Kill Monster

by Sean Doolittle

  They’d reached their junction; Deputy Curnow had to slow down to turn east. She shoved the stone into her right-hand cargo pocket, snatched the deputy’s shotgun from its clip, and piled out of the cruiser before he could react.

  ‘Hi!’ she yelled to the guy on the bike, racking the slide as she ran up to him. ‘Sorry about this. Get off. Kickstand down, please.’

  The guy’s eyes went wide inside his helmet. She heard him exclaim something, but his face shield was down, so she couldn’t make out his muffled words. But it didn’t matter; the important thing was that he got off the bike.

  ‘Glass!’ Curnow shouted behind her, already out of his cruiser and giving chase. She saw Battis and West screeching to a stop behind his car.

  Abe tossed the shotgun into the ditch with a clatter, patted the guy on one shoulder, and hopped on the bike. ‘Again, really sorry,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  Then she swiped up the kickstand, toed the bike into gear, and wrung the throttle.

  Ben opened his eyes and saw his son’s face directly in front of him. Charley was pressed flat beneath the Highlander, safe for the moment, his eyes swimming with panic. Ben’s head swam, too, filled with a kind of floating, disembodied hush. He couldn’t hear Charley’s voice. But he could read his lips:

  ‘Dad.’

  Ben reached out and grabbed Charley’s hand. ‘Don’t move!’ he shouted, his own voice resonating like a muffled speaker in the bone enclosure of his skull.

  Then he scrambled to his feet, Charley’s fingers slipping from his. Now he did hear Charley’s voice, faintly, as if from the bottom of a swimming pool. As if, God help him, from the bottom of a grave:

  ‘Dad!’

  Then time sped up again. Ben turned. Twenty feet behind him, he saw flames, smoke, a ring of buckled pavement. Then two glowing green lamps in the haze.

  And then, through the smoke, the creature emerged. It moved almost at a saunter; brow dipped low, shoulders hunched, crude arms hanging. The thing shifted its gaze slightly toward Ben, as if catching his scent. Its glowing green eyes flared brighter.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Ben said to nobody.

  Then ran.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The first time Ben Middleton had escaped from the golem sent to assassinate his fourth great-grandfather, it had been first thing in the morning. He hadn’t slept the greatest, but still, he’d been uninjured. At least semi-fresh from the night’s rest. He’d had a head’s-up, thanks to Reuben Wasserman. He’d had a head start, thanks to the four guys ranked above him in First Floor IT. He’d even had coffee.

  This time, things hardly seemed fair.

  He’d gotten about six steps when the ground thundered. Then the creature was in front of him again, rising up from a crouch like a green-eyed Atlas pushing up the world.

  Ben didn’t know whether to zig or zag. He only knew that he needed to keep moving away from Charley and Christine. So he veered right, into the grassy ditch, aiming to vault the chain-link fence. He could make a break for the vacated parking lot of the filling station just beyond. Possibly find cover. Or maybe just run in circles around the empty building until his lungs gave out.

  He tripped in the weeds instead, falling flat, rolling away from the shadow already spreading around him.

  Ben scuttled like a crab toward the mouth of a galvanized culvert pipe running beneath 144th Street. He slipped into the dark tube like a man-sized sewer fluke, clawing and scrabbling his way through foul-smelling sludge, cobwebs, broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, God only knew what else. The ground thundered again, and silt rained down, and when he looked back he saw the mouth of the tube crimped shut behind him.

  He began to lose it then, hyperventilating in the dark, his heart hammering beneath a heavy blanket of claustrophobic panic. Then, ten feet ahead of him: an open portal back into the world.

  Now blocked by a crouching, green-eyed thing looking in.

  He was trapped.

  This is it, Ben thought. This is how it ends. Silently, he began to pray: Abe. Anabeth. Anabet. Please get here with that rock. Please help my boy.

  And then, as he readied himself for whatever was to happen next, the worst thing he could have possibly imagined came to pass:

  The creature pulled its blank face away from the opening.

  And Ben heard Charley’s voice in the distance, screaming, ‘Hey, you pile of shit! Come and get it! Over here!’

