Cain's Blood: A Novel

by Girard, Geoffrey

  In any case, the truth would never be believed anyway. Cloned serial killers? Even more absurd than the notion of the Air Force shooting down Flight 93 or Goldman Sachs orchestrating a seven-trillion-dollar heist off the American people. So much easier to believe that brave Americans fought terrorists over an empty field or that a Peter-Paul bailout had been necessary to avoid the next Great Depression. So much easier. As lex parsimoniae. Occam’s razor. It made the whole damn world go round. Men like Stanforth counted on the principle to pull off the unthinkable at will. A third of the country couldn’t name the vice president. Less than half could find Afghanistan on a map. Most people were plain fucking ignorant.

  In a shallow bunker on American soil, Castillo realized that he was no different. For the last two years, he’d stayed focused on the small picture. His own. The one that was always clearest, made the most sense. Work. Sleep. Fuck. Eat. Watch sports. Repeat. All the while, tell yourself you’re one of the good guys. Not like those other stupid assholes. Not like those others . . .

  “They’re here.”

  Jeff’s muted voice broke through his dark reflections, and Castillo turned to the boy.

  “Castillo . . . ?”

  He patted Jeff’s shoulder, then tapped the transmitter on his chest. “Blue 8, message. Over.” The boy shivered beside him. Castillo tried again: “Blue Team 8?”

  “Send. Over.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing yet,” a voice from two miles away answered. A “team” of one man. There was no reason to disclose their true numbers.

  “They’re here,” Jeff said again.

  Castillo looked down the ditch-line toward Ox, who shrugged. Castillo shouldered his rifle, a modified G3, and surveyed the obverse field through the power scope. Nothing. “Gold Team 4?” He tried the scout hidden on the central bunker’s roof.

  “Negative.”

  “Roger. Out.” Castillo eyed the scope again, and in the ethereal smolder of night vision and thermal imaging, the ghost world returned. It was a territory Castillo had long walked in. These otherworldly shapes and hues, smoldering and lucent like another reality hidden within our own. How many hours, weeks, years he had traveled here, he could not say exactly, but it was enough that it was as familiar and comforting as the real world. Maybe, he allowed, more so. How many men had he watched from this same spectral perspective? Following their every movement, sometimes for hours. Sometimes pulling the trigger, sometimes not. The thousands of ghosts he’d seen: Men, women, and children drifting over a dim landscape of green and black shadow.

  The souls of the perished dead assembled forth from Erebus. Betrothed girls and youths, and much-enduring old men, and tender virgins, having a newly-grieved mind, and many wounded warriors, possessing gore-smeared arms. In great numbers, they all wandered together about the blood-filled trench on all sides with horrific screams and clamour.

  Homer’s words came to mind, but no ghosts moved among his vision. Only the barren extraterrestrial terrain. Forsaken. Dead. They’re here. . . . Jeff’s words again echoing.

  “Gold Team?” Castillo checked in once more.

  “Hold up,” the voice crackled back. “Something . . .”

  “D2,” Ox’s voice now. “Message all signs. Movement left of the pickup.”

  Castillo knew the old pickup was to his right, but out of his line of fire. His discipline and trust remained solid. He kept an eye only on his area. Still nothing. Jeff tensed beside him.

  “What the fuck . . .” Ox’s electric voice rustled in his ear. “Gold?”

  “Affirmative,” the man above them, Wilke, confirmed. “What . . . What’s he doing?”

  “C2, engage?” Ox asked.

  “Your call,” Castillo replied.

  “G4?” Ox’s voice calling the sharpshooter above. “Alex? You got him?”

  “Ah, affirmative . . . roger. In three, two . . .”

  Two shots from the Barrett M107 sniper rifle exploded like a small cannon. Ox’s automatic fire sputtered in the blast’s echo.

  Castillo bumped Jeff softly with his elbow in reassurance.

  “Loud,” Jeff said.

  Castillo nodded, edged closer. Rifle up. Still nothing.

  Blue reported in. “B8. Message over. Movement in the south and west,” the muted voice said from four miles out in the dark somewhere in his thermal-guarded ghillie suit. “Five, six. Ten men. Spreading out. Setting the perimeter.”

