Hellhound (16 page)

“If that’s the way it’s gonna be, that’s the way it’s gonna be,” replied Trey, raising the gun and pointing it at Ken’s chest.

•  •  •

By the time Becca finally made it all the way down the fire escape to the courtyard, the panic had begun to subside. The fire teams were still putting out the major blazes, but as word went around that the gas had been shut off from afar went around, most assumed the danger had passed.

She’d run as best she could down the iron stairs and now had to push past folks milling about sheeplike on her way to Building 10. But as she arrived in the lobby, she was greeted by a peculiar sight, a group of middle-aged men dancing around the bottom of the stairwell, laughing though their faces betrayed horror at whatever they were looking at.

“Who the hell do you think that belonged to?”

“I don’t know, but that’s just about the most fucked thing I think I’ve ever seen. Who’s got a camera?”

Somebody offered a camera phone. One of the men snapped a picture. Becca moved in close and saw a familiar German shepherd trying to exit the stairs, only to be blocked by the men.

“Bones!” she cried.

The men all turned, giving the dog the opening he was looking for. He barreled down the steps and began sniffing around the lobby. Becca raced over to him and picked up the leash, only to see the object of the men’s incredulity: a severed hand still attached to the leash. Rather than deal with it, she simply unhooked the lead from Bones’s harness and patted his head.

“Where is he?”

But the dog, its nose still filled with smoke and the scent of gas, looked around aimlessly, as if trying to find something he believed hidden that, in truth, was already long gone.

The standoff between Trey and Ken continued. Neither blinked nor showed any sign they might do so.

“I’m sorry, Ken, but I can’t let that thing leave here. You know how many people have died because of it? Because of
you
?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ken scoffed. “You’re really a fucking idiot, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“You think this dog told me to do all this? That would imply that I needed to be told that our neighbors deserved this. That they had infested this place, that
we
had infested this place, and needed to be dealt with. Humans are a plague, Trey.”

“Wow, you sound like the internet,” Trey said dryly. “Now, why don’t you move, let me take my shot, and we can go upstairs? Maybe I’ll even let you borrow my gun, take a couple of shots into the crowd?”

“Why don’t you drop that gun and we’ll just agree no one’s going to do anything?”

Trey and Ken turned as Detective Garza came down the stairs and into subbasement.

“Yeah, uh-oh. Police,” Garza added. “By now, you know this is all over, right?”

“If it’s all over, why is this motherfucker pointing a gun at me?” Ken barked.

“Just wondering that myself ,” Garza replied, his eyes fixed on Trey. “Why don’t we try lowering the gun?”

“I don’t know what you think you’re looking at, officer, but it’s not what’s in your head. This man is my brother. He’s the one that’s been going around pulling gas lines. You check his pockets, you’ll find a shitload of keys and probably a list of vacant apartments.”

“First off, I’m not an officer, I’m a detective,” Garza began. “Second, I’ve seen your sheet. It’s long. Hell, you shot a guy two weeks ago. Your brother, well, clean as a whistle. Also, you’ve got the gun. You’ll forgive me if I make assumptions.”

Trey finally looked nervous. He eyed the mastiff. Its expression hadn’t changed. But then he remembered something.

“My sister called your partner about all this. She told him about Ken, told him about the dog. He was going to get the police dog, Bones, and come back. He knew all this shit.”

Garza hesitated. Though he hadn’t talked to Leonhardt, he knew something must’ve brought him here.

“Well, I can’t seem to get a hold of him.”

“That’s because my little brother here killed him up on the fourteenth floor of this building,” Ken said. “You go up there and you’ll find his body burned to a crisp. Becca called the detective about her brother, but she meant this one.”

Trey stared daggers into Ken. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Detective,” Trey said. “You have to believe me. It’s some fucked-up shit. You saw the video of Mrs. Fowler, didn’t you? What about Mr. Lester? Whoever’s in with the dog is the one causing this shit. You’ve
seen
it. You
know
this.”

