The Fall

by Michael McBride

  “And said to the mountains and rocks,” a voice whispered into his ear. “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?”

  “Jesus!” Keller spat, stumbling backward.

  It was obviously Mûwth’s voice, though only a moment prior he had heard the man a good ten yards deeper into the adjacent cavern.

  “Mûwth,” he called hesitantly.

  “Follow the sound of my voice,” he called back with that thick accent.

  He sounded even further away than he had before. There was no way he could have been standing beside him to whisper in his ear and managed to get so far away in that span of time. But he had felt the warmth of the breath on his cheek, and the voice…the voice had been identical.

  I’ve got to get out of here! he screamed inside his head. I’m losing my mind!

  It was the darkness. That had to be it. It had been so long since he had seen the outside world that he was beginning to feel like the darkness itself was settling over him like a wet blanket, smothering him, sucking the very air from his lungs and forcing him to the verge of hyperventilation. He just needed to get out of the darkness, get out of his head—

  “Keller?”

  He flinched from her touch, causing her to immediately recoil.

  Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.

  “Are you all right?” Thanh asked.

  No! I’m losing my damn mind!

  “Yeah,” he said through rapid, jerky breaths. “Just…just starting to feel a little claustrophobic, you know?”

  She nodded, though in the darkness she knew he couldn’t have seen the gesture. Where was Adam?

  “I can see the light!” Mûwth exclaimed from somewhere beyond the cavern, his voice echoing as though through a long tunnel.

  “Wait!” Keller called, grabbing Thanh by the arm and dragging her quickly toward the source of the voice. They couldn’t afford to be lost in here without the Arab. He was sure they wouldn’t be able to find their way back, let alone to the other side, without the man’s help.

  “Kotter?” Thanh called back over her shoulder.

  “Right behind you.”

  Their footsteps clapped back at them from the narrowing corridor.

  “One of us should stay behind and wait for Adam,” she said.

  “You heard Mûwth. By the time we grab this thing we’ll be able to come right back and rendezvous with Adam. I’d bet anything that shoulder slowed him down and he had to take a rest. He’ll catch up in no time,” Kotter said.

  The air stirred around them as though some ambitious breeze had managed to penetrate the mountain’s husk. With it came a stench like nothing they’d ever smelled before. Worse than the sulfuric water. Worse than the makeshift graveyard they used for the refugees. The smell reminded Keller of one of his earliest childhood memories, of standing in a dark forest with his father and uncle. There had been a stag strung by its rear hooves from a thick lower limb of an ancient pine. His uncle had pried a six-inch, serrated hunting blade from its sheath and offered it to Keller, who had taken it in his small hand, surprised at just how light the weapon was. He could remember his father showing him exactly where to strike, tracing a small X in the fur on the five-pointer’s lower abdomen. Keller could remember rising on his toes and pressing the sharp point into the soft skin of the taut belly, but had neither the strength nor the leverage to penetrate sufficiently, summoning but a few droplets of blood to drain down the flesh toward the umbilicus.

  “Hold it steady,” his father had said.

  He remembered tightening both fists around the sculpted bone hilt, feeling the design of the wolf against his palms even through his gloves.

  His father clamped his large hands atop his, shoving forward fast enough to drag Keller from his feet.

  A gust of air had exploded from the hole they created. A stench he would smell again in a small shack they liked to call “The Confessional” in Kirkuk where they had disemboweled an Iraqi insurgent to learn the location of the enemy’s staging grounds; in a hidden cave beneath the desert sands where Mahmud Al Sharah, a known terrorist, had killed himself a week prior to finding him and exhuming his bloated, scarab-infested corpse.

  It was the smell of carrion peeled from heated asphalt.

  The smell of a weeping decubitus ulcer.

  He felt it, smelled it, tasted it against his face as clearly as he had as a small child when the blast of warm air had blossomed from the deer’s underside, tousling his hair and melting the snow from his cap, before pouring forth in a flood of heat that drenched his legs and rode up over his boots.

  For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

  The smell of death.

  “Oh,” Thanh gasped, pinching her hand over her mouth and nose.

  “Hurry!” Mûwth called, his voice cracking, unable to contain the excitement.

  Following his voice along a bend to the right, tracing the rugged earthen surface of the wall beside them, the darkness began to mutate slowly from a palpable black to a muted gray, until finally, the narrowing tunnel opened into a large chamber. A beam of light knifed from the ceiling to the center of the stagnant water, filled with swirling motes like a moonlit beam through otherwise tightly drawn curtains.

  The smell intensified the moment they stepped into the wide cavern, as though the entire room around them were filled with rotting corpses.

