The Fallen 3 (7 page)

A loudspeaker announcement from the bus station next to the fast-food restaurant momentarily broke Dusty’s concentration and returned him to the present. It wasn’t the bus he
was waiting for. He took another large swallow of his diet cola before immersing himself once again in the review of his folly.

A large broken pallet had been leaning against the wall of the alley, and Dusty had pried a piece of wood from its frame as he headed down toward the commotion.

“Leave him alone,” he had hollered, hefting the wooden plank, making sure the goons could see that he had a weapon in case they chose to mix it up with him.

Dusty remembered the relief he’d felt when they actually stopped beating on the old man. He also remembered how fleeting that feeling was as the three thugs let the old man drop to the ground and turned their attentions to him.

The men had slowly advanced toward Dusty, and he had had to make a conscious effort to hold his ground. It had rained for most of the day, but the sky had just begun to clear, and as the three figures slowly stalked toward him, a curtain of thick clouds drew back from the moon, filling the alleyway with an unnatural light.

That was when Dusty realized that the men who were coming for him weren’t really men at all.

Sitting at the restaurant table, Dusty closed his eyes. This was the part where he usually began to doubt himself, thinking that maybe he’d been mistaken, that what he’d really seen was a trick of the moonlight, or the effects of an empty stomach—he hadn’t eaten anything that day except a stale bagel at breakfast—causing him to hallucinate.

But what had followed had proved that it was neither.

The men stood fully exposed in the moonlight. At first Dusty’s brain had attempted to rationalize what his eyes were seeing, explaining away their awful appearance as horrible masks that made their flesh appear pale and glisten as if wet. But the closer they got, the more he realized that these men were not wearing masks or even makeup.

Their eyes were black, shiny, and unblinking, like a doll’s. Their teeth were long and pointed, and there seemed to be far too many of them crammed inside their mouths.

They looked like dead men … or at least what he imagined long-dead men would look like. These men were something he wasn’t supposed to ever have seen … something that would kill him to keep their secret safe.

“A hero amongst the sheep,” one of them managed to speak through his many teeth.

“A sheep who believes himself a hero, brother,” said another.

“But a sheep nonetheless,” the final of the three monstrosities had offered.

Dusty had spent a large portion of his life being afraid. He’d always thought his abusive father to be the ultimate bogeyman. How wrong he’d been, for the terror he felt as the three creatures began to circle him made his father seem like a joke. His heart was hammering in his chest so hard that he thought his ribs might shatter. He had no idea why he hadn’t
simply turned and run. It was as if he was mesmerized by the nightmare that had been revealed to him.

Dusty shook himself from the memory and tried to collect his wits.

The harmonica had started to make a soft, tremulous moan, as if a faint breath were blowing through the instrument. It almost sounded as if it were growling in response to the memories of Dusty’s fear.

As the monsters, for Dusty had no doubt that was what they were, had moved closer, he had noticed an odd smell about them. A smell that had made him think of every sad thing he’d experienced in his nineteen years, and
that
had made every hair on his body stand at attention.

He’d raised his weapon, bending forward ever so slightly as he prepared to defend himself.

“Now what would entice this sheep to come to the aid of the carrier?” one of the creatures asked his brethren.

Dusty tried to keep his eyes on them, turning to look at each of them as they circled him.

“Curiosity,” the second suggested. “They are naturally drawn to the misfortunes of their own kind.”

“As we have seen time after time, brother,” the third said, “they seem to gain some kind of sustenance from the suffering of others. This one has come in for a little snack only to end up as a snack himself.”

Dusty felt as though he might vomit as he watched a thick
black tongue slither from the monster’s mouth and slide over teeth that seemed too sharp.

“Perhaps,” responded the first. “But I suspect that there is something more to it … that there could in fact be some connection between—”

“And you’d be right,” a new voice interrupted.

Dusty found his own gaze following those of the three walking nightmares to the far end of the alley, where the old man had been abandoned.

