A Blood of Killers Read online

  Max wished he understood people a little better. Now that he thought about it, a wife meeting her husband in their new house was nothing unusual. Families were occasionally spontaneous. He should have planned for the contingency. But humanity was a blind spot for him.

  Light steps on the stairs. The children. Coming up.

  They didn’t stop at the second floor where all the bedrooms were located.

  Their mother came out to the living room, sat down, shut off the television and game system the kids had automatically turned on as soon as they came in. She could hear as clearly as Max that her children were going upstairs to their father’s office, but she didn’t ask them to come back down. Instead, she waited on the sofa.

  The catch in her breathing when the children reached the attic door told Max she was about to cry. Was she afraid something bad would happen to them?

  Or was she letting them play in their father’s office, wired to destroy itself if its contents were touched.

  She didn’t call out a warning.

  The Beast coiled itself into a knot, ready to spring. Max relaxed his shoulders, let his arms hang loose at his side.

  No need for collateral damage, or to indulge in diversions. Not now. Later.

  The Beast resisted. The target wasn’t here. There was time. It was hungry.

  Quiet.

  He didn’t hear the door open, didn’t realize the children had taken a step into the office and stopped, until dust tickled his nose and scratched his throat, forcing him to notice them staring at him. The Beast had been so strong and insistent making its demands that they’d both missed the reality of the intrusion.

  The children knew the code to the door lock. Had they watched their father, or had their mother given them the numbers?

  The girl was taller, pale and ruler thin with frizzy hair and clothes that hung on her frame as if she hadn’t quite grown into what an older sibling might have handed down to her. The boy, reaching his sister’s shoulder, wore a school uniform of tie and white shirt, dress pants and shoes. His hair was mussed and his cheeks red from exertion.

  The tang of their sweat whetted his appetite.

  The Beast lashed out at them, eager for blood and screams. Max grunted, squeezed his eyes shut for an instant, shaking with the effort to restrain himself. He wondered, in that instant, just how much his employers would mind if he surrendered, just this once. Would they even know? He could do the cleaning himself.

  The family wasn’t even supposed to be in the house. No one would know what had happened to them. He could get away with it.

  Max opened his eyes, weathered by the storm of his raging hunger.

  The children hadn’t moved. They continued to stare, lips pressed together, though they held hands as if to steady each other against the fierce headwind of a hurricane making landfall.

  And then the Beast relented, collapsed back into itself and deeper into Max, suddenly uninterested in vulnerable, defenseless prey.

  Max knew he hadn’t really prevailed, this time. Something else had intervened.

  The house? The memories of old atrocities echoing under the roof?

  Max met their gaze. Children see so much. Something inside him cringed under their regard, which angered as much as puzzled him. He shouldn’t be sensitive. He never thought about the old days in Calcutta, when he’d been younger than them, and had suffered, as well. He didn’t like to be reminded of that time. He should kill them just for provoking the memory.

  The house sighed, as if releasing a breath it had held for too long.

  No. He wouldn’t repeat what he’d already done here. Even with anger poised like knife points pressing against his eyes, threatening to blind him with rage, he wouldn’t punish them. The Beast didn’t insist.

  The children stood as if in a graveyard before the stone that marked the place where their father was buried. Waiting. His rage subsided. They didn’t waver under his gaze.

  He picked out the truth in their bone structure, the color of their eyes: they didn’t belong to the man he’d been sent to kill. But they belonged to the woman, the house. Stepchildren. So his target didn’t have kids of his own. Where had the mother come from, again? Another part of the story he’d missed. It shouldn’t have mattered.

  There was more: bruising on their skin, the sunken flesh of the girl’s face, the boy’s stoic, nearly dead eyes. Triggers for his flash on Calcutta. Memories haunted them, too. For them, the past’s pain was a living thing still drawing blood and smashing bone, as if they each had a tiny Beast living in their bodies, a parasitic creature sustained by pain and rage. Instead of torturing others, the Beasts they carried had become their tormentors.

  That was why his Beast had broken off its demand for prey. The children were dead. Someone had already killed them, from the inside. And the Beast was not in the mood for carrion.

  The old house seemed to remember on its own. Broken pieces of those old days blew into Max’s thoughts, but he couldn’t put together what he’d shattered. The house wouldn’t let go. It kept him mired in the history he’d made for it.

  Maybe the target had killed their true father. He was certainly their persecutor. Was he doing the same thing to the mother? Was this the work of his own demon?

  Max didn’t understand. The Beast could never torture without killing. The journey from one to the other was what fed their hunger.

  The house wouldn’t let go of Max’s thoughts. It dragged him to its past.

  Perhaps, Max had been the one to kill their father, on one of assignments. Killing was his job.

  Getting even more entangled in possibilities, Max tried to imagine the target setting up the woman’s husband in the safe house so he could have the wife. Bizarre. Complicated, like the plot of a movie Max could never sit through. Why wouldn’t the target just kill the husband?

  Not everyone was Max. That was another thing his superiors were always telling him, as if he needed the reminder.

