Slash, p.25
Slash, page 25
A hard gust of wind rattled the chalet’s rotted walls, swirling the fetid odor trapped within. Todd covered his mouth and burped acid.
“I can’t get Jerry out of here alone.”
Vince looked around the room with tears in his eyes. “Okay,” he said, the single word barely making it past his lips.
They stepped outside and Todd pointed out the closest exit point to the east of the slope.
“Where’s Otto?” Vince asked, looking down the hill.
“Hopefully far enough away for us to grab Jerry and go.”
The inexorable pull of gravity made getting down the hillside much easier than plodding up, but they had to be careful not to lose their footing and tumble down it as Otto had.
As they made it to the bottom, Todd kept expecting to see a black blur motoring their way. Otto wouldn’t go far. And he could make up lost ground lightning fast.
Bill’s odds of their making it out alive would be depressingly small right about now. That didn’t mean that Todd should stop trying.
“Jerry,” he whispered when they got close to the hiding spot.
When there was no reply, his stomach dropped.
Vince brushed past Todd and hustled behind the rock and trees. His head popped up in an instant and he waved Todd over.
At first, Todd thought Jerry was dead. His mouth hung open, his pale face shining through the darkness. Todd’s hands were numb. There was no way he could feel for a pulse. He was about to press his ear against Jerry’s chest when a small puff of vapor curled from Jerry’s mouth.
“He just passed out,” Todd said. He shook Jerry lightly by the shoulders. “Hey buddy, wake up.”
Jerry’s mouth closed and opened again, his eyes sealed shut.
If Jerry didn’t wake up, they would have to carry him out. Todd wasn’t sure if either of them were physically capable of doing it at this point.
He slapped the side of Jerry’s face. “Come on. Jerry, we need to get up and out of here.”
His eyelids fluttered.
“Like this,” Vince said, giving Jerry a hard slap.
This time, Jerry came wide awake, his eyes narrowing at Vince. “Who the fuck hit me?” He rubbed his jaw.
“We thought you were dead,” Vince said.
“You make a habit of slapping dead people?”
Todd was already hooking his arms under Jerry’s armpits and lifting him. “I know the way out. We need to haul ass.”
“Where’s Otto?”
“I don’t know. But he’s not here at the moment, so we better take advantage of it.”
They followed Todd, skirting around the base of the bunny slope, heading east. Vince handed Jerry’s gun back to him.
“I did just what you told me to. All direct hits.”
Jerry puffed hard, gritting through the pain. “You got him in the chest?”
Vince nodded. “Not that it did much good.”
Jerry kept the gun in his hand, rather than securing it in his holster. “If I’d known, I would have brought a goddamn cannon.”
It was slow going, which had Todd more anxious than a cat at a dog kennel. They avoided the trees skirting the eastern edge of the slope. He knew it would be far too easy to get lost again if they slipped between them. Without any cover, they were too exposed for Todd’s liking. It would have been better if they could run, but the best they could do was a steady plod.
“You guys see any sign of Sharon?” Jerry asked.
Neither Todd nor Vince answered. How could they describe what they saw in the chalet? Sharon might have been in there. It was impossible to tell, and paralyzing to even think about.
Jerry got the hint, for once not pressing them for more.
They had to stop when Jerry said, “I’m crying uncle.”
The fence line was nowhere in sight, but Todd had burned it into his brain when he was at the top of the hill. They still had a lot of ground to cover. Jerry settled onto the frozen earth, hissing in pain.
“Just leave me be and get the hell out of here,” he said.
“No,” Vince replied fiercely. “So don’t even fucking ask again. You hear me?”
Jerry held up his hands. “I got you, Vince. I got you. I’m just trying to make it easier for you guys.”
“Nothing will ever make it easy for us,” Vince said. His eyes searched all around them. There might not have been anyplace to hide for a bit, but at least if Otto came at them again, they’d be able to see him.
