The Darkness Inside Us (A Detective King Suspense Thriller) (A Detective King Novel Book 3) (6 page)

As I slam into someone, suddenly the cold is gone. I feel it rip off of me as if I were wrapped in a blanket and it had gotten caught in a tree or something, pulling violently free from me, lifting from my shoulders and floating away into oblivion. I almost want to look back and see what has happened. I don’t though, because now that the cold is gone, I can feel only stillness. I can feel only the vacancy of where it was. It’s like a tornado has ripped through me and where my heart, lungs, liver, and stomach used to be, there is only rubble and debris, ashes falling among my bones.

I look at the counselor’s office. I look at the doorknob, all shiny and round. I had always thought that that doorknob was the shiniest thing in the entire school and that it would be a shame if they replaced it. I lower my head, bending over in a ninety degree angle as I run. I can hear the man behind me. I can hear him coming for me. I can hear death storming through the hallway. He sees me. He sees me for what I am. I can’t let him get me.

I run with all the speed and force that I can muster. I run as fast as I can. Squeezing my eyes shut, I feel a sudden, rattling thud as I hit the doorknob with the top of my head. I hear the sickening punch as the handle caves in my skull. In my spine each vertebra collides, all of them jamming together like a terrible traffic pile up. I feel a sudden emptiness as my legs give out, my arms go limp. I fall flat on the floor. All I can feel is the stillness, the warmth of blood gushing out of the top of my head. My bones don’t feel right in my face. Everything feels askew. Everything feels like it’s shifted. Oh God, I’m dying.

There’s something inside of me. There’s something wrong with me. I want to cry out, but I can only taste blood in my mouth and I think I’m missing my tongue. I move my eyes to check. There it is, lying just a few inches from my lips on the white linoleum as blood pours out of my perfect, glossy lips. I’m dying. There’s something inside of me, crawling out of me. I can feel it. It’s leaving me here. It’s abandoning me. It’s left me here to die. Oh God, what’s happening to me?

VI

The school looks like it’s been here for maybe five years and already it has housed legions of children, sending them through the wood chipper of public education and churning them out upon the world like salmon swimming upstream toward the waiting bears.

Wrapping my fingers around the door handle. I pull open the door and I’m instantly greeted in the foyer by so many teenagers that it’s nauseating. I look at them with disdain and without a single drop of respect for any of them. Most of them are greasy-haired lowlifes with no direction in their future. They’ll end up wandering around, mindless and foolish. I look at them, taking in a deep breath and looking for every possible woman or female-esque individual who may or may not be the Alice that I’m looking for.

I rule out anyone who isn’t attractive. Alice clearly had that look about her. It’s the presence of a woman that knows she’s attractive and dresses to accentuate the powers that her genetics have graciously decided to bestow upon her. So if anyone here is not attractive, then they simply aren’t Alice. I rule out blondes and redheads also. She was clearly brunette on the video feed and that means I’m looking for an attractive, well-dressed, brunette teenage girl somewhere inside a school that could easily have seven thousand people inside of it.

Taking a step forward, I look up the main hall where kids are loitering and I see her immediately and I lock eyes with her. She has dark, chocolaty curls lazily hanging around her face, effortlessly formed. One of her shoulders is exposed by the chic sweater that she’s wearing. I look at her beautiful, perfectly and artfully cared for face. Her eyes are deep green, almost an ocean green. I look at them and see that they’re glassy. They’re glassy and suddenly full of tears, fury maybe. I look at those eyes and I know from the second I lock eyes with her that it knows. It knows that I’m here for it and it doesn’t like it one bit.

“Alice!” I shout at her, almost willing to pull out my gun. If I can get her to reason, get her to stop herself from doing something that will be regretful and terrible, then I might be able to find some way of stopping that thing inside of her from killing her. She looks at me with those eyes, full of conflict, full of terror. They have to know that something’s wrong. It’s written all across her face as she stares at me. I take a step forward, and like someone down the hallway fired off a shot at the starting blocks, she takes off running. “No! Wait!” I scream after her, grabbing a kid that smells like stale pot in front of me and hurling him aside.

