“They’re always howling about how the world is gonna end soon,” he said as Jeryline sobbed, and stroked her hair. “Maybe there’s a God up there who’ll watch over us while it does.”
As far as comforting words go, he thought dismally, there had to better ones than those.
Brayker marched up. “This area is sealed for now. Jeryline, take me through the rest of the building, show me every possible entrance and exit.”
She pulled away from Willie and swiped both palms across her eyes. “Who are you?” she whispered. “Just who in the hell are you?”
He pointed a finger in her face. “To hell with who I am. You either live, or you die, tonight. All of us. It’s that simple.”
Roach, perhaps tired of Cordelia hanging on him again, shook her aside and piped up. “Mister,” he said, “you throw orders around like a goddamned general, but not any general I’ve ever heard tell of. Me, I’m heading out to my car and getting the holy fuck out of here. Anybody care to join?”
They looked back to Brayker, their eyes full of questions. Wally Enfield, a corpse by the TV, raised his head and moaned. He spied Tupper’s body and scrunched his eyes shut.
“Well,” Cordelia muttered, “we’ve already killed two of them, and there’s only four. If we all go charging out we might make it. But not in Roach’s little bug-mobile.”
“It’s a damned good car,” Roach snarled at her.
Irene, holding her heart, stepped forward. She fanned her face with her other hand. “My car is out back. ’Eighty-two Caprice. It seats eight. All we’ve got’s seven, but we’ll have to carry Wally if he doesn’t come back from the dead any faster. That could slow us down.”
“Forget it,” Brayker said.
Bob Martel, the front of his uniform smeared and slick with whatever goop the demon that attacked him had been shiny with, decided to find his voice. “Sheriff Tupper’s cruiser is out front, people. Half of us head for it, the other half heads out back for Irene’s wheels. We’re bound to make it, cause they’re outnumbered, and besides, I’ve still got my gun.”
“Forget it,” Brayker said again. “The Salesman can make them faster than you can kill them. We have to hole up.”
Roach stepped in front of Brayker, his chest pushed out and his chin stuck up high. “Yo, hotshot,” he said tauntingly, “if you’re so full of ideas, why don’t you give us an idea who that Salesman guy is? And like Jeryline there asked just now, without you bothering to answer, just who in the hell are you?”
Brayker looked from face to face, finding fear, of course, but more anger than anything else. Why, he wondered, was he surprised? People do not want to deal with unpleasantries. People do not want to deal with the unexpected. As long as people have enough to eat and enough to drink, they will be satisfied to ignore the ways of the world until it all comes crashing down around their well-fed, well-watered heads. Suddenly they look for a quick way out, and someone to blame for the interruption.
He shut his eyes for a fraction of a moment. Once upon a time he had been a child; once upon a time he had been a sturdy little boy full of innocence and smiles. He grew up in an era when the world went mad; if not for the war and what he discovered there, he would have lived a normal life.
Exhausted, he willed his eyes open. “I have no control over you,” he said. “All I can do is warn. If you go outside, you will die. It’s that simple.”
Roach emitted pig noises through his nose. “As if that answers the question, Brayker. We want to know—we all want to know—just who you are.” He jerked out an arm to indicate the outside world. “And who that freaky guy is, and how the both of you wound up here.” He looked at the others. “Right? Don’t we all want to know?”
Brayker eyed them. No one was in unison here. It was a flock of malcontents looking for an exit from an unpopular place. He went silently to where his butterfly knife had fallen near the dining table, folded it together, and shoved it into his pocket. It was an old knife and a trusty one, and had saved his hide more than once. None of these people seemed likely to do him a similar favor. “I’m not explaining to you, or anybody else,” he said finally. “Go ahead and do what you’ve got to do. Just leave me out of it.”
The man they had called Wally was trying to get to his feet, his scrawny legs wobbling and disjointed inside his slacks. He looked at the two dead creatures on the floor and clapped both hands over his mouth.
“You there, weenie-butt,” Roach called out. “You follow the deputy out to his car. Cordelia, you and the old wino here hightail it out with them. Me and Jeryline and Irene will cut through the back to her Caprice.”
