“That’s not—”
“Oh it is. It is what you meant.” He met Victor’s eyes now. He could feel the anger inside his chest, like a demon seizing the controls. He was not losing control the way he did when he was high, but there were similarities. The anger was strong enough to convince him that, under the right circumstances, he would choke the life out of another human being, and this realization sobered him a little.
“Forget it,” Victor said, looking away. “You were right. I spoke out of line and I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”
Dante felt his anger receding, tucking itself back into the recesses of his mind where it would sleep until the next time it was provoked.
“Don’t worry, though,” Victor added. “He’ll be back.”
“Why do you say that?”
“When a stray kitten finds a saucer of milk on the porch, it returns for seconds.”
Not if you chase it away with a broom, Dante thought, but did not say.
Chapter 5: The Long Con
The little book was bound in leather and tied with a ribbon of the same. The pages were stained from the oil of Victor’s own fingers, some of them dog-eared as well—not from Victor marking them, but from the abuse the book had taken over its considerable life.
Victor remembered the words his father had said when he gave him the book: “This is the place for your most intimate secrets—the things you can’t share with anyone else.” Even as a child, he had sensed that his father was applying this phrase to him in particular, rather than to people in general, implying that Victor could not expect to ever find a person who could bear the weight of his “most intimate secrets.”
He had always been different that way. While the other kids were looking for ways to cheat on their tests or dreaming about how they would spend their summer, Victor had brought his schoolwork home with him and studied ahead. In college he’d opted for an accelerated degree, earning his bachelor’s in twenty-one months. It was the learning that fueled him—discovering the history of the world, the science of the universe, the principles of logic.
Victor untied the ribbon of leather and listened to the creak of paper as he opened the book. The fickle light of a gray dawn was dying on the window sill, and Victor was sitting at an old typewriter desk as he cradled a steaming cup of tea. He had been an inveterate coffee drinker, measuring his daily consumption by the gallon rather than the cup, but the brothers had run out of coffee years ago. Watered-down tea was the closest runner-up.
Years seemed to slip by with the turn of every page. Sections of narrative turned to dates and terse descriptions. Then, directly in the middle of the book, lay a list of six names:
BLITZ
LOKI
AJAX
RAZORBACK
KHAN
KENO
There were no further descriptions of any of the names, but the names alone were enough to conjure images in Victor’s mind. Even now, so many years later, he could remember their faces and voices.
Victor sipped his tea and stared at the page and let the memories flit by his mind’s eye, memories that only came to him in the night or in the early hours of the morning, memories he worked hard to shut out. Sometimes he would think of his mind as a switchboard and assign a switch to these memories, and when he was tired of their hounding he would flick that switch off and tell himself they had to go. Sometimes it worked. But other times those memories would just continue their carousel march, laughing at his attempts to set them aside, as if they originated from somewhere outside his mind.
His thoughts began to turn to the chores for the day. He had spent yesterday afternoon butchering the deer and smoking the meat. The wheat would be ready for harvesting soon, there were traps in the woods to check…
His mind returned to the buck hanging in the shed as he recalled his conversation with Walker. What was it about the way Walker had looked at him and Dante when they first met him? Why had he studied them so closely?
He closed the book and returned it to the bottom drawer of the desk. It was not a particularly good hiding place for something so important to him. Then again, it was usually just him and Dante in the cabin, and he could expect his own brother to respect his privacy, couldn’t he?
After finishing his tea, Victor dressed and slipped his Colt 1911 into his waistband. The Colt was an old friend who had saved his life more times than he could count, and the cold touch of its steel against his skin was like the kiss of a familiar lover. The grip was coffee brown, the barrel a smoky silver. He could have cleaned the weapon until it shined, but he preferred the weathered look it now possessed. It reminded him of how much they had been through together.
As he approached the stairs, he decided not to wake Dante. In an hour or two, he would be back and they could talk about their plans for the day. There was no need for Dante to even know he had left.
_____
Victor felt a familiar sense of excitement come over him as he drifted through the trees, pausing every few steps to study the woods around him. From the moment he’d met Walker, he’d known in his gut something was wrong about the man. Their meeting had been too spontaneous, too unlikely. Why had Walker been lurking at the edge of their property in the first place?
Because he was watching you.
This thought came like an arrow from the darkness. Victor turned it over in his mind as he crossed the wall and stole down the hill, passing near the place where the buck had breathed its last. He was not ready to dismiss this theory quite yet, but there were some inconsistencies to consider. If Walker had been watching them, why had he not been closer to the cabin? If he had known the brothers were gone, why not sneak into the cabin and take what he wanted while it was left unguarded?
Because he didn’t come to steal something from the cabin.
He liked this thought no better than the first. What had been Walker’s purpose? Had he come to spy on them for a larger group? Was that why he had been so easy to scare off, because he had already gathered the intelligence he needed?
