Kingdom of the Seven

by Jon Land

  “Last chance,” Blaine told him. “You got a move to make, go ahead.”

  His shape stayed frozen.

  “Thanks for your help,” McCracken said, and moved the rest of the way out the door.

  In the hallway Captain Neal was gone, a burly monster of a guard in his place.

  “Sergeant O’Malley,” the man said, rigid at attention. “I’m to escort you out.”

  “Your captain have other business?”

  “Some trouble in one of the cellblocks, sir.” O’Malley hesitated, swallowing hard. His eyes fixed on the door to the visitor’s room. “Was he helpful, sir?”

  “You scared of Deek, Sergeant?”

  They started down the hallway.

  “Don’t know anyone in this place who isn’t, sir.”

  “I’m going to tell you something about men like him, Sergeant. I’m going to tell you something about—”

  O’Malley shifted his frame slightly when they swung left at the end of the hall. The motion made him cock his head and gave Blaine a glimpse of the left side of his face.

  The earlobe on that side was missing.

  O‘Malley must have caught the flash of recognition in McCracken’s eyes because he spun toward him an instant before Blaine had thrown himself into motion. Blaine’s initial blow grazed off the bigger man’s cheek and kept him spinning. O’Malley tried to right himself, but McCracken slammed into him, grabbing a fistful of hair. Blaine pushed forward toward the wall, and O‘Malley’s face made the first impact. He ignored the crunching sound that followed and rammed O’Malley’s face against the concrete surface again.

  O’Malley started to slump. Blaine swung toward the sound of feet thudding his way.

  The members of the Fifth Generation rushed him from both ends of the hall; some bald, some bearded and hairy. All missing their left earlobes. Blaine knocked the first few lunges aside and felt stupidly for the pistol no longer holstered back on his hip since regulations insisted it be left at the security desk. Another assailant lashed at him from behind, and Blaine threw him up and over his own body. The move took him to one knee, and before he could recover, a pair of men launched themselves atop him. He was pinned down. A shadow loomed overhead as he struggled to twist free. Something like a whistling blur whirled down at him.

  Then nothing.

  CHAPTER 13

  Johnny Wareagle had not been to the north woods of California that encompassed Redwood National Park a single time since his pursuit of Earvin Early and the two other killers two decades earlier. Tonight those woods looked mean and foreboding, an unfriendly wild barrier that defied all efforts of man to tame it. Johnny stood staring at the forest for some time, his pack resting at his feet, as if seeking permission to enter. The darkness of the night was broken occasionally by the moon pushing its way through the dense cloud cover above.

  Johnny checked his watch. It was coming up on 10:00 P.M., the same time he had entered the woods in this very spot twenty years before. The woods had grown larger, the trees thicker and the undergrowth more tangled. But the trails would still be there. Even if Johnny could not see them, he would be able to sense their presence and the direction they broke off in.

  The woods swallowed him as he entered, wrapped him in their branches and reached for him with their vines. Wareagle gave himself up. Part of his mind saw what lay ahead now. The other recalled the sights from two decades earlier. The trees and undergrowth had buried the signs of the trail Early and the others had left in their relentless, unchecked bloodletting.

  But not the memories.

  The spirits helped rekindle them, and they came with him every step of the way. For Johnny it was like walking into a mirror. The sounds from the past mixed with those of the present. The man Earvin Early was now had been born in these woods. The spirits’ counsel had brought Johnny here on a trail he knew would lead to Judgment Day for reasons only this trek could reveal.

  Time grew distorted, at times seeming frozen, appearing to fly at others. Johnny forgot about his watch, forgot about everything. He took no water, felt no thirst.

  Twenty years ago he had been dispatched to find three men, three killers. Those who had retained him showed him the pictures of the killers’ most recent handiwork. Johnny had known then he had no choice. Earvin Early and the others had to be stopped, and he was the only one who could do it.