“Hey, man!” he mumbles before crashing to the ground face first. Maybe if he wasn’t stoned, he would have stopped his fall.

I don’t hesitate. I run as quickly as I can, slamming into people like a freight train, bashing them out of my way. I make it a dozen steps and my eyes burn, staring down the hallway, watching the girl as she slams past people, elbowing them, touching them, making contact with them. I stare at all of them. These are all possible hosts. I know that she might not be infested with that demon creature any longer. I look at them all, studying their faces. Some of them are teachers shouting after her while outraged teens stare, gawking at her with disgusted and offended looks upon their faces. I feel like pulling my gun, putting a shot in the ceiling and getting them all to hunker down. The only problem is that they might panic and flee, not to mention that there’s another hallway above me. My luck would be that I put down a kid above me and I’d be hauled off to jail, helpless to stop the demon from getting to my daughter.

Instead, I’m left with the only option, following after her. I shout her name again, ordering her to stop as I take my chance, chasing after her trail that is quickly closing up, like the Red Sea gushing in on the Israelites. I run as quickly as I can, knocking several gawkers aside. One of them is a teacher, who will no doubt want to inquire as to who the older gentleman chasing after the hot piece of ass fleeing from him was.

I watch her as she’s running, wondering if the creature is still inside of her, wondering if it’s still controlling her, what it’s telling her. She has no reason to run from me. She has no reason to fear me. The creature inside of her head must be poisoning her thoughts. I watch her, wondering how the hell this thing is working its magic inside of her. Is it doing all of this just to get away from me? It has to still be inside of her, if that’s the case. But why cling to a doomed vessel?

I watch as the girl lowers her head, dropping her back flat as she runs, putting her arms to her side as she charges a door like she’s some kind of Rocky Mountain big horn. I watch as she charges and her head slams into the door. The door doesn’t give in the slightest to the weight of her body as it all sort of jars forward, twitching before she slides down the door and spills out across the ground, splayed out like some sort of carcass. Already, there’s blood pooling under her face. People are screaming and pulling back from where she made impact. They’re stepping back in a ring of onlookers, vultures and ghouls, all watching her as she lies there.

I chase after her, shouting her name. Maybe she’s not dead. Maybe the demon made a mistake. Maybe it only paralyzed her. I rush after her, skidding to a stop. “Call the police,” I shout to everyone around me, well aware that they’re all packing cellphones. Instinctively, they’re all whipping out their cellphones, but they’re not calling the police. They’re holding up their phones, snapping pictures. Gritting my teeth, I look down at her, at her ruined head.

She’s rammed her head into the doorknob with all her strength and it looks like the doorknob won the battle. I look at it. It’s glistening crimson, covered with strands of hair, chunks of white, and dripping with blood. Looking down at her, her whole body is twitching, dying. Dropping to my knee, I look at her face. All the bones have shifted in her skull, fracturing and separating. Her face looks wrong, like something drawn in an artist’s drug-induced fantasy. Everything just seems weird, askew. Less than an inch from her face, half of Alice’s tongue is sitting in a pool of blood that is pouring out of her mouth. I look at her, pondering what a waste it was to kill such a pretty thing. Her eyes are wide and her lips are twitching. She’s still alive.

“I’m here,” I tell her softly, trying to calm her. Her eyes are wide, full of shock and horror, if she’s even still alive. It looks like the knob punched through her skull and into her brain. I don’t know shit about the human brain, maybe she’s blind now. “Don’t worry, you’re going to be okay,” I tell her. I look at all the teenagers snapping pictures of her. I instinctively pull off my blazer and cover her up. It looks like her skirt was hiked up after the impact. I cover her exposed panties and ass, not wanting the bastards to get their shot. Thankfully, teachers are starting to show up. They’re pulling the kids away, shouting at them to get out of here.

Looking at the girl, I watch as she quickly begins to pass. Her wide eyelids start to lower, going still and unstrained, almost as if they’re flaccid. Her lips stop quivering and her entire body stops shaking. I can hear the voices shouting at the kids to get back, setting up a perimeter while more teachers begin to start driving the students back. So many of them had gotten their gory panty shots and were probably going to run home to tell their friends about it. I look down at Alice, putting my finger to her neck and feeling that there’s no pulse. There’s nothing. She’s gone. I can smell the faint aroma of piss, followed by shit. I close my eyes. Why the fuck did she have to touch so many people?

