The Outkast (15 page)

Brian spoke before Craig could say a word. “It might be bleeding, but it’d do anything to kill the mother and her son—if they’re not dead yet. No hesitation for us, Craig. No turning tail. I don’t know what it is, but if it can bleed, it can be killed.”

“
It’s probably got Allan’s and Dwayne’s firearms,” Craig observed glumly.

“
It
definitely
has their guns. I’m aware of that. Allan didn’t lose his guns to the trees—he lost them to the monster. But we’ve got to put an end to this whole shit, kid. It’s been drawn out for too long. And this isn’t the time to give up. We’ve gone so far.” He ran towards the steps, gun trained ahead of him, not looking back to check if his deputy was still part of the struggle, or if he had indeed turned tail. “Craig, we’ve gone so
fucking
far.”

******

With all the lights out downstairs, The Outcast slid into a corner near the foot of the sink in the kitchen. He couldn’t see much of anything, but his intrinsic acuity advised him it had nothing to do with the absence of light.

He had dissipated so much blood in so little time.

Right now, with his vision losing its sharpness, every inch of his body throbbed with acute ache, and the pain intensified at the thought of the boy.

The boy. The traitor. The wolf in sheep’s clothing.

How could he not have smelled it—the foul odor that had lain beneath the veneer of true blood all along?

His downfall had come from the one he’d
wrongly
loved. From the one he’d thought belonged to him.

When he had crawled back inside the house, with gunshots roaring behind him, he’d observed that the boy and his mother had vanished from where he’d left them. The boy had cut his mother loose.

An urge to scream overwhelmed The Outcast. He reined it in. He mustn’t scream, because he must reign—even without the boy.

He mustn’t scream, but rather think deeply of his next move.

He had to move, if he had to reign.

But he was growing weak.

He began to slide away from the foot of the sink, slithering along the floor on his left side, doing it really quickly, yet covering very little space.

Then, he remembered.

The track.

He remembered the bloody track. Another big traitor. The blood came from him, from his very body, his tissues, his cells. But the blood wouldn’t protect him. On the contrary, it would give him away to the enemies.

Why did his life have to be full of traitors?

He reached out to a doorknob, meaning to lever himself up. He grabbed it with both hands and ... oh, the pain. The pain that bit into his hands and hissed down along his arms straight to his armpits was beyond description. But he held on tenaciously, albeit trembling as he began to rise. He couldn’t afford to crawl or slither, or else the enemy would trace his movement and figure out his next move.

He rose, voices behind him. Voices from outside.

Running now. Fast. Too fast. But he didn’t want to slow down. It was good. If he could go that fast, perhaps there would be no single trail to give him away.

Before long, he crashed in another dark room, stuffy with the scent of foodstuff. And it felt cozy. Perhaps he was in a pantry.

There he lay low, waiting and listening until all sounds were muffled.

He waited some more, touching the weapons attached to his sides. The weapons of destruction, of the final justice.

The sounds. Now the sounds were all gone. Completely.

He passed out.

A woman’s scream brought him back later.

******

Brian was just about to squeeze his trigger in the kitchen when he realized the shadow he saw in the gloom was a big vacuum cleaner.

After a heated deliberation among the faculty members of his mind, he had somehow found the courage to switch on the light in the living room, pointing his gun around at every slightest tick. Then, he had traced the blood on the floor all the way to the kitchen doorsill, beyond which superficial shadows nestled.

Although he hadn’t come in with a self-delusion that it was going to be a walk-over (in fact, he’d already concluded that his chances of surviving the battle were fifty-fifty at best), he didn’t realize it would be this challenging. Just how the hell would he know when it was right to shoot in the dark—and if he was shooting the right person? On the other side of the coin, how much risk would he expose himself to by lighting up the otherwise gloomy house?

Not daring to flip on the switch in the kitchen yet, he quickly worked his penlight, letting the thin beam from it divulge the secrets of all the murky crannies as much as it could. Then, he flipped the light on.

On the floor, as he had expected, there was a smear of blood. It covered a portion of the area at the foot of the sink, moved back towards the doorway, but then it discontinued.

He stepped back out of the kitchen, heard a sound behind him, and wheeled around.

It was Craig, already in the living room and training his own gun, too.

From upstairs, the floor creaked.

Brian gestured to Craig to find a safe vantage, stay put there, and watch while he went upstairs.

Cautiously, Brian proceeded.

There were two rooms upstairs, on the opposite sides of each other. The door of the first was left ajar, faint light oozing out through the opening. The second was closed. He tapped the first open, and quickly covered the view it afforded with his gun.

No one in there.

He stepped out, and just as he thought of how to handle the closed door of the next room, the floor creaked behind him.

With his heart jamming against his chest, he wheeled around swiftly, his gun trained, his trigger-finger almost twitching.

But no one was stalking him.

Yet, the creaking sound issued again. Less pronounced this time.

In the weak illumination produced by the light from the first room, Brian realized he was facing a closet. It nestled in the wall around the landing, and it was the location of the sound.

He stole closer.

Maybe the son-of-a-bitch was watching him from inside the closet through the cracks, readying his own gun, too.

Brian gritted his teeth as he reached out to yank the door open.

The scream was loud, and the force that pushed the door open was enormous. The wooden slab smashed Brian in the face before he even had a chance to calm Holly down.

