A Shot in the Dark jjd-2

by K. A. Stewart

  I leaned over the front seat to get a good look, locking eyes with the white-furred demon. “Punch it.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Hit him.”

  Without hesitation, Marty put his foot in it, and the Suburban lurched forward, diesel engine roaring as we barreled toward the massive creature. The Yeti bellowed back, standing his ground as we came on, and I started to wonder if maybe I’d made a huge mistake.

  Just as I tensed for impact, and Will braced his arms against the dash, muttering, “Oh shit,” the demon vanished, and we passed harmlessly through a cloud of quickly dispersing blight. When I turned to look out our back window, the road was empty.

  I think every person in that truck deflated, letting out the breaths we’d collectively been holding. I clapped Marty on the shoulder, noting that only now was he flexing his white-knuckled hands on his steering wheel. “To Fort Collins, Jeeves. And don’t spare the horses.”

  I collapsed into my seat, feeling broken glass grind against my legs, and I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

  16

  T he nearest hospital was in Fort Collins, more than an hour away, but through some miracle we made it there in record time and unmolested.

  There was no way the ER staff was ready for us. We came in like a herd of drunk buffalo, so many of us covered in blood and unidentifiable goo that they finally just herded us all into the back to let the actual docs sort us out. Even Duke managed to slip by, and he made camp next to Zane’s bed, doing a pretty damn good disappearing act for something the size of a small horse.

  I tried to disappear. My injuries were superficial at worst, and after spending so much time in them, hospitals in general give me the heebie-jeebies. I found an out-of-the-way corner and pretended that I was invisible, lost in the scent of bleach and the monotonous beep of a dozen different monitors. Maybe if I held really still, no one would notice me.

  I know you’re not supposed to use phones in hospitals, but I was desperate to get word to Mira, Ivan, anybody. I filched Cole’s phone while he was having some glass shards removed from his neck, and kept trying to get my wife on the phone. Nothing. Nada. Bubkes.

  A passing nurse paused briefly, thinking to chastise me over the phone I’m sure, but she took one look at my face and thought better of it. Instead, she grabbed some antiseptic swabs and started working at the cuts and scrapes, holding my chin in an iron grip no matter how I tried to pull away. We took turns glaring at each other as I dialed and redialed the phone, but by the end, I think we’d found some kind of happy truce. Neither of us liked the other, and we were okay with that.

  Cameron, despite the fact that he looked like the walking dead himself, was trying to explain Zane’s condition to the doctors. “I’m telling you, he was attacked by an animal, and the wound went all nasty like this in just a day. We got him here as fast as we could.” They obviously didn’t believe him, which was logical since he was lying out his ass. I wondered if he’d have to mention that in confession later. “No, we don’t know what kind of animal.”

  The bite on Zane’s hand was fairly obscured by his demon mark and the insidious infection. The others, however, over his arms and shoulders… well, those couldn’t be anything but human. Even I could see that, and I wasn’t a medical professional. Cameron was going to have to work on his song and dance skills if he wanted to explain that away.

  Will could have backed him up, but my buddy hung back, his normally chattering self uncharacteristically quiet. He didn’t like lying about medical stuff. It went against his own personal code of helping people. But when you can’t exactly run around telling people that a zombie bit your friend, you either lie, or you shut the hell up. He was doing the only thing he could, and still live with himself.

  Oscar could have backed Cam up too, or at least nodded along or something, but I think he’d finally spent the last of the energy that had sustained him throughout his introduction to this terrifying new world. He took up a chair next to Zane’s bed, holding his son’s good hand while the staff rushed to get IVs and other medical paraphernalia in place. Already, I could see the powerful painkillers taking effect, and the tension in the teenager’s face easing. The best they could do for him was let him sleep through this. Their medicine wasn’t going to do a damn thing beyond that.

  “Any luck?” A bandaged Cole found me pacing through the ER. It looked like he’d gotten away without any stitches. “I see that Nurse Ratched got her hands on you too.” He nodded toward my own lovely collection of gauze and tape.

