The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  He turned around, saw the wrecked storefronts across from the diner. One of them would be the small shop where Katherine Taylor worked; it was the second place to clear in town. Krinkle called the shop the Candle Lodge. A sign with that name was half hanging above the gaping hole where the door and windows used to be. He walked over, looked through the doorway. Twenty-nine partisans had come in here to hide. The goons found them and cut them to shreds. All adults, none matching the image of Katherine Taylor.

  He walked into the shop, stepped over the dead, and checked the back rooms. A blond-haired woman lay on her stomach, her face turned to the wall. She’d been stabbed so many times, her limbs were barely connected to her torso. The blond hair popped hot on Harper’s timeline. He moved closer, knelt on one knee. He almost touched the body, then stopped. Even dead a human form was not to be touched by Harper’s kind without authorization from HQ. There was a smashed chair nearby. He picked up a chair leg and used it to pry the dead woman from the wall and roll her body onto its back. What was left of the woman’s face didn’t belong to Katherine Taylor. He dropped the chair leg and stood to leave. The woman’s dead eyes were watching him. He gave it ten seconds to make sure her soul was gone.

  “Aeternum vale.”

  He left the back room, walked out of the shop and onto the street.

  The oily mist was heavier now and settling over everything. He checked the clouds again, then it hit him: The climate control system within the time warp was failing, causing humidity to spike. Harper looked at the filth on the palm of his right hand. He touched it with his fingertips, smelled it.

  “Jesus wept.”

  The corruption of human flesh and blood was mixing with the humidity, then evaporating and rising as steam to the dome of the time warp. Up there, in the churning clouds, the steam coagulated and fell back to the ground as fetid mist. In Lausanne, forty-eight hours ago on the altar square, Inspector Gobet said this place would be like the ninth circle of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno for any living soul trapped inside. Harper looked over the killing ground, watched the mist settle on the corpses and body parts. So far everyone in this place was dead. Maybe that was a good thing, Harper thought. Then, question: If the enemy’s surprise attack went down just over forty-eight hours ago, why did the dead of Grover’s Mill look like they’d been lying in the street for weeks? Maybe the humidity is speeding decomposition, the dead soldier in Harper’s head offered.

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  The intersection ahead marked Elm Street. Krinkle told him there’d be a small park down Elm on the left side of the street. In the park, hidden behind a dogwood tree, was a path leading into the forest; thirty yards in was Angel’s Gate. Pass through and you’re one hundred fifty yards from Katherine Taylor’s house.

  Riiiinng.

  Harper dug the timer from his coat pocket. Reset it to fifteen.

  Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick . . .

  “Two down, two to go.”

  He dropped the thing back in his coat.

  He walked quickly, rounded the corner at Elm, saw the park ahead. He scanned the asphalt for any remains; none, but there was a coagulated blood smear coming from Main Street. It read someone had dragged a body around the corner. Didn’t make sense, he thought. Goons didn’t kill solo; they got off watching one another inflict suffering and death on the innocent. He followed the blood smear until it stopped. He saw a faint set of bloody boot prints on the asphalt. The prints continued down Elm Street and into the park. Harper crouched down for a closer look. The prints were made by a heavy-duty work boot with a neoprene sole. Then he saw the bloody imprint of a small wheel winding around and lining up with the boot prints. They looked recent.

  “Like someone was pushing . . .”

  He looked at the shop on the corner. BILL’S GARDEN AND HOME SUPPLIES, read the sign on the pockmarked wall. Like the other shops on Main Street the place was wrecked, but Harper could make out the merchandise that had been on offer. DIY home supplies, garden tools . . .

  “Wheelbarrows.”

  He looked back and saw the drag marks of the body coming from around the corner. The marks stopped where the wheel imprint began.

  “Someone was taking a body for a ride in a wheelbarrow.”

  He followed the boot prints into the park. They seemed to circle the brick walk a few times before finding the path into the forest. He walked to the edge of the brick walk, leaned around the dogwood, and saw the start of a dirt path leading into the forest. The boot prints and tire track went that way.

