by L T Vargus
Contents
Title & Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Epilogue
Author's Note
More From the Authors
The Violet Darger Series
About the Authors
SILENT NIGHT
Victor Loshak Book 3
E.M. Smith, L.T. Vargus & Tim McBain
This Complete Book is Copyright © 2020 E.M. Smith, L.T. Vargus & Tim McBain
The Victor Loshak Series is Copyright © 2020 L.T. Vargus & Tim McBain
Smarmy Press
All rights reserved.
V 1.1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Prologue
The after-Christmas shoppers were out in droves. Pointless and plentiful. Teeming swells of them crashed into the storefronts, overwhelmed the food stalls, flooded out into the thoroughfare of the mall.
An ugly lot, he thought. Pocked faces and flabby trunks. Smiling like chimps, teeth the shade of butterscotch.
He watched the thickest segment of the mob congregate at the food court — the Dining Pavilion the signs called it. All the sheep gathered in one place. Loitering at the feeding trough, at the watering hole, Cinnabon gloop smeared around their mouths like semen.
He shifted in his seat, the metal bench unforgiving, probably leaving a steel mesh imprint on his ass even now. But he didn’t take his eyes off the mob of consumers flitting around the food court.
Waiting. Waiting for the pills to kick in, for the other stuff to kick in. For that metal to come ripping out of his laptop bag.
Yeah, he had a little something to show them all. Soon.
The sun had already been down by the time he crossed the parking lot toward the mall’s main entrance. Trudging through slush, sleet coming down, the black of night descending. Oh, the Christmas lights blinked red and blue back at the gloom, strands of the things wrapped around the stone columns out front and strung through the decorative bushes along the building’s facade, but their tiny glow was no match for the dark. Not tonight.
Even with the baby messiah holiday over, the place was packed. Swarming with shoppers of every race, color, creed. All the people. Somehow they all looked the same to him.
The return lines backed up halfway out of the stores, spilling out into the concourse. Kind of funny, he thought. It was December 26th. Imagine all those shitty gifts shoved right back from whence they came within 24 hours. Exchanged, whenever possible, for cold hard cash, though store credit was acceptable if mandatory. Ah, to bask in the true spirit of Christmas.
He imagined the camera in his head zooming out. Seeing the bigger picture, the full scale of the scene as though viewed from above.
The crooked lines of people snaking away from the Return desks with sweaters and turtlenecks slung over their arms. The swarming throng of food court idiots gibbering away at each other as they shoved giant cinnamon rolls down their gullets.
He watched them all. Watched them through his sunglasses, a layer of darkness that kept him separate, kept them from knowing which way his eyes were pointed.
It gave him a little thrill to walk among them undetected. To sit on this bench, the mindless herd swirling around him. They didn’t have a clue.
He could feel the accelerated pulse banging away in his neck now. The uppers were coming on strong. The weird stuff sometimes took longer.
He checked the time on his phone. Could be five more minutes or it could be forty more minutes. Soon.
One hand reached up to touch the winter hat bunched atop his head. The other moved down to confirm that his laptop bag still lay at his feet, that the hard bulk inside remained, ready and waiting. Good.
Movement caught his eye. Pulled his attention back to the mob.
An older couple fussed over a dropped slice of pizza outside of Sbarro. The man, angry, threw up his hands, both he and his wife looking down on the giant wedge of pizza lying face down on the terrazzo floor, grave expressions etched into their faces. Grief, he thought. They were grieving the loss of a slice of XL pepperoni.
A nervous chuckle pulsed out of him as he watched the scene, but the laughing made him uncomfortable. Self-conscious.
He licked his lips. Felt his tongue touch the sharp edges of his teeth, the tiniest little bumps evident on the bones as though his incisors were serrated.
Finally the old man stooped to peel the fallen pizza off the tile floor. Wads of cheese came free, sliding off the crust, lumpy piles of mozzarella sagging into his cupped palms. He stuck his whole hands into the trash can to try to rid himself of the mess, fingers coming back red with sauce.
He had to look away from the scene to keep from laughing again. Eyes swiveling to the people closest to him. Reading their faces. Expecting to find one of them watching him. Squinted eyes scrutinizing him.
No one looked his way. No one noticed him at all.
He shifted in his seat again. Paranoia intensifying? That must mean it was starting.
He smeared sweaty palms on the thighs of his pants and tried to push the antsiness down. Tried to calm himself.
