by George R. R.
Your body temperature is far above normal. Your stress levels are far above normal. We recommend you see a physician immediately.
Yes, Kane thinks. I believe I’ll do just that.
He finds an empty house within five miles of the prison and breaks in. He eats everything he can find, including several pounds of frozen meat, which helps him compensate for a little of the heat he is generating. He then rummages through the upstairs bedrooms until he finds some new clothes to wear, scrubs off the blood that marks him out, and leaves.
He finds another place some miles away to hide for the night. The residents are home—he even hears them listening to news of his escape, although it is a grossly inaccurate version that concentrates breathlessly on his cannibalism and his terrifying nickname. He lays curled in a box in their attic like a mummy, nearly comatose. When they leave in the morning, so does Kane, reshaping the bones of his face and withdrawing color from his hair. The pagan seed still chirps in his head. Every few minutes, it reminds him to keep an eye open for himself, but not to approach himself, because he is undoubtedly very, very dangerous.
* * * *
“Didn’t know anything about it.” Sartorius looks worriedly up and down the road to make sure they are alone, as if Kane hadn’t already done that better, faster, and more carefully long before the two locals had arrived at the rendezvous. “What can I say? We didn’t have any idea they had that scrambler thing. Of course, we would have let you know if we’d heard.”
“I need a doctor—somebody you’d trust with your life, because I’ll be trusting him with mine.”
“Cannibal Christian,” says young Carl in an awed voice. “That’s what they’re calling you now.”
“That’s crap.” He is not ashamed, because he was doing God’s will, but he does not want to be reminded, either.
“Or the Angel of Death, they still like that one, too. Either way, they’re sure talking about you.”
* * * *
The doctor is a woman too, a decade or so past her child-bearing years. They wake her up in her small cottage on the edge of a blighted park that looks like it was manufacturing space before a halfway attempt to redeem it. She has alcohol on her breath and her hands shake, but her eyes, although a little bloodshot, are intelligent and alert.
“Don’t bore me with your story and I won’t bore you with mine,” she says when Carl begins to introduce them. A moment later, her pupils dilate. “Hang on—I already know yours. You’re the Angel everyone’s talking about.”
“Some people call him the Cannibal Christian,” says young Carl helpfully.
“Are you a believer?” Kane asks her.
“I’m too flawed to be anything else. Who else but Jesus would keep forgiving me?”
She lays him out on a bedsheet on her kitchen table. He waves away both the anesthetic inhaler and the bottle of liquor.
“They won’t work on me unless I let them, and I can’t afford to let them work. I have to stay alert. Now please, cut that godless thing out of my head. Do you have a Spirit you can put in?”
“Beg pardon?” She straightens up, the scalpel already bloody from the incision he is doing his best to ignore.
“What do you call it here? My kind of seed, a seed of Covenant. So I can hear the voice of Spirit again—”
As if to protest its own pending removal, the Archimedes seed abruptly fills his skull with a crackle of interference.
A bad sign, Kane thinks. He must be overworking his internal systems. When he finishes here he’ll need several days’ rest before he decides what to do next.
“Sorry,” he tells the doctor. “I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
She shrugs. “I said I’d have to see what I have. One of your people died on this very table a few years ago, I’m sad to say, despite everything I did to save him. I think I kept his communication seed.” She waves her hand a little, as though such things happen or fail to happen every day. “Who knows? I’ll have a look.”
He cannot let himself hope too much. Even if she has it, what are the odds that it will work, and even more unlikely, that it will work here on Archimedes? There are booster stations on all the other colony worlds, like Arjuna, where the Word is allowed to compete freely with the lies of the Godless.
The latest crackle in his head resolves into a calm, sweetly reasonable voice....No less a philosopher than Aristotle himself said, “Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life.”
Kane forces himself to open his eyes. The room is blurry, the doctor a faint shadowy shape bending over him. Something sharp probes in his neck.
“There it is,” she says. “It’s going to hurt a bit coming out. What’s your name? Your real name?”
“Lamentation.”
“Ah.” She doesn’t smile, at least he doesn’t think she does—it’s hard for him to make out her features—but she sounds amused. ‘“She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.’ That’s Jerusalem they’re talking about,” the doctor adds. “The original one.”
“Book of Lamentations,” he says quietly. The pain is so fierce that it’s all he can do not to reach up and grab the hand that holds the probing, insupportable instrument. At times like this, when he most needs to restrain himself, he can most clearly feel his strength. If he were to lose control and loose that unfettered power, he feels that he could blaze like one of the stellar torches in heaven’s great vault, that he could destroy an entire world.
“Hey,” says a voice in the darkness beyond the pool of light on the kitchen table—young Carl “Hey. Something’s going on.”
“What are you talking about?” demands Sartorius. A moment later, the window explodes in a shower of sparkling glass and the room fills with smoke.
