Chapter Thirty

Escape, Return

As he rose, Dez heard a wet coughing sound, glanced down and saw that the werewolf’s change was reversing, the hair retracting into the skin, the bones crackling and reforming as he returned to human form. Despite their lack of time, despite the shouting voices and the sounds of skirmishes that still echoed in the Four Winds, Dez found the sight of the werewolf’s reversal spellbinding. But Dez couldn’t help but notice the damage that had been done to Chaney’s body in the battle with the minotaur. His chest was a wicker weave of stringed meat, his throat flayed open like a dressed deer. Blood was seeping from his red mouth, the yellow eyes glazed with pain. The cracking arm bones were raised and spread as though Chaney were imploring the heavens for mercy, and his legs, similarly bloody, kicked feebly at the floor.

Dez forced himself to bypass Chaney, to hurry toward the staircase. Michael might be dead already, but Dez knew if he didn’t at least attempt to save him, whatever time Dez had left would be haunted by his failure.

In spite of his shrieking feet, Dez took the stairs two at a time, and in moments he was weaving through the wreckage of the tables, chairs, lamps, and bodies. The smoke wasn’t as severe up here, but the fire was fast eating its way in this direction. Dez kept the gun ready, told himself he’d fire on anything that moved, but he knew he wasn’t at that point yet, despite all that had happened. While so many had forgotten their consciences, Dez’s had always remained hyperactive.

Maybe that’s why he was still so sick about Susan.

Don’t forget your little brother. Your father, your son.

The thought was like a punch in the gut. He realized as he neared Michael’s unconscious body that he’d done precisely what he was accusing others of doing – he’d shut off his emotions.

It was your fault, Dez, and you know it. You could have saved them. You could have saved your son!

“Stop it,” Dez growled, and a cry sounded from a nearby table.

Dez looked that way in time to see a fair-haired young man, no more than twenty, rising from his hiding place, a carving knife clutched in one hand.

The same young man who’d spoken to Dez at the bar earlier that night, the one with the branded E on the back of his hand.

The young man smiled his naïve smile and gestured with the knife. “I wasn’t going to stick you with this. I promise I wasn’t.”

Dez didn’t respond. Instead he kept moving until he stood over Michael.

Michael didn’t appear to be breathing. If he was, it was so shallow that his chest didn’t move.

Go, a voice in his head demanded.

To hell with that, Dez thought, stuffing the gun back into his underwear. He detested the way the barrel snaked between his butt cheeks, but there was no time to rearrange the weapon for comfort.

He bent, hooked his hands under Michael’s leather coat, and with a good deal of difficulty managed to hoist the unconscious man into a fireman’s carry. He started toward the stairs but stopped when he discovered the kid with the carving knife barring his way.

The young man’s eyes were large, pleading. “Take me with you,” he said.

“Move,” Dez said and pushed straight toward him.

The kid did move aside, but he clamped his free hand over Dez’s bicep. “I saw you fight down there. I saw you kill Badler.”

“Take your hand off,” Dez growled, already panting with the effort of lugging Michael, as slender as the guy was. Dez’s body was a horrorshow of cuts and bruises, he had a bullet in his ass cheek, and he worried he’d dislocated his left shoulder dangling from the chains. If Dez survived this, he’d sleep for a month.

“You killed Erica,” the young man persisted, walking abreast with him now. “You just got Aaron with a crossbow. I’ve never seen anybody shoot one that accurately before.”

They were almost to the stairs. The kid actually chuckled. “And don’t tell me that arrow to the head was luck.”

“It wasn’t.” Dez started down the stairs.

“Exactly,” the young man said. “You’ve got real skills, abilities….”

Dez accidentally bumped Michael’s head on the handrail – shit – so he slowed down, took the steps a bit more cautiously.

The kid wouldn’t shut up. “…a teacher. Someone to help me reach my potential. Please. Without that, I know I’m gonna die.”

