Fall of Man (Book 1): The Break Read online

  “Of course not. Everyone knows Cole Ristler only drinks Chianti.”

  They walked to the door, Cole looking back at his office one last time. He had everything he needed—which was to say, nothing he couldn’t carry with him at the moment. Besides, everything he “needed” was at home. With Emily. Everything else, in this cold space, could be co-opted by the person who took over his role.

  “About the company name,” Roger was saying.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, RistWorks won’t work anymore now that you’re gone.”

  “RogerWorks?”

  Roger chuckled. “That has a ring to it.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Roger laughed even harder. “Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t.” Then, making a gesture that he wanted Cole to believe he hadn’t been thinking about it ever since Cole made his intention to sell his stake in the company known, “What about RogWorks? That’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

  Cole didn’t think it did, but Roger was a good friend, so he said, “RogWorks. That could work.”

  When Cole opened his eyes, the Mercedes was frozen in place on one of the many cramped downtown streets. It wasn’t the side street that Donnie was supposed to have taken in order to get him back to Emily faster. Instead, the car was nose-to-back bumper with a white SUV, and neither vehicle was moving. The red taillights were faded under the dripping afternoon sun, and Cole could just barely make out the silhouette of a woman behind the bigger car’s driver’s seat.

  Except the streetlights three cars down weren’t red, but green, so there was no reason for them to not be moving.

  The back of Donnie’s head, just visible above the lowered headrest, was similarly frozen in place.

  Cole glanced down at his watch: 5:11 p.m.

  It was clear by the traffic around him that Donnie hadn’t been able to find that side street he’d promised to locate earlier. Or, if he had, then he’d returned to the main thoroughfare for some reason. Cole couldn’t even see the highway from here.

  He had been stuck in rush-hour traffic enough times to know that it shouldn’t have taken two hours for them to travel from his office to the highway, and, eventually, home. So what was going on up there? Some kind of accident? At this rate, it’d be nightfall by the time he got home to Emily.

  “Accident, Donnie?” Cole asked.

  There was no answer from up front.

  “Donnie?”

  Donnie continued looking silently out the front windshield, both gloved hands on the steering wheel, the back of his head still. Had he even heard a thing Cole had said? The kid was usually incredibly responsive. Sometimes too much.

  Cole looked out his window at a red Porsche in the next lane. The driver-side door was facing him, the man on the other side of the window oblivious to his gaze.

  Up the street, the lights switched from green to red.

  Cole waited for the cross traffic to show up, but they didn’t. He could, though, hear horns honking, so it wasn’t just him noticing that people weren’t driving when they were supposed to.

  He focused back on Donnie. “Donnie.”

  Nothing.

  “Donnie…”

  Still nothing.

  Then, louder, “Donnie!”

  Like shouting at a brick wall. For a moment, Cole thought the kid might have died or passed out. But no, he could actually hear Donnie’s breathing—it was slow and steady. Cole wouldn’t have been able to make it out if it wasn’t so quiet inside the car, the windows blocking out the sounds of traffic and the slow churning of the engine.

  The lights switched from red to green, and still no one moved.

  Not the SUV in front of them or the man in the Porsche in the other lane.

  Not Donnie, either.

  “Donnie…”

  Cole waited another five seconds.

  Then ten…

  …and still no one moved.

  The lights changed from green to yellow…

  He glanced to his left, expecting to see vehicles coming down the other side of traffic. But there weren’t any. The two lanes were empty.

  There was no movement outside, even though he could hear horns honking. More than one. A dozen. Two dozen. There were a lot of angry drivers out there, but not a single one of them was named Donnie and sitting behind the wheel of a Mercedes that was supposed to take Cole back home one final time.

  He glanced behind him.

  A large beat-up semi filled up the universe back there. Someone—someones—was honking their horns to get the semi moving, but the driver, like Donnie, couldn’t hear it. He seemed to be staring off at nothing. Certainly he didn’t see Cole looking at him.

