by Tim Waggoner
Allison screamed. Some of Wes’s blood had splattered onto her, dotting her face, sweater, and white dress.
Durg flooded the shack then, coming through already existing holes or making new ones. The shack shuddered and swayed, and Kevin knew it wouldn’t be long before the entire ramshackle structure collapsed.
Allison was still screaming as the Durg came at her, and Olivia shot her between the shoulder blades. Blood sprayed the air and Allison’s arms flew upward, almost as if she were beseeching some higher power for help that would never come. As the Durg swarmed over her and pulled her to the ground, Kevin thought, One shell left.
He thrust the box of shells toward Olivia.
“Reload,” he said. And then he started toward the mass of Durg savaging Allison’s corpse.
Olivia spoke as she began inserting shells into the shotgun. “What are you doing?”
“We need her head.”
The floor of the shack was filled with Durg now. They clustered over Wes’s and Allison’s bodies, mandibles clacking and legs scuttling, as they worked to strip every last shred of meat from the Bishops’ bones. Kevin hoped it wasn’t too late. Wes’s head was unusable because Olivia had destroyed his brain. But Allison’s head had been intact when she was pulled down. He hoped enough of it remained to be of use.
Heart pounding and stomach roiling—and really wishing he had time to chew several dozen antacids first—Kevin moved toward the Durg clustered over and around Allison’s body, kicking at the insects to drive them off. Several snapped at him, ripping his pants legs, and one managed to tear a gash in his calf. It hurt like blazes, but he ignored it and kept kicking.
A shotgun blast thundered and one of the Durg atop Allison flew backward. Kevin stepped back then, and Olivia kept firing until she’d cleared away most of the insects on Allison. Kevin moved back in. The woman’s body had been torn apart, reduced to a mass of loose meat, splintered bone, and blood. So much blood. A third of her skull was exposed and only half her face remained, but it looked as if her brain was still where it was supposed to be. Her head was still attached to the remnants of her torso, but when Kevin gripped it and pulled, it came away easily, like a piece of overcooked chicken. The head was slippery with blood, and Kevin cradled it against his chest with both arms to prevent it from slipping out of his hands.
He looked back over his shoulder at Olivia. “Let’s go!”
She’d reloaded once again, and as she joined him, she continued blasting at the Durg, clearing a path to the door for them. When they reached it, she kicked it open, and the two of them ran into the Bishops’ yard and headed for the van. Kevin looked back and saw the shack was covered by Durg, all of them tearing at the walls and the tarpaper roof. He faced forward once again, so he didn’t see the shack finally collapse beneath the Durg’s weight, but he heard it.
They reached the van and got in. Olivia tossed the shotgun in the back and climbed into the driver’s seat. Kevin sat in the passenger seat, Allison’s head resting in his lap, her blood soaking into his pants. At least my pants will match my shirt, he thought. He was in the process of putting on his seat belt when Olivia fired up the engine, put it in gear, and stepped on the gas. Tires squealed, the van fishtailed, and then they were roaring down the road. Several of the Durg broke away from the main mass covering the ruins of the shack to pursue them, but they couldn’t match the van’s speed, and Olivia easily outdistanced them.
“That, as they say, was too damn close,” she said. She glanced over at Kevin. “You okay?”
“One of the fuckers got me on the leg, but I don’t think it’s serious. I’ll take care of it.”
The van had a full med kit, and it wouldn’t take him long to clean his wound and put a dressing on it. “But first, we need to continue our conversation with Mrs. Bishop.”
He undid his seat belt and, crouching, carried Allison’s head to the back of the van.
* * *
Joan swung the skillet as Jon came toward her. He brought up an arm in time to block the blow, but she’d swung the iron skillet so hard that something in his arm snapped. He didn’t seem to notice, though, and he brought up his other arm, made a fist, and punched her in the face. She’d never been hit like that before in her life, and surprise struck her almost as hard as the actual blow. Her head snapped back and white light flashed behind her eyes. She staggered backward, but she didn’t lose her grip on the skillet. She was dizzy and she felt something warm and wet trickle over her lips. Was her nose bleeding? Probably.
