“Give me the damn blowtorch,” Wald said to Toby. “We’ll see how glib this little punk is when his skin is melting off his skull like butter.” The torch hissed like a cobra; a tongue of blue fire moved closer to Heck’s face. Wald’s eyes were glassy with rage and anticipation as the flame came closer to Heck’s skin. “You’re a pretty boy,” Wald said. “Let’s see how smart-ass you are when no one will look at you without gagging.”
The blowtorch’s searing flame traced a line from Heck’s cheek across his broken nose and then to his other cheek. Heck jerked wildly as fire hot enough to melt steel caressed his skin. He jerked and then got very still, almost stuporous.
“Stupid bastard’s already gone into shock,” Wald said. “No damn fun at all.” He moved the torch up to Heck’s forehead, leaning in to admire his disfiguring work. Wald frowned. He moved the torch away from Heck’s face and ran a finger over the blackened trail the flame had made. Under the soot was healthy skin, unmarred by the torch’s heat. “What is this shit?” Wald snarled in disbelief.
Heck’s eyes popped open, and he grinned the way a wolf shows his fangs to his prey. “Black magic, baby,” he said. “I’m too fucking pretty to die.” Heck swung both booted feet upward and drove them into Wald’s abdomen, hard. Wald groaned in pain and flew backward, the torch flying backward and catching Toby in the chest. Toby screamed as skin began to blacken and crisp. His shirt caught fire. Heck used the momentum of the kick to swing back on the winch chain and wrap his legs around Toby’s neck. He slipped his bound wrists off the hook and twisted as he fell to the ground. Toby’s neck twisted under the torque of Heck’s weight falling. There was a dry, snapping sound, and Toby’s burning body hit the concrete floor of the bay and lay still. Heck tumbled and came up in a crouch, his hands still tied.
“Toby!” Wald screamed, charging toward Heck with a tire iron. “You killed my brother, you freak!” Wald swung downward with the iron. Heck raised his arms and snagged it between the coiled rope that tied him. He felt the throb of the impact deep in his wrists, but the rope caught on the edge of the tool and held long enough for him to lunge up from the floor and head-butt Wald squarely in the face. Wald fell back, blood pouring from his own broken nose. Heck stood, the fallen blowtorch in his hand. He turned it inward, the flame raking across his hand and wrist, leaving a blackened line in its wake, but no pain, no injury. The torch cut through the ropes, and they fell away. Heck looked at the torch and his hands with a mix of amusement and bewilderment before checking on Wald.
Wald was beside Toby’s burning body. Tears, snot, and blood covered his face. “I’m going to kill you,” he said, his voice distorted by mucus and crushed cartilage. He stood, wincing in pain but defiant. He raised the tire iron.
There was a drumming in Heck’s ears, the rush of blood like massive, beating wings. A cold cruelty settled over him, slithered through him—an intrinsic knowledge of himself, like the certainty of fact. It was not an entirely alien sensation; he’d felt it in the war, in many firefights, and one horrible time, long ago, when he was young. Each time he’d felt it, it startled him, frightened him deep, deep down, below the black ice that hid his fears, his regrets. This is me, as much as any other part—maybe even more so than the other parts. This is who I am.
“No,” Heck said in a voice that didn’t sound entirely like his own. “No, I’m going to take that iron away from you, then I’m going to burn you with this torch in all the ways you were going to hurt me, and eventually you will beg me to stop. I won’t.”
Wald paused. His raised arm, with his makeshift weapon, trembled.
Heck continued, stepping closer, the blue flame illuminating his face, filling it with sinister shadows. He ran the torch’s flame over his arms, his palm. “Then I’ll ask you where those two kids you’re holding are, and you’ll tell me,” he said. “You’ll try to hold out, try to be tough, but eventually you’ll tell me where they are. And I still won’t stop. You’re going to die in pain, fear, and regret, just like your brother, cooking away over there.”
Wald looked back at his brother’s still burning body. “Go to hell!” he growled, and charged at Heck, who stood, smiling, his arms raised and open, as if he were awaiting an embrace.