Cordelia put on a mighty frown. “Roachie, aren’t me and you together tonight? Aren’t we? Let me go with you.”
“Fine,” he said, waving her away with one hand. “It don’t matter anyway. Half of us goes out the front, and the other half out the back. Brayker!”
Brayker shifted his gaze from a window over to Roach.
“Gimme that gun. We’re gonna have to shoot our way out, most likely.”
Brayker’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t have a chance, kid. None of you do.”
“Kid?” Roach spat on the floor and hitched his belt up higher. “I’m in the National Guard, Brayker. I’m a goddamn Specialist E-4 in the National Guard.”
“Wonderful,” Brayker grunted. “You have extensive combat experience.”
“Been trained for it, at least. And you ain’t nothing but a street bum anyhow, by the looks of you.”
“Sticks and stones,” Brayker said tiredly. “And you’re not getting my gun.”
“ ’Fraid to be without it?” Roach goaded. “Chicken-shit, maybe?”
“Extremely.”
“Then screw you, nutless. Hey, pretty girl!”
Jeryline looked around, then locked eyes with him, her face dull, her mouth hanging slack. She licked her teeth. “What?”
“You and me and Cordelia and Irene, we’re going out the back. Is there any steps back there, a porch or something? We could fall off, and none of us want to be late supper for them rubber monkeys.”
“Three steps,” she said. “Concrete. No porch.”
“Okay.” He propped his hands on his hips and surveyed his army. “Deputy, gather your crew by the door. Cordelia and Jeryline, come with me. Irene, get your keys out and ready. We’re gonna be out of here and in them cars in three seconds flat, I’m betting. Brayker? Last chance?”
Brayker dragged a hand down his dirty, haggard face. With a sudden motion he sailed Tupper’s old Colt police special across the room into Roach’s hands. “Shoot for their eyes,” he said. “Nowhere else will do.”
Now Roach grinned. “You sit tight, and I’ll have a whole cavalry here in half an hour. Wino, you go help the weenie-butt get his scrawny ass outside.”
Uncle Willie, muttering indecipherable things, went to aid Wally in his quest to get up off the floor. “Don’t be barfing on me,” he warned as he slid an arm under Wally’s shoulders to support him. “And don’t be screaming in my ear or nothing if them demons get close.”
Wally, pale as a bar of Ivory soap, nodded acceptance of the terms.
Roach blew out a long preparatory breath. “Okay. Take your positions.”
Deputy Martel, Uncle Willie, and Wally Enfield shuffled to the front entrance. Martel drew his pistol, flipped the cylinder open, checked it, clicked it back into place. “Six rounds of 132-grain wadcutter,” he told Willie. “Drop a giant in his tracks, drop him like a rock.”
“Don’t be telling me there’s giant ones out there too,” Willie said with a voice that shook.
Roach herded Cordelia, Irene, and Jeryline past the desk and into the kitchen. “On my signal!” he hollered unexpectedly, making Jeryline jump. “Got that, deputy?”
No reply drifted in, just a grumbling set of noises made, Jeryline assumed, by a deputy getting tired of taking orders from a part-time fry-cook and dishwasher.
The fry cook, still disheveled from his inte
rrupted liaison with Cordelia and still with his tennis shoes untied, pressed himself to the wall by the door. In his greasy white T-shirt, with his shapeless brown hair pasted to his head with sweat, Jeryline could not find much confidence in his soldiering expertise. It occurred to her that in the National Guard, he might be a Specialist E-4, but was probably a cook. “You three run out first,” he panted. “I’ll cover you to the car.”
Cordelia, still barefoot, with her makeup smeary and comical, latched onto his arm. “I’ll wait and run with you,” she said. “I know you won’t let them get me.”
He eyed her. “Sure. Irene, you and Jeryline run out there as fast as you can, and get the car going. Pull up as close as you can and open the doors when you see us head out. Understand?”
“It’s a plan,” Irene said. She pushed the long sleeves of her green pantsuit up to her biceps, and flexed her hands. “I’m tougher than I look, believe it or not. The body’s sagging but the frame ain’t bent. So are you ready, Jeryline? Ready?”
