The gravel parking lot was completely empty now, except for his van and a couple cars that probably belonged to whoever worked on the second floor. The band, bartenders and wait staff had all left for the night, and the big neon sign above the front door went dead. The entire two-story building looked dark now, but Zane knew film cutters worked upstairs around the clock.
He tried the front door. Locked. “Freaking wonderful.” If Tara was letting that crater-faced Serb screw her again, Zane was going to be beyond pissed.
As he was texting her again, a muscle car with a grumbling motor drove slowly past the bar, the driver scoping it out. Zane had seen that car three times in the past twenty minutes. He tried to make out the driver, but his face was hidden in shadow. Maybe Razor had more than one enemy. Or maybe the guy was just looking for trouble, which Zane was happy to oblige. Since he didn’t get to carve off the poet’s face tonight, he was feeling a little itchy to find someone else.
The car turned into the lot and blinded him with the headlights.
He stepped in front of the vintage blue Monte Carlo. “Hey, asshole, what the hell do you want?”
The driver stuck his head out the window. “I want you, nut sack.”
The car lurched forward. Zane leaped, but the front grill struck his side. He shot through the air. Landed hard on the gravel and rolled several feet. The earth spun. The stars rained down from the night sky. He could barely move, struggled to breathe, and was sure at least one rib was broken.
Shoes crunched over gravel, and a shadow covered Zane’s face. He looked up at a dark head silhouetted against the moon.
The driver grabbed Zane’s legs and dragged him around to the back of his car. Zane gripped the guy’s leg and received a punch to the nose that cracked bone and spilled blood down his mouth. After that, Zane couldn’t tell up from down.
The driver opened the trunk of his car and took hold of Zane’s wrists. “This is in case you try anything stupid.” He slammed down the trunk door on Zane’s hands, breaking all the fingers.
Chapter 12
As Tara came back down the stairs, she felt stinging pain with every step. Whenever Razor disciplined her, he unleashed all his fury. Zane was going to be pissed when he saw all the whip marks on her ass and lower back. For Tara, it was nothing to get upset over. Pain came with the job.
Dragic greeted her at the bottom of the stairs and quietly led her to the exit. Razor’s bodyguard was a man of few words, except when he had a few vodka shots and then you couldn’t shut him up.
Tara stepped out onto the front porch and lit up a cig. It was 3:30 a.m. and she was more than ready to call it a night. There was no sign of Zane. Poor boy must have gotten bored and fallen asleep in the van.
When Tara reached the passenger side, she froze. The side door window had been shattered. Glass covered the ground at her feet.
“Zane!” She slid open the door and searched the back of the van, but her boyfriend wasn’t there. She yelled his name across the parking lot, but got no response. She then searched the van to see what had been stolen. On the driver’s seat she discovered the vandal had left a calling card: Seth’s bloody skateboard with a note stuck to it.
Killing a poet
Was a big mistake
If you want to find Zane
Come back to the lake
Cursing, Tara pulled out her phone and made a call she didn’t want to make.
Chapter 13
Gripping the steering wheel, Marty settled in to this new feeling of power. Cerulean was teaching him that he no longer had to be anyone’s whipping boy. Since his soul was stuck in some dimension between the living and the dead, it was time to live by a new set of rules.
“If you can’t find heaven on earth, Marty,” his dark friend said, “then why not raise hell instead?”
Marty locked eyes with Cerulean in the rearview mirror. “Hell yeah!”
He popped in a Doors CD and listened to Jim Morrison sing “Break on Through to the Other Side”. The Sixties psychedelic rock was the perfect music for blazing through the woods at night.
* * *
In the trunk, Zane yelled and banged metal with his boots. He hated tight places. His throat constricted. He hyperventilated. His broken fingers, nose and ribs all throbbed with excruciating pain. The irony was he had painkillers in his pockets but his fingers were too bent to fish for them. And the slightest touch to his hands sent him into a fit of sobs.
This coffin on wheels reeked of blood and other bodily fluids. Another body was crammed in here with him. What felt like dreadlocks pressed against his face. “Seth, you dumb shit.” There was no time to feel remorse for his friend. Zane had his own ass to worry about.
The entire ride Jim Morrison haunted the car with classic Doors songs. He was just finishing up “People Are Strange” when the car crunched over gravel and finally came to a stop. Seconds later, the trunk door mercifully opened and Zane sucked in the cool night air. The driver pulled him out and threw him on the ground like he was a bag of rocks. He was too busy wincing at the new symphony of pain playing along his nerves to see what his conductor was doing. Chains rattled and then wrapped around Zane. Then he was placed seated against the car’s back bumper.
“Who…are…you?” Zane asked, wondering if his drug supplier had sent a hit man.
The man in coveralls squatted in front of him, and it was then that Zane recognized the face of the ghoulish thing that had walked out of the lake. A patch with the name “Marty” was on the uniform’s chest pocket, but this vigilante looked and acted nothing like the poet they had killed.
