Shattered

by Jay Bonansinga

  “C’mon, Slick, let’s get you outta here.” Grove clutched the baby to his ribs, leaned down, and picked up his gun. Then he swam his way back through the corn toward the clearing, toward the escape hatch.

  By the time he reached the clearing, another figure was poking his head out of the escape hatch.

  “Is he all right?”

  The square-jawed man peering out the lip of the tunnel shaft looked almost comical in the moonlight, visible only from the waist up, still dressed in his Brooks Brothers suit, but soaked in his own sweat and panting fiercely. His craggy face beaded with perspiration from the half-mile charge down the tunnel, Tom Geisel still had his .38 snub-nose gripped tightly in his gnarled right hand.

  “Yeah, thank God, just a little scared,” Grove said as he carried the baby over to the opening. He discreetly wiped his eyes with his sleeve, not wanting Geisel to see his tears. “A little damp, too. Take him, Tom.” Grove knelt and handed the child over to the section chief.

  “You bet.” Geisel wrestled his gun back in to its sheath as he took the baby. The child wriggled and whined. Geisel stroked the boy and cooed comforting sounds. He looked up at Grove. “You got a fix on Maura?”

  “Not yet. She’s gotta be close. They couldn’t have gotten far.” Grove was checking the Bulldog’s cylinder, making sure the loads were seated and ready to rock. “I know she’s alive, Tom, don’t ask me how. I’m going to find her. Have the baby checked out by the medics.”

  “Of course.” Geisel nodded, stroking the child’s head. “Got backup on its way. Blackhawks’ll light up this place like an operating room.”

  “Too little too late, boss—sorry.”

  “Wait for them, Ulysses.”

  Grove rose and thumbed the hammer, shaking his head. “Sorry but—”

  “That’s an order.”

  A strange pause here as Grove met Geisel’s stare, their gazes locking for just an instant. It wasn’t exactly sadness or resignation or regret, although all those emotions were present in Geisel’s eyes. There was even a hint of fondness there, a father’s forlorn realization that it was his son’s turn to fight the war. But for just an instant, before he broke the spell by speaking, Grove saw something else in Geisel’s downtrodden gaze as the baby wriggled in the older man’s arms. Geisel was keeping something from him.

  At last Grove offered a quick, tense, humorless nod. “You can fire my ass on Monday.”

  Then he turned and lurched back into the black sea of corn.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  In the darkness, the man in the bloody rags and horn-rimmed eyeglasses worked with predatorial efficiency. His movements were savage yet economical, like those of a hungry wolf, but also very robotic, and purposeful, as though he were playing out some intricate ritual.

  Maura noticed all this through her stupor of pain and terror as the man dragged her into another clearing, deeper in the no-man’s-land of corn, a smaller capsule of rocky earth no bigger than an office cubicle. He held the makeshift silencer to her head. It felt like a cold finger pressed to her temple. She had been gagged with another rag, this time so tightly it had nearly dislocated her jaw. Her hands were bound behind her back, and she felt a stabbing pain in her neck where the beast had yanked her to her feet a few minutes earlier, probably dislocating a vertebra.

  But despite the pain, and the immense fear for her baby’s safety weighing down on her like a boulder on her chest, Maura could not take her eyes off the killer. The moonlight had found his disfigured face, the sunken eyes like hot coals buried in wrinkled flesh. “Praemiummmm, praemiummmmm, praemiummmmm,” he muttered softly as he sat her against a cluster of thick cornstalks.

  Maura was ready to die. If her baby was safe, she was ready. That’s all she asked: God, let her baby be safe. This freak could do whatever he wanted to her, just so Aaron was safe.

  The tears tracked down Maura’s face and soaked her gag as Splet moved around behind her and tied her wrists to the stalks so that she couldn’t move.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon,” he whispered to her in a new voice, almost apologetically, as he came back around in front of her, his face in shadow now. Two pinpricks of red light glowed in the pits of his eye sockets.

  Maura closed her eyes and waited to die. She heard the killer shuffling across the clearing.

