Soultaker

by Bryan Smith

  He was halfway there when one of the guards stepped back through the door and noticed him. The man gaped at him for a moment, obviously not believing what he was seeing. Raymond thought of how he must look—like a heavily armed outlaw approaching the OK Corral at high noon—and a grim smile curved the corners of his mouth.

  He increased his stride and cut the remaining distance in half.

  The guard snapped out of it and reached for his weapon, but by then it was too late. Raymond squeezed the Glock’s trigger. The gun boomed and a bright patch of red bloomed at the center of the man’s gray uniform shirt. He fell dead to the ground with his weapon still in its holster. Raymond was close enough to the open door now to hear the screams, high and keening, aural testimony to intense agony and horrible death.

  Raymond started running.

  In another moment he was past the dead guard and through the open entrance. He was in a hallway now, with rows of gray metal lockers to either side of him. There was an open door on the left, some ten yards ahead. It also stood open, like an invitation to hell. Come on in, it seemed to say. We’ve been waiting for you. Raymond shivered and started toward the door. The screams were louder now. It was the most awful sound he’d ever heard, like something from the worst nightmares of a madman come to life. And there was another sound, something like the whine of a large generator working at peak capacity.

  He stepped through the door and went up a short set of stairs to another door. This one was closed. He tucked the Mossberg under his arm and turned the knob. He threw open the door and waited a beat. No one came to investigate. There were no shots. But the terrible screams were louder still. That, more than anything else, got him moving again. He went through the open door and moved down a short hallway past a dressing room.

  Then he came into the larger backstage area and saw them. All those local bigwigs with their spouses and/or lovers. They stood with their backs to him, watching the show from the wings.

  Raymond hesitated.

  He knew he had to kill as many of them as possible. At least any of them who got in his way. But for a moment he couldn’t bring himself to start shooting at their backs. It was something basic hardwired within him. Every boy raised on old Westerns knew it was cowardly to shoot unarmed people, especially in the back.

  One of those backs stiffened abruptly.

  A man in a tuxedo turned toward him.

  It was Sheldon Prather, the chief of police.

  He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps raise the alarm.

  Raymond shot him in the face.

  A hole appeared between the man’s eyes and a larger hole erupted at the back of his head. Blood and tissue from the exit wound splashed the front of Mrs. Cheever’s evening gown as the dead man’s body staggered backward a step before toppling to the floor. They all turned to face him then, and their expressions were a mixture of shock and hatred. And then outrage. He saw it in their eyes. He was here to spoil it. To stop the sacred Harvest. Raymond spared another second to study the faces of men and women he’d thought he’d known so well. Friends and neighbors. Colleagues. Formerly God-fearing members of several local churches.

  Secretly monsters, all of them.

  Raymond set his jaw and advanced on them.

  Fuck them all.

  He squeezed the Glock’s trigger again and again. The gun bucked in his hand, a wild thing working at his will as he kept his aim steady enough to mow them down. They fled to the stage and he started after them, firing at their backs, no longer caring a damn about whether it made him a coward. They fell, one by one, holes appearing in their torsos and heads. He felt like an avenging angel come to earth to invoke the wrath of God.

  He paused a moment to eject the Glock’s spent clip and slap another one home.

  He raised the gun to resume the righteous slaughter.

  Then he felt it.

  The cold steel barrel against the back of his head.

  No.

  He was so close. It couldn’t end this way. The screams of the children taunted him. He was their only hope. He would not surrender. Not now. Not ever. Instinct caused him to spin and lash out at the son of a bitch who’d gotten the drop on him. He struck the man’s arm in the millisecond before the gun went off. Raymond staggered backward, a burst of bright pain setting his torso afire. The Mossberg flew out of his left hand and went spinning across the shiny floor.

  But the Glock was still in his right hand.

  He raised it and managed to squeeze off one round in the same instant another bullet punched through his stomach and sent him to the floor.

  The pain was extraordinary. It unmanned him. He cried out for his mother and knew he was finished. But he managed to raise his head and saw the guard on his knees, with a hand held over a bloody hole in his own belly. Raymond raised the Glock one last time and shot the man in the throat, finishing him.

  The gun slipped from his numb fingers and thunked on the floor.

  He knew there was no way he could lift it again.

  I’ve failed, he thought.

  They’ll all die. All the children.

  And it’s all my fault.

  This was his last conscious thought before slipping beyond the veil.

  The harrowing screams from the auditorium continued unabated.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  It was after 2:00.

  It was already happening.

  The fucking Harvest.

  Jake cranked the Camry’s steering wheel as he blew through the four-way stop where Marlowe intersected with Spillane Boulevard. A blue Hyundai slammed on its brakes in the middle of the intersection as the Camry missed sideswiping its left fender by inches. The Hyundai’s driver shook a fist at him and honked his horn. Jake was too busy getting the Camry turned in the right direction to give a shit about the other guy’s righteous indignation. The Camry’s passengers let out startled cries and swayed from one side of the vehicle to the other. Jake felt their pain, but they’d wasted too much time already. Traffic laws and the potential for collateral damage en route to Rockville High were the least of their concerns.

  Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

  He looked at the clock again.

  2:04.

  Fuck.

  He whipped the steering wheel back the other way and now they were roaring along at seventy-five miles an hour down Spillane, where the posted speed limit was forty.

  Rockville High loomed up ahead, now only a quarter mile away.

  They should already have been there. Should already have made their big play. It could all have been over by now. All things considered, they would have been better off turning back to retrieve the book from Kelsey’s Oldsmobile. Jordan wound up spending too much time inside the Barnes & Noble. The store didn’t have a copy of the same book. Other books on ancient mythology alluded to the banishment ritual, but did not contain the necessary chants. They took a detour to the west side of Rockville to check out a used bookstore Will knew about. By then all bets were off. They all scrambled out of the Camry and rushed into Rhino Used Books, no longer caring whether anyone recognized the boys. And again they spent too much time in the store. The shelves in the nonfiction sections were all double stacked. Some were triple stacked, with old musty paperbacks tucked into every available nook and crevice. Still others were packed tight inside boxes on the floor. They’d had to pull out the stacks and sort through the titles individually. They did this with a callous disregard that upset the clerk on duty, who yelled at them about tossing books on the floor. He threatened to call the cops at one point. Kristen ushered him into a back room at gunpoint, secured him somehow, and returned to flip the Open sign on the front door over to Closed.

  Then, at last, Jordan turned up the right book. It was even the same edition. A price of one dollar had been scrawled in faded pencil on the first inside page. At Jake’s direction, Jordan dropped the fifty-dollar bill he’d given her earlier on the desk as payment and they got out of there.

 
Jake prayed the delay wouldn’t prove too costly.

  Prayed that not too many kids had died already.

  He tapped the Camry’s brakes as they neared the school, twisted the wheel hard again, then gunned across the main parking lot toward the far side of the school. He pulled to a screeching stop between two rows of cars. An instant later the Camry’s doors popped open and its occupants again scrambled out. They didn’t bother to shut the doors, knowing they might have to beat a hasty retreat.

  They all saw the same thing in the same moment.

  Will said, “Holy shit.”

  Jake felt a sickness swell inside his belly. Bile touched the back of his throat. If he’d harbored any lingering traces of denial or doubt, the sight of the dead guard vanquished them forever. He fought back the tide of nausea and placed himself in front of the others.

  He looked at Kelsey. “We’re going in. No time to fuck around, get the lay of the land, any of that shit. You got that book ready?”

  Kelsey raised a hand, his fingers bookmarking the proper page. It was a strange juxtaposition. Mythology book in one hand. Glock in the other. He looked like a deranged scholar. “Got it.”

  Jake nodded. He looked at each of them in turn, sparing none of them more than a second. Not even Kristen. She seemed to have cast her reservations aside and was as swept up in the moment as any of them. She looked him in the eye and nodded.

  Jake heaved a breath. “Right. Let’s go.”

  He turned away from them and led a grim march toward the school.

  Kelsey moved closer to Will as they neared the school’s rear entrance. There was something fucked up happening in there. The screams alone told him that. But there was more to it. The atmosphere surrounding the school was alive with some kind of unnatural energy. It made his flesh tingle and his nads shrivel. It was similar to the way he’d felt during Jordan’s levitation trick, only intensified a thousandfold. A sudden and very intense desire not to venture inside the school gripped him.

  Who the hell did he think he was anyway?

  John fucking Wayne riding to the rescue?

  Who was he kidding?

  He searched Will’s pale face and saw at once his friend was thinking similar thoughts. He could also tell Will knew the same unfortunate truth. Their fear didn’t matter. Their friends were in there. Trey was in there. And his only hope of salvation was this banishment spell, which, by God, better not turn out to be a bunch of made-up ancient hokum.

  It was their only shot.

  We’re doomed, he thought. Oh fuck. We’re doomed.

  He nudged Will with an elbow. “You ready for this, man?”

  Will swallowed and nodded. “I…think so.”

  “Well, that makes one of us.”

  And then there was no time left for idle conversation. They’d arrived at the entrance and the screams ripped at their ears. Kelsey worked hard to control the sudden tremors rippling through his body as they passed through the entrance and stood in the hallway, but it was impossible. His mind flashed on the movie Saving Private Ryan. Those soldiers in the landing boats, most of them hardly more than kids themselves. Crossing themselves and saying final prayers in those last moments before storming the beach at Normandy. For the first time, he thought he truly understood how it must have felt to have been in one of those boats.

  A door on the left stood open maybe ten yards ahead.

  The screams grew louder still as they approached it.

  They were a few strides away when a door to their right flew open and Alexis Mackeson came at them in a rush, a scream tearing out of her mouth as she veered toward her son. Will froze in his tracks and gaped at her. There was a large bruise on her forehead. And matted blood in her hair. She was wild-eyed. A savage. She was nothing at all like the very proper society lady Kelsey had known.

  There was a knife in her hand.

  A big one.

  Kelsey’s mind reeled.

  What the hell?

