The sound of gunfire at Max’s back made everyone in the room turn to face him. He ducked to the side, taking in the scene while looking for cover, and for confirmation of his suspicions.
The Beast, already picking out prey, pushed him deeper into the crowd. Max didn’t resist, preferring action over thinking about betrayal.
There were over fifty people in the high-ceiling chamber, which appeared to be the shell of a three storey concrete structure under construction in an abandoned excavation site for a water or subway tunnel, or perhaps a shelter. The abandoned municipal project must have been discovered by the local gangs and re-opened for use as a drug processing plant or housing for illegal workers. In the structure’s upper reaches, next to the banks of work lights illuminating the chamber, half-a-dozen men and women had been nailed to the wooden framework, stripped, gutted, their blood and viscera slowly dripping to the floor and anointing the gathered men and the few women clustered below the bodies. Not all the sacrifices were dead. The Beast was torn between pursuing its prey and climbing into the super-structure to pick over the offerings.
At the back of the space, on a partially built second storey, a young man stood, arms upraised in mid-exhortation. He’d stopped speaking, and his gaze shifted from Max to the door. Wearing a white shirt was soaked with sweat, strands of his long hair stuck to his forehead and cheeks, he looked like proletariat worker statue about to be toppled. Behind him stood Kueur and Alioune.
“Tonton Bébête!” Kueur shouted. Alioune raised a hand and, to his surprise, laughed.
Max froze with the moment. The Beast, as it always did in their presence, shrank to a corner in the emptiness within him, mewling and whining in frustration.
He’d known, as soon as he’d heard the knife owner mention the Beast. But knowing and seeing the reality were two very different things. Heart racing faster than even the Beast could tolerate, Max faced the reality of their betrayal. Even more surprising to him was the depth of his instinctive trust, as if the simple act of being drawn to and caring for a pair of predators could somehow protect him from becoming their prey.
In a reflection of his shock, the twins appeared older than the last time they’d visited New York, only a two months ago, as if they’d stolen years and inches from their teachers at the boarding school. They were dressed in the latest Paris fashions, bright and clinging to their lithe bodies, but their eyes were brighter, their teeth longer, sharper. The burning feral fire he remembered from the first time he’d seen them in the Bois de Boulogne, finishing their prey, had returned. The fire was bolder, wilder, possessed by an experienced savagery that was new to him. He never thought of them as innocent. But he’d never considered they could be closer to the nature of a demon like the Beast than even he might be. In the harsh construction light, even their beauty appeared withered, as if what they kept inside them had finally consumed them. He should have remained an anonymous benefactor, a mystery they might have hunted but never found, rather than indulging whatever pathetic need had driven him to become involved with them personally. The need showed weakness, and predators could not resist vulnerability. The Beast had been right all along.
“We did all this for you,” the young man said, addressing Max, his eyes pleading, his words clear and frail in the tense quiet.
The twins stayed behind him, ignoring Max, their gazes resting here and there, as if picking out their first and second kills. In that moment, they seemed so much like the Beast made into flesh.
The moment shattered when the gangsters burst through the doorway, waving guns and screaming at the assembly in a mix of English and Chinese.
Max scanned the crowd again, noticed some slipping out through gaps in the construction toward the rear of the structure. He recognized some from old ops as they turned for a final backward glance to assess the situation. They were the experienced hands, too savvy to be caught in a pointless firefight. But they were also flawed, to have participated in whatever had been going on here.
He stood a little taller, wary of becoming a target, trying to draw the twins’ attention. If they’d wanted him, then he was here to answer their challenge. They ignored him, as if they did not consider him a threat. The Beast found no traction for its rage in the insult.
Sporadic gunfire erupted from the crowd. The Chinese returned fire, and a thunderstorm rocked the chamber. Max dived to the floor, crawled toward the back as the assembly surged forward.
Bullets filled the chamber for a mad minute, whining through the air and kicking up dust and debris. Bodies fell as the sound of guns and screams and moans rose like a tornado’s roar. When the last clips had emptied, the fighting came down to hand to hand as the two groups closed. The sides seemed uneven, with gangsters cut down from nearly twenty to half a dozen still standing while the assembly had a little more than half their number remaining. But not all the men and women who had enjoyed the drippings from sacrificial victims were eager for a direct fight. The Chinese gangsters held their own against the initial rush, giving their more reluctant opponents even less motivation to join the fight.
Max circled the crowd, heading for the back and access to the second storey to settle with the twins. He recognized the crowd, now. These were not true hunters. They were not the kind who reveled in their own strength and skill and power, fighting for territory and answering challenges as well as preying on the weak. These were the lonely killers, broken men and women, dependent on the power they stole from others with tricks and subterfuge. Weak people, careful to stalk only those even more vulnerable than them, like the man who’d watched the children outside Tompkins Square Park.
Nothing at all like Max or his Beast.
The Blood of Killers, they called themselves. He’d run into them, in the past. He understood he was a legend to them, a myth fostered perhaps by the professionals he’d worked with who kept company with such children for their adulation. But the Blood of Killers had never bothered him, in the past.