  “Please don’t do that,” he finally said, his voice barely audible above the crickets.

  Maura opened her eyes and saw that Splet was sitting across from her now.

  He sat facing her on the spongy ground. He had tied his own head to the stalks with a rag, and he was crying. His body shook with spasms of grief and deep, deep shame, making the stalks shake.

  Maura gawked.

  Splet looked like a child. Tears mingling with the snot on his contorted face, he hunched over with wracking sobs for several moments, his cracked lips peeling away from yellowed teeth. “I never wanted to kill anybody…but I…I…I had to make people see what I saw…in my head…what I saw I had to—”

  He stopped suddenly.

  Maura closed her eyes again.

  “Open your eyes or I will rip your eyelids off!”

  Grove stopped abruptly, alone in the dark, in the middle of the corn, unbidden images and sensations flowing into him through his left eye, his head cocked like a hunting dog on the scent, when he heard Splet’s enraged cry.

  Spinning to the left, Grove dove into the fibrous jungle of stalks, the barrel of his Bulldog cutting a swath through the corn, sending up whorls of dust and debris. He wanted to call out for his wife, but he controlled the urge. Best to stay as silent as possible.

  He could see nothing but the dark churning sea of brown ahead of him, but he heard the echo of a madman’s wail—something about ripping eyelids—reverberating over the fields. Grove locked onto that sound.

  Official transcripts of the evening’s events would estimate the distance between him and the source of the sound at approximately two hundred yards.

  Rushing headlong through the corn, Grove put his finger on the trigger pad.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Maura watched Splet’s face change. His pale visage hardened, the muscle tissue seizing up as though electric current were bolting through his skull. His cheeks sank into cadaverous craters, his forehead furrowed into deep creases, and his eyes contracted and narrowed into canine slits. A new voice emanated from him like steam from his gullet—a monstrous whisper from the depths of the earth.

  “Donnnnnarrrrrre inssssuperrr!”

  Or at least that’s what she thought she heard. In those frenzied moments before the blade appeared in Splet’s hands, Maura could not be sure she was seeing or hearing anything properly anymore. The voice sounded like an electronically treated choir of baritones, a million different languages all melded into one, transmuting itself in Maura’s brain.

  And that’s when the enormous rust-flecked bowie knife appeared.

  Splet held it tightly in one hand, raising it up into the moonlight, the edge gleaming menacingly. Splet’s lips moved quickly, as though praying some ancient litany, the legion of voices coming out of him in horrible unison. His eyes were bright with madness now. The thing inside him was running the show—Maura could see that now—and it wanted him to do something terrible with that huge knife.

  Maura could not tear her gaze from Splet. Her eyes refused to look away.

  “I will,” Splet blurted in a strange, incongruous voice that bubbled out of his lungs. It was Splet’s original voice—a meek, chirping whine—accompanied by a pair of anguished eyes staring out from the monster’s eye sockets, the utter and absolute human degradation sparking there for just an instant. “Watch me.”

  Maura watched.

  Splet raised the knife and plunged it in to his own eye.

  Grove heard the familiar scream off to his right, strangled by a gag, maybe a hundred yards now, and pointed the Bulldog at it. Quickly correcting his course, he muscled his way through the stalks, inhaling corn silk mus
t and effluent.

  Less than sixty seconds later he saw the first blurry shadows of two people in the murky middle distance. He lined up the gun’s front sight.

  All he needed to do was figure out which one of these figures was not his wife.

  Maura could not stop screaming. Her muffled cries behind the gag suggested an animal being skinned, as she stared at the transformation unfolding before her.

  Splet convulsed as he drove the blade deeper into his left eye, piercing the cornea like the membrane of an egg, then sinking it through the iris. The knife point traveled through the lens, and finally through the vitreous humor. Pink matter bubbled out of the socket and around the blade’s hilt and down Splet’s arm as his body jerked and flopped against the cornstalks, making ghastly crackling noises.

  Maura shrieked.

