by Jim Heskett
Some shuffling came from behind it, then the massive door creaked open. A pale middle-aged woman with bloodshot eyes appeared in the darkened crack. “I don’t know you. Are you lost?”
“Yes, actually,” Isabelle said, trying to sound cheery and air-headed. “I’m sure this is a dumb question, but am I in Red Bank?”
The woman raised an eyebrow. Isabelle couldn’t tell if she was buying it. The woman’s head turned, and she whispered something to the side, then nodded a few times. Isabelle noticed some small burn marks poking above the neck of the woman’s shirt.
The door opened a little wider, and there stood a squat man with glasses, next to the woman. “Can I help you?” he said.
“My name is Isabelle. I was just a little lost, and it looked like this house had people in it.”
“Where are you trying to go?”
“A friend of mine told me to meet her in Red Bank, and I think that’s where I am, but I’m not sure. What’s your name?”
The man paused, then spread a flat smile. “I’m Norman. Would you like to come inside?”
Isabelle couldn’t get the images of Nevada out of her head. The burned man with the machete sleeping inside the gas station. The dead and mutilated woman in the bathroom. The writings in blood all around the walls.
She swallowed her fear down and tried to look grateful. “Yes, I would. Thank you.”
When she stepped inside, she didn’t find the bank of machine gunners that Sutter had predicted. Instead, the room opened to some kind of foyer, with a desk at one end and behind that, a grand staircase. A beautiful glass chandelier hung overhead like a glittering bundle of light. An elderly man smiled at her from behind the desk.
“Would you like something to drink?” Norman said. “Then I’ll see if we can’t find someone who can give you directions.”
From the top of the staircase came three men with pistols on their hips. Each of them had burned flesh on their necks and faces, and they held their hands behind their backs as they descended the stairs. The one in the middle had some kind of tattoo on his forehead, like a cross with two arms attached to an infinity symbol. These were soldiers.
“Yes, thank you,” Isabelle said. Now, she just had to find a way to delay these people for a while, before she had to start shooting.
***
Sutter led Dave into the utility room at the back of the mansion. Brooms, mops, buckets, and washrags filled the dark room. A large sink stained red caught his eye, and Sutter thought he knew what had caused the stain.
“How are you for ammo?” Sutter whispered as they approached the lone interior door.
Dave took out his pistol and showed it to Sutter. “Six in the clip, plus two backup clips.”
Sutter had the shotgun with four shells and his .45, with only three clips. He cradled the shotgun in his injured arm and passed Dave one of his two hunting knives.
“The way Isabelle tells it,” Sutter said, nodding at the knife, “you prefer this?”
Dave pursed his lips and flicked a finger along the sharpened edge of the blade. “Yeah, I’m not a big fan of guns. But don’t worry about me. I’ll do what I have to do.”
Sutter knew, after watching Dave cut down those two women inside that drug apartment, that Dave was stronger and more capable than he let on. “I don’t know what we’re going to find on the other side of this door, but we need to be ready for anything. If we can stab a few in the back quietly, we need to take advantage of that. Once we start shooting, it’s going to be pandemonium.”
“I understand.”
Sutter reached out for the knob and found it locked. Too much to hope for that it would be so easy.
“Do you know how to pick a lock?” Dave said.
Sutter had seen it done but had never done it himself. He nodded anyway and dug the point of his blade into the lock, jiggling it until he heard something click. The door still wouldn’t open. He tried it again, this time pressing against the handle of the knife with his free hand, and it clicked twice. Unlocked.
He eased the door open to an empty hall. Darkly varnished wood framed the interior, the only light coming from a window at the end, about thirty feet away. Two closed doors on the right, and then the hallway turned left before the window.
Sutter jerked his head toward the first door, and as soon as Dave took one step in that direction, someone came around the bend at the end of the hallway. Tall man, carrying some computer cables.
