“No. You can have the bodies, but I really have other things to do right now.”
“Mister, I wasn’t asking.” Soulis was an arrogant little prick. A minute ago he’d been worried because the man was obviously stronger than an ox. Now he didn’t give a damn.
“I’m trying to be a good sport, Officer . . .” He was far enough away that reading the name on Coswell’s tag should have been impossible. “Coswell, but I really do not have time to deal with any more of this. I have things I need to get done and you’re becoming an inconvenience.”
“Face the wall, spread your legs, and put your hands over your head.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“No. I’m leaving.”
“Mister, stay where you are!”
He heard the sound of sirens and smiled. He was about to get backup and that helped with the nerves that wanted to twitch.
Soulis looked past him and shook his head. “Now you’ve made things complicated.”
Soulis looked at him and scowled as two more cars came up from behind him.
Murphy and Torrance got out of their cars. “What’s the problem, Sarge?” Torrance was a burly man with enough attitude to scare the average perp into the back of a car without ever lifting a finger.
“The guy over there has been getting pissy about behaving.”
Torrance nodded and started toward Soulis, his face set in grim, unforgiving lines. “Get your ass against the wall and put your hands above your head, mister. Right now!”
He was just fine until he touched Soulis. Torrance grabbed Soulis by the shoulder and tried to spin him against the wall. Normally, that meant the person he was pushing got spun.
Soulis didn’t budge. “Don’t touch me.” The man’s face grew positively murderous.
Torrance pushed a second time.
Soulis grabbed Matthew Torrance by his arm and pivoted at the waist, sending the policeman into the wall. Torrance dropped as hard as the corpse the man had been carrying earlier. A large red smear ran where his face had struck the bricks.
“You stop right fucking there or I’ll shoot!” Murphy drew his firearm and took aim. Coswell did the same thing, both of them completely serious. Murphy pressed the talk button on his radio and called the words every cop loathed the idea of hearing. “Officer down! Repeat, officer down!” He continued on, giving their exact location.
“Torrance? You all right?” Coswell knew the answer even as he asked. There was no way the man was all right; half of his face looked like it had been pressed into an industrial steam iron.
Jason Soulis stepped toward the two of them and Coswell decided not to take any chances. He pulled the trigger and fired three shots. None of them were meant to be warnings.
The first bullet caught Jason Soulis in the center of his stomach. He didn’t even flinch. The second bullet passed through the spot where Soulis had been, which was currently filled with a thick black cloud of shadows.
The cloud dispersed in a matter of seconds, and when it was gone, so was Soulis.
“What the fuck was that?” Murphy was looking at the spot and shaking his head. “Where did he go?”
Coswell was about to answer when he saw the blackness creeping around his sides. He turned just as the cloud reformed behind him, and Jason Soulis reached for his throat.
Coswell screamed and backed away, firing his weapon again and again. His nerves were shot, and he was definitely feeling a little jumpy. The bullets slammed into Soulis and staggered him this time. Whatever weird-ass protection he was using didn’t seem so perfect at point-blank range. Soulis backpedaled madly, but his feet weren’t touching the ground. He ran into the front of Coswell’s squad car and flipped onto the hood. The windshield was a splattered ruin where the bullets that passed through the man found another target afterward.
Both men looked at Soulis’s body and fell silent.
“How the fuck did he do that?” Murphy was staring hard, his face pasty and white.
Coswell shook his head, at a loss for words. Then he remembered Torrance and moved over to see if the man was still alive. The perp could wait.
Up close he could see that Torrance’s skull had been pulped. There wasn’t enough solid bone left to even give a hint of its previous shape. “Jesus Christ.” He practically threw himself to the side before he lost his dinner. Unfortunately, one of the corpses from inside was directly in his way and he wound up vomiting on the mortal remains of the heavyset man he’d seen Soulis lift so easily. Dead eyes stared accusingly back at him as he finished with a series of dry heaves.
