The Last Rite

by Chad Morgan

  “Where did they come from?” Bethany asked.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “My grandfather says they’re the spirits of the earth or some such nonsense . . . “

  “Your grandfather?” she asked.

  The man nodded. “Yeah, he was storyteller for my tribe.”

  Bethany found that she had relaxed a bit. The monsters laid down, almost like the large cats the represented. She looked up at the man and asked, “He tells stories?”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s considered a position of honor. In some tribes, they’re made chief.”

  “And he didn’t tell you what they are?”

  The man shrugged. “He might have. He’s used to talking a lot. And I guess I’m used to not listening. My grandfather was always telling stories about spirits and talking animals and other crap.” He jerked his thumb and the relaxed nature-like monsters. “Who knew?”

  Bethany smiled. The man smiled back and her and stood up. He held out a hand. Bethany took it without hesitation, and when she was on her feet she hugged him. The monsters got to their feet, and Bethany tightened her grip on the man. She felt his hand on her back.

  “It’s okay, kid,” the man said. “They won’t hurt you, I swear.”

  She let go of him and, after making sure the monsters were in fact not coming to attack her, looked up and the man. “My name’s Bethany.”

  “Okay, Bethany,” the man said. “I’m Charlie.”

  Charlie offered out his hand again, and Bethany took it. Charlie led her to a path through the woods, the twin monsters – or were they earth spirits? – following behind them a few paces back.

  “Charlie?” she asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “The monsters don’t scare you?” she asked.

  “Which monsters? These guys?” Again, Charlie thumbed at them, “Nah, they’re fine as long as they’re watered regularly.”

  Bethany chuckled, but her brief happiness faded. “What about the other monsters?”

  “Those?” Charlie asked, and they both knew which ones they meant. “Just between you and me? Yeah, they scare me. They scare me a lot.”

  Bethany was running away from one of those dog monsters. There were no trees, no buildings, just the damn fog. Daniel ran towards her, but the whole world was in slow motion. Part of him knew he was dreaming but knowing that was irrelevant. When in a dream world, for that moment it’s the only world, and he needed to save his daughter.

  Daniel grabbed Bethany and shielded her with his body as the dog monster lunged at them. When it hit his back, the dog monster shattered to a million pieces and fluttered away. Daniel held Bethany tight against him, stroking her hair as the last pieces of the dog monster and the threat had passed.

  “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” Daniel said. “I’ve got you.”

  Then his arm tingled. His left arm, where an uneven row of puncture marks designated where the dog monster bit him. The arm started to swell and stiffen. His eyes widened as the skin faded to a molted, unhealthy color from the wound and spread outward, huge blisters erupting up his arm. The threat wasn’t gone, it was here. It was him,

  Daniel shoved Bethany away and turned from her. He felt the bones being pulled out of shape, cracking and reforming. He gritted his teeth to keep from screaming. Bethany called to him, confused. “Daniel?”

  “Bethany! Run!” he shouted, the pain choking his words as he waved her off. “Get out of here!”

  It wasn’t just the pain now. He could feel himself fade, feel his soul draining. He wanted to hurt Bethany, rip her arms off, bite into her heart . . .

  “Daniel?” she asked. He felt her hand touch his shoulder, and he couldn’t hold back any longer. He turned on her, reaching for her, his arm now a scale-covered claw as he let out an inhuman roar.

  Daniel bolted upright, breathing hard, the t-shirt under his long-sleeved thermal shirt sticking to him with cold sweat. It took him a while to reorient himself, shifting from the dream world to reality. The morning sun, the light scattered and softened by the ever-present fog, came in through the window where Lisa’s makeshift barricades didn’t cover it. Daniel turned and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, leaning on his elbows against his lap. He slid the sleeve up his arm to expose his infected dog bite. The infection was spreading, but it wasn’t as bad as in his nightmare. He was still himself, but for how long? He needed to ask Lisa, she seemed to know, but he couldn’t let her know why. She was paranoid enough. If she found out he was bitten there was no telling what she would do. He pulled the sleeve back down to cover his arm.

