Travis frowned, absorbing Brent’s revelation, then nodded. “That makes sense. Anger—the shootings and the fights. Denial—”
“The people who won’t bury their dead,” Brent supplied.
“Bargaining—explains the crossroads deals,” Travis said.
“And depression…all those suicides.”
“Shit,” Travis said, running a hand through his hair. “We need to figure out how to fight this. Let’s go back to Ryan’s, get pizza, and see what we can come up with.” He seemed to interpret Brent’s wary look. “It’s okay. He knows what we do. Well, what I do.”
“Doug Conroy should come, too. He’s an ex-cop, and he knows about…things.”
It took another hour to extricate themselves from their tasks at the crash site, but Brent managed to text Doug, who promised to meet them at the church. Father Ryan finished offering support to the responders and headed back to make preparations.
They met up at Our Lady of Sorrows. Travis and Brent were ready to make introductions, but Doug and Father Ryan grinned at the sight of each other and shook hands like old friends, and the priest exchanged a nod with Cheryl.
“Son of a gun, I wondered if you were in on this kind of thing,” Doug said.
Father Ryan shrugged. “I’ve known Travis since his seminary days, but this kind of…specialized information…doesn’t come up all the time, thank heavens.”
From the number of cars in the parking lot, Brent wondered if they could find the privacy to speak frankly, but Father Ryan waved them toward the rectory.
“No one needs me at the church tonight, and they won’t bother me here,” he assured them. “I’ve already called ahead for pizza delivery. Beer’s in the fridge, and you’re both welcome to stay over if there’s more you want to investigate here tomorrow.”
Brent followed Travis into the rectory. Father Ryan’s cat wound around his ankles.
“Don’t mind Lilith. She just hopes you’ll drop food,” Ryan called as he walked into the kitchen to set out glasses and plates. “The cookies are fresh—Mrs. Simko brought them to the parish committee meeting this morning,” he added with a nod toward a large container of homemade treats. “They’re good, but I’ve got to give them away. That’s how priests get fat,” he added and patted his belly.
Brent met the delivery man at the door and found that Father Ryan had paid in advance.
“I think this qualifies as a community meeting,” the priest said at Brent’s surprised reaction. “I have a budget for that.”
They found seats around the scarred farm-style table that took up most of the kitchen. Lilith wended her way around all of the chairs, then found a spot on the windowsill where she could keep an eye on the neighborhood and settled in.
The conversation remained light as they ate, and everyone dug into the food like they were starving. It became clear to Brent that Doug and Cheryl were well-acquainted with Father Ryan, even if they didn’t attend his church. Then again, Brent figured that as a small-town police chief Doug probably knew just about everyone.
Travis seemed more at ease than Brent had ever seen him, and he remembered what Father Ryan had said about how far they went back together. Ryan had known Travis before his ordination, before the Sinistram, before whatever it was that scarred him so deeply.
He felt a pang of sadness; when he’d left his home in South Carolina after the murders, no one he’d grown up with or played on the high school football team with had been interested in remaining in touch. They knew he wasn’t responsible for the deaths, but Brent suspected they didn’t want to risk having any of his bad luck rub off. Seeing how easy Travis and Ryan were with each other made him think of Danny, and how effortless their connection had been. He hadn’t really needed a best friend before his brother died, and he hadn’t let himself tempt fate by making one since then.
“—after the frozen yogurt place closed down,” Cheryl was saying when Brent zoned back into the conversation.
“I’m a soft-serve fan, personally,” Father Ryan replied. “Although the parish ladies do make an exceptional homemade butterscotch brickle ripple for our summer family carnival.”
“Best I’ve ever had,” Doug affirmed. “I might not be one of your parishioners, padre, but I believe all God’s children deserve good ice cream.”
“That’s true, and you’re always welcome,” Ryan added with a wink.
