Waiting for Mister Cool

by Gerard Houarner

  Max couldn’t imagine what might have insinuated itself into the minds of everyone in the vicinity. He didn’t need to know. He was used to mysteries and questions, in his line of work. Just like he was used to the Beast’s rampaging appetite, and its hatred of the new and strange. He could deal with the Beast’s moods. He’d been doing it all his life.

  He just didn’t want to catch whatever plague had seized everyone else. There was no room in his head for other voices to influence his behavior, no space in his life to act in ways he’d never before considered. He was comfortable in his own particular stew of corruption. So were his employers, who had no need for an assassin with larger agendas. The Beast roaming inside him was enough.

  He also didn’t want the twins, or even Lee, turned into simple, stupid, alien things he’d have to kill.

  He had to find Kueur and Alioune. And Lee, he reminded himself. Fast. Before he lost them, or himself.

  What he needed to do was find the heart of the mystery and deliver to it a blood sacrifice. Then take back what belonged to him. One way or another, blood always appeased the unknown.

  He pressed on, confident that even afflicted with ambiguous perceptions, he’d be able to navigate through what was to come by the one true, internal star he’d always relied on: death. The Beast offered no argument.

  In the aftermath of combat, Max found landscape transfigured into the half-lit warped reality of most battlefields he’d ever walked. Most of the damage had been done to structures around the Ferris wheel, starting with the church directly ahead, and half-a-dozen smaller structures, including the old-West style saloon that had apparently housed one of the generators. The lamps in this area were all out, but with dry wood inside some of the buildings still feeding the fires, shadows danced across the earth.

  Morris’s survivors were getting restless, their murmurs and movement revealing their position at the base of the Ferris wheel ahead and to his left, past the playhouse and partially demolished church. At least the surrounding rubble made a quiet enemy approach against them nearly impossible. If he didn’t come back for them, maybe they’d survive the night.

  His foot landed on a solid, flat surface, and he looked down on the frowning face of the theater’s tragedy mask. Max stepped around the image, found a tangle of spokes and wood framing blocking his way, and went further to his right and down a few rows into the open-air amphitheater.

  And froze as something on the platform stage below, partly lit by a single lamp across the theater from Max, lifted its head as if catching his scent.

  The Beast rose to challenge, but Max flattened himself against a wet, rotting log, carefully letting his baggage settle while watching while his heart jumped and his legs ached to carry a fight to the thing that rose on four legs. Then five.

  Six, articulated in a way that could only mean the legs were broken.

  The thing moved sideways, night and shadows dancing with it like a nervous partner. A hard, shiny shell glided into view, and Max categorized what he saw as a saddle, or perhaps a harness. Another part whipped past, too fast to identify, like a bundle of snakes launching themselves in different directions. Perhaps, a tail.

  Max strained to catch the seams in what had to be a conjoined pair of animals, searching for another pair of flopping legs, a second head. Clicking rose from the stage, like a play performed in Morse code. The night deepened for an instant. Then the stage was empty.

  There was no sign of movement among the benches.

  Max crept back up to ground level. He touched the ground lightly with his hand, for balance, and his fingertips dipped into cool pools of liquid thicker than water, brushed against bone. He jerked his hand away. An animal lay on its back atop one of the logs, gutted, bloody rainwater trickling from its ripped belly.

  The Beast wanted him to taste the meat to help catch the scent of the prey that had eluded them below.

  But a voice shouting, “Cal!” distracted him. He laid himself flat against the top row of seats.

  A man in torn pants, a huge stomach bulging over the belt line, scrapped and bloody calves as big as pineapples exposed by shredded material below the knee, staggered by a few yards away. The bag slung crosswise over his chest was also torn, and still smoldering, as was his shirt and hair. His shoes and socks were gone. Exposed skin glistened as he turned into light.

  He curled toward the amphitheater, then swung away, heading in the direction of Morris’s camp. But only for a few steps. He stopped, shouted, “CAL!” again, put his head down and started for the Ferris wheel wreckage and the small fires. He smacked into the side of a small shed, staggered backwards, made his way around.

