Frostitute 2: Dead Reckoning: A Twisted Tale of Extreme Horror Page 4

  Squatting down, she picked up Donnie's limp right hand and pressed the thumb firmly against the device's On button. The phone scanned the dead man's fingerprint, decided that this was indeed its owner, and dutifully granted Anya access to its operating system.

  I have your phone. You have a mouthful of your own dick and man-juice. Fair trade, no?

  Opening up the text window, Anya pecked out a response:

  DONNIE: SHE HANDLES JUST FINE. WHY DON'T YA COME UP HERE AND HELP MAKE THE BITCH AIRTIGHT?

  No sooner had she hit the ‘send’ button than the door at the bottom of the stairs slammed open and footsteps began to thump their way up the staircase toward her. Frank was muttering under his breath. The words were too hard to make out, but he sure as hell sounded excited. The thought of spit-roasting a hot, helpless Russian girl with his best bud probably had him all riled up.

  Well, he'd learn soon enough, Anya reflected.

  Just as the footprints reached the upper section of the staircase, she began to moan and sigh, using one booted foot to rapidly compress and release the mattress springs. They obliged by making a high-pitched squeaking noise, one which suggested that somebody was getting pounded to within an inch of her life on that nasty piece of bedding.

  "Uh...uh...yes...da...da...DA...fuck...yes..."

  As she moaned, Anya stepped lightly around to stand behind the door, where she was still able to keep pushing on the mattress and make the fake sounds of sex from her new hiding place. The bedroom door was pushed open. Frank walked in, fully expecting to find her on her hand and knees, being taken roughly from behind by Donnie.

  What he found instead was something that looked more like the inside of an abattoir than a bedroom that was ready for a three-way. Donnie's mangled corpse lay in a widening pool of blood, bent in half with the contents of its abdominal cavity spread halfway across its legs. The room stank of piss, shit, and the juices of sex and death.

  It was only when he caught sight of the severed dick sticking out of his dead friend's mouth that Frank lost it and began to retch, finally spattering the front of his sneakers with vomit.

  So disgusted was he that Frank never heard the door close slowly behind him, clicking gently into its frame and latching shut...never saw Anya coming at him out of the darkness, with a dead man's phone in her hand and murder in her cold, dead eyes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN, COLORADO

  Although his birth name was Juan Padilla, these days the government agent went by the moniker of Supervisory Agent Six, usually abbreviated to just plain old ‘Six’ when he was in the company of his colleagues and peers. Those were really two quite distinct groups of people, with the former being much larger than the latter: although The Agency employed hundreds of people, ranging from I.T. professionals and payroll clerks right up to trigger pullers such as himself, the number of Supervisory Agents could be counted on the fingers of both hands. Such men and women were few and far between, and regarded pretty much everybody else that they worked with (and especially those that they worked for) as being an annoyance at best, and inferior at worst.

  The Agency's Colorado operation also covered the surrounding states of Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas. That was a lot of territory for nine SAs to cover, even with the diverse array of line personnel that reported directly to them. More often than not, the case load remained one elusive step ahead of them, but this holiday season was turning out to be the rare exception. A flare-up in a small, po-dunk little town named Tooele, Utah, had been put down with extreme prejudice four days prior. This was the first Christmas and New Year season that Padilla could remember in which he might actually get to spend some quality time at home with his family.

  Lean and spare of build thanks to the daily six-mile runs he undertook religiously, the Hispanic Supervisory Agent would turn forty in nine months, but had the physique of a man some ten years younger. It wasn't that he was a health freak or anything like that; it was just that ten years in the Marine Corps had ingrained a habit of regular exercise and healthy eating ("warrior food," the Corps liked to call it) in him that would probably stick with him until his dying day.

