Dead Men's Dust

by Matt Hilton

  Still, belief in ghosts or not, for more than a heartbeat I genuinely accepted that the thing in front of me was a vengeful spirit risen from its grave to exact retribution. I stepped back, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. And if the blade it held in its clawed fist had been animated, I doubt that I could’ve stopped it scything my head from my shoulders.

  “Holy Christ!” I heard the words, but was unsure whether it was me or Rink that said them. Maybe we both did.

  Point Shooting is based entirely on the natural posture, the natural reaction to lifting the gun and firing wherever danger presents itself. When confronted by this diabolical creature, my reactions failed me. The SIG hung useless by my side.

  Then Rink was beside me. He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Hunter…we gotta keep moving, man. Can’t let this damn thing throw us.”

  “It’s a little hard not to,” I croaked.

  The miasma of fear gripped me, and it was an effort to shake free of it. When I did, it was through the exhalation of pent-up fear.

  “What the hell is it?” Rink asked.

  I looked again at the specter in the mist. A human skull grinned back at me. But I could see now that there was no life behind the recessed sockets, no drool dripping from its widely splayed teeth. It was a simulacrum, given the illusion of life by Cain’s artistic dementia. The skull was mounted on a pole pushed into the sand. A tattered blanket was draped over a crossbar to give the semblance of a body. Hands and forearms—withered skin and tendons holding together the bones—were bound to other poles concealed within the blanket. I shuddered.

  “It’s a warning,” I finally managed. “Or a gatekeeper. I think we’ve found him, Rink.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  We both heard the music again; a sonorous piping this time. I stepped closer to the skeletal form. The music was coming from its bones. Tiny drill holes along the radius and ulna of the forearms made for a maniac’s idea of a flute. When the wind picked up, it disturbed the blanket and produced a racket like a wind chime.

  “Son of a bitch’s crazy as a bag of weasels,” Rink offered.

  As we walked on, I couldn’t help peering back at the ghostly form. Who do those bones belong to? I wondered. Is there a family someplace that to this day hopes that their loved one will turn up one bright morning and announce that he’s fine, that he only needed to get away for a while but now he’s back? I promised myself that I would see to that return, that I would take this person home again. The day wouldn’t be bright, and neither would he be fine, but he would be going home.

  As would the next twelve skeletons we came across as we walked.

  It was an unholy baker’s dozen.

  All were posed in similar styles to the first, strung up on poles, bodies formed of blankets. But some were in reclining postures, others placed to give the impression of flight, two of them strung together as though engaged in a slow waltz. Cain was indeed crazy, as dangerous as a pit of venomous reptiles, and every bit as sly.

  Across the amphitheater we went, and with every step my dread grew. I wondered if we were already too late. If John were already strung up in an insane effigy to Cain’s dementia.

  The tiny bones strewn in the sand gave me an even greater loathing for Cain than before. Many were the remains of tiny animals and birds fallen out of the sky, but here and there, I saw the phalanges of human fingers protruding from their graves as though clawing their way to an afterlife denied them. Rink looked equally disturbed. I didn’t know what face I wore, but I was sure that if my friend studied me now, he’d see that I, too, could fear.

  The wind was picking up. The mist—not true mist, but particles of the alkaline desert borne on the wind—billowed around us. It invaded my mouth and nostrils, caused me to squint. I had the horrifying notion that the desert was actually formed of particles of bone, and I gagged and spat in reflex. It was an absurd notion, but it was there. I pulled my shirt up over my face as protection against inhaling dead men’s dust.

  “Hunter.”

  I heard Rink’s whisper. He was thirty feet to my left, crouching down, gun trained on something I couldn’t see. I stopped, took up a crouch of my own. Rink indicated something beyond him that I couldn’t discriminate from the shifting veil of sand. Duckwalking, I made my way over.

