Bloodcrier: The Complete Two-Book Series

by Richard Denoncourt

  “It was Warren,” Elkin began. “He shot him…”

  The confession didn’t save him. Soon, a second mouth opened just beneath his chin, drawn by Michael’s hand, using the point of Elkin’s hunting knife. It poured out a curtain of blood that soaked into the front of his shirt. As he gagged and dropped to his knees, the people of Gulch silently cheered.

  Michael could sense them.

  His audience.

  Chapter 20

  Readying their automatics, the men gathered in the darkness behind the pink house on Silo Street. They didn’t need to be telepaths to know the girls were inside. Peter and Eli had gotten there quick enough, and there was only one reason those two punks would be in such a hurry.

  “I’m seeing something,” one of his men said.

  “Me too. It’s Elkin.”

  Warren lost the grin. “An illusion?”

  “It’s like a vision, boss,” another man explained. “Like—like I got a movie theater in my head that I can close my eyes and watch. Like I got no choice.”

  “Wrath,” Warren said.

  Shaking his head, he closed his eyes and let his mind relax, trying to catch a glimpse of what his men were seeing. Next to him, Charlotte sighed. They had bound her wrists with rope, one man holding a pistol to her temple. Any telepathy out of her and she’d be dead in a second. She knew this. Therefore, whatever this vision might be, it was coming from somewhere else.

  The vision unraveled in his mind with all the terrifying realism of a nightmare. There was Elkin, gaping like a scared fool, his face growing larger at the approaching view. Michael was advancing on the man, and Warren watched through Michael’s eyes, unable to turn away as his best friend from childhood turned into a quivering coward.

  “Goddamn it,” Warren growled. “Elkin, you dumb shit.”

  It took about half a second for Elkin to give his blubbering confession. “It was Warren. He shot him. I’s—I’s told him not to, told him it was a bad idea. But John said—John said…”

  Hands flew toward Elkin’s neck. Warren opened his eyes, but that did nothing to halt the vision of his friend’s throat being sliced open. Served him right, the yellow bastard.

  “We’re going in,” he told his men. “Jacob, you first.”

  Jacob, with his flat, bulldoggish features, nodded and took the lead. He tried the back door, found it locked, and kicked it open with a single, powerful blow. Chirps sounded from a few crickets trapped inside. Total darkness yawned in front of them.

  Jacob hesitated.

  “Get in there,” Warren said through clenched teeth.

  Holding Charlotte like a shield, Jacob passed through the doorway. Something snapped, triggering a shotgun blast. The sound was like a bomb going off in the room.

  They all ducked. Charlotte had flung herself back onto the porch at the last second. She screamed as Jacob staggered, his boots clapping against the porch floor, his left arm swinging wildly. His shoulder had been blown apart, and his arm hung loosely attached to his body by a strip of skin and shirt fabric and nothing else.

  His body toppled onto the stairs before sliding down with heavy thumps. He died almost upside down, head resting on the dirt, his eyes turned up to a black sky. The door swung shut as if by an invisible hand, latching with a click.

  Warren cursed. “Let’s go.”

  “You mean get out of here?” Julian said. He was a small, ratty guy with slicked hair and a goatee. “Like, let’s go back?”

  “I mean like I’ll shoot you in the balls if you ask another dumb question. We ain’t going back. We just make the girl go first this time.”

  “Oh, right,” Julian said, eyeballing the other three men with them. “The girl sets off the booby traps.”

  Warren rolled his eyes, making sure to keep a firm grip on the back of Charlotte’s shirt.

  “We got your girl,” he shouted at the house. “Charlotte is here. I’m gonna make her go first, so you got any more of those booby traps, you better let me know. You hear me, Rivers? You and your tubby boyfriend are under arrest. You come out here now or your little ment girlfriend here is gonna get it.”

  He kept the pistol pressed to the back of Charlotte’s head, starting to shove her again toward the back door.

  Warren was a real idiot. Charlotte almost couldn’t believe the man had survived this long.

