Psycho Save Us (48 page)

The big man with
the tattooed belly ran for cover behind an old silver Izuzu Rodeo parked at the
curb.  Spencer turned and fired twice, just to make sure he was down.  Someone
else fired at him from the window of the house on his right.  It was a
semiautomatic weapon by the sound of it.  Bullets danced on the cracked
pavement but nowhere near his feet.

Spencer ducked
and ran around the side of the big brick house, bullets slicing at air just
behind him, some of them smashing into the picket fence and the earth.  He
heard someone shout, “
Gde?
”  Someone else cried, “
Chto ty delayesh?!
”
and someone else screamed, “
Vsyo pad kontrolem!
”

Mere seconds
before things erupted on Avery Street, Kaley Dupré felt a familiar, slippery,
slimy mind approaching her.  She felt the feelings more than the thoughts.  She
felt the lust, and white-hot anger that accompanied it.

They started
across the room, moving slowly at first but then with more purpose.  Kaley and
Bonetta both paused when they spotted the blood on the floor.  It was just
beside a small, rounded saddle, and there were stirrups around its legs where her
sister had been tied down.  Kaley fought back another bout of vomiting—there
couldn’t be much left in her stomach—and shouted, “Shannon?”  Her eyes went
rheumy.  “Shannon!”

“
Shh
!”
Bonetta hissed.  “You want ’em to hear us?”

I don’t know
which house you’re in
,
the monster whispered into her mind and heart.  Kaley didn’t immediately
answer, because she felt the pressure from the Oni’s.  They were on their way;
she knew it even before she knew she knew it. 

There was too
much going on at once and Kaley didn’t know which to act on first.

She knew exactly
where Shannon was being held, and suddenly that trumped all.  Kaley was
terrified to see what physical shape her sister had been left in, but the green
door at the other end of the basement had what in years to come Kaley would
come to call Resonance.  Her little sister resonated from that location.  She
knew it as well as she knew her arms were attached to her shoulders.  She knew
it the way that a spider knows it has something in its web, by sensing the
vibrations throughout the web itself.

She moved over
to the green door, and looked at the lock.  She tried to find the knowledge
again to pick it, but couldn’t.  The knowledge was leaving her.  The
Connection, so strong a moment before, was slowly being severed.  Like a fire
that burned so bright that it burned up all its fuel and died quickly. 
Too
much
kindling this time
, she thought.

You there?
the monster
said.

“I’m thinking,”
she said.

Beside her,
Bonetta said fervently, “Thinking about what?  Let’s go!”  Now that she was
free of the room and had space to move about, and now that Kaley’s charm had
worked to embolden her, Bonetta had found her courage.

It was all
happening so fast.  Kaley tried to give the monster an answer.  She would still
need his help since she couldn’t pick this lock.  She pictured the big brick
house, and the brief look she’d gotten before Shannon had attempted her
escape.  “It’s a big brick one,” she told the monster, while Bonetta stood
there glowering at her, “on the front somebody spray-painted L-Ray runs this
shit.  That’s all I—oh…oh God…”

She almost
vomited.

They had just
crossed over the sandbox in the Rainbow Room when she felt the waves of lust
and murder preceding the Oni family.  Footsteps.  Rapid ones coming down the
wooden stairs.  Bonetta whimpered, “Oh no…”  Kaley rattled the door.  She
banged on it, called out her sister’s name, but heard no reply.  She hadn’t
sensed Shan’s death, so she was still alive in there.  “Oh, God!” Bonetta
screamed from behind.  Kaley turned, and found Olga and Mikhael standing on the
stairs.  Olga had her Taser again, and Mikhael stood right behind her, pistol
in hand.

“Get back in
your room, little girl,” Olga said.

Kaley started to
say something.  Then, all at once, she felt defiance rise inside her.  It
belonged to Bonetta Harper, and it came from that place where we hide all our
secret rebellions, where we send them to be consumed by more logical thinking,
and yes, even by our own fears and insecurities.  The rebellion was bright and
hot and Kaley was overwhelmed by it.

