Blood Red

Chapter 21

Maggie enjoyed herself. She didn’t think she would, but she was having a blast. There was definitely something to be said for anonymity and wearing the sort of clothes where no one was trying to see down her shirt or up her skirt. At least for tonight.

The dance floor was crowded and, with his costume on, Ben was more relaxed than usual. He was dancing, and she figured under most circumstances that was about as likely as him working as call girl.

No, that was her job.

She pushed the ugly thought away and grabbed Ben’s arm as a slower song started up. That was when he started getting antsy.

She should have expected it. He wasn’t exactly an aggressive man. Maggie leaned in closer and put her arms around his neck. It was a little awkward due to the wardrobes, but she managed to pull him in tightly and smile at him.

“Thank you, Ben Kirby.”

“What for?”

“Making me go out.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You needed a day off.”

“Yeah, I did. Thanks for noticing.”

He looked her over and a grin split the makeup on his face. “Hard not to. Your hair’s a fright and your makeup isn’t up to your normal standards.”

She turned her head as they swayed to the soft music, and managed to kiss his mouth without either of them getting their clown noses knocked off.

It was not a passionate kiss, but it was heartfelt. He closed his eyes and she watched the shiver run through him. She might have been worried about it being a tremor of fear, after all she had done and he had seen, but his lips kissed back and his hands slid to her waist.

And when the kiss was done, he released a trembling breath and looked into her eyes and saw something there that he liked.

He amazed her.

The door to O’Malley’s slammed open before she could say so.

Ben turned his head sharply and Maggie looked over his shoulder as ten figures in black costumes entered the place. A few people were making appreciative comments about their makeup. Maggie was not among them. While she had never seen a vampire—as opposed to an Undead, according to Jason—she knew immediately what they were. How could she not? They were all boys from the frat house.

And they had all looked better. To the very last, they had wounds that she had inflicted on them. Fatal wounds in some cases, disfiguring in others. According to Jason, they would heal given enough time.

Todd, a big jock she’d taken downstairs, reached out and grabbed a man in a Dracula outfit by his arm and hauled him closer, his mouth opening wide to bite down on the screaming icon’s neck. Several of the patrons standing nearest the incident tried to scramble away from the carnage with only moderate success.

The rest of the vampires moved into the room, grabbing indiscriminately. Maggie stepped back, drawing Ben with her.

Ben looked on, almost mesmerized. “Maggie, what the hell?”

“We have to leave, Ben. Right now. I think Jason let his vampires out of their cages.”

People were reaching full panic now, and pushing toward the far side of the bar out of desperation. One of them almost knocked Ben down and she shoved the man without thinking, as shocked as anyone else when he went airborne and slammed into three others trying to escape. Ben watched with wide eyes.

“Run, Ben!” She pushed a few more out of the way as the vampires came further into the bar, grabbing and biting like rabid dogs. One of them reached for her and she turned to stare it in the eyes. It was the birthday boy from the frat house. He didn’t recognize her, he was just hungry.

She stared into his eyes and he looked at her with absolute terror, backing away and hissing mindlessly. That was unexpected, but a good thing just the same.

Somebody got fed up with watching people get chewed on and broke a pool cue over the head of one of the frat boys. The good thing about mob rules was that a lot of people tended to follow the leader. That was also the bad thing.

Several of the people in the room tried to fight back. All they got for their troubles was a little more pain and a lot more bloodshed. The man with the pool cue struck Doug Clark across the back of his head. Clark turned on him fast and hit him so hard that his head exploded. The vampire’s fist went clean through the skull and into the wall behind him. Another man tried the pool-cue trick and wound up with both of his arms broken before he was killed.

A third got a little craftier and threw vodka on the dead thing coming his way. The vampire didn’t take the crowd into consideration, or the decorative candles that were still burning on several tables. He stumbled back into a person who shoved him sideways into a table, where he promptly caught fire.

Maggie lifted Ben completely off the ground and pushed. Ben worked better as a battering ram than she would have expected. People were knocked left and right and down to the ground as she pushed through the people in her way.

