“To hell with that,” said Potash, and he fired his gun around the corner, clearing the stairs before charging in himself.
“Come back!” I shouted. “You can’t kill him without Elijah!” Rack had known we were coming; he’d laid this entire thing as a trap—perhaps this was his end game, to lead us along with a false investigation, culminating in an obvious attempt to contact Brooke and lure us here, completely unprepared for what he really was. Even knowing what he was, we weren’t ready.
I flicked on the light and crawled across the bloody floor to Diana. Her breath was coming in short, pained bursts. Her arm had been torn off at the shoulder, and I shuddered to think of the strength it must have taken to do such a thing.
Diana looked at me, her gasps arrhythmic, almost like hiccups, too weak to speak or even move her remaining arm. As I looked around for something to stanch the flow of blood, Elijah sat up with a grimace.
“That hurt,” he said.
“You’ll be fine,” I said, grabbing a towel from the stove handle. “I’ve seen you heal from worse. Find me more towels.”
“The only injury I’ve had that was worse was…” He grimaced. “Getting hit by that truck.”
“And you were fine,” I said. “Now find me some towels!”
He looked at me oddly, then stumbled across the blood-slick floor to rummage through the cupboards. I folded my lone towel into a tight wad and held it to Diana’s bloody shoulder as tightly as I could, gritting my teeth against the pain I imagined when the touch made her wince. Her muscles convulsed, her chest curling forward as her body tightened, her breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps.
“Death is weak,” I hissed at her, trying to think of anything I could to keep her fighting. “You will not die because you’re not going to let him win, all right? We’re going to stay alive and we’re going to find that demon and we’re going to kill him together. Are you with me Diana? Can you hear me?”
Her eyes started to roll back in her head.
“I found more towels,” said Elijah, dropping down beside me, but we both started suddenly when Ostler shouted in our ears.
“Everybody fall back! He’s outside! Fall back!”
I looked at Diana’s stumpless shoulder. “I don’t even know how to put a tourniquet on that.”
“Here,” said Elijah. He took off his belt and wrapped it around Diana’s shoulders, covering my hand on the towel. He cinched it down and I pulled my hand free; he tightened it further and Diana groaned.
“Did you hit me with that truck on purpose?” asked Elijah. I didn’t answer.
“You’re going to be fine, Diana,” I said, hoisting her onto my back. “We’re going to kill that thing together, do you hear me?” I stepped carefully across the floor, staggering under the weight, headed for the front door. “You and me,” I said, “up close and personal. We’re going to tear off his arm and beat him to death with it.” My radio was filled with screams. I clenched my teeth and walked to the front door. “Elijah, can you see anything? What’s going on out there?”
There was no answer. I turned, slowly, and saw no movement in the house behind me. Orange light spilled out of the kitchen, glinting off the pools of blood and shining on the dark black helmets of the fallen police.
“Elijah!”
He was gone. I struggled to the door, murmuring “fight back, fight back,” to Diana, and when I looked outside, the screams were finished, the gunfire was gone. Even Diana had grown silent and motionless on my shoulder. I turned, trying to see her, but her one arm hung limp and lifeless.
My radio crackled with static, empty white noise seeming to fill the entire world. Everyone we’d brought was dead. I let Diana’s body slump softly to the ground.
A tiny whisper came over the radio: Ostler’s voice, thin and reedy, like all the strength had been pulled out of it, and nothing was left but the words.
“Isn’t this what you wanted, John? Calm, peaceful silence, and all the dead bodies in the world.”
17
I ran through the darkness, dodging pools of lamplight, slipping on ice and snow. All around me the world came slowly to life, waking up from one nightmare to another—lights came on in bedroom windows, terrified faces peeked out through windows splashed with blood. The street was a scene of gruesome devastation, and somewhere in the middle was the creature who had done it, the Withered king, smiling with another man’s lips and speaking with a dead woman’s voice. I had to get away—I didn’t know where, I just knew I had to go, to run, to get as far from that place as I could.
“You can’t run forever, John.”