The Brotherhood of the Wheel

by R. S. Belcher

  “Like I said,” he replied, rubbing his face. “You won’t fucking believe me.”

  “Aw, we’re a very understanding audience, man,” Heck said, and tossed Mark the remains of his Lucky Strikes pack and his Zippo. “We just met Helvis. Try us.”

  Mark lit the cigarette with shaky hands and tossed them back to Heck. After a few long drags, like a drowning man gulping air, his hands were steady, and he looked up at his uninvited guests. The biker was pouring and passing out coffee in Styrofoam cups.

  “Dewey was always looking into weird shit—loved it since we were kids. He was onto something he’d been researching for years. Said it had to do with these Black-Eyed Kids and with the fucking highway system. He said something about … what was it, it was a Chinese thing … long … something—”

  “Wait, wait,” Max said, almost spitting out her coffee. “Was it ‘long xian,’ by any chance?”

  “Yeah,” Mark said, nodding. “It was. He talked a lot of weird shit, and sometimes I just pretended to listen. Anyways, one night we were hanging out and there’s a knock at the door—two kids in hoodies.”

  Lovina felt her stomach clench, filled with cold rocks. Her throat tightened.

  Mark went on; his hand holding the cigarette was starting to tremble again. “I remember telling Dewey to shut the fucking door, but he wouldn’t. It felt the way a nightmare feels,” he said. “Awful shit is happening and you can’t stop, even though you know you should. The kids said something, but I can’t remember the words. I was so scared, so fucking afraid, and I couldn’t run, couldn’t move. It was like looking into a cobra’s eyes. They came inside; Dewey let them in. The rest is like a dream that decays, fades, once you wake up from it. We walked outside, and he was there—at least, I think I remember him being there.”

  “Who?” Jimmie said. “Who was there, Mark?”

  “The guy that killed Dewey, the motherfucker the fucking Scode brothers work for,” Mark said, taking a last, long pull on the cigarette that was now mostly ash. Mark crushed it out on the nightstand next to him, beside the Gideon Bible and a forest of empty green beer bottles. “He rides an old black Harley, claims to be the Pagan—y’know, the serial killer.” Jimmie and Lovina traded looks as Mark continued in a shivering voice. His eyes were wide with fear as the adrenaline flooded his blood and brain. “He sacrificed Dewey to some … there isn’t a word, man. It … it was a god, some kind of god-thing.

  “A god?” Heck said, glancing at Jimmie. “Fun.”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said. “I mean, I don’t know what to call it. It was in our heads when we were out in the woods with it and the Pagan and the fucking Scode boys.… Its eyes were the holes in the clouds—the stars peeking through—and the forest was its … its body? Hands? Look, all I know is it made me feel like a fucking microbe, man, like the Devil had shit in my skull. It was so old and so … everywhere. And hungry, fuck it was hungry—ravenous! It wants to eat us, eat us all, chew us up—devour everyone, everywhere. Not anger, or hatred, just … beneath contempt. Food … all we are is food for it—prey—and it likes to play with its food.”

  “Old and hungry,” Jimmie said, rubbing his face. The weight of the road and the hours and the stress settled over him. He shrugged it off as best he could. “Did the Pagan tell you what it was? Its name?”

  “The Horned Man,” Mark said, after staring and blinking for a moment. “He said he was sacrificing for the Horned Man. Chasseur, that fucker on the bike, said that the Horned Man had made him the Master of the Hunt, whatever the hell that is. He had dogs, lots of dogs, but they weren’t dogs, they were shadows—shadow people … made out of shadows.… I know how fucking crazy this sounds, I do.”

  Max was furiously digging into her satchel. She pulled out her tablet and began to tap on the screen. Heck lit up his last cigarette, crumpled the empty pack, and tossed it in a corner. “Where were you when all this was going down, man?” Heck asked. “You said there was a forest—do you know where it was, where they took you and Dewey?”

  “Some shithole of a town called Four Houses,” Mark said. He was sweating, blinking. “I think it’s in Kansas—that’s what the kids told me.”

  “Kids?” Lovina said.

  “Dewey said they teleported us, or some such bullshit. All I know is one minute we were outside Dewey’s house and the next we were there. Like I said, it was like a bad dream. Maybe it was, maybe I just lost my fucking shit.… No, no, Dewey is dead—that’s fucking real, that’s true.”

  “What kids?” Lovina asked, leaning closer.

