PART 2

LORD OF THE FLESH EATERS

Madam Astra.

She had an office situated in the quiet part of town, where people liked to park their cars and window shop as they walked. I did the same, feeding quarters to an old parking meter and stepping out into the misting rain.

She had a listing in the phone book and a small advertisement that ran in the weekly circular. On the surface, she appeared to be a legitimate business woman, but anyone advertising tarot fortunes, astrology, and palm reading is suspect in my understanding of the world. I attribute very little of misfortune and, by proxy, the future, to the fates when the human components are all too easy and obvious culprits. So much of our lives are moved by bad meals and decisions made on two hours’ sleep and a half a bottle of vodka that I found the idea of the stars plotting our course laughable. Just as likely, she was a con artist stealing from her clients in the dubious business of hopes and dreams.

As I walked, I continued thinking about my midnight altercation with the shooter and the two rotting bodies at the house. I’d folded up the unfortunate Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, stuffing them into contractor bags for the time being. I’d gotten rid of asbestos shingles that way; but the room was a bloody mess of brains and body fluids. The most regrettable thing about that circumstance was the mess their deaths had made of my marriage bed.

The man had not wanted to hurt me. Had refused to shoot me, acknowledged my clear shot, and turned his back to me. What did it mean? And his cryptic warning. What possible alliance did this man hope to forge with me? Did he know where Owen was?

I touched the photo of Owen Rogers folded in my pocket. I made great effort to think as little of him as possible, not only because the thought of my son pained me, but because I needed to martial all my energy for this case.

I was hired to find Owen Rogers and I believed that at the end of this trail I would find Clay Adamson instead. It was too hard to think about what would happen if I failed, what my life would be if I was wrong, if this was just another stepping stone in a clever trick designed to draw me in.

There’s Niko.

Indeed, she had found her way into my life. Gorgeous, young, vibrant, and giving herself away to a corpse. How did I know she wasn’t on the take? I didn’t. She could be involved, for all I knew.

I stood on the street smoking a cigarette. The rain ran into my eyes and I pulled my hat further down, shadowing my brow while my thoughts agitated back and forth.

Niko had been working at Pleasant Hills when they brought my family in—what remained of them.

Dark days. I took a moment to remember them, forgetting the uneven texture of the cracked sidewalk beneath my feet, forgetting the biting cold of the damp wind. I shivered now like I had shivered then. Side by side with Jamie, subdued in a straightjacket. I remembered he had worn a blue suit. In the early days, it was all trial and error. They had no idea what dosage was necessary to keep me upright and functioning, so every day was a violent whipsaw of emotions, disintegrating into a zombie at a moment’s notice.

He had not wanted to take me to the funeral home, but I insisted. He had me on a tether like a rabid animal, and I hated him for it, for reducing me to this thing. I had begged him over and over again to end it. I did not want to go on like a half-animal, knowing I ate my son and wife. I wanted to see Dad, but Dad wouldn’t come, and I seethed with hatred for the old gray fox and everything that happened in Sarajevo between us, between my mother.

But I did go on—Jamie made me go on. They packed me into a Ford with tinted windows and armed guards to go to the funeral parlor. I sat in the back while a guard with an AR kept me on a short leash, Jamie at the wheel and his seven-year-old son dressed in his church clothes, a blue suit. I remembered thinking his tousled hair reminded me of Clay, and the knowledge that my son was dead hit me again with force, consistently surprising me with its ferocity. We had passed by a string of soldiers awaiting our arrival, and Jamie’s boy, Amos, sat up straighter in his seat, cocking his hand like a pistol at the armed men and shooting them down with huffing noises through his mouth in imitation of a gun blast: bang! It had drawn a long, sad smile from me.

From there to a waiting room in a long coat meant to hide my straightjacket, and a soldier on hand in case I needed to be put down. Jamie spoke to the funeral director, and in the background, with roses in her hand, a girl with Bettie Page good looks, bomb-shell style. Curling black hair. Niko.

I remembered staring at her hands. Her fingers small and I thought, Those fingers put my family back together. I could not stop staring. She spoke to Jamie. Their voices rose and fell from fathoms away; I was underwater, deep inside myself.

She passed me, and as she passed, she turned.

The soldier stepped forward with a hand on his rifle, and what was he gonna do? Spray the lot of us with bullets? Jamie intervened, caught her by the shoulder with an insistent hand, whipping her back and away from me when I realized again that it was me they were securing her from.

In the instant before the guards could whisk her out of my life, she reached out with a rose, white petals like pearl-skin, and pushed it into the fabric fold of my arm; her fingertips brushed me. Her wide, moon-shaped face wore a look of curiosity, confusion, shared grief. Jamie let me keep the rose. I held it that night, white rose in a fist, until congealed blood oozed from thorn punctures like gas station oil, thick and black.

I never forgot her. She had forgotten me.

She can’t be on the take. There’s no way. That’s an intricate con, to be working at a funeral home when you happen to kill your wife and child, just to screw you over a couple years later. Best con I ever seen.

“That’s because it’s not one,” I muttered, annoyed, and cast the burning butt into the street before I crushed it with my heel. When I stepped away, torn remains of yet another missing child poster littered the pavement. The picture of this new unfortunate boy was disintegrated until it looked like a caricature of a zombie itself, decaying in the rain before my very eyes. Didn’t anyone use milk cartons anymore?

Let’s see this Madam Astra. Let’s see how good she really is.

And with that, I headed to the shop with the glowing hand in the center window, advertising FORTUNES, FUTURE, AND FATE! Madam Astra tells all!

*

I opened the door, coming in from the misting rain. I made soggy footprints on the carpet as I stepped in. I left my hat and coat on as I took in the dim interior. Lazy smoke swirls of incense filled the air, the way I imagined a bonfire filled with hippies might smell after dousing themselves in patchouli and weed.

Darkness and colored light, red and pink lamps with ornate shades of fringe. A confusion of bright velvet and silk garments strung throughout the interior gave it the appearance of a gypsy caravan. A glass case against the wall showcased tarot cards and amulets, crystals; some for sale, some for use in the reading. A plaque on the wall advertised the different services, fortunes reading like an order off a fast-food menu. I’d like a double whammy super sized, with a large order of fatalism. A person could choose several methods of divination, from astrology chart, to tarot cards, to palm reading, or all three for a discounted price.

I perused my options. Palm reading was out of the question, unless she wanted to use my newer hand, which was only slightly less decomposed than my old one. My old one had yellow bone showing through rents in the flesh, obscured by my black gloves, a necessity in undead wardrobe.

Tarot cards and astrology chart. Jessica had always read our horoscopes aloud, tracking them in the daily paper. I didn’t have faith in the stars; what good was astrology for a dead guy like me? Stars and fates were for the living.

Tarot cards were the most appealing option, but still sounded like a rip off at twenty dollars for a short-term reading, as opposed to forty dollars for a life read. To tell you what, exactly? How terrible and empty this human experience is, and then you die? Or whatever passes for death, I considered. I reached for the bell and tapped it, sending noise throughout the shop.

In the back, a curtain swept aside and a figure emerged from the shadows; slight, a willow frame in a swirl of skirt and theatrical fabric. Long blond hair that swept to her waist. I imagined she was what a fairy would look like if that kinda thing were real; but beneath the charming patina of polished made-for-TV smile, beneath the small, pointed features, an unsettling version of fey nature lingered—not in a Hollywood cute kind of conventional fairy, but rather, the original version. The ones with their underground palaces, the ones ready to strip the meat from your bones with their teeth and sample the marrow. A mischief as capable of leading you in front of the path of a sixteen-wheel Mack Truck as a secret paradise in a shire or a mountain.

In short, she was everything I was not.

Whereas Niko was darkly intriguing, with a somber air that hinted at mystery, Madam Astra was a high school cheerleader in gypsy garb. She’d traded in pom-poms for tarot cards, and her blue eyes were oddly empty, like a puppet’s. Button nose, perky breasts. Her bright, bubbly blondness only served to highlight my monstrosity; my sunken eyes, my rotted face falling apart in strips and seams, the skin cracked like hard packed mud where I used to smile.

I had the pleasure of noticing that, as she drew closer, her walk slowed, considering me for the first time, truly seeing the awful face beneath the shadow of my hat. My rotted lips peeled back to bare crooked teeth as I watched her approach. I know what the wolf felt when Red Riding Hood came to his door, the hunger in his bottomless belly, his bottomless heart.

Most people who stole close to me, close enough to see and smell the decay and the carrion, the meat rotting off my bones, chalked it up to unusual skin diseases, cancer, even leprosy. Amazing what we’ll overlook in favor of what we prefer to see. Few used the word zombie, though it lingered on the tip of their tongues, too unbelievable a notion to voice. She stared longer than she should have before finding the center of my opaque, decayed eyes.

“Can I help you?” she asked. Her voice was steady, and she disguised her distress well.

“I’m interested in the future,” I began.

“Unusual. Most of my clientele in this town are women, you know. The majority of men I receive as customers are those looking for their wives.”

“I’m looking for someone,” I said. A knot formed in my throat. I swallowed it back into my esophagus.

“Oh?”

I pulled out the picture of Owen Rogers, laying it flat on her counter and pushing it over to her. I studied her face as she leaned over it, blond hair brushing her red velvet sleeves.

“I’m looking for my son,” I said. “His name is Clay Adamson.”

Zzzzt.

I responded to the noise instinctively, gaze flicking to the glass countertop like a snake. A fly—brilliant emerald green thorax punctuated with black wings—buzzed lazily by her fingertips, sampling the counter with a tube-like proboscis. Nausea roiled in my belly.

I hated flies.

Attempting to ignore it, I concentrated on Madam Astra once more. The sound rang in my ears like a humming electrical line, making conscious thought difficult.

“I’ve seen him,” she said.

Confirmation. A knife thrust into my belly. I choked on my heart, which was steadily climbing through my throat and out my mouth. If this was what hope felt like, I longed for my days of despair.

“He goes to my church,” she continued. “But his name isn’t Clay; you must be mistaken. He’s Owen Rogers, and his parents are a lovely couple.”

Interesting. I could feel heat creeping through my collar and up my neck, a building rage. I was tired of playing these interrogation games, pretending to slowly circle my prey; I was tired of being cautious. Weapons and instruments of torture took the place of my heart. I wanted it to beat again, trade my vena cava for a firearm and blow out bullets with each pulse.

With a long sigh, I reached up and took my hat off. I was a monster. It was about time I acted like one. Thin light cast over my barren skull, bleached bone showing through the top where the flesh peeled away around wisps of straw-like hair. Her face grew slack as her lips parted and her saliva dried up, turning her tongue to bone.

I left the hat on the counter and turned back to lock the door with a quick flick of my hand. Her eyes were as wide as dinner plates when I faced her.

“Now, let’s have us a real conversation,” I growled. “You have my son, and you know Mr. and Mrs. Rogers are dead, so why don’t we cut the shit and get down to business?”

I pulled out the Glock and let it hang by my side, my arm loose and relaxed, a precursor to a storm. I was ready. The hour was growing late, and I was due for my medication soon. I could taste her meat on the air, the blood pulsing through her veins and capillaries. Enough time without my medication, and she would be sweet. Ripe with all the hectic juices fear could provide.

Her face held the same stunned, confused, innocent-me expression for a long moment as I stared at her. Then her features smoothed out and one small hand picked up the photograph, holding it up so I was confronted with the face of my son.

“You and your son have been chosen, Vitus Adamson. It is an honor to stand in the presence of our Lord.”

And to my astonishment, she genuflected, as devout as a nun during a Sunday mass in her red velvet skirt and downcast eyes.

*

Beep-beep.

I cursed, stepping away from the woman. She bowed so low before me the tips of her blond hair brushed the carpeted floor, and I reached into my pocket without looking, popping off the cap and shoving two pills into my mouth. Anything to stave off this wild and unrepentant hunger. They always tasted so bitter, each time.

“You’re keeping the kid in a cage, that it? You got him shacked up in a house somewhere, like an animal, because you think he’s a god?”

She lifted her head. Her pupils narrowed to black pinheads with her eyes fevered and bright. Her cheeks flushed with new blood.

“We are honored to have him. But you are mistaken, Vitus. We must cage him for his own safety. What of your pills?”

I blinked and looked down at the orange prescription bottle in my hand.

“Are those any less a cage? Are they not designed to protect you, as well as those around you? We can no more set Owen free than you can roam loose without your medication. He does not understand the Lord inside himself any more than you understand the Lord inside you.”

“What Lord?” I asked.

Her voice floated on a deep, husky undertone and, if I were to close my eyes, I knew I could easily imagine a sex phone operator. She could have been describing her underpants with a voice designed to seduce and lull me. Selling me propaganda off the tip of her tongue with a smile behind her glassy eyes. Her mascara turned up at the edges to accentuate their shape, but her gaze was disconnected and out of sync. A smear of—was that dirt by her temple, wending into her scalp? Grave dirt, I thought without reason, and attempted to clamp down on my meandering thoughts. Why was I so distracted? What was it about her that was setting me on such an edge of nervous anxiety?

“Lord of the Flesh Eaters, the King of Dark Matter. The Master of Monsters.”

She bowed once more before me. I could see the lacy edge of a bra showing through the plunge of her shirt and the view invited and implied desire; deep in the gutter between her breasts and ribs, I caught a flash of something black (mold? Was that mold deep in her core? No, it must be more lace, why in the world would I think mold?) and then she rose.

I held up a hand between us as though I could ward her off, but she insisted on taking a step forward. She posed me no real physical harm—she was too small and fragile for that. It was her religious fervor I found frightening and even more the jitters rammed up my limbs and through my nerves the closer I got to her.

“We have read your scripture, your dark gospel; we know the pain of your existence. You have been called upon to do terrible things.”

I laughed. “That’s an understatement.”

“You see, Vitus? We know your hate, your rage. How long have you been living now, like this? No purpose, no direction? The pills aren’t keeping you upright—it’s your seething hatred. It’s your bitter anger. And you carry it alone.”

