Beau walked into the room wearing a shoulder rig with a handgun that would’ve made Detective Harry Callahan envious. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Disney’s Fangtasia,” I wheezed. “And you’re gonna need a bigger gun.”
“How many?” Suki growled.
“Uh, one.” I didn’t count Theresa. Hell, the thing out there could have brought a pack of rabid Dobermans and I wouldn’t have counted them, either.
“Then why are we standing here?” She ran across the room and leaped through the broken window.
“Save some for me!” Beau yelled as he made a detour to the door in order to follow. He should have had his weapon out before he opened the door. That way he might have been ready when the gigantic arm with camo-colored skin reached in and the huge gray-green hand closed around his face. Then again maybe nothing would have made him ready enough: the hand twitched and there was an audible crunch as Beau’s skull imploded. As he dropped, I pointed the Glock at the mismatched mass in the doorway and emptied the magazine.
It must have done some damage. The creature bellowed and hunkered down, turning back to peer in at me as the hammer repeatedly clicked on the empty chamber. Then a guttural but ululating battle cry erupted behind it—someone had been watching way too much Xena. The thing turned around and there was a wet smacking sound that cut the cry off in mid yi-yi-yi.
There was a serious weapons locker in the basement with a bazooka, rocket launcher, and a couple of heavy-caliber machine guns. I was turning in that direction when the monster turned back and began squeezing through the open door.
“Hey,” I said, “you can’t do that!”
“I can’t?” it purred. Purred like a lion, that is.
“I didn’t invite you in!”
“File a claim with the grievance committee.” It was taking some effort: seven-foot doors do not easily accommodate nine-foot monsters. Still, it would be on top of me before I could reach the basement stairs.
I made it as far as the den, picked up an end table and tore off a sturdy wooden leg. I turned as it crouched to work its way through the interior doorway. As the one arm was momentarily positioned behind him to push against the frame, I darted forward and drove the splintered end of my makeshift stake into the center of its massive chest with all the preternatural strength I could muster.
It should have pulped the creature’s heart. Instead, there was a muffled “clank” and the chair leg rebounded in my grasp. The monster paused and waggled a finger at me as if to say “naughty, naughty.” I glimpsed the glint of metal through the ruined patch of flesh in the middle of its chest.
There was no way I could get to a weapons locker in time, unlock it, and load something that had a prayer of stopping this thing. If I lured it out and into the cemetery it would only make a puree of The Neighbors. I could blow out the pilot-light in the stove, turn up the gas, let it build up, and blow us all to kingdom come—if the monster was willing to wait around for a half-hour.
Indecision had paralyzed me and now the thing was through the doorway and reaching for me with impossibly long arms. I leaned back and it staggered on its next step forward. A slimy beige band encircled its neck and it grew a second, smaller head beside its own: Deirdre’s. Her face and hair were spattered with river mud and a steady trickle of brackish water dribbled behind the monster’s massive legs as though her arrival had rendered him suddenly incontinent.
I grinned through my terror. “What kept you?”
“What do you mean, what kept me?” she gritted. “Who invited it in?”
The thing sniffed. “Ah.” It grinned. “Smells like team spirit . . .”
Deirdre moved higher on the creature’s back and her other arm came up, a hunting knife in her hand. Before I could open my mouth to warn her, she leaned across its huge shoulder and plunged the knife into its chest.
The blade snapped off and dropped to the floor.
“Now that’s interesting,” she said—just before our Goliath threw himself back against the interior wall. Oak planks covered with plaster snapped like a string of firecrackers and, as it leaned forward, I could see Deirdre was embedded in the wall, pushed halfway through the other side.
I didn’t call to her, asking if she was okay. If I couldn’t find a way to stop this thing in the next few minutes, none of us were ever going to be okay again. I turned and ran for the library.
Kyle was coming toward me from my study, a pair of automatic weapons in his clenched hands. “Down!” he shouted, and I dropped into a home plate slide across the hardwood floor as the Uzis made a thunderous, tearing sound.