Only the man wasn’t lying on the ground anymore. In fact, he seemed to be in relatively decent shape considering the thrashing Dusty had seen him take.

Dusty couldn’t stand it anymore and took his chance while the three were distracted.

With a bloodcurdling scream, he’d swung the board in his hand as hard as he could. Visions of his freshman year in high school, when he’d played varsity baseball, danced before his eyes. He’d wanted to send that ball to the moon, and that was exactly what he’d wanted to do to the closest monster’s head.

The board hit pale skin and skull with a strangely satisfying
thunk
, the monster’s body going comically rigid as it dropped to the alley floor. Dusty’s blow had cracked its skull like an eggshell, spilling its black, glistening contents upon the ground.

Something eel-like squirmed and flopped within the oily liquid, squealing horribly as it was exposed to the light of the
moon. Dusty couldn’t pull his eyes from the thing as it slithered across the ground, searching out a patch of darkness.

The monster’s two comrades lunged at him, reaching out with long-fingered hands. Dusty swung at them, driving their distorted bodies back as he moved down the alley toward the old man.

“Stay behind me,” Dusty ordered the old man once he reached him. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was he was going to do. He was probably only delaying the inevitable, but he’d gotten this far and wasn’t going to just lie down and die.

He’d glanced quickly over his shoulder to be sure the old man had heard him, and it was then Dusty had realized with surprise that he was blind, his eyes milky white in his dark brown face.

Dusty came out of his memory with a start, his hand flailing out and knocking over his soda cup, spilling the contents.

“Shit,” he muttered, getting up from the table and leaving his bags, and the harmonica, to get some napkins to clean up his mess. He plucked paper napkins from the metal container, attempting to hold back his further recollections but having little luck.

“Give us the instrument,” one of the monsters had hissed in the alley. “Give it to us and we’ll kill you quickly.”

Again there was that thing with the tongue, fat and slimy, snaking from its mouth.

Dusty had had no idea what they were talking about. At
first he thought the monstrosities were referring to his makeshift weapon, but then he heard the old man softly chuckle behind him.

“I think this has gone on long enough,” he said, and Dusty couldn’t have agreed more.

Then, as if things weren’t already bizarre enough, the old man pulled a tarnished horn from inside his tattered suit coat. The absurdity of the action almost made Dusty break out in laughter, until he saw the monsters’ reaction.

The pair stopped advancing, their glistening black eyes fixed upon the sight.

“The instrument,” one of them hissed excitedly.

“Give it to us,” demanded the other, holding out a twisted, clawed hand.

The old man chuckled again. “You don’t have to ask me twice,” he said. He turned his blind eyes toward Dusty, as if he could see, moving the horn up to his mouth. “You might want to cover your ears.” He smiled, then touched the horn’s mouthpiece to his ancient lips.

If he lived to be a hundred years, Dusty would never … could never … forget the sound that came from that horn. It was every horrible sound that he could imagine rolled into one.

He heard it again, in his mind, as he stood at the napkin dispenser. He heard it as he’d heard it every night since that bizarre encounter in the alley.

Dusty caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and he glanced over at the table where he’d left his things. A little kid stood there now, staring with great curiosity at the harmonica.

The harmonica that had once been a horn.

Dusty remembered what he’d seen that horn do, and he dove across the restaurant, screaming for the kid to get away from his table, to get away from the harmonica.

The instrument
.

The horrible sound couldn’t have lasted for more than a second. It had been a short blast, its shrillness barely muted by Dusty’s hands as they covered his ears. But even more fantastic was the fact that Dusty could see the sound as it left the muzzle of the battered old horn. As the notes flowed down the alley, the air had shimmered like the waves of heat from a desert road.

The monsters had tried to flee, falling over one another in an attempt to be the first to escape.

Neither got very far.

