Shimmer: A Novel (39 page)

Chief Grainger had stepped up on the modular stage as Bridget and the band concluded their second number. The singer looked a question at him and he whispered in her ear. A moment later her eyes widened. She pushed the microphone into his hands, then stepped back and conferred with her drummer. A moment later her other band mates closed ranks. Grainger tapped the microphone, producing a resounding
thunk-thunk
from the oversized speakers at either side of the stage and through all the recessed speakers in the mall. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said evenly. “I need you to remain calm and exit the mall in an orderly fashion.”

“This is bullshit!” someone shouted at the stage.

“Yeah, man! What about the concert?”

“What’s going on?”

“There’s been a—a bomb threat,” Grainger said, holding up his free hand quickly to forestall additional interruptions. “Chances are this is a prank to disrupt the young lady’s performance. However—and I’m sure you’ll agree—we need to take these types of threats very seriously nowadays.” Reluctant nods of agreement from the crowd. “Security guards will lead you to the nearest exit. And please,” he looked up to the wall of faces staring down from the second level, “exit on the level where you are now. Not the level where you parked your car. Exit first. Then find your vehicle.”

Logan winced, doubling over in pain.

“Logan?” Fallon whispered beside him.

“It’s too late!”

Fallon looked around the mall searching for the rift.

Logan sensed it was close, almost on top of them.

Unaware, Grainger continued to give instructions. “Keep the stairs, escalators and elevator clear. And thank you for your coop—”

A carousel horse exploded.

In one shocking instant, chunks of kiln-dried basswood, glass eyes, costume jewelry, and gold leaf peppered the crowd. The brass pole, which moments ago had appeared to impale the horse, shot across the stage and speared Bridget Bane’s keyboardist through his abdomen. Crimson blossomed across his white shirt as he staggered backward and fell off the rear of the stage. Bridget Bane screamed first, but members of the crowd joined her, a hundred echoes of horror. Chief Grainger’s dreaded stampede began almost immediately. Those closest to the stage, many bleeding from wooden shrapnel wounds, shoved frantically to escape the kill zone, while those farther away assumed a bomb had actually exploded and that the immediate danger had passed, at least for them. But the sudden rush from those closest to the blast, all the frenzied shoving and scrambling for cover or escape, caused many to fall and be trampled, screaming in pain as they fell under the attempt at a fevered exodus.

Chief Grainger hustled Bridget Bane and her surviving band members off the far side of the stage platform. Bridget tried to rush behind the stage to check on her fallen keyboardist, but her own security team, with “Event Staff” stenciled on the backs of their windbreakers, shielded her and the others, saying “He’s dead, Ms. Bane! We gotta move! Go! Go!”

“Son of a bitch,” Sergeant Albano said. “There
was
a fucking bomb.”

She started toward the carousel to help the wounded.

“It’s not a bomb,” Logan said urgently. “And it’s not over!”

“Whatever, kid,” she said. “Go on. Let the professionals handle this.”

“That’s just what I was thinking,” Logan said, his hand dropping to the hilt of his dagger. He turned to Fallon. “Last chance to get the hell out of here.”

“No,” Fallon said quickly, but she’d lost a bit of color. “I’m staying.”

As Sergeant Albano strode around the stage, the deejay, in his haste to escape, knocked over his table with a crash and sparking of ruined electronics. A dozen red balloons broke free and shot upward, bobbing impotently against the skylights. In his panic, the deejay tripped over the station’s banner and fell to his hands and knees, screaming as if under attack rather than a victim of his own clumsiness. People rushed by, jostling him side to side, none offering to help.

Logan grabbed Fallon’s hand and led her in a crouch behind the fallen table. Lying on its side, the table provided shelter from the mad flow of the crowd and would shield them from subsequent rift eruptions. “Look!” he said, pointing to the spot where the horse had stood frozen in mid-strut for years.

“I see it,” Fallon said. “A dark shimmering in the air.”

“It’s big,” Logan said. “Much bigger than the one on the bus”

“Bigger is bad, right?”

Logan nodded grimly. “He’s coming through this time,” he said. “Carnifex is coming into our world.”

“What should we do?”

Logan gripped the edge of the table nervously. “Hell if I know.”

The carousel lurched, wood cracked and split apart, and a second horse teetered. One of the ornate carriages between horses rose from the platform as if on a hydraulic lift, then flew into the air, a blur of motion until it struck an upper level safety railing and shattered into hundreds of pieces. The debris rained down on the shrieking crowd. A wooden chunk of sleigh rail crashed harmlessly into a penny wishing fountain. But a bench seat struck a woman pushing a stroller and she fell sideways without making a sound.

