Marcus watched as Lindsey approached the two girls. Marion tossed her half-smoked cigarette outside, then hit the switch to raise the windows. She picked up the handgun Lonnie had given her and checked to ensure it was loaded, her movements calm, practiced. She was getting ready. Just in case.
Marcus glanced at the gun sitting on the seat between him and Vanessa. Lonnie had told him it was a semi-automatic called a Desert Eagle, and the damn thing looked to him like it could stop a charging rhino. At the time, he’d taken it more to humor Lonnie than out of any real expectation that he might have to use it. But now the reality of it hit him in the face like a splash of cold water. Vanessa noticed him looking at the thing.
“That’s a big gun,” she said. “Think you can handle it?”
It wasn’t a question of could he handle it. It was a question of should he. He was a physician, for Christ’s sake. He had taken an oath to do no harm. And that oath applied to everyone, regardless of who they were or what they might’ve done—or what they might do in the future. It was his job to provide medical care to those in need, not to decide who deserved to live and who deserved to die. When he’d chosen to join Tommy and his group of vigilantes, he hadn’t fully thought through the consequences. He’d been so horrified by what Michael had done that he’d wanted to do what he could to stop the sonofabitch. He hadn’t considered what would happen if they actually found him. He supposed he’d expected they would act in a civilized manner, hold Michael prisoner until sheriff’s deputies arrived to take him into custody. He was beginning to realize how naïve he’d been. The rule for this night was simple: kill or be killed. Did he have enough killer in him to do what needed to be done? He didn’t know.
Vanessa must’ve sensed his internal struggle, for she picked up the Desert Eagle and examined it. “Heavier than it looks,” she said, but she didn’t put it back down, and Marcus didn’t ask her to hand it to him. He didn’t know how she and Marion—who were both nurses—could be comfortable with the prospect of shooting someone. Nurses didn’t have to take the Hippocratic oath when they graduated, but they were expected to adhere to the same basic principles. How could they contemplate killing someone?
Maybe, he thought, because they’re both stronger than I am.
Marion glanced up at the rearview mirror and let out a strangled gasp. Marcus turned and peered through the rear window. He immediately wished he hadn’t. A tall man wearing dark clothes and a white mask stood behind the Elantra. In one hand, he held another mask—a skull—and in the other he held a very large, very scary-looking knife. Blood dripped from the mask, and Marcus saw more blood smeared on the blade.
Michael Myers. In the fucking flesh.
Before Marcus could say anything, Michael stepped up onto the Elantra’s trunk, and from there onto the car’s roof. He took a couple steps, and then an instant later a white shape smacked onto the windshield: the bloody skull mask. When Marion saw it, she let out a shriek, raised her gun, and fired. The explosion was deafening in the confined space of the car, and the round punched a large hole in the windshield. The bullet struck the mask and flung it onto the hood. There was no sign of Michael, though.
An instant later there was a loud crump, and a portion of the ceiling above Marion’s head was dented in. Marcus imagined Michael stomping on the roof to create the dent. It was almost as if the bastard was taunting Marion, letting her know precisely where he was because there was nothing she could do to stop him. Marion pointed her gun barrel toward the ceiling, as if she intended to shoot at Michael through the roof.
Vanessa screamed, and Marcus was concerned that any delay in acting might get them all killed.
“Fuck this bullshit!” he said. “We need to get out of here!”
Lindsey had left the Elantra running when she’d gotten out. All they needed to do was put the engine in drive, floor the gas pedal, and they could leave Michael Myers’ latex-covered ass in the dust. Marion didn’t scoot over behind the wheel, though. She just kept staring up at the ceiling, eyes wide with terror, paralyzed by fear. Fine—if Marion wasn’t going to get them out of here, he would.
Marcus started to climb into the front seat, but as he did, a hand struck the front passenger window with such force that the glass cracked. Marion screamed, pointed her gun at the window, and fired. Thunder boomed again inside the Elantra, and the window shattered. Michael’s hand was no longer visible, and Marcus couldn’t tell whether or not Marion had managed to hit him.
Panicking, Marion stabbed a finger onto the control that locked the Elantra’s doors—all four of them.
Vanessa tried to open one of the rear passenger doors, but it refused to open. Marcus slipped back down into the backseat and tried the other passenger door with the same results. He realized then what had happened. In her panic, Marion had accidently activated the child locks on the back doors. Vanessa must’ve figured it out too, for she yelled, “Unlock the doors!”
Marion didn’t listen. She whirled her gun around, aimed at the driver’s side window, and fired. Glass exploded, and once more Marcus couldn’t tell if Marion had succeeded in hitting Michael. He hadn’t seen the man reaching toward the window, and he wondered if Marion was so jumpy that she’d fired without confirming a target. If she continued firing wildly like this, there was a good chance she’d end up hitting him or Vanessa, and that was a risk he didn’t want to take.
A hand reached through the front passenger window and grabbed a fistful of Marion’s hair. She moved to the side just as Michael pulled, and his hand came away with a clump of hair, leaving her with a blood-smeared patch of skin on her scalp.
