She sidestepped quickly, moving to her right as the assailant sailed past her. She snapped herself out of her fog and raised the gun, but by then the attacker had regained its bearings and lunged for her, pushing her onto her butt.
The Molotov she was holding hit the ground, and she expected to hear glass break, but there was only a hollow
ping!
The jar was still intact.
It got on all fours and scrabbled toward her; she crab-walked backward, the beast advancing on her too quickly. The muscles in its legs flexed, ready to pounce, when Harry brought the shotgun down on it like an executioner swinging an ax. He connected at the base of the skull.
Jill tried pushing it off of her, but even stunned it was too heavy to move.
“Harry!”
Harry dropped the shotgun, took two steps back, lowered his shoulder and charged like a linebacker drawing a bead on a running back. He slammed into the creature, knocking it off of her.
Jill got on her hands and knees. She hurried over to the Molotov cocktail and gripped it, prepared to throw it before realizing it wasn’t lit.
Harry got to his feet and saw what she meant to do.
“Jill!”
The Zippo came flying at her quick, and she caught it one-handed and flicked it open, the flame licking her hand. She held the flame to the rag jutting from the jar’s lid and it lit.
Harry backed up and Jill threw the jar to the ground, smashing it at the creature’s feet. The flames raced up its legs as it flailed and spun around, beating at the fire. Harry and Jill retreated down the hallway, a good twenty feet from the flaming beast. Jill snatched up the M-16, and as the demon advanced toward them, still aflame, she fired, exploding its head with two bursts from the rifle.
It fell to the ground, dead.
Harry grabbed a fire extinguisher from a glass cabinet in the wall, pulled the pin, and sprayed powdery white foam on the burning corpse. The fire was out in seconds, and Harry looked up at the ceiling.
“Lucky we didn’t set off the sprinklers,” he said.
A half-charred, stinking body caked with white powder lay on the floor. Tendrils of smoke floated up, and it smelled like someone had cooked a spoiled steak.
“God, that stinks,” she said, trying not to gag.
Even in the dim hallway light, she could see that Harry’s skin had turned three shades lighter.
“Man, that’s nasty,” Harry said, holding the extinguisher in one hand and clapping the other over his mouth and nose to block out the smell.
“We’ve got to get rid of it,” Jill said.
“And how do you propose we do that?”
“You said there’s some rooms on the third floor?”
“They’ll be locked.”
“They’re worth trying,” she said.
She took off down the hallway, jogged up the stairs and found three doors on a small landing. There was a piano in front of the door directly across from her and another steel gray door marked
ROOF—UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS PROHIBITED
. She tried the doors on the left and right and found them locked. Likewise for the door to the roof.
She gave the piano a shove just for the hell of it and found that it was on casters.
They could move the piano and hide the corpse behind it. It wasn’t the best plan, but given the options, there really were no options. Hopefully Rafferty and his crew would stay off of the third floor.
She went back downstairs and told Harry her idea.
“All right,” he said.
Harry rolled the beast over with a shove of his foot so it was on its back. He got it in a bear hug around the chest and lifted the torso up.
“Man, this thing stinks,” he muttered.
Jill took the legs, which were charred black and flaking. The skin felt like warm, dead leaves.
They lugged it to the stairs, and after fifteen minutes of grunting and struggling, they had the body stuffed behind the piano. If you stood in front of the piano, you couldn’t see it, but that wouldn’t matter because it smelled bad enough to singe nose hair.
If anyone came up here they would find it.
“I hope they stay off the third floor,” Jill said.
“I don’t see any reason for them to come up here.”
Wearily, they worked their way back downstairs, leaving foam on the floors, with nothing to clean it up. One more calling card they needed Rafferty to overlook.
C
HAPTER
33
The night before the Harvest, Matt dreamt.
In his dream, the red-haired cop came and opened Liza’s cell door, then dragged her out by her hair. Matt reached under the mattress and took out the revolver, but the cylinder swung open and the shells dropped to the floor.
When he bent over to pick up the bullets, he found them covered in a thick, mucusy gel, and they slipped from his fingers and fell back to the floor. He repeatedly tried to pick them up, but they fell through his fingers every time.
The cop grinned and put his hand around Liza’s throat, squeezing steadily until her face was purple and her tongue lolled from her mouth.
He sat up sweating, his breathing ragged. It wasn’t the only time he’d had the dream this week; in another version, the gun had a rusty trigger that would not pull no matter how hard he tried.
He supposed Freud could have a field day analyzing those dreams. Even though Matt had never taken psychology, he knew the dreams were caused by his anxiety, by a fear that the gun would fail or he would fail when the moment of truth came.