  “Two college kids,” Dewey said. They got stranded in Four Houses. I think the Pagan was going to sacrifice them, too. At least, that’s what he told me to tell Norse yesterday.”

  There was a rumble in the parking lot below, the sound of a motorcycle gliding by, slowly.

  “Norse?” Heck said. “Who the hell is Norse?”

  “Karen Collie said something about Four Horses in her dream before she disappeared,” Jimmie said. “Maybe she meant Four Houses.”

  “Can you tell us the kids’ names?” Lovina said. “Where were they from, Mark? Are they still alive?”

  “Did you have instructions to hook back up with the Pagan, Mark?” Jimmie asked. “How? Where?”

  Mark covered his ears and leaned forward, his head on his knees. “Shut up, shut up and go away … all of you please just shut the fuck up and go away!”

  “Hey!” Heck shouted out. The room stilled. “We all need to dial it down a notch, okay.” Heck knelt beside Mark’s bed, opposite Lovina and Jimmie. “Look, Mark, it’s cool, man. We’re cool. We’re all a little jacked up, but we all want the same thing. I know you’ve been through some bad, bad shit, man. You saw your buddy slaughtered—I know how that feels. I know how it eats at you inside, like rats gnawing you. I know you want to wipe yourself out and never come back. I really do know, man. But we got a job to do, okay? You can help us get the bastards who got Dewey. But you have got to stay cool, okay? Do the job.”

  Mark nodded. His eyes were damp but dead. “Yeah, okay … okay, I’m cool,” he said.

  Heck looked from Lovina to Jimmy and then back to Mark. “Okay, who’s Norse?”

  “George Norse,” Mark said. “Radio and TV guy. I was supposed to just deliver it and then call a number to be picked up. I ran. I got drunk, and I ran.”

  “What were you delivering?” Lovina asked.

  Heck felt something, a flush or a warmth along his neck, then a shudder of cold, almost like the way he had felt in the desert when he got too much sun—freezing in the sunshine. He looked toward the door and didn’t know why, but the part of him that never slept did.

  “Guys…” he had time to say, his hand slipping to the handle of the MP9, as he unslung it. Just the tone of his voice was enough for Jimmie and Lovina. Both began to raise their weapons, to stand.

  The dark corners of the room moved, congealed into the form of dogs—a half dozen, silent, with eyes like greasy moonlight. The hotel room door splintered and broke from the force of the kick, wrenching itself off one of the hinges. The man behind the kick was dressed in black riding leathers, gloves, and boots. His narrow, plain face was impassive. His hair was slicked straight back in a style popular a century ago. He held a large bone-handled hunting knife. He stepped into the room.

  “It’s time” was all Mark said. He was looking at Heck when a shadow in the shape of a man freed itself from above the bed and sank its smoky fist into Mark’s skull. Mark Stolar gave a deep groan as his eyeballs swelled, then sluiced out of his sockets, followed by a gush of blood and brains. He slumped and was quiet. The shadow removed its now ethereal hand from the dead man’s skull and once more became one with the wall.

  “No one escapes the hunt, Mr. Stolar,” the Pagan said. “Ever.” He turned from the corpse to regard the others. He opened his mouth to speak.

  “Light him up!” Jimmie shouted, unloading the 12-gauge in a thunderous blast less than three feet from the man. Lovi
na fired on him with the .40 Glock, kneeling on one knee beside Jimmie, pumping round after round into the dark rider. Heck’s machine gun clattered as he stood on the opposite side of the bed, hot brass hissing as it hit the cheap industrial carpet. Max, who had slid down between the other bed and the wall, her arm holding her tablet, popped back up to video the exchange. There was a sound like the world breaking: angry gunpowder bellows, the air scalded with the fury of bullets, then silence. The room smelled of warm brass and cordite. The gun-smoke fog drifted out the shattered door. The Pagan was unscathed; not even a bullet hole marked his leathers.

