Inheritance: A Novel Part 47

"And you're going to fight him?"

"Yes. And when I do, I want you to get my wife out of here. Can you do that? Can you get her as far away from here as possible? As far away from me as possible."

Anderson flexed his hand, the memory of the pain was still fresh in his mind. Paul could feel the echo of it.

"Can you really fight him?" Anderson said. "How will you do that?"

"I don't know," Paul said.

"Well, what will you do? How can you possibly expect to fight somebody who's already dead?"

"I won't fight him in the way you mean," Paul said. "Not with my fists. Think of it like electricity. My father believes he can connect us. He believes by doing that he will make me stronger. I think I can turn that circuit back on him. I think I can blow the fuse."

Anderson let his hand fall back into his lap. "You're talking about suicide," he said. "You mean to kill yourself."

"If that's what it takes to stop this, then yeah, I guess I am."

"Paul, you can't."

"Keith, I'm not gonna argue with you. My mind's made up."

Anderson opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. He looked down at his hands in his lap.

"Are you ready to go?" Paul said.

Anderson sighed, then seemed to make up his mind about something. He looked at Paul then and said, "Son, you sound like you're in love with death. Like you've already made up your mind that that's where you're going. Listen to me, I have seen death. I've seen so much suffering. You have no idea. I've seen the dead rotting in the gra.s.s out in some abandoned field. I've smelled them cooking on the asphalt in the summer sun after a traffic accident. I've seen them on the autopsy table, all their dignity gone. You can't possibly want that for yourself. You have no idea what that would do to Rachel to live with that kind of knowledge. Paul, some wounds don't ever heal. Don't be that cruel to her."

Paul didn't hesitate with his answer. It all came out in a flood.

"Keith," he said, "I'm not at all sure who I am anymore. I used to know. I used to be so sure. I used to think I'd gotten a raw deal in the parents department. A psychopath for a dad. A mental vegetable for a mom. Then I became a husband. And then a policeman. All those things defined me in their own way. I knew where I came from, and I knew where I was headed. But now-h.e.l.l, I don't know. Everything I thought I knew about myself has turned out to be wrong. Can you possibly know what that's like, finding out that everything you know about yourself, about your past, is just wrong? Now I find out that I'm some kind of horror waiting to be loosed upon the world. I hate what I'm destined to become, Keith. Is it any wonder to you that I'm in love with the idea of dying? Wouldn't you feel the same way in my shoes?"

Anderson looked away.

"I don't know," he said, and it was the truth. "I really don't know."

Chapter 24.

Anderson pulled his Ford Taurus into the south entrance of the Morgan Rollins Iron Works and turned off the lights. He turned to Paul and said, "So, what next? We walk from here?"

Paul looked up at the ruins. The place was dark, a twisted skeleton backlit by the distant, hazy orange glow of downtown. It cast long, intensely black shadows down the drive towards them. He cleared his mind and thought of Rachel. She was up there somewhere. He could feel her fear and her confusion as though they were his own.

"You're sure your father's up there?" Anderson said.

"I'm sure," Paul said.

"But how do you know? I still don't understand that. Is it some kind of telepathy?"

"I don't know what to call it. Maybe it is telepathy. All I can tell you is that I can feel Rachel's mind up there. She's scared and tired. But hearing her is like trying to pick a voice out from across the room with a loud party going on in between."

"And your father? You feel him, too?"

Paul nodded. "My father is different. With him, it's like stepping outside and seeing a tornado coming up the street. It feels like he's everywhere at once."

Paul turned back to study the superstructure. The Barber fifty cent piece was in his hands, glittering in the light from the dashboard as it rolled over the backs of the knuckles.

Anderson watched it fly back and forth, back and forth.

Finally he said, "Paul, why did your father choose this place?"

The coin stopped suddenly.

"This is where it all started for him," Paul said.

"I thought you said he learned this witchcraft stuff in Mexico."

"He did. But he was up in that superstructure when this vision of his first grabbed hold of him. This is where it all started to make sense to him. This is where he wants it to grab hold of me. I guess he sees in that a kind of balance."

Anderson looked up at the superstructure and frowned.

"You ready?" Paul said.

Anderson swallowed hard and said, "Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am."

There had once been an asphalt driveway that snaked its way up from the south entrance to the main parking lot in front of the iron works. After twenty years the asphalt had crumbled and gra.s.s had grown up through the cracks and squeezed in from the curb line, giving the edges of the drive a sort of beach-like shape. A tattered remnant of yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the air above the driveway. Metal fence posts leaned at odd angles along the western edge of the factory, and they cast long, intensely black shadows down the length of the drive.

