The sole person-sized door was loose, and as a stiff gust from the rainstorm caught it, the creak was straight out of a George Romero movie—and then the panel immediately slammed shut with a clap, as if Mother Nature didn’t like the stink any more than Jo did.
Taking out her phone, she texted Bill: This smell is nasty.
Aware that her heart rate just tripled, she walked across the asphalt, the rain hitting the hood of her windbreaker in a disorganized staccato. Ducking her hand under the loose nylon of the jacket, she felt for her holstered gun and kept her hand on the butt.
The door creaked open and slammed shut again, another puff of that smell releasing out of the pitch-black interior. Swallowing through throat spasms, she had to fight to keep going and not because there was wind in her face.
When she stopped in front of the door, the opening and closing ceased, as if now that she was on the verge of entering, it didn’t need to catch her attention and draw her in.
So help her God, if Pennywise was on the other side . . .
Glancing around to check there were no red balloons lolling in the area, she reached out for the door.
I just have to know, she thought as she opened the way in. I need to . . . know.
Leaning around the jamb, she saw absolutely nothing, and yet was frozen by all that she confronted. Pure evil, the kind of thing that abducted and murdered children, that slaughtered the innocent, that enjoyed the suffering of the just and merciful, pushed at her body and then penetrated it, radiation that was toxic passing through to her bones.
Coughing, she stepped back and covered her mouth and nose with the crook of her elbow. After a couple of deep breaths into her sleeve, she fumbled with her phone.
Before Bill could say anything over the whirring in his background, she bit out, “You need to come—”
“I’m already halfway to you.”
“Good.”
“What’s going on—”
Jo ended the call again and got out her flashlight, triggering the beam. Stepping forward again, she shouldered the door open and trained the spear of illumination into the space.
The light was consumed.
Sure as if she were shining it into a bolt of thick fabric, the fragile glowing shaft was no match for what she was about to enter.
The threshold she stepped over was nothing more than weather stripping, but the inch-high lip was a barrier that felt like an obstacle course she could barely surmount—and then there was the stickiness on the floor. Pointing the flashlight to the ground, she picked up one of her feet. Something like old motor oil dripped off her running shoe, the sound of it finding home echoing in the empty space.
As Jo walked forward, she found the first of the buckets on the left. Home Depot. With an orange-and-white logo smudged by a rusty, translucent substance that turned her stomach.
The beam wobbled as she looked into the cylinder, her hand shaking. Inside there was a gallon of glossy, gleaming . . . red . . . liquid. And in the back of her throat, she tasted copper—
Jo wheeled around with the flashlight.
Through the doorway, the two men who had come up behind her without a sound loomed as if they had risen out of the pavement itself, wraiths conjured from her nightmares, fed by the cold spring rain, clothed in the night. One of them had a goatee and tattoos at one of his temples, a cigarette between his lips and a downright nasty expression on his hard face. The other wore a Boston Red Sox hat and a long camel-colored coat, the tails of which blew in slow motion even though the wind was choppy. Both had long black blades holstered handles down on their chest, and she knew there were more weapons where she couldn’t see them.
They had come to kill her. Tracked her as she’d moved away from her car. Seen her as she had not seen them.
Jo stumbled back and tried to get out her gun, but her sweaty palms had her dropping her phone and struggling to keep the flashlight—
And then she couldn’t move.
Even as her brain ordered her feet to run, her legs to run, her body to run, nothing obeyed the panic-commands, her muscles twitching under the lockdown of some invisible force of will, her bones aching, her breath turning into a pant. Pain firework’d her brain, a headache sizzling through her mind.
Opening her mouth, she screamed—
Syn re-formed in the midst of the cold drizzle, his shitkickers sinking into the mud, his leather-covered body readily accepting the weight of his muscles and the pump of his black heart, his dark function resumed from a scatter of light molecules. Up ahead, the lineup of expensive foreign sedans and SUVs made no fucking sense in the cement company’s parking lot. Next to the stacks of concrete blocks, the heavy moving equipment, and the mixer trucks, they were a bunch of floozies standing among sumo wrestlers.
Walking forward, his tongue teased the tip of one of his fangs, the cut he deliberately made bleeding into his mouth. As he nursed at the taste, his hands cranked into fists and the sense that his brain was a fuse about to be lit was something he ignored.
Predators required prey.
So sometimes, you needed to eat even when your stomach was full.
As he approached a shallow overhang, the stout human man sitting beside the door on a plastic chair looked up from his Daily Racing Form. The bald lightbulb hanging from a live wire above his head made shadows of his eye sockets and his nostrils and his jaw, and Syn pictured the skull that would remain after death sloughed the mortal padding from the skeleton.
The man frowned. And by way of greeting, he moved a gun into view, placing it on top of his magazine.
“I’m here to see someone,” Syn said as he stopped.
“Ain’t no one here.”
When Syn didn’t leave, the man sat forward. “You hear what I said. Ain’t nobody here for you—”
Syn materialized onto the human, picking him up by the throat and punching him into the building, the plastic chair flipping out of the way as if it had no intention of getting involved in problems that were not its own.
As he disarmed his victim, the human’s meaty hands dug into the grip around its throat, and its legs flailed, banging the heels of its shoes against the building. The mouth, no longer slack with superiority, gaped in failed efforts to bring air down into lungs which were clearly starting to burn already.
Then again, fear had a way of demanding a dance from hypoxia, no matter how much of a wallflower oxygen deprivation was in the normal course of things.
“I am here to see somebody,” Syn said softly. “And if you are lucky, it is not you.”
Lowering the man such that those feet found purchase, Syn released pressure enough to allow for verbalization. But it was not because he wanted words. No, a response of that nature was a flimsy meal.
He wanted a proper scream to ring in his ears.
Syn unsheathed one of his steel daggers. As he brought the silver blade up, the man transferred his clawing grip from what was locked on his neck to the wrist and forearm controlling the weapon. The accompanying protest was like that of a child, of less consequence and constriction than the sleeve of Syn’s leather jacket.
The tip of the dagger went into the man’s left ear, and as the fist nick cut into the skin of the canal, Syn breathed deep.
Blood. Fear. Sweat.
He pressed his lower body into the man’s. Syn’s erection was not about sex, although given the way those watery, dark brown eyes flared, the man misinterpreted the response.