The Devil's Only Friend (28 page)

Did we get “heartless” from him as well?

“We need backup,” I said into my radio. “And every doctor you can find.”

Elijah ran toward the Withered, screaming, but Rack turned suddenly and slipped through the door to the basement. Potash paused to reload his rifle, slapping in another magazine, but Elijah ran straight for the door, only to stagger back as a hail of bullets struck him in the chest. He fell, and Potash crouched just outside the doorway.

“He was ready for Elijah,” I said. “He planned an escape and a ranged weapon to deal with him—he knew everything before we even got here.”

Potash brandished his machete. “This ends tonight. One blow to the neck, remove the head before it can heal.”

“You’ll never get close enough.”

“To hell with that,” said Potash, and he fired his gun around the corner, clearing the stairs before charging in himself.

“Come back!” I shouted. “You can’t kill him without Elijah!” Rack had known we were coming; he’d laid this entire thing as a trap—perhaps this was his end game, to lead us along with a false investigation, culminating in an obvious attempt to contact Brooke and lure us here, completely unprepared for what he really was. Even knowing what he was, we weren’t ready.

I flicked on the light and crawled across the bloody floor to Diana. Her breath was coming in short, pained bursts. Her arm had been torn off at the shoulder, and I shuddered to think of the strength it must have taken to do such a thing.

Diana looked at me, her gasps arrhythmic, almost like hiccups, too weak to speak or even move her remaining arm. As I looked around for something to stanch the flow of blood, Elijah sat up with a grimace.

“That hurt,” he said.

“You’ll be fine,” I said, grabbing a towel from the stove handle. “I’ve seen you heal from worse. Find me more towels.”

“The only injury I’ve had that was worse was…” He grimaced. “Getting hit by that truck.”

“And you were fine,” I said. “Now find me some towels!”

He looked at me oddly, then stumbled across the blood-slick floor to rummage through the cupboards. I folded my lone towel into a tight wad and held it to Diana’s bloody shoulder as tightly as I could, gritting my teeth against the pain I imagined when the touch made her wince. Her muscles convulsed, her chest curling forward as her body tightened, her breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps.

“Death is weak,” I hissed at her, trying to think of anything I could to keep her fighting. “You will not die because you’re not going to let him win, all right? We’re going to stay alive and we’re going to find that demon and we’re going to kill him together. Are you with me Diana? Can you hear me?”

Her eyes started to roll back in her head.

“I found more towels,” said Elijah, dropping down beside me, but we both started suddenly when Ostler shouted in our ears.

“Everybody fall back! He’s outside! Fall back!”

I looked at Diana’s stumpless shoulder. “I don’t even know how to put a tourniquet on that.”

“Here,” said Elijah. He took off his belt and wrapped it around Diana’s shoulders, covering my hand on the towel. He cinched it down and I pulled my hand free; he tightened it further and Diana groaned.

“Did you hit me with that truck on purpose?” asked Elijah. I didn’t answer.

“You’re going to be fine, Diana,” I said, hoisting her onto my back. “We’re going to kill that thing together, do you hear me?” I stepped carefully across the floor, staggering under the weight, headed for the front door. “You and me,” I said, “up close and personal. We’re going to tear off
his
arm and beat him to death with it.” My radio was filled with screams. I clenched my teeth and walked to the front door. “Elijah, can you see anything? What’s going on out there?”

There was no answer. I turned, slowly, and saw no movement in the house behind me. Orange light spilled out of the kitchen, glinting off the pools of blood and shining on the dark black helmets of the fallen police.

“Elijah!”

He was gone. I struggled to the door, murmuring “fight back, fight back,” to Diana, and when I looked outside, the screams were finished, the gunfire was gone. Even Diana had grown silent and motionless on my shoulder. I turned, trying to see her, but her one arm hung limp and lifeless.

My radio crackled with static, empty white noise seeming to fill the entire world. Everyone we’d brought was dead. I let Diana’s body slump softly to the ground.

A tiny whisper came over the radio: Ostler’s voice, thin and reedy, like all the strength had been pulled out of it, and nothing was left but the words.

“Isn’t this what you wanted, John? Calm, peaceful silence, and all the dead bodies in the world.”

