by Unknown
“Lance… why did you do that to your chest?” She thought that might be the key. If she was never going to see him anyway, why not risk it? Why not find out the truth?
He shook his head, eyes relaxed and remote and accepting. “You really don’t want to know.” He kissed her on the forehead, then stood and left.
Outside, in the anonymous hotel hallway, the man (whose name was not Lance) took a deep breath. He thought about women, about men. Thought about himself. Unconsciously, one hand reached up to toy with the links of chain that were punched through the skin of his chest, threaded through flesh and even under bone. Breathing out, his chest and hips bulged, features softened, and then there was the peculiar swimming, jumping sensation inside as organs changed and rearranged. When the entity that had called itself Lance breathed in again, it was a plain, dark-skinned woman. She adjusted her clothes and walked off down the hall.
* * *
Leslie and Kate had walked a mile down the cold highway before an old Chevy Blazer pulled over in front of them. The man inside was a bit fleshy and overweight, cheerful, with his left arm still deeply tanned from a summer of hanging out the driver’s side window.
“Cold day to walk,” he said. Kate smiled.
“We ran out of gas,” she said.
“That so? Well, I ‘spose I could give you a ride up to the Kaycee’s if you promise y’ain’t gonna carjack me.”
“We promise,” Leslie said. Kate kept smiling, sure that the driver couldn’t see the outline of the revolver in her purse.
He reached across to unlock the side and back doors. Kate got in front next to him, and Leslie got in the back seat.
“We really appreciate this,” Kate said.
“Well, you hear about people doing carjackings, but not around here. I mean, you’d have to be pretty dumb to try and pull that on a road that gets maybe twenty cars a day.”
“Right, we’d have no way of knowing someone would be along. I should have gassed up at the last station, but I really wanted to make good time…”
“Yeah, well, a stitch in time saves nine, ain’t it the way?”
Kate had toyed with the idea of robbing this man, but not seriously. He was far too nice, and she didn’t want to punish him for it, not even to advance a worthy agenda.
They soon pulled up at a Kaycee’s General Store. Their rescuer turned off the engine.
“You know, I just now remembered I’ve got a siphon in back. Heck, we could have just turned around and pumped you up by the side of the road. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Well, we still appreciate what you’ve done for us. Thanks.”
“You can thank me when you’re back at your car.”
“Oh, you don’t have to go out of your way…”
“Aw, it’ll take me ten minutes to drive you back, but an hour and a half for you to walk it. Greatest good for the greatest number, and all that.”
“You’re very sweet.”
“You know, I could give ‘em a ride back.” The voice came from the doorway of the convenience store. A teenager stood there, chemistry textbook in hand, looking at the trio.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, no one’s come by here for hours. I’ll just lock the door.”
Leslie started to feel a prickling sensation on the back of his neck. Were people really this kind? He looked at his mother and made a subtle gesture. She shook her head, so she wasn’t doing anything.
Kate didn’t even have to pay for their gas.
* * *
Box elder bugs are each about the size of a single Rice Krispie. They are red and black, they’re found around box elder trees, and they like sunlight. They don’t sting, and they don’t carry disease. They’re harmless. However, they do have a tendency to sun themselves on walls in colonies in the tens of thousands. As a rule, people find it unsightly when a two foot square patch of their home is covered with a squirming red and black mass of insects. This was particularly true of 58-year old widow Edna Brukitt.
The mass congealed on the west face of Mrs. Brukitt’s house was ragged around the edges. In their random, Brownian crawling, the insects in this colony formed out symbols, letters. First they spelled the word “VOTRE” for a brief, wiggling moment. Then the letters shifted to “VIE EST EN”. Wavering, they remained for a few seconds, then changed to “DANGEUR.” Then they were, once again, just a mass of mindless bugs.
Only one person was present for this peculiar transformation, and he wasn’t paying attention. His name was Joe Kimble, and he didn’t even speak French.
