A firecracker went off nearby, startling the Beast. Trucks gunned their engines heading over bridge, challenging the demon’s own roar. Exhaust and the low rumbling from idling traffic waiting for a green light clouded Max’s senses. The clatter of a busy nearby restaurant kitchen seemed to taunt the both of them. Max grunted. Growled. The Beast made him punch a steel security gate. Heads turned in Max’s direction, turned quickly away. Above them, a window slammed shut. In the wide open space of Canal Street at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. A truck headlight reflected off of something stuck into a wooden door frame.
Max recognized the sign, understood the invitation. Blood candle. Bone trophy. Knife. A killer’s trophies, a murderer’s invitation.
Someone wanted the Beast released. Perhaps a potential employer wanted to test him, see what they were going to buy.
Take the offering. Couldn’t swallow steel, like he had bone. Give it away, like the candle. Give the knife away.
In his hand, the knife would belong to the Beast. He’d give it to the Beast, another fang for it to bare. To use to kill. He took a step toward the knife. Another. Two more, quicker.
A half-dozen men ran up, blocking his path deeper into Chinatown, holding up their hands, firing off the noise of their panic. From their midst, Mrs. Chan emerged, walking cane in hand . “We have enough darkness here,” she said, standing in Max’s path. “All I ever asked was that you not add yours.”
Mrs. Chan’s escort backed away. Most raised their fists, sank into fighting stances, preparing to step back up to defend their master. Max could tell even the ones thinking of running knew they were going to die.
“Business,” Max said, the burden of speaking like the human part of himself making him want to puke.
“My neighbors saw you cross Houston,” Mrs. Chan said, leaning on her cane. She looked more like a child than an old woman, short, thin, shadows pooling in the wrinkles on her face, wearing her lucky Boston Red Sox baseball cap because she must have felt she needed the red. “They saw how you were. You are not as you have been, when you have come here on business. My neighbors are not happy with me.”
Max focused on breathing. The Beast’s hoarse snorting resonated with his every exhalation. “I’m fine.”
“Have you been practicing your meditation? Your chi kung?”
“Yes.”
“It does not feel that way.”
“If I hadn’t, you’d all be dead by now.”
“And yet, you don’t look well. Do you want to kill us?”
“I could.”
“You could try.”
Max shivered, the challenge stabbing at the Beast’s heart. Every muscle in his body knotted, twisting, tightening, instinctively trying to lock and shrink and turn him into a statue rather than lash out. His body imprisoned the Beast, and it burned and howled and scored his bones with the poisoned claws of its rage. Mrs. Chan was challenging him, not to a fight, but to force himself to push the limits of his self-control. He didn’t think he could hold on for long, or survive many more such tests.
“And yet to came to me to learn,” Mrs. Chan said, her voice soothing. She waved her stick at the men behind her, and they relaxed slightly. “Would you kill that part of yourself by seeking my death, and the death of my friends?”
“Something would,” Max muttered.
Mrs. Chan bowed her head. She tapped the can against the concrete sidewalk. A horn wailed. Tires screeched as someone took a sharp, fast turn toward the bridge.
“What are you after, my friend? Are you a tree of shadows, insubstantial, shedding or growing darkness with the changing seasons of your spirit? Or are you what casts the shadow tree you’re seeking? What will you find when you finally shake those ghost branches? More shadows, or yourself?”
Max stared at his instructor, hanging on to what had caught his attention when he’d seen her practicing and teaching in Columbus Park: the calm, the self-assurance in the face of what lived inside him. She might live, or she might die, she was ready for either. In her heart, in her spirit, she believed she could stop him in a fight, however impossible it might seem. She was like a rock sticking out of the earth – there might only by a few inches beneath the soil, or an immoveable mountain.
The Beast circled the need to test to her, but Max found the leverage to keep the demon at bay. Like the lonely light of a campfire in the mountain wilderness, the tiny embers of his calm center was enough to fend off what lay in wait behind the burning bright eyes staring out from the darkness. His calm, and the promise of more and better prey, the ones who had left him candle, bone and blade, the ones who probably watched them know, eager to witness and celebrate the Beast, was enough for the Beast. It would wait a little while longer.
