by C. J. Sears
It was once a dual rotor model, able to output sound in all directions, until it had been retrofitted into an electronic variation connected to the Forestry Station. The new design utilized a system with vertically arrayed cells arranged so they exited into a common manifold. Travers told him this was better for pattern control and that it helped focused the beam into a high-penetration form, but Rhinehold cared little for the technicalities. All he needed to know was that it could be reworked the way he wanted.
Travers kicked the door to the station open, letting Rhinehold carry the sheriff inside. The exterior of the station hadn’t been much to write home about and the interior was worse. Plaster peeled off of the walls, the air-conditioning unit was on the fritz, the tiled floor was in disrepair. More selective renovation, more lies bought and paid for by the Order, by the Bradfords, by rich old farts like Maverlies. Everyone else had paved the way for their insurgence into so many facets of Lone Oak.
He brought her to a bed the rangers used for overnight stays and laid her down. Travers reworked the switchboard that controlled the siren. Wilkins handed Rhinehold a pair of handcuffs and he secured her to the post. He considered shooting her, but that was too quick. Her family had helped destroy his. She had to suffer. What better way than to watch the town burn before her eyes?
Donahue stirred from her sleep. Good, it was about time she learned the Truth.
“Sheriff Donahue, how nice of you to rejoin us. I was beginning to think you might sleep through the Purge. Not that I would allow it, of course.”
“Where am I?” she asked.
“The Forestry Station, as we planned. Though I think you’ll find that your situation has worsened considerably.”
She tested the cuffs. No good. Rhinehold knew they wouldn’t break without brute force.
“Why don’t you kill me and get it over with? You have weapons. You’re where you wanted to be. So end it.”
“Because I like to tell stories,” he said, “all manner of them. Fiction. Myths. Religion. Today, I’m interested in non-fiction. My story, and the story of this damned town.”
“I don’t care.”
“You have no choice. Where to start? Let’s see…ah, the Bradfords. They were old blood, old money, old as Lone Oak itself. Their line weaved through the tapestry of the town, founding stores, schools, and medical care. Their religiosity was a front, a gambit in place to keep others from finding out their true beliefs.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Patience, sheriff, patience. You see, my own clan was new to Lone Oak then, displaced by the government and anti-Mormon sentiment in the Midwest. Unlike the Bradfords, the Rhineholds weren’t wealthy, but vagrants with a penchant for farming and cultivating resources. During the Dust Bowl, my grandparents grew more vegetables and fruit than their neighbors ever could. They supplied more needed goods for the community than many thought possible. Their reputation grew. They prospered. And then the resentment settled in.”
The steady decline of the Bradfords caused them such grief that Patrick, youngest of the Rhinehold sons, couldn’t comprehend their anger.
“Their constituents must have become impatient with falling standing and profits. Old money deteriorated into no money in the wake of the Great Depression and the early years of World War II. Unable to adapt to the changing tide of industry, they sank.”
“Your voice is irritating.”
He ignored the interruption. “Desperate to stay relevant, land ownership came into question. The Bradfords claimed several acres of land that now belonged to my family. Lawyers were brought in. No answers, no solutions. The feud became bloody; threats once mired in drunken backtalk became reality. Animals on both farms died mysterious deaths. Cousins went missing. Back and forth, tit for tat, Bradford descendants and Rhinehold upstarts engaged in a battle of one-upmanship that persisted until the early eighties.
“I was entering adulthood when the Bradford family accused my mother and father of poisoning their crops. The evidence was slim, little more than three packets of herbicide lying inside a trunk in the barn. There were no fingerprints; the bags had been transported with gloved hands, but the investigators insisted that it was all that was needed. I remember the sheriff’s face when his deputy informed him of what had been found. The Masons were old friends of the Bradfords. I watched your father’s eyes travel over the herbicide with a self-assured confidence. His mouth twisted into a sneering smile as he looked at the apparent perpetrators of the crime. He reveled in the chance to put the so-called uppity Rhinehold family in its place.