  On this night, just as on that night, Wareagle came to the campsite in the north woods where the bodies had been found. The forest had swallowed the sites now, leaving no sign. The picnic tables had been carted away or left to rot into the ground. The clearing had been filled in as deftly as if someone had transplanted another part of the forest over this one. The path to the nearby pond was gone, and so, too, was the pond; lost long ago to drought and no more than a wide brown strip cut out of the woods that grew narrower each year.

  But Johnny could look through the darkness and see the site tonight as he had seen it that night.

  The three killers had come upon the families not long after dawn. The bodies of the boys were found near the water. Two fathers, savagely mutilated, lay halfway between the pond and the camp, as if responding to the screams of their boys.

  Early and the others saved the women and girls for last, cut parts of them out when they were finished, parts that had never been found. The government experiment they had been subjected to had been meant to enhance their senses. It had done that and more, creating monsters driven to fill whatever insatiable needs struck them. Psychotics who lived in a surreal state that, as in dreams, bore no real consequence for any action.

  Johnny continued on through what had once been a clearing.

  Screams. He heard screams … .

  Even though they were the products of the past, the screams chilled him to the bone. Twenty years ago, Johnny had picked up on the fear and hate, enabling him to follow the trail of the killers into the night. He used the borrowed emotions when he came upon the first of the killers covering the traces of their camp in the last hours of dark.

  A knife for that one, throat cut fast and neat.

  He set out after Early and the other, climbed a tree when he sensed one of them returning up a path. When the short, muscular man passed under him, Wareagle pounced, the knife working again, not stopping until he was sure.

  And then he went after Early.

  He found the huge man standing on the edge of a ravine located at the far side of a clearing about fifty feet from Johnny. Early was standing frozen, his back to him. A massive knife glinted in the moonlight by his side. Johnny imagined it was still soiled with the blood of the families.

  Johnny unshouldered his bow and unsheathed an arrow. Pulling back on a string packing 125 pounds of pressure, he sighted.

  Early turned, the moonlight enough to catch the mad rage feasting in his eyes. He started forward.

  Johnny released his hold. The string snapped taut with a twang, arrow slicing the air. He watched it thump home.

  Early was still coming.

  Johnny unleashed another arrow and placed it no more than an inch to the right of the first, just missing the heart. Early staggered, backpedaled, losing all the ground he had gained from the edge of the ravine.

  Johnny had held his ground, another arrow at the ready. Early’s eyes sought his out in the wind-whipped darkness. Then he was gone, falling backward over the edge of the precipice into the ravine.

  Wareagle stood now in that very spot, Early’s footprints long lost to time, but not the vision of his memory. The river currents one hundred feet below churned more slowly, fed now by diminished streams of water. The trail stopped here. Earvin Early had dropped down into the dark and was gone. Yet what he had become, what he was today, was birthed.

  Something was down there. Something awaited Johnny tonight as it had awaited Early twenty years before.

  Wareagle stripped the pack from his shoulders and withdrew what he needed. Rappelling without a belay down a sheer cliff was a daunting task at night, bu
t Johnny felt impelled to follow where the spirits led him.

  He tied off his two-hundred-foot coil of climbing rope to the base of a tree twenty feet from the edge, using an assortment of webbing and carabiners. Satisfied it would hold him, Johnny pulled himself into his harness. Then he threaded the rope through the appropriate slots on his figure eight device and pulled to take up the slack. Then he backpedaled to the edge and eased himself over the rock face, feeling the tight rope spooling through his gloved hands as he began his drop.

  Johnny’s first two bounds were met unforgivingly by the rock face, but he quickly settled into a rhythm as his rustiness with the process wore off. He discovered that what had seemed a sheer face was in fact partially a ledge. It jutted out far enough to slow or even stop a fall. Early could have flailed out in his descent and in his desperation managed to latch on to one of the thick plants growing out of the face. From there, even gravely wounded, he could have lowered himself down the cliff.

