The Beast That Was Max

by Gerard Houarner

  "Fucking clerks are taking over the world," Lee muttered, looking out the passenger window. "No wonder it's all going to hell." He met Max's gaze, winked. "Don't let them bully you, Max. But don't let them make you do something stupid, either."

  The voice on the line settled into a cool, professional tone. "We realize your briefing has been inadequate. However, we know you are flexible enough to adapt to new situations. In addition, you have not been left entirely without resources. The safe house is fully supplied and equipped with electronic security, and the area will be monitored by local agencies for unusual activity. We can divert local assets to you if an emergency arises. And, because of the unusual circumstances, we have just been authorized to convert your assigned safe house to Nowhere House status. That should satisfy all of your concerns. You will not need a team because you will not be found, and there is a low probability of engagement with opposition forces during transport to and from the safe house."

  A chill passed through Max. The Beast stopped short.

  The Nowhere House was well beyond the wetwork world in which Max traveled. "Who is this woman? Who is after her?"

  "It doesn't matter who she is," the voice said, toning down the strained formality of its speech. It was as if Max was communicating with several people at the same time, and he wondered if the man on the other end of the line was somehow channeling various officials and representatives assigned to deal with Max. Or perhaps he was simply mad. "The people after her are amateurs. It's the people she's going to who are important and require reassurance. They know you, even like you and your peculiar talent. They feel their property will be safe in your hands. More important, your presence raises her value. Getting the best to escort her is a sign of her importance, a badge of honor."

  The Beast recovered from its momentary surprise and resumed pressuring Max to kill. "I can't do this.”

  “What's so hard?"

  "I've never done what you're asking. I've never had to protect anyone except myself." And the twins, he thought. But they were different. They meant something to him.

  "You're an assassin, you know how you would kill her. Anticipate. Though, as I said, it's almost certain you won't see action."

  "So I'm wasting my time. The hell with this. You do it."

  "If you don't pick up this assignment, you will die.”

  “You'd terminate our contract over this woman?”

  “She is part of a plan. So are you. Changes require consequences. Reparations. Adjustments. Your defiance can serve the plan and sustain the value of what is being done, but only if you are punished."

  "You wouldn't dare."

  "Why not? Would you dare betray us?"

  Max strained to contain the Beast. He wiped the sweat beading on his forehead. The hand holding the phone shook slightly. "She must be a hell of a woman."

  "What is your mission status?"

  Max grunted as if struck in the gut. "Operational.”

  “Check your contact for time limitations."

  Before Max could reply, the connection was severed. He put the phone back in its cradle.

  "Nice job of pulling a briefing out of those assholes," Lee said.

  "Thanks," Max said, with more of the Beast's grumble than his own voice.

  "So I guess you're not going to tell me shit, either.”

  “They said I had to check with you about time limitations."

  "Let me make a call. Maybe we can buy some wiggle room." Lee took the phone, punched in numbers, spoke in low tones, listened, glanced at Max, cocked an eyebrow, checked his watch, hung up. "Damn. I was hoping to sneak over to City Island and pick up crab legs to go before my next drop. But I really do have to get this Fordham divinity student out of the city before the papal meat boys cut off a few of his heretical parts. Looks like my dinner goes the way of your passengers in the trunk. We're cleared to delay your pickup, but I hope you're not thinking of digging really deep graves."

  "No digging."

  Lee waited a moment, studying Max as if to gauge his mood, then pressed on. "Goddamn awesome rating a Nowhere House deployment, though. Better write down anything you want to remember that happened to you over the past forty-eight hours."

  "I thought it was twelve."

  "You believe government specs? I hung out for a weekend with a team one time before they went inside. Saw them a week later during a Tibetan incursion and they took a shot at me."

  Max went over the events of the past week and found nothing worth saving. "There's nothing I need to remember."

  "Well, don't forget the protocol and write yourself instructions on what you have to do once you leave the place, or you're going to be wandering around the South Bronx wondering what the fuck you're supposed to do with your new girlfriend."

