Kingdom of Shadows

bright in the darkness and caked with blood and human flesh.

As Rooster sets to work on him, gutting Starker from throat to pelvis, Nauls moves past, through the fire and out the doorway to the field.

His feet do not touch the floor.

Rooster focuses on Starker’s laughter. No—not laughter—not anymore, cries now, screams. Beautiful screams…his face and bald head covered in blood as he spits and slobbers, each scream more horrific than the last. As Rooster tears at the enormous incision then plunges his hands inside the body, Starker chokes on the bodily fluids bubbling up into his throat and begs for mercy.

But all Rooster hears are the shrieks of souls trapped in the darkness and flames surrounding him.

Cords of intestines clutched in one hand and the knife in the other, he leaves Starker’s now silent but convulsing body and slowly approaches the doorway. Darkness waits…a field of tall grass and weeds…six wooden crosses…three with fresh scarecrows nailed to them…three still waiting…

Rooster begins to laugh, bringing the intestines to his lips and eating as he steps out of the flames and into the night.

Somewhere within the hurricane of violence and howling souls, a frantic, familiar and decidedly human voice screams for salvation.

* * *

Visions of demonic creatures—some human, some not, and others still stranded at various horrific points between the two—flashed through his mind. Held in rusty metal cages, pinned, strapped or chained to medieval devices of torture and imprisonment, the creatures gawked at him in horror, several deathly still, others violently struggling to free themselves, all of them moist with blood, urine and excrement, their bodies grotesquely deformed and savaged.

The terrifying chambers of blood and death dissolved; became a roadside.

Landon had already gone quite a ways up the incline on the side of the road and looked back as if he expected Rooster to follow. But Rooster knew now what lay on the other side of the tall grass blowing in the wind behind him.

With a shrug, Landon held his arms out like the victim of crucifixion and backed away over the ridge, vanishing from sight.

Nauls turned to him, removed his sunglasses.

We’re going where there are no eyes…

His eyes were gone, just empty sockets.

Where everyone is blind…yet everyone sees.

Without warning his body shook with impossible velocity, transforming him into little more than a blur before he again fell still. “Come with us,” Nauls said. “We’ll all figure this out together.”

Rooster shook his head no.

Nauls slid his sunglasses back on, slowly walked up the embankment after Landon then hesitated and looked back. “You really think you have a choice?”

“That’s all any of us have.”

Nauls reached into his jacket pocket, pulled free the car keys and tossed them to Rooster. “We’ll be waiting,” he said sadly. “Forever.”

-10-

He made the car tailing him even before he’d reached his apartment. Rooster pulled over a block from the housing projects and continued on foot. As he crossed the courtyard, hurrying through the cold, the black Crown Vic crept slowly past, the windows and windshield impenetrably tinted. It continued a bit further down the street then pulled over and parked. Rooster kept checking back over his shoulder, but no one emerged from the vehicle.

When he’d reached his floor, Rooster stopped at the incinerator shoot and dropped the briefcase in, listening to it slide away down the shaft to the fires below.

Burn, he thought. Burn in Hell.

He slipped into the apartment and was met by a welcome burst of heat. Moving silently, he went to the bedroom and stopped just inside the doorway. Gaby was standing next to the bed, a blanket in her arms and a laundry basket at her feet. She’d already stripped the comforter, blanket and top-sheet from the bed but the bottom sheet remained. She seemed surprised to find him there, but smiled anyway. It was perhaps the most reassuring and comforting thing he’d ever seen.

Until he took a closer look at the bed. Rich dark soil was scattered across the sheet, blood and straw along the pillows. He narrowed his eyes and grimaced as fear clawed at what few defenses he had left.

“It’s all right,” Gaby said, quickly tossing the blanket over the bed. “Don’t look. It doesn’t mean anything. They’re just trying to frighten you.”

The night sky rolled above, moving, the fog turning and twisting as the rough ground tore at his back and shoulders.

“Gaby,” he said softly, voice breaking. “Gabrielle…help me.”

They were dragging him by his legs…pulling him across the field, the grass and weeds tangling and scratching him as he went, the night sky overhead, vast and ominous, the smell of death and burning flesh filling the air.

“Hell does more than burn the wicked,” she said. “It cleanses the lost clawing for the light. Remember what I told you. Let me help you tear them apart like they’ve torn at you.”

Hideous hands of straw, of charred flesh and exposed bone held him down against the fallen cross of wood while shadows moved about, laughing horribly even as they drove nails through his palms, destroying flesh and shattering bone, even as they hoisted the cross up and into position, even as Rooster screamed and begged for God to save him, even as unseen filthy hands held his mouth closed while others pierced his lips with an old rusted needle, running the leather string through the holes and pulling it taut until his screams were muffled groans and his mouth could no longer open.

“Remember what I told you,” she said again.

Those in the shadows pulled the burlap sack over his head, two holes cut out in the fabric to accommodate his eyes. Eyes that could still see…inhuman eyes now, the eyes of a soulless scarecrow…impossible eyes opening, seeing, watching, frozen in time, crucified to damnation and endless suffering.

“Rooster,” Gaby said forcefully, “remember what I told you about my name and what it means. Do you remember?”

“God is my might.”

And his eyes see the Hell he is trapped in…a Hell not of demons with pitchforks and cloven- hooves or boundless oceans of fire…but one in a small bedroom not so different than the one Rooster stood in now. A quiet and dark room where a little boy sat on a bed with crisp white sheets, crucifixes on the walls and a devil he’d believed a god sitting next to him whispering assurances that the things happening were just and right and moral and clean. Father McKay staring down at him with those striking blue eyes and telling him everything would be all right if he simply obeyed God’s will.

Tears stain Rooster’s cheeks. Rage, sorrow, fear—he cannot decide. All of them, goddamn you, all of them in a tempest of blood and tears and evil.

“They’re dying. You’re killing them one by one.” Gaby motioned to him with a slight turn of her head, her beauty shifting to something decidedly more sinister. “Burn them. Burn the fuckers away like the leeches they are.”

He smelled death…dirt…an open grave and its rotting remains…

Terror strangled him, its grip desperate.

The priest stood behind him, filthy and discarded now, like the souls he’d torn from countless children years before. “I know you,” he said.