The officer was hurt, but still conscious. He tried to stand, tried to pull out his gun, but Chuck swung the thick tree branch over his head, smashed it back down onto the officer’s skull. Then again. And when he did it a fourth time, the officer’s head dented inward, blood bubbling out of the wound and trickling from his ears.
Chuck held his weapon above his head with both hands, looked like a caveman doing a victory dance after bagging a meal. His intestines bounced and splashed black liquid everywhere.
“Rotten. It’s all rotten and the rainbows will fuck you with their cock colors!”
“What?” Zak backed away from the crazed jock.
Chuck grinned, his eyes pointing in opposite directions like a chameleon. His teeth were black, lips caked in a crusty dark gray substance. Then he cocked back his branch and swung.
Zak ducked it just in time and the wood shattered the driver’s window of his Corolla. Gwen screamed again.
Chuck peered into the car, grabbed hold of his dick when he saw Gwen, and started stroking. He made a choking, gurgled sound, and a waterfall of inky black liquid rushed from his mouth poured all over his hand and cock, and he just kept pumping away, didn’t let the endless black vomit stream slow him.
Zak figured Chuck must have got a hold of more of Toad’s pus, either that or he was losing his mind from withdrawal. The guy looked like he had been self-mutilating since they last saw him jogging away from the house, and Zak figured Chuck would be dead from his wounds before long.
But he didn’t have time to wait for that to happen.
Chuck was leaning into the driver’s window, reaching for Gwen. She finally stopped screaming and ran out of her door and across the parking lot. Chuck pulled himself out, cackled, pointed at her with his tree limb.
“Can you feel it? Can you feel the Toad’s fingers on your cunt?” Chuck shoved a fist into his stomach cavity, pushed it in and out of the bramble of innards there. “I can feel him right in my cunt too. He’s calling us. He’s calling us!”
“What in the hell is going on out here?” The gas station attendant stood just in front of the double glass doors, the yellow and red light from the sign making him look orange. He pointed a shaking pistol at Chuck, eyes kept bouncing to the dead officer and the growing puddle of blood creeping from his head.
“Kill them all. Everyone must suffer. They all deserve it, they all deserve to fucking die!” As Chuck ran toward the man, another stream of black shot from his mouth and misted behind him as he went, tree limb held high.
“Stop! Don’t come any closer! I already called the police and they’re coming!”
“Fucking shoot him!” Gwen screamed.
And the man did. He fired the gun twice, both hitting Chuck in the guts as far as Zak could tell, but it didn’t even slow the rampaging jock down.
The wood slammed into the top of the man’s head, dropping him face-first into the pavement.
“Chuck! Stop it!” Zak held both hands in the air, approaching the kid slow and steady. “Kip doesn’t want this. Okay? Don’t do this.”
Chuck turned, his mouth, guts, and genitals all tattooed that black color. His eyes sort of circled in place, never once facing the same direction. A stupid chuckle sputtered from his lips, and he turned back to the attendant, raised his weapon high, and slammed it back down.
This man’s head gave quicker than the officer’s. His legs kicked, the toes of his shoes tapping against the concrete, hand slapping with the same chaotic motion.
Chuck hit him again until the back of his head was a mess of broken skull, hair, and brain matter. Chuck punched his fist into the opening, scooped out a handful of gray meat, then he shoved it into his own stomach cavity.
“I think I’m hungry,” Chuck said, then roared with laughter before sprinting toward Zak, nearly tripping over his viscera.
How is this motherfucker still standing?
The gun went off just beside him, and Zak fell to the ground and covered himself up. There were five more shots that rang out, and Chuck’s body hit the concrete, the exit wounds in the back of his head bubbling black liquid.
Zak looked up at Gwen, the officer’s pistol in her hands, smoke spiraling from the barrel.
“Fucking cocksucker,” she said. Her lips were tight and pinched shut, nostrils flaring, tears slowly falling from her slow blinking eyes.
Zak jumped to his feet, knees shaking. “Did you hear what he said?”
“Not a single fucking thing he said made a damn bit of sense. It was all gibberish, right? Like he went fucking coo-coo.”
“Most of it, yeah. But he said something about Toad calling him, calling everyone.”
“What does it mean?” Gwen still had the gun pointed at Chuck’s body, that black stuff still flowing from his wounds.
“Remember how I told you about that chemical? They’re like pheromones I think. If Chuck could sense them way the fuck out here…”
“Kip did say he was going to have a party. Right before we left.”
“Fuck me. Something’s changed, Gwen. Before… they were like addicts, right? Like they were all on ultra-potent ecstasy or something. Not like this though. And Kip had changed too… the color of his skin, the way he looked all bloated. Something’s changing, and if we don’t stop this shit now, I have a feeling Bowie High School’s gonna have one hell of a small graduating class.”
“What about the cops? Shouldn’t we call them?”
Zak wanted to, was terrified to face his cousin alone. “After all this shit? They’ll have questions, and we don’t have time for questions. Besides…”
“What?”
“I don’t want Kip to get hurt. Not if we don’t have to. I still love him… he’s still my cousin.”
Zak expected Gwen to call him crazy, but she just arched her mouth, nodded. “I understand.”
A pickup truck pulled into the parking lot then, an elderly man at the wheel. When he caught sight of all the violence, he immediately picked up his cell phone and started dialing. Then he saw Zak and Gwen, pointed an accusatory finger, and started shouting into his phone.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here. If we’re not already too late.”
Gwen kept the gun, and Zak still had his pistol in his glove compartment. He hoped to God they wouldn’t need them.
—15—
They came. Just like he knew they would. His power to call them to him had only intensified since his rebirth. Now they were completely powerless to resist him, no matter where they were, no matter how far away.
And that’s exactly what it was: a rebirth. He understood that as soon as consciousness had brought him back out of the darkness. It had been just like before at first. He had been swimming through an abyss of nothing, pain erupting all over his body as his followers drank him up, dried him out. The pain was there, just like last time, but it was quickly replaced with something else. Something that pumped through his body as blood once did.
Hate. Pure, poisonous hate.
His flesh became the hate, was soaked to the bone in it. He sprouted new boils all over his body, covering every part of him now, each one of them bulging with the new lethal fluid.
Kip thought he had it all figured out too. Before, all he wanted was to make friends. He wanted the other kids to stop being disgusted by him and accept him as one of them, an equal. He wanted the opposite sex to desire him, to want him and swoon over him the way they did to guys like Chuck and Zak. And so his flesh spits out pus and blood with the ability to make the things Kip wanted a reality. He doesn’t know why or how, but that’s what it was. But now. Now he no longer wanted these things. Now he only wanted them to pay, each and every one of them. He wanted them to suffer, to feel what it feels like to be treated like you are less than human, like some kind of freak.