Kornwolf

by Tristan Egolf

  That alloy was meant to be indestructible.

  He flipped off the twelve-gauge’s safety—and no sooner done than the pounding commenced from outside: a giant slam on the wall, to his left—and then, coming around, on the right … Or behind him? … Again, on the left … (?)

  He ran back to the office. The monitor screens were jolting with static. The impact was coming from all sides at once. With the fence alarms blaring and every dog in the compound baying off its rocker—he wasn’t even able to hear himself think.

  He tried to deactivate the alarm. But something was wrong with the console, apparently. Something had locked up. It wouldn’t respond. A honking blast tore out of the wall-mounted speakers above him. He fled the office.

  Out on the floor, the chorus of howling had welled to a level, atonal crescendo. From every cage in the building it rose.

  There were three aisles, each running twenty yards back to the loading gate. All of the units were stuffed with puppies. And all of the puppies were howling.

  Furious, Tulk called out for silence. He walked down the aisle, ramming the gate handles. The wailing rose, as though to spite him. Then there was pounding again, on the walls. The mounted alarms continued to blast. The Labradors wouldn’t pipe down, God damn them. He rattled their cage. They snapped at him, then resumed howling, undaunted. He flushed with rage.

  He leveled the twelve-gauge and fired.

  Silence.

  As quickly as Tulk had reacted, the sirens let up. Along with the pounding outside.

  A whimper rose from the quivering mound of Labrador puppies, most of them dead.

  Twice more, he fired.

  The rest of the cages were still.

  Jonas moved to reload. He thumbed a lead slug into the chamber and pumped it. While digging more slugs from his pocket, he suddenly thought of the cameras. He turned around, took a step back toward the office and looked in. The static was gone from the screens. They were still on. And something was moving on one of them. Jonas drew closer. It took him a moment.

  Then he saw it.

  It was looking right into the camera—grinning …

  Jonas screamed.

  His lifted his twelve-gauge to blow the whole board in response. But as quickly, the lights went out.

  Which wasn’t supposed to be able to happen.

  Benedictus had gone to ridiculous lengths to safeguard their power supply. The only way to disrupt its flow would have been to sever the main to the generator. And no one could do that without a key. The access box was made of titanium.

  Tulk, in a panic, fumbled blindly in search of the office. He ran into something—a chair. Sliding past it, he got to the door. He lifted an oil lamp down from a hook to the right of the frame. He lit it. The objects around him glowed back into view. He continued reloading the shotgun. Before he could finish, the puppies resumed their lament—from one corner, first, though scarcely perceptible, then from another, in tandem and rising: soon to engulf the whole building.

  Here was a genuine call to the damned.

  Jonas returned to the floor with the lamp. On approaching the cages, he slowed his advance. In confusion, he lifted his flame and, shivering, peered around. Something was different here. None of the lights was working. But more than that, something had changed. The scene appeared as though through a tinted, burgundy filter.

  His balance wavered.

  Slowly, he bent for a look to his right. A cage full of snapping huskies lunged at him. Something was wrong with them: milky-white gazes by lantern light. Cataracts. Blind, they were blind …

  As he backed away, his gaze fell over the unit behind them. A rottweiler stood where a litter of puppies had sat moments earlier. As with the huskies, it snapped at him viciously, foaming at the mouth. It appeared to be diseased.

  Down the aisle, they proceeded, thus: on either side of him, baying obscenely.

  Golden retrievers with scoliosis, hunched in defiance, gnawing the gate. A tick hound with some kind of skin condition. An Irish setter vomiting bile. Dobermans crippled with bone marrow cancer in squalling heaps. Arthritic dalmatians. And, underfoot, rivers of filth and feces.

  The stench was impossible, even for Tulk.

  Again, he leveled the shotgun and fired.

  The tick hound’s image was sawed in half. In its place lay a mound of bloodied puppies.

  He pumped the gun and turned around.

  An enormous slam hit the loading gate door: Once. Twice. Then three times—it buckled, steadily tearing away from the frame.

  Each impact was staggering. Never had Jonas imagined such force. He shot at the door.

