The Raven Read online

  No, he thought as he rose higher, higher, his head on a level with Tom Chaney’s knees now. No shame. He supposed there was something poetic about dying in pursuit of Susan.

  But only if one found such tragic endings poetic. For his part, he would have much rather lived.

  “Take off them underwear!” a harsh voice demanded.

  Dez twitched his head in that direction and saw it was the woman with the wind-burnt face. A tendril of childish dread squirmed in his belly. At least allow me to keep my briefs on, he thought. Please allow that one concession to dignity.

  Tom Chaney’s exposed genitalia came into view. Dez glanced at Chaney’s face, then wished he hadn’t. Chaney’s eyes were pinched shut in sorrow, the tears oozing down his hairy cheeks. He was still blubbering about Iris.

  Dez bucked against the chains, half-twisted toward the bar area, which was barren of people but newly fronted by a pulpit. He was unsurprised to note they’d removed the cross from the face of the pulpit, though the dark outline of the cross remained indelibly printed on the wood.

  Dez finally reached a level more or less even with Tom Chaney, and the cranking ceased. The chains around his ankles weren’t taut to the floor, but they didn’t allow much movement. Dez labored to draw breath, couldn’t, and had to perform a slight pull-up against the handcuffs to suck in enough air to prevent a panic attack.

  Below Dez, maybe fifteen feet away, Keaton rose and lifted his hands for silence.

  All heads in the Four Winds turned toward its proprietor.

  “Glad you could all come out tonight,” Keaton said. “It’s gonna be a good show.”

  Shouts of approval.

  “Folks, you might notice we’ve got two criminals up here. The Hound’s a bonus. I hadn’t planned on ending his miserable existence yet, but, hell, I like to be spontaneous. He took something from me I can never get back, so tonight we’ll take something from him.” He glanced up at Chaney. “After we have some fun.”

  Chaney wept.

  “You know I’m not much of a speech giver,” Keaton said, and Dez thought, Bullshit. You eat this up. “So I’m gonna turn it over to Reverend Weeks.” Keaton jolted as if he’d forgotten something. “But before I do, one more word about the condemned.”

  Here we go, Dez thought.

  “The Hound here,” Keaton said, indicating Chaney with a lazy thumb, “he’s been chained in the dungeon for what, fourteen months?”

  Fourteen months, Dez thought. Jesus.

  “And in fourteen months, the dumb fuck has never apologized for what he did. For the pain he caused.”

  And Dez thought of the ravaged bedroom, the little league trophies, the unmistakable signs of a young boy. Had Chaney murdered Keaton’s son? It seemed the only possibility that made sense. If that were the case, Dez reflected, it was a wonder Keaton had permitted Chaney to live this long.

  Keaton peered up at Chaney, perhaps giving him the opportunity to atone. When Chaney only continued to weep quietly, Keaton nodded. “Well, it’ll all be square in a couple hours.”

  A couple hours? Dez thought, heart racing. Whatever they had in store was going to take a couple hours? At the thought of a protracted torture session, Dez’s gorge rose. He didn’t want to vomit in front of these fiends, but he didn’t know how long he’d be able to control it.

  “As for this other one,” Keaton said, leveling a forefinger at Dez, “he’s gonna be a reminder to all of you who might have harbored foolish thoughts at one time or another. He didn’t like my business practices and had the audacity to break into my home and threaten my wife and daughter.”

  Ear-punishing bellows erupted at this, many in the crowd going as far as to hurl objects at Dez. He was pelted with ashtrays, one of which cracked him in the hipbone and shot freshets of pain down his leg.

  “Now, don’t trash my establishment!” Keaton yelled, his voice cleaving through the din. “You can scream at him all you want, but I won’t have my floors reduced to waste bins.”

  Chastened, the crowd quieted a little.

  “Anyhow,” Keaton continued, “this chickenshit went after the ones I love, ones who were innocent, defenseless—”

  “I didn’t touch them,” Dez said.

  “Which is the reason I let you live this long,” Keaton answered. “Had you laid a finger on my daughter’s sweet head, I’d have drawn and quartered you already.”