  He thought about it.

  After the attack, someone had carried a corpse from Grover’s Mill to Angel’s Gate. Questions: Who? Why? He reached inside his mackintosh, pulled his SIG Sauer from his kill kit, and loaded a round into the firing chamber. He raised the weapon, walked ahead. The path zigzagged now and again, but always moved deeper into the forest. He counted eighty-seven steps before he came to a clearing surrounded by tall evergreen trees. The path crossed the open ground, then returned to the forest, but not before passing through the lancet arch standing in the middle of the clearing. He didn’t know which was stranger, seeing something that looked like it belonged in an English garden instead of a forest in the Pacific Northwest, or the boot prints and tire track heading straight for it.

  Harper scanned the clearing with his SIG: no one. He walked toward the arch. It was made of very old limestone; the rise and span appeared big enough for someone pushing a wheelbarrow to pass through without ducking. Stepping closer Harper saw the path continue through the other side, but the boot prints and wheel track ended at the arch. He picked up a stone, tossed it through. The stone vanished midflight and the air between the stones wiggled. He walked up to the arch, reached out, and watched his gun disappear through the opening.

  “What will they bloody think of next?”

  He took a breath and passed through.

  He saw the boot prints and tire track in the dirt again. He looked over his shoulder and saw the arch, but the limestone thing was standing in a completely different part of the forest. He reached back to the opening, this time touching an invisible wall. He tapped the barrel of his gun against it. It was solid and rang like steel.

  “Definitely a one-way trip.”

  Then he felt it.

  The temperature this side had fallen twenty or more degrees and it was hard to breathe. He looked up. The dull gray clouds were still churning, but instead of mist falling down there was a powderlike ash. He grabbed the collar of his mackintosh and pulled it across his nose and mouth. He continued along the path to where it met a one-lane asphalt road with a heavy log across it. He panned the road with his SIG: no one, and not a sound except for the ash falling through the trees. Off the road, down in a ravine, the shattered hulk of a GMC truck lay on its side. Harper saw skid marks on the road swerving away from the log, then wide tire tracks in the dirt down to the ravine. He looked back down the road, from where the GMC would have been coming. Ten yards that way was a traffic sign:

  GROVER’S MILL 9.5 MILES AHEAD

  DROP IN AND SAY HOWDY!

  Harper holstered his SIG and climbed down into the ravine. He got to the truck’s undercarriage, saw the slash marks of killing knives, saw them rise over the frame where goons swarmed over it. He circled around, saw the open hatch into the trunk: no one, but the interior roof was splashed with blackish blood and brain tissue. Signs read a goon had taken a head shot inside the truck. Coming around to the roof he saw the truck’s exterior had sustained blast damage. Nothing like the bombs in town, more like a series of light explosives; hand grenades all gone off at once, most probably. Harper looked back to the road, imagined the scene. Whoever was in the truck had come from the town and been forced off the road. The passengers were surrounded, no hope. Somebody waited for the goons to attack and set off the grenades to take them down. Question: diversion, suicide . . .

  “Or both?”

  Harper leaned over the roof, looked inside the truck. The dashboard
was loaded with technical kit and empty weapons mounts, the kind that read Swiss Guard tactical squad. Front seats were smeared with human blood; the smears read one or both passengers up front had been severely wounded before the blast. He looked in the backseat. No one and no blood. He saw something on the floor between the front and rear seats. Harper hauled himself up. He leaned into the truck, got hold of a piece of hard plastic, and pulled it out. He felt a cold shudder seeing the thing in his hand. It was a child’s car seat.

  “Mother and child were here. They survived the attack in town.”

