The Collector 03 - The Big Reap

by Chris F. Holm

  “Hey, bitch! How’s about you try out a chew toy that might bite back?”

  The creature turned toward me and cocked its head. Her head, I found myself thinking, because – warped though this creature was – the eyeshine reflecting off its retinas could not fully mask the humanity they contained, and her features had an inexplicably feminine cast to them at odds with her hulking physicality.

  “That’s right,” I said to her. “Who’s a good dog?”

  A low rumble started in her throat and trembled her lips. “Who are you to speak to me this way?” she said.

  “I’m the guy who’s gonna end you,” I told her. “Just like I ended your friend back at the cabin.”

  She chuffed in laughter. “Impossible,” she said.

  “Lot of that going around,” I told her, making a show of looking her up and down. “But look at me – and at the runes that kept you from entering the lovely lady’s cave – and tell me if I’m bluffing. Oh, and by the way, Jain and Magnusson send their best – or, rather, they would if they weren’t dead as well.”

  Doubt crept into her eyes, her voice. “You lie!”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I do. But not about this.”

  At that, she threw her arms wide, and let out a roar that shook the trees, and blew my hair back from my face.

  And then she attacked.

  She was smarter than her friend, didn’t blindly pounce like he did. Instead, she first uprooted a full-grown tree with her uninjured left hand ,roots popping as Topher’s shoulder had, and dry dirt sounding like rain as it pattered to the ground beneath, and hurled it at me with all her might, her own bulk following close behind. I dove aside, too late. The trunk drove hard into my shoulder blades, and I ate dirt. Honestly, that tumble probably saved this meat-suit’s life. The dog-beast sailed clear over me, rolling on one shoulder and springing upright in one fluid motion, once more facing me. On all fours, she was the size of a goddamn Clydesdale. Only every bit of her, from snout to what appeared to be a gnarled, half-formed fleshy tail, appeared designed to kill.

  I shook the cobwebs from my brain and found my feet. She approached me slowly now: threatening, unconcerned. I backed up to maintain the distance between us – twenty feet, maybe less – but it was no use. Her every step – powerful haunches flexing, hot blood-tinged breath pluming iron-scented in the night – brought her closer.

  My eyes locked on her, my feet carrying me ever backward, I stumbled and went down hard. Like a goddamn amateur. Like some fucking horror-movie-teenaged-twenty-something-bottle-blond. That’s when she leapt. I knew then I was screwed but good; no getting out of this one, Thornton. So I clenched shut my eyes, tensing for the killing blow, and thought of Guam.

  I’ll tell you, I don’t know if it’s all the hiking or what, but that Zadie chick has got some muscle on that tiny frame of hers. And she’s damn quick, too. But then again, maybe I would have been as well, had I just watched my only shot in hell of leaving these woods alive just up and quit.

  Tiny hands bunched the shoulders of my jacket within their grip, and yanked me backward. My eyes sprung open as I slid along the forest floor. A fraction of a second later, the dog-beast landed in the spot that I’d just vacated: too late, because Zadie’d dragged me back into the shallow cave.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, incredulous, as if the news surprised me. “You?”

  “Yes. You’re not Nicky, are you?” she asked.

  “He prefers Nicholas.”

  Her eyes glinted with good humor. “No offense,” she said, “but so do I. Not so fond of being tied up.”

  “Nicky’s got some audio files that argue otherwise,” I told her. “You ever make it back to camp, you might want to see about destroying them.” And though the light in the cave was dim, I could swear she colored at that last.

  “So can you really kill this thing, or was that bullshit?”

  “I can,” I said. “I think. Hey, how’s it feel to find a real, live monster?”

  “Not great,” she said. “This was always Topher’s dream, not mine.” She smiled, then, not with any real cheer, but with sadness and fond remembrance. “For what it’s worth, I told him not to leave the cave. Once he got free from his restraints, I mean. But he wouldn’t listen. He said he hadn’t devoted his whole life to finding evidence of beasts like these only to go home empty-handed now. He said he’d rather die.”

  “At least he found what he was looking for,” I offered weakly, as if the words would comfort her in the slightest.

