The Brotherhood of the Wheel (50 page)

A group of shadow people appeared at the open basement door, trying to slide inside. The light obliterated them. A swarm of BEKs dropped into the basement from the ruined stairs, and the light reduced them to smoke instantly. Ava kept tearing the stone away, prying it loose and smashing more, frantically, as the creatures continued to try to reach her. Each crumbling bit of stone freed more and more light.

She began to feel the presence behind the memories and the images; it was relentless, swelling up in her head like a cluster migraine. The pressure made her feel as if her skull was going to crack and fall apart like the crumbling capstone. As the pressure behind her eyes grew stronger, Ava had an awful thought: The force at the bottom of her well was powerful, primal, and it would stop at nothing to be free. She struck the capstone again, and another chunk of the stone shattered and fell away, devoured by the light. What if, she thought through the storm of alien memories and squeezing pain, the inhuman forces that they were trying to free tonight were no better, no less ruthless or relentless or destructive, than the Horned Man? Her hands were smashing stone of their own accord now. The light was pouring forth, shining through every window, every crack and crevice in the old house, filling the night with its awful, remorseless beauty, and filling Ava with the ghosts of other lives, an unrelenting fear, and an alien purpose.

*   *   *

The semi pulled up in front of Agnes's house, the house of the Crone. Off to the left, there was a rumble and a brilliant rising ball of orange fire and trailing black smoke.

“That would be Heck,” Jimmie said, jabbing a thumb in the direction of the explosion. “Subtle, our kilted ninja.” Jimmie helped Agnes down out of the cab. He noted that the countdown clock in the truck said time was almost up—it was fifteen minutes until eight o'clock.

Jimmie helped Max down next. The professor had her face in her tablet and was working furiously, even as she climbed down. “Jimmie, I'm not sure I can do this,” she said, shaking her head at the numbers. “Viamancy works off motion and spatial formulas, and the power coming off the Road. I don't have any of that here. I don't know if we can get a message out to Agent Dann. I'm sorry.”

They were walking up the stairs to the porch. Jimmie had his shotgun and was sweeping the darkness. The porch light they had left on seemed feeble, but he was thankful for any cover from the shadow people he knew were out there. “You're sorry for not pulling another miracle out of your hat, Max? It's okay. We'll figure something out. Always another option, always a way out.”

Max looked at him strangely.

“What?” he said, as Agnes opened the front door.

“When you say all that, it sounds plausible,” Max said. “Like we actually have a chance.”

“We do,” Jimmie said. “I've been in a lot worse scrapes than this, and I'm still standing. You just got to stay positive.”

Agnes gasped as the front door swung open; a pair of BEKs snarled and launched themselves at the old woman, tackling her before she even had a chance to draw her Mauser. Jimmie fired the shotgun through the open door, scattering part of the horde of ink-eyed, fanged children that were hurtling toward them. He chambered another round and fired again, as more of the fast-moving little monsters filled the breach he had just made. He glanced down for a second at Agnes. She was wrestling the two children with great ferocity, more than Jimmie would have figured her capable of. One of the children tried to bite her left arm, but Agnes pushed the frightfully strong creature away. That left an opening for the other BEK, who sank its razor-sharp teeth into her right hand. Agnes moaned a little and dropped her Mauser in pain from the savage bite. Black tendrils began to creep across her hand, radiating from the bite.

“No!” Jimmie screamed, and lowered the shotgun against the BEK's head. The gun's blast was thunder; the BEK's head exploded in a bloody smoking mass. Several BEKs from the swarm in the hallway used the momentary distraction to pounce on the trucker, and now Jimmie had three of the strong, fast-moving creatures on him, their teeth snapping like piranha.

“Jimmie!” Max shouted behind him, as he struggled to keep the teeth at bay. He looked back to see Max backing away from the stairs. The night was roiling with shadow people. They were on the truck, all over the yard, everywhere—hundreds of them. The slight sound they gave made Jimmie think of a swarm of bats, their leathery wings whispering as one. Agitated, the shadow people were throwing themselves against the flickering porch light, smoking and unraveling in a mad effort to reach their human prey, slowly forcing themselves farther up the stairs, farther into the painful but dying light.

