Orange light. Crumbling walls. Shouts for help.
Frank recalled the raid on Kale Kane’s farmhouse for Detective Humble, remembering every detail of the grotesque place with frightening clarity.
The fetid air of decay.
The confusion.
The pain.
Choking on the unsavory taste of spent gunpowder after his shootout with the killer, Frank stood at the threshold of Kale Kane’s root cellar looking at the bodies of the dead. The only illumination came from half a dozen stout candles burning at various points around the room, but even their meager light revealed the stain of death everywhere.
He lowered his weapon.
“Good Lord,” he whispered.
Kane’s victims hung from the ceiling, suspended by thin wires anchored in their flesh with huge steel hooks. Each corpse had been taken apart and reassembled with additional body parts. Thick stitches bound the flesh of both humans and animals, creating a small army of half-rotten, darkly-hided, multi-limbed nightmares.
The eyes of one of the closest constructions still shined with false life, drawing Frank’s attention. Their positioning in the reshaped sockets of a worm-infested pig’s skull seemed to communicate the level of terror experienced by their former owner at their time of death, as if the very emotion had been fused into the corneas.
Frank looked at the floor to escape the thing’s gaze.
Further emphasizing the pure wickedness the hecatomb reeked of, he found a wide pool of blood the killer had gathered in a shallow pit at the center of the room. It gleamed in the candlelight, encircling a large column of stone. A host of cryptic symbols decorated the towering obelisk, strange characters chiseled in a three-dimensional pattern that caused Frank’s head to throb when he stared at them.
He swayed on his feet, then flinched when another officer reached out to steady him. He couldn’t fathom what sort of diabolic compulsion could’ve driven a person to commit such vile acts, what level of mental imbalance—
“He’s still alive,” a medic roared.
Frank turned to see Kane’s eyes snap open and almost fell down the steps leading into the cellar when he flinched back in shock. It wasn’t possible for the man to still be conscious, not after the amount of damage he’d received. Yet the killer struck out with the speed of a springing viper, teeth bared and hissing.
Kane reached up and grabbed the medic by the neck, ripping out his throat in a single vicious action. The man dropped to the floor, hitting the ground as Kane arose from a lake of his own blood.
His eyes shimmered.
Shiny filaments of spittle stitched together the space between his open jaws.
Blood rained from his wounds.
Frank and the surrounding policemen trained their weapons on the killer in a uniform motion, but Kane lunged at the closest officer before anyone fired a shot.
“Shit,” Frank growled, snapping up his weapon.
Several members of the tactical squad broke formation and rushed forward, reaching for their teammate. Kane met their charge with an animalistic battle cry, snapping the neck of his captive in one effortless action.
The man’s death set off a chain reaction of rage, and the other officers charged.
Kane struck the first man to reach him with an uppercut to the mouth, knocking a shard of jawbone through his cheek. He jabbed at another, gouging out an eye.
Blood sailed from Kane’s wounds with each move, yet he twisted and flexed without the slightest sign of impairment. He met the onslaught of officers with a smile, hammering his adversaries straight through their body armor and Kevlar helmets with bare fists. He punched, flipped, kicked, backhanded, and head-butted opponents before any of them got close enough to help or do damage, then heaved them aside as though they weighed less than the clothing they wore.
The crowd shifted with each new assault, blocking Frank’s attempts to move forward and help.
Gunfire cracked from various points around the room as other officers took aimed shots at the killer, carefully placing each round so not to hit one of their own. Fresh wounds peppered Kane’s flesh. Yet the madman continued to attack, advancing on the crowd as they tried to fall back.
Kane snatched a man’s arm and broke it in two. The bone sprung through the officer’s shirt sleeve like a spring-loaded blade, and Kane rammed it into the throat of another man he’d seized by the neckline of his tactical vest.
Sergeant Rice plunged into the battle and thrust his sidearm into Kane’s face, firing a round directly into the killer’s left eye. Kane’s head rocked back with the shot, then snapped forward again as if recovering from no more than a hard slap. He bellowed at Rice, spraying blood and saliva across the officer’s face. In a blur, Kane punched through the man’s teeth, burying his fist in Rice’s mouth up to the wrist.
Frank flinched.
Kane yanked his hand free, taking Rice’s tongue with it, then hurled him at the other officers, grabbing the strap of his sub-machinegun in the process.
“Oh, shit,” Frank hissed.
Kane opened fire the second Rice left his grasp, painting the cracked walls with lightning-quick pulses of light and filling the air with the repetitive thunder of gunfire. He panned Rice’s MP-5 left and right, emptying the weapon’s thirty-round magazine into the crowd.
Pivoting away, Frank ducked through the cellar doorway the same instant huge holes exploded out of its frame. Clouds of splinters and mortar dust sprayed through the air. From his new position, he had a clear view of the space across the landing and up the main staircase, where he spotted reinforcements frozen on the steps.
“Get down here, God dammit!”
The first floor door swung shut without warning, slamming into its frame with such force the candlelight at Frank’s back flickered with the sudden change in air pressure. With the door closed, only two cops remained on the steps, cut off from above like him and all the others.
