Seraphim (45 page)

“It’s gone!” Juanita shouted suddenly, staring at the stained glass window above the stairs. “The face—it’s gone!”

It was indeed.

Then, somewhere in the recesses of the house, a window shattered; a dog screamed.

“Pillsbury!” Kathy cried, then started running down the hallway, toward the commotion.

Juanita reached out and grabbed Kathy as she ran by. “No you don’t!”

As if handed the torch, Joan took up where Kathy had stumbled, and started for her shrieking dog.

“Mother, stay here!” Patricia cried, going after her. “Goddammit, Mother!”

Rachel rushed over and grabbed Joan’s arm, and was nearly yanked off her feet, the woman continuing to drive forward like a yoked ox. “You don’t want to go down there!” she insisted.

“Pillsy’s in trouble!” Joan cried. “I have to save her!” Hands waving above her head, she broke Rachel’s grip and started down the hallway, informing her squalling dog that she was on her way.

“Dude’s right,” Chris said, now pointing at something beyond the window. “We’ve got company.”

“Get everyone on the bus
now
,” ordered the driver. “If you don’t—” he pulled the hood from his decaying face “—then this reality’s going on a long vacation.”

It was already packing its bags, Duncan thought to say, as he now saw what Chris was pointing at. They were coming out of the ground; the same kind of creature he and Amy had encountered back at the hospital. He counted two, the duo squeezing themselves up from the dry lawn, near the big elm tree.

“Harpies,” the driver offered. “Nasty little bastards.”

Just then, Joan wobbled out of the far bedroom with Pillsbury’s remains in her outstretched hands. One of the creatures had hitched a ride on her back, and was pulling out tufts of silver-white hair from her scalp. She appeared more grievous over the dog than she did for herself.

Blood poured down her face, into her eyes.

“Here, take this,” Dead Man said, shoving Duncan a Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol. “It’s special, so don’t lose it.”

Patricia momentarily broke free of Rachel’s clutch, lunging toward her mother. Rachel caught her, this time with both hands.

“We can’t help her!” Rachel insisted. “And if we don’t get out of here, then we’re as dead as she is!”

Patricia wheeled on Rachel, staring, shocked that she could be so cold-hearted.

Duncan turned, bringing the sights of the .45 to eye level.

“Warfare!” Chris said. “Epic, dude!”

“I want everyone on the bus now!” Duncan roared.

Joan continued blindly down the hallway, toward Rachel and Kathy, knocking down various pictures of her granddaughter and other relatives once presumed dead, ramming against the walls, trying desperately to dislodge the creature from her back. Her head and whole upper body was now drenched in blood, and her screams had all but turned into feeble cooing.

With a lonely howl, she dropped Pillsbury’s remains, then stumbled over them.

Her legs finally gave out as she entered the living room. As her knees struck the floor, the creature clamped her head between its jaws. Her eyes rolled, and a blood bubble formed between her parted lips.

Duncan aimed the gun, but didn’t have a clear shot.

With a lightning quick turn and pull of its jaws, the creature snapped Joan’s neck.

Behind Duncan, Patricia fell to the floor in a faint.

Rachel knelt by her side and began shaking her. “No, no!” she cried. “You can’t do this now!”

Chris rushed over to Rachel and, with each taking an arm, they pulled Patricia to the front door.

The risk of accidentally hitting Patricia’s mother no longer a concern, Duncan fired one shot into the harpy. The .45 caliber slug struck the creature in the head, hurling it from the woman’s back. As if controlled by a deranged puppeteer, the harpy began to dance upon frenzied strings. Its wings fluttered in paroxysms as its head wound ejaculated blood.

Duncan let go another round.

Its strings finally cut, the creature collapsed into a silent, motionless heap.

Juanita and Kathy were themselves already at the front door, and Juanita shielded the girl’s eyes with one hand while stroking her blonde hair with the other. “It is not good to see.”

From the doorway, awake though zombie-like, Patricia stared silently at her dead mother.

As Rachel and Chris steadied Patricia, another harpy waddled like a goose down the blood-splashed hallway, hissing at them.

Duncan pulled the trigger and sent the beast tumbling backward.

Another creature now, squawking as it gashed its way through the kitchen window screen.

