Chills (17 page)

Before the creatures could swarm back toward the door, Morris lit two more and opened the door. The creature that had cleared the path immediately advanced on him, and when Morris tossed the next bottle, one of the large paws batted it away. The bottle sailed backward, shattering against the edge of one of the porch balusters and raining fire down on the creature behind. That one wailed and thrashed, flickering in and out of view. It brushed against another creature, which leaped away in pain.

The second bottle Morris tossed just as the creature leaped at him. The bottle collided with the thing's underbelly, bursting into flame, and the creature dropped out of the air. Both burning beasts flailed wildly, too panicked to put themselves out.

Morris coughed as the fumes reached him. He felt light-headed and slammed the door, stumbling over to the window. The wind was still with him, but the porch had caught fire in two places now. He didn't think it would spread over the ice and melted snow—fervently hoped, in fact, that it wouldn't—but if the wind shifted or one of those things caught fire and charged the house....

He counted the bottles. There were three left. There were two of those things that weren't flaming clumps of melting scaly flesh. Morris looked out the window. The two creatures stalked toward the door, growling low before pawing at it and finally hurling their bodies at it. The door rattled against its hinges with every
thump
,
thump
,
thump
, and Morris flew to lock it.

Then he heard a crack as the wood on the outside splintered a little.

“No. Oh no, come on,” Morris muttered to himself. He lit the next bottle and threw up the window. One of the creatures turned to Morris and when he threw the bottle, the creature backhanded it out of the air. It landed, unbroken, in a snow drift.

“Shit.” Morris picked up another, lighting it, but the thing was on him, its large, taloned paw wrapped around his wrist. Instant pain shot up his arm and down into his hand; he was pretty sure the thing was crushing the bones of his wrist. It unhinged its heavy jaw to roar at him in a polar, rotted-meat rush of air, and Morris saw his chance. He dropped the bottle into the creature's maw. Startled, it let him go, gagging a little on the bottle in its throat. Then it swallowed the lump of flaming glass, and for a moment, the creature turned back to Morris and began to advance. Then it began to tremble badly. Morris coughed, breathing through the sleeve of his damaged wrist, and with his good hand, he slammed down the window just as the creature exploded from within, pelting the window glass with lightly burning chunks of blue-blooded monster flesh.

Morris sank to the floor, breathing hard. His nasal passages and lungs burned painfully, despite the care he'd taken not to inhale the flames. He was bleeding from the corner of one eye, though he couldn't remember how he'd gotten cut. And his wrist throbbed. He looked at it, and saw that a white, scaly substance lined the marks of the thing's finger. Panicked, he rubbed his wrist hard to try to flake it off, ignoring the pain screaming through his forearm.

A loud crack nearby made him flinch, and he turned in time to see the front door bow inward. Outside, the remaining creature bellowed. Morris rose shakily and grabbed the last bottle. He lit it, and clumsily opened the window. The creature galloped toward him. He threw the bottle, but the ache in his wrist threw off his aim. The bottle crashed against the steps, the fire crackling quickly along the length of the tread. The creature's leg stepped easily over the flames as it made its way to the window.

“Dammit!” Morris slammed down the window again. What was he going to do? He was out of Molotov cocktails, and that thing would be able to break down the door with one more blow. He was pretty sure its blood was deadly, and if it got to him . . .

He thought of little Jilly and Ms. Harper upstairs, and made a snap decision. He leaped for the door and threw it open. The creature, still by the window, looked startled. He ran out the door and leaped over the blazing steps into the snow, landing on his back near the last errant bottle. When he looked back, the thing was already just behind the curtain of flames, snarling. It leaped onto the balustrade not on fire and then into the snow across from Morris. His fingers closed around the neck of the bottle and he threw it high into the air above the creature. Then he drew his gun and as the bottle descended, he shot it, sparking the contents within. Fire came down full-force on the creature, and for good measure, Morris opened fire on it. Three shots and the thing fell over in flames, and Morris sank back into the snow. He couldn't move, and found he didn't really want to. The crackling of the fires and the cold both seemed faraway, as did the muffled voices somewhere above his head.

