Placing up right here Chapter One of my Work-in-Play for your perusal. Enjoy and let me know what you think. Sequel to The Sub-TerraneanS ...
RANDOM VIOLENCE
An
Abe Stroud Bloodscreams Series Title #6
Robert
W. Walker writing as Geoffrey Caine
ONE
]
Dear Abraham –
There is a family of demonic origin - that has been set loose in
the world by the demon of demons himself, Satan. These are humans turned to his
evil cause, and the primary reason for Random Violence. The other bloodlines
that produce genius and progress in the world, compassion and social concerns
as well as the arts are targets for the Vdoq who survive generation after
generation - infiltrating the weaker-minded among the human race. Some Vdoq
become were-creatures, others vampires, still others sheer maniacs. The Devil
may take a pleasing form or not.
From a letter written to Abraham Stoker, author of Dracula, from Elias Stroud, devoted
grandfather.
Abraham Stroud’s mind reeled even as he swept out
his .38 police special, realizing that his weapon was no match for the Uzi he
faced. In that same instant, the staccato blasts of the automatic sliced the
body of the man who’d been pinned atop the hood of Stroud’s police cruiser—literally
sliced in two across the waist. The two parts of the poor devil slid off the
hood in separate directions, one at the grill, the other body part at the passenger side
front tire. Both parts of the man left a slug-trail of blood in each wake.
Stroud at first thought it all a dream, a nightmare
hanger-on from his days as a Chicago cop, long before he was given the
wherewithal to follow his dreams of being an archaeologist instead. But this was
neither dream nor nightmare. This was altogether different as he found himself
inside the mind and body of another cop and this was real time, happening now.
Stroud had somehow become the cop in danger as he inhabited the man’s body at
this crucial, dangerous moment.
That’s how he saw it even as he leapt from his car
when first he’d stopped at the traffic light and the two men outside the
cruiser wound up fighting against his—or rather Lt. Detective John Random’s
car.
In a flash of thought that only the human mind could
accomplish, Random—and so too Stroud—replayed it all in his head in a
millisecond where they now crouched
behind the vehicle. Stroud saw the lettering on the cruiser, which read: Teays Valley/Hurricane Police Department –
We Aim to Serve.
Stroud learned in rapid secession that Detective
John Random had just gone off duty, and his mind had joyfully wandered to his
two little girls, and John Junior, now playing Pop-Warner football. It had been
then that Random had first realized the explosion of violence out his
windshield. One man, a slim, angular Abe Lincoln in torn jeans and a long black
overcoat on a warm night just looked sinister.
Random had caught the devil’s look in the man’s eyes
as the assailant had shoved the second man across Random’s hood when Random had stopped for a red light. A
small, impish man was being pummeled viciously by the tall beardless Lincoln
fellow.
Random had leapt from his car, his gold shield held
out before him like a cross presented to a vampire. Random had left the engine idling, the
headlights working just fine. He believed a good shout and a scare would break
up this nonsense and send the attacker running. Such bold and loud action
typically worked with lowlifes.
It turned out it wasn’t to be as simple as that—and
Random, along with Stroud, ciphered this fact the moment they simultaneously saw
the muzzle of a black weapon rise from out of the dark overcoat. Stroud was
sharing the same eyesight, the same touch, the same loss of breath, odors,
sounds, and fear as Random now. Stroud as Random and Random as Stroud thought
the muzzle of the weapon looked like the head of a cobra rising from a basket.
Random had figured the overcoat in the valley in May
was for shoplifting; no doubt about it, but he didn’t figure on a concealed
weapon of this nature, but here it was, before him. He gave a thought to his
wife and children while staring at the damnable ugly end of the
state-of-the-art Uzi. Yes, like the head of a cobra.
“Now just
keep cool, and all three of us will go home tonight to our loved ones,” Random said
to the gun as much as to the man wielding it, this ‘cocaine cowboy’. Under the headlights, the man’s features
proved dark, pock-marked with two rocks of coal for eyes—eyes set far back
below a shaggy cliff for a brow.
