Dark Advent Read online

  His beer gone and on the fringes of sleep, Travis remembered how she smelled on that day that had become the beginning of the end, a chilly but dry Saturday last November. She had smelled of shampoo and Lysol. And he had smelled of burning leaves…

  Wearing a loose sweatshirt and baggy pants, Travis stepped in through the back door and into the kitchen. Fine gray ash speckled his hair and shoulders. Hair corkscrewed from his head, he hadn’t shaved in two days, and if pressed, he’d probably have admitted he looked like a cartoon wino. In spite of the day’s chill, his face was hot, his throat harshly dry.

  “Aw, Travis, you look atrocious. I hope the neighbors didn’t see you like that.” Sheila was stirring something in a big pot on the stove. Whatever it was, it smelled good.

  “Who cares?” He plundered the refrigerator in search of beer or soda, found nothing. He guzzled from the wide mouth of the orange juice bottle. “I’m not dressing to impress today.”

  “Well, remember there’s the Murphys across the street.” She smiled up hopefully at him, hair tied back from her face. She’d recently had it trimmed so there was barely enough to tie. “I was kind of hoping we could have them over some night soon. They’re new, remember.”

  “I was out back, dear. Out back. That means they couldn’t see me through the fucking house.” He replaced the juice, wandered over to the stove. “What’s in the pot?”

  “Chili. Want some?”

  Travis scooped a couple fingers in.

  “Travis, you’ll burn yourself!”

  He grunted and withdrew them, popped them into his mouth. “Could use a little more chili powder.”

  He watched her reach over the range hood, into the spice rack, and take down the tin of McCormick chili powder. Her hand jerked it out quick as a cobra, an extra little flourish there that usually meant some flicker of anger she was keeping in check.

  Yeah, this is how it starts. This is how it starts, all right.

  Lower lip curling slightly over her top one, Sheila dug a measuring spoon into the powder and dumped a heaping spoonful in. Again. Again. Another moment and a small island of maroon sand had appeared in the center of that pot.

  Travis let a loosely clenched fist fall onto the countertop next to the stove. “You ever hear the word moderation?”

  Her shoulders tensed for a second, a bowstring ready to snap. She slammed the tin down with the sound of a snare drum’s rimshot, hard enough that residual grains of powder sifted onto the counter. “Then fix it yourself if you’re the expert.” She wheeled around to head for the bedroom, the bathroom, any room with a door she could slam, probably. Predictable as time, she was.

  She almost got as far as the edge of the kitchen.

  Travis grabbed her by her thin upper arm and yanked her back, the flesh and muscles squelching beneath his fingers, soft and almost a little flabby. She tottered and then stood facing him, her eyes narrowed and her mouth compressed into a taut line. She looked ugly like this, not herself at all. Why she persisted in bringing this on herself he’d never know. But it was up to him to bring her around again. Sometimes it seemed that when they’d married sixteen years ago, all she’d done was trade in her father on a newer model named Travis. Maybe that was why they’d never had kids, never even truly considered it seriously. He had his hands full just keeping her in line.

  “You don’t talk to me that way. You hear?”

  Sheila was as silent and unflinching as a rock. His fingers dug deeper into her arm, pinching until they nearly met around back. But did she move? Oh no. Not a hair. Oh, this defiant little bitch was just begging for a little chastisement.

  “I said you don’t talk to me that way. You got that?”

  “Let go of me, Travis.”

  “YOU GOT THAT?”

  Her face started to relax, her mouth loosening, and he thought she was going to break down and give in. As usual. As it should be. As was the natural order of things. Case closed.

  But she took him by surprise. She brought her leg up and stamped down on his instep. Hard. He cried out for a second (but only because it surprised him, that’s all, the only reason). Bitch! He’d be lucky if he wasn’t limping when he went in on Monday. All those little bones across the top of the foot, it didn’t take much to break one or two of them, much less make them ache like hell for a few days, especially when all you were wearing was a ratty old pair of Keds.

