Bad Things Page 9

  “Carol!”

  “Time’s up. I’m bored.” King snaps his fingers. “Moving on.”

  One of the wives jams the blue-flamed blade into Larson's groin, tearing up slowly to his neck. There's a gurgle from Larson's lips. A soft cloud forms in the cold air, then dissipates from his open mouth. A twitch. A shake. Then it's over. Larson lies dead, eyes wide, his insides opened fresh like a hot, steaming buffet.

  “Carol.” King takes her face in his hands, turning her away from the horrific sight outside. “Make the goddamn phone call.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Kate and Dibs lie in bed covered in a thin coat of post monkey-love sweat.

  His once proud shadow puppet of a boner has been reduced to rubble. A sad, but satisfied, lump that lies lifeless under the sheets. Their clothes lay like dead soldiers along the floor. Kate's fantastic ensemble is balled by her favorite red high heels. Dibs loves them too. Can't talk her into wearing them during the deed, primarily since he referred to them as her whore shoes one night. He meant it was a compliment.

  Again, text jokes don’t always land.

  Kate snuggles close, resting her head on his shoulder. She wants to say so much, but knows not to. Her divorce was not pleasant. Her dating history since has not been monumental either. Recently, she has really enjoyed the times she and Dibs have spent together, and if Kate's being honest, she hasn't been this happy in some time. But she doesn't want to push it. Not the way to go. Certainly not with a guy like Dibs.

  “You going to offer me a drawer in this place?” Dibs asks.

  Kate blinks.

  “A shelf? I mean, something nice of course,” he presses.

  “Well.” Kate smiles wide, not letting him see. She hopes he can’t hear the excitement in her voice either. “I could, I guess. You think that sounds okay to you?”

  “I do. Little pissed you haven’t set that up yet.” Dibs hides his smile too. “Some pretty rude shit. That’s all.”

  Kate punches him in the shoulder. Dibs starts to get up.

  “Where are you going?” Kate asks, rising up to her elbows.

  “Find a drink.” Dibs moves to the living room. “We should toast or something. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Kate doesn't care if he sees or hears her smile now. You couldn't knock it off with a hammer. She pushes herself up out of bed, heading toward the living room. Among the flickering candles, Dibs stands watching the town that's gone dark. Kate moves up next to him holding two glasses of whiskey. She pushes a glass into his hand.

  “It’s the good stuff.” Kate leans her head on his shoulder.

  They sip. The good stuff burns the good burn.

  Dibs scans the town through the living room window. "Power's still down. I mean, we were at it for at least a couple of hours." Kate giggles, interrupting his bullshit. "Fine. But an hour and a half is a long time for the power to be out around here."

  “Right.” Kate lets the gross exaggeration of the passage of time go. “Wait.” She sees the lights on at one building. “That one has power.”

  “Oh yeah.” Dibs squints, thinks, then it registers. “That’s the station.”

  As soon as the words slip out from his lips, the lights go out in the station. It was the last building to have power. As if it was the last light on an Xmas tree holding on for dear life. Now it’s gone dark.

  His phone buzzes on the floor somewhere across the room. Dibs fishes around in the flickering candlelight, searching to find his phone. As the screen lights up, he sees the landslide of calls he’s missed. A spike of anger fires up through him, mad at himself for not noticing all the calls and texts. He lets himself off the hook because of the amazing sex he made for the last four hours. He did what he had to do, dammit.

  Looking at his phone, he sees Carol is calling.

  “Hey,” Dibs answers. “Holy balls, I’m sorry.” Decides to throw Carol a peace offering. Goes with, “I got sidetracked by pussy.”

  Kate stomps on his foot. Dibs immediately regrets his word choice as he hops up and down on one foot with his junk bouncing among the candlelight. He mouths a sorry with a shrug. Kate shakes her head in disbelief. Dibs gulps his whiskey, then back to the call.

  “How’s every—”

  “Shut up. Where are you?” Carol says through a shaky voice.

  Dibs pauses, looking to Kate. He's never heard an ounce of fear or even mild concern in Carol's voice. Ever. Actually, he's never heard anything other than disdain or hostility from her since he accepted the gig as Chief of Stagstone.

  “You okay there, Carol?”