17

I ran through the darkness, dodging pools of lamplight, slipping on ice and snow. All around me the world came slowly to life, waking up from one nightmare to another—lights came on in bedroom windows, terrified faces peeked out through windows splashed with blood. The street was a scene of gruesome devastation, and somewhere in the middle was the creature who had done it, the Withered king, smiling with another man’s lips and speaking with a dead woman’s voice. I had to get away—I didn’t know where, I just knew I had to go, to run, to get as far from that place as I could.

“You can’t run forever, John.”

I tore my radio from my vest and threw it down, leaving Ostler’s dead voice to whisper alone in the shadows.

Had Elijah betrayed us? I didn’t think so—he didn’t feel like a traitor—but how could I possibly trust my feelings? I didn’t even know how to use them. Elijah was nice to me, he was similar to me, and I felt that we shared some kind of … what? A bond? Because we lived on the fringes of the world, avoiding other people? That didn’t make us instant friends, it made us two people with all the more reason to avoid each other. He worked in a mortuary—for all I knew that was part of the trap, to win my confidence through association with the one thing left that I loved.

I’d built my life around this: getting to know people, making them think I was their friend, all so I could find their weak spot and hit it as hard I could. Now someone had done it to me.

But Elijah had been helping us. Even after the trap was sprung, he’d stayed with me, he’d tried to save Diana, he’d even tried to attack Rack. If he was part of Rack’s plan, wouldn’t he have turned on us? He could have drained my mind a dozen times tonight, leaving me in a blank, mindless coma. Instead he’d run away. Was he too much of a coward to fight us directly? Or had he felt the same link to me that I’d felt with him, and when the moment came he couldn’t go through with it?

Or was the traitor someone else?

I stopped running, leaning on a fence to catch my breath. I was blocks away from the scene of the attack, and once again the world was quiet—I couldn’t even hear screaming in the distance. Was Rack killing more people? The neighbors, or the EMTs who showed up to help? It seemed like the kind of thing he would do, but not tonight. He was on a vendetta and he wouldn’t stop until our team was dead—all of us. He hadn’t chased me, and I wondered if maybe he was saving me for last; the ones in danger now would be Nathan and Dr. Trujillo.

And Brooke.

I started running again, pulling my phone from my pocket. Was Brooke more Withered than human? I didn’t know, and as I ran I realized I didn’t care. She was my friend—maybe not a good friend, but I wasn’t exactly a role model either. Maybe my only friend left in the world. I didn’t know if Rack was planning to kill her or recruit her or something even worse, but either way I had to save her. I dialed Trujillo’s number.

Ring
.

Snow was starting to fall, and my breath came in ragged gasps, visible like smoke in the streetlights.

Ring.

“John?” It was Nathan’s voice.

“Nathan,” I said, clenching my teeth and trying to breathe. “Where’s Trujillo?”

“I can’t find him; I didn’t even know his phone was here until it started ringing. What’s going on?”

“Were you monitoring the radio?” I asked.

“It was a closed channel,” he said. “It didn’t reach this far. Did something go wrong? You sound terrible.”

“I’m running,” I said, and paused again to catch my breath. “It was a trap, and everyone’s dead. I’m the only one left—”

“Dead?”

“Rack killed them all,” I said. “Not just us but the police. Ostler, Potash, Diana, Detective Scott—”

“That—” he stuttered. “That’s impossible. How did you get away?”

“I think he’s leaving me for last, which means he’s coming for you.”

“Dammit, John—”

“Listen, Nathan, you have to find Trujillo and get Brooke and get away from there. Check her out, break her out, do whatever you have to do. I’ll call you when I get closer.”

“You brought this on us,” he said angrily. “This is your fault, everything you’ve—”

“You can yell at me when Brooke’s safe,” I said. “Are you already moving? I don’t know how much time you have.”

“Somebody had to be on the inside,” said Nathan. “If this was a trap, someone tipped him off.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

“It was Elijah,” said Nathan, “which makes you just as guilty—you’re the one who brought him into the team.”

“It wasn’t Elijah,” I said fiercely. “He was … he was helping us. He didn’t leave until we’d already lost—the same as I did, he just ran away first.”

