James Moore - Blood Red

“Come on, Mom, you can do it.”

She reached again then backed away, her expression showing her frustration. “I can’t. Something is stopping me.”

Alan watched her try again and fail. The sweet face he’d fallen in love with back in their senior year of high school— long before they dated, but it was love—grew ugly with anger and she snarled. He’d never seen her with that look on her face. He wasn’t sure her face had ever been designed for that sort of rage. She was like an almost perfect copy of the woman he married. He hated the thing outside his back door for that reason; hated it easily as much as he had ever loved his wife.

“Meghan.” His voice broke when he said her name and he felt the sting of tears threatening to escape. God, how he’d loved her; how she had completed him.

Avery turned to face him and so did his wife. “Alan? Can I come in?”

She had to ask. That much was true at least. They couldn’t come in unless they were invited; he wondered if all of the evil things in the world had that limitation. Maybe , he thought. Otherwise how could there be anything left?

“Yeah, hon. Come on in.”

Her sweet, sweet smile was his reward as she gracefully stepped past the window that the two things had shattered. Broke that fucker apart, Meghan ; he looked at the fragments of glass on the ground and was surprised to see that they cast reflections in the shards. The reflections showed a different Meghan, one who’d been dead for two days and an Avery who’d been dead most of a week. Same as you did my heart and soul.

“Alan, we’ve missed you, baby.” Yes, oh that one hurt. That perfect smile on that perfect face as she came toward him with her arms opened, ready to hug him and to love him again.

He wished he could believe it for a moment. A thousand times he wished he could believe it as Meghan and Avery came closer.

Alan held out the crucifix, showed it to them and let them see what he carried. Avery flinched, but Meghan kept coming. Alan waved it around to make sure she saw it.

“Silly man,” she smiled and grabbed the cross in her hand, drawing the cord from between his numbed fingers. She held it up for him to see and then kissed it with her full lips. Her eyes lit up with amusement. “It’s just a pretty little trinket if you don’t believe in it.”

Avery bit him on his wrist, sharp teeth cutting through his flesh with the greatest of ease. The Bible fell to the ground as he tried to shake his son free.

Meghan dropped the necklace and reached for his face with her hands. Her strength was amazing. Avery had been powerful, but Meghan was so much bigger than a ten-year-old boy.

Alan kneed his son in the chest and, as Avery staggered back from him, spitting blood and profanities, he brought his left hand around to punch the monster with Meghan’s features as hard as he could in her face. His right hand came into play too, groping along the bookshelf that held most of the family’s mementos.

Meghan barely flinched from his fist, which flared into a lightning blast of pain as he tore the stitches from the infected wound. His right hand caught a picture frame that held their favorite wedding photo. He brought the edge of the frame around and slammed it into her right temple hard enough to bend the polished chrome corner and drive slivers of breaking glass into his fingertips.

She let out a small gasp of pain as the flesh on her temple dented inward, and then Meghan caught his hand in her grip and squeezed until his bones broke and the Kodachrome memory was sliced apart by glass and bathed in his blood.

Avery lunged forward and sank his teeth into Alan’s crotch, gnashing and savaging even as his tiny hands sank into Alan’s thigh with enough force to tear the denim covering his flesh.

Alan did not go gently into the darkness. His family made sure of it.

Boyd woke up to the sound of Danny whistling “It’s a Small World,” and started into consciousness as his partner tapped his shoulder. Before he could tell his friend to shut the fuck up, Danny was pointing.

Ben Kirby and the bombshell were approaching Soulis’s front door.

“You fucken kidding me?” He sat up, fully awake, and looked as the door opened without the two bothering to knock. Jason Soulis smiled familiarly at Maggie Preston. He gave a polite bow of his head to Ben. For only a second, he looked toward their car and, even from a distance, Boyd would swear the man looked right at him through the glass.

A moment later the three were inside and the door closed.

“Did he just wink at us?” Danny chuckled as he asked the words and then shook his head. “I think that prick just winked at us.”

Thirty seconds after that, the crows started landing all over the Crown Victoria. They dropped from nearby trees and from the darkness overhead and landed, making themselves comfortable. There were enough of the damned things settling down that Boyd could feel the car’s shock absorbers compensating.

“What do you think the chances are we’ll get shit on if we climb out?”

Danny laughed out loud. “I’m thinking we get out of this car and we’re gonna be pecked to death.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever see a crow go at roadkill, Richie? They can use them beaks to cut meat like a steak knife.”

“So screw it.” He started the car and activated the wipers. The birds on the windows hopped out of the way, cawing in protest. Boyd started driving.

“We’re just quitting?”

“No, we’re going to do something else instead.” Boyd lit his cigar, filling the car with thick white smoke. When he was done with that, he shifted into drive and they pulled away from the curb.

“You’re getting fickle, Richie.”

“I don’t want to get my eyes plucked out of my head, Danny. Do you?”

He pretended to think about it. “Not really on my list of things to do, you know what I mean?”

“You want coffee?”

“Duh.”

“Yeah, I thought so.” The birds started flying away. He was surprised they’d stayed on a moving vehicle for that long.

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“We could go to bed.”

“With you? You’re a sick bastard, Danny.”

“So where are we going?”

“The morgue. I wanna check on a few things. Then I think we’ll check on our old pal, Brian Freemont.”

“Yay. I love field trips.”

“I was wondering how long it would be before you came to see me, Maggie.” Jason led them into his house. “I didn’t expect you to bring a friend.” The notion seemed to amuse him.

“He’s a very good friend to have, Jason. We were both wondering what the hell you did to me.”

“I made you better.” He led them into the dining room. “Sit, be comfortable. I’ll bring refreshments.”

They waited for a few minutes. Ben looked around the place with a nervous eye.

“Nice place.”

“I think Jason does all right for himself.” She’d been with a lot of men who managed to make money hand over fist. Jason was just the first to make her into something that wasn’t human. She rubbed her arms.

Jason came back in, carrying a tray with coffee and an array of small sandwiches. “I believe you would like answers.”

“Yes, please.”

He looked toward Ben, with that amused smile back in place. “Do you want them with Ben in the room?”

Ben made no comment and kept his face perfectly neutral.

“Yes. You can tell me in front of Ben.”

“You trust him that far?”

She nodded.

“Good. Excellent. That’s a rare thing, a trust like that.”

“What did you do to me?”

“I gave you power and the ability to defend yourself from almost anything.”