  "I know what I should to do with her."

  "Easy, big fella. You're on company time."

  Max pressed the accelerator, wove the Lincoln through the close traffic on the Saw Mill's winding roadway. Horns blared and high beams flashed in his rearview mirror. The Beast was disappointed over the failure of the other drivers' nerves. They exited at Tuckahoe, drove through quiet, tree-lined village streets with Colonials, split-levels, and the occasional overblown Tudor or small manor set on neatly trimmed lots. A stand of trees blotted out the lights of the surrounding neighborhood. Max slowed. Another house appeared, tucked among the trees. Max turned onto the gravel driveway, switched off the lights, let the car crawl toward a single light bulb shining over a side door to a run-down, three-story Victorian. A realtor's weathered For Sale sign and a construction company's renovation announcement were nailed over a faded movie production poster pasted to the door. Max popped the inside trunk release, cracked the door open.

  A dog's barking drifted faintly through the surrounding woods. Cold air stung his lungs as Max got out and took a deep breath of suburban air. He picked out the blood scents of a cat's and an owl's kill, the chemical bites of fertilizer and cleansers, an intoxicating burst of the season's first, fresh growth.

  He joined Lee at the back of the Lincoln, raised the hood, grabbed one end of a man's ravaged, naked corpse. Blood and shit stench mingled with the twins' sweet and musky markings, and with the smell of multiple orgasms spilled by all three. Max gritted his teeth, and was puzzled by the touch of jealousy. The Beast yipped with glee. Lee whistled, took hold of the feet, and stumbled along with Max as they headed toward a hole in the ground beyond the door.

  "Not for nothing, Max, but what's wrong with the traditional incinerator dust-off or swamp dump?"

  "At five tomorrow morning, a cement truck is going to pour a foundation in that pit for a house extension. The people buying the property require blood sacrifices to sanctify the ground on which they plan to hold future services. They've done favors for me in the past. This is the least I could do."

  "Some housewarming gift."

  Two sets of their shadows stretched over the hole: a faint set from the car's inside light left on by Max's open door, and a darker pair set at an angle from the house. They threw the body into the ground and went back for the woman. Max bundled her in the plastic lining the trunk, taking care that none of the blood or gore dribbled out. As they approached the pit again, the body fell out of Lee's hands. He flailed about, trying to hold on to the slick package, but managed only to grab the woman's head by her blond curls. The thin shreds of skin holding the body together snapped and the torso landed with a crackle of gravel. Max scrambled to close off the open end of the package while Lee watched, the head hanging at his side from his fist. As Max crouched, his gaze met the woman's blank stare. The Beast's low rumble of satisfaction vibrated through Max. He smiled into her frozen expression of pain and terror, remembering for the Beast all he had done to shape her final rictus. He scooped up the woman's body before he lost himself in thoughts of the last twists and twitches of her flesh. The wind whistling through budding branches reminded him of the whimper of her dying breath. He threw the body into the hole and headed ba
ck to the car.

  "You're dripping," he said, pointing to the head's ragged wound.

  "Yeah, wouldn't want to ruin the property values for Satanists." Lee went down on one knee and rested the head on the ground, atop the blood droppings. He studied the woman's face, moving the head slightly up and down and from side to side, letting the bulb shed its glow over her face.

  Max picked the shovel and flashlight from the trunk, returned, studied the ground for drippings. He gingerly picked up loose loads of stained dirt and gravel and threw them into the hole.

  "You know, I've seen things like this all my life," Lee said, staring at the woman. "All over the world. Men, women, kids, animals, some shit nobody could ever figure out what the hell they were supposed to be. Seen others and watched you do the work, and done my own share of it."

  Max policed the area around Lee until he was satisfied there was nothing left except for the head. He put the flash beam on Lee for a moment. The Beast sensed weakness as the night bore down on Lee, framing his weary face. He moved the beam to the woman before the urge to kill overcame him. Her eyes seemed to follow him in the play of light and shadow as Lee continued to pivot the head around.

