Max controlled his breathing. Following Mrs. Chan's meditation techniques, he cleared his mind. Mani's living shadow fell over his passion for killing. He welcomed her intrusive presence within him. Instincts and appetites calmed, leaving cold professionalism in charge of surviving.
He looked into the back of the car. He saw the outline of a plan in the play of what lay on the floor of the car, and in shadows, assumptions, fragments of knowledge.
"Shit, what a dumb-ass pair of stupid motherfuckers we are!" Lee glared at Max, sat up suddenly, and followed Max's gaze. He moaned. "No fucking way."
The voice gargled wetly.
Lee stared, then continued in a monotone, as if parts of him had been left behind in the dead-end street battle. "We didn't even check the car when we got in. Fuck me, but we're going to die from our own stupidity. Look at that shit back there. Should have smelled them, if I didn't have so much of that stink on me already. Fucking kids and their mom…."
As Lee babbled, Max considered bolting from the car and leaving Lee and the woman for the authorities. But he needed the car to get through the escape route. And there was the plan, an endgame gaining reality even though they had not yet survived the immediate danger.
"Drive. Let's get to Omari's. You heard where the opening is?" Max counted down the seconds until he had to kill Lee and take the car. The Beast trembled, ready to pounce, desperate to take control and kill someone not already dead.
Lee slid back into the seat, stared straight ahead, nodded, drove off.
"Give her up," a little boy said from the floor of the backseat. It had taken a few seconds for whatever had taken over the corpse to gain control of the body's breathing mechanism and vocal cords. If the boy had been alive, his raspy words might have warned of serious illness. Dead, Max knew the words were not the boy's.
Max studied the bodies huddled together like the remains of a modern ethnic cleansing crowded into a shallow grave. The older girl's jaw was broken, her mouth ruined by the blunt object used to kill her. The boy, still in his Catholic school uniform, his dark locks and high cheekbones casting him in the same feminine frame as his sister and mother, wore mottled bruises around his neck to show that his death had been slow, and perhaps enjoyed by his killer. The mother bore the familiar lipless mouth across the neck marking the majority of Rithisak's corpses. Pieces of their flesh hung on the shredded leather and padding ripped away from the rear of the car, and the armored trunk wall was scratched by their effort to get to Mani.
Three sets of eye sockets filled with tacks, crumpled aluminum foil, rat poison pellets, broken glass, torn name tags, and cigarette butts fixed on Max. Three chest holes blocked by tightly woven twig and dried-leaf walls torn from squirrel nests invited the Beast to smash through and rip out the magic mechanism of their afterlife. Their fingers, nails torn off and tips scraped raw from raking the trunk wall, were splayed across the seat cushions and doors, bracing the bodies for the ride. Rithisak's white animating fluid beaded on pale skin, reddish-brown meat and protruding white bone.
Max scanned the street for the surviving ambush car but found nothing suspicious. Line of sight was apparently not critical for Rithisak's work.
"She is not yours," the boy said. "You must give her back to me. Now."
Max recognized an inflection in the voice.
Lee grunted, took a sharp left turn. Gunfire erupted behind them. "I don't believe it," Lee said, life returning to him. "You hear that? We really do know this fuck, don't we, Max?"
A short, sharp burst of laughter escaped Max, surprising himself, the Beast, Lee. "He's come back to punish us for our sins," he said, barely containing a rising giddiness as he saw a Khmer face in a crowd of trainees countless years ago, anonymous except for a nasal twang some said was an American affectation and others claimed had its source in overindulgence of drugs, mystic chanting, or a blow to the nose by an unpaid whore. A sense of the situation's absurdity nearly overwhelmed him, as if it were a Beast of its own inside him.
Rithisak's resurrection in their lives was not a ghost coming back to haunt them, but another signal spike in the endless background static of sanctioned operations. Allies and enemies frequently exchanged places, and opposition forces on one mission often acted as facilitators on the next. There was no more meaning in his reappearance than in the civilian casualties scattered on the street they had left behind. It was not as if the victims of his pleasures were reaching out of their graves for him.
The tension, that laughter had dissipated, sank cold, bony fingers into his shoulders and squeezed.
