The Crippling Terrors (Tracking Ever Nearer Book 1)

by Jeff Vrolyks

  “As far as Kalek and the Bloodletter Board go, that was all she wrote. Pietra supposedly started going to church with her mom after that. She completely changed. Albie wanted to know exactly what happened. She became obsessed over it, just as I soon would. She tried to get the message deciphered even though Pietra urged her to let it go.”

  “What message?” I said.

  “Didn’t I mention the message,” she said musingly. “I guess I didn’t get that far. Pietra returned to her basement to destroy the board and cover the mirror with the sheet, but not before seeing what was written there. It had blood smeared on it, presumably Amber’s. She likely bit off her fingertip so she could write it. There were seven words written on it, none in English. Pietra wanted nothing to do with it. When she told Albie, Albie did. The next time she was at Pietra’s house, she wrote down the seven words. She tried getting them translated but nobody knew the language, I think. Or maybe they did but couldn’t translate it; I don’t recall. I had an uncle who spoke French and German. When Albie and I became friends again, she asked me if I would show him the words. He didn’t recognize them. I asked a few other people who spoke other languages and nobody knew. I was curious, too, but eventually I gave up. Albie didn’t give up, she just didn’t live long enough to get it translated. It was probably nothing of importance, anyway.”

  “Do you remember what the words were?” Holly asked.

  “Are you kidding? I do have a good memory, but I can’t remember a sentence in another language, especially since I don’t know what it meant. Besides, I didn’t need to memorize it, I had it written down. Written down on the back page of my high school yearbook. Too bad it’s in Amarillo, it would be interesting to work on the translation again.”

  “Damn,” Holly said. “With the internet, we could probably get it translated easily.”

  “Maybe. I really don’t think it matters, anyway. Maybe it was gibberish. I doubt it was a revelation or something fantastic.”

  “So what happened to Albie?”

  “Oh, you know what?” Sue Ellen said. “I do remember a word. Because I thought I knew what it meant. Septima. Like September. I don’t recall the exact spelling, but it was close to the month. Oh, I know another word,” she remembered.

  “Can’t remember a sentence if you don’t know what it means, huh, sweetheart?” Pea Willy teased.

  Sue Ellen shushed him. “I only remember it because it’s a word everyone knows. Ego. But I doubt it translates the same in English. Then again, who knows? But anyway, about Albie. I know you all are wanting to hear somethin’ exciting like some ghost possessed her or Kalek killed her, but it wasn’t anything like that. It was a tragedy, nothin’ exciting about it.

  “A month or so after Albie and I rekindled our friendship, her Mother found her dead just outside her house. She was killed by a dog or maybe two dogs. Nobody saw it happen, but everyone knew what happened. The neighbor had a couple of very large and mean dogs locked up in the backyard. A year or so before Albie was attacked by them, the latch on the gate wasn’t closed all the way and they got out. One of them attacked a boy, broke his wrist. The owners were quick to get them off of him. The community was pissed off. They wanted the dogs’ owners to get rid of them, but they wouldn’t. The boy’s parents threatened legal action but never went through with it.

  “On the day that Albie was found dead, her enraged father took his rifle and went over there, opened the gate, and shot both dogs dead.”

  “If they were locked up,” Holly pondered, “how did they kill Albie?”

  I wondered if the mention of a fatal dog attack struck a profound chord in Holly and assumed it must have, though she concealed it well.

  “Yeah, that’s what the neighbors argued in their defense. That and there was a hunting knife by Albie’s body, so they said that even if their dogs did kill her, they were probably provoked. I was a little weirded out that she had a knife, because of what Albie had said about Amber, chasing her with a knife before she died. My first thought was that Albie was on her way to my house with that knife. And who knows, maybe she was.

  “Nobody was around to see the incident happen, so it was their word against everyone’s theory that they locked up the dogs after they saw what they had done. That’s exactly what happened, in my opinion. It didn’t really matter because Albie was dead, regardless. No sense in lookin’ for an eraser when it’s written in ink, my Daddy use to say. She was dead and I was devastated. Not just because of Albie, but mostly because of her. The same damn day she died, my folks informed me we that were moving from Silverton to Amarillo. I fought it but it wasn’t my decision to make. My Pa got a better job out there and said we could live more comfortably. I made new friends there and ended up falling in love with Amarillo. I even decided to go to college there.”

