Blood Lust: A Supernatural Horror (8 page)

When Lew
yelled
out my name, t
he pressure lessened, and then
disappeared
.
I rolled over quickly, clumsily trying to draw my weapon
with my injure
d
arm
but my assailant was gone
, vanished
.
Dimly, out of my watering eyes, I saw Lew rushing down the nave
with
gun in hand
, sweeping
it back and forth across the
empty
nave
searching
for my assailant
.

“Are you all right?”
he yelled out
still
scanning the room for intruders
.

I considered his question for a moment to decide how best to answer
as
my burning lungs gulped down
ragged gasps of breath
. My
shoulder
was on fire, my
bruised
ribs
screamed for attention
and my chin and forehead were bloody
and scraped
from
the slide across
the floor.

“I’ll live,” I answered truthfully. “Did you see the bastard?”

He shook his head. “I glimpsed a shadow but it was gone before I could see anything. What the hell happened?”

“Somebody fell on me like a ton of bricks. Son of a bitch stabbed me in the shoulder.” I looked around the nave.
“
He could be hiding in any shadow. Let’s find him.”
I
stood
shakily
and winced as my
bruised
ribs sent a spasm of pain
shooting
through my body
.

Lew took one side
of the
sanctuary
and I took the other. The front door was locked and chained. There was no way our phantom had escaped that way.
I peered into abandoned nooks and empty alcoves
and
warily
circled columns
but
found no one.
Lew and I met at the door through which we had entered.

“Nothing,” he said
with a shrug
.

I rubbed my chin
,
succeeding
it getting it
dirty as well as bloody.
I wiped my ha
nd on m
y pants.
“There are no other doors he could have used. No windows. Where the hell is he?”

“I swear he didn’t use this door, but…” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

I
walked back to the apse
, slowly, wincing in pain as I
massaged
my right shoulder.
My hand came away wet from blood seeping though my jacket.
I pointed
t
o the altar. “I found ou
r
missing girls, I think.”

He sniffed, made a
d
our face and nodded
in agreement
. “I’ll call it in.”

While
Lew
walked around searching for a hot spot for
his cell phone, I
scanned
the nave and the corners of the transept
, finding no
place an assailant
could
hide. He could have used the shadows to reach
the
door through which we entered
undetected, but he would have to
be
extremely fleet of foot to do so. Satisfied he was no longer in the building, I turned
my attention
to the apse.

It was a sickening sight
; one that almost brought me to tears
.
Three bodies lay
sprawled
on the floor
in various degrees of decomposition
. T
he latest victim, Patricia Stewart, look
ed
almost asleep except for her
wide-open
, staring, unseeing eyes and her unnaturally pale complexion. Her skin seemed loose on her face
, her cheeks sunk
en
in
. Her
savaged
neck
revealed
a
ragged wound r
unning
laterally
from the front of her throat to
the
nape
of her neck
,
exposing
the ghostly white of
her
cervical
vertebrae
.
The other two bodies
had not fared as well
. Rodents had
been busy
gnaw
ing
their
dead flesh. Flies buzzed around the bodies and maggots writhed in open wounds.
Pools of congealed blood
mixed with recent
rainwater
formed vile puddles
around the bodies. The stench was powerful, the sight gruesome.
As I fought down the urge to throw up,
I wondered what kind of
person
could do this to another human being. I wished I had been able to get
off
a shot
at my assailant, whom I was certain was also our killer
.
It would save the state the cost of an execution. I
realized
the DA always wanted to determine why a murderer killed,
build a psychological profile for the jury,
but that did not concern me. The reasons
he killed
meant little to the victims and brought
no closure to the
families. Quick retribution was my motto. There were murderers still on death row I had arrested red-handed ten years earlier
when I first made detective
,
now
dragging out
execution of the
ir death sentences
with
endless
bogus
appeals at tax payer expense.
It was not my idea of justice.
A quick bullet to the head would solve everybody’s problem.

“They’re on the way,” Lew said
, looking
down
at the bodies
.

I
stared
at him. “You sure you didn’t get a
good
look at him?”

He glanced away
uneasily
.
I could have attributed it to his revulsion at the sight of the bodies, but
I sensed he was
holding something back
. I persisted.

