Nightmare

by Erik Henry Vick

  Jim looked back at Benny and shrugged. “Sorry, champ. Vegetables it is.”

  After dinner, Benny stood and took his plate to the sink. When he turned to leave the kitchen, his mom cleared her throat.

  “Dishes, Benny.”

  “It’s not my turn,” he said.

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t your turn before you went on your little trip, but it is your turn now, and it will be your turn until I tell you something different.” Her eyebrows arched toward the ceiling. “Do you have an issue with that, Benjamin?”

  He considered her expression. The corners of her eyes twitched, and her eyes appeared wet, watery. Her lips pressed into a thin line, and still, they shook. He glanced at his dad, but his father had found something interesting to look at in the taco he was holding. Benny sighed. “No, Mom, no problem.”

  “I said it before, Benjamin. Sigh all you want.” With that, she turned her back on him.

  “I’m sorry,” Benny murmured, but his mother didn’t hear, or pretended not to.

  He tried to fight it, but another sigh escaped him as he filled the sink with hot, soapy water. After he finished the dishes, Benny went to his dad’s study, where Jim had retreated after dinner.

  “Hey, Benny,” he said.

  “Hi.” He couldn’t keep his lip from quivering.

  “It’s not forever, Benny.”

  “I know. But Mom… Mom huh-hates me now.”

  His dad wrapped his arms around him. “No, she doesn’t, Son. She’s mad at you is all. You’ll understand her anger when you grow up and have kids of your own. Most of it comes from a fear deep in her heart that something will happen to you. Something bad.”

  “But nothing did, Daddy. And I’m not going back to that house. Not ever.”

  His dad shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, Son. Something terrible might have happened, and that fear of what might have happened turns into anger when the danger has passed. It’s a scary thing to think your kids might be hurt, or worse. That’s the biggest fear I have, Benny, that something might happen to you or your brothers, and I won’t be able to do anything about it. I’d rather die than have something like that happen to you guys.”

  Benny nodded. “Still…”

  “Still, you’ve never heard her talk like that to you.”

  Benny nodded again, trying not to cry.

  His dad sighed. “In a way, the depth of her anger tells you how much she loves you. Can you see that?”

  Benny thought about it for a minute, and it made him feel a little better. “Yeah. But how do I fix it, Dad?”

  His dad’s grin was wry. “Pray.” He tousled Benny’s hair. “I’ve known your mom for almost fifteen years, now, Benny. In that time, I’ve learned that your mom is a very understanding woman up to a point, but once you cross that line, you just have to give her time to get over the hurt, the anger. But this I’ll give you for free: cutting out all the sighing will help.”

  Benny nodded. “I’ll try.”

  “And don’t worry, Benny. She loves you until it hurts, even now.”

  Benny nodded again.

  “I’ll keep track of the extra chores. When your mom’s gotten over it a little more, she’ll be more open to time off for good behavior.”

  “Okay, Dad. Thanks.”

  “You got it, champ.”

  “Did you find out anything?”

  Jim’s face turned serious. “Yes. I think I know who’s been hurting Toby. I don’t know where he is, yet, so don’t get excited. Still working on it, though, and I asked Chief Greshin for help.”

  “Is it… It’s Toby’s mom, isn’t it.”

  His dad shook his head. “I don’t think so, Benny. I think the person hurting Toby is hurting his mom, too. But don’t worry about all that. You told me, and I told Chief Greshin, and you’d better believe that steps will be taken to doctor that problem.”

  “Okay. Thanks for everything, Dad. You’re awesome.”

  Jim Cartwright smiled, but inside, he feared that one day soon, he’d have to tell Benny about the police finding Toby’s body somewhere.

  Chapter 2

  2007

  1

  Drew needed the campus quiet—deserted—and, at four in the morning, it was. He had everything set up back in the lab. He had stopped by the pathology lab and brought the industrial digester up to temperature and had prepped it with lye and water. The only thing missing was the demon.

