I do.
The woman she once was…or is it Julia…stands before me. I cannot be certain because her long dark hair hangs in her face, blocking it, and tattered sheets cover her body as she shuffles closer. Gone is the highway, and I am back in the hut, near the fire now, kneeling and staring into it as the woman slithers around behind me, moving like a serpent, her breath hissing in long exhales that stoke the fire.
I can hear nothing but her horrible hissing, the crackling flames and my own labored breath. I want to turn and look at her, to see who she is, who she really is, but I cannot take my eyes from the fire. There are things within it that demand my attention. Evil things…horrible things…deadly things…
“Am I…awake?” I ask, the words slurred and distant and falling from my mouth without my approval.
“It is your god that sleeps,” she tells me, “while you lie awake, writhing in agony.”
The witch, fooling me, trying to convince me she’s something other than the horrible old hag she truly is. A shape-shifter and sorcerer, I cannot allow myself to believe her, even as she wraps her arms around me, leans closer and puts her lips against the side of my throat.
“Go,” she whispers. “Go to the fire.”
I lean closer, feel the heat against my face and neck, my chest. In the distance, somewhere out there in this godforsaken village of children, a bell tolls eerily in the night, once…again…and again…and strange sounds fill my head, like the ethereal cries of some ancient giant creature, its wailing song both unsettling and somehow peaceful.
I fall forward, into the flames, eyes wide open.
And I burn.
Through the flames, the witch dances, spinning and nude, younger now and beautiful, she throws her head back and through my burning eyes, I see hers as they were before they were stolen. And in those beautifully terrifying eyes, a night sky lives and breathes, lording over a throng of children standing alongside a giant bonfire. I am among them, bound, shackled and on my knees, battered and barely conscious as they stand and stare in silent judgment.
I call Julia’s name, scream it as long and loud as I can.
Their dirty pale faces come closer, their tiny fingers pulling and prodding and poking me, shaking me and pushing and shoving, they—they’re killing me, they—they’re tearing me apart and closing over me so that I can no longer see the fire or hear anything but their hideous cries and the sound of my flesh being torn from the bone.
And then there are only my screams, of horror and agony, surrender and death. Destruction…and rebirth…
* * *
Startled, I came awake certain the witch’s diseased fingers were reaching out of the darkness for me. But it was only the gnarled branches of that old tree. I found myself sitting on the ground, my back against the car. On a distant ridge overlooking the valley below, fires burned, and a crowd of children stood side-by-side along its edge, still as statues in the night. I reached for my shotgun, but the holster was empty. As I forced myself to my feet, ignoring the pain in my leg and back, I saw the weapon had been left on the ground next to me. By the time I scooped it up, Chael and Amy had broken free of the others and were walking toward me.
Confused and disoriented, I tried to clear my head and make sense of what was happening, what had happened, but everything was murky. Rather than return my shotgun to its holster, I held it down against my thigh.
Chael carried a torch, his rifle slung casually over his shoulder, while Amy carried with both hands an object wrapped in white gauze. Once they’d gotten close enough for me to see the whites of their eyes, they stopped. Amy smiled at me warmly, innocently. Even she was insane.
“Julia,” the boy said. “She’s coming back for us.”
“Yes,” I lied.
“I’m not asking. I’m telling you.”
“I understand.”
“You understand nothing. You’re just a machine that kills when it’s told to. But Julia understands. Julia cares, and she’s coming back for us.” He held the torch a bit higher and took a closer look at me. “And because she loves you, like she loves us, we’ve decided to let you live. We’ve decided to let you go to her.”
I stood there, unsure of what to say.
“Chthonia, the witch, she showed us things,” he added.
“What kind of things?”
“The future,” he said, as if this should’ve been obvious. “Some think she was lying so we’d let you go and set her free.” His eyes turned colder. “But I know the truth. She brought you here with her magic, so you could go to Julia and protect her on her journey to the Promised Land. Then she’ll come back for us. Chthonia brought you here to save us all.”
I nodded, pretending I had some idea as to what the hell he was babbling about.
“So I’m letting you go,” Chael said, motioning to Amy.
Amy took the material covering the thing in her arms and pulled it free.
As it spiraled down to the ground in a graceful pirouette, I realized it was a sheer veil, the same one the witch had worn.
“This is for you,” Amy said in her sweet little voice, hands clutching either side of Chthonia’s severed head by its blood-soaked hair, struggling to hold it up before her with all the strength her tiny body could muster.
Those aren’t children.
The eyeless face of the witch swayed in the night, the flames from the torch lapping at it as if to lick the blood free of its ravaged flesh.
“Give it to Julia,” Chael commanded. “It proves she’s the only one we worship now. Only her magic is what matters.”
When I didn’t take it, the boy nodded to Amy and she let it go. The head fell and bounced, rolled closer to me, then lay still.
What you don’t know is that you’ve come to set us both free…
Chael took Amy by the hand, turned, and together, they walked back toward the others. The little girl looked back long enough to smile at me once more and offer a quick wave.
I fumbled around in my coat pocket until I’d found my cigarettes, then rolled one into the corner of my mouth and greedily drew on it. After a few deep drags, I went to the car, found my leather gloves and pulled them on.
