Dark Screams, Volume 7

by Dark Screams- Volume 7 (retail) (epub)

  “Where did you get this?”

  “A guy in Tampico,” the Skull told him. “You kill enough people, you’ve seen everything they try to buy you off with. But this? This was a first. Where he got it, I don’t know. I get the idea it’s one of those things that doesn’t stay in the same pair of hands for long. It keeps on the move. It’s…restless.”

  Even Padre Thiago looked drawn to it, mesmerized, until the Skull lunged at him and clocked him across the jaw with his fist. The priest hit the ground before Enrique could scramble over on his knees to catch him, not wholly unconscious, but not much good for anything else for a while.

  The Skull pointed at him. “He tell you why he’s here?”

  “He said it was for doing exorcisms, and somebody didn’t like it.”

  “Yeah? That’s what he told you? Well, he’s half right.” The Skull squatted before him again, voice at a murmur. “I heard about him. This priest. Still God’s warrior while the Church is losing people left and right to Santa Muerte. Still out there saving souls.”

  It took Enrique a moment to catch on: The Skull didn’t want any of these other murderers listening to what he had to say.

  “So I went to him, see what he could do for me. I thought maybe this thing inside, whatever it is that’s got its hooks in me, I want it out, and he’s the one who can do it. Most of the time I think it’s just me. But that’s the lie it feeds you. There’s other times I can feel it moving. Like something else has got itself lined up with my eyes.”

  Or maybe that was the lie. Anything to believe it wasn’t purely him all along.

  The Skull glared at Thiago with scorn. “He didn’t do shit for me. Isn’t that the worst thing a priest can do? Leave you the same as he found you? But I don’t know why I expected more. He’s still got this Old World way of looking at things. What’s he gonna do for me when he’s stuck chasing after some pointy-tailed devil?”

  The Skull patted the bony cage of his chest.

  “So I figure as long as I’m stuck with it, I might as well go all in, make friends with it. And I got that.” He hitched his thumb at the black stone, its shiny jet surface still drifting with billows and clouds. “Only it doesn’t work for me. That’s all it ever does. It won’t show me shit.”

  I couldn’t see what he wanted me to.

  And now, now, Enrique understood why they were here.

  But he wouldn’t let me look away from the rock.

  “You? You got the vision. You got the look, like your DNA never heard of Spain. You got as far as you did figuring some of these things out on your own,” the Skull said. “So I got to wonder, how much farther could you get if we juice it up for you? How much farther can you get when there’s blood?”

  The Skull set the black stone, the smoking mirror, next to Padre Thiago, who still hadn’t come to his senses. Then he chose a knife and tossed it over. Enrique stared at it, lying in front of him on the hard-packed dirt. He gauged the distance between himself and the Skull. Looked at the guys with guns, tuning in again now that the time for talking was over.

  If he wanted a firing squad, the moment had come.

  “You know what to do,” the Skull said. “First one, that’s always the hardest. Then it gets easier. It did for Sebastián.”

  Enrique glanced back at the church and saw Sofia in the window, fists wrapped around the bars and everything about her imploring him to live. She hadn’t watched for Bas. But she was watching for him.

  He picked up the knife. The blade was long, thin, with tiny serrations along its edge. A boning knife, it looked like. It would go in easy. The Skull had chosen it for that. Enrique wiped it clean on his pant leg. Pointless, maybe, but he did it, anyway.

  He made himself look at Padre Thiago, at the man’s droopy, stubbled face as he rolled his head to the side, gaze meeting gaze. There was already blood, leaking from a split lip swollen like a bicycle tire about to burst. The priest was coming around again, peace in his eyes as he granted permission, stupid old man lying there, ready to be a martyr. This is what it takes to be like Jesus.

  Fuck these guys. He didn’t want to give either one of them what they wanted.

