Cruel World(30)

The glass cut through the pale flesh, unzipping it as if there had been a hidden seam there all along. The tip glanced off hard bone and ripped free, spewing dark blood onto the rain-soaked glass. A foul blast of air swept over him, reeking of old meat, and the baritone cry exploded inches from his face, sending an icepick into each eardrum.

Then the hand around his chest was gone and he was falling back to the solarium’s floor. He hit hard, the entire world jarring in his vision and there was a sharp pain in his ankle that eclipsed the burning cut on his hand. He gasped and drank the air in as rain and blood pattered around him. The thing roared again, its cry rising from the croak to a keening as it reached for him with its good arm.

Quinn scrambled back, sliding out of its reach as he searched the dark for the XDM. The sky fluttered with light, and he glimpsed the huge hand outstretched toward him, fingertips stabbing the floor as he pulled his feet away. Quinn spun and crawled to the far corner, his fingers knocking something away before latching onto it again. Glass shattered behind him and the thing bellowed, its sound filling the room, the world. Quinn turned and fired into the darkness.

It was there in the muzzle flash, hunched and striding toward him, reaching. The bullet took its index finger off its left hand above the first knuckle. The digit dropped free and fell to the floor like a worm hacked in two. Its massive face constricted in a rictus of pain and clutched its wounded hand, blood jetting free in thin spurts. Its eyes found him in another flicker of lightning, and there was something there in them, something familiar.

It leapt forward, long legs uncoiling, gapped teeth bared. Quinn fired again, the shot tearing out a chunk of flesh from its shoulder, but it kept coming. It hit him with the force of a car, sending the ceiling and floor into a spin as he flew across a table and slammed through a glass panel.

He somersaulted on the wet ground before sliding to a stop. His spine was crushed, he was sure of it. The storm bared down on him, forcing an icy whip of wind across his skin, bitter rain into his mouth and eyes. The gun, where was the gun? He raised his right hand and found that he still gripped the weapon, though he couldn’t feel it. The thing in the solarium punched out two panes of glass and climbed through, its snarling face there and gone in the storm. Quinn sat up and fired a shot that went wide, blasting the window above the monster. A large piece of glass slid free from the broken frame, as it tried to struggle into the open, and sliced into the thing’s back behind its jutting shoulder blades. Its cry cut the night and overrode the thunder that cracked in the sky. It flailed first one way and then the other, the heavy chunk of glass in its back snapping off as it hauled itself free of the building. Quinn steadied the gun with both hands, flipping the light on as he squeezed the trigger.

The pistol kicked, and the bridge of the thing’s nose collapsed inward. Matter flew free of the back of its head, spattering the remaining glass with bits of bone and flesh. It wavered there, wobbling on its stringy arms, nearly free of the solarium for a long heartbeat, and then tipped forward onto its side. Quinn kept the gun trained on its still form as he counted. When he reached a hundred he managed to stand, his legs barely holding him. There was a hornets’ nest buried in his back that sent a thousand stings up his spine as he took three shuffling steps forward then stopped. Training the light on the creature’s ruined head, he stood unmoving as the rain came down around him, stinging in scrapes and cuts.

The storm faded away completely as he stared, disbelief pressing down on him until his legs finally gave out and he crumpled beside the skeletal figure, the gun’s light glinting off the gold earring in the thing’s left ear.





Chapter 9



Revelations



He spent the night in his own bed with the door shut and locked, a chair shoved beneath the knob.

Sleep was fleeting, coming in short spans that he woke from shaking and clutching the pistol so hard his fingers ached. The storm continued to crash around the house, howling through the destroyed solarium with a hollow voice. Near morning it moved off to the east and burnt out over the ocean, leaving the sky clear enough to see the gray edge of dawn creeping up from the water like fog.

As the room lightened by degrees, Quinn lay on his side, his back throbbing, hand pulsing in dull strobes with each heartbeat. He stared at the wall, glancing occasionally at the painting his father had given him when he was twelve. It was a vibrant watercolor of a river valley filling with the first light of day. Rolling hills speckled with trees holding the orange and reds of fall on their branches fell down to a blue river, its surface cut by the heads of rocks peeking from its depths. His father had told him it was a real place, that he’d seen it firsthand. He’d commissioned an artist to capture it on canvas, saying that a photo wouldn’t have done it justice. You have to feel it, Quinn, and the only way to feel something that you haven’t seen in real life is through art.