by David Wood
They kept conversation to a minimum as Kyle drove down the mountain, the constant bumping and shaking from the poorly maintained roads too much for anyone to try and talk over. It reminded him of driving in Afghanistan. But, as soon as the gravel road ended at the blessed asphalt of Route 49, Taylor leaned forward and put her face between the two front seats.
“So where are we going?”
That was a good question. After getting the kids out of the mine, Kyle's first instinct had been to go to the police. That was what people usually did when the shit hit the fan. But, considering how changed so many others in town were, that didn’t seem like a good idea. So, if the local constabulary was suspect, the next logical step was the county sheriff. Stillwater was in Mingo County, and the county seat for Mingo was Williamson, an hour's drive up Route 49. All he had to figure out now was what he was going to say. Stories about psychic visions and miners with black, soulless eyes wasn't going to get the cavalry a runnin'.
“Williamson.” He flicked the wipers into their highest setting. “We need the county sheriff's department.”
Taylor leaned back to cradle Maya against the door. “You saw what I saw, bro. That guy in the mine looked seriously fucked up, and I don't mean hillbilly-spending-too-much-time-in-the-dark fucked up. I mean Exorcist-skin-splitting-and-eyes-all-crazy fucked up. Same thing for the guy your girlfriend here was passed out on top of. Something weird is happening, and I don't think small town cops are gonna be much help.”
“Then what would you suggest?”
“You're in the Army.” She frowned at him in the rearview. “Get us some damn troops! Call in the National Guard! Something! Or call the Vatican and get us some priests. Or both! We need some big guns here.”
He was impressed that she was keeping herself together as well as she was. For all his training and time overseas camped out in dangerous places, he'd never anticipated having to deal with anything as strange as what he'd seen and heard since coming back to Stillwater. His world had always been about rough people and hard facts. Now everything was being turned upside down, and all the things he'd thought he understood seemed like props on a stage, fake and temporary, hiding a truth he didn't want to know. His sanity was being tested, and he worried he was coming up short. Taylor, in spite of her age and inexperience – or maybe even because of it – was dealing better. He hoped like hell that held out, and that he could hold on with her.
“Sorry, but I don't have the president on my speed dial. And I don't have the pope either. We have to work with what we've got.” He picked his phone up from the cup holder at his knees and looked at its reception bars. NO SERVICE stared back at him. “And right now we couldn't call anyone in even if we wanted to.” He tossed his phone over his shoulder.
Taylor caught it and scowled. “Goddam it.”
The rain fell harder, and Kyle turned up the wiper speed to its highest setting. The outside world was a wash of dull gray, the lush West Virginia greens muted and dour as water pounded down. As the road curved left around the mountain, he slowed down to avoid slipping on the wet asphalt. The sudden appearance of red and blue flashing lights on the highway ahead of him made him wonder if someone hadn't already crashed, but as they drew closer he didn't see any smashed cars or ambulances or road flares. Instead, two Stillwater police cruisers, parked bumper to bumper across the highway, blocked the road, their roof lights spinning like kaleidoscopes.
A hard, cold knot formed in the pit of Kyle's stomach.
Taylor leaned forward again, her face stopping next to his shoulder. “What the hell? This can't be good.”
Kyle thought the same thing as he pressed harder on the brake pedal. At any other time and place, the sight of police cars and flashing lights wouldn't have been a cause for concern. This wasn't any other time or place though. He'd just been involved in the assaulting of two men, he had a minor with him, he'd hidden away half a dozen other kids, and he had an unconscious woman in the backseat. It was enough to make his palms sweat.
“I'd turn around.” Taylor tapped his seat. “In case you forgot, I've got a knocked out chick next to me drooling on herself.”
Kyle would have loved to have done just that, but his hands stuck in the direction they were held. “We can't turn around. We have to get to Williamson, and this is the fastest way there. Shit.”
