The Laughing Corpse - Laurell K. Hamilton [123]
Cicely lay crumpled in the middle of the hallway. Blood was spreading on the front of her blouse. She didn’t move, but that didn’t mean anything. Her gun was still gripped in one hand. She could be pretending, then when I walked up, she’d shoot me. But I had to know.
“Can you get off my arm, please?” I asked.
Wanda didn’t say anything, but she lifted herself to a sitting position, and I could finally see my arm. It was still attached. Goody. Blood was seeping down my arm in a crimson line. A point of icy burning had started to chase away the numbness. I liked the numbness better.
I did my best to ignore the arm as I stood up and walked towards Cicely. I had the Magnum pointed at her. If she so much as twitched, I’d hit her again. Her miniskirt had hiked up her thighs, displaying black garters and matching underwear. How undignified.
I stood over her, staring down. Cicely wasn’t going to twitch, not voluntarily. Her silk blouse was soaked with blood. A hole big enough for me to put my fist through took up most of her chest. Dead, very dead.
I kicked the .22 out of her hand, just in case. You can never tell with someone who plays voodoo. I’ve had people get up before with worse injuries. Cicely just lay there, bleeding.
I was lucky she’d had a ladylike caliber pistol. Anything bigger and I might have lost the arm. I stuck her pistol in the front of my pants, because I couldn’t figure out where else to put it. I did click the safety on first.
I’d never been shot before. Bitten, stabbed, beaten, burned, but never shot. It scared me because I wasn’t sure how badly I was hurt. I walked back to Wanda. Her face was pale, her brown eyes like islands in her face. “Is she dead?”
I nodded.
“You’re bleeding,” she said. She tore a strip from her long skirt. “Here, let me wrap it.”
I knelt and let her tie the multicolored strip just above the wound. She wiped the blood away with another piece of skirt. It didn’t look that bad. It looked almost like a raw, bloody scrap.
“I think the bullet just grazed me,” I said. A flesh wound, nothing but a flesh wound. It burned and was almost cold at the same time. Maybe the cold was shock. One little bullet graze and I was going into shock? Surely not.
“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. The shots will bring Bruno.” It was good that I had pain in the arm. It meant I could feel and I could move the arm. The arm did not want to be wrapped around Wanda’s waist again, but it was the only way to move her and keep my right hand free.
“Let’s go left. Maybe Cicely came in this way,” Wanda said. There was a certain logic to that. We turned and walked past Cicely’s body.
She lay there, blue eyes staring impossibly wide. There is never a look of horror on the face of the newly dead, more surprise than anything. As if death had caught them while they weren’t looking.
Wanda stared down at the body as we passed it. She whispered, “I never thought she’d die first.”
We rounded the corner and came face-to-face with Dominga’s monster.
38
THE MONSTER STOOD in the middle of a narrow little hall that seemed to take up most of the back of the house. Many-paned windows lined the wall. And in the middle of those windows was a door. Through the windows I could see black night sky. The door led outside. The only thing standing between us and freedom was the monster.
The only thing, sheesh.
The shambling mound of body parts struggled towards us. Wanda screamed, and I didn’t blame her. I raised the Magnum and sighted on the human face in the middle. The shot echoed like captive thunder.
The face exploded in a welter of blood and flesh and bone. The smell was worse. Like rotten fur on the back of my throat. The mouths screamed, an animal howling at its wound. The thing kept coming, but it was hurt. It seemed confused as to what to do now. Had I taken out the dominant brain? Was there a dominant brain? No way to be sure.
I fired three more