The final baptism of flame would come, come soon, and it would end.
Everything would end.
Malachi smiled. He hated this place. But all of it, the endless searching for Lucas, the sleeping in the forest with snakes and ticks, the smell of horse feces and human excrement, it was all worth it in this moment of triumph and Dreaming.
Then he heard a noise. He turned around. The retarded man’s corpse was twitching, his legs shuffling minutely, then seeming to gain strength.
Malachi cursed softly. He was not surprised, for he had seen this happen before. It merely meant that he had failed to completely destroy the man's brain stem. But that in itself could create problems. He had to finish the job and leave before anyone else came into the saloon, or else the town might Activate. And while any such occurrence would come too late to save Lucas, a full-scale Activation would make his escape difficult.
Malachi pulled an implement from his pocket. It was shiny and metallic, the shape and size of a pencil. He pressed a button, and it snapped open like a spring-loaded telescope, ending in a wicked point.
He walked to the mentally crippled man. The headless body was moving fluidly now, sitting up and then flipping itself around so that it rested on its hands and knees. It had no sight - the eyes were gone - but the hands felt for Malachi’s vibrations on the floor.
He knew what to expect, so when he approached the man, he was ready. The headless body lurched at him, and he sidestepped easily, kicking the corpse in the back.
The man fell, and Malachi jabbed his instrument into the back of what was left of his head. The point penetrated the meat easily, before grinding to a halt against bone. As soon as it stopped, he hit the button again. He had to be quick, for in that instant the man was already rising once more, turning toward him with hands that clicked together like pincers. Should they find him, Malachi knew he would be crushed in their vise-like grasp, his life torn from him by the fingers of a man who was not dead, because he had never been alive.
Malachi was quick, though. Quick enough to do what needed to be done, and survive. The instrument crackled with energy, and the smell of burning flesh wafted into his nostrils.
The idiot’s body jerked like a fish on a line, and then fell to the ground. The tiny portion of his head that had remained was a charred nub now, burnt beyond recognition. It was dead. And, more importantly, it would not move again.
Malachi touched the button on the shaft of the metal implement a third time, and the probe withdrew to its original pencil-shape. He put it back in his pocket and headed to the door of the saloon.
He wanted out of this place. Out of this time.
And on to somewhen else, to kill again.
ONE - LOSTON
MEMO REPRO S-7/102467
Johnny was six years old when the man tried to kill him.
He was standing in front of the kitchen window that morning, pouring himself a bowl of Wheaties. The dry brown flakes rustled like leaves as they fell into his bowl, settling gradually into a small mountain that Johnny would soon destroy with a well-placed spout of milk, pretending he was a Rain God pouring out destruction on a mountain where his subjects cowered in fear.
Pouring that milk would represent the only concrete enjoyment to be derived from the cereal, as even with generous portions of sugar added to it, Johnny thought it tasted like nothing so much as dirt. And not just plain dirt, but dirt that had been left out in the sun too long and had somehow gone bad.
There were other brands of cereal, of course, but his mother didn’t allow them. She believed cereal should have the consistency and taste of old particle board. If it didn’t, it was at the very least bad for you, if not downright evil. So she fought the good fight against the sin of sugared cereal, waging battle against her enemy with Shredded Wheat and Puffed Rice and Wheat Chex, merciless in her attack and deaf to the cries of her son: the innocent casualty of a most cruel war.
Johnny begged and pleaded for a year before he got the Wheaties, which his mother saw as a borderline breakfast food: a fuzzy demarcation between the sides of good and evil. They were horrible, but still better than Shredded Wheat, so Johnny did the best he could with them: he shoveled tablespoons of sugar on the Wheaties and closed his eyes and pretended they were something...
fun.
That’s what he was doing that Saturday morning, when it all happened, when it all began: he was pouring cereal and minding his own business and wishing for some Froot Loops or even just some Frosted Flakes, but knowing with the grim certainty of a six year old of that neither was in his future. He would eat Wheaties until he died of fiber poisoning, and then his mother would be sorry. She would cry, and perhaps put a box of Froot Loops on his casket, but it would be too late then. He would be dead, and the Froot Loops would go uneaten, and it was all Mother's fault.