  The last of his slugs tore into its lining. He dropped his twelve-gauge and went for the pistol. Tearing from its hinges, the door rushed inward—advancing upright, being pushed from behind. He fired. Sparks went up. It kept moving, unstoppable: straight up the aisle …

  Here it came.

  He unloaded his chambers at once.

  It flattened him.

  He wound up pinned to the floor underneath it. The handle had gouged and torn his scrotum. A broken rib tore into one lung.

  He strained to cry out. But his voice was gone.

  Through his agony, all he could sense was The Devil. Standing over him. Moving around.

  It wandered down one of the aisles: repugnance incarnate / brimming with foul intent.

  On every side, the howling welled into a final sustain, above which, almost inaudibly, Tulk heard the unmistakable sound of a cage door sliding open.

  It took him a couple of minutes to catch up, but Rudolf managed to overtake—and edge his way to—the head of the line. He was driving Nelson Kutay’s cruiser. The needle was pushing 105. Part of a candle was lodged in his ass. He had burn marks all over his body. Bruises. Cuts. Abrasions. Fractured appendages … Veering all over the road, he was murderous. Everyone tried to steer from his path. A man in a Chevy had almost gone into the ditch while attempting to let him pass. None of them mattered now. Only one thing was imperative: kill the Minister’s son. Wherever he’d come from, whatever abominations of chance had conspired to produce him, and disregarding all ramifications: Ephraim, The Kornwolf, the Blue Ball Devil, could not be allowed to survive this evening. There could be no risk at all of his capture. And critically: no one could get to him first … The killing stroke was reserved for Rudolf, for whom all remedial notions of personal human integrity hung in the balance. Already, he wouldn’t be able to face his fellow Lamepeter Township officers, nine in total, who’d cut him down from his shame in suspension, ever again. Even now, he could hear them laughing. For the rest of his life, he would never escape it. Some things simply cannot be lived down. Rudolf’s career as a cop was over. Aside from the charges pending, as yet—the Bontrager / Yoder / Percy debacle—he would never set foot in the precinct again. That much he’d come to terms with already. What bothered him now was the mere possibility that someone might get to the creature first: without sending it back to hell himself, Beaumont, undoubtedly, would never even be able to kill himself in peace. He wouldn’t know how to face his maker. Or The Devil.

  Bitch of eternity.

  His uniform stunk of sweat and urine. His wrists and ankles were chafed with rope burn.

  He slammed into one of the Sprawl Mart vans. It swerved to the shoulder. He pulled ahead of it. He gained on a truck full of locals with high-powered spotting lamps, probing a field to the south. It jarred to one side as he passed. He accelerated—soon to be rolling by Officer Kreider—then Sergeant Billings, and onward, hurtling—up the procession in reckless abandon. His wheel base straddled the dotted line. The ditches passed at a rumbling blur. Finally, he pulled up beside the Land Rover, leading the pack. He looked over. He pointed.

  The city detective scowled—as though to say: What the hell do you think you’re doing?

  Beaumont ignored the gesture, demanding, in turn, with a show of hands: Where is he? He pointed to the tracking box. Which direction?

  Annoyed, the
detective pointed north: Over there—then added insistently: Slow down!

  Rudolf disregarded him.

  Roaring ahead, he crossed the junction at Peterville Drive and Shelty Run Avenue. His radio garbled with angry shouts. The pavement steadily rose before him. Just ahead, it was: right over there … He could feel it now: over the hill. Almost there …

  Sheriff Highman’s voice exploded: “Beaumont, you son of a bitch!” from the radio: “Cool your jets, God damn it! Slow down!”

  Rudolf floored his accelerator. Cresting the hill at 110, he continued. The road leveled out. Then, abruptly, it started to dip.

  That’s when the woman appeared.

  Her crazed expression, her tattered dress, the slash marks running from shoulder to torso flashed in the headlights from nowhere, rising. A vision of madness, blocking the road.

  Soon she was up on the hood. The windshield exploded. Beaumont’s vehicle rolled.

  Her body was tossed.

  Through the slam and jumble, Rudolf could feel himself splattered in blood.

  The next driver over the hill, the detective, plowed right into his overturned cruiser. It spun with the impact, tearing the pavement.

