Blackwater Lights

by Michael M. Hughes

  “Stay close. We’ll get your mother and get away from here.”

  William nodded. “I was hoping you’d find us.”

  “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

  “They took my glasses. I can’t really see. What happened to your eye?”

  “You be my eyes, and I’ll be yours.”

  “Okay, Ray.”

  He pumped the shotgun again and the shell bounced down the steps and came to rest next to the cop’s head. How many shots did the thing hold?

  “Let’s go.”

  They ran toward the trees, Ray slowing so that William could keep up with him. It seemed like an eternity before they reached the tree line. He pulled the boy close and squeezed him. The kid was shaking. He’d be lucky if he didn’t have nightmares the rest of his life.

  Ray moved through the brush. Hadn’t Ellen been here? He wished he had a flashlight, or even a match.

  “Where is she?” William asked.

  Ray hushed him. What if she had woken up and found herself alone? Or if she’d been found? He pushed forward through the branches and leaves. Thorns punctured his hand. He stumbled, catching himself against a tree. She had been here. Or very close by.

  William ran and fell to his knees. “Mom.”

  Oh, thank God.

  William groaned. He sounded on the verge of panic.

  Ray grabbed the boy’s shoulders. “Shhh. It’s okay. It’s not her blood. She’s okay. She’s just not conscious. I think they drugged her.”

  William wiped tears from his eyes, then grabbed Ellen and held himself against her and started to sob.

  Gunshots. Several of them. From the other side of the house.

  Where to now? He had no idea. He pulled Ellen away from William and balanced her across his shoulders. She wasn’t that heavy, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to carry her much farther. Hopefully it would be far enough.

  The door to the house opened. Two men stepped out. Both had handguns.

  “Come on,” he whispered to William. “Carry this for me.” He handed the boy the shotgun. “Keep it pointed away or at the ground.”

  He took one last look back and wished he hadn’t. Lily was standing with the two men, still in her robe, scanning the property. He felt her eyes, burning with anger, and then she seemed to sense them. She pointed her finger, and the two men began to move in their direction.

  The three of them made little progress. The ground grew steeper and rockier. One wrong step and he could fall and crack Ellen’s head open on a boulder. Or his own.

  William clung to him, making it even harder to walk. But he didn’t have the heart to ask him to let go. What the boy had endured already he couldn’t even imagine.

  “Where are we going?” William asked.

  “As far as we can go,” he said.

  That seemed to satisfy William.

  When he finally could carry Ellen no more, he laid her against a tree and collapsed beside her. His body ached, with every muscle pushed beyond its means, and it felt as though a stake had been driven into his chest. His breath came in wheezy gasps. They’d been moving for what seemed like an hour, stopping only twice so he could put Ellen down to rest. But this time he feared he might not be able to stand up again. The ground was sodden and cold, but he didn’t care. William sat next to him and curled up against his chest. “Let’s just rest a minute,” he whispered.

  William nodded. The boy was shivering.

  Ray’s arms and shoulders trembled with exhaustion. He pulled himself closer to Ellen, wrapping her in the robe’s fabric. “Just a few minutes,” he said. “Then we’ll get moving again.”

  He felt William’s breath against his neck, and then heard the boy softly crying. And then he started weeping. He wept quietly, but his body shook along with the child’s.

  With each sob, William squeezed him tighter.

  “What’s that?” William asked.

  He’d drifted off—for minutes? Or longer?

  A dog barked. It sounded close.

  His legs had gone numb. He tried to stand but slid to his knees in the mud. “We have to get going. Now.”

  William’s eyes widened. “Are they coming?”

  He lifted Ellen onto his back. She muttered something. Was she finally emerging from shock? He’d have to keep her quiet. They needed to move, silently, and she couldn’t start talking now. “Just move. Go.”

  More barking. Closer. Probably Sheriff Morton’s K9 units, following their bloody scent as if they’d been dragging a hunk of fresh meat.

