The Beast That Was Max

by Gerard Houarner

  They were through the fence and on the other side of the street when the bomb went off. Max's skin prickled from the heat. Flames shot into the air through broken windows.

  "There goes our DNA trace," Lee said. He pointed down a street. "Come on, you know the routine. Gotta run from all the trouble we caused."

  They broke into limping trots, Lee on point, Max bringing up the rear with the boy wriggling on his shoulder, Mani between them, back hunched as if hauling RPGs for the resistance through her homeland's jungle. Helicopter rotors chopping through the air nearby, along with the sirens and shouting voices echoing through the streets, reinforced the sense of dislocation in time and space. People stood in doorways and windows, gathered on stoops and in front of bodegas, never straying far from cover but drawn to the street by the drama of police action. Eyes tracked their progress, alert to danger. Max shifted his burden to shield his face, and adjusted his gait and posture to disguise himself, as he often did during his work and his play. Fingers pointed at Max and the others, but no one came out to stop them or offer help. Old cars and a few trucks crowded the parking spots along the curb, but the street itself was empty of traffic. At their approach, the sparse neighborhood withdrew into its shell of homes, only to come out again in their wake.

  Lee glanced over his shoulder and said to Max, "You know, you might make better time without the kid. It's freaking me out, still moving in your arms like that. Why don't you dump that thing?"

  "I told you I needed it."

  "Fine, bring your own lunch, then," Lee said, increasing the pace as they crossed an intersection. "I think you need to take some time off, Max, 'cause you're flashing back to bush time, only this ain't the bush." He glanced at Mani. "And you, why didn't you tell us he'd send dead people?"

  "How was I to know?" Mani answered, more indignant than breathless. "I never took part in these kinds of operations. I was put to much subtler uses. And if I had known, and told you, would you have believed me?"

  Lee looked away instead of answering, and pointed ahead. "Next block."

  Max sifted through jungle memories, searching for just how much Mani knew of Rithisak's methods. His gut told him she was lying, and the Beast coiled inside him, urging him to leap at her back and break her neck. Max understood he was being tested, that Mani was assessing her newly chosen protector for the wider world she had entered. His rage danced with the parts of herself she had infected him with, and he could not see an immediate way out of the trap of her presence. He squeezed the dead boy's body with iron fingers. It spat gore in his face.

  As they reached the corner, a police cruiser screeched to a halt in front of them. Overhead, a helicopter passed, light flicking back and forth across the street, then doubled back, pinning the three of them in its beam. Two officers tumbled out of the car, guns raised. Lights in a bodega went out, and a few people hanging out of windows vanished.

  "What the fuck is this?" the closest shouted, while the other spoke into the radio mike.

  "Shit," Lee said, looking from side to side as if an escape route might suddenly materialize. His fingers twitched, firing weapons he did not have. "Hold up, guys, let me make a phone call—"

  "Shut up," the close officer screamed, fixing his aim at Lee.

  Max could feel the man's urge to kill, though it was founded on motives alien to Max: fear and surprise and threat. The Beast rose excitedly to the promise of violence.

  Mani straightened, walked toward the officer, whose face slackened as he stared at her face. He relaxed out of his firing stance.

  Max looked up at the helicopter hovering above, hoisted the dead boy over his head, and leered for the camera he assumed was trained on them. Face twisted, teeth bared, he showed just enough of his true face to be recognized by those he needed at the moment. The Beast roared in triumph, and Max gave its voice his throat and lungs.

  The helicopter searchlights switched off, and the craft veered away like a wounded bird driven from its nest by predators consuming its young.

  "Let them go," the officer on the radio said, holstering his weapon. "They're on our side."

  Mani stopped, lowered her head, and backed away. The nearest officer shook his head, resumed his firing stance. His partner, getting back in the cruiser, repeated the command.

  Lowering the gun, the remaining officer stared as first Lee, then Mani, jogged past the car. Max walked, the bound dead boy over his shoulder, dripping natural and unnatural vitals from his eyes and mouth. Max gave him the same expression he had offered his employers hooked into the police video cameras. He heard the officer ask quietly, of no one in particular, "They're with us?" And then Max was past the cruiser and following Lee to the safe house. The police cruiser drove off, its siren silent.

