Sam eased open the passenger side door, fearful that the metallic squeak of the hinge would alert the oni, and almost dropped his gasoline-filled bottle in the process. He helped the woman slide across the bench seat. As he turned to climb into the car after her, the heel of his boot struck an empty soda can and it clanked across the parking lot. Sam froze, staring toward the roof of the bowling alley, one hand holding the bottle, the other ready to snatch his own lighter out of his jacket pocket.
After a moment, Sam got in the car and pulled the door shut with a soft click.
“Are you police?” the woman asked.
“Consultants,” Dean said, watching the bowling alley roof through the windshield as he reached down to start the car. “Tom and John Smith.”
“Kim Jacobs,” she said. “Thanks for rescuing me.”
“We’re not out of the woods—”
A dark figure dropped from the sky with a roar and landed beside the car.
Kim screamed, her tortured voice raw.
Dean grabbed his Molotov cocktail off the dashboard and pushed his door open. “Sam …”
Dean’s voice faded away and Sam shook his head to clear the cobwebs.
He was sat in a truck stop diner, in a red booth across from Lucifer, who was slapping the bottom of a ketchup bottle over a plate of scrambled eggs. Instead of ketchup, blood dripped out of the bottle.
“Hello, Sammy!” Lucifer said. Putting the bottle down, he snapped his fingers in front of Sam’s face. “You in there, Sam? Pay attention. This is our sharing time.”
Sam reached for the scar on his left hand, but he was holding a beer bottle in his right hand and for some reason he couldn’t release it.
“C’mon, don’t be a party pooper,” Lucifer said, frowning. “Eat up! Everyone’s watching.”
Sam looked down at his plate.
A dozen gleaming white eyeballs stared up at him.
“Tastes better with a little salt,” Lucifer said, and slid the salt shaker across the table with the tip of his index finger.
A man on a stool spun around to face Sam. His eyes had been gouged out, the sockets dark and empty, leaking tears of blood.
“They’re to die for.”
* * *
Tora snapped the arm bone in half, completing the calling ritual. Then he heard a plink of metal against asphalt, followed by a metallic click. Opening his third eye, he looked beyond the building, seeing three people in the car, the woman seated between—the two interlopers! Rising to his feet, he dashed across the roof and launched himself off the edge.
The human on the driver’s side came out of the car with a gasoline-filled bottle and a lighter, attempting a firebomb attack. With a flick of his power, the oni disabled the lighter long enough to throw the man against the wall of the bowling alley, where he struck his head and fell to the ground, dazed. The bottle shattered, spraying gasoline across the ground and the wall of the building.
The other man sat in the car, in some kind of trance, his right hand holding another fire bomb as he pushed it against his left. The woman cowered against him, screaming herself hoarse. “No! No! No!”
Catching her kicking leg, Tora dragged her from the car and wrapped his large hand around the back of her neck. “Struggle and I crush your spine.”
She froze.
“Move!” he said, pushing her ahead of him.
If these two infernal men knew his location, others might follow. With the calling complete, the three would come to him, but until they were transformed by the ritual of blood, they would remain vulnerable. Fortunately, they would come wherever he was, and he had scouted alternate locations as a precaution. The decision to abandon the bowling alley was simple.
He ripped the plywood off the front door, punched through the plate glass and turned the deadbolt. After he shoved the woman inside, he scooped up the Zippo and ignited the gasoline on the wall. Then he tossed the lighter through the open car door onto the front seat, igniting the upholstery.
The two incapacitated men had attempted to run him down at the stadium. They didn’t act like any traditional law enforcement officers he had ever encountered. He wondered if they were hunters and decided they must be. He grabbed his duffel bag, then dragged the hysterical woman to his van parked in back.
Let the interfering bastards burn!
Dean regained his senses, and felt a flash of heat.
He rolled onto his back in time to see the blue van race out of the parking lot.
He remembered the oni’s attack, his lighter malfunctioning—
Something was burning.