On the bottom step Dez stopped and turned, Michael’s body heavy on his shoulders. “You a Latent?” Dez asked.

The young man’s face twisted in confusion. “Latent?”

Dez adjusted his mental estimate of the kid’s age. He was twenty, maybe, but he acted fifteen. Dez waved a hand impatiently. “Yes, Latent. No special abilities?”

The young man’s face went somber. He shook his head. “None that I’m aware of.”

“You’d know by now,” Dez said, turning.

The kid grabbed him. “Please. I need a teacher. I have to learn—”

“You want some advice?” Dez snapped. “Learn how to hide.”

He reached the ground floor and moved through the shadows of the overhanging balcony toward the main room, which was hazed with smoke. Dez’s eyes started stinging again. His throat itched, threatened a coughing fit.

“I can hide,” the kid said. “I can hide and I can scavenge. I know how to cook almost anything.” When Dez didn’t answer, the kid added, “My grandma taught me. If you shoot something, I can tell you a dozen ways to prepare it.”

Dez hardly heard this last. The sight before him stole his ability to think. Maybe he’d been too busy to really examine the main seating area of the Four Winds, but now that he did, his mind refused to register the carnage and destruction. And all of it overlaid with a thickening pall of smoke.

In the expansive space only two tables remained upright. One of those was decorated with a headless body, the ragged neck stump still leaking onto the floor.

Keaton was where Dez had left him, and Iris had finished sawing off his horned head. Dez saw no sign of Iris. Or Keaton’s head.

Nor did he see Tom Chaney. The werewolf had either been dragged to safety by someone, or he’d risen on his own power.

Or, Dez amended, he’d been lugged outside for meat, perhaps the likeliest possibility of all. As if to confirm this supposition, Dez’s attention was drawn by a quartet of cannibals who’d laid out a pair of bodies on the bar, oblivious to the deepening smoke and the flickering ceiling, which was sending down charred spurs of wood that landed like lethal snowflakes on the tables and chairs below. Some winked out before they made contact. Others, the larger scraps, ignited the surfaces with which they came into contact. In dread, Dez gazed up at the ceiling. Any time now, he thought, the whole thing’s gonna cave.

“This way,” the young man said, urging Dez away from the feasting cannibals, who, Dez realized, had taken note of him. Three men and a woman. All shirtless. Their fronts were slicked with gore, their eyes gleaming with unwholesome vitality. Dez didn’t recognize them, but he suspected they’d been here all along, biding their time until they could sate their unholy cravings.

The kid’s voice was tight. “Come on,” he murmured. “The front door.”

Dez turned that way, but Michael’s body weighted Dez down, made him stagger right into a glittering lake of broken glass.

The boy sucked in air, made a face. “Ouch. Be careful.”

“You really wanna help me?” Dez snarled. “Get me a pair of fucking boots.”

The boy blinked at him. “Off one of the dead people?”

“Size fourteen.”

“Fourteen?” the boy repeated.

Overhead, the ceiling creaked.

The boy glanced up in fright. Dez swatted him a backhand on the chest. “Over there,” Dez said, gesturing toward the body of Black Jacket. “That big bastard. His oughta fit.”

Dez started toward the front doors, which hung wide open.

He heard the boy say, “But the cannibals, they’ll—”

“Then piss off,” Dez said. “You say you wanna help….”

“Okay,” the boy moaned.

Dez navigated the wreckage of the Four Winds, the corpses, the splintered chairs and the shattered glass. He glimpsed a beer stein lying on its side, the pewter painted crimson, a scrap of hair stuck to a corner of the base like glued felt. To Dez’s right a chunk of burning wood the size of a Bible thunked to the floor.

Not long now, he thought. He coughed and wheezed against the growing smoke. His lungs were lined with nettles.

Almost to the door.

