DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
6:30 AM TUESDAY
***ALERT MODE***
A thousand feet below the ground, John flicked on the lights.
A bare room - little more than a cave, really - several hundred feet from the main shaft greeted their view in the pale light of the low-wattage bulbs that were strung on the wall like miserly Christmas lights. Several dusty cots lined the dirty cave walls, dust-laden sheets covering some of them, while others stood bereft of bedding, their filthy mattresses perched almost carelessly atop spindly aluminum springs. Other than that, the room was featureless, all bare stone and dirt. It was hardly the Holiday Inn, but it would serve for a time, and John bowed low as he turned the lights on, gesturing for Fran to enter.
"This is it?" she asked, eyeing the cobwebs and the thick layer of dust that lay across everything like a heavy winter blanket.
"Yup," John answered, beginning to strip two of the less-filthy cots. "A veritable Shangri-La."
"What about rats?"
John thought that an odd question. Malachi and his band of anonymous killers were after them, the entire town of Loston seemed to be in some kind of Red Alert mode, and oh let's not forget about the fact that dead people are having this weird habit of walking around, he thought, but she's worried about rats.
John would have traded a billion rats for a return to reality, and almost said so before he saw the look in Fran's eyes. They were darting about wildly, as though terrified that at any moment one of the rodents might erupt from the solid walls around them and chew her throat out. Clearly now was not the time to joke, so John swiftly changed the response on his lips to something less flippant and more comforting. The fact that she was in distress concerned him. He suspected it wasn't really some irrational fear of rats, but rather the question was instead evidence of the fact that her mind had gone through too much for one night. He had seen it before: men who had gone through a combat zone without breaking a sweat, and then broke down crying because when they finally got back to the relative safety of their base camp someone had moved toothbrush.
He touched her arm tenderly, reassuringly. It was not a touch meant to evince sexual response, but rather the touch of a concerned friend. Nonetheless, John was hard-pressed not to shudder at the sudden and all too pleasant warmth the contact stirred up within him. "It's okay," he said. "The only rats in here are mine rats. You’ll like them. They have cute little fluffy tails."
"Still a rat."
"Don’t worry." John turned back to the beds and finished stripping them down, shaking the bedding, trying to rid it of as much dust as possible. Fran soon grabbed a handful of sheets and began doing the same. Each shake of the sheets caused a miniature cloud of sediment to rise into the air, and John was glad he didn't work the mines often. He had no major aversion to dirt, but preferred to be clean when at all possible. "In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen one. They’re rare. Besides, the old miners say if you see one it’s good luck."
"Lunatics and lucky rats. What a day."
They worked in silence a moment, replacing the now slightly cleaner bedding and then pulling the cots together, side by side. Neither asked if such a move was necessary; neither could stand to be farther from the other than possible. Not on this night.
Fran sat down on her cot, her eyes drooping in spite of her earlier voiced doubts that she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
"Yeah, lucky rats," John said. "The story is that if you see one it’s because they’re leaving the mine, and you’ll know to get out, too, because something bad is about to happen."
"Something bad?"
"Earthquake or subterranean slide. That’s why they’re lucky: they’re God’s early warning system."
"Does that happen?" she asked.
"What?"
"Earthquakes."
John chuckled at her apparent fear at the possibility. "Not in Colorado. No seismic activity to speak of for thousands of years."
"What about the subterranean slides?"
"Only if you bump into a loosely-shored wall or set off an explosion. So no breaking wind." He couldn't believe he had just said that. It was totally unlike him to be so comfortable with a comparative stranger that he could even hint at the sticky subject of human biological reactions, let alone joking about them. It had taken months of constant contact with Gabe before John had been able to make such comments, and even then he did so only rarely. But with Fran he was under constant threat of forgetting how new they were to one another. His heart clenched into a tight fist of sudden anxiety. Would she think him crude or disgusting now?
Apparently not, for she laughed slightly and lay down. "I'll do my best. Let's just hope the mine rats keep their gas to themselves, too."
Now it was John's turn to laugh as he followed her example, laying down on the cot beside hers. He closed his eyes and almost immediately began floating into that kind of sleep that is reserved for those who are utterly exhausted. Then his eyes snapped open as he remembered something
"Fran," he said, shaking her. She was already asleep, but her eyes fluttered. "Fran, wake up."
"Tired," she murmured, only half awake.
"I know. I’m sorry. But when Mertyl came after –" he stopped, not wanting to remember the awful scene. "When we were running, you said, ‘This is worse than the last time.’" He paused for a moment. "What did you mean by that?"
