The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (19 page)

Reece didn’t want to believe any of it, but Gary was convincing. He had a fucking army out here. Sworn to him. Fighting for him. Reece was one weak voice of sanity in a mass of conviction. And he didn’t even know if he was right. All that Gary said, all that he pointed out—Reece could see it. How many times had he and Roxanne or Ryan or Ruby watched the news only to be stunned by what humans could do to one another? The cruelty and thoughtless brutality. It didn’t make sense. Unless you bought into what Gary said.

And then it made perfect sense.

“Are you ready, then?” Gary asked him cheerfully.

Reece nodded, though he was learning to fear that tone.

“Right,” Gary said. “You’ll be hunting with Walter and Dave.”

Hunting. Killing. His stomach made a queasy roll, but his brain worked overtime imagining every detail. . . . He swallowed hard, ashamed and angry all at once. But not even his disgust at his own fucked-up reactions could douse the excitement.

He nodded at Walter and Dave—privately nicknamed Casper and Shrek, though Dave wasn’t really green. They’d been in charge of his training, and they’d worked him like an animal. He was so sore he could hardly lift his hands over his head. A lot of good that would do him if it came down to a fight.

“Where’s Karen?” Gary demanded of no one in particular.

Reece heard the clatter of boots on the steps behind him, then Karen hurried over to stand beside the other two men. “I’m here.”

“What about April?” Reece asked. Karen had been like a neighbor’s kid he couldn’t shake, but he hadn’t seen April since yesterday. Whatever they battled this morning, he didn’t want April in the middle of it, but he didn’t want her facing something worse while all the cowboys were out fighting the Indians either.

“April?” Gary replied in that fucking lilt of his. “Like her, do you?”

Yeah, Yoda. He did. “Just wondered, man,” he said coolly.

Gary’s grin made Reece want to pop him one.
Fuck
. Having a conversation with Gary was like crossing an alligator-infested river. Just because it looked like a rock didn’t mean it wouldn’t bite your leg off.

“April!” Gary called out, surprising Reece. At the far edges of the gathered crowd, a slight form stiffened and stepped forward. “Fall in with Reece’s team.”

Reece tracked her as she moved closer, her skin nearly the same color as her clothes. She carried a rifle in her hands. No chance she’d be waiting back at the homestead. The whites of her eyes gleamed in the darkness.

At Gary’s mention of “Reece’s team,” Casper and Shrek both stiffened like someone had shoved pokers up their asses. Morons. He would have told them that he didn’t care whose team it was, but he didn’t like either one enough to bother.

According to Gary, he’d be hunting demons before dawn even broke. And he had permission—no,
orders—
to kill them.

Since he’d been tumbled out of bed in the early hours by Casper and ordered to the training center, Reece had bounced between horror and hallelujah. He was buzzed, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise.

Blood would be shed this morning.

“How are we supposed to find these demons?” He knew better than to ask Gary anything, but he couldn’t hold it in.

“They’ll find us,” Gary said.

A straight answer. Who’d have thought it possible?

“Trust me in this, Reece. There’ll be no mistaking what you’re aiming at.”

A few of the others voiced laughing agreement. They had the nervous energy of teenagers alone with the opposite sex for the first time. In fact, it felt a little like a party out here. Like kids waiting to go toilet paper a friend’s house in the middle of the night. But beneath it, they were scared. Every one of them.

Something howled in the distance, and they all shifted uneasily. The sound came again, and a knot formed in Reece’s gut.

“What is that?” he said.

“It’s terrifying, isn’t it?” Gary murmured. “A cry from the bowels of hell, that’s what it makes me think of.”

Yeah, that pretty much summed it up.

“And it belongs to?”

“Demons, Reece. What have I been telling you?”

He heard someone whisper, “They’re coming back,” and someone else hush them. Warily they turned their faces west, staring at the sound like it might appear in big notes on the horizon. It was stupid, but Reece couldn’t look away either.

Casper appeared at his side and Reece jumped.

“Let’s go.”

The other man’s voice sounded like a pressure gauge ready to pop. They all heard his fear and it spread like a spark through dried grass.

