Devil's Keep by Phillip Finch Read Free Book Online Page A

Sarah Jean had ever heard, a long scream, sheer terror piercing the night.
    One of the three Demons drove a fist into Wallace’s gut. Wallace folded and crumpled.
    Sarah Jean got out and ran. She headed toward the far end of the campground, the dark end. The bikers and the campfire were at her back. She was running toward the last place she had seen the crazy climber guy before he disappeared into the woods with his sleeping bag. She was thinking that she would have to search through the woods, shout for him and stumble around in the darkness.
    But no. He emerged from the pines before she got there.
    He said, “Is she playing?”
    “No way,” Sarah Jean said.
    He ran to his truck, opened the door, took out ametal baseball bat from behind the front seat. Seeing this, something in the way he held the bat, Sarah Jean got a funny feeling. A good feeling. That he was not a ballplayer but that the bat was there just for a time like this, and he had an idea how to use it.
    He took off at a lope toward the campfire.
She’s in the van,
Sarah Jean wanted to say, but then Missy screamed again, and there was no question about where she was or what was happening to her.
    Sarah Jean ran after him. She saw the three Demons poising for a fight, one of them holding a length of chain that reached from his waist almost to the ground.
    The climber kept moving toward the three bikers, now just a few strides short of where they stood.
    The Demon with the chain stepped forward and whipped it in a vicious chest-high arc. The climber dropped in mid-step, ducked under its sweep, rolled. He popped up in a crouch, suddenly behind them, and swung the bat, one-handed, and caught one of the three behind a knee.
    The biker fell as if shot through the heart.
    The chain swinger turned around, drew his arm back for another swing. From down in his crouch the climber sprung up, the bat in both hands, holding it upright. He drove it straight up, the thick end finding a spot beneath the chain swinger’s jaw as if it belonged there, then continuing upward, jacking the Demon’s head back at an impossible angle.
    Down he went.
    The third one—
    The third one had a knife. He was coming in from behind, blocked from the climber’s view, slashing the knife up as the chain swinger’s body fell away. The tip of the blade swept across the climber’s upper torso. To Sarah Jean this looked like something from a ballet, choreographed, the biker’s momentum twisting him around, the climber leaning away to avoid the knife, somehow keeping his balance, then bringing the bat around and shoving it forward so that the knob at the handle connected with the back of the biker’s skull. It was almost a gentle tap, controlled and precise.
    Down he went, number three.
    The climber turned toward the van.
    The biker women were squealing. Their screeches brought the last two from the van. They came out one after the other, almost too easy. One popped out to look—the bat smashed down across the back of his shoulders, and he tumbled out in a heap. The second one appeared. The climber grabbed him by the hair and pulled him out and rode him, shoving him toward a flat piece of granite embedded in the earth. Sarah Jean was running hard, going for the back of the van, and she was close enough to hear the crunch of bone as the last Demon’s face smashed into the stone.
    The climber’s shirt was torn along a diagonal that the knife had traveled, and blood was spreading from a cut. He spun, looked back at the three on the ground.
    No, Sarah Jean saw. Two on the ground. One wasrising to his knees, coming up with a pistol in one hand, a black revolver that he brought up at the end of his arm, pointing it at the climber.
    Sarah Jean couldn’t say exactly what happened next. At least ten or twelve feet separated the two men. Three good strides. Up came the gun, the climber spun and looked down the barrel. And then…
    … then the climber exploded into some wild fast-forward version of