As the note resonated, the disturbed air seemed to expand, enveloping the horrible pair as well as the body of their fallen comrade. Then it had torn them apart. It was as if they’d exploded, their malformed, corpselike bodies disintegrating into a fine black mist that coated the walls and floor of the alley. Even their clothing had been reduced to nothing.

As Dusty raced back to his table, he imagined that child, if he should somehow rile the instrument.…

But he needn’t have worried. His scream had driven the little boy, crying, into the arms of his mother. “He wasn’t going to touch anything,” the woman huffed as she hugged the child and glared at Dusty from her booth.

“That’s good,” Dusty muttered, reaching out and snatching up the harmonica. He carefully placed it inside the pocket of his jacket. “Wouldn’t have wanted him to get hurt.”

The mother gave Dusty another disgusted look and returned her attention to consoling her wailing son, promising him an ice cream if he would only stop crying.

Dusty sopped up the spill with a large wad of napkins, and quickly gathered his things. He threw his knapsack over his shoulder and trudged toward the door. People were staring now, and he forced himself to look at each and every one of them, just to be sure.

To be sure they were people, and not monsters.

Monsters that wanted the instrument.

In the alley, the remains of his attackers had dripped from the wall while Dusty had listened intently to the old man’s tale. Of course, at that point, the blind man could have been telling him Santa Claus was coming and Dusty would have believed him.

Tobias had explained that the Riders—he’d called them Corpse Riders—were after his horn, that they were hell-bent on getting it for a group of renegade angels called the Powers. There was a hint of relief in his voice as he told Dusty that he
was getting too old to protect it. He had stared at the horn in his hands as if he could see it. He had been traveling, he had said, searching for someone to take on the burden, for a burden it truly was.

And that was when Tobias had turned his blind stare on Dusty and offered the horn to him.

Dusty left the restaurant, and went out to wait for his bus in the damp cold. But he barely felt it, as the instrument in his pocket radiated a heat that warmed his body. He put his hand into his jacket, allowing his fingertips to gently brush the metal of the harmonica, and felt an electric tingle race through his body.

He’d felt that same tingle when he had accepted the horn from Tobias, gasping aloud as the metal touched his flesh.

The old man had smiled at him then. “She likes you.”

And Dusty had to wonder,
What if she didn’t?

That night in the alley had been the first and the last time Dusty had seen Tobias, although he had dreamed of the old man’s death—feathered wings mercilessly pounding him into darkness.

The instrument had shown him many things during the ensuing days. He previously would not have seen those visions, but now that he was the instrument’s carrier, they were images that he
must
see.

It was one of those visions that had brought him to the Seattle bus station tonight.

A bus pulled around the corner and into a space in front of the station. Its doors opened with a loud hydraulic hiss.

It was one of those images that had shown him where he needed to go. He was to go east, for
they
would be looking for him.

Dusty didn’t know who they were exactly, and felt that perhaps it would be best that he didn’t know. Images of the Corpse Riders appeared inside his head, and he quickly drove them away.

The driver stepped off the bus, fished a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, picked one out eagerly, and lit it up. Dusty climbed the stairs onto the bus and walked all the way to the back.

The instrument told him that they needed to keep moving, that it had much to show him before a decision could be made.

A decision for what?
He wondered.

Hunkering down, and closing his eyes to the whispering voice in his head, he realized that he didn’t have the courage to ask.

T
WO
W
EEKS
A
GO

Geburah hated to be in the foul presence of the Corpse Riders, but he took great pleasure from the sounds of their screams.

He had ignited the fire of Heaven in his right hand and was bringing it closer and closer to the monster’s pale face.

“You promised you would find me the instrument if I
spared your miserable life,” the Powers’ leader stated, his words lacking any emotion.

The demon squirmed beneath the holy light in Geburah’s hand while the other denizens of the demon nest were held in place by the razor-sharp stares of Geburah’s angelic brethren.

“We have done what you asked!” the Corpse Rider cried, cowering beneath the glow, his pale flesh blotchy in the cruel light of Heaven. “But since a new carrier was chosen—”