“Plus side,” Dean said grimly, “don’t see any flying cows.”
When they were within a half-mile, the funnel cloud swept across the parking lot of a gas station, veering toward the pumps. One of the supports holding a canopy over the gas station lot buckled and the roof toppled over, metal screeching and scraping along the asphalt, trailing sparks.
Two blocks away, Dean jammed the brake pedal, skidding to a stop on the slick road.
The explosion blossomed in front of them and the concussive blast rocked the Impala’s suspension. Bits of glass and flaming metal debris pelted the ground around them. A charred piece of a gas pump housing plunked the hood of the Impala and ricocheted across two lanes of traffic before slamming into a curb.
“Dean, it’s gone,” Sam said.
At first, Dean thought his brother was referring to the gas station explosion which, unlike the exploding phantom Charger, had definitely not vanished. Flames continued to burn, smoke continued to billow into the night, and wreckage continued to clink and clatter around them. The gas station was real, not a living nightmare. Its destruction was a reality. But then, Dean noticed the absence of the fierce wind that had buffeted the Impala as they had approached the tornado. Looking left and right, and then leaning out the window for a better view, he confirmed that the twister was gone.
“Small favors,” he mumbled.
Dean made a looping turn on the empty road and headed east, back toward C.J.’s Diner, but they had traveled less than a mile when the Impala trembled slightly. A moment later, it rocked to the right and shimmied. Thinking the car had taken some damage, Dean pulled to the side of the road for a quick inspection.
The moment he stepped out of the car, the ground trembled. Along the street, parked cars began to wail as their theft alarms were triggered. Windows in a nearby building cracked and shattered. In the spread of the Impala’s headlights on the asphalt, Dean saw cracks forming.
“Great, tornadoes and now an earthquake,” he muttered
He jumped back in the car, shifted into drive and sped toward the diner.
“Dean! Look out!” Sam yelled.
He saw it in time, a fissure opening diagonally across Welker Street, spreading wide enough to accommodate a car tire and break an axle. He swerved away from the worst of it, but felt the Impala lurch over a gap when he gunned the engine.
A Colorado State Patrol cruiser coming from the opposite direction wasn’t as fortunate. As the fissure continued to widen, the front wheels of the speeding cruiser dropped into the gap and the front bumper smashed into the opposite edge. The vehicle tilted forward, slipping into the abyss. The doors of the cruiser swung open and two uniformed troopers jumped out and scrambled away from the car a second before it lurched down into the crack. Only the trunk remained above ground.
Dean slowed, waiting to see if the men needed help, but another State Patrol cruiser, which had been following the first, managed to stop before plowing into the lead car. The two stranded troopers scurried back to the second car and climbed into the back.
At the end of Roman Messerly’s life, when he had no more left to give her, a spasm wracked his body so violently his collarbone shattered. When the nocnitsa released her grip on his forehead, the husk of his body fell forward, dangling against the support of the shoulder strap. He had worried about potential tragedies and emergencies his whole life, despite actions and training he’d taken to prepare himself to face them. He’d never have to worry about them again, but she’d made his fears a reality and, in his own way, Roman had left his mark on the town.
The nocnitsa shed her substance and spiraled up into the night air, potent with energy she’d culled from her first victims. With her glowing red eyes she gazed upon the town and the spreading chaos and roared with pleasure, a sound like shrill wind whistling through confined spaces. She could feel the town as a whole, from edge to edge, a busy little hive of fear and uncertainty, doubt and grief. For a few moments, before flying down to her next victim, she rippled outward, a flash of darkness that would infect every mind within miles. Those awake would feel a cold chill race up their spine and experience an unexplained feeling of dread, while those asleep... ah, those asleep spoke her natural language, and she spoke to them, deep in their minds, summoning the deepest darkness to the place where it could live...
