Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (81 page)

The other marksman turned and marched back down Winston.

Byron sighed, then dug a crumpled cigar from his pocket. The
continuing snow accumulated everywhere, turning the old warrior into a vision
of the Yeti. The bright-blue flame of his lighter chased the falling snow away
and lit the tobacco. Byron drew in his breath, pulsing the orange glow on the
end.

The first soldier returned. He whispered into the ear of the
other, who nodded, then spoke.

“Drop your weapons to the ground. Walk
backwards towards us.”

Byron nodded to the two soldiers holding Jana. They let go
of her, and she swung her arms down in defiance and disgust. The
cold clink of metal rang up from the frozen asphalt as automatic weapons hit
the ground. Byron and his guards turned their backs to the men, and
commenced pacing backward. Within minutes, the Warriors of Christ had snapped
the plastic zip ties on their wrists. One of the marksmen
grabbed Jana by the arm and led her ahead of the others, but did not secure
her.

***

“He has arrived with the girl.”

“Secure them all in the house and get your soldiers off the
street as quickly as possible.”

Father’s voice snapped through the tinny
speaker of the two-way radio.

“When can we expect you?” the sergeant asked his absent
superior.

“Two hours. If Commander Byron does
anything but smoke, shoot him dead.”

“Yes sir.”

The sergeant set the radio on the table and looked up into
the barrel of a gun. The blast knocked him through a picture
window and into the driveway of the next-door neighbor, his dead body sliding
across the ice and into the grass. Other blasts rang out. Jana found herself
balled up on the hardwood floor of her living room while a close-range gunfight
ensued around her. She heard screaming and more shouts, broken
glass, and the pulsing repetition of machine-gun fire. Jana crawled
toward the front door, coughing and spitting as suffocating, acrid smoke filled
the room. She reached forward across the threshold until a black boot crushed
her wrist on the marble tile of the foyer. Jana heard the fine
bones break as the pain raced to her brain.

Chapter
36

“C’mon, man, we gotta go.”

Sully stood over John, holding a green
military jacket and double-barreled shotgun.

John struggled to meet the day. He swam
through the fading current of a dream that refused to be summoned by his
conscious thoughts. For some reason, John recalled the gaze of the biker
chick from the night before.

Sully bent down and helped John to his
feet. The massive biker threw the jacket over John’s shoulders and held
the weapon six inches from his face.

“Snow is picking up. You’re going to
want to wear this.”

John pulled the coat around and felt a
sticky substance on the right shoulder. Cold blood soaked the coat. He
fought the urge to vomit and put his arm into the left shoulder as well.

“How’s Alex?” John asked. His voice
sounded distant and faded.

“Still healing. He’s gonna need to stay
here.”

“Okay then,” John said. “I think I’m ready.”

John pulled his thoughts together and went
through the back door of the stage. The swirling wall of snow blinded
him. The inviting warmth and darkness of the Keeper’s lair became a fleeting
memory. Confronted by a sudden urge, John relieved himself on
the carcass of an old Camry as several bikers emerged from the back door. Sully
stood in front of them all.

“If we move and don’t stop to eat the yellow snow, we should
be at your place by nightfall. Word from brothers in the field
is that there’s someone in your old house. Don’t know who or how many,
but it could be your old lady.”

John shook the remaining wisps of the night
from his head.

Sully led the renegade group down a snow-covered street. Without the city services of plows and salt trucks, the entire
landscape glared like a blank canvas. Each member of the Keepers of the
Wormwood wore their leather vest on top of whatever else they could find. Most
of the men wrapped scarves around their neck and face, giving them the look of
Muslim extremists.

John slipped into the middle of the group. They
hemmed him in on all sides like a squad of police cars bringing a chase to a
peaceful and manageable end. John heard Sully’s loud laugh or curse when he
twisted an ankle on a covered curb.

They wound their way through dead and
cursed neighborhoods. The blood-red Sign painted on many doors and walls
stuck out, intensified by the power of the pure snow. John put his head down
and watched the tip of his boots strike the powder with every step.

