The 13th (25 page)

“We need a weapon,” Christy said, pulling David deeper into the dark hallway.

“Who needs a weapon when they’ve got you?” he answered.

Christy’s heart leaped just a bit when she heard him say that. There was something about this annoying biker kid that had gotten to her. Even if he’d screwed up her job by getting in the way of her car.

“Yeah, well, I can’t drop-kick a couple dozen people all at once. And anyway, I think I bruised my foot on that guy.”

“Want me to rub it?”

“I thought you were all hell-bent on rescuing the pink-haired chick? I don’t give my feet to just anyone to rub. Especially someone else’s anyone.”

David felt like a fool. “You’re right,” he said. He didn’t know why he was flirting with the cop…He was here for Brenda. Who, at the moment, was about to be sacrificed by a bunch of demon-worshipping freaks. “What did you have in mind for a weapon?”

Christy felt her stomach sink. He was still stuck on the barfly. “Well, I don’t have my gun…but we
ought to be able to find something heavy down here. It’s a basement, for Christ’s sake!”

She turned a corner David knew all too well.

“Not this way,” he said.

She looked back at him, and David suddenly realized, even in the dark, just how brown her eyes were. Mentally, he slapped himself. What the hell?

“The Terror Twins were locked in the room down here,” he explained. “If there’d been weapons…I know they would have used ’em.”

“Good point,” she agreed.

They turned the other way and found themselves back in the room where the twelve mothers had been held. The cattle-call room, David thought.

They stepped inside and David said, “There’s not going to be anything here,” but Christy ignored him, walking to one of the places vacated by a victim. All that remained from that captivity was a length of silver chain on the wall, but Christy pulled over a wooden box and stepped up to remove the chain from its hook. Then she stepped down and began to wave the heavy links through the air, narrowly missing David’s face.

“Useful?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Then take it.” Christy tossed the heavy links his way and stepped up on the box to remove its companion for herself.

She stepped down and twirled the iron links in the air with a nearly audible fan. Her eyes looked hard at David’s, and even in the dull light of the flickering candles, he could see that she was drop-dead serious.

“Let’s go get your girl,” she said.

David gulped. It was damn hard to talk about going to rescue a girl you barely knew when there was
a hot blonde standing naked in front of you, belly button and everything it flanked so tantalizingly just feet from your own stuff. A part of him wanted to forget about Brenda at that moment and reach his hands out to cup the gorgeous cop’s…

“I don’t think the gods are going to wait for you to make up your mind,” Christy whispered.

David realized he’d been simply standing and staring at her. And the evidence of it was rising.

“I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I…I…” “Thanks,” Christy said, and stepped forward.

His eyes couldn’t seem to pull back from the bounce of her breasts.

“You’ve gotta take a side,” she said. “I’ll help you if you want.”

She looked directly into his eyes then, and David could see what his indecision was doing to her. She wanted him. It was written all over her face.

“You can’t have us both,” she said. “And if you don’t choose fast, you may lose us both.”

She stepped past him and he watched the muscles working in her ass as she did…

Christy stepped through the door, chain swinging from her hand. David shook his head. He’d come here to save Brenda. He didn’t even know if Brenda wanted him to save her. But they had had a connection. And he had to play true to that. Christy was amazing but…

“Let’s break some heads,” he said, joining her in the hall, swirling a chain to match her own.

Christy stifled the hot flood that threatened her eyes, and only nodded. “Follow me,” she finally said.

The room had quieted since they’d left, and in their unclad state, nobody seemed to notice as David and Christy quietly paced their way around the
thick of the crowd to arrive at the side of the stage. The townspeople were too enraptured watching the live porn of Rockford going down on Brenda.

David had to stifle the urge to run to the scene when he saw the doctor on top of “his girl,” but Christy gripped his shoulder.

“You won’t do her any good if you get whacked before you get to her.”

He stifled the urge to break all heads, and instead focused on getting close enough to break one in particular.

“Argehnti, Eifel ast en higs’ e’ ti!”
Amelia said, standing next to the couple on the floor and scattering some kind of herb or essence with one hand as she raised her other to the ceiling and called out foreign syllables.

“S’ in puer de se ate in leg-see!”
With that, Amelia held both hands out to the crowd. Her breasts streamed with the blood of the twelve mothers, and her thighs were equally smeared with the evidence of their former lives. “This is the moment,” she called out. Her voice sounded almost orgasmic. “This is the moment that Astarte has dreamed of for centuries. This is the moment that our god is crea—”

Amelia didn’t finish her sentence because a chain suddenly whipped through the air and cracked with a loud snap against the side of her face. Christy did not normally revel in violence, but this time, she felt no remorse whatsoever for slinging pain.