Lee spoke, turning again, weaving out of the circle of a helicopter's searchlight as they went down a street lined with burned-out lamps. "He didn't give us that goof name when we trained him, the little son of a bitch. Couldn't put together a decent patrol back then, can't pull off an ambush today. No wonder most of his people are fucking dead. Who the fuck would work for him?"
The boy held out a ragged hand to Max. "We are old comrades. She is nothing. Give her to me, and I will let you go."
"Let us go?" Lee said. "It ain't you that's kicking our asses right now, shithead."
"Fuck you, Rithisak," Max said, and reached for the dead little boy.
"Max?" Lee's tone made him turn. Ahead, a roadblock of limousines and Jeep Trailblazers, all in black, cut off the street they were on. Lee slowed. Presidential seals decorated the vehicle license plates.
"Ah, shit," Lee said, "we're going to hear about this one."
A limousine backed out, leaving a hole for the Town Car to pass through. Secret Service agents chattering into their lapel mikes checked Lee and Max through the side windows and waved them through. No one inspected the backseat or trunk. Lee never let the car come to a complete halt, and slowly rolled through the roadblock. On the other side, police cruisers and uniformed officers mingled with men in paramilitary gear and helmets, bearing automatic and sniper weapons. Heads turned. Eyes bore into the Lincoln. Max switched the ceiling light off. Helicopters thrummed overhead, their vertical searchlights joining the horizontal beams from the police cruisers in a blinding dance.
As they slipped through the security checkpoint, Max ground his teeth. The resources his superiors had allocated to the emergency on such short notice impressed him. But he was nervous under the intense scrutiny, and felt himself on the razor's edge of danger in passing so close among men who would gladly kill him if they only knew his true nature. He wanted to kill them, but he had no chance, a lone hunter so deep in the pack of his enemies. The loss of control reminded him of Mani's intrusion, and panic nipped at his gut, driving his heart to beat faster. The Beast shared his discomfort, but as Lee eased through the thinning ranks of police, firemen, bomb squad, emergency units, and special tactical units, the Beast let loose a cry of triumph at its escape. The Beast's joy infected Max, confirming his freedom. The crushing pressure of now evaporated. The future opened up, and opportunity for fresh prey was not so distant.
"We don't have far to go," Lee said. "What do you want to do about that shit in the backseat?"
Max rubbed his temples as the Beast's sustained, piercing ululation replaced the pain of closing time for the moment. Lee accelerated after passing the last police cordon closing off traffic access and keeping neighborhood locals away from the scene of the action. The Beast exhausted itself. Max relaxed into the passenger seat. Cuts and scratches, and deeper wounds, from his fight with Rithisak's dead agents called for his attention. He pushed through the noise of needs from his own body, the Beast, Mani, Lee, and focused on getting through the next few hours. Mrs. Chan's admonitions to listen to his opponent, to give in without surrendering and draw out his opponents, rose from the memories of her lessons. For once, he heard the meaning of her lesson and almost understood.
He needed one of the dead, but not three.
He started turning, the Beast rising with its strength but not its accustomed enthusiasm for slaughter. The mother shot through the gap between the passenger and driver
's seat, bone-tipped fingers curled into claws. Max clipped the woman's elbow with an instinctive blow, knocking her off balance and saving Lee's face. Before he could grab her, the daughter, snaking her way under her mother, took hold of his left forearm with both hands. The boy, crawling over the seat, slid over Max's shoulder and hung on to his right arm.
Lee cried out, fought off the mother, hit a breakaway lamppost, and sent it flying over the car. The Lincoln shuddered, wove back and forth across the street as the dead woman wrestled with Lee. Max smashed the children together, head first, tried to pull the woman off of Lee. They scraped a parked car, clipped a mailbox, and bounced off the side of a parked forty-foot tractor-trailer. Max reached over to help Lee fight off the mother, but the children exploited a wild turn of the car and pinned him against the door. Another shudder passed through the Lincoln from an impact with a loosely anchored chain-link fence pole, and they careened across a rubble-filled empty lot, crashing through a foot-high wall that crushed the front end of the car.
