Waiting for Mister Cool

by Gerard Houarner

  The Beast wanted blood and flesh, not plastic fiber threads of rope. It wanted him to turn and launch himself at the men grabbing him as he set to work on another binding. Max gagged at the taste in his mouth, in his throat. But the rope gave away just as he was regretting not sharpening his teeth, as he’d seen others who shared his appetites do to insure the kill.

  Max gave Lee the knife, turned to protect his comrade. He bore down on the Beast hard, trying to keep control. Already, he’d been stupid enough to waste time on two of Lee’s bindings, instead of working on setting a hand free first and letting Lee do the rest. Too late, he realized he’d given a weapon to a drugged man who might forget who his allies were. He had to wonder if the tingling at the back of his neck was what Lee felt, whenever Max let the Beast loose around him.

  Darkness danced with the men who’d gathered to perform their rituals and sacrifice. The pair whirled and writhed to the music of screams. There were enough unattached partners to keep Max busy, though he only had to fend off knives and sticks. Darkness seemed preoccupied with those armed with guns.

  Lee finally freed himself, but immediately lost his balance and fell, distracting Max long enough for someone to tackle him. Max spun in the man’s grip, kicked and twisted, reached without looking for something that slid easily into his hand, and finally found the blade he’d given Lee in the chest of the man he’d just killed. He pulled it out while the Beast snorted, ready for another charge.

  “Are you real?” Lee asked, blinking up at Max.

  Three more men jumped on top of them, smashing fists and rocks into their faces.

  Almost immediately, one of them vanished.

  Alioune laid her hand on Max’s shoulder as she passed, as if to reassure both herself and him that they all were alive.

  Max countered locks and chokes a man tried to apply to his arm and throat. Instead of jumping into the openings the man had left with his attempts, Max bit his attacker’s wrists and forearms. By the time he’d worked his way up through one bicep, to a shoulder, and finally the neck, Max had his man – middle-aged, smelling of soap and oils as if trying to impress someone, powerfully built with muscles grown by vanity and not labor – screaming and straining to get away.

  He gave the man to the Beast, who lingered over the kill, savoring the death, trying to catch the terror in the man’s eyes in the dim and erratic light, the smell of life bleeding away on his breath.

  A symphony of pain filled the cavern with its climax.

  A long cough of gunfire, reverberating into an angry roll of thunder, made Max tear away.

  “Fucking heads!” Lee screamed, glancing at the remains at his feet, wiping his eyes with his forearm. He’d found a gun, another Galil, or the twins had dropped it in his lap, and killed the third of the last group of attackers, who had gone down on his knees, throat slashed, eyes glazed.

  “They’re just kids! Jesus. Jesus!” Lee wailed, and like a panicked rookie, spent his clip in undisciplined fire, mostly at the far walls and the ceiling, before wincing at falling rock. He looked around, stunned, as if waking from a nightmare.

  “The twins!” Max shouted at Lee. “You’ll kill them!”

  Lee grunted, stared at the weapon in his hands. Max saw the knapsack between them, grabbed it. It was full of ammunition clips the twins had provided. Lee caught on, took the bag from Max, snapped another clip into the Galil. He hunched himself around the weapon with a mother’s tenderness for her child as he stood up. “They’re going low,” he said. “I’m aiming high. The girls and me aren’t stupid, you know.” He turned slowly in a circle, firing off short bursts. A few fallen lanterns remained lit, throwing off just enough light to sculpt the outlines of bodies from blocks of darkness.

  Max growled. The Beast gagged at the affront of being chastised.

  Lee turned his head in Max’s direction.

  Max couldn’t read the man’s expression in the gloom.

  “What the fuck happened to you?” Lee made a quarter-turn away, fired another burst. The muzzle flash illuminated him in an animated string of frozen moments in which he appeared as both an alarmingly terrible avenger and a terribly inviting target.

  “Are you back?” Max asked, resting, gauging his next move under the covering fire.

