by Paul A. Rice
Reaching a fork in the ditch, Ken sent Red and his son down to the left, whilst he and Michael took the route on the right – they all knew the two ditches would converge on the main waterway by the mill. There was a grassy bank about thirty metres away from the outer walls, and that would be the place from which Ken intended to launch his rescue mission.
He whispered his orders to them: ‘You guys clear the left side; kill anyone you see along the way, and keep an eye out for Maggie, Jane says they’ve taken her, whatever happens we need to get her back! Kill everyone who tries to stop us, but above all else try and get Maggie back. We’ll meet you at that big mound over there – watch your flanks!’ Red and Junior nodded and without a sound, crawled away down the ditch.
Ken looked at Michael. ‘Are you ready, Mikey?’ he whispered.
The boy nodded – in seconds the two of them began their own approach towards the mill. The going was difficult as the damp grass only provided a thin covering to the slippery mud lying beneath, they were soon breathing hard but Ken kept on pushing forward. Michael followed him without pause or complaint. Eventually they reached the spot where the two ditches met, Ken was glad to see the two others crawling up to join them, both men were sweating and coated in mud from the ditch.
He spoke quietly to them: ‘Okay, good job! Right, listen, this is just like we’ve practised before, same drills, same skills! Shoot and move, use controlled shots and don’t move unless your buddy tells you to, right?’
They looked up him and nodded. The time for fear was past, there was no fear, only adrenaline and anger – it was to be all they needed.
With one word, Ken unleashed his Hunters.
‘GO!’
In perfect synchronicity, the four men burst from cover, the roar of their weapons filling the air with noise. Moving and shooting, shooting and moving – time slowed almost to a halt. Ken felt the recoil, saw the flame and smoke lashing from the muzzle of Michael’s weapon. The boy screamed: ‘Move, Ken!’
A wall of noise covered the onrushing foursome. Ken’s short dash seemed to take forever; he saw a kneeling enemy to his front and snapped two rounds off before hitting the dirt on his guts. The man went down, blood exploding from his chest, bullets tearing through his body to leave splashes of dirt rising from the ground behind.
Screams and more blood, Michael followed through with two more shots.
‘Move it, Mikey, move!’ Ken’s voice was already hoarse, his rifle roared, empty shell-cases twinkling through the still air as he screamed: ‘Move, move, move!’ Running, slipping, hitting the ground with both knees burning, sweat pouring into the eyes, senses screaming. No time, no mercy, no respite – only death.
Red and Junior were screaming from over to his left, firing and screaming; rage and hot lead spewing at their enemy. ‘Muthafukas, die, you fucks, die!’
The noise filled Ken’s head, the smell of burnt propellant and blood flooded into his nose and mouth, rage and joy filled his heart. Ken was back in the land where only warriors can go, back into the eternal battle with all of his ghosts from yesterday riding shotgun. He screamed at the men to his front, all the Hunters screamed at them.
The unknown enemy seemed to wither in the face of their howling assault, firing as they started to run backwards, tripping and falling in their haste to escape the furious onslaught of their attackers. The air around Ken filled with the noise of their hurtling lead. He felt the blast of a passing bullet, its nearby impact sent earth exploding into his face – a warm, metallic taste filled his mouth.
He spat blood and then screamed some more. ‘Move, move forwards – keep moving!’ His rifle was almost too hot to hold now, smoke rose from the stock, the heat burned his left hand, but he didn’t stop. Dropping the empty magazine, Ken racked a full one into its place and kept firing. Screaming and firing. ‘Move…keep-on moving forwards, c’mon, move, move, MOVE!’
They rushed towards the final objective, dust and smoke hung in a haze over the white mill, Ken’s ears were ringing, eyes darting from one likely piece of enemy cover to the next. As he watched for any signs of movement, he heard Michael fire three rounds in quick succession from close behind. Ken saw the white dust of plaster and the red gore of an exploding head, erupting into a pink cloud from the doorway of the mill. The man, who had been hiding inside, fell forwards. Before his body had hit the ground, Red and Junior had riddled him with another fusillade of bullets. Ken’s slow-motion vision gave him a perfect view of the warheads hammering into flesh, he watched the lumps as they flew off the man’s body – they blasted him to pieces.
