Chapter LV
He didn’t feel good about lying to his Aunt and Uncle, didn’t feel good about it at all. He didn’t think he had ever done it before, but they would never have let him come into the city on his own and they would never have approved of what he was doing. Then again, they had lied to him, hadn’t they? That was the easy way to rationalize. Yes, they had lied to him over and over. Every time he asked about his father and they told him his father had died, they lied. They did a pretty good job coming up with their story, but it did have a lot of flaws. That’s what made him start to look for answers.
They had told him his father was just crazy with sadness when mama was killed in the car accident, that part might have been true. They had told him his father died soon after, of a broken heart he guessed, they just said his heart gave out. He had believed that for a while, but it never sounded quite right, once he started learning about things like that. The telltale sign for him though had been the cemetery. There was only one grave, only one name on the headstone. His father had requested cremation they said. He had never believed that. The pieces didn’t fit.
Conner Carter had started very simply, with a basic Ancestry.com search. There was the death certificate for his mother but nothing for his father. Curious, right? So, he looked deeper. He found a driver’s license, still valid, and a passport. He had a friend, a gamer, who could hack every online game system in the universe, and he elicited his help. Soon they found a bank account, with regular deposits, and a lot of money. They found an annual membership at the American Museum of Natural History, and a research card for the New York Public Library. Either his father was very much alive, or someone had stolen his identity.
When he began noticing the vagabond who watched their games, he took a few pictures with his phone. And then, that same friend did a facial recognition search online, guess what popped up? It was the New York State DMV picture for Christopher Conrad Carter, his dad.
Conner was standing at the bottom of a long flight of marble steps that led up to the entrance of the library on Fifth Avenue. It was where his father had gotten his research card. He didn’t know what he expected to find, but he had print outs of two pictures of his father and he was going to go in and start asking some questions. He guessed, a part of him expected to walk in there and see his dad slumped over some thick volume of some history or something and there would be this great and wonderful reunion. His dad would have perfectly good explanations why he had pretended to be dead, why he had chosen to ignore his only child for all these years. Yes, it would be a perfectly good explanation but for the life of him, Conner could not imagine what that explanation would be.
Chapter LVI
It was nearly midnight, and the half-moon in the indigo sky kept hiding behind the clouds. The crazy part was that they were high cumulous clouds, the type you’d see on warm sunny days, not the type of clouds that would produce snow and yet the snow kept falling. It had piled up to an inch or more all around them, but Kimberly had the feeling that if she walked a hundred yards in any direction, the ground would be the ground, there would be no cover of snow.
The woods had an eerie silence, a silver snowy silence that was unnerving, it was not just quiet it was the absence of sound, like those noise cancelling headphones. Kim was sure that if she opened her mouth to speak no sound would come out. She was worried for Chris, his feet were frozen in his sandals and she wanted to tell him to leave, go back to the room, but she couldn’t. In the first place, he wouldn’t go. Perhaps more importantly, however, she had an innate sense that she needed him here for something, some part of this. This was, after all, his quest, wasn’t it? She was just along for the ride.
“Time to move, Chris,” she whispered. “I’m going to the right, to the big opening. I need you to move left and cover the small one. I don’t know if they connect in there somewhere, I didn’t see a route from one to the other but the last thing I need is me going in the front and him coming out the back and circling around. Got it?” she asked. Her voice in the silence, even whispered, was like a shout, she had expected no sound. He nodded, and she gave him the shotgun.
“Don’t you need that?” Chris asked.
“If anything’s in there I can’t fire a shotgun, too tight a space. I’m much better off with this,” she said and pulled her Glock from the waistband behind her back. With nine rounds of a .357 Sig, she could pretty much stop a charging moose, never mind a man or a dog.
He took the six shells she pulled from her jacket pocket and offered him. He dumped them in his pocket. ‘Two in the chamber, right?” Chris asked.
She nodded. “Remember how to reload?” she asked.
“Just like we did in the room, no problem,” he answered.
She stepped into him, put her hands on the back of his head and pulled his face into hers. She kissed him hard on the lips, closing her eyes and holding his head so he couldn’t move. He didn’t try. “See you on the flip side,” she said and took off to the right.
* * * * *
Chris turned and headed in the opposite direction. Halfway to his position, he had an image of two moths circling around a flame. He had not had any problem with the darkness tonight, none of the usual nightmares that happened while he was still awake. He credited her. He wondered now if their separation would let those dark things that haunted his nights come in, crawl all over his skin like spider crickets. The shotgun felt good in his hands but part of him knew that the shells from this gun might not work, at least that’s what his research had shown but who the fuck knew anything about Remington shotguns back when these things were being hunted.
That’s when it hit him, his backpack, he had left his backpack all the way around the other side, back by the sandstone outcropping. He needed it, had to get it. He looked from his position in the woods at the small opening of the mound. He had to be here, had to guard this opening. If he went back and the thing came out and he wasn’t here to at least slow it down, Kimberly was dead. He had to stay, he imagined she might already be inside.