Reece adjusted the rifle on his shoulder and checked the wicked hunting knife in the sheath at his hip, praying he’d remember everything Shrek had drilled into him about using them. He’d practiced for hours until his arms felt like rubber. But the weapons still felt heavy and foreign in his grip. He was a city boy. He’d never even had a BB gun, though he’d wanted one in the worst way. He could still remember the clash with his dad over it and the crushing no at the end. His father had had too many concerns about Reece and Reece’s
stability
to grant his son’s wish, and they’d both known putting an eye out had been the least of them.

But they’d never talked of it. Never once. As he’d grown older, Reece had come to see that his dad had been right, though. Weapons implied violence. The last thing he needed was thoughts of
that
rooting any deeper in his mind.

April fell in behind him. He felt her there, alert and watching, and he wondered what she thought of all this. He wanted to drop back and speak with her, but Karen popped up at his side. “Don’t be nervous,” she whispered. “You’ll do fine.”

She looked scared shitless. Her face was the color of milk and her eyes and lips seemed almost superimposed. A clown face. Just what the night needed.

“You’ve done this before?” he asked.

She shook her head.

Odd that Gary would have assembled a team with
so many newcomers to accompany him. Reece couldn’t see any good reasons for it. That left only the bad ones.

“What about you?” he called softly to Casper.

“I know what I’m doing,” he said.

Which wasn’t exactly an answer. Had he done this before or not?

“Don’t worry,” Shrek said, moving to take the lead. “We won’t let the doggies eat you.”

Karen made a soft, giggly sound that ignited Reece’s jitters. April remained silent. The five of them trudged through the shadows and scrub, while the other four teams fanned out, canvassing the borders of Gary’s compound.

The baying was all around them now. It felt like the desert grabbed each eerie note and slammed it home. Whatever had amassed in the cloying darkness, there were a lot of them and they were everywhere.

Casper went commando with the hand gestures to show where he wanted each of them positioned. Reece found himself crouched behind a boulder with April. She sat with her knees drawn up, her rifle resting on top of them and her arms holding it in place. Her chin dropped low to her chest as she stared into the hollow she’d made with her body.

“You know what’s coming?” he breathed, scanning the horizon for a sign of movement.

“Hell,” she answered.

Someone whistled, a loud, beckoning sound, and
the howling stopped for just an instant. Reece imagined heads cocked and ears pricked. The whistle came again, sharp and commanding. Calling in whatever waited out there in the dark.

He glanced at April, but before he could ask anything else, a low, rumbling growl came from somewhere to his left. He froze, all the hairs on his body standing on end. The fidgeting of Gary’s soldiers suddenly ceased as they all strained to listen.

Christ, what was it?

Reece pressed his back tight against the boulder next to April, trying not to move. Trying not to breathe. He heard it again, a deep, menacing reverberation that seemed to come from just behind the boulder, and yet in front of it and all around it. The shadows gobbled the sound and spat it out in a million small, vibrating pieces. Beside him, April covered her mouth, trying to hold in her fear.

He reached over and took her free hand. She clutched his fingers desperately, her palm cold, clammy. A whisper brushed past his senses, his ears straining so hard that he couldn’t tell if what he heard had come from his mind or the clearing in front of him. The air grew so still it seemed to thin until he could see the particles within, silver on gray, slate on black.

But then it shifted and became thick. Sulfurous. Suffocating. April began to breathe through her mouth, gripping his hand so tight it hurt. Why had Gary made
her come this morning? She shouldn’t have been here, reliving the slaughter of her family. Reece brought their hands to his lips and blew warm breath on them.

“It’s okay,” he whispered against her skin.

Somewhere across the clearing he heard a shout, a scream of pain, and more snarls and howls that made him tense. Hideous crunching sounds followed, then dark, wet slurping. April gagged and Reece put his arms around her, trying to keep her quiet. She huddled into him, gun abandoned as she tried to hide from what they couldn’t see.

Another scream, this one closer, followed by three short, tortured shrieks and what sounded like a multitude of answering growls. A gun fired and another, but the bullets must have gone wild. No yelps of pain followed.