Victor stopped in his tracks and looked back toward the cabin. He could no longer see it, but he knew just where it was, and he also knew Dante would be sleeping for another hour or two. Was he safe? Was Victor a fool to leave him?
He paused for several seconds, held by a rare hesitation. A cold wind stirred among the trees, bringing to mind last year’s winter and the snows that had surrounded the cabin, just like on that Christmas day years ago that he and Dante spent with their parents. He now wondered if that day had been a turning point, a watershed. Everything had changed since then. Yet no matter how often Victor tried to puzzle it out, in never made sense to him.
A chipmunk stole from one tree to another, and this movement brought Victor’s mind back into focus. I’ll just be gone for an hour, he told himself, and continued moving through the forest.
_____
All at once the trees broke and a broad plain of weeds stood before him, sprinkled with alder and poplar saplings. A pair of maple trees loomed above this expanse, lending shade to an old colonial farmhouse. The branches, once trimmed back, now raked against the side and roof of the house, like goblins trying to claw their way in during the night.
A short distance from the farmhouse, Victor could see a gleaming silo standing like a spaceship ready to fire into the earth’s atmosphere. Beside the silo perched a large barn, with one round window in the loft facing toward Victor.
Victor crouched down at the edge of the weeds. If anyone was watching through that barn window, they would see the weeds moving as he approached. The glare of sunlight made it impossible for him to see into the barn, so he wouldn’t even know if there was a shooter watching him through the scope of a rifle.
For the second time that day, Victor considered going back. Whether or not Walker’s story was true, someone else could be holed up in the barn or the farmhouse. They might have booby-trapped the area. Or there might be a dozen men communicating with radios, monitoring him
even now and waited to see whether he entered the trap.
Just up the road. There’s a cow farm, the one with a rooster…
Victor spotted the wind vane perched above one end of the barn. Yes, that much of Walker’s story checked out. But that only meant he knew something about the place. He might have seen the wind vane in passing, on his way to…
Victor still did not have a working theory as to why Walker would have lied to them. So why did he feel dead certain Walker had lied?
Remember the way he looked at you? he thought. Like he thought he had seen you before.
He entered the weeds, carefully parting them with his hands so they wouldn’t rustle more than necessary. He nearly walked right into the web of an orb-weaver spider. The creature’s abdomen had the colors of a bumblebee. As Victor watched, the spider twirled a grasshopper with its spiny legs, wrapping the grasshopper in a cocoon of silk. The grasshopper was hardly any smaller than the spider. Anywhere else, the grasshopper might simply have leapt away. But here, in its sticky web, the advantage went to the spider.
Victor detoured around the spider, leaving it to its meal. He pushed on without incident until he reached the front of the barn. He was mindful now of how long he had been gone, but he could not go back yet. First he needed to investigate. If Walker had been living here, there would be signs of life—empty cans or wrappers, animal skins, tracks through the weeds.
He pushed the sliding door open. As the light touched the floorboards, he caught a scent of something foul, like mold in a dark well.
“Walker?”
Hearing no answer, he stepped into the barn. He moved forward without giving his eyes time to adjust to the darkness, and as he did so his hair brushed an object above him. The object shifted, and as he reached up to feel what it was, it pushed gently against his hand. It was cool and hard. Victor grasped the object, moving his fingers along it, and felt—
A human toe.
He shoved the foot away and heard a rattling sound overhead. Something pattered in his hair. He reached for it and felt the tiny thing squirm between his fingers. It was small, fat, and pale, a maggot that had been nestled in some part of the skeleton until Victor disturbed it.
Victor stepped toward the wall and brushed vigorously at his hair, trying to keep his senses keen above the kicking rhythm of his heart. It was like some scare show at a carnival, only this cadaver was no more a fake than he was.
He waited for his breathing to calm and his eyes to adjust. Now he could see the outline of the corpse hanging there, suspended from the rafters high above. It was dressed in overalls, but the feet were bare, as if someone had decided they could make better use of whatever footwear it might have been wearing. (Walker was wearing a pair of torn sneakers, he thought.) A second skeleton, a woman in an evening dress, hung beside the first.
God above, Victor thought.
He made a brief search of the barn, taking no longer than necessary. After discovering no signs anyone had been there since the double suicide, he left the barn and crossed to the house.
He entered by the side door and found himself in a living room that could have been the setting for an 1800s TV show. Everything from the curtains to the bare joists overhead spoke of old-fashioned simplicity. Most importantly, however, everything appeared to have gone untouched for a while.
The floorboards creaked as Victor moved into the kitchen. He could hear the wind rattling the panes of the windows, hear the blood pulsing in his ears, hear the grains of sand falling through the hourglass…
So far he had discovered no indication Walker had been staying here, but what did that prove? That he was a drifter who had invented a story on the fly? How did that change anything?
