The Preserve

by Patrick Lestewka

  Answer went out with them the next night. A low fog was sliding down from the mountains and, somewhere in the dark, music was playing. It was a chaotic, discordant sound, without rhythm or form or progression. It was the music of the jungle, and Answer soon realized it existed only inside his head.

  After a while he broke away from the Greenies. He set off on his own, charting a private path. Sometimes he’d go barefoot to feel the soft soil underneath his feet. He went deep enough into the land and deep enough inside himself that he vanished from sight completely.

  Alone like that, isolated from humankind, the realization dawned: There were no sides to be taken, no profound ideals worth fighting for.

  There was no good. There was no evil.

  There was only Chaos. The elemental Truth of Chaos.

  He began to kill people at night. He ignored the color of their skin and the cut of their uniforms. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t killing Gooks and he wasn’t killing Yanks, although many nights he killed both. He’d cut their tongues out, if he could, and strung them on a loop of tungsten wire around his neck.

  Never had he felt so alive and so right as he had during those jungle nights. That was, until now, with these nightmare creatures flanking him left and right.

  Now and then, he felt the same: perfectly at home.

  “Sarge?” Tripwire said. “Any idea how far we’ve come?”

  Oddy shook his head. “Lost the map.” His shoulders slumped slightly. “My sense of direction is all screwed up, anyway. All we can do is keep moving forward.”

  They lapsed into a protracted silence. There was only the sound of their boots crunching the hard-packed snow, their labored breathing. All the trees looked the same. The land described an endlessly-repeating loop, like a möbius strip. It was impossible to tell if they were breaking new ground or re-tracing old paths.

  Oddy caught his reflection in the Webley’s nickel-plated cylinder: skin ash-gray and eyes deeply sunken in their sockets, stubble fuzzing the hollows of his cheeks, slashes of dried blood streaking his face like war paint. He seemed to have aged fifteen years in the past few days. His feet were now so frostbitten he felt as if he were walking on stumps of oak.

  “Either of you got the time?” he asked. His own wristwatch currently resided at the bottom of Great Bear lake. “The date?”

  Tripwire hiked his sleeve up and looked at his Seiko. The watchface was shattered, black liquid crystal seeping through the cracks to stain his fingers. He threw it to the ground and said, “Mine’s busted.”

  “Answer?”

  “Don’t carry one.”

  “Of course not.”

  They walked and walked. How long and how far became unknowable. Day blended into night. Snow blindness set in and after awhile all they could see was an endless expanse of white. Time stretched and became liquid, simultaneously inconsequential and of greatest possible importance. One foot in front of the other. And when they could go no further…take another step.

  At some point the path bellied into a circle of bare earth ringed by tall trees. At the far side was a jumble of snow-covered branches—the skeleton of a bivouac? In front of it was a ring of snow-topped rocks—an abandoned fire pit? Oddy was rocked by a heady rush of déjà vu.

  They walked to the clearing’s center. Tripwire’s foot snagged on something. He cleared snow away with the toe of his boot.

  It was a parka. A blood-soaked parka, frozen rigid. A parka just like theirs.

  Heart hammering, Tripwire cleared away more snow. Beneath a crack-glaze of blood, a name was sewn over the breast:

  EDWARDS.

  Behind them and around them arose a sound of stamping limbs and the crick-crackling of alien joints and the snuffling of seeking snouts…

  Off to the west, seemingly within spitting distance, was the hill upon which they had been dropped. Beyond was the purple-hued sky that a Labrador helicopter would soon cleave with its dual blades.

  They were so close.

  So goddamn close.

  “And isn’t it true,” the repellently familiar voice came from behind them, “how all things that come around do so surely go around?”

  ««—»»

  Anton Grosevoir hunched on the ground. His knees were spread and his arms hung between them, fingers brushing the snow. With his stubby arms and fat legs he looked for all the world like a bullfrog coiled to hop. He wore a vanilla suit, which remained as clean and unrumpled as the day they’d first met.

  Oddy’s guts contorted with rage and for a moment the outline of his world, every plane and contour, was etched in cold blacks and reds. He curled the fingers of his good hand into a fist so tight the fingernails left bloody half-moons in his palms.

