by Alan Spencer
Mark regretted not being able to ask what had happened to Peyton before the sheriff shot him. How they had survived after the Blue Beast was smashed to pieces. He tried to ask her questions intermittently when she became silent. It was like he didn't exist to her.
Growing weary of trying, and trapped behind the bars among stinking bodies, the bodies that were beginning to turn, it wasn't until hours later that Sheriff Hildebrandt returned.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The sheriff had nothing to say at first. He collapsed behind his desk, pressed his head against the surface, and breathed in and out. Cassie remained on the floor, her head against the wall. She stared off into nothing.
She's like a battered wife.
Wait a minute!
Mark opened his mouth to speak his revelation when a body materialized out of thin air. This was a man with his face in the toilet. He wore tore up blue jeans and a black leather jacket with no shirt underneath. The man's long black hair hung about the toilet bowl, the grungy mane soiled in toilet water and piss. Mark heard the bubbles of air break the toilet water's surface.
"Stay back, Mr. Tripdick!" The sheriff had heard the commotion and set about rushing to the cell and unlocking the door. "Finally, finally I get to correct my mistake!"
"What mistake?"
"T.J. died because of me." Throwing open the cell door, the sheriff launched in the direction of the drowning man. "I'll save you! Don't die on me again!"
Mark stared up at the ceiling and recognized the initials in the ceiling from the other day. This was the sheriff's personal nightmare coming to life.
The sheriff kicked aside the corpses, forgetting they were there, and picked up the man by his neck and shoulders. When he lifted the man up, his body vanished into thin air. One of the shot up corpses, an older man, craned his neck with the audible pop of bone and said, "T. J. Burns isin hell because of you, Sheriff! His soul burns so bright."
Peyton was next to speak, his body coming to, those yellowing eyes piercing into Mark's. "Get out! Close the cell. Lock it. Save yourself!"
Peyton's lips were sealing shut when the flesh gummed up and hardened. How and why it happened, Mark didn't have the chance to dissect the situation. Appreciating what Peyton said, he jumped out of the cell and threw it locked behind him. The sheriff remained on the floor, clutching an invisible body.
The truth came out in tears as the sheriff confessed. "T.J. was a drunk and disorderly. He was rolling down the main strip of town smashing in windshields with a baseball bat. I booked him. Threw him in this cell. I wasn't paying attention, and the man threw up and passed out. He drowned in his own vomit. With his fucking head in a toilet bowl. Because of me. The angel punished me for my slight. He made me keep track of everyone; to make sure everyone who deserved to be here stayed here, and those who didn't ended up gone. But I missed somebody. Somebody came into Meadow Woods unnoticed. They're the one's making this happen. I don't know who...somebody...somebody is out there."
Then the sheriff went silent, lost in his own personal torment.
Mark removed the keys from the cell door and opened the cell with Cassie inside. He waited for Cassie's reaction. She was still living in her own mind. There was nothing he could do for her here.
He decided to let the door swing open, and stay open. If she wanted out, she could escape. He couldn't help her, he kept telling himself. He had a bigger problem to fix. He ran outside. The sky was dark again. He couldn't see out for miles.
I could drive. Keep looking for a building near the woods. I'll check all the buildings. Everywhere until I find the bastard.
Before he piled into the police car to begin his search, he heard a series of screams.
Cassie.
Rushing back into the police station, the crashing of concrete shards met him. The wall of Cassie's cell was punched through.
"No! Oh God no!" Cassie cowered out of the box, and crawling on all fours to escape, she reached the sheriff's desk, then Mark's feet. She had snapped out of her fugue. She eyed him with recognition. Those begging eyes needed protection. "He's here. Duke. He will kill me!"
The wall of the cell imploded. Hands and fists punched and decimated the barrier. By the time the attack ended, the wall was gone. The man who'd accomplished this impossibility stood among the rising dust. Mark viewed him first. That familiar square jaw. The strong piercing eyes. Thin upper lip and a fat lower lip. The slight overbite. Head shaved in a buzz cut. Arms and biceps always flexed. The man was a powerhouse, even in high school, but this was different. He could uproot trees. Smash through brick walls. And potentially murder them.
