Ten Plagues (2 page)

“Chico,” the man said. “Please, God, not him.”

She heard the true prayer in his voice.

The whole building, now engulfed in flames, shifted forward.

She turned to order the man to get away before she went back for the boy. But he was gone, running toward the boy, right into the teeth of the fire, toward certain death.

Another boy burst through the solid wall of raging flames that blocked the front door of the condemned brownstone. He screamed and beat at fire that had turned him into a human torch. He ran down the stoop of the tenement and plowed into Keren, shrieking and writhing in pain, and she staggered back as he fell at her feet. He rolled and flailed at the merciless flames.

Ignoring the white-hot raining ash, Keren tore off her blazer and smothered the fire. She slid her arm under the boy’s shoulders. The stench of burned flesh was overwhelming.

The boy screamed, but he was conscious enough to get to his feet with her support. As she moved away from the raging fire, she looked back at the building. Her heart clutched. The man scooped up the fallen boy and turned to run, but he was out of time. Bricks rained down on his shoulders and he vanished as he was buried alive.

Then, through the smothering clouds of smoke, she saw the man rise up, with what seemed like superhuman strength, and shed the bricks on his back. He had the child’s limp body cradled in his arms.

The boy beside Keren fell. She couldn’t abandon this teenager to go help the man. Her heart wrenched as she turned away from the man and virtually carried the wickedly burned boy toward safety.

She glanced back and saw the man run sideways down the street, trying to get past the collapsing building. Falling bricks and tortured metal clawed at him. Rocks and cinders pelted him with every step.

“God, help me. Help us save these boys. Help that man.” She looked back. Something slammed into the man. He staggered then fell against the side of a stripped car. Keren knew that last blow was one too many. The man had no strength left.

As Keren hauled the semiconscious boy around a corner to shelter him, she risked one more look back into the blizzard of shrapnel. Hundreds of bricks hurtled straight at the man. Then he was swallowed up by the choking dust of the explosion. Buried under tons of stone. Keren cried out at the heroic man’s failure. When he vanished, the evil she’d sensed earlier swept back, and Keren could swear she heard Satan laugh in the face of the horror that surrounded her.

Trying desperately to keep functioning, she fumbled for her phone and called 911.

A
doorless wreck of a car materialized in front of Paul Morris.

He slammed into it, realized what it was, shoved Chico in, and jumped in after him just as bricks battered the roof with brutal fury, caving it in.

Paul threw himself over the child.

The noise was deafening. Smothering dirt blinded Paul. He felt the roof press against his back. He fumbled in his pocket for his phone. When he flipped it open, the display light pushed back the terror enough that he could dial 911 in the choking dust. “There’s been an explosion.” He gave the operator the address. “There’s a fire. We need ambulances. Dozens of people hurt and killed!”

“Please stay on the line, sir.” The woman’s calm voice gave the whole thing a nightmarish quality, but Paul knew he was wide awake.

The car’s roof vibrated with the thudding bricks, rapping out an ugly song on Paul’s spine. He dropped the phone on the floor, leaving it open so he could see, and slid onto his knees beside the little boy, ready to drag Chico onto the floor, too, though there was next to no space. Blood coursed through the silt coating Chico’s face. The car held what was left of its shape as the bricks buried them alive. Paul felt for a heartbeat and found one, weak but steady. With only inches to move, he struggled out of his zippered jacket and covered the boy’s mouth and nose to protect him from breathing grit.

The first siren was audible through the bricks. He picked up his phone and said to the 911 operator, “I hear them coming. Thank you.”

“Sir, wait until—”

Paul hung up but left the phone open for the light as he turned back to Chico. He could make out a black streak on Chico’s face that had to be blood. He pressed on the fast-bleeding cut with the jacket.

Paul’s phone rang. He remembered the 911 operator had told him to wait. “Hello, I’m sorry, operator, I didn’t mean—”

“I’ll try to get the evil out of her before she dies, but there is so much. She’s so filthy.”

The voice that had started all this.

Paul fought back the brutal, ugly, satanic words he wanted to say.

“I gave you the car.”

Paul shook his head. A voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It surrounded him and comforted him. It sheltered him, just like the car he’d fallen into.

He bowed his head and saw blood dripping down the front of his torn, dirt-coated T-shirt. “You gave me the car?”

A crooning voice spoke in his ear, “I saw you trying to save those evil men.”

“Boys, not men. They’re just boys.” Paul gripped the phone, coating the keypad with bloody fingerprints.

“They’re old enough to be evil. When you saved them, you missed your chance. Now Juanita will suffer the first plague. The plague of blood.”

The connection broke off.

He had to get to Juanita. Now.

Paul shoved at the space where the car’s door should be and found bricks. Chico stirred beside him, but Paul thought of Juanita and kept digging, shoving. He knocked a hole in the stack of bricks, and they clattered to the pavement as he squirmed outside into blinding grit and ear-piercing squalling sirens. He stumbled over debris covering the street and fell to his knees. His hands landed on shards of glass and jagged brick. He was only distantly aware of the pain.

He stared, curious about the spreading stain of red on the ground around him. An echo deep in his head told him it was blood, and the blood was his. A plague of blood.

Juanita. Those pictures.

A man emerged like a phantom from the cloud of smoke and grit and crouched beside Paul. “Sir, let me help you.”