  Abe quick-shifted the big liter bike, preloading the lever and blipping the throttle instead of wasting time pulling the clutch. She leaned around an oncoming vehicle, then back the other way around the center median, slaloming through obstacles, scanning ahead for gaps and spaces. She lost the rear wheel in a scatter of gravel, reflexively backing off the twist-grip and counter-steering through a yawning, bum-clenching skid. Then she rode the center line like a rail, winding the bike up until it screamed.

  It seemed like she was moving in slow motion, even as the speedo crept toward 135. The crisp autumn air felt like a polar blizzard at such speed, freeze-drying her eyeballs and numbing her hands into unfeeling lumps. Her hair flapped so violently behind her that it stung her scalp. She focused on the pain and pushed the bike harder, praying against potholes, leaving each new state police cruiser behind her like they were standing still.

  Before long, the cruisers stopped following. Then they seemed to be helping instead of chasing, opening up lanes in the roadway far ahead of her.

  Abe pinned back the throttle, set the lock, and crouched down behind the fairing until she was draped across the fuel tank, flat as she could go. Obsessively reaching down to pat her right leg with each flashing mile.

  The stone still waited there. Still snug in its pocket. The only warm thing in her life.

  ‘I’m coming for you!’ she shouted into the wind, cold air drying her mouth, billowing her cheeks, snatching her words and whipping them away.

  And then it was nothing but smoke and madness everywhere around her.

  Dragging himself frantically out of the open end of that culvert pipe, wheeling like a madman in search of his son, finally staggering back up to the haze-clouded roadway, Benjamin Allen Middleton almost could have passed, they told him later, for a second creature himself.

  All Ben would be able to remember about it were two indelible images, burned into his soul like nuclear-flash imprints. The first image was the most terrifying thing he’d ever witnessed. The second one was the finest. He’d carry both around with him for all the rest of his days.

  The first image:

  Charley in a backpedaling sprawl, in the middle of 144th Street, at the feet of a thundering kill monster.

  Ben’s mind went blank and his body moved seemingly on its own, hobbling and limping and straining to reach its child, to grab Charley by the collar and drag him away. But his strength failed him, and the next thing he knew, they were on the ground together as the creature launched itself into the air. Ben wrapped Charley in one arm and raised the other in defense: a ridiculous, puny, futile gesture of protection he could not provide. A feeble pantomime of ultimate, irrevocable failure.

  Then came the second image:

  Anabeth Glass riding out of the smoke on the back of a motorcycle.

  It might have seemed like a manufactured memory, in retrospect, if Christine’s own recollection hadn’t borne it out: Abe climbing up on to the seat of the bike like some Wild West trick rider; Abe launching herself toward the creature as the bike skidded and tumbled away; the ageless face of Anabet Glacz, twisted in a battle snarl, as she met her long-awaited creature in midair.

  And then came the sound of a mountain cracking in half. The sound of history folding back on itself. The sound of dueling immortalities expiring simultaneously as Anabeth Glass became human again, and her creature became stone. Ben didn’t stop to listen. He was too busy dragging Charley. Or maybe Charley was dragging him.

  The rest came in flashes:

  Charley’s bloody, sweat-streaked face.

  S
tars winking on in the darkening sky.

  Anabeth, motionless, in a craggy rubble of broken stone.

  And then Ben saw nothing but boots and uniforms, felt nothing but Charley’s hot breath on his neck, heard nothing but his ex-wife’s voice, calling their names.

  GILDED LOAM AND PAINTED CLAY

  THIRTY-TWO

  It was April of the following year before they celebrated their birthdays properly: Charley’s fourteenth and Ben’s fortieth, together. They planned it on the half-year anniversary of that horrible day in October, when so much life had been lost: a long-belated gathering for family and a few friends.

  And then it just sort of got out of hand.

  They’d started with nothing more than a small family picnic at The Grotto. Charley’s idea. Then Caleb Warren canceled three club dates before Ben could stop him, crowbarring his bandmates into providing the entertainment free of charge. Francesca Montecito got wind of that and would accept no discussion to the contrary.

  Ben didn’t know what to think. Nobody was saying it was going to be Altamont; this was small-potatoes, home-town stuff. But he still worried. It seemed borderline disrespectful, first of all, and besides, things had just sort of started to die down.

