Protectors of the Veil

by Dawn Matthews

  “I’m not just a reader, you know.”

  “Right.” Cassie smirked, motioned with her head towards the thousands of books surrounding us.

  I took a drink. Ben, I saw, did not smile at her words. He barely seemed to even hear them. “I watch stuff, too,” he said. “Documentaries, mainly.” He pointed towards the book. “And I’ve seen stuff like that before.” He finally took a drink. A pretty big one, I noticed. I looked over to Cassie. She seemed to be hanging on his every word. I didn’t let it get to me this time. Because I thought I knew where Ben was going this time, and I thought it was bullshit.

  “Ah,” I said, nodding. “I get it.” I’d seen the same documentaries. “You mean those government reports on stuff like UFOs, unexplained phenomena.” I smiled, finished the rest of my drink, starting to feel a little mellow now, starting to enjoy myself. “There’s always tons of stuff blacked out in those.” I looked at Ben. “Right?” I kept waiting for him to smile. But he never did.

  “Come on,” I said, pointing towards the book. “You can’t think this is one of those.” But he did. “Babe?” I said, looking next to Cassie. “Are you buying this or—” Much like the police officer I killed earlier, I did not finish my sentence. Because just one look at her, one glance at the apprehension on her face, and I could see that she believed it, too.

  “I know a fake,” Ben said, drawing my attention back to him. “I know a forgery. And that…” He left the rest unsaid.

  “Right.” I was starting to feel a little mean now, not much liking being the odd one out. “And a highly classified, top secret government document ends up in our local library how?”

  “I don’t know.” Ben placed his glass down on the table by the book. “Did you try asking Dean?”

  I walk.

  You know, it’s funny. In today’s world, most people think it’s impossible to slip off the radar. But if you know what you’re doing, and if you really want to, it’s just as easy as it’s always been. You just get rid of your mobile phone, you don’t go to Internet cafes to update your social network status, and you head as far out into the country, where there are no cameras, as you can. All of which I’ve done. Though my last set of clothes is starting to smell a little ripe now, with all of this walking.

  But I’m out in the wilds, and when I get too tired to carry on I sleep under the stars, beneath the trees, and if the worst thing happens and a wild bear eats me, well . . .it’s probably better than the alternative.

  I’m in that frame of mind—resigned yet somehow simultaneously optimistic—when I come across the shack. I edge around it nervously, my gun ready in my hand, lest the movies I used to watch with Cassie should come true and an inbred mutant hillbilly family live inside. But I already know, I can already tell from the secluded feel of this forest: the place is deserted.

  Nice, I think, pushing open the door. Which would probably be a good way to end my story. Sort of a happy ending—as near to happy as I’m ever going to be now, anyway. But I do not intend to make this place my home. No, I have other plans for it. It looks the perfect place for me to make a last stand. Dean hadn’t seen anything. That really would have been too easy.

  But like the head librarian said: The City Library was a busy place. Plus, he had breaks to take. I still figured someone could have come along and dropped the book off in the library and then headed on their merry way without being seen. And who said that whoever had done it had to look sneaky and suspicious anyway? Maybe he was just an ordinary guy, not someone who had escaped from a government dungeon laboratory, like Ben seemed to think had happened.

  Question was, why had they done so in the first place? The answer hovered just on the horizon. Along with The Raid. The car pulls to a stop when the driver sees me. Out here in the middle of nowhere, a place where it’s surprising they even have roads, he probably just assumes my car has broken down and I’ve left it behind to seek help on foot. He changes his mind when he sees the gun, and tries to drive off.

  But by then it’s too late. I don’t kill him, though. I just knock him unconscious with the pistol, and then take his phone. I leave him in the front seat of his car, and I feel pretty secure in doing so. I mean, a regular person would just write their phone off and get the hell out of there when they come around, right? Surely, he won’t chase after me. And if he does…well, he can get in line. Line. Heh. Funny.

  I ditched my own mobile that very first night, knowing they could use it to track me. But now things have changed. Back in the shack, I check my gun is loaded, and I prepare to make a phone call. I had left the book with Ben, and in all honesty, I half-wished I could leave it all with him, all the mystery about where the thing had come from, and whether it was genuine or not. But I’ll admit it: I was too curious to do so.

  On the way over, though…Cassie kept checking the rear-view mirror.

  “Christ,” I groaned. “Not you, too.”

  It struck me then that there was an inherent mistrust of authority in most people—maybe even especially in us readers. We discover a book full of blacked-out text, and suddenly we’re looking out for someone following us. At least, she was—I wasn’t quite at that point yet.

  How I wish I’d reached it sooner.

  “Who?”

  “Is?”

  “This?”

  They only speak a single word each. They finish each other’s sentences. They sound like nothing of this world. Because they’re not.

  “You know who this is,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “We.”

  “Do.”

  They laugh. I do not. Even just hearing their voices makes me feel nauseous.

  “Where?”

  “Are?”

  “You?”

  “Guess,” I say, playing their one-word game. Then I drop the phone and get ready to wait.

