us.”
“Hurt? You speak of hurt. I’d love to tell you what hurt means, but you wouldn’t understand. Too dumb to get it. But that part is irrelevant. What’s important for you to know right now is that you’ll be the appeasement, the appeasement to the gods. My gods.” Casting a disdainful glance at Robert, as if to say,
His words were punctuated by someone else’s.
Sheriff Brian Stark was saying something outside.
The Outcast thought if everything had gone as planned, if the boy hadn’t become a little turncoat overnight and messed everything up, that man making noise outside now ought to have been dead long before this stage was reached. He listened to the Sheriff’s rambling about him surrendering willingly, but then ignored him. He went on doing what he had set to do.
“Who are…” Holly began, stuttering. “What are you, for goodness sake? What do you want from us?” Holly knew this chimp-man had a voice too human to be a monster of any kind. Scary-sounding, yes; evil, for sure. But human nonetheless. Yet, she affected confusion.
Unfurling the rope, he said, “I’m The Outcast, who’ll soon start his reign. What I want from you is, you’ll die by the hands of your own son. We both want it from you-perhaps he has never revealed this to you. I never expected him to, especially at the time when I trusted him.”
“Please, don’t hurt me.”
“But this has been predestined,” The Outcast continued, not seeming to hear or understand any of Holly’s plea. “Long before you were even conceived, it had been written.”
“No,” Holly was saying amidst her tears, shaking her head vigorously, as if by doing so, she would will the nightmarish occurrence away. “You can’t do that. No, you just can’t do-”
There was a heavy slap to her left cheek. At the impact, she began to see stars. She tasted warm blood while she watched the blurry figure of the man who had just called himself The Outcast reach out to tie her. She resisted, but the force against her was too huge.
When he finished tying her, he brought out a knife, grabbed and hauled Robert towards him. “You don’t mess this up, traitor,” he said through his chimp’s clenched teeth. Or else, the price will be too costly for you to pay.” He handed the knife to the boy, and stepped back a couple of steps, his special robe for the occasion rippling as he moved. “Now! Do it. There’s no time.”
Robert trembled. Didn’t move, couldn’t move.
“Go on now or-”
Crackles.
Sheriff Brian Stack on the megaphone again.
Stack was spitting out something The Outcast just couldn’t stomach. Something really derogatory. The Outcast had to stop the fool from tarnishing his glorious name.
He grabbed his assault rifle, and with the speed of light, he burst out through the front door.
Brian’s patience was speedily running out and he needed to do something.
After he had made a call out to the criminal inside and nothing had happened, and after he had jettisoned a multitude of worthless thoughts, a fresh idea struck him.
He went back inside the cruiser, fetched Robert’s diary, and came back out. All along, Craig was just watching, seeming to be thrown completely by every single step Brian was taking.
“What’s the next plan?” Craig asked.
“I think I just recall something the boy wrote down,” Brian said, flipping the pages. Craig moved closer. “Right here… it says ‘I’m the one cast out by the contemptuous haters, but who’s about to reign. The enemies shall be taken unawares and put to shame. Taken unawares because they will never know my plans about the rituals- especially the last one, in which The Outkast’s little True Blood will sacrifice his beloved.’”
“Outcast with a “k,” huh?”
“That’s the way the kid writes-in his own fashion.”
“Interesting fashion, I must say. And I could have sworn this came from an adult as opposed to a boy who’s hardly a teenager.”
“Me, too.”
“So, who’s the True Blood and who’s the beloved?”
“Robert Smallwood is the True Blood. And if I put two and two together, I’d say his mother is the beloved.”
“I see,” Craig said. “And what are you gonna do with this?”
“I’ll shout it out to him.”
“The Outcast?”
“That’s right. I figure since someone has known his secret, he might be furious at accepting the reality. I don’t know. It might work. It mightn’t. But we’ve gotta try something, because time is running out. If he doesn’t come out, then I don’t know what else to think of other than go get him,” Brian said, as if he was talking about picking up a kid after school hours, or about something as leisurely as getting one’s dog back from the kennels after returning home from summer vacation in the Bahamas. “And I want you to get ready, Craig. I hate to tell you this, but-”
“It might get really bloody,” Craig finished.
Brian nodded, and patted Craig on the shoulder.
He picked up the megaphone once again. “This is a last call for you to relinquish all of your arms and come outside with your hands up in the air. Do it of your own accord. Do not try to resist or pull a fast one, as doing so will only complicate your situation. You’re an outcast-The Outcast-and you’ve attained that status by way of violence. This community does-and will-not tolerate such. No sane and peace-seeking community would. And every route of escape that you might think for yourself has been blocked. Your resources have been exhausted.”
Brian found himself sliding down a long verbal chute, polished and ultra-slippery, and he just couldn’t stop yapping on and on. He only had a moment’s qualm if the approach he had chosen was the best one. He didn’t know. All he knew was, right now, he was doing a darn good job playing it by ear.
“And your delusional plan to bring the boy into your dark scheme has been uncovered, which means it has no potency anymore. It’s a complete failure. It won’t work. You need to give it up while you still have a chance to do so. It’s your call to choose between the desire to be helped and the desire to be destroyed. You need to-”
And the front entrance door to Holly Smallwood’s home flew open. Even as it did, swinging violently inward and letting the huge shape fill the portal, a bullet clanked against the front bumper of the cruiser. A second clunked against the metallic side of the megaphone, denting it before ricocheting off.
Caught flat-footed, Brian yelped and tossed the megaphone aside. He staggered backwards two steps, recollected his composure, grabbed his gun with both hands, and quickly assumed a shooter’s stance behind the shelter of the cruiser.
Allan was right. The man that burst out through the door wasn’t, in the real sense of the word, a man. Better to put him in the same class with the Unknown. Seeing his face illuminated by the light outside the house, Brian thought The Outcast was a monster. He was, indeed, an
Almost as soon as The Outcast had launched his first assault, Craig opened fire in return, chipping off the building sidings, the porch step railings, and even the jamb and lintel of the doorway through which the terror embodiment had materialized. None of his shots hit his big target, mostly because of the duck-and-shoot exercise he was doing from behind the cover of the car, but also because of his clingy fidgetiness.
At first, The Outcast didn’t appear wary of being hit. He just came running at them, yelling unintelligibility all along, his hands
Brian thought this killer of men might be a raving lunatic, but he wasn’t absolutely dead to the fear of death, after all.