  He scanned the ground around the truck, saw a trail of human blood and two sets of ash-covered footprints heading into the forest. He dropped the car seat, jumped from the truck, and hurried to the footprints. He knelt down, blew away the ash. The prints were weeks old, older than the boot prints he’d followed from town, and there were two sets here: one set of trainers, one set of boots. But these boots bore a different tread and size than the prints coming through Angel’s Gate. Depth and angle of impact read both sets of prints were made by people on the run; sizes read two women. Katherine Taylor and Officer Jannsen, one of them carrying Max, Harper thought. Had to be. One of the women was bleeding badly. He flashed the blood in the front seat of the GMC. The Swiss Guard would ride up there, meaning Officer Jannsen was the wounded one. She’d taken a bad hit; she was bleeding out. He looked ahead, his eyes following the prints.

  “And she was trying to get mother and child to the bunker.”

  He walked quickly, his heart pounding in his chest. Forty yards on he rounded a bend and stopped cold at the sight before him. Just off the path, under a tall evergreen tree, two wooden crosses stood atop two fresh graves.

  ii

  The wind swelled and stirred the ash. She straightened up, listened for the cracking sound. It did not come this time.

  “No fear, Kat.”

  She planted the shovel in the dirt. She pulled the PVC-coated gardening gloves from her hands and dropped them to the ground. She pulled the black scarf from her face and wiped ash from her eyes. She reached in her black wool cloak, found a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. She opened it, dipped her finger in the ointment. She smeared the menthol-scented stuff above her upper lip, just under her nostrils. She closed the jar, put it back in her cloak. She retied the scarf around her hair and face, leaving only her eyes exposed to the world. She reached down for the gloves and slipped them on. She grabbed the shovel and continued to fill the hole in the ground. She’d lost sight of the body a while ago, but six feet deep by one foot wide was a lot of hole to fill. Scoop and dump, scoop and dump, until a small mound of dirt equal to the mass of the buried body rose above ground level. She pounded the mound with the back of her shovel one hundred times, shaping it, forming it into something dignified. She coiled the rope she had used to lower the body into the grave and tossed it over her shoulder. She picked up the shovel, walked to the wheelbarrow. She laid the shovel across the pickax and draped the rope over the handles of the wheelbarrow. Next to the pickax was a wooden cross. She stared at it, thinking she had become much better in making them. They weren’t much; just one piece of two-by-four nailed to another. But at three feet high and two feet across, the proportions were reverently crosslike. She dug through the rest of the tools and found the club hammer.

  “Let’s get it done.”

  She grabbed the cross with her right hand, the hammer with her left, and she walked back to the grave and laid the things on the ground. Nearby was a jug of Violette’s Garden tea and four square-shaped stones. She picked up the jug and opened it. She pulled the scarf from her mouth and drank. It was the same routine each time. Dig down into the earth, hollow out a grave, lower a mutilated body into the ground, and bury it while drinking a jug of tea. One more swallow and she knelt down. She rested the jug on the ground, then arranged the hammer and the cross and the four stones as she always did. This act, too, was part of the routine. It wasn’t an act of madness; it was an act she performed each time to prove she wasn’t mad. Nothing random these days; everything organized. When all things were as they should be she pulled the permanent marker from the back pocket of her blue jeans and uncapped it. She wrote slowly along the arms of the cross.

  Unknown Swiss Guard #30

  She capped the pen and returned it to her pocket. She balanced the foot of the cross on the mound, grabbed the hammer, then, with four solid strikes, she anchored the cross into the grave. She lifted the stones one by one and set them around the cross. She pounded them into the dirt to brace the cross so it wouldn’t blow over in the night’s howling winds. When the stones were set, she laid the hammer on the ground. It was a good grave, she thought. She picked up the jug, got up, and faced the cross. She pulled the scarf from her face. She drank some tea to clear her throat.

  “Here’s where I make a speech. I try to say something different each time, but it always comes out the same, more or less. I don’t know your name. I’m not even sure which one you are because there wasn’t much left of your face. You’re the thirty-third body I’ve buried and number twenty-nine of the unknowns. I’m sorry you’re lying sideways instead of on your back. See, Anne was the first one I buried. I got the depth and length right, but the width was too narrow. When I lowered her down I couldn’t get her on her back. Then I remembered Anne liked to sleep on her side. At least she was always on her side when I peeked in her room to watch her sleep. And as she was Swiss Guard and you guys were Swiss Guard, and the people in town were all working for you, I put you all on your sides, thinking you all might sleep better.

