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  The old man nodded. “I do.”

  Flash nodded at the billboard. “The date there. That’s tomorrow.” His grin was a strained thing, almost a death’s head rictus. “That’s more of your trickery, isn’t it? What date is your illusion covering?”

  The old man glanced at the billboard briefly. “That’s no illusion.”

  Flash frowned. “Huh.”

  “It’s pure coincidence, Flash.”

  Flash grunted noncommittally. He wasn’t sure he believed in such a thing as ‘coincidence’ anymore. While he was glad to know the truth behind the manipulative creature’s illusions, he had a feeling there was an even grander, and much more unfathomable, scheme of things. Maybe the date on the billboard was coincidence, but Flash wondered if maybe—just maybe—it might be a bit of the real One True God’s handiwork, a subtle sign, a personal message from the Almighty to Jeff “Flash” Wheeler. He thought it was more than a little bit possible, and it was this possibility more than anything else that at last brought him some measure of peace.

  “One more thing I want to know before we get down to business…”

  The old man let out an abrupt fart. His nose crinkled and his cheeks turned pink from embarrassment. “Sorry about that. It’ll be a pleasure to abandon this foul shell after tomorrow.” He smiled meekly. “What is it you wish to know, Flash?”

  “Why ‘Flash’? Where’d that come from?”

  The old man smiled. “You really don’t remember?”

  Flash frowned and shook his head. “No.”

  The old man drank some beer and chuckled. In that moment, he reminded Flash strongly of his Uncle Ben. “When you were very young, little more than a toddler really, your Uncle Ben used to babysit you.”

  The reference to his uncle gave Flash a start. “Uh…”

  The old man chuckled. “Come now, Flash, surely you realize it’s by design that I resemble the man. Anyway, your uncle used to read comic books to you. The Flash and Captain America were two particular favorites. He took to calling you ‘Captain Flash’.”

  A sudden tear spilled down Flash’s cheek. “My uncle…he died when I was in first grade.”

  “I know.”

  Flash looked at him. “And you got all this by looking into my mind?”

  “I did.”

  Flash wiped the tear away and smiled. “I guess that ought to piss me off, but it doesn’t somehow. Yeah. I remember now. Ben was a good man.” He shook his head. “And I reckon I’d rather face some ancient evil as Captain Flash than as Jeff the Mechanic.”

  The old man nodded. “So be it.”

  “So…how are we taking this son of a bitch down?”

  The old man grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  October 6

  11:00 p.m.

  Emily cried out as Warren thrust roughly into her again and again, causing the headboard to slam repeatedly against the bedroom wall. He loomed high over her, with his back arched and his palms braced against the headboard, snarling, his face contorting like a madman in the grip of delirium. It was strange. Warren had never been quite so…animalistic when they were together before. The out-of-character lovemaking style might have disturbed her, but the pleasure she was experiencing was so intense she had little room in her mind for anything other than physical sensation.

  They were back in the apartment she’d previously hid out in with Jake and Abby, fucking on the bed once shared by Kelly and Laura. The room was dark, but the door was partially open, and flickering candlelight was visible from the living room. Jasmine and Zeke were out there. Emily experienced flashing moments of embarrassment, knowing they were practically witnesses to her coupling with Warren. In more normal times, she would have been mortified by the situation, would in fact never have allowed it to happen.

  But there was nothing normal about the way things were now.

  For one thing, Warren was…different. Oh, outwardly he seemed the same. And his voice remained the smoky, sexy drawl she remembered from years ago. But now he radiated a swaggering confidence and charisma he hadn’t possessed before. It turned her on. She clawed his body, raking grooves in his flesh along his sides and down his back. She felt higher than she’d ever felt before, intoxicated on the sizzling adrenaline rush of pure lust. She wished this magnificent experience would never end. Never mind that her body ached all over from being pushed beyond the normal limits of physical endurance. The pain was a small price to pay for these dazzling sunbursts of ecstasy, powerful waves of sensation that rolled out and came surging back in, over and over, stronger and longer-lasting each time. Occasionally Warren would withdraw and flip her over, enter her from behind, poking alternately at her ass and pussy. He seemed determined to have her every way a man could possibly have a woman. Emily might have chalked this thirst for variety up to a long period of sexual deprivation—except there was none of the tentativeness she would have expected in a man who’d gone a long time without.

  Warren pulled out and flipped her over yet again. Again, his strength astonished her. He was tossing her around like something with little more substance that a ragdoll. Her breath exploded out of her lungs and her face was pushed deep into the pillow as he slammed into her again.

  Her ecstatic scream was so loud it masked his burst of mad laughter.

  It seizes the Emily-thing by the hair and jerks her head back as it begins to pump harder and faster into her. It loves the screams it is able to elicit from her with this new body. The act itself is pleasurable, but what it likes best about the human sexual act is the way its innate savagery so easily strips away all pretense of civility or refinement It has reduced Emily-thing to the level of an animal in the wild, a mindless thing, a prisoner of the senses.

