Thief of Souls

by Neal Shusterman

  He went out to his truck, a rusted old Ford that had seen him through the latter part of his life, then systematically he began to fill the many pockets and compartments of a hunting jacket he had picked up in Flagstaff. The various weapons all fit handily into the jacket—all except the Winchester 1300 he had taken from Mary Wahomigie. That he hid in a trash can closer to the stadium. The band played a familiar fight song, only the drums and brass instruments making it through the baffling of the crowded bleachers. He whistled the tune, trying to clear and purify his mind for the task at hand.

  Across the parking lot, a middle-aged man checked unhappily under the hood of his Corolla.

  “Engine trouble?” Radio Joe asked as he drew near.

  “Fuel pump, I think. Just had the damn thing fixed last month.”

  “Mind if I have a look?”

  “You a mechanic?” the man asked.

  “Electrician,” Radio Joe answered truthfully, “but I’ve fixed an engine or two.” He turned to the engine, but only so he could withdraw the hunting knife from his sleeve pouch.

  “What do you think?” the man asked, leaning over Joe’s shoulder.

  Radio Joe turned quickly and buried the knife to its hilt between the man’s upper ribs. It slid in silently. Then he twisted it ninety degrees, shredding his aorta and ventricle walls.

  The man gasped, and Radio Joe clasped his free hand over his mouth, pushing him back against the side of the car. “Out of respect for your devoured soul, I put this body to rest.” Thick blood, almost black in the dim light, pumped out between Radio Joe’s fingers, but he did not remove the knife. The man groaned, too weak to scream. Radio Joe took his hand from the man’s mouth, then cradled his head, gently helping him to the ground.

  “Shh,” he said. “Let it come peacefully.”

  The man gurgled out something that sounded like a question, and then went limp. Only then did Radio Joe pull the knife from his heart. He slipped the body into the back seat of the Corolla, then wiped his hands on the parking lot gravel.

  At the south end of the stadium, he followed a large woman into the ladies room, and strong-armed his way into her stall. She screamed instantly, alerting any occupants of the stalls around them.

  Sloppy, he thought, chiding himself. He had to be quick about this now, but the hunting knife would not do, for she had already begun to fight him, and her arms were longer than his. Instead he slid out the machete he had always used to slash overgrown weeds from his yard. A single hack to the woman’s neck silenced her, but set off a geyser of arterial blood that flooded the floor.

  “What’s going on in there?” demanded a woman in the next stall.

  Again Radio Joe cursed himself, for the element of stealth was the only advantage he had, and now it was gone.

  “Oh my God!” The woman beside them screamed as the floor tiles beneath her slowly grouted red.

  Radio Joe ran from the restroom, knowing he could not afford to give the body the respect it deserved. Things had exponentiated much too quickly, and he knew his next stop would have to be the trash can where he had stowed the Winchester.

  The concession stand was at the north end of the stadium, and was understaffed for the crowd the game had drawn. The line, fifteen deep, was filled with the type of diehard snack addicts who couldn’t have their game without hot dogs, popcorn, and beer. Radio Joe approached with the rifle by his side—but it was so odd and incongruous a thing, no one took serious notice of it until it was too late. He barged his way to the front of the line.

  “Hey, what’s up, Grandpa? Wait your turn!” said the teen behind him.

  There was a woman behind the counter with oversized earrings and bleached hair. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Please stand still,” said Radio Joe. He was so close that when he swung up the barrel of the rifle, it struck her on the chin. He pulled the trigger, and the woman’s expression of shock exploded into a spray of blood that seasoned the popcorn, and splattered into the cotton-candy drum, turning the wispy strands of whipped sugar a deep crimson.

  The first scream was his own, his mind recoiling from the grisly act just as powerfully as the rifle kicked. Radio Joe turned and fired into the chest of a brawny man beside him, as the screams began to erupt around him. Then he swung the gun around to a couple who had stopped short their approach to the concession, taking them out in two consecutive shots. In the stands, the band blared the school victory march, as the Chieftains scored another touchdown. The cheers from the crowd blended in with the screams.