Heck laughed. The sound bubbled up out of him, unbidden, like a death rattle—bone raking over slate. It frightened Wald, like ice water in his guts. It frightened Heck even more.
* * *
Lovina fell down the basement stairs backward with three hissing, snarling BEKs at her throat, her AR-15 spraying fire and lead at the rest of the descending swarm as she fell. She caught herself at the base of the stairwell, grabbing hold of the railing and swinging herself wildly to one side. She smashed into an old water heater and felt a sharp stab of pain as a jagged metal part of the old tank stabbed her in the lower back.
The sudden swing helped her ditch the three BEKs. They flew to her right, and Lovina fanned the assault rifle in their direction. All three were torn to pieces by streaking tracer rounds, their burning bodies dropping near the foot of the stairwell.
The victory lasted less than a second. Lovina stepped to the mouth of the stairwell and fired upward into the mass of oil-eyed children raining down the stairs toward her, howling like rabid animals. She could feel the clip emptying as the blurring, darting small forms fell and fell and fell. Her hands moved to free a fresh clip, but her gut told her she wouldn’t have time to reload. She could smell the hot brass as spent cartridges sailed from the gun past her face. More screaming faces, illuminated in gunfire, more fangs. The flash of the muzzle and the hiss of the tracers as they ignited. Tiny pale hands reaching for her, grasping toward her. Another few seconds at the most … three, two, one … out.
The AR-15 fell silent, but so did the stairwell. The shot BEKs were all evaporating into smoke before her eyes. Lovina cleared the empty magazine, slapped a fresh one in, and slid back the bolt to chamber a fresh round in the space of a single breath. She looked down to see one of the creatures, its childlike face marred by the unnaturally wide open mouth, its fangs inches from her ankle. The face melted into black smoke, like the ones they had killed with Turla in Carbon City, as she watched.
Lovina had a choice and no time to reason it through. She bounded up the stairs, through the swirling smoke of the decaying bodies, and slammed the basement door shut. She slid the small brass deadbolt into place, sealing the door. None of the bodies on the stairs had grabbed or bitten her; no tangle of strong hands had reached out from the darkness past the doorway.
Lovina gave herself a three-second vacation to catch her breath. Her gamble to risk the stairs and to shut and lock the door had paid off. She reached to the small of her back and winced. Her hand returned covered in blood. She wiped it off on her pants until her hand was dry and then headed back down the stairs. The pounding began on the basement door before she reached the bottom of the stairs. There were snarls and shrieks from the other side of the door—sounds like the ones cats make in the dead of night.
She found the well and its capstone in the northwest corner of the basement, covered with an old canvas painter’s tarp. Lovina pulled the tarp off. The former inhabitant of the house, who had been sacrificed atop the well, scattered across the floor in a hollow, clattering rain of old, dry bones. Lovina cursed under her breath as she unslung her pack. The almost mechanical pounding on the thin door grew stronger, more insistent. She didn’t have much time. She slung the rifle, took the small pry bar, and began to work on the edges of the capstone. The rock cracked and crumbled as she pried the heavy stone up off the lip of the well. Streams of brilliant light, like that Agnes and Ava had spoken of, poured out of every opening Lovina had broken open. Her cell phone began to chime as eight o’clock struck, but Lovina could hardly hear the alarm above the roar of the light that was filling the basement, flooding her mind. She saw vaguely through the glare of the light that the BEKs had knocked down the door and were pouring down the stairs. The light, the terrible presence within the
light, tore the things that had once been children apart effortlessly.
Lovina focused on the broken capstone. She grabbed the edge of the heavy ancient stone, her fingers gripping the rock, the tendons in her forearms straining as she lifted with all her might; the light filled every cell of her body with a power and an awareness old as the stars in the cold heavens. Lovina roared as the hundreds of pounds of stone cracked, rumbled, and fell as the capstone flipped free of the well, and all the radiance—long imprisoned—fountained out. The light was everywhere, was everything, and Lovina was lost in the whiteout. The force was rushing up the stairs, filling the ground floor of the old house and spilling out every window, every crack between the bricks and wood, hurling upward, defiant, into the endless night.
