They kill, p.22
They Kill, page 22
“Oh my god! Are you all right?”
Stuart smiled. “I will be.”
He opened his mouth, intending to shoot his charger at her forehead, but the cable only ejected partway and hung limply from his mouth.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said, the words partially garbled.
Stuart took hold of the charger, intending to jam it manually into the woman, but the cable disconnected from the port beneath his tongue. He tried to reinsert it, but he found only wet, mushy flesh where the port had been. It was gone.
“Krista! What’s happening?”
There was no immediate reply, but then he heard the pop and crackle of static in his head, followed by Krista’s voice, her words almost inaudible.
“Fire…damage…system…non…func…tion…al….”
Her voice trailed away to nothing.
“Krista!” Stuart shouted, then louder, “Krista!”
He looked at the smart watch that had merged with his wrist, and he saw the screen was black. No app icons, no power indicator, nothing. It was dead. Krista was dead.
The woman who’d come out of the coffee shop had had enough of Stuart’s strange appearance and even stranger behavior. She turned and fled back into the café.
“Fuck!”
Stuart hurled the useless charger after her. It bounced off CaffeNation’s glass door and landed on the sidewalk. He left it there and continued toward his Camaro, moving more unsteadily than before.
The pain from his burns was so intense that his vision blurred and his head swam with vertigo. He thought he might pass out, but he made it to the car. The door didn’t open for him automatically, so he grabbed the handle and opened it the old-fashioned way. He practically fell into the driver’s seat and managed to close the door behind him as a fire truck zoomed past.
Stuart knew he had to get out of there before the cops arrived. He put his hands on the steering wheel and waited for his body to connect with the vehicle. But his hands didn’t merge with the steering wheel as they should’ve. He furrowed his brow – which hurt like a motherfucker, given his burns – gritted his teeth and concentrated so hard that his body began shaking. He thought it wasn’t going to work, but slowly his hands and the steering wheel became one. He felt his mind connect to the Camaro, although the link was nowhere near as strong as before. Still, it was enough. The Camaro started, and he pulled away from the curb. He did a U-turn in the middle of the street and headed away from the Historic District as fast as his vehicle would take him. A paramedic van and a couple cop cars passed him going the other way, but none of the drivers so much as glanced in his direction.
At first he drove aimlessly. It took all his waning energy to deal with the pain of his burns, and he could barely think, let alone choose a destination. But the longer he drove, the more he kept remembering Sierra’s face as she walked toward ArtWorks’ entrance, blowtorch held tight in her hand, can of paint thinner in the other. He hadn’t expected her to confront them like that, didn’t know she had it in her. He thought she’d intended to attack Mandy after what she’d done to Karolyn – and hadn’t that been some seriously sick shit? – but she’d ended up setting Grace on fire, which in turn had led to him getting the left side of his head crispy-fried. So Sierra was ultimately responsible for what had happened to him. Worse, she’d killed Krista, who – despite being a bit of a control freak – had been the best friend he’d ever had.
He’d gone to ArtWorks in the first place to teach Sierra a lesson in respect. Instead, he’d discovered others who’d been transformed like him, and in the process of trying to deal with their bullshit, Sierra had ended up making him look like an asshole – again! He wasn’t sure how the others had come to be changed. Hell, he didn’t know how and why it had happened to him. But he didn’t care about them. All that mattered to him was finally making Sierra realize that she was his, that she was nothing without him, less than nothing.
And with that, he knew where he wanted to go.
“Krista, can you—”
He broke off, remembering that he was alone now. Krista was gone, and he couldn’t use her tracking app to locate Sierra. But he didn’t need Krista to find her, did he? They’d dated long enough for him to get to know everything about her, and he knew what she did whenever she was faced with a serious problem. Before her brother died, she’d talk to him, but after he was gone, she went to her parents, and that’s where she’d go now. He was sure of it.
He’d driven in the opposite direction from the Sowells’ neighborhood, but it wouldn’t take him long to get there, not in his car. And while he might not be as strong without Krista, he figured he was still strong enough to show Sierra why it was a bad idea to disrespect him.
A very bad idea.
* * *
When Mandy hit the sidewalk, she scented the air, trying to pick up Sierra’s trail. But the stink of the fire was too strong for her to smell anything else. Frustrated, she took off running, intending to go back to her convertible, hit the streets, and see if she could get Sierra’s scent again. But she heard emergency vehicles approaching off in the distance. Her hearing was far sharper than it had been, and she knew she had several moments before they arrived, but she ducked down an alley anyway. Better to take a more roundabout route to her car and avoid being seen by the police. They’d take one look at her, see the scorch marks on her clothes and the burns on her skin – not to mention the blood that had splattered onto her when she killed Karolyn – and immediately want to question her about what had happened at ArtWorks. At the very least, they’d insist she accept medical attention from the paramedics on scene. But as much as she loved a man – or woman – in uniform, she wanted to avoid the hassle.
