Karyn’s eyes were wide and fearful, unfocused on Nail, unfocused on anything. But either she’d heard him come in, or she was pretty good at guessing. “Somebody’s coming. Somebody’s coming now. We need to run.”
“What about Van Horn?”
She gave no sign that she’d heard him, and for a moment he thought maybe she’d been having a nightmare. She wasn’t exactly in the here and now these days anyway.
The hesitation lasted a few seconds before he tossed it aside. He’d been at this way too long to ask questions. He chambered a round in his pistol. “Come on,” he said, again with no effect.
He took Karyn’s hand. Karyn obligingly stood, just as if this were one of her usual walks, but Nail could hear her rapid, frightened breathing. “It’s gonna be okay,” he said. He ducked into his room, grabbed his emergency pack, and led Karyn out to the main space.
Now what? He couldn’t see anything to the left or right, and gazing across the main area through the blown-out windows of the old cafeteria didn’t reveal anything, either. Moonlight coming through the distant holes in the wall made it worse, creating threatening patterns of light and shadow where it was just as likely that no real threats hid.
Maybe she’s just freaking out. Maybe that’s all this is.
Something cracked across the way, a sharp sound that echoed in the hollowed-out space.
“I can’t . . . ,” Karyn said. “I can’t . . . I can’t see!”
“Shh, shh.” Nail took Karyn’s hand once again. How was this going to work? Somebody was out front, blocking the main way and probably coming toward them. It didn’t make sense to leave Van Horn, not after all this shit, but it was gonna be hell getting both him and Karyn out of here. Probably have to get Van Horn to move at gunpoint, hoping his sense of self-preservation was strong enough. Then maybe hug the wall and take the long way out to where he’d parked his car at the side of the building.
It might not even be that bad. Maybe I ought to just fight it out.
Nonetheless, he headed toward Van Horn’s cell, Karyn in tow. Somebody was coming; he had little doubt of that. Best be ready.
The thought was interrupted when a line of fire bloomed into existence, cutting across the open space behind him. Nail pulled Karyn forward with him, then dropped to one knee. Two figures stood at the source of the fire, details lost in the flickering light. He squeezed off a couple of shots at them, then pushed off again, half blinded by the sudden brightness, eager to get away. The heat dried his skin and sent searing blasts of air into his lungs at every breath.
Get Van Horn and . . .
He pulled up short. There was a thing in front of Van Horn’s cell door, not ten feet away, a glistening, gray, undulating mass about the size of a couch. Firelight danced in reflections down its length. For a moment, his mind flailed for an explanation, substituting and discarding a rapid series of absurd possibilities. It was a big sack of garbage. A water bed. An inflatable raft.
The gray thing suddenly reared up, pulling the top two-thirds or more of its body off the floor. The entire bottom side of the thing was a huge mouth, surrounded with dozens or hundreds of slimy gray tendrils. Nail forgot about Van Horn, pushed off to start running, slipped on dirt and pebbles—
Half a dozen long tendrils shot out and grabbed him, wrapping around him at ankle, thigh, waist, and left arm. He fell, landing with a heavy thud that smashed his breath from his body.
The thing started to reel him in. He braced his feet against the floor, but he might as well have put them on a sheet of ice for all the good it did.
Finally, he remembered his gun. He pulled the trigger three times, scored three hits, and at each one, he saw a ripple go through the creature’s body, blue-white goo pouring out of the bullet holes. They didn’t seem to faze the creature at all.
Five feet. Less. From here, the smell coming off the creature was overpowering, a heavy, nauseating stench of decay and corruption and something that smelled a lot like semen. Nail screamed and scrabbled at the concrete floor. No good.
He pulled the trigger again and again.
Two more tendrils whipped out of the creature’s maw and wrapped around his legs.
Two more shots, three, whitish goo flying in sticky, sloppy streams, and now Nail was screaming at the top of his lungs.
The thing slopped forward, covering his feet with its mouth. Dozens of the tendrils wrapped around his legs and pulled him in farther. It moved up to his knees. His waist.
