Twisted (23 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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“Shut up, Maura! Just shut up!
Just shut up and let it go!”
Grove's outburst, driven by an unmooring of his grief and pent-up rage and raw emotions, was almost immediately drowned by the deafening peal of the storm, which now had reached a thunderous crescendo. The closest analogy would be an immense, celestial engine revving so furiously and uncontrollably that it flies off its own bearings in a fiery metallic eruption. The final booming report was so loud and so palpable it seemed to crash down on the little bungalow with the force of a wrecking ball. Maura slammed her hands over her ears—to block out either the storm or Grove's bellowing anger—and Kaminsky staggered back against the wall, knocking several gruesome artifacts to the floor, while Grove, standing alone in the center of the room, suddenly fell to his knees and covered his ears. The pandemonium seemed to collapse suddenly, caving in under its own weight, a great paroxysm of air pressure sucking the volume out of the wind, and then there was nothing but swirling white noise, and then ... a sudden and unexpected silence.
They each froze there for an infinitesimal moment of pure shock before realizing what the silence meant.
The eye had arrived.
PART III
Revelations
On that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were open.
—Genesis 7:11
19
Grove paused at the front door, breathing in the eerie stillness outside. It was like snorting a pinch of smelling salts. The air prickled with static electricity.
The front door squeaked as he pushed it open and stepped out into the night.
For a brief moment, he paused on the front porch, gathering his bearings, ankle-deep in standing water. He barely felt the heavy coil of rope digging into his shoulder, its tail snaking back behind him and into the shadows of the house. The rope was designed to be lightweight for mountaineering purposes, but still must have weighed forty or fifty pounds. Complicating matters was the fact that the other end was tied off to
Kaminsky
. (This was a decision made after a frantic debate on the safest way to anchor it. Kaminsky thought that tying it to the house—no matter how stable or strong the object—was risky since the house could literally not be there when Grove returned).
The screen door slammed behind him, making a strange, flat, echoless bang—the sound of a door slamming in a recording studio. The air outside the bungalow was cool and dank and malodorous like the air in a basement. A dog barked somewhere in the black distance.
The neighborhood had flooded. The new, improved levees had already given out. That was one of the first things that registered in Grove's brain, which was working feverishly now, a clockwork mechanism absorbing every detail in his field of vision, processing all the sensory input flowing into him. Freret Street had become a canal. The tops of cars rose out of the lazily moving water like little, square, metal islands. The lawns lay under two to three feet of water, which rippled in the gentle wind. That was another thing that occurred to Grove in those early moments, a detail he hadn't noticed on board the plane:
There's wind inside the eye
. It was a subtle little breeze of maybe ten to fifteen miles an hour, hardly noticeable, but it was there.
He descended the steps, letting out the rope as he went, then quickly waded through the brackish water of the lawn.
Moonlight shone down on the flooded street. That was the next thing Grove noticed. With dreamlike clarity it glimmered like luminous ribbons across the surface of the water. Tree debris floated hear and there. Downed telephone poles drifted calmly across a surface hectic with shards of wood, litter, and broken glass glistening like diamonds.
It didn't occur to Grove to look up just yet. He was too busy listening and smelling and absorbing every last sensory detail: the distant moaning of the eye-wall winds, the sulfurous stench of the stirred-up river, the prickling sensation on the back of his neck. He could feel a pair of feverishly attentive eyes behind him, tracking his every move from inside the darkness of the bungalow. He had convinced Maura and Kaminsky to stay inside the inner room for the duration, but Grove knew they couldn't resist peering out of the pantry, watching through the jagged, damaged front windows.
Grove paused and reached inside his coat. He pulled the Tracker from its holster. The gun felt cold and reassuring in his hand. His nerves were wired to its grip, to its hammer, to its long barrel and its front site. And he realized suddenly—maybe subconsciously, maybe consciously—he was here in this hellish place to do a job that no one else was willing or able to do. This was his destiny ... and all those years of studying and collating off-the-scale mental cases, years of getting inside the criminal mind, and getting that old empathy going for these pathetic individuals—all of it—now seemed like lies to Grove. They seemed like a part of the
old
Grove, a skin that he had shed—a veneer of civilized behavior that had been sandblasted away in the crucible of this hurricane.
