The flesh-mud sucked at his shoes, refusing to let go, until his feet slipped out and he staggered another few steps, bare toes brushing against teeth and vertebrae and soft, decomposing matter, until the dead lapped at his hips, and then his waist. His chest.
In disgust, he finally dumped the weapons, grenades and ammunition he’d been carrying. Even the knife. Stripped off his shirt. Pants. Cocked his arm to throw away the flashlight, but lost the drive. The flashlight slipped out of his hand.
Fear fed on the fresh fuel of unreasonable conjectures still haunting him, but it wasn’t the punishment of vengeful souls, or the threat of suffocating in a vat of decaying bodies, that gave rise to panic. What frightened him, more than anything had since he was a child, was the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to reach the twins in time to help them.
He screamed his frustration, taking the Beast’s voice, and his body shook and his muscles jerked and wrenched from the effort to express himself, as if he’d lifted a car over his head like a ridiculous hero from a bad movie.
Not helpful, he told himself. Stop screaming, he told the Beast. Stop acting like the Beast, he decided.
If he’d known satisfying his murderous appetite would have led him to this moment, he would have been more discriminating in selecting victims, more careful in the methods he chose.
The Beast howled in outrage over the lie, its voice rising above his, its need to kill what was already dead subsuming the necessity to be free. The Beast wanted to act, but could not. Max was its burden.
Max relaxed, becoming everything the Beast was not. Gentle to its harshness, soft to its hardness. Hanging on to life, when all the Beast wanted was death. He didn’t even realize he’d made the decision to become what he hunted until he heard the Beast’s cries as if they were a child’s – faint, remote, belonging to some other mother. He floated, naked, among the rotting bodies and infested water, and managed to push off the bottom, slip between the bodies, find seams of liquified flesh between solid clumps of decaying matter, flow with the currents of the dead instead of fighting against them. Along the way, his hand brushed against weapons, bags, the flashlight’s rubber casing. He let everything go except the light.
Using the Beast’s rage and his own fear, Max killed, not the dead all around him, but the pain in his lungs and legs and back, in his head and heart. He moved outside of time, through a calm present, in a forever between, unaware he was making progress until his hand touched solid rock.
Max pulled himself out of the pit and lay on a bed of stones on the other shore, a second-skin of gore and slime sloughing off, listening to the sound of his breathing echo through the cavern, giving the womb of earth that contained him the semblance of life.
He hadn’t let go of the light. He hadn’t let go of life. The Beast quieted, finally exhausted, sinking back into its confusion over the dead. And in that moment of triumph, with the Beast subdued, in the earth’s embrace, Max discovered a departing conceit rising through his mind like smoke from charred ruins: the dead might not have tried dragging him down to their fate, or released him to a far worse destiny. They, like the Beast, might have only wanted him to save them, to drag them out of the pit, back into the living world and its light, where they could be discovered and mourned and buried, and perhaps avenged
Max rolled over on his stomach. Got up on his hands and knees. He couldn’t even remember where all the bodies he’d buried might be found, but resolved to walk more carefully over freshly turned earth. He didn’t want to become stuck again.
He got to his feet, turned on the light, found a path up and out of the pit, and climbed.
Chapter 8
The twins’ scent flared through the stench of the dead near the top of the wall, and by the time he’d crawled onto a ledge overlooking the pit, he knew they were near. He wanted to get up and run, to throw himself at their captors and tear them apart. The Beast needed him to do that, too. It was, as always, hungry.
But his body refused to move. Arms and legs had turned to stone. The Beast couldn’t stir him. Not even the threat to Kueur and Alioune.
With no more tricks and fancies left inside, he surrendered. Stared back at the pit, flashing the light back and forth across what he’d crossed, not quite believing he’d crossed the moat of headless corpses.
He wondered if he was supposed to apologize. Beg forgiveness.
Innocence forgives without being asked. Another one of the twins’ odd fruit of education. He’d passed through the children. But there hadn’t been any mothers in the pit, as far as he could tell.