Somebody broke under her foot. She didn’t have time to think about it. The fire ran across the spilled vodka and caused even more panic. She hit the back door and the fire alarm went off. Maggie ran while Ben made an interesting array of sounds.

Right after they exited, one of the vampires grabbed and pulled the door shut. They didn’t wait around to see if anyone else got out alive.

The night had gone completely insane.

Boyd and Holdstedter walked through the fog at a fast jog, listening for the sounds of people dying. Most of what was going on seemed to be silence.

“You see where we are?”

“Yeah, the Cliff Walk.” Danny wasn’t throwing banter. He was all business. That was maybe the worst part.

“I’m seeing blood and I’m seeing candy bags. What I am not seeing is bodies.”

“This is fucked up, Richie.”

He scanned the area carefully. Not a single body to be found and not a person on the street, but there was enough scattered candy to keep a small army of kids hyperactive for a month.

“You ever see kids leave their candy behind?”

“Not without a good fuckin’ reason.”

They heard the footsteps coming down the street. They couldn’t help but hear them; the only other sound was the distant sigh of the waves.

The steps started slowly and then increased. Not one person, but several. Grown men in black costumes were coming at them. Maybe a few women, too, it was hard to tell.

“You’re fuckin’ kidding me, right? Do these assholes actually have blood on their faces?”

“Matter of fact, Danny Boy, they do.”

They spared one quick look at each other and then started shooting.

Boyd tried it by the book for the first three rounds. He shot one of the creeps in the shoulder and then in the elbow and then in the other shoulder. He saw the bullets connect, saw them punch through the meat and send spray flying from the perp’s back. When the guy kept coming, he changed the rules. The fourth shot blew out the freak’s kneecap. He fell down wailing and crying and then started to get back up. His one leg was useless and both arms were flopping around a bit. He switched targets and aimed for the legs again. Two shots and another one was down.

The third one got all Exorcist on him and rose into the air, screaming like a monkey on crack cocaine. That one just kept coming, making all sorts of barking noises every time another bullet went through him.

Seventeen bullets, including the one in the chamber, and he unloaded most of them into the sick fuck coming down at him. “Fucken die when I kill you, you stupid bitch!” It didn’t listen. “Danny! Shotgun!”

Danny was standing off to the side, methodically blowing heads open. He didn’t play by the rules. He knew why, of course. One or more of these sick bastards had killed at least one little boy, and if the blood was a good sign, maybe a whole lot more of them.

Danny aimed, fired, and moved on; leaving the first one he shot at without much of a head. The second one almost got away. The bullet blasted into his throat, but he kept coming. Danny took out his left eye with the third bullet.

Before he could aim at his fourth target, Boyd was calling for the shotgun. Rather than handing it over, his partner pulled the sort of stunt that gave Boyd an occasional nightmare and took aim about a foot in front of the moving target. The flying nun turned his head to see what was pointing his way, and Danny pulled the trigger even as Boyd was dropping backward toward the ground. If he’d kept standing, there was a good chance he would have lost his nose at the very least. The thing’s head vanished in a wet cloud of black and red.

Danny turned back and fired again, hitting one of the things in the nuts. It kept coming, and that scared Boyd more than anything else he’d seen.

He drew the next weapon from the four he had strapped to his body. This one was the type that made Dirty Harry Callahan famous. It was filled with glazer bullets and did lovely things to the targets. Glazers are filled with pellets suspended in gel: so it was sort of like putting the barrel of the shotgun into the target and then pulling the trigger. One of the things that was getting far too close to Danny took the first shot and was cut in half.

It was over in roughly thirty seconds. He hadn’t actually been timing it.

Danny was looking down at the remains with that weird-ass look he got whenever he was ready to shoot something. Danny was a good-looking guy, but sometimes he could be a cold bastard. Not that Boyd was complaining.

“Well. That was different.” Boyd looked at the things on the ground. Not a one of them looked much like it was planning on getting up and attacking.

“No, Richie,” Danny pointed with his pistol, and Boyd looked to where the first one he’d been using as a clay pigeon was still moving around. “That’s different.”

