by J P Barnett
When the shouting didn’t die down immediately, she began to wonder whether it was more than that.
Then the first gunshot left little doubt.
They sounded like muffled pops from within her cell, but there was no mistaking the sounds. She lost count of how many shots were fired. Dozens, at least.
Something bigger than a handgun fired, echoing down the narrow hallway. Whatever was happening had moved closer to her cell. Closer, panicked shouting ricocheted back to her, as gunsmoke drifted in.
Through the shouting came growling, followed by a scream that tore through all of Deirdre’s resolve. She craned her neck to see deputies running past the hallway opening, shouting orders to each other. She couldn’t make out all of them, but she didn’t need to. She knew what was coming.
She needed to hide. Maybe find a weapon of some sort. She realized that jail cells were not designed to provide either of those things, and settled for crouching in the back corner closest to the hallway entrance.
“Fall back!” she heard a shout, unmistakably from Sheriff Donner.
Deirdre heard a door open. She presumed it was the back entrance to the department. They were running. They were going to leave the beast alone with her. Her heart jumped, and she tried to make herself even smaller, knowing that it was futile. This was not something she could reason her way out of. The bars didn’t look so strong now. She was going to die.
She could tell when the beast had stopped at the entrance to the hallway. Maybe it was his breathing, or his labored steps on the concrete floor. He moved towards her at an agonizingly slow pace. She held her breath.
She jumped when she saw it standing outside of the door to her cell. She had never been able to study it in person before. Regardless of what he had been before, he was a monster now. Paradoxically, Deirdre distracted herself from imminent death by admiring this amazing creation. He was so strong and resilient and fast. He seemed to have an unnaturally long lifespan. Maybe he was even immortal.
She didn’t create him, but she had studied the serum that had. With the money from her grant and a few more years of research, she might have perfected it. She could have created real-life superheroes. Not mindless monsters like this one, but truly enhanced humans.
She knew he had no functional brain. Not really. She knew that as he stared at her, he wasn’t pondering whether he wanted to kill her. The thoughts that he received from Jake were surely so muddled and confusing. It was a wonder he could make sense of it at all. And that’s why the experiment had always failed. Eventually, the voices in his head were too overwhelming, and he reverted to his base state of aggression.
She watched as he reached up and wrapped both of his massive hands around two bars in the cell door. She winced when the steel hinges creaked, then eventually popped. He pulled the door towards himself and dropped it on the floor like it was made of paper.
He only loomed in the doorway, not entering. Was he toying with her? No. She was only projecting. He had no way to process such emotions. Jake, on the other hand, surely wanted her to suffer. The evidence did not support the theory that Jake could directly control The Beast like that, but Deirdre couldn’t help but wonder.
As he moved to take a step into her cell, a gunshot rang down the hallway and the beast reeled backward. It wasn’t a handgun. It sounded much larger than that. The beast started towards the sound of the shot, away from Deirdre. Another shot rang out and the beast stumbled, backed up, and dropped to his knees. This gun wasn’t going to kill him, but it was pushing him back.
“Dr. Valentine. Come here. Now!” the Sheriff yelled.
She needed no further invitation. She scrambled on all fours towards the cell door and stood up to run as she reached the entrance. The beast grabbed at her, latched on to her ankle and caused her to fall hard on her chest. She kicked with her other foot. He grabbed that one too. She tried desperately to find something to hold onto in the smooth concrete floor, but there was nothing to stop her from moving backwards.
Another shot rang through the air, the bullet whizzing above her head. The Beast howled in rage and loosened his grip on her ankles. She got to her knees and crawled a yard away before getting back to her feet. Her ankles hurt, but they weren’t broken. She ran as fast as she could towards the Sheriff, too scared to look back at how close the beast might be. Her body blocked the path now. The Sheriff wouldn’t be able to fire again until she cleared the hallway.
She was moving too slow. The Beast would catch her at this rate. She willed her legs to move faster, ignoring the pain and the fear.
To her surprise, the beast did not catch her. She squeezed past the Sheriff and he immediately fired another round. She stood in the hallway now, unable to see the beast. The Sheriff crouched on one knee, aiming the rifle. He dropped the muzzle of the gun, and stood up.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to her.