  Swathed in black cotton, Drew stood in the shadows, breathing controlled, no stray sounds to alert a demon to his presence, no shiny bits of metal to catch the moonlight. He wore military grade night-vision goggles that turned the darkest night into day—even if the day glowed with garish green light. He knew the demon was there—somewhere. Drew felt it, even if seeing it wasn’t possible.

  He hated the demons with an intense passion that bordered on psychotic. That most people would consider him a serial killer didn’t bother him. Drew knew what he was doing was right. No, more than right, necessary.

  His prey moved, and his gaze zeroed in on the motion. Across the quad, the demon squatted in a humongous hydrangea. It scratched its arm like mad, making the whole bush shiver and shudder.

  Drew increased the magnification on his goggles. A slow smile crept across his face. The thing wasn’t even looking in his direction. It stared at a first-floor window of Irene Glass Hall, the freshman dorms. The female freshman dorms.

  As an experiment, Drew moved his own arm. The demons could be hypervigilant, but he’d never seen one this focused care about anything but its victim. Driven by lust and hunger, the stalk became something like foreplay to them after a while.

  This one didn’t notice him moving. The thing should be able to hear his movements, and if it looked in his direction, it could pick him out with its unaided eyes—much more easily than Drew could see it. But it didn’t turn when he moved his arm, and not when he took a short step. The hunt had it engaged and engrossed.

  That was good, but bad at the same time. Good, in that Drew could sneak up on it. Bad in that it meant the thing was old, and that meant powerful and wily. He would have to be careful.

  He’d been hunting the demons for ten years—ever since he’d realized the psychiatrists were wrong. The demons weren’t a product of grandiose delusions. They were real, and the demons controlled human senses so that no one saw them for what they were. Instead, humans saw regular people.

  He wasn’t sure they were really demons—not in the biblical sense anyway—but whatever they were; they were evil, and they needed killing. Some of them looked like biblical demons—leathery wings, horns, fangs, whatever—and those he’d dubbed “traditional” demons. Others had black, rotting skin that hung from them like clothing three sizes too big. Those he called “undead” demons. The rest of them looked…alien. They might have scales or three arms or no skin and those he called “weird” demons. No single weird looked anything like any other weird.

  Whatever they looked like, they all fed on human emotions. Negative human emotions mostly—fear, anger, hatred—but some fed on things like orgasms or abuses of power.

  Drew had been seeing the things since the age of fourteen—all his memories started at that age. It was strange not to have any memories of his childhood, but the doctors called it a response to some trauma he didn’t remember. And that was fine with him. Who wanted to remember horrible things that happened in childhood?

  The demon in front of him was a weird. It had thick skin like a rhinoceros or an elephant. The night vision goggles made it impossible to tell its true color, other than something dark—it looked black in the green-washed night. It had sharp, cat-like teeth and a wide, wide mouth. It had orbs of pure black for eyes, and its tail coiled around its feet.

  As he made his way from shadow to shadow, traversing the quad in total silence toward where the demon hid, Drew unslung his modified tranquilizer rifle. In the beginning, he’d used regular firearms to stun the beasts, but that took a lot of ammunition and made
such a god-awful mess, not to mention noise. And, he couldn’t kill them that way anyway—not and have them stay dead.

  Most tranquilizer rifles had a bolt-action and could fire a single shot. He’d spent a lot of time in the darkest corners of the internet before he’d “met” someone willing to do the job. They believed he was a serial killer, and so they charged him an exorbitant rate to build a semi-automatic tranquilizer rifle with three detachable magazines for the darts. People had no faith anymore.

  The demon salivated, offering a clue to its preferred food. Its victim would die (as would he) if Drew failed, most likely through exsanguination, after being sadistically raped. The barbaric malignancy in his sights fed on blood and flesh as well as terror or debasement and shame.

  His mouth settled into a grim, determined line. I will not fail, he told himself. Drew made one last check of the rifle: loaded and ready, carbon dioxide bottle at capacity. He had two spare magazines that held five more darts each, and an additional supply of darts in the sling-backpack he wore.