  People close enough to see what had happened scattered from the concession area in a panic, dropping to the ground, crawling into any crevice available. But the panic only erupted in pockets, and those who were out of the concession’s sight line were slow to discover the danger. Joe slipped beneath the stands, where he had noticed a trio of teens drinking beer and listening to music. With his own breath coming out in wheezy cries of grief, Joe pulled out a pistol, and selected two of the three to take out, for those were the two who no longer had souls. The third one stood gawking for a moment at the holes in his dead comrades’ heads, then he ran for cover.

  The concession area was clear now, and word was beginning to make it to the stands that something was going on back there. Radio Joe came upon two young lovers hiding behind a Dumpster, terrified.

  “Please,” begged the girl. “Please don’t hurt us!” She wore her boyfriend’s class ring on a gold chain around her neck.

  “Take that off,” Radio Joe insisted.

  Quickly the girl took off the chain, and held it out to him.

  “Give it to him,” said Joe, “not me.”

  Not understanding why, the girl handed the ring on a chain to her boyfriend.

  “Save your ring for a girl who’s alive,” Radio Joe told the boy. “I mourn with you.” Then he raised his shotgun, and fired into the dark bull’s-eye of the girl’s right pupil.

  Radio Joe next headed toward the field, where panic had begun to take over. Under the bright lights of the field, his chosen targets were easy to spot as they raced from the stands—he had memorized their faces, and their clothes. His own sobs of anguish now ululated like war cries as he raised the rifle, and picked them off one by one.

  In the end, Radio Joe was harder to take down than the Toadlena quarterback.

  PARKER CHEE, THIRD DEPUTY in the quiet, uneventful town of Shiprock, knew he was sitting nostril-deep in crap as thick as quicksand. This was a big deal. The kind of small-town nightmare that drags in the media vultures. When it comes to carnage of this magnitude, they descend with such ferocity, the whole town would be picked apart by morning. Thirty-two dead in a rampage that appeared to be neither planned, nor random. There was some method behind the old man’s madness that no one could yet guess.

  “Damn shamans,” griped Sheriff Keedah. “They’re psychotic, every last one of them.” There was nothing worse in Chee’s book than a self-loathing Navajo. Keedah never missed an opportunity to berate his own people. Chee longed for the day Keedah was ousted, but in the meantime, Chee did his job, and kept a low profile. While most every other law enforcement officer in the Navajo nation dealt with the crime scene, Chee was charged with minding the prisoner until he was taken away for the type of big-time arraignment reserved for the truly notorious offenders.

  Chee found himself drawn to the old man in a sort of morbid curiosity he thought he’d gotten over in his five years on the force. He had seen his share of lunatics, but this old man didn’t fit the mold. He had a clarity about him that was almost as disturbing as his bloodbath.

  This massacre wasn’t the only disturbing thing that had happened this week. There had been a prelude. Chee had sensed a discomfort throughout the week with the citizens he came in contact with. It wasn’t everyone—just certain ones. Danny Yazzie, who he pulled over for speeding again; Addie Nahkai, who had a break-in; and more than a dozen others. Bad vibes—or more accurately, no vibes at all. Talking to them had been like
talking to a wall. It’s not that they weren’t listening—it’s that they weren’t there. Chee would have let it go—attribute it to stress, or too little or too much caffeine—except for the fact that many of those people were now dead.

  When the names of the dead began to come in, at first it seemed like coincidence, and then just plain creepy, that at least half of the people this crazy old man had singled out for execution had already made Chee’s “absentee” list.

  As Chee approached the holding cell, the old man, who identified himself only as “Radio Joe,” had calmly made the space his own. He had collected a host of dead flies and cockroaches from the corners of the cell and was now crushing them down into a fine black powder between his fingers.

  “Congratulations,” said Chee. “You’ve just guaranteed yourself the cover of this week’s Time.”

  No response from the crag-faced old man. He crumbled a beetle between his thumb and forefinger. Only now, as Chee came closer, did he see what the old man was doing. He was adding the pulverized exoskeleton to a fine-lined sand painting that was slowly expanding from the center of the cell.

  “You think that’s gonna save you from the gas chamber?”

