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  BLACK & ORANGE

  by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  Crossroad Press & Bad Moon Books Digital Edition

  Copyright 2011 by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

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  PROLOGUE

  October 31st of Last Year

  Where was Tony Nguyen? Where was the Heart of the Harvest?

  Martin couldn’t answer that. He’d lost his gun, his mind could not conjure another mantle—he was powerless. The answers he desperately needed escaped him. He just ran. Teresa wove through a field of tall grass and he followed. The brittle blades swept across his face, snapping and hissing as they went. The children flooded into the field, their dark orange jaws snapping in concert with the disruption in the grass. Martin could hear Teresa wheezing. Her pace slowed. He had to match it; she wouldn’t be left behind, not like—

  Where was Tony?

  Thousands of little fiends chomped hollowly, hungry to fill that hollowness—instinctively Martin attempted to throw a mantle and dissect the crowd, but his brain had gone completely dry; he’d overdone it. There was no mental power left. He’d failed Tony. They both had. Now the Church of Midnight would have their sacrifice. The same realization flooded into Teresa’s cold face as she sprinted through the darkness ahead. He’d wasted his power, she was ill and the Church was too damned powerful now.

  Chaplain Cloth was too damned powerful. And he took Tony. Somewhere along the line Martin and Teresa had lost the Heart of the Harvest, Tony Nguyen, that single soul that was theirs to protect from sacrifice.

  The nightscape sloped. One of the children clamped onto Teresa’s leg with its serrated teeth and twisted its head to rip at the tendons there. Martin brought down a boot on its pumpkin shaped skull. The head trauma forced the jaws open. Martin jumped forward to crush it. The thing growled and jumped to meet him. Teresa swung around and stopped the creature mid-flight with the butt of her handgun. Her frayed jeans grew dark with blood but she ran on. The other children gained. Colorless trees flooded past, the open field turning into dense forest.

  Maybe Tony had gotten away somehow. They couldn’t lose another Heart of the Harvest. The gateway grew too wide already—another sacrifice would bring the other world too close to theirs. Goddamnit, where was Tony Nguyen? Did he trip and fall somewhere? Martin’s foot hit a root. He tumbled sideways, landed on his elbow in a wet bed of leaves. Teresa took his hand and ripped him to his feet. But it wasn’t Teresa. This person wore a new face and new eyes.

  Martin twisted away from the old monster. The shark-belly skin, the night black suit and orange tie. Trees exploded behind Martin in a rush of splintery debris. He found his strength, forced on a path of adrenaline, and brought up a mantle that moment. The invisible shield wrapped around his body and deflected the attack. Martin’s heel caught mud and he slid fast into a black ravine. He lost hold of the mantle when he splashed down. His protection vanished. Where was Teresa? Where was Tony? Martin was alone.

  His legs slopped through a waist-high stream. Chaplain Cloth hadn’t come down after him and as much as that might have been a relief, it meant his direction had turned elsewhere. Martin couldn’t let that happen, not to Tony, not to Teresa. He charged hard through the cold stream and broke out of the arresting water onto a steep embankment. The memory of Cloth’s face burned in his mind: needles of pitchy hair swinging over one black eye, and the orange eye engulfed in hate. His teeth were raw pink like flayed muscle, colored from past harvests, colored with those Hearts that never saw another November.

  Screams echoed from a bubble of light somewhere north. Martin’s legs burned red-hot. Can’t stop. He focused to build another mantle. The cold spot in his brain, where mantles were drawn, bloomed with power. The light in the forest intensified. Shadows became more distinct. A voice yelled for him.

  “Martin! Here!” Teresa peered out between some stunted trees. Her face was streaked in dirt and dried blood. “Get over here.”

  He dove into the hiding place and sidled up next to her. Her words came out between gulps of air. Her wheeze sounded dry, but he knew it’d get worse soon in this dampness. “We have to get back to the van. We’ve lost him Martin. They have Tony. Tony’s gone! Let’s go.”

