Oddy’s guts contorted with rage and for a moment the outline of his world, every plane and contour, was etched in cold blacks and reds. He curled the fingers of his good hand into a fist so tight the fingernails left bloody half-moons in his palms.
“And oh how spectacularly you went around,” Grosevoir continued. “My tranquil little preserve looks like a slaughterhouse at quitting time!”
“Crosshairs and Zippo are dead,” Oddy said.
“I know.” Oddy may as well have told him the time of day for all the emotion he exhibited. “Damn good thing, too. What’s the use of maintaining monsters that don’t earn their keep?”
Tripwire’s fingers tightened around the Llama’s butt. “A deal’s a fucking deal. We made it around. You’ve got to take us home.”
“You’re finished?” Grosevoir’s fingers traced strange designs in the snow. “As far as I can see, you’ve made it exactly as far as that unlucky fellow.” He pointed at Edwards’ parka. “The hilltop is your finish line, and that remains a ways off yet. And—” he inclined his head towards the treeline, where the noise of massing bodies had reached a fever pitch. “—there are rather a lot of…things…who’d prefer you didn’t leave.”
Oddy knew they possessed neither the strength nor ammunition to withstand another assault. “This place has taken two of my men,” he said. “Two of my friends. And we’re badly hurt. But if we turn and face whatever it is waiting in those woods, I promise you we are going to kill a lot of them.” He brandished the Webley with more conviction than he truly felt. “So why don’t we call this whole fucking thing a draw?”
Deformed shapes swirled in the air above the men’s heads. For a moment Tripwire mistook the spectacle for a particularly gruesome phase of the northern lights, until the air coalesced, attaining a splintered permanence, and a shoal of faces swam out of the sky. Their aspect was hideous: eyes ripped of eyelids or punched from their skulls outright, noses bitten away, lips freakishly swelled and Negroid, tongues long and lolling and eaten through as if by parasites. Grosevoir waved his hand irritably and they broke apart into nothingness.
“A draw?” he said. “No, I can’t have that. It smacks of failure and compromise and business left unfinished. It goes against my nature.”
“And what nature is that?” Tripwire said. “What are you?”
Grosevoir said, “What do you think I am?”
“You’re no different than the things you keep—a monster.”
“No,” Answer said quietly, “not a monster. It is…Chaos.”
“I am that exactly.”
Oddy said, “What do you mean, you’re Chaos?”
“I am that which causes havoc, pandemonium, anarchy. It is my role, my position in this world.”
Having been forced to accept the existence of zombies and vampires and a thousand other monstrous manifestations, their minds easily assimilated this new revelation.
“Why all this, then?” Tripwire said. “This preserve, the monsters, us—how does it fit?”
Chaos stood and stretched. It dipped its head and regarded them out of the tops of its eyes. “Ask yourselves this: what is it such creatures inspire? Unrest, disharmony, terror…chaos. You’ve heard stories of medieval villages disappearing in the span of a single night, or men driven to madness by unseen apparitions, or sightings of such things that rational minds must dismiss as untrue. These are not myths, or delusions, or the ravings of lunatics. They are the truth. They happened.” It ran its small pink tongue across its small gray teeth. “There is always a truth, and that truth is to be found in the woods surrounding Great Bear Lake. But that truth is so unthinkable, flying in the face of all logical thought, that people refuse to believe—at least their rational minds do. But deep down, in those places where dark speculation takes root, an ember of belief is always smoldering.
“These creatures represent the unknown threat. They are the monsters under the bed. They are the dark shapes circling endlessly beyond the light of humanity’s fires. At their best, they create confusion, and insanity, and primitive fear. They aid and enable chaos. In this way they are, and always have been, foot soldiers in my cause. So you see how I have a vested interest in their health and continuance.”
“But why us,” Oddy said. “Why the letters and why the lies and why the whole goddamn front?”
The snow stopped, but the wind had picked up. It skated across the ground and wormed through the vents in their clothing to graze their many wounds. Chaos walked behind them, touching the napes of their necks with one cold fingertip. Oddy withdrew from its touch, as did Tripwire. Answer did not.