  “Do I sound okay?” she yelps, struggling to hold it together. Dibs can hear something is not right. “Where the hell are you, Dibs? Tell me. Now!”

  Dibs turns away from Kate, shielding his reply. “I’m in the company of a nice lady friend.”

  Kate rolls her eyes. Reconsiders the whole giving the guy a drawer or a shelf thing.

  “The cheerleader’s house, right?” Carol says. Carol pauses. Dead air on her side of the phone. “You’re not giving it to that waitress, right?”

  “No, no not her. That was a one-time Jägermeister event.”

  Kate can’t believe this conversation.

  “That chick from the gas station?”

  "Nope. That was an issue I had with a bottle of Thunderbird, and it was only twice."

  Kate grabs the bottle of whiskey and escapes back into the bedroom. She’s hoping that putting some distance between them and injecting denial into this situation is the answer.

  Carol is now obviously talking to someone on the other side of this call. Dibs can’t hear with whom, but whomever it is sounds male, and calm as hell. He guesses it’s that lazy bastard Larson, even though it doesn’t seem like him. Dibs starts to get pissed off again. Thoughts of the day return with a vengeance, flooding back into his head. He finishes his whiskey in a hard gulp.

  “Carol?” he says into the phone.

  Nothing. Call ended.

  Thud. Something hit the floor toward the back of the house, followed by a muffled crunch, then something that sounded oddly like the laughter of a little girl.

  “Kate?” Dibs bark-whispers. “That you?”

  He turns, finding Kate now standing next to him in a fuzzy robe with a baseball bat in hand. Dibs spins, scanning, searching the floor for his pants. More to the point, for where his holster dropped during their aggressive petting.

  Footsteps rumble from the kitchen.

  “Come on.” Kate grabs Dibs’s arm, dragging him into the bedroom. “Your gun is next to the bed.”

  Stumbling into the bedroom, Kate shuts the bedroom door then locks it, working as quietly as her trembling hands will allow while pointing her bat frantically toward Dibs’s discarded pants on the floor. They're balled up in a lump by the bed with his holster across the top.

  Dibs analyses the situation and comes up with the fast decision to strap on the holster. Kate glances back and thinks of saying something about her guy standing there naked with nothing but a gun holster and his dork hanging out. But she doesn’t. Not the time for jokes.

  He rips his Glock free, checks the magazine, then puts one in the chamber. Kate steps back toward him with her bat in hand. The footsteps outside the bedroom rumble then stop. Sounds like there's more than one out there, but they can't tell.

  Kate pulls her bat back and spreads her feet wide, remembering her softball days. She was more finesse than power back in the day, but she could crank it when she got ahold of one.

  Dibs takes aim at the door, spreading his feet slightly apart as well to absorb the kick this bad boy is going to lay down on whoever is out there. His mind begins to crank. Is this what Carol was calling about? What had her so scared? Is it too late to help her?

  It's faint, but Dibs can see the soft light under the door from the candles in the living room. Shadows move under the gap between the door and floor, then stop. Plant themselves. They're at the door. There’s another thump. A
slam at the door. Then another, and another. Each one with more force than the last. The door bows inward, flexing, straining to hold together. Its hinges bounce.

  Dibs and Kate share a look. Kate squeezes her bat. Dibs readjusts his grip on his gun.

  “If they get past my shot,” Dibs says into her ear, “then you beat the piss out of them.”

  "No shit, baby,” she whispers back, kissing his cheek with trembling lips.

  The door cracks free from the frame. Shards of wood fly. Billie Holiday starts up in the background. The one lamp in the bedroom comes back on. Confusion circles Dibs and Kate. They hold their breath.

  A dark, slick-skinned head peeks in. Dibs’s and Kate’s eyes pop wide as plates. The head of something not of this Earth stops, staring dead at them. Its red eyes pulse. The eerie sound of a robotic child laughing starts low, then builds throughout the house. The sound of more feet rushing toward the bedroom thunders down the hall. A blue flame appears in the doorway.

  Dibs pulls the trigger. The dark, slick-skinned head explodes into a gush of yellows and reds. Its massive body slumps to the floor. The blue flame from its weapon goes out as if a match had been blown out.

