“Okay, show me.” Instantly, the spider dipped and sank his tiny steel fangs into the flesh at the base of my thumb. Impressions and images lunged and jostled for attention in my head. Bodies on the floor, a lot of them, seen from twenty or thirty feet up in the air. A towering, shadowy mountain of guns thrown into a corner seen from an inch off the floor, then a head-level view of people sitting on the floor, Mazie and Greg right in the front of the crowd. One of those big helmeted bags with a shotgun and a companion, a regular bag by the look of him, standing over the group. A portable CB on a desk, looming high. All of this was interspersed with rapid-fire flashes of hallways, doorframes, and window corners.
Mr. C stood up, pulling his fangs out of my hand, and then sprang to my shoulder. He stood stock still for a moment, then his legs snapped up around his abdomen, and he slid down my shirt to land neatly in my pocket. I took a deep breath and focused on settling my queasy stomach. There was no doubt about the usefulness of Mr. C’s scouting reports, but the dizzying succession of views and angles was nauseating to say the least.
“Looks like they made their last stand, and they lost. The weird part is that they’re still alive and being guarded by a couple of bags, two or three at the most, and one of those helmeted fuckers thrown in for good measure. They don’t seem to be out of their minds like the rest of them, no clue why.”
Anne raised an eyebrow. “Why take hostages?”
“Piotr’s not one for leaving things to chance. I imagine he has a good reason.”
“Like using them as bait to lure us in?”
“That would be my guess.”
Chuck leaned his head into the space between the front seats. “So, if those guys are bait, then all we have to do is to ignore it and go after Piotr himself. Problem solved.”
I looked back over my shoulder at him. “One question. What do you do with your leftover bait after you’re done fishing and you don’t need it any more?”
Chuck’s cheeks reddened. “Yeah, good point. What’s the plan?”
I started the Rover and backed away from the cars in front of us, lights still off. “The plan is we go in and rescue some hostages. We’ll figure out the rest after that’s done.”
51
I drove around to the back of the store, which faced an empty communal parking lot for employees of the various businesses along the street. I stopped ten feet from the back door, put it in park, and got out. Chuck swapped places with me and got behind the wheel as we had discussed. My plan had the advantage of being simple and direct. It had the disadvantage of being the kind of plan that I usually come up with when I don’t have any time or resources to speak of.
Anne hopped out of the Rover. She took up position on the left side of the door while I stepped to the front bumper. The winch let out a soft electric whine as it began to turn in reverse, letting stainless steel cable spool out into my hands. I used the tow hook to make a lasso out of the end, like a miniature version of the collar I used on the Mother. The cable kept unspooling at my feet. When I judged that I had enough, I held up my hand and Chuck killed the winch.
I stepped up to the back door and pulled out my baton, holding it in my right hand, loop of cable in my left. The parking lot grew brighter as the truck’s reverse lights came on.
Anne nodded at me, both hands wrapped around Chuck’s Taurus. She was the best shot of the three of us by a wide margin, but even she wasn’t going to be able to fire that shotgun towards the hostages in the center of the room without killing some of them. So she opted for precision over firepower.
I counted to three under my breath, then slammed the end of my baton into the deadbolt keyhole. It went clean through, knocking the cylinder out the other side. I yanked the door open and the deadbolt fell out, ringing when it hit the concrete.
Everyone inside was still pretty much where Mr. C had last seen them. The big bag with the motorcycle helmet was on my right, next to the door. The two regular bags were about ten feet inside, closer to the hostages.
My reflection stared back at me from the glossy black faceplate of the big bag as he spun to face me. These things scared the hell out of me, and I had no desire to go toe-to-toe with one again any time soon. Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to.
The engine of the Range Rover roared as Chuck gunned it in neutral. I dropped my baton and used both hands to ram the loop of braided cable over the motorcycle helmet. I shoved hard against its chest and threw myself back out of the door and to the side as the Rover’s tires squealed and smoked.
The cable snapped taut as the Rover shot backwards. I had expected to be able to get the drop on the bag and get the loop over that helmet of his, snaring him in the same sort of trap I had used at the quarry.
I had not expected that it would grab the door frame as the truck yanked it head first towards the parking lot. It did manage to stop its body from being hauled out of the building. Its head, on the other hand, was another matter entirely. When the body came to an abrupt stop at the threshold the cable simply sheared right through its neck and the worm inside, sending the helmeted head flying out across the lot.
Two shots rang out before the helmet could bounce off the pavement. I got up in time to see both bags inside the store drop to the ground, identical holes in the center of their foreheads.
Anne and I stared at each other in the quiet aftermath. The whole thing had only lasted a few seconds. She shook her head, eyes wide. “I cannot believe that worked.”
“That makes two of us.”
I went through the door with my baton high, but the room was empty except for the hostages, maybe twenty in all. Greg and Mazie were seated front and center on the floor with gags between their teeth.
I motioned to Anne. “Go get Chuck so we can start cutting these people loose.” She dashed outside.
I holstered my baton and walked up to the group, uneasy. It was very quiet and the corners of the room were dark, the only light coming from a few camping lanterns on the table next to the hostages. Greg and Mazie were staring at me with wide eyes and shifting back and forth on the floor. That’s when I realized that the only sound in the room was coming from them.
Chuck and Anne trotted back inside, with Anne calling out, “Okay, let’s get started.” I put my hand up, palm out, towards them. They slowed as they sensed my wariness. Both of them did the dark corner check, same as I had.
