The Walls of Lemuria (33 page)

It wasn’t a smell you ever forgot. Like rotten cabbage inside a trash Dumpster left out in the sun for too long. As physically nausea-inducing as anything he had ever had the displeasure of sniffing. He remembered it from the motel that night, then from the police station in Bentley during the attack. It was unmistakable, and it assaulted his senses like sharp knives. Even breathing through his mouth did little to deter it now that it had invaded his system.

“Jesus, Levy,” Norris said. “What the fuck?”

It took a few seconds before Keo’s eyes could adjust to the semidarkness inside the two-car garage. One half of the room was filled with piles of burnt furniture, most of them still covered with the heavy plastic tarps Keo had discovered when he first looked through the building months ago. It was the unoccupied half of the structure that drew his attention.

Keo knew what he would see there before his eyes became accustomed to the dim lighting. The stench had given it away. He just wasn’t sure how he would react, and it took everything he had not to throw up.

It was perched in the corner, which allowed it to stay as far away from the sunlight pouring in through holes in the roof and along the walls. A metal spike had been driven into the floor and was connected to a thick rawhide rope that disappeared into the darkened corner. Inside the small section of blackness, Keo heard movement. The dirty, mud-caked rope, in response, slithered against the ground.

“I found them in here,” Levy said. “There were two of them. What I think happened was, they must have overslept and got stuck inside after sunrise. Did you know they could oversleep? I was surprised, too.”

Overslept?

Keo wasn’t sure if Levy sounded desperate to believe his own explanation, or if he had actually gone off the deep end. Oversleeping was a human trait, and what was inside that corner was
not
human.

Or at least, not anymore.

“At first, I thought about shooting them,” Levy continued, “but I realized that wouldn’t have done anything. And they couldn’t hurt me. Not in the daytime, anyway. All I had to do was stay in the light. That was before I found a way to capture them. It wasn’t easy, but with a little ingenuity and patience, it all worked out.”

Keo took out his flashlight and clicked it on. He splashed the bright LED beam into the corner, illuminating the creature hiding within.

He didn’t know what he expected to see exactly, but the shriveled, emaciated thing that looked back out at him wasn’t the least bit frightened by the light. It bared its devastated teeth, oozing black liquid dripping from rotting gums. A single black eye glistened, as if wet. Where the other eye should be, there was just a malformed hole. The end of the rope was wrapped tightly around its throat, so constricting that black blood coated the part where the rawhide bit into its flesh. Its entire left arm was missing.

“You said there was two,” Keo said.

“I had to kill the other one three weeks ago,” Levy said. “Just to be sure.”

“Be sure of what?” Norris said.

“That they don’t regenerate after death. Or re-death, I guess,” Levy said, and grinned oddly at them. He didn’t seem to notice the smell.

How long has he been in here with this thing, doing God knows what, that he doesn’t even smell it anymore?

“I’ve been thinking about it, you know,” Levy continued. “Since what happened to Earl, Gavin, and Bowe. What do we really know about them? Not much. It’s all just guesses. So I did some tests.”

“What kind of tests?” Keo asked, though he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know the answer.

“I started with the first one. Cut its limbs off one by one.”

Levy walked over to the wall and unhooked a machete hanging from one of many hooks that hadn’t been there when Keo checked the garage previously. The baseball bat was also new, as were the ax, the hand saw, the pruning saw, the sickle, the hedge shears, and what looked like some kind of makeshift spear on a wooden pole. It was like looking at a medieval armory. The only thing missing were shields, but Keo guessed Levy didn’t need that when his victims were tied up.

Levy returned with the machete. The blade was sharp and glinted against the stray beams of sunlight. He swung it around, the
whup-whup
eliciting a shuffling movement from the creature in the corner of the room.

It knows what that noise means…

“I even decapitated it,” Levy said. “Not that it did any good. Do you know they can still live even after you chop off their heads?”

Keo thought he heard Norris swallowing loudly behind him.

“It’s crazy,” Levy continued. “I swear, the blood was moving by itself.
By itself.
”

“How?” Keo said.

“I don’t know. I took Science and Biology in school like everyone else, but this is beyond me.” He grinned that strange grin again. “But it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, these things…they’re like a new race. Where did they come from?
How
did they come to be? Maybe I’ll write a book.”

“And?” Keo said. “What did you find out after…all of this?”

A part of him was intrigued, the other half horrified by what he was hearing. And yet, and yet, wasn’t Levy right? What
did
they know about the creatures? Most of it was trial and error. What else could they know about the enemy?

What was that line by Sun Tzu from
The Art of War
?

Something about knowing your enemy and blah blah blah.

Close enough.

“It’s kind of disappointing,” Levy said. He walked back to the wall and put the machete away. “They don’t grow back their limbs. When they’re exposed to sunlight, it’s gone. There are just the bones left.” Levy looked down at the floor. Keo wondered if that was where the dead
(again)
creature’s severed limbs had been twenty-one days ago. “I just had to make sure, though.”

“Be careful,”
Gillian had said.
“And remember what he’s been through, okay?”

He wondered if Gillian ever thought
this
was what Levy was up to. It sure as hell had caught him off guard. The kid didn’t look like he had the makings of a Josef Mengele. Keo didn’t think Levy could have been the Nazi doctor’s unwitting assistant.

And yet here he was, talking about torturing these undead things like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Kid’s come a long way from that first night.

“How long has this been going on?” Keo asked.

