Kornwolf (45 page)

Alarmed, the detective rolled down his window. There, on his passenger's seat, in open view, was a portable tracking box.

A couple of officers slowly emerged from the barn, looking notably pale and unsettled. Instead of dispersing the crowd that had grown to encircle the nameless Stepford detective, they joined it with heated demands for involvement. Everyone wanted in on the kill.

Dragging the box from the passenger's seat, the detective placed it on top of his hood. He activated the power. It glowed to life. A digital grid appeared. The program was loading. A moment passed … Then came a tiny electronic blip.

Adjusting a dial, the detective looked up. He pointed west: “He's over there.”

Unlike what a good many district members, and Plain Folk in general, had grown to believe, Jonas Tulk knew The Devil was vulnerable. A fleeting eternity might have elapsed since he'd shot it, but that wouldn't alter the fact: at a time when the compound had been much smaller—a twenty-cage facility—and far less secure, when the dogs had provided their only alarm, and the doors had been poorly (uselessly) fortified, Jonas alone, armed only with a .22 rifle, caught totally unawares (sleeping) and firing into the dark, no less—had crippled the beast in a single shot. He remembered it yowling off into the night—alive, but wounded: as quick to be driven away as it had appeared.

It was flesh and bone.

Tonight, after so many years, he was better prepared. Tonight, there would be no surprises. The compound was fully equipped at present. Now there were floodlights, reinforced doors, security cameras, alarms and a phone. Jonas himself, wide awake, stood armed with a sawed-off shotgun in hand and a .357 revolver tucked into his belt. Every electrical light in the building, both inside and out, was glaring intensely. All four cameras were working. As well as the alarms. And all of the doors were locked … Cleon and Bontrager may not have been there, and James and Ezekiel were roaming The Basin, but Jonas felt ready to hold down the compound alone. In fact, he preferred it this way.

From the ground floor's office, a cubicle packed with camera screens, he could survey the property. Nothing would enter—or pass—undetected. All systems were go.

And none too soon.

All through the evening, he'd waited with tortured impatience. At one point, he'd almost jumped the gun, when, from out of nowhere, a figure had crossed the highest screen of his monitor: a vaguely familiar woman's image in tattered white—partly obscured by darkness, stumbling east on the road …

The experience had left him on edge. But maybe, he decided, that was where he belonged. Ghostly apparitions wouldn't contend with the flesh and blood of The Devil. Tulk knew enough to expect a direct attack. It would probably storm the doors. As well, it would probably appear after midnight, when most of the roads were beginning to clear. The Devil had always relied on instinct more than intelligence—even though, recently,
some
thing had entered the compound through one of its ceiling hatches.

Those hatches were blocked now.

The only way into the building was via the main entrance, directly ahead.

In one of the cages, a Labrador puppy lifted its head from the slumbering cluster. It stared at the wall for a moment. Ever so gently, it thumped its tail on the mesh. Then again. It sat up.

Two cages over, a collie stirred from sleep with a growl.

Tulk stood in silence, gazing around at the angular, sheet metal walls of the building as though in the gut of an English whale.

The Labrador barked. The others around it began to sit up. They stared at the wall.

It was quiet again.

Jonas walked to the office and looked at the camera monitors. No sign of movement.

He returned to the floor.

He drew a corncob pipe from his pocket.

Maybe this would steady his nerves. He lit the bowl.

The alarm went off.

Every dog in the building sat up.

Jonas ran back to the office.

A light was flashing and buzzing under the monitors. He looked at the screens. There was nothing. No movement, no glitch in transmission. Unless the fence had been climbed already, it looked untouched.
Except
… (as it nearly eluded him)—maybe for: what was that jag in the pattern out there?—in the northeastern corner?

He flipped to manual. Zooming, he saw it: a gash in the wire.

That alloy was meant to be indestructible.

He flipped off the twelve-gauge's safety—and no sooner done than the pounding commenced from outside: a giant
slam
on the wall, to his left—and then, coming around, on the right … Or behind him? … Again, on the left … (?)

He ran back to the office. The monitor screens were jolting with static. The impact was coming from all sides at once. With the fence alarms blaring and every dog in the compound baying off its rocker—he wasn't even able to hear himself think.

He tried to deactivate the alarm. But something was wrong with the console, apparently. Something had locked up. It wouldn't respond. A honking blast tore out of the wall-mounted speakers above him. He fled the office.

Out on the floor, the chorus of howling had welled to a level, atonal crescendo. From every cage in the building it rose.

There were three aisles, each running twenty yards back to the loading gate. All of the units were stuffed with puppies. And all of the puppies were howling.

Furious, Tulk called out for silence. He walked down the aisle, ramming the gate handles. The wailing rose, as though to spite him. Then there was pounding again, on the walls. The mounted alarms continued to blast. The Labradors wouldn't pipe down, God damn them. He rattled their cage. They snapped at him, then resumed howling, undaunted. He flushed with rage.

He leveled the twelve-gauge and fired.

Silence.

As quickly as Tulk had reacted, the sirens let up. Along with the pounding outside.

A whimper rose from the quivering mound of Labrador puppies, most of them dead.

Twice more, he fired.

The rest of the cages were still.

Jonas moved to reload. He thumbed a lead slug into the chamber and pumped it. While digging more slugs from his pocket, he suddenly thought of the cameras. He turned around, took a
step back toward the office and looked in. The static was gone from the screens. They were still on. And something was moving on one of them. Jonas drew closer. It took him a moment.

Then he saw it.

It was looking right into the camera—grinning …

Jonas screamed.

His lifted his twelve-gauge to blow the whole board in response. But as quickly, the lights went out.

