All the Rage rj-4

by F. Paul Wilson

  But this'll help me find it, he thought.

  And then something occurred to him.

  "You're being awfully helpful."

  "Not at all. My sole concern is for the rakosh."

  "But you know I'm going to kill it if I find it."

  "Try to kill it. The pines are full of deer and other game, but the rakosh can't use them for food. As you know, it eats only one thing."

  Now Jack understood. He grinned. "And you think by giving me this locator, you're sending it a CARE package, so to speak."

  Oz inclined his head. "So to speak."

  "We shall see, Mr. Prather. We shall see."

  "On the contrary, I doubt anyone will ever see you again."

  "I'm not suicidal; trust me on that."

  "But you can't believe you can take on a rakosh single-handed and survive."

  "Wouldn't be the first time."

  Jack headed for his car, relishing the look of concern on Oz's face before he'd turned away. Had he sounded confident enough? Good act. Because he was feeling anything but.

  2

  "Here he comes," Doug said.

  Nadia lifted her head from his shoulder and glanced through the car window. Jack was about a hundred feet away, striding toward them. The sight of him elicited a warm glow against the deep chill that pervaded her. She couldn't remember ever being so glad to see someone as when she'd looked through the open door of that awful trailer and found Jack standing outside. She couldn't imagine how he'd tracked her down or why, but when she'd most needed someone he'd shown up.

  "Good," she said. "Now we can get out of here."

  She'd been huddled against Doug in the rear seat, feeling cold and tired, totally wrung out, but mostly sad.

  Dr. Monnet wanted me dead.

  She'd been forced to accept the truth of that, and yet… how could it be? Horrifying enough to learn that anyone wanted you dead, but Dr. Monnet… and after she'd been so worried about his well-being. It was too cruel.

  To her surprise, Jack walked past the car and into the food court. Minutes later he emerged with a canvas shoulder bag emblazoned with Atlantic city in Day-Glo green letters.

  "How's everybody doing?" he said as he slipped into the front seat.

  "Better now," Doug said. "Thanks to you." He extended his hand over the seat. "I'm Doug Gleason."

  They shook hands.

  "Jack." He gave Doug's wrist a quarter-turn. "Is that a Quisp watch? Neat."

  "You want it? It's yours."

  Jack waved him off. "No, that's OK."

  "I'm serious," Doug said. "I don't know how to thank you."

  "You will in a minute."

  Jack backed the car out of its spot but didn't drive far. To Nadia's dismay he parked in another spot in a far corner of the rest area by the rideshare info sign. She wanted to go home.

  "Aren't we going back?"

  "Not yet." Jack pulled a couple of bottles of Snapple from the canvas bag and handed them back. "If you're thirsty, drink up; otherwise, dump it out on the pavement."

  Nadia drank half of her lemon-flavored iced tea quickly. She hadn't realized how thirsty she was. Jack had opened his door and was emptying bottle after bottle into the parking lot.

  "Shame to waste the stuff, I know," he said, "but it seems Snapple's about the only thing that comes in glass bottles these days."

  Then he took out a glass cutter and began scoring the flanks of the bottles.

  Baffled, Nadia said, "What are you doing?"

  "Trick I learned from an old revolutionary. Ups the chances these'll shatter on contact."

  Then he pulled an Atlantic City souvenir T-shirt and a newspaper from the bag. He began tearing up the shirt.

  Nadia studied his face, his deft, sure movements. Where was the easy going fellow she'd seen off and on over the past few days? He'd been replaced somehow by this fiercely focused man whose sense of purpose radiated through the car. His expression was grim and the brown eyes she'd once thought mild now gleamed with intensity.

  "What's going on?" Nadia said.

  "One of Oz's attractions escaped. I have to go after it."

  "He hired you?"

  "No. This is my own thing."

  "Why on earth—?"

  "It may harm someone who matters to me."

  "Can't you call the police?"

  "They'll think I'm nuts, or trying to scam them with a Jersey Devil story."

  Doug said, "This 'attraction' wouldn't happen to be a big, strange-looking creature with yellow eyes and dark skin."

