Terrifier 2

CHAPTER ONE

Dr. Seth Bolton was having one absolutely shit-tastic night.

Being a coroner was never a laugh fest, but today had been especially grim. A family of four-parents in their thirties and their two young children-had died in their sleep the previous night. The wife's mother had stopped by her daughter's house to drop off a batch of ghost-shaped sugar cookies she'd made for the kids to celebrate Halloween. When she found the door locked, she tried calling, but her daughter didn't answer. Mom had a key for emergencies, so she opened the door, went inside, and called out their names, but there was no response. Frantic, she searched through the house, and she found everyone in their beds. At first, she thought they were asleep, but when she couldn't rouse any of them, she realized the terrible truth. They were all dead.

She called 911, police rushed to the scene, and after giving the victims a quick once-over, they called the Coroner's Office. Seth answered the phone.

"Got four cold ones for you," the officer who called had said. Despite his profession-or perhaps because of it-Seth didn't appreciate that kind of dark humor, but he said nothing, just took down the address and waited for the EMTs to deliver the bodies. It took two trips, but an hour later, the entire deceased family was in Seth's lab, lying on gurneys, zipped up in body bags, covered by white sheets. Seth was confident the family had died of carbon monoxide poisoning-the cops on the scene said there were no CO detectors in the house-but he still had to conduct autopsies to prove it, on the kids as well as the parents. That had taken a total of eight hours.

He was looking forward to getting the hell out of here, hitting a drive-thru on the way home to pick up dinner, watching a little TV, and going to sleep early for change. But just as he was about to leave, he got another call.

A middle-aged man had dropped dead at a local bar. He and his friends had been debating the Giants' chances for the season, when he broke off in the middle of a sentence-eyes wide, features frozen-and slipped off his bar stool. Seth figured the poor bastard was probably dead before he hit the floor, most likely from a heart attack or an aneurysm. But since the cause of death couldn't be determined at the scene, the man won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Coroner's Office.

The office was criminally short-staffed at the moment, too. One of the other two docs who worked there was out on maternity leave, and the third had quit to take a job as a pathologist in a hospital, and Seth hadn't had time to replace him. This meant Seth was doing the work of three people, so rather than putting the new corpse on ice until the morning, he decided to stay late and perform the autopsy, so he wouldn't be so backed up tomorrow.

Big mistake.

As he was finishing up with the barfly, yet another call came in.

A dead woman had been found in a dumpster behind a nail salon. Her clothes were on backward and inside out, and it appeared that most of the bones in her body had been broken. Another bizarre death, another guest at Chateau de Coroner. By this point, it was almost midnight, and Seth said fuck it, brewed another pot of coffee, and got to work on the woman soon after she arrived.

When he finished, it was around 3:00 a.m. Too late to go home since the day shift would start in a few hours, but maybe he'd be able to catch a few Zs in his office before then, provided no one else in this fucking town died in mysterious circumstances before 9:00 a.m.

He'd settled into his office chair, put his feet on the desk, leaned back, closed his eyes. and the goddamn phone rang again. A number of grisly murders had taken place in an abandoned warehouse on the west side of town. When Seth asked the cop on the line how many a "number" was, she'd said, "A lot-and they're bad, Doc. Really bad."

Seth had sighed as he hung up the phone. So much for sleep.

So now here he was, alone with what the nightshift EMTs-Roman and Elston-assured him were only the first bodies recovered from the warehouse massacre. At least two more would be coming. Seth wished he'd listened to his father and gone to law school. Elston had promised to bring him a breakfast sandwich-with bacon. That was something.

Time to open the presents they'd brought him.

He unbuckled the restraints that kept the victim's corpse secured to the gurney, donned a pair of rubber examination gloves, then unzipped the brown body bag just enough so he could get a look at the man's face.

"Jesus."

With the exception of the left eye-which remained intact-his entire face had been reduced to ragged, raw meat. There were cavernous holes where the right eye and nose had been, the lower jaw was shattered and hung at an angle, and only a few teeth remained visible in the violated flesh.

