Dead Roots (The Analyst) (31 page)

“When your medicine takes effect, we will be unable to communicate,” Creeping Wind explained, standing behind Tom and placing her hands on his shoulders. The hairs on his neck stood up as her head lowered and turned around to face him. “We have something to discuss.”

“Go ahead.”

“There are many that Akebara has taken that might have lived. But your actions, and mistakes, have changed things.”

“How?” Tom said, his shoulders shrinking forward. Creeping Wind’s spindly fingers on the skin of his neck were cold like the grave. “I don't understand.”

“When Akebara is defeated, all of those who have been taken will die. The severance from the tree will kill them, and I will usher them into the world of the dead. This is my price for your survival in the ravine. This is the price for taking your rightful revenge.”

Tom felt a pit in his stomach, but made no effort to argue. His dream from the night before returned to him: Keda's deepening voice, the sick yellow eye rising in his throat.

“Strike true, as is your right. Make right the wrongs done to you. Then leave this place, Thomas Bell.”

“Can I ask why...?”

“My reasons are my own. Take solace in the continued beating of your heart, and be assured there shall come no punishment.”

“...Okay.”

Tom felt the hands slip away from him and tightened his grip around the ax. His fingers felt for the handle of his gun, and Creeping Wind faded from his sight.

“Akebara will be angry, Bell. Be ready.”

The sky began to darken. At once, all of the tree's faces screamed. The rooted humans reached for Tom, wailing at him incessantly.

Tom's grip around his ax tightened. He watched the landscape change. The desert sands began to blow away. He shielded his eyes out of instinct, and then realized there was no need. The sand was not real.

The dunes under his feet dissolved in the spectral wind. He stood now in damp brown dirt. Clouds rolled into the sky and a light rain kissed his cheeks. Pine trees, the forests of West Virginia, groaned as they rose from the ground. A mountain appeared in the distance. Within a minute, Tom saw where he truly stood. A clearing in the woods outside Orchard.

Akebara itself saw no such change, but the moat of blood was now a muddy ditch, a ring of filthy rainwater around its corporeal form. Its guards, the rooted men and women it had absorbed, still stood with their feet buried in the wet dirt. Now, however, many of them were still wearing their torn, dirty clothing.

The branch people dragged themselves along the ground towards Tom, their faces mangled and dribbling red and brown offal. Where they should have had ankles, their legs extended into the ground, roots to the tree of flesh.

Tom didn't know what else to do but start swinging.

The ax struck an arm. The flesh was rotted and the blood congealed, and bone splintered with little effort. He hacked away at the closest one and a chorus of pained cries cut the air. He cut the man-shaped root from its legs, rendering it an immobile, twitching husk. But what the roots lacked in strength they made up in numbers.

Another was upon him just as he finished. He felt those cold hands wrap around his ankle and grip his pant leg. He swung down, chopping its head off. He tasted a bead of sweat in his mouth.

“
Flesh is fleeting. I am forever.
”

Even with its hand removed, the root grasped at Tom, vainly mashing its bleeding stump against his leg. It seemed he had to cut them from the source before they would finally die, a task that was becoming more difficult as more of them blocked his way.

With three of them on him, he found it hard to get in a good swing. Swinging with his elbow, he managed to carve a few solid chunks out of some shoulder meat, but he felt as if he'd have accomplished the same by slapping them with his open palm.

“
We will be one.
”

*

One of the branches wore Heather's face. With gnarled hands squeezing his throat, blocking his windpipe, he saw her descend to him, eyes lidded, bearing a sedated grin. Her hands cradled his face as he struggled to breathe.

“You want me, don't you Tom?” her voice asked, giggling huskily. “Tom, don't you want to fuck me? You can have me, forever.”

He struggled to choke out a response. He only managed to spit.

“It's like cumming into eternity,” she moaned. “Be one with us Tom. It feels like...”

She shuddered.

“
Heaven.
”

*

Suddenly he could breathe again. All at once he felt their grips recede. As though the strength was being sapped from their very bones, the taken people released him and slid to the ground.  The one that had taken Heather's form slumped to his feet, motionless.