Instead the weird anticipation grew. An overwhelming physical anxiety entered his body, shuddered through him, all of his torso electric with it. A quake in the abdomen. An intestinal throb. So intense it almost felt like he might spontaneously shit. Or puke. Or both.
Too much. Too muc
h energy. Too much life inside him thrashing like something wild, trying to bust its way out, expend itself. Too much spirit for this meat shell to contain.
He swallowed. Hard. It was always that way just before the acid kicked in. Like it hit the body before it touched the mind, sent shrill warning signs that the intensity knob was about to get cranked all the way up. Energy maximized. Overloading. The human soul verging on nuclear meltdown.
And as that drug-induced energy swelled, so too did his feelings of separation, isolation. He felt more and more outside this crowd of people bustling around him. Apart. Alone and foreign here.
Alienation. Estrangement from humanity.
Every trip was a journey inward, a striving toward something. Some kind of hidden truth that lived only in this altered mindspace. Something primal, fundamental to existence. What would he find there today? His heart stuttered a little, then ratcheted up another couple notches, almost like it was eager to find out.
Kids rushed past him then, a blur of red and navy blue winter coats, a pair of 10-years-olds chasing each other. Their mother lingered somewhere in the distance, calling after them in a strange muted-yell like the mall version of a stage whisper.
His eyes sought her, found her, elbowing her way through the congestion, something very odd about her face. The snout elongated, he thought. The lines of her jaw and cheekbones going smeary around the edges, jiggling just a little like a custard that wasn’t quite set.
It was happening. The drugs. Finally.
All the faces in the crowd started to change, to shift, to look strange to him. Something about the proportions of the jaws warped so the shoppers all looked like chinless pigs. Hideous. Alien. Naked in some way. No longer quite human. Like docile apes someone had shaved and taught to walk upright.
They bumbled about, looking for the next shiny object to go chasing after, perpetually dim expressions shimmering out from behind their eyes.
Tame. They were all so fucking tame.
Like house cats, stuck inside permanently. Convinced that all of reality existed within the walls of their home, this soccer mom jungle they were the kings of by default.
These domesticated animals from the suburbs thought the same of their little worlds. Believed that reality consisted solely of their tract in the subdivision and their stainless steel appliances and their little slot in the faceless machine and their water-activated gel cleansers.
He tongued the edges of his teeth again. Felt his heart hammering in his chest. Staring into all those alien faces. Disturbed.
And rage surged through him at last. Animal heat lurching up the walls of his skull. Hatred. He trembled with it. Arms quivering.
His reality came out of the barrel of a gun. Had a way of wiping all those lesser realities away.
Blood and bone and metal. Those were real.
The house cats could never understand that until they saw the bloodshed and death first hand. Until their hideous fates came clear. Until death came ripping.
The mob of idiots squirmed like one many-tentacled being before him now. Writhing and throbbing and moving Cinnabon Stix to all those wet maws. Something erotic in the undulations. Something grotesque.
He leaned forward. Dug in his laptop bag, his fingers finding the cool metal they sought, settling the grip in the crook of his hand and plucking it free.
He stood. Pulled the bunched up winter hat on top of his head down, the ski mask now covering his face, bulging around the sunglasses.
He stepped forward into the crowd. Some tendon or vein trembling down the length of each arm.
The voice in his head screamed before his finger even found the trigger. No words. Just something aggressive breaking loose inside, given a voice. Unharnessed at last.
The voice swelled in volume until it drowned everything out. Until all of his being was this singular aggression. Overwhelming. About to be unleashed.
And he was alive. Awake. Real. For the first time.
Becoming.
All that energy glistened on his skin, sizzled behind his eyes, lurched and spit in the depths of his stomach.
Ready for catharsis. Ready to detonate.
With the Uzi leveled at the mob, he opened fire.
Chapter 1
“Go!” Jan stage-whispered, shoving Loshak at the door. “I think Chad’s coming back. Go!”
Loshak glanced over his shoulder toward their abandoned table.
“His name was Etienne.”
“Yeah, right, and I’m Jasmine.” She poked him in the back. “Go before he sees us.”
They squeezed through the Boxing Day dinner crowd, giggling like teenagers, two slightly tipsy fifty-somethings in a crowd of trendily dressed yuppies all waiting for their reservation.
The Edison bulbs sticking out of every sconce shed just enough light to be completely useless in escaping.
“Jan, I lost the door,” Loshak said over his shoulder.
She punched him in the arm.
“Vick, you asshole, if he catches us—”
“I left him a C-note.” He smirked at his own use of the slang and heard Jan giggle behind him.