It was Duke. Cassie's dead husband. A war raged in the man's eyes when catching Cassie rise up to her feet and hide behind Mark.
"You have to protect me. He'll kill me. He'll kill me!"
Boom.
Duke was struck by a bullet in the face. The bullet shattered two of the man's front teeth and turned his lips into singed black meat. Firing again and again, Sheriff Hildebrandt kept aiming between the bars with his service revolver.
"Run. Take the patrol car. Find that son-of-a-bitch and stop him!"
Spitting blood, Duke growled, "You're saving no one. In fact, you're going to get yourself killed, Mark!"
Another bullet fired, Duke's lower mandible burst into bone spatter.
The sheriff, "Save us! Go!"
Mark scooped up Cassie, and together, they raced out of the station. It wasn't much longer that the sheriff's pistol went dry. The last he caught of the scene was Duke bending the bar's one-by-one of the sheriff's cell to reach him. It would be likewise what Duke would do to the sheriff when he got his hands on him.
Bounding towards the patrol car, the doors were unlocked. Cassie dove into the passenger side, and Mark took the wheel. Starting up the engine, he slammed the pedal and they lurched onto the road. Accelerating fast, Mark shot down the road. It was then the sky went even darker, as dark as ink.
Cassie kept watching behind them through the backseat.
"Is he coming?"
"Not that I see, though I can't a damn thing!"
"He can't run that fast. We've got him beat."
Cassie turned to him and said, "I can't trust anything anymore. We're not safe. Never again."
Mark tried to stay on the conversation of ending this madness. "The man who was killed in the woods, he was angel, right?"
"Who told you it was an angel?"
"Several people. Several dead people. That's besides the point. Is it an angel?"
"It's a long explanation."
"Try me."
Cassie was forever paranoid, eyeing the rear and side mirrors. "Not until we're somewhere safe."
"That'll be never. So speak up."
He remembered what the barber told him. "We have to get out and search the woods for a building. I don't know what it is. Ronald Sexton said it was a warehouse."
"Are you insane? Duke will get me. He wanted to beat the life out of me when he was alive, and now that's he back from the dead, he wants to slaughter me. He's haunted me for years after he died. I was safe from his memory and from the shit he put me through, until now."
"We find this killer who murdered that angel, and I know he's dead because I found him dead. He said I had to save you people, and I will. Somebody's creating these enemies. Warping our reality. Playing our lives against our own personal histories. I'm going out there, and I want you with me. There's nowhere else to go. We could be the only ones left to find this person and stop him."
Mark didn't wait for her to say one thing or another. He abandoned the vehicle, hoping she'd follow him. After reaching the mouth of the woods, she was running right behind him.
Trudging through darkness, and doing his best to avoid bumping into the trees, Mark demanded, "You need to start explaining to me everything you know in plain details. There's no point in holding back. It might be the only way we save everybody."
Mark described to Cassie the bleeding and wounded pa
le man in the woods, and how the angel beckoned Mark to save everyone, and how he was supposed to do it.
Cassie did her best to explain what she did know.
"The angel touched down in the woods. He eventually came to town center, and his powers were so great, everybody stopped what they were doing to behold him. I was at home crying and laying alone in my bed when I felt myself being drawn to where this angel stood. The angel was standing on the concrete stairs of city hall. Everybody in town was waiting for him to speak. He was a normal man, like you and me, though very pale.
"The man spoke with conviction and truth. He said he'd seen one too many injustices in the world. Everyone in town was dying of cancer, or they would develop cancer in the coming years. The fact is, the foreman at the local battery factory was disposing of harmful chemical waste illegally. Burying it in the woods, where it leeched into the water supply. Everybody drank traces of contamination. Swam in it. Fed their crops with it.