Before they knew
it, Olga and Mikhael were assailed by Bonetta, who lifted something from the
floor.  It was a whip, a prop, laid down beside the saddle and the stirrups. 
She ran screaming at her captors and was on Olga before she could raise her
Taser.  Shrieking like a banshee, and tearing at Olga’s face and hair, Kaley
felt the battle internally more than externally.  Red and black swirled in
eddies, rage that had germinated from neglect suffered over ten years. 
And…something else.  Something that was here, in this room with Kaley, with all
of them.  She couldn’t feel the monster anymore, but she didn’t need to. 
Something had been shared, however briefly.  Just as he’d unconsciously given
Kaley his lock picking skills, he’d also dumped in a bit of his humor, his
delight at what had happened in Baton Rouge.  When someday she had her
doctorate in psychology, Dr.
Kaley Alexandria Dupré would know that that’s how
such creatures worked, that it was much like the meth to her mother, how one
hit used to be enough, but after a while only a single hit didn’t satisfy for
nearly as long.  So an addict must up the dosage.

The monster had
upped his dosage.  His need was great, and he’d shared it with Kaley.  It was
there, inside of her, tugging.

This all
happened within the span of a second, while Bonetta struggled, and yet the days
and weeks and years seemed to crawl by for Kaley.  It started
out…slowly…slowly…from the back of her mind forward.  It crept across her eyes
and there was a splitting sensation.  Then, she was spinning around and
around.  It was like the vertigo she used to suffer through, only now it wasn’t
nauseating, it was…thought-provoking?  Yes…yes, it
did
provoke
thoughts.  Kaley now found herself in a position of moral flexibility.  In one
nanosecond she was empathetic to all of the creatures around her—from Bonetta
to Shannon to Olga to Mikhael and even to a moth she detected somewhere behind
her, feeling so hungry and yet exhilarated by the lights all around it.  Then,
she wasn’t empathetic at all.  She actually found herself repulsed by all of
these people, even by her sister, who, for just a millisecond, she saw as weak
and pathetic.

Something turned
over inside of her.  There were glaciers of her own that she hadn’t yet
charted, much like the monster’s own glaciers.  The landscape of her own heart
was opened to her, and it was a tortured, treacherous thing.  Kaley did not
like seeing the things she saw.  At once, she was both pitying and reviling
herself.

And there it
was.  A mentality that she normally would’ve looked at askance.  Olga and
Mikhael were wreathed in a viscous fluid.  Kaley saw it, even if Bonetta did
not.  Olga and her brother saw it, too, and acted as if snakes had leapt at
them.  They crawled away from Bonetta, who Mikhael had wrenched by her hair and
flung to the floor at gunpoint.  Now, Mikhael looked at his gun hand, and saw
the dark-red liquid slowly pouring out from his fingertips and going up, up, up
his hand.

Olga’s own
attack came from her mouth.  From her gums came lines of blood, which crawled
around her lips and into his nostrils.  Next it came from her eyes.  She cried
tears of dark red blood and fell back onto her ass, looking at her hands, where
the flesh had started peeling back.  Now Bonetta screamed, for she saw it,
too.  As it turned out, this might not just all be in Kaley’s mind.  It
appeared this was actually happening.

“
Kak dela?
”
someone said.  Kaley half realized it was her.  She spoke Russian now.  “
Ti takaya
privlekatelnaya
,”
she told Olga.  Translation: You are so pretty.  Olga looked at her.  She was
trembling, and looked over at her brother, whose own flesh had started to
melt.  It wasn’t boiled, there was no smoke coming off of him.  The flesh
sagged, and though it was not heated, it took the viscosity of lava, slowly
falling, falling, sloughing off of him.  He turned and looked at his sister
with desperate eyes, one of which hung from the socket.  He looked at his own
hands and staggered backwards, up the stairs, his flesh dropping off in great
clumps behind him.

