Fire And Steel (The Merryweather Chronicles Book 2)

by Lesley Woodral

  “He should.” The older woman said, eyeing Claire up and down before focusing on her decorated eye patch. She cocked her head sideways and her crooked smile was almost straight. She squinted and said. “You’re somebody, aren’t you?”

  “I’m Claire Moody.” Claire matched the woman’s stare with one of her own, giving her a Cheshire cat grin. She narrowed her eye at her and said. “And everybody’s somebody, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Tuesday laughed softly and said. “Be careful, Madge. This one has more courage than good sense, I think.”

  Madge was quiet for a long time as she stared at Claire, before shaking her head. “I think you’re wrong about this one, Day. I think she might have an inkling.” The woman smiled suddenly and said. “You know the little creep was right, yes? The streets aren’t safe in Matheson, especially not for a girl like you, Claire Moody. Yet, here you are, all alone and fighting devils in the dark. You’re most definitely somebody, that’s for certain. I’m just not sure you know who that is?”

  Claire looked from Madge’s intense gaze to the faces of her other would be rescuers and resisted the urge to laugh. These people were crazy. She hooked her hair over her ear and glanced at the shadowed street around them. Main street was empty except for them, a cold wind kicking a few dead leaves across the pavement. The glow of Christmas lights seemed out of place, making it all seem that much more surreal.

  Madge refocused her gaze on Claire’s eye patch and asked. “Can I see under it?”

  Claire was so taken aback that any response would’ve been a long time coming, but she was saved the trouble when Tuesday said. “Jesus, Madge! How about a little tact?” She rushed to apologize, but Claire stopped her.

  “It’s okay. It really is.” Claire reached up and lifted the eye patch and let all 3 get a long look before replacing it. Her cheeks were burning, but she kept her expression neutral as she studied Madge’s thoughtful gaze and said. “Did you get a good look?”

  Madge’s face had softened and her voice was gentle as she said. “Thank you.”

  The young man behind her had made a soft noise of surprise at the sight of the unblemished skin beneath the patch, a grunt of surprise. Madge responded as if he had spoken words. She said. “You’re right, Gorge. She is definitely somebody special. Worth watching out for.”

  “You people are crazy.” Claire said, voicing her earlier thought without thinking. But, instead of getting angry, Madge laughed. Tuesday was smiling too. Claire shook her head and glanced around at the empty street surrounding them. She then looked at the others and said. “Let me drive you all home. It’s the least I can do, after you helped me with Albert.” She didn’t really expect them to accept.

  Madge surprised her by saying. “Why not?”

  Chapter 30

  Chief Derek Teague drove slowly beneath softly glowing Christmas lights, watching his town with a quiet sense of uneasy hopefulness. Streetlights were flickering to life as the light of day faded and shadows grew longer and colder. The sun had set less than an hour earlier and the twilight painted the sky shades of orange and violet, signaling the end of the day's patrol. For him, at least.

  He passed glowing storefronts and empty sidewalks, the Christmas lights painting the snow still lining the streets different shades of green and red, and he shivered. Snow in December should have been a welcome sight. Something to put everybody more firmly In the holiday spirit. But, this year, all he could see was a possible obstacle. Was this going to make hunting grohlm harder or easier? It seemed early to him, this winter weather, but he didn’t know if it was something to do with the strangeness of Matheson or just regular climate change. The weather was getting weird everywhere in the world, but this felt somehow different. More sinister.

  He shook his head to dispel his spiraling thoughts. If he let himself dwell on all of it, the craziness that was his life now, he would go crazy. He knew it without being told. He had to let himself decompress. And, above all, he couldn’t let himself bring it home with him.

