The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (16 page)

He heard the cries and liked it.

He smelled the blood,
felt
it, and liked that, too. He remained calm through it all, never even breathing hard.

He killed other animals later, but it was never as much fun. A person would be much better. Leeds let himself fantasize. In his mind the act was always so simple, so … fulfilling. And for a time the fantasies were enough. Somewhere there was reality, but it didn’t seem to matter as much anymore. Reality was what you made it. Leeds had already discovered that in school. He knew how smart he was, far smarter than the brainless twits that taught him. But he never let on, kept his true self covered, exposing it to no one.

He began to see a younger girl from the neighborhood hanging around the woods a lot. She was often dirty, and sometimes she had bruises on her face. She said she was running away. Leeds said he would help her.

Thinking back now, he would have to say it was very much like the dog. He brought the girl food on the pretext of gaining her trust, and while she ate he looped a rope around her neck and strangled her. After burying the girl’s body near that of the dog’s, Leeds went home and listened to the radio.

He was twelve years old.

His parents never realized how smart he was. No one realized, because Leeds concealed his intelligence. They saw only what he wanted them to. Leeds could make people love him, hate him, follow him. He could frighten them, humor them, win them over, beat them down. They were playthings, toys. But they fueled his fantasies and kept him from needing to visit the woods too often.

He exposed his true potential only upon reaching college, because he saw it as a quicker route to dominate. Domination, after all, was what life was all about. Killing was about domination. Leeds could kill the body, but he could also kill the soul. By the age of thirty, three dozen people had perished under his hand. He was careful how he chose them, avoided patterns at all costs. It wasn’t enough, though. He lived off his fantasies, but to continue to make them viable he needed to merge them with reality.

He took a job as a junior high school science teacher. Three glorious months spent gaining trust and seeing the end as it was going to unfold. He made sure that the authorities could easily find the bus, making it all the worse that the bodies of the twenty-six students would never be seen again.

His stint as a doctor came next, a similar number of victims but with infinitely more pleasure since they were spread out over time, the same method never used twice. The causes of death always looked normal initially, and Leeds was gone before the police ever realized the connection. He found he could live off fantasy for only so long now, his mind like a parking meter ticking away a quarter’s worth faster and faster.

His psychiatrist identity proved unfulfilling and frustrating. He hated listening to his patients talk, complaining of the dark evils that haunted their lives. Surrender! he wanted to tell them. Give yourself up to the evils, and only then will you realize your true self… . Leeds knew they never would have listened, so after three months of practicing, he ended the problems of his therapy group forever.

Later, as a forensic pathology professor, he was disappointed to find that his brilliant students cared more for bettering their grades than expanding their minds. Was this what the world was going to be left to, this horde of the living dead? It was that very thought that gave Leeds the idea for his exit from that identity. He wondered if anyone bothered to see the symbolism.

His brief tenure at the university reaffirmed his conviction that madmen, misfits, and outcasts were the people most fit to inherit the world. The dream began to take shape over the next several months; he needed only the means to bring it to be. And when the means to accomplish it were found, during his tenure as the Candy Man, Leeds had barely been able to restrain his excitement.

In order to accomplish his goals, though, he needed to be placed in The Locks. Only from within its walls could the final strokes be brushed onto his portrait of the future:

The world was going to be turned inside out. The madness he had previously needed to flee into would be there for him to reach out and touch.

And so he had outwitted the foremost adversary he had ever encountered by turning that adversary’s greatest strength into a weakness. Let him have the thrill of the pursuit. Give Kimberlain just enough to be sure he would pick up the trail and follow it. A brilliant ploy in all respects.

But the Ferryman was still out there, and there would be no rest for Leeds until he was out of the way at last.

“Where should I begin?” Andrew Harrison Leeds continued.

