Night Chill

by Jeff Gunhus

  “I think you’re full of shit.”

  Max blinked hard as if focusing on his old friend was a particularly hard thing to do. “You do, huh? Well, you weren’t there were you? You can kiss my ass if you don’t believe me.”

  “Make me understand then. How does it work?”

  Max smiled and wagged a finger at him. “You’re trying to get me to tell you all the little secrets. Very clever, Jack. Very clever. Hell, I’ll tell you. It’ll cost you another glass of bourbon though.” He waited until Jack filled his glass before he continued. “After Huckley pushed the body through the hole, we waited for something incredible to happen, but nothing did. Minutes passed and still nothing. There was no sound inside the structure. The silence was more unnerving than any sound I could imagine. Then finally, Huckley cried out and pointed to a spot on the wall. We all saw it. A thin line of blood dripping down the rock face, as if the stone itself was bleeding. We crowded around it, holding our lanterns in a circle. The Boss inspected the area and found a small hole out of which the blood oozed, as if from a small scratch. The Boss and Huckley were ecstatic, talking about how it was just like the carvings. Then Huckley did it.”

  “Did what?” Jack asked.

  “The thing that changed all of our lives forever. The thing that might change the world eventually. He completed the ritual and did the Taking for the first time.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  Max sipped the last of the bourbon from his glass. He considered the ice leftover as if perplexed where all the booze had gone, then, defeated, sat the glass on the table beside him.

  “Huckley reached out with a finger and wiped the blood off the wall. I remember holding my breath, thinking the substance might start burning him, that maybe it was acid or poison. But Huckley knew what he was doing. He held the finger up to the Boss, showing off a little, then held out his other arm for us all to see. Huckley, like the rest of us, had scratches all over his body from the hard climb down to the cave. He located a fresh cut and wiped the blood on his finger into the wound. We thought he was crazy and cried out to stop him, but he just kept rubbing it. Then he wiped away the blood on his shirt and held his arm back up for to see the results for ourselves. The cut was gone. It had healed completely. That’s when we started to understand what we had found. The cave was the Source of healing. The Source of eternal life.”

  “The only catch is that you have to murder innocent little girls to get it,” Lonetree said.

  “And that’s quite a catch, isn’t it? Everything has its price. It seems almost fitting that something so miraculous should come so expensively. The carvings and the skeletons in the cave made it clear that women were the desired sacrifice. It was over a week before we could capture one and bring her down to the cave. The Taking went the same way but the life-giving blood that had trickled after poor Jeter was killed now gushed from the rock after the girl was sacrificed. This time Huckley drank from it, suckled the hole in the rock wall like it was a teat. No one else dared until we saw what it did to him.”

  “Which was?”

  “You still don’t get it, do you? This stuff is the cure-all. The ultimate antibiotic. The fucking fountain of youth. No disease or virus can touch us. The cells in my body don’t break down. I don’t age. Watch.” With surprising quickness, Max grabbed the glass on the table and smashed it with his hand. It shattered, sending shards of glass deep into his skin. Max held up his hand and pulled out the glass, wincing as he did so. “Still hurts like a bitch though.” Blood gushed from his wounds, running down his forearm. Slowly, the flow of blood tapered off, then stopped altogether. He held the hand out toward Jack. “See, look at the skin. It’s already growing back.”

  Jack leaned forward and saw what he was pointing to. The wound closed in on itself. Within seconds it was completely sealed.

  “Dear God,” Jack breathed.

  “Neat trick,” Lonetree said. “Want to see how you do with a bullet through the chest?”

  Max nodded. “He’s right. We’re not immortal, not by a stretch. Cut off my head, or shoot me through the heart, and I’m as dead as the next guy.”

  “I guess the movies about vampires were right, huh? A wooden stake through the heart and all that,” Lonetree said.

  “You might laugh,” Max said, “but I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if the myths about vampires don’t have some truth to them.”

  “Come on,” Jack said.