  He stumbled, and Ellen started to slide off his shoulders. He crouched, hefted her, and tried to run. After three steps, his ankle twisted beneath him, and he fell. Ellen’s weight crushed his face into the mud.

  He pulled his head out from beneath her. Wiped mud from his good eye.

  A dog bounded toward him, a bouncing shape in the darkness.

  “Go,” he said to William. “Run. Run now.”

  The boy stood immobile.

  “Go!” he said. He reached and grabbed the boy’s shirt. Tried to throw him forward.

  William started crying, the shotgun pointing upward. He stepped away and shook his head. He wasn’t going to leave them.

  The dog stopped a few feet away. It tilted its head. Shook its droopy, long face. Wagged its tail. Then barked again. A bloodhound, of all things.

  And then he saw them. Ten or more. Indistinct human shapes emerging over the hill. “Give me the gun, William. Now.” He cursed himself for nodding off. To come this far, so far, only to die at their hands.

  William handed him the shotgun. He’d take a few of them down with him. “I’ll fucking shoot you,” he screamed. “I’ll kill you, all of you. Don’t you come near me.”

  The dog hopped up on William. It licked his face.

  “Ray?”

  A familiar voice from the darkness.

  “Ray? Ray, don’t shoot. It’s all right. It’s us, Ray.”

  Mantu.

  He tried to speak, to call out Mantu’s name, but couldn’t. He sobbed so hard, so explosively, that it felt like it would never stop.

  William fell on him and squeezed him. Other hands touched him, holding the two of them and Ellen. All around them, safe, warm human hands.

  Epilogue

  They fled south, crossing the Mexican border inside an eighteen-wheeler packed with LCD televisions, then through Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras in a steamy vegetable truck. Always on the move, never stopping for more than a day or two. Mantu coordinated everything, but left them when they reached a friendly cattle farm in Nicaragua, just outside Camoapa. He’d gotten them passports and credit cards with fake identities. “I have a place for you. Where you’ll be safe. At least for a while.”

  When they arrived in Costa Rica, Mantu’s courier gave them the keys to a safe house on the coast of the Osa Peninsula. He’d also tucked a photo into the package—a yellowed image of Micah, his eyes alive and vibrant, standing in front of the church that was now a pile of charred timbers and ash. Ray kept it in his wallet.

  Ray would sometimes pick up a newspaper or sit at a computer in a café and read English-language websites until his nerves got the best of him. Mantu had warned him against searching for his name or anything to do with what happened in Blackwater, as it could trigger an alarm at any number of law enforcement agencies. But it wasn’t hard to put together the story: several wealthy industrialists and a few government officials from different corners of the world had died in unusual circumstances in one curious week in August. A collection of bloggers and armchair researchers tried to connect the string of suicides, accidents, and murders in a grand web of conspiracy involving pornography, human trafficking, and organized crime. Few people paid them any attention.

  He eventually stopped reading about himself. He was wanted for the murder of nineteen-year-old Crystal Conner in West Virginia. “Conclusive DNA evidence of rape,” the district attorney had said. After that, he’d supposedly blown off the head of his childh
ood friend, a shady porn kingpin, and dumped the body deep in the woods, where it was found so badly decomposed it was unrecognizable. His DNA showed up there, too, and his fingerprints were all over Kevin’s house. An open-and-shut case, and he had even made it onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

  A waitress he had been seen flirting with had disappeared, along with her young son. Both were presumed dead, and her ex-husband, an Iraq veteran, had sworn he’d find Ray and bring him to justice or die trying. Denny, thank God, had left a one-sentence message on his blog before disappearing: I’m done with this blog and with Blackwater and I’m moving to Pittsburgh. Ray still felt sick knowing he’d never get to tell Denny the truth. He wanted to send him an anonymous email, but Mantu warned him any communication could be traced. And any communication could get Denny killed.

  The worst was reading quotes from students, friends, and family. Lisa, now the famous former lover of a serial killer, had been hounded for weeks by tabloid TV reporters camped outside her apartment, but she’d never said a word to the press. For that he was grateful.