  Sitting back with a cup of coffee in hand, Padilla was taking advantage of the atypical peace and quiet of the operations room to catch up on the latest issue of Newsweek. Taking a sip of the still-hot liquid, he glanced up at the clock mounted high on the wall. It was getting on for six o'clock in the morning, and the night had passed uneventfully. At seven, he'd be turning over to the day watch officer, which was Roberta Bowman on the back end of the week. That should be more than enough time for him to finish reading the article about the latest medical advances in cancer treatment.

  Like every one of its regional ops centers around the country (there were also a few overseas) The Agency staffed its Rocky Mountain office on a twenty-four/seven basis, all year round. The center was located in the heart of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, once the home of NORAD and the futuristically-named Space Command, the ever-vigilant watchers over the North American skies. When NORAD had been relocated to Peterson Air Force Base back in '08, that had left behind a whole lot of usable real estate inside one of the world's most secure facilities up for grabs. The Agency had jumped on that opportunity, requisitioning the equivalent of a small city block for its own clandestine uses.

  Juan Padilla's little corner of it was a glass-walled office, one that he shared with the other SAs on a rotating basis. It contained little more than a desk and computer setup, although it did have the luxury of its own on-suite bathroom. The office looked out on the operations center proper, which was ten times as big and filled with banks of video screens and computer terminals. Several of those stations were staffed by analysts, and a pair of field agents floated between them, quietly consulting with the desk jockeys in hushed tones.

  High up on wall mounts, the major news outlets from around the world were displayed, their news anchors and field reporters mouthing soundless reports above the scrolling news feeds that represented the pulse of world events. It had been a long-standing joke in the U.S. intelligence community ever since the days of Tom Clancy that CNN and the BBC had better resources than they did, and often broke the story before the CIA and NSA even heard about it from their covert sources.

  Although physical security was handled primarily by the Air Force, and was usually tighter than a cheerleader's sweatshirt, a number of the screens also showed exterior camera feeds from outside the mountain. It was snowing up a storm out there in Colorado Springs. Juan could see the angry swirling snowflakes on each of the monitors.

  Those Air Force Academy pukes ain't gonna be up and flying today in this shit.

  Juan immersed himself in the article once more. It was good to take an interest in the everyday nine-to-five world, he firmly believed, especially when you lived in a shadowy realm populated by ghosts, monsters, and other supernatural entities. Reading about the latest events in the struggle between the Republicans versus the Democrats, or any one of a hundred mundane events, made him feel grounded, connected to the same reality that his wife Miranda and his teenaged daughters lived in on a daily basis.

  A discreet knock at his office door jarred him out of the article. He looked up to see Dennis Alvers, one of the field agents who reported to him, standing outside with an apologetic look on his face. Juan beckoned him in with two fingers. The blond field agent was young enough to be his son, but as a former Army Ranger who had served three tours in the sandbox, he had a maturity and sense of self-discipline that belied his years.

  "Sorry to disturb you, sir."

  "Don't worry about it. Wasn't doing anything important." Padilla set the magazine down on top of the desk. "What can I do for you?"

  "I just caught the start of the 9-News breakfast show, sir. Their lead story is something you might want to see."

  Opening a browser window on his computer, Padilla went to the 9-News website. They streamed a lot of their latest ne
ws content online, either as soon as it aired or immediately after, and sure enough, there was the headline that Alvers was referring to:

  POLICE OFFICER, SUSPECT KILLED DURING GUNFIGHT DOWNTOWN.

  Padilla cued up the report, opening it in its own pop-up window. The regular morning news anchor looked suitably grave as she led off.

  "A Denver police detective was killed early this morning after what is believed to be an exchange of gunfire with two suspects on Colfax Avenue. One of the suspects was hit by a passing truck, killing him instantly. Although paramedics rendered emergency care to the detective at the scene, he was later pronounced dead by doctors at Denver Health Medical Center.

  "The detective's name will not be released until his next of kin have been notified. A second suspect sustained life-threatening injuries during the incident, in what can only be described as a remarkable manner. We should warn you that the following piece of video footage, sent to us by 9-News viewer Jason Fellon, may be disturbing to some viewers, particularly children."

