by Sam Sisavath
Keo took out his flashlight and clicked it on. He splashed the bright LED beam into the corner, illuminating the creature hiding within.
He didn’t know what he expected to see exactly, but the shriveled, emaciated thing that looked back out at him wasn’t the least bit frightened by the light. It bared its devastated teeth, oozing black liquid dripping from rotting gums. A single black eye glistened, as if wet. Where the other eye should be, there was just a malformed hole. The end of the rope was wrapped tightly around its throat, so constricting that black blood coated the part where the rawhide bit into its flesh. Its entire left arm was missing.
“You said there was two,” Keo said.
“I had to kill the other one three weeks ago,” Levy said. “Just to be sure.”
“Be sure of what?” Norris said.
“That they don’t regenerate after death. Or re-death, I guess,” Levy said, and grinned oddly at them. He didn’t seem to notice the smell.
How long has he been in here with this thing, doing God knows what, that he doesn’t even smell it anymore?
“I’ve been thinking about it, you know,” Levy continued. “Since what happened to Earl, Gavin, and Bowe. What do we really know about them? Not much. It’s all just guesses. So I did some tests.”
“What kind of tests?” Keo asked, though he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know the answer.
“I started with the first one. Cut its limbs off one by one.”
Levy walked over to the wall and unhooked a machete hanging from one of many hooks that hadn’t been there when Keo checked the garage previously. The baseball bat was also new, as were the ax, the hand saw, the pruning saw, the sickle, the hedge shears, and what looked like some kind of makeshift spear on a wooden pole. It was like looking at a medieval armory. The only thing missing were shields, but Keo guessed Levy didn’t need that when his victims were tied up.
Levy returned with the machete. The blade was sharp and glinted against the stray beams of sunlight. He swung it around, the whup-whup eliciting a shuffling movement from the creature in the corner of the room.
It knows what that noise means…
“I even decapitated it,” Levy said. “Not that it did any good. Do you know they can still live even after you chop off their heads?”
Keo thought he heard Norris swallowing loudly behind him.
“It’s crazy,” Levy continued. “I swear, the blood was moving by itself. By itself.”
“How?” Keo said.
“I don’t know. I took Science and Biology in school like everyone else, but this is beyond me.” He grinned that strange grin again. “But it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, these things…they’re like a new race. Where did they come from? How did they come to be? Maybe I’ll write a book.”
“And?” Keo said. “What did you find out after…all of this?”
A part of him was intrigued, the other half horrified by what he was hearing. And yet, and yet, wasn’t Levy right? What did they know about the creatures? Most of it was trial and error. What else could they know about the enemy?
What was that line by Sun Tzu from The Art of War?
Something about knowing your enemy and blah blah blah.
Close enough.
“It’s kind of disappointing,” Levy said. He walked back to the wall and put the machete away. “They don’t grow back their limbs. When they’re exposed to sunlight, it’s gone. There are just the bones left.” Levy looked down at the floor. Keo wondered if that was where the dead (again) creature’s severed limbs had been twenty-one days ago. “I just had to make sure, though.”
“Be careful,” Gillian had said. “And remember what he’s been through, okay?”
He wondered if Gillian ever thought this was what Levy was up to. It sure as hell had caught him off guard. The kid didn’t look like he had the makings of a Josef Mengele. Keo didn’t think Levy could have been the Nazi doctor’s unwitting assistant.
And yet here he was, talking about torturing these undead things like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Kid’s come a long way from that first night.
“How long has this been going on?” Keo asked.
“I found them six weeks ago.” He looked into the corner at the remaining bloodsucker. If the creature didn’t react at all to Keo, he thought he sensed a bit of fear coming off it now, directed at Levy. “I’ve been taking my time with this one. I don’t want to just kill it. That’s not going to get us anything.”
“‘Us’?” Norris said. “I didn’t know there was an ‘us’ in any of this, kid.”
Levy gave Norris an almost hurt look. “We’re all in this together, Norris. Aren’t we? The more we learn about these things, the better we can protect ourselves and keep what happened to Earl, Bowe, and Gavin from ever happening again. Isn’t that what we want?” He turned to Keo. “Isn’t that what we all want, guys?”
Keo exchanged a brief look with Norris. He couldn’t quite tell what was going on in the ex-cop’s head at the moment. Norris looked almost pained by the whole thing.
“Now what?” Keo said to Levy. “What are you going to do with it?”
“What I’ve been doing,” Levy said. He glanced over at his wall of weapons. “I haven’t used everything on it yet, and I have a lot of ideas I want to try.” Then he looked back at them and narrowed his eyes with suspicion. “You’re not going to stop me, are you?”
“This isn’t right,” Norris said.
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t do this…”
“I’m trying to find a way to save us.”
“By torturing it?”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” Levy said. He sounded exasperated, as if he couldn’t believe he was being forced to explain something that should have been readily obvious to them. “It’s already dead,” he said. “You can’t torture something that’s already dead.”