He dumped the pack on the floor. A concussion grenade rolled loose of the pile. He scrabbled for it, knocked it away, lunged, and finally grabbed it. Then he pulled the pin, tossed the grenade over to the far side of the thing, and covered his ears with both hands.
The detonation was huge. Waves rippled through the creature’s gray, gelatinous bulk, and it tipped over, curling up on its side. A shock wave that felt like a three-hundred-pound hammer swung by a pissed-off giant slammed into Nail’s body and smashed his head into the floor. He screamed, or at least he thought he did. Everything in his vision went fuzzy. Distantly, through a haze of pain so immense he had nothing to compare it to, he heard laughter.
“Grab her!” somebody said. Van Horn, it sounded like.
“Karyn!” Nail shouted.
A cry of pain or fear came from nearby. Nail forced himself to pull the world into focus, though mostly he just wanted to black out. There were four or five figures arranged in an irregular line, maybe twenty feet off. One of them had Karyn.
Van Horn pointed at Nail. “Please kill him.”
The man on the end began chanting and waving his arms. Nail thought of a trash can lighting itself on fire from even farther off.
His gun was still in hand. The guy was blurry, doubled, and Nail’s hands none too steady, but he fired before the guy could finish working whatever horror he was preparing to unleash. One bullet, high in the belly, and the guy went down shrieking.
Sorry, guy. Meant to aim a little higher.
At the realization that maybe Nail’s stinger hadn’t been pulled quite yet, Van Horn stepped back behind Karyn. “On second thought, let’s get out of here,” he said.
Nobody moved for a moment; then Nail squeezed off another shot. The group fled, laughing, pulling Karyn along behind them. She yelled once, and then was gone.
I’m fucked. I’m so fucked. Karyn, too. He pushed with his arms, trying to get to his feet, but barely managed to lurch forward. A convulsion racked his guts, and he vomited.
He tried again. Put one foot on the floor, tried to stand—
And fell over.
Concussion. Bad one. His gut spasmed again, not quite hard enough to cause him to puke. His head swam. What if I black out? What if they come back?
Anna. Focus on that. He had to talk to Anna, let her know what happened. He managed to fumble his phone out of his pocket. After what seemed like twenty minutes of concentration intense enough to split his head open, he even managed to dial. A tinny ring came from the speaker.
The call went to voice mail. He tried Genevieve. The phone rang once. Twice. By the third ring, he was having difficulty remembering who he was trying to call. Anna? No, that wasn’t right. He’d already called Anna. He shook his head to clear it, triggering a surge of nausea.
Voice mail again. Genevieve’s.
This was bad. He tried to get up, made it to one knee, and a new wave of dizziness collapsed on him, crushing him back to the earth.
He was fucked. Karyn was fucked. Anna and Genevieve might be fucked, too. He needed a plan, something. He tried to get his mind together, dragging shreds of thought in one after another, slowly, like hauling in fish that might slip the hook.
Somehow, after what felt like an hour of idea-fishing, all those pieces added up to something.
“Fuck,” he said. He had no other plan, though, and no hope of generating one.
He dialed DeWayne.
“’Sup?” DeWayne said. “You on your way? Or just checkin’ to see if I burned the pla
ce down?”
“I need a favor.”
Silence on the phone, so total that Nail checked to see if the call had been dropped. It hadn’t. “You there?” he said.
“Sorry—I passed out there for a second. Shock. Did you say you need a favor? From me? Because that shit is, like, against the natural order of things.”
“Go to the closet in the bedroom.” Oh, shit, am I really gonna do this?
He closed his eyes and thought of Karyn’s cry as she was hauled away. Yeah, he was gonna do this. “There’s a safe.”
“Sure is. Big motherfucker, too.”
“The combination is forty-one, twelve, nineteen. Open it.”
“Oh, let me see here. Forty-one. Damn, you got some small numbers on here. Where the hell is forty-one?”
Jesus. This was going to take an hour. Nail felt drowsy. It’d be nice to take a quick nap and let DeWayne get his shit together. That was a dangerous thought, though. He forced himself to focus.
