Authors: John Skipp Cody Goodfellow
It was as if he were dying for nothing.
“RUN!” Eddie shrieked. It was the last word he had in him.
Then the blade came down, began sawing through his windpipe.
The pain was instantaneous, the damage irreparable. Eddie still struggled, but it was just a formality now. Jerking and bucking only made the hole wider. The rusty, serrated teeth peeled back his stubbly skin and sent geysers of blue venous and bright red arterial blood up into his eyes, both in and out of his mouth.
Eddie’s screams went up an octave, but soon turned
to burble and spray, as Jake kept hacking through the tough sheath of the larynx.
Somewhere behind him, Esther screamed with all her heart. But now it was just background drone. He couldn’t feel her anymore. Couldn’t feel anything but his own throat rasping open.
And a strange, urgent tugging at the back of his soul.
Something was calling, but it wasn’t Jake. Wasn’t the endless plummet. Was something else.
He felt it, and the fear began to drain away.
He looked up at Jake, and Jake began to fade. The world began to fade, or at least Eddie’s handle on it. The pain. The meat. The bottomless terror and failure. All receding.
It wasn’t light that enveloped him now. But it wasn’t darkness, either. It was bigger than both. And it was upon him.
He gave himself over, and the struggling ceased.
For Jake, listening to Esther scream was just like opera, only way more fun, and he was beside himself with righteous glee. Her anguish made it like
two
lives, swirling down the drain and straight into him. Double the flavor, double the fun.
“Let’s see YOU come back from the dead, motherfucker!” he howled at the twitching sad sack beneath him. “Let’s see YOU try…!”
Eddie stopped jerking and gave up the ghost; his breath came in bubbles, then not at all, and his eyes glazed over. Deader than mud.
Jake wiped his hands off on Eddie’s shirt. His face was a mask of arterial war paint.
“I didn’t think so. Bitch.”
Only then did Esther finally run.
And, as if in afterthought, Gray finally stopped screaming long enough to get up on one elbow and take a shot
at her. It missed, but spooked her away from the back door, and on down the hall.
Jake laughed as he watched her.
“NEXT!” he said.
Too scared to go anywhere, Emmy drifted across the backyard. Through the living room window, she saw the men fighting again, and made it across without being seen.
Emmy ran up to the holding cell window. “I’m gonna get you out of there!”
Evangeline looked up at Emmy, stunned and sleepy and guilty somehow. She waved a dismissive hand, as if to say
come back later.
Her fingers were gloved in blood.
Natalya was beside her, whispering a desperate blizzard in her ear, loud enough that she couldn’t hear anything Emmy said.
“It’s too late for you. Keep going.”
She was right, and she should know. Nobody ever really got away from Jake, not even in death. On the other side, there was the consolation of final and total surrender.
Evangeline’s wrists were scratched and torn: she had been trying to tear them open with her fingernails, but the skin was tough with scars from her experimental period, and her nails were cracked and broken from trying to escape.
Why didn’t she do it right the last time? Or any of the times before?
The answer struck her so hard and sudden that it felt like being yanked out of ice water by the hair.
She had
friends
, that was why. She had friends who gave a shit about her, and wanted nothing from her but to know she was okay. They weren’t out to fuck her. They weren’t out to make a buck off her.
And they sure as shit weren’t some dead Russian hooker, trolling for company in the great beyond.
She had friends, and one of them was dead; but maybe, just maybe, the other one wasn’t.
And here was this stranger, this dumb little Jezoid, offering to help her from outside the door. Somebody who didn’t even like her—probably hated her—taking the time to try and save her. And why?
Because that’s what good Christians do
, she thought to herself.
They try to help other people.
At that point, the spell was broken.
The moment she stopped digging, the cold euphoria wore off. The shameful pain rolled up her arms and shocked the breath out of her. Her fingers tingled with blood loss, the pins and needles of death setting up shop.
Coming out of the shadowy corner of the cell, alone, she tucked her wrists into her armpits.
“Is Christian still alive?”
