A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  He moved to the boy, who tracked Max with unblinking eyes. Kneeling suddenly in front of him, fingers splayed on the floor to keep from knocking into the other children, Max remembered to smile.

  The mother gasped. The father put his hand on Max’s shoulder. His grip was weak. Pathetic.

  The other boys barely glanced at Max before turning their attention to the squeaking, bleating toys in their hands. One held a grey robot with an LCD screen on its chest. He pushed red buttons at the robot’s belly. Another appeared to be piloting a dot of an aircraft on a device that looked like a cartoon of a military instrument. The boy staring at him held out a yellow-bordered device bearing the title of Mini-Munchman. “Hey, mister,” he said, softly, the way he might ask one of his brothers in a neighboring bed, in the middle of the night when they were all supposed to be sleeping, “do you want to play a game?”

  English accent. Bedfordshire. Educated. Max had been given assignments by men speaking with similar accents.

  It was possible someone in the grouping had been assigned to follow either Max or Mr. Tchask. A third party, curious about what was going on with an odd deployment of assets.

  Of course, they could have all been a perfectly innocent family. He wondered if he’d live long enough for the boy to grow up and ask him to kill someone.

  Max turned to the man trying to rise out of his seat while leaning on Max’s shoulder. Max broadened his grin. One of the other boys happened to look up and giggled. The father froze, then lost his balance and sat back down. “Don’t worry, sir,” Max said, as he’d been taught to do by his superiors. “I’m not here to hurt anyone.” The words rolled out mechanically, like parts of a machine he didn’t know how to put together.

  The man was a clerk, soft and doughy, a little red from the sudden exertion. No training. The wife was useless. The children were just that. Which left only the two women across the aisle.

  He turned back to the boy and said, “No, thank you. That’s not the kind of violence I condone.”

  The boy lowered and tucked his chin, keeping his eyes up and open. Good instincts. “You’re weird.”

  “My friend played a joke on me,” Max said.

  The husband and wife huddled in a manic conference. Two women from the seats across the aisle stood up, one pointing to the rear of the car where the emergency brake handle was located. The other mentioned the conductor.

  “Yes,” said the boy.

  “Can I have what he gave you?”

  The mother turned away from the husband, stared at Max, made a sound at the back of her throat. She snatched the two other boys and dragged them to her. One of the women from across the aisle fumbled through her purse.

  There she was.

  “Yeah.” The boy took a round metal film canister from a Moomims backpack behind him and handed it to Max.

  The metal felt cool in Max’s hand, but his fingers tingled. The family name of Colgrave was neatly written on dirtied masking tape stuck on the side. He popped the can open. Inside, a reel with Russian markings was filled with aging 16mm film. Nitrate, old surplus stock from behind the Iron Curtain, probably picked up at a bazaar by Mr. Tchask’s and the rest of his group’s apparently missionary parents, possibly to document their spiritual journey.

  Growing up, Max had seen all kinds of cast-off Western goods for sale at markets.

  He brushed his fingers over the cool metal of the reel. Images flashed in his mind, stolen from frames melting as they passed before a projector bulb.

  Smoke.

  Fire.

  Too many arms.

  Skulls.

  Blood pooling between blue legs.

  Max closed the canister. Perhaps the container had once been used to smuggle hallucinogens.

  The Beast shriveled into a speck of freezing hate burning like a kidney stone tearing its way through his flesh.

  The mother tried to screech but the sound died without breath. The boys writhed to break out of her arms, crying and staring at her with expressions of fright.

  “Thank you,” Max said, and slipped the boy a twenty.

  “Is it real?” the boy asked, looking at the paper with a furrowed brow.

  Behind them, Savet and his friends were making noise. There hadn’t been any gunshots, even muffled, or screams of people witnessing a slit throat or a stab to the heart. Against all odds, Mr. Tchask was still alive.

  It was Max who had what they wanted.

