Jake's Wake

by Cody Goodfellow, John Skipp

  She stopped, caught by an inkling of salvation.

  She threw open a cabinet, pushing aside the Clairol color kits and the huge Tupperware chest of prescription pain relievers, digging to the back.

  Where a bottle lay waiting.

  From the depths of Jake’s domain, they heard the sudden pounding and caterwauling of Evangeline’s fag. It sounded like he was trying to beat through the door with his bare hands, although where he’d gotten the fortitude for that was another of to night’s great mysteries. Jake and Gray paused in the corridor, listening to Christian’s noise.

  “Would you just kill him now?” Jake snarled. “I gotta take care of something.”

  Gray mopped blood off his chest. “Dude, I’ve got a big-ass hole in me. We gotta do something…”

  “I will take care of you. I swear it.” Jake looked sincere, but Gray felt his stomach go all squirrelly. “One way or the other. Now go.”

  Gray staggered—gun ready, and grimly determined—toward the bathroom where Christian continued to bang. He loved Jake. Would die for him, and not ask to come back.

  But he wasn’t sure, just now, that he was looking at his friend anymore.

  Looking over his shoulder, he stepped into Jake’s office.

  And walked right into the giggling demon.

  He recoiled and bit his tongue to keep from shrieking. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, but she was still there, leering out of the dark, peeking at him around her tiny, baby hands.

  “Jake had you kill me, too. Right in the head. BOOM!”

  She whooped and shook her baby-fat body at him, gyrating with gales of laughter, black blood squirting from the hole in her forehead.

  “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO YOU ARE!” he bellowed, as much in pain as terror.

  “Oh, you will,” she said, giggling harder. “Just wait till the rest of YOUR demons show up!”

  Gray aimed at the crazy bitch, but she was gone. The mocking laughter only got louder, as did Christian’s bang and wail.

  He continued miserably down the hall.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Now was certainly not the time for a drink; but when is the proper time for a nervous breakdown?

  Esther swigged from the vodka she had stashed. She wasn’t even trying to escape anymore. Just drinking and silently praying on her knees, in the center of the room. She never really thought she was free of Jake; it hadn’t even begun to sink in that he was gone, and then he was back. So it hadn’t even been much of a change at all.

  She was weak, no argument here, and the drink was not making her stronger. Only more flexible, more able to absorb it, maybe sleep through it altogether. Maybe she did not deserve to be saved, but she didn’t deserve to suffer, either.

  Because she was weak, and she’d been through too much already.

  Was all of this her fault? Should she have seen it in his eyes, that first time? Should she have listened to her father, who never told her what to do, once in her life?

  When he swept her off her feet, going away with the rock-and-roll preacher had seemed like rebellion against everything Mom and Dad stood for. It was not that he treated her as an object. She only tolerated that because she believed she could see the beast inside him, even when he was on his best behavior; and with her father’s selfless hippie healer dedication, she thought she could heal it.

  And how it felt when he fucked her had, naturally, nothing to do with it…

  When he loved her, he turned her inside out, unzipped her very soul. But it had only been so much stuffing to him, incidental garbage in the way of what ever he was looking for in her, in all the other women she refused to believe came after her…

  A wrecking ball tore down the bedroom door and swept through her room, overturning furniture, dumping drawers, and smashing her mirrors.

  “ESTHER!” it roared.

  “He really did love me,” she murmured, and took a last gulp of vodka. “Oh, Eddie…”

  Jake kicked down the bathroom door. It flipped off its hinges and landed squarely before her. She screamed, dropping the bottle, and scuttled back against the toilet.

  He held up a pair of handcuffs, waggling them like a leash. Wanna go for a walk, girl? He smiled, but his eyes were like burning plastic. In a face that was starting to rot in earnest and separate from the bone, it was the only part of him she recognized.

  Jake dragged Esther down the hallway by her hair. She cried out in pain and despair, but put up little other resistance. “The thing you don’t seem to understand is that you belong to me. Just ask God. He’ll tell ya.”