  No one from the band of Morris’s survivors answered. Max was surprised no one even came out to help. Maybe he’d been the resident bully or buffoon every unit always harbored, and his comrades were disappointed to hear from him. Or, one of their number had suddenly been struck by tactical insight and sensed a trap.

  The Beast saw only prey and, forgetting about the enigmatic animal in the amphitheater, urged him to finish the man. Max didn’t sense any other hunters stalking the wounded wanderer, but the other side had surprised him twice already this night. And he didn’t want to attract the attention of Morris’s men.

  Max crawled out of the theater, pausing when the man doubled back, then stopped, worked hard to catch his breath, and staggered off in another direction, still calling for his comrade.

  Max slipped into the nearest shed, freezing at the squeak of rusty door hinges, the groan of wood under his weight. The wandering survivor probably still had the blast that had torn most of his clothes off ringing in his head. The other men were too far off to hear. It was whoever might be close by that Max was worried about.

  He swept the flashlight beam over a floor crowded with cartons, bags, crates. Water dripped from the ceiling, and the smell of rotting wood permeated the air in the tightly packed space. The Beast strained for any sign of multi-jointed prey.

  The beam split, brightened, stung his eyes as it reflected between funhouse mirrors gathered in a corner. Before he could turn off the light, Max thought he caught a flash of movement in the glass surfaces curved to warp the images they captured. A man, blacker than a starless patch of night, seemed to leap from one mirror to the other, while in the back, among cracked and broken panels, a woman, almost blue, and with too many arms, danced with a speed and ferocity that gave Max a chill along his spine.

  His thumb finished its twitch, and the light went out. He dismissed what he’d seen as another trick of light and shadow mixed with hallucination. But in the darkness that rushed him, the image of a small house cat, eyes lit by fires burning inside its decomposing body, leaping out of a mirror surface toward him, lingered in his vision.

  The Beast, sensing nothing of flesh and blood, urged him to keep going.

  “CAL?” the man shouted, just outside.

  Max braced himself against the door as the man tried to push it open.

  “You in there?”

  Light caught in the mirrors and flashing through spaces between the wall’s wooden planks had caught his attention. Others had surely taken note, as well. Max stepped carefully to the middle of the shed, felt his way among the crates, pushing, pulling, gently tapping for hollow spaces.

  He found the hatch to the underground tunnels hidden beneath an empty, nailed-down crate he had to enter through the top. With the survivor banging on the shed walls, Max tossed a grenade at the entrance and quickly closed the hatch. The explosion shook dust from the hatchway’s walls, but at least he didn’t have to regret the absence of a working lock. Wreckage and the threat of another ambush were good enough to secure his rear flank.

  Once down the ladder, the damp air’s earthen smell told him he hadn’t descended into the secret military base. Without the bleaching glow of a fluorescent lamp, he had to turn the flashlight back on to confirm the lack of concrete walls and security hatches. For a moment, he couldn’t imagine why anyone during the milita
ry part of the area’s history would have wanted formal entries to the secret area’s secret underworld. Filling in or collapsing the labyrinth of foundations, tunnels, basements and storerooms made and used by the original resort’s construction crew, and expanded by subsequent colonies of smugglers, carnival and circus vets, hoboes and vagabonds, would have been the tactically secure choice. Unless government accountants had forced engineers to use parts of the existing network to build the base, establishing formal entrances for future construction and expansion into conveniently excavated areas.

  Even if the idea had been a good one, the absurd outcome was a reminder of why he’d opted out of institutions and their logic, and worked alone.

  He probed the timber-reinforced entrances to half a dozen tunnels facing him with his light. Isolated in the grave silence and perfect darkness, pieces of what he’d left behind returned to haunt him: the thorny hedgerow vegetation, the odd cottage light, Santos.

  Being knocked down by something that had dropped down from, and returned to, the clouds.

