Kingdom of Shadows

-10-

He made the car tailing him even before he’d reached his apartment. Rooster pulled over a block from the housing projects and continued on foot. As he crossed the courtyard, hurrying through the cold, the black Crown Vic crept slowly past, the windows and windshield impenetrably tinted. It continued a bit further down the street then pulled over and parked. Rooster kept checking back over his shoulder, but no one emerged from the vehicle.

When he’d reached his floor, Rooster stopped at the incinerator shoot and dropped the briefcase in, listening to it slide away down the shaft to the fires below.

Burn, he thought. Burn in Hell.

He slipped into the apartment and was met by a welcome burst of heat. Moving silently, he went to the bedroom and stopped just inside the doorway. Gaby was standing next to the bed, a blanket in her arms and a laundry basket at her feet. She’d already stripped the comforter, blanket and top-sheet from the bed but the bottom sheet remained. She seemed surprised to find him there, but smiled anyway. It was perhaps the most reassuring and comforting thing he’d ever seen.

Until he took a closer look at the bed. Rich dark soil was scattered across the sheet, blood and straw along the pillows. He narrowed his eyes and grimaced as fear clawed at what few defenses he had left.

“It’s all right,” Gaby said, quickly tossing the blanket over the bed. “Don’t look. It doesn’t mean anything. They’re just trying to frighten you.”

The night sky rolled above, moving, the fog turning and twisting as the rough ground tore at his back and shoulders.

“Gaby,” he said softly, voice breaking. “Gabrielle…help me.”

They were dragging him by his legs…pulling him across the field, the grass and weeds tangling and scratching him as he went, the night sky overhead, vast and ominous, the smell of death and burning flesh filling the air.

“Hell does more than burn the wicked,” she said. “It cleanses the lost clawing for the light. Remember what I told you. Let me help you tear them apart like they’ve torn at you.”

Hideous hands of straw, of charred flesh and exposed bone held him down against the fallen cross of wood while shadows moved about, laughing horribly even as they drove nails through his palms, destroying flesh and shattering bone, even as they hoisted the cross up and into position, even as Rooster screamed and begged for God to save him, even as unseen filthy hands held his mouth closed while others pierced his lips with an old rusted needle, running the leather string through the holes and pulling it taut until his screams were muffled groans and his mouth could no longer open.

“Remember what I told you,” she said again.

Those in the shadows pulled the burlap sack over his head, two holes cut out in the fabric to accommodate his eyes. Eyes that could still see…inhuman eyes now, the eyes of a soulless scarecrow…impossible eyes opening, seeing, watching, frozen in time, crucified to damnation and endless suffering.

“Rooster,” Gaby said forcefully, “remember what I told you about my name and what it means. Do you remember?”

“God is my might.”

And his eyes see the Hell he is trapped in…a Hell not of demons with pitchforks and cloven-hooves or boundless oceans of fire…but one in a small bedroom not so different than the one Rooster stood in now. A quiet and dark room where a little boy sat on a bed with crisp white sheets, crucifixes on the walls and a devil he’d believed a god sitting next to him whispering assurances that the things happening were just and right and moral and clean. Father McKay staring down at him with those striking blue eyes and telling him everything would be all right if he simply obeyed God’s will.

Tears stain Rooster’s cheeks. Rage, sorrow, fear—he cannot decide. All of them, goddamn you, all of them in a tempest of blood and tears and evil.

“They’re dying. You’re killing them one by one.” Gaby motioned to him with a slight turn of her head, her beauty shifting to something decidedly more sinister. “Burn them. Burn the fuckers away like the leeches they are.”

He smelled death…dirt…an open grave and its rotting remains…

Terror strangled him, its grip desperate.

The priest stood behind him, filthy and discarded now, like the souls he’d torn from countless children years before. “I know you,” he said.

“I watched you die.” Visions of Starker came to him. No. Not Starker. Father McKay, his head drenched in blood, choking on his own body fluids and gasping for forgiveness. “I killed you. Slowly.”

Blood so dark it was nearly black trickled from the corners of his eyes. “Did you think that would save your soul?” the priest asked.

“I only knew it would end you.”

The priest moved deeper into the room, stepping between him and Gaby, smiling wide like a demonic Cheshire Cat. “But that’s what you hoped for, wasn’t it. Just like now, you hope it will save you from me, from this place, from those waiting for you outside, from yourself. It won’t. Do you know why?” A fat brown spider scurried across his bald head, disappeared into his ear. He didn’t seem to notice. “Because the illusion of hope is Hell’s greatest joy.”

“And Heaven’s greatest weapon,” Gaby said from behind him, her eyes rolling to black as she grabbed hold of him, sunk her teeth into his neck and pulled him to the floor with shocking strength and violence, straddling him and tearing at his throat the way a wild dog might.

Light and dark merged as blood sprayed the walls.

Rooster backed away until he’d vanished into the safety of nearby shadows, the meager scraps of sanity he still possessed fracturing as night fell over the city of the damned.

Lost in time, through bloodshot eyes Rooster watched the sun rise on a new day, broken dreams collected at his feet, tarnished trophies stolen rather than won. The beautiful innocence of a little boy nailed to a cross of wood in burning fields called to him across the years, tears from a forgotten and wasted life and the sins of ghosts from a past he couldn’t quite remember and perhaps never would. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to.

Repent? Save our souls? Deliver ourselves from evil?

But rather than destroy, the flames in those burning fields were what would eventually free him.

Maybe that’s what we’re doing right now.

Rooster rubbed his hands together, they’d gone so cold. He lit a Marlboro and checked the corner. The Crown Vic was gone. From behind him, he heard heels clacking pavement. Bundled in a winter coat and hat, Gaby walked across the courtyard with her typical brisk stride.

Across the street, Nauls’ car waited.

Gaby smiled, no longer wolf, but lamb.

“Where are we going?” Rooster asked.

“Away from here,” she said, offering him her hand.

“Home?” he asked.

“Home,” she said. “But get rid of the cigarette. Those things’ll kill ya.”

He slipped his hand into hers, and for the first time in a long while, felt himself smile.

Fires burned. They always would. But Rooster’s flames no longer trapped him in a Hell of his or anyone else’s creation. Instead, they destroyed those things shackling him to the Devil’s playground, and all the nightmares and lies that had tried so desperately to keep him there.

The longer you struggle against truth…

In a dark and distant field, a hideous scarecrow closed its sightless eyes.

The longer the forces of darkness will bind you…

Rooster’s soul quieted as the demons fell back into the lightless abyss from which they’d come.

Hand-in-hand with Gaby, Rooster walked to the car. Somewhere beyond the horizon, death’s other kingdom waited.

A kingdom not of shadows and darkness, but of peace.