Fran’s eyes jerked all the way open and she jumped to full alertness, sitting up on her cot. "I didn’t say –"
"Yes, you did. Don’t lie to me, Fran." His exhaustion affected him, making his voice sound gruffer than he intended, giving his statement the air of a command. He continued quickly, softening his tone. "Sorry, I don't mean to snap, but if we’re going to get through this we’re going to have to trust each other. Now what were you talking about?"
"John, I can’t –"
"You have to!" This time he let the steel show through in his voice. He felt that whatever she was keeping from him might be the key to unlocking this mystery: why all this was happening, and what had happened to his friends in Loston to drive them all mad.
Then he noticed she was two steps away from crying. Instantly his expression softened and he gathered her into his arms. "Shhh, shhh. I’m sorry. Don’t worry about it." He rocked her back and forth, comforting her.
"No, you’re right," she said, sniffling. A moment, then: "My husband died not long ago."
John’s muscles clenched as the words triggered and image: Annie, laying shrunken and shriveled in a hospital bed that looked out of place around her tiny frame, crying and pleading for him to let her die.
Annie, taking a last breath, and smiling at him.
Gradually he became aware that Fran was still talking.
"...two men who showed up. They knocked and Nathan went to answer it and...." Fran’s body shook as she wept in earnest now, shivers and sobs coursing through her. John held her tighter. "One said, ‘Where’s the woman?’ Nate didn’t answer quick enough, I guess, so they shot him. Over and over and over, and then in the head."
"Don’t, Franny," said John, kissing her head. But she was beyond hearing him. She had retreated to a place that she probably hadn’t been in years - hadn’t allowed herself to go - and John knew that the memory would have to run its course. In spite of his own self-imposed pessimism about life, he still believed that people were good, on the whole. He believed in their ability to find happiness in despair. But he knew also that sometimes to find that happiness, a person had to be allowed to wade through the sorrow, trudging through the grim muck of memory until they were clear of the swampy mires of past misfortune. Fran looked like she was having such an experience as she relived this horror in her mind.
"They blew his head off," she continued. "They killed my Nate." She shivered, and then continued in a smaller voice, "I was sitting right behind him. They didn’t see me until he fell, then they came after me." She separated from John and gazed into his eyes. He looked back, seeking to pierce the veil of pain that lay over her soul, trying to find the warmth and goodness he had fallen in love with.
And it’s true, he thought. I am in love with her.
A moment later, she pulled down the neckline of her shirt, revealing a wicked scar that curled around her shoulder. "They came in shooting. Screaming something about the last days and some prophecy. Insane. They hit me in the shoulder, but I made it to the kitchen and grabbed...."
She collapsed into John again. He waited.
"I grabbed a meat cleaver. Buried it in the forehead of the first guy. The other one just looked at his friend, and started crying."
"Because you killed one of them?" asked John
He felt her shake her head, simultaneously burying her face in the hollow of his neck. He could feel her breath as she spoke.
"He started hollering that it was his turn, and he was supposed to die, and it wasn’t fair that the other guy got the honor."
"What did you do?"
"I ran as fast as I could. Into the bathroom. Jumped in the tub and prayed. The other guy ran after me and started firing through the door. Didn’t hit me, though. And the cops were there a minute later. I was surprised because that was in L.A., and cops there are actually required by law to wait until at least forty-five minutes after you're dead before responding to your call, and I hadn't even had a chance to phone them yet. But they came in and caught the guy and dragged him away. He tried to escape later that night and they killed him."
She pulled away from John to look him in the eyes again. Her eyes were dry now. She was done with weeping. "I wish I could’ve killed him myself," she said.
John stared at her.
"Fran," he finally whispered.
She dropped her gaze, ashamed. "I know. I’m sorry," she said. "Cute little Fran is a bloodthirsty bitch at heart."
"No," he said quickly, putting his hand gently below her chin and raising her eyes to his. "You are the bravest, most wonderful woman I’ve ever met. Two guys kill your husband, then come after you, and you apologize for wanting them dead?" He shook his head. "Fran, I don’t know what’s going on out there, and I hope that sooner or later everyone goes back to normal. But I do know this: some people deserve to die. People like that bastard who’s been chasing us all night long. People like that, people who have given up their humanity, renounce their right to live. As soon as they take it upon themselves to kill, they say that they themselves are ready to die. It sounds more and more like these people are some kind of cult that’s targeted us - and you in particular - to die. I don’t know why, but even if you were the mother of the Antichrist, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that you deserve to live, no matter what."
"What if I am?" she asked in a small voice, and John could tell instantly that this was something that had bothered her: a fear that had plagued her since the night of the shooting. "What if they know something I don’t, and they have to stop it by killing me? What if it we'd be better if I were dead?"
"No," John answered. "That isn’t the way it is, and even if it were, I don’t know that anyone has the right to decide that for you."
