He'd turned the mattress he'd slept on into the biggest Depends on the planet.
A squeak from outside drew him over to the blinds and he parted a seam with his nonfingers. Through the crack, he watched humans going along their lame-ass days, driving by, biking along. Frickin' morons with their simple little lives. Get up. Go to work. Come home. Bitch about their day. Wake up and do the same thing again.
As a sedan went by, he implanted a thought in the driver's mind. . . and smiled as the Pontiac swerved out of its lane, bumped up over the curb, and gunned right at the two-story across the street. The fucking POS powered straight into a bank of windows, smashing through the glass and the wood framing, air bags exploding inside the car.
Better than a cup of coffee to start the day.
He turned away and went to the shitty bureau, firing up the laptop he'd found in the back of the Mercedes. The drug deal he'd interrupted on the way home had been worth the effort. He'd grifted a couple thousand dollars as well as some OxyCs, some X, and twelve crack rocks. More important, he'd thrown the two dealers and the one customer under a trance, gotten them back to the AMG, brought them here, and turned them.
They'd trashed the hall bath by throwing up all night long, but frankly he was about done with this house and was thinking of burning it down.
So. . . he had a team of four. And whereas none of them had been volunteers, once he'd drained them and brought them back to "life," he'd promised them all kinds of shit. And what do you know. Junkies who dealt to supply their own habits would believe just about anything you told them. You just had to sell them on a future--after you'd scared the colons out of them.
Which was a no B. F. D. for him. Naturally, they'd been shitting themselves when he'd unmasked his face, but the good thing was they'd hallucinated so many times on acid trips, it wasn't completely outside their experience to talk to a living corpse. Plus he was persuasive when he wanted to be.
Damn shame he couldn't brainwash them permanently. But that parlor trick with the Pontiac driver was as far as he could go with the influence: brief and unsustainable for longer than a couple of seconds.
Fucking free will.
After the computer booted up, he went to the Caldwell Courier Journal site. . . .
Hello, front page. The "Farmhouse Massacre" was covered in a number of articles--the blood and the body parts and the strange oily residue garnering all kinds of Pulitzer-light description. Reporters also interviewed the police who'd been there, the postman who'd called 911 in the first place, twelve kinds of neighbors, and the mayor--who was evidently "calling upon the fine men and women of the CPD to solve this terrible crime against the Caldwell community. "
Consensus was: ritual deaths. Perhaps tied to an unknown cult.
All of which was just background chatter obscuring what he was really looking for--
Bingo. In the last article, he found a short two-paragrapher reporting that the crime scene had been broken into the night before. The "fine men and women of the CPD" had grudgingly allowed as how one of their late- night patrol cars had done a drive-by and found that person or persons unknown had ransacked the scene. They were quick to point out that relevant evidence had already been removed and they were putting a black- and-white there full-time from now on.
So the Brotherhood had followed up on his little message.
Had Xhex gone there, too? he wondered. Maybe waited to see if he'd show up?
Shit, he'd missed a goddamn shot at her. And the Brothers.
But he had time. Hell, when his body went full- on shadow? He had an eternity.
Checking his watch, he got his hustle on, changing quickly into black slacks and a turtleneck and that hooded raincoat. Drawing on his leather gloves, he slid his black baseball cap on and gave a gander in the mirror.
Yeah. Right.
Rummaging around, he found a black T-shirt that he ripped to ribbons and wound around his face, leaving room for his lidless eyes and the cartilage that was left of his nose and the gaping maw that was now his mouth.
Better. Not great. But better.
First stop was the bathroom to check and see how his troops were getting along. They had all passed out in a heap on the floor, their arms and legs intertwining, their heads here and there. . . but the fuckers were alive.
Man, they were so bottom-of-the-barrel, dregs-of-humanity types, he thought. If they were lucky, collectively their IQ might creep into the triple digits.
They were going to be useful, however.
Lash locked the house up tight with a spell and stepped out into the garage. Popping the Mercedes' trunk, he lifted the carpeted panel, took out the bundle of coke, and loaded up both his non- nostrils before getting behind the wheel.
Gooooooooood mornnning! As a choir of chaos lit him up from the inside, he backed down the drive and headed out of the neighborhood, going the opposite way from the cops and ambulances that had arrived at the house across the street.
Which now had a drive-through as opposed to a living room.
Once he hit the highway, the trip downtown should have been ten minutes, but because of rush-hour traffic, it was more like twenty-five-- although with the racing in his mind and his body, he felt like he was at a total standstill the entire time.