by Bruce Talmas
As if on cue, one of the two guys I’d let go came back into the room guns blazing. He must have gone back to his car, retrieved his weapons, and come back to either save the day or to try to reclaim the cash. Apparently he wasn’t such a fucking coward after all. He was, however, a terrible shot.
Six rounds and none of them came close to hitting me. Poor Romeo wasn’t so lucky. The moron’s pray-and-spray technique managed to put one through Romeo’s heart. At least his dick would remain intact for the afterlife. Perhaps there was a sympathetic God after all.
I let the idiot empty his weapon mainly into the wall and into Romeo, then drew on him and put one through his forehead.
Before he hit the ground, I turned to Josh and said, “Looks like you’ve become un-expendable now. Get your cash.”
Unfortunately, Josh was no longer with us, cognitively speaking. He was staring at Romeo’s body like he’d just lost his best friend…which he probably had. I snapped my fingers a few times in front of his face, but Josh had already checked out.
Oh well, no big loss. But I did need to know who hired him, so we both had to get out of there pronto.
I peeked out the window and saw Rose in the parking lot. He’d gotten out of the Bronco, but hadn’t come into the building yet. Surely he’d heard the shots. So why wasn’t he coming in to do his civic duty and arrest us? Unless his surveillance wasn’t, strictly speaking, legal. That would explain his hesitancy.
I started ripping through the apartment. Chances were good that Rose had the place bugged. I would have asked Josh for help but he was catatonic. After a minute of ransacking the living room I found the bug in a fake potted plant on the windowsill. I could see Rose in the parking lot four stories below, and I wondered if he was listening in right now.
“I see you,” I said softly into the microphone.
Rose immediately looked up. That answered that question.
“Time to go,” I said to Josh as I grabbed the bag of money. I left the remainder on the table. If Rose were smart, he’d take it, but I doubted it. Too many years of doing the right thing would have made it a habit. Even if it made all the sense in the world, he would leave it there for someone else to get rich off of. That’s why cops were always at a disadvantage out on the streets. They generally played by rules.
I hoisted Josh to his feet and slapped him a couple times. A quick search of his pockets revealed car keys and a wallet. Grabbing them and stuffing them into my pocket, I ran out the door and was thankful when he followed after. Carrying him down four flights of stairs wasn’t my idea of a good time.
We moved quickly down the hallway in single file. Rose had been running toward the building, so he’d probably make the same path to the room that I had made. I could simply go down the steps located just outside their apartment and out the security door nearest the car while he was still coming up the steps to get here.
We were between the second and third floors when I heard the commotion from below: Officer Rose was coming up the stairs at a full gallop. He must have propped the damned side door open just in case. I really should have thought of that before that moment. I was definitely off my game.
No time to worry about that, though. I was moments away from a face-to-face confrontation with an armed police officer while escorting Zombie Josh down the stairs. I wasn’t about to kill a cop, especially one who’d just lost a son. I had enough to feel guilty about these days.
Time was of the essence, so I pushed Josh into the hallway and jumped over the railing when Rose was directly below me. I grabbed the rail right next to him, barely keeping myself from falling two stories farther than I’d intended. I jumped over the rail and kneed him in the jaw in the same process. I had visualized kneeing him in the head and knocking him out cold, but I came in too low and merely caught him with a glancing blow. He hit the wall hard enough to expel the wind from his lungs, but not before he was able to get a good look at me. He almost certainly recognized me as the man who’d crossed in front of his Bronco outside. He probably realized it was me standing in the window as well, but I didn’t waste the time to ask him. I simply punched him in the face and eased him down onto the landing.
I went back up the stairs and collected Josh, who hadn’t moved from where I left him. On the way back down I checked Rose’s driver’s license. It couldn’t hurt to know where the guy lived. I could have reason to visit him later. I also put the bug I’d taken from the apartment into Rose’s pocket. If his surveillance wasn’t entirely legal, it would at least save him some time trying to explain the bug to his superiors, assuming he didn’t have others in the apartment.
