J.A. Konrath / Jack Kilborn Trilogy - Three Scary Thriller Novels (Origin, The List, Haunted House)

by J. A. Konrath

Mathison nodded, then crossed his heart.

  There were a few seconds of uncertainty. Josh decided, if he had to act, he’d try to use non-lethal force.

  Then the woman with the prosthetics said, “I’m Deb. This is my husband Mal.” Her voice was raspy.

  “You both got those invitations?” Fran asked.

  Deb nodded.

  “I’m Fran, and my husband Josh. Our son Duncan is in the car. We were invited, too.”

  The tension seemed to dissipate. Josh sensed that like was recognizing like. Deb and Mal had that look Josh knew all too well. That I survived something awful look.

  “Things went bad,” Mal said. “You have no idea what kind of hell is going on here.”

  “Actually,” Fran said. “We do. And we’re ready for it. How many people inside?”

  “Two are dead,” Mal told them. “One of us and one of them. Inside is a cop named Tom, a dancer named Moni, a psychic named Aabir, a biologist named Frank, a woman named Sara, and a ghost hunter named Pang.”

  Deb shook her head. “Pang is possessed.”

  “Possessed?” Josh asked.

  “His eyes turned black and he freaked out.”

  “Chemical agent?”

  “Spirits,” Mal said. “There are at least five. A slave with four arms. A bleeding guy. A guy in a lab coat. A guy in a gas mask. And a guy with an eye patch and a whip. They’re ghosts or demons or something. Guns don’t work on them.”

  Josh let that go for the moment. He’d seen some crazy shit himself and would never automatically reject the unusual. “Anyone else inside?”

  Mal nodded. “Two doctors, Forenzi and Madison. Don’t know what side they’re on. And some guards in gray suits. At least four.”

  “Some people may be down in the tunnels under the house,” Deb said. “It’s a maze down there.”

  “Woof can find them once he gets their scent,” Fran said. “We couldn’t find any blueprints of the house online, so we don’t know the layout. We could use a tour, but if you two want to wait in the van with our son, we understand.”

  Deb and Mal exchanged a look.

  “Cops would take at least an hour to get here,” Deb said to her husband. “If we could even convince them to come.”

  “I’m in if you are. I’m done with running.”

  “Me too.”

  “We’ll do it,” Mal said. “But we want lights and weapons.”

  “Can you handle a firearm?” Josh asked.

  “Guns don’t work on these things. What else you got?”

  He gave Mal his tactical flashlight and his asp; a steep baton that extended when you snapped your wrist out. Fran did the same with Deb, and also gave her a can of pepper spray.

  “Lead the way,” Josh said.

  He sensed their reluctance to go back inside, but they did, which Josh admired.

  “First guy died here.” Mal pointed to the large amount of blood on the floor.

  Fran crouched down, picked up something. “Rubber bug. Looks like a roach.”

  “Rubber?” Mal asked.

  Fran leaned forward and found something else. Something shiny. She held it up. “Bullet casing. You said guns don’t work?”

  “The cop emptied his gun into the one with the four arms. Thing didn’t even flinch.”

  Josh unclipped his spare Maglite and played the beam along the floor, following it up the wall. He walked over, running his fingernail along it, then holding his hand to his nose.

  “Wax. Could the cop be in on this? Using wax bullets instead of real ones?”

  “You mean he’s been bullshitting us?” Mal asked. “He seemed legit, but I don’t know for sure. We just met him.”

  “What’s that?” Fran asked, sweeping her light over to the chairs in the center of the great room.

  Mal made a face. “That’s Wellington. Hon, don’t look.”

  Mal put his arm around Deb, turning her away, while Josh and Fran went to investigate.

  It was pretty awful.

  “Looks like our hunch was right,” Fran said.

  Josh nodded. They’d both seen similar things in Safe Haven.

  “We were too late for this one,” he said. “Hopefully we won’t be too late for the others.”

  Josh looked around the rest of the room. They’d spent several hours reading about Butler House, and Josh had prepared as much as possible. But now that he was inside, he couldn’t get over how creepy it felt. If ghosts really did exist, this is where they’d hang out.

