The Last Rite

by Chad Morgan

  Something crunched under Charlie’s foot. He looked and saw the necklace that matched his own. He knelt and picked it up, staring at it as if there was still a chance it was something else, but there was no denying the silver dreamcatcher with interwoven turquoise.

  “Oh, no,” he gasped, all the breath draining from his lungs. “Oh, God, no.”

  He looked over at the two dog monsters laying on the ground. His mouth went dry, his heart pounding as he rushed over to one of them and rolled it over. He didn’t see anything he recognized in that one and rushed over to the other one. Turning it over, he backed away with a quivering breath, his legs shaking and then collapsing from under him. He fell to his knees, staring at the lifeless brown eye that matched his own, the slender feminine arm with the same olive skin as his. He gripped at his own necklace, his vision blurred with tears. He screamed at the sky, but the pain wouldn’t leave.

  5

  The sign had said twelve miles, but the constant turning and banking make the drive to Shellington Heights slow. In spite of what the dashboard clock said, she felt like they had been driving for an hour. The thickening fog didn’t help matters. It felt like they had faded into another world, one of endless trees and no sun, one of silence that she and Daniel lived in. Just when Bethany thought he’d be driving forever to a town never within reach, they passed a large wooden sign that said, “Welcome to Shellington Heights.”

  The mountain road transitioned into the town’s main road. As the car rolled past the stores, Bethany could see some of them boarded up. The streets were empty of people. Few cars were parked alongside the road. The road led them into the center of town. On one side was city hall, with white wood paneled sides and tall white columns in front. On top was a clock tower, but it looked like the clock had stopped running, its hands frozen. Next to the city hall was a square building made of concrete bricks with a couple of police cars parked out front. Bethany’s guess that it was a police station was confirmed when she spied the sign with the sheriff’s star on it. She wasn’t sure what the difference between police and sheriffs were, but she knew they were about the same thing. On the other side of the street from the city hall, sandwiched between a coffee shop and what looked like a store filled with old stuff, was a building with a boarded-up glass door and a sign with a red cross on it. Written on the glass door with scraped paint was “clinic.” Daniel parked the car, and Bethany watched with wide eyes as he stepped out and began looking around. Bethany whined, not wanting to be alone but not wanting to leave the relative security of the car. It had given her some protection from the dog monsters, but as she thought this, she looked down at the car door interior and to the deep scratches the thing had gouged in it. In the end, what really protected her was Daniel. Slowly, Bethany left the car and joined Daniel.

  “Mr. Burns . . . I mean, Daniel?” She corrected herself. “Where is everybody?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, scanning the empty town square. “Some of the buildings are boarded up. Maybe they were expecting a storm? Or maybe the local economy took a dump?” Daniel walked out to the middle of the road and cupped his hands to his mouth. He shouted into the air, “Hello? Anyone here?”

  There was no answer, not even an echo. To Bethany, the town was a distorted dream, some half-remembered childhood memory that was twisted into a nightmarish mockery. Had she been here with Mommy before? No, maybe when this place was normal, but this version of the town existed only in a bad dream. At least, until now.

  “This place looks like a ghost town,” Daniel told her.

  Daniel looked a mess. He had found a clean shirt in his small bag, but he was bleeding through the bandages on his arm. It must have hurt because Daniel kept clutching and unclutching his hand. Daniel turned to look at the clinic, his mind on his arm. Bethany gripped her doll to her chest and stared off into the fog. The clouds of mist swirled, and with a little imagination, she could see shapes lumbering in the distance.

  Bethany said under her breath, “No, not ghosts. Ghosts can’t hurt you.”

  The business suit man watched them from the roof of one of the buildings. Between the fog and his elevation, he was hidden well enough from the girl and whoever this guy was. It was an old trick, but people didn’t look up. How many people had he killed in Southeast Asia by climbing up in a tree and sniping? It’s why he never liked the deserts of Iraq, nothing but flat planes with no advantages.

  He glanced back at the file. Under father, it was typed “unknown.” The file needed to be updated. He hoped his companion would bring more information to him once she was back from the other world. He knew very little about his companion and didn’t care. They had been assigned together, and she seemed dedicated and competent, but he hadn’t survived Fallujah by trusting people. Like anyone else, she was a tool to use, and if she no longer proved useful, to discard. Still, at least she was decent eye candy. That made the assignment a tad more entertaining.

  He watched the unidentified man, watched how the girl interacted with him. The girl didn't trust him, that was clear. She didn’t seem afraid of the man, though, so that could only mean they were strangers. Maybe some court-appointed chaperone? The two didn’t jump back in their car and drive away, not that they could have gotten anywhere, but he understood people wanted to see the world as normal. He could never get used to the human minds ability to deny what was right in front of him. He once had a companion lose a leg from an IED, but while he bled out all over the dirt he kept grabbing at the torn remains of his leg screaming that it had to still be there, that his leg couldn’t be gone. He saw it in the face of this guy now, looking at all the empty buildings and missing people and using twisted logic to try to explain how things can somehow be normal. Denial was a powerful thing.

