Hellhound

Fair enough. “Tell me about the ride home.”

“Home.” Another snort. “I wish to Christ it was a ride home. I’d be asleep in my own bed next to Deb, like I should be.” Resentment flared up, then flickered away. “It’s like I already said. Just an ordinary night, until Tom up and killed the driver.” He scratched his chin, thinking. “Wait. There was one thing I noticed. Tom seemed a little . . . I don’t know. Twitchy. In the van after work. He kept bouncing his leg. I was sitting next to him, and it bugged me, so I told him to quit it. He did, but then a few minutes later he started again. I was about to remind him to knock it off when he killed the driver. And then everything went to hell.”

“You don’t know what set him off?”

“It wasn’t bloodlust, if that’s what you’re thinking. There wasn’t any blood until after the van crashed. And like I said, I was right beside him. If there was blood for Tom to smell, I’d have smelled it, too.”

“Okay, so Tom broke the driver’s neck. What happened next?”

“I yelled, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Or something along those lines. I tried to pull him off. At the same time, Weisner—the norm who’s our supervisor—grabbed for the wheel. Tom let go of the driver and locked his hands around Weisner’s neck. There was no pulling him off then. The boss’s face turned purple. His eyeballs bulged out like one of them cartoon characters. I punched Tom, hard, trying to make him let go, but he didn’t even feel it. We crashed. The next thing I remember is sitting on the sidewalk, tugging at my mask because I’d put it on crooked.”

“That’s when you broke your ankle?”

“Yeah. I felt it about ten seconds after I got my mask on straight. Hurt like hell then.” He pulled one leg on top of the other again and ran a finger along the line of stitches. “The bone was sticking clean through my skin. Compound fracture, the doc called it. He bolted everything back together, but I don’t know how well it’ll hold my weight.”

“Did you see the attack on the third victim?” I asked.

He let his leg fall back to the floor. “I wish I hadn’t. The poor son of a bitch came over to see if we needed help. He was asking if I was okay, reaching out a hand to help me up. I was trying to explain about my ankle when Tom loomed up behind him, looking like . . . Hell, I don’t even want to say it, but it’s true. Tom looked like a monster, like one of those dumb-ass movie zombies had walked off a screen and into the real world. He grabbed the norm and tore his head off his shoulders. Poor bastard didn’t even have a chance to scream.”

Foster moved on the other side of the door. Probably imagining himself in the world of Zombie Kill, charging onto the scene with a machete.

“There was blood everywhere.” Andy paused, tilting his head. “Now, there’s something strange—Tom didn’t even seem to notice it. He wasn’t wearing his mask, and you’d think the smell would have driven him nuts. The way it was all over him, all over the ground, he should’ve been chewing his own arm off, know what I mean? But he didn’t.”

“What did he do?”

“The other guys, they tackled him. Piled right on top of him. But he shook ’em off—all three—like a dog shaking off fleas.” Andy seemed to go inside himself as events unspooled in his mind. “I remember this part like it was happening in slow motion. The guys who’d tackled Tom were sprawled on their asses. Tom got up. He stood there, covered in blood, staring at the headless body at his feet. Still no sign of bloodlust. Then, all of a sudden, his head jerked up and he looked at the sky. The way he looked up, like he saw something that scared him, made me look, too. But I didn’t see nothing. Then Tom kinda groaned. He had his hands on his head, like this.” Andy made two fists and pressed them hard against his temples. “He dropped like someone had whacked his knees from behind with a baseball bat. He curled up into the whatchacallit—the fetal position—and started shaking. And then he just . . . blew up.” He blinked rapidly, like he was trying to clear the vision away.

“Andy,” I said, “this is important. Before Tom clutched his head, did you notice any injuries appearing on his body?”

“What, like my ankle? Nah. The accident didn’t touch him. Neither did the fellas taking him down.”

“Not from those things. I’m talking about wounds that suddenly appear, chunks of flesh gouged out from no apparent cause.”

“I didn’t see nothing like that.” His red eyes widened. “Oh, you mean like at the concert last winter? The one for . . . what was it called?”

“Paranormal Appreciation Day.”

That earned another snort. Not that I disagreed.

“Yeah, that. I was working, so I didn’t go, but I heard about it. All those zombies that got killed . . .” His red eyes widened. “That was some kind of demon attack, wasn’t it?”