Rockford lifted himself up to thrust into the Thirteenth, but felt something press against his neck. He reached back to grasp at the distraction, and was suddenly pulled back.

“That will be enough of that,
Doctor
Rockford,” David said, yanking hard on the chain looped around the doctor’s neck. Rockford coughed and rolled away
from the girl, gripping at the chain pulled tight around his throat.

Before the crowd quite realized what had happened, David and Christy had quickly overturned the ceremony of the Thirteenth, rolling both of the high priests to the ground. David grabbed Brenda’s hand and yanked her to her feet.

“What the…”

“Not now,” he said, and screamed at both women. “Upstairs, now!”

They broke for the stairwell, but the crowd surged forward.

“Just go,” Christy said, pushing David forward. “Get her out of here.”

He turned and began to argue, but a fat, naked older woman grabbed at his arm. Christy kicked the woman in the stomach, and then in a pivot turn took down a younger guy with a goatee.

“Just get the fuck out of here,” she screamed.

David gripped Brenda’s hand tight and pulled her toward the stairs.

“Where are we going?” Brenda asked, still slightly foggy from her ethereal experience on the floor.

“Consider this my version of taking you for a walk around the bar,” he said, and dragged her up the first step. Behind them, a woman screamed. David tried not to think about whether the voice matched the profile of Christy’s or not.

Leaves bit into their calves as they ran barefoot through the weeds. The mood shone overhead in an eerie spotlight that set the woods alight with spectral luminance. David wiped a tear from his face as he heard screams and cries from behind them…muffled, but still cries of pain. Who was going down in the hotel?

The wind picked up as they raced toward where he’d secreted his bike, and the trees swayed above them with their own groans.

“Here it is,” David said at last, reaching down to pull his bike from the ditch.

“We can’t get back to town on that!” Brenda laughed, but David didn’t flinch.

“Get on,” he said.

“Oh shit,” she murmured, but she did as he asked, and in seconds, David could feel the bristle of her crotch pressing against the swell of his butt as he stepped hard onto the pedal. He couldn’t think about the soft flesh that rested against his back. The flesh that, counter to every male fantasy he’d ever indulged, he now wished was clothed. Brenda was a distraction, but if she was going to live to be a distraction for a second date, he couldn’t let the feel of her against him matter now.

“Hold on,” he said, and they were on the road.

The first few meters down the gravel were tough,
but then David turned onto the asphalt of 190 and felt his legs at last get some response from the wheels. He pumped harder, and felt Brenda rise to press against him, not to tantalize, but rather to work with him to make his work easier.

Rise and fall, rise and fall their bodies went…

“Why?” a voice breathed in his ear.

“Huh?”

“Why did you come back for me?”

David didn’t have to think. “Why did you walk me around the Clam Shack? Why did you get me a pitcher of water?”

“Hardly the same thing,” she gasped, working to keep up with him. The road passed beneath them in a pale snake of asphalt and yellow lines.

“It’s exactly the same thing.”

Behind them, a light flickered on. In seconds, they could hear an engine, as the light drew closer.

“Maybe it’s just someone on the highway from the Falls,” Brenda whispered.

“Don’t bet on it,” he said. “You’re supposed to become the mother of a damn demon…I don’t think they’re letting you just walk out of there, no sweat.”

Brenda leaned in and laughed in his ear. Her voice made David’s toes tingle—which was good, since the spikes of the bike pedals were now biting into the soles of his feet so hard he could feel blood begin to flow.

“And you came to rescue me on a bicycle,” she said. “How sweet. Did you bring a cap gun by any chance?”

“Do you want to spend the night in a ditch?” he huffed.

“Only if it’s with you.”

“Now I remember why I fell in love with you,” he said, closing his eyes as he pressed down hard on the pedals. The lights behind them were now almost blinding.

Brenda didn’t say anything for a moment.

“You love me,” she said at last. Her voice struggled to remain neutral.

“No,” he said. The worst part of the uphill climb of 190 was now almost behind them. Just a few more yards…

“No, I just risked my life and got naked in front of half the town so that I could say I attended an orgy. Hate to miss out on shit like that. I mean, life’s short and all…”

Brenda flipped one long pink strand of hair back and massaged his shoulders as his body rose and fell in front of her, trying to give him some kind of energy as he struggled to pull them up the hill. “Shut up and pump,” she said, wrapping her arms around him.

“I’ve been dreaming of you saying that since…”

“I mean it. Shut up and PUMP!” she yelled as the headlights behind them grew blinding. The car engine revved and David knew that it was only a matter of seconds before the car clipped them. He was a good cyclist, maybe good enough after this summer of training to make the Olympics, but he couldn’t compete with a car. Especially while pedaling uphill and barefoot.