“You wanted to bring out Marty’s second face…well, here it is.” He held up Zane’s hunting knife. “Now, let’s see what face you’re hiding.”
Zane screamed in mortal agony as the blade sliced across his forehead and traced down to his jaw line. As the fingers began to pull down the skin from the top, slicing a little at a time, flaying him alive, the pain became too much and he lost consciousness.
Sometime later he woke up to a strange sensation. The very breeze against his face felt like needles stabbing into his sensitive nerve endings. He dared to touch his cheek and howled. His fingers came away bloody.
His torturer appeared and knelt in front of him. “No need to hide behind this anymore.” He held up a fleshy mask. “Now, smile for the camera.” He snapped a photo with Zane’s phone and showed him the red-faced horror of what he truly looked like underneath.
Chapter 14
“I’m sick and tired of cleaning up your messes,” Razor griped as he drove the van too fast down the road that wound through the woods.
“I’m sorry,” Tara said, “but I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Who do you think took Zane?”
“I don’t know,” Tara said. “Maybe someone saw us drown that guy.” She looked at the blood-stained skateboard. “Whoever it was must have beaten the shit out of Seth.”
“Maybe your boys pissed off the wrong people at the bar. A deal went bad.”
“No, the shitheads didn’t even touch our stash. Besides, that wouldn’t explain the note. Whoever wrote it knows about what we did at the lake.” She read the poem again and felt a sudden sting of betrayal. “You know what I think…Seth, that little prick, did this and left his bloody skateboard to make it look like someone else did it.”
“Why would your cameraman turn on you?”
“Because he’s freaking out about the body we left behind. Christ, he left the bar pissed off at us, but I didn’t think he was this mad!”
“He’s dead meat,” Razor said, strangling the steering wheel.
Wind from the broken window blew Tara’s hair across her shoulders. She watched the trees whip by. With every sharp turn she felt like the van was going to careen off into the woods, smash into a tree. Aside for her own life, she worried about Zane. Had Seth really attacked him? What was he after, more money? Did he want out? After all they’d done for Seth―given him a job, free drugs, gotte
n him laid―Tara couldn’t believe he would lash out at them. Seth was overly sensitive, but he’d never been vindictive. At least not to her and Zane.
Behind the van, Dragic followed in a second car. This worried Tara. She wondered if tonight the Serbs were going to execute all three of them. She needed to find her machete. She’d been thinking for a while now it was time to move on from Razor. Killing him and Dragic was her only escape.
They arrived at the empty lot of the private cove. Down the hill stretched the lake. Near the shore off to their right, the campfire they’d built earlier was raging.
Razor parked and turned off the engine. He pulled out his automatic pistol and put a bullet in the chamber. He looked at her with a lethal stare. “Stay with me.”
Together, they climbed out of the van, as Dragic got out of his car, screwing a silencer onto his pistol. Normally, she’d have felt safe with these two ex-military soldiers, but Tara was anticipating that at any second Razor was going to have her kneel before him, one last submission to her master. If he was going to kill her tonight, then she prayed for a bullet to the head.
For now, he seemed focused on hunting down whoever had left the note. She followed the two men down the hill, looking around for her machete. She couldn’t remember where she had dropped it. Last thing she remembered was she and Zane carving Marty’s corpse, and then hallucinating a phantom rising from the lake. Tara had been so coked up earlier she had no idea what really scared them enough to abandon their camp. But someone had definitely come back.
Ahead the robust fire crackled. It had been stacked with a tall pile of wood, like a bonfire. It illuminated the logs of their campsite, the cooler and boombox they’d left behind, the litter of beer cans. Seth was sitting back against one of the logs, his spidery dreadlocks silhouetted by the flames.
They stepped into the glow of the campfire and saw Seth from the front. Tara reeled and stumbled back.
“What the…?” Razor said.
Tara put a hand over her mouth, stunned at the atrocity she was seeing.
Seth was wearing his weasel mask. The rest of him looked as if someone had flayed the front side of his body. His arms, legs and chest were a mangled mess of shredded muscle. He had been gutted. His dick was gone too, his crotch bones visible in the gnarled flesh.
Dragic eased over and removed the mask.
“Shit, oh shit!” Tara yelled.
Seth’s face was gone. A red skull with dreadlocks stared back at them. Half of his scalp had been ravaged, with one ear still hanging on.
“Who did this?” Razor asked.
She shook her head. Seth’s murder made her suddenly paranoid, as if she was on a bad acid trip. It wasn’t the violence of his death that freaked her―she’d seen plenty of mutilations―it was that someone other than them had done the butchering.
The killer had arranged Seth’s corpse seated with his legs straight out and his hands in his lap, holding another note. Razor picked it up and read it:
You Kill, I Kill
Burn, Fire, Burn
You hurt me first
Now it’s your turn
“Zane did this,” Razor said. He turned his gun on Tara. “What are you two trying to pull?”
