Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2)

by Chad Huskins

  “Who are they?”

  “You tell me, you’re the one who sensed them comin’.”

  There were blue curtains on the window of the door. Kaley pushed those curtains to the side, for the moment wondering about the wonderful domestic tastes of a child rapist and killer, then peered out the window.

  A large, black SUV was parked about twenty yards away from them, and about ten yards away from the shed, with its right side facing the lodge. The SUV was still running, and the back of it was pushing out a dense cloud of white. Three men had emerged. The snow had let up some, so she could make them all out. They were all in black pants and jackets, with those big Russian fur caps on their heads, black gloves, and what had to be pistols in their hands.

  Kaley had felt their presence in the same way she detected other anomalies around her—a vibration along the same web of emotional intent connecting her and all other living things. On some level, she even felt the tiniest little chipmunks and insects in the forest all around them, but these were “dim” feelings that usually passed by her awareness, like the various ghost itches that crop up all over the body, most of them too miniscule unless one was paying exclusive attention. But these fellows, they were the big itches, a raging maelstrom of paranoia and violent intent.

  One of them had run towards another cabin, a much larger structure than the one Kaley and Spencer were in. “Who’s cabin is that?” she said.

  “Zakhar’s.”

  “I thought this was his cabin.”

  “They both are. That one’s the main residence. This one we’re in was an old hunting lodge, one his family used to rent out as outfitters, led people on hunting excursions.”

  Kaley wondered if the men would leave once they found the other cabin empty, but figured that wasn’t likely. “We have to leave,” she said.

  “Can’t. You saw to that.” Spencer had his Glock in one hand, the revolver in his other. “I was all set to leave, an’ would’ve been clear of here if I hadn’t listened to you. I should have my fucking head examined for hangin’ around when I knew this was comin’.” Kaley’s eyes watered. The heat coming off of Spencer was one she was familiar with; it was the same anger he’d felt that night when he thought himself disrespected by Dmitry. In this state, he was even more volatile and unpredictable than usual.

  “We have to hide then,” she said. “At least until they go away.”

  “Can’t,” he said, pushing the curtain to the side with the end of his Glock and peeking outside. “Zakhar’s sittin’ dead on the floor right behind us. They’ll fan out, search every nook an’ cranny.”

  “Then we’ll go out the back! If we hurry we can—”

  “And then what? Hide out there for hours? It’s getting close to sunset. Temperature’s gonna be droppin’ out there. We’d freeze to death before we made it to any road.”

  “We could hide in the woods, and wait for them to leave!”

  “I left the car runnin’, little girl! Because I thought I was getting’ outta here! I should have my fuckin’ head examined!” he repeated. “They’ll know we’re still here, because there are no fresh tire tracks in the snow leadin’ outta here. We’d freeze or starve to death by the time they decide to call off their search. The road’s too far away to walk. So no, we can’t hide out in the woods until they leave. Besides, they’ve blocked us off from the woods to the north, and there’s a frozen lake between us and the woods to the south. We’d never get around it in time before getting shot.”

  Kaley looked back out the window, and swallowed. It was dimmer than it had been when she’d followed Spencer out to the shed. He’s right. Getting darker out there. The three men had made it back to the shed, and were inside, probably talking and planning. “Maybe…” Kaley tried to think. She was almost hyperventilating. Her greatest fear was for the boy in her arms. “Maybe they’ll just think he committed suicide! We could put a gun in Zakhar’s hand—”

  Spencer laughed. “Not a bad thought, but these are pros, little girl. Almost as savvy as a forensics team. They’ll know an execution-style hit when they see it.”

  “What…what if we, like, pretend that we’ve got him hostage? We could tell them to leave us alone or we’ll kill him.”

  “They won’t buy that. If we came out here just to get Zakhar, then we came out here to kill him. They know that. They won’t just leave him alone with us.” Spencer moved to another window, peeked out. His tongue was doing that thing again, where it touched his top lip and didn’t move. He wasn’t blinking. Lost in thought.