“My parents were tried and convicted. Shame fell on my house and clan, so I ran away. But I never forgot what had transpired. I never forgave.”
Rhinehold didn’t know the full extent of the Bradfords’ depravity until after his departure, but he’d always suspected the foul underpinnings of their house. By the time he discovered their roots in the occult, the family had long since vanished from the Earth.
The flabbergasted look on Donahue’s face brought him great pleasure. She could no longer live in the ignorance of her family’s crime.
“Africa was a breath of fresh air for me compared to the wafting decay of Lone Oak. Hitching rides with strangers, working odd jobs to get by, I had never felt more alive, never more pure than on foreign soil. From the moment I arrived until the day I left, the indignity drained from my body, replaced by a sense of purpose I never believed I had. I owed my new beginnings to a single, unexpected discovery deep in the heart of darkness.”
His sub-Saharan guide, a South African man who went only by the name of Ish, had promised him adventure and peril. His reluctance to leave the safety of the vehicle irritated Rhinehold. “I was in the wellspring of Africa, surrounded by lions, rhinos, and other exciting animals in their element, and my guide wanted to pussyfoot and observe without interaction. The man’s aversion to entering a particular cave only aroused my interest. Ish had turned pale at the sight of it, his eyes wide, and shouted in half a dozen tongues about the necessity of leaving that cave alone. Without waiting for my guide to get his act together, I cut through the brush with a machete and walked inside.
“Sweating from the smoldering heat outside, I was unprepared for the sudden drop in temperature as I breached the opening of the cave. I regretted leaving my jacket in the guide’s land rover.”
Waving his flashlight about, he was almost disappointed by the lack of danger given his guide’s ridiculous dread of the place. Aside from a few unremarkable animal bones, there was nothing to see, nothing to fear.
“I had almost given up my search when I came upon a strange symbol at the back-end. The sigil etched onto the walls of the stone cavern was familiar, but at first I couldn’t place where I had seen it before.
“The rune was an asymmetrical nine-pointed star surrounded by a circle. I thought it could have been a pentagram, but there were too many pointed ends, and the circle itself wasn’t a singular, perfect line. Instead it bent inward between each point, like the misshapen star was suctioning the circle into its body. I copied the strange sign into my notebook. It became apparent that my initial assumptions weren’t correct. This wasn’t a star, but a creature. The ends were its legs and the irregular circle was its body. Looking closer at the crude drawing, I saw that the point at the top was its mouth, a jagged ridge from which tiny snake-like lines sprouted. I guessed that they were its feeding mechanism. But what was this creature? Was this what my guide had been so afraid of?”
Ish’s reaction had confirmed his suspicions. “When I presented the symbol to him, the man knocked the notebook away, rambled about evil spirits possessing his childhood friends and forcing them to murder their families. I laughed at the absurdity of the guide’s tale. It was nonsense, but I couldn’t help but be intrigued. I pressed Ish for more information. Reluctantly, the guide agreed to point me toward a library in Cape Town.”
Rhinehold followed the trail of the sigil and the so-called evil spirits it represented
. “From Cape Town, I learned of another rune site in the Alps. I journeyed there, seeking an answer to the baffling question of the rune creature and its familiarity. There was a ruined castle there, dating back to the Crusades. A map scratched in the floor of the throne room pointed me in the direction of a fishing hamlet off the eastern coast of the United States. I found that odd, but assumed it was genuine, given what I had seen so far.”
At the village, so decrepit that it had no name and less than ten people lived there, he understood why he recognized the symbol and why he’d assumed it was a nine-pointed star.
“The rune there was similar to the one in Africa, but it was if the ages had distorted its image. This sigil was more abstract, less defined as the creature, but it was undoubtedly an incarnation of the same symbol. Eight legs, a jagged mouth; all of it was there if I squinted. I had known the answer from the start. This symbol, altered by time and ruination, was the same as the one I remembered the Bradfords using as the mark of their house. It was their stamp, used on all of their letters and written charges against the Rhinehold family.