  He stood and turned suddenly, bumping into the two women from across the aisle. The scrum of bodies that had trapped Savet and his companions broke. Mr. Tchask was dumped back into his seat, and the college students moved on, fascinated by one another. The rest headed for the front of the car. Max snatched the canister of pepper spray from the hands of the woman who’d been searching through her handbag.

  Police issue. American. So the discrete traveling English family with polished accents had friends in America. What a surprise.

  “Tell your superiors thank you,” he said, still in the mechanical civilian mode. He left the car.

  Fire. Smoke. They were good ideas.

  He’d anticipated another coach, but instead Max found himself in a cafe car, brightly lit to illuminate the futility of trying to find another color in the furniture’s uniform gray. Mostly older men in business suits sat at tables, newspapers and documents spread across laminate tables, cigarette smoke rising from built in metal ashtrays.

  Max sat across from a disheveled man anxiously hunched over his portable calculator, punching in figures and noting results in tiny print in a ledger book. His ashtray was filled with butts. A pack of Winston’s and a Bic lighter lay close to the table’s edge.

  “Mind if I grab one?” Max asked.

  The man looked up, startled, small eyes growing wide as Max emptied the remaining cigarettes from the box, put them in his mouth, and lit them all. His tablemate’s lips quivered around the noise he wanted to make, but couldn’t.

  Max placed the film canister on the table between them, on top of a pile of papers. After opening it, he took a deep breath, making the burning cigarette ends glow with volcanic intensity, and then smashed them all into the nitrate film.

  Flames burst from the coil of film. Max broke open the lighter and sprinkled the remaining fuel on the film and papers. The skin of his hands and face prickled from the heat.

  The Beast shuddered inside of him. The icy knot he’d carried like an alien seed between his hips melted.

  The door slammed open. Someone shouted, “There he is.”

  At the same time, the uniformed clerk behind the cafe counter shouted, pointing at the flames leaping before Max.

  The man in front of Max grabbed his calculator, held it against his chest. Coughed, turning redder as the smoke billowed in his face.

  Max wiped everything off the table. Papers flew, caught on fire. Someone nearby shouted. Feet kicked briefcases and seats. The film spooled out of the can, whipping through the air and lashing sheets of newspaper flapping on agitated currents.

  Voices rose in panic and alarm, quickly cut off by hacking coughs as smoke quickly filled the air. Max’s eyes stung. He held his breath. The fire warmed him. Drew the Beast from its hiding place. Whatever had been on the film was gone. There was no longer any reason for fear.

  The Beast unwound, rising through Max like a snake that had been driven to nest by cold but suddenly awakened by the sun’s warmth.

  Max ran for the cafe counter, throwing whatever paper on the tables he passed into the air to catch sparks and maintain the chaos. The clerk, wild-eyed and screaming, surprised Max with a well-thrown left he barely had time to let slide by his temple. The man possessed boxing skills. Max grabbed the arm, turned, twisted, pulling the clerk up and over the counter, dropping him head first into the wall across from the counter.

  Choking through the cloth they held over their noses and mouths, Savet and his friends cleared the second knot of confused civilians Max had thrown at them. Only Savet stopped to loo
k down at what had caused the fire. The blond and the windbreaker man kept on coming.

  Max jumped over the counter, ducked down, gathered a handful of flimsy plastic tableware.

  It was the windbreaker man who leaned over the counter, blinking, wheezing, long arms falling over Max’s back, hands closing on Max’s jacket. Max gave him the utensils in one eye, pulled and flipped him so he landed with his back on the floor and his hands scrambling at the metal sticking out of his eye socket. He hadn’t had time to make a sound when Max came down twice with all his weight behind the elbow crashing into the man’s nose.

  His face became a bloody smear that spread to his bald head, spreading like the map of a lost continent. The Beast leapt to the bait, and before Max could stop himself, he was at the man’s throat.