  “I’m still tripping, but I can handle this shit. It ain’t even as good as – ow, shit, got lost for a minute....”

  “You don’t look good,” Max said, pointing at the blood still streaming from between his legs.

  “Some people pay good money for this kind of shit. And fuck you. You never smelled that bad even back in Nam. And you’re fucking naked, again. And you got another goddamned boner.”

  Max turned away from Lee, not bothering to point they were both bloody and naked. “I’ve been born again.” He followed the sound of the twins.

  Lee shouted out after him: “You look like the same old ‘you’ to me.”

  The assembly of child molesters, Morris’s secret hive of pervs, had broken, and those that could were fleeing. Kueur and Alioune each chased down an escaping group, one band climbing the wall Max had descended, the other heading for the ledge where the twins had been held captive. The twins cut prey down at the legs, then moved on, darting and angling, chasing down strays before they could get too far, then quickly returning to bring each entire herd down. The lanterns the men carried to light their way made them easy targets.

  Max grasped their strategy: work to cut off any chance for escape, then go back and finish the job with play. He peeled away, spotting a pair of men heading for a tunnel entrance at the far end of the cavern. He could track them just by the smell of the piss and shit in their pants. Bringing them down was an afterthought.

  Lee stayed in the middle the cavern, between the posts he’d been tied to, throwing the beam from a xenon flashlight he’d found into far corners, shooting at anything he didn’t recognize, which turned out to be the wounded trying to stand. He stopped when Max called out for the twins, and the girls answered him.

  The symphony paused, then slipped into a slow movement shaped by the moans and cries of those still living.

  The first to die had been the lucky ones.

  “Max?” Lee called. His voice quavered, showing he’d not recovered from what had been done to him, or what lay at his feet.

  Max gave the two men he’d caught to the Beast, though he kept watch through the mist of blood in his eyes to make sure no surprises, like tentacles whipping down from the ceiling, interfered with their pleasures. The twins returned to the prey they’d brought down and finished them, starting from the genitals, working their way partly into the intestines, then excavating hearts one by one, carefully sustaining the individual crescendos of the fleshy instruments they played with teeth and claw and tongue far beyond their natural peak, in both tone and volume. The twins took the trouble to go through the piles of the dead children’s heads, carefully picking out particular ones, some still whole, others severely decomposed, by a system of judgment Max could not conceive of, and shoving them into the faces of the prey they’d brought down. The men who’d taken the heads could only scream and squirm and crawl and beg and twitch and moan, tendons slashed, muscles torn, bones broken, bodies no longer capable of coherent motion, minds made brittle by desires now broken.

  The twins seemed smaller than Max remembered them to be, as if they’d reverted a few years to the ideal age of the pervs’ victims.

  Lee gave up shooting and ran off, waving his hands around his head as if driving off a swarm of killer bees.

  Max left when the Beast was done with its share of the prey. It didn’t press for more. That would have meant interfering with the twins.

  Max found the passage the two had been heading for, an old tunnel reinforced with wooden beams, leading to the surface where a half-ruined shack covered the opening. Outside, Lee was waiting, sitting in the light of an electric lantern staring at his trembling hands. The Galil lay across his lap, and fresh clips were piled beside him
, along with a few of Max’s grenades. Max surveyed the area, and determined they’d made it out from under the carnival grounds, well into the clearing across the way from Morris’s camp. Fires still burned from behind the hedgerow, all the way to the camp.

  “I know,” Lee said, voice cracking, staring at the nearest cottage, with its sickly yellow light leaking into the night. It seemed the glow was only capable of illuminating the cruel tips and edges of the guardian hedge leaves and thorns. “I’m a target in this light. But I don’t think there’s any more of them out here.”

  “I think you’re right,” Max said. There was no sound of movement in the trees, other than what the breeze kicked up. He was tempted to sit beside Lee and rest. But the nearest cottage kept drawing his attention.

  “Anything in the shacks we should worry about?” Lee asked wearily, as if he already knew the answer.