He shook his head. But like remains of the dead, strange thoughts clung to him.
He’d sunk to a greater depth of the madness than he usually inhabited. He really had gone insane this time. No one he’d ever known could have survived what he’d just been through. Lee would have balked and run retching from the pit. The twins would have screamed and gone off on a mad search for the perpetrators, but never crossed the morass of liquefying flesh to find them. Nor would they have dared a crossing to save themselves, or anyone else.
But Max felt like he’d returned to the place of his birth. Something about the touch of innocent flesh left him with a lingering sense of possibilities beyond the satiation of hungers, the thrill of hunting, the joy of killing. The gelatinous remnants of broken and decaying bodies had seeped into his pores, just like their stench, and touched the dead and empty places inside him, cracked open the expanses of the void his body and consciousness enclosed. Just like twins sometimes did, when they laughed in their play. Or when victims begged.
Was there any life he might have led, other than as blind, stupid prey waiting for slaughter? Could he be reborn to follow another road?
No vision came to him. He couldn’t see beyond exhaustion, as if even the hint of a possibility for another life had robbed him of his strength.
The Beast caught up the remains of Max’s true life of a hunter and killer, and wound the torn and bloody scraps around its host like a bandage, purring of hungers fulfilled.
Max’s personal brand of reason stirred at the traces of the familiar. Instinct itching just under his skin fed him, along with memories swirling like mist wafting across the swamp below.
He’d forget all of this. He’d never think about the pit again. All he had to do was move on. All the consequences and repercussions would be left behind. These bodies weren’t even his victims. Why did he care? Did he believe he really could take a wife, a lover, and give up all his ways just to dedicate himself to another? Did he really feel like spreading his seed over the earth? Believe he could feel something other than revulsion for a child he’d made, or a family?
Did he want to forget everything he knew about death, forfeiting his purpose as its agent, just to become another cog in the machinery of life?
He would have laughed, if he could have taken a deep enough breath. If fear didn’t still hold him in its grip.
Voices carried down a tunnel just beyond the opening further along the wall. Not the twins.
Someone screamed.
Not the twins.
Lee.
The twins’ scent came to him, stronger than before. Max waited to feel something besides concern for Kueur and Alioune. But all that came to him was the Beast’s regret that it was not the one inflicting pain, and its drive to keep moving and find what was worth killing.
He swatted the flies that had followed him up the wall. Swallowed a handful, savoring their dying flutter inside him.
He let the Beast rattle the bones of its cage, taking what life he could from its growing hunger, its rising rage. Strength flowed like a tide washing over dry sand, restoring life to a wasteland of twitching husks and empty shells abandoned on the shore.
Max caressed the Beast’s restless zeal, savored the death of flies, focused on bits and pieces of what still dribbled off his skin, and found what he needed to rise to the scent of his precious twins. He began by crawling, like a child, along the ledge, through
the opening, into a crumbling, brick-lined tunnel.
The faint light glowing from one end focused his thoughts. He got up, rage building, cascading, growing into a force powerful enough to propel him into the heart of his enemies, naked and weaponless.
As he’d promised himself, he pushed aside all that he’d seen and felt, and gave himself to the hunt.
It was only after he was basking in the soft, indirect glow from the lanterns of the men gathered in the middle of another cavern, that he bothered to ask what had happened to all the heads of the child corpses in the pit.
The answer, an incomprehensible sight at first, inspired the question, as his gaze was drawn across the space, larger than the one that had contained the pit, to a wide ledge and another archway, overlooking an uneven, rocky floor below. Kueur and Alioune stood on the ledge, naked, filthy, guarded by armed men. They were bruised, cut, bloodied, though there was too much blood for all of it to be their own. Wild hair partially veiled their faces. They looked like little girls raised by a pack of wolves, not young ladies attending the finest of French private academies.
