Fright Squad

by Flint Maxwell

  I lied down in my bed, complete with an Akron University throw blanket that had the school’s mascot, Zippy the kangaroo, screen printed on it. All the blinds were drawn. Total darkness in my place. I tried sleeping, but that didn’t go well. I figured a distraction was in order, especially since I kept picturing that penis-tentacle flying at my face and hearing Zack’s lame dog puns on repeat in my head. So I turned a movie on. Usually, I’d go for a monster flick, but tonight I needed something upbeat and cheerful, something that would make me smile and laugh—if that was even possible.

  I settled for Dumb & Dumber. That was always good for a chuckle. As the movie went on, my eyelids didn’t get heavier.

  Then I blinked, fell asleep, woke up, and the movie was over, back to the disc menu. Sunlight squeezed in around the edges of my blinds.

  I looked at the clock. It was almost noon, and the sounds of the bustling college campus nearby were like a free alarm clock.

  I stood up and stretched. Did all the essentials. After I’d showered and brushed my teeth, I realized I still wasn’t feeling too good.

  I checked my cell phone. It was blank. My only friends were Maddie and Zack. Maddie and Zack were the closest at BEAST; the others there were more acquaintances than anything. Then, of course, there were the other hunters in other divisions, who just outright ignored me, who thought I got special treatment because of my father.

  Hercules Crowley was a legend in the NOD of BEAST. Had he still been alive, I think he’d be running the entire organization.

  At least, this was what I’d been told countless times from Storm and Octavius and Valentine, the old heads who’d been around since the glory days of the 90s. Like I said earlier, I don’t remember my dad much aside from a few memories.

  One of which was quite sweet and probably the best memory I have of him.

  Long story short, it involved me with a deflated bouncy ball, dejected because it no longer bounced. My dad cut the ball in half, put one end of the spider-stenciled rubber on my head and the other on his, said that no one played with bouncy balls anymore, now it was all about looking cool.

  And I thought we did look cool. We wore the makeshift hats all through dinner. He left right around my bedtime and kissed me good night, still wearing the hat.

  That night was the last night I’d seen my father alive. A demon-master, a Wraith, stole his soul in Huntington, West Virginia.

  They never caught the one who had done it, but I liked to think my dad made it to the Great Beyond, anyway. And I liked to think he was still wearing that hat made out of my deflated bouncy ball when he did.

  I’d decided I wasn’t going to finish eating the bowl of cereal I’d poured for myself and I wasn’t going back to sleep or watching a movie. I needed out of the apartment and out in the fall sunshine.

  A walk was in order to clear my head.

  A little later, after my walk and after I’d lazed around the apartment all day, watching TV, eating junk, my door buzzed.

  It was Octavius.

  He came up, passed a group of stoned college students in the hallway as I stood at the threshold and waited for him.

  “Sir,” I said.

  “At ease, Abraham,” Octavius said. He was still wearing the clothes I’d seen him in that same early morning. He looked paler than usual. Thinner, too. Count Orlock was an apt description.

  “If I knew you were coming over,” I said, plucking a pair of dirty underwear off the back of the couch, “I would’ve cleaned up a little.”

  Octavius smiled. It was a pained smile. “No worries, Abraham. I was young once.”

  “So what merits this visit, sir?”

  “Not good tidings, I’m afraid,” he said.

  From his overcoat, he produced a file. Him and his files. It was old, the manila-color faded and splotched with coffee stains.

  “This is your father’s file,” he said. “Everything we know of his death.”

  I had seen it before. Trust me, many nights were wasted going through those pages.

  “I’m sure you’ve read it,” he said.

  I nodded.

  We were sitting on the couch, potato chip crumbs scattered between us.

  “I was there,” Octavius said. “The one that killed you father was named Doctor Blood. He was a Wraith. His whereabouts are unknown.”

  I knew that, too. It was in the file. Dad and Octavius were partners.