  “Biye Gak misa dtaoopyu,” the old man said. “I do not fear death.”

  In spite of his advanced age, Keedah had roughed up the old man in the interrogation room. Now his face was bruised, lips bloated, yet still he offered no words, no explanation as to why he had brutally massacred more than thirty people.

  “If you have something to say, best to say it now,” Chee advised. “Before the feds come to take you away.”

  “Let them come,” said the old man, without looking up from his sand painting.

  Chee felt his fury rising, and approached the bars. “You killed innocent people, old man. Parents—children. Don’t you feel anything, you bastard?”

  The old man was unperturbed. “I killed no one.”

  “There were hundreds of witnesses—your prints are all over half a dozen weapons!”

  “You cannot kill what is already dead.”

  Chee swallowed hard. “Exactly what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “A shotgun leaves behind its spent shell. Worthless. Useless,” said the old man. “So does this Quíkadi. The ghost-devourer. The spirit chupacabra.”

  In any other circumstance Chee would have laughed at the suggestion. Chupacabra tales had been all the rage lately: red-eyed creatures that drained the blood of livestock. But what the old man was describing was not that same new-age vampire yarn. It was something completely different.

  “You’re telling me you follow this . . . creature?”

  “I clean the waste it leaves behind. I lay the dead to rest.”

  “You’re crazy, old man.”

  And for the first time, the man called Radio Joe looked up at him. He stood, coming forward, and suddenly Chee realized the bars held no protection for him.

  “Am I crazy?” asked Radio Joe. “You would not be here if you did not already know the truth.”

  Chee wouldn’t answer to that. Wouldn’t dare think about it. “This thing—what does it look like?”

  “It wears the body of a Hualapai,” Radio Joe said. “Twenty years old.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Both.”

  Chee took a step away, not even realizing he had done it. There had been such a specter in town the week before. They had picked him up on vagrancy, as Sheriff Keedah had zero tolerance for itinerants. When they found no reason to keep him, they let him go, but Chee kept an eye on him until he left town.

  “You’ve seen it, then,” said Radio Joe.

  “I saw something,” Chee admitted.

  “Your sheriff’s soul was taken by it.”

  Suddenly the cell key became a weight in Chee’s pocket. He could feel the heavy keychain pressing into the flesh of his leg.

  “You killed thirty-two people!” screamed Chee. If he could have killed Radio Joe right there he would have, to spare himself from having to consider what he was about to do.

  “Then let them take me away,” said Radio Joe calmly. “But the job will remain undone.”

  Chee turned his back, trying to force his legs to take him out to the front office. The phones were ringing off the hook out there. Townsfolk tying up the lines; pressing them for information they simply didn’t have, or couldn’t give out until the next of kin were officially notified.

  But the old man was right. Keedah was another “absentee.” He was there in body, but not in spirit—and had been that way ever since his run-in with that genderless transient. Chee knew this to be true, and while Chee’s head told him his job was to confine this murderer, his gut told him something else entirely.

  “Damn you,” whispered Chee. “Damn you to Hell.”

  Then he turned to the cell, and slowly pulled his keychain from his pocket, inserting the cell key into the lock. The old man watched impassively. Chee turned the key in the lock until he heard the mechanism spring open. Then he removed the key and returned to the front office without giving the old man another look.

  When Chee reached the front office, Keedah was standing there, in the midst of madly ringing phones.

  “What the hell, Chee? What, are you on vacation?”

  “Had to take a leak.”

  “Worst goddamn night on earth, you’d think you could hold it until someone got back.” Then Keedah took a glance over Chee’s shoulder, and the worst night on earth hit a brand-new low.

  Radio Joe lunged out of the shadowy doorway, a steak-knife blade flashing in his hand. Keedah reached for his gun, but it was as if he had no reflexes anymore. As if his body were just going through the motions of reaching for his gun, thought Chee. The old Hualapai brought the knife down in a cutting backhand slash, and ripped open Keedah’s neck in a single stroke.

  The spray of blood caught Chee in the eyes, blinding him momentarily. He heard Keedah collapse to the ground, and when Chee cleared the blood from his eyes, the sheriff was dead, his blood no longer pumping out, but oozing slowly onto the green linoleum.