Keda
, Tom realized.
Keda and Artie. They did it.

A great rumbling sound, followed by a roar of frustration, deep as though unearthed. Tom spat out a mouthful of rotted flesh, from his attempts to bite at the hands. His mouth was stained by the taste and he vainly resisted the urge to vomit, expelling the scarce contents of his stomach onto the dirt.

Akebara's trunk writhed, its prisoners squirming as though trying to break free. Tom rose to his feet. He spat on the ground again to try and wash the taste from his mouth. Taking deep, haggard breaths, he popped his neck and took stock of his surroundings.

 Akebara's 'branches' had all fallen limply to the ground, leaving only its body standing in the middle of its dirt ring.

Tom pulled his wallet from his coat pocket. Through exhausted breaths, he spoke to the tree, flipping the wallet open to display his badge.

“
Niku no ki Akebara
,” he said haggardly. “Thomas Bell, DPSD. You are charged with unsanctioned habitation and wanton supernatural aggression, consisting of innumerable counts of murder and attempted murder, towards both civilians and DPSD personnel. You will be taken to a DPSD facility for processing and exorcism or you will be presently terminated. Will you come quietly?”

Tom flipped his badge shut and waited.

For several long seconds, there was no response. Then a groan rose from the earth, as something massive moved underneath it. The faces of Akebara's trunk screamed at Tom hoarsely, and he saw its base start to shift.

“Figured not.”

Dirt kicked up around Akebara's trunk. Tom could see it tearing itself from the ground, uprooting itself.

“
I am forever... We are forever...
”

Tom picked the wood ax up from the wet dirt and rubbed his chin. The entity had pulled itself from the earth. Its roots bore the shape of legs and arms. They flailed and twisted along the ground, dragging the tree creature towards Tom at a clumsy, lumbering gait. The trunk swayed with its motion, its branches rustling, faces screaming.

Tom stood his ground. He knew the thing was powerless.

Akebara dragged itself through the mud, the arms along its surface reaching towards Tom impotently.

“Give up,” Tom stated to it simply. “You're beaten.”

“
Arrogant, fucking mortal. Die in shit.
”

Tom had had enough. He stepped towards the creature evenly. He stood not a foot from it, staring into one of its twisted faces, the eyes rolled back into its head. Trunk-arms grasped at him, tugging weakly at his jacket. He brushed them away.

He saw Heather's body, adjacent to him. Her arms and legs had disappeared into its mass, leaving only her bare torso and head, which hung with a sick expression. Red vomit erupted from her mouth. He winced, but watched as she turned to face him, seeming as if she could barely open her eyes.

“Do it, Tom,” she croaked.

Tom blocked out the screams of malice around him. He took a step back and raised the lumber ax into the air. He swung.

Blood sprayed from Akebara's trunk as the taken screamed in unison, keeling over and clutching their stomachs in pain. Tom swung again, taking bloodied chunks out of the tree's body.

“Do it,” Heather begged through groans of agony. She vomited again, dark red sludge pooling down her front. Tom ignored her suffering as best he could. He swung, and swung, and swung.

He screamed with exertion, hacking away at Akebara's trunk wildly. With each swing Tom cleaved through the flesh of countless arms, legs, torsos. He felt resistance as metal hit solid bone, wiped a splash of blood out of his eyes. The trunk had, at its core, a column of bone, like a great spine.

“
You will die, bargainer. Race traitor. The deaths of these humans are on your head.
”

“Don't listen,” Heather sputtered out. “Send this... motherfucker... back to Hell.”

Tom tuned both of them out. There was only the aching in his arms, and the flesh-lumber.

*

Finally, it was done.

The weight of Akebara's trunk overwhelmed it. Tom had cut through so much flesh and bone that the whole thing started to lean over. He stood back and watched as the tree of dying flesh toppled over onto the trees surrounding them. Great cracking and crunching sounds were heard, from the real trees being toppled into by the weight of Akebara, and from the bones remaining at the base of its trunk that snapped from its descent. Flesh sloughed from its form and fell to the ground.

With a great crashing sound, finally, the air was silent. The screams ended. Akebara was felled.