  The building was one of several in a row of five-story apartment buildings with windows sealed by cement blocks, and a steel slab for a front door. The block was mixed, commercial and residential, gap-toothed with empty lots and a burned out shell of a low warehouse. There were only a few cars parked on the street, and no people. Lee went up the front steps, pushed the door in half a dozen spots, stepped back. The door opened. Lee walked in. Max pushed Mani up the stairs and through the door.

  Darkness smothered them as soon as the door closed. The Beast's instincts flared at the sudden change, but its rage found nothing to assault. Max's senses had already measured the hall and stairs. Rotted, water-damaged floors and walls sheltered scattering rats and bugs; dogs, cats, and squirrels had left scent markings; ragged snatches of carpet added to the mold and mildew smell and spores thick in the air. There was the scent of blood already spilled, human and animal, and cooking smells, as well as lingering sweat, cologne, and perfume, but nothing immediately dangerous.

  Cursing under his breath, Lee searched a wall until a switch clicked. The glow from a string of small, dim red bulbs carved a winding entrail of light through the darkness, wandering through first-floor rooms, descending into the basement, ascending to the upper floors.

  "Omari!" Lee called out. "Don't fuck with me now, man. It's hot out there."

  "What the hell kind of fire you started?" a deeper voice answered from above, muffled by at least two floors.

  They headed upstairs but had to stop at the first landing, unable to get past the next dozen smashed steps. Lee cursed again, louder, but inspired no further answer or guidance from above. He led the way through the maze of apartments and rooms connected by broken doorways and ragged holes in the wall, lit by red bulbs. Copper plumbing and wiring had been ripped out of the walls and ceilings, adding to the shelled look of the building's interior. A few pieces of furniture lurked in gloomy corners. After going through several dusty, graffiti-decorated rooms, they came upon an altar illuminated by a dozen colored glass-enclosed candles and Christmas tree lights.

  Its unexpected appearance and overwhelming wealth of paraphernalia captured Max's attention, drew him in even as he pushed himself to keep moving. Pictures of Catholic saints, dominated by Peter, partially covered cracks and holes in the back wall. Bottles of wine, liquor, liqueur, and soda cluttered the altar's multiple shelves, almost obliterating the other offerings and ritual objects: a rusty machete, clay, plastic and glass jars, vials, bowls and cups, cutlery, sequined cloth panels and bottles, keys, doorknobs and handles, broken locks and chain links, a large G.I. Joe Tuskegee pilot, a cane, statues of mythological figures, a blue ceramic Kali figurine, handmade and altered commercial dolls, currency, cigarettes. The floor was covered by an intricately drawn cross accented by stars, curving lines, and a chalk stroke that reminded Max of the cane on the altar, or a sword. Max's hunting instincts searched for a hidden message in the altar's arrangement, but he found no warnings, prophecies, or advice. Max curbed the Beast's impulse to clear away the sacred site. There was no time for pointless destruction.

  Small bones crunched underfoot as they went through the next room, and in another veils hung from the ceiling, which tickled his face as he passed through them. In a room wher
e old bloodstains darkened the scuffed wooden floor and the air was redolent with the stench of spoiled meat, hand-painted signs splattered the walls. One sigil caught his attention by darkening as he passed, though he cast no shadow on it. As he turned and approached the wall, the graffiti sign's thick, crude lines describing a tiny circle surrounded by a concentric pattern of triangles encircled again by a flamelike design, bled down the wall. Drawn to the thick, running liquid, Max reached out, scraped the substance from the rough plaster. Electric tingling raced up his arm, buzzed in his ears, sparked in his eyes, pinched the nerves of his spine. The dead boy jerked and moaned. Max straightened, backed away. But the connection he had made with the sign's unknown meaning resonated throughout his body, provoking muscle spasms and ghost sensations of being caressed, bitten, held. Invisible arms and legs sprouted from his body and danced to a chaotic rhythm. For a moment, he saw inside his mind the Beast's vaguely human shape, as well as Mani's much smaller mental figure, limned by the glory and power of what he had touched. The Beast cowered at first, then widened and grew taller, feeding on the strange power's vast energy as Max had fed on Rithisak's dead-raising concoction. Mani's shell-self withered in the power's glaring heat, a lost entity trapped in a dead pool long after a surging tide came and left.

