Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

When it was finished, it decided the time had come for a distraction. The people looking over Walter Sawyer’s remains were gathering too much focus on its activities and while most of them seemed harmless, it could not risk being the focus of too much curiosity.

  ***

  Crowley ignored the stares that Montoya kept shooting his way. The man was dazzled of course; stunned by the changes that had taken place and officially had no reason to doubt what his own eyes had shown him. Of course his fingerprints matched the ones on the paperwork the detective had brought with him. Why wouldn’t they? He was the same man he had been before.

  Physically, at least.

  The coroners had come and gone, the latest in a series of mutilated bodies had been wheeled out of Cherry Hill, and all was not right with the world. He was still trying to understand what he’d seen outside earlier.

  Montoya, on the other hand, was trying to decide what to do about him. As if he had any say.

  The detective shrugged and then pulled out a small envelope. “These are some photos. They aren’t very pretty. I’d like you to look at them and tell me if you can identify any of the bodies.”

  John looked at the man for a long, long time, not at all certain about doing this. “Who are these supposed to be pictures of?”

  “Your family.” The man shook his head. “You think I’d show you pictures of just any corpse?”

  His hands started sweating. “Where did you find the remains?” He was doing his best to stay calm, but it wasn’t easy.

  “I’d rather not say just yet. I want you to look at them, please, then tell me if you see anything at all that identifies them, Mr. Crowley.”

  John took the envelope and opened it, his insides trying to twist around themselves as he slid the pictures out.

  The first picture was a long-range shot. Someone had carefully excavated dirt from a large, circular area that showed one adult skeleton and three younger ones. Each had been bound in cloth and they had been laid out with their heads together and their bodies pointing out in four different directions.

  Six years had been long enough to strip whatever flesh had remained from his wife and children. He was grateful for that. The full hair around the skulls of three of the bodies let him guess the gender, though he didn’t need to guess. He knew enough about human anatomy to let him see that three were, in fact, female and one was male. There were shattered bones in each case, but the pelvic and thighbones were intact. There was no clothing, of course. They’d all been stripped in front of him.

  He looked at each consecutive photograph, his hands trembling and his mouth tasting like molten copper. One close up of the hands on the adult skeleton showed the wedding ring and engagement ring he’d given Elizabeth a lifetime ago. How many times had he stared at her hand and those rings, absorbing every detail?

  “It’s them.” His voice was hoarse as he pushed the photos back toward the detective. The emotions came on like a runaway train, slamming him against the wall and holding him in place as they assaulted him.

  The detective stared at him impassively, probably still wondering if he had murdered his own family.

  Crowley closed his eyes, trying to push back the memories again, to get past the fresh sorrow that cut through his psyche with the greatest of ease.

  Six years of being dead had done nothing to make the mourning process any easier.

  “Mr. Crowley, I need to know if you killed your family.”

  “No.” He could barely speak. Why the hell did I let myself get involved with you Elizabeth? Why didn’t I know better? And damn it all, the tears were threatening a comeback. “The rings on her finger. Those were the ones I put on my wife. If that’s not her, someone went through a lot of effort to make a fake. So I think you found them, Detective. Where were they located?”

  “The bodies were found near a state park in Oregon.”

  Crowley chuckled, a fully unintentional sound. He’d met Elizabeth in a state park in Oregon. He would have bet they were found close to the very spot where he’d first encountered her. Maybe even in the exact same spot.

  “You think this is funny, Mr. Crowley?”

  “No, you miserable fuck. I do not think this is funny!” He opened his eyes and stared hard at the man. His body trembled with the need to lash out, to do something violent instead of trying to maintain his calm. “I think it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen, you bastard.” His voice lowered into a near growl as he spoke. “I think someone is playing with me, and making me look like a fucking murderer in the process. Do you see me laughing, Detective?”