  Max glanced at the sky. Stars glared back at him, chilled angel eyes. Nothing reached out from the darkness between the stars.

  Where was the storm when he needed a good washing?

  The yellow glow called to him with the nagging insistence of unfinished business.

  He walked to the entry, listening for someone moving inside. Lee came up behind him, weapon in hand, ammunition bag slung over a shoulder, as Max knocked on the door in the places and sequence he remembered seeing. It was funny, how he could remember some things clearly, and others not at all.

  Crickets sang. An owl hooted. He found nature’s voice reassuring.

  His heart raced, banging blood through his ears. At least the Beast lay quiet in its bed of blood.

  He entered, pushing against the light as if it was resisting him. His head spun, his stomach turned. Lee cursed, stumbled, fell to his knees, supported himself with the stock of his weapon. Lee’s balls swung like bells, though his cock had shriveled into a clapper too small to ring them.

  Max kept his hard-on. He climbed the stairs.

  Santos was waiting for him, in another corner of the room. Or someone who looked like the man, or creature, Morris had introduced him to. A twin. A brother. A copy. He wasn’t sure. The smell was the same. And the unfurling of an eyebrow, the flicker of flesh at the corner of the lips, expressed Santos’ recognition of Max.

  Max didn’t think he was supposed to have survived.

  “Did I upset your plans?” Max asked.

  Santos shrugged a shoulder. “The seeds grow, the garden fulfills its design. There are always weeds and stray growth to cut back.”

  “You get around,” Max said, trying to envisage a narrow tunnel filled with the same glow linking all the cottages. He wanted to vomit.

  “No, I don’t,” Santos said. A wheeze that might have been laughter curled out of his mouth like an oily snake. “I’m always here.”

  Lee climbed up the stairs, stopped. Max didn’t need to tell him anything. Putting one of Max’s grenades down on a stair step, Lee fired off five rounds, placing them in the skull and chest. They shots were muffled, and their passage seemed to send ripples through the thick air, but the bullets ripped flesh and shattered bone with satisfying authority. The fundamental rules of the universe still applied.

  Santos’s eyes remained opened, though what lay behind them oozed from the smoking crack in his skull.

  Max grabbed the grenade, pulled the pin, followed Lee out. In the clean night air, they both took a few minutes, hunched over, Lee dry-heaving, to gather themselves. A faint sound, like a pilot light igniting a gas burner, was all the grenade would give him to confirm its detonation.

  Max’s skin itched from the drying gore. He scratched and scraped, and wondered if there were any streams nearby. The underground facility showers probably still worked, but he wasn’t going back down to look for them.

  Lee finally regained his composure. He pointed his weapon at the next cottage. “Do we need to clean them all out? Because if we do, we should just get some more grenades.” As if to demonstrate the ease of the task, he pulled the pin from another grenade he’d taken from the bag and threw it through a window.

  Max wasn’t sure how far it managed to penetrate into the cottage. The explosion, distant, as if from the other side of the compound, threw purple shadows across the interior walls and made the yellow glow more intense for a moment.

  The Beast remained quiet, unimpressed with the odd flesh that was the only thing more hunting would have to offer.

  Already, much of the night had slipped away from Max. He was tired, and empty without the Beast driving him. What memories he latched onto made no sense. He wouldn’t have gone off on one of his private hunts with Lee and the twins in tow, but from his condition and the taste in his mouth, he’d found that level of satisfaction. On the other hand, Santos’s talk of gardens and cuttings gave him the impression he’d been hired to play a part in a game whose rules and objectives he didn’t understand, certainly customary for him, but for which he hadn’t been paid, which was unthinkable.

  But the Beast seemed satisfied, if subdued, and Max was sure that he’d taken his fill of some form of payment at the end.

  The realization settled Max, and he was reluctant to upset the equilibrium he’d just achieved by probing any further. What was done was done. Besides, his best portable explosive device hadn’t put out the yellow light in the cottage. There didn’t seem to be any advantage in opening up any memories, or accounts. Not while there was an old bill waiting to be paid.