The letters EMT on the man’s chest blurred. “I’m not the one who needs help. In … in the car. A boy.” The letters faded completely. “And Juanita. I have to save her.”

Paul saw the ground rushing up to meet him.

He had the presence of mind to thank God for the car.

Keren dropped to her knees beside the boy. He didn’t move. Whatever strength he’d had to get this far was gone. She slapped at sparks that still ate at the remnants of his clothes. A piece of the boy’s crisp, blackened skin slid away. Tears cut like acid through the grit in her eyes as she pulled her hand back.

“God, please, don’t let me hurt him any more.” She reached for his neck to feel for a pulse then stopped. He was so badly burned on his upper body she didn’t dare touch his throat. She caught his wrist. She couldn’t find a pulse. He wasn’t breathing. His chest was burned black. She gritted her teeth, tilted his head back to open his airway, and began chest compressions. An ambulance, siren wailing, whizzed past Keren and skidded to a stop. Two men climbed out.

She looked up, pressing rhythmically on the boy’s breastbone. “He doesn’t have a heartbeat.”

They gently moved her aside and took over as another ambulance screamed up. She stared at the boy’s blackened flesh where it had peeled away from him and stuck to the palms of her hands. Blood seeped through her fingers.

“Let me help you, miss. You’re bleeding.” A woman pulled Keren toward the ambulance.

She shook off the hands. “I’m Detective Collins, Chicago PD. There are a lot of people here who need help more than I do.” Teenage boys, bleeding and moaning, were collapsed all along the street.

More ambulances arrived with glaring lights and screaming noise. Keren yelled over the cacophony, “A man, over there, and a little boy.” She started to lead the woman there.

O’Shea came lumbering up to her. The medics headed toward the right spot, and she saw that a couple of paramedics were already lifting someone into their ambulance. She couldn’t bear to see that heroic man and that little boy, crushed to death.

“Keren, what happened? Are you all right?” O’Shea pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to her forehead.

Mick O’Shea had taught her nearly everything she knew about being a cop. He’d saved her when she came close to being busted off the force by an arrogant, grandstanding superior officer, and Mick was lead investigator on the Juanita Lopez case.

She brushed his hand away and saw the handkerchief was soaked with blood. “Where’ve you been?”

“I got hung up in traffic,” O’Shea said. “There was an accident on the Dan Ryan Expressway, and I was the first cop on the scene.” The EMT drew a sheet over the burned boy’s face. She pressed the handkerchief back against her head wound and let her bloody hands cover her eyes.

The fire department arrived, and more police came. The rubble crawled with rescue workers. Keren turned toward the chaos. Her steps faltered. She looked at the sky-high cloud of billowing grit. It wasn’t the sight of the carnage that stopped her—the air was so clogged with dirt that she couldn’t see any details—but Keren knew evil. From her earliest memory, she always had. She was almost overwhelmed by what she sensed about whoever had done this. Usually she had to be in the presence of someone before she could discern their spirit. But this was more powerful than anything she’d felt before.

She saw a rescue dog whining and digging at shattered bricks. She and O’Shea exchanged a grim look and plunged into the madness.

Keren was a tough cop. She liked to think she was a little tougher than most.

So those weren’t tears running down her face, soaking the dust mask she’d been issued, salting her lips. It was grainy air that made her eyes run. She ignored it and kept working. She was grateful for the cover of night, even though it meant she’d been working nonstop for twelve hours. The whole block had burned out. The buildings were all condemned, but there were homeless people living in them. Many had gotten out, but with terrible injuries. Keren knew there had to be many more trapped inside and most likely dead.

Keren had a gift for sensing the difference between simple, human evil and a demonic hand. Her father had told her it was a gift given to her by God, to discern spirits, both good and evil. It had been her cross to bear all her life. In this tumult she felt an overpowering sense of the devil at work.

A boy, not older than six, hung limp in her arms. Keren hugged his dead body close, unwilling to flinch from his blood and crushed bones. Tears flowed until they streaked the coating of gray ash that encrusted the boy. She did her best to avoid numbing her feelings. This little boy deserved the respect of Keren’s horror. She let his face burn into her mind, even though she knew it would haunt her for the rest of her life.

She lay the boy gently down on a spread-out body bag and left him. Let someone else zip the bag closed; she’d give him his last minutes in the air. As she straightened, she heard the sad whine of the cadaver dogs as they began to resist hunting through the wreckage of the apartment buildings. Their handlers urged them on with coaxing voices that sounded as depressed as the hounds. She knew how the dogs felt. She was about ten minutes away from curling up on a pile of jagged bricks and going to sleep.

O’Shea grabbed her empty arms. He gave her a long look. From behind his dust mask he said, “Cap wants us at the hospital. It sounds crazy, but this explosion may have something to do with the Lopez case.”

“We can’t leave.” Keren’s voice broke.

“Orders, Keren.” O’Shea took her arm and started dragging her over the jumble of bricks.

It was a testimony to how exhausted she was that she let herself be manhandled. “How could this have anything to do with Juanita Lopez’s disappearing act?”

“They’ve got someone there, just now waking up, who claims he knows what happened and the two are related.” O’Shea kept dragging her and she kept letting him.

“Could he be responsible for this?”

“The guy in the hospital?” O’Shea asked.