For hours they marched, through empty
streets and deserted parking lots, past graveyards, gas stations, and churches.
Suddenly John recognized a block of Mayfield near Belvoir, where the
downward spiral had begun for him. The party at Reggie’s now
felt like a past life, like someone else’s life. He pushed the memory of
Sarah, of his coerced betrayal, from his mind. John thought of his Camaro, loud
guitars, and flicking a lit cigarette out the car window on a sultry summer
evening. He caught glimpses of his beautiful, naked Jana
underneath him. He could almost smell her hair.

John rejoined the group, and on they went, block after
block, but his mind remained elsewhere the entire time; John was oblivious to
the cold, to sights, sounds, everything.

“This is it,” Sully said.

In John’s daydreaming state, he did not notice that they’d
stopped and that Sully addressed him directly.

“Yeah. Plainfield Road.”

Sully turned his back to John. He moved a
closed hand to his ear. Sully’s head bobbed up and down, followed by an
audible click.

“The lighthouse is pulling us into the harbor. Let’s go.”

The Keepers of the Wormwood surrounded John and helped him
toward his house like a rushing creek carrying a lone leaf over the falls.

Chapter
37

The pain bit through Jana’s fragile state
of mind. She looked up at Byron through shimmering tears and blue
smoke... until his boot slammed into the side of her head and brought darkness.

Commander Byron lost a man in the fight,
but his small force had managed to eliminate all of Father’s other soldiers. Hidden
daggers had allowed Byron and his men to cut the zip ties, pull handguns from
strategic holsters, and open fire on Father’s unprepared men.

The surviving guard gathered the automatic
weapons and placed them inside a closet at the bottom of the stairs. For
better or worse, the cache would be theirs. He pulled bodies to the side of the
house, and placed them behind the drooping evergreens.

Byron dragged Jana by the heels, pausing on
the mudroom floor to make sure her slack arms did not snag on the bullnose of
the steps. Her head created a dull thud as it slid further down toward
the basement. The Commander yanked hard on her leg as his
breathing labored, his heart pounding through the exertion.

At the bottom, she murmured, low and incoherent. A closet door sat open to his left. Byron switched on the
rifle-mounted flashlight, and the beam showed a heating unit complete with
shiny ductwork. Behind that he saw another door, much older,
composed of unpainted, wooden planks. Judging from the fireplace chute
in the wall, Byron guessed the door led into the coal room.

The coal room spanned four feet by ten
feet, brick on all sides, with floorboards above. The frigid air nipped
at his nose but was not quite as cold as the bitter snow squall outside. Remnants
of mold and abandoned spiderwebs caused Byron to cover his mouth. He tasted the dust of ages on his dry, cracked lips.   

Byron pulled Jana through the first closet, past the
furnace, and into the brick room he thought of as “the dungeon”. He grabbed zip
ties from his pocket and secured her ankles together. Using
rusted S hooks lodged in the mortar, he fastened each wrist to one, struggling
to get one zip tie around Jana’s swollen wrist. Byron stood back and
looked at his work. Jana’s legs shot out perpendicular to the wall, sealed shut
at the ankles. Her head lolled to one side, resting on her
chest, with each arm raised at a forty-five-degree angle and secured at the
wrists on the S hooks. Before he backed out of the room, brushing
decades of cobwebs from his face, Byron spotted a roll of duct tape on top of
the furnace. He tore a strip from the brittle roll and spread
it across Jana’s mouth.

He shut the old door and slid cardboard boxes in front of
it. It would not fool a military team searching the place, but it would keep
her concealed from the untrained eye.

Byron hobbled back up the steps and sat
down in the kitchen on a wooden chair. His remaining guard handed him
the phone the dead sergeant had used to communicate with Father. Byron scrolled
through a menu and determined that the number had received no calls after the
sergeant made his fateful final one.

The commander tossed it on the kitchen
counter. A moment later, he felt a vibrating ring, and pulled another
phone from his vest. He pressed it tight to his ear.

“Yes?”

“Do you have her secure?”

“Yes. Are you bringing him?”