In rapid succession, more horses and carriages ruptured apart and exploded away from the rocking carousel. The shimmer in the air spread wider—and wider still. A spiked tentacle flashed out of the rift, wrapped itself around a man’s neck and ripped his head off. Rearing back, the tentacle wavered—searching—then shot forward, spearing a young woman with spiky blond hair through her lower back and hoisting her ten feet above the floor. Logan recognized the purple top and low-slung black jeans and felt his stomach lurch.

“Oh, God!” Fallon cried. “That’s Kelly!”

The tentacle whipped forward, like a bullwhip cracking, and Kelly Flexer hurtled through the air like a missile. Her lifeless body struck and destroyed most of the soft pretzel kiosk on the far side of the stage. The tentacle wasn’t finished. It lashed out at a redhead—Sadie Bennett!—but she dove through a shoe rack and rolled under a display table inside Best Foot Forward. The tentacle slithered across the floor like a live wire and wrapped itself around the ankle of the girl who’d been standing near Sadie—a brunette with a long ponytail wearing a jean skirt—and yanked her off her feet.

“Julie!” Fallon screamed. “We have to do something.”

Logan pulled Fallon back behind the table. He had his dagger unsheathed. “This can hurt it.”

Julie Young shrieked as the tentacle reeled her in, dragging her inexorably toward the disintegrating carousel. Chief Grainger and Sergeant Albano fired shots at the tentacle to no avail. Logan ran past the stage, his star-dagger in an overhand grip.

At that moment, an impossibly large, booted foot seemed to materialize out of thin air and smash down through the wood of the carousel platform. Logan stumbled in shock—
a foot that big!

Logan caught himself before he fell face first but had to force himself to keep moving toward the demon’s imminent point of entrance. Reality split apart. A seam in the space time continuum spread before his eyes and the ten-foot-tall demon emerged with a triumphant grin on his hideously wide face. In a split second, Logan registered the distorted head with the corkscrew horns, too many eyes, some of them milky and blind, the three vertical nostril slits, the too-wide mouth littered with jagged, mismatched fangs, the clothing made from sewn human flesh and faces, the breastplate of bones—and the enormous double-headed battle-axe.

Logan literally gasped in horror.

But he focused on one detail as he raced forward in spite of his inwardly shrieking instinct for self-preservation, and that was the tentacle of proto-flesh connecting Julie Young to the demon’s proto-flesh abdomen. He was tempted to remain at a safe distance and hurl the dagger at the soft non-flesh of the demon’s stomach, but he hadn’t practiced throwing the blade. Gideon had warned him about tossing away his only weapon. Yet Gideon had also warned him that if he was close enough to use it, he was too close.

He was vaguely aware of Grainger calling him off, but he was committed to this course of action, as foolhardy as it seemed at the moment. Dropping, he slid forward on the polished tile floor and slammed the point of the dagger into the taut tentacle, inches from Julie’s trapped ankle. The blade sliced the proto-flesh and the demon roared, more in outrage than in pain, Logan suspected.

Throwing his arms upward, Carnifex hurled aside the roof of the carousel. Poles clanged, horses and carriages crashed and bounced and shattered around them. Nearby display windows, struck by debris, exploded in a rain of glass.

Julie scrambled to her feet. Logan caught her hand and started to pull her to the relative safety of the radio station table when he felt her body lurch in his grip. Carnifex had formed another tentacle to replace the first, terminating this one in a twelve inch black spike. The tip of that spike now protruded from Julie’s throat, in the center of fresh, foaming blood. Her hand slipped from his grasp and she fell forward.

Logan’s ears rang with the sound of useless gunfire.

The floor shuddered behind him.

Fallon screamed a warning.

Logan hurled himself to the left, feeling a whoosh of air pass dangerously close to his body an instant before the curved blade of the battle-axe smashed into the floor, shattering tiles and wedging itself several inches deep. Without pause, Logan rolled and didn’t stop until he slammed into the wall of Tunes Style. Then he scrambled to his feet and raced for the table. The battle-axe swooshed overhead and destroyed the stage. The microphone stand fell, eliciting a painful screech of feedback from the large speakers.

Sergeant Albano fearlessly squeezed off shots with her .40 caliber Glock 23 and though the slugs rattled the breastplate of bones, the demon suffered no visible damage.

