Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  Saul grabbed the plastic strip with both hands, crouched, and threw himself backward with all of the force he could muster. He expected the handle to tear free and it did, but not before the bulky bag ripped through the opening in a shower of bark and water. Saul clutched at the wet bag, almost dropped it, and hugged it to his chest as he turned and ran.

  The man to his right fired once and then switched to full automatic as Saul ran out of his flashlight beam. Another shaft of light from Saul’s left found him but dropped away suddenly as the man screamed in pain and began shouting curses. A second weapon opened up fifteen feet from where it had fired earlier. Saul ran and wished he’d not lost his glasses.

  The water was only knee-deep when he tripped over a fallen log and rolled onto a low island of shrubbery and swamp debris. He could hear at least two men splashing toward him as he flipped the heavy bag over, found the zipper, opened it, and unsealed the waterproof inner bag.

  “He’s got something!” one man shouted to another. “Hurry!” They splashed closer across the strip of shallow swamp.

  Saul tugged out the web belt of C-4, tossed it aside, and pulled out the M-16 he had taken from Haines. It was not loaded. Taking care not to drop the bag in the water, Saul fumbled for one of the six ammunition clips, pulled one out, identified by feel that it was upside down, and slapped it into the magazine slit. During the scores of hours he had practiced breaking down, loading, and firing the weapon during those weeks in Charleston, he had never considered the reason behind Cohen’s advice months earlier that anyone using a rifle should know how to assemble it while blindfolded.

  The flashlight beams raked across the log Saul crouched behind and from the sounds of splashing Saul knew that the lead man was no more than ten feet away and closing quickly. Saul rolled over, clicked the selector from SAFE to SEMI with a movement born of habit, shouldered the plastic grip, and put a burst of copper-jacketed bullets into the man’s chest and belly at a distance of less than six feet. The man jackknifed forward and seemed to rise backward into the air as his flashlight dropped into the swamp. The second man stopped twenty feet to Saul’s right and shouted something unintelligible. Saul fired right down the beam of the flashlight. Glass and steel shattered, there was a single scream, and then darkness descended.

  Saul blinked, made out a ghostly green glow only feet from him, and realized that the flashlight belonging to the first man he had killed was still glowing under twenty inches of water.

  “Barry?” called a low voice forty feet from Saul’s left, back where the two men had first tried to flank him. “Kip? What the fuck’s going on? I’m hurt. Quit screwing around.”

  Saul pulled another clip from the bag, dropped the C-4 belt back in, and moved quickly to his left, trying to stay in the shallows.

  “Barry!” came the voice again, twenty feet away now. “I’m getting out of here. I’m hurt. You shot me in the fucking leg, you asshole.”

  Saul slipped forward, moving when the man made noise. “Hey! Who’s that?” cried the man in the darkness. From fifteen feet away Saul clearly heard the sound of a safety being clicked off.

  Saul put his back against a tree and whispered, “It’s me. Overholt. Give us a light.”

  The man said, “Shit,” and turned on his flashlight. Saul peered around the tree and saw a man with a gray security uniform bloodied at the left leg. He was cradling an Uzi submachine gun and fumbling with the flash-light. Saul killed him with a single bullet to the head.

  The security uniform was a single-piece coverall with a zipper down the front. Saul switched off the flashlight, tugged the uniform off the corpse, and pulled it on in the dark. There were distant shouts from the beach. The coverall was too big, the boots too small even without socks, but Saul Laski had never appreciated clothing so much in his life. He felt around in three inches of water for the long-billed cap the man had been wearing, found it, and tugged it on.

  Cradling the M-16, the Uzi in his right hand and three extra clips for it in the deep pocket of his coverall, the flashlight clipped on his belt loop, Saul waded back to where he had left his bag. The web belts of C-4, extra magazines for the rifle, and the Colt automatic were dry and accounted for. He dropped the Uzi in, sealed and shouldered the bag, and walked out of the swamp.

  A second boat had landed twenty yards down the beach and the fourth man had walked down to join the five new arrivals. He swiveled as Saul emerged west of the inlet and strolled across the beach.

