Then he laughed, a hard laughter, the sound of scorn and triumph.
“I fucking tricked you, you little bitch,” he said.
She gasped, breathless, and inched away from him on the sofa. He raised the fist.
“Do you think I don’t know what you’re up to? I’ve been looking at your web browser history. I’ve been tracking your movements, your credit card purchases, where you buy gas, your library books, your phone calls. Do you think you ever really had me fooled? The only one here who is fooling anybody is me, because I am not saved by God, I am not good ol’ boy Rodney from the past, I am not anything different than the man who returned from Kiritimati with a new mission in life to accept and spread the truth of evil across this ridiculous world of false good.”
“Rodney…” she said, trembling, still backing away from him, preparing to flee.
“Shut up,” he told her. “You are finished talking. You have told me everything I need to know. I’ve cleaned the house of evidence. You have nothing on me.”
Kelly leaped from the couch. She scrambled to the door but he was upon her in a split second, grabbing her by the hair. He pounded his fist into her face, breaking her nose with a splatter of blood. He punched her hard twice more until she fell bloody and limp to the living room floor.
As she stirred, he called out, “You can come out now.”
Kelly looked up from the floor, one eye already swelling shut. She saw three figures enter the living room from another part of the house.
It was Gary, Sam and Carol.
“Yes,” said Rodney, standing over his battered wife. “They have been here the whole time. Listening. Learning. Filling with valuable knowledge that will enable us to take our mission to the next level.”
“Hello, Kelly,” said Carol, stepping over her. “It’s nice to see you again.” She delivered a hard kick across Kelly’s face with her boot.
Kelly sank back to the floor, blood pooling in her mouth.
Gary knelt down. “Can I share something I’ve never told you before? Are you sure you won’t mind?”
Kelly said nothing, racked with pain.
“You have an amazing ass,” said Gary. “I love it and I love your sweet mouth.” Gary grabbed her blouse. He pulled hard, tearing it. “You never show enough skin, Mrs. Martinez. Let’s get a good look at your assets.”
Kelly tried to fight him off, but in seconds he had torn off her blouse.
Sam leaned forward, another face hovering over her. His head was shaved. He held a Bible.
It was the Bible given to Kelly by her grandmother on the day of Kelly’s confirmation at age 13. It was one of the most treasured belongings in her possession.
Sam began to tear pages out of the Bible, letting them fall down on her, each one gentle and soft yet stinging with emotional pain.
“You really believed for a second that Rodney was all better…because he prayed to God?” asked Sam. “So naïve. So sad.”
Sam continued to shred pages out of the Bible with a regular, steady rhythm. Gary put his hands on her breasts, groping hard. When she protested, Carol delivered a few more sharp kicks to Kelly’s legs.
Rodney spoke. “You need to understand something, Kelly. I want you to listen carefully. I haven’t changed. The Rodney you see today is not a variation of my true self. This has always been me. I just stopped lying. All of us stopped lying. Carol, Gary, Sam… We’re no longer trying to be what others expect from us. Our jobs, our church, our laws, our families…these things will not define us. It is our primal instincts that represent the core of who we are. What you see today is not a change thrust upon us. This runs so much deeper. This, my love, is the great unmasking.”
Gary began kissing Kelly’s bloody mouth, continuing to fondle her breasts.
She screamed and he clamped a hand tightly over her mouth.
“Don’t scream,” said Gary. “Because then you won’t be able to hear what I have to tell you. Do you remember Tonya? The woman who used to work in my store? The woman they found murdered? She made love to me with her last dying breath. It was beautiful. I experienced her death from the inside in the most intimate way you can imagine. I felt her skin grow cold.”
“And do you know what’s amazing?” said Carol with a sharp grin. “Nobody has accused Gary or considered him a suspect. None of us will be suspects in your murder, either. Do you know why? Because we have alibis. We’re the nicest bunch of people you’d ever hope to meet! You know my reputation, don’t you? Sweet Carol Henning, she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Once I found a spider in my office, and my coworkers laughed at me because instead of killing it, I wrapped it up carefully in a tissue and took the elevator downstairs and walked across the front lobby and went outside and across the sidewalk and into a little garden where I set him free. I couldn’t bear the thought of harming a little spider. The entire office thought I was crazy. But I had never killed a living creature of any kind my entire life, not even a mosquito as it stung my flesh and sucked my blood. I let it live. I let everything live. So I figure… I’ve got some catching up to do.”
Carol kicked Kelly in the face.
Gary began pulling down Kelly’s pants. He flipped her onto her stomach and sunk his teeth into her bare buttocks.
Sam continued to shred the Bible, page by page, creating a layer of paper across the floor that served as a bed to the madness.
Carol kicked Kelly in the back of the head again, and this time Kelly snapped into unconsciousness, out cold.
Kelly awoke naked and bloodied in the basement, hands bound behind her back by a thick rope.
Rodney stood over her. “Hello, honey.”
Kelly saw the others join him in hovering over her. Sam… Gary… Carol… Faces identical in their ice cold expressions.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” said Rodney, “but we’re going to leave you here to die.”