While he was contemplating his options, the rumble of a low growl reached his ears from somewhere near the mound. What the fuck is that, he thought, it was a low gurgling growl like a purring sound but vicious, a rabid purr. It was a sound like none he had ever heard before. It did not sound like a dog, it was more like a lion, a big mean hungry lion, but there were no lions in these woods, at least there weren’t supposed to be. He strained his eyes and brought the gun to firing position. The adrenaline was rushing into him, his pupils were as big as his irises, his temples and fingertips pounded with the force of the blood his heart was pumping through his veins. He took the safety off. The owl he had heard earlier hooted twice, he wished he heard the cardinal.
It was completely quiet for a moment and then there was the sound again, the growl, accompanied by a familiar rustling this time, like the sound a robe might make as it swished back and forth rubbing against the legs of the priest who was wearing it. And then, rising from the opening on the other side of the mound, Kim’s side, his scraggly grey hair, and vacant eyes came floating above the mound like a helium balloon rising higher and higher. Chris thought he must be ten feet tall, and still growing, his yellow teeth appeared, and they were…smiling, one in front missing. He had an odd thought of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and the day he had taken Conner to Central Park to watch the giant character balloons get blown up. From Conner his thoughts flew to Star Wars and Admiral Ackbar; “It’s a trap!!” He almost yelled it.
But that thought died quickly and was replaced by a paralyzing fear which gripped him and held him there immobile, worse than immobile, catatonic. He stared through unbelieving eyes at the creature who now stepped over the mound as easily as he might step over a garden border: Father Flynn, or more accurately the corpse of Father Flynn.
Kimberly, he thought. Oh my God, she must be dead. She went in and he came out. He could only focus on the mistake, they had thought he wasn’t here, that was the
fly in the ointment, and then the fly had entered the lair. Their miscalculation had cost the second woman he had ever loved, her life, and now it was coming for him. A new thought burst into his brain, “come on fucker,” he quietly whispered into the night.
Chapter LVII
He had waited in the dark, waited in his lair, waited for them to come. They were so predictable after all, he knew when they would come, who would come and from where they would come. He had some moments of trepidation to be sure. This man was the one that they had let live and his spirit had grown stronger and stronger ever since. He had feared him, just a little, he thought this could be the one that brought him to his end. He was not worried about The One, wasn’t really worried about himself truth be told. It was a fear like any animal might have when its end was near, when its mortality was finally being challenged after all these many years.
He was ready, of course, his days were up, but still. Does the bull in the tar pit stop trying to free its legs as it slowly sinks beneath the engulfing blackness? Does the insect entombed in the spider’s silk just give up? Does the rabbit in the raptor’s mouth not still twitch and twitch to break free until it can twitch no more? No, they fought till their last breath, as would he.
No, he was not done yet and so he sat here in the dark, in his dark, and let his senses tell him which way to go. Not his sight or hearing or touch, not his smelling or taste, it was some other sense, a subtler sense, one that had no name but all the same delivered the results. That sense had yelled in his ear suddenly and propelled him forward through the dark, through the opening and into the night. It screamed at him, “NOW YOU FUCKING ANIMAL, NOW,” and so he did.
He entered the night, his night, seeing as a man sees in the light. It couldn’t hide from him, that thing he had thought he might fear. It was right there where that sense had told him it would be. He rose from the mound and the strength of all his hundreds of years, of all his glorious feedings, of all his dedicated service to The One, came into him at once, and he took it in like air, like breath. It swelled inside him, and he grew bigger and stronger and bigger and stronger. He felt the power of The One mixing with all his elements and giving him a sense that was so unfair as to be indefatigable, undefeatable. He growled with the voice of the dog and then he growled with the voice of the bear. He turned to face the man and saw him immediately. The little fucker had urine soaked pants. He stepped over the mound and was stunned by the giant, unexpected pressure on his shoulder, it held him back, but it couldn’t stop him. Bullets, just bullets? Is that all you’ve brought? It thought.
Chapter LVIII
A fear exploded inside him with seismic force, its mushroom cloud of horror rising slowly through his body and finally exploding through his mouth, taking his breath with it. Chris felt the wetness running down his leg, spreading over his crotch, and wondered if it was blood before he realized his urine had released. A sour taste that started in his stomach boiled up and lay in his mouth, coating his tongue. Kimberly, was his only thought. First Emily and now Kimberly, fucker…
He squeezed the trigger and a flash so bright it blinded him for a moment erupted from the gun. The recoil knocked him back a step, then a second. When he looked up, the giant version of Father Flynn had most of the upper portion of his right arm and his right shoulder blown off. He had hit him. It did not, however, seem to be slowing him down, he was fifty feet away and closing. Chris reached into his pocket and pulled out some shells, dropping two but managing to hold on to two as well. He cracked open the shotgun, put the shells in and snapped it shut. He closed his left eye as though aiming but everyone knows you don’t aim a shotgun, you just shoot.