  He might as well have been dead. And, he supposed, he was dead—at least, the person he had once been was no longer alive.

  “Ray. You awake?”

  He opened his eyes, hot and delirious. He’d just gotten over his second bout of malaria, but his mind still felt in the grip of a fever dream.

  “Yeah. Sorta.”

  The cat turned from the window and looked at him, then yawned. He’d insisted on bringing the orange tabby with them, though it had complicated their escape. He’d saved Ray’s life—which meant he’d ultimately saved all three of them—so Ray couldn’t imagine leaving him behind. William had finally given him a name—Kittytron. After K-Tron, the leader of Earth’s robot army. Eventually they just called him Kitty.

  The boy sighed and shifted in his sleep. For the past week he’d been spending nights on a cot next to their bed, close enough that they could hear him when the nightmares came.

  Ray looked over at Ellen. Her hair was always bleached blond now, and cut short. He would never stop marveling at her eyes, at how much life and intelligence burned in them. She’d blanked out most of her experience at Crawford’s. Mantu said it was probably the drugs. A blessing. While they’d been running he’d told her nearly the whole story, but not everything. Some of it he couldn’t bear to speak out loud. And some things she didn’t need to know. What she did remember was bad enough.

  “I thought someone was watching me in town today. At the market. But maybe he was just checking me out.”

  Ray nodded. He wished he could assure her that they could stop running eventually, that they wouldn’t still be hunted. That they wouldn’t be recognized by a cop, or a soldier, or a tourist who had watched too many true-crime shows. Mantu hadn’t minced his words when he’d last seen him: There’s no happy ending to this.

  And she was still out there, of course. He sensed her some nights, felt her gaze seeking him in the darkness. Sometimes he woke from dreams in which she whispered to him that she was coming, almost feeling her hot breath on the back of his neck.

  He shivered. “We’ll talk about it in the morning,” he said.

  “Shhh,” William hushed them. His eyes were closed, but he waved his hand. “I’m trying to get some sleep.”

  They held each other, and despite her uneasiness Ellen stifled a laugh.

  “Sorry, kiddo,” Ray whispered.

  Ellen kissed him. Whispered goodnight in his ear. He hoped she’d sleep well tonight, lulled by the murmur of the ocean.

  He stared out the window into the night, unable to sleep, watching the stars turn in the sky.

  About the Author

  MICHAEL M. HUGHES writes both fiction and nonfiction. A portion of this book first appeared as “The Blackwater Lights,” in Legends of the Mountain State: Ghostly Tales from the State of West Virginia, edited by Michael Knost. When he’s not writing, Hughes lectures on paranormal and Fortean topics and performs as a mentalist. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife and two daughters.

  If you enjoyed Blackwater Lights, then check out this excerpt from Apocalyptic Organ Grinder

  by William Todd Rose, on sale now!

  I.

  This is how our world died …

  Once upon a time, in a kingdom called the United States, there lived an evil wizard who thought he was good. He lived in the middle of a vast desert and spent most of his days seeking guidance from a book of stories. One of his favorite tales in this book told of a time when the kingdoms of Earth would be overrun by the wicked. During this time, sickness and death would hang over the world and herald the coming of a great hero. The hero, it was said, would vanquish evil and lead His people into a land far, far away where they would live happily ever after.

  The wizard believed in this story so much that he wanted to do everything within his power to help the foretold events come to pass. Because he was a wizard, he was able to cast spells with his words. The frightened, the lonely, the broken, and the lost: these were the ones who most easily fell under his spell. Leaving loved ones and possessions behind, they journeyed to the desert on a sacred pilgrimage just so they could stand by his side and learn from his teachings.

  It came to pass that the wizard stood before his congregation one foggy morning and announced that the great hero had come to him in a dream. The hero whispered in the wizard’s ear, sharing with him divine instructions and repeating them over and over until they had been committed to memory. So the wizard kissed his wives upon their mouths, closed the oak door on his workshop, and was only seen by his most trusted knights for nearly two cycles of the moon.

