He had fallen out of bed.
His muscles were taut as piano wire. His skin felt feverish and he wondered if he had caught one of those diseases, the epidemics he had heard mentioned on the radio. He had a killer headache. He pressed his fingers and palms against his forehead and felt his pulse raging, straining against his flesh. The heat radiating from his forehead convinced him he had a fever. If he had to guess, it was well over a hundred degrees, maybe as high as brain-cooking levels, although he felt wired, rather than wiped out. His head was sore and he found a couple of lumps, as if he’d been whacked over the head with a club … Of course, he had fallen out of bed and reacted violently to the nightmares. He would probably find half a dozen bruises on his body in a few hours.
He pulled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt and put on a fresh one, then a pair of sweat pants. He walked down the hall to his father’s bedroom. Saturday morning meant he had a slim chance of actually seeing his father in person. However, when he reached the master bedroom, his father was already showered, shaved and dressed, and was combing his hair. From the determined look on his face, Ryan assumed he was heading out.
“Hey, Dad,” he said.
His father glanced his way briefly while rinsing his hands. “You look like hell.”
Ryan was several inches taller than his father and broader across the chest. He dyed his hair blue, but its natural color was red, no match to his father’s black hair. Based on photos, Ryan favored his mother more than his father and he thought maybe that resemblance brought back bad memories and was the reason his father avoided him. Maybe the simple act of being born had forever damaged the father-son bond.
“I had a bad dream,” Ryan said. “Where are you headed?”
“Errands,” his father said. “In case I’m not back for dinner, I’ll leave a twenty on the counter. Order pizza or something.”
“I was hoping we could talk…”
“Later,” his father said, slapping his shoulder as he slipped past him. “Gotta run.”
“Of course,” Ryan said to his father’s retreating back as he hurried downstairs and, less than a minute later, left the house. “It’s always later.”
Ryan noticed a photo on the floor, its edge sticking out from the closet door. He pulled the door open and found two photos he had seen recently—Ryan as a toddler on his first tricycle, with red, white and blue ribbons dangling from the handlebars, and a picture of him a few years later, cannonballing into a neighbor’s above-ground swimming pool. Sumiko had organized a birthday party for him a week ago and had borrowed a bunch of childhood photos of Ryan from his father to display on a sheet of poster board titled “Ryan Through The Years.” She had included one photo from each year of his life, from birth to his seventeenth birthday, the last taken the morning of the party.
Looking up, he saw a dark wooden box on the shelf, its lid held partially open by a stack of photos hastily put away after the party. Ryan took the box down and laid it on the foot of his father’s bed, intending to put the fallen photos back inside and secure the lid’s latch. Instead he took more photos out and placed them in two rows on the bed. Even in the photos Sumiko hadn’t selected for the poster, he was almost always alone. He had no siblings and his mother had died giving birth to him. His father had taken most of the photos, so he was behind the camera, not pictured with his son. Always alone—that was how Ryan saw himself, and the photos documented a solitary existence. From the moment he’d been born, his life had become derailed. The story of his life was “what might have been.” No relationship with a mother he couldn’t know. The happy memories expected of a normal childhood switched out at birth for years of silent grief. Many of his classmates came from broken homes, children of divorce or of parents who never married, but his family had never been whole. Not for a single day. What should have been his family was nothing more than a broken promise.
He closed his eyes and sighed. His pounding headache was not conducive to philosophical contemplation and he really had no stomach for wallowing in self-pity. Shaking his head, he gathered the photos into a neat stack and shoved them into the laminated box.
He noticed his fingernails and paused. They had darkened from the beds outward, as if bruised, but when he pressed on them they weren’t sore. Had he banged them in his sleep? Both hands? All ten fingernails? Again, he feared some mystery illness coursed through his veins.
When he stood up, lifting the box in one hand, a surge of pain flashed across his forehead and, for a moment, darkness enveloped him. The box fell from his numb fingers and struck the floor.