She had boiled
over.  Kaley could not longer contain the flow.  It came bursting out of her
like seas over the New Orleans levies.  She stood there letting it pass from
her and into the room.  It touched all corners of the basement.  She felt the
plaster on the walls and ceiling, felt the dust mop and the drops of semen, the
cracked walls, the stuffed animals and their threading.  Bonetta’s own mind was
assailed, and she lost her mind.  Kaley felt it go.  She, after all, was the
one who destroyed it.  Shannon had warded herself, either out of practice or
instinct, and was safe.  That was good, because Kaley now had no way of
protecting her.  The waters that burst those levies were taking Kaley for a
ride as much as anyone else.

Visions melded
with one another, became conjoined, and then dissolved.  Curtains of flame
appeared, then peeled back to reveal an endless darkness, and beyond that
endless darkness was herself, staring back at her from across an impossible
gulf.  Other things came to her, terrifying and seductive all at once.  It
inflated her.  It was beyond her. 
She
was the kindling, and not the enkindler.

This was what
she would come to call the Rapture.

The back yard
gave little cover against the rounds that burst out at him from the top floor
of the brick house.  Spencer blindly fired two shots behind him as he made for
a parked red sedan near a rear garage.  Just as he dived for cover, a man
stepped out from the back door with an Uzi with a suppressor.  The barrage of
gunfire lit the sedan up, shattering glass and flattening the front right tire.

Spencer pressed
his back against the rear wheel for maximum cover, even as the neighborhood
came alive all around him.  The yard was about fifty yards squared, mostly
grass except for the two-car garage and a doghouse with no dog.

The windshield
of the sedan was spackled with bullets from a silenced weapon.  He could no
longer tell exactly which direction it was all coming from.  Someone started
firing from a second storey window in the neighboring house, at least he
thought so, and two more pistols were fired from somewhere on either side of
the sedan.  They would want to hem him in, pin him down, and finish him off
quickly before the cops showed up and started asking questions.

But a flash of
light and a steady
whup-whup-whup
changed all that in an instant.  The
helicopter came seemingly out of nowhere.  For all the gunfire, Spencer never
heard its approach.  The searchlight splashed against the yard, but on the
opposite side from where Spencer was huddled.

All at once, all
gunfire ceased.

The police
chopper (for what else could it be?) crested the top of the house, and swept
its spotlight across the side of the house.  Spencer poked his head over the
top of the sedan, spotted a large shadow dashing across the lawn towards the
back door of the house.  His pulse didn’t budge.  He stood up, took careful
aim, gave a bit of a lead on his target, and squeezed the trigger.  It took the
bare-chested man in the neck.  He did a comical little dance, spinning around
and around while trying to keep his feet beneath him, until he finally collided
with a porch post.

Spencer darted
across the lawn, making for the house.  The searchlight would actually grant
him cover as long as it wasn’t on him—anyone on the other side of the
searchlight, which was most of the neighborhood, would not be able to see
through
the light to the darkness beyond.  For the moment, he could move freely, and
the chopper’s own propellers had masked his gunshot.

“
This is the
Atlanta Police Department!
” announced an authoritative voice form Among
High.  “
Lay down your weapons and put your hands in the air!
” 
Doubtless, while gunshots wouldn’t be easily heard from the chopper’s cockpit,
the flashes of muzzle flair moments ago would be familiar to the officers
inside.

As Spencer made
for the back door, he could just see around the side of the house.  He spotted
at least three sets of flashing lights, one of them belonging to a large van. 
No
,
he thought. 
No, I’m so fucking close!

At the porch he
halted, and knelt briefly over the dying Russian.  The dying man had jaundiced
skin, and pleading eyes.  “Look at me!” he shouted above the din of the chopper
and the commands its pilot was still issuing.  The man’s neck was shooting jets
of blood.  “Look at me!  Look at me!  Look at me!” he said over and over, until
the Russian finally looked up.  He had a crimson bear tattooed on his
forehead.  “You see me?  I did this to you!
 I
did!”  And he laughed as
he scooped up the man’s silenced Uzi.  The Russian looked up at him stupidly. 
To Spencer, he seemed to be considering how awful his last moments were, how
utterly
wrong
it was to have to look at a laughing enemy at a time like
this.