  “Mmph.” Cole’s wife wasn’t answering either. Oddly, that made me feel better. Steph and Mira were probably out together, doing some girl-bonding thing now that the kids were all in school during the day. They were… getting their hair done. Or… maybe catching a movie. What do women do when we’re gone? Hell, they could be having an orgy with oiled-up cabana boys, and I don’t think I’d care so long as they were safe.

  All I was doing was running Cole’s battery down too, and I finally forced myself to give up, flopping in the nearest chair. I yanked the hair tie out of my ponytail in sheer frustration, and grimaced when I realized how much foulness I had in my formerly blond hair. This vacation had most definitely not gone as planned.

  “So. Wanna bet this is the last official Colorado paintball trip?” My little brother flopped beside me, the pair of us looking like matching bookends.

  I snorted. “Ya think? I’ll be lucky if anyone on this trip speaks to me at all after we get home.”

  “It’s not that bad, big brother.” I gave him a look, and he shrugged. “Nobody died.”

  “Day’s not over yet.” Even if we could get Mira on the phone, I had to wonder if Cam would survive casting the spell to save Zane. This still had the potential to turn out all kinds of bad.

  “Listen.” Cole leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “None of this is your fault.”

  “Um… every single bit of this is my fault. If it weren’t for me, none of this would have happened.” I gestured to the entire ER, more than half the beds currently occupied by people who arrived with me. “Zane wouldn’t have been targeted. Cam wouldn’t be hurt. Marty.. . Christ, he didn’t sign up for any of this. Will either.”

  My brother blew a long breath out his nose and shook his head. “Jess… Why did you tell Will and Marty about all this in the first place? Way back when, what made you confide in them, when you’ve hidden it from almost everyone else?”

  What the hell kind of question was that? I blinked at him, perplexed.

  “Humor me. Why’d you bring them into this?”

  “Um… I guess, because I needed their help. I couldn’t do it alone.”

  “Yeah, but you could have found someone else. You could have found armor and weapons somewhere, especially after Ivan surfaced. You could have found another doctor type. So why them?”

  I had to really think about it. I didn’t recall consciously making the decision to tell my two best friends about my new calling in life. It just… happened. It never occurred to me not to. “I guess because they’re my friends. My best friends. Why wouldn’t I tell them?”

  Cole nodded with a satisfied smirk. “Exactly. They’re your best friends. They’re not gonna ditch you over this.”

  I just shrugged. Only time would tell, and honestly, I wouldn’t think ill of Marty and Will if they ran the other way screaming. If they were smart, they would.

  “So what do we do now?” My brother leaned back in his chair again, stretching out his long legs.

  “I don’t know. We need Mira to help Zane. Until then, there isn’t a lot we can do.” And I needed to get to the numbers in my phone. Viljo had to get the word out, warn people if it wasn’t already too late.

  Viljo…

  “Oh holy fuck.” I scrambled up out of the hard plastic chair, sending it across the sterile tile floor with an obnoxious screech. “Marty, I need your keys! Cole, can I steal your phone? I need the

  GPS.”

&nbs
p; Marty handed over his keys, but not without looking to my brother for confirmation first. That hurt a bit. Hurt even more when Cole held his phone just out of my reach. “Where are you going?”

  “Can’t tell you, but I’ll be back in like five hours.” Hopefully. “If you guys manage to get Mira on the phone, have her call me on yours.”

  “Why the hell can’t you tell me?” Unspoken in Cole’s question was the fact that, after all of this, I was keeping even more secrets? Really?

  But what I’d managed to remember, slow study that I was, was that Viljo, dear, geeky Viljo, lived near Pikes Peak. Pikes Peak, which was barely two hours from where I stood at that very moment. And at all costs, no one else could know where the uber-dork was, ’cause if they found him, they’d find Grapevine. And then they’d find all of Ivan’s champions, if they didn’t already know.

