Critical Failures III (Caverns and Creatures Book 3) (9 page)

“Tim!” he called out. “Stop it! Let them go.” He waved his phone for Tim to see.

Tim stopped banging on the door. “But where’s Mordred?”

“He played us for chumps.”

“Cooper!” said Tim. “Knock it off. Let them go.”

Cooper, who had been growling and waving his arms about scarily, ceased doing so. He stepped to the side. “Sorry for the delay, folks. Be on your way.”

The bus driver didn’t hesitate. The bus lurched forward. Passengers crowded against the windows to snap pictures of Cooper with their phones. He gave them the finger.

Julian answered his still ringing phone. “Hey, Stacy?”

“Did you find Mordred?”

Julian sighed. “No.”

“Then where was your phone?”

“Come on back outside. I’ll show you.” He hung up. “Damn it,” he said, rubbing the screen with his thumb. “He wrote on it with permanent marker.”

“That’s just mean,” said Cooper.

“What does it say?” asked Dave, who had only just turned up with Professor Goosewaddle.

Julian held up his phone for everyone to see. “Nice try, assholes.”

Chapter 10

Tim reclined his seat and stared at the red light on his phone.
Charging.
With everyone’s batteries dying, Stacy had insisted they stop at a Wal-Mart on the way back to buy a car charger. It was a long way back to Gulfport, and both Tim and his phone needed to recharge. Hopefully, a fresh, rested mind would be better equipped to figure out a way to track down Mordred.

“Julian,” said Tim. “If I sleep all the way there, do you think you’ll be able to show Stacy the way to the Chicken Hut?”

“I know where that is,” said Stacy. She didn’t sound thrilled about it. “You didn’t have enough at Arby’s?”

“No, we just –”

“You really need to watch what you eat. Arby’s is bad enough, but that Chicken Hut crap is just nasty.” She spat her gum out the open window.

Tim raised his seat to its original position. “I wonder,” he said, feeling as though he was walking on eggshells, “if there’s something more to your feelings for the Chicken Hut than the nutritional value of its food?”

“Fine,” said Stacy. “You caught me. My ex-boyfriend cheated on me with the whore that used to work there.”

Tim and Julian exchanged a glance. As far back in time as could possibly be relevant, there had only ever been two people who worked at the Chicken Hut, and Tim was pretty confident about ruling himself out as the whore in question.

“Also,” said Stacy, “it’s just nasty chicken. There’s a Popeye’s at the next exit.” She nodded at the approaching highway sign. “Do you want to stop there?”

“No,” said Tim. “We’ve got to go to the Chicken Hut. My sister’s locked in the freezer.”

“She’s
what
?”

“Do you think we can make it back before sundown?”

“Hang on a minute. How do you know your sister’s locked in the freezer of the Chicken Hut? Is it some weird game intuition magic?”

“No,” said Tim. “I locked her in there this morning.”

“Oh my God! Are you crazy?” said Stacy. The car suddenly picked up speed. “Julian, you need to call 911 right now!”

“Slow down!” said Tim. “She’s fine.”

Stacy looked at Tim over her sunglasses. “She could be dying in there!”

“Not likely.” Tim smiled at her. “She’s already dead.”

Stacy pulled something out of the compartment on her door and pointed it under her right arm, which she was still steering with, at Tim. “The next thing you say will determine whether or not you get a face full of mace.”

Tim’s smile was supposed to have conveyed a friendly, I-bet-you-didn’t-see-that-one-coming sort of message. But, in retrospect, he could see how smiling while he confessed to a complete stranger that he had his sister’s dead body locked in a freezer might be taken the wrong way.

“She’s a vampire,” said Tim. “She got turned while we were in the game.”

Stacy shook her head. “Of course she is. Here, have a Mentos.” She tossed the mace canister onto Tim’s lap. It turned out to be a half-eaten roll of Mentos.

Julian breathed a sigh of relief. Tim felt the same. The thought of being sprayed with mace wasn’t half as scary as the idea of the mace cloud blowing into Stacy’s eyes while the car was moving eighty miles per hour.