  All he knew that was Max—memories, appetites, skills, emotions—merged with the exploding cosmic consciousness taking root in him. For a moment, he lost sight of the Beast, Mani, Lee, his time and place in the world, in the sweep of the universe his narrow vision contained. Forces lurked at the edge of his awareness. Wars raged. Creation unfolded. And then the consciousness answered his touch with a touch, like a voice answering on a long-distance connection, and his vision burst to embrace new vistas. Rushing, racing, he tried to hang on to himself as he rode and was ridden by the discarded flotsam of a reality levels beyond anything he knew or understood, as he consumed and was swallowed by a slipstream of images and sounds and stimuli he had no organs to perceive but in the medium of higher consciousness recognized as sensations of a kind, as he was buffeted by storms and battles and lovemaking, deluged by the knowledge newborns at this level knew as instinct and weathered close to the dust of madness by the scale and scope and depth of his new surroundings. Only relentless speed saved him. His fragile dust mote bundle of concerns and appetites was cradled in a protective nest of attention, and the fleeting fragment of concern was enough to keep him from losing himself in any particular alien spectacle.

  "For me," a woman's voice whispered in his mind. Not Mani, he knew instantly. Not one of Rithisak's dead agents. A thing in the guise of a woman because that was something he understood. The power behind the sign he had touched. She was accepting the sacrifice she thought he was surrendering. For a moment, Max thought he had inadvertently offered himself. The woman's laughter rippled through him, shaking him nearly to pieces. She saw the dead boy in his mind, he realized, and understood why he was carrying the corpse. She wanted nothing from him, was only teasing him. Their paths had inadvertently crossed, nothing more.

  "Excuse the fuck out of me, Max," Lee said, slapping Max's shoulder, "but Omari's waiting for us upstairs."

  The touch of power dissipated, mist blown apart by a gust of words. Max's world tumbled back into now, into place, and the truths and super-realities he had glimpsed slipped from the limited scope of his awareness. Back in the world defined by five human senses and solid boundaries, the Beast nuzzling the bloody corners of his mind, Max recovered, grateful the vistas that had filled him to bursting and nearly obliterated everything that was himself and his world were gone. He could not even recall the shadows or afterimages of what he had seen, and he was grateful. Oblivion was less distracting.

  He knew enough not to reach for the melting sign again.

  Lee brought his attention to the ladder next to the string of red bulbs rising through a hole in the ceiling to the next floor. They climbed, Max bringing up the rear as he maneuvered the dead boy up on his back. Remote-controlled antipersonnel mines threatened to turn the passage up into a killing zone, and Max wondered how many more they had walked through downstairs. They came up onto another sealed level, the immediate floor swept clean, the faint whine and hum of electronic equipment breaking the building's quiet. Several walls had apparently been knocked down to create a large chamber.

  The man sitting at the keyboard in the middle of racks and shelves full of equipment and monitors connected and powered by a jungle of cables did not turn to greet them. He acknowledged their presence only after Lee brushed against the back of his chair on the way to the minifridge between a pair of dented file cabinets.

  "You got any beer in here?" Lee asked, pushing through plastic canisters and bottles.

  The man glanced at Lee, turned to Max and Mani standing by the ladder entrance. He flipped down the eye screen attached to his headset, took off the earphones first, and put them aside. Underneath the black kufthi he put on, large round eyes took in Max and the wriggling dead boy he dumped beside the entry hole, and the slight flare of his nostrils was all he gave up in judgment of the meaning of what he saw. Max gave him a nod of the head. Big, solid shoulders, potbelly, loose comfortable pants, and pullover gave the impression of softness. Hands too large for the keyboard contradicted the intricacy of the surrounding joined machinery. Max thought it might take more than the usual effort to kill him. The Beast let out a growl of curiosity, rising out of the languor that had settled over it after its brush with the power in the melting sign. Max did not need Mani's shadow to soothe the Beast. He was counting on its appetite for what was to come, and did not want either of them to waste energy on useless prey.