  She proceeded across the porch, taking small steps. The voice inside her head urged her along, reassuring her. This was going to hurt, but hopefully not too much.

  Warren whispered in her ear. “Now you open that door, y’hear me?”

  Charlotte reached out, an inch at a time.

  Behind her, the men watched closely, holding their breaths. She could sense it. Everything was quiet so far except for the chirping of crickets. She turned the knob, then began to push the door open. Slowly, very slowly.

  The door opened to expose the well-lit kitchen just past the mudroom instead of the darkness from before. Beyond that was the dining room, with its broad table of polished oak, only the end of which was visible from this angle. A clock ticked.

  Charlotte took a single, tentative step onto the strip rug at her feet. Neither Warren nor his men asked why such a rug, so obviously out of place with its beige color and delicate, furry texture, had been placed in this particular spot. It was clean, too, as if no one had ever stomped a pair of boots on it after coming in from the backyard. No one in her right mind would put a rug down in this spot.

  Unless she were hiding something.

  I’m going, she sent to the others.

  Then she turned to face Warren and his men. Warren gave her a resentful scowl.

  “Get in there,” he whispered fiercely.

  Smiling, Charlotte lifted her bound hands and flipped up her middle finger.

  “Kiss my pretty ass,” she spat at him.

  She stepped backward. With a flapping sound, she disappeared, taking the rug with her.

  John Meacham drove south toward the edge of the Hollows, his headlights washing over the empty streets. When he began to feel a slight dullness in his mind, he pulled the vehicle over and got out. No ment asshole was going to wreck his new truck. He was better on his feet anyway, as long as he had his gun.

  Except it wasn’t just any gun. It was a fully restored M16 assault rifle with a mounted, high-powered tactical flashlight, set for three-round bursts, just waiting to be unloaded at mutinous sons-of-bitches like Louis Blake and his boys. The People’s Republic newspapers were right; Blake was a terrorist if Meacham had ever seen one, ready to shit all over the integrity and safety of Gulch just to get his own way.

  Liberty, my ass. If he wanted war, he’d get it.

  Meacham ran toward a group of buildings nestled against the foothills, which now rose darkly ahead of him like ships approaching a bay at night. The IceHouse Lodge & Condominiums complex—leftovers from an age when this town had been a winter resort—formed a C-shaped mass of buildings, the windows dark holes against the brick after so many years of neglect.

  He gripped the M16, glad to have its reassuring weight in his hands. Its flashlight guided him as he crossed the plaza in front of the building. Rubble was strewn all over the place, loose bricks and empty beer bottles with the labels worn off. The place was infested with crickets. Their cacophonous chirping was enough to drive a man insane. He went straight to the back door, where a familiar stench of pinecones and urine greeted him.

  This was the place.

  He shot apart the lock and chain, each burst deafening in the night, the flashes bright, and then he kicked open the door into darkness. Dim moonlight filtered in through the grimy skylights, and Meacham could see the place was empty, covered in nothing but dust and spider webs.

  He set the rifle on a stack of boxes with the flashlight pointing into the room. Then he lit a lantern he’d hung on the wall once, back when he and a team of his men had first inspected the place for supplies. Those were the good old days, when Gulch had been a treasure trove of
old, prewar furniture, medicines, and canned foods. He pulled out the small kit he’d brought with him, the one he had spent nearly a tenth of the town’s annual budget on to purchase from the last caravan.

  He hoped it was worth it.

  Out came the small glass bottle and a syringe. He pulled the plastic sheath off with his teeth, stabbed the needle into the bottle, and sucked out a third of its contents. After squeezing the air out of the needle, which produced a few glistening drops, he found a vein in his arm and injected the drug into himself.

  Selarix. It was so new it didn’t even have a street name.

  The effect settled over him at once. It was not a euphoric one. Because of that, no one would find much of this stuff on the black market in any city. Instead of pleasure, he felt his thoughts speed up—zip, zip, zip—like a merry-go-round spinning at fifty miles per hour. An unpleasant feeling, but it would keep Louis Blake out of his head. Most telepathy was useless against this stuff, which meant he and Blake would be on the same footing—man to man, gun to gun, none of this combat telepathy bullshit.

