The Last Rite

by Chad Morgan

  Daniel chuckled. “Of course I do. It’s my dream, isn’t it?”

  Anna smiled, like a mother explaining something to a young child. “I mean this day in particular. Remember, this was when I asked you about having a family.” She didn’t ask, she was telling him.

  “Yeah, about a month before you disappeared,” Daniel said. He looked down at her flat stomach, but he knew Bethany had to be in there, a fetus no larger than his thumb. He stopped and, with Anna’s hand in his, guided her back to face him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant? You should have known how happy I would have been.”

  Anna laid her free hand on her chest. “I did know. But what’s important is why I knew. Remember.”

  Again, it wasn’t a question, it was a command. He didn’t want too, but Anna’s unblinking eyes bored into him, and in truth could he ever say no to her? He sighed. “This was the day I told you about my father.”

  That wasn’t enough for Anna. “Go on.”

  He didn’t want to go through this again. He was here with Anna again. It was just a dream, but couldn’t he enjoy it? Maybe he could change things this time. Maybe this time Anna wouldn’t leave, and he could watch her stomach get large as he ran to the store for pickles and ice cream, or whatever Anna’s midnight cravings might have been. He could be by her side as their daughter was born, hold her during those midnight feedings, and watch her take her first steps. They could reply their entire lives in this dream, why ruin it by rehashing his issue with his father? Time was fluid in a dream, but eventually, he would wake up and this precious gift would be gone. “You know this. Why . . .?”

  “Humor me,” she said. Her voice was kind and patient, but it had an authority behind it.

  Daniel let out a heavier sigh and hung his head back, staring up into the clear sky. He had to do this? Fine. He looked back to Anna. And rattled off the facts. “My dad died when I was young. I was old enough to remember what my life was like when he was here, old enough to know what I was missing. I guess I always wanted to have a family because I wanted to get back some of what I was missing,”

  He shrugged his shoulders, silently asking if that was it, but Anna just smiled and asked, “What do you remember about your dad?”

  Christ, would this torture ever end? He looked away from Anna, but standing on the beach was a man in an army uniform. The waves rolled over his patent leather shoes and soaked the cuffs of his pants, but he stood at attention like a life-sized G. I. Joe doll. This was his father as he remembered him – strong and tall and handsome. It was an idealized version of his father, Daniel understood, but what young boy didn’t idolize his father? His eyes began to swell, and he looked away back to Anna. He wasn’t sure if that was any better.

  “Dad was career army,” he said. “He was big, strong, always talking about duty and honor and responsibility. I remember he used to say `If doing the right thing was easy, everyone would do it`.”

  Anna nodded. “What else did he tell you?”

  Daniel wiped a stray tear with his finger. “That family was everything. That family would always be there for you, and that you need to always be there for family.”

  “Yes,” Anna said, “and that he loved you more than life itself.”

  “That’s what you wanted me to remember? Could have dreamed of Dad to hear that,” he said, realizing he had dreamt of his father. He glanced back, but the soldier was gone. He looked around, seeing if he could spot him, but he was just gone. Dreams had no continuity he reminded himself.

  Anna reached down and took Daniel’s hand in hers. It was warm and soft. That didn’t make sense. He couldn’t feel the sand on his feet or the sun above him, but he could feel Anna’s skin? Before he could figure out that puzzle, Anna said, “Daniel, Bethany needs you.”

  “Don’t worry,” Daniel said. “I’ll take care of Bethany. I won’t let anything happen to her.”

  Something warm and wet trickled over his wrists. Now he could smell salt, but also something like copper. Daniel looked down to see blood trickling over his hands in rivulets. He let go of Anna’s hands, who turned her hands palms-up. She wasn’t in her sundress anymore, but something that looked more like a medical uniform, the kind nurses wear in surgery, a weird blue-green color with “Harper View Psychiatric” stenciled on them. Across Anna’s wrists were long slashes going from the fold of her elbow to the end of her wrist. Blood poured from the cuts, forming puddles on the sand. Anna stretched her bleeding arms out to him.

