The Complete John Wayne Cleaver Series: I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, I Don't Want to Kill You, Devil's Only Friend, Over Your Dead Body, Nothing Left to Lose

by Dan Wells

  “John’s still in there! You’ll kill him!”

  I raced to the front door and stumbled down the steps. The women were huddled together, crying and wailing as if they were more scared now than they’d ever been in the dungeon. I ran toward them but something hit me from behind, knocking me down.

  “John!” cried Brooke.

  “He’s part of this!” shouted a deep voice. Curt. “He’s working with him—they’re partners!”

  I tried to stand up but Curt hit me again, with something hard and metal. A gas can.

  “He’s trying to help!” shouted Brooke. “He’s the one who got us all out of there!”

  There were flames behind Curt—the house was on fire. He stepped toward me and raised the gas can over his head.

  “He was going to cut me,” said Curt. “He was going to torture me, both of them together. It was the same for you, too—I heard everything.”

  Brooke opened her mouth, but paused. I had been about to attack her, and she knew it. Her eyes were dark, and I knew that she was remembering: even if she knew it had been a trick she also knew, in that moment, that she wasn’t sure if I was good or evil. Curt took advantage of her hesitation and slammed the gas can down on my head, making it ring with pain. My vision went black and I fell to the ground.

  “You want to make sure that bastard’s dead?” he said, his voice a thousand miles away. “Burn the damn place down.” There was a crash and a new roar of flame.

  “Not yet,” I said, too weak to move. “There’s a woman in the wall . . .”

  And then the sound went dead, and the world spun around, and everything was gone.

  22

  This time, I dreamed of nothing. It was just me, floating, surrounded by endless stretches of . . . well, nothing. I guess it was black, if that counts as something, but in the dream that didn’t occur to me—I knew it was nothing, and the strange thing was, I was fine with that. I wasn’t scared or nervous or sad, I was content. And something else. I was excited.

  I think I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that just because there was nothing at the moment, that didn’t mean there would never be anything at all. It just meant that I got to choose.

  I woke up in a hospital room, sometime in the middle of the night. It was dark and quiet. Lights were blinking behind me, reflected in the blank TV screen on the opposite wall. Soft voices drifted in from the hallway, hushed and distant. The curtains were open, and the moon shone faintly in the sky. Everything was still.

  My mom was asleep on the chair next to me, curled up under a light hospital blanket that rose and fell softly as she breathed. Her hand was stretched out, bridging the gap between the chair and the bed, holding the side rail protectively. Her hair was pulled back, with a few loose strands that hung over her face like wisps of dark cloud. Her hair seemed grayer in the moonlight, and her face more lined and sad; her body small and fragile.

  I wished, just for a moment, that I was like Forman—that I could reach out and feel what she was feeling. Was she sad? Happy? Did it matter? She was here. No matter what I did, no matter what anyone did, she would love me. She would never leave me.

  I drifted back to sleep.

  When I woke again the next morning Mom was still there, picking at a plate of hospital breakfast. There were other people in the room as well: a doctor and a policeman, conferring quietly in the corner.

  “He’s awake!”

  I turned my head and saw Lauren, standing up from another chair and walking to the bed. Mom practically leapt out of her chair and grabbed my hand.

  “John,” she said, “can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked. My throat was dry and raw, and it hurt to speak.

  “Look who’s up,” said the doctor, coming over quickly. He shone a penlight into each of my eyes, holding each one open with his thumb. I blinked when he let go, and he nodded. “Good. Now I want you to say your name.”

  “John—” I swallowed and coughed. “John Wayne Cleaver.”

  “Excellent,” said the doctor, and pointed at my mom. “Do you recognize this woman?”

  “That’s my mom.”

  “You’re checking his memory?” asked Mom.

  “His speech, mostly,” said the doctor. “His memory seems to be good, though.”

  “What happened?” I rasped.

  The policeman—it was Officer Jensen, Marci’s father—glanced at my mother, then at Lauren, then back at me.

  “Curt Halsey is in custody,” he said, “for assaulting you, among other things. Clark Forman is, as near as we can tell, deceased.”

  “Not them,” I said, “what happened to the girl?”

  “Brooke’s fine,” said Mom, putting her hand on mine.

  “No,” I said, closing my eyes. I was getting too anxious, and I was starting to feel weak again. “There was another woman, trapped in the wall. What happened to her?”

  “Remains were recovered from the ashes of the house,” Officer Jensen said, “but we haven’t identified them yet. One of them did appear to be imprisoned in a wall; she was surrounded by medical equipment, IVs and things. That’s probably how he kept her alive.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

  I hadn’t saved her. I opened my eyes again. “Is everyone else okay?”

  “The women you rescued are here in the hospital,” said the doctor, “though most of them will be transferred today. We’re not a very big facility, unfortunately, and they can be cared for much better in the city.”

  “We’re keeping you here,” said Mom, patting my hand. “Don’t worry.”