Anderson was walking with his head down, shoulders stooped forward, like a tired man walking into a strong wind, and he was starting to breathe hard, even though the slope of the drive was not that steep.

"Wait up, please," Anderson said to Paul, his voice breathy and winded. "You're going too fast."

Anderson drew the Glock at his hip. As the detective came abreast of him, Paul watched a bead of sweat pop out of his forehead and roll down his cheek.

"You're not gonna need that," Paul said, nodding at the gun. "Bullets won't hurt him."

"It makes me feel better knowing I've got it."

Paul shrugged.

"When we get inside, I want you to go straight to the smokestacks. You'll find Rachel there. Get her and get her out of here."

"Okay," Anderson said. "Just don't walk so fast."

A wind moaned through the ruins above them, and it brought with it a fetid odor that was deeper than scorched vegetation and dust and rot.

Anderson groaned.

Paul turned and looked at him. He knew what was happening to the detective. His mind was being a.s.saulted by despair and pain, his father's first line of defense. With his mind, Paul could feel the energy flowing around him like he was a rock in a fast-moving stream. But Anderson wasn't equipped to push that energy aside.

"Can you go on?" Paul asked.

Anderson closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, the expression there was soul sick, but he nodded.

Good man, Paul thought. Strong.

They entered the superstructure and started climbing their way through the twisted, ruined ma.s.s of cables and pipes and collapsed metal walkways. "Up here," Paul said, and pulled himself onto an elevated catwalk. Then he knelt down and reached a hand through the bars for Anderson to grab and said, "Here, give me your hand."

Anderson reached up for Paul's hand, but then his gaze went over Paul's shoulder to the metal wall behind him, and his eyes went wide.

"Paul, oh my G.o.d!"

Paul was bent over through the bars. He looked back over his shoulder and up the three story high wall behind him. Ten naked dead men were spidering down it head first. Their hair hung down from their heads like dirty rags. Their ruined junkie bodies shone palely in the low light. A keening moan rose from the one closest to them, and it was answered by the others in a sickening chorus.

"How?" Anderson said.

Paul turned back to him. "Run!" he said. "Get going. Get to the smokestacks." He pointed to Anderson's right. "That way. Go!"

"What about you?"

"Go!"

Anderson backed away from Paul.

"Go!"

He turned his gaze up once more at the dead men coming down the wall and stumbled off in the direction Paul had told him to go. Then he disappeared into the dark.

Paul watched him go, then stood up, and waited for the dead men to come for him.

It was like slogging his way through a muddy field. Anderson tried to make himself move, tried to get his hands and legs to obey, but it was so hard. He just wanted to fall back on his b.u.t.t and rest. There was a loud, droning noise at the edges of his mind that threatened to wash over him. He sensed it like the coming of sleep, so welcome, so warm, so easy to just give in and forget.

But he knew on some level that to give in was to die, and he wasn't ready to do that. Not by a long shot. He grabbed hold of the railing next to him and stumbled forward, climbing over rusted debris and closing his nose to the smell of the old blankets and rotting garbage that he pa.s.sed along the way to the smokestacks.

He could see them off to his left. They were gray towers poking above a skeleton of pipes and machinery. What were they, two hundred yards away? He could make that.

Maybe.

But then a sound stopped him, a slight noise around the corner ahead of him.

It had to be the wind rustling the sheets of corrugated metal that hung from everywhere around here. There wasn't anything else up ahead.

He heard another noise, the straining of rusted bolts and hinges beneath a large weight. He stared into the dark ahead of him and shook his head. Footsteps sounded on the metal catwalk a few yards away. He could hear moaning, that same gut-turning moan he'd heard just moments before when Paul had tried to pull him up through the bars, and he knew what that dirty shape standing in silhouette ahead of him was.

Anderson felt the sweat on his lips. He could taste the dust in the air, and even before the dead man stumbled around the corner ahead of him, his arms raised towards him in a gesture of supplication, he knew it was Bobby Cantrell.

When Ram stepped into the light he almost seemed to be pleading with Anderson. Cantrell's jaw moved constantly. His hands, mottled with the purplish tinge of lividity, opened and closed as though he was begging for food. His words wouldn't come, though his face was twisted with the effort to make his wallowing tongue p.r.o.nounce them.

