The image, and the thick odor, brought him back to slaughtered villages with bodies stacked like lumber between burnt-out houses, all wrapped in the kind of underworld silence that came after dissenters had been pacified, a rebellion put down, a strike broken, a pocket of an unwanted tribe or faith cleansed. Max shifted the weight of the weapons on his shoulders and let old business slip away, like dreams. But the smell remained, the kind for which earth movers were called in, to bury the source, and any fear, shame or regret it provoked in those who ordered or facilitated the butchery.
He passed the light down, into a pit. Stared, the Beast howling and leaping with joy, at something he couldn’t recognize at first. But the foulness of blood and fleshy rot, like a wall rising to smash him in the face, helped clarify what he was looking at, placing the reality below in the familiar context of an aftermath to a killing rage.
It was the trace of the twins that confused him. Their blood scent shouldn’t have been associated with such carnage. The scent of their sweat, the sound of their laughter as they took their pleasures, perhaps. But not blood.
Fear, its cold grip tightening, shortened his breath. The Beast laughed at him. He tried to shake off the feeling by calling up anger at Morris, Cal, Santos; at the Mister Cool whose missed appointment had dragged Max into this affair; at the storm, and the hallucinations, and the things that just didn’t belong. But fear wouldn’t let go.
There was no place to run to, as there had been when he was a child. He couldn’t curl into a little ball and hide, as the Beast did when it was upset. And there was no one to kill. The business of death had left no room for being afraid. Fear was a burden he’d never learned to carry.
So he stared, and as he picked out nude torsos and limbs, with bits of brightly colored dresses and stained pants mixed into the closely packed carcasses like greens in a stew, rage drained from him, and with it his strength, as quickly and violently as if he’d been caught in a crossfire and shot to pieces.
The pit was filled with the broken, naked – and headless – bodies of children, covered in flies that rose only for the rats his beam caught darting over the hoard.
“Kueur,” he said, softly. “Alioune.”
Their names echoed, but they didn’t answer.
He thought of the other pit he’d seen earlier, a pool of thick, rich liquid life. If the twins were –
He closed his eyes.
If the twins had been tossed into the pit below, maybe their heads hadn’t been taken, yet, and he could carry them to that section of the complex, bathe them. Bring them back.
Would they ever grow up? Would they sleep like sheep in barracks, subsist on boiled leaves, and rise only to kill on command? Would they welcome their final rest, when he couldn’t stand their presence anymore and delivered them to it?
Death played its games, but remained death. He knew better than most. The dead didn’t come back. Not really. Not for long. He’d borne witness to supposed miracles in jungles, laboratories, cellars and caves. In dreams, he lived a life between the days of his Calcutta childhood and his first taste of war, in a place where he’d discovered there was more to existence than pain. In that place, the dead had sometimes come back on their own. But that was in dreams.
He granted there was always more to learn, but doubted there was much to discover beyond the certainties he dealt with in his work. Right now, the smell told him there were no new lessons here.
The empty places in him twisted, and the Beast recoiled. Max pressed knuckles against eyelids and sucked in air as if the polluted surroundings could kill the pain tearing at his insides. Then shame curdled the faint hope that the twins might only be wounded, still clinging to life as they were tossed into the pit to die. As if anyone would go in among the bodies to remove their heads afterwards. He was disgusted with himself for indulging in such a pathetic fancy, like common prey. The Beast cackled.
Rooting for the sustenance of his killing nature, he managed to find reason to salvage dignity. There were, after all, pleasures to be found in tossing dying victims to the dead. There’d be screaming, and cries of despair. And cruel suffering for survivors forced to bear witness, to listen, and smell, and watch, even to the very end, when the prize was collected. It was something he might have done, even if he’d had to go back into the pile himself to take off their heads. Or force a witness, under the threat of also being tossed into the pit, to wade in for him and finish the work.