  But already it grows weary of the creature. It has broken her completely and feels there is little fun left to be had by punishing her this way. It thinks of the others in the outer room. In its mind, it can see them sitting silently on the sofa, shifting nervously now and then as they listen to the shrill music of two animals fornicating with abandon. It laughs, imagining all sorts of delightful games it might play with them. As well as numerous creative methods of torture and humiliation.

  First, though, it must finish this stage of Emily-thing’s punishment. It grasps her by the neck with both hands and smiles at the delicious sight of her bulging eyes. It can taste her thoughts, and reflected in those eyes is the knowledge that she might die at the hands of the hands of the man she loves more than anything else. It sees that she is not completely opposed to this possibility. Just one more indication of how completely in its thrall she is. It could theoretically keep doing this thing to her indefinitely, so complete is its ability to regulate the host’s body. But now it chooses to relax the tight control it has exerted and suddenly the host’s body is speeding toward orgasm, pounding Emily-thing so hard the bed groans from the strain. At the moment of orgasm, there’s a sound of splintering wood as the bed frame gives way and the mattress and boxspring collapse to the floor.

  It pulls away from the woman, leaving her panting and close to unconsciousness. It dresses itself in the host’s clothes and stands staring down at her for a moment. She looks like a limp, broken thing, the discarded victim of a wild predator.

  It smiles again. The expression feels less offensive now. The result, perhaps, of too much time spent in human shells. Soon, though, the last of these execrable creatures will be dead and it will again be able to assume its natural form.

  But first….

  Jasmine’s breath caught in her throat as she watched Warren walk into the room. Though the sounds of sex had ceased several minutes earlier, she was surprised to see him. A storm of conflicting emotions buffeted her soul. She felt equal parts rage, jealousy, and fear. The jealousy was to be expected. Just two nights ago she had been the one on the receiving end of Warren’s attentions. And now tonight she had to sit in this room and listen while he put it to some other bitch. It was a brazen, hea
rtless, inconsiderate thing, and this—at least in part—was what lead to the anger.

  But then there was the fear.

  She was afraid of Warren. Partly because he was behaving in ways utterly unlike what she remembered from before they’d arrived in Nashville. But mostly because there was something just…wrong…about him. She couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was, but when she looked into his eyes she couldn’t hold his gaze for long. The intensity she saw there made her want to find something to hide behind, anywhere where she’d be shielded from that crazed, feral gleam. Her fear was also fueled by the fuzziness of her short-term memory. She remembered walking with Warren for days, all those miles of desolate interstate, every grim bit of it until they were almost in Nashville.

  Then—

  Nothing. Until, that is, Warren and Zeke, the cable news guy, had shown up at that sidewalk table. She had no idea how she’d come to be at that table. Or why she’d been sitting there with that bitch Emily. The missing portion of her memory troubled her, so much so that she’d refrained from mentioning it to the others. She had a vague sense that she had become separated from Warren at some point prior to this meeting, but she remembered nothing specific about that. She ached to question him about it, but some instinct stilled her tongue. She didn’t know why, but she sensed broaching the subject would be a very bad idea.

  She kept her gaze trained on the coffee table as Warren took a seat in a recliner opposite the sofa. She didn’t realize how terrified she was until she looked at her lap and saw her tightly clenched hands shaking.

  “Look at me, Jasmine.”

  She didn’t want to look at him. But the words conveyed a command, not a request. And she knew she could only obey. Shivering like a person trapped outside in the middle of a blizzard, she raised her gaze and tried not to whimper at the sight of Warren’s grinning face.

  That’s not him, she thought. _I don’t know who, or WHAT, it is. But it’s NOT him. It’s just something masquerading as Warren.

  Warren laughed. “My, but you’re a resilient creature. I wiped that part of your memory, but on some level you still know the truth.”

  Now Jasmine did whimper. Because the charade was over. The thing wearing the Warren mask was speaking solely as itself now.

  It laughed again. “I could finish the job, you know. Reach into your mind and do a deeper cleansing of your memory. And I could do so much more. Do you know that with just a thought I could pop a vessel in your brain and make you have a stroke? Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I’m done playing with you. Just use you up the way I used up the other female, then leave you helpless and drooling on the floor.” More debased laughter. “That would be more satisfying than just killing your outright. I quite like the idea of leaving you to stew in your own shit and piss, just gawping there on the floor like a landed fish.”

  Jasmine sniffled. “Please…”

  “I love that word.” There was an obscenely rapturous look on its face. “It conveys so much, doesn’t it? Desperation. Surrender. Utter helplessness. Its one of my greater pleasures, making lesser beings beg and mewl.”

  Jasmine wanted to say it again, in fact. She had never been so frightened in her life, not even in those first moments after Gary died. But she bit her lower lip, turning the word back before it could roll past the edge of her tongue. She was determined not to give this foul thing the satisfaction of hearing her beg. At least for this moment. At least until it forced her to break down. It was a small thing. But it mattered, goddammit. She would not willingly surrender the last frail shred of her dignity.

  The look of rapture on its face gave way to a glower. “Say it again. Now.”

  Jasmine bit down harder on her lip. She felt flesh part beneath her rending teeth and the salty sting of blood on her tongue. This was her last stand. The last remaining iota of defiance she could muster. Then she felt a presence in her head, a warm tickle, and in a flash she saw herself sprawled on the floor, her mind ripped apart and her body rendered useless.