“Ju
got people, I dunt got nobody,” said the attacker, whose accent marked him as
Hispanic, possibly Cuban or Columbian. Impossible to be sure, as the area was
home to both, despite the majority white population.
Random held up both
hands, and Stroud worried about his hands being so far from his weapon. “No
need for this to go any further, amigo.”
“I
am not your amigo! Do ju know me? No, and I dunt know ju neither, so shut that
shit up, man!”
“You’re
hardly out of your teens, aren’t you?” Random asked. “You finish high school?”
“Shut
up, old man!”
Stroud realized that time was not the same in astral
journey as he was on, not while inhabiting another being. This incident may
well have all happened a day ago, a week, a year. There was no telling.
Meanwhile, sequences from Random’s mind to Strouds jumped like bad reception.
Random had just turned thirty-six and thought of
himself as eighteen. The little squirrely guy had wiggled out of the attacker’s
grasp, and groaning in pain, climbed higher on the hood as if trying to get
behind Random for protection.
Random then said, “No
need for any more violence, young fellow. Tell me, what’s your name?” Random
had negotiated many a good outcome as a negotiator with the local PD, and he
was often called into nearby Charleston to help out there.
“Ju
don’t need my damn name.”
“All
right, Paco. I’ll just call you Paco and you can me John.”
“How
‘bout I call you Random!” the punk replied and opened fire on his victim there
on the hood, the torrent of bullets tearing the victim in two. Bullets went
through the dead man, tearing through the hood and pinging and ricocheting off
the engine block.
Random dropped to the ground the moment Paco opened
fire, but when the shooting stopped, hearing the gun jam, Detective Random rose
to fire on the assailant when his full attention fell on the victim, seeing his
now upper and lower torso disappearing over the front and passenger side of the
hood. Somewhere in back of his mind, the detective wondered how this murdering
SOB knew his name. In that single moment of hesitation, Paco opened fire on
Random as he dove for cover. A round hit Random and Stroud felt the searing
pain as it had torn through him as well.
John Random and Abe Stroud next heard the maniacal
laughter; together they heard the killer’s footsteps rounding the car to get to
Random where he lay helpless and bleeding from his check and from behind his
right ear where the slug had exited, leaving a hole large enough for an iPhone
to pocket.
“Now old-old man, Random, you can go to hell,” Paco said
in a sneering voice.
Random, in great pain, tried to turn over, feeling
his gun below him. If I can turn over like John Wayne in the old movies and
fire,” he was thinking when he heard and felt the second bullet rip through his flesh. Random mercifully
wafted off into a coma. He did so to the sound of Paco’s satanic laughter.
Paco was about to put another bullet into Random’s
head when a close-on siren sounded, followed by a second, along with the sudden
onslaught of strobe lights: two police
cars racing toward the scene from two directions.
Stroud, terrified at what might happen should Random
be killed outright with his astral body inside Random, trapped in a death
spiral, had released Random and he now hovered over the scene. He saw Paco race
off, taking his weapon with him, leaving behind his senseless act of seemingly
random violence behind. As he did so, Stroud heard the he ask in Spanish
something of the night sky, “Did I do good? I got Random. Now I want payback.”
Paco was not on a cellphone as he spoke. He seemed
to be speaking to some voice inside his head, like a man possessed. The night
sky failed to answer him. From the confusion on his face, Stroud guessed that the
voice or voices inside his head also failed to answer him. In an attempt to
understand the gunman’s motivation, Stroud’s astral self entered the killer as
he had entered John Random, but this time he was fully conscious and making the
decision himself. In Random’s case, some force outside him had sent him here.
“Ju
wanna take time, eh? Caution. I know, but I put two bullets in the hero.”
