Inheritance: A Novel Part 48

Above him, the wreckage continued to shift and groan. He blinked the dust from his eyes and saw movement through the web of metal that had landed on top of him. Cantrell and the other dead men were moving through that web, and they were close by, maybe ten or twelve feet above him at the most.

Anderson closed his eyes and prayed.

Paul listened to the sound of gunfire echoing through the superstructure. Three quick shots in succession. Anderson was in trouble. And wasting his ammunition, too. These weren't Hollywood zombies. They didn't go down with a well-placed shot to the brain. They were extensions of his father's will, meat puppets at the end of a wire. As long as his father had need of them, they would continue to advance.

Several of the dead men dropped from the wall and onto the platform. They were in front of him now. Others had him cut off from behind.

But they didn't advance on him. They stayed back a good twenty feet. Paul stayed perfectly still. One of the dead men pulled a section of corrugated metal off the wall, exposing an empty s.p.a.ce within. Paul looked into the blackness and knew it was a direct route into the center of the superstructure where the circular chamber, and his father, waited.

He scanned the faces of the dead men, and though their eyes were milky and vacant, he knew what they wanted of him. He was to go through there, and he was to do it of his own accord.

That was important. Somehow, in fact, it made all the difference. If he came willingly, it was his way of turning control over to his father, of surrendering his will. But to do that was to lose. Even if he fought, they would still subdue him and bring him to his father's feet-he knew that-but he would do it with his will unbent. And that was the difference.

Yet it wasn't so easy to keep his chin up. The same power that had been growing exponentially within him over the last few days had now become something like a magnet. It wanted to cling to what was in that circular chamber. Even the simple act of standing still required a tremendous effort on his part. He wanted to go inside. Every cell in his body begged him to go. Only his will fought back.

He reached into his pocket and he took out the Barber fifty cent piece. He turned it over in his hand and it winked at him in the low light. He caressed the edges of the coin with his thumb, feeling the deep gouge at the top that had been worn smooth by countless hours of slipping through his fingers.

It felt heavier than normal. He closed his fingers around it and tried to focus on everything that had happened to him. When he told Anderson that he felt like everything he thought he knew about himself had turned out to be a lie, he wasn't being completely truthful. Yes, his childhood was a lie. He had been oblivious to his mother's suffering. He had lived in the same house as her for twelve years and never understood what his father was doing to her, how he was bleeding her dry, body and soul. And when his father had returned, he had almost gone over to him. He had almost believed in his father's vision. He knew now that was a lie, too.

But the one thing that had not changed was Rachel. That love remained, and it was not a lie. That part of his life was clear to the bottom of the gla.s.s, and when he held that Barber in his hand, he could touch the truth of that love.

When he opened his eyes again, he found it easier to hold his ground. One of the dead men held a withered arm out towards the blackness of the tunnel like he was leading a tour through an old Roman ruin. This way to the other side, sir. Through here you'll see a lovely furnished colonnade that opens up to the public amphitheater. If you please, sir. Watch your step there...

Paul shook his head.

The dead man dropped his arm. Two others advanced on him.

Paul slid his collapsible baton from his belt and snapped it open. He stood with it c.o.c.ked back over his right shoulder, waiting for the lead dead man to walk into the sweet spot of his stroke.

"Come on," Paul said. "A little closer."

When the first dead man came into range, Paul stroked him upside the head with a blow so forceful it broke the man's neck and left a grotesque indentation just above the man's left ear. Paul drew the baton back over his shoulder and backpedaled. The dead man continued to advance, his head bent over to one side at an unnatural angle. His hands came up towards Paul and the fingers flexed. Paul stepped forward again and swung his baton. This time it was like hitting a rotten pumpkin. The skull gave way beneath the blow with a splat. Paul rained blows down on it again and again, reducing the man's head in seconds to something that looked like a deflated balloon.

And still it came on.

Paul swept its legs out from under it, then turned and tried to climb up the railing behind him. The dead were on him in moments. He fought with his fists and his knees and his elbows, slinging bodies off the side of the platform and down into the tangled wreckage beneath him, but there were just too many of them. They pulled him down to the floor and they twisted his arms behind his back and he felt the bite of his own handcuffs as they clamped down on his wrists.

Chapter 25.

Rachel had crawled as far as she could go into a corner. Behind her, a pair of cement walls rose up twenty feet to the base of the smokestacks. The smokestacks towered up another hundred feet above the top of the walls. Gazing up at them made her dizzy. In front of her were huge piles of garbage laced through with skeins of heavy metal cables. Presumably, she was in some sort of abandoned factory, but what she was doing here, and what was to happen to her, she had no idea. The dead men who brought her here had evidently not wanted to kill her. They certainly could have if they'd wanted to. The way they'd punched into her apartment and pulled her from it like birds pulling a worm from the earth, she suspected they could have torn her to pieces.

