Husk (38 page)

“
Where is she now?”

Paul fumbled for a reply in the wake of BJ’s outburst—not once but twice—then fell into a grateful silence when Rebecca’s hand’s settled on his shoulders and she answered the question for him. “She’s at Valleyfair with my son, Tim. You don’t think she could be in some kind of danger, do you? I mean, from whoever did this?”

Before anyone could reply, the officer who’d gone over to Harry’s called to them from the garage. “There was someone else in the house,” he said. Everyone glanced in the direction of the voice while he and his partner—a slim black woman—jogged over to the group.

“
There were two perpetrators?” Melissa asked.

“
No,” the female officer replied. “The girl remembers another group of people coming into the house
after
the intruder left. Poor thing. She’s so scared, I almost couldn’t calm her down.”

“
So, maybe the kids
were
here?” Rebecca said to Paul, her features ashen.

“
Did the young lady get a look at the prowler?” Frank asked.

The officer shook her head. “I don’t think she’s sure of what she saw. She’s convinced her attacker was invisible.”

“
Invisible
?” Hale repeated.

Frank and Melissa exchanged glances, the look in their eyes strengthening Paul’s fear that their presence here went beyond trying to track down a common criminal.

“
That’s what she says,” the officer told Hale. “At first, I thought she was on something, but her story’s the same each time she tells it. She’s genuinely terrified.”

“
What about the others she heard in the house?” Frank asked. “Who were they?”

Rebecca’s hand tightened on Paul’s arm when the patrolwoman repeated Lori Hanlon’s recollection of hearing Tim’s name called out and the mention of a barn.

“
She’s talking about the old farm,” Harry said. “That rickety pile in the back forty behind the neighborhood.”

“
I know the place,” Hale replied. “That’s where all the underage kids do most of their partying. The damn thing’s a teen-magnet.”

“
How far is it from here?” Melissa asked.

Hale shrugged. “No more than a minute or two by car.”

“
Show us,” Frank ordered.

CHAPTER 47

The first bullet zipped past Tim’s head, displacing the air inches from his left eye.

Before the introductory round smacked into the barn, five successive shots boomed out of the dark, kicking up dirt and hissing past at a heart-stopping proximity.

Everyone scattered, racing for cover. Tim was already facing the barn, but the open terrain between him and the doors would’ve made him an easy target. Instead, he ran to the right, toward a bank of old hen houses.

 
He glanced behind just long enough to catch a view of the gunman emerging from the forest. To his surprise he saw a man. Given all he’d been through, he’d expected to see another walking gestalt of mismatched garbage, something like the grass-monster from the church cul-de-sac. Regardless of the assailant’s human likeness, he knew the creature had arrived, just in another form, and that realization made his quest to reach Mallory all the more urgent.

Suddenly something sharp cut into Tim’s legs. He flipped forward, sailing off his feet, and slammed hard to the dirt, rolling painfully. At the edge of his awareness the scrape of metal on metal reached his ears. It accented each tumble and twist, and he quickly realized that while he’d been looking over his shoulder at the gunman, he’d run headlong into a sagging barbwire fence.

Sharp spikes bit into his shins and calves, ankles and knees. He looked down to discover he’d become entangled in the fall.

Footsteps crunched through the dry weeds. He craned his head to look behind him.

Thirty feet away, the killer strode past without even a glance.

* * *

After the sixth shot, the gunfire ceased, enabling the fleeing teens to reach safety before another assault. Troy, Chris, and Elsa all made it back into the barn unscathed, but upon their arrival, Mallory discovered that Becky, Adam, Lisa and Tim had become separated from them in the frantic rush to get away.

“
Oh, God, where are the others?” Mallory cried.

“
And my sister?” Derrick added.

They’d come to the edge of the loft, across from the trapdoor, miserably aware they’d become instant targets if they descended the ladder with the barn’s main doors standing open.

Chris’s breath came and went in quick bursts. “I think I saw them run for the cars.”

Elsa asked, “Who the hell is that? Why was he shooting at us?”

“
I don’t know, and I don’t want to,” Troy huffed. “I say we find a back way out of this place and haul ass.”

“
We can’t go without our friends,” Mallory snapped.

“
Wanna bet!”

Chris peered around the door’s edge. A volley of lightning flashes flickered across the sky. “Oh, shit, he’s still coming,” he whispered. “We better do something fast.”

“
Like what?” asked Elsa.

“
The others are on their own,” Troy said.

“
Shut the hell up,” Derrick hissed. “I’ve got an idea. I think we can take this fucker.” Pushing away from Mallory, he crossed the loft and grabbed hold of the armchair.

“
What are you talking about?” she asked after him.

Without answering, he dragged the piece of furniture back to the loft’s ledge. “Okay, listen up,” he said, speaking quickly to the others. “You three grab some boards from the firewood pile, then go hide in the last two stables and wait for him—”

“
Us?” Troy gasped.

Derrick made a fist at him. “Just listen, you idiot. There’s some furniture up here. We’ll wait for him to come through the doors then drop this chair on him. Once he’s down, you guys come out and beat the shit out of him.”

“
Yeah, and what if you miss?” Chris challenged.

“
We won’t miss,” Derrick snarled. “But even if we do, we’ll have distracted the asshole long enough for you three to take him by surprise.”

Mallory grimaced. “We don’t want to kill the guy.”

“
Speak for yourself,” Troy replied.

“
There’s not much time,” Derrick growled. “Now hide!”

* * *

Clad in an exoskeleton of flesh and bone, the entity marched forward, striding through the weeds toward where Mallory had taken refuge. The time for games was over. Too many people had become aware of its presence.