Dez’s hand slipped instinctively into the rear of his underwear even before the cannibal sprang from his hiding place and ran screaming toward him, his mouth smeared with blood and Gattis’s mace raised aloft with both hands. The man reminded Dez of that character from Welcome Back, Kotter, a TV show his dad used to watch, frizzy curled hair, big eyes, what was the character’s name? Dez waited until the man was five feet away and fired. A hole at the top of the man’s chest opened and the makeshift mace skidded on the floor past Dez’s feet.

Horshack, Dez remembered. The character’s name had been Horshack. Dez considered shooting the cannibal in the forehead and ending his misery, but that would be a waste of a bullet. He left Horshack gasping for breath and gurgling blood from the corners of his mouth.

Dez reached the trio of steps and with a supreme effort passed through the open doorway. Cool breeze caressed his skin. Dez decided to keep the gun at the ready in case another psycho was waiting for him. Hell, for all he knew one of Keaton’s loyalists had marshaled the dead leader’s remaining forces out here for a revenge mission.

But there didn’t appear to be anyone outside. Dez staggered down the steps, his chains dragging behind him. He bent and laid Michael on the weedy gravel as gently as he could, which wasn’t all that gently. Dez exhaled, rested there on his knees, hunched over, his lungs boiling. He coughed, and the burning sensation spiked.

He remembered, long ago, a teacher showing them how much damage one cigarette could do. The teacher had fashioned a pair of lungs out of cotton balls and had funneled smoke, via a plastic tube, into the tall glass jar housing the lungs. Within thirty seconds the cotton had been stained a dingy gray and soon, the color of gunmetal. Dez was never sure about the veracity of the teacher’s conclusions, but damned if the experiment hadn’t made an impression. How much worse, he wondered now, would the damage to his lungs be, inhaling woodsmoke and microscopic embers?

“You’re not hit, are you?” a voice asked.

Dez looked through watery eyes at Iris, who had never appeared stronger. His crossbow hung on her back, behind which loomed a large blue backpack. Her hair had come loose, was dripping with sweat, but other than a scrape along her jawline, the buckshot in her scalp, and an abrasion on her forehead, she appeared completely healthy.

By contrast, Dez felt like utter shit.

“Can you move?” she asked.

“Gimme a couple minutes,” he said. It felt like someone had implanted one of those blowfish in his chest, the kind that was covered with spikes.

“We don’t have minutes,” Iris said.

Dez cringed, lowered to all fours. His lungs….

“Hold still,” she said. He felt a tugging on his wrist, then a relief of pressure. Iris had found the key, was unlocking the cuffs. Despite how difficult it was to breathe, being released from the hand and leg cuffs felt exquisite. He allowed himself a moment to savor the feeling.

“Hey,” she said, shaking his shoulder. “We’ve got to leave. The vampires will be here any moment. And the cannibals.”

Dez thought of the human buffet on the bar. Shivered.

Iris hunkered down beside Michael, placed fingers against his neck.

“He alive?” Dez asked.

She nodded. “He’s small and wiry, but he’s a tough little shit. He’ll live. The question is how we’re going to carry him around until he comes to. You’re in no shape to do it.”

Smoke wafted over them. Dez glanced back and saw the doorway of the Four Winds flickering orange and yellow, the room within seething like hellfire.

“Guess the kid didn’t make it,” Dez murmured.

Iris frowned. “Huh?”

“Never mind. What’d you do with Keaton’s head?”

Iris smiled crookedly. Nodded to his left.

Dez turned that way and saw, perched atop the FIRST ASSEMBLY BAPTIST CHURCH sign, the minotaur’s horned head. The ravaged eyes gazed sightlessly at Dez; the beast’s tongue lolled over its serrated bottom teeth.

Dez nodded. “Appropriate.”

Iris sucked in a breath, rose, gun extended.

Dez beheld a figure blundering down the front steps bearing an armload of black clothes. His hair sweat-plastered to his head, the kid stumbled up next to Dez and dropped the whole load – boots, black jacket, leather pants – on the gravel.

“I would’ve—” the boy with the E on his hand started, but doubled over in a coughing fit, “—would’ve gotten the t-shirt and underwear, but it was too smoky…the cannibals kept eyeing me…and the dead guy really reeked.”

