Chapter 28
Voices surrounded her. Dozens of people milled around, crowding her space, whispering with excitement, agitation, and fear. They poked, pushed, and prodded at Jackie, urging her to move. She did not want to, however. A listless lethargy consumed her, a cold comfort that made her limbs far too heavy to lift.
Hon! Jackie! Come on, sweetie. You have to wake up,
Laurel said.
Why? I don't want to move. I'm so cold.
Charlotte is killing Nick and Shelby. We have to get out.
The haze began to coalesce, taking on the form of girls, a dozen of them perhaps, all crowded around her. One of them held her arm, stroking it, a gray nimbus of light enveloping her hands. Jackie realized then that something was wrong with her arm. Chunks of it were missing, shredded skin surrounding the wounds. The memory came back to her in a rush. Margolin! The bastard had shot her.
The Rebeccas' hands sank into Jackie's skin as she continued to rub over the wound and gradually continued, until her arms had somehow buried themselves in her wound. She smiled at Jackie.
You can't let her win. Whatever you must do, stop her.
With that, the Rebeccas continued to vanish into Jackie's arm until she was gone. The ripped flesh around her wounds shrank. The huge divots taken out had receded back to something approaching a normal-looking arm. It looked like Jackie had done little more than burn herself in several places.
The ghost had just fueled her healing, like she was a goddamn vampire.
Wait! What are you doing? Rebecca? No! I don't want to take you for this. It isn't right, damn it! I'm supposed to save you from her.
The real Rebecca came forward then, settling beside her.
I'm sorry, Jackie, but you have no choice. Charlotte has used us for a hundred years to fuel her twisted dream of bringing me back. We've lingered here, unknowing, because she took who we were away from us. Give us the dignity of a worthy end. Let us help you stop her.
I don't know that I can.
Let us help, Jackie. Your friends are going to die if you don't try.
Nick. They were coming in to get me.
They're here,
Laurel said.
And Charlotte is winning. You have to do this now.
Did she have a choice? Could the dead ever matter more than the living? What it really came down to, though, was could she willingly let someone sacrifice her soul for justice? She would, so how could she say no to someone else?
OK. Rebecca, let's do this. I'm not sure what I'm doing, but we have to try.
With the open invitation, the Rebeccas swarmed around her, pressing in until she felt smothered, shouting encouragement, crying for vengeance and freedom. They seeped into Jackie, their energy dispersing and filling her body, and the cold, dead weight that had been dragging her down began to lift. Only the real Rebecca remained at the end, waiting.
Different sounds began to drift into her awareness. Faint pops, a scream, and Nick's voice. He was close. Jackie's eyes fluttered open to the grunt of his voice and the splintering crack of wood.
Charlotte stood above her, blood splattered across the side of her face. Something had torn a hole in her left cheek. Next to her a chair lay in a broken heap, beneath which legs protruded out against her side. The cowboy boots were all too familiar.
Her voice croaked. “Nick?”
Charlotte's livid gaze focused on her. “Jackie. You've ... well. Look what you've done.”
She reached down and grabbed Jackie by the jacket and jerked her up to her feet. “Hello, Sis. You in there?” Charlotte shook her hard enough to snap Jackie's head back and forth. “I can feel you in there.”
Holy hell, she's strong.
Jackie grabbed onto Charlotte's wrists, letting the power given to her flow through her arms and into her hands. She was not exactly sure what she was doing or how to do it, but Laurel helped guide her efforts. Her fingers dug into the tendons on Charlotte's wrists to the point her short nails began to break the skin.
“She's says it's time for this to be over,” Jackie said. “You can't do this anymore, Charlotte.”
“Jack!” It was McManus's voice calling from outside the window. “Charlotte Thatcher! This is the FBI. Your house is surrounded. You need to release our agent and come out with your hands on top of your head.”
Charlotte glanced out the window and a moment later, Jackie heard something crash through the remains of the window. McManus swore.
“Get everyone back, McManus!” Jackie said.
“Half the town is coming up the hill, Jack.”
Shit.
“Just stay back.” She began to twist her hands, attempting to pry Charlotte's off of her. “It's all over, Charlotte. Let your people go.” Blood was seeping out between her fingers now.
“You can't arrest me,” she said, her voice now strained with the effort of keeping her grip on Jackie. For the moment at least, it seemed the amount of power they possessed was close to equivalent. “And you know you can't, so let's pretend we're both smarter than that, shall we? You mean to kill me. It's the only way to stop me.”
“It doesn't have to be that way, Charlotte,” Jackie replied, losing some of her grip as Charlotte lifted her off the ground.
“You can't let me walk away and you can't arrest me,” she said, the cherubic smile back on her face. “So, that leaves you one option, and I think you knew that coming in here. I really hate being patronized.” With that, she tipped forward and dropped Jackie to the floor, where the air rushed out of her lungs in a dizzying whoosh.
Jackie brought up her arms to deflect away Charlotte's effort to grab her by the throat, and brought her elbow across to slam into Charlotte's jaw where it had been torn open. Charlotte grunted and then laughed, blood staining her teeth in a devilish grin. She reached down and grabbed a broken table leg from the shattered end table. “You never liked to fight fair, did you, Sis?”
The jagged edge of the leg whipped down and Jackie caught Charlotte's wrist just before it hit her left eye. Inside, both Laurel and Rebecca gave a startled scream before recovering to help Jackie hold the weapon back. Charlotte bore down, using her weight as leverage, and Jackie realized that she would not have the strength to hold it back for long.