After departing from its encounter with Frank and the policewoman, it had returned to where it abandoned Judge Anderson’s van and took possession of his corpse, arming itself with the man’s revolver.

But now it tossed the empty firearm aside, along with a handful of extra ammunition. Conventional weapons were never its preferred instrument of destruction, and its skill in using them had already proved insufficient to meet its current needs.

Time was no longer on its side, either.

Instead, it decided to rely on its own assortment of powers in capturing Mallory and killing whoever tried to stop it.

The entity crossed the barn’s threshold and moved to where a crackling fire burned unattended just inside the main room.

Mallory.

It sensed her presence above it, detecting her glorious life force that churned like a near-bottomless reservoir of nurturing energy. Such a powerful reserve stood out like a nuclear fire in a starless void when compared to the others around her. It knew that three of the children hid near the back of the building, believing themselves to be cleverly concealed, much like Mallory and her friend above assumed their location was unknown.

Manipulating Anderson’s mouth into a wide smile, the entity directed its attention upward, to where the reward for its efforts waited.

* * *

Squinting like a frightened moviegoer in the grip of a horror film, Mallory watched the armchair drop into the gunman’s face, impacting at the precise moment he turned around and looked up.

It hit him dead-on, right in the head.

Mallory flinched.

He’s dead,
she thought.
Oh, Jesus, we killed him.

It seemed absurd to be concerned for someone who’d just fired six bullets at her, but despite whatever hatred he harbored for her, she didn’t want to see someone get murdered. She wished they could’ve found something else to restrain him with, something less damaging,
but Derrick had disagreed, having argued that the chair was the only piece of furniture besides the couch that could incapacitate the gunman long enough for them to escape. But what if he’d miscalculated? What would happen to her and the others if the man died?

But the chair
didn’t
kill the stranger.

It didn’t even knock him down!

He staggered a few steps to the side from the impact, then regained his balance and angled his eyes upward again, looking right at her. His pale skin adopted the orange light of the fire when he stepped closer to the flames, and his cloudy eyes looked like twin blisters on an enormous burn.

Then she saw the blood.

It didn’t glisten in the firelight, as if caused by the chair, but it coated his shirt, neck, and chin in a frightening quantity. The hair at the back of his head stuck up like a crown of red spikes.

Worst of all, he wore an ear-to-ear smile of perverse anticipation.

Mallory shivered, shaking her head, thinking,
I take it back—Hurry up and throw something else at him.

The stranger continued to stare at her in that unnerving manner while he moved toward the loft’s ladder, not taking his eyes off her for a second.

“
He’s still coming,” she said.

Like they’d planned, Troy and Chris dashed out of the shadows. They charged the man from behind, boards raised over their heads in preparation to strike. Troy reached him first, swinging his timber at the back of the man’s head with enough force to crack a skull.

Whack!

“
Yeah,” Derrick bellowed, adding, “Take that, fucker!” when Chris landed a hit to the man’s midsection.

The combined damage inflicted by the boys’ attacks should’ve killed a normal person, or at least brought him down, but the stranger withstood their assaults without making a sound.

Mallory gaped.
He didn’t even flinch.

Below, Troy readied another swing.

And the man’s head turned around to meet him.

With the stomach-wrenching sound of snapping bone and torn tendons, the stranger’s head swiveled one hundred-eighty degrees to face Troy.

Mallory shrieked with surprise—then cried out again when she saw the huge empty hole in the back of the man’s head.

The leaping flames of the fire illuminated the petrified look in Troy’s eyes when the stranger pivoted and lunged. The madman struck out with one hand as if grabbing a fistful of the boy’s shirt, but his clawed fingers stabbed into Troy’s chest—
stabbed
—plunging between the ribs all the way to the last knuckles.

Gasps and screams resounded off the barn’s walls, while a concussion of thunder hailed it from outside. On the floor below, Chris dropped his two-by-four and backed away, slumping to the ground. He clenched his teeth, caging a scream.

Gripping him the same way an eagle would hold its prey, the stranger lifted Troy off his feet and hefted him over his head. He threw the boy away with such force his body crashed through one of the partitions dividing the horse stalls, blasting the boards asunder.

Mallory’s knees weakened.

“
Hell with this,” Derrick screeched, his voice cracking. He dashed from the loft’s edge and went straight for the rubbish-cobbled coffee table. Heaving away the blotched particleboard, he hoisted one of the four cinderblock-supports.

He rushed back to the loft’s open ledge and slung the concrete at the stranger.

Below, the man stood gazing in the direction where Troy’s body had flown, oblivious of their movements in the loft. He opened his arms in a peculiar gesture, looking ready to receive a hug—then crashed forward as Derrick’s shot hit him square in the back.

The man flew off his feet, knocked to the ground.

Derrick hollered a cheer of victory, but choked it off when the killer turned on his side and got up.

Mallory gasped. The impact of the cinderblock had ripped through the man’s clothing and gouged into his skin, having stripped away the meat to expose his spine. Bone gleamed in the wound. Yet he climbed to his feet once more. He stabilized himself and resumed his march toward the ladder.

“
This ain’t real,” Derrick screamed.

“
Just get more things to throw,” Mallory yelled.

Together, they hurried to the remaining furniture and grabbed hold of the couch, tugging it away from the wall.

“
Malloryeee,” a hateful voice called from below.

Before she could recall where she’d heard that growling tone before, they pushed the reeking couch forward—the old frame of its hideaway bed scraping the loft’s floorboards like claws—until it plunged over the edge. It slammed down atop the stranger, hammering him to the floor, pushing him into the fire.