Tears rolled from Kelly’s eyes, burning as they sunk into the cuts on her face.
“The four of us are going on a trip,” continued Rodney in a chipper tone. “We’re going to Atlanta to see your friend, the man you told us about, Calvin Beck. You see, we want to hear more about this second bomb. If it exists, we could have a lot of fun with it. That first inversion bomb…exploding it in the middle of the ocean…off the coast of some tiny island…that’s just too remote to have the proper effect. What we’d like to do is take a bomb like that and detonate it in a very highly populated area. Why contaminate eight or nine people when you could influence hundreds of thousands, maybe millions? Think of the number of people we could infect with a really well-placed inversion bomb. We could open the gates to hell right here in a major city and have so much fun. So we’re going to get Mr. Beck to tell us where that bomb is. He doesn’t know it yet, but we’re going to persuade him into telling us…everything.”
Consumed by pain, the words barely reached Kelly. The man speaking them was no longer her husband.
Through her blurred vision, she saw only Satan.
“Goodbye Kelly,” said Rodney. “Time to go night night.”
He pushed the others away from her.
“This is my treat.”
And he beat her into darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Wordlessly, they entered Calvin Beck’s room at the Sunshine Way retirement home and closed the door behind them. Beck sat up in bed with a newspaper, watching them in silence. Rodney walked over to the window and shut the curtains, snuffing the daylight. Carol disconnected the phone with a swift tug. Sam pulled the plug on the television, killing the murmur of an old, black and white movie. Gary removed the newspaper from Beck’s hands, neatly folded it and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. He then stuck his hand into Beck’s face and took his reading glasses. He folded them up and placed them in his breast pocket.
The four visitors formed a semicircle around Calvin
Beck’s bed.
Rodney spoke. “Laura Newsteader. Thomas Newsteader. Andrew Beck. Ashley Beck. Danny Beck.”
Beck frowned.
“Do you know those names, old man?” asked Rodney.
“Of course,” Beck replied.
“Who are they?”
“They are my grandchildren.”
“Correct. So your mental facilities remain intact, more or less.”
Beck said nothing.
“Let me add a footnote to your answer,” said Rodney. “They are indeed your grandchildren, but they are also something more. They are potential victims of tragedy. For instance, it would be a shame if young Danny was discovered in some bushes with a broken neck…murdered on his way home from Greenbriar Elementary School.”
Beck stared at him. He said, “I recognize those eyes.” He studied each of their faces. “I know that look. I haven’t seen it for more than 50 years, but it’s something you never forget. You’re infected.”
“Infected is a poor word choice,” spoke up Carol. “We have been released. We are pure again.”
“You are evil,” responded Beck.
“Call it what you will, you know what we are capable of,” said Gary. “You know the strength of our conviction. You understand that we would not hesitate to make our point through harm to one of your loved ones. We’re no longer programmed to succumb to guilt or shame or obey the rules and morals of others. We will take extreme measures to further our goals.”
“Then what is it you want?” asked Beck. “I told the woman everything I know. What else is there? Why do I matter?”
“You do matter,” said Gary. “You’re going to help us take this concept of hell on earth to a brand-new level.”
“I can’t help you.”
“But you can. It’s easy.” Gary moved closer to Beck, leaning over the bed to stare into his eyes. “You will tell us where to find the second bomb.”
“Second bomb?”
“Don’t play dumb, old man. We have no patience for that, and you won’t like what happens when we get impatient. So I’m going to ask again and keep it simple. Where is the second inversion bomb? The military created two of them. One was detonated off the shores of Kiritimati. The other remains in a nuclear weapons storage facility somewhere in the United States. Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Rodney shook his head and formed a fist. “Bad answer. When you say, ‘I don’t know,’ I don’t hear ‘I don’t know,’ I hear, ‘let one of my grandchildren die.’”
“We’ll start with Ashley,” said Carol. “She’s the youngest. Then we’ll work our way up…”
“Listen to me, you fools!” shouted Beck. “I am telling you the truth. I don’t know where it is.”
“But you knew of its existence,” said Sam. “You were on the team that detonated the first one and studied its effects. I’m certain you know about the secret labs and storage facilities that supported your work.”
“It’s not there,” said Beck.
Carol headed for the door. “If I leave now, I can be at Ashley’s house by dark.”
“Let me explain!” said Beck. “I don’t know where it is because it was stolen.”
Carol stopped and turned.
Gary said, “Stolen? How convenient.”
“I don’t care what you believe,” said Beck. “I am telling you everything I know. This is highly classified but it still won’t help you. Yes, a second inversion bomb was created. It was built in a lab in New Mexico during the Cold War, shortly after the first one. After the first bomb was tested, all plans to continue developing such a weapon were terminated. We recognized what we had created was not just a bomb that could harm masses of people, but threatened all of mankind. We ended the research and testing. The warhead for the second bomb stayed in the lab with plans to move it to underground storage. In 1962, Soviet Union spies infiltrated that facility, led by a KGB man named Yuri Kolstov. Posing as scientists, they staged a deadly raid and killed seven of our men. They took control of the warhead and removed it from the lab.”
