God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (20 page)

“The bars!” Clover yelled, tugging his arm. He turned and saw the pre-manufactured cage being pulled off the side of the house. A creeper began to crawl through the window, but a gun went off outside and its head exploded. Steve appeared and yanked the body out of the window.

“We’re clear this way! Come on!” Steve said, turning and firing his gun twice more into the night. He turned back to the window, his hand outstretched.

“Watch the glass!” he warned Clover as she stuffed her feet into her shoes and went toward him. She took his hand and he helped her out of the window and onto the lawn.

“Come on!” Steve shouted, his hand outstretched again.

AJ started toward the window and stopped, still shoeless and shirtless, looking at the jagged pieces of busted window littered across the stained green carpet of their room.

“Now! Come on!” Steve yelled, Clover’s voice joining his.

He quickly glanced at the doorway; Logan and John were still pumping round after round into the coming wave of the undead but were making their way towards his room.

“Go, kid!” Lubbock shouted over his shoulder.

“Come on, give it to me! Give me the book!” Steve screamed.

AJ held it out and saw a flicker in Steve’s eyes, not one of light but a flicker of darkness. Steve dove halfway through the open window, arms outstretched, reaching for the book, his stomach slamming into the bottom sill. AJ took a stumbling step backwards just in time.

“What the fuck!” AJ said.

Steve braced his hands against the windowsill, shards of glass sinking into his palms—one of them actually popping out the back of his left hand—and pushed himself back outside again. AJ saw the last three inches of a shard of glass jutting out of his stomach, his clean, white shirt already soaking through with blood. Ignoring the glass in his hands, Steve drew his gun and pointed it at AJ’s head.

* * * * *

Clover stared with sick fascination at the shard of glass coming out of Steve’s stomach and she could feel the very air around her turn cold. He drew his gun with bleeding hands and aimed it back through the window. She charged forward, lowering her shoulder as she had done on the lacrosse field as a seventh grader when she meant to
really
check a bitch, slamming into him as he pulled the trigger, the bullet blowing a hole in the wall behind AJ’s head, about a foot to the left.

* * * * *

The book was hot in AJ’s hand now and he felt the wind of the bullet passing by his face just as he was registering the fact that Steve had shot at him and that Clover had likely just saved his life. He looked down and the book was
steaming
, a clean, pure steam that held its own inner light.

“AJ!” Logan screamed again from the doorway.

AJ ignored him, staring down at the seal on the front of the book, which was almost too bright to look at.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said to himself and then felt a kind of calm descend over him. He turned toward the door and raised the book over his head as he went, the seal on the cover facing out into the hall.

“HELP ME!” AJ screamed and a beam of that pure, white light shot out of the front of the book, blowing the dead men it touched completely to dust.

Another dead man was coming toward John and he didn’t have time to get his gun around. AJ turned the book and screamed again, a wordless exultation to the universe, the veins on his arms and in his neck standing out in stark relief as the light burst forth from the book again.

But there were more, and more, and more.

He pivoted, screamed again, and focused his mind, his body, and his entire
being
on the book. Another beam of light shot out, wider and brighter than the others had been, and not in a single short blast like before, but as a solid thing, almost physical. Logan shot two more on his left as John reloaded his gun. John’s door was pulled off its hinges and AJ turned to see another wave of them crowded into his room, all trying to get through the door at once. He focused again and the light shot out, filling John’s room and leaving nothing but dust when he was finished sweeping it left to right. Terrance stumbled toward them, untouched by the mass of creepers, bleeding from his eyes and ears. He had his gun drawn, leveled at AJ’s head, his eyes flickering back and forth from his natural hazel to the darkest black over and over like a strobe light, his finger wrapped around the trigger.

* * * * *

Steve lashed out and locked one steel clamp of a hand around her wrist, grinding the bones together. Clover could hear AJ in the house, his shouted words lost in the noise of gunshots and death. She screamed again as Steve drew her toward him. Clover drew her knee up as hard as she could into his balls.

Steve’s face paled a shade and he vomited a steaming clot onto himself. Hot bile splashed onto the bare dirt of the back yard and across her shoes, but his grasp didn’t falter.

Then the house lit up with a white light. It came flooding out of the windows, lighting the darkened yard up like it was the middle of the day. It was the last thing she saw before Steve Neilsen’s fist crashed into her face, breaking her nose and knocking her unconscious.

* * * * *

Terrance staggered toward AJ. A small jet of blood squirted out of Terrance’s left ear and he pointed the gun at the kid he was supposed to protect.