Seth remembered what Elston had told him.

You're probably going to have to identify this poor bastard by his teeth-if you can dig them out of the back of his skull.

He'd thought the EMT had been exaggerating. If anything, the kid had understated the severity of the man's injuries.

Seth looked up and stared at the second body bag, lying on a gurney several feet away. The killer was in there. Elston had said the fucker had killed himself rather than be taken into police custody, but Seth thought the man had gotten off too lightly. Anyone who could do something like this to another human being-he gazed back down at the victim's red, wet ruin of a face-deserved to be punished, to suffer, for a long time. Seth didn't believe in Heaven or Hell, but at times like this, he wished he did. It would be a comfort to know this man's killer was roasting in the fires of damnation for all eternity.

He sighed. At least the maniac could never hurt anyone else.

"Let's have a look at the man of the hour."

He zipped up the victim's body bag, concealing the ravaged face once more. Seth wasn't squeamish-not after twenty-two years on the job-but that didn't mean he enjoyed gazing at mangled meat and crushed bone any longer than he had to.

He walked over to the second gurney, undid the straps, and unzipped the bag. Before opening it all the way, he looked down at the spot where the killer's head was hidden.

"I hope your fifteen minutes of fame was worth it, you sick son of a bitch."

He pulled the bag open-

-and immediately drew back in surprise.

The motherfucker was dressed like some kind of goddamn demon clown. Why hadn't Roman and Elston given him a heads-up? Maybe they'd just forgotten; or maybe they'd decided to treat ol' Doc to a little trick tonight. Jerks. God, he hated working on Halloween.

He leaned forward to examine the killer's face more closely.

The killer wore a bloodstained white skull cap that covered his head and ears, and his face was covered with white makeup. Black makeup encircled his lips and mouth, and formed cartoonishly thin crescent eyebrows that reached up to his forehead. He didn't appear to have any actual eyebrows. Had he shaved them? He had a long, hooked, witch-like nose-complete with a small black wart-like dot on the tip-sharp, protruding cheekbones, an exaggerated brow ridge, and a thick, prominent chin. At first, he assumed these features were merely more makeup, rubber appliances affixed to the man's face with some kind of adhesive. And yet, they looked like real flesh, bone, and cartilage. Seth couldn't escape the feeling that if he were to reach out and gently pinch the end of the killer's nose, he'd find it wasn't a prosthetic at all.

The fucker stank, too. He smelled of blood-both fresh and congealed. And his body odor was so strong, it was like he regularly bathed in sewer water.

The worst part was the killer's teeth. The mouth was stretched in a wide orifice, revealing swollen black gums and rotting teeth, slick with blood. The mouth looked as if it belonged to some loathsome deep-sea creature rather than a man, and it gave him a disturbingly inhuman appearance.

He could only see a bit of the clown's costume-a ruffled white collar (stained with blood, of course) and a tiny black top hat he wore at a jaunty angle on the left side of his head, held in place by an elastic strap that reached beneath his chin. He supposed the hat was meant to add a touch of whimsy to the outfit, but all it did was make the bastard seem even more creepy.

There was something else about the man, too, something Seth couldn't quite put his finger on. Even dead, he exuded an aura of menace, of violence waiting to erupt at any moment, like a powerful thunderstorm on the verge of letting loose. It was an unsettling feeling, and he didn't like it.

Seth had been so fascinated by the man's bizarre appearance that he'd momentarily forgotten to examine his injuries, and he did so now. The right eye was gone, and since he saw no obvious signs of it being cut or pulled out, he assumed it had been pushed out by great force.

He blew his brains out before they could take him in, Elston had said.

Seth saw no obvious wounds to the head, so he assumed the clown had jammed the gun muzzle into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The force of the blast could've forced the right eye out of its socket, and the exit wound would most likely be in the back of the head. Shooting himself that way would account for the blood on his teeth, too.

Police found him eating the face off some girl...