  “There” was all Rink said. I could make out a hulking formation of rocks jutting out of the desert like the ruins of a mythical castle. Like the sand, the rocks were chalk white and glowed with phosphorescence against the night sky. If this amphitheater had once been the floor of an ocean, then the rocks were millions of years old, ancient testimony to volcanic activity that had shattered the sea floor in a cataclysmic upheaval. Directly ahead of us, two more spectral forms marked a fissure in the rocks. Truly, they were gatekeepers this time.

  This had to be the final place. Cain’s place.

  43

  ALONE, EITHER MAN WAS A FORMIDABLE ENEMY. TOGETHER, Cain had no hope of defeating them. Not when he was armed only with his scaling knife while both of them had semiautomatic handguns. The only chance he had was to separate them; use their loyalty for each other against them. It was a weakness Cain immediately saw. Though they were fearless warriors, neither wanted to die or to lose his friend. Cain, on the other hand, had no such qualms. He was prepared to die to achieve his aims.

  Both Joe Hunter and Jared Rington transcended the level of even the most hard-boiled soldier. Their training…no, their indoctrination…had seen to that. Maybe they were beyond the normal psychological and physiological responses to the death of a friend guaranteed to halt even the sturdiest warrior in his tracks. Perhaps, like Cain himself, they had reached that ultracognizant level where they could elevate themselves above the ken of mortal man, to float on the seas of chaos where the “natural” order of being meant that nothing was as it seemed. This was the realm in which Cain existed; what if these two had achieved the same level of consciousness? What if, after all these years, he had found worthy protagonists, contenders for his title of Prince of Chaos?

  He chuckled to himself. Careful that the sound didn’t betray his hiding place.

  Not a chance.

  44

  STANDING AT THE THRESHOLD TO CAIN’S DOMAIN, I BALKED at entering without a full reconnaissance of the area. Yet at the same time I knew that time was of the utmost importance. John was in terrible danger, possibly with only seconds to live, and I was dithering at the entrance to his torture chamber. Still, that unnatural talent for spotting the viper in the grass was screaming at me and I had to heed it.

  I had to choose between my own and John’s well-being, and at the end of the day I was left with very few choices. If I waited, he’d be dead. If I charged in, he could still end up dead. I had to act.

  I stepped forward.

  Rink was behind me. I knew that Cain couldn’t come on me from that direction. Rink, on the other hand, had me as a buffer if Cain chose to come at us from the rocks. I went slowly, gun out, eyes and ears scanning for any sign of life. Periodically I looked up.

  The rocks towered over me. They were sheer enough that I didn’t believe Cain could scale them, but more than one soldier had lost his life by ignoring what was lurking above his field of vision. In Vietnam, many a jarhead was taken by surprise by a noose dropped around his throat, or even by the constriction of an assassin’s legs dropping from an overhanging bough. The martial art named Viet Vo Dao is based upon that very premise.

  I know I was crediting Cain with more tools than he perhaps possessed, but at that moment, before meeting him in combat, I had to credit him with everything possible. In my line of work, to underestimate an individual is to invite death.

  The twin sentinels watched my progress. They were larger than those skeletons we’d already passed. More formidable to the eye, with their bison skulls and hulking forms of tattered rags and strips of leather. They looked like something out of a Tolkien novel; chimera-like demons guarding the door to the lower realms.

  Beyond the
m, I came upon a well-beaten path that led to the center of the rock formation. The fissure in the rocks was natural, but here and there I detected evidence that Cain had helped widen the doorway by means of hammer and chisel. Also, he’d marked his progress with weird symbols and pictograms straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. In retrospect, I believe the paintings on the rock surface were a history of his killings, but at the time, I couldn’t give his demented story much more notice.

  Rink was disciplined enough that he didn’t immediately follow me into the passage. I was aware of him somewhere behind me. I could hear his breathing as he crouched at the entrance to the passageway, the strange acoustics amplifying his trepidation. But no words passed between us now. Talking would identify our position. We had to rely on stealth to get us through this thing unscathed. I walked on, mindful of not stepping on a loose pebble or piece of wind-blown brush that would alert Cain. Sweat moistened my brow, tickled between my shoulder blades. My vision was constricted to a narrow focus and my blood rushed in my ears. Not the ideal conditions for hunting. But they were was a response to the adrenaline racing through me and there was nothing I could do about it.