He stepped past me as he emptied his magazines and I scrambled on into the next room. I had no faith that bullets or even grenades could stop our fanged juggernaut. Think! my brain screamed as my gaze darted around the room. How do you stop a two-legged freight train? The bookshelves mocked me. I checked the desk. Letter opener? Scissors? That was it: if I could just get the thing to run through the house with a pair of scissors . . .
The fireplace was cold: not even a winking ember much less a burning brand to wave in its face. I reached for the heavy iron poker just as the Uzis fell silent and Kyle screamed. It was a short scream, terminated by a sickening crunch. I looked back through the doorway just in time to see his bloodied face hurtling in my direction.
I went down with his mangled corpse on top of me. He was wadded up like a crumpled piece of paper and it cost me precious seconds to extricate myself from his wet and tangled remains. I was up on one knee and suddenly looking into the face of my own death. It smiled. “Goodness, gracious,” it rumbled in a happy voice, “that was thirsty work! I need a drink . . .” Its cavernous mouth opened and its three-and-a-half-inch fangs actually moved, growing another inch!
Even worse, the daggerlike teeth had the color and reflective qualities of stainless steel, not the ivory hue of natural dental enamel.
This time there was no war cry, just an abbreviated roar as an Oriental lion stuck its demonic head between the monster’s massive thighs. It twisted its fantastic visage upwards and its fanged and tusked mouth snapped shut on Frankenvamp’s crotch.
The monster stopped and stood very still for a moment. Perhaps it didn’t have a heart but it did appear to have balls. “That hurts,” it announced conversationally.
As if the rest of its scorched and punctured flesh was mere illusion.
“Then maybe you should lie down!” Deirdre announced from behind it.
The thing suddenly pitched forward and only my enhanced reflexes got me out of the way in time. It crashed, facefirst, into the floor. Deirdre stood just beyond in the den, holding the bunched end of the carpet runner that led from the den to the study. She glared at me. “If we survive this, promise me that I get to kill that body-swapping bitch! But, in the meantime, run!”
I didn’t run. Where was I going to go? And while I like to think I was loath to leave Deirdre and Suki, it was more likely I was too pissed off to retreat any more. I started whacking the thing with the heavy iron fireplace poker, smashing it down on Gargantua’s shaggy head again and again. “Why? Won’t? You? Die?” I grunted, delivering what should have been a killing blow with each syllable.
There was the muffled clanking sound with each blow and the creature’s skull retained its general shape despite the repeated punishment.
Then it started to rise.
“The question is,” the thing rumbled, “why won’t you? I have come to gather data and specimens to assist in researching this issue.” It reached down between its legs and pulled Suki away. She came reluctantly and with her toothy maw full. As it threw her through the side window I saw a freshet of gore where its groin used to be. The fluids that dribbled forth looked more like antifreeze than blood.
“Now,” it said turning back to me, “we can do this the hard way . . . or the easy way.”
I looked at the trail of gore and structural damage behind it. “The hard way?”
It nodded. “Thou
sayest.”
“Nooooo!” With a banshee wail, Deirdre leapt back onto the aircraft carrier expanse of its shoulders as it reached toward me. She had no weapons and her own superhuman strength was clearly inadequate as she grasped its blocky head and tried to snap its tree-stump neck. I tried to thrust the poker into the wound where its heart should be and was rewarded with another metallic sound as the heavy tool met heavier resistance.
The creature ignored its redheaded jockey and focused on me. That was its first mistake. As it plucked the poker from my shock-numbed grasp, Deirdre’s hands flew to the monster’s face, curving into fleshy claws just below its heavy, shelflike brow. Faster than it could reach up to grasp her hands, she plunged the index and second fingers of each into the thing’s eye sockets.