Perhaps
this
was the secret meaning within the visions that had been plaguing Grove all his life, the very simple kernel of truth inside all the mumbo jumbo his mother had visited upon him over the years: “You are chosen, Mwana, chosen for something real, something big, it is written in the bones, in the words of the ‘seer.'” Grove realized what it was now: The gods simply needed a garbage collector. They simply wanted somebody to periodically come along and take these assholes out, thin the herd, shore up the accounting. And after all the ponderous analysis, and profiling on the fly, Grove realized he felt no sympathy for this damaged young man named Michael Doerr. He made no allowances for the probability of abuse in Doerr's past. At that moment, Grove could not have cared less about Doerr's scars, both psychic and literal, or the profound anguish Doerr must have experienced for most of his wretched life. There was nothing to learn from Doerr. There was nothing to learn from
any
of the homicidal maniacs whom Grove had hunted. They were mutations—created by nature, and nurtured by the brutality of cruel caretakers, and very possibly hosts to a single parasite,
whatever it was
... .
Grove took a deep breath and then waded across the street, letting the rope uncoil off his shoulder as he moved, grasping the gun tightly with his right hand. He moved with a purpose. Not hurriedly ... but
purposeful.
He knew he only had a few minutes to get the job done.
And he would do just that:
get the job done ... or die trying
.
 
 
“Can you see him anymore?” Maura was leaning against the doorjamb outside the pantry, still feeling the sting of Grove's outburst, trying to see through the gaping windows in the living room, where the outer world was obscured by jagged puzzle pieces of broken glass, most of them beaded with condensation, and fogged almost to the point of being opaque.
“No, regrettably, he has just passed behind the Jeep.” Kaminsky stood just inside the kitchen archway, the rope looped around his massive girth and tied off on a metal carabineer.
“Jesus Christ, what is that noise?” Maura leaned back against one side of the pantry, accidentally knocking a box of instant grits to the puddled floor. The two inches of standing water in the pantry was littered with soggy spilled cereal and pasta. It smelled like moldy dog fur in there. Roaches floated like bloated raisins in the puddles.
“That noise is the eye wall,” Kaminsky informed her. The big man came back into the pantry, dragging the rope like a tail, and plucked the shotgun from the shelf. He started clicking shells into the breech as he talked, the snap of each shell punctuating his deep, gravel baritone. “It is not cooperating.”
Snap
! “To be perfectly frank with you.”
Snap
!
“What do you mean?”
“It has doubled over the last few hours.”
Snap!
“Which means it is big, and will take a while to pass through.”
Snap!
“What's wrong with that? That doesn't sound so bad. It'll give Ulysses more time. Right?
Right
?”
The Russian looked at her. “That is true, Maura, but unfortunately when the eye
does
finally pass through, and the other side of the eye wall returns, it will be worse than ever.”
Snap!
“Perhaps the worst we have ever seen.”
Snap!
“And Grove will be stuck.”
“God
damn
, that noise is driving me batty.” Maura put her hands over her ears and slid down the shelf until her rear end plopped down into the water, soaking through immediately. She didn't care anymore. She didn't care about anything anymore, except Grove's chance of survival, which right now seemed to be diminishing faster than Maura's resolve.
 
 
The water rose to his knees now, and the moaning noise was changing, rising, getting closer, but he kept on. He kept on wading through the muck toward St. Charles Avenue, which lay in the tomblike stillness several blocks away. He had no idea if the rope would reach, but he had to try. Doerr
had
to be in this general vicinity. Considering the intensity of the storm, the young man would have gotten pinned down shortly after he had fled the bungalow. Clinically possessed or not, no human being could negotiate those eye-wall winds.
Only a few seconds had passed since Grove had emerged from that bungalow, but already he was becoming attuned to the strange universe inside the eye. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears, which were still ringing. The lapping sounds of the thigh-high water sent gooseflesh down his back, and the eerie moaning of the wind wall—judging from its constant, plaintive wailing, it lay a quarter mile or so off in all directions—began to resemble a vast armature, as though Grove were trapped inside a giant turbine. Finally he paused, and he looked up at the sky.
