by Joey Ruff
Copyright © 2013 Joey Ruff
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1481948547
ISBN-13: 978-1481948548
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63001-267-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
To Madison.
You taught me what it was to be a father and you gave me the love only a daughter could.
I love you.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
About The Author
Thanks to all of my friends and family for the love and support. This really wouldn’t have been possible without you, especially my wife, Allison.
Special Thanks to
Marc Nutton and Josh Ruff
“Say Goodbye, as we dance with the devil tonight.
Don’t you dare look at him in the eye…”
Breaking Benjamin, Dance with the Devil
1
Three days ago, Julie Easter, age seven, went missing. The bus took her to school in the morning, it didn’t bring her home. The school had no idea what happened to her, and when the local authorities couldn’t do anything, Frank and Judy Easter, hired me.
I didn’t normally take missing persons cases, but was getting more calls for disappearances and runaways than I could turn down.
I was a father once. I guess Julie just reminded me of Anna.
So I did what I do: tracked down some leads, followed some clues. I talked to bus drivers, teachers, little kids. When that turned up nothing, I squeezed some informants, got something out of a Satyr that owed me a solid and got a bead on an old, condemned Colonial house in a bad part of town. With the flaking paint, the loosely dangling shutters, and the sagging shingles on the roof, the place couldn’t have looked worse had it weathered a zombie apocalypse.
Ape and I had circled the block and approached from the rear, hopped the fence from the neighbor’s yard, and dodged the rusted swing set built for four-year-olds. There was a broken wagon nearby, once red, now more of a rusty brown, sitting next to a flimsy metal shed that had apparently been kicked in by an angry pack mule. The overgrown lawn was littered with trash and debris, used fast-food cartons, and piles of dog shit.
We were on the other side of town from the Easter home, and there was no way a young girl would wander into a place like this. She’d been taken, that was for sure. By what, I had no fucking idea, and the not knowing made me nervous.
In my trade, knowledge was the number one weapon, and the difference between success and failure, most of the time, was in knowing what kind of ammunition to take. Iron burned the fairy kind. Rock salt was a purifier, used to dispel the undead. For the rest, silver – it didn’t always kill, but it at least burned like fuck.
I hated going in blind. I was used to doing my homework to learn what I was up against.
“I’d feel better if you hadn’t made me leave Glory in the car,” I said.
“We're in a neighborhood,” Ape replied. Ape was Terry Towers, my roommate and partner, but not in that San Francisco, Harvey Milk kind of way. Affectionately, I called him Ape because, well, his physique was wrought with that tight sinewy muscle of a white rapper and the coarse, head-to-toe brown fur of a Teen Wolf. “And it would be great if, just this once, you didn't attract any unnecessary attention.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Glory is a military-grade assault rifle. Besides,” he added, “Don’t you think you have enough guns?”
He was referring to the pair of Glock twenty-two’s on my belt and the sawn-off Mossberg five hundred cruiser twelve-gauge shotgun on my back.
Then there was Grace, my Russian beauty, a triplebarreled TP-82 cosmonaut pistol I kept strapped to my left thigh. Some would say she was a relic due to the fact the Soviets discontinued the standard rounds. But I knew a guy who modded her out. Maybe she’d been around the block a time or two, but with the work she’d had done, she fired standard twelve-gauge shells from the two smoothbore jublees on top and 5.6 mm rounds from her under-snatch. She was sexy as hell.
But a girl like her was too good for the safe stuff. She liked adventure, and I liked to use specialty rounds: flares, grenades…the occasional steel cable bolo. Although bolos are marketed as non-lethal ammunition used more to snare a target, if you time a shot just right it can sever a limb.
Ape didn’t use guns, didn’t believe in them. He used his monkey-ass strength, which could tear the jaw-bone off a unicorn.
“You’re no fun,” I said. “Besides, mate, in this neighborhood, nobody’s going to care.” I motioned at large to the houses on either side of us, at least one of which I was convinced was an active crack house. “Well, they might open fire, but they won’t call the coppers.”
“You do realize we’re trying to catch this thing by surprise, right? It could be listening to you bitch right now. Hell, depending on what we’re dealing with, it could have smelled us long before we approached the house.”
“You really know how to make a bloke feel comforted.”
“Shut up and check the door,” he said, pointed to the loose floorboards of the back porch and the boarded window of the rear entrance.
I rolled my eyes and took the three stairs to the porch, winced as it creaked underfoot. I tried the doorknob: locked. The glass that had once served as a window in the little door had been broken out and a board covered most of the open hole. There was just enough of a crack for me to see into the darkened room beyond. There was no sound, no movement.
“Over here,” came Ape’s voice.
I found him behind the house where he’d parted the tall grass to reveal a basement window, one of those that sit even with the lawn and was barely visible in the overgrowth. We squatted down and Ape gave it a push.
After he’d slithered in, he said, “It’s clear. Come on down.”