It was while he was blowing his meal that Jason Soulis got back up.
Lee Murphy was a good cop. He’d been with the department for ten years and planned on staying there for the rest of his life. He kept his plans. Jason Soulis grabbed for him as he started firing into what should have been a dead man.
The bullets knocked him back again, but this time he kept his footing and started walking forward, his lips peeled back to reveal hard white fangs where his teeth should have been. From under the shadows of his brow, the man’s eyes were burning, and Murphy stared into them as he kept pulling the trigger.
Jason Soulis caught Murphy’s wrists and pulled them apart, sending the now empty pistol falling to the ground. He kept staring hard and Murphy kept staring back, frozen with fear and then with pain as the man yanked savagely and dislocated both of his shoulders.
Murphy passed out. Coswell couldn’t blame him. The sound of more sirens coming didn’t even make the madman blink.
Coswell made himself crawl over to Torrance’s body and grab his weapon. He hadn’t thought to reload his own as yet.
“You’re beginning to piss me off, Officer.”
Coswell laughed, the fear sending him over the edge a little further than he was comfortable going, and started firing. He aimed for the head. His hands were shaking, but his aim didn’t completely suck and he got the man in the neck, the shoulder, and the chin. He saw the wounds as they were formed, and saw them as they healed, too. One instant there was a hole in the man’s jaw and the next it was gone, just . . . gone. The skin was unmarred; the bones he knew should have been shattered were intact.
“That’s enough out of you, I think.” He took two steps forward. Coswell threw the weapon and stood up, his knees shaking violently and his head feeling far too light.
The squad car that came toward them came in hard and fast, not slowing down in the least. Coswell had enough time to see the driver—Logan Walker, and the passenger who was busily chewing on his face.
Then the car was ramming into the rest of the parked police cars and starting a chain reaction. Metal screamed in protest and the car Murphy had pulled up in rolled forward like a rocket, bashing in the rear end of his cruiser. His cruiser, faithful to the end, jumped forward and hit Soulis in the back.
Jason Soulis went down, pinned under the black and white, and Coswell looked on, stunned. A few feet in front of him, Jason Soulis lay pinned under a vehicle and twenty feet further away, the newest addition to the police car pileup kept revving its engine sporadically.
He started toward Soulis and changed his mind, remembering that Walker was in deep shit of his own. He stepped past the dead perp and moved toward Walker’s car. Before he could even call out the officer’s name, the door came open and Walker flopped to the ground.
A naked, pregnant woman climbed out of the car, wearing only a crimson stain across her full breasts and her swollen belly. She looked right at Coswell and licked the smear of red from her lips.
Angie Freemont stepped toward him with a look of unadulterated hunger on her face.
And as he stepped back, he heard the sound of metal groaning.
Angie looked over his shoulder and her deathly white face grew a shade or two whiter. She backed away from him as fast as she could, her breasts swaying and her eyes wide and terrified.
Coswell looked over his shoulder just in time to see Jason Soulis finish lifting the car off of his back. His cruiser was well over a thousand pounds, maybe even a ton, and the man was standing up, the whole of the fucking car supported by his arms. He looked like a modernist’s demented sculpture of Atlas.
“I’ve had enough of you.”
Soulis threw the car at him. Coswell was too shocked to duck.
Chapter 22
I
Four more policemen tried their luck with Jason Soulis. He broke the back of the first and shattered the rib cage of the second. The third and fourth, he bled dry. The wounds he’d sustained drained him and he needed to feed.
By the time it was done, a substantial crowd had gathered to see what was happening. Most of them became food.
After that, he rose into the air and let himself drift away from the carnage. He hadn’t intended to participate at all. This was the night for his children and his experiments.
He had theories to test, and the police were not a part of what he wanted to examine.
Once he was high enough in the air, he spread his senses out, reaching for his creations and seeing through the eyes of his crows. The results were interesting enough to keep him distracted.