  “How do you know? Did—?”

  She guided his face over, leaving dank mud on his chin. In his confusion he’d overlooked a nearby ledge over a washout. Pine trees wreathed the area in a nighttime vertigo. At the other side of the washout stood an old brick structure, a primary school left to ruin. A gaping mouth opened through the bricks. The gateway leading to the Old Domain stretched forth impatiently, power-starved. At the other side of the bilious corridor, human arms pushed and pulled and wrenched to open a fist-sized hole separating the worlds. The arms withdrew a moment and a woman’s face filled the hole. Smiling. It was a lovely face with corpse cold eyes.

  They shrunk back as Chaplain Cloth strode from the gathering of trees adjoining the school. Tony Nguyen’s furrowed body hung limp in Cloth’s arms. He was alive, but Martin knew that wouldn’t last long.

  “We have to do something,” he whispered.

  “You know there’s nothing we can do now,” said Teresa. “We can only hope the gateway will shut again. This was bound to happen again.”

  “We can try—”

  “No,” she said, firmly, “I’m calling this one.”

  Tony wasn’t scared, although the abrasions from Cloth’s children had almost bled him out. So very brave—thought Martin. How had they let this happen? They were too slow.

  Without warning, the boy’s torso twisted back; the spine snapped in three places. The Chaplain rested his hand on the damp white shirt and it jumped apart at the poisonous touch. Through Tony’s abdomen, the ribcage surfaced through the skin like the hull of a sunken ship. Once each bone was exposed, they shattered in succession. Cloth blinked back at the chalky discharges. Strands of muscle and skin ignited and burst into tiny organic filaments. Cloth worked a pale finger around the dense muscle in the cavity. Pulled the heart free from Tony’s chest.

  The Heart of the Harvest didn’t glow, or shimmer, or change colors. It looked like a human heart, like any mammal heart, a tough piece of bloody flesh. But then Martin saw—everything for miles around had been deprived of color. Teresa’s face looked gray beside him. Even Cloth’s black and orange eyes were two smoky discs. Yet the heart had a burgundy hue so ferocious it looked like something from a surreal dream, an apple galvanized with cinnamon steel.

  Tony’s jaw clicked as his body met the forest’s carpet of twigs and leaves. He was carrion now because of them. This kid, this great kid that once explained in detail how he planned to code videogames after college, and once he mastered that, wanted a large family—he wasn’t one of those guys who hated the idea. Becoming a good father someday was his ultimate goal, because his own father left so much to be
desired. Tony had wanted to have a life after this Halloween. And now he would be fertilizer for the forest. Dust.

  The heart was placed outside the gateway. The arms inside thrashed frantically as the brilliant red lump boiled. A swarm of children attacked the organ, taking measured bites of the fruit. Their bulbous bodies fled inside, charged with radiant power. Hundreds detonated. Through the eclipses of darkness and light, layers of the hole collapsed into soot. The opening widened and a slender arm, the woman’s arm, came through with her head. She moved quickly through, for the gateway would repair and soon.

  “They’re coming through.” Teresa swallowed the words.

  “I don’t think it will stay open forever,” Martin told her. They’d lost Hearts before, but he still wasn’t sure.

  Laughter scaled the peaks of the hovering pines. More Church members clamored through the forest toward the new arrivals.

  Teresa tugged at him, but Martin couldn’t move. All he could do was think about the end. His body came off the ground with a surge of strength. “This is done, Martin. We have to go!”

  Thousands of demented orange faces exploded around them. Teresa flung a mantle and it powered through the children like a cannon ball. Martin followed her through the maze of twisting trees, trusting her to lead them to the van.

  Chaplain Cloth’s laughter followed them all the way back.

