by Ronald Malfi
Across the room, the bundle on the desk moved.
It was almost imperceptible and Maggie would have missed it had she not been staring straight at it. She blinked and cleared her vision just in time to see the gray blanket—or whatever was wrapped in the gray blanket—move again. Something was shifting within.
Her eyes shifted to the doorway. Shadows moved back and forth out there and she could still hear people talking in hushed voices. When she looked back at the thing on the desk, she found the shape beneath the blanket sitting upright. A cool sweat prickled Maggie’s scalp. She saw a pale hand slide out from beneath the blanket and felt her heart seize in her chest. The suggestion of a foot pressed against the dark fabric of the blanket.
No—
A section of the blanket fell away. In the half-light, a face was revealed to her. Eyes like simmering white-hot coals and a wide mouth dotted with tiny teeth, the fucking thing actually grinned at her.
Maggie tried to scream but could not find her voice.
The thing slipped off the table amid a flutter of blanket and crinkling tarpaulin. She heard its bare feet strike the floor on the other side of the desk. As it scurried across the room in the dark, she could see its childlike form briefly silhouetted as it passed in front of the doorway that led out into the hall.
Then Maggie did scream—a throat-cracking, strangled bleat.
The voices out in the hall rose. Both officers filed into the room. One of them—the skinnier of the two—came over to the cell and peered through the bars at her, his sallow face twisted into grim incomprehension.
“What’s—” he began, just as the officer behind him screamed shrilly. He spun around and Maggie rushed against the bars in time to see the larger officer stagger blindly until his back struck one wall. He was covering his face…and there was something over his face—a greenish slime in which his fingers sank up to the knuckles. What looked like steam radiated from the ooze and Maggie thought she could hear a faint sizzling sound. A second later, the stink of burning flesh filled her nose.
“Mel?” the skinny officer croaked weakly. Under any other circumstances, it would have been a comical sound.
Maggie heard a woman scream out in the hallway.
The larger officer’s hands then sank straight through the mask of slime, impossibly far, and Maggie had time to think, There is no longer a face behind that stuff; there is no longer a head back there.
The sludge splattered against the wall, bubbling like acid, and the officer’s body—sans head—fell forward and slammed lifelessly against the floor. The white nub of the man’s spine protruded from the ragged hole of his neck where the skin still sizzled and melted away.
A small figure darted from behind one desk to another. The skinny officer must have remembered he had a gun at his hip; he dove for it now with one hand and tugged at it, tugged at it, tugged, seemingly unable to recall how to pull it out. Then Maggie heard the snap on the holster give and the officer was just preparing to yank the handgun free when the creature sprang out from the shadows at him. The officer staggered backward and slammed against the bars of Maggie’s cell. The gun clattered to the floor and spun away into the darkness.
Maggie backed up until she struck the far wall of her cell. On the other side of the bars, the officer bucked and cried out and struggled with the creature that was now situated on his chest. An arc of green slim belched out of the creature’s mouth and spattered across the officer’s face. Some stray drops passed through the bars and struck the concrete floor of the cell, where they sizzled like plutonium and left steaming craters in the cement.
The officer’s head narrowed and melted to a mushy pulp beneath the flesh-eating slime. It did not take long for the officer’s body to fold into a heap on the floor, dead.
Maggie shuddered. A piece of her mind seemed to break away at that moment, floating like a raft out across a moonlit sea.
On the other side of the bars, the creature rose. It wasn’t a creature at all. It was a boy; hairless, pale-skinned, bug-eyed…but a boy nonetheless. A child.
Mine. You’re mine. You came back for me after all, didn’t you? I knew that you would. Somehow, I knew someday that you would. You’ve come back home to your mother.
The boy’s eyes hung on her. She could smell him standing there, a smell like industrial cleaners and detergents.
“I’m sorry,” she said, just barely above a whisper. “Don’t hurt me.”
