Shimmer: A Novel (17 page)

Despite the experience and confidence of the FBI profilers, Gideon thought Reilly was closer to the truth, even if he misunderstood the true nature of the killer. Soon after Harry Wallace and his beagle, on an early morning walk, discovered the mangled body of nine-year-old Amy Lynne Madigan, the first victim, Gideon began to experience the uneasy sensation of
otherness,
as if the ripples of its fetid inhumanity spilled over him, coating him with psychic filth.
God, don’t let it be a
grim
,
he thought at the time.
Not here.

A “grim” was what the Walkers called Outsiders who camouflaged themselves as humans while preying upon humans. Their victims might fit a certain profile, similar to the selective patterns of some serial killers, or they might choose victims of convenience. They might torture, consume, disembowel or exsanguinate their victims, but the end result was always the same: death.

Gideon had fled the concentrations of humanity, hoping to leave Outsiders behind, to avoid any involvement in a war he could not fight or hope to win. He had, in effect, resigned his commission and fled to the great outdoors, abandoning the hustle and bustle and battle for the tranquility of nature and seclusion. And though he refused Ambrose’s entreaties to come to New Jersey, he was finding it much harder to ignore an Outsider incursion in his own backyard.

Maybe somebody forgot to tell the Outsiders that Gideon Walker is retired,
he thought with bitter humor.

He was not without choices. First, he could pack up and leave, surrendering this new battlefield to the enemy. Or he could turn the tables and call Ambrose for help… although Ambrose had a bigger problem in New Jersey and was unlikely to send anyone anytime soon.
Then wait until he
can
help,
Gideon told himself, but rejected the idea immediately. While he waited, the Outsider would continue to slaughter young victims to satisfy its demented appetite.

With a resigned sigh and another swig of beer, Gideon studied the articles again, searching for some clue the police or the FBI had misinterpreted or misunderstood. By the time he finished the twelve-ounce bottle, he’d come to the conclusion that his methods were doomed to failure for the same reason they failed traditional law enforcement. The only way for him to find the clues he needed to stop the Outsider was for him to examine the crime scenes and the bodies of the victims. For his unique Walker advantages to come into play, he needed proximity to the otherness and its handiwork. Half-measures wouldn’t cut it. And that created a new set of problems. Interfering in an open police—and FBI!—investigation was a good way to get himself detained or arrested as a suspect.

He stood, stretched his neck, and thought about grabbing a third bottle of beer. Alcohol had a comforting way of numbing his extra Walker senses, making the otherness fade away into his subconscious for a while, a very tempting prospect at the moment. So he stalled, grabbing his plate from the counter and scraping the uneaten food down the drain for consumption by the disposal. As he rinsed the plate and stacked it in the dishwasher, his hands began to tremble. “The hell am I thinking?” he whispered to himself. “I quit for a reason. Not cut out for this anymore!”

Crossing the kitchen with a firm shake of his head, he tugged open the refrigerator and reached inside to grab the last bottle of beer from the flimsy cardboard holder. At first he didn’t hear the doorbell ring. Thought he imagined it. Then it rang twice more, a carefree sound at odds with his temperament. He released the beer bottle, letting it fall back into its square cardboard compartment, and closed the refrigerator door.

“Alan?” he said aloud. He couldn’t imagine anyone else visiting him in the evening. If there had been an accident on the job site, Alan would have called. Unless…
No,
he realized,
no matter the severity of the accident, Alan would call me immediately.

As he strode to the door, he tried to recall the last time anyone had visited his Laramie rancher. Business associates always came to the office. For a fleeting moment, Gideon entertained the idea that Bucky had come to thank him yet again, in person, for his continued gainful employment.

And so it was with a tolerant grin on his face that Gideon opened the front door. His amusement vaporized in an instant. “You,” Gideon said in surprise. “You followed me?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the stranger in black said in an oily voice. Alan had been right; the man was pale as death. “Seems I had no other choice.”

“What are you talking about?” Gideon asked, confused. His fingers were digging into the edge of the door. Anger percolated inside him, dulled a bit by the alcohol, but definitely on the rise. “Who are you?”