“What do you know about Pastor Pete?” Brent asked. He winced as the jovial conversation ground to a halt. “Sorry, didn’t mean to be a buzzkill. He organized the volunteer tent at the crash scene, and I didn’t know whether he’d be an ally in…this…”
Father Ryan sighed. “Pete’s a good man, but I’m afraid he’s rather literal when it comes to anything supernatural. I’m as willing to accept that whatever is troubling this area came from another realm, another planet, or another dimension as I am to blame it on the Devil—which opens up a lot of different avenues to fight it—but I fear Pete’s take on it will be more orthodox.”
“Gotcha,” Brent said with a nod. “We already know that exorcism won’t work on everything.”
Doug cleared away the pizza boxes and loaded the dishwasher. Ryan put on a fresh pot of coffee, set out mugs, and pulled several bottles of beer from the fridge. Travis grabbed his laptop, and Brent fetched the files he had brought in his backpack. When he returned to the table, he saw that Ryan had a worn spiral notebook, and Doug had unfolded a marked map of the area and put it in the center of their workspace.
“So the ‘blast zone’ seems to be an area fifty miles across, with Cooper City and Peale smack in the middle,” Doug said. “There are too many ‘events’ to mark, but I put dots for the bigger ones, and I brought a list of everything I’ve found or that you’ve sent me that might be connected.” He peered at them over his reading glasses. “It’s a mighty long list, and it began about four months ago.”
Doug pulled out a multi-page printout from a manila folder in Cheryl’s big purse and set it down next to the map. Travis reached for it and thumbed through the names, dates, and notes. “Shit, there’s a lot of stuff,” he muttered, not even bothering to make an apologetic glance in Father Ryan’s direction. “For a small area, that’s a lot of dead people and bad luck.”
Ryan nodded. “Within the circle on the map, I’d say pretty much everyone’s been touched by those tragedies in some way. Friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors, classmates—people in these parts know each other. Most of them grew up together, and sometimes so did their parents and grandparents. So bad news travels fast, and bad luck feels like it affects everyone when it strikes.”
“Everything that’s going on, it’s part of a fifty-year cycle,” Travis said. “We’ve found plenty of evidence to document that every fifty years this area gets hit with a string of catastrophes, some man-made, and others seemingly natural. When you know what to look for, that includes suspicious deaths, possible suicides, missing persons, bankruptcies, and a crime spike.” He sat back and crossed his arms.
“I’ve had two ghosts—whom I’d call first-hand witnesses,” Travis added with a glance toward Brent and Doug, daring them to disagree, “and they confirmed the involvement of demons, but said that the demons were a symptom, not a cause. One of them told me that whatever’s going on attracts the demonic and the dark supernatural like flies on a battlefield. So the monsters and demons—and most likely, the Silverado killer—are part of the problem and we need to deal with them. But getting rid of them won’t stop the half-century apocalypse.”
“Which explains the psi-vamp I fought off at Peale,” Brent said, “the zombies over by Milesburg, and the reports the local police have been getting about red-eyed wolves in the woods that are eating pets and farm animals. Plus the hell-maggots—low-level demons. They’re the vultures, but they didn’t start the war.”
“There’ve been other strange creatures people didn’t report to the police, but they told their friends,” Doug said. “No one wants to be out in the woo
ds after dark.”
“You’re talking about a hell gate,” Father Ryan said quietly. “I’m surprised your ‘friends’ aren’t all over this.”
Travis cleared his throat uncomfortably as Doug and the others looked at him. “I used to work for a secret organization of demon-hunting priests. We didn’t part on the best of terms.” That tracked with what Brent’s friend, Mark, had suspected. Oddly enough, it was nice to know he wasn’t alone in his tug-of-war with CHARON.
“They obviously either don’t know or don’t care,” Travis continued. “And since no one’s bothered to break the cycle before this, and we’re not swarming with ninja priests, my bet is that by their standards this is too small to bother with.”
Cheryl huffed, rightfully offended.