  He couldn’t remember the dead faces from the last time he’d been in the house to compare them to the children. So much happened over the years. He couldn’t be sure. Didn’t care. He’d done so much more, so much worse.

  But the mystery of the family’s unexpected appearance, the children’s visit, and the Beast’s reaction to them, teased him with their hidden truths.

  There was vulnerability in the unknown, and he couldn’t be vulnerable. He was the hunter, not the prey.

  Max stretched for a truth to get him through the standoff with the children.

  Did the mother know he was upstairs? Did she know what he was? Who he was in her life—perhaps her old husband’s killer, certainly her new husband’s?

  Had she sent the children upstairs to see the man who’d murdered their true father, and who would release them from the man she’d mistakenly replaced him with? Was the suffering the children endured supposed to reach into his heart to motivate or punish him? Was she offering them to him in the hopes that he would put them out of their pain?

  The girl and boy continued to stare. Only the boy blinked. The girl looked like she was falling head first into a pit and trying to make out the bottom so she could anticipate the pain of her landing.

  He didn’t have to be their father’s killer. He might actually be innocent of creating orphans, this time. Were they here to show him he was doing more than just killing an inconvenient asset? To plead that he take special vengeance for them on their new father for all he’d done to them, for what he’d done to their real father?

  He stopped at the possibility that the woman and man had both had a role in the old husband’s death, and that she’d come to regret her betrayal.

  A nonsensical twist. Things like that never happened in real life. Even the house moaned from the weight of possibilities.

  Too many human bonds, feelings, truths. He was lost in actions and consequences not entirely his own. The house was a maze of emotional knots, both past and present.

  Questions. They didn’t matt
er, in the end. There were other, simpler options that could make questions irrelevant.

  Eliminate them all.

  Tempting.

  But Max didn’t move. He was supposed to wait for the intended target. Killing them now might warn his prey. And there was still the issue of collateral damage. Children were always a problem. He avoided them at all costs.

  But the children might also raise an alarm if he didn’t do anything about them.

  Maybe the mother didn’t know he was up here, after all. Perhaps she’d been distracted by her pain and hadn’t noticed them going to the attic.

  The children would tell her they’d found someone in their Daddy’s office.

  Downstairs, their mother broke down, sobbing.

  Reality. He’d lost himself in the house, in feeding the Beast bits of the past to keep it quiet. He was imagining scenarios too fantastic to be true. After all, did children really confront killers in the world outside this moment? Did mothers throw their young in the way of predators? Could a woman discover her new lover’s hand in her old husband’s murder, or conspire with a lover to kill her children’s father and then regret her action? Did wives arrange to place themselves at the scene of their husband’s assassination? Did they contract killers? Want to die alongside their victim?

  Could a man be so blind not to see his closest, dearest enemy? The Beast snickered, making a sound like breaking bones inside Max’s head, enjoying a joke Max could not quite grasp.

  It seemed to Max that the answer to such questions should be self-evident. But for him, they remained elusive, lost in the tangle of humanity.

  And he was the one they called a monster.

  In the end, answers didn’t matter, only what he did.

  The children glanced over their shoulders, as if hearing their mother’s call, looked to one more time at him, then turned to leave. “Don’t tell her,” he said, surprising himself. And then, he said, “Stay here.”

  He’d kill them all when the husband came home, discovered his wife, ran upstairs to flee her weeping.

  The boy put a finger to his lips. The girl shushed Max, gently. The Beast barely noticed, as if nothing more than shadows had crossed over Max.

  An understanding passed between himself and the children, though he wasn’t sure what bargain had been struck.

  When they were gone, Max had difficulty remembering if the children had actually ever been in the room. Had he been hallucinating? Did they actually exist? Had he let memories and appetite twist his sensibilities?

  No. New dust had been raised. They’d left footprints. He heard the children and their mother talking, downstairs. There was even a thin trickle of laughter running through them. They were all real.

  The children wandered into the kitchen. Tools left behind by workmen clinked and clattered.

  The woman called to them, and there was silence.

  Whispers followed.

  The stairs creaked with the weight of the children climbing back up.

  Max had a vision of child killers throwing the door open and firing nail guns at him. But the Beast remained untroubled, preferring to nest in old blood.

  The door cracked open. Something bounced on the floor, then rolled. Too small for a grenade.

  A faint voice whispered, “Monster.”

  That word, again.

  The door closed.

  The Beast caught the hot fragrance of fresh blood. The mother’s blood, from a cut seconds old. The blood had been splattered on the bullet that rolled to a stop between Max and the door.

  He stared at the bullet, a 9mm hollow-point round. The children descended the stairs. They whispered to their mother, who led them out. They ran back to the kitchen for a final snack. Before she closed the door, she reset the alarm.

  A dog barked from a yard a few houses down the block.

  The house remained, as did memories. The woman wasn’t putting herself on the altar of retribution. She’d just come by for the sake of the children. To leave the bullet.

