Brood XIX

by Michael McBride

  He glanced at his watch. Twenty-two hours, twenty-one minutes.

  At the back of the kitchen, the sink was overflowing with foul-smelling pots, above which bloated black flies swarmed, seething over the tarnished copper. They darted in and out of the hole to the garbage disposal. The gold sashes covering the window behind were alive with them.

  Carver turned to his right and passed through the mudroom without slowing, bursting out through the rear door onto a windswept stretch of hard dirt. A worn path led to the corrugated aluminum building, the slanted roof covered by screaming crows jostling for position.

  Voices rose in tumult from the far side of the house, now a black silhouette against the swirling red cherries. Footsteps thundered hollowly on the front porch and pounded the packed earth as they converged upon his position.

  Twenty-two hours, twenty-two minutes. There was no time to wait for backup.

  He grabbed the knob and threw the door inward, thrusting the Beretta through in front of him. The sour smell of spoiled meat and feces swatted him in the face. Frenzied talons clamored on the roof, the frantic cawing reaching a crescendo. Twin slants of mote-infested light stained the straw floor crimson, illuminating a bare room the size of the entire house, with only a single fold-out table with a laptop on it in the middle of the vast emptiness. The screen faced away from him, deeper into the vacuous space.

  You'll never find her in time.

  He sprinted to the table and spun the laptop so he could see the image he knew would be there. The girl had slouched forward onto the concrete floor, her face buried beneath her tangled blonde hair, her flesh a sickly shade of gray under the single overhead bulb. Her shoulders trembled almost imperceptibly with a soundless inhalation.

  "She's still alive," he shouted over his shoulder.

  He yanked on the computer until he met resistance. The power cord was strung to an orange extension cord and buried beneath the straw, but it was the network cable stretching deeper into the outbuilding that he sought. Following its length, he stomped as he pulled it from the straw, listening until he heard the change from solid cement to something metallic.

  Carver fell to his knees and cleared away the detritus, uncovering a rusted iron hatch, secured to the concrete by an eye-bolt and a padlock. A single shot destroyed the lock and he frantically lifted the hatch, revealing a set of wooden stairs leading down into the earth.

  Steeling himself against the intensified smell, he pointed the barrel toward the landing below, and slowly began the decent into hell.

  Twenty-two hours and thirty-two minutes earlier, Carver had known he was close, but he had no idea just how close. He had been pursuing the monster for the last two months, since the discovery of the body of eleven year-old Ashlee Porter. A vagrant had found her right foot in the Dumpster behind a convenience store, but the resultant search had only turned up eight more parts in trash receptacles across the west side of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Fortunately, her head had been among them. Angela Downing's corpse had been found similarly dismembered in the hollow trunk of a lightning-struck cottonwood outside of Brush, Colorado three weeks later, and only two weeks prior to unearthing the right hand of Jessica Fenton from the bank of the Big Thompson River southeast of Greeley. By a stroke of luck, one of her fingerprints had escaped the claws of the crawfish, providing her identification since they never did find her head, or any of the rest of her for that matter. All three had presented with lacerations of the palmar surface of the distal phalanges, broken fingernails, and trauma to the cuticles consistent with a futile struggle against a hard surface while being pinned from behind. The two salvaged heads had exhibited bruising on the occipital and temporal regions, betraying repeated blows from behind, and areas where fistfuls of hair had been torn from the scalp. Angela Downing's left ankle had been chafed to the exposed muscle by what residual traces of metal confirmed to be an iron manacle.

  The Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory had been able to conclude that all three victims had been exsanguinated prior to being butchered. The superficial strata of their skin showed elevated levels of ammonia absorption consistent with chronic exposure to urine and feces, a trait common in people held captive in close confines over an extended period of time. Unfortunately, they had been unable to separate any viable DNA from those of the corpses.

  Until that point, his day had been spent following up on one dead-end lead after another and he had been both physically and emotionally exhausted by the time he returned to his townhouse that night, take-out Chinese under one arm and a week's worth of forgotten mail under the other. He had left his briefcase in the car, knowing that if he brought it in with him, he would be staring down the barrel of another sleepless night spent poring over the pictures of dismembered little girls. For a moment, he thought he had been right on the monster's heels, but he had come to the grim realization that there would be no more progress until his worst nightmare became reality.

  Until they discovered the next body.

  He set the soggy brown paper sack on the table and the mail on the eating bar. The sink beneath the lone window was brimming with dishes he'd at least managed to rinse, the curtains riffling gently behind. The counter beside was littered with crumpled fast food wrappers. He was about to open the fridge to grab a Killian's when he saw the note he had affixed to it only the night before: Buy Beer. Shaking his head, he shrugged off his suit jacket and drank some water straight from the faucet. He'd just head upstairs and change his clothes, come back down, choke down a little Mongolian Beef, and pray sleep claimed him before he again broke down and cracked open the case files.

  Passing through the darkened living room, the light from the kitchen reflecting through the layer of dust on the TV, he ascended the stairs one at a time, feeling aches upon pains throughout his body. There were three doors at the top of the landing overlooking the great room: to the left, the master bedroom; straight ahead, a bathroom; and to the right, the second bedroom, which served as his study. He always kept them open. Always.