Paco had re-attached his Uzi to the interior of his
long coat. It anguished him that THEY had gone silent, but perhaps this was
THEIR way once a mission was carried out. Maybe the beings he only knew as Vdocqs
had to hold some sort of ritual or silent vigil when an enemy was killed…maybe,
just maybe, but who knew? Then a creeping little fear for his own life seeped
into his consciousness and Stroud shared his palpable fear.
Paco eyed a man walking a dog coming toward him. Jus’ a man and his dog, nothin’ to trouble
myself over. Didn’t see nothin’. Knows nothin’. Might’ve seen me talkin’ to
myself is all. No matter. Still…being close, the man had to’ve heard shots—
unless deaf. Maybe I need do this guy. Leave nothin’ to chance. No witness to
ID me in a lineup.
His fingers went for the still hot touch of his
weapon, but before Paco could whip his monster gun out, the dog—a German
shepherd that had morphed into a hound from Hades itself and leaped, knocking
Paco over and thrusting huge fangs into his throat. Stroud rushed from Paco’s
body as the hellhound ripped out Paco’s throat.
Hovering above the bloody scene, Abraham Stroud
recounted in his own mind what had happened. All in an instant, the old man had
released his hold on what appeared a harmless dog, and dragging the leash, the
monstrous hound devoured Paco’s throat. Actually, the single bite threw Paco
into a paroxysm of pain and trauma, and as he bled out, the dog walker stood
over him with the grin of a satanic imp.
“Yes, Mister Cruz, you
fulfilled your end of the bargain,” the impish fellow said, and then to the
hellish creature, “Dante, stop it now. Come away. You can’t be lapping up so
much. You know it makes you ill to do so.” Then the imp again addressed the dying
Mr. Cruz. “Now you can become one of us in spirit over flesh.”
Back at the scene of the shootings, uniformed police
had fanned out in an effort to locate the shooter. All this while EMS workers
were doing all in their power to save Detective Random. One said to his
partner, “I hear he was supposed to be promoted to captain status next week.”
“Won’t
be at that ceremony,” replied his partner.
“Think
he has a chance in hell?”
“Hard
to say. Sometimes when they go into coma like this,” the partner began and
shrugged, “it’s like the body’s way of shutting off the trauma. Hard to tell.”
“Coma…such
a weird thing.”
“Likely
the docs would’ve induced a coma if he hadn’t done it himself.”
“What
do you think goes on in a person’s head when he’s…you know…out there in
Coma-land?”
“Anyone’s
guess. Science knows shit about that landscape.”
“Wonder
about that, too,” said the first man.
“What’s
that?”
“How
it is that some people go into shock and die with such wounds, and others go
into coma and live?”
“Not
everyone who goes into coma lives either, Pat.”
“I
know, Steve…but some do.”
“This
cop-shooting across the country, and now here, in our city’s sucks man.”
The man’s partner,
nodding agreed. “It’s gotten like some kind of carnival game for the gangs.”
“It is getting old
fast.”
Loaded into the
emergency medical van marked Putnam County, on IV, the comatose John Random
found home, his wife, and his children. He had never felt so warmly welcomed,
so at home, and so alive. But it was as though there was something gnawing,
scratching at his door…at his consciousness. Some sort of danger and disharmony
wishing to be visited upon him, upon his family, upon his city, upon his
country, and perhaps upon his world. Yet a powerful opiate-like desire to focus
only on his family now overtook him, banishing the thing at the door of his
home here in the Teays Valley-Hurricane area, a bedroom community for both
Huntington and Charleston, West Virgina; a place that hadn’t seen a murder case
in six years.
“Where am I?” Stroud
had wondered when he first entered the comatose John Random where he had begun
his journey through Random’s mind. It had been Random, lying on the street,
bleeding and comatose who had astrally entered the shooter’s mind. Stroud had
only entered Random in his hospital bed where he remained in deep coma. All the
time that Dr.Abraham Stroud, archaeologist and vampire slayer, had seen and
felt the entire incident only through contact with the comatose patient’s
memories. Stroud knew it was time for him to pull free of Random—at least for
now. He did so with a swirl of questions left in his own mind.