Instead, they brought her here.

She really didn't even remember how she'd gotten here. One of them had slung her over his shoulder in a sort of fireman's carry and brought her into the backyard behind her apartment. They had stepped into thick vegetation that choked the alley beyond the fence. She'd felt weeds and branches tearing at her skin. And then they were through the vegetation and crawling over endless catwalks and piles of garbage. She had ended up here, tucked away in this corner.

Those things, those dead men, had been standing guard over her at first. But they were gone now. She was alone, scared and alone. There had been some strange noises, high, metallic popping noises that almost sounded like distant gunshots. After that, those dead men had scaled over the garbage and disappeared. They hadn't looked at each other. They hadn't spoken. They didn't seem to perk up like dogs to a whistle outside of the range of her hearing. They just climbed into the superstructure and vanished, like spiders into a sink full of dirty dishes.

They'd been gone for a while now. Slowly, almost as though she doubted that she could, she rose to her feet. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and started walking through the wreckage, trying to be quiet, listening for anything, always expecting another of those dead men to suddenly step around a corner in front of her and tear her apart, until at last she came to a place where the superstructure had collapsed. The tangled mess before her seemed to be the remains of a catwalk and its supports. There was no way around it, and she couldn't climb over it. It didn't look stable. And she certainly couldn't turn around and go back. Those dead men were back there.

Her only real choice was to try to go through it. She ducked down and found a small tunnel where a platform of some sort had collapsed over top of the catwalk itself. The metal lattice floor of the catwalk was tilted to one side, but if she held on to the railings and pulled herself along, she might be able to make it through. It looked like she'd have to crawl for about sixty feet, maybe less.

She grabbed the bottom rung of the railing and made her way into the tunnel with a hand over hand motion. Her toes provided a little grip on the lattice, but most of the weight was carried by the muscles in her arms, and after only a few feet of that, she was breathing hard and sweating. The metal bar became slippery in her hands, and though she was terrified, she knew she had to stop for just a second and catch her breath. She hooked one arm around a metal bar and stopped to rest. She closed her eyes and let her forehead rest against the metal lattice floor of the catwalk. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself staring through the metal lattice into another pair of open eyes.

She screamed.

"Be quiet! G.o.dd.a.m.n it, shut up! Rachel, stop it. They'll hear you."

Hearing her own name seemed to calm her, and Anderson knew he'd guessed right. He made shushing noises after that, keeping his voice as low and as gentle as the pain up and down his right side would allow.

He said, "You're Rachel, right?"

"Yes," she said, her voice breathy. Her eyes were wide open, a deep, rich brown with flecks of green. She had dirt all over her face, and her features were twisted by fear, but Anderson could see, even beneath the fear and the dirt, that she was pretty. A little skinny for his tastes, but definitely a knockout.

"Who are you?" she said.

"I'm Keith Anderson. I'm here with Paul. He sent me to get-"

"Where is he?" she said. "Where's Paul? Is he okay?"

"I don't know," Anderson said, and he had to stop there. Speaking had sent a fresh wave of pain through him, and he closed his eyes and groaned. When he opened his eyes again, he was panting. "He wants to stop his father."

"His father?"

Anderson nodded. Her expression told him enough. She knew what was going on, or at least some of it. Enough to be scared as h.e.l.l, anyway.

Slowly, he tried to move.

"He told me to find you and get you out of here."

"We have to find Paul first," she said.

"Rachel, those things...we can't fight them. I shot one of them in the head. We can't beat them."

"Then we have to get Paul out of here."

"He wasn't afraid of them, Rachel. I think he understands them."

"I won't leave here without him."

Anderson closed his eyes and tried to catch his breath. He couldn't see his right foot from where he was, but from the way the pain there was beginning to drown out everything else he knew that it was bad.

"Can you move?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said truthfully. "I think so."

"Try," she said. "You have to help me."

He reached up and grabbed hold of the edge of the catwalk, his left arm doing all the work.

"Can you help me get up there?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said. "Give me your hand."

A few minutes later, he had an arm over her shoulder and she was helping him away from the wreckage of the catwalk. They stopped in one of the walkways that led up to the superstructure, and Anderson sat down on a thick pipe and inspected the wound to his right foot. It wasn't as bad as he first thought. The cut was deep, and he would almost certainly need a teta.n.u.s shot, but they had been able to stop the worst of the bleeding with some tissues he had in his pocket.

