God Of The Dead

by M. C. Norris

  “Don’t do it Cecile,” he said, in a strangled, watery voice. “Not yet.” He snugged the stock of the rifle to his shoulder, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

  The incendiary round screamed through the air, punched through the steel wall of the foremost storage tank, and released its payload of flammable chemicals. One shot was all it took. All four of the oil storage vessels appeared to combust at once. A massive globe of white light surged outward across the wastelands in a lake of burning napalm. Malcolm managed a bloody smile. Although he could no longer see Cecile through the curtain of black smoke drawn over the silver edge of a new dawn, he knew that one way or another, he’d saved her from death at the hands of the savages. Flaming bikes, still in motion, rolled rider-less to the far shores of the lake of fire before pitching over in the inferno. Not one had avoided the explosion. Every demon of this desert had been blasted simultaneously back to the realm in which they belonged.

  Malcolm collapsed from the windowsill. Still smiling, he rolled onto his back in a bed of flames. It felt good. He could feel his scalp splitting in the intense heat, sizzling, his ears burning away, and it felt so right, but he wasn’t ready to go, not yet, not before he did one last terrible thing.

  Malcolm stripped off his mask, and he cast it into the flames. He didn’t need that fucking thing anymore, and he wasn’t going to die with anything covering his true face. The mask wasn’t him anymore. It was the face of a damned counterpart, an evil twin, who would die right alongside him.

  As Malcolm looked up to the winged destroyers circling languidly above, he finally understood why a dying hermit crab always crawled out of its shell. He’d been wrong for years. It wasn’t ever about some deathbed admission of cowardice, or any sort of revelation of the stinking worm that the little soldier had always been, hiding all its life inside of a suit of armor. No. Now, Malcolm understood that abandoning its shell was a crab’s final act of altruism. In doing so, it ensured the survival of another young crab. In its last moments, a dying crab crawled out to bequeath its suit of armor to one lucky member of the next generation. There could be no more honorable act that a warrior could hope to perform, than to shed his armor in his last moment, exposing his sad and naked truth to a cruel and predatory world that would always be waiting to seize him in his moment of vulnerability, just so that one other member of his species might live.

  Malcolm smiled, as a new mask of flames slid over his face. He raised the barrel of his M-16 skyward, and pointed it at the bloated underbelly of the largest of the gas-filled monsters. He closed his eyes, and he squeezed the trigger.

  ###

  A wall of flames slid over Zurich’s neighborhoods, transforming the inconspicuous town into a hellish beacon of calamity visible for fifty miles. Distanced from the destruction, Cecile fled on foot. She traveled southward, alone, across the sodden desert from which they’d come, back in the direction of Hays. Any remaining killers in the vicinity would almost certainly be drawn toward Zurich, and with the layer slick mud upon the fields, they would be forced to take the faster route of paved roads. Still, the rain poured, as though the storm might never pass. She was a ghost in the torrent, floating alone over empty fields, up gradual escarpments, and down through flooded swales.

  Cecile guessed that she had close to fifteen hours before her midnight rendezvous back at the train station, but without Malcolm at her side, pushing her, encouraging her, she worried that she might lack the fortitude to make it back to Hays at all. Her eyes and nostrils burned. Her throat remained tightened from her brief exposure to the tainted air. Every breath that she drew was a gasping effort. Frequently, she rested, hunkering in every draw, hypnotized by the swirling eddies of muddy water that spun forever by. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so exhausted, so emptied, so dead inside.

  When the oil tank battery exploded, she guessed the disaster that had claimed the lives of every marauder was an accident of their own doing, one errant shot by a savage that had sparked their fatal flame. As the fire consumed their writhing forms, Cecile appraised their burning as a bit of poetic justice, but when she heard the second shot, she realized the truth. A single rifle report had seemed to detonate the whole pod of hovering Khepra, obliterating their bloated forms in a chain reaction of volatile gases. Her eyes had widened when it struck her that it was Malcolm who’d saved her life, and he’d only done so by embracing the end of his own. Cecile dipped her fingertips in the flowing water, and then withdrew them. Water had a rather impersonal way of instantly refilling the gaps left by missing objects, as though they’d never even been there at all. Streams just kept on flowing.