Travis raised his hands in appeasement. “Clearly, I don’t agree. Just saying.”
“What’s a hell gate, and how do we shut it down?” Doug asked. “And does it really go to, you know, hell?”
“Not always,” Brent replied, glad for the information Mark had given him and what he had gotten from his lore expert, Simon Kincaide. “Some people call them a nexus or a vortex. It’s a door between here and somewhere else—and what’s on the other side is pretty nasty.”
“There are several ways hell gates get created,” Travis picked up. “Someone could work really strong, dark magic, bad enough to permanently stain the land. In other cases, there’s a disaster—a huge catastrophe with a lot of deaths—and all of that pain and blood twist a place’s energy somehow.”
“And sometimes there are just places that are born evil,” Brent finished. “Or at least, whatever made them bad happened so long ago there aren’t even legends. People just avoid them and make up stories about why.”
“That last one is what I think we’re dealing with because the story of the area being cursed goes back so far,” Travis said. “A genius loci is a primal spirit that is rooted in a place, an immortal entity tied to the land. Usually, when people consider a mountain or a grove or a cave to be sacred, it’s because they sense a genius loci’s presence and want to honor it.”
“But it’s possible for the spirit to become warped, turned to chaos,” Brent jumped in. “And we think that maybe what we have is kind of a combination hell gate and genius loci, a doorway that opens every fifty years to let out the primal spirit, and then seals it away again until the next cycle. The spirit has to feed while the portal—the hell gate—is open. If it feeds really well, the bloodshed is even worse the next time the hell gate opens, because the spirit has gotten stronger.”
“What you’re saying makes sense,” Cheryl said. “Because I can’t say that the local historical society has any record of ancient satanic cults around Cooper City.”
“I suspect that there was always something off about the area, but the lure of mines and timber—and now natural gas—was enough that people settled here anyhow,” Doug said. “People will go against all their self-preservation instincts if they need money bad enough—or are so greedy that they don’t care who gets hurt.”
“If people hadn’t settled around here, the genius loci would still have lured in sacrifices every so often, but it wouldn’t have gotten so strong,” Father Ryan mused. “It might have been a valley where unwary hunters disappeared, out in the middle of nowhere.”
“But people built railroads and mines and highways—and permanent towns,” Brent said. “And there was more for the spirit to feed on in each cycle.”
“As far as the hell gate, it could be natural, the way cicadas live underground for seventeen years and come back again,” Travis picked up the story. “Or maybe some forgotten witch back in the day tried to lock up the genius loci and failed. We don’t want to destroy the hell gate, because I don’t think we’ll be able to destroy the genius loci, and we need to contain it. We want to limit the damage, and shut it away early if we can.”
“So how do we make that happen?” Cheryl asked. “And are you sure we can’t stop the cycle from happening again?”
Travis and Father Ryan exchanged a glance. “We don’t know whether we can stop the hell gate from opening again,” Travis said. “But if we can keep the genius loci from feeding well this cycle, maybe it won’t be as strong the next time, and then we try to leave what we learn about fighting it so that the next poor bastards don’t have to start all over again.”
“Then we’d better get busy,” Doug said. “Because we don’t want to be here for the grand finale.”
They talked late into the night until Travis had filled pages of his notebook with the ideas they came up with, and all of the cookies were gone. When Cheryl and Doug finally said goodnight and left, Brent knew they had generated a lot of possible tactics, but none of them knew for certain what would work.
“Do you think anything we just talked about will make a difference?” Brent asked Father Ryan, as the priest shut and locked the door and led them back into the living room.
“Won’t know until we try,” the priest answered. “But we’ve got more than we started with, including some good allies. Tomorrow we can sort through things again and make a plan. Right now, I’ve had about all the strategizing I can take for one day.” He bent down to scoop up the big cat in his arms. “And a good night’s sleep is worth a hundred Hail Marys when you’re facing down the Devil.”
