by Joe McKinney
“His father?”
Anderson nodded. Her expression told him enough. She knew what was going on, or at least some of it. Enough to be scared as hell, anyway.
Slowly, he tried to move.
“He told me to find you and get you out of here.”
“We have to find Paul first,” she said.
“Rachel, those things...we can’t fight them. I shot one of them in the head. We can’t beat them.”
“Then we have to get Paul out of here.”
“He wasn’t afraid of them, Rachel. I think he understands them.”
“I won’t leave here without him.”
Anderson closed his eyes and tried to catch his breath. He couldn’t see his right foot from where he was, but from the way the pain there was beginning to drown out everything else he knew that it was bad.
“Can you move?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “I think so.”
“Try,” she said. “You have to help me.”
He reached up and grabbed hold of the edge of the catwalk, his left arm doing all the work.
“Can you help me get up there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Give me your hand.”
***
A few minutes later, he had an arm over her shoulder and she was helping him away from the wreckage of the catwalk. They stopped in one of the walkways that led up to the superstructure, and Anderson sat down on a thick pipe and inspected the wound to his right foot. It wasn’t as bad as he first thought. The cut was deep, and he would almost certainly need a tetanus shot, but they had been able to stop the worst of the bleeding with some tissues he had in his pocket.
His right side wasn’t as bad it had first seemed either. He unbuttoned his shirt and looked at his ribs and saw the beginnings of a nasty bruise spreading down his flank, but at least none of the ribs were broken.
“Can you walk?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “But, Rachel, you know we can’t fight those things. You have to know that.”
“I don’t want to fight anybody. I just want Paul.”
“Rachel,” he said, “you know he means to die doing this.”
She looked at him like he had suddenly grown four extra heads. “What? No.”
“He wanted you as far away from here as possible when that happened. He made me promise I would get you away from here.”
“No, that’s not right. Hurting himself wouldn’t do any good.”
“Rachel, he doesn’t believe that. The way Paul told it to me, he thinks he can burn his father up by fighting him. Short circuit him.”
“I won’t let him hurt himself.”
“Rachel, I don’t think we have a choice. Even if I wasn’t hurt like this, we wouldn’t be able to fight what’s out there. And we’ll probably only slow Paul down. Come on, let me get you out of here. It’s what Paul wanted.”
Rachel shook her head. “I won’t do that. I won’t leave him here.”
She got up to leave. He saw it on her face, and a sudden fear went through him. She was going to do this, with or without him. And if she did it without him, he’d probably die trying to get out of this place. He’d been a fool to come, he knew that now.
“Your mind’s made up then?” he said to her back.
She turned to face him. “What would you do?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The same I guess. At least I hope I would. I just don’t know. I got to tell you though, Rachel. I’m scared all the way down to my toes.”
Moans echoed through the factory. Rachel lifted her head to the sound and her lips drew into an even tighter line. There was almost no color in her face now.
“I’m going,” she said.
“All right,” he said. He held up his hand to her. “Can you at least give me a hand up first.”
She helped him to his feet, and a moment later, they were headed into the superstructure.
***
There was a dead man on either side of him, each one holding an arm. They dragged him into the circular chamber and dropped him unceremoniously at his father’s feet.
Paul’s eyes fluttered open and he found himself staring at a black pair of Red Wing boots with a high shine. His father was looking down at him. He looked the same as he had six years ago. His face was lean and deeply tanned, shoebox-shaped. The eyes were half-closed in a fierce squint beneath the brim of his black Stetson.
“We done with this foolishness?” his father said. “You gonna stop fighting me?”
Paul’s mouth was full of blood. He spit it out, right at his father’s feet. He missed by a good eight inches.
He looked at the blood and laughed and his tongue probed a loose tooth.
His father didn’t even acknowledge the gesture of defiance. He stepped closer to Paul, walking right over the thick puddle of blood and spit Paul had just made, and knelt down in front of his son.
“It ain’t gonna change nothing,” his father said. He waited for Paul to say something. “Nothing, boy? Nothing to say to your old man?” Martin reached down and picked up some of the dirt in front of Paul’s face and let it sift through his fingers thoughtfully. Paul watched the dirt catch the breeze and drift away, and he thought back to an early summer day when he was eight or nine and the two of them were in the peach orchard, his father testing the soil with his fingers and wondering out loud if there was going to be enough rain for a good harvest that year.
Paul pulled himself up to his knees. With his fingers he started digging for the handcuff key that was secured inside his waistband.
“Why are you fighting me, Paul? A few days ago, you were ready to accept this charge you’ve been given.”
“You know what’s changed,” Paul said.
Martin Henninger almost smiled.
“Your mother didn’t believe in none of this, Paul. To her, it was just craziness. She never really got it.”
“She got it,” Paul said. “I saw inside her mind. I know how scared she was.”
A question flashed across his father’s face. And something else, too. Was it alarm, something he hadn’t anticipated?
