A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [27]
Edgar jerked into motion, his arm dropping from his eyes and the beer can flying. I dropped the pool bag, inhaling the weird sour-yeasty odor Kate’s house had taken on recently, and brought the pepper spray up. The tab depressed, and the jet of it hit him right in his open, snarling mouth.
And if I hadn’t believed Kate before, I did now. Because the instant the spray hit him, he changed.
Strong, champing ivory teeth, fangs curving to sharp points. Hellfire burning in his swelling bruised eyes, his aquiline nose instantly running with snot and pepper-spray. He made a sound like a freight train crashing into the side of a skyscraper, and I almost dropped the spray. My fingers froze, I started shouting every bad word I knew and pressed the tab down hard. The spray fizzed and spurted. He got a whole mouthful of it and dropped off the couch like he’d been hit on the head with a sack full of hammers.
Kate finally got the curtains jerked open. Someone had fastened them with duct tape, and the sound of it ripping away from the wall was like pants ripping down the back when a fat teacher squats. Light flooded the room, direct sun pouring in. Edgar howled, the inhuman sound bubbling through a mess of snot and blood on his face.
I began to feel dizzy. The Communion necklace burned against my skin, a thin curl of steam drifting up.
He convulsed against the carpet, hitting the couch and making it thump solidly back. Kate let out a half-scream, half-sob. The sunlight ate at him like acid, and the plan was for me to get close enough to snap the handcuffs on him. We could have asked him some questions before I hammered the dowel through his chest with the deadblow hammer filched from my dad’s never-used shop bench in the garage. And if that didn’t kill him, there was the thing I’d taken from the safe. Dad had told me never to mess with it, never to touch it, never never never.
He’d said that about boys too. Would he be happy that I’d listened? Probably not.
I stared at the smoking thing on the floor. It stopped howling and spasming, twitching instead. It had long translucent claws that sliced at the thin carpet. Bits of bubbling stuff ran out of it.
I dropped the pepper spray. Bent down and cautiously dug in my pool bag. The yeasty smell crawled along the back of my throat.
The gun was heavy. There wasn’t any safety. I pointed it at the steaming, bubbling, hissing thing.
“Becca?” Kate whispered.
“Just stay cool.” I sounded like I had something stuck in my throat. The thing jerked. “Just stay right where you—”
The thing on the carpet screeched and scrabbled up, leaping for me. Bits of bone peeked through its rotting skin. His pompadour was melting, sliding down his face in long runnels.
The first shot went wide, plowing through the wall between the living room and kitchen. The thing that used to be Edgar moved faster than it had any right to, and I fell over backward, the gun skittering away and his teeth clicking shut like heavy billiard balls smacking each other. I got an arm up, rugburn crawling up my left calf as I screamed and crab-walked back too slowly.
His teeth sank into my forearm with a meaty sound and I screamed again. Kate yelled too, our voices rising in weird harmony. A bolt of sick fire raced up my arm, jolted my shoulder; he growled and shook his head the way a dog will try to shake a bone. My necklace flared with heat, a shhhhhh! under all the noise, like bacon slapped on a hot griddle.
Kate was screaming my name. I was just screaming, the way you will in a nightmare. I fell back into the hall, into a square of golden light. Edgar made a ratcheting sound deep in his rotting throat.
A gulping sound.
The gun roared. I squealed, losing all my air at the end of a scream as something burned along my leg. Edgar flopped senselessly aside in the long rectangle of evening sunlight.
Kate stood there, both hands clumsily bracing the gun, and shot him four more times. I got in a whooping deep lungful. Someone was mowing their grass somewhere, and the fresh green scent cut briefly through the yeasty rot.