He paused, a bit surprised at his speech. Hadn’t he killed in the war? And not only killed once, but numerous times, quickly and efficiently as anyone ever had. How could he condemn others for taking that same action?
He shook his head. It wasn’t the same; couldn’t be. He had fought for his country; for what he believed was a good cause, in spite of all the information that came out after the war, about the doubts or the concerns that perhaps the President had known the war was coming and let it happen in order to generate price drops and ratings climbs.
But these people that were after them, they were different. They had to be. There was nothing of honor in the way they fought, and John could see the dim smile that seemed to play around Malachi’s lips as he threatened John in Devorough’s house. There was no courage there, only madness and death. No prevention of some evil that could only be stopped by someone's death, either, for the eyes of Malachi and those of his followers were untouched by human concern. Whatever their motive, it was a selfish one, and he believed - he knew - that what he had done in the war and what Fran had done to protect herself was as different from their motives as Gandhi’s beliefs would be from Hitler's.
Fran sniffled, and John wasn’t sure what else he could do to convince her that she was a good person; that she deserved to be alive. What he finally did was a product of instinct; an action he wouldn’t have taken had he thought about it: he pulled down his shirt and showed her his scar. It was an eerie parallel to her own. She touched it. "How?"
"My father died when I was young. A man shot him. Just like the ones who shot your husband." He sighed. "I know about death. And I know that those who seek to steal lives need to be stopped."
"Were you there?"
John nodded, for a moment sinking into that long-past memory. He felt as always the wall at the far side of that memory, that implacable and blank buttress that kept him from seeing what had happened after his father was killed.
"What did you do?"
He did not know exactly how she meant him to take that question. Had he thought about it, he may have realized that she was likely asking how he dealt with the grief and the loss that followed; how he grappled with life without his father. But he did not think about it, for in that instant the wall that had held him back from understanding for so very long suddenly crumpled like cheap aluminum siding. It folded before him, and in a single, dizzying instant he could see what lay beyond.
He hissed sharply, inhaling like a drowning man clawing desperately for breath. He was drowning, fallen into a deep pool of memory, engulfed by a torrent of remembrance that had been held back by the dam of his memory-wall for decades.
Dimly, he was aware of Fran shaking him. "John?" she asked. "John, what's wrong?"
He heard his own voice and it sounded strange and thin as an echo in his ears. It was as though he were hearing his own voice from across the Grand Canyon or some other gulf of titanic proportion. He had to strain to hear his own voice, to comprehend his own question as he asked, "Did the men who killed your husband - did either of them have a cross shaved in his head?"
Fran stared at him dumbly, and though she did not respond affirmatively, he knew her answer was yes. Terror and unbelief flared in her eyes. "How did you know?" she whispered.
"Because that's what the man who killed my father had," he answered quietly. And the thought ran flitted his mind, as it had earlier in the evening, while they were running from Gabe's house: Daddy, why you walkin’?
Only this time it was different. This time he knew what the thought meant, and the devastating fact of that knowledge slammed into him like a mountain, as though the mine had suddenly collapsed and buried him beneath it. His breath hitched again, then once more. He felt bile rise up in his throat and choked it back, only to have it replaced by equally traumatic hammer blows that seemed to rain down on him from everywhere at once and only gradually could be identified as the suddenly devastating pound of his own heart.
"John," said Fran, and now it was her turn to hold him, cradling him in her arms like a baby. She rocked slightly, trying to soothe him with those comforting motions that seemed to be hardwired into the human brain as acceptable calming methods.
For John, however, the embrace and the rocking did not have the power to take his mind off of itself; to turn his thoughts away from memory and focus instead on the pleasant effect her touch might normally have on him. Instead it thrust him deeper into the morass of memory that threatened to overwhelm him, each sway of her body taking him back a day, then a month, a year, whole decades, until he found himself reliving that day, that awful day.
He remembered the day vividly now, and he spoke as the details flooded through him, recounting the events of the day to Fran as each moment surfaced from subconscious to conscious understanding. She continued to rock him, but he was unaware of that fact. In fact, he was not even cognizant of the fact that he was speaking to her and recounting the events that unfolded themselves in his mind. He could not feel his lips moving, nor hear his own voice. All he could feel and hear were the fear and blood and death of that day. The day the man with the cruciform pattern shaved in his scalp had shot his father.
His father lay beside him, one eyelid ripped off, the other eye gone, along with half of his head. Johnny, too, was wounded, shot still lodged in his shoulder, blood pooling below him and one arm useless, but he did not feel that. He just felt horror at the sight of his dead father.
The sight was all he could think of until his father's killer moved, bringing his weapon to bear on little Johnny as he said, "For my God and my Redeemer."
