Peter lifted his hands in a gesture that asked Clay to trust him in return.
Clay nodded and unhanded him. “Es,” his father shouted. “I’m calling the police. I don’t want you near Clay if he’s dangerous. Wait in your car till they get here.”
The sweetness came right back: “There’s something I came to tell you. I don’t want to yell it through our door, but you’re giving me no choice.”
Peter kept his feet planted—though his upper body seemed to lean toward her words. “It’s not safe for you. There might be someone else outside with you. I need you—”
“I’m pregnant, Peter. The baby is yours. I’m pregnant and you won’t open the door.”
It was awhile before anyone moved. Clay watched the astonishment deepen on his father’s face. “Pregnant? That’s… not possible.” His voice stricken—no longer the confident lawyer, now the condemned man, desperate to be heard and believed. “We were always careful. Never once without protection—”
“I’m cold, baby. Your unborn baby is cold. Don’t let that hellspawn twist you up. Let me in and we’ll deal with him together.”
“Not possible,” Peter repeated, all the color drained from his face.
“Because she’s lying.”
“Please, Es, get in your car!”
Essie slammed her body against the door, testing the lock. “Let. Me. In!”
“Please—”
“Asshole, fucker, cocksucker!” she shrieked. “Think you can keep me out? Bastard-maker! I’ll get to you, Peter. And your little bastard-maker. I’ll slid it right down my throat—the way you like it—then, when you’re about to blow, I’ll take a nice, sharp bite!”
Clay watched his father, certain he would go to pieces, make a play for the door, shove his son away long enough to release the locks. He underestimated him though. Rather than wither at the sound of Essie’s thunder, Peter hardened to it. His face settled into a steely calm as the door jumped in its frame.
“Sooner or later, they’re going to get in,” Clay told him. “We need more than a knife to defend ourselves.”
Peter nodded and reached into the pocket of his bathrobe. “I didn’t really give the .38 away.” He revealed the silver revolver, small and cold-looking in his palm.
“That’s good. But I’m not sure if bullets alone are going to stop them.”
“How can bullets not stop them?”
Clay was still forming a reply, when they realized Essie had quit pounding.
There was a moment of truly unsettling calm. Before—
Watch out! a voice hissed at his back. Boyle’s voice. Drifting through the central-air vent near the ceiling. Clay, watch your back!
Clay swung around. Davis Karney was running down the hall at him, hands held out. One blackened, the other skeletal. He was still naked, the charred muscles flexing, the half-nub of his scorched penis bobbing as he charged. Clay barely had time to lift his arms before Karney tackled him. His legs struck the Rickenbacker’s case and he keeled backward over it, Karney tumbling with him.
Peter screamed at the sight of the intruder, angry and terrified.
In the stark light of the foyer, the rock star’s face was worse than imaginable, greasy with pus that leaked from the burn scars. His strangling fingers were irrepressible. Clay grunted in revulsion as his own fingers sank all the way to Karney’s wrist bones.
The blackened hand covered Clay’s face and sealed off his airway. “Gonna get that tongue of yours,” Karney promised. And inside his exposed throat, the vocal cords jumped like the strings of a piano. “Gonna eat it up right in front of you—”
A loud crack shrank Clay’s eardrums. A bullet tore through Karney’s skull.
Peter had the gun pointed inches from the burnt man’s head. And if Karney had been a mortal being, or even a staggering zombie, the slug would have ended him. But Karney, whatever he was now, was neither. He stuck his pinky into the exit wound in his forehead with child-like wonder.
The gun cracked again and Karney’s right eye—the milky, acid-fried one—burst like a rotten grape. A piece struck wetly against Clay’s cheek.
But the rictus grin never left the scalded face. He leapt off Clay and went for Peter. Clay snatched at one of his ankles, but Karney tore it loose—he wasn’t anything but jellied flesh and brittle bone, and yet his strength was twice any living man’s.
Peter got one more shot off—Clay heard it burrow uselessly into Karney’s torso—before Karney was jerking his father’s wrist violently upward. The snap was unmistakable, as was Peter’s low moan at the sight of the .38’s barrel pointing ceiling-ward while the rest of his arm was held straight out.
Karney shoved him against the stairs and would have pounced had Clay not seized a strip of hospital gown, melted and fused into Karney’s back, and slung him across the foyer. Karney’s body weighed next to nothing and he went flying, slamming headfirst into the door.
Essie slammed the door back, furious. “Goddammit, open!”
Karney sat blinking at Clay with his good eye. Then he reached up and threw the lock and chain before Clay could reach him. The door gave and Essie was inside, still in her nightgown, spattered with mud and grass—and a pinkish discharge that appeared to be leaching from the fatal wound Annie Strafford had delivered to her chest. To Clay, she looked beyond dead now, her skin as pale as cottage cheese, eyes sunken and jaundiced. Her stare rolled hatefully toward Clay, then to his father, her sugar daddy, who had been little more than a peripheral player in all of this, and yet who’d dared to stand in her way at a pivotal moment.
The sight of her finally broke the old man and he began to weep. Clay tried to get in Essie’s way, but she swatted him easily aside. His already-battered body rebounded off a console table and crashed to the floor. Essie stood over Peter, gripping his chin between her fingers like she was scalding a shitting dog. “When I tell you to open, Petey, you do it, goddamn you.”
“Rocco!” Clay called hoarsely. “We need help!”
“He’s isn’t going to
