The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [74]
The realization of what he was seeing swept through Max like a turbulent bitter chill, which numbed his senses and found him at odds with how to react. He didn’t expect the sight displayed raw and blatant before him, he’d expected a great deal of things but not that, and though it now made perfect sense given his suspicions and instincts, he didn’t know what to do.
Simon Boleve was responsible for what happened at the motel.
But for one thing Max had been wrong. Dead wrong.
He should’ve brought Matt McGregor with him.
He found himself hurrying forward into the room then, just steps behind the distraught pastor, when something grabbed at him, something caught a firm hold of his jacket with such sudden surprise and with such force that it propelled him forward and into the pastor, sending them both toppling headlong one on top of the other and onto the hardwood floor, flailing and stunned and several feet short of the brass-knobbed corner of the bed.
The door behind them slammed shut unto pale damp darkness.
And something attacked them. The same confounding grip, which sent them falling now dug into Max’s shoulder blades and wrenched him from atop the pastor and spilled him to his side. He felt someone’s foot press dead center into his abdomen and he cried out as the back of his neck collided against something hard and painful, like the blunt corner of a low wooden table. His vision was a blur of incoherent helplessness.
And then he began to see.
His eyes focused, and what he beheld was a dismal figure, abhorrent and nude, bearded, wretched, stick-like fleshy thin and crouched over an impossibly bent-backwards silhouette of Pastor Bradshaw, who to no avail kicked and writhed and flung his arms in a contorted effort to free himself of the horrid oppression which pinned him down against his backside and which seemed to hold him fast by his neck with one attenuated hand until....
...until a swift series of see-saw strokes sent liquid gushes of thick black outwards from his throat in a grisly spew spanning for what appeared to Max to be several feet ahead of the two, rippling and splashing across the floor and upon the side of the bed, and within the next moment afterwards the figure abandoned the pastor and went for Max.
Max impulsively thrust one foot forward to fend the figure away, successfully, locking his foot onto the figure’s midsection and the pushing against it with every ounce of strength and agility any one man could summon in a bout of chaotic confusion, and it sent the figure plummeting backwards across the gasping and weakening mass sprawled out below him.
The figure spared no time in managing himself to his feet and he lunged towards Max once more, and alertly Max flung his body forward and into him, seizing his grip upon his assailant’s left arm. But to his outright dismay, the figure’s right came down upon him briskly, and something searing and sharp cut into his side beneath his jacket and dug easily below the right portion of his rib cage, releasing a debilitating abundance of agony and wetness as his elbow braced against it and he slid into a deadlock embrace against a towering piece of furniture immediately behind him.
Max wailed.
The figure’s right arm came down on him again. Pain roared across his upper chest and underneath his left collar bone. Across his chest again, in the opposite direction. The misshapen tower of dark furniture which braced his upper torso gave way and went crashing backwards onto the floor with a tremendous thud and the back of Max’s head fell with it into what now seemed to be the base of a short wooden bookcase riddled with hardcover books nestled snug between three rows of shelves.
A short handful of minutes from the onset of the ambush had seen Max catapulted into a state of sheer terror and dismay until then, until the realization of what was happening came together like a magnet to his senses