“Smells like we’ve just crawled into a giant’s ass,” Kotter said.
“This is a natural hot spring,” Mûwth said. The faint hint of his silhouette drew contrast against the darkness. He was a good ten feet out from them, though his voice sounded like it was coming from everywhere at once.
“Feels like it’s got to be close to ninety degrees,” Thanh mused. “And I don’t know if it’s the sulfuric content, but I almost feel like a buoy, like I’m floating.”
“You sure you know your way through here?” Keller called after Mûwth, who was already swimming away from them, judging by the clamor of his stroking arms and kicking legs.
“Follow me to your destiny.”
II
Barstow, California
EVELYN AWOKE TO THE SOUND OF SCREAMING. HER EYES SNAPPED WIDE AND she shot upright, blinking as she tried to rationalize her surroundings. For a fleeting moment, she thought her entire adulthood had been a dream, and here she was again, thirteen and asleep in her old bedroom. It took the wavering kelp beneath hanging lights as intense as the sun to draw her back to the present.
Had she been dreaming?
The faint residue of an all-consuming dream lingered in her head like a slowly dissipating fog. Her last vanishing thought was of a lake stretching away as far as she could see. Or was it an ocean? All she could remember were sands as white as snow rimming the course of the bank. And smoke. Smoke washing over from behind on an unseen wind, bringing with it the scent of burning meat. Thick black smoke as though whatever was burning had long since been consumed.
Her eyes had been steadily dripping closed, sleep summoning her back to its invitingly warm embrace.
Shrill screaming.
She was wide awake now, eyes darting from side to side around her room. The tremendous glare of the sodium halide bulbs turned the middle of the room to daylight, chasing the darkness into all four corners. Behind a shelf lined with dolls their shadows stood twice their height, stretching clear up to the ceiling where a wash of darkness pooled like crude oil.
The sound echoed through her head, slowly dissipating as her mind tried to comprehend the noise. It hadn’t been screaming; not like a wailing baby or a terrified woman. It had been more shrill, hundreds of voices mounting one another in a discordant cry of terror.
“The pheasants!” she gasped, lunging to her feet.
The tingling of sleep still infested her legs, yet she dragged them out of the bedroom, bracing herself on the hallway wall before propelling herself toward the main room. Through her father’s closed door she could hear the buzz of static from the television, a stain of gray creeping across the floor from beneath the door.
She slapped at the kitchen light, which blossomed like a quasar before popping with a snap, leaving a lingering blue glow. The rear door rattled when she slammed into it, barely able to grab the knob before twisting and tugging it inward far enough to slip through.
The sound of screaming assaulted her like a slap to the face.
Launching herself from the stairs, she barely maintained her balance on the hard, windblown dirt, skinning her palms as she caught herself.
All she could see ahead were the vague outlines of the rows of bird pens against the night horizon to the east. A mass of flapping wings pounded together, the air filled with short downy feathers and long multicolored quills ripped from their flesh moorings. Her first thought was that the coyotes that stalked this area of the Mojave Desert had found a way into the pens, but the shrieking of the pheasants was beyond anything she had ever heard. Usually a single mongrel managed to dig beneath the netting or squeeze through a weak spot, but it would quickly grab the first bird it could snap it jaws around and dash off into the night before even startling the other birds from their slumber. And that was just one pen. Every enclosure she could see was alive with activity, shadowed forms battling in the air in their mad attempts to tear through the nylon netting surrounding the twenty-foot rectangular cage.
Sand kicking from her heels, heavy feet scraping the hard earth, she reached the ringneck pen first. There were only about sixty birds in there as there had been a recent run of budget hunters, but it appeared as though every single one of them was hurling itself against the netting in a frantic attempt at freedom.
She tried to say something soothing to calm them, but her voice was drowned out by the frenetic shrieking and the thunder of pounding wings.
The holes in the netting were smaller than those of a chain link fence, yet many of the birds had managed to shove their green, red-splotched heads through to the point that they lodged themselves there, wings beating furiously to try to either propel themselves through or tear themselves away. Spurred feet ripped like claws at the webbing.
Evelyn tried to shove as many heads back through the netting as she could, clumps of feathers tearing from their breasts, sharp beaks slicing into her palms. It seemed as though each pheasant she forced back onto the ground in the pen was immediately replaced by another. Minuscule droplets of blood patterned her face and arms like a mist from the tiny holes where the feathers had been violently plucked.
“Stop it!” she screamed, shoving at one last ringneck before dashing to the adjacent pen, filled with black pheasants mimicking their frenzied brethren.
She had no idea what to do. She was panicked. This was beyond anything she’d ever imagined.
“Daddy!” she whirled and screamed back over her shoulder, madly pressing at struggling, floundering bodies.
After an eternal moment of battling the birds with blood-soaked palms, wan light spilled across the ground from the porch light behind her, followed by the bang of the withered screen door against the side of the house.
“What’s wrong?” her father called in a weak voice still resonant with the overwhelming effects of the Vicadin and a dreamless sleep.
“They’re going crazy! What am I supposed to do?”
