More Blood
Jack’s roar tore through the precinct’s blood-slick air. “You crazy psycho bitch…”
His .38 barked—six shots in rapid succession, muzzle flashes strobing the charnel house like lightning in a slaughter pen. Bullets punched through the axe-woman’s tattered cloak, shredding fabric in ragged holes, but passed through her torso like smoke through a sieve. No blood. No stagger. She didn’t even flinch. The empty casings pinged off the tile, rolling through pooling crimson.
The freckled girl—name forgotten in the red haze of terror—scrambled over a corpse, her bare feet slipping in the warm, viscous lake. She bolted through the open cell door Jack had left unlocked in his panic, her sobs echoing down the hallway as she vanished into the precinct’s darker guts.
The axe-woman’s head snapped toward Jack with a sound like cracking ice. Her black eyes locked on him—bottomless, hungry. She moved—blurred—a predator’s glide that ate the distance in a heartbeat. Jack swung the empty revolver like a club, desperation fueling the arc; she parried with the axe haft, wood cracking against steel with a sound like a bone snapping. He drove a boot into her knee—nothing. She was cold, solid, wrong, like kicking a marble statue wrapped in river rot. Her free hand clamped his throat with fingers like iron cables, lifting him clear off the floor, boots kicking air, the world tilting as his windpipe compressed.
Through the haze of choking stars, Jack saw the girl’s silhouette vanish out the front door into the night. Good. She’d make it. Then rage—Matilda’s face, headless in the river, her laugh silenced forever—surged hotter than fear, hotter than pain. He spotted his car keys on the desk, three feet away, glinting under the strobing fluorescents. Run. The thought flashed like a lifeline. But it curdled, turned to ash. No. He spat a mouthful of blood in the woman’s corpse-pale face, the glob striking her cheek and sliding down like a tear.
“Come on, you bitch,” he rasped, voice shredded but defiant. “For Matilda.”
She smiled—lips peeling back from too many teeth, sharp as fishhooks—and the axe sang. One diagonal slash, shoulder to hip, the blade parting flesh and bone with a wet schlick that echoed like a butcher’s cleaver through meat. Jack’s world exploded in red. His body hit the floor in two wet halves, spine severed, breath gurgling through severed lungs, vision tunneling to the EXIT sign’s dying red pulse.
Outside, the girl stumbled into the gravel lot, sobbing, night air ripping her lungs raw. Headlights from a distant patrol car—too far, too late. Her bare feet bled on the stones. Footsteps behind her—soft, deliberate, inevitable. She turned, knees buckling. The axe-woman stood beneath the streetlamp, blade dripping thick ropes of Jack’s blood, cloak fluttering though there was no wind. Her voice was layered, a chorus from the river’s depths, ancient and childlike at once, “Every child will be taken.”
The girl’s scream never left her throat. The axe fell with a sound like the world ending, the precinct lights flickering out for good, Jack’s blood cooling on the tile in two separate pools, the girl’s body crumpling in the gravel—Greenly Bay’s curse feasting, the night swallowing every plea.