Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (44 page)

“I’m not leaving them!”

“Yer choice!”  He never hesitated.  He opened the door and tossed the Benelli into the passenger seat, slammed the door and put the keys in the ignition.  Immediately, he knew something was wrong.  There was a pair of holes in the steering column, right around the ignition.  Before he even turned the key, he knew it wasn’t going to work. 
Click-click-click
, was all he got.  “That motherfucker!” he screamed, and punched the dashboard.

Spencer shoved the door open and came out with the shotgun at low-ready. 
How many more of them were out here?  Was it a trap, or…?

He got his answer when he saw a pair of headlights penetrating the storm.  “These fucking Russians!” he hollered, running for the Priora.  It was locked, naturally, and when he tried to open it the
car alarm went off.  It was blaring, and it would carry far out here.  His would-be assassin had thought of everything. 
Now he knows exactly where I am, and can follow the noise through the storm
.

A long, mournful howl. 
Wolves
. 
On top of everything else, fucking wolves!

“Spencer!” little Kaley
Dupré was shouting behind him.  With the butt of the shotgun, he smashed open the window, unlocked the door, and slid inside without even bothering to rake the glass off the leather seat.  “Spencer, you have to help them!”  Using the butt of the shotgun, he smashed the steering column several times.  “Oh…Spencer, here come some people—”

“I know!”

“—and I think they’re with the other guy—”

“
I know!
”

On the seventh lick, he smashed open the
ignition cover on the steering column and tossed the Benelli into the passenger seat.  Having worked on Russian vehicles for a few months in Derbent, Spencer had gotten the lay of their circuitry.  He reached up to turn on the overhead light.  Blood still oozing from his hand, he fumbled with the wires.  It took a moment to identify the power and starter wires—the Prioras were always color-coded differently.

Behind him, coming through the rear windshield, were new
headlights.  They were almost upon him.

Spencer started touching the main wires together, and got a
stutter, then another, then an almost-start.  Now, Kaley leapt
through
the passenger door and sat in the seat next to him.  “Spencer!  They’re right—” She shut up when the car started up.  He slammed the door shut and reached through Kaley, retrieving the shotgun from her seat, and set it in his lap.  He put the Priora in gear and hit the gas.

The car alarm still blaring, they slid more sideways than forward once they were off.  Spencer had no room in the ro
ad to turn around, not with reinforcement coming in behind him and the inert Subaru parked in front of him.  So he turned hard to the left, to where the kids were at the fence, shaking it and looking for a way through.  And behind them…oh, behind them, a darkness had filled the air.  Through the storm, he could see a large dark spot spreading out from the dock house.

“Don’t!  You’ll hit them!”

But Spencer had already made his decision, and the children darted out of the way just as he went smashing through the fence.  Something panged off the side of the car, probably a bullet.  Spencer spun in the snow, got halfway down the hill, and slid sideways to a stop.  Kaley launched herself through the seat, into the back, and, strangely enough, was able to open the rear door on the passenger side.  “Get in!” she hollered, waving to the four children.

Spencer floored it,
but the tires found little traction in the ice and snow.  Another shot smashed into the windshield in the back, just as the boy was leaping inside with the injured girl.  The other two girls leapt in just in time before the Priora found purchase and started moving, fishtailing left and right until Spencer got command over it.

Another shot.  This one through the rear driver’s side window.  Spencer looked at his rearview mirror.  There were two sets of headlights just behind him, both maneuvering better than he could because those were SUVs.  His was a little Priora with snow chains. 
They’re gonna win this race
, he thought. 
But only if it’s a race
.

He let the steering wheel go free while he ducked his head and both hands out the window, took aim with the Benelli, aimed just above the driver’s side headlight, and fired.  He couldn’t be sure if
he hit the driver or the windshield, the snowfall and the darkness and the headlights beaming in his face obscured all, but it certainly sent the SUV sliding and fishtailing.

Kaley screamed something at Spencer, but he couldn’t hear her.  The other kids were ducked down in the seat, Kaley having flung herself over the others to protect them.
  She was “solid-state Kaley” now, probably because she had felt compelled to open the back door to let them in.

Spencer cocked and fired once more, then came back inside to steer.  He winced as a shard of glass in his seat stabbed him
in his ass.  “Son of a—”  Something smacked up against the passenger side window.  Spencer looked, saw some long and tenebrous thing sliding along the glass, leaving a long line of smeared oil.  One of the impossible limbs from the Deep, trying to pull him back to the dock house.

He looked at the passenger side rearview mirror.  Amid the headlights chasing him, he saw a spiraling miasma coming at him.  Angry, curling limbs moving over and under the SUVs behind.

“He’s gaining on us,” Spencer shouted.

“Who?”

“Your Prisoner pal!”

“It’s not him.”

“What—”  He was cut off by another shot, which panged off the side of the car.  “Whattaya mean it’s not him?”

“This is just one of the Others?  Or all of them.  I don’t know.”

“If this is the Others, then where the
fuck
is he?”

“Waiting.”

“For wh—”

Another series
of shots.  It was a volley. Spencer ducked and kept steering with one hand.  The other hand reached up and bent the rearview mirror down a little so that he could see his pursuers.  Then, the rear passenger side window shattered.  Spencer turned to look.  A tentacle reached in and coiled around Kaley’s throat, and before she had a chance to do anything, she was pulled from the car.  The last he saw of Kaley Dupré, she looked at him with a desperate plea for help, and then vanished into the darkness.

Perhaps it was reflex that had made her become corporeal enough to open the back door for the children.  Perhaps it was because the children needed her, and Kaley’s first instincts were to protect others from going through what she’d gone through.  Whatever it was, Kaley had once again switched places.  Walking through the open courtyard on her way to the cafeteria, she suddenly became immaterial Kaley Dupré again, while the version of herself inside that car in Russia became material.