“I wanted my denizens to be challenged,” it said, “and knew you would fill that need. As to how I knew you would fill that need…” It returned to its position facing them. The eye patch had been removed. The skin underneath was wet and raw, as if the wound had been inflicted only moments ago. “Do I really need to tell you?”
“No,” the three men said in near-unison.
And how long had they known? In their hearts and in their minds and in their souls—known. Had they been tricked? Really tricked? Or had they merely been tricking themselves?
“I looked different then, I know. This,” he swept his hand down his chest, “is strictly for civility’s sake. It’s so difficult to secure a table at a decent restaurant looking as I did in Vietnam.”
“And that’s it?” Oddy said. “Because twenty years ago, when we were fucking kids, we hurt you—revenge, pure and simple?”
“Not the only reason,” Chaos said. “But one of them. I have lived a long time and, sad as it is to say, have become somewhat petty. But if simple vengeance was all I wanted, I could’ve killed you all long ago.”
Chaos’s true shape shifted beneath the skin of its human form. The flesh rippled like water stirred by a slight breeze and something tore wetly. It said, “A time comes for all things to change. This body—my adopted body—is getting old and infirm. Its previous owner gave it to me willingly, as they all have. This particular body belonged to a freak show performer. The fellow bit heads off live chickens and had gotten into the nasty habit of killing a single child in each and every village his sideshow toured through.” Chaos cocked his head to the side, as a dog sometimes will. Oddy found the gesture jarringly familiar. “You see, his nature was the same as mine. I am always on the lookout for such specimens.”
There was another tearing sound and the skin of Chaos’s head split down the center. The wound was red and raw-looking, the skin spread an inch wide. Something was pushing its way out.
“I made this man the same offer I made all of them: become the vessel of Chaos. Your body becomes mine, my powers yours. You will live beyond all natural bounds. The only pain you feel will be the pain of others. Most importantly, you will exist at all times in those places where bloodshed, and disharmony, and anarchy reign.”
Chaos’s forehead split wider and a sharp V-shaped wedge of bone forced its way through the wound. It looked like an axe-head, or a shark’s fin.
“The time for change has come.” Its voice was no longer human. “I need a new vessel. That is why I brought you here. To make a choice.”
Chaos’s false face loosened, then folded, then began to fall away. Gaping tears at the eyes, the ears, the neck. Like an old, rotten t-shirt ripping, Tripwire thought. Or a snake shedding its skin. Then, horrifically: Or like a baby being born.
Chaos’s old face fell off. Underneath was another face: sharp and white and hard as bone, a little bloody, one blood-red eye and a mouth wide enough to devour entire worlds.
“Now,” it said. “Choose.”
Tripwire’s mind reeled. The proposition was ungodly, unthinkable. Become one with…that thing? No. Never. He’d die first. The proposition was somehow insulting, given all they’d seen and done in the previous days—he’d gone through hell just to surrender? Rage welled up within him, vast and wild and bitter.
In the sky to the south a faint thrum arose. Oddy squinted his e
yes into the gloom. He could see, or thought he saw, a pinprick of dark movement, growing slightly larger with each passing moment.
“No,” Tripwire said. “Not me. Not ever. Fuck you.” He pulled a pistol from his waistband and brought it to bear. “Fuck y—”
The sound was so whisper-soft that Oddy nearly missed it. Tsshshsh, like trembling waves lapping a sandy shore, or a deep-tongue kiss.
Tripwire’s neck—his pale slim neck—had a K-Bar knife sticking out of it. A hand was wrapped around the hilt. The back of that hand had red hairs growing on it. Oddy’s eyes followed the hand to where the arm met the shoulder, across to the clavicle, and up to a pair of eyes he’d stared into a thousand times without ever really understanding the thoughts that turned over behind their cold and lifeless blue.
“The world needs a little Chaos, Sarge,” Answer said. “You see that, don’t you?”
