Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror
Page 5
It rained sewage.
With his words came the stench, wafting into the truck like an invisible cloud. Mason coughed. Dara stirred. As the soldier shuffled away to attach a line from the tanker truck, a terrible thought came to her and pushed the sharp smell of urine, feces, and rot out of her head. “There’s nowhere here to sleep.”
“We stay in the truck, that’s all,” Mason said.
“But Tamir …” She thought of him still huddled in the dark, locked in with the horrible droning voice in such a small, cramped space. “Where?”
Keena answered in a calm voice. “He sleep in worse place. When the soldiers come to our town, they kill and kill. No anyone allowed escape. They put bodies on farming wagons and take to the fields to bury. We snuck onto wagon and dug under bodies—our neighbors, our friends. We had to wait two days before we sneak away. Two days with dead. That is how we survive.”
As Keena spoke, Priscilla felt the heat drain from her face. As horrible as the story was, she still couldn’t just leave the old man back there. “He can have my seat. I’ll sleep outside.”
“In this … rain? Don’t think so,” Mason said, opening the driver’s side door. “I’m sure there’s room in one of the Jeeps. For me.”
She reached out and slid a hand over his shoulder as she followed him out of the truck. “Thank you.”
He grinned. “Can’t very well have you going back to America telling all of your cowboy boyfriends that Irish boys have no manners, could I?”
Mason stopped to ask the soldier if they had room for him in one of the Jeeps. Priscilla continued to the back of the truck. Tiny wet droplets splattered against her face, one landing in the corner of her eye. It stung. Wiping away the foul moisture, she unlatched the truck’s doors and threw them open. For a moment she could see nothing, not even the faces of the closest boxes, as if the station’s lights had to fight to enter, as if something inside wanted it dark. Her eyes focused.
Tamir stared back at her from the shadows, face paler than she remembered, eyes unblinking, completely still. For a moment she thought he’d died, his body stiffening in his seated position, but as she drew closer she could see his Adam’s apple bob with each shallow breath.
“Tamir?” she asked.
He didn’t respond.
Leaning in, she tried to match his stare, but his focus was too far off, impossibly distant. Dozens of blood vessels had risen to the surface of his eyes, bulging out and forming a chaotic map of deep red lines on sleek white. A trail of dried mucus ran from his right nostril to the crest of his upper lip.
“Tamir? Are you okay?” She reached for his hand.
For just a second, almost too quickly gone to be completely sure it had happened at all, she heard that terrible, droning voice return from deep inside the truck’s bed. It wasn’t words this time. It was laughter.
Her fingers touched down on Tamir’s knuckles.
She snatched her hand away. His skin was superheated, burning with fever, hotter than she would have believed possible. Turning, she screamed, “MASON-”
He came running, skidding on loose gravel, quickly assessing the situation. Running his hand over Tamir’s forehead, he said, “He’s having some sort of reaction. Violent allergic trauma, something. We’ve got to get him out of there. Help me.”
Grabbling with his jacket and pants, they pulled him from the truck and rested him on the asphalt. Mason used his thumb and forefinger to force the old man’s eyelids back, fully opening his eyes. Then he opened his jaw and examined his tongue.
“You’re a doctor?” she asked, watching over his shoulder.
Wagging a finger through Tamir’s vision, he frowned. “Nothing that’s written out on a diploma. In Ireland, it’s useful to know the basics. You’d be surprised how often there are chances to learn from experience.”
“Can you tell what’s—”
Keena and Dara came around the truck, both already screaming. Seeing Tamir, Keena dropped to her knees, crawled to him, and wrapped his head in her hands. She sobbed, and within her cries were tiny screams and both English and Czech words. “No … not Tamir … Prosím ne … TAMIR …No … What has happened to my brother? Tamir … můj bratr … no …”
Dara approached cautiously, eyes wide. Priscilla reached down and took her hand to keep her tethered close. Directing her voice to Mason, she completed her question: “Can you tell what’s happened to him?”
Keena continued to ramble, cradling her brother’s head to her chest and rocking, obstructing Mason’s examination.
