The Raven Read online

He didn’t look back again.

  Part Three

  The Four Winds Bar

  Chapter Ten

  Missing Obi-Wan

  October 22nd

  I can’t see the Four Winds Bar yet, but I know it’s there. First off, there’s the sign I passed a minute ago. If it was any indication, this is going to be more unpleasant than I assumed.

  I guess that’s why I’m sitting here in this copse of forest rather than striding my way down the crumbling macadam toward Bill Keaton’s headquarters. Oh, I’m not going to drive there. No way. If the patrons – or worse, one of Keaton’s goons – see this truck, they’ll seize it before I set foot in the door. The only chance I have of keeping it is stashing it here and hoping no one discovers it. That way, if I get the chance, I can return here and drive away afterward.

  Something tells me I might need to leave in a hurry.

  I know I should tell you about Bill Keaton now, but the thought of that son of a bitch makes me grip this pen so tightly I fear I might snap it. So first I’ll tell you about the sign I passed.

  It’s impossible to know what the sign used to advertise. It’s broad and tall and arched at the top. The whole thing has been spraypainted black, with the letters done in red. It would have been more logical – more legible – for the sign’s creator to have used white since that would have shown up better than red, but I suspect that red’s similarity to blood had something to do with this decision, even if you can’t read the damn thing unless you slow to a crawl and squint at it.

  THE FOUR WINDS BAR, it says in dripping crimson letters.

  And beneath that: HOME OF BILL KEATON BARTER AND TRADE.

  That might sound innocuous to you, but when you consider what Keaton barters and trades, any trace of harmlessness vanishes like a filigree of smoke from one of Keaton’s smelly cigars.

  Keaton deals in human flesh.

  His chief clientele are vampires and cannibals, though I hear the satyrs have begun to creep northward in search of new victims.

  Bill Keaton is more than happy to accommodate them.

  Back in March, I first became aware of Keaton from a whiff of his foul-smelling smoke. I was out scrounging for food when I smelled it. My first reaction upon detecting that withering odor – a combination of flatulence and wet, rotten grass, the kind caked on the bottom of a lawnmower after mowing a yard you’ve put off for too long – was slow-witted confusion. I stood there frowning and wondering who in the vicinity was smoking. Not even worrying about the threat they might pose.

  It was early morning at the time, so maybe that was part of my sluggishness. But most of it, I’m sorry to say, was complacency. Susan and I had survived far longer than just about anyone. A slatternly, stupid compartment of my brain had come to view our new existence as permanent, that the universe had somehow been put right again, that the worst was behind us.

  My God, was I a fool?

  You might think I bolted in the direction of the camp then, but you’d be wrong. What followed was a sort of agitated incredulity. Who, I remember thinking, still smoked cigars in this bleak new age? How did one even find cigars when it was difficult to go anywhere without becoming someone’s dinner?

  The answer, of course, was if you were powerful – say, powerful enough to build a depraved empire using fear, intimidation, and animal cunning – you could locate all the cigars you desired. Or have them found for you by your army of emissaries.

  It was the voices of Keaton’s thugs I heard next.

  That and Susan’s screaming.

  What happened next…I can’t think about.

  I still might have tracked them down had I not run into another Latent that same night. It was a man with a nasty scar on the underside of his nose. The guy claimed to have seen Keaton’s men transporting a woman fitting Susan’s description north on Highway 421. He claimed there was a cannibal compound in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Keaton’s most generous buyer resided.

  I spent the better part of three months making my way to Kalamazoo, only to learn the whole city had been burned to the ground long ago. Then I spent the next three months getting back to where I am now.

  For the false information, I had paid the man with my best gun – a nearly-new Smith & Wesson .38 – and all the food I’d scrounged.

  I failed. Miserably. And the problem with failure, at least where I’m concerned, is that I can’t let it go. In fact, I’ve never been able to let anything go, but failure most of all.

  I was a teacher in my former life. English, Creative Writing, Short Stories, whatever else my department head needed me to do. My strength as a teacher was the fact that I gave a shit about my students.

