by Jack Ketchum
Perhaps it was for the best. Yes, maybe it was time to do something I should've done years ago: leave this city behind. Why not? It was high time I explored the world that lay beyond it.
How pathetic that this had only occurred to me now.
***
I discovered that time had no meaning in this indeterminate state that is neither living nor dead. How long had it been now? Days? Weeks? Months?
It felt as if I'd walked several lifetimes, and yet, no matter how far I travelled—the past refused to be left behind.
However, there was something far more disturbing that I discovered during my trek. The world vanished around me with each step I took. The tastes and smells I once took for granted had now disappeared. The infinite sounds and countless textures of the earth were also gone—evaporated like yesterday's rain. As I walked, I would have given anything to hear my own footsteps again—anything to end the relentless drone of nothingness.
Though I clung to what was left of my sight, I noted that the once vibrant colors of the earth had fused into a dullish gray. My chance to experience all the wonders of the earth had simply...expired. There was no choice but to return to the city; there was no longer anything beyond it.
***
I am again in the darkened, back room of the coffee shop. The silent ones are all around me: the dispirited embodiment of countless promises unfulfilled, quiet desperations—and lost lives.
I glance from one hollow-eyed face to another and realize how desperately I will miss these silent figures—for the significance of their fellowship has become clear.
In some perverse way, they are here simply to connect—to bond with others somehow. They reach out to each other to keep from fading yet again—into an even deeper, more forsaken plane of existence than this one: an unspeakably lonely place that awaits those who choose to isolate themselves.
This congregation of lost souls offered my last opportunity to avoid such a fate; a missed opportunity that I will regret for eternity.
I am fading fast, into a nether level that swallows me even now.
I am the festering abomination propped against the wall in the far corner—and even the silent ones don't notice me anymore...
—Joe McKinney
Joe McKinney has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a homicide detective, a disaster mitigation specialist, a patrol commander, and a successful novelist. His books include the four part Dead World series, Quarantined and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and Dating in Dead World and Other Stories. For more information go to www.joemckinney.wordpress.com
—Sky of Brass, Land of Iron
By Joe McKinney
For Robert Garza, it started on a cool, breezy night in early May. He was driving home on Texas Farm Route 181 when he saw the first one moving across the road from left to right with a slow, loping gait. At first he didn't recognize it as a coyote. It didn't look right. It didn't move right. Coyotes were supposed to move like dogs. But there was something different about this one. It almost seemed to hop. More like a rat than a dog. Garza watched it move across the road and thought it was odd, but not particularly alarming.
Two more went by, disappearing into the cedar thicket off to his right.
A forth went by a moment later.
He waited to see if there were any more, but none came. The night was perfectly still and quiet, save for the burbling exhaust of his idling truck. He could smell the faint tinge of wood smoke on the night breeze.
He shook his head and chuckled, dismissing the encounter as just another strange thing you sometimes see on empty country roads in the middle of the night.
He drove on.
At the time, it didn't occur to him to worry.
***
Garza's best friend was a man named Frank Resendez. They'd known each other for almost ten years, going back to when Garza was a rookie detective assigned to the San Antonio Police Department's Homicide Unit and Resendez was his sergeant. It was Resendez, in fact, who'd talked Garza into moving his family out to Espada Ridge.
Garza would be the first to admit that Resendez was a genius. And he wasn't alone in that belief, either. He'd watched, like the kid brother of somebody famous, as Resendez's skill as an investigator and police administrator made him a law enforcement legend all across South Texas. Those same skills also earned Resendez the coveted lieutenant's position overseeing San Antonio's Homicide Unit, a job he still held, and did exceedingly well, despite everything else he had on his plate. For as successful as he was in police circles, he was even more successful writing about it. His textbook, Criminal Investigations for the Texas Peace Officer, was now in its fourth edition, and the money he made from that allowed him to reinvent himself yet again—this time as a major player in South Texas real estate.
Now, looking out over the 3400 acres that Resendez planned to turn into the Espada Ridge Estates, Garza felt a renewed awe for the scope of the man's vision. It was a beautiful, but hard country. Espada Ridge formed a fat crescent around the north corner of Worther Lake. Its gently rolling hills were densely covered with cedar and hardy Spanish oaks, and close to the water, there were occasional meadows that, in April, burst forth with wildflowers. In a few places, Resendez had added old-fashioned split rail fences to demarcate available lots. And, of course, there was the lake itself. Right now, it was dappled with late afternoon sunshine, a rich tapestry of yellows and reds, a pool of molten bronze.
Resendez was showing him an old country church and the ruins of six small cottages he'd found while clearing the bottom ten acres of his land. "Impossible to say how old they are," Resendez said. "Too overgrown. I bet the place is probably crawling with rattlesnakes."
Garza nodded, suddenly mindful of where he stepped. The cottages themselves were nothing special, just small moldering derelicts waist deep in yellow alkali grass. None of them had roofs, and only one still had all four walls. The weather and the years had not been kind to them.