  Ben was pretty hip and New-Age when it came to his attitude towards the fairer sex—a whole wall of his collection was given over to feminist writing, and as you may have already guessed, he had some pretty big walls. But some things die hard in us simple men-folk, and when he asked me to come up to his study the night of The Raid I knew he had something that he didn’t wish to discuss in front of Cassie.

  “Dude,” I said, eyes growing wide as he pulled open one of his drawers and unveiled the gun that lay inside. “Don’t you think you’re exaggerating just a little?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  Then he glanced towards the window and back to me. I recognized the look in his eye because I’d seen the same one in Cassie earlier.

  “Ben,” I said. “Relax. No one’s watching.” But I was starting to wonder about that. Surely it couldn’t be that both of them were merely paranoid? Or was I just thinking that way because I didn’t want to feel left out?

  “Maybe,” Ben said. “But you can’t be too careful.” And he held out the weapon to me.

  I shook my head. “Too many documentaries,” I said. But I took the gun.

  “Why do you even have this?” I asked, eyeing it warily.

  “I’ve got quite an expensive collection here,” he said, shrugging. “It’s for protection.”

  “From what?” I said. “Who’d try to steal a book?” I added, and that was when I heard Cassie scream.

  What I’d give to hear her voice now. But she’s gone. Like Ben. Like my life. Like everything.

  I ran out of the study and down the stairs, gun in my hand. That was when I first saw them, standing just inside of the front door. Three of them, all identical. Hulking, hairless creatures. Their heads bizarrely conically shaped, a strange mixture of skin and a pulsing green goo. Dressed in shirts whose arms had been sliced away. And instead of left hands, they had huge black markers.

  Their actual left hands, half claw and half flipper, hung around their necks on ropes. Their mouths flopped open, revealing blackened teeth, and then they spoke.

  “We.”

  “Are.”

  “The.”

&nbs
p; “Marker.”

  “Men.”

  “You.”

  “Found.”

  “The.”

  “Book.”

  “That.”

  “Book.”

  “Belongs.”

  “In.”

  “Our.”

  “Hands.”

  And they came further into the room. Cassie backed towards the stairs, towards me. I levelled the gun at them.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” I shouted. “Now!”

  “Not.

  “Yet.”

  “Not.”

  “Without.”

  “The.”

  “Book.”

  I looked back at Ben. I was worried he was about to play hero. But he wasn’t. He looked terrified. And I knew now that he’d been right.

  He pulled the book from his pocket and tossed it to the three creatures. The lead Marker Man plucked it out of the air, pulled it open, and looked at it. My eyes were firmly on them. I didn’t notice that Cassie was closer to them than she was to me. I took a couple of steps down towards her, keeping the gun steady, keeping it trained on the creatures. The Marker Men looked up at me.

  “You.”

  “Read.”

  “It.”

  “Read what?” Ben said behind me, finding his voice once more. “There’s nothing there to read!”

  “Better.”

  “Make.”

  “Sure,” the third one finished, and he swept his marker hand across Cassie’s throat.

  There was no blood. She did not scream. Her throat merely vanished and her head toppled off. I screamed, then, and started firing. The bullets hit the creatures, but did not seem to harm them. They started walking, coming up the stairs, but they pushed past me and went straight to Ben. They pushed him down on the stairs and put their markers upon him and began to erase him, bit by bit, limb by limb.

  I screamed at them to take me, too, knowing that I couldn’t live past this, knowing that I didn’t want to. But they did not listen. They just kept on wiping Ben away.

  I let the gun drop.

  I asked, “Why?” The reply came from behind me.

  “You don’t believe, son.”

  I looked around and looked down the stairs. I saw a man in his fifties, in an army uniform, standing there.

  “They only like to hurt those that believe in them,” he said, walking towards me. “That’s the only thing we’ve found that entertains them.”

  “But…” I looked back at the things. “What are they?”

  “Something we called up to… help out with certain things.” He looked at them distastefully. “Only problem was, we didn’t realize we couldn’t send them back, when we were done with them.” He sighed. “Couldn’t kill them, either. That’s when we came up with this little game, to keep them occupied.”

  I looked at the book. “So, it was genuine.”

  The old man did something then that angered me. He smiled.

  “Genuine,” he said. “That’s a laugh. Those conspiracy nuts have been going on about those blacked-out books for years. That’s why we decided to give them what they wanted.” He pointed to the three creatures. “The procedure was fun. They helped cut their own hands off.”

  The trio made a noise that could have been a giggle.

  “So, it’s a fake?” I asked.

  “Not quite, son,” he said. “It’s just a part of the game, that’s all. We drop that book in some random place and let someone find it. Then my three companions here start the watch. Didn’t you feel them, following you?”

  I remembered Cassie’s glance towards the rear-view mirror earlier.

  “Your friends did,” the military man said, nodding. “They felt it.” His eyes met mine. “But I had a feeling it would be you that ended up going the distance.” As he said this, the Marker Men turned around to face me for a second. They smiled. They had been feeding on the parts of Ben they had not erased, and their teeth were coated in his blood. They returned to the task at hand.

  “Now you’re part of the game, too.” He motioned towards the door. “So, you’d better get out of here.”