Disoriented, he swayed on his feet and tasted blood. His lip was split and bleeding where a canine had jabbed into the flesh. Seizure victims could bite their tongues. Was it possible he had experienced a brief seizure?
His father couldn’t afford an emergency room bill, especially for a false alarm. Ryan would wait and see if it got worse before visiting an E.R.
Bending carefully, he picked up the wooden photo box— and discovered a hidden panel in the base. The fall had jarred it loose, less than a quarter-inch, but he found a hidden latch to release the tray and pulled it out. Tucked carefully inside the narrow compartment was a folded piece of loose-leaf paper filled with a swooping, feminine cursive: a handwritten note from his mother that his father had never shown him.
Leaving the box on the bed, he walked slowly out of his father’s bedroom as he read the letter.
In his dream, Dalton Rourke punched Summerdale kids in the face, over and over. He would knock them down and they would rise up again, their faces bloody but ready and willing to take more punishment. At first he enjoyed the continual violence, the grim satisfaction of inflicting pain, unleashing his rage on all the kids who had it easy, had more than him, who looked down their noses at him. He would beat the crap out of every one of them and shake them down, like a tax for having it too good. Teach them that life was anything but easy, then let them crawl home, bawling for their mommies to make it all better.
But the dream suddenly became weird. When one kid’s cheek split open, something hard and twisted grew out of the blood, like a diseased shrub. Another teen, with the bridge of his nose split, clawed at his face as vines sprouted from beneath the torn flesh. A third one doubled over, coughing up blood from internal injuries one moment, then spewing fast-growing vines the next. Wooden spikes erupt from the fourth teen’s eye sockets.
Staring at their transformations in horror, he backed away. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “What the hell are you?”
“We are what you made us.”
“You’re—you’re not human!”
The kid with spikes for eyes turned to the others and said, “Look who’s talking, boys!”
“You’re crazy,” Dalton whispered.
The others laughed hysterically, pausing to grunt uncomfortably as vines and branches erupted from their flesh and splashed him with their blood, before resuming their laughter. Their blood sprayed his eyes, and his vision blurred and swam as he tried to blink it away. The more he tried to see, the darker everything became, first blood-red, before descending into darkness, where their laughter followed him in a series of distorted echoes.
He awoke in his narrow bed in his cramped bedroom overflowing with his intentional clutter, soaked in his own sweat, panting as if he’d run a four-minute mile. His head throbbed and it felt like a steel band was tightening around his skull. After a few moments, he tasted blood in his mouth and he thought crazily that the splatter of dream-blood had crossed over from nightmare into reality, that the blood of his victims contaminated him even now that he was awake.
Lurching out of bed, he stumbled to his trashcan and emptied the contents of his stomach, retching so hard he felt muscles cramping in his side. His lips were cut, swollen and bloody. Droplets of blood speckled his forearms and hands. He curled his right hand into a fist so hard that his arm trembled. With a savage grunt, he drove his fist into the wall, his knuckles smashing a hole through the pl
aster.
Jesse Trumball raised the tire iron over the man’s head and this time nobody stopped him. He swung the rod down, like it was an axe and he was splitting wood. The metal crushed the man’s skull as the woman screamed. He swung it again, pulping the man’s head. Lifeless eyes hung loose in their shattered sockets. By the third swing he noticed bits of fractured molars sticking to the tire iron, which was tacky with blood.
The woman kneeled beside the dead man, her face gripped in her hands, wailing inconsolably. Taking position in front of her, he hoisted the tire iron again. Before he swung it, she looked up at him, hair wild, her eyes wide with grief and terror, tears streaking her mascara so that he had the impression her face had begun to melt. He waited for the inevitable plea for life. Actually, he wanted her to beg for mercy so that for one moment she would understand how pointless that was, that she had wasted her life believing the wrong things. He edged the rod slightly higher, jaw clenched, preparing to split her skull open with the first blow.
She took a deep, trembling breath. “You’re a monster,” she said. “You know that now, don’t you?”