  “Kip, that you?” shouted the man over wind and surf sounds.

  Saul shook his head. “Barry,” he called, hand cupped half over his mouth.

  “What the hell’s all the shooting? Did you get him?”

  “East!” Saul shouted cryptically and waved his hand down the beach beyond the men. Three of the guards raised weapons and jogged that way. The man who had shouted raised a hand radio and talked quickly. Two of the boats patrolling beyond the breakers swung east and began playing their searchlights along the tree line.

  Saul waded to the first beached boat, lifted the small anchor out of the sand and dropped it in the back, and climbed in, dropping his bag onto the passenger seat. Blood from his back had soaked the long carrying strap. There were two huge outboard motors mounted, but the boat had an electronic ignition and required a key. The key was in the dash-mounted ignition switch.

  Saul started the motors, backed away from the beach in a snarl of foam and sand, swung it into the breakers, and pounded through to open sea. Two hundred yards out he swung the boat east and opened the throttles to full speed. The bow raised and he came around the northeast edge of the island and roared south at forty-five knots. Saul felt the crashing of the bow and keel against the waves as a pounding through his very bones. The radio rasped and he turned it off. A boat heading north blinked at him, but he ignored it.

  Saul slid the M-16 lower so the salt spray could not get at it. The water beaded on his stubbled cheeks and refreshed him as a cold shower might. He knew he had lost blood and was losing more— his leg continued to bleed and he could feel the stickiness against his back— but even in the post-adrenaline letdown, determination burned in him like a blue flame. He felt strong and very, very angry.

  A mile ahead a green light blinked at the end of the long dock that led to Live Oak Lane and to the Manse and to Oberst Wilhelm von Borchert.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Charleston Tuesday,

  June 16, 1981

  It was after midnight and Natalie Preston felt trapped in a nightmare she had suffered as a child. An event that occurred the evening of her mother’s funeral had brought her awake screaming for her father at least once a week for months that long-ago summer and fall.

  The funeral had been an old-fashioned one with hours of visitation in the old mortuary. Friends and relatives had arrived and filed by the open coffin for what seemed like days to Natalie as she sat in sad silence next to her father. She had cried for the past two days and had been empty of tears as she sat holding her father’s hand, but at some point she had felt the pressing need to go to the bathroom and whispered the fact to her father. He rose to lead her to the rest room, but another contingent of older relatives had come up to him just then and an elderly aunt had offered to take her. The old lady had taken her hand and led her down hallways, through several doorways, and up a flight of stairs before pointing to a white door.

  When Natalie emerged, pressing down the skirt of her stiff, dark blue dress, the elderly aunt was gone. Natalie confidently turned left instead of right, went through doors, down halls and stairways, and was lost within a minute. It did not frighten her. She knew the chapel and receiving rooms must take up most of the first floor and if she opened enough doors she would find her father. What she did not know was that the rear staircase descended directly to the basement.

  Natalie had looked through two doors opening into bare, empty rooms when she swung open a door and let the corridor light illuminate steel tables, racks of huge bottles holding dark fluid
, and long, hollow steel needles attached to thin rubber hoses. She had covered her mouth with her hands and backed down the corridor, turning to run through broad double doors. She was halfway across a large, box-filled room before her eyes adjusted to the weak light filtering through the small curtained windows.

  Natalie stopped in the middle of the room. No sounds disturbed the heavy air. The objects around her were not boxes; they were coffins. The heavy, dark wood of their surfaces seemed to absorb the diffused light. Several of the caskets had their hinged lids open at the top, just as her mother’s did. Not five feet away from Natalie was a small, white box— just her size— with a crucifix on top. Years later, Natalie realized that she had stumbled into a casket storeroom or showroom, but at the time she was sure that she stood alone in the dim light in the middle of a dozen filled coffins. She expected white-faced corpses to sit up at any second, jack-knifing rigidly into a sitting position, heads turning and eyes opening toward her just like they did on the Friday Creature Feature vampire movies she and her dad watched.