His right side wasn't as bad it had first seemed either. He unb.u.t.toned his shirt and looked at his ribs and saw the beginnings of a nasty bruise spreading down his flank, but at least none of the ribs were broken.

"Can you walk?"

"Yeah, I think so," he said. "But, Rachel, you know we can't fight those things. You have to know that."

"I don't want to fight anybody. I just want Paul."

"Rachel," he said, "you know he means to die doing this."

She looked at him like he had suddenly grown four extra heads. "What? No."

"He wanted you as far away from here as possible when that happened. He made me promise I would get you away from here."

"No, that's not right. Hurting himself wouldn't do any good."

"Rachel, he doesn't believe that. The way Paul told it to me, he thinks he can burn his father up by fighting him. Short circuit him."

"I won't let him hurt himself."

"Rachel, I don't think we have a choice. Even if I wasn't hurt like this, we wouldn't be able to fight what's out there. And we'll probably only slow Paul down. Come on, let me get you out of here. It's what Paul wanted."

Rachel shook her head. "I won't do that. I won't leave him here."

She got up to leave. He saw it on her face, and a sudden fear went through him. She was going to do this, with or without him. And if she did it without him, he'd probably die trying to get out of this place. He'd been a fool to come, he knew that now.

"Your mind's made up then?" he said to her back.

She turned to face him. "What would you do?" she said.

"I don't know," he said. "The same I guess. At least I hope I would. I just don't know. I got to tell you though, Rachel. I'm scared all the way down to my toes."

Moans echoed through the factory. Rachel lifted her head to the sound and her lips drew into an even tighter line. There was almost no color in her face now.

"I'm going," she said.

"All right," he said. He held up his hand to her. "Can you at least give me a hand up first."

She helped him to his feet, and a moment later, they were headed into the superstructure.

There was a dead man on either side of him, each one holding an arm. They dragged him into the circular chamber and dropped him unceremoniously at his father's feet.

Paul's eyes fluttered open and he found himself staring at a black pair of Red Wing boots with a high shine. His father was looking down at him. He looked the same as he had six years ago. His face was lean and deeply tanned, s...o...b..x-shaped. The eyes were half-closed in a fierce squint beneath the brim of his black Stetson.

"We done with this foolishness?" his father said. "You gonna stop fighting me?"

Paul's mouth was full of blood. He spit it out, right at his father's feet. He missed by a good eight inches.

He looked at the blood and laughed and his tongue probed a loose tooth.

His father didn't even acknowledge the gesture of defiance. He stepped closer to Paul, walking right over the thick puddle of blood and spit Paul had just made, and knelt down in front of his son.

"It ain't gonna change nothing," his father said. He waited for Paul to say something. "Nothing, boy? Nothing to say to your old man?" Martin reached down and picked up some of the dirt in front of Paul's face and let it sift through his fingers thoughtfully. Paul watched the dirt catch the breeze and drift away, and he thought back to an early summer day when he was eight or nine and the two of them were in the peach orchard, his father testing the soil with his fingers and wondering out loud if there was going to be enough rain for a good harvest that year.

Paul pulled himself up to his knees. With his fingers he started digging for the handcuff key that was secured inside his waistband.

"Why are you fighting me, Paul? A few days ago, you were ready to accept this charge you've been given."

"You know what's changed," Paul said.

Martin Henninger almost smiled.

"Your mother didn't believe in none of this, Paul. To her, it was just craziness. She never really got it."

"She got it," Paul said. "I saw inside her mind. I know how scared she was."

A question flashed across his father's face. And something else, too. Was it alarm, something he hadn't antic.i.p.ated?

"You know why she was so scared, Daddy? She was scared because you couldn't see the senselessness of what you're doing. That's the part she thought was crazy. All of this, your grand vision, none of it has to happen. There's no reason to make it happen. It doesn't serve any purpose other your own vanity."

His father shook his head. "That's not right, Paul. After all I've showed you, you don't know that? This isn't vanity, Paul. This is evolution. This is a better world."

"A better world? Daddy, you're insane."

"Your mother was the crazy one, Paul."

"You did a lot to make me believe that, Daddy. But I got to wonder why. That's the thing I don't understand. Why'd you think you had to kill her? I'd have followed you anywhere if you hadn't done that. If you'd have asked me to follow you, I'd have thrown down everything I own and gone with you."

"I know that, Paul. I knew that from the moment you first started walking and talking. Something told me even then that you were special."