The Big Reap

19.

It was Saturday, at least, which wasn’t nothing. Meant there’d be fewer kids. Fewer, but not none. The cars in the parking lot spoke to that fact, and the lights burning in every third window or so.

Clubs, I thought, inasmuch as I thought anything at all. Chess. Math. Anime, for all I knew. Heard once on the news that was a thing. Kids getting together to watch overdubbed cartoons or some shit. I remember thinking at the time, aren’t all cartoons overdubbed?

Lights showed too in the windows of the gymnasium, all placed high up so you’d have to work to knock one out with an errant ball. Meant I couldn’t see inside from the pancake place. Could be it was full. Could be just a janitor, waxing the hardwood floor. What did middle schoolers play come spring — basketball? Floor hockey? I had no idea. The fields outside the school were empty, which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it meant three injured, weakened Brethren looking to recharge their batteries with a fresh helping of life’s blood couldn’t swing by the drive-through and nosh to their blackened hearts’ content, they were gonna hafta go inside. Bad because that meant we had to follow after, and find them before they made with the snackin’.

“Let’s move,” I said, heading toward the school at a trot. Kate didn’t need telling, she was already across the parking lot and out into the street — horns blaring as traffic swerved to avoid her, because she didn’t so much as break stride. Me, I was ready to follow, and Gio, round fellow though he was, looked keen to as well, but Theresa was just standing there, mucking with her sawed-off.

“Ter…” said Gio, egging her along.

“Just a sec,” she said, and then I realized what she was doing. She was breaking down her weapon. She unscrewed the barrel cap. Dumped the spring and her spare shells. Then she removed the barrel, hefted it in one hand like a club. The rest, she chucked to the ground. “You think I’m bringing a gun into a goddamn school, you’re fucking nuts,” she said, “but that don’t mean I’m leaving it here where folks might do ill with it, neither. Now let’s go save some kids, shall we?”

We sprinted across the street after Kate, following the jagged line of Drustanus’ blood. Me lumbering out front in my sturdy new trucker meat-suit, Gio and Ter trailing behind. It was awkward the way they were forced to run. She was damn near twice his height and athletic to boot, while the body he was stuck in was as squat as it was short, but her blindness forced her to rein in her natural grace and shuffle alongside him, her hand gripping his upper arm. But like everything about those two, as odd and clumsy as it seemed, it worked — albeit slowly, in this case.

Sirens wailed in the distance, fast approaching. They’d be too late to save those kids, though, and so would we, if we didn’t hurry.

I scaled the front steps to the building two at a time, this big guy’s knees protesting against the strain. Gio and Ter fell behind — horns honking, tires squealing, the two of them cursing as they navigated as best they could across the street. The double-doors at the front entrance had been kicked in. Their small, square panes of glass had shattered, but were held in place by diamond-patterned wire. A foot-sized dent was in the middle of each, the doors buckled all around. The left one still rocked slightly where it lay just inside the entryway. Meant they weren’t far ahead.

“Sam!”

Kate’s voice, hoarse with panic, from the direction the blood drips veered. Away from the sign declaring open auditions for Guys and Dolls, thank God. I woulda thought that too sumptuous a meal for the likes of the Brethren to pass up.

I followed down the darkened, locker-lined hall, my only accompaniment the echoes of my footfalls. As I rounded the corner, slipping on the buffed-shiny vinyl tiles, I spotted Kate crouched and tense, her back to me. She was a good twenty yards away. Twenty more past her hunkered down a muscled beast, pocked with a crosshatch of thick, pink scars and random, bone-threaded piercings — across his face, his shoulders, his naked haunches, his dangling, mutilated member… and his sole remaining arm. Drustanus. By the angle and the regularity of the scars, they mostly looked self-inflicted. The piercings, of which there were dozens, were amateur and thick-scarred all around as well, through cheeks, through muscle, a couple even looking as though they’d been forced or drilled through bone. Each one looked to’ve been more excruciating than the last.

In his hand, he clenched with bleeding fingers a long, jagged shard of window glass. He must’ve run the whole way over from the restaurant with it in his grasp. But why?