The child’s eyes hung on her a moment longer. Then he shifted his gaze back down to the cop who lay dead at his feet. The skin on the cop’s face had dissolved into a puddle of bubbling soup that seemed to be eating through the floor. The skull itself melted like wax. Maggie thought she could make out a pair of eye sockets slowly receding into the sizzling liquid. The boy positioned his slender body so that his face hung directly above the mess that had just moments ago been the officer’s head. The boy’s mouth worked itself into an O as the skin stretched and elongated to form some sort of tubular appendage. Once the appendage had grown to a length of several impossible inches, like the proboscis of an insect, the boy dipped it into the sludge and proceeded to noisily slurp the mess up.
“Don’t hurt me,” Maggie continued to murmur. It was like a mantra now, a prayer. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
When the child-thing had finished, it stood up off his haunches and regarded Maggie once again through the bars of her cell. As she stared back at him, the tubular appendage retreated toward the child’s face until it changed back into a mouth. It was a boy once again, wide-eyed and innocent, his tight little lips smeared with blood.
“Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
The child-thing’s hands closed around two of the cell’s bars. It slid one pale, splay-toed foot between the bars and into her cell.
“Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
It was thin enough to squeeze through the bars, its body sliding toward her unimpeded. The boy was as insubstantial as smoke.
“Don’t hurt me.” Her voice was a shrill tremolo now as she cowered in one corner of the cell. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
It hurt her.
Chapter Seventeen
1
The streetlights along Belfast Avenue blinked on and off, as if signaling to some spacecraft high above the clouds. Rain slammed the earth, and the windshield wipers of Ben’s squad car could hardly keep up with such ferocity. As he turned into the parking lot of the police station, his concern quickly mounted…though he could not necessarily identify why. Cold, wet, and covered in mud, it had taken him a good half hour to change the tire back on Route 40. On the first attempt, he had the car jacked up and was about to spin the last lug nut off when the jack bent to one side and the car crashed back down to the pavement, the entire undercarriage shuddering. By the time he’d managed to jack the car up again, replace the ruined tire with the spare, and lower it back to the ground, Ben’s clothes were soaked through and his nose was running like a sieve. Then, on the drive back to the station, he’d attempted to use both his cell phone and the police radio again, but each proved useless. The storm wreaked havoc.
He parked right out in front of the station and ran into the building to find the sodium lights in the ceiling fizzing. Likewise, the lights in the dispatch room threatened to blink off and stay that way.
“Shirley?” He poked his head into the dispatch room to find it empty. One of Shirley’s People magazines lay flat on the counter.
Back out in the hall, he shouted a “hello.” Aside from the echo, there came no response.
When he entered lockup, the world threatened to break apart all around him. He saw Melvin Haggis’s corpse first. Haggis’s large body was on the floor, straining the blood-drenched fabric of his khaki police uniform. Where his head should have been lay a pulpy, scarlet stew through which Haggis’s lower jawbone protruded like a tree root arching out of a swamp. His hands were melted down to th
e wrists, where knobby bones jutted from the shredded wounds.
Ben’s gun was out before he moved over to the second corpse, that of Joseph Platt, although he was only able to identify the man because he knew he’d been with Haggis earlier. Platt’s head was gone as well; where it should have been was a sizzling crater in the floor, clogged with blood and hair. Platt’s gun was gone. There were bloody slashes across his pant legs and sleeves. He had one white, rigid hand wrapped around one of the bars of the first cell.
And in the first cell was what remained of Maggie Quedentock. She lay slumped in one corner, her legs splayed out before her, one shoe off. Her head lay at an unnatural angle against the wall, the top portion of which had been sheared away to reveal a hollow cavern in the center of her nest of wet, stringy hair. The skull was an empty bowl that dribbled a pinkish fluid down her forehead. Her eye sockets dripped blood.