The aura of battle soared around them, a million years of inbred warrior-instincts, of blood and hatred for their sworn enemy, exploded from within the Hunters. The war cry ringing loudly through their heads: ‘Death to the Demon…down with the darkness, death, death, death!’ The sound of victory shrieked in their minds, it howled like a banshee and its light burned brighter than the fire lashing from their weapons’ muzzles. ‘Die…Die...Die!’
Nothing would stand in their way, not now and not ever!
And then it was over.
Deathly silence descended over the calm waters of the lake, only the sound of someone moaning broke the grip of the ringing stillness. Ken looked for the others, through the haze of smoke and dust he saw all three members of his team; they were correctly spread out and were covering their arcs, both front and back. He shouted over at them: ‘Red, are you two okay?’
The question was answered with a small laugh and Red’s deep voice.
‘Yeah, boss, we’re mighty fine!’ he boomed.
Ken looked back at Michael; the boy gave him the ‘A-OK’ hand signal, grinning as he dropped an empty magazine from his weapon to fit a fresh one.
‘It’s the last one, Ken,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope they’re all done for, huh?’ Then, without batting an eyelid, Michael leaned forward and puked onto the grass. After wiping his mouth, he looked up and smiled. ‘I’m alright,’ he groaned, ‘it must’ve been something I ate!’ Red’s son laughed from behind them, and then said something about having probably eaten the same thing himself.
Ken wiped a lump of mud off his sweating face, spat some of the foul taste from his mouth, and said, ‘Right…listen to me: Junior, you and Mikey watch our backs! Red, you come with me, let’s go and see who’s left around here, shall we?’ The big man grinned and turned to follow Ken.
In silence the two men skirted from one body to another. There were seven in total, plus the three down by the ditch, all were dead, except the last one, a man they found lying half-submerged in one of the water-filled feeder channels for the windmill. He had a horrific chest injury and they saw that he was not long for this world. Red dumped his rifle and hoisted the man onto the bank; their enemy screamed in agony at the movement and lay writhing on the grass with blood pouring from his wound.
Ken knelt by his side, whilst Red, having rearmed himself, stayed on watch and covered the open space on the other side of the mill. The man looked up, then rolled his eyes and began to fade into unconsciousness; Ken slapped him hard across the face and the man jerked back into the present. Ken leaned up close and said, ‘Who are you?’ He shook the man violently. As he stared into the man’s face, he saw the rolling eyes change shape, they became almost feline. Watching in disbelief, Ken saw a smoky, orange opaqueness flooding into those awful eyes.
He tried to shove the man’s head away from him, and was just reaching for his rifle, when the Dark One had his first proper peek at the inside of Kenneth Robinson’s head. Ken felt as though it was he instead of time that had been frozen for a change. He couldn’t look away, felt himself pulled into those cat-like eyes, those burning yellow orbs – burning, pulling, sucking him inwards, deeper.
The man breathed deeply, as if inflating himself, and then spoke.
‘Who am I?’ He belched the words out; the foul smell of rotting flesh and burnt hair rushed over Ken’s face. The man beneath him grinned, saying: ‘I will tell yo
u exactly who I am! I’m your worst, fuckin’ nightmare! Why don’ yoo just get some balls and com’on over here to see fer yoreself, you soft-pricked cunt?’ The chuckle that exited the deflating chest, on the bow wave of another putrid burp, was the most horrifying sound Ken had ever heard, anywhere.
It chilled him to the very core; once again he felt the hairs rise on his neck. Only this time the feeling wasn’t one of some newfound joy caused by the wonderful discovery of an imagined, yellow flower. No, this time it was a sense of abject terror that fetched his follicles to attention. Total and absolute dread filled his soul; an immense darkness seemed to grasp his brain, plucked it quivering and dripping from his skull.
In that single moment, Kenneth Robinson lost his mind to the Demon.
