Children of Chaos

by Greg F. Gifune

  “Who are you?” I called above the rain.

  Just short of the tent, the man managed to get to his hands and knees. He seemed to have regained some strength, as he lifted his head and looked back at me. Those ice-blue eyes bore straight through me, and something flashed before me. I thought for a moment it might have been lightning but it was too close, as if he’d sent it directly from his eyes to mine.

  “Did you do it?” I asked, head reeling. “Did you do that to Sarah Bryant?”

  Rather than answer, the scarred man crawled toward the tent and reached for a threadbare knapsack just inside the opening.

  Martin vaulted over the man and snatched up the knapsack before he could reach it. Stumbling away and splashing puddles as he went, he opened the flap and reached inside. His hand came back holding what looked like a rather ornate sword.

  We all stood there gawking at it in the rain. No one said a word.

  The scarred man hung his head but remained on all fours.

  Martin held it up in evidence. The steel blade was not terribly long—only a little over a foot perhaps—but came to a severe point much like a dagger, and was thick, beveled and covered in etchings of what appeared to be intricate and ancient symbols. The handle had been forged to resemble a pair of wings, one on either side of the handgrip and angled downward, and set into the center of the handle was a solitary and rather beautiful blue stone roughly the size of a quarter. Holding it up before him, soaking wet and eyes ablaze, Martin looked completely insane.

  I’d seen enough. Why would anyone have such a weapon?

  “Jamie,” I said, calling to him over my shoulder, “run back to the midway and call the police. We’ll stay here and watch him.”

  Maybe it was the wind that distracted us. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe just for a moment we all realized we’d completely lost our minds. But in that instant, that second of silence, the scarred man began to rise.

  I remember Martin brandishing the sword threateningly as the scarred man finally regained his feet, shaking his arms to get the circulation moving again. Jamie stood frozen at the edge of the road where he’d been all along, and I remembered thinking I should say something. But all I heard was the rain as Martin stepped forward and swung the blade down into the scarred man’s leg.

  An awful, gut-wrenching sound echoed above the wind and rain as the sword cut through flesh and into bone.

  And then that scream. Unlike anything I’d ever heard before or since—equal parts agony and rage—it split the night and convinced me that whatever the scarred man may or may not have done, he was not human.

  Nothing human could make such a sound.

  As Martin yanked the sword free, pulling it loose from the man’s thigh with a double-handed grip, he lost his balance, slipped in the mud and almost went down. The scarred man reached for him with amazing speed and clamped a powerful hand onto Martin’s throat.

  The idea of running certainly would’ve occurred to me had I been thinking. But I simply reacted, charged the man and tackled him. We fell into the mud, and then suddenly Jamie was there too and we were on top of him, pummeling him with our fists.

  Released from the chokehold, Martin coughed and doubled-over in an attempt to catch his breath.

  Even with the horrible wound, the scarred man swatted us away like bothersome insects and again rose to his feet.

  But Martin was waiting, and this time when he swung the blade it connected with the man’s throat.

  It sounded as if he’d smashed it into a grapefruit, an odd thwack and then a squishy sound, followed by profound silence.

  I’d never seen so much blood.

  Martin seemed as shocked as anyone, and stood staring at what he’d done, his face frozen in horror. He let go of the sword and it fell free of the gaping wound, splashing down into the mud. “I didn’t…I didn’t mean…”

  The scarred man dropped to his knees, hands fumbling desperately with his slashed throat as those bright blue eyes looked out beyond us at the field and the tall grass there, the darkness, the traces of moonlight, or perhaps things only he was able to see.

  Impossibly, he began to rise again.

  Jamie and I attacked him a second time, punching and kicking at him until he collapsed face-first into the mud.

  He lay there at our feet, and for a while made disturbing gurgling noises as his body twitched and convulsed.

  When he finally went still, I turned to Martin. The man’s blood had spattered his cheeks and chin, but the rain had washed most of it away. His face bore no expression whatsoever, like he’d died too.

