by Garton, Ray
She opened the door and heard what she first thought to be the wind. But it wasn’t blowing as hard as it had before and this sound was something else.
A rapidly growing scream.
Fara stepped outside the door and Emilio followed right behind her. Both of them turned to the left, toward a shimmering orange glow in the corridor.
A fire in the shape of a person was running through the darkness toward them, screaming in agony, burning arms flailing.
“What the hell happened back there?” Deputy Olivia Burkett asked as she drove along Emerald Canyon slowly.
“Long story,” Ram said. “Buncha subhuman trash. Fuckin’ drug dealers and spics and niggers.”
Burkett frowned as she looked back and forth from the road to Ram.
“You feeling okay, Ram?”
“Me? You kidding? Never been better. Hell of a night, though. Hell of a night.”
“We’re supposed to turn up here on Ogden Pass.”
“Ogden Pass is closed.”
“Supposed to be, yeah. But there’s a new road there that leads to that old hospital. That’s where the sheriff is.”
“What the hell happened, anyway?”
“I don’t know. I hope we’re not the first ones there. Some kinda trouble.”
“Fuck. More trouble.”
She turned right onto Ogden Pass.
“Hey, what’s that?” Ram said, nodding past Burkett out her window, where a dark SUV was parked beside the road on the other side. “Stop a second.”
She stopped the car.
“Shine your light over there.”
She turned on the spotlight on her door, manipulating it with a toggle so it pointed directly at the SUV.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Ram said with a grin. He opened the door.
“What are you doing?”
“Give me a second. I know this guy. Keep the light on.”
He got out of the car, ducked his head against the wind and rain, and jogged across the road to the SUV. He knocked on the window, grinning.
“Hey, Andy!” he shouted.
The window slid down slowly and Andy squinted against the rain. “Ram,” he said.
“What the hell’re you doing here, anyway? And where’d you get—” He laughed loudly. “Did you steal this vehicle, Andy?”
“Well, uh . . .”
“Why didn’t you just wait for me? I was gonna drive you home when we were done there. I’m still gonna drive you home. Come on, get into the patrol car.”
“I think I’ll just drive us home myself, Ram,” Andy said.
“In a stolen vehicle? You’re not gonna make me arrest you for stealin’ a car, are you, Andy?”
“Arrest me?”
“Well, yeah! It’s against the law, y’know!” Ram looked beyond Andy and saw Donny pressing himself into the back of the passenger seat. “Hey, Donny! How ya doin’, buddy?” He looked at Andy again, still grinning. “C’mon, get out. I got one more call to answer, then I’ll take you guys home. Just leave this thing here and it’ll be found later. The owner’ll get it back.” He laughed. “’Course, if the owner was one of the assholes in Giff’s house, he probably ain’t gonna need it anymore.” He laughed as he opened Andy’s door and stepped back so he could get out.
“Ram, I’m not sure I want to—”
Smiling as he shook his head, Ram said, “I’m not asking, Andy.” When he saw that they were going to get out, Ram turned and went back to the patrol car and knocked on Burkett’s window, then opened the door a crack. “Can you step out here for a second, Olivia?”
He stepped aside and she pushed the door all the way open. As she got out of the car, Ram took his gun from its holster, leveled it with the back of her head and fired.
The crack of the gun sounded thick and insulated in the wind and rain.
Deputy Olivia Burkett fell forward, hit the car door, then collapsed to the ground.
Ram looked across the road at Andy and Donny standing beside the SUV, gawking at him.
“C’mon, chop-chop!” Ram shouted. “Get in the car!”
He bent down and grabbed Burkett’s hair and dragged her away from the open door. He looked across the road again and saw that they were still standing there.
Ram hefted the gun in his hand and said, “Am I gonna have to come over there and get you?”
Andy put a hand on the back of Donny’s head and they started toward Ram and the patrol car.
