Blood-Stained Kings

by Tim Willocks

  If the Mercedes had been moving he’d still have been able to hear it, he was sure. Had the driver with the mustache heard him? Did he have a partner riding shotgun in back Grimes hadn’t seen? Were they waiting for him with pump-actions? He couldn’t afford to drive any further: they had to be close. Grimes got out of his car, closed the door quiedy, went around to the trunk and opened it. Amid the jumble he found a four-battery flashlight and a tire iron. He stuffed them into the pockets of his suit, shut the trunk and started up the road in the dark.

  He walked as fast as he could without running. He started to sweat from the effort but that was good. The sweating helped keep his mind off the gun blasts he expected to roar from the pitch dark at any moment. At least he was wearing black. He unfolded the lapels of his jacket to cover the patch of white shirt at his chest. Three or four hundred yards ahead he saw a pale yellow glow: the headlights of the Mercedes, pointing away from him. Silhouetted by the lights, and blacker than the surrounding dark, loomed a geometric hulk. Some kind of building.

  As he got closer he slowed down. He could see the Mercedes clearly now. Both doors hung open and the car was empty. It was parked in a wide tarmacadamed yard framed on the far side by a family-size house and on the left adjacent side by a concrete building with the shape and dimensions of a large barn. Between the house and barn was a field. The family house was in darkness. The concrete barn had no windows in its walls but Grimes could see light rising skyward from what must have been windows set into the roof. The headlights of the Mercedes were trained obliquely on the front of the barn, set into the wall of which was a sliding metal door. There was no other entrance that he could see and the metal door was shut. The third, right-hand, side of the yard was closed in by a bunch of trees with pale gray trunks, faintly luminous in the reflected light. Throughout the yard nothing moved and Grimes could hear no sound above the thump of his own heartbeat in his ears. He headed for the line of trees.

  They were silver birches. He slipped behind the nearest trunk and scanned the yard again. It was still silent but now, in the eccentric light and shadows thrown by the headlights, he could make out four dark heaps scattered about the yard. The farthest heap was bigger than the rest. Even at this distance Grimes recognized the limp density characteristic of a human corpse. The other heaps, he couldn’t make out.

  Grimes looked down. The ground at his feet was overgrown with knee-high grass and ferns. He decided not to risk the flashlight. Trying not to step on any branches or break his ankle, Grimes crept forward past a dozen more tree trunks, then peered out again at the yard.

  The three smaller heaps appeared to be dead dogs.

  Grimes swallowed and found his mouth as dry as adobe brick. He’d heard no shots: this small massacre must have taken place earlier on. Lenna and her captor had to be inside the concrete barn. He could still hear nothing, but the walls looked thick and the door heavy. Grimes turned away from the yard and squatted on his heels with his back to the trunk of the tree. The tire iron in his pocket jabbed into his side and he thought about the slaughter decorating the tarmac behind him. He closed his eyes and sifted through his options. He could run, that was always the first. His father had been kind enough to leave him the airline ticket to more peaceful climes. Or he could wait until whoever was in the barn with Lenna came out again and jump him at the door. Grimes remembered the plump pout of the guy’s mouth and his gut soured with disgust. No, he’d have to go in clutching his tire iron and hope for the best.

  Grimes heard a rustling sound.

  With his eyes already closed as they were, he was tempted to leave them that way and let Death release him right now. The rustle got closer; he could feel the grass moving against his shins. He opened his eyes.

  His first thought was that Death had taken him after all and was staring him in the face. But while he was willing to believe that Death might choose the form of a black wolf from eternity’s nether regions, Grimes didn’t believe that he’d show up bleeding.

  The dog stood between Grimes’s splayed knees and gazed into what felt like his soul. The dog’s eyes—he knew at once that it was a male—were as black as the sea and twice as deep. If Grimes had ever believed that consciousness was the property of humans alone he now abandoned that idea in an instant. In the sea of this animal’s eyes moved an unquestionable sadness and pain. Its face, which managed to suggest at one and the same moment both savagery and grace, was tapering and fine; and, somehow, as sad as its eyes. The dog was huge—its chest as wide as Grimes’s own—and hung with a robe of long, dank hair. Some demon breed of German shepherd. On its skull, curving down obliquely from the crown into the root of its half-severed ear, was gouged a moist wound. From the base of the gouge came a glimmer of exposed bone.