“If he was trustworthy he would have stayed to help you,” said Nathan.

“Why?” I asked. “So we could lock him up again? So we could run him over with another truck? He gave us everything he had, and we tried our plan and failed. He’s probably running right now, and we need to do the same. Get Brooke—”

“If it wasn’t Elijah then it was obviously Brooke,” said Nathan. “We know she was communicating with Rack, she must have warned him we were coming.”

“We didn’t plan this attack until after the letters were cut off,” I said. “Brooke didn’t even know about it at all—Trujillo wouldn’t let us tell her, just in case—”

“Do you think it was Trujillo?” asked Nathan.

I stopped, shaking my head. “I don’t…” I tried to control my breathing. “Why would he betray us?”

“He knew everything we were doing,” said Nathan, “and he had the time and the means to tip Rack off. Dammit, John, he had hours alone with Brooke, for weeks on end, to be seduced by whatever promises the Withered were making.”

“Seduced?”

“Trujillo practically lived over there, and you honestly think he didn’t know about the letters she was sending? I’m the one who found them, not him—if I hadn’t been there to force the search, we might never have found out about them. And now we’ve been betrayed and he’s disappeared, and there’s no way that’s a coincidence.”

“Trujillo wouldn’t just turn like that,” I said, though I knew as I said it that I couldn’t be sure. “He worked as a profiler for years—he put dozens of serial killers in jail.”

“Because he trained himself to think like them,” Nathan countered. “Obviously some of it rubbed off, and now a few talks with Nobody, maybe a talk or two with Rack directly, was all he needed to tip over the edge.”

I stopped on a corner, looking at the street signs: Leonard and Morgan. Whiteflower was still miles away. “I’m going to try to grab a bus, but I’m still at least a half an hour out. If Trujillo is the traitor and you’re not dead, he’ll be going after Brooke next.”

“He won’t kill her, he’ll just take her to join them.”

“You think that’s better?” I asked. I turned and started jogging toward the nearest major street. I was covered with Diana’s blood; I’d have to find some way to clean up, or at least hide it. “Do you still have a gun?”

“Are you kidding? With all the crap we’ve been through I don’t let that thing out of my reach even to shower.”

“Get Brooke and get out. Take her somewhere we’ve never been before—a Denny’s or something, something that’s open all night—and make sure you walk. Your car is traceable, especially to someone with Trujillo’s police contacts. Call me when you have her, and I’ll call you when I’m close. And Nathan?”

“Yeah?”

“Brooke is literally, without exaggeration, the only thing I have left in my life. If you let anything happen to her, you’ll wish Rack had gotten to you before I do.”

*   *   *

I met up with Nathan and Brooke in an old movie theater, where they huddled in the back row while a late night horror movie flickered on the screen. There were only a handful of other people in the theater, most of them either high or making out in the corners. I sat down next to Brooke; she was dressed in her plain cotton pajamas, with big rubber boots and Trujillo’s long trench coat over them. Trujillo was a wide man, and it dwarfed her like a circus tent.

Brooke grabbed my hand. “I missed you.” She stopped, frowning, and held my hand up to the faint light from the screen. “Your hands are sticky, here between the fingers.” She peered closely. “You have blood on you.”

I nodded. “I don’t know if the guy at the ticket counter noticed, or if the police even have time to respond if he calls it in. Either way, we shouldn’t hang around here much longer.”

“Where are we going?” asked Nathan.

“Did you find Trujillo?” I asked.

“I don’t like him,” said Brooke.

Nathan shook his head. “No sign of him at Whiteflower or the office.” He held up a cell phone. “I’ve got his phone.”

“Too bad,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind calling him if he ever came back to get it.”

“You want to talk to him?”

“You don’t?” I asked. “The least he could do is tell us why he turned.”

Nathan swore. “I don’t even care anymore. What’s our plan to get out of town?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “We can’t trust any of our own homes, any of our own cars; we can’t go anywhere Rack might be expecting us to go. Even the bus station out of town is too risky.”

“That leaves stealing a car,” said Nathan, “do you even know how to do that?”

“I do,” said Brooke.

“If we steal a car then Rack
and
the police will be looking for us,” I said. “We need to go to the one place no one’s going to expect us.”