It roared like a wounded elephant and bucked like a rabid mustang. Deirdre and the poker both went flying. My computer preceded her as she skimmed the top of the desk, both ending up impacted against the outer wall, just below the shattered window. The poker smashed through the heavy glass of the giant aquarium like an elongated bullet and the whole thing exploded. A miniature tsunami of water swept me off my feet and just out of the monster’s reach.
But only for a moment.
Kneeling on the newly made beach of rocks and sand and broken glass, I gazed across the tableau of flopping, dying fish and gingerly reached for the red, brown, and white striped Scorpaenidae that some aquarists call a lion-fish. The Pterois volitans looks like a three-dimensional lace doily with candy-cane coloring and fins of gossamer. I picked it up by its fragile tail, careful to avoid the Tinkertoy scaffolding that spread its saillike appendages in multiple directions. The spines were barbed and hollow and capable of delivering painful if not lethal doses of poison and neurotoxins.
I looked up at the monster’s blind and bloody face towering above me. “Stay for dinner?” I hissed. “We’re having fish!” And I snapped the lion-fish up so that it imbedded in the creature’s right cheek like a giant sticky burr.
The monster instinctively swatted at it with its hand which only made matters worse. It howled and I scrambled, pulling myself up to the fireplace and reaching for the glass jar with the heart, sitting on the mantel. I figured a shattered glass jar was better than no weapon at all.
Then I looked a little higher.
I caught the jar one-handed as a battering ram shaped like an arm smashed into the brickwork just below the mantel. The other arm was thrusting forward just inches to my left. “Scraps!” it yelled: “Scraps!”
I danced a complicated two-step, trying to avoid the deadly grab and sweep of those giant limbs as I reached up with my free hand and grasped the hilt of Brother Michael’s great sword. The monster cocked its head as the blade came free of the scabbard with a serpentine hiss. A moment later I was knocked on my back and sliding across the floor as one of its flailing arms connected. It was hard to tell whether the broken glass from the aquarium was doing more damage to the hardwood floor or my nether regions in the process. I suspected both would require refinishing if I survived.
The jar was still intact as I’d cradled it to my chest with the fall. The sword clattered off to my right, just out of immediate reach.
The thing cocked its head again, listening for anything that would give away my position or disposition. I lay still, fighting to get my wind back and trying to reach for the sword without making any further sounds. The jar against my chest was a hindrance and the sword was just out of reach. The back of my shirt was in tatters as, I was sure, was my skin past the subcutaneous layer. The floor was already wet so it was tough to tell how much blood I was losing.
“Scraps!” it bellowed again. “I need visuals! Help me or the precious blood is lost!”
If it were possible for this to get any weirder, well I just didn’t want to know. I turned my attention to slowly setting the jar down off to my left.
“Scraps! To me! Tick-Tock is winding down . . .”
I twisted just enough to settle the jar a couple of feet to my left and then started twisting to the right to reach for the sword.
There was a sound from the front of the house.
The front door closed.
Then the sound of footfalls as someone followed the trail of destruction toward the library.
It smiled in anticipation of reinforcements, the curve of its fanged lips ghastly on that sightless, ruined face.
I turned further, my fingers brushing the sword’s hilt . . . and a small shower of loose coins fell from my pants pocket to chatter and roll across the hardwood floor.
Its head snapped forward and I scrambled amidst the loose change and glass debris to grab the weapon and get out of reach.
“What the hell is going on?” asked the wrong voice as a massive hand clutched my ankle. “Some big boat down by the dock takes off like a bat out of hell as I’m makin’ my approach. Then I come up here and find someone’s started a party without me. The door’s off the hinges, there’s a bunch of fresh stiffs littering the joint, and oh shit!”
The Kid had finally noticed the monster.
“Betrayal!” the thing hissed as it turned toward the new arrival, dragging me with it. “Father was right; she could not be relied upon. May each piece of her rot on earth and again in Hell!”
“Hey, it talks!” He produced his ancient .38 police special like a magician’s card trick: one moment his hand was empty, the next it was pointing a blunderbuss of a revolver at the fearsome intruder. “Put ‘em down and dust, High Pockets, or I’m gonna start squirtin’ metal!”