  Cecile guessed that in the end, their missions were accomplished. Against all odds, they’d managed to survive what was considered to be a suicidal crossing through enemy territory, where she’d succeeded in finding and retrieving a personal object affiliated with the most elusive public enemy on earth. That was no small feat. In the end, Malcolm had served the purpose for which he’d been deployed by protecting her life with the sacrifice of his own. They were already done, whether she made it back to St. Louis or not. They’d found the treasure at the end of that map, and Malcolm had died a hero, meeting at last with that violent end for which some part of him had always longed.

  “Got what you wanted, Honey,” she whispered, “and I hope you’re back in the loving arms of that little boy you were missing so bad.” She felt a knot tightening in her throat as she stared down into the churning water, but she didn’t quite know what to do with it. The swirling fluid before her eyes reminded her of the Styx, and of all the wonders that had always awaited her beyond the far bank of that stream of collective consciousness. She placed her masked face in her hands and clawed at her helmeted head, rocking back and forth against her knees, but for some reason, she could not find it in herself to cry.

  The prospect of returning to Nod filled her with dread. Never in her life had she felt afraid of death, until now. She’d never had a reason to fear it. Nod was her private world, a safe and familiar place where she could always venture to escape the trials of the living world. She was aware of the dangers over there, but Cecile had never felt threatened by any of those malevolent presences, not with Nana Hess on that side. Things were different now. Nod had changed. She could feel it. Something terrible had happened over there. It was like there was a big bully pacing the sidewalk of her home block, just waiting for her to come around the corner. Whatever the Khepra spirit was, and how it was related to the dragons of the living world, she felt it in her bones that it was something just as dangerous in death, as the Khepra dragons were, in life.

  Malcolm, God bless him, he had been so right about so many things, but he’d only figured out half of the horrible truth. Originally, there did indeed seem to have been one Khepra, and only one. It was the egg-bearing matriarch that Malcom had suspected that had initiated some sort of a countdown to the end of humanity a very long time ago. It had evidently died, from one way or another, because it was lurking in the Land of Nod. She knew that much to be true. No one in the living world knew about the talking pile of yarn that was her Nana. Somehow, against every rule that segregated the two realms, the spirit of this bygone monster had managed to find a way to influence the living world, exerting its unearthly will over an army of Hunters through the mind of one brain damaged child.

  Cecile furrowed her brow, staring down into the swirling water. Nod was a fluid realm, not linear, but even in a state of formless, timeless fluidity, there were rules. No spirit in Nod, disconnected by death from the living world, could ever hope to reach through the Styx to affect those on the other side. That was impossible. That’s part of what kept the two worlds so neatly separated. Crossing that stream from one side to the other was a quite a trick, and it was one that could only be performed by a living medium—a female medium, according to her Nana. Male minds, with their linear thinking, didn’t function in just the right way, but maybe her Nana had been wrong about that. Maybe there were men—or, at
least, one boy—who was able to do it. If little Owen Cyrus had somehow fallen prey to a predatory spirit of Nod, then he would’ve had to possess the dark gift. He would have had to have been a spiritual medium, but Owen was a boy.

  Cecile had received enough snapshots of evidence, while squatted on the filthy floor of that bus with those handcuffs resting on her quivering palm, to appreciate the horrendous level of abuse that the child had suffered. His grotesque disfigurement was not owed to injuries sustained in battle, during his adult appointment as some sort of a tribal warlord, as the IDC liked so much to believe. No, he’d received those anfractuosities as a child, at the cruel hands of an alcoholic monster who’d made his life a living hell. The visions that filled her mind when she held those cuffs were perhaps the worst she’d ever beheld in her twenty years as a spiritual medium. What he’d endured, fettered for years like an animal in the back of that school bus, were indignities unimaginable to a normal mind, but the visions she’d beheld were not Owen’s. They couldn’t have been, because Owen, the Green Man, was still alive. The memories infused into those steel manacles belonged to another tormented soul, the one who’d last touched them the night she’d sacrificed her life to insert a silver key into a lock, spring those cuffs, and set her poor child free. The visions belonged to Owen’s mama.