I said nothing, blinking and stupefied. The truth was, I’d never heard my life summarized in such a way, through another’s eyes. It caught me off guard and cut loose a howling voice on the inside of me. So I listened to her, spellbound by the rhythm of her voice.

“And so he will build a life of sweet things, a thin wall he erects against the darkness. One by one, he will eat his security, his love, his happiness to fill the void that can never be filled. So it is written, praise the Lord of Flesh Eaters! Master of Monsters! He can only be sustained by flesh and blood.”

She brought her hands together until her fingers formed a steeple.

“You worship this condition, is that it?” I gestured to myself, tapping the edge of my frayed lapel. “I’m a corpse. Pre-deceased.”

“That’s not who you really are. You think you’re a monster? Who told you such a lie? Jamie? You’ll believe him, the one who arranged for you to be like this in the first place? What proof do you have that you are such a monster?”

I stared at her.

“I ate my wife.”

“Did you? Or did Jamie have her killed so he could keep you to himself? Why do you think Owen’s been in hiding all this time? We couldn’t let Jamie find him.”

I was prepared to dismiss her words as ravings, as though she were only a Kool-Aid cup from madness, but her last words emptied my mouth of protest. How much did she know about me? Enough to know about Virus X, about the experiments, and about Jamie.

Enough to have my son in captivity?

“They showed you scraps of your wife. How did you know it was her?”

“They found me with them,” I protested. An odd tremor built from my legs into my spine and punctured the decomposing muscles of my arm as though the dead nerve endings came to life and sent racing flames through my veins. “They found me with her! I had her blood in my mouth, I tasted her perfume . . .”

“Is that what you remember, or what they told you?”

My breath caught; I had no memory of the event, only Jamie’s version, how he had found me in a room strewn with body parts and blood.

Jamie would never have killed Jessica. He would have done everything to save her. He was the best man at my wedding, for Christ’s sake . . .

But oh, lying was very much Jamie’s style. Him and the old gray fox.

A most uncomfortable sensation formed in the center of my guts, where my stomach churned with the bile and venom and the bitter pills holding my existence intact with a thin chemical veil—doubt. Doubt was opening a crack inside me that would widen into an abyss.

She inclined her head so the light from the window caught her hair like a halo; thin wisps of incense smoke filled the air until the room spun and chased the tail of the horizon. Only the gun in my hand was real, burning an outline into my palm.

Kill her, I thought grimly. I could stop this vivisection of the past and break her hold over me and all it would require was her life. Kill her.

“In all the time, with all that you’ve been through, did Jamie ever say he saved you because he loved you?”

I should have stopped breathing. I gave up air in the well of my lungs I didn’t know I had left. Scattered tarot cards beneath the glass counter and constellations charted out until their shapes resembled grinding teeth and then she was pressing a hand over my chest. Fabric crinkled and rasped as she pressed my white button-down shirt with her palm. My chest an iceberg, her fingers icicles.

I couldn’t remember the last time anyone ever said they loved me.

“We need you, Vitus. Come with us, and you will know your son again. You can have the life they took from you.”

“Nothing can change this,” I whispered. “You’re lying.”

“No, Vitus. But we will wait for you, because we love you for what you really are.”

She stepped away, withdrawing her frozen hand from my cold chest. My gun hand twitched. I wanted to put a bullet between her eyes, but all I could hear was the question, over and over again: Did Jamie ever say he saved you because he loved you?

Not once.

Never.

*

I slammed the door hard enough to crack the glass as I left and trudged out into the mist. I clutched the gun in one hand, heedless of the pedestrians. Some gave me wary stares and others were too stupid and distracted by their techno-gadgets to notice. I holstered resentfully.

Before the car, I hesitated. Where was I going, what was my plan? What kind of life was I returning to? With my hand clutching the door handle, I saw the panorama view of my life unfolding forever in one endless loop. Just one case after the other, of foolish people doing dangerous things, dirty things. Watching people tear themselves apart, husbands and wives without trust or faith, children abducted and ruined, employers and employees spying on each other—I was looking at an eternity of watching people tear at themselves as though they were . . . zombies.

I slammed a fist against the car hood. The metal popped as I clenched my broken, wasted fingers inside the glove. I felt nothing, I felt everything.

The bitch had my son. And she wasn’t giving him up—not without gaining me as her own personal chess piece. I couldn’t trust anything she had to say, and no doubt she knew about the Rogers—emissaries designed to draw me in? The conspiracy widened. I took in a short breath that thrilled my muscles with a sensation of panic. Had this all been an elaborate ploy with one intention—to entrap me?

How did she know so much about Jamie, about Virus X?

I feared to ask—the answers may be terrible to behold.

Get a grip. Start from the beginning. Unravel the mystery. You have an objective: you want your son. All the rest is bullshit. How do you get your son back?

“Force or persuasion,” I muttered.

I cast away the feeling of the moment and refocused. Logic and strategy would lead my way out of the mire. Use of force was questionable; she was as vacant as a churchgoer who charms snakes and writhes on the ground in a pantomime of demonic possession. I could threaten her with death, but in the eyes of a religious fanatic, that was a reward. She’d jump at the chance to be a martyr for a cause, so physical threats were out of the question.

Come with us, and you will know your son again.

She wanted my participation in their church in exchange for my son.

“It’s a fucking Roman Polanski film,” I hissed and shoved a cigarette in between my lips just to keep my mouth occupied. I got into the car and started the engine.

I guess that leaves persuasion.

I groaned and pealed out of the lot.

*

Rain came down in heavy drifts by the time I pulled into my driveway, making it difficult to see and navigate. From the porch, with keys in hand, I paused warily before the entrance.

My front door stood ajar into a slice of darkness. I hovered with one hand over the weapon as a gambler might his talismans. Prick-eared and alert. I heard nothing and detected no movement from within. I tapped open the door with fingers spread and entered the house.

A shadow on my left.

I choked the figure back against the wall. My arm locked over his throat and I pinned him. An umbrella clattered beneath a kicking foot and a picture frame see-sawed in a ninety-degree angle before dropping to the floor and exploding glass across our scuffling feet. I yanked the gun free. All shadows and smoke, he squirmed beneath my grip.

“Vitus!”

Shit. I released the shadow and stepped away. The gun fell to my side like a heavy pendulum.

“What are you doing here, Niko?”

I moved aside a curtain to let in the feeble rain-light. She stood illuminated in a slicker, black hair curled and moist with the rain; her lips an inviting apple red.

“I had to talk to you.”

“So you broke into my house?”

“Like you broke into my work and forced me to fix your jaw at gunpoint? You don’t have a phone, and I had no other way to reach you. And anyway, I was going to wait for you outside. You left the door open.”

I sighed and lit a cigarette, breathing in the hot fumes of tar and tobacco. Her eyes glistened in the half-light as she watched the ember trace an orange outline in the air. I’d locked the door before I left; perhaps one of Madam Astra’s minions had paid my house a visit in my absence. I’d have them doing my landscaping next, at this rate.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what, exactly?” I asked, suspicious.

“I remember you now.”

An uncomfortable silence bloomed between us. I looked away to the window. In the yard, trees bent and twisted and cut dark paths against the neglected yard. While she spoke, I listened to the interior of the house and scanned the world around me for movement, watchful. Hyper-vigilance dogged me even in the quiet.

While I leaned by the window, keeping constant vigil over my surroundings, Niko unfolded her story. Earlier in the day, the fumes from the formaldehyde began to bother her. Dizzy, she took a walk out among the graves where she passed my wife and child and the headstone above my empty grave. The flowers I left behind were still fresh and blooming, and latent memory in the background of her thoughts pulsed through her splitting headache until the feeling passed; clarity replaced pain.

She found me then, in the long lost corridors of her mind, like a pressed flower buried in the gutter of a book. The white roses I left propped against the gravestone set off a cascade of recollections.

“I remembered you,” she whispered.

I did not look at her. I exhaled smoke and tasted my own blood sandwiched on either side of my decomposing tongue. I wished all that was left of me was a memory; if I could dream, I would dream of living six feet underground in a six-sided box. I would not be here, looking out a dirty window and pretending to look at everything but her, play-acting a monster with a mind as dead as my heart.

She waited for me to speak, and I know I disappointed her. This was the moment I was supposed to give her the tender heart of me, to show her I was a human, that I had once lived and loved. Maybe even procure tears for her amusement. My tear ducts were as dry and broken as abandoned tunnel ways from a dead civilization. I had nothing left to give her that I had not eaten or cannibalized in the end.

Beep-beep.

The siren song of Atroxipine broke the silence. I remained still until the digital beep faded and then took out the bottle, uncapped it, and knocked a dosage into my mouth. Pills rattled against the back of my throat. My broken teeth ground them into dust against my molars. Metal clicked inside my jaw.

“Goddamn you, Vitus. You think you’re the only one who’s lost someone?” she snapped.

Furious, I rounded on her.

“You don’t know anything about me. If you’re smart, you’d leave.”

“You’re the one who keeps coming back!” she returned and took a step forward, matching my advance. Her courage took me aback. What had I expected? A meek girl, all fear and trembling? How foolish I had been. I calculated curves and softness—behind her feminine mystique was barbed wire. Hold her close and I’d come away with rust and punctures for my trouble.

“You think I really don’t understand, do you?”

“You don’t,” I stated. I blew smoke out between us, a lazy ring. I tested her patience, and she knew it, but what I really wanted was to drive her away. If being rude and obnoxious did the trick, so be it.

“I lied to you, Vitus.”

I lifted an eyebrow. Beforehand, I believed the only thing she really had going for her was a pretty face and a nuclear figure that could melt nails. This new admission of duplicity excited my interest, awoke me to all the secrets bound within her. I took a breath.

Confession time. Here it is. She’s involved somehow.

She’d been a villain all along.

“I didn’t tell you the truth about Hawaii.”

Her words flowed fast upon the other and dismantled my suspicion and paranoia in one breath, though I did not show it. I kept myself locked within my mask as though I did not feel; but for each word she spoke, I felt everything, married with the shame that I had ever doubted her.

She told me of Hawaii. Born in the moist, tropical air. Loving parents and the waving palm fronds cradled her in youth; rills of Pacific water washing up on shore. Her pale skin, her raven black hair, all genetic gifts from a native Hawaiian mother and a father who had been stationed on a military base. This young soldier wandered off the main road one day, following a dirt trail to a communal house in the middle of palm trees, sugar cane, and celestial waters.

“It was a Lazar House, Vitus.”

I pinched the end of my cigarette with two fingers, listening to the sound of my flesh sizzle against the extinguished tip.

“You’re talking about the leper colony, aren’t you?”

They called them Lazar Houses, a long time ago in the dark ages. Even with a medical system struggling with reform in our present day, the pestilence of a millennium ago made our present-day concerns look palatial by comparison. Hard to imagine a world where leprosy was so virulent, every town in the English-speaking world had a Lazar House, lepers living together and begging for charity from strangers. Advanced stages have been known to numb limbs and open the way to gangrene through bacterial infection. Limbs rotting away. Flesh dissolving into the primal mud from which an ancient, vengeful God is rumored to have formed us. And in their time, to be a leper was to be punished by God. Hell visited you on Earth instead of troubling you to go there yourself.

No one would ever mistake me for a leper—our conditions were radically different, but equally stigmatized and displayed on our faces. Still. What was it like for her to look at my face? Did I remind her of the ones she’d left behind?

“My mother used to hold me,” she said. “Long hands. Graceful. Like a bird. As time passed, that became more difficult, because she lost her fingers to secondary infection, one by one, until all that remained were the nubs of her palms. She’d hold them together in prayer. She would sit by my bed and stroke my hair with a stump instead of a hand as though she could feel it still. And somewhere along the way my father left; hard to say if it was those hauntingly reduced hands of hers, whose bones inspired terror in the neighborhood children, likewise terror in him. When they had first met, she was whole, lithe, beautiful. But she fractured over time, like a flawed diamond, relentlessly tapped until she shattered.”

The words dried up. My cold, cold heart felt colder still. It didn’t take a special kind of moron to realize I was a decayed surrogate father figure. She took a step closer to me. I held my ground, but the mood, the moment, was steeped in volatile emotions. I dared not breathe.

“Do you know, the rotting, the gangrene, isn’t the worst of it? No one will touch them, Vitus. People fear to lay their hands, like so,” she whispered, moving in closer.

I backed up against the end table, cornered in the darkness.

We both held our breath, her palm open and approaching my face. Her touch met my skin. My cheek, rough textured as rope, as concrete, weathered with damage.

“I know what it is to be touch-starved, Vitus.”

I swallowed, metal clicking in my jaw, and did not respond with a look or a word. Her hand fell away. She faded into the background, dissolving into the darkness.

“It’s a terrible affliction to know the pain of those whom no one else will touch. She wanted me to stay, but she wanted her daughter to have a better life. She couldn’t have both. So she sent me away. And I left. And do you know what I found when I got here?”

“What?” I asked.

“I find a coward! A low-life, dead-beat junkie!”

I flinched. Somewhere inside my dark chest, my dead heart moved in eerie pantomime of a heartbeat.

“It’s not like that—” I protested.

“What was it like, then? Time and again, you thrust yourself into my life, unwelcome, unasked for, and you didn’t think telling me was important? You didn’t think you owed me the story of what happened? I can forgive whatever happened to you—I can let the past remain buried in the past. But you couldn’t even look me in the eyes and tell me—”

Before she could eject her final, bitter words, I was moving across the expanse, knocking over the end table, sending a vase of moldy water and dead flowers splashing onto the floorboards where the smell of decay persisted. I held her by the neck, pushing her back, undead eyes blazing with a jack-o-lantern glow, animated with a force beyond death. I smelled the heady aromas that constituted her, the perfume—beneath the perfume, her sweat and her tissues throbbing in erotic harmony, calling me in to take a piece, sample the flesh, taste it—

“Look at my eyes,” I hissed.

She jerked backward, but I was unrelenting, and I hated myself for it. It must be done.

