Redeemer

by C. E. Murphy

  The phonograph shrieked, not the recorded woman's scream but the high squeal of a needle scratching vinyl. Pieces broke from the turntable and the distinctive ping of metal bouncing against the concrete floor rang out. The record player itself thudded more loudly, its days as an entertainment piece ending with what Rosie guessed had been a sharp kick.

  Pearl flinched and backed away with her hands clenched at her mouth. A spike of dread shot through Rosie's heart, breathtaking and cold. She turned to see the phonograph sprawled across the floor in pieces, and PFC Goode crunching the record beneath his feet as he approached.

  He looked like Pearl, up close. They shared the same pallor, like neither of them had seen sunshine in far too long. Her eyes, though, were haunted, and his were dead. Rosie didn't see how he could inspire the lust Ruby and the others had felt, though she understood Pearl's fear well enough.

  Then he smiled, and everything about him changed. Gauntness became slenderness, dead eyes became bright, his quick wink charming. Rosie smiled in return without meaning to, then, uncomfortable at having done so, shook herself and backed up a step. Closer to Pearl, in hopes the other girl would be made braver by Rosie's presence. "Whatever you're doing, Mr Goode, it has to stop. It will stop."

  He grinned, full of fresh healthy American good looks. "‘Mr Goode'? Jeez, miss, that's my dad. You call me Johnny, why don't you? What's your name?"

  "Rosie." Rosie bit her tongue too late, astonished that she'd answered. Like she'd had to. Like she'd wanted to, even though she hadn't intended to give this oddly threatening man anything. "Mr Goode," she repeated, more firmly and maybe, if she told herself the truth, maybe more desperately. "Pearl says a lot of girls have gone missing, that you're responsible. It's going to stop."

  "Shucks, Rosie, of course it's not. You're not even going to remember a bit of this, are you? It's just me and Pearl here, stealing a cig in the factory when we're not supposed to be." He came closer as he spoke, and Rosie forgot she'd meant to back up farther. Goode glanced beyond her at Pearl, offering the other girl a smile of her own. "Good job with this one, Pearl. She's got a lot of life in her. She might even finish the job for you."

  "The job?" Rosie made her feet move, concrete cold through her socks. That helped her keep moving: as long as she didn't stay still long enough to warm the floor where she stood, she was doing all right. But Pearl was following her now too, boxing her in. Rosie edged toward the belly of the plane, trying not to look like she was running. "What job? Pearl's got a job here, she's a riveter like the rest of us … "

  "Not that kind of job. Some of the blood splashed on me, see," Pearl whispered. "I thought it was my own, I'd cut myself earlier, so I stuck my finger in my mouth. But it was his, and now I just keep being hungry for more. I'm almost there, Johnny says I'm almost there, just a little more to drink, but he's gotta keep refreshing his own, too. You shoulda run, Rosie. You shoulda done what I said."

  Bile filled Rosie's throat, though she barely understood what the other girl meant. She swallowed and forced a laugh. "Blood? What, you think he's a vampire? Sweetheart, you have to stop watching all those Dracula movi—"

  Goode picked up a welding torch, twisted it into uselessness, and tossed it away. Rosie's words died in her throat. Cold drained from the top of her head to her fingertips, through her chest and all the way to her toes, numbing her body with disbelief. Half of forever passed before her heart started up again, a single thick beat that pushed back against cold. Not hard enough, though. Rosie just stood there, frozen with astonishment, until Goode spoke again and she jerked hard in response to his voice.

  "Most of it isn't true. Turning to mist, turning into a bat, no reflection … " Goode brushed his hair with his fingertips, familiar action of a vain man. "Good thing, too. Nobody would cut a man's hair they couldn't see in the mirror."

  "Vampires aren't real," Rosie said blankly. "They're not—you can't be … "

  Goode shrugged and picked up another torch, flicking this one on. "Whether they are or aren't, I'm sure something, aren't I? Tell you what, Rosie. You start running, and if you get away, I'll never hunt you again. I'm not fast," he promised with an unnervingly sweet smile. "Go on, Rosie. Run."

  Rosie's gaze flickered to Pearl, who nodded once. "He always lets them run," she whispered. She looked worse than pallid now. Fragile, desperate. Hungry. "Better go."