Emmy tugged at the locked door, hyperventilating. “I don’t know!”
“Well, get me out of here,” she said, “and let’s find out.”
Out front, LeGrange sat behind the wheel of his cruiser with the door hanging open. He was on the radio, checking in. Screams and shooting came from the house. Another heathen converted.
“Yeah, Sandy. The wife’s in shock,” he said. “Needs some Valium and a shrink, not the cops.”
“Copy that,” said Sandy, the dispatcher. Jewish, but he forgave her to night. They would all awaken to the same faith. “It’s a hell of a thing, after losing her husband like that…” Her menthol-scratchy voice went vague, like it always did when someone talked in her other ear.
“Sheriff, we got a 911 call…need you and Peet to go check out Joey’s Cabaret on Kearny, ASAP…There’s a man down…”
At the sound of her name, LeGrange looked back at Peet.
Still dead.
Agnostic, of lapsed Catholic parents. Strict vegetarian. Never could get his head around it.
Damned, though, if the stink of the shit in her britches didn’t stink a mite less than the average death-dump.
LeGrange wanted to tell Sandy to round up the boys, have them load up all the prisoners in the holding cells
in the bus, and bring them here to share in the miracle, but he was getting ahead of himself.
Surely, the Lord must have new orders for him. And he would serve…unto death, and beyond.
Halfway down the strobe-lit corridor, Esther tried the laundry room door, threw it open…
…and a voluptuous, used-up demon-whore reached out for her, cackling as she beckoned from just within a throat of swirling blackness, stuffed to choking with wailing, damned souls.
Esther screamed, kept running, the laughter pursuing her.
Gray hawked and spat out a gob of dark, half-congealed blood. Jake got up, pulled his friend up by one hand, ignoring his tremors and curses, and started down the hall. Gray was almost delirious with pain, but he could walk.
“Come on. You can do this.”
Gray limped down the hall, trying to light a cigarette. “Augh! Fuck!”
Esther reached the end of the corridor, and Jake’s door. She balked at touching it, then raced into her own bedroom, slammed the door and threw herself against it, turning the flimsy lock in the knob that he’d broken half a dozen times before…
Breathe. Breathe. You’re alive.
But you’re not very bright, are you?
The only windows were narrow slits, ten feet above the floor.
She looked at her bed, her closet, her pretty things, her refuge from Jake. The only other door led to her bathroom.
Behind her, the footsteps, the hyena-barks of pain and insane anger, were coming closer.
Esther retreated into the bathroom and locked the door, turned on the flickering light.
Again, no escape but those narrow windows, far above. So stupid, so helpless. He tried to save her, told her to run…
She whimpered, trapped, spinning round and round.
She stopped, caught by an inkling of salvation.
She threw open a cabinet, pushing aside the Clairol color kits and the huge Tupperware chest of prescription pain relievers, digging to the back.
Where a bottle lay waiting.
From the depths of Jake’s domain, they heard the sudden pounding and caterwauling of Evangeline’s fag. It sounded like he was trying to beat through the door with his bare hands, although where he’d gotten the fortitude for that was another of to night’s great mysteries. Jake and Gray paused in the corridor, listening to Christian’s noise.
“Would you just kill him now?” Jake snarled. “I gotta take care of something.”
Gray mopped blood off his chest. “Dude, I’ve got a big-ass hole in me. We gotta do something…”
“I will take care of you. I swear it.” Jake looked sincere, but Gray felt his stomach go all squirrelly. “One way or the other. Now go.”
Gray staggered—gun ready, and grimly determined—toward the bathroom where Christian continued to bang. He loved Jake. Would die for him, and not ask to come back.
But he wasn’t sure, just now, that he was looking at his friend anymore.
Looking over his shoulder, he stepped into Jake’s office.
And walked right into the giggling demon.
He recoiled and bit his tongue to keep from shrieking.
He blinked and rubbed his eyes, but she was still there, leering out of the dark, peeking at him around her tiny, baby hands.
“Jake had you kill me, too. Right in the head. BOOM!”