  “Fuck us,” Heck had time to mutter. In one, fluid movement, the Pagan backhanded Jimmie, the impact slamming him into his chair, breaking it, and then driving him into the corner by the air conditioner under the room’s large curtained window. Aussapile gasped in pain as the force of the almost casual slap knocked his still smoking shotgun from his hands and shattered the plastic molding and the plasterboard of the room’s wall. He slid to the floor. The Pagan continued, driving a low, clumsy kick toward Lovina. She blocked it expertly, but was startled when the sheer strength of the blow turned her block aside, like a child trying to slow down a rampaging bear. The power of the kick tossed her across the room, where she smashed into the heavy wooden dresser that the flat-screen TV was resting on. The dresser collapsed, and Lovina crumpled to the floor, buried under shattered wood and broken electronics. Heck stood between the two beds, between the Pagan and the still hiding Max. He lowered the MP9 but kept his eyes on the Pagan. Jimmie couldn’t believe it: Heck was grinning.

  “Now, as I was trying to say,” the Pagan continued. “I have sensed your regard as you have hunted me. Though you are all mortal—made of soft skin, fragile glass bones, you fought well against the cubs I sent against you in Illinois. Only one of your number died, though I’m of a mind that it should have been two.” The Pagan locked eyes with Heck. “Look at you.”

  “I am a sight,” Heck growled. “That I am.”

  “The other animals are in pain, in fear, but you—you can’t wait for the fight, can you?”

  “I’m looking forward to kicking your ass, yeah,” Heck said.

  “Why were you not infected and overcome when you were bitten, as your ally was?” the Pagan asked.

  “You drink the shit I’ve chugged at MC initiation parties, and I’m sure I can handle whatever venom was in the little love bites from your black-eyed boy band.”

  The Pagan cocked his head. It was an unnatural motion, like a machine trying to mimic human confusion. “You don’t know what you are,” he said. “You hear the song of oblivion screaming in you and hide from it, ignore it, try to silence it. You truly have no idea. How pathetic.”

  “Why don’t you explain it to me, then,” Heck said. Some of the sneering sarcasm faltered, and Lovina saw doubt and some fear creeping onto Heck’s face, into his voice.

  “You are a hunter of men, just as I am,” the Pagan said. “A dragon walking among sheep. They are nothing but prey to you, as they are to me, to my master. You and I have more in common than you have with any of the simpering, bleating chattel.”

  Heck was silent, lost in the desert again, in the flames that talked. The Pagan’s voice was there, in the fire. Jimmie struggled to reach the shotgun, and Lovina tried to rise from the debris.

  “You have all witnessed the hunt,” the Pagan said. “No one survives that.” He raised a gloved hand, and the shadow hounds began to pad silently from the darkness. Max suddenly popped up from behind the other bed.

  “Get down!” Jimmie shouted.

  “An fiach fiáin,” Max called out to the Pagan, in a quavering voice. Jimmie recognized the strange phrase. Karen Collie had said it to him when he picked her up, when she asked him to stop the monster that had devoured her and her friends. Max continued, “We honor the Divine Marriage, the Three Who Are One, the union of Cernunnos and Diana. Stay the Master of the Hunt’s hand. We beg thee, and will offer the proper sacrifices.”

  “One of you actually knows the old ways,” the Pagan said. “Very good, but far, far too late. The three who are one are gone—diminished by my master. Diana is dead. Only the Fury remains, only the Horned God. There is no place in this universe for mercy now.” The Pagan looked at each of them. “Your hunt has ended,” he said. He dropped his raised arm, and the shadow hounds surged forward as the Pagan turned his back and stepped through the doorway.

  One of the beasts was on top of Lovina, even as she tried to get to her knees. The hound’s mouth opened and a horrible keening spilled out across the room, as it began to close its massive maw on Lovina.

  “No!” Max shouted. She held up a small cylinder, a laser pointer, and fired the red beam at the hound on Lovina. The creature’s howl turned into a whine of pain as the beam cut through its inky hide and reduced the hound to a cloud of black smoke, much like what had happened to the slain BEKs they had faced in Illinois. Two more of the hounds were almost on Heck, and a third jumped the bed, over Mark’s corpse, toward Jimmie. Another moved to maul Lovina, and the last knocked Max against the wall, pinning her behind the bed.

  “The curtains, Jimmie, the curtains!” Max screamed as she tried to struggle with the shadow beast that was like fog to her touch but was more than capable of touching her, biting her. Heck snapped out of his daze and spun to meet the two hounds as they hurled toward him. Jimmie grabbed at the edge of the thick canvas curtain and pulled with all his might. The shadow hound was on top of him; its breath was dust and ice. He snarled into the beast’s face and wrenched. The curtain popped, then tore free, and sunlight poured into the room. The pack howled in pain and rage—a sound that chewed on every nerve. The howl faded quickly, as each shadow dog became a plume of odorless black smoke, the sunlight knifing through the clouds, scattering them on the air.

