The drive out to Stillman’s Creek was an ominous one for the three teenagers. They knew that the road ahead was full of danger, but they knew they could handle it. What they didn’t know, was that their false sense of bravado was about to get them into a whole lot of trouble.
“Kill the engine,” Tom instructed Ryan as the Toyota approached the bridge.
“Don’t say kill please,” Jacey answered. “It gives me the jeebies.”
“I don’t care how horny I get, I’m not coming back to this place once this day is over,” Ryan said, as he opened the car door. The smell of the swampy water was a sensation he’d just as soon forget.
“What’s that smell?” Jacey asked. “It makes me want to throw up.”
“Stay in the car, Jacey,” Ryan instructed. He contemplated whether bringing her along was a good idea in the first place.
“Why? I can run faster than Tom,” she said, as if reading his mind. “We already established that.” She got out from the backseat and stood on the snow covered ground beside Ryan.
“Good point,” Ryan conceded. “Tom, stay in the car.”
“Why me? She blew up the jail.” He got out of the Toyota and leaned across the trunk.
“Also a valid point,” he said as he watched Jacey pull her cell phone from her coat. “What are you doing, Jacey? This is no time to take a call unless it’s from 1-800-BITEME.”
“Dude, I think you need another digit,” Tom noted.
“It’s Ellie,” Jacey said excitedly. “She’s sent me a message. It says ‘bloo’.” She looked questioningly at Ryan. “What does bloo mean?”
“Gimme that,” he said, pulling the phone from her hand. He glanced at the screen. “It says b.loo.” He paused for a moment. “I thought you were British.”
“I am.”
“She’s in the old schoolhouse all right. She’s trying to tell us she’s in the boy’s washroom.
“Oh I get it,” Jacey laughed, tilting her head in the perky manner that drove Ryan insane. “That’s cute,” she continued. “b.loo, g.loo”. She smiled at Tom, and whether he found it funny, or whether it was just the nervous tension in the air, he found himself giggling too.
Ryan exhaled in exasperation. “Look, both of you girls, stay here. I’ll just have to do it myself.” He turned to leave.
Jacey unexpectedly grabbed Ryan by the scruff of his neck and pulled him within inches of her face. “You listen to me, Ryan Lachey. You might be the big football star at school, but you didn’t get there all by yourself, no matter what you think. You had teammates that helped you. I might not be as fast with my hands as Tommy, but we’re all wearing the same jersey here.”
“The jersey of the damned,” Tom said flippantly. “Why don’t we just call the cops?”
“No cops,” Ryan insisted. His level of trust for Troy’s men in blue had fallen to an all-time low.
“We all had a part in this,” Jacey continued, stomping her right foot to emphasize the point. “We all have to help her.”
“You’ve wrecked your boots, Jace,” Ryan noticed, looking at her feet. The Jimmy Choo's were wet and torn and stained with a combination of soot and snow. He didn’t know whether the world had finally beaten him down or not, but he actually felt bad for her. Her boots were like a cornerstone in an old building. They held the key to the past and they needed to be deconstructed. They might make a good chew toy for Ralph’s dogs.
“I don’t care,” Jacey said, and the honesty in her voice surprised all three of them.
“Okay then. You’re in,” Ryan agreed.” He looked at Tom. “Well?”
“I don’t have the big locker room speech to give you,” Tom replied. “But I never said I wanted to stay in the car, so quit looking at me like that. I never said I wanted to bail out on you. I’ve never said I wanted to bail out on you. ”
Ryan reflected this for a moment until a more urgent issue came over him. “Nature calls. I gotta take a leak. Alone,” Ryan told them. “Unless we’re all in that together too?” He waited for Jacey or Tom to comment. “No? So I’m good to go. Thanks for that.” He walked off into the trees and proceeded to unzip his fly. “I will never underestimate the freedom of whizzin’ in the wild again,” he told himself, grateful to be out of jail, albeit illegally. He was re-adjusting himself in the wilds of the woods when he heard Jacey scream.
“What the fuck?” he wondered, turning around towards his friends. Subconsciously knowing it was time to hide, he ducked down behind the nearest bush. Its leafless limbs didn’t offer much camouflage, but it was better than nothing.
