28 Teeth of Rage

By

Ennis Drake

Omnium Gatherum
Los Angeles CA

28 Teeth of Rage

Copyright © 2012 Ennis Drake

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and publisher. http://omniumgatherumedia.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

First Edition

For Patti

"To live is to suffer..." —Friedrich Nietzche

"I'm falling apart, I'm barely breathing

With a broken heart that's still beating

In the pain, there is healing

In your name I find meaning

So I'm holdin' on, I'm holdin' on, I'm holdin' on

I'm barely holdin' on to you"

—Lifehouse, Broken

PROLOGUE: HEATHENS

God how he must have run! Riley thinks as the book slips (it is slipping, slipping, slipping without end) from his hand.

They're coming!

All his effort, all his will, all his strength. He is running. The old bullet wound in his hip is burning. His thoughts are mercurial streams blasted to vapor at the headwaters of his instinctive mind. There and gone, because the only thing that matters is (running) staying alive.

It's just a dream, he tries to tell himself, but he can't hold the thought, and even if he could, the ancient beast in his genes would refuse it.

Scrub, vine, sapling, and palmetto grab him, cut him, slap his face, as if the very woods would deliver him to the heathens; the ones even the Seminoles have branded as castaways.

They have many names, this splinter tribe: Teeth Sticks, Yaholo, Blood Feet. There aren't many of them, maybe as few as twenty, but they fight like coon dogs ate up with the rabies.

Riley can hear them now, hollering, yipping (Yaholo). He turns to scream at Kenneth, his negro, to tell him to run, but Kenneth is far behind, hung up in the tentacular roots of a ground creeper. Kenneth is a good man, a good soldier, but Riley doesn't stop running. Riley doesn't even waste his breath on the word (run) lying thin and useless behind his teeth.

"McGillian!" Kenneth cries out. "Help me!"

Riley puts on a burst of speed, tapping reserves he wouldn't have believed existed before now. Tears mingle with the sweat in his eyes, blurring the brown and green of the wood into a meaningless tunnel.

Kenneth cries out one last time. "No!" Then there is only the sound of an ax or a club (or both) digging in flesh, breaking bone, freeing blood. And of course, there are the yips. The hollers. Voices demanding blood in the foul tongue of the Muskogean.

Kenneth was a good negro, he thinks again. A thought, were he not dreaming, Riley would find both ironic and more than a little disgusting. But not now. Oh, no, not now.

The rifle in his chapped white hands is spent, but it is long, heavy, and solid oak. English oak. He grips it like a club, expecting the blood-painted hands of the Yaholo at his neck with every passing breath, but the savage shrieks are trailing away and Riley, daring to hope, slows his stride. His heart feels, not like it's beating, but like it is exploding and imploding.

He stops, leaning against a massive first-growth pine for support. Aside from the Ba-Boom! Ba-Boom! of his heart, and the fading shouts of the Yaholo, the forest is as quiet and still as a second-day grave. Riley looks up through the canopy. The sky is so pale it's almost white.

Good God, man, what are you doing?!

Riley takes a paper cartridge from the leather bag slung over his shoulder. Tears it open with his teeth. Half cocks the musket and dumps powder from the cartridge into the flash pan. Snaps the frizzen closed and pours the rest of the cartridge— a little more powder and a .69 caliber piece of shot— into the barrel. Rams it down to the breach with the ramrod. Full cock. And he's ready to fire.

His heart is still exploding-imploding, but it's slowing and his breath is coming easier now. He feels better for having reloaded his rifle. Can think a little clearer now that the sounds of the Yaholo have died away. He's not safe, he knows that... but your fate's not so awful as Kenneth's, now is it?

The Captain should've known better than to stray so close to the lake country. It wasn't safe. The last three payrolls out of Sanford had been hit. The Seminoles were restless enough east of Pendryville, but Christ as his Savior, he honestly never believed the stories about the Yaholo; he thought they were just that... stories.

God, Oh God! Please help me! They're all dead: the Captain, Andrew, Roberts, even brawly Steffano and Kenneth. Those Red bastards took General Eustis' payroll and the horses. Worse, Riley doesn't know exactly where he is. Fort Mason could be two miles away, or ten.

You're not alone, a voice warns Riley.

Another man might have confused the warning as the voice of instinct. But Riley knows better than that. Because Riley knows this voice. More intrusion than thought, it is like a parasite crawling the surface of his brain.

He hears the barest whisper of buckskin on damp leaves and brings the rifle up just in time to stop the Yaholo's club from caving in his head. The blow is so hard it knocks Riley on his ass. Before he can even think of shouldering the musket, the Yaholo's club comes down again.

Riley kicks out, knocking the Injun back far enough that he's able to rise to his knees and level his weapon.

"Ayaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" The Injun's war-cry penetrates the quiet of the wood like shrapnel.

Boom! The thunder of the musket is so loud, Riley thinks it must be an affront to the very Heavens; to God Himself.

Blue smoke hangs in the air, heavy as a quilt, and even though he continues to pray this is only a dream, Riley can taste the gunpowder: sour, metallic, like blood.

Riley stands shakily, once again gripping the musket like a club. His bayonet, forgotten, hangs useless as a limp pecker in its shoulder carriage. The smoke is clearing. Through it, he can see the Yaholo. Most of his right side is missing below the ribcage. There's only a red and black hole, now. The Injun holds in the slick, tender coils of his small intestine with one hand. The ropes look like blue-veined links of sausage where they bulge between his fingers. Riley raises his rifle high in both hands, retreating one step for every two he advances, but the Yaholo only stands there, dumb as a midnight cow in the clearing smoke.

Riley watches, mesmerized, as the Injun's guts spill between his fingers; the young warrior's blood-painted lips rolling in flabby waves of pain.

The cane arrow hits him in the back hard as a hammer blow.

"Ugh!" is all the response Riley can manage.

The wounded Yaholo, however, comes to life at the sound of Riley's surprised pain. Miraculously, the Injun still holds his club, which is studded with long, curved teeth. Alligator teeth, maybe? Bear? Or panther? It doesn't matter. They'll pierce him just the same.

The moment of his likely demise seems to be infinitely expanding and Riley takes a good long look at the savage: young; sixteen (Riley would bet house and piss-pot on it), though at that age the Injun is likely an honored warrior, and certainly a man, in the eyes of his tribe; he wears a long mohowawog, not up, but down and swept to one side like a raven's wing; his every muscle defined as carven cypress, skin dark red with the blood he uses as body-paint; he wears nothing, save short buckskin boots as blood-stained as his skin (Blood Feet).

The young Yaholo charges, boots digging in the dead, wet leaves. He screams again. Raises his club. His eyes are black pits and in their depths Riley sees a Hell very different from the one described in his Protestant faith; a Hell not even Steffano's much-loved Dante could imagine. The Injun's mouth yawns— as the pits of his daemonic eyes yawn— showing rows of spindly teeth that remind Riley of the gar in Lake Yale.

A second cane arrow pierces Riley's side, in the fat above his hip, and he shrieks; drops his musket.

The Yaholo, guts pouring from the musket wound in a steady stream of unwinding coils, brains Riley with his tooth-studded club.

The world goes liquid; black and velvet crimson.

The dream is shifting.

~ ~ ~

The chanting is Madness. A vocalization of Chaos, in which love and light and wholeness is made a mockery. And within the chanting is the steady punctuation of mutilation. A knife undoing what the Lord hath wrought. An ax defiling. Teeth ripping off pound after pound of flesh.

What could drive men to such savagery? What outrages had they committed against God and Nature down through the centuries... and in whose name?

General Jackson is right to wage war on these... these things . They are not human. And, yet, they are not animals, either. No, they are too intelligent, too intentional in their atrocities to be lowly animals. How the Lord, his God in Heaven, can allow such heathens to exist, Riley does not know.

He tries to open his eyes, but they are thick with crust. His left eye feels like it is leaking something and even behind the lid, he sees only perfect blackness on that side. No tiny bursts of red or white. No fleshy shadow. Nothing. He doesn't know it yet, but his eye is sliding down his cheek like a ruptured grape in a river of mucous.

The air is damp, earthy, but the smell of copper and shit overrides its natural purity. He listens harder, straining his ears, and hears the faint lap of water on a shore.

He reaches for his leaking, unseeing eye, hand trembling (could it know what his mind does not?). He brushes the ruin on his cheek and pulls away with a hiss, as if he's touched a hot coal; chokes down the scream that rushes out of his bowels and into his throat.

Gone. Blind.

Riley steels himself. Reaches for the other eye. Pries it open.

He lies on the reedy rim of a small lake. The sun is a burning spherical mold above the dark, piney horizon— the Lord's daily casting nearly complete, nearly cooled. Standing among the reeds and lilies is a short, grotesque totem carved from cypress. A confusing tangle of legs, arms, and demonic faces that spiral towards the bloated centipede dominating its pinnacle. A thing so hideous it could drive a man to madness. Its many limbs crawling upon the wood. Its faces leering in hatred and contorted with pain. And above it all that monstrous figure; that centipede with a mouth like a bladed machine... and its eyes, Oh God! Its eyes! Deliver me from it! Riley thinks. Take me from its sight, Oh Lord!

Kenneth lies beneath it, surrounded by Yaholo. The Injuns, barely half a dozen of them (that Riley can see), are literally cutting the poor negro to pieces.

Presiding over this is a figure who can only be the Yaholo's chieftain. He wears a cape of human skin; his headdress is fashioned from the actual face of another man, dozens and dozens of shriveled black fingers sewn to the leathery forehead like feathers. That horrid countenance turns its empty black eye-holes on Riley and the flesh of the mask pulls into a smile.

Hadjo. It calls itself Hadjo, Detective.

"Yip-yip-yip! Ayaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" the Chieftain cries and the last thing Riley remembers is the swarm of blood-painted faces...

~ ~ ~

Riley wakes with a start and a name on his lips: "McGillian!"

He struggles with unseen assailants for several seconds before realizing he has fallen asleep in the worn club chair in the corner of his den. He remembers the thunder of his (no, not mine, McGillian's) heart as the Yaholo ran him down. His own heart (my heart, my heart, I'm me) explodes-implodes. He rips every breath from his lungs by will alone. He feels faint. Worries he will fade back into the fugue (no, no more, not that Hell).

Riley moves to the edge of the chair, holding his hands out as if warming them by a fire. He needs to see that they aren't chapped and white; that they aren't the hands of a long dead American soldier. They are, of course, black.

No, old man, they are gray. 'Cause you're sick, but he's relieved at the sight of his own flesh just the same.

"Been sick," he mumbles. "But there might be worse things than bein' sick if you don't put this thing behind you."

It is too late for that, Detective.

Riley runs his hands across his face. His touch is delicate, searching, like a blind man meeting an old friend after a long parting.

Did you see it, Detective? Did you see Hadjo's mask?

I saw it, Riley thinks. You wanted me to see it, but it wasn't real.

How can you be sure, Detective? How can you be sure about anything?

Riley leans over and picks up the journal he was researching before he fell asleep.

Umatilla: A History of The Land of Many Lakes

He thumbs its pages.

Hadjo's mask, he thinks and closes his eyes, thumbs running the pages of the book back and forth, faster and faster, back and forth.

The Yaholo chieftain's mask... the face... it was Riley's face.

"My face."

From Umatilla: A History of the Land of Many Lakes by Hilda Nielsen-Neimeier (Tulane University Press, 1903), pp. 50-51

There are scant accounts of the robbing of Fort Mason's payroll from the Army courier originating from Fort Sanford. Most of the reports are pedantic, at best, and involve an unseemly amount of speculation regarding General Abraham Eustis' purported relationship with the Yaholo tribe of Indians. Not coincidentally, the same natives reported to have stolen the payroll shipment from Captain Halstead, who was charged with delivering the monies to Eustis. The following, however, is the account of Jeffrey McGillian, the only surviving soldier under Captain Halstead's command. Based on my interviews with the McGillian's surviving descendants and commanding officers, I have drawn the conclusion that McGillian's recording of the incident is the only reliable, existing documentation of the event in question.

They were waiting for us, I know that, and even though I never saw one of the Yaholo with a musket, there was musket fire when the ambush started. I know that, too. The lead horse was shot, and so was the Captain. We were stopped and Halstead was dead before we really understood what was happening. Kenneth and I both fired shots before we saw the Injuns, but really we were firing blind into the scrub. I was at least. We rallied around the coach, but the Injuns, they were everywhere and nowhere at once. They were not Seminoles... not that I think we were capable of holding onto the payroll even if they had been.

Honestly, I don't recall much of the fight after that. The next thing I can remember with any certainty was running. Kenneth and me fighting our way through the pine scrub...

CHAPTER 1: DETECTIVE RILEY

Riley eases his unmarked, dark blue Impala onto 5th Street. Nielsen-Neimeier's Umatilla lies on the Chevy's beige passenger seat.

"Where have all these damned people come from?" he wonders, sipping at his third cup of coffee. He's wondered the same thing every day for the past ten years.

A beat-to-shit Ford pickup with ladders hanging out of the back breaks hard at Jolly's corner store and Riley spills coffee all over his hand when he breaks in response.

"Motherfucker!" he screams, mind suddenly seething with red. His lip skins into a snarl and it's a struggle to assert his better nature; to keep himself from pulling into Jolly's after the pickup. Not to give the guy a piece of his mind, not even to write him a ticket (which he could do and which would be incredibly satisfying), but to....

To what?

Red.

He sees his Glock .40 in his mind as clearly as if it were displayed on white satin.

Pain.

The red pain. Give him theredpain!

"Jesus," he says through his teeth. "Jesus."

Cold, sleety rain sluices down the windshield. The wipers rump-rump-rump!

"Asshole," Riley says as he passes Jolly's. But he's calm again (are you?). He tells himself he's too tired to be pissed— he has to sell it hard, but eventually he picks up what he's puttin' down.

He pulls in behind a line of cars waiting for the light at Donnelly.

"Where do they come from and where the Hell are they all goin'?" he goes back to grumbling, sticking his hand out of the window and into the rain to wash it off.

"Damn, that's cold," he mutters, putting the window back up.

He remembers the Triangle when it was nothin' but orange groves. Remembers workin' 'em when he was a kid. Him, his Daddy, and his brothers. Daddy used to tease about it bein' the family business. Now, the cities are nothin' but shoppin' centers, gas stations, fast food, and pharmacies. If he had a nickel for every corner that had a CVS or a Walgreens planted on it, he'd eat free for a week. Used to be, the roads were only busy when people was goin' to work, when the schools let out, or when people was goin' home from work. Now, oh now, the roads are packed with cars coming and going at all hours of the day and night. He just didn't see how there was enough room for all these people. There sure weren't enough jobs for 'em. Not anymore.

Red.

Pain.

So much meat.

Riley flinches; reaches for the radio so fast he spills coffee on himself again. This time he doesn't notice. Smooth jazz pours suddenly, soothingly, from the Chevy's stereo and that's good. That's real good. 'Cause he doesn't want to hear himself anymore.

The light at the intersection of Donnelly and 5th changes and traffic gives a jerky start.

On the radio, Chet Baker is singing: "I should have saved those leftover dreams. Funny. But here's that rainy day!"

And the rain slashes in, slashes down.

Riley rides along the northern bulk of Lake Forres, glancing up at the homes that have overlooked it for a hundred and fifty years: almost all of them Colonials, or sprawling Victorians. He passes Lakeshore Drive, however, without so much as a glance; the road that would have taken him to downtown Tavares and to work. Fifth becomes State Road 19 and within a few short minutes he crosses the 441 overpass. Lake Woodward spreads like a puddle of lead to the east.

Riley glances at the book riding shotgun on the passenger seat.

The Seminoles called this place Umatilla, The Land of Many Lakes. Now, it is Lake County. A simple, soulless name.

Riley leaves the limits of Forres, where he lives, and crosses into the City of Pendryville.

State Road 19 becomes Bay Street.

Riley checks the clock on his laptop.

9:40 A.M.

He was supposed to meet Del Hickey at nine.

Riley hasn't seen 9:00 A.M. in months. He drinks all night. Most nights, anyway. He doesn't fall asleep until four, sometimes five in the morning, and sleeps (if you can call his nightmare-infested tossings and turnings sleep) till around eleven... which is becoming a real problem with Lieutenant Desjardins.

Approaching Woodward Avenue, Riley feels the draw of the...

Of the what? he thinks. Of the WHAT?

It would be so easy to make a right and follow his way down into the bowl that holds the still, scummy remains of Lake Gracie. In his mind's eye he sees the totem and the chieftain with his human mask of dusky flesh. The black eye holes turning on him. Marking him...

You seek answers, Detective, and I am the only one who has them. Only me. Come. Come to me.

"No," Riley whispers. But he is so tired. So weak. And the answers, he needs them.

"No!" he says again, more forcefully this time.

Woodward passes. The pull, just to look, is almost too strong to resist, as if unseen hands have him by the hair.

A ghostly soldier stands by the STOP sign at the corner of the intersection. His white summer Roundabouts are stained with blood. His head is bowed and he holds his leather Forage cap in his hands, as if he's waiting for a bus that will take him somewhere he doesn't want to go. The ghostly soldier lifts his head, watching Riley with knowing eyes as he passes.

Then the ride is over. Instead of a right on Woodward, Riley makes a left into Strom Wheldon's driveway.

~ ~ ~

Del Hickey's Dually is parked in the driveway. The Wheldon house looms, scorned and empty over the narrow property. The police line that fenced the yard has been torn loose, probably by neighborhood kids, maybe by Del himself. It slithers and flicks in the nasty morning like a coach snake whipping its tail in warning.

The rain slashes in, slashes down. And the Wheldon house watches with vacant eyes.

Riley pulls into the front yard, flashes his red and blue emergency lights once, and sticks his hand out the window just far enough to wave Del over.

When Del doesn't show himself, anxiety crawls Riley's arms like stinging ants, the sensation moving, surging, into the hive of his heart until it is no longer anxiety, but seething red rage.

He's gone in the house! Riley thinks.

Why? Why would you do that? he wonders, jealousy rising in him like a foul tide.

Then Del's truck door opens and the man runs across the yard toward Riley's Impala, hunching his head against the rain.

The feeling of jealousy remains, but Riley's rage washes away as fast as it came.

Riley turns the radio off and cranks the heat on high. Despite his "hot flashes", as he calls them, and the fever he's been battling the last few days, he can't seem to stay warm. You go and figure that.

Del jerks open the passenger door and leaps inside, slamming the door as fast as he can. He's soaked from his hooded UF sweatshirt to his braided leather loafers.

"Fuck'n'A, I hate a January storm!" Del says, wiping beads of water from his face with his sleeve.

Riley's only met with Del Hickey three times before today, but, despite the infrequency (and the circumstances) of their acquaintance, the first thing Riley thinks is that the man has lost a lot of weight, and a lot of sleep.

"You look like shit," Del says, beating Riley to the proverbial punch.

"Yeah, well... I'm probably gettin' 'bout as much sleep as you Mr. Hickey."

Del Hickey doesn't laugh. His face, his body language, even the air he's breathing out, tells the same story: Del is dead inside.

Riley can relate, after a fashion.

"You said you had something for me," Riley says.

"Yeah," Del says and frowns. "I just wish I could've brought it to you down at the station instead of... instead of..."

Riley looks up at the house. Shit, he thinks and scrubs his face with his hands. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hickey. I didn't—"

"No, it's all right. It's just a house, I guess. Anyway, I'm glad you made it. I was about to leave."

"Sorry about that too," Riley says. "The mornings are gettin' harder and harder."

"You got that right, Detective. Here," Del says, pulling a book out from under his sweatshirt. It's blue and purple and dotted with monarch butterflies on the wing. "I thought this might help. It's Jodi's journal. She left it at the house before she... Del chokes on the rest of his sentence. Clears his throat. "Listen, I gotta run. You'll call us as soon as you hear something?"

"Yeah, yeah, of course," Riley says, engrossed by the book in his hands. "We'll, uh, we'll call you."

~ ~ ~

It's damned near noon when Riley steps into the Department foyer. He shakes his hat off onto the floor and makes his way (squeaking with every step on the old green vinyl tile) to the single elevator.

Marie Glumly eyes him severely from her Fortress of Reception, but Riley doesn't pay her any attention. He's met her husband... and spent plenty of time around her; he knows what her opinion of a wet old nigger creeping in to work at noon is. He's surprised she doesn't ask to smell his breath.

