by Hunter
Joshua checked his watch. It was three-thirty. Two-and-a-half hours until dawn. The hunter rubbed at the stubble on his chin. If it wasn’t for the obvious signs of corruption on the two men, he could have been eavesdropping on a drug buy.
Somewhere, far off, came the sound of a truck engine. It sounded like a big rig, probably an eighteen-wheeler, working its way in low gear amid the close-set buildings. The hunter frowned and pulled out his phone. John picked up immediately.
“I’m here, ” Joshua said without preamble. “What the hell is going on? ”
“A business transaction, ” John replied. “Is the truck there yet? ”
“Almost. I can hear it coming down the street now. “
He listened as the semi pulled up on the other side of the building, then heard the dragon’s-hiss of its airbrakes. Doors slammed, then he heard voices shouting harshly to one another. Whoever they were, they were in a hurry, Joshua noted. Then a trailer door banged open and the voices began barking orders.
Movement inside the warehouse caught his eye. The man on the stairwell tossed away his cigarette and readied his shotgun as a rolling metal door rattled upwards and a line of scrawny figures came stumbling inside. They staggered weakly across the trash-strewn floor, kicking up clouds of dust that swirled in the shafts of harsh overhead light. Joshua watched men, women and children driven into the room by more skull-faced men. Some of the skull-faces carried shotguns. Others had cattle prods dangling loosely from their hands. They drove their charges into the center of the room and forced them to sit or kneel in the refuse, getting their message across with swipes of a shotgun butt or a brandished shock stick.
“Who the hell are these people? ” Joshua scanned the rows of terrified faces. His eyes settled on one girl in particular who hugged her knees to her chest and studied her surroundings warily with dark, almond-shaped eyes.
“Illegal immigrants. Mostly Vietnamese, some Cambodians. They sold everything they owned and used the money to pay for a ninety-day trip in a cargo container. They lived in darkness and ate nothing but a handful of rice a day. Maybe half of them, the most fit and the most determined, survive the voyage. And their nightmare is only beginning. ”
Two of the skull-faces were walking among the immigrants, segregating them into discrete groups: the few elderly men and women went into one group, then the young men and finally the women and children. The girl moved quickly and quietly when the skull-faces gestured; most of the others were becoming uneasy, but she seemed calm. Joshua shook his head in disbelief. “What do the monsters want them for? Don’t they have enough food here? ”
“They’re not food. They’re a commodity, ” John said grimly. “Think about it. As far as the good old U. S. A is concerned, these people don’t exist. Anything could happen to them here, and no one would notice, much less care. You can work them day and night, pimp them to any sick bastard with a torture fetish or put ‘em in snuff films if that’s how you get your kicks. And make a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. What do you think a slave goes for in America these days? ” Down below, one of the skull-faces caught the girl eyeing one of the exits. He came up behind her in a silent rush and brought his cattle prod down between her shoulders. She collapsed into a ball and the skull-face struck her twice more, shouting something furiously. Joshua felt his guts turn to ice. “My God, ” he said in a choked whisper, “My God… ”
“I know. ” The edge was suddenly gone from John’s voice. “Just when I think I’ve learned how bad things really are, I realize that I’ve just scratched the surface. You know what I think? I think we only guess at how deep the evil runs in this world. I think the Angels are so cryptic because they know if we were told straight up what we were signing on for we’d put a gun to our heads the first night. ”
Joshua tasted bile. He felt a wave of despair rise sluggishly in his chest, lapping at his heart. “What does the monster get out of this? ”
“Money. Influence in the local flesh trade, I suppose. Beyond that, I don’t know. ” John hesitated. “Maybe he just took the idea of ‘humans as cattle’ to the next logical step. ”
The skull-face moved away from the girl, who continued to lie on her side, hugging her bruised ribs. There were tears on her cheeks, but her eyes were still determined. She glanced up at the line of windows and Joshua thought she looked directly at him, but her eyes slid past his without any sign of realization.