Max boxed slightly to Mrs. Chan. He took a step, another, heading cross town on Canal Street. The lights of the oncoming bridge traffic burned his eyes, but he stared, hard, into the light and the shadows they cast, looking for the next sign.
Mrs. Chan’s followers let him pass, but the clink of metal on concrete stopped him.
“Take what you need to finish your business,” said Mrs. Chan. “Find out what you are.”
“I already know,” Max said, picking up the knife. It has long, twelve inches. Heavy. Balanced, though not for him. There were nicks in the steel. It had been well-used, had done hard work. There was old sweat and blood in the handle leather.
“Then find what you need to be more,” Mrs. Chan said. She didn’t wait for him to find another answer.
He’d already forgotten her as he put the blade against his face. The scent of murder was strong. It had been a valued tool for sacrifice, and it had been sacrificed, to him. It pointed to its former owner, to his many victims, and to all the others who would be given to the maw of hunger and appetite. The Beast curled itself around the knife, savoring the morsels of pain it found.
Max put the blade under his shirt, close to his skin. The other two knives he carried seemed to shrivel in their sheaths. The steel was chilly, refused to be warmed by his flesh. It burned, like a cold flame. Scorched his flesh as he walked west on Canal, telling him he was getting closer. The pain cleared his head for a moment, pushed back the Beast’s attention. The knife didn’t want him, it wanted the hand that had always wielded it. Sometimes, things refused to be sacrificed. A bullet jammed, a bomb failed to explode, a blade broke. That was what came from putting so much into an instrument. The tool became a part of the owner. It could not function without its maker. Passed on, lost, abandoned, the tool betrayed its function. Sometimes, it came back to haunt, or avenge, its maker. Sometimes, the instrument turned into something even more terrible than what it had been fashioned to be.
Perhaps that’s what the Beast had been, a weapon that had been lost in war, or used and discarded. Perhaps it was broken. Or, it was still waiting for the time when it would be called upon to perform its function. Perhaps Max was only a vessel, the shell casing for the bullet that would kill something he could not imagine.
The Beast snapped up his thoughts and tore them apart. It had been aroused, and now it wanted to be fed.
Max turned on to Mott Street, heading downtown. Tourists filled the street, oblivious to him, to the young gang members watching and laughing, to the workers scrambling to make their shifts in secret factories. The knife drove him like the Beast did, blindly through the fog of the world’s distractions to the suffering at its heart.
He followed a group of four women into a mini-mall of tightly packed shops offering jewelry, electronics, liquor. They passed through a door. Max headed for the opening, but hands grabbed his arms and shoulder. An elbow to the jaw loosened the grip on his shoulder, but a kick to the back of his knee brought him down. They were good, with an advantage in tight quarters. He grabbed one man’s groin, pulled and twisted, slipped a kick and delivered a punch to the belly. On his feet, Max drew the knife and finished the two before they could bring out their own weapons.
The knife sang in his hand, in hi
s mind. And yet, it was disappointed. He was not the same. He had no art.
The Beast protested, as well. Too fast, too soon, it felt.
There was more to come, he told himself.
The counter sales clerks and customers were screaming, shouting, moving for the exits. Behind the walls, more voices were raised. Footsteps pounded rickety floorboards. Max pushed through the opening, made his way through a narrow hallway lit by naked neon tubes. The Glock was out, the suppressor on.
Max sank into the urgency of the fight’s moment. He forgot what he was here for. An assignment, perhaps. Or maybe those four women had been prey the Beast had targeted. It didn’t matter. Counting the guards he heard coming, he fired off one shot, another, taking down two over-eager gangsters rushing around a corner and down the stairs in their shiny suits. The noise of their falls was louder than his shots. But the Beast boiled his heart with its lust for the ones who had sent the signs. The knife yearned for its master. Max remembered.
