The Crippling Terrors (Tracking Ever Nearer Book 1)

by Jeff Vrolyks

  * * *

  Only a few songs remained before the show would wrap up. Aside from the extortion attempt, Diggs was satisfied with how smoothly things had gone.

  But the day wasn’t over.

  When One Shot Cobb radioed him that there was a repugnant odor coming from the garage, Diggs was rightfully concerned. For reasons unknown to Diggs, the only thing more important to Kloss than the security of the garage was the security of Holly. What was of dire importance in the garage wasn’t disclosed to him and he preferred it that way. It wasn’t his business. But he had to draw the line somewhere. Just what exactly did Robert know that was worthy of extorting Kloss over? Was the answer to that question currently stinking up the garage? He didn’t want to know the answer to that because he would be pushed over the fine line that he was walking. Ignorance is bliss and Kloss paid him well to be blissful. However, an odor as such was a potential problem—as the heat intensified, so would the smell. A hundred people would pass the courtyard, and thus the garage. If a breeze wafted the curious stench in their direction, eyebrows would rise. Their curiosity might lead to a different kind of stink. Diggs thought it would be wise to inform Holly of the odor, and leave it in her hands.

  “There’s an odor coming from inside the garage. Until your brother wraps up his recording, you’re the boss. What do you want to do?”

  Holly frowned. “How bad is it?”

  “One Shot wouldn’t have called me on it if it weren’t bad.”

  “All right, I’ll go check it out. Thanks, Diggs.”

  To Alison she said, “I’m going to check out the garage real quick. Diggs said there’s an odor.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Ali insisted. “I was about to go inside to pee, anyway.” She lowered her voice (even though music blared) and said in Holly’s ear, “I’ll grab a few blankets and cover them better. I knew a tarp wouldn’t be good enough. It has to be twenty degrees hotter in there if not more. They’re probably cooking.”

  “It’s not your responsibility,” Holly said. “You shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

  “Shush. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  Alison went through the sliding backdoor to the linen cabinet. She took a stack of blankets and set them by the front door and went to the restroom.

  * * *

  Robert parked his Saturn at home and slammed the door shut. “So much for buying a freakin’ Corvette!” Kloss doesn’t know my real name, he thought. If that wooden-shoe wearing, dike-plugging, tulip farming bastard doesn’t want to pay me, fine! I can at least rub that damn smirk off his face by calling the cops. I won’t even mention the river—if he’s hiding the fact that a couple people were shot and killed on his property, that’s enough to bury him and won’t incriminate me. But what if he already got rid of the bodies, he pondered. He went inside the house and picked up the phone. He muttered, “If he hasn’t yet, he will soon.” He dialed the S.P.D. and left an anonymous tip.

  * * *

  Karl drove past Hanging Gardens Court and parked at the end of the subsequent cul-de-sac. With a rifle in one hand and ladder in the other, they paced quickly between two estates and into the barren field beyond them. Nobody seemed to notice them, which was a good thing, for the neighborhood residents. They trudged across the dead grass toward the sound of live music.

  The VonFuren estate was enclosed by an eight-foot tall brick wall topped with barbed wire, with dense trees lining the inside perimeter. It wasn’t easy finding a gap wide enough for a view of their target. When they found an ideal spot, they leaned their ladders against the wall and climbed up, carefully peeking over the top brick and through the tangle of barbed wire. Partially obstructing their view was an RV. Past the RV was the lawn with the viewing audience shaded under a stand of canopies, backs facing the gunmen. Upwards of forty yards from their post was a pair of men sitting at an equipment table. Ten yards or so directly beyond them was another table: John and Karl grinned. The two engineers would be first to go, as they were in the way. A muscle-bound sentry stood directly between the gunmen and the girl: he would have to go as well. The woman they knew to be Sue Ellen sat directly in front of Holly at the table. Pleasantly absent were the wolves. John and Karl had kept a watchful eye for them, as always, and would be quick to act should they encounter them. They had taken care of several of them over the week. Of the seven—there always had and always would be seven—there were only two remaining (assuming they survived the fire and truck accident). Never had they killed all seven wolves or the three females before they procreated anew. They perpetually dwelled on such an outcome. If one or both of the surviving wolves were indeed here, they were avoiding the confrontation, possibly for that very reason of reproducing.