Both he and the twins had fed on just that kind of despair. They all relished toying, if time allowed, with prey. If whoever had captured Kueur and Alioune shared Max’s and the twins’ fierce nature, there was a chance of saving them.
The Beast wallowed in brutality and its consequences, ignoring hope. Max clung to that hope, as unfamiliar as it was, compensating for reality’s worst possibility with a chance only a fool would believe in.
Max tried to imagine his hope’s deliverance: the twins rising from the swamp’s gelatinous depths, laughing at their adventure, their eyes full of pain and pleasure, eager for more. Instead, he saw the faces of young men, expressions blank, eyes hollowed, eagerly throwing their lives away.
A stray flight of flies crashed against his face, then buzzed him and alighted on exposed skin to sample living flesh.
He opened his eyes to the darkness, brushed away ghosts and insects. Hope was as useless as fear. Only reality mattered. Blood. Death. Pain. Pleasure.
The twins’ scent, the only piece of reality he had to hang on to, drove him forward. Dead or alive, in the wallow of corpses below or somewhere on the other side, he had to find them, even if for nothing more than to bury a part of himself. The Beast celebrated their vanishing, and Max hung on to its surging power as his demon leapt through the void in his heart, the mirror to the killing field below.
Max traced a route down into the pit with the light, and descended, even as the faint evidence of Kueur and Alioune faded, swallowed by corruption’s miasma. Gingerly walking on slippery rock along the edge, he swung the light back and forth searching for fresh bodies among the bloated, decomposing husks. The weapons and ammunition pouches slung over his shoulders banged and scrapped against the walls, disembodied evidence, like the beam of light, that there was life in the depths of darkness.
Loose earth gave way, slick stone offered no grip to steady himself. Max scrambled, dug his heels in, used stocks and barrels to brace himself, but still he slid, up to his knees, into the muck of rotting flesh. Flies rose up in a droning storm to welcome him.
Pushing through the top layer of bodies, most a month or two old, he sank deeper into the warm soup of partly liquified flesh. With footing treacherous, he had to shorten his stride, and balance himself with a slight push off of a shoulder, a knee, a hip, he found thrusting out of the mass. Maggots clung to his hands, dipping into the raw hand wounds he’d given himself. The slope of the ground drew him down, deeper into the swamp of bodies, to his thighs, his hips. Fingers stroked his legs as he pressed on, anonymous limbs and stiff torsos tangled with his feet. He jerked and wrenched his body forward, and with every heave a faint, sucking sound rose to accompany his heavy breathing, as if the bodies were kissing him with the open mouths of their raw and bloody neck stumps.
His cargo of weapons rattled as he lifted the straps high to keep them dry. Spiders and beetles darted across distended bellies, up and down bones sticking up with their flesh sloughing off. Mites clogged his nose and throat; flies crawled into his ears, danced across his eyes, tasted his tongue.
The atmosphere of decomposition was thick, viscous, like concrete pouring into him, plugging every pore, filling trachea and lungs, suffocating him with the consequence of prey’s fate. Every labored breath he took solidified in his body, weighing him down, dragging his killing spirit down the road of all the murders it had ever committed. The Beast flailed and cried as it drowned.
His light ran across a mottled hand rising from the crest of a wave moving away from him as the force of his progress ripple
d through the bodies. His reached out with his free hand, responding to the chance of a survivor. He opened his mouth to call out the twins’ names.
A body rolled in front of him, exposing a nipple, a rack of ribs poking through ragged flaps of skin, a boney knee. He pulled back, put his head down, pushed harder through the swamp. The rocky shore he’d lit up at other end of the pit didn’t seem to be getting any nearer.