Dave grunted and whipped his knife. It went sailing through the air, and the man in the hallway didn’t have time to react before the knife plunged into his chest. He hit the ground, mewling softly as he bled out onto an ornate rug.
“Hot damn,” Sutter said. “Did you really just do that?”
Dave scurried down the hall and grabbed the dead man under his armpits. Sutter helped him drag the body back into the utility room. “Spent some time in Chalmers’ army a few years back learning hand to hand. But that… that was luck.”
Weapons ready, they opened the first of the two doors. Empty bathroom. A set of decorative soaps shaped like animals sat in a bowl on the back of the toilet, and that sight gave Sutter the curious urge to giggle. Murderous doomsday cult… with decorative soaps in the bathroom.
They moved on to the second door, and inside found a computer workstation on a solitary desk in the room. Laptop connected to a bank of batteries.
Sutter flipped the laptop over and removed the battery, which he then broke in half over his knee. Then he raised the laptop over his head and was about to smash it against the desk when Dave held up a hand. “Can you do that quieter?” Dave said.
So Sutter bent it backward until the screen half tore away, then he dropped it on the desk. Dave pointed at a pistol sitting on a chair in the corner. Sutter picked it up, checked the clip, then shoved it in the front of his waistband. He nodded back at the hallway.
They left the room and crept along the corridor as the sound of voices around the corner grew. Two, maybe three people talking, and the sound of a guitar strumming. Pausing just before the turn, Sutter waited until Dave had both his gun and a knife out. Dave’s chest was heaving, and as Sutter stared, Dave seemed to catch himself and slow his breathing.
Time to go.
Sutter spun around the edge to find the hallway widen into a sitting area. In the middle of the room, two men were sitting at a small table playing chess, while a third sat in the corner, plucking at an acoustic guitar. They all three stopped what they were doing and gawked at Sutter.
One of them opened his mouth to scream, and Sutter rushed forward, knife out. In his haste, the shotgun clattered to the floor.
The young man got out a half second of scream before Sutter plunged the knife into his throat. The other one jumped up from the chess table while the guitar player dropped the guitar and turned to pick up a rifle resting against the wall.
Before the man could get a handle on the rifle, Dave flung his knife, which missed, but made the guy jerk out of the way. Then Dave put a bullet in his stomach, and he howled as his hands rushed to the wound. The blast echoed all around the room. Sutter fired a bullet into his chest to stop the screaming and put two more in the still-living chess player.
The sounds of shouts came from several directions. The time for stealth was over. Now they had to kill everyone.
***
Of the three soldiers who’d descended the stairs while Isabelle was waiting in the foyer, the one on the left concerned her the most. The look in his eyes was nothing short of murderous. And as she expected, he was the one who spoke.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“This young lady says she is lost,” Norman said. “She’s looking for directions.”
“Directions to what?” the soldier said.
“Downtown, I think,” Isabelle said. “There’s a coffee shop there, the windows are supposed to be boarded up with drywall and marked with arrows. She said I can’t miss it.”
The three men on the s
tairs shared a look. This wasn’t going well.
“You’re going to need to come with us,” the soldier said.
From somewhere deep in the mansion, a shout echoed. Then a half second later, the blast of a gun.
Isabelle reacted. She whipped out the submachine gun, said a quick prayer that it wouldn’t jam, and squeezed the trigger. She mowed down the soldiers first, cutting a line across their midsections. All three of them fell, tumbling down the stairs.
A split second of worry for Dave pulsed in her head, but she pushed it aside. Couldn’t focus on that now.
She raised her weapon toward that chandelier and squeezed the trigger, aiming for the chain above it. She missed, but a few stray bullets knocked some glass shards loose, which dive-bombed and splintered on the floor.
As Isabelle checked her surroundings, Norman was sprinting toward a door. She fired off a couple shots but missed him as he escaped the room. The woman who’d answered the door drew a knife from her belt, and Isabelle sent a bullet into her forehead.
