Crucifax (41 page)

"We can be together like this, Jeff," she said, sliding her lips along the side of his cock. "Together like this all the time, and no one will find us or stop us or…"

Her voice faded away because now she was sitting up, removing the T-shirt, taking Jeff's hands and putting them on
her breasts, pressing them over the mounds of flesh that he had wanted to touch for so long, and far away he could hear himself laugh, hear his voice say, "Yes, yes, yes," feel his head nod, smell her musky odor, and as he slipped inside of her he knew that wherever she was going, he would go with her….

The crowd in Fantazm continued to grow more and more restless. More than once, J.R. saw a chair lifted above the bobbing heads and tossed through the air. Screams and laughter mingled until it became impossible to distinguish the two.

More parents arrived, and some had gone into the mass of teenagers, searching, some of them shouting. One man, an executive type with black hair and gray tufts above his ears and wearing a dark suit, shouldered into the crowd, towering above the others. He cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted, waved a hand, trying to get someone's attention. Apparently he'd found who he was looking for.

The music never stopped. One song blended into another as Mace strutted and sneaked across the stage, passing his arms back and forth before him as if casting a spell over the audience. As far as J.R. could tell, a new song had just begun, and for the first time since the band had begun playing, he listened for the lyrics as he scanned the horde of teenagers below.

Take me deep inside you

Squeeze tight and don't let go

'They're gone," Erin said. "I don't see them, do you see them?"

Standing on tiptoe, shading her eyes from the stage lights, Lily shook her head.

J.R. watched the man in the suit reach for a girl in a shiny red jumpsuit a few feet ahead of him. She was backing through the crowd to get away from him, screaming something at him, her face twisted into the expression of a cornered animal….

We'll leave this mess together

And no one will ever know

The stage lights and the dim lights in the entryway flickered for a moment, and J.R. thought they would go out, but the flickering stopped.

The man stopped, too, stopped reaching for the girl and looked down at his feet; his head began bobbing as he hopped this way and that, as if he were doing an odd sort of dance. He almost fell once—

They're holding him off,
J.R. thought.

—but he grabbed someone's shoulder, regained his balance; and when he saw the girl getting away, being led toward the stage by a boy with long blond hair, he pushed two others aside and headed after her.

Say goodbye to Mom and Dad

Say goodbye to Sis

I'm goin' while I got the chance

I've had enough of this

The words made the skin on the back of J.R.'s neck shrivel; when his eyes met Lily's and saw the cold gray look of dread on her face, he knew she felt the same.

The man in the suit pushed a girl aside roughly, knocking her to the floor—

A slice of skin

A spurt of blood

—and leapt forward, grabbing the collar of the jumpsuit.

A scream, a cry A hisssss

The girl jerked backward, her arms flailed before her, and she spun around to face the man.

A crack of bone

An open skull

He clutched her shoulders and began shaking her violently as he shouted at her. The girl spat in his face.

Gonna say goodbye

To all of this

For a heartbeat, the club was plunged into darkness as the lights flickered again. More glass shattered in the crowd, and a boy stood on a table and dived into the mass with a loud scream. The thought of the power going off, leaving the club in total darkness, made J.R. shudder, and he put his arm around Erin, turning her toward the doors and saying, "I think you and Lily should get out of here."

"Are you kidding?" she shouted, pulling away. "I'm not leaving here until I find Jeff and Mallory."

Frustrated, J.R. turned to the stage again, and the bottom of his stomach fell away.

Mace was staring directly into J.R.'s eyes and smiling as he sang, his voice powerful, solid, a trumpet of flesh and blood making a sound that entered J.R.'s brain like a chilled icepick….

No more deaf ears, no more blind eyes

No spittin' in my face

No more hands that pull away

Goin' to a better place

His smile spread, oozed over his face as he made his guitar scream like an angry demon, still watching JR.

He can't see me,
J.R. thought,
not with those lights shining in his eyes, he can't.

There was another tremble in the lights; it lasted longer this time.

