Psycho Save Us

by Huskins, Chad

  Spencer kept walking. He listened to the footsteps behind him and estimated their distance. About twenty feet. The big guy with the round tattooed belly was walking parallel to him on the sidewalk about twelve feet away.

  “You gonna talk to me, punk?”

  “I’m meetin’ a friend o’ mine,” Spencer said, making it to the fence and stepping right on into the yard.

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “Dmitry. He inside?”

  “There’s no fucking Dmitry lives around here, asshole. Sounds like you got yourself lost. Time to turn back around—”

  Spencer did turn around. Smoothly, and with purpose. His right hand went to his waistline, where he withdrew the Glock. The man walking behind him had a moment for his cocky smile to linger while he processed how the world had turned on him here on his own turf. Another young man was walking behind him, this one with jeans and a Metallica T-shirt, who turned on his heels and ran a second before the bullet ripped through his friend’s skull. The sharp bang caused a scream from someplace. He heard a window break, strangely enough, and shots were fired at him. At least, he thought they were.

  The big man with the tattooed belly ran for cover behind an old silver Izuzu Rodeo parked at the curb. Spencer turned and fired twice, just to make sure he was down. Someone else fired at him from the window of the house on his right. It was a semiautomatic weapon by the sound of it. Bullets danced on the cracked pavement but nowhere near his feet.

  Spencer ducked and ran around the side of the big brick house, bullets slicing at air just behind him, some of them smashing into the picket fence and the earth. He heard someone shout, “Gde?” Someone else cried, “Chto ty delayesh?!” and someone else screamed, “Vsyo pad kontrolem!”

  Mere seconds before things erupted on Avery Street, Kaley Dupré felt a familiar, slippery, slimy mind approaching her. She felt the feelings more than the thoughts. She felt the lust, and white-hot anger that accompanied it.

  They started across the room, moving slowly at first but then with more purpose. Kaley and Bonetta both paused when they spotted the blood on the floor. It was just beside a small, rounded saddle, and there were stirrups around its legs where her sister had been tied down. Kaley fought back another bout of vomiting—there couldn’t be much left in her stomach—and shouted, “Shannon?” Her eyes went rheumy. “Shannon!”

  “Shh!” Bonetta hissed. “You want ’em to hear us?”

  I don’t know which house you’re in, the monster whispered into her mind and heart. Kaley didn’t immediately answer, because she felt the pressure from the Oni’s. They were on their way; she knew it even before she knew she knew it.

  There was too much going on at once and Kaley didn’t know which to act on first.

  She knew exactly where Shannon was being held, and suddenly that trumped all. Kaley was terrified to see what physical shape her sister had been left in, but the green door at the other end of the basement had what in years to come Kaley would come to call Resonance. Her little sister resonated from that location. She knew it as well as she knew her arms were attached to her shoulders. She knew it the way that a spider knows it has something in its web, by sensing the vibrations throughout the web itself.

  She moved over to the green door, and looked at the lock. She tried to find the knowledge again to pick it, but couldn’t. The knowledge was leaving her. The Connection, so strong a moment before, was slowly being severed. Like a fire that burned so bright that it burned up all its fuel and died quickly. Too much kindling this time, she thought.

  You there? the monster said.

  “I’m thinking,” she said.

  Beside her, Bonetta said fervently, “Thinking about what? Let’s go!” Now that she was free of the room and had space to move about, and now that Kaley’s charm had worked to embolden her, Bonetta had found her courage.

  It was all happening so fast. Kaley tried to give the monster an answer. She would still need his help since she couldn’t pick this lock. She pictured the big brick house, and the brief look she’d gotten before Shannon had attempted her escape. “It’s a big brick one,” she told the monster, while Bonetta stood there glowering at her, “on the front somebody spray-painted L-Ray runs this shit. That’s all I—oh…oh God…”

  She almost vomited.

