Demonic, page 5
“No,” I admitted. “It’s not.”
We went inside. Quinn slapped her hand over her mouth as she saw the bloody hallway and Darla’s corpse. “Who’s that?” she asked. “Is that the woman he was...?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.” I shut the door.
Quinn closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to calm herself down or pretend that this wasn’t happening. She opened her eyes again, then gave me a look that wasn’t exactly filled with love and affection.
“You thought you were going to be a hero, so you tried to kill Vic. How’d you do it?”
“Stabbed him in the throat.”
“And he didn’t die?”
“No. Bled a lot but didn’t die. I stabbed him over and over.” I pointed to Darla. “She shot him in the head. Nothing worked.”
“Shit.”
“I wish you were more shocked by this.”
“I wish I was, too. So he ran away?”
I nodded. “He was completely mangled. I mean, I slashed his Achilles tendons, and he still ran away. I chased him, but then he went all demonic, like he was possessed.”
“He wasn’t possessed, but I know what you mean.”
“Where do you think he went?”
“I don’t know. I guess we could follow the blood, but it doesn’t matter.”
“It seems like it matters a little.”
“He’s hiding somewhere while he heals up,” Quinn said. “It won’t take long.”
“Is there a way to kill him?”
“I don’t know. For some reason, he never bothered to share that information with me.” The panic in her voice wasn’t enough to outweigh the sarcasm.
“There has to be a way, right?”
“I suppose we could try running him over with a steamroller. Maybe throwing him into a volcano.”
“Your attitude isn’t helping,” I said. “I get that I screwed up, but I was trying to save lives. I was trying to save you.”
“Corey, however bad you think you may have screwed up, it’s worse. It’s so much worse. I’m sorry that you think I have a poor attitude right now, but we are in deep, deep shit.” She thought for a moment. “Are you on any medications? Anything you absolutely need?”
“Just sleeping pills.”
“And do you absolutely need these sleeping pills to survive?”
“No! Jesus, Quinn, I know you’re upset, but give me a break while I try to process what is happening right now. Apparently you were mentally prepared for your husband to get stabbed in the neck and walk it off. I wasn’t.”
“What about money?” Quinn asked. “Do you have a stash of cash at home?”
“No.”
“Gold? Jewelry? Anything you can liquidate easily?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m always getting compliments on my collection of gold chains.”
“And they’re in your apartment?”
“I was joking.”
“Don’t joke!” Quinn screamed, making me flinch as if a fifth gunshot had gone off. “There is nothing funny about this! Are you keeping up with what I’m trying to say here? We are going on the run, Corey. We are fleeing for our lives. So I need to know if we have to stop at your apartment to get anything, or if we can skip that step.”
“No, there’s...I mean, how long are we going to be gone?”
“Maybe a long time.”
“I need my phone charger, but I guess I can buy a new one.”
“How long had Vic been gone before you called me?”
“A few minutes? I chased after him, only a couple of blocks, and then I ran right back here.”
“So he’s been gone for twenty-five, thirty minutes?”
“That sounds right.”
“Okay.” Quinn thought for a moment. “Drive home and pack a bag. Do it really quickly—I’m talking ten minutes at the most. Clothes, toiletries, whatever you think you’ll need. Text me your address. I’ll come get you.”
I nodded. “All right. What are you gonna do?”
“I’m going to grab my bug-out bag. Vic let me have it because we knew that at some point we might have to run from the FBI.”
“There’s a blood trail. Do you think maybe we should try to hunt him down? Maybe you could talk to him. Convince him that I did this all by myself?”
“Oh, he knows that. He knows I wouldn’t be stupid enough to send you after him. I’m sure we could find him, but the only way he’d let me talk this out is if I started the conversation by tossing him your severed head. Which is tempting. Very tempting.”
“Ouch.”
“Go,” she told me.
“I’m really sorry about this.”
“I don’t care.”
I left the house, got in my car, and sped off.
I turned on the radio, cranked the volume as high as it would go without blowing out the speakers, and blasted hard rock as I drove. I sang along—screamed along, really—so that I could focus entirely on the music and not my thoughts. I didn’t want to think about the fact that I could no longer chuckle and say that people with glowing red eyes didn’t exist. This was “my entire world has changed, and there’s no going back” stuff, and I quite honestly didn’t want to cope with it right now.
When I arrived at my apartment complex, eighty-year-old Mrs. Elster was seated on the stairs, wearing a too-light jacket. That’s where she spent most of her day, sitting out there, talking to people as they passed. Any other time, I was happy to oblige and spend a few minutes chatting with her. Today, I rudely ran past her, acknowledging her greeting with a quick, “Hi, can’t talk, sorry.”
I pulled a small suitcase out from under my bed and began throwing in clothes. If you’d told me that I’d be packing for a trip with Quinn, I would’ve expected to be putting a lot more thought into what to wear. I already had a small travel bag packed with a toothbrush, razor, and other essentials, so I tossed that into the suitcase as well, followed by my laptop computer and my phone charger.