I took a knee and called into the darkened hole. “I’m not falling for that again.”
“Swyftt!” he said, louder but still a whisper.
I counted to five, zipped my leather jacket, and slipped inside, careful not to bang my merchandise on the small opening. I looked over at Ape, gave him a grin.
He ignored it, looked away. “Fall for what?” he asked.
“You remember the children’s hospital.”
He sighed. “I said I was sorry for that.” Then he flashed me a quick smile, probably thinking I couldn’t see it in the darkness. The only light was coming in throu
gh the one window we’d just come through, and dust swirled heavy in the air.
I unholstered one of my Glocks and clicked on the high-powered flashlight that was mounted under the barrel. Pulled the other out and tossed it to Ape. He caught it nimbly and clicked on the light in the same fluid motion.
“Sorry, my arse,” I mumbled. “Those fucking Red Cap gnomes broke a rib and punctured a lung.”
The basement consisted of several large, unfinished, rooms that bore the cold smell of mildew. Apart from the long-cold furnace, a carpet of broken glass, and some boxes that bulged with water damage and bore the words “Christmas decorations” in a faint, markered hand, it was mostly empty.
Ape bent to examine the boxes, and I moved through the empty door frame into a much larger, darker room. A quick sweep of my beam found a stack of wooden pallets in the corner, a utility sink, and the exposed hook-ups for a washer and dryer. Rat pellets littered the floor, intermingled amongst spilled metal cans and glossy liquid pooling at the base of a broken wooden shelf. From the smell, the liquid was chemical, of some sort, and noxious.
Then I saw the stairs, moved instinctively for them, but Ape grabbed my shoulder. I stopped and turned. His beam was fixed on something in the corner – a darkened, lumpy wad – that began to take form as we neared. My stomach soured.
Ape took a knee and poked it stoically with a finger. “A rat. Looks like it’s been eaten.”
That was more than the drive-thru breakfast in my stomach could handle. He lifted it by its tail, brought his light close, and I went and stood by the pallets. “You can see the markings of an incisor tooth,” he said. “There’s remnants of something sticky around the edges. Saliva, probably. This is fresh. Hours old at most.”
“Oh, fantastic. We may not know what’s in here with us, but at least we know it’s full.”
The pallets were piled waist-high and stacked loosely at best. As I leaned against them, they leaned away, four or five pallets – BAM – over onto the hard concrete. In the darkened, empty basement, it sounded like a gunshot going off.
Immediately, floorboards creaked above us.
Ape snapped to attention, his gaze fixed on me with a look that seemed to say, “Jono, wait….”
I was in motion before he could get a word out, taking the stairs two at a time. I could see the halo of daylight from the closed door above me. In one motion, I holstered the Glock and unslung the shotgun from my back, clicked the safety off and kicked the door in without missing a beat.
The way I entered that room, you woulda thought I’d been SWAT, clearing the left and then sweeping right, seeing no one.
I quickly surveyed the room: a kitchen, broken and chipped linoleum flooring, fridge and stove missing their doors, dirty lavender wallpaper, broken bulb in an exposed socket overhead. There was a table built for two to my right, but it looked like someone had bled a horse out on top of it. The untreated wood was spattered with Rorschach ink blots in that same deep red juice that oozes out of raw hamburger meat. Bloody stains spiraled down two of the legs, and the floor below it was thick with a sticky, reddish-black paste. In the center was a severed human finger.
Although I saw no one, I felt a presence. My gaze lingered on the table and its macabre dye job for a moment, and then I spun, catching the faintest glimpse of something moving at the far end of the hallway. I fired. Glass frames hanging loosely on the walls in the little corridor shattered loudly. Drywall dust clouded heavy in the air.
“You can do this the easy way or the hard way,” I called, hoping whatever it was spoke English – or even spoke at all. Something I could reason with and not some overgrown animal. The last thing I wanted to do was back some Bonnacon into a corner and unleash the full flaming fury of its irritable bowel syndrome.
There was no reply, of course – I wasn’t Batman. The things I hunted didn’t taunt me with verbal quips.
When there was no movement in the darkness around me, I started down the hallway, careful to avoid the glass bits underfoot. There was a doorway to my left that opened into an empty, formal dining room. I swept the room, saw nothing, heard nothing. There was a wider door at either end, the left leading to the back of the house – possibly a bedroom or an office – the right leading to the front door and the walk-in foyer.
Something moved in the kitchen, and I spun with the shotgun.
Ape stood there, wide-eyed, hands in the air.
He shot me an annoyed look and shoved the gun barrel down and to the side. “Would you quit playing around?”
“What?! I saw it.”
He looked past me into the gloom. “Did you see what it was?”
“Yeah. I took a fucking Polaroid. No, I didn’t get a look at it.”
He said nothing.
“You go around that way,” I said, pointing to the back of the house, “and I’ll go this way. Whatever it is, maybe we can trap it.”
He stared at me for a moment and said, “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid this time.”
“This time?”
