Homecoming, page 12
The movements became slower and less nervous as she approached, and she knew that her natural aura would be calming the creature and allaying its fears.
“That's right, nothing to be afraid of,” she cooed gently as she started to kneel down to seem even less of a threat.
She put a few pellets in her open hand and outstretched it towards the bushes. The other hand was still holding the phone and her thumb was on the camera button ready to take a snap once she had won the animal's trust.
She could feel it moving towards her now, tentative leanings as the leaves and branches started to part ways, and her thumb tightened on the camera button ready to snap her new friend’s first appearance.
She was waiting for the snout to emerge first, slowly testing the air, before the face would follow. What she got, however, was the sudden explosive movement of something lunging at her from the shadows. The form was large and bulkier and far bigger than a deer, and she realised at the last second that she'd made a terrible mistake.
Hands curled like claws reached for her. One dug razor-sharp nails into her forearm and yanked her forward as the other clamped down on her mouth and sliced into her flesh, while at the same time preventing her from screaming.
Just at the moment of impact, her thumb involuntarily pressed the camera button on the phone. The shadows were briefly illuminated enough for her to see what nightmare from hell had hold of her. The lower half of her face was being crushed by tremendous force as flesh shredded and bones splintered, and her screams could only now come out as drunken bloody gurgles before the phone slipped from her grasp, and she was yanked off into the blackened forest.
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Vanek headed towards the barn with all the due care and diligence he could muster. The sounds inside had died to a silence, and he wasn't sure if that was worse or better.
The revolver in his hand was cocked and ready to rock, but it felt like a toy in his sweaty grasp, and he'd have given his right arm for one of the automatic weapons that Kline's men had brought with them.
Kline was hanging back, and he didn't judge the man for it; hell, he hadn't survived this long at the top by doing his own dirty work.
The smell from the barn was overpowering as he reached the rear window. He eased himself up from his crouching position to take a peek inside.
His nostrils were full of shit and blood from the human wreckage inside. The barn floor was splattered with both, and the bodies of Kline’s men lay strewn about, ripped to pieces. Torn limbs were scattered, thrown aside carelessly, and torsos were bloody messes pulled apart at the chest.
He had seen a few dead bodies before, and had even taken several lives himself, but he'd never seen such barbarity so close at hand before. Kline's men looked as though they had been savaged by wild animals but in an impossibly short time.
Vanek checked the shadowy corners of the barn and couldn't see anything moving inside, either survivors or perpetrators.
What had caught his attention, however, were the several firearms lying discarded on the ground inside the barn. While they obviously hadn’t done the men wielding them much good, Vanek’s fingers still itched at the sight of a submachine gun nearby.
The barn window was open, and his hand started to move towards it to open it further so he could creep inside. He wasn't entirely convinced that the killer – or, more likely, killers – had fled, but the sight of the glistening gun barrel made for a tempting sight, one too good to resist.
He could feel Kline’s gaze boring into him from behind and knew that his entering the barn would seem crazy in the other man’s eyes. But whatever had done this might be coming back, and he was certain that he'd hit it – or hit one of them – before with his revolver, and that hadn't done much to stop it. While logic dictated that the machinegun had done little to save its previous owner, he would still feel better with it in his hands.
He eased himself in through the window, every movement careful and as silent as he could manage. His ears were attuned to the barn's silence, vigilant to any movement that wasn't his own.
Vanek crawled across the barn floor until he snagged the weapon. He checked it over and found that the clip had only been half emptied. The owner, or what was left of him, was lying on the ground a few feet away with an ammo clip around his waist. Steeling his stomach, Vanek moved towards him.
The man was missing an entire arm and half a leg. His jacket was torn open and his chest likewise. Vanek risked a look inside, and while he wasn't a surgeon, he saw that it seemed like there were a couple of bloody holes where organs should be.
His hand reached out slowly for the ammo, and suddenly, another hand clamped down on his. The man's eyes opened, and he coughed a splatter of blood up into Vanek’s face. The single cough seemed monstrously loud in the echoing barn, and Vanek’s heart skipped a beat as the noise risked giving him away.
He reached down and clamped his own hand over the man’s mouth and squeezed it there. He felt no guilt about cutting off the man’s ability to breathe: the guy was already dead – the remains of his body just hadn't yet caught up to the fact.
The man started to struggle but it was weak and Vanek controlled it easily until the pants became softer under his hand and then stopped altogether.
He kept his hand there for a few more seconds just to make sure before he released his grip.
Crouched in the middle of the barn, he could see better; while the men had been slaughtered, it had seemingly not been the wild attack that he’d first assumed. The bodies looked to have been almost operated on, albeit crudely. Limbs had been torn off, and while some were still lying on the ground, some were missing entirely along with what looked like several organs.
It looked more like a clumsy amateur operating theatre than an abattoir, which made even less sense than either an animal or lunatic attack.
The thing that had come out of the woods chasing the young girl had been largely obscured by the darkness of the forest, but the coincidence was far too strong for him to dismiss. Something had murdered O’Reilly, tried to murder the photographer – before he had – and now had slaughtered Kline’s men.