“I don’t remember that from seminary,” Travis teased.
“There’s a lot they forgot to mention,” Ryan replied. “Now you’re welcome to stay up and talk, but Lilith and I are ready to crash.”
They were both too tired to keep working, so they followed him down the hallway to their rooms. But as Brent lay awake, waiting for sleep, he wondered what Danny made of their plans, and wished with all his heart that he could ask.
Chapter Ten
“How can it be Meghan? She died three years ago.” The bewildered man buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking. “Oh, God. What have I done?”
Brent and Travis exchanged a glance. Doug had called them before they left Father Ryan’s rectory in the morning, with news that Cooper City had a new problem.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Clint,” Doug said, placing a hand on the sobbing man’s shoulder. “Far as you knew, there was an intruder trying to get into your home. You saw someone break down your door, with your wife and child inside your home. There’s not a jury in the state that would fault you if it ever came to that.”
“I swear, I didn’t know it was Meghan,” Clint said brokenly. “I buried her. She’d been so sick—”
“We’ll take care of it,” Doug assured the broken man. He’d had one of the officers escort Clint’s wife and young daughter out the back door, with orders to drive them to a friend’s house.
“Am I going to jail?” Clint looked up, eyes red, tears streaking his face.
“Can’t kill someone who was already dead,” Doug replied. “And it’s not abuse of a corpse if the body was attacking you at the time. So…no. You’re not in trouble. But I would appreciate it if you kept this quiet. We don’t want a panic.”
Clint nodded, but his eyes looked glazed. “Sure.”
“I’ll get Doc Brenner to stop by,” Doug said. “Maybe he can give you something to help you sleep.”
While Doug finished up with Clint, Travis and Brent walked the long way around the house to stay off the front porch. The door hung askew from its hinges, split down the middle and then blasted through with the shotgun shell that hit the unwanted visitor.
The corpse that had been Meghan Zimmerman lay sprawled on the steps, chest blown open. Travis and Brent waited by the cars while two young cops who looked like they were about to lose their lunch scraped up the rotted flesh and what remained of the decomposing body and shoveled it into a body bag.
“So this time, the zombies remember how to come home,” Travis said, trying to rein in his anger and not having much success. Beside him, Brent looked unnerved and pissed off.
“Hell of a surprise,” Brent re
plied. He looked a little green around the gills. “Do you think there’s any chance she knew who she was? The other zombies, they were just shamblers. But this…” His voice trailed off, and Travis could hear the uncertainty in his tone.
“Did she really remember where she used to live, or did whatever pulled her body out of the ground give her a push and send her on her way for maximum shock value?” Travis kept his voice low, to keep the two police officers from overhearing. They looked like they were barely holding it together, as it was.
“I want to believe that she was a puppet,” Brent said. “That’s still horrible, but better than coming back to find out your husband had moved on without you.”
Travis shrugged. “Isn’t that what we tell people to do, after a death or a divorce? It’s not like he ran out and got hitched the day of her wake.” If Brent thought he had questions, Travis knew that his religious education created an existential chasm. Can you have memory without a soul? Are our memories what makes our “self?” The questions were huge, enough for a team of philosophers to debate for ages, and the implications might gnaw at Travis in the hour of the wolf, but they made little difference with the calamity facing Cooper City.
“How the hell can they keep this off the news?” Brent wondered aloud.
“Very carefully.” Doug came up behind them. “The only people who know what happened are right here. My men aren’t going to tell anyone, because I’ve told them they’ll lose their jobs, their pension, and any recommendation I might have given them. Doc won’t say anything. And frankly, no one’s going to believe Clint.”
“His wife—”
“Didn’t actually see anything,” Doug replied. “She and the kid were in the bedroom. As for what Clint saw—people have been seeing strange things around here for weeks now. Without a body, it’ll just be one more ghost sighting.”
Travis rubbed his eyes, trying to fend off a headache. “You said there’d been another situation.”
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