Rise the Dark

by Michael Koryta

  Then he hit Cantu again with the slapjack, two rapid smacks, one above each knee, in the thick muscles of the quads, and Cantu grunted with pain and fell flat on the porch, writhing on his belly. Mark glanced at Larry, who was circling Cantu like a wolf around fallen prey. Mark wanted to tell his uncle that it was good enough, that they didn’t need to push it any further; Cantu was down and they had the guns and there was no need to hit him again. Mark hadn’t been the one tied to a trailer hitch and whipped, though. Larry would decide when it was done.

  Larry took off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his long white hair. When he put the cap back on he spent a little extra time bending the grimy bill, and Mark could see that the busy hands were designed to keep his emotions in check, bleed out a little of the tension that filled him.

  “I need you to be able to talk, so be grateful for that,” Larry said. He kicked Cantu in the ass, hard. “Where’s Pate?”

  Sal Cantu looked like a trout left on the rocks, bug-eyed and fighting for breath, mouth open wide, a string of spit between his lips. Despite the pain he had to be feeling, though, there was a smile in his eyes, and the smile had risen at Pate’s name.

  “Speak,” Larry said.

  Cantu lifted his head. It took some effort. “You actually think your sister matters, Larry?” he said. “You really think her tired old cooze means a damn thing?”

  When Mark hit him, he did it so fast and so hard that even Larry said, “Shit!” Mark backhanded Cantu across the face with his .38, driving his head sideways, and then caught him again for a forehand, using the pistol like a tennis racket, two fluid swings that left Sal Cantu howling into his hands, curled up and bleeding on the porch. Mark saw Larry shift from side to side, but his uncle didn’t say anything, just watched. Mark didn’t look him in the eye.

  “You’ve got a dangerous impression of things,” Mark told Cantu, who was writhing in pain, blood running between his fingers. “You think you know why we came here, and what we want, and what we left behind. You don’t know any of those things.”

  Cantu still had his hands up to his face, his fingertips looking as if they’d been dipped in red ink, but over them, his dark eyes were focused. He was listening.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” Mark said, kneeling down, “so you don’t have to suffer the pain of your misconceptions any longer. I’m Markus Novak, and I’m not here because of anything that happened with my uncle or my mother or any of the people you consider relevant in this situation. That’s important for you to understand. I’m here for something very different, all right? And I don’t have time to waste.”

  Cantu breathed through his mouth and stared at Mark and didn’t speak. Mark looked at him for a moment and said, “You’re going to test my seriousness here, aren’t you?” He shook his head. “That’s a poor play.”

  Mark stood up and holstered the gun and extended his hand to his uncle without looking at him. He kept his eyes on Sal Cantu.

  “Let me borrow that slapjack.”

  Larry didn’t hesitate. The weighted leather socked into Mark’s palm. He grasped it, stepped back, and took a couple of short practice swings, testing the feel. It was perfect; heavy enough but balanced and flexible. A craftsman’s answer to brass knuckles. Mark ran his thumb along the worn leather and advanced toward the bleeding man on the porch floor.

  Sal Cantu watched him come and said, “I’ll tell you where to go, but you’ll get more than what you’re ready for. With Pate, you’d better believe that.”

  “Sure. Where is he?”

  “There’s a warehouse in Byron, maybe a mile out of town north on Route 5, toward the oil field. A big prefab deal with an eight-foot fence around it. Looks empty.” He was speaking to Larry now.

  “But it’s not empty,” Larry said. “He’s there? Pate himself?”

  “He’s there.”

  “It’s a long drive if he isn’t.”

  “Guess you’ll have to trust me.”

  “Guess so,” Larry said, and then he reached behind him and withdrew the length of paracord he’d stuck in his pocket. He tossed it to Mark. “Hands and feet.”

  Mark caught the cord, tossed the slapjack back to his uncle, and knelt to tie Cantu’s hands.