* * *
The porch light failed just as Max pulled a bulky cylinder out of her bag. It took both hands for her to heft it. She flipped the switch on it as she shouted, “Eyes!”
The HellFighter spotlight fired a three-thousand lumen, xenon-fueled beam of pure white light that illuminated the porch as if it were day. The shadows grabbing at the fringes of Max’s clothing, all the shadows that had vaulted onto the porch in the second of darkness, turned to smoke. The BEKs wrestling with Jimmie clutched their eyes and screamed like wounded animals; the light didn’t destroy them the way it did the shadows, but it definitely hurt them. Jimmie, squinting against the light, kicked and punched them off him. Kneeling with the shotgun, he fired again and again, and the howling BEKs fell and were silent. Jimmie struggled to stand. Max’s spotlight was a military-grade gadget that was designed to be mounted on vehicles in combat or on .50 machine guns. Jimmie recalled having something similar on the Abrams tanks he had crewed during Desert Storm. Cecil Dann had looked confused when Jimmie asked him to use his law-enforcement credentials to secure the HellFighter for them, but he was damn glad he had asked for it now. If he’d had more time in Atlanta, he could have had a few of the spotlights mounted on the truck, but they had been racing a clock. The porch was clear of shadows, and the BEKs still in the house had slunk back down the hall, confused and blinded by the HellFighter for the moment. Jimmie reloaded the shotgun as he knelt by Agnes. Black veins were creeping up her hand and moving toward her arm.
“Can you move?” Jimmie asked, looking at the old woman and then glancing back down the hall at all the hateful pale faces snarling at them, lined up between them and the basement.
“Yes,” Agnes said. “I can.” She struggled to her feet with Jimmie’s help. She picked up her Mauser and inspected it to make sure it was ready to fire, returning it to her uninjured hand. “The little blighters’ bite packs quite a punch.” She staggered a bit, and Jimmie righted her. Max had joined them, still carrying the spotlight. There was a beeping sound, the 8:05 alarm Jimmie had set on his phone.
“Damn it,” Jimmie said. “Okay, straight to the basement. We have no more time. Kill whatever gets in the way. We don’t stop, y’all clear on that, we don’t stop.”
“Yes,” Max said, nodding, blinking in fear.
“Yes, dear boy,” Agnes said, a pained smile on her face. “Let’s kick their asses, shall we?”
Jimmie had to smile in spite of himself. “Yes, ma’am, let’s. Max, keep that light on them. Let’s go!”
The three plunged into the house of the Crone, into the wall of monsters before them, hoping that they weren’t already too late to stop the force that lived behind those soulless eyes.
* * *
“Good evening,” George Norse said to the television camera’s Cyclopean red light and to the twenty million viewers on the other side of the camera, “and welcome to Paranormal America Live. I’m your host, George Norse. Tonight, a ruthless psychopathic murderer who has stalked the highways and byways of America for over sixty years breaks his silence as we uncover shocking found footage that will show you that the so-called Pagan is linked to supernatural phenomena.”
In the control booth, Cecil Dann watched the monitors, his arms crossed, looking dour. Most shows would have milked this footage thing and shown it in the last few minutes of the program; however, the show’s director, Jonah Gage, who was giving orders to the studio’s floor crew through a headset, had told Dann they were going to lead with the Pagan video. “Audiences these days don’t possess the attention span necessary to wait forty minutes to see it,” Gage said during a pre-show conference with Norse and Dann. “They will already have flipped channels if we wait that long.”
“These are the folks who elect politicians for us?” Dann had said. “Fantastic.”
“And the killer himself has let us know he’s watching tonight,” Norse said to the camera. “Who knows, maybe he’ll call in on Paranormal America Live!” The show’s credits began to roll on the control-room monitors and on millions of TV screens. The studio audience cheered. The red light on the camera went off. As the credits faded to black, the first round of commercials began on the monitors, and the in-studio audience murmured excitedly.
“We’re clear,” the floor manager called out. “Back in five.”
Norse walked over to his assistant and took a headset she was holding. He placed the earpiece and the mike near his face without messing up his makeup and hair. “Jonah, let me talk to Agent Dann,” George said.