Anderson pointed his gun at Cantrell. The weapon's molded grip wasn't any help. He was in such a state he could barely wrap his fingers around the receiver. The corpse shambling towards him obliterated every tenuous hold he had on sanity with each step. The rest of the world shrank away, and Anderson was left with an abomination moving towards him through the tunnel his vision had become.

Cantrell was barely recognizable. He had been in the South Texas heat for a week, the bacteria and the other microbes that fed on death eating him from the inside out, rotting him, creating a cloud of stench that moved with him. Anderson's lips curled up at the corner of his mouth in a sort of snarl, though it was a purely reflexive response to the smell. He brought up his gun and aimed it at his friend's chest.

"Stop, Bobby," he said, though he knew they were well past that point now.

Anderson could wait no longer.

He fired.

The first shot hit Bobby in the chest. He fired twice more in close succession. The bullets thudded into Bobby and shook him like a man shivering against a sudden chill.

But Bobby kept coming on.

Anderson's bowels almost let go. He raised the gun higher, took aim, and popped off another round.

The bullet hit right below the dead man's nostrils. It was a flawless take down shot, the sniper's sweet spot, designed to punch through the nasal cavity and turn the medulla oblongata behind it into a cloud of pink spray out the back of the head. And Anderson did see a wet chunk of something blow out the back of his friend's head. But it did nothing to stop the corpse. Bobby Cantrell continued forward, staggering on rotting legs, reaching for him with swollen, purple fingers, staring at him with dead eyes that felt nothing and contained no hint of memory, no recognition of a lifetime of friendship.

More dead men appeared behind Cantrell. They poured around the corner, nude and hideous with their thick black autopsy scars on their chests, the skin around the sutures puckered over by purplish skin that had swelled grotesquely by the action of expanding gas within their rotten husks.

Anderson turned and ran.

He bounded up a half flight of rusted stairs and swung himself up and over a railing beyond that. He ran down the length of the catwalk until he reached a section where part of the structure had given way. An open pit thirty feet deep yawned in front of him. He looked down and saw a mess of debris below him. Across the other side of the pit, a distance of maybe seven or eight feet, was the remainder of the catwalk. He could see it holding onto the metal wall to his right with frail looking mounts.

He turned and looked back. Cantrell and the dead men were coming. They weren't far away now. Where Anderson had been forced to stop and pull his soft, out-of-shape body up and over railings, or duck and belly crawl under loose sections of metal, the dead men advanced with the steadiness of ants.

He had to jump. There was no other alternative. They would be on him in another few seconds. He took a few steps back and muttered a quiet prayer. Then he ducked his head and sprinted for the edge of the busted catwalk and jumped for the far side. Anderson hung suspended in midair above the pit for a long moment, but even before his feet left the catwalk he knew he wasn't going to clear the pit. The instep of his right foot caught the jagged edge of the far side and he pitched over forward, landing hard face down on the other catwalk.

For a moment, everything went purple. His body, overloaded by pain and starving for the air that had been knocked from his lungs, refused to process the sensation. All at once feeling flooded back into him and he rolled over onto his back and screamed with pain. His foot felt like it had been sheared off, and he was surprised to see it still there when at last he could move his head enough to look at his own body.

Blood was pouring out of the wound, and there was a sharp, searing pain of pulled muscles along the backs of his legs and up and down his back, but that wasn't the worst of his problems. The metal catwalk was swaying like a tree in a stiff breeze. He could feel it moving beneath him, rocking against its mounts. There was a moment of dread that came from the foreknowledge of what was going to happen, and then his stomach rolled with nausea as the mounts gave way and the whole contraption upon which he lay went crashing over and down.

Anderson grabbed onto the railing. He felt the wreckage picking up speed, the collapsing metal groaning in protest. He imagined he could see the ground racing up to meet him, his body impaled upon tines of rebar sticking up from a debris pile.

And then he hit.

Everything rolled away beneath him and he hit, even harder than before, square on his right side. He tumbled downward on a tilted bit of catwalk and finally landed on his back. A wave of dirt rained down upon him and hit him in the face. Spluttering, he opened his eyes and saw metal. A large section of the catwalk had shifted downward and stopped just inches above his nose. Some sort of metal spar had speared into the ground less than a foot from his right ear.

But he was alive.

A thin groan escaped his lips. More dust sifted down from the debris above him and into his face. He shook his head and wiped it away with a b.l.o.o.d.y hand. Everything hurt, his whole body.

"Oh Jesus," he murmured against the pain. He could taste blood in his mouth.