  “Good thing, too,” Pea Willy said. “It’s where we met.”

  Chapter 44

  Karl pulled up to John’s house in a beater Chevy pickup a little before 1:30 P.M. He turned down the volume of the bootleg recording of a VonFurenz concert and parked in front of the garage door. He didn’t knock and the door was unlocked. He entered and noticed his running-shoe lace was coming untied. He squatted and tied it in a knot, noticed clothes strewn around the tile floor. Men’s and women’s. He picked up the panties and grinned. There was moaning coming from somewhere. His grin became a smile. He moved furtively to the bedroom and peeked inside. He saw the tan legs and ass of a beautiful naked woman and savored the sight even after he pulled away from the door to avoid being seen by John.

  He couldn’t resist and peeked again after he heard her moaning in what appeared to be a struggle: she was being squeezed between John’s legs, twitched a few times before settling still. John pressed her off the bed: she fell limply onto the carpeted floor. Karl was fascinated by her naked body, specifically her shapely breasts.

  John was now banging the bar with his cuffs and couldn’t see Karl crawling into the room on hands and knees. Karl knew he was doing a bad thing, but his desire for the woman was too great to resist. He arrived at the woman and groped feverishly her warm body as the clanking of steel against brass continued on. He fondled her breasts, tasted them, pulled her legs apart. Karl was so enraptured in the moment that he hadn’t noticed the clanking had subsided. John had freed himself of the cuffs inside the closet. Karl’s tongue was probing her mouth when he noticed John standing naked before him, and he was furious, incensed.

  “Vos fossor,” John scolded, “ego mos iuguolo vos!”

  Karl sprang to his feet and hung his head, begged for forgiveness. John grabbed a fistful of Karl’s shirt and shook him, snarled, “Vos dedecus nostrum prosapia! Animadverto ullus lupus en vestri via hic?”

  Karl shook his head: he hadn’t seen the wolves on the way over. John pushed him into the bureau, and got dressed. Together they departed.

  Near the front door John stepped on a large solid object in a pair of sweats. He stooped down and withdrew a gun from the pocket. Karl cautiously touched John’s shoulder and shook his head. He walked past John and gestured him to follow. John dropped the gun and followed.

  The contents in the back of the pickup was covered with a quilt. Karl folded it back and anticipated John’s approval. He rarely made a mistake; the few he had made he wouldn’t forget. The angry vengeful hand of his master stretched dimensions and crossed the threshold of unbearable pain. John smiled as he examined the twin rifles, a pair of step ladders, and brown paper bag with four ten-round .50 caliber magazines. He praised Karl’s efforts.

  John removed the Barret M82 rifle from the truck bed. He took two magazines and stuffed one in his pant’s pocket and leaned against the bed of the truck as he fed the other into the weapon. He aimed the rifle at the front window of the house—partially obscured by the extended garage—to familiarize himself with the scope. From the corner of his eye, John spotted a man approaching from the neighboring house.

  “Johnny boy! Whatcha got there, buddy? You never to
ld me you were into hunting. We should go!” he said cheerfully.

  “Oh I love hunting, Fredrick,” John muttered. He lined the crosshairs of the scope on the quartering intersection of window frame, dead center window. If an ant crawled across it, John would be able to see a piece of food stuck in its teeth. “We should go hunting, Mister Fredrick Alfonse Gasault. In fact, I’m going hunting this afternoon.”

  The smiling neighbor was now on John’s lawn. “Holy Jesus, did you get that in the army? Is that a Barret sniper rifle?”

  “Mhmm,” John hummed.

  “What are you hunting for this time of year?”

  Karl took the other M82 and the last two magazines and loaded it.

  “A disease-spawning, soon-to-be-dead bitch,” John growled with a sardonic grin.

  Fredrick’s smile disappeared like the word murder under an eraser.

  Just as John began transitioning his stare away from the window, he thought he saw movement. Movement beyond the living-room window. He peered narrowly through the window. Nothing. He continued where he left off and turned to the neighbor, squeezing the trigger—

  Booom!