  “No, I’m serious. Not flying bats, pointy teeth and that bullshit, but the root mythology. The idea that beings exist who are biologically capable of transforming the energy of other living things into a reusable resource. And that blood is the bridge to make it happen. The myth is all over the place when you start looking for it. Think about it. Isn’t this really about the blood being transformed into life? What do you think Christians do every time they take communion? Doesn’t the catechism talk about the blood of Christ being the source of life and salvation?”

  “I think it’s a stretch,” Jack said.

  “Maybe, but there are other cases. The statues of the Virgin that cries tears of blood. Healing tears, Jack, just like the blood from the Source. The Aztecs sacrificed hundreds of people a day to their gods. They ripped still-beating hearts from the chests of their victims. Wasn’t that blood cult the same thing? The same mythology of giving blood to a god in return for life?”

  “So what are you trying to say? That the Source is a god?”

  Max lowered his head into his hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. I’m just trying to make sense of it, you know. Maybe if there was a higher purpose then it would all make sense.” Max was still coherent, but it was obvious he was having trouble focusing. Jack wondered how much time they had left before their source of information passed out.

  “You mean the killing you’ve done would make sense,” Lonetree said.

  Jack tried to move Max’s attention away from Lonetree. “If you’ve already had this serum, why go on killing?”

  “The Source always wants more sacrifices. And we need to drink the transmuted blood regularly for it to work.”

  “And Sarah. Why her?”

  Max shook his head. “I’m not sure. Huckley and the Boss have been working on some project together for years. Maybe Sarah has something to do with that. One thing I can tell you is that Huckley’s psychic abilities have gone to a different level recently. I mean, over time, each of us developed something almost like a mutation. Kind of like a gift from the Source. For Huckley, it was his special abilities.”

  “What was yours?” Lonetree asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said you all changed from Taking. How about you? What was your gift?”

  Max’s eyes drifted to the back of the room. Both Lonetree and Jack checked over their shoulders to make sure no one had sneaked in behind them, but there was nothing there. When Jack turned back he recognized Max’s expression as the same one he had seen at Piper’s when they were talking about Jesse’s heart disease. Max was in a different time and place, somewhere far away, before his girl was sick, before his world came to an end.

  “Max?” Jack said.

  Max jerked his head back as if he had been slapped, as if the force of his return to the here and now was more physical than emotional. “My gift? It was nothing. Nothing important.”

  Jack decided to leave the obvious lie alone. He was getting impatient. Every minute spent trying to coax information out of Max was a minute lost in the race to save Sarah. “Huckley then. Tell me more about Huckley.”

  “I never really understood his powers. Honestly, I never tried. I’d like to tell you I was curious about all the odd things that happened, but I can’t. If anything, I prayed to know less than I did. Maybe that makes me a coward, but it’s the truth. I never asked for this. Not even back then.”

  “But that didn’t stop you from Taking, did it?” Lonetree said.

  Max nodded, “Eternal life. Life without sickness or disease. The t
emptation is too great. You can both sit there and judge me all you want, but you weren’t there. It wasn’t offered to you. And until it is, you can’t ever understand the power of it. Immortality is a narcotic; it lures you in and makes you a slave until you’ll do anything to have it.” Max looked away again. “You’ll do things you wouldn’t believe.”

  Jack fought down his revulsion. He wanted to ask Max why his life was so much more important than the victims he took to the cave. Why other men’s daughters were less valuable than his own. But he left the questions unspoken. He didn’t have time to preach or judge. He just wanted answers. “You said Huckley has greater psychic powers. Like what?”

  “He claims to talk directly to the Source all the time, which, for him, is just like talking to God. The only reason I can imagine that he risked what he did to get Sarah was if he thought the Source itself made him to do it. True or not, if Huckley believes it, then things don’t look good for Sarah. I’m sorry, Jack. I really am. But Sarah is going to die. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Jack walked over to the fireplace and stared at the ashes and bits of burnt wood piled up under the metal grate. He wished there was a fire going. Everything felt suddenly cold and dark. “I don’t understand Max. How do you all get away with this? How do you live this long and no one notices?”