Dez couldn’t suppress a grin. “I’ve got underwear.”

Panting, hands on knees, the kid glanced at him uncomprehendingly. Then he smiled. “Oh yeah. I guess you do.”

“Let’s go,” Iris said, lowering the gun.

Dez winced and began the job of sliding on Black Jacket’s leather pants. He’d have to roll up the cuffs and cinch the belt extra tight – and the kid was right; the clothes smelled like scorched feces – but they were better than nothing.

Dez slid one leg through the pants. “Where’s Chaney?”

“He staggered into the woods,” Iris said, indicating the forest behind the Four Winds.

Dez coughed. He drew in a shuddering breath, concentrated on working his other leg into the pants. “Is he—”

“Recovering,” Iris said. “He was half-healed already when I saw him last, and that was several minutes ago. Come on.” She grabbed Dez under the armpit. “Let’s catch up with him.”

Dez shook free. “Not going that way. I’ve got a truck.”

“With gasoline?” Iris demanded.

Dez nodded. “Some.”

Still bent over and coughing, the boy said, “It’s over there, about fifty yards inside the tree line.”

Dez paused, one bleeding foot halfway inside a boot. “How the hell you know that?”

The kid gave him a sheepish smile. “I was hiding in the woods. I saw you come.”

“You sneaky little shit.”

The kid looked away, but he was grinning.

A moan drew their attention. Dez glanced down and saw Michael shaking his head slowly, as though he were trapped in the jaws of a bad dream.

Iris put a hand on Michael’s chest. “You hear me, Michael? It’s Iris.”

Michael groaned, moved his head weakly.

“We gotta go,” she said. “Hey.” She tapped his cheek with an open palm.

A noisy crash sounded from inside the Four Winds; smoke billowed out at them.

“We’ve got to get away from the building,” Dez said. “It falls now, we’ll die as surely as if we were in it.”

“Help me,” Iris said, and within seconds she and the boy were hauling Michael toward the gravel lane. Dez clutched a boot and the jacket under an arm and hobbled after them. Judging from the roominess of the boot he’d slid on, Black Jacket had been closer to a sixteen than a fourteen, but Dez couldn’t afford to be choosy. Oversized boots were better than no boots. Plus, it felt much nicer stowing the gun in a hip pocket than it did in the seat of his underwear.

“What about Chaney?” Dez asked when he’d caught up to them. They were fifty feet from the bar, but Iris didn’t appear eager to stop.

“He’ll be okay,” she said. “He was mending rapidly. There was still blood…a few open wounds….” She bared her teeth from the effort of hauling Michael. “But he’ll survive. If we can, we’ll loop around to County Road 900, see if we can catch him there.”

“Wait,” the boy said, though he kept shuffling awkwardly along, Michael’s booted feet clutched against his hips. “You’re telling me we’re going into vampire country? That’s suicide.”

Dez hobbled on, the tiny rocks lancing the sole of his left foot like fishhooks. “Who the hell says you’re going with us?”

The boy looked stricken. “I got you clothes! I damned near died inside—”

But he never finished. With a mighty roar and a fusillade of crashes, the Four Winds Bar caved in, casting jets of flame and orange showers of sparks into the velvety night sky. Even from a distance, Dez felt the puff of superheated air roll over him. He raised an arm to shield his eyes from the brilliant firelight.

After a time, Dez turned and saw something coming down the lane toward them. He was sure at first it was a trick of his overtaxed senses. But the vision crystalized, swimming into focus.

It was a man on a bicycle. A wagon trundled behind it.

Iris placed Michael on the ground, drew her weapon.

The bicycle moved closer, its rider frontlighted by the inferno.

“Oh hell,” Dez said.

Iris stiffened. “You know him?”

Dez didn’t answer. He only watched the old man on the bike crunch to a stop, level a finger at him.

“You stole my truck,” Jim the Werewolf said.