  “Yeah,” she said, eyeing his cave-side remains. “And I lost what I was looking for.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, and I meant it. After all, I thought, the image of Elizabeth rising unbidden in my mind, I knew exactly how she felt.

  A huff of breath announced the creature’s presence outside the cave. I looked up to find it hunkered down on its haunches, its eyes staring back at me in the near-dark. Even crouching as it was, the damn thing was taller than my meat-suit at full height. Curled up to fit inside the cave, I felt pretty damn insignificant by comparison.

  “Fe, fi, fo, fum,” I muttered. The creature snorted in what I realized was laughter.

  “I smell more than blood,” it told me. “I smell your fear. Your desperation. You’d given up, hadn’t you? If your lady-friend hadn’t saved you, you’d be dead right now.”

  “Nah,” I told her. “Worst case, I’d be sipping Mai Tais on the beach. And she’s not my lady-friend.”

  The creature sniffed the air. Her black canine lips parted in a smile. “Of course she’s not; I can smell her scent all over this one. I suppose she and I have each taken something from the other now, then. The only difference is, I will soon get you back. Perhaps for her impertinence in stealing you away from me, I’ll make her watch while I disembowel you.”

  Zadie scoffed. “For my impertinence, sure. What was your excuse for making me watch you kill my boyfriend?”

  “His death was not my fault!” the creature bellowed. “For one thousand years, my brother and I have subsisted without killing a soul – taking only what we needed to sustain ourselves and no more. First from the animals of this vast continent, not so uninhabited as we’d hoped when we happened upon it in our self-styled exile from humanity, but absent enough of people we could, for the most part, avoid temptation. Then from those who settled here, tasting, sure, but never killing. The same can sadly not be said of Jain, nor of Ricou, both of whom we were forced to turn out centuries ago on account of their… unfortunate lack of willpower. But then you arrive,” she said, jabbing a clawed finger in my direction, which bounced off the plane of the cave mouth as surely as if it had just met a sheet of plexiglas, “and all we’ve worked toward goes to shit. Lukas is dead. My fast is broken. And I fear that after such delectable game as this,” she said, licking clean her gore-strewn lips with her wet, black tongue, “weaning myself back off it may well prove troublesome.”

  “You could avoid the issue altogether,” I told her, “and let me kill you here and now.”

  She mock-pondered my proposal for a moment, bobbing her monstrous head from side to side. “It’s true,” she said, “I could, provided you’re capable, which I doubt. For if you were, why have you not yet struck?”

  “Ask your brother,” I goaded her.

  “Lukas,” she enunciated carefully, as if speaking of him pained her, “was struck by your makeshift bomb when you attacked. He went up quick, and was no doubt quite weakened by the flames. Still, I hold out hope that, given time, he will recover; I shall bury him beneath the garden to allow him to knit himself in peace. For he and I have naught but time. As for the others, perhaps they are truly dead, or perhaps you’re but a flim-flam man, lying to buy yourself time. But I assure you, I have plenty of it to spare; if I wished, I could just sit here and watch you two slowly die of cold and of starvation, and then go on my merry way. The idea does have its appeal. But I confess, my earlier meal has left m
e oddly peckish, and edgy, and eager for more… I’d forgotten how succulent the meat and brain of your kind can be. So I fear instead,” she said, raising her ruined right hand to show the jutting bones, “I’ll simply have to sacrifice my good hand, and hope that between the two of you, there’s enough sustenance to make me whole once more.”

  The great beast rose. Zadie whimpered. I pressed her back against the far wall of the shallow cave, and stood before her like a shield. Fist met rock, and rock yielded. The creature howled in pain and celebration.

  And as it crouched once more to strike, I snatched up the nearest kinda-sorta weapon – the handled end of Zadie’s broken walking pole – and did the only thing I could think to do. I rushed the creature, put my hand smack in the center of its chest, and drove the jagged pole clean through both with all the strength I had.

  10.

  “Good morning, Collector. I see you’re getting an early start.”

