DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
3:30 PM MONDAY
Over one full day.
The sign that hung on the door upstairs had one word scrawled across it: "CLOSED."
No one had come. No one would come. Casey was a man who liked his privacy, and none would think to intrude with inquiries as to why he had closed his doors for the first time in well over a decade.
No one would come.
And no one would hear him scream.
Malachi leaned in close to Casey. The blood that streamed from Casey’s nose and ears oozed in sticky rivulets down his neck, joining the darkening pools of brown and crimson that already stained his shirt. Tears dripped their own salty paths down his face, mixing with the blood into a thin streamlets of sickly pink: small tributaries of the larger rivers of pain that tracked their paths over his body.
Casey had been crying for hours, and bleeding for more, under the terrible attention of Malachi. But still hardly a sound had escaped his lips, though he’d prayed to God and Jesus and the Holy Virgin and all the Saints and every other person he could think of, asking them all to let him die or at least let him tell the crazy man what he wanted to know.
Malachi pulled out a small box, and Casey wanted to shriek but of course could not. Malachi had withdrawn several implements and instruments in the past hours. Each had been unfamiliar to Casey, but each had brought new and unimaginable pain.
Malachi touched a button, and out popped a thin spear about ten inches in length. It looked like a surgical tool. Malachi touched the button again, and a low hum began. It originated at the box and traveled in tight reverberations up the length of the metal spire and seemed to hover in a dark mass around the deadly point.
Malachi smiled, and Casey knew this was it. This was the end, and he was grateful because if it was the end he could stop hurting. He had heard of men in so much pain that they were afraid death was coming, but Casey was well beyond that stage. Now, he existed in such agony that his only fear was that death would not come soon enough.
The crazy man pushed the point slowly into Casey’s eye. One half of Casey’s world disappeared, and the pain that traveled through his body was so intense, so frightening. He felt with peculiar distance the sensation of his bowels and bladder letting go.
"Tell me," Malachi whispered.
Please, Mary, Mother of God, he thought, Please, Mary Mother of God, he prayed as he had been praying for hours. Please hear my prayer and let me speak.
And at last his prayer was answered. Casey opened his mouth wide and screamed. He screamed until his lungs gave out, high-pitched yowls of animal agony and rage that slowly petered into whimpers and wheezes.
The whole time, the madman before him smiled. He lay a hand on Casey’s head, like a patriarch of old giving a farewell blessing to a journey-bound son.
When Casey was finished screaming, Malachi leaned in again. The needle was still in Casey’s eye.
"Where are the new move-ins? A girl?"
"Sherman Street," panted Casey. It was hard to speak: Malachi had pulled out each of his teeth with a pair of pliers some hours before, so his voice sounded mushy and soft. "Grey house. North side of town. Corn fields around it."
"What is her name?" asked Malachi. "What name is she going by here?"
"Kaylie Devorough," answered Casey. He wanted to pass out and not wake up, but his body somehow held itself together.
"I knew it," said the blonde girl. "I knew they’d change her name."
"I wonder what reason she’s been given for changing it," said the other man - not Malachi, the younger one with beautiful eyes and a smile that was brightest when Casey started screaming. The black woman remained silent, as she had during the entire time in the basement.
Malachi cut off their conversation with a curt gesture. "Anyone else coming in soon?" he asked. Casey just stared at him a moment, not comprehending the query, his mind stretched to breaking.
Then the question percolated through to the small part of his mind that was still capable of responding.
"FRAN!" he screamed. "NOW LET ME DIE!"
The force of the shout shook him to the core, but his four assailants didn’t react, and Casey’s pain and fatigue sodden mind slowly realized he hadn’t said anything. Nothing at all. He could not say what he wanted to say.
"No," he gurgled, and saw Malachi smile again.
"Is he lying?" asked the black woman, her first words in his hearing. Her voice was soft, Casey noted, but it had a slight rasp to it, like her throat was coated with chalk dust.
Malachi looked at Casey, still holding the needle that had punctured the bartender’s eye and still remained planted in the orb. "I don’t think so," he said. "He’s broken."
He laid his other hand, the one not holding the box, on Casey’s head again. Casey didn’t know what he was going to do.
"Goodbye," said Malachi.
***
When the bartender was dead, Malachi stood a moment with his hand on the man’s cool head. Part of that was just to make sure the man didn’t reanimate, though Malachi was fairly sure he’d fried out the man completely.
Part of it was just to feel the moment. Even with a soulless one, the moment of passing was a moment of virtue. Of love. Not for the bartender, of course, but for the fact that each of these moments was a moment closer to the realization of Malachi's task. He smoothed down Casey’s hair, through which wisps of smoke slowly curled.
"What now?" asked Todd.
"We find her house. She’ll probably have a Protector with her," answered Malachi.
"So, do we go after them?" asked Jenna.
"No, we’ll just wait inside their house." He nodded at Casey’s body. "It looks like everyone in Loston has been put on Alert, so if we attacked her in public, it would never work. We’ll wait inside her house. When she comes in, we kill her privately."
"What if someone else comes in first?" asked Jenna.
"Then they got in the way." He went to the stairs that led back to the bar. Then stopped and turned back to Jenna. "You spoke too soon, asking about Fran the way you did. And if you ever do something like that again, you won’t be helping us anymore. I’ll kill you and leave your body for the worms and your soul for Satan."
He ascended the stairs without waiting for her reaction.