“Look into these eyes and tell me what version of the truth you’d like. You think it gives me pleasure to spend time with the woman who pieced together the remains of my wife? I look at your hands and I think of her.”

I released her with a jerk, my breath coming in quick pants. She fell backward, but her eyes were unfrightened, her expression lemon-sour.

“You think I enjoy inhabiting this rotting, decomposing body? That I could ever spend a second with you and not remember the man I’d once been? Wish I was him again, just long enough to be whatever you need me to be? Your kiss is like a knife stab. It’s just a reminder of how dead I am on the inside. I’m a corpse. I don’t have the self-respect, the soul of a leper.”

The conversation was over. She was smart enough to know it; she turned on her heel and took out a picture frame as she left. It smashed onto the floor. Glass shattered in the frame over the faces of old friends from Alpha company, guns in hand, posing for me behind the camera. Tough guys about to be dead.

I’d meant to throw that out anyway.

She opened the door, and then stopped to look at me one last time.

“A guy was waiting here for you on the porch. He wanted me to give you a message: stop looking for Owen.”

And with that, she slammed the door shut and left, the sound reverberating through the darkness.

*

What can I say?

I’d had enough of this place.

My shoes crunched over glass as I watched her through the window, descending the steps to her car parked out on the road. A black shape caught my eye: the vulture. He watched her in likewise, detached fashion, beady eyes following her from his place on the far end of the porch until her car pulled out; leaving the vulture with a sad and regretful air.

Or maybe I had him confused with me.

Whatever the case, I didn’t sweep up the glass or clean up the mess. I continued to stand by the window and consider my options.

Stop looking for Owen.

Who had it been? I turned away from the molten lava of my self-loathing long enough to collect my thoughts anew. At the back of the room, I engaged the computer and brought the security feed up on the screen.

Within moments, I had a visual. Security footage saved up to the last forty-eight hours, just long enough to incriminate you if you killed a hooker at your house or if you let someone in to hand out religious tracts and you wanted to get a better look at his face.

The bastard was clever, and it was my shooter, I was sure of it. He’d taken a cowboy hat, shadowing most of his face from the overhead view, and I cursed. I could tell it was him by his carriage, his steady walk, which ate distance with a persistent efficiency as he drew close and waited for me to show up.

Instead, he found Niko first. I watched as she ascended the stairs and he stepped out of the darkness, announcing himself without any indication of who, or what, he was. What interest he had in my welfare was hard to understand. One thing for sure, no one helps no one in New Jersey without something in it for them, and that includes your dear old Granny.

Stop looking for Owen.

Which, in its own way, was an admission that there was a Clay to look for in the first place.

*

I packed nothing for the journey. I thought about calling someone, as though I were a man with one day left to live. What would I leave behind for the people who had known me? I had nothing of real value, just a house full of bad memories and a well-stocked liquor cabinet.

I began to write a note with one of Clay’s old half-chewed pencils, but halfway through, it felt too much like a farewell speech. Too much like love. I picked it up and ignited the end with my cigarette tip, watched the smoke swirl over the surface and catch the flame before dropping it into the wastebasket, where it sputtered hungrily.

I regarded the vulture on the porch one last time as I locked the front door with a jingle of keys.

It’s a stupid idea. The vulture blinked lazily and his head bobbed in the wind before he returned to the business of ignoring me.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I know.”

I went anyway.

If that bird stuck around long enough, I’d have to give him a name.

*

Outside the fortune shop, a man in a sweater vest with his hair neatly combed stood by the front door. As I drew closer, the similarities to the Mr. Rogers of firefights past became all too evident, as though sweater vests were the new jogging suits of hive-mind mentality.

“Rogers?” I asked as I passed.

His eyes narrowed as he watched me, unmoving before the glass door.

“Yes, do I know you?”

I ran a hand over the brim of my hat to block my eyes and draw his attention away from my face.

“Do you guys come off an assembly line or something?”

Apparently, humor does not run in the Rogers family, because he looked at me as though I spoke a complex language he only half understood.

“Never mind,” I muttered. “You work for the lady inside?”

He did not answer, but licked his lips nervously, as though I weren’t supposed to know that.

“That must be a nice setup, huh? She brainwashes you guys. Cheaper than paying bodyguards, I guess.”

Rogers did not answer, so I brushed past him. It made me wonder how many of them there were, and I thought of the journal, Owen’s words of guardians and watchers. The Rogers? Likely, I considered, watching him pace the cracked sidewalk outside before I pushed the door open and entered with the chime of the bell.

Astra stood at the counter. Nothing had changed, and I was struck by the sensation that she had remained in that exact spot where I’d last seen her, never moving—if it had taken ten years to make up my mind and return, she would be there, still in her long skirts, incense clinging to her flesh in a thick ring.

“So soon,” she whispered.

Her lips formed a red, pulsing, elongated heart; every word dipped in blood.

“Why wait?” I asked her. I did not mention there was no one left in the world who would notice I was missing. She didn’t have to know how pathetic my life was.

The shop was the same as when I had left it, with the same gypsy caravan decor, the same empty, musty interior. I wondered if she ever had many customers or if it was just a front, from the crystals to the cards to the hippie-inspired garb. Her makeup looked slathered on so thick it formed a separate mask from her face. An undersmell persisted; old gym socks or fermenting yogurt.

She smiled through her red heart mouth as though we were lovers with a string of trysts behind us to cement our relationship. I still wore my old ill-fitting suit, moth eaten at the sleeves, stained with my decomposing juices of years past. I shook out a cigarette and lit up. Tobacco competed with the smell of patchouli. I was pleased with the result.

“Tell me how this works, Madam Astra. You have my son at an undisclosed location, and you want me to enlist in your mind-fuck army?”

Her smile hesitated, but did not fail. Not yet. She wanted to keep her mask in place just long enough to lead me into her hive. Venomous queen bee. I remembered 1996, Hale-Bopp, all the crazies in the jogging suits who were found dead on a floor with their testicles cut off in amateur fashion. Helluva way to die. I hoped whatever Madam Astra had in mind was a little more creative, because while I may be a “zombie” in layman’s terms, cutting off my junk was just going to piss me off.

Most of it had fallen off already anyway, but it’s the principle that matters.

“Vitus, you have a way with words.”

“That’s what the strippers tell me.”

“Well, you’ll come with me, of course. And I will lead you to the congregation, who will show you the ropes, so to speak. We have a wonderful, communal place, and once you’ve become acclimated to everything, you’ll have the chance to meet Owen. We are celebrating your arrival with a special feast and ceremony.”

I laughed, a dark chuckle of white smoke issuing from my yellow, tombstone teeth.

“Do I look like a chump to you?”

“Pardon me, Mr. Adamson?”

“Don’t give me the stupid, doe-eyed look. Some ritualistic ‘ceremony’ you need my help with? You’re a tawdry villain from a B-movie, lady. You’ll lead me to some compound where three generations of inbred fools quote scripture, or better yet, say ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and await the holy apocalypse, and then I’ll find myself the focus of your human sacrifice.”

She blinked. Her expression was slack and vacant, and I sighed with exasperation. Didn’t she watch any movies, read any pulp novels? Maybe they didn’t keep those sorts of things in the “compound.”

“Far from it, Vitus. No one is sacrificed. You are the guest of honor, and you are the one for whom our holy Lord will come forth for. No blood need be spilt, no sacrifice but what you’re willing to give.”

“Or take from me.”

“No! No sacrifice, no death! Transformation.”

Now, she had my attention.

“Into what?”

Her lips curled; one second she played the supermodel with her carefully molded face and in the next, a coquette. She wore a mask for each word and tailored them for my benefit, driving her duplicity deeper. Ever-shifting and unstable. The smell of foul yogurt and rancid gym socks was stronger here.

“You know a little something about transformation, don’t you, Vitus? What they’ve done to you. Wouldn’t you like to have the chance to become something more? I’m offering something greater than your son. I’m offering the chance to be born anew, in the image of our Dark Father.”

“To be born, I must die.”

“That’s the beauty, Vitus. You’re already dead.”

She had a point.

*

“Lead the way,” I said.

Her Trojan Horse smile articulated as though cogs and gears were at work behind it. She turned it on and off according to her mood, but the vacant look in her eyes remained. She was a hundred pounds sopping wet, but I didn’t like her. I felt intimidated without reason and threatened without cause. Something in her was colder than I was, frozen temperatures packed into a hot body.

“Come with me, Vitus. We are honored to have you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Show me my son, we’ll talk more.”

“As you will,” she conceded, frozen smile; she came around the counter and led me toward the back, sweeping aside a fabric curtain heavy with the smells of incense. I followed her into the interior of the shop, senses alert, ready for anything.

The whole business reeked of a trap, but I decided after Niko had left that my first objective was to find my son. After that, I would worry about the mess, how many people I needed to kill to get out of it, and ask the questions later. I could mend bridges I burned and make up for being a bastard when I was back on the upswing of things.

Nothing else mattered but Clay. He’d only been two on July 25, 1999, when the world fell apart, but 1999 was long ago and far away. It occurred to me that Clay would not want to come with me. If he was attached to this cult and brainwashed, I’d have to carry him out by force. And abducting a kid is a lot more complicated than getting a five-finger discount on a candy bar at a convenience store. Kids asked questions. Kids who weren’t kids anymore were adults and they’d fight back. Who was to say he’d even remember me?

I was going to leave a trail of burned bridges behind me at this rate. Sloppy work, and I didn’t like sloppy—sloppy got you killed.

You’re dead already, Vitus. What’s the worst that could happen?

Zzzzzt.

A fly alighted on the lapel of my suit coat. I paused in the dim light, as Madam Astra led the way toward the back, and glanced down at the fly. He had no inclination to move, enjoying the brittle fabric and the cold, rotten meat of my body beneath.

I crushed it with my fist, grimacing, and smeared insect parts across the cloth. Unsettled, I forged on.

We traversed a stock room filled with boxes on shaky industrial metal shelves, shelves leaning against the back wall, and a black door with scored and peeling paint. She waded through the dusty interior, the hem of her skirt dragging over the floor littered with scraps of discarded paper and dust bunnies. Faded and yellowed invoices. I stepped over what looked like old blood stains on the concrete and they aroused questions I couldn’t answer. A stray earring. (And was that a piece of earlobe attached to the metal charm on the end? No, surely not.) I shuffled after her faster with every sense and each dim eye hunting for evidence of the snare closing in around me. I could all but feel the loop of wire set across the game trail, waiting only for me to stick my neck through it.

She opened another door and I followed her through and into a narrow pathway of descending steps. Total darkness broken by bare bulbs set in the ceiling. They glowed like distant stars in a gasping void. Down we went. Damp and musty air. I kept my hands loose and ready to pull the gun. Would a series of brain-washed goons swapped out from a cheap horror movie appear at the bottom and apprehend me? No one appeared, and I craved such familiar and identifiable enemies to comfort me and give me a framework for this trepidation and fear drumming up from my very marrow.

At the bottom, my feet touched down on concrete. She’d been here before, I could tell by the confidence in her gait. Well-versed and certain of her terrain even in the darkness. She made a hard right with a sweep of her gypsy skirt so the fabric twisted like minnows darting through a flow of water. My footsteps echoed her tread. Another door yawned ahead, illuminated by a yellow light.

“Welcome, Vitus,” she said and opened the door and stepped aside to beckon me in. “They’ve been waiting for you.”

I stooped to duck through. Permanent midnight engulfed me and I turned to look for her, but she was gone. The door swung emptily behind me. I could leave if I wanted, retreat back up the steps. I dared not call out her name, and in the shadows beyond the entryway; I heard sounds beyond—shuffling steps, whispering clothes, steady breathing.

I attempted to penetrate the darkness with a touch. My fingers met with fabric, smooth velvet. The sound of my steps echoed the substance of wood, and while I attempted to understand what new level of maze I’d been forced into, the darkness broke like the shell of an egg.

Overwhelming light flooded and blinded me. I held my arm up and shielded my face. Heat enveloped me. A collective gasp of a thousand held breaths broke the silence. A whirring of velvet curtains parted before me. I pulled my arm away from my face and I saw my shoes firmly planted on a wooden stage that dropped off into nothingness several feet beyond.

My dead eyes adjusted and I let the brim of my hat do the work for me as I looked down.

I stood before a large room with a hundred people in long red robes standing before the stage, watching me. Their faces immersed in shadow beneath the peak of their hoods and I wondered if I had not been kidnapped by a series of Harry Potter wizard wannabes who wished to induct me into a bizarro Hogwarts school.

“Honor your Lord!”

The voice projected from the back of the room in symphony with the hum of unseen speakers. In unison, the congregation fell to its knees, a rustling of red cloaks and hoods. A sea of red poppies falling in concert. I moved for my gun, but did not draw, remained frozen with my fingers over the shape of it, unable to articulate the fear that peeled my lips back from my teeth—a grown, undead monster terrified by a gathering of innocent children.

I had never felt such an excruciating focus brought to bear upon me; I knew what insects knew, to be poised beneath a magnifying glass under a shaft of hot and burning light. A hundred sets of eyes studied me as their red figures genuflected.

They pulled their hoods back from their faces, emerging like worms from cocoons, their bright, coffee eyes—their soft, corn silk hair.

“Clay,” I whispered.

Clay was there. And Clay was also next to the first Clay I laid eyes on, and next to him another Clay, and another, and another.

A room full of a hundred Clays.

A hundred sons that should be dead, but weren’t; sons I killed in my blood-soaked memories, over and over again.

My fingers clenched over my gun; I did not have enough bullets. I had sixteen shots; not sixteen hundred. But is that what I had come here to do, kill my son?

My sons.

“Who are you?” I whispered. I asked the question as though they were one entity conspiring against me, and they would answer with one collective voice. But they never had the chance.

“I kept my promise, Vitus.”

Madam Astra emerged from the archway toward the back. The stage lights limited my vision and I held a hand up to focus and lock in on her. The heat sweltered beneath the lights. She waded into the ocean of red. My lips were dry and cracked as they parted to release breath. And all this time, I thought there was nothing so terrible as myself.