The elevator opens and Riley hustles inside. "Mornin', Marie," he says with as much fake cheer as he can muster.

Marie raises her eyebrows. Her lip curls. "Lieutenant Desjardins has been looking for you."

Riley punches the 4.

"Bitch," he mumbles as the doors close.

The fourth floor is deserted, the only sound the whisper of Riley's raincoat and the harsh tick of the oversized clock on the west wall. The smattering of cubicles and second hand desks are piled with budget memos and case files and complaints from the unincorporated townships outlying the growing metropolitan Triangle (the Triangle being the cities of Pendryville, Forres, and Tavares, the county seat). Everyone's either out to lunch, or out on calls. Which suits Riley fine.

He grabs some cold coffee on his way through. Nasty, bitter shit full of grounds. They'll still be stuck in his teeth when they catch him butchering Marie Glumly on the shore of Lake Gracie in the early hours of the coming morning.

In his office, he closes and locks the door behind him. Hits the lights. One of the fluorescents hums and sputters but won't come on. He pulls the blinds behind the desk to let some of the gray from outside in. It doesn't help much.

"Nice."

He shrugs out of his Sheriff's Department windbreaker and tosses it at one of the plastic chairs in the corner; lays his hat on top of the short bookcase under the window and settles in. On the glass blotter there is a stack of 8X10 crime scene photos and a plastic baggie with an old tape recorder inside.

Welcome back, they seem to say.

Riley tosses Jodi Wheldon's journal on the blotter next to the pictures.

The photos are from two different, but undeniably related cases; a visual evidence catalogue of severed limbs from the Nuestro Castillo / Wheldon murders. Of the fourteen victims, nine have been identified through dental records and DNA testing. The rest are Johns and Janes. The Department would probably never know who they'd been. Transients, likely, Riley thinks, scrubbing his short white beard. Rainbow People, the folks in Shahaptin and Pendryville call them— mostly teens and twenty-somethings that live in a new age hippie commune out in the Ocala National Forest. They come in to town now and again, begging for money, or trading mushrooms and weed to the high school kids for toilet paper, and toothpaste.

I can tell you all the secrets of that old, cold meat, Detective.

Riley turns the whole batch of photos face down and picks up the baggie with the tape recorder in it, shutting out the voice that's cost him so much sleep these last few months.

The prints have already been lifted from the recorder, but he leaves it in the bag anyway. Rewinds it. Presses PLAY.

It is Strom Wheldon's secrets he is interested in...

CHAPTER 2: THIS IS A CONFESSION

My name is Strom Wheldon.

That's how these things go, right?

[Silence.]

[Coughing. Indistinguishable noise.]

Wow, um, I don't know where to start.

[The snick! of a lighter and the sound of Strom inhaling.]

I was a Marine. 2nd Battalion 2nd Marines. Warlords, Keep Moving! That was our motto. What a joke that turned out to be, huh?

Anyway, I guess that's as good as any other place to start.

Jodi used to say it wasn't my being gone that hurt so much as my actual going. She'd drop me at the National Guard Armory on South Bay and we'd stand there by our little red Honda while she wept into me. I'd say, I know, baby, I know. I'd rub her back and eventually she'd cry herself out. When the tears were done she'd paw at me for a while and Id let her. I never said, I'll be okay, or, It's gonna be fine, and I never ever said Goodbye . That shit was bad luck (and I didn't want to say it in case it turned out to be a lie, or worse, a simple goodbye turned out to be a real goodbye— one of the Everlasting kind; besides, Jodi knew how much I loved her. Words were cheap. It was the bond between us that mattered.

In the end our bond was the only thing that got us through.

[Wheldon laughs]

It is an uncertain sound, Riley thinks. Fearful and uncomfortable to hear.

[The tape reels out with a faint hiss, like the sound the Earth might make turning on its axis, if such a thing could be heard.]

This is a confession.

[Tiny little wheels of film spinning and spinning.]

This is harder than I thought it'd be.

CHAPTER 3: THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Rustling.]

It was late January and I was finally home from Walter Reed after two months of surgeries, and rehab.

[Sniffs.]

Jodi was so Goddamned strong for me.

Fuck, I loved her so much, and showed it so little, it was like a shard of glass buried in my chest. Every time I moved, or breathed, or [inaudible] an edge of it bit into me.

[Quiet sobbing]

[Wheldon goes on like that for ten minutes, the sound of his anguish overlaid with the Earth-spinning hiss of the tape.]

It's unsettling to Riley that Wheldon never thinks to stop the recorder; Strom Wheldon doesn't strike the detective as the kind of man who'd shed tears if there was anyone to witness it.

So it was January and I was home.

Strom blurts this out, as if he's anxious to put his moment of weakness behind him and move on.

I'd done the last tour I'd ever do in Iraq, or anywhere else. Three days into my third rotation an IED blew off both my legs and sent a hunk of shrapnel into my spine. I got a medal for it, if you can believe that shit.

Riley believes it. He took a bullet in his hip during Desert Storm. "Friendly fire". He got a Purple Heart for it when it was all said and done.

There I was, a six foot three, two hundred eighty pound Marine with a taste for blood— I'm not proud of it, far from it, but I'm not so dishonest as to deny it— who came out of the VA a four foot, two hundred pound amputee with a taste for Oxycodone and Xanax.

It was bad, you know? Yeah, you're right. You don't know. I'd suffered PTSD before, but it was worse now. Two days before Jodi bought me the saw, I almost choked her to death in the middle of the night. I don't even know how to explain how that feels. No matter what I say, it'll never take that huddled fear out of her eyes. Even after the bruises faded, I saw them; fat purple blotches, like hand shaped birthmarks. Phantom wounds, I guess. Like the phantom pains I felt in legs that were no longer part of me. I was at the bottom of a deep depression as it was, but hurting Jodi was too much for me. She was so scared she moved into the spare room. I wondered how long before she moved back to her folks?

When I found her gone that morning, I reached into the nightstand for my .40. I remember thinking I'd put an end to the bullshit one way or another... but my gun was gone. I cried. I cried for a long time. Jodi had hidden my gun. Fuck, maybe she'd gotten rid of it altogether. Sold it to one of my old "buddies"— you know, the guys I grew up with, guys who'd been there for me through every kind of shit you can imagine, the ones who came (once and only once) to see me after I was discharged from Walter Reed. That was hard on me. I guess the worst part was that they didn't really look at me anymore... because they couldn't take their eyes off the empty space where my legs had been. In that moment, I hated Jodi for having legs, for taking my fucking gun and just... just walking off with it.

[Wheldon pauses]

Already Riley is beginning to hate the sound of the tape running out the man's silences.

My legs were hidden under the down comforter and I liked them that way. Hidden, I mean. Even though it was January, it was one of those record-breaking, humid days that make Florida such a bitch of a state to live in. It had been cool the night before and leaving the windows open had been enough to be comfortable, but that morning it was bright and clear and a touch muggy. Despite that, I still didn't want to take the comforter off. And I got pissed off all over again. Not wanting to face the reality of my body seemed cowardly to me. It was making me hate myself.

The center of the bed was lined with CD's, magazines, books— 'The Great Wall of Media', Jodi called it. She resented it. Said I was building an actual wall between us in our own fucking bed. I grabbed at it, throwing whatever I could lay my hands on and halfway through my impotent little rampage I saw the butt of my pistol on the top shelf of the closet. It was laying on a stack of shoe boxes I knew were stuffed with letters Jodi and I had written back and forth to each other over the years.

"Bitch," I said, out of breath.

The fact Jodi had thought, I'll just stick this up here in case he gets any ideas, sent a new wave of self-pity and rage rushing through me. The cunt thought her poor, crippled husband couldn't get the big bad gun if she put it waaaaay up there— it's not like he has legs anymore.

I threw the covers off and there they were: the ruin. Two misshapen sticks that'd been snapped in half. The stumps ended above the knee. Skin grafts capped the bone, their seams vivid red. Above the grafts, ladders of scars climbed toward the limp wad of my cock, which was wrapped in its condom-like external catheter— but believe me, you have no idea how much better that was than having a tube rammed up your dick-hole. I slept naked, but I was sweating bad, little rivers of it running down into my pubes; my hair, which had started to go wild since my discharge, was wet and clinging. My back hurt already, but my nonexistent legs were worse. You hear a lot about phantom pains, read about it, know it exists, but nothing can prepare you for the reality of it. My legs (which, for the most part, were fertilizing the dirt of some shit road in Iraq) burned like they were covered in ants. Crazy, isn't it? Know what's even nuttier? The Oxycodone helped. I popped three of the tablets out of my pill organizer, one of those plastic deals with the days of the week on it— mine was big enough to hold tackle— and swallowed 'em dry.

It took me almost five minutes to get out of bed and into my wheelchair. I rolled over to the closet and stared at the butt of my .40. I'm ashamed to say I got more than a little satisfaction out of imagining Jodi finding me with half my head gone. Sick, isn't it? Yeah, you'd think so, but only because you're whole.

How the fuck was I going to get it down?

I could see the clip wasn't in it and that was good. I didn't want to accidentally shoot myself in the gut, which would probably be my luck. I threw a couple of books at the boxes the gun was on top of, but with no success. I was getting angry again, but I worked past it. I could do this. I was going to do this.

[More rustling and other unidentifiable noise. The buzz of a fan? Music? A hymn, maybe, and an organ?]

Riley doesn't know. He's not sure it even matters anymore.

I backed my chair over to the dresser. The TV, the cable box, and a DVD player sat on top of it. I took the DVD player down, yanked it free of its cables and threw it as hard as I could at the curtain rod over the bed. The DVD player shattered, the old plaster cracked, falling in mildewed chunks to the mountain of pillows below, and down came the curtain rod.

I used the rod to knock the pistol off the shoe boxes. Easy as pie; easy as brain pie. I found an extra clip and a box of Hydra-Shok hollow points in my range bag in the back corner of the closet. Brain pie! Hyuk-fucking-yuk! I kill me.

The bullets snapped into the clip easy enough. I didn't need a full mag, of course, but habit led the way and my hands followed. There was a gratifying ratcheting when I slapped the clip home and the slide released, chambering a round.

I stuck the barrel in my mouth.

I'd loved the sweet smell of gun oil all my life, but I've got to tell you, it tastes like dog ass.

[The hiss of the tape. Spinning. Spinning.]

Strom doesn't say it. Maybe Strom doesn't see it. Not yet, anyway, but as the film winds out, like wind over an endless wasteland, Riley can see it all. Sees it as if he were there; and he is, in a way; another unseen spirit in a house full of them.

The scene is so clear, so perfect, it's almost surreal. Wheldon, naked in his wheelchair, his withered body an atlas of angry red scars. He is sheathed in sweat, but it isn't from fear. His hands are steady. His hands are still a Marine's hands and they remember their work. Their work is the gun. Their work is to kill. Strom's teeth click on the barrel— bone hugging steel— when he puts it in his mouth. But, despite what he thinks, Strom is not alone in his bedroom. Hadjo is there, straddling the broken mountain chain of media on Strom's bed. The chieftain's cape of human skin pulses with indigo veins, as if the flesh lives for him still. His desiccated headdress— that dusky mask that was once another man's face licks its lips. The black eye-holes watch with a kind of vacuous apathy. And there is another figure. He watches Strom from the bedroom doorway. His eyes remind Riley of steel shot. His face is hawkish, patrician, predatory. Lips a down turned blue cut. He wears the uniform of an officer as though he were born in it. He is the paragon of a cruel, cunning soldier... and he is covered in blood almost as completely as the Yaholo chieftain. His name, Riley knows, is Abraham Eustis. General Abraham Eustis.

My mistake, I realized as soon as I'd made it, was jerking the trigger. In my desire to get it over with before I could really think about it, I forgot the cardinal rule of shooting: squeeeeeeeze. The round that should've ended my life (and sometimes, when I wake up from nightmares of a ragged iron temple, and the many-limbed monster throned at its pinnacle, I wish my life had ended) stove-piped. And that was pretty much the end of that. It takes terrible balls to kill yourself. I was surprised I had the one attempt in me, honestly; I wasn't that brave. I certainly wasn't going to clear the jam and try again. Not today, anyway.

I don't know how much time passed before Jodi walked into the bedroom. I didn't hear her pull up. Didn't hear her on the steps. I was numb, sitting there, staring at the .40 cal hollow point that'd gone tits up in the chamber of my Springfield.

"Hey baby," I said without looking up.

She didn't say anything about the mess in the bedroom. Not about the gun in my hands. And she never did. She took the pistol, put it on top of the TV, and went to the head of the stairs. Then she said: "Let me help you into the lift. I got you something."

CHAPTER 4: DETECTIVE RILEY II

It's almost quarter to one. Riley stops the recorder. Drinks another mouthful of cold, muddy coffee, and swivels in his chair to look out at the black body of Lake Forres. The rain has finally slacked off a little; the clouds more dull silver than gray. He drains the wax coffee cup and tosses it in the trashcan under the desk, turns around and picks up the journal Del Hickey gave him this morning.

Jodi's journal.

What is it you think you will find in there, Detective?

"I... I just want answers," Riley whispers. "I need to understand."

Strom Wheldon wanted to understand, too, Detective, but he was too weak to embody the truth.

"Shut up!" Riley screams, banging his fist on the desk so hard it fractures bone. "SHUT... UP!"

He yanks open the squat filing cabinet next to his desk. Buried at the bottom is an old tin thermos and in that, a bottle of Wild Turkey. Riley dumps out the whiskey, screws the top off with a fast-swelling hand and downs almost half of it in a turn. It burns so good.

It helps, he thinks. He wishes it didn't, but it does.

He takes a smaller turn, hisses, and breathes out a sharp, rancid breath into his hand. He recoils from the stench, but doesn't bother with the pack of gum he keeps in his breast pocket. He doesn't bother with a lot of things lately.

Riley holds up his broken hand. The spindly fingers are getting fat, the flesh on the underside blood-purple. "Only I can save you," he says aloud. He says it because he expects the Voice to say it.

Nothing; only the sputter of the fluorescent light with the bad ballast and the imagined noise of the growths inside him.

"Isn't that right?" he shouts hoarsely, tears spilling from his bloodshot eyes.

His bones hurt. They feel like fractured glass. Stabbing. Grinding together. His stomach churns, the whiskey burning him with the flames of indigestion now. But he's nauseous most of the time, with or without the drink. He only eats once a day. Everything tastes like cardboard and even if it didn't, Riley doesn't find much pleasure in eating anymore. In his prime, he weighed two-sixty and most of it was muscle. Over the past two years he's dropped to a buck seventy, give or take. At six feet tall, he looks like the Grim-Goddamned-Reaper. It was worse with the chemo and the radiation therapy, but he stopped both almost a month ago.

Bone cancer. Chondrosarcoma. "Ain't it a bitch?" he says, tears turning to grim laughter.

He reaches for the stack of photos on the blotter with his broken hand and swipes a dozen of them onto the floor.

"What's the price? That's the answer I really want. What's the price and can I live with it? You're living with it!" Riley says, snatching Strom Wheldon's file from under the rest of the photos. "You're living with it fine, aren't you, Wheldon? What, maybe you lose a little sleep every night? Well, my, my! But what did you gain? What did you GAIN?"

He pitches the file across the room like a Frisbee, its contents raining every which way when it strikes the far wall.

His meager rage spent, Riley takes up Jodi's journal again, tracing one of the monarch butterflies printed on its plastic cover with a bony gray finger.

CHAPTER 5: JODI'S JOURNAL I

    SEPTEMBER 5TH, 2006

Strom and I have been married three years. Three years and two tours. Seems like a lifetime. And like no time at all.

Strom left for his third rotation last night. He promised me he wasn't going to sign back on. That he was done with that life. But they gave him a re-enlistment bonus and he said we needed it to help pay for the house.

Just another excuse to play War. To prove something to himself, I guess. So he can feel like a man.

God, that sounds so terrible.

I understand it. Why he needs it. He never knew his dad and his mom was a flake. He grew up a literal bastard. (Wow. I'm 2 for 2 today.) The Bastard, he'd sometimes say and laugh, but that laugh was hiding a lot of hurt, whether he wanted to admit it, or not. Until he met my dad, he never had a positive male influence in his life. Strom'd been on his own since he was fifteen and he was always in some kind of trouble. It was Daddy's idea for Strom to join the Marines in the first place. After Strom spent three months in County for assault (he didn't even start the fight, that jackass Mitch Connel did), Daddy told Strom if he really loved me, and if he cared at all about him, he'd get his act together and grow the hell up. It was that, or stay away. Strom asked Daddy to drive him to the recruiter's office up in Leesburg three days later.

Daddy was a Marine. In Vietnam. He doesn't talk about it, but I've seen the little wooden box he keeps his medals in. So, naturally, Daddy was very pleased about it all (at the time, I didn't know he'd more or less put Strom up to it). I wasn't sure how I felt about it. I was only nineteen. And Strom was only twenty. I mean, I loved Strom more than anything, but I'd never really considered whether or not our relationship might become something more. I'll never forget seeing him the day he graduated Basic, though. Strom was always a big guy. After those three months at Parris Island, he was a god. He looked so good. He'd changed so much. And that night, at dinner with me, Daddy, and Momma in Beaufort, South Carolina Strom asked me to marry him. If someone had asked me a month earlier if I'd accept a proposal from him, I probably would've answered no. Whatever he'd gone through, physically and emotionally, it knocked the bullshit right out of him. The way he looked at me, I couldn't have said anything but yes. There were only two things in his eyes that night: his love of me and an honest hope that he could make a future for himself. For us.

Ugh! Here come the tears.

This is killing me.

I really don't think I can live through two more years of this shit.

We did get the house in Pendryville. It's really beautiful. Needs a lot of TLC, but I'm okay with that. It's actually kept me pretty busy (which has kept my mind off being alone). I had to go to the closing by myself, because Strom was still in North Carolina at Camp Lejeune, but he was able to get two weeks leave for the move. It was nice to have the time together. It was stressful too. Not that we had that much stuff to move— we were living in a one bedroom apartment behind the new Publix on David Walker Drive. But Strom could make just about anything stressful these days.

He's so restless now when he's home.

Oh, you know what? Screw this. I'm gonna watch TV. Yard Crashers is on. Ahmed Hassan... yes please!

    SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2006

Daddy picked scaffolding up from We Rent It All! and set it up for me on Sunday, while I was at work. Spent the past two nights pulling off baseboard and crown molding. It's satisfying as hell to work on the house. Who needs a man? I got the DIY Network and the internet!

Finally decided on Languid Blue for the kitchen and nook. Tomorrow, I paint!

    SEPTEMBER 9TH, 2006

I got a call from a Captain Bethany Woodrow about six hours ago. Something happened to Strom's fireteam. I didn't get specifics, or, if I did, I didn't hear them. Whatever it was, it was bad. They flew Strom from Iraq to Lindstuhl hospital in Rammstein, Germany. I'm on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic right now. All I can see out of the window is blackness.

I'm afraid. God, I'm so afraid.

    OCTOBER 30TH, 2006

We're back in the States. At Walter Reed. Thank goodness. I had no one, and I mean NO ONE, in Germany, and even though Landstuhl is primarily a U.S. military hospital, most of the staff still spoke German. It was a terrifying, confusing enough experience without the surreality of being dumped in what might as well have been an alien city.

But the important thing is that Strom is alive. He's alive and he still has his mind.

I've cried a lot the past few years, but I've never shed as many tears as I did the month I was in Germany. Tears for Strom, who was rarely aware enough to realize I was there (or even who I was), tears for our future, and tears for myself (I want to hate myself for that, but it's true). And there's so much that's still uncertain.

CHAPTER 6: DETECTIVE RILEY III

"Come on," Riley says, flipping through Jodi's journal. "The saw, woman! Come on, come on! There's gotta be somethin' in here."

So far, the journal is a disappointment. There are details of Strom's injuries, the surgeries, the rehab, their flight back to the States and their stay at Walter Reed. Day to day stuff, but a lot of gaps and short entries, too. Not that Riley expects anything different, giving what was going on around Jodi Wheldon at the time, but he was hoping.

Then, he thinks he's found what he was looking for...

    JANUARY 2ND, 2007

We brought Strom home today. Home-home. Daddy's been so much help. He had a company based out of Orlando come in and install one of those chair lifts on the stairs. And Mom did some grocery shopping for us, the laundry, cleaned up the house. Stuff like that.