  They had just crossed over the sandbox in the Rainbow Room when she felt the waves of lust and murder preceding the Oni family. Footsteps. Rapid ones coming down the wooden stairs. Bonetta whimpered, “Oh no…” Kaley rattled the door. She banged on it, called out her sister’s name, but heard no reply. She hadn’t sensed Shan’s death, so she was still alive in there. “Oh, God!” Bonetta screamed from behind. Kaley turned, and found Olga and Mikhael standing on the stairs. Olga had her Taser again, and Mikhael stood right behind her, pistol in hand.

  “Get back in your room, little girl,” Olga said.

  Kaley started to say something. Then, all at once, she felt defiance rise inside her. It belonged to Bonetta Harper, and it came from that place where we hide all our secret rebellions, where we send them to be consumed by more logical thinking, and yes, even by our own fears and insecurities. The rebellion was bright and hot and Kaley was overwhelmed by it.

  Before they knew it, Olga and Mikhael were assailed by Bonetta, who lifted something from the floor. It was a whip, a prop, laid down beside the saddle and the stirrups. She ran screaming at her captors and was on Olga before she could raise her Taser. Shrieking like a banshee, and tearing at Olga’s face and hair, Kaley felt the battle internally more than externally. Red and black swirled in eddies, rage that had germinated from neglect suffered over ten years. And…something else. Something that was here, in this room with Kaley, with all of them. She couldn’t feel the monster anymore, but she didn’t need to. Something had been shared, however briefly. Just as he’d unconsciously given Kaley his lock picking skills, he’d also dumped in a bit of his humor, his delight at what had happened in Baton Rouge. When someday she had her doctorate in psychology, Dr. Kaley Alexandria Dupré would know that that’s how such creatures worked, that it was much like the meth to her mother, how one hit used to be enough, but after a while only a single hit didn’t satisfy for nearly as long. So an addict must up the dosage.

  The monster had upped his dosage. His need was great, and he’d shared it with Kaley. It was there, inside of her, tugging.

  This all happened within the span of a second, while Bonetta struggled, and yet the days and weeks and years seemed to crawl by for Kaley. It started out…slowly…slowly…from the back of her mind forward. It crept across her eyes and there was a splitting sensation. Then, she was spinning around and around. It was like the vertigo she used to suffer through, only now it wasn’t nauseating, it was…thought-provoking? Yes…yes, it did provoke thoughts. Kaley now found herself in a position of moral flexibility. In one nanosecond she was empathetic to all of the creatures around her—from Bonetta to Shannon to Olga to Mikhael and even to a moth she detected somewhere behind her, feeling so hungry and yet exhilarated by the lights all around it. Then, she wasn’t empathetic at all. She actually found herself repulsed by all of these people, even by her sister, who, for just a millisecond, she saw as weak and pathetic.

  Something turned over inside of her. There were glaciers of her own that she hadn’t yet charted, much like the monster’s own glaciers. The landscape of her own heart was opened to her, and it was a tortured, treacherous thing. Kaley did not like seeing the things she saw. At once, she was both pitying and reviling herself.

  And there it was. A mentality that she normally would’ve looked at askance. Olga and Mikhael were wreathed in a viscous fluid. Kaley saw it, even if Bonetta did not. Olga and her brother saw it, too, and acted as if snakes had leapt at them. They crawled away from Bonetta, who Mikhael had wrenched by her hair and flung to the floor at gunpoint. Now, Mikhael looked at his gun hand, and saw the dark-red liquid slowly pouring out from his fingertips and going up, up, up his hand.

&nb
sp; Olga’s own attack came from her mouth. From her gums came lines of blood, which crawled around her lips and into his nostrils. Next it came from her eyes. She cried tears of dark red blood and fell back onto her ass, looking at her hands, where the flesh had started peeling back. Now Bonetta screamed, for she saw it, too. As it turned out, this might not just all be in Kaley’s mind. It appeared this was actually happening.

  “Kak dela?” someone said. Kaley half realized it was her. She spoke Russian now. “Ti takaya privlekatelnaya,” she told Olga. Translation: You are so pretty. Olga looked at her. She was trembling, and looked over at her brother, whose own flesh had started to melt. It wasn’t boiled, there was no smoke coming off of him. The flesh sagged, and though it was not heated, it took the viscosity of lava, slowly falling, falling, sloughing off of him. He turned and looked at his sister with desperate eyes, one of which hung from the socket. He looked at his own hands and staggered backwards, up the stairs, his flesh dropping off in great clumps behind him.

