“You know I can’t.”
“Okay, so look at it from my perspective. I help you out for nothing in return, what are the guys at the department going to think of me?”
“But I’m your brother. Benny and Mike are your nephews. Isn’t that enough?”
“Not to those guys. You know how it is, Terry. I’ve told you this before. If you don’t make a sacrifice, it’ll look bad. I’m only talking once, twice a week.”
“I make plenty of sacrifices,” Terry said, his voice softer now. He was pleading. “The Party keeps half the money I earn and more. Come on, Sal, I’m begging you here.”
“How ’bout this, then: we keep it in the family. No one has to know, eh? Not your sons, not your neighbors. I’ll tell the guys at work, but that’ll be it. Hell, they’re all doing it, too. They wouldn’t understand if I opted out. You want me to look bad in front of them?”
“Then lie about it, Sal.”
“Are you kidding me? They got ments—little ment kids—that make sure we don’t do that kinda thing. Look at me, Terry. You’re getting off lucky here. Under my protection, your tax fumbles won’t even matter. There’s zero chance you’ll get shipped to the camps. You know what would happen to Lydia here if you got shipped to a labor camp, right? And your two boys?”
There was a moment of silence in which Michael’s blood pulsed through his body with such loud insistence that he could hear it.
“Okay, then.” Uncle Sal clapped his hands together. “It’s settled. Two nights a week, starting Thursday. It’s the best thing for your family, baby brother. Trust me.”
Michael waited for his father to say something, but the man kept silent. Michael turned very slowly and tiptoed back to his room, where he tossed and turned in his bed for hours, trying to decipher what he had just heard.
His dreams over the next few days were erratic and terrifying. In one recurring dream, he was in a dark van with strangers dressed in all black. They had no faces, only pale masks of flesh covering their skulls, and they were murmuring deep in their throats and reaching for him, all fingers and nails, as the van drove them through a place that smelled like trees.
Thursday arrived quickly.
Michael went to bed early that night and awoke covered in sweat to a strange tugging sensation. It was as if a string had been tied to a hook inside his skull, and someone was pulling it from another room. He pushed aside his covers and swung his legs out of the bed.
“Oh, man,” he said as a dry ache flared inside his head. Something wasn’t right.
A rumble came from down the hall, a sound like furniture being shifted. He held his breath and listened. A clapping sound followed, like someone being slapped.
Michael clicked off the bathroom light and stood listening in the dark. The sound had come from his parents’ bedroom.
Exactly where the tugging sensation was trying to lead him.
He crept toward the stairs, keeping his eyes on the door. A squeak sounded, followed by a low clack. An image flashed in his mind of his parents wrestling naked on top of the covers.
And yet somehow, inexplicably, he knew the man inside the room was not his father.
“Shhh…easy,” said a gruff voice, followed by a woman’s panicked breathing.
Michael tried the knob but the door was locked. He took a few steps back, then sprinted forward, raised his right foot, and kicked the door open.
The bed was a mess of tousled blankets and sheets that had been pulled toward the center, exposing the frayed corners of the mattress. On top of that mess lay his mother, naked and spread-eagled as if in the process of giving birth. Her breasts flopped on either side of her like they were melting off her chest.
A man with a stocky body and a hairy chest kneeled at the end of the mattress, also completely naked, a shadowy figure in the low light. He held an empty bottle in his right hand like he wanted to hit something with it. There was a dank, clammy smell in the room. A single candle on the bedside table added a disturbing intimacy to the scene.
Michael flipped the switch, and the room filled with light so fast it was like a powdery burst, like flour being thrown into his eyes. The two figures on the bed winced.
Uncle Sal pulled back his right arm, the one holding the bottle. Michael didn’t have time to react. He was so shocked by the sight of his mother’s naked body, that at first he didn’t realize the loud thump and the sunburst of pain on his skull had come from the bottle, which his uncle had thrown straight at him. It rolled across the carpeted floor. Michael fell against the wall and covered the throbbing welt on his head.
“Mom?” he said.
“Mikey, it’s not what you think,” his mother said, covering her breasts. “Get out of here. Go!”
Uncle Sal climbed down off the mattress. He bared his teeth, hairy chest quivering.
“You little shit!”
Michael scrambled backward on the carpet, arms raised to defend himself.
“Uncle Sal, don’t!”
The man grabbed Michael by the hair and flung him against the wall.
“Think you can just barge in on me?”
His uncle got hold of the bottle again. He held it up, about to strike.
Michael lifted his arms and cringed. The invisible thread that had pulled him here was quivering wildly now; he could feel it reaching for the smaller, tighter thread in Uncle Sal’s head now visible to Michael—reaching to connect them both.
A word burst from Michael’s mouth as the connection was made.
“Stop!”
He kept his arms over his head, eyes shut tight. There was no crash, no shatter of glass. All he heard were pounding footsteps as men ran down the hall toward the room. Sal’s men were coming.
He opened his eyes to the revolting sight of his uncle’s limp genitals and hanging belly, his chest hair matted down with sweat. His gaze crept further up until it reached Sal’s face, which was frozen into a mask of howling rage. He was still holding the bottle high above his head without wavering at all, without blinking, like he’d suddenly become a statue.