  The last they’d seen of her she’d been tied up and stuffed inside a closet. How had she gotten here? Who had released her?

  She had lain in wait for him.

  Had somehow known he would come here.

  In the time it took for these thoughts to flit through his head, she brought the knife around in a savage arc and ripped a gash in Will’s throat. Blood leaped from the wound as Will staggered backward and banged into a row of lockers.

  “NOOOOOO!”

  Then the booming report of a gun overrode his cry of grief. Kristen stood ramrod straight in a classic shooter’s stance and pumped several rounds into Alexis. The woman’s body jerked as each slug tore through it, then toppled to the floor.

  Will was on the ground now.

  On his back.

  His eyes staring up at the ceiling tiles.

  Kelsey dropped to his knees, the book slipping from his fingers.

  He scooted across the floor.

  Stared down at his friend’s eyes.

  His dead, sightless eyes.

  In the next moment a scream of his own joined the chorus of agony issuing from the auditorium.

  He could feel it all slipping away, his control of the situation pouring like sand through his fingers.

  No.

  Not like that.

  Like blood from a mortal wound. A deep gash in the neck, say. And no matter how desperately you wished to stop the hemorrhaging, you just couldn’t do it. Jake stared at the dead boy on the floor and for a moment was stunned insensible. He just stood there. He didn’t know what to do next. Didn’t have the first inkling. He’d known he was heading into a life-or-death situation. Knowing that on an intellectual level was all well and good. But it did nothing to prepare you for that first moment of sudden, shocking violence. He doubted anything could prepare a person for this. He looked at Kelsey’s tear-streaked face and wished he could ease the boy’s pain somehow.

  But there was one thing he could try to do.

  The only thing left.

  He reached for the fallen book.

  As he knelt he became aware of a new sound rising above the screams from the auditorium. It was an ominous sound he associated with the impending storm. He was down on one knee when he heard Kristen shout his name. The alarm in her voice diverted him from the task of retrieving the book. He looked up and saw several pieces of notebook paper come swirling down the length of the corridor, buffeted by a powerful, rushing…

  WIND.

  Now hold on a second.

  This didn’t make sense.

  A wind originating from inside the school?

  How—

  And then it hit him. It was like being struck by hurricane winds. The force of it knocked him off his feet and sent him sliding several feet down the hallway. He rolled onto his stomach and saw the mythology book go flying past him, the slim volume’s pages flapping in the gale, looking for a moment like a wounded bird struggling to stay aloft. For a nanosecond, he saw it framed in the light visible through the open back doors. Then it was gone.

  Someone screamed.

  He didn’t know who.

  Could even have been himself.

  A burst of adrenaline slammed into him and he surged to his feet to stagger after the book. The wind continued to buffet him, slamming him against the lockers more than once, but he managed to stay upright through a monumental effort of physical will. Then he was through the doors and back in the parking lot. The strange wind followed him out of the building, blew past him, and lifted the book off the asphalt. He dove for the book and a fingertip brushed its spine for a moment before it flew high into the sky and disappeared forever.

  He screamed and pounded the pavement with his fist. He was so lost in feelings of impotent rage that he hardly noticed the wind had ceased blowing.

  Then Kristen was kneeling next to him, a trembling hand on his back. “Jake? Baby, get up. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Jake found a fresh reserve of strength and pushed himself to his knees. He stared at the open
rear entrance, saw only the dead security guard. He looked at Kristen. “Jordan. Kelsey. Where are they?”

  She hesitated a moment; then her shoulders sagged. “Still in the school.”

  Jake got to his feet and started walking back toward the school.

  Kristen hurried after him, grabbed him by an elbow, stopped him. She spun him toward her. “Did you hear me? We have to go. Now.”

  Jake shook his head. “I’m not leaving them in there.”

  Kristen made a sound of frustration. “You don’t even know them! Don’t you get it yet? This is bigger than us! There’s nothing we can do to stop it. The fucking army couldn’t stop this. We have to leave before we’re dead, too.”

  Jake looked at her and felt a bone-deep weariness. The day had started off with a monster hangover and he was still feeling some of its effects. He was in nowhere near peak physical condition to begin with. Factor in an ass-kicking at the hands of his jock brother, an afternoon spent speeding around town like some kind of berserk meth-head, and what you wound up with was an exhaustion so enervating all he wanted was to find a comfortable bed and sleep twenty-four hours straight. And yet he knew he couldn’t just run away. Not this time. Maybe he couldn’t save the Rockville High class of 2009, but he could at least try to save two people. And it didn’t matter that they were strangers. They were human beings. The girl was maybe even related to him somehow. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t make the effort.

  “I have to try.”

  Kristen made a face. “Fuck.”

  Jake started toward the school again. “You can leave with out me. I understand.”

  She followed him. “Right. You know I can’t do that.”

  “Just so you know. I wish you would go. But there’s no time to waste trying to convince you.”

  They stepped through the rear entrance again. Pages of notebook paper—the contents of someone’s discarded folder—littered the floor. Kelsey was where they’d left him, still knelt over the corpse of his best friend.