  —before coming to a stop. The enormous bullet met his head dead center; it exploded like a Gallagher watermelon. John and Karl met eyes and nodded approvingly. John pointed to the front window of the house and said, “Mulier ultra fenestra?”

  Karl gazed at the window, shrugged, and answered, “Incertus.”

  “Invado domus,” John ordered. Karl nodded and hurried to the front door, rifle in hand. He opened the door cautiously with his foot and peeked inside before entering.

  John heard a door opening from across the street, behind him. Keeping his rifle out of view, he turned his head and saw a very large man in overalls with ridiculously curly red hair approaching with an expression of concern. The fucking guy was a cross-breed of Ronald McDonald and Paul Bunyan. An ogre.

  The man squinted at the five-foot tall man (six-foot tall only seconds ago), wondering if what he was seeing was real. “Oh, it’s real, all right,” John muttered amusedly. The curly-haired lumberjack halted when his eyes filled in the blanks. Dumbfounded or just plain dumb, he gathered that his crossing the street to check out the loud bang was a shit-poor idea. He looked away from the corpse, meeting eyes with his neighbor John (the Mr. half of the Mr. and Mrs. Glazier sign that hung over their front door—noticed every October thirty-first, when he stood behind his ‘trick-or-treat!’ precipitating children). Mr. John Glazier was doing a little trick-or-treating of his own this afternoon, a good five months early, and wearing the costume of a good neighbor with bad intentions.

  John worked up a friendly smile and rested the barrel of the gun over his shoulder like a baseball bat and turned to face the gaping man. “Howdy neighbor! Where are your two darlings today? Halloween is still a good ways away, but I’ll tell you what,” John said gamely, “I’ll give them a treat today. Hell, I’ll give you one too.”

  John expected him to run like hell. To his surprise, and delight, the man charged at him. He let the barrel roll off his shoulder, leveling at his hip. Before firing, the shrill shriek of a widow on the porch of the neighbor’s house drew his attention. He shot a quick glance at her and the phone against her ear. Before she made it back inside the house, a quick shot—

  Booom!

  —hit her in the back, making quick work of her. John quickly returned focus to the Defensive Tackle of the Neighborhood Watch, a locomotive of muscle and balls with his arms reaching out and body leaning forward. His war cry of “Ah-uh-AH-uh-ah” silenced when the M82 screamed—

  Booom!

  His forward momentum neutralized with a grapefruit sized hole in his gut. Mouth gasping, he trudged forward. “Are you a fucking hippo?” John said incredulously. He promptly returned the rifle to a slugger’s stance and wound back for the pitch.

  When the determined neighbor got within reach, a homerun swing made contact just above his left ear. A broken bat Craack! sounded off, but it was the ball that split, not the bat. He was dead before he could hear it.

  Karl came out of the house and shrugged. He observed the dead man on the driveway and stepped to him, poked him with the muzzle of his rifle. They simultaneously looked around the neighborhood to see what else the good citizens of Alvarado Street had in store for them. A few eyes peeked warily from behind curtains and between blind-slats, but they were all smart enough to stay the hell away. I guess they do learn, John thought.

  A car drove in their direction from down the street. John let the rifle slide through his hand, the stock lightly smacking the driveway. He palmed the barrel’s muzzle and leaned on it like a short crutch. Karl pointed his rifle down the side of his leg.

  Both men watched as the Buick passed; a balding fat man stared curiously at them, and then the new landscaping, which were two corpses. He mashed the accelerator.

  John pointed to the front window and said, “Simone?”

  Karl shook his head.

  They got in the truck and headed to the Beaumont Estates.

  Chapter 45

  Chad Hotchkins reached inside his podium for a bottle of water. If there was a thermometer near the front gate, Chad would wager today’s eight-hundred-dollar security-detail payout that it was north of a hundred degrees. And at forty minutes past one, there was another hour before the mercury would be satisfied.

  Things were going better than he had hoped.