  Speaking of which, where was Lisa? Daniel stood up and looked around the room.

  “Lisa?”

  There was no answer. Daniel walked around the bed and out the bedroom, double-checking that his sleeve was down and covering the infected dog bite. He leaned against the doorframe and peered into the rest of the apartment. He found Lisa cowering on the floor next to the couch.

  “Lisa?” he called out, taking a few steps to her. “What’s wrong?”

  Lisa recoiled, shrinking into an even tighter ball. Daniel froze on the spot, raising his open hands.

  “Whoa, easy!” he said. He took a very careful step forward, then another, like approaching a wild animal. “Lisa, talk to me. What’s wrong? I’m not going to hurt you. Whatever’s wrong, I can help.”

  Lisa jumped to her feet and rushed at him, pulling from behind her back a large kitchen knife. Daniel jerked back, holding his arms up to block the knife as Lisa swung it back and forth. As he staggered backward, quickly running out of room, the knife came down and sliced through his left sleeve and through his skin. Dark red blood droplets flew from his arm, and Daniel gripped the knife wound with his free hand. He held the cut sleeve against his arm to stem the bleeding, but Lisa was returning the knife in a backhand swing. Daniel ignored his bleeding arm and grabbed Lisa by the wrist. His police training kicked in without thinking and he used Lisa’s momentum against her, spinning around and throwing her into the small hallway. Lisa’s back slammed against the wall and slid down to the floor.

  Daniel backed away, his hands up, as Lisa held the knife at him. She pushed herself up the wall, her wide eyes never leaving Daniel. He continued to walk backwards, Lisa gripping her knife with both hands and aiming it at him when his foot caught something that slipped under him, some piece of garbage in the chaotic living room. Daniel fell down onto his back, his vision full of stars as the back of his head slammed against the ripped carpeted floor. Adrenaline pushed the stars from his vision just in time to see Lisa airborne, leaping at him like a tiger, the knife pointing straight down. Daniel caught her wrists as her light, malnourished body plopped down against his, but Lisa put all her weight on the knife. Daniel’s arms quaked as he pushed back against Lisa, the knife edge inching towards his neck. He kept Lisa at bay, but he knew his strength would fail eventually, and then Lisa could slice his neck open, spilling his blood over the floor.

  As they lay there in a stalemate, he looked up into Lisa’s face, and he could see she was not only mustering all her strength but her will. He saw the anguish on her face, and that gave Daniel a chance. Twisting his body and shoving her hard from the side, Daniel took advantage of her indecision and rolled the two of them until he was on top of her. He pinned both her arms down, his weight forcing her slim hips onto the ground. Lisa thrashed like a fish caught in a net, but her grip was as tight as death around the handle of the knife.

  “Lisa! Lisa! Calm down! Stop it!” Daniel shouted. With Lisa’s knife-hand in his left, he picked up her hand and slammed it onto the ground repeatedly. “Drop the knife! Drop it!”

  The knife shook loose from her hand and bounced beyond her fingertips. Daniel stopped banging the hand against the ground and pinned it in place. Lisa stared up at him with a fear so raw that Daniel was almost shocked into letting her go. “Kill me. Just kill me. Don’t turn me into one of those things, just kill me, please.”

  Lisa turned he
r head away, as if expecting a guillotine and didn’t want to watch the blade decapitating her. Daniel shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Lisa snapped her head back, and now fierce anger displaced her fear. “You’re one of them! You were bit. You lied to me! I fucking asked you if they got you, and you said no! I asked you!”

  Daniel let out a heavy sigh. She knew. It was of little consolation that he correctly predicted her reaction. He guessed Lisa must have seen one of his wounds while he was sleeping. He supposed he should be grateful she didn’t kill him in his sleep, but Daniel thought about the conflict he saw on her face when she had the chance to kill him but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Lisa was scared and desperate, but she wasn’t a killer.