"This angel admitted to going against God by coming to Earth. He was tired of watching our suffering when he could end it himself, so he cast out God, and he touched down in this town to change things."
Her voice went dark. "But we had to make a sacrifice of our own. Each year on the same day, we had to commit. Commit to the angel's way of life. The angel became God in this town. We lived by his truths, his realities, and his ambitions. It was easy, because the angel cast out the cancer and gave us everything we ever wanted from life. Happiness. Immortality. This angel only had so much power, nobody else outside our town limits could enjoy the blessings unless you were invited. Like you, Mark, we were allowed to leave and find you and take you here.
"But if you leave without permission, you cast herself into hell. Your body dissolves." Mark once again imagined Richie's sizzling bones, and shuttered. "You commit by plunging yourself into the blades. Slicing up your body. This device, it renders your body into nothing but flesh. Pliable flesh. Like, like paper. Flesh pulp. What the angel does with your flesh, I honestly don't know. The pain is excruciating. But the pain ends quickly. The angel created this machine when he plotted against God. He took it with him from heaven, and it's here somewhere in Meadow Woods."
Mark was forced to believe the unbelievable because it was living and breathing all around him. "How much time is left before you have to commit again?"
Scared, "A matter of hours."
"Then what happens?"
"If we can't throw our bodies into the blades, the blessings we've been given will end. Then after that, I don't really know. Death, I imagine. Plunged into hell."
"Do you anybody who'd wish to kill the angel?"
"Everybody was so happy. Nobody in their right mind would want to. Maybe Gibbs. He was a bit off in the head, though his books kept him happy."
"Gibbs is gone, trust me. He's not the one who did this."
"Then I don't know who would kill the angel."
The smell crossed their noses. It stopped them in their tracks.
The pre-dawn light glowed in the sky to show them what they couldn't see previously. The trees were soft with the flesh of human skin. Their leaves were shriveled human organs, like dried prunes taking on morbid shapes. He gasped at the shape of faces embedded in the trees. They tried to speak, the faces in the bark, their lips stretching thin to breaking in the process of screaming. Hundreds of trees were like this, standing collections of human beings.
They shirked from each tree, terrified. The hum of troubled breathing, the moan of self-pity and agony spread. Mark held onto Cassie as though to go back the way they came.
Then it hit him. This was all about fear. Terrorizing. Someone wanted to scare them. If what Cassie said was true, they had only a matter of hours before their time to commit was up, and then they'd lose their blessings forever. This was a show to slow them down and keep them from salvation.
They had to find that machine.
Cassie stopped in her tracks to stare at the statue standing ahead of them. The statue was of bronze. A perfect replica of the angel he'd seen in the woods. Paintings hung from trees suspended by ropes and hooks. Paintings of the town gathering at city hall. The angel speaking among them as crowds watched on in awe. The angel placing his hands on the sick and healing them. Blessing the downtrodden. Those in town were on their hands and knees in worship. Then there were various paintings of the lake expanding into an ocean. New buildings rising from the old ones. Chuck at his grill, cooking to everyone's delight. Lindsey at a large party gathering, her eyes alight with pride and happiness. Sheriff Hildebrandt scolding a set of kids for blowing up a mailbox with firecrackers. Gibbs sitting about reading a book in the sun with a bottle of whiskey between his legs. Patricia Lake sitting in her room alone clutching a jar of suckers. Dr. Albert soothing a child with a scraped knee at the hospital. The imagines kept going on and on, and Mark realized it wasn't paint on canvas. The rocks, the trees, the very air itself proved to be a canvas. Only one person was capable of these feats, and she was on her haunches nearby. Her fingers were raw with rub blisters. She was covered head-to-toe with different colors of paints. When she looked up at them, Mark gasped.
Reyna had gouged out her own eyes.
The orbs were bleeding hollows she'd scooped out clean. Blind, she called out desperately to them, "Who's there?" She seized a pallet knife strewn on the ground. "Stay away from me!"