“How could they just walk off with an atom bomb?” asked Carol, hands on hips.
“We’re talking about a warhead, a cylinder containing just the fission material itself. It wasn’t secured to a missile or torpedo. Several men can carry such a device and hide it in a small truck.”
“So they just made off with it?” said Rodney. “We let them walk away?”
“No. We caught up with the Soviets days later. We tracked them down in the desert. A special unit took them down. Some were killed, others committed suicide to avoid capture. Unfortunately, there were no survivors. No one to interrogate, and that was the real dilemma because the bomb was never recovered. The Soviets hid it. Somewhere out there in the thousands of miles of desert, there is the warhead to an inversion bomb and to this day it has not been recovered.”
“Someone must know where it is…”
“The only people who know are dead. There have been many, many efforts to find it.”
Rodney stepped closer to the bed. “You seem to know an awful lot. How do we know you don’t know where it is…and you’re not telling?”
“I have told you one of the biggest government secrets…scandals…of the past century. I can assure you, I am not holding anything back.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Gary.
“I understand your intentions,” said Beck. “You are disciples of Satan and you have been given a mission. Evil has but one desire—to create more evil. You want to create another portal. You are obvious in your simplicity. So let me be simple in return. Your mission is doomed to fail. The last group of Satan’s disciples failed. They were locked up in mental institutions, placed in solitary confinement, where they spent the rest of their lives in a slow, rotting decay. The evil had nowhere to go. I see you as no different. Four sick individuals with grand plans for committing evil…but in the end, you are small, so very small in a world that is dominated by good.”
“I’m going to give you one more chance, old man, to tell us where that bomb is hidden,” said Rodney, grabbing the frame of the bed. “You know more than you’re telling us!”
“I suggest the four of you buy four shovels…head into the middle of the desert…and start digging,” said Beck with a smile on his face. “Immerse yourselves in endless repetition. Isn’t that what most crazy people do?”
Rodney exploded. He grabbed Beck, lifting his frail body from the bed and tossed him to the floor with a hard thud. After Beck landed, Rodney kicked him, causing Beck to curl like a worm. Rodney grabbed a nearby cane leaned against the wall. He smashed it across Beck’s forehead.
“Stop!” cried out Gary.
Rodney continued to bash the cane into Beck’s skull, creating a spray of blood. Beck became limp and silent.
Gary pulled Rodney away. “Stop, you maniac. You’re making too much noise. You should’ve strangled him.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Sam.
Carol took a moment to lean over Beck, who lay in an expanding pool of his own blood. Both eyes remained half open, not blinking. “He’s dead,” she confirmed.
Sam opened the door and the visitors swiftly left the room.
Minutes after their departure from the nursing home, a staff member entered Calvin Beck’s room and discovered the body.
“You asshole, you lost your temper, and now we’ve lost our only link back to that bomb,” said Carol to Rodney.
“He was fucking with us,” grumbled Rodney.
“He wasn’t going to tell us anything more,” spoke up Gary. “I believe he was telling the truth.”
“If he’s telling the truth, then our plans are fucked,” said Carol. “We’ll never get that bomb.”
Sam reached across the table for a packet of strawberry jam for his toast. The four of them
sat in a booth in a Denny’s restaurant in Atlanta, eating breakfast and considering their next move.
To the average outsider, they looked no different than any other group of patrons enjoying a leisurely meal.
“I still think we could’ve beaten more out of him,” said Carol. “You didn’t have to finish him so quickly.”
“Can I help it if he broke so easily? I only hit him a few times,” said Rodney.
“He was in his eighties, falling on the sidewalk could kill him,” said Gary, chewing on a piece of bacon. “What did you expect?”
“That bomb is out there and we have no one who can help us find it,” said Carol, scowling. “No one.”
Sam, who had been quiet, spoke up. “That’s not quite true,” he said.
“Not true?” said Carol. “Then enlighten me, Sam. Who is going to show us the way to that bomb?”
“Yuri Kolstov,” replied Sam.
“The leader of those Soviet spies?” said Gary. “You heard Beck. He’s dead. They’re all dead.”
“Yes,” said Sam. “I believe that to be true.”
“Then how, exactly, is Yuri going to help us?”
“Yuri and his men may be dead, but they’re not lost to us,” said Sam. “Think about it. They sought a weapon of mass destruction. They killed seven people. I know where to find them. It’s destiny. They guaranteed themselves a one-way ticket to hell.”
The table went silent.
Gary broke out into a grin. He eyed the others with a growing nod. “Road trip!”
At O’Hare International Airport, Carol called home to let Jake know she was leaving for an urgent business trip in London regarding some international investments. “I’m not sure when I’ll be home,” she told him. “Don’t count on me for anything.”
“But, honey,” said Jake. “Thursday is Michael’s birthday. We were going to plan a party for this weekend and invite my parents and his cousins.”
“For Christ’s sake, Jake, he’s 13 years old. He’s too old for a birthday party,” she said. “Buy him a goddamn gift card and be done with it.”
Anatomy of Evil Page 16