Blood and Silver - 04

by James R. Tuck

  Acne scars stood out on sallow cheekbones as his cardboard brown complexion washed white in the halogen gleam of the tactical light mounted on the shotgun. Sweat popped out below his bandanna, glimmering in trails down the sides of his baby face. White showed all around dark brown irises, pupils shrinking to pinpricks in the harsh glare of the light on the shotgun. Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he looked to be about fifteen years old.

  “Ssssshhhhhhhhhhhh,” I hissed at him. I kept my voice low. “Drop the gun.” His fingers opened, sleek Berretta 9mm tumbling to the floor, lost in the litter. It was a nice gun.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “It’s cool esse, it’s cool.” His voice was brittle with fear.

  “Who else is on your crew?”

  “Nobody, Holmes. Just me and Jaime.” I believed him. The stink of fear rolled off him like cheap cologne.

  “Where’s McMahon?” He shook his head, lips pulled tight, refusing to speak. I pushed the barrel of the shotgun to his face. Blood welled up around the teeth of the breeching shroud as it bit his cheek. “Do you think I’m playing with you? Where. Is. He?”

  He jerked a thumb behind him. “Back there. Please don’t shoot me, man. My grandma’s sick. I needed the money.” Tears streamed out of his eyes.

  He was a kid. He should have been in high school, playing baseball or rugby or something. A tiny spot inside my chest loosened up for him as I looked into that baby face and those fear-filled brown eyes.

  And then I remembered.

  This “kid” was a drug dealer. He sold poison to people, watching them become animals a twenty rock at a time. I remembered the crackhead in front of the house, bringing her daughter to trade for drugs. This “kid” would have been the one answering the door, taking the girl to this McMahon, handing over the nugget of crack cocaine. This “kid” knew about little Kaylee Anne Dobbs, missing now for almost twelve hours.

  That tiny spot in my chest hardened to concrete.

  My boot lashed out, steel toe cracking across his shinbone. I felt it give under my foot with a wet snap. The kid dropped to the ground. A high-pitched scream ripped out of his throat on the way to the floor. He rolled over, still screaming. His hand came up with the Beretta. He had found it in the trash on the floor. He pointed it at me. From two feet away he wouldn’t miss. I whipped the shotgun barrel down, across the bones of his forearm. The steel tube might as well have been a baseball bat and I might as well have been Babe Ruth. His arm snapped over just below his wrist. Ivory bone popped through the skin in a well of dark blood as the Beretta went flying. The kid made a moist choking sound as he stared at his arm.

  Then he passed out cold.

  I stepped over him, moving back through the house. The hallway turned at a ninety-degree angle. I rounded the corner, gun ready, and stepped into a new layer of supernatural weirdness.

  My stomach jerked into a knot and the air took on the consistency of a blanket that had been drenched in boiling water. Everything was hot, so smotheringly hot I could barely breathe.

  Down the hallway were two openings between me and the back wall. On my left was a steel gate, like prison bars. It had a big lock on it. I swept the light inside the bars. There were shelves lining each wall stacked with bins. In the center of the room was a long, cheap table. At the table sat naked women stuffing little white rocks of crack into small ziplock bags. They were naked so they couldn’t steal crack from the drug dealers, so high they moved like automatons. Robotically, they swung their arms from piles of crack to piles of plastic bags. So far gone that none of them looked over at the big scary man with the shotgun and the halogen spotlight. I turned away, moving on.

  A few steps down the hall was a wide-open archway. Warm yellow light spilled out, cutting a space open on the floor of the hallway. The carpet of trash abruptly stopped just short of the opening, leaving a clean hardwood floor under the spilled light. I pressed my back against the wall and listened. There was a clinking noise, low and chiming. Not repetitive, but similar each time it sounded. My mind couldn’t pick out a pattern to it or place where I had heard it before. The supernatural taint to the air was oppressive. I took a deep breath to center myself. The inhale brought me up short.

  I smelled pot roast.