“What did you see, Lew?”

He
exhaled
slowly
in a sigh
. “I don’t know.
He
was a blur, like a man wearing a gray cape. He was tall.” He held out his hand parallel to the floor
a few inches above his head
to indicate a height of about seven feet.

I shook my head
in disbelief
. “You’re saying we’re looking for a
caped
NBA player or something?”

“I’m not sure what I saw
, Tack
. He moved like lightning
and his angles were all wrong
.
” He glanced over my shoulder at my back.
“You’re wounded.
”

I reached back
over my shoulder
and felt
sticky
blood
between my fingers
. “
Yeah,
I’m b
leeding like a stuck pig. It felt like he knifed me with a machete.”

“I never saw him bend over you. He just… stood over you a minute; then ran of
f
when I yelled your name.”

I thought about that a minute. “Maybe he
stabbed me when he knocked me down or maybe he
had a spear or something long.
” I laughed. “
Hell, m
aybe he was a seven-foot tall
spear-wielding
Watusi warrior
with rickets
here
on a
basketball
scholarship,
”
I snapped irritably
in my frustration
.

Lew shrugged
, biting off a
nasty
retort to my rant
. “I don’t know
,
”
he said.

I was angry and I had a right to be, but not at Lew.
He had probably saved my life. I was pissed because w
e had a lot of nothing. We were in the same room as our killer and he
had
go
t
t
en
away
with no description
from either of us
. All we knew was that he was tall, fast and deadly.
I made the rounds of the room
again
waiting on forensics
to arrive
.
Stone steps behind the altar descended to
a
basement.
A locked rusty iron gate that looked like no one had opened it in years barred the way.
God only knew where the key was.
I
scoured the floor and
found a few indistinguishable footprints but nothing else. I looked back at our easily recognizable tracks
in the dust
and scratched my head. It
did
n’t
make sense.

“How could this guy get around without leaving prints?
” I asked aloud. “
How the hell did he get the three bodies in
here
?”

I glanced up at the roof.
My shoulder throbbed and I grew suddenly dizzy when I looked up.
There were some sizable holes in the roof but no scaffolding or anything our killer could descend. Considering his prowess on roofs, I considered ropes. I turned to Lew.

“Have forensics check out the roof.”

I stuffed my handkerchief beneath my jacket to staunch the flow of blood and
suddenly
sat down heavily on the
cold stone
floor. Lew looked over at me with concern.

“You okay,
Tack
?”

He started toward me
but
I waved him off. Even that small movement caused severe pain
to shoot down my arm and side
.
“Go out front and wait on the lab guys.
I’ll
sit here and rest.
”

He
glanced
around uneasily.
“You sure?”

Sitting on the floor seemed the sensible thing to do. A few minutes rest would make a new man of me.
“Yeah. I’m fine,” I lied
, my mind slipping away from recent events
.
I felt exhausted.
I wanted to do nothing more than lie down and get some sleep.
It had been a
long day. The room was nice and dark so the sun must have set.
The floor was cool and inviting.
Before I knew it, I
lay
curled up on the cold tile floor.

3

I regained consciousness
lying
on a gurney
staring up at the roof of an
ambulance. My head throbbed and my mouth
tasted like the inside of a dirty sock
. A white-jacketed E
MT
was
hanging
an
intravenous
bottle
from a hook
.
He glanced down at me and continued working.

“Where the hell am I?” I groaned, trying to rise to a sitting position
and noticed I was not wearing a shirt
.
I reached back and felt the bandage on my shoulder
and the memory of
my assailant stabbing me
flooded back, along with the pain in my shoulder. My head ached and I
felt
disoriented
. M
y mouth was dry
and
I had no idea how much time had passed.

The EMT swung around and looked at me analytically, judging
best
how to reply
. “You were unconscious when your partner found you, Detective.
You have
a nasty wound in your
right
shoulder. It’s very infected
and y
ou’re running a high fever.
You should have had it treated much earlier.”
             
My confusion deepened
.
I looked out the rear door. It was daylight, still mid
-
afternoon
.
I had been wrong about the sun setting.
It had just been me blacking out.
I touched my bruised and cut chin and winced.
“Earlier? What day is it?”