A deep voice responded through the headset a second later. “Mr. Norse, it’s Cecil Dann.”
“Agent Dann,” Norse said, “I just wanted you to know we have a special phone bank set up; in case the Pagan calls in, we can trace his call.”
Up in the booth, Dann shook his head, even though Norse couldn’t see him do it from the stage below. “Mr. Norse, the bureau is ready to trace any calls coming in on any line you have. He won’t be stupid enough to make that mistake, though. He’ll know we’re doing that.”
“I’m just trying to help,” Norse said as the floor manager gestured that he had less than two minutes to get back to his mark for the camera. Norse, still holding the headset to his ear, nodded and gave a thumbs-up.
“Mr. Norse, I appreciate that,” Dann replied into his own headset. “You seem like a genuinely decent fella, but showing this video is dangerous. We have no idea what the Pagan will do.”
“We don’t know what he’ll do if we don’t show it,” Norse said. “His courier said he would kill two college kids if we didn’t. Look, the point is pretty academic now, right? I just wanted you to know that I’ll do whatever I can to help you guys catch him.”
Dann sighed. “Okay, Mr. Norse, thanks for your cooperation.”
He handed the headset back to Gage, who had begun giving orders to the cameramen and the floor manager even as the final seconds of the current commercial counted down.
This was wrong, Dann knew. He could feel it in his bones, but without the DOJ giving him clearance to pull the plug, what the hell was he supposed to do? The audience was applauding again as the program come back from the break. Norse turned to address the crowd and another camera.
“This week, we received a digital video file from a source claiming to be the infamous serial killer the Pagan,” Norse said, “who has been active across the United States since the 1950s. The video shows the horrifying last moments of a young girl’s life as she is stalked and slain by this brutal killer. However, the video also clearly shows the presence of some kind of supernatural entity—perhaps a demonic force—that is also present in the girl’s final, tortured seconds of life. We’re going to show you this video now. We warn you—the content is violent and disturbing, and parental discretion is strongly advised.”
With those magic words, Dann, sitting in the control room, knew that millions of younger viewers, watching alone, just scooted closer to the screen. He hoped his wife, Jenna, wasn’t watching, but she might be. He had told her what was going on when he called her earlier from the hotel.
The video began. Norse’s people had “sweetened it up,” in the parlance of the biz. It was cleaner, the audio clearer. Dann closed his eyes and swallowed. It was sti
ll hard for him to watch it, still hard to believe that the thing visible in the last few seconds of the video wasn’t some computer-generated special effect. It had to be—no matter what some crazy truck driver said. Dann kept telling himself that, but he also earnestly wished, prayed, that the crazy trucker would call him and tell him it was all going to be okay. The video played on. The girl’s screams ran along the electron highway, racing across the land.
* * *
The darkness above the earth spun mutely with cold indifference. The stars, the moon, the seasons, the great endless hall of time itself—all tumblers, turning, locking into place.
In a New Orleans hospital, Russell Lime sat beside the bed of his beloved bride—her name was Treasure. She slept, and he held her hand. On the hospital television, he watched the video play out on Paranormal America Live. He wondered if Lovina Marcou was okay. It had been a few days since they had spoken. Thoughts of Lovina always led Russell to thoughts of her father, his old friend. He squeezed Treasure’s hand tighter, and, even in drugged sleep, she squeezed back.
There was a knock at the door. It was slow, almost mechanical, but insistent and strong. Russ expected a nurse or a doctor to open the door a second later, but that didn’t happen. The knock repeated, again. Again.
“That’s damn odd,” Russ said, slowly rising from the chair by Treasure’s bed and moving to open the door.
* * *
In Leesburg, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, Jenna Dann, dressed in her pajamas and a robe, rose from the couch where she had been watching the video play out on that paranormal show Cecil was investigating. She wondered who could be knocking on her door at this hour, and why they weren’t using the doorbell? It was most likely someone from Cecil’s work looking for him, some new crisis that couldn’t wait. It was part of the price you paid for being a cop’s wife. Jenna walked toward her front door.
The Brotherhood of the Wheel Page 39