“When I asked the villagers what the symbol represented, they spoke in an agitated mixture of English and German. They told me it was the mark of the Esoteric Order of Ein Geist. In my studies abroad, I had developed an elementary understanding of the language. Literally translated, the words stood for one mind. I realized what that meant in relation to the creature. But I had never heard of such a cult before. I couldn’t fathom that a parasite was capable of such feats. Nothing sounded more supernatural than brainwashing a man to do its bidding. But the belief in it was so widespread, so ancient.
“I was eager to return to Lone Oak, to find where the Bradfords hid their dirty little secret. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that the family was dead and buried, murdered by someone never caught. I had wanted to do it myself. I couldn’t enter their mansion without arousing suspicion. And then fortune smiled upon me. A private detective found me one day and told me he knew about my family’s feud. He knew that I was familiar with the town and the location. I took him there, pleased to have a guise to investigate my own suspicions. That was a mistake.
“The parasite was there, hidden in the basement. But Black had seen too much. So I had to take new measures. I enjoyed manipulating him, preying on the love of his daughter. I found out about Maverlies’ involvement, about the mine. But I had no money. So I published my memoirs. Soon I had enough. Using a dummy company, I purchased the quarry, reopened it. I discovered the fossils and became familiar with the curious organisms.”
With their limited, primitive intellect, he understood why the first practitioners of the Order had mistaken the parasite’s talents as a form of mind-control. “Their influence is corruptive, godlike in authority, bending desires to perpetuate their will. But they are not divine, not magic. It is chemistry, bodily functions they acquired before any man uncovered them. This holds true for any single specimen. Individually, the parasite maintains its host in whatever state necessary to sustain itself. Communally, their intelligence grows, able to perform simple, cooperative tasks, like worker ants. These drones, however, are not capable of doing anything more elaborate without direction. That falls to the role of the Father.” His own private joke.
“The Father specimen, unlike its smaller, more abundant relatives, wields control not over its host, but the other parasites.” Specifics eluded him, but Rhinehold understood that it was similar to the principal used in dog whistles. “The Father emits a sound that only the infected can hear. This signal is then interpreted as a command that must be obeyed without question. When I discovered the truth of the parasite in the Bradford mansion years ago, I didn’t hesitate in taking advantage of this new weapon.”
The brief pain Rhinehold felt in letting the creature into his body was nothing compared to the anguish of losing his family. Nothing compared to the wrath he would bring upon Lone Oak. The Order, the Church, whatever they called themselves now; their god belonged to him, and him alone.
It was unfortunate that Black’s blunders had forced him to accelerate his plans.
“That is the breadth of my story, sheriff. What you needed to hear, at least. A gift, if you will. And I have another.”
He opened the door to the field. A dozen of the infected surrounded a prone Deputy Rick Mason.
The sheriff cried out for her brother. Rhinehold smiled.
Now all that was left was the final witness to his vengeance. If he didn’t come, it was for nothing. A low rumble sounded in his throat. The sheriff screamed. Rhinehold hummed.
* * *
Quarter-sized rocks pelted the windshield of the police car as Finch made a harsh turn onto a dirt road leading to the Forestry Station. In the passenger seat, Kruger shouted directions at him as they swerved to avoid a large group of infected that attempted to block their path. The car clipped the shoulder of a man, sent him spinning backward into the outstretched arms of the horde.
The wheels bounced off the earth, jolting him upright in his seat. He kept his hands on the wheel and his foot on the gas, not sure how much time he had before whatever Rhinehold had planned would come to fruition.
A mixture of anger and uncertainty swirled in his mind. Black had never fit the profile of a narcissist, yet all the same Finch had been convinced he was the culprit from the second he laid eyes on the man. How many had died, would die, because he hadn’t trusted his initial inclination toward Rhinehold? He forced himself to think of the faces he’d seen, burned, bashed, or otherwise mutilated. They were now his victims as much as they were Rhinehold’s.