The children flew out of Max's arms as glass shattered under flying bricks and air bags ballooned. Max fought for breath as the children's heads pressed against his chest, driven by the safety bags. Metal crunched and clanged in the wheel wells as the car continued rolling. Lee's muffled scream broke into a string of curses. The car vaulted, landed front end first, and remained stuck, tail elevated. The sudden stop shot Max into the ceiling. Ears rang, vision narrowed. A shock wave of pain swept through his skull. His stomach lurched at the smell of burnt oil and gasoline mingled with the stench of guts and gases forced out of the dead by sudden pressure. The world blacked out.
Max woke, stunned, to the Beast's howl of outrage and the engine sputtering and grinding itself into annihilation. The dead children fidgeted against him, their fingers finding wounds to burrow into and widen. The children's teeth, loosened by the impact and Max's blows, gnawed at the meat of his limbs. Max clawed out of the fog in his head, instincts telling him he had been out for only moments, the Beast driving him to fight. The children reached for his eyes. Lee moaned, and sounds of a struggle dominated his side of the car.
The air bags ripped and deflated before Max's frenzied burst to rid himself of his attackers. He drove the boy to the floor, trapped his head against the floor of the car with one leaden foot, focused his attention on the girl. The Beast spat at Max's restraint.
Cursing faster than he could breathe, Lee fought his way out of the driver's-side crumpled window, dragging the mother out with him as she clung to his waist and tried to bite his crotch.
Max finished with the girl, freeing her body from Rithisak's enslavement, and heaving her empty form into the backseat. He ripped the air bag free by rubbing it against protruding, twisted shards of front-end metal, and bound the boy tightly with the plastic. He tried his door, surprised by the blood splattered against the glass and side panel. The Beast added its rage to his adrenaline rush, but their combined strength wasted itself against the car's mangled shell. He crawled to the driver's side, pulling the dead boy after him, and followed Lee into the night.
Max fell headfirst into a ditch. The boy slipped from his grasp. Lee grunted and cursed a few feet away as he imitated Max's tactics and tore Rithisak's controlling substances from the mother's body. Max tried to get to his feet and fell like a drunkard, face first, against the car. He tried again, failed, realized his legs were numb from the impact. He checked himself for broken bones and found none. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he vomited.
"Max," Lee called, throwing off the mother's husk, "we only have a block to go. Get up, you lazy fucking bastard, you ain't hurt I wasn't even going twenty at the end ….”
Max wiped his mouth, trading bitter bile for gore and his own blood splattered over his skin. A police cruiser sped past, sirens and lights carving the night, the officers ignoring the torn fence and smoking wreck in the empty lot. The Beast rose to answer Max's unspoken need, mobilizing every ounce of latent strength. His legs tingled. Pain, the beginning of life, crept through his body like rivulets of blood breaking a drought's parched earth.
Lee drew himself up. "Fine, you take a fucking vacation and I'll get your date." He leaned over Max, took out the car keys, went around to the back. "Ah, shit, I fucking hope she's still alive."
Max pushed himself to join Lee. Nothing happened. More, the Beast demanded. His body needed even more strength, more pain.
He tasted the blood on his fingers, the excrement and refuse, bits of other people's dead skin, the sticky residue of Rithisak's controlling substance trapped under his nails. Mani's shadow stirred inside him, deepening with remembrances, offering hope. Max crawled to the mother's corpse, lapped at the white matter running slow and thick like sap from her chest wound. Familiar flavors from the fight overlaid knowledge of tropical flora Mani had left in his mind, and a part of him began analyzing the ingredients Rithisak used. The Beast pounced on the substance, savoring the glutinous milk as if it were life's essence. Max devoured the residue as he would blood at the height of his lust, scooping out remnants from inside the carcass, scraping the body's inner walls, consuming like a madman starving for nourishment, dying of thirst.
Sap oozed between his fingers, crept on ten thousand prickling legs down his throat, burrowed into his stomach. Wild seasonings lingered in his mouth. Within moments, time slowed, his heartbeat resounded like the footsteps of a god coming for him, and the surrounding reality's straight urban lines melted, folded, curled into a hellish maze.