The world took another turn in perspective. Offerings. Welcoming. Their desperate need for him.
The twins. Maybe he wasn’t their prey, after all.
He looked for them on the make-shift stage, and found their bloody faces rising from the young man who had stood over the crowd and now lay, throat and belly open on the partial second story floor above the fray.
Max called to the twins, but they ignored him. Instead, they stood, craned their necks forward as if enticed by an irresistible scent, and leapt.
Max watched with admiration as the two creatures fell to the floor in a delicate arc, landing and bounding forward like the spray from a wave crashing against rock. They met the weakest of the Blood as they were turning to run to the back of the structure and escape. The twins didn’t waste much time with them, dancing away from their clumsy strikes and grabs, darting in to cripple them with knee breaks or throat punches and leaving them for later.
For later. Max grunted. Even the Beast understood.
He aimed the Glock at the knot of fighters still locked in hand-to-hand combat. Saw them go down in his mind, prematurely. The Beast stirred in its corner. He fired a few quiet rounds into the lights, bringing gloom into the chamber, then put the gun down. The men locked in combat continued their battle, falling, rising, taking and giving to the death, oblivious to what happened outside their circle. There were the real killers, the ones who made shedding blood a joy.
The twins worked their way through the reluctant fighters more eager to attack two young girls than risk themselves against prey that fought back. But Kueur and Alioune moved like smoke, eluding crude strikes and kicks, answering with bites, and with slashes by fingers tipped with more than human nails. A few fell mercifully by their hand, cut throats depriving them of future suffering. The rest slipped to the floor stunned, shocked, immobilized, bleeding but alive. Max could already what would happen to their writhing bodies, later. But for now, the prey had been caught in a web of helplessness.
Cries and blood tempted the Be
ast. It moved through Max, tentative, but hungry, fighting its fear of the twins to be enough of a monster to answer the call for a feasting.
Max drew his two knives, charged in behind the twins with the Beast riding him. He killed two men in seconds. The rest scattered. The twins cried out. Hearing their frustration, he understood he’d ruined the game of their hunt. They’d wanted to bait their prey to come to them. Regret made him pause. The Beast jumped in, killed another, started in chewing through to the ribs.
And then the twins were on him, slashing, pulling at his arms, legs and hair, punching him in the back. His jacket came apart, his skin stung from a dozen minor cuts. Their grunts and growls filled his ears, their hot, bloody breath choked him. The Beast withdrew, not for anything they did, but for what more they might become. Already, they’d shown Max far more than when they’d first met.
He countered, shifting his weight, turning hips and shoulders, finally throwing Kueur off, connecting with Alioune on the chin. He thought again of betrayal, and the possibility that he really had angered them by spoiling their hunt. Like the Beast, and even himself, they might not be able to control themselves when blood was in the air.
The two girls landed on the concrete floor, moaning, crying. The men who’d started to run off stopped, circled back. They stared at the twins, laying flat as if broken, ready to be picked over. They glanced at him, drawn to the blood. They were figuring the odds, one man with two knives, wounded by two girls -- how tough could he be? Looks were exchanged. Who was going to go in first? Did someone want to play with Max after they had him subdued, or was this going to be a straight kill, an appetizer before they made a meal of the girls.
When they’d come close enough, the girls jumped up like marionettes pulled by strings. Before the men could react, the twins took down two and were dancing off in opposite directions, spiraling out and away from each other in a beautiful dance that cut off any chance for escape by their victims.
“Tonton!” Kueur shouted. “Go after the others, we’ll finish these.”
Max hesitated, and Alioune added, “Talk later.”
Their words burst the tension of his uncertainty. Suddenly, their intentions and all that had happened felt right, even if he couldn’t see their reason or logic. In that moment he recognized another hunger he’d felt but never named since the first night he saw them hunt in the Bois. He felt their passion for pain and blood, their appetite for pleasures and death. He wanted their wild company, to belong to their pack. Though snarling and snapping at each other, he was sure they’d unite in the hunt. He could not deny that they were things he had never seen before, spirits reflecting his nature.
What he couldn’t understand was how what they were doing would change their relationship. What they might be together was new territory, something he did not want to consider or explore. Like the Beast, he wanted to run, to go to ground and wait for the threat to pass. But there was work to do to survive. Appetites to fulfill.
He left the twins to their pleasures and approached the knot of hardened killers struggling in a loose scrum of bodies shifting back and forth in front of the doorway like drunken brawlers numb to pain. Combatants fell, others rejoined the fight. The floor was littered with those who couldn’t get up anymore because they were dead, crippled or unconscious. Knives flashed, clubs and fighting sticks whirled and smacked each other, occasionally landing on bone with a crack.
