The Dead Man: Kill Them All (4 page)

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 been 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.

Scotty stopped in the middle of describing Larry Csonka plowing through three defenders and knocking himself silly running into the goalpost. He seemed annoyed by the interruption.

“What?”

“Somebody is outside,” the guard said. “Women.”

“The fuck?”

The other bored mercenaries rushed the door like frat boys, their weapons at half-mast.

Scotty sighed and stared down at the bed for a few seconds. When he looked up, his face was just raw meat and writhing worms. Matt cringed as Scotty shook his head and a couple of gray worms fell off and dropped writhing on the bedsheet.

“I don’t care if it’s the chicks from ‘Black Swan’ licking each other,” Scotty said. “Stay sharp or I’ll shoot you myself.”

The stoner went to the window, opened it, and jammed himself into the corner with his weapon pointed outside. To Matt, the man’s eyes were black holes. His nose had fallen off. The other two went to their assigned posts as well. Scotty patted Matt’s leg in an absurd parody of politeness.

“Excuse me for a second.”

Scotty gripped his weapon and went to the door. He kept the weapon behind his back and filled the doorway. Matt gathered himself to call for help but then realized he’d just get whoever was outside killed.

The breathless voice of an unfamiliar female. “Sorry to bother you, honey.”

“Hold it right there, honey,” Scotty said. Matt watched as Scotty’s fingers tensed on the Glock. Matt hoped whoever it was wouldn’t be killed right there in front of him.

“We’re coming back from a party in Elko,” another woman said. Her voice sounded slurred. “We got a flat tire.”

The stoner said, “I’ll change it.”

Scotty shot him a dirty look. He peered out the door again. Seemingly satisfied, he relaxed. “Just stay where you are, okay? Someone will be out in a second.”

He closed the door, looked at the stoner. “Get them out of here.”