“Head shots,” Shrek shouted with the angry impatience of someone forced to repeat himself over and over. “
Head shots
.”

The howls were everywhere now, echoing against the scrub and dirt, bouncing off the stars and velvet sky. He heard ripping, snapping, more tortured screams of agony, more gunfire. A man’s voice—one he didn’t recognize—begged for mercy and then begged for it to be over. A woman sobbed as those gruesome sounds went on and on. Soon the night was filled with them and the smell. Fuck, it smelled like death.

April pushed away from him and crawled to her knees, retching helplessly. Reece could do little more
than rub her back and murmur soft hushing sounds as he scanned the hostile darkness, waiting for the hot breath that would precede snapping jaws.

He didn’t know why they’d drilled him all those hours with the rifle. He couldn’t see anything in the dark. But he could feel them, moving closer, stalking Gary’s soldiers, picking them off one by one. Eating them alive.

The gunfire came fast and furious now, bullets winging in every direction but the right one, judging from the screams. He pulled April back behind the shelter of the boulder after one whizzed past his ear and lodged in the dirt. April cried big, silent tears. He could feel them against his chest. What had she expected to find here? Glory?

“
Shhhhh,
” he breathed as someone else went down in a torrent of bullets and screams. It sounded like a whole fucking herd of wild animals had ambushed them. But they’d all been set and waiting for them. Armed and dangerous. How had they been caught so unprepared?

The air shifted again, slapping him with a gust of blood and sulfur.

That’s when he heard it. The soft
chuff
of an exhalation just behind him.

In his arms, April stiffened, her breath terminating in a gasp that barely emerged. His skin was hot and cold at once, drawn so tight it felt like it should split.
He tried to swallow but couldn’t force anything past his dry throat. He couldn’t even breathe.

It came again.
Chuff, chuff.
This time he felt it, the moist warmth caressing his ear. April’s hands fisted in his shirt, catching flesh in her grasp. The pinching pain focused him.

Slowly—
godsoslowly
—he reached for the knife at his hip as he turned his head and came nose to nose with something out of a nightmare.

The creature was huge. Standing on all fours, it was at least five feet from the tips of its pointy ears to the ground beneath its misshapen feet—
paws?
—hands. Whatever the fuck they were. A black and white pelt gave it better camouflage than he wore. Its skull was thick and heavy, with a protruding snout that sprouted long, curled canines. Thick as fingers, sharper than blades. Blood and gore covered its whole fucking head. The thing’s nostrils flared as it took his scent.

Reece couldn’t look away. The ice-cold gleam of its feral eyes had him trapped. Eyes so white they looked like halogens bearing down on him. Only the pinpoint of the pupil broke the bleached sheen.

Reece still held his gun, but there was no way to bring it up. The creature stood too close, watched him too intently. The knife, though. He might stand a chance with that. His fingers closed over the grip. The creature growled and Reece froze. It needed only to snap its enormous jaws around his throat so it could feast as its friends
did all around them. He could feel April shaking beside him. She probably felt him, too.

The creature continued to stare, assessing. Beside it another appeared and another. The smell shoved him right past scared to ready to piss his pants.

They watched. But they didn’t attack. Why didn’t they attack?

Slowly,
fucking God, slowly,
he released April, carefully angling his body in front of her. Still they watched him with an almost doglike expression. Curious. As if they expected him to pull out a rubber ball and toss it. Except each one wore a coat of blood and guts. They were covered in it. Stinking of it. And they wanted more.

The one in the lead licked its chops and let its tongue loll out.

Watching. Watching.
Watching
.

What did they want? Why didn’t they kill him?

Reece pulled his legs up, got his feet beneath him, and stood. “Easy, easy,” he breathed.

The creature in front made a sharp, whining sound. Then it did the same: Stood. Like a twisted mutant in a really bad movie. It glared at him with those headlight eyes, red-tinted drool coming off its teeth. From his periphery, he saw the other two hunker down, haunches bunched, ready to go, ready to devour.