“Hold on,” he warned, and pulled the bike to the right, away from the drop-off to the valley.

The car barreled by, but instantly the air was colored in red as the brake lights lit. David pulled his own hand brakes and the bike slid to a halt.

“What are you doing?”

“We can’t outrun them on a bike,” David said. “We either fight or get away off-road on foot.”

“Right,” Brenda said. “I have my getaway shoes tucked right here in my…oh shit, I forgot my bag at the demonic orgy. Whatever will I do?”

David skidded out the back tire and cursed as he
put one tender foot to the asphalt. “One word,” he answered. “Run.”

All four doors of the black sedan opened a few meters ahead of them and several figures got out and wasted no time in thinking. Feet were in motion, and headed toward David and Brenda.

“Where?” she said, looking around in panic. The left-hand side of the road dropped into a gulley that would have killed a mountain goat, and the right wasn’t much better; the rock face simply rose up instead of down.

“Straight ahead,” David decided. He grabbed her hand and let the bike fall as they raced forward. He saw that Captain Ryan was one of the men to leave the car, as was Rockford. Amelia and the man he’d begun to think of as the Butcher had slipped out of the back of the car and both held long knives at the ready. The steel glinted dangerously in the moonlight.

“Straight ahead…Into the fire?” she gasped.

“Around it,” he huffed. For a few seconds he led them almost straight toward the cliff, but then, just as the group had turned to intercept them there, at the rock wall, David gave Brenda’s hand a harder yank and pulled her to slant left toward the valley. The deception worked and in a second the two were running hard past the car as the group behind scrambled to follow.

“They…will…just…get…back…in…the…car,” Brenda gasped as they ran together hand in hand.

“Maybe,” David answered. “But maybe…we’ll be…in…a…better…”

Brenda yanked David’s hand and then suddenly let go. He turned to look just in time to see the fist that met him in the eye.

The sky suddenly moved…and then flickered…out.

“You really should have listened to me,” Aunt Elsie said. Her voice seemed to come from far away, afloat on a sea of voices and murmurs. As he struggled to wake up, David saw in his mind’s eye a flash of disparate, yet connected images;
Brenda and her pink hair. The Clam Shack loud and blurry at midnight. The old hotel, Castle Point. A mob of townspeople sacrificing women in the hotel’s basement
…Then he heard his aunt’s voice again and felt her hand stroke his forehead. “Everything’s okay,” she murmured.

A grin grew on his face, as he struggled to wake. He must have tied some kinda drunk on last night, he thought. Hearing Elsie’s voice, he knew that all those weird memories were somehow just a part of the delusion; he must’ve been drinking a LOT.

But then Elsie ran her fingers through his hair and said something else. “Everything’s okay now that the Thirteenth is here again.”

David’s eyes popped open. The first thing he saw was Aunt Elsie’s kind, wrinkled face above his, rheumy eyes staring down at his head lying in her lap. The next thing he saw was that she wasn’t wearing any clothes, and before his mind could absorb every blue vein and age spot that ran from her throat across tiny, sagging breasts to her stretch-mark-scarred belly, he wrenched his face away.

But the view in the other direction wasn’t much
better. A fat man’s hairy back blocked his line of sight until he sat up, which he did almost as soon as he realized that his nightmares hadn’t been dreams at all. Gingerly holding a palm over the raw, swollen left eye, David looked up at the stage and saw that all of his pedaling had been for naught. The Butcher held Brenda’s arms to the sky as Rockford and Amelia ran their fingers up and down Brenda’s ribs and flanks. They looked as if they were worshipping her every pore. They mouthed some kind of chant, but he didn’t even try to focus on the words.

Elsie rubbed his neck and leaned over to whisper, “The hour of the Thirteenth was almost passed…but they brought you two back just in time. In a few minutes the god incarnate will be among us, entrusted to the womb of your very own girl. You should consider yourself lucky. If you stay with her, the god will surely be generous with you both.”

David yanked away from his aunt, the woman who had cradled him as a baby and played catch with him in her backyard as a kid. He took one look at her, ignoring the wrinkled skin below her neck. He saw the face of a crone; the face of someone he didn’t know at all. Where was the kindly old woman who’d cooked him a hangover breakfast?

“I was here the last time they tried the ceremony of the Thirteenth,” Elsie said. “It’s been a long wait for it to happen again. And this time, we won’t let anybody stop it.”

Something cold pressed against his neck, and before he could react, his aunt had pulled herself closer to him again. “Settle down, sport, or you’ll join the bodies up there.” She pointed at the dead women cast around the stage like gruesome props. “I don’t need to do anything more than push like this…” She demonstrated with a little pressure how easily the pain could start. David felt something
hot trickle down his neck. “…and you’ll never be able to watch
Jeopardy
with me again.”