“When will the monster arrive? ” he asked. “An hour and a half, maybe a little less. Depends on the amount of ‘product’ to be moved. He doesn’t get involved with auctioning off the old folks or the men. He only turns up later, to take bids on the top commodities — the women and children. I figure you’ve got about half and hour before the first person goes on the block. ” “That only leaves about an hour or so until dawn, ” Joshua mused. “That’s cutting it pretty fine for a bloodsucker. ”
“I didn’t say he was a bloodsucker. ”
“Well, what is he, then? ”
“Does it matter? ”
“If I’m going to eliminate him it sure as hell does, ” Joshua said.
The line fell silent. Then, after a moment, John said, “What about the immigrants? ” Joshua frowned. “What about them? ” “Aren’t you going to do something? ”
“Yes I am, ” the hunter replied. “When that son of a bitch shows up, I’m going to destroy him. ” The silence stretched longer than before. Joshua thought he heard John sigh. Then the voice on the line said, “Fifty’three people died in that nightclub fire. ”
“I’m sorry to hear that, ” Joshua replied. “Yeah. Me, too, ” John said, and the line went dead.
A commotion down on the warehouse floor caught Joshua’s eye. One of the elderly men had risen to his feet and was addressing one of the skull-faces. He couldn’t hear what the old man was saying, but the fellow’s shoulders were straight and his expression was one of stem dignity. Many of the other immigrants watched the elder with looks of reverence and growing resolve.
The man was still talking when one of the skull faces stepped forward and shot him in the chest. The elder’s body collapsed in a heap, and an older woman reached for it with a shrill, anguished scream. Others took up the heartbroken cry and the skull-faces waded in with their shock sticks to beat them back into silence.
Joshua put away his phone and settled down to wait.
• • • •
It started to rain at a quarter-past four. Joshua was soaked through in minutes, but he was grateful for the extra cover. Rain meant that visibility would be lower and any sentries outside would be less alert. Occasionally the hunter turned his face up to the darkness and let the cold raindrops wash over his tired eyes and the bum on his cheek. It felt like a gift from God.
The skull-faces knew their business well. They kept the immigrants in line with a methodical, emotionless application of force, and by the time the first bidders arrived, even the children sat in stunned silence, eyes fixed on the floor. Some of the men and women rocked slightly back and forth, their faces blank with shock. From time to time Joshua looked to see how the girl was holding up. She kept her eyes downcast like all the others, but the hunter noticed that she had pulled a necklace of some kind from a pocket and was rubbing it between thumb and forefinger. Perhaps they were prayer beads, or a family heirloom she’d kept out of all the possessions she’d been forced to sell. As she took strength from the necklace, he found himself taking strength from her, beating back the despair that sapped at his resolve. If she could hold together in the face of such horror, he could stay the course and do what had to be done.
The bidders were brought in groups of two to five, escorted up the rusting steel stairs to the foreman’s office where they could look down on the assembled immigrants and make their offers to one of the skull-faces. Occasionally the skull-face taking the bid would call down to the floor and have one person stand up so the bidders could get a better look. The deals were conducted quickly; the winning bidder han
ded the skull-face in charge an envelope and then went downstairs to claim his property. As John described, the elderly went first, then the men; the first time the skull-faces began separating the purchased individuals from the crowd the immigrants went into a panic, but the thugs savagely put the crowd in its place again. Joshua watched young men separated from their wives and children, their eyes full of silent entreaties not to give up hope. By the time the last of the men were gone those entreaties had all been forgotten.
The monster arrived without warning. Joshua had grown accustomed to the brisk, heartless routine, and at first took the creature to be just another bidder. He wore an expensive black overcoat tailored to his broad shoulders and slim waist, and his dark hair and eyes further emphasized the chalky pallor of his face. He was handsome in the same way a hawk was, regal and sharp-featured, his expression cruel and aloof. The creature paused at the entrance and took everything in with a single, sweeping glance, and the whole echoing space went still. A small group of bidders trailed in the monster’s wake, appearing small in the shadow of the creature’s sheer presence.