  “Oh, Daniel,” she said. “It’s already too late for that.”

  Daniel bolted upright. Some deep part of his psyche remembered enough not to scream out, but the rest of his mind was racing to catch up, to sort fantasy from reality. The sun was shining down on him. Not the bright, unencumbered sun from the beach in his dream, but the scattered light of sunlight through fog. He was in Shelington Heights, the town was covered in fog, that part was right, but something nagged at the back of his mind that he was overlooking something. It would come to him in a moment, his mind was still reordering itself. He felt around with his hands. Under one was the spent police revolver, under the other was the lug wrench. He patted his jacket and felt the diary in his pocket. Daniel tried to look around, but the sun was bright in his eyes.

  The door was open. Daniel sat in a dim sunbeam like a cat warming himself, the wooden planks laying to the side on the floor. The war was over, both sides retreating with the dawn. There weren’t even bodies of the creatures littering the street. It could have all been a dream.

  “What the hell? Bethany? What happened? How did . . . Bethany?“

  He looked over, but where Bethany been sleeping, a blanket lay crumpled on the floor. The words scrawled in blood on the exam room ceiling came back to him. Daniel grabbed the lug wrench and jumped to his feet, looking around the clinic and shouting Bethany’s name. No answer came. He ran to the back, searching the rest of the clinic in a manic frenzy, but there was no sign of Bethany. He ran out of the clinic and out into the street, forgetting about the war of monsters that was waging the night before and screaming out Bethany’s name.

  Daniel ran to the center of the empty street, turning in place, and calling Bethany’s name over and over until his voice crumbled into a horse cough. Gasping for breath, he looked down around for any sign of a trail. Laying on the ground was Chrissy, Bethany’s doll. Daniel knelt before it and picked it up. He had failed. He had failed Bethany, he had failed Anna, and he was responsible for another child’s death. He screamed Bethany’s name into the air.

  Moments later, Daniel was sitting in the reception area of the medical clinic, holding Bethany’s doll one-handed to his chest. His tears had cut tracks through the grime on his face. He stroked the doll’s hair as he tried to think of what to do next, if there was anything to do next. The door hung open wide. He didn’t bother to close it. The monsters were all gone, but he wasn’t sure if he cared either way. He was sleeping right next to her when they pried open the door and took her. How could he not hear them? Why did they leave him alive? He thought back to how the writing in blood just appeared on the ceiling of the exam room while he was sitting on the floor under it. Monsters weren’t the only things he was facing in this crazy place.

  The honking of a car horn pulled him out of his despair. His car horn. He looked up and stared at his car through the open door, still sitting near the lamppost he had rammed into, but the car was moved. From where he sat, he couldn’t make out the silhouette of the hood that had crumpled on impact with the post. There was no one there, but he thought he saw the glint of something on top of the crushed hood. He slid the gun into one pocket, then picked up the lug wrench in one hand and Bethany’s doll in the other and left the clinic.

  The car had been repaired. The broken glass was replaced, the front end straightened out, even scratches on the back bumper that was there before coming to Shellington Heights were gone. The car was in showroom condition. His keys dangled from the ignition. Daniel opened the door and tr
ied it and wasn’t surprised when the engine roared to life. He killed the engine and slammed the door closed, which made the computer tablet on the hood rattle. That was the glint he saw from the clinic. He walked over and picked up the tablet when it came to life.

  A man’s face popped onto the face of the tablet. He was clean-shaven with blond hair cut so short it screamed military to Daniel. His thick neck was covered with the color of a business shirt and jacket, and a thick windsor knot. He looked straight out of the screen to Daniel. “Mr. Burns. Good morning. We know you had an eventful night, so I will make this brief.”

  Daniel lowered the tablet and looked around. He couldn’t ignore monsters and prophetic dreams, but there was no way some tree-creature left a recorded message for him on a tablet. There had to be someone, probably the person in this video, that had left him the video postcard.

  “Mr. Burns? Excuse me?” the man in the business suit said through the tinny speakers of the tablet. “May I have your attention, please?”