Jerry turned his head to Todd. “Is it weird that my leg doesn’t hurt anymore? Now, all the pain is in my back, all the way to my shoulders, and it’s even worse than before.”
“No, that’s normal,” Todd said, not knowing if it was or not. “It’s like when we played tackle football in the street and that time Bobby Wager drove me into Mr. Abernathy’s Caddy. I thought he broke my shoulder.”
“And man, did you whine like a bitch about it,” Jerry said, smirking.
“At least until you stomped on my foot and said, ‘See, now your shoulder doesn’t hurt so much.’”
“Trade one pain for another.”
“Exactly.”
“Except this pain is even making it hard to breathe.”
“We have to go now,” Vince said.
“Then run,” Jerry said, not making a move to get up.
Vince chewed on one of his knuckles. “You don’t understand.” He pointed behind them. “He’s coming.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Jerry checked his gun and spun around.
Sure enough, the hulking shape of Otto was running toward them. Todd, Vince and Jerry had nowhere to go. They were going to have to face him head-on with very little to defend themselves.
Todd should have known it was foolish to think they could just walk out of the Hayden. Even if they weren’t hurt and on motorcycles, Otto would have found a way to stop them. They’d made the fatal error of traipsing on his killing ground.
“Shitshitshitshitshit,” Vince muttered.
Otto had been shot in the face and the chest and God knows where else. Nothing had even slowed him down. Jerry might be able to divert him for a little while, but it would never be enough for them to limp to freedom.
Not that they could ever be free.
Ash had lived with the memory of Otto, even if it was hidden, bleeding into her nightmares. In the end, she knew Otto couldn’t die, and as long as he existed, so did the threat of his finding her and cleaning up his unfinished business. Now Todd knew the true, soul-shattering terror she’d been living with. And he understood why she’d taken matters into her own hands and beaten Otto to the punch. After what he’d seen the Nazi do to Heather, he knew that even if he somehow survived this night, he’d never be able to free himself from the knowledge of what Otto was capable of. How long would it be before Todd found himself at the end of a rope? Would he be able to live with the memories of this night, the surety that Otto was still out there, as long as she had?
It looked like those were questions that had no answers.
Otto was going to end them, here and now.
“Just stay behind me,” Jerry said. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from pain and exhaustion.
Otto kept running in a straight line, right for them. It wouldn’t be long before he reached them.
Todd heard the pounding of footsteps behind them.
Are there two of them?
He spun around and saw someone approaching from behind a bend in the hill. She was carrying something long in both hands.
It could only be Sharon.
The spitfire ran like a pole-vaulter, the ends of the pipe dipping up and down with each hurried step.
A shot rang out and Todd flinched. Otto had gotten close enough for Jerry to shoot him. It didn’t slow him down.
“He’s still coming!” Vince wailed.
He and Jerry hadn’t noticed Sharon yet. Todd wanted to scream at her to stop, to drop the pole and run the other way. He’d no sooner drawn a breath than she was rushing past him. Instead, he had to yell to Jerry, “Don’t shoot!”
Sharon’s hair cascaded behind her like wild snakes writhing in the wind. He thought he heard her growl as she sped past them. The pipe she was holding like a lance looked like it had been pulled from the plumbing works somewhere in the resort.
She darted into Jerry’s line of fire and his arm jerked skyward just as he pulled the trigger. The bullet sailed above them and into the night sky.
Otto and Sharon were on a collision course.
“Sharon, no!” Todd yelped.
At the last second before impact, Sharon drove the back end of the pipe into the hard ground. She pointed the front end at Otto’s stomach. His incredible forward momentum prevented him from slowing down or veering away. Instead, he impaled himself on the pipe. The furious impact of the supernatural force hammered the back end of the pole deeper into the earth. Sharon leaped away, allowing room for Otto’s body to slide farther and farther along the pipe. Otto’s shoulders and arms slumped lifelessly, his body frozen at a forty-five-degree angle, knees bent and touching the ground. A clump of something dark and ropy hung off the end of the pole.
