The Telling

by Mike Duran

  She could make out a pair of grubby overalls beneath a thick apron.

  “We thought you’d be twouble. And then when I cawth you back here, we knew it.”

  Annie did not look into the face of Stevie Veigh’s dark angel. Instead she stared at the bank of bodies. How many of her friends lay in there? Eugenia? Vera? Now a mass of rotting flesh. It wouldn’t be long before Annie’s body was next to them. How had it come to this?

  “You probly been wonderin’ how we do it, where the bodies hath been goin’.” Stevie walked around the basin and sent more roaches skittering from his boot steps. A cat hissed and emerged from the back of the pile. It was Jezebel, most likely standing guard over her master’s remains. “They had it figured out a long time ago. The scientiths. Couldn’t have all these dead angel bodies lyin’ round. They had to hide their trackths, you know.”

  Stevie approached a large open-faced barrel and wriggled on a thick pair of black rubber gloves. “Hydrochloric athid. They dissolved ’em, poured ’em right down the drain. When we took Roth, things changed. Now the tables hath turned. He’s got connections, ya know?” He smiled, his cleft pallet revealing a triangle of gums. “Now we’re doin’ the disposal.”

  He twisted, reached into the pile, and yanked on a leg.

  She groaned and looked away.

  “What?” Stevie stopped. “You don’t wanna watch?”

  “She’ll see it soon enough.”

  Annie squirmed, adjusting her body to see where the second voice came from. A man stood deeper in the subterranean shadows. He emerged into the naked light wearing a long coat and wire-rimmed glasses. His face was long, gaunt. Annie had seen this man before and tried to place him.

  “Walther Roth,” he said in answer to her thoughts. “Guardian of the gateway.”

  Stevie bowed clumsily. “On earth ath it is in hell.”

  Roth waved his hand through the air dismissively. “Save it, you fool.” He approached Annie, looking into the basin. “By the time anyone really figures it out, they’ll be swapped. We calculate we can take the whole city in twenty-six days. Twenty-six days. All a matter of critical mass. And once the black cherub comes through, the world as you know it will fundamentally change. The Third Column will be fused.”

  “So mote it be,” Stevie snickered.

  “Shut up!” Roth’s eyes flashed amber, and a tittering sound escaped his throat. “Get to work! There’ll be more on the way.”

  Stevie slobbered something and continued extricating one of the bodies from the stinking heap.

  Meanwhile Roth stood directly before Annie. “You’ve been a thorn in our side, Annie, but night is almost here. And when it comes, the shadows dance. The hive awakens. That’s when our power is strong.”

  A dry slither sounded from below. Something was moving in the dark tunnel. What darkness had gestated below? Annie might as well have stopped breathing, such was her dread. She peered into the black maw of the ancient stone chamber.

  A bat-like squeal was followed by raspy chatter.

  Roth watched her with cool intensity. “It’s in the dark places that we live—your fears, your lusts, your despair gives us life. And that pitiful thing inside you called hope. Its dying brings us life.”

  Behind him Annie glimpsed Stevie struggling to hoist a body over his shoulder.

  She was too far away from Marvale to cry out for help, and Tamra would have no idea to look here. Annie was supposed to have stayed in her apartment. This creature named Roth was right. That pitiful thing inside her had finally met its match. Annie Lane wouldn’t stand in the gap. Her life had been one huge, disappointing waste.

  “The darkness comes. The hive awakes.” Roth motioned down the tunnel. “Soon your little resistance—your remnant—will be swapped, devoured by the seraph. Even now, the hive is on their way. The trap is set.” He chuckled, then laughed, a laughter that rose in a maniacal crescendo. “The Prince is on his way. The Seer! And with him is your guardian angel.”

  The vat sizzled and sputtered, and a sickly gray cloud of acid filled that place of death.

  Metallic rustling sounded: the grate of a metal hinge. Gray daylight cast a languid stream from an upper chamber of the room.

  Roth clapped his hands.

  A misshapen figure plodded through the door, its steps ponderous, its frame malformed. Heavy breathing interspersed the scratching of gravel. It was dragging something.

