American Nocturne Read online

  The rain was just heavy enough to be annoying. She exited her car into it, scurrying in a crouch across the street and down the sidewalk. She slinked up to the rear of the bread truck. It had a pair of opposing doors, each with a small window set high and centered from the edge. Using the bumper, she raised herself high and tried to peer inside, but it was too dark. She dropped back down, did what she came there to do, then returned to her car.

  She dried her hands and face with a paper towel, then pulled a cell phone from her duffel and powered it on. A burner, bought with cash. Prepaid, using a Visa gift card, also purchased with cash. Completely disposable. She thumbed her way to a text screen, input the number. Then she pecked out a message:

  Nice little torture room you got here. Really love what you did with the place.

  She hit send and waited, watching. She ticked off the seconds in her mind until three minutes had passed, or close enough, then sent another text.

  Particularly like the Dante line. Cute.

  She stared through the misty rain and watched the windows of the tiny duplex. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Then an upstairs light popped on.

  Her lips creased, forming a grim smile. Got you, motherfucker.

  Several more minutes crept by. The shadow of a person swam behind the glowing curtain at random intervals. At one point the edge of it curved in, as if someone was peeking through from around the corner, trying to use the wall as cover. But she was too far away to be sure.

  The light went out. Marlie started counting again. The phone in her hand toned.

  Who is this. I will call the police.

  Another joyless smile. This one due to the predictable response, the stupid lack of originality.

  Please, go right ahead. Have them call and I’ll give them directions. I’m sure they would love to see this place. Think of how it will shine in the UV light! No doubt their investigation will turn up nothing on you, no matter how closely they look. No chance you left any DNA or anything, right?

  The rain started falling more aggressively, drops slapping against the windshield. Another minute passed. The phone chimed its ring tone.

  She ignored it.

  Two more minutes passed. Then a ping.

  What do you want?

  Marlie stared at the screen, knowing what to say, but wanting to make sure she picked the right way to say it.

  I have followed your work closely. I have a proposal. Meet me at your playpen. Thirty minutes. I’ll wait.

  The tattoo of rain quickened, stayed that way for a string of moments. Then a wind blew through, fanning the sheets horizontally. When it died down, the pelting did, too, the drops popping in syncopation. Bacon frying over a gentle flame.

  Red lights on the back of the truck. She hadn’t seen him exit the duplex, but another set of rear lights engaged and the truck started to back out onto the street. It curved to a stop and reversed direction abruptly, the rear tires spinning for an instant before finding traction on the wet asphalt.

  Marlie didn’t move. She was low behind the steering wheel, peering through the top arch over the dashboard. She waited for him to be out of sight before powering up a tablet and opening a specific app. A map appeared on the screen, with a blinking white circle moving along a blue corridor. It was moving away from another circle. She waited for the blinking circle to turn off one blue line and onto another before she started her car and turned on her headlights.

  The white circle merged onto a highway and drove for over ten minutes, then exited. She followed the same route, watched carefully as it turned off a frontage road. It continued another three minutes. By the time it stopped, there was no road on the screen.

  She checked the time. She figured she had about two and a half hours, but she knew even that would be pushing it. She tapped the screen a few times until the app was set to navigate and followed its audible directions. She covered the screen with her duffel bag to subdue the glow.

  The exit appeared quickly, and she took it. The area was rural, a smattering of low-rent business lots lodged between scrub land and pockets of dense woodland. Along the access road was a place that stored boats and RVs behind a tall chain-link fence with razor wire. Just past that was a scrap metal yard, followed by a place that sold gravel. After that the land became thick with pines and oaks and riots of undergrowth. The turn the tablet told her to take was a nothing more than an interruption of the drainage trench, solid ground over a culvert to allow vehicle access to land that had never been developed. A narrow path cut back from there through the trees, two wheel tracks worn into grass and weeds. She shut off the car’s lights and eased off the access road and into the woods.