  “Hey,” Sal said. “The fuck you think you’re going to do? I just told you—”

  “When we find Pate, someone will find you,” Larry said. “Until we do, you’ll join the missing. Consider that, and consider if you want to give different directions.”

  “Nobody’s tying me. I gave you what you needed, damn it.” Cantu struggled upright.

  “Glad to hear it,” Larry said, and then he stepped forward and swung the slapjack again, and this time he had more than his wrist behind it. The lead-laced leather cracked off the back of Sal Cantu’s skull, and the big man dropped to the porch floor. Mark stared as blood dripped down the unconscious man’s face. Larry put the slapjack back in his pocket and looked at Mark with challenging eyes.

  “You forget how to work a knot?”

  Mark bound Sal’s hands and feet while Larry opened the cabin door. Then they hauled him inside. Larry found a dishrag, shoved it into Cantu’s mouth, and said, “Tie that in there good too. If he wants to breathe, he’s got a nose.”

  “You believe those directions he gave are worth a damn?” Mark asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure they’re worth something,” Larry said. “That boy isn’t the sort to send you on a wild-goose chase. He’s the sort to send you into a hornet’s nest.”

  47

  The recruitment of Doug Oriel had been Janell’s primary assignment in Florida. His combination of military-grade demolition skills and full-blown conspiracy-theorist paranoia was enticing to Eli, but his network of like-minded souls was even more intriguing. The problem with Doug was that he had a deep-seated distrust of the Internet, which meant Eli’s standard recruiting tactics were ineffective. Thus the decision to approach him in person.

  For nine months, Janell had devoted herself to the coddling of this oversize child. In the miles since they’d left Ardachu’s house, she realized that it had all been a waste.

  He didn’t speak for nearly two hours, and when he did, it was to demand that she drop him off at a bus station.

  “A bus station,” she said. “That’s your idea of where you should go now? Only a few hundred miles from being a part of this, you want to stop and get on a bus?”

  “Yes. I don’t want any part of this. Not anymore. Not with you.”

  She gripped the wheel tighter. “You are not going to a bus station. We are going to finish the journey.”

  “You can do what you want. I won’t be along for the ride.”

  In the hours of silence, he’d managed to locate some confidence to fill in the places where before shock and horror had existed. He was sitting taller, his shoulders back and his big chest filling. Trying to make himself larger, the thing they told you to do if you stumbled across a mountain lion in the woods.

  She wanted to laugh.

  “No bus station,” she said. “You want out, you can pick your place on our route, but I’m not changing course.”

  But she knew she’d have to.

  The group Eli was gathering all believed a narrative of nonviolence. That was the great irony of the first strike force—they were mostly peaceful by nature, shepherded together by their opposition to oil drilling, fracking, big business, and pollution, all the tedious minutiae of those who believed the earth was worth saving. Janell’s understanding was that, with the notable exception of bodyguards recruited from some meth runners, the tribes, as Eli called them, would recoil at the idea of murder.

  Now she was driving Doug and his new story to their doorstep. That could not happen. It would be safer to take him to the bus station as he wished than to deliver him to anyone whose resolve could shatter.

  She hated to lose him, though. Through Doug, they had reached dozens of potential players. To a man, they feared the government, believed in shadow
conspiracies, and were firmly convinced that the U.S. military was looking for any excuse to claim first the guns and then the freedoms of Americans. Doug had facilitated contact with three different militia groups, an arm of the Ku Klux Klan, and a team of Texas preppers who were better armed than most third-world militaries.

  All this energy expended preparing for a nonexistent war, and a single dead man had brought Doug to his knees.

  “There are casualties in any worthy mission,” she said. “You’ve always known this.”

  He shook his head. “This is exactly what the police want us to do. They won’t even have to lie about us now. You’ve made it the truth.”

  She fought for patience, for the right words. There was no time to waste finding the right words, though. Recruiting days were done. They were in action now, and she had neither the time nor the energy to return to the wars of rhetoric.

  “You understand that’s all a lie, don’t you?” she said.

  “What is?”

