrow.’
Christine narrowed her eyes in a way that immediately made Ben wish he hadn’t led off by provoking her. What was wrong with him? ‘Now that you mention it, he took Charley to Guitar Center,’ she said. ‘They’ll probably be gone for hours.’
‘Ouch.’
‘You started it.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’
‘Look, whatever. Tony’s out of town until Sunday, for your information. And Charley’s still not here.’
‘That’s OK. I came to talk to you, actually.’
‘Did you lose your phone again?’
‘Yes, but that’s not why I dropped by.’
‘Leaving the mystery of your unexpected visit as yet unexplained.’
Ben sighed. ‘I wanted to chat parent-to-parent, that’s all. Can I come in, or what?’
‘I was just about to hop in the shower.’ It was a cursory objection – something to say as she stepped back into the house, pulling the door open with her.
Ben rubbed his hands together as he entered the soaring, cinnamon-scented foyer of the Mr and Mrs Antonio and Christine Montecito household. ‘Fell right into my trap,’ he said. ‘Phase One complete.’
‘What’s Phase Two? Borrow some money?’
‘Wow. You’re shooting to kill tonight.’
‘Sorry. You bring it out of me.’
Kill Monster Page 3