I was sure that Officer Rose wouldn’t be happy to see me if our paths crossed again, but at least he would know that I didn’t kill him when I clearly had the chance. It probably wouldn’t get me invited to the Policeman’s Ball, but it might stop him from shooting me on sight the next time we met.
Chapter 19
We drove around in Josh or Romeo’s Nissan Murano for a while. Josh was slowly emerging from his stupor, and I was impatiently waiting for him to tell me where the hell we were going. The parallels to my drive through the desert with Junk weren’t lost on me. I’d been actively avoiding that particular train of thought for a while now, so I saw no reason to start dwelling on it at present. Junk would survive or he wouldn’t. Hopefully, if he found the strength to survive the desert, he’d be able to stay off the drugs once he got back to civilization. If not, then he would go on with his junkie existence until he died in the same kind of hole he’d been headed for before I came back.
Then again, maybe my vision in Hell was accurate and he was ensnared by some long-slumbering Angel. None were good outcomes, but at least the first option gave him life of a sort. Sure, it would be a hard life, constantly fighting his addictions and general bent toward self-annihilation, but hey, you take the good with the bad.
In the meantime, I had other idiots to worry about. Josh was finally aware enough to start looking around, and his eyes eventually settled on me with an unreadable expression. I took it for blunt stupidity.
“You’re going to take me to the place you picked up the cash,” I told him.
He nodded. I couldn’t tell if he was actually responding to me or not, but it was a start. He was moving of his own volition at least.
“Which means I need to know where I’m going,” I prodded.
“Get on 28 North. Like you’re going toward Clarion.”
Clarion was about 100 miles north of Pittsburgh, which was about 80 miles north of our current location. I did not want to be in the car with him that long, but current circumstances didn’t give me much of a choice. I took the ramp to 28 North, found a radio station that was playing something with a little balls to it, and gunned it up to 100 mph. A whispered Obscuring to rid us of any speed traps along the way, and we settled in for the ride.
Forty minutes later, Josh mumbled for me to turn off. We came off the highway and were instantly in farm country. A poorly-kept road jostled us around for a few minutes before leading us to a poorerly-kept road, which eventually disappeared altogether.
“Turn here,” he said.
I looked around. “Turn where? There’s no fucking road anymore.” There weren’t even tire tracks. I’d have suspected a trap if Josh were a little more coherent.
“Here.”
From what I could see, it was a completely arbitrary place to turn, but he seemed satisfied when I edged the car through a break in the trees, narrowly missing a squirrel that, quite rightly, looked at me like I had no business being there.
We headed on in general randomness for a couple minutes, and after a few yards I could make out tire tracks in the softer parts of the dirt. Eventually, we broke through into a large field. He had me follow the edge of the woods for a while until we came to a farm road lined by a wooden fence that wouldn’t have kept out a motivated chipmunk.
“Stop here.”
I stopped. I looked at him. He looked at me. I shoo
k my head and got out of the car.
“How did you find this place?” I asked him as he mirrored my exit from the vehicle.
“We were given a GPS with the location already marked. The exchange happened right there.” He pointed at a fence post that had a single rusted strand of barbed wire tied around it.
“How many of them were there when you made the drop?”
“Two that I could see. There might have been more in the car. The windows were tinted.”
"What'd they look like?"
"Tall. Short hair. I couldn't see much more than that. They had hoods and sunglasses on."
“What kind of car were they driving?”
“Some big black luxury car, like you’d see a rich old guy driving.”
“Like a Cadillac, or like a Town Car?” I asked.
“Yeah, like that.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know. I’m not an old rich guy.” Josh was finally getting his sense of humor back.
