by M. C. Norris
Malcolm reached for his radio toggle. She did not need to see this. Hunters were enough of an insult to humanity, but this monster, like the troll beneath the bridge over the Saline River, had fallen from our own ranks to become something even worse than our enemies.
Malcolm shook his head at the man in the bathtub, and he closed the door. As the darkness folded over the monster in the bathtub, it appeared to be grinning, as though amused by some awful joke known only to the dead. Dialing up the volume on his radio, Malcolm keyed-up to emergency dispatch, but he couldn’t find the military band. It was a ghost frequency. The static was a strange amalgam of white noise haunted by indistinct sounds, whispering voices, and a stuttering rhythm like the whirling rotors of a faraway chopper.
“Cecile, it’s Malcolm, do you copy?”
He keyed down and listened intently to the chugging cadence behind the static. There was definitely something there. He could hear the pulsing rhythm, thumping away in the radio dimension like the heartbeat of some small animal. His heart gave an arrhythmic lurch against the walls of his chest. “No,” Malcolm whispered, shaking his head, eyes widening. It couldn’t be. Not here. Not in the heart of a desert that was devoid of power and people. They had no reason to be here. Nothing at all to draw them in. Nothing except—her.
Malcolm bolted down the blackened hallway toward the west bedroom, hoping for a window that overlooked the backyard. He ejected the magazine from his rifle, replacing it with a different one from his bandolier strap. This was the special magazine, the red one, the one loaded with incendiary rounds.
Hail clattered against the shingles. Malcolm pushed past the stinking corpse propped in the doorway. Shoving the box springs aside, he dumped the grimacing corpse facedown onto the bedroom floor. He clambered over it, ripping the stapled blankets from the west window. A weird green light flooded the room. They were coming. He could hear them, muting the storm’s cacophony with the godlike rumbling of their internal generators. Streams of electrons leapt from the tops of cedar trees to the clouds. Chaos particles crackled in the charged air.
“No-no-no-no!” Malcolm bashed out the glass with the butt of his rifle. It shattered, and rain sprayed through the jagged opening. Broken pane fragments sailed down into the hash of dried weeds, one story below. “Cecile!” he shouted. “Cecile, can you hear me!”
“I hear you,” replied a voice, rattling and robotic in his radio earpiece.
“Cecile?” Malcolm scowled through the tempest, glaring down upon the rusty roof of the school bus. Hail pellets clattered over the yellow panels. They collected in the grooves like snow. “Who is this?” he whispered, as the dark immensity of the dragon pod descended from the churning clouds. This was happening. Bolts of energy leapt from the sodden ground to grope their segmented bellies.
“I am God of the Dead, the Lord of Silence, and the Voice of the Khepra.”
“Are you—are you the Green Man?” Malcolm asked, his eyes tracking the descending forms of the destroyers. Only seconds remained before the creatures discharged their incinerating payloads, reducing everything beneath them to ash. “If you’re the Green Man,” Malcolm said, his voice catching in his throat, “we’ve been looking for you. We want to meet with you, discuss your terms in a treaty.” Breathless, Malcolm awaited a reply, but all he could hear was the pulsing static of dragon energy over the airwaves. “If you’re out there, we’re ready to negotiate. I’m speaking for all of mankind. All that I need to know is what you want. What can we offer you? You have to need something, or you wouldn’t be doing this! What do you need?”
The drones’ carapaces split bilaterally. The dark halves of their shelves yawned wide as they fanned their paneled, gossamer wings. Beautiful, deadly, they tilted their enormous bodies beneath the shelves of electromagnetic clouds, and the Khepra began to spiral over the farmhouse. The cyclonic formation always preceded a gas attack.
“Say it, please! Say anything!” Malcolm screamed, leveling his M-16 on the shattered windowsill. He put a bead on one of the circling drones, knowing all too well that if he squeezed the trigger at this close range, the explosion of volatile gases would vaporize him in an instant. “What do you want humanity to do for you?”
“Die.”
