by Platt, Sean
More yelling and cursing, drowning his cries to get off.
An army of blows assaulted his ribs, his back, and his head as the angry mob kicked, hit, and tore at him. At some point, the pain would be too much to bear, and John would either lose the battle and be ripped apart, or burned alive when the blanket was pulled fully away. Maybe both.
No, no, no, no, this can’t be happening.
Sirens wailed closer, blurting and buzzing, followed by a man’s voice, crackling through an intercom and punctuating the arrival of the authorities. “Back away!”
The mob continued the torrent, raining blow after blow upon him as John grappled with wavering consciousness, still clinging to his blanket.
Slowly, the pillowcase surrendered to a militia of mauling hands. He flinched as the final ribbon of cotton armor was ripped from his face. The blanket followed, and the crowd erupted in a victorious roar.
John was ready for whatever Hades was waiting but was met with twilight and cool wind caressing the sides of his bloody, charred cheeks instead. A salve to his angered flesh.
His world tipped into a new possibility.
The sun was gone.
Darkness had reclaimed the sky and awakened something inside him. Something with the power to twist rage and an unholy, unspeakable thirst into power. Again, time paused and crawled for him, offering John a moment to inhale his surroundings.
He was surrounded by dozens of people, but the most immediate threat loomed directly above — a young man poised to deliver a lethal kick to his face. In that suspended moment, the man’s eyes went from dark with feral rage to wide and white with fear.
John growled. Reality moved forward like a snapping rubber band. He caught the man’s boot, wrenched his leg sideways until it snapped, and sent the punk to the ground in a blur.
John stood and turned in a slow circle. Sweat poured from one side of his face; blood dripped from the other. He eyed the encroaching crowd, cautiously retreating, almost in unison, like a pack of gazelles who had happened upon a feasting lion. A collective instinct whispered inherent truth: Death has come to claim us.
John lunged at the attacker, his fingers closing so hard around the man’s throat that they almost went straight through. Their skin fused, and John drank deep from his life force.
John lowered his chin, feeling his eyes roll to the back of his head, absorbing the energy as it flowed through his body. His skull bobbed back and forth in a half-drunken nod, his skin rippling with some unseen internal climax. The fibers of his body were alive and moving, flesh mending like death in reverse.
Oh God, yes.
The air filled with screams from the witnesses to his feasting. Some ran. Others, like animals captured by headlights, could do nothing.
Holding the withering corpse casually in his palm, John turned sharply, his eyes locking onto another lamb in the crowd. Standing ten feet away — an older man holding a tire iron, which John was sure had been used to hit him.
“You!” John uncurled a finger at the man, then leaped onto his body and stole another life.
The second time was different, energy flooding from the man like blood from a deep and sudden cut, so fresh it still teased blue. John saw a glimpse of himself attacking the man then flashed on a memory of the man eating pizza for lunch. Some dark part of John laughed out loud at the befitting vision as he feasted on the fallen man.
Thunder tore through the riot. A gunshot.
John snapped out of his feeding, glanced up, and saw a sheriff’s deputy ten feet away, aiming a shotgun at him. The first bullet was a stray, but John was certain Lady Luck wouldn’t wink at him twice. He tossed the burning corpse at the cop then sprinted toward the grocery store parking lot.
Another gunshot.
A car window in front of John erupted in chunks of safety glass.
“Stop!” the cop shouted.
John didn’t.
He raced ahead, wrestling his senses for a second of calm, long enough to carve an escape.
The cop held pace ten yards behind John then stopped to take another shot. Death whizzed by his ears and smashed into another car window.
Ahead, John spotted a woman leaning into the back of her car, gently setting brown bags into an empty back seat. While others in the lot had noticed him, the woman had not. He raced up behind her and screamed, “Move!”
Her head hit the car’s interior roof as she spun clumsily around, her heel slipping forward, stopping short of touching John’s leg. She was young, with long blonde hair, full of energy that flared from her every pore. A hunger stirred within him, a mix of lust and a desire to feed. She stared at him, frozen by terror or something else he couldn’t quite place in the narrow sweep between seconds.
The woman’s rear window shattered as another gunshot rang out. She shrieked, launched herself backward in the car, jerked open the passenger side back door, and scrambled out the other side. As she ran for safety, John spun around to see the cop advancing, about thirty yards away, aiming the shotgun.
From the corner of his eye, John saw that the woman had dropped her keys on the ground.
He ducked down, grabbed a handful of silver, opened the front door, and jumped into the driver’s seat.
“Stop!” the cop screamed, now a few yards away.
He keyed the ignition, threw the car in reverse, and yanked the wheel hard right. The car stopped just in front of the cop as he leveled the shotgun squarely at John’s head. John shifted into drive and floored the gas, but not before the cop fired, thunder erupting from his shotgun.
The slug shattered the window and found its mark, slamming into John’s chest. His body launched back against the seat as the car struck the cop and sent his badge scraping across the hood. His body fell into an angry tumble behind the bumper.
John gasped for air, barely managing to dip out of the shopping center parking lot and into traffic. The pain was intense, but his wounded flesh was already stitching itself together as his breath slowly returned.
