The Raven

by Jonathan Janz

  The smoker chuckled. “Or maybe you don’t have one. In that case, the nutsack will do. That is, if you’ve got a pair.”

  Dez deliberately waited another few seconds before turning and staring at the man. Maybe it was the fact that Dez was down here on the lane, and the smoker stood eight or nine feet higher at the apex of the steps, but from this perspective, the man looked rangy. Six-four at least, but slim. Delicate almost.

  The way the man watched him was disconcerting, but Dez couldn’t let it show. He approached the man leisurely, noting as he did how motionless the figure was.

  “Looking for a girl,” the man said.

  Dez faltered mid-step. He couldn’t help it. Was the man just guessing, or was there, as Dez now feared, something more to the man’s accurate diagnosis?

  “You don’t have to talk,” the man said, the cigarette pinched a few inches from his face like a marijuana joint. “I can read you like a billboard.” A pause, the man’s scrutiny a palpable thing. “Sarah,” the man said. Within the shadows, Dez saw the man’s eyes widen. He stabbed the luminous red tip of the cigarette at Dez. “Susan! That’s her name.”

  Dez felt his guts curdle.

  The man cocked his head, took a slow drag on his cigarette. “Don’t recall a Susan. But then again—” A chuckle. “—there’re so many. You know how it is.”

  Dez paused at the base of the steps.

  “‘Nevermore’,” the man said.

  Dez squinted at him.

  The man continued to stare at him. Dez experienced the weirdest sensation…like the man was rummaging around in his head.

  “‘The Raven’,” the man said.

  “What about it?”

  “You…you used to teach it.”

  Dez didn’t answer.

  “That would make you….” The man’s eyes bored into him. “You taught freshman English.”

  “Among other things.”

  The man nodded, pleased with himself. “Think I’ll call you the Raven.”

  Dez ignored that. “Keaton,” he said.

  “This is his place all right,” the man answered. “But I’m not Keaton.”

  “I know that.”

  “Boss takes the others on his runs, but not me. A couple of us guys have got the touch.” A pull on the cigarette, the white cylinder little more than a stub now. “He doesn’t take me out scouting.” A sly wink. “I’m too valuable. You believe that, Raven?”

  Dez became aware of music within the building. It might be loud in there, but the sturdy brick façade dampened it enough that out here it was only a formless murmur. The song was familiar, but Dez couldn’t place it. The thrum of the generator was louder now. Dez wondered what the electricity was being used for. It wasn’t heat, or there wouldn’t be smoke rising from the building. Lights, maybe.

  “You don’t belong here,” the man said. “Latent like you.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You’re forty-two years old,” the man went on. “Forty-two and scared.”

  “Only fools aren’t scared,” Dez said.

  The man nodded. “Name’s Lefebvre,” he said. “And your name is really…McClane?”

  Dez couldn’t stifle a grin. “How do you do that?”

  “Don’t know,” Lefebvre said. “The ability came on fairly abruptly. At first I thought I was just really perceptive. Or a good guesser. Then I started to see things I knew others would never want me to see.” He sucked the cigarette, exhaled slowly. “That’s when I knew.”

  “Bet you found out stuff you didn’t want to.”

  “Like my wife was cheating? You bet.” He took a last drag of his cigarette, dropped it, and mashed it with the toe of a black loafer. “Found out who was transforming into what. Neighbors, predators converging on my house at night. It kept me alive. Still keeps me alive. You need to leave.”

  “If you’re really so perceptive, you know I can’t do that.”

  “Drinking seawater,” Lefebvre remarked. “That’s how revenge is. You think you’ve slaked the thirst, but no matter what you do, no matter who you hurt…or kill, you can’t get back what was taken.” He crossed his arms, leaned against the alcove wall. “Susan’s dead.”

  Gastric juices elevatored up Dez’s throat, clogged his airway. He knew how naked and frail his voice sounded, but all he could manage was, “Are you sure?”

