Frankenstorm:Deranged

Book 4: Frankenstorm

by Ray Garton

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Women And Children First In the fourth shattering installment of Ray Garton's six-part Frankenstorm, an outbreak of madness, mayhem, and murder has every man, woman and child running for shelter. But home is where the horror is. . . Frankenstorm Andy is more than a little worried when his ex-wife—a former drug addict who has custody of their son—is seen hanging around with her old crowd. But when he learns that her dealer has moved in with them, Andy has no choice but to take action. He finds an unlikely ally in Police Deputy Ram von Pohle—a local bully who tormented Andy in school. Ram swears he wants to make up for those years of abuse. He convinces Andy that the raging storm is the perfect opportunity to break in to his ex-wife's home and save Andy's boy. But when the weather reaches a fever pitch, their simple plan backfires. The night quickly escalates into a bloodbath. Ram explodes with rage, bodies are torn apart by bullets, and Andy and his son find themselves trapped inside a nightmare. . .with a deranged sadist. When the storm hits this close to home, no one is safe. And no one gets out alive. . . Praise For Ray Garton "Scary. . .involving. . .mature and thoughtful." —Stephen King on Dark Channel "Gripping, original, and sly." —Dean Koontz on Live Girls "Ray Garton is, and always has been, one of horror fiction's great innovators."—F. Paul Wilson "Garton never fails to go for the throat!" —Richard Laymon "Garton has a flair for taking veteran horror themes and twisting them to evocative or entertaining effect." — Publishers Weekly "Razor-sharp and gut-punch brutal, Garton will scare you." —Mark Kidwell, Fangoria magazine "Garton does not even know that there is top to go over." —Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column "Ray Garton has consistently created some of the best horror ever set to print." — Cemetery Dance magazine 17,500 Words

Release date: February 4, 2014

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 53

Sample

Quentin ripped through Humboldt County like a horde of demons.

The roof of the café and gift shop at the Sequoia Park Zoo was peeled off the building. The roar of the wind could not drown out the cries of the animals in the zoo—the hooting and howling of gibbons, the shrieking of birds. The storm destroyed much of the Barnyard petting zoo, flattening fences and tearing down porticos.

The Old Town Shelter was the only part of Old Town that had not been evacuated. The police knew they wouldn’t be able to get all the homeless out of the area. They had hiding places where they would lay low to avoid having to move. Most of them were scared of the police and hid from them. They were suspicious of relocations and especially evacuations. The shelter remained open for those who would inevitably come out of their hiding places and need food and shelter from the storm.

It was in a white clapboard building in a First Street storefront. It had been a flophouse back in another time. Now it stood between a restaurant supply store and FleshArt Tattoos and Piercing in the most consistently disheveled and run-down part of Old Town.

It was dark and crowded inside. Much of the light they had came from kerosene lanterns and battery-operated lights positioned here and there, stable and unwavering, but the rest came from flashlights and handheld lanterns and flew all over the place as the lights were moved around. Someone led them in singing old campfire songs they remembered from Boy Scouts and summer camps, while waxed paper cups of hot chocolate were handed out.

Something crashed into the front of the building with a sound that some would later describe as a bomb going off. It was a power pole, but it did not fall into the building—it was hurled into the building like a missile. It slammed into one of the front pillars in the old building as sparks flew from two overturned kerosene lanterns. The explosive crash was immediately followed by the screaming of voices in pain.

Flashlight beams cut through the dark and converged on the damage.

Someone shouted, “Get that lantern! It’s burning!”

And then there were flames, and screaming, and a frantic explosion of movement.

The steeple of St. Bernard’s Church was sheared off at the base and thrown several blocks, where it crashed through the roof of a sewing machine store and repair shop.

A twenty-three-foot-long Airstream Flying Cloud was lifted from the Redwood Empire RV and Motorhome Park and flung a distance of two miles by the storm, until it crashed and slid loudly through a Safeway grocery store parking lot, spraying sparks as it gouged the pavement.

It was a night when more than rain was falling from the sky and the wind was out for blood.

A single pair of headlights moved cautiously through the street, slowly up one block, then down another, fighting the wind, easing through the downpour, as if searching the streets for something....

Sheriff Mitchell Kaufman worried about his blood pressure as he drove through the storm. He was so tense at the wheel that the muscles of his back, neck, and shoulders burned and his chest felt tight. His blood pressure was probably high and climbing. His cholesterol level probably felt pretty good about itself in comparison.

His patrol car was rocked and jostled by the wind as he drove slowly through the eastern part of town. Farther west, closer to the bay, much of the town was already flooding. Even here, the gutters had become creeks.

Kaufman had lived in Eureka his whole life. With a population of a little more than 27,000, it was the biggest coastal city in the state north of San Francisco, but it was still a rural town more than a 160 years after its founding. As sheriff, Kaufman’s responsibility was the entire county of Humboldt, which was home to nearly 135,000 people. Tonight, with the power outages and flooding and other damage done by the hurricane, all of those people would be a lot more stressed than usual, which meant that Kaufman’s department and Eureka’s police department were going to be busier than usual.

Kaufman was old enough to remember the Columbus Day Storm of 1962. His little brother had been born only a month earlier and Kaufman was almost six years old. It turned out to be one of the most powerful cyclones ever recorded in the United States in the twentieth century. He remembered his father driving them to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, a big Victorian in McKinleyville with a dark, musty basement that young Kaufman refused to enter alone. They spent the entire storm huddling in that drafty basement in the flickering light of kerosene lanterns. It was fun and terrifying all at once—fun because it was a new and exciting experience and terrifying because of the constant, violent sound of the howling storm trying its best to get at them. As h. . .