Garza turned to Ken and, for the briefest of moments, saw something flash across the man’s face that looked disturbingly close to madness. His mouth opened as if to comment, but he was interrupted by the mastiff rising to its feet, pushing past Ken, and walking over to Trey where it sat at his feet, looking up at him expectantly.

“Oh, fuck you,” Trey exclaimed, turning his gun on the dog.

He pulled the trigger, only to then see that his arm was still outstretched, the weapon still aimed at his brother. The bullet erupted from the muzzle, crossed the short distance between the brothers, and entered Ken’s chest just above his heart. Trey’s eyes went wide as Ken fell back. He turned to Garza in time for his vision to be momentarily blinded by muzzle flash as Garza fired two shots into his torso. The impact sent Trey flying, his gun dropping to the floor.

It had all happened in the briefest of moments, so fast that Garza almost didn’t believe what he was seeing.

He hurried to Trey’s side and checked his vitals, only to see that he was in the process of dying. The detective stared into the younger man’s face as it looked like he was trying to speak. Garza leaned down, but Trey pushed him away.

“My
gun
,” Trey hissed, blood misting out of his mouth as he spoke.

Garza turned. The last thing he ever saw was the wounded Ken aiming Trey’s pistol at his face.

•  •  •

When the first gunshots echoed through the Building 10 lobby, no one moved. But when Ken emptied the magazine into Detective Garza’s head at point-blank range, everyone scattered.

“Somebody’s shooting!” they called out as they ran into the courtyard.

Everyone, that is, except Becca and Bones.

“Come on, boy!” Becca cried.

The German shepherd didn’t need an invitation. Together, they hurried to the stairs leading to the subbasement and descended. What they found was easily Becca’s worst nightmare.

“Trey!
Ken!
” she screamed, clambering down the stairs and over to them.

Detective Garza’s head had been functionally obliterated, a mass of blood and ruined bones, so Becca had no idea who that corpse belonged to. But as she pushed it aside, she saw that Trey’s eyed were fixed and beginning to dilate as they stared at the ceiling.

“No!” she wailed, the tears coming quickly.

She turned to Ken and, upon seeing the gun, wondered if he had been the one to shoot both of the others. She couldn’t imagine Trey had shot him, but until this day, there were a lot of things she couldn’t have imagined either of her brothers capable of doing.

She went over to Ken and found him unconscious, though still breathing, labored and shallow. She looked around the locker room, unsure what to do, until she saw Bones at the service hatch. He was already pawing it open, the hatch having swung shut after its last use.

“Is that where he went?” she asked breathlessly.

Bones glanced back at her for only a second before continuing to work on the door.

Becca picked up the gun next to Ken, but it felt light. She knew there weren’t any bullets in it. She moved over to Trey, the gun that had taken his life sitting close by. It was heavier. She pocketed it and then moved with the shepherd to the service hatch.

“Okay,” she whispered.

Swinging the hatch open, the unlikely duo exited the locker room and slipped into darkness.

B
ecca had never been under the city before, but she understood that there was an endless labyrinth just below the streets. Trey had talked about the ways the various buildings of Neville Houses were connected by service tunnels and that some of these had access points elsewhere in the city, but she didn’t always believe everything Trey said.

Trey
.

She couldn’t make the connection between the body she’d just seen in the subbasement and her brother. He couldn’t be gone. Not him. She hadn’t wanted to leave Ken behind, but part of her wondered if that was her brother anymore. She’d heard him on the roof. Something was inside him. Something, she feared, that couldn’t be extricated until the dog lost its power over him.

That meant killing the beast. And that meant following it all the way to hell if necessary.

She wasn’t sure what made her feel better, the gun in her hand or the German shepherd at her side. She didn’t know why Bones was going after the mastiff. She knew there was nothing “personal” between the two dogs…or was there?

She eyed the dog. Bones’s nose was pressed to the concrete floor of the dark tunnel. Becca had feared that it would be completely dark, but there were dull emergency lights glowing every thirty yards or so. They didn’t do much, but they cut down Becca’s terror.

