“Get away from her!” Clay screamed, diving at the bipedal thing, wrapping his hand around the few dripping tendrils of hair that remained and attempting to rip him off. Though, to Clay’s horror, the scalp was no longer terra firma; the hair slid off Karney’s skull like a cheap hairpiece, leaving Clay with a souvenir.
Karney’s eyes were gleeful. His crooked teeth, exposed after his lips had been burned away, clacked happily, and he slammed both hands into Clay’s chest, sending him careening into the dark, in the direction the guitar had gone.
“You ruined me,” the creature garble-gargled. It was Karney’s voice alright—and something else at the same time. A dank narrator of nightmares.
With Savy on all fours, Karney lurched toward Clay, shreds of hospital gown flapping over seared flesh. Clay scrambled back. Karney’s fingers were scarcely more than bone as they reached down to pluck something, a scrolled paper, tucked in a gap between his exposed femur and what remained of the leg muscle. “You earned the same contract I did. Now you sign it!”
Retreating, Clay barked his hip on something hard—in the dark he couldn’t tell what—and struggled to keep upright. He looked for the Schecter, but wouldn’t have seen it if it was right there next to him. All the while Karney was closing in. Clay could still smell the fire on him, the kerosene, the wretched meat, mixing with the fresher scent of pool chlorine. Chlorine! That was what Clay had struck his hip on. The bin that held his pool supplies. And in a moment’s inspiration, he tossed the lid up and had two seconds to snag a plastic gallon and a single second to pop the child-proof cap before Karney caught him around a shoulder with startling strength and swatted him in the nose with the contract. “Sign it, you fucking wannabe. Come live in my wor—”
Clay hurled the gallon at Karney’s face like a bucket at a fire. The liquid—it wasn’t chlorine after all, but the far nastier muriatic acid—caught the creature full in one eye, and Karney shrank back and opened his mouth, presumably to shriek, but Clay drenched his face again. And again. Then threw the gallon at him and raced for Savy, lifting her from the deck and dragging her into the house.
Together they fumbled with the locks, as what remained of Davis Karney renewed his attack, stumbling up and banging into the glass, leering at them from an eye that—they could hear it even through the door—was sizzling like an overcooked egg. “Go!” Savy gasped, and Clay sprinted down the hall and activated every last alarm zone.
“Is it on?” Savy called, still catching her breath.
“Yeah,” Clay shouted. And to his amazement, she opened the door again, separated the magnetic security strips, and tripped the alarm. The hundred-decibel bank-robber bells shrieked from every direction. Even Savy, who was expecting it, jumped madly as she slammed the door again.
Karney was off the deck in a flash, sprinting away on bone-thin legs, plowing straight through the rose bushes, indifferent to the havoc the tooth-like thorns had on his flesh. He gained the wall, leapt up to grab the top of it, and was gone a moment later. He doesn’t move like someone half-dead, Clay observed, and a moment later his eyes were drawn to the Generator’s loft, its window and skylight winking rapidly as Boyle flipped the lights on, off, on, off.
Clay hit the nearest lights himself and observed his guitar player’s ashen face; and he wanted to hold her, to comfort her and be comforted. “Let’s go back to being nobodies,”he told her.
“What?” she screamed back, and Clay heard that the full force of her lungs was restored—because at that moment, the alarm bells died. His father was hovering in half-buttoned pajamas at the panel, his fingers still stuffed in his ears. Behind him, Essie appeared in her ghostly nightgown, looking younger and more vibrant than ever.
“What the hell”—Peter’s eyes appraised their sweaty faces and disheveled clothes—“are you into now?”
“There was an intruder in the yard,” Clay told him. “The alarms weren’t set.”
“I armed them before bed. How did they get unset?”
“I haven’t even been in the house, so don’t look at me.” Clay lifted his hand and presented Essie, whose jaw clenched tellingly.
No matter, Peter didn’t even consider it. “Don’t start that again. In fact, why don’t you—”
“It was me,” Savy cut in. “Our band was meeting us here after the gig and I was afraid we’d trip the alarm hauling our gear in. Totally rude of me—I even forgot to ask Clay’s permission. I’m sorry. There were a couple of knuckleheads hanging out front and I should’ve known better.”
“Ahh. Do all your band-lings have our code, Clay?”
“She’s covering for him,” Essie said, no longer playing the worried step-mom. “There wasn’t anyone here. What are you up to?”
“No, I saw them too,” Peter told her. “I ran to the window as soon as the alarm went off. There was a… a shadow running through the roses.”
A shadow was one way of putting it. Still, Clay felt an incomparable sense of relief that his old man had seen something and admitted it. “He jumped the north wall. There could be others. We need to call security, have them check.”
To this, Clay would have expected Peter to answer in the negative, if for no other reason than it was his son’s idea. But: “Yeah,” his father said. “I think that’s a good idea.”
And behind him, Essie—transformed so quickly from savior to malefactor—gave Clay a wicked little sneer.
The armed response circled the property twice on foot and promised to patrol the cul-de-sac through the night. There was nothing else to be done, no way to convince Peter to toss Essie from the house; even suggesting as much would have