He had counted meals since he had been in jail, and deduced eight days had passed. This morning he left his breakfast untouched, a mix of runny scrambled eggs and burned wheat toast.
Liza remained dormant on the bed, the silence in the block punctuated by her groans as her suffering grew worse. He feared she didn’t have much time left, and hoped gangrene wasn’t setting into the wound. It seemed less and less likely that she would be able to assist him when the time came to make an escape.
The day passed without much fanfare, with no way to tell time for there was no window in the block.
When he guessed it was getting close to evening, he looked down the hallway to make sure no one was watching and took the revolver out from under the mattress. He tucked it in his waist at the small of his back, the metal digging hard into his flesh. He pulled his shirt tail over the gun. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it was the only place he could conceal it and have relatively quick access to the gun.
Shortly after he had concealed the gun, the red-haired cop strolled down the hallway, a Remington shotgun tucked under his arm.
Wonderful.
He was hoping the cop would have only his sidearm and would have to draw it from the holster, but he obviously felt he needed to be heavily armed
.
Why not just bring a goddamn bazooka while you’re at it?
He breezed past Liza’s cell and stood in front of Matt’s, exactly what wasn’t supposed to happen. Liza must have been too out of it to get up and try and coerce the cop into opening her cell first.
“On your feet. Let’s go.”
“Where we going? Can I drive?”
“Turn around so I can cuff you.”
“Oh, all right.”
Matt stood and turned his back to the cop, his arms hanging at his sides. His shirttail covered the revolver. Behind him, keys jingled as the cop prepared to open the cell door.
One for the money ...
He lifted the shirt and pulled the gun from his waistband. Matt spun around, feeling like his feet were stuck in drying concrete, even though the motion only took a second.
When he turned around, the cop was leveling the shotgun to fire; the son of a bitch was quick, you had to give him that.
Matt fired first, catching him in the shoulder, then again in the chest. The shotgun roared, and Matt dove for the bunk, the skin on his hand flayed off as the buckshot skimmed him and slammed into the wall. Instinctively, he clutched at his wounded hand, dropping the revolver in the process.
It bounced once and blooped through the bars like an errant ground ball.
Oh, fuck.
Hand stinging, he rolled off the bunk and spotted the jailer’s five keys on a ring lying an arm’s length away outside the bars. The cop was on his back, blood pooling under him, but still stirring.
The shotgun lay next to him on the floor, directly in front of Liza’s cell.
Matt kneeled by the bars, pressing himself up as tight as he could while sticking his arm through the opening, grasping for the keys. They were two inches out of his reach.
He squeezed up tighter until cold steel dug his collarbone, sending excruciating pain up his neck. An inch away. A goddamn inch!
Lord, please give me another inch
.
His gaze flicked to the side, where the revolver had landed. It was three feet away, and it might as well have been three miles, because there was no chance of reaching it.
The cop rolled onto his side, his shirt dark with blood.
Matt got his middle finger on the key ring and slid it toward him a hair closer to the bars.
Matt was dimly aware of movement out of the corner of his left eye, and it took him a second to register: Liza slid off her bunk and was crawling on her hands and knees, holding her wounded hand in close to her body.
“Bastard,” he said to the keys, as if that would inspire them to move closer to his fingers.
The cop was up on one knee, patting around on the ground like a man hunting for a lost contact lens.
The cop was looking for the shotgun, but unable to find it even though it was only a foot away from him. The wound must have put him in shock and momentarily disoriented him so even a simple task such as locating an object was difficult. It wouldn’t last much longer, for he was bound to find the gun.
Liza reached the bars at the front of the cell and groped through with her good hand, finding the shotgun and yanking it by the barrel. Her actions seemed to jar the cop out of his state of shock, and he turned, looking surprised that the gun was still there.
“Give me that damn shotgun,” he said.
Liza turned the gun so the barrel was away from her, and got it halfway through the bars.
In the meantime, Matt stretched himself until he thought his shoulder would pop from the socket.
“Motherfucking keys!”
With a final stretch, he hooked his fingertip around the key ring and dragged them toward the bars. Drawing them inside the cell, he stood up and began trying the keys in the lock.
The first attempt yielded nothing.
Liza sat on her rear end, the gun almost through the bars, when the cop grabbed the other end of the weapon.
Liza put her feet against the bars for leverage, the stock tucked under her armpit, hanging on for dear life. She looked at the weapon and realized her advantage. She pulled the trigger and the shotgun boomed. The shot grazed Clarence’s arm, but he still tugged.
Then her grip slipped. Matt knew he had to get the door open. Finally, the fourth key clicked home and he opened the door just as the cop ripped the shotgun away from Liza.
Rafferty’s cell phone rang. It was Linda.
“Report of shots fired at the elementary school.”