  It was so sudden, so unexpected, so against the grain. And he might have laughed had it not been so hugely, totally, WRONG. And what was this? What was this? This look on her face of smug triumph? Why, this was one of Life’s Great No-No’s. Thou shalt not raise thy hand or foot to Travis…because Travis will turn around and smite thy face in.

  Could anyone blame him?

  The first blow was a backhand. So was the second. And the third…

  And as she finally slumped toward the floor, he couldn’t quite understand why she was laughing. It hurt, it hurt bad, he knew that, because he saw the tears streaming down her face. He was getting through to her, she was taking her medicine, but damn it, the effects of this little lesson in the way things should and should not be were getting negated. And he simply couldn’t have that.

  Something spoke deep within him with the voice of a doomcrier, and it told him that he was witnessing some manner of rebirth taking place before him, that things were never going to be the same. A rebirth of blood and saltwater tears.

  Laughing—she just wouldn’t stop it. No matter how hard he tried to make her.

  It was the memory of this failure that still haunted him, and he remembered it every time he tripped one of Sheila’s little stinkbombs into malevolent life. It was worse than the time he was eighteen and got fired from a job parking cars after he’d been found pilfering through them to pocket what looked interesting. It was worse than all the memories of his brother Galen, who’d come along when Travis was three, and how Travis just didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. And why should he? Why should he when Galen was younger and cuter and sweeter, and all the teachers said that Galen was so smart, that he’d be destined for great things someday. Oh sure, Galen this, Galen that, Galen and his college scholarships. And if their folks had had a fatted calf any weekend Galen decided to visit and grace them with his presence, you can bet old Dad would’ve been out there with a knife poised over the fucker’s heart.

  Watching Sheila laugh at him was worse than all that rolled into one big wrecking ball. Because for the first time in recent memory he could feel the control of a situation slipping through his fingers like water through a sieve.

  Travis made himself a solemn promise that he’d never feel that again, no matter what the cost. He sauntered over to the front window, squinting against the sun, and peered out and down the street. He could scarcely see the front edge of the house two doors down, but he imagined he could hear the steady thump of a bass line from their stereo.

  No more loss of control. Not now, not ever.

  Especially not with a houseful of lazy, longhaired pussies who didn’t even have the guts to face him five-on-one in the back yard.

  4

  When The Courier made it back home to Wyoming, he was a tornado in that final moment before descent. He was still up in the clouds, gathering force and fury, ready to dip down low and give brand new definitions to the phrase hell on earth.

  Feels so good coming down.

  For the past three years, Clairmont had headquartered his operations in northeastern Wyoming, south of Gillette. Desolate place, real boondocks country. He had storehouses of munitions and all the latest toys of catastrophe the world over—the Florida Everglades, Quebec, Malta, West Berlin—and his inventory sheets read like a travelogue. But for the projects that fell under Special Development, the stretches of endless country in Wyoming did the trick. It’s not nearly as hard as you might think to hide where there’s so much nothing.
/>   The aboveground installation wouldn’t have drawn much more than a passing glance. You might think it a bit odd that a dairy farm would be encircled by a heavy chain-link fence, electrified at that, but in today’s world, a few paranoid eccentricities are only good for a yawn. The main barn complex was bright and clean within, rows and rows of happy, contented milkers whizzing away the contents of their udders into receptacles that would lead it into the bellies of America’s children. Just one more link in the food chain.

  Ah, but underground…

  Find the elevator if you could, and take a short trip down, and you’d discover a labyrinth of corridors. Forty feet beneath those milking machines were administrative offices and libraries of files and military manuals and the labs comprising Clairmont’s Research and Development Center. A true capitalist, that Clairmont. He wanted to offer his buyers things they simply couldn’t get elsewhere. That’s the way you corner the market.