  Rosie took another step back. It jarred her out of stupefaction, let her think again with the clarity of fear. The plane was above her now, burnished steel hanging too far overhead to touch. Ladders still leaned against it, abandoned by the women who had been working there not long before. Women who would find Rosie's own body, maybe, crushed in some machine's teeth. The other girls who had gone missing hadn't been found, though. She clung to that, reaching for an answer like it would save her life. "Where are they? The others, what did you do with them?"

  Goode waved his torch, hissing blue flame making a short streak in Rosie's vision. "I ate them, Rosie. A man can't live by blood alone, you know. I made bread with their marrow." His eyebrows flicked together. "It's harder than it looks, isn't it? Making bread. My loaves are like logs."

  Rosie's stomach turned, though macabre humor washed some of the sickness away. No wonder Goode wanted Pearl. A wife to cook and clean for him, just like every other man back from the war.

  Except every other man couldn't bend steel, or dance his fingers through blue-hot flame the way Goode was doing now. Rosie's heart lurched again. Everyone had gone on break, leaving no one nearby to hear her scream. No one would save her. No one but herself. Her hand closed around a riveting gun. She lifted it, the familiar weight a sudden comfort, and Goode's voice dropped with disappointment. "Oh, Rosie, what are you doing?"

  The riveting gun's weight steadied the jackhammer beat of Rosie's heart, letting her whisper, "There's nowhere to run and you know it. This factory's full of machines more dangerous than you are. I'm not going to let you chase me into one of them so I can be written off as a terrible accident."

  "Pearl." All the niceness left Goode's voice, making him the unsettling man Rosie had first laid eyes on.

  He might not have been quick. Pearl, though, moved way faster than Rosie expected. Quick with desperation, maybe. She veered wide of the riveting gun, springing at Rosie's shoulders from the side. Rosie spun, the gun's weight giving her momentum. To her own shock, metal hit flesh with a resounding thunk. Pearl collapsed to the floor, her temple already bruising. Rosie drew in a sharp breath, gaping, then snapped her attention back to Goode.

  He gazed at Pearl with surprise before lifting his eyebrows at Rosie. "Guess I should've picked me more of a fighter for my first wife. You might just do instead, Miss Rosie." He took a step forward.

  Rosie, though her cheeks hot with horror at having downed Pearl, hefted the riveting gun at arm's length with hands that remained cold and steady. "Not one more step, Mr Goode."

  He smiled, almost recovering the mask of charm he'd worn before. The one that had almost drawn her in, that had made Rosie give up her name when she didn't want to. It wouldn't work again. Not with her heart fast with fear, not with Pearl a huddle at her feet. Maybe men at war felt this resolved, facing the enemy. Goode's smile widened, showing teeth, and he spread his hands. "Or what, Rosie? You'll shoot me? An unarmed man?"

  Showing teeth. Showing a mouthful of too-long, hollow-looking teeth, like snake fangs except by the tens instead of just two. She couldn't see their bottoms, but they narrowed as they pressed against his lower lip, and Rosie just knew they ended in vicious points.

  "You're something wrong, mister," Rosie breathed. "Something unnatural and wrong. Men might put up a sweet lying front, but they don't bend steel and they don't cup fire in their palms. I don't know what you are, but you are not a man."

  "I was once," Goode said, and took one more step forward. Put his chest against the gun, and reached for its neck, to throttle the air flow and render it useless.

  Rosie shot him.

&nbs
p; The gun made the same sound it always did, a familiar, comforting bam! of air slamming a rivet into place.

  Goode sounded nothing like airplane steel being punctured.

  He made a soft sound, a wet sound, one that went with the sudden red mist and chunks of white that were things Rosie didn't even want to think about. He looked surprised in the instant before his hands splayed open and his whole body caved backward, away from her. Blood smeared first the air, then concrete. Goode was louder hitting the floor than taking the rivet, a pop like a hollowed-out grapefruit when his skull made contact.

  Revulsion and relief tore through Rosie. Her hands shook, though she didn't release the gun, didn't even lower it. Couldn't if her life depended on it.

  Her life had depended on it.