  The gateways took on a layer of meaning as deep and indecipherable as scratches on a stone tablet left from a dead civilization. The weight of the generations of men who’d dug through the earth momentarily came to rest on his shoulders. They whispered questions he couldn’t quite understand, but which roused his curiosity about what they had been doing for so long below the ground.

  But the Beast reared in his disgust over his irrelevant concerns, and in frustration that it could not kill all those generations of diggers, explorers, and military planners.

  Shapeless, demonic threat roiled in the darkness, and inflamed the aching wound that was the twins’ absence.

  He shook his head sharply, trying to buck whatever had gotten into him that was driving him to distraction. Mysteries didn’t matter. The blood of prey, and the blood of bonds, did.

  Taking a moment to align himself in the direction of the enemy camp, Max picked the opening closest to the direction in which he wanted to go. He passed through the old, cracked wood-framed entrance, pace locked into the cadence of his beating heart and the Beast’s eager rumbles, listening for movement, breathing, a sign of living enemies, or anything else that might want him dead.

  Chapter 7

  The tunnel widened or narrowed at random, and was lined at times with stone, brick, dirt or wood, as if built in spurts over time for different purposes. But what set Max’s nerve on edge were the turns that confounded his sense of direction, and the forks he didn’t want to choose between.

  The first detour went around an underground tank, with pipes and a bank of antique control valves running from the corroded metal wall Max had come up against. An electronic panel add-on with dead LCD readouts felt warm to the touch. Putting an ear against the tank, Max heard a slow, ponderous series of beats, like the sound of lead balls dropping into a pool. Or a large heart pounding.

  The first fork offered him a choice between a rising path, from which a slight breeze blew against his face, and a descending one, blocked by dust-covered webs. He took the high road, which curled along a drunkard’s path, dipping and rising, dividing three more times. He chose against the breeze once and turned back at a cul-de-sac filled with animal bones and skulls. A fresh collection, from rats, a dog, and a raccoon, with flesh and fur still visible, was piled against the near wall. An ammonia-like smell quickly drove him back.

  He had to crawl through a half-size tunnel going around a rock fall. Nearby scorch marks and metal debris indicated an old explosion. Pausing to clear the weapons of dust, he spotted a side passage and flicked the flashlight beam over the walls, discovering a catacomb of human bones carefully piled in stacks, capped by skulls.

  He continued following the flow of air until the tunnels delivered him to a widened space with wooden floorboards, a mirrored ceiling and plywood walls that didn’t reach the ceiling, arranged in a simple maze. Though it looked like a primitive version of a floor full of office cubicles, the space actually felt like a basement for a building that had either been destroyed or never built, perhaps part of a carnival funhouse. With boots crunching old glass shards to splinters, he negotiated a path using the few surviving overhead mirrors, discolored and warped, to navigate. Neither he nor the Beast liked catching his inverted reflection bobbing up and down on the ceiling.

  On the other side, he faced a choice of three openings, as well as a wall of mirrors that captured and distorted his image, turning him thin, fat, tall, short, and in one construction, sending him cascading down the endless mirage of a glass corridor. He tried to gauge his location under the carnival grounds, but couldn’t be certain if he was still heading toward the enemy camp. He regretted not looking for a compass when he was arming himself.

  Max swept the light back and forth across the mirrors and entrances, then paused at the corridor mirage, thinking something else had moved, near the vanishing point where his image nearly collapsed into an infinite point.

  Something with too many arms smiled back at him from the mirror’s depths, showing teeth that glowed like razor-sharp moons.