He put cereal in the bowl. Milk on top. Sugar. Stir it up. Add a little more sugar. More milk so that it sticks. And some sugar. Taste. More sugar. It was a ritual that would end as it always did, with his eyes closed and his mouth working at a frantic pace as he choked down grainy masses of sugar and pulped Wheaties and then worked up the courage to ask Mother one more time for something tastier.
The ritual was interrupted mid-stream, however, as he noticed the man who was walking down the street in front of the house. He was clearly visible from Johnny’s vantage point, perched as he was atop a chair in front of the kitchen sink. Johnny could see the man clearly by looking out the large window his father had installed only the year before, at Mother's urging. That window now provided Johnny with an easy view of the man, who stood a mere fifty feet away from the boy and his breakfast.
It wasn’t anyone Johnny had ever seen before, and in a town the size of Loston, that was odd. Most of the town eked a subsistence living out of the almost-dry silver mine in the nearby mountains, and the rest raised several staple crops: corn, wheat, some potatoes. Almost everyone knew almost everyone else. In fact, the only people who didn’t know everyone else were the members of the Town Council, who had the job because no one else wanted it and so they didn’t have to worry about getting to know the folk they represented in order to keep their positions.
Johnny wasn’t a Councilman, so even at his young age he already knew by sight most everyone in the town. But he didn’t know this person. The thought struck him then, perhaps for the first time, that Loston wasn’t the only place in the world.
The shot was less than a minute away.
Of course, Johnny didn’t know that. He only knew that he was understanding the concept of a stranger for the first time.
Stranger.
Strange.
Different.
This was a different man, a man unknown. As such he was, in Loston, as starkly out of place in the bright sunny day as a vampire would have been.
The man was dark. He had black hair and a purposeful stride that reminded Johnny of the way his daddy walked when he was angry...usually at something Johnny had done. It was a long stride, with each footstep placed firmly and fixedly as though walking according to a very specific set of instructions, almost machine-like in its precision and placement.
The man noticed Johnny watching him and looked fixedly back. He stared at him from the street, gazing at him in a way the little boy didn’t like, a pointed look that seemed to challenge Johnny's right to be alive.
Thirty seconds until the shot came.
Johnny was saved from being embarrassed at the man's scrutiny by the man's hair, which had one sharply-defined streak of gray in the front. Johnny nearly laughed when he realized the man looked like a skunk.
Skunk Man. He’s a skunk.
The thought amused him almost enough to make him forget his discomfort at being stared at, and the only thing that kept him from giggling out loud was the fact that his parents were asleep in their room not ten feet away. So he clamped his teeth together, wheezing silent laughter in the back of his throat, knowing that if he woke up his parents he would be forced to trade watching Saturday morning cartoons for watching himself pull weeds out of the thick soil in his mother’s garden.
The laughter threatened to overwhelm him, though, even as he tried to choke it down. In desperation, he clapped his tiny hands over his mouth and thought of his father being angry, and that seemed to help. It was enough to quiet him down again, at least for a moment. But his mind was feeling rebellious, it seemed, for suddenly in the midst of his imagining a new picture burst full-force into his brain. He pictured his father, yelling, his hand touching his belt in an ominous way...and in the middle of the movie playing in his head, Johnny realized his father had a booger hanging out of his nose. Not a big one, just a teeny one. But the thought of any kind of booger was too much for the self-control of a six-year old already wired from an earlier bowl of well-sugared cereal.
Skunk Man. Boogers. Daddy’s got a booger and there’s a skunk man walking down the street.
Johnny laughed a short staccato laugh, like a high-pitched machine gun that fired a mere three times before silence fell again. It was enough, however: Johnny’s father came out of his room, looking disheveled and a bit angry at being awakened too early on his one day off from the mine. Chore time.