Danny walked closer to the pasty thing and looked at its face. It lunged and tried to bite him. He stepped back. “You notice anything weird here, Richie?”

Boyd laughed. “You mean aside from everything?”

“Well, yeah, but this is really weird.”

“What?”

“Ain’t a damn one of them that’s dead.”

“My ass.”

“No, really, look.”

Boyd looked. Danny was right. Even the ones with most of their heads gone were still twitching, still trying to do something. “That’s just fucked up.”

“Yeah. What do we do with them?” As Danny asked, the one that had been Boyd’s first target tried for his leg again. Danny aimed the shotgun and pressed it into the thing’s back before pulling the trigger.

“Wanna tell me how it is that you’re firing a shotgun one-handed and not getting your hand blown off for your troubles?”

Danny smiled. “I work out.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t know jacking off built muscles like that.”

“You learn something new every day, Richie.” He shrugged. “So… Soulis?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking it’s about time we talked with that boy.”

“Backup?”

“From where?”

“Just checking. You never know.”

“We could call O’Neill.”

“Think he’d show?”

“Probably. He’s a cop first and a bitch second.”

“True enough.”

They walked toward the dark stone house they had visited before. “We going in like gentlemen?”

“When the fuck were you ever a gentleman?”

“That’s what the ladies call me, Richie.”

“Your momma doesn’t count as a lady.”

“Oh, then it hasn’t happened yet. Never mind.”

They knocked nice and polite but didn’t get an answer.

“Richie, I want to kill the bad man.”

“No bad man here, Danny. We’re gonna have to look for him.”

“That sucks.”

The police were definitely staying busy. Every time they turned around there was another report of a violent crime, and most of those were calls about murders.

Someone must have slipped something into the water when no one was looking, because either there were a lot of false alarms, or the murder victims were getting up and walking away.

At least that was the way it seemed to be going until Alan Coswell saw the guy taking the bodies from one crime scene. He was driving up to what was supposed to be another massacre and for a change of pace, he saw corpses. There were five people inside the 7-Eleven and every last one of them was dead. It looked like they’d been slapped around and dragged across half of the store in the process, too.

He called it in and asked for backup. Whatever the hell was going on, he didn’t much like the idea of trying to handle it by himself. Maybe he was being a little weak-kneed today, but he’d seen what had been done to that sick fuck Freemont, and he didn’t feel any special desire to get himself ripped limb from limb. Looking at the carnage inside the store convinced him that whoever had done it was exactly the sort who could scatter Freemont across the map.

As Coswell was stepping out of the car, he saw the man. He seemed to come out of nowhere, to just appear all of a sudden, walking out of the shadows.

Coswell froze, more than merely startled by the appearance. He was scared. Something about the guy just gave off an air of menace. Everything about him was dark: dark hair, dark clothes, dark eyes, and a dark demeanor. This was not a man he wanted to play with.

He knew it for certain when the man in question picked up the first body and laid it over his arm. The corpse had to weigh somewhere near two hundred pounds, and the man carried the bulk like he was holding a small purse.

I’m supposed to go in there and stop him. I know that, but I don’t want to.

Why?

Because any man that can swing that much on one arm is going to knock my head off my shoulders if I try to stop him.

And there was the gun to consider, of course. The man didn’t look armed.

The man doesn’t look like he can pick up a corpse and swing it like a baseball bat, either.

As if to prove his point that guns didn’t automatically make everything superspecial, the dark-haired stranger lifted a second body and started to carry them away from the crime scene.

“Screw this acting-like-a-pussy shit.”

Coswell climbed out of the squad car after calling one more time for backup and pulled his pistol at the same time.

“Stop where you are.” He did his best to sound like he was in control of the situation. The man looked his way and let a very tiny smile curl the edges of his mouth before he kept going.

“Mister! Are you crazy? I said stop where you are. Now!” He’d been holding his firearm to the side of his body but now lifted it and got into a proper firing stance.

The fucker kept going. “One more step and I’ll be forced to restrain you.”

Tall, dark, and creepy looked his way and took two more steps. Coswell fired a warning shot five feet ahead of him. The bullet hit the brick wall, rebounded, and passed through the body in the man’s grip.