He sprinted towards the back of the hallway to the rear entrance of the department. She should have followed, but she saw another path. If she followed Cam, she would still be in his custody. But if she ran the other direction, she might escape. Without weighing the pros and cons, she ran away from the Sheriff towards the front doors of the department.
“Stop right there, Doc!” she heard him cry.
She didn’t stop. He wouldn’t shoot her. Not when his ammo was so precious. He needed to keep his gun ready for when the beast regained the strength to walk out of the cellblock. He wasn’t going to waste it on her tiny, fragile body. She felt her feet slip out from under her as she hit a wet patch of blood, causing her to fall to one knee. Her stomach lurched as her eyes scanned over two halves of a dead body, but she suppressed the bile in her throat, pushed herself up and lunged forward.
She heard the beast growl behind her as she crashed into the door and out into the warm night’s air. It was dark, with no one in sight. It must have been late. She took off in a dead run across the highway, into a field, and then into a grove of trees.
She stopped to catch her breath as another shot rang out. They wouldn’t be chasing her right now. They couldn’t afford to. She was a tiny little girl, not an immortal monster.
After catching her breath for as long as she dared, Deirdre walked deeper into the woods away from the department. She didn’t know where she was going just yet, but she knew she needed to clear as much ground as possible before the beast vanished and left the deputies with nothing to do but hunt her down.
The Sheriff could have shot her, but he hadn’t, and Deirdre took that as a sign. Cam couldn’t kill Jake. But she could. And Cam wanted her to. She understood, of course, that such an unholy alliance could never be verbalized, but he had forged one with her on this night when he let her go.
Yes. There could be no doubt. Sheriff Donner counted on her to kill Jake and save Rose Valley.
Chapter 36
Jake fought to flex his fingers, shooting fire up his arm as his mind groggily pushed away nightmares of Deirdre bearing down on him. With his watch pinned, he couldn’t tell how long they’d been asleep, but based on the lack of circulation in his arm, it had been a few hours at least. He didn’t want to move. Her body against his felt heavenly, energizing him with her every shallow breath. But he also didn’t want to have a non-functional arm, so he slowly shimmied his arm out from under her and rolled over on his back. She protested a little with soft murmurs but otherwise remained asleep.
The moment his skin left contact with hers, he regretted it, so he lightly reached out and laid his hand on her hip, causing her to sigh. Darkness enveloped the room, but his eyes could make out shapes here and there, adding to the odd sensation of being in someone else’s bedroom. The clock read 1:24am. He pondered on the weird juxtaposition of emotions coursing through his body. Dread of the manhunt mixed with an overwhelming sense of happiness and contentment.
As he lay there trying to fall back asleep, he felt a light buzzing in his wrist, followed by his phone ringing from the nightstand. The screen showed a
Rose Valley number, but not one that came from his address book. It could have been a wrong number, he supposed, but that seemed especially odd since his cell phone didn’t have a local number. Jake avoided answering his phone in any case, especially at night, and tonight provided the best excuse of all to do so. It eventually went silent.
Almost immediately, it rang again. Shandi stirred and mumbled, “Who is it?”
“I don’t recognize the number.”
“Read it to me,” she said, her voice hoarse from sleep.
He read her the number to appease her.
“That’s Cam.”
Jake blinked. “Should I answer it?”
Shandi nodded and sunk back into the pillows. She didn’t seem terribly concerned.
Jake answered on speakerphone so that Shandi could hear. “Hello?”
“Jake. This is Sheriff Donner.”
“Hi, sheriff, what’s---”
Cam interrupted the pleasantries. “Listen. I’m really sorry about calling you in the middle of the night like this. I just. I should have pulled the trigger. But I didn’t. I just wanted to tell you as soon as possible.”
Jake glanced at Shandi.
Cam continued before Jake said anything. “The beast attacked the jail earlier tonight. We lost a good officer. But also...”
He trailed off. Jake’s mind followed the sheriff’s train of thought as fast as he spoke, his blood going cold the moment the sheriff uttered his next words.