“No, I don’t know. His heartbeat is slow … strange for a man with a fever. My best guess would say he’s been poisoned somehow.” Mason waved one hand toward the stacked crates inside the truck. “Maybe one of the relics is giving off a toxin and he breathed it in.”
The idea turned a slow wheel in her stomach: A crippled old man sitting in the dark, wedged between boxes, inhaling the slow rot of the centuries; sickness swirling around him, invisible wisps snaking up his nostrils, numbing his brain; the shine in his eyes dulling like the light from a dying star. But her thoughts didn’t dwell on a chemical released by dyes on ancient pottery or an exotic allergen still lingering inside folds of long-aged ceremonial garments; Priscilla’s mind pulled up the memory of that terrible voice, clear enough that she could hear it again, resonating in her eardrums, all-consuming: not a voice at all but some kind of weapon.
Mason waved to the soldier as he capped the gas tank. “This man needs a doctor. We need to get him to the closest hospital.”
Weeping, Keena raised Tamir’s hands to her face and kissed them. Words barely discernable through her tears, she pleaded, “Yes … please … help him …”
The soldier, confused, shook his head. “No, sir, I mean, it’s not as easy as all that. You must understand, we’re a nation under siege and the hospitals are all full up with the wounded. Those that are still open at all, that is. Even if you made the trip, there would be no doctor for him. And no empty beds, either. They’re all taken with victims of the bombs, bleeding out and such, situations where stitches and antiseptic can save a life.”
Squeezing Dara’s hand, Priscilla asked, “Then what should we do for him?”
The soldier leaned down and helped Mason pull the old man off the ground. “I’ll help you get him inside your truck and fetch a blanket. You keep him warm and dry. That’s his best chance.”
Lifting, Mason said, “He’s right.”
Looking into Tamir’s cloudy eyes as they carried him, Priscilla’s heart sank. She saw nothing there, only a void, as if the spark of life had been drained from him.
She turned, let go of Dara’s hand, and slammed the truck’s heavy doors closed.
Chapter 5
The tapping wasn’t hailstones striking the truck’s roof, although that was her first thought when she woke inside the cab. It was the sound of debris clicking against the sheet metal over her head. Pebbles skittered down the windshield, following the cracks in the glass, before skipping over the curved roof and dropping off the edges. The wind had strengthened through the night—howling overhead like an immense pack of feral dogs—and was thick with remnants of London—tiny bits of concrete and brick, asphalt and wood, masonry rock and quarry stone. Not just the fragments of buildings, either. Priscilla watched a human incisor dance down the glass and come to a rest on the ledge of a bent windshield wiper.
She thought of Owney.
Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, nineteen hours ago. She’d skipped lunch with the expectation of a meal aboard the transport ship. Also on the boat and not far out of mind: a bed with clean linen, a shower with a bar of soap, a hairbrush.
And Buddy Martin, of course. The thought of him forced her to turn her head and squint, to fight to see through the downpour. Inside the Jeep, Mason slept upright beside the young soldier. A lump of guilt settled into her throat. She tried to swallow, but it wouldn’t move.
The soldier brok
e away from the paperback novel he was reading, perhaps sensing her gaze, and waved. She pressed a hand against the driver’s side window and held it there until the soldier’s attention returned to the book. She turned her head and studied the sleeping faces of her companions.
Keena’s head rested on her shoulder, tangles of brown and gray hair tickling her breastbone. Dara slept on her aunt’s lap, hands clasped under her chin as if in prayer. Brigham’s head was propped against the passenger side window, snoring with parted, quivering lips, pink tongue peeking out at the crook of his mouth.
Tamir sat between Keena and Brigham, dull eyes staring out into the night. She had no way of knowing if he was awake or asleep. Only the slight rise and fall of his chest told her he was alive at all; his perfect stillness unnerved her. Even his flesh had taken on an unnatural hue, not quite a normal flesh tone, more like a lazy painter’s sloppy mix of weak peach and alabaster white.
