Perish, p.18
Perish, page 18
“Don’t.” One word. Nothing more.
I withheld my comment.
His gaze released me, and he glanced at his phone. “Time to go downstairs. Jasper should have returned by now.”
He shut off the light and stopped me in the doorway. “Alex will come to the house.”
“Yes.”
“And he will bring one of these boxes inside.”
“Yes.”
“And we must kill him before he opens it.”
I nodded.
“Jack,” he tapped my face kindly, “we will kill him before he opens it.” With that, he walked out of the room. Tentatively, I followed him downstairs.
Jasper wore a long brown coat, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, likely filled with his own weapons, headset, and wires. The silver in his salt-and-pepper hair glinted. He nodded to the others as he entered the room.
For the next hour and a half, they reviewed the plan repeatedly. I glanced again at the missed messages from Patrick on my phone. Oddly, he had never complained about his father; he had kept up the pretense as Flannigan preferred. I doubted that the first time Flannigan had hit his son was in 1C, with me standing there. It did not escape me that people like Patrick, born and bred in hard circumstances, seek similar people. I wondered if that was why he was comfortable with me.
Violence observed is violence forcibly adored. Trauma repeats. That’s how it works. I wondered what patterns I repeated.
Was I building another cult?
I shivered. If we survived the night, I would leave Roth and his men behind.
If we survived the night.
At exactly six in the evening, Roth, Jasper, and I left the house, proceeded to the end of the concrete walkway, and waited beside the curb. The darkening sky had not entirely lost its blue, and the energy of the land seemed dim and distraught. The grass was yellow, and the leaves had already dropped and darkened. Moisture scented the air, not like dew and not like rain, as though a storm hovered very close and would just graze us.
Roth’s dark eyes scanned both directions, and he nodded to me.
I exhaled and approached the side of the curb, keeping an eye on the white to see if it would turn red when I got too close. To my relief, it remained colorless. My hand reached above the tiny pebbles and glistening trails of snails. I let the spring inside me unwind, and as it uncoiled, the delicious energy that was already humming inside my body exploded and eagerly passed from my center to my fingers. It landed on the address label, and the numbers shifted red.
A movement at the front of the house caught my eye.
Not only the numbers on the curb turned red. So had the front door.
“Damn,” Jasper said.
Roth looked at him, and they exchanged something unspoken. It seemed they were noting my power and its usefulness in a refreshed way; that they needed to take full advantage of it, of me. But one huge impediment remained: the box in 1C.
“We end this tonight. We have better things to do,” Roth said.
Jasper assented. I rose, and Roth placed his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He kept his hand there until we reentered the house.
When we stepped inside and shut the door, the room quieted with renewed energy. Roth said to me, “You stay away from the windows when they arrive. If you see one of us go down, bring him back, but otherwise, we’ll take care of it.”
“You’ll take care of it?” I nearly laughed. They still did not quite understand what they were getting into, despite my warnings. “All right.”
He shook his head dismissively before he led the majority of the group out the back door. Four remained in the living room, and they switched their electric wires on. Their fiery false veins glowed, visible from the road in the twilight.
About fifteen minutes passed before Roth said, “There are several cars driving up.” We heard his words through our headsets, but because I stood close, I sensed the urgency and focus of his voice. “Five in all. There may be more than we expected.”
I crept to the window and peered out. Three cars, two SUVs, and one van appeared on the street.
All five of the vehicles shut off in succession and waited in the road. I stopped breathing as I searched the vehicles, wondering if my brother sat in them.
Roth shifted the gun at his side, and metal clicked. His lights were not illuminated, and I reached to the button at his wrist and pressed. The orange spread across his hands and up his neck.
Another man shifted his toe, and a floorboard creaked.
“When they leave the vehicles,” he said, “remember—five yards from the house. No farther. No closer.”
Every person in the room, and every man outside, held his breath. I could feel it. It was like a deep freeze.
A man in the third vehicle opened his door and stepped to the back. He opened the passenger door, and a man wearing a pin-striped suit exited. His dark hair, flat face, and pointed chin immediately invoked his name.
“Flannigan,” I whispered. “What is he doing here?” I assumed he simply funded Alex, not actively pursued what the box might yield. Which party in the agreement had given in? Had Flannigan been forced to take part by Alex, or had he wormed his way into a situation he couldn’t possibly understand?
Roth spoke flatly into his mouthpiece. “Wait.”
Patrick’s father buttoned his jacket and smoothed his hair back. He looked toward the house, seeming to notice the red door and the tiny stripes of orange glowing through the windows.
“He sees us,” Roth said, as though reassuring the others.
Flannigan retrieved a cell phone from his pocket and made a call. He paced back and forth beside the car, nodding and toeing the rocks and dirt.
When he slipped the phone back into his pocket, Flannigan gestured with his hand, and men began opening vehicle doors. This group reminded me of the Outfit. They were uniformly dressed and obviously disciplined.
“Wait,” Roth repeated.
After the SUV trunks opened, two men proceeded to hand weapons to the others. They appeared to be as well-armed as Roth’s group. They turned toward the house and crossed the yard to the walkway. Roth aimed his M4 more precisely.
