Fright Squad

by Flint Maxwell

  The gun popped off six more shots, stopped. Maddie was reloading.

  On my left, taking on the vampire with the eye-stalks, was Zack. He slashed with the hatchet, like a mini lumberjack. The vampire’s claws reached out for Zack’s wispy beard.

  Wax on, wax off—and those claw-fingers were chopped into the size of baby carrots. The vampire didn’t even make a sound. Little tentacles came out of the stubs, reminding me of the last bit of toothpaste squeezed out of a tube.

  But Zack hacked at those, too.

  The cyclops and the minotaur turned their attention on me now. The one eye found my two. There, I saw hate, pure, unrelenting hate.

  Bang!

  The eye shattered as Maddie’s bullet hit. Unfortunately, I was close enough to get misted by the explosion of retina and cornea and pupil.

  But, unsurprisingly, a thick orange tentacle burst from the wound. On it were a hundred staring eyes. This was a cyclops no longer.

  Just as the tentacle, thick and pulsing, wrapped around my waist and pulled me closer, the minotaur charged.

  With a quick hack, I sliced the tentacle in two. The noise it made as it severed was like the hissing of a tea kettle.

  I spun out of the way before the minotaur reached me, bounced off the wall, which was covered in blues and greens and pinks and red (like a Jackson Pollock painting), and saw that the minotaur collided with the giant body of the cyclops. They hit with a bone-jolting force and tumbled to the ground.

  Then, as I am ever an opportunist, I pounced and thrust the sword downward, ending both of their lives with my one stab. I had to throw all of my weight into it in order to burst through the tough skin of the minotaur which had landed on top. But I did it. It was a regular supernatural shish-kebab.

  Now there was a path through the hallway and downed bodies that could get me into the lobby. I pulled the sword free and ran. Well, walked carefully would be a more accurate description since there was about a bucket of tentacle fluid and blood on the floor. I didn’t trust myself to run. I was uncoordinated enough as it was.

  “Abe!” Zack shouted.

  I turned, my tunnel vision vanishing like morning fog in the sun, and there was Zack. He was wrestling with the mummy. The mummy’s bandages had turned into thin tentacles, and they were gripping Zack’s head. The skull face of the Egyptian monster was visible and it looked pretty bad, like a four-thousand year old raisin.

  At the same time I saw this, I heard screaming from the lobby. Lola’s screaming. She must’ve been hiding under her desk and they had found her.

  “Catch!” I said to Zack and I threw the sword. It pinwheeled in the air, moving in slow motion. Again, I regretted it. Zack wasn’t going to catch it.

  Also, I’ve never been an athlete. I frequently failed gym class in school and once got benched in tee ball because I couldn’t get a hit. I mean, the ball is right there on the tee just waiting for you to crush it and I couldn’t do it. Man, that’s pretty sad.

  Anyway, the sword dropped, and because my aim was so off, the blade sliced downward on the tentacles gripping Zack’s head, close enough to trim that shaggy beard he thought was so cool. Now released from the mummy’s hold, Zack brought his hatchet back and heaved it forward. It shattered the skull like a clay pigeon, and the mummy dropped dead (again) as its tentacular wrapping curled up and fizzled like burnt paper.

  Good, I thought. On to the next one.

  Most of the monsters were down for the count. Maddie was still at the end of the hall, feeding bullets into that six-gun of hers.

  I realized I’d gone partially deaf, and I realized this when I heard some unholy beast roar in the lobby. It was so loud that the very walls shook. Dust floated down from the rafters. If I had heard that roar with two full eardrums, I think I’d be bleeding from my ears. I almost lost my balance, too, but that could’ve been because of the monster guts jammed into the tread on my boots, so who knows?

  Well, I know.

  When I turned the corner, the ugliest thing I’d ever laid eyes on stood in a blown open hole in the wall. Around it, flames danced.

  This beast was not something I had a name for, not something I’d seen in my training.

  It made everything stop: my blood, my breathing, my pulse, any sarcastic comments I had on the tip of my tongue—everything.