“We’re going to need something to feed her,” said Tim. “Arby’s won’t cut it.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open for orphanages,” said Stacy. “What’s she doing in the Chicken Hut freezer anyway?”

Tim had hoped against reason that she wouldn’t bring that up. But there it was. He might as well get it over with while there was plenty of driving left to be done. “We own it.”

“The freezer?” Apparently Stacy was also hoping against reason.

“The Chicken Hut.”

Stacy gripped the steering wheel tighter with both hands. “
Do
you?” she said accusingly. “And just how long have you owned it?”

“Look,” said Tim. “I don’t know what happened between your boyfriend and my sister, and I really don’t want to know. But what’s important right now is that she’s a hungry vampire, and she needs to feed. She’ll only be able to hold back her bloodlust for so long before she snaps and hurts someone.”

Stacy steered with her knee while she cracked her knuckles. “I’ve got something to feed her.”

“She’s really strong now,” said Tim. “She’d tear you in half.”

“Tim,” said Julian. “That’s perhaps not the most diplo—”

“We were practically engaged!” said Stacy. “And then one Halloween he goes and makes out with some floozy in a cat costume at Bar Bones!”

Tim had hoped that it might all be a big misunderstanding, but his hopes just evaporated. Bar Bones was Katherine’s favorite hangout. Also, he remembered that Halloween. It was two years ago. She had left him manning the store all by himself so she could go to that Halloween party. He remembered the cat costume.
But Stacy didn’t know that he remembered any of that.

“How do you know it was her?”

“My boyfriend’s dumbass friend posted pictures of it all over Facebook,” said Stacy. “It didn’t take too many clicks on friends of friends of friends to track her down.”

Well, shit.
“She couldn’t have known he was engaged. If you think about it, she did you a favor. He was going to cheat on you sooner or later.”

“Julian, honey,” said Stacy. “Can you pass me a Slim Jim?”

“Uh… sure,” said Julian. “Do you want me to unwrap it for you?”

“Nah, that’s all right, sweetie. Just pass it here.”

Julian passed her the beef stick, and she slapped Tim over the head with it.

“Ow!” said Tim, more from surprise than pain. After you have your foot gnawed nearly off by a giant rat, you can more easily withstand being slapped by a sausage.

“Does asshole run in your family?”

“I’m sorry,” said Tim. “I was just trying to –”

“Ahem,” said Julian. “If I may?”

“Fine,” said Tim.

“Stacy,” said Julian. “There’s no point in dwelling on past misfortune. You’re a beautiful young woman who deserves much better than some loser who would cheat on you with Tim’s sister.”

“Hey,” said Tim. But he could see Julian’s Diplomacy skill in action. He was complimenting Stacy while insulting Katherine at the same time. It was just what she wanted to hear. Brilliant.

“Why ain’t you a sweet thing!,” said Stacy. “Go on.”

“And I’m sure that when this is all over, and we’re back to our normal selves, that if you’d like to beat the shit out of Katherine, then Tim won’t stand in your way.”

“That sounds fair,” said Stacy. She looked at Tim. “Get me a cigarette out of the glove box.” She pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter button.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” said Tim, eager to fill his own lungs with tar and nicotine. He’d finished off his own pack in the back of Randy’s van.

“It’s just when I’m upset.”

Tim opened the glove box and found a nearly full pack of Virginia Slims. Not his brand, but he wasn’t picky. He passed her a cigarette. “Is it okay if I –”

“No!” she said, snatching the cigarette out of his hand. She lit it, placed the plug back into its socket, and took a nice, long drag. Tim watched longingly until she started hacking like she was about to barf up a lung. She threw the barely spent cigarette out of the window. “I haven’t been upset for a while.”

Tim reclined his seat once more, sat back, and watched the sun sink lower in the sky as his exhaustion overtook him. They weren’t going to make it back before sundown. Katherine was going to be pissed.

