by ST Branton
Nothing happened.
I put my foot down, eliciting another, softer creak. Pretending to walk on the thinnest ice imaginable, I padded down the front hall and into the sitting room. I expected more of the same: coffee cups on the arm of the sofa, books turned upside down to save the reader’s place, a half-eaten cookie on a plate left on the floor.
What I got instead was carnage.
Dark patches of blood painted the room, streaks splashing as high as the ceiling in some places. The articles left behind were shreds of clothing and broken glasses, sneakers with the laces in tangles. Crimson pools soaked into the plain beige carpet.
“Marcus, what the fuck is this?” I asked incredulously, though I already knew the answer.
This is the work of the gods. This is what we are fighting against.
I went through the next doorway before I had time to have second thoughts. It led me into the kitchen, which was in total disarray, the scene of a grisly fight. More blood blazed in brutal relief against the white tile. Broken picture frames hung crooked on the wall. Closest to my eye level was a family portrait, all the faces but one smeared with gore. She was, as far as I could tell, the mother of the house. Brown hair, freckles, sunny green eyes. Her smile stretched all the way up into her cheeks.
I didn’t want to look at her or think about what had happened to her in this house, where she thought she was safe. In fact, I didn’t want to be there anymore at all. Rather than tour the rest of the house, which I was sure wouldn’t be any better, I punched out the few remaining shards of glass in the kitchen window and jumped out without even checking to see if the coast was clear.
My skin crawled. I shuddered with the residual horror of all I had just seen. Killing vamps and harpies was one thing. But when it was people?
I chewed my lip. Was I already in over my head?
Victoria, are you all right? You seem unwell.
I sucked a deep draught of the cold, wet air. “I’m fine,” I said, unsure if I was lying or not. “That was just… it was a lot to see, you know? I wasn’t ready.”
I understand. If you need a moment to regain your composure, feel free to take one. I will keep watch.
“Thanks, buddy, but I’ll regain my composure when I find whoever did this and shove my sword down their throat.” I slunk around the other side of the house into the rapidly overgrowing mess of weeds that had likely once been a garden. My nerves felt dangerously frayed. If I turned around, I was afraid I’d just run straight back home.
At this point, even I knew that would be unacceptable.
So, I sucked it up and soldiered on, darting from shadow to shadow around the probing antennae of the FBI flashlights. Damn, those things were bright. They flicked back and forth with neurotic energy, unlike the slow, predictable arcs I had come to expect from games and television. Twice, I leapt back just in time to keep from being blinded by the demonic eye of one of those portable suns.
“Damn it to hell. This better be worth it.” I crawled on my stomach across the soggy ground to a car that was parked outside of its garage. The undercarriage had started to rust from all the moisture, and when I sat up, I saw streaky red handprints all over the inside of the windows. I closed my eyes, inhaled, exhaled. “Better be so damn worth it.”
“Who are you talking to?” a small voice whispered.
I clamped my mouth shut to hold in the sound that wanted to burst forth from my lungs—either a scream or a torrent of violent swears. I wasn’t sure which. Searching the darkness, I spotted a pair of eyes staring at me from beneath the car’s headlights. They were startlingly low to the ground; that, combined with the high pitch of the voice, told me everything I didn’t want to know.
There was a kid out here in the middle of Murder Ghost Town, USA. As if things needed to be just a little more complicated.
What is a child doing here? Marcus almost sounded offended by the idea.
Any other time, I would have loved to know the answer as well, but at the moment, I was too preoccupied with figuring out what the hell to do. It was too late to try and sneak by undetected—the little bugger had already found and acknowledged me. I could ignore him, pretend I didn’t hear, and split, but the newly rekindled embers of humanity in my formerly cold, dead heart wouldn’t allow it.
I stifled a groan. “No one. Stay quiet, okay? I’m going to get you some help.”
This strikes me as a fool’s errand, Victoria. If you are found out, then the mission ends immediately.
