“Did you hear that?”
Scott stopped from the grisly task of separating Neal Ashford’s arm from its socket. They’d broken one of the blades of the power saw while trying to saw through Neal’s legs and had replaced it with a sturdier one. Dave had tried hacking away at the other corpse with an axe and wasn’t having much luck. Bones were harder to break than he thought, which was weird considering he’d broken facial bones with his bare fists in past wilding sessions. “Hear what?”
“That noise.” Steve was crouched by the fireplace in the den, pausing in his task of feeding dismembered remains into the roaring flames. The basement was stiflingly hot and sweat was pouring in rivulets down their bare backs and chests.
“What noise?” Scott called out. It was hard enough to hear in the workroom with the power saw going and Dave trying to cut Neal into little pieces with the axe. Had Steve heard police sirens?
“Sounds like somebody’s outside,” Steve said.
Scott turned off the saw and stepped away from the workbench. As the silence settled into his system he heard something from upstairs. Somebody entering the house through the kitchen.
“Hold on,” Scott said. He brushed past Dave, who set the axe down and followed Scott to the den where they joined Steve. The only remains left of the zombie to dispose of in the fireplace was an arm, a foot, a lower torso, and the head. Neal’s disarticulated pieces were still back in the workroom.
They stood in silence, listening. There was definitely somebody upstairs. Scott relaxed. It was Dad. Who else would it be?
“Did you hear sirens?” Scott asked. “Or the sound of a car pulling up?”
Steve shook his head.
They listened some more. In addition to the sound of footsteps in the kitchen there were other sounds; something was being dragged across the floor, more footsteps outside, and footsteps tramping their way in from the side door. Scott felt his stomach clench as the footsteps exited the kitchen and traveled through the living room.
Scott stepped forward. “I’ll go up and see what’s going on.”
As Scott headed upstairs he heard another sound, a tinkling of glass breaking. He was just opening the door to the basement, peeking out, and was having second thoughts about heading up the stairs when Dad stepped into his field of vision. Dad had his back turned to Scott and was looking toward the kitchen, presumably toward the sound of breaking glass. Scott opened the door and stepped out of the basement. “Everything okay?”
Dad turned around and Scott yelled.
Dad was dead. His throat was ripped out and by all rights his head should have been lolling forward on his chest. Scott could see a part of Dad’s spine through the meat and gristle of his neck. Dad stepped toward Scott, arms reaching toward him, and that’s when the rest of them poured into the living room from the kitchen.
Dad’s friends Victor and Harry were first, similarly torn up, bloody and very dead. They shambled in and immediately zeroed in on Scott as other figures tumbled into the room, several of them young guys, also dead and bloody, one of them wearing a tattered T-shirt with the words “Dr. Chud” emblazoned on the front. From the opposite direction, a woman Scott didn’t recognize strolled into the living room. She was naked from the waist down; her gutted abdomen trailed loopy ropes of intestine behind her.
Dad reached Scott first and the force of his momentum catapulted Scott backwards down the stairs. Dad clung to him, his fingers clawing into his flesh. Scott’s head cracked on the stairs and he saw stars. He was dimly aware of Steve and Dave in the basement yelling out in surprise, then fear as the rest of the zombies piled down the basement stairs and swarmed the room, then his Dad bit into his face with his strong jaws, working the flesh off with savage shakes of his head, the pain filling him with an intensity he’d never experienced before, and then everything exploded and he knew no more.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Naomi Gaines was doing one more quick check to make sure she had everything in her purse when the phone rang.
Jeff was in his basement office gathering some paperwork and she quickly picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
A male voice she didn’t recognize asked, “Hello, can I speak to Tim Gaines, please?”
“This is his mother. Can I ask who’s calling?”
“My name is William Sawyer. I’m responding to an email Tim sent through my website. I’m a writer.”
Recognition set in. William Sawyer was the author of half a dozen suspense novels she’d picked up at the Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Lancaster. “You wrote the novel Scream.”
“That’s me.”
“May I ask why you’re calling my son?”
“He read a novel of mine. Back From the Dead.”
“You’re the author of Back From the Dead?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I thought that was written by somebody else.”
“It’s me. I did that book under a pseudonym.”
“Oh. I see. Tim contacted you?”
“He did.” There was a short pause. “Um, how old is your son, Ms. Gaines?”
“Tim’s sixteen,” Naomi said. “He’ll be seventeen next month.” Jeff was coming up the stairs and she turned to the kitchen. She held her hand up to him as he emerged and mouthed hold on a minute. “Let me guess. Tim contacted you about the ritual that’s depicted in your novel.”
“He did. I was hoping I could — “
“Did Tim tell you what is happening?”
Another short pause. “I’m afraid he didn’t, Ms. Gaines. He simply asked where I got the background information on the spell that’s mentioned in my novel. It was…well, it was another question of his that prompted me to call, actually.”
“And what would that be?”
William Sawyer paused. Naomi had the feeling the author was uncomfortable. Jeff was standing beside her now, asking who she was talking to, and Naomi had to shush him so she could hear. “Ms. Gaines, do you live in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by any chance?”
“We do,” Naomi said, all thoughts to personal privacy set aside.
“The reason I called was due to what’s on the national news.”
Naomi turned to Jeff and mouthed, turn on the news. Jeff nodded and scampered to the television in the living room. “Let me guess. Tim asked you if there was a counter-spell to the one depicted in your novel.”
William sounded surprised. “He did. And he didn’t tell me why he wanted to know, either. It wasn’t until I turned on the news a moment ago and saw what was happening…” William’s voice verged on borderline fear and panic. “What’s happening now is only touched on briefly in my book, Ms. Gaines. I can’t believe its happening, but the events…what I’ve been seeing on TV and the way Tim worded his email…I had to call to find out what’s going on…”
An irrational person would have told William Sawyer that he’d been reprehensible to include that kind of information in his book, even if it was fiction. Suppose somebody mentally unstable took it seriously? Of course, Naomi realized such arguments were bullshit. Detailed concepts of death and destruction were laid out in thousands of novels, plays, and movies every year and the only example Naomi could think of something disastrous happening due to somebody not getting it was a decade ago, when two boys mimicked a scene from a movie by lying down in a busy street during rush hour traffic. Instead of the vehicles driving over them and escaping unscathed as depicted in the movie, the boys weren’t as lucky. They were turned into roadkill.
William Sawyer must have been on her wave-length. “I wrote five horror novels under the Richard Long byline,” he said. “They’ve done moderately well, but they aren’t my bread-and-butter novels by any means. Most of my fiction is pure psychological suspense like Scream, which sells much more than the horror stuff under the Richard Long pseudonym. Prior to today, I would have thought it was more likely for some nut to get inspired by a scene from Scream and smear her cheating husband’s genitals with honey and leave him in the woods for the ants. That book’s sold almost a million copies. My novel Mother Love was even worse. I got hate mail for it, but I got even more letters from women claiming they would have done the same thing if they were in my main character’s position. My psychological suspense novels push buttons, they’re rooted in reality, but they don’t inspire people to do the things I depict. I hardly thought the scenes in a supernatural horror novel would inspire somebody to actually do the wacky shit I describe.”