There were two hulking creatures in what was left of their police uniforms standing in front of Tom and Jacey. They were big, and they were blond, but their similarity with anything human stopped there. It was the Daytons, but then again, not the Daytons. The twins were “Hulk-ified.”
“Again, what the fuck?” Ryan said to himself. He crept as far to the edge of the thicket as he could without revealing himself. He watched as Cody— at least he thought it was Cody—pushed Tom effortlessly to the ground. The wraith shoved his boot firmly on Tom’s back, holding him down as he reached reached around for his handcuffs. Tom’s brief attempt to struggle was met with a swift kick to the ribs by Cody’s other foot. Ryan heard his friend scream in pain, an audible reflex that resulted in another boot to his side.
Colin had Jacey pinned to the ground as well. He was straddling her, his legs pressed against her thighs like a vice. “Look at the pretty girl,” Ryan could hear him snarl, in a demonic voice. “Pretty little missy, makes me want to kissy.”
Ryan instinctively wanted to rush to help them, but if he had learned anything over the past few days, it was that the old saying ‘fools rush in’, was sage advice. There was no way he could get to his friends without being seen in advance of any attempted attack. The wraiths had guns and handcuffs and quite possibly supernatural powers, and he had nothing. He had never felt more helpless in his life.
Held to the ground, Jacey froze in terror, as the wraith took his sopping tongue and licked her cheek in a slow, lingering motion. “Why are you crying, pretty girl?” he taunted, his sour breath making her flinch. “I’ll give you something to cry about.”
The wraith moved his tongue above his top gum line, where something lay hidden in his upper right cheek pocket. He maneuvered the object down to between his front teeth, glowering menacingly in her line of sight as he revealed the disposable razor blade he had deftly kept hidden. He tore it across the surface of his own bottom lip, making it bleed before the girl’s eyes, eliminating any possible doubt as to whether it was sharp or not. He moved closer towards her, projecting the edge of the blade within inches of her cheek, and sadistically watched as she began to sob uncontrollably.
“You should have accepted my affection, you stuck-up bitch,” he screeched, as he swiftly moved the blade across her left cheek tearing her flesh in a straight slice.
“Leave her alone, you fucking bastard,” Tom screamed at him.
Cody Dayton looked at him and laughed. “I visited your daddy’s hardware store today,” he said. “I needed a new razor too,” he said, pulling a pack of disposable razors from his pocket. He grabbed Tom by the hair and began to hack away at his blonde locks in a haphazard fashion. When he had shorn most of it, he pulled Tom’s head back so he could admire his handiwork. “This looks like crap, pretty-boy,” he said, and began to shave away what was left of Tom’s streaked tresses. “Get up,” he instructed him, “and show your girlfriend your new hairdo.”
“Go to hell,” Tom shouted.
“I said get up,” Cody repeated, pulling his pistol from his holster and pointing it at Tom’s head.
Colin made the same request of Jacey, putting the gun next to her temple so she would be certain to hear the safety being released. “Let’s go for a little walk,” he said to her, pulling her up from the ground by her elbow. He shoved her in front of him and hit her head with the side of the gun, indicating to her to take the path on th
e right. She had no choice but to do so. Tom and Cody followed behind them.
Ryan’s viewpoint from the thicket indicated that the four were headed towards the old schoolhouse. If he stayed calm, and moved quietly through the edge of the woods, he could most likely get there undetected. “They’re big,” he muttered to himself, sizing up the wraiths. “But they’re still butt-ass half-deaf morons.” As he watched the four enter through the nearest side entrance, Ryan made his way around to the far end of the school, to an area big enough to be a gymnasium. The doors were chained together.
“Fuck,” Ryan cursed, looking around for another point of entry. “Where are the vandals when you need them?” He noticed a curtain blowing through a classroom window. “Looks like Bubba forgot to close the window during the fire drill.” He grabbed the window ledge with the palm of his hands and proceeded to pull himself up and over the sill and into the classroom. “And Betty told me nothing good would come out of my detentions. Thank the fuck for the million pull-ups Coach Skinner made me do.”