  Enrique didn’t think about it. He just did it. Shoved up the long black sleeve of his shirt, crusted with days of sweat and dirt, and slashed the blade across the meat of his forearm. It opened like a lipless mouth, red on the inside but nothing happening, just like he didn’t feel anything yet, then all at once it hurt and welled up and spilled over hot.

  “You stupid motherfucker! Why did you do that?” The Skull turned frenetic, diving toward him to snatch the knife and fling it out of reach. “Why would you do that?”

  Somewhere behind him, Sofia was screaming, too. A voice like that, maybe it should’ve been her at the front of the stage all along. And it was almost funny. This is what it takes to say I love you.

  The Skull scrambled with him in the dirt and the blood, and he was strong, crazy strong, freakishly strong, as he dragged the stone over and grabbed Enrique’s arm to lay it across the shiny black surface. Because while it may have been the wrong blood, as long as it was flowing, might as well not waste it.

  Black and red, red on black—it pulsed and spattered, and the Skull smeared it across the smooth glass like a kid starting on a finger painting. Enrique was already going lightheaded, maybe not so much from actual blood loss as the idea of losing it. He’d always been a wuss about that, seeing himself leak a reminder of those childhood beatings from guys like this, the kids who listened to the call.

  Lightheaded—how else to explain what he was seeing? Stone didn’t absorb blood. Sandstone, maybe, a little, but not obsidian. That wasn’t how it worked. That wasn’t how anything he knew about the world and rocks worked.

  But the stone was a greedy thing, and it drank as if a million microscopic mouths opened wherever the blood pooled, and wanted more. His arm delivered. The Skull saw to that.

  Whatever the black glass was showing him, clouds or smoke or steam, the billows and wisps began to drift apart. The space he saw waiting behind them looked shiny, shiny in a way that went beyond the glossiness of the surface. There was depth here, or a perfect illusion of it, the smooth black more like a porthole than a screen.

  He couldn’t tell if what he was seeing belonged to the infinite depths between worlds or the unplumbed recesses beneath the earth, only that whatever stirred there stirred alone. No, not stirred…crawled, all body and no limbs. His perspective was small, yet what stared back seemed vast, titanic in the way only something so pure and simple could be. When it raised its head, its blind face had the unfinished look of a worm.

  The Skull was riding his back now, jamming his head next to Enrique’s like they were both reading from the same engrossing book.

  He thought of everything that lay between him and this monstrosity on the other side. He thought of altars, of ritual bowls and chacmools. He thought of killing fields and the steep, blood-slick steps descending the side of a pyramid. Channels and conduits, all. It didn’t matter where this thing was—he sensed that much in his heart. Didn’t matter how near or far away it dwelled. When blood was let, the flow found a way there. All spaces were one, a single point in time.

  It drank him the same as it must have drunk millions before him, the thinnest visible drizzle falling on the flat, probing slug of its tongue. It then recoiled, as if it didn’t like the taste of him. Blood was blood, you’d think, but maybe its palate was more refined than you’d expect. Maybe it could discern some difference in the flavor of him, his blood let by his own hand because he would rather do that than slaughter the man next to him.

  And it spewed him from the cavern of its mouth.

  The smoke billowed across the glass to obscure the gulf between once more, and the stone was only obsidian again, black glass and nothing more.

  He thought it was a trick of the mind when a shadow seemed to dim the light on this patch of ground where he lay facedown and bleeding. That’s what blood loss did. Made y
our world a dimmer place.

  But did it make hardened killers, bored with watching men die, shout and run?

  Did it make the ground shake under three ponderous footsteps?

  Did it make a sound like an enormous scythe sweeping down from above to cut the air in two?

  Beside him, Padre Thiago lifted off the ground, there one instant, then gone. It took the last effort Enrique could call on to roll over onto his back, where he saw the halves of the priest’s body fly away to either side of the enormous blade, and beyond that, looming far above, the bone face of their Santa Muerte, the skull he’d always thought looked much too real.

  A red rain showered them all.