  Jack looked up. "You saw it?"

  "Yeah. I think so. The night I was kidnapped they brought me into one of the tents and pushed me up against the bars of a cage with this huge guy in a stinking rubber monster suit inside."

  "That wasn't a suit."

  "Bullshit."

  Jack focused those eyes on him. "Do I look like I'm bullshitting?"

  "No." Doug swallowed. "And to tell the truth, afterward I got to thinking either that's the most convincing rubber suit on earth or I was face-to-face with a real live demon. So I kept telling myself that nothing like that ever existed in real life, so it had to be a suit."

  "What happened when they put you up against the bars? Did it take a swipe at you, try to grab you?"

  "No. It pretty much ignored me. It seemed more interested in getting out of its cage."

  Jack simply stared at Doug.

  "What?" Doug asked.

  Jack shook his head. "When you get back home, do yourself a favor and buy a lottery ticket. If your luck's still holding, you'll wake up a multimillionaire."

  He stepped out of the car, opened the trunk, and returned with a metal can and a flashlight.

  Nadia remembered something. "Jack, is this the creature you told me about this morning—the source of the drug?"

  "One and the same."

  "I think I saw it when I was peeking through a crack between the boards over our windows. I saw them loading a big blue-black creature in a steel cage onto one of the trucks." And she remembered thinking at the time it had to be some sort of gimmick attraction because nothing that looked like that should be living and breathing on this earth. "That… that was real?"

  Jack nodded. He squatted outside the car and began refilling the empty Snapple bottles from the big metal can.

  Oh, no, Nadia thought, fighting a surge of panic as she watched him. He's not really—

  But he was. Oh, yes, he was. The smell of gasoline was unmistakable.

  Dizzy, she closed her eyes and hung on, wondering what had happened to her world in the past few days. She felt as if she'd tumbled down a rabbit hole into a nastily surreal Wonderland. The molecule she'd been assigned to stabilize had turned out to be an illegal drug, her fiance had been abducted, a man she'd known for years and deeply respected, had even made love to, had ordered her death, and then he himself had been murdered. And now she was parked in a rest stop helping a man she barely knew make Molotov cocktails to go after some awful creature from a nightmare.

  Nightmare… that's where she was right now.

  She wished she'd never heard of Jack. If she hadn't hired him, maybe none of this would have happened.

  She opened her eyes again and looked at him. "You're really going to chase after that thing? Alone? In the dark?"

  He nodded. "Not exactly my idea of a fun time, but…"

  "I'll go with you," Doug said.

  Nadia wanted to punch him and scream, How can you be such an idiot? but held her tongue when she saw Jack immediately shake his head.

  "This doesn't involve you."

  "I could watch your back," Doug said, pressing. "I feel I owe you something."

  Nadia wanted to kill him. The only hunting Doug had ever done was on a computer screen.

  Jack finished tightening the cap on the last bottle.

  "I appreciate the offer, but this is a one-man operation." He glanced at her and winked. "Good man."

  "I know," she said, clutching Doug's arm. And I want
to keep him good and alive.

  Jack gently placed the six gasoline-filled bottles back into the canvas shoulder bag and worked sections of newspaper between them to keep them from clinking, then threw the pieces of T-shirt on top.

  "What you can do for me is drive," he said, moving into the passenger seat.

  Doug scrambled around, leaving Nadia alone in the back. They drove north through the New Gretna toll, then turned around and came back south through the toll again.

  "We'll be stopping soon," Jack said. He seemed to be eyeing the mile markers closely. "After you drop me off, head back to the rest area and wait inside where you can hear the public phones. I've got the number of one of them. When I'm done I'll call you on my cell phone and tell you where to pick me up."

  "How long do you think you'll be?" Nadia said.

  "Can't say." He tapped the dashboard clock. "Just about two A.M. now. If you don't hear from me by six… go home."

  "Without you?"

  He cleared his throat as he scribbled on a scrap of paper. "If you don't hear from me by then it means things have gotten complicated. Go back to the city and call this number. A guy named Abe will answer. Tell him what you know. He'll take it from there."