  Cole turned back around. “Donnie.”

  No response.

  Cole leaned forward and between the two front seats. “Donnie!”

  That seemed to do it. Donnie lifted his head slightly, then slowly looked left, forward, before turning to his right—then he kept going until he had twisted completely around and was looking straight at Cole.

  That’s not right, Cole thought at the sight of Donnie’s eyes.

  They were large and bulging, flaring. Blood oozed from somewhere behind the eyes, draping around the eyeballs until it looked like the scleras were engulfed in a sea of thick, red fire that threatened to engulf the brown of Donnie’s irises and the black of his pupils. Razor-thin rivulets of blood dripped from both eyes and down his cheeks, then ran along the angles of his chin before dripping in small amounts to the armrest between the two front seats.

  Donnie’s breath had accelerated noticeably, and Cole swore he could hear the twenty-something’s heartbeat sledgehammering behind his chest, pumping an abnormal amount of blood to the rest of his body. That might have been why, when Donnie lunged into the back seat, reaching for Cole’s throat, he seemed to possess superhuman speed.

  That’s definitely not right!

  Cole reacted instinctively by jerking backward, and Donnie would have gotten ahold of him around the neck if not for the two front seats blocking his path. The driver’s body became stuck between the seats, and for a moment—just a brief, very odd moment—Cole thought he was looking at a child unable to understand the concept of barriers.

  “Donnie, what the fuck!” Cole shouted.

  Donnie didn’t answer. At least, not vocally. Instead, his lips twisted into a Joker-like smile, something Cole had never seen before.

  This wasn’t Donnie.

  This wasn’t Donnie anymore.

  “Donnie!” Cole shouted again, hoping to get through…whatever Donnie had become.

  With a snarling grunt, Donnie twisted his body and slid through the two front seats. Cole darted to the left and into the car door as Donnie deposited himself into the backseat with him.

  Cole spun around, shouted, “Donnie! Stop!”

  Donnie twisted at the waist, bloodied eyes zeroing in on Cole. There was nothing human in those eyes. Nothing that would lead Cole to believe there was once a kid named Donnie who called everyone sir and ma’am. No, this was someone else. Something else.

  A voice from somewhere in the back of Cole’s mind, that he hadn’t heard in a while, said, “He’s gone. Can’t you see he’s gone? Now what are you going to do about it?”

  Donnie attacked, throwing himself across the back seat like a wild animal. Cole didn’t have time to think. He just kicked out and caught the driver in the right shoulder with the sole of his loafer. The kick was strong enough to send the kid careening into the other side of the back seat.

  Not that it stopped him from spinning around like some kind of freakish contortionist, able to make his joints do impossible things even in the confines of the back seat. With something that almost resembled an animalistic growl, with thin tendrils of blood dripping down to the expensive upholstery from his eyes, Donnie lunged across the cramped back seat. His bloodied red eyes, Cole saw, had widened into almost perfect round circles, which should have been impossible.
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br />   “He’s going to kill you,” the Voice said. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  Cole struck out with his right arm, landing his sharp elbow into Donnie’s left cheek. That momentarily halted the kid’s forward momentum.

  But again, not for very long.

  Cole kicked out one more time, this time connecting with his driver’s bent right knee. A sickening crack! as something gave, and Donnie crumpled off the seat, face slamming into the hump between the two floors.

  “Donnie!” Cole shouted. “Stay down!”

  But the kid didn’t.

  “Stupid,” the Voice said. “Just kill him already.”

  No! Cole thought.

  “Do it!”

  No!

  “Just do it!”

  Cole hadn’t taken a breath before Donnie picked himself up from the floor. Blood flicked wildly from his eyes as he whipped his head right and left. A low, deep growl came out between cracked lips.

  Again, his eyes zeroed in on Cole.

  Fuck, Cole thought.

  “That’s right,” the Voice said. “It’s either you or him. So which one will it be?”