  His radio clicked twice—Duncan’s all clear signal. Woof got on the scent of something and then stood stock-still, growling low in his throat.

  Everyone shined their lights—

  —on a black man with four arms, dragging a machete.

  “That’s who killed Wellington!” Mal said, stepping in front of Deb and raising his asp.

  “Freeze!” Fran ordered, raising her weapon.

  The four-armed man kept advancing, heading for Deb and Mal.

  Josh fired a warning shot, putting three rounds into the floor in front of the man’s feet.

  The supposed ghost stopped, dropped his machete, and then fell to one knee, pulling out a pistol from the back of his ratty pants.

  Fran and Josh let loose. Their AR-15 rifles were loaded with 5.56 NATO cartridges and fired as quickly as they could pull the trigger.

  The target took ten shots in the chest and didn’t drop. Josh adjusted for the head shot, but Fran beat him to it, taking off the back of the ghost’s head, dropping it where it stood.

  “I guess bullets work,” Mal said.

  Josh approached first, sensing his wife flanking him. He kicked away the enemy’s dropped weapon—a Colt 1911—and knelt next to him.

  No pulse, obviously, but definitely made of flesh and blood and not ectoplasm. He touched one of the extra arms and it pulled off without too much effort.

  Fake. Rubber and latex, glued on with spirit gum.

  But he wasn’t wearing body armor. The fact that he took ten hits and didn’t go down scared the shit out of Josh. It was familiar, in a very bad way.

  “He might have been enhanced somehow,” Josh told Fran.

  “Red-Ops?” He heard fear in his wife’s voice.

  “I don’t know.” Josh frowned, and his stomach clenched like a fist. “But if there are others, they’re going to be damn hard to kill.”

  Sara

  Sara stopped screaming.

  The pain was beyond anything she could have ever imagined. Sara hadn’t looked, but she guessed her little finger had been chewed down to the bone. It was so intense, so unremitting, that it almost drowned out every other thought in her head.

  Almost.

  Because part of her brain was still able to think clearly, to focus. This was the worst thing Sara had ever endured, but in the middle of it all a bit of clarity broke through the misery and Sara latched onto it.

  I’m a survivor.

  Sara had lost so much on Rock Island. So much of who she was. She’d been so devastated, so diminished, by the experience, it had resulted in her losing even more. Her son. The one thing she had left. Taken from her.

  And she finally understood why.

  All along, Sara had been drowning in self-pity. Wondering how all of these terrible things could have happened to her. Blaming the universe, and trying to numb the pain rather than deal with it.

  Child services had been right to take Jack. She had been unfit. But even when that happened…

  I’m a survivor.

  She’d taken the hits, and she was still here.

  She’d lost everything, and she was still here.

  She’d tried to kill herself with booze, and she was still here.

  And if this psychotic Lester Paks/Blackjack Reedy ghost demon bastard chewed her entire arm off, Sara knew she would still be here.

  I’m a survivor.

  I’ll survive to straighten my life out.

  I’ll survive to get my son back.

  I will survive
.

  In a sea of agony, Sara latched on to that little Zen lifeboat. All she had to do was get through this one more ordeal.

  As he started on the second finger, Sara closed her eyes imagined the life she once had, and could have again. Her son. A house. A job. Maybe even Frank, because as gentle and funny as he was, Sara knew he was survivor too, and suffering be damned they’d both get through this and—

  “Hey! Ugly pirate guy! I’ll give you something something something to chew on!”

  Frank!

  Sara watched as Dr. Frank Belgium, his broken arm flopping uselessly at his side, ran into the room brandishing a gigantic wooden mallet and smashing a surprised Blackjack Reedy right in his face.

  Blood and sharp teeth went flying. Blackjack went down. And then Moni was on top of him, hitting him over and over again with an iron bar until the monster stopped moving.

  “Oh dear dear dear.” Frank fumbled with the straps on her restraint chair, setting her free and then trying to examine the damage to her fingers.

