Darkest Hour (30 page)

The truck had landed on the passenger side, leaving him suspended in the driver’s seat by the seatbelt alone. The logic of his drive fast, drive hard plan was lost to him now, if it had ever existed in the first place. He had focused so much on providing a distraction for Kate, he forgot to worry about his own ass.

As this occurred to him, he heard a duet of screams. Vamp screams. He craned his neck, trying to see what it was about, but the front of the truck was turned away from the source. Had to be the two vamps that attacked him. The screams were close, maybe only a couple dozen yards from the truck. They didn’t sound like pissed-off vamps. They sounded like vamps in pain. A pleasant sound to Lockman, despite how it scraped at the eardrum like a jagged fingernail.

Lockman rolled down his window—amazingly un-cracked in the crash—and hooked his left arm out the door. He disengaged his seatbelt and dangled there by his arm until he could shift his legs around and get his feet under him. Using the steering wheel and the seat, he climbed down to the passenger side. He had set his AR-15 between the seats, but he spotted it in the back of the truck, almost all the way by the rear doors. With the passenger seat ripped out, Lockman easily climbed into the back to retrieve his rifle.

By the time he returned to the front, the screaming had turned to a soft mewling. Lockman slipped out of through the missing windshield and skirted the truck until he came upon the vamps.

The one from inside the truck lay on its back. The ragged hole in its face smoked like the open top of a Jack O’ Lantern with its candle recently blown out. Despite half its mouth missing, the vamp continued to whimper while it clenched its fists on either side of its head and twitched like a meth head in withdrawal.

The other vamp knelt on the ground, ducked down, with its hands over its head, the classic duck-and-cover pose. The skin on the backs of its hands and neck bubbled and hissed like fat on a griddle. Wisps of smoke came off its head as clumps of its hair fell out from where its hands didn’t cover.

Lockman looked up toward the sun, then he gazed across the compound’s central square. From here he could see half of the arch, which looked like it bloomed out of the roof of the science building. He couldn’t see Kate or Jessie. But Kate must have done something.

He returned his attention to the vamps before him.

They had stopped cooking. The wind carried off the last strands of smoke. Yet they both continued to weep like a pair of heartbroken teenage girls. New vamps. Fresh turns that had never felt the effects of sunlight as it was meant to be, and the experience had turned them into a couple of cry babies.

But whatever had disrupted their immunity to the light had passed. Once they realized this, they would eventually shake off the memory of pain and get back to the work of tearing Lockman apart.

Of course, he had no intention of giving them the chance.

He sprinted at the one on its knees first. Aside from his fall off the truck’s roof and the burns from the sun, it was otherwise unscathed. The larger threat. Lockman neutralized that threat by holding the barrel of his AR-15 a couple inches from the vamp’s head, opening fire, and obliterating its skull and everything inside.

The vamp with the chewed face must have heard the gunfire. It leapt to its feet and glared at Lockman with its one loose eye. Lockman had spent three-quarters of his rounds vaporizing the one vamp’s head. He pulled the magazine and replaced it with the fresh one from his side pocket. Even with this other vamp missing a chunk of its face, Lockman wouldn’t chance running out of ammo before he could fully destroy its head. Funny, but he would have been better armed if he’d thought to bring a machete instead of the rifle.

“Didn’t like that sun, did you?” Lockman said as he racked the bolt on the rifle. “You’re gonna like me even less.”

The vamp hissed out the hole in its face and bent at the knees as if to spring.

Lockman sighted down his rifle, aiming for the head, and held position. Decapitating a vamp with an automatic rifle required close range if he wanted to make sure and do it right. He didn’t have ammo to waste, and he didn’t have that machete. “Come on, asshole.”