“Yes. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

The line clicked and delivered silence.

Byron shut the phone and put it back in his vest.

“Watch the front door and make sure the
asshole doesn’t try anything stupid. If he does, shoot him right in the
face.”

The soldier nodded to Commander Byron and stood sentry by
the front door.

Chapter
38

They marched to within four houses of
John’s, and yet the blasting snow made it difficult to see it. The slate
clouds held the sky close, suffocating the warm visions of seasons past.

“You won’t need this anymore,” said Sully.

He yanked the shotgun from John’s hand and tossed it to
another faceless biker, the Keepers of the Wormwood hidden beneath the scarves.

John replayed the one-sided telephone conversation in his
mind. He looked at Sully, who lost the bounce in his step.

“Why not?” John asked.

“C’mon dude. You tellin’ me you haven’t figured it out yet?”

John shook his head and brushed the accumulating snow from
his face.

“Which one is it?” asked Sully.

Too confused to lie, John pointed down the
street, to a house on the right. The group saw a vague outline through
the swirling whiteout. Snow accumulated on the ground,
covering most distinguishable landmarks.

As they turned up the driveway, John saw himself mowing the
lawn. He saw Jana in her white tank top and jean shorts,
weeding the flower beds. Other memories surfaced and collided, morphed
and separated, like broken seashells tossed by the surf. Tears stung his face,
brought to fruition by his recollections and the driving snow.

The Sign stood out from the falling white
wall. It glared red, accusing and menacing. Sully stood
back as the others aimed their weapons. After a second, the door swung
open and the soldier appeared, pointing his weapon back at them.

“Ease off, boys!” Sully ordered.

The Keepers pointed their weapons to the ground, but neither
turned away nor backed up.

John saw an older man appear behind the soldier, and an
orange circle glowing in the dark of his living room. He
recognized the smell of a cigar, even in the wicked blizzard. The old
man backed slightly away, as did the soldier. The two Keepers
of the Wormwood locked eyes with Sully, who motioned them forward.

Sully, the rest of the Keepers, and John filed into the
living room. John looked around, trying to recognize his
former life.

A meaty fist grabbed John by the collar and tossed him into
his dining room. The hand pushed him down by the shoulder
until John’s tailbone smacked hard off the floor. John looked up and saw
Sully facing the old man with the cigar.

“Commander Byron, you ancient piece of
shit.”

Byron smiled. Yellowed teeth accompanied a single, black eye
patch and dust-covered beret.

“Sully, and his Worms,” the old man
replied.

Ignoring the jab, Sully said, “Where’s the girl?”

“You do not think I am so stupid as to have
her here, do you?”

John wondered to himself if Jana was “the girl”, but kept
quiet as he saw the blood rush to Sully’s face. The man’s eyes twitched and
narrowed.

“Don’t fuck with me, old man.”

Byron shifted his weight to one leg, the
side with his cane. “Or what, you baboon? He is worthless without the
girl. Father needs both.”

Byron waited and watched for a response from Sully, whose
mouth sat open and silent.

“When will he be here?” asked Sully.

Byron exhaled and grinned.

“In an hour. We have half of that
time to determine how we are going to deal with him when he arrives.”

Sully turned toward one of the Keepers of
the Wormwood. The man unwrapped the scarf from his head, revealing a scarred
face.

“If he moves, shoot him. If Byron’s
little bitch moves, shoot him.”

The man nodded to Sully from where he stood
sentinel, just above John, who was struggling to figure a way to turn the armed
men against one another. Byron’s soldier stood on the opposite wall, his
weapon confiscated by another one of Sully’s personal army.

Sully followed Byron out of the dining room
and into the remains of the kitchen. The refrigerator door stood open,
revealing shattered bottles and moldy, black streaks. Byron removed a bottle
from one of the cabinets and used an opener on it. He handed
the beer to Sully and then took one down for himself. The two men stood
in silence, drinking their brew, staring each other down.

“Let’s get this straight right now. I need him dead, but I
don’t trust you as far as I can throw ya,” said Sully.