HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (28 page)

“
Well, no
matter, who made me, I don't think it matters,” he said. “Here
we are, the two of us finding ourselves united. Now that we've been
properly introduced, turn out the light. And put those wings away.
You don't need them with me.” He lay back and his body morphed
into the scarecrow human who turned onto his side away from her. He
pulled the sheet up over his body and was soon snoring again, dead to
the world.

Outside the motel
room a small branch near the window blew back and forth in the wind
sweeping down from the mountains. The branch scraped the glass like
long nails searching for a way inside. The moon rose and cast yellow
light over the small parking lot where gum wrappers and empty
cigarette packs blew about the scarred tarmac.

Angelique's wings
withdrew and she pulled the light string. Darkness embraced the two
non-humans, silence wrapped around them, and Angelique lay thinking
about Henry until she fell into an exhausted, uneasy, dreamless
slumber.

CHAPTER 33

WHEN YOU LEAST
EXPECT IT

Nick and Jody rode a
bus from Reno, Nevada to Sacramento, California. They spent the night
in the bus station lounging uncomfortably in waiting chairs. Nick sat
slouched down, his long legs propped in a chair across from him. Jody
simply curled up across two chairs, tucking his hands between his fat
thighs. A bus left the next morning for San Francisco, but they were
too tired to take it. Instead, Nick found them a motel room and they
spent the rest of the day catching up on sleep. Later that night they
walked down the road from the motel and found an all-night cafe. They
had hamburgers and fries and chocolate sundaes. Full and sleepy once
again, they trudged to the motel and by eleven were sound asleep
again.

The following day
Jody got a stomach virus that kept him in the motel bathroom. Nick
offered to go get him some something, but Jody told him hold off, I'm
going to be fine.

He wasn't fine, not
by a long shot, and by afternoon was weak from the runny runs. He let
Nick go out to get something from the pharmacy. It turned out to be
a thick white nectar that smelled like coal tar and tasted worse. But
by supper time he had stopped hogging the toilet.

“
Man,”
he said. “Those burgers must have had laxatives in 'em. At
least mine did.”

Nick offered to go
out and bring something back for him to eat, but Jody demurred. “I
don't think I can eat for a while. Maybe tomorrow.”

The next day he felt
strong enough to try breakfast, but they took it at a different cafe.
Around noon they got back to the bus station and had tickets for San
Francisco.

That is where Nick
felt they could find a steamer or tramper leaving the country. Having
arrived finally in the port city, they both had been on buses so long
they felt the land under their feet was still moving. Jody swayed a
little and Nick reached out to grip his shoulder, steadying him.

“
We need a
room,” Nick said, scanning the street outside the downtown bus
station. Together they had little money left, but enough for a couple
of nights lodging and food. He began to walk west and Jody strode at
his side, shoulders thrown back. People gave them wide berth—the
tall, handsome blond man and the midget. They paid them no mind other
than to stay out of their way.

They found quarters
in a run-down hotel eight blocks from the bus station and near the
wharves. The lobby was layered in torn linoleum of various color and
pattern and the stairs leading up to the rooms looked rickety. The
counterman took Nick's money and handed over a key without ever
really looking into his face.

In the morning after
a quick wash, they went into the streets and had a breakfast of
scrambled eggs, bacon, and biscuits at a cafe. By noon they had found
jobs, Nick as a new bartender, though he'd have to be trained, and
Jody as a clean up man for the same speakeasy bar. It was an illegal
bar breaking the Prohibition Act and the owners named it the Red
Casket, which Jody said meant it was for dead people, and Nick said
it meant what held the whiskey.

“
Or the Red
Casket's for dead people drinking raw-gut whiskey,” Jody said,
grinning in a mischievous way.

It was a rough
speakeasy in a bad part of town, frequented by working class men who
held jobs on or near the wharves. On the door was a simple sign in
red and there were no outside lights or any other signal that this
was a place where people congregated. Once through the door, however,
the interior was large, open, with high ceilings of pressed tin. A
bar ran along one side of the room and tables were scattered around.
In the very back through red curtains stood three tables for card
players.

Nick was often
called upon to break up fights or to throw someone out of the club
who got too rowdy. Within days, due to tips more than to pay, Jody
and Nick had a healthy stash of money saved. Guys drinking rot-gut
seemed to be charitable to the help.

One Monday in their
room, Nick rose early considering they'd worked until two in the
morning. He began to pack a bag. Jody woke and rolled over onto his
side to watch. “You're leaving?”

“
She's still
coming--Angelique. If I take a ship out and you go on down South, she
won't find you.”

“
What if I
want to go with you?”

“
You don't
like the ocean. You said so.”

“
Well, I
didn't lie, I don't like boats and the sea scares me, but I want to
go anyway.”

Nick stopped
packing. “Are you sure? Is it what you really want? We'd have
to get you a passport. We'd have to travel on a working ship, a
steamer, but I don't think they'll hire you so you'd have to pay for
your way. And I'm not coming back, Jody. You'll be in a foreign
land.”

“
What foreign
land?”

“
I don't know
yet, because I don't know what ship I can get on, but it won't be the
States anymore.”

Jody thought about
it for only a few seconds before leaping from the bed to pack his
bag. “I'm in,” he said. “I figure I'm better off
with you than taking my chances here, even if I run south. I'd rather
not be on the same continent with Angelique either, thanks. Where can
I get a passport?”

