CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE FIRST KILL

 

 

CADE’S MOTHER DIED in childbirth, of course.

She was a slight woman, thin and frail, anaemic-looking, sickly and washed out. It was a difficult birth, and though the doctors did everything they possibly could, Cade’s mother passed away shortly after delivering the boy.

Cade’s father was never the same after that. His name was Tobias and he worked in construction, and by all accounts he was a man possessed of both uncommon strength and uncommon gentleness, who smiled readily and often. This Cade only found out at his funeral, as Tobias had never displayed such qualities during Cade’s life.

When his wife died, something broke inside Tobias, some essential part of the mechanism that ran him. Some inner gear slipped and snapped, the jagged metal teeth tearing at the workings of his soul, damaging them beyond any repair. He began to drink, where he never had before – beer by the case at first, and when that failed to quiet his demons, rotgut whisky. To begin with, his sister cared for the boy while Tobias went on his benders, and she was one of the few who could calm the man when he came crashing through the door, howling and yelling, hitting out with fists as strong as brick at anyone unlucky enough to get within ten feet of him.

Cade was thus spared more than an occasional beating from his father, although perhaps it was a blow to the head, delivered at full strength, landing him a month’s stay in a hospital – and this before his first birthday – that accounted for what he became later in life. More likely, he simply absorbed the atmosphere of that first home, a trailer on the edge of a small town near El Paso.

He grew up quiet – so quiet that most thought him retarded – and serious, a little boy who said nothing but observed much.

After he’d turned six, his father’s sister died. There were some, mostly those few friends she’d kept after moving in with her brother, who said Tobias had worried her into her grave with his drinking and his rages and with the strain of looking after his boy, who surely suffered from autism if not worse – although most treated it as an unavoidable tragedy. Tobias laid the blame elsewhere. On returning from the funeral, tears rolling down his cheeks and a bottle of rotgut in his hand, he had told the boy that he’d murdered twice now, that he was born a killer and a killer he’d remain. Then he beat his hide black and blue with a leather belt.

Despite this, Tobias remained popular with the construction crew. His drinking was limited to after hours, and he gave little hint of any problems at home, making sure his boy wore long sleeves and hid the bruises when he came around to the site after school. His job was never in danger – in fact, before much time had passed, he found himself promoted to foreman. Success in his career didn’t limit his drinking – in fact, it only made him drink more, because there was more to spend on it. Somehow, he always managed to drag himself to work every morning and put in a full day.

It was as if the time spent beating his only child gave him strength.

The boy was hospitalised four times over the next two years, but nothing was said. If a doctor did suspect that the broken bones and contusions were caused by something other than a fall down the stairs – despite the fact that there were no stairs in the trailer – he either kept his own counsel on the matter or was unable to break through the twin walls of Tobias’s denial and Cade’s deep silence to find the truth.

It was clear, in other words, that this was a problem Cade would have to solve himself, despite being all of eight years old.

Time passed, and every day after school Cade would wander down to the site to watch his father work, waiting for Tobias to finish working so they could go home, where the drink and the belt waited. Sometimes he skipped school, so as to watch his father and the construction crew work through the whole day. There was no punishment for playing truant beyond what his father already did to him.

The men enjoyed the strange, silent boy’s company – they ruffled his hair and joked amongst themselves about how the boy was touched. His father joked with them, keeping his anger for later.

Cade just watched.

He especially liked to watch when they got the big tarmac spreader, and spread the hot black tarmac over the foundations to make a parking lot or a driveway, and then rolled the big steamroller over it to make it flat. He watched that very carefully. He had very good eyes, for an eight-year-old.

Then, one by one, the men would leave, and only his father would be left, checking through paperwork and time cards and locking the site up for the day. He’d either take Cade with him to the bar, where the drunks and the rummies would ruffle his hair and say how the boy was touched while his father drank himself stupid on rye, or he’d just drag the boy back to the trailer and beat the shit out of him before going to the bar.

Either way, Cade could count on at least a few cracks of the leather belt, and probably a kicking with a steel-toed work boot into the bargain.

This he tolerated until one day at the end of November.