  “That part is easier than you think. At first we thought we would have to move every couple of decades, make pilgrimages back to the Source. But it’s never been a problem.”

  “Don’t people notice? Don’t they ask questions?”

  “People see what they want to see. They believe what they want to believe. If their eyes show them something impossible, their brains step in and make the adjustment for them. We all get comments about how little we age, how good we look, but it never goes beyond that. If it does, then we take care of it.”

  “You kill them,” Lonetree said. “And you have the perfect set-up. Janney runs protection. Butcher listens at his bar for people to talk about their suspicions after they have a few drinks.”

  Max nodded, “The Boss set that up. His smartest move was having Scott Moran get credentialed as a psychiatrist.”

  “Jesus, Moran’s one of you? I told him everything.”

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to work. People bring in a sixty year old photograph of one of us and Scott convinces them they are delusional and paranoid. Medicates them into submission.” He nodded toward Jack. “Almost worked on you.”

  “But the women. The girls,” Jack said, his voice cracking as he pictured Sarah in his mind. “How do you…I mean, how could you—”

  Murder innocent people?” Max said. “Be responsible for so many deaths and stay sane?”

  Jack turned back to look at the ashes in the fireplace. “Yeah. How do you do that?”

  “You might as well ask a crack head on the street why he killed someone for a pair of Nikes. Why? Because he could sell them on the street for fifteen bucks and get one more hit. I can’t explain it anymore that any addict can explain why he drinks, snorts, shoots up, or whatever. I need it. And when the need comes, I’ll do anything to get it.”

  “But you killed children. I’ve seen how much you love your own kids and I don’t get it. Or was that a lie too? Was all that crying on my shoulder about Jesse’s heart disease just an act like everything else?”

  “I did it for her too,” Max tried to shout. It came out as bubbling slur, saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth. “Don’t you understand? The Boss said he would break the rules and let me bring Jesse to the cave if I helped them take care of you. If I helped them get Sarah.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know anything about this.”

  Max blinked hard, then arched his eye brows and blinked again as if something had floated into his eye. “But I couldn’t do it, Jack. I…I couldn’t d-do that. Not e-e-ven for Jesse. Besides, I…I found ana…anoth’…other way. I used…used my gift.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed as he watched Max struggle through his words. He was disorientated. The corners of his mouth drooped down and his chin trembled. With a cry, Max’s hands flew to his eyes and rubbed them as if someone had just thrown a handful of salt in them.

  “Are you all right?” Jack asked.

  Max stuck his thumbs in the corner of his eyes and pressed in hard.

  “Jesus, you’re bleeding. Your eyes are bleeding,” Jack cried out as tiny trickles of blood ran down Max’s cheek. When Max pulled his hands away, Jack saw that the whites of his eyes were dark red, as if every blood vessel in them had simultaneously exploded. “What the hell…”

  “Get…a mirror…please,” Max mumbled, pointing to the fireplace.

  Lonetree grabbed a round mirror off the fireplace mantle and walked it over to him. Max took it and held it up to his face with shaking hands. He turned his head side to side to view his face from different angles. His face was changing so fast that between oscillations new blotches and marks appeared. The skin around his eyes was now gouged with deep lines. His nose swelled. Then whole sections of it melted away, as if it were being devoured by a runaway cancer. With each turn of his head, handfuls of hair fell onto his shoulders leaving the pale white flesh of his scalp exposed.

  “So fast. I didn’t expect it to ‘appen tho fast,” Max groaned, raising a liver spotted hand to his mouth. He parted his lips and felt his teeth. They sank into soft, rotten gums. He closed his mouth in horror and covered it with his hand. He moaned in pain. Forcing himself to confront the damage, he raised the mirror and opened his mouth again. A flow of blood poured over his bottom lip and drained down the front of his shirt. Rotten teeth mixed with the gore of black gums and the lining from inside his mouth slid down his chin.