  This is also a reason why my students still haunt me.

  And not just the ones who died or became monsters when the world changed. I’m talking about the ones from before the Four Winds, the ones I tried to help but couldn’t.

  Dammit. I can’t think about that now. I have work to do tonight. I didn’t survive a werewolf attack and drive all this way down hazardous, bottlenecked roads in order to camp out in this thicket, as pretty and peaceful as it might be.

  I came to find Bill Keaton.

  I’m close. Less than a mile away. The sunlight is fading, and in another hour it’ll be full dark. It’s no good to be out at night. Exposed.

  Not that the Four Winds Bar will be any safer, if the rumors I’ve heard are true. If what Jim the Werewolf told me before he transformed is right. If the behavior of Keaton and his henchmen were any indication.

  Crazily, I’m reminded of a line from Star Wars, Obi-Wan telling Luke, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

  God, I miss Star Wars. I miss movies.

  I remember the first time Dad showed me the original trilogy. We watched the VHS cassettes when I was ten years old, and it was magic. I remember believing my dad was a lot like Obi-Wan, even if he wasn’t much like him at all. At least, not physically. While Obi-Wan was white-haired and sort of slender, my dad was full-bellied and his hair was a gentle brown until the day he died.

  The day he died, we were watching the news – everyone watched the news when the outbreak happened – but what we should have been doing was hunkering down inside some safe place. Before the bombs flew, people made fun of preppers. I suppose I was one who mocked them. But I’ll tell you, a stocked bunker sure as hell would have come in handy that awful autumn afternoon.

  CNN was running a story about the apparent transformation of a prominent politician into a vampire. The politician, a high-ranking Democrat whose views on immigration and global warming I respected, began to lose it in the middle of a press conference. Her eyes, brown before, glowed a lambent orange. She lunged at an unfortunate aide standing beside her podium. The camera had cut off at that point – or CNN had ended the tape – and while my dad and I sat there flabbergasted at what we’d just witnessed, a crash sounded from the front of my dad’s house.

  We’d told ourselves that the house was fortified, but looking back, the measures we’d taken had been a joke. I barely had time to push out of my chair before the pair of cannibals appeared in the hallway. My dad was still attempting to climb out of his recliner – as I’ve mentioned, my dad was not a small man – when the pair fell on him. Like I wasn’t even there.

  And that was the worst part. Being ignored. Being discounted.

  I lunged for the recliner, where they’d begun to rip and tear at him. They must have recently fed because their strength and ferocity were nothing short of ghastly. I grabbed one of the cannibals by the shoulder, who I’d first assumed was a long-haired man, the kind who’d been into heavy metal before the Four Winds shifted his interests to devouring human flesh. But the cannibal was a woman; she snarled at me. I aimed a punch at her, and she backhanded me such a blow that I flew across the room and cracked my head on the carpetless wood floor. I
thought for sure she’d come for me then, but as I crawled away, I saw she’d returned to feasting on my father. One of the best men I’ve ever known.

  Could I have saved him had I acted faster, or more heroically? I don’t know. But I do know I didn’t try hard enough.

  I should have done more.

  And Future Reader, whoever you are, I suppose I’ve just admitted something to you. My darkest secret. It’s a simple one, sure, but it’s still a difficult truth for me to accept.

  I’m a coward. I’ve proved it again and again. Any steel I’ve shown has been feigned or dumb luck. I’m scared pretty much all the time, even if I don’t admit it to myself. Hell, I was scared before the missiles flew.

  Now? My nerves are stretched taut all the time. My sleep – what meager sleep I manage – is a carousel of nightmares. I see the faces of my loved ones every time I close my eyes.

  Will. Joey. Susan.

  And my father.

  I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry I failed you the way I’ve failed everyone.

  I wish I’d been a better son.

  And now, as I sit here in the savaged pickup truck, I find myself wishing I had a companion, someone like my dad. Or someone as sage and formidable as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Maybe I should have tried to persuade Jim to travel to the Four Winds with me. Werewolves are dangerous company, I realize, but at least Jim craved normalcy. He didn’t wish me harm.

