Jake's Wake (12 page)

Gray slammed and locked the door.

Strolling back across the lawn in the wind-whipped gloom, he smiled as he heard them tuning up, already. He certainly heard someone screaming and moaning, out there…

Christian’s phone walked him through its wondrous array of features, then settled on its ready screen, which told him there were fewer bars available than in the depths of Mormon country.

“Shit,” he hissed, but started to punch in the number.

Three Missed Calls
, said an alert screen, with a chipper chirp that made his fillings jump out of his teeth.

“Come on, come on…”

Out of habit, he hit
Enter
to look at the calls. All from Lisa, Jasper’s date for the night.

Christian sighed as he cleared the phone. He barely knew her, but Jasper’s women tended to latch onto Christian if they hoped to stick around. They thought that, because he was gay, he was a reliable double agent.

Lisa was afraid Jasper was hung up on Evangeline, and didn’t want to get used as a rebound. She really liked Jasper. Everyone really liked Jasper—

Wiping his eyes, he hit the 9. The 1—

Jasper’s phone rang.

Loud as fuck, and right here in the room with him.

Jake pointed at Mathias. “Or hey, maybe you can gang up on me, get a little tag-team action going. Whaddaya think?”

Eddie trembled with helpless rage. Mathias just trembled. Eddie shot a glance at the kid, but his eyes were pinned to the ceiling as if it were the Sistine Chapel.

“Didn’t think so. So I guess we’ll save it for your confession. After Bible Boy, here.”

Mathias snapped out of his trance, looking more shocked and helpless than ever. He must have thought his prayers would do something about this, like wake him up.

The silence curled around them again, not awkward, now, but a huge, predatory presence, breathing in time with the purr of the idling studio gear.

And then, muffled by distance and heavy acoustics, someone started wailing hair metal licks on an electric guitar.

Christian was dumbstruck.

Dropping his own phone in the sink, he knelt beside his friend’s corpse. “Shit! Shut up, shut up—”

Jasper never turned off his phone, but even when his phone went off in the movies, people just laughed. That it sounded like Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen dueling over the last bottle of vodka on a transatlantic flight only made it more ridiculous. Even if they didn’t know he was a boxing champ, nobody could stay mad at Jasper—

“Shit!”

The guitar solo continued, looping over and over.

“God damn it!” Jake got between the door and Eddie and Mathias, who looked ready to bolt.
“Did you let him keep his phone?”

Gray appeared in the doorway. “I got it,” he snapped, and jumped at the bathroom door.

Stifling a swell of nausea, Christian laid open Jasper’s blazer and dug into the pockets, but it wasn’t so easy with his left hand. Jasper’s pockets were stuffed with a pack of Camels, lighters lifted off anyone who’d ever offered him a light, receipts, and loose cash, all of it drenched in cool, clotting blood like cranberry sauce.

In the other pocket, Jasper’s phone shivered and screamed. Slimy with blood, slippery as a fish, the phone almost jumped out of his hand when he dug it out.

Cursing himself, he flipped it open.

“Hello…?”
A woman’s voice, compressed shouting over a muddy wall of music.

“Lisa!” Christian whispered, loud as he dared. “Jasper’s dead! He…”

“What? I can’t hear you. Jasper…?”

The door slammed open. Gray stepped in and showed Christian his gun. “You got less than a second to hang up that phone.”

Christian hung up and handed over the phone. Gray tossed it in the toilet and flushed. Christian stood to block the sink, but Gray shoved him back down on his knees beside Jasper.

The gun brushed Christian’s ear. He closed his eyes.

Chuckling to himself, Gray turned on the tap and ran cold water over Christian’s phone.

Jake plucked a baseball bat from the umbrella stand by the door as he strode toward the bathroom. It was unsurprisingly burnished black, with Sammy Sosa’s ersatz signature engraved in white upon it, like bone peeking out through meticulously ruptured flesh.

“Get in here and watch these guys,” he barked. “I wanna have a word with the sodomite.”

Down the hall, on the bathroom floor, Christian could not help but laugh. “Which one?”

Gray cocked his foot to kick him, but Jake bellowed “NOW!” from the other room.