“Help me, John! I can’t stop! I’m sorry but I can’t, please just fucking
KILL ME
!”

Terrance pulled the trigger right as John shoved himself in front of AJ, knocking him almost to the floor.

John heard the crash of a .38 and hot pain tore through his left shoulder; his whole arm went numb.

Terrance continued his advance, his eyes flickering like a TV with bad reception. Hazel then black. Hazel then black. The flow of blood doubled from his nose and ears when he adjusted his aim, and once more AJ found himself staring down the barrel of a gun.

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” Terrance screamed. Blood poured from his ears and nose. One thick, red tear ran from the corner of one eye and Terrance put his police issued .45 in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His body remained standing for an entire second, then collapsed onto AJ, the dead weight of the man pinning him to the ground and soaking him with blood.

AJ shut his eyes against the sting of the other man’s blood and struggled to roll the corpse off him.

“Goddamn it, Logan, help me!”

Logan fired his gun twice more and the last two creepers dropped to the ground. He swiveled and grabbed Terrance by the belt at the back of his pants and, with one hand, threw him across the room. AJ jumped to his feet, the book still in his hands.

“Where is she?” he asked. “Clover?
Clover
!”

He started toward the front door, stepping on a hot shell casing and burning the sole of his foot, picking his way through shattered corpses and piles of dust, the result of his handiwork. He heard Logan coming after them and they reached the front door together, AJ a step ahead of him.

All he could see were tail lights in the distance, lighting up the rooster tail of dust from the dirt road as they receded.

“NO!”

Logan ran past him, slamming another magazine into his shotgun as he ran. He climbed on his bike and drove his foot down to start it, but instead of the roar AJ had expected, there was a sputter, and a cough, and then nothing. It was only then that AJ saw the tangled wires coming from the engine of the bike and the four flat tires John’s car was sitting on.

The tail lights crested a slight hill and then dropped out of sight when it reached the other side.

AJ felt his legs give out beneath him and he collapsed into the dirt, the book laying forgotten at his side.

She was gone.

CHAPTER NINE

Daed Sixxez physically recoiled when Terrance Wills took his own life. An explosion of stigmatic pain rocked through Daed’s head, but His pure, absolute rage pushed it away. He put His hands upon His face, an expression beneath them a mask of grotesque fury.

“So...Fucking...CLOSE!” He screamed, digging fingernails into pale flesh the color of dirty snow. He raked trenches in the flesh, opening wounds, which oozed a black, viscous ichor.

But what was done was done. It was time to focus on what He had. The girl.

* * * * *

AJ sat slumped against the wall, waiting for the ambulance to come. He was pale and looked extremely ill. The gash on his forehead was still bleeding. The look of utter loss and defeat was painted sadly across his face. AJ laid his hands across it, fingertips on his forehead, in much the same way Daed Sixxez had in a place beneath the city.

AJ knew then why his hand had been guided to Steve when it had held the gun and he would have given anything to be able to go back and pull that trigger. In the distance, he could hear the slow warble of an ambulance and he turned his thoughts from Clover to John. He’d been shot at point-blank range with a .38 in the shoulder. Lubbock had been coherent enough to tell them he couldn’t feel his arm, couldn’t move it, and did they think he might die?

AJ slammed his fists against the ground. “Fuck!” He looked up at Logan, who had retrieved the book from the dust of the front yard where AJ had dropped it and hadn’t put it down since. He did, however, seem vaguely uncomfortable holding it. He could smoke the fucking thing for all AJ cared.

There was blood everywhere. His own blood, John’s blood, a whole lot of Terrance’s blood.

AJ leaned his abused head in his hands; it felt like it would never stop hurting. There he sat, until the ambulance came, his tears quietly mixing with his blood, wishing he had listened and pulled the trigger when fate had asked.

* * * * *

They sat in the waiting room, doing just that. AJ had no idea what time it was and wouldn’t have cared anyway. The stitches in his forehead itched under the bandage and his head still hurt despite the Vicodin.

They knew John was alive but that was all. No one had come to update them on the fact or to tell them of his condition. AJ looked down at his hands and scratched dried blood off the backs of them, off his knuckles. His pants and shirt were stiff with it and it felt awful against his skin.

Was she alive or dead?

He felt a sick rolling in his body and was afraid that the next time he saw her, maybe her throat would be torn out, like his mom’s had been. Her hair would be robbed of its shine by death, her perfect smile a homicidal smirk. He thought of her deep green eyes turned to black.