  Somehow, some way—and obviously not through any agency of Splet’s dwindling strength—the knife was withdrawn from the left eye, leaving behind a hemorrhaging mass of pulp that flowed down Splet’s chest in rivulets of purple arterial blood. He plunged the knife into his other eye. Blood oozed and bubbled as the blade went all the way down to the optical nerve, kindling fiery pictures on Splet’s fractured brain-screen, scrambling every last tangled synapse of misery and mental illness.

  Maura’s scream deteriorated into something even more desperate.

  She was staring at a dead man who stared back at her with empty, bloody eye sockets. Splet’s knife hand went limp, then collapsed into his lap. But worse than that—far worse—was the fact that something seemed to still be emanating from those gruesome eye sockets.

  Something that was staring back at Maura.

  Right then, the sound of Grove’s .44 magnum barked in the sky…and Splet’s head came apart.

  FORTY

  Grove exploded through the last layer of corn, stumbling into the narrow clearing, his .44 still ready to roar. Both hands were welded to the gun’s grip, his eyes staring ahead. Dust particles floated in the moonlight in front of his face as he frantically scanned the darkness.

  He saw the bloody mess that was once Henry Splet. Then he spun and saw Maura—alive—intact—sitting across the clearing from Splet, staring straight ahead, her lips moving behind the gag, looking shell-shocked, dazed.

  “Thank God,” Grove uttered almost involuntarily as he dropped to his knees next to her. He loosened the gag until it fell around her neck. She let out a pained sigh of air but didn’t say anything. He gently untied her wrists. “It’s over, kiddo. You’re safe now.”

  She flopped forward, and Grove caught her. It was like hugging a rag doll. She felt limp and hollow. Not exactly dead but all spent and wrung out. Grove stroked her hair. “I’m here now. I’m here.”

  Her head lolled, and he hugged her tighter. She smelled of musk and fear. Tears burned in Grove’s eyes, and it was a good long moment before he realized that she had yet to speak or even look at him. “Kiddo? You okay?” He held her face and looked into her eyes. “Talk to me, Maura. Can you talk to me?” Her eyes stared through him. Her pupils were huge and black. Grove shook her a little. “Can you hear me, sweetheart?”

  No response.

  Grove’s heartbeat quickened, his mouth quick drying with panic. He had seen people in this condition. Over the years he had dealt with shock of all sorts—neurogenic, anaphylactic, hypovolemic, cardiogenic—but this looked different. Maura seemed to be physically okay. Her breathing was strong. But something about her color, her posture—something wasn’t right.

  Grove pressed his fingers to her neck. Her pulse was good. “Maura!” He shook her. “Maura!”

  Behind him, heavy boot steps crunched toward the clearing, the crackle of a radio filling the air. Grove hardly heard any of it. He held his wife up, tenderly wiping a stain from her cheek, cradling her face in his hands. Her eyes were huge and dilated and shiny with tears, the gawking stare of a sleepwalker caught in a nightmare. Her lips barely moved in subtle little tics and twitches, as though she were trying to remember something that she had once memorized. For one horrible instant Grove thought of Alzheimer’s patients, old people drooling on themselves in nursing facilities.

  “Talk to me, Mo.”

  “Sss—”

  “That’s it. Good. Talk to me.”

  “Ss-still…” Maura looked as though she had just had a stroke and was trying so hard to get her mouth around the simplest sentence, trying to articulate something horrible yet imperative. She licked her dry, cracked lips, her eyes widening even further, until her pupils looked like two wet glass orbs. “…ss-still inside…”

  Grove distinctly heard the words this time, and he felt a cold dagger of panic cleave his chest. Still inside? Inside the house? Grove looked into Maura’s horrified gaze and tried to decode what was behind those two glassy eyes, which were practically bugging out of her head now as she moaned, “Still inside h-him—Look!”

  At the exact same moment that Grove heard the word look, he saw something extraordinary flickering across Maura’s eyeballs over the space of a single instant.

  Twin reflections.

  For the briefest time imaginable Grove saw a corpse reflected in Maura’s eyes, a corpse lying supine in an oily black puddle behind him, its arms splayed in Christlike surrender. But before Grove even registered the fact that he was seeing Splet’s dead body reflected in Maura’s wet eyes, he realized he was witnessing something else unfolding behind him in those tiny twin reflections.