“Deirdre escaped.”
Shandi audibly gasped and immediately got out of bed. She turned on a lamp and searched around the room for her clothes. Jake sat up in bed in a panic, trying to process the news. Cam continued, thankfully oblivious to the fact that his ex-wife rushed around the room naked.
“It’s probably not a big deal. If she’s smart, she skipped town. But just to be safe, I’m going to send a deputy out to your place. Just to keep an eye on things.”
Deirdre’s zealotry had led her to attempt to murder him once, and Jake had a hard time believing that she would have walked away from her mission. Regardless of Cam’s promises of safety, Jake suspected that Deirdre lurked in the shadows of Rose Valley along with the beast now.
Shandi pulled on the last of her clothes, and moved towards him, having put together the implications of the conversation faster than him. Given his current location, sending a deputy out to Watermelon Ranch served no discernible purpose. Before Jake could react, Shandi began talking into the microphone.
“Cam? Don’t be mad, okay?”
“Shandi?” his voice cracked with surprise.
She gave Jake a strained look before answering, “Yeah. We can talk about this later, but right now I need you to know that Jake isn’t at his house.”
“Then where the hell is he?” Cam said, the volume of his voice escalating.
“He’s at mine,” Shandi said, closing her eyes to prepare for Cam’s reaction.
The line went silent. Shandi looked worried. Jake didn’t know what to do. He wanted to comfort her, but touching her under the circumstances felt exceptionally inappropriate.
Shandi couldn’t take the silence. “Don’t be mad, Cam. There’s not time for that. I promise that we can sit down, just the two of us, and have a sane discussion about this. But right now, we need to make sure Deirdre doesn’t get to Jake, right?”
The room fell agonizingly silent once again for what seemed like an eternity before Cam finally answered, “I’m on my way.”
The line went dead. “Oh, that’s not good,” Jake said.
Shandi sighed. “That’s not exactly how I wanted him to find out about us. But what’s done is done. The good news is that he’ll be here if Deirdre shows up.”
Jake half-joked, “Yeah, but the bad news is that he might kill me first.”
Shandi made a show of pulling him down to her for a kiss before responding. “No. He’ll be fine. He just needs some time to process it. You’re not his favorite person.”
She walked towards the bedroom door, glancing over her shoulder as she went. “It’ll probably be better for you if you have clothes on when he gets here, though.”
Jake looked down and surprised himself, somehow having forgotten that he didn’t have any clothes on. He found his garments strewn around the room, slipped them on as fast as he could and joined Shandi in the kitchen, where she busied herself making coffee. Though adrenaline served just fine as a wake-up call, the aroma of the coffee enticed him.
“Could you make sure the door is locked?” Shandi asked him.
Surely, they had locked the door, right? Who would leave the door unlocked when a monster roamed the streets? Jake rewound his memory to the previous night, dwelling on the sensations of them devouring one another, while Shandi haphazardly tried to get her key into the lock. Perhaps such a distraction had kept them from locking the door, after all.
Being unfamiliar with Shandi’s house, Jake couldn’t tell what the direction of the lock meant. He reached for the handle so that he could turn it to find out, but when he gripped it, he felt it turn from the other side. He jumped back. The door opened and there was a gun pointed at his face. He followed the muzzle down a rail thin arm and into the blue ocean of Deirdre’s eyes.
“Back up!” she yelled at him.
Jake backed up. Shandi rushed to his side and grabbed his hand, as Deirdre stepped inside without closing the door. She kept the gun level with Jake’s face, hovering only a few feet away. Even she wouldn’t miss at that range.
Deirdre’s eyes flicked down to their hands. “Isn’t that so sweet.”
Jake dropped Shandi’s hand. “Deirdre. Don’t do this. We know who the beast is. You don’t have to kill me.”
“The man that was the beast is long gone, Jake. You’re not going to get him back. And you’re not going to be able to kill him either. Don’t kid yourself.” Her eyes filled with a rage that Jake had never seen.
“How do you know, though? Can’t we at least try? You don’t want to kill me, Deirdre. We’ve been friends for a long time.”