“Now you keep yours.”

*

What does a man do when confronted with a hundred children from Christmas Past?

A better man—a living, breathing man—might have fallen to his knees and cried. I stood in a sea of children, reflected ghosts of my son. But they were not only my son from the moment he had died, that chubby toddler still learning how to walk a straight line and practice his vocabulary for his proud father—no. Each one was Clay, from his blond hair to his brown eyes, but they were Clay from every age. A ten-year-old Clay, a six-year-old Clay, a fifteen-year-old Clay. A living timeline.

Clones, I thought frantically, my eyes jumping from figure to figure in a desperate attempt to connect them, to make sense of the trick that had been played on me. Their faces took on science fiction proportions as I imagined a laboratory filled with scientists—scientists specifically lacking in moral fiber, like my brother Jamie—filling petri dishes with dividing cells soon to be my hundred sons.

But they were not clones. In this dark and musty basement, with the millions Astra made from fortune telling? Unlikely.

The fevered moment of panic passed from me. These were not my sons. They could not be. Logic took over and ticked off a thousand reasons, deconstructing the desires of my heart. They were strange children gathered with the purpose of pulling me into an intricate trap whose shape I was still determining. Nothing more—no son here.

And then the first of them reached up with a hand and clasped my gloved fingers in his own. I felt the warmth of his young skin against my dead, cold flesh. His touch punctured a bullet wound, shot straight up from my wrist to the tip of my spine, rattling every bone.

I looked down, and he looked up at me, a ten-year-old Clay, with large doe eyes. His face a cherub’s, unlined and so unlike my own, free of the corruption of age and bitterness.

“Will you come with us, Daddy?”

I sucked in a breath.

“I’m not your Daddy.”

“Who will save us?” the child wailed. He latched onto my gloved hand with his other one, pulling and tugging at me. His face collapsed in on itself as tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, his mouth pulled down as dry, heaving sobs escaped his lips.

Disconcerted, I kneeled down to his height, bones creaking against the concrete. Brown eyes watched and studied me from every corner as I set a hand against a curl of his blond hair, and he stopped his howling.

“Listen,” I whispered, “I’m not your Daddy, but I’ll save you, okay?”

He pouted, making fists against his hips. “Only Daddy can save us. So you have to be our Daddy.”

“Fuckin’ Christ kid—”

“You said a bad word,” he whispered, his eyes wide and round.

I never said I was a good father. Only that I was one.

“You drive a hard bargain. I’ll be your Daddy, and I’ll try to watch my mouth.”

The child watched me, searching for a trick, a lie behind my opalescent white eyes. When he was satisfied with my sincerity, or show of it, at least, he turned and the crowd of Clays absorbed him, blending back into their crimson robes and their similar faces.

Sure, kid. I’ll be your Daddy. Right up until I figure out what the fuck is going on. And then, like every true relative, you’ll learn to hate me.

I smiled down at the congregation, and a slightly older boy, perhaps thirteen, parted through the crowd. Astra stood at the back, combing a child’s hair back from his forehead, rubbing a smudge out of a red robe in motherly fashion.

The boy approached me, his eyes as wide as all the others. They stared at me the way I imagined natives had greeted the conquistadors.

“Madam Astra says I should show you your quarters, now.”

“Lead on,” I said, and gestured that he should lead the way.

*

In the underground dampness, the altar room led out into a hallway, branching off into separate rooms. I glanced through the doorways as I passed and noted the bathrooms, the guest rooms with small cots set up beside end tables and vases with red and white flowers, and picture frames.

A paused before a door while the child continued forward, unaware I stopped to peer through the threshold. What caught my eye and stopped me dead in my tracks was the picture frame in every room. I took a step forward to confirm what my eyes perceived.

It was my picture. Not just any picture—Jessica and me on our wedding day. If my heart wasn’t already stopped, this was enough to ensure it never started again.

Jessica and I stood side by side. A white rose nestled in the lapel of my wedding suit; her hair twisted up and curled in blond cascades, the same hair she would pass on to our son. I would keep the darkness for myself and thank God every day I had not passed it down.

In the picture, I was human, alive, dewy skin that breathed and glowed like any human’s. The contrast startled me. A reverse portrait of Dorian Gray. I had no more pictures of myself, and to be confronted with one here threw off my balance and sent my internal compass spinning.

“Clever,” I whispered. “We’ll see how clever you are when you’re picking lead out of your skull.”

“Sir?”

The child’s voice broke on the word and he winced, waiting for me to turn and acknowledge him.

“I’m coming,” I said, turning away from the photograph to follow once more. A perfect square of hurtful memories.

I took advantage of Astra’s absence; all the rooms appeared empty and there was no one in the hall to interrupt us.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Owen Rogers.”

“I mean, your real name.”

“Owen Rogers is my real name.”

I sighed. He stood before the door of my room. A simple cot with white sheets, a vase with roses, and the terrible picture of my wedding day repeated here, as it was in every room. A reminder of everything I had lost.

I entered and picked up the frame before setting it face down on the end table.

“Where were you born?” I asked him.

“Here.”

“And you don’t remember your parents from before?”

The boy regarded me with a blank expression. My questions did not strike him as unusual and he answered in hushed notes as though he did not understand what I was getting at. His conversation sounded coached.

“What parents? You’re our father. And Madam Astra is our mother.”

“Do you like Madam Astra?”

I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the wall beside the door, not quite blocking his exit, but making it clear I was in the way. He did not move and remained in his eager to please manner. A puppy programmed by a trainer with endless dog treats. Anyone will salivate when they’ve been given a steak enough times.

“I love Madam Astra. She’s my mother.”

“So by that logic, you love me as well?”

“Of course! We’ve been waiting so long for you. Madam Astra has been unhappy all these years, preparing for your arrival.”

“Has she.”

My words were not phrased as a question. I could stand here and shoot the shit with this kid all day, asking him question after question, but his answers were getting me no closer to what I needed to know. Madam Astra was a clever brainwasher—she’d secured these children’s most basic needs. They wanted for nothing, not for food, security, shelter, and most of all, unconditional love. By providing that, instead of the normal cult tactic of withholding it, she’d bought their loyalty lock, stock, and barrel. If I wanted to break that, I needed to offer something new that Astra could not. Something a boy in his teenage years might want.

I confirmed once more that we were alone with a furtive glance down the hall and reached into the suit jacket, withdrawing the Glock.

“Ever seen a gun before, Owen?”

“No, sir.”

His eyes became larger, if that were possible, round as saucers. His brow wrinkled in severe concentration as he studied the lines of metal in my palm, the sleek black surface of the most perfect killing machine. For his benefit, I dropped the magazine out onto my palm and opened the chamber to empty it of the round inside. I deftly caught it in the air as it ejected and deposited both bullet and magazine into my pocket.

I held the empty gun out to the boy.

“It’s safe now, so I’ll let you hold it, if you want.”

Gingerly, he reached for it, small fingers on the butt as he lifted it into the air, as though it were a snake that might reach back and bite at any moment.

“Don’t put your finger on the trigger. Yeah, you’ve got it, keep them along the barrel. That’s right. How does that feel, sonny?”

“It’s cool,” he spoke, his voice a near whisper. He held it in both hands, aiming at an imaginary target in the dark corner of the room, making a shooting noise with his mouth in imitation of a gun blast.

Now. Spring it on him now.

“What kind of games would you play with a thing like that?”

“Um, I don’t know.” He stared at the barrel. “I like arrows better.”

I laughed. “That’s probably for the best, because weapons aren’t toys. But ain’t no harm in pretending, eh?”

“No-oo.” He shot it into the wall again with his imaginary sounds.

“What do you picture shooting?”

“Dragons! But I’m pretending they’re arrows.”

“Did you ever get to play with guns before?”

“No, Mommy wouldn’t let them in the—”

He stopped, a horrified expression filling his features as his cheeks flooded red. His lips formed a thin line as he turned the muzzle on me, maintaining his shooter’s stance. With the black hole of the barrel before me, I didn’t appreciate his gun enthusiasm.

“You tricked me!” he accused.

I smiled, rotted lips cracking and dropping bits of flesh as they expanded.

“Madam Astra doesn’t need to know. It can just be our little secret, eh? So what’s your Mommy’s name?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about them. She’ll be angry.”

“She’ll be angrier if I tell her that you slipped up, buddy.”

“You wouldn’t do that!”

I smiled again and let the silence draw out between us. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and his forehead as he stewed in thoughts of the consequences of his actions. I saw no signs of physical abuse, no visible bruises, but who knew if Astra had mastered the art of hitting without leaving a mark.

“Why should I care what happens to a boy who does nothing but lie all day?” I pointed out, and his facade cracked like a shattered diamond, broken apart by its own flawed nature. His happy boy mask came away, revealing a hollowed, haunted child underneath his eager-to-please demeanor.

And he began to turn the gun on himself.

The chamber was empty, I had seen to that myself. I tore it from his small fingers with vicious locomotion and he reeled backward against the wall, eyes frightened and broken.

“Don’t tell her!” he begged, collapsing into sobs. Look alike Clay cried between his soft, pink fingers, covering his hot face in layers of shame. “Please don’t tell her! She says if we aren’t good, you’ll go away!”

Quickly, I turned and closed the door behind us. Even alone, our privacy could be an illusion, and I wanted as many layers as I could manage between us and Astra. I returned to the boy, pulling up a wooden chair and seating myself before him so we were on level with each other.

“What does she do to you if you talk? Does she hit you?”

I was going to rip each of her toenails out and make her dance Swan Lake if she so much as laid a hand on these boys. I reached out and hesitated an instant before letting my hand fall on the boy’s shoulder. He didn’t move away or flinch at the contact but gathered strength from the fatherly touch. As though it were something he missed.

“No, it’s just that . . .”

“What? What is it?”

“I told you already,” he whispered. “If we’re bad, you’ll go away.”

“That’s why you are crying? Because you’re afraid I’ll go away?”

He swallowed a great gulping breath, before continuing on, his tear-wet hands falling away from his face as he looked me in the eye.

“We’ve been waiting for you for so long.”

*

Beep-beep.

Time for candy.

I turned away from the boy, reaching inside my jacket for the bottle of pills and knocked two of them back. While I dry swallowed my dose, the boy’s words ran back and forth in my mind. I knew when I had entered that nothing I would find would bring me peace, but I had expected something more overtly sinister. Instead, I was in a labyrinth where every answer plunged me into dead ends. Logical deduction came to a standstill; rational conclusion sent me into a further tailspin. What would the cost be to me, to these children, if I could not decipher this twisted game?

“I should get back,” the boy broke in, motioning for the door. I stepped before him, blocking the way.

“So soon? I’ve only just begun to get to know you, sonny,” I said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. I lit one up, bitter smoke filling the atmosphere between us. He stood there, watching me, with something like worship and fear.

“Smoking’s bad,” the boy said.

“No shit,” I answered, and the boy gasped in further offense. The door vibrated behind me, the brass knob turning, and then accompanied by a steady rap of knuckles against wood.

Annoyed to be interrupted, I stepped out of the way. The boy lost no time, happy to be out of my clutches; the door swung open and Madam Astra stood there, delicate features in a thin face, nipples straining against the thin fabric of her gypsy garb as the boy scurried past her in his crimson cloak. A deep funk entered the room with her and I thought to myself I should follow the stink and see where it led.

“We don’t provide very lavish quarters, I’m afraid, Mr. Adamson.”

“Why have you told these kids I’m their father?”

She blinked, a confused look like a dazed rabbit. “These are all your children.”

“I had one child born to me, and I have yet to see him.”

“Vitus,” she whispered, pleading. “Do not upset us so. Do you know how long they have been waiting for your return? Only all of their lives. And you will crush their hearts, hurt their feelings so, by denying that you are their father? Are you so cruel, Vitus?”

I had expected outrage, an argument, maybe even a knock-down-drag-out with a broken vase and spilled flowers as a follow-up to the last meeting I had with Niko. Hair pulling would have been preferable. In all my travels and violent cases, pleas of mercy were only accompanied by gunfire. This tender plea was out of my realm of expertise.

First Niko, now Astra. Since when did I have a female fan club? And when had Astra declared herself president?

I groaned.

“My patience for this game is wearing thin,” I warned her.

“You should meet them. All of them. They’re upstairs waiting for you, where the feast is being prepared. Please, reserve your judgment; you are free to come and go as you please. Make yourself comfortable and join us upstairs. The children love you so, Vitus, and they want to see you.”

With that, she vanished down the corridor with her blond hair swinging after her like a curtain.

*

I wandered back over to the picture frame, lifted it up. I had broken the glass when I slammed it down on its face. Stray shards tinkled against the end table surface. My young face. A face untouched by rot and mold, a face tanned by warm summer suns, not cold and blue-tinged and marked with striations where the flesh had pulled apart.

And her. My Jessica.

I sighed and ran a thumb over her face briefly. My thumb paused there, and then trembled.

I cast a glance back over my shoulder, down the hallway where Astra had disappeared.

Her long, blond hair. My Jessica had long, blond hair.

Suspicion took hold. Hooked tentacles dragging through my gray matter. I balked at first. But each passing second only served to increase the sensation of fear and I had to consider the possibility. A trembling built inside my chest where a beating heart should be and threatened to send me to my knees.

Not possible.

But I believed my son had lived, didn’t I? Why not my wife as well?

Well, for one, she would have to be infected. And Madam Astra did not look like zombie material, which put her out of the running.

Yet, it would explain why she knows so much—knows about Jamie. About our son.

And that smell. That curious scale of green at her hairline . . .

I did not wear my wedding ring anymore. Obvious reasons—when the flesh of your fingers rots off on a regular basis, it’s hard to keep a good fit. That, and the marriage had been over since I killed her—why hold on to the memory with that thin, gold band of pain? I pulled out my wallet and opened the billfold. Nestled beside a few crumpled bills was my wedding band. I kept it on me always, even if I did not wear it.