Ben leaned over one of the desks and vomited on the floor. Heat whooshed out of his shirt collar, causing sweat to spring out across his face. It took him several seconds to regain some semblance of composure. Through bleary eyes, he could see small bloody footprints on the floor tiles. They led in various erratic directions, like some animal trying to evade capture…or like some predator darting after prey.
The boy, Matthew Crawly…his body was gone. The fire retardant blanket and the sheet of blue tarp lay on the floor, kicked away and discarded like bedsheets in the middle of the night.
Trembling, Ben struggled to his feet. He planted one hand against the nearest wall for support while his pistol shook in his other hand. He scanned the rest of the room but saw nothing but hidden shadows and empty spaces. Rain slammed against the roof. His eyes kept returning to the three bodies scattered throughout the room. He was in no frame of mind to even begin to question what had happened here, to even try to formulate some kind of hypothesis.
Moving strictly off instinct, Ben made his way back across the room and out into the hall. His gun jumped and shook as he clenched it in both hands.
“Anybody here?”
No one answered him. From Shirley’s office, he could hear the ticking of the wall-mounted clock above her desk—a ghostly electronic toll. In the ceiling, the lights continued to blink. The air was charged with a faint medicinal odor, one that Ben readily recognized…
A soft, muffled whimper came from nearby. Ben looked around, his eyes finally landing on the closed door of the supply closet directly in front of him. Listening, he could hear something shuffling around on the other side of that door. He extended a shaky hand and gripped the doorknob with one sweaty palm…
The door swung outward before he could even grasp the knob. Ben uttered a small cry and, staggering backward, repositioned his handgun at the figure that burst out into the hallway.
It was Shirley. Her eyes, large as saucers, found him instantly. Her skin was bloodless and she held her hands out timidly before her in some mockery of Frankenstein’s monster. As she stared at Ben, a gasp of pent-up breath escaped her lungs. She looked about ready to collapse. Then she shrieked.
Ben holstered his gun and slung an arm around the woman, just as she went limp against him.
“Are you okay? What happened?”
She sobbed against him for a time and he didn’t bother asking her any further questions until she was able to get herself under control.
“The b-boy,” she stammered after a while. She was a tough old bird and Ben could tell she was struggling to keep it together. “He wasn’t dead. He w-wasn’t d-d-dead, Ben.”
“Where’s the boy now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see what happened? How did it happen? What did you see?” He knew he was talking too fast for poor Shirley’s addled mind to keep up. He squeezed her shoulder. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Shirley righted herself against him, swiping tracks of runny mascara off her cheeks. “I don’t think—”
Something banged at the far end of the hall, the reverberation of its echo like a gunshot. Both Ben and Shirley froze and whipped their heads in unison in the direction of the sound—the sally port. Shirley began making a shuddery, whimpering noise.
“Stay here,” Ben said as he began to creep down the hall toward the sally port, his gun leading the way.
“Don’t,” Shirley intoned. “Don’t leave me alone.” She clutched at the back of Ben’s shirt and followed him as he proceeded down the hallway. Just before they reached the door to the sally port, the lights blinked out and the phones ringing at the opposite end of the hallway went dead. Again, Shirley moaned.
“Shit,” Ben whispered. The station fell as silent as a crypt.
Then the lights winked back on, the electricity humming through the circuits in the walls, and Ben’s heart began beating again. On the other side of the sally port door, something metallic clanged around, grinding against the cement floor.
Ben kicked open the door, shoving his gun straight into the darkness with one hand while his other hand went quickly for the light switch beside the door. The lights jumped on, stinging Ben’s eyes. He swatted blindly at the air then gripped the gun again in both hands. Shirley’s fingernails dug deeper into his back.
The noise came from the bell-shaped birdcage. It had fallen to the floor and scraped along the concrete as the small bat inside beat frantically against the bars of the cage. It unleashed a series of aggravated screeches that cleaved through the center of Ben’s skull.