She whooped and shook her baby-fat body at him, gyrating with gales of laughter, black blood squirting from the hole in her forehead.
“I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO YOU ARE!” he bellowed, as much in pain as terror.
“Oh, you will,”
she said, giggling harder.
“Just wait till the rest of YOUR demons show up!”
Gray aimed at the crazy bitch, but she was gone. The mocking laughter only got louder, as did Christian’s bang and wail.
He continued miserably down the hall.
Now was certainly not the time for a drink; but when
is
the proper time for a nervous breakdown?
Esther swigged from the vodka she had stashed. She wasn’t even trying to escape anymore. Just drinking and silently praying on her knees, in the center of the room. She never really thought she was free of Jake; it hadn’t even begun to sink in that he was gone, and then he was back. So it hadn’t even been much of a change at all.
She was weak, no argument here, and the drink was not making her stronger. Only more flexible, more able to absorb it, maybe sleep through it altogether. Maybe she did not deserve to be saved, but she didn’t deserve to suffer, either.
Because she was weak, and she’d been through too much already.
Was all of this her fault? Should she have seen it in his eyes, that first time? Should she have listened to her father, who never told her what to do, once in her life?
When he swept her off her feet, going away with the rock-and-roll preacher had seemed like rebellion against everything Mom and Dad stood for. It was not that he treated her as an object. She only tolerated that because she believed she could see the beast inside him, even
when he was on his best behavior; and with her father’s selfless hippie healer dedication, she thought she could heal it.
And how it felt when he fucked her had, naturally, nothing to do with it…
When he loved her, he turned her inside out, unzipped her very soul. But it had only been so much stuffing to him, incidental garbage in the way of what ever he was looking for in her, in all the other women she refused to believe came after her…
A wrecking ball tore down the bedroom door and swept through her room, overturning furniture, dumping drawers, and smashing her mirrors.
“ESTHER!” it roared.
“He really did love me,” she murmured, and took a last gulp of vodka. “Oh, Eddie…”
Jake kicked down the bathroom door. It flipped off its hinges and landed squarely before her. She screamed, dropping the bottle, and scuttled back against the toilet.
He held up a pair of handcuffs, waggling them like a leash.
Wanna go for a walk, girl?
He smiled, but his eyes were like burning plastic. In a face that was starting to rot in earnest and separate from the bone, it was the only part of him she recognized.
Jake dragged Esther down the hallway by her hair. She cried out in pain and despair, but put up little other resistance. “The thing you don’t seem to understand is that you belong to me. Just ask God. He’ll tell ya.”
They followed the long smeared track of blood from Evangeline’s friend all the way back to the living room, where Eddie’s dead body lay supine on the shag carpet, arms stretched out on a cape of deep burgundy.
Esther wailed and took a swing at Jake.
The blow barely mussed his hair, but he cut a grotesque pantomime, as if she’d mortally wounded him.
“He takes note of betrayal, believe you me. He’s like Santa Claus and the ‘naughty’ list with that shit.”
Jake flipped open one shiny steel cuff and held it out like the fanged mouth of a rattlesnake.
“Not like me…”
Gray staggered up to the bathroom door where Christian was still pounding. If only everything to night were this simple. Pointing the gun, he walked up to the door, thumbed the safety off, and started firing.
From inside, Christian yelped.
The banging stopped.
As Gray reached for the knob, he noticed that he’d stepped in a puddle. The sissy must’ve flooded the place. His sense of smell was hardly the best, what with a lifetime of smoking, one working lung, and a night with an embalmed guy. But he smelled alcohol, and not the fun kind.
He turned the lock and opened the door.
Something small and metallic hit the floor on the other side. Blue flames squirted out from under the door and devoured the puddle he stood in.
Gray jumped back and pumped three more rounds through the half-open door. His shoes, socks, and trouser legs were sheathed in fire.
Even as he yelped, danced, and batted at them, the flames began to die out. Fed on rubbing alcohol and cologne, they were nothing more than a distraction—