Before Nick ever
opened the door of their room to leave, he had a sudden bad feeling.
He thought of Angelique and felt she might be outside his door. He
paused, his hand on the doorknob. But that was silly superstitious.
He'd know when she was there. He'd know for sure.

“
What is it?”
Jody asked.

“
I'm not
sure.” He shook his head as if clearing cobwebs and opened the
door, ready to swing into the hall with his bag.

Except a madman
stood in his way with a knife. For a split second his face morphed
into that of a little girl with gleaming eyes. She had sent him.

“
What's this
then?” Jody asked.

Nick paused again,
his mind recognizing the truth of the situation—that Angelique
had used a man who had gone mad to attack him. And thinking this,
giving the attacker just this much leeway was exactly what he
shouldn't have done. He saw the darkness welling out of the man's
eyes in that instant. It threatened to devour the world.

“
Stay behind
me,” Nick said, pushing Jody back.

He put out his hand
as if to stop the man and that's when Nick was struck. He was a
bruiser, tall and big, his shoulders like blocks of wood. He hit Nick
full in the body and it was seconds after the strike that Nick
realized he'd been stabbed. He pushed against the big man while Jody
screamed in impotent frustration. The man snarled, the darkness in
his eyes floating out and covering Nick's face, blinding him for a
moment, and then he withdrew the long blade and rushed away down the
hallway to the stairs.

Nick fell back
hitting the wall next to the door and slumped to the floor. He had
one hand over the bleeding wound in his gut.

“
Oh no, oh
no!” Jody bent hover him, his eyes wide and scared.

“
I'll be all
right. Just...just get me back in the room.”

Jody acted as a
cane, his shoulder taking the weight of Nick's hand as he pulled
himself from the floor and staggered to the open doorway. He fell
onto the bed and instructed Jody to close the door.

When Jody returned
to the bed, he saw blood had soaked the angel's shirt and now poured
onto the brown twill bed cover, staining it black. “You're
dying,” Jody said with great sadness.

“
No, I won't
die. I want you to bring me towels and then go for a doctor.”

Jody hurried to the
rusty sink in the small bathroom and found a threadbare towel hanging
on a rack on the wall. He snatched it down and hurried back to Nick.

“
Go now, ask
the man downstairs where to find a doctor.”

Jody vanished from
the room like he was a miniature tornado, slamming the door behind
him.

Nick lay in his
blood and pain, surprised at how much it hurt. He hadn't been harmed
in a hundred years and now, taken by surprise, he had been knifed.
The assailant was mentally unhinged and he'd probably been either
drunk or drugged. He'd come at him like a missile, a force of nature.
There had been no way for Nick to prepare for such an onslaught. He
should have been more careful.

So this is what it
feels like to be truly human, he thought. They feel this pain. They
suffer tremendously and then they die. Like his poor Mary, eaten away
by nothing more than the body failing itself, dying awash in an ocean
of pain before the light went out in her eyes.

And he had felt all
this before—the stabbing, the blood, the dying.

It had been so
sudden, so unpredictable—the man lying in wait right before the
door. It was what Angelique wanted—to at least weaken him
before she came for him herself. Anything could end him and why did
it always have to be knives? As Caesar he'd been stabbed to death and
now, again, a knife might bring him to the brink of death. He'd go
back into the everlasting void and this time Angelique would not
summon him. He'd never leave that loneliness that drove him insane.
He'd never see this world again. OH GOD, he whispered into the grimy
room.

He gritted his teeth
and pressed down hard on the wound, trying to hold back his blood. If
he lost too much before a doctor could come, he'd never make it. He
might be angel, but he lived inside a very human body. He was almost
as much at risk from a sudden death as any other human.

He felt his mind
slipping, slipping...He tried to concentrate, tried to remain
conscious so he could put pressure on the wound, but he
was...slipping...

His thought
processes slowed until they fell into nothingness.

Jody stood aside as
the doctor worked. He wasn't much of a doctor. He had an office in an
old building that stank of cat urine though there was no cat to be
seen. His medical degree, which Jody hadn't had time to read, hung
crooked on a dirty plaster wall. He wouldn't even come out until Jody
had emptied his pockets and given him every dollar he had on him.

Now the old doc
worked, cutting open Nick with a small incision and probing the wound
where it went in to tear and rend intestine and stomach. He sewed
back the damage with delicate stitches, sweat forming on his brow. He
had to keep pausing to soak up blood with gauze. Jody thought if
this old bastard killed Nick, he'd break his legs. He'd take the lone
chair standing over by the filmy window and break the man's legs.

“
He needs to
be in a hospital for this,” the doctor said.

“
We didn't
have time for that.”

The doctor waggled
his head and sweat flew off each side of his face. “I can see
that, you fool. If I'd gotten here ten minutes later, he'd have been
gone.”

He finished sewing
shut the flaps of skin, his incision neat as a finely sewn hem on a
ladies skirt. He dabbed the long scar with a red-yellow disinfectant,
applied a salve, then dressed it. He washed up at the sink but had to
dry his hands on the sides of his gray slacks. He pursed his lips in
disgust.

“
What do I do
for him?” Jody asked. “Is he going to make it?”

“
It was a deep
injury, but with some luck he can live. I put things inside him back
together, but he can't eat any solid food for a couple weeks and
you'll have to give him these to stave off infection.” He
reached into his worn, black bag and handed Jody a bottle of pills.
“They're antibiotics, the strongest I have. Give him three a
day until they're gone. Don't miss any.”