by Stephen Ayer
SHADOW AND LIGHT
Stephen Ayer
Illustrations by
John Anthony Di Giovanni
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen Ayer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover Lettering: Stewart Williams
Cover/Illustration: John Anthony Di Giovanni
Editor: Nicole Franklin
eBook: Marcia Breece
Prologue
Tunguska, Siberia 1908
Sergei warmed his hands over the fire for the last time. The sound of his chittering teeth accompanied the medley of nature sounds. The gentle, icy flow of the nearby brook, the first roosters beginning their morning calls as the songbirds flitted from tree to tree, more eager than usual to begin their day.
A tenseness filled the wood—a tenseness that Sergei was blind to notice, his body too hungry for warmth to feel the uneasy note of expectation in the air. He moved over to stir his cooking rabbit, bringing his nose close to savor the rich, savory spices, the undercurrent of electricity and smell of ozone eluding his dulled senses.
He turned his head when he heard the crunching footsteps of his wife, Marya. She sat across from him, having brought some sweet potatoes for the churning stew. The two smiled, going about their tasks in silence. After all these years, they never had much to say, the two taking refuge in each other’s warmth. Actions spoke for them now.
And so it was quite unusual when their ritual silence was broken by Marya’s soft voice, her breath coming out in a hoary frost. “Today feels odd, doesn’t it?”
Sergei shrugged his shoulders, looking back into the stew, letting the hot steam warm his stiff face.
Marya looked around. The songbirds seemed more energetic and louder, scrambling among the branches in some flustered agitation, while their tied up dogs strained at their leashes, barking into the sky, the poor hounds close to choking themselves on their collars.
Sergei’s face moved up from his stew, his eyes wide in excitement. “Did you feel that!?” A strange rumble pulsed underneath them, shifting fine granules of snow apart like something was rising out of the ground.
Marya nodded, backing away from the fire as her husband did much the same, their eyes darting for any piece of land that did not seem to be vibrating. The snow kept rising off the ground, their solid clumps reduced to a fine white mist, with little bands of electricity dancing between the crystalline flakes.
A low pitch sound developed, rising higher and higher in tandem to the snow. Both husband and wife ran to their dogs, hugging each other as a bizarre growling made itself known, becoming more deep as the pitch became more piercing. They squeezed each other close as a chorus of snapping sounds emanated through the forest, with some trees bursting in half, others only suffering a profusion of cracks.
Sergei held his chin on his wife’s shoulder, feeling her tears daub against his skin, quickly freezing underneath the horrid cold snap. He could barely hear her sobs over the banshee cacophony, and brought her head closer to his face, keeping her from the sight of their beloved dog Palko, his sturdy frame collapsed into the snow.
His dead eyes became frosty marbles, weeping rivers of red into the virgin snow, while his fur crystallized into ice. Sergei panicked when saw a blue gray fog inching closer and closer to him and his wife. Just then he felt a warm fluid dribble out of his right ear. The rugged huntsman brought himself and his wife up into a standing position, granting them more space in their increasingly encroached upon island of snow.
He took his wife into his arms just as the fog began to lick at his feet. He grit his teeth as icy, needling pain shot through his toes. Breath became shallow and quick, unable to take the air he needed.
Just as he felt like his feet were going to collapse like a heap of cracked ceramics, the mist faded. His breath rushed back to him as he collapsed into the snow, dropping her into the soft powder, while the screaming pitch silenced and the floating snow fell.
Marya’s chest heaved, thankful it was over as an overbearing silence nestled in the wood, the snowflakes floating down lazily, kissing her skin with utmost gentleness. She turned her head over to her gasping husband, feeling relieved when he pulled his feet out of his boots, checking for any signs of frostbite.
Sergei looked at his unblemished feet, rubbing his hands over them repeatedly to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Was the pain a dream? He didn’t know or care, only looking up into the pale white sky and letting loose a hearty laugh, reveling in the cold tears of joy that raced down his cheeks.
