Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (27 page)

Brayker shook his head as he scrubbed his face. “He can’t even touch it until all the blood is gone from the orb. And do you still recall how much was left?”

“I do,” she said. “Next to nothing. But he still can’t touch it, so it has to be lying around someplace.”

“Inside the case he brought. Don’t forget the case.”

She made fists, then interlaced her hands again. Five paces, turn, five paces, turn. This could become a habit. “So he still needs one of us to empty out the last drop. He can’t use pot holders or anything, right? Right. So he must keep one of us alive to do it for him.”

“Not necessarily you or me,” Brayker said. “Anybody he can find.”

“But it’s late,” she said. “He’s in Wormwood, apparently everybody and their grandma has become a demon here, and that leaves us. You, me, that fucknuts deputy, and Irene. Everyone else is dead.”

“We can assume that, yeah.”

She stopped pacing. “So then, I have a plan. You and I are going to arrange a truce with the Salesman.”

He held the pillowcase out and made strange faces.

“Are we being bugged here?” she asked, toning down her voice. “Can he listen in?”

Brayker shrugged. “You’re asking the ant what the anteater will do next. All I know is to duck and run and never stop when he’s around.”

“Forget that then. I say we stay put until sunrise.”

“So do I.”

She frowned. Somehow they had reached an agreement without solving anything. “So,” she said, and dropped down on the bed to sit beside him. “Ever played charades?”

He started to smile, then spun his head around. Jeryline turned to follow his eyes, her heart plummeting, having no idea what disaster might strike next, but assuming that since it was unexpected, it had to be a disaster nevertheless.

Danny Long was standing in the doorway with his mouth wide open in a terrific yawn. He rubbed his eyes and looked at Jeryline. “I can’t find my mom and dad,” he said. “And I’m scared of the monsters.”

Jeryline stood. “Aw, you poor baby. Come here and let me hold you.”

He looked back down the hallway, his lower lip pooched out as he got ready to cry. “Go with me,” he said. “Please go with me.”

Brayker touched her arm. “Make him walk through.”

She saw sense in that. She sat on the bed again and extended her arms. “I’ll help you, Danny,” she crooned. “Come here and give me a hug.”

He looked fretfully at her. “Some guy got smashed on the floor down there,” he said. “He smells like poop.”

“Just come in here, and then we’ll go,” she said, and got up again. “Come on.”

“What if my mom got smashed too? What if my dad’s still down in the tunnel with his head bleeding? Please come with me.”

She looked at Brayker. undecided. Danny was just a little kid who’d seen far too much tonight, was half out of his mind from the force of these recent tragedies. “We have to wait for morning,” she told him, still keeping her distance. “Come stay with us in here.”

He gave her a long, tearful look, turned his head to look at the stairway, and took a faltering step. Jeryline glanced down at Brayker. He was slowly scrubbing a hand over his face, looking as old as he probably was.

“Danny,” she pleaded, “don’t go. Everything will be better in the morning.”

He wiped his nose with his sleeve, tired and seeming at the point of collapse. He slowly walked out of sight.

“Shit,” Jeryline said under her breath. “I can’t take this anymore.”

Brayker heard her. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Not until he comes through the door.”

She hesitated, torn in half by her common sense and her emotions. She went to the door and peeked around it. Danny was still going, dragging his feet and sobbing. She saw that one of his shoes was untied. It was a pitiful enough sight to break the deadlock. “I’ll just bring him back here,” she said to Brayker. “Nothing can happen.”

He shook his head, then bent down and fished the Swiss Army knife off the floor. He held it out to her. “If he turns on you,” he said, “stab out his eyes. You have to do it fast and without feeling, and then run. Can you do that?”

She accepted it. “I guess I can.”

“No guessing,” he said. “And no hesitation. Promise me.”

She smiled an affirmation, then went out of the room. “Hold up,” she called to Danny, and he stopped. Once beside him, she dropped to her knees and took hold of his shoulders. “I want you to listen,” she said, turning him to face her. “There’s nothing we can do about your mom and dad right now. We’re going to go back into that room and you are going straight to bed. I can even tell you a story.”

His eyelashes were sparkling with fresh tears. Without warning he jerked out of her grasp and scurried down the stairway. Jeryline jumped to her feet. “Danny!”