Two of the four walls in the conference room were covered by maps of the United States. The other two had maps of the world. Thin track lighting aimed at those maps provided the room’s only light, so that its darkest point was actually the conference table where eight of the nine chairs were occupied by silent figures. Leeds moved to the unoccupied chair at the head and sat down.

“With apologies, of course. I’m sorry I’m late, my fellows, but it couldn’t be avoided. My work is almost complete. Shipment from Kansas begins in a matter of a few weeks and distribution soon after. All that is left is the waiting, waiting for a rotting society to be cleansed of its weaknesses.”

Andrew Harrison Leeds clutched the end of the table with his hands. He waited for one of the eight figures gathered about the table to speak. None did.

“What, my fellows, no words? No words of congratulations or commendation? But no. I understand. You are so full of admiration for my schemes you remain speechless. I will succeed, after all, where you have failed. You each tried to found a dominion based on your personal vision, yet in the end each of you was defeated. The ninth dominion will be different, because I have determined the way the world was always meant to be and have discovered the means to make it so.”

Leeds rose slowly, then paced to the right side of the table and peered more closely at the figures around the table, as if waiting for them to speak. But they didn’t. The figures Leeds had assembled were all wax replicas of formerly great commanders and visionaries, ranging from Caesar and Genghis Khan to Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler. These were the only leaders Leeds believed could approach him in purpose and mentality.

Leeds stopped at the last figure seated on the right. “You, Genghis Khan, could have controlled all of Asia, the Orient, and beyond. But your thirst for violence frightened off your inner circle, and you paid with your life.”

The wax figure of Genghis Khan did not argue, did not stir. Andrew Harrison Leeds moved on.

“And you, Alexander, were limited by your own satisfaction and contentment. You thought you had conquered enough, and what you failed to accomplish became the seeds of your undoing.”

Leeds touched the waxen shoulder of the next figure. “Ah, Caesar, destroyed on the verge of great achievement from within your own ranks, those you considered closest. You let them get too close, for men like you and I can ill afford such a luxury.”

He moved on to a uniformed figure with hair tight to its scalp and a carved-off mustache. “Adolf Hitler. You among us had the least reason to fail, and yet you failed quickly after coming so close to a dominion that would have changed the course of history. But obsession ruined you. You saw only guarded images through a tunnel of your own making. You did not see the whole, and this destroyed you.”

Andrew Harrison Leeds gazed at the remaining four but did not address them as he moved back toward the head of the table past Catherine the Great and Attila the Hun.

“All of you must be commended for seeking to shape the world in the image you had of it. But in the end it was the error of your vision that condemned you to failure. The ninth dominion will be different.” Leeds paused and took a deep breath. “In the ninety day period commencing September 1, the United States will become a virtual wasteland. A minimum of ninety-five percent of her population will be dead with no damage whatsoever done to the structures and technology. No nuclear fallout, no biological toxins floating about in the air—nothing so crass and final. I will inherit what is left and forge it as my dominion with those I have deemed worthy to populate the wasteland. The rest of the world will follow shortly, unable to resist the tide I bring forth.

“My ninth dominion will be peopled from the ranks of the outcasts, those that society has shunned and have shunned society in return. The prisoners who thirst inside for a freedom that will allow them to express themselves without fear of chastisement and alienation. It will be their world to do with as they please.”

Compassion filled the face of Andrew Harrison Leeds. His eyes grew watery.

“How I feel for you, who could not see your visions reach fulfillment. But you can still succeed. Come with me, my fellows. Come with me as I embark on a journey into the abyss of man’s soul, as I turn the world inside out so it may at last be right and proper. The time has come to rise from the crevices, to crawl up from the cracks where society has stowed those of us who understand life well enough to express it. The world will bury us no longer.” He grabbed the waxen hands of Hitler and Catherine the Great, seated on either side of the table’s head. “Join me on a crusade that will see over two hundred and fifty million people perish in the blink of the eye, be swept away by a vision that will see itself denied no longer.”

