Terminal City: Book One in the Terminal City Saga

by Trevor Melanson

  Clayton spotted a bullet.

  It was lying right beside his foot, obscured under a veil of dirt and blood. He couldn’t see it well, but it looked like a 9mm, a handgun bullet. Certainly not used for hunting, but then these weren’t hunting grounds. Indeed, the evidence was starting to suggest what he already felt in his gut— someone had been shot.

  As he often did, Clayton unconsciously touched the wounds on his stomach, neighboring scars left behind from the two bullets that had entered his body a couple years back— a permanent reminder that he didn’t know when to pull the trigger. And of Charlie Reese, the kid who didn’t survive his bullets. Clayton thought about him every day, sometimes like he knew him, like he was a younger brother who’d taken a wrong turn in life.

  The memory, up until a point, remained vivid to this day: Charlie lifting his gun, Clayton pleading with him not to do it. He’d seen it coming and let it happen, for which he’d nearly died. Lessons don’t come tougher than that. And yet he still wondered if he’d have the nerve to shoot at the right time now, if ever he were put in that situation again. Or perhaps he would overcompensate and shoot too quickly. For some reason, that frightened him even more.

  In any event, Clayton suspected that whoever had been shot by the bullet in this clearing hadn’t been as lucky as he’d been that day. Then again, nothing was certain yet. This was a strange crime scene.

  James, the other detective on site, stepped out from behind a tree. “Hey, Clayton.”

  “Hey, James.” Clayton stood up. “Get anything useful from the witness?”

  James shrugged. “Nah. She didn’t see anything. Just rambled on about this being a safe neighborhood, the same shit you’ve heard a million times. What about you? Find anything interesting? I haven’t poked around yet.”

  “A bullet.” Clayton pointed near his feet. “Right here. It’s a bit hard to see.”

  “That is interesting,” said James.

  “It’s sort of strange too,” added Clayton.

  “How so?”

  “Well, whoever shot this bullet took the time to remove the body, but he made no effort to conceal the crime scene,” explained Clayton.

  “You’re saying it was an amateur,” replied James.

  “Perhaps, assuming he was trying to get rid of the evidence.” Clayton knelt back down and examined the bullet from two feet away. “Or maybe the victim lived. Maybe he was carried away kicking, or maybe he played dead until the shooter left, used his shirt to stop the bleeding then stumbled on out of here.”

  “I don’t know.” James didn’t look convinced. “That’s a lot of blood. Plus, if someone went to the ER with a bullet wound, we’d know. I didn’t hear anything this morning.”

  “Perhaps.” Clayton kept his eyes on the ground. “If he went to the ER, but not everyone wants to involve the police. Or maybe our guy just didn’t make it far enough. I know it’s a long shot, man, but stranger things have…” He trailed off.

  “What is it?” asked James.

  “Another bullet,” said Clayton.

  “Two bullets. You still think this guy lived?” James walked past him. “I’m going to look around the woods a bit, see if I can find anything else.”

  “All right.” Clayton looked around too, but he didn’t find any more clues— or bullets.

  His cell phone vibrated. It was a text message from Alicia: Dinner tomorrow?

  Clayton’s smile emerged. He texted her back — What are we having? — and for a few seconds managed not to think about bullets or blood.

  Chapter 18

  David,

  I miss you, you beautiful bastard. Just a few more weeks then I’ll be home. Promise. This kid, I tell ya… what an arrogant little know-it-all. I like him. Reminds me so much of John.

  Lots of love,

  Lester

  PS. That is what “LOL” stands for, right?

  —lesterwright@nmail.com

  * * *

  Mason couldn’t fall asleep, but he wasn’t quite awake either. He lingered somewhere in between, just conscious enough to know he was conscious. It wasn’t only the bumpy car ride that kept him up; it was as much the man sitting beside him, Rowland, whom he was tasked to kill. The situation was rather unnerving, to say the least. And yet he was more exhausted than he’d ever been before, more exhausted than he had known was possible. Death, it seemed, sucked the life right out of you.

  Mason felt the car slow down and opened his eyes. “Are we there?”

  “No,” replied Rowland. “Not yet.”

  Mason peered out the window. They had stopped along the side of a winding road, two lanes barely wide enough for passing cars. The concrete was a web of cracks and neglect, just some skinny line of humanity cutting through the mountains around them. He hadn’t been paying much attention to their journey thus far and was a little surprised by the snow outside. They must be pretty high up.

  “Why did you pull over?” asked Mason.

  “A cop,” said Rowland.

  “What?”

  A man’s knuckles knocked on Rowland’s window.

  Ah, a cop.

  Rowland had to roll down his window by hand— it was an old car. “Yes?” he said, making no effort to mask his annoyance.

  The cop hunched over to get eye level. “Do you know how fast you were going?” He was a portly man with a generation’s-old moustache.

  “Yes,” replied Rowland. “I do.”

  “And do you know what the speed limit is on this road?”

  “Get to your point.”