Taylor grunted, her head shaking in his rearview mirror. “Then you better come up with a good story.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he replied as he pressed down on the brake. The police cars were still a hundred feet ahead of him, two officers standing in front of them covered in yellow rain slickers, but in his mind they were already boxing him in, guns aimed at him by the dozen. Knowing that the worst thing he could do was act suspicious, he kept his hands steady and his foot smooth as he slowed the Jeep down, but in his mind he was frantically thinking of what he could say or do that might help get them out of Stillwater. By the time he stopped he had the beginnings of an idea. He fished his wallet out of his back pocket and opened it.
The officer tapped Kyle's window with his flashlight. Kyle looked up to see if he recognized who it was, but the darkness caused by the heavy cloud cover and the slicker's hood kept the officer's face in shadow. He pressed the button to lower the window. Rain pelted him, drenching his face before the window was all the way down, but he ignored it and held his wallet up, his driver's license and military ID facing out.
“Good afternoon, officer,” he said in his best I'm-a-model-citizen voice. “Is there a problem with the road? I've got a sick friend that I'm trying to get to a doctor.”
The policeman didn't respond. Kyle tried to find eyes to look into for what the officer might be thinking, but there weren't any. His entire face was lost to shadow. The cold hardness in Kyle's stomach expanded, chilling his entire body.
“Sorry you have to stand out in the rain like this,” Kyle continued, hoping like hell some sympathy would things moving along. “Back when I was in Afghanistan rain was a blessing, but here it's just a pain.”
Still the policeman said nothing. Meanwhile, another officer slowly approached on the passenger side of the Jeep, and two more exited the parked cruisers.
“So, should I turn around?” he asked, his lips numb and his tongue thick in his mouth. Every instinct told him they were in danger, that the darkness spreading in the town behind him was reaching out, but he just wasn't ready to give into that yet. In spite of everything that had happened, he still wanted things to make sense. He wanted his world to be normal. Running from cops was the opposite of normal, and despite the ice pick of fear pushing into the back of his skull, he refused to give into it. That wasn't how things were done.
“Okay,” he said, “ I've taken up too much of your time. I'll find another –”
As he drew his left hand back, the officer grabbed his wrist, and the intense coldness of his touch sent a shock through Kyle's system, making him drop his wallet. He gasped and stared at the hand holding him. The skin was ash gray, the fingernails black and split. The sudden movement caused the officer's hood to jerk backward, revealing a gray face with dark wells for eyes, and the mouth that sneered at him parted just enough to show teeth that would have been more at home in a dog's muzzle. Kyle flashed back to the men at the mines, seeing the same sallow skin and empty eyes. The situation was rapidly deteriorating into madness.
“Yer gonna pay for what you done.” The frozen vise of the officer’s hand chilled Kyle's blood, but he forgot all about it when the officer pulled his pistol and shoved it in his face. The black depths of the gun barrel echoed the dark pits of the policeman's eyes, and in all of them Kyle saw his death. “You ain't fit for the glory that's comin'.”
Over the next several seconds a great number of things happened, each event like a car crashing into the one in front of it, and the one constant was the screaming.
At the sight of the gun, Taylor cried out, grabbed Maya, and hurled herself onto the backseat floorboard. Moving quicker than he ever h
ad before, Kyle jerked his arm away from the officer, leaned his head back, and grabbed the hand holding the gun. The dark skin felt clammy, but he didn't care as he pushed the arm forward and banged it against the steering wheel. Two-tenths of a second later, the gun went off, filling the Jeep with roaring noise and the stench of burnt gunpowder. The front passenger window exploded in a shower of glass as the bullet blasted through it, and the policeman approaching from that side dove to the ground to avoid being hit.
Taylor screamed, but the ringing in Kyle's ears almost drowned it out. The policeman next to him jerked to get away, but Kyle tightened his grip and jammed the cop's arm against the wheel several times in quick succession. The gun went off again, blasting a hole through the passenger door.
Fearing the next bullet would find flesh, Kyle balled up his right hand and punched at the fingers holding the gun. They spasmed open, and the gun tumbled to the floor mat beneath Kyle's legs. As it fell, the tiny part of his mind that the army had trained to not run around like a spooked puppy noted that the gun was a Smith & Wesson M&P40.