“Okay. Forty-one.” Sounds of movement, a grunt, presumably as DeWayne sat down in front of the safe. “Twelve.”
“I don’t need a play-by-play. Just open it!”
“Relax, man. I’ll get there.”
One . . . Two . . .
“Motherfucker! You paid Clarence off and you still have this lying around? You rob a bank or what? Nice piece, too. Three-eighty?”
Three . . . Four . . . “Get the keys to the car. They’re on the bottom, in front of the money. Hard to miss. Don’t touch the gun. Don’t touch the cash.”
“You need somebody to hold some of this for safekeeping, you just let me know, huh?”
“The car keys. Get the car keys.”
“Key, bro.”
“What?”
“It’s just one key.”
“Are you seriously fuckin’ correcting my fuckin’ grammar right now?”
“No, man. Just makin’ sure. I mean, what if there’s supposed to be more?”
“There’s just one goddamn key. Do you have it?”
“Yeah. I got it.”
“Great. Get my car and come pick me up. And move your ass. Don’t dick around here, DeWayne.”
“I got it. Where you at?”
“East of Doyle Gardens. Pico and High Street.”
“Damn, man. Even I don’t go down there.”
“Just get here quick, okay? I’m hurt, so don’t screw around.” Maybe if he repeated it enough, it would sink into his brother’s thick skull. “See you in twenty.”
“Cool.”
Nail hung up. His head swam, and his surroundings seemed viewed through a thick, swirling liquid. His earlier thought, that of taking a quick nap, returned, this time followed by alarm bells and klaxons. You didn’t go to sleep after a concussion, right? That was bad. He’d had two in high school, when he played football, and they’d always warned him about that. Neither had been anything like this, though. This was like being drunk, having the flu, and having somebody turning the crank on a clamp positioned on his skull, really leaning into the fucker, all at the same time.
He took a long, deep breath.
To his right, something moved. He turned his head, fighting off another wave of dizziness.
A woman, clambering awkwardly over the remains of a shattered wall. Something was odd about it—her arms were bent, curled inward, and she seemed to be using her wrists to brace herself against the wall as she came over.
Nail panicked for a moment when he couldn’t remember what he’d done with his gun, then found it down by his leg. “Don’t move,” he said, hauling the weapon up to level it at her. His hand shook, but he thought he had six bullets left. Lots of chances.
She was one of Van Horn’s—Nail remembered her, though she hadn’t been in the lineup he’d recently been shooting at. Hair a limp shock of blond that had once been bleached, dirty jeans, and a blouse that might have been blue under layers of bloodstains. Her skin hung loose as though she’d lost a lot of weight in a very short period of time. Reminded him of his grandma, how she’d wasted away before his eyes like an ice cube in a fry pan. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold the gun on her, didn’t know how much longer he could hold the gun at all. He wanted to rest so bad. Sweat ran down his face in cold rivulets, dripping steadily off the end of his nose, and he was breathing way too fast. He became aware of other pain, in his shoulders, his back, his ribs. Might be more than his head was fucked-up, he realized.
The woman stood uneasily, and she stepped forward into the faint glow of the distant streetlight. Blood pumped slowly from a wound on her head. Nail got a better look at her hands now, and everything was wrong there. They were a mess of bandages, crusted with dried blood, and he was pretty sure she was missing most of her fingers. They curled inward at the wrist, as though she was unconsciously protecting the wounds.
“Get the hell out of here,” he said. “And do not come back.”
The woman grinned at him, stumbled, and caught herself against part of the wall with her maimed left hand. A shriek of agony and laughter sent gooseflesh all the way up Nail’s back. She found her footing and pulled her hand in, cradling it against her belly.
“Where’s Van Horn?” she asked.
“I will shoot you dead, lady, you come one step closer.”
“Will you?” She said something he couldn’t make out, and a fragment of brick the size of his fist slid down a pile of debris, then floated into the air near her shoulder. “Where’s Van Horn?” she asked again.
