The Spook House (The Spook Series Book 1) (13 page)

I held up my light to a get a better look. The man with the gun across from us did the same.

“C Team! Identify!” I ordered. There was no answer. I immediately knew was something wrong.

“You hear me? Identify yourself! Now!”

The soldier’s flashlight flickered and died. Without his light in my eyes, I got a better look at him. My excitement turned to terror. The soldier had no legs. His body just disappeared below the waist. Paco aimed his gunpoint and light beneath the suspect. The spotlight swept the floor unobstructed. This “man” was a floating torso.

“What the fuck? Do you see that!?” Paco yelled. “DO YOU SEE THAT!?”

“Oh hell no,” Dubois said, not so much as an answer but as a denial of the whole situation.

“Identify!” I screamed, trying to sound powerful but hoping my voice wouldn’t crack. I clutched my light. I really wanted a gun.

The response came from the other figure with legs.

“Abrams,” said a horrible, raspy voice. “You don’t remember me? Look at my face!”

The figure clicked a flashlight under his chin like a child scaring his friends in the dark. The light illuminated a ghastly face. Half of it was badly scarred and the eye was a dead, opaque white. It looked like eye of a blind, monstrous fish at the bottom of the ocean where sunlight never reaches. The side of his face was covered in blood. It looked fresh, glistening in the light.

The figure let the flashlight drop to the floor. It clanged loudly and rolled away. Then I noticed that he had no right arm.

“Gunner!?”

“You did this to me!” he shrieked, raising a stump of an elbow that was still dripping blood. “YOU DID THIS TO ME!”

I felt like a swimmer who finds himself face-to-face with a great white shark. I wanted out. I wanted away. My legs shook uncontrollably and I fell to my knees. Gunner, or whatever it was, pulled out a pistol with his remaining arm and aimed it at my head, meaning to kill me execution-style.

Paco fired his rifle and blasted the bloody body backward. The floating ghost returned fire. Dubois went down, dropping Kaz. The fall was so hard I knew he’d been hit.

I sprawled on the ground. I reached over and felt around the floor for one of the guns Dubois dropped. He had relieved me of my weapon earlier but it was within reach now. My fingers found it and wrapped around it.

Paco yelled out a line heard in every zombie movie: “Shoot ‘em in the head!”

The hallway flickered with muzzle flashes. Gunfire assaulted my eardrums.

“Take that motherfuckers!” he shouted. “Take …”

Paco went down.

“No!”

I rolled into position and raised my weapon, but the hovering thing crashed to the floor before I had a chance to fire. It convulsed, coughed up blood, and lay motionless.

All of the machine gun fire stopped.

Slowly, I got to my feet. The bodies of our enemies were lying on the floor. With my gun trained on them, I carefully closed in on them to make sure they were dead.

I stared down in horror. Everyone had all of their limbs. These weren’t mutilated bodies or personal demons. These were are our own guys. I was looking at the bodies of Barnes and Boudreaux.

Barnes was dead. Paco had shot him in the head. I couldn’t see Boudreaux’s wound. I expected him to sit up suddenly like a B-movie monster that can’t be killed. I pointed my gun at his head, focussing my flashlight beam on his face to check what I already knew. He was dead. There were no signs of breathing. His face was covered in blood. Then his eyes snapped open.

I cried out and jumped back. It’s a miracle I didn't pull the trigger.

“FUCK!”

“A-Abe? Is that you?”

“Fuck! B-Boudreaux?”

I moved cautiously towards him. Then I put down my gun and knelt beside him. There were tears in his eyes now, and blood in his mouth.

Gasping for air, he asked, “W-Why?”

I wanted to say something, but I simply shook my head. I had no answer.

Then he said, “We thought ... We saw vampires carrying Kaz’s body.”

I nodded. He still didn’t really understand what was going on. I had to let him know it wasn’t his fault.

“They’re testing drugs on us,” I said. “We’re all on acid.”

Boudreaux looked at me with confusion, then I could see the painful realization sink in. He hadn’t been shooting at monsters. We were the “vampires.”