“It’s the only way they’ve ever been able to stop him. The doctors killed three seekers to keep him dormant. The difference was that they knew what they signed up for. They knew the risks. I know you didn’t ask for this, Jake, but there’s no other option.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jake sensed an imperceptible tensing of Shandi’s muscles. Having overpowered Deirdre once before, Jake feared that Shandi would try it again. Before he could stop it, Shandi lunged, and Jake instinctively stepped in front of her. Deirdre fired.
He screamed as pain roared through his right arm. He grabbed it with his left hand, feeling the warm sticky goo of his own blood ooze between his fingers. Shandi screamed his name. With his back to Deirdre, Jake fell forward into Shandi’s arms. She gingerly lowered him to the ground, then ripped her shirt off in one smooth jerk.
Jake winced as Shandi wrapped her shirt tight around the wound. He felt queasy. It looked like a serious wound, but he wasn’t losing consciousness or anything. Not yet.
He forced himself to look up at Deirdre, desperate to know where she stood and what her next move might be. She looked stunned, with the gun still out in front of her; the muzzle drifting with him towards the ground. But she looked less resolute now, her anger losing out to fear.
Once Shandi seemed satisfied with her triage work, she stood slowly, keeping her hands up where Deirdre could see them. Jake hoped that Deirdre’s willingness to fire had scared Shandi away from trying anything else stupid. Once Shandi stretched to her full height, Deirdre shifted the gun to Shandi’s face.
“Don’t move, you little bitch.”
Jake wanted to end it somehow. He couldn’t bear the thought of Shandi getting shot. He spent so much time worrying about whether the beast might come for her that he’d never considered that Deirdre might also want her dead. Jake would have bet on Shandi for any number of things, but not hostage negotiations.
“Listen, Deirdre. Just
let me talk, ok?” Shandi said with remarkable calmness.
Deirdre didn’t answer, but neither did she fire her gun or make any move indicating she would. Jake took that as a good sign. Shandi did as well.
“His name is Billy Hargrove. He was a major in the army. He was assigned to Arrowhead Research. They did this to him. You can undo it.”
Deirdre shook her head. “No, I can’t. No one can. Billy Hargrove is dead! We can kill Jake, and then that thing will go dormant. We can kill it then, maybe. Cut off its head or something.”
Jake interjected, “Why didn’t they do that the last three times, then?”
Deirdre glanced down, seemingly contemplating the shaking that flowed through her entire body. She flinched as if she would point the gun towards Jake, but then thought better of it and kept it aimed at Shandi. Jake didn’t like it.
“I... don’t know. Maybe they didn’t know how to find him?”
Shandi jumped back in. “Or maybe they didn’t want to kill him. Maybe they knew they could save him eventually.”
Deirdre shook her head. Jake saw Shandi tense up. Please, Shandi, don’t do anything stupid.
Deirdre locked her elbows. The gun rattled as she decisively pointed it at Shandi again before answering, “You’re not going to confuse me. I know what I have to do. I know more about this than you could ever hope to. Killing the seeker is the only way!”
The intensity of the moment overwhelmed him, adrenaline surging as the pain in his arm throbbed in rhythm with his heart. The baby blue of Shandi’s shirt turned redder with every pulse.
Shandi gently kicked Jake’s foot and spoke again, “Right. Because the seeker is the one that controls the beast, right? He can make him do what he wants.”
“We have to do this, Shandi,” tears started forming in Deirdre’s eyes. “I don’t need to kill you, but we have to kill Jake.”
Jake pondered Shandi’s meaning. She wanted him to summon the beast. But he didn’t know how. Where would he even start?
Given that he didn’t see any other options, Jake closed his eyes and focused. He focused on Deirdre. He pictured her in his head. Her blonde hair. Her big blue eyes. Her imaginary form took shape in his mind. Worried that just Deirdre wouldn’t be enough, he thought about Shandi’s house. He described it to himself in vivid detail. He thought of every color, every corner, every material adorning the outside. He thought of her cars in the driveway. He thought of the entry way to the house.