  Chad awoke this morning with a message on his answering machine from A.J. Diggs, giving him good news and bad. The good couldn’t have been better, aside from Cynthia finally accepting his apology for cheating and taking him back. He, along with every member of today’s security detail, was to receive double pay. He began developing a chip on his shoulder when Diggs raised him to four hundred a gig; at eight hundred, he thought about buying a high horse with his next paycheck. The bad news was indeed bad news. But more than bad, it was unsettling. The S.P.D. was called-off to aid security. Outsourcing a few security positions to cover the absence of police wasn’t bad news, in itself, but “Wear your bullet-proof vest and you’ll be issued a .50 caliber Desert Eagle when you arrive, and bring your Beretta as well,” was. Two guns? A Desert fucking Eagle? But Chad trusted Diggs. Diggs wouldn’t accept the gig if there was a good chance of things going south.

  When he arrived at two hours before noon, his nerves were further abused with new rules put on the table. There was to be a weapons search of every individual entering the premises, no exceptions. Friends and family? Search ‘em. Off duty cop? Search ‘em. Pat downs were to be accompanied by a metal detector wand-screening. Security was no joke today. No sirree, Bob, no fucking joke.

  Then there was the fact that Aaron ‘One Shot’ Cobb (a sizeableness second only to Diggs) was on something called ‘garage detail’. He was to use any means necessary to prevent people from entering the garage, of all places. Aaron picked up the name ‘One Shot’ in the Marines during Desert Storm in Iraq, where he first met Diggs. One Shot only needed one shot to down a target—he never misses, allegedly. The name grew roots when he killed two Iraqi militants with a single shot (through the neck of one and into the eye of the other). His crackshot shooting was somewhere between uncanny and supernatural. He was a good forty pounds heavier than Chad—all muscle and heart—yet Diggs chose him for garage detail and Chad for the gate. Stranger things have happened, but the day seemed to have more stranger things have happened than he could shake a fifty-caliber Desert Eagle at.

  Two rent-a-cops were posted a dozen yards from Chad, physically opening the gate and screening the people Chad authorized. Chad and the two mercenaries (Steven and Kale) separated the outside world from the chosen few inside. Things were running flawlessly until a man (not on the list, but Diggs let him in anyway) ran off the property as fast as his legs would allow, while leaving a piss trail behind him. Chad would have tackled him for such suspicious and reckless behavior, but Diggs had radioed Chad seconds prior and cleared him. Diggs told C
had to kick him in the ass as he ran by; Chad thought it unprofessional, but funny.

  The day had a few more three-dollar-bills in its pocket.

  The driveway from the street-end to the gate was damn near the length of a runway, narrow and snaked between a double colonnade of trees. Looky-loos, fans, and a few trying to make a living were at the gate when Chad arrived. Shortly after, they relocated to the sidewalk and street under threat of arrest. He could still see some of them, though the curving line of trees obscured most of his street view.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw an attractive girl with a knockout body crossing the courtyard. He squinted at her and wondered if she was Alison, whom he had met once at Arco Arena and asked out on a date. He didn’t recall her having such a hard body; but at Arco she was heavier dressed, as opposed to the pink skirt and white tee she wore now. “Damn,” he whispered. Yep, she was the girl he had asked out on a date. She had said no but was awfully sweet about it at least. He waved at her, unsure if she noticed. Oh well.

  Chad uncapped the water-bottle and threw his head back. The sixteen ounces of water would soon join the previous ones as sweat. He squinted at the ripened sun until the bottle emptied, then lowered his head to an even stare with an animal. The last gulp of water locked up in his throat as he entered a staring contest with a large yellow-eyed dog with a white bib on a black coat.

  Sure does look like a wolf, Chad thought. A voice in his head recited the news report he had listened to on the radio on the drive over: a fatal mountain lion attack occurred at the nearby Brenner’s Pass. Dollars to donuts, this was the animal the authorities were searching for, he told himself. Chad glanced at the rent-a-cops behind him, who were oblivious to the threat and palavering. Nobody else was nearby. He slowly unsnapped the thumb-break of the holstered Desert Eagle. The wolf was directly across the driveway from him, in a narrow gap between Cypress Pines. To his relief, it lowered its ears, smiled its eyes, and began panting. If it wasn’t friendly, it sure did a great job acting like it was. Before he could decide if he should inform Diggs or just let it slide, gunfire broke out.