Jesse screamed and swung the tire iron—
His body jerked awake.
His eyes flew open, his heart racing as he took a moment to recognize his bedroom. Memory merged with the dream. He fought to separate reality from fantasy. Had he killed the man? And the woman? Or had he spared them? No… he’d wanted to kill the man, but Bart had stopped him. Bart had been absent in the dream version.
Was the dream a vision of what would have happened if he’d attacked the theatergoers alone? Or just his subconscious playing games with him? He grabbed the bed sheet to toss it aside and noticed that it was slashed in several places, as if someone had gone nuts with a box cutter. As he stood, a pounding headache overwhelmed him and he swayed on his feet, catching the headboard to stop himself from tipping over.
With a little help from Bart and Keith, he’d polished off a case of beer before coming home. That could explain why most of the night was a blur and maybe account for the weird dream and the morning hangover. He wondered if his father felt this way every day of his life. Staggering toward the bathroom, he rubbed two raised bumps on his scalp. He couldn’t remember banging his head. Maybe he’d passed out and Bart and Keith had given him a taste of his own weapon for scaring the crap out of them.
If they had messed with him while he was unconscious, he’d break their arms, then shove their heads through the nearest brick wall. Either way, they were dead to him.
Twenty-One
Kim Jacobs came to her senses, gradually aware of a series of body aches, as brief images from recent memory flashed across her mind: working late to finalize her company’s financial statements, leaving the supermarket after picking up ingredients to cook herself dinner, the flat tire, her attempt to change the flat tire, the tall man in the van who wouldn’t go away. Then everything came back to her, the attack in the street, banging her head against the side of her Altima, lying in the back of his van with duct tape wrapped around her legs …
Even before she willed her eyes open, the pain in her head was throbbing in time with her heartbeat. She assumed she had suffered a concussion in the attack, possibly a fractured skull. Pressed together, her wrists burned, and she couldn’t move her legs, though her bare toes rubbed against thin carpeting. Her shoulders ached as if someone had tried to pull her arms out of their sockets. In a moment, she understood why. Her body was suspended vertically, all her weight supported by her wrists held high overhead.
When she looked up, she saw rope looped around her wrists and tied to a large eyebolt screwed into the ceiling. Her toes brushed the ground, but couldn’t support much of her weight. Instead, she twisted in a slow rotation, glimpsing an unlit neon sign of letters spelling out the word ARCADE. Beneath the sign was a room with a large display window, but no pinball machines or coin-operated video games. Anything that had been in there had been stolen or sold. Turning a bit farther, she saw a three-tiered rack holding a dozen chipped bowling balls, then a series of polished wooden bowling lanes fronted with standard consoles and attached plastic seats, ringed by plastic benches for those not keeping score. She saw no pins at the ends of the lanes, just dark holes beneath the pin-setters. She recognized the place. The bowling alley had been closed for several months. Years ago, she had bowled at Laurel Lanes with her coworkers in a casual league on Tuesday nights. Now she was a prisoner here.
Turning farther, she recoiled in horror as she almost bumped into the body of a dead man hanging upside down by his ankles, wearing only a white t-shirt and boxers. Rectangular sections of flesh on his thighs and upper arms had been carved out with a sharp instrument, the wounds raw and red.
The cop in the back of the van, she thought immediately. Her gaze lowered to check his face. She screamed.
His body ended at the bloody stump of his neck. He’d been decapitated.
Shrieking, she lurched against her bonds, twisting and pulling with all her strength, hoping to break free of the ropes or dislodge the eyebolt in the ceiling. After thrashing helplessly for what felt like ten minutes, she sagged in exhaustion, panting as the white spots in her vision disappeared one by one.
“You are strong,” he said. “Good. That strength will help you survive the ritual.”
Pivoting on her big toe, she twisted so she could see her kidnapper. He sat on a high stool behind the shoe counter. The cubbyholes behind him held a half-dozen unmatched shoes, abandoned just like the damaged bowling balls, too worthless to sell.
