So, the business inside – now she guessed they were hooked on heroin or meth, something that saps the capacity for joy out of people – wasn't happening in the living room.
The Bull’s Eye slipped around to the back corner again and eased far enough from the exterior wall to look up and down both sides of the house that she could see from here. Nothing, just dark windows, so she risked it and ran at a half-squat to the other back corner. From there she could see the other rooms were all dark except for one. It had a mismatched set of curtains in the window and they hadn't bothered to close them. Inside, by the dim light of a night light beside a clock radio, she could see – well. She paused. This wasn’t what she had expected.
The other twin and the bogeyman were making out. The visitor was kissing the neck of the twin who had been more together, healthier looking, when she visited them the first. She was a little surprised this was something so tame as an affair. The way everyone carried on was a little over the top. It was certainly more than she would have expected of having a couple of gentrifying queens move into the neighborhood. Maybe the twin in the living room was a fundamentalist who couldn’t handle his brother having grown-up times with a friend. Maybe the brother who was neck-deep in a session of heavy petting was a prostitute and this guy was simply a regular john. She could come up with explanations for the anguished behavior of the kid in the living room, but either way none of it was really what she considered her beat. Hookers and gigolos live hard enough lives without getting busted for it. She would never have bound up a prostitute in zip ties and dumped her on a convenient street corner for the cops to pick up.
On the other hand, a hooker probably wouldn’t have excited the kind of talk the neighborhood kids had been feeding her, either.
She kept watching, just in case something more sinister presented itself and because, to be honest, it had been a while and she was as much a latent voyeur as anyone else in the television age. The twin whose neck was being kissed didn’t actually look like he was enjoying it. Rather, he looked like he was counting cracks in the ceiling while waiting for something to happen. (Definitely prostitution.) This continued for a few seconds until he grimaced and squeezed his eyes closed, the rest of his body straining uselessly against the old guy holding him down. The kid opened his eyes again for a moment before they fluttered shut with a kind of finality. He slumped in the other guy's grasp, suddenly as slack and pliant as a rag doll. The visitor noticed, pulled away for a moment while still holding the guy up from the mattress a little bit, and that's when The Bull’s Eye had only her Delta Force training to thank for allowing her not to scream: blood was gushing from the kid's neck.
The bogeyman's lips were coated in it.
The older guy licked the wounded throat once and the gash was gone, like he'd just erased it with a magic wand. A little something like color returned to the kid's cheeks before he convulsed once, twice, a third time. Consciously or reflexively the kid’s pale fist balled up a bit of bed cover next to him. His toes curled. The Bull’s Eye realized with something not entirely unlike shame that the kid had just orgasmed in the middle of whatever anguished assault this was. The visitor dropped him onto the bed with remarkable carelessness, stood up and walked into a bathroom. He started washing his face in the sink.
Holy shit. That was all she could think. She had seen a lot in her time in the army, but that was the third or fourth craziest thing she had ever seen, ever. Now she understood why the brother in the living room was crying: either he was next or next time it was his turn.
Either one would be enough to make a man weep.
There were three things The Bull’s Eye knew immediately about this situation: that she did not believe real vampires existed, which meant a psychopath was attacking and injuring people on her watch and she was pretty sure that wasn't okay no matter how into it the victims were by the time it was over; that she had no idea what to do about this situation, either to clarify it or to put a stop to it; and that she had to do something about it anyway. She took advantage of the visitor's time spent cleaning up to run back across the yard, confident no one would ever notice her. She had to wait until the guy was away from the house before she followed him, just in case there was a confrontation and the twins inside were in fact so into this arrangement, whatever it might be, that they would attempt to defend him from her.
The Bull’s Eye slipped across the deserted late-night street and darted behind her tree from before. One hand against its trunk, the other against the middle of her chest, she tried to steady herself and her own mind against what she had seen. She had seen people do unbelievable things, senseless things, things done by an id lashing out at a world its vessel no longer could understand. She had seen people do the unthinkable to themselves, to their children, to persons they suspected of collaborating with one or another of the powers in their lives. She had spent years getting paid to be the United States’ eyes and ears in situations where those sorts of moments were an ongoing problem.
What she’d seen in that house tonight had been different, though. This was in the sort of suburban neighborhood where she had let herself begin to think she was the baddest thing around. She had chased that one burglar, her very first night, out of reflex and out of anger but those feelings had morphed over time into a mission and a sense of invulnerability.
Ann had looked back on the things she had done in the guise of Sgt. Fletcher on behalf of distantly derived policy and let them make meth heads and purse-snatchers and gas station money-grabbers seem, in comparison, to be less than a real threat to her safety when she took to the street as The Bull’s Eye. She had come to think nothing here could threaten her very much.