Deep, steadying breaths kept Michael from vomiting. His father and Benny ran to the door, looked in for a moment, then cautiously sidestepped inside. They kept their eyes on Sal.
“What’s going on?” Benny said. He looked at his mother, who was on her knees on the mattress, still naked and clutching a bed sheet up to her neck. “Ma, what—what are you…”
“Oh God!” She scrambled off the bed, wrapping herself in the sheet. “Terry, my God, what did he do to him?”
Terry Lanza stood frozen in place much like his older brother, mouth gaping open.
“Dad,” Michael said, standing. He circled around his flash-frozen uncle. “I don’t know what happened. All I said was—”
“Stop.” His father held up a hand. “Don’t say another word.”
“But, Dad…”
“You can explain later.” He pointed at Sal. “Right now we need to clean him up.”
It was like moving an awkward piece of furniture.
Terry tied a bed sheet around his brother’s waist so it resembled a giant diaper. Then the three of them—Michael, his father, and Benny—lowered the man’s flabby arms and tipped him onto the bed. They tried closing his eyes but the lids kept springing open. It was Michael’s idea to rest heavy coins over them to keep them shut.
When Uncle Sal was safely nestled in bed—the coins giving him a phantom-like staring expression—the four members of the Lanza family went downstairs and opened a bottle of wine, one his father had been saving for a special occasion. A resigned expression on his father’s face told Michael the man was not surprised by any of this. They sat in silence for a while until he began to speak.
“She was my sister,” his father began in an uncertain voice. “She was, I guess you could say, different. Claudia Cairne. We had to change our family name after what happened to her. By then, Sal was already in the academy, and my father had disowned him. Sal changed his last name to Mas
trano to keep from being associated with us or anything we might have been involved in, that’s how scared he was of Claudia.”
The name Cairne rang in Michael’s mind like a heavy bell. It sounded familiar. He took a sip of his wine, which tasted like battery acid. His mother, dressed in pajamas and wrapped in a thick blanket, was already on her second glass.
“There was an incident at school when she was about nine years old,” his father continued. “She shouted something at her teacher, and the woman had some kind of breakdown. No one knows exactly what happened, but later that night, three men in suits came to our house and took her away. I was ten years old. I never saw her again.
“Then one night about thirteen years ago—I remember it was during a thunderstorm that knocked out the power—a woman showed up at my door with a child, just soaked to the bone. ‘This is Claudia’s son,’ she told me. ‘His name is Michael, and he needs to be kept safe.’ She was crying and saying over and over, ‘They found us, they found us.’ It wasn’t until I took your hand that I noticed she was bleeding. She died on my doorstep. No money, no identification. She was a ghost. I hid you and had the police come for her body, told them she was just some crazy woman, and that was all.”
Terry wiped one eye with a shivering hand. “I knew as soon as I looked at you that you were Claudia’s son. You have her eyes, Mike.”
Michael stared at the wine in his glass, not really seeing it. His hand twitched and the glass spilled. The wine, only a few mouthfuls, slid across the table. No one moved to clean it.
“Who’s my real father?” he said, not looking up.
The man who had been his father for the past thirteen years sighed and shook his head. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that.”
“I want to know.”
His father—no, his uncle—closed his eyes. “I have no way of knowing, but the woman who delivered you said something before she died.”
They all waited for him to continue. He appeared to struggle with the words.
“She said, ‘Give him to Louis Blake. If Harris Kole finds him, millions will die.’”
Chapter 5
The mountains shone in the distance like piles of gold covered with moss.
“Kill the ment! Kill him dead!” the boys chanted.
There were three of them. The nearest one threw a rock, then melted back into a crouch behind the grassy dune. The rock smacked the window of a ramshackle house half-hidden among the trees. The boys giggled.
“You hit it,” one said.
“You didn’t shatter it, though,” said the other.
“Shut up! I’d like to see you try it.”
The boy who’d thrown the rock glowered at his two friends, challenging them to say something else about how the glass hadn’t broken. He looked dirty but proud in his dusty gray T-shirt and faded cargo pants. A true Eastlander. All he needed now was a pistol shoved into his belt.
His name was Gary. The other two were Eric and Sid.
“Do you think he’ll come out?” Eric said.
“Nah.” Gary peered over the dune at the rickety old house. His arm tensed with the urge to throw something bigger. “He never comes out. He’s just an old ment who smokes too much. That’s what my mom says, anyway. Here, gimme something else.”
Eric and Sid searched the ground. Sid found a glass bottle, dusty brown with the label worn off, and handed it over. “What about this?”
“It’ll do. Gotta fill it with dirt first to make it heavier. Watch and learn.”
He tilted the spout against the dune and smoothed dirt over the opening. In the mountain cliffs surrounding the small town, crows called to each other across the canyon in which the town lay. It was a bright, sunny afternoon; a delicious day for mischief.
“We could get in so much trouble for this,” Eric said.
“Wait a second.” This was Sid, always the scaredy cat. “What if he’s our teacher in a few years?”