  “After Anne, I buried the two guards I found at the top of the stairs leaving the bunker. There was one more in the control room and twenty-six in the yard. That’s a whole other story. See, they were covered by bad shadows and cocoons for a while. When I saw it happen I ran the fuck away because I’d seen it before at Lausanne Cathedral. That’s where Marc Rochat and . . . Sorry, you probably know all that stuff, don’t you? Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean I have to bore you to tears.

  “Please don’t think me flippant. But I’m trying to hold on, see. And talking through what happened with each of you, each time . . . well, it helps. Each time I remember something else.”

  She took a long swig from the jug.

  “I’ve been drinking my teas again, and they help, too. Though it’s weird to be drinking this particular tea at the moment. It’s called Violette’s Garden. It’s for the remembrance of pleasant memories. I haven’t had any yet, but that’s what it says on the jar back in the bunker. It’s what I’m supposed to drink in the afternoons, so I do. Even as I dig graves. I suppose the fact I haven’t jumped in with one of you and pulled the dirt down on top of me means the teas are working. But I have been tempted, you know? Jump in, pull the dirt down onto both me and the dead one just to end it. But I can’t. There are still so many to bury. That’s why I keep up with the teas.

  “I always figure each of you wants to know what happened. Whether you died for something worthwhile or if it was in vain. You deserve to be told. It just takes me some time to get there so, please, bear with me.”

  She looked up to the tops of the trees. They were beginning that weird swirling motion. The winds were beginning, and the shade of gray in the clouds said she had another hour of daylight.

  “As far as I can tell, after the bad shit happened, I stayed down in the bunker for a couple days. I think it was a couple days. There are no clocks or calendars here, none that work, anyway. I keep track the best I can and all I know for sure is it’s been a while since I lost my son and Anne, and Molly and Lieutenant Worf, and the rest of you. But after however long it was, I decided I needed to bury Anne. See, drinking the teas helped me remember who she was. And I remembered I loved her. Did you know that? Did you know she loved me? No, I suppose not.

  “Anyways, I dragged her up the stairs into the backyard to bury her. That’s when I saw the other guys weren’t wrapped up by bad shadows and cocoons anymore. They we
re just bodies on the ground. But that’s a whole other story, too. I mean, before the house was burning nonstop, but it never burned down, and Jesus, it was so fucking weird. But getting up top with Anne’s body, the house was just a massive pile of steaming ash. Then these howling winds came and blew the ash into the sky. At first the winds only came at night, now they come earlier in the day. And sometimes there’s this cracking sound. First time I heard it I thought it was thunder. Now I can’t tell. It just sounds like the world is breaking apart. Anne told me the truth about this place on the last day, when we were trying to get back to the house after the bombs in town. I remember her telling me we were locked inside . . . a time warp, she said.

  “Jesus, I sound like a lunatic again. Stay with me, I’ll get to what I want to say. Each time I bury one of you, I start free-forming it. Each time I find myself saying something more than planned. It’s like talking to you guys is helping me. Like you’re still protecting me. Burying you is the least I can do to repay you.”

  There was a swell of wind, and she lifted her arm to protect her face from the ash. Sometimes it felt like it wasn’t just blowing by her, but nipping and biting at her. When the wind calmed she lowered her arm.

  “Anyway, I needed tools to bury all of you. I couldn’t find anything at the house so I walked back to town. I made the same walk with Anne lots of times. First time was right after I realized I was pregnant. That was the day I first met Molly at the diner. I was thinking of getting an abortion. Anne said I could if I chose to. But sitting with Anne that day in the diner, she told me I was carrying a boy and something happened. I wanted him to be born, and I wanted to protect him from harm. With Anne, with you guys, I thought I could be tough enough. You guys taught me how to shoot, and all that Krav Maga stuff. But I wasn’t tough enough to protect him.”