  They followed the long smeared track of blood from Evangeline’s friend all the way back to the living room, where Eddie’s dead body lay supine on the shag carpet, arms stretched out on a cape of deep burgundy.

  Esther wailed and took a swing at Jake.

  The blow barely mussed his hair, but he cut a grotesque pantomime, as if she’d mortally wounded him.

  “He takes note of betrayal, believe you me. He’s like Santa Claus and the ‘naughty’ list with that shit.”

  Jake flipped open one shiny steel cuff and held it out like the fanged mouth of a rattlesnake.

  “Not like me…”

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Gray staggered up to the bathroom door where Christian was still pounding. If only everything to night were this simple. Pointing the gun, he walked up to the door, thumbed the safety off, and started firing.

  From inside, Christian yelped.

  The banging stopped.

  As Gray reached for the knob, he noticed that he’d stepped in a puddle. The sissy must’ve flooded the place. His sense of smell was hardly the best, what with a lifetime of smoking, one working lung, and a night with an embalmed guy. But he smelled alcohol, and not the fun kind.

  He turned the lock and opened the door.

  Something small and metallic hit the floor on the other side. Blue flames squirted out from under the door and devoured the puddle he stood in.

  Gray jumped back and pumped three more rounds through the half-open door. His shoes, socks, and trouser legs were sheathed in fire.

  Even as he yelped, danced, and batted at them, the flames began to die out. Fed on rubbing alcohol and cologne, they were nothing more than a distraction—

  He looked up just as Christian spilled out the bathroom door and pointed something at him.

  An industrial spray can of insecticide.

  A cold mist engulfed Gray’s face in liquid agony. His eyes stung, teared up, seemed to melt down his face. He sucked in a breath and promptly gagged on the flavor, felt his lungs turn brittle and wither like dead flowers.

  The awful tingling weakness spread out into his limbs, robbing him of his last reserves of strength. Suffocating, blind.

  But damned if that bitch was getting past him.

  He heard Christian in front of him, aimed and fired, charging, then instantly tripped over Jasper’s dead body.

  Shards of glass punctured his knee, and more bit into his shoulder and face when he sprawled in the chunky glass from the broken cologne bottles, the razorlike light bulb shards.

  Gray heard crunching glass behind him, over the sound of his own screaming.

  Grunting in sudden pain, the faggot kicked him in the ass, thanked him for an enchanted evening, and slammed the bathroom door.

  Chapter Fifty

  Christian limped into the studio. The fog of shock was all but worn off, and he could vividly feel every broken rib fragment grating against the walls of his chest with every movement.

  It was all he could do not to scream at the top of his lungs, but that would hardly help with the pain. And even if he couldn’t find anybody, he was pretty sure he wasn’t the only one left. He had to find Evangeline. They needed to get the fuck out of here before he passed out—

  “Oh dear God,” he said.

  It just slipped out. It didn’t mean anything. What else would he say, upon seeing an eyeless, crucified boy?

  The dead kid,
Mathias, looked like a prop. Its skin had a marbled gray pallor that made it tough to think of as human flesh. The cameras pointing at it all had blinking red lights. He was taping this, recording the death…and then what?

  It was heartbreaking, true enough, but all the sight made Christian think of was that he had to find Evangeline. Now.

  That, and some serious Vicodin.

  He heard the banging of metal on metal or stone. And screams.

  Shuffling across the studio to the sliding glass door, he heard Evangeline screaming. He tore the curtain aside and tugged the door open, wincing at the pressure on his ribs.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead. If he didn’t lie down, he was going to pass out. If he didn’t do something to save his friend, he might as well lie down and die.

  That was no choice at all. He kept going.

  At the holding cell, Bible Girl was trying to smash the lock on the door with a rock. And getting nowhere.

  “Try the garage!” Evangeline yelled.