What else?
I opened my bottom dresser drawer and grabbed my passport and birth certificate, just in case.
Less than ten minutes. Not bad.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to wait in the parking lot, or if Quinn was going to text me when she arrived. Since she was so angry with me, I decided that I should be waiting and ready when she got there.
I walked past Mrs. Elster, apologizing again. I considered standing and talking to her, which might distract me from my thoughts, but I also didn’t want her to say, “Oh, yes, he was acting very strange,” if she had to give a statement to the police.
I tried to think of a rational explanation for what had happened. If I’d merely been a witness, I could say that I’d been watching a state-of-the-art special effects show, but I’d slammed the knives into Vic myself. The idea that he’d slipped in some glowing red contact lenses and was using some sort of voice distortion device was as ridiculous as the idea that his eyeballs were actually glowing.
So, yeah, that kind of shit existed in the world.
I’d do my best to stay sane.
I paced for about twenty minutes, half-expecting a dozen police cars to suddenly surround me, or for Vic to show up, ready to do to my neck what I’d done to his. Finally, a small brown car I didn’t recognize, with tinted windows, pulled up next to me.
I prepared to make a mad dash, if necessary.
The window rolled down. “Get in,” Quinn told me.
I opened the back door and tossed my suitcase onto the seat next to a large duffel bag. Then I got into the front passenger seat.
“Sorry,” said Quinn. “Getting the new car took longer than I expected.”
“That was still pretty quick.”
“I’d planned ahead. Not for you screwing things up, but for things going bad.”
She pulled out of the parking lot and drove off.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“You didn’t plan that out ahead?”
She turned and glared at me. “I have multiple plans. I’m trying to figure out which one to go with. For now, I just want to get as far away from here as possible.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe this. I can’t even describe how bad this is. What the hell were you thinking?”
“You know what? You can stop that shit.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Quinn. “Am I hurting your feelings?”
“Vic is the Toledo Trasher. He’s a serial killer—one of the worst. And he was forcing you to go along with him. So I decided, not just for you, but for humanity, that I was going to kill him. Then you wouldn’t have to go to prison for whatever role you played. And my plan worked. I stabbed him in the throat. By any realistic scenario that I should’ve been able to predict, your husband should be dead on the floor, and you’d be free and clear. I’m getting really sick of you acting like I’m stupid because I didn’t know that Vic couldn’t be killed by having his entire neck ripped open!”
Quinn drove in silence for a moment. “All right. I’ll grant you that point.”
“Thank you.”
“But don’t act like your plan would’ve gone flawlessly, because Vic’s dead mistress is in my hallway.”
“If Vic wasn’t some kind of supernatural being, I would’ve handled it.”
“Would you?”
“Yes!”
“Why didn’t you tell me before you did it?”
“Because I didn’t want you to be involved. I didn’t want you to put yourself in danger. In retrospect, sure, it would’ve been nice to know beforehand that Vic could get shot in the head and survive, but I don’t think I was being sloppy by not considering that tiny little detail. I didn’t think that was the kind of helpful tidbit you’d have available to share.”
“Fine. You had no way of knowing he couldn’t be killed. But let’s be clear—you went to my house to murder my husband and kept me out of the loop. You’re not blameless.”
“But, again, your husband is the Toledo Trasher. It’s not like I was trying to knock him off so we could be together.”
“You want us to be together?” asked Quinn.
“Not anymore, no.”
“Okay, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stop bitching at you, but you have to listen to everything I say from now on. Don’t question anything I tell you to do. I’m in charge.”
“Got it. So what is he? Is he even human?”
Quinn nodded. “Yeah, he’s human. You’re going to have a hard time believing what his deal is.”
“No, I’m really not. I’m open to a lot of possibilities right now.”
“He’s not a demon. But he’s powered by a demon.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t demonic possession.”
“It’s not. Not really. When you think demonic possession, you think of an unwilling host, like the little girl in The Exorcist.”
“Regan,” I said.
“I don’t give a shit what her name was.”
“I feel like we’re getting hostile with each other again.”
“Fine. Her name was Regan. Anyway, it’s like he and the demon are working as a team, but it doesn’t control his thoughts or actions or anything like that. It just gives him abilities.”
“The ability to not die when he’s all hacked up.”
“Among other things.”
“What kind of other things?”
“He can burn you with his hands. It’s not something he can do spur of the moment, but if he concentrates, he can turn your skin to ash.”
“Damn,” I said. “What else?”
“I don’t know. He kept a lot of secrets. Maybe that’s as far as it goes, or maybe he can do a bunch of other stuff. Maybe he can make your head explode with his mind.”
“I hope not.”
“Me too.”
“Okay, so, this is obviously very bad. But I’m smaller than him, and I only had a couple of knives to work with, and I sent him running. I don’t get why we had to drop everything and flee town. Why not send the cops after him? He can’t teleport out of a jail cell, can he?”