Jon moved in for another strike, but she swung the skillet wildly. She didn’t aim, but she got lucky. She hit Jon on the jaw and heard another sharp crack, but the injury seemed to cause him no more pain than the blow to his arm had. The right side of his mouth went slack, but the left side of his mouth twitched upward in what she thought was an attempt at a smile.
Then he hit her again, and she felt her legs collapse beneath her, as if her bones had suddenly turned to water. Darkness rushed in to claim her as she fell to the floor, and she had time for one last thought before she lost consciousness.
I’m going to kill him.
CHAPTER 7
Surveillance vans were equipped with tech that agents might find useful in the field. Some of it was used fairly regularly, such as negative-energy sensors. Other devices were used only in the rarest circumstances, and Kevin employed one of those now. He held Allison’s head with one arm while he withdrew a gray plastic case from the van’s equipment locker. He then sat cross-legged on the floor, wincing as his wounded leg complained, and put Allison’s head in his lap. He opened the case to reveal an electronic console with a shallow depression. He pushed a button to power up the machine, and then pushed another. A metal spike emerged from the depression, and Kevin placed Allison’s head on it. The head shook with the van’s vibrations, but the spike held it in place well enough. He then pressed a red button next to the depression and hoped enough of Allison’s brain remained intact for the revivifier to work with.
The machine began to hum as power built, and then there was a loud zzzz as that power was channeled through the metal spike and into Allison’s head. Her mouth stiffened and her remaining eye snapped open.
“Allison! Can you hear me?”
Her eye rolled in his direction, but before she could say anything, her mouth went slack once more and her eye closed.
“Fuck,” Kevin muttered. He waited several moments and then pushed the red button again. The revivifier hummed once more as power built and was then discharged into Allison’s head for a second time. Her eye flew open and she took in a gasping breath. Or rather, she tried to. Without lungs, breathing wasn’t an option for her. She wouldn’t need to breathe to be able to speak, though. The revivifier would stimulate her vocal cords sufficiently enough for them to produce sound.
Kevin heard Olivia speaking. At first he thought she was talking to him, but when he glanced over his shoulder, he saw she was talking on her phone. He assumed she was talking to Deanna, filling her in on what had happened to the Bishops and asking what they should do next. Kevin didn’t care what Deanna would say, though. He knew what they had to do. They needed to return to Ash Creek and help Joan. But to do that, they needed more information.
Most of Allison’s scalp was gone, and what remained was a patch of skin with blood-matted hair on top. One eye was gone—the socket empty save for a bit of optic nerve. Her nose remained, although it had been broken and shoved to one side, the skin swollen and discolored. Her lips had been scratched in places but were mostly intact, and when her mouth opened, Kevin saw that she was missing several teeth. She only had one ear, on the same side as her surviving eye, and he leaned closer to it as he spoke.
“Can you hear me, Allison?”
Her eye focused on him, and she blinked several times, as if she was having trouble seeing him. A slow sound emerged from her lips.
“Fffffffffffff…”
He leaned his ear closer to her mouth.
&nbs
p; “Yes? What is it?”
“Ffffffffuck you! I didn’t want to die again, and I sure didn’t want to be brought back as a goddamned severed head! I’m not even a full head, am I? I can’t see or hear on my left side. Why would you do this to me?”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t protect you, but—”
“Protect me? You and your partner killed me by bringing the Durg to us. Maegarr never would’ve found us if it wasn’t for you!”
“Who’s Maegarr? What’s going on? Please tell me so I can stop it.”
Allison let out a cynical laugh.
“There’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop him. He’s worked toward this night for decades.”
“Maegarr.”
“Yes. Do you know about Placidity?”
Kevin shook his head, and so Allison told him the story of Mark Maegarr and his followers, how they moved to Suriname in the seventies, founded a pseudo-religious colony, and ultimately died horrific deaths there. The more she spoke, the more familiar her story sounded to Kevin. He thought he’d read about the massacre at Placidity before, but he was certain he’d heard Mark Maegarr’s music. His existential themes of entropy and the ultimate meaninglessness of existence spoke to those who worked for Maintenance, making Slogeny a favorite band among their people.