  For a moment, Lefebvre’s gaze remained oblique. The Stetson hat shadowed his eyes, but to Dez, the man’s expression didn’t seem bereft of feeling.

  At length, Lefebvre said, “I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. But if she was taken in March—”

  “Late March.”

  “—the odds of her still living are—”

  “But you don’t know,” Dez said.

  A pause, Lefebvre studying him. “No,” he finally admitted. “I don’t know.”

  From inside the bar, the music faded to silence. Dez could make out the murmur of voices, but nothing more.

  Dez mounted the steps, never taking his eyes off Lefebvre. When he reached the top, he realized he was correct about the man’s tall, slight build. In his Stetson hat, his denim jacket, the red-and-black flannel shirt and dark blue jeans, Lefebvre resembled some ineffectual dandy sheriff from a Hollywood western, the sort of man who’s in league with the outlaws and is usurped by a grittier lawman halfway through the film.

  “You’re letting me go in?” Dez said.

  “I screen,” Lefebvre said simply. “You’re not a threat to my employer.” The ghost of a smile. “No offense, Raven.”

  Dez ignored that. He studied the man’s sardonic face, placed him in his early forties. “You aren’t one of Keaton’s thugs. Why do you work for him?”

  “I was a teacher too.”

  Dez made sure not to show his surprise. “Yeah?”

  “Journalism mostly. It was a small high school, so I also ran the yearbook and the theater program. I work for Keaton to stay alive.”

  “By sanctioning murder.”

  Lefebvre stiffened. “Go inside.”

  Dez grinned. “By allowing them to rip apart the few good lives that are left. By letting them eat decent people.”

  Lefebvre’s mouth twitched. His hand moved to a holstered gun.

  Dez didn’t go for one of his own weapons. “You won’t kill me.”

  Lefebvre licked his lips. “The hell I won’t.”

  Dez glanced at the gun on Lefebvre’s hip, the polished walnut handle, another nod to cinematic Westerns. His eyes returned to Lefebvre’s. “I don’t have to be a clairvoyant to know a coward when I see one.” Dez winked. “No offense.”

  Lefebvre flinched. “I’m a telepath, not a clairvoyant. Now get the fuck inside, or get out of here.”

  Dez stared at the man a moment longer before dismissing him and striding the final few feet to the sturdy wooden double doors. He reached out, grasped a copper handle, and pushed down the thumb lock, which was sticky to the touch.

  With one final thought of the severed dicks nailed to the First Assembly Baptist Church sign, Dez opened the door and stepped inside.

  Chapter Twelve

  Erica

  It wasn’t like the movies where everyone turned and gawked at the hero when he walked inside. In a way, that would have been better. Rather than having every gaze swoop toward him and stare him down until he spoke, not one thing in the room changed when he entered.

  But room wasn’t the right word. This was obviously the place where the parishioners of the First Baptist Church had congregated to worship, an A-framed sanctuary capacious enough to seat perhaps five hundred people. Not a gigantic church like some of the ones he’d seen in big cities, but not a quaint country church either. Before the bombs flew, the First Baptist Church might have been thriving.

  There was nothing holy about the pl
ace anymore. There were a few pews scattered here and there in the far reaches of the space, but most of them, he suspected, had been chopped up for firewood. In their stead had been arranged an assortment of wooden tables and chairs, so that the church now resembled an Old West saloon. Most of the tables were round, but a few were square, and though there were empty seats here and there, the majority of them were occupied.

  It was the largest gathering Dez had beheld in years.

  The stench was revolting. Unaired flatulence and unwashed bodies, spiced with a whiff of putrefying corpses.

  Dez breathed through his mouth.

  Opposite him, forty yards ahead, lay what had been the primary worship area of the Baptist church. He half-expected the enormous wooden cross on the wall to be desecrated in some way – perhaps festooned with one of Bill Keaton’s crucified enemies – but curiously, the cross appeared unscathed by human hands.