Before he could dwell on the door’s abrupt closure, the hail of gunfire ceased, replaced by the faint, bell-like sounds of spent 9mm casings bouncing off the concrete floor. Then nothing.
Silence descended over the room like a smothering hand.
Frank tensed, listening, afraid the fracas had affected his hearing. From above came the incessant pounding and muffled shouts of the officers on the first floor as they fought to break down the door. Beyond that, he picked out the haggard gasping of the wounded men in the adjacent room, followed by the louder sound of the empty MP-5 clattering to the floor.
Frank brought up one hand, signaling for the officers on the staircase to hold their position. Given the number of men Kane had dropped in the other room, a veritable arsenal of loaded weapons awaited the killer’s hands.
He looked to his own weapon. Smoke rose from a bullet hole that had peeled open the breach, exposing the copper shell of a cartridge.
Shit!
He knelt down and set the weapon on the floor. His helmet slipped forward on his sweat-slicked forehead when he did, and he quickly pushed it back, eyeing the doorway.
He upholstered his sidearm, a 9mm Sig, and readied to move.
Staying low on the narrow cellar steps, he tipped his head around the corner of the bullet-shattered doorframe and got a quick glimpse of the other room.
Kane stood amongst the crumpled bodies of the fallen officers like the sole survivor of a war, splattered with blood, surrounded by smoke. The final moans of the dying faded to silence.
Frank concentrated on the fact Kane hadn’t replaced the MP-5 with one of the other firearms scattered about the floor. Instead, the killer stood amidst the wreckage of bodies, arms in front of him, palms up, studying his own injuries in soundless contemplation.
Frank’s grip on the handgun tightened. He flicked off the safeties and put two pounds of pull on the trigger.
Across the room, Kane pulled apart the two halves of his shirt and Frank tensed. The cloth had once been faded brown with a lighter tan check pattern, but now glistened almost solid crimson.
Multitudes of dark gunshot wounds peppered Kane’s torso, each a fatal ticket that should’ve secured his passage to Hell. Stranger still, among the scattering of bullet holes lay a series of deep lacerations that could’ve only come from a knife. Not random cuts, either. They looked like designs carved into his flesh, symbols similar those written across the stone pillar sitting in the pool of blood.
Frank quivered with disgust.
Without warning, Kane’s expression changed from triumph to fear. Frank didn’t think it was possible after all the mayhem he’d witnessed, but he could see it in the maniac’s freakish eyes; pure, unbridled fear.
Frank watched the man curl his bloody hands into claws, staring at them in shock.
Kane shrieked at the sight.
Frank recoiled from the sound and almost lost his footing on the steps. Steadying himself, he readied his weapon, watching Kane slap at his bare chest and stomach, flailing himself, almost like he was trying to brush away the bullet holes. He cried louder with each breath, stomping his feet, ranting like a child in the thrall of a tantrum.
Frank motioned for the two officers on the stairs to get ready to move, certain they could take the man unaware while he wallowed in his deranged self-assault. He edged back out of Kane’s sight, stood up, and—
The orange light bulb over the landing suddenly popped and went out.
Frank’s half-drawn breath snared in his throat as darkness leapt in to take the light’s place, stopped at the cellar doorway by the glow of the few candles in Kane’s earth-walled lair.
He hesitated, poised on the verge of a tension-induced heart attack. Kane had fallen silent just a second before the light flashed out, and the thought of confronting him while nearly blind, armed or not, no longer seemed wise.
There came a noise: the subtle rattling of a chain.
It sounded at Frank’s back, from somewhere in the cellar of patchwork cadavers: an inconspicuous jingle under the clamor of men still trying to force their way through Hell’s gate at the top of the stairs.
“Fraaaaank,” a voice growled in his ear.
He swung around and fired three rounds into the wrinkled, slack-eyed face of a dead man chained at the far side of the room, at least twenty feet away. No one loomed behind him in the cellar. Everyone was dead. Dead and unmoving.
He twisted back to confront the doorway and met Kane’s grinning face. It flashed into the candlelight, his black eyes once again gleaming with a red reflection. Frank tried to aim his weapon, but Kane caught his hand, locking it in an unbreakable grip. He smashed it into the doorjamb, holding it there, with the handgun’s muzzle pointed uselessly away.
Then the knife flashed into view, clutched in the killer’s fist. It arced toward him with merciless speed, too fast to dodge, but skipped off the brim of his helmet when he tried to maneuver out of its way. The blade grazed his eyeball, splitting its surface, then stabbed into his face. It streaked down his cheekbone, cutting a hot trail from his ruptured eyeball to his jaw.
Frank shrieked.
Kane released him, letting him fall backward into the cellar. The killer smiled at him, his teeth gleaming in the murk.
Then Kane jolted and convulsed when gunfire exploded through him from behind, opening more holes in his chest.
The guys on the staircase, Frank thought.
He hit the floor, teetering on the dark edge of unconsciousness.
And blacked out when Kane collapsed beside him.