Grabbing the head by the stringy, bloody hair, I hoisted it up, walked around to the rear of the car, popped the trunk and tossed it inside. It landed with a dull thud, spraying the underside with blood and tissue.
You are violence, Dreamcatcher, why should such things bother your kind?
With only the dim light from the trunk, I couldn’t see much, but I stared down at what remained of Chthonia for a long while anyway. I still didn’t fully understand what had happened and probably never would, but none of that concerned me now.
I was battered and hobbled, but alive. And at least for now, so was Julia.
Nothing else mattered.
I slammed closed the trunk, flicked my cigarette into the night, then slid behind the wheel and headed for the highway.
PART TWO
“The terminal point of addiction is damnation.”
—W.H. Auden
12
I don’t know how long I’d been driving, the road kept coming and the night seemed to last forever. Headlights cut the darkness, and the old girl kept rocketing along, but more than once she sputtered, bucked and threatened to stall out. There wasn’t much life left in either one of us, apparently. I was hungry, tired and thirsty, and although when I’d left the city I’d thrown a few bottles of water in the trunk, they were long gone now. My mouth was ash dry, my stomach was tearing itself apart and I was weak and getting weaker. At a minimum I needed to find some water, and soon.
The dash lights blinked, drawing my attention to the gauges. I was almost out of gas. I wondered how much longer I’d have. In the last few hours I hadn’t seen a single building or other living thing, only darkness and endless highway. Eventually I’d end up walking, and who knew what was out there? We’d all heard the stories about the marauders that supposedly traveled these outlands, ro
bbing, raping and killing anyone foolish enough to be out in this wilderness in the first place, ultra-violent crazies so far gone, unreliable and volatile they were even beyond nightmare work. Banished to the outlands and long forgotten, they were also rumored to be cannibals. Because there were no animals out here, no other real sources of food, they consumed the flesh of others, including their own kind. Word was such practices made them even crazier. Maybe those were rumors, stories spun from the minds of those with nothing better to do. I had no way of knowing for sure, but something told me when the car died and I was on foot, it’d only be a matter of time before I had my answers.
You’re just a machine that kills when it’s told to.
That little punk’s words kept coming back to me, replaying in my head no matter how many times I tried to ignore them and focus on something else. To him, I was no different than the savages that allegedly ran free in these outlands, a bloodthirsty killer that lived for chaos and cruelty and violence. What he and others didn’t understand was that for most Dreamcatchers, it was just a job. There were those who enjoyed the killing, but I’d never been one of them. I didn’t feel anything one way or the other, although I always found it easier if they fought back. The harder they fought the more justified my actions seemed. Regardless, often, once it was done, I felt sorrow for having been given such a task, and sometimes felt sorry for the runner as well. But I had a job to do, and I did it. Judgment had nothing to do with me or my duty; that was for others. I came later, an executioner carrying out orders from those more important and powerful than I’d ever be. For me, it was get the job done, then go home and forget it as best I could. If that meant drinking or drugs or sex or whatever else, so be it. We all had to get through the night and sleep the day as best we could.
For some reason, memories of a particular runner came to me then, one that had always bothered me more than the others. A woman, she couldn’t have been more than twenty or so, had run but didn’t get far. I cornered her on a tram car but couldn’t risk firing a weapon because the car was full. We rode on that tram for what seemed forever, her standing there holding on to a rail and me near the doors, my hand in my coat pocket and clutching the gun I’d later use to end her existence in this world. She never once pleaded for her life, never cried or even said a word, never even fought back or tried to stop me or save herself in any way, she just stared at me with these big blue eyes, stared like she knew something I didn’t, and maybe she did.
Maybe that young girl knew a lot of things I didn’t.
For nearly an hour we stayed on the tram as it moved through the city, stopping now and then to let off passengers or take on new ones. And finally, when it reached the end of the line and we were the only two left in the car, I walked over to her, took out my revolver and told her I needed her to come in with me.
She shook her head no but she never took her eyes from me.
I asked her again, and again, she shook her head.
I shot her in the neck and down she went. She lay there on the floor of the tram car, eyes wide with shock and a hand pressed uselessly against the wound as her body began to convulse. She never made a sound. I sat on the nearest bench, lit a cigarette and watched her bleed out. Then I called it in, hit a bar, had as many drinks as I could stand and went home to Julia.
“Why do they make me do it?” I asked her later that night as we lay in bed together in a tangle of sweaty flesh and cool sheets.
“They don’t have to make you,” Julia said. “They give the order and you obey.”
I never told her that’s not what I’d meant. I was referring to the runners.
So much blood, so much death…
Maybe we’d all sold our souls to the darkness. Maybe that’s why we were here.
But why? For what? I’d always wondered if that young woman even knew why she was running, or where the hell she thought she was running to. Did it even matter?
None of it made any goddamn sense. It never had.
Don’t worry, I heard Lenore’s voice say in my mind, the night loves her children.
“This isn’t love,” I muttered.
We’re parlor tricks…rumors whispered in the rain…in darkness…
Maybe Gideon was smarter than any of us, locked away with her books.
