“She okay?” he asked.
“Jesus Christ, Richie. Give a guy a heart attack,” I whispered.
“Gotta die sometime,” he said.
Richie held his Colt 1911 at his side.
“Can you stand watch out here? I can’t leave her alone, and I have to go back inside and find Jax.”
He sighed. “Wait for backup, man. You know better.”
“You would do that?” I asked, my voice incredulous. “You would stand around while your partner was in trouble?”
“Hell, no.”
“I’m going in,” I said.
“’Course y’are. Watch your six and be careful. Sing out if you need me.”
“Stay with her,” I said, putting Ms. Layne down on the gravel.
Adrenaline hit as I climbed the steps to the house, and my senses kicked into overdrive; the smells of a New England spring evening were almost overwhelming, and the sound of bees buzzing in the woods a couple of acres away. With one last glance at Richie, I stepped back into the foul-smelling house. I had my gun out again, holding it ready in front of me.
The utility room light was off again, and my eyes tracked to the dark room beyond. I heard the subtle scrape of an athletic shoe on a wooden floor, and I snapped into the ‘move and shoot’ stance that I had drilled to exhaustion. I glared into the laundry room, eyes straining to sift the shadows.
As I stepped inside, all sound ceased. It was like being thrust deep underwater, where the only sound was that of my own pulse beating in my ears. I slid forward on the balls of my feet, muscles as tight as high-tension power lines, nerves crackling. I tried to move like a wolf stalking a rabbit, smooth and quiet.
Something clicked on the other side of the room, the lights flared, and I was blinded for a moment.
Bloody tracks of athletic shoes trailed across the blue and gray linoleum. Two troopers were dead on the floor. They had been…tortured. Bitten. Blood was everywhere.
As I stared at the two dark doorways across from me, the pain in my neck and shoulders ratcheted up until it was as intense as any pain I’d ever felt. I tried to roll my shoulders, but that only made me want to scream.
“Don’t be timid, Hank. Come the hell in.” It sounded like Jax, but there was a strange quality to the voice—like it came from a throat more used to growling and snarling than speaking.
The sound came from the doorway to the right, and, after a brief hesitation at the door, I stepped into the darkness. I couldn’t see anything but inky blackness—my night vision was gone. It was like being blindfolded.
“You know how good I am with this pistol,” I said. “Give up now, Hatton.”
“I would expect nothing less than perfection out of you with your preferred weapon.” The voice belonged to Lieutenant Gruber.
A chair across the room creaked, and I hit the lights. I wish I hadn’t. There was a mutilated body on the table that looked broken, ripped, twisted…savaged.
Hatton snickered. He sat in one of the dining room chairs, arms out on the backs of two others. He looked pleased with himself.
I fired my pistol without thinking about it.
The bullet struck Hatton in the right shoulder and went right through him to paint the wall behind him with blood. He didn’t stop smiling. Yes, the impact jerked him around a little, but Hatton didn’t even flinch.
It wasn’t an effective shot, certainly not a killing shot, but getting shot hurts, and humans react to it. They scream, they clutch the wound, they fall down. The man across from the ruin of my partner’s body didn’t do any of those things.
He laughed.
I didn’t know how to react to that. It was like my brain was numb.
Not my hands, though. No, they did as I’d trained them to do.
The next bullet hit him right above the solar plexus, center of mass. He took another round at the base of his neck, and either shot should have killed him. He didn’t die, though.
He was still laughing. I couldn’t understand how he could even be breathing, much less laughing like a hyena.
The Glock wavered in my hand like I was a rookie on his first trip to the firing range.
“Ah, Hank,” said Hatton, while wiping at the tears on his cheeks. “This is why I like you so much.” His throat was full of blood, and as he spoke, it trickled out of his mouth. “You act. You don’t talk about it, you don’t beg or question how things are the way they are. You just act—you just do it. Where I come from, that is the mark of a good man to have on your side of things.”
