The Dead Man: Kill Them All Read online

  Matt shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ll be fine, so long as somebody comes along in the next couple of hours.”

  She laughed. “There are cars out here, Matt. Just not a lot of them.” She tossed him a large plastic bottle of water from below her front seat. “You take care.”

  He slid out of the car, grabbed his backpack, ax, and bedroll, and put on his beat-up cowboy hat. “You, too, Sally.”

  She sped away without looking back. Matt Cahill knew a part of her heart had stayed with him. She’d made him think of his dead wife, Janey, and sadness thickened his breathing. He shouldered his things and walked over to the fork in the road, where he set his gear down, slammed the ax head down into the earth, and propped his hat on it for a bit of shade. He had a seat, closed his eyes, and waited for the drone of the next car headed south and west.

  The sun beat down, frying his bare skin, drying his body out like a strip of old leather. Matt wondered how he’d come to be so alone in the world. Not for the first time, he thought, Shit, why me?

  Of course, the only possible answer was Why not you?

  Time passed, and then a shimmering little silver bug appeared on the horizon. A car was coming his way. About fucking time.

  Matt swallowed several gulps of water and got to his feet. Apprehension tickled his stomach. This might all be for nothing, but it felt good to be close to finding out. When the car seemed close enough, he stuck out his thumb. He willed the driver to throw caution to the pathetic lack of wind, take pity on a slowly roasting hitchhiker, and take a risk.

  As the car got closer, Matt noticed it was drifting from side to side. The observation gave him an uneasy feeling. He shaded his eyes. The road looked empty all the way back to the horizon. All things considered, Matt figured he’d have to take whatever he could get.

  The vehicle was a flatbed Ford truck, with a piss-poor paint job somewhere between silver and blue. The windshield had a long crack across it. The front fender hung low, like a penis at half-mast, and the right front headlight was missing. The driver pulled up and parked with the engine still running. The engine sounded like the car looked. Matt walked closer and saw that the driver was a man around fifty, compact and wiry, with big bottle glasses and a dyed comb-over. He wore a checkered red-and-white cowboy shirt with a string tie, and he seemed exhausted.

  “Well, shit. You gonna stand out there all day looking at me?” The driver had a tenor voice, scratchy and annoying. Fortunately he drove the next several miles without saying another word.

  The driver dropped Matt near where he’d been standing when he’d first heard the call for help. Matt could see the old mine shaft, and beyond it some buildings. He walked past the “Kearns Property Leave Shit Here” sign. After about a quarter mile, an old house came into view. It was low to the ground, slanted to one side, painted white to deflect some of the smothering heat. There was a splintering wooden porch and a rocking chair. Behind the place was a shambles of a garage, car parts everywhere, old farming equipment, rusty wrecked cars half covered with thirsty weeds.

  Matt dropped his backpack, ax, and bedroll in the sand. He studied the shack for a while, looking for any movement. Kearns had already seemed out to lunch. A man who lived alone out here might just as soon shoot a stranger as ask questions.

  And then he saw it, a faint shimmering in the air near the back of the garage. Matt felt his stomach clench with disappointment. He gave the buildings a wide berth and walked around to the south. There was a small stovepipe chimney at the back of the garage, and it was releasing heat and a trace of smoke. Matt sniffed the air, smelled something sharp and chemical. His shoulders slumped. The guy was cooking meth. Matt turned to go.

  “Don’t you fucking move. I’ll blow you out of those boots, motherfucker.”

  Matt froze. His scrotum tried to shrink into a slipknot.

  An eerie specter rose out of some trash and a bit of cactus. He was covered with dust and powder. Kearns again. This time the man cradled a sawed-off shotgun in his arms, business end pointed Matt’s way. The twin barrels seemed to sneer. The guy still wore those ripped overalls, no shirt, and had blistering, sunburned skin. He was one butt-ugly sight, balding and toothless and sallow. Matt, as accustomed to horrific apparitions as he’d become, almost cringed at his appearance. Now it was clear that the rot wasn’t from evil. It was from the crystal methamphetamine the dumb peckerwood was cooking and shooting.