Flaming gasoline had ignited the sleeve of his jacket. He whipped the coat off and stomped on the sleeve, extinguishing the fire.
Black smoke streamed out of the Monte Carlo.
Sam!
Skirting the flames around the broken bottle, he rushed to the car and saw the bench seat smoldering around the Zippo lighter. Tossing his ruined jacket over the seat, he smothered the flame.
Sam stared through the windshield, the unused Molotov clutched in his right hand. As soon as Dean plucked the bottle out of his hand, Sam reached for his scar.
From the trunk of the car, Dean retrieved a portable fire extinguisher and sprayed the burnt seat cushion for good measure.
How can we win with the deck stacked against us?
“Dean?” Sam said, looking around before focusing on his older brother. “What happened? I saw the—Where’s Kim?”
“We lost her.”
Twenty-Eight
“I really wanted to toss the old bastard down the stairs.”
Dalton Rourke sat beside Jimmy Ferrato on the grassy incline that overlooked the high-speed rail line. Escaping the house had been as simple as opening his bedroom window. As soon as his grandparents started to dress for an early dinner before seeing Fiddler on the Roof at the Cheshire Theater, he slipped out. There was no chance they would ruin their big night trying to track him down. Hell, they might not even open his bedroom door to check on him before they left.
He and Jimmy often visited this embankment to watch the trains zoom past, so fast the faces in the windows were indistinct blurs. The rush of the trains promised instant escape from the town. It didn’t matter that the people on the trains were mostly commuters, coming from or returning to Philadelphia, maybe New York. The idea of escape was all that mattered. Getting the hell out of Laurel Hill, New Jersey. He hated his life and that made him hate the town that had trapped him within its borders. Once Dalton got out, he would never return.
“I could picture it in my head, Jimmy,” Dalton continued. “I heard his bones crunch and him wailing in pain. It was so sweet. But then I saw the look in my grandmother’s eyes. She wasn’t afraid. No, man, it was like she was daring me to hurt him, daring me to take that next step, like that’s what they’d been waiting for all these years, baiting me to commit a crime serious enough to have me locked up.”
“Sick way to live, dude,” Jimmy said, chuckling darkly.
“But if I killed him and her,” Dalton said, “I’d be free. There’d be nobody to turn me in. I could hop a train and be gone like the wind.”
“Dream on, D-man,” Jimmy said, chuckling again. “I’ve seen you lay a righteous beat-down on dudes looked at you cross-eyed, but no way you’re gonna kill your g-parents.”
“You think it’s funny?” Dalton asked, climbing to his feet to tower over his friend, fists clenched. “You think I’m funny?”
Jimmy scrambled back and jumped up. “C’mon, man,” he said. “It’s a joke, you know. A whatchamacallit, reality check. Right?”
Sudden fury surged in Dalton and he swung his right fist into his scrawny friend’s gut, doubling him over. “My life is not a joke!”
Jimmy sputtered, holding up a hand to stall Dalton. “What the hell—!”
“You think I’m a joke?”
“Not what I meant, okay…”
Dalton felt the familiar rumble of an approaching high-speed train. He ha
d read once that they traveled up to 150 miles per hour and they blew through many train stations without slowing down.
“You want a reality check?” Dalton asked.
He grabbed the back of Jimmy’s shirt collar and a belt loop and ran him down the incline while Jimmy staggered to keep his balance. Out of the corner of his eye, Dalton saw the silver blur flashing toward them, glittering in the late-afternoon sunlight.
“Here’s your reality check!”
Using Jimmy’s forward momentum, Dalton hurled him onto the train tracks. His arms flailing, one of Jimmy’s feet touched down between the rails a split second before the high-speed train struck his body. The bone-crushing impact was muffled by the roar of the train.
Dalton dropped to his knees, closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sky as the wind from the train’s passage whipped his clothes and cooled the fire burning under his skin.
A voice from inside his head spoke to him. “Come to me!”
Suddenly, he knew there was a place for him.