  Ten. Castillo shook his head. That’s all Blue could see. Might be another dozen covering the back side or to the east. Still, fifty men . . . it would be the least of their worries. “G4?”

  No response. Jeff’s gas mask stared up at him, and Castillo turned down toward Ox. The elfin man was huddled against the forward trench barrage, his back turned to Castillo, the AK74 aimed downfield. “Gold Team?” he tried again. “Ox?” No point using the handles. These people already knew who Ox was, where he lived, what he knew. . . .

  “Send.” Ox’s voice emerging in his ear.

  “Target?”

  “Negative. I don’t know . . . maybe. Had him dead in my sights. But now . . . I’m not so . . . and I’m not going out there to find out. I . . . What the fuck, man?”

  “Copy that. G4?” Maybe Wilke, overhead with the sniper rifle, had a better look at what they’d done. If anything. “Gold Four. Come in.” Castillo fought the urge to turn and eye the roof above.

  Jeff mumbled something beside him. Castillo wasn’t sure it had been words at all, and he turned. The boy stood frozen, hands and arms out before his own mask. Studying his suit. Tiny splashes, stars, of blood glistened on his suit. Twinkled almost. A dozen tiny red stars. Castillo stared in confusion as another appeared. And one more.

  Then he understood.

  The next drops hit him now. Spitting down on them both like dark, reluctant rain from above. He finally looked up. Jeff, too.

  The moist stain started at the top of the concrete building, trailed unevenly in several distinct rivulets down the side of the wall. An arm dangled off the rooftop. The sharpshooter, Wilke. Braced by the elbow, the wrist and fingers sagging and lifeless above them. The blood dribbled slowly, steadily from the dangling hand. They watched as his arm slid backward, something unhurriedly dragging his body back from the edge.

  “This is Castillo,” he snapped. He grabbed the boy by the chest with his hand. “Red 1, go.”

  The voice came back. “Go?”

  “Now!” Castillo roared, pulling Jeff toward him.

  The whole night exploded, shook the hilltop. The boom, a long series of succinct succeeding detonations, heralded an unnatural and fleeting dawn in the western woods.

  Castillo had lifted Jeff with his left arm and was already carrying him down the line toward the bunker’s entrance. Random rifle fire returned from the forest indicated that the lure had been taken. Smoke rolled like mist out of the forest after them.

  Ox and another man waited, providing cover, outside the barred entrance. They unleashed a hail of ammunition as another series of explosions shattered the western woodland. “Guess they didn’t get the hint the first time,” Ox said beneath his mask, unlatching the entryway. “Come on.”

  “Wilke’s down,” Castillo told him.

  “Copy.” Ox stepped inside, rifle aimed above toward where Wilke’s body had been.

  “C2 to all: Hands Out. Hands Out.” Castillo gave the signal to retreat back toward the shelter in an attempt to keep bringing them closer, then he led Jeff, Ox, and another man down the long, dim hall. Thin muted green fluorescent lights lined the descending floor, blurring into one long line as they filed back together. Jeff shuffled behind him, knowing that every second counted. Ox and the other man, McLaughlin, fell into step to their rear. More gunfire trailed in ever-softening echoes behind them. Reinforcements, just two men, moved into new positions against the advancing ATF teams.

  At the end of the tunnel, the passageway split into a T-shape, and Castillo guided Jeff to the left, pushing
him into the waiting darkness. As quickly, he turned back, crouched to one knee. Ox had struck a similar position opposite them along the top of the T as McLaughlin wrestled with his harness. Castillo thought about taking his place, then glanced back down the long hallway.

  Through the night vision goggles, nothing. Thermal heat scope, nothing. If we’re hard to see with stuff Ox found on eBay, what does this killer have at its disposal? The egg that had given birth to Jeff had started as a single cell from a dead hair follicle. In a world that could do something like that, how difficult to genetically alter a man into something cold-blooded? Castillo’d been spraying his uniforms for more than a decade with chemicals to reduce his own infrared signature. How difficult to change the genetic makeup of skin?

  Castillo pressed his eye tight to the scope, still picking up nothing in the hallway. Will it wait for the others? Did it not take the bait?