  Rather than housing an altar, the head of the church was now a lengthy bar, and not of the makeshift variety. Dez supposed it wasn’t all that difficult to fathom. After all, now that society was destroyed, it would be relatively simple to find an abandoned bar and, if one possessed the manpower, have it transported here in sections. Nevertheless, seeing the length of polished wood and the patrons ranged on stools was a shock. Above the shoulders and heads of the figures seated at the bar, Dez made out an assortment of bottles, a swath of mirrors about four feet high spanning the length of the bar.

  Evidently, Keaton was a fan of cowboy movies. Though he was loath to admit it, this meant that Dez and the ruthless son of a bitch who owned this house of horrors had something in common.

  Furthering the impression of a Western barroom were the long balconies enshadowing the flanks of the main sanctuary. From where he stood he couldn’t see much of these balconies, but there were quite a few figures up there, just elbows resting on handrails or faces limned by wall sconces.

  He’d been right about the generator. The light in here wasn’t dazzling – some of it was provided by old-fashioned kerosene lamps or squat candles within ruby-glassed globes – but the illumination spilling out of the overhead lights and wall sconces was enough that he could make out the architecture and the patrons.

  He could also, he realized now, discern some of the Four Winds Bar’s décor.

  Dez’s guts gave a sideways lurch. And he’d thought the penises on the sign outside had been bad.

  Before the world ended, the word terrorist meant one thing: enemies of peace, foreign or domestic, who blew up buildings or hijacked airplanes or fired automatic weapons at defenseless people. Since the bombs flew, however, terrorism had come to mean something very different, at least in Dez’s mind. The invocation of terror was now as common as a word of greeting. What remained of the human race had adopted the belief that frightening fellow survivors was preferable to befriending them.

  Bill Keaton clearly understood the benefits of terrorism. Keaton could now count Dez among the individuals who’d been suitably terrified by his handiwork.

  The strips of wood running beneath the balconies on both sides of the sanctuary were adorned with human heads. Their eyes had been opened, their mouths arranged in permanent screams.

  Dez knew it would mark him as weak-stomached, but he couldn’t help it. He closed his eyes and braced himself on the back of an empty chair, yet the afterimages still pursued him.

  Fuck me, he thought.

  Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. It was useless to pretend the severed heads weren’t there, so he allowed his gaze to rove over them, thinking vaguely that meeting the horror head-on – Christ – might, like some macabre species of immersion therapy, inure him to its effects.

  Nope, he thought after a few moments. It’s not working at all.

  The gory flaps of throat were horrid enough. Worse still were the words carved into the foreheads of the deceased. MUTINEER, read the head immediately over Dez’s left shoulder. The face beneath the mauve inscription was shriveled and dark, like a prune into which some amateur sculptor had etched human features. Next to that was a female face, not as decayed, with the word SLUT sliced raggedly across her brow. LIAR, COWARD, and SODOMITE came next, and though these were ghastly, the inscription that stopped him was the sixth.

  WEREWOLF, the forehead said.

  The face was half-human, half-beast, the werewolf apparently having been beheaded mid-transformation. Dez was reminded forcibly of Jim, who’d murdered his wife against his will, who was forced to live out the rest of his days in a purgatory of guilt and excruciating metamorphoses. Pity wasn’t the right word for what he felt for Jim, but it came close. Dez gazed upon the face of the werewolf and wondered if the man had been similarly tormented by what he’d become.

  “Like them, do you?” a voice asked.

  Dez glanced at the speaker and saw a bald man with a tangled growth of beard and sunken eyes watching him from a table full of patrons. The man looked familiar. Dez stared at him until he realized who the guy reminded him of. Evan Gattis, a former Houston Astros slugger.

  Gattis was grinning. So were the others. All but one, Dez realized. Of the six ranged around the circular table, one man kept his back to Dez, the figure small, a bit hunched.

  “He asked you if you liked the heads,” another voice said. This speaker was a younger man, full of piercings, his dun-colored hair messily cut, like he’d done the job while inebriated. All the men gripped heavy pewter steins. Not the sort of receptacles Dez would have expected.

