I heard a ruckus and managed to get up on one elbow. My vision cleared enough to see Silas leap at my attacker. Paul, still with that uncanny quickness, twirled just in time and jabbed the cane at Silas. Its clear tip let loose a volley of blue sparks when it connected with Silas’s chest. Silas tottered backward and collapsed, shaking while electricity rippled over him. His eyes rolled to the back of his head.
“Silas!” I screamed. In my rage, the pain in my face and hip became mere traces of discomfort.
I struggled to my feet and charged, but Paul was once again the swifter of us. He brought the cane down on my shoulder without even turning around. The force of the blow compelled me to my knees. Numbness streaked through me. I remembered the time I stuck a fork into an electrical outlet when I was a kid. The sensation I felt then was very similar to now, only a thousand times worse.
Paul drew back his combination walking stick/sedation weapon. I toppled over, finally able to breathe. I didn’t black out as Silas had, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
“What…do you…want…” I gasped. It felt like someone had shoved a dry sponge down my throat.
“I need your life to mean nothing,” he replied softly.
52
I wanted to give Paul a wise-ass response, something like, well, you’re too late, because my life stopped meaning anything long before I met you, but I fought the urge. My whole body ached and Silas was unconscious only six feet away. The last thing I wanted to do was prod the crazy bastard into doing something to hurt my boy.
With the two of us down for the count, Paul seemed to revert to his previous, feeble state. He turned his head to the side and shouted in what sounded like German – hatten see esoof was what I heard – and then faced me. The black circles surrounding his green eyes darkened, as if he’d expended all his energy and needed to be recharged. He stabbed at the floor with his cane and leaned on it, breathing in heavy, rasping bursts. I didn’t try to make a move. I’d seen how quick he was when he wanted to be and didn’t want to provoke a repeat performance.
Paul stared at me without saying a word. He blinked, and I noticed a change coming over his eyes. They’d been green not five seconds ago, but now the right one looked pale, going on gray, growing murkier as the seconds ticked away. The left eye followed suit.
Pretty soon they’ll be the same color as mine, I thought.
His right eye blinked again, all by itself. It looked like he winked at me, but his expression was still slacked with joyless indifference. I decided that he’d gone insane. That had to be the case. There was no way the man who left me that letter, the man who cared so deeply for the two boys back in the bunker, would be capable of such callousness and violence.
As if to answer this contemplation, Paul muttered, “I’m sorry.” His voice sounded different somehow – softer, more delicate, with an underlying hint of dismay.
It didn’t last. He suddenly shot up straight and twirled the cane. His head twisted to the side again, as if he’d been slapped. When he turned back to me the change in his eyes reversed, becoming green once more. I wondered if they’d ever really shifted, or if it had been an effect of the inconsistent light from the fluorescents.
“As I mentioned before,” said Paul with an indifferent shrug, “your life has to mean nothing.”
I let my eyes wander to Silas, who was still unconscious just to the left of Paul. Silas’s chest still rose and fell, which was good, and he began squirming. He was okay. Paul noticed this too, and he brought the electrified tip of his cane off the ground ever so slightly.
With him paying attention to Silas, I drew my right knee beneath me and prepared to leap if the moment presented itself. I took a deep breath into my dry, cracked throat, and managed to speak in the most staid tone I could.
“Touch him and I’ll kill you.”
Paul spun around, glaring at me, his lips pursed and his eyebrows raised. I knew what was going to come out of his mouth, so I cut him off just as he started to speak.
“Because he’s my boy,” I snarled. “You’d do the same thing if it was one of your boys laying there. That’s right, Kaiser and Will. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t. Being a douche doesn’t become you.”
He peered at Silas as if he was going to go in that direction and then faced me again. He seemed confused. One moment his eyelids squeezed shut in anger, the next they bulged as if he’d seen a ghost. All the while his mouth kept opening and closing, uttering incomprehensible words to no one in particular. He looked like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Just as his body started to shake, Paul did a very odd thing. In a split-second of clarity his eyes smiled at me and he nodded, as if beckoning me forward. After that his eyes rolled back, revealing their yellowing, sickly underbellies. His body lurched to the side and his arm almost didn’t move fast enough to wedge the cane beneath him to break his fall.