9
At eighteen minutes after one on Saturday morning, the town of Eureka, California, was dark. Normally a bed of diamonds at night on the dark Pacific coast, it now seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth.
A storm was still raging, but it was no longer the destructive force that had passed through town that night.
The only lights were those of emergency vehicles trying to make their way through the storm and the damage it had done—flooded roads, fallen trees and power poles, piles of rubble. Some roads that weren’t flooded were piled with debris—the remains of homes, entire mobile homes, even some small vehicles, as well as trees and power poles had become roadblocks that resembled giant beaver dams.
The tree that had fallen on the dark front of the long-abandoned Springmeier Neuropsychiatric Hospital had crushed the reception area with its three-story-tall vaulted ceiling. But the damage continued to spread well after the tree had fallen.
Eddie Loomis had been crawling slowly through the water and mud toward the spot where they’d entered the grounds. He knew they would return to that fence when they were done, and he wanted to be there. Each time he used his hands and left leg to pull and push himself forward, the movement sent jolts of hot electricity through his right leg. He clenched his teeth and let the pain out as a big breath with a little groan behind it. Then he would have to rest a bit and recover from that before doing it again.
As he made that painful journey across the flooded parking lot, Eddie kept hearing sounds inside the building. He still wore his night-vision goggles and each time he looked over at the building, something was collapsing. Wood crunched and glass shattered.
But those sounds were overwhelmed by the pain in Eddie’s leg, pain that chewed through him like fangs. He tried to ignore everything else and focus on getting to that fence.
Emilio grabbed Fara and pulled her back into the office as the flaming screamer ran by, close enough for her to feel heat radiating from the flames. He shoved her farther into the office and ran out again, hurrying across the corridor.
Fara remembered the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall across the way. She went to the open door—Ollie’s two men stood just behind her—and watched Emilio run to the flames. Ollie shoved his way to the door and stood beside her. The person had fallen to the floor. Emilio sprayed the flames with the extinguisher, moving the nozzle back and forth to cover the burning body. The flames flickered in the billowing white cloud, but not for long.
Screams came from the main corridor and Fara and Ollie turned their heads toward it. The beam of Ollie’s headlamp illuminated the corridor for a surprising distance, but it still ended at a wall of darkness. Another burning person ran down the main corridor, heading for the front of the building and the collapsed cafeteria. The person passed their view in a heartbeat, screaming along the way.
“Shit,” Ollie said. “Flamethrowers. Get in here, Emilio, now.” He roughly grabbed her shoulders—
“Hey!”
—turned her around and shoved her back in the office. “You need to come in here.”
“No!” she said, shoving past him to the door. “I have to get out of here now. We all do. Flamethrowers, they’ve got flamethrowers ? I hope they keep in mind that we’ve got oxygen tanks upstairs.”
Ollie grabbed her arm and pulled her back in. “Look, you can’t go out there because they’re gonna—”
Fara spun around and swung her fist as hard as she could. It connected with Ollie’s face and he stumbled backwards with a yelp.
�
��Leave me alone!” she said. “I’m going out to my car and I’m leaving.”
Emilio stood in the doorway. “No, you’re not.”
Fara kicked him between the legs.
Emilio doubled over with a cry of pain, then fell forward onto the floor.
Fara stepped over him and left the office, ignoring the burned body.
Cold wind still blew in the corridor. She stayed next to the left wall, close enough to touch—which she frequently did—and walked fast. She reached into her purse and removed her gun.
There were sounds everywhere, including more rumbling crashes deep in the building, but she focused on getting out of the building safely. Anything else would merely distract her, frighten her, slow her down. She didn’t listen to her pounding heart or her rapid breaths. She only moved forward quickly, steadily, possessed by the need to get outside that building and then as far away from it as possible as soon as she could, that was her goal, the focus of her concentration.
She rounded the corner to the left without hesitation, and her flashlight beam leapt ahead of her and fell on what looked like a gorilla.
Fara gasped and stopped, staring at the creature.
