God Of The Dead

by M. C. Norris

  ##

  Hunkered in the downpour beneath a plastic slip-or-slide, they surveyed the west end of the main street of the little town from their shelter in the playground area of what once had been a city park. The town appeared to be deserted. Doors to parallel ranks of darkened stores, an empty pool hall, and a little taco shop swung ajar, exposing what little remained after a year’s worth of looting. Vehicles loitered patiently in their angled parking slots on either side of the bricked pavement, awaiting owners with jingling keys who would never return. A tattered, blaze-orange banner sagged over the doors of the pool hall. There was an image of a pheasant in the middle. It advertised a friendly welcome to hunters.

  “Are we in Zurich?”

  Malcolm shook his head. “Not yet. This is Plainville.” Wesley’s town. Malcolm recalled the cocky banter that he’d enjoyed on the Sawyer’s stern with that kid. He imagined him as a child growing up here, probably playing in this very park on sunny afternoons.

  “How far are we from Zurich?”

  “Pretty close. Less than ten miles.”

  Ten miles seemed like a perilous eternity. The storm kept gathering in intensity with every passing hour. It showed no signs of letting up. The rain had found its way into Malcom’s hazmat suit and down into his boots, where the water weighted them down with every sloshing step. He found himself starting to shiver, but he was still grateful for the cover that the storm had provided them. North of the Saline River, they’d ridden in a cloak of virtual invisibility. The ground was so hardened by drought that the driving rains didn’t penetrate for over an hour. A sheet of water flowed right over the surface, following the complex whorls of the watershed rather than soaking into the soil. Again, they were lucky, because if it had saturated the ground, it might have bogged their tires and limited them to traveling on foot. So far, everything had been in their favor.

  “I just hope that I can find what I’m looking for,” Cecile whispered.

  Malcolm turned her way. It was the first time she’d ever mentioned looking for anything specific on this goose chase. “What are you looking for?”

  “A school bus, for starters.”

  “A school bus?” Malcolm peered out from beneath the slide, looking up and down the length of the unlit street. “Might’ve been a good idea if we’d discussed this back in St. Louis, when we could have figured out where the school is.”

  “We’re not looking for a school, I don’t think.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “It’s just a bus. A broken down bus, parked behind an old ramshackle house.”

  Malcolm rubbed the back of his neck. His muscles ached from the train ride, from his tug-of-war with the troll from under the bridge. Staring through a rain spattered visor was starting to give him a splitting headache. “I imagine that every house in Zurich is going to look pretty run-down by now. Any idea which side of the town it’s on?”

  He knew what her answer was going to be, before she ever shook her head. This was so unlike any mission into which he’d ever been deployed. In Afghanistan, the objectives were clear, locations pinpointed on a GPS. The only x-factor was always going to be the number of local fighters, but even with respect to those guys, you were always going to have some degree of reliable intelligence. Not this time. This whole mission was an x-factor. That wasn’t Cecile’s fault. He guessed that he understood her role in this assignment now, to some extent. Although her skill set was not exactly tangible, after what happened down in the river valley, he respected her—perhaps more than he’d ever be willing to let her know. He didn’t know why he was so reluctant to thank her. Probably because he’d been assigned to protect her life with his own, and the voodoo princess had ended up saving his ass. Regardless, as a soldier, he held to a certain standard that no matter how many years passed, no matter what might happen between them, her act of valor in battle when his life depended on it would remain a personal accolade that would never came down off her wall. There was a deeper bond between them now, whether he expressed it or not. From this point forward, at the very least, he intended for Cecile to see his appreciation through his actions.

  “Once we find your school bus, then what?” he asked. “Are we looking for something in particular?”

  “I’ll be learning as we go. What I need, specifically, is a personal object. Personal objects retain the energy of their owner. I can follow that trail of energy, and connect with them on a more intimate level.”

  “Connect with who?”

  “The Green Man, through the spirit of his mama, his dad or a sibling. I need something from his childhood. Something highly personal, that meant something to him, and to his family.”