Joe was dressed in brown coveralls and combat boots. The coveralls were unzipped to the center of his chest. Underneath, he wore a black Metallica “Kill ‘Em All” t-shirt with a small stain on the stomach. He had an old Walkman tape player and was listening to “Master of Puppets” as he sprayed the bugs with poison. The back of the coveralls said “Kimble Exterminators.” On the front was a patch that said “Joe.”
Joe stood about five foot eleven, and his skin had tanned a deep, dark brown. He was trying to grow his hair out until it came to the middle of his back, like he’d had it in high school, but so far he only had an inch and a half of wiry black thatch sticking straight out from his scalp. His full lips were now, as usual, set in a resigned, sullen pout.
He didn’t hear the stranger approach, so he flinched, jumped and turned around when the man touched his shoulder.
“Jeeziz!” Joe snarled.
“Uh, hello.”
“You try’na gimme a heart attack?”
“Sorry, sorry.”
Joe squinted.
“Who the hell’re you anyway?”
“You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of yours.”
Joe didn’t like the stranger’s looks. He had lines around his cheeks from grinning and no matching smile lines on his eyes. His teeth were crooked and cigarette-yellow. In his sixties, maybe, with straw-and-gray hair under a fussy brown old-man fedora. He wore oxblood wing-tip shoes, khaki Dockers, and a three-button jacket over a white polo shirt. It was marked with yellow sweat on the collar and armpits. He stuck out a hand.
Dubious, Joe shook it.
“So…” the man squinted at the name patch “Joe. Pleased to meet you.”
“What’s your name, buddy?”
“Dobbs. Seth Dobbs. We haven’t met. But if I were you, I’d get used to meeting strangers.” He tried a knowing smile. It was hideous.
“Huh?” Although phrased as a question, Joe’s tone indicated that he was bored already and didn’t want to hear more.
“You don’t know it, but people are looking for you. Tell me Joe, ever notice anything… odd?”
“You mean, like some old dude showing up from nowhere and smirking at me?”
“Like unexplained cold spots.” Dobbs’ voice took on a harder tone, and he squinted, trying to look mean. It didn’t work. “Missing time? Spontaneous injuries? Visions? Dreams that later came true?”
“What the hell you talking about?”
“Why so defensive?” Dobbs said it incisively, like Perry Mason trapping someone into a confession.
Apparently Joe didn’t realize he’d been trapped.
“Who you think you are, coming’ up to people on the street and throwing all this dumbass bullshit down? If you got something to say to me, say it awready. If you don’t, you mind if I do my job here?”
Seth essayed a cool, knowing smirk. He pulled a wallet out of his pocket and flicked it open. Credit cards and ATM receipts spilled on the grass.
“Oops! Oh damn,” Seth cried, pulling at his pants legs as he grunted and bent to retrieve his possessions.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Joe muttered, and bent to help him. When Seth straightened out, his face was beet red, but he had a business card in his hand.
“Here, take this. If you change your mind…” he said significantly.
“Change my mind about what? You haven’t asked me nothin’ or told me nothin’ or given me any kind of choice, so wh
at the fuck am I s’posed to change my mind about?”
“If you decide you want someone to explain what’s going on. Or if you decide you need a friend. I’m at the Sleepy Teepee motel, got it?” He turned and left, willing himself not to look back.
“What, are you a fag? Is that it?” Joe yelled at his retreating back.
The card said “Seth Dobbs, Extraordinary Investigations.” It had no address, just a phone and fax number.
He almost tossed the card away, but figured widow Brukitt might yell at him for littering. He stuck it in a pocket instead.
Seth walked across the street, unlocked his car and got in. There was a large, sealed glass jar on the passenger seat. Inside, floating in some clear, preservative liquid, was a shriveled human fetus. Care had been taken to bind its left arm to the side of its head with wire, and to contort the fingers of that hand so that it pointed. The entire tiny body was like an arrow. Floating free in the liquid, it turned like a compass needle. As Joe Kimble returned to his poisoning, the fetus made minute adjustments to point directly at him. As Seth drove away, it continued to turn, pointing always directly at Joe.