  Donnie attacked, hands stretching out for Cole’s throat.

  Cole smashed the heel of his left hand into the kid’s face, heard the crunch! of the nose breaking. He followed it with his right, driving the knuckles into Donnie’s left pectoral, which seemed to stun his attacker for half a second.

  Just half a second, though.

  But it was all the time Cole needed to cock back his left hand and, using the door behind him to push off with, drove forward and sent his elbow straight into the side of Donnie’s neck. That produced another satisfying crack! as bone broke under the assault.

  Donnie fell sideways and to the right, slumping back to the floor of the Mercedes a second time. Except he didn’t get immediately back up. His eyes stared blankly up at the pristine ceiling of the car, the pooling blood around his eyes turning the windows into his soul into some kind of grotesque domino mask.

  Cole spun, reached for the door lever, and pulled it.

  He stumbled outside into the crisp evening air, and it took him exactly three seconds to realize he might have been better off staying inside the Mercedes.

  Chapter 3

  The car almost hit him as it roared past the intersection. At the same time, the streets around him came to life, almost as if it’d been on pause all this time as he fought for his life against Donnie inside the Mercedes. But now that someone had pressed the play button, the world came suddenly awake in a heartbeat, and everyone—and everything—suddenly snapped back to life.

  And it was a glorious and bloody life.

  Cole couldn’t have jumped out of the vehicle’s path if he’d wanted to, because he was too busy watching a homeless man hitting another man in an expensive three-piece suit with a beer bottle. It didn’t take long for the bottle to break and thick streams of blood to flit across the pavement.

  “Deader than a doorknob,” the Voice said inside his head.

  The Voice.

  The Voice!

  The persistent Devil on his shoulder. It was a blast from the past, one that Cole had done everything possible to forget. He was not the man he used to be, so the Voice hadn’t been necessary. It didn’t belong in civilized society, and for the longest time, the Voice had slept.

  The Devil had slumbered.

  But it’d awoken. Cole remembered hearing it back in the Mercedes, when he had killed poor Donnie.

  “Stop daydreaming, and move!” the Voice shouted.

  Cole did move, and just in time too, as another car came right at him. It clipped his right leg as it somehow managed to swerve around him at the last second, making a wide arc before smashing into a street lamp. The front hood crumpled, and the driver-side door opened as a woman wearing just one high heel, blood running down her forehead and over a silk blouse, stumbled outside. She glanced around for a moment, grabbing at her bleeding head, when she locked eyes with Cole.

  The woman started to say something when a figure leaped out of the opened driver-side door and knocked her to the ground. Cole started to move forward to help, when the attacker, who was much smaller than the woman, straddled the driver and began digging into her eyes with her fingers.

  The woman screamed.

  Cole didn’t know whether to run to help or flee. He was stuck between two possibilities—

  “Run!” the Voice said.

  Cole didn’t run. He couldn’t. How could he? He wasn’t a coward, and this woman needed his help. She was having her eyes gouged out by a girl that couldn’t have been more than thirteen, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she was digging, digging her thumbs into the woman’s eyes.

  Cole didn’t hear the eyeballs pop, but he saw the streams of blood from twenty meters away. The woman let out a pained scream, and Cole began running toward them when the girl picked up the woman’s head and drove it back down—again, and again—into the pavement.

  Blood. More blood. So much blood.

  “What are you doing? Run away, not toward them! She’s a goner! Deader than a doorknob!”

  The stupid Voice. Emily had helped him to calm it, but it was back now. He hated it, because it reminded him of another time, another place.

  Another him.

  Shut up, Cole told it.

  “You need me,” it said.

  No, I don’t.

  “Yes, you do. I’ll prove it.”

  The woman had stopped screaming and now lay still, and it didn’t take the girl long to understand that her victim was dead.

  Cole stopped ten meters from them and watched the small figure climb off the bigger woman and turn around. Now that he could see her face, Cole noticed the resemblance between the girl and the dead woman. They could have been mother and daughter.