He saw himself running – an overwhelming sensation of freedom seemed to fill his head with desire. He was armed with only his rifle, sprinting naked across the warm grass, leaving a trail of dead friends, covered in blood, in his wake. Firing from the hip at Jane, tracer rounds ripping through her stunned face, hot shell-cases burning his bare skin; running and laughing at Tori as she fumbled with the pistol. Ken watched as his bullets smashed into her soft, white flesh…red blood and white flesh…he saw himself leap upon her; Tori’s awful wounds looked so inviting. Ken thrust himself into them.
Blood and warmth, lust, fear, and awful rage – he was lost to them.
White light, along with a shrieking bolt of noise and pain, filled his head. Ken screamed and fell onto his side; the ringing sound in his skull was almost overwhelming. He was barely able to hear the words that Red was uttering.
‘Ken, Kenny! Are you okay, man? Kenny, can you hear me?’
Ken felt fluid covering his face and running down his neck, hot, sticky liquid. His consciousness faded and left him floating in a sea of red mist, he heard the others shouting but they were distant somehow, he couldn’t see anything and only the sharp pain in his ear gave him something to hold onto.
As he passed out, Ken heard two things. The first was that awful, rusty chuckle, the sound of which reached out for him once more, it was utterly irresistible and filled him with the desire to touch it – Ken couldn’t help himself. The Demon laughed as he extended his hand toward the stricken Hunter. Ken heard the awful voice gloating, and yet he was no more able to pull his hand away than he would have been able to fetch Mikey back to life.
The Demon felt those thoughts and wickedly taunted him.
‘Oh my…’ the voice said, with another horrendous chuckle. ‘What an unexpected bonus, what a treasure this will be…oh my-my-my!’
As his fingers reached out to grasp the extended hand, Ken began to hear a second thing; it was the sound of singing. ‘Someone’s singing, who’s…’ The thought startled him and he felt his mind twist once more, in near-madness he turned to look, but it was to be of no avail. His world was dark red, no sights to see and no other thoughts to have, only the Demon and his soft caress – but there was singing. No doubt at all, it was definitely singing. He stopped reaching for the offered hand and took a break whilst he listened to the words of the song.
It happened to be one of his favourites; he knew the words off by heart.
‘The grass was greener. The light was brighter. The taste was sweeter. The nights of wonder, with friends surrounded, the dawn mist, glowing, the water flowing. The endless river, forever and ever…’
Ken couldn’t quite remember the name of the track, and it sounded as though the singer had somehow missed his favourite verse. As the thought entered his head, he heard the singer deliver the missing verse, and it was a really good rendition. Frozen in time and petrified with fear, Ken had only one choice to make. Remembering the artist, he lay back and let the immortal words of Pink Floyd rock his world. He smiled as he heard those awesome lyrics.
They saved him.
‘So I opened my door to my enemies and I ask could we wipe the slate clean, but they tell me to please go fuck myself. You know you just can't win.’
With Pink Floyd’s magical guitar-notes playing in his head, a sudden realisation filled him with light. The thoughts anchored Ken to some nearly-lost reality. ‘It’s Maggie doing the singing, Maggie!’ Then a field of flowers started to fill his vision, acres of yellow buttercups stretched as far as he was able to see.
Flowers and singing – they were his world.
Ken laughed at himself, thinking more clearly now: ‘Here am I, holding the Dragon’s hand like some wandering hippy! Together we’re gonna go skipping through a field of yellow flowers, happily singing-along to Pink-Fucking-Floyd!’ He laughed again and the sound echoed in his mind like pebbles falling onto a lowering coffin.
The noise broke his frozen trance.
Ken heard Maggie laughing, too, and with that sound echoing in his ears, he turned his mind back to the Dark One. He looked at the Demon’s proffered hand and realised that its caress didn’t seem quite so inviting, not in the slightest. The hand was nothing more than a writhing black eel. Nothing more than a filthy leper’s limb of oily smoke, pus and blackness. Ken’s mind snapped back from the precipice, he began to hear the voices of his friends back on the farm.
‘Kenny…can you hear? Ken!’ Those voices and Maggie’s singing were all that remained for him to hold on to. But, they were momentarily drowned out by a curse of angry despair as the Dragon screamed in rage; the metallic twang filling Ken’s mind.