“Abe,” he said, “Abe … D-Don’t let it be like this. Don’t let them get away with it. Abe …”

I was waiting for more. I held his head and moved my ears closer to his mouth. His eyes stared intently into mine, pleading. He whispered, “Don’t …”

I said, “They won’t get away with it. I swear.”

 Boudreaux’s intense gaze lost focus and he slumped in my arms. I eased him on to the floor. He was gone.

I remember Sgt. Coles telling us a story about how weird war was. He said you could be talking to guy one second and the next he’s dead. Forever. “Just like that,” he said.

Now Boudreaux was gone. I had given him some measure peace, I told myself, by telling him what he what he needed to hear.

I heard a low moan behind me. I snatched the gun off of the ground and spun around.

Dubois’ body was moving slightly.

Oh God, I thought, Somebody’s still alive. I put the gun down and rushed to kneel beside him. He looked bad.

“Those guys … Are they …? Who …?”

I shook my head. Dubois stared at me, and I could see the realization sink in.

“No,” he groaned. “C Team?”

I nodded.

“No!” he breathed. “They were ...” He started convulsing.

“Let me help you up,” I said. I put my arms around him and tried lift him.

He cried out, “No! No! No! It’s not supposed to be like this!”

I set him back down on the floor. My arms were covered in blood. He was worse than I thought.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” I said.

“I’m done, Bro. Promise me you’ll get out of here. Swear …”

I looked into his watering eyes and said, “I swear.”

Dubois closed his eyes and started to cry. I heard him softly muttering, ”Died for nothin’ … died for nothin’.”

He opened his eyes again. They found mine. I saw a moment of peace. He was happy I hadn’t left him alone. The life in his eyes was like a light, and I watched it fade away and go out completely. I closed his eyes with my palm.

I checked the others. Paco was dead. He’d been shot in the head and neck. Kaz was gone too.

I stood up slowly. There I was, covered in blood, surrounded by dead bodies. I half expected the front door to crack open. Congratulations! You’re the last man standing! Or maybe all of the guys would stand up again and laugh. We were using blanks the whole time! This is fake blood! You’re on a reality TV show and didn’t know it!

I waited. I really expected something like that to happen. But it didn’t. I took off my helmet and shouted at it.

“Happy now!? Seen enough?”

I waited for an answer. There was none. I ripped the camera and microphone off. I threw them on the ground and stomped on them.

It seemed like my ordeal should be over, but I knew it wasn’t. I had just made two promises to dying friends – that I would get out of here, and that I would get whomever or whatever did this to us. I intended to keep those promises.

–––––

I looked around. It might have been my imagination, but the windows looked smaller.

It’s sealing itself up, I thought to myself. It can taste the blood, and it’s getting ready to consume the bodies. But there’s one left who’s still alive – me. Maybe it doesn’t care. Maybe it’s going to start feeding anyway. Maybe if I stood here, I could watch it.

But I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t going to stay there. I had to think. The doors and the windows were sealed on this floor. Upstairs, there had been a draft in the room where we found Kaz. At least, I think it was a draft. That meant there was an opening, apparently one large enough to let in a big gust of wind.

I was kidding myself. As soon as I thought of it, I knew I wasn’t going back upstairs, and certainly not to that bedroom.

I also knew that it was pointless to try to shoot out any more windows. Hell, in the front room, there probably weren’t any by now. I wasn’t going to anywhere near the library, the kitchen, or the moonlit hall where I encountered the “girl.”

What did that leave? I didn’t like the answer. In fact, as soon as my brain answered, “The cellar,” another part of it yelled, “Are you kidding me!?”

I didn’t like that idea at all. But in the “playback” mode in my mind, I saw the open cellar doors that I had noticed while approaching the house hours ago – an event that seemed so long ago it was like it happened to somebody else. But that was my exit. There was a way out.

There was another problem with going down to the cellar. Stillman might still be down there. He was unaccounted for. He could be alive or dead. If he were dead, it would be good to confirm that. If he were alive, he might be tripping and might try to shoot me. But why would he still be down there? Wouldn’t he have come up by now? If he were wounded, wouldn’t I hear him screaming down there?

My gut feeling told me Stillman was dead. I don’t know why that thought comforted me, but it did.

I had a choice. Go down to the cellar, and face possible death, or stay here and face certain death.