“Yeah, yeah. But if this kid gets killed, I won’t be able to live with myself whether I succeed in the mission or not, okay? Just let me prioritize here.” I looked around for a landmark, then lifted the walkie talkie to my mouth and pressed to talk. “I don’t know who’s on the other end, but I’ve got a child inside the secured perimeter. Repeat, a child inside the secured perimeter. Near the old white church. Please send rescue, ASAP.” Then I turned to the kid, who was still little more than a pair of huge brown eyes. “Don’t move an inch, and don’t fight them when they show up for you. It’s not safe here.”
“I know,” he said somberly. “That’s why I’m hiding.”
Shit.
“Did you see what happened here.”
The kid nodded. “Mommy, she was making me dinner. And then she got sick. Then her and daddy started fighting.”
I looked back at the house, picturing the scene with my mind. It was hard for me to imagine that someone with kids would willingly make a deal with the gods, but then again, the world was full of shitty people. “Well it’s OK, kid. All that’s over now. You just sit tight until the men in uniform show up, all right?”
He nodded again, then huddled back against the car.
Good deed done, it was time to make myself disappear. I booked it over the neighbor’s garden wall and knelt in their ruined vegetable patch, my knee square inside the corpse of a tiny pumpkin. I should have moved on right away, but I just wanted to make sure he got collected. The low wall shielded me from most of the piercing light as a brigade of strangely bulky figures surrounded the car.
I furrowed my brow and blinked a few times. I had to be seeing this wrong.
They were all wearing Hazmat suits.
CHAPTER FIVE
Something truly messed up was going down in this village, and I had to get to the bottom of it. The best way to deal with fear was to puzzle it out, and I was pretty damn scared. So that meant digging my heels in and pushing forward instead of running the other way.
First chance I got, I left that garden and looped around the far side of the group at the car. They’d taken the little boy into their care without incident, and I was fairly sure he hadn’t said anything about me. Although, now that I’d used the cop’s radio, I knew I’d have to be extra careful. No way did I sound like that walkie talkie rightfully belonged to me.
Two houses away, as I edged along a gradually collapsing fence near the outer rim of the town, I heard a scream that I could only describe as rattling. It was not a scream from horror movies, processed and still kind of playful.
This was the sound of someone dying,
“Shit!” I burst into overdrive, temporarily not caring who heard or saw me. My legs pumped furiously over the muddy dirt, vaulting overturned paving stones, roots erupting from the soil, more broken pieces of wall. By the time I reached the source of the harrowing cry, he was very, very dead. It was hard to fathom a scenario in which he could have been alive. The body was more or less torn to leaking shreds, gristle and bone interspersed with pieces of the Hazmat suit that was supposed to protect him.
No suit could protect these guys from whatever was in these woods.
“Up here, this way. Last saw him over there.”
My heart dropped, and then it started hammering. I’d recognize that low, smooth, drawly voice anywhere, even in a fog-drenched, murderous ghost town deep in the Pacific Northwest. Hadn’t I been hoping he wouldn’t show up less than fifteen minutes ago? Then again, I guessed I didn’t hav
e any right to be surprised
Life had a funny way of spitting directly in my face.
I was immobilized just long enough to completely negate any chance of escape. Deacon’s flashlight, as strong as all the others, caught me bent over the mutilated body like some kind of ghoul. I looked up, straight into his face—which was shielded by a Hazmat suit.
“What’s the deal with those suits?” I asked as casually as possible.
He stared at me, dumbfounded for a split second. “Vic?” His voice was hesitant, as if he really couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “What the hell are you doing here?” Before I could answer, he held up a hand. “Wait, don’t tell me. You’re here to make my life that much harder yet again. Is that it?”
“Glad to see me?” I asked, giving him a coy smile. It wasn’t really the time to mess around, but Deacon St. Clare just had a knack for bringing my hackles all the way up.
“How do you even know about this? Are you...is this somehow connected to whatever shit you’re in?”