  “You mean to tell me, we’re going to the Green Man’s house?”

  “His childhood home, yes.”

  “I thought he was Egyptian.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “In your photograph, he’s wearing a keffiyeh. That, and I could see the goddamned Sphinx sitting right there in the background.”

  “Nope. This guy’s from Kansas.”

  “What I don’t understand is how you can find his childhood home, but not know anything else about him.”

  “Because I met his dead mama, over in Nod. That’s all she gave me.”

  Anytime she opened her mouth, she stripped away another shred of his confidence in what exactly they were supposed to be doing out here, replacing his courage with an equal or greater amount of anxiety. This wasn’t conventional warfare, not by any stretch of his imagination. Even engaging dragons involved a basic, tactical approach, but now, they weren’t even hunting monsters. They were hunting ghosts. They were tracking down living enemies with the cooperation of the dead.

  Malcolm considered himself to be meticulous. He tried to be thorough in every aspect of his preparation in order to ensure, to the best of his ability, that he would be ready for whatever situations presented themselves on the battlefield. In all his life, he’d never felt so alienated from his own mission, so wholly and so horribly unprepared. Had he known, had he the faintest suspicion of the level of danger inherent in this mission, and what the mission’s success would be riding on, he might have run screaming in the opposite direction. He was thankful to have met Cecile. He liked her. She had moxie, but this mission with her, this was his worst fucking nightmare.

  “That photo was taken on the eve of Z-Day,” she whispered. “The photographer was a teenaged boy who was killed just moments after he took it.”

  “Everyone within one-hundred miles of Cairo was killed that night,” Malcolm replied. “It was the hardest hit target in the whole Middle East. No one survived. Even with masks, no one could even go near that zone for months, it was so damned toxic. The hole in the ground, where the Great Pyramid of Giza used to be? I’ll tell you this much: it was the biggest fucking hole that I’ve ever seen in my life. It was half a kilometer wide, and it dropped straight down into Hell. Whatever came out of that hole was huge. Unfathomably huge. It was bigger than any dragon I’ve ever seen.”

  “Maybe there’s your missing queen.”

  Malcom stared through the rivulets of rain coursing down the front of his visor. He’d thought about that. He’d almost accepted that, in the back of his mind. Whatever emerged from that tunnel was something of such enormity that there was nowhere on earth where it could possibly hide undetected for almost a year, yet somehow, whatever crawled out of that hole seemed to have vanished right into thin air. Everyone present at the moment of its emergence had died instantly. There were no living witnesses—except maybe for him, the guy whose home they were about to invade.

  Malcolm resisted the urge to allow the paranormal to haunt his logical thought processes, but the bizarre nature of this mission certainly invoked his recurring propensity to lean into some uncharacteristic directions. If the Green Man was controlling the Hunters, serving as something of a communications hub between the minions and the monsters, then he had to admit that it made some sense for the
Green Man to have been positioned nowhere else on earth, at the eve of Zero Day, than right at the foot of the Dragon Queen’s thrown. He would have been in Giza. He would have been stationed there to protect her, as she emerged from the center of the earth, moist and vulnerable after her molt. This was a duty that would’ve been expected of him, as a demonstration of his loyalty, to escort the queen of the colony through the gates of her new kingdom.

  “Wait-wait,” Malcolm whispered, clamping his hand on Cecile’s shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  He was sure that he’d seen something through the rain. Maybe a trick played upon the weary eyes by the tempestuous elements, the cavorting arcs of electricity through the clouds, but it had certainly looked like a horizontal beam of light. He blinked his eyes, squinting hard for a couple of seconds before reopening them. There it was again. He pulled Cecile slowly down to the muddy ground, where they wallowed together in a frigid pool at the foot of the slide.

  “There’s something coming,” he whispered, sliding the M-16 around his neck. He took slow aim at the western end of the street from a prone shooter’s position. “Right there.”