  I heave a rueful sigh and peer at the early evening horizon, the sunset-washed trees. If Jim ever sees me again, he’ll kill me. Hell, he might be pursuing me now, just as Stomper and Paul might be pursuing me. It seems everyone wants to kill me these days.

  Might as well add a few more adversaries to the list.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Doorman

  The first sign Dez glimpsed of the Four Winds Bar was a brazen cloud of smoke rising from what appeared to be a broad, shallow valley. One of the most persistent problems of this new age was how to conceal smoke. It could be seen from great distances, scented by all manner of hostile beasts. Yet you needed it for warmth, for cooking meat. So you prayed for a windy day and did your best to shelter it so it wouldn’t be snuffed out. If the wind scattered the smoke ribbon, no one could fix your location visually. Sure, it was possible for the keen, evolved noses to pick up the acrid tang in the air, but if you didn’t linger where you’d built the fire, you’d be safely on your way before predators arrived.

  Bill Keaton evidently didn’t worry about predators. Maybe because he was one.

  Dez emerged from the copse of trees, but kept to the far edge of the lane. Maybe sixty yards and he’d reach the valley, and from the looks of it, he’d be woefully exposed once he was there. Would Keaton have his henchmen standing sentry over the valley? Or would he, as his cigar smoking suggested, be too arrogant to brood about such precautions?

  Dez suspected the latter, but it didn’t make him feel any safer.

  Nor did Jim the Werewolf’s suggestion that Keaton was something unnatural. Of course, the notion had occurred to Dez. To reach the top of any hierarchy, particularly one as depraved as the one over which Keaton presided, you had to be ruthless, spiteful, capable of intimidating others who craved power. Though Dez hated to give him credit, it was apparent that Keaton possessed a well-honed species of jungle intelligence.

  Did he possess fearsome physical abilities too? Jim had certainly believed so. Dez crunched along the sparse gravel lane and thought of the shudder that had run through Jim’s body when the subject of Keaton had been broached.

  Best steer clear of that place, Jim had said.

  Ironic advice, Dez thought, considering how Jim had nearly ripped him apart.

  He reached the end of the woods and beheld the shallow bowl of valley. On the far side of a vast, grassy meadow lay the Four Winds Bar.

  It was nestled against a backdrop of forest, its mammoth chimney broadcasting an unhealthy plume of yellow-brown smoke into the otherwise gorgeous evening sky, which painted the gray shingled roof in hues of pink and orange and indigo. The structure itself was nearly all brick, quite large, with a towering A-framed center flanked in back by a pair of single-story outcroppings. Dez had to laugh as he realized what the Four Winds once was, before the world went to hell.

  A church.

  Someone had removed the crossbar from the steeple protruding from the building’s roof. The sleek spire now rose to the level of the treetops like a tribute to a pagan god.

  Dez realized there was a figure leaning in the alcove of the front porch. A tiny vermilion eye glowed in the shadows of the covered porch, died down, the figure smoking a cigarette, or perhaps a cigar like Keaton.

  Whether he’d spotted Dez or not, there was no going back now. And anyway, Dez didn’t plan on storming in and taking Keaton by force. There’d be too much security for that. Besides, who knew if Keaton was here? In his business, a man needed a constant flow of bodies to satisfy his buyers. Chances were good Keaton was out on a collection run, and all of this would come to nothing.

  That’s untrue and you know it.

  Yes, Dez thought. He did know it. When someone recognized him, they’d know he’d come for Susan or revenge or both, and then they’d kill him. Or try.

  Dez’s fingers curled into fists. Let them try.

  But the words felt forced, empty. Just what the hell was his plan? To stride into the bar and holler, Old West-style, for Keaton to come on out and settle this man to man? That it was time for a reckoning? That you took my woman, and I aim to get her back?

  Hell.

  The lurid eye from the porch glowed, dwindled. The figure had surely marked him by now. Dez became aware of a muffled thrum, the steady burr of a generator.

