Limbus, Inc., Book III

by Jonathan Maberry

  Creely’s mind pulsed with a colossal tryptic of memories of his myriad deaths. Shot in war and love; disembowelment, strangulation, disease, senility, derangement, torn apart by hyenas, exsanguination, defenestration, drowning, starvation, bricked up in a cell, and countless other methods. This particular incident commemorated a first in his existence: he’d suffered torture and degradation directly related to his true nature.

  A fresh-faced homicidal lunatic with a letter sweater, he sought vengeance during the next go around of the great wheel of karma. Sadly, he failed to exact recompense from either of the principal villains. The billionaire and Dr. Beringer died of natural causes in the summer of 1994 and 1996 respectively, thereby escaping a world of horrifying punishment. Creely tracked Arvad to a hospice in South Africa. The former intelligence agent had succumbed to dementia; cancer devoured his pancreas. Creely was forced to satisfy the debt by systematically hunting down and murdering the dozen or so technicians and assistant researchers who’d conducted the bunker experiments. One desperate technician said, we were following orders! as Creely bit off the man’s fingers. This proved supremely hollow. Nightmares of his captivity persisted.

  These bad memories drifted near the surface and caused him increasing anxiety. The snare might be tightening once more. Today at the Hurley Mountain Wildlife Refuge, he’d observed owls and raptors gone mad in their enclosures, and a pack of timber wolves pacing near the fence line, hackles bunched, somber gazes fixed upon him where he observed from the midst of a crowd.

  A rabbit emerged from a hedge on the outer perimeter of the fence. Neither the crowd nor the wolves noticed Mr. Bunny. Creely did—the rabbit smiled at him and cleaned its paws.

  *

  Intrepid researchers at Sima de los Huesos dug up the smashed skull of a near-human primate that got himself clobbered about four-hundred and thirty-thousand years ago. Let’s call the prehistoric dead guy Bill.

  One of Creely’s corporations funded a significant portion of the research. Curious individuals wouldn’t read news reports of his generous contribution to science because nearly two dozen false fronts and dummy companies filtered the cash. The right people knew the score and his largesse bought a private viewing of the remains. Under museum-quality glass in a room closed off by velvet curtains. Soft lights, very romantic.

  “Hello, Bill,” Creely said after a few reverential moments. “I’m not sorry.” He lit a cigarette to flaunt the secret of fire before any ancient ghost who might linger. “Goodbye and fuck you, amigo.”

  *

  Mid-autumn of 1985, near sunset, Jim Conklin of Kingston, New York, shot a black bear. The bear shrugged off the 30.06 round and bolted into the woods. Conklin and his two hunting buddies gave chase. Although neither of the other men had seen a bear—Frank Smolko thought it was smaller, perhaps a wild boar; and Nick Reese thought maybe a dog. A big damned dog.

  As darkness approached, Smolko and Reese voted to set camp and resume at dawn. The party had hiked into the Adirondacks the day prior and were far from any road or habitation. A man could get hurt or lost wandering the mountains during the dead of night. Add a wounded bear to the scenario and the odds of disaster became exponential. Conklin was hot to follow the blood trail by flashlight, but relented to common sense and the promise of a knapsack of beer.

  The men pitched camp and made a bonfire. Reese cooked beans and bacon for supper. The beer disappeared by the time the waning moon peeped through a cottony film of clouds. The hunters discussed football, the sorry state of the world, and their even sorrier jobs and marriages, and lamented that Smolko should’ve lugged more beer or a fifth of the hard stuff.

  Smolko opened his mouth to crack wise. Instead, he pointed. “Oh, lordie, fellas.”

  A young man stood at the rim of the campfire glow. Naked and covered in blood. Not completely naked—he wore a leather necklace strung through a chipped fang.

  “You got me, Tex. It’ll be okay, though. Tom Waits told you, you need the right bullets.” The kid uttered a coarse laugh and toppled, face-down. A nasty exit wound in his upper back had clotted. Leaves and dirt stuck to his body.

  The men rushed to him and did what could be done under the circumstances. Reese cleaned the wound and applied a pressure bandage from Smolko’s first aid kit. They wrapped the kid in a blanket and made him comfortable near the fire. He lay inert as a corpse. Sweat beaded upon his forehead. Occasionally his eyelids fluttered. Otherwise he might’ve been stone dead.

