Falling Prey

by M. C. Norris

  “Tara, wait!”

  She glanced back over her shoulder. He was coming, running after her through the rain. Nate didn’t even look like the same person to her. Something fundamental about him had changed. She didn’t trust the thing that he’d become. After all she’d been through, she didn’t know if she could ever trust another man again.

  “Tara, let me explain!”

  She felt his hand clamp down on her shoulder. Her scream reopened every split on her lips, and her tongue warmed with the metallic salts of blood. She fought, but he wouldn’t let go. He was pulling her close. It felt as though what had happened to her back in the jungle was about to happen all over again, right here in front of everyone, and she knew that no one would stop him. No one would care. “Get away from me! Get away!”

  ###

  21-F

  Lost in a Roman … wilderness of pain.

  And all the children are insane.

  All the children are insane.

  Waiting for the summer rain, yeah.

  Peanut’s eyes brightened to the familiar timbre of Jim Morrison’s voice reverberating through the green chaos. They’d started the music. Could it be evening already? Had the most glorious day of his entire life really flown by so quickly? Tipping an offered wineskin that seemed to keep coming back around, Peanut swallowed, and slipped in the greasy mud. Cursing, he fell. Laughing, he rolled. He loved the feel of the mud, and the blood, and the rain. Lifting his hand to his forehead, he streaked his gory face with blackened fingertips. He imagined his demonic appearance, and the image that filled his mind pleased him in the darkest sort of way. At last, he’d been reborn.

  The killer awoke before dawn.

  He put his boots on.

  He took a face from the ancient gallery,

  And he walked on down the hall.

  “Get up, Peanut.”

  “I told you, don’t you call me Peanut anymore. Name’s Matthew.”

  Red hands seized his upper arms, and hoisted him back to his feet. Their support was all he needed. He was one them, a Bad Face. Back home, he was nothing. He was just a naïve kid, a slave obeying orders, a little robot conforming to the social programming that robbed a boy of all wildness in his soul. Not here. In the Garden of Eden, he was free to be the creature that God had designed him to be. Here, he was the Lizard King, and he could do anything.

  He went into the room where his sister lived,

  And then he …

  Paid a visit to his brother,

  And then he …

  He walked on down the hall,

  And he came to a door.

  And he looked inside.

  “Open the gates!” Peanut bellowed over the tempest at the sentry perched high on Briggstown’s tower. Tonight, he was going to make Tara Riley his wife. Tara Riley, the girl of his dreams since the seventh grade, she was really going to be his, and only his. No other man would be permitted to look at her. He’d keep her safe. He was her hero. If anything that walked or crawled upon this world ever threatened her, there would be Hell to pay.

  The gates trundled woodenly along their tracks. Beyond, a crowd had gathered on the plaza. At its center, a battered and bleeding young woman struggled in the arms of a man he recognized, a man he knew all too well. The girl fell into the mud beneath him. She emitted a primal scream as he flipped her onto her back, and seized her by her thin shoulders, shaking her, shouting in her face.

  Father?

  Yes, son?

  I want to kill you.

  His vision seemed to constrict inward, darkening all peripheral detail but the man in the center, the man on top of his bride. There would never be another like him. Not one. Not another man in the village of Briggstown would ever dare touch Tara Riley once they’d all beheld the gruesome example that would be made of this one. Knuckles tightening around his spear’s bloodstained shaft, Matthew leveled its lancet point at Nate’s chest, and he charged.

  CHAPTER 13

  23-A

  “Watch the timer!” Dr. Bendu shouted, pointing at the device rigged to Margot’s chest. “The ultimate moment in the War of Ages approaches, when the ancestors teach their great-grandchildren a painful lesson. We will show our descendants that we will not tolerate their misbehavior. We handed them our world on a silver platter, and they ran it into the ground. Is that our fault?”

  “No!” the crowd replied.

  “Should we pay for their mistakes?”

  “No!”

  “They lack the gall to cull their own for what they’ve done to the world in their time, so we’ll do the culling for them! We’ll show them how it’s done in real time!”

  Courting moons waltzed over distant reefs of vegetation, spinning between the jungle dancefloor, and a billowing canopy of clouds. The space between them visibly shrank as their gravities attracted, drawing them nearer, nearer. Lifting her veil of moon dust, the larger celestial body descended upon its mate with an almost predatory lust. They wanted this. Another year’s worth of yearning for one another was released as the heavens moaned, the world trembled, and spumes of meteors seeded the earth. A burning wad plunged down into Briggstown’s crater lake, birthing a great phantom of steam. Another slammed into the rim, collapsing a section of the wall. Logs toppled, tumbling over dwellings in a fiery cavalcade.

  Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill …

  “I need you to listen to me!” Nate said, placing his palms on either side of Tara’s bloodied face. “No one is going to hurt you.”

  Tara shrieked, wrenching his hands away.

  “All of this you’re seeing … it had to happen this way. There was never any choice in the matter. This was the whole purpose, right here, right now!”

  “You’re insane! Just like all the rest of them! You’ve gone totally insane!”