The Beast fought for its life, like any living creature sinking in strange waters. It rose to add its rage against the threat of capture, and its fuel made Max want to snap bones, to reach into soft flesh of broken bodies and rip out jellied organs. Riding the Beast too closely, he emptied the Ruger’s clip into the corpses in front of him, tossed the gun away, did the same with the Beretta. The blasts reverberated, and he unslung an AK-47 and braced himself for firing, searching the cavern’s upper reaches for the first sign of muzzle flash while the blasts rang in his ears. There was no reply to his crazed firing, which frustrated the Beast. Before he knew what he’d done, a live grenade had flipped out of his hand, tossed only a few feet in front of him to clear a path.
The Beast dipped below death’s surface, momentarily overwhelmed. And then Max realized in that moment of clarity that he was well within in the grenade’s kill zone.
What had he been thinking? He hadn’t, of course. He’d let the Beast run out of control, and it was relying on his wits to save them both.
There was nowhere to hide. He ran the light over the corpses directly ahead, and caught the metal top of the grenade just as it sank beneath the surface.
He was dead.
And with the certainty of that realization, he understood he’d met his punishment. It was as if the dead children had reached into him and ignited his self-destructive nature, to avenge all the deaths of innocents he’d caused. In his eyes, he was a much different kind of killer than the monsters who had murdered them. But to their souls, he doubted they could tell the difference.
Or maybe, he thought with a chill that reached through flesh to twist his stomach, the twins had tired of his secret slaughtering and led him into this trap.
He shook his head. Anything was possible. The chance of betrayal tightened the turns in his stomach and guts, until he thought he might rip apart from the inside.
He waited for the detonation, the flash and pressure wall of flying bits of bone and debris, the shock, the final darkness deeper than what surrounded him in life.
Waited.
No regrets. No hungers.
Curious.
The Beast, confused, tried to rise, but Max pushed it down. Death was coming, no need to rush into its arms.
Drifting, beyond the time he’d set for the fuses to go off.
The blast refused to come.
Max released the Beast, impatient for the end. A part of him marveled at the physical sensation of a new kind of hunger: wanting death. The screams of those he’d tortured seemed much clearer.
No explosion.
The Beast broke the surface of Max’s calm, roaring in defiance. But death didn’t take them. It left them trapped in the awareness of its imminence.
The grenade had failed.
Impossible, he told himself. And then, because the Beast shook death’s nearness off first to shout its contempt, Max confessed: it happens. Less often for him, because he made his own. But others had handled his constructions, and maybe someone had investigated its non-standard appearance, ruining the mechanism. In the field, guns jammed, explosives failed, or set off prematurely. Which was one reason he preferred using his hands when the kill had to be made.
Maybe the dead had dragged the grenade down, worked their blind fingers and disarmed the weapon, saving him in the hope that he would avenge them. Or perhaps, they knew something he didn’t, and were preserving him for a worse fate waiting in the future.
Bone grazed his flesh. He thought he heard ghosts laughing.
Kueur and Alioune could have saved him, as well. He still wasn’t sure of all that they might be capable of doing. Nor could he be certain why they’d intervene, if they could.
The Beast’s contempt for death collapsed into empty defiance as it circled the error of its annihilation. But there was no prey in self-examination, and it quickly lost interest, rose up again, outraged that it was still stuck in a place it did not want to be.
Max, keeping watch over frustration, channeled the rage as best he could to the fight through the pit. Lashing out was all the Beast knew how to do. Max was supposed to know better.
He tried not to think of the dead children.
But in the repetitive grind of the struggle, raising a leg fractions of an inch, pushing himself forward, setting his foot down, putting all his weight and muscle into every step, contending as if he was wrestling an evenly matched opponent for his life, the nature of the death he’d just eluded and the desperate tricks his mind had played taunted him.
Kueur and Alioune might have laughed at the irony. How many children had he killed, directly or indirectly, over the course of his life, from rivals and street gang members in Calcutta to those casually dispatched with their families in the course of war and in his blind killing? The pit might have held a couple of hundred bodies, with room for thousands, but he didn’t know if it was large enough to contain the answer to the question. There were almost enough to choke on.
He’d fallen into the crucible of his sins.