Marcus had seen enough. He took the Desert Eagle from Vanessa, pointed it at the driver’s side passenger window, and fired two shots. The weapon bucked in his hand like a thing alive, taking out most of the glass. He shoved the gun back in his wife’s hand.
“Vanessa, go! I love you, baby!”
It took her a second to understand what he wanted her to do. Then she crawled over his lap and began wriggling through the broken window. She was slender and would have no problem getting through. She might cut herself on the remnants of window glass protruding from the door frame, but with any luck she wouldn’t be injured too badly. Besides, a few cuts beat the hell out of getting accidently shot by a hysterical nurse with a bleeding scalp wound. Vanessa pushed her bare feet against the car seat to give herself a final shove forward, and then she was through the window and onto the ground outside.
His turn.
He started for the window, but just as he reached toward it, Michael dropped down off the roof in front of him, knife in one hand, a fistful of Marion’s hair in the other.
* * *
Lindsey watched in horror as Michael attacked her friends. She winced at the sound of multiple gunshots, but Michael didn’t fall. She wasn’t surprised. Tommy might believe that Michael could be killed, and logically, Lindsey knew that he could. But the little girl inside her, the one that had sat next to Tommy on his couch watching the Dr. Dementia horror movie marathon while Laurie made popcorn in 1978, knew better. Michael was a monster, and true monsters never died.
The girls on the swings were watching Michael with wide-eyed disbelief, holding onto the chains of their swings with death grips, as if doing so would activate some kind of magic charm that might protect them. But Lindsey knew there was only one way to ensure their safety. She turned and gave them a command in the sternest mom voice she could muster.
“Run! Now! Go home!”
The girls looked at her, startled, and then they jumped off the swings and ran like hell across the park in the opposite direction.
Thank god, Lindsey thought. Two fewer victims for Michael to claim. Now she had to see what she could do to prevent Michael from killing her friends. She hadn’t brought her gun with her when she left the car—hadn’t wanted to scare the girls—but now she wished to hell she had. She would just have to improvise. She looked around to see what she might be able to work with. The girls had left their masks behind when they’d fled, but those wouldn’t be of any use. They’d also left the pillowcase filled with candy, but unless Michael had a sweet tooth, she didn’t see what they… Her gaze fell upon the crumbling brick of the trash receptacle then, and a plan came to her.
She snatched the pillowcase off the ground, ran over, and emptied the remaining candy into the receptacle. She then kicked at its brick housing, once, twice, three times. There had already been a couple bricks lying on the ground, but she wanted more, as many as she could get. She managed to dislodge several additional bricks and she crouched down and quickly filled the pillowcase with them. She stood, hefted the pillowcase, liked the feel of its weight. This’ll do, she thought.
She started running toward the car.
* * *
When Marcus saw Michael standing before the broken passenger window, he scuttled to the other side of the car and tried to open the door, but it remained locked. Marion opened the front passenger side door and tried to get out, but suddenly Michael was there, and he attacked. Marion fell back onto the seat, and Michael reached in for her. She still had hold of her gun, but in her fear, it seemed she’d forgotten all about the weapon.
“Marion! Shoot him!” Marcus yelled.
She screamed and kicked, but Michael managed to grab hold of one of her feet and began pulling her toward him. She remembered her gun then and struggled to aim it at Michael, but she squeezed the trigger too soon, firing off two rounds, both of which struck the ceiling, missing him entirely. And then Marcus watched as Michael leaned in over Marion and slammed his knife into her chest. The strike was surgical in its precision, the blade slipping through the intercostal space between the fourth and fifth ribs to the left of the sternum.
Marion’s eyes closed and she fell still.
As a doctor, Marcus was no stranger to death. He’d dissected cadavers in medical school, had patients with conditions that, despite his best efforts, had ultimately killed them. You learned to deal with death when you were a physician, to make your peace with it, or else you couldn’t do the job. But he had never seen someone die like this before, her life snuffed out so easily, like someone blowing out a candle flame; one breath, then gone. And he could never have imagined the monstrous indifference toward human life demonstrated by Michael Myers. He was no different than a disease, a cancerous rot masquerading as a human being, a mindless thing that killed simply because it could. Well, Marcus was a doctor, goddammit, and it was his duty to combat disease, wherever he found it.
He’d given the Desert Eagle to Vanessa, but he had another tool to fight with, one much more appropriate for his profession. He reached into the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out his stethoscope. Michael had yet to remove the knife from Marion. He held it inside her body, his masked face mere inches from her own, and Marcus wondered what, if anything, he saw in the woman’s lifeless eyes. Perhaps only his own emotionless reflection.