“Funny,” I said, and shot him in the head. The shot echoed around the hills for a while. I wasn’t going to get anything more useful from him, I knew, and the pleasure of his company wasn’t worth keeping him around. Whoever had hired him had been careful not to tip their hand. Josh, Romeo, and Company had been hired out as contractors, but they didn’t mastermind the kidnapping. Whoever did hire them had given them just enough information to lead me here, which happened to be less than a mile from my adoptive home. Which also happened to be the site of my adoptive brother’s recent untimely end. Which was a pretty fucking huge coincidence, especially for someone who didn’t believe in them.
********
I cleaned up the car and decided to walk. I had a dead body and a stolen car on my hands; what better place to leave them than a place that even people that were there didn’t know where they were. They’d be found eventually, but by that time, they wouldn’t be my problem anymore. Actually, they stopped being my problem the second I started walking away.
I wandered through the field for a while, eventually cutting back into the woods. I wanted to approach the farmhouse I’d lived in for most of my first ten years without being seen. The fresh air cleared my head and restored my flagging energy. I’d been in New York, L.A., Las Vegas, Cleveland and Pittsburgh in the last few days. One city after another, one crowd of people after another. One stench after another. For me, it was exhausting. I needed to be away from it all. I needed to breathe air without the scent of a hundred thousand other people filling my nostrils and scarring my lungs. The country was more my pace. It didn’t give me peace, but it at least dampened the shrill chaos of society for a little bit.
I wandered without thinking, my memory steering me along paths that I hadn’t walked in twenty years. Back when this place was my home, the demon had been in control. My humanity was an unwilling passenger in my body, nothing more. The memories of that impotence and frustration still remained, carried somewhere so deep I knew it would never truly leave. It felt like being damned: to have no hope and nothing to look forward to beyond your current nightmare existence. In many ways, I’d been twice damned, and this place still carried the memory of that torment with it.
The memories washed over me, and I let them for a while. It was nothing new, just like my memories from Hell. They were clearly mine, but the eyes that had looked upon those things belonged to someone else. Something else. Something foreign. It was as though the memories had merely been uploaded into my brain by some diabolical machine, there to be reviewed and analyzed, but otherwise just a nasty bit of business that I couldn’t avoid, so I’d stopped trying.
The woods began to thin and I refocused. The closer I got to the homestead, the more my uneasiness grew. The wrongness of the place was overwhelming to my demon senses. A lot of evil had been done here, and probably had continued to be done here until very recently. For all I knew, it was still being done at this very moment, so I had to be careful.
I came upon the farmhouse from the opposite side of the road. High grass hid my approach to the house should anyone be watching. The foliage thinned around the farmhouse, as if even the plant life wanted nothing to do with the place. The only trees on the property were the ones too big or too old to cut down. It looked like a painting. A dark, disturbing, gothic painting. Most of the leaves had fallen away from the trees by now, giving them a skeletal and menacing appearance. They looked like the decrepit hands of long-dead gods that were reaching up to reclaim a world that had abandoned them long ago. I could sympathize.
A dozen yards from the road was a spot that offered me a view of the house and barn, as well as clear sight lines in either direction; if anyone approached I would have plenty of warning. The house seemed to be abandoned, but I watched and waited for a long time before I was willing to risk breaking my cover to go in.
I had just decided all was safe when I heard an engine approaching from the west. It was the first sound of human life I’d heard since I had left the vehicle and Josh’s corpse behind. Ducking my head under the high weeds, I waited until the vehicle came into view. It was a late-nineties model Bronco.
Obviously I hadn’t knocked Officer Rose unconscious for very long. And obviously he hadn’t stuck around to be party to the investigation at the apartment complex.
He pulled into the driveway of my old childhood home and just sat there. That seemed to be kind of his thing. He must have stayed like that for a good twenty minutes before he finally cut the engine and got out. He had a gun in his right hand. I wondered what he expected to find inside. I also wondered what led him here in the first place. This place was a bit outside the jurisdiction of a Pittsburgh cop.
After a false start or two, during which he looked back at his car like he should really call for backup, he went inside the house. Meeting him there wouldn’t be in my favor, so I slipped along the road and followed the high grass until the massive barn obscured my approach to the house. I came around and leaned my back against the barn, still hidden from view from any prying eyes inside the house.