  “Mr. Kearns, I just came to apologize for striking you. I’ll just be on my way.”

  “Who the fuck asked for an apology?” No front teeth, a slavering lisp. “You from the gummint?”

  “I’m not from the government, no, Mr. Kearns.”

  “Bullshit.” Kearns spat. “You get off my land.”

  “Sure…”

  Suddenly Kearns shrieked. A crow and two vultures took flight in alarm as the sound echoed. Startled and afraid of the shotgun, Matt flinched.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Kearns fired the shotgun, aiming towards his own house. Out here in the middle of nowhere, the noise was like the bark of a giant dog. “Stay away from me, you bastard! Stay back!”

  Spooked, Matt looked. The house. The rocker. There was nobody there.

  Kearns squinted, carefully studying his porch for the movement of a creature that didn’t exist. Matt took advantage of the distraction and edged towards his belongings. Kearns clearly had a bad case of amphetamine psychosis—full-on auditory and visual hallucinations. If he had really seen the Dark Man, the experience had run together in his mind with dozens of other delusions. He’d be useless in terms of acquiring new information. The trip had been a waste of time—and could still be a fatal mistake.

  The gun discharged again. An echo barked back a few seconds later, and then one more. The crow cawed as if amused. Kearns screamed in a voice high and shrill. He fired at it the bird, and blood and feathers exploded in all directions.

  “Take that, you skinny, black-winged motherfucker!”

  Matt trotted over to his stuff but didn’t take his eyes off of Kearns. He gathered up the backpack and sleeping bag and reached for the ax. Matt thought he heard some kind of low throbbing sound, wasn’t sure from where. Could have been the panicked blood thundering through the veins in his own ears. Facing down an enemy was one thing. A psychotic with a shotgun was quite another.

  Kearns hunkered down like a man taking a dump in his pants, which was actually quite possible, all things considered. He gripped the shotgun in his trembling right hand and with his left he dug into his filthy pocket for another shell. He seemed to have forgotten Matt’s presence or written it off as a hallucination. Kearns reloaded and stalked towards his own home.

  But Kearns stalked nothing and fired at nothing. Matt backed away, the ax in his right hand and the pack and bedroll over his left shoulder. He was almost out of range of the shotgun when he noticed the humming sound again and pegged it for an engine.

  A vehicle this far from the highway?

  A large one, a truck or a van, and it sounded closer. Perhaps he could hitch a ride away from this madhouse.

  “Ugh!”

  Kearns threw his hands up as if upset by something, and the shotgun went sailing. Matt blinked. Part of the redneck’s head disappeared, to be replaced by a strange pink cloud that floated away. Kearns dropped to his knees and fell over dead.

  He’d been shot, and Matt hadn’t heard a thing.

  Someone was using a silencer.

  Matt ducked and tried to run, but something slammed into the side of his head, and he dropped his gear. The world went white with pain, spun in a circle, and turned pitch-black.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Friday, 4:32 p.m.

  Matt came to but kept his eyes closed. He was inside and could feel cool air-conditioning on his exposed skin. His arm ached—like an IV needle had been badly inserted and then clumsily taped down. The back of his head was pounding. No one could have gotten close enough to hit him without Matt sensing it, so he’d b
een shot with something, perhaps a beanbag. Cops or military? But why?

  “Sleeping Beauty is awake.” A man’s jocular baritone. “Bro, we have been trying to catch up to your ass for a week. This morning we got here ahead of you. At last we meet!”

  Matt forced his eyes open and squinted. He was on a gurney but not in a hospital. This was some kind of gigantic van—he could tell by the shape of the walls. Everything around and below him vibrated a bit. The speaker was dressed in black with a web belt and a sidearm. Mercenary all the way. He had a friendly, boyish face and a good-natured grin.

  “My name is Scotty, Cahill,” the man said. “And of course we already know who you are.”