Tamir reminded her of a character in one of her brother’s school plays. James had wanted to be an actor but didn’t have the looks for a leading role. Instead, the drama teacher cast him in minor roles— “Messenger Boy” and “Policeman #2,” —keeping him involved so he would help paint sets and work as an usher. One play was a murder mystery and James was cast as the victim—a single ten-minute scene lying flat on his back in white greasepaint, trying not to visibly breathe. Tamir’s performance was far more convincing.
The tapping on the roof grew more intense, intervals between strikes shrinking, the sound pitching upward into a constant, clattering crescendo. Brigham snorted and shifted his body, mouth wagging open and closed like a goldfish, but neither he nor the others woke. The windshield became a waterfall blur of sewage and pebbles, blocking out the world beyond the glass.
“He spoke.”
Jittering with alarm, Priscilla’s eyes shot to the gravelly voice. Tamir’s head had turned and the old man was staring at her, the whites of his eyes now as reflective and distorted as carnival mirrors, the pupils lost under a prism of light-bending cataracts. His jaw fell open to reveal swollen black gums peppered with purple sores. The stench of his breath forced her eyes to pucker and tear. It was the smell of a deathbed: sweat and urine and defecation, and prayer and agony and sin and hurt, and blasphemy and rage and thoughts of suicide and—
“Spoke … to me …”
—violence and regret and nightmares and screams in the middle of the night, and bedsores and dry mouth and disease and vomit and pitiful laughter and dementia, and her mother calling out for her son, James, and Priscilla reminding her that he was dead, that the Germans had shot him during the war, and then the crying and the nausea and the rapping hands on the bedside Bible, and the tearing of pages and—
“… he said …”
—the sound of the men from the hospice hoisting Mother down the staircase on the stretcher, white sheets already soiled, the tap-and-whirl of casters as they hit each stair, and then that final, weak wave as they took her out the door, her hand as crooked as a dead crow’s talon.
“… you, you are his.”
Tamir closed his eyes and mouth.
The smell retreated and the memory shroud that had cocooned her mind vanished with it. She instantly drew a correlation between the awful smell and the sound from the truck, as if her ears and nose had independently perceived the same essence in their own ways, equally overpowering to the rest of her senses, returning her to her blackest memories.
Tamir’s mouth cracked back open and her mother’s voice spilled out, weakened and cracking, but unmistakable. “I belong to him now, too, Prissy. You’ve given me to him.”
Priscilla recoiled, pushing herself against the driver’s door, hands raised in front of her. Tamir smiled wide, his lips arching impossibly upward, too far for the strain of his face, until his skin tore at the corners of his mouth, slicing up to his earlobes.
She screamed. The others bolted awake.
Eyes flashing open, Tamir roared, filling the truck’s cab with fresh stench and spraying amber spittle as he whipped his head around. His hands lashed out and latched around Dara’s arm as the girl bolted off her aunt’s lap. Screaming, she tried to thrash free of the fingers digging into her flesh, but could not break his grip. He twisted and her shoulder popped. Overcome with pain, she shook wildly and slapped at Tamir with her free hand. Wrapping herself around Dara’s middle, Keena ripped the girl away from her brother, twisting away from his clutches.
Bone snapped as Dara’s wrist wrenched free of Tamir’s grasp, her skinny arm flopped in the air, Radius and Ulna broken. High pitched wailing filled the cab, a sound more animal than human, as shrill as the squeal of swine at a slaughterhouse.
Brigham leaped out of his sleep, jerking awake with a violent spasm, his body bouncing off the side door. Eyes wide and bloodshot, he reached out as Keena passed the wailing child into his hands and snatched her to his chest, jostling her broken arm and loosing an even louder scream.
Pressed against the driver’s side door, Priscilla felt her body lock up, her muscles seizing as her senses were overpowered by a rush of icy prickling and the bloom of a booming headache. Shock, she thought, I’m going into shock.