  “And oh how spectacularly you went around,” Grosevoir continued. “My tranquil little preserve looks like a slaughterhouse at quitting time!”

  “Crosshairs and Zippo are dead,” Oddy said.

  “I know.” Oddy may as well have told him the time of day for all the emotion he exhibited. “Damn good thing, too. What’s the use of maintaining monsters that don’t earn their keep?”

  Tripwire’s fingers tightened around the Llama’s butt. “A deal’s a fucking deal. We made it around. You’ve got to take us home.”

  “You’re finished?” Grosevoir’s fingers traced strange designs in the snow. “As far as I can see, you’ve made it exactly as far as that unlucky fellow.” He pointed at Edwards’ parka. “The hilltop is your finish line, and that remains a ways off yet. And—” he inclined his head towards the treeline, where the noise of massing bodies had reached a fever pitch. “—there are rather a lot of…things…who’d prefer you didn’t leave.”

  Oddy knew they possessed neither the strength nor ammunition to withstand another assault. “This place has taken two of my men,” he said. “Two of my friends. And we’re badly hurt. But if we turn and face whatever it is waiting in those woods, I promise you we are going to kill a lot of them.” He brandished the Webley with more conviction than he truly felt. “So why don’t we call this whole fucking thing a draw?”

  Deformed shapes swirled in the air above the men’s heads. For a moment Tripwire mistook the spectacle for a particularly gruesome phase of the northern lights, until the air coalesced, attaining a splintered permanence, and a shoal of faces swam out of the sky. Their aspect was hideous: eyes ripped of eyelids or punched from their skulls outright, noses bitten away, lips freakishly swelled and Negroid, tongues long and lolling and eaten through as if by parasites. Grosevoir waved his hand irritably and they broke apart into nothingness.

  “A draw?” he said. “No, I can’t have that. It smacks of failure and compromise and business left unfinished. It goes against my nature.”

  “And what nature is that?” Tripwire said. “What are you?”

  Grosevoir said, “What do you think I am?”

  “You’re no different than the things you keep—a monster.”

  “No,” Answer said quietly, “not a monster. It is…Chaos.”

  “I am that exactly.”

  Oddy said, “What do you mean, you’re Chaos?”

  “I am that which causes havoc, pandemonium, anarchy. It is my role, my position in this world.”

  Having been forced to accept the existence of zombies and vampires and a thousand other monstrous manifestations, their minds easily assimilated this new revelation.

  “Why all this, then?” Tripwire said. “This preserve, the monsters, us—how does it fit?”

  Chaos stood and stretched. It dipped its head and regarded them out of the tops of its eyes. “Ask yourselves this: what is it such creatures inspire? Unrest, disharmony, terror…chaos. You’ve heard stories of medieval villages disappearing in the span of a single night, or men driven to madness by unseen apparitions, or sightings of such things that rational minds must dismiss as untrue. These are not myths, or delusions, or the ravings of lunatics. They are the truth. They happened.” It ran its small pink tongue across its small gray teeth
. “There is always a truth, and that truth is to be found in the woods surrounding Great Bear Lake. But that truth is so unthinkable, flying in the face of all logical thought, that people refuse to believe—at least their rational minds do. But deep down, in those places where dark speculation takes root, an ember of belief is always smoldering.

  “These creatures represent the unknown threat. They are the monsters under the bed. They are the dark shapes circling endlessly beyond the light of humanity’s fires. At their best, they create confusion, and insanity, and primitive fear. They aid and enable chaos. In this way they are, and always have been, foot soldiers in my cause. So you see how I have a vested interest in their health and continuance.”

  “But why us,” Oddy said. “Why the letters and why the lies and why the whole goddamn front?”

  The snow stopped, but the wind had picked up. It skated across the ground and wormed through the vents in their clothing to graze their many wounds. Chaos walked behind them, touching the napes of their necks with one cold fingertip. Oddy withdrew from its touch, as did Tripwire. Answer did not.

  “I wanted my denizens to be challenged,” it said, “and knew you would fill that need. As to how I knew you would fill that need…” It returned to its position facing them. The eye patch had been removed. The skin underneath was wet and raw, as if the wound had been inflicted only moments ago. “Do I really need to tell you?”