Let’s put the theory to the test then, I thought, pulling out the ring and cupping it in my hand.

*

Upstairs, the main altar I had arrived at had been turned into a feast room, tables and chairs lined up against a concrete floor, great swaths of fabric draping the tables like misshapen animals. I stood at the door, watching the children bringing in flowers from their rooms. They were the most polite, cooperative children I had ever seen, and their eyes were far from the empty, vacant stares of brainwashed cult members—they were excited and brimming with youthful energy. I was to blame for the excitement; they were making great efforts to pretend I wasn’t there, watching me from the sidelines. They couldn’t help snatching glances in my direction, with the same atmosphere of fear-worship I had already been subjected to.

The child I spoke with earlier in my room set plates and linens on the table for him and the other children and I studied him, as though I might have a second chance to crack the facade he wore and delve beneath the surface. To my frustration, he maintained his joyful presence and hid the darker monster beneath. As I watched him with cold detachment, a fly landed on his cheek.

I pulled a face of disgust.

The boy stood still. He sensed the fly’s presence and deferred to it, remaining frozen with a stack of plates in his hand, silverware gathered in the other. My eyes narrowed as I observed him, and he waited until the fly was done sampling his skin. The insect flitted off into the darkness, satisfied, and with a long sigh, the boy resumed his duties.

What the fuck was that all about?

Nothing good. I had a sharp longing for Niko—to be able to see her, to talk to her, but that was all over with now. She wanted nothing to do with me. I couldn’t say I blamed her.

Through it all, Astra moved between the children, dictating and giving orders. Nothing sinister there—from time to time, she tousled their hair or squeezed their shoulders with all the warmth of a natural mother. Except now, I could not help but compare her to Jessica, looking for similarities. When she helped a child set a platter, was that the way my Jessica had done so? Impossible to tell. Asking questions got me nowhere.

Then maybe you should play the part. They’ve set up a grand stage, and you’re supposed to be the loving father to the children, husband to her wife; they expect your defiance. Throw them off balance by acquiescing and see what shakes out.

I nodded to myself and took a moment to breathe deep. I disliked such a charade. These were not my children. That strange, fey woman could not possibly be my wife. Pretending that they were offended me at my core. And why? Haven’t you guessed?

“Because I can never go back,” I whispered, tracking her with my eyes. “Those days are over. There is no more pleasure, no more happiness. I can never, ever, get them back.”

I would still be as dead tomorrow as I was today. No amount of pretense could bring me back to life, coax my cells to divide anew, my DNA to reawaken like hungover crashers at a drunken party and carry on with their lives.

What if she were my wife, alive after all these years?

Who said I even wanted her back?

The pain of losing her was sharp; no less knowing that I had killed her. The dead man I was now knew no other existence than that heart-rending pain. Without it, I was nothing. The man I had been stood in awful counterpoint to the man I became: honest, naïve, integrity, courageous, a non-smoker. I had stood for something pure, something greater. I was a twisted shadow of my former self, and now that I had tasted the blood of my family, consumed them down to their marrow, I knew no other way to be. The darkness was my home now. I chose my evil of my own free will.

Straightening my suit jacket, I waded through the children—my children—to Astra.

*

She turned as I breached the distance between us. I hesitated, and then pushed forward, fighting against my basic instincts. Everything inside me rebelled; but time and circumstance and bitter memories are persuasive factors. With great effort, I choked the sentiment into my words.

“Jessica,” I said.

Astra remained still, frozen. Continuing the charade, I reached out with a gloved hand and caressed her cheek, moving a strand of her hair away from her face. This was the sort of motion I would have made when I was alive, a tender gesture. I often did so when I came back from service, coming up the porch in my fatigues. She’d run outside with a shriek, throw her arms around me. So small, she still had the power to squeeze until I gasped to catch my breath.

“Vitus,” she said.

She did not deny it!

I wanted to turn my open hand into a slap, ring her across the face and demand the truth. Jessica was dead. Why was she pretending? What could she hope to gain by this insult, by throwing the death of my wife in my face?

To keep you under her thumb, to throw you off balance.

My fingers twitched uncontrollably. From this distance I could almost taste her blood, the meaty texture of her flesh. I contained myself, swallowing back my rage and letting my hand fall to grip her comfortably around the waist. I moved in close to whisper in her ear.

I could kill you here. I could eat you just like I did my wife.

“Are we ready, honey?” came out instead.

She smiled, a sway in her hips like an excited schoolgirl. Her lashes dipped over her cool eyes, bedroom eyes.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she whispered in return and, taking me by the hand, led me to the head of the grand table, where plates and silverware and wine glasses set out before us. I bit back a groan as she ground my decomposing finger bones against each other in her grip, leading me to a seat with her place setting beside it.

While she turned her back to usher a child into a chair beside us, I dipped the wedding ring into her drink. A gold ring descended in a swallow of wine and settled on the bottom of the glass.

You think she’s a faker. How did she know about Jamie, then?

“No,” I muttered.

“What?” she was back beside me, watching me with hungry eyes. Difficult to define the emotions I saw there—more than worship, I was a god whose light she borrowed for an instant. A cruel word from me could extinguish it forever. Her level of devotion was frightening.

“Nothing,” I said, and waved her off.

Far from throwing her off her game, I was the one who was unbalanced.

Get control of yourself, man!

But I did not have control. Silence fell in the altar room, now transformed into a dining hall, and she gestured with the raising of her graceful arms. Together, they sat as one, moving in eerie concert. Children of so many ages, in my experience, are noisy and excitable, but they were on their best behavior, speaking in soft tones amongst each other, often looking toward where myself and Astra—Jessica—remained seated.

The plates were empty. I glanced down the line of children with their blond heads poking through their crimson capes, a hundred twins. I meant to ask about the food—what was on the menu tonight? But the words were mangled, shriveled, would not suffer my clumsy tongue.

Something else came out instead.

“I never got a chance to tell you,” I said aloud.

“Yes, dear?”

Just like that, a lilt in her voice, a turn of her head. Astra watched me with Jessica’s cobalt eyes.

Did I eat her eyes?

God, did I?

“I never got a chance to say I was sorry,” I blurted.

“That’s all in the past now,” she returned smoothly.

“I don’t remember that night.”

“Calm yourself, Vitus, you’re—goodness, you’re trembling. Are you well?”

“No, no, I think I need . . .”

I stood, nearly upsetting the chair, the tablecloth, the glass beside it. The gold ring at the bottom of her wine glass winked at me, like a yellow eye in a draught of pus. I reached convulsively for the pills inside my suit pocket, my fingers pulling out the prescription bottle.

My wristwatch should have noted the time for my last dose, but the lights were burning overhead in the cracked ceiling, brighter than they should have been. I looked at the watch.

The digital face was empty. The surface was a dead mirror, reflecting my rotted face back into my white eyes. If I had life functions, I imagined I would have experienced a cold sweat, hairs standing on the back of my neck. Instead, there was a wire of panic winding around my belly, then up my spine.

I missed my dose.

It’s not too late, I thought, and began to struggle with the childproof bottle. My fingers grew thick and clumsy in their gloves, clawing and sliding. My coordination slipping, a sign of my slow digression into monstrosity.

“That’s not what you need,” she spoke gently, and lifted the bottle out of my fingers, the way she used to take a rattle out of Clay’s hands. The pills shook inside with musical noise, amplified a hundred-fold.

“I need that,” I protested. “Don’t make me—”

“—hurt you?” she filled in, her voice deep, husky. “Like you did to me before?”

Her last words felled me and sliced me at the nerve. I fell back into the chair, staring into her eyes. Locked to each other as pythons constricting into a single, crushing knot.

She handed the bottle to a child. Another Clay disappeared with it, fading into the crowd of red Clays where he had come from.

My throat and my chest tightened, choked with iron bands. Every dead, rotting cell in my body pulsed with decay, a decay far deeper than that of a corpse. All my guilt, my shame, my devastation was bound inside my undead body and the tide threatened to drown me. The tide was coming. The tide was death, ultimate undeath; a great mouth that ate and gnashed and devoured everything before me, a hollow opening from the inside out.

If I did not have my dose soon . . .

“Jessica,” I whispered. I opened my mouth to beg her to bring back the pills, but it occurred to me that this was the reason I was here—what I had done to my beautiful wife must be repaid in full. No judge or jury had ever exacted retribution or justice for my crime. Instead, Jamie had plucked me from disaster and saved my unlife with no consideration for the lives I took or the price that must be paid for the abomination I had become.

I had begged him to kill me and he had refused. To live as a monster was unconscionable, but as a monster that had killed its own wife, every moment elevated into agony.

I deserved this; I deserved to be a monster.

She lifted the glass to her red lips, refracting a semicircle of light as she swallowed the wine. The ring tapped against her teeth and, startled, she looked at it once more, plunging a delicate pinky finger into the bottom and bringing out the wedding ring.

“Oh, Vitus,” she sighed, lovingly.

My sick heart thrilled at the sound of her voice.

She turned and gripped my hand in hers and peeled back a layer of black glove from my fingers. She slipped the ring over my wedding finger, pushing metal against flayed flesh that parted beneath the pressure and lacerated bone at the faintest urging. I did not object or shy away, but let her, as though we were newlyweds before the altar.

Abruptly, she let go of my hand and rose before the dining room to command the attention of all the children. Their eyes tracked her like a thousand fireflies in their curious Clay faces, the most well-behaved, brainwashed children a father could have.

“The time has come, my sons! Your father needs you now! His evil brother has starved him so! Years we have gone without our Lord, been deprived of his holy presence, and we are not the only ones to suffer, no! Your father has spent these ten years in search of nourishment, and what did they give him in return? Nothing! Snatched the food from his mouth, delayed the moment of feast! Let it begin now! We take back all that has been taken from us!”

A great cry rose, a ringing clatter as countless small hands gripped silverware and banged forks and knives against glasses and plates in enthusiastic applause. Stupefied, the sound filled me with a miasma of emotions impossible to define. Jessica gripped me by the shoulder and raised me to my feet. Before, their scrutiny had been a dissection, but here was an entirely new sensation that had me gasping for air and struggling not to drown in the feeling.

Admiration. Pride. Overwhelming love.

They loved me. They were my children and they loved me.

Few seductions prove so powerful. Booze couldn’t replace it, sex couldn’t allay it, there wasn’t a drug or experience in the world that came close. Unconditional acceptance. Undying love. All my life, torn from happiness and tossed among the waves of misfortune, brought home at last. The maelstrom spat me out after a thousand years on the fringe of a downward spiral and this is where I landed.

Just as I was about to open my mouth to speak—without any understanding of what I was about to say—the eldest Clay beside me picked up his knife, jerked up his shirt, and cut into the flesh of his abdomen.

*

Blood spurted across the white table cloth.

With my mouth open, I stared like a village idiot, tongue like raw meat hanging down between my teeth. The smell of the coppery blood, metallic and salty and earthy and delightful, hit the air like a mist. I could taste his youth, his lipids still circulating through his blood, cells dividing in a frenzy of enthusiastic youth. Like a non-smoker holding a first cigarette until I was dizzied and swayed by the taste of his blood on the air.

God, I needed those pills.

“Make him stop, Jessica!” I cried.

Speaking hurt my head, riving it into halves, a too-ripe pumpkin run riot with decay. Brain-seeds spilling out from the leaking tissues.

“It’s happening all over again,” I groaned and stumbled, Jessica’s strong grip still upon my shoulder and her fingers dug in through the fabric of my suit to pull me back and steady me.

“You must feed,” she hissed. “It never would have happened if they had only given you what you truly needed!”

“I need my pills!”

My breath wafted as sweet as exhaust fumes from a past-era diesel truck. My fists clenched convulsively to satisfy a desire to tear and rip and claw my way through the world. Bring me flesh, I’ll bring Hell.

“And look,” she persisted in arguing with me, “they’ve turned you into a spineless junkie. This is not the man I married.”

“He’s dead!” I roared.

“Here, Daddy,” a quiet voice spoke beside me.

The older boy who had cut himself moments before held his plate out to me. On the surface of the glass, gristle of fat and meat, no more than a fingertip in length. His pale face stared upwards, awaiting my approval. My lips peeled back from my teeth in horrified disgust.

I wanted it. My stomach churned in anticipation.

With effort, I turned away but fared no better in the other direction; down the dining table, row after row of children were lifting their knives and cutting pieces of themselves, butchers flaying meat off their own bodies. Their blood hit the air like a breaking storm when the barometric pressure dropped, stitched through lightning and thunder.

“An offering, Vitus. For you.”

And God, I was starving.

“No,” I whispered.

“Deny your own children!” Jessica accused.

I took her accusation with a flinch, forgetting entirely about the Glock nestled in my holster. Who would I have shot and for what crime? It was as dead as the rest of me, forgotten in the failing sectors of my brain. My mind was a tall building whose lights were slowly being shut down, each floor closed off with crime scene tape and shut away behind locked doors. One by one, each room plunged into darkness.

My temperature ratcheted into stratospheric levels. Heat crept into my dead and torn cheeks, fevered with the ravaging virus.

Soon, there would be nothing left of me to stop the inevitable, and Jessica knew it. The tilt of her head, the fall of her blond hair, put me in mind of my porch vulture, watching me to see what I would do, if I would cave in or refuse. The air was thick with their shared scent of blood and skin and hot, breathing bodies. They crowded in upon me until my back was up against the stage. It bit into my spine. Their images parsed through my senses as jumpy and frenetic frames.

“Eat, Vitus. Your family awaits you.”

Abruptly, the

last

sentient

part of          me

met with

darkness.

*

Zzzzt.

Zzzzt.

*

And then, I awoke.

My head throbbed, my skull reduced to fragments of a broken bowl encased in a thin layer of rotten flesh. The ceiling of my cell in Madam Astra’s—Jessica’s—quarters, loomed above me. I attempted to sit up and wrench myself into an upright position and failed. I was pinioned against the uncomfortable cot, a metal band across my neck, more lashings constricted around my wrists and ankles.