  The radio crackled as the night crew patrolled, keeping to the streets and careful of any possible ambush points. They weren’t hunting grohlm, not alone and at night. They mainly watched for anybody foolish enough to be out past curfew. And some people were that careless and stupid, even with the disappearances. Mostly teenagers and young people, rebelling for the sake of rebelling. Nobody today trusted like they used to. Especially when it came to police and the government. The worse part was that Teague couldn’t blame them. Not really. He was on the inside, swimming among the cogs and hidden machinations, and there were still things kept from him. By the town. By the few council members that would bother returning his calls. Hell, even by his own companions. Men that he had trusted for years. Men that he called friends. They kept secrets, even as they risked their lives by helping him.

  He didn’t fault them their secrets, God knew he had his own, but he couldn’t help but feel that their secrets would someday get him killed.

  He felt his cautious optimism slip a little and changed the direction of his thoughts. How long before the curfew was finally lifted? Not long, he hoped. But also not too soon. With the rate he and the hunters were going, the grohlm couldn’t hold up much longer. They had killed hundreds already, maybe even a thousand. The chaos of every fight made it hard to accurately count kills, but he himself killed dozens during each skirmish. And he couldn’t see that he was fighting any harder or better than his men.

  Surely, there couldn't be as many as Brandon Merryweather feared. Not tens of thousands?

  Teague's house was a glowing beacon at the end of the cul de sac, waiting placidly for him to arrive. The neighborhood was quiet. His neighbor’s houses were covered in decorations, more thoroughly decorated than the rest of the town. Teague's house was no different. An 8 foot tall snowman towered over his front lawn, held aloft by the little fan hidden in its base, and cast a long shadow over the hood of his car as he parked at the curb. The house glowed golden in the night, chasing away his dark thoughts and making him smile as he shut down everything and got his bearings.

  It was snowing again when he climbed out of the squad car, closing the door and pausing to listen to the night. It was quiet, except for sounds of his neighbor's televisions and Christmas music, playing in one of the other houses. He left the assault rifle resting on the passenger seat, covered by his heavy vest. Not exactly standard protocol, but nobody would bother the locked police car, not in Matheson, and he didn't want Rachel to see him with such an ugly gun. She'd already made her uneasiness at his new position well known, despite the bump in pay and the added authority. Before the promotion, she had been after him to put in for a transfer out of Matheson, not caring about the possible commute or whether he would have to go back to patrolling to get one.

  If she saw him with a machine gun, he'd never hear the end of it.

  If she thought it odd that he wanted the house lit up all the time, day or night, she didn't say. Maybe she liked it that way too? With Christmas break starting in a few days, Teague knew that his job was about to get a lot harder. Even if every parent in town kept their kids on short leashes and under lock and key, some might still be lost. The Grohlm didn't need darkness to kill, just preferred it, and if a child was alone or unguarded for any length of time, they were in danger. But he couldn’t just come out and tell everybody that. Not without causing a panic and not without losing the small amount of authority he now had.

  Once again pushing away grim thoughts, Teague headed for the front door, his boots crunching in the unbroken snow on his front path. He would have to shovel the sidewalk in the morning, before he left for work, otherwise Rachel might do it herself. He knew it wasn’t popular or politically correct, but he still thought there were some things a husband was better built to take care of.

  Of course, Rachel would punch him in the arm if he said that out loud. So he avoided the subject by getting to those jobs first as often as possible.

  The sound of crunc
hing snow behind him made Teague spin, pulling the Glock from his hip in one smooth motion. He aimed at the shadows behind him, staring hard for movement. Nothing.

  There was nothing there. No movement. Snapping on the light clipped to the shoulder of his uniform, he moved slowly. Walking carefully back to the parked car, he bent and checked beneath it. Nothing.

  Standing up, he turned off the light and listened, waiting for another sound. But, other than the ticking of the cooling engine and the muffled sounds from his neighbors, there was nothing else. But that didn't mean anything. Keeping the Glock in hand, Teague scanned the surrounding houses and moved toward the front door of his house. He didn't put the gun away until he was inside and the door was closed and locked behind him.

  He stood in the front hall for a long moment, just breathing and holding his gun tight against his leg. The house was warm, with the smell of food drifting from the kitchen and the sound of the television going in the living room. Rachel called out from the living room. "You're late, love. I left your dinner in the microwave." There was a smile in her voice.

