by Rio Youers
“Not too late for the hospital,” I said to Steve-O, showing him the keys.
“Yeah, it is,” he groaned. His head lolled to one side. I saw what looked like tear tracks in the blood on his face. “Don’t sweat it, kid. I’m next to my soulmate and surrounded by my fallen enemies. That ain’t a bad way to hop on the last rattler.”
“I didn’t want it to end this way.”
“Nothing’s ended,” Steve-O said. “Go get our girl.”
* * *
Outside, I washed the blood from my face with water scooped from a dented barrel. It was warm, full of bugs. I then took the cell phone from my pocket. The map of Casper Creek was still on screen.
The red house, I thought, and imagined Lang inside. Isolated. No security. But powerful, Frankenstein’s Boots had warned me. More powerful.
You don’t … stand a chance.
Maybe, but I’d gotten this far. Something—some crazy mojo—was working for me. Also, it was the dead of night. Lang might be tucked up in bed, dreaming his wicked dreams. I could give him one hell of a wake-up call.
I adjusted the gun in my waistband, then pulled the keys from my pocket and pressed the unlock button on the fob again. Lights flashed. I walked to the car and saw without any surprise that it was a nondescript midsize.
I got behind the wheel. Cranked the ignition.
My turn to play hunt dog.
Thirty
It took two hours to reach Casper Creek. I drove the speed limit the entire way, stopped at every amber light—couldn’t risk clipping a red and perhaps getting stopped by the cops. The engine hummed: a calming sound that didn’t calm me. I ached and bled. My heart thumped so hard I imagined it glowing, like an element about to overheat.
Casper Creek was nothing, really. A convenience store (closed). A gas station (closed). A stoplight (red). I consulted the cell phone, made a left onto the rurally named Coyote Pup Pass, which looped through the dense woods and led me to Lang’s property. I had expected a wrought-iron gate, locked, perhaps an intercom. What I found was a wooden gate haphazardly splashed with red paint. It was wide open.
The driveway was broad and paved, bordered with towering pines. My headlights picked out more splashes of red paint on some of the lower boughs. I followed the driveway—this also splashed with red—until the house came into view. My plan was to ditch the car, snake through the trees, approach from the rear so that I wouldn’t activate the light sensors. This didn’t happen.
I walked directly to the front door, bathed in light.
* * *
The house was ranch style with a modern edge. All dark wood and glass. Any hope of sneaking up on Lang while he slept was gone; every light blazed, outside and in. I heard music playing—something eerie, distorted by distance. The front door, like the gate, was wide open.
I had a feeling he was expecting me.
I stepped toward the front door with the gun clenched in one trembling fist, my heart doing its now regular mad gallop. The steps were stained near-black. The red paint daubed across them was fresh. The door—a mahogany slab—had been wildly painted. It was tacky to the touch.
I stepped into the entranceway and saw why it was called the red house. The décor was largely red: the walls, the ceiling, the trim. There was a standing vase festooned with synthetic red feathers. I saw two paintings on the walls. One was of a naked man with red wings, elevated godlike above a devout people. The other was a Pollock-style piece, red drips on a black background. There was a tall lamp with a red shade, a soapstone carving of a woman cradling a red infant. Stepping deeper into the house, I saw that some of the non-red décor—the doors, the light fittings, the hardwood floor—had been recently marked: a red X here, a red brushstroke there. The words BLISS and ME and BIRD were scrawled all over.
No sign of Lang, but I sensed he was close. I stepped cautiously down the hallway with the gun raised, following the music. Something from the roaring twenties, I thought, but not at all Gatsby-esque. The warbling gramophone sound gave it a nightmarish quality, as did the lyrics: “T’ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones…”
I’d been in the house seconds and felt like screaming.