  The train lurched to a stop. A chorus of cries and screams rose to accompany the screech of metal. Someone had pulled the emergency brake.

  The blond grabbed Max’s ankle, raised high by the spill. He twisted and pulled Max’s joint, just as Max would have in his position.

  Max let go of the windbreaker man’s throat, swallowed blood as he pushed himself up from the floor, going with the direction of the blond’s attack. When he had both legs clear of the counter, Max leveraged himself by balancing himself with hands on a metal shelf under the counter. Then he pushed off again and turned his hips, sending a quick snap kick in the direction of the blond’s head.

  The man’s sunglasses flew off and his stylish and perfectly placed hair exploded into a sunburst of soft radiance.

  Max fell to the floor on the other side of the counter, his ankle sore, the Beast roaring for blood. But conductors had arrived, one putting out fires while the other evacuated the car.

  Max was still on mission. He needed to get away.

  The blond man came after him, but Max gave him a dose of pepper spray in the eyes. He grabbed the bigger man’s head, drew it down to him as he lay with his back on the floor, and shot another dose down the blond’s throat and into his nose.

  Max threw the man off, got to his feet. A conductor rushed up to him, asked if he was all right. Max wiped his face. The windbreaker man’s blood came off on his hands. The conductor took him by the elbow and led him to the door. Max glanced at the blond writhing and screaming on the floor with regret. The Beast made him take a few stumbling steps back, but the conductor held on and shouted, “I’ll take care of him if you can make it out on your own.” Max almost laughed at the conductor’s misinterpretation of his intention.

  The Beast found nothing to laugh at.

  Very soon, Max promised. We’re almost done.

  The Beast, as usual, refused to relent. But there was too much going on for Max to feel the pain of the demon’s displeasure. At least he had the Beast flowing through him once more. That made everything easier.

  Max left the car, climbed down on to the rail bed, but away from the conductor helping people evacuate on the side of the train facing an open field.

  On the other side of the train, in the shadow of a stand of cedar, Savet was waiting for him. He’d lost his driving cap and his curly hair had spread into an irregular mane. The hem of his suit jacket had been singed, and tears still ran down his cheeks from the sting of smoke from the burning film.

  Mr. Tchask watched from a nearby window. Behind him, the car’s passengers filed to the rear to be evacuated. The English woman who’d carried the pepper spray spotted him and she tried to get to a window to watch. But the husband drew her back, yelling, and made her pick up one of the boys.

  Max couldn’t see the one Tchask had used as a mule. He was sure if he looked under the train carriage, he’d find the boy staring from the other side, if only at his feet.

  “That film changed our mothers and fathers,” Savek said. His left hand hung low while the right gestured, trying to draw Max’s gaze. “They saw something they shouldn’t have, and worse, took pictures. They were making a documentary that was going to make everyone believe in God, even if it took catching the Devil in the act of corruption. They didn’t understand what they were doing. They’re all dead. Drugs. Suicide. Murder. We’re the only ones left. And you.”

  “I had nothing to do with those killings,” Max said. For once, he wanted to add.

  “You had everything to do with their deaths,” Savek said. His left hand was at his hip.

  Max wanted to ask where he’d been trained.

  “But you’re right, their deaths aren’t your fault. You never asked to be what you are.”

  “I’m a killer.”

  “Right.”

  “The film is gone. Mr. Tchask doesn’t matter, anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “You have what you wanted.”

  “What we wanted was to be left alone with our secret. What we wanted was to keep track of you, so we’d know how to stay out of your way. But my brother saw another path. Instead of hiding you from the world and yourself, he wanted to expose you. Sometimes, that is the way of brothers. To part at the crossroads and never look back “

  “You want something else, now.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t kill your friends.”

  ‘No.”

  “But I will.”

  “I know.”

  “And you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Tchask.”

  “That’s why—”

  But Max had the Beretta out, and Savet had been lured just a step out of the moment, out of the center of his life and death, by their exchange and the distractions of a past that should never have been remembered. Max never saw Savet’s gun. He put three rounds in Savet’s chest and the man dropped.