  Sliding the gun into the holster on his hip, he un-clipped it and placed it on the table beside the hall closet. He emptied his pockets into the pretty porcelain bowl the gun lay beside; wallet, change, and keys. Hanging his coat in the closet, he rubbed his face with his hands and tried to shake off the memories of the day's hunt.

  Rachel was on the living room couch, watching a cartoon. Frosty The Snowman was playing on TV. The baby was on the floor at her feet, playing with a pile of plastic blocks. Rachel looked up, smiling, as Teague slid onto the couch beside her. Sighing loudly, he pulled her close and nuzzled her neck. Laughing, she pushed him back. "Derek, your nose is ice cold. Quit it." She laughed harder when he slid his hand along her bare leg. She was in a tee-shirt and shorts. Her legs, smooth and pretty, were tucked underneath her. They pebbled with gooseflesh as he ran his icy hand along their length. Squealing, she thumped his chest with a fist and kept pushing at him. "Back, I say. Back." She was using her lion tamer voice and trying to stifle her laughter.

  Laughing, he relented and got off the couch, getting down onto the floor with the baby. On his hands and knees, he blew a raspberry at his daughter's face. Lyndsey was almost 2 and she laughed at her daddy's funny faces the same way that she laughed at every thing else. Like an angel.

  She was still laughing when the living room window exploded inward and grohlm poured into the light. Icy wind poured in behind a living nightmare of gnashing teeth and animal stink and, at the same instant, every other window in the house shattered. The sound of chittering and howling grohlm drowned out the sound of Frosty's singing.

  Rachel screamed and Derek felt his insides go loose and hot, but he didn't panic. Snatching the baby up from the floor, he leapt to his feet, dragging Rachel with him, out of the living room. Shoving Lyndsey into Rachel's arms, he had time to shove them both into the hall closet, before the first of the grohlm leapt at him from the living room doorway.

  Snatching the Glock up from the hall table, Derek spun and fired as the lizard slammed into him, sending them both crashing to the floor. He shouted at the top of his lungs as he fired again, splashing hot stinking blood onto his face, and the lizard quivered against him. Even as it died, more appeared at the end of the hall and at the open doorway to the living room. He fired into the grohlm, bellowing to keep their attention on him and not on what might be in the closet behind him. They screeched and fell, thrashing at the floor and clawing over one another as they came on. Wave after wave.

  Teague was still shouting as the gun ran out of ammunition and the first grohlm, a thing with the face of a goat, came within arm's reach of him.

  Rachel held Lyndsey close as they huddled inside the closet, listening to Derek scream and fire his gun. After a few seconds, the shouting and the gunfire stopped, but the sounds of snarling and howls from the monsters that had crashed through the windows seemed to intensify. It sounded like they were tearing the house apart.

  Rachel held Lyndsey with one arm as she held the knob tight with her other hand. She was too frightened to scream, but she would moan against her clenched teeth every time something thumped against the closed door. The door opened outward, so she didn't worry overmuch about them breaking it down. But those animals walked like men. They might know how to open doors, even locked ones.

  Lyndsey was crying against Rachel's shirt, clutching tight with her chubby fists. The inside of the closet was pitch black, close and cloying with the smell of dust and shoe leather. Rachel was afraid to turn the light on. What if they were drawn to the light?

  The sounds outside the closet had died down and Rachel began to hope that the things had left, when the knob jumped in her hand and began to turn. She tried to hold it tight. Lyndsey began to scream again and the knob twisted beneath Rachel's sweaty hand, slipping through her grasp. The door jerked open and she fell back, clutching her daughter tight against her chest, and blinked at the sudden light flooding into the closet. Derek stood in the open doorway, covered in blood and blinking wide wild eyes at her. His shirt was torn in a dozen places and his face had a long gash down his right cheek. "Come on." He said, his voice a fierce whisper. "We don't have much time."