"It's Mark Tripdick, and Cassie. We're not here to hurt you."
Her face shriveled as if to cry, though she had no vector for tears anymore. "But I could hurt you. I cut out my eyes to keep everyone safe from me. I'd look at someone or something, and it'd turn into something terrible. I didn't use to have such a vivid imagination. I could never be a true artist, and now that I've been granted my wish, this happens. You should see the horrors I've caused. Such suffering. That's why I'm hiding out here, and I keep painting in the hopes it'll calm the beast in my head. Stay away from me before I hurt you. Run!"
Cassie was already taking off, but Mark was rooted in place. He had to understand what had happened to her. How she was being manipulated and used.
"You think of things, and they happen. Is that it?"
"I think of things, and they're destroyed. I see a person, and they become violated. I've warped buildings. I've caused people to trade skins. Anything and everything unimaginable. Something's using my imagination against me."
"You think it, and it just happens?"
"Yes!" Frustrated, the bronze statue of the angel began to melt. The paintings and engravings from the flesh trees began to erase, the paint turning into red liquid. Blood. "Get away from me before you die too!"
Mark tensed as every tree made of skin howled in rage and horror. The trees were trying to uproot themselves from the earth, but the roots were cords of muscle tissue. Tree limbs were gnarled twisted collections of flesh. Faces kept sprouting from the bodies, shouting their distress.
They're trying to scare me because I'm onto something.
I have to try something.
Mark shouted at Reyna. "Destroy every building except the one where you committed. Spare that place. It's the building! Picture the building, and nothing else!"
Reyna screamed, cupping her ears.
Did she hear him? Did Reyna understand what he was getting at?
The trees of bodies were edging closer. Tearing sinew, bone, and flesh to reach them. Cassie screamed when the trees huddled together to box them in. Mouths clacked with exaggerated teeth. Teeth as long as arms and tongues like anaconda bodies, the anatomical monstrosities were closing in. There was no way of escape.
Reyna was on all fours. She threw her head back and screamed, shrieking, unleashing her thoughts as the sky burst with sunlight. One last scream, and Reyna caused the impossible.
The earth was turned upside down.
Like a great A-bomb going off, the concussion shook everything to the point of destruction. Dirt was kicked up, the dust a screen that blotted out everything. Mark became weightless. Float
ing in the air, falling high nor low. He expected his landing to be hard, to break bones, to knock him unconscious, to possibly kill him, but instead, he kept falling, and flailing, and uselessly swiping at the air for purchase. Free falling into the sky. How could he fall if there was nothing to land on? Cassie was gone. Everything was swirls of dust. The air was slapping him hard. The dust cleared momentarily. He caught sections of the woods below him, parts of town (he now had a panoramic view of Meadow Woods) were uprooted and broken apart and seemingly mulched by invisible chopping machines. Shards of concrete burst. Earth eroded and detonated. Lake water evaporated. Corpses crashed into other corpses, bursting into pink mist as the town suffered an upside down earthquake. Reyna's screams and shrieks hit a crescendo and then stopped. As fast as it had happened, Mark began to fall back to earth.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Mark woke on top of a pile of corpse pieces. Hills of anatomical messes resembling broken up mortar destroyed by high tech weapons. The ringing in his ears persisted, a woooooong sound. Mark was slow to rise, having trouble finding his footing on the terrain of human bodies. Everywhere was destruction. The town had literally been turned upside down and thrown back down. He stood in the wake of utter destruction, though one building stayed true. The place was a three story warehouse. It was padlocked from the outside, but the security fence around it had been lifted. That had to the place where the enemy hid, the one who was destroying their blessings.
Yards from him, Mark cried out in horror. Cassie had a street sign pole wedged through her chest. She garbled on blood, calling out to him the best she could. "Save us, Mark...in the building...you, you were right. You used the magic of this place against itself. Go now. I...I love you. Don't ever forget that."
Mark couldn't un-wedge her from the pole.