  He heard the high heels of his companion clicking on the rooftop coming up behind him. Good, she was back from the other world. He had stopped thinking of it as the “real” world. For him, this was the new real world, the one that best suited him. She walked up beside him, her arms crossed over her chest and she stared down at the two in the city streets below. He said nothing, not interrupting her study of the new actor. She’d tell him what she had learned when she was ready. Another skill he had learned from years of hunting people was patience.

  Daniel stood in the center of the street, almost begging for a car to barrel down the road and hit him. At least getting run over would mean someone was alive in this damn town. He pulled his cell phone out.

  “Who are you calling?” Bethany asked.

  Daniel glanced down at her. “Greg, at work.”

  “He your friend?”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said, but that wasn’t quite true. “Well, I mean we work together. Good guy though . . .”

  The phone picked up on the other end, cutting him off. The signal was weak, Greg’s voice coming in static-filling bursts. “Daniel? Where . . .you? Can’t . . .”

  “Greg? Can you hear me?” He shouted into the phone. “Sounds like we have a bad connection.”

  “What . . . custody of Bethany . . . Any idea . . .“

  Daniel shook his head. “I can’t hear you. I’m in a town call Shellington Heights.”

  There was a pause, then more bursts of static. “. . . Doesn’t exist . . . Can’t find . . .”

  “Greg? Hello?” Daniel looked at his phone. The call was dropped. He put it back in his pocket and looked at Bethany. “Bad connection. Could barely hear him. I’ll try later when we leave.”

  Save for dry pine needles collecting in the gutters the streets were clean but laying in the middle of the road was something glinting in the indirect sunlight. Daniel cocked his head to the side and walked over to investigate. Bethany watched him walk by her and trotted to join him. Daniel knelt to see another necklace like the one he saw at the crash site.

  “What is it?” Bethany asked.

  Daniel reached for it. “Some kind of necklace. I saw one . . . Ouch!”

  The moment Daniel grabbed the necklace it sc
orched his hand. He dropped it immediately, but the pain remained, his hand throbbing and radiating heat. He looked at his open hand. His fingers were bright red, but no blisters so it wasn’t too bad. Still, it ached, his hand a sponge full of pain. Daniel wished he could wring the pain out it.

  “What’s wrong?” Bethany asked, her eyes wide.

  “It burned me,” he said. “Something on it, some kind of chemical maybe. Leave it alone.”

  Daniel walked away from the necklace. When he wasn’t looking, Bethany reached down and picked up the necklace. If it had burned Bethany the scream of pain would have alerted Daniel, but as nothing happened, Daniel never knew Bethany held the necklace in her hand.

  Daniel looked back over his shoulder to see the girl looking at the necklace. “Beth? C’mon!”

  Bethany dropped the necklace and ran to him. “Daniel, I don’t like it here. I really want to go.”

  Daniel couldn’t blame her. The emptiness of the town was unsettling, and it only made sense that if the town was evacuated then they should evacuate too. There was a possibility that the danger had passed and the residents were on their way back, but it was just as possible the danger had yet to hit. Then he noticed something else that was missing. If there was an evacuation, there would have been notices plastered everywhere explaining the danger and telling everyone where to go. Instead, the streets were empty. The people were just gone. He looked at the boarded-up windows of the shops. Something about it was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about how they were boarded up nagged at him as if this were a movie set and the prop department had gotten some nitpicky detail wrong. Daniel was seeing it, it was right in front of him, but he still couldn’t say what it was.

  His injured arm throbbed. No, now it burned, the pain from his right hand migrating to his left wrist. He gripped his wrist with his hand. Looking around, the building in front of them had a simple sign with a red cross. He guessed it was a small clinic. The town was probably not large enough for anything more.

  “C’mon, that looks like a medical clinic over there,” Daniel said. “I’ll get this arm cleaned up and we’ll go.”

  As he walked up to the clinic it finally dawned on him what was so wrong with all the boarded-up windows. When preparing for a storm or closing a failed business, you boarded up the window from the outside to project the glass. These buildings, however, were boarded up from the inside. People hadn’t been closing the buildings, they had tried to barricade themselves inside.

  So where had the people gone?

  The graveyard was as old as the town. The gravestones had been broken and restored many times. The graves were buried in and around the forest trees and hills, and the forest, in turn, had grown around the graves. One tree had expanded to grow over a tombstone, frozen in the middle of a century-long swallow of the worn granite slab. Roots from another tree had grown through cracks of an above-ground tomb, splitting the wall over the decades of growth. The graves in a gully were under an inch of water, the gravestones half buried from years of water-soaked soil sinking deeper and deeper.

  Charlie walked up to the gates of the graveyard, the bow in his hand and the quiver over his shoulder. Two of the avatars, the creatures formed from the living forest, stood on either side like guard dogs. The two avatars crouched down like cats ready to pounce and made their way to Charlie, but he all but ignored them. The leaves and branches rustled as the moving bushes sniffed him, though how the flora could smell without a real nose was one more thing Charlie didn’t understand. They had the shape of a nose, and Charlie could feel the air moving against him, but the creatures had no lungs.

