Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (26 page)

Slowly and deliberately, Becky backed up until she was standing roughly in the middle of Brandon and I. Tony shuffled warily into view. The guy can only have weighed one-ten, maybe one-twenty tops. He looked like a stick figure, albeit a very dangerous one. His body twitched and jerked with what looked like tiny little seizures, which I figured was a side-effect of the meth. A grimy Denver Broncos baseball cap, turned backwards in the style of a sniper or a gang member, sat on top of a mop of lank, greasy shoulder-length dark hair. The look on Tony’s face was somewhere between a smirk and a sneer and kept shifting, as though the muscles couldn’t quite decide which expression to go with and wanted to split the difference. A pair of frayed jeans with holes in both knees and a stained Broncos vest to match his cap completed the whole ugly ensemble.

“Y’all just couldn’t take the hint, could you? You just
had
to stick your ugly little noses in again, and now just look at what you’re going to make me do.”

“
Make
you do? We’re not
making
you do anything.” Becky sounded truly indignant, which was kind of surprising given the circumstances we had found ourselves in. Poking the bear was not a strategy I would have gone with, personally. But there was no stopping Becky now — she was working up a real head of steam.

“Nobody
made
you come up here, Tony. Nobody
made
you go with meth cooking as your career choice, did they? That’s all on you, you pathetic, miserable excuse for a human being.”

Looking down without actually moving my head, I could see that Becky’s right hand was beginning to inch slowly down towards her side. My first instinct was to try and calm this down, get all “whoa, whoa,
wait a minute!”
and play the peacemaker, but I knew deep down that it wouldn’t be a smart move. There was something in those eyes of his that warned me away, and I trusted the small inner voice that was telling me not to trust him, not one single inch.

I could already tell that Tony was the worst kind of bully; not just the casual kind that Brandon had seemed to be, but the real deal, the sort of truly malicious, black-hearted son of a bitch that genuinely enjoyed inflicting pain and misery on others. His kind got off on having those who were weaker than him in his power.

Besides, how nuclear was he going to go when he found out about what had happened to Jake?

For either our side or his, this wasn’t going to end well, and this time we couldn’t count on Polly and a pissed-off Mister Long Brook to ride in like the cavalry and save the day. It was totally up to us — or more accurately, it was up to Becky.

It was quickly coming down to life or death for all of us. My mouth was as dry as a desert. Please, please let her make the right play.

Becky’s gun came down a little further, held at the level of her thigh and pointing straight down towards the floor. She had been smart enough to angle her body slightly, so that her left side was facing towards Tony, leaving the right in deeper shadow.

“Missy, you want to be very,
very
careful how you talk to me. Young girl like you could get herself in a
lot
of trouble running her mouth like that.”

“Thank you for the attitude correction, Anthony,” Becky said in the sweetest, most charming tone of voice that I had ever heard her use, “you pathetic, miserable little turd.”

Time seemed to slow down then, warping and distorting as if everything was happening all at once. I’ll tell it as a best I can, but you’ll have to forgive me if my memory isn’t one hundred percent clear on what happened just then, because I was too busy diving for the questionable cover provided by a workbench to make note of all of the details.

One thing was for sure: Becky’s insult must have really hit the mark, because Tony’s expression went from ‘attempting to intimidate you’ to ‘you’ll pay for that’ in the space of a few seconds.

He extended the pistol out towards Becky from where it had been held to casually cover us at the level of his waist before, bringing it up and out, though whether he meant to actually kill Becky or simply to tighten the thumbscrews of fear, we would never know for sure.

Dad always talked about armed enemies in exactly the same way. “Don’t listen to what they tell you, don’t try and figure out their intentions or read their body language or any of that other BS the ‘experts’ like to talk about. If they have a weapon in their hand and they’re pointing it at you, it’s nearly always too damn late. And if it isn’t, thank the Lord for His gift to you, and get the drop on him first. Make damn good and sure that
you’re
the one who walks away and goes home safe.”

I guess Becky’s mom or dad must have taught her something similar, because she didn’t flinch or hesitate for a split-second. It was only afterward, when it was all over and I had time to reflect on it a little, that I realized that Becky had actually pulled
two
triggers. The first had been that sweet little insult, which had done a fine job of getting Tony riled up and thinking even less straight than he had been before.

Shooting angry is not a great way to shoot accurately, something else Dad had loved to preach.

The second shot (and the third, fourth, fifth, and so on) had been fired maybe two seconds later, when Becky was diving to her right like Chow Yun Fat in some classic Hong Kong action movie.

It could only have been more Hollywood if she’d been firing two pistols at the same time instead of just the one. Fortunately, that one turned out to be more than enough.

For the second time that night, the sounds of gunfire echoed throughout Long Brook Sanatorium. Becky must have just kept jerking the trigger until the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

Tony got off a couple of shots as well, but his weren’t nearly as accurate as Becky’s had been. Looking back on it now, I think that he must have felt so superior looking down on us from what he thought was his position at the top of the food chain, that he couldn’t even begin to imagine that one of us poor, helpless kids might have been armed ourselves, or in any condition to actually fight back.

That turned out to be an expensive mistake to make.

I hit the ground fairly hard, but managed to break most of my fall with outstretched hands. The only injury I suffered was a couple of scraped palms. It had been necessary for me to drop the lantern in order to do that, and it had smashed on impact, littering shards of broken glass all around it. The bulb still worked, though, throwing out a small circle of light for us to see by.

