Shuttered Sky

that it was gone—that it hadn’t been there for years. He had lost it in his days of infestation, when the wrecking- hunger consumed him, and the parasite of destruction co-opted his power to feed itself. He remembered stumbling into a church during those dark times—but even the poor priest who had heard his confession had been destroyed by his presence. So helpless and confused he had been. It was the same way now. Suddenly the sanctuary of this homely church seemed the most inviting place on earth, and he longed to curl up in the protective shadow of something greater than himself.

He tried to make a beeline to the church, but found himself stum­bling all the way through the field. The path of brown grass and dried autumn leaves greened like a living stream around him, spreading out­ward like a wake on water. As he approached the church from the back, he tripped over a waist-high wrought iron fence around the property. He found himself on the ground, facing a row of headstones. The church had its own graveyard. A sizeable one. The brown grass on the graves was already turning green. He sensed what was about to happen, and he closed his eyes, desperately praying that it wouldn’t—but he had no faith in his own prayer. He knew that today his prayers would go as unheeded as the prayers of pigeons.

“Dillon, look at me!”

It was Maddy again. She grabbed him and rolled him over, pinning his shoulders. “Focus on me!”

“No! No—I can’t be here!” But it was already too late, because he could hear—he could feel beneath the reviving grass, a deeper gath­ering of life.

* * *

Holding Dillon down was like gripping a live wire. His irides­cence burned through Maddy, an intense sensation her body could not decipher as either pleasure or pain, but an amalgam of both. Then when she heard the first voice, it caught Maddy off guard, and she loosened her grip on Dillon just enough for him to push her off and scramble away. He didn’t get far; just a few yards, before he crumpled by a tombstone, weeping and slowly shaking his head like a bull struck by a car.

“Hey!” someone had shouted. “Hey, is anybody there?” She looked around. The voice was muffled and distant. She couldn’t place the direction from which it came.

Then there was a second voice and another, and another. “What is this?”

“Somebody answer me!”

“Hello?!”

And it dawned on Maddy with a jagged, penetrating chill that these voices were not coming from the church or the woods, or nearby buildings. They came from beneath her feet.

“What’s happening?”

“Help me!”

“Who’s out there?”

It began as confusion and curiosity, then when some rudimentary understanding kicked in, their cries turned fearful, their fists pounding in the dark upon the satin-lined caskets that confined them. At first it was just a few, but it soon grew into a chorus screaming for release beneath the tons of earth that covered them.

“No no no!” Dillon cried, covering his ears, “Make them stop! Make them stop!”

Maddy stood there, dumbfounded. She had no response for this. Nothing in her tactical training had prepared her for this.

Suddenly a rhythmic roar swooped down from above, for a brief moment overwhelming the cries of the underchorus before it passed. Maddy knew it was a helicopter even before she saw it. Generic gray, with no markings. It buzzed the treetops, then set down in a clearing a hundred yards away.

Then, when she turned back to the graveyard there was a flak-jacketed, rifle-armed force—at least a dozen men—storming the graveyard from two directions. Once in range, they brought up their rifles and took aim. Some were trained on her, but most were on Dillon. She went to Dillon, shielding him with her body, trying to keep him from making sudden moves, because he was still within himself, oblivious to it all. And beneath them, the chorus grew in desperate intensity.

A figure approached from the helicopter. He wore a dark suit, and had a familiar stride. Even though she had a clear view of him as he approached, it wasn’t until he stepped into the graveyard that she locked on his identity. It was Elon Tessic.

* * *

To Elon Tessic, disguise was a simple trick of perception; once he became defined by his white attire, he merely had to shed it to become invisible. Even personal friends had failed to recognize him when he wore anything other than pressed Mediterranean white. Today he was just another man in a dark suit.

As he approached, Tessic found his overzealous mercenaries to have far too much firepower for his liking, so he signaled to their leader, a militia-bred mercenary named Davitt, to lower their weapons.

Even before he stepped into the graveyard, Elon could hear the distraught voices underfoot, and feel the waves of psychic energy strob­ing off of Dillon. It was intimidating to say the least, but not entirely unexpected. Once he had stepped over the fence, he approached Maddy, whose confusion had already taken a turn toward anger.

“Tessic!” she screamed. “You son of a bitch.”

“My men will escort you to my helicopter,” he said calmly.

“If they come near us, I’ll break their necks.”

“I have no doubt you would . . . but if you decide to stay here, I can guarantee that your military friends won’t be far behind.”

She hesitated, studying him. “You’re not working for them?”

“I’m an independent contractor,” he told her. “Today I’m here to help.”

She threw a glance at the armed men around them. “Are they?”

Elon grabbed one of the mercenaries’ rifles, opened the barrel, and showed it to Maddy.

“Tranquilizer darts, in case we encountered your resistance.”

The moment of silence between them was punctuated by the muf­fled voices hopelessly calling from the grave.

“We must get Dillon away from this place,” he told her. “Do you hear around you? Do you understand?”

Without answering, Maddy knelt back down to Dillon, who had been subdued by the voices of those he had called back from the dead. She helped him to his feet and threw an untrusting glance at Tessic, but in the end, got Dillon out of the graveyard, and moved him toward the helicopter that waited in the nearby field.

A dozen yards away, a scraping of concrete drew Tessic’s attention. A man labored to push up the concrete lid of his own crypt, his fin­gertips already raw from the task. A scene from the Haunted Mansion, but far more disturbing.

Disturbing, thought Tessic, but not frightening—for these were not ghouls, but ordinary people, unable to know the cause of their situation. Not comprehending their own death, much less their call back to life.

“Help me. Please,” said the man, straining against the concrete lid. “Someone’s put me down here . . . someone’s buried me alive . . .”

A few of Tessic’s mercenaries, now fearful themselves, looked at Tessic for direction. Even Davitt was affected by it. “What do we do?” he asked.

“Go help him!” Tessic ordered.

Two men forced off the lid of the crypt and it tumbled to the ground. They pulled out a middle-aged man in a tan, pin-striped suit that was pressed and clean. The style was at least thirty years out of date.

“Who in blazes are you?” the man asked, when Tessic approached. Since no response would have made sense to him, Tessic chose not to answer. Instead he turned to Davitt. “We’ll take him with us as well.”

“What about all the others?”

Tessic looked around the graveyard. The voices were growing weaker. There were only two crypts with lids that could be removed. The rest were earthen graves. Even if he had had a hundred men with shovels, he couldn’t have unearthed a single one of them before they all suffocated. So Tessic had his men remove the occupant of the sec­ond crypt, then forced himself to listen to the other voices, giving them at the very least, the dignity of a witness.

He could hear in their fading voices a mix of emotions. There were those who had some rudimentary understanding, and accepted this moment as a gift, and those who saw it as a curse. There were the sounds of