  The screen cut away to a shaky-cam view of a city street, the video obviously having been shot on a cell phone's camera. Although it was dark, the street lights were illuminating the snow on the ground, along with that which was still falling from the sky. The camera panned along the length of an eighteen-wheeler truck which was jack-knifed at an intersection. 9-News had pixelated the front of the truck. At first Padilla thought it was to blur out the license plate, standard practice for television, but he soon realized that it was because there was something stuffed under the truck that didn't belong there. To his practiced eye, that something was suspiciously human-shaped.

  To the left of the truck, a man was hunched over another man, cradling him in his arms and rocking him gently. The cameraman (or woman, Padilla couldn't tell from the name alone) panned further left, to where an ambulance had come to a halt, its paramedic crew jumping out and striding purposefully toward the two men.

  Suddenly, the camera jerked sharply to the right. A body came sailing through the air, its arms and legs windmilling, to land in a crumpled heap on the snow. It had been thrown so forcefully that when it hit the ground, the body skidded across the ice like a bowling ball caroming straight down the middle of an alley.

  "Holy shit," Padilla whispered softly.

  "Yes sir," Alvers agreed. "Ain't no way an ordinary human being was responsible for that. So unless the Denver gangbangers are building themselves catapults and trebuchet..."

  "Point taken." The Supervisory Agent sighed. So much for peace and quiet over the holidays..."

  "What now, sir?"

  "Now, Dennis, you and I go to Denver and figure out what's what. My relief will be here any minute now. I'll brief her in on the situation while you check out a car from the motor pool. Make sure you get one that handles well in the snow, not some two-wheel drive piece of shit, okay?" Alvers nodded solemnly. "Great. Then I get the distinct pleasure of calling my wife and letting her know that I'm not gonna be home today..."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Frank Christensen had seen some shit in his time. You didn't get to be a career heroin and meth user and small-time dealer without running into your fair share of violence, particularly when turf wars erupted between competitors.

  Donnie was the brains of their own little outfit, the one who called all the plays and figured out when somebody had to be taken down a peg or two. Then it was up to Frank and that little fuckweasel Terry to take care of the light work, which usually meant jumping said unsuspecting competitor in a dark alley and delivering a beating they'd never forget. They'd also committed a couple of outright murders when the turf wars had gotten out of hand, one of them a drive-by shooting that had taken twenty-eight rounds of nine millimeter ammunition to score a single hit on the rival drug dealer's head, and the other a throat-cutting that came at the end of a five hour stalk. That guy had gotten falling-down drunk in one of Denver's shittier nightclubs, a dive named Ferretti's, before Frank had followed him into the men's room, kicked in the stall door while he was taking a shit, then cut his throat and shanked him eight times just to be sure.

  With the benefit of hindsight, Frank had to admit that it had been nothing short of fucking miraculous that he had gotten away with that last one. The checkered red shirt that Donnie had insisted he wear to hide any bloodstains had done its job well, but his hands were still shaking and covered in his victim's blood when he hooked open the restroom door with an elbow to avoid leaving fingerprints and headed back out into the nightclub, then did his best to saunter casually out with his hands buried deep in his pockets.

  Frank had spent the following three weeks expecting the cops to turn up and arrest him, but the knock at the door never came. It gradually dawned on him that he had, quite literally, gotten away with murder for the second time.

  But that didn't do anything to stop the nightmares.

  No matter how tired he was, every night when he lay down and closed his eyes, Frank found himself back in that men's room again, kicking in the shitter door and swiping the blade across his rival's throat, before plunging it into his neck, chest, and belly, then darting away before getting any of the spurting blood on his face. It splashed across the front of his shirt, but that was easily missed in a dark nightclub with only strobe lighting to see by.