No, it wasn’t a creature—it was a man dressed in black, including a black helmet over his head, and his clothes were bulky with body armor, just as Ollie had predicted. In his arms he held a pipe. No, it was some kind of odd-looking gun, more like a nozzle of sorts, and his finger was on a trigger.
Flames exploded from the nozzle and turned the world into a conflagration. The flames clung to Fara and filled her eyes and lungs and ears so that she could not hear her own screams.
“What the fuck!” Ram said. “Looks like it’s really hit the fan here.”
He drove slowly along the gravel road, the headlights illuminating bodies on the ground, a smashed gate, an abandoned police car. The right side of the car jumped twice as Ram drove over one of the bodies.
“Speed bump!” he shouted, then he bellowed laughter. “Oh, shit! A goddamned TV van. What are they doing here?”
Andy was relieved to see the KIEM van. There were other cars in the lot, as well . . . along with dead bodies on the ground.
Ram had wanted Donny to sit up front with him while Andy sat in the back, but Andy had flatly refused. “Go ahead and shoot me, if you want, but he sits in back with me.” Ram had laughed then and claimed he was only joking around.
Andy had no idea why they were at the old hospital or what to expect next, but he knew he had to get Donny away from Ram at the first available opportunity.
“Look at that!” Ram said when a blast of fire exploded out of a second-floor window
“Whoa,” Donny said, leaning forward in the seat. “What kind of place is this?”
“This is the old mental hospital I’ve told you about. Remember?”
He nodded. “Is it going to blow up?”
“I really don’t know.”
“See, my problem is, my boss is in there somewhere,” Ram said. “The sheriff. He’s in there and he’s hurt and we’ve gotta get him out.” He laughed. “Well, not we as in me and you guys!” Another laugh. “I mean we deputies.” He got on the radio. “One-oh-two at the location. Please advise.”
“Who else is on the scene?” the female voice on the radio asked.
“A TV van. KIEM. No other units. There are explosions in the building.”
“Explosions? Is that what you said?”
“Yep, affirmative. A window blew out and—whoa! Another one just blew!”
Another fireball blew through the glass pane just two windows down from the first.
“I’m gonna get out and have a look around,” Ram said. “Tell those other units to pick up some speed.”
He racked the microphone, then unfastened his seat belt and opened the door. He looked over his shoulder and said, “You guys stay here, okay? I’m gonna see what I can see.”
He got out and closed the door.
The news van wasn’t very far away, maybe forty feet ahead of them. It was idling and its lights were on, there were people inside. Andy watched to see if that was where Ram was going. If it was, he decided he would get out and warn them. But instead, he walked toward the hospital, past the van.
“What’re we gonna do, Dad?” Donny whispered.
Andy got his phone from his pocket and called 911. The call was answered by a recording that explained he would have to wait his turn due to a heavy calling load. He cursed under his breath as he put the phone away.
“I’m going to run over to that van and tell them what’s happened to us,” he said. “I can’t leave you here in case he comes back, so you’re going to have to come with me. I’m gonna hold your hand, but if I let go for some reason, I want you to stay right beside me, okay? Can you do that?”
Donny nodded. They removed their seat belts and Andy opened the door.
“Let’s go.” They got out, he grabbed Donny’s hand, and they hurried toward the van. Andy kept glancing at Ram to make sure he still had his back to them. He led Donny to the passenger side so the van was between them and Ram. He knocked on the window.
The passenger seat was empty. The driver, a fat man wearing a cap, flipped the switch on his door that rolled down the window in front of Andy.
“Look, you’ve got to help us,” Andy said. “My name’s Andy, and I’ve got my little boy Donny with me. We’ve been kidnapped by the sheriff’s deputy parked behind you. His name is Ram von Pohle and he’s killed several people tonight, and—”
“Whoa, whoa,” the driver said as two heads appeared, leaning forward from the backseat, “slow down. You’ve got a little boy with you?”
