All the Devil's Creatures

  •

  Bobby heard the lawyer lose his cool. He felt a burning pain on his back, along his arms—as if the razored insects had skinned him alive. He trembled there on the ground—he tried to get up, tried to speak, but he could make no movement beyond that involuntary twitching. With his cheek resting in the mud, he saw one of the metallic dragonflies that the boy had crushed there on the ground beside his face. It twitched as well but then seemed to dissolve into a fine powder, and then it was gone.

  They ran to him when he first fell, and he saw the private investigator grab a kit from her pack. She swabbed him with medicinal-smelling cloths and he saw her pull them away pink with his blood. It felt as if she had lit his skin on fire. He heard their voices but found it hard to comprehend (… going into shock … not too deep … there could be venom …) and he could remember none of their names.

  They swaddled him in gauze and the woman (Mary … Marianne …? Not quite …) knelt beside him. Keep him stable … make sure we can move him … got to get him out of here …

  Then the lawyer stood and started yelling. “What the hell, Willie? What the hell have you got us into? He could have been killed. We could all be killed. Why didn’t you warn us? We could have brought … gear or whatever.”

  “Dang it, Geoff, I didn’t know. Never seen them kind of bugs before.” The old man did not sound defensive.

  Bobby worried over the names of his companions, and it brought a calming focus to his mind. Geoff—the lawyer’s name is Geoff … Walton? And Willie is the old man.

  The boy spoke in a voice soft and distant. “They knew someone would come back. They set a trap. They’re gone now.”

  When the woman beside him spoke, he felt the rhythm of her voice vibrate in his skull. “Who, Joey? Can you tell us?”

  “The people inside. They’re all gone. Except the Doctor. It’s all melting away.”

  “How in God’s name does he know these things, Willie?” The lawyer sounded calmer now. “Dammit, you’ve got to start telling us stuff.”

  “No more arguing, guys. We’ve got to get Bobby to a hospital.”

  They lifted him and slung his arms around the shoulders of Geoff and … Marisol. And he hobbled between them back to the boat, Willie and the boy following close behind. They got him into a seat and Marisol draped a wool blanket over him. Geoff called to the old man and the boy.

  “Get in, y’all.”

  “No. Y’all go ahead. Joey and I are going on.”

  Bobby through his haze could hear the lawyer again becoming apoplectic. “Are you crazy? After what just happened? No—we’re going to the hospital. We’ll gear up and do this the right way later.”

  “Paw-paw’s right. I need to go. I think it’s safe now. Just a little trap …”

  “To keep the less serious interlopers out, I reckon.” Willie turned and began walking back toward the well. “Come on, son.”

  Willie’s voice and the boy’s voice sounded far away and monotonous, as if pulled from a hypnotic trance. Bobby wondered if this seeming distance meant he was drifting away from consciousness, but then the lawyer’s rough words brought him to.

  “Dammit!”

  For the first time, Marisol’s voice betrayed impatience. “Geoff. We’ve got to go.”

  Bobby watched Geoff look from the shore to Marisol. “I can’t let them go alone. You get Bobby to the hospital, then come back with the boat.”

  “Geoff, don’t be nuts—”

  “Cell phones aren’t worth a durn out here. Are these two-way radios? Bobby!”

  The sound of his name brought brief clarity. Bobby saw Geoff gesturing to the walkie-talkies nestled in the boat’s console. He nodded.

  Tossing his car keys to Marisol, Geoff took a radio and rose to leave the boat. “We’ll use these to get in touch when you get back.”

  As Geoff began to disembark, Marisol stopped him with a gentle hand on his elbow. “Wait. If you’re going to insist on this craziness …” And then Bobby watched her remove her gun belt with the semi-automatic tucked into its holster. She handed it to the lawyer. Bobby began feeling sleepy then, and he let himself drift off as the outboard motor roared into life.

  •

  They descended the ladder—Willie first, agile despite his crooked frame. Then Joey in the middle, and Geoff last. The circle of daylight from the well opening above grew smaller like a distant sun shrinking and leaving only a hostile void.