  Conklin fell to his knees. He rocked, clutching his head, crossing himself, the whole bit. “God as my witness, I thought he was a bear. God as my witness.” Somebody handed him the last can of beer and he drank it in a long gulp.

  Smolko pulled Reese aside. “We can’t move the kid until daybreak. Keep an eye on ‘em. I’m gonna scout around a bit, see if he’s got a camp nearby.”

  Reese didn’t like the idea—they’d set camp to avoid this very activity. He understood the wisdom of Smolko’s plan, however. The kid might have friends in the neighborhood and they’d need to know the situation. Smolko shouldered his rifle and set forth, guided by the fragile beam of his all-weather flashlight. He could’ve sworn the kid opened his eyes to watch him go; wrote it off as a trick of the light and jangling nerves.

  Two hours later with nothing to show for tramping around the woods, Smolko decided to circle back to camp. He nearly tripped over the rotted porch of a tiny hunting shack. Moss camouflaged the cabin where its decayed bones nestled amid roots and rocks. Screened by brush, its ancient foundation was sinking into the earth. No windows, no door—sockets and a toothless mouth.

  Blood dried in patches on the soft ground and spackled ferns and beds of pale fungi. Smolko gagged at the reek of powerful musk. An animal had recently pissed virulent streams against the buckled planks.

  Inside, roots erupted from floorboards. The floor made small hillocks where the earth had heaved. Condensation oozed from petrified rafters. The fireplace had collapsed. Doors had detached from empty cabinets. Pelts hung from the beams and were piled on the ground. Bear, coyote, deer, and other kinds. Some matted and moldering, some pristine. And among these trophies, a variety of bleached skulls lay scattered.

  Smolko felt as if he’d ducked into the heart of a beast’s cave lair. Although that didn’t quite fit—stick figure men and animals were carved into the walls, and half-moons and crudely depicted constellations. He recalled cave drawings from history class and magazine photographs.

  On closer inspection, he realized several of the skulls were human. One of the hides was too wrinkly and strange for any critter he’d seen; the skin dangled like a pair of hooded long johns. Ultimately, a rusted can chock full of driver licenses sent him scrambling from the death cabin. He charged in the general direction of camp, bellowing and firing the rifle into the sky.

  Somewhere in the dark, Smolko tripped. He broke his leg and split his head open. He lay unconscious for forty-eight hours, maybe longer, then crawled for three days, utterly lost and raving in fevered delirium. A pair of off duty state troopers heard something rustling in the bushes and discovered him. He screamed and fought until they bound him with duct tape at wrist and ankle and lugged him back to civilization.

  Search teams never found hide nor hair of Conklin, Reese, nor the mysterious kid. Cops located the shack, burnt to ashes. Years later, after he’d descended into a drunken shambles of the family man who’d gone hunting that weekend, Smolko told anybody who’d listen that busting his leg and going into a two-day coma had saved his hide, so to speak.

  While dying of cirrhosis in a hospice in 2006, he grabbed a nurse by the sleeve and told her he’d seen Satan the day the troopers loaded him into a trailer behind their ATV.

  “Lucifer stood beside a tree as we pulled away on that old trail. The young guy Jim shot. Naked as a jaybird and fondling that fang at his neck. Covered in gore, head to toe. Blew me a kiss.”

  *

  Authorities should have known there was something rotten in Sto
ne Ridge. The stink, thinly masked by the perfume of affluence, wafted from the venerable Creely estate. Savaged cattle; dead hookers; the occasional mutilated deer hunter; and a handful of overheated eyewitness accounts of a big cat or a bigger wolf roaming the mid-Hudson Valley with evil intent. Cops are overworked and under motivated, not stupid. Sheriff Oakland, for example, had a feeling in his gut that spoiled his appetite on several occasions. The sheriff rolled by in his cruiser some late nights and wondered what debauchery or murder might be transpiring by the light of the moon. He slowed, slowed, and kept on rolling homeward to take it out on poor Mrs. Oakland (who nightly came a tick closer to unloading on him with the .32 she stashed under her pillow).