For a moment, a window opened in a place beyond where the Beast resided. A vision blazed, filled his mind with a view looking out onto a land of death. Howls of agony and despair rose from a landscape of twisted bone partially hidden by flesh draped like the banners of ancient, fallen armies. Someone—something—called his name. Hatred hit him like waves of heat coming off the ground. Senses alerted him to a stalker.
Max closed his eyes, trying to filter the vision and isolate the enemy coming for him. He strained for a glimpse, a taste, the scent of his hunter, but even the frisson of a malevolent gaze brushing against him was absent. The Beast cast out its inhuman senses, but floundered in the territory between hallucinations and reality. Neither of them could define the enemy. What eluded their grasp was a shape of power, vast and slow, dotted with the hint of multiplicity, like the eye of a fly, and reinforced by the palpable despair underlying a concentration camp's cold hate.
The enemy was far away, but closing. Not Rithisak or Mani, who were near and familiar. Something new and terrible. The threat unbalanced him even more than all the assaults, from his official contacts, Mani, and Rithisak's army of the dead, he had suffered.
The Beast sucked the warped perceptions into itself, feeding on hallucination's excesses. The sense of being stalked faded, became irrelevant. Strength returned to Max's limbs. Pain blazed, then diminished into a manageable throbbing. Max stood, pulled the weakly writhing dead boy from the car, and dragged it to the back of the Lincoln sticking up out of the ditch, where Lee struggled with the lock.
"You into souvenirs again?" Lee asked, doing a double take at Max's approach.
Max let the body go, slapped Lee's hand away from the lock. "I need it."
Lee looked Max over. "I hate to ask what for. You got any more of the shit that's got you buzzed up again?"
Max reached into the boy's partially stoppered heart hole and took out a fingertip full of Rithisak's white life-giving fluid. He offered it to Lee, who winced and shook his head. Max stuck the finger into his mouth, then pushed a release point near the bumper while turning the key. The trunk hood popped open.
Max met Mani as she emerged, putting his hands around her waist and lifting her out. "Are you all right?" he said, surprising himself with the question, and the emotion behind the words. "The baby?" The Beast growled a warning.
"The child still lives inside me." She leaned into him after he set her down, hands traveling over his torn clothing and wounds. "Cambodians are used to suffering. Water f
lows where it can, where it must. I know how to protect what I carry. After all, you did not set off one of your smart bombs in the trunk, or beat and rape me for hours."
He examined her body by the dim glow of the trunk light, dabbing bleeding cuts with the cleaner shreds of her clothing, putting his palm against her belly to try and feel the faint motions of life in her. His pulse quickened, and senses sharpened in the way they did when he closed on a kill. He felt the fetus inside her, cocooned in layers of unfamiliar tissue. He wondered what trick she knew to fool his senses, or what magic had grown a protective egg in her.
A slight tremor took hold of his hands. Unaccustomed excitement paced the flow of his newfound energy. A protective urge seized him, as if a bond had established itself with Mani as it had between him and the twins. He puzzled over this new, unwanted attachment, wondering how she might mean something to him. The Beast's shrill barking rose in protest. Max agreed with its jealous caution. There was nothing real between them, as there was between Max and the twins, and the Beast. She was only burrowing deeper into him, like a ravenous worm feasting on a corpse. The scope and strength of her influence surprised him, and the confidence he had held in his self-control waned like the moon slipping behind storm clouds. He thought of Rithisak.
He wanted to forget.
Lee tapped Max on the shoulder as he spoke into the secure cell phone, speaking hurriedly about cleaners and safe house ETA. Max pushed Mani away, leaned into the trunk, slid a small panel door open, and punched a code into a tiny electronic pad. A red light blinked.
Max picked up the boy and threw him over one shoulder, then ran across the empty lot, grabbing hold of Mani's forearm and dragging her along. Lee followed. Pain flashed through Max's knees and ankles with every step. Lee grunted as if he were finishing a thirty-mile hike with a full pack. Mani gasped and moaned for a moment, but then struggled to keep pace with Max in steely silence.
The Beast That Was Max Page 8