  Chee wanted to feel revulsion, shock, horror—anything, but he could not. Because Keedah had been dead for days. The old man was right.

  Radio Joe put the steak knife back down on Chee’s half-eaten dinner, where he had found it, then knelt down and took Keedah’s gun. Chee didn’t stop him.

  “The one you’re looking for—he headed west,” Chee told him. “Hopped a train with two others.”

  “Others?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  Radio Joe nodded. “This town is still lousy with the dead,” he said.

  Chee let loose a sigh of surrender. “Leave them to me,” he said. “You find that thing. Stop it any way you can.”

  The old Indian slipped out quietly into the cold night.

  Then Parker Chee, trying to keep Keedah’s body in his blind spot, unlocked the ammo locker, pulling out two boxes of .22-caliber bullets. He made sure his clip was loaded, then loaded a second. As he headed out to fulfill his new assignment, Chee regretted that the devourer of souls hadn’t taken his soul as well . . . because by dawn it would surely be damned.

  14. SIMPLE PLEASURES

  * * *

  THE DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATIONS DID NOT come to evict the Shards from Hearst Castle. The National Guard never showed up to drive them out. Any official who came knocking, quickly pledged themselves into the service of the five—and in that new allegiance, those same officials made sure no word of what was really going on ever made it to the outside world. By the sixth day at the castle, it became clear that they could remain there, anonymous and invisible, as long as they wanted. And their numbers continued to build.

  “This place is like a black hole,” Winston had commented; “things fall in, and they don’t come out.” Which, noted Michael, was also an accurate description of a Roach Motel.

  At first Drew kept a notebook of all the wondrous things that occurred within the c
astle grounds, as well as a record of who had joined their numbers—but after the second day, he gave up the pad and paper in favor of a video camera, to journalize the days.

  But if anyone truly rose to the occasion, it was Okoya. With a quick mind and powerful spirit, he instantly became akin to a chief of staff. It was Okoya who kept track of the Happy Campers—organizing what they did, and when they did it—and when new recruits walked bleary-eyed out of the Gothic Study, with new leases on life, it was Okoya who led them away to be assimilated into the Great Repair that Dillon had begun.

  “They need to be debriefed,” Okoya had said. “I’d be happy to see to it personally.”

  And yet in spite of all of those responsibilities, Okoya made sure he had time to spend with each of the Shards. Plenty of time. As their personal confidant and advisor, Okoya was always there to ease their minds.

  “I ADMIRE YOU, WINSTON,” Okoya said. “You know so many things.”

  It was their fourth evening in the castle. Winston sat on his private balcony watching the sunset and reading yet another of Mr. Hearst’s leather-bound volumes. Okoya had slipped in beside him without Winston noticing.

  “Yeah, I’m a regular encyclopedia,” he said, shrugging off the compliment.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Machiavelli,” answered Winston. “Personally, I think he’s full of himself.”

  Okoya ran a hand through his shiny hair; the wind lifted it, and cast it about his shoulders. “I’ll bet you could write things that would put them all to shame,” Okoya told Winston. “I’ll bet you could inspire millions. You could convince them to do anything—cultivate their minds in any direction you wanted them to grow.”

  “Flattery or truth?” Winston quipped.

  “I think you know.”

  The crimson and cobalts of the sky were quickly fading to a rich violet, as the sun slipped below the horizon. Too dark to read by. Winston closed his book, and rubbed his eyes. It had been an exhausting day. They were getting better at their little medical triage sessions, but the Happy Campers had brought in almost forty people to repair today, most of them so badly injured it sapped all the Shards’ strength to do the job. Winston knew this was good work he was doing, but like so much of the information crammed into his brain, he failed to see how it fit into the larger picture. Even if they fixed the ills of ten thousand, in a world so large, it would make little difference. How could it stop this “great unraveling” Dillon was so fond of prophesizing? Dillon claimed to have it all worked out, but Winston suspected that, with all his skills of foresight and pattern recognition, Dillon was flying this one blind.