Kingdom of the Seven

by Jon Land

  Above him, though, the pipes had all but come free of their worn fasteners, the ceiling ready to give them up. Blaine knew he couldn’t take much more, perhaps not even one jolt. The next setting was the highest, and if he managed to survive it, the effects might well leave him unable to respond further.

  “You are weak,” Deek told him. “Your strength is only an illusion, an illusion you share with so many others. All the weak will perish when Judgment Day comes. The weak will perish, and the strong—the deserving—shall rise to take our rightful place. We have the key.” Deek came forward and jammed Blaine’s face to him. “Do you hear me? We have the key to the door into the new world. We will be reborn into it, and in our image it shall be remade.”

  He stepped back and readied the prongs. They hummed slightly.

  McCracken tensed his wrist muscles and willed the control back into them. He let the hot water run down his face, using the pain to recharge himself. His hands tightened on the chains affixed to the loosened pipes.

  Loose enough … They had to be.

  “In the name of God,” said Deek, and the prongs started forward.

  McCracken yanked on the pipes. The flood of water that came when they jerked free of the wall soaked him exclusively. Deek noticed it too late, along with the corrugated steel flashing between him and his target. The prongs wedged up against the steel and sizzled. Deek’s scream was deafening but brief, giving way quickly to a raspy gurgle that hung in the air while he jittered and juked. One of the Fifth Generation disciples had grasped his leader at the shoulders to try and pull him free. The result instead was his simply joining in the death dance, a bizarre duet now, one virtually mirroring the other.

  The lights in the shower room flickered once and then died, plunging it into a darkness broken only by dull rays sneaking in around the corner leading toward the sinks and toilets. The darkness, coupled with the Fifth Generation members’ shock, gave Blaine the freedom to slide his chains all the way from the pipes’ hold. His legs were still unsteady and he nearly collapsed when he tried to put all his weight on the two of them. He remained jammed against the wall, willing the strength back into his limbs.

  The water from the pipes he had split was the same scalding temperature as what had been coming from the shower, and the result was to cast a steam cloud over the entire scene, further hiding him from sight. But neither the near-darkness nor the steam would keep him camouflaged forever, not even long enough for the prison guards to come to his rescue. He had to seize the advantage while he had it.

  In their boldness none of the Fifth Generation had entered the shower carrying a weapon, and that made the chains still laced to Blaine’s wrists all the more effective. His eyes were able to make out shapes in the steamy darkness and he lunged toward the first ones he saw, whirling the chain still laced to his right wrist from left to right. The gnarled links surged across the prisoners’ faces and eyes, blinding them.

  McCracken jumped forward and looped one of his chains around the neck of the next nearest disciple and joined his free hand to it. He took the slack out and caught the man’s windpipe between two of the links. The man stiffened, flailing away before his windpipe snapped, and Blaine dropped him off to the side.

  Two of the surviving members of the Fifth Generation adjusted enough to the dark to charge at Blaine through the steam. McCracken twisted from their path to position one between himself and the other. He reached for the nearest and jammed his thumbs into both the man’s eyes. The man’s agonized howl rose over the rush of spilling water and panicked cries of those still milling about. The other man had a knife, more of a prison shank in truth, and Blaine twisted his blinded fellow into the path of the first wild strike he launched. The blade tore though the disciple’s windpipe and splashed blood all over the rising steam.

  “Where is he? Where is he?”

  The desperate call repeated again and again. The man with the shank knew, or at least thought he did. He launched the shank forward at a shape lost to the dark. But the shape was gone, melted, and when he lunged to follow, the body of the blinded disciple still gurgling blood caught his foot and nearly spilled him. The man was trying to recover his balance when a hand latched on to the wrist holding the shank and twisted it totally around. The snap was as audible as a gunshot. The man’s scream would have been as well, had not a hand clamped over his mouth and twisted his chin with sufficient force to snap his neck.

  The remaining disciples had at last gathered themselves, the terrible calamity that had befallen them suddenly clear. They fanned out through the shower room, careful to dodge the bodies of their fellows. Inspecting the ones they encountered to see if one of them might have been McCracken’s.

  None were. He was nowhere to be found.

  “He’s out!” one cried.

  “He couldn’t be!” another followed.

  “The door!”

  “Covered!”

  “But where is he?”

  “Get the lights back on! Someone get the lights back on!”

  From his perch above them, lying atop the exposed piping that ran a yard beneath the ceiling, Blaine heard footsteps shuffling. According to his count, six more of Deek’s charges remained for him to contend with. Two of these passed directly beneath him. McCracken tightened his hold on a different pipe and his hand snapped away singed. The motion nearly toppled him and he felt something rubbery when he altered his grasp to hold on.

  It was an electric cord, the power supply for the prods that had tortured him and killed Deek. The cord had been snaked up through the piping and plugged into an outlet somewhere high in the wall or even through the ceiling. He couldn’t see the twin prods in the thickening, virtually foglike darkness, but followed the cord three or four feet down from the labyrinthine extensions of piping. If he could pull the prods up to him …

  Yes! It might work!