My moment had arrived. Gritting my teeth so tight I could feel pressure build in my sinuses, I used the foot tucked underneath me like a spring and jumped, soaring over the cataleptic robot, my shoulder aimed at Paul’s chest. In my haste my targeting was off and I hit him on the side. My body went careening. I hit the ground and rolled while Paul staggered and then teetered over, unnaturally stiff. He landed flat on his back with a wet thud.
Around the time Paul’s body hit the floor, Silas had regained a bit of his senses. He lifted his head, his eyes groggy. I waved at him and he seemed to register my presence before burying his face in the crook of his arm. Edginess gnawed at my insides. Paul had fallen close enough to my boy that his twitching fingers were only a precious few inches away from his naked rump.
I scampered on all fours and before I knew it I was close enough to pounce. I landed on Paul’s midsection. A burst of the most pungent breath I’d ever smelled blustered between his lips, along with a stream of bloody saliva. It dripped down my cheeks and a strand hung from my nose, but I didn’t care. The crazy bastard was not going to hurt my dog, my boy, my gi-faht. No way, no how, nosiree Bob.
I balled my fist, not feeling any pain. Paul’s eyes started doing that shifting thing again, but just as with my pain, it didn’t register. My rage, the urge to protect my kin, was all that mattered.
My fist hit paydirt and Paul’s head snapped to the side. A torrent of his bloody spittle painted a jagged line across the dusty steel floor. His eyelids fluttered and he trilled in a weak voice. I punched him again, this time on his ear. My knuckles slid and a section of skin just below his lobe sloughed away like putty, revealing a patch of glistening red.
My stomach lurched and one primal reaction overtook another – I dropped to the floor and dry heaved. The world spun while I used my palms, wet and slippery from my sweat and Paul’s blood, to pull myself away from him. I heaved again, then again, and after one more time I waited, my body tense, anticipating another pitch that thankfully didn’t come. I uttered a soft cry and saw Silas staring at me with his big, brown-blue eyes. He crouched a few feet away with a half-smile on his human face.
Silas cautiously inched toward Paul, who gasped for breath while his wrecked ear bled out. I wanted to yell out for him to stop, but something about his expression held my tongue. He looked eerily similar to the way his doggy self did the first time he set eyes on the dead body of Bridget Cormier. He rested his head on Paul’s thigh, whose surprisingly gentle hand then ran through his nest of black hair. The sight of this threw me overboard.
“Get your hand of him!” I said. “That’s my boy!”
Silas lifted his head and looked at me, seemingly oblivious to the burden my voice projected. Paul glimpsed my way, as well, and I noticed the color of his eyes waver once more. His corneas became a shifting weave of emerald green and dark brown. His jaw worked up and down while his nostrils flared. I found myself mesmerized.
The whirlpool of color ceased churning and a pair of brown eyes flecked with gold, very much like mine, stared at me. They appeared both kind and tormented. The
face containing them, stripped of superciliousness and anger, became an older version of my own. My breathing hitched and I tilted my head.
“What the…,” I said aloud. “I don’t…”
Paul brought up his right hand. It seemed to take a great amount of effort for him to do so. He dabbed a finger into the gory mess of his ear and he stared at the red stain on his fingertips. He grimaced, glanced at Silas, and then turned my way again. His expression seemed urgent, and soon I understood why.
His corneas began to eddy.
His lips moved and the voice that came from between them was aggrieved and jarringly familiar. “Come here,” he said. “Please.”
I crept forward on my hands and knees until I hovered over him. I put my hand on his shoulder, feeling how slender and frail he was beneath his long white coat. He looked impossibly old now, malnourished to a point near death. How he could’ve been capable of the incredible feats of strength he displayed earlier was beyond me.
“Look,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.