  Suddenly, Kaley was very aware of the flimsiness of this lodge. It was solid. She had never before considered solid, material objects to be so flimsy. Having experienced both a material and immaterial body, she now had a very different concept of what objects were. Now, almost everything around her seemed thin as paper, yet as clunky and inert as a broken down Chevy. Useless. Everything around me is utterly useless.

  The lodge’s floors were solid beneath her solid feet, and her feet were cold. The lodge was very nice and done-up with rugs and cupboards and refrigerators and couches and a warm, crackling fireplace, but its walls were also just plain wood with windows made of glass, the roof likely no better than shingles or tin.

  Back at school, Kaley conducted her incorporeal self to turn back away from the classroom door and head towards the bathroom. Very soon now, Mrs. Cartwright would send someone to check on her, and if they stepped out and saw her standing at the door, and then reached out to grab her…

  Thankfully, the girls’ bathroom was just a few steps away. Kaley pressed the door. It did not budge—or maybe it did?—just an instant before she slipped through it. She felt a cold deep inside of her, like she’d just swallowed a dozen ice cubes. The world became fuzzy as she passed through it; she didn’t see the insides of the wooden door, it didn’t work quite like that. Instead, the world became almost black and fuzzy. When she emerged on the other side, she felt short of breath. This made her equally short of breath while holding the boy back in the cabin. It was strange how one “body” was affected by the doings of the other.

  “I think I hear her,” someone whispered. It wasn’t the main commanding voice, rather a smaller, teenier voice. A subordinate to the first voice. “Yessss…yes, it’s her! She’s somewhere nearby! Yes, yes, yes, yesssssssssss!”

  At school, Kaley half walked, half slid towards one of the stall doors. She put a hand out, felt the same slippery coldness—and perhaps the door did move just a tad at her touch?—and she slipped on through. The murky water was in here, too, foaming and frothing around the base of the toilet.

  Spencer moved to another window, and peeked out. “Probably the same assholes been callin’ Zakhar’s phone. They didn’t get an answer, so they came to check. I should have my fuckin’ head examined,” he spat.

  Yeah, you should, Kaley thought, but didn’t say. Right now, it was Spencer’s show. She was out of ideas and inside the lodge, in this solid-state form, she was just as vulnerable as Spencer and the boy. “Okay…okay, so, what do we do?”

  Spencer looked at the kitchen, the living room, the dead body on the floor, the boy in Kaley’s arms, then, strangely enough, he glanced up at the mounted moose head on the wall, squinted, and tilted his head, as if the moose had said something rather amusing. Then, all at once, he turned to her tossed her the revolver. Without thinking, Kaley reached out to catch it, just like she had reached out to catch the boy in her arms. Though, she caught it awkwardly and in a panic, afraid that if she dropped it it would fire. She now held it by its barrel. “What do you want me to do with this?”

  “You’ll shoot it,” he said.

  “I…I can’t shoot anybody—”

  “You will if ya don’t want those men comin’ in here an’ finishin’ that boy off like Zakhar would have.”

  Kaley noticed his ploy immediately. He hadn’t made her feel frightened for her own life, no. He knows how to get to me. He knows to appeal to my empathy. He knows that’s what made m
e…do what I did that night. “I-I-I don’t even know how to—”

  “You’ve watched movies, right? You’ve seen Star Wars, how Han Solo pulls the goddam trigger? Yosemite Sam? Wyatt Earp? Just point, an’ pull the trigger. Trust me, once ya get used to it, it’s actually kinda f—”

  She shook her head fervently and held it up to him. “Spencer, I-I can’t—”

  “I just need ya to shoot out the window, keep their heads down, while I do the same. If they know there’s just one person in here, they’ll come in no problem, kill us both. If we make ’em think there are two or three hitters hiding in here, then they’ll be a little reluctant to come inside. That’ll at least stall ’em, give us time to think.” Kaley started to protest again, but couldn’t find her voice.

  The boy had buried his head deeper in her shoulder, and was clutching her arms in great fistfuls of her clothing and skin. Her fear was spreading to him, amplifying his own. She was losing control of herself. The feedback had begun—his increased fear was diminishing her reserves of courage.