  “People only matter if they’re yours,” Dez heard himself saying. “That about right?”

  Keaton chuckled softly. “I really am gonna enjoy this.” He turned, raised his arms. “Folks, I give you Reverend Bryce Weeks.”

  The crowd cheered. Dez struggled to turn and watch the reverend’s entrance, but found it tough going. Every time he’d maneuver his body sideways, the chains attached to his legs would haul him back around to face the crowd. As it was, he caught glimpses of a short bespectacled man, slightly pudgy, bald on top with light brown hair remaining on the sides. He was garbed in black, with a traditional white collar, and clutched a book at one side. He appeared to be in his early forties.

  Smiling beatifically, Weeks spread his arms and addressed the crowd. “Good evening, friends. Let us begin with a word of prayer.”

  To Dez’s surprise, the entire assembly of vicious-looking patrons bowed its heads.

  “Fellow survivors,” Weeks began in a resonant voice, “we have come this far for a reason. Many of us entered the new order through tragedy and suffering, and we have all endured many a hardship.”

  Loud mutterings of agreement, many of the patrons nodding their bowed heads.

  Dez studied them, fascinated. One pair, particularly, drew his attention. They were a couple, for one thing. Couples were rare in the new world. Sure, people hooked up for a meaningless rut sometimes, but something about the way the man and woman sat together – she as Caucasian as Dez, the man perhaps of Middle Eastern descent and sporting an elaborate neck tattoo – reminded Dez of the old world, of the good things they had lost. The man and woman appeared neither glad to see Dez and Chaney strung up nor especially impressed with Weeks’s sermonizing.

  “But we have survived,” Weeks said. “That is the point. We have persevered. We have harnessed what gifts nature has bequeathed us. We have adapted.”

  Dez scanned the patrons, noticed only one other individual who wasn’t immersed in the prayer.

  Lefebvre.

  The tall man leaned by the entrance door, his eyes on Pastor Weeks. Dez tried but could not identify the emotion on Lefebvre’s narrow face. Interest? Contempt? Resignation?

  Did it fucking matter?

  Dez’s shoulder blades ached.

  “We have adapted, dear friends, that is the salient point,” Weeks said, his voice full of warmth. “The wisdom of the cosmos is unknowable to us, yet when one stands in the deep, pellucid night and gazes at the heavens, one understands that there is indeed order. There is, unmistakably, a plan.”

  Dez couldn’t deny his curiosity. He wriggled against the chains to better see Weeks.

  “Does anyone doubt where this world was heading?”

  A shaking of heads.

  “Does anyone here believe we would have lasted another year, much less another decade, with the demagogues leading the world?”

  “No sir,” someone muttered amidst the voices.

  “Nuclear annihilation,” Weeks said, enunciating each syllable clearly, if incorrectly – he pronounced it nucular. “My dearest survivors, the apocalypse was at hand!”

  Louder mutterings at this, patrons exchanging approving glances.

  “And though the shift in the Earth’s population was no doubt painful to many here tonight, can there be any doubt the new world appears more sustainable than the old?”

  Solemn agreement. More than ever, Dez felt he’d gone mad.

  “Which is why,” Weeks said, st
epping around the pulpit to a position near Chaney, “we need men like Bill Keaton to maintain order.”

  Shouts of Amen.

  “What we have is worth protecting, dear friends. Never again will the beauty of this world be blighted by the unworthiness of man. Never again will the forests fall and the oceans darken with man’s contamination.”

  More Amens. Several patrons, Dez noticed with dumbfounded hilarity, had tears shining on their cheeks.

  Weeks moved closer to the assembly, stood before Bill Keaton. Weeks folded his hands before him and bowed his head. “Mr. Keaton named this establishment the Four Winds Bar. He did so because, in his wisdom, he understood the new opportunities this great change represented.”

  Keaton nodded, and Badler, who sat behind Keaton, leaned forward and gave his boss’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze.

  Weeks’s voice crescendoed, the tone still high but the sound resonant in the large room. “The Four Winds liberated us! The Four Winds showed us what we could become!”

  Loud cheers.