“I’ve had many names. Lately, I refer to myself as Urgog. But really, I expected more of you,” the stranger said. He was tall and cadaverously thin. Beneath a pronounced widow’s peak, he had a long V-shaped face with sunken black eyes, an uneven, mashed nose and thin lips that seemed to stretch from ear to ear when he flashed his unctuous grin. “In fact, there’s a better question you should be asking.”

“And what question is that?”

“
What
”—the stranger said as he spread his arms wide—“am I?”

“Don’t know what game you’re playing, buddy,” Gideon said, shaking his head as he began to close the door on the man, “but we’re done here.”

Urgog’s right hand flashed forward and his fingertips struck the door with the sound of a wooden mallet, holding the door open. “I’m afraid we’ve only just begun.”

“Get lost,” Gideon said, but his voice had lost its edge. Even dulled by alcohol his senses were screaming at him to react before it was too late.

“Too late,” Urgog said, eerily seeming to read Gideon’s mind. “I know you’re one of them. You reek of it.”

“What—what do you mean?” Gideon asked, though he could no longer deny the evidence. He’d left the fight, his old world behind, but it had followed him all the way to Laramie.

“You know perfectly well what I mean, Gideon,” Urgog said, shaking his head slowly in a sardonic mixture of contempt and disappointment. “You’re a Walker. Oh, but more than that. What is it you call yourselves? Ah yes, you are a
shadow walker.”

Gideon swallowed hard. “What—what do you want?”

“Word gets around,” Urgog said with a careless shrug. “You have quite a reputation among my kind. Never quite believed it myself, and I’m at a loss as to how someone like you could possibly inspire so much fear in your betters, but I’m not one to turn down a rather significant bounty for something as insignificant as a human head.”

As the Outsider, a grim—no denying it anymore—uttered the last word, his left hand lashed out to clamp around Gideon’s throat, squeezing hard as he slammed the back of his head against the far wall of the small vestibule. Flashbulbs seemed to pop inside Gideon’s head.

Urgog’s right hand dipped into the hip pocket of his black jacket and removed a bone-handled knife that looked as if it had been stolen from a museum exhibit. Despite the weapon’s apparent antiquity, the metal blade gleamed and the edge appeared razor sharp. “Now, before I begin,” the stranger said evenly, “if you would be so good as to tell me where I might find some more Walker heads to liberate, I would be most grateful.” With that, he smiled, and his lips spread much wider than before, revealing bunched top and bottom rows of bristling, three-inch fanged teeth. “I’ll even promise to make your decapitation as painless as… inhumanly possible.”

Keeping his eye on the dagger, Gideon curled his left fist and drilled an uppercut into the Outsider’s solar plexus—if he actually had a solar plexus. The Outsider grunted in mild discomfort but his left-handed grip remained firm. Gideon caught the wrist of the knife-wielding hand in his left hand while reaching up to the hand around his throat with his right. Rather than trying to break the stranger’s grip outright, Gideon latched onto his little finger and pulled it back until the joint snapped—and beyond, tearing flesh and bone.

The grim snarled with rabid ferocity. Stringy drool spilled from his toothy crocodile maw and his fetid breath washed over Gideon’s face. Hard to remember he looked human moments ago.

Gideon swung his right forearm against the inside of the Outsider’s left elbow, to weaken his hold. At the same moment, he carried Urgog’s right hand forward, driving the point of the dagger several inches into the wall beside his shoulder. If he could lodge the blade into a stud, he might be able to snap it free of the bone handle. Then, risking a lacerated scalp, Gideon slammed the crown of his head into the Outsider’s face. The blow might have shattered bone and cartilage in the grim’s nose, had there been any bone or cartilage in his nose, but it was sufficient to throw him off-balance.

Urgog hurled him sideways, toward the dining room.

Gideon landed on the dining room table, but not before his head struck the low-hanging chandelier. Inertia carried him across the table, smashing a crystal sculpture centerpiece before he skidded off the edge. He slammed into the wall and collapsed to the floor amid the splintered ruins of two chairs that had stood between him and the wall.

Dazed, Gideon made an effort to climb to his hands and knees—and collapsed again.

Urgog slammed the front door shut, pried his antique knife out of the wall, then strode calmly toward Gideon. “Pathetic,” the Outsider said as he stood over Gideon’s prone form. “Ah, what’s this…?” The voice receded as he stepped into the kitchen.