It's all been so exhausting. But we're home. We're together.

Strom's sleeping next to me, in the King-size bed he'd insisted on when we bought the apartment (and just like I said, the thing had barely fit in the bedroom— of course, it fits in the master in the new house like a glove) and that's worth more than anything in the world to me right now. He's been sleeping all day, except for the few times he woke up wanting his pain meds. I can't help staring at him. Touching him. He looks so awful. If I didn't know it was him, I don't think I'd recognize him. Mom cried when she saw him. There's a lot of scarring. From the shrapnel, the doctors said. And, of course, he's lost a lot of weight. And his legs... the muscles in his thighs have already started to atrophy, and that's all that's left of them. There's nothing below the knee. There aren't even knees anymore.

His face is so haggard, so... what's the word... sallow?

There's more, but Riley skips the rest of that entry, rapidly skimming the entries for the following two weeks.

    JANUARY 15TH, 2007

It's been three weeks and Strom only gets out of bed when the physical therapist makes him, and today he told her to "get the fuck out and don't come back". He hasn't left the master bedroom since he's been home. The doctors say he should be mobile now. Functioning. That he should be adjusting to the chair. Depression is expected. I know that. But the medication isn't helping him. And it's not that he isn't physically able to get out of the bed... he is. Strom just refuses to accept... I don't know... life. This new life.

I'm grateful that he's still alive. I just wish he was.

Riley has come to know a "gratefulness for life" more than most, of late. It is a gratefulness, he thinks, only the terminally ill are capable of. Every minute, he knows, is a blessing. Not just for him, or for the sick, but for each and every one of us. Despite his Evangelical upbringing and what he'd believed until recently to be a rock solid faith in the Lord— his personal Savior, the Risen Jesus Christ— Riley no longer thinks the afterlife has anything to offer that isn't a pale comparison to the pleasures, the joys, of the earthly flesh. There is no more precious gift than life, after all. How could there be?

Now, he might not know what it's like for a man like Strom Wheldon to lose his legs, but he does know a thing or two about war. He wasn't a Marine. Not him. He was just a grunt: Dagger Brigade, 2-16 Infantry Battalion. That's how he ended up with the Lake County Sheriff's Department; his service record. The color of his skin sure didn't help him much.

His Daddy had been dead-set against him joining the Army, but Riley really didn't have a lot of options at the time. He'd worked the groves since he was four or five years old, so it was only natural that he stayed on as a young man; all his brothers had. But when the big freeze hit in '83— Riley was 23 years old at the time— that was the end of citrus in Lake County. Everything, everything, was wiped out (and another bad freeze in '85 made sure it stayed that way). Times were bad, then, just like times are bad now, and Riley couldn't find work no matter how hard he tried. So he joined the Army. He served eight years with Uncle Sam. Got a degree in criminal psychology and a lot of satisfaction out of it. Got a bullet, too, in the Gulf War. If it hadn't been for that, he probably would have been a lifer.

You don't forget War. Even a pantywaist one like Operation Desert Storm. It's a cancer all its own, Riley thinks. A monster as vivid as blue skies and sunshine; big as life and twice as mean, his Daddy would have said. And Riley remembers it all just like it was on a reel of film. But what he recalls, if not most vividly, then most often, is the incident report that resulted in his discharge...

At approximately 10:00 A.M. February 26, 1991, Master Sergeant Ernest Elson Riley (2-16 Infantry Battalion) was shot in the side (hip?) by Private First Class Lee Carrol (2-16 Infantry Battalion) near the 73 Easting phase line. Combat was fierce, visibility poor due to a sandstorm, and according to eyewitnesses, the shooting was a case of "friendly fire".

That's how it went officially, but what Riley had firsthand experience with was Lee Carrol's special hatred for niggers; his nigger section leader in particular. Carrol was your stereotypical, dyed-in-the-wool Kentucky redneck. Of course, Riley's family were very much your stereotypical orange-pickin' Florida negroes, if you wanted (or felt the need) to reduce living, loving, bleeding people to their most basic roots. Riley, on the other hand, really didn't fit the plate of that particular stereotype, no matter where he came from. The problem was, you couldn't dig any deeper than Racist Kentucky Redneck Motherfucker when it came to Lee Carrol; the boy only went so deep. Like the shallow, rust-rich wells they used to dig to irrigate the groves.

The short and long of it was simple: Carrol hadn't liked being under the command of a black man. And Riley couldn't let the little prick keep getting away with insubordination. During a training exercise at Fort Benning, a month before they deployed to Kuwait for Desert Storm, Riley had had enough of Carrol's mouth and laid the skinny little shit out with one good overhand right; and he did it in front of the whole platoon. Carrol never got over it and he saw his opportunity for revenge during their first contact with the Tawalkana Republican Guard. A dust storm had blown up and Riley's unit had found themselves in sporadic engagements with the Tawalkana for a little over an hour. Lee had used his sidearm, a 9mm, and shot Riley in the right hip. The coward had done it from behind. Riley never really knew whether Carrol had been trying to kill him, or just wound him. If he had to take a guess, Riley'd say Lee aimed to kill— redneck or not, Carrol was never that great of a shot. Anyway, that was it for Riley. He walked with a pronounced limp, still did, and that was after three surgeries to reconstruct his hip. He certainly couldn't run anymore. Hell, for the first few years he could only walk for short periods of time and that was with a cane. At least he'd been smart during his time in the Army, used his benefits and put himself through college. If not for that, and the Purple Heart he got for being wounded in combat, he never would have made the Sheriff's department. And here he is! Detective Riley, ladies and gent'amen! The dancing, terminally-ill Blackie! Solvin' some crimes real good! He gets a late start and smells like cheap whiskey, but once he gets goin' that Riley like a ghetto Columbo! Riley mocks a tap dance with his feet, sprouts some lackluster jazz hands and struggles to hold back tears.

Wiping at the corners of his sunken eyes, he realizes the underside of his fist has swollen up like a baseball. And it's bleeding. Bleeding good (and it probably tastes like whiskey, that blood). The glass blotter is webbed and veined with little fractures (just like the bone in your hand) and smeared with blood.

He takes a couple of tissues from the box on his desk and stops the flow; leaves them wadded against his skin like tabs of toilet paper on a shaving cut.

How much time do you think you have, Detective? the Voice asks, but this time Riley doesn't recognize it as a thought outside of his own.

"Not much," he answers, his voice churlish to his ears.

He rifles through Jodi's journal again, letting obsession take him into her arms, where there is no worry, no care; and he devours her offerings with feverish zeal.

    JANUARY 19TH, 2007

I don't know what else to do with him. He's forcing my hand. I love him. I don't want to leave him, even to teach him a lesson, but he's so down, so deep in himself, it's not fair. Okay, now I'm sounding like the selfish one, I guess, but if it's selfish for me to want Strom to move on, to accept what's happened and count his blessings (me among them), then that's just the way it is. It's all so frustrating. The thing that's living upstairs is not my husband. My husband is off the cuff, a little bad in a fun sort of way, and strong. That's the problem, I think. I'm becoming more disgusted by his self-pity than I am concerned about it. His legs are gone and they're not coming back. No, I don't know how awful that is for him. I know how awful it was for me at first, to see him... you know, hurt... like that, though. And I like to think I can imagine, to some extent, what it's done to his head, but I'm still here, Goddamnit. I still love him. I'm helping him. We have the house. We have our life together. It's like that doesn't count for anything to him.

Riley feathers the pages forward.

Close. He's getting close. Let something be here, he thinks, arming cold sweat from his forehead.

    JANUARY 22ND, 2007

Went yard-saleing with Mom this morning. I've been buying tools and house stuff when I can find them. It's been a little bit of a high being a Do-It-Yourselfer girl. Well, it was before Strom got hurt, anyway.

That's kind of why I went out with Mom this morning. I've been wanting to get Strom a chop saw since we bought the house... that and a planer, and some other things I knew he'd like to have to start restoring the molding. The house has so much beautiful woodwork, all of it oak. It was really what sold Strom on the house, I think. He loved the idea of restoring the place, especially all of the trim and the little architectural details. He worked with a trim carpenter before he joined the Marines and I know he enjoyed it. He used to talk about going into business for himself as a sub-contractor when he came back home...

I hear him upstairs.

Finally awake.

Anyway, Mom heard a guy that lived down on Lake Gracie was selling off a bunch of tools and stuff, so we went down to see what he had and I found Strom a really nice saw for forty bucks! I'm hoping I can coax him into working on the house. Maybe it'll bring back his confidence.

Riley stops cold.

Lake Gracie. He runs a finger under Jodi's bubbly, scrawling script.

Nuestro Castillo, he thinks. The lake. The saw.

What revelations! the Voice, says. Surely the bitch-pig is a prophet, Detective.

Riley snatches up the plastic evidence bag with Strom Wheldon's recording in it and presses PLAY.

CHAPTER 7: THE GIFT (KILL SAW)

I called it Rage, Strom begins. Tim Vestergaard, the cabinet man who bought it new almost a decade before called it the Kill Saw.

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Jodi's surprise was a chop saw.

She bought some other tools too, but it was the saw that's important... not, I guess, that anyone's going to believe any of this. Eudeve says that doesn't matter. I think it matters, but this isn't about me. It's about my soul... not, I guess, that anyone's going to believe any of this.

[Riley pauses the tape]

He laughs humorlessly about the qualification Wheldon's offered:

Oh, no, my friend! I believe you, Riley thinks.

[He rewinds the tape. Plays it]

Eudeve says that doesn't matter.

[STOP. FAST-FORWARD]

...isn't about me. It's about my soul.

[STOP]

What's in a soul? Riley wonders.

It's just a shadow.

Like the shadow of Pan? The shadow of the Immortal Youth?

Yes, Detective. Yes. It is in all this meat where the True Life lives.

Come to me. Do you not wish to look upon me?

Riley drowns the Voice with the rest of the Wild Turkey.

[PLAY]

Jodi was smart, and her timing, well, it was spot on wouldn't you say? She gave me tools that day, actual tools, sure, but she gave me metaphorical tools too. Her gift was nothing more or less than my own survival. I wasn't living. I was rotting away in our second-story bedroom is what I was doing. Waiting to die. Wanting to die. Literally half a man. Two months before I went to Iraq on my last tour, back when I walked around like the upright monkey Darwin theorized me to be, Jodi and I found the house on Bay Street. It was two blocks over from downtown, which was experiencing a revival of sorts, despite the economy. The house was a fixer-upper if ever there was one, but it was being foreclosed on and we ended up closing on it for fifty grand.

It's funny. I remember the house as a kid. Me and my friends used to think it was haunted. Not because anyone'd said it; we'd never heard stories about the place. We thought it must be haunted because it was falling apart and it was perpetually for sale. When I was a teenager, Bob Thorne— an old carpenter-turned-handyman I used to help out to put a little cash in my pocket— told me the house had belonged to Clifford Eustis, the son of General Abraham Eustis. Abraham Eustis, of course, was famous for slaughtering the Seminoles who lived in Tavares. He founded Pendryville and Lake Abraham was named after him, but that's what he was really known for— killing Indians. Bob told me Clifford built the house on the remains of his family's estate, said that in 1843 there was a fire and the original Eustis house burned to the ground. The fire claimed the lives of both Abraham and his young wife, Marlette, along with seven slaves. Clifford, only a baby at the time, was saved by his nursemaid. Bob Thorne said the only thing left of the original house was part of a low stone wall at the back corner of the property. He showed it to me, the wall. And it's still there.

Bob, who, to me, was older than dirt, said his granddad told him once that there'd been a lot of "spek'lation" 'bout whether or not Abraham Eustis had set that fire himself. Some folks believed Abraham had murdered Marlette and killed himself; that he'd set the fire to get rid of the evidence. This was just "porch talk" as far as Bob Thorne was concerned, but even he admitted "twas damn sportin' gossip" in his granddad's day.

Now, it was my day and the house was mine. Mine and Jodi's.

As it turned out, Jodi had done a considerable amount of work to the place in my absence, but I'd been too consumed with my own wasting away to even know it (forgive me the circumstances of my missing legs, partial paralysis, chronic urinary infections, and let's not forget my growing dependence on Oxycodone). Considering I'd almost blown my brains out an hour ago, I think it was safe say I hadn't been quite myself of late. Yet, here I was, sitting at the kitchen table— my own damned kitchen table, in my very own house— for the first time. The walls were a fresh powdery blue (Languid Blue, specifically, Jodi said) and the old heart pine floors had been stripped, filled, and sanded smooth again.

"Wow," I said, genuinely amazed.

Jodi put a mug of hot tea in front of me and forced a smile. It was the saddest thing I'd ever seen.

"What's a desperate young housewife to do, other than O.D. on the DIY network and HGTV?" she said.

"Bone the pool boy?" I offered (a little too seriously) and winced.

"We don't have a pool," she said, her face flushing hot.

"Watch the Cooking Network?"

She laughed. It was a beautiful sound. "There was a little of that too... between stripping floors and patching plaster."

"Hey, the Cooking Network's as American as apple pie," I said. I remember thinking it was, in a poignant kind of way, probably more American than apple pie these days.

"What'd you do with all the crown and base?" I asked, realizing it was missing. "You know the woodwork was one of the things I loved most about this place."

Jodi smiled; perfect; natural. "Come outside," she said.

Someone, either Jodi, or Del, my father-in-law, had built a plywood ramp at the side door, which let onto a long covered carport. It was here Jodi had stacked all the baseboard and crown molding she'd taken down. Hundreds and hundreds of feet of one hundred twenty year old hand-carved oak piled carefully on tarps.

"Ta da!" Jodi said, gesturing to a low work table at the far end of the carport. She patted the table as though it were a prize on a game show.

For the moment, however, I was arrested by two things: the clean, unseasonably warm air; and the vast silver-gray pool of Lake Abraham to the west.

I had a thought. What seemed to me an alien thought, spoken by no inner voice I'd ever heard: I can almost taste it.

I wouldn't admit it then. I don't want to admit it now...

[There is quiet, but it is a new degree of silence. A fulsome, almost bodily remorse that pours from the recorder's tiny speaker and into the darkling air of Riley's office]

The Voice! Riley thinks. My God, it spoke to him too!

All right. okay. If this is going to work it has to be the truth. I just told you the thought I had was: I can almost taste it. I was struck by the air, the vastness of the lake, so the thought didn't, doesn't, seem so out of place. That's because it's a lie.

[Wheldon groans]

It's a tortured sound. Riley can barely stand to listen to it.

The thought I really had— and that's not even true, not entirely, because, as I said, it was more like an alien presence in my mind— was: I can taste her.

Jodi was still doing her Vanna White thing and she'd laid a hand on top of the chop saw. This might be imaginative recollection, but the tiny red eye of the laser flashed (which should've been impossible, because the power cord was wrapped around it, neat as you please).

I can taste her, Strom.

I should've responded to it, taken it as a warning, something, but the mind is constantly vomiting up strange thoughts, strange images, creating connections that aren't there, and I passed it off just like that. There are people, not a lot of people I don't think, but some, who are good (and I mean really good) at lying to other people; but we're all good at lying to ourselves.

"What's all this about?" I asked. But I knew. Hadn't I been sitting in my wheelchair with a pistol in my mouth? Hadn't I gone from attempted suicide to hot tea at the kitchen table in less time than it takes most people to get to work? Like that was normal? And hadn't Jodi helped me through that little charade? Sure she had. She took the pistol and didn't say a word, didn't she? What had she done? Brought me outside and gave me tools.

That's love, baby.

"Do you want the honest answer?" Jodi asked.

"No," I said, probably too quickly.

She frowned and I realized how haggard she looked. Not defeated, not yet, but close. Her pale blue eyes were all the more vivid for the rings of bruise-purple flesh that ringed them. Her hair, normally blonde and fine, looked, I don't know, dull and brittle. She'd lost weight, and considering the girl was a stick to begin with, the result was, well, pretty bad.

"How about this: You lost your legs..." her composure blew away just that fast, but she sucked it up and went on, "...and I'm sorry for you, baby, God you know I am, but you're home now. You're alive! Even if you're not grateful for it, I am. I mean, you haven't come off the second floor since you got home! You only get out of bed when I make you, and this morning I come home and find you with a... with a fucking..." she stopped short of saying it, but the storm broke, tears, snot runners, hitching breath and all.

I rolled over to her, but she stuck her hand out to stop me, so I let her go; let her finish and collect herself.

"This wasn't how I planned this," she said. She put her palms hard into her eyes, gave her hair a quick flip and drew herself up. "I got you this stuff," she motioned at the tools (and was the little red eye of the saw gleaming? I think it was), "so you could finish the house, like we planned. You're not gonna be happy unless you feel like you're useful. So be useful, Strom. Or blow your fucking brains out and get it over with so I can stop mourning you."

CHAPTER 8: JODI'S DIARY II

    JANUARY 27TH, 2007

Well, what do I say? I guess this is the place where I don't lie... not even to myself.

Strom tried to kill himself. I know he actually tried, versus just thinking about it real hard with the gun in his hand (laugh a million) because, when the spell of his injuries finally broke and we started moving into the den downstairs, I saw Strom clear the jam before he put the pistol away. I saw him put that bullet in his pocket, too. I don't know where it is now, but I suppose I'd agree with his sentimental urge to keep it: it was definitely a magic bullet, in the best possible way.

So, I'm hoping all that's behind us now. Strom certainly seems more like himself. He's been using the chair to get around the neighborhood, exercising, running little trips to Carter's Hardware downtown, or coming to Bay Pharmacy to see me while I'm at work. And, speaking of work, that's something else I'm grateful for. Not only did old Normand Dillion (Strom used to call him Methuselah's Medicine Man) take me back as his assistant pharmacist (and after almost five months) as soon as I walked through the door, but he's been giving me Strom's prescriptions for nothing.

It's good to be back to work— Normand's always been like a second father to me— and it's good to see Strom actually living in the new house. I miss the master bedroom upstairs, though. The den is cramped and the bathroom's on the other side of the house! But that's okay. Really, if that's the best bitch I can come up with, I think things are going to be all right.

CHAPTER 9: BEING USEFUL (STROM)

The alarm clock went off at 5:30 A.M., but I was already awake. I'd like to tell you it wasn't the pain keeping me up, but what was on my mind. I'd even like to tell you it was 50/50 pain and worry, but it was more like 80/20. I'd been weaning myself off the Oxycodone the past few days (not completely; I'd never be off it completely), and the pain (my need) was causing me some restless nights. Unrest breeds unrest, apparently, and my mind was turning what Jodi had said to me over and over: ...get it over with so I can stop mourning you. Most people, I thought, would have said start mourning you. Jodi wasn't most people, though, and our situation wasn't garden variety, either. I think she said what she did because she'd been mourning the loss of me since my first tour. Sure, I came back, but I wonder if, in Jodi's heart, I was dead the minute I left; if she'd been living like a young widow since my first rotation? Now, here I was, home for good, but I wasn't the same. I wasn't the Strom Wheldon she'd married. I was, literally, half the man she'd pledged her life to. We'd never ride horses together again, or the Harley. We'd never walk hand in hand along the strand at New Smyrna or Daytona. We'd probably never have children. She'd lost all those things and more when I lost my legs. And gained more than she, or any other woman, deserved: catheter changes, erectile dysfunction, she had to help bathe me, wipe my ass, work sixty hour weeks to keep us afloat even with my gravy money from Uncle Sam, and then there were the three hour trips to the VA in Gainesville twice a month, my night terrors and phantom pains, my real pains, and the list went on and on.

Ah, fuck this, I thought and tossed the covers off. My sweats were on the nightstand. It takes me awhile to get them on by myself. Once that was done I shucked and jived my way into the wheelchair, which was also waiting by the bed. I pulled on an old MARINES tee and a hoodie, pinned up my sweats nice and tight around the stumps of my legs and rolled out into the kitchen. The timer on the coffee pot had kicked on and it was burbling away. It smelled good. I forgot how good that smell can be in the morning, when it's early enough to still be dark out, the world creaking and whispering with the promise of a day that is not yet made.

I poured a cup of coffee and drank it parked in front of the kitchen sink. I could see Venus through the window over the sink. I could see the thermometer mounted outside the window, too: thirty-nine degrees. Today was not going to be unseasonably cold.