  An eerie quiet followed. The rain fell. The wind blew. The tall grass swayed. But we’d all gone somewhere else, and I wasn’t certain we’d ever truly return.

  “We need the cops out here,” I finally said.

  “No.” Martin’s voice was surprisingly strong and clear. “No cops.”

  “What did we do?” Jamie brought his hands to his head and began to cry. “What did we—what—what did we do?”

  “It was self-defense.” I couldn’t get my hands to stop shaking.

  “He might just be hurt, he could still be alive, he—”

  “He’s dead.” Impossible as it seemed, there was no sense denying it now.

  “He killed Sarah Bryant,” Martin said.

  Jamie frantically shook his head. “We don’t know that for sure! Why did you kill him, you—could’ve just wounded him you didn’t have to stab him in the throat, he—”

  “We killed him,” Martin snapped.

  “I was trying to help you, he was strangling you, I—”

  “Both of you shut-up.” I stepped between them and the body, hoping they’d focus on me instead. “We have to get the police and tell them what happened. This man’s dead.”

  “He’s no man.”

  “We have to—”

  “I’m not going to prison.”

  “We’re minors, and it was self-defense. Nobody’s going to prison.”

  “You remember Vince Rhodes?” Martin asked.

  “This is different.”

  “He went to juvenile for B&Es when he was thirteen. They sent him to that maximum-security place in the western part of the state. The older kids beat him up every day and screwed him in the ass every night. When he came back he was a fucking zombie. That’s never happening to me, and I won’t let it happen to you guys either. We gotta get rid of the body.”

  “Get rid of it? You think we’re in a movie?”

  “Nobody can tie this to us, Phil. They’d have no reason to.”

  “Oh God.”

  We looked to Jamie. He’d knelt in the mud and begun rummaging through the man’s knapsack. “Maybe he wasn’t going for the sword,” he said, pulling a tattered black book free with an ancient sun-like symbol carved into the center.

  “What is it?”

  Jamie carefully flipped through some pages, shielding it as best he could from the rain with his body. “I think it’s a Bible or…something like a Bible. Looks like some kind of really old holy book, but I—it’s not in English.”

  Martin bent down and pulled the sword from the mud, holding it with both hands and pointing it at the ground. “He was going for this,” he said.

  “What if he wasn’t?” Jamie screamed. “What then?”

  “He killed Sarah Bryant.”

  “We don’t know that,” Jamie cried, holding the book against his chest with both hands and rocking slowly on his heels. “We don’t know that.”

  “What kind of person has a sword like this? Look at it, man, it’s like something some devil-worshiper would carry around.”

  I felt like I was coming apart at the seams. Terror had given way to shock and disbelief and finally to the sad and frightening realization of what we’d just done. I wanted to cry, scream, run, go home and forget any of this had ever happened. But all I did was stand there, soaked to the bone, my hands sore and swollen from punching the scarred man.

  “‘Be not forgetful to en
tertain strangers,’” Jamie sobbed, choking on emotion as he attempted to quote scripture, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’”

  “Shut up, Jamie,” Martin barked. “I don’t want to hear your stupid Bible shit, you got it? I mean it, man, shut your fucking mouth.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  Martin looked at me. I nodded. Our fates were sealed.

  Jamie suddenly went very still, and when he spoke again, all the emotion had left him, replaced instead by a lifeless monotone.

  “I think we just killed God.”

  A few weeks later summer was over and we found ourselves in high school. Martin and I went to public school, Jamie to a private Catholic Prep School a few towns away. We didn’t see as much of each other after that, and with the passage of each month then year, we grew apart. In school, Martin and I moved in different circles. I was a loner, rebellious and barely passed most of my classes. Though he was as much a free spirit as I was, he handled it differently. He managed to use his eccentricity to his advantage, and was seen by most as an enigmatic character. I was just a pain in the ass.

