Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (30 page)

Jack let that all sink in. He thought he ought to be happy. Castillo and his superiors had cleaned up their mess, kept them all out of the media. But then he thought of Matt Brocklebank’s parents and his little sister Jeannie, who was still in college, and he could not find it in himself to be happy.

“They’ll never know what really happened,” he muttered.

“They can’t,” Molly agreed. “The guy can never be caught because the cops already incinerated his body, just like they do anytime one of the monsters shows up.”

Her voice was bitter, angry. Jack wanted to call her on it, but knew he had no right, for he felt the same. Yet the police were doing their best. The conspiracy was understandable. The world would change completely if knowledge of the Prowlers’ existence were to become common. And it certainly was convenient for Jack and the people he loved.

After a moment, Molly sighed, her hands fluttering in the air. “I’m sorry. I know we have a lot to be grateful for. The Ravenous is gone. This thing, Dallas, wanted to kill us, and we’re all still here. But none of us are walking away without scars, Jack. Courtney especially—”

“And everybody wants to pretend it didn’t happen.”

She stopped, blinked, and stared at him as though she had only just noticed him standing there. “Yes. That’s it exactly.”

Jack smiled softly. “Makes you wonder how many other secrets there are, what else they’re keeping from us.”

“It does. Artie talked about conspiracies all the time. I thought he was just paranoid.”

They shared a soft, uneasy laugh.

“How’s your hand? Still numb?”

He flexed it, shook it out a little. “Getting better.”

“It will,” Molly said, pushing her wild red hair behind her ears and gazing at him earnestly. “We’ll all get better. The numbness will go away. Then we’ll be able to feel again.”

Jack smiled softly, not wanting to look away, never wanting to break the connection he felt with her then. The space between them was alive with possibility.

Then they fell in beside each other and began to walk down the hall toward the room where Courtney had been brought after surgery. After he had seen the extent of her injuries, Jack was afraid to even hope his sister would be all right. Instead, he had prayed with all his heart. He knew, after all, that there was
something
out there. Whatever it was. Something that might listen, and might be able to help.

Doctors had been forced to remove a section of her intestine, and it was touch and go for a while because of all the blood she had lost. But in the end they stitched her up, pumped her full of antibiotics to fight potential infection, and announced that as long as she rested, gave herself plenty of time to heal, and there were no further complications, she would be all right.

It would likely be days, perhaps a week, before she could go home, and many more weeks before the wounds would heal. Cosmetic surgery would need to be done in the meanwhile if she did not want the scars to be there forever.

But Courtney was alive.

She had survived.

They all had.

Just outside Courtney’s hospital room, Molly hesitated. He thought she might actually be blushing, but did not dare ask her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She lifted her chin and met his gaze, her emerald green eyes sparkling. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m staying. I’m not going to Yale.”

“What? Oh, Mol, you can’t just—”

“Yeah, I can. I might try to get into someplace local for a January admission. Boston College maybe. But Yale is just too far away. With Courtney out of commission for a while, it’s going to take all three of us to run the pub, especially if we’re really going to try tracking these things.” Jack hesitated. The night before they had stood in Courtney’s bedroom and stared at the news clippings on the bulletin board, and they had agreed, in just a few words, that the smartest thing they could possibly do was forget the Prowlers ever existed, keep their heads down, and pray that Jasmine would forget about them as well.

But they had also agreed that they could not do that. The Prowlers were out there, hunting and killing, forming new packs. And Jasmine seemed as though she was intent upon seeing them dead.

The only thing they could do was find her first and destroy her. This war against the Prowlers was no casual thing anymore. It was a mission now, a purpose. No one else was going to take on the responsibility, so it was up to them to hunt the monsters. Jack had wondered how Molly could be so emphatic about that if she was going away, but he had said nothing.