‘Ohhh, yoo fuckin’ bitch, he was mine – he wanted to be mine! Oh, now yooo’ll pay, now yooo’ll feel what it’s like to be in Hell, you fuckin’ bitch!’ The sound of Maggie’s soft voice ended with the abruptness of a slamming door, a door to a padded asylum cell. ‘Mind your fuckin’ fingers, bitch!’
Ken fell back from the madness.
The last thing he remembered was the howling pain in his ear, and then those terrible, red-misted surroundings turned to blackness.
8
Discovery and Defence
When he awoke, Ken felt as though someone was shoving a hot needle into the deepest part of his ear – he groaned in pain and opened his eyes. Jane was sitting by his bedside, seeing him stir she reached across and stroked his forehead. ‘How are you feeling, my love?’ his wife asked.
Ken groaned a dry throated reply. ‘Like shit, Jesus, my head hurts!’ he croaked, struggling into a sitting position to accept the glass of water she held out for him. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Do you have any aspirin?’ She laughed and handed him two. After two more glasses of water, he started to feel somewhat more human. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry, it’s only the day after, eight o’clock in the morning, to be exact,’ Jane said. ‘You were out for just the one night, and, by the way – you slept like a baby!’ She smiled and stroked his forehead again.
Ken lay back against the headboard. ‘Thank God for that,’ he whispered. ‘I was half-expecting you to tell me that I’d had another one of those six-week holidays…’ The aspirins had started working and Ken began to feel a lot better. He looked at his wife and grinned. ‘It’s crazy stuff, huh?’ he said.
Jane smiled at him and asked what he remembered.
Ken thought for a while. He was able to recall the attack, the smell was still in his nose – blood and heat – and then he remembered Maggie. The old girl had been singing, Maggie! He sat more upright as the full recollection barged into his head. ‘Where’s Maggie, did we find her?’ he asked, looking at Jane and trying to make sense of those smoke-filled memories.
In no time at all, Jane had managed to bring him up to date and told him of what she and the others knew. Ken seemed to have been entranced by the man who lay dying before him, kneeling in some frozen stupor before the man’s strange yellow eyes – kneeling there and giggling insanely. Red had run across to see what was happening and had instantly felt the force of those eyes; they had seemed to be pulling Ken toward the man’s leering face. Jane told Ken that Red had said he’d sensed the blackness, said he felt his mind do a little flip.
As she looked at him with her face twisting in disbelief, Jane said, ‘Red reckons he saw Jeremiah, he said he saw his father, saw him laughing inside his own head, he said it made his brain feel like an omelette!’ Her eyes widened. ‘That’s when he shot him, the man you were looking at – Red just shoved his rifle into the guy’s eye and pulled the trigger!’ She shuddered.
Red’s quick action had apparently saved Ken, the noise of the shot shattering the trance, severing that horrible link the Demon had managed to build between it and her stupefied husband. Jane said that half the man’s head had sprayed over Ken’s face, and that he, Ken, had fallen onto his side and simply laid there with his eyes wide open, staring into space and humming some strange tune or another.
‘It’s not surprising that my head hurts so much, Red must have damned-near burst my eardrum!’ Ken said, gently rubbing the offending organ. ‘What else did I do, nothing terrible, was it?’ The memories of his naked rampage were still fresh in his mind, and he doubted that he would never forget that particular vision: naked and running, blood and lust, Tori’s delicious wounds.
Jane looked at him, saying: ‘You were mumbling something about Maggie, and you were singing, you just lay there humming, laughing, and…and well, then you passed out.’ She passed him another glass of water, asking: ‘Are you okay now, my darling? I thought you’d been shot or something, you were absolutely covered in blood and dirt – look at your hand!’ Whatever had occurred, whatever tale Red had told Jane, seemed to have scared the living daylights out of her.
Ken looked down at his left hand – there were several blisters at the top of his palm and two on his middle finger. He hadn’t even noticed them. Looking back into Jane’s eyes, he said, ‘It’s nothing, don’t worry about it, it’s just some weapon rash, is all – I’ll live!’ He drank the water, then lay back and thought for a while; the events were now up to date in his mind, all except for one thing. ‘How many were they, how many did we kill?’ he asked. Ken remembered counting at least seven.