  The scent of cooked meat tore through the air, so out of place in the environment I was in that it was jarring. The smell clashed in my mind, reminding me of Sunday dinners at home with my family after Mass.

  I shoved that memory away. I couldn’t get caught in it, especially back then. They still sneak up on me even today. Memories like that, they blindside you. Memories like that could drive me to my knees. Memories like that could drive me insane. Memories like that could get me killed, and there were two little girls waiting on me to save them: Kaylee Anne Dobbs and Mary with the big brown eyes who was waiting in the Comet. They needed me. I couldn’t fall apart because of a memory. So I ripped it out of my mind and crammed it deep down, pushing it away violently.

  The smell still jangled on my nerves. So out of place. My skin was tight, every muscle primed. Adrenaline simmered in my veins as I swung around the archway to face whatever was in that glowing, yellow room.

  I found a man sitting at a table eating supper.

  The man was huge. His silverware looked dainty in hands the size of catcher’s mitts. He was well-groomed, red hair and full beard neatly kept. The clothes he wore were very suburban. A light blue polo shirt strained over shoulders the size of bowling balls, and I could see khaki pants covering his legs under the small table where he sat. The hems of the pants sat on loafers the size of shoeboxes that stretched out between the table legs.

  He didn’t look up, even with the shotgun’s light shining on him. He just continued eating the last of the meal on the plate in front of him. The knife in one hand cut meat with a clinking scrape. The fork in the other stabbed the meat along with potatoes and carrots, and scooped them up to his mouth.

  “What the hell are you doing? Are you McMahon?”

  Ignoring me, he tucked away his last bite, chewing and savoring it. With a sigh, he wiped his mouth with a wad of fabric and looked up. His eyes were beady and black, set in a wide face. There was still a bit of potato stuck in his beard.

  “I am McMahon. Who the hell are you?” His voice had an Irish lilt to it.

  “Where is Kaylee Dobbs?”

  “Oh, you are here about the girl.” His hands came down on the table and he looked like he was going to stand up. I swiveled the shotgun and squeezed the trigger. Thunder roared out of the barrel as the last breecher slug smashed into the refrigerator beside him. Racking the slide kicked the spent shell out to fly over my shoulder and dance on the linoleum floor. Another shell slipped into its place like a familiar lover.

  “Stay where you are or the next one will blow your skull apart.” I took a step closer to him. “Where is Kaylee? Answer the question or I won’t wait for you to move.”

  “You are not a cop.” He said it as a statement.

  Most people, even men his size, get nervous when a gun is pointed at them, especially a shotgun. Most people shit their pants. He was sitting calmly in the fifties-style kitchen and talking to me as if I were an acquaintance.

  My shoulders grew tight. This was a dangerous man. There was something more than his size that made the hair stick up on my arms. My finger tightened, taking the slack out of the trigger, one twitch away from shooting him in the face.

  “What I am is the man who is about one second from blasting a cap in your ass if you don’t tell me where Kaylee is.”

  He sighed. “Do you know how easy it is to get a little girl to come with you? The classics still work, even in this age of heightened awareness.” His smile was wide, making the tiny piece of potato tumble from his beard and onto his shirt. “‘Little girl, do you want some candy?’” He chuckled and shook his head. “For instance, sweet little Kaylee just wanted to help me find my lost puppy.”

  My stomach churned in disgust. I t
urned, squeezing the trigger again. The shotgun bucked and roared, blasting into the stove. The oven door fell off and heat washed into the room. I racked the slide and pointed the barrel back to his head, fighting to keep from squeezing the trigger.

  My voice was a snarl. “No more warning shots. Tell me where she is!”

  “Sweet, delicious Kaylee is gone. I just finished her off, as a matter of fact.” His hand twitched, knocking the wad of fabric he had used to wipe his mouth off the table. It tumbled slowly to the floor, billowing out.

  It was a tiny sundress made of pink paisley fabric.