  The passage widened out, opening into a cul-de-sac hemmed in on three sides by the towering rock formation. There was only one way in; the ideal location for a trap. Quickly I scanned the rocks above me, my gun at the point of my vision. Nothing stirred; there was nothing to indicate that an ambush would come from above. I stepped into the cul-de-sac, circling on my heels to cover all directions as best I could. Twenty feet in, I found the hole in the ground. Steps leading down into darkness. Breath caught in my throat.

  I couldn’t make out anything beyond the first few steps. The night had fully descended, and though my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, the steps descended into a space I can only describe as being devoid of anything. It was beyond night, beyond black.

  I couldn’t bring myself to step into the hole. I even looked back for moral support from Rink. If he could have seen me then, he would have seen the face of terror. I couldn’t allow that; I quickly stepped forward, tracing the first step with the toe of my boot. Then, before my desperate boldness fled, I descended the stairs as rapidly as I could.

  When I reached the bottom, I could make out the faint outlines of a door before me. The reflection of a flame leaked out from beneath the door. Beyond the door a lamp burned. That knowledge gave me the courage to reach out and tug on the door handle. I did so sharply, then stepped into the room it revealed, my gun searching for targets.

  The smell hit me first.

  I gagged. That was bad enough.

  Then my eyes began to make sense of what I was looking at, and for the first time in my life, I retreated with a cry of alarm.

  45

  OH, WHAT AN IDIOT. YOU’RE BARING YOUR NECK TO THE headsman’s block. You deserve to die with ignominy, you stumbling, sightless fool! To think I credited you with respect when you’re as blind as all the rest. Die, cretin. Die, Jared Rington.

  Rink was there, no more than an arm’s length from him. The big lummox’s nerves were strung taut, shredded, fraying under the pressure. His head swung from side to side. He didn’t know which way to look. Because of that, he didn’t look anywhere. He saw everything, but in doing so, he saw nothing. His mind was so full of stimuli that it was unable to process what was right before his eyes.

  And that was all Cain required. He would use Rink’s blindness to his advantage. He timed the rhythm of Rink’s movements, watched and discerned the momentary gap where the eyes swung a fraction of an instant before the barrel of the gun followed. Into that fraction of space, Cain would insert himself. Before Rink could make any sense of his appearance, it would already be too late.

  A-one and a-two and a-…now.

  From within the shroud of blankets that was the body of the bison-skulled monstrosity to Rink’s left, Cain erupted. He made as little sound as possible, and didn’t so much leap out as jut forward from his waist, arm streaking down at the juncture of Rink’s neck and shoulder. It was a guaranteed instant kill. The point of his blade jabbing down to puncture the heart from above. Rington would die instantly, drop like a slaughtered steer. No shout of warning to Joe Hunter.

  Except Rink wasn’t as blind as he looked.

  He detected the shifting shadows and he jerked away. The blade still slid into flesh, but instead of finding that pinpoint where the blade could be forced down into the heart, it found resistance in the form of his sturdy clavicle. The metal scoured bone, but it was deflected away from the vitals and into the pectoral muscle.

  “Sumbitch!” Rink grunted, his gun coming around. He fired in an arc, not waiting for the target to present itself before jerking on the trigger. Three times he fired. Two bullets cut chips from the rocks, one snatched at the blanket swathing Cain’s form. Then Cain’s knee thumped against his forearm, halting the gun, and the knife once more cut a swathe through the night. Rink staggered back, blood from his sliced forehead invading his vision.

  Move, move, move. A mantra for both men.

  Even as Cain extricated himself from his hiding place, Rink was firing again. Blind, but with determination. One bullet scoured Cain’s left thigh, another plucked hair from his head. But then Cain was out of the line of fire and he cut again at Rink.