* * *
Hundreds of miles up the road from Joe and his dead bugs, Kate and Leslie at last pulled their own car into the gas station. When Leslie was done pumping gas, he accompanied Kate to the pay phone. While Leslie watched, notepad in hand, Kate took a deep breath, bit her lip softly, ran her tongue across the front of her teeth. Then she dropped her coins into the machine, turned her back counter-clockwise, closed her eyes, put her left hand behind her back and stabbed blindly at the keypad, just as she had been taught. Quietly, she muttered, “Calling Fred Mundy, calling Fred Mundy…” Leslie, watching closely, jotted down the number.
Kate suppressed a shiver when a familiar voice answered roughly. She almost spoke, but simply cut off the line.
“Did you get it?”
“Uh huh,” Leslie said. “Let’s go check those hospital records.”
Back at the car, Leslie opened the back door and rummaged briefly in a cardboard box containing eight or nine old manila folders. He frowned, then consulted an atlas, then smiled.
“Four one seven,” he said. “Downstate Missouri. Got it right here. Joe Kimble. He’s the one.”
He looked up when he heard a metallic click, and saw Kate with her snub-nosed Colt revolver in hand. One thin, pink-nailed hand had fetched an unmarked box of .38 caliber ammunition from the glove compartment. As he watched, she fitted a bullet into its socket.
“You think we’re going to need that?” Leslie asked.
Her face was inscrutable, she said, “Naw, probably not.”
* * *
Mordecai Thanatos was not happy. Truthfully, he was scared, and he found fear distasteful, unless other people were experiencing it.
“Listen to me, Raven,” he growled into his phone. “I do not want you to have anything to do with Abel’s puling little errand boy, unless it be to pound on his face until he shits his pants. Clear?”
This was not supposed to happen. Mordecai had gone through a lengthy, intense and expensive process of self-invention. He owned a luxurious home in the desert outside L.A. His furniture was leather. His drink was an aged and expensive armagnac. His cigar was smuggled from Cuba. His Satanic death-cult was the largest and most illustrious in the Los Angeles basin. He had close to a hundred followers, and probably a half-dozen of them would kill or die on his command.
He was not supposed to be afraid of a bumbling, ignorant billionaire with a taste for the occult. He was not supposed to be scared by Alex Abel.
The man on the other end of the line was nowhere near as confident as Mordecai. He’d spent as many years trying to be someone new, but unlike Mordecai he’d gone about it in a haphazard fashion involving drugs, tattoos and very loud music. He felt like he was finally making some progress with Satanism, but (truth be told) his mentor Mordecai was less interested in creating rival leaders than obedient followers. Consequently, the new Raven (as opposed to his old self, which had been named Robert) was prone to shut up and do as told.
On the other hand, Alex Abel’s emissary to the Church of Death Triumphant had been a very persuasive man.
“But master,” Raven said. “What does it matter if we agree to Abel’s terms or not? Surely you would know if he had opened his soul to the Powers, and since he hasn’t, what’s wrong with allowing him to think we’re his allies?”
A heavyset man named Carl, who was also listening, grunted in approval. Neither of the other men could hear him, of course.
“What’s wrong with it?” Mordecai’s hand clenched convulsively around his silver pentagram medallion. “It’s an inversion of the proper order, you imbecile! Perhaps from your position at the bottom of society’s shit heap, any higher position looks enviable, but let me assure you, Death’s emissary on Earth bends knee to no man, especially not some uppity rich nigger with delusions of grandeur!”
Carl made a soft tsk noise in his throat at the “n-word.” Looking through his 8X scope, he could see that Raven wasn’t terribly happy either. He was picking nervously at his earlobe, which had been expanded by a succession of stretching rings until it he could fit his pinkie tip inside it.
“I know, Master, but he said he could make himself useful…”
“Sweet bestial night, do you continue to defy me? Can’t you see how his poisonous maneuverings endanger us even now? If you, whom I had judged to be reliable, contradict me, and continue to do so, it is a sign that the faith I had in you was poorly placed indeed. Do you cling to life? Is that it?”