TWENTY-FIVE
Kurt Machalek had collected hearts in mason jars because hearts were totems. They imparted mystical powers to the one who claimed them. But for that power to pass to him, he’d had to seize them from living sacrifices. His socalled victims never understood their higher purpose in his apotheosis, so he explained it to them in detail before carving the still-beating organ from their chests. To become invulnerable and immortal, he’d needed to collect a dozen hearts. Unfortunately, the FBI caught him after his seventh acquisition and took the hearts from him. Unenlightened, they didn’t understand. As a result, when he escaped from his solitary cell, he would have to begin his collection all over again. He’d lost his accumulated mystical powers when they captured him and removed his totems. Locked away in his cell in the supermax wing of Falls Federal, he slept and dreamed of the day when he could restore his mystical energies. Once he got his dozen, he would show them true power.
In his dreams he saw his victims again, every one of them, and he would smile at the fond memories of those early acquisitions. They would scream as the power left their bodies, propelled into their hearts for him to capture. By the time they were still, their power was his to wield and it electrified him with his growing potential.
While he would have preferred to dream and fantasize about future sacrifices to his glorification, he had no control over his subconscious. Not that it mattered. Reliving his socalled crimes was a pleasurable experience, a brief mental vacation. He never had nightmares because he feared nobody and nothing...
But suddenly, his dream became troubling. He’d been toiling over his fourth victim—a young soccer mom who begged him to let her go, saying she wouldn’t tell if he just let her go—when he noticed people standing around him in a circle. That was wrong. Each sacrifice demanded his complete focus to channel the heart energy at the moment of death. He never allowed witnesses to his sacred rite. But for some reason, while he could sense people closing around him in a tightening circle, he couldn’t see them. He plunged the bowie knife into the soccer mom’s chest, delighting in the brief scream of primal power as he sliced his way to the pulsing heart and—
—woke up in his bunk in the dim lighting of his solitary cell.
But he was not alone. Others stood in his cell, in a semicircle around him, their clothes stained with dried blood, smeared and clumped with the dirt of their shallow graves. All except for the young soccer mom standing in the middle of the seven. Her torn blouse was wet with fresh blood, the gaping hole in her chest dripping crimson droplets onto the floor of his cell.
“No,” he said. “You can’t be here. None of you. I took your power.”
En masse, they stepped forward, their eyes wide with fury, teeth bared, spittle and flecks of blood on their chins. As one, they raised their arms, each holding a butcher knife.
“No! This isn’t right,” he said. “It’s personal and sacred!”
The soccer mom stabbed his thigh, the butcher knife sinking deep enough to scrape bone.
He roared in pain and shoved her back. She smiled a wicked little smile and spat in his face.
As if that was their cue, the other six surged forward, knives rising and falling, plunging into his flesh, slicing his arms and legs, sinking into the meat behind his collarbone, puncturing a lung. Though he was physically strong, they overwhelmed him. Every push and shove, every punch and kick, was met with the bite of steel ripping into his flesh. They swarmed over him, knocking him from his bunk.
He curled into a fetal position, arms over his face and head, but they aimed lower, cutting through his abdomen with single-minded ferocity. Then, one by one, they reached their grave-co
ld hands inside his body, and their clawing fingers ripped out his organs and crushed them in their fists.
They saved his heart for last.
In the break room of Taco Terrace, located at the southern edge of town, Mike Keoghan leaned his chair back against the wall, put his feet up on the table, crossed at the ankles, and shoved earbuds into his ears with the iPod’s volume turned up loud enough to drown out the usual commotion at the front of the fast-food restaurant. He was determined to get maximum value out of his fifteen-minute break. The previous night he’d been up until nearly dawn, talking on the phone with his girlfriend, who’d had a big fight with her parents about breaking curfew.
After a long day, he was tired, his feet ached and his eyes burned. He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes, drifting into a nap while Johnny Cash sung about his “Ring of Fire.”