This way, he heard, from the blood spattered on the floor and wall. Here, a door. Max smashed the butt of the knife into a blank wall. A mechanism clicked, a crack widened, an opening grew. Stairs. Down. The door closed behind him. Darkness, broken by a faint glow a couple of stories further down.
He descended, nearly blind, the rickety wood frame swaying.
Max didn’t need the Beast to tell him there was more blood, deeper in the bedrock, freshly shed. And below, people crowded together, quiet, their breathing steady, as if gathered in a shelter to wait out a storm, or in a church, expecting an angel to appear. The knife felt like it was almost home. Upstairs, the voices of outraged Tong quieted.
“I’ll tell them you’re one of us,” someone said, above and behind Max.
“Who are you?” Max asked, tracking the speaker’s motions in the darkness. He was good, a trained op, hiding in the support structure and piping for the building above them. Their words echoed in the hollow space in the rock.
“You know.”
The Beast reared back, eager to push on, angered by the delay. The knife burned Max’s palm.
“They said you wouldn’t like us. You don’t like anyone, really. But you wouldn’t mind offerings. ”
The man landed on the stairs. Max had him.
“You weren’t supposed to come here,” the guard said, with a trace of annoyance. “We would have made arrangements.”
“Who told you about me?” Max asked.
The door above them burst open. The guard shouted in Chinese. A few shots were fired, stopped quickly as numbers were shouted, back and forth, payment for damages, lost lives.
Max didn’t see the advantage for him in controlled scenario and put a round in the guard’s back. Curses rang out from the doorway, a few shots were fired randomly into the blackness. Cautiously, the gangsters descended.
Max moved ahead of them, feeling as if he was chasing the Beast already imagining itself in a feast of slaughter.
At the foot of the stairs, two men blocked a steel door lit by a single light above it. The air was hot, humid, stinging with gun smoke. Max showed them the gun and the knife. The stairs creaked behind and above him.
A third man came out from a corner, half-dressed, as if he’d been changing clothes, and Max pressured the Glock’s trigger. He didn’t recognize him from the park or the streets, and concluded he’d found one of his stalkers. Only the man’s eyes stopped Max. His gaze was on the knife Max held in his other hand.
“You brought it back,” the man said, tears streaming down his face. Hair peppered with gray, wrinkles gathered in corners of his mouth and eyes, the man was still trim and fit, a solid package, perhaps ex-military, though Max didn’t read the hardness of a combat vet in his voice or stance. Max found, instead, a brittle, broken quality to the man in his voice, in the need to change as if compelled to perform some kind of ritual before going through the door. But the predator’s coldness was there, beneath the tears and in the shifting lines of his face, already turning an offense Max could not understand into a reason for murder.
The knife told him it had come home.
Max held the knife out, approached the man. Someone called out in Chinese from above. One of the guards looked up, answered.
The other guard moved to intercept Max. “Sir, please, we mean no harm, if you want to join us we would be honored, you mean so much—“
“You didn’t think it was worthy?” the salt-and-pepper haired man asked, wiping his face.
“But they said you’d appreciate offerings. To feed the Beast.”
Max froze for an instant, stunned by the revelation of his most closely-guarded secret. No one knew about the thing inside him.
But then, he remembered, there were two who did. The threat was not what he’d thought it might be.
Max felt as if the Beast was ripping through his ribs and chest to get at the man, understanding only that it had been exposed and made vulnerable. The knife seemed to be skinning the flesh from his hand in its effort to free itself from his grip.
Max returned the knife, burying it in the owner’s throat through the spine. The man staggered back, grabbed the hilt, reached back to finger the tip protruding from the back of his neck. He stared down, eyes wide, at the thing that had been returned to him, blood pulsing from torn flesh.
Max shot the closest guard, fired a few quiet rounds into the shadows of the stairs. Chinese curses were cut off by a barrage of gunfire. Patience had run out and automatic weaponry had been deployed. The other guard fell. The Beast took a taste of the blood coming from the killer’s throat before Max pushed through the door.