  “I saw the one that killed him. It was hazy and my description in the statements are as accurate as my memory had been at the time, but there was something else… Something else I left out of the report because I must’ve been so shocked.”

  I leaned forward now, my heart thundering in my chest. Cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck. “What was it?”

  “I didn’t remember until last night—or early morning at the church in Woodhaven, after I’d heard your story,” Octavius said. Somehow, he looked even worse than when he got here. “The tentacles.”

  There came that queasy feeling again, that and Val’s rickety, prophet’s voice. “I remembered the tentacles. That man, Doctor Blood, was dealing in the darkest of magics.”

  He was a Wraith, after all, I thought. Wraiths were basically dark magicians.

  “He had control over them. Control, Abraham. Like last night, you said in your report—”

  “That it was like someone else was in control of that thing,” I said.

  I sprang up, a feeling coming over me like I’d just climbed Mount Everest without feet. To call it excitement would be selling it short. “That means—” I began.

  “He may be back,” Octavius said. “May.”

  “What are we doing here then?” I got up and began putting on clothes.

  “Abraham.” Octavius’s voice was stern. “It is just a hunch. I am going to do some more digging, as you say. I will hopefully be back at HQ tonight. We shall discuss this more then.” Hope was dancing in his eyes, though, and I felt more alert and awake than I had in a long time.

  It was a life-long goal of mine to find and exact revenge on the man who had murdered my father fifteen years ago in Huntington, West Virginia.

  Now it seemed I was getting closer. No tentacle would stand in my way.

  13

  Another Call

  The rest of the day passed in a blur and before I knew it I was dressed in my standard BEAST attire—jeans, black boots, and a different jean jacket than the one that had been ripped up last night, which wasn’t anything special. We didn’t have a dress code or anything like that, but it was pretty much the same thing I wore all the time. It helped me blend in and that was important in this business. You couldn’t go around in matching uniforms, letting every supernatural creature know you were apart of BEAST.

  It took all my power to not go out investigating Octavius’s hunch. Instead, I dreamt up ways I’d kill the dark magician. Morbid? Maybe.

  Unfortunately, at the HQ, Octavius was nowhere to be found. Lola told me he’d had to travel to Columbus because he was in hot water for swiping a SOD’s case out from under their nose.

  I knew that was a front. Hoped it was, at least.

  As much as I wanted to stay and chat with Lola (she had been looking rather beautiful tonight in a flowered blouse with her hair curled), I couldn’t.

  Maddie and Zack were in the evidence room. I could hear them rooting through stuff from the lobby and I had to let them know about what Octavius had told me, even if it came to nothing in the end.

  “Knock, knock!” I said.

  Zack, who was bent down and rooting through files behind a suit of armor shot up and knocked his head against the knight’s shield. There was a loud clatter and an even louder laugh from Maddie.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Geez, Abe,” Zack said.

  Maddie was sitting on a bench stacked with old dusty vinyls, which, when played backward, would sing the actual songs Satan’s had composed. She had a large soft drink from the gas station in her hands.

 
“What are you doing?” I asked Zack.

  Maddie answered for him. “Looking through stuff.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “The tentacles,” Zack said. “What else?”

  “About that…” I said and began telling the story of Octavius’s visit. It took all of thirty seconds because I basically word-vomited.

  Zack said, “No way!” and jumped up, high-fiving me. Maddie did this thing where she fanned her face. It was pandemonium. They knew how much avenging my father meant.

  “That’s all he knew about the guy, though? All that was in the file?” Maddie asked when I was done. “That he was bald, wore a robe, and went by the name Doctor Blood?”

  I nodded.

  “Sounds like every occult wack-o out there,” she said.

  I nodded again.

  Wanting to steer the conversation from the lack of information or lead we had on the guy, I asked, “How was Kevin?”

  “Oh, my God!” they said simultaneously. Zack caught himself before he could start fanning his face.

  “He was so precious. Made me really want a dog,” Maddie said. “But, you know, this job makes it kind of hard to have one. Puppies need, like, major attention.”