  Doug said, "But what—?"

  "Whoa! Here's my stop."

  Doug pulled over and Jack jumped out. He slipped the straps of the bag onto a shoulder and pulled the flashlight from a pocket.

  "See you later," he said.

  Nadia noticed how he limped as he hurried down the slope toward the trees.

  I hope so, she thought as they pulled away. She felt a cold weight growing in her stomach. When she looked back, Jack had disappeared into the tall shadows.

  3

  Jack trained his flashlight beam on the scrub at the base of the slope, looking for broken branches. He found them. Lots of them. Something big had torn through here not long ago.

  He stepped through and followed the path of destruction. He was glad he'd kept the boonie cap; without it the branches would be tearing at the sutures in his scalp. Already had a throbbing headache and a banged-up hip. Didn't need to start bleeding.

  When he was sure he was out of sight of the highway, he stopped and pulled out the electronic locator. He was facing west and the blip was at the top edge of the screen. Had to move. Scar-lip was almost out of range.

  He pressed forward until he came to a narrow path. A deer trail, most likely. Flashed his beam down and saw what looked like deer tracks in the damp sand, but they weren't alone: deep imprints of big, alien, three-toed feet, and work-boot prints coming after. Scar-lip, with Hank following—obviously behind because the boot prints occasionally stepped on the rakosh tracks.

  What's Hank thinking? Jack wondered. That he's got a gun and maybe he learned how to hunt when he was a kid, so that makes him a match for the Sharkman? Maybe he's not thinking. Maybe a belly full of Mad Dog has convinced him he can handle the equivalent of taking on a great white with a penknife in a sea of ink.

  Jack began following the deer trail, keeping one eye on the locator and turning his flashlight beam on and off every so often to check the ground. Scrub pines closed in, forming a twenty- to thirty-foot wall around him, arching their branches over the trail, allowing only an occasional glimpse of the starlit sky.

  Quiet. Just the sound of insects and the branches brushing against his clothes. Jack hated the great outdoors. Give him a city with cars and buses and honking cabs, with pavements and right angles and subways rumbling beneath his feet and—best of all—streetlights. It wasn't just dark out here, it was dark.

  His adrenaline was up but despite the alien surroundings, he felt curiously relaxed. The locator gave him a buffer zone of safety. He knew where Scar-lip was and didn't have to worry about it jumping out of the bushes and tearing into him at any second. But he did have to worry about Hank. An armed drunk in the woods could be a danger to anything that moved. Didn't want to be mistaken for Scar-lip.

  The trail wound this way and that, briefly meandering north and south, but taking him generally westward. Jack moved as fast as the circumstances allowed, making his best time along the occasional brief straightaway, but his left hip felt like someone had lit a blowtorch in the socket.

  The green blip that was Scar-lip gradually moved nearer and nearer the center of the locator screen, which meant he was gaining steadily on the rakosh. Looked like the creature had stopped moving. Why? Resting? Or waiting?

  He guesstimated he was about a quarter-mile from the rakosh when a gun report somewhere ahead brought him up short. Sounded like a shotgun. There it was again. And again.

  And then a scream of fear and mortal agony echoed through the trees, rising toward a shriek that cut off sharply before it peaked.

  Silence.

  Jack had thought the woods quiet before, but now even the insects had shut up. He waited for other sounds. None came. And the blip on the locator showed no movement.

  That pretty much told the story: Scar-lip had sensed it was being followed so it hunkered down and waited. Who comes along but one of the guys who used it as a pincushion when it was caged. Chomp-chomp, crunch-crunch, good-bye, Hank.

  Jack's tongue was dry as felt. That could have—most likely would have—been him if he'd gone after Scar-lip without the locator.

  But that's not the way it's going to play. I know where you are, pal, so no nasty surprises for me.

  He crept ahead, and the crack and crunch of every twig and leaf he stepped on sounded amplified through a stasdium PA. But Scar-lip was staying put—eating, perhaps?—so Jack kept moving.