  “Every word we’ve ever said. Every…single…word.”

  She looked away from the road, at his face, and he blinked at her, utterly oblivious, and her frustration swelled to something deeper and darker.

  “We find people of value,” she said, speaking like a teacher addressing a young child, “and we determine what story they need to hear. It’s the story that they’re already telling themselves, don’t you see? It’s the nightmare they believe in. Once you understand that nightmare, you join them in it. Their fear becomes your fear. It’s all a shared experience then. And once you have that, once they feel that is the truth, all the way down to their core, then your coping strategy becomes theirs. It’s a natural progression. This is the power of the shared narrative. Of the echo chamber. Do you follow that? Can you comprehend what I’m saying?”

  He stared at her, his broad face showing all the intellect of a steer who has reached the end of the slaughterhouse chute without realizing where he’s been led.

  “Infrastructure,” he said stupidly. “That’s all that needs to be hit. A man like the one in that house, he might have believed exactly what we believe. You don’t know. You didn’t bother to ask, you just cut his throat.”

  She took a deep, patient breath. Said, “Let’s try this once more. Everything you have heard me say is a lie. Take your time. I’ll give you a few seconds to figure it out.”

  “I don’t know what in the hell has gotten into you,” he said. “You’re out of your mind. You’re right—I don’t believe a word you’ve said. Not anymore. Pull over. I’d rather walk to prison than ride another mile with you.”

  She remembered nine months ago, when they’d arrived in Cassadaga, how quickly she’d been able to convince him that he needed to stay away from television and computers. They were the most common tools of brainwashing, she’d explained, and then she’d given him a book about neurolinguistic programming. It had been, admittedly, a risky joke to play, because if he paid any attention to the book at all, he might have had some questions about her, but instead he’d swallowed the story whole. Why? Because it was what he had already suspected. Already feared.

  Everyone wanted to believe he or she was the prophet of truth, and when that truth was rooted in fear, the desire was even stronger. Every human response was stronger when it came from a place of fear.

  Now the source of Doug’s fear had shifted.

  “Pull over,” he repeated.

  They were driving through prairie country, flat and desolate and entirely empty. She slowed the Yukon and pulled off the road and bounced over the shoulder and onto the grass beyond. She was reaching for the gearshift when she saw the gun in his hand.

  “On second thought,” he said, “you’ll do the walking.”

  She looked at the gun, not his eyes, while she nodded. Then she moved the gearshift into park, let her foot off the brake, and said, “I’m taking the phones and radios. You clearly won’t have a need for them, and when you’re caught, I’m not letting you get caught with those.”

  “You can have your phones. Just get out.”

  “Such a waste of potential,” she said.

  “Get out.”

  She opened the door and stepped out onto the road. The sun put a haze over the asphalt, but the day wasn’t warm. Spring in the high plains, a climate of confusion.

  As she walked toward the tailgate, Doug shifted awkwardly. He wanted to just slide from the passenger seat to the driver’s, but he was too big and clumsy for that. She had the tailgate up when he opened the passenger door and stepped out onto the crunching, brittle grass.

  On top of the radio bags was the 12-gauge shotgun she’d stolen from Gregory Ardachu’s cabinet. It was loaded with double-aught shells. When she stepped back from the Yukon, he was blank-faced, the pistol at the side of his leg pointed to the ground.

  She’d endured this for nine months. It ended in a tenth of a second.

  The sound of the 12-gauge echoed across the plains, then faded into their vast spaces. Doug Oriel’s body fell in the dirt beside the Yukon, taking the bottom of his head down with it. The top had been separated from it, and now the remains settled in the grass in a red mist. A bad shot, too high.

  But in the end, effective.

  She walked to the body and looked down. Only one of his eyes remained, and it was staring into the dust, looking away from her. She sighed and shook her head. Eli had harbored high hopes for Doug and wanted to meet him in person. He’d be disappointed by this result, but he would understand. Doug had lost track of his narrative, and once that happened, he was not only of limited value but high risk.