Stop!
he yelled inside his head. Thinking about it wouldn’t help anything. She would be okay; she had to be. He stopped the immediate doubt from surfacing as best he could.Logan tapped his leg and motioned toward the door. AJ looked up and saw John’s doctor enter the waiting room. They went to him.

“How is he?” AJ asked.

“He’s alive,” the doctor replied. “The bullet clipped his collarbone on the left side, otherwise it might have just gone straight through. Instead…well, he’s also suffered some nerve-and-tendon trauma.” The doctor checked his chart again. “He may also lose some or all use of his left arm, but only time will tell us that.”

“Can we see him?” AJ asked.

“Not tonight. He needs his rest. There were some complications in removing the bullet, and some fragments of bone, and he had to be heavily sedated. I’m not sure you could wake him up even if I allowed a visit.”

“Then when?” AJ shuddered as he thought of bone fragments.

“Why don’t you two go get some rest? Come back tomorrow and we’ll make sure you get to see your friend.”

They thanked him and turned to leave. Outside they were met by a police car and they got in. AJ had seen enough police cars to last him the rest of his life. He knew the cops were doing everything they could for him but that wasn’t the point.

He felt like for the remainder of his days, he would be reminded of this monstrous reality that surrounded him, seeming to permeate and poison everything he once knew; every time he saw a cop or an ambulance or even a goddamn hotel room he would revisit the pain and carnage that had fallen out of time and landed on his shoulders, doing everything it could to break them.

AJ rode in silence, not knowing where he was going and not caring. All he knew was that when he got there, Clover wouldn’t be. She was now in the hands of some horrible amalgamation of evil and flesh.

All of this had hit him out of nowhere but he accepted it. He had always been a big believer in karma and fate. But what had she done to deserve this? She had been thrust into the thick of it along with him. He knew he would spend the rest of his life with her, if he ever got her back. His one true love had been snatched away from him and stolen in the night and there was not a thing he could do about it. Yet.

He thought all these things, unable to stop himself, and it slowly carved away at his insides, hollowing out a special place for those particular sorrows. John Lubbock was there and he might never use his left arm again. His parents were there and all they had done was take in a helpless, orphaned child. Clover was there simply because she seemed to be nowhere else.

These thoughts were small, bitter knives, and when they cut, it hurt in a way he never thought possible. AJ was far older now than he had been only one short week ago. And how old would he be when this was all over? Assuming the world wasn’t choked and beaten to death by every collective nightmare it held, what was all this doing to him? He felt like he was slowly losing his mind, a person at a time.

Would it be possible for him to lead a normal life? He supposed it was a bit late to ask for a standard one, but he would settle for less.

Just give her back to me, he prayed. Just give her back. He turned in his seat and looked at Logan, and before he could stop himself, the question popped out of AJ’s mouth.

“Do you think Clover’s alive?”

Logan flinched at the mention of her name. “I can’t possibly answer that question, AJ. This is not a situation I’ve ever been in.”

“Couldn’t you
hold council
or whatever it is you do? Talk to Them?”

“I could try, but I can’t guarantee it’ll work. And if it does, you must be prepared for the fact that you may not like what I tell you.”

AJ nodded and swallowed hard. “I have to know, one way or another.”

“You love her.”

“More than anything.” AJ took another drag. “Have you ever, you know...loved anyone?”

“Love is not my Purpose,” Logan said.

“But that’s not what I asked.” There was a long silence and AJ was about to abandon hope of an answer when Logan finally spoke up.

“I did once. As much as something like me can, I suppose I loved her.”

“Who was she?” AJ asked as another question popped into his head. “
When
was she?”

“Annette was her name. In New Orleans, early 1900s. Not this New Orleans, though. One a little higher up.”

AJ let that last bit go. “What happened?”

“She aged and died. I didn’t. Then I was called again. I wonder sometimes...but it’s irrelevant. Love isn’t in my Purpose.”

“So what would you do if this all ends? With me, I mean. If I succeed?”

“If Daed Sixxez were banished from this level?” Logan seemed to be asking the question to himself, as if he had never considered it before. “I’d just go on, I suppose. The Entities would show me where. There’s always work for my kind.”

“What’s all this about levels? You’ve mentioned that a couple of times.”

“There isn’t one world, one existence. Everything that has ever happened or will ever happen in your world is on one level. There are six others.”

“Are they like this one?” AJ asked with a childlike sense of awe in his voice.