My mouth opened, but I had no words. I just stared at him, feeling slow and stupid, both arms drifting down to my sides like balloons with slow leaks. He pointed a blood-speckled index finger at me and mimicked taking a shot. The blood that had been pouring out of him a moment before slowed to a trickle, as I watched. I shook my head to clear it. “That’s…impossible”
“Nothing is impossible, Hank.” His voice already sounded better, strong and full, but he didn’t look better. Still gaunt, still ashen. As I watched, the bullet wounds closed. I stared at him, struck mute or stupid or both. “You can’t kill me. No matter how many times you fire,” he said. He held up his hands, palms toward me. “Not that I want you to go on trying. It hurts, you know.”
My gaze drifted back to the body on the table, and what I saw tore the air from my lungs. Jax lay there, his face bloody and torn, flesh ripped, bones broken. “You killed Jax.”
Hatton winked at me and grinned. “Yes. He was delicious. Not as tasty as your friend the other night. Would you believe he fought me at first? Not that he stood any kind of a chance. I was already changing, and Liz was just across the road.” He was gloating, goading me.
I was surprised to find my pistol pointed at the spot between Hatton’s eyes. I wanted to pull the trigger, to put him down. Or at least wipe the smug grin off his face. I wanted to shoot Hatton in the face like I’ve never wanted anything else.
His hands went up. “I surrender, Hank.”
Every particle of my being wanted me to pull the trigger. I’m not sure I’d ever wanted to shoot someone before that night, but to my shame, I did want to shoot Hatton in the face, and then to shoot him again and again and again until the pistol ran dry. Then I wanted to eject the magazine, slam in one of my spares, and shoot him until that was also empty. It was a powerful temptation, and my hands trembled with the intensity of it. But it would be murder, and I couldn’t stoop that low.
“I surrender, Hank,” Hatton said again, looking down at the gun shaking in my hands.
Feeling disgusted, I reached for my cuffs and tossed them over Jax’s cooling corpse to the fiend who had been sitting there feasting on my friend. “Put those on. Don’t make me shoot again, Hatton. I…I don’t think I could stop.”
Hatton nodded. “I understand, Hank. Though, you disappoint me.” His voice had changed. It was deeper, torn and abused. “The queen said you wouldn’t have the guts.”
I pointed at his other hand with my Glock. “Other hand. Now.”
He smiled and closed the chromed bracelet on his other wrist. “No problem, Hank. I’m not resisting. I surrender.” He looked down at the table and sighed. “I do want you to know that if it were up to me, I would not have killed your partner. You two were so cute together. Like an old married couple.”
I gestured with the gun at the gruesome display on the table before me. “It was up to you.” The volume of my voice swelled as I came to the end of the sentence. The tip of the gun was again pointing at Hatton’s face, as if by magic. My hands were almost convulsing with agitation, and I could feel the muscles and tendons of my trigger finger creaking with the strain of not pulling that trigger.
“No. No, it wasn’t up to me. She ordered it, you see. She decided his fate that first day you went to the house and confronted her. She cursed him.”
The image of Tutor screaming gibberish at us, her cigarette bouncing in the corner of her mouth flashed through my mind. “If she cursed Jax, then she cursed me.�
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“I warned you she had a vicious tongue.” Hatton shrugged, a small smile playing on his lips. “She commanded me to kill your partner tonight. She told me to remind you of her… What was the phrase?” He brought his handcuffed hands to his chin and scratched it. “Hoodoo voodoo?”
Something dark and terrible warred with an icy fear as it built inside me. “What in the hell are you two? What brand of crazy?”
He laughed. “We are anything but insane, Hank. We are gods. Don’t you understand that yet?”
Whatever was building inside me popped like a balloon, and I couldn’t help it—I laughed. It was a harsh sound, anything but amused. I couldn’t process what he was saying with anything approaching rationality. Jax had been murdered for a delusion of grandeur.
“I know how it sounds,” he said.