All in all, she’d escaped ArtWorks relatively unscathed. She had a few burns here and there, but she found the pain stimulating rather than debilitating. Same for the stab wound to her breast. The waves of agony that pulsed outward from the injury were almost indistinguishable from the sensations of building orgasm. She thought if she reached up and dug a finger into the wound, the resulting pain would cause her to explode with orgasm. She was tempted, but she decided against it. Not only couldn’t she afford the distraction right now, but with each passing moment, the pains of her injuries lessened. She was healing at an extraordinarily rapid rate, so fast that soon it would be like she hadn’t been injured at all.
She wished she’d had the opportunity to kill Grace for what the bitch had done to her, but Sierra had taken that pleasure from her. Admittedly, it had been amusing to watch the old crone thrash around as she burned, vomiting gouts of fire everywhere. Mandy wasn’t clear on why there were other people connected to Sierra who’d undergone their own significant alterations. She’d recognized them all. Sierra had mentioned them to her during the weeks after her brother’s death – her brother who was no longer quite so deceased – when she’d sought emotional comfort from Mandy. Deep down, Mandy had wanted to make a move on Sierra then, but she never would’ve allowed herself to consciously express such a desire. Thank Christ that version of her was gone.
She suspected that there was something larger in scope going on here than just her wanting to fuck the shit out of Sierra, some kind of master plan that she was only a part of. But she didn’t care. So long as she got what she wanted – Sierra – nothing else mattered. Part of her – a part that was rational and orderly and saw the world in terms of factors to be calculated and problems to be solved – thought this single-mindedness might prove to be a mistake in the long run, and a costly one at that. But Mandy was all impulse, desire, and hunger now. She had an appetite for Sierra, and that appetite must be sated, regardless of the cost.
She continued running through alleys, her body healing, and imagined all the things she was going to do to Sierra when she finally got the cute little bitch alone.
* * *
Randall hadn’t realized how badly he was bleeding until he was behind the wheel of his Lincoln Town Car and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He had returned completely to his normal self – his hated self – once more, and the left side of his head was a blood-soaked mess. Blood ran down his neck and onto his chest, and he’d likely left a trail of it on the sidewalk for the police to follow straight to him. Best to start driving and get the hell out of here while he still could. People were starting to come out of businesses up and down the street, lured by the sound of approaching sirens. Every one of them was a potential witness, and he needed to go before they noticed his vehicle or – worse yet – thought to take a picture of it with their phones.
But he didn’t start the engine, just sat there, staring at his reflection. It was hard to tell with all the blood, but it looked as if his head had a small dent in it. Had Jeffrey damaged his skull when he’d backhanded him? No, he thought. Jeffrey had somehow made a portion of his skull cease to exist. What he was looking at wasn’t a cut. It was an opening in his head, a newly made hole.
He reached up with shaking hands and gently probed the injury. He brushed away some blood with a thumb and found himself looking at a small section of brain tissue. There was a concavity in it, as if Jeffrey’s touch had erased part of his brain, along with the skin and bone that protected it.
Cold fear lanced through him, and he wondered just how seriously he’d been injured. He felt almost no pain. He figured Jeffrey’s touch must have destroyed the nerve endings in the affected area, basically anesthetizing the wound. But just because it didn’t hurt didn’t mean he could dismiss it. His goddamned brain was exposed to the fucking air!
I need to go to a hospital.
He turned on the Town Car’s engine, put the vehicle in gear, and drove away from the curb. Bishop Hill didn’t have a hospital of its own. The nearest one was in Ash Creek, about a twenty-minute drive from here. He briefly debated going back and letting the paramedics tend to him. Paramedics always came out to the scenes of fires, didn’t they? But how could he explain what had happened to him?
There was this young man who grew up across the street from me. He died in an automobile accident last year, but for some unknown reason he returned from the dead today, and his touch causes things to decay. Why was I at ArtWorks? After killing several people earlier – including my own wife – I wanted to kill the dead boy’s sister because she insulted my Chucks this morning.
If he told them this, they’d send him off to a psychiatric hospital after patching his wound. No, that was wrong. The police would send his clothes out to be tested because of all the blood on them, and they’d learn the blood belonged to people who had been hacked to death with a knife. He’d end up in a prison for the criminally insane.
Maybe that would be best. After everything that had happened today, he was no longer sure what was real and what wasn’t. He’d accepted that he’d somehow become a Chuck – although it seemed ridiculous now – but he was having trouble believing that four others, Jeffrey included, had undergone similar transformations. One such transformation was a miracle. A dark one, for sure, but a miracle still. But five? It was too much.
Rather than being dismayed by this line of thought, Randall felt a glimmer of hope. If he was crazy, then maybe none of this – him being a Chuck, the killings, the others who’d been changed – was real. If he was mentally ill, he could be treated, maybe even fully recover. And then he could put all of this behind him, a waking nightmare that had no more reality than the sort that plagued one’s sleep. But how could he know for certain that what he’d experienced today had been only delusions?
He could think of one way to prove it. He could go home, walk into his kitchen, and see if Erika’s corpse lay on the living room floor. If it didn’t, if she was still alive and going about her day, then he’d know he was mentally ill, and he’d ask her to take him to the hospital. But if he found her body….
He tried not to think about that possibility. No need to borrow trouble.