  “Though we did not see it at the moment,” Weeks declaimed, “the Four Winds tore the scales from our eyes and leeched the eons of iniquity from our genetic codes!”

  Louder cheers, many patrons toasting with their steins.

  “The Four Winds allowed us to become the legendary figures we were meant to be!”

  The shouts were well nigh rapturous now.

  “And if we look around, dear friends, we see joy and fellowship! We see a healthy respect and a proper fear! We see—”

  The front doors opened and every head in the room turned.

  In stalked a pair of figures in black clothes. Not only had Weeks stopped talking, but the rest of the patrons had fallen deathly silent as well. The two, a man and a woman, both with long raven-colored hair and sinuous bodies, moved to the left edge of the room, passing tables slowly, their eyes studying the patrons they passed. Dez noted with apprehension how the patrons averted their eyes as the pair drew closer, as though, Medusa-like, the newcomers would turn them to stone. The figures were very pale, but then again, paleness was common these days.

  The pair passed under the left balcony and selected a table with empty chairs. There were three other men at the table, but they’d scooted their chairs to the table’s fore in order to improve their view of the ceremony. The trio of men kept their gazes studiously forward, but Dez could see in their faces how terrified they were of the newcomers.

  “Go on, Reverend,” Keaton said quietly.

  Weeks gazed upon the newcomers a moment longer, then shook himself loose of his trance and cleared his throat. “Yes, friends, it is a better world in which we now find ourselves. Although some—” A glance up at Chaney. “—still insist on staining the pristineness of the new order.”

  Dez peered at Chaney and noticed he’d ceased weeping. Contrary to the rest of the patrons, Chaney was staring at the newcomers with interest. So too, Dez realized, was Lefebvre, whom the two must have passed on the way in.

  Weeks dabbed sweat from his brow with a white handkerchief. “The new world, if it is to make good on the promise afforded it by the architects of the Four Winds cleansing event—”

  Dez felt the first spark of anger since he’d been strung up. Cleansing event? The phrase turned his stomach.

  “—must have order. It must—” Weeks mopped his brow. “—appoint sentinels to…to protect its sanctity. We must embrace this chance to recapture what once must have been commonplace, the natural state of—”

  Movement from the newcomers’ table drew Dez’s attention. He turned that way in time to see one of the black-garbed figures – the female – batten onto the neck of one of the men. The pale woman’s face was bestial, her teeth elongated and tapered, and when they sank into the side of the man’s neck, they set to shredding the flesh and unleashing torrents of scarlet. The man, whose dark brown cowboy hat tumbled off his head, screamed and sank down in his chair as if to escape the bite of the vampire, but this only sent his attacker into wilder paroxysms of ferocity. Several men in the immediate area had stumbled to their feet to escape the bloodletting, and one of the trio who hadn’t been bitten took a step toward the victim as though to intervene.

  But Bernadette was there, a revolver extended at the would-be savior. “Stay back,” she said, her voice unsteady. Not with fear of the intervener, Dez decided, but in utter terror of the vampires.

  There was a horrible interval in which no one moved, the only sounds in the bar the repugnant biting and sucking of the vampire. The victim had ceased struggling, his lifeblood either inside the vampire’s gullet or spent on the grungy floorboards.

  Dez realized the male vampire was transforming, his orange eyes glowing at the men in the immediate area.

  The feeding vampire stood up and wiped her mouth with a leather-clad forearm. The bottom half of her face was smeared with gore, the upper half flushed from the feeding. Her face having transformed into its vampiric form, she scarcely resembled a human being.

  Dez’s gaze shifted to the vampire who hadn’t yet fed and noted he was staring unwholesomely at a muscular individual who was almost certainly a cannibal. The man was attired in a red athletic training shirt, a gray Under Armour insignia visible on the chest. Like the vampires’ hair, the strong man’s hair was longer, but unlike the vampires, who wore their hair tossed to one side, his was styled straight back with some product, reminding Dez of male models in the old world.

  “Now, don’t you think about—” the man with the stylish hair began, but the unfed vampire darted forward anyway, moving with an agility no human could muster. The man yelped as the vampire seized him by the hair and dragged him toward the front doors. The vampire who’d fed followed her companion, heedless of the patrons who shrank from her as she passed.