“We’ve been here since before white men appeared on their wooden ships. I was here at a time when only the native tribes ran in these woods and fished in these streams. They thought we were gods for a long time—hardly the first time those labels were ascribed to us. Then they began to see our way of life as a curse. Wendigo, they called us, as they tried to drive us from their lands. My, but we had fun slaughtering them.” His voice had taken on a wistful quality. “Before that, I was other places—in this world and in others.”
“All this,” I said, “all this for some vampire delusion.” A melancholy exhaustion seemed to seep into me from the very air.
He laughed. “Vampire? There is no such thing as vampires.”
I shook my head.
“Listen, Hank. You can be one of us. I want to—” Hatton snapped his mouth shut and seemed to perk up, like a dog hearing something in the distance. Then, he looked me in the eye with what appeared to be sadness and regret. “I wish we had more time, Hank. I want you to understand. All the power I have—you could have it, too.”
His left deltoid twitched. It looked like a rat moving under his skin. He was…growing. His shoulders widened as I watched.
Dread took my mind in an iron grip. Once again, I was surprised to find my gun pointing at his face.
“No, Hank,” he said. His voice sounded several registers deeper than it had a moment ago. “No more bullets.” It sounded as if his mouth were filled with pebbles and dirt.
I pulled the trigger twice.
Hatton sat there like a statue, glaring at me. Blood ran down his face and neck, from bullet holes in his cheeks and forehead. His left eye was gone. “I told you not to do that.” His voice took on a basso quality that made me want to turn and run. It was like his voice had been piped through a vocal synthesizer. “Why don’t you ever listen?”
The darkness building inside me exploded, erasing coherent thought. The gun bucked again and again. When the slide locked back, my hands hurt like they’d been crushed under some heavy weight.
He roared like some kind of cornered predator. A bear or a lion, something like that. A loud, ringing kind of popping noise resounded in the small room, and my handcuffs fell off of cockamamie wrists larger than they had been when he’d cuffed himself. The chair groaned and creaked beneath him right before it broke. He hopped to the table top, shoving Jax’s remains to the floor with disdain.
He reached out with slow deliberation, his arm stretching, growing a length that belied belief, and took the Glock in one hand. He squeezed, muscles and tendons popping out on his forearms. The composite body of the pistol cracked like ice, and he tossed it to the floor in disgust.
“I should kill you for that,” he howled. “I would if she hadn’t forbidden it! She wants you to suffer, and suffer you shall!”
It seemed my feet had taken lessons from my hands and arms—I was backing away on autopilot, staring into his too-large face, watching his blood drip from his lips like drool. Sores were breaking out across his face and chest. Pus dripped to mingle with the congealed blood on the floor. The air was full of the reek of putrefying flesh. Bile burned the back of my throat.
He crouched on the table and glared at me, picking chips of his cheek bone from his face and neck. “Stupid,” he growled. “Waste.” The table cracked and popped beneath him, and he took a giant step forward, off the table to overshadow me by at least a couple of feet.
He was getting bigger, but it was like he was stretching rather than bulking up. If anything, he looked even skinnier than when he was normal sized, his bones seemed to be trying to escape from his skin. He was getting taller by the second. He started making a weird grunting noise.
“She…was…right…to…curse…you.” He struggled to speak as if he had to force the words out through a throat that didn’t want to cooperate. “Teach…you…something.”
For the first time that evening, it struck me that I was a dead man, standing there watching Hatton turn into I don’t know what.
Hatton’s chin began making weird, animal-like jerks to one side or the other. In time with those jerks, he made a strange sound—something that sounded like he was trying to up-chuck while humming a tune. His eyes were riveted on mine. “Not…insane.” He leaned forward and put his face in front of mine. He growled with menace.
“What in the hell are you?” I asked in a still, small voice, wondering why I wasn’t running away. It was like I was in one of those dreams that you just can’t seem to escape no matter how much you wanted to.
He made a strange barking noise that seemed like a laugh. “Ooooo…Oolf…hye…thidn.” It was the last thing he said. He was staring at me like he’d like to take a bite, even as he continued to stretch and grow.