Tripwire made a dry hacking noise. His eyes reflected a wretched bewilderment and Oddy recalled a fawn he’d hit while driving to Poughkeepsie and how the animal had died without dignity or shelter, how it had died lacking the awareness of what had killed it, or why. They had been the eyes of a creature awakened to the hideous serendipity of this world when it was too late to do anything about it. Tripwire’s hand jerked up and grabbed at the knife but all he did was cut his fingers and make Answer jam the blade in further.
The distant thrum to the south grew louder. The black dot in the sky attained a recognizable shape.
A Labrador helicopter.
Answer pulled the knife out of Tripwire’s neck. Tripwire staggered back and Oddy caught him before he fell into the snow. His body was rigid; the muscles and tendons of his neck and shoulders pulsed against the skin like twisted mangrove roots. Blood pumped out of the slit in his neck, the brightest red Oddy had ever seen. He pressed his hand over the wound even though he knew it was useless. Blood pushed between his fingers and down his arm and the dying warmth of it made him want to throw up.
You fucker, he thought. Oh you fucking motherFUCK…
“Blegghh,” Tripwire said. His face was white and his teeth were red and his eyes were focused on the helicopter with a sort of terrified sadness, like a marathon runner who is approaching the finish line only to find he ultimately lacks the strength to cross it.
“Blegghh.” The sound came out with so little force, was so pitifully meaningless. It filled Oddy with crushing sorrow to see the man who had kept him sane through the madness of Vietnam robbed of the simple ability to express his dying thoughts. Something blossomed inside Oddy in that moment, flowing dark through his arteries, vile and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase.
Oh you fuck oh you goddamn motherfucker….
Answer wiped Tripwire’s blood on his pants and approached Chaos.
“I looked for you,” he said. “In the jungle.”
“It was a busy time for me,” Chaos said. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“This is going to…sting.”
Chaos began to change—began to melt, to streamline. The shape of its skull elongated, as if it had been made of wax that was softening and starting to run. Its body transformed into something that resembled hot tar, molten and malleable and deepest black. It surged forward, a long thick rope pushing its way into Answer’s wide-open mouth. Answer struggled against the intrusion, gagging, clawing at the inrushing blackness. Oddy saw, for the first time, a real and definable emotion flash across those ice-blue eyes, and if that emotion could have somehow been translated into words, those words might have been oh dear god what have I done?
As Chaos entered Answer its shape changed. Gibbering faces appeared along its dark length, human and beast and others whose aspects were in no way analogous to anything ever glimpsed in this world; nightmare limbs, claw-tipped and sucker-dotted, pulsed from the amorphous mass only to melt into the blackness again. Then, for an instant, Oddy believed he nearly saw what shape Chaos really was, and his heart froze in his chest, leaving him gasping.
The helicopter touched down on the hilltop.
How long would it stay?
“Blegghh,” Tripwire said again. And then, mercifully, he was dead. He died so quickly he didn’t even have time to shut his eyes.
FUCKER FUCKER MOTHERFUCKER—
With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand Oddy closed Tripwire’s eyes. He set the body down with as much gentleness as his clumsy arms were capable of.
Answer stood ten feet away. His lips and cheeks and the inside of his mouth were sheathed in blackness. Only he wasn’t Answer anymore. His eyes, previously blue, were now completely red. On the other hand, he wasn’t not Answer: physically he was unchanged and his eyes, though a different shade, still radiated the same chilling deadness.
“You wouldn’t believe it, Sarge,” he said, voice slightly breathless. “You wouldn’t bel—”
He said no more.
Because that was when Oddy pulled the Webley
…FUCKER…
the sound of the hammer cocking like some great cosmic gear turning over
…DIRTY MOTHERFUCKER…
and shot him square in the face.
Answer’s head rocked back in a spray of black and red. His arms flew upwards like a giddy rider awaiting a roller coaster’s plunge. His back bent at a ludicrous angle and his arms pinwheeled for balance: he looked like a man perched on a high-rise ledge caught off-guard by a sudden gust of wind. Then he fell backwards to land with a puff of snow.