Patrolman Lintz yelled, “Everybody out! Now!”

Carnifex roared. “Nobody leaves!”

A series of distant bangs preceded a sudden change in air pressure. People began shouting that the doors wouldn’t open, the glass wouldn’t break. Carnifex lunged toward Lintz and, before the police officer could react, gripped the man’s head in his massive hand and pulped his skull with the ease of someone crushing a raw egg. Carnifex hurled the ruined body into the upper level and laughed at the fresh outburst of screams.

“Sergeant!” Grainger called. “Get those doors open.”

Albano nodded, turned on her heel—

—as a frightful whistling sound swept past her.

She tried to move, but her legs no longer obeyed her brain’s commands. The wide battle-axe blade had sliced through her abdomen. She collapsed—in two separate pieces—her torso falling to the right, her legs toppling forward.

Grainger’s other patrolman, Mark Gossett, joined the chief. Together they tried to provide cover fire for the escaping crowd. Unfortunately, their cover fire was futile and the crowd could not escape the magically sealed mall. People crowded into the temporary shelter of stores, huddling behind or under displays. Logan realized with awful conviction that Carnifex intended to kill every man, woman, and child in the Renaissance Mall. The demon lord took several lumbering steps to one side and then the other, swinging his axe back and forth. And with the ease of a scythe cutting through wheat, he began to harvest his blood crop.

Beside Logan, Fallon silently wept.

He wrapped his arm around her quaking shoulders but had no words of comfort. He’d never felt more helpless in his life. The dagger clutched in his hand seemed as dangerous as a child’s toy.

“He’s coming back this way!” Gossett shouted.

Logan looked up and stared into the hideously grinning face of a lord of hell. Gnashing teeth slathered with blood and raw human flesh. While Logan tried to comfort Fallon, the demon had fed.

He felt a tingling in his leg, suspected a wound, but suddenly realized the sensation came from his cell phone—on vibrate! “Hello,” he whispered frantically. “Who’s there? We need you—!”

“Logan, we’re here,” Gideon’s said calmly into Logan’s ear. “Be ready. We’ll fight Carnifex. You need to go through the rift. Take Fallon. You’ll know when. Find them!”

“Who—what—are they coming?” Fallon asked.

Almost in answer the recessed lighting in the mall flickered and crackled, winking out for a terrifying moment. In the brief darkness, screams rang anew from the panicked crowd. When the lights winked back on, Carnifex looked around curiously, battle-axe held high. A bolt of blue lightning ripped through the air and struck the demon in the chest, shattering the breastplate of bones. Carnifex staggered, stunned, as oily black smoke billowed off his chest. “Show yourself!”

A second bolt of blue lightning arced through the air, this one blasting the demon in the face, specifically targeting one of his four remaining good eyes and melting the orb in its socket. Carnifex roared in genuine pain, lumbering in a circle, his free hand pressed to his scorched face. “Show yourself, coward!”

“Who’s the coward, Carnifex?” Thalia shouted, emerging from behind the ruins of the pretzel kiosk. A pearlescent blue glow surrounded her body. Logan guessed that she had absorbed some of the mall’s electrical energy into her own aura, either as protection or as a power reserve, like a spare clip of ammunition. “About time you picked on someone who can fight back?”

Carnifex took the bait. Lowering his head, he charged her.

Grainger and Gossett separated, with the former diving into a clothing store and the latter rolling under the remains of the stage. Most of the trapped mall patrons continued to cower in the stores, behind and under display tables. None of them would remain out of Carnifex’s reach.

Logan saw a flash of movement from the upper level. A man launched himself off the safety railing—a man with a sword—in a perfectly timed jump. He landed on Carnifex’s shoulders, crouching for balance as he plunged the sword downward in a two-handed grip and took out another good eye. But Carnifex was quick to react, howling as he swept his forearm up to strike Gideon with the shaft of the battle-axe.

Gideon sailed through the air and hit the floor hard. Though he tried to roll with the impact, his shoulder took the brunt of the fall. When Carnifex stormed toward him, Patrolman Gossett scrambled out from under the ruined stage and took aim at one of the demon’s two remaining good eyes with his Glock 23. Unfortunately, he underestimated the speed of the demon. Logan had to wonder if the bullet would have had any effect on the soft tissue of the eye. He never found out. Carnifex swung his foot as if he were kicking a soccer ball and the tip of his heavy boot struck Gossett right below the ribs, shattering bones and propelling the man twenty feet through the air before he crashed among the bulk of the carousel debris.