Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [32]
Suddenly, something moved across the ceiling. Angus looked up, but he couldn’t make anything out in the bloody gloom of the place.
Damned heathens, with their nooks and crannies and inadequate light and mad architecture.
The cop had a torch, and he flicked it on and shone it on the arched stone ceiling.
Bits of dust and plaster glowed in the torchlight.
So did the three claw marks in the stone.
Jesus bloody Christ!
“What the hell is that?”
“Over there!” the two-gun girl said, pointing toward another part of the ceiling.
Angus followed the cop’s torchlight, which he shone where the woman pointed.
All it illuminated were more bloody claw marks.
“There!” Now it was the Morales girl pointing.
This time, the cop’s bloody torch caught what it was moving in the shadows.
All things considered, Angus wished he hadn’t bothered.
“Jesus!”
It was like something out of a nightmare.
Nominally, it had a human shape: two arms, two legs, but its spine was all bent so it could move on all fours. It looked like it had been flensed, with just corded red muscle and white bone on the surface—but it looked hard, like a rhino’s leathery skin. The bloody thing’s fingers and toes ended in huge claws, which explained the markings.
The head, though, was what held Angus’s attention.
The squared-off mouth was bad enough—it was chock-full of jagged teeth and a massive bloody tongue. Angus had seen frogs with proportionately smaller tongues than this thing had wriggling out of its bloody mouth.
But what got Angus to seriously considering soiling his trousers were the creature’s eyes.
It didn’t have any.
The monster moved out of the cop’s torch beam after a second.
That was more than enough for Angus.
He ran.
“Wait!” the two-gun girl cried, but Angus ignored her and ran to the back of the church.
He’d be safe there.
“I’ll get him,” the bloody stupid girl said.
Turning a corner, he ran into a side area, separated from the rest of the church by a wooden screen. He saw the large birdbath-like tub, and realized this was the baptistry. Several smaller pews were set up nearby.
Suddenly, a candelabrum on the side wall fell. Angus jumped, and almost pulled the trigger on his gun. He hadn’t fired it yet, but he was bloody well ready to.
But he didn’t see anything.
A sound like cracking wood came from the area where the small pews were. Angus turned the gun toward the pews.
He still didn’t see anything.
Bloody hell.
With a resounding crash, the baptismal font fell to the stone floor, its collapse echoing off the ceilings, holy water spilling at Angus’s feet. He turned his gun on the floor where the font had fallen.
Still, he didn’t see a bloody thing.
Where was the creature?
Why was it playing these games?
Angus just wanted to live.
Was that asking so much?
He turned to leave the baptistry—
—and found himself face to eyeless face with the creature he’d glimpsed before.
The tongue leapt out of its mouth and wrapped around Angus’s neck.
Then it squeezed.
Angus tried desperately to lift his arm so he could fire his gun, but he was having so much trouble breathing that he couldn’t make any body part behave itself properly.
The tongue started to retract, pulling him closer. Angus noted, bizarrely, that the monster had bloody wretched breath.
As soon as Angus was close enough, the creature grabbed him.
With its claws extended.
Angus had never felt pain so great in his life as he did when the monster literally tore him to pieces.
The only consolation was that it didn’t last for very long.
Fifteen
Jill Valentine heard a dripping sound as she moved behind the wooden screen to a closed-off area of the church. She had heard a noise there, and thought that maybe the idiot had gone back there.
Or maybe it was that thing Peyton had captured in his flashlight beam for an instant.
Jill realized that she didn’t even know the idiot’s name. She focused on that, because focusing on anything else was just too much at this point.
Zombies walking the forests of Arklay was bad enough.
Then being suspended.
Then