  Finally.

  Chapter 21

  In an upstairs bedroom inside the girls’ house on Silo Street, Fran, Rocio, and Sally cowered behind the bed, their sights set on the door. Peter had given Rocio a pistol and instructed her to shoot anyone who came in who wasn’t on their side. Since then, Rocio had remained on her knees with her elbows on the mattress, both hands holding the pistol pointed at the door.

  “Oh God,” she kept saying. “Oh God, oh God…”

  “It’s okay,” Sally said.

  A blast went off downstairs.

  Blake knew something was wrong.

  The fact he couldn’t sense John Meacham’s presence within the IceHouse Lodge meant one of two things—either Blake had lost his knack, or John Meacham had gotten hold of Selarix, the new drug being produced in the NDR, which sped up the mind while blocking any attempts at telepathic intrusion. The caravans coming out of the NDR had started carrying it.

  But for one to bring it this far into the mountains was unbelievable.

  If Meacham had been able to get his hands on enough assault rifles to outfit his men, he could get his hands on Selarix without a lot of extra effort. If that was the case, his mind was probably doing cartwheels right now.

  Without his telepathy to guide him, Blake felt like he was standing in a war zone wearing a blindfold. He turned off his flashlight outside the lodge—the last place he had sensed Meacham—and kicked open the side door. Inhaling deeply, he walked into pure darkness.

  Closing his eyes, he ran through techniques to calm his nerves and divert his energy to his other four senses. He would be able to tell, by sound and smell, what was around him. It wasn’t perfect. If he opened his eyes, it would take at least ten dangerous seconds for his sight to return to normal, but it was all he had.

  Raising the pistol, he began to make his way through what had once been the lobby, his ears and nose searching for John Meacham.

  “No,” Warren shouted.

  With her middle finger raised, Charlotte fell through the hole in the hallway floor, taking the strip rug with her. The whole house was probably littered with traps and escape routes.

  Before he could react, someone at the other end of the hallway turned the corner and fired at him. Warren felt the slug graze his shoulder, heard it sink into the man behind him. Without thinking, he dove off to the side and crashed into the wall as the gun let off a few more rounds.

  “Rivers,” he shouted, checking his wound and wincing. “You’re a dead man, y’hear me?”

  One of his men—Julian—had been shot in the neck. The blood spurting out of him was black in the moonlight. He struggled to place his hand against the wound, his face contorting in agony. Warren sped up the process, kicking the man off the porch. He didn’t care how it looked. Julian fell onto the grass with a loud thump, missing the stairs entirely. It had been a hell of a kick.

  “Give me an M16,” Warren told his men, ditching the pistol. “One of you has one. Give it to me.”

  Kevin Ferlocher—Meacham’s latest recruit and a whelp no older than fifteen—handed over his rifle with a frown. Warren tossed him the pistol in exchange.

  Truthfully, Warren hadn’t thought it would get this far—that he would actually need an M16 tonight. But he was glad for it. Things were about to get a lot more fun.

  “Come on in, Warren,” he heard Eli call from inside. “I can hear your thoughts. You’re afraid. Well, I got the cure for that.”

  Warren kept silent. He nodded at the others with him. They returned the gesture, Kevin raising his hands to block his ears as Warren crept toward the door.

  Four men armed with M16 assault rifles guarded the jail, all dressed in brown with golden badges flashing on their shirts. The head jailer glanced at his watch.

  It was time. Time to rid this town of that queer sharpshooter once and for all. Maybe afterward, they could raid his store and get themselves something nice to wear.

  “Let’s take him out,” he said. “I’m itchin’ to spill some blood.”

  He was a small man with darting eyes who kept nervously licking his lips. If he could just get through this night without disappointing John Meacham, tomorrow they would all get to live like kings. It had been promised.