Chapter 11

Katherine’s eyes snapped open, and she knew the night had begun. She’d been hungry when she lay down to sleep on the freezer floor, but now her insides ached like they never had before. She needed blood. She needed it now.

“Master,” said Ginfizzle, sitting up. “I starve.”

“I know, Ginny,” said Katherine. “I’m hungry, too. Let’s see what the boys brought for us.” She stood up and knocked on the inside of the freezer door. Nobody answered. She knocked harder. Still no response. She put her ear to the door. Ginfizzle did likewise. The metal was ice cold against her skin, but not uncomfortable.

“Do you hear anything?” asked Katherine.

“Nothing, master.”

Katherine couldn’t hear anything either. That could have been due to the thickness of the door, but she suspected it was probably due to her brother and his fucktard friends forgetting about her.

“Stand back,” said Katherine, taking off her shoes. She raised her arms and kicked her heel into the door as hard as she could. Cold steel gave way to her dead foot. The locking mechanism crunched as the freezer door swung open. She walked into the kitchen through a cloud as frosty air met humid warmth. “Wait here.”

Katherine briefly admired the dent her foot had left in the steel door. As much of a badass bitch as she felt, she remained cautious. She peeked around the door and between kitchen equipment into the dining area. The lights were turned off, and the twilit sky provided little light through the gaps in the blinds over the front windows, but she could see with near perfect clarity that the place was empty.

Walking silently past the office, she caught something amiss in the corner of her eye. Or rather, it was the lack of something. In the cracked office mirror, she saw only the fractured reflection of the little black dress she’d asked Millard to have made for her. That wasn’t so odd, as it was the dress she was currently wearing. The odd part was that it appeared to be empty and hovering. She couldn’t see any of herself in the reflection. She went into the office to get a closer look at one of the larger pieces of mirror. Her eyes had not deceived her.

“Holy shit,” she said to herself. “I’m invisible!” She pulled the dress off over her head and looked in the mirror again. It was incredible. There was absolutely nothing of her there. She closed her eyes as her stomach churned. She would feed soon. Being invisible meant that she could hunt with impunity.

“Master!” Ginfizzle croaked from inside the freezer. “I’m hungry.”

“It’s safe to come out,” said Katherine. “Take off your clothes.”

“Well I… As you wish, master.”

The blue light on the CPU meant that Tim had left the computer on. She wiggled the mouse, and the screen lit up. The first thing she saw was the Gulfport sex offender registry.

“What the fuck?” she murmured to herself. Was Tim out there kidnapping a pedophile to feed her? She supposed there was some logic to it. Who’d miss a pedophile? It was a sweet gesture on Tim’s part, but they’d inevitably screw this up. Being super strong and invisible, she was much better suited to go hunt down pedos on her own. She made a mental note of the area with the highest concentration of registered sex offenders. She only hoped she and Ginny could get there before Tim got hurt.

“I’m sorry,” said Ginfizzle. He was behind her, standing in the office doorway. “My dingle isn’t working.”

“Your what?” Katherine turned around. Ginfizzle was standing in the doorway, frowning down at his limp little vienna sausage dick. “WHAT THE FUCK!”

“I’m sorry, master,” said Ginfizzle. “This has never hap—” He looked up. His mouth hung open as he gaped, transfixed by Katherine’s breasts.

Katherine gasped and snatched her dress from off the desk, trying to cover as much as she could. “Get the hell out of here, you little creep!”

Ginfizzle backed up into the kitchen. “But you said –” He turned his head. Something to his right had managed to tear his gaze away from Katherine’s body. The something growled.

“Butterbean!” said Katherine.

Ginfizzle licked his lips. “Blood.”

Butterbean barked, and Ginfizzle disappeared from the doorway.

Katherine dropped her dress and ran out after him. When she arrived in the dining area, Ginfizzle was on top of a struggling Butterbean, his fangs already sucking out her wolf’s lifeblood through its neck.