Malcolm’s right hand separated from his forearm at the wrist. The rifle clattered to the bedsprings, with his twitching hand still attached. He felt no pain, only shock at the sight of those red streams of blood spraying from the end of the stump. A long blade slid beneath his chin. A bare arm hooked around his throat from the opposite side, in a headlock that lifted his toes off the carpet. The strength of the unseen assassin was astounding. Malcolm grabbed hold of the blade, and tried to stop it, as the machete’s razor edge dragged slowly across his throat. There was not enough pressure being exerted to sever his windpipe, his carotid arteries. Just enough force was being applied to peel back the skin of his throat, exposing the first layer of muscle, beneath. The assassin was toying with him, just playing, and milking every moment of sadistic pleasure out of the killing stroke.
Malcolm lowered his remaining hand in a gesture of submission, squeezing off the gushing fountain at his wrist. This was it. If the assassin intended to slice his throat to the spine, he could do nothing to prevent it. The lack of oxygen to his brain, the loss of blood, it was all beginning to make him dizzy. His thoughts shifted from survival to Jacob. Malcolm clung to the image of the orange crayon drawing, the stick of gum, to the hopeful expression of his little boy smiling on the laptop screen.
Kum hom Dade.
“I’m coming,” he whispered.
“This is nice. I enjoy watching humans die,” the voice rattled through the speaker in Malcolm’s ear. “Unmasked, your faces are so expressive. Horror brightens your eyes, spreads your mouths into screams. We Khepra die quietly, without such expression. Scream for me, human. Let me watch you die, and afterward, you will kneel before the Khepra when we meet, face to face.”
The assassin withdrew the blade from beneath his chin. He brought it around behind Malcolm, pressed the blunt tip of the instrument into the small of his back, and rammed it to the hilt through his spine. Malcolm emitted a retching sound that he’d never heard himself produce before, as he looked down upon the wet blade that protruded strangely from his belly. The killer’s fingers groped beneath his chin. His mask and helmet were ripped away, tossed to the side, and Malcolm was kicked off the impaling blade, facedown upon the box springs.
Already dead as the corpse pinned beneath him, Malcolm rolled to look upon his assassin. Black skinned and glistening with fresh blood, the Hunter stood poised in the bedroom doorway, flashing a golden grin. His eyes glowed like twin portals straight to Hell, but behind those eyes, Malcolm felt yet another presence, peering through at him.
Malcolm coughed up a mouthful of blood. The assassin’s smile widened. His gold teeth glimmered in the greenish effervescence of roiling hydrocyanic gas. The inhuman presence behind those borrowed eyes revealed its pleasure through the changing expressions worn by its mindless slave’s face. Was it the Green Man speaking to him over the radio, or something else entirely? Somehow, the Voice, whoever or whatever it was, seemed to be a living conduit connecting Hunters, like the assassin leering over him, to something else, something bigger than the robotic voice in his ear, something with an otherworldly will fastened upon the minds of a thousand men. The truth, if this could possibly be true, was worse than anything he’d ever dared imagine. It was waiting for him to die, this thing that called itself the Khepra, waiting for his soul on the other side. There was no escape from this entity, not anywhere in the living world or in the hereafter.
Malcolm’s throat began to constrict as hydrocyanic fumes filled the room. It was agony inside his lungs, searing his eyes, filling his nostrils with an almandine stink. At last, he knew the torment experienced by those billions already lost to the gas attacks. The looming demon threw back its head of frizzled hair and released a long, sputtering laugh as he felt his swelli
ng tongue begin to protrude. As his eyes rolled back into his head beneath his fluttering lids, his last sight were the shadows of the circling Khepra dragons scrolling dreamily across the bedroom walls. His ears were filled with the demonic laughter, the thunderous roar of the destroyers, the revving of what sounded like a hundred dirt bike engines, and the screams of his voodoo princess. “I’m sorry,” Malcolm whispered, as his eyelids fell closed.
Chapter Thirteen
She ran. Bolting through the back doors of the old school bus, Cecile tore across the open fields through a blizzard of hailstones. Every so often, she glanced back over her shoulder, searching the Cyrus property for Malcolm, but she couldn’t spot him anywhere in the mounting chaos. She hoped to God that he wasn’t still inside the farmhouse, where jettisons of plasma were being spewed from the abdomens of circling dragons like ropes of fire whipping from giant flamethrowers. In an instant, the house of nightmares was engulfed in a roaring inferno.