  Satisfied, the creatures backed away and resumed their posts. Charlie walked through the gates and entered the graveyard. The moment he was amongst the tombstones he relaxed. His grandfather had explained the abominations couldn’t enter the graveyard, some bullshit about sacred ground or something. The avatars, however, didn’t have that limitation. That’s what he called them, his way of distinguishing the two – abominations and avatars. The avatar’s freedom to enter the hallowed ground was supposed to be a sign they were on their side, but Charlie didn’t know how much faith he could put into breathing topiary.

  Charlie walked amongst the graves, heading up towards the old caretaker’s shack. Like everything else in the graveyard, it was aged, worn, and repaired over and over. The warped slats that made up the walls kept out the wind about as well as a screen door, and the door almost fell off the rotted frame if he pushed it in the wrong place. Inside, sitting at a wooden table that was about as worn and warped as the shack’s walls, was his grandfather, Professor Jacob Lightfoot. Compared to the shack, his grandfather looked young, but his black hair had turned gray a long time ago. The wrinkles in his eyes were deep, but Charlie had known they came from more than just age. He had always known his grandfather kept secrets, ones that weight on him, ones he carried from before he was born. He just hadn’t known it was anything like this. How could he?

  On the table, held in place by rocks and candlesticks and anything else weighing more than a mosquito, were old scrolls, along with a pad of paper where his grandfather jotted notes and translations. The parchment fluttered, fighting its anchors, trying feebly to escape from the table and ride the wind. His grandfather didn’t look up from his papers.

  “Did you find the scroll?” he asked in his deep monotone voice.

  “Grandfather?” he said, pushing the words out of his lungs. His chest hurt, and his heart turned to stone and sank into his stomach. “Carolyn . . . Carolyn’s dead.”

  His grandfather looked up from his work. Their eyes met, and Charlie saw all the color drain from the old professor’s face. He expected the old man to stumble towards Charlie, and they would wrap their arms around each other and cry like toddlers with skinned knees. He wouldn’t have been too surprised if the old man had slapped him instead, blaming Carolyn’s death on him, no matter how irrational that accusation would be. His grandfather, however, looked back to his work and repeated, “The scroll? Did you find it?”

  Charlie’s brows furrowed, tears dried up by anger swelling in him. With a dry voice, he said, “No. I didn’t find it.”

  Charlie watched his grandfather wipe a tear from his eye, and he felt a venomous satisfaction that his grandfather felt some pain over her death, but the old man didn’t look up from his damn papers. “We have to assume the others have it . . .”

  “Did you hear me?” Charlie asked. “Carolyn’s dead.”

  “Casualties,” he said, “are to be expected.”

  “Casualties?” Charlie stepped in and slammed the bow on the papers under his grandfather’s gaze. He snarled at the old man who still refused to look away from his work as if he could read his scrolls through Charlie’s hand. He froze in place as Charlie growled, “Your granddaughter is dead! Dead! Don’t you give a damn about that?”

  Now his grandfather looked up. Charlie expected the stern gaze of the man who had raised him, but instead his eyes were heavy. He had only seen that look on his face one other time - when he had to tell Charlie his parents were dead. “A lot more people than your cousin have already died.”

  Charlie ran out of the shack and slammed the door behind him. He punched the worn post holding up the collapsing awning. The rotten wood did an even worse job blocking out sound than it did the wind, and he heard his grandfather say aloud to the empty room, “And many, many more are going to die as long as Bethany Sloan is alive.”

  On a neighboring hill, perched up on top of one of the tombs, a wolf watched the caretaker shack. Its fur was almost white, standing out even in the gray fog. The wolf studied Charlie, watched him struggle with his grief. He would pace, punch at the air, scream to the sky, then slump down on the porch. The wolf turned away and disappeared into the fog.

  6

  Daniel pushed hard against the clinic door. Every shove made the door creak open another inch. Bethany peered from behind Daniel, not wanting to get too close b
ut curious to see what was inside, but all she could see was darkness and dust.

  “Why is everybody gone?” Bethany asked.

  Daniel grunted as he shoved the door open another inch. “I don’t know, Beth.”

  She thought for a moment, then suggested, “Maybe they all went on vacation at the same time?”

  Daniel let out something that was a mix of a grunt and a laugh. “That would be one hell of a coincidence.”

  “Mommy always said a coincidence was a small miracle that God wanted to stay annoni . . .” She always had trouble remembering that word. She chased it around on her tongue. “Anomi . . . Anyo . . .”

  “Anonymous,” Daniel said for her.

  “Yeah, anonymous,” she said.

  The door finally gave, and Daniel poked his head into the door.

  “I wish that was true,” Daniel said. Before Bethany could reply he shouted into the clinic, “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  No one answered. Daniel looked down at her, shrugged his shoulders, and turned back towards the clinic. With the tire iron in hand, he stepped into the clinic. Bethany got as close to the door without going in. She wasn’t sure what she feared more, following Daniel into the dark and dusty building, or staying outside alone. She teetered on the edge between the two.

  “You don’t believe in coincidences?” she asked.

  Daniel looked around the clinic, the darkness swallowing him. “I think a coincidence is a pattern we haven’t figured out yet.”