  Sara didn’t care about her fingers. She threw her arms around Frank’s neck, so overwhelmed with absolute joy that she started bawling.

  “If you need need need some painkiller,” he said, “heroin gets my highest endorsement.”

  “I don’t need anything.” Sara had never spoken truer words. “Except you.”

  “Well… that’s… that’s pretty terrific.”

  “You saved the girl, Doc.” Moni said. “Kiss her already.”

  Sara offered her tilted chin, and Frank kissed her. There was a lot more heat this time, and for a brief, glorious moment, all the pain Sara felt just melted away until the only thing in the whole world was Frank’s lips on hers.

  “Okay,” Moni said, interrupting the moment. “You guys gonna fuck, or are we getting the hell out of here?”

  Frank pulled back enough to look at her, and he had a twinkle in his eye that told Sara he was weighing his options.

  “We’re going,” Sara said, and she noted it was said with some reluctance.

  “Okay. And you might want to put a bandage or something on your hand. It’s gross.”

  Sara finally looked at the damage that had been done, and wondered why she was holding some raw hamburger.

  That’s not raw hamburger. That’s my hand.

  And she promptly passed out.

  Duncan

  Duncan VanCamp sat behind the wheel of the Dodge Caravan and wondered why he wasn’t more scared.

  Though he was just a kid when all the bad stuff happened in Safe Haven, he still thought about it a lot. And sometimes, when he was alone in his room at night, he was frightened enough to turn on his closet light.

  But everything since then had been great. He loved Josh like he was his real dad. He loved living in Hawaii. He had cool friends. He’d even been seeing a few girls. When he went to the beach with Woof and Mathison, girls would flock around him like he was a celebrity. And these weren’t like the girls in his freshman high school classes. These girls were older. One was even eighteen, and she kissed Duncan and they texted each other a lot, even though he told his buddies it wasn’t serious because he was too young to get tied down.

  But now here he was, thousands of miles away from home, helping his parents clean up the mess that began at Safe Haven.

  He should have been freaked out. This wasn’t kid stuff. This was real serious shit. People dying, government cover-ups, experimental military super commandos. But as Mom and Josh had told him too many times to count, praemonitus praemunitus; forewarned is forearmed.

  In other words, if you’re always prepared for anything, you can never be surprised.

  So Duncan took judo classes, and learned to shoot and field strip various firearms, and was able to wake up from a dead sleep and get into the panic room in less than thirty seconds. He didn’t find any of that strange. It was just part of his daily life.

  He checked his watch, then reached for the walkie-talkie on the passenger seat next to the 9mm and tapped the talk button twice, giving his parents the all clear signal once again. The night, and the fields, and the house, was all pretty spooky. But Duncan kept cool. He’d just seen Mom shoot some dude, and it didn’t bug him at all. Dude shouldn’t have shot first. Duh. You can’t expect to act violent and not expect violence in retaliation.

  Praemonitus praemunitus.

  Duncan placed his hands on the steering wheel. The van was parked, the engine not running, but Duncan had already driven three times, even though he still hadn’t gotten his permit, and he was pretty sure he knew what he was doing. He went through the start-up procedure, like Josh had taught him.

  Put on his seatbelt. Done.

  Check to make sure all of his mirrors were adjusted. Done.

  Keys in the ignition, foot on the brake. Done.

  Then Duncan pretended to start the van. In his mind he put it into drive and pulled onto the H2 Freeway in Mililani. He had Jenni, the eighteen-year-old he’d kissed, in the passenger seat. She was wearing a halter top, and her boobs were huge. If Duncan had a chance to kiss her again, he’d have to try to touch one and—

  Something dark appeared in the passenger window.

  Duncan turned and looked, but there wasn’t anything there.

  Weird. He would have sworn that—

  The walkie-talkie that had been on the seat.

  It was gone.

  Duncan looked up, finding the interior light on the ceiling, switching it on. The radio wasn’t on the floor. Could it have fallen between the seat and the door? If so, how?