  Inside, standing on the metal rungs of the ladder, Geoff realized that this was no real well shaft. The sides were of stainless steel—not the odd animated metal of the disk above but gleaming nonetheless in the shine of his pen light.

  At the bottom, they found themselves in a ventilation duct tall enough so that only Geoff had to stoop. Cool air flowed past them as Willie led the way through the gloom. They walked over the occasional grate, and Geoff peered down into the complex below. He saw corridors and laboratories and offices—but no sign of the mysterious people who worked in this facility—rogue scientists, according to the Prince.

  As if hearing his thoughts, Joey said, “They’ve deserted this place. Not much time left.”

  “Wait, Joey. What does that mean? Who’s deserted this place?”

  Willie did not pause. “Never you mind, counselor. We’re almost to what you want.”

  After a few more feet and another turn, Willie stopped and removed a screwdriver from his pouch. He went to work on a ventilation vent.

  “This here’s the main lab—the evidence you wanted.”

  For Geoff, the opening was barely wide enough. He slid through after the little old man and his strange grandson and dropped twelve feet to a wide counter-top, then four more feet to the floor.

  The lab was clean and dim and silent. In the center of the cavernous space, stations of equipment stood in good order and ready for use. And what Geoff saw along one wall filled him with fear and nausea—as Marisol must have felt in Eileen’s storage unit. As he imagined Dalia felt when she left her rambling voice mail to Eileen. At long last, he understood the terror in T-Jacques’s eyes.

  For he looked upon rows of glass canisters containing a yellowish fluid, each plugged into its own dock, each holding a bizarre and malformed humanoid fetus.

  “This is it. The organ farm.”

  “Yep. They’re all dead. And they weren’t just organs in them critters. They was each one of them alive in their own right—like each heart and each lung and each dadgum liver had its own soul. And they could repair themselves—never get sick or hurt.” Willie looked down at Joey and placed a gnarled hand over the child’s fine blonde hair.

  Geoff unhooked a canister from its dock and gazed at the lifeless and unnatural creature inside. What had the Moth Wing bastards wrought? He pined again for Eileen despite her cageyness, her self-serving machinations. He pined for her scientific mind, to help him make sense of it all.

  Meeting Joey’s glimmering gaze, Geoff wrapped the canister in a towel and secured it in his pack. “And you, Joey. Are you a product of this technology?”

  His client spoke before the boy could answer. “Like I said before—none of your concern. You’ve got your proof. You can show the world what the corporation and ol’ Duchamp were really up to down here.” The old man gestured toward a ceiling vent above a ledge. “You need to climb up there and find your way back to the well. Meet up with Ms. Solis and check on the deputy.”

  “Wait, what? You’re not coming back with me?” In the diner, Willie had begged Geoff to come with him beneath the bayou, to expose this place; now he wanted to send him away. But Willie’s eyes still pleaded, and Geoff thought he understood. For he could feel the push and the pull from the boy deep in his head—but not strong, because it was not directed at him. Joey had taken control. And yet still he had allowed Geoff to come this far, and Geoff thought again: a mind divided.

  As if in confirmation, Joey wept, but his voice was firm. “No. We have an appointment to meet my father.”

  •
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  Marisol piloted the Sheriff’s Department boat a mile down the bayou, back to Dunlap’s Marina and Geoff’s old car. Semi-conscious, Bobby shivered and sweat beside her. His breathing was labored, but his pulse seemed regular. She could not tell if the insects had poisoned him or if he was just in shock.

  She reached the shore and tied up the boat and considered how to get the injured deputy out and to the car. Attempting to rouse him, she determined she would need another set of legs and shoulders. She looked toward the ramshackle marina—just a shack on stilts, boat ramp, and a pier with a couple of archaic gas pumps. She felt sure it would be open on as fine a springtime Saturday as this. But when she called out and blew the boat’s air horn, she received no response and saw no movement from within.