J.R. held Erin's arm, just in case; if the lights did go out, he didn't want to stick around in the dark.

Through the music, J.R. heard a scream so shrill and so filled with hate that it hovered in the air long after it had stopped, and he turned his eyes to the man in the suit again.

He held his daughter's left arm, pulling her through the mob as he might pull on the leash of a stubborn dog, angrily shouting at her over his shoulder. She was slapping at him with her free hand, spitting and screaming as she snapped her head back and forth.

Mace screamed into the microphone. His voice rose clear and distinct above the band. "
That's where we're goin', a better place!
"

The girl in the red jumpsuit was still screaming and fighting, but the man was near the edge of the crowd, pulling her toward J.R. and the double doors.

A scream, a cry

A hisssss

J.R. spotted other parents in the group waving and shouting at their kids, arguing, cajoling, but none of the other teenagers was reacting as violently as the girl in the red jumpsuit.

A crack of bone

An open skull

He saw it coming seconds before it happened. He pulled Erin to him as the girl reached under her collar, her fingers fumbling for something just below her throat, pulling out a cord, pulling until something flipped onto her chest, hanging from the cord, swinging back and forth over her breasts.

Gonna say goodbye

She clutched it in her fist and lifted it from her chest.

"No!" J.R. shouted.

Erin sputtered, "What? What?"

Lily saw it, too, and screamed, lifting a trembling hand to her face.

The man's back was to the girl, and he didn't seem to notice that she was no longer resisting him, didn't see her raise the Crucifax to her throat—

To all of this
Yeah, I'm gonna say goodbye

—press the edge to her flesh…

The lights dimmed.

Blinked.

Went out.

The music stopped and a brief, startled hush passed through the darkness, punctuated by a long, gurgling wail.

"Jesus
God!
"
J.R. blurted, pushing Erin back toward the doors, reaching for Lily's hand to pull her with them.

An instant later, the auxiliary lights clicked on, bathing the club in a harsh, antiseptic white light as a grown man screamed like a young girl.

J.R. saw the man in the suit throw up his arms and fall out of sight as a gout of blood spurted from his daughter's open throat. She dropped, twitching, to the floor with her father, buried by the crowd, which was coming back to life with a few cheers and some applause. The man went on screaming, but Mace raised his arms and spoke; even without a microphone, his voice cut through the club like a sharp knife through tender flesh as he said, "What are we waiting for?" and the crowd roared as one, drowning out the man's shrieks.

Mace put down his guitar, lifted his arms, gestured to the band, and jumped off the stage; a path opened in the crowd, allowing him to pass through. The path closed behind him as the teenagers followed, and Mace looked up at J.R. with a happy, confident smile, heading straight for him.

Something at the bottom of the steps below caught J.R.'s eye.

Three of the creatures were hurrying across the floor, loping up the steps toward them.

J.R. pulled Erin and Lily toward the door, calling, "Reverend, come on now!"

"But—Jeff!" Lily cried. "Where's Jeff?"

"Just come on, we're getting the hell out of here now!"

Erin began to protest, too, but J.R. opened the doors and pushed her through. He followed them outside to the parking lot and into darkness.

There were no streetlights, no traffic lights, no lit windows; only the headlights of cars on the boulevard lit the night, reflected on the wet pavement of the parking lot in shifting, glowing patterns.

"Jesus, a blackout," J.R. muttered.

The wind threw the rain into his face, and the drops stung like pebbles; a jagged tentacle of lightning cut the sky to the south, and the thunder that followed sounded like the crack of an enormous tree trunk.

Behind them, beyond Fantazm's double-door entrance, J.R. heard another kind of thunder, the thunder of voices and rushing feet, laughter and screams.

"Where are you parked?" J.R. shouted at Erin.

"A block away."

"I'm closer." He waved at Lily and the reverend. "Come on, let's—"

The doors burst open and hit the walls with the sound of two gunshots, and Mace came out, arms held up, elbows locked, smiling. His arms dropped, and the wind blew his hair around his head as the teenagers followed him into the parking lot, gushing out of the club like blood from an open wound.