*
“He’s already killed one of them?” Gillian asked.
“The way he said it, it was an accident,” Keo said. “When he cut off its head, the rest of the body stumbled into the sunlight and…well, you know what happened then.”
“They vaporize.”
“Yes.”
“And he told you he wanted to see if they would regenerate?”
“That’s what he said.”
“What about the head?”
“He said he kept it around for a while…”
Gillian was speechless for a moment, and remained sitting on her bed looking across the room at him. Keo wasn’t entirely sure what Gillian was thinking. Maybe she was wondering if he were crazy, too.
Just like Levy.
“I told you it wasn’t pretty,” Keo said.
“Maybe I should go talk to him,” Gillian said softly.
“And say what? ‘How’s the experiment on the undead things going today, Levy?’”
She gave him an annoyed look. “So what do you think we should do about him?”
“I think we should leave him alone.”
“How can you say that? He’s torturing those things out there, Keo.”
“Thing. There’s just one left.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Look, we hardly knew the guy before he lost everything. For all we know, losing Earl, Bowe, and Gavin all in the same day was too much for him to handle, and this is his way of making sense of it. Maybe he just needed a mission, and this is it. I’m frankly shocked the guy lasted this long. I expected him to do something this insane months ago.”
“Do you think he’s dangerous?”
“To who?”
“Us. The girls. In general, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” Keo said honestly.
“We have to do something. He goes to it every day, and he stays with it for hours. I don’t want to think about what he does to it.”
“It can’t die.”
“I know that, Keo. But he does things to it. It’s not right.”
/>
“It’s already dead.”
“Keo, stop justifying it.”
He sighed. “I’m not.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I…” He stopped himself.
Was he justifying Levy’s actions? Maybe. He knew one thing: The old Keo would have had no trouble with what Levy was doing now. That Keo would want to know everything about the enemy. Even if nothing was learned, and even if all of it was Levy’s crazy way of coping with his friends’ deaths, the ultimate goal wasn’t a bad one.
Maybe I haven’t gone all that soft, after all.
“What should we do, Keo?” Gillian said, watching him closely.
“We should leave him alone,” Keo said. “He’s not hurting anyone.”
“What about it?”
“What about it?”
“He’s hurting it.”
“It’s already dead, Gillian. He can’t hurt it anymore than that.”
“But you don’t know that. Maybe they still feel pain and fear. We don’t know for sure that they don’t.”
He recalled the creature shifting inside the dark corner of the garage when Levy whipped the machete in the air…
“I don’t know,” Keo said. “Anything’s possible with these things. Levy’s right about one thing: What do we know about them? Practically nothing. Where they came from, how they came to be.”
“Be serious, Keo. Levy’s just a country kid pulling wings off flies. He’s not going to discover anything groundbreaking about their origins.” She stood up and walked over to the window and looked out the burglar bars at the woods outside. “This is nuts,” she said after a while.
“Which part?”
“All of it.” She sighed. “This is sick. You have to know that.” She looked over at him, and he could see the pleading in her eyes. “Please tell me you know that, Keo.”
He nodded. “I do.”
She looked relieved, before turning back to the window.
Did he really know that what Levy was doing was sick, though? Keo guessed his values were a little out of whack compared to someone as upright as Gillian. Or Norris, Rachel, and everyone else in the house, for that matter. He hadn’t exactly had to make a lot of moral decisions in his life. It had always been a matter of doing what the organization tasked him with. This was uncharted territory. He was being asked to make decisions about people’s lives, and the strangest part was, no one was even paying him to do it.
Tread carefully, pal. Really carefully.
“Norris and I will keep an eye on him,” Keo said. “We’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything that’ll hurt us.”
“What happens if he goes…over the line?”
The line? Where’s that, exactly? Who knows where the line begins and ends these days.
“We’ll deal with it when that happens,” Keo said. “I’ll deal with it.”
CHAPTER 27
Levy was a problem, even if Keo couldn’t convince himself what the kid was doing back in that garage was entirely wrong. Doing something about it, though, was where things got murky. Keo wasn’t convinced he should stop Levy. What did it really matter to the house what Levy did with his free time? As long as the thing in the garage was half a mile away from them. That was probably all that mattered. Wasn’t it?
“That kid’s trouble,” Norris said.
“Trouble or troubled?” Keo said.
They were outside the house, looking in the direction where they knew Levy had gone again this morning.
“Both,” Norris said, sipping the instant coffee from the same white and yellow LSU Tigers mug he had rescued from a convenience store.
“What did you used to do with troubled kids back when you were walking the beat, old timer?”
“Put them in a hospital.”
“With your nightstick?”
“Yeah, that too.”
Keo chuckled. “Not a lot of hospitals around anymore. What are we going to do? Arrest him for kidnapping? Read him his Miranda rights? Sic the United Nations on him for war crimes against non-humanity?”