  I looked up from my drink – some strange carnivore’s version of a Bloody Mary garnished not with a celery stalk but a single hot-smoked pork rib of all things – to see two blurry Liliths swimming in my meat-suit’s vision, wearing wisp-thin matching silk slip dresses the color of black coffee. I confess, my choice of drink seemed a tad morbid and insensitive, given that I’d not nine hours ago seen poor Topher reduced to a disemboweled, blood-soaked corpse, but it was scarcely 10am in Colorado Springs, and my beverage choices were limited. Took me a good ten minutes’ walk through the mostly residential, tree-lined streets surrounding the sprawling Penrose-St Francis hospital complex before I found anyplace that served booze, and even then, it was just a quaint little brunch joint whose drink menu consisted entirely of Bellinis, Mimosas, and Bloody Marys. You should have seen the looks I got when I ordered one of each to start, and then a round of three more Bloody Marys when I discovered I was none too fond of champagne cocktails. I’d waved off the wait staff’s repeated – and increasingly desperate – attempts to solicit a food order from me, but now that I realized the room was spinning, and my vision was skipping about like a movie that’s jumped its reel, I wondered if maybe I made the wrong call on that front. I made a mental note to ask for some steak and eggs if I hadn’t yet scared the waitress off for good.

  “Yeah, well.” I slurred. “Rough night.”

  “So I gathered. Were you… successful in your mission?”

  I snort-laughed at the politesse of her euphemism. “Yup. I succeeded the living shit outta them,” I said. “And this time, I only killed one civvie doing it. I think my batting average is improving. Although my poor meat-suit probably won’t be playing piano with that hand anytime soon.”

  Lilith looked around to see if anyone had overheard, but the waitstaff had long since started avoiding me, and in fact had taken to seating other patrons as far from me as possible about an hour ago, when they decided I was trouble. I think the only reason they’d yet to ask me to leave is because they were worried I’d make a scene. Even chance they weren’t wrong.

  You know the problem with going toe-to-toe with a pair of creepy, supernatural dog-beasts in the middle of the Colorado wilds? Once you’re done getting knocked around six ways from Sunday and you kill the fuckers, you’re still stuck out in the Colorado wilds.

  At least the walking pole worked like a charm. Soon as I stabbed that evil bitch through Nicholas-not-Nicky’s hand, she and I both started thrumming. My angle was awkward, though, and stabbing through bone both hand- and breast- meant I didn’t drive the pole clean through like with Magnusson or Jain. So there was an awkward moment or two when Angry Dog Chick (it seems weird to me – sad, even – that I still don’t know her name, but unlike human souls, the Brethren’s do not speak to me when I touch them) was reeling backward trying to shake me, as I remained pinned to her dinner table-sized chest. Eventually, I rode her to the ground, and punched the pole through with all my might. The forest rattled and shook as she expired, the land she called home mourning her if no one else would.

  Once the beast was felled, and the fog of battle lifted, the pain in Nicholas-not-Nicky’s hand was excruciating. A tender, hesitant Zadie did her best to wrap it for me with a rag torn from her own shirt, flinching every time I winced. When she finished, I thanked her by name, and she corrected me. “Please, Nick, or Not-Nick, or whoever you are – call me Susan.” I guess she was done pretending to be someone she was not – her hipster mask of cool remove discarded. Wish I could say the same, but my whole existence is pretending. Lying. Burying myself so deep I’m not sure I’ll ever find the guy I was again.

  Neither of us were in any shape to hike out in the dark. So instead, we called 911 on Topher’s sat phone, and left the line open until they pinpointed our location. Then we huddled together beside the cooling embers of the cabin and waited for our saviors and the morning light to arrive.

  Zadie – Susan, I mean – spent most of the night crying. I held her wordlessly and let her weep. What could I have said? There were no words to make her better. And I wouldn’t have said them if there were, for what is mourning if not love’s darker aspect? Seems to me, it’s best never to quash love or push it away, regardless of its form, or of its cost. Sometimes, I think my last tattered shreds of love are all that keep me from becoming as monstrous as the Brethren themselves.

  She loved Topher with all her heart, that much was clear. Enough to follow him on his insane quest for answers, for truth, for understanding. You ask me, we’re not built for any of the three. We’re wired for survival, nothing more. Topher’s ruined form, which Susan insisted we drag nearer to the waning firelight so he would not be picked over by animals, stood as a sad monument to the fact that survival and truth were two ends often at odds with one another.