  There had been another door, but it seemed miles away and to get to it Natalie would have had to walk within clutching distance of four or five dark caskets. She did so, looking ahead only at the door and walking slowly, waiting for the pale arms and hands to lunge at her but refusing to run or scream. It was too important a day; it was her mother’s funeral and she loved her mother.

  Natalie had gone through the door, climbed a lighted stairway, and emerged in the hall near the front door. “There you are, dear!” exclaimed the elderly aunt and had brought her back to her father in the next room with whispered admonitions not to go wandering off to play again.

  She had not thought of her old nightmare in a dozen years, but as she sat in Melanie Fuller’s parlor with Justin sitting across from her, staring at her with his mad, old-woman eyes set in that pale, pudgy face, Natalie’s reaction was the same as it had been in her dream when the coffin lids had been pushed back, when a dozen corpses had sat up stiffly in their boxes, and when two dozen hands had clutched at her and dragged her— resisting but still not screaming— toward the small white coffin that lay empty and waiting for her.

  “A penny for your thoughts, dear,” came the old woman’s voice from the mouth of the child across from her.

  Natalie jerked fully awake. It was the first time either of them had spoken since the senseless pointing and shouting the child had gone through twenty minutes earlier. “What’s happening?” asked Natalie.

  Justin shrugged, but his smile was very wide. His baby teeth looked as if they had been sharpened to points.

  “Where is Saul?” demanded Natalie. Her fingers went to the monitor pack on her belt. “Tell me!” she snapped. Saul had designed the telemetry pack hookup to the explosives, but had balked at her actually using it when she was with Melanie. They had compromised with a monitor that transmitted a warning to the second receiver in the car with Jackson rather than triggering the C-4. It had been Natalie who reattached the wires to the C-4 on her web belt after Saul left for the island. During the last twenty-seven hours she had found herself half hoping that the old monster would try to seize her mind and that the thing would trigger the explosive. Natalie was exhausted and drained by fear and at times it seemed preferable just to have it over with. She did not know if the C-4 was certain to kill the old woman from this distance, but she was certain that Melanie’s zombies would not let her get any closer to the creature upstairs.

  “Where’s Saul?” repeated Natalie. “Oh, they have him,” the boy said casually.

  Natalie stood up. There were stirrings in the shadows of adjoining rooms. “You’re lying,” she snapped.

  “Am I?” Justin smiled. “Now why would I do that?”

  “What happened?”

  Justin shrugged again and stifled a yawn. “It’s after my bedtime, Nina. Why don’t we continue this conversation in the morning?”

  “Tell me!” shouted Natalie. Her finger found the override button on the monitor.

  “Oh, all right,” pouted the boy. “Your Hebrew friend got away from the guards, but Willi’s man caught him and took him back to the Manse.”

  “The Manse,” breathed Natalie. “Yes, yes,” snapped the boy. He kicked his heels against the leg of the chair. “Willi and Mr. Barent want to talk to him. They’re playing a game.”

  Natalie looked around her. Something moved in the foyer. “Is Saul hurt?”

  Justin shrugged. “Is he still alive?” demanded Natalie.

  The boy made a face. “I said they wanted to talk to him, Nina. They can’t talk to a dead person, now can they?”

  Natalie lifted her free hand and chewed at a nail. “It’s time to do what we planned,” she said.

  “It’s not,” whined the six-year-old. “It’s not at all the situation you told me to wait for. They’re just playing.”

  “You’re lying,” said Natalie. “They can’t be playing the game if Willi’s man is out and Saul’s at the Manse.”

  “Not that game,” said the boy, shaking his head at her stupidity. It was difficult for Natalie to remember that he was only a flesh and blood marionette being manipulated by the ancient crone upstairs. “They’re playing chess,” said the boy.

  “Chess,” said Natalie. “Yes. The winner gets to decide on the next game. Willi wants to play for bigger stakes.” Justin shook his head in an old woman’s gesture. “Willi always had a Wagnerian preoccupation with Ragnarok and Armageddon. It comes with German blood, I’m sure.”