He should try to throw around a few more. Find an opportune moment to slip in a What up, doe? and really get her going.
“Our drinks were probably only half that,” he added.
Loshak made it to a wall, then a hallway. But that was also packed with people waiting for their reservation, and between their heads he could see restroom signs. He turned around.
There was the door to the foyer, on the opposite side of this mass. Loshak grabbed Jan’s hand and pulled her through the crowd. A group of young professionals in suits and respectable black pea coats and trenches had just shoved their way in out of the cold. As he and Jan approached, the group turned and tried to push back against the wall to let them pass. One of the women held the door.
Loshak nodded graciously at her.
“What up, doe.”
Behind him, Jan let out a shriek of laughter, then slapped her hand over her mouth. So maybe they were more than a little tipsy. But Chad-Etienne had just kept bringing more drinks. Really skimped on the free bread, though.
They stumbled out onto the sidewalk, leaving behind a foyer full of serious, professional, confused young adults in formal wear.
“Oh, God, it’s freezing out here,” Jan said.
She grabbed her bare arms, white clouds puffing from her lips with every word.
“Here.”
Loshak unhooked Jan’s coat from his arm and put it around her shoulders. The icy cold wind felt nice on his burning face after the stuffiness of the restaurant and somewhere between three and eight scotches, but then he was in a three-piece suit and Jan only had on a slinky black dress.
He tried to come up with something else too young and hip for a fifty-three-year-old FBI agent to say, something about how her dress would look warmer on the floor of his bedroom, but he was a couple drinks past clever.
“We need food,” he blurted out.
Jan gasped and grabbed his arm, her eyes wide.
“Onion rings,” she said.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, they were sitting in a Denny’s with an appetizer sampler piled high between them.
“Now this is food,” Jan said, dredging an onion ring in chipotle ranch sauce. “Not that pretentious crap Chad was trying to force down our throats.”
“That, I’m pretty sure, was Fancy Feast,” Loshak said.
Jan snorted, hurrying to put a hand over her mouth before she spewed breading and sauce everywhere.
“Seriously,” Loshak said. “I’ve seen those exact servings on commercials. They bring out the dainty little lump of pâté sprinkled with microgreens on a white plate and this smoosh-faced white cat starts chowing down. A Himalayan, I think. Whatever those snoutless cats are. Flat noses. Just two slits under the eyeballs like Voldemort or something.”
There were tears in Jan’s green eyes from trying not to laugh. She swiped at them
with the back of her hand and swallowed.
“I think you’re right,” she said. “When I was in the supermarket the other day, I saw Cheddar and Crab Soufflé on one of those cans. And Salmon with Accents of Parsley. Isn’t that what Chad was trying to sell us as tonight’s special?”
Loshak picked up a fried mushroom. “To be honest, I stopped listening after my third drink. I think it was pretty clear from the time Chad mentioned artisan ketchup that he and I weren’t going to get along.”
The breading popped when he bit down, filling his mouth with piping hot mushroom and grease. Two weeks fighting to get that damn reservation. Jan flying all the way to Virginia from Santa Fe. And now here they were in a greasy chain diner.
“Sorry your birthday dinner was crap,” he said.
“You idiot.” Jan grinned and flicked a bit of broken-off of breading across the table at him. “This is the best birthday I’ve had in…”
At first, he thought she’d trailed off because she knew that “drunk the night after Christmas in a twenty-four-hour diner” wasn’t the best time to start talking about your dead daughter and broken marriage. Not when you were trying to rebuild it.
But then he realized her eyes had focused on something behind him. Her lips parted, mouth easing open.
“Vick,” she whispered, pointing.
Dread turned the fried mushrooms in his gut to stone. Loshak twisted around in the booth, following the direction of her finger.
There were TVs mounted around the interior of the Denny’s. A few tuned to sports, the rest to news. The one Jan pointed at showed footage of a ravaged mall food court. Crime scene tape. Police and paramedics. Stretchers and body bags.
The sound was off, but closed captioning scrolled by at the bottom of the screen.
Thirteen confirmed dead so far in a mass shooting at Woodfield Mall in suburban Chicago. The shooter is still at large.
Chapter 2
Jaw clenching, heart thundering, he exited the mall and ducked into the dark of the back parking lot. A cold blast of wind battered at him, not quite able to touch the heat now saturating his flesh — some fever of rampage turning him on like a furnace, rolling its swelter off of his body in waves.
The sky spit down snow, tiny and sparse, the little crystals twirling in the air around him. More like ice chips than flakes.
