by M. C. Norris
“I’ll keep an eye on the house and fields,” Malcom whispered. “You go do whatever you need to do.”
“Okay.” Cecile nodded, and stepped past him.
“Hey.” Malcolm reached out and took her by the upper arm.
“What?”
He held her for a moment. “Be careful.”
Cecile pulled away from his grip with a playful turn of her shoulder, and glared through her visor into his worried eyes. “You be careful.”
Chapter Twelve
The bus windows by which she passed were curtained with sheeting rain, obscured by clawing limbs that raked at the glass with a yearning hunger to get inside. Frequent pulses of energy chased through the clouds, silhouetting the pistol she clasped in both hands as she slinked catlike through the gloom, row by row, and seat by seat. Malcolm’s eyes widened when he realized he should have checked and cleared the bus interior before she ever stepped inside. If this had been Afghanistan, it would have been a death trap, an obvious place for tripwires and explosive devices, but he calmed himself. This was not Afghanistan. No one was expecting them here. He couldn’t allow himself to believe that superstitious nonsense, because if he accepted even a piece of it, he would have to accept it all. The only dangers out here were the Hunters, and they’d already ridden through. Their timing was perfect. As soon as Cecile was finished, they could find a safe place to rest until nightfall. Perhaps right here in the old farmhouse, once he’d cleared it of any threats.
Malcolm turned and glowered through the cedar brambles at the little farmhouse that they might decide to call home. It was actually quite perfect for their purposes, located on the outskirts of town, offering a commanding view of the surrounding fields, yet concealed from prying eyes by the dead cedars, and by blankets already covering the windows. The place was a little run down, littered and unkempt, but that’s precisely what made it feel safe to him, in the sense that Hunters would have no real incentive to bother it.
He glanced back in the direction of the bus, where Cecile’s form continued to slide past the windows. With her pistol readied in the air, she looked so deadly vulnerable. She was a toy soldier who’d lucked into a little taste of blood and found it queerly pleasant. She was attractive, in her own strange way, and he was almost ready to admit it to himself. The swift manner in which she’d leapt into action excited him, as he recalled the explosion of that headshot she’d delivered to that Neanderthal, down in the riverbed. Not once, in the hours that had followed that amazing interlude, had Cecile lamented or bragged over her lethal choice of action. That was peculiar. Malcolm furrowed his brow, wondering if perhaps there was more to this woman than he’d afforded the time to consider. Who took a life for the first time and said nothing about it? If she’d killed before, then the fault was his own for failing to extend her that basic level of respect that one survivor of the apocalypse should automatically owe to another. From the moment he’d first laid eyes on Cecile, he’d underestimated her, regarding her with an undeserved prejudice from behind his own blinding ego. As he watched her slide fearlessly into the mouth of the beast, he began to wonder if Cecile had really even needed his protection at all.
What little he knew of her, for failing to ask, was that she was a Creole from the rough streets of New Orleans, the city hit first and hardest by the dragons. She was a self-proclaimed spiritual medium, steeped in voodoo, and for years had cooperated with Louisiana law enforcement to solve more than a hundred cold cases with the help of the dead. She possessed the conviction and the direction to spearhead hundreds of deadly expeditions into terrible worlds, knowing all the while that a coldblooded killer would always be waiting for her at the end of her journey. Again and again, she’d accepted these perilous missions, each bearing the distinct possibility of an engagement with a murderer who, if he ever discovered the identity of the Creole witch in pursuit, could always double-back on his own trail and begin hunting her. Unlike Malcom’s missions that always ended in a safe place, a home base, an untouchable sanctum, Cecile had never known the luxury of safety, because her enemies could always follow her home. She had to know that. She had to intuit that she had no sanctum, in her nights of restless sleep, paranoid glances out her windows, midnight checks of every room and closet, maybe with a baseball bat or a knife clenched in her hand.