  The Land Rover ended up jammed in a ditch.

  Then came a Sprawl Mart wagon, dead-on. It went end over end.

  The pileup commenced:

  Officer Kreider collided with three different vehicles—Sergeant Billings’s cruiser, the truck full of locals with deer spotting lamps, and Kutay’s vehicle, with Beaumont inside of it—consecutively, all in attempting to steer clear of one: the upended Sprawl Mart wagon. Seven more vehicles—three patrol cars, two pickups, one Holtwoodmobile and a Rabbit—were added. Thirteen vehicles lay in states of ruin before it was over.

  Bodies began to appear in the wreckage, crawling from windows, cursing Jesus.

  The headless corpse of the woman lay sprawled on the road, hosing blood all over the pavement.

  Inside of the overturned cruiser, Rudolf found her head.

  The Minister’s sister.

  Yelling, he scurried out of the heap.

  On his feet now, he couldn’t determine where all of the blood was coming from. Given the pain, he assumed that his right arm was broken. And something was wrong with his neck. But he didn’t feel cut. He was covered with blood, but it didn’t appear to be his …

  He had killed her.

  To hell with it.

  Dozens of people were mobbing the road. He hobbled across the pavement, managing, somehow, not to be singled out. Over the shoulder and down the embankment. He opened the Land Rover’s passenger door. Inside of it, clutching his ribs, the detective scowled. “What kind of an asshole are you?”

  A .45 auto was pressed to his skull. Beaumont demanded: “Where is he?”

  Coughing, the detective shook his head. “I already told you.” He pointed across the field. “He’s right over there. We were almost on top of him.”

  Rudolf followed his gesture.

  Back to and over the road he proceeded, down the bank to a field of weeds. Before he could blend into darkness entirely, somebody called his name. He’d been spotted.

  No matter.

  The field was awash in moonlight. He ran through the weeds. There was mud underfoot. It was marshy and black.

  He fell on his face.

  Plastered in oozing grit and sediment, he got back up. He shook off his pistol, groaning. He clutched his arm. It was broken.

  No matter.

  He pressed on.

  After a break in the weeds, an incline lifted steadily out of the marsh—up, up—to a dry plateau. From the edge of which, Rudolf finally spotted it.

  Moving away in the dark, maybe forty yards up: in a streak of white. It was stumbling.

  Wounded.

  It must have been shot.

  It was breathing erratically, wheezing. Beaumont could hear it.

  Ignoring a cry from behind, he went after it.

  “Rudy!” somebody yelled for him. “Stop!”

  They were chasing him …

  No matter: this was the end.

  He dropped to one knee and took careful aim. He squeezed the trigger.

  The figure collapsed.

  Slowly exhaling, Beaumont looked over the trembling sights of his smoking barrel. He squinted, then stood up. Ahead, the motionless figure lay sprawled in a clump of thickets.

  Kreider ran by. Then Officer Hertz …

  He followed them over to look at the body.

  Facedown in the weeds, it was perfectly dead. The bullet had gone through the back of its chest.

  The problem was: even in death, it was bigger than Beaumont expected. Bigger than Ephraim. And whiter. And older: with sagging buttocks.

  Most notably, it was a human being.

  And worse: its hands were bound with wire. As well, it was gagged with electrical tape. And something was literally pinned to its shoulder—pinned into place with a finishing staple.

  He stooped to look closer. The object was plastic. It looked like an ankle bacelet. It was—a police-issued ankle bracelet: tagged to the bone with a staple.

  Kreider whistled. “Whoa. Jesus Christ, Rudy …”

  Officer Hertz shook his head, bending forward.

  A couple of people ran up as the body was rolled over, onto its back.

  Benedictus.

  In spite of his noble intentions, along with his moral authority in court that evening, there wasn’t much left to this whole affair that could have gone worse for Jarret Yoder. Assessing the damage, now, at the mill—and all it implied, indirectly or not so—he realized he hadn’t made one right move the whole way through. His failure was total. Had he listened to Jack at the outset, weeks ago, the worst charge they might have been facing now would be (arguably justifiable) kidnapping. Had he left the floor to Stutz that evening—or better yet, turned the case over to Metzger, as intended, or even pled guilty as charged—he wouldn’t be facing potential disbarment, he wouldn’t have doomed his reputation, and he wouldn’t have placed his trusted colleague, the judge, in the line of the coming shit storm.