He listened at the door. He could hear voices down in one direction. He took the other. “There’s got to be a fucking weapon in here somewhere,” he surmised, as he entered the gym. The room was dark, making it next to impossible to find anything. He got down on his hands and knees and crept along the wall until he found what he believed to be a storage locker. He tugged at the mesh door, but it didn’t give. “For cryin’ out loud,” he muttered, “can’t I catch a fucking break?” He slid his hand along the mesh until he found a space where it gave some slack. He used his fingers to grasp it and pulled with all his might, wincing as he did so. His shoulder still hurt like hell. Eventually the mesh gave way, and Ryan was able to make a hole big enough to shove his upper body through. His quick search produced three items: a basketball, a javelin and a baseball bat. “Weapons drop. Lives added,” he chuckled, quoting his favorite video game.
In the boys washroom, both Ellie and Gaspar could hear the commotion coming down the hall. The wraiths and their two prisoners soon entered the room.
“Well, well. Look what the cats dragged in,” Gaspar laughed, looking at what the wraiths had done to Jacey and Tom. “It’s Scarface and Chrome Dome. Thanks for coming to my party, but it’s a little late for Halloween.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Tom told him.
“Now, now, potty-mouth” Gaspar sneered, “don’t go all ballsy on me. You’ve been spending way too much time around the other one. Speaking of which, where is the foul-mouthed behemoth?”
“Right here, fucker,” Ryan announced, standing in the doorway, his arsenal of weaponry in his arms.
“Do we have a problem?” Gaspar asked, looking at him. “You seem rather irritated. Do you need to get in a little exercise before your death sentence?”
“Yes we have a problem,” Ryan said, turning towards Colin. “Dude, you’re supposed to be at the hospital, guarding my mother.” He palmed the basketball and threw it towards the wraith. “Dodge ball,” he said, hurling it towards the demon’s head hoping to stun him. It made contact, but the impact didn’t even make Colin flinch.
Tom positioned himself for the rebound, hoping to get a chance to take the other one out. The ball wound up hitting him in face, sending him down to the ground.
“Now?” Ryan asked him. “After all these years, now you want to get in the game? You’re not Samson. You need your hair, dude.” He looked over at Jacey and noticed the gash on her face. He was going to kill the sons-of-bitches that did that to her, if it was the last thing he did. His eyes searched the room frantically for Goth-Chic, and he was momentarily relieved to see that she appeared to be unharmed, despite being chained to an over-sized sink. He winked at her, in an effort to let her know he was going to do everything possible to get them all out of this horror show.
Sensing Ryan’s momentary distraction, Gaspar moved towards him and ripped the baseball bat from his left hand. “Let’s see how many sports you’re good at,” he taunted.
The vampire’s movements caught Ryan totally off guard, causing him to inadvertently drop the javelin from his right hand as well. So much for being heavily armed.
“Swing low, sweet chariot!” Gaspar sang, swirling the bat first above his head, and then outward from his body like he was a batter warming up at the top of the first. “I know,” he sighed, “I never was much good at this. I’m about to strike out,” he told Ryan. “Maybe once, maybe twice. But I’ll hit something eventually.” He took a practice swing in the direction of Ryan’s kneecaps. “B-b-b-batter up!”
Ryan’s career hopes were a Louisville Slugger away from being taken from him permanently. Jacey’s hopes of being a supermodel were all but dashed. Tom’s perfect coif was lying in the middle of the forest. Ellie was chained to a monstrous slab of marble, her freedom taken from her before she really had any freedom to speak of. Not exactly a great day for any of them.
The wraiths laughed in unison like a pack of hyenas.
“Goth,” Ryan began, “we have made a fuckupery of gothic magnitude. I’m so sorry.”
Ellie wasn’t listening. Through a broken off pipe in the wall beside her, she heard another version of Sweet Chariot—a hauntingly low, slightly off tempo, whistling of the tune. She began to sing along to it, almost inaudibly at first, then getting louder with each stanza until everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and stared at her like she was crazy. “Tell all my friends, I’m coming too,” she sang. “Comin’ for to carry me home.”