“So, Jesse,” Bart Larribeau said as the three of them walked along the paved bike path that wound behind the elementary and middle schools, “Keith and me been talking about this and we decided—”
“You decided?” Jesse interrupted, feeling anger bubbling up, again. After he had stabbed his old man, he thought he’d cured himself of his anger issues. After all, his father had always been the problem in his life and Jesse had finally shut him up for good. His next order of business: hit the road and never come back. But why rush? Nobody would miss his father. He had no job, no coworkers, no family or friends who wanted anything to do with him. The man was toxic and anyone who knew him would experience relief at his absence. Jesse could take his time and gather enough funds to hit the road in style.
Then Bart and Keith had requested a meeting, said it was important. He thought maybe the cops knew something, so he had agreed to meet them back in the woods, away from prying eyes.
Jesse wore a gray hoodie with the hood pulled tight over his bald head to hide the weird lumps that had started to break through the skin. He needed to see a doctor, but that could wait until he set himself up in another town, far from here.
“We got this sweet home burglary routine now,” Bart continued. “Low risk, high reward. And you … you’re not interested and that’s fine. You’re too hardcore for us, Jesse. That tire iron beating … You nearly killed that dude. So, me and Keith, we decided we should go our own way. You got your thing, we got ours. No harm, no foul, right?”
Jesse stood with Bart on his left and Keith on his right. He looked back and forth between them, incredulous. “You both decided this?”
“Yeah, man,” Keith said, shrugging. “Different strokes.”
Jesse raised his right arm swiftly and rammed his elbow into Keith’s throat. Gasping for air, Keith dropped to his knees. Then Jesse grabbed both sides of Bart’s head in his hands and pulled his face down as he brought his knee up, shattering Bart’s nose. Bart staggered backward, stumbling off the asphalt path and down the dirt embankment toward the streambed below.
Jesse followed Bart.
“You want to kick me out of your pathetic gang?” he said. “You think I need you two losers?” He grabbed the back of Bart’s head and slammed his face repeatedly into the nearest tree trunk. “You’re pathetic.”
He dropped Bart to the ground, climbed the embankment and found Keith lying on his side, choking and slobbering helplessly. Grabbing Keith’s wrist, Jesse dragged him down the slope and dropped him beside Bart’s lifeless body. While Keith sputtered and wheezed, Jesse found a nice hefty rock.
Keith stared up at Jesse, his eyes widening in panic when he saw the rock raised above him. He sputtered some more. “Nuh-nuh-nuh!”
“You had your say,” Jesse said and slammed the rock down on Keith’s face.
After the third or fourth crushing impact of stone against flesh and bone, Jesse stopped.
Neither of his former friends was recognizable. That seemed appropriate.
He spared a few moments to swipe their wallets and cash. Then he covered their bodies with dead leaves, twigs, clumps of moist dirt, and bits of brush—enough camouflage to conceal them for a while from any bikers or pedestrians who might pass by on the trail above.
Relieved rather than remorseful, he said, “Good riddance.”
A voice spoke, not from without, but from within: “Come to me!”
Ryan Bramble sat on the ground behind the small shopping center consisting of Sal’s Sandwich Shop, LH Liquors, Tattoo U, and Tony’s Pizzeria, hidden between two of the four Dumpsters. Rocking back and forth, his hands pressed to the sides of his head, he tried not to think about the secret his father had kept from him his whole life. Because each time he thought about it, he wanted to kill his father. He debated walking the three miles back to his home and finishing what he’d started. As much as he tried to calm himself, the anger boiled up inside him.
He had pushed Sumiko away and was afraid to go near her now. Her computer monitor had been the first casualty of his insane rage, and he couldn’t bear the thought that he might hurt her.
What’s happening to me?
The sour tang of garbage filled his nostrils, but the unpleasant odor fitted his mood. At the moment, he didn’t trust himself to be around anyone.
Movement registered on the periphery of his vision. Glancing down, he saw a rat’s head poking out from under the Dumpster on his right, its nose twitching excitedly. The same smells that disgusted Ryan probably filled the beady-eyed rodent with delight.
