Bloodman (28 page)

65

The truck threw up thick plumes of water as it barreled down the empty streets of Southampton, enough that the Israelites could have followed in its wake. Since leaving the Sheriff’s Department, Jake had forded two newly-formed storm-fueled rivers that had sprung up in town and both times the water had actually climbed up over the hood—somehow Frank’s snorkel contraption seemed to be doing its job because the engine had not so much as coughed. When he wasn’t resorting to naval tactics, Jake kept his foot down as he ripped through the empty town. After a few blocks he realized that he had to ease off or he’d flip Frank’s gas-guzzling bitch and end up drowning alone in the middle of one of the abandoned streets.

Gunning it through the dark neighborhoods had a creepy, postapocalyptic quality to it. The farther he got from the sheriff’s office—the deeper into Southampton—the more visceral this feeling became. The whole time he barreled toward the Mitchell home, his brain was working on his father’s fragmented portrait. Was it just a symbol of his fractured mind or had he meant for it to be a portrait of the Bloodman? Jake was sure he had left all those faceless portraits for Jake to see, to pique his curiosity, to get him used to thinking. To get him used to looking.

Why hadn’t he just told Jake who the killer was? Left a note? A letter? Why the babushka-doll approach? A riddle hidden inside a riddle hidden inside a riddle hidden inside a…Jesus fucking Christ, it was endless!

Jake ran his mental fingers over the years, trying to find anything in the dust-caked pages that would help make sense of why his father had done this.

Jake knew that he was the one who was supposed to see it; that’s what he did—even his old man would know that. Bury a needle in a haystack, hide the haystack in a field of haystacks, and unleash Jakey with that divining-rod head of his and he’d find it, figure it out, solve the mystery.

Only it wasn’t just a mystery. Not any more. Not a job or a game or even an obsession. It was a need.

Something told him that Kay and Jeremy were alive. Why? Because they hadn’t found any bodies. And this fucker—the Bloodman—liked to leave a little something behind for his fans.

And if Jake didn’t drown or get crushed by a falling tree or get jolted by an electromagnetic pulse, he knew that he would find who he was looking for. He would find
him
.

At least now Jake would have something to call him when he put the barrel of the revolver to his head and opened it as wide as the sky.

66

Jake pulled up on the Mitchells’ lawn and the 9,000-pound truck settled to the rims in the wet earth. He kicked the heavy door open with his foot and jumped out into shin-deep water. The street was flooding, the neighborhood was flooding, the lawn was flooding. In another hour it could all be washed away. He wondered if Wohl had reached Hauser and if the sheriff was on the way. He wished that Hauser were here, or Scopes, or anyone else, because if that fucker showed up…

He raced across thirty feet of lawn, moving through the current that mired him down like a foot of wet cement. Candles now flickered in a few rooms and it looked like Mrs. Mitchell had fired up the old kerosene Coleman that had been sitting on the hall table. There was movement inside. A shadow passed by the big front window, stopped to look out. Jake recognized the shape of Mrs. Mitchell. His heart leveled out a little.

His foot hit the precast concrete step and he grabbed the iron railing. Mrs. Mitchell opened the door. She smiled for an instant.

And then Jake saw him. Behind her, standing in the kitchen doorway. For an instant he thought that it was his own reflection, but then he moved.

There was a knife hanging from his hand, the gleam of death in the dark.

He was just a dim outline but Jake knew the shape; it was the faceless man that Jacob had splattered on the wall in his blood. The man from the portrait. The man of blood. The Bloodman.

Jake’s hand went under the poncho, into his jacket, and he felt the rubber combat grip of his revolver, warm and dry against his hand.

The thing behind her moved. Twitched.

Jake got his index through the trigger guard and began to draw the weapon. He opened his mouth to scream, to warn her. There was a shift on Mrs. Mitchell’s face as she saw his expression, saw him go under the poncho for his pistol, and she began to turn, to look behind her.

Jake saw the faceless form move in the darkness.

There was deep
whump
followed by a resonant crack that lit up the sky like a billion-watt generator blowing its magnets. The earth rang as the bolt of lightning impregnated the ground and the soil went supernova, killing every earthworm in a quarter-mile radius.

Jake saw the world overload for a millisecond before the power went out. Then it was just as if nothing existed at all.

He fell back.

Away.

Away from the world.

Away from the steps.

Away from Mrs. Mitchell and Emily and everything else he had promised he would not leave to the Bloodman.