He answered as if I’d asked the question aloud. “My brother tells me metal implements put you at an advantage,” he rasped, his words baring a crowded jumble of jagged yellow-brown teeth, and a tongue forked, black, and glistening. “Which is why I’ve chosen to gut you and your pretty little human here with something less conductive.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Of course, you should have enlisted your missus to help you out. I don’t plan on going easily, after all, and it looks like you could use the hand.”

Drustanus looked down at his bleeding stump — which had begun to knit itself back together, but still pattered globs of red-black clotted blood onto the floor — and then back at me. I was hoping to prod him into anger, maybe prompt a careless, ill-considered attack, but instead Drustanus laughed.

“I suppose I should be honored to hear the dulcet tones of your sultry, sultry voice,” I said. “I hear tell you ain’t been much for talking these past few hundred years. But then maybe that crazy bint of yours just ain’t worth talking to.”

“Your jibes,” he said, “sting not, for Yseult knows full well the depth of my love for her. Every bit of suffering I inflict, and every bit that I endure, serve to demonstrate my devotion to my own dear, sweet Yseult. She is the sole goddess to whom I sacrifice, and I am the sole god to whom she does the same.”

“Cool. I’ll tell you what, when I kill your ass — and believe you me, I’m gonna — I’ll be sure to dedicate your dying breath to her. It’s just a shame she won’t be here to see you off. I’d hate to rob you of such a touching moment.”

“Fear not,” he croaked, “you haven’t.”

A door shut just behind me. I hadn’t even heard it open. I wheeled to find behind us the mottled flesh of the no-longer human-looking Yseult, slinking toward us from a once-more shuttered classroom.

Her frame was still small and feminine — almost childlike. Her arched back, small breasts, and duck feet suggested dancer. Her ratty accidental-dreadlock hair and oozing open sores suggested meth-head. The fact those sores crawled with maggots, and that her mottled purple livor mortis skin was sloughing off in chunks — exposing muscle here, yellow adipose there, a gleaming white glimpse of bone at knee, and of tooth through gaping cheek — suggested that this dancer meth-head had taken a long walk off a short pier into cold water and didn’t wash up for a week or two, once the crabs and lobsters had their fill.

It took me a sec to realize the sores that polka-dotted her dead flesh weren’t sores at all. They were too round, too regular, a Venn diagram of overlapping circles, some knotted old scars, others seeping lymph and pus, still others raised with fresh blisters.

They were burns: from cigarettes, from cigars, from orange-glowing coils of old-fashioned automobile lighters. Self-inflicted, no doubt, to demonstrate how much she burned for him.

It’d be sweet if it weren’t so goddamned disgusting.

When I saw a shard of glass in her blue-tinged, black-nailed hand as well, I realized too late what had happened. The words fell from my lips as soon as they occurred to me.

“This is a trap,” I said. “Grigori told you to lay a trap for me, didn’t he?”

The question was, by default, directed at Yseult, since she was the closer of the two, and therefore the one that I was facing. But it was Drustanus who answered. “She won’t tell you anything,” he said. “She can’t.”

“Aw, c’mon,” I chided, trying to buy some time, “cat got her tongue?”

“Actually,” he said, a note of affection evident in his tone, “it was a hyena she fed it to, once she bit it off to prove her love to me.” She opened her mouth and stuck out as best she could a ruined stump of blackened meat that was once a tongue. “She always has been better at expressing her devotion than I.”

“He set you up, you know,” I said. “Grigori, I mean.”

“He didn’t.” Drustanus’ rusty voice was full of defiance and false bluster, doubt shading both.

“He did,” I insisted. “Just like he did to Ricou. What was it he told me? That Ricou was a sacrifice to the greater good. How’s it feel to be tied down atop the altar right behind him?”

Kate leaned in close and muttered, “Uh, Sam? You think when we find ourselves stuck between Zombie Bonnie and Clyde is the right time to practice your taunting skills?”

I ignored her. And the voices in my head saying pretty much the same damn thing — one mine, the other the trucker’s.

“You’re mistaken,” said Drustanus.

“Yeah? Then answer this, whose idea was it you should lead me away from him while he went and found someone to eat?”

Drustanus’ hideous features darkened. “It was only logical,” he said. “My injury left a trail, after all, and Grigori knew we two would not assent to being separated. If we wished to confront you in numbers, it had to be Yseult and I.”

