Shadow Falls: Badlands (3 page)

“Carrion,” William said. “For animals,” preempting Miles's obvious question. “By the morrow there will hardly be anything left of him.”

“D-d-d-did we come to bury him?” Miles blurted out.

“No,” his father said, and from the inside of his frock coat drew a dagger.

Miles's breath caught in his throat. He saw the blade and froze, expecting the next moment to be his last.

He's going to kill me
, Miles thought. But instead of turning the blade on his son, William crouched next to the dead man and cut a small lock of hair from what was left on his head.

“Hold this and follow me,” William commanded, handing Miles the torch. Carefully, he followed his father to the bramble a few feet away—and that's where he saw it.

Another man, naked, curled up on the ground and, judging from the fact that half his head was missing, very dead.

“Animals didn't do this,” Miles whispered.

“No,” William responded, crouching down next to the body of the naked man. “I did.”

A chill ran down Miles's spine.

“This man attacked us earlier,” William said. “I had no choice.”

Miles looked down.

“He was one of us.”

“Was. Not any longer. He had turned. I'm positive he killed the other man.”

“I— I— I don't believe you.” Miles was stunned. That he'd just said this to his father shocked even himself.

“Please, Miles. I don't expect you to understand quite yet.” His father cut a lock from the body of the naked man as well. “Bring the torch over here.”

Miles did as told. He dared not disobey as long as his father still had his pistol.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim firelight, William paced a circle twice, drawing it in the dirt with his dagger the second time through. From there he drew several lines crossing and connecting. Miles had seen this before back home, but was always told by his mother he was too young to know of such things.

“It's a pentagram,” William said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Back home we were persecuted for our beliefs. Shunned, ridiculed, even murdered. This is why we came to the new world, Miles. To find a better place where we are free to practice our religion as we see fit.”

William positioned Miles in the middle of the pentagram.

“Be still,” he told the boy. “And watch.”

His father began by circling the pentagram.

“Some dare call us Pagans. Heretics. Worshippers of Darkness. Let them. From whence we came, it is the self-proclaimed duty of the self-righteous to judge us based upon the fact that our beliefs do not accord with theirs. We have chosen the master we wish to worship and it is He who has delivered us to this place—a place of our destiny. But it is obvious that before we are to claim that which is ours, we will be tested first. Tested by the obstacles others choose to put in our path to challenge our faith. Tested by people who dare stand in our way. Like that one-eyed hoodlum who wanted to hold us up for more money and tried to scare us with tales of spooks and spirits. It was I, however, who had the last laugh on him. He will not be extorting monies from gullible travelers anymore. I made sure of that.”

Miles swallowed hard. He thought of the woman going overboard. He thought of the man lying dead with half his skull blown off, brains for offal.

“For years, I have had visions of this place. Visions of what we will find here and, before my very eyes, these visions have been true. Every last one of them.”

A sound started in William's throat, beginning first as a low whisper then turning into a low growl—the chant coming from his mouth melting into words and phrases in a language Miles had never heard before. A language so guttural and primitive, yet at the same time mentally hypnotizing. William's arms drew back and forth in a way reminiscent of the conductor of a small orchestra Miles had seen back in Portsmouth. Back then the conductor had been summoning music from the musicians; here his father was summoning, but what was anybody's guess.

As the chanting grew louder and more intense, Miles looked up and saw that in place of his father's eyes were now shocks of white. Miles couldn’t scream; he couldn't even move. It felt as if bands of iron had wrapped around his body. The terror inside him was swelling to the point where he felt as if his sanity were being torn asunder from his body.

William reached out and grabbed Miles’s wrist with one hand, raising the dagger in the other. With one quick stroke he sliced clean across the boy's palm. Then, clutching it inside his own, balled both hands into a fist and squeezed. Miles felt as if the bones in his hand would shatter—his hand being crushed inside his father’s hand—but instead blood poured out onto the ground as if he were letting a calf. The blood, which pooled at Miles' feet, quickly disappeared into the ground as if being sucked down by a vampiric earth. And as quickly as it started, William dropped Miles' hand and it was over. The invisible bands holding Miles in place were gone and the youth, drained physically from the ritual, fell to the ground at his father's feet.

“You are ready,” William said, catching his own breath, “to do that which needs to be done.”

In silence, they waited for sunrise to come. William mouthed some kind of unholy prayer to himself. Miles had become too scared to even move, feeling as if something were sitting next to him, but anytime he’d look, there was nothing. It was a presence he could feel—but not see. To Miles, it was something oddly comforting; he no longer knew whom his father was, though this presence next to him felt familiar. At some point during the night exhaustion overwhelmed Miles and sleep enveloped him.

It was his father who shook him awake.

“Time to go,” William said. He didn’t even wait for Miles to get up before starting off down the path back towards camp.

Miles started to his feet, his limbs stiff from inactivity. He glanced down at his hands, looking for the deep cut his father had put there but it was nowhere to be seen. His eyes darted from one hand to the other. Nothing. So certain he had been of the gash, his father squeezing his closed fist like...

“Miles, please hurry!” his father called out. Miles tried to remember what had indeed happened last night—but his memory seemed foggy. He vaguely recalled what Thomas had said about how the things he’d seen on the boat evaporating from his mind like morning dew. Miles turned back to the spot where they camped—and that’s when he saw it. In the woods, through the bramble and thicket, were eyes. Hundreds upon hundreds of eyes, staring back at him from hiding.

And those eyes seemed hungry.

“It isn’t possible,” Miles whispered to himself; but when he turned back the stares were still there. Watching him.

