Jake's Wake (26 page)

He looked up just as Christian spilled out the bathroom door and pointed something at him.

An industrial spray can of insecticide.

A cold mist engulfed Gray’s face in liquid agony. His eyes stung, teared up, seemed to melt down his face. He sucked in a breath and promptly gagged on the flavor, felt his lungs turn brittle and wither like dead flowers.

The awful tingling weakness spread out into his limbs, robbing him of his last reserves of strength. Suffocating, blind.

But damned if that bitch was getting past him.

He heard Christian in front of him, aimed and fired, charging, then instantly tripped over Jasper’s dead body.

Shards of glass punctured his knee, and more bit into his shoulder and face when he sprawled in the chunky glass from the broken cologne bottles, the razorlike light bulb shards.

Gray heard crunching glass behind him, over the sound of his own screaming.

Grunting in sudden pain, the faggot kicked him in the ass, thanked him for an enchanted evening, and slammed the bathroom door.

Christian limped into the studio. The fog of shock was all but worn off, and he could vividly feel every broken rib fragment grating against the walls of his chest with every movement.

It was all he could do not to scream at the top of his lungs, but that would hardly help with the pain. And even if he couldn’t find anybody, he was pretty sure he wasn’t the only one left. He had to find Evangeline. They needed to get the fuck out of here before he passed out—

“Oh dear God,” he said.

It just slipped out. It didn’t mean anything. What else would he say, upon seeing an eyeless, crucified boy?

The dead kid, Mathias, looked like a prop. Its skin had a marbled gray pallor that made it tough to think of as human flesh. The cameras pointing at it all had blinking red lights. He was taping this, recording the death…and then what?

It was heartbreaking, true enough, but all the sight made Christian think of was that he had to find Evangeline. Now.

That, and some serious Vicodin.

He heard the banging of metal on metal or stone. And screams.

Shuffling across the studio to the sliding glass door, he heard Evangeline screaming. He tore the curtain aside and tugged the door open, wincing at the pressure on his ribs.

Sweat broke out on his forehead. If he didn’t lie down, he was going to pass out. If he didn’t do something to save his friend, he might as well lie down and die.

That was no choice at all. He kept going.

At the holding cell, Bible Girl was trying to smash the lock on the door with a rock. And getting nowhere.

“Try the garage!” Evangeline yelled.

“What, for keys?”

“No, get a goddamn hammer!” Christian yelled, surprising them both, and praying that Emmy knew enough not to hug him right now.

Jake hauled Esther’s limp form over to lie beside Eddie’s body. Driven into a frenzy by her passivity, he pushed her to her knees, and ground her face in his open throat, holding her by the back of her head as if he meant to drown her.

She screamed into her lover’s mortal wound and flailed at her undead husband’s unyielding arm. If she held her breath, she could black out. Maybe she could drown. She could deny him that little bit, at least—

When he tired of this game, Jake grabbed one dainty wrist, twisted it behind her, and slapped a cuff on it. Her face came up slathered with blood, coughing up inhaled blood and vodka vomit.

She gasped for air, and blew it all out as loud as she could. “NO!”

“No?”
He paused, as if genuinely puzzled. “Guess you should have thought of that before you spread for him, huh?”

Yanking her cuffed arm away from her breasts, Jake slapped the other cuff around Eddie’s wrist.

“And now you’re gonna stay with him, just like this, until you rot.”

LeGrange came in the front door, observing, hat in hand. Esther screamed up at him.

“PLEASE!”

He looked at her like she was dirt, then turned devotedly to Jake.

“Lord, you said…” He bowed his head, overcome by stage fright in the face of his cable-access savior.

“What? Speak up!” Jake demanded.

“You said that…on the Day of Reckoning, even those whose bodies had been burned or buried would rise, in spirit, to return to the faithful…?”

“Yeah, sure, all that shit’s totally gonna happen. But in case you hadn’t noticed, there’re nonbelievers in the temple. Thieves trying to steal what’s mine.”

“Forgive me,” LeGrange fumbled. “How may I serve you, Lord?”