“You sound just like him. He wound you up with all his pretty talk and let you go, didn’t he? That must be why he waited until the bitter end to make a punk bitch out of you, no one likes to have to put down their favorite lapdog.”

Drustanus roared. Charged. Blood dripping from his stump, and from his one remaining hand, which still gripped the makeshift blade of glass. And then, in that slow/fast/out-of-sequence/all-at-once way times of blood and valor seem to unfold, the scene shifted. Yseult coiling to pounce in support of her one true love, a low growl escaping her lips. Kate, beside me, assuming a defensive stance — knees bent; weight on the balls of her feet a shoulder-width apart; hands open, not balled into fists; arms up and ready. Me, looking back and forth between the two threats, handicapping the odds of each reaching us before the other. A rush of footfalls. Drustanus, distracted, looking past me and away. Me following his gaze. Yseult turning, twisting, and then with a metallic thunk and a crack like shattered bone, she’s going down, jaw shattered, head half caved in. Gio, behind her a little ways, doubled over, panting, one hand against a nearby locker for support. And Theresa following through with her swing of the steel pipe that was her dismantled shotgun’s barrel as if she were Hammerin’ Hank himself, knocking a ball into the stands.

Drustanus still coming. Eyes wide and wet and not on Kate or me, instead locked on Yseult’s dazed, flopping form; her eyes rolled back, her limbs rigid, mangled mouth foaming pink at the corners.

“Ter,” I yelled, “the pipe!”

Ter’s a good soldier. A fighter through and through. She didn’t question, didn’t hesitate, and — despite her blindness — didn’t miss. She chucked the barrel to me, and I lunged toward the speeding freight train that was Drustanus, jabbing it forward with all I had.

It struck his ruined flesh, his fragile bone, underfed and undernourished in the face of all the energy he’d been expending — and, thrumming with sudden electricity — punched straight through.

He slumped to his knees. Blinked in confusion. Dropped his shard of glass onto the floor. It shattered. He tipped forward. And as I plucked the yellow, chalky remains of his soul from the end of the gun barrel, grinding them to dust between my fingers, his last pained, reverent word was, “Yseult.”

His body caved in before our eyes. Shook the building from foundation to rafters. While behind us, unnoticed at first, Yseult struggled to her knees, and plucked her own glass shard up off the floor.

It was her strangled pleading I noticed first. A wet, guttural sound, like an animal not known for the ability trying to mimic human speech. When I turned away from her fallen lover, I saw her, head dented like a rotten Jack O’Lantern, moving her shattered jaw, her face all twisted up, not with anger, nor malice, but simply grim determination.

When my gaze trailed downward to what her hands were doing, I realized what she was trying to say, what she was trying to ask of me.

She’d used the shard of glass to slice open the flesh of her chest; gouged deep furrows into the yellowed breastbone beneath, and cut muscle and connective tissue away from between her two exposed ribs. Pushed her tiny fingers through the gap — probing, searching, to no avail. What she wanted could not be found without assistance, without the touch of one of my kind to make it present itself.

She was trying to gouge out her own soul.

To follow her beloved to the grave.

As Drustanus had said, she always was better at expressing her devotion than was he.

I approached her, hand extended — equal parts a calming gesture, and a promise of death’s reprieve. “Sammy, the fuck you think you’re doing?” asked Gio with alarm. “You just killed that freaky bitch’s boyfriend. Now you’re gonna make all nice?”

He took a step toward me, intending to intervene, but I waved him off with my free hand.

“It’s okay, Gio. Yseult’s not going to hurt me. If she did, if she evicted me from this meat-suit, it would only delay her in following Drustanus. Isn’t that right, Yseult?”

Tears shone in her eyes. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

I couldn’t help but feel some kinship with her. My eternal damnation, after all, was nothing more or less than an extended demonstration of my love for my dear, sweet Elizabeth. As my hand found her shoulder, and her body shuddered from the sudden current of my touch, I told her, “I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal.”

Her hand dug deep into her own chest once more, and then her eyes went wide. With her last ounce of strength, she pulled it free, and then slackened.

Her withered soul fell from her grasp, cracking as it hit the floor.

I let go of her. She slumped to the vinyl tiles. Then I ground her soul to dust beneath my boot. Her body followed suit, desiccating before our eyes.

“Now,” I said, “let’s go find Grigori.”