Helmet Head

by Mike Baron

  Her younger brother Brent stayed in his room in the basement playing with computers.

  Shane had nailed her twice. She bled, and had to hide it from her folks. He threatened to kill her if she ever told. At thirteen she was a stick figure, a rag doll. Tiny tits and a boy’s ass. At seventeen, Shane was pumped and primed. He lifted weights in the school gym after school, a fact that his counselors noted with irony as he often skipped classes.

  Shane was already in trouble for “inappropriate touching” at school events. His hormones were out of control. He should have gone into the Army right then. All he thought about was pussy. Pussy pussy pussy. She could hear him at night jacking off in his room. She found his porn stash and ran in disgust. Shane was extremely good looking. He took after his mother.

  When Macy tried to tell Bernice what was going on, she went into total denial and threatened to send Macy to a facility for disturbed children. Not her Shane. Not the star of the basketball court and the football field.

  So here she was hiding in the woods, mosquitoes dining on her neck like it was a Country Buffet, and Shane swooping through the bushes singing, “Where arrrrrrre you, Macy? Come out, come out wherever you are!”

  She wished she had a bow and arrow. Drill that fucker right through the heart. What kind of brother rapes his own little sister? Since her parents seemed to side with Shane she felt she had no recourse except to run away from home. She’d already started packing and saving money. She had a friend who said there were youth shelters in Omaha that would take her in. She would find a lawyer and seek to be emancipated.

  She was too little and too young to get a job.

  She hadn’t known about Child Protective Services. It never occurred to her to go to the police or her school counselor. These weren’t things you talked about if you were a thirteen year old girl. At school she was shy, a loner, a target for bullies. They made fun of her goth urges, her shyness. Like chickens jabbing at a spot of blood.

  She huddled in a copse of alder a couple feet from the stream listening to Shane thrashing around. A green snake slithered over her shoe. She almost cried out.

  The woods went away. She stared uncomprehending at an old plaster ceiling, cheap light fixture in the middle, pile of dead insects gathered at the bottom of the globe, plaster trickling down from a couple of holes. She was lying down, on her back. She tried to get up. She could hardly move. A wave of nausea rolled through her. Oh God she did not want to throw up. She’d been doing that a lot lately. It was as if she were at the bottom of the Marianas Trench with 20,000 feet of seawater holding her down.

  It took her a second to realize she’d been drugged. She knew that feeling all too well. Well they didn’t know Macy.

  What was she doing here? How did she get here?

  Then she remembered Fred’s headless corpse seizing her wrist and rising from the freezer like some kind of fucking vampire only instead of a head he had a little circuit board sticking straight up with a tiny camera on the top.

  Fred’s grip was like steel. She tried to scream but Fred struck her in the jaw with a brick-like fist knocking her out. That was the last thing she remembered.

  Macy shook with revulsion and her body responded. The old bed squeaked in protest. Good! Let her memory get her motor running. She had years of experience fighting her way out of drugged stupors. Like that time they got a call at seven in the morning that the cops were on their way.

  Okay, kid. Let’s start with the right leg. Just the right leg. Tentatively she tried raising her right leg. It went up a couple inches and collapsed.

  Come on that’s no good! Is this the little girl who ran through the woods for miles and miles? Who rode her own chopper? Who got Wild Bill out of bed at seven a.m. after an epic 72-hour bender? And out the back door?

  She tried again and this time succeeded in moving her buttocks close enough to the edge that her leg flopped over. It seemed to take forever fighting through Jell-O to get to a sitting position. What the fuck. She was wearing a red dress. Someone had undressed her and put her in this dress.

  She sat and listened to her heart beat. She looked up. An old dresser with a stand-up photograph on top. The closet’s cheap accordion door was shut. Putting one hand on the newel post Macy swayed to her feet. It was three feet to the bureau, a yawning gulf. She had to see that picture. Letting go the newel post she stumbled forward and caught herself on the top of the dresser nearly pulling it down on top of her.

  The photo fell on its face. Holding on with one hand she picked the photo up and turned it over. Four by eight, faded color, possibly a Polaroid of the smiling family, tall, good-looking father, svelte blond mother, the two happy kids.