“
What about the Ferryman?
” Leeds thought he heard one of the figures ask.

Leeds’s face began twitching. His left cheek pulsed and seemed to be rising toward his sunken eye. His breathing picked up. The waxen limbs he held in either hand began to compress under his grip.

“He is being taken care of.”

“
You already missed your chance
.”

“
You should have killed him. You should have waited at his house and killed him
.”

“
He can bring you down. He’s the only man that can
.”

Leeds released his grip, and the waxen mounds that had been finely chiseled hands thumped to the table. The voices of the failed conquerors seemed to be converging on him, smothering him with their accusations.

“
What about the woman?
”

“
She’s very dangerous because she knows about
—”

“Enough!” Leeds screamed. His hands clutched the underside of the conference table and, with an incredible burst of strength, lifted it up and over. The heavy table crashed down and scattered the wax figures in all directions. Hitler’s head snapped off and rolled across the floor. Catherine the Great’s arm jumped into the air and flopped back to the floor.

“I’ll kill the Ferryman, do you hear me?” Leeds demanded. “I’ll find him and kill him. The woman, too! Is that enough for you?
Goddamn it, is that enough?
”

“
When?
” the voices seemed to ask in unison.

“Tonight!” Leeds ranted before his voice grew eerily calm. “Tonight.”

Chapter 16

GARTH SECKLE SLEPT OUTSIDE,
sometimes in a tent, sometimes under the stars. The air was thicker tonight but pleasantly cool for summer. Too cool would have made him uncomfortable and perhaps necessitated a brief fire. But he didn’t want to start one. Nothing that might draw attention to him. He was alone and had to stay that way. Leave no trail, nothing to follow. He hadn’t yet and didn’t plan to.

He had carried many names through his life, but none of them meant as much as the one the country was calling him now:

Tiny Tim.

Imagine that! The press was so creative, naming him for an innocent little crippled boy who wouldn’t harm a fly. Well, he would harm flies as well as crippled boys and make no distinction between them.

He had lost a big chunk of his left foot back then when his life changed for the first time. Some nights the cold wind made his bad foot hurt more than usual. Tonight the wind felt soothing. He liked to take off his sock and look at the foot, because it was the only thing that reminded him of who he really was and the task that remained before him.

Seckle twisted on the grass and pulled his pack over to use as a pillow. The night was warm enough that he didn’t need to use his sleeping bag as a blanket. He never slept inside it. Too confining, especially for a man six-foot-ten-inches tall weighing nearly three hundred pounds. Seckle had never liked to be confined. He had the instincts of a wild animal. A man who lived alone and hunted alone.

Seckle stretched beneath his blanket of stars. His bad leg and foot throbbed. There was always pain, not a second without it.

The two towns had gone easy for him, four blessed hours in each when death stood by his side and cheered his every move. Enter the first house, silenced machine gun in hand. Parents’ room first, then the kids’.

Pfffft … Pfffft … Pfffft …

And the bodies jumped a little, then stopped. Sometimes blood sprayed. Sometimes it didn’t. A few times his victims managed a glance at him before he dispatched them. A few times they even managed to move or start a plea. Seckle saw them through the deep haze of his night-vision goggles.

Some layouts required the use of the poisoned gas canisters he wore attached to his commando belt. A high-tech gas mask that made him look like something from a science-fiction film hung from his belt. He always saved his hands for near the end, the innermost section of what Seckle called his death circle. Snap the necks quick or squeeze the life out of them and watch their eyeballs bulge. Seckle liked the look when they gave up and knew it was finished. He wished he could make that moment linger.

Of course, the bulk of these victims meant nothing to him. They were no more real than black and white cardboard silhouettes on a shooting range. They were nonentities, meaningless in death as they had been in life. His only true satisfaction lay in a single stop on each of his visits. For these he used special means and could have left it at that. But this was a game for him, and he wanted to see if there was anyone out there good enough to play along.