The scrapbook,
Gideon realized.
A momentary distraction, nothing more.
Gideon took advantage of that moment and struggled to his hands and knees, this time managing to climb to his feet without his legs betraying him.

“I see you haven’t turned a blind eye to my adventures, after all,” Urgog said, chuckling. “Well, you still have the one good eye, right?”

“Adventures?” Gideon repeated, confused. “Of course. It’s you. You’re the killer.”

“Bravo!” Urgog said. “Frankly, I couldn’t figure out why you ignored my little challenge. Surely, one of the fabled shadow walkers would recognize a tossed gauntlet. Or perhaps you’re a bit dim-witted for a Walker. Hmm?”

“A challenge? A gauntlet?” Gideon was incensed.

“Not to say I didn’t enjoy those
little
diversions, but really—”

“Those children—you murdered innocent children! You sick bastard!”

“Sanctimonious human,” Urgog said, shaking his head in disappointment. “Judging your physical and intellectual superiors by your narrow morality.”

“Judge this,” Gideon said and lunged at the grim with a concealed weapon—a jagged spike of wood from one of the ruined chairs. His accelerated reflexes served him well. The wooden point sank several inches into the Outsider’s abdomen, doubling him over. The scrapbook fell to the floor.

Gideon grabbed clumps of stringy hair in each hand and drove his knee into Urgog’s face once, twice, three times in rapid succession. Two steps back and a spin kick sent the Outsider sprawling across the kitchen floor, but he still clutched the bone-handled knife.

Fearing he would eventually lose a physical battle to the Outsider, Gideon yanked open the door to the coat closet and grabbed the upright vacuum cleaner by the handle only to toss it out of his way. What he needed was buried deeper, amid several boxes he’d never bothered to unpack. Coats spilled off hangers as he shoved boxes aside with no regard for their contents.

“Afraid there’s no hiding anymore, Walker,” Urgog said from the closet doorway. “Come out now, and I promise to end this quickly.”

Gideon laid his hands on the long wooden case, flipped the latches open and reached inside. “There’s something we can agree on,” he said as he turned around to face the Outsider.

Urgog had pulled the wooden stake out of his abdomen. His black shirt glistened with white leakage, some type of Outsider blood or other vital fluid, but not enough for the wound to have been mortal. Gideon’s makeshift weapon had had the effectiveness of a nasty splinter, nothing more, which proved his instincts had been right. He’d needed a real weapon.

“My, my, what have you got there?” Urgog asked as if he were merely amused at Gideon’s feeble attempts to prolong the battle. “Shiny, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is shiny,” Gideon said. Then he lunged forward again, this time driving the sword blade up under Urgog’s ribs, probably skewering a few alien organs before piercing his back. “And out of this world!”

Urgog’s face contorted in a tortured grimace. He gasped for breath as he staggered backward, colliding with the dining room table. “Me—meteor blade,” he croaked. “B—burns…never thought…” He shook his head and the white fluid gushed through his rows of teeth, coursing down the pale flesh of his chin. “Never believed…”

Urgog stepped sideways, then lost his balance and collapsed awkwardly. His back arched on the floor as he writhed in pain. “Please…”

Gideon walked over to him and grabbed the hilt of the long sword. “For what you did to those innocent children, I should let you suffer as long as possible.”

“But…you… won’t…” Urgog gasped. “Mercy…me.”

Gideon twisted the sword viciously, cutting into fresh flesh and organs. “Don’t be too sure what I will and will not do, you transdimensional piece of filth.”

Skewered and helpless, the grim began to tremble violently.

Gideon withdrew the sword, then placed the white-bloodied tip under Urgog’s clenched chin, beyond the devastating ring of teeth, pressing it against the softer, vulnerable flesh.

Released from the immediate burning of the sword if not recovered from the internal injuries, Urgog sighed in relief, almost smiling, as if clemency was assured.

“Time’s up!” Gideon said through clenched teeth.

He buried the sword deep into the Outsider’s brain and held it there, motionless, until the black-cloaked body was no long viable, until it faded out of earth’s dimension, leaving nothing of itself… except the human carnage left in its wake.

Gideon picked up the scrapbook and placed it carefully, almost reverently on the kitchen table. First he would clean his sword and pack it away. Then he would call Alan and his office manager to make arrangements for his extended absence. He’d been foolish to think he could ignore who he was and what he was.