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Authors: Jon Land

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BOOK: Kingdom of the Seven
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The electrified prods were pinned beneath him.
The hiss that came when the plastic activators compressed upon striking the floor under the water was brief. The screams and wails that followed were not. Blaine heard them as he hoisted himself back up upon the piping. The shower became one vast electric pool, pouring thousands of volts through all the men standing within it. Blaine could barely make out the shaking, twisting, writhing forms that toppled like dominoes one after the other.
A sizzling hiss preceded a shower of sparks from the area of the ceiling outlet where the cord had been plugged in. A pop sounded with a bright flash as power in the entire cellblock shorted out, and the shower room was plunged into darkness yet again.
McCracken dropped down from the pipe, and his feet sloshed into the steaming water. He eased forward, doing his best to avoid stepping on bodies en route to the door. Blaine found the latch and threw it open.
He emerged into the darkness of the cold corridor and hurried to the nearest guard station.
Wayne Denbo loved being in the dark. In the dark he felt in control. As soon as the light began to intrude, and the voices started to reach him, the control was gone, letting the fear return.
He had no idea of exactly how long he’d been where he was, only that more and more of the dark was receding. He’d reached out to keep it, but it was getting harder and harder to grasp. And the more it receded, the more he could see the shapes coming at him out of the dust in Beaver Falls. Coming at him like they’d come for the others.
Only he’d gotten away. Eyes glued more to the rearview mirror than the windshield, he’d quickly lost his sense of direction, cared only that he wasn’t being followed. There seemed to be nothing to do but drive, although he did keep squawking into his mike for a good five minutes before he realized that he’d crushed it. Didn’t even notice the blood seeping out of his hand until he smelled its coppery stench, and even then he’d been afraid to spare the time to bandage the wound.
Twice in the past day he’d seen the figures from the dust coming for him in the hospital room, and woke up screaming both times. It took three men to hold him down while a nurse gave him a shot that brought the blessed darkness back for a stretch, though not long enough. Got to the point where he knew if he screamed loud enough, they’d give him a shot and he could have the darkness back, because that was all he had wanted.
Denbo knew he could speak if he really tried, but he chose not to; they wouldn’t let him have the darkness again if he did, and the darkness was his only refuge. There none of it had happened. There he had never gone to Beaver Falls. There Joe Langhorn was still sitting next to him in the car.
But Joe was gone now. Wayne was alone.
No one else would listen. No one would believe. He had nowhere to go.
Except the darkness.
 
 
The twins were like chameleons, able to become part of any situation they entered and appear as though they belonged. It was a skill long mastered and well practiced. The news that a number of inmates had been killed brought scores of relatives out to the federal penitentiary. The twins mixed easily among them, and according to plan, it was Jacob who slid inside the Sheridan Correctional Center’s gates along with representatives of the media.
“Interesting,” was his first comment when he emerged just under an hour later.
“What were you able to find out?” Rachel asked him.
“Fourteen inmates are believed to have been killed. The rumor is, a single man was responsible.”
“Rumor …”
“There’s more. Apparently all the victims were members of the Fifth Generation, including their leader.”
“Then it was McCracken! He was
here
!”
“Just as we would have been, given the same information he had.”
“Please don’t compare yourself to—”
“I was comparing us.”
“Never mind.” Her gaze drifted back to the prison yard, where revolving lights continued their red spin through the night. “Could he still be inside?”
“If he is, he won’t come out through the front.”
“Then there’s a chance! If we keep moving about the other exits, if we get lucky …”
“It’s worth a try,” Jacob said with little enthusiasm.
“You think he’s gone.”
“We would be by now.”
“Comparisons again.”
“If we’re going to find Blaine McCracken,” Jacob told his twin sister, “we’d better learn to think like him.”
The rifle-wielding figures enclosing Johnny Wareagle started to move forward, looking more scared than angry. If they were going to shoot, it seemed to Johnny, they would have already.
“Is he one of ‘em?” a new voice blared. “I think he’s one of ’em!”
“Then let’s kill him.”
“Hush up!” ordered a new, gravelly voice. “He ain’t carrying a gun. They ever come, it’d be with guns.”
“What’d ya call that thing on his chest there?”
“A knife.”
“Biggest one I ever saw. Killin’ is killin’.”
“Never mind that,” noted the gravelly voice. “We know he’s alone. They’d never come alone.”
“Who?” Johnny dared to ask.
“Shut your trap!” ordered the original voice.
The gravel-voiced speaker came closer to Johnny in the darkness. “You lost?”
“No.”
“Looking for us, then?”
“Looking for … something.”
The man with the gravel voice scanned the others with his eyes. “I say we talk to him.”
“I say we kill him!” from somewhere in the tight pack of his captors.
“Might not be as easy as it seems.”
“He’s seen us, goddamnit! Even if he ain’t one of them—”
“They did this,” Johnny said suddenly, calmly.
The men enclosing him looked at each other.
“What?” the man who wanted to kill him asked.
“Whoever you fear I am a part of, they burned this village.”
The man with the gravelly voice finally stepped forward, into the moonlight. The right side of his face was a mass of patchy scar tissue, the eye on that side no more than a shriveled socket sewn closed by the years.
“You come here lookin’ for us?” he asked through the perpetual grimace his mouth had been turned into.
“No,” Johnny told him, starting to realize. “I think I’ve come here looking for them.”
 