  The detective wasn’t intimidated in the least. The muscles in his jaw bunched as he looked back with equal dislike. “I know you’re grieving, so I’m going to forget what you just said. Do you know who killed your family, Mr. Crowley?”

  “No.” He shook his head and pushed himself away from the wall, annoyed with the palsied tremble he felt in his hands. “I don’t know, not yet. But I’ll find out. When I do, there’ll be a damned big reckoning.”

  “You said before that you had a physical description.”

  “It won’t do any good. Whoever was in that body left it a long time back or it’s changed so much you’d never recognize it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You wouldn’t understand and I don’t have the time to explain it.”

  The detective grabbed John’s arm as he started walking away. He had a good, strong grip and brought Crowley to a halt. “Try me, Mr. Crowley.”

  “You’re forgetting yourself, Detective. You’re out of your jurisdiction. Get your hand off of me, or I might forget that I’m trying to be friendly today.”

  “Are you threatening me?” The man was actually shocked.

  “No, sweet pea, I’m telling you a fact. Get your hands off of me, or I’ll defend myself from an unwanted assault.”

  The detective let go. Crowley started walking again and sure enough, the man followed him.

  Crowley moved down the hallway until he reached the stairwell and then started the climb to the third floor. Montoya walked a few paces behind him and kept his mouth shut. Maybe he’d gotten the point about being outside of his jurisdiction.

  Or maybe he was just biding his time. In his experience, John had seldom met anyone in authority who liked to be put in his place. It made them want to be stupid.

  He stopped on the third floor of the South Wing, in what the doctors had called the violent ward. He’d only heard about the incident up there after they found the dead man in the lower levels. Now he wanted to see what was left of the crime scene and to determine if there was any connection. He knew there was, of course, unless they had two monsters roaming the corridors of Cherry Hill, but he had to know how and why they were connected. So far, he’d come up with nothing solid on what was happening and it was starting to piss him off.

  The hairs on the back of his neck rose as soon as he entered the wing. It wasn’t the knowledge that a death had taken place. No, he was far too used to death to let a stranger in an asylum affect him. It was something else, but he couldn’t quite place what that something was.

  “Hmmm.”

  “What?” Montoya must have been feeling something, too, because he was looking a little jumpy.

  Crowley saw no sign of a nurse, a doctor, or a security guard. “I don’t know yet. I probably won’t know, either, if you don’t stop yapping.” John was starting to remember what it was he liked about being alone, back before Elizabeth stepped into his life. It was hard to concentrate when people were constantly asking stupid questions.

  There were twenty cells on each level of the wing, ten to a side. Normally there were security guards hanging around. There hadn’t been a lot of obvious security when he was first admitted, but the odd deaths had changed that in the last few days. First there was one guard on each floor and now there were two. Except here. There was no sign of a security detail anywhere around.

  Down the hallway he heard a phone ringing. No one ans
wered it. One of the cell doors squeaked open on the right side, and a patient walked into the main corridor as if doing so was nothing unusual.

  The man was tall, lean and dressed in nothing but a hospital gown and the shredded remains of a straight jacket. His skin was as pale as expected from a man who probably hadn’t seen sunlight in the last few years, but his hands were covered in flaking rusty splotches.

  Blood, old enough to have dried to the man’s skin.

  The man looked down the hallway in the direction of the phone, and Crowley wondered whether or not he could get to the patient without being noticed.

  “Hey! Freeze!” Montoya’s voice echoed down the corridor and John wasn’t sure who jumped harder, the mental patient with the bloody hands or him.

  “Brilliant, you asshole. Let’s not try being subtle first.”

  Eighteen of the nineteen remaining cell doors swung open, disgorging the men who normally were forced to remain on the other side of them. The first one, the lanky man with the bloodied hands, walked over to the nurse’s station and ripped the phone out of the wall: the cords hidden within the wall stretched and broke partially through the steel box that held them before they finally snapped.