  He ran up on the mirror, stared into its depths, hand flitting from one weapon to the next before settling on the knife, but not pulling it out. He peered into the glass as deeply as his sight could take him, and saw his reflection change as it receded, growing younger, until he hardly recognized himself as a juvenile, then a child. He touched the glass, as if he could reach through its surface to pull out a younger face. Perhaps it was another child who stared back at him, a feral survivor of a kidnapping who, even as Max watched, bled from the eyes while darkening into a shadow that was blinding, painful to look at, and then deepened into the blackness of an abyss, the maw of a terrible hunger, a living thing that reached for the fingers pressed against the mirror, threatening to grab Max, pull him in, consume him in the ravenous emptiness of his mirror image. Max blinked, turned the flashlight away. When he looked again, he found nothing more at the reflections’ end than the laughter of dead carnival hucksters as they celebrated another rube brought low by their deceit.

  The Beast, its attention now drawn to mirrors, wanted to wreck the wall before moving on, but Max calmed himself, refusing to serve any more notice of his approach. He was beginning to hate mirrors.

  He picked up a mix of scents: human, earth, and machine. One predominant smell blew from each of the entrances. He explored the passage promising a return to men: a concrete corridor which was eventually illuminated by powered fixtures that let him save his batteries. He passed a few locked doors, thick and wooden, with brass hinges and antique porcelain and glass handles. The scent thinned in the stale air. The construction pre-dated the military complex, but whatever purpose it had served eluded Max. He was about to turn back when he found an open room with a chair positioned directly in front of a video monitor connected by insulated cable running through the wall to a remote feed.

  The sound was off, but the scenes playing out on the screen might have come from a video record of Max’s assignments, especially the kind requiring he return with information. When he looked closer, the scenes might have been a recording of the twins’ nightmares. Or his own.

  The Beast, restive from the bloodless underground journey, found the images arousing. It supplied the soundtrack from memory, and the screams and pleas for mercy, the incomprehensible speech of the suffering slowly transforming into mad prattling, filled Max with dull pleasure. He wandered to the chair, rested his hands on its back, swayed with the rhythm of the blows being delivered by men. On children.

  Though the Beast protested, Max took a step back and gripped the chair for support. He watched a slap snap a head sideways, and grunted. His cheeks flushed. A short, sharp sting shot through his skull, ear to ear. The Beast withdrew into a corner of his mind, confused by his reactions. Max had the impression the Beast considered him mad.

  He recognized the touch, though no one had put a hand on him. Kueur and Alioune were haunting him, from somewhere deep inside himself,
reaching him through the power of what he was witnessing. They’d been making men suffer when he’d found them, but that had not always been the case. They’d been young for a long time, as Lee liked to point out. As young certainly as these videotaped children.

  Calcutta returned to his mind, like a corpse on the tide, and his legs suddenly felt tired, as if he’d been running for days.

  The twins had never tolerated Max’s hunting of children. The Beast, like any wild predator, didn’t distinguish between adult and child, even favoring the young because they made easier prey. He’d found the twins’ distinctions odd, but had obeyed the restriction, despite the Beast’s protests. Sacrificing a small range of his usual pleasures in exchange for their company had seemed like a minor inconvenience, particularly when they spent so little time together. And he could do as he wished when the twins were off learning the ways of civilization under his protection in Paris.

  But watching the video images, and feeling for the first time an infinitesimal part of the violence, slavery and rape Kueur and Alioune implied they’d suffered on the journey through their early childhood, Max was stunned by the reverberations of old blows, the echoes of forgotten cries. Some belonged to the twins. Others, he’d taken.

  In the fusion of bygone pain, Max not only felt what the twins had endured. He reveled in how the pain had sharpened their savagery, and awakened the appetites in them that made the twins feel like his kin.

  To his shock, he felt something else, as well. Pain, feeding the wells of their empathy.

  Foreign words. Alien concepts. What was he thinking?

  Max leaned forward, on the chair, nausea twisting his stomach. He couldn’t stop the rush of thoughts, a river of babble run-off from the storm of nonsense the twins always returned from Paris with, inevitably forgotten when instinct and appetite called for a return to the realities of the hunt. But in that haunted moment, all their civilized foolishness came rushing at him, a mask coalescing out of chaos, wanting to become a real face. The Beast whimpered at his insanity.