  Blaine steadied himself and carefully leaned his body forward to grasp the cord. Once he had it, he began to tug, slowly at first, and then snatched the prods to him in a quick burst when he encountered no resistance. As expected, they were operated by a simple setting switch on the power pack connected to the base unit. Once the arrow was moved to any of the five settings, the cuplike prods were automatically activated. As soon as the plastic casements were compressed slightly by pressure, the electricity would surge outward. The remainder of the enemy, meanwhile, collectively stood within the steadily pooling water that made for the best conductor of all.

  Easy targets, if Blaine could make the prods work for him once they got the power back on. The machine’s electrical potency still set to the highest level, McCracken let the twin prods dangle below the pipe he was perched upon.

  “Up there!” a voice called from below.

  “Something moved!”

  “It’s him!”

  Blaine let the prods drop still lower. One of the disciples fighting his way through the fetid mist and near blackness smacked into them.

  The lights flashed back on, creating a dull haze through the thickening steam.

  McCracken dropped down from the pipe, arms cradled above it to keep himself from reaching the floor. He swung his legs hard and caught the man nearest the prods in the back. The blow stripped the disciple of his balance and sent him over face-first into the deepening pool.

  The electrified prods were pinned beneath him.

  The hiss that came when the plastic activators compressed upon striking the floor under the water was brief. The screams and wails that followed were not. Blaine heard them as he hoisted himself back up upon the piping. The shower became one vast electric pool, pouring thousands of volts through all the men standing within it. Blaine could barely make out the shaking, twisting, writhing forms that toppled like dominoes one after the other.

  A sizzling hiss preceded a shower of sparks from the area of the ceiling outlet where the cord had been plugged in. A pop sounded with a bright flash as power in the entire cellblock shorted out, and the shower room was plung
ed into darkness yet again.

  McCracken dropped down from the pipe, and his feet sloshed into the steaming water. He eased forward, doing his best to avoid stepping on bodies en route to the door. Blaine found the latch and threw it open.

  He emerged into the darkness of the cold corridor and hurried to the nearest guard station.

  Wayne Denbo loved being in the dark. In the dark he felt in control. As soon as the light began to intrude, and the voices started to reach him, the control was gone, letting the fear return.

  He had no idea of exactly how long he’d been where he was, only that more and more of the dark was receding. He’d reached out to keep it, but it was getting harder and harder to grasp. And the more it receded, the more he could see the shapes coming at him out of the dust in Beaver Falls. Coming at him like they’d come for the others.

  Only he’d gotten away. Eyes glued more to the rearview mirror than the windshield, he’d quickly lost his sense of direction, cared only that he wasn’t being followed. There seemed to be nothing to do but drive, although he did keep squawking into his mike for a good five minutes before he realized that he’d crushed it. Didn’t even notice the blood seeping out of his hand until he smelled its coppery stench, and even then he’d been afraid to spare the time to bandage the wound.

  Twice in the past day he’d seen the figures from the dust coming for him in the hospital room, and woke up screaming both times. It took three men to hold him down while a nurse gave him a shot that brought the blessed darkness back for a stretch, though not long enough. Got to the point where he knew if he screamed loud enough, they’d give him a shot and he could have the darkness back, because that was all he had wanted.

  Denbo knew he could speak if he really tried, but he chose not to; they wouldn’t let him have the darkness again if he did, and the darkness was his only refuge. There none of it had happened. There he had never gone to Beaver Falls. There Joe Langhorn was still sitting next to him in the car.

  But Joe was gone now. Wayne was alone.

  No one else would listen. No one would believe. He had nowhere to go.

  Except the darkness.

  The twins were like chameleons, able to become part of any situation they entered and appear as though they belonged. It was a skill long mastered and well practiced. The news that a number of inmates had been killed brought scores of relatives out to the federal penitentiary. The twins mixed easily among them, and according to plan, it was Jacob who slid inside the Sheridan Correctional Center’s gates along with representatives of the media.

  “Interesting,” was his first comment when he emerged just under an hour later.

  “What were you able to find out?” Rachel asked him.

  “Fourteen inmates are believed to have been killed. The rumor is, a single man was responsible.”

  “Rumor …”

  “There’s more. Apparently all the victims were members of the Fifth Generation, including their leader.”

  “Then it was McCracken! He was here!”

  “Just as we would have been, given the same information he had.”

  “Please don’t compare yourself to—”

  “I was comparing us.”

  “Never mind.” Her gaze drifted back to the prison yard, where revolving lights continued their red spin through the night. “Could he still be inside?”

  “If he is, he won’t come out through the front.”

  “Then there’s a chance! If we keep moving about the other exits, if we get lucky …”

  “It’s worth a try,” Jacob said with little enthusiasm.

  “You think he’s gone.”

  “We would be by now.”

  “Comparisons again.”

  “If we’re going to find Blaine McCracken,” Jacob told his twin sister, “we’d better learn to think like him.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The rifle-wielding figures enclosing Johnny Wareagle started to move forward, looking more scared than angry. If they were going to shoot, it seemed to Johnny, they would have already.