Malcolm imagined this perilous existence, and it made his skin crawl. Once again, he’d been a fool. There was no separation between worlds for Cecile, as there had always been for him. Hers was one deadly world, haunted by vengeful spirits, and stalked by the predators of men. Cecile would have had no choice but to become the deadly vulnerable creature that skulked past the bus windows, and it now seemed obvious to him that this girl had killed before, and would again.
Fumbling for the hand crank on his helmet, he generated enough static in the vacuum tube for a brief transmission. He keyed-up to dispatch with a flip of the toggle. “Cecile? It’s Malcolm. Do you copy?”
“I copy,” she replied, after few lingering seconds of crackling silence.
“If your situation seems secure, I’m going to check the perimeter, and clear the farmhouse.” He waited for what seemed an eternity without a response, but he could see her standing there with her hand on her headset. Probably having some technological difficulties, given the storm. Vacuum tubes were jarred loose rather easily during combat, and together, they’d suffered more than a few tube-loosening situations since they’d deployed. He’d have ordinarily checked something like that, had they not been within an arm’s reach of one another the entire journey. “Cecile? If you copy, I want you to stay on the bus. I repeat. Stay on that bus until I come get you.”
Malcolm wrinkled his nose and squinted, as a garbled reply rattled back through his earpiece. The response was unintelligible, somewhat robotic, but he was at least able to discern the critical word, “copy.” Satisfied, he reduced the volume on his earpiece, and then slipped through the belt of cedars and into the backyard.
Trees swayed and creaked in the chilly gale that moaned out of the wastelands to bother every object in its path, harrying a barrage of pelting raindrops to a trajectory that was nearly horizontal at times. Malcolm crept around to the leeward side of the old farmhouse to find a windbreak against those nagging elements that leeched the will right out of a wearied body. From this position, he could peer out over the empty streets of Zurich’s abandoned neighborhoods, listening to the agonized squeals of the house’s timbers, the intermittent hissing of rain against the structure’s windward side. His eyes played tricks on his sleep-deprived mind, causing his heart to buck with every mirage of a moving life form that inevitably became the shadow of a tree throttled by the wind. Zurich was dead. What could be looted had long ago been taken. No one lived here, and he guessed that no one probably had for the better part of a year. It was a ghost town.
Peering around the front corner of the house, he surveyed a front yard that looked more like a salvage yard for ruined toys. Remnants of bygone childhoods were strewn haphazardly amongst a litter of empty bottles and flattened cans. The mixed evidence of lost innocence and debauchery gave the yard the appearance of the aftermath of some great festival of drunken elves. Dolls, dismembered and beheaded, were unceremoniously discarded in the filth. Raindrops plunked dully against crushed beer cans. An inverted bicycle, missing a front wheel, forever awaited the further attention of some little mechanic who’d never return. It was a dismal situation. Imagining a childhood in this environment made him a little queasy.
Hugging the wall with his leading shoulder, Malcolm readied his rifle, and he eased around the corner of the house. Once he was sure that his movements had gone undetected, he stepped up onto the porch. He expected some ghastly creaks as he edged his way across the woodwork, but the soaking rains had softened the decking, lubricating the shafts of nails that secured each plank to the rotten joists. His footsteps were soundless as he slipped past the blanketed front windows, around the remains of a collapsed porch swing, right up t
o the yawning mouth of the front door.
The stench hit him at the threshold. A fiercely sour putrescence needed no explanation. He slipped inside the doorway, hovering there for a few seconds with the hope that his eyes might eventually adjust to lightless conditions. Not a trace of muted starlight could pass through the layers of material that had been stapled over every window, featuring casts of animated cartoon characters. Only a vacillating rectangle of wan light was thrown against the back wall from where it shafted through the open door. It wasn’t much, but that weak spray of luminescence was sufficient to discern the grisly leavings of some past inhabitant of this chamber, who’d smeared two ruddy words across the opposite wall with great sweeps of gory hands.
The Voice.