He dreamed of black smoke rising from a fire but when he looked for the flames, all he saw was the smoke, hanging overhead like poisoned clouds. Something was wrong about the black clouds, but the reason escaped him. Slowly, he became aware of someone tugging at his brown polyester Taco Terrace shirt.
“Couple more minutes,” he mumbled.
The tugging continued.
Irritably, he moved his arm to brush away the person’s hand but something wasn’t right. Instead of touching clothes or skin, he felt fur beneath his fingers. Rising to groggy consciousness, he experienced the tugging and pulling from both sides of his body. Something pushed at his chest and arms, even his legs. When he shoved against the weight on his left arm, he yelped, jerking his hand away. Something had bit him.
“What the hell—?”
Opening his eyes, he saw dozens of beady black eyes staring back at him. Rats—crawling all over his body. They waddled up his torso, pink noses twitching, sharp teeth flashing at him.
Yelling, he kicked convulsively, causing the tilted chair to slide down and drop him hard. The back of his head struck the linoleum floor and lights flashed in his skull.
In a moment, the rats swarmed over him.
Frantically, he looked to the left and right and saw hundreds of them flowing across the floor, a pulsing tide of grimy fur. He rolled onto hands and knees, crushing some rats beneath him, while dozens more bit his hands, neck and ears. As he lunged upright and staggered toward the door, they covered his body like a living fur coat, continually biting his exposed flesh. Three climbed up the back of his scalp while another ducked its head inside his mouth and, when he tried to scream, gnawed his tongue.
Furious, he bit its head off and spit it out like a bloody wad of chewing tobacco and slammed his body against the door. Several rats were dislodged from his clothing, but others scrambled up his sneakers and under the cuffs of his trousers, clawing his shins and biting the meaty back of his calves.
He fumbled with the doorknob while rats gnawed the back of his hand, tearing away his flesh, bit by bit. His own blood made the doorknob slippery but he finally managed to turn it and push his way through into the cooking area.
The customers lined up to order their meals saw him draped with hungry rats before his coworkers noticed. Uniformly, the customers screamed and ran for the exits. One teenaged girl held up her cell phone and recorded some video as she backed out of the restaurant. But when Mike had opened the door to the break room, all the rats that hadn’t climbed on him, rushed through the doorway into the restaurant’s seating area. The screams became shrieks and the people who hadn’t already left shoved each other aside and struggled through the doors. Some fell and were trampled by those behind them, then were attacked by the rats themselves.
Mike’s coworkers reacted seconds after the customers. Gail had just lifted a metal basket filled with fries out of the deep fryer. When she saw him, she screamed and hurled the basket at him. The hot grease dripping from the basket burned his face, but dislodged the two rats that had been chewing through his cheeks and another that had crossed over his ear to gnaw on his right eye.
“Help me!” Mike cried.
Jimmy, who ran on the high school track team, jumped over the counter, his legs swinging to the side and knocking over a condiment stand before landing on all fours in front of the soft drink refill station. Rats covered the floor like a living carpet and when Jimmy landed on them, they swarmed up his arms and legs.
Gail, who was naturally thin, backed away and tried to climb through the drive-through window. Snakelike, she wriggled her way through the narrow gap, but her hips got caught when she bumped the lever that worked the window. Hanging in space, half in and half out of the restaurant, she began to scream in terror.
Albert, the night manager, backed away from Mike, a look of incomprehensible horror on his face. He stumbled backward and reached out to catch himself, inadvertently pressing his palms on the hot grill. Yelping in pain, he lurched in the opposite direction. He grabbed the phone off the hook with his tender hands and dialed 911, all the while backing away from Mike and completely ignoring Gail’s helpless screams. His heel mushed a jumble of fries strewn on the floor and he slipped, cracking his forehead against the edge of the counter. By the time the 911 operator asked him to state the nature of his emergency, Albert was unconscious. As she repeated the question a second time, the rats swarming along the floor ignored the plentiful fries and chewed ravenously on Albert’s face.