Though she hadn’t seen the mastiff since they’d entered the tunnels, she was confident that Bones was taking her in the right direction. He didn’t stop moving, but kept right on going as if the trail was lit in neon. When they came to side tunnels or other passageways, the shepherd might lift his head to sniff the air a little, but then he’d go left or right or straight ahead without doubling back. He knew exactly where the other dog had gone.

At one point, the environment changed. The tunnel, already cold, grew colder. The tunnel narrowed and the walls and floor became slick, as if Becca had somehow entered the throat of a living creature.

But as Bones pressed on, so did she.

She wondered how long they’d been underground, but the darkness played tricks on her perception. It might’ve been an hour, but if it turned out to be fifteen minutes, Becca would’ve believed it. She had long given up trying to determine which direction they were going, much less how long it would take to reach their destination.

Then it changed. The tunnel widened again and the air remained dank, but the walls no longer perspired, and she tasted fresh air. Up ahead, she could just make out a light source coming in from above. A ladder came into view, little more than iron rungs bolted into the wall, but Bones stopped in front of it and looked up.

“He climbed the ladder?” Becca asked in surprise, trying to imagine such a large animal ascending the steps with ease.

But then, as if making a point, the German shepherd placed its forepaws on one of the lowest rungs, sank back on its haunches, and then leaped forward, half-jumping, half-climbing to the surface.

As soon as the dog disappeared, Becca climbed up after it. When she reached the surface, she was surprised to find herself in the woods. The sun was just beginning to rise in the east. She realized she must have been underground a lot longer than she’d initially suspected.

Turning back, she saw the lights of Manhattan behind her. She walked towards the edge of the trees and saw that she had walked all the way from Harlem to Randall’s Island, having taken a service tunnel under the East River.

She turned back to see where Bones had gone, but he was out of sight.

“Bones?!” she cried, instinctively feeling for the gun in her pocket.

She hurried through the trees until she found herself in a large park. There were two soccer fields and a baseball diamond, all with bleachers. She’d been here, she realized, but only a couple of times with Ken. There’d been a neighborhood get-together and then a birthday party for a classmate once. She scanned the area, but saw no sign of the German shepherd.

What she did see was a single open gate at the edge of the park. She made a beeline for it, hoping that the animals simply hadn’t hopped the nearest fence and gone off in a different direction.

Once she was on the other side of the fence, she found a long, curving road and began to follow it along the shoulder. The longer she went without seeing Bones, the worse she felt. She’d undertaken this mission, and now she had failed in it.

She kept going until she reached the far side of the little island, finding herself between two bridges that crossed the East River, emptying out into Queens. One was the continuation of I-278 to Queens, the other a much smaller bridge used by trains.

As she eyed the train bridge, she saw, silhouetted against the purpling sky, the shape of the mastiff as it made its way to the center of the bridge.

Her reaction was immediate and instinctual. She took off running. She moved as fast as her legs would carry her, almost tripping over her own feet as she flew down the rock-strewn shoreline towards the train bridge. She still saw no sign of Bones, but didn’t care.

She had the gun.

She had the target.

This was going to end right now.

When she got to the bridge, there was no easy access at the waterline, so she had to go inland a few dozen yards to clamber up onto the train tracks and hurry onto the bridge that way. She could still see the dog. It had stopped walking and was now sitting dead center, staring down into the water. It looked like it was waiting for something or, stranger, about to jump.

She kept running, fumbling for the gun. She took out of her pocket and felt the safety, which was on. She knew a lot about guns for someone who had never fired one. She knew when a safety was off, when a gun was loaded, and when a bullet was in the chamber.

A second later, and all three of these things were true about the pistol in her hand. The mastiff still hadn’t acknowledged her by the time she was only ten feet away. She stopped, held the gun in both of her hands, and aimed it at the dog.

“Hey, motherfucker!” she yelled, spitting her rage at this horrible beast.

As the mastiff turned to her, she realized that she wasn’t looking at the black dog at all, but Bones, the German shepherd sitting there as calm as could be, staring out over the water.