Mace led them between two rows of parked cars, passing less than ten feet in front of J.R. and the others as if they weren't there. The teenagers following him were just as loud as they had been in the club and their laughter and shouting was whipped away by the wind, echoing across the parking lot.

J.R. watched with sickening horror as they continued to pour out of the club. He saw, with some relief, that not all of them were following Mace. Some remained apart from the group, keeping pace, shouting as they hurried along.

"
—
do
you think you're
going,
Matty, what's he gonna—"

"—ease come back,
please,
something bad is gonna—"

"—this is
it
with us if you go, do you under—"

There were parents following the crowd, too, staying to the side, keeping a good distance, some arguing among themselves, others calling their sons and daughters.

A heavyset woman wearing a tan raincoat over a nurse's uniform: "Dammit, Rhonda, come back here right now, do you hear—"

A small black woman held her purse over her head to protect her hair from the rain and paced agitatedly as the parade of teenagers passed by. "You be back by eleven-thirty, Beth," she shouted, "or you're grounded for a
week!
"

There were about fifteen others—not very many, considering how many J.R. had called—looking for their children, shouting disciplinary threats. J.R. recognized a few of them as parents he'd spoken with that day, but one in particular caught his attention. He didn't recognize the face, but the voice was unmistakable. It was Mr. Brubaker, Wayne Bru— baker's father. J.R. had had a very unpleasant telephone conversation with him earlier, and the man looked exactly as he'd sounded on the phone: short dark hair and a bushy beard and mustache, thick neck, a red plaid shirt under a camouflage down jacket. Brubaker had become irate when J.R. explained why he was calling, accusing J.R. of trying to tell him how to raise his son.

"I'm not doing that at all," J.R. had said patiently, "I'm just trying to keep him out of trouble."

"Well, that's my job, okay?" the man had barked. "The trouble stuff is
my
job, and you stay out of it."

J.R. assumed the timid-looking woman with him was Mrs. Brubaker. Her hands fluttered nervously at the buttons of her long brown coat, and she looked as if she might blow away with the wind.

"I
knew
we shouldn't've come!" Brubaker shouted. "I wish I hadn't told you about that goddamned phone call."

Mrs. Brubaker craned her neck, searching the passing horde for her son.

"I don't
see
him!" she cried. "Do you? Do you see him?"

"Oh, Christ, Barbara, he'll come back, he always
does.
"

"But I just saw him a second ago, he was right in front of me. Something's wrong here. Wayne! Waaayyyne!"

"Oh, God, don't go wailin' for him now!"

Mace led the teenagers around the corner of the building and down the sidewalk on Lankershim. There were still some more coming out of the club, hurrying to catch up. J.R. wondered how many there were. A hundred and fifty? Two hundred? More?

"Jeff isn't with them," Erin said, moving closer to him. She sounded weak, sick with fear. "Jeff and Mallory must still be in the club."

"I don't think so," J.R. said. "I think they left earlier."

"We have to go back in and see if—"

"
No.
We don't know how many of those things are in there."

"I think I know where he's taking them," the reverend said, watching the last of the teenagers disappear around the corner.

Lily spoke up: "The health club." She was crying quietly.

The reverend nodded and turned to J.R. "The basement."

It sounded ludicrous at first; surely the basement of that abandoned building was not big enough to accommodate that many people. But he knew Mace wasn't taking them there for a social gathering. An unexpected thought sent a physical jolt through his body:

You can stack dead bodies…

J.R. looked around the parking lot; the parents and remaining teenagers were quickly breaking up, hurrying through the rain to their cars.

"Wait!" J.R. called, stepping away from Erin. "Please, wait a second!"

In a flash of lightning, he saw them turning to him one by one. There were about thirty of them, their skin corpse-white for an instant. After the thunder shot through the sky, J.R. said, "We have an idea where they're going. If we can—"