  “Technically,” said Officer Jensen, “we’re keeping you here in protective custody. We haven’t confirmed that your kidnapper is dead, so it’s partly for your own safety, but . . .” he glanced at my mom again. She frowned at him. “I’m afraid that you have been accused of a number of crimes yourself, including . . .” he paused, “the murder of Radha Behar.”

  “You can’t possibly—” Mom said, but Officer Jensen cut her off.

  “I’ve told your mother several times,” he said, “and I’m telling you now, not to worry about this. The women you rescued have provided overwhelming testimony in your favor. We have a couple of things we’re still looking at, but it’s mostly just paperwork at this point. You’re a hero, John. You should be proud.” He smiled. “Now get some rest.” He pulled the doctor aside again and they stepped into the hall, speaking in low voices.

  “You’re a hero,” Mom repeated, squeezing my hand and kissing my forehead. “You saved six lives in that house! Six! Sure, one of them was a creep,” she looked at Lauren, “but that’s what makes it so good. ‘Love thine enemies.’ ”

  Lauren shook her head and smiled at me. “And don’t worry about Curt,” she said. “We are so broken up.”

  “Six lives,” Mom repeated.

  But I was trying to save seven.

  I gave my statement several times, leaving out the part about Forman being a demon. Instead I told them everything I knew about Forman’s history of torture, focusing specifically on the house—the chains in the basement, the pit in the floor, the torture room upstairs, and even the reinforced walls in the closet. The other prisoners gave corroborating statements, and as the police cross-referenced our testimonies—and as they discovered the identities of the other women Forman had killed—they began to piece together a strong sense of where and how he worked. They ended up linking him, in the end, to several dozen missing persons cases, all women, and postulated that he had kept it all hidden thanks to his position in the FBI. If they knew what I knew—that Forman was thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years old—they would have known that the few dozen crimes they’d linked him to were only a fraction of his life’s work. He’d been torturing and killing for ages.

  But now he was gone.

  I was released the next day, from both the hospital and from police custody. Curt’s accusations that I was Forman’s accomplice were thrown out almost immediately, based on a lack of proof. E
ven more redeeming were the eyewitness accounts from the women in the basement, who explained very convincingly that not only did Forman kill Radha, but that I had nearly been killed as well trying to stop him. It all added up to a very heroic depiction of John the Brave, the demon slayer, who ventured into the foul beast’s darkest dungeon and rescued not one but five princesses. A story like that would normally make the news—it would probably make national news—but I was lucky. Jess and Carly’s story about being held in another house, where a different person had come to feed them, made the police concerned that Forman’s true accomplice, whoever he was, would come looking for revenge. They kept my name out of the story almost completely, and since I’d only been gone for forty-eight hours, very few people knew I’d been missing at all.

  I was a hero, but nobody knew about it.

  “Why can’t normal things ever happen here?” asked Max, gazing out over the freeway. We were on the Route 12 bridge, leaning on the railing while cars sped past beneath us on the highway. He was tossing bits of gravel onto the tops of the semis.

  “Plenty of normal things happen here,” I said. “We get up, we eat breakfast, we have school, we have jobs. We watch TV.”

  “No, I don’t mean normal boring things, I mean normal cool things.”

  “How can they be normal and cool at the same time?” I asked.

  “Because cool things happen all the time,” he said. “Cool is normal everywhere but here. Maybe someone could film a movie here, or open up a new comic shop, or we could finally get a good restaurant in town. I don’t know, maybe a movie star could visit or something.”

  “They’re probably at the shoe museum all the time,” I said. “You just never hang out in the kinds of places movie stars visit, unless you’re expecting Bruce Willis to come throw rocks off the bridge with us.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” said Max, “you’re missing the point. All I’m saying is that everything here is either boring or somebody dies. There’s either nothing going on, or there’s a dead body in the lake. Neither one is cool. I just want something to be excited about for once.”

  There was a gap in the traffic below us, and I tossed a rock onto the road. A moment later a truck zoomed by and clipped it with a tire, shooting the rock into the dead grass off the side of the highway. The truck, never even noticing, continued down the road.

  “I held Brooke’s hand,” I said.

  “Shut up.”

  “No, really.”

  Max looked at me, his face unreadable.

  “Dude,” he said. “You kissed her yet?”

  “I think I would have led with that if I had.”

  “So kiss her already,” said Max. “Are you an idiot? And then cop a feel while you’re at it, because wow. She has got a butt I would love to get my hands on.”

  I shook my head. “How is it possible that an upstanding guy like you doesn’t have a girlfriend?”

  “The ladies love Max,” said Max, turning back to the railing. “They just . . . you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  Two days after I left the hospital, Brooke met me outside when I was walking to my car. It was nearly nine o’clock at night, and dark. It was the first time I’d seen her since Forman’s house.

  “Hey,” she said. She was holding something in her hands.

  “Hey.”

  And then she said nothing, for a long time, and I wasn’t sure what to do. She was watching me, her mouth crooked, her eyes narrow and set. Her jaw kept moving, like she was about to talk, and after nearly a minute she did.