Even confronted with the reality of an angry parent, however, Johnny's mind was determined to cause trouble. He kept seeing the image of his father in his head, red-faced, yelling, and now with boogers flying out of his nose like some kind of plague of Moses. The two images – his father as he stood in the kitchen and his father as he appeared in Johnny’s mind – superimposed weirdly, creating a strange feeling of unreality in the little boy.
His father opened his mouth to speak. As he did Johnny glanced out the window again and saw the Skunk Man disappear around a corner.
And at the same instant another man stepped into the house.
He entered through the rear sliding glass door that Johnny’s parents never locked. It was Loston, and no one came there to steal or even to visit, so what was the use of locking the door? Still, Johnny knew it was wrong to just walk into another person’s house. But here was someone doing it. Just doing it like it was all right.
Like the Skunk Man, this newcomer was completely unknown to Johnny, who wondered at the sudden influx of strangers in the small town. Then all curiosity fled as the man pointed something at Johnny’s father. A shotgun.
Johnny’s father opened his mouth wide in an expression of surprise. Perhaps to ask what the stranger thought he was doing, just walking in like that. Regardless, there was no fear in his eyes, possibly because the entry and threat had come too suddenly, too unexpectedly to be perceived as anything but one more annoyance on a very early Saturday morning.
Johnny's father had his mouth open, but he never got the chance to speak. His final thoughts remained just that, and would never be heard beyond his mind, for the stranger’s shotgun blasted out a gout of black smoke and a flash of bright flame and Johnny’s father fell. Johnny fell, too, the shock and the sound driving him to the ground as powerfully and irresistibly as though he were a nail under a mallet. It was a physical shock that had actual force, transcending sound and becoming a palpable feeling that slammed him downward to the cold tile of the kitchen floor.
As Johnny fell, he heard the stranger’s shotgun roar a second time. He heard/felt/smelled something whiz by his face, hitting the window, which exploded in a shrieking screech of shattering glass and crushed wood, and realized that if he had not fallen he would be dead.
A piece of his mind screamed to him, You’re hit! Buckshot had lodged in his shoulder, shattering his scapula and cracking his clavicle.
But Johnny did not feel the pain. Nor did he notice as the stranger cracked open the breach of the shotgun and shoved another pair of shells into the tube before closing the gun with a sharp crack. Johnny did not feel or hear anything at all at that moment, because at that moment all he was aware of was the strange sensation of looking at his father, lying on the floor beside him. At what was left of him.
The shot had exploded through his neck, tearing away flesh and bone and skin. The head was gone. Nearly gone, at any rate. Johnny found himself staring into the half of a head that remained: into the crater that had held his father’s brains only a moment before. Into a sightless eye whose lid had ripped off but which somehow had escaped damage. The eye seemed to stare at him, but Johnny knew that was a lie, even before the eye turned red as burst capillaries inside the orb allowed blood to flow like cheap dye across a costly white cloth.
His father was dead, and the eye stared at nothing.
Then Johnny looked up, and forgot for a beautiful second that his father was dead and lying beside him in a pool of blood. He forgot because the man who had come in the house was now pointing the shotgun at Johnny, point blank and no chance of escape in sight.
The gunman himself commanded attention almost more than the smoking instrument of death he clutched in one white-knuckled hand. His clothing wrapped around him like a kind of glove, tight-fitting and sleek. It was made of a fabric Johnny had never seen before. He wanted to touch it, but knew that now was not the time to do it. Or to do anything else. Miniscule lights danced across the surface of the man’s outfit, tripping back and forth like children playing hopscotch, a dizzying dance of changing colors that would be beautiful in other circumstances, but now merely served to spotlight the horror of this moment.
His hair was short and gray. Johnny could make out some kind of a symbol shaven into the side of the man’s head. It was a cross, like the kind in the front of Aunt Wilma’s church, only the vertical line of this man’s cross ended in a lightning bolt. It had a jagged, ugly look to it, as though the symbol had an inherent power to cause discomfort in any who might look upon it.