  It was frog-like, except where a frog is small and compact, this thing was like a thousand frogs all rolled into one bulbous, gelatinous hulking mass of grossness. Three yellow-gray eyes peered at me. It had six legs, all crouched by nature and seemingly ready for a jump.

  It roared again. Hot, rotten breath shot out like hurricane winds. I wish I could’ve ducked from them but the stench was everywhere.

  That wasn’t the worst part, either. The worst part was seeing Storm and Lola taken into the shadows. Lola’s pale hand glowed in the darkness, but it was quickly engulfed by a whipping cape worn by a tall, scarecrow-like man, holding the monster on a chain leash.

  Then they were gone.

  Poof.

  A cloud of smoke hung around the blown opening.

  They disappeared right before my eyes.

  Now my bowels went watery. I felt like I was going to pass out. The only thing in our world that would be able to disappear like that was a magician—a dark magician.

  For a few minutes, I had been in the same building as Doctor Blood, the man who murdered my father.

  After a moment I realized that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Storm and Lola were gone and I didn’t know what had become of Octavius.

  Then I was running again. I went to the jagged opening in the wall, where Doctor Blood and his gang of monsters had entered. I even went to the parking garage, saw the same. There was nothing. Not even goblins. Not even Slayer. I hoped Doctor Blood hadn’t taken him, too.

  When I got back, Maddie and Zack were huddled in the corner opposite of the desk Lola had always sat behind; there she had smiled at me and complimented my hair or my clothes many times though those aspects of me—my hairstyle and my sense of fashion—rarely ever merited compliments. I had been too afraid to ask her out, always waiting for the right moment, and now there would never be a right moment. She was gone.

  Zack and Maddie were hunkered down.

  A weak coughing sounded from whoever they hovered over. All of this was starting to hit me, the fact that not only did I fail, but I lost people I cared about. It was all too much. My head spun, my heart hurt, and I felt sick to my stomach.

  “Abe?” Maddie had seen me. She was looking in my direction. I must’ve appeared terrible, judging by the way her eyes quivered and filled with tears.

  Then I realized it wasn’t me she was crying over because she stood up and gave me a view of who those tears were for.

  I didn’t want to move, but my feet were doing their best to betray my brain, and there I went across the floor, drifting like a ghost through an empty graveyard.

  Octavius sat against the wall. A large pool of red spread around him, grew even as I looked at it. From his stomach, protruded a horn. It looked like the horn from a minotaur, crooked and sharp, as if held against a grindstone solely for the purpose of stabbing someone. He was dying. You could see that as plain as you could see the twisted corpses of the monsters and the destruction of the NOD BEAST HQ. And I couldn’t believe it.

  His lips peeled back and he smiled at me. Blood lined his teeth. I had rarely seen Octavius smile, and how he could do it at a time like this, a time where he could hear the gears in his life-clock wind down, I don’t know. But I admired him for it, just as I’d always admired the gangly monster-master.

  “We gotta get him to the hospital,” I said. “Val’s gone. On vacation. We need help fast and City Hospital is close.”

  Octavius’s eyes rolled back, fluttered. He looked super stoned, and that’s what I was imagining. I didn’t want to face the reality that he might be dying.

  “Abe,” he croaked, his eyes rolling back, finding me.

  He
never called me Abe.

  “Yes?” I leaned closer. A bloody hand gripped my shirt. He held on with a death-grip.

  “You have to— You need to stop…him,” he said.

  “I will,” I answered.

  Octavius closed his eyes. His mouth was slack, the tongue hanging out.

  “Is he dead?” Zack asked.

  Maddie took Zack’s hand, squeezed.

  We watched Octavius. We watched his chest rise no longer.

  Then—

  He coughed, spraying flecks of blood in the process, and his breathing started up again. Ragged, yes, but it was better than no breathing at all.

  “Help me,” I said.

  Maddie and Zack didn’t hesitate. We lifted him up. He wasn’t heavy.

  We got him into the elevator, then raced him into the rented SUV.