“Detective Morris? Detective?”

Ms. Harper's face swam into view over him, followed by Jilly's. Each of them had a rag from the pile they'd brought down tied over their mouth and nose.

“Detective, are you okay?”

“Did I get them all?”

“Yes, and if I may be so bold, in a very cinematic, Clint Eastwood sort of way.” Ms. Harper offered him a hand and pulled him up and, with Jilly's help, got him to his car. The heat of the nearby flames had melted the snow around the tires. In Morris's state, he would have sworn the snow seemed to be shying away from it.

“Your house,” he said weakly. “I'm so sorry, ma'am.”

“Hush, now,” Ms. Harper said. With his keys, she unlocked the passenger-side door and helped him into it. Jilly got in back and Ms. Harper made her way around to the front seat.

“Where to?” she asked, starting the car.

Morris blinked, pulling himself together. “County coroner's office, on Hyatt Street. I've been trying to get there all day.”

When they reached Hyatt Street, Morris directed Ms. Harper toward the lot. The tan stucco building was imposing in its authority, with its modern angles, mirror-glass windows, ice-ridged aluminum railings, and official county seal on each of the doors. By the time they had parked and gotten out of the car, Morris felt much more himself. He shouldered into the wind, which had picked up again, spraying abrasive snow filled with tiny sharp ice particles in their faces and chests.

Morris was relieved that the county coroner's office was still up and running. His appointment with Cordwell aside, he supposed all the incoming bodies were keeping the coroner busy. Jackson, the guard, was another welcome sight. It was a sign of normalcy, of business as usual—or, at the very least, of order amid all the chaos.

Morris led them through the doors and to the guard station, where he showed his ID and signed and time-noted the guest book. The elevators were just beyond, and Morris paused before heading toward them. A morgue was no place for a little girl. He looked at her, then Ms. Harper, before finally turning to Jackson.

“Jackson, would you mind?”

Jackson looked confused, then caught Morris's nod in Jilly's and Ms. Harper's direction. “Who, me?”

“Yeah,” Morris said. “If you would. The girl's been through a lot today, and she does not need to see anything down there. Ms. Harper is her guardian. If you could keep them company while I talk to Cordwell . . .”

Jackson sized them up. He was a big, round man with an appealing sense of humor and a good heart. Dark-skinned and dark eyed, with a buzz cut of black hair and a goatee, he found great amusement in the detectives' nickname for him.

“You'd really be doing me a solid, Big Bar.” It was a name he'd earned one Halloween when some detectives dropping by for a follow-up with Cordwell caught him wide-eyed and startled with one of the king-sized Hershey's dark chocolate bars in his mouth. Then he'd grinned at them around the chocolate, and his response had been something along the lines of “Just blew your minds, huh, detectives? A dark chocolate big bar eating a dark chocolate big bar.”

Jackson gave him a sideways look and said, “Well, there are worse ways to spend the afternoon than in the company of two ladies.” He gave Jilly a friendly smile and a wave, and she returned a shy little wave back.

Morris smiled, too. “Thanks, Jackson. I owe you one. Seriously.”

“I take cash,” Jackson called after him as Morris rushed to the elevator.

Morris pushed the down button and looked back at Ms. Harper. “Be back in a little bit. You need anything, Jackson here will take care of you.”

Ms. Harper smiled and nodded. “We'll be fine. Go.”

The elevator doors opened, and he slipped inside. As he pushed the button for B1, he sank against the elevator wall. In the last forty-eight hours or so, he hadn't had much time to think or feel, and he supposed that alone had kept him going. He hadn't thought about being tired or hungry or cold and so he hadn't really been aware of feeling those things. He'd just focused on fixing those feelings in others—Dan Murphy, Kathy, Jilly, and Ms. Harper.