Which wasn't supposed to be able to happen.

Benedictus had gone to ridiculous lengths to safeguard their power supply. The only way to disrupt its flow would have been to sever the main to the generator. And no one could do that without a key. The access box was made of titanium.

Tulk, in a panic, fumbled blindly in search of the office. He ran into something—a chair. Sliding past it, he got to the door. He lifted an oil lamp down from a hook to the right of the frame. He lit it. The objects around him glowed back into view. He continued reloading the shotgun. Before he could finish, the puppies resumed their lament—from one corner, first, though scarcely perceptible, then from another, in tandem and rising: soon to engulf the whole building.

Here was a genuine call to the damned.

Jonas returned to the floor with the lamp. On approaching the cages, he slowed his advance. In confusion, he lifted his flame and, shivering, peered around. Something was different here. None of the lights was working. But more than that, something had changed. The scene appeared as though through a tinted, burgundy filter.

His balance wavered.

Slowly, he bent for a look to his right. A cage full of snapping huskies lunged at him. Something was wrong with them: milky-white gazes by lantern light. Cataracts. Blind, they were blind …

As he backed away, his gaze fell over the unit behind them. A rottweiler stood where a litter of puppies had sat moments earlier.
As with the huskies, it snapped at him viciously, foaming at the mouth. It appeared to be diseased.

Down the aisle, they proceeded, thus: on either side of him, baying obscenely.

Golden retrievers with scoliosis, hunched in defiance, gnawing the gate. A tick hound with some kind of skin condition. An Irish setter vomiting bile. Dobermans crippled with bone marrow cancer in squalling heaps. Arthritic dalmatians. And, underfoot, rivers of filth and feces.

The stench was impossible, even for Tulk.

Again, he leveled the shotgun and fired.

The tick hound's image was sawed in half. In its place lay a mound of bloodied puppies.

He pumped the gun and turned around.

An enormous
slam
hit the loading gate door: Once. Twice. Then three times—it buckled, steadily tearing away from the frame.

Each impact was staggering. Never had Jonas imagined such force. He shot at the door.

The last of his slugs tore into its lining. He dropped his twelve-gauge and went for the pistol. Tearing from its hinges, the door rushed inward—advancing upright, being pushed from behind. He fired. Sparks went up. It kept moving, unstoppable: straight up the aisle …

Here it came.

He unloaded his chambers at once.

It flattened him.

He wound up pinned to the floor underneath it. The handle had gouged and torn his scrotum. A broken rib tore into one lung.

He strained to cry out. But his voice was gone.

Through his agony, all he could sense was The Devil. Standing over him. Moving around.

It wandered down one of the aisles: repugnance incarnate / brimming with foul intent.

On every side, the howling welled into a final sustain, above which, almost inaudibly, Tulk heard the unmistakable sound of a cage door sliding open.

It took him a couple of minutes to catch up, but Rudolf managed to overtake—and edge his way to—the head of the line. He was driving Nelson Kutay's cruiser. The needle was pushing 105. Part of a candle was lodged in his ass. He had burn marks all over his body. Bruises. Cuts. Abrasions. Fractured appendages … Veering all over the road, he was murderous. Everyone tried to steer from his path. A man in a Chevy had almost gone into the ditch while attempting to let him pass. None of them mattered now. Only one thing was imperative: kill the Minister's son. Wherever he'd come from, whatever abominations of chance had conspired to produce him, and disregarding all ramifications: Ephraim, The Kornwolf, the Blue Ball Devil, could not be allowed to survive this evening. There could be no risk at all of his capture. And critically: no one could get to him first … The killing stroke was reserved for Rudolf, for whom all remedial notions of personal human integrity hung in the balance. Already, he wouldn't be able to face his fellow Lamepeter Township officers, nine in total, who'd cut him down from his shame in suspension, ever again. Even now, he could hear them laughing. For the rest of his life, he would never escape it. Some things simply cannot be lived down. Rudolf's career as a cop was over. Aside from the charges pending, as yet—the Bontrager / Yoder / Percy debacle—he would never set foot in the precinct again. That much he'd come to terms with already. What bothered him now was the mere possibility that someone might get to the creature first: without sending it back to hell himself, Beaumont, undoubtedly, would never even be able to
kill
himself in peace. He wouldn't know how to face his maker. Or The Devil.

Bitch of eternity.

His uniform stunk of sweat and urine. His wrists and ankles were chafed with rope burn.

He
slammed
into one of the Sprawl Mart vans. It swerved to the shoulder. He pulled ahead of it. He gained on a truck full of locals with high-powered spotting lamps, probing a field to the south. It jarred to one side as he passed. He accelerated—soon to be rolling by Officer Kreider—then Sergeant Billings, and onward, hurtling—up the procession in reckless abandon. His wheel base straddled the dotted line. The ditches passed at a rumbling blur. Finally, he pulled up beside the Land Rover, leading the pack. He looked over. He pointed.

The city detective scowled—as though to say:
What the hell do you think you're doing?

Beaumont ignored the gesture, demanding, in turn, with a show of hands:
Where is he?
He pointed to the tracking box.
Which direction?

Annoyed, the detective pointed north:
Over there
—then added insistently:
Slow down!

Rudolf disregarded him.

Roaring ahead, he crossed the junction at Peterville Drive and Shelty Run Avenue. His radio garbled with angry shouts. The pavement steadily rose before him. Just ahead, it was:
right over there
… He could feel it now: over the hill. Almost there …

Sheriff Highman's voice exploded: “
Beaumont, you son of a bitch!
” from the radio: “
Cool your jets, God damn it! Slow down!
”