Jake pointed out back. LeGrange picked up the fireplace poker where Christian dropped it, as he crossed the room, impervious to Esther’s pleading, and went out the back door.

Jake grinned malevolently down at her, then turned to the roaring flame.

Emmy came running with a hammer from the garage. Christian leaned against the door, talking to Evangeline. “We’re gonna get you out, okay?”

Evangeline reached a bloody hand out through the bars to touch his face. Her fingertips felt like dry ice. “Oh God, Christian…”

Evangeline held on to him as Emmy took the hammer in both her pudgy little hands and started banging on the lock. In her haste, she just swung faster and wilder with each stroke, almost braining Christian. Each bang was as loud as a gunshot, but she seemed to be doing little else.

“Give me that.” Christian took it from her and, struggling to hold himself steady, banged on the cheap sheet metal flange holding the lock onto the door frame.

Three strokes and it broke.

Evangeline popped out the door, hugged Christian, making him grunt in pain. “Never so happy to see a cop in my life—”

Christian struggled to turn around in her arms. He only caught a glimpse of the big man in khaki and a cowboy hat coming up the yard toward them.

But Emmy recoiled in fear. “Oh, no…”

Christian hobbled out to meet LeGrange, who strode
across the lawn like he was late giving a ticket. Swinging at his side, Christian only barely noticed, was the wrought-iron fireplace poker.

“Thank God!” Christian wheezed. “Officer…”

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

LeGrange laid into Christian with the poker. Christian turned away and raised the hammer, but the iron rod clipped his undamaged arm above the wrist, snapping the bones clean through his skin.

Christian bowed over his ruined arm just as LeGrange kicked him in the balls hard enough to flip him on his back, then resumed savagely beating him with the poker.

Frozen for a fatal instant by the betrayal of a man in uniform, Evangeline and Emmy could only stand and scream at Sheriff LeGrange to stop.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

Jake was kneeling in front of Esther and Eddie, transfixed by the roaring hellfire, the oversized family Bible laid out before him. A miasma of noxious fumes curled up from his suit and his sick, sallow skin. He was barely aware of them as he tore sheaves of onionskin pages out of the New Testament and offered them to the fire.

Every so often, he took up a Buck knife and cut off some of her hair, added it to the blaze. She feigned unconsciousness, squeezing her eyes tight and biting back screams as he turned to cut off something more substantial from Eddie’s face.

The hungry red flames seemed to feed on something much more volatile than paper, hair, and flesh, and bloomed up from a place much deeper than the hearth. Like an infinity of fire, stretching down into a bottomless pit.

Something danced in it, feeding the fire forever without ever being consumed.

It spoke to him.

Suddenly, despite the fire, the living room became as cold as a tomb, as if a door had opened on the Arctic. Esther opened her eyes again and looked around. The
last dregs of vodka still in her stomach curdled and agitated for escape.

The lights slowly went brown and died out, until only the unearthly fire lit the room, the walls of which now receded into blackness.

She looked, and she saw them.

Three naked women appeared out of the shadows, forming a triangle around Jake and his victims. Fluttering, twitching as if they were unstuck in time and space, and ridden by a dozen warring appetites.

Their eyes, fixed on Jake, were mirrors. They sneered and dripped venom that turned to smoke and flies. But when they spoke, it was with one voice.

“This is the Night of the Great Transformation. This is the end of the world you knew.”

Jake quivered. “I’m ready…”

“This is the Night of All Souls, in revelation. The death of all lies, in the face of what’s true.”

Jake threw the rest of the Bible into the fire. “Hallelujah!”

Esther saw the demons all too clearly now as they converged on Jake, and she began to go out of her mind.

They were not demons, she told herself, but ghosts. The ghosts of his women: the one who scarred him, and the harem of hapless whores on whom he vented his awful wrath. Hollowed out by their vices until they served only hell, they taunted him with their spectral nakedness, gyrating lewdly and convulsing as in a Saint Vitus’ dance, as if jolts of orgasm and strands of barbed wire ran through their nerves.