  “Because anything I tell you, someone can take from you, probably involving horrific torture and a lovely vacation somewhere very hot. Glare at me all you want, little brother, but I’m not budging on this one.” The whole champion game had changed in the last year. I felt this to the core of my being. We-all of us champions-had tried to pretend like it hadn’t, tried to go on with business as usual. But it was the thing we never talked about, the demonic elephant in the room. Somehow, we puny humans had stumbled into something much bigger, and even if I didn’t know what it was yet, I could feel it looming near, like a rabbit in a hawk’s shadow. We had to take precautions, things we’d never dreamed of before. We had to cover our asses, which meant first and foremost protecting Grapevine.

  Finally, Cole handed over his phone, but he wasn’t happy about it. I figured I was in for a lecture later.

  I delayed my trip long enough that my buddies could grab their packs for anything essential. Pulling Cole aside one last time, I told him, “If anything goes wrong, do not let that big furry son of a bitch touch Zane. If he touches the kid, he’ll turn him into one of those things. At all costs, he can’t take the kid.” Cole nodded like he understood, and I took off, paintball marker in the seat beside me, aired up and loaded with holy ammo.

  Driving Marty’s Suburban was like maneuvering a garbage barge after driving my little Mazda pickup, but I’d manage. I knew Viljo’s address, since we’d mailed him Mira’s dead computer earlier this summer, and I plugged that into Cole’s phone and pointed myself south.

  The problem with long drives is that it gives the mind too much time to wander. Mine, of course, kept going back to the Yeti, and I scratched at the black marks on my skin a few times. It didn’t itch, really. It burned like hell, sinking in, but that passed quickly. Mostly, it was just the knowledge that it was there, y’know?

  I made myself look straight ahead, trying to be a conscientious driver and all, but there was that insidious voice in the back of my head, the one that was whispering all the horrible crap that was going to happen to me. Pretty sure that going into a battle fully expecting to lose was a bad thing.

  But I knew damn well that the last time I’d faced him, I’d been only lucky.

  That wasn’t entirely true. I mean, I had skill, even back then. No brains, that’s for damn sure, but I could swing a blade. If I hadn’t been good, he’d have ripped me in half before I’d taken two steps.

  The kicker was, that thing that cornered us up at the cabin, that wasn’t what I’d fought, last time. He was… bigger. Stronger. Just

  … more. He couldn’t have handled his little zombie army, back then. Couldn’t have stood up to Axel, even if I had no idea who and what Axel really was. The Yeti was a thug, then, not a master.

  Still, I’d been lucky.

  It was my second challenge, ever. A local television reporter that Cole had known. Sold his soul for his fifteen minutes in the TV spotlight, I guess. He was dying, when Cole brought him to me. He actually passed away a few months after the fight.

  At that point, I hadn’t asked Marty to make my armor yet, so it was just me and my sword, and balls the size of boulders. I really thought I was hot shit.

  Will had been there, the first time I ever asked him for help. I didn’t expect to need it. My first challenge had gone so smoothly. My second one… did not. If he hadn’t been there afterward to duct tape my guts in, I’d have bled out on the spot. Lucky, see?

  I guess it could have been worse. I mean, I held my own for about half an hour before I realized the Yeti was just toying with me. Like a cat batting a mouse around. I imagine I had amused him greatly. Scrawny little human darting around with his big flashy sword. I’d scored a couple of hits on him, blight trickling out, but nothing big enough to take him down, nothing crippling enough to finish it. I figure he’d let me have those strikes, just to see what I was made of.

  The moment he decided he was bored, it was all over. Even as huge as he was, he moved faster than anything I’d ever dreamed of. This vicious flurry of claws, flying at my face, at anything I couldn’t defend with a single blade. I clearly remembered the last feint, flowing into a block for a strike that wasn’t coming, and knowing, knowing, I’d been had.

  He picked me up like a bowling ball, sinking his claws into my ribs. Some act of divine providence kept my sword in my hand, and I forced myself to open my eyes when I felt his fetid breath on my face. He sniffed at me, and obviously found me wanting. Those jaws, bristling with fangs the length of my head, opened up, and that’s when I opened his throat. I let him hold me up, feeling my own weight fracturing my ribs on his claws, and slashed the big furry neck almost to the spine.