  Wiping Bobby’s brow, she spoke into his ear. “Wait here. I’ll be right back with help.”

  She left the boat and walked the few yards up the pier to the shack. Opening the weathered screen door, she started to call out. But she stopped as she stepped inside and looked into the barrel of a gun.

  •

  Sheriff Seastrunk drove the back roads of the county past fine country homes and dilapidated tar paper shacks abandoned long ago, through pine forest and over the dark bayous that fed into the lake. He drove along the water’s edge by fishing camps built on stilts. He didn’t have a purpose that he knew of but he heard (felt) an undulating calling through the trees, conflicting messages pushing and pulling—save me … stay away … save me … stay away.

  He no longer cared whether he was going insane. He just drove.

  •

  “I’m coming with you,” Geoff said, knowing somehow that Joey’s … what? his life? his soul? … depended on it. He saw it in the boy’s eyes—shimmering strange and metallic one second, shining only with the tears of a little boy the next. He did not speak to the child; he could feel the Joey’s strange and contrasting yearnings like a tidal pull in his head. He gave his mind to the child and directed his words at his client. “I don’t know where the hell you’re going, but I’m coming with you.”

  “Nossir.” But he read relief in the old man’s eyes.

  “Willie, whatever’s going on here, it’s dangerous.” Geoff patted the holster at his hip. “And I have the gun.”

  Joey looked up at the old man and seemed to say, come on then; we’ll all perish or none of us will.

  “Well all right, dang it,” Willie said. “Don’t know how much good that gun’ll do, though.”

  “Well, maybe you’ve got more poke salat, then.” He didn’t mean to sound sarcastic; he felt cold when Willie’s expression told him he feared something too terrible for strange herbs or bullets to stop.

  Geoff followed them into a modern and gleaming but dim corridor, as if the fluorescent lights were on an energy-saving setting. Joey ran his long fingers along the metallic wall, and it glimmered like the disk that had hovered above the well hole.

  “It’s dying. I can feel it.”

  “But the Doctor’s here.”

  “Yes, I can hear him.”

  “Who is this doctor?”

  Then Joey’s voice sounded a million miles away. “My … father.”

  “Hush, boy.” Willie glanced back to Geoff. “The Doctor’s the one who’s been running this place for decades. Duchamp and them … they worked for him.”

  The Prince had spoken more truth than Geoff had surmised. But he did not know how Joey fit into the scheme. His heart cried for the boy; he no longer brushed his feelings off as mere psychological transference. He had seen too much terror in too many eyes. Yet his scientific mind could not stop probing for rational answers.

  “For decades? The doctor—he can’t be one of the original scientists, can he? That was sixty years ago.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Geoff. He’s old as the hills.”

  They came to a door and Joey led them in. To Geoff it seemed they had walked through a portal from a strange and distant future into the last century.

  A bust of Adolph Hitler dominated the room from atop a white pillar—the eyes of that scourge seeming to survey the room. Reading lamps cast a soft glow against walls not of any strange metal or living synthetic skin but of dark wood paneling adorned with Abrusson tapestries, a massive painting of a Teutonic landscape in a gilded frame, and a counter-historical map in which the Third Reich stretched across Europe and Siberia and the North American continent. Amid all this stood book shelves filled with specimen jars and leather-bound volumes with swastikas on their spines. In the rear of the room, the red white and black flags of that lost and baneful empire flanked an ornate desk. German eagle finials perched atop the flagpoles.

  A man rose from behind the desk whose skin glowed smooth but inauthentic as if sculpted on. His eyes, dark and sunken and lifeless, betrayed his antiquity.

  The Doctor, the mentor of Mengele of whom the Prince had warned.

  “Mr. Kincaid. I’ve been expecting you since I heard young Josef descending the well shaft.” The old Nazi tapped his pate through gossamer wisps of gray hair—a scalp so thin it looked like a bare skull—as he turned his gaze to Joey. They seemed to speak without words, and then he smiled at Willie, the grin of a death mask. “You needn’t have gone to this trouble—I would have come to you to keep our appointment soon enough.”