  "So what? Come on, I thought you were in a hurry to get back."

  "Was she good?" Lee held the head up to his face, peered into her eyes. "Did she give you a thrill?”

  “Yes."

  "But she didn't want to go like this."

  "No."

  "You didn't care."

  "You just wanted what you wanted, because you wanted to, and that was it."

  "Yes. Same as you. Same as always. What's your point?"

  "And it was worth it. No matter how messy or what a pain in the ass it was to clean up after, it's always worth it. It always is."

  Max shut off the flashlight, let the blade sink into gravel and dirt with a metallic clink. He knew what was coming, had heard the kind of talk before, in asylums and hospitals, jungle encampments, basements, tunnels, and caves. It was a moment humans seemed to find inescapable, even if the remorse they presented was only a pretense to fool themselves into believing they had feelings of sorrow and regret where there were none, and preserve their place among others and in the world.

  "Do you think there's any forgiveness for this?" Lee asked, not taking his gaze away from the woman as he presented her head to Max.

  "What's to forgive?"

  "The pain. The terror."

  "Isn't that what life's about?"

  Lee brought her head back to level with his. "I don't know, is it?" Her head swung away from him with the momentum of his arm motion. "I think there's more than just pain and terror."

  "Yes, there's always appetite."

  "Yours?"

  "Yes."

  "What about hers?" Again, he held her head high, swinging it slightly back and forth.

  Max watched the pattern of blood dripping on the ground. He thought the drops formed a rough arrow pointing to him. "Mine was stronger."

  "Don't you ever wonder if there's more than that? The game, the killing, the appetite?"

  "Like what?"

  "Don't you ever feel like you're not human?"

  "All the time."

  "Do you miss feeling human?"

  The head rotated in Lee's grip to face Max. The house light fell against the folds and grooves in her face, exaggerating with shadows the expression locked in her flesh. Her eyes, which Max thought had been looking down, now seemed to rotate under the lacerated brow and glare at him through a hanging eyebrow and loose strands of golden hair.

  “What is there to miss?" Max answered through the Beast's mad roar as it rose in outrage to answer the challenge of the dead. "It's better being the hunter than the prey. To feel human is to be prey." He put a hand to his holster, loosened his gun, put his finger on the trigger. The Beast urged him to aim, to put a bullet in the man's head. Its raging voice was louder than the crack of the gunshot Max anticipated. It was louder than a cannon barrage falling short of its target, and threatened to carry him away on winds more terrible than those raised by a stray bombing run laying down arc light on the wrong position.

  "You've never been hunted?"

  Max raised the Ruger, pointed it at Lee. "No."

  Lee smiled, looked to Max. He grinned at the gun. "Shit. You're going to love this job."

  Max shifted, fired. The bullet smashed into the dead woman's head. The head jumped in Lee's steady grip, bone and gore spraying from the back of the skull. Blond hair bounced with newfound life. The Beast screamed in frustration at Lee's survival, then roared in triumph as it relived the consummation of her death. But its joy exhausted itself in another moment as it dry-humped the memory, and its passion blew away like dust.

  "That'll wake the neighbors."

  "The trees won't tell." He knew the stand would act as a sound barrier, and he doubted anyone beyond the trees in the village of Tuckahoe knew or remembered what gunfire was like, or would believe it resounding dimly in their haven.

  The Beast rattled in his head, demanding hot, wet satisfaction. Max's hunger rose in response, as if he had never touched the woman, never heard her screams, not done the things he had done over the past few hours before meeting Lee.

  "Had you going there, didn't I?" Lee asked, getting up and dumping the head in the hole. "Thought I got the fever, didn't you? Broken old man, shaking with the guilts?" Lee's high-pitched laughter drifted to the stars.

  Max threw the shovel at him. "You clean the mess up." He put the gun back in the holster, started back to the Lincoln.