Not smoke, gas. Kane springs off the table, accidentally knocking the doctor back against the wall. He gulps in enough breath to last him a quarter of an hour and flares the tissues of his pharynx to seal his air passages. If it’s a nerve gas, there is nothing much he can do, though—too much skin exposed.
In the corner, the doctor struggles to her feet, emerging from the billows of gas on the floor with her mouth wide and working but nothing coming out. It isn’t just her. Carl and Sartorius are holding their breath as they shove furniture against the door as a makeshift barricade. The bigger, older man already has a gun in his hand. Why is it so quiet outside? What are they doing out there?
The answer comes with a stuttering roar. Small arms fire suddenly fills the kitchen wall with holes. The doctor throws up her hands and begins a terrible jig, as though she is being stitched by an invisible sewing machine. When she falls to the ground, it is in pieces.
Young Carl stretches motionless on the floor in a pool of his own spreading blood and brains. Sartorius is still standing unsteadily, but red bubbles seep through his clothing in several places.
Kane is on the ground—he has dropped without realizing it. He does not stop to consider the near-certainty of failure, but instead springs to the ceiling and digs his fingers in long enough to smash his way through with the other hand, then hunkers in the crawlspace until the first team of troopers comes in to check the damage, flashlights darting through the fog of gas fumes. How did they find him so quickly? More important, what have they brought to use against him?
Speed is his best weapon. He climbs out through the vent. He has to widen it, and the splintering brings a fusillade from below. When he reaches the roof dozens of shots crack past him and two actually hit him, one in the arm and one in the back, these from the parked security vehicles where the rest of the invasion team are waiting for the first wave to signal them inside. The shock waves travel through him so that he shakes like a wet dog. A moment later, as he suspected, they deploy the scrambler. This time, though, he is ready: he saturates his neurons with calcium
to deaden the electromagnetic surge, and although his own brain activity ceases for a moment and he drops bonelessly across the roof crest, there is no damage. A few seconds later, he is up again. Their best weapon spent, the soldiers have three seconds to shoot at a dark figure scrambling with incredible speed along the roofline; then Lamentation Kane jumps down into the hot tracery of their fire, sprints forward and leaps off the hood of their own vehicle and over them before they can change firing positions.
He can’t make it to full speed this time—not enough rest and not enough refueling—but he can go fast enough that he has vanished into the Hellas City sewers by time the strike team can remobilize.
The Archimedes seed, which has been telling his enemies exactly where he is, lies behind him now, wrapped in bloody gauze somewhere in the ruins of the doctor’s kitchen. Keeta Januari and her Rationalists will learn much about the ability of the Covenant scientists to manufacture imitations of Archimedes technology, but they will not learn anything more about Kane. Not from the seed. He is free of it now.
* * * *
He emerges almost a full day later from a pumping station on the outskirts of one of Hellas City’s suburbs, but now he is a different Kane entirely, a Kane never before seen. Although the doctor removed the Archimedes seed, she had no time to locate, let alone implant, a Spirit device in its place: for the first time in as long as he can remember his thoughts are entirely his own, his head empty of any other voices.
The solitude is terrifying.
He makes his way up into the hills west of the great city, hiding in the daytime, moving cautiously by night because so many of the rural residents have elaborate security systems or animals who can smell Kane even before he can smell them. At last he finds an untended property. He could break in easily, but instead extrudes one of his fingernails and hardens it to pick the lock. He wants to minimize his presence whenever possible—he needs time to think, to plan. The ceiling has been lifted off his world and he is confused.
For safety’s sake, he spends the first two days exploring his new hiding place only at night, with the lights out and his pupils dilated so far that even the sudden appearance of a white piece of paper in front of him is painful. From what he can tell, the small modern house belongs to a man traveling for a month on the eastern side of the continent. The owner has been gone only a week, which gives Kane ample time to rest and think about what he is going to do next.
The first thing he has to get used to is the silence in his head. All his life since he was a tiny unknowing child, Spirit has spoken to him. Now he cannot hear her calm, inspiring voice. The godless prattle of Archimedes is silenced too. There is nothing and no one to share Kane’s thoughts.
He cries that first night as he cried in the whore’s room, like a lost child. He is a ghost. He is no longer human. He has lost his inner guide, he has botched his mission, he has failed his God and his people. He has eaten the flesh of his own kind, and for nothing.
Lamentation Kane is alone with his great sin.
* * * *
He moves on before the owner of the house returns. He knows he could kill the man and stay for many more months, but it seems time to do things differently, although Kane can’t say precisely why. He can’t even say for certain what things he is going to do. He still owes God the death of Prime Minister Januari, but something seems to have changed inside him, and he is in no hurry to fulfill that promise. The silence in his head, at first so frightening, has begun to seem something more. Holy, perhaps, but certainly different from anything he has experienced before, as though every moment is a waking dream.