“Where?” I asked. Silas had joined me by then, and he looked worried. Paul tugged on the lower hem of the yellow undershirt that clung to his much-too-slender torso. He didn’t seem to have the strength to pull it up. I reached down to help him.
“Hurry,” he muttered. He coughed, and the blood from his lips painted streaks on his shirt. “There isn’t…much…time.”
I yanked up his top. The sickly-sweet aroma of decay I’d come to know from my time in the ditch at the Mancuso farm filled my nostrils. I gagged. Silas did, as well, and scurried away. I covered my mouth and nose with the collar of my shirt – a shirt that had originally belonged to the man below me – and gazed with horror at what I’d uncovered.
Paul’s chest and stomach were a wan shade of olive green. Thick varicose veins pulsed beneath his waxy flesh. His navel was black and crusted over, his stomach sunken like an anorexic’s. Yet none of this was as repulsive as what I found between his ribs.
Positioned just left of center on his breastplate was an eight-inch tube. It was black and seemed to be made of rubber. In the center of the tube shone a circular, red-and-green, eye-like emblem. The whole device was covered with a layer of slime. From each end of the tube were two wires, one green and one red. The points where these wires entered Paul’s skin oozed with pus and meniscus fluid. It was a wholly frightening-looking device whose purpose I could only imagine.
I heart a soft ticking noise and bent over the black and slimy thing, making sure to keep my own flesh as far away as possible. It came again, a faint chink, like a lock sliding into place. Then it happened again. I counted four Mississippi before it happened a fourth time.
“So weird,” I said aloud.
Silas grabbed my hair and pulled me up. He looked frightened. He put his hands on my cheeks and guided my head until I was looking in Paul’s direction. The man with the weird apparatus in his chest gazed upon me, his face a twisted mask of pain. He moved his lips, speaking words I couldn’t hear. Bloody spit trickled over his chin. I leaned in closer.
“Pull it out,” he murmured.
I sat up and grimaced. “You sure?” I asked. “What’ll it do to you?”
Paul grabbed my shirt and my collar fell away from my nose. That smell of rot, of death, overran my nostrils again, burning my nose hairs. I glanced at the emaciated hand that held me, and then back at its owner.
“Do it now,” he said, louder this time. The mechanical joylessness from earlier entered his tone. Silas noticed this too and backed up ever so slightly. Paul gritted his teeth and said with even more force, “There’s not much time. I can’t hold it back much longer.”
As if to illustrate that point, the hand not holding my shirt snapped up and started wrenching my hair. White hot pins gouged my scalp. It felt like the guy was going to rip my hair right out of my head. In a panic I lost sight of my apprehension and wrapped both hands around the tube embedded in his chest. My fingers sunk into the sludge covering it.
Paul heaved and so did I. The device lifted off his chest easily, pulling the wires taut beneath his stretched skin. Paul intensified his hair-wrangling efforts, dragging me into a bent, half-kneeling, half-standing position. He seemed to gain strength with each wasted second. I looked over and saw the hand not pulling my hair inching closer and closer to the cane, which was only a few short finger-lunges away.
“Oh shit!” I said with a yelp, and tugged on the device harder.
Paul screamed and arched his back as the wires pulled farther and farther out, ripping his skin and causing blood to flow. He let go of my hair and tried to get my hands off the thing, but my grip was sure and he kept slipping. I rose to my feet and backed away, still pulling. I couldn’t believe how long the wires were. Standing off to the side as I was, they were at least four feet long and still emerging. I thought of marionette strings, shivered, and yanked harder still.
Two more feet was all it took. The wires popped free from Paul’s chest. The ends of the wires were balled, and they ripped open his sternum. Blood disgorged from the slits in liquid ribbons. Paul’s body convulsed. I released the oblong, glop-covered, ticking device. It fell to my feet with a wet clank. The wires writhed on the floor like they were dying. The balls at the ends of them were collapsible spheres that snapped open and shut. Yet another shudder overcame me.
I kicked the sickening device away and knelt over my fading doppelganger. Silas joined me. There were tears in Silas’s eyes as he stroked the dying man’s sandy hair. Paul had stopped convulsing by then, lying still in an ever-expanding pool of red. His chest rose and fell sporadically and his eyes were open, brimming with moisture. I placed one slime-covered hand on his cheek.