  "Do you want me to lay some dirt over the bodies so they don't look so obvious?" Lee called back, shovel scraping against gravel.

  "Don't bother, the contractor is expecting them. He has a permit to start at dawn, so no one should stumble across them."

  Lee carefully looked the ground over, tossed the shovel in the pit, then walked to the house door. He looked at the movie poster and said, "I remember this piece of made-for-TV shit when it came out. They wouldn't know a psycho killer if he bit them in the ass. And I sure as hell felt like biting them after watching that crap." Laughing again, he unscrewed the bulb and threw it toward the grave. "Let the dead rest in peace," he said, sliding into the passenger seat.

  Max backed out of driveway, checked the woods on both sides with a small night-vision scope. A car rounded a corner, sped past, leaving a crescendo from Beethoven's Second Symphony reverberating in its wake.

  Max waited until it was gone, turned on the headlights, and headed back toward the city. The Beast would not rest. It roamed the emptiness he created for it in his mind, scraped the walls of the body he kept calm and in control. He did not give the Beast the reins of his self, as he had done in times past, as he did when he hunted. He focused on the mission, on maintaining discipline. He almost let himself smile as he thought of how pleased the latest of his martial teachers, the old Chan woman, would be if she could sense his discipline now. How much greater would her pride be, he wondered, if she knew the nature and powers of the monster that lived inside him? Would she try to kill him, as other masters had done, when they discovered what he truly was? Would he have to kill her when she came for him?

  He pulled up behind a black Lexus parked in front of the Buddhist Temple on Albany Crescent off the Deegan. Lee stepped out, went to the car, spoke to the driver. The doors of the Temple cracked opened, revealing a flash of saffron. A group of men and women walked out, mostly Asian, laughing and talking. Lee stood, scanned the buildings and roofline, glanced at Max. Max got out and walked into the group, joined in their laughter as they drifted to the Lexus. Max identified the gathering's leaders as Khmer, immigrant survivors of the Cambodian killing fields.

  A whiff of sweet incense accompanied subtle drumming spilling out of the Temple. A huddle of bald, painted heads gathered in the dark slit of the Temple door's opening. By manner, color, and spirit, Max knew them as foreign monks dragged from their isolation to reluctantly play a role in the game bein
g played. The Beast's growl gave sympathetic accompaniment to their desperate, hungry eyes fixed on the Lexus. Max thought it was not the car, nor the superficial Western wealth of the surrounding city, that challenged the discipline of their faith. They were not a threat to the exchange, Max thought, only some of its victims. Unlike the immigrants, Max was not certain they would survive.

  Lee opened the back door. A woman poured out, graceful, sure, resigned. Max and the Beast catalogued her attributes. Asian but not easily sorted into one of the modern nationalities, as if a primal root of the current subtle genetic divisions had survived millennia of tribalization. Short and slim, dressed in black: beaded slippers, Capri pants, quilted silk jacket with red brocade. Her hair was a jasmine-scented waterfall of midnight oil drawn from the world's heart. Her face was a pale reflection of another world, her lips an oracle, her eyes pits deeper and more deathly than the grave in which he had just dumped two bodies and nearly a third.

  Her gaze caught his. She stopped short. Lee bumped into her from behind, shook his head in irritation, became distracted by a young immigrant's insistent whispering. The woman looked Max up and down.

  A warning, born from the Beast's instinct, shivered through Max. She smiled.

  Vertigo swept Max up in a spinning vortex. Heart pumping madly, stomach lurching, a cold sweat breaking over his skin, Max sank into a slight crouch and let training take over. Through the assault, he checked for gas, a drug-tipped dart, the fading touch from contact poison.

  Before he found the source of the attack, the world shifted again and he was lost in a sensory flurry. Perspectives merged and warped until Picasso images of people's faces filled his vision, and the exact same inane snatches of conversation punctuated by empty laughter sounded from different directions, out of synch. Max floated above his body, over the street. The Beast scrambled to hang on to him.