  Rosie gave a short ugly laugh that did nothing to push away the dizziness sweeping her. Gold light unlike anything the factory had to offer danced around the edges of her vision. It coalesced above Goode like it was drawn to his blood, and gathered into a small dust devil that spun ever tighter. She took a step back, riveting gun still choked in her grip. The light comforted her with its warmth and beauty, but Goode had almost tricked her into believing in his beauty, too. She didn't know what happened to vampires when they died, but if she had to shoot the burgeoning light, too, then she would.

  It became a column, spinning so quickly it wobbled. Goode's body arched as its pull lifted him a centimeter or two from the floor. A silver glow stained with blood eked out of his pores, drawn toward the golden column. Rosie wet her lips, knotted her finger around the gun's trigger, and waited in horrified fascination.

  The bloodstains stretched and loosened, coming free from Goode's—soul, Rosie thought, and wanted to laugh at herself, but couldn't. The stains spiraled upward, taken into the whipping gold column, then spattered outward, cast away. Rosie's gaze snapped to follow them, but they disappeared before they reached her, even though she stood just a couple steps from the man she'd killed.

  Unstained, unblemished, uncorrupted, Goode's soul rose after the blood, sucked into the column's vortex as well. But it shot upward when released, a bright streak reaching for Heaven. The column collapsed, and Goode's body fell to cold concrete.

  Rosie edged forward. Under the hard factory lights, Goode had the skin tones and musculature of a youth who had been badly injured and a long time recovering. He looked handsome now, a cheeky all-American boy despite the trauma his body had seen. The horrible hollow-looking teeth shrank back into his gums as she watched, distending his mouth and then disappearing. With their retreat, his sickly pallor faded, more than just vitality fading in death's cool grip. It was as if a poison had been eradicated, thoroughly cleansing the young PFC of his life's misdeeds.

  Whole, Rosie thought. He was whole, when he hadn't been before, and without knowing why, she dropped to her knees and cried.

  THREE

  The police found her there, serene with exhaustion. Horror had spun away with the golden column, leaving a deep, gentle regret in Rosie's breast. She had never wanted to hurt anybody, much less kill someone, but the peculiar certainty that she had done well made facing the police easier. They awakened Pearl, whose sob when she saw Goode's body cut through Rosie like a blade.

  "He hit her," Rosie told the police, "and came after me. I had no choice."

  Even through tears, Pearl's attention sharpened at the lie. Then she dissolved again, agonizing loss in each caught breath. She didn't, though, dispute the story Rosie had told. Better to be the victim than the accomplice. Better to escape the factory and face Rosie alone later than reveal her unnatural desire for Goode's blood. A calm space in Rosie's chest told her she would mete Pearl a similar fate, if necessary, but maybe it wouldn't be. Maybe with his inhuman lure extinguished, Pearl would return to normal.

  "You weren't hurt, were you, miss?" One of the officers offered her a hand up.

  Rosie took it gratefully, shaking her head as she stood. "Just frightened." She recounted what had happened—how she and Pearl had been chatting, lingering in the changing rooms when the alarm sounded. How they'd heard a woman's screams and followed them instead of leaving as they were supposed to. How they'd discovered the record player, and how Goode had attacked them. How he'd confessed to killing and—Rosie shuddered, theatrical but heartfelt—eating several women who had recently been thought to have left the factory's employment.

  The officer paled, muttered, "Stay here," and went to get his supervisor. A few seconds later the older man's voice shot up: "Eating them? We got a God-damned lunatic cannibal—" He broke off, glancing self-consciously toward Rosie and Pearl, and through the calm haze of survival, Rosie almost laughed. The girls at the factory said saltier things every few minutes, but she supposed admitting that to a man born in the last century would only shock him.

  He strode over and towered above them, a big man with a touch of black still coloring the hair visible beneath his hat. Most of the police looked rumpled in the night's heat, but his collars were crisp and his tie straight, and his shirt wasn't yet stained with sweat. It made him that much more professional, his expression that much grimmer. "I'm Detective Johnson. I'm sorry, girls. I know you've had a rough night, and I wish I could just send you home, but you're going to have to come down to the station so we can get the whole story."

  Pearl shot Rosie a panicked look, but Rosie only nodded at the detective. The other girl had heard the tale Rosie had spun. The rest was up to her to deliver. Rosie hoped the police wouldn't find any of Pearl's belongings at Goode's home for her own sake as much as Pearl's, but if they did, she would amend her own story to another version of the truth. No one would believe the full truth, not even after she heard another officer say, "What the hell?" as he found the welding torch Goode had mangled.