  The bullet kept him company while he waited for the target. Max wasn’t sure what he felt about prey escaping his grasp, but the Beast didn’t whine about the loss. That was something, at least.

  The bullet, like the presence of the children in the attic, teased out a few more odd questions. The house wouldn’t let him go, proving itself worse than a debriefing officer after an operation. Something bad always happened with too much waiting time. Usually, collateral damage.

  Was the round a warning that he should leave, that he was sitting in a trap? Was it a gift for the man he was supposed to kill? Did the wounded little family really believe he was their avenger?

  A chill passed through him. The attic was cold.

  The tactical team designated by the depths of his mind to kill him never materialized.

  Max wanted to laugh. Now he had good reason not to go back to old killing grounds. They posed too many questions.

  The shadows grew longer across the attic floor. The Beast became restless again, starving on old blood. The room remained cold. The garage door suddenly opened. A car pulled in.

  The inside house door from the garage opened.

  Someone punched in the alarm code.

  Heavy footsteps raced up the stairs, driven by apparent eagerness for the work needing to be done.

  The door opened. The man burst in. Saw Max. Tripped on his own feet and fell to his knees. Cried out.

  Max demolished old dreams and made new memories in the house. When he was done, he left the bullet on the remains.

  If he’d waited for the dead to come back, he might have asked if they were satisfied with what he’d given them. But Max was done wallowing in old blood. Let the past and all that had and might have happened stay where he’d left it.

  Leave the house with its ghosts.

  No collateral damage. Not even to the house, though he was tempted to trigger the self-destruct mechanisms and put the old, bloody beams to rest. But the explosion would trigger a probe and eventually the basement would be dug up, the body discovered, and questions raised about why someone had been buried alive.

  No. Not even the house. His employers would have nothing to complain about.

  He took his time leaving the way he’d come in. There was no hurry. The house couldn’t reach his thoughts, anymore, through the fresh paint of blood.

  There was nothing more to do until the Beast’s hunger returned, or a new assignment came, or the next wounded soul rose from the ranks of the living or the dead to call him a monster.

  THE KEEPER

  Seth sat in the straight-backed, unpadded metal fold-up chair in the Quiet Room staring out the wire-grill-covered window while Mr. Black talked. Mr. Black was not his real name. That was the least of his secrets. Seth found it too painful to look at Mr. Black directly. The secrets were like the barbed wire that topped the facility’s layers of fences. They slashed and cut when Seth made eye contact, when he touched Mr. Black’s mind.

  “We’d like to try something new,” Mr. Black said. “A little role reversal. Like that old Star Trek episode where the captain and his crew wound up in the dark universe.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Seth said, quietly. The medication rounded off the sharp edges of his mood. Seth tried to draw comfort from the certainty that, before being institutionalized, he would have given Mr. Black a good fight before the government man killed him.

  “Excellent,” Mr. Black said, closing his hands into fists. “You already know. You understand. Perfect.”

  Seth recoiled slightly at the acrid hormonal cloud of aggression Mr. Black exuded. He didn’t always need a look to know what someone else wanted. “This isn’t a television show. This is real life. Real people are going to be hurt.”

  “Do you think you might get hurt?”

  “I’m not suicidal.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Mr. Black clapped his hands, stood, went to the door and rapped the window with a large, misshapen knuckle.

  Two keepers
entered and helped Seth up by the arm. Bracketed by their solid bodies, Seth walked the hall of the ward that had been his home for the past year. Omar and Kasie started toward him, but Mr. Black strode ahead and they withered and withdrew like night flowers facing the sun. The duty nurse barely looked up from her station by the door. Mr. Black passed his ID card over the door lock and it clicked open.

  The keepers carried Seth over the threshold. Someone screamed on the ward. The door slammed shut behind them.

  Outside. Seth closed his eyes against the brighter lights, the white walls. He wanted his own ward’s softer hues and subdued lighting, carpeting, aromatic therapies, subliminal calming visuals packaged into the pastoral videos playing on the wall-mounted televisions. Worse, he could not smell his friends, his lovers Omar and Kasie, and the rest of the ward’s population and staff that constituted the big, crippled family that had protected him from himself since he retired from reality and surrendered to the authorities. He was out of the womb he had worked so hard to return to, born again to the dangers of being himself among others who were not like him.

  “I have rights—”

  “As a matter of fact, you don’t. This is a military forensic facility and you are under Federal jurisdiction. Your court-appointed lawyer signed the papers on your behalf. And besides, we are perfectly justified in making this happen. It is a part of your treatment plan.”

  “I didn’t agree to anything.”

  “You didn’t agree to kill twenty-one school children in Montana, either, or strangle an eighty-year-old grandmother, or castrate the quadriplegic, or any of the other things on your record. You simply did them.”

  “I couldn’t help it. Their eyes, the things inside them—”

  “We understand. I sympathize. Even with the children. We’re all here to help. Trust me, you’ll feel like a new man once this is over.”

  “And if I don’t feel better?”

  “What’s the harm?”