Killing Land (Rune Alexander Book 8) (2 page)

She ran with most of her considerable speed, but still
remained alert to her surroundings. The countryside was quiet and as far as she
could tell, appeared empty of people.

Still, she’d spotted houses, so surely there were people.

She jumped a ditch and began following the road. It took her
seconds to reach the first house. It wasn’t a house so much as a shack. The
roof was half caved in, the old wood was rotting, and it was missing its front
door. There were two windows facing the road. Both had a few shards of filthy
glass holding valiantly to the broken wood of the frame.

She called out anyway. “Hello?
Anyone
there?”

No one answered.

It was the same with the next two homes, but finally she
reached a dismal mobile home that had once been white.

The front yard was cleared and two metal chairs had been
placed around a handmade brick
firepit
. Beer cans had
been emptied, crushed, and then tossed into a rusty barrel.

She adjusted the shotgun strap over her shoulder and walked
farther into the yard. There were no sounds, and other than the ashes in the
firepit
and the gentle scent of smoke hanging in the air,
the trailer appeared abandoned.

“Hello,” she called. “Hello?”

She climbed the surprisingly sturdy steps of the small deck
before reaching out to knock on the metal door.

When no one answered, she tried the door. It was locked, and
she didn’t force it. Her gut told her the place was empty.

Back on the road, she ran a little slower, head swiveling as
she peered into the woods that bordered one side of the road and the field that
bordered the other.

She rounded a curve and spotted a small bridge ahead on the
left, and before she reached it she decided not to veer off but to keep on the
road.

She ran.

Ten minutes later she came upon clusters of houses—small,
single level homes situated on both sides of the—finally—paved road, but they
appeared to be in little better condition than the ones she’d encountered
earlier.

And there were people.

Smoke swirled lazily from some of the chimneys, and she
heard the sharp distant sound of male laughter and the
very
distant
sound of country music.

She slowed to a walk.

People.

But for some reason, she didn’t feel better.

Uneasy, she walked the road between the houses, alert.
Unsettled.

Shiv Crow cawed from far above and she paused to watch him,
taking deep breaths, forcing herself to relax.

She was in her world. She was.

She just had to figure out exactly where in her world she
was.

Mailboxes, old, metal boxes with broken flags and hanging
doors sat on listing and weathered posts. Some of them sported legible
names—Devon Adams, Ruby Shannon, Alice Corbin—but none of them gave her any
real information.

When she heard loud vehicles approaching, the only thing
that kept her glued to the spot was the surprising and overwhelming desire to
hide.

Rune Alexander did not run and she did not hide.

No matter how badly she might want to.

Two pickup trucks, both of them in better shape than any of
the houses she’d seen, roared suddenly into sight.

She pushed at the knot in her stomach and moved to the side
of the road to wait.

From her peripheral vision she spotted movement and glanced
across the street in time to see two people, a man and a woman, walk out onto
their porch. The screen door slammed shut behind them.

The trucks stopped a few yards from her. The drivers decided
it was a good time to have a contest on who had the loudest vehicle, and for
the next two minutes they sat in the street and revved their engines like
obnoxious teenagers.

She didn’t move.

More people left their houses, some of them walking down the
street to stand beside the trucks, some hopping up into the truck beds, and
some of them hurrying to the porches of their neighbors to gather in little
knots and stare at Rune.

She looked down at her clothes and then reached up to smooth
her hair, wondering why they found her so…
alien
that they needed to
stare.

“A stranger,” one of them said, answering her unasked
question.

The doors opened at pretty much the same time, and five men
climbed from the trucks.

They were dressed too lightly for the weather. One of them
wore a blue jean jacket with the sleeves ripped out, one a black Guns-n-Roses
T-shirt that was two sizes too large, and the other three were in zip-up
hoodies.

All five were armed.

All the people who’d congregated around the trucks were
armed.

More people arrived and just that fast, it was a party.

And she was the party crasher.

“Well now.” One of the drivers, a large man with greasy
brown hair and at least six silver crucifixes around his neck walked toward
her. “What have we here?”

“Not an abundance of originality,” she replied.

He stopped walking and frowned. “What?”

Another man stepped up. “Who are you?”

She ignored the question. “I’m lost. What town is this?”

The two men looked at each other.

“You don’t know where you are,” the first man said,
skepticism in his voice. “How’d you get here?”

She shook her head. “Last thing I remember I was having a
good time with some buddies. I woke up here. I have no idea how I got here or
where
here
even is.” And because they seemed to be the type who’d
appreciate it, she put her hand over her heart. “Swear to God.”

“Bullshit,” someone called.

“You look like you’ve had the shit kicked out of you,” the
first man said.

“Yeah?
You should see the other
guy.” Almost self-consciously, she slid her hand over the scars showing through
the shreds of her shirt.

The path had been unkind.

“You had a fight here?” a red-cheeked woman asked.

She held up a palm. “Listen, guys. I just need to get home.
But…”

“But,” the second man interrupted, “you don’t know where you
are so you don’t know how to get home.”

“That’s right.”

They laughed.

“May I borrow a cell phone?”

The first man crossed meaty arms. “Most of us don’t go for
cell phones and the like around here.”

“Let’s take her to Gage,” the other man said. “He’ll want to
know why some stranger just up and appeared in Killing Land.”

The first man slapped him on the back of his head.
“Idiot.”

Killing Land.

And then a long forgotten memory surfaced and suddenly she
knew exactly where she was.

Seventy or so miles from River County.
She could run that in no time.

“Why are you smiling?” the first man asked.

She looked around at all of them as relief flooded her.
“Honestly, I just realized I’m in the right world, and that makes me pretty
fucking happy.”

