| |
Sitting in a cell at the county jail, Deirdre desperately wished she had studied law instead. She had wanted to cooperate, to turn the Sheriff to her cause. That plan was thus far not working out like she’d hoped. The days blurred together. Surely, they meant to either charge her with something or release her soon.
The Rose Valley Sheriff’s Department had two jail cells that served as mirrors to one another across a narrow hallway. One end of the hallway ended in what Deirdre assumed was a very thick brick wall. The other led out into the main area of the department, separated by a door that no one had bothered to close. Dub had told her that if she needed anything, she could always “holler,” but she didn’t think she needed to resort to that just yet.
She decided that the next time an officer checked on her, she would request a lawyer. She should have already done it. She chalked it up to one more thing that she avoided because of pride. In her career, she had learned early on that confidence was important. A woman would not be taken seriously, otherwise. But now her hubris betrayed her at every turn.
She had received the occasional roommate over the last couple of days. Mostly drunk teenagers. The Sheriff had no qualms about sticking men in the cell with her. It seemed inappropriate, but none of them had caused any trouble.
Currently, there was no one in her cell, or the sister one across the hall. She had enjoyed the silence at first, but now it was gnawing at her nerves. She had learned from the last drunkard that the beast had killed a college kid from Missouri. The one before had mentioned that the beast had killed Bernard Jones as well, but the latter said that he had just died of a heart attack. Deirdre didn’t know which one was true, but if the beast had killed even one of them, that meant that the carnage would only ramp up from there.
Deirdre didn’t know for certain how the beast would react as long as Jake was in a drug-induced coma, but she suspected that the beast would remain active. Jake would dream and his mind would meander. It might confuse the beast, cause him to do strange things or to become easily distracted. But it wouldn’t shut him down. He was out there somewhere, ready to prey further on the residents of Rose Valley.
She stretched out on the bench and stared at the ceiling, drifting in and out of a fitful half-sleep until she jolted awake from shouts and scrambling elsewhere in the building. Probably some belligerent drunk. Who could blame someone for throwing a few back when their hometown was under siege by a monster?
When the shouting didn’t die down immediately, she began to wonder whether it was more than that.
Then the first gunshot left little doubt.
They sounded like muffled pops from within her cell, but there was no mistaking the sounds. She lost count of how many shots were fired. Dozens, at least.
Something bigger than a handgun fired, echoing down the narrow hallway. Whatever was happening had moved closer to her cell. Closer, panicked shouting ricocheted back to her, as gunsmoke drifted in.
Through the shouting came growling, followed by a scream that tore through all of Deirdre’s resolve. She craned her neck to see deputies running past the hallway opening, shouting orders to each other. She couldn’t make out all of them, but she didn’t need to. She knew what was coming.
She needed to hide. Maybe find a weapon of some sort. She realized that jail cells were not designed to provide either of those things, and settled for crouching in the back corner closest to the hallway entrance.
“Fall back!” she heard a shout, unmistakably from Sheriff Donner.
Deirdre heard a door open. She presumed it was the back entrance to the department. They were running. They were going to leave the beast alone with her. Her heart jumped, and she tried to make herself even smaller, knowing that it was futile. This was not something she could reason her way out of. The bars didn’t look so strong now. She was going to die.
She could tell when the beast had stopped at the entrance to the hallway. Maybe it was his breathing, or his labored steps on the concrete floor. He moved towards her at an agonizingly slow pace. She held her breath.
She jumped when she saw it standing outside of the door to her cell. She had never been able to study it in person before. Regardless of what he had been before, he was a monster now. Paradoxically, Deirdre distracted herself from imminent death by admiring this amazing creation. He was so strong and resilient and fast. He seemed to have an unnaturally long lifespan. Maybe he was even immortal.
She didn’t create him, but she had studied the serum that had. With the money from her grant and a few more years of research, she might have perfected it. She could have created real-life superheroes. Not mindless monsters like this one, but truly enhanced humans.