“I…I had nothing do with this.” She recognized the handwriting. “No, Stalker Boy did this.”
“Who?”
“Marty. The guy we drowned earlier. Maybe he wasn’t dead.” She walked along the lakeshore. “The body’s gone. We left it right here.” She got the skin-crawling feeling they were being watched. “Marty, are you out there?”
Razor said, “You expect me to believe a guy you stabbed multiple times and drowned was able to walk away and do this to Seth? I’m not buying it.”
“Then someone else is…”
Just then she heard branches snapping in the woods. A man yelped. They all turned to see a figure shaped like Zane working his way through the pines towards them. His toad mask covered his face. Walking stiffly, he entered the firelight. He held Tara’s machete in one hand. His shirt was covered in crimson stains. His eyes looked wild and bloodshot inside the eyeholes of the mask. It was then that Tara noticed the machete handle was bound to his hand. His other hand reached for her with crooked fingers. “R-r-run…” he mumbled.
Before Tara could think or speak, Razor aimed his pistol and fired three shots into Zane’s chest. Her boyfriend made one last cry of pain and fell to the ground.
She ran to him, but her Zaney was gone. If she didn’t do something quick, the next bullet was for her. She fake-sobbed. “Baby, no…” over and over, all the while loosening the machete handle from Zane’s grip. It had been wrapped around his hand with baling wire. There was no time to worry about who had done this. The psycho who scared her most was the man standing right behind her.
Razor made a sound of exasperation. “Rabbit, I had such high hopes for you. Dragic, go get my razorblades.”
Tara tensed up. She looked at her master with pleading eyes, as he kept his pistol aimed at her. “Please, Razor, don’t, this is not my fault. Someone else did this. He’s out there watching us.”
Razor looked around. “Wish I could believe you. The way I see it, lover boy there killed your cameraman and you lured me out here so you two could take me out. That was a very bad move.”
Dragic returned with a large glass pickle jar full of razorblades. Razor took it and unscrewed the lid. “Crawl over here, Rabbit.”
“No,” Tara cried.
“Dragic, bring her to me.”
The bodyguard gripped Tara’s wrist and pulled her. She screamed, kicking the ground, as he dragged her to Razor’s feet.
“Look at me.”
Crying, she looked up into her master’s cold eyes. He touched her cheek, caressed it briefly. “You were always my favorite pet.” He reached into his jar and pulled out a handful of razorblades. “Now, open that pretty mouth of yours.”
In the parking lot, the van’s horn honked and the headlights suddenly flashed on.
Dragic drew his pistol again.
“Who else is here?” Razor asked.
“I don’t know,” Tara said. “I swear.”
“Dragic, check it out.”
As the tall gunman walked up the hill, Razor remained with Tara. She held her breath. The van sat quiet and dark, except for the headlights. With Razor’s attention on his bodyguard, Tara kept glancing at the machete a few feet away.
Then her eyes followed Dragic as he approach the passenger side. He kept his pistol aimed and slid open the side door. From the interior’s darkness came a sudden blur of movement. Dragic yelped and fired a shot that pinged off the van’s roof. A spike stabbed through his body and out his back. A dark figure held the other end of the weapon. He stepped out of the van and lifted the Serb off the ground with an impossible strength. Dragic dangled limply.
Razor dropped his jar of blades and reached behind his back for his gun.
The killer dropped the body and pulled out a cross-shaped tire iron with a blood-dripping spike. He started walking down the hill, towards the campsite. “That bitch is mine!”
Tara crawled backwards, wrapped her hand around the machete’s handle.
As Razor aimed at the man walking towards them, Tara leaped up with the machete and chopped off his gun hand. It fell to the ground and bounced into the fire. Razor cried out, holding up his bleeding stump. He looked at her with shocked eyes and fell to his knees.
She was about to behead her master, but the killer in bloody gray coveralls stepped into the glow of the fire. Tara held out the machete with shaking arms. “Back off!”
Her mind tried to deny that the phantom from the lake was real. The papier-mâché man cocked his head. The eye holes of his paper-molded mask were filled with darkness. “You and I are going to have some fun tonight, Tara, just like you had fun with my friend, Marty.”
His voice was different, cold and menacing. She threw her machete at him and then took off down the shore. A hundred yards down t
he beach, she stopped to catch her breath and dared to look back. At the campsite, Razor let out a muffled cry. The killer was stuffing her boss’s mouth with razorblades.
Chapter 15
As the man with the ponytail choked and bled from two dozen blades lodged down his throat, Marty backed away, his hands trembling. He couldn’t believe what Cerulean was making him do. Killing Seth and defacing Zane had sickened Marty. Now, he had attacked two men he didn’t even know.
Darkness Rising: A Novella of Extreme Horror and Suspense Page 6