There was no mistaking the way he jumped. Not like a friend. Not like an employee. Not like a legitimate partner in crime.

Just exactly like a prison bitch.

Christian laughed some more. It felt powerfully good. It felt…accurate. He might be doomed, but he at least had a handle on what was going on around here.

If he had to die—as he’d always known he would, eventually, at the hands of some psycho closet case—he could at least die speaking truth to perversity.

He’d been training for this moment all his life.

“Your master’s calling,” he said, as Gray shuffled
glumly toward the doorway. “Take it hard up the ass once, for me.”

“You’ll be shuttin’ up soon,” were Gray’s famous last words.

Then he was out the door.

Christian heaved a whickering sigh of uncertain relief. Gray would have flat-out executed him. Jake liked to play games.

Maybe there was a way out of this, after all.

The bathroom doorway was yawning, empty. Across the hallway, Jake’s bedroom loomed. The only window was at ceiling height, barely deep enough to crawl through.

But the hallway was right there.

There was a part of Christian that thought
what if I just run right now? Grab Jasper’s keys, and motor on out? Call the cops? Call the National Guard? Call whoever it takes to take this fucker down forever?

It was a beautiful thought, but it was not the truth.

Jake stepped into the doorway.

And Christian got ready to die.

Even without the baseball bat, Jake would have been terrifying. He was six feet and change of muscle-bound, weight-trained, reanimated corpse-flesh: a still-handsome man-mountain that filled the doorway like a portrait barely squeezed into the frame.

And then there were his eyes: smoldering coals that flickered from black to red, then black again. They did not look real, but they were painfully expressive.

Jake smiled, and it would have been a winning smile, were it not for the red-black agitation in those eyes.

Was it shame that Christian saw there? A little homosexual panic, cutting into his godlike confidence?

Jake stepped forward, feigning nonchalance as he stepped over Jasper’s body, took a lazy check-swing with the bat. “You were saying?”

“Oh, faggot, please.” Christian rallied inside, whipped up his best no-nonsense smile, made a point of looking Jake right in his nightmare eyes. “I mean, I know you’re the biggest swinging dick in these parts, and all the ladies just swoon, and cock-a-doodle-doo for you…”

“But…?” Jake was bridling, no matter how hard he tried to keep that
check-how-cool-I-am
smirk etched into his face. He did not like the look in Christian’s eyes, did not like being seen that clearly.

“But let’s face it, sweetheart. You’ll fuck anything that walks or crawls, if it’ll get you what you want. You’re proud, but you’re not
that
proud. Are ya?”

The words stung. It was amazing to watch. Knives hadn’t worked. Embalming hadn’t worked.

But calling him a faggot?

Now
that
hit a nerve.

“You don’t know me,” Jake snarled: smirk gone entirely, body tensed to strike.

Christian just laughed. It was all he had left.

But it felt so goddamn good.

“Again: bitch, please!” Leaning into it now. Savoring those final moments of bliss. “If I kept that much secret pet man-ass in my closet, I’d have to change my name to Karl Rove…”

That was when Jake swung the bat.

Christian automatically threw himself backward, raised his right arm up without even thinking. A dull double-crack resounded, and the arm went all floppy as the bones inside it shattered.

Christian screamed—the good part over—sagging against the toilet as Jake brought the bat up. Utterly demolished, his right arm fluttered on the tile, leaving him wide open.

Jake hit him again. Ribs cracked and splintered in his chest, crushing the breath out of him in big, blood-misted gusts. The pain ratcheted way past unbelievable.

The bat came up again.

Then wavered in midair, as if thinking about it.

Please
, Christian thought, but could not bring himself to say it.

That was when Jake started smiling again.

And lowered the bat, ever so slowly.

“You don’t know me at all,” he said.

It wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter. History was always written by the winner. The last one standing. And that would be Jake.

Christian hung in for as long as he could before keeling over on his good side, hacking up blood from deep within. One of his lungs burned and bubbled when he tried to take a breath. More deep red liquid upsurged.

Jake hovered for a long, awful moment, tapping the tip of the bat on the floor beside Christian’s skull.

