Madness (Asher Benson #2)

by Jason Brant

  The stabbing agony in his leg got worse.

  And the pain in his arm returned.

  His eyes blurred.

  Shook his head.

  “Ahh, damn.” He took a deep breath through his nose, hoping it would steady him. It didn’t.

  They were only a half-mile from the station. If he could just make it there, Allison could patch him up enough to staunch the bleeding.

  Or so he hoped.

  “What?” Allison turned her attention back to him. “Is the bleeding getting worse?”

  “Sure ain’t getting any better. Starting to feel lightheaded.”

  “Pull over and let me drive.”

  “We’re almost—”

  Black spots formed in Adams’ vision. He blinked rapidly, but the darkness spread. His thoughts lost cohesion, his panic sliding away. The pain in his leg remained, but the edge of it blunted.

  Fatigue settled in.

  Eyelids drooped.

  Allison screamed from the seat beside him, but he couldn’t make out her words. His senses came through a sieve, everything strained and incomprehensible. The whine of the engine quieted.

  And then, much too slowly, his vision returned. Colors saturated, objects came into focus.

  Allison’s shoulder was pressed against his, their hips almost touching. Her hands were on the steering wheel, attempting to wrangle it from his grasp. His foot had the accelerator pressed to the floor.

  Dust plumed around the car as it swerved onto the shoulder, the tires inches from sliding into the drainage ditch.

  “Stop!” Allison kicked at Adams’ calf in a frantic attempt to dislodge his foot from the pedal.

  The heft of his leg made it feel as if he’d fallen into quicksand. With an effort that almost made him fade out again, George took pressure off the accelerator. He tried to hit the brake, but his foot fumbled against the side of the pedal. The strength in his arms failed, his grip sliding down.

  As he released the wheel, Allison took control of it and yanked them back to the road. The car drifted along, still doing forty. Through the trees ahead, the police station came into view. The old house still had all the first-floor lights on.

  The ambulance hadn’t arrived yet.

  George focused on forming his words correctly. His lips felt plump and immobile, giving him a slight slur. “Losing too much blood. Need the medkit.”

  “You almost killed us.” Allison kept her eyes straight ahead as she steered the car toward the gravel parking lot of the station. “Can you hit the brake?”

  “I think so.” George waited until they were almost into the parking lot to slow them down even more. They coasted onto the gravel, tiny rocks kicking up into the underbelly of the cruiser.

  The heat indicator beside the speedometer had maxed out.

  They’d made it back, but his car was officially toast. If they needed to go any further, they would have to get through to someone and hitch a ride. The sheriff wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere.

  With the car still going almost ten miles an hour, Allison grabbed the gear shifter and slammed it into park. The transmission locked with a loud thunk in front of the dash, and the entire car bucked forward.

  Allison twisted the keys, putting the engine out of its misery. “Where’s the kit?”

  “In the storage room, top shelf on the left.” Adams looked down at the flowing stream of crimson running to the floor. “Better hurry.”

  Now that he wasn’t driving or dodging bullets, the sheriff needed to get a better look at the wound. He grabbed the fabric of his pants around the hole where the bullet had entered and tried to tear it open. The weakness that had spread to his limbs was worse than he thought.

  The fabric didn’t rip.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Allison opened her door and jumped out of the car.

  Glass fell to the parking lot from her seat.

  She ran through the door to the office and disappeared inside.

  George tried to tear his pants one more time, but he just didn’t have the strength left. His labored breathing wasn’t helping. He put his left palm over the wound and pressed down, hoping to stymie the blood flow.

  As he sat there and waited, wondering if today would be the day the reaper punched his ticket, George watched as a pillar of smoke rose above the trees leading into town.

  11 – Meet Ash

  Allison ran through the empty office, darting around the sheriff’s desk. The ambulance hadn’t arrived. Neither had the receptionist, Melody. Allison hoped they hadn’t run into the psychopaths down the road.

  She found the storage room at the back of the old house and frantically searched the walls for the light switch. A naked bulb flickered on, casting the room in a soft glow. Allison found the shelving George had mentioned and stood on her tiptoes to see the top.

  There was no medkit sitting there.

  “Goddamn it!”

  Allison looked to the second shelf and spotted boxes of files and stationary. She rummaged through them, knocking several to the floor. Dust flitted through the air, twinkling under the low-hanging light. A coffee mug filled with pens shattered between her feet, startling her.

  She spun around, eyeing the storage units on the opposite wall and caught sight of a red box with a white cross on it sitting on the top shelf. “The right side, not the left,” Allison shouted as she grabbed it.

  A film of decade-old dust covered the top.

  The bizarreness of her racing through a police station to get medical equipment for the wounded sheriff didn’t escape her. In the blink of an eye, her morning had devolved into a nightmare. It felt like an eternity ago that she’d been on her way to work. Now, she was trapped in a series of seemingly unending torments.

  She thought of the poor professor they had left behind and her throat worked. The way his head had popped made her gorge rise as she ran the moment of his death through her mind over and over again.

  Allison stood in the doorway of the storage room and closed her eyes, forced her breathing to slow. Her attention focused on helping the sheriff, pushing all other concerns to the periphery. If she didn’t get him taken care of, he would die.