* * *
The hallway was L-shaped and led to an open-concept kitchen, dining, and living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows faced the lake, although nothing could be seen now but light glare and reflections. I followed the reek of fresh paint from the kitchen to the living room. This was where the music came from—that jaunty, scratchy melody that made me want to claw out my eardrums. I had expected a gramophone with a dripping red horn, but it was a sleek stereo system, one of the few things untouched by Lang’s bright red brush. The paint was splashed across the floor, the leather sofa, the coffee table. It plinked from the light fittings and bookshelves.
This was the work of a very sick man, one whose mania had recently deepened. Lang wasn’t only tyrant-dangerous, though God knows that would be bad enough; he was consumed with power—Sally’s power, specifically.
He didn’t just want the red bird … he wanted to be it.
“Harvey,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
He stood on the other side of the living room, naked but for a pair of boxer shorts and an ornate bird’s mask—red, of course—with a long, hooked beak, the kind commonly worn at a masquerade. He had red feathers in his hair, stark against the silver. I watched as he dipped his brush into a pot of red paint and slapped the word BIRD across his chest.
I took two staggering steps toward him. More red feathers swirled around my bloodstained sneakers.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Broken,” he said. “Unquestionably.”
He looked at me. His fierce eyes flashed through the holes in his mask.
* * *
I had a gun in my hand but couldn’t use it. The lines of communication between my brain and trigger finger had been disrupted. I could no more shoot Lang than I could crawl lizardlike along the wall.
Lang appeared barely to notice the gun, but of course he was the disruption. He was stopping me from pulling the trigger and it was effortless. This was not the same man who’d spidered through my mind back in Jersey—a psychic effort that had left him withered and in need of oxygen. He was now replete with power and energy. He almost glowed.
I watched as he dipped his brush again, drew it across his mouth. A broad red smile. He spread his arms wide.
“Do you like the new me?”
“No,” I replied. “But then, I didn’t much like the old you.”
“Oh, Harvey. I’m just another American with a dream.”
I wondered how I could get to him—if I could short-circuit his psychic coil just long enough to point the gun and shoot. I didn’t care for his glow, though. Or his smile. The real one. The one beneath the paint.
“They’re all dead,” I said in an effort to unnerve him. “Your army. Your dogs. I buried Jackie Corvino in New Jersey. The rest are stinking up a warehouse somewhere in Nashville.”
“Yes, I know.” Lang nodded. The red beak went up and down. “I can see it in your mind. I don’t even have to spider inside.” He wiggled his fingers. “You project it. Everything you’re thinking … I’m one step ahead of you.”
The music switched. Another roaring twenties number. Equally maddening. Lang didn’t think so; he broke into an impromptu Charleston. It was as unsettling as it was ridiculous.
His attention diverted, I focused on my trigger finger, trying to take back control. I couldn’t do it, though. The gun could have been in someone else’s hand.
“It’s barely a loss,” Lang suggested a moment later, shrugging indifferently. “The dogs had served their purpose. They had nothing left to hunt. You saved me the awkward task of firing them. Not all of them, of course; I have security for my presidential campaign to consider.”
I placed one hand on the back of the sofa to steady myself.
“I should be ready for 2020,” he said
. “I’ll reestablish Nova Oculus, earn favor on the Hill, maybe another short spell in the Senate, and then…” He put down the paint pot and drew a banner in the air: “LANG 2020: I HAVE THE VISION. How’s that for a kick-ass slogan?”
I brought to mind a different vision, one I’d had before: of a tyrannized people rising up, of broken streets and shattered lives, of desperation and anarchy. I saw a post-apocalyptic cityscape: collapsed buildings, smoke, fire … a single red feather in the foreground.
“A little dramatic, don’t you think?” Lang asked.
“No,” I said.
“We are a nation bathed in blood, Harvey. Always have been.” Lang took a step toward me. “We don’t need fifty stars on our flag. Only seven: one for every sin we represent.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You look at me and think—”
“Tyrant,” I finished for him. “Madman. Beast.”