Feeling better now that he had a plan of action, he took his right hand off the steering wheel and put it into his pants pocket so he could feel the reassuring solidity of his Chucks. He needed to remain positive if he was going to get through this, and nothing was more positive than a Chuck.
“Chuck says keep your chin up,” he said, forcing himself to sound cheerful. “Things are going to get better!”
In the rearview mirror, just for an instant, he thought he saw a large yellow smiley face wink at him. Then it was gone, and he concentrated on driving, gripping the Chucks so tight his hand hurt.
* * *
Sierra pulled Ladybug into her parents’ driveway and parked. She and Marc sat there for a moment, both too tired and emotionally wrung out to move. But then Sierra got out of the car, and Marc followed.
“What are you going to tell them?” Marc asked.
“I have no idea. Maybe I’ll try the truth, as insane as it is, and just see how they react. I’ll have you to back me up on it, so that might make a difference.”
“Maybe,” Marc said, but he didn’t sound convinced. Sierra didn’t blame him. She doubted there was a chance in hell that her parents would believe their story, but she didn’t know what else to do.
Her parents lived in a safe neighborhood and usually left their front door unlocked during the day. Sierra had a key, but she didn’t remember the last time she’d needed to use it. She opened the door and stepped inside, Marc following.
“It’s weird to be back,” he said. “I haven’t come here—”
“Since after Jeffrey’s funeral,” Sierra said.
“Yeah.”
Walter and Dana Sowell were good people, if not particularly imaginative. Both were retired, but Walter had owned and managed a carpet store in town called Gotcha Covered, and Dana had worked as a dental hygienist. Sierra had no idea where she’d gotten her artistic nature from, but it certainly hadn’t been from them. Their house was nicely if blandly furnished, and the place was always clean and tidy. She suspected that her mom might have more than a touch of OCD, but she’d only laughed the one time Sierra had suggested it to her.
Who cares? she’d said. So long as the house is clean.
The living room – which was never used – was to the right of the foyer. Sierra led Marc into the hall, then toward the kitchen. It was the homiest place in the house, decorated in warm earth tones with framed watercolor paintings Sierra had done in college hanging on the walls. She found the paintings embarrassing. She was capable of producing much better work now, but her parents loved them. There was a breakfast nook in one corner where her parents spent a great deal of their time, drinking coffee, reading, talking, or just looking out the window and watching birds in the backyard. When she’d been a kid, Sierra had thought her mom and dad were the dullest people on the planet, but now she thought the idea of them doing simple things together and enjoying each other’s company was sweet. She hoped she could have a relationship like that one day.
They weren’t at the table, though.
“Mom? Dad?”
No answer.
Maybe it was because so many bad things had happened today, or maybe it was some primal instinct, but she had the sudden sick feeling that something was wrong.
She ran through the kitchen, into the dining room, and then into the family room. This was where Walter and Dana Sowell did most of their living – when they weren’t sitting at the breakfast nook table, that was. It was also, unfortunately, where they’d done their dying. Her mother’s body lay facedown on the couch, one arm hanging down, fingers touching the carpet. Her father lay next to the fireplace, his body twisted at the waist so his head and torso faced the ceiling and his trunk and legs were on their sides. Sierra had no doubt they were both dead. They’d sustained numerous stabs wounds, so many that it looked as if someone had dumped several gallons of red paint on them, and then splashed a few more gallons around the general vicinity for good measure. She knew who’d killed them too, for several dozen goddamned Chucks were scattered around the room, some of them – the shuriken kind – embedded in her parents’ flesh.
Even though she knew there was no point to it, knew that her mom and dad were beyond help, she wanted to run to them, shake them, shout their names until life came back into their glassy eyes. She wanted them to look at her, smile, and say, It’s okay, sweetie. Everything’s going to be all right. Except it wasn’t and it wouldn’t be. Not now and never again.
She fell to her knees, a great wracking sob convulsing her body. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, and she thought that was okay, that she didn’t want to breathe, wanted to lie down, close her eyes, and wait for her heart to stop beating. Then Marc was kneeling next to her. He wrapped his arms around her, and she drew in a shuddering breath and began to cry. She wasn’t surprised when Marc started crying with her.
* * *
Stuart pulled up to the Sowells’ house and parked on the street. Sierra’s Beetle – had a dumber-looking car ever been made? – sat in the driveway. He allowed himself a moment of smug satisfaction. He’d been right about where she’d go. Of course he had. Who knew her better than he?
The burns on the left side of his head still hurt like hell, but he decided to use the pain to fuel his anger. He felt almost totally drained of energy now. If only his fucking charger hadn’t crapped out on him when he’d needed it. But if wishes were horses, then fuckety-fuck.
He tried to remove his hands from the steering wheel, but they refused to budge. They remained enmeshed with the substance of the steering wheel, and no matter how hard he concentrated, he was unable to separate himself from the car. He tried pulling himself free, but while the steering wheel shook, his flesh and bone remained fused with it, and all he succeeded in doing was sending jolts of pain shooting through his wrists.
“Fuck!”
He would’ve pounded his fist on the dashboard if he’d had a hand free. But he didn’t, and it looked as if he wasn’t going to separate himself from the car anytime soon.