With his hands positioned on either side of a scuffed red bowling ball bag, the tall man smiled at her. “I wanted you awake for this.”
“Are you—are you planning to … kill me?”
“If I wanted you dead, you would be dead.”
“Then what?” Kim asked, horrible possibilities rising to the surface of her mind faster than she could push them back down.
“I have special plans for you,” he said gravely. “I want to bring you through the demon gate.”
“What—what does that mean?”
“In time,” he said. “First, I want you to witness this.”
He reached into the bowling bag and she braced herself, sensing what was in the bag. For a moment, she squeezed her eyes shut, but then she had to look—
—at the severed head of the dead cop.
“Oh, God—oh, God—oh, God,” she whispered.
She felt her gorge rise and gagged as bile burned her throat.
“You see,” he said slowly, raising his fingers toward the cop’s head, “they must shed their human face. That is the first step.”
His fingernails were angled into sharp points and seemed unnaturally thick, like animal claws. With the fingernail of his index finger, he dug into the top of the cop’s forehead and peeled a long strip of skin away from the face. Then another one. And another.
She screamed until her voice failed.
Dean stood watching the television news at low volume, tapping the red marker against his palm. Dr. Charlotte Kinzie, the news station’s medical expert, was explaining to the anchor that the Burlington County Health Department had declared additional outbreaks of food poisoning, mentioning salmonella, listeria and e-coli, traced to a local supermarket. In addition to the new outbreaks, the influenza and MRSA cases were reaching epidemic proportions, with over a dozen deaths. While she spoke, the station aired footage of a packed emergency room, doctors and nurses hurrying through the hallways, followed by a brief interview with an elderly doctor who declared the situation to be the worst he had experienced in his forty years in medicine. He mentioned that the new strain of influenza was deadlier than the one Laurel Hill experienced eighteen years ago, only three years into his tenure at Laurel Hill General.
Sam had had his nose glued to the laptop all morning, spending half his time checking for new accidents of a bizarre nature and relaying the incident locations to Dean so he could update their oversized town map, and th
e other half seeking additional lore for ways to defeat the oni.
“A guy fell cleaning his gutters,” Sam said. “Died.”
“Normal accident?”
“He impaled his brain on a garden hoe.”
“I’ll add it with a question mark.”
Bobby, dressed in his Fed suit and ready to roll, hung around long enough to take an old-school approach, calling hunters he had worked with over the years, looking for anyone who may have crossed paths with an oni.
“The town’s scheduled to have a fiftieth anniversary parade tomorrow. We could try the soybean casting-out ceremony,” Sam suggested.
“Definitely Plan B,” Dean said. “Maybe Plan C.”
Knuckles rapped impatiently on the front door.
“Did somebody order pizza?” Dean asked.
“For breakfast?” Sam said.
“Well, it ain’t Roy,” Bobby said as he covered his phone. “It’s his place.”
“Maybe he lost his key?” Dean wondered aloud. But his internal paranoia meter had started ticking.
Bobby walked toward the door as he ended his call. “Thanks, Digger,” he said into his cell phone. “Find anything, call me pronto. I’ll owe you.”
Dean looked at Sam and mouthed “Digger?” Sam shrugged.
Bobby glanced through the curtained window beside the door. “It’s McClary.”
Dean frowned. “Were you expecting him?”
“Didn’t schedule a play date, if that’s what you mean.”
Bobby reached for the doorknob.
“Hold up a second.”
Dean hurried to the kitchen, grabbing Sam’s arm on the way. “Back my play.”
Sam looked confused, but withheld his questions.
Dean set a meat cleaver on the countertop and gave Sam a meaningful nod. Then he pulled a jug of borax from beneath the sink and poured the liquid over a striped dishtowel. He wrung it out just shy of sopping. With his hands wet from the cleanser, he moved toward Bobby, dishtowel in hand.
Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage Page 18