  Lefebvre opened the door for them, his face unreadable, and when they’d hauled away their new victim, he closed the door without comment.

  There was a dreadful silence in the Four Winds.

  Keaton glowered at Weeks. “Go on with the goddamn sermon!”

  Weeks, who had paled to the color of cream cheese, adjusted his collar and took in a shuddering breath. “Um, yes. Yes, we must…maintain order.” He swallowed. “We must, you know, harvest new respect….”

  “Get to the condemned,” Keaton growled. Several patrons echoed this sentiment. Amazing, Dez thought, how quickly they’d turned on Weeks. As though it were his fault that a lifeless body was now being hauled along the side wall by Keaton’s goons. Dez watched them pass the bar and disappear into the back hallway. Evidently, they were disinclined to use the same exit the vampires had used.

  Dez wondered if the vampires had exsanguinated their second victim yet.

  Weeks nodded, collecting himself. “Part of what makes Bill Keaton such a worthy leader is his unwillingness to allow brazen misdeeds to go unpunished. When Tom Chaney committed the atrocity of which we’re all aware, Mr. Keaton’s justice was as fair as it was decisive. He apprehended Mr. Chaney—”

  “Hound,” Keaton corrected.

  Weeks opened his mouth, nodded hastily. “Yes, when he caught the, uh, Hound in the middle of his luciferian actions….”

  Weeks continued, but Dez had tuned him out, focusing instead on Chaney. The hairy man looked tired, defeated. He hung from his chains like a horrid prize in some carnival game. Knock over the milk bottle and win this werewolf!

  “Tom,” Dez said.

  Chaney didn’t look up.

  “Tom?” Dez said with more force. In the background, Weeks was railing about sin and punishment. There were no echoes of approbation, the vampires’ incursion having robbed the patrons of their enthusiasm.

  Slowly, Chaney glanced at him. Red-eyed, glazed, Chaney looked dead already.

  “Was it Keaton’s son you killed?”

  When Chaney didn’t answer, Dez added, �
�It’s important.”

  “His mistress,” Chaney said in his gravelly, thick-tongued voice.

  Dez studied Chaney’s face. “Why did you do it? Did she hurt you? Threaten you?”

  Chaney ran his tongue along his lips. “I couldn’t help it.”

  Dez was about to ask another question when his body was jostled. He looked down to discover Weeks shaking his leg chains. “This,” Weeks said, much of his former gusto restored, “this is what threatens our new paradise. This reprobate—” another shake, “—dares trespass in Mr. Keaton’s haven? This heathen snake, with neither physical nor mental abilities, a bottom-feeder who contributes nothing to our glorious age…. Who can doubt he needs to be expunged?”

  A couple patrons murmured approval at this, though Dez doubted they knew the meaning of expunged.

  “So let us bring this ceremony to its conclusion,” Weeks said. “Hernandez? Badler?”

  The two henchmen got to their feet. Badler looked eager to participate, Hernandez much less so.

  Dez glanced at Chaney. “They going to cut on us?” When Chaney only hung there, glazed and unresponsive, Dez added, “Do they torture people first, or just kill them?”

  Chaney sounded half-asleep. “They don’t cut. Too many…too many cannibals in here for that…it’d go nuts if they started cutting.”

  Dez bared his teeth at the maddening sluggishness of Chaney’s speech. “What then? They gonna shoot us? A firing squad? Or—”

  The chains jerked taut, and Dez shot a look over his shoulder to where Hernandez stood. Until now, Dez hadn’t thought much about the steel cranks that protruded from the winches housing the chains.

  Oh hell, he thought as the chains began to tauten. They’re gonna tear us apart.

  Hernandez glanced at the chains above Dez, and the ceiling pulley over which the chains snicked. Hernandez looked everywhere except at Dez’s face.

  Badler, by contrast, was cranking his winch spasmodically, a repulsive lust in his muscle-broadened face. Chaney was already beginning to groan. Dez could see the blood madness in Badler’s eyes.