  Nothing else mattered until he was bandaged up.

  “I can do this.” Allison opened her eyes and made her way down the hallway to the office at the front of the house. “I can do this.”

  She stepped through the door and stopped in midstride.

  A black car pulled into the parking lot, stopping ten yards behind the destroyed police cruiser.

  The windows were tinted.

  Allison looked at the sheriff. He’d opened his door, but hadn’t climbed out. His head leaned against the seat, eyes closed. Both hands clutched at his wounded leg.

  “Sheriff!” she hissed.

  He didn’t move. She couldn’t tell if he had slipped into unconsciousness again.

  “George!”

  The driver’s door of the black sedan opened, and a man stepped out. He was shirtless, his chest slathered in some kind of filth. A slimy sheen covered his shoulders, face, and arms. It looked as if he’d just swam through sludge.

  Someone like that didn’t belong behind the wheel of an official-looking car.

  He must have stolen it, she thought. Oh, God! He’s one of them!

  Allison wanted to turn and flee back through the station, but she couldn’t leave the sheriff alone. He was defenseless in the car. They would kill him with ease and then probably hunt her down anyway.

  The man moved around the door and raised his hands out in front of him, palms up. “Relax, Allison. I didn’t steal the car.” His head cocked to the side a few degrees. “Well, I guess I did, but the owner was dead, so I’m not really sure if that still counts.”

  Allison’s eyes widened at the word dead.

  “Whoa, sorry.” The man slapped his forehead with his palm. “It’s been a long morning, and I’m not quite thinking clearly. My name is Asher. I rent the cabin down the road a piece.
”

  The passenger door opened, and a bald-headed man in an off-the-rack suit stepped out. His head gleamed under the morning sun. “I’m Detective Andrew Lloyd.”

  “Bullshit,” Allison said. She was amazed at the strength in her voice. It didn’t betray the fact that her blood pressure was so high that she feared the top of her head might blow off.

  “Just take it easy.” The bald man slowly reached into his jacket and pulled out one of those tiny, leather ID holders she’d seen detectives use in a dozen cop dramas on television. “Here’s my identification.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me. We sell fake badges for three bucks down at the station.” Allison felt the medkit tapping against her thigh and realized her hands were shaking.

  The dirty man took another step forward. “Allison, I know you’re scared. We are too. We came here to use the phone to call for help. Some people were killed.” He nodded at the pulverized police cruiser. “And it looks like he needs it even more than we do.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I can explain that later. We need to get his leg bandaged before he bleeds to death.”

  Allison looked from one man to the other. She couldn’t wrap her head around what was happening. The one with the shaved head had a professional, neat appearance. The other looked as if he’d spent the night going through a garbage disposal. They were polar opposites, yet they’d arrived together in a car with government plates. “I don’t understand what’s happening here.”

  “We don’t either.”

  The back doors of the car opened.

  A statuesque blonde climbed out of the backseat and looked around, her eyes fearful. She wore tight clothing that left little to the imagination.

  Feet were visible under the other door, but a head didn’t appear above it. An incredibly short, pigtailed black girl stepped around the door and looked over at Allison. “Sup.”

  Allison gaped at them. Of all the people she could have expected to step out of the car at the moment, she never would have imagined such an odd group. None of them were similar to the other in any meaningful way, save for the thick builds of the two men.

  “My build is better than his though, right?” the filthy man asked. “I’m all man. Drew is only about seventy-five percent man. The rest is made up of the jelly donuts he scarfs down all day.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Ashley. Can we at least diffuse the situation before getting back to the pointless banter?” The supposed detective, Drew, came a few steps closer. “Ignore him—he uses snark incessantly when he’s scared.”

  “Would you two shut the fuck up?” The black girl walked around the dirty man and looked at the sheriff. “That dude got his ass beat. You might want to help him out.”

  Allison was shocked at how vulgar the little girl was.

  She swears more than a sailor who has been at sea for too long.

  “She really is an obscene little turd, isn’t she?” The dirty man took another step forward. “Allison, you need to let us take care of him and then get our people on the phone. I know you’re scared, we all are, but we don’t have a lot of time to burn.”

  The way he, Asher he’d said his name was, kept saying what she’d been thinking had her confused. Were her emotions that plain on her face? She’d never had someone read her so openly before.

  Allison didn’t want to get near any of those people, but she knew they were right about one thing—the sheriff needed help. She slowly moved toward the cruiser, holding the medkit to her chest. “How do you know my name?”

  Asher and the detective exchanged a quick glance. Asher said, “I’ve seen you around town before.”

  “Give me the kit.” Drew came toward her, hand outstretched. “I’ve bandaged more than a few gunshot wounds in my day.” He looked to Asher. “Go inside and see if you can get someone on the horn.”

  Asher gave him a small salute. “Hooah.”

  Allison hesitated, still clutching the medkit to her chest.

  “Unless you know how to stop the sheriff’s bleeding, hand it over.” Drew stopped in front of her, his face softening. “We’re here to help, I promise.”