  Revulsion slammed into the back of my throat, bile churning in my mouth. I roared out, squeezing the trigger. The shotgun bucked, spitting a load of silver shot across the room.

  The pellets smashed into the small table, absorbed by the thick wood.

  Faster than sight, the big man had snatched the table, putting it in front of him as a shield. Before I could rack the slide, he raised it up and threw it across the room at me. I ducked to get out of its path, twisting away. The heavy wood struck across my shoulder. Numbness flashed down my arm like lightning. The shotgun tore out of my hands, spinning through the air and clattering inside the open oven. It rattled around and stopped, hung up on the wire oven racks.

  I was knocked to the ground. My face slammed into the slick linoleum and there was a hot gush as my eyebrow split open from the impact. White sparks flew across my vision. I threw my weight to the side, scrambling. I wound up with my back against the dishwasher. My right hand yanked the Desert Eagle from its holster and my left hand wiped blood from my eye. I swept the room with the gun, the tactical laser burning trails through the air.

  The man was standing in the center of the room.

  Massive shoulders hunched over, veins standing like cables on his arms. The polo shirt ripped at the seams as he screamed to the sky. His muscles were swelling, twitching, and jerking as they grew. I watched his arms and legs twist. Joints distended as his legs became thicker. The supernatural in the air was like soup. Heat washed over me, my skin felt like it was on fire. The desire to plunge in salty, icy water consumed me.

  The man roared as his ribs broke with a snap and a jerk, chest expanding into a barrel. The bones in his neck grew and his skull re-formed itself. His face pulled into a snout, big and square. Head thrown back, I could see his teeth grow. All four incisors split gums, shooting out into four-inch-long enameled daggers. A thick tongue lashed out to lick the blood off them. His nose colored black as it changed shape, becoming a square at the end of his snout.

  Power rushed over me in a tide. My stomach tore itself apart in hunger. I wanted meat, red and raw and briny. I wanted to lick salty blood off the ice. I wanted to rend flesh, to tear blubber from bone in strips to swallow it whole.

  The man convulsed as his body swelled. His skin thickened over muscles that had reknit themselves to three and four times their size. His clothes were shredded, hanging in rags. His square skull brushed the ceiling. Hands and feet had elongated into paws, razor-sharp black talons jutting from the end of each former finger. A deep guttural grunt tore out of him as one last convulsion ran from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head. In its wake, white fur sprouted from his skin, lengthening and growing into a thick pelt.

  Inside the kitchen, inside a crack house in the ’hood, stood a fucking polar bear.

  Holy shit.

  4

  I scrambled to my feet as the bear turned to look at me. A roar tore through the air, washing hot and moist over me. My finger squeezed. The gun in my hand kicked back, its roar shorter and sharper, but just as loud as the bear’s. Four .357 Magnum bullets in four blinks of the eye. They slapped center mass into white fur.

  And disappeared.

  The bear jerked his head down, looking at where the bullets had vanished. His skull convulsed, shrinking back with a shift of bone until it was a mix of bear and man. The voice that came out of that mouth was completely inhuman. It sounded like a garbage disposal trying to form words in English.

  “Silver? You shot me with silver?” That mutated face looked at me. “What the hell are you doing with silver bullets?”

  My finger squeezed the trigger in response.

  The next two bullets disappeared into that expanse of white fur.

  “QUIT SHOOTING ME!” he screamed. “IT BURNS!” Sure enough, I could see black spots forming where I had shot him. Tiny wisps of smoke curled out between strands of white fur.

  I pulled the trigger on the last four bullets.

  The air shook as the bear screamed out. Between my pulling the trigger and the bullets reaching him, he turned, grabbed the refrigerator, and yanked it in front of him. It was so fast I didn’t see it happen. One second he was standing in my line of fire, the next he had the refrigerator in front of him. The bullets splatted against the insulated side of the fridge, tearing holes and leaving marks, but not penetrating through to hit him.

  The slide of my pistol locked back, open and empty.

  Dammit!