  The Courier drove his AMC Jeep past the guard just inside the fence. Dusk had passed about an hour ago. He followed the drive in, took a right branch that led to a parking lot where several cars sat; beyond them hulked a number of semi-cabs and their various trailers.

  The Courier shut off his engine and sat in the silence that seems so utterly vast in the western United States at night. He then took hold of a familiar attaché case. Opened it. Withdrew a hypodermic syringe and a squared-off vial of amber liquid. He fed the needle into the skin of rubber in the vial’s cap and drew out sufficient cc’s for immunization, then depressed the plunger to remove any air. Liquid squirted from the needle. He rolled up his shirtsleeve to expose the taut muscle of his shoulder, swabbed a spot with a foil-wrapped alcohol swab, then jabbed the needle in. Drove the plunger home. He felt a subtle burning within the muscle, a fire that cleansed. At last he took one of the steel canisters containing the CBW culture, slipped it into the sizable pocket of his bush vest. Then took another; one to grow on, as it were. For luck. He latched the case closed.

  The Courier strolled his jaunty way across to the barn, the briefcase in one hand. Over the opposite shoulder hung looped a moderately sized canvas bag, khaki in color. He mooed at a couple of cows who stared at him, then found the elevator and grinned when the doors slid quietly shut. As the cab descended, he set the case down in a back corner. Here it would stay, for all eternity, having served its purpose well. But no longer needed.

  He reached into his canvas bag and withdrew a rectangle of dark plastic and metal, roughly the size of his fist. When he depressed a silent electronic switch, a tiny red status light began to wink on and off. Activated. He reached through the movable panel in the cab’s roof, set it above his head, pulled his hand back. Nothing like a little incentive to keep things running on schedule.

  He’d been back from Cancun for several hours, but had purposely waited until night. Even though this subterranean lair was a perpetual flood of fluorescent light, up topside there lay all the darkness in the world. Whispering darkness. In the beginning there was darkness, and it was good.

  …and he shuts his eyes and lets it wash over him, imagining it to be filling the elevator cab, complete and total, just the same as those childhood closets he’d been condemned to. But his victory is always assured by sheer will, and he conquers the darkness once more and makes it his friend, his ally, his partner. His goal.

  And when the elevator thumps to a gentle stop and the doors glide open, he steps out with an Uzi extended like a third hand, and when he first sees humanity he opens fire, the Uzi a chattering ally all its own. He sweeps left, sweeps right, spinning into doorways, emptying the 32-round magazines into scientist and civilian alike, ejecting and replacing them with fresh magazines from the apparently bottomless khaki bag. He pauses only to drop his little plastic and metal bundles, red lights winking, in strategic locations, and then he moves along.

  He’s alive and grinning, rocking and rolling, proficient as hell and taking no prisoners. He’s mighty Zeus, hurling thunderbolts down from Olympus on unsuspecting mortals. He’s death on two legs, hell on wheels, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator ain’t got nothing on him. He’s the worst kind of interior decorator, redoing the walls and the floors and oh dear god sometimes even the ceilings in bright fans of crimson and splurts of brain.

  At last he’s even managed to track down Colonel Clairmont himself, the fat old bag of flatulence who still wears his uniforms from his Pentagon glory days even though they’re about twenty pounds too tight. Only now that uniform is pocked by several holes, and the Colonel’s legs are folded beneath him as he props himself up against a once-white corridor wall.

  “I’m meant for much bigger things, you know,” The Courier says. Clairmont can only gaze upward into those cheerful eyes and choke and wheeze and wonder why, for he doesn’t know that bits of his lungs have been blasted through his back and are dribbling down the wall.

  “I do dislike violence,” The Courier muses, pausing to withdraw another bomb from his bag and activate it and set it beneath Clairmont’s leg, “but you must admit, I am awfully good at it.’’ Such are the last words the Colonel hears in this life.

