The Brotherhood of the Wheel (52 page)

“Okay, baby,” Layla said, settling back into the cushions of the couch with an audible
“Whoosh”
and holding her pregnant belly. “Look before you open the door! And make sure they got the anchovies on my side of the pie.”

“I know, I know,” Peyton said. “That baby has gross cravings, Mom!” She paused. “Mom, it's not the pizza guy; it's two little kids.”

Layla frowned. She began to rise again, turning sideways to get herself off the couch. “Kids? See what they want, baby. I'll be right there.”

Peyton reached for the doorknob.

*   *   *

Across the East Coast, at millions of doors, there was knocking—insistent, relentless knocking. Strong, small, pale hands knocking. Soulless eyes, filled with the will of an old, bloody, hungry god, waited for the doors to open, waited for those who had seen the Wild Hunt to offer themselves, waited for the sacrifices to begin. In the void, beyond the corpses of light in the sky, beyond the tiny island we call reason, something older than names licked its chops in anticipation.

 

TWENTY-FIVE

“10-82”

Lexi's head was full of angry bees. It was the bitter broth the Scodes had forced her and Cole to drink when they took them out to the woods earlier. Her thoughts were like water; she tried to hold on to one but it would slip away, splash into a million droplets of disjointed words and images. She looked up and saw the dark edges of high trees at the periphery of her vision, like jagged teeth trying to eat the sky full of stars. The rock was sharp and cold beneath her bare flesh. She suddenly realized that she was on the sacrifice stone, where Dewey Rears had been murdered, and that she was nude, then the thought slipped away, fell, and splashed—
drip, drip, drip
.

Cole was beside her, staring, trying to form words. Tears ran from his glassy eyes down the side of his head and fell onto the cold, uncaring stone. He was painted, as she was, in thick pastes of blue and white. The paint had been drawn in spiral circles all over their bodies and faces. Lexi reached out to him; he was so beautiful, and so sad. She tried to use her words, but they were lost in the hum of her brain, the crunching sound of the gears of the universe. She loved him; she had loved him for a very long time, and only now, when the world was running like chalk drawings washing away in the rain, could she feel it, know it. She took his hand, and he held hers tightly.

Lexi looked up and saw him standing above them, the Master of the Hunt, the bright waning half-moon crescent behind him. The blade was in his hand, the same bone-handled knife he had killed Rears with on this very spot. He had a bowl in his other hand. It was very old, and stained brown.

“You two have a great privilege,” Chasseur said to Lexi and Cole as he knelt to carefully place the bowl in a cradle of stone. His leathers creaked. “Your blood shall be the first the Horned God drinks upon his full manifestation into this world. Your young, vital life force, your lust for life, for each other, shall slake his thirst after his long journey along the road between worlds to here—his new kingdom.”

Two large columns of brilliant white light sliced the darkness. They came from the direction of Four Houses. Chasseur looked up, and Lexi saw worry cloud his face for a moment, even if she could not hold on to the comprehension of it. The Master of the Hunt waited, and after a moment the cruel razor cut of a smile returned to his pale, bland face. “Only two,” he said to Lexi and Cole as he stood. “It would seem my pack was too much for them. They were worthy prey, but such is the fate of mortals who would oppose a god.”

Chasseur raised the blade above Lexi; it flashed in the moonlight.
“Is sine de gods, tugaimid ar dhuit,”
he intoned
. “Devour na saol, céim idir an saol mar a osclaíonn an imbhalla agus ar an mbealach soiléir. Tar Pan! Tar Amun! Tar Ammon! Tar Cernunnos! Osclaíonn an doras agus muid a thabhairt faoi shaoirse tú
an fuil, dí
agus siúl saol seo!”

The Master of the Hunt looked into Lexi's, then Cole's, eyes. Lexi's mind cleared for a moment as the horror overcame the drugs. She saw, felt, the death of all things in Chasseur's eyes. She saw him with great horns branching out of his temples, reaching skyward, to gore the moon itself. The knife began to fall. Lexi squeezed Cole's hand, and he hers—a final, frail human act of love, so small in the face of such a rapacious universe.