“Bam!” Sharon shouted, arms flailing in victory. “Take that, you ugly motherfucker!”
“Don’t get close to him,” Jerry warned her. She looked like she wanted to get in Otto’s face and taunt him. She circled his motionless body, steam coming off her in trailing wisps.
“Come on,” she taunted. “Let’s see you walk away from this.” She hocked up a load of phlegm and spit on his back. “Don’t mess with a bitch who knows what to do with a pole.” Her eyes bordered between gleeful and manic.
Todd swung his light to get a better look at Otto’s face. The second the light touched upon it, he wished he hadn’t.
There was a deep furrow in Otto’s cheek where Jerry’s bullet had buried itself in his massive head. The flesh looked like a clump of clay, after someone had pushed their finger deep inside. There was no sign of blood, no surrounding destruction from the bullet’s entry. Half his face should have been obliterated. But there was only the small, deep hole.
Otto’s eyes were deep-set and open and gray as death. Todd couldn’t detect a pupil or iris. Otto’s lower jaw hung open, his teeth blunted and brown, his tongue the mottled black and purple of a tumor.
Sharon leaned in to get a better look, just inches from Otto’s face.
“I mean it, Sharon,” Jerry said. “Back the hell up.”
She sneered at him. “You can tell me what to do when you parade me into jail. Right now, I’m not hearing you.”
“He’s right,” Todd said. “We don’t know if he’s really dead.”
Todd and Vince cautiously approached the impaled body. “He was always dead,” Vince said. “The question is, what level of dead is he now?”
“He was not always dead,” Jerry said. He stayed where he was, his gun locked on Otto, just in case.
Vince gave a wide berth to the body. He examined the clump of innards hanging from the pipe’s end like a flag on a windless day. “What the hell is this?”
Todd came over and they spotlighted it with their flashlights. The formless black substance looked a lot like a clod of wet dirt. Sharon reached over and touched it.
“It’s cold. Like dry ice cold.”
“I’m gonna take your word for it,” Vince said.
She sniffed her finger and her nose crinkled. “Smells like, I don’t know, the ground by a septic tank that’s overfilled.”
Todd looked at her. “That’s very specific.”
She shrugged. “It happened once at my uncle’s place. It’s the kind of stench you never forget. Here, give it a whiff.” She jammed her finger under Todd’s nose. He snapped his head back, but not before latching onto the vile scent. He’d never experienced what she had at her uncle’s house, but he thought that was a perfect assessment of the rank odor on her finger.
Without warning, Vince kicked Otto in the back. His heavy body slid farther down the pipe.
“Fuck you!” He kicked the corpse again and Otto inched closer to the ground. Vince slammed the back of the Nazi’s head with his flashlight, over and over until the light sputtered out and the entire thing cracked in half, batteries spilling out. Vince cried as he bashed Otto. Todd wrapped him up in his arms and swung him away. He held Vince as his body shuddered, hot tears coating Todd’s cold neck. “I want to do to him what he did to Heather,” Vince choked. “I want to tear him into pieces so small, I can feed them to the rats.”
“I know, buddy. I know.”
He saw Sharon wipe her finger off on Otto’s moldy jacket. It looked like it had fused with his skin. He could only imagine what horrors lay beneath that filthy fabric.
Otto looked human in the sense that he had a torso, arms, legs and a head, no matter how misshapen. But being this close to his corpse, every hair on Todd’s body stood on end as he began to realize the resurrected Nazi was far less, or perhaps greater, than a flesh and blood person. As tempted as he was to touch Otto’s face and feel that flesh, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He wasn’t as bold – or was it reckless – as Sharon.
“I say we light him up,” Sharon said.
“What?” Jerry said.
“Let’s set the asshole on fire.” Unlike Todd, she had no issues with touching Otto. She patted his clothes, flicked her fingers through his hair. “It’s freezing out here. At least he’ll be good for something. He’ll go up like dry kindling. Jerry, let me have your lighter.”