  Annie looked away.

  Roth’s glasses glinted in the overhead light as he watched the figure on the platform above with apparent glee.

  That stuff about taking risks and finding truth seemed like a joke. Her stubbornness and pride loomed before her, mocking her. God, forgive me! She had taken risks, all right, and now she would die with her risks.

  The acid splat and sizzled. Roth laughed again. The bare bulb swung wildly in the rising acidic cloud.

  They were soul eaters, that’s what Weaver had called them. And this was their operation. Swapping souls and liquefying the remains. Annie was about to experience firsthand what that process was like.

  She looked up, trying to make sense of what was happening above her. The figure had stopped and released its load. A wedge of light revealed a gray curtain outside. She could not tell what time of day it was. But through the open door Annie could make out the rock wall where she had crouched several nights ago. She was in the bowels of Camp Poverty.

  How long had this been going on? How could no one have observed these hideous impostors? How many of these dark angels walked among them, protecting this little secret?

  The figure stood on the platform with its back to her, hunched forward and panting like some simian cave creature. It turned its elephantine head toward her, and Annie saw the monster that once was Fergus Coyne.

  His head was massive, disproportionate to the size of his body, and lolled from its sickly girth. Tiny eyes were embedded in the swollen cranium and glowed with a savage radiation.

  “Look who I just found.” Fergus slurped drool.

  “An angel,” Roth chortled. “Guardian of the gateway, wasn’t that it?”

  Fergus issued a garbled yip, and Stevie rose from the pile of cadavers cackling and jigging. Their hideous laughter echoed in the chamber.

  Fergus stepped back enough for Annie to glimpse someone lying at his feet. It was the body of Little Weaver. Blood splattered his jaw, and his arms were bound behind him.

  At that moment any hope Annie had mustered vanished.

  Chapter 58

  Z? That you?”

  Zeph stared up the cellar steps. Dust motes swirled through that gray aperture. He could see the familiar leather sandals and, circling the calf, the tattoo of a viper peeking from under cutoff sweat pants.

  His heart leaped at the sight. Zeph looked sideways at Tamra, who had returned to staring at the makeshift coffin. Then he said, “It’s me, Dad.”

  “You shoulda called, son.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  His father descended the steps, bringing the stink of nicotine and liquor with him. The man stopped when he saw Tamra.

  Howard Walker had grown a gut in the years since Zeph’s departure, but he still maintained that military look. Apart from the gray around the temples, his crew cut retained its meticulous sheen. Except for a manicured strip of mustache, he was well shaven. Zeph recalled how, after his disfigurement, he became jealous of his father’s rugged smooth jawline and wondered if the man shaved just to mock him. Howard Walker stood with impeccably upright posture, open-chested to the point of cock-surety. Apparently the man had kept up his daily push-up routines. He tended toward flower print shirts and always wore them unbuttoned to reveal his stellar pecs. Nevertheless, any real connection with the military had been jettisoned upon discharge. Unsuitability and substandard performance were the terms used often by Belle Walker, which seemed to send the old man further into his world of disdain and cold indifference.

  He took the last step and looked from Tamra to Zeph.
r />   “This is Tamra Lane,” Zeph said.

  She turned, but her demeanor had soured. And by the looks of it she was prepared to unload on this wannabe military man.

  Before either of them could speak, Zeph said, “She’s a friend,” answering the question he knew would have followed.

  Howard grunted and then swayed slightly. By this hour of the day he was probably four drinks deep. “You come for your car?”

  Zeph shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “Well, it’s right there if you ever want it.”

  Zeph nodded. However, he knew that the chances of the rusty red Triumph ever leaving these premises would require a flood, a cyclone, or some other act of God.

  “It’s been awhile,” Howard said.

  “Eight years.”

  “I mean since I’ve come down here.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  Howard studied the musty tomb, and then his features grew still.

  “It wasn’t my idea, Z.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I told her it was wrong. But your mother—that woman was nuts.”

  Zeph could not corroborate that fact and remained silent.