“Maegarr believed that if the universe was destined to end, it should do so as soon as possible. That way a new and better universe would be born. A paradise.”
Kevin didn’t say anything, but his doubt must have shown on his face, for Allison said, “We bought into his bullshit hook, line, and sinker. But when he summoned the Durg to kill us and we crossed over into Shadow and then beyond, we knew the truth. Our spirits didn’t fuse into a bright sword of energy that would cut a deep wound in the universe, causing it to bleed out. We were nothing but more food for the Gyre and whatever lies beyond it.”
“The Vast,” Kevin whispered.
Allison continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
“We all sensed the truth at once. Maegarr, in his madness, refused to believe it, and he fought to keep us together with the force of his will. But one of us—a woman named Debbie—managed to escape. He’d killed her before he’d finished the rite, and to my shame, Brian and I helped. Do you know what her crime was? Sending a letter back home to her family so they wouldn’t worry about her. But that was high betrayal to Maegarr. As far as he was concerned, the Congregation was supposed to be our one and only family. After Debbie’s spirit escaped Maegarr, it fled back to Earth, where it was reborn in physical form as a baby who would one day grow up to be Joan Lantz.
“Maegarr was furious, and he blamed the failure of our mission on Debbie’s lack of faith. He believed that all of the Congregation’s souls were needed to kill the universe, and if he could get hers back, then his plan would still succeed. He imprisoned the souls of the Congregation inside himself, but he allowed two of his most trusted servants—the man and woman Wes and I once were—to help him reclaim Debbie. We were skeptical after what had been revealed to us about the Gyre, but Maegarr’s will is so strong, and in the end we agreed to help him. He sent the two of us back to Earth, and using his mystic knowledge to bend time itself, Wes and I were reborn several years before Debbie. I became her sister Ashley and Wes became my boyfriend Billy. We killed Joan’s parents. Mine, too, at that point. Thanks to Maegarr’s power, we retained some measure of our memories and original personalities. The plan was to deliver a psychological blow to Joan so strong that it would weaken her mind and shatter her psychic defenses. Then we would kill her, releasing her spirit and allowing Maegarr to regain control of her. But he underestimated her strength and determination, and although devastated by what we’d done, she avenged her parents’ deaths by killing us both.
“Maegarr was so angry with us, I thought he would hurl us into the Gyre for sure. But instead, he decided to try again. He sent us back to Earth, where we were reborn as Wes and Allison. This time, instead of attacking Joan directly, Maegarr decided to go slow and create a trap from which she couldn’t escape.”
“The house,” Kevin said.
“Complete with a basement portal to Placidity. Not the real one, of course, but a re-creation Maegarr carved out of Shadow’s substance. It’s where he waits for her.”
The revivification process was a temporary one. Even with the right technology, entropy could only be held at bay for a short time. Allison was already beginning to show the strain. The remaining flesh on her skull had begun to sag, the skin becoming gray and mottled. Her eye had clouded over, and her speech had become mushy, as if her tongue had started to rot. Kevin knew she wouldn’t last much longer. He had to hurry.
“And what will Maegarr do once he has Joan?” he asked.
“He will claim her spirit and add it to the others. He believes that once the Congregation is together again, once it’s whole, he can use us to finally make his plan come to fruition. He will poke a pinhole in the universe, causing entropy to speed up, like a balloon leaking air.”
Her speech was slower now and slurred. Kevin feared she had only moments left.
As mad as Maegarr’s plan sounded, could it actually work? If Maegarr could harness enough spiritual energy and if he used the knowledge he’d obtained from his occult studies… Yes, it just might. The universe tended toward entropy already and had since it had first come into existence. All it would take is the right push in the right place at the right time to speed it up. Precision was the key. Like cutting a diamond, he thought. And Maegarr’s decades as a spirit had granted him perspective and insight he could never have possessed while alive. He might not have been able to accomplish his goal back in 1981, but it could well be a different story now. There would be no rebirth and no paradise to come after, though. Just the endless nothing known as the Vast.
“Why did you betray Maegarr and try to help Joan?” he asked.