  He remembered that much.

  He looked up at the sky again as he said, “Let’s just do what we came here to do.”

  “Right,” Lee said. He ducked his head, glanced at the sky. “I almost forgot about that.”

  They went back to the shack and waited for the twins to come out.

  Chapter 9

  “What happened to you?” Alioune asked, holding hands with Kueur as they shuffled out of the shed and into the night with a bare glance at Max. Their blood-slick skin glistened in the light of Lee’s lamp.

  “I don’t remember,” Max said, studying the dried, stinking film of matter stuck to his skin. His nose was broken, again. He thought he’d done that to himself, this time, for whatever reason. He remembered heads. And headless corpses. The two images didn’t make sense.

  The Beast, surfacing like a lizard lurking in muddy water, revealing only a hint of its shape and hunger, announced his innocence with the silence of its displeasure. But he’d participated. He always did. Wearing life’s remains like a robe was proof.

  Lee covered his nakedness with the clip bag, but couldn’t hide the haunted look of the tortured in the curve of his spine and the droop of lips and brow. At least his random tics were gone. The twins let their small steps take them in a circle around Lee and Max, as if they’d been reduced to moths captured by the gravity of simple lantern light. Max wanted to hold them in his arms. The Beast fought the instinct. Max remained still, unsure of his motives, and of what comfort might be found by spreading the dead on each other.

  “I’m fine,” Lee said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Clothes,” Kueur said, picking up the lantern waving it around, looking at the ground.

  It took a moment for Max to realize she was looking for bodies to scavenge. She said something else, but the meat in her mouth made it hard for him to understand her.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Water,” Alioune said, pointing at the woods, as if she could hear the splashing of a stream. “Wash.”

  “Hell yeah,” Lee said. “Nothing like wearing the clothes of the man you killed.”

  “You could wear his skin.”

  “Tonton,” Kueur said.

  “Right,” said Lee. “Wash and wear. That’s what we need to do. Going to call in an airstrike?”

  “That war is over,” Max said.

  “Not for those children,” Kueur said.

  “Those kids,” said Lee.

  His tears stunned Max.

  Kueur put the lantern on the ground as if it had become too heavy to
bear.

  “What happened to them?” Lee asked. “Their bodies?”

  Max frowned at the hint of a memory. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Fucking bastards. Morris was right, they were monsters, those guys. Fucking monsters.”

  Max took the gun out of Lee’s hands, seeing his finger tighten on the trigger. He thought there’d been enough noise for the night. “Everybody’s a monster.”

  “Not like that,” Lee said. And quietly, he repeated, “not like that.” He plucked a grenade from the bag. “Where is Morris, anyway?”

  The name sparked recognition. “He’s gone,” Max said, feeling the satisfaction that he’d done something to make the statement true.

  “Shit. Guess we did his job for him, anyway.”

  “Some of his men were left.” He was certain what he’d said was true, but couldn’t say how or why. Max looked to the cottages, and the hedge wall, listening for voices, or sounds of movement, coming from something he could only think of as the carnival town. “Think they left.”

  “Smart.”

  “We’re still here.”

  “So’s this place. Let’s get the fuck out.”

  Lee stood up first, then Max. They both hesitated in taking the first step, and Max felt the weight of unfinished business.

  And then Kueur broke down, weeping, and Alioune joined her, and they fought off Max and Lee as the men tried to comfort the twins.

  Neither Lee nor Max pressed, and Max felt suddenly ashamed of his nakedness. And something else.

  The twins. He’d failed as their protector.

  The Beast’s barking laugh taunted him.

  Max took off, finding a line of vehicles parked among the trees nearby. He into broke cars, trucks and SUV’s, scavenging for clothes, supplies, a sweet to give the girls. Lee joined him, emptying the bag he carried and filling it with a harvest of trail mix packs, fruit, bottled water. The collections of photographs they found unraveled at least part of the mystery of what they’d all been through.