A buzzing began in my head as I touched the dark red planks of the barn. The buzzing immediately grew into a pulsating pain that left me nauseous, like I had a migraine coming on. The problem with that was that I didn’t get migraines or any other type of headache. Never in my life. At least until that moment. The buzz in my head began to resonate, and the resonance only increased the nausea. Its frequency getting higher and higher until I could hear it echoing in my ears and feel it in my teeth. Eventually, it descended into my stomach and started doing real damage. The molecules that made up the tissues of my organs started vibrating like I’d just been thrown into an industrial-grade microwave oven. If it kept up much longer, I was going to turn to mush right there next to that big old barn. Just a clump of useless molecules to mark the spot where I died.
I took a few staggering steps away from the barn and mumbled a Discovery to see what sort of Ward was being used that could have such a violent affect on me. The moment I did so, I hit a magic so powerful it knocked me off my feet. Not a Ward. Something bigger. Something that made trying to find magic as puny as a mere Ward impossible. It was like trying to locate a candle flame on the surface of the sun.
The front door of the house opened. I heard the storm door creak open and then slam shut. My muscles were twitching like I just touched an electrified fence, but I was just begging to be exposed if I stayed there. I was flopping around like a landed fish, but my brain was cognitively functional enough to know that I had to move. I took a deep breath and let the pain in. It screamed across my nerve endings and into my brain with the ferocity of a tidal wave. I accepted it at first, but then slowly started pushing back. Eventually, I was able to get to my feet. Rose had come through the yard and was heading towards the barn. I leaned back against the wood of the barn again, since it was the only way to keep from being seen.
This time there was nothing. Whatever had lit my nerve endings on fire had gone away entirely. No hint of magic of any
kind. I should have been thankful I guess, but it just made me more suspicious. Whatever was happening here, I didn’t understand it, and that meant it was more likely to be able to hurt me.
I heard heavy footsteps approach the barn from the house. At the same time, furtive movements came from the interior of the barn. Not the furtive movements of an animal, but the stealthy movements of a human waiting in ambush.
A sound like thunder rumbled through the wood as Rose opened the massive doors at the front of the barn. I could hear him struggling with them, which was not surprising. They were old and heavy, large enough to store a combine for repairs, back in the days when the land had been alive and actively farmed. Now the land was untended and the farm had fallen into disuse. It was just another place where bad things happened. The world was full of those places.
I poked my head around the corner just as Rose flipped on his flashlight and went inside. I wanted to follow, but I stayed back a little because I didn't want to announce my presence quite yet.
As a child, I’d spent a lot of time in this barn. It was where my adopted family of Satanists liked to perform their ‘rituals.’ There was a service door on the side of the building that opened up into a small room used to store shovels, axes, and other smaller farm equipment. If it was still operable, I’d be able to get into the barn through that service door without alerting Rose or the unknown third party that I was there.
As I pushed it open, ever so slowly, I could hear Rose rummaging through one of the lofts. There was no light inside except for the long shaft that slipped through the gap in the doors Rose had opened, plus the occasional sweep of his flashlight that would randomly escape the confines of the loft. That was fine by me: Demons have superb night vision. Spend a few thousand years in Hell and you get used to seeing the world in blackness. Hellfire is everywhere, but it gives off very little light. The most you can hope for in a Hell is a dingy perpetual twilight.
While the average person wouldn’t have been able to see more than a few feet in the dingy darkness, I could make out Rose from across the room. I watched him search the loft. After finding nothing, he descended the ladder from above. I could also see the young man waiting for him in the corner with a wooden plank. I’d never seen him before. I was sure of that, since the tattoos that covered his face were quite memorable. He had no gun, so I figured I’d let whatever was about to happen play out. There could be others around, and Rose might still react badly to seeing me again, so hanging in the shadows seemed the prudent move for the time being.