Tamir’s hand shot out and clawed into Keena’s scalp, his fingers knotting into her hair; he yanked her back. Spinning, she balled both hands into fists and struck out, striking him in the chest. Tamir’s torn face opened and his jaw unlocked, rotten orange teeth separating at an impossible angle: the mouth of a rusted bear trap. He plunged forward and bit into the side of her face, drawing blood and tearing upward, opening parallel lines in her skin, until his jaws snapped shut with her ear between them. His head shook from side-to-side like a dog drying its coat, facial features lost in a blur, until flesh and cartilage tore free inside a wellspring of blood.
He swallowed her ear.
Keena’s shriek intensified. The cab was no longer filled with the sounds of a meat plant; now it echoed with the miserable suffering of Hell.
Brigham threw open the passenger side door and dove out, carrying Dara into the darkness. Tamir hissed at them, spraying a fine mist of blood, and gestured at the swinging door with his free hand. Propelled by an invisible force, it slammed shut behind them.
The icy sensation covering Priscilla’s skin deepened, now the bite of arctic cold on bare flesh, and she realized it wasn’t shock. She could feel a cold electricity surge through her, a foreign intruder passing through each cell of her being. It was an attack.
Digging his claws deeper into the back of her head, Tamir thrust Keena’s face against the dashboard. Her nose burst open. Tamir roared, lifting her head before slamming it back down. The second blow cut off her scream. Keena’s body went limp.
In one quick motion, he lifted her body and whipped it over the dashboard. The weakened glass shattered and Keena crashed through and landed on the truck’s hood.
Tamir turned to Priscilla and sneered, his face covered in blood, tiny links of skin wedged between his bared teeth. The voice that escaped from between his broken lips was not her father’s, though it mimicked his Boston lilt; instead, it was another she recognized: the hideous voice from inside the truck now speaking English in a staggered, choppy drone, a language freshly plucked from her brain. “Mine. You’re mine.”
He reached out for her, bone-thin fingers elongating and enveloping her face, curved yellow fingernails scraping along her skin. This slightest touch sent a violent chill through her, a sensation so ferocious it might have been an acute electrical shock. Her vision trembled and exploded, images overlapping with no regard for logic or physics like an insane kaleidoscope. She could still see Tamir’s horrible face leering at her but saw more, too: her drunk father floated there, lecturing with the fervor of a deep South Baptist minister; her dying mother, frail arms raised up and shaking after falling from the bed, gripping a handful of bed sheets and trying to climb back up but slipping and collapsing to the hardwood floor; the glum faces of her brother’s pallbearers, six young men u
nable to pull their gaze off their feet.
The voice rumbled as Tamir’s lips parted and said, “I’ll take you to them when you’re mine.”
She wanted to agree, to give herself away, to offer anything to vanish the images. All of the pain and grief flooded back to her. Her equilibrium shifted and a new wave of nausea overtook her, the same sickness she’d felt when they’d taken her mother away; when she’d read the letter from the President regretting the loss of her brother; when her sister had miscarried; when she’d found the pills—
“No,” she whispered.
Tamir’s eyes clouded. Confusion bloomed in his destroyed face, his tightly bound muscles relaxing for a quick moment, but then anger erupted and he screamed, mouth snapping open wide like a crocodile. His facial skin tore further open, the upper and lower halves of his face now separate. His hand closed around her face, palm pressing against her nose, fingernails digging into her temples and the side of her skin. Her nose crackled in her ears as he applied more pressure.
“Then you die,” Tamir said, “and suffer me forever.”
The truck rocked. From between Tamir’s fingers, Priscilla saw Mason jump from the bumper onto the hood. Crawling on all fours, he passed over Keena and leaped through the vacant windshield face first with both arms outstretched. Keena’s knife was in his right hand.
Without turning, Tamir brought his foot up and kicked, his heel crashing against Mason’s broad shoulder, blocking his advance, and pinning him against the dash. Hanging through the windshield, Mason drove the blade into the stump of Tamir’s missing leg and twisted. The roaring monstrosity released Priscilla and turned its full attention on its attacker. Slapping both hands over Mason’s ears, Tamir cracked his head against the dash and began to twist. Mason abandoned the knife inside Tamir and locked onto the old man’s arms, fighting to pry them loose. He screamed as his head pivoted in the monster’s grip.