Malcolm’s heart rate increased at the sight of this strange and meaningless graffiti. All around those two words, bloody handprints were stamped obsessively across every canvas of peeling wallpaper like some primitive interpretation of a sky filled with crimson stars. Malcolm suddenly became aware that he was not alone in this cavern. They were sprawled on the floor all around him. Dried and twisted entities lay reeking, stiffened in their final throes. Their fetal positions and defensive gestures were reminiscent of those casts of victims who’d been frozen forever in time by the volcanic cataclysm that buried the ancient city of Pompey. Malcom’s gaze travelled over the silenced band of refugees, and he couldn’t decide if these were the victims of Z-Day, or if they’d fallen prey to their fellow man. He supposed the latter, because there was nothing in Zurich, Kansas that could attract a pod of dragons. These people, living hours away from the allure of any major metropolitan area, would have survived the apocalyptic cleansing.
He unsnapped a pouch on his web belt, and withdrew a little flashlight. With the heel of his boot, he pushed the door closed quietly behind him. Absolute blackness enveloped the ghastly scene, inviting an awful intimacy with the rotting ones. He could feel their deathly presence pressing in all around him. Shouldering his rifle by its sling, he took hold of the little lever on the flashlight, cranking it slowly until it afforded a feeble glow of light. That was just enough. Shadows cast by withered hands curled against chests seemed to claw at the living room walls as he swept the beam over them. The circumstances of their deaths at once became clear. As he’d suspected, these people hadn’t lost their lives from any cloud of poisonous gas. No, they’d gone the other way.
The ceiling was blackened over a halved steel drum that was situated in the room’s center, where the carpet was scorched in a wide ring around the indoor fire pit. Neighboring heaps of flayed bones were smashed and gleaned of their fatty marrow. Not all of the butchered remains were human. Whatever monster had haunted this painted cave did not appear to have discriminated much between the flesh of people and those nameless other things that could no longer be identified as being anything more specific than inhuman. Stripped limbs and ribcages, skulls both round and tapered, were strewn and enmeshed in general mountains of waste heaped against the east wall.
Malcolm stooped to retrieve a crumpled hotrod magazine from the burn pile. He examined the mailing address label, which was directed to one Dell Cyrus, who was presumably the man of this house. Malcolm’s gaze crept over the piles of picked bones, and he wondered if Dell Cyrus was the monster responsible, or if he was just another victim whose remains now rotted amongst the slain.
Dropping the magazine back to the charred carpet, he stepped through the boneyard and into the kitchen, where much butchering had been done. The linoleum floor was slathered with dark stains, footprints. A round dining table presented a heap of dried hands and feet. The sink was filled with blackened ropes of viscera. The refrigerator hung ajar. Morbid curiosity got the best of him. He directed his dim light inside the fridge, halfway hoping to find himself a six-pack of tepid beer, but there was nothing inside the dead appliance but an open bottle of solidified catsup.
Smears of blood snaked across the kitchen floor, and down an adjoining hallway in the direction of a back room, to or from which, someone or something had evidently been dragged for slaughter. Malcom followed the trail down the carpeted hall, and he peered through the doorway into what had once been a young boy’s bedroom. Superheroes postured from a poster tacked to the wall above a neat arrangement of toy cars, all parked on a shelf. An empty water cup perched on the edge of a nightstand beside a stack of comic books. A pair of little blue shoes rested beside a twin bed that had been carefully made, one last time, by a good boy. It hurt to stand in the doorway of that room. The trail of blood on the carpet slithered into an open closet. He would not look in there.
Malcolm turned away, returning to the kitchen, swallowing down the hard knot that tightened in his throat. He’d never seen Jacob’s bedroom. Not even once. He’d never know what posters might’ve decorated his walls, what little treasures his son had showcased on his shelves, the color of his shoes, and whether or not he’d made his bed or left it messy on the last morning of his life. All he could do was to imagine these things, and his mind could only draw and infuriating blank.
An emotion, hot and familiar, coursed up through his jugulars to fill his head with boiling pressure. He wanted to smash something. He wanted to punch a hole through a wall with his fist, to feel his knuckles crack, blood flowing from their scalped knobs. More than anything else, he wanted to find and confront the savage responsible for every sin ever committed in this house. He wanted to step into a back room and find that monster cowering in a pile of reeking blankets with its suckled bones and bottles. He wanted to squeeze a trigger that would blow a hole right through the center of its chest, watch it die lowing like a beast on the slaughterhouse floor.