  It only took an instant to occur, and by the time Grove whirled around it was gone.

  “Oh God, Uly, what’s happening?”

  Maura’s anguished voice wrenched Grove out of his momentary paralysis. He turned back to his wife. He saw her terror turn to confusion, her eyes welling up, the tears obliterating the sinister reflections. He reached out and pulled her into a frantic embrace.

  “It’s over now.”

  “Oh God, oh God…”

  “It’s over, it’s over. I’m with you now. It’s over Mo, it’s over.”

  They clung to each other then, all heat and fever and panic sweat oozing from their pores, as the cornstalk amphitheater around them trembled suddenly, a beam from a high-powered flashlight piercing the murk.

  All at once a black-clad tactical officer burst through the membrane of corn, stumbling into the clearing, leading the charge with the muzzle of his assault rifle. Then came another, and another.

  One of them shouted: “Clear! We’re clear! Subject down! Subject down!”

  Boots slammed down on Splet’s cooling body, the area immediately crawling with tactical people, two-ways sizzling, flashlights and laser sighting beams stitching the shadows. Grove barely noticed any of it. Someone called for a medic but Maura would not let go of Grove.

  She kept clinging to him, softly sobbing and murmuring, “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”

  Grove stayed on the ground with her throughout the frenzied process of securing the area and getting the evac equipment from the house to the clearing. He just kept holding her, stroking her damp hair, and assuring her that it was all over and she was okay and Aaron was safe and they were all going to be fine.

  But in the back of Grove’s mind, the ghostly phenomenon he had seen only minutes ago, reflected off the pools of Maura’s eyeballs, slithering up behind Grove for a second, remained burned into his memory. A smudge of black vapor had risen out of Splet’s ragged remains like a snuffed candle expelling its last puff of smoke. A tendril of noxious black ectoplasm curling up through the night air and vanishing in the dark heavens.

  Something not of this world.

  An image that had already burned itself into the recesses of Grove’s brain.

  Where it would remain for the rest of his life.

  FORTY-ONE

  A trace of that dark matter remained inside Maura as well. It emerged gradually over the subsequent days and nights, as the Grove family—ensconced in a new government-issue split-level home outside Alexandria—licked its psychic wounds. At first, G
rove figured the odd behavior was merely post-traumatic stress popping and crackling in her subconscious like radio signal interference. But the more he noticed the subtle little signs and indicators, the more he realized that the thing which had leached out of Splet that night in his dying moments—reflecting off Maura’s eyes like tiny mandalas—had infected Maura as well.

  The first signs manifested themselves as faint tremors in her hands. Grove noticed them while drying the dishes one night. Maura was washing and could barely hold on to the china. On another night the shaking got so bad that Maura nearly dropped Aaron. She blamed it on nerves. But Grove noticed other little signs cropping up. Maura would wander off into the wooded nature preserve adjacent to their new backyard, muttering to herself, which was completely out of character. She would doodle nervously while watching TV.

  One afternoon Grove came home to find her dozing on the couch, Aaron in a playpen next to her, Maura’s beloved New York Times crossword puzzle splayed open on a TV tray, riddled with strange strings of Latin in the margins. Latin? Grove had studied the dead language in undergraduate school, but had forgotten most of it. Still, the words had some kind of strange resonance in the back of his mind. At dinner that night, he innocently asked Maura if she had ever studied Latin and she confessed that she hadn’t. Grove dropped the subject then, and never commented on it again, unsure of Maura’s emotional state, not wanting to alarm her. But he did slip the newspaper in his briefcase the next morning.

  Grove knew a cryptologist at Langley named Clorefene, and asked the guy to come over to Quantico for an informal cup of coffee one afternoon. Clorefene was an officious little balding man with a heart of gold, a genius-level IQ, and a severe stutter. He took one look at the words that Maura had absently doodled and grinned. “Ch-ch-ch-church Latin they call it, sh-she a g-good Catholic?”