I forced everything from my mind, focused on the road, and drove into the night.
Sometime later, the earliest hints of dawn began to break over the horizon, partially illuminating the road ahead, beyond the headlights, and it was then that I realized there was no road ahead. The highway was coming to an end.
I slowed the car and it coughed, sputtered and stalled. Coasting, I eased my foot onto the brake and slowly pulled over. Perhaps fifty yards or so ahead, the highway simply stopped and became dirt. But there was something more. My headlights settled on another car parked at an odd angle at the edge of the road. It looked like it had skidded into a sideways position and been left there. Black smoke billowed from beneath the hood. Whatever had happened here hadn’t taken place that long ago.
I checked my mirrors and looked out as far as I could see. Nothing. The grass was higher here, but the ground as flat and open. I grabbed my shotgun, made sure it was loaded, and then climbed from the car, ignoring the pain ravaging me from head to toe.
Keeping an eye on my surroundings and using the headlights to guide me, I walked slowly toward the smoking vehicle, the shotgun in hand. By the time I’d gotten within twenty feet of it, I recognized the car as the black rocket of a sports sedan Dingo drove. They’d sent him for Julia, and for me, like Eddie said they eventually would. That meant he’d likely found Eddie’s body, which also meant HQ now knew Eddie was dead too, and I’d been the one that killed her. That meant others were coming too. I’d have had zero chance with both Eddie and Dingo on my case, but Dingo alone wasn’t good enough to take me down by himself, and they all knew it. With Eddie terminated, there was no question Cap would pull all the stops and send half the goddamn department after me. Apparently Dingo had missed my car parked off-road under that old tree and went right by, unaware that I was no longer on the road ahead of him but had been taken by the children instead. He’d wound up here, at the literal end of the road. Now there was no sign of him, at least not yet.
I noticed something on the highway between the car and myself. A machete lay in the middle of the road. I crouched down, picked it up. Dingo carried this, he was a blade guy, liked to use knives whenever he could, and was known to favor machetes over guns. But despite the acrid odor of heavy black smoke pouring from the hood of his car, the smell of gunpowder lingered in the air as well. Weapons had been fired here, and recently, which meant Dingo had been outnumbered and gone to his gun out of necessity.
For a moment, I stayed where I was and listened to what remained of the night.
A light breeze blew through the open expanse of flatlands but otherwise the slowly dying darkness was quiet. I stood up and moved closer to Dingo’s car. No one inside, but a duffel bag likely used to carry an arsenal of weapons sat on the seat, torn open and empty now, a few bullets scattered about.
As I rounded the front of the vehicle, I saw a smear of blood along the road in front of the car. A wide swath, it had clearly come from a horrific wound. I stepped around it and onto the side of the road.
Dawn was breaking, it was time to sleep.
But I wasn’t alone out here.
I looked back at the road. A pair of skid marks painted a path, showing where Dingo’s car had screeched to a stop. He’d been ambushed, forced from the road. I walked back toward the marks and noticed a second set, these much thinner. They appeared in the center of the highway, then turned and abruptly stopped.
And then there came a deep growling sound. In the distance, drawing closer. I looked down the stretch of highway from which I’d come, and although the light was stronger now it still wasn’t sufficient for me to see what was coming. But I knew that sound, and the tracks here gave it away. A motorcycle was headed r
ight for me. For the briefest moment I pictured Falcon Eddie flying toward me on her giant silver chopper. But this was something different, something worse.
A horrible burst of maniacal laughter followed the sound of heavy footfalls from the other side of the road. I spun and saw several dark forms charging toward me. Dressed entirely in black, they were hard to discern in the limited light, but I knew what they were. The stories were true.
They attacked from the side while another came straight at me down the highway on a battered black motorcycle, controlling the bike with one hand and swinging an enormous heavy chain in the air with the other. They looked like the crazies they were, their hair either shaved off or into Mohawks, faces littered with tattoos of odd symbols and smeared with war paint, mouths still wet with Dingo’s flesh and blood, and their eyes diseased, demented and wild.
I slid between the vehicles, out of the way of the oncoming motorcycle and the chain its driver was wielding, then leveled the shotgun and fired at the others charging me on foot, pumped, and fired again.
The marauder closest, a short but powerful-looking bald man leading the charge and screaming like a banshee, was blown backward off his feet as his midsection exploded in a burst of blood and tissue.
As he fell away, I dropped the now-empty shotgun and met the next in line with a swing of the machete. With a sickening sound, it struck him in the side of the neck, above the shoulder, but didn’t even slow him.
The hatchet in his hand swept past my face, barely missing me as I arched my back in an attempt to get out of the way. As I yanked the machete free, ribbons of blood flew into the air. I turned, gripping the machete with both hands, and swung it up and around, bringing the blade down across his arm and severing it at the elbow. The limb fell at our feet, the hand still clutching the ax, and while the man howled and staggered about in shock, glaring at the bloody, stringy stump that was now his arm, I dropped into a crouch and slammed the machete up into his gut. Standing, and again using both hands, I brought the blade with me, drawing it higher and up into his chest, tearing everything in its path as it went.
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