“I found them six weeks ago.” He looked into the corner at the remaining bloodsucker. If the creature didn’t react at all to Keo, he thought he sensed a bit of fear coming off it now, directed at Levy. “I’ve been taking my time with this one. I don’t want to just kill it. That’s not going to get us anything.”

“‘Us’?” Norris said. “I didn’t know there was an ‘us’ in any of this, kid.”

Levy gave Norris an almost hurt look. “We’re all in this together, Norris. Aren’t we? The more we learn about these things, the better we can protect ourselves and keep what happened to Earl, Bowe, and Gavin from ever happening again. Isn’t that what we want?” He turned to Keo. “Isn’t that what we all want, guys?”

Keo exchanged a brief look with Norris. He couldn’t quite tell what was going on in the ex-cop’s head at the moment. Norris looked almost pained by the whole thing.

“Now what?” Keo said to Levy. “What are you going to do with it?”

“What I’ve been doing,” Levy said. He glanced over at his wall of weapons. “I haven’t used everything on it yet, and I have a lot of ideas I want to try.” Then he looked back at them and narrowed his eyes with suspicion. “You’re not going to stop me, are you?”

“This isn’t right,” Norris said.

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t do this…”

“I’m trying to find a way to save us.”

“By torturing it?”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Levy said. He sounded exasperated, as if he couldn’t believe he was being forced to explain something that should have been readily obvious to them. “It’s already dead,” he said. “You can’t torture something that’s already dead.”

*

“He’s already killed
one of them?” Gillian asked.

“The way he said it, it was an accident,” Keo said. “When he cut off its head, the rest of the body stumbled into the sunlight and…well, you know what happened then.”

“They vaporize.”

“Yes.”

“And he told you he wanted to see if they would regenerate?”

“That’s what he said.”

“What about the head?”

“He said he kept it around for a while…”

Gillian was speechless for a moment, and remained sitting on her bed looking across the room at him. Keo wasn’t entirely sure what Gillian was thinking. Maybe she was wondering if he were crazy, too.

Just like Levy.

“I told you it wasn’t pretty,” Keo said.

“Maybe I should go talk to him,” Gillian said softly.

“And say what? ‘How’s the experiment on the undead things going today, Levy?’”

She gave him an annoyed look. “So what do you think we should do about him?”

“I think we should leave him alone.”

“How can you say that? He’s
torturing
those things out there, Keo.”

“Thing. There’s just one left.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Look, we hardly knew the guy before he lost everything. For all we know, losing Earl, Bowe, and Gavin all in the same day was too much for him to handle, and this is his way of making sense of it. Maybe he just needed a mission, and this is it. I’m frankly shocked the guy lasted this long. I expected him to do something this insane months ago.”

“Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“To who?”

“Us. The girls. In general, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Keo said honestly.

“We have to do something. He goes to it every day, and he stays with it for hours. I don’t want to think about what he does to it.”

“It can’t die.”

“I know that, Keo. But he does
things
to it. It’s not right.”

“It’s already dead.”

“Keo, stop justifying it.”

He sighed. “I’m not.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I…” He stopped himself.

Was he justifying Levy’s actions? Maybe. He knew one thing: The old Keo would have had no trouble with what Levy was doing now. That Keo would want to know everything about the enemy. Even if nothing was learned, and even if all of it was Levy’s crazy way of coping with his friends’ deaths, the ultimate goal wasn’t a bad one.

Maybe I haven’t gone all that soft, after all.

“What should we do, Keo?” Gillian said, watching him closely.

“We should leave him alone,” Keo said. “He’s not hurting anyone.”

“What about it?”

“What about it?”

“He’s hurting it.”

“It’s already dead, Gillian. He can’t hurt it anymore than that.”

“But you don’t
know
that. Maybe they still feel pain and fear. We don’t know for sure that they don’t.”

He recalled the creature shifting inside the dark corner of the garage when Levy whipped the machete in the air…

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “Anything’s possible with these things. Levy’s right about one thing: What do we know about them? Practically nothing. Where they came from,
how
they came to be.”

“Be serious, Keo. Levy’s just a country kid pulling wings off flies. He’s not going to discover anything groundbreaking about their origins.” She stood up and walked over to the window and looked out the burglar bars at the woods outside. “This is nuts,” she said after a while.

“Which part?”

“All of it.” She sighed. “This is sick. You have to know that.” She looked over at him, and he could see the pleading in her eyes. “Please tell me you know that, Keo.”

He nodded. “I do.”

She looked relieved, before turning back to the window.

Did he really know that what Levy was doing was sick, though? Keo guessed his values were a little out of whack compared to someone as upright as Gillian. Or Norris, Rachel, and everyone else in the house, for that matter. He hadn’t exactly had to make a lot of moral decisions in his life. It had always been a matter of doing what the organization tasked him with. This was uncharted territory. He was being asked to make decisions about people’s lives, and the strangest part was, no one was even paying him to do it.

Tread carefully, pal. Really carefully.

“Norris and I will keep an eye on him,” Keo said. “We’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything that’ll hurt us.”

“What happens if he goes…over the line?”

The line? Where’s that, exactly? Who knows where the line begins and ends these days.

“We’ll deal with it when that happens,” Keo said. “I’ll deal with it.”

Levy was a
problem, even if Keo couldn’t convince himself what the kid was doing back in that garage was entirely wrong. Doing something about it, though, was where things got murky. Keo wasn’t convinced he should stop Levy. What did it really matter to the house what Levy did with his free time? As long as the
thing
in the garage was half a mile away from them. That was probably all that mattered. Wasn’t it?