Tom wiped sweat and blood off of his brow, and looked over his work. The spine at its core lay splayed out from within, the bodies and twisted mass of flesh surrounding it having come loose during its descent. The taken people surrounding the small island now lay across the ground in heaps. The clearing was littered with dead.

Tom dropped the ax to the ground, exhausted. He looked up. The sky was gray and he became aware of the weather. A mild rain wet his cheeks and soaked the blood all around him into the grass.

Tom reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He rubbed his forehead in exasperation. If the phone was to be believed, he'd been gone less than half an hour.

He took one last look at the trunk, and considered its final words. He made out Heather's nude form on the ground. She was the least mutilated of all around him, which wasn't to say her arms and legs were not broken, or that she was not caked with blood and gore. Making his way over to her, he knelt down and checked her pulse, more out of habit than anything else. He cradled her chin in his hand and turned her to face him. Her eyes were locked open in death, a hollow, glassy stare looking past him into forever.

Bargainer
, it had called him.

He removed his jacket and laid it across her torso. He gingerly lifted her form. She was wiry and weighed little. With Officer Dawes, killed in action, in his arms, he turned from the scene and set off back down the tunnel to the Bailey house. The journey was much shorter this time.

12

“Margaret”

“So how bad is it?” Margaret asked with concern, her voice crackling through the sub-par cellphone reception.

“I don't know what this town is going to do,” Tom said. He sipped from a can of soda, blowing out some smoke and leaning against the car. Artie was inside the Garden using the facilities.

“That bad, huh?”

“I got back to the Bailey place and... well, all those people outside were... dead.”

Tom tried to push the image out of his mind. The house had been infested, and Artie had told him that the noise had just stopped in an instant. He looked inside the car. Keda was sleeping in the backseat. Susan Bailey’s copy of
At the Mountains of Madness
lay on the floor, its corner peeking out of a nondescript plastic bag.

“So...”

“Probably half the town's economy. They'll all move away from here, if they know what's good for them.”

“I'm going to send a cleanup team from the Charleston office within the next couple of hours. Can you tell me anything?”

“I've got the book that the thing was anchored to, but I don't know if it's really possessed anymore. From what I can tell, the entity itself is the spine at the center of the trunk. Once that was cut in half, the bodies just started falling off it like gangrene. Follow the directions in my report and you'll find it.”

“Did any of it get on camera?”

“I don't know. There weren't any media when I got back, but they might have snuck back in to snoop around.”

“This is a real mess, Tom. A real fucking mess. If any of that got out...”

“Call it a mass suicide,” Tom said. “They were acting like a fucking cult anyway. Say they all took cyanide pills or something. Doctor a few coroner’s reports.”

“That's actually pretty good. I'm impressed.”

 Tom grinned and took a satisfied drag. “Well, I'm not completely worthless.”

“No, just mostly. Don't be more trouble than you're worth.”

“We need to talk about this Harold character,” Tom stated.

“We will. Just worry about getting home, I'll bring it up to the brass.”

“Alright.”

There was a pause. Tom finished his soda and tossed the can aside nonchalantly.

“Are you okay?” Margaret asked. Tom sighed deeply.

“Yeah. A lot to think about. I'll be alright, though.”

“I'm sorry you had to go through this. But in my defense, I tried to pull you off the case.”

“Yeah, well. I've thought about it for a long time, what I'd do if I ever came across that thing again. I gotta say-- it went about exactly as I'd hoped.”

Tom felt a pang as he thought back to Heather's face sticking out from Akebara's trunk. He scrunched his eyes up. Her body now lay in the Orchard morgue awaiting an autopsy. It would be swiftly snatched up by Charleston's cleanup crew, sequestered in an underground facility, leaving nothing for her family but a letter and a sincere apology for her disappearance. Missing in action, presumed dead.

“Well. Almost.”

“Get home safe, Tom. I'll see you soon.”

“Yeah. Bye, Maggie.”

“Margaret.” She hung up.

Tom rubbed his eyes, not wanting to let a tear out, but he couldn't help it any longer. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and thanked God that Heather's aviator sunglasses hid his eyes.