  Keller opened his mouth to speak, but instead, he simply stood in awe of the ray of light that came through the stalactite-riddled ceiling as little more than a fiery dot, but widened to the size of a spotlight’s beam. While he had reluctantly resolved to believe the man’s story, he assumed much of it to have been either fabricated or stretched from a child’s imagination into something far more dramatic than it actually was over the years. But this… This was like nothing he had ever seen in his entire life, as though the light itself didn’t just penetrate the rocky roof, but grew from it, becoming increasingly blinding the further it traveled from the source. Where it touched the water, the circle of light took on an orange tint, not like the banal coloration of a tangerine, but like the intense rustic tinge of the inner layer of flesh surrounding an over ripened peach pit. The water around it appeared black, though the beam attenuated beneath the surface, fading from an impossible sunset stain to a deeper red like molten lava. And there upon the floor of the cave, shimmering like a coin at the bottom of a well, was the medallion, so gold he could only look at it for a moment before it blinded him like staring into the heart of the sun.

  “Does it not call to you?” Mûwth said; a shadow against the black lake wading down its rapidly descending slope.

  Keller was certain that it did, as though there were invisible strands of cord sewn through the prickled skin on his chest, urging him forward.

  “Yes,” Thanh finally whispered, gently freeing her arm from Keller’s grasp to ease along the stony embankment.

  “I took it with me once,” Mûwth said, propelling himself forward into the water that didn’t splash around his paddling arms, but rather absorbed him, as viscous as tomato soup. “But I had to return it. Nothing can live without a heart. And this medallion, this thing, is the heart of this mountain. Of this entire desert. Without it, the sandstone would crumble to dust, plants would cease to grow, and the precious water would be sucked back into the earth to fill the void left in the heart’s absence.”

  Thanh crouched at the edge of the lake, cupping her palm and immersing it momentarily before drawing up a handful of the warm liquid.

  She brought it to her nose, but immediately recoiled. It was the source of the stench, if such a repugnant scent could be concentrated into liquid form. It was thicker than water, a viscosity she knew intimately through her experience as a surgeon. She rubbed her fingers together, the fluid redolent with corpus
cles that popped like citrus vesicles. There was no reason to even dab at it with the tip of her tongue.

  It was blood. There was no doubt about it. Not smooth and clean as though from a tapped artery, but thickened and mealy as though wrung from a cirrhotic liver.

  “Is it…?” Kotter asked.

  Thanh nodded, affixing her eyes to the back of Mûwth’s head, his long braid trailing along the surface like a crocodile’s tail. He paused in the wash of light, looking up into its depths momentarily, his features bled white. His shoulders rose with the great inhalation, and then he dove beneath the surface, his form wavering like a mirage beneath the tranquilly rippling fluid.

  “He should have reached it by now,” Keller whispered. He watched the man’s arms reaching deeper into the abyss, seeking leverage to draw himself toward the glowing medallion.

  Mûwth’s shape became smaller and smaller, the bottom fathomless.

  “He’s going to run out of air,” Thanh said, realizing that until that precise moment she’d been holding her breath as well.

  Kotter waded in to his knees, the fluid seeping through his clothing and clinging to his bare skin, trying to clot against it. He was a heartbeat away from throwing himself forward into the putrid fluid when Mûwth’s hand closed like a black clamshell over the medallion.

  “Come on,” Kotter whispered, edging further into the liquid.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” Keller said, finally granting voice to the panic rising from his tight neck, throbbing in his primitive hindbrain.

  “We can’t leave him down there,” Thanh gasped, watching the now miniaturized form try to plant its feet on the floor of the cavern and propel itself upward, but though the medallion had appeared to be resting on the stone floor, it had been illusory.

  “It’s a lake of blood!” Keller snapped.

  “You don’t think I’d be able to tell it was blood even without smelling or seeing it?”

  “I’m not questioning your assessment, doctor. I’m a little more concerned about the fact that this entire cave is filled with a lake of blood. Where the hell do you think it all came from?”

  She looked at him, the wan light highlighting her confusion. Had she even stopped to wonder?

  “How many animals or people or God knows what had to be killed to provide this much blood?” Keller raged. Something was dreadfully wrong here. He could feel it in the knots in his spine, in the frigid fingers prickling his flesh, in the tremors that set in upon his hands. They needed to get out of there right now or they weren’t going to be able to at all. He was sure of it. If he didn’t grab Thanh and Kotter by the scruff of their necks and run as fast as he could, they were going to die here beneath the mountain. Or worse, though he couldn’t imagine what could possibly be further down the scale past death. It was the same overwhelming urge that triggered him to flee the market in Basul before it was swallowed by a fireball; the same compulsion that drove him not to walk around the corner of the demolished building that had allowed insurgents to snipe three of his friends before sending a child wading through the rubble with a bomb strapped to her chest, killing another five.

  Kotter sloshed out further until he was in to his waist. He appeared to be debating whether or not to dive any further away from the shore into what smelled like a cutting room floor a week after the drain clogged with hair.

  “We’re going to die here,” Keller whispered, turning to try to decipher the black tunnel’s mouth from the swarming darkness.

  Behind him, Mûwth broke the filmy surface with a frantic gasp that sounded like a scream.

  It was too late now.