  From what Ben could tell, roughly 25 percent of the world thought the whole thing about the runaway mud monster in Nebraska was bullshit. Total Fake News. Of those that were left – at least judging by the Internet – another 25 percent thought Ben Middleton should have fed himself and his kid to the monster and saved a hundred other people the agony.

  The rest thought all kinds of crazy things. Personally, Ben found it all queasy and unpleasant and easy enough to ignore, but what if it just started making Charley’s life a living hell again?

  Charley, of course, said bring it on, screw ’em if they can’t take a joke. Tentative green light from Christine. And then Ben complained about it to Ajeet Mallipudi on the phone one day, and Jeeter said, ‘Why don’t you charge tickets and donate the money to the Ashland Fund, or something of that nature?’

  He’d come such a long way, that guy. Worrisome cerebral contusions; compression fractures and nerve damage throughout his cervical spine; twelve weeks in a halo brace. Ben knew that he still got headaches, and he sometimes seemed frustrated with himself, but Jeeter never seemed to let it keep him down. After six months of rehab, he was looking at least 80 percent again to Ben, and climbing fast.

  And, honestly, it hadn’t seemed like the worst idea he’d ever heard. So they set up a flatbed trailer in the pasture and started the whole thing off with a memorial. Shirley Rademacher, Big Glenn’s widow, got up and said a few words. Sheriff Dale Prescott followed her with a few words of his own. Tiff Curnow ran a slideshow of faces and read out a too-long list of names.

  As imagined, it was a pretty somber cow pasture by that point. To nudge things toward a lighter mood, the Saunders County Sheriff’s Department ended the service with a twenty-one-gun salute. Using paintball rifles.

  Then Crane climbed up and got things moving in different direction entirely. Caleb said it reminded him of the old days. The security crew said you could hear the set all the way out on the road.

  Along the way, back down underground in the semi-privacy of the shelter itself, Ben found a moment to give Charley his present: a custom Partscaster, cut and dried from a hundred-year-old hackberry tree that had fallen on Ben’s property during a storm the year before. Pretty simple – a bare-bones instrument, basically dressed up like a ’54 Blackguard, with a few extra windings in the pickups just for spice. Not a masterpiece, by any means. But it screamed like a demon and played like butter, and it put Charley over the moon.

  Corby McLaren got plastered and sprained his ankle stepping into a badger hole. First Floor IT set him up in the back of Gordon Frerking’s freshly restored Vandura, with the back doors propped open, where he could watch the rest of the show with his foot on ice. Ben doubted the incident would negatively affect his rank on Corby’s stack chart. It couldn’t get lower anyway.

  Frankie and her friends took so many selfies with Caleb and the other band members that Ben wondered if Instagram would survive the assault. At one point her dad wandered over, his face ruddy from the margarita fountain, and plopped down in an empty lawn chair next to Ben.

  ‘Middleton, I’ll take my hat off to you,’ he said. ‘You know how to go over the hill in style.’

  Ben chuckled. ‘Thanks. Your wife vetoed the mud-wrestling.’

  Tony Montecito raised his Solo cup. ‘Happy birthday.’

  Ben touched his thermal coffee mug to the rim. ‘Cheers.’

  They drank, then sat and watched Charley having the time of his life up on the flatbed, power-chording along with the band at Caleb Warren’s invitation for a hard-driving cover of CCR’s ‘Fortunate Son.’

  ‘I still sometimes wish I’d been the one to punch you in the nose, though,’ Montecito said then, apropos of nothing, his eyes wistfully glassy. ‘I don’t know why.’

  Later, after Tony had wandered off again, Ben turned to Christine and said, ‘He seems to be having fun.’

  Christine laughed. ‘He’s a little drunk, I think. Did you know he took Charley golfing today?’

  ‘I heard. They have a good time?’

  ‘Charley hated it.’

  ‘That’s my boy.’

  ‘But he was very sweet.’ Christine got up, stooped down, and planted a quick smooch on Ben’s cheek. ‘Happy birthday.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ben said, touching the spot. ‘What was that for?’

