David took one second to look up, into the empty window. It had gone dark. Then a flash of light and a roar. Another blast of the shotgun.
The sudden illumination revealed two silhouettes inside.
Instinct took over. David was running, right hand pulling his nine-millimeter as he went.
The heavy door came open. He shoved through, into the dark of the building. His feet took him up the stairs.
Another explosion of shotgun fire. He was to the second floor.
A scream. Jason’s voice. He had reached the office.
David rammed through the door and leveled his gun.
“Jason!” he yelled.
His eyes swept the dark of the room. The window blasted out. The shotgun missing from its rack. Chairs overturned. A lamp knocked down, bulb broken. The only light coming in was from a streetlight outside, just bright enough to illuminate something on the floor . . .
Not something. Someone. Feet pointed skyward. Feet wearing red Converse sneakers.
David stepped forward into the shadows.
“Jason?”
The legs lay face up, but the torso twisted impossibly, folding over on itself, so that the chest almost touched the floor.
David inched closer, keeping his gun raised. He reached out his hand to shake his cousin, to rouse him. Then he stopped.
The abdomen had been sliced open, a great diagonal wound that went almost entirely through him. Intestines and organs spilled out from beneath sheared-off rib bones that stuck out like teeth.
David followed the body up, to where the neck rose into the lower jaw and then simply ended. He was staring into the bisected tongue and throat cavity, and the white circle of spinal column. It couldn’t be his cousin.
Then he saw the rest of the head. It had landed a couple of feet away and sat on the ground, staring forward. It looked as if Jason had poked his head up through a hole cut into the floor. David’s stomach seized.
A crackle of static, and David spun, searching the room.
His radio on his belt. “Boss! You there? I heard gunshots. In the building, upstairs. Shots fired in the building!”
David held down the transmit button on the radio. He kept his voice low.
“I’m here. Jason is down. I’m looking for the assailant . . .”
A shadow moved in his periphery, fast. He let go of the radio and swung his gun to the right.
Too late. The shape crashed into him at full speed, and he smashed into a file cabinet, barely keeping hold of his pistol.
The shape went out the door.
“Stop!” David yelled as he pushed himself to his feet and ran out, following.
As he sprinted to the stairwell, he heard the building’s front door open below. He ran down, shoved his way out. Gun raised and ready.
David stalked forward into the night. The moon was just a sliver, little help. There were no trees or bushes. Nowhere to hide.
The scrape of shoes on gravel.
David spun to the sound.
There. A shadow moving behind his truck in the parking lot.
“Freeze!”
The shadow charged away, into a neighboring yard. David threw himself after it.
Breath came in gasps. His ribs were bruised, maybe broken. The image of Jason’s face, of the fear in his dead eyes, the eviscerated body kept forcing its way to the front of David’s thoughts. No. Stay buried. Not now.
David came around a shed, into an expanse of grass leading to a single-story house. Nothing. He stepped forward, into the open, between the open door of the shed and the house.
He started to reach for his flashlight as he stepped toward the cave-like entrance to the shed. It opened wide in front of him, pitch black. His fingers struggled to pull the flashlight free.
Out of the blackness, the form shot out, straight at David.
A man. Face hidden beneath the dark hood of a jacket. Holding something along his right side. A long blade that hissed in the air as it swung forward.
David startled back a step as he fired.
The man ducked to the side, the shot missing high, bullet cracking against something metal inside the shed.
David caught his balance and aimed again, but the man was already in the shadows of the next yard, putting an impossible distance between them. This won’t work. Try something else.
David didn’t pursue the man directly, instead going out to the street, circling around the block. Maybe he’d be lucky. Maybe the person in the shadows would angle for a way out, rather than keep on sprinting dead ahead through one yard after another.
He eased into an alley, jogging with soft steps, darting from the shadow of one building to the next.
Then the man stepped in front of him, some twenty feet away.
He turned toward David. His face remained hidden beneath the hood of the black jacket. The blade was more than a foot long, its cutting edge running straight, then ending in a slight curve.
“Drop your weapon!”
The man gave no sign of moving. Said nothing.
David steadied his finger over the Glock’s trigger and stepped forward.
“Last warning!”
In a movement that was as smooth as it was instantaneous, the man turned and vaulted over a six-foot-tall wooden privacy fence into a yard.
Panting, David ran to the spot. He jumped, grabbing onto the top of the fence, and pulled himself up to look over. No sign of anything.
He knew. The man with the knife was gone, disappeared into the black of the night.
David lowered himself down and turned back toward the courthouse. The empty window looked out at him. He stopped resisting and let the vision of his dead cousin come back in full, and he began to scream.