He hadn’t laughed that hard in years.
He trudged over to his wife, with nothing but his socks, helping her up before hugging her tighter than he had in years. She held him, finding his mirth infectious and giggling in turn, the couple’s laughs musical in the silent forest.
He pulled back from her, looking straight into her misty eyes, sporting a long smile, one that he had not had in a long time. “I think...I think it’s over. It’s over!” He sighed.
The two looked at each other in silence.
One flash of light changed it all. In a screeching blast of flame and wind, another sun ignited in the sky, knocking over trees like dominoes, alpine towers of flame thundering into the snowy ground. Sergei grabbed Marya, rolling in between two fallen giants, just as they were knocked off their feet by a blast of heat.
He kept her head facing the ground, as a blinding blue column of light shattered into the earth from the roiling sky, sending another horrendous thunder clap out against the air. The two buckled down in front of the raging winds, both confronted with the strange sensation of being battered with hot air and cold snow.
Marya broke down once more, crying into the frosty dirt as another thunder clap shattered sound and air, forcing her to take more refuge in the shuddering earth. Screaming gusts whipped across her back while errant pine needles were swept into her nose and mouth, her senses unable to tell whether it was the icy snow or infernal heat that stung her cheeks.
With a loud sucking sound the ravaged forest was cowed into silence once more, ash and snowflakes marrying into great plumes that rendered each indistinguishable from the other. She coughed for each precious breath, the air coming to her begrudgingly and not without great effort.
“Sergei...Sergei...” she wheezed, her jacketed arm fumbling around for her beloved’s back, instinctively wanting to bring him close. She stopped suddenly when she felt his pendant in the snow, her fingers clasping around it and nothing else. She pushed herself off the ground, her watery eyes looking over the imprint of Sergei’s body.
She was too shocked to cry any more, her ash mingled tears stinging her eyes as her gaze roved over his imprint and onto the strange claw marks in the snow, glowing like blue fire. Hope lingered in her heart still, and with a quickness unknown to even herself, she followed the trail from her husband’s imprint.
“Sergei!” she called, her boots throwing up snow and cracking branches, her search intensifying as a foul stench began to creep up her nose. All around, it was like a frozen hell, with great shocks of fire running along marred snowy ground, the crackling flame, crunching feet and her calls the only sound in an ocean of dead silence.
“Serg-” she caught herself, bringing her hand to her mouth, stifling her screams and fighting back her tears. Within the ashen atmosphere, the white light of day broke through, and in those brief rays of light, were illuminated azure streaks of color among the smoke. Below those vivid splashes of chromatic splendor, rested her husband, his eyes a milky white shade of death, his soft throat
cracked open and red, like a broken bamboo shaft.
A grotesque slurping sound emanated from the squat creature that huddled over his corpse, his maimed jugular a fount for the arcane being. Its face was hidden in shadow, but Marya could see its thin, reed like hair, hanging over a scaly head, its skin having the pallor of necrotized flesh. Its hands, strangely elegant and feminine, were plunged in both sides of her husband’s chest, eliciting spasms and twitches from his corpse as rhythmic pulses of silvery light flowed down the beast’s arms, illuminated underneath its raised veins.
Marya backed away as slowly as possible, holding back the lump in her throat and trying to suppress the anguish ridden shivers in her hands, her body screaming for her to leave and never come back again. She had backed far enough from terrible sight that the cadenced sound of chopping and gnashing was almost far away, covered by the sound of fire.
Until she tripped, snapping a branch she could not see.
She fell over into the snow and cursed, stilling herself as much as possible. She leaned her ear more into the direction of the creature, hoping to still hear its sounds of feasting. But to no avail, only the sonorous notes of crumbling trees and dying flames played for her attention.
She brought her husband’s pendant up, exhaling deeply as she looked into its reflective surface, seeing the orange gold tones of the scrambled fires, the calm gray of day, to the strange emerald light that grew ever closer.