  —

  He awoke to heat and stillness and the lazy buzzing of flies. There were flies in Hell, weren’t there? Pesky, biting, pain-in-the-ass flies that never let up tormenting the sinners. So maybe he was okay. These were just hanging around, the same old everyday shit-eaters.

  The inside of his left forearm burned, but that was his own fault. Enrique found it bandaged, and beneath that, stitched. The Skull and the rest of his crew—what were they, if not a unit gone to war? It made sense they’d have a medic around.

  He lay on a thin mattress atop squeaky springs, staring at a ceiling scarred with peeling paint and plaster so cracked and crumbled he could see the wooden slats above it. Some run-down room in some other building that wasn’t the church. He’d slept in worse places, actually, back when the band had to take whatever it could get. Never in clothes sticky with a priest’s blood, though. There were all kinds of ways to hit a new low.

  Except for the flies, he couldn’t hear a sound. There was no sound to hear.

  He got up from the bed—hung over from something they’d shot him up with, it felt like—and wandered to the window. Like waking up in a ghost town. Nothing out there to see but dust and corpses and pieces of corpses. None of it seemed real. He might as well be waking up in a video game. Wounded, not a clue, and next thing he was supposed to do was find a weapon and start killing anything that moved.

  Only everything was dead already. Nothing outside was moving. Just him, once he got there.

  Under the hot white eye of the sun, Enrique trudged toward the bodies. They’d really cleaned house before they’d abandoned the place, hadn’t they? Finished what they’d started, wrapping it up in a hurry, then bugging out fast. Maybe this was normal for them, treating places like a landfill, and when the bodies piled up too high, they moved on.

  Most were hanging by their ankles, like bloody laundry, from cables stretched between poles, more than he could count at a glance. Nobody had died easy. Some had just died harder than others. More blood for the vast grave worm that tunneled through their lives, their world, their existence. And sooner or later, all the flies found their way here.

  He trembled like it was twenty degrees instead of a hundred. As he scanned the rows of the dead, he looked for clothing because he couldn’t bring himself to look at faces, and was relieved to see there wasn’t much black, and none of it meant for a stage.

  Lots of black hair, though. Except for the blond guy. Except for Olaf. Olaf the photographer. Whose real name was Oliver, he’d learned in the church, the sort of thing that came out when you were sitting around killing time waiting to see who was next to be killed. Said he got more gigs as Olaf than he ever had as Oliver—a man who knew how the game was played.

  Yet here he was.

  Enrique checked for a smaller body, half of it hair, but Morgan wasn’t among them. He was past deciding whether something was good or bad anymore. Maybe all that was left was bad right now, and bad deferred to later.

  Like that empty spot where the towering Santa Muerte had stood. Did you just pack up a thing like that and move it? Was something like that really a priority? You’d need two strong guys just to carry the scythe.

  Because no way had he seen what he thought he had there at the end. That priest had found some other way to get cut in half.

  He turned his attention to the church. The pair of front doors was secured with a heavy, squared-off crossbar. Before he wrestled it from its brackets, he stooped to gather what was waiting, what had plainly been placed here for him to find. Three phones, plus a charger. When he tried his own, it was dead. When he tried the others, they were dead, too.

  But better the phones than Sofia and Sebastián.

  He found them inside, huddled along the far wall. Before they saw it was him, they scurried back farther, reacting only to the opening of the door, the way you learned to live in a place like this, where a few more millimeters might mean another second of life.

  No sign of Morgan, though. She was just…gone.

  When he went to Sofia and Bas, they felt real enough, sounded real enough, even if it felt like something was missing. Everybody too far gone at this point for a show of relief, let alone jubilation. How was he supposed to bring them back to themselves? How were they supposed to bring him back? There were no manuals for this. There was only standing. There was putting one foot after another. There was holding hands and holding close. There was making your way back into the sunshine, in spite of what it showed.