  Montoya stepped up next to John, his hand reaching for the service revolver he normally carried on his hip. It might have been a nicer gesture if he hadn’t had to surrender the weapon when he entered the building.

  “Oh, shit.” Montoya’s tone almost made the words a question.

  “We aren’t looking for visitors right now.” Red Hand dropped the phone as he spoke and then moved in their direction. John shook his head and Montoya spat, his face set for trouble.

  “Well, we’re not really visiting. We’re new to the ward, thought we’d check out the place before we settled in.” Crowley took three steps forward, looking from one patient to the next, assessing how badly he was going to get his ass kicked in the coming fight.

  One of the men started giggling, an unsettling sound considering the bruiser looked like he probably ate trees for breakfast. Another one growled and moved forward. The man was chunky and pale, his dark hair receded from his scalp and his mostly nude body was covered with scars.

  He also moved faster than he should have, covering the distance between his cell door and Montoya so fast that he took the detective by surprise.

  The nutcase hit Montoya hard enough to send him staggering and pushed him again before he could recover. Cop and psycho hit the ground in a tangle of limbs, and Crowley stepped forward, a grin growing on his face.

  “Thanks, guys. Really. I’ve been meaning to vent some steam.” They stepped toward him en masse, apparently feeling the same way about the promise of carnage. John stood his ground and waited, forcing his body to relax as the madmen came for him. As they moved closer, he could feel the unnatural energies that radiated from their bodies. Someone or something had been very busy while he was looking elsewhere.

  The first man came in low, charging like a bull, and John sidestepped, and let him run straight into the wall with a stupid look on his face. The second was much better and drove a fist like a sledgehammer into Crowley’s stomach. The force lifted him off his feet and doubled him over.

  The third one managed to get a firm grip on his left leg and before John had a chance to recover from the first punch, the bastard was biting deep into the muscles of his calf. Having a leg back was great, but it didn’t seem like he’d have it for much longer.

  Crowley let out a yelp and pushed himself up onto his right leg, shifting his body to compensate for the awkward position. He hopped twice to get the leverage he needed and then brought his right foot up and around to wallop the Biter on the back of his head. Both of them went down, but this time John caught himself and was back up a moment later.

  It didn’t do him much good. There were simply too many people trying to tear in to him to make defensive fighting a possibility. Hands grabbed at his face and arms while fists struck him again and again wherever they could get through.

  He felt his skin and muscles itching where he’d been struck and knew that his abilities were working properly again. The itching told him his body was healing every bit of damage he took. He didn’t recover from injuries any faster than other people, except when the supernatural was involved. That little fact told him that it wasn’t one or two of the men that had been altered. It was all of them.

  And that meant he could set aside feeling bad for the people he was dealing with and finally cut loose.

  Jonathan Crowley laughed, and started counter attacking.

  Red Hands reached for him, filthy fingers seeking the soft meat of his eyes, and Crowley blocked before punching the man in his throat. The man fell back, his eyes bulging as his trachea ruptured. He wasn’t dead, but he would be soon. As Red Hands struggled to breathe, John grabbed the next in line by the ear and ripped downward as hard as he could, feeling cartilage snap as his new victim screamed.

  All of the confusion and grief faded away for the moment, replaced by the pure primal joy of inflicting pain. A lucky punch broke his nose and he blinked tears out of his eyes even as he drove his foot into somebody’s chest and felt the bones breaking beneath his heel. His left hand grabbed the thick hair of a man wearing a security guard’s uniform top over his robes, and Crowley slammed the stranger’s head into the wall hard enough to break bone and brick alike. The inmates of the violent ward retreated as Crowley grabbed another man and dislocated his shoulder, grinning all the while.

  Montoya was shrieking, his voice rising in octaves. Crowley looked over to see the bullish man on top of him forcing his fingers into the detective’s stomach. Under most normal circumstances it would have been a physical impossibility, but the strength and resilience of the madmen was inhuman.