  “No,” the three men said in near-unison.

  And how long had they known? In their hearts and in their minds and in their souls—known. Had they been tricked? Really tricked? Or had they merely been tricking themselves?

  “I looked different then, I know. This,” he swept his hand down his chest, “is strictly for civility’s sake. It’s so difficult to secure a table at a decent restaurant looking as I did in Vietnam.”

  “And that’s it?” Oddy said. “Because twenty years ago, when we were fucking kids, we hurt you—revenge, pure and simple?”

  “Not the only reason,” Chaos said. “But one of them. I have lived a long time and, sad as it is to say, have become somewhat petty. But if simple vengeance was all I wanted, I could’ve killed you all long ago.”

  Chaos’s true shape shifted beneath the skin of its human form. The flesh rippled like water stirred by a slight breeze and something tore wetly. It said, “A time comes for all things to change. This body—my adopted body—is getting old and infirm. Its previous owner gave it to me willingly, as they all have. This particular body belonged to a freak show performer. The fellow bit heads off live chickens and had gotten into the nasty habit of killing a single child in each and every village his sideshow toured through.” Chaos cocked his head to the side, as a dog sometimes will. Oddy found the gesture jarringly familiar. “You see, his nature was the same as mine. I am always on the lookout for such specimens.”

  There was another tearing sound and the skin of Chaos’s head split down the center. The wound was red and raw-looking, the skin spread an inch wide. Something was pushing its way out.

  “I made this man the same offer I made all of them: become the vessel of Chaos. Your body becomes mine, my powers yours. You will live beyond all natural bounds. The only pain you feel will be the pain of others. Most importantly, you will exist at all times in those places where bloodshed, and disharmony, and anarchy reign.”

  Chaos’s forehead split wider and a sharp V-shaped wedge of bone forced its way through the wound. It looked like an axe-head, or a shark’s fin.

  “The time for change has come.” Its voice was no longer human. “I need a new vessel. That is why I brought you here. To make a choice.”

  Chaos’s false face loosened, then folded, then began to fall away. Gaping tears at the eyes, the ears, the neck. Like an old, rotten t-shirt ripping, Tripwire thought. Or a snake shedding its skin. Then, horrifically: Or like a baby being born.

  Chaos’s old face fell off. Underneath was another face: sharp and white and hard as bone, a little bloody, one blood-red eye and a mouth wide enough to devour entire worlds.

  “Now,” it said. “Choose.”

  Tripwire’s mind reeled. The proposition was ungodly, unthinkable. Become one with…that thing? No. Never. He’d die first. The proposition was somehow insulting, given all they’d seen and done in the previous days—he’d gone through hell just to surrender? Rage welled up within him, vast and wild and bitter.

  In the sky to the south a faint thrum arose. Oddy squinted his eyes into the gloom. He could see, or thought he saw, a pinprick of dark movement, growing slightly larger with each passing moment.

  “No,” Tripwire said. “Not me. Not ever. Fuck you.” He pulled a pistol from his waistband and brought it to bear. “Fuck y—”

  The sound was so whisper-soft that Oddy nearly missed it. Tsshshsh, like trembling waves lapping a sandy shore, or a deep-tongue kiss.

  Tripwire’s neck—his pale slim neck—had a K-Bar knife sticking out of it. A hand was wrapped around the hilt. The back of that hand had red hairs growing on it. Oddy’s eyes followed the hand to where the arm met the shoulder, across to the clavicle, and up to a pair of eyes he’d stared into a thousand times without ever really understanding the thoughts that turned over behind their cold and lifeless blue.

  “The world needs a little Chaos, Sarge,” Answer said. “You see that, don’t you?”

  Tripwire made a dry hacking noise. His eyes reflected a wretched bewilderment and Oddy recalled a fawn he’d hit while driving to Poughkeepsie and how the animal had died without dignity or shelter, how it had died lacking the awareness of what had killed it, or why. They had been the eyes of a creature awakened to the hideous serendipity of this world when it was too late to do anything about it. Tripwire’s hand jerked up and grabbed at the knife but all he did was cut his fingers and make Answer jam the blade in further.