The walk deeper into the woods took all of a half hour. Johnny towered over his dozen or so captors and made sure his hands were always in plain view so they would have no reason to fear he might be hiding another weapon. They brought Johnny to a settlement nearly indistinguishable from the woods containing it, the decently built cabins shrouded by trees and brush. He couldn’t tell exactly how many cabins there were. A row of ten or so lined the front. However many lay amidst the woods beyond these was indiscernible. The settlement’s only clearing contained a central hearth around which rock seats had been placed. Tonight Johnny could see that no fire burned in that hearth. Almost to the clearing, the man with the scarred face turned on his flashlight and poured its beam over Johnny.
“You’re an Indian.”
“Yes.”
“You said you thought it was them you were after,” the scarred man continued to Johnny. “Mind telling us exactly how you came to that conclusion?”
“I was in these woods before. Twenty years ago.”
“So was we,” a voice Johnny didn’t recognize put forth.
Farther back from the circle, new figures had gathered at the rim of the clearing. Wareagle tried not to let his stare linger on them long, but a few seconds were more than enough for him to identify a number of women and a few older children. What little he could glimpse of their faces showed the same trepidation and uncertainty that had laced the voices of his captors.
“I killed two men that night,” Johnny told the men. “I thought I killed three. The third survived, fell off the cliff and into the river. His name was Earvin Early.”
The scarred man’s expression turned even more pained. “Little late to come after him, ain’t it?”
“I only learned Monday afternoon that he was still alive. To me that makes the trail barely thirty-six hours old.”
“You a bounty hunter, something like that?” the scarred man wanted to know.
“In a manner of speaking, I was back then,” Johnny told them all, and summarized the events of twenty years ago as best he could.
The scarred man was nodding in the end. “These, er, people who sent you after the killers. They musta had their reasons for choosing you.”
“They did.”
“Knew you were the kinda man got a job done right.”
“Until yesterday, I thought I had.”
“Those three the only ones you were looking for?”
“Back then, yes.”
“And now?”
“Wherever Early’s trail takes me,” Johnny said, leaving out mention of Judgment Day.
“But it took you to us.” The moonlight caught the good side of the scarred man’s face, showed it to be creased and wrinkled, the single eye a pale gray color set in a grim countenance. “See, here’s the problem. You say this Early and the two others were what brought you to the woods originally. Thing is, it coulda been any of us, Injun, ’cause the truth is, we’re not much different. We’re all criminals and we were all on the lam when we got here.”
The moon peeked out from behind the clouds and caught the whole of the scarred man’s face, now concentrated intensely his way. Johnny gazed down at him. “And yet you weren’t worried that was what brought me to you tonight.”
The scarred man’s jaw clenched tight. His eye narrowed into a determined slit, and Johnny could see in it the memories of the burned-out settlement they had left a few miles back in the woods. “They’ll be back. Just a matter of time, and time’s the one thing we fought to keep our control over.”
“Who are
they
?”
“The rest of us, Injun, the ones that got away. The rest of the founding members of the Key Society.”
 