  He was close, inside the demon’s range of lethality. Drew’s senses kicked into overdrive as the adrenaline flooded his bloodstream. The demon breathed and scratched its arm—both harsh, ragged sounds that grated against Drew’s nerves. Worse, the foul thing reeked like burnt kale overlaid with the thick scent of sex.

  Drew brought the rifle up to his shoulder, sighting through the holographic sight that had been customized to fit over the end of his goggles. He centered the weapon on the beast’s wide back. He took a deep breath, released it, then squeezed the trigger.

  Even as fixated on its prey as this demon had been, the pneumatic hiss of the gun alerted it, and it spun toward the sound, moving faster than the dart traveled. Still, the dart hit the beast in a bulbous shoulder and stuck fast.

  The demon’s gaze zipped around the quad, peering into shadows, staring at clumps of shrubs. It would perceive him at any second, and the veterinary-grade sedatives he used in his darts didn’t work that fast on the demons.

  Drew fired the remaining four darts in the magazine in rapid succession, the gun making the pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft sound that the movie industry loved so much. He thumbed the magazine release, letting it fall to the ground at his feet, and slammed another magazine in its place.

  He looked up and into the hate-filled eyes of the demon and fired five times as fast as he could pull the trigger. His darts hung from the beast’s torso, ignored by the demon. It stepped from the hydrangea, its eyes never leaving his. The demon cocked its head to the side, its face settling into that now-familiar expression of confusion.

  Yeah, I can still see you, motherfucker, Drew thought and changed magazines. He raised the gun to fire again. Five more darts. Hope that’s enough for this big bastard. He fired the magazine dry and slung the rifle, getting ready to run for his life. He loaded the darts with a heavy dose of M99, a sedative for large animals—like hippos and elephants. At least he didn’t have to worry about killing the demon, so he filled the darts to capacity with the drug. In the TV show Dexter, M99 took instantaneous effect, and he wished for the umpteenth time that it worked that fast in reality.

  The demon roared and charged at him. It started more than a hundred yards away, and the beast showed no signs of going out. Drew moved, skipping to the side like a matador in a bull-fight. He hoped that the demon’s bulk would mean it lacked agility, but the demon corrected with each zig and each zag, growing ever closer.

  Drew turned his back on the beast and sprinted away in a straight line. Adapt or die, he thought. As he ran, he pulled the magazine out of the rifle. He reached into the sling-backpack and pulled out five more darts. He leapt a shrub and almost dropped all of them. He fed them into the magazine and tried to push the magazine into the gun.

  Instead, Drew dropped the magazine.

  The demon kept coming, nostrils flared wide, mouth open like a shark about to bite. Drew’s options were disappearing at a rapid pace. He cut to the side like a running-back, eyes frantic, skimming back and forth for the lost magazine. When he saw it, he dove, no time for consideration.

  He landed on top of the magazine, grabbed it, and rolled to the side, slotting the magazine. The demon’s clawed foot slammed into the ground where he had been a moment before, and Drew wished he’d kept running.

  Wouldn’t have mattered, he told himself. It’s a faster sprinter. In fluid, graceful motion, Drew swept the gun up from his side and fired point-blank into the beast’s face and neck.

  The demon staggered back, holding a massive arm in front of its face. Drew sprinted away, but it was a wasted effort. Behind him, the demon took a step and then fell in a heap.

  He approached it, ready to run at a moment’s notice, and prodded the demon’s shoulder with his booted foot. The demon didn’t react, just kept right on tearing harsh, craggy breaths out of the air.

  “Three hundred migs of M99. I’ll be damned,” he murmured. A bull elephant went down in under a minute and a half with just fifteen milligrams of the stuff. I need more M99, he thought.

  He bent to the task of moving the heavy demon first to his lab, and then to the industrial digester kept for the medical school. He didn't notice the new automated campus security cameras tracking his progress.

  2

  Like most mornings, Mike Richards had a splitting headache when he rolled out of bed. Late for my shift. Again. Good thing I’m the boss or I might be in trouble.

  He shuffled into his master bath, kicking aside empty beer cans and an almost-empty bottle of Jack Daniels. The bathroom shined bright, warmed by the mid-morning sun. Too bright—it made him want to throw up, and it made his head pound.