  Owen was not a blood relative to his abuser, she didn’t think. It didn’t feel right from the moment she made contact with the other side. Cecile sensed that he was the child of another man. When she focused on this aspect, she got the sense that his conception had been a forcible one, an act of rape committed by someone who struck Cecile as being outside of the family, someone apart from their small network of neighbors and acquaintances in Zurich. This man was something unexpected, a stranger. She got the impression that he was a rough type, a laborer, maybe a toiler of the fields, but he wasn’t from Zurich. It was a small town, where everyone knew everyone. He was a stranger in town, a drifter, perhaps someone who’d ridden the rails, someone who’d wandered into town one afternoon when the man of the Cyrus household was away, when the other children were at school. That’s when it happened. That’s when this migrant slipped through the cedar grove, and crept into the farmhouse through the open back door.

  Cecile closed her eyes, and went deeper into the stream, feeling a jolt of that woman’s terror when she’d looked up to see a strange man standing in her kitchen. A drink was dropped to the linoleum floor. Glass shattered. There was a feeble attempt to escape, but not much of a struggle. Cecile didn’t sense that there had been a fight. The woman had tearfully submitted, just as she had on a hundred other occasions, to being led her upstairs to a dreary bedroom that overlooked the school bus, the open fields. That room was the place where her womb received a seed of the darkest destiny.

  Already a broken and cowering creature familiar with every sort of abuse, the woman dared not speak of the humiliating interlude. No one in the family had even noticed a change in her, as she went about her lowly routine. Not that the rape had affected her to any greater extent than had the years of torment by another rapist to whom she was married. He controlled her fear, her mind, and he grew resentful of the bulge that began to swell in her midsection. Another bawling mouth to feed, was his appraisal; another source of interrupted sleep and piles of shitty diapers. When the interloper’s child was born with dark skin and eyes, baby Owen became a lightning rod for his nightly storms of tyrannical rage.

  Cecile supposed that a young mind that became so damaged as poor Owen’s could no longer fit any firm definition of gender, or even species. He was born a male, but in the end, his linear male brain had been beaten into a lump of gray matter barely capable of facilitating the most basic bodily functions, and as a result of that handicap, the tyrant forced him to live outside.

  In the bus, Owen devolved into an animalistic state. Pacing day and night down the center aisle, following a length of braided steel cable reeved through the other handcuff, back and forth, back and forth, was a mindless creature with an impossible gift. It was a dark gift that he was mentally incapable of controlling. His doorway to Nod swung forever ajar, exposing him to the other side as a chunk of living bait for every supernatural danger.

  Cecile furrowed her brow, nodding her head in affirmation. That’s how it had all transpired, just so. It was in Owen’s helpless state of exposure that the spirit of the Khepra had found him, and it fell upon the child like a vulture onto a carcass, tearing its way into Owen’s dead brain. Whether his mind was beaten into a state of androgynous indifference, or whether he’d always been something special in the living world, something unique, he was simply used from that point forward. He was enslaved as a living transmitter to those others infected with the Khepra gene—a gene that enabled the ability to communicate telepathically with others of that hybridized kind. Of all those innocent hybrids whose minds were seized suddenly by an alien influence, Owen Cyrus was perhaps the greatest tragedy.

  Cecile swallowed down the useless knot in her throat. She guessed that she would cry for that poor boy one day, just as she would cry long and hard for her Malcolm. At the moment, her mind and body were too wholly depleted to produce the ingredients to form a single tear. Besides, the one thing that Malcom had never taught her was how to cry inside of a mask.