“Vic is part of a cult,” said Quinn. “It’s this whole ‘Satan is our master’ thing, and I don’t know if it’s actually the devil that they talk to, but if not, it’s pretty damn close. It’s something very, very evil. And the cult has a policy where if you fuck with one of them, you fuck with all of them.”
“Oh,” I said.
“So, yeah, Vic is not the only one like that. And they’re all going to come after us.”
Chapter Seven
“Can we not talk for a little bit?” I asked. “I’d just like some time to sit here quietly.”
“That’s fine,” said Quinn.
I closed my eyes and tried to think of something happy. Kittens. Puppies. Fond childhood memories of the Scholastic Book Fair. Oh, how I’d loved the Scholastic Book Fair! And I loved those catalogs they sent home. We didn’t have a lot of money, but my parents would always make sure I got to order at least one book. I could still remember how excited I was when the box of books would be resting on my teacher’s desk in the morning.
And baby otters. They seemed to be so full of energy and joy. I could watch baby otters for hours.
I opened my eyes again.
“How many members are in the cult?” I asked.
“At least a dozen.”
“At least?”
“Probably closer to twenty.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah.”
“Are they all in Toledo?”
“No,” said Quinn. “Vic may be the only one. They’re all over the country.”
“So we may be driving closer to some of them?”
“Maybe, yeah. We’re not trying to outrun the whole group. We’re trying to get away from Vic, and hide ourselves away where he can’t find us.”
“Okay, so I’m trying to figure out the actual amount of danger that we’re in. It’s not like they’re tracking us with, I don’t know, cult satellites or anything like that, right? Forget I said cult satellites. That was stupid. What I mean is, can they use the power of the devil or whatever to find us?”
“I wouldn’t be comfortable promising you that they can’t.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay, so, while I continue to assess the situation, you’re saying that up to twenty supernatural demon-assisted cultists might be using the power of Satan to hunt us?”
“I’m not saying they aren’t.”
“All right,” I said. “I now understand why you were so upset earlier. It all makes sense.”
“I’m sorry,” said Quinn. “I would have told you, but how was I supposed to know that you were going to try to kill him? It never would have occurred to me that you’d do something like that. That was insane. I wouldn’t have even thought that you’d try to threaten him, or try to talk to him. I literally would never have expected you to make any kind of contact with my husband.”
“Would you have let me turn him in to the police?”
“Yes. But we would’ve been gone before they showed up at the door.”
“Well, that’s lovely.”
“If he went to prison, the others would’ve showed up.”
“Are the others all psychopathic serial killers? Are there, like, twenty Toledo Trashers out there?”
“No. Vic had that need before. This just made it easier for him. I don’t know exactly what the others are like—I’ve never met any of them—but they’re all the kind of people who would join a Satan-worshipping cult and let demons enter their bodies. They aren’t the finest specimens that humanity has to offer.”
“Got it. They probably aren’t very nice.”
“Not at all. For all I know, Vic is the friendliest one of them.”
“And we know for sure that they’re all coming after us?”
“What I know is that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. When it did, Vic went off on what he called ‘his holy mission,’ and it turned out really bad for some guy and his family. Did you hear about that massacre that happened in Grand Rapids a couple of years ago?”
“Refresh my memory,” I said.
“A family of five was skinned alive, including the two-year-old.”
“Okay, yeah, I heard about that.”
“Want to know what the father did to deserve it? It was a car accident. One where nobody died. And Vic’s brother—not his real brother; that’s just what they call themselves—was the one who ran the red light. It wasn’t the other guy’s fault. Could’ve happened to anybody. But they snatched up the five of them, took them to a soundproofed basement, and skinned them one at a time, youngest to oldest, making the others watch. Vic laughed about it when he got home.”
Yes, the Scholastic Book Fair! Oh, such happy memories! And what about Christmas morning, when I’d wake up my parents to let them know that Santa Claus had arrived! I wasn’t sure why Santa Claus gave superior gifts to my richer friends, but it was always a wonderful time of year.
“There has to be a way to defeat them, right?” I asked. “Some kind of weakness we could exploit?”
“You mean like splashing water on them, or we find out that they can’t withstand the common cold?”
“Something like that.”
“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Have you decided on a plan yet?”
“Nope.”
“What about turning ourselves in? Could they get to us if we were in prison?”
“I don’t know,” said Quinn.
“I mean, they can’t just magically pass through walls, right? Even if you can’t be killed, you can’t just walk into a prison and murder one of the inmates. I’m obviously not in love with this idea, but we’d be safe.”
“I’m not sure they’d give up. Do you want to spend the rest of your life behind bars?”
“Better than being skinned alive.”
“Maybe they couldn’t get us. Maybe they could possess a guard and shank us in our sleep. I don’t know how it works. If you want me to drop you off at the next prison, I’ll be happy to do so, but I’m not interested in going that route.”