  October 26th- This Year

  ONE

  Martin spent the last of their cash on a package of cookies and drinks. The Messenger usually left them enough money for the year, but in the past few months they’d resorted to selling off some equipment and arms to Ebay thugs and pawn shops. That had only lasted so long; the road was expensive, and their cash flow thinned to a trickle. Maybe this was a punishment for losing Tony last year.

  Martin could only afford a cheap diet raspberry ice tea. He ran the gamut of other drink options: beverages in Styrofoam cups (so, benzene poisoning), aluminum cans (so, aluminum salts and Alzheimer’s to follow) and plastic bottles (so, bisphenol-A to disrupt your hormones). Some drinks were sugared or chemicaled. Too many were caramel colored, caffeinated, and energized with herbal supplements the FDA still hadn’t bothered investigating. But raspberry tea always gave him butterflies. He never remembered if he liked it or hated it. It sounded good; so he let go his inhibitions. Enjoyed the lingering question. It thrilled him like the early-morning charge of heading out on an unknown road in their ‘79 Ford Quadravan, windows down, cold air deep in his lungs and the whole day before him.

  Teresa slept with her cheek smooshed against her shoulder. Only a nomad could sleep so comfortably in that position. The sun winked over the distant hills behind her, the day still buried in piles of shadow beyond another prehistoric gas station tipping over the edge of American stupor.

  He gagged suddenly on the drink. “Ick—too sweet.”

  Teresa stirred.

  He dropped the bottle in the cup holder. “I thought you were the one that didn’t like raspberry.”

  “Peach,” she answered.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “Chest still hurts. I think I fractured a rib coughing yesterday.”

  “Exaggerator.” He tickled just under her triceps.

  Her eyes opened, that dangerous blue of open water. “Don’t screw around Martin. I’m not playing.” She shut her eyes again and softened her tone. “Where are we, anyway?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “There again?”

  He spent a moment admiring her. She had hit fifty in August but looked younger—even with the cancer. His thirty-eight year old body had taken as much mental and physical abuse as hers, and yet, glancing in the rearview mirror, he could see the old man gimping to the surface. Sometimes he wondered if this was genetic, if his parents had prematurely aged. He wished he could remember them better. All of his photos were either destroyed or left behind somewhere in the sprawling galaxy of roadside motels.

  Eighteen years without seeing another person diminished everything to dry details. He remembered his parents held him at a distance because he was different, then because he reminded them of the other place, and then because they knew he’d leave someday anyway, to do the Messenger’s work. Birthdays were spent in solitude with heaps of unwrapped presents: butterfly knives, smoke grenades, M-80s, and pellet guns. They knew his destiny. His mother would be off Windexing windows and his father would be on duty doing good-guy police stuff, and Martin would always be left alone to think on his future, with no idea what kind of man he’d become, a man worried about the saccharin content of this horrible raspberry swill.

  Teresa stared at him now. “Are we going to leave or what?”

  “Or what what?”

  “The last letter said the Heart of the Harvest would be in San Bernardino County this year, so I think we should head that way before we run things too close.”

  “Like last October?”

  Teresa said nothing and rested her head again. She’d looked a deal worse than this before. Right after the diagnosis, after the pneumonia, he’d wondered if she would even make it to another autumn.

  She had.

  She wiggled in her seat and glanced unhappily at the bottle of water he’d brought her. “Did you waste our last three bucks on that? I told you to pick up my Djarums.”

  His morning rush vanished and Martin turned the ignition.

  “They only had regular cigarettes.”

  TWO

  Paul’s best friend was still.

  Pieces of Justin’s skull stuck into the Joshua tree like shards of cinnamon glass. The ugly desert tree slowly dripped in ruby streams, thin and thick, dark and light. Its bayonet leaves trembled from the impact of Justin’s body falling back—drip, drip.

  Paul felt his eyes water. The ugly bastard of a palm and cactus had given him allergies. The sneeze wouldn’t come though. Come on, sneeze! His mother, who Paul affectionately referred to as the Whore to End all Other Whores, once said all you needed to do was stare up at the sun a bit to catch a sneeze.