  The mother’s red dress. The sleeves came to just over the elbow with a discreetly plunging neckline. Macy looked at her arm. She was wearing the same dress. It felt old and smelled faintly of jasmine and mothballs.

  Where was this place? What was she doing here? The room did not look like it belonged to a woman. The walls were bare, the furnishings minimalist. It was monk-like. One hand against the wall for support she went to the closet, the effects of the drug receding with every step.

  She seized the plastic handle and compressed the door to the side. For a moment she stood there uncomprehending. She began to shake her head. The closet contained four sets of complete black leathers. Above each on the hat shelf was a full-face black helmet with a heavily tinted shield.

  A quartet of monsters.

  It took Macy a second to realize they were just outfits. Gasping, she fell back on the bed.

  The front door opened and slammed shut.

  ***

  CHAPTER 36

  Lone Survivor

  The seat squealed like a stuck pig as Fagan shoved it back. He doubted Fred had let anyone drive his truck. Fagan set the shotgun and pistol on the seat next to him. The old Ford started on the first turn of the key. The interior was spotless. It smelled of dust and age. Fuzzy dice hung from the rearview and there was four on the floor. The shift knob was a giant red plastic die. The steering wheel sported a necker knob with a sixties-era nude. Shifting into first gear, Fagan pulled away from the shack hearing empty beer bottles roll and clink against each other in the bed. He drove around the club and onto the state road heading east toward the glow in the sky. The old truck accelerated smoothly up to fifty, which was as fast as Fagan dared push it in the gloom and storm. Eight miles on he came to the turnoff to Milton’s Hollow. Several times he steered around broken branches lying in the road. Soon he was deep in Milton’s Hollow, the forest gloom accelerated by nightfall. His headlights disappeared ten feet in front of the truck.

  Fagan slowed way down. He came around a tight curve and the lights briefly picked up a mass of fur and muscle—a coyote dragging something out of the woods on one side and crossing over. It looked like a human arm.

  Around another corner an ash tree lay across the road. Fagan thought about plowing through but the tree looked a little too big. Leaving the engine running and lights on he got out of the truck and examined the obstacle. A couple swift cuts with a chainsaw would do it. Fagan looked in the back of the truck. An old lawn chair next to a cooler. Fred liked to sit in the back summer evenings drinking and stargazing.

  There was a galvanized tool box stretching the width just behind the cab. It was unlatched. He opened it and found numerous tools including a long-handled ax. It would have to do.

  Stripped to his khaki t-shirt Fagan swung the ax. The wood’s freshness made it hard work and the sound of the ax striking the tree struck Fagan as somehow obscene. Every swing of the ax caused his ribs to shriek in protest, other bruises adding to a bohemian rhapsody of pain. Pausing, Fagan looked up and saw red eyes peering at him from the forest.

  Strange behavior for a coyote or a wolf. Fagan didn’t care. Part of him actually hoped that something would lunge at him so he could bury the ax in its skull. Nevertheless, he went back to the truck and jammed his nine in his belt while he resumed his work. He c
hopped the trunk into three sections and laboriously dragged them to the side of the road.

  By the time he finished he was drenched in sweat. He got back in the truck and drove through the rubble keeping an eye on the glow in the sky. It disappeared as he hit the bottom of a dense coulee, reappeared as he crested. He could smell burning wood, gas and hay through the open window. Thank God for the storms—at least the danger of forest fire was minimal.

  He saw the crushed weeds, the road to the burning barn and took it, the old pick-up jouncing up and down on its springs. Lightning flickered, gleamed metallic red off one of the motorcycle helmets in the little cemetery. Fagan paused long enough to take it in, realized he was near the place Larry died. No time to investigate. Macy’s life was in danger.

  A hundred yards on he came to the yard. The Dogs’ bikes lay around like scattered toys. The barn was gone—collapsed in on itself, a bed of coal, leaving the blackened remains of a Caterpillar compact track and loader and the blackened bones of a jumble of bikes. A few overhanging limbs smoked but the woods were too wet to catch fire.