  John and Karl slid their rifles through the thatch of barbed wire and took position.

  * * *

  Alison left the house with the stack of blankets. The two gate guards, whom Alison didn’t recognize, stared at her as she crossed the courtyard. Chad waved at her from his podium just beyond the gate. She was greeted at the garage by One Shot Cobb. He scared her. He looked like he spent too much time studying ways to hurt people (when he wasn’t in the gym or actively hurting people). He had two holsters strapped to him. If you kill in one shot, she wondered, why do you need two guns?

  “Afternoon, pretty lady! Let me carry those blankets for you, ma’am.”

  “No thanks, Aaron, I got it.” She smelled it. Them. It was faint, but it wouldn’t stay that way in this blistering heat. She strode to the side-door of the garage.

  “Ali!” Mike exclaimed as he jogged toward her from the front door of the house. Alison smiled and waited for him. “Let me get those for you,” Mike insisted. He took the blankets and said, “I thought you might need a hand.” She thanked him and dug the keys out of her pocket. When she saw the Ford key with a Cobra logo, she tingled. She found the only round key in the bunch and inserted it in the lock and turned, but it wasn’t locked. Alison frowned at that. Unlocked? She gagged upon stepping foot inside. It was an oven in there. A stinky oven. The oppressive heat hit her like a tangible object. She began perspiring at once. The bodies were slow cooking. Kloss was hosting a barbecue, all right.

  “That’s the most disgusting smell on earth,” she said. Mike agreed.

  She lifted her shirt over her nose and hit the light switch. A series of fluorescent light fixtures buzzed and flickered. Her beloved Cobra, Kloss’s BMW, and Holly’s Toyota blinked into view from the darkness. She closed and locked the oven door behind her. At the far end of the garage was a blue vinyl tarp covering Keith and Bertha. Her stomach gnarled. She pinched her nose through her shirt collar and put forth.

  She lifted a corner of the tarp. They were the first dead bodies she’d witnessed, and hopefully the last. Beside the tarp were the blankets covering Jack and Peaches, only now they were flat against the concrete. What the hell.

  “Hmm, where did Kloss move you guys to?” Her voice was muffled through her shirt.

  “I don’t know, but we’re going to cook in here,” Mike said. “You know what?—we should put them in the trunk of one of these cars and cover them with the blankets. That should do it.”

  “Yeah, let’s do that. Good idea. But not in my car. And not Holly’s, she would kill us. That leaves Kloss’s BMW. Could you pop the trunk?”

  “Sure.” Mike opened the unlocked car and popped the trunk. They rolled Keith in the tarp and Bertha in a blanket and carried them one at a time to the spacious trunk of the large seven-series sedan. Two additional blankets were placed over them.

  Then came the gun blasts. They dashed out of the garage and saw One Shot and the three gate guards running toward the backyard with guns drawn.

  * * *

  Holly patted my thigh and leaned to my ear and said, “You should go on stage after they’re done and sing my song to me.”

  “I would die in front of a crowd like this, sweetie.”

  She leaned across the table to Sue Ellen, who met
her halfway. “Are you and Pea Willy staying over tonight? I hope?”

  “We were going to head out this evening, but maybe we can leave in the morning instead.” Sue Ellen stood and said, “I need a couple aspirin. Anyone want a beer while I’m up?” Nobody heard a word she said. She pointed to an empty beer bottle and Pea Willy nodded.

  Booom!

  The thunderous gun blast, a hundred-plus guests now screaming, the music ripping to a stop, gripped me with trepidation and confusion. Another gun blast, a second after the first. Impulsively we stood and searched for the source. Ten yards ahead of us the engineers lay dead against their soundboards. My horror wasn’t limited to the fact that they were dead; the destruction caused from a single bullet in each of them was singularly alarming. Gaping bloody holes so large that you could reach your arm through their torsos without touching flesh.