  “Okay, Lisa, I’m going to get off you, and we’re going to talk this out, all right?” Daniel said. Lisa was looking away again, fuming. “But I need you to stay calm, because all this screaming is going to call the monsters back, remember?”

  She turned back to Daniel and snarled at him. “What does it matter? You’re one of them!”

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “Can we just talk about this? Please?”

  Lisa said nothing, but Daniel couldn’t keep her pinned to the floor forever. He needed her to trust him. Daniel reached over for the knife and shoved it away. The metal blade danced with the pale light as it slid and spun to the far wall. Daniel got to his feet, and Lisa skittered away. He was afraid she’d keep on crawling until she reached her kitchen knife, but she got to her feet and stood in front of Daniel, albeit a couple arm lengths away.

  “Just stay calm, and tell me what’s going on,” Daniel said.

  “You lied!” she spat. “You were bit.”

  Daniel looked down to where Lisa cut his arm, the sleeve of his shirt sliced open. The elastic cuff of his shirt feebly hugged his wrist, but the other end was weighted down with dark blood, pulling the separation in the fabric open wide to reveal the infected wound underneath.

  “You’re one of those things!” Lisa shouted, pointing out the window as if Daniel needed any clarification on what things she meant.

  “No, I’m not!” he said, pointing to himself. “Look at me, I’m normal.”

  “You won’t be! You’ll change, and then you’ll be one of them!” Lisa pointed to the door. “Get out!”

  “Hold on . . .” Daniel tried to say, but Lisa closed the distance between them, her fear flushed away by her fury. She pointed again to the door.

  “Get out!” she screamed.

  Then the ceiling came crashing in.

  19

  Professor Jacob Lightfoot stood at the gates of the cemetery with a wrapped bundle of animal hides in his hand and one of the avatars standing on either side of him. That was the name he gave them, avatars, for they were shells for the living spirit of the earth. As a child, he was taught his people’s beliefs, that everything had a soul, from the fish in the stream and the bear that eats them, to the rocks and the water of the stream itself. As he grew and studied not only the mythologies and religions of his people but of peoples across the globe, his view of the world started to shift slightly. He no longer thought of every object in the world imbued with its own soul, but as a piece of a larger soul shared by all of creation. Some would take that idea and call it Gaia, but that was a gross simplification, the elementary-school version that college kids would embrace to call themselves enlightened, all the while ignorant of the depth that waited for them, never to be discovered.

  Then he met the Order, and he learned how much he had right, and how much more he had to learn. It was with them he learned about the last rite, about the blood line of the old woman, the tales of the Mad Arab, and how perilous all of creation really was. He remembered when the Order first approached him, spoon-feeding him their secrets, getting him hooked on the conspiracies until he had to have more. Only then did he learn everything, and he didn’t want to believe it. Looking back on it, denial was the only natural reaction. Even now, with the creatures roaming the streets and creation itself rising to defend itself, he doubted Charlie could handle the entire truth, just as he couldn’t at first. It was all too horrible, both what could happen, and what it would take to stop it.

  Professor Lightfoot stood there for what felt like hours, though time was more subjective in this new reality, but as the light of the new day bled through the dense fog, Charlie came walking down the road towards the graveyard. The bow of his ancestors was slung on his back, and he was flanked on either side by tiger-like avatars. Besides Charlie was the girl. The group walked up to him, and Charlie was smiling his usual Charlie smile.

  Professor Lightfoot had missed that smile. For years Charlie lived in the big cities, never returning home to the reservation. Life on the reservation was hard, but Professor Lightfoot worked tirelessly with their chief to keep their reservation from falling into the same fate that other reservations faced, the abject poverty leading to drugs, alcoholism, and crime. He pushed more and more of their young to experience the world and go to college, education being the best defense against a land devoid of jobs, but it had an unintended side effect. Instead of staying for the betterment of the reservation, they left for a better life outside. Charlie was one of them. Unlike Carolyn, his cousin, Charlie never returned to his people. Thinking back on it, perhaps it was for the best. It meant most of his people were far away from Shellington Heights when all this went down.

