Bestial (41 page)

Meanwhile, to the left of Taggart, a naked man grabbed Vanessa Peterman and shouted, “Kill her! Kill her, Gavin,
kill her
!” Another gunshot sounded to Ella’s left. Vanessa fell to the floor of the stage, then rolled down the steps.

When Taggart turned back to the crowd, his eye fell directly on Ella as she broke through the group. Taggart’s eye bulged and his upper lip curled back to reveal fangs.

Clutching the forks in her fists, Ella stopped, bent her knees, then lunged forward, planning to jump over the three steps and land directly on Taggart.

At that moment, several gunshots went off in rapid succession from the left side of the sanctuary.

Ella was in mid-air, on her way to Taggart, ready to plunge those forks into his body.

As if from nowhere, a growling werewolf slammed into her on the right and tackled her. Her left side hit the floor under her assailant’s weight and air gushed out of her lungs. The flatware in her bag jangled out over the floor as the other werewolf closed its snout on Ella’s neck.

After Taggart spoke to the beautiful girl with the long, dark, honey-gold hair, Cynthia watched her turn, hurry away, and disappear behind a large planter filled with artificial greenery. She did not allow herself time to think about the fact that the girl was her daughter, that she had given birth to her only four months ago, or that had it not been for Ella, she would have been fed to the girl that night like a plump, pink baby rat to a pet snake. Breaking away from Ella, Cynthia shouldered her way through the crowd as confusion broke out in response to the gunshots.

She leaped up the three steps onto the stage and rushed past Taggart, who was much too distracted to notice her. Cynthia ducked around the plastic plants, went behind the baptistery, and through the passageway, hurrying to catch up with the girl. She turned left into the corridor behind the sanctuary just in time to see the girl go through a doorway to the right.

Cynthia hurried after her, stopped outside the door and peered around the doorjamb into the room. It was a large room with folding chairs and tables against a couple of the walls. Through a rectangular opening in the wall to the far right, she saw a kitchen.

The girl stood at a window across the room, looking out at the night.

Cynthia clenched the fork in her hand and quietly went into the room.

Martin Burgess’s eighteen “troops” arrived in two SUVs, which parked in front of the strip mall across the street from the church. They wasted no time. Lloyd Canwright led them across Crozier Street. A car stopped abruptly in the street when its headlights fell on the group of beefy men carrying Uzis and wearing camouflaged tactical vests loaded down with grenades, ammunition magazines, pistols, and knives.

Lloyd wore a whistle on a chain around his neck. Once they were inside and doing what they had come to do, the whistle would be their signal to get out.

They had already agreed to break up into three groups of six—one was to go into the church through the front, another through the rear, and the third was to try to find a side entrance.

Lloyd was still absorbing the last phone conversation he’d had with Mr. Burgess, who had explained exactly what was going on in Big Rock, why they were going in, exactly where they were to go, and what they were supposed to do when they got there. Lloyd had passed this information on to the other men.

They had been slowed down late that afternoon by mechanical problems with the jet Mr. Burgess had sent for them. When they’d landed in Eureka, the two SUVs Mr. Burgess had arranged were waiting for them, each driven by an employee of Mr. Burgess’s who knew exactly where they were going.

Werewolves,
Lloyd thought as he and the others walked by the long rectangular sign into which was carved the words SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST CHURCH.
Who knew there were fuckin’ werewolves anywhere? This just proves that I’m right—there’s a whooole lotta shit goin’ on in this world that we don’t know a fuckin’ thing about.

Mr. Burgess had explained that it might be difficult to tell who was a werewolf and who wasn’t if they were in their human form. Lloyd hoped this wasn’t the case. He didn’t want to shoot the wrong people, but neither did he want to have to pussyfoot around about who to shoot and who not to shoot.