The childhood home of little Owen Cyrus imparted itself into the atmosphere in a wild conflagration of smoke and roiling energy. That was the boy’s name, she’d learned. It came to her in a snapshot of a hospital wristband after she’d recovered a pair of rusty handcuffs from the floor of the bus, and held them gently in her hand. The bus had served for years as a sort of solitary confinement cell for that little boy. Brain damaged, woefully disfigured, secreted away in his tormented world, this was the unlikely child who would grow up to become the suspected ringleader of an international terrorist network, usher to the apocalypse, and an infamous phantom known as the Green Man.
“Run, deep dreamer.” The ruined voice of Owen Cyrus rattled mechanically through her earpiece. “Run as far and as fast as you can, but no matter which direction you choose, your path will always lead you to the Khepra.”
“Owen,” she cried, “you were a good boy. You didn’t deserve the things that happened to you in there. It wasn’t your fault. There’s still good inside you, Owen. I know there is.”
“No,” the voice purred in her ear. “There is nothing inside of Owen Cyrus but the Khepra. This body was always an empty husk, a perfect vessel that I came to elevate from its nothingness. This body was raised in a glorious transformation from a hollowed shell into Osiris, the God of the Dead, and the living voice of the Khepra. Let all those with ears hear my words flow between his lips, and let them all obey.”
Cecile’s boots splashed through lakes of dancing water, slipped through mires of sticky mud. She fell repeatedly, rising each time to smear the filth from her visor, and continue to run. She could hear the growl of their engines, their keening howls, as the wolf pack came snarling around either side of the inferno. This had all been nothing but a trap, and there would be no escape from it. Deep down, some part of her had always known it. The wolves were coming, and they were going to tear her apart.
“I’ve promised your body as a gift to my chosen people, Cecile. When your time of servitude in the living world has come to pass, you will at last come to meet me, face to face. You’ll be quite surprised by the changes that I’ve made in your so-called Land of Nod. Tell me, whoever was that talking pile of yarn?”
“What? Nana?” Cecile’s breath caught in her throat. “Who—who the hell are you?”
“I am the one, and I am the many. I am the colonist, the Argonaut, the Alpha and the Omega, the ancient mother and the egg-bearer, the giver and the taker, the builder and the destroyer. I am the spoken words of Osiris, the Lord of Silence, and the God of the Dead. I am the Star God, the Khepra, and I am waiting for you, Cecile, waiting five-thousand years over in the Land of Nod.”
Puddles leapt around her feet at the crack of small arm’s fire. She could hear their engines buzzing like a force of chainsaws, their whoops and screams of bloodlust, drawing nearer. They were closing in, and there was nowhere to run, nothing but miles of pounded wasteland in every direction. She set a course for the only island of structure on the horizon. It was a lonely oil patch, where an old hammerhead pumper sat frozen in time before a squat battery of rusty storage tanks. It was the only place in this godforsaken desert where she could attempt to make her last stand. Damned if she wasn’t going to take a few lives with her. This wasn’t the death that she wanted. She wanted to grow old and gray, bestowing her words of wisdom onto her children’s children, until at last, she drifted off in her sleep. No, this death was Malcolm’s, a violent end to a life of willful violence. As she staggered into the oil patch, her eyes filled with tears of certainty that this steel oasis of industrial ruin was the bleak place where her life was going to end.
Bullets panged off the steel sides of the tanks as she stumbled through them. She hesitated to steal a glimpse of the oncoming horde of marauders. They stood upright on the foot-pegs of their bikes, swinging clubs and hatchets in the air. Scalps twirled from their handlebars. Ragged man-hides flapped in the driving rain. A burst of automatic weapon fire rattled bullets throughout the tank battery. Oil spewed from ruptured hulls. Cecile cringed, and then rose again and fled, abandoning the imminent massacre for some dream of open fields.
They would have to shoot her down. She refused to stop running, to submit to the hours of abuse that would precede her slow death if she ever gave up and surrendered. Their battle cries resounded through the steel jungle as dozens of dirt bikes roared through the oil patch. This was it. Her long run was over. Cecile spun on her heels, drew Malcolm’s pistol, and screamed as she squeezed the trigger, again and again, until the lead raiders toppled, flipping several more over their handlebars into the mud. There were too many of them. Far more than she had bullets to spare. The wolf pack swerved around the wreckage of their fallen.