“Get off of him!” she screamed, grabbing Ginfizzle by the back of the neck. She pulled him off Butterbean and lifted him up in the air.

“Mine!” cried Ginfizzle. He squirmed in Katherine’s grasp and kicked her in the face. It was harder than she’d ever been hit in her life. Had it not been for her own superpowers, it might have knocked her head clean off. Still, the crunch she heard and felt inside her head suggested that he had broken her nose.

“Get out of here, you little troll!” Katherine hurled the naked, undead halfling head-first through the front window, destroying the blinds. The right side of the headrail collapsed, sweeping the blinds to the left. The entire window pane had turned white, webbed with tiny fractures, but the window held together except for the foot-and-a-half diameter hole Ginfizzle had flown through.

Ginfizzle stood up in the parking lot outside, a little naked guy smeared in blood. He pointed back at Katherine “MINE!”

“You stay away from here!”

Ginfizzle shook with impotent rage, which Katherine understood. She felt bad for him, but she couldn’t allow him to be near Butterbean. Then his body suddenly became covered with coarse, brown hair. This, she didn’t understand quite so much. His head and arms shrank while his fingers grew crazy long, a membranous web forming between them. It wasn’t until just before the transformation was complete that Katherine had any clue as to what was going on. The big bat in the parking lot launched itself up into the evening sky, flapping awkwardly as it came to terms with being a bat for the first time. Katherine watched Ginfizzle fly away and thought that she, too, would have to try out this bat thing sooner than later. A whimper broke her train of though. She turned around.

Butterbean lay helpless on the floor. His eyes were open, and he was still breathing. A small pool of shiny red blood expanded slowly on the floor below the two dripping puncture wounds on his neck.

Katherine’s naked body shook with hunger. She clenched her fists, her long fingernails digging into her palms. She shut her eyes tight.

Out of sight, out of mind.

No good. She could still smell it, salty and nourishing. She wouldn’t be able to stay here much longer without finishing the job that Ginfizzle had started.

Mustering all of her will, she forced herself back into the office. “There’s plenty of blood to be had outside,” she told herself. “I’ll chase down squirrels and stray dogs until Tim gets back with a nice, fat, juicy pedophile.” She knew she might be deluding herself, but it cleared her head long enough for her to slip her dress back on. Her purse was there, so she grabbed that too. She needed to put as much distance as possible between herself and Butterbean. Not wanting to risk another glance at him, she hurried out the back exit of the restaurant.

She felt a little relief when she closed the door behind her. There was a barrier between herself and Butterbean. She knew it was little more than a psychological barrier. Hell, she could probably punch holes through the concrete walls of the restaurant if she wanted to.

She scanned the sky for Ginfizzle. As long as she had no idea where to go, it would probably be a good idea to keep an eye on him. But he was long gone. She needed her brother’s help. He and his friends knew this game. And she needed Dave to hurry back and heal Butterbean. Since she couldn’t wait around here, she’d go find them. The pedophile dots on that map were just a few miles away. Now all she needed to do was figure out how to turn into a bat.

Even as she thought it, the transformation started. She briefly witnessed her fingers growing longer before her vision blacked out. Some kind of transformation was taking place in her eyeballs as well. The whole process was over in a few seconds. The next thing she knew, she was flapping her leathery, misshapen arms against the pavement.

After a few more flaps, she got into a rhythm. She could feel the membranes of her wings catch air the way they were supposed to. And before she knew it, she was flapping like a madman and hovering a couple of feet off the ground.

“Hell yeah!” she tried to say, but it just came out as a high-pitched squeal. To her surprise, the sound of her own bat voice formed an image in her mind of her immediate surroundings. It wasn’t exactly a vision, because it was separate to what her eyes were seeing. The best way she could describe it was an overlay of a colorless, textureless clay model of her surroundings, flashing over what she actually saw with her eyes.

She shrieked again, and the image flashed inside her tiny bat head again. It lined up perfectly with her actual vision, which she was surprised to discover was just fine. She had always thought bats were nearly blind. She’d remember this the next time someone used the phrase ‘blind as a bat’. And then she’d tear their throat out.