  Dirty Asher pointed to a gun stuffed into the waistband of his basketball shorts. “If we wanted to hurt you, we would have done it already.”

  Realizing they were right and that her options had become extremely limited, Allison finally handed it over. “Two men down the road killed someone right in front of us. They tried to murder us too, but he managed to get us out of there.”

  The even tone of her voice still surprised Allison. The sight of the professor’s destroyed head had nearly made her faint when he’d been shot, but she’d managed to internalize it better than she had expected. She wondered, not for the first time that day, if she was in shock.

  “We saw them,” Asher said. He walked over to her and stopped a few feet away. “We’re going to call for help and get those assholes taken care of. Our cell phones aren’t working though, so we need to use the landline inside the station.”

  Allison caught a whiff of the filthy man’s body odor and winced. She recovered quickly and tried to hide her disgust, but Asher saw it anyway.

  “Yeah, I know. I could use a shower.”

  The little black girl scoffed. “You need more than that. Bleach probably can’t get the stank off you.”

  Allison ignored their ludicrous back and forth. “The phone lines are down.”

  Asher and Drew exchanged a glance. Drew said, “This is going from bad to worse.”

  “Have you tried the computers yet?” the little girl asked. “Actually calling someone is for old people, anyway.”

  Ash gestured to the girl. “Allison, this is Short Round. Short Round, this is Allison.”

  “Dick.” The little girl glared at him for a second. “Don’t pay any attention to him. I’m Nami.”

  Allison closed her eyes. Of all the people she could run into at a time like this, why did it have to be such a dysfunctional group? They argued and jabbed at each other rather than trying to figure out what was going on. The men guarding the road could be coming for them right now, and they were standing in front of the station having a pissing contest.

  It felt like she’d fallen into the middle of a horrible buddy-cop movie.

  Except there were no heroes in this film, just a bunch of wannabe comedians.

  “I’m Sammy.”

  Allison opened her eyes and saw the blonde waving at her. “Hi.”

  “They aren’t too bad,” Sammy said, gesturing to the others. “They argue a lot, but they’re good people.”

  “I’m finding that a little hard to believe.”

  Drew knelt beside the sheriff, tearing a hole in the fabric of the old man’s pants. “He’s lost a lot of blood. We need to get him to a hospital.”

  Ash turned to Nami. “See if you can use the internet in there while Drew works on the old timer. I’ll watch the road in case we get a few more unwelcome visitors.” He looked to Sammy. “See if you can find more guns in the station.”

  “Got it.” Sammy headed for the station, stopping to allow Allison to walk beside her. The vulgar girl, Nami, came up behind them.

  Allison peered over at the tall blonde and saw that her hands were shaking as well. Now that she was closer to the two of them, she thought they looked familiar. “Have we met before?”

  “I doubt it,” Sammy said. “But we get that a lot.”

  “Are you on television or something?” Allison pulled the door open and let the others go in first.

  “We were a few months ago.”

  Nami followed Sammy inside. “Remember the shit that went down with President Thomas? When he got shot?”

  “Who wouldn’t remember that?” Allison asked.

  Nami held her hands up. “Hey, I don’t know what you hillbillies do out here. I figured you were too busy with tractor pulls and cow-tipping to watch the news.” She walked over to the first desk, Melody’s, and pulled herself into
the office chair.

  Allison didn’t appreciate the ‘hillbilly’ dig and was about to chastise the little girl when she finally recognized her. She’d seen both of them on the news in the days after the attempted assassination of the president. They’d been a huge part of the 24/7 coverage around that insane day in D.C.

  Nami worked for the DoD or DoJ or something like that. She wasn’t a little girl, but was actually in her thirties. She’d become relatively famous online when people had recut videos of her expletive-laden interviews.

  Sammy was an innocent bystander who had been caught up with the others by mistake. She had also been a focus during the coverage because of her Barbiesque appearance.

  And then she remembered Ash.

  His infamy had come from the dozens of videos, shot by reporters and bystanders with cell phones, showing him kill the would-be assassin in the middle of the National Mall. As far as Allison knew, he’d never given an interview about it.

  There had been a big push to hear from the hero of the hour, but like all things in the news, interest faded rapidly.

  The detective, as she recalled, had also stayed out of the limelight.

  Allison spun around and looked back at the men through the window at the front of the station. Ash stood at the end of the parking lot, watching the road. He looked both ways every few seconds.

  “He shot the terrorist who was trying to kill the president.” Allison stared at him, struggling to believe that the filthy, smelly man outside was a famous hero.

  “That’s him,” Sammy said. “He doesn’t look like much sometimes, but he’s the bravest man I’ve ever met.”

  Ash turned around and looked back at the station. Allison couldn’t be certain, but she thought that he’d puffed his chest out a bit when Sammy had complimented him. He was much too far away to have heard them though, so she dismissed the thought.

  The idea that such an odd, out-of-sorts man had been the subject of so much attention and adoration struck her as almost humorous. The story had fallen off the radar over the summer, though Allison hadn’t really noticed until she thought about it now. She’d spent so much time drinking lately that she rarely paid attention to anything outside of her shift at work or the specials at the pub.