He joined the mass and felt as one with collected killers, part of monster consuming itself rather than a pack member taking down a kill. He slashed, stabbed, kicked, pushed in closer, bit, carved, twisted. The blows began to rain down on him, and the Beast roused itself from its fearful stupor. Blinded by blood in his eyes, Max let the Beast take control, use his body, his senses. He rode the demon as it rose and gathered speed, marshaled strength, howled its challenge.
Yips and grunts answered. The self-destructing monster of killers turned its attention outward, to what was killing it. Max. The Beast. The weight of men pushing back fell hard on Max’s back and legs. The blows stung, and more. They took something from him, bits and pieces of his hunger to fight. He was flesh and blood, and the monster of killers was taking both from him.
But the Beast picked him up, took him above the fray, beyond the pain. It swept through wood and steel, flesh and bone. His knifes were lightning arcing through the air, his teeth, obsidian blades rending flesh.
The fresh blood that bathed him washed his own blood away. His vision cleared. His lungs filled with the final exhalations of the dead. He flew on the screams of the dying, far into the heart of the pain he inflicted, into the darkness that claimed everyone around him.
He took the spirit of the best who called themselves the Blood of Killers, and the hard hearts of seasoned gang enforcers, and gorged on their last glimmerings of agony as life faded and death took them beyond his reach.
Max floated for what seemed like an eternity in the red universe of murder, oblivious to his own pain, to anything that could not bleed and feed him.
And when at last there was nothing left to kill, when the Beast had sunk back to all fours and shuddered, coughing up what it could not fit into the black pit of its belly, Max saw there were no more men standing before him. Only the twins were left, standing to the back of the chamber, girls once more, innocence in their eyes as blood stained their mouths and faces, laughing and applauding now that he had returned to them.
The knives fell from his hands. He walked slowly toward them. The twins raced to close the distance, threw themselves on him and hugged him. Kueur giggled and squealed. Alioune grunted, growling low and deep like a slumbering jungle cat lost in dream.
Max at last freed himself. He took in the survivors, some rousing from unconsciousness, others trying to crawl away.
“What did you do?” he asked them.
“We wanted to see,” Alioune answered.
“You never show us,” Kueur said.
“See what?”
“That thing,” Kueur said. “What you hide from us.”
“What hides from us,” Alioune added.
“Why?”
“Because you are our Tonton Bébête,” said Alioune, “and we must know all about the one who saved us from this civilized world.”
Max shook his head. He remembered feeling anger, and fear, because of the twins. But feelings had been ground down to a smooth, polished surface on which everything slid far and down into oblivion. All he could grasp was a single thread of curiosity.
“I mean, why this place? These people?”
“Because they’re the Blood,” Kueur said. “They call themselves the Blood of Killers, and they love you. See, up there?” she said, pointing to the rafters where the six opened sacrifices still bleed slowly. At least one of them still lived, grinning as she stared at Max with adoration. “They sacrificed themselves in your honor. Offered you what they valued most. They would have done anything for you.”
“You told them about me.”
“Yes.” Alioune said.
The sisters were silent for a moment, as if acknowledging the gravity of what they had done.
“But we wanted to give them to you, as a gift.” Kueur took Max’s hand in hers. “So you could see how much you are loved.”
“These people don’t love me. They want to be me. They sacrifice themselves so they can become greater than their small, weak lives lets them be. Better than what they are.”
“That is why we wanted you to take them,” Alioune said. “To see you feed on the weakness of their love.”
Kueur laughed. “Don’t worry, Tonton. Our love is strong. We won’t fail you.”
Alioune stepped closer and put a hand to Max’s elbow. “You are different to us, now that we see you more clearly. We are closer.”
Kueur jumped playfully as her expression changed suddenly to mock surprise. “We have to talk, Tonton. About the place you’re building. We were thinking, there should be a place in it. A room.”
“
A box,” said Alioune. “Where can put all the things that we are together, and be safe.”
“A box?” Max said, feeling that their meaning almost made sense, though he didn’t understand it.
“Yes,” Kueur said. “The Box. Where things like this could happen, and we would be safe.”
Max nodded his head, not sure of what he was agreeing to, positive only that he was tired, and the Beast was quiet, and there were still things to be done before the night was over.
“We can’t leave witnesses,” he said.
“No,” Alioune said, turning away from him, fixing on the survivor who had crawled furthest away, half-way into one of the openings at the rear of the chamber. The slightest of smiles made a shadow on her lips.
Kueur released his hands, licked her teeth. “Desert,” she said.
They were children, Max thought. Predatory children, one dimensional, their needs almost simple. He was glad he’d found them, such simple leaves fallen from some great tree of shadows. The world was harsh, and the traps that prey set out to catch and kill the likes of them were sometimes subtle and always deadly. He had a lot to teach them about the ways of men and their civilization. Far more than the nuns and teachers at the boarding schools he sent them to.
And maybe someday, they’d be good company on whatever road they took to find the blood and pain on which they’d feed.
THE EVIL
By Hugh B. Cave
1
High in a mountain clearing
in a red, red house
in the wilds of Haiti,
black candles burn
in a room of many colors.
The night is nearly over.
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