  At once, he could hear them. The blood drained from his extremities. His face tingled coldly while his heart began to thud against his chest. Their combined yowling transformed the town into something that sounded like a logger’s camp of buzzing chainsaws. The ruckus drew nearer, until the jouncing swaths of numerous headlamps swept over the darkened storefronts. The pack of mechanical wolves growled into town, their engines snarling cantankerously in the rain. There were too many of them to count, and they just kept coming. Dark riders, scarcely clothed but for their flapping capes of man-hide, glowered beneath hoods of skinned faces, matted hair that snaked in the wind. Dried scalps twirled from their handlebars. Glistening burdens dragged through pooled water behind their rear wheels. Skinless and strange, these parcels nodded in affirmation as they thumped over the disjointed bricks. The wolf pack slid past the tattered, orange banner that bid an eerie welcome to their namesake.

  “We’re in big fucking trouble.”

  The spearhead of the biker gang disappeared beyond the eastern edge of Malcom’s line of sight, and the parade kept growling on by, setting the town ablaze with yellow headlights that gleamed on the slick pavement like a solid bolt of lightning on which they rode. A single shot was fired. Then, bursts of flame spat from numerous automatic rifles, shattering storefront windows in a cacophony of calving glass. The sounds of wanton destruction seemed to excite them. Ammunition was wasted, as though they had plenty to spare. Barbarians raised their stretched lips up to the tempest, and they howled, scalped cowls streaming behind their reeking heads, as they discharged guns in their revelry over the harvest of human lives.

  Chapter Eleven

  In the direction from which the marauders had come, they pedaled, seven miles through a hammering downpour. Flapping sheets of silver rain whipped so hard against them that Cecile’s handlebars wrestled in her grip with the fervor of something desperate and doomed. Their pace was beleaguered by the elements. The effort required to press onward was tremendous. Mud sucked at her tires. Her wheel twisted through every rut gouged by the wheels of recent motorbikes that had churned the road’s surface into the consistency of tar. At times, she felt that her heart would give out. She stood upright on her pedals to employ her body’s weight to every laborious down-stroke, only to feel her rear wheel repeatedly lose traction and spin wetly beneath her. It was like pushing a pedal-driven plough up small inclines and down again, over windswept crests that nearly blew her over, and through flooded draws, where the churning waters rose to a height past her pedals. When at last Malcolm pulled off to the side of the road, and dragged his bike over toward a belt of dead trees, she followed him into the tree line, and then collapsed to the sodden ground.

  Rain poured from the heavens against her upturned mask, so uselessly fogged that she could barely see. The roiling show of fluid and raw energy before her eyes seemed almost hallucinogenic, an effect furthered by her exhaustion and lack of sleep. Were it not for the extreme danger of their situation, she could have lied like a corpse amongst those trunks of lifeless trees all night and through the following day. She was not sure how much more of this constant punishment her body could take.

  “Need another can of rations?”

  “No.” Cecile grimaced, wishing away the memory of compressed pet food filling her cheeks. “Do you have any water?”

  She heard Malcolm fumbling with the snaps and ties of his assorted pouches. She closed her eyes and just listened to the sounds of someone working, focusing her ears on the rustling of the nearby hands of a sentient being who was quietly manipulating the ordinary objects of a physical world. Somehow, it was a very pleasant sensory experience to focus only on the profound simplicity of that moment. It was nice to receive stimuli from some sense other than her weary eyes, to imagine what was taking place, and to know that its source meant her no harm.

  She blinked when she felt his warm hands suddenly against her throat, beneath her chin, connecting to her. She extended her tongue, found the groove in the snout of her mask, and without ever opening her eyes, released the bulb of her feeding tube into her open mouth.

  “Are you ready?”

  His voice in the darkness. She nodded weakly.

  Tepid water filled her cheeks. She swallowed. The second mouthful made her choke. She sat upright, coughing and sputtering water inside the face of her flooding mask. Her thumbs were already jamming beneath the seal as she panicked, ready to rip the device right off of her face, but Malcolm jerked away the injection tubing, grabbed her wrists, and ordered her to calm. Still coughing into the water that was nearly up to her nostrils, it took every bit of her nerve to ward off a panic attack.