Man, but those gunshots were
loud.
Once the ringing in my ears had gone away, the first thing I could hear was the sound of Tony screaming, and with damned good reason; the drug dealer was clutching his left thigh with both hands, the pistol now resting on the ground at his side, trying to control a steady stream of blood that was oozing out from between his trembling fingers.

“Come on!”

Becky was on her feet in a flash, scooping up Tony’s pistol and making for the way out. I staggered upright too, snatching one of the two surviving lanterns to replace the one that had broken. Bringing up the rear, Brandon grabbed the last and we left Tony bleeding and squealing in near-darkness on the cellar floor.

Good riddance, you piece of trash.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Damn, Becky, that was
badass!”

Brandon was obviously really impressed with the way she had faced off against Tony down there, and to tell you the truth, so was I. I don’t know that either of us would have shown that kind of nerve, let alone shoot straight and quite literally dodge a bullet too.

“No big deal,” Becky smiled coyly, though it was very apparent that she was pleased with the compliment. Even though we were running for our lives up a staircase that led away from an underground meth lab, into a sanatorium haunted by the ghost of a psychotic Nazi doctor and his equally-crazy team of dead nurses, I still wasn’t will to let Brandon win the compliment game and worm his way deeper into Becky’s good books, so I said the first nice thing that popped into my mind.

“That was really great shooting. You know, hitting him in the leg like that.” It sounded a lot less lame inside my own brain, before I actually said it.

“Thanks, Danny. I was actually aiming for his head, but the leg worked out okay in the end.”

That shut me up on the spot. I couldn’t tell whether she was kidding or not, and it didn’t seem like a great time to ask. In the end though, curiosity won out and I just couldn’t help it.

“I thought that Wiccans didn’t believe in killing people.”

“We’re a practical faith. Wiccans don’t like to harm anybody if we can help it, but if it’s absolutely necessary, we aren’t going to shy away from it either,” Becky replied matter-of-factly as she kicked open the cellar door.

We piled out into the long hallway again, following Becky’s lead; she was, after all, the one who was dual-wielding pistols, although I didn’t think we’d need them any longer.

By the time Tony got his bleeding under control and managed to limp his way back upstairs, we’d be long gone. My only worry was that Tony and Jake must have gotten up to Long Brook in a car or truck (they’d have had to haul all of that meth-cooking crap with them) that was hidden somewhere on the grounds, so Tony would probably head straight for that and try and cut us off on the road. If there were more guns in his vehicle, things could still get pretty ugly, and the Peak-to-Peak Highway could be a lonely stretch of road in the early hours of the morning.

I explained all of those concerns to Becky and Brandon.

“Might be smarter for us to just sit tight in the woods until morning,” Brandon said, thinking out loud. “When the sun comes up, flag down the first car we see that isn’t been driven by a wounded drug dealer.”

“I won’t say I like the idea, but I don’t have a better one,” Becky agreed reluctantly. “I think there are still some rounds left in this,” she waved the pistol that had been liberated from Tony, “but if I don’t have to shoot anybody else ever again, I’d be perfectly happy with that.”

“That works for me too,” I added. “For now, we just need to focus on getting the hell
out
of here, before Spiessbach and his cronies come back.”

“Spiessbach? Who the hell is Spiessbach?” Brandon sounded confused. “Is that Tony’s last name?”

Shaking my head, I hurried gave him the short version, explaining what we had learned about the insane head of the sanatorium. His only response was, “Man, that is
messed up.
” Hard to argue with that, I thought.

Using the lanterns to light our way, we cut through the laundry room again and made our way back carefully towards the main hall. There were no ghostly doctors or nurses in there now, just the sad and pathetic dead body left behind when Jake’s spirit had departed.

Almost as if on cue, a shrill, high-pitched scream came down from one of the floors above us. The cry was full of pain and anguish, the sound of a man being horribly tortured.

“Oh no,” was all Becky could think of to say.

“What?” Brandon demanded, looking upwards for the source of the scream. “What is it?”

“It’s Jake,” I said quietly. “They’re operating on him.”

“Oh God.” Becky covered her mouth with one hand, looking as though she wanted to throw up.

Jake’s screams were nothing short of gut-wrenching. I don’t think that I have ever heard a human being in that much pain, whether they were alive or dead.

“It sounds like they’re tearing the guy apart,” Brandon said, shaking his head in sympathy.

“They probably are. Spirits can feel pain sometimes, just like the living can. Jake doesn’t even
have
tuberculosis, but that’s not going to stop a maniac like Spiessbach.”

All three of us looked at another in the lantern-light. There was a long silence, broken by another hysterical cry from several floors above us.

“I can’t listen to this,” Becky said firmly. “We need to be getting the hell out of here.”

“I know,” I answered quietly, but when she and Brandon started to head towards the double doors that would lead us towards the sanatorium’s main entrance — and freedom — I couldn’t quite bring myself to follow them.

“What?” Becky had stopped halfway to the doorway and turned back towards me. “What is it?”

I let out a long breath. Sometimes I really, really
hated
being a Deadseer.

“I can’t just leave him.”

Brandon came back over to try and reason with me.

“Dude, are you
crazy?
The guy’s a drug dealer, and he tried to
kill
me! Not to mention holding a gun to
your
head too…”

“I know, man. I know, okay? But I can’t just leave him here. And what about the rest of them? What about Matilda? What about Polly, and Billy? Hell, even Mister Long Brook deserves a better afterlife than
this.”