  “All that religious mumbo-jumbo.” Howard pursed his lips and appeared to bite back a rising tide of anger. “You know, once she said that God would kill me if I didn’t change my ways. Well, guess who the last one standing was.”

  He thought about Blaise Duty spinning to the floor. Zeph’s perception of who God needed to strike dead had changed. Truth be told, there wasn’t a single one of them who didn’t deserve a lightning bolt from the Almighty. Everything else was straight mercy.

  His father reached into his shirt pocket and fumbled for a pack of cigarettes.

  Zeph needed a second to gather his nerves for what he was about to say. He watched his father remove a cigarette with trembling fingers, his face flushing. There was no way to ease into this, and Zeph didn’t have time for diplomacy.

  “I’ve come to tell you something, sir.”

  “That a fact?” A hint of defensiveness cast an edge to his father’s tone.

  Zeph shifted his weight. “Dad, listen I …”

  His father managed to stuff the pack into his pocket and stood, tapping the cigarette on a nearby crate like a judge bringing a court to order with his gavel. His gaze grew steely. Zeph knew what usually accompanied that gaze and fought to keep from recoiling.

  “Go on, boy. What is it?”

  “I …” Zeph swallowed. “I forgive you.”

  His father stopped tapping his cigarette. “Me?”

  “Dad, I forgive you.”

  Howard Walker looked surprised. “You forgive … me?” He glanced at Tamra, who did not share his amusement. “You forgive me? After eight years you came all the way over here to tell me you forgive me?”

  However, at that moment, Zeph could not take affront with his father’s growing resentment. There were logical reasons for the man to have resisted. However, after having spoken that word—and what seemed like eons holding it in—Zeph relished the sense of peace that accompanied the surrender.

  “You just show up and … and what? Absolve yourself of guilt? I forgive you, Dad. After eight years? Eight years, Z! And you just roll in to indict me.”

  But Zeph would not be drawn in. He had seen this before. Rather he thought about all those people over the years who wept at the Telling and found hope in his words. He wondered how this word could have such an effect. Wouldn’t most people want to be pardoned? Wouldn’t most people pine for absolution? Apparently Howard Walker was not one of them.

  “All those years I just stayed out of your guys’ way. I let you go off and do your thing, prophesy and preach it up. Jostle around like some ghetto revivalist. Buncha baloney, if you ask me. And now you wanna come back and blame me?”

  His father jammed the cigarette behind his ear, his face now red and twitching with anger. He aimed his thick forearm up the stairwell. “You get outta here, boy. You and your girlfriend. You got your money, and I got stiffed. If anyone needs forgivin’, it’s Belle and what she did to me. And what she did to you.”

  He studied his father’s tanned smooth jawline. Zeph had his chin. And his short temper. Yet despite the rage in his father’s eyes, Zeph’s temper was not aroused.

  Howard Walker flinched. “It was her idea, Z. When your brother died,” he looked away, “she thought you was to blame. It was her way of making things right. And she believed—” He shook his head. “—she really believed that locking you up would purge the evil. And I wasn’t about to argue with that nut job. ’Sides, a man needs discipline.” His pectoral muscles rippled. He retrained his gaze, and his antipathy, upon his son.

  Zeph nodded at his father, sadly, and turned to Tamra, who had pushed past his father and was almost halfway up the stairs before he noticed. Then he turned and looked one last time at the crate that housed his brother’s body.

  Zeph left the cellar knowing he would never return. Tamra waited just long enough in the grass for him to know she was angry and she was leading the way off the Walker property. The overcast sky had been sundered by a ray of light that rested on her auburn hair, giving Tamra Lane all the appearance of an angel.

  As odd as the feeling was, at that moment, everything seemed right. He might have conceded it was even his destiny to have come to this awful place with Tamra Lane.

  Zeph followed her through the gate, down the driveway, to his truck. Tamra’s fingerprint in the dirty window of the Triumph was the last thing Zeph would see of Howard Walker’s house. They got into the truck and sat there.