  “I’m going to lift the bottom seal of your mask, and I want you to gently purge it out, but do not ever remove your mask. Not ever. Understand?”

  She nodded, but could not verbalize a reply. The water was over her lips. Malcolm worked one of his thumbs up into the gap between her throat and the rubber seal. Immediately, her personal aquarium began to drain. As the water level receded, her fright dissipated, and she was relieved to see that the accident had at least rinsed the fog from her visor. She could see him clearly now, kneeling over her, fawning down at her through his buggy, black eyes as if he were her insect mate on some queer planet on which they’d been marooned. She allowed herself to fall forward into his arms, resting her helmeted head upon his shoulder. It felt good. Even through layers of plastic and rubber, human contact felt good. She wished that he would never let go, that this moment would never end.

  “We made it,” he said. “We’re in Zurich.”

  It was strange, how back in that other life, in that world of sunshine, cars, music and animals, she’d been so picky about her men. Not that she’d had many relationships. Her Nana Hess strongly disapproved of any dependence on men, be it financial or emotional. Her philosophy was quite the reverse of the social norm, but even when that philosophy was adopted, there was no ignoring her natural attraction to men. When she did find herself presented with a potential suitor, it was an affordable luxury in those days to be exceedingly choosy about body styles, colors, quirks of personality and differing tastes. She could and would choose or refuse a man on the basis of a movie he liked, a song he played, or a pair of shoes that he wore. Now, those things all seemed so trivial. Only trust mattered in a world where no one had anything, where all men wore the same masks, where you searched that sea of masks until you found just one that you could trust with your life, and you let them know that they could trust you right back. That was a perfect match, even if you both looked like a couple of bugs.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “Hmm?”

  Malcolm tapped the cheek of her mask. “I saw your bubbles.”

  “Nothing.” Bugs smiled on the inside, because their faces never moved.

  “Need another hit?” He
held up the can.

  “I’m good.”

  “Okay, then,” he pivoted on an arm, and sat down in the mud beside her, “I brought you to Zurich, Ghost Rider. This is your show, now.”

  They left the bikes in the trees, and crawled into the outskirts of Zurich. She led, while Malcolm covered her from behind with the rifle. Together, it felt like they could do anything. She felt stronger, more in control of her world than she’d felt in almost a year. You never knew how much time you left out here. You just lived for the moment, and these moments were pretty good ones. Cecile wondered, regardless of whether they succeeded in finding the Green Man, if she and Malcolm would stay together. She didn’t see why not. She trusted him, and after she’d saved his life in the riverbed, she guessed that he ought to extend the same level of trust back to her, and that was all that mattered. Love, if such a luxury was still allowed in such a desecrated world, was a thing that could perhaps come later.

  “What if the Hunters come back this way?” she asked, peering down the stormy byway.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think they’d come back through here twice in the same night. If anything, they’re heading south, back toward Hays.”

  “What are we going to do if they’re waiting for us back at the train station?”

  “We’ll worry about that later. Let’s just stayed focused on what we need to do here, right now.”

  Cecile nodded.

  “Think hard. Is there anything else you can remember about the place we’re going? Any little detail that might help us locate this house a little faster?”

  “It was a tired old house, the kind with lots of bad memories.” Cecile closed her eyes, and put her head between her knees. “Clothes, garbage, toys in the front lawn. A sky blue door behind a ratty screen. White house with peeling paint. Around back, the school bus. Trees and weeds growing up all round it, as if it had been sitting there for years. Something about that bus … it’s a connection to him, a strong connection to his childhood, like he used to spend a lot of time in there, but it wasn’t like a clubhouse, or a place where he played.” Cecile squinted and shook her head from side to side. “It was a bad place.” She drew a sharp breath, her bottom lip beginning to tremble. “Bad things happened to him in there. He spent days and nights in there, summers and winters. Burning and freezing, crying and bleeding, for days and nights, days and nights, just looking out the back windows of that bus at nothing—nothing but miles of empty fields, going on forever.”