*   *   *

Jimmie was almost out of shells for the shotgun. He swung the gun like a club and knocked two more of the clawing BEKs away from him as he held the doorway, while Max helped Agnes to descend into the basement. Mercifully, there were no BEKs or shadow people down there—Max theorized that they would instinctively avoid proximity to the well and the light within that could so easily annihilate them.

Agnes was not looking good; the black veins were creeping up her neck now, and she gasped audibly in pain. Max helped her off the last step, and the two women moved toward the crumbling well cover. There were two loud booms as Jimmie discharged the shotgun again with a few of his remaining precious shells.

“We good?” Jimmie yelled.

“Yes!” Max called back. Agnes rested against the lip of the capstone while Max set down the heavy spotlight and rummaged in her pack for the pry bar. Max checked her phone—it was well after eight.

Jimmie kicked one of the hissing child-things back and slammed the door to the basement. There was no lock on his side. He held the knob and braced himself with the railing as the door was jerked by powerful hands on the other side. “I can't hold them but a few minutes!” he called down. Pounding started on the door, and a thin seam of a crack began to appear in the wood.

Max began to take the small bar and work on the capstone of the well, but a frail, black-veined hand took the bar from her. “This is my work to do, dear,” Agnes rasped. “It has to be.” Agnes took the bar and began to strike the crumbling edges of the stone, near the spot where the loose chunk she had shown Ava was. Rock chips flew. A finger of light lanced out from the disintegrating stone, and it seemed to invigorate Agnes. She struck again and again, with more strength than her age and condition should allow. She looked up at Max, the black veins crawling up her face toward her eyes now. “Go help Jimmie, dear,” she said to the younger woman. “I can manage.”

Max ran up the stairs to stand beside Jimmie as he struggled to keep the door closed. “Shells in my jacket pocket,” he said. Max took the shotgun and rummaged in his pocket. She retrieved two shells.

“The last,” she said, and began to slide them into the feed.

“How's she doing?” he asked.

Max shook her head. “This is bad, isn't it, Jimmie?” she asked. “Like, ‘we're not going to make it' bad, right?” Jimmie braced his shoulder against the convulsing door. Max helped him as best she could, leaning against the door with her slight frame.

“We're not dead yet,” he said through gritted teeth. “Still liking fieldwork?”

Max gave him an odd smile; her eyes lightened. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am. Thank you. It's been an honor and a privilege.”

“You stow that down with the ship crap,” Jimmie said. “I got a family to get home to and a load to pick up and deliver. Ain't got no time for dying.”

Max snapped her fingers and cradled the shotgun as she reached into Jimmie's inside jacket pocket. Downstairs, there was a loud
whoosh,
and the chamber began to fill with light.

“What you doing?” Jimmie asked. Max pulled out his cell phone and began to tap and search on it.

“I think I know a way you can reach Agent Dann,” she said, “but it has to be right now. When that energy is released from the wells, I think it punches a hole in the reality of this place for an instant. That hole should allow a signal to pass over to the next adjacent dimension—our earth. The principle is similar to what Chasseur's trying to do with the Horned Man.”

The door bucked hard, and the crack in the wood widened. Dozens of tiny, pale fingers appeared at the edges of the door, prying it open. “His number's in there,” Jimmie shouted. He grabbed the shotgun from Max, jammed the barrel through the widening opening, and fired. The small hands slid out of sight. One round left. “Do it, do it!”

“It won't be a long message,” Max said. “What do I say?”

Jimmie told her. Max quickly typed in the message, ready to send it. The light was getting brighter, filling the stairwell, starting to white out everything. Sound accompanied the light—it was like a hurricane now. The door was splintering. “Get downstairs!” Jimmie shouted. Max ran down to Agnes and the light, and Jimmie followed. The door crashed open as he jumped down to the bottom stairs. He fired behind him without looking back and heard the screams of the things that pretended to be children.

Max and Jimmie saw Agnes vaguely in the geyser of light from the well. She struck the final piece of the capstone, and it fell into the roaring nimbus of pallid fire, along with the pry bar. Agnes's skin was smoking, the radiance engulfing the darkness twisting inside her. The well was open. Agnes climbed onto the low lip of it, her features almost obscured by the long-imprisoned power.

