In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  God knew what they ever thought it could be used for. Unless you wanted to end mankind, of course. For that it was the perfect agent of change.

  10) Insane People Should Not Be Allowed To Work With Contagious Bioweapons. He stuffed his last envelope, then opened his mouth and gave his tongue a spritz. Yummy. He decided his last rule needed no elaboration. It was self evident.

  Walter filled a nylon duffel bag with his envelopes, hung it over his shoulder, grabbed his coat and shut off the lights in the lab as he had promised. It was only Thursday, with two more mail service days before the holiday. The people in charge wouldn’t find the murdered corporal for hours, and wouldn’t find Walter for days. By then he would have visited four mailboxes and three different post offices, and PV would be well on its way to spreading its holiday cheer.

  At the main doors, bright desert sunlight streamed into the facility lobby. The Army sergeant at the watch desk looked him over, then gestured for Walter’s bag to be placed on a nearby table. He unzipped it, and began pawing through the envelopes.

  “What’s all this?”

  “My holiday newsletter. I’m late getting it out.” He gave what he hoped would look like a sheepish grin. “I used some of Uncle Sam’s time to get them ready to mail.” The sergeant raised an eyebrow, still sifting through the envelopes, and covering himself, the table, the lobby of the lab building with Poveglia V particles. Within an hour, the forty-nine people still working in the building would be infected, and they would bring it home to their families, their neighborhood grocery stores and gas stations, restaurants and holiday parties. About half would be flying to other parts of the country for the long weekend, and not one of them would notice a thing until Christmas.

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant,” Walter said. “All the envelopes and paper are mine. I didn’t take any government property for personal use.”

  The sergeant zipped up the bag and pushed it back to Walter. “Merry Christmas.”

  Walter walked out, and looked back through the glass doors. He threw the sergeant a wave and a smile. “Fuck you very much.”

  KING OF THE MONSTER HOUSE

  It was a small place, neat and tidy, simple and empty. Except for Carla, who sat alone in her kitchen with only the light over the stove to chase away the night. On the table in front of her sat a birthday cake with eighteen lit candles. Beside it in a 5x7 silver frame was a photo of a seven-year-old girl with dark hair, a school picture. In it, the girl was smiling without her front teeth.

  “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” Carla said to the picture. “Eighteen. A real milestone.” Carla raised a glass of vodka to the cake and took a long swallow, her last remaining vice. She’d kicked smoking, wrestled through a tough patch with sleeping pills and come out the other side, and was eating right and keeping fit. July twenty-third was the only day she drank, and always alone.

  “We’d be getting you ready for college, baby.” She smiled and tipped the glass again. “You’d be excited and nervous, I’d be happy for you but so sad inside, not wanting you to go. I’d try to keep up the smile but you’d know how I was feeling, wouldn’t you?” It was now nearly impossible to see her daughter’s face when she closed her eyes. She needed photos to remind her.

  Anita stopped having birthdays just after she turned seven, but that hadn’t stopped Carla from celebrating them. She sat and looked at the vacant chair across from her, wishing she could see her, even just a glimpse, a smile, a reassurance for mommy that she was happy in Heaven.

  “I’d be so proud of you, off to become a doctor, a professor, maybe a business executive…maybe a…” Carla started crying then, softly at first and then building into great wracking sobs, squeezing her eyes tightly against the tears which fell onto the tablecloth, clenching her fists until her nails dug moons in her palms. She gasped for an endless breath, then let out a long, rising and falling moan, rocking back and forth, red eyes staring at the ceiling as if searching for an answer to the unanswerable. There was only the empty kitchen.

  She snatched the vodka glass off the table and hurled it at the refrigerator with a snarl, exploding it, her clenched teeth bared. “Why?” she screamed. “Why? Why her, you fuck?” At first Carla wasn’t sure which sadist she meant, but decided she was screaming at God. He chose not to respond, so she began drinking from the bottle, staring at the picture as her sobbing turned to a dull ache in her chest, getting quietly drunk. Just before she passed out, she thought she heard the mobile of ceramic hummingbirds over the kitchen sink tinkle softly, could swear she felt the soft touch of a little hand on her back. And then there was the sweet oblivion of nothingness.

  In the morning, Carla took a shower and scrubbed the bitterness from her mouth, did her usual five mile run, showered again and got ready for work. On the drive in, she stopped for coffee and spent the rest of her ride thinking about Kelvin Finch.

  Deacon Valley Correctional Facility sat in the northeast corner of the state, surrounded by miles of flat, open prairie. Both the prison marksmen and the inmates behind the wire referred to that open space as the killing fields, for there was no place to hide from and no way to outrun a bullet fired from a tower. Deacon Valley, or simply DV, was made up of the administrative wing, engineering and motor pool areas, and the main building itself, broken into ten structures home to dining and kitchen facilities, recreation rooms, a small medical center, and housing for the inmates themselves. They were numbered DV-1, DV-2, DV-3 and so on.