  “Game?” I looked at Cassie’s severed head, gazed upon the face I’d loved so much. Then I looked down at Ben, now little more than a collection of unassembled body parts and blood covered holes. “Game?”

  The military man did not look at all sad when I picked up the gun and blew his head off. He seemed, in fact, to expect it. And when I reached my car, I saw that he had already made all the preparations that he needed to. There was a suitcase there with various identification cards in it. All with my face, but under different names. I rooted through them and found other cards, too, ones with Cassie’s or Ben’s face upon them.

  There were more for me. They’d taken no chances, but like the old bastard I’d just killed had said, they’d had a feeling it would be me. God, why had I just not believed in the first place? Then I would be dead, and maybe…I fell to my knees, weeping.

  In the depths of my panic, I wondered, as so many conspiracy theory types must have done before me, if I should go public with this. If that would ever stand a chance. But the kind of government body that could not only produce IDs as realistic looking as this, not to mention call forth the Marker Men from wherever they had come—“up”, the man had said, and I think we could all take a guess at what that means—was not something I could ever go to war with.

  Besides…I looked back to the house, they would be coming for me soon, hunting me, and I was going to have my hands full fighting them. And fight them I knew I would, someday soon. Now that I was finally a believer.

  I got into my car and drove away from Ben’s house.

  So now you know.

  And maybe now you won’t laugh, next time you hear someone tell a joke about a guy with a crazy belief. I just wish I’d made that leap sooner. But I believe now. Oh yes. And maybe that will help. Maybe my bullets had no affect back at Ben’s house because I didn’t really believe what I was seeing. Or maybe I need to do it hand-to-hand, need to kill them up close and personal. Who knows?

  I guess I’ll find out soon enough, because now I hear them coming through the woods, heading towards the shack. So, I whisper a final prayer of sorrow to Cassie and Ben, then I ready my gun.

  And I leap out of the shack firing.

  END.

  “Danny took a few of them out, but there were too many. The man that owned the cabin showed up with another guy. They had weapons and shot at them, killing them all. It didn’t occur to them not to believe what they were seeing. The three men are still at the cabin, trying to figure out what happened. Danny will be dead soon, but the other two need to be convinced that nothing out of the ordinary happened…or need to be killed. Mork will be your partner. Good luck.”

  Jason got in the car and Mork was already there, as excited as ever. “GOOD AFTERNOON, JASON!” Mork said. “I hope you don’t mind, I asked for this assignment. My last assignment was too short.”

  “I don’t mind at all, Mork, I love working with you,” Jason replied. “How are you doing today?”

  “I’m very excited to be here!” Mork said, “I’m sure you guessed that. I enjoy working with humans. I’d like to try to pretend to be one, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure, if you want,” Jason said. He pushed the button and they were at the cabin.

  “Danny has just died,” Mork said. “They are discussing what to do about it.”

  Jason knocked on the door. They had their badges out. They could hear whispering. Nobody wants to open the door when there is a dead body lying on the couch. They heard a male voice say, “Go answer it, I’ll put a blanket over the body.”

  A few moments later, the door cracked open. “Yes, what do you want?” the man asked quickly.

  Jason and Mork held their badges so the man could read them. “We’re from the NSA and we’d like to ask you a few questions, please.”

  The man looked as though he might pass out. There was b
lood on the porch. He pointed to it saying, “That…that…that…we were huntin’.”

  “We’re not here about the body, but we can help you with that if you let us talk to you,” Jason said.

  “I swear we didn’t kill him! There were these things!” the man said.

  “I know; you saw some huge deformed men. Can we come in and talk with you about it?” Jason asked.

  The man looked back at his friend, “You promise you aren’t gonna arrest us?”

  “Yes, sir. We know you didn’t do this. We just want to ask you some questions and discuss it a little. Then we’ll take the body and you can get on with your huntin’ trip.”

  “Okay,” he said, “c’mon in.”

  “Gentleman,” Jason said, “My name is Special Agent Jason Olinski, and this is my partner Agent…Mork. We’d like you to tell us, in your own words, what happened today.”

  They looked at each other and the man that answered the door started talking, “You aren’t gonna believe it, I lived it and I’m not sure I believe it.”

  “Understood,” Jason said, “sometimes what we think we’ve seen has a different explanation than what we think.”

  “Oh, I don’t even know what to think about what we saw,” the man said. His name was Tayllor Armstrong.

  “Me either,” his friend, Nicolas Todaro said.

  “Okay,” Mork said as calmly as he could muster, “tell us exactly what you did see without thinking about it.”

  “Well,” Tayllor said, “I was driving the car, and we pulled into the road leading to the cabin and heard all these weird noises. This guy,” he motioned to the body, “was yelling and shooting these big lumbering things. I can’t even begin to describe them, they were just weird looking.”

  “We weren’t really sure what was going on at first,” Nicolas said. “This guy was running towards them and shooting. At first we were just going to call the cops, until we got a better look and decided we should just help this guy out. One of the lumbering things had grabbed him.”

  “He had already killed three of them, but once they got their hands on him, he was done for. It looked like a claw or something, crushing his throat. So, we shot that one and the others that were alive. The weird thing is, their bodies just disappeared when they died.”