But the church was in better shape. It no longer had a front door, and few of the gravestones on its north lawn were still standing, but it retained enough of its former self that you could tell at a glance it was a church.
"This is what I wanted to show you," Resendez said, watching with pleasure at the fascination on Garza's face. "Go on, look inside."
Garza got as far as the front steps and stopped. "Oh Jesus," he said. He put a hand over his mouth and gagged. "Something's dead in there."
"It's a deer," Resendez said.
Garza glanced at Resendez, his face wrinkled in disgust. Even after twenty years of handling homicides, the smell of rotting flesh still rattled him.
"Go on, you big baby," Resendez said. "Go inside."
Gagging, Garza went. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness, but once they did, he saw that the church was as simple inside as out, no frills, no ornamentation. It was just a large, high-ceilinged, rectangular room with a couple pews. The dead deer lay across what had once been the altar, and swarming around its carcass was a vast gathering of flies. Their murmuring buzz filled the deepening shadows.
Resendez led him around the carcass to a small wooden box tucked back into a corner. The ancient black iron lock had been forced open. "One of my workers found this yesterday while he was clearing brush for me," Resendez said. "Go ahead. Open it."
Inside lay a small brown leather book. The back flap was water-damaged, but the spine was still somewhat supple, and the pages felt stiff as he thumbed through them. The handwriting was a thin, scrunched-together scrawl that didn't yield to easy translation. It looked like a series of journal entries, with an occasional list of names and dates. Some of the earliest were from the 1720s.
"It's in German," Garza said.
"Yeah, I was hoping you could translate it. That's what you did in the Army, right? A language officer?"
Flies buzzed around them. Garza waved a hand to shoo them away. "
That was twenty-five years ago," he said. 'Rusty' didn't even come close to describing his comfort level with the German language. "I can try, I guess."
Resendez nodded and together they walked outside. The dusty haze of late afternoon wrapped around the trees. Resendez said something about wanting to know the history of the place.
But Garza was only half listening. He was watching a coyote about forty yards off, and it was watching him. Garza opened his mouth to say something about it, but the animal melted back into the cedar before he could get the words out.
He turned to Resendez. "Did you see that?"
***
Garza and his wife, Linda, both lay awake in bed, their eyes open in the dark, as their dog howled in the kitchen downstairs.
"Will you please go check on him?" Linda asked.
Garza grumbled something about strangling the damn dog with his bare hands and got dressed. On his way downstairs, he passed his daughter Sam's room. A white glow bordered the door. She was awake, of course, probably on her cell phone, or listening to music. For a moment he thought of getting her to do it. Guthrie was her dog, after all, and she was probably in there doing nothing, as usual.
"Screw it," he mumbled, and went down to shut the dog up himself.
Guthrie, a full grown chocolate lab, ordinarily gentle as a kitten, stood in the kitchen by the back door, barking himself hoarse. His coat bristled down his spine and his lips pulled back over his teeth in a fairly convincing imitation of a tough-as-nails junkyard dog.
"Guthrie, shut up!"
The dog looked at him, whined once, then started barking even louder at the door. Garza watched him for a second, morbidly fascinated. He'd never acted like this. Not when they lived in the city.
Of course, there, Guthrie hadn't had ten acres of land to lord over.
A part of Garza wanted to slap the dog and be done with it. But another part of him recognized something hideous in his bark. At times, it became a keening wail, almost feral, wolf-like. City dogs didn't make noises like that. And Guthrie, despite his new home, was decidedly a city dog.
Garza flipped on the kitchen light and Guthrie backed away from the door, his barks trailing off to a low, stuttering growl.
He turned on the floodlights for the backyard and looked through the window.
There was nothing there.
"Stupid dog," Garza said, and patted him on the head.
He looked outside again, his hand poised over the switch to turn out the lights, when he heard a low murmuring hum. He glanced at Guthrie, who was still growling, and then back at the yard.
There was nothing but grass and darkness beyond the trees. He hesitated for a moment, then opened the door and stepped outside—only to jump right back in and slam the door behind him.
A huge swarm of flies covered the outside of the door. He put his knuckles in his mouth to stifle the nausea threatening to overtake him.
"Jesus," he said. "Oh Jesus."
***
Though he was unbelievably tired, Garza stayed awake most of that night thinking about the church on Resendez's land, and the book he'd been given to translate.
It was curious how a building like that could have been spared the ravages of the South Texas weather for as long as it had. According to the book, the church had been there since at least 1728, for there had been a baptism in March of that year. Later entries showed the church was in constant use until 1848, when the last entry was made.
But the most curious thing about the book was that it only mentioned one name—Kretschmer. Garza guessed that it was a family prayer book, which might explain why only that name was written there. The other alternative, that the little community had been so isolated that they only married each other, was too repugnant for him to dwell on.