No! No! No!

Enough dilly-dally. Katherine needed to find the guys before she hurt someone. Julian would be able to summon her a nice fat horse. That should hold her over until they figured things out.

She flapped her wings harder, pushing more and more air beneath her, until she could see everything within miles of her. It occurred to her that she ought to be terrified, being so high up off the ground, but she wasn’t. Were it not for the growing hunger pains gnawing away at her insides, she might have deemed the experience refreshing.

Katherine climbed slowly, but steadily, in altitude while she flew in the general direction of the pedophile neighborhood where she expected to find Tim and his friends. She hadn’t memorized the map on the computer, but if she could find the Rouse’s nearby, she was pretty sure she’d be able to pinpoint the particular street she was looking for.

Rouse’s didn’t take long to find. It was the largest building, with the largest parking lot, for miles around. Flying was so much more convenient than driving. She spread her wings wide and held them still, which sent her plummeting toward the hard, unforgiving earth below. She flapped wildly until she was able to stabilize herself in the air. Lesson learned. She wasn’t much of a glider.

Flying over the Rouse’s parking lot toward Pass Road, Katherine spotted something strangely familiar. In the very back of the lot, segregated from all of the other cars, sat two cars, side by side, like nerds at a car party. One of them looked conspicuously like Tim’s.

It probably wasn’t Tim’s car. There might be a thousand faded blue 90’s era Honda Civics… with a broken passenger-side mirror… and a “
Don’t make me get out and roll initiative!”
bumper sticker.

Holy shit. That was Tim’s car!

The car next to it was probably Dave’s. Katherine couldn’t remember exactly what he drove, but it looked familiar enough. Those dorks must have blown the pedophile mission, and now they were at Rouse’s trying to talk the butcher into giving them some stale cow blood or something. That might do in a pinch, but she craved warm, living blood, pumped fresh from a beating heart.

She decided to wait for the boys to come out. If they managed to score any blood at all, she needed it. In the meantime, she’d fly around to the back of the store and see if there was a raccoon in the dumpster or something.

When she got to the back of the store, she changed back into her normal form. That is to say as normal as one could call her half-elf form. When the transformation was complete, she was pleased to find that she was still wearing her dress. She was worried she might morph back naked, but it appeared that the dress and purse were absorbed into her bat form. She wished she had thought to wear shoes.

Katherine lifted the lid on the dumpster behind the building, releasing a cloud of flies and the putrescence of rancid meat, fish, and spoiled fruit sun baked in a closed metal box. No raccoons or stray cats or possums or anything. But what she did see was a nice big rat scurrying away from her.

“Come here, rat,” said Katherine. She didn’t know why she said it, or why she didn’t feel stupid for saying it immediately after the words escaped her lips.

The rat stopped and turned around. Somewhere deep inside her mind, Katherine had expected it would do just that.

Katherine squatted down and smiled. “Come here, little guy.” She reached her hand out. The rat moved slowly toward her. “That’s it. Don’t be afraid.”

She placed her open hand palm-up on the pavement. The rat sniffed it briefly before stepping on.

“That’s a good boy,” said Katherine. She snapped her hand shut around the squirming rat’s body, grabbed its head with her other hand and bit savagely into its side. She spit out the chunk of hairy flesh she had bitten off and sucked in the hot, fatty rat blood which oozed out of the wound. It was delicious.

All too soon the rat had no more blood to give, despite her best effort to squeeze it from both sides. When she finally decided to give up, she bit the rat’s head off and spit it on the ground, just in case. She had already accidentally turned a midget. She didn’t want to take any chances on setting a swarm of vampiric rats loose on an unsuspecting Gulfport.

When she tossed the decapitated rat corpse on the ground, she nearly hit a second rat. It was sitting on its hind legs staring up at her. Another rat came to join it, followed by two more. They were coming from around both sides of the building, and from the dumpster of the neighboring building.