Standing up, I look down the three hallways, staring at all the teachers and security officers driving them back like torches keeping the darkness away. Staring down the hallway which I came from, I can’t help but wonder who it was that she touched last. Who was it that the demon hopped into? It wasn’t a mistake that she happened to touch all those people, bumping into them, shoving them aside. It’s out there, in the school, waiting to get to a more suitable host. I shake my head. What the fuck does this thing want? I can’t quarantine the entire school. They’re underage. That would turn into a legal clusterfuck that would end up with me handing this case over to White and Landsmen, turning in my badge and gun, then taking a nice long drive to Florida with early retirement. I shake my head. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I can hear kids crying, wailing down the hallways.

“Who the hell are you?” someone demands. I turn and look at a bald man with a fat mustache on his upper lip, trying his hardest to look like a hard ass. Maybe he is, to children. But to me, this guy is just a jackass who is interrupting my thinking process. I look at him and wonder how many tons of shit he’s going to drop when I flash my badge and tell him that he’s got a killer on the loose in the school. I reach for my badge. The rent-a-cop security guards coming up behind me see the handcuffs behind my back and my holstered pistol. They quickly know who I am. These jokers are all sentenced here because they couldn’t make it as a beat cop. The uniform was too much for them, so now they’re all exiled here.

“Detective Steven King,” I tell him.

“Like the author?” He furrows his brow.

“Like the fucking author,” I growl back at him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” the man demands, approaching me still, bold and unwilling to step back. “This is a public school building. You cannot just come in here and chase one of my students, antagonizing her into doing something like this.”

“I didn’t antagonize her,” I tell him with as much authority and force as I can muster. “She was under suicide watch and was a threat to herself. I attempted to apprehend her before she could bring harm to herself or those around her. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to go through the proper channels, her life was in danger. When she saw me enter, she was compelled to take action into her own hands, thus making a public spectacle of her death.”

“I’ve known Alice since she was a freshman,” the man argues. “That girl has never missed a day, never gotten anything less than a B on a test, and sure as hell wasn’t under suicide watch. So I’m going to give you one more time to explain to me what the hell you’re doing here before the police show up.”

“I’m going to need you to back the fuck up,” I tell him. My eyes dart from him, glancing up at the security camera that’s pointed down the hallway. I look at it and suddenly realize that there are dozens of cameras inside this building, probably two pointed up and down this hallway. They have to monitor everything that’s going on inside of these places. “I need access to your camera feeds. I need to see everyone she touched before committing suicide.”

“Over my dead body,” the man who I’m assuming now is the principal looks at me with fire in his eyes. “This is a public school. What do you not get about that? You go get yourself a warrant and we’ll talk about handing over that footage to you. In fact, gentlemen, please make sure that our guest here doesn’t make any sudden movements before the actual police show up to legitimize his claims.”

I can feel all of the wannabes around me lowering their hands to their tasers, ready to pull them if I make any sudden movements. I feel sick to my stomach. I know that there’s another life in danger right now and this asshole is going to make it harder for me to do anything about it. I look around me at the academy dropouts, wishing that backup would get here and one of them might be connected to Owens in some way. If I could get one of his conspirators behind me, then I’d be smooth sailing. I hold my hands up slightly at my sides, showing them that I’m not planning on doing anything stupid, the only one doing that would be the principal. He looks me over and then glances down at Alice.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, putting his hand over his mouth and shaking his head. “We’re not even a month into the first semester.”

I look at him, resisting the urge to punch him right in the middle of his round, red nose. I look at him, wanting to tell him everything. I want to tell him how it was a demon inside of Alice that made her kill herself, that it’s done this hundreds, if not thousands, of times before already. I want to inform him that it’s now lost somewhere in his school and while they’re wasting time with me, it’s out there somewhere, finding someone else to infect.

But before I can tell him any of that, we all hear the scream.