  Daniel turned back to the tablet. This wasn’t a recording, this was a live feed. He couldn’t get a decent cell phone signal, so maybe a local wi-fi setup? This guy had to be close by somewhere.

  “Let me start by assuring you that young Ms. Sloan is unharmed,” the business suit man said, his bright blue eyes glinting through the screen. His smile was professional, a forced courtesy that looked as authentic as a bowl of plastic fruit. “She is currently in our care and I assure you that she is at no risk from the creatures you have encountered. We can protect her from those monsters. Far better than you can, by all accounts.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Daniel asked.

  “That’s not important,” the business suit man replied. “What is important is that we have a proposition for you. Your car is repaired, and we can offer you safe passage out of the town. Our only condition is you leave now.”

  He looked at the man right in the eyes, though he knew the camera was built into the tablet’s frame. “Give me back my daughter and I’ll be more than happy to leave”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Burns,” the business suit man replied. “Your daughter is very important to bringing resolution to the current situation.”

  “She’s the key,” Daniel said.

  The fake smile slipped of the business man’s face, but he caught it and put it back on. It was a small victory to unnerve him, and while Daniel still had no clue what this key business was all about, he did know it was meant as confidential information. Even though he regained his fake smile, the man in the business suit spoke with an undertone that Daniel felt was meant to be threatening. “You can leave now. This will be the only time we will make this offer. I suggest you take it.”

  “Not without my daughter,” Daniel said.

  “Think about it, Mr. Burns,” the business suit man said. “What is this girl to you really? Can you honestly say you’re emotionally invested in her? No, of course you can’t. She’s a stranger to you. She’s nothing to you. Why risk your life for some child you’ve never met before? Go back to your life, Mr. Burns. Forget this ever happened. What do you say, Mr. Burns?”

  He looked away from the tablet, thinking of how best to phrase his response. The anger swelled up in his stomach like a bad lunch he was about to vomit up, his hand gripping the tire iron tighter and tighter. He wasn’t sure what made him, the parts the business suit man got wrong, or the parts he got right. Daniel was a stranger to his own daughter. He shouldn’t be, he should be her father, but that was taken from him. No, he wasn’t emotionally invested in his daughter, not as much as a father should. He would be if that wasn’t taken from him like his daughter was taken from him. Again.

  He laid the tabled on the hood of the car, then brought the tire iron bend-first down on the tablet over and over, each blow harder than the next. Glass flew into the air with each blow from the tire iron, the hood of the car denting and buckling and its paint scratching until the table was a pile of plastic and glass and bits of circuitry. With one swipe, he brushed the shattered tablet onto the ground. Without giving the tablet a further thought, he reached down, grabbed Bethany’s doll with his other hand, and walked away.

  From above the street on one of the rooftops, the business suit man dropped his tablet to his feet, his partner looking at him with smug satisfaction. Seeing the first blow coming across the screen was a shock. From above, he watched Burns destroy the tablet, not to mention do a small amount of damage to the car they just had repaired. He hadn’t predicted that but then again reading people was his partner’s skill, not his, and she had told him it wouldn’t work. Now, he had to hear about it.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  “I told you he wouldn’t leave,” his partner said from behind him, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “It won’t matter,” he said. “Unlike the old man and his grandchildren, Mr. Burns is one thorn that will work itself out over time.”

  “Don’t get complacent,” she said. “I have a bad feeling about him.”

  The man in the business suit swallowed a huff. He made a point of maintaining control. Not letting his opponents know his mood gave him an edge, a habit he learned in some of the more seedier parts of the world. “He’s nothing. A minor nuisance.”

  “He knows more than he should,” she said. Unlike him, his partner lacked that discipline. He can already tell she was panicked, confused, and angry by how rapidly she shot her words out.

  “He knows nothing,” he retorted. “I could see it in his eyes.”

  “He knows his daughter is the key,” she said.