  Here’s the thing—nobody gives a damn about cows, hookers, or the occasional hunter who gets tagged back by Mother Nature. Even if some eager beaver on the outside took a shine to the weird goings-on, an investigation would’ve been stonewalled in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

  Isaac Creely, at the onset of heroic middle age, belonged to old, old money, and had lived, as three generations before him, his entire life in Ulster County, New York with various excursions around the world as jet setting playboys are wont, nay, required, to assay. He donated wads of that old, old money heavily to strategic causes. His private investigators were the best that old, old money could buy, and these worthies periodically dug up a bit of dirt on the local power players. Cops and politicians loved him and hated him. Most importantly, they feared what he might tell if provoked.

  Creely also threw fabulous, opulent parties.

  The ballroom emptied as the gala wound down. High-tone guests, liquored nicely, and in some cases, a smidgeon past the line, kissed their host or shook his hand, and swayed red-faced into the night. Soon, a procession of taillights flickered on the long private drive leading from the estate and toward Highway 209.

  A team of servants began cleaning with military precision.

  Creely filled a tuxedo nicely; mandatory for men of his social status. He kept his hair (black and shot through with the first streaks of white) trimmed in an expensive cut the Golden Age of comic books artists favored during the height of the cold war. Steely eyes, square jaw, thick neck, and a swimmer’s body. When he loosened that Brooks Brothers tie it wouldn’t have surprised his more observant admirers to catch a glimpse of spandex with an S or a stylized bat blazoned across his chest.

  “Self-made man is a misnomer,” he said as the blonde ran her hands over him. Expensive fabric; a muscled body, sleek and smooth as only money can supply. What wasn’t to like?

  “Misnomer?” she said.

  “Misnomer.”

  “How did you get this?” She touched a bullet scar on his left shoulder.

  “Hunting accident.”

  “Brutal. The sport of kings isn’t a game for the hunted, is it?”

  He tried to determine what sort of animal she’d be in an animated film or after a different, less fortunate draw in the genetic lottery. “I inherited everything. The money, of course. A network of powerful allies and subordinates. Enemies, too. Mother and Father were beautiful. Grandfather could’ve been a supermodel if they’d had those in the forties.” The woman (Minnie? Mandy?) nipped his chin as she worked his shirt buttons. A fox? Why not? “You’re foxy.” He slurred ever so slightly despite the fact he’d nursed exactly one martini the entire evening. Force of habit; it was usually best to keep colleagues and lovers off balance. Always best to have the edge, the half step advantage, because one could never be entirely sure what might happen next in the wild, wild kingdom.

  They rolled around on a billiards table. Creely had chosen her from a throng of women vying for his attention like doves cooing on a sill. He enjoyed her scent; she didn’t use much perfume or hair spray. She radiated a feral heat that intrigued and intoxicated him. He licked her belly and tasted traces of coconut lotion and pheromones. Orgasm (a few seconds or an eternity) contracted his consciousness, then expanded rapidly and shattered like a piece of crystal fracturing into a blizzard of tiny revolving universes. He relived every climax in his lengthy existence. The outward expression of this transcendent moment was a dilation of his pupils, a mild shudder, and the tightening of his fist in her hair.

  “There are three kinds,” he said. “Men who turn into animals at the sight of the moon or blood. Animals who go on two legs. And men who are wholly themselves.”

  “What kinds of women are there?”

  “There’s only one kind.”

  She dug her nails into his biceps and stared, glazed-eyed, at the lamp shining upon them like a crimson sun. The crimson sun burned the top of his skull…

  …When he opened his eyes again, gelid red light shone through the mouth of a cave and dripped from icicles. Wisps of smoke lingered in a fire pit. He lay upon frozen ground and knew it was real, yet not real, and felt the killing cold nonetheless. A mantle of mammoth hide wrapped his shoulders; his flint-toothed spear leaned against a rock. Petroglyphs scored the walls of the cave. The figures of men and animals told a story, a saga. He’d forgotten the saga across the eons as his brow flattened and his jawline receded, except in snatches during his Technicolor dreams, but the sweet, rude memory of it filled his mind instantly as the smoke from the fire pit curled into his nostrils. Tears froze his lashes.

  Withered from the toll of a relentless winter and malnutrition, he’d also broken his legs. The accident occurred as he pursued an elk herd across ice sheets. Fellow hunters plunged into a sudden abyss, dying before they could scream. He’d fallen onto a ledge and eventually climbed free despite massive injuries. His hands and arms were powerful, even here at the end.