“We might have been dead, but we still continued to learn. To grow. We eventually came to understand that what Maegarr was doing was wrong. We did not have the strength to openly disobey him, but we attempted to thwart him in small ways. I kept telling Joan about problems with the house—making most of them up—in the hope that she’d decide not to buy it. But she wanted a home of her own so badly, one to replace the childhood home we’d taken from her. And, although she wasn’t aware of it as Joan, to replace the home she’d lost as Debbie when the Congregation died at Placidity. When the sale went through, we tried to hide the basement. For all the good…it…did.”
This was it. Kevin got down on his hands and knees and spoke close to Allison’s ear, which was now dripping in fleshy strands, as if she were made of melting wax. He wanted to make certain she heard his next words.
“How can we stop Maegarr?”
Allison’s mouth moved slowly, but no sound came out. Her broken nose began to liquefy, and her lips drooped and then peeled away from her face, landing on the revivifier’s console with soft plops. A hissing sound came from between teeth grown black and rotten. Kevin thought it was a word. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it sounded like Joan.
Allison’s head shuddered once, then became still. The rest of her flesh oozed off the skull, and her brain came with it, a gray-green sludge that joined the rest of the muck on the console. But even that didn’t last long. As the seconds passed, the viscous mass dried up and crumbled away to dust. The skull did the same. Cracks fissured through the bone, and it fell away from the metal spike that had held it upright. The fragments turned to dust, and then the mound of tiny black pieces that marked all that remained of Allison’s head slowly evaporated in curls of mist that vanished almost as soon as they touched the air. Within moments, the console was clean, and no trace of Allison remained.
Despite the horrific nature of what had happened to Allison, Kevin couldn’t help being awed by witnessing entropy in its most primal form. It was one thing to talk about entropy in the abstract, to work to delay it, to say “Flavor to the Feast” as if it meant som
ething. But seeing Allison’s head dissolve into nothing drove home why Maintenance did what they did. Maybe the most they could accomplish in the end was a delaying action, but that was worth something, wasn’t it?
Kevin turned off the revivifier. The spike retracted automatically, and he closed the case and returned it to the equipment locker. He then moved back to the front of the van, took the passenger seat once more, and buckled himself in. He then gave Olivia a quick rundown of what he’d learned from Allison.
“That poor woman,” he said. “She died once at Placidity, then again in Joan’s childhood home, once tonight when the Durg attacked her and you shot her—at my suggestion, I admit—and now she died again after I brought her back to answer my questions. That makes four deaths in all.”
“That’s a lot of dying,” Olivia said.
Kevin nodded. “For a man who supposedly wants to speed up entropy, Maegarr seems to spend a lot of effort trying to defy it.”
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” Olivia said.
“I suppose. But this is more like using a lot of little eggs to break one very big one.” He turned to look at her. “Was that Deanna you were talking to on the phone?”
“Yes. I called to tell her what you were doing, and she contacted the Analysts and told them to switch to a live feed from your glasses. They heard what Allison said. Unless I miss my guess, we should be—” Her phone rang. She removed it from her pants pocket and answered it. “Hello. Yes. Yes. I see. All right. We’re on our way now, and we’ll return as soon as we can.” She ended the call and slipped the phone back in her pocket.
“What did she say?”
“She’s ordered an immediate strike on the Lantzes’ house. We’re to return to the office for debriefing.”
It made sense. They were still twenty minutes or so away from Ash Creek, and the situation was too dangerous to wait. Yes, Joan’s life was at risk, but potentially the continued existence of the entire universe was at stake as well. Any delay could prove disastrous. Besides, Olivia and he were Surveyors. Their job was to keep watch and gather information. And yet, he knew he had to be there tonight, to bear witness to what happened, if nothing else. Maybe it was because he wanted to prove old man Harris wrong, that he wasn’t going to confront the Vast this night. But mostly it was because he’d gotten to know Joan Lantz. They’d met only briefly and had spoken little, and while he’d certainly found her attractive, it wasn’t as if he’d fallen in love with her at first sight or anything foolish like that. It was simply that, for the first time since he’d started watching people for Maintenance, he’d made a personal connection. And however tenuous that connection might be, in a strange way, it made him feel responsible for Joan. Returning to the office wasn’t an option.