One of the things that they had not yet talked about was Bill’s niece, Olivia. According to Dallas, the girl had disappeared. If they were really going to get into this thing, that would certainly be Bill’s first order of business, to find that girl and make sure she’s alive, find out whose side she was on. And they would have to track down Jasmine as well.

Make the predator the prey.

Molly watched him, waiting for a response.

Jack smiled and shrugged. “If you’re waiting for me to talk you out of it, I’m not going to. I think you should go to college. But if you went somewhere nearby . . . that would be better. I feel like we’re a part of something. All of us. And . . . and maybe just you and me. It would be a shame not to find out what’s meant to happen next.” Molly nodded slowly, gaze earnest. “I couldn’t agree more.”

Together, they turned to look into the hospital room. Courtney lay in bed, pale and drawn, her hair a mess. But she smiled up at Bill with her eyes aglow, as though he were her lifeline. They talked softly, the big man dwarfing the metal and plastic chair next to the bed, and whatever they whispered about, Jack decided it was not for him to hear.

Beside him, Molly reached out to touch his hand, and their fingers intertwined. He felt the warmth of her skin, the comfort of her touch, and a kind of strength surged up in him. Jack held Molly’s hand tightly and watched Bill and Courtney whisper to each other, and he knew that whatever came, whatever monsters stalked the shadows, they would be all right.

They would face the darkness together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the award-winning,
L.A. Times
bestselling author of such novels as
Straight on ’til Morning
and
Strangewood,
and the
Prowlers
and
Body of Evidence
series of teen thrillers.

Golden has also written a great many books and comic books related to the TV series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and
Angel.
His other comic book work includes stories featuring such characters as Batman, Wolverine, Spider-Man, The Crow, and Hellboy, among many others.

As a pop culture journalist, he was the editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning book of criticism,
CUT!: Horror Writers on Horror Film,
and co-author of both
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Monster Book
and
The Stephen King Universe.

Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He graduated from Tufts University. He is currently at work on the fourth book in the
Prowlers
series,
Wild Things,
and a new novel for Signet called
The Ferryman.
There are more than four million copies of his books in print. Please visit him at
www.christophergolden.com.

Turn the page for a prev iew of the next
P rowl ers
thriller

W ILD THINGS

Av ailable April 2002

P R O L O G U E

Alone in the dark.

Chet Douglas lay on a bedroll in the cab of his rig and stared up at the ceiling in the dark. Whenever he was on a long haul like this one—the trailer filled with electronic parts on their way from Alabama to Albany, New York—he split the drive up with two and three hour catnaps. It had taken some getting used to, but it got the load there faster, got the pay in the bank sooner. He was young, after all. There would be time to sleep later.

In his mind, all those excuses seemed completely reasonable. But there was another reason Chet tried not to sleep too much on a long haul. Sometimes . . . sometimes the rest areas were empty, the lot abandoned, even the highway quiet. Chet prided himself on his safety record. He was not going to be another one of those long-haul boys who fell asleep at the wheel and took out some grandmother or a couple from Iowa with three kids in the car. So when he was tired, he stopped. He rested. But he never liked those darkened spots, bereft of any life save for whatever rustled in the trees beyond the pavement.

Chet Douglas hated to be alone in the dark.

Of course he never would have admitted that to anyone. He was a grown man, after all. But now, there in the truck, he felt like a child again. He knew, absolutely, that if he dared to look out the windows, he would see things shifting in the shadows, just as he always had as a little boy.

Dawn was hours off and he had to lie there and force himself to close his eyes, try to keep his mind from turning again to the dark. He felt the world slipping away from him, a haze falling over his consciousness. Exhaustion finally catching up with him, and Chet gave himself over to it willingly. He drifted toward oblivion, his chest rising and falling in a soothing rhythm, his breath slowing. Outside, the muffled sound of the wind.

The wind, soothing, gently rocking . . .

Chet opened his eyes, suddenly awake. For a moment he was confused, lost in that realm between sleep and consciousness. Something had roused him, had reached in from the night and touched him. A loud engine passing by on the highway?