“Mommy,” he wailed. “Where are you? Daddy?”

She clenched her eyes shut. This was horrible, she was not equipped to handle situations as horrible as this, she wanted to go to bed and dream herself away from here. But only a miracle had saved Danny’s hide the last time he went on his own. This time he would surely die.

“Stop!” she shouted, and chased after him, taking the steps two at a time. At the bottom she caught sight of him headed straight for the trapdoor to the basement. Up and behind her, Brayker shouted her name into the hallway.

“Danny,
please!”
she hollered at his back. “Stop and listen to me!”

He stopped at the point where Martel had broken all the jars. The assorted jellies on the floor had been smashed and tracked in a dozen directions by the horde of demons the basement had disgorged. Jeryline skidded to an unsteady halt and turned him around.

“Upstairs,” she said, breathing hard. “No more running.”

He looked up at her. A grin curved his mouth up at the corners. He pointed a finger in her face and she realized with a jolt of horror that the fingernail was round and sharp, a talon the color of mustard.

“You’re right, Jerry,” he wheezed, blowing the stench of bloody ruin in her face. “There will be no more running at all.”

She started to turn with a shout for Brayker already forming inside her lungs when she saw that she and Danny were no longer alone.

“Meet my new pals,” Danny chortled. “Too bad we don’t have time for introductions.”

She felt her mind graying out. No introductions were needed in this sudden ring of demons. Though each one looked different, they were all cut from the same mold: the Salesman’s mold.

She dropped to the floor just as they sprang at her.

20

T
hough it looked like Diamond County Deputy Sheriff Bob Martel had lost supreme command of the freedom fighters to Irene Galvin, he had not lost the whole battle, not by a long shot. Currently Irene had him slogging around outside in the rain on some kind of search-and-destroy mission in the yard. After coming down from the steeple they had checked in all the rooms and found no one, which Martel interpreted as meaning everybody else was dead. But no, Irene insisted that in such a big place as the Mission Inn there were lots of good hiding spaces. She did not seem to realize that Brayker was content to blow the whole night cowering in Room Five, and apparently Jerry as well. Suddenly now they were gone, Room Five was empty, and Uncle Willie had not bothered to come down from the security of the steeple. The smell of death hung in every noseful Martel inhaled, and with every minute that dragged by it was looking like he and Irene were the sole survivors.

But what had enticed Brayker and Jerry out of the room? During the short time Irene and he were gone catching Uncle Willie in what was supposed to be an attic, those two took off. Were they downstairs now? Were they in the steeple now? Was Brayker a lying son of a bitch, a county official who planned this whole terrible episode just to put a certain deputy to the test before either firing him or promoting him?

Martel’s head ached with questions. The undersized field jacket was horrifically tight on him, the rain pounding his head felt like a hail of cold buckshot, he was hungry and needed to see the blood of these demons to renew his warrior’s spirit. He had no doubt that he would be killing them all soon, if Irene would ever stop ordering him around like a general. His silly mission now was to circle the building to look for Danny, as if the kid actually made it out here into the rain and decided to hunker down and be miserable all night. And now it seemed that the flashlight wanted to order a midnight snack of new batteries, the once-mighty white beam yellowing and getting soft.

There was a clump of former hedges at the northwest corner of the building and Martel dutifully stuck the barrel of the shotgun inside the nest of crumbling branches to pull it apart. What? No Danny curled up inside? The proper authorities would hear of this! Especially since the Proper Authority here consisted of Deputy Martel and no one else.

He continued his tour around the building. Someone had left a tattered white T-shirt in the mud. Call the FBI, for God’s sake. Beyond it, something that looked suspiciously like a dog turd loomed squatly on the ground. The CIA must be told of this. Around the next corner he ran across a tumbleweed that had become soggy and was unable to tumble anymore. He stomped it to a pile of pointy little twiglets while using a mental clipboard to remind himself to phone the President with this ghastly news.

And then he was back at the same kitchen door Irene had forced him out of. She was inside, scooping up wet ashes with a dustpan, looking lumpy and green in her clothes, like a big mutated frog. How he hated her.

“Nothing, huh?” she said as he came in. Then, in less than the time it takes a real frog to perform one hop, she popped up on her feet and aimed the dustpan at him. “Hold it right there!” she shouted.