The group of men at the middle of the cavern floor parted, raising their lanterns in ritualistic circling motions, revealing Lee naked and tied spread-eagled in mid-air, suspended by his limbs from four steel rods embedded in concrete bases. The heads of children lay just underneath him, like a bed waiting to welcome him to his rest. Some of the heads fresh, eyes still open, and mouths. Others had rotted halfway to bone.
Max rocked back on his heels, preparing to launch himself in the air, a hawk, an arrow, a nuclear-tipped missile. The girls, in their horrible vulnerability, compelled him. He’d never seen them in captivity, their savagery held in check against their consent. The perversion of their nature shocked the rage from him, just for an instant.
One of the men, lean, bearded, tattooed up and down his bare arms, lashed Lee across his exposed genitals with a whip made of the sharp-leafed vegetation surrounding the carnival grounds.
Lee screamed, again. A few of the younger men, bald or hair close-cropped, dressed in slickly cut slacks, shirts and jackets in shades of black, jostled one another as they laughed. Another, wearing glasses in large plastic frames and a stained beige windbreaker, put his fingers over his lips as if to suppress his amusement. Gold and platinum jewelry flashed from more than one of the men gathered, though there were just as many who looked like they’d rob their companions if they thought they could get away with it.
Fresh, bloody scars across Lee’s limbs and torso revealed the torture he’d taken, before finally giving pain a voice.
The rest of men lowered the lamps, joined in the laughter, talked among themselves. Many dipped their own thorny branches in Lee’s blood.
Max turned his attention back to Kueur and Alioune, his shock deepening at their passivity. The heads of the children alone should have launched them into raging madness equal to the Beast’s. And though they sometimes amused themselves with games of seduction and fury with their uncle Lee, they’d proven protective enough of him in dangerous situations. Letting him suffer this way was not in their nature, even if it was in Max’s.
They had to be drugged. Lost in hallucinations from the poison tipped thorns. As good a reason as any to attack, but Max held off, hunting skills picking out the details that told him Kueur and Alioune were taking in everything happening to Lee. They weren’t lost in their own inner neverland.
He had to fight through the mounting pressure to do something, as well as the Beast’s bellowing, its frantic urging to attack, kill, wash the gore covering his body with fresh, warm blood, before finally grasping the realities of numbers, spacing, distance. His adopted nieces were deliberately holding themselves back, were in fact trapped, because Lee, their Tonton Bébête’s comrade, would be killed before they had the chance to rescue him.
The glimpse of the bonds between the twins, Lee and himself only fueled the Beast’s wrath. Tears burned in Max’s eyes, though they did not bubble to the surface.
Max balled his fists, searching for a path that wouldn’t lead to Lee’s death and the twins’ pain at the loss.
Alioune suddenly sagged, weeping, against one of her guards. The man laughed as the girl held on to his web belt and put her head against his big belly. Kueur went down on one knee, as if too weak to stand. One of the men behind her licked his lips and ran boney fingers through her hair. She turned her head slightly, as if taking comfort in his touch.
Max stared. He’d seen the twins play at weakness to lure others to them. But the totality of their submission startled him. They’d opened themselves in ways he was used to seeing only in the weakest of prey. He looked over the men gathered around Lee, trying to find any among them capable of breaking the twins.
Not these men. Again, he thought of poison.
And then the hunter in him understood, and even the Beast.
The twins had spotted him. They were only closing with their prey. Drawing what they hunted far inside their killing circle. Sacrificing everything in their nature and their selves, giving their captors everything they wanted to focus their attention away from the true danger, so Max had a clear chance at saving Lee.
The pretense of their breakdown made heads turn in the twins’ direction. Smirks cracked even the reserved expressions of the oldest of the gathered men. Blood had spilled into the water. The ceremony involving Lee’s torture ground to a halt, and someone suggested it would be a shame to waste an opportunity with such fine young girls. Someone else said they’d better be quick, before the girls got any older. Laughter rippled through the cavern. The circle around Lee broke. Streams of men trickled toward the ledge. Clothes slipped off, revealing fleshy, hairy, naked bodies. Someone accidentally kicked over a child’s head, and it rolled, golden locks flashing against bare rock.