“Get back, Kid!” I yelled. “This thing’s fast!”
“So’m I. An’ I ast ya: how fast can somethin’ that big—”
These were the last words The Kid ever uttered in the flesh. The creature’s other great hand fell upon J.D.’s head, enclosing it in a giant five-fingered cage. The Kid was fast, as well: he got off four shots, the large-caliber slugs notching grooves across the massive torso as they were deflected by something denser beneath the outer sheath of gray flesh. Then the hand clenched and, like Beau’s, the scrappy little vampire’s head was crushed. It and then the rest of him dissolved in a silent explosion of chalky dust.
“Nooo!” I shrieked. I was still on my back, my leg trapped in the creature’s bear trap grasp, but I’d kept the sword. I pulled a sit-up and swung the blade down across the forearm that held me prisoner. The bright metal sheared through that tree trunk of muscle like a hot knife through whipped cream. The monster screamed, raising its stump of an arm that was now spouting greenish ichors like a Halloween drinking fountain. I screamed along as the hand that was still locked around my lower leg spasmed, crushing my tibia and fibula.
“Ruin!” the monster moaned, clutching the dribbling stump to its armored chest. “I should kill you but my master needs your blood.”
“Where?” I gasped, struggling to my knees. “Where can I find your master, you son-of-a-bitching fiend?” I didn’t think it was any more likely to give up that information than Theresa, but hey, as long as I was still talking I wasn’t blacking out.
“High above the world, O wretch,” it answered. “In his eagle’s aerie he watches over us all. You need not search for it: he will come to you, soon. Or bid you come to him. And you will, you know.”
“Count on it,” I hissed, shuffling forward on my knees. “Just give me the address.”
“He will send it with your wife and daughter.” He leaned toward me. “His power will remake the world.”
He was close enough. I whirled the sword and chopped off the creature’s loathsome head. “Not if I rock his world, first,” I said as the huge head went bouncing across the room.
Somebody put hinges in the floor: it suddenly rose up to hit me in the face.
I slept and dreamed of bat-headed demons.
Chapter Eight
Aside from feeling ravenous, waking up was not the nightmare I expected it to be.
I was in bed. I was clean. And the only immediate discomfort
associated with my crushed left leg was that it was encased in a makeshift traction-splint.
Deirdre was sleeping in a chair next to my side of the bed. The other side of the bed was still empty.
I turned my head and studied her face as she slept. She must have washed up hurriedly for there were still flecks of river mud here and there and she had failed to get all of the twigs and leaves out of her tangled auburn tresses. There were shadows on her face, neck, and arms, as well—the last remnants of bruises that would have lasted for weeks on human skin. A faint line marked the divide where her lip had been split. An eye that had started to swell and close now appeared to have nothing more than the casual application of eye shadow.
The sound of footfalls on the stairs woke her and her eyes fluttered open as Dr. Mooncloud entered the room carrying a pair of goblets on a bed tray.
Taj was short, round, and brown. Her jet-black hair and eyes reflected the fusion of her American Indian and East Indian heritages. Likewise her professional pedigree was a fusion of medicine and mythology with a degree from Johns Hopkins and an internship in her father’s medicine sweat lodge.
Nothing about her suggested that she worked for a vampire enclave in the Pacific Northwest.
“Ah, you are awake, finally.”
“How long have I slept?” I asked, trying to sit up. Deirdre reached behind me and arranged the pillows to give me some back support.
“Two days.”
“Two—?”
“You were in a healing trance,” she explained, settling the tray across my lap. “You should be very hungry, now. I didn’t know whether to bring you warm or cold, so I brought you both.”
I looked down at the goblets, both filled with blood. It took all of my self-control not to grab one and start greedily gulping it down. “How’s Suki?”
“Sleeping. As is Dr. Burton. I’ve got the day shift, he’s got the night. Now, drink.”
“Have you seen Lupé?”
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 13