He stepped closer, then stopped as he got a better glance at the sack of blood and guts at my feet. “Mother of—”
“Yeah.” There was nothing to argue about there. “That about sums it up.”
He called in the body, and then he turned to me, his hand lingering at his side. “What the hell is going on here? No more games. That’s a federal agent—a dead federal agent. Tell me you’ve got a reasonable explanation for this.”
I paused, unsure of how to continue. “Deacon, there’s an explanation, although I doubt you’d call it reasonable.”
“Try me. I’ve gone out on a pretty big limb for you. You could try reciprocating at least a little. Not telling me is bull—” He never finished his sentence. A shape, large and moving fast, broke through the fog. One instant, Deacon was there in front of me, and the next, he flew through the air, set aloft by something I hadn’t quite seen. I felt his body hit the ground more than I heard it, the impact reverberating through my feet.
“Deacon!” He was too far away to see clearly, but I lunged half-blind toward him. Before I reached his body, the shape reappeared.
Its huge head was sunken down between two hulking shoulders. Even hunched over like it was, it loomed over me. But it wasn’t its size, nor the fact that it had just thrown Deacon like he was a doll, that held my attention.
It was the eyes. Burning bronze eyes set deep in a long hairy skull.
The Forgotten reveals itself.
I skidded to a stop. My hand found the reassuring weight of the sword hilt in my bag. As the creature lunged toward me, my golden blade cut an arc through the dismal gray fog, biting into its flesh. I saw the monster’s blood fly up in a scarlet fan. It made a surreal, howling roar.
Following through with my swing, I set up for another. The thing reared up on its hind legs, threw its head back, and howled again. In the ambient light cast by the Gladius Solis, the wound I’d inflicted gleamed with running blood. The creature was almost humanoid, but not quite. The broad, paw-like hands were wrong, and so were the vicious claws. So were the furious bronze eyes locked on mine.
I retreated a step, then another. The sword reared back in my hand, preparing for the kind of driving strike that had ended the lives of other monsters. This creature was exceptionally tall, but I was confident I could put an end to things right now.
Until the beast fell forward onto all fours, wheeled around, and ran into the trees.
I was about to chase after it, until I remembered Deacon lying yards away. The sword slipped from my hands and I ran toward him. I dropped to my knees where he had fallen, splattering his Hazmat suit with mud.
It didn’t matter. The suit was torn straight through across the torso, wide enough that I could see he was bleeding.
“Shit. Deacon, can you hear me?”
“It’s… getting away,” he managed.
“Shut up, you prick. You’re bleeding out. You need help.”
He shook his head weakly. “No. No help. You… go after it.” His eyes started to close, jerked open, and drifted shut again. “Go… Vic. I’ll… I’ll be fine.”
“As you were saying before you got creamed by that pup, that’s bullshit.” I glanced back toward the sword still protruding from the mud and sinking deeper every second. Reasoning that Deacon was delirious and probably wouldn’t recall a thing, I put out my hand and called the Gladius Solis to me. Then I stuck it in my bag and slung Deacon’s arm over my shoulder, using it as leverage to pull the rest of him across my back.
He wasn’t as heavy as he looked—or I was stronger than I felt like I should have been. Either way, I hiked out of there with him like a backpack on my shoulders. A mumbling, semi-conscious backpack.
“How… how are you doing this?” he asked. “I’m… too big for you.”
I readjusted his weight. “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re pretty average.”
He went silent after that. Probably because he passed out for good, but I told myself he just couldn’t handle the searing heat of my sick burn.
***
“Where… What the hell?” The voice pulled me from my light slumber.
I opened my eyes to see Deacon finally stirring from his nearly catatonic slumber. The motel room we were crashing in was nothing to write home about. The overhead bulb flickered and there was a steady drip from the sink in the bathroom. But it was quiet, and cheap, and gave me the time I needed to bandage my favorite FBI agent up.
And then tie him to the bed.