  “What, for keys?”

  “No, get a goddamn hammer!” Christian yelled, surprising them both, and praying that Emmy knew enough not to hug him right now.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Jake hauled Esther’s limp form over to lie beside Eddie’s body. Driven into a frenzy by her passivity, he pushed her to her knees, and ground her face in his open throat, holding her by the back of her head as if he meant to drown her.

  She screamed into her lover’s mortal wound and flailed at her undead husband’s unyielding arm. If she held her breath, she could black out. Maybe she could drown. She could deny him that little bit, at least—

  When he tired of this game, Jake grabbed one dainty wrist, twisted it behind her, and slapped a cuff on it. Her face came up slathered with blood, coughing up inhaled blood and vodka vomit.

  She gasped for air, and blew it all out as loud as she could. “NO!”

  “No?” He paused, as if genuinely puzzled. “Guess you should have thought of that before you spread for him, huh?”

  Yanking her cuffed arm away from her breasts, Jake slapped the other cuff around Eddie’s wrist.

  “And now you’re gonna stay with him, just like this, until you rot.”

  LeGrange came in the front door, observing, hat in hand. Esther screamed up at him.

  “PLEASE!”

  He looked at her like she was dirt, then turned devotedly to Jake.

  “Lord, you said…” He bowed his head, overcome by stage fright in the face of his cable-access savior.

  “What? Speak up!” Jake demanded.

  “You said that…on the Day of Reckoning, even those whose bodies had been burned or buried would rise, in spirit, to return to the faithful…?”

  “Yeah, sure, all that shit’s totally gonna happen. But in case you hadn’t noticed, there’re nonbelievers in the temple. Thieves trying to steal what’s mine.”

  “Forgive me,” LeGrange fumbled. “How may I serve you, Lord?”

  Jake pointed out back. LeGrange picked up the fireplace poker where Christian dropped it, as he crossed the room, impervious to Esther’s pleading, and went out the back door.

  Jake grinned malevolently down at her, then turned to the roaring flame.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Emmy came running with a hammer from the garage. Christian leaned against the door, talking to Evangeline. “We’re gonna get you out, okay?”

  Evangeline reached a bloody hand out through the bars to touch his face. Her fingertips felt like dry ice. “Oh God, Christian…”

  Evangeline held on to him as Emmy took the hammer in both her pudgy little hands and started banging on the lock. In her haste, she just swung faster and wilder with each stroke, almost braining Christian. Each bang was as loud as a gunshot, but she seemed to be doing little else.

  “Give me that.” Christian took it from her and, struggling to hold himself steady, banged on the cheap sheet metal flange holding the lock onto the door frame.

  Three strokes and it broke.

  Evangeline popped out the door, hugged Christian, making him grunt in pain. “Never so happy to see a cop in my life—”

  Christian struggled to turn around in her arms. He only caught a glimpse of the big man in khaki and a cowboy hat coming up the yard toward them.

  But Emmy recoiled in fear. “Oh, no…”

  Christian hobbled out to meet LeGrange, who strode across the lawn like he was late giving a ticket. Swinging at his side, Christian only barely noticed, was the wrought-iron fireplace poker.

  “Thank God!” Christian wheezed. “Officer…”

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  LeGrange laid into Christian with the poker. Christian turned away and raised the hammer, but the iron rod clipped his undamaged arm above the wrist, snapping the bones clean through his skin.

  Christian bowed over his ruined arm just as LeGrange kicked him in the balls hard enough to flip him on his back, then resumed savagely beating him with the poker.

  Frozen for a fatal instant by the betrayal of a man in uniform, Evangeline and Emmy could only stand and scream at Sheriff LeGrange to stop.

  But that wasn’t going to happen.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Jake was kneeling in front of Esther and Eddie, transfixed by the roaring hellfire, the oversized family Bible laid out before him. A miasma of noxious fumes curled up from his suit and his sick, sallow skin. He was barely aware of them as he tore sheaves of onionskin pages out of the New Testament and offered them to the fire.

