Page 48 of Fortress
Tobias flinched, then shifted closer to Jake’s side, hoping no one had noticed.
“Pretty sure she wasn’t fucking him,” said the guy with braids who’d introduced himself as Darryl, rolling the edge of his bottle around the counter. “I mean, her brother?” He must have caught something on Jake’s face, because he elaborated. “There was suspicious shit going down at the community college where her brother went. Guess they narrowed it down to him, because the next day he was gone—poof, just like that.”
“Let me guess,” Jake said. “‘They’re a government agency, starts with A, ends with C?” He was trying for humor, but there was something tight in his tone, and Tobias could have sworn that he was paler than he had been just moments before.
Darryl tapped his nose with one long finger. “Damn, that wasn’t pretty. The Grants called the cops when the ASC showed up, didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on. Their girl never stopped screaming.”
“I heard they’re still trying to get blood off the porch,” Steve, the red-faced guy, said, taking a swig of his drink. “I heard they cut the freak’s throat, and it healed up just like that. Not a fucking mark on it.”
Tobias swallowed hard, keeping his eyes on the counter and the Coke that Jake had bought him. This wasn’t camp. This wasn’t memories of camp, or even something that he could remember happening to him. This was someone else’s life, and having a panic attack right here and now would not help him, or Jake, or the victims of the new supernatural threat terrorizing the town. “W-what was he doing?” He hoped his voice did not quaver too much.
“I heard he was cutting up cats and shit, making sacrifices, that sort of thing, made him fucking invulnerable or some shit,” Steve said, downing the last of his beer.
Arnie, the one in the baseball cap, clarified. “He was researching some of the more arcane shit in the library, started sleepwalking and talking about a voice that was coming for him, fucked-up stuff, man.” He noticed his other buddies staring at him, and his eyes widened. “You hear stuff! I live down there, guys, you can’t say you’ve never talked about that shit. That’s crazy shit, guys, I ain’t into that shit, I’m no freaklover!”
“Whatever. And now we’ve got the Mitchelson shit in town too. Right after Grandma Mitchelson’s centennial birthday,” Darryl added. “They even threw this huge fucking party maybetwo weeks before, had a bonfire, let the old lady show off stuff she’d saved up, jewelry and things. Happy family shit on a mega scale.” He sighed. “Sucks.”
Tobias’s head snapped up. He knew, then, he fuckingknew, and he tried to give Jake alook, something to let him know that they had to get out of there that moment because not only did Tobias know what had been killing people, but they might already be too late to stop it from happening again.
Whatever Jake saw in his face got him moving.
“Well, thanks for the advice, dudes. And if you could keep this under your hats for the next few days, we’d appreciate it.” He threw a couple twenties onto the bar, his movements charged, lacking Jake’s usual good humor and careless energy. “Have a round on us.”
“Good luck! And if you get stuck, you can always call 666!” Steve called after them and then laughed into his next drink, while the other two chuckled and Darryl stared after their departing backs.
Tobias hurried after Jake. The cool air outside was refreshing after the claustrophobic bar interior. “W-why would we call 666?” he asked, catching his breath. Terror had not hit him that hard in a while.
“It’s a bad joke,” Jake said, distantly. He wasn’t looking at Tobias. “For a while, folks talked about having a special hotline for the ASC, like 911 but for supernatural shit. Assholes like that think it would be funny if it were 666.”
“But there is a number for the ASC.” Tobias had filed reports, when he was allowed to work in the library. He could repeat by heart the phone number and all eight specialized extensions.
“Yeah, Toby, it’s a really stupid joke.” Jake looked vacant, and more tired than their day warranted. “You okay?”
Tobias blinked, because sure, they were both a little shaken, but that wasn’t why they’d had to leave, and then he realizedthat Jake was still back there, thinking about whatever he had been thinking about when the reals (though “the assholes” kept floating to his mind as another name for them) had been telling them about that poor woman and her freak brother. “I think I have a lead on the case.”
Jake blinked, turning to look at him directly at last. “Damn. Okay. Where are we going, Toby?”
Tobias told him and, moments later, Jake gunned the Eldorado out of the bar parking lot.
Later, Tobias would wonder at the belongings that people had, the stuff that made up a real life. The floor was covered in stuffed animals, papers, clothes—including a dress shirt, the cuffs torn where the cufflinks had been yanked out. All this debris was tangled at the feet of the monster now possessing one of the cleanup crew workers, his hands grasping to close their airways. Whether the hazmat suits hadn’t been enough protection against the artifact (the cufflinks were either cursed or haunted, Tobias would’ve needed more research to say for sure), or the workers hadn’t been smart enough to run an EMF scanner over the entire house, Tobias didn’t know. But he knew that that particular possession had cost this family their lives and now seemed intent on taking even more.
Tobias had figured out, recalling the old photographs in the online newspaper records, that the killer wasn’t a flesh and blood monster seeking prey or a spirit that slept and woke according to a strict schedule. He had seen a set of cufflinks in an old photograph of the Dalton family taken before their tragic death, and one of the men’s wrists was blurred in the image. He’d thought at the time it was just a flaw in the photograph, butghosts had been known to cause that sort of distortion. And his gut said that it wasn’t just an action blur.
The workman wearing the cufflinks now looked at them with wide, wild eyes, the whites bloodshot, his pupils washed out by black-light blue.
“You cannot stop us,” he hissed, hands stretched out like claws. Tobias had already seen those claws in action on another crew member, currently gasping on the floor in his torn hazmat suit. The claws hadn’t left any visible wounds, but they had dropped him immediately to the floor, writhing, struggling and failing to breathe. Jake had hit him with blessed salt, forcing some of it into his mouth, and the man had been able to get air into his lungs again, though he remained on the floor, pale and shuddering.
“We’re sure as hell going to try,” Jake said, and he fired a blessed salt shotgun round dead center into his chest.
He didn’t go down then. It took both Tobias and Jake pinning him to the floor, cutting the cufflinks off his wrists (they had fused into his skin) and lighting them on fire right in the middle of the living room. Then, finally, the man ceased screaming and thrashing.
Jake used a curtain to snuff the flames, and then to wrap the man’s bleeding wrists. The Hawthornes were panting hard, but any shakiness was just from adrenaline.
The man who had been attacked by his coworker was still awake, chest heaving, watching them with large eyes but making no attempt to speak. Tobias picked up a telephone from a nearby end table, dialed 911, and pressed the phone into the man’s hand. As he slowly lifted it to his ear and they heard the operator say, “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” Tobias and Jake rushed out of the house.
They’d just left the subdivision when they heard sirens wailing on the street behind them.
Tobias held onto his shotgun as they drew closer to the hotel. With his free hand, he withdrew the map from the door pocket, spreading it open to find the best route out of town.