  A useless gesture. Crawling wouldn’t keep him alive for long, nor had he much reason to struggle besides stubbornness. As the snows spread from the mountains, his own mate and children had gone to sleep one by one, never to awaken. Broken and alone, mind full of darkness, belly full of ache, the long sleep was welcome. The bifurcation of his consciousness, the ancient headwaters and the new tributary, altered his perspective into strange and terrifying permutations. His animalistic cries toward inchoate, primordial forces of judgment were translated into contemporary terms after a tiny lag. He beheld himself as proto-man and modern man, freezing and dying, warm and well-fucked. He could almost reconcile the gulf, except myriad other fractured selves from a myriad fractured shards of reality impinged upon his awareness. Whiteness greater than any blizzard overtook him and he was lost in the thing that resides behind the curtain of death.

  It had been this way for epochs.

  He surfaced into the present. He gasped for breath.

  “Oh my god.” The blonde’s thighs locked around his waist and it hurt. Her expression suggested she too had traveled far. The billiard table transformed into a flat rock draped in furs.

  She bit his neck like she was a lioness chomping into a gazelle.

  Interlude: Doomsday Variations

  NARRATORS UNK (BETA CONTINUUM) RECORDING 4:

  “Item A: Transhumanism occurs concomitant with a sequence of intellectual and scientific breakthroughs. A newly discovered deep cavern in France contains heretofore unimagined and unparalleled petroglyphs and color paintings. ‘Junk’ DNA code within members of the research team are activated. The resultant contagion is transmitted via physical contact. Later, visual contact suffices. The transference range is unlimited. A recorded image is no less virulent than a live image…”

  “Item B: Rapid mutations within the human genome initiate profound psychological and biochemical changes. In a nutshell, we grow exponentially smarter. The sum of humanity’s knowledge doubles every nine days. Cycles of catastrophic violence and catatonic hibernation alternate. Previously inconceivable advances in technology materialize from active dream states…”

  “Item C: The Singularity is a horror that exceeds direst predictions.

  Alien megastructure is made of bones. The quantum drone shot forth to take a look. The pilot began to scream when she grasped the structure
’s composition…”

  “I trained for marathons and would get so exhausted, I’d hallucinate spiders carving messages into leaves. My wife understood—she thought the owls at the campground were reporting our location to the bears. We visited this park in Portland. A homeless guy told us to beware the murderer stalking the bike paths. My headlamp died and when it came back on, the dude had a hatchet in his hand…”

  “Gazing into the abyss of the 8 ball…all possibilities resolve to three likely outcomes—happy and uneventful until old age; war of the roses and bitterness; a horror that I have seen but must not say.”

  “A Gray—12 feet tall, potbellied, blandly malevolent. Dropped down onto the road in front of my truck. Out in the pasture were the dead cattle. Couldn’t see ‘em in the gloom, but their blood hung thick on the air…”

  “The signal is dark matter pouring from the heart of the sun. That scream is dark matter pouring from the wound in his face…”

  “People’s eyes milked over. A complete black or white shell, and their bodies hardened into a semi-flexible plastic. We called them Retches on account of how they changed. For example: My third grade teacher, Mr. Sheffield, was the first I seen. In the middle of reading us a chapter from Pinocchio, he stopped dead and his eyes got big behind his glasses. He gagged like a cat with a hairball and turned red and did a face-plant on the floor. Thin carpet over concrete equals a busted nose and smashed glasses…”

  “Eight years old, dude. I never saw anybody cough up a spleen before…”

  “The whole class freaked, right? Becky Heath screamed and didn’t stop to take a breath. She started the dominoes tumbling. A lot of kids screamed. Nobody ran, though, because we’d had an active shooter drill (they referred to it as something more kid-friendly) the day before and the rule was you stayed in your room when it went down. We froze…”

  “Mr. Sheffield did the funky chicken for fifteen or twenty seconds and barfed his insides. Suddenly, he climbed to his feet and looked at us, real calm and collected. The lenses of his glasses were cracked and that made the blackness of his eyes weirder. He leaned against his desk and opened Pinocchio and started reading from the beginning. His voice sounded strange, too. Nothing as strange as the loop of intestine hanging down his shirt next to his Bugs Bunny tie…”