  "Could I change my clothes and call the USO?" she wondered aloud. "My friends were expecting me there tonight. Somebody could get a message to them."

  "Soon as we get to the station," Johnson promised, and Rosie went with him, grateful to leave the dead man behind.

  She hadn't been inside the police station since she'd gotten her driver's license. Not much had changed. The concrete walls painted cream were yellower than they'd been, maybe. The wide-open windows were stained with tobacco smoke and dirt, and the noise, even late at night, was consistent. There were fewer young men than there had been: all the officers were past enlistment age, and some looked like they'd come out of retirement. Johnson told the receptionist to let Rosie use the phone, but she stood with its black earpiece curved in her palm and couldn't think what she would say. Jean deserved to be told about Ruby in person, and anything other than the truth would offer no excuse for Rosie's failure to show at the USO. After a minute she put the phone down. The receptionist pointed her at the restrooms so she could change clothes and wash up, then, when Rosie came out again, showed her to a seat. "Want some coffee, sweetheart?"

  "Thanks, yes, please." Rosie sat watching Johnson talking to Pearl at a desk halfway across the room. She could hear the detective's questions but not Pearl's answers, which the other girl mumbled at her lap. Once she dissolved into tears, and Johnson glanced Rosie's way with a frown. She didn't pretend not to be watching, and when he finished with Pearl, Johnson beckoned Rosie over. "You look like you're holding up all right."

  "It's the coffee." Rosie smiled wanly and smoothed her skirt under her thighs as she sat. "Good thing it's Friday, though. I'd never be awake enough to work tomorrow."

  Johnson looked toward the wall clock, ticking past one in the morning, and nodded. "Saturday morning, now. I meant considering you just killed a man."

  The coffee turned acid in Rosie's stomach. She folded her hands over it, pressing. "He was trying to kill us."

  Johnson shifted in his chair, sitting back. It creaked, both springs and leather needing attention. "Well, Miss Ransom, I must say you're a better liar than Miss Daly is."

  Rosie's gaze jerked up again, so surprised she didn't even feel guilty. "I am? I mean,
what? I haven't lied."

  "Haven't you? Why don't you start at the beginning, Miss Ransom. I'll tell you where you're going wrong."

  She stared at him, heat flaming in her cheeks. Anybody would blush, she thought, being accused of lying to a policeman. Her mouth dried up and it took two tries to speak. "Pearl and I were lingering in the changing room—"

  "Right there," Johnson said, and Rosie broke off with another stare. Johnson waited a few seconds, then, gently, said, "She was his accomplice, wasn't she, Rosie? She as much as said so. You've got a good heart, trying to protect her, but it won't do her any good. My boys will find evidence they've been living together back at Goode's apartment. Why don't you tell me what really happened?"

  "It happened like I told you," Rosie said after a long moment. "Except Pearl followed me through the factory, we didn't go together. And she tried to grab me so PFC Goode could—I don't know what. I hit her with the riveting gun, and he came after me anyways, and I shot him."

  "That's it?"

  "Isn't that enough? I shot somebody, Detective. I killed a man." Rosie's voice rose and broke, emotion surging up from a buried place within her. "And my friends are dead, girls I've known since school, and that monster ate them, and—!"

  "Monster," Johnson murmured under her tirade. "Why do you use that word?"

  The image of Goode's unnerving teeth retreating into his skull made Rosie snap her jaw shut. Breathing hard, voice still high, she said, "What else would you call someone who kills and eats girls?"

  Johnson's shoulders sank a fraction of an inch. "Monster's good enough for me. Miss Ransom, you lied to protect Miss Daly. Why?"

  Rosie slumped in her chair. The station was too hot, even in the middle of the night with buzzing floor fans pushing a thick breeze through the big room. The heat dulled her thoughts as badly as emotion draining away did. All she had as an answer was the truth, and it couldn't be good if the truth seemed like a last resort. She offered it anyways. "Because I heard my friends talking about how he seemed to hypnotize girls. I thought maybe Pearl didn't have any choice, that she was stuck under his thumb and didn't know how to get out. I wanted to give her a chance, I guess. She didn't seem bad, just … scared."