“She’s still high,” someone noted.

Rune laughed. “I’m really going to need to borrow—”

An air raid siren split the air, suddenly, stridently, and
so loudly it took her a long, startled moment to adjust to it.

The people didn’t hesitate. Without giving her a second
glance, they melted away as quickly as they’d appeared. The trucks were abandoned.

“I’m in a fucking twilight zone,” she muttered, alone once
again.
Alone but for the trucks and the maddening,
earsplitting siren.

Dogs began to howl, their voices wavering pitifully with the
whistle, but there were no other sounds.

She jogged around the trucks, her thoughts half scrambled by
the siren, disoriented by the strangeness of the situation, and, she was sure,
by the fact that she’d just left the path.
Just left
Skyll
.

She was a little overwhelmed.

And the siren went on and on and on, wailing a somehow
horrible song of danger. She could feel it, but she didn’t know what the holy
hell it was.

“I’m losing my mind,” she murmured.

Killing Land.

Why had she been thrown into Killing Land?

An isolated little town in Cork County, Ohio, Killing Land
had once been known as Rosewood before a night long massacre had turned the
strange place into a ghost town.

Obviously it’d been repopulated.

Someone grabbed her arm. “Come with me.”

She pulled away so violently she nearly fell. “Where the
fuck did you come from?”

It was doubtful he heard her over the screaming siren. He
didn’t answer her question, just grabbed her arm again. “It’s not safe out
here. You have to come with me.”

His voice was impatient, his stare sharp and darting as he
dragged her across the street and into a small yard crowded with birdbaths.

She went with him. She
was
curious.

And he would have a phone, surely. If he refused to let her
borrow it, she’d take it.

He didn’t lead her into the house, but pulled her down a
small flagstone path to the backyard. It was as full of birdbaths as the front
yard.

“That’s just crazy,” she muttered.

“Down you go,” he said, barely looking at her. He had a gun
in his right hand, and reached down to open a wooden cellar door with his left.
“Hurry.”

She peered into the hole, barely able to see the stone steps
leading down into the darkness below.
“Dude.
I’m not
going down there.”

The siren stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the
abrupt and complete silence was heavy and uncomfortable.

But then, there was something in the silence.
Thumps,
and something…

“What is that sound?” she asked. “Is that…wings?”

“Shit,” he whispered. “Sorry.” And without any sort of
warning, he shoved her.

She tumbled down the steps and landed hard—a normal person
would have been knocked unconscious and probably broken a few bones in the
process. As it was, she lay for a second, winded, her shoulder screaming in
pain as she wrenched her shotgun from under it—and before she could actually
figure out how to breathe again, he’d slammed shut the wooden doors. The only
light shone through the few cracks between the boards.

He leapt down the steps to crouch beside her.

“What the fuck—”

“Quiet,” he hissed.

She sat up and pulled the shotgun strap over her head. “Does
Killing Land have a monster?” She kept her voice low to placate him. “I can
handle a monster.”

He snorted, his face turned up toward the door. “You can’t
handle this one.”

“You might be surprised.” But she shrugged and let it go.
“What happened when the rotting disease hit? Did you guys lose a lot of
Others
?”

“The only
Others
welcome in Killing
Land are the Others who...” Then it was his turn to shrug, and he fell silent,
leaving his comment unfinished.

“What is your monster?” She shivered, but wasn’t sure if the
shiver was from excitement or fear.
“A demon?”

He looked at her then, and she drew in a sharp breath as she
caught the full impact of his stare there in the shadowy, dusty half-light.

His eyes were extremely light, the color somewhere between
green and gray, and they stood out like tiny beams of moonlight against his
olive skin.

Dark brows slashed above them, drawn low as he frowned at
her.

It didn’t matter if he frowned. His eyes were…

Fucking crazy beautiful
.

She swallowed hard, mentally slapping herself. She’d seen
beautiful men before and that was not the time to care how he looked.

His
eyes,
though.

“I need to make a call,” she said. “Can I use your cell?”

He pushed his hair behind his ears and shook his head. “I
don’t have a phone.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Is it against the law to carry cell
phones in Killing land?”

A scream, nearly as loud as the siren, startled them both,
and before he could stop her she was climbing the cellar steps.

“No,” he called, and went after her.

“You’d better start talking,” she told him, poised to burst
through the door. “What the fuck is that thing?”

The scream came again, and she shuddered. There were bad
things in that scream, and she realized before he told her that the screams
were not a victim’s screams. They were coming from the monster.

“I’m going out there.” And she started to push open the
cellar door.

“Wait,” he said.

“Talk.”

“I can’t. We don’t talk to outsiders. All you need to know
is that thing out there will destroy you if it sees you. It’ll be safe to leave
the cellar in a few minutes. Then you need to get out of Killing Land.”

“I can help this town. I hunt monsters for a living.” She
grinned at him, but was pretty sure he could read in her eyes how unamused she
was. “Unless you plan on fighting me to delay things, then you need to give me
some information about your monster.”

“We don’t talk to outsiders,” he repeated. “And I don’t hurt
women.”

She lifted an eyebrow,
then
peered
up through the cracks of the door. She saw nothing but gray sky. But the scream,
distant and echoing, came again. The monster was moving on—and hopefully not
toward Roma. “You shoved me down a flight of stone steps, dude. That kind of
fucking hurt.”

“I’m sorry for that.” He walked back down the steps. “Come.
Sit.”

She watched him, silent for a long moment.

Half-forgotten conversations, news programs, and gossip
about Killing Land teased at her memory. It was full of criminals, people who
needed to hide, and addicts.
Killers
lived in Killing Land.