  “Take it easy, Ted,” his partner said. “We’ve got all night.”

  The man who had spoken was also named Ted, but his friends called him Teddy Bear because that was what his mother called him, and they knew he hated it. As big and burly as a bear, he was deaf in one ear and walked with a limp from having fallen from a tree as a child.

  “I’m takin’ it easy,” Ted said. “Let’s go.”

  Teddy Bear limped after him.

  When they were inside, Ted put aside his rifle. “We should have a little fun with him first.”

  Grinning, his eyes darted around the room before pointing toward the jail cell where the prisoner lay like a heap of soiled laundry on the narrow cot.

  “There he is,” Ted said.

  Reggie groaned as Ted inserted the key into the lock and opened the cell.

  “You sure about this?” Teddy Bear asked.

  Grinning, Ted pulled out a hunting knife with a dirty, serrated blade. It looked as if he’d used it to skin an animal, then put it away without washing off the blood.

  “He won’t be so pretty without a face.”

  Charlotte landed on a pile of blankets.

  She coughed from the dust that rained down on her. Then her ears exploded as an assault rifle went off overhead, making light flash over the hole.

  Above her, someone cried out in pain. One of the boys had been hit. She scrambled to get away, praying William was somewhere safe.

  This was all Michael’s fault. She was certain of it. She had almost died tonight because of the violence he had brought to Gulch.

  She would make him pay for this someday.

  If only he’d brought a grenade to throw into the hole after that little slut.

  Gripping the M16 tightly, Warren released a splash of bullets into the hallway, then heard a satisfying growl of pain.

  But something was wrong. Horrorstruck, he pressed against the wall, shocked by what was happening to his men.

  Kevin rose into the air, his eyelids cranked all the way open. But he was already dead.

  His body was cast aside as if someone had thrown him, but all Warren saw was a shadow. He searched in the dark for his pistol, picked it up, and shot at it, whatever it was, but the shadow evanesced and took form across the room, where it slashed Hardy Denloch’s neck open with a flash of light against blade.

  Warren shot at the shadow, but hit Hardy instead. Lincoln Jessup was standing by the door. As the shadow approached, Warren lunged toward Lincoln, pulled him down, and used him as a shield. The shadow took human form, then cut into Lincoln using movements almost too fast to see.

  Warren bolted for the door, jumped down the full set of stairs, and went tum
bling across the grass. He shot up again and ran, glancing over his shoulder only once to see Ian Meacham standing in the doorway, a blade gleaming by his side.

  “You’re next, Warren,” Ian shouted after him.

  Warren ran for the mountains.

  The two guards outside the jail fell first.

  They were in the middle of a conversation when Dominic’s knife flashed at them, severing their voices once and for all.

  Inside the jail, Ted had managed to lay Reggie out on the cot as if he were a patient about to undergo surgery. Reggie had been gagged with a balled-up handkerchief, his wrists handcuffed around his front. He grunted and struggled, his eyes swollen shut, blood running from a gash in his lower lip that had been opened anew by Teddy Bear’s fist.

  Ted held the knife, even now making delicate slashing motions in anticipation of his next act. Behind him, Teddy Bear scanned his surroundings nervously. He had heard the thumping sounds of the guards falling outside.

  “Did you hear that?”

  Ted ignored him, focusing on his victim instead. Reggie squirmed, moaning as he tried to scream.

  “Hey, hold up,” Teddy Bear said. “I thought I heard—”

  His words were cut short as a force he hadn’t seen coming tossed him into his partner, sending them tumbling across the tiny space. They scrambled to get up against the wall. A tall, dark figure stood at the entrance to the cell, holding a gleaming instrument that was so slim they couldn’t identify it in their stupor.

  Dominic lifted the scalpel to the light, then twisted. His next words came out a grating rasp.

  “Say good-bye.”

  Rocio closed her eyes, trying to breathe steadily. Her trembling arms still rested on the mattress with the pistol aimed at the door.

  “Why did this have to happen?” she said. “Why do so many people have to die like this?”