We'd moved into the den downstairs because it was more practical, all around, plus I'd been getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to work on the house. Jodi had been right (fuck, she was always right), working made me feel better. I rolled back into the den as quietly as I could and grabbed my jean jacket off one of the bed's posters.

Jodi was curled up like a dream on her side of the bed. I must have accidentally stripped the covers half off of her when I got up. She was wearing an old flannel shirt of mine and a few of the buttons had come undone, exposing one of her breasts. Soft and white, the nipple pale pink, tight, hard, in the cold. Her long bare legs were all slim curves and sensual angles.

I felt a tingle, a stir, in the crotch of my sweats. I waited, hoping, but that was all. It was bittersweet, but I smiled anyway.

I shrugged into my jacket and wheeled out.

Hi-ho, hi-ho.

~ ~ ~

When I came outside that morning the saw was sitting right where Jodi had left it, cord wrapped around it just as neat as you please. For some reason it reminded me of a sleeping cat with its tail all tucked in.

I'd always been a handy guy in my Walking Life and I wasn't doing too bad working from the chair, all things considered, but it was still surreal wheeling up to the worktable Jodi had cobbled together for me. It was a struggle not to think of the chair as a Goddamned rolling prison cell.

The world has changed because the man who sees it has changed.

It was so hard not to hate myself, to not wallow in self-pity. I felt sub-human. Fuck, I was sub-human.

A thing.

And I would be that way forever.

The children stare, but they're not the worst, are they?

"No."

No, it's the men and women. They won't look at you at all, will they? Because you're not...

"...natural."

I know (now, I know) Rage had begun to feed on me, tasting my weakness and my pain, working at me with its need. I'm not sure how long I sat there staring at it, thinking its thoughts, not fully recognizing the intrusions for what they were.

Dawn broke cool and blue at my back, the light fleshing the somehow profane hulk of the saw. When I think about it, I think it was waiting. Watching me like I was watching it.

Its red eye gleamed dully for a moment, but faded just as quickly.

Just a trick of the light.

That set a chill climbing my spine: it's what I thought when I saw the IED on the side of the road outside Fallujah.

The one thing I didn't want to think about was the one thing I couldn't stop thinking about.

"Come on, don't do this," I told myself.

Fallujah.

The desert. Your men. All that pain. All that meat cooking under the ceaseless sun.

It was so different than home. Everything was harsh and white, or harsh and yellow. Two flavors of suck. And it stank like garbage and shit, sweat and gun oil, blood and...

...Death.

My gun in my hand. My back aching. My feet hurting. Sweat in my eyes. Boots on one dirt road or another.

You left more than your boot prints on that dirt road in Fallujah...

September 7th, 2006. It was a hundred and eight degrees that day. Me and the rest of my fireteam had gladly hitched a ride in the back of a passing light tactical truck after a patrol. We were headed back to the MEK Compound, hot and tired, and feeling lucky we didn't have to hump all the way to base. I was standing up against the cab, smoking a cigarette and letting the wind blow in my face, when I saw something flash on the side of the road. I inched over to that side of the truck, but I didn't see it anymore. I handed my cigarette behind me to Sergeant McQuaig (who was punching my asshole because I wasn't sharing it fast enough) and thought: Just a trick of the light

You've never felt anything so brilliant in your life. The pain of coming apart, it was like the sun was inside me; like knives, hundreds of knives, all stabbing and sawing and biting. Biting like teeth. Burning like the sun.

The last thing I remembered was Mike McQuaig...

[Soft and sudden sobbing. Distortion.]

...God, I miss him. Mike was the best friend I ever had. That day, on patrol, I was trying for about the hundredth time to convince him to move Emelina and the kids to Florida. Mike was like me, both his parents were gone, he was an only child, he really had nothing tying him down. But Emelina's family (and she had a big one) all lived in Del Rio, Texas. Mike said he'd move in a heartbeat, but he doubted Emelina was going anywhere, and there was no question who wore the pants in that marriage. "You don't fuck with Emelina," Mike used to say. I remember him telling Captain Rahme during the Battle of Nasiriyah that if the division commander would've listened to him the fight would already be over. Rahme asked him what the hell he was talking about and Mike said: "I told the Colonel to fly my wife in and drop her in the middle of this shithole. Not only would al-Qaeda be runnin' home for their mommies with their nuts in their pockets, this dump would be clean— and I mean fuckin' sparklin', Cap— and dinner'd be on the table. It'd be good, too. Slow-cooked pork roast with stewed tomatoes or some shit like that." We were laid up in an alleyway, sand so thick in the air it was like the smoke from the oil fields in Rumaila, and then there was the actual smoke from the house fires, small arms crackin' and poppin' around us like kettle corn. The Captain was screaming at Mike, "Sergeant, do you really think that's funny?" A bullet ricocheted off the top of Mike's K-pot and blasted a chunk out of the sandstone wall three inches over his head. Everything stopped. Everything except Mike. He started laughing hysterically. "Yeah, Cap'n! I think it's fuckin' hilarious! Tell him it's hilarious, Wheldon!" Rahme cracked up, him and Mike giggling like a couple of little girls, and I said, "Captain, Sir, for the record, this Marine doesn't think it's funny at all! You hear me, Mike? Your bullshit is not funny right now!" And that got the two of them going even harder.

Ten minutes later some towelhead shot an RPG into the alley.

Six wounded and two dead. The two dead guys were

Army—, 162nd Infantry—, PFC Paul Abramsky and 2nd Lt. Renaldo Ramsey. We'd found both of them pinned in the alley (it didn't take long for us to get pinned in with them, either). They'd gotten separated from the rest of their platoon when the push to the Euphrates started. The RPG struck the wall right next to Ramsey. The poor bastard was pretty much instantly ground beef. The concussive force probably killed Abramsky (who was huddled up next to his buddy bawling his eyes out) instantly, too. I hope that it did, anyway, because the kid was cut to pieces by razor-sharp sandstone. Half the damned building collapsed on top of the rest of us, and as soon as that wall came down, some guy wearing a hound-tooth scarf over his face started spraying us with an AK from the other end of the alley. Mike took three rounds in the chest (thank God for armor— it's heavy and it's hot, but better that than dead). Captain Rahme got shot through the bicep and grazed on the neck— lucky fucky ducky— a matter of maybe an eighth of an inch from bleeding out in that accursed shitpie of a country. Me, I could hear the bullets snapping past me; left, right, left; could actually feel them, a swarm of white-hot 7.62mm wasps buzzing past my face. I sighted that towelhead (if you're gonna thank God for armor, better give Him an 'allelujah! and an Amen! for fiber optics, too), put the red target on his face and blew his A-rab brains out. Pop! Just like that. Like playing a video game.

After Nasiriyah I was due to be discharged. I'd served my time and I didn't want to go back. But I did go back. And it didn't have anything to do with the sign-on bonus they gave me (that's what I told Jodi and that's what I tried to tell myself). You know, you go home and you're glad, you're ecstatic to be there... but after a while the "real" world just doesn't seem real anymore. You keep waiting to wake up in your cot, or for someone to take a pot shot at you from a passing car. I went back because I'd been doing it so long, I really didn't think I could do anything else. I didn't feel like a belonged in my own life anymore. I'd gotten a taste of blood and war, and I liked it.

What does that say about me? For that matter, what does towelhead this, and fucking towelhead that say about me? It's unfair, isn't it? Life isn't black and white. I know that now. Too little too late, maybe.

Anyway, Mike was due out, too, and he was ready for it, to go home to Emelina and his little girls, but I talked him back into it. He needed the money. I think that's all there was to it for him. We were three days in-country, on patrol outside Fallujah. We hopped a quick ride in a tactical truck. A trick of the light. And the last time I ever saw Mike he was lying with his guts in the dirt, and his eyes were gone. That's the last thing I remember. I woke up four days later at Landstuhl General in Rammstein.

I shivered. It didn't have much to do with the weather, either. The mind's an old horse that finds its way home time after time, I guess.

The next few hours were fairly mindless and that was a blessing. I'd begun the task of pulling nails out of the baseboard. I did a little wood filling and sanding, too. Some of the base had been ruined, but Jodi bought a few new sticks the day before and we'd given them a third coat of stain before dinner that night; now, the pieces were sitting on saw horses at the far side of the carport. I was hoping I'd have all the base for the kitchen finished so we could put it up when Jodi got home.

Jodi came out, dressed in her scrubs. She worked two blocks over at Pendryville Pharmacy, which had been in the business of drugs since 1912 (Jodi swore old Normand Dillion wasn't the original Pharmacist, but I had my doubts). She kissed me on the cheek and handed me a bagel.

"Hi ho, hi ho?" I asked.

"You know it. See you at dinner?"

"What, I'm going somewhere?" I asked and she smacked me on the arm.

"You should," she said. "Well, after you're done with that base." She blew me a kiss.

I watched her go (I never did mind watching her go), then plugged the saw into an extension cord we'd fed through the kitchen window. One of the many inconvenient things about owning a house built in the late 1800's was not having exterior power outlets. When I seated the plug there was a deep humming in the motor casing. The laser winked on, drawing a vivid red line across the aluminum baseplate, and the humming stopped.

I released the lock at the back of the saw and the blade housing sprang up. That was the first time I saw Vestergaard's "cleverness": the manufacturer's name, which at one time had read SKILL SAW, had been defaced. Someone'd scratched out most of the first S with a razor knife so it read KILL SAW.

"Cute," I said, but I didn't like it. It sure as shit wasn't cute. It struck a nerve— one of the ones that wasn't dead or damaged— down someplace deep.

I grabbed the handle, thumbed the safety, squeezed the trigger. The blade turned instantly to life, as if it were eager (Oh, and it was! Desperate as a starving dog with a piece of table scrap).

God how it whined!

I felt this kind of sick, crawling exhilaration at the noise, at the sheer power of it. I released the trigger and laughed, my anxiety gone.

"Damn thing works great."

I unplugged the cord, re-locked the arm (and the blade) and gave the whole thing another look-over. The plastic guard sheath was missing, but that wasn't so strange. If it'd still been attached I would've taken it off myself. Even with a 12" miter saw, it's almost impossible to cut profiles larger than 6" with the guard in place. Everything but the blade seemed to be in great shape. I ran a finger over one of the teeth. It was a little dull and there were some dark rust spots around the bolt that held it in place. You could see the circular wear marks around the manufacturer's sticker, too, which was a brand I'd never heard of. It said simply:

RAGE

28 Teeth

No problem, I thought.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

After the first accident, I couldn't get rid of the suspicion the saw didn't want its blade changed. As ridiculous a thought as that was, I never could shake it. It nagged at me all the way to the end. Which is to say, even as I record this, it nags at me. I believe the blade was where Rage's power lay, that that's where its taste for blood had been reborn; where its foothold in this modern age was centered.

I'd gone down to Carter's Hardware (which was conveniently only a block from my house) yesterday afternoon to pick up a new blade. I knew if I didn't need it right away, I would eventually. Plus, it was nice to be out of the house. It was, in fact, liberating to get myself dressed and roll down to the hardware; running my own errands, so to speak.

I wasn't used to using the wheelchair for extended periods, and I attributed my inability to loosen the bolt holding the old blade in place to the trip to Carter's (my arms were aching pretty good). I sprayed it with a little W-D 40 and let it sit for a few minutes while I measured and marked some cuts. Tried the bolt again. Nothing. I couldn't get it to turn at all.

"What the fuck?" I said. Then realized my mistake. "You gotta turn it the opposite way, asshole."

I used a pair of vice grips to lock the blade down tighter and bore down on my wrench with all my upper body strength. It moved, but only a little.

I wasn't getting enough leverage.

I hefted the saw off the table (it weighed about thirty pounds) and into my lap, and from my lap to the ground. I got on the ground with it so I could lean into the wrench. I put my weight against it and the eye of the laser flared, the socket wrench came loose, and I fell forward over the blade. I jerked away instinctively; at the same instant the saw whined to life, flinging the cold-forged steel vice grips into my eye at 4200 revolutions per minute.

~ ~ ~

Red.

Pain.

I like you, Strom, you taste like pain and self-pity.

I wasn't sure what I was hearing. I wasn't even sure where I was, or what had happened till I opened my eyes and saw the saw. There was a good deal of blood on it. Too much, I thought, watching the blade as it made slow, almost deliberate revolutions. For some reason it reminded me of a lapping tongue.

Then the pain hit me, sudden and monstrous; it was like waking up at the wheel to find a semi bearing down on you. I touched my eye. I couldn't see anything but a red haze out of it. That whole side of my face was swollen, slick with blood. A nasty gash ran from the middle of my eyebrow to the inside corner of my eye and it felt far too meaty.

In my delirium I tried to stand up and almost fell on my face. Insult to injury, right?

You didn't unplug me, Strom.

I could've sworn I unplugged the damned thing, but it was plugged in, all right. No arguing that.

What the hell's Jodi gonna think when she sees this mess?

~ ~ ~

I was waiting for her at the kitchen table. It was already dark outside so she wasn't likely to see the bloodstains on the concrete, or the saw sitting on the ground. I'd cleaned up everything else. Including myself. While I was washing myself off, I found a deep cut in the meat of my forearm where the blade must have caught me, but it was nothing compared to the pain in my head. My second daily dosage of Oxycodone had eased it, but it was still there; a dull throbbing. The eye was shut and ice hadn't done much for the bruising, or the swelling. Steri-strips had closed the gash and I'd bandaged my forearm with some gauze and tape.

There was no hiding it, so I was waiting.

I'd made spaghetti for dinner and worked halfway through a twelve-pack of Miller Lite. I was trying like hell to recall what, exactly, had happened. I remembered going outside that morning: the dark, the chill, the dawn at my back. I remembered trying to change the blade. And I remembered waking up hurt. I know I cleaned up the mess (the closing act of the day's cluster fuck), but didn't have a clear recollection of the doing, if you can understand that. The day had devolved into a greasy hash of half-ass events and impressions. The further I moved away from it in time, the more muddled it became.

I heard Jodi pull in; saw the splash of headlights strafe the shadowy space of the living room.

You had an accident.

I had an accident. What was I so freaked out about? I considered taking a couple of Xanax, but resisted.

Jodi's sneaks shuffled on the gritty concrete outside the open kitchen window. She paused. Sighed contentedly. The silence that followed was so profound I could actually hear her contentment shatter. Her eyes, I knew, had moved beyond the bit of work I'd done that morning to the overturned saw, to the blackening stain next to it. "Oh no..." she said, inhaling the exclamation.

I want her, Strom.

No, no, no, no. Just come inside, I thought.

I waited for the sound of her key in the lock. Instead I heard the scuffling of her shoes again.

My eyes went to the socket next to the coffee pot (the outlet nearest the kitchen window). The green extension cord was plugged into it.

Christ, did I unplug the saw?

"Jodi!"

Just a little taste, Strom.

"Jodi, don't touch it!"

I was moving, but a hell of a lot slower than I should have been. You see, I knew in my gut Jodi shouldn't touch the saw, I just didn't know why. Because Rage was inside me. Eating away at me. It had taken my blood and I belonged to it. I just didn't know it yet.

I yanked the extension cord out of the socket, knocking the coffee maker off the counter in the process. The machine and the pot shattered. I rolled into the side door, flipped the lock, and pushed the door open so hard it broke one of the hinges. Jodi shrieked and dropped the saw just as it whined to life. Rage— that was the moment I actually started thinking of it as Rage— made a sharp chonking sound when it struck the slab. It was making that low humming down in the casing again (like it was moaning, almost; lustful), and the blade was revolving... slowly, deliberately.

"Jodi!" My chair canted to the side as I rolled down the ramp, one of the wheels bound on the edge of the plywood, and the chair threw me like a spooked horse.

"Strom! What are you doing? What in God's name is wrong with you?"

"Get inside!" I screamed at her and she cringed.

"What's wrong?"

I grabbed at her calves, pushing her. "Go, just go!" I said, crawling up the ramp, trying to herd her into the house.

Her eyes teared up and she was trembling. She didn't understand.

I could relate. I didn't either.

Jodi grabbed my chair and backed into the kitchen with it, waiting for me to crawl inside before she fumbled the broken door shut. She saw the coffee maker and held her hands up in a gesture of wonder (and exasperation).

I slumped against the door, trying to reason out what was happening to me. It's hard to explain, even now. Hindsight is a window, I suppose, or I wouldn't be able to tell you as much as I have.

Jodi saw my face and all the color ran out of her. She dropped to her knees. "Baby, what happened to you? Did you... did you hurt yourself? Was it an attack?"

That last jarred me. Jodi was talking about PTSD; but I saw myself unplugging the extension cord before I attempted to change the blade. I imagined it snaking its way back to the female end of the extension, curling around it, sliding into it. Was it an attack? I looked up at the counter and swore I saw the end of the green extension cord coil on itself. Had it... had it been reaching for the outlet?

Jodi touched the swollen half of my face. "Talk to me, Strom! Please!"

Tell her it was just...

"...an accident," I said.

CHAPTER 10: JODI'S DIARY III

    February 8th, 2007

Strom had some kind of accident with the saw today and he totally wigged out on me when I got home. I don't know if it's his PTSD, or the Elavil the doctor at the VA prescribed him, but the stuff he was saying was downright psychotic. Like he thought the damned saw was alive, or something!

God, I really thought all this was behind us. Have I just been lying to myself? Being willfully blind? He's seemed so much more like himself the past few days and now THIS!

I was afraid of him. For him, too, but of him more.

I haven't talked about it but I guess I'm about to. Strom's second week home here at the house he attacked me in the middle of the night. Choked me. Choked me so hard I had these giant butterfly-shaped bruises on my neck for almost a week. I thought he was going to kill me. He was having a dream, or a flashback, or something. I know he'd never hurt me on purpose, but I was terrified of him. I moved into the guest room down the hall for a couple of nights afterward; hardly spoke to him, either. Not out of anger, or spite, but because I didn't know what to say. And he clearly didn't know what to say, either.

Tonight, though, was different. Tonight he was afraid for me. He thought shit, I don't know what he thought. The accident, which he still won't tell me about, must have set him off. He's hurt really bad. He needs to go to the ER, but he wouldn't even hear of it. After I got him calmed down, he locked himself in the den. He won't answer me through the door. Not a word. Nothing. So, I'm sitting in the guest bed upstairs.

Is it always going to be this way? And if I knew the answer was 'yes', what would I do?

CHAPTER 11: BUSY BEE DREAMING

I was dreaming. I knew this because I was walking; walking down the cellar stairs. The house on Bay was unique, so far as homes in Florida go, in that it had a small basement. Had I come home from Iraq a whole man, the basement is exactly where I'd have been working.

The soft rocking of my body as I descended the steps felt overly pronounced. I guess you don't really notice the pendulum motion of walking until you stop experiencing it. It would have been soothing if not for the sound of Rage humming softly down in the dark.

Crimson light flared, and I knew it was (its eye) the laser. It should not have been capable of such luminance, but a saw shouldn't have been capable of hunger, either. The hateful radiance swirled through the blackness like a fog. Body parts littered every corner. Arms, legs, torsos, heads. But mostly legs. They crawled with flies. Oozed colonies of maggots. Even though you can't smell in dream, my subconscious filled in the blanks and I retched. Rage sat at the far end of the room on a strange throne of twisted steel (Shrapnel; its shrapnel!). Its blade was caked in shredded meat and blood. I was drawn to it, literally unable to resist it. As I approached, the exposed block walls began to bleed; the many dismembered limbs bucked and twisted, twitched and curled. The disembodied heads turned eyes like overripe grapes on me, tracking my passage as they mouthed silent, leathery curses.

I want her, Strom, Rage said.

I stopped in front of it. Kneeled. "Not her."

Rage shrieked and spun, flinging hunks of meat and gelatinous old blood into my face. It was angry— I was to be its slave, the key to its release, I could sense that much from it— but it was weak, too. Weak with hunger.

Give me your hand.

"These are all I have left," I said, holding my hands up pleadingly, knowing it was true. My phantom dream legs were gone. What was left was open, ragged, burnt.

I was no longer in the basement.

I was on the side of that road in Iraq.

Rage was there, but it was no longer a saw. It was a massive void in space. An endless, insatiable pit.

All around me men were screaming. Men missing arms. Men reduced to limbless piles of human chuck and trailing intestines. Men that called for their mothers, or for God.