“On my way,” Rafferty said, and hung up.
Rafferty raced to Saint Mark’s, his lights on but his sirens off. He pulled up in front of the main doors wondering if his watchdog had found intruders.
Father Mike Hannah was waiting for him. Father Mike was the vice principal, and he had called from the neighboring rectory to report noises.
He wore a trench coat thrown over flannel pajamas and had on a pair of black penny loafers. Rafferty could see the milky tops of his feet for he wore no socks. The wind whipped up and messed the priest’s thinning gray hair.
Rafferty climbed the front steps.
“Hello, Chief Rafferty.”
“Can you open the door?”
“Yes,” he said, producing a ring with at least twenty keys on it.
Rafferty stood close to him, getting a whiff of his sour breath, the breath of sleep.
Father Mike unlocked the front door.
“No alarm system,” Rafferty said.
“Unfortunately. Not in the budget. Do you want me to go in with you?”
“No. There could be dangerous people running around. Wait out here. Will I need any of those keys?”
“No. You should be able to circle around the new wing and then back without any problem.”
Rafferty switched on his flashlight, the beam cutting into the gloom inside the door. He stepped into the main foyer and trained the light on the trophy case, where a film of dust coated the mock gold and silver prizes.
The doors to his right led to the old wing and the gymnasium, and those were surely locked. He would take the old priest’s advice and make his way down the new wing of the school, then circle around. For reasons known only to the architects, the entrance to the new wing did not have doors, so anyone who got into the building through the main entrance could travel down the new wing freely.
He hoped he wouldn’t need Father Mike to open any doors, for truth be told, the old man gave him the willies. Being around anyone associated with a god made him nervous.
Making his way down the wing, he passed the third grade classrooms and made a right, then passed the fourth grade rooms until reaching a stair well near the art room.
At the top of the stairs, he shined the beam into the gloom and proceeded into the old wing, drawing his revolver and sweeping back and forth with it.
He stopped at a dusting of white powder spread on the floor. Crouching down, he ran his finger through it and rubbed his fingers together. At first he had no clue what it was, then he saw the fire extinguisher on the wall. He shined the light on it, revealing residue at the tip of the hose.
To confirm his suspicions, he took the fire extinguisher off of its bracket, pulled the pin and squeezed the lever. Foam whooshed out, definitely the same substance that was on the floor.
Someone’s been up here playing with fire.
A faint burnt smell lingered in the hallway. It was coming from upstairs, and he didn’t need his eyes to tell him what his nose already knew; they had set his watchdog on fire.
He started up the stairs, knowing he would find the charred creature, either dead or dying from its wounds.
What had probably happened was they had found it (or it had found them), and they decided on using fire to roast it alive. Although he lost his watchdog, at least he knew that Jill and Pierce had been here. But they didn’t know that Rafferty was aware of them, and that could give him the element of surprise. The best fucking weapon ever invented.
He found the piano on the landing near the roof door and shoved it aside. The blackened, twisted corpse lay on the ground, and he put his hand on it. Still warm to the touch. There were two jagged holes in its head where bullets had torn through, obviously the source of the gunfire that Father Ed had heard.
Rafferty shuddered at the thought of being burned alive. It was the only thing that his race feared, for they had no natural enemies, but fire touched on something primal in them. The place deep down that was strung tight like piano wire, waiting for someone to pluck it and send shivers through the body.
He could bring a whole army to the school right now and sniff them out of their hiding place, but that would ruin all his plans. He had a very special ceremony planned and he was intent on carrying it out. So confident was he that they would fall right into his hands, he dismissed the idea of finding Jill and Harry immediately. They would be his in time.
He rolled the piano back in place, leaving the body as he had found it. Better to let his little mice think the bad old tomcat was never here at all.
He left the building to find the priest waiting for him, his coat clenched in a liver-spotted fist, trying to keep out the damp air.
“Find anything?” Father Mike asked.
“Nope. Your ears are playing tricks on you. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”
“Okay. You know best, Chief.”
He smiled, showing yellowed teeth, but the look on his face told Rafferty he knew something happened in that school.
“I’ll send an officer over in the morning to make another sweep, okay?”
“That would be nice, Chief.”
Rafferty descended the steps and got into his patrol car, leaving the priest walking away, shaking his head and muttering to himself.
Matt slid the door open as the cop fumbled with the shotgun. Matt lunged and plowed into the cop. The guy was solidly built—and it was like hitting a side of beef. Still, the cop was half sitting up, and the blow was enough to knock him on his back.
Now on top of the cop, Matt brought his forearm down and slammed it into the redhead’s forehead. All he got for his trouble was a sore arm.
The son of a bitch’s skull must be two inches thick.