  And The Courier moves steadily, relentlessly onward, finishing up this most distasteful of cleanup operations, as he doesn’t yet have anyone to do his dirty work for him. But he will soon, he’s sure of it, and the thought makes him grin even wider and he storms a supply room adjacent to one of the R & D labs, and he fills his khaki bag with several toys heretofore unseen by merchants of death the world over.

  And with his job complete, he returns to the elevator, striding around and over bodies left in tattered heaps by his 9mm hailstorm, ignoring the occasional wounded moan because he knows they won’t have anything to moan about soon enough.

  The cab takes him up, out of that bright sterile netherworld that will never again be seen by human eyes, up, out of the carnage and technology triumphant, up, into the waiting arms of the night. And darkness.

  He was all the way to the trucks on the far side of the lot when the bombs began detonating. Dull coughing roars, muffled through forty feet of earth, sounded in the night. At last the one in the elevator shaft went off, and a fireball rolled up and into the dairy. Chain reaction. He heard falling timbers, rending metal, the terrified squalling of several tons of charbroiled beef on the hoof. The few topside personnel left at night were in a sudden panic, running to and fro with guns drawn and no idea what they were looking for. One man came running from the direction of the station at the entrance, asked The Courier what was going on. The Courier uttered some vague explanation about angry Libyans and let the man pass.

  The Courier found the truck he wanted on the farthest reaches of the lot, different than the rest. Its plain trailer was in no way linked with the dairy. The cab was glossy black beneath coats of road dust. And in the trailer, well, a strange little wrinkle to the viral project that Dr. Shaffer had been working on before his untimely demise and entombment.

  A placid eye in the midst of a growing hurricane, The Courier strolled around to the driver’s door and hoisted himself up by the handrails, opened the door, slung his bag inside, slid behind the wheel. Through the wide expanse of polarized windshield, he could stare down on everything in his path.

  He felt beneath the mat for the keys, as simple as that. After another moment, black clouds of exhaust roared from the twin pipes running up the height of the semi-cab’s back, and it shuddered with sudden diesel power. The exhaust continued to rise, to fan out, to finally mingle with the smoke from the dairy. He flexed one leg on the clutch and caressed the gear levers, caught in the green luminous glow of the dashboard’s eighteen dials. Overhead, a CB radio burst into caterwauling life with a barrage of static and nasal cowboy bravado.

  The Courier surged ahead. No turning back now. He slowly steered a path along the exit drive, past the little swarm of running figures. His rolling departure was framed against the growing conflagration
of the dairy, boiling fire and a pillar of smoke. When he reached the fence and found no one to open it for him, he gunned the throttle and roared through the fence like an angry dinosaur, watched it shear open in a snowstorm of sparks like so much flimsy netting.

  Before long he was rolling on a southern course on Route 59. Before much longer he’d pick up I-25. From there, deeper and deeper into the heart of the country.

  Ignorant sons of bitches, those Libyans. Hoping to bring the Western world to its knees through the threat of disease. Why hadn’t he seen the folly of it all before? Blinded by daylight, no doubt. Nah, they had it all wrong. The real magic, the real power, lay in the ability to take the world and restructure it. Strip away the stagnant debris of a world that was already dying and too dumb to accept it and roll over.

  In time, The Courier began to realize that he needed a name once again. He’d gone by many names in many lands, but as of late he’d preferred The Courier to anything else. There was a certain security to be found in anonymity. No more, though. You definitely need a name if others are expected to talk about you, and there would be plenty of cause for that as time went on. Because, at last, his work would no longer be conducted in the background. At last, he was stepping forth from the shadows. Coming out of the closet, as it were.

  Buffeting cars with slipstream, he thought it over. A name…

  Finally he pieced together the name Peter Solomon, and liked it. Liked it a lot. Instant approval. Biblical precedents considered, it conveyed strength, and wisdom. The strength and wisdom of the gods.

  And the seeds of deity were growing deep within him with every passing mile. Some things you just can’t hold inside. You have to share them with one and all.