“As opposed to every other time.”
I flashed him a grin. “You know I can’t promise that.”
He shook his head, and I watched him disappear around the corner before stepping into the dining room.
I listened again, took a step. I was surprised to find my hands shaking a bit. I wasn’t scared, was I? I’d done this so many times. I was being cautious, maybe. That was all. Cautious people had sweaty palms.
I took a deep breath to steady myself and, with meditated steps, entered the foyer. Swept the gun up and to the left at the grand staircase there, and then quickly to the right where a formal den sat. It was empty too.
Empty, except for the sound. A faint yet distinguishable rhythmic ticking sound echoed through the room for a few seconds before dying away. I waited and listened, and the noise started again.
As I moved around the base of the staircase, I saw the blood pooling on the floor. Then I saw him, all hair and matted dirt, smelling like spoiled beef and rotten eggs. I tried to breath out of my mouth, but could almost taste it, hanging palpable and heavy in the air.
He looked up at me with tense, wide eyes that glimmered like a cat’s caught in a beam of light. Blood was all around him, and he squatted and held something like a corn cob between his hands — if you could call them hands. His fingertips were pointed as if he’d stuck them into a pencil sharpener. Exposed pink and red tissue enflamed each digit. His face dripped with thick, sticky red, and his teeth were bared, not feral, but rat-like. Whatever he held between his hands like a corn cob, he’d been gnawing on.
“Look,” I said. “I’m just looking for a little girl. If you tell me where she is, you can get back to your…what, I…I don’t even know what the fuck that is. It looks tasty.”
He stood, his eyes never leaving me. His skin was extremely pale, almost transparent in places, red and blue veins standing out starkly. A mountain man’s beard and hair like Moses if he’d been struck by lightning. He was dirty, and his ragged clothes – shredded flannel and broken denim – were stained with dirt and mud and the same deep red that haunted the kitchen table.
He lifted his hand and showed me the little piece of meat that he’d been gnawing on. Tossed it at my feet. I wasn’t about to pick it up, but at first glance, I knew it wasn’t a rat this time. It was a human hand, or at least, what was left of one. Most of the muscle and skin had been peeled back and eaten. The fingernails were painted hot pink.
For a split-second, I was a father again. My mind went immediately to Anna, and the rage and pain and anguish and revulsion I felt was all-consuming. I wanted to yell, to scream, to unload the seven shells still in the shotgun. But I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
I saw what still lay at the man’s feet: strawberry blonde hair, long and beautiful, a turquoise skirt mottled with a camouflage I knew wasn’t fingerpaint, and a heap of tissue, flashes of red, and other things I’ll never be able to forget if I live a thousand lifetime
s.
He stepped forward, but I wasn’t paying attention.
He sucker-punched me: a hard, jarring pain once between my eyes, and then again. Hard. Much too hard for a guy who’d been getting his meals second-hand or starving to the point he’d turn to cannibalism. He should’ve hit like an Ethiopian kid, not a prizefighter. I wasn’t expecting it, and it spun me.
Before I could rebound, he was on me. I could feel those jagged nails tearing against my neck, pulling on my jacket. I tried to fight, but the shotgun had been tossed from my hands, and he had my shoulders pinned.
“Ape!!” I yelled.
No answer. Where the fuck was he?!
I was able to move my hands. Not enough to throw a punch, but enough to reach my belt. I squirmed and writhed and wriggled. He was heavy as bollocks, and it was all I could do to keep him from biting my face, trying to awkwardly head-butt him, but giving myself a headache instead. I had to keep blinking as he spat on me like a rabid dog, but it wasn’t just spit. I could tell from the coloring.
My fingers fumbled at my belt, and then I found what I was after, gripping tightly around the handle of my Glock, pulling it free and firing five, six, seven rounds blindly, but connecting. I don’t know where I hit, or even how many times. Maybe an enema or two he wouldn’t soon be forgetting. He writhed on top of me, flailing back, and it was enough of a change to pull my arm out from under him. My hands were shaking so badly with rage and pain, my vision going blurry and red. I blinked and it burned, but I managed to squeeze off a few more rounds to send him tumbling.
I stood quickly, wiped my eyes, and looked to see the man shaking and spitting at me, but getting back up. At least three shots connected: the stomach, the shoulder, the arm. No, four. He was bleeding from his neck. Damn my shaky nerves; I’d been aiming for his head.
He charged, faster than he should have been able to, and I couldn’t move in time. He hit like a linebacker. We collided with the front door, but we didn’t stop.
Then everything slowed.
I must have had an out-of-body experience, because I swear the next thing I remember is standing outside the house on the lawn, amazed as the front door blew off its frame and careened through the air. Atop the busted door, as if surfing it on his back, was a handsome fucking devil: long brown hair, black denim pants, the coolest leather jacket I’d ever seen, a pistol falling from his grip. He had a look of pain on his face, blood trickling along the corner of his eye and his forehead. I pitied the man.