The Travelling Man (33 page)

He rolled up and onto his feet quickly. He raised a hand to the open wound near his throat and was relieved to find that it had just fallen short; any higher and he would be bleeding out. Instead, the blood was a thin trickle although there was what felt like a huge chunk of flesh missing. Anger surged through his body as he faced Jim Lesnar. He had no idea what had driven the man mad, but right now he didn’t care. Jeanne was hanging from a hook in the ceiling and little Ellie was in here somewhere and God only knew what plans this lunatic had for the both of them.

They circled each other warily, neither one speaking, like two jungle cats eyeing for a weakness. While Kevin was much taller and made of steel, he had felt Lesnar’s strength on the ground and had no desire to return to a position that so favoured the mine owner. Lesnar’s legs may well be short but his arms were long and powerful; not to mention the fact that he was brimming with the added strength of the insane.

His intimidation grew a little deeper as Lesnar withdrew a wicked looking serrated hunting knife from the back of his pants and licked the tip of the blade, drawing a thin line of blood on his tongue. Kevin had never wished for his sidearm as much as he did right then. Lesnar unarmed was dangerous enough, but the silver blade looked sharp and he looked hungry to use it.

Lesnar lurched to one side and the knife flashed out. Kevin realised at the last minute that he had underestimated the man’s reach and an orangutan sized limb sliced across his chest, cutting deeply. Lesnar grinned broadly, still without speaking. He circled again, occasionally slicing through the air to keep Kevin off balance.

Kevin dodged the blows easily, making sure that he was out of distance. He stepped backwards and away from Jeanne, not daring to risk a glance in her direction, as while Lesnar could not run fast, his arms possessed their own impressive speed.

Worryingly, Kevin started to feel a little faint and his chest was tingling. He could feel the shirt was soaking through with blood from the knife wound at an alarming rate and he was concerned that the blade had cut far deeper than he’d imagined. His vision started to blur and he shook his head violently to try and clear his sight.

Lesnar suddenly charged forward as if he had sensed the weakness and Kevin slumped to one side at the most opportune moment as the knife plunged into thin air where his heart had been only milliseconds before. Kevin reached out and clamped a powerful hand down on Lesnar’s wrist, squeezing hard enough to crush the man’s grip on the weapon. Kevin grinned without humor as Lesnar screamed in pain, and he heard a bone or two crack. He allowed Lesnar’s momentum to carry the man forward, adding his own hard shove. Lesnar span out of control and crashed into a dimly lit metal appliance of some kind,  accompanied by the sound of glass breaking. Kevin staggered towards the fallen man, eager to keep the upper hand, but Lesnar suddenly lunged forward again clutching a shard of broken mirror in his hand. The piece of glass cut deeply into his palm but he seemed not to notice or care. Kevin got an arm up just in time as Lesnar swung the makeshift weapon downwards. The shard drove its way deep into his forearm as Lesnar’s weight hit him again at chest height. Kevin tried to stay on his feet but he was driven down to his knees with the piece of glass embedded in his flesh. A hard punch caught him squarely on the jaw and he fell backwards. Lesnar was on him in a flash, yanking the shard out of his forearm with a crimson spray of blood as it came loose. Kevin looked up into the eyes of the man who was going to kill him and wondered what it must feel like to love and be loved back.

The explosion of the shotgun was monstrously loud in the basement and Lesnar was suddenly flying backwards through the air as the pellets peppered his chest and shoulder, blowing a hole clean through.

The blood loss started to overtake Kevin as he lay on the floor bleeding from multiple wounds, but he felt the figure walk into the room. The basement was suddenly bathed in bright light and he saw Mrs. Fiorentino approach, holding a battery powered lantern and cradling a shotgun.

He twisted his head to look back towards Jeanne hanging on the hook. Their eyes met and he wondered why she wasn’t looking relieved at her imminent rescue. He supposed that she must be full of fear for his safety, given the amount of blood that was currently leaking from him. He tried to give her a reassuring wink but suddenly, thanks to Mrs. Fiorentino’s lantern, he could see more clearly. There were several figures, all hanging suspended from similar hooks to Jeanne. Male bodies were stripped of clothing and most had long pieces of flesh carefully carved from their bones. All were dead and Kevin’s stomach revolted at the sudden realisation that he was staring at a larder.

“I told you, Deputy,” Mrs. Fiorentino said as she drew close, “I will never be dependent on anyone ever again. The lord says that we reap what we sow and I shall reap my harvest and I will endure these trials. Some of my boys were absent from the mine on the day of the reckoning and I soon found that God does indeed help those who help themselves. He came to me in a dream you know, or was it a dream?” she said, looking puzzled, and Kevin could see the same shimmer of madness in her eyes that Lesnar had. “We struck a bargain, him and I, a deal which meant I will never again want for food in my belly and never have to rely on anyone again. Is that Mr. Lesnar over there that I just shot? Whatever is he doing down here? Well, not to worry, ours isn’t to question why, ours, or maybe more accurately yours, is to do and die. You and Mr. Lesnar look a little stringy for my taste, but your friend over there is nice and soft and juicy.” She salivated towards Jeanne with relish as she brought the butt of the shotgun down hard on Kevin’s head, sending him crashing deep into the darkness.    

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Cassie and Kravis ran up what was left of Main Street and turned into the town square as the red sky was lit up by blinding lightning. She didn’t have time to consider the heartbreaking new damage that seemed determined to destroy all that was left of Granton. As the lightning flashed again, she could see the gathering up on the hill by the church and she led Kravis in that direction.