Their mercurial, ever-shifting faces betrayed the pure desolation of human hearts that might once have saved themselves from this. But Jake’s Furies descended on him only to urge him to greater cruelty, wider wakes of torment and devastation.

This was not revenge. This was not justice.

This was evil rewarding evil…and where was God?

Beneath his notice now, Esther started crawling toward the back door, dragging the inert concrete of Eddie’s body, not trying to escape, only to get away. The handcuff dug bloody ruts into her wrist. Eddie’s empty olive face stared at her, minus the random plots of skin and scalp that Jake had carved off. Twin, blood-rimmed mouths hung agape, asking her why he threw her away.

Jake and the demons laughed at her, but were content to let her crawl away.

At last, he had everything he needed.

Half blind and still picking glass out of his face, Gray staggered out into the backyard.

Drawn by the sound of Christian’s screams like a moth to a streetlight, he fought the pain and weakness that were dragging him down. Even before he staggered out onto the lawn and saw them, his brain pulled him forward with the tantalizing image of Sheriff LeGrange kneeling over Christian, beating him.

There is a magic moment in every fight when the combatants slip out of the deadlock of evenly traded blows, and one ascends, while the other submits, or simply breaks down.

To witness that moment, when the victor ritually drinks his victim’s courage as totally as if he’d literally pried out and devoured his heart, is to feed on the spray of energy released in the delivery of the deathblow. Professional sports is as much designed to maximize and lay bare that mysterious transaction, as it is to preserve the lives of the contestants.

In the front of Gray’s mind as he hobbled over to the horribly uneven match were two things: pure, simple disgust with how this evening had spun out of control, and the overwhelming need to clean house.

In the back of his mind—unexpressed in words, but driving his unsteady stride more than any sense of duty or love—was the idea that if he could get into this limousine wreck before that magic moment, on this night of all nights, he could devour them both, and be made whole.

Sometimes, you just had to believe in miracles.

“LeGrange,” he said. “Your zipper’s down.”

The sheriff looked up from his work, his eyes a hundred thousand years away. Christian mewled on the red grass, but thrust up a twisted arm to swat at the sheriff’s leg. Still alive, still a fighter.

Gray shot LeGrange dead-center in the forehead. The sheriff dropped flat on his ass beside the queer, then flopped on his back, Stetson pushed down over his face like he’d just laid down for a siesta.

Christian looked acidly up at him with his one intact eye, stuck out his tongue, and sprayed fragments of teeth and blood-threaded spittle as he blew a ripe raspberry.

Gray took aim and fired.

“NO!” Evangeline shrieked, tackling Gray, but not before his shot put a hole where Christian’s heart was.

Then his legs tied in a bow and dumped him under the pummeling, blood-crusted fists of the kamikaze whore.

Emmy whimpered and covered her eyes, but still leapt up to run back to the house.

Evangeline’s broken fingernails dug into Gray’s scalp and raked his face, searching for his eyes. Rolling and batting at Evangeline, Gray threw out his gun arm and fired.

The wild bullet hit the wall just in front of Emmy, who squealed and ducked into the studio.

Emmy ran through the studio with her hands up like blinders, sliding into the hallway in her stocking feet, looking for a place to hide. The bathroom and bedroom doors flanked her, both open, but hardly inviting. The bathroom door was scorched, and puddles of blood and broken glass fanned out into the hall. She smelled Old Spice and overcooked bacon.

She froze and hugged herself when she heard Jake’s pounding footsteps, rounding the turn at the far end of the hall. She stifled a scream and ducked into his bedroom, realizing too late that there was no exit, and never would be.

Jake thundered down the corridor. The walls seemed to shake with every step. There was almost no point in hiding. If he didn’t find her, he’d bring the house down on top of her.

Esther did not stop to cry as she dragged Eddie around the back of the house, but her breaths came in exhausted sobs, and tears blurred her vision. After desperately racing to get around the corner of the house, she had collapsed beside Eddie. It would be vintage Jake to let her run just far enough away to think she was safe—
to kid herself he’d let her go—before he reached out and slapped her down again.