He could shoot her, he thought—but if he missed, he had a pretty good idea where that brick would end up. The thought of it hitting him in the head almost made him throw up again.
“Where’s Rain?” she asked.
“What the hell are you talking about? Just get the fuck out of here!”
She stepped forward again and staggered, clutching her wounded hands. Drops of blood hit the pavement. The whole time, the brick didn’t so much as waver. When she straightened, she looked him over. Her tongue flicked out and licked the corner of her mouth. Saliva glistened on her chin. Jesus, I got a live one here.
“You throw that brick, you best not miss,” Nail said. “What are you still doing here?”
Confusion washed over her features. “I ran into a post.”
“Maybe you should watch where you’re going.”
“It’s dark, asshole.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
“Or what? You gonna put me in a cell, too?” the woman asked. “Make me do tricks?”
“Jesus,” Nail said. This was bullshit. This was all bullshit. His head was throbbing, crying on its own behalf even as it compiled complaints from the rest of his body, and he was arguing with somebody who wasn’t on speaking terms with reality.
She just stood there, either awaiting an answer or simply looking for an opportunity.
Headlights sent shadows swinging through the school, then stopped moving, sending blazing rectangles of light through the windows, sending rats scurrying for their dark warrens. DeWayne, Nail prayed, not somebody else wanting to crash the party tonight.
A car door slammed.
“Yo!”
DeWayne. He’d actually come. Unbelievable.
“Hold up!” Nail yelled.
The woman didn’t take her attention from Nail, despite the glare of the headlights raking her face. Not for even half a second. She shuffled backward to get out of the light.
The sound of quick footsteps and DeWayne, never one to listen to goddamn instructions, came running up and skidded to a halt. “What the fuck?” he said, staring big-eyed at the scene. Oddly, Nail’s first thought was that DeWayne had shaved his head since the last time he saw him. It had been cornrows before, for years. Also, he’d grown a seriously ugly mustache, a ratty thing that Nail guessed was supposed to be a handlebar but wasn’t quite up to the job.
“Where’s Van Horn?” the woman asked again. “So help me, I’ll kill you both.”
DeWayne looked as frightene
d as Nail felt. “What in the hell is going on here?”
“She’s insane,” Nail said. He thumbed back the hammer on his pistol.
The brick rotated slowly. “Don’t,” the woman warned him.
“Holy shit, is that a flying brick?” Then, without waiting for an answer or even pausing for air, DeWayne continued. “Okay, look.” He held up both hands, palms out, presumably to show just how harmless and reasonable he was. “This shit doesn’t need to get all crazy. We’re all friends here, well, maybe not yet, but we could be, I guess. I don’t know what the misunderstanding is, but we can get this all worked out. Hey, sweetheart, what’s your name?”
“What?” the woman asked.
“Your name. I’m DeWayne. This here’s my brother—he’s a tough guy, so you can call him Nail. What’s your name?”
Oh my God, Nail thought.
To his amazement, the woman answered, “Uh . . . Sheila.”
“Okay, see, that’s better? Bro, you wanna lower the gun?”
“You want me to shove it up your ass?” Nail said.
“I guess we’re not ready for that yet,” DeWayne said, unfazed. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but we’ll figure it out, huh?” He looked uneasily from Sheila to Sheila’s brick to Nail and back. “Is this a money thing? He owes you some money or something? We can get that straightened out toot sweet.“
I’m gonna kill you next, Nail wanted to say, but Sheila was already talking.
“It’s not money,” she said. “I need . . . I need help.”
“I can see that,” DeWayne said, his voice mellow and reasonable. “Maybe we get you to a hospital or something, then you can settle your beef with this asshole later?”
“A hospital can’t help me. I need Van Horn. Belial. I need Rain. Something.”
“It’s August, baby,” DeWayne said. “It’s not going to rain.”
“Not . . .” Sheila gestured skyward. “Rain. She’s . . . a person.” A rivulet of blood trickled from her nose. She extended her tongue to a point, curled it, and licked the redness from her upper lip. It left a wide smear.
“You know this Rain?” DeWayne asked Nail.
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