She flapped a hand and Kravis fell in behind her as they marched double time in single file. The closer that they got to the melee, she could see that their clandestine approach was unnecessary. The large gathering of people was a confused throng of bloody bodies with seemingly little direction or aim. She recognised several faces but many more had their features obscured by savage streaming wounds. Kind townsfolk of Granton that she had known for more years than she could remember were now strangers as they rolled and flailed in the mud like wild animals. The air was thick with insanity and the stench was acrid and burned in her throat.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell are they doing?” she whispered under her breath.

“It’s him,” Kravis responded from behind. “He’s doing it. He must be close by.”

Cassie was about to tell him that there was no way that criminal masterminds wandered about their crime scenes in person, but then she saw him. Gilbert Grange could not have been physically further from the man that she had seen in town not that long ago. Gone was the dapper gent adorned in a perfectly tailored suit, oblivious to the desert heat. In his place stumbled a stooped man of infinite age and feeble appearance. Grange looked like he could barely stand and his expensive suit hung off his shoulders in filthy rags. His hat was missing, and without it she could see that his head was shorn of most of its hair and what remained were loose strands of snowy white.

Cassie moved closer, making sure to stay within the confines of the brush undergrowth for at least some kind of cover. The eerie red light that filtered over the battlefield gave scant illumination, but through the glow she could see Grange’s face.

The skin was peeling away from his cheeks and forehead as large open sores split open and leaked a yellow, oozing pus. Long flaps of flesh had fallen clean away, leaving his skull exposed in bloody swathes across his scalp and her stomach revolted as she could see the shiny grey matter beneath. The only part of him that looked like it was still alive, however, were his eyes. These precious jewels sparkled and twirled with the colours of the rainbow and Cassie felt herself drawn into their dancing light.

Grange stepped over a couple of bodies on the floor that were too covered in red clay mud and blood for her to identify. He moved with difficulty and shambled, rather than walked. Even from this distance, she could feel his clawing hunger and she buried herself deeper into her cover in the hope of avoiding detection.

She felt Kravis crawl up alongside and heard his gasp of surprise at Grange’s appearance.

“Did he look anything like that in your town?” she asked quietly.

Kravis’ shocked silence answered her question.

“How the hell do we stop something like that?” she hissed, aware that she hadn’t said “someone”.

“What happened to your plan of putting a bullet in his head?” Kravis whispered back.

“Right now I’m thinking that will only piss him off,” she admitted.

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Ellie crept from her bedroom. She had been looking out of the window earlier and for some reason, Deputy Kevin had suddenly looked scared and had rushed into the house, but as soon as she had turned around there had been no one behind her. She had barely been able to keep her eyes open and had soon fallen back into a deep sleep. Mrs. Fiorentino had brought her cocoa but she’d barely touched it.

She had slept for what felt like a long time but she was still so very tired. She knew that her illness was progressing unchecked as there were simply no doctors available to treat her. She was trying to be brave, to show the sort of courage that she knew her mother possessed, but it was hard to measure up.

Her bed was littered with pieces of paper strewn about by her kicking sleeping feet. Her drawings had become more and more difficult to decipher and most were now wild scribbles of jagged shapes and colours. She grabbed a handful of her strange artwork and peered through them intently. A couple of her latest seemed to draw her attention and she pondered their significance. The sketches had started to fade in their strength and regularity and she felt like wherever they came from was going away.

She looked down at the last of them and pushed the others onto the floor. The picture seemed to swirl before her eyes, taking shape and taking on a sense of life. The centre of the image seemed to become familiar and she could make out a cross emerging from the black centre. The dark middle moved into a kind of block shape and the cross glowed on top.
The church,
she thought to herself; that was where it was going to end. Her heart began to flutter as the swirl of shapes in front of the building started to dance and move. Flashes of red criss-crossed throughout the figures and most were starting to lie down on the ground, motionless. The cross on top of the church began to glow stronger and suddenly, within what remained of the figures, another bright glow started to emanate, but this shape was a star. She didn’t need to see the figures closely to know that they were people and only two people she knew wore stars on their chest and one of them was here.

She carefully folded the picture up and tucked it into her pocket. She swung her legs off the bed and fought against the wave of nausea that ran through her body. She held down what little food remained in her stomach and stood up slowly. She walked slowly to the door, steeling herself for the journey.

She stepped out into the hallway beyond the room and looked both ways. For some reason, she felt compelled to keep quiet and not cry out for attention. The large house seemed deserted and she could not hear Kevin or Jeanne or the landlady. Her nose crinkled at the thought of Mrs. Fiorentino. The woman just seemed off somehow, like a wicked witch in a fairy tale that Ellie was too old for these days. She couldn’t help but wonder just how large the woman’s stove was and if it would be big enough to take young children.

She moved quietly along the corridor and towards the stairs, all the while listening out for any sounds or movement. She desperately wanted for her mother to be here, or the next best thing would be Kevin. He was a giant of a man whose head seemed to brush every ceiling. In some ways, he reminded her of her grandfather who had been the biggest man that she had ever seen albeit only in photographs; right now, all she wanted was to feel safe again.

She shook the childish emotion aside and tried to find her strength, strength that ran in her blood from her grandfather and mother. She had often wondered who her father had been; she had tried many times to picture him and hoped that he had been brave and kind. Her mother had told her a couple of years ago that they had been passing ships in the night and that the man had been sent to her to give her the greatest gift of all, and that was Ellie. She knew that it was a story to avoid the truth but she had yet to press her mother further on the subject; for some reason, the bliss of her own imagination still outweighed the fear of the truth. She knew that there would come a day when she was older that she would need to know, but that day was not yet.

She had played many games in her mind imagining her father. Sometimes he was a spy unable to have a family of his own because he was out saving the world; sometimes he was a superhero unwilling to risk his family’s identity. Other times he was a scientist, or an astronaut or maybe a politician, but he was always important and he would always have an important reason why he had not been to see her. She knew that one day he would return and on that day everything would become clear to her.