I moved up to Greg and Mazie, carefully, and looked over their heads. Their hands were bound with nylon tie wraps that were secured to the floor by a metal bracket bolted into the concrete. Mazie’s restraints were bloody from where she had been fighting against them.
Behind her was the first row of five hostages, all sitting on the floor with their heads down, gags in place. But they were still and quiet. I moved around her and gingerly touched the man directly behind Mazie. He was stiff and cold and dead. Behind him was a wooden plank that was bolted to a metal bracket that was in turn bolted to the floor. The plank was screwed into his back, holding him upright. A quick glance down the row showed the same macabre support system attached to the other hostages.
Piotr’s voice rang out behind me, closing the trap.
52
“I thought you would be more angry when you figured it out. But your face just went kind of sad instead,” said Piotr as he stepped through the doorway behind us.
At the sound of his voice, Anne spun around and snapped off two rounds into his chest. It was fast, precise, and shockingly loud.
The bullets hung in midair for a brief moment, suspended by the same tendrils of milky fog that we had seen at the lake. Metal fragments clattered to the concrete floor as the tendrils seeped back through Piotr’s shirt to a spot over his heart. He shrugged gracefully, even apologetically.
One of the hugely swollen bags came through door behind him, sans helmet. His neck was purple and stretched taut with the massive trunk of the worm distending it, and his jaws were locked wide open by the thick black tentacles hanging and curling out of it. I doubted he could still get a helmet on over all of that.
Then another came in. And another. And still more until the door was flanked on both sides by a dozen of the glassy-eyed horrors. Anne’s knuckles went white around the grip of her pistol as she calculated the odds of taking them all down before they killed us, and then went slack as the same answer came up over and over again.
Chuck’s face was resigned as well. I could see the fight drain out of both of them.
Piotr sauntered over to the work table and picked up a pair of long-handled bolt cutters, likely left there for this purpose when he set all of this up. He then went over and clipped through Mazie’s restraints, catching her as she began to fall over. He helped her up, every bit a gentleman and walked her to over to his monsters. She didn’t bother struggling.
He moved back to Greg and turned to me. He searched my face with a critical eye, looking for something. Judging me. I stared back. He sighed, raised the bolt cutters over his head and swung them down, crushing Greg’s skull. Blood flew. I screamed and launched myself at him.
I made it halfway across the room before a tidal wave of inhumanly strong, foul smelling bags crashed into me and smashed me to the floor. I heard guns go off as I struggled, punching and kicking and tearing.
I gave it everything I had, but I never really had a chance. In the end, I wound up face down on the ground, with a bag kneeling on my back between my shoulder blades pointing my face at Piotr with both hands while his buddies pinned my arms and legs to the floor.
I stopped struggling when I saw what Piotr wanted me to see. He was holding Mazie’s head in both hands, and with a savage jerk, snapped her neck in front of me.
I came off the floor. The bags were able to immobilize me again, but this time two of them were down as well, heads crushed or missing. I could feel blood on my face and my right hand felt broken.
Piotr knelt down next to my face, just out of my reach as I struggled. “That’s much better, Abraham. But it seems that I’m going through these hostages pretty fast. We’ll have to be more careful, yes?” Anne and Chuck were standing at the front of the room with two stout cords tied around their necks.
Behind each of them stood one of the huge alpha bags. One cord went to a wooden handle in the swollen fist of the bag behind them, and a second, longer cord was tied around the bag’s waist to prevent an escape even if the bag were killed.
Piotr was close enough that I could see the fine drops of Greg’s blood dotting his shirt and jacket. I strained to move, to reach him, and actually managed to drag the bags holding me several inches closer.
“Good,” he said. “Hold on to what you’re feeling. We’re getting close to the end of this unpleasant business, you and I, and I promise that you’ll be satisfied with the way things turn out. We’ll each get what we want, in the end. For now, however, you’re going to have to trust me. I’m going to have your hands bound behind your back with police zip cuffs. Now, I know they can’t hold you, even as … unfinished as you are, but if you break free, that’s a clear sign that you’re not cooperating, and my slaves over there will simply give a good yank on those cords and kill your friends. Okay?”
I went limp. Piotr placed one hand on my head, almost reverently. Possessively. “Thank you.”
Zip cuffs are police restraints that resemble big plastic zip-ties like the kind the hostages had been bound with, only thicker and with two loops that ran through a central plastic block to hold each wrist. The bags pulled the strips so tight that my skin caught in the slot where the band entered the plastic housing, cutting the flesh.
After that I was yanked roughly to my feet and shoved out the door and into the parking lot with everyone else. One of the prison buses sat idling close by. Piotr took the pistol from Anne and tossed it away. He stepped up to me and pulled my baton out of its holster. He turned it over in his hands thoughtfully.
“You made this, correct?” I could still hear a touch of his Polish origins under the tacked-on Midwestern accent he used. “Well, I say you made it, but I think we both know that it wasn’t entirely you.”
“I made it. Just me.”
“Really. Quite a coincidence, isn’t it? That you would create this object, this specific object, right after we met. I mean, what are the odds? Unless, perhaps, our meeting changed you more than you admit to other people. Or to yourself, yes? Well, in any case, you won’t be needing this crude imitation any more.”
My heart sank as he turned and threw my baton out into the darkness. I never heard it land.
“Well. Time to get started. I’m a patient man, but I think I’ve waited long enough, don’t you? Thanks to your friends all those years ago, pulling you out of your birth waters too soon and stealing my book. Yes, I think we’ve both waited long enough.”
Piotr gestured at the open door to the bus with a little half bow, every bit the genial host.