  His first murder, the shooting, had been as simple as having Terry help him to steal a car, screeching it to a halt outside his intended target's house, and emptying two clips' worth of ammo into the windows out front, then high-tailing it into the night. They'd gotten word of the man's death from the TV news the next day, never seeing the body for themselves.

  Knife work, on the other hand, was very different. As the victim slumped backward against the toilet, gushing blood from his throat and eight deep puncture wounds, his legs kicked and thrashed like those Irish fuckers doing Riverdance. His dancing feet skidded and smeared the blood that was pooling quickly at the base of the toilet, and Frank found himself standing back there each night in his dreams, standing in the cubicle doorway and simply watching the look of horror on his victim's face as the light of life left his eyes.

  Frank always woke up nauseated, his heart pounding fit to burst right out of his chest and his pulse racing through his body like a machine gun set to full auto. He could still smell the coppery scent of blood, lingering even after his eyes were open, could feel it sticking his fingers together where they had been gripping the knife's handle. The dead man's eyes, always accusatory, haunted him whether he was awake or asleep, provoking a sensation as close to guilt as Frank was still capable of feeling.

  When the vengeful female apparition came at him out of the dark, her curvaceous naked body spattered with blood, the drug addict simply froze. His mind went into vapor lock, transfixed by the horrific sight. It was the girl, he realized, the one he had taken at knifepoint as a target of opportunity. She was dressed like a prostitute, despite the sub-zero temperatures tonight, and obviously begging for a little male attention. The way he had figured it, he and the boys would have their fun with her, and then depending on her reactions after the fact, would either send her on her way again with a pat on the ass and a cheery wave, or make good on their threat and disappear her for good.

  Now all of that was out of the window. When Donnie had led the girl up here to fuck her brains out, she had looked suitably nervous and willing to please, maybe even eager. But now the look on her face was one of sheer spite. It wasn't until she was practically right on him that Frank realized he had been taken in by a wolf in sheep's clothing.

  The naked girl reached for him with outstretched arms. Frank tried to step back, and it was only when his left foot stepped backward into empty air that he realized there was only the staircase behind him. Arms flailing, he grabbed for the handrail, his fingers closing around it in a death grip. The bannister was rickety and shook, but it held. Not that it was much cause for relief, because the girl's hands were still reaching for him; she jammed her fi
ngers into his mouth, top and bottom, and began to prise his jaws apart. He caught a glimpse of them, just for an instant, and what he saw made his eyes widen still further: rather than the soft, perfectly manicured nails that he had seen when he had first taken the girl captive, Frank now saw jagged, bony protrusions that were fractured at the ends, poking through the flesh of her fingers.

  Still grappling with the handrail, he had no way to fight her off. Her nakedness, something he would ordinarily have found alluring but now struck him as terrifying and creepy, was pushed up against him, and that's when Frank realized that her breasts were smearing hot, fresh blood across the front of his shirt.

  Whose blood...?

  Donnie's. It had to be. The bitch had killed Donnie...

  The thought barely had time to settle in before Frank suddenly found himself with much bigger things to worry about. The girl's fingertips were anchoring themselves against his teeth. In addition to their horrific appearance, there was also something odd about the way they felt, as though she had dipped them in a bucket of ice before inserting them into his mouth.

  "Oh Francis," the girl purred seductively, her rich, full lips pouting, "Why don't you want to kiss me? Don't you find me attractive?"

  That was when her face changed. Not slowly, but in an instant, taking no longer than the blink of an eye. All of a sudden, the beautiful, heart-shaped face with milky skin and cheekbones like finely-cut crystal was replaced by a vision of such grotesque ugliness that Frank screamed from between her probing fingers. The face had been pounded into a bloody pulp, bludgeoned by a blunt object of some kind; then, once the initial damage had been done, the bludgeoner had taken something sharp to the remains, hacking and slicing at the facial features until sections of skull and tendon were visible through what was left of the flesh.