“Man who brought us here called it that ’cause he figured he had the key,” the scarred man continued, after introducing himself as Hodge and inviting Johnny to take a seat across from him on one of the rocks that enclosed the cold hearth. Most of the others joined them in the ragtag circle, the rest hanging back on foot or crouched on their haunches. The women and children had vanished from the clearing, at least from sight. In the wooden cabins that rimmed it, Johnny caught occasional flashes of dim light that came and went quickly in the darkness. “What we’re talking about here is second chances, a kind of rebirth, or as Frye called it, the key that would unlock the door to a better world for us.”
“Frye?” Johnny questioned.
Hodge’s eye swam about the others in the circle before responding. “You never heard of him?”
“No.”
“The Reverend
Harlan
Frye?”
Wareagle shook his head.
“Television preacher, rich as sin now. Founded the Church of the Redeemer. Worth maybe a billion dollars.”
“I don’t see any television antennas in the area.”
“We got our sources. Got to keep abreast of the son of a bitch. Anyway, these woods was where he got his start. You’re looking at some of the original disciples he was determined to save by opening the door to a better life—his jargon.”
“I understand.”
“Well, what else you got to understand is, those of us came here did so with the law sniffing at our tails. Had nowhere else but the road and where it led. Word was out about this place, a refuge for those down on their luck who’d tried to change it the wrong way. Musta been fifteen or so here when I pulled in. Came with three others I met up with ’long the road. All dead now, all killed that night.”
“The fire?”
Hodge didn’t respond. “Frye welcomed us all with open arms. Said we were welcome to stay ’long as we wanted, so long as we were willing to leave the men we were at the start of the woods. Oh, he wasn’t talking about rehabilitating us. He was talking about making us realize we were worth something, that he had the key to open up a better world for us, and all we had to do was listen for him to use it. Son of a bitch honestly believed he could save the world one person at a time, starting here.”
“How did you find out about … this place?” Johnny wondered.
“Word gets passed along the road, rumors and stories. At first you don’t believe ‘em. Then you figure, what the hell you got to lose, and you come out this way. New men—and some women—started arriving not long after
we did, pretty regular flow. The work of building that settlement back there in the woods kept us busy. Frye kept us in line. Don’t ask me how neither. I mean some of these boys were ornery sorts who’d slit your throat as easy as shake your hand. But they never moved on the Reverend. Like he held some kind of power over ’em.”
“What about you?”
“Me, too, I guess. I was just a house burglar who got clumsy with a club when the owner came home early. Plenty of the others was different.”
“Like Earvin Early.”
Hodge’s one eye widened briefly at that. “What’d he do, anyway? All these years, I never knew that.”
“Murdered two families,” Johnny replied, figuring that was enough.
The one eye closed briefly, then looked back up. “I remember the night some of the others found him dragging himself out of the river. Big mess of a man, scary to look at it.” The eye sought out Johnny’s. “Still?”
“Worse.”
“Things had already started going sour here by then. Frye had gone loony. We had maybe two hundred in our number, more than we could handle as it was, and the flow had started slowing down. But that wasn’t enough for the Reverend. He didn’t figure it was enough anymore to save only those who showed up here. He wanted to go out and find them that were in need. Thing was, he wanted us to go with him as his messengers, spread the word of his key to a better world. That was fine for the men who didn’t give a shit about showing their faces where they plainly didn’t belong. But those of us that still had our marbles knew better than to be seen again. We liked what we built here, wanted to stay. Frye was disappointed, but he agreed to let us.”
The wind whipped up, rattling the trees above them. It was a warm wind that nonetheless drew a shiver from Hodge as he grabbed a stick and began poking it into the dirt. The moonlight continued to light the clearing.
“Then one night, not long afterwards,” he continued, “Frye had your friend Early cut the throats of some of those that had spoken out against leaving and elected to stay. One of them managed to get away and run back to warn the rest of us.”
Hodge’s words were slower and more deliberate now. He poked the ground even harder, bending the stick, threatening to break it. Johnny looked into his one eye and knew for him it was that night again. Hodge turned his face away and concentrated on the ground between his feet.
“We fought back, then tried to run. They caught most of us and tied us inside the buildings before lighting them on fire. I was in the last house they set. Could hear the screams of the dying, smell the stink, ‘fore they even got to me. The rest of Frye’s people were hootin’ and hollerin’ up a storm. They ran off, left me for dead. But the ones of us they didn’t catch came back. Managed to get me and maybe five others freed.” Hodge touched the mangled side of his face with his free hand. “Little late in my account, but least I was alive. Plenty of men died in that burned-out settlement we found you in tonight. I won’t tell you they were good men, just better than those that killed ’em.” Hodge’s one-eyed gaze came back up, reflective. “Eighteen years ago that be now. We ain’t seen sign of Frye or the others since.”
“But still you take precautions. The men who spotted me enter the woods must have been on a regular shift.”
“Thing is, if you’d known we were here and came after us, would they have seen you?”
“No,” Johnny said.
“That’s what keeps us fearing the nights. We figure sooner or later Frye’s gonna come back to finish the job he started. He ain’t the sort to leave things uncompleted, no matter how long it takes.” Hodge took a long, deep breath. “As for us,” he resumed, taking in the whole of his domain with a quick sweep of his one eye, “what you see is what you get. Word about this being a haven for those on
the lam don’t get spread no more, and that suits us just fine. There are children here now, families. We ain’t got much, but we get by.” Hodge gave Johnny a long look. “Man like you could spoil it.”
“Could, but won’t.”
The look became knowing. “You come here after Earvin Early, maybe you’re after Harlan Frye too. Early worshiped him, that much I remember. He done something that set you on his trail, you can bet the preacher wasn’t far behind him. That being the case, I’d watch myself, I was you. Frye don’t take kindly to people disagreeing with him.” Hodge touched the ruined side of his face. “And he’s got a fondness for fire to go with it. Burn the world if that’s what it took to do in those against him.”
“Judgment Day,” Johnny muttered, just loud enough for Hodge to hear.
“Every time the sun comes up, if you’re Harlan Frye.”
 
It was well after midnight before Blaine McCracken was permitted to leave the Sheridan Correctional Center in Illinois. Shortly after exiting the shower room, his nearly naked figure had been illuminated by the flashlights of guards responding to the power failure in the cellblock. The shocking sight of his handiwork in the shower room led to his detainment, the guards not caring to accept his explanation. The warden was summoned to the scene, and even with help from the proper contacts in Washington, McCracken had a tough go at gaining his release after being responsible for the deaths of over a dozen prisoners. A thorough search of the premises had turned up his clothing, piled into a corner of a storage closet adjacent to the shower room.
BOOK: Kingdom of the Seven
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