Jimmie struggled to bring the shotgun up, but small, too-strong hands were pinning his arms. Teeth clattered very near his ear, the sound of snapping bone.

The porch light made a sizzling sound and began to fade, then it came back up, but the shadows were closer now to Max, who was fumbling with her satchel. The light faded again, worse this time and a second longer. The shadow people were closer.

Jimmie thought of Layla and of Peyton, of his unborn child. The weight of failing them was greater than the monsters pinning him to the porch, preparing to tear into his flesh.

The light failed.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

“10-33”

The shadow people were the night—they were everywhere, slipping through every narrow crack in Buddy's, surging toward the helpless, fragile humans who huddled together in fear and a primal instinct to cling to one another when death was nigh.

“Light 'em up!” Carl shouted, as he, Barb, and the other defenders brandished the small souvenir laser-pointer key chains that Jimmie and the others had delivered that afternoon. The red beams sliced through the shadows like knives and made the creatures melt into odorless smoke in their wake.

A shadow's long, slender fingers had begun to slide toward the face of a screaming, terrified six-year-old when it was struck by a crimson beam. The shadow flailed, as if in silent pain, and boiled away into smoke. Dennis Cottington, sitting up in his cot, nodded and gave the confused child a “V for Victory” sign with the hand not holding the laser pointer. The child smiled at the old man.

“Bloody Jerries,” Dennis said.

“Now, Christina!” Barb shouted to Christina Moric, one of the defenders behind the bar. Christina flipped a switch on an independent power supply running to multiple power cables, and the whole interior of Buddy's was illuminated with powerful carbon arc light from a series of tripod-mounted klieg lights—the lights used in television and film production—another part of the arsenal Aussapile and his allies had brought with them. The lights made the interior of Buddy's as bright as daylight. The shadows began to come apart, smoking, almost diluting, like too little ink in too much water. In a matter of several chaotic, terrifying moments, it was over. Barb looked around the roadhouse. It was still, and no shadow remained. She looked over at Carl and smiled. His eyes narrowed, waiting for the next wave of monsters, but it didn't come. They hugged each other and listened to the tiny scary noises the thwarted shadows made, out in the night. They worried for Aussapile and the others, out there with no daylight to protect them.

*   *   *

Heck opened his eyes. He hurt. His side throbbed, as though someone had driven a few cigarettes into his flesh with a sledgehammer. He took a breath and felt the sharp stab of a broken rib. He'd wiped out enough times on a bike to know how that felt. He tasted some dried blood on his lips and realized that his face mask was gone. A shitty AM radio somewhere was playing Hank Williams's “Lost Highway” through a curtain of static rain. His wrists were wrapped in nylon clothesline, and he was hanging a few inches off the ground; the line binding his wrists was cradled in a mechanical winch hook. Wald and Toby Scode were in front of him. Toby was preparing a battered acetylene tank and a torch rig, while Wald watched Heck with his arms crossed and a shit-eating grin on his craggy face.

“I wouldn't smile too much with a mug like that, man,” Heck croaked. “Someone might mistake it for your bum and try to wipe it.” Wald's smile fell, and he drove a powerful right hook into Heck's face. There was a flash of white light behind Heck's eyes and then numbness. He was pretty sure Wald had broken his nose, also not a new experience for Heck. “Oh, oh, wait,” Heck said, sucking a glob of blood up out of his crushed sinuses. The pain that caused chased the numbness away and confirmed the status of his nose. He spit the blood on Wald's work shirt. “Have we started? Okay, the safe word is … umm…” Heck looked the Scodes up and down. “Inbred?” Wald punched him again. “You sure got a purty mouth? Banjo music? Children of the Corn? Any of these working for you two scholars?”

“Give me the damn blowtorch,” Wald said to Toby. “We'll see how glib this little punk is when his skin is melting off his skull like butter.” The torch hissed like a cobra; a tongue of blue fire moved closer to Heck's face. Wald's eyes were glassy with rage and anticipation as the flame came closer to Heck's skin. “You're a pretty boy,” Wald said. “Let's see how smart-ass you are when no one will look at you without gagging.”

The blowtorch's searing flame traced a line from Heck's cheek across his broken nose and then to his other cheek. Heck jerked wildly as fire hot enough to melt steel caressed his skin. He jerked and then got very still, almost stuporous.