  “I’d go in on one with you,” Zack said, kind of quietly. Sometimes he didn’t like showing he was really a big softie. Or a Poptart.

  “Well, we work the same shifts. That puppy would be alone all night. I couldn't do that to a puppy, Zack.”

  Zack looked down at his feet. “All right,” he said, also softly.

  I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like he had forgotten I was there witnessing all of this.

  Then Maddie nudged him with her elbow and said, “Thanks, though. You’re sweet.”

  And Zack’s face lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “I guess, for now, we’ll just have to keep visiting Kevin at your mom’s,” Zack said. “If…that’s okay?”

  “Oh, yeah! Of course,” Maddie said. “Would you mind helping me move some of my old books out of my room, too?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  This was weird. But also kind of cute in an uncomfortable sort of way. I needed cute after all the crap I’d been through.

  Before this could go on anymore, the intercom near the door crackled and Lola’s voice filled the large room full of artifacts.

  “Forty-seven-ninety at City Hospital,” she said.

  Zack and I looked at each other with crossed eyes and furrowed brows. I mouthed Forty-seven-ninety?

  By then, Maddie was already shoving past us, the ice cubes in her soft drink clattering against plastic.

  “It’s a robbery,” she said. “Come on, dummies.”

  “Ohh,” Zack said.

  “A supernatural robbery,” I added for clarification.

  Then we were out of the evidence room and at the front desk. Lola briefed us on the incident. It was a standard-fare vampiric robbery. The Junkies, as I’d liked to call the ones who couldn’t live without human blood, unlike the reformed vamps who stuck to animals, hit up blood banks and hospitals every so often. These type of calls usually went pretty smoothly. Which meant arrests and no killing. It was the equivalent of telling a drunk guy he can’t urinate on that sidewalk or that building over there.

  We listened to the recording. A young woman, by the sound of her, said she was outside on her smoke break when a homeless man and three women approached her. They were shivering and their lips were as blue as a corpse’s. They said they weren’t homeless, they were just waiting for their ride to pick them up.

  Well, why don’t you wait inside? the nurse had asked them.

  That’s what did it. You have to invite a vampire in. Bram Stoker and Hollywood got that one right.

  Before she knew it, they were all inside and she’d been knocked unconscious, and when she woke up she found her security badge stolen.

  Figured they were junkies just looking for a fix, the nurse had said, adding, but I’m not gonna lose my job over this!

  She wasn’t technically wrong. They weren’t drug junkies; they were blood junkies.

  But the cops were on their way and so were we.

  “Do you need backup?” Lola asked us.

  Zack just laughed and sauntered on toward the elevator. Maddie leaned over and whispered, “Better send whoever you can spare.”

  I didn’t disagree with her. Two vamp incidents and a tentacular werewolf incident all in twenty-four hours had worn me out. But this was what I wanted, wasn’t it?

  “I’ll get McLachlan and Lyles on the horn.” Lola winked at Maddie then looked at me with a smile. “Be careful,” she said.

  “Always am,” I replied. Still, I wasn’t Rico Suave, and that was really starting to bug me. Maybe I just didn’t have it.

  We left the HQ behind and piled into Zack’s rental car. The damage sustained from Slayer running the monster over was pretty extensive. It wasn’t like the monster was huge or especially solid. Nothing like that. It was just that PT Cruisers weren’t built very well, like most cars these days, actually—according to Storm.

  Anyhow, Zack’s rental was a cherry colored Ford Explorer. Fairly new and sparkly. It would be a shame to ruin the trunk with dead vampire juices, but that might’ve been exactly what it would come down to.

  Because of the previous night at Lover’s Pass, we were well stocked with weapons meant to fight vampires. Plus, we had recovered our guns from the forest around the church except for Zack, who’d opted not to re-arm himself, even though a silver bullet wouldn’t kill a vamp, but it sure would slow one down.

