Ted Kosmatka - Prophet of Bones

There was silence on the line. The crackle of static.

“Where do you want to meet?”

“The bridge two blocks over.”

“My jacket is already on.”

Paul watched the front steps. He was parked a block and a half away, but he had a clear line of sight to the front of Alan’s building.

He opened the text feature on his phone and typed in Alan’s number. Then he typed the words STOP, GO BACK.

His finger hovered over the Send button but did not press it. He waited.

Although Alan had said his jacket was on, it still took three minutes for a man to exit Alan’s building—small and slight, wearing Alan’s leather jacket, a baseball cap pulled down over a head of dark hair. If it wasn’t Alan, it was a guy who looked just like him.

Paul scanned the street carefully. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. No one followed. No one stepped from the shadows. Alan looked both ways, then turned and moved up the sidewalk, disappearing around the corner. Paul waited a full minute before closing his phone. He climbed out of his car and walked one block over, heading for the bridge. The streets were quiet this time of the night. The traffic was light. Few pedestrians on the sidewalks. Around the corner, the bridge loomed into view. The structure itself was an old, iron monstrosity, about 150 yards long, an intermittently lit suspension of two-lane road. A pedestrian walkway crowded one edge of the traffic lanes. The bridge crossed a sloping landscape of trees and brush that dropped into a low, dark river in the center of the span. Up ahead, Alan stopped against the handrail under a streetlight, about a third of the way across. His collar was turned up, the cap still hiding his face.

Paul approached.

As he got closer, he waved.

Alan waved back.

There was something in his stance. Something off about it. Paul’s pace slowed. Alan seemed to sense this, and he turned slightly, his face coming out of the shadows for a moment, and it was then that Paul saw it. The bruises. Two black eyes. A broken nose.

Paul stopped. He was thirty feet away.

“Alan?”

Alan refused to look him in the face. Paul noticed that his hand was bandaged. Soaked through in blood. Blood dripped to the pavement.

“What…” Paul began, but there was no need to finish the question.

From somewhere behind Paul came the sound of a gunning engine. Paul turned. A gray van surged up the street, its bright lights bearing down on them through the darkness.

“I’m sorry,” Alan said. “They made me.”

Paul ran.

He sprinted past Alan along the walkway, pumping his legs as fast as he could. The sound of the engine grew louder, until it was right beside him. He chanced a look and saw a blond man in the driver’s seat, glaring at him. The squeal of brakes and doors opening—then shouts.

“Stop right fucking there!”

“You’re only making it harder!”

“No, let him run.” It was the last voice that brought Paul’s gaze around again. A twisted voice from out of a nightmare.

A dark, hooded figure was stepping away from the van. A long coat flapped in the wind, and beneath the hood Paul caught the flash of something that his mind couldn’t process. A face.

Paul bolted. Footfalls closed in on him. He ran as fast as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. The thing hit him like a locomotive. A dark man-shaped thing that bulged out from beneath a gray trench coat. Paul slammed into the railing, slipped, spun, fell. He staggered to his feet, turning to look at his attacker. It was a few inches shorter than him but wider. The darkness and a hooded sweatshirt hid its features.

“You’re making this fun,” the shape said.

Paul lunged away but it was faster. Much faster.

The blow knocked Paul off his feet. He hit the corrugated grating.

And now the others were there.

The blond man, grinning in the dark.

In the distance, a scream. “No!” Alan tried to fight them as he was shoved into the open van. One of the men jumped into the driver’s seat and the van sped along the bridge, screeching to a halt right in front of Paul, blocking his view of the roadway.

Paul pulled himself to his feet and hooked an arm around the bridge railing. Here the bridge was still above land, not water. A tangle of branches spread below.

He angled away from them, moving along the walkway, but the hooded shape advanced, cutting him off.

“They don’t get out much,” the blond man said, gesturing toward his hooded partner. “They’re a specialized set. Bad at some things, good at others. But this kind of work, hunting down men—it’s like they were born for it.”

Paul backed up against the rail.

“Another step, and I’ll jump.”

The blond man smiled. “Do us a fucking favor.”

They came for him in a rush, the hooded figure moving faster than the others, and Paul leaned backward, the small of his back pressed against the railing. His legs came up… only instead of going over, he put everything he had into a two-legged kick at the hooded, incoming face. The thing’s head snapped back with the force of the blow. Then fast—so fast—a huge arm came up like a piston and smashed Paul in the side of the head, sending him spinning over the rail, and then he was falling.

An iron grip caught him by the ankle.

He looked up in shock, and there was the dark shape glaring down at him. Impossibly fast, impossibly strong. Paul weighed north of two-thirty and this thing had him in one viselike hand.

Paul looked down and saw the tree branches a dozen feet below. It was impossible to tell how high he was. Where he’d land. What he’d land on.

Paul looked up at the leering face. For the first time, he got a good view of it, in the light from a passing car. Under the hooded sweatshirt, the face was impossible. Huge and prognathic, thin lips peeled back from teeth like no human ever had—enormous canines, clenched down with insane intensity. The eyes had no whites—just dark pools of rage.

And then that impossibly strong arm pulled and Paul’s two-hundred-thirty-plus pounds were drawn inexorably upward.

Paul used his other foot to kick the demon in the face, and then he fell.

Free fall.

The sound of rushing wind. The soft, supple texture of the last few moments of his life.

Then branches clawed his face, and Paul spun, clutching—boughs coming apart in his hands, body twisting in the darkness, as he smashed through the leafy canopy—the crackle of rending wood getting louder as the thin outer branches bent under his weight, carrying him downward before snapping, and still he hung on, the taste of leaves, pinwheeling, taking on angular momentum as his body careened off the thicker branches.

Sounds like bones breaking, like gunshots; then a huge blow to the back of his legs, and his body swung beneath the branch, spinning—and then a moment of nothing, free fall again, and time slowed to an instant crack.

He hit the ground.

There were two things in the universe.

Darkness.

Pain.

Waking like sleeping. Half-conscious, aware only that he was alive. Shouts rained down from high above. From another world.

“Paul? You dead, Paul?”

“I think he’s dead.”

“We need to check.”

Paul was on his back. The entire world above him. He sat up, and the pain was excruciating. He collapsed into a heap. Blackness.

The men.

The thing.

Paul opened his eye again, slowly this time, trying to remember what he was supposed to do.

His head throbbed. His thoughts were jumbled. Where his spine had once been was now only white-hot screaming pain. His eye burned.

When he thought he could sit up, he did, and the pain laid him out again.