  Peeking at the screen beneath her bag, she waited until she had come within a few hundred yards of where he’d left his vehicle. She didn’t dare risk getting any closer. A thought sent a sudden panic through her heart, sparked an unnerving conversation in her head. What if he had doubled back? Parked the car and was just letting you roll into a trap? Just waiting for you to get out so he could pounce?

  She squeezed the steering wheel. Stop it. You always get this way, always have these doubts, think these thoughts. Nothing but nerves, the part of you that’s afraid trying to persuade the rest of you it knows something. But it’s always wrong. It’s never what you think of that you have to worry about.

  The car rattled and the engine made a hiss when she shut it off. She reached into her duffel and, with some doing, pulled out a plastic case about a yard long. It opened long-ways and she balanced it on the console next to her. She removed the two lengths of aluminum and set them on her lap. Then she reached into a side pocket of the bag, pulled out a small rolled towel. She unfurled it in her lap and removed a pair of syringes. After thinking about it for a moment, she returned one of the aluminum tubes to the case.

  Okay, Marlie. Time to get moving.

  Even so close to the highway – less than a mile, she guessed – the night surrounding her seemed feral. Darkness in every direction; a chorus of insects sounding their warnings. A starless sky above her the purple of a bruise, the ground beneath her damp and spongy. She waited next to her car until her eyes could make out the shapes of trees, the gap that lay ahead of her, before setting out on foot.

  The cloud cover reflected light from the nearby highway enough for her to make out the bread truck. It was next to a square shape she could tell was a man-made structure. Using a light of any kind would be too risky, so she crept forward with only the varying degrees of shadows to guide her.

  She could tell she was at the edge of a small clearing by the way the darkness thinned and the sky stretched. The truck was a few yards out and the shadow next to it took on some detail. It was square, squat. Something about it suggested a tool shed, but bigger, sturdier.

  Crouching low, Marlie removed the plastic needle-tip cover from one of the syringes and loaded the syringe into the end of the rod. She set the spring load then engaged the safety lock. She checked the tip on the other needle and gently slid it into a thigh pocket along the side of her pants.

  The covered the distance to the truck in a low sprint, hunkering down behind it and catching her breath. She stared at the front of the structure, imagining the entryway she couldn’t quite see. She doubted he’d be down there long. Should be coming out any moment.

  Stun gun, she reminded herself. He used one on Tasha, so she needed to be careful. She rolled the tube in her hands, slid it along her palm a bit. Keep him at a distance.

  She watched. She waited. Nothing.

  Something wasn’t right. He should have gone down, seen she wasn’t there, that no one was waiting for him, then come back up. He would walk out, cast a few glances, get back in his truck. That’s when she would stick him. As he was opening the door to the truck, before he got in.

  But enough time had already passed – how long? Ten minutes? More than it should have taken for him to reemerge. She’d miscalculated. It’s always the things you don’t think of.

  The
question was, what to do now? She could abort. She knew who he was, where he lived, where he worked. His ultimate fate was pretty much sealed. But no. She owed it to Tasha, couldn’t allow it to drag on like that. She needed to finish this, right there, right then.

  She eased out from behind the bread truck and kept low as she made her way to the front of the small building. The rain was starting to fall again, cold droplets on her face and hands. She found the front door, more sensing it than seeing it, and groped for the knob. She opened it slowly.

  The inside sounded hollow, the pinging rain dying in faint echoes. The darkness was complete, blacker than an abyss. She was loathe to use a light, but reached for one in her pocket anyway. She thumbed the tiny button on the end and the tight triangle of LED bulbs flashed a bright white circle that illuminated most of the space.

  Empty. Nothing but a rickety old storage shed of some type. Completely bare. She panned the light over the corrugated metal walls. Not so much as a shovel or a bucket or a pile of rags.

  He walked the rest of the way. The spot is deeper in, farther back in the woods, and he parked here to walk. You blew it! It’s the things you don’t think of.