  Grimes found that he wasn’t breathing. He breathed. He also found, and for some reason this didn’t surprise him, that while he was frightened by just about everything else that had happened that day, he wasn’t frightened of the dog. He figured he might as well play it straight up. If the dog decided to kill him there wasn’t much he could do to stop him.

  “Come here, pal,” said Grimes.

  The dog came.

  He pushed his chest and shoulders between Grimes’s thighs and lifted his muzzle toward his face. Around the dog’s neck was a plain leather collar two inches wide but no ID tag. He opened his jaws to show a set of serrated yellow fangs, then a lilac tongue longer than seemed possible rolled out and flicked across Grimes’s throat. Grimes didn’t flinch. He slid his hands through the fur on the dog’s flanks and the dog pressed its long throat against his chest and licked his face. And Grimes knew that to whomsoever the dog had previously owed its loyalty, he had now transferred it to him.

  Grimes wasn’t sure if that was what he wanted but he wasn’t about to argue.

  “Okay, wounded soldier,” said Grimes. “We’ll fix you up later.”

  If he was honest with himself he was as glad of the dog’s company as the dog appeared to be of his. He disengaged himself and stood up. The dog reared up on its hind legs and slapped his paws on Grimes’s shoulders. If the tree hadn’t been just behind him Grimes would have fallen over. The dog was even bigger than Grimes had thought: the glittering black eyes were almost level with his own.

  “Down, pal,” said Grimes.

  The dog dropped immediately to the ground and stood waiting and Grimes felt thrilled to be obeyed. He turned and looked across the yard: it was as silent as before.

  “Come on,” he said, and stepped out from the trees.

  The dog padded ahead of him, big paws slapping the asphalt as if to show Grimes it was okay, he could handle himself. The dog went over to the human corpse and sat down beside it. Presumably it was his former master. Grimes followed. The man was as dead as he could get, with a shotgun wound in the midsection and a bullet hole in the side of his head. His eyes were half-open, the uprolled whites vivid in the shadowed face. It was ugly and strangely banal; as it always was. Grimes squatted and straightened the twisted limbs and closed the eyes. He did it gently, partly from respect, partly so as not to upset the dog, then quickly searched the body for weapons. In one pants pocket he found a clip of shells but no gun; he left the clip where he found it. He stood up and looked at the dog and at the bullet gouge on his skull. The dog looked back.

  “Looks like you were the lucky one,” said Grimes softly.

  He guessed the dog had been stunned unconscious by the slug and left for dead. “Smart enough to hide when they came back, too.”

  Grimes walked past the dead animals to the Mercedes. The dog trotted ahead of him with a professional disregard for his dead companions and stuck his head, snuffling, into the driver’s seat. From the depths of his chest came a low, primal growl, the kind of sound Grimes imagined a mountain might make as its entrails were torn out. Grimes wanted to swallow but couldn’t find any spit. The dog sounded angry—raw-meat angry—with the mustachioed man.

  “Down, pal,” he whispered. “Sit.”<
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  With a hint of reluctance the dog backed off and settled onto his haunches. Again Grimes was impressed. He took a quick look around the car’s interior. No guns. He ducked out.

  “Heel, pal,” he said.

  With the dog at his right leg, he walked over to the sliding steel door. At its right-hand edge was a jagged twist of metal, the edges scorched blue. The lock had been blown open. These boys had come prepared and hadn’t messed around. Grimes sensed a military ruthlessness at work. Kill anything that moved, blow the door, go in. He put his hands to the door and slowly increased the pressure until it budged. It moved the first inch easily and without much sound. Light spilled from within. Grimes’s neck tingled again as the growl rumbled low and menacing at his knee. Grimes crouched and looked the dog in the eye.