The bullets were now a real threat to her, yet she’d flung herself onto the children anyway.  Kaley’s empathetic connection to others around her made it where she could do nothing else except defend them.

And now, the tentacle had her.

It was strange, walking to the cafeteria and knowing that she was an apparition here, that all the kids currently seeing her didn’t know that they were essentially looking at her ghost. 
Am I dead already?
she thought, even as she was twisted and dangled in the air by limbs from another world.  The other kids were giving her a wide berth—she had been walking through the courtyard, shouting things like “Spencer!” and “I’m not leaving them!”  Maybe some of them thought she had a cell phone, or maybe a Bluetooth in her ear, or something, and she was arguing with someone on the other end.  Maybe the others just thought it was that new weirdo Dupré being herself.  She was far from caring.  She only wanted the children safe, and now they were left with Spencer Pelletier, a man who would feed them to the Others if it meant half a chance at escape.

In the courtyard surrounding the lunchroom, all seemed fine and normal.  Birds chirped self-importantly to
themselves, the wind blew gently through the trees, and red and orange leaves floated down to the earth.  She was now walking towards the lunchroom.  Her life in peril in Russia, she was still thinking,
I’m hungry
. 
Hope it’s tacos today
.

The murky water all around Kaley’s lunchroom was a tumultuous current now.  Stepping through the door, she found the walls occasionally jetting out geysers of the white foamy liquid.  It splashed across tables
, formed puddles in chairs where kids sat, oozed over the sides of lunch trays and dangled from the fingers of one oblivious teacher, Mrs. Bryant.  It all transpired without any of the kids or staff being the wiser.

The tentacles tasted and
prodded and poked.  Kaley tried to scream, but her breath was stolen from her as two powerful serpents squeezed her chest and stomach.  Another serpent was still squeezing her neck.  She felt like her head was about to pop off.  The world was retreating from her. 

She stood transfixed by all of this,
and then reached into her pocket to retrieve her lunch money…

Then someone bumped into her.  Just like that, lunchroom Kaley was solid again.  Not only that, but she was Whole.  She’d blinked, and was no longer in two places at once, but
here
, right here in Cartersville Middle School, and
only
in Cartersville Middle School, standing at the front doors of the lunchroom and looking out across a sea of kids claiming their usual seats at lunch tables.

T
he sludge was gone as well.  That murky water, that thin film between worlds, was just gone.  Mopped up.  Wiped away.  It was a normal day in the lunchroom at CMS.  “Look out, freak,” said Nancy Boyle.  It was her that had bumped into Kaley, somehow bringing her back from the precipice of doom.  Kaley looked at her.  She knew where Nancy would be sitting.

At lunch, all tables were assigned to specific teacher’s classes—Ms. Burgess’s third-period students were assigned to four long tables at the far right wall of the room—but within that area, students could choose where they wanted to be seated.  Therefore, kids with friends in other classes selected seats neighboring a friend at the table of another class.

That’s how she knew where Nancy Boyle would sit.  She was in Mrs. Baker’s third-period English class, which neighbored the table occupied by Ms. Burgess’s students.  Nancy would sit at the far end of Mrs. Baker’s table, and her girlfriend Laquanda would sit at the far end of Ms. Burgess’s table, where the two would laugh, point, and mock not just Kaley, but anybody else that wandered haplessly into their danger zone.

A warm tear fell down Kaley’s cheek.  She reached up to wipe it away. 
The children
, she thought. 
Oh God, I left them
. 
Spencer!  He’ll
…

“You gonna grab somethin’ to eat, little missy?” said Mr. Watson.  Kaley didn’t have him for any classes, he was
a sixth-grade math teacher, but the man was assigned lunchroom monitor duties during this period.  He was smiling at her warmly.  Another good man.  She could feel it.  A good man often made to feel low by the students, who made often made fun of him for his bad breath—he had halitosis, and it couldn’t be helped.  He was also pudgy and a little soft-spoken.  A pushover.  By reflex, her heart bled for him.  “You okay, little missy?”

“Ye
s sir,” she finally said.  “I’m just, like, kind of out of it?”  She started for the lunch line.

It was strange now that the duality was gone.  Kaley had narrowly escaped death, but somewhere on the other side of the planet she had left four innocent children in the hands of a madman.  And what about that one girl?  The one
with the One Direction shirt, that had died being twisted to pieces by the limbs of the Others? 
I failed her
.

“Here she is,” someone muttered.  “The freak.” 
Moving on autopilot again, Kaley had somehow gotten in line, and just behind her was Laquanda Everest. 
She feels Nancy’s closeness, she knows that Nancy is here in the lunchroom with her, and now her confidence is at its daily peak
.  Whether they knew it or not, people everywhere had some degree of Kaley’s powers—the power to feed off of the emotions of others, or to be empowered by them.  Bullies were no different.  This would be another long lunch.

Spencer saw it all.  One of the impossible limbs licked out at him, smashed his windshield to pieces, tore it out and in came the rushing blizzard.  However, the limb continued on and smashed into the vehicles pursuing him.  Their headlights showed they were zigzagging, fishtailing, and finally one of them lost it on an embankment.  He thought he heard a scream or two before the thing was surrounded by the amorphous limbs, and then vanished into darkness.

The last SUV was driving parallel to Spencer, climbing high up the same embankment, no longer trying to catch him but trying to escape.  Spencer and th
e SUV hit the same road leading up and away from the docks, through a closed toll gate and then smashing through another chain-link fence.  He ducked as some of the razor wire came in through where the windshield used to be.  In the back, the kids were screaming almost as loud as the car alarm still going off.