“I’m not going to say it again!” Duncan demanded. “Everybody
out!
”

At the kitchen sink, the creature had turned on the faucet and was lapping noisily from the stream of water.

As he raised the gun, bolts of pain shot through his right lower leg. He looked down. “Shit!” A harpy was clamped upon his calf. Point-blank, he fired. The creature spun away, leaving a very nasty bite.

Duncan fell to his knees. Growling, the harpy in the kitchen was threatening to leap from the Formica counter top. Duncan wiped the sweat from his eyes. Aimed. Fired.

Missed.

Wings outstretched, the harpy pounced.

He fired again, sending the creature crashing into the cupboard doors.

Duncan looked around. No one was left in the house except him. And poor Mrs. Pendleton, upon whose twitching body now perched another creature, tugging on a cord of intestine.

Without aiming, he blasted the harpy.

He raised himself unsteadily to his feet, prayed to whoever might be listening for a miracle, then headed for the front door.

2.

Eli awoke to an unbelievable, unthinkable perversion.

Wet and pleated, his new wings glistened pink like the newborn skin of a rat.

He pushed himself up from the cold cement. Maladroit on his feet, he was unskilled with the new, encumbering appendages on his back. The combined weight of both wings easily exceeded his own, and he was certain they would each surpass twelve feet in length when dry.

They were massive.

They were hideous.

They were not what he’d ordered.

Gamble had betrayed him.

He directed his voice to the ceiling, hoping his mentor was in earshot. “GAMBLE, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”

Then, taken aback, he wondered if Gamble might take that as a compliment. There was so much he still didn’t know.

His head hung low, he began to weep, clenching and unclenching his fists.

So unfair.

His back, his sides, his entire body, it seemed, ached with his new burden.

Exhausted, he hunkered below the nearest window well, one of the basement’s two, both fortified on the outside with metal mesh welded across their openings. In a few hours, the morning sun would be dropping through and, since the central heater wasn’t presently an option (at least not a wise one, as any forced artificial heat might cause shrinkage, he thought), maybe he could get his wings to dry in a quicker and more natural way.

3.

Like frantic prairie dogs from their flooded homes, the harpies exited the ground.

Dead Man hurried everyone into the vehicle.

Patricia stopped. “Mr. and Mrs. Kensington!” she hollered to her neighbors, who were clutching the chain link fence on the south side of her lawn. Fascination had transfixed their eyes just as firmly as fear had gripped their legs.

“Please, get back in your house—no, wait!” Considering what just happened in her home, she turned desperately to Dead Man and said, “Can they come with us?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “This is a chartered vehicle.”

Duncan raised the gun toward the lawn and shot one harpy as it lifted from its hole. Squealing, its wings whipped up plumes of parched earth. Then it fell silent, jaws gnawing the brittle blades of dead grass.

Everyone was inside the shuttle now except Patricia and Duncan. They were both at the gate. Dead Man held the shuttle’s doors open and shouted, “Goddammit,
hurry!”

“What about my neighbors?” Patricia cried.

Duncan grabbed her arm. “You heard the driver. No other fares.”

“But that’s bullshit!”

From inside, two harpies crashed though Patricia’s front bay window. They righted themselves almost immediately and began to advance upon Duncan and Patricia in macabre, synchronized steps.

Mrs. Kensington screamed at the sight, alerting the creatures to her and her husband’s presence.

One harpy broke from the other and took to the air. It swooped once at Patricia’s neighbors, circled, and dived again. It gouged out both Mr. Kensington’s eyes with its talons and its barbed tail lacerated his wife’s forehead. She stammered a few feet, then fell to the ground, a blubbering wreck.

“Three more coming from the lawn!” Kathy warned from her window.

“Fuck it, let’s go!” Duncan shouted. He pulled at Patricia’s arm, lugging her to the vehicle.

“But they need our help!” she screamed, pointing to her neighbors.

“
We
need our help!” Duncan said, glancing back at the two harpies now squatting like vultures upon the butchered couple. “Nothing we can do!”

Duncan pushed Patricia onto the steps of the shuttle, then pushed himself against her. “No going back!”