“Stupid bastard's already gone into shock,” Wald said. “No damn fun at all.” He moved the torch up to Heck's forehead, leaning in to admire his disfiguring work. Wald frowned. He moved the torch away from Heck's face and ran a finger over the blackened trail the flame had made. Under the soot was healthy skin, unmarred by the torch's heat. “What is this shit?” Wald snarled in disbelief.

Heck's eyes popped open, and he grinned the way a wolf shows his fangs to his prey. “Black magic, baby,” he said. “I'm too fucking pretty to die.” Heck swung both booted feet upward and drove them into Wald's abdomen, hard. Wald groaned in pain and flew backward, the torch flying backward and catching Toby in the chest. Toby screamed as skin began to blacken and crisp. His shirt caught fire. Heck used the momentum of the kick to swing back on the winch chain and wrap his legs around Toby's neck. He slipped his bound wrists off the hook and twisted as he fell to the ground. Toby's neck twisted under the torque of Heck's weight falling. There was a dry, snapping sound, and Toby's burning body hit the concrete floor of the bay and lay still. Heck tumbled and came up in a crouch, his hands still tied.

“Toby!” Wald screamed, charging toward Heck with a tire iron. “You killed my brother, you freak!” Wald swung downward with the iron. Heck raised his arms and snagged it between the coiled rope that tied him. He felt the throb of the impact deep in his wrists, but the rope caught on the edge of the tool and held long enough for him to lunge up from the floor and head-butt Wald squarely in the face. Wald fell back, blood pouring from his own broken nose. Heck stood, the fallen blowtorch in his hand. He turned it inward, the flame raking across his hand and wrist, leaving a blackened line in its wake, but no pain, no injury. The torch cut through the ropes, and they fell away. Heck looked at the torch and his hands with a mix of amusement and bewilderment before checking on Wald.

Wald was beside Toby's burning body. Tears, snot, and blood covered his face. “I'm going to kill you,” he said, his voice distorted by mucus and crushed cartilage. He stood, wincing in pain but defiant. He raised the tire iron.

There was a drumming in Heck's ears, the rush of blood like massive, beating wings. A cold cruelty settled over him, slithered through him—an intrinsic knowledge of himself, like the certainty of fact. It was not an entirely alien sensation; he'd felt it in the war, in many firefights, and one horrible time, long ago, when he was young. Each time he'd felt it, it startled him, frightened him deep, deep down, below the black ice that hid his fears, his regrets.
This is me, as much as any other part—maybe even more so than the other parts. This is who I am
.

“No,” Heck said in a voice that didn't sound entirely like his own. “No, I'm going to take that iron away from you, then I'm going to burn you with this torch in all the ways you were going to hurt me, and eventually you will beg me to stop. I won't.”

Wald paused. His raised arm, with his makeshift weapon, trembled.

Heck continued, stepping closer, the blue flame illuminating his face, filling it with sinister shadows. He ran the torch's flame over his arms, his palm. “Then I'll ask you where those two kids you're holding are, and you'll tell me,” he said. “You'll try to hold out, try to be tough, but eventually you'll tell me where they are. And I still won't stop. You're going to die in pain, fear, and regret, just like your brother, cooking away over there.”

Wald looked back at his brother's still burning body. “Go to hell!” he growled, and charged at Heck, who stood, smiling, his arms raised and open, as if he were awaiting an embrace.

Heck laughed. The sound bubbled up out of him, unbidden, like a death rattle—bone raking over slate. It frightened Wald, like ice water in his guts. It frightened Heck even more.

*   *   *

Lovina fell down the basement stairs backward with three hissing, snarling BEKs at her throat, her AR-15 spraying fire and lead at the rest of the descending swarm as she fell. She caught herself at the base of the stairwell, grabbing hold of the railing and swinging herself wildly to one side. She smashed into an old water heater and felt a sharp stab of pain as a jagged metal part of the old tank stabbed her in the lower back.

The sudden swing helped her ditch the three BEKs. They flew to her right, and Lovina fanned the assault rifle in their direction. All three were torn to pieces by streaking tracer rounds, their burning bodies dropping near the foot of the stairwell.