Suddenly, there was movement from the door area, and a silhouette filled the opening. Vanek reacted quickly and lay down beside the dead man on the ground, using the body to hopefully obscure his own. He could hear movement entering the barn and then moving closer towards him, but from his position, he couldn't see anything. His fingers tightened on the machine gun trigger, but he held himself steady.
A wet sawing sound came from nearby as someone started to use some sort of tool to cut into one of the fallen. The sound was sickening and seemed to go on forever. Back and forth the blade cut through flesh and then into bone before continuing to hack away.
Vanek held his breath as long as he could manage, praying that he would remain undiscovered, a prayer that went unanswered.
He let out his breath as quietly as he could muster, but the sawing instantly stopped, and he knew that he was found.
Movement came quickly towards him, and he sat up instantly as the shadow fell over him.
The barn was dimly lit by the moonlight cascading through the window, and the silhouette was little more than a living shadow as it suddenly rushed towards him.
Vanek could smell the thing. It gave off a thick, animalistic musk and walked on two legs like a man, but Vanek knew instinctively it was something in between.
It rushed him with the startling speed of a predator, belying its shuffling form, but Vanek had never regarded himself as prey.
He kept his weapon down and out of sight until the very last second. The thing fell upon him with hands reaching out and fingers curled into claws, its mouth emitting a hungry guttural growl, and at the last second, Vanek saw the glowing yellow of its eyes.
He felt the touch of its cold hand on his throat before he tried to swing his own up with the weapon, but he was too slow. Double claws dug into his flesh, and he felt blood start to seep out as the air was choked out of him.
The thing leaned in closer with both hands clamped around his throat, and he smelled its foul breath as it bared rotten teeth into his face.
Being this close, he could see that it wasn’t a man but a grotesquely deformed woman. Her face looked as though it had been sewn together haphazardly with stitch scars crisscrossing her skin. The woman stank of the grave but was still moving, death seemingly not willing to take her all the way over the threshold… or perhaps she'd simply returned.
Vanek felt his life slipping away, his very breath being squeezed out of his lungs as the woman on top of him placed a heavy knee on his chest to stop his squirming. In his desire to fight, the submachine gun had quickly fallen from his grip as he'd needed both hands to try and prise away his would-be killer’s. Now he had to fight against all of his natural instinct. He removed one of his own hands from the fight, allowing his throat to be choked even tighter, so that his free hand could feel for the weapon. His fingers scrabbled frantically on the ground beside him, searching for the weapon, until he finally touched the cold metal. The light was fading fast around him, and his vision had narrowed to a pinprick, but in that moment between life and death, his soul chose life and found just enough trembling strength to lift his hand up and pull the trigger.
The submachine gun spat fire at close range into the thing's face and obliterated it, showering him with blood and brains that made him gag.
He rolled quickly up and away, staggering to his feet, coughing and spluttering as merciful air rushed back into his lungs. The weapon was still aimed down at the ground and the unmoving figure lying there.
“You okay?” he heard a voice say from the doorway.
Vanek answered by emptying what remained in the clip into the woman’s body, a steady line of bullets rippling through her body all the way from foot to face.
“Thanks for the help,” he croaked to Kline as the gun ran dry and the other man watched on.
“You were doing all right.” Kline shrugged. “Now let's get the hell out of here.”
“No.”
“Excuse me? What the hell do you mean, ‘no’?”
“Did you see that thing? Have you seen your men? Or should I say, what's left of them. No way that just one of those things did all that. There’s more of them out there.”
“So what?”
“So people need to be warned.”
“You've got to be kidding me!” Kline exclaimed with a bitter laugh.
“No. This town has no idea these things are out here, and if we don't tell them, then they’re all going to end up the same way as your men there.” He pointed to the shredded corpses.
“So the hell what? We need to leave, right now. No way am I sticking around for the bloody authorities to show up!”
All the time that they'd been talking, Vanek had been moving closer to the door and the standing Kline. He was keeping the man’s attention on him and his disbelief raging. He wanted the attention of his now ex-boss fully diverted for a moment as he reached him.
“We have to,” Vanek said, standing next to him.
“And why in God’s name do we have to?” he demanded.
Vanek lifted the weapon again in his hands, but this time he didn't pull the trigger. Instead, he used the butt of the gun and slammed it into Kline’s temple, knocking the man out cold.
“Because I might be a bad guy, but I'm not a fucking monster,” he answered the unconscious man at his feet.
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Dan Marko sat at the table inside The View Lounge, which was Wellspring’s only proper restaurant.
It was so named because it was perched on the top of a hill overlooking the town and the surrounding forest with uninterrupted views stretching as far as the eye could see.
Sitting at the table, waiting nervously, he was actually glad for the distraction. Since the doc’s assertion that Tommy O’Reilly had been dead before he'd been shot, his body had been coursing with equal parts of anxiety and excitement.