  As a dead man, though, he had renewed potential. She would see to it that he fulfilled his own prophecy.

  It seemed he deserved at least that much for his service.

  She put the shotgun back in the Yukon, closed first the tailgate and then the passenger door, and got behind the wheel, alone.

  48

  It took Mark and his uncle nearly an hour to reach Byron, and during the drive neither of them said much. Mark was thinking of the way Sal Cantu had smiled when he’d looked at Larry and said, You actually think your sister matters? It reminded him of the amusement Janell Cole had shown over the idea that Mark believed Lauren mattered. Yet Lauren had known the phrase rise the dark, which mattered to all of them, and certainly mattered to Lynn Deschaine and Homeland Security. How had Lauren heard of it? He was beginning to wish they’d gotten in a few more questions before Larry had knocked the man out.

  “This would be the place,” Larry said, slowing. “The warehouse Cantu described. That’s it, right?”

  Calling it a warehouse was lipstick on a pig—the place was just an oversize old prefabricated barn in a gravel parking lot surrounded by a high fence and a gate with a keypad. There were no vehicles in the lot, and the property looked beyond empty. Desolate.

  Larry was pulling in when Mark felt the sensation that had come over him in Cassadaga—that soft, rubber-band sound, and suddenly he was tense, hand drifting toward his gun.

  “Drive past.”

  Larry obliged without comment, cruising down the lonely road for another mile, until the barn was out of sight and they were facing a sign for the Byron oil field, which loomed just to the north.

  “Okay, chief,” Larry said, pulling onto the shoulder and turning off the car, “what’s the master plan?”

  “We go back on foot. It’s so damned empty that they’re going to hear anybody in a truck, particularly this abomination of an exhaust system.”

  Larry looked wounded. “I had Blue tuned up not five years ago!”

  “There’s only so much a mortician can do to improve a situation, Uncle.”

  “It was a mechanic.”

  “Uh-huh. Regardless, I’d like to go in quietly. It’s not much of a walk.”

  “It’s a damned empty one, though. A truck pulled up outside of that place looks like it belongs, maybe. Left here? It’s abandoned. It draws the eye. If anyone is in the place, they�
�ll see us coming ten minutes before we get there instead of thirty seconds. And if anything goes wrong, we’ve got a mile of empty highway to come back up, with nowhere to hide.”

  He pointed at the surrounding countryside, bleak and barren, looking more like West Texas than Wyoming. There was no snow here; the earth was dry and fissured, like the palm of an old man’s hand. Until the Pryor Mountains rose up in the north, red-baked and uninspiring, there was no shelter. Fleeing on foot would mean covering a long stretch of open land dotted with scrub pines and brush. Larry was right—if it came to that, they’d wish the truck were a hell of a lot closer.

  “All right,” Mark said. “Just make it fast. This wreck sounds like a steam locomotive.”

  “Don’t you listen to him, Blue. Don’t you listen.” Larry started the engine. The exhaust fired like a cannon volley, and then they were in motion. Mark’s mouth was dry, and the strange, echoing pops were back in his skull. He was aware of a single bead of sweat trickling down his spine.

  What’s the matter with you, Markus? It’s an empty pole barn, nothing more. What in the hell is the matter with you?

  He’d felt this way before; that was the problem. His body had trapped the memory of the house in Cassadaga and was throwing it back at his mind.

  But why? The house in Cassadaga was straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. This is an empty barn in wide-open country. There’s no similarity.

  Still, the feeling was there.

  Where’s that strange boy when I need him? Or, better yet, Walter, the dead man who apparently took a shine to me. I could use his advice right now. Tell me, Walt, what’s the issue up ahead?

  Mark forced a smile as the fenced-in barn came back into sight, looking as if it had been abandoned for months. Beyond the fence was sun-and-wind-blasted soil with a few thatches of brush clinging to whatever groundwater there was to be found.

  “I’ll drive right up to the gate and we’ll climb again,” Larry said. “Ain’t no point in jacking with that security box.”