  “Listen, soldier, when we find whoever it is you’ve got a grudge against, you can have his dick for supper. Until then I want you to stay cool, okay? Like me. Cool.”

  The dog blinked once and Grimes took that to mean it was a deal. He straightened, and keeping his body behind the door, he slid it open another two feet. The dog smelled the air but held his ground. Inside was what looked like a warehouse space, lit by harsh white strip lights and stacked full of crates. Grimes stooped and slipped his right hand under the leather collar and let the dog pull him inside.

  He was almost dragged off his feet. The animal’s strength was shocking and he wasn’t even trying. Grimes tugged back a little and the dog slowed. If it had been the dead man who’d trained him, he’d done so to perfection. Grimes allowed himself to be guided through a short maze of stacks until they reached a wall with a second door, also of steel and also breached by explosives. It hung partly open. Grimes looked into a short, featureless corridor at the end of which was a third door. This one was closed and showed no signs of damage. On the floor of the corridor was a pool of congealed blood. No sound came from within. Grimes walked down the corridor and put his eye to the peephole in the door. He expected it to be lensed so as to look outward, toward him; but this one was for looking in.

  A warped perspective, a distorted cone of space, offered itself to his eye. The visual field was striped with blurred vertical lines, which he realized after a moment were steel bars. He was looking at a giant cage, brighdy lit. Inside the cage, in the center of his view, was a massive dark brown box. Grimes struggled with the hallucinatory focus. No, he was right: the box was a building. It had a window in it, and walls built of logs. A shack or a cabin. At the edge of the cone, where the lenses distorted most, there was a blurry movement of something pink—fleshy pink—and closer to the intervening bars than it was to the cabin. The surreal picture was accompanied by utter silence.

  Grimes looked down at the door’s handle, a short matte stainless steel tube above an empty keyhole. It looked like the kind you had to lock deliberately. Either way he was fucked if it didn’t open. He took the handle, twisted down and pulled. The door edged a couple of millimeters toward him. Grimes glanced down at the dog, silent and poised.

  “We’re in business,” whispered Grimes.

  Still holding the handle he put his eye back to the spyhole. The fleshy blur had gone. He pulled the door back a fraction more and the blur reappeared and came into focus. It was a naked man. With a mustache. He was swaying back and forth in a strange dance. His right hand was gripping his penis. As Grimes pulled the handle again to get a different angle through the lens, the edge of the door came open an inch from the frame and there was a sudden blast of sound from within.

  “Fuck me then, maggot-dick! Pick your hole and stick it in!”

  Lenna Parillaud, defiant. But Grimes heard horror in the voice too. There followed a burst of coarse laughter.

  “Why, we got all the time in the world, Miss High and Mighty. Me, I’m a big fan of all that good foreplay shit. Ain’t that what you gals like too?” He laughed again.

  Grimes drew back from the spyhole and pulled the tire iron from his pocket. He suddenly felt a monstrous anger battering on the inside of his forehead. A flood of adrenaline and other rage chemicals swamped his arteries and weakened his limbs and something inside him screamed for the spilling of blood. Easy, a calmer voice counseled. He breathed and nodded and his muscles steadied. He looked down. The dog glanced at him, licked its chops, and resumed its beady gaze at the crack in the door.

  “Yeah,” said Grimes, “me too. Let’s go.”

  He snapped the door wide open. A dark snarling wind flew inside. Grimes charged after it.

  Impression: unbroken bars; the cage door closed against them. A yell of surprise turning to fear. A pink ungainly movement to his right. A clatter. The gate to the cage. Keys dangling from the lock: the other side. Three paces to go. The dog already there. A deafening canine roar that seared the oldest synapses in Grimes’s body. His hands swapping cold iron from right to left, arm through the bars, fingers on the key, twisting, wrenching. The door swinging out toward him. A black bolt of thunder past his leg. Grimes plunged into the cage.

  He turned his head.

  Impression: a naked man waddling away from a seated figure in black. Brown liquid leaking down his legs. Hairy arms stretching toward a crumple of clothes on the floor. On top of the clothes: a blued revolver. A face, a mustache: carved with total fear. The cold iron swapped again—left to right—and raised and thrown. The carved face already shrieking as the iron smashed bloody into hair and teeth and white -taut lips.