Her free arm wrapped around his chest and David flinched for the first time in his life at a hug from his favorite aunt. He tried not to think about the flesh that was pressing itself to him from behind, and focused only on the scene on the stage.

“Bring us the blood of the twelve mothers,” Amelia called to the crowd, and for the second time that night, they lined up at the front of the stage. “Kiss the Thirteenth, and press the life you’ve taken to her. The blood of the mothers will coagulate and transform in the one.”

The first in line was an old man—Mr. Gordon from the supermarket. He pressed his entire body against Brenda as he ran his hands, sticky with the gore of a dozen slaughtered women and children, up and down her smooth body. Then he tried to kiss her, with an anxious, forceful tongue.

Brenda spit at him when he stepped back, but the man only spread two rows of yellowing teeth and laughed.

“Quickly,” Amelia cautioned. “There are only minutes left and you all must give what you have taken to her before Dr. Rockford can finish it.”

The line moved faster then, grandmother, trucker, coed and priest, bartender, auto monkey, receptionist, bum…each taking Brenda in their arms to enjoy their brief taste of her flesh.

She didn’t spit again, but her face ran wet with tears. The taste in her mouth was sour and bitter and…gross, was all she could think to describe it. She closed her eyes and tried to bear it, because she couldn’t begin to escape from the grip of the Butcher; his hands on hers were a vise.

It may have been the smoke from the candles, but Brenda didn’t think so. It felt like the air around her grew thicker, heavier, palpable. As the murderous mob came one by one to embrace her in their bloody sweat, she could feel other touches against her…Feathery, cold ones. And when she opened her eyes, from the side she thought she saw movement, a fleeting glance of a face that disappeared in the air like smoke.

David saw the people touching his girl…He realized as the thought passed that he labeled her as “his girl.” He was ready to die to make sure that she got out of this place. He considered his chances of turning on Elsie before she severed his jugular…If she went deep, before he’d gotten Brenda off the stage, then he had done no good at all.

Amelia whistled as if she were calling a dog. The mumbling ambient noise dropped off and she held her hands up to the crowd. “We have sent the blood of the twelve mothers to Ba’al and their babies to the mother, Astarte,” she said. “And you have given it back to the Thirteenth through your hands. Now, we call Ba’al, and if our sacrifices were good, he will be among us…and we will be his.”

David shuddered as he looked at Brenda on the stage. Her breasts glimmered wetly in the firelight, and the smears from dozens of hands left her body clothed in a chocolaty smear of blood. If nothing else, at least some of her nakedness was covered by the blood of the mothers.

“Fuck,” David said. “How do I help you?”

His aunt turned to answer, digging in the knife just a little more. “Maybe you could start by helping her to meet her destiny instead of running from it.”

Rockford took Brenda by the shoulders, and began to push her toward the ground. The crowd began to
cheer, and someone started to chant, “Astarte, Ba’al, Astarte, Ba’al.” The whole room took up the cry.

David began to move, forgetting the knife at his throat, but Elsie wasn’t forgetting. It dug into his flesh and he cried out, at the same time as Brenda, who Rockford had finally pushed all the way to the floor.

For the first time in the whole ordeal, David finally felt truly, completely afraid. Not for his life, but for what was coming. As the townspeople milled around and chanted at the stage, the air seemed to grow murkier in the already-shadowy room. It was as if a cloud had passed overhead, but it didn’t go away. While the flames on the side of the room continued to gutter and sway, their impact lessened as the inky blackness grew from the ceiling. It twisted and moved, and then David saw something emerging like a funnel from the center. Something that almost glowed black in the darkness. But in its center, there was something lighter. Two somethings. Somethings that moved in slow motion to circle the room until they came to rest on him.

Eyes.

The cloud had grown a head and eyes that found him. He tried to look away, but couldn’t…The thing held his gaze like a magnet, and David felt tears begin to stream down his cheeks as it slid through the oily air to grow closer, so close that he could see the deep black holes in the center of the yellowed eyeballs. Holes that you could get sucked into, he thought, as his groin turned over inside him. Even as his stomach quailed, his groin burned at the gaze of the demon, and suddenly David knew that all was lost. In a heartbeat he had gone from crushing fear to burning desire at the look of the thing. If this was what Rockford and Amelia were calling, then no man would prevail against it. The thing was
lust incarnate, and David strained against the knife to move closer. He needed it. Needed…

Elsie whispered in his ear, “Not for you. Not now.”

And with that the demon’s gaze flipped away, back to the stage where Rockford knelt between the legs of David’s girl.

Amelia invoked the demons from her place on the stage and someone in the room screamed, “At last, the god, at last.”

That’s when the gunshot echoed through the room.