  ‘Because I love you, dummy.’

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘Unfortunately for you, slow learner, I also love my husband.’ She tousled his hair. ‘And he’s better-looking. Makes a shit-ton more money. Also …’

  ‘Go towel off your rock star,’ he told her. ‘Let me grow old in peace.’

  He’d have liked it if Wasserman could have made it to the shindig. But between a brand-new nephew on the home front, and newfound celebrity on YouTube, Reuben had enough on his plate these days.

  The enigmatic toxic shock that nearly ended him had gone a long way toward freshening his perspective on a few things, Reuben claimed, and he was working hard on building back some of the trust he’d wrecked with Claire. After spending four days handcuffed in a closet with only the ghastliest disjointed memories of how she’d gotten there, she’d been – perhaps understandably – uncertain about the long-term potential of their relationship.

  But they were working on it. Ben could only advise him, from personal experience, that honesty was generally the best policy. In the meantime, at least for the moment, no more trips to Omaha.

  They kept the party going long into the night. Ben checked his phone about a thousand times, hoping for a return text to the one he’d sent that afternoon. Just before midnight, he finally got it: a photo with an accompanying note.

  The photo depicted a fiery sunrise over a blue-domed mosque. The note said, simply: Today’s the day.

  Ben sat with that a moment.

  Then he texted back: It sure as hell is.

  MULE VARIATIONS

  vii. Farewell to Arms

  Southern Kurdistan

  She finally caught up with him at a café in Erbil. He was sitting alone at a window table, sipping coffee from a dainty fenjan, reading the daily Al-Mashriq. Word around the campfire was that he’d arrived two days prior with a bottled-up djinn for sale. His suspected buyer: a known sleeper cell holed up somewhere in the Qandil Mountains near the border.

  ‘Hello, Betsy,’ he said in her shadow, before she’d even lowered her hijab. Frost raised his eyes from the newspaper, took one look at the carbon fiber prosthetic she wore in place of her lower right arm, and smirked. ‘Have you come to give me a hand?’

  ‘That’s exactly right,’ she told him. ‘A helping hand all the way home.’

  Frost seemed to think that was funny. ‘Will you sit?’

  She didn’t see why not.

  She wa
tched the street traffic around the citadel through the café window as he motioned for a server. Then she watched him pour her a cup of coffee from the dallah already on the table. She paid special attention to his hands.

  ‘It’s bitter,’ he said. ‘You’ll like it.’

  ‘Just the one cup, and then we’ll be going.’

  Frost chuckled. It was an unpleasant sight. An unpleasant sound. She hadn’t forgotten it. She doubted she would any time soon.

  ‘So, tell me,’ he said, freshening his own cup from the same vessel. ‘How does it feel to be dying a little bit each day, just like the rest of us?’

  ‘It feels glorious, now that you mention it.’

  ‘We may see about that.’

  Anabeth smiled and took down her headscarf, still pondering the coffee in front of her.

  ‘Try me,’ she said.

  viii. Farewell to Ass

  Kansas City

  If Dickie James Bierbaum had said it once, he’d said it a thousand times: You can’t fight city hall. Not that he had much heart for it these days, anyway. When it came to hunting treasure, Dickie had liked the digging and the finding. Red tape had been Randy’s job.

  Now Randy was gone.

  And so was Arcadia. They’d taken her, of course, after everything that happened. Under amended guidelines of the Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1988, oversight and curation of the remaining excavation had passed to a task force of state, federal, and international agencies. Cooperating institutions included the United States Department of Homeland Security, the Archaeological Institute of America, the World Council of Religious Leaders, the University of Kansas, and the Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian. There’d been all sorts of arguing and fighting about the whos and whats and whens, but Dickie hadn’t paid attention to any of that. At least not until it was time to talk turkey.

  He’d sunk everything he had into that blasted hole in the ground, after all. Now he was a fifty-five-year-old man with bad knees, glaucoma, and a heart valve that flapped like a busted laundry vent. By the time all the madness was over with, he hadn’t had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out, unless you counted Randy’s – which Dickie couldn’t anymore, since Myra and the kids had gotten everything left of any value in what passed for his big brother’s estate.