  “Saul is hurt and captured at the Manse where they’re playing chess,” said Natalie in a monotone. She remembered the afternoon seven months earlier when she and Rob had listened to Saul Laski retell his story of the camps and the run-down castle keep in the Polish forest where the young Oberst had challenged Der Alte in a final game.

  “Yes, yes,” Justin said happily. “Miss Sewell will also get to play. On Mr. Barent’s team. He’s very handsome.”

  Natalie stepped back. Saul and she had discussed what she should do if the plan fell apart. He recommended that Natalie throw the satchel charges with the forty-second timer and run, even though it meant letting Barent and the others escape. The second possibility was to continue the bluff, force Melanie’s hand, in the hopes of still getting Barent and possibly other members of the Island Club.

  Now Natalie saw a third possibility. At least six hours of darkness remained. She realized that while the demand for justice and revenge for her father’s murder was still strong in her, that her love for Saul was stronger. She also knew that Saul’s discussion with her of exit plans had been only talk; that he had made no escape plans.

  Natalie knew that justice demanded that she stay and follow the plan through, but justice was second in her heart at that moment to the rising urge to save Saul if there was any chance at all.

  “I’m leaving for a few minutes,” she said firmly. “If Barent tries to leave or the other conditions apply, do precisely what we planned. I mean it, Melanie. I will brook no failure here. Your own life depends on this. If you fail, the Island Club will surely plan to kill you, but they will be too late because I will kill you. Do you understand, Melanie?”

  Justin stared at her, a slight smile on his round face.

  Natalie whirled and walked toward the foyer. Someone moved quickly in the darkness ahead of her, going through the door to the dining room. Justin followed her. Someone moved on the landing at the head of the stairs and there were sounds in the kitchen. Natalie stopped in the foyer, her finger still on the red button. Her scalp itched under the round tape of the electrodes. “I will be back before sunrise,” she said.

  Justin smiled up at her, his face glowing slightly in the faint green glow from the second floor.

  Catfish had been watching for more than six hours when Natalie emerged from the Fuller house. That wasn’t on the night’s flight plan. He squeezed the transmitter button on the cheap CB twice— what Jackson had called “breaking squelch”— and crouched in the bus
hes to see what was going on. He had yet to see Marvin, but when he did he was going to make his move to save his old gang leader from the Voodoo Lady, no matter what else was going down.

  Natalie was moving fast when she crossed the courtyard. She waited while some dude Catfish couldn’t see unlocked the gate for her.

  She crossed the street without looking back and turned right past Catfish’s alley rather than turning left toward where Jackson was parked down the street. That was the prearranged signal that she might be followed. Catfish broke squelch three times letting Jax know to head around the block for the pickup point and then he crouched lower and waited.

  A man moved out of the shadows of the Fuller courtyard and jogged across the street in a half crouch the minute Natalie was out of sight. Catfish caught a glimpse of reflected light from the streetlight on the blue steel of the barrel of a handgun. Big automatic from the looks of it. “Shit,” whispered Catfish, waited a minute to make sure no one else was following, and slipped along in the shadow of parked cars on the east side of the street.

  The guy with the gun was a dude Catfish didn’t recognize— too small to be the Culley monster he’d glimpsed in the courtyard, too white to be Marvin.

  Catfish moved silently to the corner and crawled through some screening shrubbery to poke his head out. Natalie was halfway down the block, ready to cross to the other side. White dude with the gun was moving real slow in the shadow on this side. Catfish broke squelch four times and followed, his black pants and windbreaker making him invisible.

  He hoped Natalie’d unplugged all that C-4 shit. High explosives made Catfish nervous. He’d seen the bits and pieces that were all that was left of his best friend Leroy after the crazy dude’d set off that dynamite he was carry ing. Catfish didn’t mind dying— he’d never expected to see thirty— but he wanted his smiling self to be laid out in one big gorgeous piece, wrapped in his best seven-hundred-dollar suit, for Marcie, Sheila, and Belinda to weep over.