  The anger was rolling off her like heat waves off the August asphalt. But something else had possessed him.

  “Okay,” he finally said, with a deep sigh. “Now I’m ready.”

  Chapter 59

  Tamra barely spoke to Zeph on the way to Marvale. Her silence was not out of spite or fear, and she guessed he knew that. Seeing the crate with his brother’s body in it and the cellar where a young boy had been locked sent her emotional sensors into overload. She thought about Dieter and Nams and Shady Lady limping around with her bad hip, rescued from inevitable death. How could anyone—much less a parent—lock a child in a cellar? Suddenly the Bible pages plastered across his wall made perfect sense—he was simply trying to reconcile truth with its abuse.

  She tried to call Annie again but received her answering machine. Where could she have gone? Different scenarios unraveled in Tamra’s mind, none of them good. Hopefully Little Weaver had reached Marvale and rendezvoused with Annie to stop Fergus.

  Upon Tamra’s urging Zeph drove his truck through Marvale’s lower parking lot and climbed the service road to park closer. Buzz spotted them and immediately got on his walkie-talkie. Zeph parked near the delivery dock, and they got out and hurried to the front doors. Bev Beason was on the deck, in her usual spot. Out of the corner of her eye, Tamra could see the woman staring.

  “Well, what’s the fizz, biker chick?” Hannah sat at the reception desk gawking as Tamra and Zeph hurried past.

  Tamra slowed but was unsure how, or if, she should engage the woman. What more did Hannah know about this? Several days ago, the girl had the skinny on the Marvale invasion. By now she could be part of it.

  “No hurry,” Tamra said as they bustled past.

  “Well, be on the lookout.”

  Tamra stopped, leaving Zeph marching down the hall. “For what?”

  “You mean, for who?” Hannah glanced both ways and then whispered, “Mother Superior’s on the prowl.”

  After having caught the director in Eugenia’s apartment, Tamra was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t good reason for the staff’s dislike for the woman. Perhaps Janice Marshman knew more about the happenings at Marvale Manor than she was letting on.

  Tamra said, “So, that stuff we talked about …”

  Hannah glanced at Zeph, who stood in the lobby waiting for Tamra. “Oh, that stuff? It appears to be catching.” An impish sm
ile crept across Hannah’s face.

  Tamra took a step back. “I’ll make sure to keep an eye out.”

  Hannah fluffed at her hair. “Do that, Easy Rider.” She chuckled, a slow rumble that escalated into a near guffaw.

  Tamra joined Zeph without bothering to look back at the receptionist, and they hurried to Annie’s. “So, how can we tell?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “If someone’s one of them. I mean, how can we tell?”

  “Um, we can pour water on them and see if they melt.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’m not sure there is a way to tell. Weaver said they were genetic duplicates—clones. So any differences would not be external. It’d have to be behavioral or emotional. Even if we can tell, we can’t just start knocking people off. Whatever it is, we’re going to have to stay on our toes.” He paused. “And trust each other.”

  Tamra cast a sidelong glance and arched her eyebrow.

  “I know,” Zeph admitted. “I have to do more of that.”

  They arrived at Annie’s apartment, and Tamra began searching her backpack for the keys. As she did, Zeph tried the handle and discovered the door was open.

  “What the—” Tamra squeezed between Zeph, pushed the door open, walked in, and stood gawking.

  Annie’s apartment had been ransacked. Drawers lay on the floor, their contents emptied. The sofa cushions had been removed and strewn about the place. Even the refrigerator door was wide open.

  “Nams!” Tamra marched through the apartment, from one room to the next. “Nams!”

  In the bedroom the mattress had been removed, sliced open in spots, and boxes of picture albums lay scattered across the carpet.

  Tamra stood incredulous “They were looking for the journal,” Zeph said, staring over her shoulder.

  “Weaver has it.”

  “Yeah, but whoever was here doesn’t know that.”

  “What if she was kidnapped?”

  “In the middle of the day? In public? Your grandmother doesn’t strike me as someone who could be carted off without some kinda commotion.”

  “Unless the entire facility is in on it.”