Waiting for Mister Cool Read online

  The upper hatch closed. Keitz and Morris stood at the control room hatch, watching. Max fell against the stairs, shattering one of the steps. Morris called out, staring at Max.

  The thump of an explosion shook the room, made the lights blink and released a shower dust from the concrete ceiling and in the control room. But the walls held. They were safe.

  Morris ran in, with Cal covering the entrance at the ceiling. Keitz stood in the doorway to the control room, still holding on to that hatch as if ready to shut it.

  “Never saw anyone move like that,” Morris said, grabbing Max by the waist of his pants and pulling him to his feet.

  “Guess I’m not as old as I look,” Max said.

  “Yeah. Or you take better drugs than me.” He signaled impatiently for Keitz to come out, then for Cal to open the hatch above. “You feel any different after you screwed with those thorns? Or did that water get you going?”

  “I always feel different,” Max said, realizing he’d dropped the M16 in the control room. He pulled out the .45 instead of going back to retrieve the weapon, suddenly not feeling the need for advanced weaponry. He stayed close to Cal, ready to poke the gun through the hatch and shoot.

  Keeping close to the action made it hard for Morris to ask him any more questions. And the promise of death kept him from imagining how the opposition might have acquired one of his grenades.

  The hatch went up, though Cal and Max had to push hard. The shed had blown apart, and wreckage had fallen back on the entrance. The Ferris wheel’s lights were faint in the swirling smoke that had replaced the shelter, but the crackle of automatic weapons’ fire was clear enough.

  Max crawled out on to the rubble first. Feeling his way to clear ground, his hand fell on the bloody shoulder stump of the man they’d left on guard up top. He brought his blood-stained hand back to his face and breathed in the fresh spill, eager to replace the clinging fetor of the pool. Cal and Morris came out next. Keitz was last, standing up too tall.

  The smoke billowed, and against the Ferris wheel’s lights he provided a good enough silhouette for a decent target.

  He danced a stutter-step ballet as bullets ripped through his legs and hips, punched his vest and pushed him back, then exploded his throat and cracked his skull.

  Max admired the artistry of the kill, but knew it had been lucky. Anyone that good on the other side would have shown themselves in the first attack. And he wouldn’t have missed the rest of them.

  Max circled, and tracked the shots to a nearby mound, where a pot-bellied man in work boots, jeans and checkered shirt was struggling to rise from his belly, bracing himself with a Galil for balance. Max came up behind him as the man, intent on ruins of the shed, assumed a kneeling firing position. After a quick glance to make sure there was no support, and with the Beast roaring so loudly in his mind he could barely see, Max put a bullet through his victim’s brain. The man’s cap, advertising an American beer, flew into the air trailing an arc of blood. He found two more grenades on the man and immediately regretted the quick death that had broken his only link with the twins. The Beast didn’t care, and urged him back into the fight.

  Morris was shouting into his headset while Cal fired short bursts into smoke when Max found them using part of the shed’s roof for cover. No one seemed to be returning fire. From the chatter, Max knew the men Morris had sent around the hedge perimeter had been ambushed by a small contingent of more crazed young men supported by a few armed adults. Darkness had proved to be a great equalizer.

  “Guess these guys aren’t up on the latest in military tactics,” Max said, raising the .45 but holding his fire until he could see something to kill. Both he and the Beast were ravenous for closer action.

  “Fucking amateurs,” Morris shouted.

  For once, Max agreed with Morris. “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”

  “Yeah, but I guess we got both,” Morris answered.

  Dirt kicked up a few yards in front, accompanied by the sound of angry hornets, as someone finally targeted Cal’s position. The cries and moans of the wounded rose through a sudden lull in the action, as Morris confirmed the positions of his own men. Then weapons barked like a scattered pack of wild dogs. From a distance, screams curled into the night. Max recognized their guttural source, deep in the tooth and claw death hunters granted their prey, and he envied the youths their moment of bliss, though he doubted any of them would survive the dying gunfire of their victims.