The sound of gunfire at Max’s back made everyone in the room turn to face him. He ducked to the side, taking in the scene while looking for cover, and for confirmation of his suspicions.
The Beast, already picking out prey, pushed him deeper into the crowd. Max didn’t resist, preferring action over thinking about betrayal.
There were over fifty people in the high-ceiling chamber, which appeared to be the shell of a three storey concrete structure under construction in an abandoned excavation site for a water or subway tunnel, or perhaps a shelter. The abandoned municipal project must have been discovered by the local gangs and re-opened for use as a drug processing plant or housing for illegal workers. In the structure’s upper reaches, next to the banks of work lights illuminating the chamber, half-a-dozen men and women had been nailed to the wooden framework, stripped, gutted, their blood and viscera slowly dripping to the floor and anointing the gathered men and the few women clustered below the bodies. Not all the sacrifices were dead. The Beast was torn between pursuing its prey and climbing into the super-structure to pick over the offerings.
At the back of the space, on a partially built second storey, a young man stood, arms upraised in mid-exhortation. He’d stopped speaking, and his gaze shifted from Max to the door. Wearing a white shirt was soaked with sweat, strands of his long hair stuck to his forehead and cheeks, he looked like proletariat worker statue about to be toppled. Behind him stood Kueur and Alioune.
“Tonton Bébête!” Kueur shouted. Alioune raised a hand and, to his surprise, laughed.
Max froze with the moment. The Beast, as it always did in their presence, shrank to a corner in the emptiness within him, mewling and whining in frustration.
He’d known, as soon as he’d heard the knife owner mention the Beast. But knowing and seeing the reality were two very different things. Heart racing faster than even the Beast could tolerate, Max faced the reality of their betrayal. Even more surprising to him was the depth of his instinctive trust, as if the simple act of being drawn to and caring for a pair of predators could somehow protect him from becoming their prey.
In a reflection of his shock, the twins appeared older than the last time they’d visited New York, only a two months ago, as if they’d stolen years and inches from their teachers at the boarding school. They were dressed in the latest Paris fashions, bright and clinging to their lithe bodies,
but their eyes were brighter, their teeth longer, sharper. The burning feral fire he remembered from the first time he’d seen them in the Bois de Boulogne, finishing their prey, had returned. The fire was bolder, wilder, possessed by an experienced savagery that was new to him. He never thought of them as innocent. But he’d never considered they could be closer to the nature of a demon like the Beast than even he might be. In the harsh construction light, even their beauty appeared withered, as if what they kept inside them had finally consumed them. He should have remained an anonymous benefactor, a mystery they might have hunted but never found, rather than indulging whatever pathetic need had driven him to become involved with them personally. The need showed weakness, and predators could not resist vulnerability. The Beast had been right all along.
“We did all this for you,” the young man said, addressing Max, his eyes pleading, his words clear and frail in the tense quiet.
The twins stayed behind him, ignoring Max, their gazes resting here and there, as if picking out their first and second kills. In that moment, they seemed so much like the Beast made into flesh.
The moment shattered when the gangsters burst through the doorway, waving guns and screaming at the assembly in a mix of English and Chinese.
Max scanned the crowd again, noticed some slipping out through gaps in the construction toward the rear of the structure. He recognized some from old ops as they turned for a final backward glance to assess the situation. They were the experienced hands, too savvy to be caught in a pointless firefight. But they were also flawed, to have participated in whatever had been going on here.
He stood a little taller, wary of becoming a target, trying to draw the twins’ attention. If they’d wanted him, then he was here to answer their challenge. They ignored him, as if they did not consider him a threat. The Beast found no traction for its rage in the insult.
Sporadic gunfire erupted from the crowd. The Chinese returned fire, and a thunderstorm rocked the chamber. Max dived to the floor, crawled toward the back as the assembly surged forward.
The Beast That Was Max Page 34