  “I don’t know what happened in that house,” she said. “I don’t know why he took me, or why he took you, or why that guy burned it down, or anything. I know there’s reasons, because there’s got to be reasons, but I just don’t think I want to know what they are. I think that maybe you . . .” She stopped again. She looked away.

  There were a lot of things I couldn’t read from people, emotionally speaking, but “I’m leaving you” was one I knew pretty well.

  “You’re a really brave guy,” she said. “And you’re really nice.” She paused. “I just don’t want to remember what happened in there. I don’t want it to be a part of my life.”

  It was just like my mom and the demon—she knew it had happened, but she didn’t want to confront it. She was the one person in the world I could share this with, and she was walking away from it. And from me.

  I wanted to speak, but . . . I couldn’t. Sometimes you can’t talk because there’s nothing to say, and sometimes there’s just too much.

  “Here,” she said, holding out something small and black. I took it, being careful our fingers didn’t touch. It was a cell phone. “It’s Agent Forman’s,” she said. “I forgot I even had it until I found it in my jacket pocket this afternoon. The police are going to want it, I guess, but I don’t want to deal with it anymore. Can you give it to them?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Thanks. And thanks again for getting me out of there alive. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t . . .” Pause. “Well, I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah.”

  And then she walked away.

  I was John the Brave, the demon slayer, who saved the kingdom and didn’t get any glory; who braved the dungeon and didn’t get any treasure; who rescued five princesses and ended up alone. I was John the Brave.

  I knew who I was.

  The phone in my hands was better than treasure—it was a map of the underworld. I flipped it open and scanned through the contact list, seeing name after name—people from the FBI, and from Forman’s research network: doctors, psychologists, criminologists, and more. And interspersed throughout, buried in the middle under fake names I could only guess at, were the others. Demons. Crowley had been cut off, but Forman knew them all. If I could find the right numbers, then I could find them, too.

  I stopped suddenly, scrolling through the list, my eyes catching on a name. There in the Ns between “NMHA” and “Norfolk office” was a single word: “Nobody.” In one of the phone calls I’d overheard, Forman had called one of the demons “nobody,” but I hadn’t understood why. Apparently it was an actual name.

  I dialed it.

  A woman’s voice answered, small and weak. “Hello, Kanta.” Kanta must have been Forman’s other name, just like Crowley was Mkhai. “They’re saying interesting things about you on the news,” she said. “I wondered if you’d survived.”

  “He didn’t,” I said. “I killed him.”

  Silence.

  “I killed Mkhai, too,” I said. “Tens of thousands of years, gone in the blink of an eye.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked the voice.

  “Because you’re next,” I said. “I’m the demon slayer. Come and get me.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  MR. MONSTER

  Copyright © 2010 by Dan Wells

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by Moshe Feder

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2248-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2790-1 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: October 2010

  I DON’T WANT TO KILL YOU

  Dan Wells

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  The book is dedicated to my teachers, who taught me how to read, and to my parents, who taught me why.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I love writing acknowledgments, because I get to sit back and remember all the awesome people who believe in me and in my book, and who helped to make it a reality. We’ll start with the professional crew: my agent,
Sara Crowe; my editor, Moshe Feder; and the whole Tor team of publicists and editors: Paul Stevens, Alexis Saarela, Patty Garcia, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and everyone else working so far behind the scenes I don’t even know about it. You guys are awesome. Next comes my writing group, the fabled Rats with Swords: Karla Bennion, Drew Olds, Ben Olsen, Janci Patterson, Brandon Sanderson, Emily Sanderson, Isaac Stewart, Eric James Stone, Heidi Summers, and Rachel Whitaker. This is such a better book thanks to their input, I can’t even tell you. Many other friends and family gave their support and encouragement as well, including Martha Andelin, Dave Bird, Steve Diamond, Nick Dianatkhah, Eric Ehlers, Dawn Wells, Rob Wells, and of course my parents, Robert and Patty, whom I already mentioned in the dedication. They’re going to get big heads.

  Special consideration goes to Allison Hill and Jennifer Zeller, who wanted to be in my book and were intensely excited to learn of their grisly deaths. Last but not least, a shout-out to my future son-in-law Thorfinneas Olsen: here’s looking at you, big guy. Consider this the dowry.

  where

  always

  it’s

  Spring) and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves

  —who knows if the moon’s

  E. E. CUMMINGS

  PROLOGUE

  I didn’t know Jenny Zeller very well. Nobody did, really. I guess that’s why she killed herself.

  I know she had friends, and I know she did a lot of stuff at school. When we were kids she used to play unicorns with her friend on the playground at recess, which I remember only because I used to think her friend was cute. By middle school her friend had moved away, and Jenny ran for student government—not president, just one of the weird little ones like secretary or treasurer. Her campaign posters had cats on them, so I guess she liked cats. She didn’t win. By high school she’d gone off my radar completely. According to her obituary, she was fluent in American Sign Language, but that’s not the kind of thing that makes people remember who you are. That’s the kind of thing you read in an obituary and say “Oh. Huh.”