The vamp hesitated. Didn’t like Lockman’s confidence. Lockman, on the other hand, hadn’t felt so cool and focused in months. Whatever his feelings on mojo, Kate had done a good job of fixing his head. It occurred to him the damage might have started a while before the massacre in Alaska. But Kate had hit a reset button on his psyche. If he could make it through this mess without losing anybody else close to him, maybe life on the other side could look like something normal. Could he hope for such a thing? A lot depended on what qualified as normal. That alone would take some figuring out. He wasn’t sure he would recognize
normal
if it came up and licked his face.

As far as faces were concerned, the vamp with little more than half of one took a step back. Getting burned by the sun had made it timid. As if to confirm this, the vamp glanced up at the sky. It blinked its good eye once, only the eyelid didn’t come down since the eye itself hung too low without the support of the bottom of the socket. Brackish blood dribbled off its chin and stained the Atlanta Braves logo on its shirt. It eyed Lockman again. Took another step back.

“You chicken shit son of a bitch.” Lockman closed in, the rifle’s stock tucked firmly against his shoulder, his aim held true. He couldn’t let the thing run off, after all. Fucked up face or not, if the creature found its way back to civilization, it could feast its way back to health with no one trained on how to stop it.

But the vamp matched Lockman’s approach with steps enough to keep the distance between them the same. It gurgled low in its throat and a squirt of blood popped out its ruined mouth. It raised a hand, palm out, in the universal
halt
gesture.

Lockman didn’t halt. He quickened his pace.

The vamp back-pedaled with equal speed. Lucky for Lockman, it hadn’t fully committed to fleeing. If it had turned to run away, it might have noticed the stone in the grass. Nothing huge. A little bigger than a kindergartener’s fist. Enough to hook the vamp’s heel as it scampered backward. The vamp’s one eye flashed in the instant it realized what was happening. Then it tripped backward with a solid flop.

Lockman rushed forward, planted a foot on the vamp’s chest, and emptied the magazine into the vamp’s face. The gunfire chewed through its head and into the ground below. Bloody chunks of skull, glops of brain matter, and clumps of dirt all mixed together to become one lumpy stain above the vamp’s shoulders.

Lockman tossed the rifle aside and looked toward the science building. His ears rang from the sustained gunfire. Something tickled his cheek. He wiped at it and his fingers came away red. The cut on his scalp was bleeding pretty good. Through the ringing, Lockman heard the clink of the halyard knocking against the flagpole in the breeze and the ripple and snap of the flag itself. Nothing else.

He stood shy of a hundred yards from the end of the arch obscured by the science building. He started running.

The crash had worked over his body hard. The nauseating ache in his belly exploded as he sprinted. Blood kept running into his eye. His head pounded. He acknowledged all these pains, then tucked them aside for later evaluation. His only goal now was to check on Kate. He knew she must have faced off with Gabriel. Somehow she had disrupted whatever mojo kept the vamps from melting in sunlight. She hadn’t stopped it, though. Which meant if her confrontation with Gabriel had ended, it hadn’t ended in Kate’s favor.

I never should have let her go after him alone.

What choice did he have, though?

I can’t lose another. I can’t. I won’t. I can’t...

His lungs turned to pure fire as he finally rounded the science building. He stumbled to a halt, panting, and if he could have caught his breath, he would have screamed until his throat burst.

Jessie stood over Kate, who lay on her back with a knife in her chest.

“Oops,” Jessie said, though it didn’t sound like her at all, because it
wasn’t
her at all. But they were
her
eyes shining above the wicked curve of
her
mouth. “I think I killed Mom.”

Chapter Forty-One

Mom?

Jessie. Somewhere in the dark. Kate’s heart raced. She couldn’t see. How could it be so damn dark. She threw her hands out in front of her, trying to find something in the utter blackness to get her bearings. Her hands skated through nothingness.

Had she fallen down a well?

No. If this was a well, she would have felt the walls and some light could come from the hole above. This was more like an underground cell.

Mom?

“Jessie,” Kate called out. “Where are you?”

That question sounded so familiar. The magic question. The question at the crux of everything. But Kate was having a hard time remembering things—

Like how I ended up in this pitch black vault
.