  A silent beat.

  Dibs steps toward the body, lowering his gun. He nudges the head with his foot, then turns to Kate and shrugs. “Well, that was easy.”

  The blade fires up the blue flame.

  “Shit.” Dibs tries to spin his gun around.

  The wife grabs him by the ankle, yanking him hard down to the floor. As she stands towering over him, she picks him up by the foot and tosses him like a stick. Dibs crunches into the wall, shattering a picture before landing on the bed.

  Kate rushes up, cracking the wife in the leg with her bat. The wife drops down to the floor on its knees. Kate screams, raising the bat over her head and slamming it down on the monster’s head. There’s a squish of goo. A blood-curdling scream of a little girl in pain. Its eyes glow red. Brighter than before.

  "Oh shit," Kate whispers.

  The blue flame swings fast. Kate dives clear, barely missing the swipe. Her bat rolls across the floor, out of reach. Dibs bounces up to his knees on the bed and fires three quick shots. Pops of goo splash and fly from various spots. The wife roars, the sound ripping through the house, shaking the windows. Little girl gone. This is now a full-on pissed off beast. The wife leaps onto the bed like it was shot from a cannon. The blue blade comes down hard as Dibs rolls to the side. The bed is cut in half. Dibs comes up with his gun on the wife’s head, but is backhanded by a massive hand that sends him skidding into the corner.

  Kate lands on the wife’s shoulders. Spit flies from her mouth as Kate yells while holding on for dear life. The wife whips back and forth, frantically trying to shake her loose. Kate holds a red high heel her hand. She stabs it deep into the wife’s red eyes, alternating between them. Goo sprays on the walls and bed. Again and again she thrusts at a relentless pace. Something has snapped in Kate. Something animalistic down inside her has taken over. Brutal but necessary.

  Finally, Kate is thrown off. The wife makes it a step, then two, before she slumps to the floor in a heap near the door. A lifeless lump of alien spilling its lifeblood out onto the bedroom floor.

  Kate drops the shoe. She wipes some of the yellow and red goo from her face as she helps Dibs up to his feet. Dibs can’t help but be afraid, impressed and a little turned on.

  Bone-rattling screams rip through the house. The shrill sound of a pack of angry animals bounces off every wall. Kate holds her ears tight. Dibs winces, biting down, trying to get his mind around what is happening.

  The wife’s lifeless body is pulled away from the doorway, fast as lightning. The eardrum-punishing screams have altered to a tone of sorrow. Dibs and Kate hear footsteps race away from the bedroom. Pounding the floor. Rattling the windows. The front door cracks loudly. Wood-splintering crunch. Sounds as if it's been blown wide open. Sounds of the night outside echo through the house, then settle. An unnerving stillness surrounds them.

  Kate looks to Dibs. “What do we do?” she asks.

  “We get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “You’re the chief of police.”

  "Fuck that shit." Dibs rushes toward the living room in hopes that the whiskey is still standing. "I'm new to this town, and I didn't come here to deal with anything like that shit."

  He finds the bottle of the good stuff and begins gulping from the bottle.

  Kate follows him into the living room. The place is a disaster. The front door, as expected, has been completely blown out, with only scraps of wood left hanging from the hinges. There's a residue, a slime, in blotches on the floor and walls. She eyes the puddle in the doorway of the bedroom, tries not to think if she or Dibs walked through it. It's a thick mess of swirls of bright yellows and reds. A dab of purple, maybe.

  "Yeah, the hell with all this nonsense," Kate says, clutching her robe tight with one hand, snatching the bottle from Dibs’s fist with the other.

  "I mean, I left New York to get myself to a nice, safe, quiet life." He starts pacing across the floor. "I ain't no hero. Nobody's savior. That's a dead man's game."

  “We can leave.” Kate takes a swig of whiskey. “Bolt from here. Not talk about it. Get a therapist.”

  “That’s right.” Dibs nods.

  Kate gulps again. "Change our names. Dye our hair." As the words leave her mouth, she begins to calm down.

  So does Dibs. As he makes the turn from his steady line of pacing, he sees the glimmer from his badge on the floor in the bedroom. Just beyond the puddle of dead alien goop, it shines off the one light on in the house. The light goes out. Billie Holiday stops in a snap. The power is gone once again.