The men split up into their three prearranged groups. Lloyd’s group was going in through the front, so he led the five other men straight up the steps and through the glass doors in front. As soon as they were in the empty foyer, Lloyd heard the howling and screaming coming from the sanctuary. The crack of a gunshot was soon followed by another, then a succession of shots.

Lloyd and the others exchanged a look as P.J. Galt, a thick-necked, tattooed redneck with a lump of chewing tobacco under his lip, said, “What the fuck is
that
?”

Lloyd went to the big wooden double doors that stood open across the foyer and looked into the sanctuary. What he saw and smelled made him a little dizzy.

“Holy shit,” he said as the other men joined him.

Cyrus Cooper, a tall, broad, muscular black man with a shaved head who vaguely resembled a human gun safe, said, “Is this them?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lloyd said. “Gotta be.”

“We take ‘em out?” Cyrus said.

“Yeah, take ‘em out,” he said. Then he smiled and chuckled and muttered to himself. “Take-out.”

Lloyd stepped into the sanctuary, leveled his Uzi, and sent a spurt of fire into the backs of the hairy creatures standing at the rear of the crowd. Those hit spun and dropped to the floor, crying out in pain. Others turned to see what was wrong, saw the wounded writhing on the floor and screaming in agony, then saw Lloyd and the men spreading out on either side of him.

“Ooooo
kay
!” Lloyd shouted at the top of his lungs. “Who ordered the take-out?”

The sanctuary filled with the sharp, sputtering sound of machine gun fire as Lloyd and his group began to mow down werewolves.

Still holding the forks in her fists, Ella buried her fangs into the arm of her tackler, ground her jaws together and buried them deep. The creature released its bite on her neck and shrieked in pain. She took advantage of the moment and rolled on top of her assailant, then tore at the werewolf’s throat with her fangs.

With her attacker’s blood in her mouth, Ella quickly got to her feet. She knew the other werewolf would heal quickly, but that the wound would give her the time she needed. She took a brief second to push from her mind the pain of her bleeding neck wound, then looked up at Taggart on the stage. He was transforming, his muscles bulging to rip through his uniform and reveal his rapidly-thickening fur. Beyond him, she saw Cynthia hurrying behind some artificial plants.

From the rear of the sanctuary, the thick, menacing rattle of a machine gun cut through all the noise. Someone shouted something in the back, but Ella’s attention was focused on Taggart.

Taggart’s eye—silver now as he transformed—was darting around the stage like that of a cornered animal as several machine guns began to fire in the rear of the sanctuary.

Ella sprang toward him again, holding the forks up at each side, ready to drive them into Taggart.

As she shot toward him through the air, the corners of his mouth pulled back over his snout as if in a smile. At the last instant, he swung his right leg up high and hard. His foot landed in Ella’s solar plexus. A moment after the kick, he lost his footing and fell backward.

The second time she hit the floor, everything went dark for a moment.

Hunched forward slightly, Cynthia rushed across the room without a sound. She pounced on the girl’s back, swung her right arm around hard and drove the fork into her daughter’s throat.

An elbow swung back and stabbed into Cynthia’s gut hard enough to knock her to the floor.

The girl turned around, the fork jutting from her throat, and looked down at Cynthia. She frowned slightly as she reached up and jerked the fork out, then held it up and looked it over, as if she’d never seen one before.

Gasping for breath and hurting from the elbow to the abdomen, Cynthia quickly got to her feet. She expected the girl to drop the floor and start screaming from the pain created by the silver. Instead, she simply continued to examine the fork.

Something wasn’t right. Had Ella been mistaken about the flatware? Was it made of something other than silver?

Cynthia shifted the knife from her left hand to her right and prepared to attack again the creature that was her daughter.

The girl’s eyes moved slowly from the fork to Cynthia. She smiled, and her transformation happened smoothly and quickly, with virtually none of the bone-popping, muscle-tearing sounds that usually accompanied it.

She’s different,
Cynthia thought in a rush of panic.
She’s not like the others. Silver doesn’t hurt her!

