“Can you handle a firearm?” Josh asked.
“Guns don’t work on these things. What else you got?”
He gave Mal his tactical flashlight and his asp; a steep baton that extended when you snapped your wrist out. Fran did the same with Deb, and also gave her a can of pepper spray.
“Lead the way,” Josh said.
He sensed their reluctance to go back inside, but they did, which Josh admired.
“First guy died here.” Mal pointed to the large amount of blood on the floor.
Fran crouched down, picked up something. “Rubber bug. Looks like a roach.”
“Rubber?” Mal asked.
Fran leaned forward and found something else. Something shiny. She held it up. “Bullet casing. You said guns don’t work?”
“The cop emptied his gun into the one with the four arms. Thing didn’t even flinch.”
Josh unclipped his spare Maglite and played the beam along the floor, following it up the wall. He walked over, running his fingernail along it, then holding his hand to his nose.
“Wax. Could the cop be in on this? Using wax bullets instead of real ones?”
“You mean he’s been bullshitting us?” Mal asked. “He seemed legit, but I don’t know for sure. We just met him.”
“What’s that?” Fran asked, sweeping her light over to the chairs in the center of the great room.
Mal made a face. “That’s Wellington. Hon, don’t look.”
Mal put his arm around Deb, turning her away, while Josh and Fran went to investigate.
It was pretty awful.
“Looks like our hunch was right,” Fran said.
Josh nodded. They’d both seen similar things in Safe Haven.
“We were too late for this one,” he said. “Hopefully we won’t be too late for the others.”
Josh looked around the rest of the room. They’d spent several hours reading about Butler House, and Josh had prepared as much as possible. But now that he was inside, he couldn’t get over how creepy it felt. If ghosts really did exist, this is where they’d hang out.
His radio clicked twice—Duncan’s all clear signal. Woof got on the scent of something and then stood stock-still, growling low in his throat.
Everyone shined their lights—
—on a black man with four arms, dragging a machete.
“That’s who killed Wellington!” Mal said, stepping in front of Deb and raising his asp.
“Freeze!” Fran ordered, raising her weapon.
The four-armed man kept advancing, heading for Deb and Mal.
Josh fired a warning shot, putting three rounds into the floor in front of the man’s feet.
The supposed ghost stopped, dropped his machete, and then fell to one knee, pulling out a pistol from the back of his ratty pants.
Fran and Josh let loose. Their AR-15 rifles were loaded with 5.56 NATO cartridges and fired as quickly as they could pull the trigger.
The target took ten shots in the chest and didn’t drop. Josh adjusted for the head shot, but Fran beat him to it, taking off the back of the ghost’s head, dropping it where it stood.
“I guess bullets work,” Mal said.
Josh approached first, sensing his wife flanking him. He kicked away the enemy’s dropped weapon—a Colt 1911—and knelt next to him.
No pulse, obviously, but definitely made of flesh and blood and not ectoplasm. He touched one of the extra arms and it pulled off without too much effort.
Fake. Rubber and latex, glued on with spirit gum.
But he wasn’t wearing body armor. The fact that he took ten hits and didn’t go down scared the shit out of Josh. It was familiar, in a very bad way.
“He might have been enhanced somehow,” Josh told Fran.
“Red-Ops?” He heard fear in his wife’s voice.
“I don’t know.” Josh frowned, and his stomach clenched like a fist. “But if there are others, they’re going to be damn hard to kill.”
Sara
Sara stopped screaming.
The pain was beyond anything she could have ever imagined. Sara hadn’t looked, but she guessed her little finger had been chewed down to the bone. It was so intense, so unremitting, that it almost drowned out every other thought in her head.
Almost.
Because part of her brain was still able to think clearly, to focus. This was the worst thing Sara had ever endured, but in the middle of it all a bit of clarity broke through the misery and Sara latched onto it.
I’m a survivor.
Sara had lost so much on Rock Island. So much of who she was. She’d been so devastated, so diminished, by the experience, it had resulted in her losing even more. Her son. The one thing she had left. Taken from her.
And she finally understood why.
All along, Sara had been drowning in self-pity. Wondering how all of these terrible things could have happened to her. Blaming the universe, and trying to numb the pain rather than deal with it.
Child services had been right to take Jack. She had been unfit. But even when that happened…
I’m a survivor.
She’d taken the hits, and she was still here.
She’d lost everything, and she was still here.
She’d tried to kill herself with booze, and she was still here.
And if this psychotic Lester Paks/Blackjack Reedy ghost demon bastard chewed her entire arm off, Sara knew she would still be here.
I’m a survivor.
I’ll survive to straighten my life out.
I’ll survive to get my son back.
I will survive.
In a sea of agony, Sara latched on to that little Zen lifeboat. All she had to do was get through this one more ordeal.
As he started on the second finger, Sara closed her eyes imagined the life she once had, and could have again. Her son. A house. A job. Maybe even Frank, because as gentle and funny as he was, Sara knew he was survivor too, and suffering be damned they’d both get through this and—
“Hey! Ugly pirate guy! I’ll give you something something something to chew on!”
Frank!
Sara watched as Dr. Frank Belgium, his broken arm flopping uselessly at his side, ran into the room brandishing a gigantic wooden mallet and smashing a surprised Blackjack Reedy right in his face.
Blood and sharp teeth went flying. Blackjack went down. And then Moni was on top of him, hitting him over and over again with an iron bar until the monster stopped moving.
“Oh dear dear dear.” Frank fumbled with the straps on her restraint chair, setting her free and then trying to examine the damage to her fingers.
Sara didn’t care about her fingers. She threw her arms around Frank’s neck, so overwhelmed with absolute joy that she started bawling.
“If you need need need some painkiller,” he said, “heroin gets my highest endorsement.”
“I don’t need anything.” Sara had never spoken truer words. “Except you.”
“Well… that’s… that’s pretty terrific.”
“You saved the girl, Doc.” Moni said. “Kiss her already.”
Sara offered her tilted chin, and Frank kissed her. There was a lot more heat this time, and for a brief, glorious moment, all the pain Sara felt just melted away until the only thing in the whole world was Frank’s lips on hers.
“Okay,” Moni said, interrupting the moment. “You guys gonna fuck, or are we getting the hell out of here?”
Frank pulled back enough to look at her, and he had a twinkle in his eye that told Sara he was weighing his options.
“We’re going,” Sara said, and she noted it was said with some reluctance.
“Okay. And you might want to put a bandage or something on your hand. It’s gross.”
Sara finally looked at the damage that had been done, and wondered why she was holding some raw hamburger.