No, it is more like waking up from a dream. But what kind of dream has he escaped, a good one or a bad one? And what will replace it?
Even without Spirit’s prompting, he remembers Christ’s words: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. In his new inner silence, the ancient promise seem to have many meanings. Does Kane really want the truth? Could he stand to be truly free?
Before he leaves the house, he takes the owner’s second-best camping equipment, the things the man left behind. Kane will live in the wild areas in the highest parts of the hills for as long as seems right. He will think. It is possible that he will leave Lamentation Kane there behind him when he comes out again. He may leave the Angel of Death behind as well.
What will remain? And whom will such a new sort of creature serve? The angels, the devils ... or just itself?
Kane will be interested to find out.
<
* * * *
Joe R. Lansdale
Prolific Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has won the Edgar Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the American Mystery Award, the International Crime Writer’s Award, and seven Bram Stoker Awards, Although perhaps best known for horror/thrillers such as The Nightrunners, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Bottoms, The God of the Razor; and The Drive-In, he also writes the popular Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series—Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Rumble Tumble, Captains Outrageous—as well as western novels such as A Fine Dark Line and Blood Dance, and totally unclassifiable cross-genre novels such as Zeppelins West, Magic Wagon, and Flaming London. His other novels include Dead in the West, The Big Blow, Sunset and Sawdust, Act of Love, Freezer Burn, Waltz of Shadows, and The Drive-in 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels. He has also contributed novels to series such as Batman and Tarzan. His many short stories have been collected in By Bizarre Hands, Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back; The Shadows, Kith and Kin; The Long Ones; Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy; Bestsellers Guaranteed; On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks; Electric Gumbo; Writer of the Purple Rage; A Fist Full of Stories (and Articles); Steppin’ Out, Summer ‘68; Bumper Crop; The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent; For a Few Stories More; Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories; The King and Other Stories; and High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. As editor, he has produced the anthologiesThe Best of the West, Retro-Pulp Tales, Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto), Dark at Heart (with wife Karen Lansdale), and the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology, Cross Plains Universe (with Scott A. Cupp). An anthology in tribute to Lansdale’s work is Lords of the Razor. His most recent books are Leather Maiden and a novel written with John Lansdale,Hell’s Bounty. The newest anthology, Son of Retro Pulp Tales, was published in 2009. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Here’s a funny and sizzlingly fast-paced look at two men who do what Huck and Tom only dream about doing and actually do “light out for the territories”—and run into a lot more trouble there than they bargained for.
* * * *
Soldierin’
They said if you went out West and joined up with the colored soldiers, they’d pay you in real Yankee dollars, thirteen of them a month, feed and clothe you, and it seemed like a right smart idea since I was wanted for a lynchin’. It wasn’t that I was invited to hold the rope or sing a little spiritual. I was the guest of honor on this one. They was plannin’ to stretch my neck like a goozle-wrung chicken at Sunday dinner.
Thing I’d done was nothin’ on purpose, but in a moment of eyeballin’ while walkin’ along the road on my way to cut some firewood for a nickel and ajar of jam, a white girl who was hangin’ out wash bent over and pressed some serious butt up against her gingham, and a white fella, her brother, seen me take a look, and that just crawled all up in his ass and died, and he couldn’t stand the stink.
Next thing I know, I’m wanted for being bold with a white girl, like maybe I’d broke into her yard and jammed my arm up her ass, but I hadn’t done nothin’ but what’s natural, which is glance at a nice butt when it was available to me.
Now, in the livin’ of my life, I’ve killed men and animals and made love to three Chinese women on the same night in the same bed and one of them with only one leg, and part of it wood, and I even ate some of a dead fella once when I was crossin’ the mountains, though I want to rush in here and make
it clear I didn’t know him all that well, and we damn sure wasn’t kinfolks. Another thing I did was I won me a shootin’ contest up Colorady way against some pretty damn famous shooters, all white boys, but them’s different stories and not even akin to the one I want to tell, and I’d like to add, just like them other events, this time I’m talking about is as true as the sunset.
Pardon me. Now that I’ve gotten older, sometimes I find I start out to tell one story and end up tellin’ another. But to get back to the one I was talkin’ about...So, havin’ been invited to a lynchin’, I took my daddy’s horse and big ole loaded six-gun he kept wrapped up in an oilcloth from under the floorboards of our shack, and took off like someone had set my ass on fire. I rode that poor old horse till he was slap worn out. I had to stop over in a little place just outside of Nacogdoches and steal another one, not on account of I was a thief, but on account of I didn’t want to get caught by the posse and hung and maybe have my pecker cut off and stuck in my mouth. Oh. I also took a chicken. He’s no longer with me, of course, as I ate him out there on the trail.