If I were alive, I might have liked this, I noted with gallows amusement, attempting to arch my back and get a better view of my surroundings.

A rustling. A shadow moved beside me.

The dark figure drew closer. A cameo illuminated only by feeble light from a bulb in the wall socket. A ski mask shrouded his features, but I knew him from his lambent eyes and his lean and starved gait: the shooter.

“You,” I hissed.

He raised a finger to his lips, his eyes darting to the door and back again. He held a gun in his grip. A silencer protruded from the end. Footsteps shuffled at the closed door behind him and sent shadows through the threshold before they passed on with their business. In this underground lair, it begged the question of how he’d found me at all.

I pondered this new turn of events, attempting to remember something, anything, from the moments before, leading up to this one.

All that was left in my fractured memory were broken images of the dining hall. Faces like shuffled cards. I ran a dead tongue over the surface of my teeth. I tasted blood, hints of flesh stuck between the serrated molars. These remains were the only proof I needed of what had elapsed from my last conscious memory, of the children closing in on me in the dining hall, with Jessica by my side, to now.

I cursed myself, like a drunk recovering from one bender too many. Jessica had taken my pills away. What had happened that I was awake now? I doubted she was feeling benevolent and decided to dose me before trussing me up like a Christmas turkey. To whom did I owe my brief spell of lucidity?

As if in answer, the shooter opened his gloved palm. On the flat surface, he produced a bottle, my pills rattling inside of it. I recognized the bottle—my emergency stash. I kept it in a hidden compartment in my vintage television housing at home, along with a porn magazine I’d never thrown out and didn’t even like.

“What’d you do with the magazine?” I whispered.

His eyes narrowed in consternation, and if I were in a better mood I would have laughed. I had already decided he wasn’t here to kill me. If that had been his intention he would have done it already. He glanced back at the door and I struggled in my bindings.

“Get me out of here,” I demanded.

He did not answer. Instead, he set the gun aside on the end table beside the picture of me and Jessica in the shattered frame. After a moment of reflection, he studied his shoes, heaved a sigh, and with one hand, lifted away the ski mask. It slid away from a mop of blond hair, pale features.

I was looking at a double of myself.

I gaped openly, until he cleared his throat and shifted, uncomfortable with the scrutiny.

“Clay?” I whispered.

He looked sad, then, his lips twisted. He struggled with the answer, and the minute the words escaped his lips, I knew it was a lie.

“Yes.”

He’s lying!

You thought that about Jessica, too.

I considered that thought, handling it like a lit stick of dynamite. After a moment, it was easier to blow out the fuse. His identity, real or imagined, was not important yet. Getting out of this hellhole and away from my angry wife and a hundred bloody, zombie-food munchkins was.

“You fed me the pills?”

“You weren’t much good without them. You wouldn’t open your mouth at first, but when I held my fingers out you tried to snap at them, so I just chucked the pills at you until I got two in.”

“Oh,” I said, wishing I had not known. “Help me out of here.”

“I can’t,” he whispered. “They closed off the main entrance with concrete blocks. Cemented it in.”

“How are they supposed to leave, then?”

He looked at me, so like myself at that age—about to marry, join the army, and ruin my life in general. Before Kosovo. The resemblance was both ghostly and eerie. Maybe he was Clay.

I shoved that thought aside.

“Don’t you get it? They’re not planning on leaving. This is it. Swan song.”

Rage flared suddenly and my temper was blown to shreds with my patience. My wrists chafed uncomfortably against the metal cuffs.

“So what’s the plan, recite poetry and light farts? You should have left me like I was.”

“I didn’t know any other way to wake you—”

“That’s the idea, stupid! Leave me dead, leave me animal, leave me a monster! The idea is to never wake up. Never.”

I averted my gaze, looking off into the ceiling. White space interspliced with shadows cut across the surface. An awkward, hurt silence filled the space between us, and he cleared his throat before speaking again.

“I just wanted to tell you I love you, Dad,” he spoke gently, and picking up his gun, yanked his ski mask back over his face.

In that moment, I was certain that he was not Clay—he never had been, never would be. All this chasing a longlost ghost to discover my wife had been the one who survived, not my son. My “son” was the decoy to seduce me to her door, the one thing Jessica knew I’d never stop searching for. The truth was obvious now that I was confronted by an imposter—if Clay were alive, Jessica would not need a hundred copies of him to surround her, because she would have been satisfied with the original.

I thought of the missing child posters scattered across town. On signposts and convenience stores. I passed them when I bought my cigarettes and crushed them beneath my feet when they fell to the tarmac. Which of them was the young man standing before me now?

Clay was dead.

The grief cut me afresh, and I turned to the man who believed I was his father.

“You were the first one, weren’t you?”

He stopped in mid-stride, a black figure in the center of the room, tall. He looked strong, the sort of son that would make a father proud—somebody else’s father, to be sure. I wondered how long his natural parents spent searching for him, or if he had been a convenient orphan Jessica had picked up along the way, the first one to begin the terrible spiral into madness.

“Yes,” he answered. He turned back to face me and finally seated himself beside the mattress, cold brown eyes watching me with quiet wonder. He had waited all of his life for this moment; I hoped it was everything he imagined, like a cheap melodrama designed to exploit the vulnerable, the young, the inexperienced who didn’t yet know life adhered to no script and offered only cold indifference for each measure of your love and bitter experience. Good, I thought, let one of us get something he wants.

“She brought the others after. At first, it wasn’t a big deal. But after awhile, there were so many . . . she sent me away before it got that far. She said I was not her son anymore. I was too old.”

“The cage?” I whispered, and my fist clenched involuntarily. “Everything in that journal, that diary . . . was that real, what I found? Did you write that?”

“It’s real, the cage,” he answered, and looked away. “But whatever you found, it doesn’t belong to me, but it’s real, Vitus. Who knows what unfortunate child wrote it, and what miserable end he met with.”

He might not be my Clay, my real son; but the memory of the journal, the adolescent tears staining the ink on the yellowed pages, invoked a protective rage. She had used it against me, and I had followed the lure all the way back to the source, the barbs of her hook set deep in my throat.

No, he wasn’t my son.

But for a while, I pleaded with myself, let me pretend.

“And what then?” I asked.

“Everything changed. Events might have been different, if I had stayed a boy.”

“But you grew up,” I filled in.

“She sent me away once I began to ask questions. I was not like the others, I was curious, I was—”

“You were smarter. She couldn’t maneuver you as easily.”

“Then, I left. Escaped. I . . . killed one of them,” and he spoke with pained regret. By rights, he should have been a boy worried about girls (or boys, for all I knew) and picking out a career path after high school. Instead, his young face bore the marks of trauma in training—something wizened lurked behind his eyes. “He was in my way.”

I had never had the chance to see Clay at this age, to know him as an adult, and never would. Faced with my boy’s doppelgänger, I was at a loss. I could console him with what limited emotional resources I had. That’s what a father would have done, and I found I wanted to be fill that role, even if only in these dark hours.

“You did what you had to do,” I offered, and hoped it would be enough.

Cold comfort. He remained still, then shrugged, refusing to look me in the eyes.

“My questioning was bad enough. That, maybe Mother could have lived with. The beginning of the end was the night I found her without her face.”

While he spoke, he lifted the gun and began to unload the weapon just to pull out the magazine and the chambered round. Fingers that should have been doing something more mundane, like texting or working an after-school job, serviced a killing machine instead. We don’t all get that kind of idyllic life and I knew it well. That he weathered a different kind filled me with pride that I had no right to feel on his behalf.

I said nothing and waited for him to fill the silence, as I knew he would.

“It was a warm night and I was thirsty. They locked me in, but I’d already mastered lock-picking by the time I was ten. I remember creeping out into the hallway and the bedroom door was open just a crack. And beyond her mattress, the room opened up into a bathroom, and I could see her, standing at a mirror. She was my mother, the only mother I had ever known—and she didn’t have a face.

“She was studying her reflection. What for, I don’t know, it was horrible to behold. I could see all the things beneath her skin, roping veins and red, wet tissue, the shape of her teeth in her jaw and the hole that was her nose. Beside her, there was this deflated . . . mask, I suppose. Her face a sheath of skin, like a shedding snake.”

I hitched in a breath.

“Dead,” I said between clenched teeth.

Astra evaded definition and capture because I couldn’t summon the logic to understand how she could be my wife and still be alive. If I had bitten her, I had infected her. Reason stood that she would be every bit a zombie that I was, minus the pills.

It was falling into place now. The smell that followed her in a thick miasma. The hint of mold in the shadows of her dress.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Something about it . . . even her real eyes were milky gray, like yours. She hides them. Sometimes with contacts. Can you imagine my fear, my overwhelming terror, to wake up and realize my mother was dead, and she wore masks? That I had never seen her true face?”

He shook his head and began to reload the magazine.

“After that, things weren’t the same. I thought she hadn’t seen me, but she acted different. Maybe she sensed me, smelled me, but she knew I’d been there. She didn’t want me interacting with the other kids and giving her away. So she sent me away. Years went by, I got away, started living where I could—on the streets, in empty houses, anywhere I could make a space and sleep at night. I kept contact with some of them. We’d swap notes and leave messages for each other in empty mailboxes and under the porches of foreclosed houses. Do you know how many McMansions are just sitting empty out there in abandoned developments? And then, a few months ago, one of them let me know that they were preparing for the Lord. I knew they had found you.”

He pushed the magazine back into the gun with his eyes trained on the door. When he was satisfied with his loaded weapon and could detect no movement beyond the wall, he turned back to me.

“They used the Rogers to lure me in,” I concluded.

He nodded. “Once she took the children, she’d locate the parents. They were broken, disconsolate in their grief. It made them vulnerable to suggestion. She managed to take them on once they were broken by the loss of their children. People are so vulnerable at that moment. They work for her now. They are loyal, and most of them are the ones she stole the children from. They’ve never seen the compound. They just do her dirty work, believing when they die they will be saved and reunited with their lost children. Little do they know that just beneath their feet their missing children are housed in a compound and taught to believe Astra is their mother. Mrs. Pied Piper herself.”

“So you shot the ones she sent for me.”

He nodded again.

All this time, he’d been trying to stave off the inevitable. His efforts had been to protect me, not to put me down. I cursed myself quietly.

“Kid?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a helluva shot.”

He smiled but could not meet my eyes while he did it. The contained expression on his face was telling, revealing a man who received the barest minimum of support and love from the world. I wondered if I should be the one to tell him it only gets worse from here.

“Get out of here, Owen,” I said.

His expression changed swiftly, immediately concerned.

“I’m going to take you out of here—”

“You said it yourself, they blocked off the entrance. If we try to leave together, we get caught together. I’m dead already, Owen. You’re still alive. You’ve got a chance. Hide. Search for a way out. When you find it, take it, and don’t look back.”

“No,” he said. “I’m in it with you. I’m not leaving.”

My face hardened. I brought up my next words from the harder spaces inside myself.

“You’re a sorry excuse for a son. Wouldn’t matter if you died anyway, huh? Clearly, the college life isn’t in your future. Pissed that away.” I forced a sneer to match the words, a sneer I did not feel. He flinched before me, creeping back an inch, as though I were filled with a heat that would burn him.

“You’re lying,” he snapped. “I can tell. You want to drive me away.”

His eyes turned hard as he reached out and gripped my hand. Warm fingers on my own, and for a moment I thought he was going to hold hands with me like a frightened child. A nice gesture, but not really helpful. Instead, he pulled out a marker from his pocket and bit the cap off with his mouth.

He wrote across the side of my index finger and when the marker sunk into the spongy membrane to poke at the bone beneath, he cursed and continued on with dedicated patience until he had big, clear letters: DADDY.

“What’s that for?”

He put away the marker.

“For you to remember when you forget everything else.”

He rattled the pills in his hand.

“God, not again,” I whispered.

“There’s no other way. Listen, the dose will run out before morning, by the time they come in to take you away. This word on your hand, look at it.”

I made a mental note to ask him when he started moonlighting as my personal pharmacist. This kid knew more about me and my habits than I was comfortable with. Did he gain all that through surveillance? Internet searches? It left another bad taste in my mouth among the many, but there was no time for it now. Later, I told myself. For now, I attempted to do as he asked, bending against the restraints to examine his handiwork. Black marker on my dead, rotten skin.

“Something about the disease . . . kills the consciousness, destroys the frontal lobe. I’m not a doctor, I can’t stop it, but it’s basic psychology. Hypnotic suggestion. Use the word to trigger the subconscious.”

“How about we screw that and just use a real trigger, eh?”

“I’m serious,” he insisted. “Triggering the subconscious won’t change the drive of your base instincts, okay? But it could modify your behavior. Give you . . . second thoughts, in a manner of speaking. Focus you. You’ll still be a monster, but you’ll be a motivated monster instead. Got it?”

“How do you know that’ll work?”

“I don’t. I just read a lot of books.”

None of this explained why Jessica still retained her higher brain functions without medication or the use of special trigger words. I said as much, and Owen considered it a moment.

“I don’t know why she doesn’t act like you when you’re off the meds. I’ve never seen her take a pill, but I think . . . I think . . .”

He paused and looked at me strangely.

“The reason I think the trigger word will work for you is because she uses a trigger, too.”

“Something that focuses her? So much she can actually reason?” I asked.

I was incredulous. I couldn’t penetrate the memories of my time as a shuffle-shuffle moan-moan, how the hell was she conscious and conniving to boot?

“I think if you find her trigger, she’ll regress. She’ll go back to being a monstrosity.”

“You realize what you’re asking me to do, don’t you?” I whispered. “You’re asking me to destroy my wife all over again. Who said I would do it?”

He smiled, an odd quirk of his lips.

“Because I know the secret.”

“What secret is that?”

“You don’t love her. And maybe never did.”

And with that, he picked up the gun, resumed the mask, and eased out of the room like a wisp of smoke.

*

Irony, it turns out, tastes worse than my medication.