She took a deeper look into the pendant, realizing she had seen it before she heard it, just as a subtle crunching of powder sounded out right behind her back. It was too close. She could not hope to escape. The Siberian woman resigned herself to her fate, holding her husband’s pendant to her chest as she cried softly into the forest.
She closed her eyes just as she felt a gentle grip sink into her shoulders, pulling her away from violence and misery, and into an eternal sleep.
Chapter 1: The Frank
Somewhere in Mexico
Gunshots and screams rang out in the air, the pale moon of night shining down on an isolated safe house. The windows flashed from within, blood stains accompanying each flash as they sprayed against the glass. A man burst out the door as the roar of the night itself drowned out his screams.
His protests were brought to an end as an impossibly fast shadow bounded across the desert floor, falling upon him like a beast of prey, bringing his talons and fangs down like hammers upon a fleshy anvil. Billows of dust were kicked up, swirling in the air like a brown fog as the man was devoured by the creature’s ceaseless thirst for carnage, his blood geysering into the air like the insides of some sick flesh piñata.
A group of survivors stood in the safe house, listening to the muffled sound outside as their night visitor snapped apart their comrade’s bones with loud breaks and snaps. The momentary diversion was enough for any of them to leap to their feet and make a dash for the truck outside but so great was their fright that they stayed, barely able to keep their shaking guns up at the torn away entrance.
Tattoos of a nubile and voluptuous Mother Mary overlaid one’s tensed and muscular back, while another had a circular Aztec mosaic on the back of his bald head with a stylized skull in the center. Of the other two, only one was so similarly inked, sporting spiraling designs of various mistresses and children fathered by him down his forearm, odes to his virility.
The last and unmarked one was Jose, an enforcer for the Sinaloa cartel. He kissed his St. Jude pendant and tucked it behind his checkered shirt and stabilized his position over a crate of contraband ammo. The sound outside had come to a silence and he dared not speak to his men. What more was there to say? Whether they survived the next few moments all came down to their trigger fingers.
They had expected the beast to come back as violently as he entered, roaring, screaming and chopping. Leftovers of his first attack littered the floor in masses of limbs and blood. They did not expect a stalking shadow, flitting in between the ever shifting pools of darkness from the lone amber light that hung from the ceiling, still swaying from earlier commotion.
The beast moved smoothly, like a panther, the various boxes and crates his blades of grass. Jose tapped on the shoulder on Carlos, the man with his conquests inked on his arms, and pointed to their desert predator, still biding its time. The man nodded and grinned, silently alerting the other two.
Jose gulped when he saw the barest edges of the creature’s silhouette against one of the safe house windows, overdeveloped trapezius muscles bunched like a catapult about to strike while bat-like ears as long as daggers twitched to the slightest of sounds.
“Ahora...” he whispered and all four men opened fire at once. Orange muzzle flashes seared into Jose’s retina, leaving after-images in the safe house’s wavering darkness. The beast howled and leapt and only for the briefest glimpses was he able to make out its body through the flashes.
Massive fangs extended from a slavering maw as if it were some bipedal python. Veined and translucent webbing covered the span of its armpits, backlit by the moon. Jose screamed when he saw burly Roberto’s head crushed in between the beast’s jaws, his screams and shakes an ignoble denouement to such a hard-lived man. Long rivulets of ruby streamed down his back, caressing Mother Mary with a fresh patina of red before his skull was cracked in half like an egg and the beast dropped him dead.
Jose shrieked when Carlos spasmed and his firing went out of control, spraying Xavier in the back with his submachine gun. Xavier’s tattooed head nodded forward as he stumbled, misfiring his weapon into the beast and lone ceiling light. The light exploded in a shower of sparks and darkness fell, Jose not seeing where Xavier dropped.