“Where are you?” he asked Abigail, navigating through horrified pedestrians and sluggish vehicles.
No one answered.
Twelve
Abigail
Abigail lifted her head and opened her eyes to a swath of angry shadows cast in a blood-red blur.
She was sitting upright in a chair, arms fastened behind her, thick cord chewing her ankles. Somewhere above her, soft cinnamon lights cast the dark room in a sinister blush. She nearly jumped when she saw the hazy image of someone sitting directly in front of her, also bound.
She pretended not to notice the other person while slowly attempting to calculate her surroundings before her captors grew wise; a lesson well learned during her time in the monster’s closet. Her new cage was maybe twice the size of her old closet, yet still it felt cramped.
A dull ache throbbed in her body. She tried to squirm free of her bindings, but they were too tight.
Her mind’s fog slowly receded, and Abigail finally realized that the other prisoner was just her reflection in a large mirror running along the wall. In the reflection, she saw a concrete wall with another smaller mirrored window and a door with one deadbolt and no knob.
Prisoner again.
The last thing Abigail remembered was the van door sliding open. Immediately before that, the thing she could never forget: the murder of a cop. She remembered looking down and watching in horror as his blood sprayed her arms and the front of her jacket. That jacket was now missing. She was in her T-shirt and pajama bottoms, the stench of sweat and blood coating her like dry mud.
She struggled again to loosen her binds, but her muscles spasmed in painful protest. She wiggled her toes against a cold floor that had neither tile nor carpet, dressed instead in the slightly powdery feel of unfinished concrete. Using her toes, Abigail found just enough leverage to scoot her chair back a bit. The chair screeched, and she was certain whoever was watching her, probably from the other side of the mirror, had heard the sound.
She looked directly into the mirror and smiled.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” she asked in an unwavering veneer of false courage.
Silence met her facade.
A sudden fear rippled through Abigail’s body. She wondered which would be the worse fate: to be left alone in a room to die or held prisoner by the men who stole her. No time to think; keys jingled against the other side of her prison door.
The lock clicked, and the door swung open.
A tall bald man in all black materialized in the reflection. He appeared to be in his late forties, but truth is always harder to see in the dark. His face had no color, and his cheeks were sunken. Two angry black pits bounced against the mirror toward her from gray pools in his face. The man smiled, perhaps the creepiest smile Abigail had ever seen — even worse than Randy’s. He made her think of a drawing of a scarecrow she once saw in a book.
The man in black disappeared from the doorway for a moment, then Abigail heard a long, drawn out scraping coming up the hall.
Scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaape …
What the?
She watched the mirror, her heart beating hard enough to echo as she tried to imagine the source.
Scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaape …
The man reappeared, dragging a heavy-looking black wooden chair slowly and deliberately behind him, his eyes never leaving her reflection, the crooked smile never leaving his face.
Scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaape …
“Hello.” His voice was smooth, almost soothing.
The scraping grew louder as he circled her with the chair, coming to rest a few feet in front of her. He yanked the chair up, surprisingly quick. Abigail flinched, and his smile widened.
He slammed the chair down with a thunderous crack. It echoed off the walls. The man sat down, his legs straddling the seat back, arms draped almost lazily off the back of the chair, fingers dangling just inches from her chest.
“Cat got your tongue? I said hello.”
“Hello,” Abigail whimpered, her bravery evaporated.
Her heartbeat was thunder in such a narrow space. Somehow, the man not only seemed to notice her rapid pulse but appeared to take tremendous pleasure in her obvious fear.
“And what is your name, sweetheart?”
She saw no sense in lying, so Abigail revealed her name in a frightened whisper. He extended his fingers, gesturing a hand shake before pulling them back, as if he’d absentmindedly forgotten that she was bound.
“My name is Jacob, and I’d like to ask you some questions about the man you were with.”
Abigail hesitated then asked, “What man?”
Jacob — if that was indeed his name — cocked his head to the side. The earlier smile that had haunted his face returned, though wider and now more terrifying.
“Listen, Abigail, I’m going to ask you some questions, and I’d really hate to be you if you lie.”
She stared at him, silent, hoping to buy time while she considered how to best answer questions about her angel.
Jacob leaned in to Abigail until his fingers were an inch from her face. A blue spark shot from his skin to hers, and she jumped back with a squeal.
Is he the same as John?
She tried to move away but had nowhere to go. Abigail imagined his hands seizing her body and burning her alive.
He withdrew his hand, tilted his head slightly, and furrowed his brow.
“Oh, I’m quite sorry,” he said, wearing sincerity like an ornament, “I really didn’t mean to do that.”
He stood and faced away from her, into the mirror, where his eyes met Abigail’s in an unbreakable embrace.
“You see, sometimes I forget … ” he trailed off, lost in thought. “I certainly don’t wish you harm. You are only a child, after all. A poor, innocent child caught up in something far beyond her understanding.”
Sincerity on his face seemed to deepen alongside her confusion. Abigail began to wonder if this man could help John. Maybe the two of them were friends, part of some secret group of whatever they were?