  The is the end,

  Beautiful friend,

  This is the end,

  My only friend, the end.

  “Ten … nine … eight … seven …”

  As the crowd began to chant, he appeared, red as brimstone and glistening. Tara caught just the flash of his eyes, the striated patterns, and the reek of blood that glistened on his skin. Nate never even saw the devil come hurtling out of the darkness, coming straight for his soul. She watched Nate’s eyes fill with mystery and wonder, as both of his lungs collapsed with a hollow pop.

  “… six … five … four … three …”

  Meteors streaked the skies beyond that plunging shaft. It drew back, and it reamed him, again and again and again, until the solidity of Nate’s ribcage sucked wetly with every thrust. She could feel its lethal energy through his corpse, its mechanical action, as the spear plunged repeatedly through one side of him, and out the other.

  “ … two … one …”

  ###

  28-D

  The sound of the music that he’d been following came to an end with a thunderous explosion. The concussion shook the very ground beneath his feet, and made a few of the monsters trailing him rear their heads to snort in surprise. Hart took a moment to press his ear against the shackled man’s chest. He nearly panicked when at first he didn’t hear a beat at all, but after a moment his ear detected the weak pulse of his dying friend. Still there. For the moment, he was there.

  Whimpering, he cradled his friend close to his chest, and resumed plodding in the direction of the explosion. The monsters followed him, as always, loyal if not to him, then to whatever bitter end their reptilian brains intuited he’d usher them. Hart couldn’t remember why he’d been following music through the jungle, but he suspected that a better version of himself had once known, and had good reason for propelling him in that direction. There were clues, like those letters painted in blood upon his chest. These glyphs seemed important, like hints as to the man he’d once been, or perhaps the significance of this final mission in life. Words held no meaning anymore, but he still recognized the letters. Hart wondered how long it would be before he lost that ability, as well.

  “
HEL,” they read.

  Trees snapped and crashed to the forest floor, all around him. The monsters were right on his heels, champing along in their demonic parade. He could smell the sour reek of death emanating from the shuffling folds of dank feathers, and he could hear their basal groans, the clattering of dagger teeth. These were perfect killers, voracious consumers of flesh, but they treated him as their master, following him like a pack of enormous, stray dogs that had nothing better to do than to tag along behind him with the hope of being rewarded a treat.

  The muted ambiance of the jungle lifted, as he clambered up a burning ridge line over a vast clearing around the shores of a hidden lake. Burning logs were strewn everywhere, amongst the remnants of some bygone civilization. Small fires flickering throughout the wide depression burned as brightly as those fleets of meteors that streaked the sky. Twisted human bodies were strewn over what resembled a small battlefield, where every combatant had simultaneously fallen along concentric valences, as though they’d all been pulverized by shockwaves originating at the epicenter of some tremendous blast.

  It looked wrong to him. All of this was wrong. Hart gazed across the open graveyard. Whatever had happened here was not just a random accident. By the manner in which the bodies were scattered, Hart was certain that a crowd of spectators had gathered here to watch some sort of a great stunt. A vestigial part of his hijacked mind still remembered how stunts, no matter how well planned and controlled, could often go horribly awry.

  Shaggy beasts thundered around him, and into the feast. Flesh was all they wanted. Just flesh. All that these creatures really cared about was filling their mouths with flesh, and he’d led them right to the banquet. All of this was for them. It was not for him, and it was certainly not for his dying friend. It didn’t seem fair. All of his efforts, his hopes, and his dreams along that road over which he’d long struggled, in the end would amount to nothing more than a feast of flesh. For the scavengers, life was a fair and perfect circle. Not so, for the billions departed with unrealized dreams, gutted to a shell of their innocent selves by a lifetime of cruel twists. For them, the only reward was to fill the vultures’ bulging guts with their pounds of unloved flesh. Life never promised to be fair, and it never was. Life was nothing more than a window with a view, better for some than for others.

  Hart lowered his head to his only friend’s chest, as the lesser moon was rent asunder by the lust of the larger. Emitting a lugubrious death moan, it departed life with great wedges of moon-flesh that calved its celestial bones, and glittering fountains of its essence that sprayed across the heavens. Meteors gushed from its open chest, pouring down upon the earth like blood rain. Hart closed his eyes as the moon carcass fell, darkening the world below in the shadow of a shared demise. All eyes that could see beheld the end, as necks turtled to the imminent promise for the death of one savage age, and the birth of another.

  The beats within the shackled man’s chest became irregular, like the footsteps of an elderly man who’d suddenly stumbled, and began to fall. Hart hugged his friend close, weeping. He wouldn’t leave him. He’d never let him go. They’d depart this world together, and if it pleased their worm-infested gods, they’d walk together through gilded gates into a brighter age, and a second chance to fulfil their destiny.

  The heartbeat stopped. An internal relay clicked. Every man and beast within twenty meters departed their doomed world together, in a flash of blinding green light.

  < The End >

  Read on for a free sample of RIP Tyde

  RIP Tyde

  This is going to save our marriage. It will give us time to sort through the pieces of a broken life and fit some of them back together. It’s just like a puzzle. I used to be really good at those. The pieces will fit back together. All we need is the time to do it.

