Blood Red

Coswell laughed, the fear sending him over the edge a little further than he was comfortable going, and started firing. He aimed for the head. His hands were shaking, but his aim didn’t completely suck and he got the man in the neck, the shoulder, and the chin. He saw the wounds as they were formed, and saw them as they healed, too. One instant there was a hole in the man’s jaw and the next it was gone, just . . . gone. The skin was unmarred; the bones he knew should have been shattered were intact.

“That’s enough out of you, I think.” He took two steps forward. Coswell threw the weapon and stood up, his knees shaking violently and his head feeling far too light.

The squad car that came toward them came in hard and fast, not slowing down in the least. Coswell had enough time to see the driver—Logan Walker, and the passenger who was busily chewing on his face.

Then the car was ramming into the rest of the parked police cars and starting a chain reaction. Metal screamed in protest and the car Murphy had pulled up in rolled forward like a rocket, bashing in the rear end of his cruiser. His cruiser, faithful to the end, jumped forward and hit Soulis in the back.

Jason Soulis went down, pinned under the black and white, and Coswell looked on, stunned. A few feet in front of him, Jason Soulis lay pinned under a vehicle and twenty feet further away, the newest addition to the police car pileup kept revving its engine sporadically.

He started toward Soulis and changed his mind, remembering that Walker was in deep shit of his own. He stepped past the dead perp and moved toward Walker’s car. Before he could even call out the officer’s name, the door came open and Walker flopped to the ground.

A naked, pregnant woman climbed out of the car, wearing only a crimson stain across her full breasts and her swollen belly. She looked right at Coswell and licked the smear of red from her lips.

Angie Freemont stepped toward him with a look of unadulterated hunger on her face.

And as he stepped back, he heard the sound of metal groaning.

Angie looked over his shoulder and her deathly white face grew a shade or two whiter. She backed away from him as fast as she could, her breasts swaying and her eyes wide and terrified.

Coswell looked over his shoulder just in time to see Jason Soulis finish lifting the car off of his back. His cruiser was well over a thousand pounds, maybe even a ton, and the man was standing up, the whole of the fucking car supported by his arms. He looked like a modernist’s demented sculpture of Atlas.

“I’ve had enough of you.”

Soulis threw the car at him. Coswell was too shocked to duck.

Chapter 22

I

Four more policemen tried their luck with Jason Soulis. He broke the back of the first and shattered the rib cage of the second. The third and fourth, he bled dry. The wounds he’d sustained drained him and he needed to feed.

By the time it was done, a substantial crowd had gathered to see what was happening. Most of them became food.

After that, he rose into the air and let himself drift away from the carnage. He hadn’t intended to participate at all. This was the night for his children and his experiments.

He had theories to test, and the police were not a part of what he wanted to examine.

Once he was high enough in the air, he spread his senses out, reaching for his creations and seeing through the eyes of his crows. The results were interesting enough to keep him distracted.

II

The town had lost its mind. That was the only possible answer as far as O’Neill was concerned. First he had to deal with Boyd and Holdstedter, which was like dealing with rabid pit bulls as far as he was concerned, and now half of the town was making insane phone calls. Somehow in the last twenty-four hours his little corner of the world had gone off the deep end.

Brian Freemont had been torn apart. He had a drug dealer who had been tortured to death in an ugly scene, a man who had been tortured by the drug dealer, and the man’s daughter who was supposed to be the next new victim of the drug dealer, over forty missing people in the last week, a frat house that had burned to the ground, and now his cops were screaming about officers being killed near the 7-Eleven.

It wasn’t the least bit funny, but he felt like he should be waiting for the punchline to a joke.

He also felt like he was going to have a stroke in about five minutes. Every single car was out, and the dispatcher was getting more calls and fewer responses all the time.

He didn’t have a choice. He called the State Patrol out of Newport and climbed into his bulletproof vest.

“Where are you going?” Mike was on dispatch and he was looking a bit shell-shocked.

“I’ve got officers down. Where the hell do you think I’m going?”

“You can’t leave me here alone.”

“Watch me. Call if you need me.”

He left the building and climbed into his car. In the distance he heard the wail of fire engines taking off. “This fucking night is never going to end.”