  So she blurted it out: “Please!”

  It cocked its head, made Warren’s handsome face grin. “Please…what?”

  Jasmine released a big breath, then drew in a deep lungful of air. Her fingernails etched bloody grooves in her palms as she struggled not to hyperventilate. She swallowed hard and said, “Please…don’t hurt me.”

  The thing made Warren’s face screw up like a man pondering one of the universe’s most impenetrable mysteries. Then it smiled again. “Okay.”

  Jasmine felt the warm tickle recede from her head.

  She breathed a relieved sigh and sniffled again, hot tears racing down her face as she tried not to think about the possibility that she was nearing the end of her life. That a descent into eternal darkness might only be moments away.

  “You don’t want to die do you, Jasmine?”

  She shuddered and shook her head. “No.” Her voice was barely audible. “I don’t.”

  “Then come over here and sit at my feet.”

  Jasmine experienced a flash of panic. She considered a run for the apartment’s front door, but dismissed the idea at once. She wouldn’t get two feet before the thing stopped her with nothing more than a thought. So she stood and moved haltingly toward the grinning thing in the recliner. It bade her forward with its gleaming eyes, and soon Jasmine was kneeling in front of it.

  It said, “Lay your head in my lap.”

  And she did, feeling broken, utterly robbed of any will of her own, like a whipped dog desperately attempting to curry the favor of its abusive master.

  Then it was stroking her hair and saying, “That’s a good girl. You’ve learned your place.” It chuckled. “Now let’s see about Zekey-boy, eh?”

  Emily managed to recover some measure of her wits while Warren entertained himself with the debasement of Jasmine and Zeke. She came back to herself slowly at first, like a heroin junkie coming down from a rush. Voices floated in from the living room, but at first the words were just meaningless noise. She detected cruelty in the male voice, and fear in the female’s. She focused on those base feelings until her head felt marginally clearer, then the words started to register.

  She sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, listening in growing horror as Warren played some sadistic mind game with the woman named Jasmine. She thought at first they were acting out a kinky master-slave scenario, maybe some routine they’d worked out during their days spent walking across the country together. This thought sent a flash of jealousy through her and she came close to dashing out to the living room to kick the bitch’s ass. But she sat there and listened some more, and the jealousy faded. What she was hearing was no game, she was sure of it.

  There was something desperately wrong with Warren. This cruel man was nothing like the Warren she remembered. That Warren, though flawed, had been a man worthy of love and devotion. At least until he became almost terminally self-destructive. But this person that looked and sounded like Warren was a stranger. It was as if some malevolent being had hijacked Warren’s body.

  Emily’s eyes went wide at the thought.

  She flashed back to the confrontation at Aaron’s hiding place, saw that little girl walk out of a black supernatural soup into that too-brightly lit room. The girl’s eyes had possessed the same strange, leering gleam she’d seen in Warren’s eyes. A possibility so awful it nearly made her cry out bloomed in Emily’s mind like a black flower. The girl was a vessel, a flesh and blood prisoner of some darker consciousness. If the thing that had possessed Abby could leap to another body…

  Emily rose slowly from the bed and moved in careful steps to the door. She kept her mouth closed, suddenly certain it was crucial she not make a sound. She reached the door and stood behind it, listening as Warren (not him, only looks like him…) ordered Zeke to do something that made her stomach churn.

  She didn’t want to see what was happening. Could hardly bear the thought of it. But she had no choice. She needed visual confirmation, a final bit of condemning evide
nce, before she could write Warren off forever.

  She took a careful breath and shuffled one foot to the left, then peered around the edge of the door.

  At first her mind couldn’t process what she was seeing.

  It was too insane to be real.

  Zeke Johnson was sitting on the floor next to the coffee table. His cheeks looked bloated and were speckled with gore. His right hand was pressed through his open mouth and his jaw was moving in a mechanical way as he worked at chewing off his fingers.

  Emily’s stomach clenched and she felt nausea rise in her throat. She felt the strength seep out of her legs as she gripped the edge of the door in an effort to keep from falling, but she only succeeded in pulling the door the rest of the way open—and thereby exposing herself to the monster inhabiting Warren’s body.

  It looked at her, grinning as if it’d been aware of her scrutiny all along. She realized with a dawning sickness that it probably had been. Jasmine looked up from the thing’s lap and showed her a sick, demented smile. Blood dribbled from the corners of the woman’s mouth. The creature had done something to her brain, had either short-circuited it or rewired it in some fucked-up way. Either that, or she’d simply snapped from bearing witness to so much horror. The expression on the woman’s face made her look more like a rabid animal than a human being.

  The thing that looked like Warren giggled, reminding her so much of Aaron Harris her skin crawled. “Look everybody. Emily’s come out to play. I had a good time with that nimble little body of hers. What say we see what else we can do with it, eh?”

  Emily shook her head. “Nuh-nuh…no.”

  Another giggle from the Warren-thing. “No? Oh, I don’t think so.”

  But Emily’s terror and physical shakiness overwhelmed her before the creature could issue a command.