  Tyde Gregory tried to calm his nerves with that bittersweet mantra as he threw the last of his things into his yellow duffle bag and zipped it closed. The nametag hung from a loop on the bottom of the bag. Tyde flipped the tag and examined his own name. Over the years, he had come to accept the fact that his parents were California surf hippies and had the best of intentions when they named him, but he would be lying if there weren’t times that he really wished his nametag said ‘Bob’ or ‘Scott’ instead. Then again, his parents must have been onto to something when they named him Tyde; sure they were definitely on something when they did, but he couldn’t deny that they seemed to instinctually know he would love the water.

  Being in the water was one of the few times that Tyde ever felt truly at peace. The water brought him Wendy. Memories of her walking into his diving class all those years ago flashed through his mind. She was beautiful, tanned and giggling with her friends as they waited for the class to start. It had been one of those classes people took on vacation, half-drunk, bobbing around in the hotel pool and breathing through the regulator. No one ever really learned how to dive, but Wendy cornered Tyde after the class and insisted that he give her a private lesson. There was no way in hell Tyde was going to turn down a bikini-clad request for a private class. Wendy left after her week was up and Tyde followed. They had been inseparable since.

  Life had been easy, like they were destined to be together. Wendy took a job teaching kindergarten and Tyde started working in a local dive shop. Even though he wore surf shorts to work on most days, it felt a little too corporate for him. But he was willing to deal with timesheets and inventory if it meant he got to go home to Wendy every night.

  Weekends had been devoted to dive trips with friends. Everything fit together and worked. They had been happy. Their friends had been happy. The water brought them all together and made their happiness possible. Life made sense when they were diving or at least it used to.

  Tyde shook his head, trying to banish thoughts of the past from his head and laughed when the mirror on top of Wendy’s dresser reflected an image of the dirty blond rat’s nest that blossomed from the side of his head. He didn’t want to waste time getting lost in the past. He was looking towards the future. That’s why they were going on this trip, or maybe it was more accurate to say that was why he was going on the trip. Wendy refused at first. Later just protested. And finally reluctantly agreed to go.

  Wendy’s things were already packed. She was always more prepared than Tyde, though neither of them had been prepared for last year’s diving trip. No checklist or equipment double-check could have prepared them. More past that Tyde didn’t want to think about. He grabbed Wendy’s bag and walked towards the door. The rest of their gear was in the garage. Wendy was out there double-checking everything before the taxi came to bring them to the airport.

  Tyde tried to convince himself that last year’s trip was when his marriage began to fall apart, that the trauma of the trip drove a wedge between him and Wendy, but he knew that wasn’t true. Things were bad before the trip, probably for longer than Tyde even knew, and the trip only made them worse.

  It was true that Wendy agreed to go on this trip. That had to count for something. It had to mean there was some small splinter of hope and love left in her heart. Tyde hoped for all of those things, but knew that his wife’s motivation might have more to do with the fact that they were flying to Long Island in the Bahamas to dive a blue hole. They had swam just about anywhere there was water, but never had the opportunity to explore the amazing underwater cave systems known as blue holes. Aside from Belize, the one on Long Island was probably the best in the world. This breathtaking blue world plunged over six hundred feet below sea level, opening into a honeycomb of rooms that had only just begun to be explored. It was unlike anything Tyde or Wendy had ever seen, completely alien and intoxicating.

  Still, Wendy agreed to go. They weren’t going to spend the entire time underwater. There would be time to talk, to reconnect. Time to save their marriage.

  This is going to save our marriage. It will give us time to sort through the pieces of a broken life and fit some of them back together. It’s just like a puzzle. I used
to be really good at those. The pieces will fit back together. All we need is the time to do it.

  Tyde repeated his mantra as Wendy greeted him with a sad, broken smile from the waiting taxi. Tyde threw the rest of their gear into the trunk of the taxi and climbed inside. He reached over and gently squeezed Wendy’s hand. She looked out the window. Tyde squeezed once more, a simple, pleading gesture that spoke volumes about their relationship. Wendy’s fingers fluttered in Tyde’s and tightened ever so slightly.

  This would work. It had to work. Tyde could fix this. He could find a way to fit these pieces together, just like all of those puzzles from so long ago. Tyde loved puzzles when he was a child. He just never wanted his marriage to become one.

  -2-

  The needle on Milo’s air gauge ticked slightly over from yellow to red. There was plenty of air left in the tanks considering that the surface was only twenty to thirty feet overhead, but his tanks had been problematic ever since Jefferson dropped them on the dock. There had to be a small leak somewhere in the system, not that Milo and Jefferson had the money to fix it. He would need to head for the surface.

  Milo signaled the three college boys he was guiding today – time to head to the surface. One of the kids held up five fingers. What harm could five more minutes do? Milo gave him the thumbs up, the college boys were experienced divers, and began swimming for the surface. He turned to watch the three college boys swimming near the wreck they had explored today. One ducked inside the ship. Experienced, not smart.