  But something else had awaited him at the bottom, something that had allowed him to survive to become whatever he was part of today. It was a feeling in Johnny that grew stronger with each bound off the rock and sharpened every time his boots clacked against the hard face with the rope threading comfortably through his gloved hands and harness.

  At the bottom a trickling stream gurgled where the churning river had been. Johnny left his rope hanging and returned his harness and gloves to his pack. The night glow showed the water to be barely up to his boots.

  His instincts told him to cross the stream to the other side, where the foliage was thinner and more easily navigated. He found himself on a path that, unlike those in the woods above, remained clear of intrusive vines and branches.

  Johnny leaned over and first felt the ground, then sniffed it. Men had been down this path fairly recently, a week before at most, a few days even. He rose slowly.

  One of the tracks was fresh. Last-half-hour fresh. Someone out in the night who may have seen him in the midst of his rappel down the cliff face.

  Johnny moved on down the trail. His pace was slow at first, methodical. But soon, before he knew it, he was trotting. Branches whisked by his face. The night meant nothing.

  A few hundred yards later, the trail widened to almost road size. Soon after the woods receded altogether and a clearing appeared, carved out of the forest. Johnny stood very still, all his senses alert for any sound or movement signaling a human presence. Reassured that he was alone, he reached back into his pack and pulled out his flashlight.

  Its beam fell on what had been a small nest of cabins. Now there were just blackened shells and dark patches incised into the ground to mark the spots where homes had once been.

  The cabins had been burned to the ground, each and every one of them. Slabs of petrified wood and blackened hunks that had once been heavy base lumber were all that remained, taking the form of gravestones. Johnny reached down and picked up a charred chunk of black. A single squeeze turned it to powdery dust in his hand. The fires that had done this had burned long ago. Eerily, the clearing smelled of nothing, not life or death. Only the night.

  Johnny continued to move about. The burn pattern was incredibly even. The buildings had frozen dark and dead in the midst of uniform smoldering. The flames could hardly be considered the result of an accident. Almost certainly they had been set, nurtured, coaxed. Wareagle shuffled his feet through some of the black-soaked earth.

  Was this where Earvin Early had ended up? Might he have been responsible for the fire that had destroyed this place?

  No. The fire had been years ago, but not twenty. The first question, though, remained open. Early could have found his way here after salvaging himself from the river. It made sense.

  Crack …

  Something still whole had given way underfoot. Not ahead of him—behind. Johnny turned off his flashlight.

  More rustling sounded, some distant, some close. Ghosts rising out of the black soot to bid him welcome, maybe Earvin Early himself come back to pay his respects. There was a louder snap and Johnny swung to find a burly figure with purposely blackened flesh standing there grasping a leveled shotgun. In the next instant similar shapes appeared in the darkness, surrounding him while keeping their distance safe.

  “Be a good idea,” started the first figure he had glimpsed, as the others began to advance, “if you just stayed right where you are.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The first thing Blaine felt when he began to come around was water dripping onto him. His initial sensation was to cough out a pool of it that had slid into his mouth. He tried to wipe the remnants from his chin, but his hand wouldn’t move. Then he remembered. His eyes opened and cleared slowly to the memory of being overcome by an endless wave of members of the Fifth Generation. He wasn’t dead; that was something, however little for the time being.

  His vision sharpened to find a grinning face not more than a yard from his own. The face was still sweating, the eyes dark and malevolent. The bald head glistened.

  “Nice of you to join us, heathen,” greeted Arthur Deek.

  Blaine gazed around him. The water dripping down on his face came from a rusted showerhead directly above. His hands were suspended over him to exposed piping, a pair of chains dangling down that had been fastened around his wrists. His unshackled legs were spread at shoulder width, his toes barely able to touch the floor. He was naked except for his briefs. His beard itched and he couldn’t reach it.