There is nothing in all the worlds to rival their pain, Strom, the void said and there was a sharp intake, as if it were trying to taste the air. Not love, not hate, not birth, or death. To feel the pain of coming apart is unrivaled; it is pure. To inflict it...the void made a sound that made me think of a lion swallowing a large piece of meat, its teeth clicking together in its greed.

Mike McQuaig lay beside me, face down in the dirt. The bomb had split him right up the center. Sweet Christ, he looked like the remains of a lobster dinner. There was no way he could be alive— I could see his breastbone through the hole that'd been his back— but he turned his charred and empty eye sockets on me anyway. Opened and closed a mouth full of shattered teeth. "Give me your hand," he said, reaching for me with an arm that was mostly bone.

"STROM!"

I woke to the whining of Rage's blade. Jodi was screaming my name. Candy, the neighbor's German shepherd, was barking, snarling, and raking the chain link fence with her paws.

Jodi had one arm around my neck, the other under one of my armpits. She was pulling me, but I was fighting her.

"Stop it! Stop it!" she screamed.

In my confusion I did stop and she freed my hand from Rage's trigger. My other hand was under the blade.

Next door, the windows were lighting up, one by one.

"Come inside, Strom! Oh my God, c'mon, please!"

I let her wheel me into the kitchen.

Pendryville police showed up less than ten minutes later. I could hear Jodi talking to them out on the front porch. I could hear enough, anyway: "Vet", "PTSD", "lost his legs", "not adjusting well".

What had I almost done? What was wrong with me? Was it the drugs? Was I going crazy? I remembered fragments of the dream, but it was just a nightmare, wasn't it? I'd had night terrors since my first tour. What I remembered about this one hadn't been so different. Except, I'd never been a sleepwalker and I sure as shit never tried to cut off my own hand with a...

I need to feed, Strom. You need to feed.

I was hungry. No, not just hungry, starving.

It was going to have to wait. I heard the front door close. The old heart pine floors creaked outside the kitchen. Jodi was out there, steeling herself. I steeled myself too.

She came through the door at a near run and slapped me in the face as hard as she could.

~ ~ ~

Jodi left. At the time I didn't know if it was for a little while, or for good. The last thing she said to me before she went was: "You're a fucking coward, Strom."

"Jodi, please..."

I tried to follow her outside, but she slammed the crooked side door in my face.

My head felt like a pressure cooker from the slap she'd given me. I thought my still red-hazy eye would explode, but the first thing I did when I knew Jodi was gone was eat. I ate more than I had in months. I ate till I was ready to bust. The spaghetti I'd made for dinner. Roast beef. Fistfuls of bread followed with fistfuls of leftover meatloaf. I washed it down with a beer. Then another. Then another, though I wore more of the last one than I drank. I started ripping cheese out of its butcher paper wrapping, not caring if I ate some of the paper, too. Raw eggs, moldy macaroni, I ate everything I could get my hands on, making a horrendous mess in front of the fridge.

I didn't understand why I should be so hungry.

I barely spared a thought for Jodi. I felt like there were holes in me, that they were getting bigger with every passing minute. The holes were mouths and they were starved. Yet, at the same time, the more I ate the better my head felt, the clearer my vision became.

Feed me, Strom. Feed me and I will perform miracles for you.

I was shoveling macaroni into my mouth and realized I wasn't alone in the kitchen. I looked up, knowing it was Jodi (who else could it have been?), wondering how I was going to explain just what the Hell I was doing, but when I saw her standing there I knew I didn't have an explanation. And I didn't need one, because it wasn't Jodi.

I dropped the Tupperware container of macaroni onto the floor and I think if I hadn't been half in a trance, I would have screamed.

The woman standing in the breakfast nook resembled Jodi. Eerily so. Thin, fair-skinned, young— no more than a year or two older than my wife. Her eyes were dark, so was her hair, and her face was more angular, where Jodi was blue-eyed, blonde, and round in the face. Subtleties aside, they could have been sisters. She was wearing what might have been a long nightgown. Her skin so pale it was almost luminous. The flesh around her dark, solemn eyes black as coal. Leaves and dead pine needles were stuck in her hair, and on her gown, as if she'd been lying down outside. Her left hand had been severed three or four inches above the wrist and she was holding it in her single remaining hand.

"Who... what do you want?"

"She is going to die," the woman said.

I was sweating. The air was suddenly very hot and getting hotter.

"She is going... TO DIE!" the woman shrieked and punctuated her vulgar prophecy by vomiting a mouthful of blood and black mud onto herself.

The kitchen was sweltering. Heat-shimmer rose all around the phantom woman. Flames burst along the floor at her feet; licked the walls with hungry, flicking tongues; leapt  from the walls to the ceiling. The heart-pine floors began to sizzle, little knots bursting into showers of sparks like Lilliputian artillery. The woman's skin began to crack, to blacken, to burn.

No! He is mine! a voice screamed. I think, I'm not sure, maybe it was me.

The flames vanished at once. It was as if they'd never been there at all. The phantom, the woman, stood before me unmarred, unhurt. Even her severed hand was once more where it belonged: attached to bone, sinew, muscle and flesh. Gone too was the blood and muck she'd puked up after she proclaimed her warning. A cloud of vapor (although, I think it was likely more liquid than gas, judging by what I know now) appeared behind her, oozing from this skin we call reality; spewing itself from nowhere, folding in and out on itself, stretching like a wad of cotton, yet somehow, it was becoming more substantial. I watched the mass with a, I don't know, a mixed breed of horror and suspended belief, and as I watched  the cloud of milky fluid insinuated itself into the shape of a man.

The transformation took less than ten seconds. Maybe as few as five.

The man...

...the General...

...was dressed in a U.S. Army uniform, albeit one that predated the Civil War by at least a decade. He was sharp-featured, beady eyed, his stern mouth framed with the deep lines of an unceasing sneer. He was a frighteningly cruel-looking man.

Eustis. My precious failure.

He grabbed the spirit of the young woman from behind, putting her in a chokehold, and dragged her kicking, and screaming, through the open arch that led out of the kitchen. I rolled after them, slowly, watching with that dull terror.

"It doesn't matter what you do. You belong to it, now," the man (Eustis, General Eustis) snarled at me. "Don't you fuck this up!" he said and a bullet wound opened in his forehead like a slick black mouth. He dragged the woman over the threshold, but it wasn't Eustis holding her anymore, it was Mike McQuaig. His skin was smoking. His eyes gone. "Don't you dick around and fuck this up, Strom," he said, one charred hand clamped over the woman's mouth. "You be a good soldier and follow orders. You're a killer. You've always been a killer. Don't you forget that."

I backed my chair up until I'd wheeled all the way to the sink. I watched, disbelieving, as Mike and the woman vanished.

I retched hard, my mouth filling with soft macaroni and God knows what else. I could feel everything I'd just eaten boiling in my stomach; and it was all gonna come up. I turned toward the trashcan and there was an Indian standing there. He was drenched in blood, painted with it. He was holding an ax with a stone head and the edge of that weapon seemed impossibly sharp for such a primitive thing. It spoke. I don't know what it said, because it was speaking in some tribal tongue. He— it— gestured at me with that ax. A quick, sharp gesture that made me flinch and throw up in my mouth a little more. A deep retch came right after it. One of those gagging reflexes that feels like you're simultaneously trying to inhale your sinuses and eject your stomach. Aw, no! I thought. I don't know if I didn't want to puke, or if I didn't want to look at the Indian's face. It was wearing a mask and I was sure it was made out of somebody else's face, but that wasn't the worst part. No, the worst part was that the mask's mouth moved as if it was the Indian's mouth; the skin crawled, as if seeking to escape its wearer; and the eyes, my God the eyes were nothing but black pits. Not sockets. That's not what I mean. I mean pits. Voids. Holes full of infinite nothing.

I threw up. I threw up like Lard-Ass in that movie Stand By Me. You know, the fat guy who drank the bottle of castor oil right before the pie-eating contest? I'm talking about a fucking geyser of barely digested food that shot at least three feet from my mouth, stopped, then erupted again. It was so forceful I didn't even get any on myself the first two times. The third time, though, Oh, the third time was the charm! There was just as much, but there wasn't the force behind it; it all slopped into my lap. I was breathing hard, dry-heaving between gulps of air, doing my best not to take my eyes off the blood-painted Indian-thing with the razor sharp ax.

To my amazement, it was laughing— it was howling!— the mask's leathery mouth yawning-rippling-stretching with each bray of hateful joy. And then it was howling with rage. It brought the ax back to strike. I spun one wheel in my own puke and tipped over backward. My head hit the wood floors hard enough to make me bite through my tongue. I was fading before I knew I'd gone over, the Indian...

...Hadjo...

...hissing in my face with two impossible mouths filled with two rows of impossible fangs. Cannibals' teeth, I thought. I don't remember what happened next, but I must have been busy. Busy, busy, busy.

~ ~ ~

Bay Street was busy that night. Busy with bodies. Busy with unseen bodies gathering like unheard bees on a hive.

First was the soldier Riley himself would see standing at the corner of Bay and Woodward many months from now, his white summer Roundabouts stained with blood, leather Forage cap turning restlessly in his hands. His name was Jeffrey McGillian and he knew both Hadjo and General Abraham Eustis. Even in death, he feared them. He stood on the opposite side of the street from Strom's house, but he couldn't seem to make himself lift his head and look at it. Minutes later he was joined by Kenneth, the negro soldier. Kenneth was nothing so much as a ghostly torso— no arms, no legs— his only means of locomotion a grotesque writhing and flailing of what little remained of his ragged biceps and thighs. Next were the shades, the shadows. The ghosts so old, and whose bodies had been so desecrated, they no longer possessed any form save that of a swath of blackness. These were the Seminoles and the Yaholo who had fallen under Hadjo's blade. Neither McGillian nor Kenneth saw them; only felt the hate that filled and fueled the shells of their souls. There were many more soldiers. Eustis' soldiers. And there were slaves, a dozen or more of them, who'd gone missing from the town and Fort Mason in the months leading up to the fire that claimed Eustis' life. And, of course, there were the slaves who'd died in the fire Eustis set; Eustis' own; skin like charcoal that sloughed from the cooked-white muscle beneath, clothes seared to flesh so that it was indistinguishable, one from the other, where it hung from meat and bone. And all of them, save McGillian, turned eyes, turned flat black faces without feature, turned still-flaming sockets on the Wheldon house.

In the basement, Rage roared.

McGillian literally shook with terror, ectoplasmic tears spilling from the lines of his phantom face, raining to the ground in an oozing cascade. Eventually the noise of the saw was lost to the night, but McGillian's terror only worsened. He escaped the Yaholo with his life; lived to tell his tale. But his miraculous escape was short-lived. Eustis' men came for him in the night. Took him from his infirmary bed and brought him to the General. God how he suffered!

A car rushed past— its headlights causing all but the shades to vanish momentarily— and somewhere, a dog began to bark.

CHAPTER 12: CANDY

Wherever I was, it was utterly black. The air sour and fetid. It reminded me of the barn at Wolfbranch Ranch, where me and Jodi used to stable the horses, but there was a strong iron smell underlying it. My body ached like I'd been drawn and quartered. My back had never hurt so bad before. It felt broken. The worst pain, which never crossed my mind as odd until much later, was in my lower back, in my tailbone, hips and thighs— strange because it was in those areas where the nerve damage was most severe. I shouldn't have felt much of anything, if I felt anything at all, but now, I was on fire from my stumps to the base of my neck.

I couldn't see anything, I hurt, and I was very, very scared. My hands were wet. Sticky. So was my face.

I started to panic.

"Jodi?" I called into the darkness.

"JODI!" I begged.

Crimson light flared, blinding at first, but slowly lending definition to the basement, corner by corner, wall by wall.

The first thing I saw was the dog's head.

Oh, Candy! Sweet, sweet Candy! Did you know that? Did you know her name was Candy?

I didn't immediately recognize it as a dog's head and I certainly didn't recognize it as the German shepherd from next door. Honestly, what it looked like was a giant, slimy rat's head— the fur wet and swept with blood, the eyes dull, but not quite sightless (I think that was the most terrible part; that it might still be seeing some of this world), the tongue stiff and jutting.

I screamed; shrill, deep-lung shrieks I couldn't stop sounding. I screamed until my throat closed— raw, dry meat narrowed to the point that I thought I might suffocate.

Rage whuzzed corpulently.

I threw up on the blood-slick concrete. There wasn't much left in me, but I was more than thankful for the acidic wetness of it.

This is no dream! I thought, staring into Candy's fast-clouding eyes.

How I managed to get Rage down cellar, I don't know. It was not impossible. How I subdued and mutilated Candy, a seventy pound dog, was something I just couldn't wrap my head around.

I cried. For Candy. For my soul.

~ ~ ~

It took me a long time to haul myself out of the basement, Rage running faster and louder (and angrier?) the further I got from it. By the time I made it to the kitchen, it was almost three in the afternoon. I was so exhausted, and in so much pain, it took me another half hour to crawl into the downstairs bath. I spent the rest of the day and night in a tub of shallow, freezing water that slowly turned the same color and texture as the blood you get out of a package of defrosted chicken. I slept there, in the tub; fitful, dreaming.

CHAPTER 13: NUESTRO CASTILLO (STROM)

I found my wheelchair the next morning. It was on the edge of the carport, the wheels locked down. No surprise, I guess, that it was facing the neighbor's house? Candy was conspicuously absent from the yard. Of course she was. She was in my basement. I'd beheaded her with a fucking chop saw.

With my wheels back, I went to the "junk" drawer in the kitchen. I knew what I was looking for, but I didn't know if it existed, and if it did, I didn't know what it looked like. Despite that, I didn't search long, or in vain. Under the Century Link (formerly EMBARQ) community directory, folded into a wad of other receipts, was a slip of pink carbon paper. There was a list of purchases written in a shaky hand and a total payment of forty dollars, but what I was interested in was printed right at the top:

William & Edith Stinsen

1446 Lake Gracie Drive

Pendryville, FL 32736

Lake Gracie! That was only four or five blocks east of me.

Bill can't help you. He has outlived his usefulness.

"Fuck you," I said, rolling out of the house and onto the sidewalk.

It was a long trip in more ways than one. My muscles, already screaming, were torn and fiery by the time I got to Center Street— which runs north and south of Lake Gracie. The pain in my back was worse. I'd missed at least three, maybe as many as five doses of my pain meds. I hadn't changed my catheter either, but I couldn't really feel that because of the nerve damage, and another urinary tract infection was the least of my problems, wouldn't you say?

Sure you would.

[Wheldon sighs. There are footsteps in the background. Knocking and static and shuffling. Someone whispering in Spanish. Then a beat of silence that tells detective Riley Strom has turned the recorder off and back on again.]

I kind of had a growing list of problems and I was staring down into another one: Lake Gracie, which might actually have been a lake back when Pendryville was founded by General Abraham Eustis, was now little more than a pond and had been for a good hundred years. Lake Gracie Drive, which ran its course around the lake's receding shore, was at the bottom of a valley. There were a number of roads leading into this bowl, but each one was steeper than the last.

I crested the top of East Key Street. There was more of a grade there, but I wasn't sure I had the strength to keep from hurting myself. I wished I had some gloves.

"What the hell?" I said and gave both wheels a good hard shove.

"Woo-ha!" I shouted. Wooooooooh-fuckin-ha!"

The wind was rushing across my face, through my hair. I was hauling ass. I shot down East Key like a wheeled bullet. Like most things, I suppose, it was scary as hell at first, not so bad in the middle, and one serious thrill when it was all over. I think the only time I really panicked was when I blasted past the first intersection of Key and Lake Gracie Drive. I could so easily have wound up road kill. If a car had been coming it would've been a certainty. But the coast was clear and I sailed all the way to William Stinsen's driveway— a good third of mile, give or take.

The house was built into the slope of the old lake bed (and I was struck by the certainty that this house, like mine, was possessed of a basement, that rarity of rarities here in the Sugar Sand State). It was a turn of the century Spanish style, which was oddly common in the heart of Pendryville, yet something about it seemed out of place. Something about it seemed wrong. The yard was overgrown with weeds, palmettos, and orange trees (their sour, rotted fruit piled at their trunks like sacrificial offerings). Massive, diseased water oaks crowded the property line, hung with moss that dangled to the ground in bristly sheets. The house itself might once have been beautiful. The stucco had been worked into a scale-like texture, but now it was shadowed and accentuated with years of grime and mildew, giving it the look of a hide. There were soft spots in the roof, missing tiles, torn window screens, and structural cracks so obvious the place begged to be condemned. A weather-warped sign hung above the door. It was hard to make out, but it looked like it said: Nuestro Castillo.

Casa del Muerte was more like it.

What are you doing, Strom?

I didn't know what I was doing. Nothing felt real anymore.

You decapitated a fucking dog, man. How's that for real? I thought. And your hand... you almost chopped off your own hand! It was the s—

It was exquisite.

No! It was... God, it was...

The basement. The blackness. The red eye of Rage, watching, washing me in its red fugue. Red. Pain. Candy warm beneath me. I was straddling her like a horse. Knees in. Locked. She was so warm with life. And she was waking up. Coming to. Her claws scraping on the concrete, head shifting left, right. Head whipping. Teeth gnashing. I broke her back. Slammed her onto Rage's aluminum deck. The blade was so loud. Screaming. It was screaming. The blade was screaming!

I was sitting in my chair at the bottom of Stinsen's driveway screaming at the top of my lungs. I had to put my hands to my mouth to muffle the sound because I couldn't stop. The real shitter was, I'd already forgotten why I was screaming.

What are you doing, Strom?

I didn't know what I was doing. Nothing felt real anymore.

It took me a minute to figure out where I was.

At the house next door to Stinsen's, an old woman was watching me from behind the screen of her front porch. I could feel other eyes on me, too, but didn't see anyone else.

As I wheeled myself up the cracked, uneven driveway, I noticed all the windows were either boarded up, or painted with what looked like wood stain. I wouldn't have believed anyone lived there if it hadn't been for the Ford F-150 under the carport.

Can you sense them, Strom, sown in the earth like crop? Can you hear them? Can you hear the echoes of their pain?

"My God, you fed you'self to it!"

My heart overlapped three stuttering beats (it felt like a ragged steel butterfly fluttering in my chest) and a surge of acid spilled into my mouth, express delivery from Mr. Stomach.

A man was standing in the shadows at the rear of the carport. Behind him, a low gate let into the backyard.

"What did you say?" I asked, rolling up between the Ford and the house.

The man regarded me for a long time. He was old, probably in his mid-seventies, and he had a kind of cancerous haggardness about him. He was wearing Dickies coveralls, thick work gloves, and his loafers (which might have been new in the '80s) were caked with dirt. It was almost lewd, the way he scrutinized me.

"No. No, I was wrong," he mumbled.

It was obvious he wasn't speaking to me. I wondered if he knew he was speaking at all? A cataract had swallowed his left eye in a milky film, and the other eye, while not completely taken with the disease, had a noticeable vacancy about it.

"Are you William—"

"You know who I am! And I know who you are!" he snarled, coming violently to life. His face blushed red and the veins in his neck stood out like the roots of the diseased oaks that bordered his house. "It didn't want me no more! It's yours now... bought and paid for!"

"Where did it come from?" I asked. I thought that was what mattered.

He laughed. A dry, rattling sound that instantly betrayed his infirmity. "Why, it come from a factory, a'course. The real question is: What is it? I mean to say, what is it really? On the inside?"

I hadn't had the time, or the freedom of mind to think that far. The question scared the shit out of me.

Bill Stinsen— he was right, I knew exactly who he was, and I thought I had a good idea what he'd been— turned away from me, passing through the low gate into the backyard. "Not much time, now. My Edith, she's been gone a long time. And that nosy bitch is lookin' for 'er. It's gone, too, but they still need tendin'," he mumbled.

Chills, like an icy electrical current, radiated up out of the numb part of me (Its gone, too).

"Where did you get it?" I called after Stinsen.

"My son bought it from a man named Tim Vestergaard. Look 'im up... all the good it'll do ya," he said over his shoulder.

He turned back to me, then, his good eye searching for, and finding, my wedding band. His brow creased and he seemed truly lucid for the first time. "Send her away."

Stinsen grabbed a shovel leaning against the side of the house and wandered out of sight. The next time I saw him it was on the ten o'clock news.