  Five minutes later we were at City Hospital. The parking deck was completely roped off and when we entered the emergency entrance, a buzz hung in the air.

  “Oh, no,” someone said.

  I turned and saw a nurse, the same blonde one, who’d been knocked over when she-Dracula escaped. She must’ve been really dedicated to her job to not call it a night after all that.

  “Not you guys again,” she said.

  “Please,” I said, “he’s hurt.”

  The woman looked at Octavius. Blood pattered the tile. A sneezing man, holding tissues to his nose, got up and receded into the shadowy corner of the waiting room. A different woman on her phone let the handset drop to her side.

  The rest was a blur.

  A group of orderlies came out from the automatic doors with a stretcher and took Octavius into a room we couldn’t enter.

  One of them was shouting vital signs, like blood pressure and heart rate, and the wheels were squeaking. My head was pounding.

  Maddie held me back.

  “He’ll be okay,” she said, but I didn’t know if she meant it or not.

  We sat in the waiting room for nearly thirty minutes. It had felt much longer.

  As the clock ticked on, the old man with his tissues was called back, the woman on her phone, too. A sea of unrecognizable faces entered the room with us, sat down, rustled magazines. Their names were called, but I didn’t hear or understand them. I looked down at my shirt. I was covered in a rainbow of colors. The color that stood out more than the rest was red. Blood. Octavius’s blood.

  “I can’t wait any longer,” I said.

  “Where are you gonna go?” Zack asked.

  “I have to go after whoever that was. They took Storm and Lola.” I heard my voice. It had sounded much too loud in the quiet of the waiting room. People were looking at me. “They’re family.”

  “You don’t know who it was or where they went,” Maddie said. “Wait until Octavius comes to. He knew. You heard him.”

  She was right.

  I waited another fifteen minutes that felt like three hours before a doctor came out.

  “Are you family?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, never missing a beat.

  “Octavius is going to make it,” he said. I saw spatters of blood on his white coat. “We preformed an emergency procedure to remove the horn. He is in rough shape now, yes, but he will make it.”

  “Can we see him?” Maddie asked.

  “He is resting, I’m afraid,” the doctor said. He had introduced himself, but I’d blocked it out. “I don’t think it would be wise—”

  That’s as far as he got before I walked past him.

  Octavius was in the first room on the left. It was a shared room with other people recovering from various surgeries. The machinery hooked up to him beeped. His breathing was ragged and wheezing. Next to him, the room divided by a heavy curtain, another patient watched Family Feud while others slept. It smelled of lemony cleaning supplies and blood.

  Octavius was nearly unrecognizable. He was pale, a shade of gray I’d never seen before. His glasses were off, folded on the bedside table. A large gauze pad had been placed over his stomach and it was soaked through with red, the brightest thing in this room.

  Seeing him like that, I’d felt my legs go weak. I had to sit down, catch my breath.

  Not long after, I heard footsteps in the hall, and I figured it was security coming to kick me out.

  But Maddie and Zack entered the room and I was glad I’d been wrong. They were holding hands. When I looked down at that, they quickly unclasped them and looked embarrassed.

  I don’t know why.

  “Oh, boy,” Zack said. He didn’t look too good himself.

  A nurse came in. She was very tall and her hair was short and spiked with gel or mousse. On her wrist was a smartwatch.

  “He’s a lucky man,” the nurse said. “Lucky you guys brought him when you did. What happened anyway?”

  Maddie went off into a tale about how Octavius was our father and he’d caught some college kids on the farm trying to tip cows. He had run after them and in all the mayhem, one of the bulls speared him with his horn. It was a lie, but the nurse bought it.

  She shook her head, looking almost as pale as Octavius, and brought a hand up to her mouth.

  The nurse gave us each a hug then fiddled with the machinery. No security ever came.

  I watched the clock on the wall across from Octavius’s hospital bed tick onward. Twenty minutes passed.

  Zack asked if he should call what happened in to SOD for backup or something, maybe? I wanted to say no, but what choice did we have?