  The distant thrum to the south grew louder. The black dot in the sky attained a recognizable shape.

  A Labrador helicopter.

  Answer pulled the knife out of Tripwire’s neck. Tripwire staggered back and Oddy caught him before he fell into the snow. His body was rigid; the muscles and tendons of his neck and shoulders pulsed against the skin like twisted mangrove roots. Blood pumped out of the slit in his neck, the brightest red Oddy had ever seen. He pressed his hand over the wound even though he knew it was useless. Blood pushed between his fingers and down his arm and the dying warmth of it made him want to throw up.

  You fucker, he thought. Oh you fucking motherFUCK…

  “Blegghh,” Tripwire said. His face was white and his teeth were red and his eyes were focused on the helicopter with a sort of terrified sadness, like a marathon runner who is approaching the finish line only to find he ultimately lacks the strength to cross it.

  “Blegghh.” The sound came out with so little force, was so pitifully meaningless. It filled Oddy with crushing sorrow to see the man who had kept him sane through the madness of Vietnam robbed of the simple ability to express his dying thoughts. Something blossomed inside Oddy in that moment, flowing dark through his arteries, vile and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase.

  Oh you fuck oh you goddamn motherfucker….

  Answer wiped Tripwire’s blood on his pants and approached Chaos.

  “I looked for you,” he said. “In the jungle.”

  “It was a busy time for me,” Chaos said. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is going to…sting.”

  Chaos began to change—began to melt, to streamline. The shape of its skull elongated, as if it had been made of wax that was softening and starting to run. Its body transformed into something that resembled hot tar, molten and malleable and deepest black. It surged forward, a long thick rope pushing its way into Answer’s wide-open mouth. Answer struggled against the intrusion, gagging, clawing at the inrushing blackness. Oddy saw, for the first time, a real and definable emotion flash across those ice-blue eyes, and if that emotion could have somehow been transla
ted into words, those words might have been oh dear god what have I done?

  As Chaos entered Answer its shape changed. Gibbering faces appeared along its dark length, human and beast and others whose aspects were in no way analogous to anything ever glimpsed in this world; nightmare limbs, claw-tipped and sucker-dotted, pulsed from the amorphous mass only to melt into the blackness again. Then, for an instant, Oddy believed he nearly saw what shape Chaos really was, and his heart froze in his chest, leaving him gasping.

  The helicopter touched down on the hilltop.

  How long would it stay?

  “Blegghh,” Tripwire said again. And then, mercifully, he was dead. He died so quickly he didn’t even have time to shut his eyes.

  FUCKER FUCKER MOTHERFUCKER—

  With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand Oddy closed Tripwire’s eyes. He set the body down with as much gentleness as his clumsy arms were capable of.

  Answer stood ten feet away. His lips and cheeks and the inside of his mouth were sheathed in blackness. Only he wasn’t Answer anymore. His eyes, previously blue, were now completely red. On the other hand, he wasn’t not Answer: physically he was unchanged and his eyes, though a different shade, still radiated the same chilling deadness.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, Sarge,” he said, voice slightly breathless. “You wouldn’t bel—”

  He said no more.

  Because that was when Oddy pulled the Webley

  …FUCKER…

  the sound of the hammer cocking like some great cosmic gear turning over

  …DIRTY MOTHERFUCKER…

  and shot him square in the face.

  Answer’s head rocked back in a spray of black and red. His arms flew upwards like a giddy rider awaiting a roller coaster’s plunge. His back bent at a ludicrous angle and his arms pinwheeled for balance: he looked like a man perched on a high-rise ledge caught off-guard by a sudden gust of wind. Then he fell backwards to land with a puff of snow.

  ««—»»

  Oddy never got the chance to view the result of his marksmanship. It was as if the crack of his pistol had signaled the start of some desperate race as the creatures who’d lain in wait burst into the clearing and made a reckless beeline for him. He got a good look at the leader of the pack, an apparition straight out of a madman’s fever dream: the legs of a giant crab and the elongated neck of a giraffe terminating in the flattened head of a Portuguese Man O’ War, bulbous green eyes set atop insectile stalks and its mouth packed not with teeth but with bone, sharpened knuckles of bone chattering a skeletal calliope.