  Diggs simultaneously drew his Desert Eagle and Colt Commander handguns and scoured the western perimeter for the source of the attack.

  I shouted “Move!” Sue Ellen broke her stare of the engineers and faced me; our eyes met. Hers were wide and bright, energized with sudden understanding. I’ll never forget her final expression.

  Two more shots.

  Sue Ellen slammed forward, coming to rest with her torso on the table. The other bullet struck Pea Willy and vaporized his shoulder. The sheer force of the projectile turned him around.

  I wanted to run, wanted to move, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the lifeless eyes of Sue Ellen. Holly grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the ground, under the table. The shrieking and shouting was almost as deafening as the rifle blasts. The depth of Pea Willy’s pain was discerned from his wailing, and it had nothing to do with his shoulder.

  Booom! Booom!

  The table overhead decimated. We took to a run, hunched over, ape-like, as fast as our postures would allow, away from the crowd and gunfire. Hordes of guests aimlessly ran pell-mell, many collecting in our wake and jostling their way toward the head of the pack. The gunmen would have to mow down a lawn of men and woman to get to us.

  Diggs raised both steel-clenching hands above the heads of the scatter-shot of people, and finally opposing gunfire commenced.

  Tat! Tat! Pop! Tat! Pop! Tat!

  Another round of rifle-fire boomed, echoing for seconds after the blast.

  Holly and I sought the cover of the house’s eastern wall, seemingly a mile away. Diggs was reloading when he took both .50 caliber rifle shots to the chest, knocking him flat on his back. Even with the thickest ceramic-plated ballistic-vest money could buy, he wasn’t soon to get up, and struggled for air. A trio of security guards approached, guns eager.

  John demanded Karl take out the guards as he worked on killing his main target. A veritable stampede of guests shared Holly’s idea of hiding around the house, making the area a nightmare to line up on a specific target. Holly moved in and out of his crosshairs, along with a dozen others. At ten bullets per magazine, he couldn’t afford to kill them all. The second he caught a glimpse of Holly in his scope, he fired.

  Booom!

  A man with dreadlocks and a VonFurenz shirt had chosen a poor path to follow. His right arm was blown off at the elbow, the bullet continuing into his side, piercing his liver and severing his spine. He inadvertently saved Holly’s life. More guests had found their way between Holly and the rifle barrel. She would find safety behind the house soon.

  Three guards were now in view of the gunmen. Just as two ducked their heads out of sight, a torrent of gunfire opened up on them, pelting them with brick debris and chiseling away their cover. Because of the wall and their opposition’s unfavorable angle, John and Karl would be a bitch of a target to hit; however, they couldn’t take position to shoot Holly without relinquishing the safety the wall afforded them. They instead kept their heads down as Karl blindly emptied the remainder of his magazine in the vicinity of the guards, luckily killing one and maiming another. Handgun fire now came from a single guard. As Karl exchanged magazines, John sprang up and shot the third guard, and immediately returned to Holly, who was alarmingly near the safety of the far wall. With a fresh magazine, Karl resumed position.

  John targeted the corner of the house and fired, blasting plaster and glass in front of Holly and her company, halting them. Karl dealt with the incoming gate guards. The two gate rookies arrived and fired at Karl and John, missing widely. Karl shot one in the neck: dead before he hit the ground. John struggled to line up on Holly—now frog-crawling her escape amid a crowd. Desperate to end this, he fired at everyone between him and her, killing them one squeeze at a time. Karl took aim at the second rent-a-cop, whose eyes widened as he stared down the large barrel of the M82. He spun around, arms flailing, and ran like hell, taking two steps before his left leg took a third step on its own, without a body attached to it. He tipped over and rolled to his back in time to see the bullet that burrowed in his forehead like a fifty caliber deer tick.