Jeryline felt wobbly and sick, and the inner screen of her mind kept presenting her with color slides of the dead and mangled things, the sheriff, the monsters, the demons, the unbelievable. She had lived through months of hell in prison, had been put into solitary time and again for fighting with inmates, fighting with guards. If it were a gang of killer bikers out there now, she could deal with it. But not with a pack of guys in cheap rubber . . .
. . . monster suits?
Again she felt the need to howl with laughter. It was too bizarre, it had never been posted to the roster of her life that on this night she must run through the rain and the wind to escape a pack of guys in . . .
. . . guys in . . .
Screw it. She clamped a hand over her eyes. The world was more fucked up than she ever would have believed. She had been used and abused but had never faced the idea of being killed, perhaps killed and eaten, by a pack of demons wearing demon suits. No zippers, even. Real horrors from the top of their misshapen heads to the bottoms of their misshapen feet.
Irene put her hand around the knob, tested it slowly to make sure it wasn’t locked, and looked into Jeryline’s eyes. “On three,” she said breathlessly, and offered a wink. “One, two—”
Something heavy and hard crunched against the door, nearly splitting it in half down the center. A webbed, pebbly hand squeezed through the open slot between the door and its casing, flexing, clawing, embedding gouges into the old brown paint.
Roach grunted with surprise. He shifted the pistol in his hand and began to hammer the butt of it on those questing fingers, where two-inch nails the color of butterscotch clicked and scraped.
The door was slammed from outside again. Irene leaned into it, grabbing Jeryline by the hair and hauling her into the act. “I need your weight,” she shouted. “Push against me!”
The broken door groaned against its hinges. Cordelia got the idea and dropped to the floor between Jeryline’s legs. She scrambled to press her weight against the bottom part of the door, her bare feet squeaking on the linoleum tiles.
“It’s—no—good!” Irene groaned. “We’re losing it!”
Roach dropped back and held the pistol in a two-handed cop stance. “Let it blow,” he barked. “I got ’em!”
As it turned out, no one needed to let it go: in the next assault the door snapped apart in a spray of wood chips and paint. Jeryline squealed as she was sent spinning across the black-and-white checkered tiles on her fanny. She slammed against a plastic trash barrel, crushed it against the south wall, and ricocheted across the room to come to an ignoble stop under the aluminum prep table, where just a few hours ago she had quartered the potatoes for dinner. That, of course, was before Brayker entered her life. She wished desperately that he had stayed away forever.
She crawled from under the table and pushed herself to her feet. Her hair was in her eyes again and she swatted it aside. Roach and Irene had become very popular with the rubber-suit crowd, she observed, and Cordelia had come across a rolling pin, which she was using as a club against the bumpy head of the gargoyle trying to drag Roach outside. Roach himself was squalling like a pig, hanging onto nearby objects and kicking at that distorted animal head, at those bulbous yellow eyes. It did not seem to matter to the stuntman inside the rubber suit; he was a fellow dedicated to his craft.
Jeryline turned in a clumsy circle. Irene was a cheapskate when it came to owning the Mission Inn, but she did have a set of very good cooking knives sticking through a slotted block of wood that was screwed to the wall by the prep table. Jeryline lunged for them, came up short, and banged her forehead against the table’s rounded edge. She saw brief stars, a few comets. Then she was up again, clawing for the knives, hauling a big one from the wooden holder so fast it made a whirring sound as it sliced the air.
She spun around. Cordelia was doing her best with the rolling pin, but it was like fending off wild boars with a flyswatter. Roach grunted and squealed as he was jerked farther through the smashed door. The pistol Brayker had taken from Sheriff Tupper’s body was still in Roach’s hand but he was ignoring it, had apparently forgotten he had it at all. Jeryline charged at the nearest stuntman, one who was in a finely crafted monster suit that made him look like a green and red frog with a rooster’s comb flapping on top. He was bent over Irene, pawing through her hair. Jeryline raised the knife over her head, hesitated there while a drop of sweat rolled off her nose, then grunted and stabbed the knife deep into the stuntman’s back.