  “Don’t give me lip,” the cop warned. “You were doing ‘bout twenty kilometers over the speed limit, on a dangerous road no less. Not to mention it’s snowin’ pretty heavy. What if you’d slid into a car coming ‘round that bend up there?” He smacked his palms together, mimicking a crash. “Or flew off the mountain side and killed you and your friend.” He shook his head. “You can’t be speeding through these mountains, mister.”

  “My senses and reflexes are superior to yours,” explained Rowland. “I will be just fine. As will my… friend.”

  The police officer scoffed. “Famous last words.” He stood up straight, metal clipboard in hand, and began filling out Rowland’s speeding ticket. “Now I better not catch you speeding again,” he said. “Don’t think I won’t haul your ass into jail.”

  “Oh,” said Rowland. “I do not think that.”

  The cop walked to the back of their car to double-check the licence plate. Rowland eyed him through the rear-view mirror. Mason eyed both of them, unsure which one he should be more worried about.

  The police officer stepped back into view and hunched down again. “There’s a strange odor coming from your trunk. Mind opening it up for me so I can take a look inside,” he said.

  Mason’s heart sank.

  Rowland, on the other hand, didn’t look worried at all. “Yes,” he said. “I do mind.”

  “I wasn’t really asking.” The cop had one hand on his holstered pistol. “Open up your trunk, sir.”

  They stared at one another for only a few seconds — though if time were measured in tension, it might have lasted forever — before Rowland made his move. He did so without so much as a peep. In fact, it was the cop who gave it away, and it wasn’t pleasant. The noise he made— it seemed like the only noise he could make. It was half a cough, half a scream, and wholly unexpected going by the expression Mason saw in his eyes. He knew what came next.

  The police officer collapsed to the ground, bouncing off the side of Rowland’s Cadillac on his way down. Rowland put his foot back on the pedal, not wasting any time. Mason felt a bump as the car accelerated, but he didn’t look back to see what part of the cop they’d just run over. Frankly, he didn’t want to know. He already knew enough— he knew the man was dead.

  He asked anyway: “Did you… d
id you kill him?”

  “Of course,” Rowland said matter-of-factly. They were driving at full speed now— or rather, about twenty kilometers over the limit.

  Mason made a fist and pounded the air like a gavel. “Why?” For a moment, his anger toward the man beside him outpaced his fear of him. “Couldn’t you have just, I don’t know, knocked him out or something?”

  “He had my licence plate number,” explained Rowland. “I like this car. And he had seen our faces. Had I let him live, we would have become fugitives. Then I would have had to kill many cops. This way, it is just the one. Surely, you can see the logic in that.”

  Mason gave him a cold shoulder, gazing out his passenger window at the trees, trying to find the furthest one from the man beside him. “People are not… math,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, but they are,” replied Rowland. “More so than you think.”

  “How’s that?” asked Mason, regretting the question immediately.

  “They are predictable,” said Rowland, “variables stuck in the same old equations. They never learn. They never change.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Mason was still mad.

  Rowland took a deep breath and leaned forward in his seat, keeping his attention on the increasingly snowy road ahead; they could no longer see the asphalt. “Most people fear what they do not understand,” he said. “They fear anything different, anything new.”

  Suddenly, the car skidded, only for a second, but there wasn’t a lot of leeway up here. Rowland slowed down. Mason thought he looked a little embarrassed.

  Rowland continued, his anger slipping through the cracks of his pragmatic facade: “Outsiders, for example, are invariably met by the masses with hostility.” He enunciated each consonant like gunfire. “Foreigners, heretics, men who love men— it plays out the same way each time. The outsiders are persecuted, killed, made scapegoats for whatever ails society. The masses do come to accept them after a time, but only as society evolves, only as they are normalized. Not because these people have learned anything, Mason Cross— there is a difference.

  “When the next set of strangers steps off the boat or out from the closet, the masses will treat them just as they treated outsiders before them. Even those who were victimized in the past, even those who continue to be victimized— they will join right in, ensuring the cycle never ends.

  “You see, people are stupid.” Rowland had regained his perfect composure. “They accept what they are told like dogs memorizing tricks. They like to think they are more moral, more enlightened than their ancestors, but they are not. They benefit from hindsight but do not see the big picture. That would require them to think for themselves, to be like you and me. Most people are not like us, Mason Cross. And thus society, at least as it exists today, is doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

  “Like I said, variables in the same old equations,” said Rowland. “Equations people are too ignorant to see, which is why they are stuck in them. They see only the other, the enemy. Imagine they saw necromancers.” He lingered on that for a moment. “I am much, much older than you, Mason Cross. I have seen firsthand how history unfolds. It frustrated me when I was younger. Now it bores me.”

  “So, people are predictable,” said Mason, who didn’t altogether disagree. “That doesn’t justify killing them like fucking flies. That cop probably had a family. And how do you know he fit your stereotype? Not everyone gives into mob mentality, and even those who do… don’t always. Ignorance comes in degrees, and no one escapes it completely. Your math only works when you generalize, when you imagine there are two types of people, smart and stupid, us and them, so how are you any better than the people you despise for thinking the same way?”

  “Because I knew he was a fool,” said Rowland. “What makes me different is the fact that my judgements are born from knowledge. I can see people’s spirits. I can see who they are, how they think. I could see what kind of man he was, that cop, and what I saw was a fucking fool.” Rowland was tensing up; it reminded Mason of his father. “Do not presume to know the limits of my power, novice.”