  When he finally emerged, the wizard had grown a bushy beard and held aloft a vial of magic liquid. What made this liquid magic was that it was actually alive. Tiny creatures, much too small to be seen, swam within the container and the wizard told his people how these organisms were actually bits of the angel Gabriel, who would cleanse the world with his fiery sword.

  The magic liquid was then transferred, a little at a time, into other containers that were called cigarette lighters. Cigarette lighters had a little button that, when pushed, would cause fire to jump out of a hole on its top. The wizard’s special cigarette lighters, however, produced no flame. Instead, there was a small tab that could easily be pulled out. Once the tab had been removed, the liquid turned to gas and seeped out through a crack in the plastic that was thinner than a human hair. The gas carried the pieces of the angel Gabriel into the air, where they could be brought into the body through breathing.

  In this time, there were also giant metal birds that flew all over the world. The birds would land at nests where people, like you and me, would climb into their bellies and be carried away to distant lands. And it was to these nests that the wizard and his disciples went.

  Instead of allowing the metal birds to eat them, however, they stood outside the nest and watched for people who had normal cigarette lighters that had stopped working. Using a decoy lighter to produce fire, they then swapped it out for one of the Gabriel lighters and told the weary travelers to keep it as they had many, many more. So in the course of a week, bits of the angel had been sent out to every kingdom of the Earth.

  And that, dear children, is where the fucking fairy tale ends.

  II.

  Tanner Kline crept through the forest with the stealth of a mountain lion. Placing one foot in front of the other, he was acutely aware of every brittle twig and dry leaf. The worn soles of his combat boots hit the moss covered earth heel first. His toes then followed suit in a rolling motion so smooth and practiced that the sound of his steps were no louder than the wind rustling the trees overhead. He breathed as slowly as he walked, pulling air through the cloth particle mask that covered his nose, and then exhaled it through his mouth so calmly that the dirty cotton didn’t so much as bulge.

  On cooler days, the mask was the worst piece of his uniform. The elastic band held it snugly to his face, and the metal
band across the nosepiece felt as if it were grinding into his bones. The air within the mask always felt warm and moist, which lead his skin to itch in the places where the convex piece of cloth rubbed against his cheeks and chin. On this particular day, however, it wasn’t the mask he mentally cursed; it was the white Tyvek suit that crinkled like a tarp with every move he made.

  Originally, the suit had been designed to keep chemicals from leaking onto the clothes and skin of workers unfortunate enough to spill a barrel of sulfuric acid. As such, the material was so tightly woven that not even the smallest drop of contaminant could seep through its pores. The inverse, however, was also true. The suit trapped body heat like the glass walls of a greenhouse, even within the shade of trees.

  Tanner’s back and chest was slick with sweat and he knew he’d have to stop for water soon. But first he had to ensure the immediate area was clear: it simply wouldn’t do for him to unzip his naked body from the protective shell and take a long pull from the canteen slung over his shoulder only to have a Spewer come along. He’d be as defenseless as a baby bird with a broken wing, his entire body exposed to potential infection. As a Sweeper, it was his job to be cautious and methodical, to patrol the forests surrounding his settlement and eliminate threats to the community. Dying out here, in what should have been his realm of expertise, would be a dishonor that would taint his family for generations to come. So he had to be certain he was completely alone before he’d so much as pull the mask from his face.

  He stalked through the clearing, circling the perimeter as birds chirped overhead, and clutched his antique thirty-aught-six in gloved hands. The wind whispered through the boughs of trees as sweat trickled down his spine. Even more than a drink of water, he wanted to feel that breeze on his bare flesh, to relish the coolness of evaporating sweat and let the stink of his body be buffeted away. When on patrol, he usually hoped to stumble across a Spewer; besides the swell of pride that accompanied a clean kill, there was a certain satisfaction that came with knowing he’d made the world a little safer for his daughter. He dreamed of a day when she could run and play in the fields without the escort of an armed guard, when she could just be free to be a kid. But, at least for now, he prayed that there was nothing out there but plants and wildlife.