His display of…well, whatever it was, it terrified me. All I could think of was the night at Jay’s Diner when Hatton kept repeating: “I’ll bite.” He had to hunch against the nine-foot ceiling. His face began to look like a plastic mask stretched over a wolf’s skull. He smelled like an animal.
In the distance, I heard the sirens. I could tell by the look in his eyes that there was still a human intelligence inside and that he knew I could hear them.
I balled my hands into fists and tried to stay loose in the face of the distending, purulent monstrosity. I had a sinking certainty that my time to die had arrived, and I wanted to die well.
Run, you fool! Just get the hell out of here before he finishes…becoming whatever he’s becoming, yelled a querulous voice, deep inside me. I wondered if there really was any such thing as ‘dying well’—or if it was only dying. Either way, I didn’t want to see the monster that lived at the end of Hatton’s twisted metamorphosis.
Hatton bared his fangs at me and made a harsh, chuffing sound.
It dawned on me that he was waiting for something. I shook my head, squinting up at him and trying to figure out what he wanted.
He made the harsh sound again and then growled. I have heard a lot of dogs growl over the years, but none of them made me want to cower in fear. Hatton’s growl did.
“What do you want?” I asked, sounding like a child.
He snapped his teeth in my face and, as slow as glacial ice, brought his hand up to his head and twirled his claw-like finger in a circle. Then he growled with even more menace than before.
“No,” I said, and the sound of my voice brought the vision of a puppy rolling over on his back to my mind. “I don’t think you are insane anymore. Maybe I’m the one who’s insane.”
He jerked his head back and snapped his teeth twice.
I steeled myself for the bite I felt certain was coming. Instead, stars and light exploded from the left side of my head, and I was airborne. I smashed through the plaster and lathe wall, still airborne and moving fast. I slammed through another wall and only came to a stop when I hit the cast iron tub in the bathroom, and everything went dark and hazy.
I lay there for who knows how long, dazed. I heard two shots from outside the house and then both the roar of a large animal and the shriek of a very scared man. I thought of Richie standing up to the monstrosity that Hatton had changed into and groaned. I struggled to my feet, dizzy, nauseated, and
felt sticky blood all down the left side of my face. My muscles threatened to betray me as the room spun and tilted around me, and my feet seemed to want to tap dance. They just flapped around by themselves while I tried to stay upright and start moving.
Outside, it sounded like there was a pack of wolves in a feeding frenzy—growls and barks filled the air, and beneath that, the shrieking wail of approaching sirens.
I made myself move, holding my hands out to my sides, pressing my hands against the walls to keep myself upright. I stumbled down the hall and into the kitchen. I slipped in the blood of the two troopers and fell hard, bruising my hip.
I didn’t think I could get up—not again, so I crawled through the laundry, through the tiny mudroom, and down the three steps to the gravel; I fought for consciousness the entire time, my head hanging in front of me, my eyes closed against the spinning and nausea. When I felt the bite of the gravel on my palms, I no longer heard the wolf-pack noises—only the sirens caterwauling as they approached.
I forced my eyes open and fought the urge to vomit as I turned my head this way and that. The broken, torn body of Richie Duvall lay in the middle of the driveway. The shattered remains of his gun lay by his side in a tidy pile.
I moved away from the house, away from Richie and the remains of his Colt, shambling along on my hands and knees. I tried to push myself to my feet, but the effort was too much, and I faded out again. When I came to again, I was lying on my side, facing the farm land behind the house. As if on cue, Hatton burst out of the darkness to my side, Melanie Layne’s limp form thrown over his shoulder.
“No,” I muttered. “You leave…her alone.”
He looked at me with such arrogance and menace that it felt like he stared at me a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. I remember thinking that I could feel his malice much better in this monstrous form than when he appeared as a man. He looked like a giant crossed with some kind of demonic wolf. His gaze drilled into mine, accompanied by a low growl, like a dog that feels challenged.
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 19