The Bull’s Eye noticed someone else on the street. Glancing over, she saw there were actually two someones: two children, within the same age ranges as the others she’d interviewed in the last few days, but they were not hiding in their houses. They were standing on the sidewalk, maybe forty yards from her. They both had hooded sweatshirts on and their cowls were pulled up so she couldn’t quite make out their faces. The Bull’s Eye needed to get them out of here right away. This was not the time for a couple of neighborhood kids to decide to be brave. She had considered the possibility her asking around might gin up some youthful courage but she had discounted it. Now that she knew the violence of what was going on, she didn’t need to have to think about these kids, too.
She’d heard nothing from the house: no front door, no screaming match, no anguished cries and no peals of laughter. Whatever was going on in there, it wasn’t doing a damned thing to indicate how close it might be to over. She decided to risk it; she had to if she wanted to get the kids off the street. The Bull’s Eye sprinted in great strides from one huge old tree to the next until she was ten or fifteen feet from the two kids. They watched her approach without moving or gesturing or making a sound. Once she was within range of a whisper she pointed towards the houses nearby.
“Kids, you need to get out of here.” Her voice was a harsh hiss. “Beat it. Seriously, you need to scram.”
The two children in hoodies continued to stare at her, their eyes glittering. The Bull’s Eye strained to see them better, because she’d noticed a disturbing trick of the interspersed light and shadow: their eyes looked completely dark. She didn’t just see dark irises, though. She saw nothing but a glittering onyx void where their eyes would be, like their eyes were made of the chitin of some enormous beetle.
The Bull’s Eye felt the same creeping horror she’d experienced when she looked into that bedroom window not three minutes before. Something was wrong with these kids, something beyond their eyes. There was something alien and off-putting about them, something she felt way back in the reptile brain. It told her to run from them, to run away from all of this and to keep running until she’d run so long she’d had time to forget them.
The kids moved towards her now, slow feet rising and falling in unison. A career begun with lots of marching made her recognize the way th
ey moved as one. They were not moving quickly or even strolling. They were just barely walking, completely casually, almost entirely in silence. Little houses of all the styles marketed to lower-middle-class families for the last hundred years were stacked up all around them, practically on top of one another, all on lots above street level, every lawn in a state of care as different from the ones around it as could be imagined, and The Bull’s Eye wondered if here, in the suburban jumble of a neighborhood on the skids, was where she would finally die.
The pavement was broken in places by potholes that would never be filled and the sidewalk was just as cracked and scarred. It took her less than a second to map the best running route through it and away, towards the light of the thoroughfare a few blocks from here. She could outrun any child. She just had to figure out how to move her legs again.
Her infinity of hesitation was broken when she heard a footstep behind her. A single glance back took in three more kids in hooded sweatshirts, eyes like a night sky full of unfamiliar stars, and the neighborhood bogeyman was standing in the middle of the street not twenty yards away.
“My children have seen you,” he said. His voice was raspy and quiet and weak. He sounded old. He looked old and not-old. She noted his thin, grease-streaked hair; his sunken cheeks; the waddle dangling under his chin. He looked like he was very old but not all over. His hair was still dark and the flesh around his eyes was tight and firm, not in the way of cosmetic surgery but in the way of youth. He looked like a young man wearing the skin of an older one as a disguise.
It occurred to her this was not necessarily outside the realm of the possible.
“They are awaiting my command.” He went on, addressing her directly, at total ease with his exposed position in the middle of the street. “I have to decide what I want them to do with you. I don’t like…” He seemed to chew something bitter for a moment. “People in my business.”
The Bull’s Eye knew better than to wait for the villain to finish his soliloquy. She bolted, all her training lighting up at once, and she was halfway up the block inside three clean seconds. Tiny sneakers pounded asphalt in unison behind her.
For five blocks they ran. She reached the main thoroughfare up ahead and saw some traffic coming in each direction. Rather than slow she sped up and stitched between them like a game of Frogger on fast-forward. She wanted to use the traffic as a barrier between herself and the guy and those creepy little kids with the black eyes.
No dice: they simply ran into traffic after her. The Bull’s Eye heard tires screech and horns sound as the kids threw themselves into the paths of one car and then another in their pursuit. She didn’t hear any impacts, though, and moments later all she could hear was the sound of their unified footfalls again keeping pace behind her.
Keeping pace. She couldn’t shake them with speed. Surely she could beat them for endurance, though. She’d run half-marathons to kill a Saturday morning. She could outlast them if she couldn’t outrun them.
A perfectly preserved little Dodge hatchback from the 1980’s pulled up next to her, its engine running like a Swiss watch. She could have remembered the model name if she'd tried: a friend of hers had driven that in high school. That car had been a piece of junk; junk then and junk when it was new on the lot. One day its engine simply fell out while he was driving down the road. Its motor mounts had rusted through with only sixty thousand miles on it. The Bull’s Eye had no idea why all of this was coming to her now, flooding back.
The car scooted ahead, then turned to one side to block her path. The neighborhood bogeyman stepped out of the driver’s side with the car between them and looked right at her as she ran up, then slowed, then sped back up to try to run around. “Did you think I would not detect you?” His voice was heavy and a little drunk sounding. His accent was Midwestern. It was the sort of accent she had heard come out of big corn fed Iowa boys. She hadn't heard it since she was in the Army. She didn't know what she had expected to hear, but it wasn't an accent so... pedestrian, with a wording so oddly stilted. “Our kind can hear a drop of blood in a bathtub from two miles away.”