He held it right where she wanted it. “Huh?”

“You could be the Salesman all over again!”

“I ain’t no Salesman,” he growled at her while water drained out of his clothing to form a widening pool under his shoes. “I’m Bob Martel and I’m the Deputy Sheriff.”

She pressed her chin down toward her breastbone, eyeing him fiercely in a classic pose of mistrust. Her single grenade was hooked to the waistband of her slacks, and now one hand went down to touch it. “Prove it,” she demanded.

Bob Martel spluttered and fumed. “Goddammit, Irene! I’m who I am!”

Her eyes grew narrower. “And who might that be?”

He propped the shotgun against the wall, quite willing by now to unhook a hand grenade from his new coat and blow her stupid ass, and the stupid rest of her, off the face of the earth. “Irene,” he said in tightly measured words, “with Sheriff Tupper dead, I am the man in charge here. I also have grenades in easy reach. You may think you are the newest thing since Dairy Queen invented ice cream, but I am here to tell you it ain’t so. Got that?”

She rolled her eyes. “So sue me. Come on in, Bob. I just had to be sure.”

He deflated to his normal, un-angry size. “Christ, we need a code word,” he complained. He stuck the flashlight into his holster. “You call me something, I call you something different.”

She bent down and resumed collecting wet ashes. “Fine. You call me Irene, I’ll call you shit-for-brains.”

“Not funny, Irene. We’ll do it this way. Your code-name will be, uh, Frog Lady.”

“Frog Lady?”

“Something the Salesman could never know, see? And I’ll be, uh . . .”

“Stuporman. Nah, he’d guess that right off the bat.”

“Not funny again. I’ll be Gunbelt. How’s that? Can you remember it?”

She nodded. “Gumby. No problem.”

He ground his teeth. “Anyhow, Danny’s not outside.”

“All right, then. Now go check the basement.”

He eyed her warily. “You want
me,
alone, in the
basement?
Suppose it’s still crawling with demons down there? Do you want me dead? Is that it?”

She thought for a moment. “You’re right, Gumby. A slow death would be better.”

He retrieved the shotgun and strode past her. “Screw you,” he muttered. “When you hear my grenades going off down there, you’d better not be standing above where I throw them.”

“Just straddle the sucker and knock on the ceiling before she blows,” she said. Martel knocked the bat-wing door apart with one fist, hesitated, and pushed his way back through.

“Forget it,” he said. “No way am I going down there.”

Irene rose up with the dustpan heaped full of ashes, and crossed to the trashcan beside the prep table. “Then at least go back up and drag Willie’s drunken ass down here.” She dumped the ashes inside it, regarded the dustpan, then set it aside. “These suckers stink just as bad dead as they did alive. I’ll let Willie finish.”

She looked back over to Martel. “Going to stand there all day? Get moving!”

“No,” he said. He had worked a long, long shift and was too tired to play her games anymore. “I’m the cop here, and I go where I tell myself to.”

She leaned against the prep table and passed a hand tiredly over her hair, looking old and worn out. “Whatever. One of those demons is probably belching up Danny-burps even as we speak, so call off the search. Myself, I’m staying right here. Yourself, you can go where you please.”

Martel squared his shoulders; his authority had been established at last. “Fine, then. I will now go out to Tupper’s cruiser and retrieve the box of shotgun shells I know is in there.”

He started for the back door, but turned when Irene called to him. “Now what?” he demanded.

She raised two fingers. “Before you risk life and limb for a box of shotgun shells, you should ask yourself two questions.”

He sighed. “What two questions?”

“Number one: why not use the front door?”

“Any trained combat fighter could tell you that,” he retorted nastily. “My last patrol just now ended at the rear. Walking out the front door would be a blind approach. By coming at the enemy from the side I have the advantage of surprise. Next?”

“Number two,” she said, “if you can make it to the car, why don’t you drive over the lawn to the front steps, open a door, and
pick me up so we can get the fuck out of here?!”

He blinked. Good idea. He had tried it once before and almost lost his life to the demons, but now he was better at this survival thing, was a seasoned veteran not afraid of webbed claws and bloated faces with long yellow fangs. “I’ll honk,” he said. “You stay close till you hear it, then run like hell out the front.”