“And you don’t get off that easy,” he added.

Then he rose up and shattered the overhead light.

Glass ricocheted off the porcelain and tile, cascading down onto Christian and the floor. A couple stray pieces bit into his cheek, his useless arm. But there was nothing he could do.

“You better hope I’m wrong,” Jake continued, “while you’re listening to the others die. Cuz my hope is that—a couple of hours from now—you’ll still be puking up your own lungs, and I’ll have nothing better to do. Kinda like stompin’ a bug.”

Then Jake slammed and locked the door.

Leaving Christian in total darkness.

And woefully still alive.

Jake stormed back into the studio, with the bat chopping the air in a blur like a helicopter rotor.

Gray shifted from foot to foot, like he had to pee. “Jake. The front door—”

“I know, I know. Take care of it. I got things to do.”

Eddie felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead. A huge Rorschach moth of perspiration spread out from his back to meet the overflow from his armpits.

Jake looked from Eddie to Mathias, doing some sick math in his head before pointing. “Take the handyman.”

Gray motioned to Eddie with the gun.

Eddie wanted to run, but he tried one last time to get Mathias’s attention. The boy was trapped like a bird under Jake’s penetrating stare.

Gray manhandled him out of the studio, but he looked over his shoulder as they left.

Still swinging the bat, Jake strolled over to Mathias, his arrogant grin back at full wattage.

“It’s time to share our faith.”

Gray shut the door, and the curtain closed around it like a shroud.

In the suffocating darkness of the holding cell, the women huddled by the window, watching Eddie and Gray come out the sliding glass door: Emmy craning for a peek at Mathias through the momentary gap in the curtain; Esther pressed against the glass, as if the sight of her might finally goose her lame-ass manservant into action.

Evangeline, too, was staring through the window, trying to gauge the possibilities of escape. Right now, it all rode on this Eddie guy. And, sweet mother of God, she hoped he had a plan.

Evangeline could not stop shaking. It was almost like a palsy, too much like cold turkey: all her muscles feverishly convulsing at once, from feet to fingertips to the follicles of her scalp.

She hugged herself, but it didn’t help. Right up there with trying to tickle herself, in the uselessness department. The terror in her ran so fucking deep that Jesus himself probably couldn’t massage it out of her.

Gray had the gun aimed at the back of Eddie’s head; but since Eddie couldn’t see it, he took a moment to aim it at the window and grin, as if this were the funniest thing in the world. Which, to him, it probably was.

The other women recoiled, screeching as if already shot; but Evangeline held her ground. She knew that psychotic freak wouldn’t scratch his own balls without Jake’s say-so.

“Fuck you,” she said out loud, and flipped him a pair of fluttering birds that only made Gray yawn theatrically.

Gray slid the door shut behind him, pulled a flashlight from his pocket. Then he and Eddie moved out of sight, on their way to the garage.

Emmy quivered in the center of the holding cell,
also hugging herself. It didn’t seem to be working for her, either.

Meanwhile, Esther turned away from the window and tipped the flask to her lips, took a serious tug. It was the only sensible response, and the addict in Evangeline responded at once.

“Gimme some of that,” she heard herself say, almost before the thought had registered.

Esther pulled back, possessive. “There isn’t much.”

“I don’t want much. I don’t want any.” Her whole body shuddered. “I just need a little, right now.”

Esther looked at her knowingly, but did not nod her head, shook the flask instead. Not a lot left. That much was true.

“Please?” Evangeline said, trying to muzzle the voice inside that said,
don’t make me take it from you, bitch…

Eddie opened the garage door and stared into pure darkness. Gray’s flashlight shone into it but only illuminated a narrow window of it at a time, casting the rest of it into murky chaos.

It was the default storage locker, full of boxes, bric-a-brac, and broken furniture: the kind of shit you kept, but somehow never needed again.

There was a fully stocked workbench, cluttered with tools that glistened in the flashlight’s beam. Eddie’s shadow cut across it as he stepped inside, started walking toward the back.

“Where’s the light switch?”

“Right next to you,” said Eddie. “But it doesn’t work. I have to pull the chain on the overhead.”