  Every so often, he took up a Buck knife and cut off some of her hair, added it to the blaze. She feigned unconsciousness, squeezing her eyes tight and biting back screams as he turned to cut off something more substantial from Eddie’s face.

  The hungry red flames seemed to feed on something much more volatile than paper, hair, and flesh, and bloomed up from a place much deeper than the hearth. Like an infinity of fire, stretching down into a bottomless pit.

  Something danced in it, feeding the fire forever without ever being consumed.

  It spoke to him.

  Suddenly, despite the fire, the living room became as cold as a tomb, as if a door had opened on the Arctic. Esther opened her eyes again and looked around. The last dregs of vodka still in her stomach curdled and agitated for escape.

  The lights slowly went brown and died out, until only the unearthly fire lit the room, the walls of which now receded into blackness.

  She looked, and she saw them.

  Three naked women appeared out of the shadows, forming a triangle around Jake and his victims. Fluttering, twitching as if they were unstuck in time and space, and ridden by a dozen warring appetites.

  Their eyes, fixed on Jake, were mirrors. They sneered and dripped venom that turned to smoke and flies. But when they spoke, it was with one voice.

  “This is the Night of the Great Transformation. This is the end of the world you knew.”

  Jake quivered. “I’m ready…”

  “This is the Night of All Souls, in revelation. The death of all lies, in the face of what’s true.”

  Jake threw the rest of the Bible into the fire. “Hallelujah!”

  Esther saw the demons all too clearly now as they converged on Jake, and she began to go out of her mind.

  They were not demons, she told herself, but ghosts. The ghosts of his women: the one who scarred him, and the harem of hapless whores on whom he vented his awful wrath. Hollowed out by their vices until they served only hell, they taunted him with their spectral nakedness, gyrating lewdly and convulsing as in a Saint Vitus’ dance, as if jolts of orgasm and strands of barbed wire ran through their nerves.

  Their mercurial, ever-shifting faces betrayed the pure desolation of human hearts that might once have saved themselves from this. But Jake’s Furies descended on him only to urge him to greater cruelty, wider wakes of torment and devastation.

  This was not revenge. This was not justice.

  This was evil rewarding evil
…and where was God?

  Beneath his notice now, Esther started crawling toward the back door, dragging the inert concrete of Eddie’s body, not trying to escape, only to get away. The handcuff dug bloody ruts into her wrist. Eddie’s empty olive face stared at her, minus the random plots of skin and scalp that Jake had carved off. Twin, blood-rimmed mouths hung agape, asking her why he threw her away.

  Jake and the demons laughed at her, but were content to let her crawl away.

  At last, he had everything he needed.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Half blind and still picking glass out of his face, Gray staggered out into the backyard.

  Drawn by the sound of Christian’s screams like a moth to a streetlight, he fought the pain and weakness that were dragging him down. Even before he staggered out onto the lawn and saw them, his brain pulled him forward with the tantalizing image of Sheriff LeGrange kneeling over Christian, beating him.

  There is a magic moment in every fight when the combatants slip out of the deadlock of evenly traded blows, and one ascends, while the other submits, or simply breaks down.

  To witness that moment, when the victor ritually drinks his victim’s courage as totally as if he’d literally pried out and devoured his heart, is to feed on the spray of energy released in the delivery of the deathblow. Professional sports is as much designed to maximize and lay bare that mysterious transaction, as it is to preserve the lives of the contestants.

  In the front of Gray’s mind as he hobbled over to the horribly uneven match were two things: pure, simple disgust with how this evening had spun out of control, and the overwhelming need to clean house.

  In the back of his mind—unexpressed in words, but driving his unsteady stride more than any sense of duty or love—was the idea that if he could get into this limousine wreck before that magic moment, on this night of all nights, he could devour them both, and be made whole.