“Oh no master! No! Death is my only truth, death and what comes after!”
“Cut yourself in penance to me.”
As Carl watched, Raven dug into his pocket and produced a switchblade of illegal size. He popped the blade open and with no hesitation drew it across the back of the hand that held the receiver.
“Your will, the will of death and Satan, is my only will.”
“That’s better.” Mordecai sounded satisfied and Carl wondered if the man could know, even miles away, that his command had been obeyed. He suspected it was a bluff.
“Raven, do not be uneasy. Alex Abel and his ‘New Inquisition’ have no real idea what’s going on. I don’t care how much money Alex Abel pours into his private occult war, the man is no adept. He has no comprehension of the powers with which he toys. In time, they will toy with him.”
“I believe you.”
“That’s good Raven. That’s why, the next time Abel’s lickspittle comes to talk to you, I want you to smile, and act pleasant, and kill him.”
“Shall I bring him for a ritual?”
“Mmmm… no. No, such a one isn’t worthy to even be present at one of our celebrations, let alone give his blood to it. Do it as you will, slow or fast. Do it to your pleasure, not his own.”
“You don’t need to tell me that, master. You’ve taught me well.”
“I should hope so. Who rules this world?”
“Death, my lord.”
“And who rules the next?”
“Satan.”
With that, Raven hung up his phone. He turned to go to the bathroom for a bandage. His hand throbbed. Raven was used to pain—he was actually more distracted by the sticky feeling of his blood on the phone receiver. Perhaps that was why he didn’t see the tiny ruby glow that a laser targeting scope made on the grime of his window. Carl sighted on Raven’s throat, then temple, picking his shot, taking his time, giving Raven a lead, then sending a high velocity round through the Satanist’s neck. The rifle made a sound no louder than a clap. There was no muzzle flash. Carl fired two more times. His face had no expression. Then he began dismantling his wiretap and preparing to flee, leaving the rifle at the scene. Rumors would soon be in place that Raven was a smuggler who crossed his connection.
Miles away and still irritated, Mordecai Thanatos leaned forward to set down his sleek black telephone. On the mahogany table was a smoldering cigar an
d his snifter. He chose the drink, sipped, and set it down as he leaned back, relaxing. As the base of the glass touched the glossy surface of the table, a left hand in a black leather glove snaked silently around from behind his chair. So perfectly did the hand’s speed match the rate of his head’s movement, that its presence did not really register for the split second between when he saw it and when it covered his mouth and pulled his head back against the chair. The left hand did not kill him. It merely held his head steady as a right hand in a matching glove shoved a four-inch awl through his right ear hole and into his brain.
He did not have time to react to his death, not even to close his eyes.
His assassin looked down at the top of his head, then took a step back, leaving the awl where it was. She walked around to the side of his chair, by the table. With his eyes wide and his mouth slightly agape, he looked mildly surprised.
The killer’s name was Jolene.
She took a deep breath, trying to be calm, but it still came out of her ragged. She looked around the place a bit and scratched her chin, waiting for his blood to settle in him a bit. Took another shuddering breath and frowned, annoyed that she was so affected by a murder that had gone so smoothly. Too smoothly, perhaps. Usually, there was a struggle. Maybe that was why. Or perhaps the Satanic trappings had affected her more than she would consciously acknowledge.
As a gesture of bravado, she took a deep drag from the dead man’s cigar and knocked the ashes off in his mouth.
When she was sure no blood would spurt or leak, she gently tilted his head to the side and withdrew her weapon. After a moment’s hesitation, she closed his eyes. She wasn’t sure if a forensic technician could tell if a corpse burned with its eyes open or not, and she decided not to take the chance. It had all gone so easily, she didn’t want to screw up in the final stretch.
Once she had carefully taken his pentagram pendant—her superiors might find it useful, as a psychological bargaining chip if nothing else—Jolene splashed his drink on his chest. Then she set the cigar on him, roughly where it would have fallen if he had dozed off with it in his mouth. The brandy on his clothes caught easily.