He dropped the body and looked at Coswell. “Was that entirely necessary?”

So he could speak after all. “I told you to stop moving, and I meant it.”

“Well, here I am. What seems to be the problem?”

“Murder? Bodysnatching?”

“Oh, I didn’t murder anyone.” He was smiling again. The sick fuck was having a good time with all of this. “I’m just moving the bodies.”

“Well, that’s called tampering with a crime scene. It’s against the law.”

“You just fired at an unarmed man. What? You don’t have handcuffs?”

“Put down the bodies and get against the damned wall, smartass.”

The man dropped the other body unceremoniously to the ground. It flopped down like a rag doll. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. There was blood all over his sweater and the dark jeans he was wearing.

“What’s your name, mister?”

“Jason Soulis.”

“Why were you taking the bodies from a crime scene?”

“I wanted them.”

Coswell was starting to get the idea that the man was teasing him and he didn’t much like the notion. “Turn, face the wall, and place your hands above your head.”

“No. You can have the bodies, but I really have other things to do right now.”

“Mister, I wasn’t asking.” Soulis was an arrogant little prick. A minute ago he’d been worried because the man was obviously stronger than an ox. Now he didn’t give a damn.

“I’m trying to be a good sport, Officer…” He was far enough away that reading the name on Coswell’s tag should have been impossible. “Coswell, but I really do not have time to deal with any more of this. I have things I need to get done and you’re becoming an inconvenience.”

“Face the wall, spread your legs, and put your hands over your head.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“No. I’m leaving.”

“Mister, stay where you are!”

He heard the sound of sirens and smiled. He was about to get backup and that helped with the nerves that wanted to twitch.

Soulis looked past him and shook his head. “Now you’ve made things complicated.”

Soulis looked at him and scowled as two more cars came up from behind him.

Murphy and Torrance got out of their cars. “What’s the problem, Sarge?” Torrance was a burly man with enough attitude to scare the average perp into the back of a car without ever lifting a finger.

“The guy over there has been getting pissy about behaving.”

Torrance nodded and started toward Soulis, his face set in grim, unforgiving lines. “Get your ass against the wall and put your hands above your head, mister. Right now!”

He was just fine until he touched Soulis. Torrance grabbed Soulis by the shoulder and tried to spin him against the wall. Normally, that meant the person he was pushing got spun.

Soulis didn’t budge. “Don’t touch me.” The man’s face grew positively murderous.

Torrance pushed a second time.

Soulis grabbed Matthew Torrance by his arm and pivoted at the waist, sending the policeman into the wall. Torrance dropped as hard as the corpse the man had been carrying earlier. A large red smear ran where his face had struck the bricks.

“You stop right fucking there or I’ll shoot!” Murphy drew his firearm and took aim. Coswell did the same thing, both of them completely serious. Murphy pressed the talk button on his radio and called the words every cop loathed the idea of hearing. “Officer down! Repeat, officer down!” He continued on, giving their exact location.

“Torrance? You all right?” Coswell knew the answer even as he asked. There was no way the man was all right; half of his face looked like it had been pressed into an industrial steam iron.

Jason Soulis stepped toward the two of them and Coswell decided not to take any chances. He pulled the trigger and fired three shots. None of them were meant to be warnings.

The first bullet caught Jason Soulis in the center of his stomach. He didn’t even flinch. The second bullet passed through the spot where Soulis had been, which was currently filled with a thick black cloud of shadows.

The cloud dispersed in a matter of seconds, and when it was gone, so was Soulis.

“What the fuck was that?” Murphy was looking at the spot and shaking his head. “Where did he go?”

Coswell was about to answer when he saw the blackness creeping around his sides. He turned just as the cloud reformed behind him, and Jason Soulis reached for his throat.

Coswell screamed and backed away, firing his weapon again and again. His nerves were shot, and he was definitely feeling a little jumpy. The bullets slammed into Soulis and staggered him this time. Whatever weird-ass protection he was using didn’t seem so perfect at point-blank range. Soulis backpedaled madly, but his feet weren’t touching the ground. He ran into the front of Coswell’s squad car and flipped onto the hood. The windshield was a splattered ruin where the bullets that passed through the man found another target afterward.