  “Things went well, I see,” he said to Charlie.

  “Not as well as we’d hoped. I rescued the girl.” Charlie did a half turn and bowed to the girl, who seemed surprised someone was acknowledging her existence. Charlie continued, “Who’s named Bethany, by the way.”

  Bethany offered a weak smile, and Professor Lightfoot matched it with a weak smile of his own. It was hard to imagine that this sweet, innocent child, through no fault of her own, was the center of all the death and destruction that happened, and of the possible carnage yet to happen.

  “This is my grandfather, Professor Jacob Lightfoot,” Charlie continued with the introductions.

  “Hi,” Bethany said.

  “Hello, Ms. Sloan. We’re glad you’re alright,” he said to her in his deep baritone voice, then looked up to his grandson. “And the scroll?”

  Charlie shook his head. “The scroll wasn’t there. The two suits ran off in the scuffle, but once the last of the abominations were killed or chased off, I searched the entire place. The scroll was nowhere.”

  “That is unfortunate,” he said, “but not the largest of our worries. Nothing will happen until we get the scroll”

  For now, they had the girl . . . Bethany, he reminded himself. He had to not think of her as an item. She was a person, a child. They had Bethany, so the business suit people couldn’t perform the last rite and finish what they started, but without performing the last rite, Professor Lightfoot couldn’t reverse it either. They were at a stalemate.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” Charlie asked, and Professor Lightfoot heard the eagerness in his grandson’s voice. That was warming and concerning at the same time. Charlie still didn’t know the full scope of what was happening, or what it would take to stop it. He wondered how eager Charlie would be if he did know, but he pushed the thought aside. They had to find the last rite if there was any hope of setting things right.

  “They must have felt the mill wasn’t secure enough to keep the scroll there,” Professor Lightfoot said.

  Charlie considered it for a moment, then suggested, “The bank?”

  “Worth a look,” Professor Lightfoot agreed.

  “I’ll head back into town, see if I can’t get a bead on where Mr. and Mrs. Corporate America ran off too,” Charlie said, though while wearing his own wrinkled and dirt-covered suit, the professor grimaced at the irony. Charlie seemed not to notice, but nodded at Bethany and asked his grandfather, “You got her? She going to be safe here?”

  “Safer here than anywhere else, at least,” he said. “The
abominations are not yet strong enough to invade here, though I don’t know for how much longer that will be true.”

  “Don’t dilly dally. Got it,” he said, then knelt in front of Bethany. “You’re going to be okay here?”

  The girl said nothing but looked up at the professor with a knowing gaze. How much had the BEC people told her, he wondered. There was no way of knowing until Charlie was gone. He didn’t want him knowing. Not yet. They both looked to Charlie.

  “Right,” Charlie said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Okay, well, I need to get going.”

  “Keep an eye out for her father as well,” he said. “We need him.”

  “He was bitten,” Charlie said, eyeing Bethany as he spoke. “I told you that.”

  “I know,” he replied. “I’m betting he hasn’t converted yet. We need to reach him before it’s too late.”

  “And then what?” Charlie asked.

  Professor Lightfoot handed him the animal hide bundle, with some papers written in the professor’s hand pinned to the side. Charlie took it and took a whiff of it. Not convinced, he looked to his grandfather.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A medicine bundle,” the professor said. “It’s his only chance. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s the only thing I can think of.”

  “Where did you find this?” Charlie asked.

  The professor tapped the side of his forehead. “The advantage of having a culture that relies on an oral history. You learn to remember things. You need to perform the ceremony exactly . . .”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Charlie said, reading the note on the side as he turned to leave.

  “I’m serious, Charlie,” he said to his grandson, stopping him. “If there were ever a time to honor our traditions . . .”

  “I said I got it,” Charlie said, his smile gone.

  The professor bowed his head. He knew he couldn’t push him too hard or risk Charlie growing more defiant, but more than that, he was afraid he would meet the same fate as Carolyn. He lost one grandchild already, he would hate it if he not only lost Charlie too, but if the last moments they had were angry ones.