  Grimes kept running.

  Impression: a long black tapering snarl of skull, heaving and hauling beneath a juddering paunch. The naked man floundering as he fell with a piercing falsetto scream, arms still flapping for the gun as the dog wrenched free of his crotch in a shower of red. The nerveless hands slapping at the gun, fumbling, dropping. The black thunder scrambling on top of him for more, burrowing into the throat with dripping jowls.

  Grimes bent down and picked up the gun.

  Above a pair of busy, shag-furred shoulders he saw a gargling face.

  Grimes crammed the gun barrel into one stretched and glazing eye and pulled the trigger.

  After the gunshot there was a window of deathly silence. Then into Grimes’s ears seeped the moist rummaging of serrated jaws.

  “Down,” said Grimes.

  The dog ignored him.

  “Down, goddamnit. It’s over.”

  The dog stopped and stared up at him with what looked like reproach. Grimes was careful not to look beyond the panting jaws to what lay on the floor behind. He slapped his thigh.

  “Come here, pal,” said Grimes.

  His bloodstained guardian reared up and leaned against his chest and smeared Grimes’s throat with another man’s gore. Grimes shut his eyes and gave himself up to blind trust and tried not to be sick. He put his arm around the dog and squeezed.

  “Good dog,” he said.

  He opened his eyes. He was staring at an old log cabin—in a steel cage in a concrete barn—with a corpse at his feet, blood slaver on his neck and a multimillionairess on his hands. “Good dog” was as apt as anything else he could think of saying. After all, without the dog the dead guy would probably have reached his gun.

  Grimes said it again. “Good dog. I owe you one.”

  He pushed the dog down and slipped the gun into his waistband and looked over at Lenna Parillaud. She was sitting in a strange plastic chair with two straps binding her wrists to the armrests and a third around her chest. She was dressed in a black jacket and long pants and seemed physically unharmed. She watched Grimes walk up to her with the steady green eyes he remembered from before. He started to unbuckle the straps.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Lenna took a breath, held it for a moment.

  “Yes and no,” she said.

  Her face was scrubbed clean of cosmetics. She looked less pale than before, and older; the wrinkles around her eyes more obvious, the skin dryer. Without the makeup, Grimes thought she looked better. Her hands were stained with dried blood. It didn’t
appear to be hers. She glanced downward to his right. Grimes felt the dog against his thigh.

  “You’ve made a friend,” she said.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Grimes. “So far he’s on our side.”

  “He never seemed to like me.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Lenna said, “He’s called Gul.”

  Grimes liked the name as soon as he heard it. He tried it.

  “Gul.”

  Gul barked once.

  Grimes unfastened the chest strap and Lenna stood up in front of him. Her face was impassive. He couldn’t read her. She seemed super-humanly calm—matter-of-fact—as if none of what had taken place around her was especially unusual. He put it down to shock.

  “Why did you come back?” she said. She sounded as if she wished he hadn’t.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m looking for my father.”

  Her expression didn’t change. “Your father,” she said, flady.

  “George. He’s missing.”

  Lenna didn’t say anything and Grimes felt uneasy.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “I guess yours is too. Maybe we should swap them somewhere else.”

  “Bobby’s dead. Bobby Frechette.”

  Grimes glanced at the dried purple-brown streaks on her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Atwater murdered him.”

  Grimes felt bad about Frechette but the bodyguard—the samurai—wouldn’t have wanted him to waste time grieving.

  He said, “We should go.”

  Lenna walked past him and stopped by the dead man. She looked down at him. Grimes didn’t. Lenna looked up into Grimes’s eyes.

  “I would have left him alive a little longer,” she said.

  Grimes said nothing. He felt the revolver, heavy against his stomach. He couldn’t say why he’d shot the man: whether to spare the guy a few final moments of obscene terror or to indulge the rage that had seized his heart in the corridor. It didn’t really matter.

  Lenna said, “He was called Jack Seed.”