Norris grunted. “I’m telling you, kid. I’ve seen this before.”
“This?”
“Not this, this. But the same ballpark. People ignoring all the obvious signs that someone’s headed for trouble. It only encourages them.”
Maybe Norris was right. Gillian seemed to think so. But she didn’t have any answers either, and from the sounds of it, neither did Norris. What exactly were they going to do with Levy if they did decide he was too dangerous? If his “experiments” came home to roost? He recalled those scratches on the garage door. Were the other creatures trying to get in to save their own?
There you go again, assigning them human behavior. They’re not human anymore. Get that through your head.
“You know I’m right about this,” Norris said.
“Knowing and doing something about it are two different beasts.”
“You gotta make the decision.”
Keo stared at him. “Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Why am I the one who has to make a decision?”
“You’re the de facto leader, aren’t you?”
“When the hell did that happen?”
Norris shrugged and sipped his mug. “I guess it was that night back in November when you told us how it was going to go down. You basically set yourself up as our fearless leader.”
“Not on purpose.”
“Maybe not, but there it is.”
“And you approve?”
“I’m already too old for this shit. I’m basically Murtaugh to your Riggs.”
“Rigs what?”
“Riggs. R-i-g-g-s. You know, Lethal Weapon?”
“What is that?”
“It’s a buddy cop movie from the ’80s.” Norris grunted. “You’ve never seen it.”
“I don’t watch a lot of movies,” Keo said. “When I do, I try to watch one made after I was born.”
“You’re missing out.”
“What was it about?”
“These two diametrically opposed guys who also happen to be cops. One’s insane and single, the other’s by the book and married with children. They’re thrown into a situation where they basically have to trust one another with their lives. Hard to do since they’re so different and all, which is where the movie’s conflict comes in. You’ve really never seen it?”
“Nope. So, Murtaugh and Riggs?”
“Yeah. One was an over-the-hill black guy. Like me. The other was a loose cannon white guy with a death wish. Like you.”
“I’m not white,” Keo grinned.
“You’re half white, so that makes me half right.”
“Question.”
“Shoot.”
“Did Murtaugh and Riggs live at the end of the movie?”
“Oh, hell yeah. They even did three sequels in the next ten years after the first one.”
“Ten more years?” Keo said. “I’d take that. Hell, I’d take five more years.”
“That’s the spirit, kid; think high.”
“You don’t understand, old timer. The things I’ve done, even before all of this…” He shook his head. “The fact that I’ve survived this long is a miracle.”
“Like I said, loose cannon with a death wish.” He slurped his coffee. It was probably already cold by now. “On the plus side, we know where he goes now.”
“Are we still talking about Levy?”
“No, the Pope.” He wrinkled his nose like he had an itch. “It’s a mistake. What’s happening back there at the garage isn’t helping us, but it could hurt us. Karma’s a bitch, kid. If we let him keep doing what he’s doing, how does that make us better than the Nazis during World War II?”
“You sound like you’ve been thinking about this for a while.”
“It’s a problem. Can’t just stick your head in the sand and pretend what he’s doing isn’t wrong.”
Keo nodded. “Maybe you’re right…”
“It’s been
known to happen.”
Keo noticed that Norris’s beard had become less salt and pepper and almost entirely gray these days. “You getting any sleep?”
“As much as the rest of you, I guess. Gotten a few more extra hours since Jordan and the others showed up.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve had a full night’s sleep since all of this began.”
“Yeah. Me, neither.”
“What kind of night’s sleep you think Levy gets every day?”
“I don’t know. He seems pretty damn cheery in the mornings, though.”
Norris snorted. “Maybe we should ask him what his secret is.”
“I would,” Keo said, “but I’m a little afraid he might tell me.”
*
Things with Levy came to a head two weeks later and caught everyone off guard, especially Keo. He would have been fine spending the rest of his life not having to deal with the “Levy Problem,” as it had become known around the house when Levy wasn’t around. Reality, unfortunately, had its own ideas.
With no supply runs scheduled for the day, Keo was walking the woods when his radio squawked and he heard Gillian’s voice, panicked, but clearly doing her best to stay calm.
“Keo. Please come in.”
“I’m here,” Keo said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, but Lotte’s missing.”
“What do you mean, ‘missing’?” Norris asked through the radio.
“I mean she’s not here, and no one’s seen her since this morning,” Gillian said.
Keo began jogging through the woods back toward the house, while Norris said through the radio, “Didn’t I see her this morning during breakfast?”
“No,” Gillian said, “she wasn’t there. I didn’t realize that until an hour ago. She usually has coffee with me and Rachel.”
“And Rachel hasn’t seen her either?” Keo asked into the radio.
“No,” Gillian said. “No one has. And I asked everyone, including Christine. No one has seen her, guys.” Then, more panicked, “Hurry, Keo.”
“I’m coming,” Keo said.
He put the radio away and ran faster.