  The door to the study was closed.

  He took a deep breath to focus his senses. There was no time to hesitate or whoever was inside would realize that he knew. He pulled the Smith & Wesson Model 19 snubnose from his ankle holster and jammed it under his waistband, untucking his button-down to hang in front. Drawing his Beretta, he kicked the door in with a crack of the destroyed trim.

  The room beyond was dark, as he knew it would be, but he immediately sensed someone else in there with him. He could smell their sweat, rank breath, ammonia---

  Cold metal pressed against the base of his skull behind his left ear as he entered the room. An even colder, trembling hand with spider-like fingers closed around his and relieved him of the Beretta.

  "Why couldn't you find them?" a voice whimpered directly into his ear. It was somewhat effeminate and dry, a freshly sharpened scythe through wheat.

  "I must have been close."

  "I never meant to hurt them. But I know, I know. I did. They're dead, aren't they? Dead, dead, dead!" the man said, jabbing him in the head with the barrel of the gun.

  Carver staggered deeper into the room, colliding with his desk chair.

  "Sit down," the man said, training both guns on him through the darkness. The mismatched pair of pistols shook in his hands. There was a rustling of papers as he sat on the desk. "I have to show you. So you'll understand. You have to see."

  He turned the computer monitor on the desk toward him and pressed the power button with the barrel of the gun in his right hand. A weak glow blossomed from the screen, highlighting his face. His unblinking eyes bulged and tears streamed down his cheeks. The muscles in his face twitched spastically.

  "This wasn't what I wanted," the man sobbed. "It wasn't supposed to be like this. No one can help them. No one can---"

  Before the man could turn back to him, Carver pulled the snubnose from beneath his waistband, raised it, and fired. He caught a glimpse of the man's profile, silhouetted by the
light from the screen, as he flipped backwards over the desk, a pinwheel of blood following him from the spouting hole in his ruined chest.

  Carver lunged from the chair and leapt up onto the desk, training the revolver on the heap of humanity crumpled against the base of his bookcase. The man shuddered and tried to rise. Carver dropped down beside him and kicked both of the guns away. He was just about to drag the man back around to the front of the desk when he heard a soft voice behind him.

  He turned to face the monitor on the bloody desktop.

  There was a hiss of static, a droning monotone interrupted by the sound of labored breathing.

  "Please," the voice whispered, barely discernible above the din. "Mommy... Please..."

  A girl was sprawled on a filthy concrete floor, naked save the brown skein of refuse and blood coating her body. Her tangled blonde hair covered her face, framed by both hands, still feebly trying to push her up from the ground. A thick chain trailed from the manacle on her ankle to an eyebolt on the nicotine-yellow concrete block wall.

  A single overhead bulb illuminated the room, casting a dirty manila glare over everything, turning the spatters on the walls and the dried pools on the floor black.

  "Jesus," Carver gasped.

  There were no windows in the girl's prison. Her respirations were already becoming jerky, agonal. She was asphyxiating.

  "Where is she?"

  A burbling of fluid metamorphosed into crying.

  "Where is she?" Carver shouted.

  The man whimpered. Blood drained from the corners of his mouth. Trembling, he tried to stand, but collapsed again.

  Carver grabbed him by the shirt, lifting him from the ground and slamming him against the shelves. Blood exploded past the man's lips, hot against Carver's face. "Where is she?"

  The man's head fell forward onto Carver's shoulder.

  "You'll never find her in time," he rasped. The burbling tapered to a hiss as heat streamed down Carver's back, and then finally to nothing at all.

  Carver eased down the stairs. They were sticky and made the sound of peeling masking tape each time he lifted a foot. There was no sound from ahead. The only light was a pale stain creeping along the concrete floor at the bottom from beneath a rusted iron door with an X riveted across it.

  Footsteps stampeded behind and above him.

  Carver licked his lips and seated his finger firmly on the trigger. He leaned his shoulder against the door and prepared to grab the handle, but the pressure caused the door to open inward with a squeal of the hinges, allowing more light to spill onto the landing. Cringing against the stench, he shoved the door and ducked into the small chamber, swinging his pistol from left to right.

  Twenty-two hours and twenty-three minutes.

  He had never stood a chance.

  The laptop monitor to his left, balanced on top of a workbench crusted with blood, still showed the image of the girl collapsed on the floor, and the web camera mounted above still faced into the room, but it had all been a ruse.

  Beneath the harsh brass glare, he lowered the Beretta and stepped deeper into the cell. In the middle of the floor where the girl had once been was a stack of body parts, a pyramid of severed appendages built upon her torso, her head balanced precariously on top, facing the doorway. Her lank hair stuck to the blood on her face, eyelids peeled back in an expression of accusation, lips pulped and split over fractured teeth.

  She'd been dead before the monster had even revealed himself to Carver, her agonizing death previously recorded and broadcast after the fact.

  Carver averted his eyes from the carnage as the sounds of voices and pounding treads filled the room.

  A full-length mirror had been recently affixed to the gore-stained gray wall directly ahead. A single word was painted in blood near the top.

