Jonathan Maberry - Dead of Night

The flash popped everything into moments of brightness that reminded Dez of the starkness of the skies in Afghanistan.

Flash.

Dez shot the handprints on the wall. She shot the blood spatter on the lampshade and across the desk. She shot the pool of blood around the wheeled office chair. She turned and straightened to take photos of the vic.

Flash.

And the cleaning woman was standing right there.

Right.

There.

Flash.

Dez stared in absolute and uncomprehending horror at the big Russian woman standing two feet away. Eyes open to reveal nothing. There was no hint of awareness or pain or anything in those bottomless black eyes.

“I don’t—” Dez began.

And the woman snarled and lunged at her.

The woman slammed into Dez with full weight, grabbing her hair, driving Dez backward, and then they were falling. The woman snarled — a weird gargling impossibility that came from her ruined throat — and darted her head forward even as they crashed onto the coffee table, exploding it into a thousand fragments of wood and decorative inlay. The impact tore a scream from Dez as the woman’s two hundred pounds came down on her and items on her utility belt punched into spine and kidneys and ribs.

She heard the woman’s blood-streaked teeth clack together an inch from her ear. Dez jammed her forearm under the woman’s chin as the teeth snapped again and again, trying to bite her face, her ear, her windpipe. Black clotted blood dribbled from the corners of the woman’s mouth and splashed on Dez’s cheeks and shirt.

“Get off of me you crazy bitch!” Dez screamed, twisting her body to try to escape the crushing weight.

The Russian kept trying to twist her fingers into Dez’s French braid. The woman straddled Dez, massive thighs blocking her from grabbing her weapons. Yet for all of the woman’s bulk she was strangely limp, as if her muscles were half-asleep and sagging. It was a horrible dead-weight quality, and it made escape much harder.

There was no real plan to the cleaning woman’s attack except to pull Dez close enough to bite. She snarled and hissed and bit the air, squirming to get her chin around the barrier of Dez’s forearm. Fending off those teeth was immediately exhausting because it meant that Dez had to push away most of that slack, squirming mass.

The woman tried to spit at Dez, expectorating a viscous mass of dead blood at her, but Dez twisted away. The black goo splatted on the floor, and out of the corner of Dez’s eye she could see something like maggots squirming in the muck.

“Christ!”

Dez finally managed to pull her right arm free. The camera was still attached to her wrist by its lanyard; Dez grabbed it and smashed it with all her strength against the woman’s temple. The impact shot pain through Dez’s wrist; pieces of metal and plastic flew everywhere, and the force knocked the Russian woman’s head away. But that was all it did. There was absolutely no change of expression on the woman’s face, even though a flap of skin as large as a silver dollar flopped down onto her cheek. The wound did not bleed … and there was no reaction at all to the blow or the pain that it must have caused.

A growl burst from low in Dez’s chest as she swung again and again, hitting with the camera every time, mashing the woman’s ear, splitting her eyebrow, grinding into temple and eye socket and sinus. The jagged edges of the broken camera tore the woman’s face to red ribbons.

But they did not slow the woman’s attack at all. She did not even attempt to block the blows. She kept trying to bite, her cold fingers continued to scrabble and grab. The woman spat more black blood at Dez, splattering her uniform shirt.

“JT!” Dez screamed as panic surged up inside of her.

Then Dez pulled her heels close to her own buttocks, bent her knees and placed her soles flat on the ground, then she abruptly snapped her hips upward in a reverse bronco buck-off. The sudden upward thrust bounced the Russian woman’s body into the air, and Dez instantly rolled sideways, using the turn of her hips against the inside of the attacker’s thighs. Leverage won out and the woman fell sideways.

Dez immediately rolled the other way, spinning onto her side and kicking out at the woman with both feet, catching her in the chest and face and knocking her back against the sofa.

The woman was not even stunned. She flopped back from the point of impact, flopped onto her hands and knees, and began crawling toward Dez.

“Shit!” Dez rolled onto her back and drew her Glock. “Fucking freeze !”

The woman snarled and snapped her teeth together — and lunged.

Dez fired.

The bullet caught the woman in the upper chest, punching a black hole through the breastbone an inch below the clavicle. The force sent the woman reeling back on her knees, arms flailing like a supplicant in the throes of a religious mania. There was no pain on her face, no sign that she even noticed the.44 round that had punched through her body. Her lips curled back from bloody teeth and she dove once more at Dez.

Dez screamed and fired.

The second round caught the woman on the side of the chin and blew a hole out past her ear, spraying the sofa with blood and flecks of gray matter.

The woman paused, her feral expression dissolving into vacuity, her mouth losing the firmness of its snarl.

And still she did not go down.

Dez felt the world spin around her. Two shots at this range. Two shots. Chest and face. There was bone and brain tissue on the goddamn couch. This was impossible.

It could not be the truth.

With bizarre slowness, the woman came on, throwing herself at Dez’s legs, grabbing at her thighs, teeth apart to bite.

Dez bent forward and slammed the hot barrel against the woman’s forehead.

“Fucking die !”

She squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. The woman’s head exploded. Skull fragments and strips of dura mater and brain pulp blew back against the sofa and the wall and the floor lamp.

The woman … collapsed.

All at once.

Just as JT burst through the door from the prep room with the shotgun.

“Dez — are you all right?” JT demanded as he rushed to her.

“I…” Dez’s voice faltered on the first word as she saw the gore that was splattered on her legs and gun hand. She saw the squirming larvae and went into a hysterical fit, slapping the stuff off her clothes. “God!”

“Are you hurt?”

“No — help me the fuck up!”

JT hooked a hand under her armpit and pulled her out from under the corpse. Dez’s heels scrabbled at the blood-soaked floor as she backpedaled into JT. He lost his grip on her ten feet from the corpse, and Dez fell hard on her ass and sat there, staring, mouth open, shaking her head. Her gun fell from her hand and she made no move to pick it up; so JT did.

“What happened?”

His question seemed to be coming from another room; it was tinny and distant and Dez wasn’t sure if he was really there. JT came around and squatted down in front of her. His face twisted into a frown of doubt and he snapped his fingers the same way she had done to him — God, was it only a few minutes ago? On some remote level Dez understood that she was in shock, just as she was aware that she was thinking about being in shock. Her mind was fragmented as it tried to crawl away from the precise reality of what just happened.

“I…” Dez began again, but didn’t know where to go with it. She shook her head.

JT rose and helped Dez carefully to her feet, took her by the elbow and guided her across the room to a niche filled with filing cabinets. He still held her Glock in his other hand.