  "Omari," the man said by way of introduction, voice pitched higher than Max expected for such a big man. "I've heard much about you. Your work in my properties has always been of value to me. Welcome."

  "I never saw altars before," Max said.

  "They come after a building has been. . . broken in. The Blood of Killers did this place for me. You boys been raising quite a bit of hell out there tonight." He pointed to a trunk next to the hole in the floor through which they had arrived. "Outside of showers, what you need is in there."

  Lee joined Max at the trunk and pulled out medical supplies. "Ain't no beer in here," Lee said.

  Mani knelt beside the boy and stared into its empty eyes. She reminded Max of a soldier separated from his platoon, lost in enemy territory, calling for help on a dead radio.

  "You're late. There's business to be done," Omari said, closing down programs on the screens with deft taps on the keyboard and clicks of the rollerball. "And you don't need any damn beer."

  "Is it here?" Lee asked, standing, peering into corners and staring at piles, searching for something apparently missing from the cornucopia of goods.

  For a moment, Max thought he was still talking about the beer.

  In the next room, on the edge of the glow of red bulbs, electronic equipment boxed in the original manufacturers' cartons was stacked in piles according to type, many marked for government use only. Weapon crates, some with Russian and Chinese markings, were stored farther away on the floor, nearly hidden behind rubble. Plastic bags with designer clothing name tags hung from rusty heating pipes. Cases of military M.R.E.s, Hooah! bars, and ERGO drink provided the foundation for a table set with bottles of wine, champagne, liquor and water, caviar tins and baskets filled with exotic cheeses, fresh fruit, pâté, crackers and bread sticks, and a variety of canned and jarred delicacies. Microwavable dishes lay atop the microwave along with the cappuccino maker on the shelf above the small refrigerator.

  Omari leaned back in the swivel chair, watching the surrounding screens power down. "Your people dropped it off before the fireworks began. They explained the preset timer to control effect-duration after you turn it on, the tracking mechanisms installed in the carrier box, as well as the instrumentation available to track what's inside. I was told what would happen to me and about a square mile of the city if I tried to break
the security seals, and what would happen to the greater consensual reality if I actually let out what the seals are guarding. They also pointed out who my sons and daughters in Lebanon, Sierra Leone, and Wisconsin would be sold to and what would happen afterward if I didn't follow the established protocol precisely. Then they threatened my life if it wasn't here when they returned.

  "And they took some of my inventory. Without paying for it."

  Lee nodded, eyebrows raised in sympathy. "They were in a hurry; things are pretty crazy in the city right now. Sounds like they were short of equipment, too. You got off lucky. Most times, they give newbies like you demonstrations. Welcome to the club."

  Omari stood, flicking power switches to shut off the computer web. "I thought you backed me with your employers. I thought you said, after years of loyal service hiding their shit, they'd trust me with their precious device."

  "Don't take it personal. They check everybody out, Omari. They know people are going to exploit the thing, they just want to make sure it's done in ways that don't throw everything out of control. And they don't want you getting too big for yourself, either."

  Omari cocked his head at Max. "They check him out?"

  Max let the silence drag on until only Omari remained staring at him. "They only do background checks on what belongs to them," he said at last.

  Omari snorted, turned away. Fists on hips, he surveyed his domain and shook his head. "The price for the privilege of belonging."

  "Think of what you can charge those mumbo jumbo priests you're renting chapel space to downstairs," Lee said. "Think of all the networks and outfits you're plugged into now, the cost savings on your payoffs and purchasing, the profit margins on your distribution."

  Omari grunted. "Sometimes it's hard to see what kind of garden will grow from a field of fertilizer."

  Max laid out gauze, bandages, scissors, tape, antibiotic salves, medical needles, and thread on a blanket, all drawn from the trunk. Mani joined him, took over setting up. Max glanced at the dead boy. He was still firmly secured, squirming weakly. Mani got several liter bottles of springwater from the gourmet spread, then took the scissors and cut off the rest of Max's clothes, stripping him naked.