  But that wasn’t what commanded Cole’s focus. It was the girl’s face. Streams of blood, like fingers, stretched from the corners of bloodshot eyes.

  Just like Donnie’s eyes, earlier…

  Cole started to turn away from the girl when something broadsided him and knocked him to the ground. He landed on the slightly cool pavement and looked up to find a hulking figure, dirty cap covering a sweaty, reddened face. Bulging red eyes—the bloodied scleras, like lakes of blood surrounding shrinking irises and pupils—zeroed in on him.

  Like Donnie…

  Like the girl…

  Shit. I’m in trouble.

  “You think?” the Voice said.

  Shut up!

  With the bigger body crushed against him, Cole could feel every thundering heartbeat from the other man. Those sledgehammering heartbeats were sending adrenaline through every inch of the man’s body. The speed. The strength. The things that made Donnie nearly unstoppable, until Cole broke his neck, was all adrenaline. Cole knew that now.

  “Kill him. It’s either that, or let him kill you!” the Voice said. “Kill or be killed! Just like old times!”

  I told you to shut up!

  The Voice laughed. “You don’t mean that.”

  Yes, I do!

  “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  It was the truck driver. The same one that had been staring out the windshield of his semi moments ago as it was parked behind the Mercedes. The man’s beefy fingers reached for Cole’s face, the thumbs going for his eyes, even as the thick lips twisted into a nasty snarl. Nothing that even resembled humanity shone on his face.

  Cole swung, striking the much bigger man (the guy had at least five inches and a solid 100 pounds of fat on him) in the side of the neck with his elbow. He had learned his lesson with Donnie, and Cole went straight for the kill shot with the first strike.

  “That’s my boy!”

  Shut up!

  “You need me!”

  I said, shut up!

  But unlike with Donnie, this time Cole met resistance—too much fat. The blow did stun the driver for a moment. Just a moment, before the ma
n resumed reaching for Cole’s eyes again a half-second later. At the same time, the man’s bulk kept Cole pinned to the street.

  He was fat. And big. Shit, he was fat and big!

  Cole struck his target again, and again—and again—aiming for the same spot and waiting, waiting to hear the telltale crack! of the neck bone breaking. But he didn’t hear it on the second or third or even fourth blow, and now the driver’s greasy fingers had grabbed ahold of Cole’s face, and those same sausage-like thumbs were searching for a weak spot, even as the corners of the man’s lips curved into a giggling smile. Thin streams of blood flicked out of the man’s eyes and onto Cole’s face, drip-drip-dripping against his forehead, then nose, then cheek.

  “Are you going to take this?” the Voice asked.

  No…

  “So do something about it.”

  I’m trying…

  “Do it, or don’t do it! Stop trying!”

  A wild animal scream as the girl who had killed the older woman (Her mother? That had to be her mother. Jesus Christ, she just crushed her mom’s head into the pavement!) jumped onto the truck driver’s back and began biting his neck. A thick stream of blood arced through the air as the girl’s teeth came away with a chunk of flesh. That, more than anything Cole had done, made the big man relinquish his hold on Cole and scramble to his feet.

  And Cole was free!

  “Not for long, if you don’t get the hell out of here!” the Voice said.

  Cole rolled away, thankful he could finally breathe again. He sat up just in time to see the driver reach back with one large hand, grab the girl by the head—it looked like an NBA player palming a smaller-than-regulation basketball—and lifted the girl off him. She had been going for a second bite when he snatched her off. She never made it, as the big man slammed her into the street, swinging her body as if she were a rag doll.

  The girl let out a sound that didn’t quite resemble pain as she came into contact with the hard pavement. Not that the truck driver let go. He sat down on her much, much smaller body and began striking her face with both balled fists. All the while, a maniac’s smile formed on his face. Blood gushed out of the hole in the side of the big man’s neck, some joining the thick pools splattering the street around the girl’s pulverized face.