  The Beast’s ache for blood pushed Max to jump deeper into the fight, to draw blood in hand-to-hand action, and mix the aromas of ruptured gut and gunpowder into a heady perfume he could carry with him for a while.

  But Max held on tight to one of the grenades he’d taken off the last man he’d shot. The twins, he reminded himself. The twins. A chill passed through him, making him feel alone, abandoned, like an orphan cub, like the child he’d been. The sensation of emptiness brought a metallic taste to his mouth, and he wondered if he was, so many years after Calcutta, afraid.

  The first explosion made his loaded hands jump. Cal cursed and Morris’s shoulders twitched. The night retreated before an instant of combustion, and if there were any bodies flying through the lightning-lit air with the wreckage of the base of the Ferris wheel, neither Max nor the Beast could tell. The flash and bang of explosives always interfered with the sensual relationship between prey and hunter, and Max always did his best to avoid them. But sometimes, they were the best tools for the job. In this case, Morris and all of his men were the job. But the job hadn’t been given to him to perform.

  The detonation inspired a moment of hope that the twins were near. But there was no trace of them in the smoky air, and predatory instinct gave way to the void expanding from his heart.

  The Beast rushed in to fill him with a burst of rage so intense he could only resist the urge to kill Cal and Morris by squeezing the grenade until he thought it might explode from the pressure of his grip.

  The Ferris wheel teetered. Metal groaned. The lights flickered, then went out. Another explosion blew apart one of the lower cars and sent spokes shooting through the sky like burning spears. A third blew out a wall at the base of church steeple. A tight grouping of dull cracks, like a mortar barrage, or distant thunder, shook the structure from within. Walls sagged, part of the roof collapsed.

  The steeple and Ferris wheel fell at the same time, the wheel toward Max’s position, the steeple back into the church roof.

  “What the hell are they using?” Morris shouted, pointing at the steeple’s descent.

  “I told you,” Max said, holding up one of the grenades in Morris’s face. “You needed better intel on these guys. By the sound and strength of some of those blasts, they probably threw in some propane tanks, as well.”

  “But they’re just of bunch of –”

  Morris words were drowned in the crash of the Ferris wheel. Wood and metal blew past them. One of the cars bounced by, safety rail flapping. Nearby lamps snapped, though others positioned further away from the center of the fight remained lit. The din of destruction resonated with a resurgence of gunfire, more explosions and, too faint for normal hearing, the wails of the dying.

  The Beast consumed what it could from the fragments of flesh and bone, and at least one head, that rained down with the detritus of battle.

  Cal started up, pursuing a shadow on fire staggering out of cover, but he slipped in mud and fell. Morris gave up on the headset, throwing it aside and shouting for his men to fall back and gather around him. He flashed his light as a signal, which drew fire, but also answering signals. Max wanted to tell him to shut up and stop giving away their position. He aimed his pistol at the back of Morris’s head. Stopped. Pressed on the trigger. Stopped. Lowered the gun. Stopped. Waited.

  The Beast prowled at the edges of his thoughts.

  Weapons fire and explosions subsided like the exertions of exhausted lovers. Fires burned in the broken-down playhouse, saloon, and smaller buildings, where fie
ry debris had penetrated to the what dry wood could be found inside, though the ring of bunker houses around the perimeter remained untouched, as if immune to any violence. In the surrounding hedge, smoke drifted from embers glowing among branches and roots, as if fire had nested in and mated with the trees, vines and bushes to produce ghostly offspring.

  In the quiet, human voices rose in a faint, profane choir. Someone wept nearby. Max slipped away, found a man on his stomach. Turning him over revealed an open pit of a gut, black and bubbling with an aroma of raw sewage, surrounded by the remains of a thin, middle-aged man wearing a cheap shirt and tie, both stitched with the image of a laughing hamburger. Eyes glazed, the man didn’t seem to realize he’d been found, and Max picked one of the bone shards protruding from his thighs and shook it until the man seemed to catch sight of Max.