Darryl Hartman eased down the wooden stairs, gripping the wobbling railing for dear life. He could barely keep his legs beneath him, let alone force them to bear his weight. Pain raced from his feet all the way up into his hips where it exploded like a powder keg. Tears streaming from his eyes, reflecting what little moonlight permeated the roiling black cloud cover, he nearly cried out with each step, stifling it by biting down and refusing to let his teeth part.
By the time he reached the bottom of the staircase and took his first step toward the pens, it was over.
The screaming of the pheasants ceased abruptly like air through a slashed trachea. With a resounding thump, all of the panicked airborne pheasants hit the ground at once, staggering and swaying in a momentary daze before finding the strength to scurry back through the hole in the wooden coop at the back of the pen.
The ground was littered with mangled lumps. Feathers descended like snowflakes inside the cages.
“My God,” Evelyn whispered, curling her fingers through the mesh netting and leaning forward.
The hay substrate was bled black in sweeping arcs, blotched with corpses with stiff, outstretched legs forked to the sky, bare breasts poking through in diseased-looking swatches where the feathers had been torn away. Even from where she stood, she could see the dead birds in the adjacent pen: mounds of twitching or already stilled flesh.
A howl erupted from the distance, across the field of dirt and dying Joshua trees ringed by tufts of dried weeds.
Evelyn stepped around to the side of the pen, walking between the two toward the source of the sound. The sun was only now beginning to bleed light blue onto the otherwise blackened eastern horizon, yet she could still see them…lined up at the edge of her range of sight, shoulder to shoulder, merely sitting and watching as though those scurvy beasts no longer cared if they were seen. They were usually fairly timid and ducked back out of sight when they even suspected that human eyes had fallen upon them. But not tonight.
Light flashed from their minion eyes like so many halogen headlights.
She’d never seen s
o many coyotes together in her life. There had to be hundreds of them, all sitting patiently like obedient dogs waiting for their master to fill their food bowls, a line of sharp triangular ears cutting the darkness like a saw blade.
“What’s going on here?” Evelyn whispered.
With a moan, her father made his way to her side, grabbing her shoulder and transferring an inordinate amount of weight to her small frame. She widened her stance to accommodate him, slipping her arm around his midsection so she could help provide just enough balance to take some of the pressure off of his hip. The pain must have been excruciating, yet he stood beside her, trembling lips clamped over gritted teeth.
“My father used to say that all things eventually come home to roost,” he said, barely able to part his jaws enough to speak through the pain. “I don’t suppose he meant it quite this literally.”
She smiled meekly and kissed him on his scruffy cheek.
“Let’s get you back to bed,” she whispered. “I’ll take care of the pens.”
“Best do so in a hurry ’fore those mangy coyotes figure out they aren’t so scared of us and decide to rush the pens. Lord knows they’ve already caught the scent. You know I’d help you, but…”
“I know, daddy,” she said, laboring under his weight. She couldn’t bring herself to look him in the face as she could clearly hear the tears in his voice. He felt helpless, useless, and in a very tangible way, for her father, that was a fate worse than death. “I know.”
She walked him slowly toward the back door of the house, his feet hardly rising far enough from the ground to drag. Evelyn hated herself for allowing this to happen to him. He was the strongest man she had ever known, the kind of man who could eat nails for breakfast and pass an anvil without breaking a sweat. His skin was coarse and callused from working his entire life with only the tools the good Lord gave him, though even now it felt comfortable against her skin, as though that by itself was enough to let her know that it was still her daddy inside that failing form.
Evelyn eased him up the first step, grabbing hold of the back of his trousers in case he needed a boost.
Another howl pierced the silence, followed by another and another until there was a chorus of coyotes baying hauntingly.
Then silence.
Evelyn stood there with her father a moment, enrapt by the sudden stillness around her.
“Do you need to try the bathroom first?” she asked, even her soft voice like a gunshot in the quiet.
He just shook his head, hating what he’d been reduced to.
“I can manage from here,” he said at the top of the stairs, leaning onto the open door as he had on her. He shuffled his slippered feet across the threshold and onto the linoleum, grabbing onto the counter to use it as a guide and a crutch to the living room.
“Are you sure?” she managed to ask before the tears bloomed from the corners of her eyes.
Her father just grunted and edged further into the kitchen, the chapped soles of his slippers scraping like sandpaper on rough timber.
She turned back to the night, wiping the tears across her cheek but refusing to sniff and betray her emotions. It would absolutely kill her old man if he were forced to see his current state through her eyes, if only a glimpse.
Evelyn trod across the drive, wary of the feral silhouettes against the coming dawn, now showing their true browns and grays, silver eyes flashing like twinkling stars. Jerking the latch on the barn door, she threw it wide and eased into the pitch black, feeling along the edge of the dusty workbench until she found a pair of old cowhide gloves, crusted with mud and blood, and shoved her hands inside.
There was only one acceptable way of dealing with this many dead and dying birds. They couldn’t afford to take any chances. If some disease were to develop and get back to the live birds in the pens, it could easily wipe out their entire stock and cripple them financially.
Beneath the bench she found the gas can and sloshed it around, content with the amount of fluid and the resultant thick fumes. Hanging from one of the multitude of hooks on the pegboard above was a lighter with a long silver snout designed for outdoor grills and pilot lights.