  More, had he kept his mouth shut, the kid would be holed up in Joseph’s Hall right now—maybe strapped to a chair in the psych ward, or locked in a padded cell, full of tranquilizers. Sixteen injuries, four of them critical, wouldn’t have been sustained in the pile-up. An unidentified Amish youth wouldn’t lie in paralysis, shot in the back. Dozens of Orderly juveniles probably wouldn’t be roaming the fields either. The only decent cop in Blue Ball, Nelson Kutay, wouldn’t be dead. Jane Doe from the Schlabach Farm wouldn’t be on the floor with a gunshot wound. One of Yoder’s targets, Beaumont, wouldn’t have mowed down another, Bontrager—after he’d already killed the defense’s witness, Grizelda Hostler—in public. And, last: the body of Jonas Tulk might not lie mauled to a gurgling pulp …

  A heartbreaker, that one.

  Yoder was watching them scoop his remains from the compound floor.

  At least this answered a few of Jarret’s oldest questions, however egregiously.

  Since long before he had left The Basin, moved to the city and enrolled in law school, he had been suffering, agonizing over his role in what had become of Jacob.

  In the end, he had always been forced to accept the fact that there’d been no choice.

  When, finally (after not having been seen for a week), Jacob had stumbled out of the forest that early November morning, appearing to Yoder on his grandfather’s property, he had been less than half alive. A rifle slug had been lodged in his chest. His tattered shirt had been soaked in blood. He’d been writhing in fitful, delirious starts.

  Without medical attention, he wouldn’t have made it. Jarret harbored no guilt on that matter. How to get that attention had been the dilemma—as it haunted him still, after all this time.

  He couldn’t have reported his friend to The Order, as District Seven had shunned him already. More alarmingly, rumors that Jonas Tulk had shot The Devil the night before had been
drifting around the Intercourse Market. For Jacob to show up then, the next morning, with a bullet wound would’ve been suicidal.

  In light of ongoing events in Blue Ball, he couldn’t have turned to the cops either. The Basin had been much smaller back then—less populated by a factor of three. One look at Jacob and the local police might have dragged him out back, if given the chance.

  Jarret could not have accepted that risk.

  But what had that left him, then?

  The army.

  Initially, the mere idea had sickened him. That Yoder, of all people—first as a Mennonite (albeit a doomed, if still pacifistic one), and second, as a young man of worldly ambitions growing up in the dawn of the Age of Aquarius—would even consider contacting government “hippy catchers” felt tantamount to blasphemy.

  Yet, for that matter, he hadn’t been a doctor. And Jacob had been dying.

  There had been no choice.

  Jarret had driven his car to a filling station. From there, he had placed a call to the Stepford County recruiting office. An MD had been dispatched to accompany him back to the shack on his grandfather’s property. There, an unconscious Jacob was placed on a stretcher, then loaded into an ambulance.

  Jarret had watched them roll away.

  And so had gone Jacob’s life in The Basin.

  On the good side, Jack would not only forgive him (though Yoder wouldn’t know it for years), he would later commend him for acting sensibly. More, he would thank him for saving his life—and, far more still: the lives of others. On that point, Jack would remain insistent.

  And now, at last, Yoder understood why.

  On the bad end, Jacob would lose almost everything, beginning with his status as an Orderly CO. Having violated the terms of his service (“1–W” work), he was no longer eligible for road patrol. Normally, this would’ve relegated him overnight to basic training. But Jarret, through months of dogged persistence, would never be able to confirm as much. The closest he would get, via dozens of phone calls to army spokesmen all over the world, was an indirect suggestion that Jacob, his friend, was “possibly”’ overseas. Jarret would never have any specific knowledge of Jack’s career in the service. Aside from a claim to have “spent some time in Asia,” Jack himself wouldn’t speak of it. Only one thing was dependably certain: he had been gone for the next four years.