When she spoke her voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “I’m sorry, Abe. It didn’t work today.”
“Seemed to work fine to me. No misfires, no jams.”
“Not the gun. The gun was fine. Me.”
I didn’t push. Instead I just watched as she cleaned the rest of the pieces, one after another, her hands guided by the habits of a lifetime, her mind far away.
“Did you know that I lied to you when we met? I pretended not to know about my grandfather’s gift or the things that you did together in the war. But I did. I grew up on his stories. I’ve known about the monsters all my life.”
She put the cloth down and picked up the tiny bottle of oil. Her other hand plucked a cotton swab from the plastic bag. The tip of the bottle trembled as she held it over the head of the swab. The first drop missed and landed on the bed spread, leaving a dark dot. She touched the tip of the swab to the bottle to get the second drop and put the bottle down.
“This is what I wanted my life to be. My grandfather told me I’d fight for the world, for everyone who couldn’t, and he put fire into my hand and my heart. He said I had a calling. I believed him when he told me that. So I practiced. And I waited. And I let my life sail past me, year after year. No real friends, no long term relationships. No career. Just standing in a restaurant with a tray in my hands, dodging grabby men and going home to an empty apartment. Waiting for my calling. For my life to begin. And now here I am. I got everything I wanted and I can’t do it. I broke today. The monsters came for me and I couldn’t stop them and I broke. If I can’t do this, then who am I?”
She bowed her head and her shoulders shook. Then she threw the swab on the bed and lunged for me, hugging me fiercely around the neck. I was so surprised that it took me a moment to bring my arms up to hold her in return.
Patrick had turned the skill he wanted her to have into a sword and shield both. He’d made the attainment of absolute mastery into an article of faith, a sanctuary against the darkness. He must have known that it couldn’t last. That nobody was untouchable.
I should have realized it back in Belmont when she was changing the ammo in her shotgun. She’d gone strangely calm and remote, submerged into herself, armoring herself in her belief that as long as she didn’t miss, she was safe. But I hadn’t understood.
She clung to me for a few more moments and then pushed away. She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand and picked up the cotton swab like nothing had happened, but I knew how deeply she must have been hurt to show it. She’d spent her whole life being forced to prove how tough she was to Patrick and now she didn’t know how to stop, even after his death.
“You panicked today. Big deal. I hardly think that means that you have to give up. If that were the case, we’d have had about three guys on the front lines during the war.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. When Piotr was dragging me around that catwalk with a cord around my neck? I was scared out of my mind. But I still wanted to fight him. I was determined not to let him win. Even if it killed me.” My heart skipped as the image of her jumping off into empty air passed before my eyes. “But this time? I just wanted to quit. Whatever courage I had back in Belmont is gone. They came for me and I would have done anything to make them just go away.”
“You gave up? I guess that’s why you’re in here packing your suitcase, right? Oh, wait. You’re not. You’re cleaning your gun and making sure that you’re ready for the next fight. Not only didn’t you give up, you didn’t even do a good job pretending to give up.”
She looked at the cotton swab in her hand and the parts neatly arrayed on the bed as if seeing them for the first time.
I held her eyes with mine. “Courage isn’t something you have, it’s something you create new every single time. And sometimes it won’t be enough. That’s true for everybody, not just you.”
“How can you sit there and give me a bunch of horseshit about fear and being brave when nothing can hurt you? What do you know about fear, Abe? Tell me that.”
“I know that I have to choose to fight every day, same as you. And some days I feel like giving in. Think about what it’s like to live in the body of some gibbering horror that wanted to eat the whole world. It was never meant to hold a human soul. Is it changing me? If it does, will I even know?”
I took the cotton swab out of her unresisting fingers and started oiling the frame of her gun. The tip left a shiny streak of oil wherever it touched.
“I don’t sleep anymore, did you know that? Not since Belmont.”
I oiled the rest of the gun’s components ran a couple of patches through barrel until they came out the other side clean. Anne let me do it without protest.
“Something else, too. I’ve been wearing a jacket outside so that I don’t look out of place, but the cold can’t touch me anymore. It’s like I’m getting further from the real world every day. I can feel the air on my skin and I can tell that it’s cold, but it’s not the same. It’s just information, like seeing a color. What’s going to happen to me when I can no longer remember what it was like to sleep and shiver and sweat and not be hungry all the time? What will I become if I live like that long enough?”
I reassembled the gun and placed it into her outstretched hand. “Believe me, I’m plenty scared. But just like you, I’ll keep on, day after day. You know why?”
She shook her head.
“Because you and I were born to it. There’s nothing else for us but this. I never cared about anything until I found out that there was a line in the sand between the good guys and the bad guys. Until there was something to defend and a reason to defend it. But as soon as I heard about Pearl Harbor, my whole life snapped into focus. It’s not just the fight that defines us, Anne. It’s the reason for the fight.”
She searched my eyes for a long time and then kissed me on the cheek. Then she loaded her weapon.
20
I cleaned out the last of my stash that night. I was sitting in the frosty pre-dawn darkness with a pile of empty cans between my feet when the kitchen light snapped on, throwing a yellow rectangle out across the yard.