  “What’s happening to you?” Jack whispered.

  “I saved ‘er,” he struggled to say. Another bloody tooth tumbled down his chin. “Is my gif’ from tha Source. I th’aved Jesse.”

  Jack shook his head that he didn’t understand. It was Lonetree who guessed it. “He said they all changed from Taking. His mutation, his gift, must have been the ability to transfer his life energy to someone else. Looks like it was a one time deal. I think we’re seeing time catch up with your friend here.”

  A gurgling sound rose from the back of Max’s throat. His legs started to thrash in wild spasms. Jack watched his friend deteriorate before him. His skin drew in on itself, like shrink wrap on wet plastic. His bones stuck out, in some places breaking through the now brittle skin. Max was turning into a corpse right in front of them.

  “I don’t get it.” Lonetree said. “He’s had to have killed hundreds of people over the years. Why would he give up now to save one little girl?”

  Jack didn’t have the same question in his mind. He knew. He knew because he also was a father and understood the bond. Understood a father’s willingness to sacrifice himself so that his daughter could live. Max wasn’t just saving a little girl, he was saving his little girl. Jack knew he would trade his own life in a second if he could get Sarah back safely. He leaned in so that Max could hear him. “That’s it, isn’t it? You did this for Jesse?”

  Max nodded but his eyes were unfocused. His head dipped as if he were drifting off to sleep.

  “Listen. I need your help. Please, for the love of God, tell me who the Boss is. Tell me where they’ve taken Sarah.” Max was drifting away so Jack reached out to shake him awake. But when he grabbed his arm, his fingers sank into rotten flesh until he clutched bone. He pulled back his hand in disgust, bile rising in the back of his throat.

  On a violent exhalation of breath that sent blood and spittle flying through the air, Max tried to form a word.

  “Come on. Say it. COME ON.”

  Jack pleaded as he watched Max’s eyes turn into pale blue clouds as clusters of cataracts grew like crystals.

  “How do I stop them?” Jack shouted. “How do I stop them from killing my daughter?”

  It was too late. Max was dead.

 
SIXTY-FOUR

  They didn’t have a plan. They parked around the corner and kept to the shadows as they jogged up to the hospital grounds. There were a half dozen cop cars in the parking lot, but only one of them was running. Lonetree pointed out the fire escape he’d used to break into the third floor on his first visit to Huckley. Framed in the window was the silhouette of a man in uniform. Lonetree looked through his field binoculars.

  “That’s a cop watching the window.”

  “Now what?” Jack asked.

  “Don’t worry about him. A little diversion in the front of the hospital and he’ll go check it out.”

  Jack asked the question that had been nagging at him. “Why didn’t you kill Huckley when you sneaked in there the first time?”

  “I needed to find out who would protect him. I knew about Janney, Max and Butcher, but I needed to see who else came out of the woodwork. The Boss is the one I’m looking for. You have to understand, I don’t want to just kill these people. I want to punish them. What happened to your buddy Max back there is fine with me.”

  Jack didn’t argue. As long as Lonetree was after the same people he was after, he didn’t care where he got his motivation. Besides, if the unthinkable were to happen and Sarah were killed, he would welcome any punishment Lonetree meted out. In fact, he would be right next to him. “From what Max said, it sounds like Huckley has turned into a loose cannon. I’m surprised someone didn’t finish him off while he was in the coma.”

  “I’ve thought about that. I’m guessing the Boss has a use for him. Max said Huckley can communicate with the Source. Either Huckley is insane and he’s imagining things or the Source possesses some kind of sentient intelligence. Either way, I think it’s time to screw with the Boss’s plans. He wants Huckley alive. For me, that’s a good enough reason to kill him. At least it will force the Boss to react.”

  Jack nodded, vaguely aware how he now talked about death and killing as easily as if he were planning strategy for a road trip. Still, something bothered him about Lonetree’s first visit to Huckley’s hospital room. “So if you weren’t trying to kill him, what were you doing in his room?”