Both men looked at Soulis’s body and fell silent.

“How the fuck did he do that?” Murphy was staring hard, his face pasty and white.

Coswell shook his head, at a loss for words. Then he remembered Torrance and moved over to see if the man was still alive. The perp could wait.

Up close he could see that Torrance’s skull had been pulped. There wasn’t enough solid bone left to even give a hint of its previous shape. “Jesus Christ.” He practically threw himself to the side before he lost his dinner. Unfortunately, one of the corpses from inside was directly in his way and he wound up vomiting on the mortal remains of the heavyset man he’d seen Soulis lift so easily. Dead eyes stared accusingly back at him as he finished with a series of dry heaves.

It was while he was blowing his meal that Jason Soulis got back up.

Lee Murphy was a good cop. He’d been with the department for ten years and planned on staying there for the rest of his life. He kept his plans. Jason Soulis grabbed for him as he started firing into what should have been a dead man.

The bullets knocked him back again, but this time he kept his footing and started walking forward, his lips peeled back to reveal hard white fangs where his teeth should have been. From under the shadows of his brow, the man’s eyes were burning, and Murphy stared into them as he kept pulling the trigger.

Jason Soulis caught Murphy’s wrists and pulled them apart, sending the now empty pistol falling to the ground. He kept staring hard and Murphy kept staring back, frozen with fear and then with pain as the man yanked savagely and dislocated both of his shoulders.

Murphy passed out. Coswell couldn’t blame him. The sound of more sirens coming didn’t even make the madman blink.

Coswell made himself crawl over to Torrance’s body and grab his weapon. He hadn’t thought to reload his own as yet.

“You’re beginning to piss me off, Officer.”

Coswell laughed, the fear sending him over the edge a little further than he was comfortable going, and started firing. He aimed for the head. His hands were shaking, but his aim didn’t completely suck and he got the man in the neck, the shoulder, and the chin. He saw the wounds as they were formed, and saw them as they healed, too. One instant there was a hole in the man’s jaw and the next it was gone, just… gone. The skin was unmarred; the bones he knew should have been shattered were intact.

“That’s enough out of you, I think.” He took two steps forward. Coswell threw the weapon and stood up, his knees shaking violently and his head feeling far too light.

The squad car that came toward them came in hard and fast, not slowing down in the least. Coswell had enough time to see the driver—Logan Walker, and the passenger who was busily chewing on his face.

Then the car was ramming into the rest of the parked police cars and starting a chain reaction. Metal screamed in protest and the car Murphy had pulled up in rolled forward like a rocket, bashing in the rear end of his cruiser. His cruiser, faithful to the end, jumped forward and hit Soulis in the back.

Jason Soulis went down, pinned under the black and white, and Coswell looked on, stunned. A few feet in front of him, Jason Soulis lay pinned under a vehicle and twenty feet further away, the newest addition to the police car pileup kept revving its engine sporadically.

He started toward Soulis and changed his mind, remembering that Walker was in deep shit of his own. He stepped past the dead perp and moved toward Walker’s car. Before he could even call out the officer’s name, the door came open and Walker flopped to the ground.

A naked, pregnant woman climbed out of the car, wearing only a crimson stain across her full breasts and her swollen belly. She looked right at Coswell and licked the smear of red from her lips.

Angie Freemont stepped toward him with a look of unadulterated hunger on her face.

And as he stepped back, he heard the sound of metal groaning.

Angie looked over his shoulder and her deathly white face grew a shade or two whiter. She backed away from him as fast as she could, her breasts swaying and her eyes wide and terrified.

Coswell looked over his shoulder just in time to see Jason Soulis finish lifting the car off of his back. His cruiser was well over a thousand pounds, maybe even a ton, and the man was standing up, the whole of the fucking car supported by his arms. He looked like a modernist’s demented sculpture of Atlas.

“I’ve had enough of you.”

Soulis threw the car at him. Coswell was too shocked to duck.