I bolted off the porch and ran for the garbage cans behind the workshop, clutching the evidence of my shameful ritual under my jacket as I ran. I buried everything underneath yesterday’s newspaper and coffee grounds, digging down deep into the garbage to make sure that it stayed hidden.
There was no way that I’d be able to sneak back into the house undetected, so I squared my shoulders and went in the kitchen door.
Leon spun around in alarm when I entered, knocking a bowl off the counter. Bits of broken glass and globs of raw egg exploded over his feet with a bang.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell were you doing outside?”
I grabbed a dishtowel and got down on the floor to start cleaning up the mess. “Couldn’t sleep. Don’t move until I get the glass up or you’ll get cut. What are you doing up so early?”
“I couldn’t sleep, either. I figured I’d make some breakfast for everybody since I was up. But maybe next time I’ll try your plan of jumping out and scaring the bejeesus out of people instead.”
I got up and shook the glass out into the trash, then began to wash my hands. “I recommend it. The look on your face was hilarious.”
Anne and Chuck burst into the kitchen, Anne wrapped in a pink Hello Kitty robe and Chuck in a pair of boxer shorts.
Anne scanned the room and then lowered her pistol. “What happened?”
“Nothing, just dropped a bowl,” said Leon, taking another one out of the cabinet. “Sorry to startle everybody.” He gave me a look. “Breakfast in about twenty minutes, though, if that makes up for it.”
“If there’s bacon, then yes. I’ll be back after I get a quick shower.”
Chuck glared at us with bleary eyes. “A lot of bacon.” Then he shuffled out of the room, scratching himself.
Half an hour later we were gathered in the kitchen, eating. Even Henry, who claimed to have not heard the commoti
on earlier, but who had somehow managed to sit down at the table exactly when the food was ready.
We ate and shared a little carefully worded small talk in an attempt to avoid the more painful subjects of the recent past. That lasted until Leon’s cell chirped. Conversation stopped mid-sentence while we watched him pull his phone out of his pocket as if it were a live snake.
“It’s just an address in town.”
“Who sent it?” I asked.
“No idea, I don’t recognize the number.” The phone rang loudly in his hand, making everyone jump.
He answered and put it on speaker. “Hello?”
Slow, ragged breathing.
“Hello? Who is this?”
More breathing, but hitching now. Then a strangled sort of wheeze, and then silence.
Leon hung up. “Do we go?”
All eyes turned to me. “No choice. Even if we’re playing into Prime’s hands, it’s not like we have any other information to go on. Our only other plan is to randomly search the woods in this corner of North Carolina, which isn’t exactly promising.”
Everyone grabbed their guns and I buckled on Hunger’s sheath. As always, it felt fever-warm to the touch, even though the house was cool.
The address was on a street in Halfway, so it took us twenty minutes to get to town and another five to find the place we were looking for, a brown single-story house at the end of a residential street. The driveway and the street in front of the house were full of cars and trucks, late model and mostly sporting dark tinted windows and oversized rims.
Nobody answered when I knocked and rang the bell. The door was locked.
“If we’re going to break in,” I said, “we should probably do it out of sight of the neighbors.”
The area out back looked like the aftermath of a year-long house party. Mounds of garbage bags formed a barracade around overflowing bins and cigarette butts and beer cans fought to obscure any hint of grass that may have survived in the backyard. Lots of young men living in a house together leave some pretty unmistakable signs. Between that and the kind of cars parked out front, I had a pretty good idea who lived here.
The back door was open a few inches. I stood to one side of the doorway and shouted through the crack. “Hello?”
No answer. A foul odor seeped out of the house.
Anne touched my arm. “Smells bad. I mean, obviously, but the other way, too.” She drew her pistol.
I nodded and pushed the door open. It opened into a laundry room, dirty clothes piled onto every available surface. I pulled Hunger from its sheath and stepped across the tiny space to the next door. There was no sound from the other side, so I slowly turned the knob and peered into the adjacent room.
I’m not a squeamish guy, but even I had to look away and collect myself for a second before stepping inside.
The smell was like a physical thing, thickening the air until you felt like you were pushing against it. The source was immediately obvious. KC was splayed out on his back on the kitchen table, his intestines heaped in a greasy pile on his chest.
21
Chuck spun around and ran back to the yard, retching. Anne covered her mouth and nose with one hand, but I don’t think it helped. The smell was the kind that coated the inside of your nose and the back of your throat. She followed Chuck outside.
A quick survey of the house showed that KC wasn’t alone. There were rubbery, shriveled bodies everywhere. I counted six in the kitchen, stacked in the corners like cordwood, and five more in the living room, perched on the sofa and chairs as if watching TV. Each was contorted horribly as Paulie had been, and obviously had been balanced on the furniture after they had died.
Back in the kitchen, Henry was leaning over KC’s body, carefully avoiding the blood that had run off the table and onto the floor.
“Look here, inside the body.”
“Come on, Henry. Seriously?” The stomach had been cut open from ribcage to pelvis. The intestines had been pulled out of the way, exposing wet lumps and shapes underneath.