“On the count of three,” he said. “One.”
Flannigan remained at the cars. He folded his arms and leaned back against the hood. The other fifteen or so fanned out, in no hurry at all, and surrounded the house. It would only be a few moments before they reached the backyard. There, they would find six individuals waiting for them.
“Two.”
Seven men stood in the yard in a small semi-circle. They gazed into the windows. I stole one more look before I pulled back and covered my ears.
“Three.”
The four men in the living room fired their rifles twice in the space of a second, shooting out the glass of the windows and killing those on the lawn.
From the backyard came the rapid reports as several automatic weapons fired.
No long and tiresome shootout commenced. The process ended in the span of a few seconds.
Roth opened the front door. He and Jasper left the house and shot three more people on their way out. Flannigan dashed into one of the cars and started the engine.
Asher grabbed a shotgun from the mantle and ran out of the door. He called to Roth and threw him the weapon. Halfway across the lawn, Roth turned and caught the twelve-gauge expertly. Just as Flannigan pulled out, Roth shot the car engine twice. The engine died, and the car rolled back into the SUV behind it with a crunch. Roth walked up to the car window and pumped two more rounds. Blood and glass exploded.
Patrick’s father died. Staring at the car, unable to see inside, I felt strange, conflicted even, not knowing if this had destroyed Patrick or released him from an oppressor.
“All clear,” Roth said.
Three more all clears arrived in my earpiece. Shaking away my thoughts about Flannigan, I walked out to the front lawn, my boots crunching through the dead grass, and stared at the blood splashed across the yard. The Outfit’s men at the back of the house walked to the front.
“How many bodies?” Jasper asked.
“Sixteen total,” Asher answered.
“Are any of them Alex?” Roth asked.
Three more voices called, “No.”
I waited beside Roth as his men dragged the corpses to the center of the yard. “Jack, do you see him? Look closely.”
I didn’t need to look at their faces. I had already seen them. None of them were Alex. Nevertheless, I searched each body, checking for anyone from my past.
“Seemed to me they were waiting for someone else to arrive,” I said as they dragged over more bodies for me to observe. None of them were familiar.
“Yes,” Roth said. “We’ll prepare for a second round.”
After they laid out all fifteen bodies, I confirmed I knew none of them. The men carried them into the house.
Roth approached the third vehicle and pulled Flannigan’s body out. His face was unrecognizable. Nausea filled me.
Jasper followed and climbed into the car; five other men surrounded it and began pushing it to the back of the house. Roth carried Flannigan’s body inside.
A sick feeling flooded my stomach, a sensation of uncertainty, and I thought of Patrick as Roth and his cargo passed by.
Roth’s men inside twinkled through the windows with the fluorescing orange delineations. I retrieved the gold cigarette case from my inside jacket pocket and plucked one out. A large C carved itself into the front of the case, and I slipped my thumb across it, frowned, and returned it to my pocket. I placed the cigarette in my mouth and lit it, inhaling deeply.
I looked up the hill. It rose high above the house. Tall trees speckled the land. Except for an occasional brush of wind, the area remained quiet. The air turned cold, the sky almost completely dark, and I didn’t expect the sounds of birds or dogs or people, but the silence struck me nevertheless—heart-stopping almost, like the moisture in the air.
Up in the trees, the figure of a man appeared.
I cocked my head, the cigarette planted firmly between my lips, and I bit down reflexively, cutting the filter in two.
Moonlight began to cover the land, and it illuminated a tiny section of yellow-blond hair among the trees. My heart leaped, and I almost cried out, “You!” But I kept quiet. He did not seem to notice me.
Thirty feet from the house, I glanced through its windows, realizing that the man on the hill witnessed what I saw—a house apparently full of ferrics. There was no knowing how long Alex had been standing there, what he had heard or witnessed.
I moved past the perimeter of the yard and gazed up the hill.
The figure also moved. He bent low, hunkered down. I whispered into my mouthpiece, “There’s someone on the hill behind the house.”
Every glowing movement in front of the windows stopped.
“Get inside,” Roth instructed. Trying to avoid attention, I began to creep ahead. Then I stopped. Something strange happened on the hill.
A tiny waterfall dropped from the figure, painting a line through the landscape. The flow became violent, no longer clear, but churning white and gray. The waterfall expanded, widened, stretched, finally colliding with the ground about fifty feet down before it bounded up again. Sections appeared more like powder than water. The flow tossed whirring grains into the air, coating everything. Powder, though, is light and loose. This was solid and eerily silent.
In just a few seconds, the substance splashed against the house and exploded twenty feet skyward. The blue trim went white, as did the grass and nearby trees.
“Impossible,” I muttered. The cigarette dropped from my mouth. This box worked outside.
“Run!” I screamed.
CHAPTER 26:
PROOF
As I turned, Roth and several others leaped from the porch.
I raced at a diagonal angle, hoping to veer from the white liquid trail. Behind me, it expanded its path, quickly approaching. The house and Roth’s men were no longer visible. Everything suffocated in the soft, thick false snow.