  She had boiled over. Kaley could not longer contain the flow. It came bursting out of her like seas over the New Orleans levies. She stood there letting it pass from her and into the room. It touched all corners of the basement. She felt the plaster on the walls and ceiling, felt the dust mop and the drops of semen, the cracked walls, the stuffed animals and their threading. Bonetta’s own mind was assailed, and she lost her mind. Kaley felt it go. She, after all, was the one who destroyed it. Shannon had warded herself, either out of practice or instinct, and was safe. That was good, because Kaley now had no way of protecting her. The waters that burst those levies were taking Kaley for a ride as much as anyone else.

  Visions melded with one another, became conjoined, and then dissolved. Curtains of flame appeared, then peeled back to reveal an endless darkness, and beyond that endless darkness was herself, staring back at her from across an impossible gulf. Other things came to her, terrifying and seductive all at once. It inflated her. It was beyond her. She was the kindling, and not the enkindler.

  This was what she would come to call the Rapture.

  The back yard gave little cover against the rounds that burst out at him from the top floor of the brick house. Spencer blindly fired two shots behind him as he made for a parked red sedan near a rear garage. Just as he dived for cover, a man stepped out from the back door with an Uzi with a suppressor. The barrage of gunfire lit the sedan up, shattering glass and flattening the front right tire.

  Spencer pressed his back against the rear wheel for maximum cover, even as the neighborhood came alive all around him. The yard was about fifty yards squared, mostly grass except for the two-car garage and a doghouse with no dog.

  The windshield of the sedan was spackled with bullets from a silenced weapon. He could no longer tell exactly which direction it was all coming from. Someone started firing from a second storey window in the neighboring house, at least he thought so, and two more pistols were fired from somewhere on either side of the sedan. They would want to hem him in, pin him down, and finish him off quickly before the cops showed up and started asking questions.

  But a flash of light and a steady whup-whup-whup changed all that in an instant. The helicopter came seemingly out of nowhere. For all the gunfire, Spencer never heard its approach. The searchlight splashed against the yard, but on the opposite side from where Spencer was huddled.

  All at once, all gunfire ceased.

  The police chopper (for what else could it be?) crested the top of the house, and swept its spotlight across the side of the house. Spencer poked his head over the top of the sedan, spotted a large shadow dashing across the lawn towards the back door of the house. His pulse didn’t budge. He stood up, took careful aim, gave a bit of a lead on his target, and squeezed the trigger. It took the bare-chested man in the neck. He did a comical little dance, spinning around and around while trying to keep his feet beneath him, until he finally collided with a porch post.

  Spencer darted across the lawn, making for the house. The searchlight would actually grant him cover as long as it wasn’t on him—anyone on the other side of the searchlight, which was most of the neighborhood, would not be able to see through the light to the darkness beyond. For the moment, he could move freely, and the chopper’s own propellers had masked his gunshot.

  “This is the Atlanta Police Department!” announced an authoritative voice form Among High. “Lay down your weapons and put your hands in the air!” Doubtless, while gunshots wouldn’t be easily heard from the chopper’s cockpit, the flashes of muzzle flair moments ago would be familiar to the officers inside.

  As Spencer made for the back door, he could just see around the side of the house. He spotted at least three sets of flashing lights, one of them belonging to a large van. No, he thought. No, I’m so fucking close!

  At the porch he halted, and knelt briefly over the dying Russian. The dying man had jaundiced skin, and pleading eyes. “Look at me!” he shouted above the din of the chopper and the commands its pilot was still issuing. The man’s neck was shooting jets of blood. “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” he said over and over, until the Russian finally looked up. He had a crimson bear tattooed on his forehead. “You see me? I did this to you! I did!” And he laughed as he scooped up the man’s silenced Uzi. The Russian looked up at him stupidly. To Spencer, he seemed to be considering how awful his last moments were, how utterly wrong it was to have to look at a laughing enemy at a time like this.