“Hey there, man,” I said, looking into my own eyes. In my growing sorrow I didn’t feel the slightest bit silly when I asked, “How’re you feeling?”
“Been…better,” Paul managed to cough out. His breath smelled like rotten beef. He closed his eyes and uttered, “Just…unp…plug…it…” in a voice so small it seemed to come from another dimension. He convulsed one more time, a faint cry creased his lips, and he fell still. I searched his neck for a pulse and couldn’t find one. Blood no longer spurted from his wounds.
He was gone.
“Oh no,” I whispered. I sat back and Silas came up to me, rolling into my lap. My heart raced. “Unplug what?” I asked the dead man, staring at him, pleading with his corpse. “From where?”
The lights in the room dimmed. The ticking from the device I yanked from Paul’s chest grew both louder and closer together. The evil eye in the center of the contraption pointed in our direction, flashing red, green, red, green. The ticking became so fast that it was like a drummer gone wild on a snare drum. Then, it abruptly stopped, making a popping noise before a plume of smoke rose up.
When that happened, the lights in the room faded even more. A horn, like an air-raid siren, blared. I covered my ears and winced. A woman’s voice came next, speaking in a flat, mechanical tone so deafening that the siren seemed pitiful by comparison.
“EMERGENCY CODE 233.53,” the voice said. “PROJECT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED…INITIATING COUNTERMEASURES…YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO ENTER THE PASSWORD.”
“Goddamn it, what now?” I screamed.
53
“FIVE…FOUR…THREE…”
I skittered around the room like a caged baboon while the mechanized lady in the machine counted down. The giant panels on the walls lit up with ominous numbers, counting along with her. With emergency lights flashing, everything around me was colored red and black. I jumped over Paul’s corpse and worked my way around the multiple consoles, searching for something to grab hold of. The consoles’ undersides were smooth and gapless, with no chords to be found. I reached mannequin man, the cataleptic robot, and stepped over it. “Unplug HIM?” I bellowed at the monitors. Then I turned to Paul’s body, above which Silas still knelt, and yelled, “It’d be nice if you weren’t so freaking vague!”
I hadn’t
made it a quarter of the way around the room when the countdown clock hit zero. “INITIALIZING PURGING MEASURES,” the voice said, and everything stopped. The red lights faded away and the fluorescents came back up. The endless drone of machinery from beneath the structure ceased, as well. All was silent, all was still. Silas looked up at me with curious, concerned eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe there’s a malfunction or something.” I waved my arm in a wide arc, as if he could understand the gesture. “I mean, this place has got to be pretty damn old. Maybe everything just bro –”
Another thunderous sound shook me to my core, cutting me off, sounding like a series of giant rubber bands snapping in steady progression. Instinctively I cowered, covering my head with my arms in case something fell from above. Then I heard a sequence of pops, followed by the hissing of steam from a colossal tea kettle, and finally the rumble and creak of gears grinding together.
All that noise came from behind me, from the platform on which the Monster of Oddville crouched.
Not really wanting to, I slowly dropped my hands and craned my neck. My heart, that poor, damaged vessel, beat faster than it ever had before. I backed away, still stooped, until my head cracked against an instrument panel. Flashbulbs of pain blocked out my sight.
The stars faded and I saw the various tubes that held the Dreadnaught in place dangling around it, no longer attached. More grinding followed, and the whir of servos followed that. The two telescope-like eyes on the beast’s head glowed red, whining as they contracted back into its metal skull and then out again. Its joints shuddered and screeched. It rose from its squat and stood at full height. The mechanical arms lifted their razor-filled hands. The wings spread wide. Its mouth of steel daggers opened and it shrieked. It was the same sound I’d heard outside the bomb shelter. At a distance it had been disturbing, but up close, as with most every sound that had pummeled my eardrums over the last couple days, it was unbearable.
Silas: A Supernatural Thriller Page 21