She fell away, her breath screeching up and down in her throat, her eyes as big as silver dollars. The knife was a prop, was only a prop in this movie: she had buried it to the hilt in the middle of the stuntman’s back, yet all he did was straighten up angrily, eye her with his costume’s huge yellow eyes blazing and hateful, then leap at her, still quite alive. She was smashed to the floor on her back and felt long hot teeth snap at the meat of her throat.
She screamed. The time for the director of this movie to shout Cut! was long overdue; the stunt people in the gruesome duds had gone insane and taken over the entire production. She pushed her hands against the demon’s slick green chest, levered it upward a bit, and found it amazingly heavy, as if it were full of water. Its drooling jaws clamped open and shut with the furious speed of a ferret attacking a snake, spittle flipping from its elongated teeth in a spray of yellowish foam. The creature smelled like sulfur, like freshly peeled boiled eggs.
Jeryline’s arms weakened, wobbled, failed. The demon seemed to grin a rubbery, lipless Thank you as it crushed down on her again. It wrenched its jaws open. She turned her head and groaned, batting weakly at its face with her fists.
It squealed suddenly and its weight was gone from her. She looked up: the thing now had something strange sticking out of one lidless eye. It hopped and bellowed, pawing at it, knocking it aside finally. Jeryline rolled to her hands and knees and saw that Brayker’s butterfly knife was on the floor, its shiny blade dull with something like foamy yellow mustard. Stuntman eye-juice, she decided crazily, and grabbed for it, able to see Brayker running toward her after having thrown it. Clawing in agony, the demon managed to knock the knife across the floor. Jeryline let out another groan, then brightened. By rising to her knees she was able to reach across the creature’s back and work the kitchen knife free from its bony moorings there.
“In the eyes!” Brayker shouted. “You have to get them in the eyes!”
Green fluid was on this knife, your standard monster-blood. As she swung out with it she did not care if the stuff was camel snot or Cordelia’s X-rated guacamole dip that had turned her bedsheets so green. The knife punctured the demon’s remaining eye with a syrupy pop. White fluid squirted out to boil holes into the linoleum of Irene’s kitchen, and several more on the front of Jeryline’s canvas apron. With a squeal of disgust she jumped to her feet, untied it, and ripped it away. The demon went into a mindless, shrieking spasm of sorts a few seconds before it relaxed.
The gun in Roach’s hand popped o
ff a single random shot; Jeryline saw a burst of porcelain chips explode from the kitchen sink. Brayker dived for Roach, who was whooping and howling as he departed. Brayker wrested the pistol from Roach’s hand and shot the eyes out of the two demons dragging him outside. Cordelia, currently going apeshit with the rolling pin, stepped aside long enough for Brayker to kill the last one.
Brayker kicked Roach away from the shattered door, then took out the key and worked the glass bulb open. He shook it at the ruined doorway. Lines of sparkling fire sketched a quick outline, then were gone.
He turned. “Now do you see?” he shouted. “Now do you see!”
Something wet and gray shot out of the dark behind Brayker. Jeryline uttered a short screech and dropped into a crouch with her arms protecting her head, sure now that this invasion would never end. The creature sailed through the shattered doorway, its claws outstretched, its tail arched and its eyes glowing and insane; it crossed the boundary between inside and outside and burst into a quick, blinding flash of white flame. When it hit the kitchen floor and slid against the wall it was little more than a husk, a drift of oddly shaped ashes.
After a wondering moment, Jeryline rose up again. “That—that liquid stuff. What is it?”
Brayker armed sweat off his face and dug the leather pouch out of his clothes. He shoved the key inside. “Weird science,” he said, approaching her. “What we have to do now is seal everything in this building. All of it. Come on.”
He took hold of her arm. She allowed herself to be carted a few steps, then jerked away. “No,” she said, backing away from him. Although this kitchen had been part of her life for many months it seemed alien and dangerous now, a new prison with new terrors, new inmates, a new breed of guard. “No way, Brayker. I am not part of this scene, I do not have anything to do with you, you can go fight your rubber monkeys without me around.”
Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight Page 7