  “Best to get it over with. So his momma don’t have to know.”

  “Oh but she will know. A fine world indeed awaits our little Ubermensch.”

  Geoff’s glare met those dead eyes. “Who the hell are you and what do you want with the boy?”

  “The tenacious Herr Waltz. I’ve been keeping an eye on you—through my associates. I suppose it is only fair you should know the truth about the beautiful era this miraculous child is to usher in. Perhaps it will set your heart at ease. Before you die.”

  •

  “You,” Marisol said.

  The Prince smiled and gestured Marisol into the marina store with his pistol. She glanced toward the figure of old man Dunlap who owned this place, hog tied and unconscious on the floor.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll be alright. And you will be too, Ms. Solis. If you hand over what’s in your satchel.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But there’s a man out there hurt bad—I need to get him help.”

  Keeping the gun in her face, the Prince grabbed for Marisol’s backpack. “Give it here.”

  She did not resist him taking her bag and pondered her options has he poked through it. She felt naked without her weapon.

  “There’s nothing here.” The Prince held his gun to her forehead. “Where is it, bitch? I’m not afraid to kill you.”

  She tried to stay calm. “Please, just tell me what you want.”

  “You were in the facility, were you not? Don’t think I haven’t been tracking you, you and Waltz, following your movements for weeks—”

  “How—”

  “His phone, you fool. Like an idiot, he handed it over to me when I met him at a warehouse in Dallas. I had it bugged and gave it back.” He gave her a sick smirk. “Your man’s a bit of an amateur, no?”

  She tried again. “Look, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you want.”

  “The organ receptacle, you little harlot. The vegetable babies, or what have you.” He waved the gun again, and it seemed to Marisol that he was not accustomed to its weight, its feel. He seemed drunk with the power it wrought.

  I can take him, she thought.

  “To the boat,” he said.

  “It’s not there. We never made it inside the facility.” With the muzzle of the gun pressing into the small of her back, the Prince led her out the screen door and down the pier. “We had an injury. You’ll see—my guy’s hurt. I’m just trying to get him to the hospital.”

  They reached the boat and the Prince saw Bobby and said, “Look at this poor fellow.” He motioned for Marisol to board but she stood still.

  “Get on that boat, tramp. If you have one of those gol
den embryos aboard, you’d better hand it over. Otherwise we’re going to sink your friend into this bloody swamp and you’re going to show me your way in. I’ve got a big-pharma rep willing to pay a fair sum for that technology. I’ve come too far to lose it now.”

  Marisol glanced at Bobby and saw that he had fully gone under, his breathing more labored. “Alright,” she said, pointing to a space beneath the boat’s console. “Yes, we did manage to grab one of the embryos. It’s right down there in that compartment. Just let me get it, and then please let us go.”

  The Prince nodded and Marisol boarded the boat. She bent down and began messing with things, looking busy. Then she said, “The latch is stuck. It’s right in here…”

  “Oh for God’s sake.”

  The Prince leapt into the boat, causing a precarious rocking back and forth. I didn’t expect it to be this easy. And as he steadied himself, waving the gun toward the water by his side, Marisol lunged, driving her head home into his scrawny torso. The Prince buckled up and went over the side of the boat and would have fallen into the bayou had he not hit a pier post and bounced back on board. He grabbed her as he fell forward and then they both tumbled over the other side and into the black water.

  They wrestled for the gun. Marisol held tight to the Prince’s wrist, keeping the weapon pointed into the air. She could feel the sandy bottom beneath her feet—maybe five feet down. She was stronger than him, but he had two inches on her—just enough to keep his nose above the surface. She knew she would tire soon and take in water, and then he would overpower her. She brought a knee up, aiming for his crotch, but could not accomplish a solid blow through the murk. The bastard sputtered but kept hold of the gun.

  Then she heard sirens. A car door slammed. Boot heels ran on the pier’s weathered planks.