  I was covered in blight, freezing and numb, and I remembered hitting the ground. At that point, I didn’t really care. It was warm there, lying in a pool of my own blood, and the stars were very bright that night. I remembered being vaguely annoyed at Will for blocking my view at one point. And then I didn’t know anything until weeks later, when I woke up in some ICU with more tubes and monitors than NASA.

  You can understand why I wasn’t anxious to use that particular strategy again. Not like it was an option. The Yeti would never let me get that close again, never pause to gloat. He was going to rip me into tiny Jesse kibbles and that would be the end of that.

  The scars down my ribs itched too, again more a product of my mind than any actual physical cause. There were details about that long-ago fight I was pretty sure I had wrong, things I’d blocked out, or forgotten or whatever. But what my waking mind couldn’t remember, my sleeping mind did. I’d dreamt of the Yeti ever since, and every single time, he killed me with little to no effort.

  Contemplation of my own impending doom got me as far as Denver, where I was forced to stop for fuel and something that vaguely resembled a cheeseburger. By the time I got the big truck full, I’d promised myself that I’d find something else to think about for the remainder of the trip, even if I had to resort to singing show tunes. Luckily, I found a radio station that played classic rock, turned it up to a level even I could hear with my damaged eardrums, and I was on the road again.

  Another hour saw me in Manitou Springs, ready to crush Cole’s phone into tiny electron particles. Yes, I understand that GPS systems are only as good as the data that’s been entered into them, but when it kept telling me that Viljo lived in a Taco Shack, I was pretty sure it was wrong. I mean, it would be brilliant, not having to leave the house for food and such (if Taco Shack counted as food, which was debatable), but I didn’t think even Viljo was that much of a shut-in.

  Finally, in frustration, I rolled the window down and asked the next person I saw walking along.

  “Oh, you want Old Backlick Road. That’s up toward the Peak.” The man pointed in the direction of the looming mountain in question. “You go up the highway a piece, take a left at the Git-n-Go, go a couple a miles. You’ll see a blinking yellow light-keep going straight. Then you’ll come to a T in the road. Hang a right, go about five miles, and you’ll see the sign. If it hasn’t fallen down again.”

  Of course. Old Backlick Road. How silly of me. Lives were at stake, and the G
PS wanted to quibble about the age of the freakin’ road.

  What my very helpful guide neglected to tell me was that the blacktop ran out shortly after the isolated, possibly abandoned gas station. Keep in mind that I was no stranger to gravel roads-Missouri has plenty, and not far from my house-but I was driving a monster of a strange vehicle, and these particular roads had ruts that made the Grand Canyon envious. Five minutes in, and I was sure that every vertebra in my back was pulverized, and my teeth clacked together as I jounced over the road so hard that I saw stars.

  Luckily, the sign for “Old” Backlick Road-which still said just BACKLICK ROAD, I might add. And what the hell kind of name is that??-had not fallen down, and with some deductive reasoning (I guessed), I took a right and headed out into what is officially known as “the boonies.”

  It took me another half an hour to find what I hoped was Viljo’s place. The double-wide trailer sat off the main road (and I use the word “main” loosely) quite a ways, and the path that passed for a driveway was so overgrown, it might as well have been nonexistent. The only reason I even realized it was there was the mailbox at the corner, and the pile of FedEx boxes sitting under it. Surely, they’d be delivering out here only if someone was around to pick up the packages.

  The Suburban rattled down the treelined trail until I found a very large, very angry-looking plywood penguin pointing an intimidating flipper at me. The sign around its neck said TRESPASSERS WILL BE REFORMATTED. Okay, I admit, I have no idea what the penguin had to do with anything other than being flat-out bizarre, but the menacing sign was definitely a computer reference, so I assumed I had the right place.

  The double-wide trailer I found at the end of the trail could have been anyone’s trailer, really, except for the numerous phone and power lines running in through the top of it. Lines that I really should have noticed, coming off the road. Proof that humans, as a species, seldom think to look up.

  I turned the diesel engine off and sat in silence for a few moments, waiting to see if anyone was going to come investigate. Truthfully, despite my rural upbringing, overly rustic places like this always make me listen warily for banjo music on the wind. The last thing I needed was to get out and find myself looking down the barrel of a shotgun.