II
The town had lost its mind. That was the only possible answer as far as O’Neill was concerned. First he had to deal with Boyd and Holdstedter, which was like dealing with rabid pit bulls as far as he was concerned, and now half of the town was making insane phone calls. Somehow in the last twenty-four hours his little corner of the world had gone off the deep end.
Brian Freemont had been torn apart. He had a drug dealer who had been tortured to death in an ugly scene, a man who had been tortured by the drug dealer, and the man’s daughter who was supposed to be the next new victim of the drug dealer, over forty missing people in the last week, a frat house that had burned to the ground, and now his cops were screaming about officers being killed near the 7-Eleven.
It wasn’t the least bit funny, but he felt like he should be waiting for the punchline to a joke.
He also felt like he was going to have a stroke in about five minutes. Every single car was out, and the dispatcher was getting more calls and fewer responses all the time.
He didn’t have a choice. He called the State Patrol out of Newport and climbed into his bulletproof vest.
“Where are you going?” Mike was on dispatch and he was looking a bit shell-shocked.
“I’ve got officers down. Where the hell do you think I’m going?”
“You can’t leave me here alone.”
“Watch me. Call if you need me.”
He left the building and climbed into his car. In the distance he heard the wail of fire engines taking off. “This fucking night is never going to end.”
It ended sooner than he expected. The vampires came down hard on the police captain. He never even had a chance to draw his weapon.
III
The Black Stone Bay High School Tigers were stuck playing a game in Newport. After that, the plan was to get together and party for a few hours. They had won the game and were ready for a little celebration.
The deep fog that had settled over the area made getting where they wanted to go a lot slower than they would have liked, but there were a few pleasant distractions and everyone was feeling pretty good about the victory. They only grumbled when the bus came to a stop nearly a mile from the school.
“Come on, Jonesy!” Mitch Larson was fed up with the delays. He had a promise from Leanne that he was going to get some action if he scored more than half the points in the game and he’d done it, “What’s the holdup?”
Oscar Jones, the bus driver, was a mellow old man who never complained about how the kids called him Jonesy, They loved him for that; but sometimes he was a little slow on the driving speeds.
Jonesy looked over his shoulder and shrugged. “We got four cars here that ain’t moving, Mitch. They’re blocking both sides of the road.”
Mitch stood up and shook his head. “They’re gonna move; believe it.” Leanne chuckled at his attitude. He’d make her pay later.
Mitch and two of the others got out of the bus and headed for the cars. All of them were empty, but it looked like whoever had been in them had left in a hurry.
Mitch was just climbing into the first of them when the frat boys from the college came for the fresh meat. A few of the guys coming their way had badly burned flesh. One of them was missing most of his arm. If it was makeup, it was fucking realistic. He couldn’t see where there were any smears of stage paint, and the sagging of their faces didn’t seem like it could have been done without heavy latex applications.
It wasn’t makeup.
The varsity football team put up a good fight. They didn’t last very long, but they tried.
Go Tigers!
IV
Sol Marcone was not a very good sailor, but he loved to fish. He was anchored out in the middle of the bay and decided he was just fine staying there until the damned fog lifted. He had cereal, milk, and enough coffee and beer to keep him going for several hours.
He liked fishing on Halloween. It kept the kids from being annoying. They could knock to their heart’s content and never ever manage to disturb him.
He had a reputation for not liking children very much and it was well earned. He’d never actually drop-kicked one of the little shits, but he thought about it all the time. Kids were noisy, smelly, and only slightly less offensive than their parents these days. Used to be that parents knew how to use a belt for discipline; these days they tried to reason with their pups, which was just stupid.
He really didn’t expect to have a young teenager come swimming across the bay toward him. The girl couldn’t have been more than twelve or so, a pretty little thing who was stuck in the bay.
Sol frowned and wondered if some idiot had wrecked their boat against the rocks. It would be easy to do in this fog.