  If the boy was looking under the carriage, Max wondered what he’d make of his first glimpse of death.

  Max looked up at the train. Mr. Tchask was still staring, not at his fallen brother, but at Max. His lips were parted, his eyes wide and alert, and his fingers were pressed against the window. He might have witnessed a miracle.

  When he blinked, his tattooed eyelids seemed to bless Max’s actions.

  Max climbed back aboard, slipping behind a conductor looking into the café car, spotting smoldering bits of paper and film still drifted in the air. The counter clerk recovered sufficiently to put out flames.

  He went to Mr. Tchask, sitting on the inside seat he’d wanted since the beginning of the trip. Safe.

  “I —” Mr. Tchask began, but Max pulled out the Beretta again and emptied the rest of the clip, except one round, into Savet’s body on the ground outside. He made a tight circle through the broken glass, so forensics would not be able to confirm exactly how many bullets had been fired from the train. The close grouping on Savet’s chest also insured that entry wounds and trajectories would be difficult to confirm.

  Questions would be asked. Mysteries investigated. But like so much in life, conclusions would never be reached. Certainties, like memories, would remain dim, out of reach, subject to further questioning and different points of view.

  Mr. Tchask looked up at Max with the first smile he’d seen from the man. His entire body trembled, and his left leg kicked repetitively, as if he’d achieved a self-perpetuating state of orgasm. He threw his head back, offering himself, and closed his eyes. This time, the exposed lines inked into his eyelids writhed in a flowing pattern that streamed over skin like a ticker-tape chant invoking the presence of death.

  Max didn’t have to ask about Mr. Tchask’s other mission.

  The Beast demanded a bite to the throat, a slow, blood-filled choking of the windpipe.

  “We’re almost there,” Max promised.

  He put the Beretta in Mr. Tchask’s hand, positioned the muzzle beneath his chin, aimed for the brainpan and pulled the trigger.

  Whatever the windbreaker man and the blond offered as an explanation as they blinked their tattooed eyelids, Max knew only that they’d confuse the authorities even more.

  He jumped off the train, ran into the embrace of the welcom
ing cedar. A voice called out, a child’s, and Max almost turned around.

  But other voices rose to drown the first—the voices of men, of authority.

  He went to ground, finding a berth in the back of a truck which took him to one of the smoky, grime-covered dying cities he’d been looking for to spend some time away from work.

  It would be just like old times in Calcutta, only this time he’d have power. It would be just like those heady first days in the jungles, but without officers and sergeants and operatives watching every move he made.

  He knew he couldn’t live on the run forever. He’d have to go back to the protection of his employers soon. There would come a time for debriefings, questions, lies. But for now, he didn’t have to settle for quick and random hunts or the thin gruel of memories. The Beast had been good. It had obeyed him and only made him suffer a little.

  The Beast had returned to him when he’d destroyed what it feared.

  It was time to make memories and fantasies real; time, in the haze of despair filling the streets of a dying city, for Max to be himself. And it was time for the Beast to be, at last, bad.

  SAY NO

  Todd stood beneath the yellow awning of the corner candy store and braced himself with his back against the security gatepost.

  He stared at the massive high school building across the street, squatting like a giant pale toad in the marsh of his Brooklyn neighborhood’s dark, six-story walk-ups tenement. The test paper from his math class was stuffed in his jacket pocket, and when he glanced down at it the red number circled in crimson stared back up at him like a bloodshot cyclops’ eye.

  “No,” Todd whispered to himself, his voice an echo of the one he used when he’d first received the paper.

  “Oh yes, Mr. Todd Jacobs,” his teacher had said when she had returned the paper to Todd and paused over him as he whispered his faint denial.

  Todd had looked up at the hint of concern in the nasal whine of her voice. But neither her concern, nor his denial, changed the brand of failure.