  Of course, he wouldn’t have expected a Baptist church to be decorated in severed heads either. He supposed it could be an allusion to the fate of John the Baptist, but that would be giving Keaton too much credit.

  “You a mute?” a third member of the table asked. This one had shoulder-length red hair, pale blue eyes, and a nose so pockmarked it appeared he’d been mauled by wild dogs.

  At least the men’s hostility took Dez’s mind off the heads. He didn’t feel good – he figured he’d be queasy for several more minutes – but he no longer worried he’d faint.

  Ignoring the jeering patrons, he navigated his way between a pair of tables. He drew even with them as the ginger man with the dog-chewed nose pushed up from his chair and barred his way.

  Okay, Dez thought. You knew you’d have to prove yourself one way or the other. It might as well be with this asshole.

  But only if you have to, a voice cautioned. At the sound of the voice, Dez suppressed a smile. His dad. A smartass, but a smartass with a heart. Man, Dez missed him.

  “Something funny?” Gattis snapped.

  “Just thinking of someone,” Dez answered without heat.

  “Is that right?” the red-haired man asked, his breath puffing over Dez’s face. It smelled of bourbon and death. The man apparently didn’t spend much time on dental hygiene. “Well, we always enjoy a good story.”

  “It passes the time,” Gattis explained.

  “Pull up a chair,” the one with the piercings said and stifled a burp.

  Dez inspected their faces. The problem was you never knew. The red-haired man could be a werewolf. Gattis could be a cannibal. He certainly appeared burly enough to be a flesh-eater. Even the young man with the piercings and the butchered hair might be a monster.

  You could never be sure. Not until it was too late.

  “Thanks for the offer,” Dez said, “but I’m heading to the bar.”

  Gattis shrugged, leaned back on two chair legs. “No need for that. Iris’s servers will be by any minute. They know I like my beer full.”

  Dez tried not to show his surprise. He hadn’t tasted beer in two years, had assumed it was as extinct as Major League Baseball and the Internet.

  Gattis seemed to catch his train of thought. “Keaton brews his own. Or rather Hernandez does.”

  “Hernandez?”

  “One of Keaton’s guys,” the red-haired m
an said. “Hernandez grows his own hops. Was a real aficionado before the Shift.”

  Dez grunted. It was the first time he’d heard the extinction of mankind referred to as the Shift. He supposed it was as apt a description as any. If, that was, you considered the deaths of nearly seven billion people a shift.

  “Sit,” the red-haired man said, gesturing toward an open chair. It wasn’t a request.

  Dez made to sidestep the man, but he stepped along with Dez, his pale blue eyes widening. “Hey now, we’ve been nice. No reason to make enemies when we can be friends.”

  A corner of Dez’s mouth rose. “You want to be my friend?”

  The man’s face split in an icy grin. “Why else would we invite you into our crew?”

  “Simple camaraderie,” Gattis said.

  The red-haired man spread his arms. “See?”

  “I get the crossbow,” the one with the piercings said.

  The red-haired man grinned and Gattis chuckled softly.

  “Let him pass,” a voice said.

  Dez looked askance at the speaker. It was the man with his back to Dez, the hunched, scrawny figure seated opposite Gattis. This man’s hair was trimmed in a style Dez associated with medieval monks, minus the bald tonsure. Furthering the monastic appearance was the black cloak draped over the man’s shoulders.

  Gattis frowned at the man in the cloak. The red-haired man did too, something uncertain, even fearful creeping into his pockmarked face.

  When no one spoke, the figure in the cloak half-turned in his chair, looked up at the red-haired man, and said, “Let him pass.”

  It was a woman, Dez realized. His first reaction was surprise. You didn’t encounter nearly the same ratio of women now as you did before. The Bastards from Baltimore had seen to that. Just one of many flaws in their hideous plan. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that men had been at the root of most of humankind’s problems before the Four Winds. Now men had even more power, and look at how fucked up the world was.