Our kind. Great: it wasn’t just a kinky sex thing; he was definitely insane. That made things simpler.
Running hadn’t worked, so it was time to change tactics. “You should raise your hands over your head,” The Bull’s Eye said as she stopped. Her voice was perfectly calm. She had said the same words, in half a dozen different languages, to men who were pointing guns at her in countries she couldn’t remember. This was just another day at the office in some ways, even though the feet of half a dozen children skidded to a halt behind her to reinforce her awareness that she was alone and they believed themselves to be in control. “You should keep your hands there while I restrain you. If you cooperate you will not be hurt.” She withdrew a set of zip-ties from one of the pockets on her cargo pants and held them up where they could be seen. “Do you understand? Nod to indicate that you understand what I am saying.”
He smiled, and he had way too many teeth. Well, OK, he only had two that really stood out, but they were more than she had expected. He launched himself towards her and his mouth was open and she knew the only word for them was fangs. All she had time to do was drop and roll to try to trip him up by impacting his feet and shins with her body. She had to dive towards him to do so, which is not something instinct is ready to allow without extensive retraining.
The adrenaline rush came right on time, just like clockwork, so that when he pitched forward and rolled into a somersault and then stood, turning around, she was also already up and smiling. At least now he and the kids were all on one side of her, giving her a direction empty of enemies.
“You insolent…,” he hissed. “I'll kill you right here on the street. When they find you in the morning you'll remind everyone – everyone – to respect their betters.” There was a blur and something slammed into her back. She fell forward, all the wind knocked out of her, and he was standing there with his fist out. He was still grinning, but she didn't understand how he did that: how he had gone from one side of her to the other in a flash. He had simply been in one place and then another.
He raised a boot; she rolled out of the way and stood. He blurred again. This time she spun when he did so and saw him abruptly appear behind her. The Bull’s Eye twisted at the same time, grabbed his arm and rotated back around to use his momentum against him. He sailed over her shoulder, forward, but turned in mid-air like he'd done it a hundred times, like they'd practiced this, and landed on his feet, facing her.
“...” Her lips parted to say something but her own training reminded her that he would try to take advantage of her ongoing disorientation and she dropped, sweeping a kick around her for almost the whole three hundred sixty degrees. That caught something and he was knocked off balance and fell onto his back. She let herself produce one choked guffaw as she tried to get up and moving. Whatever his deal was, he was really strong and impossibly fast and she couldn't win this fight, she knew, so she needed to do something like disable his car and call the police, anything that would get more firepower involved but there he was, right in front of her, his hand around her neck.
He lifted her off the pavement and he looked so satisfied when he did. She could feel his fingers digging into her throat. The Bull’s Eye couldn't believe her vigilante career would end this way. She didn't give a good goddamn about her career as a janitor for Durham Tech, but this? This felt like letting someone down. This felt like losing. The children gathered behind him, staring at her with those not-eyes, their blank gazes ready to watch her die.
A car made the turn from the thoroughfare they’d crossed, down this street, and its headlights played across the darkness. LED high-beams, the kind she found so annoying every other time she had ever seen them, washed over the assembled figures and the car’s brakes squealed. The bogeyman looked away – away from her and away from the car, shielding his face – and he dropped her. He simply let go and allowed her to fall into the street. Ano
ther blur of movement and he was gone. He vaulted onto one of the raised lots; she heard leaves; then silence.
The black-eyed kids stood there for another moment before scattering. The half-dozen children burst in different directions away from her, out of the light.
Feet came running up to her, from the car that had turned, and a man said, “Man, are you okay? Holy shit! I said, are you okay? 911! I'll call 'em.” He struggled in his hurry to dig a phone out of a pocket. The Bull’s Eye couldn't stick around and deal with that. She didn’t need to get caught up in the authorities now. If she lay very still and took very slow, shallow breaths she could breathe well enough to confirm that everything was still working in her neck. She wanted to get the license plate on the old Dodge – an Omni, that's what it was called – but the headlights of that Good Samaritan were shining in her eyes and she couldn't make out the plates.
Her savior gave out a stunned “Whoah!” when she leapt to her feet. Her throat burned like hell but she was moving. The Bull’s Eye ran over to the car to look at the tag and was surprised to see no plate at all on the car. She blinked. Cops could practically smell a beater car with no tags being driven around. It was the kind of thing she’d heard referred to as a “bust-me-mobile”.
The good Samaritan got off the phone and came hobbling back towards her (she catalogued: limp favoring his right leg; probably a broken bone he’d never had properly set, several years old, he must not do anything too physical for his job or maybe he did and it pained him and he simply bore it out of necessity, she’d certainly seen that enough times in places where a misstep led to all kinds of joint problems). He said something about “them” being on their way and that obviously meant the police, so she had to go.
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 12