  Christ. Listen to me. Leave it to booze to make even a denizen of hell all maudlin and philosophical.

  Anyways, by the time the rescue crew arrived – by ATV, not helicopter as I’d envisioned – the embers of the cabin fire were cold and dead, and the two Brethren corpses had withered to dust. That left only Topher to explain. Poor Susan was too despondent to answer the men’s inquiries, so I filled in the gaps where I could. Some kind of large animal. Hit too fast for us to see. Dragged Topher away from us so quickly, we gave chase without thinking, and wound up lost. By the time we caught up, this was all of him that was left. And this fire? Some kind of abandoned structure, we told them. Collapsed for decades, no doubt, before we ever stumbled across it. Without means to fell a tree, it was the only wood we had available to burn. And why not just pitch our tents? The body, I told them. She couldn’t bear to leave it. And so we sat together in the bitter cold beneath the stars, and watched the fire die as we mourned our friend.

  The men made some noises about bears and mountain lions, but it was clear by the looks they shared when they thought I wasn’t looking that they had no idea what could have done this. But they didn’t seem to think Susan or Nicholas did, so that was something, at least. They did ask whether we’d captured any footage of the attack, but I told them the camera wasn’t rolling at the time, and anyway, it was damaged in the chase that ensued – beyond repair, as near as I could tell.

  That last part was true enough. I spent twenty minutes bashing the camera with a rock before they found us on the off chance I’d inadvertently recorded anything.

  I stuck with Susan until the hospital. Then I hopped a ride inside an orderly just before they put me under for hand-surgery. Felt the bile rise in his throat when I took over, but I sucked wind, and willed him not to puke. He didn’t, his body acquiescing to my commands more easily than I would have expected. It’d been that way of late. Guess I was developing the knack. I wondered if maybe that means I’m a little less human that I used to be. I wondered why I didn’t care much about that fact. Told myself it was because I had a job to do, but I didn’t fully believe it. If you ask me, I didn’t care much about my humanity slowly bleeding away because the part of me that would have was now in the minority.

  Nicholas started
ranting about monsters and possession just before I left the room in my new meat-suit. Freaked out and started thrashing on the gurney. They strapped him down – for his own safety, they kept telling him – and sedated him. His lids slammed shut like a set of blinds whose string’d been pulled, and the poor guy was finally, briefly, at peace. He’d probably start right back up with the freak-out when the drugs wore off. The scuttlebutt at the nurse’s station afterward was that he’d experienced a mental break on account of all he’d seen. For what it’s worth, they weren’t far from wrong. Except for the part where they thought the insane nonsense he was spouting wasn’t true.

  Personally, I find that judicious application of alcohol helps stave off such mental breaks. Hell, some days it’s all that keeps me from being Thorazined into oblivion and left to drool inside my very own padded cell. No lie, today was one of those days. Which is why – for strictly therapeutic purposes, you understand – I walked straight out of the hospital in my new meat-suit, not even bothering to ditch the scrubs in favor of street clothes, and found myself a drink or six.

  “So that makes what?” asked Lilith, mock-sweet as Splenda, “Four Brethren down? Just think, you’ve only five to go.”

  “Yay,” I said. “Can’t hardly wait.”

  “I can tell. The enthusiasm’s coming off of you in waves. No, wait,” she amended, “those are vodka fumes.”

  “No worries. I’ll ditch this skin-suit before the hangover hits.”

  “How lovely for him,” she replied drolly. “Perhaps I could be of assistance in identifying your next vessel.”

  “I take that to mean you’ve got a new assignment for me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Another feral Brethren?”

  “Feral, no. Brethren, yes. Leads on the two remaining feral Brethren have been scant of late, I confess. For a time, I felt as though I might be closing in on one of them in rural Brazil. I’ve been following centuries of lore about a strange creature dragging villagers and livestock into the dark waters of the Amazon under cover of night. Rumors of new abductions came at a rate of one or two a week stretching as far back as there’ve been people there to spread them. But a few months back, they seem to have ceased.”