  The scary stranger Sally had mentioned. Scotty instantly reminded Matt of someone. Someone he knew. His head hurt too much to focus. He rolled his head to the right. There was a needle in his arm. And some kind of a transfusion bottle there, but something didn’t look right. What was it? Matt struggled to make sense of his situation. He felt weak and dizzy. And then it finally hit him. They weren’t giving him fluids or medication.

  They were drawing his blood.

  Lots of it.

  “You hungry?”

  “What?”

  Scotty repeated, “You hungry? Our medic says you’ll last longer if we give you some fruit and orange juice once in a while.”

  Matt felt the world slide sideways and tilt. He was growing weaker by the second. Matt knew he wasn’t like other people—not anymore, not since he’d come back from the dead. No one was guaranteed immortality. How many pints of blood in a human body? Something like ten? How much had he lost already?

  They were bleeding him.

  “Two things I get off on,” Scotty said. “Football and old movies. You ever watch Laurel and Hardy? Those two old comics from the silent movie days? One tall and skinny, one short and fat. Loved those guys. You know, it turns out the dumb one was the brains.”

  “Huh?”

  Scotty grinned again. The boyish smile prompted Matt’s memory. “Andy,” he said. His voice was already becoming a desperate croak.

  “Andy?”

  “You remind me of my friend Andy.” A lifelong friend Matt had to kill after the Dark Man and the rot of evil took him over. And now that same rot was spreading across Scotty’s face, eating away the flesh on his chin. A thin stream of pus dribbled from his right nostril.

  “That so?” Scotty seemed pleased. “Cool. Hey, thing is, under other circumstances, we probably could have been friends. Hope you realize this isn’t personal, Cahill. If it was up to me, I’d keep you around. Orders are orders.”

  Matt shivered. The air was cold and he felt weak. “Whose orders?”

  “Boss man says to take your blood, so we take your blood. Ours is not to reason why.” Scotty yawned. Something ugly and black writhed like a worm of smoke in the back of his throat as if fighting to get out.

  “Don’t do this,” Matt said. “It’s murder.”

  “War is hell,” Scotty said. And he flashed that Andy grin again. Matt felt fear and a deep sadness, both for himself and for Scotty, who might have been a decent person once but was past saving now. Matt didn’t want to die like this, but he was too weak for much of anything else—and growing weaker by the minute. He closed his eyes.

  Scotty slapped his face lightly. “Stay awake, dude. We want you around for as long as possible.”

  “Screw you.”

  “That’s it! Come on, you don’t want this to be too easy, do you?”

  “I don’t want this at all.”

  Matt rolled his head the other way. A couple of mercenaries sat nearby. One was sucking on what smelled like a joint. The other was snoozing. The sliding side door to the van was open a crack. Another mercenary stood guard outside, but without much panache or enthusiasm. These men were well trained, but evil was on board, eroding their focus. Individual discipline was sliding. Appetites running amuck. They all reeked of sin. If Mr. Dark wasn’t actually running the show, he was most certainly involved. Had to be in some way.

  Matt studied his foe. Tried to speak. “Why?”

  Scotty blinked. “Why take your blood? Dude, you’re fucking famous. Matt Cahill, the man who was frozen solid for three months and brought back to life. The word went out among the very, very, very rich that you are Ponce de Fucking León himself, the owner of the secret of eternal youth. It was only a matter of time until someone hired a guy like me to come and find you.”

  “Who?”

  Scotty smiled. “Guess it doesn’t matter if I tell you. The checks come from some very smart men with money. Old men who contribute heavily to the university where you were first studied.”

  “The university?”

  “Alumni, shall we say.”

  “They think it’s in my blood?”

  “They say it has to be, dude. Somewhere in your blood or your DNA. So they figure it’s something money can locate and copy, or at least secure the rights to.” Scotty leaned closer. His breath stank of the rot eating him from inside. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Why not just steal a sample and go to work on that? Why bleed you dry? So I asked the same question. Seems to me we could take some, let you eat and rest, then take some more, and even go on and on for months or years that way.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Just let me stay alive long enough to figure a way out of here…

  “But no, we’re supposed to get as much as we can over a few days, then punch your ticket and dispose of the body. In case you’re curious, it will be a state-of-the-art cremation. That is, we plan to burn your ass up with a frag and split.”