««—»»
Oddy never got the chance to view the result of his marksmanship. It was as if the crack of his pistol had signaled the start of some desperate race as the creatures who’d lain in wait burst into the clearing and made a reckless beeline for him. He got a good look at the leader of the pack, an apparition straight out of a madman’s fever dream: the legs of a giant crab and the elongated neck of a giraffe terminating in the flattened head of a Portuguese Man O’ War, bulbous green eyes set atop insectile stalks and its mouth packed not with teeth but with bone, sharpened knuckles of bone chattering a skeletal calliope.
Oddy turned and ran faster than he’d ever run before. His feet skimmed across the snow so quickly he couldn’t be certain his boots left their indentation in the snow. Fear and exhaustion fought against one another; fear was winning at the moment.
He reached the base of the hilltop. Something buzzed past his skull. There was a wet ripping sound and Oddy raised his hand to the stump where his ear used to be. He dug his feet into the hillside, unable to feel the ground beneath him, and started to climb. Noises gathered beneath him, clickings and gurglings and the sob of hungry infants.
He snagged his foot on an exposed root and something snapped below his Achilles tendon and for a moment nothing and then pain roared up his leg, through his belly, through his neck. It seemed to rip the top of his head off and he puked a gut-wrenching stream into the snow but he never slowed, never gave pain the upper hand. He was thinking of Gunner and Tripwire and Crosshairs and Slash and how he owed it to them to reach that fucking whirlybird; he couldn’t save them but if he could save himself then maybe, somehow, he’d be saving them all. The concept made no sense but it was all he had and he clung to it like a drowning man to a life preserver.
There was a snapping whiplike noise and sudden pain sang up his arm. Oddy stared down at his left hand to see that now, in addition to the stripped tendons, his ring and little fingers were gone. Well, at least I can still make a peace sign, he thought madly. He glanced over his shoulder at the creature who’d done it: small, the rough size of a monkey, the skin of its head peeled off in tiny ribbons that danced and circulated around its raw face in the manner of streamers tied to an oscillating fan. Its limbs were filament-thin threads, the purplish tendrils of an anemone, thousands upon thousands, lashing out to lick at his lower extremities.
He spun awkwardly and fired. Through dumb luck or benign providence the slug struck the creature’s center and sent it tumbling backwards, f
ilaments licking uselessly, where it was trampled by the advancing horde. Oddy’s peripheral vision was a blur of bizarre movement and streaking shapes, things beyond description, things nearly beyond conception, things his tautly-stretched mind rebelled stridently at the very existence of. Pain blossomed in his skull, a great burst-open flower, making his eyes water. He ran on senseless feet, legs pumping, arms pistoning, blinding blood in his eyes. The helicopter was ten feet away. The lowered gangway yawned like an open mouth.
The time it took him to cross those remaining ten feet was a little under three seconds. Yet those scant moments unfolded into a lifetime inside his head. Unconnected images sprang, unbidden, into his mind: his mother chopping onions over the sink, the sun streaming through an open window to touch the blackness of her hair; a package of cigarettes, his father’s brand, half-open on a folding TV-tray, droplets of blood flecking the cellophane wrapper; a pretty girl on a city bus who had touched his knee and so he had touched hers and something had passed between them but now all he could recall was the narrow outline of her bra-strap beneath her blouse and the smell of her body like fresh-picked spearmint; the draft letter held in his twenty-year-old hands, his clean and unlined and somehow innocent hands, the letter’s folds machine-straight and the words stark on the bright white page; a dark trench in the jungle’s heart, the stink of terrified young bodies and tracer fire snapping overhead; Dade’s face blown wide open and his limp body rolling across the freeway. And he wondered, idly but earnestly, what his mother was doing right now, at that exact moment, who she was talking to or what thoughts might be occupying her mind as her son fought for his life in a place as foreign and remote as the dark side of the moon…
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