  Maddie sat in the front seat like always while I was in the back. Maddie hadn’t turned on the radio. I guess that after last night, she didn’t feel like listening to music. I didn’t blame her.

  We arrived at City Hospital maybe fifteen minutes later. Saturday night traffic was thicker than I’d anticipated.

  The cops were already there. Parked in the lot was a few police cruisers and SUVs. That was how Lola picked up supernatural incidents. BEAST doesn’t have a hotline number. Instead, we scanned the police channels and frequented the conspiracy theorists’ forums and comment sections on social media sites. If someone saw something unusual in this day and age, you could bet they were taking a picture of it with their smartphone and uploading it to the ‘Gram. That’s Instagram for all you people not in the loop (Don’t worry, I had to look that one up, too, the first time I heard it).

  The call relayed from the Akron Police Department was about a group of homeless men and women who’d broken into the basement level. This was where the hospital kept their stash of blood. Around the corner was the morgue.

  There were no drugs in the basement.

  Of course, it still could’ve been homeless people who’d broken into the hospital. We knew that. Hell, we hoped that.

  But when we walked into the hospital, took a staff elevator down to the basement level, and saw Lieutenant Walker holding his gun up and yelling, “Step away from the bodies!” we knew that hope had just vanished.

  What the heck would vamps want with dead bodies?

  14

  Vampires from Beyond

  “Walker!” I shouted, holding up the crossbow. “Duck!”

  Walker and BEAST went way back. A select few of the local cops in the city knew about us—I mean, how could they not?—and though we didn’t always get along, we stayed out of their way and they stayed out of ours. In other words: We let them deal with the drunken and disorderly while we dealt with the dead, drunken, and disorderly. And monsterly.

  Walker recognized my voice and dropped. I had a clear shot at one of the vampires. There were three of them, all in varying states of decay. The nearest one was a man with slicked-back black hair and a face smeared with blood. When he—well, really, I should call him an it—looked at me and hissed, its eyes glittered like a holographic baseball card.

  I knew the vampire; we all did. His name was Rip and he’d always make jokes that
it meant “Rest in Pieces” to which we’d never laugh at. Rip got into a lot of petty squabbles with the local BEAST forces. Walking into a grocery store in a hazmat suit and destroying the place’s inventory of garlic, going to the local graveyards and bashing any headstones shaped like crucifixes, asking people for some of their blood—that kind of stuff.

  This—this was a whole other level to Rip’s petty criminal acts.

  “Is that Rip?” Zack asked.

  “Yeah,” I said and lowered Zack’s crossbow. Only to save someone from a stake in the ass. Maddie’s and mine never wavered.

  “Rip, what are you doing?” I asked.

  But this wasn’t Rip. It looked like him, but something had happened. I could see that easily. So did Maddie and Zack.

  “Rip, step away from the body or we’re gonna have to stake you,” I said, not really believing in my own voice.

  He hissed again.

  The others followed his cue. They hissed and brought their arms in front of their faces so their fangs were just visible over their shoddy clothing, except they didn’t wear capes like Christopher Lee in those old Hammer Horror films, so they looked kind of…dumb. Really, they just looked like hobos with messed-up teeth.

  But it was the hunger in their eyes that unnerved me.

  “You are trespassing,” Lieutenant Walker said. He stood in the hallway while Maddie, Zack, and I stood in the doorway.

  The room was filled with hissing, so much I thought one of the pipes running along the ceiling had sprung a leak.

  “Rip,” I said, “I mean it.”

  “Fucking vampires,” Walker said. He looked over at a cop on the opposite wall. This cop’s face was the color of old cheese. “Picked a hell of a day to start the night shift, Johnson!”

  Which was a contradictory statement in and of itself.

  “This ain’t even that bad,” another cop said. I knew this one as Hernandez, a tall Hispanic fella with a great smile. Maddie always gave him googly-eyes when he was around. It made me want to throw up in my mouth and made Zack want to leave Hernandez for the vamps.