Bryan Smith - Soultaker

Then he came into the larger backstage area and saw them. All those local bigwigs with their spouses and/or lovers. They stood with their backs to him, watching the show from the wings.

Raymond hesitated.

He knew he had to kill as many of them as possible. At least any of them who got in his way. But for a moment he couldn’t bring himself to start shooting at their backs. It was something basic hardwired within him. Every boy raised on old Westerns knew it was cowardly to shoot unarmed people, especially in the back.

One of those backs stiffened abruptly.

A man in a tuxedo turned toward him.

It was Sheldon Prather, the chief of police.

He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps raise the alarm.

Raymond shot him in the face.

A hole appeared between the man’s eyes and a larger hole erupted at the back of his head. Blood and tissue from the exit wound splashed the front of Mrs. Cheever’s evening gown as the dead man’s body staggered backward a step before toppling to the floor. They all turned to face him then, and their expressions were a mixture of shock and hatred. And then outrage. He saw it in their eyes. He was here to spoil it. To stop the sacred Harvest. Raymond spared another second to study the faces of men and women he’d thought he’d known so well. Friends and neighbors. Colleagues. Formerly God-fearing members of several local churches.

Secretly monsters, all of them.

Raymond set his jaw and advanced on them.

Fuck them all.

He squeezed the Glock’s trigger again and again. The gun bucked in his hand, a wild thing working at his will as he kept his aim steady enough to mow them down. They fled to the stage and he started after them, firing at their backs, no longer caring a damn about whether it made him a coward. They fell, one by one, holes appearing in their torsos and heads. He felt like an avenging angel come to earth to invoke the wrath of God.

He paused a moment to eject the Glock’s spent clip and slap another one home.

He raised the gun to resume the righteous slaughter.

Then he felt it.

The cold steel barrel against the back of his head.

No.

He was so close. It couldn’t end this way. The screams of the children taunted him. He was their only hope. He would not surrender. Not now. Not ever. Instinct caused him to spin and lash out at the son of a bitch who’d gotten the drop on him. He struck the man’s arm in the millisecond before the gun went off. Raymond staggered backward, a burst of bright pain setting his torso afire. The Mossberg flew out of his left hand and went spinning across the shiny floor.

But the Glock was still in his right hand.

He raised it and managed to squeeze off one round in the same instant another bullet punched through his stomach and sent him to the floor.

The pain was extraordinary. It unmanned him. He cried out for his mother and knew he was finished. But he managed to raise his head and saw the guard on his knees, with a hand held over a bloody hole in his own belly. Raymond raised the Glock one last time and shot the man in the throat, finishing him.

The gun slipped from his numb fingers and thunked on the floor.

He knew there was no way he could lift it again.

I’ve failed, he thought.

They’ll all die. All the children.

And it’s all my fault.

This was his last conscious thought before slipping beyond the veil.

The harrowing screams from the auditorium continued unabated.

It was after 2:00.

It was already happening.

The fucking Harvest.

Jake cranked the Camry’s steering wheel as he blew through the four-way stop where Marlowe intersected with Spillane Boulevard. A blue Hyundai slammed on its brakes in the middle of the intersection as the Camry missed sideswiping its left fender by inches. The Hyundai’s driver shook a fist at him and honked his horn. Jake was too busy getting the Camry turned in the right direction to give a shit about the other guy’s righteous indignation. The Camry’s passengers let out startled cries and swayed from one side of the vehicle to the other. Jake felt their pain, but they’d wasted too much time already. Traffic laws and the potential for collateral damage en route to Rockville High were the least of their concerns.

Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

He looked at the clock again.

2:04.

Fuck.

He whipped the steering wheel back the other way and now they were roaring along at seventy-five miles an hour down Spillane, where the posted speed limit was forty.

Rockville High loomed up ahead, now only a quarter mile away.

They should already have been there. Should already have made their big play. It could all have been over by now. All things considered, they would have been better off turning back to retrieve the book from Kelsey’s Oldsmobile. Jordan wound up spending too much time inside the Barnes & Noble. The store didn’t have a copy of the same book. Other books on ancient mythology alluded to the banishment ritual, but did not contain the necessary chants. They took a detour to the west side of Rockville to check out a used bookstore Will knew about. By then all bets were off. They all scrambled out of the Camry and rushed into Rhino Used Books, no longer caring whether anyone recognized the boys. And again they spent too much time in the store. The shelves in the nonfiction sections were all double stacked. Some were triple stacked, with old musty paperbacks tucked into every available nook and crevice. Still others were packed tight inside boxes on the floor. They’d had to pull out the stacks and sort through the titles individually. They did this with a callous disregard that upset the clerk on duty, who yelled at them about tossing books on the floor. He threatened to call the cops at one point. Kristen ushered him into a back room at gunpoint, secured him somehow, and returned to flip the Open sign on the front door over to Closed.

Then, at last, Jordan turned up the right book. It was even the same edition. A price of one dollar had been scrawled in faded pencil on the first inside page. At Jake’s direction, Jordan dropped the fifty-dollar bill he’d given her earlier on the desk as payment and they got out of there.

Jake prayed the delay wouldn’t prove too costly.

Prayed that not too many kids had died already.

He tapped the Camry’s brakes as they neared the school, twisted the wheel hard again, then gunned across the main parking lot toward the far side of the school. He pulled to a screeching stop between two rows of cars. An instant later the Camry’s doors popped open and its occupants again scrambled out. They didn’t bother to shut the doors, knowing they might have to beat a hasty retreat.

They all saw the same thing in the same moment.

Will said, “Holy shit.”

Jake felt a sickness swell inside his belly. Bile touched the back of his throat. If he’d harbored any lingering traces of denial or doubt, the sight of the dead guard vanquished them forever. He fought back the tide of nausea and placed himself in front of the others.

He looked at Kelsey. “We’re going in. No time to fuck around, get the lay of the land, any of that shit. You got that book ready?”

Kelsey raised a hand, his fingers bookmarking the proper page. It was a strange juxtaposition. Mythology book in one hand. Glock in the other. He looked like a deranged scholar. “Got it.”

Jake nodded. He looked at each of them in turn, sparing none of them more than a second. Not even Kristen. She seemed to have cast her reservations aside and was as swept up in the moment as any of them. She looked him in the eye and nodded.

Jake heaved a breath. “Right. Let’s go.”