Scared, though . . . he'd had plenty of time to be outright terrified, and although he didn't think it was throwing him too off his game, it was catching up to him. He absently rubbed at his wrist, which had swollen to an ugly, waxy red (he figured Cordwell could take a look at it and maybe bandage it or something), and thought about those creatures out there in the snow.

What he couldn't wrap his brain around was that the Hand of the Black Stars cult honestly believed they were somehow invulnerable. Okay, maybe something in the black magic they were working was actually keeping those creatures and even the Blue People, those inhuman coordinators of it all, from attacking the cultists themselves. But that Majoram woman had told him that all the horrors they'd faced, horrors which he'd bet good money had wiped out a significant portion of Colby's population in just a couple of days, were the small potatoes of the whole fiasco. They were only paving the way. So what would their masters be like? What would these greater gods do to Colby—hell, to the whole planet?

Morris wasn't a churchgoer, but he did think of himself as a spiritual, if not quite religious, person. He believed God (or whatever that force of life and creation was really called) was the ultimate force of good, and that in the system of checks and balances that kept the universe spinning and expanding, there was probably an equal but opposite force of evil. He was willing to concede that there were probably many levels of such things; people called them lesser gods, angels, demons, saints, spirits.... The names were countless, but the idea was the same the world over, across languages and races and religions, over time. The forces that drove the universe were very real things, pushing and pulling, fighting over humans' heads and under their noses.

But these Greater Gods were not just beings from a faraway part of the edge of this universe or entities from parallel planes, which were terrifying enough to imagine leaking into Colby. These were apparently the stuff of other worlds' nightmares, creatures from the outer edges of an alien dimension. The possibility scared him that they were devoid of any concept of compassion or respect for life, that their drives, their thoughts and feelings, were so alien to human ways of thinking as to be incomprehensible. Which meant that horrors he couldn't even begin to imagine were not only possible, but probable. And they, the human race in general and Morris and the task force in particular, seemed woefully unequipped. It made Morris wonder if the human race really was on its own. After all, where was the God of his altar boy days? Where was the God of Sunday school? Where was the God he had been taught as a boy would always be there to protect and deliver? He didn't appear to want anything to do with Colby, Connecticut, just then.

The elevator doors opened with a ding that shook him free of his thoughts. The physical weight of them, though, settled as a cold ball of nausea in the pit of his stomach and the beginnings of an ache in his head.

He walked down the long tiled hall toward the morgue, wondering for the fourth or fifth time that day who could be behind the perpetration of such monstrosity. What people could honestly believe they could control the whims of gods, once those gods got what they wanted—free passage to a new universe to devour?

The door at the end of the hall was the faded sea-foam green of most of Colby's official doors, both municipal and educational. When he knocked, Cordwell greeted him warmly, though avoided a handshake by holding up rubber-gloved hands.

Morris often eschewed visits to the morgue whenever he could. The smell of the place on the best of days was vaguely meaty overlaid with abrasive cleaners. The invasive glare from the bright round UFO lights above the stainless steel gurneys gave everything a harsh, exaggeratedly ugly cast. It was no doubt an efficient space, just one that seemed stripped of emotion and humanity. Cordwell's Cave, as the eponymous coroner called it, was a sterile room tiled in the same pale ecru of the hallway floor outside and fitted with wide white counters along two sides of the room. Above and below the counters were rows of somewhat kitchen-like cabinets in which Morris assumed supplies were kept. Trays of tools were laid out along one of the counters in between the gulfs of stainless-steel sinks, while a flat-screen monitor, a laptop, and a small printer sat on the other. There were also vents in the walls above the counters, and near one of the gurneys, on the side with the sinks, was a large scale like the kind for weighing produce, only bigger. What struck Morris as perhaps the most incongruous of all the things in the room was a stainless-steel shelf on the computer side with an assortment of mugs: #1 C
ORONER,
I ♥ C
ONNECTICUT
, C
ORONERS
—A C
UT
A
BOVE THE
R
EST,
etc. He'd had no idea that the coffee mug industry was so keyed in to the java needs of coroners. It was an idea he found both amusing and a little disturbing.