ELSEWHERE
Kuebiko’s entire life had been an execution by lingchi—the death of a thousand cuts—and with the final figurative slice, the last drops of humanity trickled to the concrete floor and drained through the rusted grate. All that remained now was the physical vessel, a vaguely human form stuffed with pain and misery, a husk animated by hatred and rage. The time had come to revisit that suffering upon the men who had taken such pleasure in inflicting it.
“All … will … know … the … truth.”
And with those words, Kuebiko became no more, leaving behind the Scarecrow, an all-knowing, all-seeing creature no longer constrained by the frailty of the flesh or the threat of damnation. Those were the failings of man and it was no longer one of their kind. It embraced its role in the coming nightmare, for, being dead already, it no longer felt fear. At long last, it would shine a light into the shadows and reveal not just the monsters but those who chose not to see their atrocities, making them complicit in the horrors perpetrated upon innocent men, women, and even children. They would pay for what they’d done—the whole godforsaken world would pay—starting with the men responsible for the interminable agony and culminating with the man who was ultimately to blame, even if he was too blind to see the role he’d played.
“Blind…”
The Scarecrow pressed its skeletal fingertip over the stoma in its throat and issued a harsh, rasping laugh. The sound echoed throughout the cold, insensate chamber, where it sat in complete darkness, by itself and yet not alone, breathing the dusty air and listening to the hum of machinery and the soft, dysrhythmic breathing of another from the live feed on its cell phone. In a matter of days, even that would be gone, but there would be no one left to bear witness to the silence.
For the first time, it noticed the alarm beacon at the top of the screen. Someone had triggered the early warning system that it had built into the improvised explosive device attached to the front door of the farmhouse. The hunt would soon commence in earnest, but there was no hope of stopping the course of events that had already been set in motion.
Millions of people would die, just not where anyone expected, especially the man who’d commissioned the Scarecrow’s services, the same man who’d unknowingly created it in the first place.
A hiss erupted from the hole in its throat, a roar to which it couldn’t even give voice. It crawled over the earthen mounds, struggled to its feet, and stormed out of the main room. Its wheezing exhalations trailed it down the hallway and into the room it had created with a single purpose in mind. The old man locked in the cage in the corner attempted to cry out at the sound of the approaching footsteps, but the duct tape turned the noise into a muffled grunt. His wrists and feet were bound together, forcing him into a fetal position, making it impossible for him to move in the slightest. He struggled to breathe through the mucus burbling from his nose. His eyes widened, but it was so dark that the old man couldn’t have seen his hand in front of his face, let alone the silhouette standing before it.
The Scarecrow could, though. It could see everything.
“Do … you … remember … me?”
A desperate flurry of grunts to the negative. The old man tried to speak, but there would be no talking his way out of what was to come.
The Scarecrow reached up, grabbed one of the handcrafted objects hanging from the ceiling—starlike designs made from wooden tongue depressors bound together with yarn to form what almost looked like little men, or perhaps stick-figure dolls—and thrust it through the cage, into the old man’s hand.
“How … about … now?”
The old man turned it over and over until recognition dawned.
He screamed into the duct tape and thrashed against his restraints.
The Scarecrow savored the exquisite sounds of his suffering.