A shot rang out, close enough to momentarily deafen Jackie's ears. Blood sprayed across her face as the table leg blew apart from Charlotte's hand. Jackie was able to then leverage her legs to knock Charlotte over to the side and scramble back to her feet. Nick lay on his side beneath the broken chair, the Glock in one hand. A sheet of blood covered him from jaw to neck.
“Here,” he said, and flipped the gun to her.
Jackie picked it up and tried to bring it around on Charlotte, but from the position on her side, she brought her pointy-toed shoe around and sent it flying before Jackie could even get a shot off. Shouts outside could be heard now, unfamiliar voices. The townsfolk were arriving on the scene. Somewhere in the background, Jackie also heard the rumble of an engine. Jessica had started up the motorcycle.
A swell of energy began to fill the room. Jackie rolled away from Charlotte and sprang to her feet. To her right by the fireplace lay the shotgun and one of the Glocks. Another was a few feet away toward the broken window. She could dive for one and be firing in two seconds, even with a burst of speed. Outside people were calling out for Charlie.
“That all you got, Sis?” Charlotte asked. “It was more fun when you were alive.”
Pistol by the fireplace,
Rebecca said.
Now.
Jackie jumped without thinking twice. Charlotte lunged as well. She landed next to Shelby and slid forward by the fireplace that still crackled with glowing embers. Jackie brought up the Glock to find something huge and dark swinging through the air toward her in a swift, downward arc.
Jesus Christ!
Jackie reflexively turned away, raising an arm to shield herself from the sofa that whirled around and slammed her into the wall at the corner of the fireplace. Her skull cracked against the brick mantle of the fireplace and everything exploded in a momentary, blinding flash, dropping Jackie to her knees.
An immediate flood of cool, dead energy washed the stunning effects away, and Jackie found herself buried under the sofa. More worrisome, though, was the greater chill of energy that was enveloping the room, filling everything around her. Her head still throbbed, but she worked her hands up under the couch to throw it off. That was when the first disturbing groan and crack sound echoed through the room.
“Was it worth the wait, Sis?” Charlotte yelled at her, her voice full of rage and tears. There were more cracking sounds, and Jackie felt the floor shift subtly beneath her. “You betrayed me!”
The house had literally begun to shake. Jackie shoved the sofa aside. “Nick? We have to move.” He had pushed the chair aside, but Jackie could see now that he wasn't running anywhere fast. A shotgun blast had torn his foot all to hell. Shelby still lay crumpled on the floor behind her, blood oozing out of her hair and running across her neck to soak into her shirt.
“Get out of here,” he said, “while you still can.”
“Damn it, Nick,” Jackie replied and then had to dodge to the side to avoid a piece of plaster falling from the ceiling.
Charlotte had already moved. She stood in the entry, shotgun back in her hands.
Jump right,
Rebecca said.
She's going to shoot.
“Good-bye, Sis,” Charlotte said and raised the gun.
Jackie leaped as the shotgun went off. The strength in her legs sent her over the coffee table that sat in front of where the sofa had been, and into the other chair, tipping it backward and sending Jackie tumbling across the floor to the back of the room. When she stood back up, her leg burned like someone had jammed a hot poker into her thigh. Jackie began to run back when the living room ceiling split in half, a crack in the plaster opening up like a fault line running the length of the house. Sections of ceiling began to fall. The windows behind her, looking out into the back, exploded in a shower of broken shards as the frame abruptly went trapezoidal with the shifting house.
Nick was trying to pull himself back to his feet with one leg. The foot on the other dragged at an awkward angle, leaving a smear of blood across the floor.
Jackie reached him and pulled him up. “Out! Now.” She let him go and stepped over to Shelby, finding her body quite easy to pick up in her dead-fueled arms. Then the wall on that side of the house buckled inward, knocking her forward into the room and into the broken sofa. The chimney, unable to withstand such a change in structure, collapsed somewhere above, sending bricks down the flue and into the fireplace. A shower of sparks and tiny embers showered the living room floor.
Fire. Jackie struggled back up to her feet with Shelby, seeing the smoking orange lights scattered over the room, most of them on the area rug that sat beneath the chairs and sofa. Nick limped toward the window, only a few feet away from being able to jump out.
“Nick, you better jumpâ”
The end of her sentence got cut off by the sound of another shotgun blast. An instant later, the north end of the house filled with flame, and Jackie could see that it would likely billow right on through to their side in a second, maybe two if they were lucky. She crouched and sprang forward, hoping to dive the fifteen feet she had left to get through the broken window in the front of the house, but never made it. The first floor walls buckled under the concussion of the propane blast, and the window, once five feet high, folded in on itself, and Jackie crashed to the floor, landing against the mayor's body.
She cradled her arms around Shelby's head, closed her eyes, and focused everything she had on keeping the second floor from crushing them to death as it pancaked down on top of them.
Oh, Sweet Mother of us all,
Laurel said.
No!
Rebecca screamed.
She cannot get away with this. No, no!
No, she could not. Charlotte and Jessica could not get out of this town. Likely, they would never see them again, and they would set themselves up in a new place and start over, creating a new Thatcher's Mill. Charlotte enjoyed running things too much to just live quietly in the background sipping on the blood of the occasional wayward person unfortunate to get on her radar. The team was out there as well, unless McManus had been smart enough to get the team out, and now a couple hundred townsfolk were gathered around, wanting their pretty little leader to be safe. Of course, half the house had just blown up. There could be a bunch of dead or dying people out there now. Jackie turned her focus inward and opened the door to Deadworld.
Hon, what are you doing?
Laurel asked, worried.
The only option they had left was what she was doing. The door between the living and the dead opened wide, and as she expected, Jackie saw the familiar, alien figure standing there.