  “The girls,” Max said. “What did you do with the girls?”

  “Thank you,” the man blubbered, reaching for Max with shaking hands, as he bled from his mouth. Rectangular folded paper napkins, soaked in blood, tumbled from his fingers.

  Max shook him, hard. Morris called. Max ignored him, pressed his cheek against the man’s face, blood lubricating their stubble-lined joining. “Are they alive?”

  “They deliver us,” the man said, then laughed, sputtering blood that showered on the back of Max’s neck. “Thank you–”

  The croaking at the back of the throat told Max he wouldn’t get more, and he let the Beast take its victim, biting off the nose, taking both eyes, ripping the ears, chewing off the lips, all before the man’s last breath. The Beast leapt within him, joyous with the pain it had bestowed, the convulsions of agony it received in turn.

  Morris called to him again, louder, and Max returned to the remains of the shed’s roof that served as their pathetic cover.

  “I sent Cal out to round up the men,” Morris said, voice shaking, but eyes narrowed and mouth pursed as if doing his best to hold on to his training and his courage. “Don’t wander off.”

  Max grunted, then shouted into the night as loud as he could, “Kueur. Alioune.”

  “What the fuck,” Morris said, training his weapon on Max. He flashed his light in Max’s face, but quickly turned it off.

  “The girls,” Max said, listening for any signal they might send, even in a random cry of someone else’s suffering.

  “Fuck them, asshole,” Morris said, turning his attention back to the landscape’s blasted remains. “I warned you.”

  Max didn’t bother sharing his suspicions that the twins had been captured by the other camp. Or worse, had pretended to ally themselves with a nest of child abusers to escalate the confrontation. They would have had confidence in Max’s ability to survive, and might have even engineered the ambush to give him and the Beast reason to let loose and play. Though the Beast feared them, the twins held a measure of affection, perhaps even respect, for his demonic nature, and enjoyed arousing his secret self and watching the resulting carnage. And in the meantime, they could dig into the heart of their enemy and prepare to take their vengeance.

  He silently cursed Lee for not doing a better job keeping them out of trouble. But, of course, what could he have done to stop them, if they wanted to play? And if something had happened where they couldn’t have saved themselves, it was sure Lee, too, could not have offered any real protection.

  For a moment, he wondered what had happened to his old comrade, and almost called out Lee’s name.

  Instead, Max lay next to Morris, .45 at the ready, pretending to keep watch for enemies. His mind on the twins, he asked a question in their name, not really interested in an answer, hoping only to keep them alive inside of him, next to the Beast.

  “What about any kids these child molesters of yours might have with them?”

  “What about them?” Morris said, with contempt.

  “Young ones, I mean. Little ones. The kind these types like. If we find them when we –”

  “Put them out of their misery.” Morris kept staring out into the battered night.

  “Wouldn’t that be as bad what these men are doing to them?”

  “No, these sick fucks are using children for their own perverted needs. Look how the older ones they drained dry ended as – fucking zombies. They’re corrupting this holy place, the power it holds. Taking something sacred to get their disgusting rocks off on. It makes me sick.”

  “How about saving the children. The young ones.”

  Morris finally glared at Max. “Let’s stay with the big picture, okay? Keep it simple. Truth costs. They disappeared when they wound up here. Let them stay disappeared. We don’t need any strays who’ll slow us down, get investigations started by people who don’t understand what’s going on, what’s at stake.”

  “Do any of your men have kids?”

  “Why don’t you pick up a real gun and earn your keep,” Morris said.

  “Why don’t you put that flashlight away before you get us killed,” Max answered.

  Morris smashed his fist against the earth. “You think these morons are doing anything more than shooting blind and hiding from us right now?” His voice was shrill, and Max realized Morris might have gone to Coronado, but had definitely never made it through SEAL training, and had probably earned a psych discharge.

  “You don’t look so good, son,” Max said. It was the first time he’d ever called anyone ‘son.’ Though he disliked the term, he thought the word, couched in a softer tone, might put Morris at ease. He needed more information before deciding on his course.