He assumed it was a prayer book because the various authors whose handwriting he could decipher all made mention of religious rites and ceremonies. He'd skimmed over them at first, only because he figured they described conventional ceremonies, like baptism and marriage. But when he began to read them in more detail, he realized they described activities so hideously strange they could only be Satanic in design. There were so many references to demons that Garza wondered if the community's isolation was voluntary, or perhaps forced on them by horrified neighbors.
He was enough of a modern man to dismiss most of what he read in the prayer book as hogwash. But there were constant references to flies that stirred something inside him. He was almost surprised to discover this superstitious side of his personality was there, but there it was. He read the numerous entries about the flies, and how the book said they were the eyes and ears of a demon called De Vermis, which Garza guessed meant "the worm," and he found himself thoroughly creeped out. It wasn't a feeling he enjoyed.
But he hadn't known any of that when he went to Resendez's house earlier that evening. At that time, shortly after touring the church and cottages on Resendez's land and before making it back to his place for dinner, he hadn't even opened the book yet. It wouldn't be until he was alone in his own study, while Sam was upstairs doing her homework and Linda was in the kitchen doing the dishes, that he learned about the demon the Kretschmers called De Vermis.
"I suppose the first thing we ought to do is figure out how old those structures are," Resendez had said. "Once we know that, we can make more informed decisions."
They were sitting in Resendez's study, looking over some maps of the land around the lake.
"Decisions about what, exactly?"
"Well, think about it, Robert. If it's just some cowboy church, we might as well bulldoze it and move on. But if it's something else, something older—maybe Spanish—we could use that."
"Why would it be Spanish? That book was in German."
"You know what I mean. I just want to know if we can use it somehow."
"Use how?"
Resendez smiled at him patiently. "We could market it. Maybe change the name of the development from Espada Ridge to something having to do with the church."
Garza started to speak, but suddenly stopped himself. It dawned on him that he and Resendez had very different ideas about their obligations.
"Do you think we have the right to do that?" Garza asked.
"What do you mean? Why wouldn't we?"
"Well, if it is a church, Spanish or otherwise, wouldn't it fall under some kind of historical preservation act? The federal government's got that law protecting archeological artifacts."
Resendez waved the idea away with a dismissive flick of his hand. "This isn't like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, Robert. It's just a little out of the way church the world forgot about. My point is we could use it to really give the development an identity. Make it something unique, you know?"
"Frank, I really think—"
Resendez said, "I'm not going to turn this thing over to a bunch of academics and let them put the development on hold indefinitely, Robert. You know that's what they'd do. Remember when they were building the Wal-Mart over off General Kirby Parkway and they found that old Indian village? The academics got a court order to put a twenty-million-dollar building project on hold so they could dig around for a bunch of fucking arrowheads and cornhusk dolls. You think I want that?"
"No."
"Well, you're right. I don't. What I do want is for you to translate that book. Try to get me some answers."
And just like that, Garza realized he'd been given an order. There'd be no further discussion. The matter was closed.
***
"Hey, honey."
"Yes, dear?" Linda said. She was dropping spaghetti into a large pot of boiling water.
"We probably shouldn't put our garbage out on the back porch anymore. It attracts flies."
"Flies?"
"Yeah. Probably other things too. I think that's what Guthrie was barking at last night."
Linda looked puzzled. "I didn't put any garbage out back," she said. "We always put it out on the side, remember?"
Garza nodded. "Must
have been Sam. I'll talk to her about it."
***
The little town of Bonheim stood about three miles South of Worther Lake. It was a quiet crossroads for the surrounding ranches, with a little eight-man police department under the command of Chief Pablo Delgado.
Delgado was a heavyset man in his early sixties with a sunburnt face and bald head. He'd been an assistant chief in Horizon City, and the chief's job at Bonheim was his retirement gig. Bonheim was a peaceful little town that didn't demand a lot from its police force, and that suited Delgado just fine. He preferred to be easy going anyway, more like a benevolent grandpa than a serious lawman.
Garza knew that Delgado also happened to be the local expert on regional history, so he called Delgado, and the two agreed to meet in a little cafe in town.
"What kind of history do you want to know about?" Delgado asked as he managed to wrap his mouth around an enormous pulled pork sandwich that dripped red ropes of barbecue sauce onto his plate.
That was a good question, Garza thought. He didn't really know. Or he did, he just didn't know how to bring it up. How does one break the ice when talking about demon worshipping in-breeders?
In the end he decided to come as close to the truth as he could.
"I've heard rumors about a family named Kretschmer that was supposed to live around these parts," he said. "Folks I've talked to said they lived up by the lake. Near my house."
The smile on Delgado's face slipped away like a greasy egg yolk running off a piece of toast, and Garza guessed he'd hit a nerve. The man put his sandwich down and wiped the barbecue sauce from the corner of his mouth. "How'd you find out about the Kretschmer family?"