“Will you shut up?” Gary said. The bottle was half full now. “All right. Ready?”
He peered around the side of the dune, located the window he wanted to hit, and got ready to launch.
A strange thing happened. Before he could release the bottle, the muscles in his arm went soft. It was as if they had turned to dough. It wasn’t just his arm, either. The feeling was spreading all over his body.
A wretched coughing sound—like the hacking of a sick dog—tore its way out of the house.
“What the hell is that?” Eric said.
Sid’s breathing came out panicked. “Just throw it and let’s get out of here.”
Gary was still trying to figure out what was wrong with his arm. It drifted down to his side like melting candle wax, the fingers going soft around the bottle. The muscles around his bladder began to loosen as well. He looked down at the dark stain spreading over his thighs.
His mother had always told him to stay away from Old Man Blake.
He should have listened.
Louis Blake peered through the blinds at the grassy dune in front of his house. He’d have to get rid of that thing, shovel it down flat or something. It was too good of a hiding spot for those little brats.
Out there, next to the dune, the boys were laughing at the one who had wet himself.
“Ha ha ha, Gary pissed himself. Ha ha ha.”
“Shut up!”
They chased after the boy with the wet pants, Gary Tomlinson. Blake knew his mother. Gary didn’t look back at the house once, and Blake chuckled.
“Serves you right, you little bastard.”
This sent him into another coughing fit. He pressed his mouth into the crook of his arm as a web of pain spread across his chest. The cough syrup was on the kitchen counter, still wrapped in Midas’s note.
He made his way toward it with shuffling steps. He unwrapped and immediately read the scrap of paper on which Midas had scrawled the message in his sloppy script. For such a smart man—a doctor, no less—his handwriting was that of a drunken sixth grader.
Louis,
New stuff here. Should help with the pain as well as the coughing. Will dull your mind a little, but that shouldn’t be a problem. If you weren’t such a dummy to begin with, you’d have quit smoking a long time ago.
Midas
“Yeah, yeah.” A dry rasp instead of a voice. “Go tell it on the mountain, you old drunk.”
He crumpled the note and tossed it at the overflowing wastebasket in the corner, where it bounced off the rest of the trash and tumbled into a square of sunlight beneath the window.
He drank a mouthful of cough syrup, burped, and let out a tired sigh.
Louis Blake didn’t feel like a man of sixty-seven years. He felt more like a man in his eighties.
The sun blasted down on him as he descended the porch steps, one hand on his lower back to soothe a pain that had risen there.
He took out his pack of cigarettes, fished around for one, and stuck it between his cracked lips. Just as he was about to light it, he heard the phone ring inside the house.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, lighting it anyway and gulping down the smoke. There were no phones in Gulch, except this one: Blake’s old satellite phone, which he hadn’t used in close to eight months. Sam Weisman was supposed to call him once a year on Blake’s birthday to make sure the phone still worked. He was early by more than four months, which meant something was wrong.
Blake tripped on his way up the porch steps.
“Damn it,” he said as his back filled with pain. He grabbed the banister and limped the rest of the way. The phone beeped and a man’s voice filled the living room, high and nasally.
“Blake, Weisman here.”
Blake crashed through the screen door and almost tripped over the mat where he always wiped his boots. His cigarette exploded in a puff of burning embers.
“God damn it.”
“…hope you’re sitting down,” the voice continued, “because I’ve got something you need to hear.”
Blake dove
toward the table on which the phone sat half-covered by a yellowed newspaper and a spider web. It was cold against his ear.
“Sam, what is it? What have you got?”
He was thankful for Midas’s cough syrup. The stuff was magic. All of this action would have sent him into a coughing fit otherwise.
“Glad I caught you, Major. Listen, I need you to take a seat.”
Blake let out a grating sigh. He was slumped over the table on his elbows. “Just throw it at me.”
He could hear Weisman lighting a cigarette of his own. Blake pictured the smoke curling against the brim of his baseball cap, the man’s thin, cynical eyes narrowing above his beak nose.
“One of our scouts picked up a signal. He followed it into the slums—”
“Which one?”
“Cielo Tercer.”
“Go on.”
“Well”—Weisman dragged on the cigarette, obviously at a loss for words—“we got ourselves a Type I, it seems. No blocking ability whatsoever. Just pure transmission. Almost like he wants to be found.”
“You’re sure—”
“I’ve never seen a power this strong, not since—you know who.”
Blake rose and stood bent over the table, phone pressed to his ear, mouth open in shock.
“I don’t believe it. It—it’s got to be a false alarm.”
“I’m just telling you what we picked up. I’d seek him out myself, but—”
“No. This one’s out of your field of expertise. It could be dangerous.”
“That’s why I called you, Major.”
Blake closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “They’ll find him.”
“Yeah, we will,” Weisman said, “unless you get someone on it fast. Someone who’s in the city now.”
Blake rifled through the mess on his desk, found a scrap of paper and a pencil, and readied himself to take notes. “I can be there by tomorrow night.”
Weisman let out a faint chuckle. “Don’t kid yourself. You’re better off calling Dominic.”
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