Just the elderly man at the desk left. She pointed the submachine gun at him, and he raised his hands in surrender. Even with a gun pointed at his face, he showed no sign of fear. Just as calm as when she’d first walked in.
“How many of you are there in this house?” she said.
“Maybe fifteen or twenty. I’m not sure, exactly. People come and go all the time.”
Isabelle waved the gun toward the door. “You can walk out that front door or I can shoot you in the head. Your choice.”
The sounds of gunfire intensified through the walls. The elderly man lowered his hands. “I will leave.”
He stood, and Isabelle lowered the gun, which proved to be a big mistake. With speed she hadn’t expected, the man dug into an open drawer of the desk and whipped out a revolver. She raised her own gun, squeezed the trigger, but it jammed.
The old man fired off a shot, which barely missed her left ear. She felt the hair fly back on that side of her head.
She dropped the submachine gun and lunged forward as she withdrew her pistol, then blasted him in the chest. He flew backward, smacking against a hanging painting, which rocked and then fell on top of his head.
Isabelle rushed forward and snatched up the man’s revolver from the floor. As she did so, the door Norman had escaped through opened, and there he stood, with a shotgun in his hands.
She dug her heels in and raced in the other direction as an explosion rocked the room. Norman had shot at her. As she ran, she didn’t feel any immediate pain, but a half second later, something pinched her in the back. She barreled toward the door as Norman fired again.
She burst through the door into a hallway, and now felt the sting all across her back. She could still move, so he must have only grazed her.
Halfway down the hall, a table and two chairs sat outside a door, marked with the same strange cross/infinity symbol the soldiers had worn tattooed on their faces. She rushed at the door, crashing into it.
On the other side, she found a small room, like a library with bookshelves lining the walls. An obese naked man sat on a stool next to a hospital bed. In the bed was a young woman, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. Her left wrist had been slit, and the obese man was holding a cup under the wrist, collecting the blood.
He looked up at her, an expression of horror and shock on his face. Burn marks covered most of his flesh, the same as the man inside the gas station in Nevada.
“No!” he shouted. “You can’t be in here. This is my final test and you are not allowed to be in here. You’re going to ruin everything.”
She shot him in the neck and he slumped off the stool as the cup of collected blood spilled all over the floor.
Isabelle raced to the hospital bed and tried to check the girl’s pulse. She was dead.
***
Two more came around the corner into the sitting room, and Sutter and Dave dived for cover behind the overturned chess table. Bullets flew by overhead, and Sutter raised his weapon to spit a couple shots.
One of the men grunted, and the shooting stopped for a second, so Sutter jumped up and blasted them both. Dave finished them off with bullets to the head.
Sutter waved Dave forward to the other end of the sitting room, which led to a short hallway. At the end, they stumbled through the door into a massive ballroom, and a group of six or seven people forming a circle. They were naked, standing on a collection of bearskin rugs. As he and Dave dashed toward the circle, Sutter noticed what was in the middle of the ring of people. A woman on her knees, and a man behind her, grasping her by the hips.
Sutter killed three of the members of the circle before any of them had even noticed. Dave shot two more, and then put a bullet in the back of the last one as he ran.
The astonishing thing was that the couple having sex persisted, seemingly oblivious to the gunfire going on around them. The man was thrusting while the woman was screaming and grasping at a chunk of bearskin rug for leverage.
Sutter shot the thrusting man in the side of the head, and the woman looked up at him with dull eyes.
“Why did you do that?” she said.
“It’s okay,” Dave said. “You’re safe now.”
“Safe?” she said, her voice elevating to a scream. “You’re all going to burn!”
As she scrambled toward a pistol on a nearby table, Sutter blasted a hole in the back of her head. The incident had jarred him, but he refused to let the insanity of what was going on around him dominate his thoughts. Focus.
“We need to find the kitchen,” Dave said.