The two kept on firing randomly into the dark, blasting at every bit of shadow that didn’t bend with the moonlight. Silence ruled as they fumbled on reloading. Spent clips clattered on concrete and smoke coiled like gray snakes through the silvery light. Carlos reloaded first and spun from side to side as he showered everything in front of him with hot lead, uncaring of the additional boxes of ammo he set off, eliciting a chorus of ballistic ricochets.
A pained growl pierced through the darkness and Carlos screamed back in defiance. When Jose’s fumbling fingers finally slammed in a fresh clip, he looked up in time to behold the perfect image of terror. His brain became lost in a mad froth of dopamine and epinephrine, prolonging a glimpse into an enduring enthrallment where every detail was like a lash upon his soul.
Expended copper shells took on a golden glint in the muzzle flash as they flew through the air. Sanguine eyes narrowed in the darkness like dimming stars, windows into a terrible soul where each rage went indulged, every pain remembered. Above the hollow and gargoyle like formation of his sockets, furrowed a dark, hairless and leathery brow, overcome with triumph as it was with bloodlust. Beneath high boned cheeks descended great gleaming fangs, glistening and yellowed near the root, speckled with red and loose chunks of bone.
Jose fired in this moment of clarity, not caring that he hit Carlos’s shoulder. The beast was so fast there was only now. Bullets burrowed into rippling muscle matter like hot ticks, little and inconsequential nine millimeter holes upon the greater beast. The little blackish red rivers that flowed from its wounds were nothing before the crescent of crimson that rose into the air as the beast killed Carlos with one stroke.
Four deep, ruinous trenches ran along the cartel member’s ribs, up his chest and ended with a torn clavicle and a gaping throat. Jose kept firing as Carlos collapsed into a steaming pile, roaring into the blood soaked darkness until at last the staccato of his weapon was replaced with the click of his trigger.
He gasped and shook his weapon in silence for an interminable amount of time. Only now did he notice the hanging strands of drool from his chin and how painfully tight he held his weapon. The sound of groans and snapping sounded from the darkness. Whether it was the weak cries of impending death from Carlos or something else, he couldn’t tell.
But he could feel. As soon as his breath returned, his empty
gun was ripped from his hands as if he were a mere child, unruly and undeserving of his toy. Sharp, crippling pain bloomed along his upper neck and jaw as he was backhanded into a pile of boxes. He landed on his elbows, bloody and scraped, but not as much as his legs, which lay in the sticky pools of his cooling men.
Blood and a trickle of vomit seeped from his lips. The raw force of the brutal blow dissipated under layers of flesh that were never meant to absorb such shock. Any harder and his neck would have cracked and popped like an abused doll.
When the ringing cleared from his ears he noticed the deep and deliberate breaths of another right in front of him. They sounded man like. A lone flame ignited in the darkness, shining upon a shredded black t-shirt, soaked with blood and despoiling the alabaster skin tapestry beneath in splotches of red.
The flame rose higher still, revealing a face that looked a few weeks unshaven, sweaty with blood soaking the corners of the mouth and a complexion paler than any gringo he had seen before. He knew that pallor well and his insides curdled when he remembered where he had seen it last.
A corpse.
His funereal hue was unmistakable.
Jose sighed with relief when the man puffed out a cloud of smoke. The gesture lent just enough humanity to his terror for him to focus. And then fear even more. His future killer may have been inhuman, but he seemed human enough. Jose was well acquainted with the depths of human depravity to know they put to shame any torment that haunted his dreams.
That this stalker should have the visage of his nightmares and perhaps the soul of man made Jose regret that he did not save a bullet for himself.
The glow of the man’s cigarette hung as an orb of crumbling fire in the moonlight, his flaming red glare like bloody tiger eyes. “You boys made me earn this one, didn’t you? Thought I had you at Torreón, almost lost you when you ran into Carillo turf. Clever play with that one. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’” He took another drag and grinned. “I’ll tell you what, the enemy of your enemy is dead. Not that you gave a shit”