Shrugging the rifle off his shoulder, he clenched the M-16 in one hand, finger looped over the trigger, ready to squeeze one off from the hip. Flashlight gripped in his other hand, he spun back through the kitchen doorway, following the beam of his torch up a darkened staircase. A thousand bloody handprints all hailed him from the walls, honoring him, pledging their damned allegiance to whatever sect they seemed to imagine that he belonged. He ignored the regiments of saluting hands as he climbed. Shriveled gobbets crunched beneath his boots with every tread. The staircase walls, twisted to irregular angles by the drag of the settling house, narrowed as he approached the landing. The stench became even more ineffable, perhaps due to the effect of rising heat, or perhaps owed to yet another source of odor that remained undiscovered.
This was Afghanistan.
Blood drummed in Malcolm’s ears, when he realized that he was back. It was a second chance to make things right, to reeve again through the whorls of a painted Afghani cave, a reeking catacomb where he might once again face the sight of severed heads tumbling over one another in a kettle. He was ready to face it all again, one last time, to play god in a godless pit, to exact vengeance upon those ragged goatherds who left traps that disintegrated men, traps that collapsed tunnels and ground soldiers to paste between the earth’s molars. Time itself had wrinkled in a queer mash-up of modern men pitted against Stone Age savages armed with satellite phones and rocket launchers. He’d returned to that Hell, strapped once again with the best that modern technology had to offer, burning to clash against cannibals, skinners and decapitators, barbarians who scooped brains from children’s skulls to smear their apelike art on the walls of caves.
Malcolm’s eyes flashed behind his visor. He wanted to see him, face him, that perfect enemy to uniformed legions since the days of ancient Rome. From the depths of the oceans to the gulfs of outer space, mankind continued to evolve, to explore and ascend, but no matter to what great heights mankind rose, the inner brute was never far behind, always lurking. When civilized man stumbled, he would always appear, a wishfully forgotten ape forever haunting the modern mind, forever waiting to rise again from the primordial ooze to show us how rapidly we could be devolved. With a smugly bloody grin, this inner thing loved to prove that despite all of our gadgets, our eight-hundred-thousand years of struggling t
o escape our savage past that we’d not come so far as we believed. That was the endgame’s cruel lesson. It was all just a grand joke played upon us by the God of Entropy who would show us as we fell that not since time’s beginning had there ever been a point to our evolution.
Malcolm stepped onto the landing. A short hall with a bedroom on either end was divided by what appeared to be a bathroom. It was even darker upstairs, if that were possible. He paused to give a few more cranks to his flashlight. Sweeping the beam in the direction of the west bedroom, he found himself ogled by another corpse, bound wrists and ankles to a propped mattress. It hung by flayed limbs, crucified against the box springs. Malcolm stared at the gruesome remains of this particular victim, who’d not just been butchered like the rest, but had been slowly and methodically eviscerated. The cruelest attention had been given to this one’s torment, evidencing a more monstrous personality than Malcolm had envisioned. He swung the beam down the opposite hallway, where a dark and creeping stain on the carpet reached beneath an east bedroom door that had been boarded shut from the outside.
Glancing back in the direction of the vivisected corpse, Malcolm edged his way to the open bathroom door. His flashlight beam fell upon a dead man. Clothed in filthy overalls and a stained flannel shirt, the figure was slumped in the bathtub beside a spent propane lantern. An emptied whiskey bottle was still clenched in one mummified hand. A dropped revolver rested within inches of the curled fingers of the other. This was his flesh-eating monster. This was the inglorious end to which a killer’s perversions had delivered him, with his deranged thoughts fanned from his shattered skull across the tiled walls. Hunters didn’t kill themselves, not when there was so much dirty work to do. This was no servant of the enemy. It was just a fallen man, one who’d reigned as the apex predator of his family and neighbors for almost a year.