  Spencer said, “I need to send them a message first, though. Something to make them understand that we’re not just a couple o’ jerks in here. We have to get inside their heads a little. They need to be made to see. They need to see that we’re mean motor scooters, too.”

  “H-how?” said Kaley, now trembling.

  Spencer looked all around the lodge, then peeked out the kitchen window. “Shit, they’re coming!” All at once, he walked over to the radio on the kitchen countertop, flipped it on (it was playing some loud Russian folk music), turned it way, way up, and said, “Drop the kid!”

  “I’m not leaving him!”

  “Drop the kid and grab Zakhar’s legs!”

  Kaley stared at him. She was locked in stunned inaction, both inside the girls’ bathroom at Cartersville Middle School and inside the lodge. The duplicity was killing her, as was the fear—the damnable, tangible fear. “Grab…?”

  Spencer flipped the body over. All at once, she was face-to-face with a dead man. The blood had pooled around his face, leaving one side covered in blood. The mouth was slightly agape, like it wanted to say something, and the eyes were open. An ember of surprise still lived in those dead eyes.

  “Just grab his feet!” he shouted. Kaley looked up at him. “Help me get him over to the door! I’ll do the rest!”

  There was something else. Another tingling sensation rippled through her, and from multiple directions. She hear the whispers “…she’s so close now, we’ve almost found her…” trickling down the back of her brain like oil, while at the same time something swam in the water all around her, a black eel of some kind, which almost peeked its head out to look around, but never quite.

  And something else. More paranoia…and greed…and fury. More bundles of hatred coming her way. “Spencer…there’s more. More are coming.”

  “I figured as much—”

  “No, I mean…the Others. They Others are—”

  “Then stop standing there like a fucking retard and grab his goddam feet!”

  Shcherbakov didn’t have to wait long, thankfully. The woman pulled up in a grey Honda Civic, parked kind of lopsided in the parking space, backed up, and corrected her parking job. She sat inside her car for two minutes. Shcherbakov could see her looking down, fiddling with something. Probably texting, he figured.

  Finally, she stepped out. A beautiful middle-aged blonde wearing a green parka and an overly large black stocking cap, with large flaps over the ears. Her gloves were also comically large; big red mittens that allowed for no dexterity at all, evidenced by her first two attempts to open her back door before succeeding on the third attempt. She produced a pair of plastic shopping bags, all of them filled with what looked like fruit—some apples, bananas, maybe a pineapple, a few oranges and some grapes. She wove the handles of the plastic bags over her forearms, stuffed a few more in her fists, and then shut the back door with her foot and headed for a nearby set of stairs.

  Shcherbakov stepped out of his car, shut the door, but left it running. Hands in his coat, he waited as another car passed in front of him, kicking up some slush, and then hustled across the lot. He came right up behind the woman just as she was approaching the top of the stairs. When he was almost to the second-floor landing, he slowed down. She was struggling to put the key into her apartment door and hold up her bags.

  Improvisation had become Shcherbakov’s key skill in these matters. “Need help holding something?” he said. She looked at him, and smiled. A perfect row of clean, white teeth. Her parents had taken good care of her, most likely going the whole nine yards with braces and regular cleanings. One of the many reasons she had been prepared for a life of modeling, if Shcherbakov’s information was correct.

  “Thank you,” she said in near perfect Russian, and handed him all the bags in her right hand.

  “Not a problem.”

  “Very cold out today.”

  “Yes. Very. I understand the storm may lessen throughout the day, then get worse later on tonight. Much worse, they’re saying.”

  “Oh my.”

  She reached up to put the key in the deadbolt, unlocked it, and pushed the door open with her foot. Shcherbakov smiled at her as he handed her back the bags, took one look around to make sure no one was around. Just as the woman accepted her bags back from him and was issuing thanks, Shcherbakov withdrew the Taser from his other pocket and touched it to the side of her neck. At full power, it made her go stiff as a board and drop to her knees. The bags dropped from her hands. In rehearsed movements, Shcherbakov caught her, slipped the Taser back inside his coat, and dragged her inside. He kicked the door shut with his heel and immediately produced the auto-injector from his inside his coat pocket. The injector gave the woman the effects of four grams of a concoction of Shcherbakov’s own devising. A high-potency short-to-intermediate-acting 3-hydroxy benzodiazepine drug. It had all five intrinsic benzodiazepine effects: anxiolytic, amnesic, sedative/hypnotic, anticonvulsant and muscle relaxant.