The road tapered off ahead of him. Finch thought he might have taken a wrong turn, but Kruger assured him this was the correct road. Worried that the coroner didn’t know the town as well as he thought, he slowed down, glancing in his side-view mirrors for any signs of infected on their tail. Bunched together, they were slower than he would’ve thought, but stragglers moved with a swiftness that was impossible to predict. Black had been proof of that. On a road this narrow, he wasn’t sure if that would help or hinder them
He rolled to a stop, yanking the parking brake as he caught sight of the row of vehicles lined along the road. Finch saw a police van at the head of the convoy and frowned. He’d expected to find Rhinehold and perhaps several coconspirators, but the presence of the Lone Oak Police Department gave him pause. He hadn’t considered their involvement and assumed they were all dead. With Donahue and her brother having vanished, he worried that they were just as dead.
Reluctant to step outside of the vehicle but knowing it was his responsibility, he turned to Kruger and said, “I’m going in alone. Take the car, get to the crossroads. Find somebody and tell them what’s going on.”
The coroner raised an eyebrow. “Are you crazy? No one’s going to believe this. And you can’t stroll up there like you’re John Wayne or something. You’re dead.”
“Probably,” Finch said, his eyes fixed straight on the cars in front of them. He grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from the glove box, wrote something down. He handed it to Kruger. “This number is a direct line to my superiors. When you get to Daleport, call it. Tell them that Agent Llewyn Finch said this is a Code Omega. They’ll know what it means.”
He grabbed the shotgun from the backseat, counted the shells as he fed them into the receiver. Six rounds, a full load. Not enough, but he’d make do. Breathing deep, he pushed open the driver’s side door. Kruger tried to stall him again. Finch ignored him, held the pump-action at his waist and walked toward the police van.
Pinecones littered the road, grinding against the rubbery tread of his shoes as he made his way forward. It was unnerving to hear such a noise after the maelstrom of screeches, wails, and skittering feet of the past four days. He’d forgotten what normalcy felt like.
When he reached the van, he raised his gun. At the back of the line, the other cars had obscured much of its frame from his view. Now that he was here, he could see that the back doors were
unlatched and ajar. It was stupid, violated every instinct in his body, but he nudged the door with his gun, ready to fire at whatever waited for him inside.
Between the canopy and the lack of light inside the van itself, it was difficult to see the corners. A flashlight would’ve been nice. He felt around with his free hand, pulled away when he felt something sticky between his fingers. He scrutinized the substance, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. Tree sap. He looked back up at the roof of the van and saw the hole where a bolt should be. Must have dripped down from above.
Finch heard what sounded like the snap of a twig behind him. He whirled around, the barrel of the shotgun raised high. Nobody there, not even Kruger. Only a bunch of parked cars, ditches, and too many trees. Relaxing, he slid the door into place, making sure not to slam it and draw attention to himself.
Wiping his hand on his pants, he inched past the van. The lack of infected this close to Rhinehold continued to bug him. If his theories about the parasite were true, he expected to run into the cavalry any second. But no one intercepted him, not a single parasite man or woman. Once again, he wondered if his deductions had been wrong.
At the top of the hill, he got his first glimpse of the old siren. He wasn’t familiar with the original model, but he knew the retrofits had adapted it to the modern world. If Rhinehold planned to broadcast his voice across the whole town, Finch had no doubt it would work. Whatever else might occur, he wouldn’t let that happen.
A gag-inducing stench became apparent as he stepped into the field where the Forestry Station stood. Like that night in the mansion basement, the smell permeated the air, a warning of the rotten viscera that maggots swooned for. The heat hit him next. He felt as if someone had shoved his head into the incinerator at a crematorium. He pointed the gun in every direction he could see, knew that the infected had to be all around him in this moment.