“Some of them.” The words hung in the air, the conversation faded.

* * * * *

Clover opened her eyes. One of them, anyway. The other was swollen shut. Her head felt like a rotting tooth; wave after wave of pain kicked her into consciousness. Her lips had been split open and some of her hair had been pulled out.

Clover found herself in a large, round room, with walls made of old, ugly brick. The lighting was dim, a sickly green luminance with an undeterminable origin.

She couldn’t move her arms, they were outstretched as if she had been crucified. She turned her head left and right and understood why she couldn’t move them. Hell, she couldn’t even see them from below her elbow. They were encased in a dark grey substance that seemed organic, although what it could be she had no idea. She could feel it slowly moving around her arms and legs, the sensation against her skin was like putting your arms in a barrel packed tightly with huge, sedated worms.

It was warm but not in a pleasant way. The heat emanating from it was ill, feverish. From her arms it grew out on either side, spreading up and down the curve of the greasy stone. Along the floor it ran back to her feet and held her legs up to the knees.

She struggled against it to free herself, feeling the grip on her arms and legs tighten. It twisted as it clenched, wrenching her left arm painfully. She immediately stopped her struggle but the pain didn’t stop in her arms or in her legs and it felt like her arm was being ripped off or at least broken off and—

Only when her body slumped back into unconsciousness did the pressure on her arms relent.

It was dark, but a soft darkness, penetrated only by the small candle that was flickering on the table. Her eye wasn’t swollen and she didn’t have a bald patch where hair had been pulled out. Her arms were still outstretched, not out but up. It was all right, though, she put them there. In her hands were AJ’s, her eyes were closed and he kissed her deeply. They had been under the covers at first, just lying there naked in each other’s arms, and he warmed her up by holding her and just by being there. She said something about him being like an oven and he smiled and kissed her on the forehead. It had made her feel a like a little kid. Her mom had always kissed her on the forehead...but this was different, this was more. He looked into her eyes and he thought to her. She heard it in her head as clear as if he’d spoken it.

I love you. Can you hear me?
She smiled her answer and took her arms from around his back and put them around his neck and rolled onto her back, bringing him on top of her. She looked up at him and he filled the world, he was all there was and all that mattered was that he was there with her. She had bitten her lower lip to stifle a moan when he entered her and it was the only one she had been able to stop.

It was slow for a long time, an excruciatingly pleasant eternity, then it was faster and there was bliss there was love and oh god it was never like this before, never thought it could be and it seemed to go on forever, to go on and on until she thought the pleasure would softly kill her and his whole body flexed on top of hers, in hers, and she did the same and it was pure and it was perfect. AJ took her hands in his and stretched them up above her head. Well, not really above her head, more out to the sides and what was she thinking? He wasn’t on top of her, he was in front of her, standing in front of her, his greasy hands cupping her chin. His hands were cold, his nails ragged and digging into her skin. And when he kissed her it wasn’t love, it was hate, it was pain and fear. His tongue had been soft and sexy and moist and warm before but now it hurt, it was slimy and poisonous. It was a snake and it wasn’t AJ, not all, it was Him, she—

She opened her eyes with a scream and saw Him, walking slowly toward her from the tunnel on the other side of the chamber. The light, that dead, green light was His, He commanded it. It followed Him, obeyed Him, hid His face from every angle, casting shadows where there shouldn’t be, like the shadow on her heart.

The scream died in her throat, having barely made it out at all.

Then it laughed, this cancerous silhouette laughed as it continued toward her. He spoke, and she recognized it. It was insanity. It was Gina Lancaster and Terrance Wills and Steve Nielsen and it was
Him
.

“Rise and shine,” He said and let out a small, lunatic cackle. That was when her bladder let go, she had no warning and no choice, just a warm stain spreading down the legs of her pants. Her stomach was a block of ice, her tears hot and stinging and just as sudden. Her body was racked with violent shivers as the air grew cold.

“Not feeling talkative, dear heart?” He asked her and laughed again. It was the sound of brain damage. He took a few final steps closer, was now no more than a foot from her, she was face to face with the physical form of a nightmare god. His hair was long, hanging down to the middle of His back in greasy strands. His skin was an imperfect white. Not pale, but
white
, as if He were covered in dirty clown makeup. His lips were dead and grey and smeared broadly in a hideous grin. His body was covered in scars, twisted and disgusting as the thing that wore them. She gasped in spite of herself as He took another step closer and she got her first good look into His eyes.