  The sun wasn’t far off. Rose shadows gradually colored the toasted landscape. Paul holstered his piece in his coat and knelt. The gun’s discharge had sent several kangaroo rats scurrying out from the coarse bushes nearby. A few of the stunted rodents inquired around Justin’s spattered pant leg with twinkling black eyes. Paul half-considered shooting one, just to see what design a fifty caliber would leave behind in the dirt. It was a trifle cruel though, not to mention loud.

  A bit of human meat—one nostril in its bloodless center—swung from a reluctant branch of watery flesh. Paul could still see Justin’s open eye in the mess. The lonesome eye wasn’t posing a question. It wasn’t demanding a cause. Causes were out of the game now. But the eye persisted: We were friends, cocksucker.

  “That’s right Justin,” Paul told the corpse. “But that’s love, isn’t? Some kind of fucked up shit.”

  Unseen bugs chirped nearby, or maybe his ears still rang from the bullet. Paul smoothed a hand over his head and gripped a wad of his blonde hair at the back. Sweaty, oily. He would need another shower something fierce after shuffling around in all this dirt, before people started offering him pocket change.

  The eyeball stared listlessly.

  “It’s the only way, Justin. You know me and women. I don’t jerk off; I get off. You should have let the job go to the right guy. I warned you.”

  The right side of the speckled face wasn’t sympathetic. Paul shifted onto his other knee and put a hand in his inner pocket. He brought out the suicide letter, which had been folded in a neat square, as he knew Justin would have done in his hyper-obsessive way.“I want you to know that this is no small thing. It’s beyond pussy, pal. This is on a different scale. She is on a different scale. I don’t expect your naïve ass to understand.” He tucked the square inside Justin’s pants and patted his hip.

  He could just imagine Justin’s rebuttal. “You think I’m being unfair calling you naïve? You’re the damned nature boy. Wh
en have I—in all the time you’ve known me—ever asked to drive out and see a desert sunrise? I was afraid you’d think I was coming on to you. Ever since bishophood you’ve been a big ole pile of fucked-up, Justin. You just slipped man, you slipped. It’s a fine resting place out here though.” Paul stood at a gradual, respectful speed. More and more, blowing Justin’s head off was making him feel giddy, and worthy. The friendship had meant something to him, and so it was a just sacrifice. For the Priestess.

  And Paul Quintana would keep sacrificing. His place in line was next and he would be named a Bishop now. There could be no sidestepping him this time. Hell, there would be a string of “suicides” if it came down any other way. He’d see to it. Things were full circle, finally. The eighteen year old whelp who left home and never said goodbye, that boy had known this day would come; he would have the ideal woman, even if it killed him.

  Paul’s heart jumped and his body followed. Through great, rolling plumes of dust, a limousine sped around the foothill and accelerated at him like an out-of-control coffin. His comrades found him. The Church of Midnight had come. Dust clouds wrapped around him and he let out a fierce sneeze into his shoulder. He couldn’t enjoy the sneeze though.

  The limo shuttered to a halt. Paul heard a door open but couldn’t see anything at first. The dust cleared and Cole Szerszen stepped out, a leaning fortress in a faded Giorgio Armani. The suit might have been scrubbed over river rock for all its wrinkles. Had it ever been black? Cole’s thick unruly hair matched the suit, as did his ashen eyes. For a Bishop of Midnight, he took little pride in grooming.

  Two others fell out of the stretched deal. Raymond Traven and Melissa Paterson. Ray unsheathed his road bottle of Wild Turkey. The burst capillary hue of his cabbage nose took on a sudden happy glow. Melissa sidled close to Cole and yanked tight her well-ironed pants suit. She kept her eyes down. Her mortification made her look overcautious, like an old lady trying to avoid breaking her pelvis. No way was she going to look Paul in the eyes. Not with Cole standing so close nearby.