  Thumb sweeping the release button made the clip drop out of the bottom of the gun. It fell and clattered on the floor. My left hand had a fresh clip and was already moving to the opening. It slid home and clicked into place. I flicked the slide release and it jerked forward, stripping a round off the clip and seating it in the chamber.

  The bear threw the refrigerator at me.

  Time shrank around me again as I watched hundreds of pounds of metal fly toward me. The door swung open as it flipped toward me in the air, food tumbling out. Mustard, ketchup, carton of eggs, head of lettuce; my mind took stock of these on one track. On the other was the thought: That damn fridge is going to crush me.

  Without thinking, I threw my feet out and dove under the flying hunk of metal and insulation. My shoulder slammed into the floor as I rolled. The door to the fridge whirlwinded over my face so close it brushed my goatee. I kept tumbling to a stop as the refrigerator smashed into the wall behind where I had been standing. Sheetrock exploded into dust, raining down over the kitchen appliance. I was on my stomach. Pain throbbed across my shoulder and my breath was gone.

  Get up!

  I pulled my knees under me when something slammed across my back like the fist of God and drove me back to the floor. Another blow hit me across the kidneys, this one with a tug and a ripping sound. The Kevlar vest jerked around my body, edge of the collar rubbing a cloth burn across my throat that blossomed lava hot immediately.

  I rolled away. The bear was standing over me, pieces of my Kevlar vest hanging off black talons. Kevlar is just a cloth. The weave and layering is what makes it stop bullets, but it isn’t worth a damn against bladed attacks. That included bear claws.

  I swung the Desert Eagle up, pulling the trigger, absorbing the shock through my shoulder, letting the recoil carry the gun up in an arc. Silver bullets stitched a haphazard line up the bear’s body from knee to neck. The skin convulsed around the entry points, white fur rolling back to expose black holes.

  There was no blood. There should have been blood.

  The bear’s skin was too thick for the .357 bullets to penetrate. The rounds were lodging in the layer of blubber that protects polar bears from arctic chill. The .357 is a hot-loaded .38 caliber bullet—more powder, more kick, more penetrating force. It’s a substantial bullet, good for almost anything, but it was still about the size of a large pea. They just weren’t enough to do any real damage to something as big as a bear.

  The slide locked again as the bear pawed the air in anger. Before I could grab another clip, the polar bear began to fall. On top of me. Two tons of killing machine fell like a redwood toward me. My heels dug in and I pushed off the floor, clambering to my feet as it crashed down on all four paws where I had been laying.

  My foot landed on the mustard bottle that had flown out of the fridge earlier. I jerked myself to a stop so I could keep my feet. That massive square head, the size of my chest, swung around. Black lips pulled back on jaws full
of murderous teeth. Faster than sight, they clamped down on my right arm. Both sets of incisors punched through my bicep in a shower of blood as the jaws closed just above my elbow.

  Agony exploded in my arm, spasming from fingertip to shoulder, then running down my lat and across the small of my back. Pain splashed across my chest, and my heart closed like a fist. It held shut, skipping beats, locked in the throb of sheer agony. With a sharp shock it thudded back to life. My mind went blind for a second and the world disappeared.

  My bones vibrated as the bear growled in victory. The vibration carried more pain in its path as it jolted through my skeleton. Acid boiled in my stomach, growing hot and queasy. Left hand reaching back, it closed on the Glock tucked in my waistband. I drew it out and pressed it against that bog white skull. My finger jerked the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  Semiautomatics jam at the worst possible times.

  Anger chased pain, clearing my head. I drew back and whacked the pistol across that black snout. Beady, brown, bear eyes closed and he snorted around my arm. The bear’s head shook, yanking pain through my arm and chest again. I began to pound the useless gun into its head. Over and over. Bringing it up, slamming it down. My strength leaked away with each hit. The skin split across the snout. Blood ran freely, staining the white fur crimson. Thin nasal bone crumpled under the butt of the gun.