“You know why she was so scared, Daddy? She was scared because you couldn’t see the senselessness of what you’re doing. That’s the part she thought was crazy. All of this, your grand vision, none of it has to happen. There’s no reason to make it happen. It doesn’t serve any purpose other your own vanity.”
His father shook his head. “That’s not right, Paul. After all I’ve showed you, you don’t know that? This isn’t vanity, Paul. This is evolution. This is a better world.”
“A better world? Daddy, you’re insane.”
“Your mother was the crazy one, Paul.”
“You did a lot to make me believe that, Daddy. But I got to wonder why. That’s the thing I don’t understand. Why’d you think you had to kill her? I’d have followed you anywhere if you hadn’t done that. If you’d have asked me to follow you, I’d have thrown down everything I own and gone with you.”
“I know that, Paul. I knew that from the moment you first started walking and talking. Something told me even then that you were special.”
Martin dusted off his hands and rested them on his thighs. They looked large and powerful. But his voice was delicate. It touched something vulnerable inside of Paul and coaxed it up to the surface, for his father’s voice was resonating inside his head, too, lulling him into a quiet ease. The world around him turned to heat shimmers and grew dark. For a moment, nearly everything but the sound of his father’s voice dropped away.
Paul’s fingers had slipped off the handcuff key and his head rolled on his shoulders.
Would it be so bad to just stand up and let my father lead me into the new world? Would it really be that bad?
“The thing is, Paul, a boy’s always gonna feel like he’s grounded to this world while he’s got his mother in it. You know what I mean? You tell me now that you would have followed me, and I’m sure yo
u believe it, but I wonder if that’s true. Don’t you see? I couldn’t take that chance with you. You got a different destiny laid out for you, son. You’ve been called upon to do a lot more than just fix a world that’s dying. You’ve been called upon to tear it down and build a new one up in its place. That means you’ve got to kill this world before you can make it new again. Do you think you could kill a world that’s got your mother in it? I had to create distance between you and her.”
Something Magdalena said just before she died came back to him. You need to center yourself in this world. Only your love in this world can do that. Find something worth holding on to, because the dead will take you over when you quit loving this world.
The Barber fifty cent piece was still in his front pocket. It had helped him once already. It could help him again. He couldn’t touch it with his fingers, but there were other ways to touch it. He reached out and closed his mind around it, thinking of Rachel, and he found he could shut out his father’s voice almost completely. The man was still talking, but it was like he was standing on the other side of a glass now.
Paul took up the handcuff key again. He twisted his hand up and around the base of the handcuffs and probed with his finger until he found the keyhole. Careful to keep his mind clear and his movements slight, for he thought his father could still read his body language even if he couldn’t penetrate into his mind, he worked the key first one way and then the other until he felt it catch and the ratchet arm release.
Martin Henninger stood up and looked down at his son. Did he sense his control over his son fading? Paul stared back at him from his knees and thought maybe he did. One cuff was off now and he was working on the other one. His father turned then and walked to the center of the chamber, where a large wooden pole rose ten feet into the air. His father motioned to a group of dead men standing in the shadows of the chamber wall and they brought forth a pair of huge Angora goats on leather leashes and tied them to the pole. Then the dead men slipped back into the shadows.
“Have you figured out yet what this ceremony means?” Martin said, turning to face Paul.
The other cuff came loose.
The Barber, Paul thought. Focus on the Barber.
“The goats are a symbol,” Paul said, “of what happens to the world. One dies in sacrifice so that the other can be born anew.”
“That’s right. That’s good, Paul.”
Paul took the cuffs in his right hand, holding the connecting chain in his fist. The two ratchet arms swung loose from either side of his fist.
Don’t ever let a bad guy get a hold of your cuffs, one of his tactics instructors at the Academy had said. They start swinging those things around, with that ratchet arm swinging free, they can tear you to ribbons.
At the base of the pole was a shallow brass bowl, and inside that a loose arrangement of oily wood chips, Lebanese Cedar. Martin struck a match with his thumbnail and dropped it into the bowl. The flame shrank away almost immediately and a thin, acrid-smelling column of smoke rose from the bowl, which Martin set down again at the base of the pole.
He put a hand on the head of each goat and spoke a few words over each. His voice was low, the words indistinct, but Paul knew what was being said. Even with his mind holding tightly to the Barber, his father’s chanting was blaring inside his head like he was standing inside the throat of a ship’s foghorn. And then his father grabbed one of the goats by the neck in his left hand and lifted it until the animal stood eye to eye with him, its back hooves kicking at the ground for purchase. With his right hand he removed his knife from his belt and quickly sliced the animal open from its throat to its anus.
He let the carcass fall to the ground.
The other goat he untied from the pole and turned it around to face Paul.
“Do you know why you must take the Scapegoat’s heart as your own?”
Paul turned his gaze from the dead goat to his father. The Barber. The Barber.
“No clue,” he said.