He tried to take a deep breath, but it was cut off as he realized he’d been filleted at some point in the very recent past. I went over, shook out a few pills, and fed them to him, then I helped them down with a glass of water.
He took the pain killers without complaint, then looked down at his bandages hugging his chest. And then he noticed the wire I ripped from the in-room telephone which held his wrists to the bed frame. He pulled at his right, then his left before giving up. Finally he turned his head back to me.
“Vic? What the hell happened?”
“Don’t tell me, you had an amazing dream with me and Toto and a bunch of flying monkeys,” I said. “Was I wearing the ruby slippers or were you?”
“Dammit can we meet up even once without you doing something batshit crazy?”
“Most men find me mysterious and alluring,” I grinned.
“Yeah, and how many of those men wake up tied to a bed with weird bandages and…” he looked down at his body again and the sheet covering his lower half. “Where the hell are my clothes?”
“I admit, it’s not ideal.” I stood up and started pacing the room. “But there were extenuating circumstances. You were unconscious and wounded—the hazmat suit was torn to shreds. Frankly, I acted rather heroically, bringing you here and making sure you didn’t bleed out. Not a bad patch job, even if you were a shit patient. You should be grateful.”
He opened his mouth as if to reply, when his memory finally dawned on him. “Mormouth. You were there. I was attacked by… What was I attacked by?”
I debated telling him the truth, but somehow, I didn’t think he’d take it well. I was already kind of pushing the bounds of credulity—what with him tied up naked to the bed and all.
“A bear,” I answered.
“A bear?”
“Yep. Real mean sucker too. He was foraging for your berries or something. Luckily, I was there to scare him off.”
Deacon shook his head. “Scare him off. How—?”
“With my winning personality,” I cut him off. “But that’s not really important right now. What’s important is that you’re safe and I’m safe. We’re both safe. But that town, Mormouth, isn’t. I was wondering if you could clue me in on what happened there. As payment for services rendered.” I pointed to the bandages encasing his torso.
“Ah,” he said. “You’re looking for intel. Which explains why I’m here with these cheap sheets scratching my ass and not in a hospital.”
“Hospital? Now
where’s the fun in that? Besides, I make one hell of a nurse.” I stopped my pacing and took a step closer to him.
Deacon’s face shifted instantly from frustration to bewilderment to acceptance. He sighed, “I’ll be honest with you here: there’s not much intel to go around. Something tells me you already know more than me.”
I crossed my arms but kept the smile from my face.
Deacon gritted his teeth. “Fine, but only because no one actually knows for sure what’s going on. We only arrived yesterday, but it’s such a shitshow in there, it will take days to unpack it all. When the locals first showed up, they said a whole mess of the population was missing—those who weren’t just dead, anyway. No one can agree on cause of death in their reports. Some people went with wild animal attacks, even though that doesn’t make any damn sense. What kind of animal attacks all at once like that, in people’s homes? In their cars? Maybe some bears or whatever came in after the fact, but there’s human intent behind this. I’d bet my badge on it. There was aggression in those attacks. Rage.”
“Sounds cultish to me,” I said, aiming for him to confirm or deny. If he said anything about worship at all, I’d consider my hypothesis proven. It seemed impossible that the gods wouldn’t be involved somehow in a horror show like this. The whole thing was right up Lorcan’s twisted alley.
“Don’t think so,” Deacon said. “That was my first guess, some sort of ritual mass killing. But the facts don’t fit the theory. We’ve managed to put together profiles on several of the missing persons, and there’s nothing out of the ordinary at all. The town is clean, just pure country living one day, and the next, this. We’re talking families here, Vic. A town that goes back generations. They just don’t turn on each other. Not without reason. And that’s the other thing, there’s no clear pattern amongst the dead or the living.
“Old women, young kids, brothers and parents. Whatever is going on here it disregards the demographics. Maybe if it was all the young men who were gone, or several whole families, then I’d be inclined to chalk it up to a cult, but these people didn’t drink any Kool-Aid, not as far as I can tell.”