  Besides Deek, another dozen or so of the Fifth Generation were present in the shower room, approximately one for each of the ancient heads that dripped water to varying degrees. It pooled on the filthy tile floor and slid toward the drain. The continued plopping sounds of the drips provided an incessant backdrop, until someone turned the nozzle activating the shower directly above McCracken. An irregular spray of scalding water singed his flesh and made him arch involuntarily.

  “You will tell me who sent you,” Deek demanded, through the steam that floated between them.

  “No one.”

  “You lie! They sent you. I know. Admit it and you die easy.”

  “Why don’t you tell me who they are?”

  Deek drew a bit closer. “This is our world. You don’t belong.”

  “Let me go and I’ll be glad to—”

  Deek backhanded him, and Blaine felt blood pooling in his mouth.

  “The traitors sent you, but you die knowing nothing.”

  “What traitors? Traitors to what?”

  Deek nodded toward one of the figures behind him. The man slid forward and handed him some sort of electrical device formed of twin prods wired to a base station farther back. Deek took one in either hand and held them out to Blaine so he could see they looked like those of a portable defibrillating machine.

  “We must know the identities of all our enemies.” Showing the prods now. “Why did you ask me about Ratansky?”

  “I told you why, scumbag.”

  Deek’s eyes flared, the prongs raised to their level, close enough for Blaine to smell. “Where are the contents of his briefcase? Where is the list he stole?”

  “Stole from who?”

  “Tell me where it is!”

  “Where do you fit into Judgment Day, Deek? What’s your stake? What have you been promised?”

  Deek jabbed the prongs forward. Blaine heard a buzzing sound an instant before the pain rocked him. A spasm shot through his body and slammed his teeth together. His eyes faded to darkness, then slowly found the light again. He couldn’t stop shaking. The spray of hot water pounding him from above was what kept him from passing out, he figured.

  “The lowest setting,” Deek told McCracken. “Four more to go before we reach the highest. Your choice.”

  Blaine resisted the feeling of hopelessness that threatened to overcome him, analyzing his options. Since the jolt-induced spasms, something seemed different about his bonds. His wrists enjoyed a bit more slack. Ever so subtly he tried to move his hands and felt the exposed p
ipes they were chained to wobble.

  Weakening! The pipes were weakening!

  “You stood smug as my conqueror in the visitor’s room,” Deek taunted. “But none who know the true purpose of our existence can live.”

  “Judgment Day,” Blaine muttered.

  This time he saw the prods coming and tried to brace himself. It was no use. An even greater burst of fiery pain surged through him from toe to scalp. He wanted to kick himself out of his skin. His head whiplashed back and banged off the tile. Hot needles of water burned his scalp. He gasped, forgetting how to breathe for a lingering moment.

  Above him the pipes his wrists were attached to were creaking from the strain.

  “You will tell me where I can find the contents of Ratansky’s briefcase!” Deek demanded. “You will tell me who you have shared them with!”

  Blaine looked at him, having trouble keeping his head up. His legs were beginning to throb now from the strain of resting his weight all on his toes. He had to keep it that way so that the Fifth Generation members wouldn’t notice the slack the pipes above were giving.

  “Who has the list Ratansky stole?”

  McCracken couldn’t have answered even if he had wanted to. He could barely feel the steamy heat of the water flowing upon him now.

  “Who sent you?”

  Just getting all his breath back now.

  “Talk!”

  Blaine screamed an instant before the prongs hit this time. His whole body jumped, his spine seeming to sizzle. When the jolt ended, he had no feeling anywhere in his body. Everything was numb and tingly. His leg muscles had cramped and the pain was awful.

  “Scream if you want!” Deek suggested gleefully.

  McCracken still couldn’t breathe.

  “Scream!”

  And the prongs came forward again.

  This time Blaine felt almost nothing. The world before him turned black with agony. A cut on his tongue dribbled blood through his mouth and it leaked out with his saliva. His knees buckled and vibrated. He would have screamed if he could have, but the breath to manage it wasn’t there.