  Marlie turned and stepped out, thumbing the light off, weighing whether she might be able to hide again, wait for him behind the truck just as she’d planned. Then she stopped.

  Why would a storage shed be empty? And why would any storage shed be out here in this wooded patch of nothing in the first place?

  She stepped inside again and reengaged the light. The walls were sheets of corrugated metal supported by metal frame studs. The floor consisted of two sheets of diamond tread plating, each panel taking up one half of the roughly eight-by-eight space. She placed her weight on the ball of one foot, bounced a bit. Solid. She ran the light over it, bending closer. Near the middle, where the pieces met, she saw a groove.

  Crouching, she dug her fingers into the groove and hooked them beneath the edge. She moved both feet onto the other plate as she did and pulled. It was heavy – heavy enough to send a jolt through her back – but it lifted. A few inches, painful inches, excruciating inches, the weight of it making her fingers scream, and then the weight seemed to vanish. The panel moved much more easily, the edge rising, parabolic, a vertical door on hinges.

  Marlie thumbed off the light, letting everything go black despite a burning curiosity to understand the mechanism at work, imagining a pneumatic door opener attached, picturing some large strut assemblage that engages automatically. But there was no time for indulging such things. Tasha was waiting.

  The space below may as well have been a tar pit. Marlie could barely see where the entry was let alone what lay beyond. She took a breath. This was not what she bargained for. The chances of him not hearing her coming, if he didn’t already know she was there, seemed slim. Prudence, not to mention common sense, dictated she turn back. But she couldn’t shake the thoughts of Tasha, of what that poor girl – just a kid, really – was going through, and knew it wasn’t an option.

  She would have to go in dark, keep her jabstick at the ready. She lowered herself at the edge and swung her feet around so they dangled. There would be a ladder of some kind, a way to get down. She scraped one leg down the wall beneath her, felt nothing but rough cement. She reached the same leg over, swimming it through the inky open space, until it touched the adjacent wall. Leaning back, she waved her foot around, pointing her toes, until her tennis shoe knocked against something. She adjusted her body until she felt it. A rung, protruding from the concrete.

  She shimmied over and tested her weight on it. It held. She twisted her body around and let her hips sink, stepping to the next rung below, until she was able to grab the top one with her free hand and descend. She counted six rungs before her foot hung in empty air, no purchase to be found. She stretched her leg down, letting her other foot leave the last rung, until she felt the hard surface of a floor.

  The ambient acoustics told her the space was tight, surrounded by walls. She heard her breath as she exhaled – a sigh in the void, alien. Then she heard another, right behind her.

  She whirled, bringing the jabstick around in a tight arc so she could thrust it forward. But it knocked against something on the way, the sudden jolt almost causing her to lose it and making her fumble to regain her grip. Then the world collapsed with a flash into a thousand fists pummeling her ribs and spine, her body gasping for breath as her jaw clenched, her midsection seeming to collapse into itself. When the pounding stopped and the breath finally came she felt her body crash to the unforgiving floor beneath her, so drained of energy even blinking seemed like an unthinkable chore.

  A hand clenched a clump of her hair near her crown and seemed to explode from everywhere at once. She managed to wrap her fingers around the wrist, relieving the pressure on her scalp, but she was moving, sliding across a rough floor, her hips and knees and ass and heels raking, abrading. One leg banged against something solid and she was vaguely aware of entering another space. With some effort, she opened one eye. Then the other.

  A faint light glimmered, enough to bathe the surroundings in a pale, dim glow. She felt her arm get yanked by the wrist, followed by something stiff slamming against it. A buzz of metal clicks. Her arm was suspended above her, hanging down and keeping her from slumping into a heap. A wall was cold and hard on her back, the floor equally so on her ass.

  “This is interesting. Where did you get it?”

  The voice was far away, only loud. An announcer’s voice. A PA system voice. God’s voice.

  “It wouldn’t have worked. On me, I mean. But I like it. It’s modern and medieval all at the same time.”