“We are all beasts,” he said. His teeth appeared in the strip of paint across his mouth. A horrible grin. “We don’t need a good man to run this country. We need a strong man to control it.”
“You’re not strong,” I said. “You’re insane. You’ll destroy us all.”
“Not destroy, Harvey. Change.”
The Orwell quote occurred to me: Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
“Exactly,” Lang said.
“It’s demonic,” I said.
“It’s entirely necessary.” He snapped his fingers, as if suggesting how easy it would be. “And long overdue.”
I considered my trigger finger. Useless to me. So I turned from hate to my other reason for being there: love. The reason I fought.
“Where’s Sally?”
“It doesn’t seem that long ago I was asking you the same question.” Lang dropped into another hot-stepping Charleston—the swift, elegant moves of a man in fine physical condition. “I won’t be quite so difficult, though.” He stopped dancing and held out one hand. “Come with me.”
I took his hand. Not because I wanted to, but because he made me. He clutched it like a lover, and as he turned I saw the bright red markings on his back. They started at his shoulder blades and stretched along the backs of his arms.
He’d painted himself wings.
* * *
We walked hand in hand down a short red hall, through a red door, down a flight of red stairs. The basement was comfortably cool. It smelled of sawdust and something sour. I heard the birds before I saw them: perhaps a hundred of them, agitated and crying. They were packed into a dozen cages that formed a narrow corridor at the foot of the stairs. Their feathers had been dyed red.
Lang let go of my hand and strode between the shrieking birds toward the far end of the basement where a red curtain hung from a U-shaped rail. He snatched it aside, revealing a steel bed fitted with arm and leg straps. They were no longer employed—no longer needed. Same with the IV. A half-empty bag with the word CHLORPROMAZINE hung from the hook, but the drip wasn’t connected.
“Sally,” I whispered.
I didn’t know what to expect. I’d envisioned many macabre scenarios, from her being blindfolded, tortured beyond recognition, to finding her facedown on a slab with a hole drilled through her cranium. I also recalled Sally telling me that Lang used to fantasize about eating her, and braced myself to find her carved into deli-thin slices, served on silver platters.
My darkest fears were not realized. Nor was it a best-case scenario, of Sally being alert and aware. She lay naked on the bed, on a red satin sheet, still as glass and paper-pale. Her breast moved too delicately to know if she was breathing. Only the thinnest vein, ticking in her left eyelid, told me she was still alive.
Red feathers were scattered around her.
“Fallen,” Lang said.
I limped toward her, pushing the IV stand aside so that I could get close, take her hand. She was as cool as she was still. Lang went around the other side, took her other hand.
“Don’t touch her,” I said.
“A little late for that.”
The birds screeched and whirled. They enveloped the music from upstairs, though. No small relief.
“Sally…”
Only that thin vein moved.
“I’ve taken everything I can,” Lang said. “She isn’t completely void; her coil has some flicker yet, and I left her with the memories of rapists and killers. There may be a few of her own memories ghosting around, but she’ll never be the woman she was. She’ll be more like a dog, I think. Stupidly faithful. Shit anywhere. Haven’t you always wanted a dog, Harvey?”
Tears welled in my eyes, spilled onto my cheeks. “Sally…” I lifted her hand to my broken lips and kissed her fingers. “Sally, baby…”
“I reclaimed my powers, of course,” Lang continued. “And learned a few new tricks in the bargain. Wonderful news: I’m stronger than ever. Most importantly, I recovered the sequences for my memories. Had to dig deep to get them, but it was worth it. I remember everything, Harvey. Oh, bliss!”
He let go of Sally’s hand and pirouetted. The birds sang furiously.
I used Sally’s fingers to wipe my tears away. She didn’t react. Broken, Lang had said. Unquestionably. And I feared he was right. I wondered if she’d simply given up—if she was too tired of running, of fighting, and had let Lang in.