  “Castillo?” The mask-stifled voice from behind.

  “Hold on . . .” He gestured Jeff quiet, his other hand still on the trigger. He poured his whole self into the scope, trying to spirit a form that simply wasn’t there. Still . . . nothing.

  “Castillo . . .” Jeff’s voice again.

  Castillo looked down and discovered the boy had slumped against the wall. He was half curled into a ball, one knee up, hands up and crossed and bent awkwardly in front of his mask. Protectively.

  “Take it easy, kid, we got you,” he said, his voice sounding strange to his own ears, quiet. Comforting. “He’ll come, but it’s not here yet. We just have to wait—”

  “It’s here,” cried Jeff. He was shaking uncontrollably, his fingers trembling over the hard shell encasing his face.

  Castillo swung around, checked again, squinting hard into the scope—nothing at all, not the faintest blip of life. “There’s nothing there, buddy,” he began, only to break off his words at Jeff’s near-incoherent moan, the sound thick. Primal. Not a sound any kid should make. Not a sound any human should make, but one he’d made himself once in a cave in Iran.

  “You picking up anything?” he asked the others.

  “Negative,” both men across from him replied as one.

  Damn it.

  Jeff’s fingers had peeled away from his mask and curled into a quivering fist. A slender finger jabbed into the darkness, shaking and crippled with fright. “It . . . it’s,” he moaned, his voice a mere whisper of sound, as if it was being ground out of him by sheer will. He couldn’t unlock his hand, continuing to stab into the pitch black.

  “Jeff, what?”

  The boy said, “It’s standing right there.”

  Castillo glanced down at his useless scope, then back to the kid, a one-human GPS for all that was sick in the world. “Fuck it,” he growled. “McLaughlin! Go.”

  The man on the other side of the T jerked around to him, his surprise palpable even though Castillo couldn’t see his eyes. “Go?”

  “All of it!” Castillo barked and McLaughlin moved before the command had even finished, the flamethrower belching forth into the dark down the hallway.

  But the thick blazing fire trail had already stopped and erupted in a hundred directions.

  McLaughlin jerked the stream of flame upward. Blinding light, flames, and heat blasted back at them all.

  “Fuck!” Castillo fell back, pushing the boy with him. Curses and shouting across the hallway. The flamethrower had stopped. The hallway glowed warmly, the burning gel still spurted in a line on the floor. And something else.

  Something was standing right in front of them. Not three feet away.

  Something screaming. And on fire.

  A man.

  And a shape and presence Castillo recognized immediately now.

  Castillo wrapped his hand into Jeff’s collar, below the mask. Pulled him closer, and then behind.

  WER MIT UNGEHEUERN KÄMPFT

  JUNE 15, WEDNESDAY—NEAR ROUTE 47, SD

  Jeff stared down the hallway. The firestorm that’d lit up the blackness had dwindled to a single point: A man in flames. A man who was somehow part him. Screaming in agony, flailing against the floor and wall. Its mind now Jeff’s mind, its thoughts Jeff’s thoughts, culminating in rage and agony and fire. Get out of my head! the boy screamed in his own mind.

  Two thunderous shots came from beside him. Someone—Castillo, he thought—putting the burning man out of its misery. Or, just maybe, it was to put Jeff out of his, as the alien thoughts vanished in an instant.

  “We need to get back up top,” Ox said, as if there wasn’t a dead body still smoking in front of them. “The others will need cover.”

  As one, they went back up the tunnel, not speaking. Even through the mask, Jeff could smell its burning flesh, couldn’t avoid looking at it, the man, as they stepped around—and it was a man, not a thing anymore. A man with open, staring eyes and a gaping, terrified mouth. A man that could have been him. Made from the same stuff. Made by his father.

  “Keep moving,” Castillo said, the words surprisingly loud in the sudden hush. His feet started forward again, and they moved up the hallway, the smoke finally clearing enough for the little green lights to come up again, guiding their path until the natural light from outside came clearer. “Wait here, keep down here against the wall.”

  Jeff blinked hard, lifting his arm to rub his sleeve over the mask, clearing away the greasy soot and grime of the flamethrower residue. “I’m good,” he said. His throat closed up at that thought, and he stepped forward, even as a burst of gunfire sounded around the opening of the bunker.