  It would’ve been easier if the Skull had left a note, some validation of why they were still alive. But maybe the mere fact they were breathing was all the note he would ever need: Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep looking. Like skin, there’s always another layer deeper to go.

  Yeah. Like he wanted any part of that. Like he didn’t want to wipe his memory clean of everything about these past few days. Like he wouldn’t do anything to hit the reset switch and go back a week.

  No, longer than that—go back two years, take those first conceptual sketches for La máscara detrás de la cara and throw them out. Hope that some intuitive voice inside would tell him, Stop right now, you don’t want to start looking behind that succession of masks and faces, and hope he’d have the balls to listen.

  “How are we getting out of here?” Sofia said. “They could’ve at least left us one of the cars.”

  All they could do was charge one of the dead phones, try using it to get a fix on where they were, then relay the information to whomever they could raise. Sebastián had a GPS app on his, so they put him in charge of finding the nearest electrical outlet. They would’ve, anyway, because if Bas didn’t have something to do, he was going to keep falling apart a little more at a time.

  Enrique knew the feeling. You couldn’t stand around waiting. You had to do something, anything. He pointed to the church’s open bell tower, said to Sofia, Come on, they should get up there, take the high ground and see if they could spot a landmark, more than they could see from down below.

  They found the roof access tucked off a hallway inside, like a closet with a ladder affixed to the wall, stuffy as a chimney the higher they climbed. A trapdoor put them topside. The bell still hung mounted on a wooden headstock, no sign of the rope used for ringing it. Sofia gave it a rap with her knuckles to summon a sad, hollow clunk.

  The bell sounded as dead as everything else looked, as far as he could see.

  They were on an observation deck with nothing left to observe, a seared land scraped thin across a rocky world in a dozen shades of brown, barren of everything but scattered shacks and ruins. To the east, a line of green struggled to overcome, life trying to hang on beside an arroyo, maybe. He wished it well.

  The sky, the blue of dreams, was the only vibrant thing to see. They hadn’t killed the sky yet. Give them time, and enough guns and blades and poison, and they would find a way.

  Sofia saw it first, pointing it out in the distance, nearly at the limits of his vision. His soul knew what it was before his mind let him believe his eyes. Even lost amid a simmering hellscape stretching for the horizon, it towered against the rugged desert hills, crossed gullies and washes in a single step, this striding colossus with bone for a face and a scythe in its hands and hunger in whatever passed for its heart.

  She was, he realized, too terrib
le and too true not to have been real all along. And he feared she wouldn’t stop until she’d visited every square inch of this land and gathered up her due.

  Something had gone wrong here. Hundreds of years ago, or maybe thousands. No wonder it had always wanted their blood. That was where the memory lingered most.

  They watched until its saint passed from view, beyond the farthest hills, then turned to one another again. Sofia touched his face like she’d never truly seen it before, and when he touched hers, the thing that hurt most was knowing that under the skin, the two of them looked more alike than not, and the same as everybody else.

  The Expedition

  Bill Schweigart

  AUGUST 1938

  To Lieutenant Dietrich Drexler it was a simple mathematical problem: They had one wolf pursuing their party and one injured man. The guide had been thrown from his horse when something, perhaps the wolf, had spooked it. It was early in their expedition, and Drexler, at the rank of Obersturmführer, a senior storm leader of the Schutzstaffel, was confident he could lead them out of the remote hills of Romania to Bucharest himself. Unfortunately, they were still several days’ journey from the capital, and despite their medic’s best efforts, fever had set in.

  Drexler had seen it done before, by his father, on their farm in Waldtrudering. Periodically, the countryside would be plagued by wolf packs. His father would select stock of little value—a lame animal, a dying sheep, an old hen. They would bind it, take it to a clearing, and stake the binding into the ground. From there, it was a matter of waiting with the rifles. Sometimes, it would take all night. More often, it didn’t. The plaintive wailing and bleating of the animal would draw the predators from the forest. It only required vigilance. And a steady hand. Drexler prided himself on possessing both.