The construction crew were building a new supermarket on the edge of the town, with a parking lot out front and another behind. They poured the tarmac for the first lot, and rolled it flat with the steamroller, and then it was clocking-off time and the men filed out. Marty Callaghan, who drove the steamroller, ruffled Cade’s hair. “Poor fella’s touched,” he said, whereupon Cade hugged him tight – a gesture he’d not made before, and one that caused no end of laughter among the men. “I ain’t your daddy, son,” said Marty, chuckling. “Your daddy’s over there.” And he pointed to Tobias, who was standing in front of the steamroller, a blueprint in his hand, making a careful check of the equipment and what there was still to be done before he clocked off.

Cade knew where his daddy was, all right.

Marty Callaghan wasn’t just the man who drove the steamroller. He was also, in his youth, what the papers had called a juvenile delinquent, and one of his souvenirs of that wild time was a switchblade knife with a skull carved on the handle in ivory, still as sharp as ever. Marty occasionally liked to show it off, flicking out the deadly blade for the appreciation of his co-workers.

Cade liked to watch him do that.

Soon, all the crew were gone, and Cade looked around himself for a moment, then picked up a loose chuck of brick and wandered down to the fresh-laid tarmac to say hello to his father.

“Dad?” he said. It was the first time he’d said a single word in about seven months.

Tobias hadn’t kept count.

“Not now, boy,” he said, not looking up from his blueprint. “Not now, you little –”

That was when Marty’s switchblade, which Cade had carefully lifted from his pocket, severed Tobias’s left Achilles tendon, and he went down like a ton of bricks, screaming at the top of his lungs. Cade swung the chunk of brick in his other hand and hit his father in the side of the temple with a hard clunk. Enough to put him out.

Then he turned his attention to the steamroller.

He’d lifted Marty’s keys from his pocket along with the knife, and he’d watched closely enough over the past months to have a good understanding of how the steamroller was operated. He managed to get it going without too much fuss.

Then he set it rolling.

The big roller moved slowly, rumbling across the ground, and Tobias actually had time to wake up out of his daze, although by that time the great steel roller was less than three feet away from him. There was no way he could crawl or roll out of the way in time.

“Jesus!” he screamed. “Jesus Christ, what the holy fuck are you doing? I’m your father, goddammit! Your father! Your –”

He didn’t say anything else after that. Just screamed.

The roller crunched over his feet first, rupturing the flesh and splintering the bone to fragments, and then slowly squashed the rest of him. Tobias was still alive when his belly burst open and his guts went flying, and he may even have been conscious when the hideous weight crushed his ribcage to powder and his heart with it, although that seems unlikely.

Cade waited until the roller had rumbled right over him, and then switched it off, and left the keys in it, and wandered home to the trailer that was now his alone.

He kept the knife.

 

 

YOU KILLED YOUR Mom and then you ran your Pops over with a steamroller, after you’d driven your Auntie to an early grave. Heartwarming fuckin’ story, dog.

Cade nodded. Things had gotten a lot better after that. The orphanage was a pretty decent place if you were willing to get your knuckles a little dirty, and Cade had been more than willing. After they kicked him out, it was a pretty average story – gangs, robbery with violence, a murder here and there. Eventually, the marines had offered him something close to a reason for living, or he’d felt that way at the time.

Bullshit. They just offered you a way to kill a shitload of people without any comeback, that’s all. Don’t kid yourself you were there for the reasons any other motherfucker was, bitch.

Cade blinked, and looked at the clock. Getting on for half six. The Pastor’d be stewing, and the sun would be getting ready to go down. Probably they were all screwing in the Park by now.

Best to get a move on.

But there was something he had to get done first.

“Won’t be needing you for this next bit, Fuel-Air.”

Fuel-Air sneered, the metal skin glinting as he leaned forward. Sure you don’t. Want to commit your fuckin’ atrocity in peace, right? Fuck you, dog. You’re stuck with me, motherfucker, and I’m going to be on your fuckin’ back until the day you die, about every goddamn fuck-up you –

Cade took the gun out of his belt.

It was a Magnum .44, big and mean. Cade wasn’t a fan of guns, but he’d figured he’d need one that’d do the job.

Fuel-Air stared at it, stunned. Where the fuck did you get that?

Cade shrugged. “Does it matter?”

Fuel-Air snarled, and suddenly his face was a writhing, suppurating mass of maggots, crawling and slithering over one another, a boiling, oozing sea of putrefaction that seemed to burn into Cade’s vision.