He pulled the trigger again and this time he was better braced for the recoil and the result was a much more accurate shot. It blew the left side of Father Flynn’s face clear off. It stunned the giant for sure and he stopped. Chris crazily stopped as well, watching the thing, instead of reloading his gun. It no longer looked like Father Flynn, it had morphed into some caricature of an old man, long stringy gray hair, deep-set dark sunken eyes, skeletal, with a toothless smile that said is that all you’ve got. Too late, Chris thought to reload, dipping his hand into his pocket he brought out the two remaining shells and dropped one. He crouched to pick it up. When he had looked at the thing before he stooped to grab a bullet it was forty feet away when he stood back up it was in his face. It had moved like light, turn it on over there and poof you see it over here.
The toothless grin was so broad and so big up close, that Chris realized his whole head would fit inside this thing’s mouth. There was no humor in that grin. The smell coming from its mouth was vomit and shit and death. The thing stretched its arms to Chris, the good one, and the mangled one, and held them on either side of his head. Chris dropped the gun. The snow was falling fiercely now and covering the thing, giving him the appearance of a snow-capped alp. He could not believe he had lost. All these years, all his preparation, all the positive energy of being on the side of good, had meant nothing. He was as dead as Emily, as dead as Kimberly, as dead as that little ten-year-old girl in the park with the slit throat and his cum in her belly.
He heard a crack and thought it had snapped his neck like it had snapped Amy Reed’s neck, but he wasn’t dead. Another small piece of the left side of its face came off, then another crack and a piece of its nose fell on Chris. Then came a third and a fourth crack and he finally realized what it was. Kimberly was shooting, Kimberly was alive. “Backpack,” weakly passed over his lips. He tried again, “Backpack,” a little bit louder but still, the air was thick with snow. Finally, “BACKPACK,” he yelled, and the lights went out.
Chapter LIX
Special Agent Kimberly Watson had been on her knees in front of the large opening, she had just released the safety when a low growl emanated inside the mound. It sounded like a dog at first and then something much bigger, a mountain lion or a bear, although she doubted if a bear could fit inside. It was a sound that she did not relish meeting, so she scrambled away on her hands and knees propelling herself into the thicket at the edge of the woods. She knelt there peering at the opening, into the opening. There was movement inside. She wished Chris had a phone that she could text, tell him to stay low, stay hidden no matter what happened. Why hadn’t she gotten him a goddam phone.
The snow was falling harder, and the owl spoke up again, three haunting hoots. She started slowly making her way around the perimeter toward Chris when suddenly a shadow crossed over her, she turned to see a twenty-foot version of the woman who had sold her into the sex trade as a child, standing at the opening of the mound. How the fuck did that thing fit in there when it was tight for me? Was all she could think. She froze motionlessly, watching, the wheels inside working overtime, racing blindly toward an end that she had not yet envisioned. It was heading for Chris. She took a step in his direction and thought the woman heard her. It stopped and looked toward Kimberly. Then the flash of a muzzle broke the dark and the woman stumbled, she’d been hit. Fuckin A, Chris.
The woman took a couple more steps toward Chris and the Remington boomed again, the flash lighting up everything around her including Chris’s backpack laying at her feet. She was halfway there. When she looked at the woman it was no longer the woman, but some grotesque walking skeleton and this time Chris had blown half its face away. The acrid smell of gunpowder filled the thick snow-filled air. She blinked, and the creature was gone. It was suddenly right on top of Chris, she saw him drop his gun. She took aim with her Glock, “FBI, FREEZE!” she yelled as loud as she could, ensuring her voice penetrated the thick air. The thing kept right on moving. Kim fired; BOOM! one, BOOM! two, BOOM! three, BOOM! four until all nine shells were ejected and she had scored nine direct hits. The thing was standing there as if nothing had happened. It was missing most of its face, half an arm, a shoulder, and blood was pouring from its side where there were surely multiple broken ribs. It didn’t seem fazed.
She heard Chris’s voice, quietly at first
, as though he were half a mile away, not just a hundred feet. Then clearly and loudly one word came through the darkness, “backpack.” She looked down and then dropped to her knees thrusting both hands through the pull string opening until her hand touched cold steel. She pulled out a .38 special. She threw open the chamber, there were two bullets inside that reflected the moonlight in their smooth pure silver: Two bullets, two silver bullets. Where the fuck did he get those, she thought. She stepped into the clearing. Both of her hands held the .38 out in front of her. The thing had his hands on either side of Chris’s head and was lifting him.
“Hey” she yelled loudly again, screamed; “Hey fucker, over here!” Chris was a ragdoll now, “Jesus Christ,” she said, not sure if she was praying or cursing. “FBI, FREEZE AND PUT HIM DOWN.” As if in a dream, she saw movement to her right, and turned to look, the whole thing happening in slow motion. Out of the tall grass that led down to the water, a brown bear, a big fucking brown bear rose on two legs with a roar that permeated her skin and drove to her core like the explosion of a bomb, it took her breath away. What the fuck? She thought. Do bears swim? We’re on a goddam island. She looked back to the thing that had Chris.
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