  Fagan looked at the old farmhouse. He’d ridden past once or twice and had never known it was there. In the barn’s dying flames and the flicker of lightning it looked like a listing pile of timber inhabited by vermin. The roof was absurdly steep as if it had originally been intended for a mountain climate. The chimney kinked like Fred’s leg.

  There … was no sign of the creature’s motorcycle.

  A motion drew Fagan’s attention back to the barn. A Kevlar-clad arm swept the air. A mound turned into a man. Slowly Doc sat up. Fagan ran to him.

  “Doc! What the hell happened? Where’s Macy?”

  “Don’t know. I was out to lunch. We found him. Fucker chopped off Mad Dog’s head, barbecued Chainsaw, I don’t know what happened to Wild Bill. Curtis got caught in the fire. I tried to save him.…”

  Doc ran out of breath and spasm coughed. Fagan could see Doc’s jacket and beard were scorched, eyebrows singed, burns on his face, tears on his hands. The coughs came in choppy waves like an angry sea. Gradually they died down.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll live. Saw had a go at him before the fucker got ’im. That chainsaw was no match for his sword.” Doc coughed spasmodically. “You wanna grab my kit and water bottle? It’s in my left bag.” Doc broke into another paroxysm of coughing.

  Fagan gripped Doc’s wrist. “Macy. It took her.”

  Doc shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that, son. I only just now come around. But she might be in the house. We found Larry’s head in the oven.”

  “Jesus.”

  Fagan saw something in Doc’s eyes. “What?”

  “There’s a photo in the living room of some Nazi standing in front of a concentration camp.”

  “Great,” Fagan said. He ran to Doc’s bike lying on its side, ripped open the saddlebag and found the medical kit in a black leather zip-bag. He popped it open and put in a sealed plastic water bottle and tossed it to Doc from ten feet. Doc snagged it out of the air. Fagan returned to the truck for the shotgun and headed for the house.

  ***

  CHAPTER 37

  Downstairs, Upstairs, In My Lady’s Chamber

  Fagan circumnavigated the house. The front door faced west. One lit window in the back punctuated the otherwise featureless south-facing wall. There was a slanted storm cellar door to the east, probably used to deliver coal. The ground reared up thirty feet beyond revealing limestone gums. The fireplace backed up against the north wall. The exposed stone chimney was flanked on either side by mullioned windows and had an eerie facial quality. There was a term for people who saw faces everywhere. Maybe he had it.

  The only light came from the first floor back. After circling the house Fagan crept up to the back door and peered in through the kitchen window. He saw the narrow hall leading to the front, the shut basement door. He returned to the front, entered through the open front door and inhaled deeply of what smelled like roast pork, steeling himself against what he might find. He went into the living room searching for the photograph. Doc had left it on the table. Fagan picked it up, experiencing a visceral revulsion at the sight of the uniformed Nazi. No one had to teach him this—whether his birth parents were Jews or not didn’t matter. He’d always felt it. Maybe it was part of the ancient lizard brain, an image of horror as natural as night terrors.

  Maybe that’s why the Nazis used it.

  Maybe that’s why he’d been obsessed with it. The nature of evil, one of the mysteries of life. Like a moth he circled and circled trying to understand without being consumed.

  The figure was tall and lean with the silver piping of a colonel. Fagan turned the frame over and pried away the tin constraints. He slid the photograph out from between the glass and the backing board and turned it over. Written in old-fashioned script with a nib pen was, “Standartenfueher Heinrich R. Von Mulverstedt, Doctor of Medicine, Wahlberg Konzentrationslager, Gdaz, Poland, 1945.”

  Fagan looked from the photo in his hand to the photo on the mantle. Helmut Von Mulverstedt, kendo champion. There was an undeniable resemblance. The Nazi was probably Von Mulverstedt’s grandfather. Why else would he have such a thing? How did people who came from evil live with that? As an orphan it was one of many mysteries he’d pondered in adjusting his attitude to his own fate.