Marcus lunged over the seat toward Michael, wrapped the stethoscope around his neck and pulled it tight. Michael let go of the knife and reached upward with both hands, attempting to pull the black rubber tubing loose. But Marcus kept up the pressure, now twisting the tubing, making it tighter, his hands shaking from the effort. It shouldn’t take long for the motherfucker to slip into unconsciousness. Most people could be choked out in five seconds or less, and even if they knew how to tense their neck muscles to slow the process, it still wouldn’t take more than fifteen seconds, max. Once Michael was out, it would only take a few more minutes of pressure to kill him. Or maybe he’d speed things up by removing the knife from poor Marion and cutting Michael’s throat, give the bastard a taste of his own medicine.
Michael’s hands fell away from the tubing then, and Marcus thought that this was beddy-byes for the Boogeyman. But then Michael raised his left arm and rammed his elbow into Marcus’ jaw. White light flashed behind his eyes, and he fell back, releasing his hold on the stethoscope. His ears rang, and he felt dizzy, but his vision cleared in time for Michael to yank the knife out of Marion, turn, and slam the blade up into Marcus’ head just below his left eye. The metal penetrated his brain, killing him instantly.
* * *
When Vanessa climbed out of the Elantra’s window, she fell onto the sidewalk next to the street. She didn’t fall far, but she landed awkwardly on the concrete, and the impact stunned her for a second. She rolled onto her back and tried to catch her breath, then looked up and saw Michael Myers standing on the roof of Lindsey’s car. He turned— his attention no doubt drawn by the sound of her falling—and when she saw that ivory face, when she felt the monster looking at her, contemplating her, as if trying to decide if he’d rather kill her now or save her for later, she freaked the fuck out. She jumped to her feet and ran into the park, propelled by blind unreasoning terror.
It felt like she ran forever, but when she glanced back to see if Michael had followed her—she imagined him right behind her, knife raised, ready to ram it into her flesh—she saw that she’d only run a dozen yards or so from the car. More than that, she saw that Michael had decided to ignore her for now. He’d jumped down from the Elantra and stood on the vehicle’s passenger side, trying to get at Marion. A gun went off, firing twice, and Vanessa jumped at the sound. Then she grinned and felt like pumping her fist in the air. Marion had got the bastard!
But her sense of victory was short-lived. She couldn’t make out specific details of what was happening in the car, but she could tell that a struggle was going on inside. She saw silhouettes moving, the car shaking in response to their exertions. It could only mean one thing: either Marion had only wounded Michael or she’d missed him altogether. Vanessa waited a second to see if Marion would fire the gun again, but no third shot came. Maybe Marion couldn’t shoot again. Maybe she was dead. And if that was the case, only two people remained in the car: Michael Myers and Marcus. She felt like such an absolute shit for abandoning Marion and her husband. She’d fled from Michael out of pure instinct, without a single thought for anything but her own survival. She hadn’t done it on purpose, but she had done it. What kind of person did that make her? If someone else had done the same thing, she would’ve told them that they were simply being human. But she still felt like a selfish bitch. Maybe if she hadn’t dropped the Desert Eagle when she’d fallen out of the Elantra’s window, she might’ve been able to do something, but as it was…
She realized something then. Her right hand wasn’t empty. There was something in it, something heavy. She looked down and saw she still gripped the Desert Eagle. She hadn’t dropped it when she’d hit the sidewalk. Without realizing it, she’d held onto the gun and carried it with her when she’d panicked. She’d been so terrified of Michael Myers that she’d completely forgotten she had a weapon which could fill him full of holes. Big ones. If she hadn’t panicked, hadn’t run, if she’d simply gotten up, aimed the Desert Eagle at Michael, and fired, he’d be dead now, and her Marcus wouldn’t be in that car fighting for his life. She started running again, only this time she ran toward the Elantra.
I’m coming, baby, she thought. Hold on…
When she drew near the car, she started firing one-handed, but the gun’s recoil was so strong, she nearly dropped the weapon. She got lucky, though, and her rounds stitched the side of Lindsey’s car. Still, she doubted any of the bullets penetrated far enough to strike Michael. She needed to get closer.
She hurried around the front of the car to the passenger side. The door hung partially open, and she saw Michael was in the front seat, facing the back—facing Marcus. Marion lay on the front seat too, Michael’s knife protruding from her chest, a widening bloodstain on the front of her blouse. Marcus was using his stethoscope to strangle Michael—Hell, yeah!—but she didn’t know if he’d be able to choke Michael out. A stethoscope was hardly a garotte. She needed to get a little closer, then she could fire through the window and send Michael Myers straight to hell, where he belonged.
Hold on, baby, she thought. Just a few seconds more…
She saw Michael suddenly elbow Marcus in the face, watched Marcus recoil from the blow, saw Michael yank the knife out of Marion’s chest and bury it her husband’s brain, the blade sliding in just below the left eye.
“Marcus!” she screamed.
Michael spun around as she raised the Desert Eagle. He kicked the passenger side door hard, and it flew all the way open, striking Vanessa’s gun hand. The impact caused her arm to fold at the elbow, bringing the Desert Eagle up so that the barrel pointed toward her face. Her finger tightened reflexively on the trigger, and for a fraction of a fraction of a second, she heard the sound of the gun going off, saw the bright muzzle flash.
And then she was as dead as her husband.