  “But he has no idea what that means,” he said. He couldn’t read people’s feelings like his partner, maybe because he lacked those feelings in himself and therefore couldn’t understand them, but he could judge a tactical situation and assess intelligence. It was a necessary skill in his previous line of work. “He’s not a threat.”

  The business suit woman stepped in front of him, blocking his view of Burns in the street below. She glared deep into his eyes. “He’s a random element. We didn’t take him into account, and I take everything into account.”

  “You missed something,” he said, his smile hiding the growl under his voice. “We’ll deal with it. Get over it.”

  “You’re not getting it!” She snapped. “There’s another player in this game, one who likes to maneuver behind the scenes. Whoever he is, he made his first move, and Mr. Burns is his pawn.”

  They glare at each other, their contempt for each other raw and exposed, then they turned their anger and their gaze to Burns down below them. As the business suit man watched him, his partner’s words sunk in. It wasn’t Burns she was worried about, it was whoever got him involved that they had to deal with, whoever that was.

  11

  Daniel walked down the street, the lug wrench in one hand and Chrissy, Bethany’s doll, dangling from the other when he heard a growl from deep in the fog. Sounded like one of those dog monsters, but if the battle waged the night before taught Daniel anything, there were way more horrors in this damn town. He stopped and looked around, but as he tucked the lug wrench under his belt, all he saw was fog. He pulled out the sheriff’s pistol and opened the chamber, staring through the six empty cylinders.

  “Lot of good this thing is,” he muttered to himself.

  Another growl echoed through the fog. Another one of those monsters could be six feet in front of him and he’d never know until it was too late, the fog was so thick. He needed to find more ammo, maybe better firearms. The sheriff’s station was right in front of him. It could be possible there was more ammo inside. He had run out with Bethany before searching the rest of the station, the crazy man in the cell screaming at them. He felt stupid now, letting his panic drive his actions, but he had paid a high price for that. They had his daughter, and he was going to do whatever he needed to get her back. He looked down at the empty cylinders, then back up to the sheriff’s station, and he made up his mind.

  T
here were even fewer lights working now as he walked back into the station. The sheriff’s body was ripped apart into tiny pieces. Whatever had killed him must have come back, but the thing was interested in meat and not hardware. Laying on the ground, still in its spot on the utility belt, was a long-handled flashlight. Daniel grabbed it by the end and slid it out, then aimed the flashlight and turned it on.

  The station wasn’t in good shape before, but it was worse now. Several desks were overturned, deep claw marks gouged in the metal, clotted blood splattered all over. He couldn’t think about it, he had to find ammunition. He stepped carefully through the gore, trying not to slip or step in any large bit of the late sheriff. From the holding cell, he heard the prisoner shuffling and talking to himself. Daniel couldn’t make out what he was saying, it sounded like gurgling and Daniel shivered at the thought of what new self-mutilation that crazy man might have performed. He could see him huddled in the corner, but the light was too dim to make out anything more than a shape. That was fine for him.

  “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m just looking for ammo.”

  The only reply was more gurgling. Was he dying in there, Daniel wondered? He didn’t like the crazy person in the cell, but there was still a long way between dislike and wanting the man to die. Deep in his bones, even though he didn’t wear a badge anymore, he was still a cop. Ingrained in him was a sense of duty, to protect and serve.

  “You okay in there?” he asked, shining the flashlight beam in the prisoner’s direction.

  The thing in the cell rushed the bars, slamming his face into the iron. The loud crack made Daniel jump back, his first thought that the bars were breaking way, but a heartbeat later he realized iron doesn’t make that cracking sound. That was the sound of breaking bone, probably from the front of the creature’s skull, one human eye bulging from its socket, threatening to shoot out while the other eye was covered in blisters. The prisoner was melted and deformed. In places, he ripped from his clothes, on others, he fused with it. Black blood oozed from his face from where it rammed it into the bars, and it reached out at him with a clawed arm. Behind the thing that used to be the prisoner, something caught the flashlight beam. Daniel aimed it up to see, scrawled in black blood, what he imagined was the prisoner’s last coherent thought before becoming this thing – “KILL ME PLEASE!”