You called me up, motherfucker, don’t you get it? You brought me out. I’m part of you, you stupid-ass son of a bitch, and I’m never fucking letting you be, not ever again – shit, dog, you honestly think you can put a bullet in me? A fuckin’ bullet? You can’t do shit. Let me draw you a picture, bitch – you snapped on that fuckin’ road you were nailed to, you broke like fuckin’ glass. Shit, it ain’t no surprise, you know what I’m saying? You had to go a little crazy or a lot crazy, and I’m the crazy you went. I’m your fucking delusion, dog, your bloody conscience, the part of you that doesn’t let you get away with this kind of fucking bullshit...

Cade nodded, and shrugged. Wasn’t anything he hadn’t figured out.

So what are you going to do with that fuckin’ piece of yours, bitch? Shoot me? I’m a figment of your motherfucking imagination!

“Yeah.“ Cade shrugged again. Then his eyes narrowed. “So’s the gun.”

The roar of the Magnum filled the room, and Fuel-Air flew backwards as the bullet hit him right between the eyes. For a moment he didn’t look like Fuel-Air. He looked like Sergeant A, or maybe the Captain, or maybe Duke, or maybe his father, or maybe all of them at once. Then his head burst like an over-ripe melon and his body slumped down the wall in a trail of old corpse-blood.

Cade put the gun down on the table, then leant back for a moment and closed his eyes.

When he opened them, there was no body. There was no gun. There was just Cade, sitting in a coffee shop, watching a clock on the wall.

Okay, then.

On the way out, he caught a glimpse of something just across the street. HALLOWEEN STORE. This time he paid a little closer attention.

The glass was smashed, but there was plenty still in the front window of the store, waiting to be taken. Cade guessed there wasn’t much call for anything a Halloween store might sell. The whole damn world was Halloween now.

He wondered what it was that kept drawing his eye, and then he saw it, sitting on a polystyrene head, dead centre. The whole plan fell into his head right there. It was crazy – maybe the craziest thing Cade had considered in his whole time in San Francisco, and that was saying somethin’.

Still, he figured it couldn’t be that crazy.

After all, Cade wasn’t crazy anymore.

 

 

WHEN CADE GOT back to the pickup, the bomb was just a bomb.

The Pastor didn’t like being kept waiting. His face was dark as a thunderstorm and his fingers drummed the dashboard in a slow, deliberate pattern while he read through a pocket Bible. His men were slouched around the pickup, cocking and uncocking whatever guns they had like a bunch of kids playing cops and robbers. Cade wondered if they’d done anything sensible with the guns, like cleaning them or sharing out ammo, or if they’d just played and posed with them a while, trying to psyche themselves up for what was ahead, feel a little badass.

He wondered what the rate of misfires was going to be. If he knew anything at all about guns, those ones were going to jam after the first shot.

Hell with it. He’d find out soon enough.

“Brother Cade,” hissed the Pastor, curling his lip back from his teeth in a cold, mocking sneer, “You’ve returned to us. I will confess, Brother, for a moment I took it in my mind to doubt you, even to wonder if you had de-sert-ed the true path of –”

Cade got behind the wheel and gunned the engine. “No time. Tell your men to run. Not got long. Sunset came quicker than I figured.” That was a lie, of course. Cade had timed it damn near perfect.

The Pastor looked at him a moment, as if he didn’t quite comprehend, and Cade wondered how much he’d found out about Clearly’s people and their nightly cycle of free love and free hate. Cade didn’t figure there was much point in explaining it. The point wasn’t for them to live through this, after all.

“They’re vulnerable. Let’s go.” Cade put her in gear and drove the truck forward at a clip, heading down Laguna, keeping just fast enough that the men behind had to run to keep up, but not fast enough to lose them. Not yet.

Cade looked to the passenger seat, and saw that the Pastor had the detonator clutched in his hand, his thumb caressing the button that would blow the both of them sky-high with one press. Not the best situation to work with.

Hell with it. It was what he had.

This was the endgame. This was where everything came to a head, for better or for worse.

If he was lucky, he was about to murder the city of San Francisco once and for all. The thought didn’t bother him overmuch. In fact, he was starting to feel a hell of a lot more like his old self.

His palms didn’t even itch any more. The corners of his mouth twitched slightly, almost, but not quite, a smile.

Then he gunned the engine, and turned right, heading down Haight Street towards the Golden Gate Park, and the not-quite-human things that were waiting there for him.