  Sliced to the bone, Rink kicked back. His foot caught Cain in the gut, propelled him backward. Cain was too canny a fighter to be caught so easily. Instead of floundering for balance, Cain allowed his momentum to take him over in a roll that brought him back immediately to his feet. And in that instant he was already coming back at Rink. Rink was big, powerful beneath his clothing, trained to deal with dangerous foes, but unprepared for one as determined as Tubal Cain, Father of Cutting Instruments. The Harvestman.

  Rink shot again. But the bullet passed through space that Cain had occupied a second before. He was already two paces to the left. As Rink swung toward him, he arced his blade under the barrel of the gun. The pinching of Rink’s eyes showed Cain he’d cut him. Then Cain gained the space below Rink’s armpit, squirmed under and behind the big man, and looped his free arm around his throat. He jerked backward, sliced at the throat.

  Rink grabbed at his knife, but Cain heard the telltale groan of someone in pain. Cain released him, kicked him away. Rink staggered and his head banged off the rock wall. Pivoting, he fell flat on his face. Blood mingled with the chalk-white sand.

  Finally, Cain gave voice.

  But all he had to say was “Ha!”

  He stepped forward. Rink didn’t get up. Cain smiled. Leaned down and plucked the gun out of Rink’s grasp.

  Distantly, he caught the sound of someone calling his name.

  He turned quickly, heading into the narrow passage.

  46

  I SHOULD’VE EXPECTED SOMETHING LIKE THIS. CAIN’S HISTORY should have prepared me. The photographs of his victims viewed on Harvey’s computer. The skeletons posed out there in the desert. The grotesque art daubed on the rocks outside. But nothing primed me for the chamber I now stood in.

  The chamber wasn’t huge. But Cain had used the space economically.

  There wasn’t a surface more than the width of my hand on walls or ceiling that wasn’t decorated with human skulls, scapulas, or pelvic bones. Femur, humorus, radius, and ulna bones formed strange mosaics. Spinal columns had been arranged as borders to separate one insane montage from another. Interspersed between the human remains were countless bones gleaned from road-killed wildlife. And equally disturbing in their own way, myriad patches of cloth snagged from unsuspecting bodies were woven between the bones. Human rib cages dominated the far end of the room like shields on coats of arms. And there, as the living embodiment of Cain’s insanity, was his centerpiece.

  “Oh, my God. John?”

  My voice came out as a wheeze and my arms reached out. My feet wouldn’t follow them.

  “John?” I asked again.

  He was displayed like all the other of Cain’s exh
ibits, attached to the walls of the cave by chains fixed to iron spikes hammered through the stone, his chest against the bedrock. Cords were looped around his throat, woven around his skull, and fixed to a hook in the ceiling. His head was forced back on his spine so that he peered upward. His arms were outstretched, the skin peeled from his back stretched taut beneath them like demonic wings. I could see what Cain was attempting to portray. He intended that John be seen as a supplicant, beseeching a higher spirit in the heavens above him. A fallen angel begging for God’s grace?

  Walter said that FBI profilers had concluded that Cain might be attempting to make amends for slaughtering his own family. Perhaps John was representative of the demon that was Martin Maxwell, and in reality, it was he who begged grace from God. Maybe we’d never know the true meaning, and everything was simply the product of his depraved mind.

  It wasn’t just the pose that shocked me. In itself it was terrible. The way in which Cain had stripped the flesh from John’s back, exposing the musculature, went way beyond awful. Yet that wasn’t the worst. What made me shrink inside was that John still shivered with life.

  Caught in a snapshot moment again, eternity was measured by the thrum of one heartbeat.

  Then I was moving forward with no sense of volition.

  One moment I was standing at the threshold, the next I was cradling John’s head between my palms. My SIG was lying in the dust at my feet, forgotten in my urgency to help my brother. All that was in my head, my heart, my soul, was to give John a modicum of comfort. He wasn’t conscious; not in the real sense of the word. He stirred. I didn’t want to look at his wounds, but inexorably my eyes drifted down. My eyes screwed tight, blocking the image, but I knew I’d see it for a long time to come.

  “Oh, my God,” I moaned again. Beyond reason, the prayer was for my own mortal soul. I gently caressed John’s head, and this time he responded.