The door to the left of the window burst open. Large, imposing men in camouflaged vests rushed into the room holding small, compact machine guns.

“Jesus Christ!” one of the shouted as he looked back and forth between Cynthia and the now hairy creature in the room with her.

Cynthia remembered how she looked and realized how frightening she must be to the armed men who gawked at her now, horrified. They raised their guns.

“Wait,
no
!” Cynthia shouted.

They opened fire. Three of them turned and sprayed bullets into the creature by the window.

Both werewolves went down.

The distraction of machine gun fire combined with all the pained, terrified screams and Abe’s rapid, unceasing stabs with the silverware allowed Karen to break away from the werewolves. As she stumbled out into the side aisle, she grabbed Abe’s arm and dragged him with her. His hands glistened with blood and red was splattered all over his shirt.

Chaos was breaking out in the sanctuary as the creatures tried to run screaming from the machine gun fire.

“That’s the backup Burgess said he was going to send,” Karen said to Abe, shouting to be heard. “Let’s get out of here.”

Toward the front of the sanctuary, about fifteen feet from them, was a side entrance. Werewolves were rushing out of it, but it had not yet become bottlenecked. Karen grabbed Abe’s arm and they jogged to the door. Once they got through it, they were in the church’s main corridor.

Karen’s heart hammered in her throat as she said, “God, I hope Gavin’s able to get out of there.”

Once they saw what Gavin’s bullets were capable of doing, the werewolves backed off. Those he had shot lay squirming and kicking in pain on the floor. Then the machine guns began to fire, and this seemed to worry the creatures. They quickly forgot about him.

Apparently, Burgess’s troops had arrived.

“
Finally
!” Gavin barked as he looked up at the stage and saw Bob standing there with his mouth hanging open, gawking at a werewolf at the foot of the steps in the final ugly moments of its life.

Just beyond Bob, Taggart struggled to his feet, his uniform in tatters on his hairy body now. As he stood, the sheriff kept his attention on something just in front of the stage. When Gavin followed Taggart’s gaze, he saw Ella on the floor. Bleeding and dazed, she tried to get up.

Gavin wanted to get Bob and Ella out of the church before they were killed in all the gunfire, but most importantly, he wanted to kill Taggart.

George had stopped thinking. He followed his sense of smell and taste, and his hunger. He wrestled one werewolf to the floor after another and tore their flesh away, chewing noisily as the wonderful taste of their blood filled his mouth. He did not keep track of the number of werewolves he had attacked, he just kept attacking them, eating chunks of them. Blood matted the fur around his snout and strips of glistening meat clung to his fangs.

He turned to attack another one—any one, it didn’t matter, the blood had him in a frenzy—and instead of a werewolf, he faced a broad-shouldered man with a black machine gun.

“Goodnight, Gracie!” the man shouted as he sprayed bullets into George’s chest and abdomen.

Suddenly, George found himself on the floor. The other werewolves trampled him as pain flowed through his body. He cried out as his skin opened up in wet, burning sores.

In spite of his pain and through the sound of his own agonized, dying shrieks, he was aware of the fact that he was still hungry.

Bob stood on the stage in a state of numb, paralyzed shock. His eyes did not move from Vanessa, who convulsed on the floor at the foot of the stage steps, her body bubbling with open, running sores. Her convulsions gradually slowed. Bob was certain she was dying, but he felt nothing in response to it. He felt nothing at all.

Hell was breaking out in the sanctuary—screams and howls, gunshots, machine gun fire. But Bob stood frozen, a slight frown creasing his brow. Bullets shattered the windows, a web of dark smoke began to rise from the rear half of the right column of pews and somewhere in the back of his mind, he understood that something was burning, probably one of the pew cushions, perhaps set off by all the gunfire.

 
A hand grabbed Bob’s left arm and shook him hard, startling him from his stupor. It was Gavin.