  When we graduated I went to a local community college. Jamie attended Boston College then joined the seminary, fulfilling his desire to become a priest. Martin disappeared, having announced he planned to backpack around Europe for a year or two before deciding what to do with his life.

  It was as if for him that night had never happened, and in some ways, I suppose it hadn’t. Little Sarah Bryant’s murderer turned out to be her own father, a deeply troubled man who had been concealing a double life that included an addiction to child pornography and other assorted perversions. He confessed a few days after her murder and the case became the most infamous in New Bethany’s history, as it was covered by news agencies all over the country.

  Maybe the scarred man had been going for that book after all.

  His body was never found. We broke down the tent, gathered his few belongings and carried them along with him to the river on the far side of the field. After weighting the body down with the largest rocks we could find, we dumped it in the water. Jamie cried and prayed the whole time. Martin was oddly quiet throughout, and me, I was too numb to feel much of anything.

  We drifted apart, probably on purpose, and a few years passed before we discussed it again.

  Maybe the scarred man’s body was still out there, just a bunch of bones at the bottom of that river now. Maybe not. I wasn’t sure we’d ever know, and I often thought that was probably best, because whether we’d killed a man or something more that night didn’t much seem to matter.

  We’d have to pay for it either way.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Bad news always comes at night. It wasn’t quite dawn and I hadn’t slept at all. On the rare occasions when I could sleep, I always came awake terrified that I was back in that rain and mud. But I never was. Some days I believed it was because I’d never really been there at all, and others because I’d never really left.

  The night was nearly gone and I’d spent it awake, guzzling Jack Daniels right out of the bottle and smoking cigarettes one after the next while staggering around my apartment naked, thinking and talking to myself, crying and screaming and losing whatever was left of my mind.

  The phone rang three times that night. The first call was from Mr. Cote, the guy downstairs, threatening to call the cops if I didn’t stop making so much noise. The second was the police telling me they’d had a complaint and to keep it down or they’d have to send a couple of officers my way for a chat. The third was from my ex-wife Trish. She wanted me to meet her at the hospital downtown. Our daughter had been in a car accident.

  Through bleary eyes I checked my watch. It was nearly three in the morning. What the hell was my fifteen-year-old daughter doing out at that hour?

  “Is she all right?” I asked irritably.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “Phil, I don’t know.”

  “I’m on my way.” As I hung up my daughter’s face drifted past my mind’s eye. There was no safety. Control and sanctuary were cruel myths. And though I’d already known that all too well, the shock still set in. Gillian was one of the few things in my life I was proud of and truly loved. About the only profoundly good thing I’d ever done was help bring her into the world, and though I had my faults for sure, I’d always been there for my daughter. I could be accused of many things, and I was probably guilty of most, but being a bad father wasn’t one of them.

  I tossed the phone aside and found myself collapsed against the side of my bed, two empty bottles of whiskey on the carpet. An ashtray brimming with butts littered the nightstand, an empty and crumpled pack of cigarettes next to it. My lighter was clutched in my right hand so tightly it hurt. I eased up, opened my hand and let the lighter slide free to the floor. It bounced soundlessly across the cheap carpeting. My last cigarette was already between my lips, dangling there and smoking. I took a pull, watched the gray ash grow longer then longer still until it finally lopped off and fell onto the top of my thigh, breaking apart and vanishing into the forest of hair there.

  The mirror over the bureau was broken, the frame still intact but the glass in pieces. Luckily I’m a southpaw, because my right hand was slashed and coated with a glaze of blood that ran like tiny crimson rivers between my fingers. It seemed rather useless in its present state, and though I couldn’t move it much, the pain was severe even when I held it still. My left hand was sore and the knuckles were scraped here and there but otherwise undamaged.

  For some reason—probably because I was literally drunk off my ass and terrified I’d soon be forced to face horrifying news about Gillian—I began to laugh hysterically, helplessly. I couldn’t think of what else to do. I only knew if I let myself cry I might never make it out of that apartment.