  He remembers when he received that badge. The pride he felt. The optimism of all the good he was going to do. There was some good done, to be sure, but it was washed away by the waves of bad throughout the years. The streets of New York can do that to a person. Even the best cops get a little dirty sometimes.

  “We’ll dye our hair,” he repeats, his eyes still focused on the badge.

  He thinks of how he almost died. Probably should have. He thinks of Louis Cody.

  "Let's get out of here," Dibs says, but more as if he's talking to himself.

  He thinks of the little old lady he saved from a home invasion when he was a rookie.

  "No," he mutters.

  Kate looks at him.

  Dibs remembers the family he protected that night years ago in Central Park. They were from a small town in Idaho, he thinks, and they came to New York to see the city. Take in a show. They were cornered in the park that night. Walked up on a drug deal gone bad. They were so scared. Dibs charged in like they were his own family. The proudest moment of his career. He still has the medal. Still has the card they sent him when their child graduated high school.

  “We can’t leave,” he says. “We have to figure this out.”

  “What?”

  "We have to be better than that," Dibs says. "I don't like it. I don't want to do any of this, but you and me, we're not giant assholes."

  She blinks.

  "Sure, we are assholes, but we're not giant assholes." He locks eyes with her. "It’s a subtle difference, but it's there."

  Kate holds his stare, letting his words seep into her mind. “I know, dammit,” she says, setting the bottle down, disgusted with herself. “I just lost it for a second.”

  “You okay?”

  "No, but I will be." Kate smiles, shaking the bottle for the last gulp.

  Dibs smiles, takes in her face. There're still a few candles lit, not as many as before, but they are still going. Even after all this she still is so damn pretty, minus the alien goo of course. Dibs can see the fear in her eyes, and the strength behind them as well.

  “Dibs,” she says.

  He hears her, but he's lost in his own head. Maybe it's the adrenaline of what's happened tonight, the jarring memories of New York, or looking at Kate, but he needed a moment to s
tep away mentally.

  “Dibs.”

  Not a deeply spiritual man, Dibs was raised Catholic most of his life, but he has moments when he thinks fate plays a role. He was brought to the town for a reason. He thought it was to escape Louis Cody and all that hell. Maybe it was to meet Kate. That would be more than enough. But maybe, also, it was to meet Kate AND to save this town.

  Perhaps even more.

  "Whatever that was, it wasn't human,” Dibs says, thinking out loud. "That's for damn sure. We're dealing with something else. All the crazy shit going on today, man. There are some beasties out there that are simply not playing games—"

  "Dibs," Kate repeats louder, putting a little something on it.

  He looks to her with an eyebrow raised. What?

  “You have a massive hard-on.” Kate points to his erect member standing proudly, a flagpole just below the buckle of this gun holster.

  Dibs nods.

  It’s all coming together.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The beat-up Blazer is being pushed to its limits.

  The machine rattle-rambles through the darkened streets of Stagstone like a possessed creature with wheels. Tires screech. Needle pinned deep into the red.

  Dibs cuts the wheel left then right, bobbing and weaving his way through the still and quiet town. A town he’s sworn to protect no matter how badly his expectations have been blown to shit. No matter how cake he thought the job was going to be. This is his charge. Things have changed. His once safe path of least resistance has become a place of panic and whacko disbelief.

  What the hell was that thing? Those things? They have to be what's responsible for what's been going on around town. Everything. The livestock, the meth trailer, the undeniable blanket of undeniably weird shit that's covered Stagstone recently.

  Kate holds on tight to the oh shit handle, but her face doesn't show an ounce of what she should be feeling—fear. There's concern, but she knows this is something that has to be dealt with. Can't turn away. Can't run. Gotta lean in to it and figure it the hell out.

  She and Dibs are on the same page now. It wasn't discussed long. Only a few essential sentences. They threw on some clothes. Sat on the couch. Looked into each other’s eyes and agreed they both lost their cool while in the moment. It happens. Completely understandable. It got a little crazy with all that run for the hills talk. They both decided that's not who they are, nor who they want to become. It was decided they needed to haul ass to the station and find out what all that was with Carol.