Andy bent down and picked up Donny so they could see him.
“You’ve got to let us in,” he said. “This guy is going to kill us. He’s insane, I’m serious, that’s all he’s been doing tonight, killing people. He killed a house full of people tonight that included my—” Andy stopped talking when he realized that Donny did not know his mother was dead. “You have to let us in.”
Light flashed in the side-view mirror on the driver’s side and the fat man turned to look at it.
“Looks like we’ve got some company coming,” he said.
Ram’s smiling face appeared in the driver’s side window and he rapped on the glass with his knuckles, shining a flashlight into the van. “Roll it down,” he said.
There were eight of the bulky, helmeted men in black and they moved through the hospital quickly and efficiently, leaving behind them rooms in flames. They knew where the oxygen tanks were kept and were counting on them to spread the fire.
They were to leave nothing and no one behind.
10
Latrice was lost, but she didn’t let that slow her down. She continued to drive down Emerald Canyon, swerving around fallen trees and power poles, sending plumes of water up on either side of her Highlander as she drove through puddles and flooded sections of road.
Behind her, the police car kept up, its red and blue lights spinning, siren wailing.
“No, no, no, no, I’m not stoppin’ for you, Mr. Policeman, I’ve got shit to do! The fuck you think I am, stupid?” Latrice shouted at the rearview mirror.
The road curved to the right, and her headlight beams cut through the rain as she followed it around, and the beams fell on a large redwood tree across the road a hundred yards ahead. Lodged against the tree was a large, half-crushed truck camper without a truck.
“Shit!” Latrice said as she hit the brake.
The Highlander went into a sideways skid over the wet road and slammed broadside into the tree. The airbag deployed and Latrice was momentarily stunned once the SUV stopped moving. Then she began struggling against the bag. She groped for the door handle with her left hand, found it, and shoved the door open. She squeezed out of the seat and fell from the SUV, hitting the pavement hard below.
She climbed to her feet and saw the police car parked several yards away, facing her. The car’s door was open an
d the police officer was heading toward her.
Latrice began to stomp toward him, her right arm outstretched, finger pointing at him as she shouted, “Motherfucker, you made me do that! You fucking asshole, what were you chasing me for, motherfucker!”
As Latrice continued to shout at the cop, advancing on him while pointing at him, the officer quickly drew his gun and aimed it at her between both hands.
“Drop it!” he shouted. “Drop it now or I will shoot! Drop it now!”
She did not lower her arm and continued to shout at him as she drew closer.
The cop fired his gun twice.
A huge invisible fist punched Latrice in the chest, then in the gut. She found herself on the wet ground, staring up at the black sky.
She was vaguely aware of pain, of a shortness of breath that rapidly grew worse, but she quickly got to her knees, then her feet. She pointed at the cop again, screamed at him again.
“I told you to put it down, goddammit!” the cop shouted.
He fired again.
This time, fire began to spread through her abdomen. She went down again. The next time she tried to shout, she made only a gurgling sound as blood rose up in her throat.
She tried to get up again, but her strength was draining from her fast and she dropped back onto the pavement and closed her eyes. Rain fell on her face.
“I gotta get to my babies,” she said, spitting blood, tasting it in her mouth, shallow breaths coming rapidly. “I gotta . . . get to my . . . my fuckin’ babies . . . so I can . . . make them . . . pay.”
When she opened her eyes again, the cop towered over her, head forward, looking down at her. “Aaawww, shit,” he said, staring at her hand. He bent down, pulled up the cuff of his right pants leg and produced a small gun. He put it in her hand, then closed her fingers around it.
Blood bubbled up from Latrice’s mouth and dribbled down her cheeks when she said, “Fuck you.” Then she died.
Emilio’s testicles throbbed with pain that extended into his gut and made him severely nauseated. On hands and knees, he stared at the floor and waited to see if he was going to vomit. When he didn’t, he slowly got to his feet with a grunt.