Only one option remained, and she intended to take it while she still had time. After a lifetime of hunting down killers, the tables had finally turned in their favor. It was payback time, or so they thought. Cecile fell to her knees in the mud, hopelessly defiant. They would never have her, not in their preferred way. Death would be her choice, not theirs. She peeled back her mask, flung it into the mud, and jammed the barrel of the pistol down into her throat.
###
The farmhouse was a raft of flames, ferrying Malcolm toward the gates of Hell. Every crack, every gap between clapboards, glowed like burning seams between the two merging worlds, until hem between those realms was indistinguishable. The grinning assassin had fled. Although immune to the hydrocyanic gases, not even the Hunters were impervious to flames. His mutilator had rejoined the wolf pack, more eager to take part in the pursuit of their next quarry than to risk his hide for the lesser pleasure of watching Malcolm burn.
Malcolm retched on the blood that filled his closing throat, drowning him in the same fluids that trickled from the stump of his missing hand. He was lightheaded, numb, bleeding out. A glistening loop of pink viscera bulged from his ruptured belly, where the killer’s blade had reamed him through. His legs wouldn’t move. Couldn’t feel them at all. He felt no sensation whatsoever below his midsection, which led him to believe that his spine had been severed. This was a cruel death, even by the Hunters’ standards. If he chose to do what he knew was the right thing to do, then he’d be forced to survive in this decrepit state just long enough to burn alive.
So be it.
Reaching for a pouch at his hip, Malcolm withdrew the plastic box that contained his cyanide antidote kit. He placed it on his chest. Popping the hasps, he removed the little glass ampule of amyl nitrite. With trembling fingers, he placed the ampule inside his mask, and he crushed it beneath the pad of his thumb. As the powerful inhalant filled the concave lenses of the visor, he mashed the mask snugly against his face, pulling the elastic band around the back of his head. Choking up blood, he strained repeatedly to inhale the amyl nitrite fumes until he felt the constricted walls of his throat beginning to relax. There was no shortage of ways to die in the few seconds of time that he had left in this world, but at least he still possessed the ability to eliminate one means to his end, and it was not going to
be by poison gas.
He removed the hypodermic needle, and plunged its stainless steel tip through the plastic wall of the bottle of sodium nitrate. Three-hundred milligrams were the specified dosage, but at this stage, he didn’t guess that an exact dosage really mattered. He filled the syringe completely, withdrew the glistening needle, and plunged it into the left side of his neck.
Burning plaster fell from the ceiling onto his useless legs. The roof was about to collapse. The rubber leggings of his hazmat suit began to blister and bubble, as was the flesh on the crown of his uncovered head. He could smell the rank musk of his burning hair, as he plunged the hypodermic into the final reagent of the kit. Filling the syringe with sodium thiosulfate, he administered the same jugular injection to the left side of his neck. Within seconds, he began coughing up great gouts of coagulating blood as the walls of his throat opened wide. At last, he could breathe. For a few minutes, at least, he’d afforded himself the ability to breathe the same noxious air as the Hunters.
Malcolm rolled onto his belly. He picked his M-16 off the bedroom floor, just as a blinding avalanche of burning wood and plaster crashed down upon him, as the overhead timbers gave way with an earsplitting crack. The collapsed roof provided an unobstructed view of the circling pod of Khepra dragons in the fiery sky. Employing the butt of his weapon as a crutch, Malcolm dragged himself out from beneath the burning wreckage. Inch by inch, he hauled himself back over to the shattered window. Melted strings of black rubber stretched from his bubbling legs across the carpet. Fire would be his end, and he would share that end with as many others as he had time to take with him.
There was his voodoo princess, kneeling on a rocky outcrop, just beyond the distant oil patch, with a pistol in her mouth. The motorized horde of barbarians funneled between the ranks of oil storage tanks, making a beeline right for her. Malcolm spat blood into his mask, as he propped his M-16 on the burning windowsill. He would have to do this left-handed.