Then it came again, distant and muffled as the wind, a shriek of terror and anguish, a desperate cry that made him freeze, eyes wide. His heart began to hammer in his chest and his breathing became ragged.

“Jesus,” Chet whispered, there in the dark.

A third time the voice cried out, somewhere in the night beyond the metal cradle of the cab of his semi. This time it was closer and there were smaller sounds accompanying it, little squeals of fear that sounded more than a little like surrender.

A woman. Maybe a girl.

But where had she come from? If a truck had pulled in he would have heard the rumble of the engine, the hiss of hydraulic brakes. Even a car engine coming up that close would have woken him.

From the woods,
Chet thought.
She came from the woods.

Get out of here!

Suddenly he was in motion. He sat up, threw the curtain back and climbed into his seat. Chet scrambled to get the keys out of his pocket. They jangled as he pulled them out, listening hard to for any sound outside the truck that should not have been there.

The engine roared and at last Chet looked out the window to his left, where the sounds had come from. Out there in the darkened lot, by the trees. He saw her then, a dark-haired woman stumbling toward the truck, dark streaks on her face that might have been mascara or dirt or blood, one arm hanging limply at her side.

In that moment, Chet Douglas hated himself.

Coward,
he thought.

Here was this woman, maybe barely old enough for him to call her that, injured and in trouble. If she came from the woods, she had likely been camping and gotten lost. He had no idea how she came by her injuries, maybe an angry boyfriend or even a bear. She was running away from something, that much was obvious.

And you were gonna take off on her. What a child,
he scolded himself.
Afraid of the dark.
There would be more recriminations later, more guilt, of that he was sure. But that was for later.

Chet killed the engine and reached behind the seat to grab an aluminum baseball bat he kept back there. Its paint was faded and its surface scarred, not from parking lot scraps but from playing ball with his boys. The metal was cold against his skin and its weight felt good. He hefted the bat, popped the lock on the door and stepped down out of the truck. Chet sucked in a breath of cold October night air and lifted his chin, stood a bit straighter.

The girl—he could see now that she was no more than sixteen or seventeen—ran right at him, staggering the last few feet.

“Oh God, oh Jesus, thank you,” she whispered, breath coming in ragged gasps.

Chet could practically smell the blood on her face and clothes. Her eyes were wild with terror, half blind with it as her gaze darted around at the truck, the darkness, at Chet himself, trying to focus, maybe just to make sense of it all.

“What happened to you, honey?” he asked, voice a tired rasp. “Where is the son of a bitch?” He felt braver now. “Come on out, you bastard!” he shouted into the dark, sure now that it must be her husband or boyfriend. “I’ll give you a taste of what you did to her!” The terrified girl began to laugh softly, madly.
Poor thing really has snapped,
Chet thought. He squinted his eyes and thought he saw someone else moving in the trees, in the woods. He was surprised that the guy had the guts to come out now and face him.

“Come on,” he muttered to the figure in the woods. “I’ll give you a taste.”

Then, as Chet watched, the man stepped out of the woods. No, that wasn’t right. The man stumbled out. Even in the dark, with only a sliver moon and the stars above, Chet could see that he had been hurt, that his face was ravaged and his clothes hung in strips from his body.

“What the—” Chet began.

The man collapsed in a heap on the tar and did not move.

Beside him, the girl laughed again, a bit louder now, a sharp edge to it. Chet turned to look at her . . . and the girl began to change. As though it had consumed her from within, a monster tore its way out of her skin, a sleek, slavering thing with sable fur and glistening needle teeth. As if the darkness itself had claws, it reached for him.

The beast laughed.

Alone again, alone in the dark, Chet had time only to think that all along he had been right about the night and the shadows and the faces at the window.

Then it was upon him.

The bat clanged to the ground, leaving only the whispers of the wind and the low, contented growling of the darkness.