[Rustling. A faint click. And that beat of silence that suggests Wheldon has once more stopped the tape.]

 Riley follows Strom's lead and presses PAUSE.

He remembers the day clearly. It  was the first and last time he  ever saw Strom Wheldon in the flesh.

Riley had been watching Bill Stinsen for weeks. He went so far as to follow Wheldon home that day, circling round and round on back streets and side streets, trying to stay out of sight. Riley thought about stopping him; having a chat with him about what, exactly, he and ol' Bill had been talking about. He decided it could wait... and lost Wheldon in the shuffle of days that followed. That was, oddly enough, the night Riley got the approval from the Support Services Bureau to search Stinsen's property. The warrant had finally come down from the 5th Circuit and the Department turned Stinsen's place inside out and upside down. By five that next morning they'd brought in a backhoe. Things moved fast after that.

~ ~ ~

It was hedging noon by the time I got back home. My meeting with Bill Stinsen had been disturbing, to say the least.

What is it? On the inside? Stinsen said that was the real question, but what was he implying? The saw was possessed? I didn't think so. I thought maybe, just maybe, it was something else, something Other, jutting through the fabric of reality and into this world like a shard of glass poking at the bottom of a trash bag. Maybe in this world it only looked like a saw.

[Laughs. It is that uncomfortable, fearful laugh Riley has become so familiar with.]

What was I saying? That it was some kind of... alien god?

Fuck. Maybe.

In my mind I could see Mike McQuaig turning his charred and empty eye sockets on me. His mouthful of shattered teeth clacking open and closed. "Give me your hand," he had said. And I'd laid my hand on Rage's gated aluminum altar. Feed me, Strom. Feed me and I will perform miracles for you, Rage had said. The basement. The blackness. Candy's claws scraping on the concrete floor. Head thrashing. Teeth gnashing. And the blade... screaming.

"Where are my miracles?" I said, but there was no answer and I didn't expect one.

I didn't want to think about it anymore. It was too much.

You're being watched, Strom.

I looked up and saw a dark blue Impala stopped in front of my driveway. It looked like an unmarked cop car, but I couldn't be sure. The driver-side window was down most of the way and I could see a black man at the wheel. He was older, with a scruffy white beard and a hollowed out look, but he was wearing a ridiculous wool Trilby hat, and I couldn't see much else. He seemed to hesitate, then rolled up the window and drove off.

You shouldn't have gone to Nuestro Castillo, Strom.

No. Maybe I shouldn't have, I thought and pinched a hand over my eyes. I sat in the shade of the carport for a while, trying to convince myself none of this was happening and when that failed I tried to just be empty.

"Hey, Wheels!"

What now? I thought and gave my chair a half turn in the direction of the call.

It was my neighbor. I called him 'Ohio Joe' because the only thing I knew about him was that he was originally from Columbus (well, that, and he was an asshole).

"Wheels! Yeah, I'm talking to you!"

I heard the faint whine of Rage's blade down in the basement. My own rage was at an instant boil under the lid of my skull.

"What the fuck did you call me?"

"You seen my dog?" Ohio asked.

"Yeah, I seen her. I hauled her rangy ass out of your yard last night, toted her down into the basement and cut her barking fucking head off!"

Rage began to shriek and Ohio stopped dead. He'd been advancing toward me, but he was backpedaling toward the fence line, now.

"Get off my property before I put a hole in your cocksucker!" I growled.

I was surprised— at least as surprised as Ohio Joe— to find my pistol in my hand. Rage's whirring grew and grew. It should have been impossible for it to be so loud.  In a just world, in a holy world, it would have been.

Ohio Joe turned tail and ran.

Come inside, Strom. You must eat. Then you must rest.

I... eat. Yes. Food and some rest. Everything would sort itself out after that.

CHAPTER 14: DETECTIVE RILEY IV

STOP.

The tape recorder goes silent.

Jodi's journal lies, blood smeared, on the fractured blotter, and Riley lightly tosses the baggie with the recorder on top of the book.

He grabs a random stack of photos from the scattered pile of 8X10's. Cuts them like a deck of cards. Shuffles them.

"What is the price?"

He lays out a picture from the top of his morbid deck. A shallow hole in the earth, its sandy sides smooth and uncertain. In the hole is a severed, decomposing arm.

"What is the price?"

A body bag. It contains a disembodied head, a partial torso that is mostly bone, parts of two arms, and a leg. The remains are less than six months old according to the forensic technicians. Riley lays the photo next to the previous one.

"What is the price?"

The basement at Nuestro Castillo. It is a stark, functional room. Fifteen feet by thirteen feet. Alarmingly similar to the basement at the Wheldon home on Bay Street. Just one of many parallels between the crime scenes... and the crimes themselves. Too many parallels to be mere coincidence, as far as Riley is concerned. Riley notes one of the key differences in the photo: a shrine, built around a putrid corpse arranged in the fetal position on a Christmas tree skirt. The corpse is headless and missing the left hand, but otherwise intact. It is surrounded by crudely fashioned crosses and framed photographs. The woman— the corpse— was murdered, butchered, in that basement by her own husband. Her name was Edith Stinsen. Riley puts the picture into play with the other two, creating a fan.

"What is—".

The price is blood, Detective. The price is flesh.

"And the prize... "

...is life.

Riley tosses the rest of the photos into the trashcan.

He is coming.

Riley looks up, straining to see through the half-open slats of the blinds that cover the interior window to his office. Lieutenant Desjardins and Sheriff Odom are coming out of the elevator.

"Shit."

Riley grabs his hat and coat and rakes Jodi's Journal and Strom's recording into his old leather brief bag. He drapes the rain coat over the brief bag (and his swollen hand), and creeps to the edge of the window by the door. Desjardins and Sheriff Odom are talking with Sergeant Senecker. Sergeant Senecker looks over his shoulder at Riley's closed office door. Desjardins seems to be discouraging him from doing this. They all look away.

Riley slips out of his office, limping to the nearest cubicle, which is empty. He loosens his Glock in its holster, moves to the next cubicle closest to the stairs, and is surprised to find Deputy Pignetti in his seat.

"Oh, hey Ernest! You scared me," Pignetti says.

Most of the people at the Department think Pignetti's sheepish and effeminate, at best. Riley knows the man is merely cautious and observant. And gay. They've been, if not friends, confidants for a long time.

He leans over Pignetti (fever rolls off Riley like heat off summer blacktop) and says, almost whispers, "I need those lab reports from the University of Florida. And I need your Taser. You're not giving them to me, I'm taking them from you... that way, you'll be able to live with yourself when this is all over."

Riley prods Pignetti lightly in the side with his Glock to drive it all home. "I'm sorry."

Pignetti doesn't bother to look down at the weapon Riley's holding on him. He hands Riley the lab reports, then his Taser.

"The second I get through that door," Riley says, motioning his head at the door to the stairs, "you signal the Sheriff and Desjardins."

Riley limps through the heavy steel door and is gone.

Pignetti stares after him for perhaps five, maybe even as many as ten seconds before he sounds the alarm.

~ ~ ~

Riley honestly doesn't believe he's going to make it. If he'd asked Pignetti for a head start Riley knows the guy would have given it to him, but like Riley said, he wanted Pignetti to be able to live with himself; to be able to look at himself in the mirror every morning and every night and not believe that he was a murderer.

Despite the pain in his bones, especially his hip, Riley takes the steps two at a time. Coming down the second flight, he loses his footing and rolls the rest of the way to the first floor.

Pain. Red pain.

They're coming.

All his effort, all his will, all his strength. He is running. The old bullet wound in his hip is burning. His thoughts are mercurial streams blasted to vapor at the headwaters of his instinctive mind. There and gone, because the only thing that matters is (running) staying alive.

The price is blood.

The price is flesh.

The prize, Oh! The prize is life.

Riley brays laughter. Perfectly (insane) rational laughter. He laughs as limbs and scrub rake at him, cutting his hands, his face. He laughs at the shrill hoots and hollers of the Yaholo as he reloads his musket. Laughs himself into darkness when the Yaholo warrior's spiked club sinks into his skull.

"None of it's real," he says through sprays of rugged, moribund laughter.

Your interaction with and understanding of reality is so minute as to be nonexistent. You are less than bugs in the infinite multiverses that populate true reality. You are less than two dimensional in a Creation possessed of incalculable dimension. It is all real. It is the intersection of past, present, and future. It is the culmination of Destiny. Do you feel the pain in your hand? Do you feel the pain in your bones? Can you hear it, can you hear the Beast that feeds on you from the inside out? Is it not real? Get up, Detective Riley. Get up, now!

Beneath Riley, damp leaves become concrete. All around him the preternatural gloom of a virgin wood becomes harsh fluorescent light. Trees become steel stairs with black, powder-coated railing.

Get up, you gotta get up, Riley tells himself, fighting the pain. Every joint feels like it's full of broken glass, every bone like splintered ceramic. He's broken at least one rib. There's no doubt about that. His head is bleeding, too, and his hand, the hand he already broke, is a useless lump of fire.

You've come this far, Detective. You've stepped in shit. They were only going to put you on probation for tampering with and withholding evidence. They would've gone easy on you because of the Beast that is nesting in your bones, but now you've threatened one of your own; you've lost your mind... and everyone knows it.

Riley grips the stair railing and pulls himself to his knees. He collects his brief and Pignetti's Taser. Gains his feet, wobbling on legs that are really nothing but sticks of utter agony.

You've come this far, he tells himself.

"Okay, think man, think."

Around the corner and to the right there is a fire door that will take him into the north parking lot; Riley yanks open the lobby door instead. He almost trips over Squeaky the janitor's mop bucket on the way through, but somehow manages to keep his  feet under him. His mind may be unraveling, but it's still plenty sharp, thank you very much, and Riley seizes the opportunity without even thinking about it. He grabs the mop and bars the stairwell door with it. Squeaky's rolling yellow mop bucket he kicks over in front of the elevator doors.

The elevator is on 4. On 3.

"Oh my God, Detective, are you all right?" Marie Glumly asks from her Fortress of Reception.

Riley brings the Taser up, aims, fires. The darts shoot out, their metal lines unwinding with a sound like sprung springs, and just like that Marie Glumly's doing a 150,000 volt jitterbug. Riley releases the wires from the Taser and Marie drops to the floor. He gives her a quick shot in the face with the little can of pepper spray he carries on his belt, just to be sure she's compliant.

The elevator's on 2. On 1.

Riley snatches a couple of inches of Scotch tape from the dispenser on Marie's desk and takes aim with the Taser again.

The stainless steel doors part.

Riley is lucky, none of the men onboard have drawn their weapons.

It isn't luck, Detective. They have no real reason to fear their own. Most of these men have only the deepest sympathy for you and your cancer.

Lieutenant Desjardins is the first out and he takes a literal head-over-heels tumble as soon as his slick dress shoes hit the wet vinyl tile. After Desjardins there are only three others— all you can fit in the tiny elevator— Sheriff Odom, followed by Sergeant Senecker, and Deputy Pignetti.

That's good for Pignetti, really, Riley thinks and fires the Taser twice, managing to catch all three men. He takes the length of Scotch tape and tapes the trigger down, discarding the weapon onto the floor. It's spent, anyway.

The four men spasm and jump, all of them down in the mop water now, cookin' and floppin' like live fish in a frying pan.

Marie Glumley is screaming. The shock of being tased has loosened, but the pepper spray is burning her eyes. Her fair freckled skin is red as the blood oozing from Riley's scalp.

Riley pulls his Glock.

Somebody has rammed the stairwell door. They hit it again. Riley knows that mop isn't going to hold for long.

He grabs a fistful of Marie's red hair and drags her out from behind the counter, making his way to the front entrance. He puts a couple of rounds through the stairwell door to discourage whoever's in there from battering it any more. Of course, there's the fire door that lets out onto the north lot, but anyone going that way will have half a block to cover on foot before they catch up to him.

The elevator doors hiss closed.

Going up! Riley thinks.

You do not disappoint, Detective.

~ ~ ~

Allison Higgins, who runs The Clockwork, the little sandwich shop around the corner from the Sheriff's offices, drives an '80 Toyota Celica the same color as butter (except in the places where it's the same color as rust). Riley smashes the driver-side window, reaches in and pops the trunk, never letting go of Marie Glumley's fiery hair. She tries to scream when he puts her in the trunk, but he pepper sprays her in the mouth, then pistol whips her until she blacks out.

In the driver's seat, Riley smashes the steering column, pulls the ignition switch from the back of the lock cylinder and uses his tactical knife as a key. The old Toyota cranks hard, but it cranks. As he drives away, he finishes knocking the glass out of the smashed window.

He cranks the heat. Even though he's sweating with fever, he's cold. So Goddamned cold.

He dials through the old radio until he finds some easy listening. KJAZ out of Tampa. The reception isn't great, but that's all right. Pat Boone is singing "Two Hearts, Two Kisses".

It's still raining. Not as hard as it was this morning, but hard enough.

Riley hits the wipers.

The rain slashes in, slashes down.

~ ~ ~

Riley pulls into Bill Stinsen's driveway, breaking the yellow police tape that cordons it off from Lake Gracie Drive. He brings the Celica all the way under the carport and sits with the engine (and the heat) running, listening to the rain beat a steel drum rhythm on the aluminum roof above him.

In the trunk, Marie Glumley is beating her own panicked rhythm.

"What am I doing?" Riley asks and lays his head against the steering wheel. "My God, what am I doing?"

I am your God, now, Detective. Who else do you have? Who else can offer you that which you desire most?

Riley gets out of the car, slinging his brief bag over his shoulder.

Bring the woman downstairs.

He pops the trunk. Sticks the barrel of his Glock in Marie's mouth.

"Get out," he says. He keeps the gun in her mouth as she struggles out.

Once she's standing, he pulls her close and jams the pistol into her spine.

"Inside," he says, pushing her toward the side door. As they approach it, the door swings open invitingly.

CHAPTER 15: NUESTRO CASTILLO (RILEY)

The house is unexpectedly warm, but it's an offensive, fetid warmth that immediately assaults  Riley's nose. A combination of old cloth, the dirty-dog reek of disuse, and an overlying, overpowering stench of decay that speaks of both the physical and the spiritual.

Nuestro Castillo's side door lets into a small galley kitchen that, on the right, opens onto a formal dining room and, from there, an expansive living room. A great deal of furniture remains, though much of it has been pushed into corners, or stacked one on top of another, while still more is covered in layers of dust. The house is dark. Most of the windows either covered with warped pressboard, or painted with wood stain. The little light that filters through the stain-painted windows is dull, earthy, and ominously predictive of the narrowing path that will lead from this place.

As if sensing this, Marie pleads with Riley, painfully aware that her words are the words of uncountable victims before her: "You don't have to do this."

"You nigger," Riley says, still staring at the brown light filtering in through the dining room window.

"What?" Marie says, mouth gaping.

"That's good!" Riley says, turning on her with a smile. "You almost sound convincing."

"Fuck you!" Marie snarls through swollen lips.

"Fuck you... nigger. You don't have to do this, but I know you're goin' to anyway 'cause you ain't nothin' but a nigger," Riley says. "At least do me the decency of finishing your thoughts out loud. I can hear them, you know?"

"You're fucking crazy!"

"You know," Riley says, turning in a circle, taking in all the blood-writing that covers the paneled walls, "I think I am."

Seeing the writing for the first time, Marie falls to her knees, plump tears welling in her thick lashes. "You're going to... to kill me."

Riley continues to study the writing on the walls. Most of it can't be read, of course, because it's written in pidgin Muskogean, but some of it— drawn in pictograms— is plain in its meaning. Riley is drawn to one in particular, illustrated with some care in the space above the kitchen breezeway: several bloody stick figures offering up mutilated remains to a bloated totem with a hideously yawing mouth— a saw-like rictus that depicts with surreal clarity the insatiate nature of its hunger.

"What did you offer Bill Stinsen?" Riley asks the stick-totem drawing. "What was his prize?"

Sight, Detective. I gave Bill Stinsen his eyes back. And I returned to him his strength. Bill Stinsen was a very sick man.

"Who are you talk—?" Marie mewls.

"Shut up," Riley says, breathless.

In the hall behind Marie— the hall that leads to the basement and a guest bedroom (if Riley remembers right) — a cluster of family photos have begun to rattle on the wall.

Marie cries out, hugging herself, her swollen black cow's eyes bulging like olives. She sucks in air, like she wants to scream, and scream, and scream, but her works are locked up with fear.

Chills run through Riley's sick-hot body as the photos slap their frames back and forth on the plaster walls until one leaps from its nail, shattering itself face down on the Saltillo tile floor.

"Oh God, Oh God, Oh God!" Marie mumbles, hugging her knees, rocking herself like a child on the cold tile.

"We are lost to Him," Riley says, stepping past Marie into the hall. "There ain't no God of deserts, Jews, or Gentiles, here. This... this is a temple of pain. A church of the Worm of Suffering."

Riley picks up the shattered picture frame. Shakes the glass from it. There is nothing extraordinary about the picture housed within. Bill Stinsen and his wife. An old man and an old woman side by side in this very house. But Stinsen is in a wheelchair in the photograph. He looks like the pictures Riley's seen of Jews in the death camps during World War II; emaciated; hollowed out. Stinsen had been a sick man. Hadn't Riley seen something in Stinsen's medical records? Myo-something? Myotonic Dystrophy? Yeah, that was it.

"Oh, you like the sick, don't you?

"I wouldn't do that," Riley says to Marie, who is crawling toward the side door.

Riley is not as surprised as Marie to hear the deadbolt throw of its own accord, to see the wooden door swell in its frame until no light at all escapes around the jamb.

"Get up," Riley tells her and when she doesn't rise to his order, he yanks her to her feet by her hair.

~ ~ ~

In the basement the stink of rot, of death, is unbearable.

Marie's stomach lets go first. She heaves, then gushes on the open-frame stairs. Her lunch splatters onto the splitting wood tread in front of her; drips thickly through the open riser; sounds heavy on the packed dirt floor below.

Riley goes next. To his credit, he held onto it a few seconds longer.

As soon as he retches, Marie balls a fist and tries to hit him in the balls. Riley hammers her in the nose with the Glock on pure instinct, but overextends, and they fall in a tangle the rest of the way down the basement stairs.

The landing is rough.

One of them is screaming. Riley isn't sure which. There's a moment of blessed red numbness (blessed only because it is the precursor of pain and not the pain itself) as he stares up at the exposed boards of the ceiling, but it's only a moment. When the pain comes it pours, pours from that red caldera of deadness in the center of Riley in fast-flowing rivers of molten agony. Riley writhes on the floor, body twisting and knotting, muscles clenching on brittle, cancerous bones. His teeth lock together and it's only then he realizes he was the one screaming.

"Kill you. Kill you, fucker. KILL YOU!"

Marie Glumley climbs on top of Riley. She's holding the Glock.

Riley manages to grab her wrist with his one good hand, forcing the pistol to the right of his head just as Marie pulls the trigger.

The muzzle flash burns his face. The gunpowder blinds him. Burns in his nose.

Marie muscles the gun sideways. Riley's pushing with all his strength, but it isn't enough. He's so fucking weak!

"No!" he rasps.

The Glock goes off again. The bullet cuts a canyon through the top of Riley's skull. Deafens his right ear. But he feels a surge of strength— inhuman strength— flood through him; so much that he breaks Marie's bony wrist with a quick squeeze of his hand. She drops the gun and screams. Riley knees her in the side, feeling her ribs break (so fragile, this woman, like a bird). He claws his way to his feet, retrieves his pistol. Inside him is a red storm of rage.

"Please, I'm sorry," Marie whimpers through new tears. I'm so sorry. Don't kill me."

Not yet, Detective. Not this way.

"Not what way?" Riley growls.

But Rage is quiet.

"There's no way out of here," Riley says to Marie. "But you be a good girl any ol' way."

~ ~ ~

In the living room, Riley dumps his brief bag onto the wooden breakfast table that dominates the north wall— the wall that would've looked out over the lake had the picture windows not been boarded over with plywood. Besides the breakfast table (which one of the Crime Scene techs must have moved in there), there's a floral patterned sofa and an old, rusted folding chair. Riley pulls the folding chair over to the table and sits down.

He takes Strom's recorder out of its plastic evidence bag, turning it thoughtfully in his hands for several minutes. He wishes he had something to ease his pain. He wishes he had a drink.