Directly overhead, as though through the open roof of an indoor stadium, the clear black heavens were visible, rich with stars, a brilliant moon shining down. It seemed impossible, but there it was, like a proscenium portal in the middle of a boiling, milky, time-lapse sky. Grove gaped up at it, enthralled, paralyzed with the simian fascination of a caveman staring at fire.
A noise to his left.
He spun toward the sound and aimed the gun, and almost squeezed off a shot, but something told him to wait,
don't shoot, don't give your position away, not yet, not yet.
He pointed the gun at a cluster of loblollies in a flooded lawn across the street. In the moonlight, a leprous snout poked out of the water near a phalanx of stumps. Opening and closing convulsively, revealing dull yellow fangs, the snout belonged to an injured alligator, evidently in its death throes. A dark cloud of blood stewed in the floodwater around it.
The gator had somehow tumbled across the lawn in the storm and gotten itself impaled.
Another noise rattled across the street and Grove whirled. Stuck the gun out. Bit down hard. Held his breath. An icy needle of panic pierced him as he scanned the shadows of a deserted parking lot. Nothing moved at first. Only the lazy drifting of debris across the surface of the flooded lot. A boarded storefront lay just beyond the lot, the moonlight painting it silver. But no movement. No shadows. Then another noise gurgled to Grove's immediate left.
The gun swung over, Grove's hot gaze locking onto bubbles,
bubbles
, coming up from beneath the surface. In that one feverish instant before the source of the bubbles made itself known, Grove figured it might be another alligator. He pointed the gun at the disturbance on the water.
The corpse bobbed to the surface as though making an entrance in a carefully choreographed play. Grove grew very still. The body was male, dark-skinned and elderly, with graying tufts of hair, and it floated a few feet away from Grove, the gentle currents caressing it as though it were anchored there. The old man had sustained massive lacerations to the jugular, and had already started to bloat in the water. His wrinkled face was caved in on one side, his mouth a bloody, toothless divot, his left eye an empty black crater of glistening tissue. Deep arterial blood blossomed around the cadaver like an inky penumbra in the moonlight.
More noises clicked and burbled all around Grove now, and he began breathing through his nostrils in long, regular, rhythmic beats, shrugging off the coil of rope, the coil splashing in the water. He cupped the gun in both hands, assuming the Weaver position, fixing the front sight on the shadows behind the adjacent trees and buildings. He held his breath then, reaching down inside himself for that snaky calm he needed to take the target down, because he saw more bodies in his peripheral field of vision.
They bobbed to the surface in the middle distance, one after another, each in more putrefied stages of mutilation. They were connected somehow—both literally, through guide wires or cables or ropes, and figuratively, through some insane logic that Grove would have to collate at a later time—and they were meant for Grove's eyes only. And also maybe God's eyes. They had turned the moonlit water scarlet black, forming a familiar pattern that Grove was just beginning to recognize when another noise yanked his attention to a parallel rooftop.
A dark figure crouched up there—on top of an old, stately, Italianate mansion—perched on the steep pitch of its gable like an enormous owl.
For one slim instant, Grove hesitated. He had a clean kill shot—maybe forty yards, fifty at the most; a completely acceptable range for the weapon—but something stopped him. Something made him stare at this creature that used to be called Michael Doerr.
At this distance Grove could just barely make out the expression on the figure's face beneath that weird black cowl of a headpiece—leathery skin the color of cowhide, sunken eyes, a giant crevice of a mouth. The mouth widened until it practically split the face apart, peeling away from dull white teeth. At first Grove thought the thing was grinning. But soon it became clear the rictus on that ravaged face was a look of pure hate.
“
Whoever you are! Whatever you are!”
Grove called out, his voice shattering the tenuous silence of the eye. “
It ends tonight!”
The killer cocked his head to one side like a dog hearing a high-pitched whistle.
He seemed to be savoring the moment.
 
 
The Holy Ghost gazed down upon the flooded street, memorizing every last detail of the tall African-American standing down there with the weapon. The true nature of this “FBI” man's spirit registered in the deepest recesses of the entity's core like a spotlight flaring on, illuminating the darkest corners of its being with cleansing light.

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