  “Nice job back there.” Castillo gripped his shoulder. “You hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give us one minute to collect the others, then we’re out the back as planned. OK?”

  Jeff nodded, swallowed. And then Castillo and the others were stepping outside. Through the opening, he watched Ox gesture. Another man’s shaggy outline materialized in the trench line, silhouetted in the shelter’s half-cracked opening. Rosfeld maybe, Jeff thought.

  No sooner had Rosfeld appeared than a hissing whistle and several thunks surrounded them with sound. Smoke detonated from a dozen different places, enveloping the trench rolling down the hallway and cutting off Jeff’s sight. He couldn’t see three feet in front of him.

  “Castillo!”

  “Don’t move, Jeff,” Castillo’s voice came back from outside, reassuringly close. “It’s only smoke. I got you.”

  “Grenades!” someone—Jeff couldn’t tell who—shouted.

  “Down!” Castillo barked, yanking Jeff out through the doorway and throwing him bodily into a low trench as a tremendous boom filled the whole world. Jeff felt his body smack the bottom of the pit almost with relief, the tactile contact the only thing that kept him pinned to the earth. Ears ringing, gasping for breath in the stifling mask.

  He fell away from Castillo, hugging the bottom of the pit and praying the wet, cold earth would stop spinning beneath him. Around him there were curses, orders, and the sound of more gunfire, but his pulse was pounding so loud in his ears that everything seemed an echo of the initial boom. He scrambled farther along the trench, seeking cover, safety, until he trusted his eyes enough to not see three of everything and lifted his head. Smoke everywhere, bodies rushing around like ghosts in an ash storm. Jeff looked left for Castillo—and he was gone.

  Jeff spun back around. Castillo had been right with him, but he was nowhere. The trench was empty, and he was blind beyond maybe a few feet. “Castillo!” he yelled, but in the rain of gunfire his voice was completely lost.

  Then the smoke cleared enough and he squinted into it. Castillo was crouched ahead, not ten feet away, waving at him—his face obscured by his gas mask and his body tight and coiled, as if he was ready to spring. “Castillo . . . ,” Jeff shouted and pushed forward, relief washing through him for the first time in what seemed like hours.

  As Jeff rushed forward, Castillo looked up and smiled at him.

  Except you can’t smile through a gas mask
.

  Jeff’s feet skidded to a stop.

  It wasn’t Castillo.

  And the face wasn’t really a face at all anymore.

  Just an open gaping maw, dripping, leering at him with terrible glee.

  He’d seen that same non-face a hundred times before. The same face had reigned over his nightmares and stared out of dark shadows for as long as he could remember. It wasn’t really a face anymore because it was every face. It was his face. His and Ted’s and Henry’s. And Al’s and David’s too. All of them. Even the one painted like a clown. Each and every copy of the same damned thing.

  It was one of the things that he’d felt moving down the steps, crawling down the hallway toward him. Only he hadn’t known this one was here, and he’d run right fucking toward it like some sort of idiot baby running to his daddy. Jeff turned. Fled.

  Where was Castillo? He had to find Castillo! But Castillo could have been anywhere—he was probably fighting for his life, and if Jeff came up on him too fast, he’d be distracted. Maybe even killed. Jeff wheeled around, his eyes skipping off buildings, bunkers, men. Flashing bursts of gunfire. “No no no no no!” Jeff cried, though no one was listening anymore. The smoke had cleared enough that he could see the line of trees ahead, not thirty feet away. He didn’t need to, couldn’t really, get to Castillo. He’d fucked up the one thing Castillo’d told him to do. But it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, Castillo would find him no matter where he went. He just needed to get away and hide. He’d be fine if he made it into the woods. He could hide there, he could be safe. The woods!

  His lungs burned as he reached the deep black trees, stumbling over roots and fallen branches, his breathing coming so fast and hard that it steamed up the inside of his mask until it was dripping with condensation and his vision was entirely blurred again. Like nightmare running. With a grunt, he ripped off his gas mask, tossed it as he picked up pace, the sudden rush of oxygen all he needed to keep going.