“Unfortunately,” Jacob said, still staring in the mirror, “my ugly lovelies don’t share my compunctions about children.”
A sound snapped the uncertain quiet behind her, and Abigail watched in horror as something unthinkable writhed through the doorway.
An almost skeletal woman entered the room, nude and hairless, her skin almost featureless save for a nearly translucent membrane that glistened in the amber glow. She looked, in a word, undone. Her breasts were two small sacks without nipples. Her face was a nightmare, lacking eyes, ears, or even a mouth, its landscape constantly changing as bones, or something, shifted under the skin as if in a blind attempt at completing its form.
The sound, the crunching of bones beneath the monster’s flesh, reached into her gut and twisted like a blade.
The thing moved slowly, long skeletal fingers reaching out blindly to feel its way around the room. It inched forward with trepidation, footfalls like wet fish slapping the floor as it moved closer. As the creature’s fingers searched the room, now just three feet away, Abigail shook violently in her chair, trying to break free. She wasn’t sure what it would do if it touched her, and that made the creature all the more horrible.
“No, don’t let it touch me!” she cried out, pleading to Jacob, who merely looked down at her with his ever-present smile.
“Please,” Abigail repeated, her voice almost choked in panic as she saw the thing step up a foot behind her in the mirror, its fingers inches from finding her in the darkness.
“Please, Jacob!”
He raised a hand, almost casually, and the thing recoiled, its limbs flying over its unformed face like a scolded child. An unholy shriek filled the room, though the thing had no mouth. Abigail was certain it wasn’t something she heard with her ears, but rather her mind.
“Go!” Jacob commanded.
Its shrieking stopped, and the undone monstrosity retreated, its hands finding the threshold before leaving the room.
Abigail was still shaking, shame flushing her face as she realized she’d pissed herself.
Jacob smiled.
“Remember now,” he said, smiling. “No lies.”
Thirteen
Caleb
Caleb was hard pressed to remember a bigger bunch of fuckups than the local law enforcement he was saddled with.
How could they blow a felony stop like that?
After processing the crime scene with his team and deftly maneuvering through a media blitzkrieg, Caleb retreated to the rolling headquarters, seeking relief from the throbbing headache cleaving his focus to pieces. He sank back into his chair, reached into his jacket pocket, and found his relief.
Fuck.
The pill bottle was empty, and he’d have to wait until he got home to hit his stash. He lowered his head and unleashed a string of muttered curses, chastising himself for not planning. Caleb prided himself on always being prepared.
He stared at the reports canvassed across two open laptops on the table. He’d already spent twenty minutes staring at them, but it didn’t make the impossible any easier to swallow. Every eyewitness account read like something from The X-Files. From the “monster” who had burned two people to near vapor to whoever was in the van who’d snatched the little girl and shot the cop, this case was quickly mounting to a massive clusterfuck.
Caleb called a buddy in Missing Persons and asked for help identifying and locating the seemingly kidnapped girl. He had enough shit to deal with and didn’t need some asshole in a van kidnapping an already missing child.
What the fuck is going on?
While information was coming in, it was bullshit so far, almost as if fate were conspiring to make this case as difficult as possible. Caleb was close to the killer, for the first time in years, and now he was back on the run.
Weight on the carpet outside his office pulled Caleb’s attention to the doorway. Agent Garcia was standing in the threshold. He’d been dealing with a half-dozen reporte
rs and looked battered, broken, and maybe even burned from the glowing coals they’d spent the day raking him across.
“The press is asking about the video, and demanding to speak to you.”
“The video at the house?”
Garcia shook his head and pointed toward the bank of monitors just past Caleb’s laptops, a flashing mosaic of local and national feeds. Caleb followed his gaze. All but one of the channels was broadcasting varying frames from the same video: shaky footage starring the same leading man from the earlier home video. Only this time, he was bloodied and battered. The suspect stood atop his target, his hand fused to the man’s torso as the victim melted to cinders in an embarrassment of seconds.
“Jesus Christ,” Caleb stood from his chair and leaned forward toward the bank of monitors, “where the fuck did they get that?”
“Some kid with his cell phone,” Garcia shook his head. “Punk ass caught the whole thing and put it on YouTube.”
“And none of us have it?”
“No, sir. Well, not the original.”
Caleb wanted to punch something; a slab of concrete would’ve been nice. Given the opportunity, he could’ve squashed the video. But now it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle. With every asshole and their brother armed with cell phones cameras and the proliferation of so-called citizen journalists, it was becoming increasingly harder to control information. There was nothing to do now but have his people question the video’s authenticity and hope no one else was walking around with a different angle.
“Tell them no comment until we get the original video. Then … get me the goddamned video!” Caleb slammed his fists on the table. The laptops jumped an inch before settling back into place.
Garcia left, and Caleb sank back in his seat with a sigh.
Outside, the world was splitting at the seams. Somebody had better find a way to keep it all together, because Caleb sure as hell wasn’t feeling up to the job. He needed a nap. Well, pills and sleep, in that order.