  “I take back everything bad I ever said about Builders,” Jimmie said, struggling to rise, wincing with pain. “Thanks, Max.”

  Max smiled and scrambled to help Lovina to her feet. “You okay?” the professor asked.

  “I’m alive, thanks to you,” Lovina said with a groan. “How did you do that, the laser thing? How did you know that would hurt them?”

  “I didn’t,” Max said. “It’s a toy for my cat, Pyewacket. I had it in my bag, and I thought if they’re cohesive darkness, then maybe cohesive light would … you know, affect them.”

  Lovina laughed. “Smart,” she said. “And all that stuff you said to him?”

  “If what he was saying is true,” Max said, “then the universe is in terrible danger.”

  “The universe?” Lovina said.

  Max nodded. “The whole universe.”

  Jimmie limped over to Heck. “You okay?” the trucker asked. Heck nodded. He pulled a sheet over Mark’s face. A crowd of hotel guests were sheepishly beginning to peek inside the room. The gunshots had done the trick. Several had out cell phones to video or take pictures, and others were calling 911. There was a rumble of a motorcycle in the lot below.

  “Yeah, sorry I flaked out,” Heck said. “I let the asshole get to me.”

  “It’s okay,” Jimmie said. Aussapile looked at everyone. “Pedal to the metal, people—we’re taking this son of a bitch down. No way in hell is he getting away.”

  SIXTEEN

  “10-80”

  The Pagan, the Master of the Hunt, drove his black 1945 Harley-Davidson WLA out of the parking lot of the motel and onto MLK Jr. Drive, headed east. Heck was the first out the shattered door of the late Mark Stolar’s hotel room. He pushed past the crowd, jumped most of the first flight of steps, then flipped over the wrought-iron rail and landed, running, on the lot’s asphalt. He had his helmet on by the time Jimmie, Lovina, and Max were crossing the lot to their vehicles.

  “He’s headed east on MLK!” Heck shouted as he slid the steel demon face over his own and kicked the T5 Blackie in the guts, bringing it to snarling life. He tore out of the lot after the Master of the Hunt.

  “Ears
on!” Jimmie shouted out to the biker as they reached his rig and Lovina’s Charger. “Channel 23!” Sirens were filling the air. “You’re with me, Doc,” Jimmie said. “I need a consult.” Max nodded and struggled into the passenger seat of the 18-wheeler as Jimmie climbed into the truck’s cab. “You got that handset radio I gave you?” Jimmie asked Lovina as she slid behind the wheel of the Charger.

  “Got it,” she said. Jimmie gave her a thumbs-up and started up the truck.

  Heck swung the turn out of the motel lot hard and fast. He heard horns bleat at him, blurs of motion at the edges of his periphery; he swerved to avoid a Volvo. There was a wall of flashing blue lights barreling down on the motel parking lot, westbound on MLK Jr. Drive.

  “Shit!” he said, clicking on the radio on his belt. “Cops,” he said into the mike. “All up your asses. I got ’em.”

  Heck swerved to a full stop on the street and sprayed the patrol cars with machine-gun fire, shooting out the light bars on the roofs of the cars. Squad cars swerved, braked, and crashed everywhere.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jimmie’s voice boomed in Heck’s ear.

  “Being a good fucking team player!” Heck growled. He let the MP9 drop back to his side and flipped off the assembled horde of police cars. He spun out the back tire of the Blackie, streaming foul-smelling rubber smoke, and shot off the wrong way down his side of the street, headed west now. The police units that could still move chased after him, ignoring the 18-wheeler and the muscle car speeding in pursuit of the Master of the Hunt in the other direction.

  Max clutched at her seat belt as Jimmie slid the lumbering rig through the jumble of late-morning rush-hour traffic, squeezing through gaps she didn’t believe it was physically possible for Paladin’s truck to move through.

  “He’s turning right onto Joe Lowery Boulevard,” Jimmie said into his headset. “I think he’s headed for the interstate.” Jimmie keyed his mike to Channel 23 again. “Break 2-3, break 2-3, looking for any brothers out there, anyone. This is Paladin, and we sure could use some help right about now, c’mon?” There was no answer, only silence. “Damn it,” Jimmie muttered, and swung the wheel to avoid a car and to slip through another impossible gap.