  In the midst of a lunatical throng, its patrons being picked off one by one, Holly and I impulsively changed directions before we became one of the picked-off. We stayed low, below the people scrambling around us providing ample cover. We’d be behind the bandstand soon, if they didn’t find us first.

  Mike followed Alison up the driveway behind Aaron ‘One Shot’ Cobb, who ran behind the gate-guard Chad Hotchkins. At the end of the driveway and in front of the RV, she saw the two rifle barrels planked over the brick. She moved as near the wall as the foliage of the cypress-pines would allow; Mike followed her every step. One Shot was ahead of them both and had drawn his Desert Eagle. She prayed his name lived up to the hype. She and Mike stopped and waited to see what would become of One Shot and Chad.

  John commanded Karl to help him with locating Holly before it was too late. Karl insisted he take care of the guards, and squeezed one off at Chad. The bullet struck the top of his ballistic-vest and knocked him off his feet and out of consciousness.

  “Caedo… Holly,” John ordered.

  Karl new this tone well and abandoned the guards and sought Holly. John glimpsed us entering the rear of the bandstand, gave an order to his subordinate, and took aim past the speaker tower near the platform—she’d enter his crosshairs in a second. He grinned.

  Pop!

  A single gunshot and a fan of wet mush splattered the side of John’s head. He glanced at his falling partner: enough of his head was missing that it was clear that his partner was no longer controlling Karl’s earthen body.

  John proceeded to square off with One Shot Cobb. Both men took aim at the other with the lightning quick speed and intensity of a draw in an old western duel. As John pulled the trigger, so did One Shot—

  Pop!

  Booom!

  One Shot Cobb ate the M82 bullet as the Desert Eagle round skimmed the side of John’s head—his ear shaved clean off; his cranium shattered down to his mandible. His jaw unhinged at the impacted side, mouth drooped down into a half frown.

  “Sthuckin’ astt-hole!” His anger was short lived, now that no guards were left to stop him.

  Holly had successfully taken cover behind the bandstand. John’s only way of reaching her now would be from the opposite side of the estate. It would take time to carry his rifle and ladder to a location where he could reach Holly, but he was confident that no guards remained to stifle his efforts. He made his way down the ladder as quickly as possible. As he ran, rifle in one hand and ladder in the other, he dizzied from blood loss, but his health wasn’t what was on his mind. Killing the bitch was.

  Alison and Mike crept up slowly along the inner wall, locking eyes with Kloss who was doing the same thing on the other side of the gunman’s post. Kloss signaled them to stay put; he approached the overhanging rifle barrel. His idea to grab the barrel ended when the gunman pulled the gun back. Kloss, Ali, and Mike listened as he descended the ladder stairs in a hurry. Kloss instructed Alison and Mike to find his sister and have her hide, while he searched the outside perimeter. He took both handguns from
the corpse of One Shot and ran to the front gate. His plan of first traversing the side where the gunman had taken post would make Kloss’s efforts futile in reaching him before he reached Holly.

  John rounded the second corner and found a spot he estimated to be near where Holly was taking cover. She would never know what hit her. He leaned the ladder against the brick wall and climbed his way to the top. The foliage of Cypress trees obscured his vision. He would have to stand on the top rung and lean forward through the leafy branches. The barbed wire would snare him, but that didn’t matter. He shed his shirt and draped it over the nest of wire and cautiously erected to a stand on the wall. Once situated, he checked his ammo: two rounds remained, one more than would be necessary. He leaned forward and parted the foliage. The backyard came into view. His chosen spot proved to be directly behind the bandstand and the crouching girl. If he could see through the opposing wall across the backyard, he would see Kloss striding, Desert Eagle in hand.

  John lined up on Holly: a wide open shot. There would be no escape this time. He had her number, and her number was seven. His mangled jaw dripping rivulets of blood twisted out a warped smile.

  Holly stood up and shouted Alison’s name, who was heading toward her. John placed his finger over the trigger. “Die die, my darling,” John muttered, as he centered Holly’s head in his sights.