“Tell Dennis I love him,” she shouted above the howling gale. “And tell Ava … well done.” She fell into the heart of the Crone's fury and was gone. The BEKs that had dared to rush down the stairs to press their assault ceased to be in the face of the merciless radiance. The monsters upstairs had a few seconds longer before they suffered the same fate. The light tore free of the house and arched skyward, to join the other two beacons in the night.

“Agnes!” Jimmie screamed, but his voice was nothing, drowned out in the maelstrom. Max hit Send on Jimmie's phone as everything was washed away, consumed by white.

*   *   *

The battered old tow truck screamed, tires smoking, out of the parking lot of the blazing inferno that was Scode's Garage. Heck turned a hard left down the two-lane and kept accelerating. The cab of the truck reeked of gasoline, and he could hear the jerricans full of gas rattling against the acetylene tanks in the bed of the truck. He fumbled in his jacket with his free hand as he stared coolly out into the night, the raging fire in his rearview, his headlights grasping at the white lines of the road. He had clicked on the old radio in the truck, and through the ghostly AM static he heard Molly Hatchet's “Flirtin' with Disaster.” He found his crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes and removed the only cigarette not destroyed by his tumble with the late Scode brothers. He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and looked at the mangled package. Heck laughed—it was a cold, sharp thing. Two absurdities amused him immensely in the moment. One was the Lucky Strike slogan on the package:
“It's Toasted.”
The other was that he realized he didn't have a light. He laughed again at this as he swung the truck right onto the access road next to the small shrine and sacrifices left for the Horned Man. The truck bounced down the rutted gravel road.

He rubbed his soot-covered face again, the one that had been kissed by a 5,700-degree-Fahrenheit-blowtorch flame. He glanced down at his arm that had been viciously bitten by a Black-Eyed Kid. He had survived the corrupting bite when it killed Gil Turla within minutes. He pushed in the small plug of a cigarette lighter on the dashboard of the old truck. He recalled what the burning, laughing thing had told him after it killed all his friends, deep in the Afghan desert. It had tried to burn him, too, before he destroyed it. He remembered what Chasseur had said to him in the hotel room in Atlanta and how it had made him feel. A dark, hungry hole at the center of him told him that what the Master of the Hunt had said about him was true, all true. A snake made of ice writhed in Heck's guts. He didn't feel like himself, yet he had never felt more like himself. Nothing seemed to matter except the velocity, the diamond-edged oblivion he hurtled toward, and the growling hunger in him to rip everything apart. He stomped on the small pedal on the floorboard, and the high beams of the truck snapped on. The dark forest gave way to a clearing and a field. An old cabin squatted in the field: the house of the Horned Man.

The lighter popped out of the dash. Heck grinned; there was no joy in it. He glanced down to the empty gas can beside him. His clothes, the whole truck—inside and out—was soaked in fuel. He took the lighter plug and lit his cigarette with the cherry-red end of the plug as he drove off the road and straight toward the old house. “It's toasted, motherfucker,” he said as he dropped the lighter into his own lap and felt the gasoline catch. The cabin was engulfed in flames and laughter.

*   *   *

The video was reaching the part where the girl had fallen and was saying her goodbyes to her family, to her sister. It made Dann ill in the core of him. There was a buzz in his pocket from his cell. He read the message sent from Aussapile. It said,
“Stop it, Cecil, now
.
”

“You need to turn that off … now,” Dann said to John Gage, the director. Dann put his phone away. Gage snorted.

“Yeah, I know; it's pretty awful,” Gage replied, “That poor…”

“No, I'm ordering you to turn it off right now, on my authority,” Dann said. Gage spun in his chair.

“Agent Dann, I can't do that. It's only got fifty-three seconds left, anyway. We're live right now. You need to talk to the legal department about this. I'm sorry, but—”

“No, I'm sorry,” Cecil said as he drew his sidearm, a Springfield 1911A1, and pointed it at Gage's suddenly pale face. “I don't have time to explain. Stop the video, right now.” Gage spun in his chair and punched a series of buttons on the panel in front of him. The images on the monitor vanished, replaced by black. The clock counting down to the end of the video was blinking, stopped at 39 seconds.