He ignored me. “See here, where the liver has been cut open?”
“Not really. It’s just one big mess to me.”
“This was an act of heptomancy. Entrail reading. Somebody was looking for answers.”
I stepped back from the body and turned my face away. “Any idea what?”
“Usually it’s a yes or no kind of answer. If things look good, smooth and well-formed, then the reading is a yes. Bumpy liver, twisted entrails, anything discolored, then the answer is no. That’s what we get from historical records, back to the Babylonians and down through the Greeks and Romans. But there are accounts of more sophisticated divination practiced by an Etruscan Haruspex named Teitu, who was something of a genius in his field. The Etruscan Mozart of sheep guts, you might say.”
“I doubt I would say that, but okay. Can we do the lecture outside?”
“No. I mention Teitu because of two things.” He pointed at a series of symbols cut into KC’s skin all around the tear in his stomach. “First, these readings were generally taken without any other preparation of the sacrifice. The powers that be already knew what you were worried about, but if you wanted to be extra sure, you might chant something about it during the hoopla leading up to the viewing of the entrails. But Tietu wasn’t looking for a yes or no, so he cut specific information about his question into to the victim’s flesh beforehand.”
I looked longingly towards the door and fresh air. “How quickly can you tell me about the second thing?”
“Heptomancy is usually performed on a freshly killed animal. Teitu held that he could only read the entrails of the living. And, of course, it had to be a person. Look at KC’s wrists and ankles.”
I hadn’t noticed before, but now that Henry had pointed it out, I saw that the skin there was torn all the way to the bone. He’d been held down as he struggled and not by ropes or straps. Picturing the rough wooden hands of Prime and his creations, I could easily see how KC’s injuries would have been created.
I looked away and resumed my study of the back wall. No matter how long I lived, or what I saw, I could never seem to get the clinical detachment that Henry had. I figured it must be something you’re born with, as I’d never seen him bothered by this stuff, even as a young man.
“So, what was the question and what was the answer?”
Henry shrugged. “I have no idea about the question that was asked. These symbols don’t make any sense to me. But as for the answer, well, Old Teitu was famous for exactly one thing, and that was finding out the when to go with a what. So my guess is that these symbols describe what Prime is looking to do and the answer tells him when he needs to do it. It’s in the liver, right there. See?”
“Why do you always make me look at this stuff?”
He shook his head and laughed, white teeth flashing in his dark face. “Builds character.”
I leaned in and found the liver Henry had pointed out before. It had been divided and the pieces placed face up to show the insides of the halves. On each were three dark symbols made of what looked like black blood that had seeped to the surface. The symbols on each end were hollow and rounded with one point on the bottom and three points on top. The one in the center was a stick drawing of a four-legged animal.
“Okay, I looked. I didn’t learn anything, but I looked.”
“The symbols on the ends are fire. The animal in the center represents livestock, either a cow or a sheep. Taken together, these are depicting an old harvest ceremony where farmers would walk their animals between two bonfires in a ritual cleansing to keep them healthy and productive. It’s done as a part of the celebrations of Samhain, or All Hallow’s Eve.”
“So it happens on Halloween.”
“Not just Halloween, but at a specific kind of Halloween celebration involving a bonfire. Like the one Halfway is throwing in town tonight.”
“Tonight? Are you sure?”
Henry’s answer was cut off by the sharp bang of the kitchen
door slamming into the wall. Men with drawn weapons poured into the room, Sheriff Fowler first among them.
22
The deputies pounded into the room with guns drawn and eyes wide, ready to fight for their lives if need be. Two seconds later, standing in that kitchen and taking their first breath, all of the gung-ho just fell out of them. To a man they flinched and half had to turn their heads.
Flies buzzed around the corpse ceaselessly, drunkenly spinning away to bump into the walls and ceiling with loud clicks.
Owen pointed his service .38 at us with one hand and gestured with the other. “Outside, right now!”
We went gladly. The fresh air was sweet and intoxicating. I could feel the muscles in my neck and back unclenching as soon as the stink washed out of my lungs.
Chuck and Anne were already cuffed and standing by one wall, their weapons in plastic bags on the trunk of a cruiser. Deputy Ellis approached me while Owen kept his weapon trained on me and yanked Hunger from the sheath strapped to my leg. He hesitated for a moment before handing it to a deputy waiting with a bag, his lips thinning in distaste.
Touching Hunger is disturbing on a primal level, much like touching the Devourer’s altar pieces. To me it just feels warm, even a little comforting. I wondered if I held an altar piece now if I would still recoil like I used to.
Deputy Ellis dropped Hunger quickly into the bag and rubbed his hand on his pants.
Then he spun me around roughly and cuffed me. “Stand over there with the others.”
Everyone was against the wall except Henry, who was shaking his head at Owen. I couldn’t make out what was being said, but neither man looked happy.
Henry turned around and put his hands behind his back, and Owen gently put cuffs on him. We were all bundled into the back of different cruisers as the crime scene folks arrived, burdened with bulky cameras around their necks and carrying big plastic equipment cases in each hand.
Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) Page 8