Both in, Dead Man closed the doors. Just as he released the clutch, two more harpies slammed like linebackers into the rear of the shuttle.

Looking around, Duncan saw that half the block was now stirring, people standing on their front lawns and doorways, still in their pajamas; some with their morning cups of coffee listing in their hands, morning papers fluttering to the ground, jaws sagging in disbelief.

Down the street, three shots in rapid procession dotted the morning.

Then a shotgun blast from the next block over. Someone screamed. A man.

Dead Man had the shuttle up and rolling to maybe five miles an hour when he had to stop to avoid hitting a black man who’d run out into the street, wearing only his silk jockeys and gold watch. A black woman chased after him, maybe his wife, screaming for him to come back.

The man waved his hands for Dead Man to stop, then began beating on the hood. Anxiously looking back at the approaching woman, he began to yell, “Take me! Take me! Goddamn you, take me!”

Pressing down the clutch, Dead Man revved the engine, trying to scare the man away, but the bluff was wasted.

The woman gained on him now and began crazily slapping him about the face and chest. “Cheatin’ motherfucker!” she screamed. “Filthy, rotten, cheatin’ motherfucker! I’ll kill you!”

Ignoring the woman’s cudgeling, the man made his way to the side of the shuttle and attempted to open the doors, his nose bleeding from both nostrils.

“Sorry,” Dead Man said sincerely. He hit the gas, leaving the man to his own harpy’s discretion.

To Duncan’s left, one middle-age woman, arms flailing, went shrieking back inside her house, leaving her ogling mate alone on their crescent driveway, where two creatures ambushed him from behind, eviscerating him in front of his own screaming neighbors.

Up ahead, a little boy, eight or nine, silently crawled along the sidewalk, blood gushing from a severe head wound.

“Oh my God!” Rachel cried. “Stop! We have to get him!”

“No can do,” reminded Dead Man.

Bolting from a hedge of azalea bushes, two harpies finished the child in seconds.

Two males, an older man and a boy in his late teens, immediately burst from a brick rancher, in front of which lay the dead boy’s remains. Firing fully automatic rifles, they advanced upon the creatures, whooping and hollering like a couple of drunken cowboys. They were nearly upon the harpies when they discovered their bullets were having no affect. They never made it back inside the house.

Juanita, blubbering now, fists clutched against the sides of her head, appeared ready to start yanking out hair. Duncan realized, however, that she was only shielding her ears from the high-pitched screams.

Duncan stared down at his Colt.

It’s special, so don’t lose it.

The rubber grips offered an insignia of some kind. Duncan thought the symbol looked familiar. He’d definitely seen it before, but couldn’t place it. He extracted the clip and found that it had its full complement of bullets.

How can that be?

The streets were congesting quickly with fleeing people and motorists trying to escape.

Dead Man cursed.

It was stop and go, stop and go. The highway, Dead Man said, was less than a quarter-mile away, but there was doubt in his voice that they’d reach it.

An old woman passed them on the sidewalk, wearing an aluminum colander over her head. She was speaking poignantly into a spoon, gesturing with her free hand as she stumbled along. She might have been giving her listeners a harrowing play-by-play of the war, much like Orson Wells had done with his infamous broadcast of 1936.

A stray bullet struck the windshield, but left only a feathery blemish of smoke.

Shouts and orders, wails and screams, caterwauls of all kinds, distant and up-close, were filling the morning.

Patricia, her face simply blank, said, “Well, Chris, I guess I owe you an apology.”

“You don’t owe me a thing,” he said. “And I’m really truly sorry about your mom.”

She didn’t respond; just continued staring out the window with the same vapid look on her face.

Just ahead, to the right, an obese woman in curlers lurched into the middle of the street to snatch her tabby. The cat didn’t know where to run any more than did the screaming neighbors. From the electrical lines above, four harpies dropped upon her. The cat got away only long enough to be crushed beneath the wheels of Dead Man’s bus.

“One down,” Dead Man declared. “Ten billion more to go.”

Kathy leaned forward and placed both her hands on Duncan’s head. “Now your leg won’t hurt anymore,” she said.

Chris slid open his window. “What’s the matter with you people?” he hollered, scared half out of his own wits. “Haven’t you ever seen the end of the world before?”