Johnny knew in that instant that he was going to die. There was no way to avoid it. Daddy was dead, and no one was close enough to save him from the shot that was coming to end his life. But then Johnny's father moved. He was dead - had to be dead - but he moved. Too fast to see, but the killer shrieked and clutched an arm suddenly broken at the wrist.
The shotgun fell near Johnny and he scooped it up with his good hand, running to the back of the kitchen. He had no thoughts of using the weapon, only of getting it away from the gunman. Getting it away, and then getting himself away from the strange, impossible events that had invaded his house.
But he couldn’t move far. His young mind froze as he watched his father. Daddy had been dead, Johnny was sure. Positive. But he was moving. Half his head gone, how could he be moving? But he was. Moving fast, with jerky motions that were nonetheless quick as those of a praying mantis.
His father reached the gunman, who had fallen and was scrabbling backwards like a crab, his hands finding little purchase on Johnny's mother's antiseptically clean white linoleum floor.
Johnny’s father reached out his hand and caught the man’s leg. Pulled it. Twisted. Wet-dry snaps shattered the air as the man’s leg broke. He screamed.
Johnny’s father grabbed the other leg. Pulled. Twisted. This time there were no snaps, but a sucking, ripping noise that was a thousand times worse than the shrieking splinters of shattering bones. The gunman’s shriek grew high pitched. It climbed in volume until it was too loud to bear. Johnny dropped the gun at his feet and clapped his hands on his ears.
His father continued twisting, and the noise kept echoing painfully off the shining white floor as the gunman’s leg slowly but inexorably separated from his body. It pulled out at the upper thigh, where the leg met the groin, and Johnny heard a high-pitched mewling that he gradually realized was coming out of his own mouth. Two great splashes of blood pumped out of the leg socket, now empty and wet. Then the gush slowed to a steady pumping, which in turn became only a trickle that beat rhythmically forth, keeping time with hollow cadence of the dying man's heartsong.
The man kept screaming. Kept screaming until Johnny’s father stood and with a surgically precise movement reached out and crushed the man’s trachea.
The scream cut off, instantly transforming to a whisper of painfully compressed air passages. The man grabbed Johnny’s father’s leg. Johnny’s father stared at the would-be assailant out of his remaining eye. Then he kicked the man. The man’s neck snapped backward with the force of the blow, blasting into a ninety degree angle. Another kick, and the head popped off, like an overripe watermelon being kicked off its vine.
At last, the gunman was still.
Johnny’s father stood there a moment, then turned to his son. Johnny was crying, weeping, wanting to know what was happening, but not wanting to know what was happening. He did not understand what could be going on, but knew that he did not like it; that he would be forever changed by it. Nothing was the same now, nothing would ever be the same again. Johnny felt a wrenching sensation in the pit of his stomach and knew that it was the feeling of his childhood withering and dying before its time. Daddy, why you walkin’? he thought, and the question squeezed the last traces of life from his youthful innocence.
His father smiled, and two of his teeth fell out of the side of his mouth that was permanently open, because of the fact that he had no cheek and only half a lower palate.
"Shokay, shon. It’sh all right," said his father's corpse, his voice mushy and strained through flesh that hung off what remained of his lips.
He stopped. Johnny could see the one eye moving back and forth. Back and forth in what would have been confusion if the rest of his head had been there.
His father moved to the refrigerator. A mirror hung on the side of the appliance, where his mother had hung it. She said it was a joke, something that she put there because she was so busy cooking and cleaning that the only way she could find time to do her hair would be if she could do it in the kitchen while making breakfast.
Johnny’s father looked in the mirror. His blood-covered hand went to his face. To the half that was left. Touched ruined mouth, disintegrated jaw. Then dipped inside the head, where the brain had been and where perhaps a bit of the brain still hid.
Johnny screamed when his father put his hand in his head and felt what was inside. Or what wasn’t.
But as loud as he screamed, it was nothing to match his father. His father opened his mouth, and out spewed a sound of anguish and terror like nothing Johnny had ever heard.
His father screamed, and at first it was a wordless, mindless squeal, but it soon resolved into words. Into three words, over and over. The same words as his father advanced on Johnny.
Johnny shied away, pressing into the cupboard at his back. His father was dead. Had to be dead. And yet he still moved, so he must be a monster. Something that had killed one man and now would kill Johnny. And Johnny didn’t believe the words the monster screamed. Not for one second.
But the monster wasn’t about to touch Johnny. Wasn’t about to pick him up and eat him. No, instead it took the shotgun Johnny clutched with white hands.
It looked down the barrel with one good eye.
Pulled the trigger.
Johnny renewed his screams. Screamed until he was hoarse and there was no screaming left in him. Screamed until he couldn’t even see anything but the scream. Screamed until he couldn’t hear his father’s last words.
"I’m not real."