67

Jake stood in the entry with the fractured sounds of the storm battering the house a distant drone that barely penetrated the static swirling around his skull. He stared at the top of Emily Mitchell’s scalp sitting on the newel post, a skullcap of thick black bangs held back with a bright yellow barrette. The bridge of her nose and one eyebrow were visible beneath. The rest lay in the living room in the middle of a cheap imitation Persian carpet sopping with blood and flecked with puzzle pieces. The thing that used to be her mother lay beside her, stretched out and butchered.

Hauser was outside throwing up and Jake hoped he was pointed downwind. It was one of those back-of-the-mind things that came to him while he examined the top of the girl’s head, thrown carelessly onto the newel post like a winter cap, a little lopsided.

Hauser and his deputy had found Jake floating near the road. The drag of the heavy water-filled poncho had acted like a sea-anchor and saved him from being washed away in the surge that sloshed across the lawn. He had been unconscious and Hauser had slapped him, yelled, shook him. His eyes had fluttered open, and that first big breath hit him in the chest like an atom bomb. He sat up, screamed Emily Mitchell’s name. Hauser had run for the house. Taken the screen door off the hinges. Stumbled out fifteen seconds later and barfed in the swamp that used to be a garden.

Jake lifted himself from the water, his brain actually making a cartoon spring sound as he tried to keep the world from spinning. He fought to his feet and lurched across the lawn and fell up the steps like a drunk trying to make it to the toilet in time.

Mother and daughter were in the living room. Mostly.

68

Jake shuffled up the emergency-lit stairs of the hospital on autopilot, his feet taking him from one dim pool of light to the next. He was soaked through now, and the wet leather of his boots rubbed against his shins and every time he took a step the storm squished between his toes to remind him just how unfinished all of this was. He had very little left in him and the only thing that kept his heart beating and his legs pumping was the chance that he could somehow save Kay and Jeremy. He wondered if there was anything remotely rational in this line of thinking or if it was just blind hope. After all, there were no bodies. That was something, wasn’t it? Because this guy liked to leave behind—Jake stopped the image from welling up in his head. He couldn’t—refused to—think like that. Not with his wife and son.

He opened the steel door and stepped out into the hallway.

The third floor of the Southampton Hospital throbbed with the collective voice of the bedridden, the frightened, the infirm. The lights had been reduced to thirty percent power, an engineering decision made to cut strain on the generator. In the dim half-light, the hallway linoleum looked like a cancerous supermarket pizza that couldn’t be identified by the age-old question of
Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
All the patients who could travel had been moved after a mountain of releases had been signed and those who remained were mostly palliative care and ICU trauma cases. Accompanying the murmur of the patients was the sound of windows shifting in their frames and the unmistakable krang of metal flashing being tortured by the wind somewhere outside.

Frank was at the nurses’ station, trying to get a Tylenol to combat the headache that the incessant wail of the storm and the patients had brought on.

Jake moved by him, the dim light morphing his shadows into a long spiderlike animation that headed down the hall.

The passage was darker than it had been two hours ago and the sounds coming from the rooms were more like the animal grunts at some midnight petting zoo than a place where human beings were sent to mend. The taste in the atmosphere was unmistakable and every breath he took in stunk of fear.

The door to his father’s room was the only one closed. He opened it and Jacob Coleridge was harnessed in, the nylon straps and bright chrome buckles gleaming dementia in the dark room. With the sound of his footsteps, his father’s head turned on the pillow like a lifeless dime-store mannequin being run on rudimentary mechanics. His hair scraped the pillow as his face rotated, his eyes deep screws of terror. The soft shimmer of a noise began at the back of his throat, a low, bubbling sound.

Out of the corner of his eye, at the edge of his peripheral vision, Jake saw the spattered nightstand, something dull and dead on top and the bright gleam of steel. He didn’t deflect his vision, didn’t take his eyes from the old man’s face, although every fiber in his brain was screaming for him to look at the thing at the edge of his sight.

Jacob Coleridge’s face, barely visible in the dim light of the room, was smeared with the same bloody graffiti that had decorated Jeremy that morning. His sockets and cheeks smeared in red-black lines that outlined the skull beneath his flesh. The bloody teeth finger-painted over his mouth unzipped, and his lips formed into a black O, a sightless eye socket. The soft rasp simmering in his throat grew into a howl, like the distant call of an injured animal, and blood bubbled out and down his chin, splattering his chest.

Jake took a step toward his father and the mournful howl rose to a bright scream of panic that was supposed to be the word
No
, but only came out as a long tortured vowel. Without having to look, Jake knew that Jacob Coleridge’s tongue lay on the nightstand, lines of blood and mucus gleaming on the surface of the safety razor lying in the slop beside it.

69

After they rushed his father off to emergency surgery, Jake grabbed Frank’s arm and led him into the stairwell.