  For the great day of his wrath is come…

  V

  Dover, Tennessee

  MARE CHECKED THE GARAGE BEFORE HURRYING UP THE STAIRS INTO HIS father’s bedroom. Neither his dad’s black Charger nor Staci’s yellow ’85 Mustang were in there, but it was only a matter of time before they came home. Undoubtedly, his father had knocked off early at the mill and was already slouched over a stool down at The Still finding the courage to drag himself back home. He knew his old man felt terrible about belting him—as well he should—and more than likely dreaded that first confrontation between the two of them. He’d probably spent his day at the lathe checking over his shoulder every thirty seconds waiting for the cops to show up to haul him away. Served him right, Mare thought.

  He entered their bedroom, leaving the door standing wide open. He wanted as much notice as he could get when and if those first footsteps hit the stairs. This had to be done before Missy got back from the river. He couldn’t stand the thought of risking her getting caught too. It was one thing to incur a beating for himself, but there was absolutely no way he would ever allow anyone to raise a hand to his sister, which is what frightened him the most. With their father becoming increasingly violent, it was only a matter of time before he lost his cool with Missy, and at that point, Mare knew he’d do whatever he had to do.

  Absolutely whatever he had to.

  With a quick glance across the room, Mare went straight toward the closet.

  The bed was unmade as usual, the humidity-dampened covers crumpled in a heap at the foot. Empty bottles crowded the nightstand, relegating the clock to behind, its red digital readout staining the glass. Clothes were strewn all over the floor, socks bunched inside overturned shoes. Cobwebs made themselves at home above, connecting the corners and encircling the light fixture. The dresser was buried beneath folded clothes Staci had been too lazy to shove into the drawers and a litter of crumpled gum wrappers. There were a couple of glasses that looked like they’d been sitting there for far too long and bowls crusted with Lord only knew what. The bathroom door stood ajar, through which he could see the toilet seat standing guard over the bowl, the dark blue, mildew-lined shower curtain drawn closed in front of the tub.

  Mare jumped and popped up the square of drywall, seated in a frame of painted trim, over the top shelf of the closet. Dragging a roughly kept, black leather chest with brass corners from beneath the hanging clothes, he hopped up and rose to his tiptoes, reaching over the lip. He slid his hand side to side, fingers probing through the dusty fiberglass insulation.

  “Looking for this?” a deep voice asked from behind him.

  Mare closed his eyes and turned his face to the heavens. His heart stalled and his lungs refused to fill. Legs trembling, his first impulse was to propel himself upward into the attic, but then what? There was only one other hatch between the spider-infested crawlspace and the house beneath, over the hallway, but there was no way he would be able to launch himself into the darkness, scurry across the rafters and drop down into the hallway before his father could take the dozen steps down the hall to be waiting beneath the opening.

  “Why don’t you come on down, son?” his father said. His voice was cool and even, but Mare heard the manila envelope crumpling in his tightening fist.

  If he knew what was good for him, he’d come right down before his father’s anger boiled over, but for the life of him, he couldn’t make his quivering legs move.

  “Come on down,” his father repeated, this time through bared teeth.

  Mare was caught and there wasn’t a thing he could think to do but to just clamber down and face the music. Where had his father been? His car wasn’t in the garage and the bedroom had been empty.

  The shower curtain had been drawn closed.

  After noticing the missing money, they must have gone looking for it. They hadn’t come across it in all the years that it had been up there, couldn’t they have just made it another couple of weeks? Another day?

  “I said ‘come down’!” his father bellowed.

  Twin fists slammed into Mare’s back, twisting into his shirt. Before he could even begin to comprehend what was happening, he was in the air, feet cleaved from the top of the chest. He saw his arms flailing above him, then flashes of light exploded across his vision, the entirety of his breath firing past his lips. The back of his head pounded the floor with a re
sounding crack, releasing a metallic taste to slither from his sinuses. He tried to roll over onto his side, tried to curl into the fetal position to suck in the deficit of air, but his old man was already on top of him. Sawdust-crusted jeans were tight over the knees that pinned his biceps to the floor, his father’s weight sitting squarely on Mare’s already compressed chest.

  “Think you’re smarter than me, huh?” his father demanded, eyes and nostrils flared from his blazing red face. Vapors of pure whiskey steamed from his rapid breaths. “Not this old man! You left your damned footprints on the chest!”

  Mare tried to gasp, but he simply couldn’t force his lungs to expand to fill with the oxygen he so desperately needed, blotching his field of view with metamorphosing pink shapes like protozoans across a microscope slide. Tears pinched from the corners of eyes he didn’t dare blink.

  “You know how much money’s in here?” his father screamed, rearing back and smacking Mare across the face with the cash-stuffed envelope. Mare could instantly feel his hot lip begin to swell. “Twenty-three hundred dollars! You stole twenty-three hundred dollars from us!”

  Mare scrambled to come up with any sort of plausible explanation, anything at all, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was a dry cough that compounded the pressure in his chest.

  “What were you going to do with this? Huh? Do you have any idea how we’ve been scrimping and scrounging just to pay the bills? Do you even care?”

  Another furious swat with the envelope opened a wide seam in his lip, the stack of bills exploding from the torn package. His father followed with his left fist, clattering Mare’s teeth and starting a flood from his right nostril.