“Not at all,” Lang said. “I compromised her coil with a steady drip of antipsychotics.” He gestured at the half-empty bag hanging from the IV stand. “Not without risk: The required dosage could result in tachycardia or neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which would almost certainly prove fatal. Fortunately, I discovered a new weakness and was able to exploit it.”
He looked at me. A bead of light winked off his glimmering beak.
“You, Harvey. You’re her weakness.” He spread his arms—his wings. “The antipsychotics started the process, but threatening to kill you accelerated it. She broke so easily in the end.”
I tried raising the gun again. Still nothing.
“Quite romantic,” Lang said, “what you’ve sacrificed for each other.” He swept a strand of hair from her brow. “Maybe I left some love behind. A morsel. A crumb. If so, Harvey, I hope you find it.”
“My dad was right about you,” I said. “You’re a fucking reptile.”
“I’m a bird,” he said, sneering. “And don’t think me unfeeling. I may change my mind about letting you take her.”
I dropped Sally’s hand. It landed on the bed with a soft thump. Feathers lifted and swirled.
“What?”
“You heard me,” he said. “I don’t need her anymore. So take her. Just go.”
I shook my head, looking from Sally to Lang, then beyond the noisy birdcages to the short flight of stairs. I imagined carrying Sally up them, through the red house, then out to the car and away … away.
“What?”
“You’re a fighter, Harvey. You’ve earned this. God knows so has she.”
I stared at him, considering the other fighters: Steve-O and Tatum, and Dad, of course. They’d all gone to battle. They’d all fallen.
The mantra rumbled. I wasn’t going anywhere yet.
“Ah, yes,” Lang said, smiling. “How foolish of me. You didn’t come here just for Sally, did you?”
“No,” I said.
“Kill the fucker … is that how it goes?”
I nodded.
Lang squawked laughter—actually squawked, then all the mirth, affected or otherwise, dropped from his demeanor. His eyes burned inside the mask. He stepped around the bed with long strides, pounding his chest with his fists.
“So come on,” he screeched. “Kill me, Harvey. I’m right here. Let’s do this.”
I imagined it: aiming the gun at his chest, curling my finger around the trigger, squeezing off a single deadly shot, blowing him across the room as easily as blowing a feather from my palm.
“That’s it,” he said. “One shot. Come
on.”
He stood in front of me. I looked at the word BIRD on his chest, thinking I would aim for the R. The gun trembled in my hand. I couldn’t lift it.
“Kill me.”
“You’re blocking me.”
“Kill me.”
And suddenly the block was gone. I felt the life return to my hand—to my trigger finger. I lifted the gun, stared down the sights, about to shoot when my vision blurred. I shook my head and blinked, wiping my eyes with my free hand, and when everything swam back into focus I saw my mother standing in front of me.
“Baby boy,” she said.
Except it wasn’t Mom; she had red feathers in her hair.
“No,” I said. The tip of the gun wavered.
“Baby,” she said. “You should have let Sally die … just like you let me die.”
“No!” My finger trembled on the trigger. I closed my eyes and took a faltering step backward. Mom laughed, a maniacal sound that turned into a scream and then cut to silence. I opened my eyes. Dad was there.
“Kill yourself, Harvey,” he advised, and grinned. His scarred face was daubed with red paint. “It’s the only way out of this. Trust me.”
I felt a tugging sensation in my brain. My right arm tingled. I flipped the gun on myself, opened my mouth, and lodged the barrel so deep I gagged.
“There you go,” Dad said. He walked a slow circle around me. I followed him as far as I could with my eyes and when he came back into view it was Lang again. The mask was gone. His dark eyes sizzled.
“Just like Daddy,” he said. “Boom.”
Tears squeezed from my eyes. My finger twitched against the trigger.
“Orwell was right.” Lang took a whistling breath and spread his hands. “Power is in fucking people over and reshaping their minds.” He winked, plucked a feather from his hair, ran it from my cheek to my forearm. “But sometimes it’s better to destroy them completely.”