I launched myself over a short wooden fence along the road and raced across the land beyond it. My heartbeat thrummed hard and loud. If anyone called to me, I would not be able to hear him.
As I entered the tree line, I scanned the trunks, looking for one I could climb. I rushed among them, glancing back only once to confirm that the white froth still followed. Indeed, it chased only a few yards behind.
On my left, I spotted a tree that should work and bolted toward it. My calves burned as I launched myself at the tree. I jumped high, caught a branch, and swung my feet up and over. As the white fog rolled under me like silent thunder, the tree creaked and swayed. Holding myself onto the limb, my waist against the branch, I lifted my right foot up, and then my left, and stood, carefully balancing. I reached higher, caught another limb, and lifted myself the same way, pulling my legs over, swiveling around the limb, then upright with the branch at my waist. I wanted to climb higher, but no sturdy limbs remained. I bent low, gripped the trunk tightly, and steadied myself, my muscles on fire, my heart pounding. The white rolled under me.
White trees now populated the entirety of the woods, as though a disease had spread underground and soaked the sap from them.
In all my life I had never witnessed anything like this. Cyrus’s boxes had worked on a small scale, indoors, hidden from the rest of the world. This, however, affected nature, where I had always believed it was safest to be. Four walls weren’t closing me in, yet the rolling, bleaching tide trapped me.
From high up and far away, the current weakened. The height of the silent, mysterious fluid diminished. I released a slow, steadying breath, trying to calm my panic.
When I tried to speak into the mouthpiece to ask who was all right and who was not, my tongue froze on the tip of my teeth. It was possible that if even one of Roth’s men died—and likely several had—the figure on the hill could have walked inside and taken one of the headsets. I didn’t want to announce that I was alive, let alone the only survivor. I chose to keep my mouth shut, and I knew that if any of the men had survived, they would do the same.
They couldn’t have survived, though, could they? Roth had been at least thirty feet from me. He could not have made it when I almost hadn’t.
Below me, the fog began to clear. The fleece-like mass rolled back like a tide lowering and dissipated into nothing. A few wisps of smoke curled around the tree roots. They evaporated, and all stilled. I wondered if all the poisonous stuff was gone.
Bark had scraped my hands, and a smear of my blood stood out against the white trunk. I looked down at myself and realized that my clothes stuck out as the only dark features in the landscape. I would be noticed immediately and might already have been. I needed to get out of sight.
Trusting that the floor of the woods was now safe, I clasped the branch I crouched on and swung down until I dangled by my arms. The bark ground into my skin and beneath my nails. Suppressing a grunt, I tentatively dropped to the next branch and landed perfectly on it, balancing with one hand against the trunk of the tree. Instantly, I squatted and steadied myself. I grasped the last branch carefully and lowered myself again. I hit the ground.
The grass and dirt felt particularly dry beneath my boots. I dug at the ground with the toe of my right foot; beneath the white grains that fluoresced under the moon arrived fresh, black earth, as dark as coffee, and that comforted me.
I questioned if I should continue the way I was going or return to the house.
Either way, the land was clear, particularly so, the forest colorless, tinged a faint lemon hue from the moon.
A twig snapped behind me, and I turned.
Alex stood there, smiling. At the sight, my heart seemed to explode, and both terror and delight flooded me. Seeing him, a reminder of the old world, someone sharing my origin, made me experience something akin to nostalgia.
He stood between two white trees, his head slightly cocked. “It’s been a while,” he said. He pointed behind him, toward the house. “The costumes. Smart.” He shook his head and sneered. “So smart. You had me fooled, I confess.”
I took a deep breath and steadied myself. At least four months had passed since I’d last seen him. He and I had both changed.
“You’re taller now,” I said. “You must have grown a foot.”
He nodded. “Your hair is longer.”
That’s not all, Alex, but I guess it’s hard to notice in the night.
He stepped toward me. It sounded like he broke bones as he walked across the white twigs and leaves, through the white trees, his path lit brilliantly with moonglow. It was surreal to see him after so long, and in such a place. I slipped my hand into my pocket and clasped my knife. I thought once again of my vision of him on the table, the white monster looming over him, working inside him. In that vision, Alex’s face and hair had whitened, and he had moved robotically. The Alex that stood before me appeared human, and he moved like I remembered. It made me wonder: If he had changed like I had changed, would I be able to see it? In the light of the moon from a distance, he did not see my transformation.
“Yes, the costumes were smart.” He lifted his chin inquiringly. “But how did you turn the address red, and the door to the house? Plus that can of paint, hm? Oh yes, I see the realization in your eyes, and you are absolutely right. I know you were at Lucient. Flannigan showed me a tape of you there.”
I said nothing. He began to walk around me, crunching through the grass as though it were ice. “No, no, that can’t be the most important question. I haven’t gone back far enough, have I? Let’s start at the beginning. Why aren’t you dead? How did you convince the Outfit not to kill you? To kill Julian instead? Answer me that first.”
As he spoke, I tried to plan my next move. “If you don’t know, you haven’t looked hard enough.”