  No one thought it was a coincidence that the Protective Custody unit segregating the violent sex offenders from the rest of the population was numbered DV-8. Administration and official documents called it PC. The inmates and COs at Deacon Valley called it the Monster House.

  Twenty-eight men were housed in two tiers of fourteen, single occupant cells against one wall, the upper level reached by a catwalk with a stairway at both ends. The common area, filled with metal tables and benches cemented to the floor, sat in front of the cells, and a shower area was off to the left. It looked like every other corrections housing unit built since the 90’s, each cell door secured by a steel, motorized rolling door with a reinforced glass window and a food slot with a locking hatch. The only way in or out of the block was through the Bubble, an octagonal control point of armored glass and steel with a separate airlock-style passageway for people to move in and out. The Bubble was staffed 24/7 by a pair of corrections officers who controlled the locks and movement of each cell door, as well as the access passage. Officers only went onto the block when it was time to serve meals, and they never left the Bubble unmanned.

  In many prisons, this area would have been called the SHU, for special housing unit. Deacon Valley did indeed have a SHU, but it was elsewhere, and much larger. Those cells had back doors which opened into small, individual, heavily fenced exercise yards where the inmate occupants were allowed to go for one hour a day. They were locked down the other twenty-three. Inmates in the SHU were the most violent, and posed the greatest threat to staff.

  Also in many prisons, sex offenders found themselves housed in general population, where they had a hard time of it, enduring physical and sexual assault, enslavement to other inmates, and living a life of paranoia and fear, never knowing from which direction the next attack would come. They were the absolute lowest life form on the prison food chain.

  Deacon Valley was a little different. The garden variety sex offenders and rapists were still housed in GenPop, and their existences were no different from others like themselves around the country. But the State of Oklahoma decided that the most violent sexual predators would be housed together in the PC. This wasn’t any acknowledgement that they were special, and most posed no risk to staff. The state, however, knew these men were the most reviled, and the most at risk of being murdered by other inmates. Such instances meant weighty investigations and second-guessing by review boards, politicians and the media, all of which interfered with the smooth day-to-day of the facility. And so they were kept in the Monster House t
o keep them alive, the worst of the rotten eggs in one basket.

  In DV-8, the ground level cell on the far left was where the King lived.

  Because of what he had done, he couldn’t have survived on any other block, and while the inmates in PC might have been hated, the King was despised above all others. Yet here within the Monster House, he was a celebrity. Several years ago, TRU TV had done a ten minute piece on his exploits and included it in an American Predators episode. When HBO announced its intention to put together a full hour documentary on him, titled “King of the Monster House,” Kelvin Finch was elevated to the status of rock star.

  King Finch VIII, eight for the number of his victims. Or at least that was how many he’d confessed to. Investigators across five states suspected there were many more, but Kelvin wasn’t talking. Everyone believed he was holding back information which he intended to parlay for future attention once his fame started to dim. He certainly had time in which to play his games. Initially facing lethal injection, Finch’s lawyer negotiated life without the possibility of parole in exchange for his client leading them to the remains of his seven previous victims, and providing full disclosure of the details of each case. The opportunity to close out so many disappearances and bring a measure of peace to so many family members was impossible to pass up, and so Kelvin Finch bought himself a lifetime, after ending so many others.

  Right now the King was out of his cell and sitting at one of the tables playing chess with another inmate, using a soft felt game board and plastic pieces. Across from him was a heavyset black man named Linus James, doing twenty-five-to-life for abducting a fourteen-year-old runaway and sodomizing her for four days in a hotel room before smothering her with a pillow. Pretending to play chess – a game Linus neither understood nor cared about – the inmate gave a casual look around, and then carefully passed a dog-eared wallet photo under the table to the King. It was a picture of a girl at a birthday party.

  “Like we agreed,” Linus said softly.

  The King glanced down at the picture before tucking it away. He smiled, revealing a missing front tooth, his lips still yellowish purple from the bruise. Several weeks ago, a rookie CO named Granger had been assigned to the Monster House, and made the mistake of talking with another officer about his six-year-old daughter Katie, with Kelvin Finch close enough to hear it. For weeks Finch took every opportunity to whisper vile comments about what he wanted to do to Katie when only Granger could hear. The rookie acted like a professional, writing Finch up repeatedly and ensuring his privileges were revoked as long as was permitted. Finch kept at it, each softly spoken remark more twisted than the last, and it began to wear at the young man. Finally, one afternoon when the inmates were lined up at the rolling food service carts, Finch whispered to Granger the specifics of how he would murder Katie and what he would then do with the body. Granger snapped, turned on him and punched Finch in the face, knocking him down, knocking him out, and knocking out a tooth.

  Granger lost his job.

  Finch filed criminal charges, and the prison scheduled him for a dental implant.

  Finch’s lawyer hastily drew up the lawsuit.