  He leaned over, trying to see, but the seatbelt only stretched so far. So he unbuckled it, opened the door, and walked to the front of the van. The moon was out, but not very bright. And there were no lights on in Butler House. Only the interior light of the van.

  Then that winked off.

  In Hawaii, even the darkest night was bright with stars, alive with sounds. This place was dark and dead. No frogs, no insects, no birds. The night was like a smothering blanket, covering Duncan’s eyes and ears.

  And he was afraid.

  He hurried around to the passenger side, no longer caring about the radio, much more interested in getting that 9mm pistol Josh had left him in his hand. Duncan swung open the door, reaching for the seat.

  The gun wasn’t there.

  He felt all the old fears come back and climb onto his shoulders, weighing him down, pinning him so he couldn’t react.

  Then he pushed all the fear away. This was being forewarned. Now what did he need to do to protect himself?

  When he didn’t check in, his parents would come back for him. That meant holding his position until they arrived.

  Duncan immediately climbed into the van and crawled into the driver seat. He locked both doors, and rolled up the windows as he hit the overhead light again.

  As soon as it went on, something lunged out of the backseat and attacked Duncan with a scalpel, driving it into the boy’s shoulder.

  Tom

  Torble held the glowing branding iron in front of Tom’s nose.

  “This liquid smoke crap Forenzi insisted I spray all over my body, so I smell like Sturgis Butler burned at the stake, it’s not right. I mean, it seems to scare people just fine. But the odor is off. As I told you in prison today, the real smell of searing flesh is much tastier.”

  Torble tore the buttons off Tom’s shirt, exposing his bare chest. Just as he stepped back, Tom lashed out with his foot, trying to kick away the poker.

  He missed. By a lot.

  “Seriously?” Torble said, looking amused. “That was your big move? How long have you been planning that one?”

  “A while,” Tom admitted.

  “That was pathetic, man. I mean, I’m actually embarrassed for you.”

  “It went better in my head.”

  “How so?”

  “I kicked the poker, it went flying up into the air, and burned my rope off, freeing me.”

  Torble nodded. “That would h
ave been pretty cinematic. But instead we’ll have to settle for this.”

  When the branding iron touched Tom’s chest, the sensation defied description. He’d been hurt before. Badly. Plus there were all the common, human pains everyone had to deal with. Toothaches. Back strains. Ear infections. Kidney stones. Kicked in the balls.

  This was worse than all of that, happening all at once, confined to one small section of Tom’s body, multiplied by ten.

  It hurt like hell.

  The next thing Tom knew, he was being slapped in the face. When he woke up, the pain was still there.

  “You passed out,” Torble said. “And you’re crying. It’s really disappointing, Tom. Aren’t you supposed to be the hero? The one who rushes in to save the day?”

  The branding iron was back in the stove. Tom was shivering all over, and the tears wouldn’t stop.

  “You smell that?” Torble took a big, exaggerated sniff. “That’s you. Isn’t it the most succulent scent? I confess, sometimes when I had a whore down here, the smell was so overpowering that I took a little nibble. I’ll try to refrain from doing that with you, Detective. I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable. But if I do have a moment of weakness, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Tom kept looking at the stove.

  “Don’t worry, Tom. It’ll be ready shortly. Iron holds its heat pretty well. If you’re anxious, I can have two irons going at once, so one is always heating up. I’ve also got some pincers we can try. They snip out a bit of flesh while they’re burning you.”

  Torble came over, gave Tom a gentle poke in his new burn.

  “I believe that’s going to leave a scar, Detective. That is, it would, if you lived long enough for it to heal. I have to say, you look really frightened right now.”

  Torble moved closer.

  “Don’t you have anything at all to say, Tom? No begging me to stop? No threats? Don’t worry, you’ll open up. You’ll tell me all about your life. Try to get my sympathy. Try to distract me. By the end of the day, I’ll know everything about you. Your hopes and dreams. Your fears. All the little secrets you’re too embarrassed to even tell your lover. It’s a bonding experience, Tom.”

  Then Torble stuck out his tongue and gave Tom’s burn a slow lick.