“Where the fuck were you?” It was anger again, not real language.

Frank had the shell-shocked expression of a plane-crash survivor. “I…I was there the whole time, Jakey.” The old man bit his bottom lip and his teeth made a soft, scraping sound against his whiskers. “I didn’t even go out for a smoke.” To illustrate his point, he held up a cigarette. The filter was chewed and the shaft bent. Then he paused, and the mechanics of his face jittered. “Wait a minute! Just wait a fucking minute!” He pointed at Jake. “You don’t think—!”

Jake’s eyes were dead black points nailed to his head. In the weak light and dark shadows, he was expressionless. He thought about the question for a second. “No, I don’t.”

“So what’s going on, Jakey?” Frank rolled up on the balls of his feet.

Jake shook his head. It was a defeated movement powered by a long string of failures on his part. “Someone wants to keep something from me.” He paced the small landing.

Frank finally fired up the cigarette he had been chewing for the past two hours. The snap of the lighter sounded like a gunshot in the small confines of the stairwell and the flame was brighter than the dull bulb illuminating the space. “Jakey, I wasn’t away from that room more than five minutes before you showed up. No one went in.” He wrapped his face around the cigarette and pulled in a deep chestful of smoke. “No one, Jakey.” The old man’s eyes narrowed and his face tightened up. Jake saw a little fear in there and he wondered what Frank wasn’t telling him.

Jake paced the welded boilerplate floor. Thunder shook the building and drowned out the clunk of his boots on the painted steel. He did jail-cell laps while Frank smoked his cigarette, his hand cupped around the butt, like a kid smoking in school. “What did that little girl draw? Did you have time to look at it?”

Jake stopped, lifted his head. “She used my father’s concept but her drawing had nothing to do with what he painted. She got the shapes right.”

Frank dropped the cigarette and crushed it out with the heel of his boot.

“She’s dead, Frank.”

Frank winced. “Dead? Who—” And then he got it. “Jesus. How?”

Jake took a cigarette from Frank’s pocket and fired it up. “The same way, Frank. Her mother, too. It’s what this guy does.”

Frank lost a little of his height and a lot of his presence in one great sigh. “Where is the portrait?”

“Sitting in the bottom of a garbage can at Hauser’s.” Jake suddenly realized that he was very tired and very cold. His fingers felt like they had been salvaged from someone else’s hands and he was storing a frozen roast in his chest. “I need a hot shower, some dry clothes, and about a thousand years of sleep.”

“Go bed down in one of the empty rooms. This is America, Jakey. You can do shit like that.”

“Can’t. Kay, Jeremy. I won’t stop until I know…” The words dropped off for a few seconds. Then he came back with things he could do. “I need to talk to Hauser. I need to get back to the station.”

“And your father?” Frank said.

Jake headed down the steps. “They’ll get him through surgery. There’s sweet fuck-all I can do here. Let’s go.”

Frank stood in place, his foot poised a few inches over the next step down. “What if he—
it
—comes back?”

An image in grainy brilliance flashed on the TV tube behind Jake’s eyes, an image of the figure standing in the corridor behind Mrs. Mitchell. “If he wanted Dad dead, he wouldn’t have cut out his tongue. He’d have cut his fucking head off, Frank. He’s gone from here.” What else could he say? That he really didn’t give a fuck about his old man, not if forced to make a choice between the old bastard and his wife and son? No, he couldn’t say that. Not out loud.

Frank pulled out another cigarette and started down the steps. “If he’s done with everyone else, Jakey, he’s coming after you next.”

Jake felt the frozen roast shift in his chest. “I’m counting on that.”

Jake had to put his shoulder into the steel emergency door to force it open. He held it for Frank and it bucked and pulled against his fingers and he pushed it closed with both arms.

They kept low, hunched into the wind, and moved as fast as they could for the Hummer parked around the corner of the hospital, up on the grass. Jake climbed over a mailbox that the storm had thrown across the parking lot and jammed up against the side of the vehicle. The roof of a house sat in the lot on Frank’s side of the truck, shingles ripped up, joists sticking through like broken bones.

He got in, snapped the seat belt on, slid the key into the ignition, and froze.

A T-shirt was slung over the steering wheel like a towel left to dry. It was hacked through with dozens of slash marks, the once baby-blue cotton now stained black. David Hasselhoff grinned up obscenely from the bloody fabric, the line
Don’t Hassel The Hoff!
blaring out in bright script streaked with blood.

It was a gift—a postcard—a note to let him know that someone was thinking about him.
Having a grand time. Wish you were here
.

Jake screamed.