He twisted the blade before ripping it out with a sickening sucking noise. Bringing the blade to his thick lips, he licked some of the blood off, then wiped the rest away with his index finger.
Frightened and scared, Liz Tyler wandered from room to room trying to find one that had been left open. She could hear the sounds from the living room with crystal clarity. -thunk-, -thunk-, -thunk-, -thunk-, a weird cracking sound, followed by a loud rip and a lot of footsteps.
She tried one door after another in an attempt to escape the inevitable peril that was crashing down onto her like a wave onto the shore. Grendel’s bedroom door had been barred shut, as had been the downstairs bathroom. Her only option left was the spare room. She rushed to it quickly, reaching out her long, slender arm and turning the cold metal knob.
To her immense relief, it turned freely.
She swung the door open and almost closed it again with fright. Before her were Cathy and Mike, laid down on each other, both unconscious. She stepped back for a moment. Then, hearing a wet snap in the living room she stepped in, she closed the door and locked it behind her.
She glanced around the room, and finally just curled up in a corner and started to sob as water ran down her cheeks.
She was only there a moment when she came to a realization: Wasn’t Xander supposed to have been in the room as well?
The killer looked around at his handiwork and smiled, then walked from the living room into the hallway. He kicked down one door and looked inside.
Nothing.
The next, a bathroom. Nobody inside.
Then he found his way to the spare room.
Forcing the door open, he stepped inside...
Liz heard the latch on the door break. The door swung open and slammed against the wall. She buried her head into her arms and pretended that she was invisible. She was breathing hard, her chest near convulsing. When the killer came into view, she felt her heart skip a beat. He walked over to Mike and Cathy. He turned Cathy onto her back so that he could see her face. He held it in his hand for a moment before he heard it. Heard her. He turned and stared down at her, shaking in the corner. He reached down and picked her up by the scruff of her neck, then reached to his back to draw out his sword... then stopped when he heard a new sound.
The sound of police coming.
Some concerned neighbor must have called the police.
The killer looked down at his prey for a moment before he merely threw her against the wall as if she were a rag doll, snapping her neck. He opened the large bay window and stepped out, taking his leave.
CHAPTER SIX:
ZONE
Mike awoke on a stretcher. He opened his eyes then immediately closed them again, forcing them to adjust to the light. He opened them a second time, this time as he got up.
A paramedic rushed over to him. His name was Richard Dreyfus, and less than two hours ago he had asked his girlfriend of two years, Marjorie, to marry him. She’d said yes, and they’d both cried happily. Her three-year-old son had thought something was wrong at first, and had patted Richard soothingly on the back. It had been adorable. They’d all laughed, and he’d given the boy a hearty kiss on the cheek. The idea of being his father was overwhelming and good, and he hoped the feeling would never go away.
His pager had gone off just as Marjorie was calling her mother.
It seemed like a lifetime ago now.
“Easy, son,” Richard said, putting Mike’s arm around his shoulder. “You’ll be alright if you just sit down and rest. It’s over now.”
“W-wha?” Mike stumbled, having trouble getting the word out. His head felt like it was in a vice. He put his hand up to it, only to discover a rather thick layer of bandages surrounding it. Suddenly, his eyes went wide. “Cathy?”
“She’s fine. Would you like to see her?”
Mike nodded, and the Richard helped him to his feet and around the corner of the ambulance he had been sitting in the shadow of.
There were cars parked all over the front of Grendel’s front lawn, and the lawn next door. Police cars and ghost cars and ambulances, all of them flashing their lights in different patterns and casting a stuttering red hue over everything in their path. It was like the streets had been painted in blood, and as he looked beyond this street and onto the next, he saw that it continued out into the rest of Coral Beach. Maybe even the entire world.
There were bodies lined on the grass. They didn’t look like bodies, covered in zipped-up black bags that looked like the ones Mike’s father took his suits to the dry cleaners in. It didn’t help, though. He knew what they were, lined up seemingly forever and casting long, thin shadows with the light.
Police and paramedics and firefighters scrambled everywhere. They ran around and past each other, one somehow never hitting the other. Some people stood and just surveyed the chaos. People cried. There were more sirens far away, as well as a constant buzz of radios as reports were updated and then re-updated.
Cathy was sitting on the sidewalk with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her head enveloped in her arms. She looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps.
“Mike.” She smiled, wiping tears from her eyes. “They wouldn’t let me see you until you woke, and--”
“Shhh,” he said, placing his arm around her. “It’s alright now.”
She broke down crying in his arms. “No. It isn’t. It never