  “Is he one of ‘em?” a new voice blared. “I think he’s one of ’em!”

  “Then let’s kill him.”

  “Hush up!” ordered a new, gravelly voice. “He ain’t carrying a gun. They ever come, it’d be with guns.”

  “What’d ya call that thing on his chest there?”

  “A knife.”

  “Biggest one I ever saw. Killin’ is killin’.”

  “Never mind that,” noted the gravelly voice. “We know he’s alone. They’d never come alone.”

  “Who?” Johnny dared to ask.

  “Shut your trap!” ordered the original voice.

  The gravel-voiced speaker came closer to Johnny in the darkness. “You lost?”

  “No.”

  “Looking for us, then?”

  “Looking for … something.”

  The man with the gravel voice scanned the others with his eyes. “I say we talk to him.”

  “I say we kill him!” from somewhere in the tight pack of his captors.

  “Might not be as easy as it seems.”

  “He’s seen us, goddamnit! Even if he ain’t one of them—”

  “They did this,” Johnny said suddenly, calmly.

  The men enclosing him looked at each other.

  “What?” the man who wanted to kill him asked.

  “Whoever you fear I am a part of, they burned this village.”

  The man with the gravelly voice finally stepped forward, into the moonlight. The right side of his face was a mass of patchy scar tissue, the eye on that side no more than a shriveled socket sewn closed by the years.

  “You come here lookin’ for us?” he asked through the perpetual grimace his mouth had been turned into.

  “No,” Johnny told him, starting to realize. “I think I’ve come here looking for them.”

  The walk deeper into the woods took all of a half hour. Johnny towered over his dozen or so captors and made sure his hands were always in plain view so they would have no reason to fear he might be hiding another weapon. They brought Johnny to a settlement nearly indistinguishable from the woods containing it, the decently built cabins shrouded by trees and brush. He couldn’t tell exactly how many cabins there were. A row of ten or so lined the front. However many lay amidst the woods beyond these was indiscernible. The settlement’s only clearing contained a central hearth around which rock seats had been placed. Tonight Johnny could see that no fire burned in that hearth. Almost to the clearing, the man with the scarred face turned on his flashlight and poured its beam over Johnny.

  “You’re an Indian.”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you thought it was them you were after,” the scarred man continued to Johnny. “Mind telling us exactly how you came to that conclusion?”

  “I was in these woods before. Twenty years ago.”

  “So was we,” a voice Johnny didn’t recognize put forth.

  Farther back from the circle, new figures had gathered at the rim of the clearing. Wareagle tried not to let his stare linger on them long, but a few seconds were more than enough for him to identify a number of women and a few older children. What little he could glimpse of their faces showed the same trepidation and uncertainty that had laced the voices of his captors.

  “I killed two men that night,” Johnny told the men. “I thought I killed three. The third survived, fell off the cliff and into the river. His name was Earvin Early.”

  The scarred man’s expression turned even more pained. “Little late to come after him, ain’t it?”

  “I only learned Monday afternoon that he was still alive. To me that makes the trail barely thirty-six hours old.”

  “You a bounty hunter, something like that?” the scarred man wanted to know.

  “In a manner of speaking, I was back then,” Johnny told them all, and summarized the events of twenty years ago as best he could.

  The scarred man was nodding in the end. “These, er, people who
sent you after the killers. They musta had their reasons for choosing you.”

  “They did.”

  “Knew you were the kinda man got a job done right.”

  “Until yesterday, I thought I had.”

  “Those three the only ones you were looking for?”

  “Back then, yes.”

  “And now?”

  “Wherever Early’s trail takes me,” Johnny said, leaving out mention of Judgment Day.

  “But it took you to us.” The moonlight caught the good side of the scarred man’s face, showed it to be creased and wrinkled, the single eye a pale gray color set in a grim countenance. “See, here’s the problem. You say this Early and the two others were what brought you to the woods originally. Thing is, it coulda been any of us, Injun, ’cause the truth is, we’re not much different. We’re all criminals and we were all on the lam when we got here.”

  The moon peeked out from behind the clouds and caught the whole of the scarred man’s face, now concentrated intensely his way. Johnny gazed down at him. “And yet you weren’t worried that was what brought me to you tonight.”

  The scarred man’s jaw clenched tight. His eye narrowed into a determined slit, and Johnny could see in it the memories of the burned-out settlement they had left a few miles back in the woods. “They’ll be back. Just a matter of time, and time’s the one thing we fought to keep our control over.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The rest of us, Injun, the ones that got away. The rest of the founding members of the Key Society.”

  “Man who brought us here called it that ’cause he figured he had the key,” the scarred man continued, after introducing himself as Hodge and inviting Johnny to take a seat across from him on one of the rocks that enclosed the cold hearth. Most of the others joined them in the ragtag circle, the rest hanging back on foot or crouched on their haunches. The women and children had vanished from the clearing, at least from sight. In the wooden cabins that rimmed it, Johnny caught occasional flashes of dim light that came and went quickly in the darkness. “What we’re talking about here is second chances, a kind of rebirth, or as Frye called it, the key that would unlock the door to a better world for us.”