He grunted, wanting to laugh. He’d fallen far. He rarely had the luxury to think of dying, much less consider retribution in some kind of hell that prey seemed to fear. Life in the eternal now, filled with hungers and needs, had driven him, at least until he met the twins. And even with them, he’d concerned himself only with their needs and safety, not the condition of whatever it was mortal flesh might harbor that was supposed to move on to heaven or hell – a soul, a spirit, a thing that was neither, like the Beast.
And when threats and circumstances forced him to at least acknowledge death, he’d assumed it would take him with a sudden bullet to the head – or an explosion – with nothing but oblivion to follow. If punishment came for what he’d done, he’d suffer for a while at the hands of men before he died, and then nothing of what he’d done would matter to him.
He’d never believed in ghosts. Or spirits. Or gods. Though he’d seen things he couldn’t explain. The lack of logical explanation didn’t make a thing supernatural. If that were the case, most governments and corporations, along with their secret operations and assassinations, qualified as magical. But he’d never thought the dead capable of reaching out from their graves to avenge themselves. Until now. And, of course, the fantasy was not helping him through the mire.
Old, stupid man.
He’d let rage and imagination run wild. He’d allowed himself to sink to the level of a victim waiting to be taken. He was on the verge of bringing himself down with the simplest of traps, laid out for stunned, stupid prey.
Then again, maybe he was already dead, laid out on the battleground above, his life extinguished by a blast or crossfire, and he’d experienced since then the dreaming of his last fevered moments. Or perhaps that thing from the sky had smashed his skull in, and everything since had been a journey to punishment: the pit. There was no oblivion, as he’d always thought. Only punishment.
For all that they loved him, the twins would have appreciated the justice. Sometimes, in their quiet moments, they’d looked at the blood on their own hands, and on his, and questioned their right to satisfy their appetites. Max had dismissed the doubts as more pretty academic thoughts. He hadn’t even bothered to point out how, in the next moment, the twins were out luring prey into one of their web, unable to sustain interest in moral speculations when their bodies craved the pleasures of the hunt. They were so young, contained so many contradictions. Had he ever been that young? Had he ever bothered to ask questions about himself and the world around him?
No. Existence had always been a simple equation of pain and pleasure balanced by de
ath. Trapped in a hole in the ground filled with death, the equation had changed, but it remained simple. Death was both the problem and the solution: a tight, tiny circle etched with razors into his mind, bleeding out through his body to skin.
For the first time in his life, Max felt restricted rather than liberated by the limits of his vision. Let the twins laugh, if they wanted to. If he was being punished, they’d follow him down the same road soon enough.
Dead or alive, on whatever kind of road he walked, it seemed to him he still had a long way to go.
He knew he shouldn’t stop. But his legs and chest burned from the effort to move on, from carrying the burdens he’d taken on. Every particle of his being felt saturated by all that he’d done over the years, until it seemed in that moment that he’d become the thing his life had served most faithfully: death. His loyal service was not the power he’d always thought it to be, but a handicap. It wasn’t a door to freedom, but to a prison.
The circle closed. He shut off the flashlight. There was nothing to see.
Max paused, catching his breath.
His heart hammered in his chest. Muscles burned. Blood pulsed and throbbed through his skull. These were all signs of life, not death.
Old, stupid man. Of course he was alive.
And in the pit’s dead pool, there were no ghosts or spirits, only corpses. Someone else’s prey. What he might have been, himself, long ago, without luck and desperation.
What had caught him were merely pieces of himself, useless, vulnerable, chopped off and disposed of by chance and by all the dangers he’d survived along the path of his life. Shards of innocence murdered, in bloody acts, through callous choices. Sacrificed to the endless hunger of the Beast.
The bodies didn’t matter. Or the sins.
The ground beneath him gave way, and he sank a few more inches into the morass. Bones scraped against his skin through the fabric of his pants. He’d been standing on a body, and its chest had finally caved in.
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