“Sort of.” I didn’t need to go into the details of how the Morfran was the spirit that animated demons. The popular understanding was that demonic crows had attacked the concert. It was close enough.

“In our previous interview, you told me you heard crows cawing,” Daniel prompted. “When precisely did you hear them?”

“Right after Tom blew up. It was like Blam! And then this burst of cawing right away, like the noise had scared a flock somewhere. But you’re saying maybe it wasn’t crows. Not real ones.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.” From what Andy was telling us, Tom Malone’s death bore some of the hallmarks of a Morfran attack, but there were also significant differences. “The cawing you heard may have been exactly what you thought—some crows roosting nearby were startled by the sudden noise.”

Andy’s expression showed his doubts. “I never would’ve admitted it an hour ago, but I guess I was lucky, huh? Them crows could’ve gone for me next.”

I didn’t have any more questions, and I needed to process what we’d learned. I held out my hand, and Andy shook it. “Thank you for your help, Andy. I’ll get word to your wife.”

“Like hell,” Foster muttered from the other side of the door. Damn. I’d forgotten he was there, listening in.

Daniel shook Andy’s hand, too, and I knew he’d help me find Deb Skibinsky. Maybe he was thinking about how his girlfriend, Lynne, would feel if he didn’t come home some night. Maybe he was thinking of the families of the other zombies—God knew how many—stashed in this underground complex. Anyway, it was the least we could do, and Daniel knew it.

7

WE LEFT ANDY SITTING ON HIS COT, CONTEMPLATING HOW close he’d come to being Morfran chow. If it was the Morfran.

“Is there such a thing as coffee in this place?” I asked Daniel. He nodded and led the way to a cafeteria. Despite my hopes that we could ditch Foster, he followed.

I poured steaming coffee into the biggest paper cup I could find and added a sleeve so it wouldn’t burn my hand. Daniel insisted on paying. “It’s on the department,” he said.

“In that case . . .” Foster tried.

“Use your own expense account,” Daniel said.

We sat down at a small table with two chairs. Within a minute, Foster had dragged over a chair from another table. Okay, I thought. There was no shaking the guy. I would’ve liked to bounce my thoughts off Daniel alone, but it wasn’t like I was saying anything off the record. Still, I didn’t have to welcome Foster to the conversation. I angled my chair so my back was toward him.

“It’s like I told Andy,” I said to Daniel. I swallowed some coffee. Hot. Strong. Bitter. Exactly what I needed. “What happened to Malone almost sounds like a Morfran attack.”

“But that ‘almost’ bothers you.”

I nodded. “Nothing in Andy’s description indicates the first stage of a Morfran attack. And that stage is crucial; it’s how the Morfran gets inside its victim to feed.”

Daniel waited while I gathered my thoughts.

“Andy was right there. He was watching Malone. There’s no way Malone could have experienced that stage without Andy noticing.” I sipped my coffee. “I’ve been on the receiving end of stage one, Daniel. It hurts like hell.” That attack had been cut short by Mab, who’d saved my life by drawing the Morfran away from me. “All I could think about was protecting myself from whatever was tearing at my flesh.”

Foster heaved a sigh, as though he wished the Morfran had won that battle. I scooted my chair closer to Daniel.

“I know what you mean,” Daniel said. “I saw it happen at the concert. The PDH I observed was frantic, twisting and ducking and trying to bat the crows away.”

“Exactly.” I suppressed a shudder at the memory of all that pain. “From the description we just heard, it sounds like Malone was attacked from the inside.”

“Can that happen?”

“The Morfran can possess humans.” Daniel’s lips compressed into a grim line, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. A human police officer we’d both known, not exactly a friend but a good cop, had been possessed by the Morfran. And if the Morfran comprises the soul of a demon, you can imagine what it drives a person to do. The cop had become a serial killer, tormented by the Morfran until he ended his own life.

“You think it can possess PDHs, too?” Daniel asked.

“That’s the trouble—I don’t see why it would. Zombies are nothing but food to the Morfran. And since the Morfran is always ravenous, it doesn’t make sense that the spirit would dwell inside a zombie without consuming it. Unless . . .”

Daniel leaned forward. “What?”

“Unless some kind of sorcery is involved.”

Behind me, Foster spewed coffee. Some landed on the back of my neck. “First demons, now sorcerers? Why are we wasting money on this freak?” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">