He wishes he didn't have Marie Glumley held hostage in the basement of a crime scene. Yeah. He wishes that.

Riley sets the recorder upright on the table.

[PLAY]

CHAPTER 16: INDIANS, GENERALS, AND GODS

The next thing I remembered was coming to in front of the door that led down to the basement. It was either late morning or early evening, judging by the light filtering down the hall. I looked down at my lap (and beyond it) and started screaming. Not because of the blood, though there was a lot of it; and not because I knew that this time it wasn't dogs blood; I was screaming because of my legs.

I was wearing shorts (whether they were boxers or trunks, I couldn't say— I was coated with meat and skin and hair, saturated with blood), and there, beyond the nubs of my wasted thighs, were my legs. As pretty and pink and firm as you please. But they were fading, and they were fading fast.

"No!" I rasped, clutching at them... and then through them. My hands came away coated in what felt like hair gel, but my legs were gone. "Oh, no, no, no! Come back!"

I'd wondered how I'd gotten Rage down to the basement, how I'd subdued and carried a seventy pound dog from the neighbors' to the pit of my house (and its horrible death). Now I knew.

I knew something else, too. An answer to a question I hadn't asked. Surely, when I took Candy from her yard she didn't come without a struggle. She was a big, aggressive dog, yet I came away from the encounter with superficial wounds: shallow scratches and a bite to the hand that amounted to little more than red dimples in the flesh. And how about your face? I thought, running my fingers along the place where the vice grips had struck me. There was very little swelling. No tenderness. I peeled away the steri-strips; the gash was closed, almost smooth.

[Riley stops the tape]

He opens the lab report with the results for the residue the CSU collected from Strom's basement stairs.

Now, Riley doesnt know what Protobiont are, but the stuff had caused quite a stir in the labs, and at the University of Florida, where the tech guys sent most of the shit. Riley had seen the samples himself. If you asked him, the ectoplasm, or protobiont, if you prefer, looked like cum.

"You can do it," Riley says. "You can heal me. Cure me. I'm dying you know? I mean, I'm dying right now. I don't think I'll ever leave this house. It might be a matter of hours. I can feel it."

Rage does not answer.

Riley thinks Rage has given all the answers it's going to give.

He closes the file with the lab reports in it. If he is going to die, he is going to hear out Strom Wheldon before he passes.

[PLAY]

By the time I'd cleaned myself, dark was falling. A hurried wind gusted around the house and the temperature had dropped almost ten degrees. In the basement, Rage was quiet and I slept a broken sleep on the couch in the living room, dreaming the dreams of the prophetic. They were fast moving, dissolving one into the other, but they were lucid, and when I recall them now, peeking through the window of hindsight, I believe they were visions of a very real past:

I was standing at the crest of a low hill. Palmettos, water oaks, and pines crowded around me, shading me from the bright sun— a heavenly, but hot summer light. Tall grass clung to me, tickled my knees. Below me was a wide lake, its surface silver, muddy blue, and black all at once. On the shore nearest me was a crescent of sandy beach... and a totem carved from cypress. It's shadow fell across the golden, sun-washed sand like spilled oil; the totem itself seemed too hideous to belong in this bright, still place; its images an unnatural tangle of angular sculpture— disembodied legs and arms and demonic faces that spiraled toward the bloated pinnacle figure: a centipede, its thousand legs not insectan, but human.

Behind me I heard rustling and shouting in a guttural, staccato language I'd never heard.

A small group of Indians emerged from the scrub. They were naked, bathed in layers of blood so thick the texture of it was like mud. There were three of them. Taut and muscled, ritually scarred. They broke from the scrub like harried animals. And that's exactly what they were.

A musket sounded off with a shattering boom, eclipsing all other sound. The ball of shot exploded from the center of the first Indian's chest in a cloud of fractured bone, sizzling hunks of heart, gore and gristle. He fell soundlessly into my arms and I shoved him away. He lay on the ground, staring up at me, face speckled with shadow and light, dead but not knowing it. A second and third musket blast tore through the scrub, one winging an Indian in the side, the other felling a young birch in an explosion of hot pulp. Then came a fourth shot. A fifth. A sixth. Soldiers in white uniforms and black leather caps charged from the brush, empty muskets held out like spears, the sun gleaming on long, slender bayonets. And one of these men I knew, or, at least, I knew his face: cruel, patrician features; black marble eyes in tiny, hooded sockets. Eustis. General Abraham Eustis. He sprinted past, favoring me with a wicked smile, and fell upon the Indian who'd been winged by the musket fire. Eustis put the native down with a thrust from his bayonet. Two more soldiers joined him and they stabbed savagely at the defenseless Indian. Up and down. Steel in soft meat. Up and down. Then they were charging toward the lake's edge again.

I followed after, watching as they cut down the last Indian in a flurry of clubbing and stabbing that seemed to go on and on and on. I've been to war. I've seen more than my share of brutality. In the thin hours of the night, those futile, endless hours when your skin doesn't fit right and your bones are all wrong, I've often wondered what can drive men to such savagery. Hate? Fear? Faith, even? The still-fresh memory of the Animal in our genes? I always came to the same conclusion... there was no answer. No real answer. But I knew different, now.

Eustis and his men went on with their slaughterous victory, blinded by blood-lust. Blinded to the figure slowly rising from the lake. Seeing it emerge— as if being born— from those velvet depths was like watching a prophet part a sea, or a messiah walking on water. At first there was only the alien shape of its head, a dark leathery mass crowned with dead hair and spindly bones, but as it left the womb of the lake behind, as it gained the slash of beach, taking on the shape of a man, I realized I knew this creature, too.

Hadjo.

It went through Eustis' men like a razored wind. Two of the General's six were on their knees clutching slit throats before the rest understood their victory was premature. Hadjo gutted a third, the man's insides spilling over his feet with a sound like the sudden dumping of a bucket of water. Hadjo threw up an arm and the musket blow that should've caved in its skull (and broken its arm for that matter) was stopped as soundly, as solidly, as if by a brick wall. The second blow broke the rifle to kindling across Hadjo's back. The creature didn't seem to feel it. It tore the soldier's throat out with a single, rigid hand.

Four veteran soldiers dead in a span of seconds.

Eustis pulled a sidearm. I could hear the sizzle in the flash pan all the way up the hill.

Thoom!

An oozing purple hole the size of a tea saucer opened in Hadjo's chest. The shot only just missed the thing's shrunken, slimy heart... I know that because I could see the grotesque muscle still beating inside it.

Eustis' last man speared his bayonet through Hadjo's heart. And Hadjo hammered the man in the side of the head with enough force to shatter his skull. The bayonet blade broke off inside Hadjo, still piercing its heart (which went on clenching and unclenching around the sliver of steel).

Eustis rammed powder and shot into his musket's breach. He yanked the ramrod out and dropped it to the ground.

Hadjo advanced. Faltered.

Full cock. Eustis shouldered his musket.

The worm at the totem's pinnacle reared and its maw gaped in a roar, revealing a mouth of teeth that spun round the orifice like the bladed chain of a chainsaw; its many human-like legs clacked  a beat of fury against the pole.

Neither Eustis, nor  Hadjo seemed to notice.

Hadjo collapsed to its knees at Eustis' feet.

"The gold, demon! Where's my gold?" Eustis seethed.

Hadjo pointed at the lake.

Eustis smiled. "Take off that mask."

Hadjo boomed laughter. Raised its hands to its mask of human flesh and pulled it (peeled it) away. Filaments of mucous strung out between the mask and the almost-bare skull beneath. It reminded me of the way cooked skin will slough away from muscle. Hadjo's true face was far more terrible than its mask; it truly was a monster. It'd been born with no eyes; a single vaginal slit for a nose; its mouth a tiny rictus in the hollow of one jaw— the jaw itself large and disfigured, and growing not from the bottom of the thing's face, but jutting from the side opposite its penny-sized mouth. The horror on Eustis' face was pure and naked. He triggered the musket out of total revulsion; out of the instant need to eradicate the unnatural thing before him. Hadjo's head disintegrated... but its mask went on laughing.

The dream shifted.

A late February frost clung to the ground and all but the evergreens had shed their leaves. General Abraham Eustis was chopping a young slave boy to death beneath the totem. The boy's screams were blessedly short. Lake Gracie was no longer silver or even winter-steel, but red.

The dream shifted.

Many summers had passed... and this would be Eustis' last. Abraham, a much older Abraham, chopped at the base of the totem with inhuman fury. A woman of perhaps thirty lay at the totem's feet. One of her arms had been cut off just above the wrist. Her blood pumped onto the sand, stained her plain white dress. Something on her severed hand glinted. A simple band of gold. Her wedding band.

The dream shifted.

The lake was overgrown— wasted lilies and water lettuce, and years of wild floaters fringed the withered shores like a scab. Houses were being built in fast-motion along its old, dry banks. The totem was long gone.

The dream shifted.

I recognized Lake Gracie as the place I knew in my waking existence.

A manufacturing plant had been erected on the northeastern shore. A small crane was lifting the company's sign into place: SKILL SAW.

An assembly line. Conveyers.

I watched a man take a saw from the line. He set it on a stand. His name tag read:

GEORGE GIZELT

Quality Assurance Inspector

George was having trouble with the saw he intended to inspect. The dream dissolved to black, but I could hear screams. Screams of pain. Screams of fear...

I woke, breathless, to the sound of the TV.

"Seventy-four year old William Stinsen of Pendryville was arrested early this morning on murder charges. Lake County Sheriff, Aurelio Odom, said the arrest was the result of an ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Stinsen's wife. According to Sheriff's Department investigators, Edith Luanne Stinsen, seventy-one, was reported missing by her sister late last December after she had failed, on numerous occasions, to contact Maggie."

I heard Bill, very clearly, saying: Not much time, now. My Edith's been gone a long time and that nosy bitch is lookin' for 'er.

"According to another source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Stinsen is also under suspicion in at least fourteen other missing persons cases."

It's gone, too... but they still need tendin'.

The news anchor had been replaced by video of Nuestro Castillo. Part of the street had been barricaded and a backhoe was running in the backyard. Deputies were bringing out bag after black bag to a waiting ambulance. They were body bags, of course, but they weren't full.

I had a flash of memory: Ohio Joe's living room. Him and his wife watching TV on the couch. I struck out with a hammer. Blood spurted all the way to the ceiling and Ohio Joe leaned oddly forward. I caved his wife's screaming face in. Teeth flew. I struck again and again.

My hands were shaking.

Rage sang fat and sulky

I'm so close, Strom. Just a little more.

"No," I croaked.

She'll be back soon, Strom...

Send her away, Bill had said.

...and when she comes, you will bring her to me.

CHAPTER 17: RAGE

There was no Tim Vestergaard in the Century Link (formerly EMBARQ) residential listings, but there was a Vestergaard Cabinetry in the Yellow Pages. They didn't open till nine, and it was only seven A.M.

There were bloody drag trails all through the kitchen and I killed two hours (yuk-yuk) staring at them, numb from the nubs up. Surely none of this was happening. I thought (probably not for the first time) that I'd died in Iraq and I was in Hell. That was the only explanation.

There are many Hells, Strom, Rage said, its normally waspy voice sluggish, almost apathetic.

It was sated, for now, but I could feel the glimmer of its hunger.

The time passed slowly, but it passed, and I made my phone call.

For all the good it'll do ya. They were Bill Stinsen's words, but it was Rage who spoke them. It still sounded moribund, but its glut was burning off.

"Vestergaard's Custom Cabinets," a man said on the other end of the line.

"Is Tim in?" I asked.

"You got him."

"Tell me about the KILL SAW," I said. There was no time for preamble.

There was a hollow pause. "Who is this?"

"You don't know me," I said, "but I need to know about that saw. Please!"

Another pause. A much longer, much fuller one.

"I... I don't know what it matters. Listen, is this some kind of joke?"

"Please, Tim."

"What do you want me to tell you? I don't know... Fuck! All right. Okay. Listen up. It was a piece of shit right out of the box. Took three fingers from three different guys in the time I had it. I scratched the 'S' off the blade arm and used to spook the helpers with a bunch of bullshit about the KILL SAW. Wooo-ooooh!" he said and laughed, but there was no humor in it, only restrained fear. "When the bubble busted we scaled back to one crew and sold off some tools to pay the rent, and the Goddamned payroll taxes. That's the long and short of it, buddy."

"Did it ever sp—".

Click!

I sat there for a while. The conversation, if you could even call it that, wasn't what I'd expected. I didn't think Vestergaard was lying (but I didnt think he was telling me everything, either), so where did that leave me? There were no answers with Stinsen. Rage had used him, just like it was using me.

I rolled into the hall and stopped in front of the basement door. "What are you?" I screamed, and in my mind's eye I saw the totem on the shore of Lake Gracie.

You will see soon enough. I will show you, Strom. It is a great honor... and the greatest of horrors. Your pitiful monkey's mind will not bear it, but you shall see, nonetheless.

The crimson light of Rage's laser bled from beneath the door and I knew in that moment my basement had become the womb of something unnameable, something unspeakable, but I knew too, it was not a thing beyond comprehension; no, the most terrible thing about it was the simplicity of its hunger, its desire to inflict pain and reap torment. Its ego was bloated with the air of its own immortality. It believed my "monkey's brain" could not comprehend it, but the truth was, or so I believed, the mind of man and the turmoil in his heart was infinitely more complex than the monster in my basement. That didn't mean I was immune to its mastery of me. My understanding was not a victory over it. It was, for all its simple bloodlust, an entity possessed of power far beyond the ken (as my grandfather might have said) of mortal man.

Ah, Strom, she is coming...

~ ~ ~

Jodi's Civic squealed to a stop just shy of the carport. I watched the phantom legs as they reappeared beneath the ruination of my thighs. As bone and gristle, muscle and flesh became solid, my self-possession grew tenuous, slippery, until it faded altogether, the force of my consciousness shunted into the farthest corner of my mind.

I rose. Hid behind the kitchen door. I wasn't aware of it— honestly, I'm filling in the blanks again with imaginative speculation— I was not myself, after all. But I must have laid in wait for her, for Jodi, because I was the one who carried her into that pit of unimaginable horrors...

~ ~ ~

I've never fought so hard in my life; not at the Battle of Nasiriyah, not in Operation Phantom Fury, when we were making the push to the Euphrates River. Rage had forced me down, but I was clawing my way back up.

I was carrying Jodi through a forest of human meat. The air was red and orange and thick, like the air might be the first few seconds after the birth of the Apocalypse. All around rose spires of fused bodies that churned and swayed, waving their twisted limbs in hateful agony. They moaned tonelessly, reminding me of the wind muttering in the pines on our back lot, but as I passed with Jodi in my arms the grotesque formations began to shriek. I tried to turn and run, but my phantom legs would not obey. They carried me on, unflinching, uncaring.

The ground itself was flesh, covered in sores that oozed and bled, and patches of coarse hair as tall as maiden cane. Beneath the spires tubular lesions and dark melanomas bloomed like some kind of time-lapsed garden of fungus. I smelled fire and the stink of roasting bodies. Black smoke rose in the distance and through that screen of expanding char I saw the silhouette of some fantastic structure.

A temple.

The totem.

One and the same?

The spires crowded the path, grasping at Jodi. I hunched over her, trying to shield her, but there were too many molesting hands.

The overlapping faces within the hellish trees began to speak: Cut her! Hurt the bitch! Cut her! Dig the sockets of her arms from her fucking shoulders! Do it! Cut that four-piece monkey whore! DELIVER HER!

Impossibly long arms raked at my hair, groped at my face. There were so many arms reaching down from the spires that I couldn't see where I was going. Not that it mattered. My phantom legs would deliver me and Jodi both.

A creature— a woman's severed head with sixteen spidery finger-legs— scuttled between my feet. "Open 'er cunt's belly with rusty barbwire you faggot! Bleed 'er! Open 'er up and suck 'er dry!" it said, making a slurping sound around its swollen black tongue. It was Edith, Bill Stinsen's wife. I had no way of knowing that, but I knew it just the same.

The curtain of fondling arms opened, the spires fell back on both sides and I found myself standing in front of a great, fuming pit from which the dead (dead men I knew) began to crawl. Their faces were alien: impossibly bloated, purple-black with death. Maggots foamed from their mouths. Flies covered the ragged stumps of their arms, or legs, or shredded guts like moving bandages. They all wore American flag patches on the shoulders of their desert camo fatigues and Sergeant McQuaig was first among them.

My phantom feet stopped and McQuaig crawled to them, fondled them. I wanted to draw away, his hands alternately slimy and charred against my skin, but I couldnt move.

"You lived, Strom," he rasped and choked up a piece of shrapnel. What's it like on the other end of the pain, huh, buddy? What's it like when you cut them apart?" he asked. The bony spurs of his ribcage, sharp and dangerous-looking where they'd come away from the spine, twiddled excitedly.

When I didn't answer, McQuaig shifted his attention to Jodi. He made a strange whistling sound. Wind through a hollowed bone. That's what it sounded like. "She's so wholesome!" McQuaig rattled, laughing and spitting up more shrapnel.

Rage's grip on me loosened and I had a sensation I can only describe as coming forward in my mind. I lifted one of my phantom feet and kicked McQuaig in the mouth as hard as I could.

Something roared in the distance. There arent words to describe it, it was too many things, and none of them, all at once. The leg I'd kicked McQuaig with flickered and I fell to my knees, dropping Jodi on top of my old "buddy".

"Oh, yes!" he rasped. "Oh, yes, let me taste her!"

He bit savagely into Jodi's wrist, lapping with his half-burnt tongue at the blood that ran along her forearm.

The others (the ones that'd been on the truck with me that day in Fallujah) crawled toward us— My God, they were so fast! —but that roar sounded again and the spoiled things that'd once been my men shrieked in pain, or fear, or both. I tore Jodi from McQuaig's grasp before he fled with the others back into the fuming pit.

This might surprise you, but that was the first time I really looked at Jodi. I'd wrested back control of myself (at least for the moment), and it was only then I realized how badly she was hurt. Blood  coursed from her hairline and when I touched my hand to the back of her head it didn't feel right. What did I do to her?

You hit her with a hammer, Strom. The one you used on Ohio Bill and his lovely wife. Your Daddy's old Craftsman hammer. You used it on Mr. and Mrs. Buckeye Bill because you didn't want anyone to hear the gunshots from the .40. And you used it on Jodi just the same (except, not quite so vigorously). Now, bring her to me. Come and see what I am. Wasn't that what you wanted? Let us see if you can suffer to look upon me.

My legs strengthened and I reveled in them. I stood and, once more, surrendered myself to Rage. As it spoke I huddled in the corner of my mind, cradling myself, rocking back and forth. Not in terror, but in a kind of childlike excitement. There's a part of us that has to see. When we're kids it's the dark lump of clothes in the corner of our room that looks like a monstrous dog. We see the suggestion of every sleek muscle, the rise and fall of its powerful chest, the gleam of its fangs. We see it, we fear it, and even though we tell ourselves we don't want to look, we can't take our eyes off of it. When we get a little older, it's horror movies. Most of us say we don't like it; we cover our eyes when the blood-bucket-fodder has their short, gory moment of fame. We cover our eyes, but our fingers are split. We are peeking. Of course, even when we're much older there's nothing quite so fascinating as news footage of a train wreck, a plane crash, or best of all, getting up close and personal with a car accident. So, yes, I wanted to see! Of course, I wanted more than that, now, didn't I? McQuaig had asked what it felt like, to cut them apart.

What did it feel like, Strom?

It felt... powerful.

Like undoing life?

No, not just life, but Life!

Like breaking apart the Universe, atom by atom?

It felt like raping God! It was wonderful and terrible, and I don't think I ever resisted at all. How could I? How could anyone resist that kind of power? And my legs! Rage had given me back my legs!

What has God, any god, ever done for you, besides me, Strom? Have I not performed miracles for you?

I served my wife. I served my family. I served my country.

And what has it gotten you, my servant?

Ruination.

Massive teeth grew out of the fuming pit, wedge-shaped and serrated on the sides like shark's teeth, but wrought of dark iron. They formed a bridge and I crossed it. Black smoke lay thick on the ground, in the air, but I could see the hulk of the temple emerging from it. It was enormous. A haphazard ziggurat of razor sharp metal. Atop it curled something gargantuan; a thing so foul and alien I couldn't even guess at its true shape.