  Vasilisa Rubashkin’s eyes opened in dull disbelief for a moment, then the auto-injector’s chemical set in, and the eyes kind of floated. Doubtless, she was off in a dream somewhere, perhaps one about the nice man that helped her with her bags of fruit.

  Thinking on that, Shcherbakov moved the woman’s body into her living room so that he could step outside to retrieve the remaining bags. A tiny little dog was barking fiercely somewhere; the woman’s Jack Russell terrier trapped inside his pen in the kitchen. From another pocket inside his coat, Shcherbakov took out the zip ties and bound the woman’s wrists and ankles, just in case by some freak phenomenon she was able to fight off some of the effects and move around.

  Shcherbakov collected the fruit outside, glanced around to make sure no one had seen, and then slipped back inside. The dog was still barking. He needed to end that, lest an annoyed neighbor came over to complain. He stepped over the top of the pen. The little dog ran from him, but it had nowhere to go. It tried nipping at him as he snatched it by its throat. He knelt, squeezed very hard, and waited. The animal kicked and scratched and clawed, but with each second did so less and less. Finally, the animal went limp. Shcherbakov held on for a few more seconds, just to be certain, then snapped the neck and tossed the corpse to the floor.

  He got up, searched the house for any surprise guests or visitors that shouldn’t be there, and once satisfied, Shcherbakov stepped back outside and retrieved his bag from the car. He had his target, now the only thing left was the message.

  A man nearing sixty years old approached the front steps of the lodge cautiously. His name was Semyon Travkin. In his hand was a Makarov pistol. The two younger men flanking him, Timofei and Erik, each held Uzis in their hands. Everyone had their weapons at low-ready. Behind them, waiting at the wheel in the SUV, Yulian was on the phone with the others, as per Semyon’s command.

  The storm had grown indecisive—now powerful, now dying down, now windy again and with more snow, now dissipating
again. The lodge of one of their benefactors was largely surrounded by mounds of snow that had collected in great slopes, up to the windowsills in some places.

  A brief check of the main cabin had yielded nothing. No one was at home, but smoke was coming out of the chimney in the old hunting lodge. It’s either Zakhar or some of his hunting buddies from the hunting society, Semyon thought.

  In his pocket, the phone rang. Semyon answered it. It was Yulian, in the SUV. “I just called Abram. They’re still ten minutes away.” A pregnant pause, then, “Perhaps we should wait?”

  Semyon looked at his cousins on either side of him. “I’m going to knock,” he said, then hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. To his cousins, he said, “Stay close.” The snow was getting knee high in places, causing him to take larger, more awkward steps. There looked to be slight indentations in the snow—Footprints? The storm was filling them in, working hard to keep its secrets. Semyon walked to the top of the steps, and paused. “Zakhar?” he called. “Zakhar Ogorodnikov, are you in there?”

  No answer. For a while, no one moved. Semyon thought he could hear a radio going inside. Loud folk music.

  Behind him, Timofei whispered, “This doesn’t feel right. We should go back.” Semyon looked at him, saw the look of foreboding on his face.

  Semyon waved them on in silence, and started towards the door. As he did, the door parted suddenly. Semyon paused, and his gun came up. Ogorodnikov came to the door…or staggered to the door…or something. His face came peeking through, then Semyon saw the blood on his head, and took a step back as the neck came through, then the arms and chest, then the whole body flopped out onto the porch and landed facedown with a hard thunk! on the frozen planks.

  Wordlessly, Semyon and his people leapt back from the door as it slammed shut. He heard it lock on the other side. Semyon felt his blood boil over. It’s him. He’s here. Semyon had never had any special fondness for Ogorodnikov, he’d only ever met the man four or five times at gatherings of the families, and didn’t like how the man always kept to himself. But he was family, god damn it.