  When the blip was almost center screen, Jack stopped. He smelled something and flashed his light along the ground.

  The otherwise smooth sand was kicked up ferociously for a space of about a dozen feet, ending with two large oblong gouts of blood, drying thick and dark red, with little droplets of the same speckled all around them. A twelve-gauge Mossberg pump-action lay in the brush at the edge of the trail, its wooden stock shattered.

  Only one set of prints led away—the three-toed kind.

  Jack crouched in the scrub grass, staring around, listening, looking for signs of movement. Nothing. But he knew from the locator that Scar-lip was dead ahead, and not too far.

  Waiting to do to me what he did to Hank, no doubt. Sorry, pal. We're gonna play it my way this time.

  He removed two Snapple bottles from the shoulder bag and unscrewed their caps. Gasoline fumes rose around him as he stuffed a piece of T-shirt into the mouth of each. Lifted one, lit the rag with a little butane lighter he'd picked up along with everything else, and quickly tossed it straight ahead along the trail.

  The small flame at its mouth traced a fiery arc through the air. Before it hit the ground and whoom-phed into an explosion of flame, Jack had the second one in hand, ready to light.

  Muscles tight, heart pounding, Jack blinked in the sudden glare as his eyes searched out the slightest sign of movement. Wavering shadows from the flickering light of the flames made everything look like it was moving. But nothing big and dark and solid appeared.

  Something small and shiny glittered on a branch just this side of the flames. Warily, Jack approached it. His foot slipped on something along the way: the sharpened steel rod Bondy had used to torment the rakosh lay half-buried in the sand. Jack picked it up and carried it in his left hand like a spear. He had two weapons now. He felt like an Indian hunter, armed with an iron spear and a container of magic burning liquid.

  Closer to the flames now, he stepped over a fallen log and his foot landed on something soft and yielding. Glanced down and saw a very dead Hank staring up at him through glazed eyes. He let out an involuntary yelp and jumped back.

  After glancing around to make sure this wasn't a trap, he took another look at Hank. Firelight glimmered in dead blue eyes that were fixed on the stars; the pallor of Hank's bloodless face accentuated the dark rims of his shiners and blended almost perfectly with the sand under his head; his throat was a red
pulpy hole and his right arm was missing at the shoulder.

  Jack swallowed hard. That could be me soon if I don't watch it.

  Stepped over him and kept moving. The fire from the first Molotov cocktail was burning low when he reached the branch. Some of the brush had caught fire but the flames weren't spreading. Still they cast enough light to allow him to identify the shiny object.

  Scar-lip's telltale collar.

  Jack whirled in near panic, alarm clamoring along his adrenalized nerves as he lit the second cocktail, and scanned the area for signs of the rakosh.

  Nothing stirred.

  This was bad, very bad. In the middle of nowhere and he'd given himself away with the first bomb. Now tables were reversed: Scar-lip knew exactly where Jack was, while Jack was lost in the dark with only four cocktails left.

  Dark… that was the big problem. If he could find a safe place to hide for a few hours, the rising sun would level the playing field a little. But where?

  Looked around and fixed on a big tree towering above the pines ahead. That might be the answer.

  Jack tossed away the locator and hooked the straps of the canvas bag around his shoulders, knapsack style. Spear in one hand, Molotov in the other, he edged ahead in a half-crouch, ready to spring in any direction.

  Sweat trickled down his back as he swung his gaze back and forth, watching, listening, but heard nothing beyond his own harsh, ragged breaths and his racing pulse drumming in his ears.

  Hopped over the dying flames of the first Molotov and saw that the trail opened onto a small clearing with the big tree at its center. Good chance Scar-lip was somewhere in or near the clearing, maybe behind the tree trunk. One good way to find out…

  Tossed the second firebomb—another flaming whoomph! but no sign of Scar-lip… yet. Had to get to that tree. Angled around so he could see behind it—nothing. Clearing empty.

  Dropped the iron spear—it would only get in his way—hustled over to the trunk, and began to climb.

  Not fun. His hip shot pain through his pelvis and down his leg, and the effort worsened his headache.