  She rose from the water’s edge, plodding through a turbid current that sucked at her leggings. This one was deeper than the other streams that she’d encountered over her return trek to Hays, deep enough that she supposed that this was in fact the Saline River, filled to capacity with a wasteland’s shed tears. Downstream, she looked upon a distant bridge. It appeared different, more distinct in the steely light of the afternoon than the foreboding shadow that she remembered from the night before, from which that flesh-eater had emerged, and pursued them. She scanned the banks for its headless body, but there was no sign of it. That was somewhat bothersome, until she decided that the carcass had been flushed downstream by the cleansing deluge, alongside every scrap of the fallen man’s miserable existence.

  The water rose to her waist, but the current was not as swift as she’d feared that it might be. The crossing went smoothly, and the ascending slopes looked not as steep as they’d seemed in the gloom of a stormy night, the rocky outcrops not so jagged and treacherous. Daylight had a benevolent way of making midnight problems more manageable. There was even a trace of hope, if hope could at all be gleaned from this wasteland, in the fact that she’d come so far already. She’d made good time. The train station would not be far away.

  Burdened by the extra time that she hadn’t anticipated, still hours before her rendezvous with the Portland steamer, Cecile fell to her knees on the opposite shore, and she collapsed in the mud. All she could do was breathe as her head spun, and her limbs throbbed all the way into her toes and fingertips. She was utterly depleted, to the extent that she could not bring herself to care if she was discovered, because she couldn’t take a single step in the same direction. Not at the moment. This would be her resting place, as she had no strength to find a safer one. There were hours, whole hours of time to restore her body with sleep, to drink deeply of the heady dreams of which her mind had long been deprived.

  “Nana,” she whispered, her lids fluttering closed as her eyes rolled back into her head. “Don’t worry, Nana. I’m going to find you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  She felt that fiber stretching thin, pulling taut in some indefinite abdominal region. She could buck hard and probably break it if she tried, leave all the pain of the living world with her prone body on the muddy riverbank. That sounded so good, to put an end to it, and it was an easy enough trick to do. That fragile connection between body and soul could only take so much tugging before it snapped, cutting the spirit adrift like a balloon through the Land of Nod. That’s how her mama escaped Storyville. Nana Hess had told her so. It wasn’t the drugs, although drugs had certainly been involved. Her mama had just had enough of the living world, and she’d pulled loose of it
.

  “She could hear the voice of every ghost in Nod all yammering at once, but she never once could listen to mine.” Nana Hess must have repeated that statement at least a hundred times. “Mine was the only voice that girl ever needed to hear, but she shut me out. Shut me clean out of her life, so she could go on chasing rainbows, looking for that pot of gold. You see where that got her, C.C.? The living mind ain’t made to take so much abuse. The mind is a fragile thing. Just as fragile as that bit of yarn that knits the body to the soul. Both can be broken, but the mind always goes first. You need to shut them out, C.C. Shut out all them voices but mine. They’ll make you crazy. Sure enough, they will, you get more than one jabbering in your head, day and night. Once you crack that door open, and one of them voices gets in, won’t be long before plenty more will be coming. Mm-hmm. Before you know it, your mind gets to be a crowded room, and you can’t never get them all chased out. It’s over, then. All over. Can’t think, can’t sleep, can’t function in your life … can’t even speak a sentence to make sense. That’s what happened to your mama, C.C. She wouldn’t learn to shut that door in the back of her mind, to keep it closed, to keep it locked and nailed shut, the way I be teaching you. Let them fools scratch on the other side. Let them cry and pound away. Don’t you ever, ever open that door to no strangers, no matter how much they beg. You alone can pass through that door, but don’t let nothing sneak in.”

  Cecile squirmed and bucked, writhing from her body like some larvae from its egg casing until she was loose of that wretched trapping, floating freely through the stream of collective consciousness, but she enjoyed no elation in this transition. Things were different. Never before had the far shore seemed so foreboding, as if she were willfully stealing right toward the gates of Hell.