  “I already did,” Maddie said. “They’re at the HQ now. I’m sure they’ll find whoever did it, Abe,” she said to me. “And they’ll get Storm and Lola back”

  But I knew that wasn’t true. You want something done right, take matters into your own hands.

  After thirty minutes of silence, Octavius stirred. My head snapped in his direction.

  He brought a hand, hooked to an IV, up and pressed it against the bandage on his stomach.

  “Oooh,” he moaned.

  “Octavius?” I whispered.

  He licked his lips. They were beyond chapped. His eyes opened. In the whites were a thousand little red veins, zig-zagging.

  “Ouch,” he said. He spoke with a drugged thickness.

  Maddie and Zack had gotten up from their chairs and stood close by. Together, the three of us huddled over our Captain.

  Now his eyes seemed to focus. “Abraham? What are you doing in my home?” He paused, looked around with wider eyes. “Wait a moment, this isn’t my—”

  “You’ve been hurt, Octavius,” I said. “Hurt pretty bad.”

  “But you’re gonna be okay,” Maddie said. “They fixed you right up. You’re at City Hospital.”

  “The minotaur?” he asked. “That wasn’t…that wasn’t a dream?”

  “I wish it was, Captain,” Zack said.

  “Oh, my,” Octavius said. With a great struggle, he raised his hand and gripped my own. His flesh was very cold.

  “Was it him?” I asked. “Was it really him?”

  “Yes,” Octavius said. “Doctor Blood. The Wraith.”

  I moved back slightly. My flesh broke out in goosebumps and my pulse quickened. I knew it. I had felt him, even if I hadn’t seen anything besides his cape.

  “How do I find him?” I asked.

  “The church,” Octavius croaked. He licked his lips. The sound his tongue made against them was like pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. “The one with the candle in the window.”

  “Tell me more,” I said. “Where did he take them? Is it the church?”

  Octavius shook his head. “No. I do not know. He will at the church.”

  “Who?”

  No answer.

  I kept on. “Where were you today? After you left my apartment, where did you go?”

  Octavius’s eyes fluttered again. He seemed to be thinking much too hard. “The town,” he said. “We’d been detecting abnormal activity in the town.”

  “What town?” I asked. “Huntington?” That was w
here my father had been murdered.

  “No. The place they call Helltown,” he said.

  “Is that where he’s at?”

  “I-I don’t know for sure, Abraham. I don’t. But the church is there. I would’ve gone myself, but…”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I took Octavius’s hand.

  “He is too strong. Doctor Blood…he will kill you,” Octavius said. “All of you.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Zack said quietly.

  “So much like your father,” Octavius wheezed, sounding delirious, drugged. He tried a smile then his eyes fluttered and he passed out.

  I left him to his rest.

  18

  A Plan

  “Abe?” Maddie called after me. I walked with a purpose out of the room, didn’t look back. Things had changed now. I wasn’t just an agent of BEAST doing his job; I was a man on a mission, trying to save people he cared about, trying to avenge my father’s murder.

  The church in Helltown, I thought. The candle in the window.

  Whatever the heck that meant.

  Zack and Maddie caught up as I went through the door into the waiting area.

  “Where are you going? You can’t be serious, Abe. You can’t go waltzing in to Helltown. That’s monster-master stuff,” Maddie was saying.

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “We need to call backup. Get the SOD on our side,” Maddie said.

  Now I stopped and looked at my partners, my best friends.

  “They’ll never go for that. And time isn’t our friend right now. If the Wraith hasn’t killed them already, he will soon. Or worse… He’ll turn them into one of those things, those tentacle-things,” I said. Then more firmly: “I’m going.”

  “What if he’s not even there?” Maddie said.

  Good point.

  I answered, “It’s better than standing around and doing nothing. And he is there. I know he is.”

  I didn’t know how I knew, but I did. I felt it.

  We stared at each other for a long moment. I did my best to show I wasn’t budging. Maybe it wasn’t smart for me to rush into a potential war without being prepared, but I didn’t care. I had people to save and vengeance to dish out.