“
Oh, shit,” he grunted, grabbing his nose and simultaneously trying not to fumble the gun in a wrong way.

Holly pulled Robert along with her, intending to bolt past Brian.

Brian detached his hand from his nose, caught her arm, spun her around, and quickly covered her mouth to stifle her scream.

******

In his chamber, The Outcast came to at the sound of a woman’s short-lived scream. He blinked at the faint beam of light that seemed determined to make its presence known in spite of its inadequacy. It was coming from some other part of the house.

Something had changed. He didn’t go to bed with any lights on. Someone must have broken into his home. A burglar.

But what about the scream?

The scream made him remember. He wasn’t actually in his chamber. He was rather on the battlefield. And that was the woman screaming. He had to kill her. And her son. And everyone else that didn’t belong to him. Then, he would begin to reign.

He had groped around and grabbed the edge of a table to support himself up, and he was already making his ascent while the thoughts roamed around his head.

He gritted his teeth, determined to ignore his pains.

He listened. There were muffled voices coming from upstairs. Whispers from a man and a woman.

He moved, standing by the side of the door now, watching a shadow that danced around the wall in the hall, and then on the floor, wandering back and forth, back and forth.

The Outcast wrapped his shattered hand around one of his weapons, yanked it out of his robe. Ready to strike when the time was right.

The shadow moved closer.

The Outcast melded into the region immediately beyond the jamb, away from the rays of light, but still at a point where he could keep a good watch over the advancement of the shadow.

In no time at all, the shadow grew larger until it became solid, transforming into a figure in a cop’s uniform.

It bent down, examining something on the floor.

The Outcast knew he shouldn’t scream. But he also knew his cancerous rage—and the sweet realization that one more enemy was about to be felled—would make him unable not to scream.

So, he screamed as he leaped.

******

When Craig Nelson had taken a vow to protect the inhabitants of Ogre’s Pond with integrity and altruism, he hadn’t understood the entire ramifications of the deal he had made.

But now, with cold sweat seeping out of his scrotum and from beneath his armpits, and with none of those people available to offer something to cool him off in order to help him cope with his challenge, he thought he had made a very huge mistake. He should have considered taking a little longer time to weigh all the pros against the corresponding cons before finalizing his decision to join the Sheriff’s Department. Today was the harvest season—the appointed time to reap the fruit of his rashness.

He watched Brian tip-toe upstairs.

Then, he considered moving to a safe spot.

Safe spot?
he wondered. Where exactly could he assume safe in this house? Where was the monster? There was blood on the kitchen floor as well as in the living room, but where was the big demon from
which
the blood had flowed? And why did the trail of blood get terminated at some point? Had the dangerous creature fled through the back door or set up an in-house ambush for them?

He moved to the kitchen, pointing his gun at every corner, as if Brian might have overlooked those spots, and thereby missed the killer when he had checked earlier. He was just turning around to walk back to the door when Holly’s scream shattered the quiet.

He jumped, but when he realized it was her, and that she had reacted to Brian’s presence rather than the intruder’s, he sighed.

Out in the hallway now, with his heart beating fast, Craig walked back and forth. Right on the spot, he felt like calling out to Brian to get the woman and the kid so they could just get the hell out of the house.

But then, he thought he saw the missing link on the floor. He moved closer and bent over to check. At that moment, gazing down at the tiny drop of blood, he smelled the danger nearby. Even before the crazy shriek that rushed out from the dark room located to his right, he had already started rising and turning—which was good, because the keen-bladed knife that would have been buried deep in the center of his back only sliced through his right shoulder.

Craig fell on his back, crying out in pain and calling for Brian as he went down. He didn’t know if he could handle the situation and make it on his own. However, he
knew
he definitely wouldn’t make it if he let go of his gun, so he held on to it all the way down to the floor.

As his bones jarred against the flooring, he took aim, shot, missed, and was surprised—then freshly afraid—at the creature’s agility to have evaded the bullet despite its initial bullet-wounds. How could it have had enough strength to do that?

Or maybe it was his own fear getting the better of him.
Whatever you do,
Brian’s voice echoed in his head
, Craig, in God’s beautiful name, don’t you let your fear get the better of you…

So, he attempted to shut the door on his fear and concentrate instead. He took aim again, and began to pull the trigger even as he watched the pointed nose of the knife sail through the air like some miniature rocket. It flew at him too fast and sank too deep into his chest.

In his dying moments, Craig believed he had shot the monster dead, because he heard an agonized cry.

******

Friendly fire.

The tune played over and over in Brian’s head as The Outcast approached him with a big knife in its hand.

It’s got to be ... friendly fire.

******

Brian rushed downstairs in response to Craig’s call for help. He was close to the landing, toting his gun and searching for The Outcast. Instead, he caught sight of Craig and the soaring knife very briefly before something hit him in his right breast. The thing had teeth, and it bit into his flesh voraciously.

There had been a blast, so it must have been a bullet.

He screamed and grew weak all of a sudden. He tumbled down the rest of the way and rolled far into the center of the living room.

Lying on the floor in the pool of his blood, watching the big beast as it tottered towards him with its scintillating knife, Brian thought,
Yeah, the end has come, and it’s because of the friendly fire from Craig’s gunshot, it’s got to be ... friendly fire.