  Everyone knew Granger had been provoked, but the assault was witnessed by thirty people, and there was no way around that. Although threats were made by the administration to shut down HBO’s access and interviews, Finch’s lawyer suggested that it would most certainly be construed by a civil jury – as well as the media – as retaliation and abuse of power, not to mention a possible violation of First Amendment rights. Reluctantly, the administration withdrew its threat, and the special was still a go, much to the King’s delight.

  Linus nodded to Finch. “Talk to me.” The deal was a picture of Linus James’s young niece in exchange for Finch’s detailed telling of his fourth abduction and murder, a grade school girl in Kansas City named Lilly Barnes.

  The King smirked. “It’s all about the preparation, my friend,” and went into his tale. When he was done, Linus James was sweating and wanting to spend some time alone in his cell.

  “You one sick motherfucker, King.”

  “Better believe it, son.”

  Carla kept her life simple. It was the best way she’d found to hold it together. She kept to routines; grocery shopping at the same store, the same day of the week; oil change for her Nissan on the 3rd of every month; apartment cleaned room by room in the same order; closets neat and organized, with hangers one finger’s width apart; running every day, regardless of the weather. Some would have labeled her behavior OCD, but that just wasn’t so. It was how she pushed back the images which wouldn’t fade, the grief which chewed at her soul day after day.

  At first, though, there was nothing but helplessness, a raging sadness which threatened to sweep her away in a storm of bitter anguish, a great hollow left in her heart which she knew would never be filled. Her doctor, with the best of intentions, prescribed sleeping pills, and although she had the temptation to simply swallow the bottle and chase it with vodka, she resisted, and got hooked instead. It led to four months of barely leaving her bed, and shuffling like a confused zombie when she did. Yet something – she liked to think it was Anita – talked her back into the world, and she kicked the pills.

  Her marriage wasn’t so successful, and within six months of Anita’s death – the discovery of her remains, actually – she and Emilio were finished. The counselor Carla was seeing in order to deal with it all was compassionate, and gently told her that divorce was extremely common within a year of losing a child, under any circumstances. There was simply too much guilt, blame and second-guessing of one another that few could survive it with an intact relationship. The counselor went on to say that parents with other, surviving children fared better at staying together, statistically anyway, and in some cases because they threw new energy into their other kids, the death sparking a renewed appreciation for their family, and one another. This was rare, she pointed out. Frequently the grieving parents became so wrapped up in the loss and feeding off one another that it was the surviving children who suffered, moving through the house and their lives like ghosts, unnoticed and forgotten by their mothers and fathers, often ending up resentful towards the lost sibling who had not only died, but taken their parents with her.

  Anita was an only child, so there had never really been much of a chance for their marriage.

  Carla stayed in the house for another year, quietly losing touch with her family and friends. She’d lost her job months earlier when her supervisors, although sympathetic, could no longer tolerate her long absences. Once her savings ran out, it was time to find new employment, but she had no desire to return to the retail jobs she’d held her whole life. All that time alone, all the thinking, eventually convinced her that a complete change of life was in order, including a career which could mean something. She landed a job which required a move, and had no regrets as she left behind a town she had come to despise, a house where happy memories turned black, a tomb which she haunted all by herself.

  Kelvin Finch was fifty-three, and had been incarcerated at Deacon Valley for nearly ten years. He’d taken the first of his eight victims almost twenty years earlier, and the idea they had about him that he had suddenly decided at age thirty-three to abduct, sexually torture and murder young girls was laughable. They were supposed to be so smart, these clinicians and psychologists and profilers. The cops were a different story, suspicious to the bone and not believing it for a second. Eight indeed. Kelvin’s real number was nineteen.

  He’d been twelve when he took the first one, a six year old in a city park who’d wandered away from a babysitter. Kelvin had been fantasizing about this for as long as he could remember, and that afternoon he’d seen his chance and lured her into a cinderblock restroom building. When he was finished, he’d held her face in a toilet until she drowned, then slipped out and ran home. No one ever suspected him.

  The following ten were spread out over the next twenty years, both in his home town and then out of st
ate once he was older. Some he left where he’d killed them, but most were deeply buried, and he became very skilled at not only hunting, but avoiding leaving behind evidence and artfully disposing of the bodies where no one would ever find them. What was significant about the eight was that was the time when he’d started sending letters and photos to the families.

  Kelvin was a very intelligent man, and he knew why he’d done that. Some of it came from a need for attention. The bigger reason, he knew, was that after so many he’d begun to grow bored with the actual acts themselves. Taunting the families gave him a thrill he hadn’t felt in a long time. It aroused him to imagine the expressions and reactions of the parents when they opened the anonymous letters and read his calm description of what he had done, along with an admonishment that, had mommy or daddy kept a better eye on their little angel, none of this would have happened. Sometimes the photo was an action shot, or a carefully-crafted scene involving restraints. The panicked eyes were key in those. Sometimes he led the parents to believe their daughter was still alive. A few times he sent them a picture of the child crumpled in their grave hole, about to be filled in.