  I only vaguely remembered punching out the mirror, but the resulting pain was harder to forget as it pulsed and throbbed in time to the beat of my heart. The bleeding had apparently stopped at some earlier point. The blood was sticky and caked on my flesh. Guess I’d shown the furniture who was boss.

  Ten minutes later I was wandering around a makeshift waiting room at the ER downtown. I downed a cup of black coffee from a vending machine, and that, coupled with the fear, left me relatively sober. My hand still hurt like hell but the pain had lessened some. I kept it in my jacket pocket, concealed like the shameful thing it was.

  I paced about, trying to occupy my mind with something—anything—that would distract me from visions of my only child in this horrible place, battered and bloodied in some distant room.

  For the life of me, I don’t know why I pulled this particular memory out of the ether just then, but it was a diversion, so rather than question it I held tight and took the ride.

  One afternoon when I was a kid, I was playing out in the yard and came upon a couple of ants squaring off for a fight. There was this narrow little paved path that led to the backdoor of the house we were living in at the time, that ran parallel to the yard, and every so often I’d see two different armies of ants soldiering back and forth across the pavement. One team was black, the other red. For the most part they didn’t seem to bother with each other, but on this afternoon two individuals had decided to stare each other down in the center of the path. Strangely fascinated, I dropped into a crouch for a closer look. The black ant was larger and looked more powerful, but the red ant was clearly more aggressive and fearless. For a moment the black ant just stood there while his adversary made quick little movements, its entire body jerking like it was throwing jabs. And then something interesting happened. The black ant moved forward, grabbed the red ant and almost instantly crippled it. The way that ant struck, committing and never hesitating once the decision had been made, was something I never forgot. But it wasn’t a move without forethought. It wasn’t reckless—just the opposite in fact—it seemed cold and almost logical, thought through and th
en acted on, which is ultimately what made it so deadly.

  Later, in my own life, I’d think of that black ant whenever I needed to make a move. Every time I got in a fistfight as a kid, or when I took up wrestling in high school and later in college, I’d think of that ant every time I shot for a takedown. I’d size up the situation and when the opening came I’d shoot, committing, going hard and without hesitation. I took that lesson with me when I took up boxing right around the same time. I never fought professionally or anything, it was always more a hobby and way to stay in shape than anything serious, but I trained for several years in both traditional boxing and kickboxing, and always followed the black ant’s lead. Throw a punch—commit. Throw a kick—commit. Go for a takedown—commit. Throw with conviction, clarity and extreme prejudice. For a time I approached my entire life using that philosophy. Assess then go. Sometimes it served me well. Other times, not so much.

  Though the memory seemed so vivid in that moment, it had been years since I’d remembered that black ant moving away through the grass with the mangled and slowly dying red ant still in its clutches. I’d just begun to replay it in my head when the need for nicotine pulled me back to the here and now. I drew a deep breath and heard my chest wheeze. Probably couldn’t spar five rounds without dropping dead these days. I was only forty-four but felt eighty.

  Please Excuse Our Appearance While We Renovate.

  Yeah, I thought. Mine too.

  I glanced at the small sign perched atop an inexpensive little table covered in old, dog-eared magazines. Equally inexpensive chairs lined up on either side of the table were mostly empty, but an older, dazed-looking man sat in one, and occupying another was a heavyset woman in sweatpants juggling two small sleeping children and a purse roughly the size of a suitcase. Farther down the line a young guy on crutches was talking the ear off a female volunteer in a flowery smock. I’d been to this hospital before but not in years, and the old emergency room waiting area had been sealed off and hidden behind temporary sheetrock blockades and yellow tape. What was essentially a hallway had been converted into a waiting area. At the far end of the hall was a wall made almost entirely of glass, the night beyond blurred from a heavy downpour that had started the day before and continued with no signs of letting up anytime soon.