  “I’ve been in the shit, before,” Morris said, through a clenched jaw.

  “This deep?”

  “Don’t know how deep it is, yet.” Morris glanced at Max, then asked, “You don’t look so good, either, asshole.”

  Max hadn’t considered he might be showing his concern for the twins. “Not afraid. Curious.”

  “Yeah. Like what.”

  Max shrugged. “Like missing ‘air support.’ Like what’re we fighting over. Curious, I guess, about the things you haven’t told me.”

  “Fucking steeple went down,” Morris said. “That hurts. Didn’t think they had the ordinance for that.”

  “What was it about the church?”

  “The fire. Up high.”

  “Not what you usually expect to see where bells ring.”

  “Throw a few seeds in every hour. Not too many. The smoke’ll kill you.”

  “So?”

  “What we call doesn’t hear. But it sees the fire.”

  Max wasn’t sure if Morris had gone insane, or if he was talking about a new kind of weapon system based on tracking a specific kind of plant, or even a certain kind of organic fuel for a fire. His own experience with the leaves and thorns, as well as his trip to the secret pool, brought to mind Morris’s mention of biological weapons, designed at the very least to induce mass hallucinations. He tapped Morris on the shoulder and pointed at the smoldering hedge behind them. In the night, the pockets of burning wreckage suspended in the branches looked like eyes, as if the blood-red berries had fed, and grown.

  “Shit,” Morris said. “Can’t go back there.”

  “But your secret weapon should see the fire.”

  “No seeds.”

  “What kind of plant doesn’t have seeds?”

  “Did you see that thing in the sky?”

  “I felt it.”

  “It carries the seeds. Every now and then, it gives us brief shower of them, and we pick up as much as we can. Keep the stuff contained, localized, until everything’s ready.” His voice sank to a reverent whisper when he said: “It doesn’t come from our sky. It comes from the bottom of another sea.”

  “What hit me wasn’t wet.”

  “I didn’t say that sea was made of water.”

  Max felt like he was arguing with a child, or a drugged adult. “A sea is still made of some kind of liquid. And an ocean doesn’t float over dry land, in the sky.”

  “What about the one where your dreams
come from, and your nightmares.”

  A headache sprouted at the base of Max’s skull, and immediately sent shoots to his temples and behind his eyes. He coughed, and only belated caught the acrid stink of something foul on the breeze blowing from Morris’s camp.

  “Well, whatever you had up there wasn’t worth too much tactically,” Max said. “It almost took me and some of your other men out. What other surprises do you have?”

  Morris stiffened. “You try controlling a thousand-meter limb in an alien environment, and a gravity well you’re not accustomed to –”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Max asked, his hand jerking as the Beast begged him to put Morris out of his misery.

  A shiver seized Morris’s body, like a sudden fever. Or fright. Perhaps a withdrawal spasm as a drug craving hit. “People keep all kinds of crazy beliefs in their heads,” he said, as much to himself as to Max. “Want to hang on to the past. To failure. Afraid of change. They don’t see reality. The future. They’re stuck in the past. Makes them stupid. Vulnerable. Fair game for folks like me, who can see opportunity in a pile of shit.”

  Max heard someone moving close by and tracked the sound, raised his gun.

  A familiar face loomed out of the darkness. “Lots of dead and wounded,” Cal said in a hoarse voice, trying to whisper and be heard at the same time. “Both sides. Nobody we can take with us. Stay here. Be back.” His eyes blazed above a grin for a moment, in an innocent expression of murderous joy.

  Cal moved off. Max settled into the silence, calculating the need for Morris and Cal. No one else seemed to be coming after them, and their last opposition would not have hit them so hard without Max’s explosives. It seemed a fair bet to believe he could safely make his way across the carnival grounds and into the camp by himself.

  The Beast urged him on, not for the sake of finding the twins or Lee, but to hunt for more prey.