  After that, they didn’t speak for another half-hour. By the time Rowland broke the silence, the snow on the road had piled high enough to force them well below the speed limit. It was an agonizing situation for both of them: Rowland wanted to go fast, and Mason just wanted to go home, to get this nightmare of a road trip over with.

  “Someday,” said Rowland, “when you are older and wiser, you will see the world as I do.”

  Mason shook his head defiantly. “Never.”

  This time, the silence lasted the rest of the way there.

  * * *

  There was nothing particularly necromantic about the wood-paneled house they drove up to — at least not from the outside — although it was certainly isolated. And big. Mason couldn’t tell where the property ended and the forest began, but the last house he’d seen must have been about a kilometer back.

  They reached the end of the driveway and slowed to a stop. “Go. Knock,” said Rowland. He kept one hand on the steering wheel and the car engine humming.

  “Fine.” Mason unsnapped his seat belt and stepped out into the biting cold. He was still dressed for Terminal City weather, not the mountains. He zipped up his jacket on the way to the front door and then knocked twice.

  Half a minute passed and no one answered. Mason looked over toward Rowland, who was waiting impatiently in his idling Cadillac, and shrugged. That’s when the door swung open.

  “Hello?”

  Mason turned on his heel.

  The voice belonged to a middle-aged woman with bushy black hair. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Hi,” Mason said and then hesitated. “Do you… are you a friend of Lester Wright?”

  “Yes,” she replied, eyeing him suspiciously. “What is this about?”

  It struck Mason then that he hadn’t prepared himself for this. He didn’t quite know how he should deliver the news, in spite of the fact that he himself had been on the receiving end before. He’d been so caught up worrying about Rowland that the gravity of this moment had all but evaded him. Until now.

  “What do you want?” she asked again, peering over his shoulder distrustfully at Rowland’s car.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he said. “It’s about Lester.”

  She returned her gaze to him, and now Mason could see dread in her eyes, in the way her body shifted. “Who are you?” she asked, even more accusingly than before.

  “My name is Mason Cross. I’m John Cross’s son. My father was a friend of—”

  “I know who your father was,” she interrupted him. “I knew him quite well, in fact. I’m sorry for your loss.” And just like that, her defences had come down. “And for my bad manners. We don’t get a lot of visitors here.” She cleared her throat. “You can call me Clarissa. Now, what’s this about Lester?”

  “Lester, he…” Mason stalled for a moment, but he knew there was no point in beating around the bush; he’d always preferred clarity when it came to his dad’s death. He took a deep breath and told her, unambiguously, “Lester’s been killed.”

  Clarissa closed her eyes and grasped the edge of the door, as if to keep herself from falling. “How?” she whispered.

  “Inquisitors.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  When she reopened her eyes, they were red with tears. “Who’s that waiting in the car behind you?” she asked.

  “Another necromancer,” said Mason. “You might know him. His name is Rowland.”

  Clarissa took a step backward. “Rowland? As in the Rowland?”

  “He really does have quite the reputation,” replied Mason. “He was hunting the inquisitor who killed Lester, but he arrived too late and found me instead. He helped me find this place. Do you know him personal
ly?”

  “We’ve spoken once or twice before,” she replied. “I’d heard a rumor that he had returned, but I didn’t really believe it myself. I’d always figured he’d gotten bored with life after all these years and ended his. Wishful thinking, I guess. You should know he’s bad news, Mason. If your father knew you were—”

  “I know, I know,” he interrupted her. “Believe me, but there was no other way to get here. I didn’t have an address, and I thought Lester’s body should be brought home to you, to the people he loved. Rowland said he knew how to get here and insisted on driving.”

  Clarissa nodded sympathetically. “Thank you, Mason. That was very thoughtful. You’re a good man, just like your father— just like your mentor.” She wiped a tear from her cheek with the butt of her palm. “It was only a week ago when we last talked, Lester and I. He told me you were very bright, very talented for someone so young. He was quite fond of you, you know, even if he wasn’t any good at showing it. That’s just how he was.”

  “I think we had that in common,” said Mason. “His body… it’s in the trunk of that car. I can help bring it inside if you need.” He sure as hell didn’t want Rowland moving it his way.

  “No, no. You’ve done enough.” She touched his arm affectionately. “I’ll get Pat and Roger to carry him in. But please, stay for the night. The funeral will be in a few hours.”

  “So soon?” Mason didn’t mean to sound judgemental.

  “We’re necromancers, Mason.” A sad smile reached across her face. “We see life and death in a different light, so we celebrate them differently too. In private. Besides, I want you to be here for the ceremony. You don’t need to say anything. I just want you to hear what a great man your mentor was from the people who knew him best.”

  Then Clarissa nodded to the car idling behind him. “He can stay too,” she said. “If he must.”

  * * *

  As they often do, preparations took longer than planned, and it was almost midnight by the time Lester’s funeral started. It was also freezing cold. Mason had borrowed a winter coat from Pat, who was much larger than he was, and now had his hands tucked away in its long sleeves.