I was keenly aware of Jodis vitality, bundled and warm in my arms.

Inside me, the huddling, rocking Strom knew exactly where I was— where I really was— and what I was about to do.

In the shadowed attic of my mind, that other me peered through the almond shaped windows of my eyes, engrossed by the spectacle of two unfolding realities. Through one window he saw the shape of the saw, waiting eagerly at the far end of the basement. He could see its flashing, cyclopean eye; imagined he could hear its thrumming. Through the other window the temple grew closer and he licked his lips. He could almost taste the blood that would be spilled.

"You've always been a pussy, Strom."

The other me whirled on his pitiful stumps, fear drawing his face into a snarl. In the basement, Rage screamed (the shapeless horror roared on the temple mount and the spires of human meat cried out in response). The other me was all thin waxy flesh taught over sharp bones. Red rivers of infection ran against gravity from his cock to his pronounced ribcage. His eye sockets collapsed into unseeing pits ringed with human teeth and his mouth was filled with whirring, ripping blades.

Jodi stood in the other corner of my darkling mindscape. Her white scrubs glowed with harsh, almost incandescent light.

"You're so fucking pathetic," she said. "Look at you."

The other me recoiled, the blades in his mouth whining in time with the saw on its pedestal in the basement (with the cat-like roaring of the thing waiting behind its screen of fuming smoke on the temple mount).

"You were so scared of loving me you booked the first flight to Iraq the Marine Corps would give you. Then, you were scared of starting a family so you went back to that Hellhole, leaving me to wonder if you'd ever come home again. And look at you now that you did come home! Still just a scared little boy.

"I loved you with all my heart, I still love you, and you're going to repay the sacrifices I've made for you by feeding me to this thing? For what, Strom? Oh, right, for legs. So you can run, baby, run."

It wasn't Jodi at all, of course, only me waging a war with myself. Jodi was just the best part of me. She'd always been the best part of me, and if she wasn't willing to deal in the dirty truth, I guess I was finally ready to step into her shoes and do it for her.

This new, third me shed Jodi's image like a skin. This Strom Wheldon stood tall in his Justin boots, Wranglers, and t-shirt. He was whole. He was strong. "GET OUT!" he thundered.

The ravaged creature that I'd become and the towering manifestation of the man I'd once been merged into one. I was no longer tall, or whole, but I felt strong for the first time in a long time.

I was free.

[Strom laughs as if he has told the world's most ironic joke. Perhaps he has.]

I had that sensation of coming forward in my mind again and found myself mounting the wide, blade-like stairs of the temple. The curtains of smoke drew back as if on strings and I saw Rage's true face. My first impression was of an enormous worm, fat and glistening, but its flesh was that of men, pinned and stitched together with bone and tendon. Thousands of arms and legs were folded to its chest. Its head a swollen wad of tissue pitted with uncountable clacking mouths. It descended the stairs on its thousand legs, weaving in an uncannily supple S. I will have her! it shrieked.

I screamed in terror, folding Jodi protectively to me, but we were no longer in the seething world that belonged to the worm-god of suffering. We were in the basement. Maybe we'd always been in the basement.

CHAPTER 18: KILL BOX

Rage sat on its throne of metal that'd bloomed from the concrete slab like some kind of shrapnel flower. Power cords hung from the ceiling and walls, feeding into the saw, giving the impression of a spider at the center of a half-formed web. Littered around it was the mutilated remains of Ohio Joe, his wife, and their dog (can't forget Candy; can't forget my first). Old blood painted every surface. Flies by the hundreds buzzed and rubbed their legs, picked at the meat of my victims. I could actually hear the wet squirming of their many maggot children. Rage spun and roared, its red eye glaring like a tiny red sun.

My legs felt watery. Not gone, not yet, but I was aware they were formed from something viscous and insubstantial and the substance was growing less so. Making this tape, I am reminded of pictures I've seen of psychic mediums with ectoplasm spewing from their mouths.

Rage spoke aloud to me, performing this vile miracle by changing the speed of its whining blade. "Your defiance comes too late, half-man! The sow is mine... and I will butcher her like the bitch-pig she is!"

If it had wanted anyone other than Jodi, Rage would've had me. I'd have murdered dozens to get my legs back.

That's been a hard truth to reconcile.

I backed toward the stairs, knowing the phantom legs wouldn't last much longer. The fact that they'd remained at all made me wonder if I'd been the one creating them all along.

Rage shot sparks and its blade spun so fast I thought it might tear free and eviscerate me. The fuse box was smoking. I smelled the circuits and wiring cooking. Out on the street, I could hear the transformer buzzing like something alive. Rage shrieked and shrieked. The air around it rippled with heat, the power lines that fed it danced and snapped, and Rage began to change.

I slipped as I mounted the stairs, and even though I didn't want to look away (Hell, I almost couldn't look away), I noticed my bare feet were leaving a trail of something that looked suspiciously like semen. My legs were coated in the stuff. Beneath the film, my shins and calves had become translucent. They quavered and I fell back hard on my ass... but I didn't stop moving. I dug in with my heels and pushed my way up the stairs. I was leaving gobs of the semeny stuff behind on the treads now. "Just a little longer," I begged.

Below, Rage was transforming. The legs of its base elongated on bars of hot metal and the whole thing sort of stood up. The base bent, twisted itself forward, and the blade arm extended, flexing side to side, up and down. The steel cowl that housed the blade peeled back like the lips of a dog, running hot and molten down over the blade arm where it cooled suddenly into a weird, sinewy pattern of slag that was almost organic. The extension arm on the side of the aluminum deck curled into a wicked claw. When Rage stepped off its shrapnel-flower throne it was almost four feet tall. The many cords and lines flowing out of its back looked like wings.

My legs were drooling away, seeping down between the open frame stairs. A huge glob that'd only moments ago been my left foot splattered down onto my rucksack. I stared at it, incredulous; I hadn't even known it was there. When Jodi and Del brought me home from Walter Reed they must have had it. Jodi probably carried it down here and tossed it under the stairs to keep it out of sight (and out of mind.) My machete was sticking handle-up out of its sheath on the side of the pack. I'd gotten the thing standard-issue during special operations training at Mu Juk in South Korea after my first tour. There wasn't any bush in Iraq, but I'd taken it with me anyway. The bastard was wicked sharp. I looked from the machete to the buzzing wings sprouting from Rage's back, and back again to the machete.

I rolled Jodi out of my lap and onto the landing, then did a little roll of my own— right off the side of the stairs.

My right leg exploded when I hit, the impact reducing it to a puddle of jelly. I bounced the back of my head hard against the slab and knocked the breath out of my lungs. I faded for a minute, barely aware of my own gasping and sucking as my body fought for air.

Rage limped toward me on its metal feet, its blade keening, its laser-eye glaring, and I willed myself into consciousness. I reached to my right and caught hold of one of the ruck's straps, yanked it to me, and fumbled the machete out of its button-up scabbard.

Rage shuffled three steps forward, its whine deafening; maddening. Then it ceased.

I pulled myself onto my side (imagining all the adrenaline my body was dumping flowing into the one good ectoplasmic leg I still had, willing it to solidify, to strengthen). Rage's blade turned slowly. Deliberately. It looked at me, then turned its gaze on Jodi. If it had had a mouth it would have smiled.

Rage shambled toward the stairs, its blade picking up speed.

I pushed up onto my knees.

"Get away from her, you fuck!"

Rage gave a whirring, air-tearing laugh and mounted the stairs. Its laughter didn't last long, though. It had reached the length of some of its power lines and jerked to a stop on the first tread. It roared and more lines burst from the block wall on the stairs, through the plaster overhead, feeding themselves into Rage's back. Several of the lines that had stopped its forward momentum uncoupled and fell slack.

Rage gained two more steps.

God, take the rest of me, but let me save her.

I stood. I only had one, liquefying leg to do it on, but I stood.

I reached across the simple board banister, grabbed a fistful of power lines and hacked through them with the machete. I got shocked, but the pain was a goad and I kept hacking. Rage's blade arm bent over backward and all of a sudden the blade was buried in my shoulder, chewing through skin, muscle, and bone. Someone was screaming but it wasn't me. It wasn't just me. Jodi had regained consciousness and she was curled into a ball at the head of the stairs, wailing as Rage bit into me.

The last thing I remember (aside from my desperate hacking at Rage's power source, and the pain of its bite), was saying: "Kill the power! Jodi, you have to kill the power! She inched down the steps on her ass, thinking I meant the breaker box next to Rage. But Jodi was smarter than that (I could see the light of understanding in those pale baby-blues). She was Missus Home Improvement, after all. She got up and staggered through the basement door.

CHAPTER 19: DETECTIVE RILEY V

Riley stops the tape. There is more. A little, anyway. Jodi Wheldon pulled the meter outside and put a whole clip of .40 cal hollow points into the transformer for good measure. She saved her husband. And he saved her. Good for them. What came after is anyone's guess, but there was no doubt Strom and Jodi vamoosed. How they got far with the injuries the tape suggested they sustained (and the amount of blood found at the scene) was a goddamned miracle. Riley's own office, Florida Highway Patrol, and the FBI had called every hospital from Key West to Falls Church Virginia, and as far west as El Paso Texas.

There were zero leads.

The saw had been conspicuously missing from the Wheldon house, but Riley knows where it is.

Even through the plywood covering the windows he can see the reed-ringed shore of the lake. He knows if the Sheriff's Department were to dredge the lake, they'd find the saw. That isn't all they'd find, either. No. There would be bones. Hundreds of them, dating back to the founding of Pendryville and long before. And the totem would be there, he knows. Buried in muck. Petrified.

"So you threw the damned thing in the lake? Why there, of all places?" Riley asks, his mind turning back to Strom. "To complete it, to complete all of this, somehow? To complete a circle?"

Another link forged in the chain of a never ending helix.

Madness. Yours is a path to madness. Not life, Riley thinks. But he can't deny the power that swept through him in the basement. He can't deny the appeal of it.

Rage gave Hadjo sight, strength. It gave him Face. And it had given Bill Stinsen nearly the same thing. Cured the disease that blinded him and stole his life. Strom's gift was all too obvious. But what about Eustis? What had it given Eustis? Rage chose the others, but not the General. Eustis had unwittingly chosen it when he killed Hadjo. Rage made him an even more powerful man than he already was, no question about that; secretly recovering the stolen payroll certainly hadn't hurt him either, had it? Hell, Eustis built Pendryville with that money. Built it. Owned it. Presided over it with the eye and will of a tyrant, no doubt. How else could he have gotten away with killing so many for so long?

It is time, Detective.

Riley puts Wheldon's attempt at absolution down on the blotter and strips out of his belt and holster. He takes his badge out of his pocket and traces the star with a swollen, broken finger. He sets it carefully on the table. Next to it he sets his tactical knife.

Two tokens. Two paths.

"You know the price. You know how it ended for Strom Wheldon, now. How does it end for you, Riley?

"How bad do you want to live?" he asks himself.

CHAPTER 20: FLIGHT TO DEL RIO (STROM AND JODI)

It was early November. Loreto's rainy season. That's what the locals said, anyway. I hadn't seen a single cloud since me and Jodi hit the Ensenada-Santa Rosalia branch of MEX-1. Hell, I don't think I'd seen any since we hit Baja California Sur. MEX-1 was pretty much a straight shot south along the Sea of Cortez from Misíon San Bruno— where we'd been holed up, recovering— to the township of Loreto (where we intended to live out the rest of our lives). Padre Eudeve had housed us, healed our spirits, and favored us with the Grace of the Lord. It was at Eudeve's urging that I made the tape recording. Expiation, he had said. I must suffer through my sins again so I could once again find adunamentum , or unity, with God. I wasn't crazy about mailing the thing to the Lake County Sheriff's Department (even anonymously), but Eudeve insisted it must be done and I trusted him.

So... I haven't left you with much of an ending, have I?

Well, I'd been worried about Jodi after we fled Pendryville (and Florida altogether). We had had to move fast. I doctored her the best I could, but she'd needed real medical attention, and she didn't get it until we got to Del Rio, Texas. I wasn't surprised that Emelina McQuaig took us into her home. I'd been counting on it. I was surprised, and inexpressibly grateful, when Emelina took Jodi to her sister-in-law, who turned out to be a Nurse Practitioner (not a doctor, but close enough). Jodi's head injury turned out to be a non-depressed, comminuted skull fracture. It would heal on its own. Despite persisting symptoms of a concussion, Jodi was going to be Okay.

 A few weeks later we crossed the border into Mexico in the back of a box truck with the thousand dollars Emelina had forced on us, a thread-bare hope, and nothing else.

Funny how things work out.

The trike— a big ugly burgundy thing with gold fleck trim— was on loan from one of Padre Eudeve's parishioners. All was not well with the world, but with Jodi leaning against my back, the bright desert to the west, and the brighter sea to the east, the world was not dark. There were no basements out here (except the one in my dreams), and I hadn't seen a power line in forty miles, much less a power tool.

"Pull over, Strom!" Jodi yelled over the trike's ridiculous V8 twin. "I wanna swim!"

I peeled off the road, angled over a rocky little dune, and parked thirty yards from the water. Jodi was off the trike, her long slender legs propelling her into the soft lap of the sea before the bike stopped humming between my stumps. I looked at the collapsed wheelchair lashed over the right wheel well...

...you're probably asking yourself some things right about now. Maybe what's foremost on your mind is Rage's blade biting down into my shoulder. How could I survive that?

I closed my eyes. I could hear Jodi's laughter and I smiled. In my mind's eye her legs were flashing in the sunshine. I imagined Rage atop its twisted ziggurat, pictured it sinking into the fuming pit of its own Hell, banished— if not from this world, then at least from my body and mind. In reality, Rage was sitting at the bottom of Lake Gracie. As good as gone; but it had left something behind. The seed of an Other knowledge.

I opened my eyes. The sun was bright and hot and heavenly on my face. The wind, cool in my ever-lengthening, sun-bleached hair. I could taste the salt of the sea on my lips.

"C'mon, Strom!" Jodi called.

Again I looked at the wheelchair. I hardly needed it anymore.

Ectoplasm flowed from the train wreck of my thighs. I could feel the semeny stuff sweating from the fast-healing wound in my shoulder, too. I ran down to Jodi and dove in the water. We splashed, we made love in the sand. Later we might walk down the strand, hand in hand. And I'd forget, for a while, Rage lying at the bottom of the lake, and the blood that stains my soul.

EPILOGUE: RILEY

It's early November. The rain's coming down hard. Not as hard as it was this morning, but hard enough. Even in the dark stench of the basement she can hear the rain's prattle.

She's down in a death hole and she knows it. She knows these are her last thoughts, but she doesn't want to cry anymore because her ribs are broken and every little movement is agony. Her wrist is broken too. It's blown up like a balloon and she cradles it against her chest with her good hand.

He's gone. Riley's gone. For how long, she doesn't know, but she heard the door slam and it's been quiet upstairs since. Before that, she could hear him pacing back and forth above her.

Get up, she tells herself. Get up, Marie! Get UP! If you want to live, you have to get up and get out now!

But she can't.

She whimpers and her insides light up like hot coals in a wind.

He didn't take the car, she thinks, once the pain dies down. She would have heard it.

Her face and throat burn from the pepper spray and she feels a little spacey from the beatings Riley doled out.

"I don't want to die," she rasps.

Get out! her instincts scream.

It's too late for that, Marie.

She hears footsteps above her. Heavy, with a limping, awkward gait.

"No" she slurs, choking back tears and trying unsuccessfully to hug away the fire in her insides.

Riley throws open the basement door, glistening in the weak amber light of the upstairs hall. He's soaking wet. Water runs off of him, spilling down between the open risers of the stairs in little waterfalls. At first Marie thinks he's slick with rain, but that's before she sees the mud caked to him, and the weeds, and reeds. He's holding something; something twisted and ungainly. A thousand black tendrils flap and curl and writhe in the back-lighted doorway. The strange tentacles whip the walls, the ceiling, searching for something; and they find it, piercing block, plaster, wood, even Riley himself.

What is that? Oh, God, what is it? she thinks and backs against the basement wall, pressing herself against it as if she can will her body through brick and earth. And just when her terror seems at its peak, when she believes she has reached the absolute physical and emotional limit of fright, the basement light sizzles, pops, and sprays the room with its luminance.

Marie screams. And her lungs scream. And her broken ribs scream.

In Riley's arms, Rage screams, the twisted saw's blade turning with violent velocity. A thousand power lines run from its body into the ceiling and walls, into and around Riley.

"I want to live!" Riley shrieks over the whine of the saw. He fumbles down two steps at a time, Rage's blade reaching out for Marie. "I want to LIVE!"

There are sirens in the distance.

As the blade sinks into flesh and bone, Marie focuses on the sound of the sirens; the sound of salvation come too late.

She is swallowed by red. Swallowed by pain.

Table of Contents

28 Teeth of Rage

PROLOGUE: HEATHENS

CHAPTER 1: DETECTIVE RILEY

CHAPTER 2: THIS IS A CONFESSION

CHAPTER 3: THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

CHAPTER 4: DETECTIVE RILEY II

CHAPTER 5: JODI'S JOURNAL I

CHAPTER 6: DETECTIVE RILEY III

CHAPTER 7: THE GIFT (KILL SAW)

CHAPTER 8: JODI'S DIARY II

CHAPTER 9: BEING USEFUL (STROM)

CHAPTER 10: JODI'S DIARY III

CHAPTER 11: BUSY BEE DREAMING

CHAPTER 12: CANDY

CHAPTER 13: NUESTRO CASTILLO (STROM)

CHAPTER 14: DETECTIVE RILEY IV

CHAPTER 15: NUESTRO CASTILLO (RILEY)

CHAPTER 16: INDIANS, GENERALS, AND GODS

CHAPTER 17: RAGE

CHAPTER 18: KILL BOX

CHAPTER 19: DETECTIVE RILEY V

CHAPTER 20: FLIGHT TO DEL RIO (STROM AND JODI)

EPILOGUE: RILEY

Table of Contents

28 Teeth of Rage

PROLOGUE: HEATHENS

CHAPTER 1: DETECTIVE RILEY

CHAPTER 2: THIS IS A CONFESSION

CHAPTER 3: THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

CHAPTER 4: DETECTIVE RILEY II

CHAPTER 5: JODI'S JOURNAL I

CHAPTER 6: DETECTIVE RILEY III

CHAPTER 7: THE GIFT (KILL SAW)

CHAPTER 8: JODI'S DIARY II

CHAPTER 9: BEING USEFUL (STROM)

CHAPTER 10: JODI'S DIARY III

CHAPTER 11: BUSY BEE DREAMING

CHAPTER 12: CANDY

CHAPTER 13: NUESTRO CASTILLO (STROM)

CHAPTER 14: DETECTIVE RILEY IV

CHAPTER 15: NUESTRO CASTILLO (RILEY)

CHAPTER 16: INDIANS, GENERALS, AND GODS

CHAPTER 17: RAGE

CHAPTER 18: KILL BOX

CHAPTER 19: DETECTIVE RILEY V

CHAPTER 20: FLIGHT TO DEL RIO (STROM AND JODI)

EPILOGUE: RILEY

Table of Contents

28 Teeth of Rage

PROLOGUE: HEATHENS

CHAPTER 1: DETECTIVE RILEY

CHAPTER 2: THIS IS A CONFESSION

CHAPTER 3: THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

CHAPTER 4: DETECTIVE RILEY II

CHAPTER 5: JODI'S JOURNAL I

CHAPTER 6: DETECTIVE RILEY III

CHAPTER 7: THE GIFT (KILL SAW)

CHAPTER 8: JODI'S DIARY II

CHAPTER 9: BEING USEFUL (STROM)

CHAPTER 10: JODI'S DIARY III

CHAPTER 11: BUSY BEE DREAMING

CHAPTER 12: CANDY

CHAPTER 13: NUESTRO CASTILLO (STROM)

CHAPTER 14: DETECTIVE RILEY IV

CHAPTER 15: NUESTRO CASTILLO (RILEY)

CHAPTER 16: INDIANS, GENERALS, AND GODS

CHAPTER 17: RAGE

CHAPTER 18: KILL BOX

CHAPTER 19: DETECTIVE RILEY V

CHAPTER 20: FLIGHT TO DEL RIO (STROM AND JODI)

EPILOGUE: RILEY