  Marlie raised her head. The man in front of her was holding her jabstick, eyeing it like a shopper trying to justify a purchase.

  He looked at her, cocked his head slightly. Those eyes. Tasha had commented on those eyes. The effect was jarring. Irises almost white, a shade bluer at most than the white surrounding them. A tiny black dot set in the center of each.

  “How did you find me?”

  Marlie said nothing. Adrenaline was spiking her heart and her mind began to race along with her pulse.

  “I could see you the whole time,” he said. “Saw you standing there, a few feet away. Clear as day. Clearer, actually. That’s how I knew, in case you were wondering. It’s how I learned what I was. The doctors called it ocular albinism, but they were stumped by how sensitive I was to light. How I could see so easily when there wasn’t any. Said I had an unusual concentration of Rhodopsin. But I knew the truth. My dying mother called me her Angel. Her last words were: you’ll always be my Angel.”

  Her limbs felt waterlogged, her arms limp, her legs hugging the floor like they were filled with wet sand.

  “I have to assume you know what I do, why I’m here. What my mission is. That’s what you hoped to stop.”

  Think, girl. Think, think, think. She tugged at the cuff around her wrist; the chain solid, her arm wobbling as it pulled taut.

  “But you can’t stop it, of course. It is only because of your flaw, the corruption of original sin, that you are unable to see that. That you can’t understand. It’s okay. I forgive you.”

  His attention shifted back to the rod in his hand, the steel needle at its tip. “This might come in quite handy. I hope by now you understand this was your true purpose in coming here, your true part of the plan. To give me this new tool. For your participation, you will be rewarded with a cleanse. I am sorry, though. You can’t be part of the Synthesis.” He said it almost like two words, run together: Sin-Thesis. “You have not been selected.”

  Of course not, she thought. That would only be for trim, pretty ones barely out of their teens.

  But she knew he would never admit that. The sick son of a bitch had surely reached the point of believing his own bullshit.

  “Still,” he continued. “You should rejoice in the knowledge that your sins are about to be erased, wiped away. You will be welcomed into the arms of Heaven as pu
re as a newborn.”

  He turned away, first trying to rest the jabstick against the wall then laying it gently on the cement floor.

  The needle. Marlie reached her free arm across her body, felt along her opposite leg for the extra syringe. It was there, in the side pocket midway down her thigh. Her chest heaved in relief.

  But getting it out was going to be a challenge. Her arm didn’t quite reach far enough to get to the top of the pocket, certainly not enough to reach inside, the fact her knees were up the only reason she could feel where it was on her leg. She cursed the extra girth she carried. Any skinny bitch would have it out in seconds.

  The man pulled off his shirt, showing his back. It looked normal, except for two prominent scars, one near each shoulder blade. Two realizations hit her in rapid succession. One was that he wanted her to see that, which was why he turned his back. The other was that the scars were supposed to represent lost wings. She didn’t know how she knew that, she just did.

  “This is going to be unpleasant for you,” he said, speaking back over his shoulder. “For that I am truly sorry. Just know that it is the only way. Not only will you be cleansed of all impurity for your sacrifice, rewarded with eternal grace, but the demon that absorbs your sins will also be vanquished by my hand, one less soldier in Satan’s Army. It is only by leaving this mortal shell, allowing it to be occupied by an unclean spirit, that I can acquire enough power to defeat it.”

  He turned to face her. She yanked her arm back across her body, tried to hide the action by a larger motion of rolling onto her hip, as if her prior pose had grown too uncomfortable.

  Think, Marlie. You have to buy some time.

  A deep intake of breath, and he raised his arms, closing his eyes. His body was faintly luminescent in the dim light, the wall behind him completely black. Her eyes shot to the corners of the wall. Rough cement on the walls to each, dark but still a shade of gray. Not so with the wall behind him. It was pure black, smooth. Not shrouded in darkness, but actually black. She could make out a texture.