Miles picked up the pace of his feet until he had caught up with his father, grasping William’s hand for comfort.

As they approached camp, Miles could see the clearing up ahead through the trees. The wagons were still circled in the same way to which Miles was accustomed. He wanted to run toward them—to his mother, brother, and baby sister.

“Wait,” his father said. “One thing I must tell you before we go back.”

Miles waited in anticipation. The evening had been long enough; he just wanted to be back at camp.

“You could say part of my vision for this new land and our future was drawn in blood.”

Miles’s heart beat faster; he didn’t like where this was heading.

“We live in a time of great peril,” William continued. “War; pestilence; greed. We are at the verge of a great reckoning. Just because we walk on this ground now does not mean we always shall—I have foreseen this with mine own mind’s eye. The evil of man—persecution; genocide—has pushed this world to the brink of Armageddon. It is, undeniably, upon us.”

Miles began shaking. His father had long ago abandoned the pulpit in the church of which he’d been a pastor. Miles had been three years old at the time and had barely a recollection of it—though at night, in secret, Thomas would talk about it on occasion. William explained he had “lost his faith,” claiming he had seen the “truth” about his beliefs. Miles was beginning to think his father’s visions were this “truth.” He was aware of the strange rituals he would sometimes hear his mother and father secretly performing late in the evening, but chose to believe they were just things he was too young to understand. He thought of the secret moans and sounds coming nightly from his parents’ room that he would often cover his ears not to hear.

“I did this for us, Miles,” his father said. “I brought us here to be with Him, to serve at His right hand when the day of reckoning arrives—for this is the place from where He will emerge to reclaim the throne He was denied.”

Miles closed his eyes. In his mind was an image from an old church primer from years ago, a book that had been long banished from their house. The image, a horned beast trapped in a pit of flame, seemed to burn itself into Miles’s mind.

“I brought Him the sacrifice he wanted, Miles. I brought it to Him all the way out here.”

His father turned his head and gestured toward the clearing—toward the camp.

Pulling away from his father, Miles bolted down the path.

“Miles, come back here!” William shouted. “You’re not going to like what you find there.”

Miles ran as fast as his legs would carry him, his feet pumping against the hard dirt. His lungs burned but he kept running, finally breaking free into the clearing.

His heart felt like it was going to explode but he kept moving toward the wagons.

“Thomas!” he called out, gasping for breath. “Thomas! Mother!”

It was then that he saw the bodies.

Two of them lay on the ground, their limbs sprawled at unnatural angles. Miles approached, slowly, his whole body shaking. Some thing had dismembered the man and woman on the ground, their bodies apparently thrown to the ground as if they were playthings. Her clothing had been ripped apart, her skirt mercilessly dragged up over her face. The man next to her did not even have a face to speak of—for the flesh had been torn off, his exposed jaw hanging open in a never-ending silent scream.

Miles turned. “Thomas!” he yelled. “Mother!”

No sound greeted him in return. He turned past the first wagon and looked inside. The flies had begun to already light on the dead woman, landing on the bloody gash along her neck. In her arms she clutched a bundle wrapped in a blanket. Miles remembered—this was the woman who had given birth in Portsmouth just two months before they boarded the Majestyk.

Miles ran to the next wagon. Dripping from between the wooden slats of the undercarriage was blood. He need not look inside to know what had happened. He took two steps and found another man, laying face down, his legs severed above the knee, exposing denuded bone. Miles knew without question: those legs had been chewed off.

And then behind him he heard a sound.

He spun to find three coyotes gnawing the flesh of another dead body just under the next wagon. The scavengers were oblivious to Miles as he approached, but when one of the coyotes looked up, exposing its victim, is when Miles saw it.

Thomas’s face.

Or, more accurately, what was left of it.

“No!” Miles screamed. “No!” He ran toward the coyotes shrieking and waving his arms like a wild man to shoo them away. The beasts scattered, disappearing into the woods at full stride. Miles fell to his knees next to his dead brother.

“Thomas! Thomas!” He grabbed his brother’s limp arm, his shirt torn and soaked with blood. At the end was a gnarled stump where Thomas’s hand had been chewed away.

The tears exploded from Miles as he clutched Thomas’s body to his, crying into the sky, sobbing to the point of silence—just deep, hitching breaths.

“I’m sorry, Miles. Here is the sacrifice we must make,” William’s voice came from behind him. Miles squeezed his eyes shut and held his brother’s lifeless body closer.

“Miles.”

William reached out to him but Miles pulled away, leaping to his feet, dropping Thomas’s body.

“Please, boy.”

Miles backed away from his father’s reach. He bumped into a wagon. Behind him, he heard a thud and a hand fell upon his shoulder. His head shot around to find the outstretched arm of his mother, her visage barely recognizable with her lower jaw torn away, the rest of her face frozen in a grimace of agony. Still clutched to his mother’s breast was baby Alyson, a cry bursting from her tiny lungs.

“She’s alive,” Miles said, relief washing over him. “She’s alive.” He reached for her but his father grabbed him from behind and spun him around.

“Please understand, Miles.”

“You did this!” Miles sobbed. “You killed them all!”

“No. It was not my hand.”

“But you knew. You brought us here to be slaughtered!”

Baby Alyson’s cries cut through the air. Miles wanted to grab her and run but his father’s hands clutched his shoulders.

Miles could hear someone else sobbing from an adjacent wagon—a girl’s cry, but he could not place whom.

“There are others still alive; we must help them,” Miles pleaded.

“In this world we are the persecuted, in the next we will be one with His power. His time is coming, Miles. And when that day is upon us, it will change everything. We will rule by His side.”