  He didn’t like the detective. But he didn’t hate him either. Crowley reached around and hooked his fingers into the psychopath’s face, dragging them up from the chin all the way to the top of his victim’s skull. He drew blood from the cheek and from one eye as he progressed.

  Somebody kicked him in the balls at the same time, but it didn’t matter. The pain was a pleasant distraction from his thoughts and adrenaline kept him moving.

  Montoya took advantage of the opening John gave him and started swinging his fists. Crowley left him to handle his own affairs and returned to the rest of the inmates. The remaining prisoners were watching from a distance now, cautious where before they’d been reckless.

  Three of the men retreated to their cells. They were the lucky ones; he let them live.

  With the rest of them, he took his time, maiming in some cases and killing in others. He had a lot of stress to get out his system and they’d volunteered to help him.

  ***

  Ricardo Alejandro Montoya was a third generation American and proud of it. His family had embraced everything about the United States when they came to California and he was raised with the simple belief that good eventually triumphs over evil. He’d held to that belief when he was in Korea and had a few scars to prove it.

  He was a happily married man who kept a picture of his wife in his wallet and wore his wedding ring with pride. He’d never taken a bribe while on duty and he believed firmly that following procedures was the best way to catch criminals.

  All of that meant exactly nothing to him when the oversized, half-naked baboon of a man tackled him and started trying to tear him limb from limb. He fought back hard, but every punch he threw seemed ineffective, and the man was too heavy for him to push away.

  When the man’s fingers started pushing on his sternum it hurt enough to make him cry out. When they tore through the fabric over his stomach and started scraping skin, he panicked. Not because the man was hurting him, but because what he was doing was impossible. Fingers might tear though an occasional piece of flimsy material, but not through a jacket, a vest and a shirt.

  Rico was a logical man. He didn’t have room in his life for the impossible. Handling what seemed to have happe
ned to Crowley was pushing the limits of his acceptance.

  Just as the fingers that had shredded his suit were starting to break through skin, Rico saw Crowley over the bruiser’s shoulder. The man was grinning ear to ear as he reached out with one hand and drew blood on Rico’s assailant with his fingertips.

  The fat man let out a scream of his own, and as he reached for his ruined face, Rico punched him as hard as he could in the throat. Adrenaline and anger took care of the rest. Rico managed to get himself out from under the unconscious man and was ready to take on the next one a few seconds later.

  He looked over just in time to see Jonathan Crowley slam a man’s face into the wall hard enough to shatter bone. The man’s nose was busted and bleeding as he grinned, leaving red and pink stains on his lips and teeth alike. He moved to the next of the inmates, a rail thin man who had apparently painted himself in feces, and dropped the man to the ground with a spinning roundhouse kick. Three of the patients decided to work together to take him down. They hit Crowley from three separate directions and sacked him, their fists rose up and down making meaty smacking noises as they connected with the man.

  Rico watched, uncertain exactly whom he should be cheering on. The man directly over Crowley let out a groan and then a scream as Crowley caught his nose between his thumb and forefinger and twisted it savagely. Before he could do more than pull his face back from the attack, Crowley caught him at the ear and wrenched his head violently to the left. It was enough to make the man fall to the side; enough to let Crowley get some fighting room.

  There were no fancy moves, no sudden weapons produced to even the odds; the inmates fought hard and dirty and their target kept up with them in the savagery displayed. A few of the inmates broke away and fled back to their cells. Most of them kept coming, and kept falling, beaten down or flat out murdered by the person Rico had come here to interrogate.

  He saw Jonathan Crowley catch a fist to the eye that should have left him crying and half blind. Crowley acted like it was all just good, clean fun and broke the offender’s wrist, then his elbow and finally his neck with three blows almost too fast to actually see. Before the dead man could hit the floor, Crowley’s wounded eye was almost back to normal, and the dead man in his hands was used to shield several more punches.