In the wake of Owen’s absence I was left to ponder his parting words. I clenched a fist in my restraints, the long snaking marker DADDY curling along the line of my finger. The word that would focus me, allow me to hold on to a shred of consciousness. The idea had merit; the brain was a muscle, after all. But I was still yet a weakling—how could I pull myself from the murk of pre-deceased, low brain function? How could I rise above a reptilian limbic system that demanded flesh, and more flesh? I doubted myself, doubted I was capable of such a feat. This particular brain muscle was weak.

Owen had made that brutally clear in his parting words: You don’t love her. And maybe never did.

I laughed softly into the stuffy basement air. A weak man who made a weak marriage. He was right. I hadn’t loved her. At eighteen, I thought I found love in the back of a Toyota with a blond young thing named Jessica. And for awhile, that was all of love I knew. We played passion games in dark rooms at house parties, one hand up her dress and molding the shape of her hip, the other pulling her closer to me, closer to me. Like I could eat her. A shadow of our future.

Then, two years after, I was in Bosnia. Kosovo.

I groaned. How long until the dose wore off? Did I have hours, or only minutes? The disintegration of my waking mind was no longer an event to be feared. Now, I wished to retreat into a darkened world where no new memories were made, no old ones to haunt, and nothing to live through or to live for. Give me obliteration, give me an undead life. Instead, I went reeling back into the past.

I had got the call in Mississippi, during boot camp. Jessica was pregnant; white knuckled fingers on the phone. I was the same age as the shooter in the ski mask that I pretended was my long-dead son. I hadn’t spoken to Jessica in months. The warm thighs of a Southern woman hot from the delta had been keeping me company during long, humid nights. I showed her what I knew and she wasn’t impressed.

In that distant past I examined myself as I had been. Not quite a man, no longer a boy. Sweat and mosquitoes, I was suddenly a father, a role I had never pictured for myself. The old gray fox had been my only template for a father, and fear-sweat filled me as I heard the empty notes of Jessica’s voice—shock, surprise, wonderment. I shot rounds off at the range but I was terrified of a fetus smaller than a bullet.

I told her I would give her an answer. But I never really did; I came back to her house when boot camp was over and she took me in, announced our engagement to her family. I had none left to announce anything to. The old gray fox was unreachable and refused to take our calls. My mother in exile. Jamie told me not to do anything stupid. My fate was decided by my fear, fearing to abandon, fearing to act. In a moment of hesitation, I became a father and a husband.

No, I did not love her.

A particular fondness, loyalty, devotion—perhaps love was nestled somewhere between those concepts and had carved out a space beside my cold and deadened heart. Ancient history.

*

Things were heating up in Kosovo, and rumors of ground troops were followed by Clinton’s refusal to send them. But we all knew it was a matter of time. The more Slobadon refused to yield, the more NATO bombed, which brought us closer to the brink. Ground troops would be inevitable if the Serbs did not capitulate soon. Bondsteel Camp wasn’t even on the map yet.

I met with Jamie in Kosovo, which was an unplanned event. We talked about the air strikes, NATO, the whole mess. He said they’d called him down with the initial troops on our “peacekeeping” mission to look at the mass graves. Information was dodgy. Every side had a different version, and rumor was something had happened in the farmland. People gone missing. He was there to help excavate. That was the first drink.

By the second drink, he explained they were working on something really revolutionary, the sort of thing that could change the way wars were waged. No more death, no more suffering.

By the third drink, he was slurring his words and I thought I heard him wrong.

Where are the mass graves? I asked.

What mass graves?

The ones we’re fighting this fucking war over, dumbass.

He chuckled into his drink, and then ordered a fourth.

About that, he began slowly. I’m gonna bring them back to life. How’d you like that?

We never talked about that conversation in Kosovo again. I took him back to the barracks and helped him into bed while alcohol seeped from his pores and fermented in his sweat.

The next morning, he requested I join him as part of an armed escort with a handful of troops to the mass grave excavation. This wasn’t what I had signed on for, and we stood by while a bulldozer raised the earth and broke apart its crust, shoving black dirt this way and that in heaps and mounds.

There was nothing there.

Jamie became agitated as the minutes passed and bulldozer’s metal jaws continued to come away with nothing but dirt; no bones, no meat, no corpses.

A soldier beside me cracked a joke: Maybe they walked out, eh?

But Jamie wasn’t laughing. He had a hard, desperate look in his eyes. I shared a smoke with another soldier and he asked me what the fuck that guy’s problem was. I shrugged and said nothing, but wondered what had my brother under so much pressure that he bit his lip and paced the outer edge of the hole like a prisoner before a set of bars. Something about that empty hole in the ground, his barely concealed rage, filled me with an apprehension the Balkan chill could not disperse. They’d find bodies much later; but for now, I could have sworn my brother wanted a massacre to supply him with corpses. Needed the corpses. I didn’t ask why.

The next morning, he told me they had something they were working on that would make our careers in the military, if I wanted to be a part of it. I hesitated, distrustful, cautious. While I pondered my choices, Jamie talked about his project—Virus X—with me from the back of a convoy for cover, and in heated discussion I failed to notice the vehicle moving and swaying. Conveying us to the helicopter pad.

He had been depending on the mass graves to further his scientific goals and use what he found as fodder for his experiments. Without them, he must turn to the scant reserves of volunteers, he explained, looking at me hopefully. He was impatient; mass graves would be discovered mere months later. That didn’t rule out the possibility that the corpses from the abandoned site hadn’t walked out on their own after all. Anything is possible.

It’s a chance to change the world, Vitus. No more death. No one has to die. We could reverse every dumb-fuck thing our father ever did, you know that? Give the old man something to make the rest of his hair turn white.

In two years of hoping for advancement and receiving none, I took Jamie at his word. And in that moment of hesitation, my future was written. I was pre-deceased; I just didn’t know it yet.

*

All those things—long ago, far away.

Another man walked in my shoes. I never really got to know him, the boy that I was. At twenty years of age, he died ignobly as part of a military sanctioned, pharmaceutical experiment. In his place, I was born—a darkling encased in rotting meat, a walking, talking corpse, still picking pieces of his wife and son from his teeth. A convenient tragedy packing heat. I was a pathetic human and I made for an even more pathetic monster.

I flexed my hand again. The length of the word DADDY waved and I re-examined the word. Being Jessica’s husband had been an empty experience and a duty I had sought to fulfill out of a sense of obligation—as had my decision to join the military. My father had been a soldier and so I believed I should be one.

Fatherhood had been different; I had watched Clay like a scientist unsure of the organism that had just outgrown the Petri dish. Even at the age of two, Clay had his own ideas about where he wanted to go, who he wanted to be. He didn’t want my help, or Jessica’s. He hated naps and enjoyed running from us.

Until I stopped his running forever.

And that left a hole in my heart I could not name.

What does it mean to be a father? I asked myself, looking at the word. I tried to imbue it with a sense of responsibility, but all my responsibilities had been failures. No, DADDY wasn’t my word; it was Owen’s word. Owen, who believed he was my Clay, and that we were reunited at last.

Instead, Owen had probably been snatched from an arcade while his parents left him there to shop at a neighboring store; or maybe Jessica had spotted him outside a school playground and the likeness had struck a chord in her that could not be silenced. How many children went missing every day? Enough so that a young boy, the first boy Jessica chose, would be lost in the mire of paperwork and AMBER Alerts.

He was the first domino to fall. Once Jessica had snatched and indoctrinated Owen, it was only a matter of time before dissatisfaction set in, and she began to take others to fill his place. And whose fault was this but my own? In the long chain of unintended consequences, I was the living embodiment of chaos and everyone around me had been swallowed in the widening gyre.

What had it meant to Owen, who must have buried the memories of his parents deep, so deep he could no longer remember? Instead, he was willing to accept me as his father with no questions asked. He gave his trust without hesitation; he gave his love without reservation and condition. His gift was profound in its depth, its size; I could not measure up to the pedestal he wanted to raise me to. And did I not owe him more, if I was the catalyst for all this misery?

I looked at the word again.

You wanted to pretend Owen was your son. Maybe the secret to this word, DADDY, is that you finally accept it—accept the role Owen aches to fill. Accept this new son in place of the old. You owe him that much.

It’s sick! I lamented, stifling a wail. I refused it still. And inside, an ache crept steadily up my spine like a writhing snake and all the way up to the base of my skull where the ache expanded to ocean-size proportions.

Not much time left to me now. These could be my last moments of consciousness before I was lost forever. I stared at the word fiercely. I thought of Owen and what it cost him to turn away the memory of his old parents in favor of a new one. Maybe his parents had never truly loved him anyway. Why else would he abandon their memory so eagerly, be so complicit with Jessica?

And he spent his life waiting for me. Waiting for my arrival.

Owen’s father wouldn’t lay here, bellyaching over the past. Time to pay back the love given. You know how precious that gift is. It’s too late for Clay—nothing can change the mistakes of the past. But there is still time for Owen. He’s giving you an opportunity to die with a final shred of dignity—knowing you did something for someone other than yourself—something for your son.

Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

A fly buzzed energetically against the concrete wall. I watched it with hatred rising through the fibers of my broken cells and leavening through my deadening brain matter. I wanted to eat the fly and consume the world and shove it into my jaws and keep going. My salivary glands worked overtime, wetting my lips with anticipation. The hour of turning was upon me.

Curdled eyes rolled in my sockets. My belly churned. The time was now.

“Hang on,” I whispered, I begged myself. Consciousness scrambled for purchase along the edges of my darkening mind. Did the light dim yet? “Hang on.”

What was the word again? I found it hard to remember. There was a boy, a boy I had known. Just here. I was. Where. Hunger. Find the boy. Keep the boy. Safe.

Keep. Him. Safe.

Keep. Him. Safe.

Keep.

Safe.

*

There is no past. There is no future.

“How did we sleep today, dear husband?”

The Dead Man looks up.

A woman crowned with long blond hair occupies the space before him. His nose crinkles like a wolf’s until the dead skin parts beneath the pressure. He smells her female smell, a mixture of incense and patchouli, but they provide a barrier for her real smell, the smell of rotting flesh, of long-dead corpse flesh.

She is like him.

His moonstone eyes meet hers from the bed where his hands clench and spasm in the iron fetters around his wrists. He wants to taste her and swallow her.

She sees the feral look in his eye, the hungry look, and smiles knowingly, like an experienced woman about to lead a virgin into a bedroom.

“I’m going to let you up, Vitus. I’m sorry I have to keep you on the leash, but hopefully that will be temporary until we have you trained.”

The Dead Man watches her small, fine-boned fingers work a metal strap over his neck. A hard, steel edge rubs against the deteriorating flesh of his throat as he spasms against it.

A sensation erupts from within the Dead Man as though two people looking out from behind his eyes and reflected inside one another into infinity but then it’s lost in the yammering background of his thoughts. Mirrors propped against one another.

Trigger word, Vitus. You got the word?

The Dead Man flinches but the Dead Man is me and I am him, and abruptly the conscious thought bursts like a bubble on the wind and whatever understanding he almost reached is gone.

He is only a Dead Man watching a Dead Woman unlock his wrists from their iron prisons.

He makes a grab for her and then hesitates with his head tilted in uncertainty. Her flesh is spongy as old cheese underneath the meringue swirl of her dress, and he retracts his hand as he realizes she is no longer a viable food source. Her rot is hidden beneath the clever application of spices and incense, and up close with his monster senses he recognizes her for the dead corpse she is.

He frowns as he sits up, clenching and spasming fingers at his side, waiting for her next command.

A long link chain leads from the collar around his neck to her small fist, where she clutches it as though he might fight against her at any moment. He cannot remember if he ever has.

DADDY.

The word written in black across the edge of his hand fills him with a torrent of trace memories and sent his thoughts cascading back with images and scents and trace impressions of a flimsy past that will not hold still; a man in a ski mask, blond hair, candid brown eyes. A father and a son.

Me?

The concept of me fractures and fragments and the Dead Man cannot seem to connect them.

Vitus! You’re the father! You are me! Do you have the word?

He does not have the word.

The nattering voice clamoring at the edge of his thoughts makes his teeth clench until metal clicks inside his jaw. The sound echoes nostalgia and a woman’s black hair with a burst of exuberance and then, the Dead Woman tugs him along. Across the room he shambles with broken and uncoordinated movements. He moves like a marionette with only half the strings cut.

Out into a hallway. Little boys are stationed outside their rooms in flowing red capes like soldiers or superheroes. The Dead Man smells the scent of their blood, and recent wounds upon their bodies still weep blood beneath their bandages. White blood cells on top of the red like cream on milk. He makes a sound deep in his throat like a German Shepherd. Low, snarling growl.

She tugs at the chain with force. The collar chokes off his windpipe, but he resists and tests his raw power, little more than sheer will behind collapsed and decayed muscle. Closer, closer, close enough to bite into the beckoning flesh and feed with abandon, without reservation.

“Now, now,” she cautions and leads him down the hall.

Boys watch him with wide eyes and try not to stare but snatch glances at him as he follows the Dead Woman at her heels. He snaps at one young boy who shrieks, and she sends the Dead Man reeling backward with a yank so hard he gulps at the damp air like a fish. He does not need to breathe, but the discomfort addles him as he struggles upright against the leash.

“See, dears? He’s harmless, I’d never let him hurt you. We just have to get him fed, don’t we, Vitus? And I’ve got a special meal for you.”

The boys rush past, wild snatches of crimson fabric down the hall. Their feet tap out eerie, discordant time against the concrete.

Pied Piper. The Pied Piper of Hamlin, he thinks, but the thought disconnects into a free floating balloon above his head until it bursts and evaporates. He remembers a blond-headed boy that a man named Vitus used to read fairytales to. One of them was the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

I used to read the Pied Piper to Clay.

The moment of clarity is brief and the Dead Man looks down to stare at the DADDY word written in the skin of his hand again.

“Wwh. Wh.”

Blond hair swirls as the Dead Woman pauses to look at him, her brow furrowing. The Dead Man struggles to make the words but his lips trip like a pair of clumsy feet.

