John Connolly - Bad Men

She leaned in close to her sister, stroked her hair from her eyes, and whispered to her.

“Nancy, I’m going to go for help. I won’t be gone but five minutes.”

Linda kissed her sister’s brow. It was clammy and hot. She stood and shrugged on her own overcoat. At her feet, the dogs began to turn in circles, alternately barking and whining.

“No, you dumb mutts, this isn’t a walk.”

But the dogs weren’t following her to the door. Instead, they were moving back from it. Max, the German shepherd, went down on his front paws, his tail between his legs, and began to growl. Something of their fear returned to Linda as she looked back at them.

“The hell is wrong with you both?” she asked.

She opened the front door, and the Gray Girl pounced.

For a moment, there was confusion in the station house. The blinds had been drawn in Dupree’s office and the heavy cloud cover meant that there was no moonlight. With the loss of the street lamps, the small station house was suddenly plunged into darkness. The suppressed guns spat softly, but Dupree was already moving. Braun and Leonie heard a door opening in the far-right-hand corner of the office. Both fired toward the sound.

“Go around,” said Leonie. “Don’t let him get into the woods.”

Braun ran into the street, then hung a left and made for the rear of the station. Silently, Leonie advanced toward the back room. Her night vision was already improving and she could see the shape of the doorway ahead of her. She stopped to the right of the frame and listened. There was no sound from inside. Leonie crouched down and risked a glance inside. She saw a big water tank with a small generator behind it. Oilskins were hanging from hooks on the wall. There were two lockers, one of them open. Beyond them, the back door stood ajar and snow was already beginning to cover the floor.

Leonie moved slowly into the room. To her right was a narrow gap between the tank and the wall. The open mouth of a pipe was visible in the gap. Leonie paused for a moment and the pipe belched fire. She heard the bellow of the shotgun as her being ignited in pain, and then a voice was calling her name. Braun. It was Braun. She tried to speak, but no words would form. She felt herself sliding down the wall.

“Bra-”

There was blood in her mouth.

“Br-”

The monstrous form of the giant emerged from the shadows in the corner of the room, the very darkness come to life. There came the sound of another load being jacked, but already she knew that he would have no call for it. Leonie’s fingers brushed the gun upon the floor beside her, and she was no longer dying in an alien place. She was a young girl walking across a patch of waste ground, the revolver like a warm hand upon her belly, spreading tendrils of heat through her body and filling her with pleasure and power. She felt a great pressure build inside her, pain and remembrance intertwining like lovers in her mind. Her lips parted in a kind of ecstasy, and her eyes closed as the life left her body, her final breath briefly catching in her throat before at last it found its release.

Braun was almost at the corner when he heard the shotgun blast. Ahead of him, he could see the open back door of the station house. There were no footprints in the snow.

“Leonie,” he cried out instinctively. There was no reply.

Braun looked toward the forest. The big cop could be anywhere inside the station house. If he approached the doorway, Braun would make an easy target. He retreated instead, making his way in a wide arc into the trees at the back of the station. He moved as quietly as he could, the snow muffling his footfalls. The doorway was empty, but it was dark inside and he could see no movement within. Then the reinforced steel door closed suddenly, propelled shut by the force of Dupree’s shoe, and Braun swore loudly. He couldn’t leave the cop alive in there. He would call for help, and next thing he knew there would be a blue army arriving on the island. Braun prepared to move just as a noise came from close by. He spun rapidly, his back to the station house. There was something big in the trees: a deer, perhaps, or maybe the rookie had come back and was already behind him.

The sound came again but this time it was far to his right. His first thought was that, whatever it was, it was moving quickly, but that was swiftly followed by the realization that nothing could move that fast through the woods. He would have heard branches rustling, twigs snapping, even in the snow. Now there was more than one and the disturbances seemed to be coming from above his head, as though some great bird were flying unseen through the trees.

Braun rose and started moving backward, trying to keep both the woods and the station house in sight, his gun panning across the trees. There were figures moving in the darkness. They were gray, seemingly iridescent, like moonlight shining on the fur of animals, and they glided across the snow or flitted through the gaps between the branches of the evergreens. Then one of the shapes seemed to halt and he caught a glimpse of gray skin and a reflection of himself in a dark pupil.

And teeth. Rotting yellow teeth.

“What the fuck?”

The gray shape curled in on itself, like paper crumpled in a fist, then moved swiftly toward him. Braun started firing, but the thing kept on coming. Braun staggered out of the cover of the woods and turned to see Joe Dupree leaning against the wall of the station, the shotgun at his shoulder. He dove to the ground as the shotgun bucked in Dupree’s hands. Bark and splinters exploded from the tree trunk above Braun’s head. He heard a second shot, and felt a pull at his left arm. He looked down to see blood above his elbow and part of his forearm reduced to red meat by the blast. A searing white heat began to burn its way through his upper body.

Braun staggered into the forest, and the gray shapes followed.

Linda Tooker wasn’t a particularly fast mover. Even during rush hour in the diner (which never numbered more than a dozen people, yet still put the sisters under pressure) she served at a slower pace than her sister cooked, which meant lukewarm sandwiches and cool soup for everyone. Yet in the instant after she registered the approaching figure-its tattered skin, its black eyes, its mouth like a sucking wound-she reacted faster than she had since high school. She slammed the door in the Gray Girl’s face and felt the wood strike her, but the gap wouldn’t close. She looked to her right and saw the child’s fingers caught between the door and the frame. The nails were sharp and yellowed and there was no flesh on the bones. They looked like twigs wrapped in burnt paper, delicate enough to be snapped off by a heavy door.

Except the fingers weren’t snapping.

They were gripping.

Linda felt her feet begin to slide on the floor as the door was pushed inward. That’s not possible, she thought. No child could be so strong. There must be someone else out there, someone helping her. Then a second hand materialized in the growing breach, this time braced against the frame, and the Gray Girl’s face appeared, her black eyes focused not on Linda but on her sister.

“No!” shouted Linda. She jammed her right foot against the last stair, placed her forearm against the door, and swung her fisted right hand with all her force into the child’s face. She heard bone crack as the blow struck, and the child’s head rocked slightly. Then it was back in the opening again, the gray skin open across the nose to reveal the dirty bone beneath. The punch appeared only to have angered her, increasing her strength, for she pushed with renewed force, Linda’s legs giving way, the gap now almost big enough to permit the child’s whole body to enter. Linda heard herself sob as her strength failed and the door opened wide.