A few voices rose in protest. A stern, resounding voice filled the cavern with nonsense about gods and sacrifices. An argument erupted.
Max recognized hunger, and in that hunger, weakness.
Familiarity released the hunter in him, and suddenly the last vestiges of doubt and confusion were gone. Max crept out, slithered over rock, staying to the darkness beyond the faint light of the lamps. Froze, watched, like a sniper approaching a target. Or a hunting cat, gore-stained skin like a coat of spotted fur, stalking a herd. Flies still buzzed around him. As he neared the outer circle of men, a few coughed and waved hands in front of their faces, annoyed by flies or Max’s stink.
One turned away from his companions. Young, taut as a wire muscle, he peered into the darkness, fingers tapping the top of his bald, tattooed skull. He glanced back at the twins, then whirled, took a step in Max’s direction. Others looked to him, but turned their attention back to the argument, apparently inured to odd behavior from him.
Max recognized kin, and his blood warmed.
Another step brought the young man close enough. The Beast burned in his belly, nearly blinded him with its rage. But Max knew exactly how and where to strike.
Now.
The young man jumped back, as if he’d anticipated the attack. His leg kicked up to deflect Max’s leap. But Max grabbed the leg, brought the man down with him as he fell.
Max sank fingertips into his target’s eyes, to hold the head still, while his other hand straddled the inked body of a coiled and slightly faded dragon. Too late, his enemy clawed at Max’s eyes, groped at his throat, tried to knee his crotch.
Max ripped out the man’s throat with his teeth. It was a quick death, out of necessity, but also out of honor to a kindred spirit. Max could only hope he’d receive the same when his turn came.
He was up before the nearest members of the circle knew what had happened, and past them as the young man he’d killed staggered to his feet, trying to wail, clutching at his bleeding throat and face as he gasped wetly for air, not yet realizing he was dead.
The Beast wanted another death, but Max exploded through the gathering toward Lee, knocking men off balance so they cou
ldn’t bring their guns to bear in time. He snatched a knife from a belt, twisting the edge to cut the owner across the belly. The man cried out, searching where Max had been for his killer. Lanterns swayed wildly. Bodies bumped into each other. Someone fired off a burst, and rock and dust sprayed from the entrance Max had used to get into the cavern. The weapon was a cheap, Bulgarian AK-47, not the same quality as the weapons in Morris’s camp. The sound stung his ears.
Orders for calm, to cease fire, and to kill him, clashed with questions, warnings, protests, and fragments of the argument over rituals and sacrifices still lingering in the air. The echoes made it seem as if a firefight had erupted.
Max skipped over the bed of heads to reach Lee. A pair of hands clutched at him. Meaty hands. Flesh, blood and bone. Max shoved the knife into a soft throat.
He checked for the twins, but they were gone. Their guards were down in jagged heaps of torn flesh and broken bones.
He reached one of the posts and tore at the rope holding Lee at the ankle with knife and teeth.
Lee’s eyes grew large. He tried to pull away, squirming in his bonds like a wild animal. “Goddamn, man, they’re fucking eating me, man, they’re gonna eat me alive, you bastards, fuck you, fuck you!” Lee yelled.
“It’s me,” Max growled, but his words had no effect. Lee was lost in hallucination. Or perhaps, adrift in the depths of reality. He ignored Lee’s struggles, clenching his jaws, sinking his teeth into nylon, wrenching his head back and forth, chewing through the artificial fibers at the same time he used the knife to alternately slash at the rope and fend off anyone trying to pry him away.
Men screamed, far out of Max’s reach.
More lanterns fell. Went dark.
“Alioune! Kueur!” Max shouted.
The names seemed to snap Lee back. “The girls,” he cried out. “Fuck me, get to them–”
The binding gave way, and Max moved to a wrist. A tall, broadly built man who moved like a slow truck tried to block his path, but Max stabbed him in the eye.
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