  Squinting, he flipped the shower to full-hot and opened the tap. He sank to the toilet and leaned back, resting his head against the wall, and closing his eyes against the barrage of morning light.

  He snapped awake sometime later, confused for a moment by the hot steam surrounding him, and the crick in his neck. His head still pounded, and he still wanted to puke, but stepped into the shower, letting the scalding hot water sluice over his head and pour down his back. Mike stayed in the shower for a long time, and when he got out, he felt a modicum less skeezy. He dressed in a hurry and went out to the junk heap the town manager insisted on calling the “Chief’s Cruiser,” the 1994 Chevrolet Caprice which had seen better days. Mike had no idea how the town mechanic kept it running, but it always started on the first try—even if it smelled like an old can of bear farts. Whatever the town manager wanted to call the car, he called it “Shamu” because it was a whale of a car, and because of how it looked: black fenders, white body. He had no doubt that back in 1994, it ran like a man being chased by demons, but thirteen years later it wheezed like a dying man and rattled like a spray can. It was a run-down whale of a car with a cracked side mirror and peeling dash. He turned the key, the old engine wheezed to life, and then he jammed it into drive.

  The car lurched and shuddered out of his cracked asphalt driveway, squealing the belts the whole way. He cranked the air conditioning, despite the cool weather outside the car, and pointed the vents at his forehead. His drive to work took him through the remains of the town of Oneka Falls—empty store fronts, falling down buildings, cracked pavement. Half of the buildings had chain-link barriers in place, or plywood nailed over the doors and windows to keep the kids out.

  After that horrific fall in 1979—the crime spree and the mass of child disappearances that followed it, the town had just died. Who wanted to live in a town where the chance that your kid would go missing was more than twenty times the national average? Who wanted to live in a dying town? Mike scoffed. He knew the answer to those questions: drunks, drug addicts, low lifes, and petty criminals. At least he was only a drunk. The town manager was all of the above.

  Mike parked the decrepit car in the spot reserved for the Chief of Police and climbed out into the garbage strewn lot. The town manager’s 2007 BMW 750i was in its accustomed spot (which was two spots—the only two han
dicapped spots in the lot). City funds had paid for the damn car, of course. Sport package, Monaco Blue metallic paint, and a beige convertible top. Just the essentials. Mike scoffed again, hawked and spat on the back window.

  He trudged inside the run-down town hall, eyes roving over the peeling paint, warped siding, weedy planting beds. The glass door squealed when he opened it, sending an icepick shivering through his head.

  Sally McBride sat behind her expansive counter, glaring at him with disdain. “On time again, I see,” she snapped.

  “Sally, when I answer to you, I hope to Christ someone will have the decency to shoot me and put me out of my misery.”

  “Such a fine example you set, Mike Richards. Are you even sober today?”

  “Fuck you, Sally,” he said cheerfully as he walked past the reception desk. “He in yet?”

  She glared at him but gave him a terse nod.

  Mike turned left into the part of the building reserved for the police department, such as it was. Since the town population had dipped, the police department consisted of a Chief, and three officers, one on days with Mike, and two on evenings. The night shift they had to contract out to a security firm from Rochester. They couldn’t even afford to pay a dispatcher anymore. 911 calls were routed to the radio system during days and evenings, and to an on-call cell phone during the night shift.

  Mike sat behind his desk in the big room that served as the communal “office” for the police department and slid open his bottom drawer with his foot. He toyed with the idea of taking a quick nip from the pint bottle he kept in the drawer. It would help his head, but it sure as hell wouldn’t contribute to getting anything done. With a regretful sigh, he slid the drawer closed.

  A mountain of paperwork, file folders, newspapers, dead radio batteries, used Kleenexes, empty Dr. Pepper bottles, and even a pair of dirty socks, covered the top of his desk. He wrinkled his nose at the mess but didn’t straighten any of it. Instead, he stood up and walked into the so-called break room—a converted broom closet—and touched the coffee pot. It was lukewarm, and the coffee was guaranteed to taste like piss.