  “Why kill me? Just to leave no evidence?”

  “Monopoly, dude. Once we have enough healthy samples, taking your ass out leaves no way for anyone else to compete. Business is murder these days.”

  Matt licked his lips. “Water. Please.”

  Scotty snapped his fingers. The mercenary with the marijuana sighed, pinched out his joint, and got a small bottle of water. He tossed it to Scotty, who opened it and poured a taste into Matt’s mouth. “Go easy, partner. Wouldn’t want you to get sick. We’ll turn off the drip now, let you get some strength back.”

  Matt managed to make his left hand crawl up to grab the bottle. He wanted to handle it himself. He took another sip. “You must feel really proud of yourself.”

  Scotty blinked once, then looked away.

  A hit, a palpable hit.

  The mercenary got up, walked around the gurney, and stopped the blood flow. He put some grapes and orange slices on a paper plate and set it down on Matt’s legs. Something in Scotty’s weakened mind wandered, though, and instead of feeding Matt he began to absently snack on the grapes himself. He looked normal again, and then horrific. These dangerous men were rapidly being taken over by their own mindless appetites.

  Matt swallowed some more water, choking a bit but keeping it down. He looked to his right, where the needle protruded, and his mind raced for some kind of answer. He was alone in a huge trailer parked out in the desert, guarded by mercenary soldiers recruited in the cause of evil. Everyone thought he’d left town. The rancher he’d visited was dead, and perhaps Matt would be blamed for the murder. As for any chance of rescue, no one even knew he was here. Only one thing was certain.

  Matt was in deep, deep shit.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sunday, 11:34 a.m.

  He lost track of the number of times they woke him up to give him water, fruit and juice or to change the trickle of urine in the bedpan. As soon as he’d regained some of his strength, they’d start collecting blood again. Matt was light-headed all the time now, and his vision was blurring. The mercenaries looked horrific, their souls pocked with the unspoken evil of what they were doing. One with a shaved head never looked at him. One with thick red hair never stopped. The stoner never quit smoking. Their lack of sympathy and interest betrayed souls too far gone for any kind of recovery.

  These were trained mercenaries, in great condition and still
quite lethal, but the Dark Man had found a way to touch them. They ate Matt’s food on a whim, smoked dope, drank booze, and napped. When Matt was able to concentrate, he wondered if these men would even remember what they had done here. They seemed beyond caring.

  And Matt didn’t have much longer to live.

  The mercenaries rotated positions. Scotty was the only one with a smidgen of bedside manner. The others rarely spoke, except to grunt a request or use a four-letter word. One had the habit of constantly scratching his balls. They argued violently, exercised, cleaned their weapons endlessly, burped and farted, slept and snored. Sometimes they fought like animals over a scrap of meat. Killers without a purpose.

  Matt was pretty certain it was just the next day, not two days later. The sun was up again, and the light and shade he could see through the small opening suggested it was approaching noon. He’d finally realized why they kept the door open, despite the constant air-conditioning. The pot smell bothered Scotty.

  As Matt slowly died, Scotty talked about Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. Finally he switched to professional football. He had an obsession with the classic teams of the sixties and early seventies, especially Miami. He droned on and on about the Dolphins’ perfect season with Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick and Mercury Morris at halfback. The backup quarterback Earl Morrall. He described plays against the Redskins and a big playoff game against the Chiefs that went into overtime.

  Matt came to appreciate those talks because listening to Scotty gave him something to hold on to, something to think about other than gathering darkness and the fear of bleeding to death. He wondered if he’d see Janey after he died and hold her again. That thought was a comfort.

  “Boss?” one of the mercenaries asked. He was standing guard in the doorway, with an AK pointed down at the floor.