  Then, gunfire erupted all around him. Left, right, from the windows of the neighboring house, and even from up above. Yes, the helicopter had gone on the offensive.

  Spencer went to the back door and stood to one side of it. “All right, boys!” he howled. “I’m a fucking Portia! Know what that is? It’s a fucking spider that eats other spiders! I’m comin’ into yer parlor, bitch!” He tittered, barely able to contain his excitement as he kicked open the door and moved inside. What he saw next, he would never forget.

  David was the first car on the scene, but only by about fifteen seconds. The chopper was already hovering above the big brick house at the far end of Avery Street, on the right side of the cul-de-sac. Its searchlight was out but no longer sweeping, which suggested it had locked on to something, or someone. That was the first thing that struck him. The second thing was the Penske truck, parked at the side of the street without any attempt to hide it behind something of equal size or larger.

  Then, the first bullet came through the rear window on the passenger side, ripping through the leather seat in the back. David slammed on his brakes and put the vehicle in park, then ducked out of the door and used it as a shield as he hunkered down and gauged his surroundings. He was about twenty yards into Avery, with the first two houses on either side of him. Lights were on in various windows. Behind him, another squad car was on its way, its coming foretold by the red and blue flashing lights that flickered against the threes around the bend.

  Fucking jackalope!

  He shouted into his radio, “This is one-Adam-four, Officer David Emerson! I’m at Avery Street and taking fire! Repeat, officer taking fire! I’ve spotted the yellow Penske ditched at the side of—” He stopped when two more bullets panged off of the hood of his car, and a third cut the air over his head and smacked into a mailbox thirty feet away. “More shots fired! I need more backup!”

  The squad car he’d seen coming had now rounded the bend, and was speeding up towards, no doubt having heard his call for help. It screeched to a halt just behind his car, and out came Officers Walt Keitrich and McDevitt. “Grab some cover!” he advised them, just as the first shots bounced off their windshield. David peeked over the open door, saw a few open windows on the house on his right. There were two quick flares from a window on the top floor, and gunshots rang out, both round bouncing off the other squad care. “Top floor, second opening from the left!” David fired the first shot in retaliation.

  Keitrich and McDevitt peeked over their own open doors and saw where he was shooting, and fir
ed warning shots of their own. Two more answered them, then David fired another and waited. There was no more return gunfire from that window. He was down on one knee, waiting…

  Suddenly, the world came alive with booming guns, panging bullets, and shattering glass. The bullets came from everywhere at once, perhaps even behind him. David dived back into the driver’s seat and ducked his head towards the floorboard. He heard hissing and felt the front of the car tilt to one side. That’s how he knew the run-flat tires had taken serious damage, since it took a great deal to empty them of air so quickly.

  Outside, he heard Keitrich and McDevitt returning fire. He heard screaming from one of them. “Officer down! Officer down! Officer down on Avery Street!”

  A curtain of flames greeted him at the threshold, though he didn’t think the flames were real because he felt no heat. “You open this door with the key of imagination,” he said. The flames defied the standard laws of fire, licking down from the ceiling, as well as out from the walls, rather than climbing upwards. An ocean of roiling liquid fire churned on the floor, spreading around his feet, parting for him as he past, revealing unburned carpet and furniture. On the floor was a bottle of Michelob light, a Styrofoam container holding leftovers from Buffalo’s Café, and a Mary Kay catalog unburned, despite flames dancing around it.

  Someone screamed.

  Inside, he moved with greater care. Somehow, he knew this wasn’t meant for him. It was someone else’s hell, and he was just getting a glimpse. Yet still, something moved on the floor, something with hooks in its face and desperate eyes. A hand reached up to him, a beseeching hand. It belonged to a younger man. A boy of maybe seventeen years, eighteen tops. He writhed on the ground, the hooks in his skin connected to chains that came out from openings in the walls, which pulled at him, peeling his lips and nose back over his face. His pants were down around his ankles, and there was a hairless, oily four-legged creature pumping on him endlessly, tirelessly. The creature paused to look up at Spencer, regarded him for a moment, and then went back to his business.