A door at the far end of the ballroom swung open, and a man with a rifle poked his head through. He fired off a shot, and Sutter felt a sting of pain on the side of his head. Then he went woozy, stumbled, and hit the ground.
A few gunshots went off around him, but what should have been thunderous blasts came through as distant warbles of noise. He suddenly felt exhausted, and the desire to close his eyes and sleep overpowered him.
Dave’s face came into view, panicked, shouting. Dave’s voice sounded far away and blurry, like someone trying to wake him from a dream. He felt his body being dragged along the floor, and he had no ability to move or stop it.
“Sutter. Sutter. You have to get up. We can’t stay here.”
He turned his head to the right and noticed something brown. Fabric. A couch. Dave had dragged him to the far side of the room.
Dave was kneeling next to him, behind the couch. The couch scooted and jerked as their enemy peppered it with rifle bullets. Dave popped up and squeezed off a few more shots, then he grabbed Sutter by the shirt collar and shook him.
Sutter blinked. “What happened?”
“You got shot. I think it just grazed you, though. I don’t see a hole.”
Then Dave was poking and prodding at his forehead, which now throbbed like a bass drum. Get up. Stand up. He had to stand up. He knew this, but he couldn’t make his limbs cooperate.
“Now!” Dave shouted. “We can’t stay here. You have to stand up right now.”
Dave helped him to his feet as the world swam before his eyes. The rifleman lay face down at the other end of the ballroom, as well as two others, sprawled like rag dolls.
“You killed all of them?” Sutter said, and his voice sounded like something filtered through a scratchy cellphone connection. Full of static. He tried to remember the last time he’d used a cellphone.
Dave helped him move through the ballroom as Sutter’s vision normalized over the next few seconds. He regained focus.
Danger. Wake up.
“I’m okay,” Sutter said. Then he pointed at a door to the right. “Let’s check for the kitchen that way.”
They raced toward the door and flung it open as a bullet passed within an inch of his head.
***
Beyond that quasi-hospital room, Isabelle stumbled into an empty dining room, then paused a moment to collect her thoughts. Burning their own flesh and drinking blood? Who the hell wer
e these people?
Kitchen. If this was the dining room, then the kitchen had to be nearby. Through a swinging door at one end of the dining room, she spied two more soldiers running toward her, guns out. She ducked down and blasted both of them in the thighs, which sent them sprawling.
She raced toward them and slit both their throats, then picked up their guns. When the room went quiet, she finally noticed where she was, in a hallway. Door to the left, door to the right, and one at the end. She opened the door on the right. A closet full of winter coats and umbrellas.
Dave. He was probably dead.
She tried to push the thought from her mind, but it kept repeating over and over, making her brain muddy. Why had she left him alone with Sutter? She never should have let go of him. She should have been there to protect him, and now he was likely being strapped to a gurney somewhere in this house, his wrists slit to fill some nutjob’s cup.
Then she crashed through the door on the left and found the kitchen. The door at the far end of the kitchen opened a second later, and two soldiers emerged. She squeezed off a shot, then she realized it wasn’t soldiers, it was Dave and Sutter.
“Oh shit,” she said, dashing forward. Blood was rushing down Sutter’s forehead, and Dave was helping him stand. They both leaned against a counter.
“I’m so sorry. I shot him,” Isabelle said.
“Wasn’t you,” Dave said. “Guy with a rifle got him in the ballroom.”
A wave of relief passed over her and she leaned up to kiss Dave on the cheek. He smiled down at her, but his eyes were loose and haggard. She wanted to throw her arms around him, but there was no time for that.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“I’m fine,” he said, in that way that meant he wasn’t fine. Even so, with all that gunfire she’d been hearing over the last ten minutes, she couldn’t believe he was still alive.
“What about you?” Isabelle said, locking eyes with Sutter.
Sutter grunted and nodded, but Dave shook his head. “He hit his head pretty hard on the ground,” Dave said. “He might have a concussion.”