No, Victor thought, there was more to it than that. He knew something. The way he looked at us…
The kitchen table was set for a feast. Half a dozen plates held the remains of a meal. There were turkey bones, bits of mashed potato, carrots, a saucer that smelled of gravy. It was as if a group of people had decided to enjoy Thanksgiving early. But how did they get all this food? And where were they now?
Victor drew the Colt from his waistband. A growing unease filled his chest as he followed the muddy bootprints that led to the front door, then along a beaten path to a fence. The area around the fence had been heavily trampled. A smell caught Victor’s attention, and he stooped over something on the ground.
Horse manure.
Chapter 6: En Passant
The wall of the castle stood a hundred feet tall, drawing up toward a sky that blazed in stunning flashes of lightning. Dante could hear the roll of thunder like a train taking speed as it comes around a corner—and maybe it was a train behind him, but he knew he simply had to climb that wall. Because somewhere, locked in one of the many rooms of that castle, lay a treasure of immeasurable value.
Dante took hold of the wall and began to climb. So great was his sense of purpose that nothing, not even the smoothness of the stones, could stop his ascent. Hand over hand, with the bright sky blinding his eyes, Dante rose higher along the dark wall until he could see the spires of the castle jutting upward like the spikes along a graveyard fence, and behind him…
There was that growl again, like thunder or the unbreakable momentum of a train. Beads of sweat gathered beneath Dante’s arms and rolled along his ribcage. He was climbing faster now, but still he seemed no closer to reaching the top of the wall.
The wind rose, whipping the water into a furious maelstrom. It was ocean below him, not land, and the wall was a seaward cliff barring him not just from the castle, but from everything beyond the castle.
Hand over hand, grip by grip, sweat rolling down his side, and that growling, like a hungry beast that has caught the scent of prey and cannot rest until it has sated its appetite. Dante knew he must either reach the top of the wall or fall to the creature that was lurking below him, splashing in the water, its tongue lolling in anticipation. But like a runner on a treadmill, the wall seemed to match him stride for stride, testing its will against his, calling his bluff. He could not climb. There was climbing and there was falling, and soon…
His hand slipped. His head turned, his eyes glancing downward as a flash of lightning lit the scene. There was the beast, coiled like a heap of intestines (Where had he seen that?), and then the creature began to spread its mouth wide, saliva snapping like steel cables between its bony jaws, and the darkness within that maw blotted the ocean below and the sky above and he could feel the warm breath of the monster against his face, and his hands…slipping…
Dante opened his eyes and rolled the blankets back. He hadn’t experienced such a vivid dream since his junkie days. Even now, as the dream was replaced by the familiar surroundings of his bedroom, he could still sense that vision haunting the sunken pools of his mind, lurking there until he lowered his guard again.
As he was dressing, he noticed the dampness of his clothes. He felt a sudden, lurching fear he had wet himself in his terror, but it was only the dampness of sweat. Terror wasn’t the right word, anyway. He had been afraid, sure, just like any other person who feels trapped in a nightmare. But it wasn’t really a nightmare, either. Nightmares were full of unpleasant experiences, and though the monster salivating below him had certainly fit the bill, there had also been something attractive in the dream, something magnetic.
Yes, that was the word. He had not been running from the monster so much as running toward the castle. Or climbing, to be exact. Because, even as the dream dissolved into jumbled fragments beneath the scrutiny of his waking mind, he knew the castle contained something so precious he had been seeking it all his life.
Dante pulled a gray hoodie over his t-shirt, slipped into his favorite pair of beat-up sneakers, and left the bedroom. As he reached the top of the stairs, he heard the clink of silverware and supposed Victor must have made breakfast. He confirmed this with the scent of venison, which came wafting up the stairs like a colored cloud in a child’s cartoon.
Nothin
g like steak for breakfast, he thought cheerfully.
Despite the dream, and despite his anger at how Victor had chased Walker off the day before, it felt like a good morning. He could forgive Victor for being overprotective. That’s all it was, after all—Victor’s need to maintain control, to eliminate other variables. When Dante doubted whose interests Victor was keeping at heart, he reminded himself where he would be right now if not for his brother.
An unidentified OD victim in some shabby apartment. Yeah, great ending.
Dante took a deep breath as he entered the kitchen. He intended to let Victor know there were no hard feelings about yesterday’s argument, that the important thing was they were brothers and must always have each others’ backs, no matter their disagreements. But as he turned his eyes to the table and saw the man sitting there with a fork in his hand, Dante realized this was going to be a different kind of conversation altogether.
“Walker?” he murmured as his jaw swung open like a poorly-hung door. His eyes traveled to the counter on which lay a venous piece of meat shaped almost like a massive canine tooth. Part of the organ now lay on Walker’s plate. It was the buck’s heart, and Walker was eating it raw.
Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1) Page 4