“I’m not warming myself by a burning man,” Vince said. “Fire will only make him smell worse.”
When Jerry hesitated, she said, “Don’t make us the assholes who don’t finish the killer off when they had the chance.”
Jerry put his gun down and said, “Screw it.” He tossed his Zippo to Sharon. She then held it out to Vince.
“You should do the honors. I nailed him like a diseased butterfly for Sheri. Now do this for Heather.” A river of tears ran down her cheeks.
Vince accepted the lighter with a shaky hand. Todd stepped in front of him to block the wind. It took Vince several tries before he got a flame. He looked into Todd’s eyes.
“For all of them,” Vince said.
“Yeah,” Todd said, barely above a whisper because his throat felt tighter than a drumhead. “For all of them.”
Vince touched the flame to Otto’s coat. The fire jumped from the Zippo like a returning wartime soldier seeing his love at the end of the reception line. There followed a loud whoosh of air and Otto’s body was engulfed in flames quicker than it would have been if he’d been doused in gasoline. They had to step back quickly before they got burned.
“Damn,” Sharon murmured. The reflected flames danced in her wide, wild eyes.
Thick coils of black smoke rolled off Otto’s burning corpse.
Jerry covered his mouth and gagged. “Jesus, that’s rotten.”
The heady stench of Otto’s roasting flesh smelled like burning garbage. Todd’s eyes watered and his guts twisted. He buried his mouth and nose in the crook of his elbow.
Vince and Sharon didn’t seem to notice the smell. They were mesmerized by the burning monster.
Jerry hobbled to Todd’s side. “That’s not burning meat.” He spit over and over onto the cold, dry grass.
“What do you mean?” Todd said.
“I’ve smelled a dude that was on fire. He got in his car one night after a blowup with his wife and poof, set himself on fire. I’m not sure whether it was to get away from her or teach her a lesson. Probably both. Anyway, I know what a person on fire smells like.” He pointed at Otto, his body slipping farther down the pipe like a roast on a spit. “And that ain’t it. Makes you wonder what he really was.”
It did, but not enough for Todd to care.
Otto – the Wraith – was finally dead. Todd hoped Ash, Heather, Bill, Sheri and everyone who had ever spent their last terrified moments in Otto’s wicked presence could see this now. It might not give them rest, but maybe it would bring them pleasure.
As inviting as the warmth coming off the fire was, Todd had to step back and turn his head. Otto’s foul redolence was a physical force pushing him away. Even Vince and Sharon had backed up by a few paces, keeping upwind.
“We should get going,” Jerry said.
Todd held him back. “No. We stay until there’s nothing left.”
Vince and Sharon didn’t have to say a word for him to know they were in full agreement. Todd had watched Ash slowly fall apart and die over five years. He would savor however long it took to see Otto reduced to fetid embers.
There came a loud pop, as if a pocket of liquid under Otto’s flesh came to a boil and exploded, followed by the crackling of fireworks. Everyone but Jerry leaped back.
The flames around Otto turned as blue as the budding fire on a gas stovetop.
And then Otto’s crisping body began to twitch.
Chapter Thirty-Five
At first, Todd thought it was Otto’s muscles retracting as they tightened and curled from the heat. He’d read that corpses will raise their arms during a cremation, as if imploring a higher power to set them free from the burning flames.
Otto’s legs tensed and his body tipped forward just slightly.
Jerry was quick to point his gun at the impaled corpse.
“It’s all right,” Todd said. “Just his body breaking down.”
“No it’s not,” Jerry said. “Get out of the way.”
Todd spun on his heels and saw Otto’s arms go rigid, then jerk forward so his hands could grab hold of the pipe. In the span between Todd’s worried breaths, Otto had pulled the pipe free from the ground and gotten off his knees.
“No!” Sharon screamed.