“You do, Paul. Think about it, boy. The world that’s about to be born is symbolized by what’s inside this animal. When you take its heart inside your body it beats beside your own. You become a bridge between what’s gone and what’s to be. You become the link that connects both of them. You become balance incarnate.”
Martin brought the animal forward, so that it was standing right in front of Paul.
“You see it now? You see that by containing both worlds inside yourself, you inherit them both? That is important, boy. I want you to tell me you understand.”
Paul’s mind felt like it was stuck in mud. He struggled up towards consciousness, fighting against the noise his father was making in his head.
The Barber, the Barber, he thought.
He pictured the coin solidly in his mind, and gradually spokes of light formed from behind it, lighting a sort of corona around it. His father’s voice grew quiet, less insistent, and the nightmare images of the world overrun by the dead shredded like tissue and scattered on the wind. The light behind the coin continued to grow stronger. It should have blinded him, Paul thought, but it didn’t hurt to look at. In fact it seemed to spread a warmth through him, like something good was trying to reach for him. And then at once it came to him.
“Momma.”
His father recoiled from him.
“Say the words, Paul. Tell me you see what this means.”
Paul looked his father in the eye, and the faintest trace of a smile played at the corner of his mouth.
“Do you know what I see, Daddy?”
Martin waited.
“All I see is a dead man.”
He sprang to his feet then and swung the cuffs at his father’s face.
Paul’s fist connected with his father’s jaw and the contact sent a spike of pain up through the nerves of his right arm. It was like somebody had jammed an ice cold piece of metal up through the marrow cavity of his bone.
Paul fell backwards, holding back a scream, but only barely.
The cuffs had left a pair of jagged gouges in his father’s cheeks. Black soot poured out of the wounds and drifted away on the breeze like windblown sand. But the wounds didn’t stay open for long. As Paul watched, they healed over.
Martin’s black Stetson had fallen to the ground. He picked it up and dusted off the brim and seated it back on his head. Then he turned his attention back to Paul.
“Boy,” he said, “sometimes, you ain’t got no smarts at all.”
He stepped forward and grabbed Paul by the shoulders and shook him the way a dog does a stuffed rabbit.
Paul threw an upper cut that caught his father under the chin, but Martin’s head barely moved. He took a step back and short punched Paul in the mouth. Paul’s vision went black and he rocked back on his heels and teetered there for a moment before he started to fall backwards.
“Get over there,” his father said, and grabbed him by the front of his uniform jersey and threw him into the pole.
Paul’s head and back crashed into the pole at the same time and it knocked the air from his lungs. For a moment, his vision went purple. He let out a low, stuttering groan and started to slide down to the ground. His father caught him by the throat and hoisted him back to his feet. Paul’s eyelids fluttered involuntarily. He tried to speak, but his father’s fingers were wrapped too tightly around his throat. He managed a whistling gasp and that was all.
“Why do you think you have to fight me, boy?”
Paul couldn’t answer.
His father removed his belt, and exactly as he had done six years before, wrapped the belt around Paul’s throat so that he was lashed to the pole. Then he fed it through the buckle and yanked it tight and pushed the tine through the leather. The loose end he let fall against Paul’s chest like a necktie.
“I told you once before, boy. It’s gonna happen, one way or the other. Might as well come to me willingly.”
“Go to hell,” Paul gasped.
“I won’t get to go there with you, Paul.
I can open the doorway for you, but it’ll be up to you to take this world there yourself. You’ll see.”
Then he grabbed the scapegoat just as he had done the first goat and raised it up with one hand. Paul heard it bleat with a small, scared voice. Its eyes were rolling wildly in its head, but its body was hanging limply from his father’s fist.
Martin pulled the knife from his belt and held it so Paul could see.
“Make yourself ready, boy. This is where it starts.”
***
They stepped into the circular chamber suddenly, unexpectedly. Anderson had been certain they were still several levels below the entrance, and he had been right about to say so when they rounded a corner and emerged into the starlit chamber.
They both gasped at the same time.
Paul was there, lashed to a wooden pole. The air smelled of death and blood and dust. That terrible sense of crushing defeat and pain he’d felt in the presence of the dead men was palpable here as well, and though he couldn’t see them, he knew they were there.
As it was, all his attention was focused on the man in the black Stetson cowboy hat. He was standing a short distance in front of Paul, whose head was sagging to his chest and whose face was dark with blood, with a goat suspended in one hand. It took Anderson a moment to take all that in. The goat had to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds, and yet this man held it up one-handed as though it was an empty potato sack.
The man turned to face them. And Paul looked at them, but his face was too badly battered to show any emotion. Anderson stared from one to the other and he was immediately struck by the resemblance. They were obviously father and son. Anderson tried to raise a hand to touch Rachel on her shoulder, but his arm felt like it weighed a ton. He had seen movement in the shadows off to his right, and now that movement had turned into the dusky silhouettes of dead men shambling forward on broken legs, arms raised in a gesture that seemed like they were begging.
He took a step back. Rachel gasped beside him. More of the dead men were advancing on them from the left.