She took small, shuffling steps, waving her hands out in front of her, expecting to run into something or trip at any moment. She must have taken three dozen tiny steps or more, and still she walked through the blackness as if it went on forever.

Could it?

Mom!

“Don’t shout at me like that, young lady. You don’t talk to your mother in that tone.”

I’m here, Mom. Stop moving.

Kate froze. She listened. The word
silence
didn’t cut the total void of sound that pressed against her ears like a pair of hands. It was as though sound ceased to exist.

“Where are you, baby?”

I’m with you.

Then the obvious question. “Where am I?”

In between.

“In between what? For heaven’s sake, Jess, can’t you say more than three words at a time?”

No response.

A gnawing guilt took hold. Kate wrung her hands. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. Talk to me. Talk to me, please.”

A sharp line of light cut the black before her, as if someone had cracked a door open. The line thickened as the door opened. It shined so brightly, Kate had to put up a hand to block her eyes. Eventually, a tall monolith of pure light stood in front of her. Something prodded her in the back.

Go.

“Jessie?” Kate twisted around, but even with the blast of light from the doorway, she saw only darkness. She turned back to the glowing rectangle. Her eyes had adjusted to its intense brightness, yet she could see nothing beyond the light. It looked like an entry into the yin of her current location’s yang, a door between a world of total darkness into a world of total light.

What was the point?

Go.

“I wish you would tell me what’s going on.”

Jessie didn’t speak again. Kate was left to make the choice—remain in the darkness, or step into the light. It didn’t seem like much of a choice at all. She stepped through the opening, squinting as the blaring whiteness burned her eyes.

A loud clang echoed from behind her, the sound of a metal door slamming shut.

Kate jumped, her heart rate cranking up a few gears. She turned around and all at once the blinding white gave way to reveal a physical place. She stood in the center of the round room with the pentagram engraved in the marble floor. The sound of the shutting door had come from the door into the room, though it was much farther from her than the door she had entered through. She saw no sign of that entrance, though.

She felt watched. Watched from above. And without looking up—she couldn’t stand the thought of looking up—she knew the angels and demons in that mural on the ceiling stared down at her like a flock of crows contemplating fresh road kill.

Cold ripples ran up and down her spine.

“Kate.”

The voice came from her side. She recognized the resonant baritone at once and wasn’t surprised to find Romeo Kress standing in the room with her. He wore a long, black robe with a hood that made him look like the Halloween version of the Grim Reaper. His chin quivered and his eyes watered as if he were about to cry.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I have no idea how I even got here.”

One tear ran down his cheek. He wiped it away with the sleeve of his robe. “You’re not supposed to be here. Not yet.”

“What are you talking about? Why can’t anyone around here speak to me like a normal person?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You’ve spoken with someone else?”

“Jessie. She’s the one who told me to go through the bright door. That’s how I ended up here.”

“The Chosen One directed you here?”

“My daughter. Everything was dark. She kept calling for me, then said some things that didn’t make any sense—like you’re doing now. Then this bright door opened and she told me to go through it.”

“How did you get to the dark place?”

Kate strained, trying to pull together some scrap of the moments before she found herself in the dark. She sighed, shook her head. “I can’t remember.”

Kress pulled his hood back, revealing a pair of stubby horns poking through his hair. He never had horns before. Kate was certain of that. Her and several million movie lovers knew Romeo Kress did not have horns. It occurred to her that this might be a dream. It seemed so obvious now, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought about it sooner.

Kress noticed Kate’s attention to his horns. “They’ve always been there,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “You just couldn’t see them from where you were.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re in all those movies. Someone would have noticed.”

“You misunderstand.” He pursed his lips. The corners of his eyes crinkled. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, trying to come to some decision. “Kate, do you know where you are?”

“Back at your palace of infinite rooms.” She held out her hands to indicate the room around them. “In the place where you killed me and brought be back to life.”

Kress shook his head. “That is your mind’s representation of this place. You are not in my building.”