“Oh,” Shirley sighed at his back, her breath warm along the pockets of sweat that had broken out across the back of Ben’s shirt. The relief was evident in her voice. She managed it a second time. “Oh…”
Despite the insanity all around them, Ben felt a burst of laughter borne on the waters of his own stark relief, threaten his throat. “I forgot that thing was in here,” he said.
“It’s going berserk,” said Shirley.
The bat raged against the bars of the cage with enough force to drag it several inches across the floor. It screeched and tittered, its clawed wings and scrabbling feet clanging against the cage. At one point, it hooked a pair of fangs around one of the bars and hung suspended by its snout.
“Looks like it wants to get out,” Shirley said. She took a step closer to the cage, still clinging to the back of Ben’s shirt with one hand.
A nonspecific disquiet settled around Ben like a shroud. Piping up in his head was Brandy Crawly’s voice, whispering, The bats go wherever he goes. I mean, I think so, anyway. And on the heels of that, He isn’t dead. He’s just…changed. He’s some kind of…vampire now.
Again, the lights blinked off then back on. Very soon, the storm would knock the power out for good.
“It wants to get out, all right,” Ben said, crouching down beside the bat’s cage. Its beady little eyes stared at him. Its fangs, still clinging to one of the bars, looked like the fangs of a rattlesnake. “It knows something. It wants to get somewhere.” Ben stood. “I want to know where it wants to go.”
“What are you talking about, Ben?”
“This thing’s a homing device.” I mean, I think so, anyway, Brandy added in his head. “If I let it out, I bet it takes me straight to…”
“To where?” Shirley asked.
You have to kill the head vampire, Ben.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to speak the words aloud. Despite all that had transpired in Stillwater in the past two weeks, it was still too ridiculous to think about…still too insane…
“To whatever has been going on in this town,” he said at last. It was the best he could do to speak the truth of it. He holstered his handgun and found that his hands shook terribly. “How do you follow a goddamn bat, Shirley?” He wondered if Eddie would know—Eddie, with all his ridiculous horror magazines, Stephen King novels, and beloved gory vampire films. When was the last time he’d heard from Eddie? Ben’s mind raced. He couldn’t think straight.
“Ha!” Shirley cried, startling him. When he faced her, he found a surprising grin stretc
hed across her otherwise bleary face. Her eyes were alight. “You don’t follow a bat, Ben. You track it.”
“Yeah? And how do you do that?”
Shirley released her grip on the back of Ben’s shirt then went immediately to one of the two-by-four shelves that were hammered straight into the drywall. She rummaged through stacks of boxes until she found what she was looking for—a plastic case roughly the size of a laptop. Shirley set the case on an overturned five-gallon bucket and opened it. Pressed into the foam padding was a GPS screen, a jumble of wires, and four nondescript black boxes, each one approximately the size of a silver dollar.
“What is that?” Ben asked.
Shirley picked up one of the black boxes and examined it more closely in the palm of her hand. “A tracking device. Don’t you remember? Cumberland sent them over to us, in case we ever needed to track a vehicle. Mike laughed.”
“You don’t mean…I mean, you think…”
“Why not?”
Ben peered down at the tiny black box in the center of Shirley’s hand. “Holy crap, Shirl. You’re a goddamn genius.”
“I want a raise when this is all over,” Shirley said.
2
Her mother took a Valium, poured a glass of red wine, and fell asleep on the living room sofa. Once Brandy was confident her mother was out, she went up into her mother’s bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. There was a pink shoebox in there and it was filled with her grandmother’s belongings—various trinkets and bits of costume jewelry that the woman had left to Wendy, her only daughter, just before she died many years earlier. Brandy had very few memories of her grandmother but she knew about the shoebox. On occasion, whenever her mother felt nostalgic, they went through the ancient and tarnished relics together. There were large, spangled rings and great looping necklaces, and earrings that looked as though they’d been made from the shells of tortoises. But those were not the items Brandy concerned herself with on this night.