The policeman lunged into the Jeep and reached for Kyle's neck. The sickly cold fingers tightened on his windpipe when Taylor's screams finally broke through the ringing in his ears. “Go! Go! Go!” she shouted, the word coming out of her like a mantra.
Hearing her reminded him exactly where he was, so while he fended off the policeman with one hand he put the Jeep into reverse with the other. His foot slammed against the gas pedal, and the vehicle leapt backward in a rush of power. The policeman outside Kyle's window tried to hold on, even going so far as to lean through the window opening, but Kyle hit him in the side of the head with his elbow and yanked the wheel to the right, both of which combined to shake the officer loose and send him tumbling to the ground.
Tires squealed against wet asphalt, but that was drowned out by the sound of gunfire and shattering glass. A loud bang and a shudder told him they’d shot out one of the tires. He ducked and shouted for Taylor to stay down, then glanced in the rearview mirror. The Jeep's back window was a cloudy web of cracks, broken only by savage holes through which he could see the police taking aim for another round. He kept the gas pedal pressed against the floorboard and held the bucking steering wheel with an iron grip.
The swirling lights disappeared a few seconds later as they rounded the mountain. But, he knew they would be after him at any moment, so he took the first road to the right he saw, pelted down it at breakneck speed, and then took whatever turns came his way. Several minutes later he was far from the cops and deep in the back mountain roads of Stillwater, large stretches of trees and broken rocks hiding him away, at least for the moment.
“What the fuck was that?” Taylor asked as he pulled onto a narrow dirt lane and parked.
Kyle shook his head and stared at the trees flanking the road ahead of them. “That was shit going from bad to worse.”
Taylor giggled for a moment, the sound so counter to the tension and fear that filled the interior of the Jeep, but then she let out a scream that curled the hairs on his neck. He turned around to find her banging her right hand on the seat and gripping Maya's left shoulder tightly. The dam had finally broken inside her.
“They shot at us!” she shouted, her eyes red and wide as they stared into him. “They fucking shot at us! What the fuck! Why... How are we...” She turned her dead from side to side as though looking for an answer somewhere in the backseat. Finally she sighed and crumpled. “Shit.”
“Yeah, that about covers it.” Kyle didn't know what more to say. In less than a day the world had turned on its head, and in the wake of it he didn't have a clue what to do. His sister needed comfort – and hell, so did he – but more than that they needed a plan. He didn't know where to start with one, though, because he didn't have a clue what they were up against. In the Army they’d taught him that when he had an enemy his job was to point his weapon at that enemy and make them die for their country before he died for his. But who was his enemy here? The cops? His dad? Everyone? Or, was it something far more sinister and secret than a simple bad guy? No matter how evil a person was, their skin didn't change and crack and their teeth didn't turn into a dog's snarl. Something much worse than a bad cop and abusive father was at work in Stillwater, and Kyle didn't know how to even begin dealing with it.
“Shit isn't even the beginning of it.” Maya’s voice was weak and groggy, but the unexpectedness of it made Kyle and Taylor gasp. Maya leaned against the car door, her face a chalky brown color, and her eyes were red around the edges, but the look she gave Taylor and then Kyle through the rearview mirror was solid, grave, and unflinching. “You have no idea just how bad things really are.”
Chapter 18
Maya felt like death warmed over. As she sat crammed up against the backseat driver's side door, she tried to pull herself together and gather what wits she had left back into her oatmeal bowl of a brain. It was easier said than done, and it didn't help that she'd woken up in the middle of a backwoods NASCAR race. How she'd gone from standing near the back entrance to the mine to being strapped into the back of the Jeep as it slalomed around country roads was a story she wanted to hear sometime, but at the moment there were more pressing matters to deal with.
Kyle pulled the Jeep onto a dirt road shrouded by trees, stopped, and turned around in his seat and looked at her over the headrest. “Do I even want to ask what you mean?”
“Does she know something we don’t, Kyle?” the strange girl sitting next to her asked him, her skin and clothes chalky with soot.