They couldn’t risk drawing the coyotes in any further either. Once they lost their fear…
Her face ashen, features expressionless, Evelyn walked out of the barn and set the can of gas and the lighter on the far side of the barn by a circular depression surrounded by a ring of scorched earth.
With a final tug on her gloves, Evelyn opened the hatch to the closest pen, and with the first red stain of the rising sun permeating the cloudy sky, began the arduous task of gathering the bodies.
III
East of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
PHOENIX SAT IN THE CORNER OF THE ROOM ON THE CEMENT FLOOR. COLD though it was, he reveled in the feeling of the walls behind him, the warm water sliding across its surface. It was as close as he could get to an embrace without feeling like the life was being sucked out of him. And so long as there was concrete behind him, he only had to worry about what was coming directly at him.
The morning after being descended upon by The Swarm, he always felt as though he had been turned inside out and mercilessly pummeled. His throat was beyond parched; even licking the fluid from the slimy walls wasn’t enough to dampen the discomfort. His eyes burned like he hadn’t slept in weeks. His limp arms cradled his legs—tingling on the verge of falling asleep—to his chest, his numbed bare feet flat on the floor.
He knew she was out there even before she disengaged the series of locks.
“Breakfast,” she said, hurrying into the room and setting a bowl on the floor before him. Tepid oatmeal slopped over the side onto the ground.
Phoenix reached for it with a flaccid hand.
She watched nervously, then took a step toward him and nudged the bowl closer with her toe.
“Thank you,” he croaked. His trachea felt as though it had been shredded by the words.
The woman just looked at him, then down to the shin-length black apron she wore over an aged brown sweater, unraveling from the shoulders and collar. Dirty jeans covered what little leg reached the floor beneath the blacksmith-style smock. Thick yellow toenails capped dirty, plump toes, the soles of her feet callused and flaking.
Long, oily black hair hung in front of her face, hiding eyes like jagged chunks of ore.
She looked at him again, only parts of her eyes peeking between the greasy locks, then reached into one of the front pockets of the apron and produced a tarnished spoon. Bending at the knees, eyes still watching him carefully, she leaned forward to the extent of her reach and barely slid the business end of the spoon over the lip of the bowl. Before she could jerk her hand back, Phoenix’s arm shot from his side, his hand clasping her firmly around the wrist. She tugged against him, but was unable to wrest free.
“Why do you hate me?” he whispered.
Darkness flooded over him, pouring from her flesh like a crashing tide.
The man with the white collar towered over him, fingers tightened to the point that they turned white around a belt folded in half, the metal prong poking out from a gap in his fist. He raised it over his head, but the arms that reached out to ward off the coming blow didn’t belong to Phoenix. The fingers were stunted and pudgy, the nails gnawed nearly back to the quick, flabby skin hanging from the arms, wriggling with fear.
“Accept him!” the man raged, eyes maniacally wide, pupils like dots in his fiery irises. Lightning bolts of ruptured blood vessels struck through the whites. His lips stretched back from square, wooden-looking teeth bared so wickedly hard they appeared to be close to cracking. Wild hair framed his head like briars.
The belt snapped forward before the arms could even flinch. A spatter of blood fired out from the right side of his vision, which swam in and out of focus as though peering through water.
“Accept him!” the man screamed, raising the belt again.
“Please” the woman moaned.
Another s
nap of the belt and he was looking across the floor at the man’s black leather shoes, scuffed in spots to a dirty brown. The hardwood floor was riddled with deep grooves, the frayed wood peeling away like truffles.
The man crouched down before him, tilting his head from side to side like a vulture deciding which carotid to slash open first. A calm washed over his face, the anger vanishing as though it had never ravaged his features at all.
“Your mother was a saint,” he said, smiling. For a moment there was a twinkle in his eyes. “She was quite possibly the most divine woman to ever set foot on God’s earth, shy of the Holy Virgin Mother herself. She would have laid down her life for the Lord. She would have gladly borne the sins of man in her own frail body had she been able.”
The man reached into the front pocket of his black jacket, producing a baby food jar, which he quickly closed in his fist.
“Purity of mind and body. Do you know what purity is? Purity is the form beneath the flesh, the cleanliness of the soul as God initially breathed it into your heart, the hidden body that only God can see.”
She whimpered.
He leaned forward until the rancid stench of breath like festering raw meat curled her nostrils.
“I can see it too,” he whispered, thrusting out one large hand to clamp over her nose and mouth. “Do you know what I see in your soul?”
Panicked grunts of fear pushed through his fierce grip on her face.
“You’ve a taint on your soul. When the day of reckoning comes, when God reaches through The Rapture and summons His flock to His side, you would be left behind. I cannot allow that…my own daughter abandoned on the earth to cavort with the sinners and heathens.”
He opened his clenched fist to display the small glass jar. The label had been peeled away, leaving small rings of tacky paper.
Phoenix heard her scream.
“We must purify your soul, dear heart.”
Inside the jar was a tiny coiled snake, blacker even than the darkness behind Phoenix’s closed eyelids in his basement cell.
The Fall Page 8