  He made the mistake of taking his eyes off the figure on the porch.

  To Dez’s immediate right was a flyblown corpse. It had no head. Its midsection was a gory ruin.

  Dez shivered. Thank God the grass in the surrounding meadow was so high. He could make out numerous cadavers littering the valley, but they were only shapeless humps on the dismal green landscape. Just objects. Not humans who’d been savaged by monsters.

  Dez forced his legs to move. The evening was crisp but not unpleasant. High forties maybe, with little breeze. The gravel lane wasn’t pristine, but someone had evidently been performing minimal upkeep. Unlike many gravel roads he’d encountered, this one featured very few weeds. Which meant Keaton and his men drove it with reasonable frequency.

  Dez realized he’d been keeping to the edge of the lane despite being completely exposed out here in the center of the meadow. Annoyed with himself, he angled toward the middle, did his best to ignore the unmoving shadow on the porch and the eerie red eye’s sluggish throb. If he needed to make an escape from here in a hurry, the only option was the southern woods. Approaching as he was from the north, he’d be utterly defenseless if he attempted a straight flight to the truck.

  Which was damned inconvenient. He’d need to duck into the sheltering forest, evade capture as he threaded his way through the dense trees, and, if providence was on his side, reach the truck and peel ass out of here. A million things could go wrong. The chances of him living through the night seemed smaller and smaller. Dez felt tiny out here on the lane by himself, incapable of doing what he planned on doing.

  What is your plan? a wry voice demanded.

  Fifty yards from the bar, Dez shivered as a chill plaited down his back.

  The plan is simple, he answered. If Susan is here—

  She’s not.

  —if Susan is here, I’ll find her, smuggle her out, and if we both live, if that improbable miracle occurs, I’ll keep her safe and apologize to her for the rest of our lives for screwing up and allowing them to take her in the first place.

  She’s not here.

  Then I’ll find her, goddammit! I’ll ask the patrons or the bartender or— />
  They won’t know. Or won’t care. You think Susan matters to them? She’s just another body, a piece of livestock they sold off months ago to the highest bidder.

  No!

  She’s dead and eaten by now, Dez. Digested and shat out and fertilizing the lawn of some cannibal compound. Or her desiccated corpse is lying on some refuse heap outside a vampire’s lair, exsanguinated, then mummified by the sun.

  She’s alive.

  Uh-huh. Just like Joey’s still alive. Just like your dad and your son and—

  Dez stopped, grasped handfuls of hair, and shook his head until the voice ceased taunting him.

  He thought he’d outrun it. Then, the words came as clearly as if someone had spoken to him from three feet away: You failed them. You’ll fail everyone in the end.

  Heart pounding, he got moving again.

  Thirty yards from the bar, Dez spied another sign. At least this one hadn’t been painted black. Half-obscured by a cheerful red X, he made out the words FIRST ASSEMBLY BAPTIST CHURCH. Beneath that, unmarred text read PASTOR BRYCE WEEKS PRESIDING.

  But that wasn’t what stopped Dez. What stopped him was the reef of withered mushrooms that formed a ragged border around the sign. Each mushroom had been nailed to the wooden surface, and though some were nothing more than shriveled brown twists an inch long at best, others were longer, and not as dark as the shriveled ones were.

  The realization smacked Dez like a brutal cuff to the head. The mushrooms weren’t mushrooms. Their stalks had been pulled not from the ground, but from nests of pubic hair.

  Bill Keaton was collecting severed penises. Dez counted thirty-five before he lost track and felt his gorge clench. A few of them were fresh, or relatively so. Their ragged bases indicated they hadn’t been severed cleanly, but either sawed off like pesky willow branches or ripped off by savage hands.

  “Think yours would look good up there?” a voice asked.

  The smoker on the porch. Dez resisted an urge to look at the man, did his best to form his features into a mask of hardness, as though the severed penises didn’t unnerve him, as if he were confronted with sights this grotesque every day.