  Killer.

  Beneath the word, he stared at his own reflection.

  II

  Sinagua Ruins

  36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona

  Kajika Dodge followed the buzzing sound to a small patch of shade beneath a creosote bush where the diamondback waited for him, testing his scent in darting flicks of its black tongue. It acknowledged the burlap sack at his side, ripening with the limp carcasses of its brethren, with a show of its vibrating rattle.

  No matter. Soon enough it would join them.

  Kajika readjusted his grip on his pinning stick.

  The rattler seized the opportunity and shot diagonally out onto the blazing sand away from him.

  He dropped the bag and with a single practiced stride was in position to drive the forked end of his stick onto the viper's neck when it vanished into a circular hole in the earth.

  Kajika could only stare. A short length of three-inch PVC pipe protruded from the ground. The white plastic was smooth and unscarred, brand new. He wandered through this section of the desert at least once a week. It was a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts, an opportunity to pay homage to the desert from which his lifeblood had sprung. The pipe was definitely a recent addition, the only manmade interruption in the otherwise smooth sand.

  Why would someone wander out into the middle of the Sonoran, a solid half-mile from the nearest dirt road, only to shove a length of pipe into the ground?

  He crouched and pulled the plastic tube out of the earth. The sand immediately collapsed in its stead. He brushed it away with the prongs, revealing a shallow system of roots and a warren of darkness beneath.

  The sand slowly slid back into place.

  This was all wrong.

  Wiping the streams of sweat from beneath the thick braid on his neck, he surveyed the landscape of golden desert painted by creosote and sage in choppy green and blue brushstrokes. Beyond rose a rugged backdrop of stratified buttes, red as the blood of his ancestors. Their spirits still inhabited the Sonoran Desert, lingering in the memories of crumbling stone walls and scattered potsherds.

  He lowered his black eyes again to the ground. Those weren't roots. Not six feet from the shrub.

  Turning the stick around, he shoved the duct-taped handle into the nearly invisible hole until it lodged against something solid and levered it upward. A tent of what appeared to be leather-wrapped sticks broke through the sand, smooth and tan.

  His instincts told him to grab his sack and head back to the truck. Forget about the diamondback and the odd length of pipe. His mother had named him Kajika, he who walks without sound, as a constant reminder that there were things in life from which he would be better served to silently slink away.

  But those weren't roots.

  He kicked the sand aside with the toe of his boot, summoning a cloud of dust that clung to his already dirty jeans and flannel shirt, thickening the sweat on his brick face.

  With a sigh, he unholstered the canteen from his hip and drew a long swig, closing his eyes and reveling in the cool sensation trickling down his throat.

  "Couldn't have left well enough alone," he said aloud, grabbing his bag and stick and heading back toward his truck, where there was a shovel waiting in the cluttered bed.

  No, that wasn't a tangle of roots. Not unless roots could be articulated with joints.

  The sun had fallen to the western horizon, bleeding the desert scarlet by the time he climbed back out of the pit. His undershirt was soaked, his flannel draped over a clump of sage. He dragged the back of his hand across his forehead and slapped the sweat to the ground. Strands of long ebon hair had wriggled loose from the braid to cling to his cheeks. Night would descend soon enough, bringing with it the much anticipated chill.

  The rhythmic hooting of an owl drifted from its distant hollow in a cereus cactus.

  Tipping back the canteen, he drained the last of the warm water and cast it aside, unable to wrench his gaze from the decayed old bundle he had exhumed. Tattered fabric bound its contents into an egg shape, a desiccated knee protruding from a frayed tear, exposing the acutely flexed lower extremity he had initially mistaken for roots, the mummified flesh taut over the bones. Even
though the rest was still shrouded in an ancient blanket tacky with bodily dissolution, it didn't take a genius to imagine what the leg was attached to.

  "Burnin' daylight," he said at last, sliding back down into the hole.

  He slashed the bundle with the shovel, the sickly-smelling cloth parting easily for the dull blade. The foul breath of decomposition belched from within.

  "Moses in a rowboat," he gasped, tugging his undershirt up over his nose and mouth, biting it to hold it in place.

  Casting the shovel aside, he leaned over the bundle and grasped either side of the torn blanket. He could now clearly see two legs, both bent sharply, pinned side by side.

  The stench of death was nauseating.

  He jerked his hands apart with the sound of ripping worn carpet from a floorboard, the shredded blanket falling away to betray its contents.

  A gaunt face leered back at him, teeth bared from shriveled lips, nose collapsed, eyes hollow, save the concave straps of the dried eyelids. Its long black hair was knotted and tangled, fallen away in patches to expose the brown cranium. It had been folded into tight fetal position, its thighs pinning its crossed arms to its chest. Lengths of rope, hairy with decay, bound the body across the shins and around the back, tied so forcefully the dried skin had peeled away from beneath. There was no muscle left, no adipose tissue. Only leathered skin and knobby bone.

  Kajika was overcome by a sense of reverence. Could this possibly be one of his ancestors? Could the very blood that had crusted and rotted into the fabric and putrid sand now flow through his veins?