There are two basic strategies for survival. If people are looking for you, it is often best to stay where you are and wait for rescue. If not, I heard (from Sgt. Coles and also one of those survival guys on TV) that “The essence of survival is to keep moving.”

So that was it. I would go down to the cellar. I had to prepare myself. I rummaged around the bodies of my teammates like a scavenger scouring the bodies on a battlefield. When I was done, I had a lantern hanging from each hip, their handles tied to my belt with stolen shoelaces. I had a rifle slung over each shoulder, and one in my hands. The flashlight underneath each one was turned on.

So there I was, with two lanterns, three flashlights, two extra canteens, all the ammo I could carry, and three machine guns. I was as ready as I would ever be. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and stood on the top step of the stairwell leading down into darkness.

21

OK. Remember that whole story about how God wanted me to kill a judge and then the Devil showed up at my door to talk me out of it? Well, I didn’t do it. The killing, I mean. I almost did, but I didn’t. You might dismiss the whole thing as a series of acid trips, and believe me, I tried to do that too. But that wasn’t the end of the story. I actually got confirmation that I wasn’t crazy (and we can all use that). I have to tell you what happened next.

Several times after I aborted the mission, I tried to talk to God. I tried to explain. I asked for His forgiveness. I hoped He was listening, but I couldn’t tell for sure. If He was, it was a one-way conversation. He wasn’t speaking to me any more.

Several days passed and it was like nothing ever happened. Sampson and I were on our own again.

Then about a week later, I was on the computer one night when it started again. I was jacking around when an IM window popped up. Who would be Instant Messaging me? The user name surprised me. It was from Ashira666.

“Want to chat?”

My heart started beating faster. She wanted to go into a “private chat room.” Even though that just meant that she wanted to IM over a secure connection between her computer and mine, I was nervous. It felt vulnerable, like I did that time I was alone with her in my house. I was afraid, but then again, I really wanted to hear what she had to say. Did I want to talk? My finger hovered over the keyboard and typed in “Y” for Yes.

“Jacob - Long time no see.”

“What do you want?” I wrote. Short and to the point. I wasn’t here to socialize with the Devil.

“To say thank you,” she wrote. A small shiver went through me. I didn’t like the sound of that. She knew. She had seen the whole thing. Or maybe she hadn’t. She might be fishing for information. I decided to play dumb.

“Thanks for what?”

“You know.”

“But do you?”

“You aborted your mission.”

 Damn it. She knew.

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“I know.”

I sat there, thinking. Neither God and nor Devil had known what side I was on before this event. That’s why they had both tried to bend me to their will. It was all a big game to them. But in the end, neither one had won. I made my own choice. I knew whose side I was on – my own.

“So what happens now?” I asked Ashira.

She typed, “The game goes on, using different pieces.”

“It that what this is to you? A game? Just a round-about way of getting what you want?”

“Isn’t everything?”

I was about to type “No” but I didn’t. I just sat there. After a pause, I asked again, “What do you want?”

“This is so impersonal. Let’s switch to a video feed.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Trust me. You do. If you say no, I’ll leave now and you can go back to wondering whether or not you imagined all this and whether or not you’re crazy.”

Damn. Again, she knew me. The choice for a video link appeared on screen. Did I want to link up with Ashira666? “Y or N?”

I took a deep breath, sighed, and hit “Y”.

A square window popped up on my screen. The beautiful red-haired woman who had come to my door before looked into my eyes. Her smile was both seductive and wicked. She was wearing red lingerie and was sitting on a large bed covered in red silk sheets. She picked up an unlit candle and waved her hand over it. When her hand passed over the top, the wick ignited. The flames danced eerily in her eyes. She set the candle down on a nightstand next to the bed. I was momentarily weirded out, but I half-smiled. Girls often light candles when they want sex. It’s like they need them to set the mood.

“Well,” she said, “What do you want to do first?”

I stared at her image. Several answers came to mind. I reminded myself of who she was, and how afraid I had been when she showed up in person.

As if reading my mind, or maybe just the expression on my face, Ashira pouted and said, “Oh come on. I’m not that scary, am I?” She laughed and started slipping the shoulder straps off of her lingerie.