Joshua watched the monster intently as he moved gracefully up the office stair. The creature was not gaunt or feverish like his servants, instead radiating an aura of icy vitality. He was very much alive, the hunter realized, yet the look in his eyes was anything but human. The creature’s stare hinted at an intelligence older and more alien than anything Joshua had ever seen before, and the realization sent a chill down his spine. He remembered what John had said to him, little more than an hour before: we only guess at how deep the evil runs in this world.
As the monster led the bidders into the foreman’s office Joshua carefully eased himself down the pile of crates. He hugged the wall of the warehouse and worked his way around the building to the front. Peering carefully around the comer he saw the same Ford Explorer he’d seen before, as well as a couple of vans and a Mercedes sedan. The hunter noticed the driver’s side window of the sedan was cracked open and a thin stream of cigarette smoke curled into the cold, rainy air. Joshua nodded thoughtfully to himself, and the pieces of a plan fell into place.
He made his way back to the Pontiac, resisting the urge to break into a run. When he got to the car he popped open the trunk and reached for a small styrofoam cooler buried under a moth-eaten blanket. Inside the cooler was a lump of gray, clay-like explosive. He’d stolen the C-3 from a construction site months ago and saved it for just such an eventuality. Joshua set the explosive on the cooler’s lid and pulled out a plastic baggie containing the detonators.
His hands shook while he worked. Joshua’s mind kept drifting back to the girl, her slim fingers worrying at the beads and refusing to give in. He wondered what would become of her. Had she seen him when she’d looked at the windows? Was she pinning her hopes on him, praying he would come to the rescue?
Joshua was pressing a radio detonator into the C-3 when his cell phone rang. He jumped. For a wild second his blood turned to ice until he realized that if the detonator had been armed he wouldn’t still be alive to worry about it.
He set down the bomb and pulled out the phone, biting back a stream of curses. “What? ” “You didn’t even try to get those people out, did you? ” John said, his voice cold. “How could you sit there and watch, and not do anything? ” Joshua leaned against the trunk, running a hand over his shaved head and trying to focus his thoughts. “I’m doing what’s necessary, John. Surely you see that. ”
“Since when is it necessary to sacrifice people wholesale for the sake of one monster? The police at the nightclub said that someone had used a torch to weld the fire doors’ hinges shut. You expected that people would die in that fire, but you didn’t give a damn. What is the point of fighting if we become just like them? ” “We aren’t like them, John, and we never will be, ” Joshua snapped. “They are a cancer on the face of mankind, corrupting it from within. Someone has to cut out the tumor, and occasionally that means sacrificing a little healthy tissue in order to save the patient. People die all the time, John. We are expected to do whatever is necessary in order to ensure that humanity as a whole survives. ”
“How can you be so sure? ”
“Because we’ve been made immune to the disease, “ Joshua said, as if explaining something to a child. “Don’t you see? Humans can become bloodsuckers, or blood slaves, but we can’t. A werewolf can infect any victim with his bite except us. When we die, we stay in our graves. We’re antibodies. We’ve been created to make humanity healthy again. ” “Bullshit! ” John cried. “No one came down from heaven and gave you that story on a stone tablet. You’re fumbling in the dark like everyone else. The fact is, we don’t know who did this to us, or why. What if it isn’t heaven that’s doing this to us, but hell? ”
Joshua hung up on him. Then for good measure he turned off the phone. The vision of the girl still hung in his mind’s eye. And the rain beat down, but where he’d thought it a blessing before, now it made him shiver, and he couldn’t stop no matter how hard he tried.
• • • •
He took the bomb and a shotgun from the trunk and took a circuitous route back to the warehouse, running the entire way. His lungs ached and his calves burned, and he focused on the pain, driving all else from his mind.