Being a police officer in Wellspring had never threatened to offer him anything other than a steady paycheque and a whole lot of time with his feet up on a desk. But now there might have actually been a real crime committed, and it would be up to him and Tara to find the person responsible.
Tara’s current working theory centred around Saul and Jeremy King and the break in at the Schaefer Institute. It seemed the most likely hypothesis; after all, it stood to reason that the two rare crimes had to be related.
She had suggested to him that perhaps the brothers were hiding out and that O’Reilly had stumbled upon them. A fight could have ensued and things got out of hand – it happened from time to time when a drunken brawl at one of the bars in town crossed a line. But they'd not had a fatality of that nature since he'd joined the force.
The trouble, of course, was that the time of year meant that trying to organise any kind of serious search party for the forest just beyond the McNichol border line was impossible. With the heavy snow falling and growing steadily worse, trying to find any kind of tracks was a nonstarter, not to mention the fact that if the King boys had been hiding out there, then they were sure to have moved on by now, and the forest was no place to start wandering blindly; that was a sure-fire way to lose more people.
Tara had assured him that the brothers’ descriptions had been circulated beyond Wellspring to the surrounding towns and cities beyond in case they made it that far.
He'd had to agree with her assessment that the brothers were too dumb not to get picked up sooner rather than later, and when they did, they'd have their answers. For now, there was little that they could do until they heard news from outside. Besides, if the brothers didn't make it out, then some hiker or fisherman would no doubt discover them once the thaw hit when spring did.
The reason for him sitting here tonight was that he’d finally plucked up the courage to ask Dr Ngo out, and he was waiting at the table woefully out of his depth and feeling like he’d slipped back into his early teens again.
The weather closing in had finally given him the shove to ask her out as the snowfall was already increasing its daily dump on the town, and soon the restaurant would close for the season with the steep road up the hill becoming quickly impassable.
It had been now or wait for three months to ask the doc out, and when he'd finally taken the plunge, he had been so shocked by her quick acceptance that he'd already been making her excuses for her without realising that she'd said yes. Now he sat in his one good suit, sweating through a liberal dose of industrial-strength underarm deodorant and feeling monstrously overdressed. .
He had been mentally prepared for her no-show when she walked in, and he found the air sucked from his lungs. While it was undoubtedly her personality that had drawn him to her, she was undeniably cute in her understated work clothes. Now, as she came strolling in, she wore a dress that clung to a frame that hadn't been hinted at under a lab coat, and his inferiority complex shot through the roof. If there had been a back door that he could have slipped through unnoticed, then there was a good chance he'd have taken it and fled into the night.
She waved at him when she spotted his table and headed over as the maître d' took her heavy winter coat.
“I think I overdid it,” she whispered to him as she sat down.
She was wearing just enough makeup to highlight her features, and her stunning green eyes sparkled at him. For a moment, his words failed him as he opened his mouth to speak but only a dead croak came out.
“Jesus, I look a mess, right?” she asked, mistaking his silence. “I knew it. You see women in movies and in photos, and they make it look so bloody easy. I've never been good at the whole dressing up thing.”
“You look... incredible, Doc,” Marko managed to splutter out.
“Oh... thank you.” She blushed sweetly in reply. “And enough of the ‘Doc’. If you don't mind, it’s Lizzie.”
The waiter came over and they ordered drinks, something that Marko was grateful for. He downed in one the strong bourbon shot that arrived, calming his nerves. After that, they split a bottle of wine, and slowly, two awkward, nervous people began to relax and enjoy an evening that had started stiffly but quickly relaxed into the work-banter dynamic that they'd enjoyed for the past months.
They ate and drank and talked about work before soon delving into more personal matters. They exchanged family member comparisons and childhood stories, finding many unexpected, shared areas.
The early awkwardness soon gave way to a comfortable familiarity, and her dry sense of humour and intelligence soon exerted dominance over her beauty. While the feeling of inferiority never left him, slowly Marko allowed himself to believe that she was actually here because for some bizarre reason she liked him.
The restaurant had been busy when they'd arrived. It was still relatively early by the time they were finishing coffees, and there were a handful of diners remaining, but he became aware of the sly looks the waiting staff were giving them as they were obviously keen to finish up and go home for the night.
“I think they want us out,” he whispered across the table as their waiter left after checking for the second time if they wanted the bill.
“I think you're right.” She chuckled. “It is getting – check that, it's gotten – late. I just need to use the little girls’ room.” She excused herself and headed a little unsteadily, he noted, towards the bathrooms.
A thought suddenly struck him hard enough to sober him up and wreck the sense of calm that he'd found over the past couple of hours. What if she wanted him to take her home? While the thought was one he’d entertained endlessly while speaking to her at work and around town at every opportunity he could engineer, in his mind it was fine, but if it was suddenly a real-world possibility? That thought chilled him to the very bone, especially given the way that she looked tonight.
He started to sweat profusely again and tried to keep the look of panic from his face. While he wasn't inexperienced in the physical and intimate act of love, the fact that the stunning woman he'd fantasised about for so long was now a little tipsy and insisting that he call her Lizzie was scaring him half to death.