She knew he had no functional brain. Not really. She knew that as he stared at her, he wasn’t pondering whether he wanted to kill her. The thoughts that he received from Jake were surely so muddled and confusing. It was a wonder he could make sense of it at all. And that’s why the experiment had always failed. Eventually, the voices in his head were too overwhelming, and he reverted to his base state of aggression.
She watched as he reached up and wrapped both of his massive hands around two bars in the cell door. She winced when the steel hinges creaked, then eventually popped. He pulled the door towards himself and dropped it on the floor like it was made of paper.
He only loomed in the doorway, not entering. Was he toying with her? No. She was only projecting. He had no way to process such emotions. Jake, on the other hand, surely wanted her to suffer. The evidence did not support the theory that Jake could directly control The Beast like that, but Deirdre couldn’t help but wonder.
As he moved to take a step into her cell, a gunshot rang down the hallway and the beast reeled backward. It wasn’t a handgun. It sounded much larger than that. The beast started towards the sound of the shot, away from Deirdre. Another shot rang out and the beast stumbled, backed up, and dropped to his knees. This gun wasn’t going to kill him, but it was pushing him back.
“Dr. Valentine. Come here. Now!” the Sheriff yelled.
She needed no further invitation. She scrambled on all fours towards the cell door and stood up to run as she reached the entrance. The beast grabbed at her, latched on to her ankle and caused her to fall hard on her chest. She kicked with her other foot. He grabbed that one too. She tried desperately to find something to hold onto in the smooth concrete floor, but there was nothing to stop her from moving backwards.
Another shot rang through the air, the bullet whizzing above her head. The Beast howled in rage and loosened his grip on her ankles. She got to her knees and crawled a yard away before getting back to her feet. Her ankles hurt, but they weren’t broken. She ran as fast as she could towards the Sheriff, too scared to look back at how close the beast might be. Her body blocked the path now. The Sheriff wouldn’t be able to fire again until she cleared the hallway.
She was moving too slow. The Beast would catch her at this rate. She willed her legs to move faster, ignoring the pain and the fear.
To her surprise, the beast did not catch her. She squeezed past the Sheriff and he immediately fired another round. She stood in the hallway now, unable to see the beast. The Sheriff crouched on one knee, aiming the rifle. He dropped the muzzle of the gun, and stood up.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to her.
He sprinted towards the back of the hallway to the rear entrance of the department. She should have followed, but she saw another path. If she followed Cam, she would still be in his custody. But if she ran the other direction, she might escape. Without weighing the pros and cons, she ran away from the Sheriff towards the front doors of the department.
“Stop right there, Doc!” she heard him cry.
She didn’t stop. He wouldn’t shoot her. Not when his ammo was so precious. He needed to keep his gun ready for when the beast regained the strength to walk out of the cellblock. He wasn’t going to waste it on her tiny, fragile body. She felt her feet slip out from under her as she hit a wet patch of blood, causing her to fall to one knee. Her stomach lurched as her eyes scanned over two halves of a dead body, but she suppressed the bile in her throat, pushed herself up and lunged forward.
She heard the beast growl behind her as she crashed into the door and out into the warm night’s air. It was dark, with no one in sight. It must have been late. She took off in a dead run across the highway, into a field, and then into a grove of trees.
She stopped to catch her breath as another shot rang out. They wouldn’t be chasing her right now. They couldn’t afford to. She was a tiny little girl, not an immortal monster.
After catching her breath for as long as she dared, Deirdre walked deeper into the woods away from the department. She didn’t know where she was going just yet, but she knew she needed to clear as much ground as possible before the beast vanished and left the deputies with nothing to do but hunt her down.
The Sheriff could have shot her, but he hadn’t, and Deirdre took that as a sign. Cam couldn’t kill Jake. But she could. And Cam wanted her to. She understood, of course, that such an unholy alliance could never be verbalized, but he had forged one with her on this night when he let her go.
Yes. There could be no doubt. Sheriff Donner counted on her to kill Jake and save Rose Valley.