He sat still as the rat edged closer. Maybe it was going to challenge him. This was the rat’s turf and Ryan had intruded. Its pink paws took a couple more tentative steps toward him.
Ryan was unaware that he had bared his own teeth until he flicked out his hand and caught the rat, wrapping his fingers around its back and attempting to squeeze the life out of it. His dark fingernails cut into the nearly boneless flesh. The rat squealed and clawed at him, its sharp teeth nipping into Ryan’s fingers, drawing blood. No matter how hard he squeezed, the damn thing wouldn’t die.
He slammed the rat’s head against the blacktop so hard he bruised his knuckles. Then he rammed it against the side of the Dumpster. Still it twitched in his grip. Uttering a string of obscenities, Ryan brought the rat to his mouth and ripped a chunk of flesh out of its belly. Then, disgusted with himself, he spat out the hunk of raw flesh and fur and hurled the rat against the back wall of the tattoo parlor. He trembled with rage.
As rat blood dribbled down his chin, he ran his hands over the twin lumps protruding from his scalp. Some of his dyed blue hair had fallen out round the lumps, and its natural red color was showing near the roots.
Without warning, bile surged up his throat. Leaning sideways, he vomited against the side of the Dumpster, blotting out the smeared rat blood.
He stumbled away from the smell of his own vomit and dropped down next to the last Dumpster, tucking himself into the corner. Now he was almost certain he had caught something, probably something fatal, like mad cow disease or something else that made you crazy before you died.
Fumbling in his pocket, he took out his cell phone and called Sumiko.
“Hello?” she said. “Ryan?”
He had only wanted to hear her voice, he’d forgotten that his name, number and photo would show up on her phone’s display. “Hey, Miko.”
“Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I wanted to hear your voice.”
“What’s happening, Ryan?”
“Have you—What have you heard about the diseases, the epidemics?”
“The flu, MRSA, food poisoning—that’s what you want to talk about?”
“No,” Ryan said. “I mean … I wondered if anything really bizarre was affecting people. Crazy stuff. I figured, for your blog, you might …”
“To hell with the blog, Ryan,” Sumiko said. “What’s happening with you?”
He laughed bitterly. “My dad told me he isn’t, you know.”
“Isn’t what?”
“My father,” Ryan said. “He was—My mother was … Some guy attacked her.”
Sumiko was silent for a moment. “Oh, Ryan, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“You and me both.”
“Can we talk? Where are you? I’ll come to you.”
“Not a good idea,” Ryan said. “I … need to be alone. For now. To process.”
“Okay,” she said. “Understood. But I’m here, any time you want to talk.”
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, “about your monitor. I don’t know what came… I mean, I’m sorry. No excuses. And I wanted to say thanks.”
“For what?”
“If it hadn’t been for you,” Ryan said, “I would’ve… You were—are a good influence.”
“Ryan, I’m worried about you,” she said. “Don’t do anything stupid. Okay? You’ll get over this. Things will get better. I promise.”
“Thanks,” Ryan said. “I gotta go.”
He heard her calling his name as he disconnected the call. When she called back, he let it go to voicemail. Something bad was happening to him, and whatever it was, he had to face it alone.
A voice spoke to him. “Come to me!”
Twenty-Nine
Sumiko jabbed the disconnect button and stared at her phone. “Voicemail,” she said in disbelief. “Seriously, Ryan?”
Putting the phone down, she tapped her fingernails on her desk, a nervous habit she had when undecided about what to do next.
Ryan had dropped a bombshell on her about his parentage and then refused to talk about it. To be fair, Sumiko was the talker in the relationship. Ryan brooded. And he’d just found out he wasn’t related to the man who had raised him, and that he had been born as the result of a sexual attack on his mother.
She grabbed the phone, noting but not reading the multiple text messages from friends and Lion Truth sources about the stadium collapse, then set it down again.
He said he needed time to process the information. She had to respect that. Right? At the same time, he’d sounded awfully depressed, maybe dangerously so.
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