  Pulling his wife and daughter from the closet, he led them through the hall to the open front door. Rachel kept the baby's face against her chest as she stepped around the tangle of monstrous corpses littering the floor. The big pools of black blood were harder to avoid and Rachel had to move carefully to avoid slipping. She was barefoot and had to swallow the urge to gag as her feet came down in the blood, still warm, and onto other things that sometimes squished and burst between her toes.

  Derek no longer held his gun, she noticed, but carried a hooked ax in his right hand and a short curved sword in his left. Both were black with gore and bits of broken bone and flesh, dripping thickly onto the floor.

  Crouching at the doorway, Derek peered out into the night for a long time before turning and looking at her. He was about to say something but his eyes went over her shoulder and popped wide. Roaring silently, he threw himself toward her and the baby.

  Screaming, Rachel fell sideways, slipping on the gore underfoot, and landed on her hip. She somehow kept the baby from the nastiness they fell onto. A rusty sword blade cut through the air where her head had been only a moment before. The blade buried into the wall and the bear wielding it grunted. Roaring loudly, it shook its massive head as it tried to pull it free.

  Before it could yank the weapon free, Derek was on it. Splitting its face with the ax, he drove a boot into the thing's chest and sent it crashing backwards. The ax bound in the monster's skull and was torn from Derek's grasp. He didn't waste time trying to go back for it.

  Catching Rachel by the arm, he hauled her to her feet and pulled her outside with him. Her bare feet crunched in the snow, the cold biting painfully, but she didn't care. The passenger side door of Derek's squad car was open and she ran for it before Derek could tell her to. He followed close behind, trying to look everywhere at once. She scrambled into the car, just ahead of Derek, who had to run around to the driver's side. Once inside, with both doors closed and locked, the family allowed themselves a moment to wrap arms around one another. Lyndsey was still snuffling and Rachel was trying to talk, but Derek hushed her. "Not yet." He said, kissing her to shut her up. "I'll explain it all later, but, right now, we have to go." Starting the car and putting it into gear, he backed the car out of the driveway and pointed it toward the station. The tires kicked up snow as they rushed away from their ruined home. Looking at Rachel, Derek squeezed her hand and said. "We have to warn everybody before it's too late."

  Claire drove slowly as she took her new friends home, listening to their odd and lively banter as she watched the road. Madge’s interest in what lay beneath her eyepatch reminded her of the talk she and Mr. Underhill had on the park bench, so long ago, and her original intention when she came to town tonight. She’d wanted to find Un
derhill and tell him everything, just in case something happened to her and Brandon. She knew it was a mistake, that he would just think she was crazy or unstable or whatever and then her parents would be called. Doctors and Psychiatrists would be brought in and she would never see Brandon again.

  She banished those unthinkable thoughts and said. “So, what do you guys think of all the craziness going on?”

  The long silence that followed her question was the strangest and most awkward that she’d ever suffered through in her short life. She was mortified. What in the hell was she doing?!!

  Then Madge said. “I take it you mean the army of vicious little monsters responsible for most of the recent deaths in Matheson?” There was a smile in her voice, though her tone was slightly condescending. She went on. “Or is it the demon shadowing you that has you so terrified?”

  Tuesday just stared at the other woman, eyes popping in their sockets. In a tight whisper, she said. “Tact, Madge. We’ve discussed this.”

  Madge didn’t answer her friend. Her reflection stared at Claire in the rear view mirror, her eyes unreadable.

  The sigh that escaped Claire’s clenched teeth was equal parts surprise and relief and she said. “What the hell is happening to our town? Can any of you just answer me that one simple question?”

  “The question isn’t so simple.” Madge said. Behind her, Gorge watched the empty streets they passed with tightly coiled intensity. Before getting into the SUV, Madge had properly introduced herself and her son to Claire. Gorge was the extremely large silent type. He and his mother ran a tattoo parlor next door to Tuesday’s record store, Vinyl Gods. They were also her neighbors away from work, living in the same trailer park.