Watching Albert accidentally burn his hands had given Mike an idea.
He slammed his fur-covered forearms on the grill and burned at least seven rats, enjoying their pitiful squeals as they sizzled against the hot metal. With his arms free, he stumbled past Albert and kicked running rats away from his feet. He squeezed one eyelid shut to ward off a rat nipping at the tender flesh there and managed to swat it away before it sank its fangs into his eyeball.
Gail was kicking her legs frantically while she screamed, even though the rats hadn’t worked their way up to the counter yet and none were attacking her. Catching her legs in his arms to still them, Mike twisted her hips and pushed her through the window. She fell awkwardly outside, with a yelp and a curse, but she had escaped. Since Gail never went anywhere without her cell phone, Mike prayed she would call for help—soon as she stopped freaking out.
He tried to call to her, but his voice came out as a gurgle. Two rats were ripping into his throat and blood had washed down the front of his uniform shirt. Too much blood. He felt lightheaded and his balance was iffy. Seeing the phone dangling from its cord, he staggered toward it and dropped to his knees. He cradled the receiver in his hands but his fingers were numb, useless. He leaned over and tried to call for help, but no words escaped his lips. Everything had become darker, as if the restaurant lights were dying, and the floor spun beneath him and then his cheek was pressed to the linoleum, sticky with warm blood.
Far away, too far to matter to him anymore, sirens wailed in the night.
Rat tails slithered along his neck. A cold nose poked into his bloody ear.
Darkness swept over him and he remembered the darkness in his dream of the poisoned clouds...
TWENTY-SIX
For the past two days, Bryn Gunning had felt a tickle in her throat, a sure sign she was coming down with a head cold or some kind of virus she had probably picked up from one of her fifth-grade students. During the school year, somebody was always sick and the viruses survived by tag team propagation, as she called it. Sometimes it seemed as if schools were just incubators for the evolution of the super flu that would one day create an extinction event for the human race. Or, maybe she was feeling sorry for herself at the thought of yet another illness wracking her body for the next three to six weeks.
She’d been getting plenty of rest and taking echinacea, zinc and mega-doses of vitamin C since the first sign of the cold, hoping to nip it in its viral bud, but that strategy always amounted to little more than hopeless optimism. At least, she reasoned, she’d go down swinging.
Thunderstorms jarred her from sleep and the uncomfortable dream she’d been having about
difficulty swallowing. Tangled up in her bed sheets, she wrestled her way out of bed and stumbled toward the bathroom in her fuzzy bunny slippers. Without warning, she began coughing and couldn’t stop. It was a dry cough and soon she was wheezing, unable to catch her breath. Flicking on the bathroom light, she grabbed a cup and tried to fill it with tap water while her body was wracked with spasms.
She managed to get a mouthful into the cup and half of that into her mouth, then sprayed it across the mirror as another round of coughing doubled her over. Hacking, she had the sensation that something was caught in her throat— and it was trying to get out!
With trembling fingers she reached into her mouth and grabbed something hard and pulled. The size of a large button, it had thin, twitching legs. Disgusted, she flung it into the sink and it crawled around the basin—a cockroach. Backing away from the sink, she bumped against the door and wiped her saliva-sticky hands against her oversized nightshirt, panting. Then the panting degraded into more coughing.
She spat three more wiggling cockroaches out of her mouth.
Weeping and shaking in revulsion, she gagged as she imagined them swarming in her stomach and crawling up her throat. On hands and knees, she crossed to the toilet, flung up the lid and gripped the edge of the bowl a moment before the torrent of vomit surged up her esophagus. Clear fluid, streaked with blood and riddled with squirming cockroaches, centipedes and spiders spilled out of her and flowed down the side of the toilet bowl. Desperately, she reached for the handle to flush the chitinous mass down the drain, but many of the bugs scrambled up the porcelain and dropped to her tile flooring. They wriggled and twitched and scuttled toward her legs.
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