Maya assumed from their resemblance, and from the way they talked to each other, that it was his sister Taylor.
Taylor stared at him like a drowning person stares at a raft floating just out of reach, desperate and afraid, then turned her frantic gaze on Maya. “What do you know? And how?”
Seeing the girl was on the verge of freaking out, Maya took a deep breath, calmed her face, and started talking in as smooth a voice as she could manage. She told Taylor an abbreviated version of her experiences as a child, about how that lead to her website and her writing, and how that had led her to Stillwater. Taylor looked skeptical at first, but as more of her story came out, the more Taylor’s expression changed from a frown to vigorous head nodding.
“So then I’m not crazy after all,” the young girl said with a sigh.
Kyle nodded without hesitation. “You’re sure not. Something weird is going on, Piglet, and it’s a far cry from normal.”
“So you think there's...” Taylor looked around quickly, searching for the words she needed in the air, “shit, some sort of monster or...or demon loose in town, and it's causing all this?”
That wasn't exactly right, but it was close. Maya knew neither of them would want to hear what she had to tell them, but what other choice did she have? The truth was the truth, and no amount of hemming and hawing would make it less so.
“I hate to say this.” Maya fixed each of them in turn with a hard stare. “But I think what we're dealing with is worse than that. Much worse.”
“What could be worse than a demon?” Taylor asked, her voice taking on a brittle edge.
Maya sympathized with the girl next to her, but she couldn't hold back. “The thing demons answer to.”
“And what does that mean?” Kyle looked at her in the rearview mirror with wide, bloodshot eyes. “Do you mean we’re dealing with the Devil?”
“Not exactly.” Maya struggled to convey what she knew without turning the conversation into a theological seminar. They weren't in a coffee shop, trading beliefs and ideas over scones. They were in a Jeep that had been shot up, hiding from people who'd been poisoned by an ancient evil. There wasn't time to get into the complexities of the spiritual realm. So, to keep things simple, she powered forward and just started talking.
“What you were taught in Sunday school isn't the truth. Neither is what people learned in their mosques or synagogues or temples. Every religion out there claims to have the truth, but
they don't. At best they have a kernel of it, and that kernel's been buried in centuries of dogma and bullshit. The reality of the spiritual world is far stranger and more complex than you could ever imagine. And right now, here in Stillwater, we're sitting at ground zero of a supernatural apocalypse.”
Taylor closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When her eyes were open again, she asked, “And how do you know this?”
“Because I saw it,” Maya replied, looking first at Taylor, then at Kyle. “When I fell on that man outside the mine, my skin touched his, and through that contact I saw some of what's been going on out here.”
At the memory of those visions, Maya dropped her head and stared down at her lap. Visions were never easy things to experience, but what she'd seen outside that mine made every other experience seem tame. And it wasn't just images that had been trust into her mind. She'd heard things, smelled things, tasted... She'd been overrun with sensations, drowned in experiences that were terrible and dark. Even recalling it made the blood run cold in her veins.
“Just tell us what you saw.” Kyle reached back to caress her arm. His touch was warm, a balm against the cold wet darkness closing in on her.
Nodding to herself in a you-can-do-this gesture, she looked back up and told them what she knew. “Evil, Kyle. So much evil. For thousands of years it covered the world in vast legions of darkness, fire, and blood. Demons walked the world, and mountains crumbled in their wakes. It was an age of evil that... I wish I could cut the memory of it out of my mind. No one should see what I saw. But then a flood came and destroyed them all.”
Kyle reached into her lap and took her hand, his fingers warm as they stroked her skin. “A flood? Like from the Bible?”
“Not exactly,” Maya replied. She soaked his warmth in and looked up at him. “The Bible isn't the only place you'll find a flood story. It’s been told all over the world, in nearly every religion and culture. The Hindu, Mayans, Greeks, Native Americans, and more all have flood stories as part of their tradition. The details change, but the idea of water being used to purify the world runs through them all. I don't know who sent the waters, whether it was God or gods or...something else, but eventually the waters fell, and all the evil that plagued the world was drowned and washed away. Well, almost all of it.”