  Now that Fagan had a name he thought of Helmet Head as Von Mulverstedt. It made him seem less a force of nature and more a common criminal. But he was obviously no common criminal if, in fact, he had been cutting the heads off bikers for fifteen years. He was in fact a bizarrely successful serial killer.

  Fagan stared at the head model with the leather mask. It bothered him. He placed his pistol on the mantle and carefully undid the Velcro straps affixing the mask to the head. Beneath lay a skull with leathery skin, a series of blue stars inked across the cheekbones, an inked blue tear at the corner of the left eye. The mummified head’s eyes had been replaced with goat’s glass eyes from a taxidermist mounted to stare in different directions. One of them stared at the cop. The pupils were gold and shaped like elongated hourglasses. The teeth thrust nightmarishly from the shrunken lips and cheeks. Maybe they could identify him from dental records.

  Fagan inhaled and let it out slowly, extending his hearing throughout the house. He heard the wind whistling through the trees, the creaking of the foundation as it continued to settle, the sudden report of a beam snapping in the defunct barn, the distant rumble of thunder.

  There was a scrape from above. Fagan snatched up the pistol and moved silently to the base of the pyramidal stairs which had been shoehorned into a tight space and rose at a ridiculous fifty degrees with a rope banister. Gripping the shotgun in one hand, he shoved the pistol in his belt and grabbed the rope to pull himself up stepping next to the wall on the balls of his feet so as to minimize the noise. He rose silently. As his head cleared the top floor he saw a pair of red eyes regarding him from eight feet away and a foot above the worn and scratched wood.

  The raccoon squeaked, scuttled around a corner and disappeared. Fagan slowly lowered the shotgun and his heart from his throat. Must have got in through the ceiling or something. He paused listening, letting his eyes accustom to the gloom. On his left were two doors, probably to bedrooms. At the end of the short corridor was the bathroom. On his right was the windowless wall. Pale rectangles indicated where pictures had once hung.

  Macy could be in either room, incapacitated, unconscious. The silence disturbed him. That monster had to weigh two-fifty—his every step would signal throughout the house with creaks and groans. Fagan leaned forward from three steps down and peered through the half inch gap between the bottom of the door and the floor.

  He saw faint gloom, furniture legs, dust bunnies. He laid the shotgun down below the top step. Pistol in right hand he reached for the doorknob, turned it silently and swung the door inward.

  Nothing happened. Fagan waited. He slowly straightened and entered the room beh
ind his nine. It was a den or a storeroom with institutional green file cabinets and stacks of cardboard boxes, many of them sealed. Some of the boxes were marked Fassnacht Pharma. Some were marked Bayer, Neuer Aftrag, Rallopharm or Exodus.

  The room smelled of dust, patchouli oil and some faint medicine.

  To his left some kind of shrine. A ceramic Buddha on a hand-carved teak-wood table with inlaid mother-of-pearl, lit by a tiny purple spotlight affixed to the stand casting an eerie reflection on the walls and boxes. Three Nazi medals laid out on the teak stand: Order of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, Order of the German Cross with eight points and swastika, and the Knight’s Cross of War Merit with both swastika and Maltese cross.

  The colonel’s.

  Below that a black lacquered rack containing a long sword and a short sword in their ceremonial binders. Before that a teak box on top of which sat a broad and deep ceramic bowl, marked with Japanese characters, half full of grayish water and a series of stone pumice blocks, one mounted in a wooden box at an angle. One of those odd Swedish “chairs” where you balance on your knees and buttocks was pushed to one side.

  It was, Fagan realized, Helmet Head’s polishing station. Here he worshiped his strange gods and sharpened his lethal blade. But if Helmet Head kept his sword with him, what were these?

  Fagan rolled the seat into place and crouched before the shrine. There was a white scroll on the wall with Japanese calligraphy. Carefully, he reached for the long sword on the lower rungs. A katana, he thought. In Iraq there had been endless talk about knives, blades, who made the best, who fought the best. Everybody was an expert. Carefully, he drew forth the blade far enough to see the intricate scroll work, the polished steel. He could feel that it was old. It seemed to generate its own low wattage. He slid the blade back and replaced it in the rack.