One of the vans was gone by the time he got back. The driver of the Mercedes still sat inside the car, out of the rain, and the earlier sentry was nowhere to be seen. Joshua left the shotgun in the shadow of a nearby alley and crept up in the sedan’s blind spot. It was reckless, but at that moment he didn’t care.
The hunter lay on the rain-soaked asphalt and wriggled underneath the car, pressing the plastic explosive against the sedan’s gas tank. At the last moment he remembered to arm the detonator, then he clambered free and dashed back into the darkness.
He reached the alley and recovered the shotgun, and then there was nothing to do except wait. Joshua thought about the girl. Part of him hoped that she left on the first van. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see her again.
We only guess at how deep the evil in this world runs. What if it isn’t heaven that’s doing this to us, but hell?
“We aren’t like them, ” he told himself, holding the shotgun in a white-knuckled grip. “We can’t be. We’re immune. ”
Or are we just a different strain of the disease? Joshua heard a door open, and then someone gave a muted order. He peered around the corner and saw a small group of women being herded by the skull-faces to the remaining van. Then came the bidders, and, finally, the monster.
The creature moved with fluid precision, haughty as a god. The sheer force of his presence flowed around him like a cloud of ice. If the rain even touched him, he gave no sign.
The girl walked in the creature’s wake. She moved as though in a dream, almost gliding along the ground. The necklace dangled uselessly from her hand, and her eyes were wide with terror.
Joshua fumbled the detonator from his pocket. The sedan’s driver was already rushing out to open the door for the monster.
The hunter glanced at the women being forced into the van. The bidders stood to one side, watching the skull-faces work. The sight made Joshua’s guts turn to ice.
He hit the detonator.
The plastic explosive went off with a thunderous bang, and the street lit up as the sedan’s gas tank went off in a huge ball of fire. The concussion hit him like a hot wind, but the comer of the alley protected him from the worst of it, and Joshua was running towards the center of the blast within seconds, shotgun at the ready.
The car was gone. Nothing remained except burning pieces of rubber and charred metal. There were bodies and body parts everywhere. Joshua saw two skull-faces struggling to their feet, covered in blood. The hunter fired two blasts, and both creatures fell.
The monster had been less than two yards from the car when it exploded. His body was thrown back nearly to the warehouse wall, and lay in a blazing heap. The girl had fallen where she stood. The monster’s body had shielded
her from the fire and shrapnel, and there wasn’t a single mark on her. The concussion of the blast had killed her instantly.
Joshua knelt by her side. He reached out with a gloved hand and stroked her dark hair. Her face was peaceful, as though she were asleep. “Forgive me, ” he said softly. “He was a monster, and he had to die. ”
A sudden gust of warm air was his only warning. Joshua threw himself backwards as the blazing form of the beast reared over him. His clothes had mostly burned away and his flesh was tom by shrapnel, but the fire didn’t seem to touch him at all. His lips pulled back in a snarl, revealing teeth like obsidian knives.
The hunter fired the shotgun again and again, emptying the weapon into the thing’s chest. It collapsed nearly on top of him, one hand closing spasmodically around Joshua’s throat. He nearly blacked out before he could pry himself free.
That was when he saw it. He stared at the creature’s arm, and for a moment the world seemed to spin. A fist of ice closed around his heart.
With a strangled cry of anger and pain Joshua pushed away from the body. He pulled the phone from his pocket and forced his trembling hands to dial John’s number. It picked up on the first ring.
“You son of a bitch, ” Joshua said bleakly. “You sonofabitch. You knew. You knew all along! ”
“I’m sorr}, ” a recorded voice told him, “but the number you have dialed has been disconnected. “
The body of the monster lay outstretched beside the young girl, one hand seeming to reach for her gentle face. The shifting glow of the fire picked out the dark lines of a tattoo on the creature’s forearm. It was an arcane symbol known only to a select few.