“Who. Ooooo. Whooo. Who is.”

A splitting headache rips into the side of his frontal lobe, the tender, spongy brain matter controlling logic, reason, and good manners. The pain is excruciating and delivers pulses of earth-shattering agony through his forehead and down to his splintered nose, his rotted lips, and his lacerated cheeks. He struggles with the sentence.

“Is. Vight. Us.”

Who is Vitus?

The Dead Woman smiles and does not answer. Instead, she pulls him forth so hard that he falls onto his face and breaks the thin cartilage piecing his nose together against the concrete. Gore falls out and all that remains is a triangle of dark emptiness, accentuating his skeletal appearance. He wipes a long smear of broken bone matter and blood over the front of his suit and barely has time to do so before he is dragged forward once more, struggling to keep his feet as she draws him closer to the altar room door. A hunk of metal presses up against his chest, concealed within his suit.

Gun. Old gray fox likes 1911s and you swore you’d never carry a 1911 just to piss him off. Gun. Firearm. The Glock. Your baby, the Glock. Don’t forget.

And like a cassette tape ribbon unraveling in a wind, the thought is gone, an errant radio transmission lost in space.

“I was going to provide you your usual meal, but you are our guest of honor. And you always did have such passionate appetites, Vitus. Ah.”

She sighs, gone misty with past memories, and what she needs now is a little Vaseline smeared around the memory lens like a two-bit soap opera. Dream sequence. The tinkle of a harp. She blinks and her manner changes, forgetting the rosy-colored past and catapulting into the stark future.

“Well, no more waiting, then. Here you go, Vitus.”

She opens the door and closes it behind her, reaches for his collar and unsnaps the chain, setting him free.

*

The Dead Man’s senses were far from dead.

Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

An errant fly drew a lazy circle about the room before settling on a white plate piled high with strips of bloody flesh like raw bacon. A room of concrete, with a table and chair at its center. Walls dripped with slow lines of dark sweat while a bare bulb swung back and forth on a chain. Stains proliferated and embedded the pocked surface of the floor.

From the far shadow in the corner, a man stepped forth.

The Dead Man’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. The man in the shadow raised a cigarette to his thin lips and produced a lighter. He lit up with lazy satisfaction, pausing to look at the Dead Man with a penetrating gaze beneath the brim of his hat.

The Dead Woman seated herself before the table with the plate of festering flesh. She helped herself as though the strips of human flesh were delicacies, oysters on the half-shell that she gobbled one by one with hungry, slurping noises. She licked from her lips as though she were experiencing an orgasm with eyes half-lidded and her breath hitching fast.

She took no notice of the man in the corner.

The Dead Man growled. People were food sources, nothing more; it was not a cognitive thought reaction, but something he pursued on instinct alone; primordial forces drove the Dead Man when all other functions ceased.

But the man in the corner was different.

He moved with fluid grace, smoking at his leisure; rings of blue smoke circled his head in a tenebrous corona and a slice of his mouth made visible in the shaky light. While the Dead Woman dined, oblivious to the distress of her zombie pet, the man in the corner spoke directly to the Dead Man and she did not seem to notice at all.

“Vitus.”

The Dead Man stared, dim witted, slow—unable to connect the name to the collection of rotting tissue that defined him bodily.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

The words were meaningless, and the Dead Man met them with silence, cocking his head like a dog attempting to discern his master’s voice.

“Do you have the word, Vitus?”

He did not have the word.

“Noo. Ooooo.” The Dead Man blew rotten breath between his sore lips like a locomotive, overtaken by a panic he could not explain. A new sensation in his limited faculties. His clumsy skeleton shook and shivered until every joint ground painfully and collapsed in on its decaying supports.

The man left the corner and approached the Dead Man with the confidence of a grown man who has left the uncertainty of youth behind and embraced the prowess that only experience can temper. Assured. More than self-confidence. Kinesthetic ease. Ashes fell from the tip of his cigarette and the Dead Man cowered before him as his face lifted into the light.

The Dead Man’s brain split into two halves—each one a radiating migraine, exploding with stars and light. He clutched at his head with trembling fingers, tearing at the dead skin like old cheese as though he could extract the pain with his splintered, yellowed fingernails. The man filled him with fear but the pain crippled and annihilated what was left. He could not cower but hold his position, frozen before the man’s approach.

“You’re me, Vitus,” the man said. “I’m the you that served my tour in the army and came back to raise a son. I’m the you that could have been, the you without Virus X, the you without Jamie.”

The words were like pennies dropped into a well. They made a tinny rattle, but the Dead Man could barely hear it through the axe strokes boring repeatedly into his skull. He clapped his hands over his ears, determined to stop the ache from there.

The man took off his fedora and braved a step forward into the Dead Man’s sphere of influence—clear brown eyes to his spoiled ones. He set the hat on the Dead Man’s forehead. His skin split beneath the pressure, like overfilled denim tearing at the seam.

Once he’d placed the hat, he brushed off the Dead Man’s suit with a paternalistic air, inspecting him like a prize animal. He straightened out the lapel with a sad gesture of familiarity.

A handsome man; hair cropped close against his scalp, his eyes clear, lucid, a man well-satisfied and at peace with himself. He studied the Dead Man with an apology written in his mud-brown eyes; a regret that pierced him deep and called up lost moments, broken promises. A life that could have been.

“I was there, watching you when it happened. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. I was just a background watcher. I’m the guy in your dreams, your Id that demands and hungers and wants and feels. You’re like an older software version of me, y’know? Back when we were lizards, with scales instead of skin. Right?”

The Dead Man said nothing, and the other man took it as encouragement to continue.

“You don’t remember what happened to your son or your wife. You always could have asked me, if you really wanted to know; but then, you never really wanted to know, did you, Vitus?”

He was silent a moment, collecting his thoughts.

“I know thinking is difficult for you right now. And that meat over on that plate must be really distracting. A clever trick, that headache, right? That’s the sensation of your frontal lobe trying to process forward thinking thought, choices between good and bad, recognizing consequences, and a lot of other boring shit. A bitch, huh? Don’t worry. Some people aren’t even zombies and they can’t manage it.

“Do you want to know what happened that night, Vitus?”

The Dead Man stared, and dark eyes met moonstone ones. The man sighed, as though speaking to a small child, and forged on, relentless. The Dead Man trembled to hear his voice, feel the pain shiver through his ear and into his soft, gray matter.

“You should know,” he said gently, and reached out to touch the Dead Man’s shoulder. “Sometimes, I’m there in the background when you remember a fragment of the past, in that time just before sleep, or when you’re awake but not quite there, yes? Make no mistake about it—we can never go back to the way things were before.

“Hell, Vitus. You made Hell in your home. You killed your son outright. Deep down, you know Owen isn’t Clay. You knew it from the beginning—but still you tracked him down, doggedly, loyal to the end. For what loyalty is worth.

“And your wife, the one you married because you were too dickless to do the right thing and set her free? If you had, she’d still be alive right now. Our fate turns on the many things we lack the courage to do, as well as the mistakes we commit to.

“Well, you didn’t quite kill her. That would have been a mercy, compared to the hell she lives in now. In case you haven’t noticed, she’s not quite all there. She believes a dark force animates her, an evil god, and we are all manifestations of that Dark Lord—you in particular, Lord of the Flesh Eaters. Here she is, still trying to be the perfect wife, feed you, love you, gain your approval in a final, desperate attempt to heal the wounds of the past—wounds scarred over many times with thick and unreliable tissue. She is not the woman you married. She is a devil of your own making. And deep down, she’s not truly evil. She believes she’s helping you. With just enough nourishment. With just enough love, you could be made whole again. But we both know that’s not possible.

“Do you know what you did, to her, Vitus, the thing you block out that you cannot remember? You tried to kiss her. One last act of love. But you turned while you were kissing her. Ate her face off. While you were busy cannibalizing Clay, she escaped, and all this while, she’s been focused, intent with one purpose—to find you, bring you back, and resume the life you both had before. That is all that animates her, drives her, makes her conscious. Without that, she is as animal as you are, dead inside are you are at this very moment. And the ghost of your dead child between you both. How goes the saying? Ah, dear old father would have known: Amor vincit omnia—love conquers all. And destroys all, in the same measure.

“It would be so much easier if she was just a two-dimensional villain, wouldn’t it? Something you could kill without regret. But inside, she doesn’t really understand why death came to her door in the form of the man she loved, the man she worshipped, the man she put up on a pedestal, just to watch him crawl down to eat everything in his path. Still, even after all these years, she doesn’t understand. Remember Jackie Kennedy, pulling the brains and bits of skull from back of the car, desperately trying to put something back together that is beyond saving? That’s your wife. Still putting the pieces back together.

“Yet, they don’t fit, they cannot enmesh and unite once more. They fail, they darken, they decay. And still she persists, waiting for your love, your approval. You cannot let this cruel existence continue.

“It’s time for me to go, Vitus. But before I do that, do this last thing before we part.”

The man set his hand against the Dead Man’s heart, but there was no heart—only a hunk of metal and dense plastic called a firearm, and the man smiled at the touch.

The Dead Man smiled with him—in imitation or genuine pleasure, impossible to know.

“Unmask the bitch and end her suffering.”

*

The fog lifted—and I stood there a long moment.

They were gone, the Dead Man I was, the stranger I had once been, a new monster restored in its place. The splitting pain dividing my head faded to a steady, dull throb and I swayed, dizzy and disoriented.

Jessica remained at the table. She left a portion of the plate in reserve for me, for when I was ready to dine with her—very un-zombie behavior. With her blond hair like a halo in the trembling light, I memorized her as she was at this very moment. I did not like what I saw, an emotionally crippled monster wearing the flesh of a woman, destroyed from the inside out. Her lips were red with blood, her teeth with bits of boy-flesh between them.

Is that what people saw when they looked at me?

Is that what Niko saw?

There was still time to make things right, for her and myself.

I approached and with each step made my measurements and calculations and strategies—no longer the shuffling of a pre-deceased corpse. The collar around my neck chafed against the skin and heightened the sensation of claustrophobia. The walls sweated in damp lines.

I put a hand on the back of her chair, the sort of thing I used to do when we had both been alive. My wedding ring winked in the feeble light, a circle of reflection. DADDY scrawled across the hand—Owen’s desperate plea to bring me back to life.

I deflated a long sigh into her ear. Jessica turned in the seat to stare up at me.

“My love,” I whispered.

Up close, I made out a seam by her scalp, extending down along the base of her jaw. Spots and lesions of rot made visible, imperfections she cleverly hid with the assistance of scarves and clothing. Until now. Her flesh bared in all its hurt and waiting for my ministrations.

Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

The errant fly would be dealt with later. I had a wife to tend to, a woman I promised I would be faithful to, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health.

’Til death do us part.

And the time had come to part.

*

I leaned down to kiss her. The past merged with the present, the long-buried memory surfacing and overlaid across time like transparent paper. The moment of turning, divided between monster and human and crossing the line of consciousness. I did it again. Lucid and aware to taste the rot of my saliva as I opened my mouth and kissed her. With our lips interlaced, I bit down hard and pulled away with force, feeling her flesh give between my teeth and taking her entire face away with me.

I made it quick; moved with the velocity of a snake strike. She did not expect it and went reeling back into the table, sending the cutlery, the dishes, and the furniture upside down in a clatter that filled and echoed throughout the room. I stood with the flap of skin that was her face in my hands, leathery, as though my wife just asked me to hold her purse.

Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

I turned it over in my hand. Against the side of glistening red decay that fit against her inner face, things crawled and squirmed over the surface. My eyes stared but could not process what I saw; could not make sense of the white worms writhing and stitching through her tissues.

Maggots.

She was riddled through with maggots. Flies giving birth in her veins.

I dropped the mask of skin. It fell to the floor like an empty pancake. Maggots erupted from the surface and scattered. A shrieking commenced and filled the room like a siren.

Zzzzt. Zzzzt.

The sound of buzzing grew persistent and rose in volume. Her mask hid the festering gobbits of larvae all this time and grew in the damp heat of the underground lair. Now they hatched by the thousands as she writhed and screamed, sending torrents of flies from her open mouth, crawling along her tongue, from deep within her belly.

Later, I told myself. I would deal with the flies later.

Take care of her, Vitus, my Id breathed from within.

She ran for the door. I drew my weapon and squeezed the trigger, once, twice, three times. The first shot went wild and punched into the door frame inches above her head. I heard a sizzle as the second bullet caught a tangle of her hair in midair. The stench was lost amid the other rank and vile smells preceding it. The third caught her in the back of the throat where it exited and exploded through the door. Gore and maggot guts followed and sprayed the wall around it.

The buzzing increased in intensity. The final shot impacted too low and missed all the important bits—not high enough to take her head off and incapacitate her. She ran, shrieking through the hole in her throat as she yanked the door open and pounded through. Swirls of skirt flowed behind her in one eclipsing shadow.

Too late, I cursed, and slapped the back of my neck. My hand came away black with fly guts. My lips peeled away from my teeth and I hissed my disgust. They were everywhere. Filling the room and pacing the walls with their pin-prick feet, with their emerald and sapphire bodies, tasting, sampling, mindlessly eating everything they touched. Some crawled into my collar and another grazed my ear. They alighted, settled, and flew off like snowflakes in a blizzard.

While I stood there, repulsed and horrified, slapping at the horde of flies come to eat of my flesh, my wife closed the door and threw the lock.

My brief moment of lucidity faded; the headache returned with greater force and my overwhelming fear in the face of these dirty insects sent my consciousness reeling back inside myself, throwing forward the monster part of me, better equipped to deal with the horror and disgust of the flies.

Not now, I thought, groaning.

I dared not open my mouth for fear they would dart in and insert themselves along the lining of my gums and plant their children in the spaces between my teeth. I stared at the word written across my hand—DADDY. I thought of Owen, who was already taking the place of Clay inside my head, until their two identities were indistinguishable from each other, one and the same, and then where was I flies zzzt zzzt I am zzzt so hungry

dark

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