sorts. The hills rose in tiers, each set having a few tin shacks or bunkers dug into them with perimeters of barbwire. He decided they needed to get up and out of the slop so, Maria behind him, they followed a greasy trail up and out to the next tier where there was a flattened walkway. The bunkers looked empty and he checked them one by one. Maybe the Red Hand were in the other encampments. He saw a few corpses, skittering rats, some standing water in the bunkers, but not much else.
“That one over there,” Maria suggested.
It was a wood-framed hut built right into the hillside. It was much larger than the shack and looked somewhat defensible. As they made their way over there, a low warm wind began to blow. The world was silent, a dim light laying over it.
There was a red cross on the door of the hut and it must have been some kind of aid station for war games. For reasons he did not even fully understand, Slaughter knocked on the door a few times before opening it and going in low with the M-16 held out before him. It was warm and dry inside. There were a couple of cots, a few empty drug cabinets. A woman with glazed eyes was sitting in a chair before a folding table.
“Don’t mind us,” he said.
She didn’t mind them at all. In fact, she seemed utterly oblivious to their presence. She mumbled under her breath, chattered her teeth, and shook with sudden quick spasms. Her teeth were bad, her face pockmarked with sores. She looked like a meth freak.
Slaughter looked over at Maria and she shook her head, twirled her finger next to her temple to indicate this lady was crazy. They sat together on one of the cots and watched the crazy woman, intrigued by her own closed world of madness.
She was clutching something to her breast with muddy fingers and then she revealed it, setting it on the table: a jelly jar. A jelly jar about a third way full with squirming red worms. Slaughter and Maria just watched. They said nothing, appalled, but not really surprised. Still humming and mumbling, the woman pulled a baggie of brown powder from the pocket of her flannel shirt. Slaughter thought it looked like low-grade Mexican brown heroin cut with something. From between her legs came a little vinyl fanny pack. She unzipped it and took out a spoon and a hypodermic needle, a Bic lighter and something like a small set of blunt tongs that he knew was a garlic press. Then a set of medical forceps.
With shaking hands she searched around, patting herself, and then pulled a length of rubber hose from inside her shirt. It was dirty and well-used, as was the needle. She rolled up her sleeve and tied off the rubber hose at her bicep. Her forearm was bruised and ugly with needle tracks.
Maria took his hand, tried to pull him up so they could leave.
But he would not leave.
He had to see this. He had heard about this shit but he had always thought it was some kind of half-baked urban legend. Now that the tourniquet was tied off, the woman spilled some powder carefully into the spoon, patting it down with the tip of one finger. Setting the spoon aside gently…very gently…she took up the forceps and dug around in the jar of worms until she had a real good fat one. Most of them were sluggish or dead. But the worm she chose was quite lively. She brought it out and captured it in the garlic press. Licking her lips, her humming rising higher and higher, she crushed the worm with the press, the pale pink juice dripping into the powder on the spoon. She set it aside and, taking up the spoon, brought the flame of the lighter beneath it until the powder and worm juice became a bubbling liquid mass.
Her humming sounded like erotic joy by this time.
“Let’s go,” Maria said. “Please.”
Slaughter ignored her. There was a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches on the window sill. He helped himself, smoking and watching, transfixed.
Using the syringe, the haggard woman sucked up the pale brown fluid and, breathing heavily, selected a vein that wasn’t collapsed. She jabbed the needle into it, gasping with pleasure, sucked up some blood, then injected the syringe of fluid into her vein.
She set the needle aside, pulled off the tourniquet.
“Please,” Maria said, pulling on Slaughter’s arm. “Let’s get out of here before she starts talking.”
The woman began to grin, huge and moony, her glazed eyes bright and sparkling.
Then, wetting her lips, she turned and faced her visitors and began to speak.
“I know what you seek,” said the woman. “I can see it.”
Slaughter just stared at her. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“What I’m doing I’m doing for my brother.”
The woman tittered with laughter that was acerbic, caustic even. “The one you seek was here. He laid with me. He spoke the tongue in my ear.”
Slaughter looked at Maria but she did not meet his gaze.
“He said…he said you would come and I would know you. That your name is Death and that you ride a pale horse,” the woman said, her eyes almost blazing now as if something in her brain were slowly smoldering. “He said I would see the hate in your soul, the murder in your eyes, and smell the blood upon your hands. I would know you as Death.”
“You don’t know shit, lady.”
She smiled at him. “But I do, John Slaughter. You are Death. On the surface you can tell yourself that you seek freedom for your brother but underneath, in the darkest tracts of your soul, you only want to kill and kill again. You are Death but you pretend to be freedom and life. And that is the great irony, is it not? That Death does not even recognize himself
Slaughter was stunned.
The crazy bitch knew his name, about his brother, and was that just because Black Hat had told her or was it the drugs? Did that worm juice tweak some latent telepathy or powers of prophecy? He didn’t know. Couldn’t know. But it disturbed him greatly.
He swallowed, looked at Maria.
She still would not meet his gaze. As the crazy woman fell into some weird little fugue, her eyes rolling back white in her head, he grabbed hold of Maria’s chin none too gently and forced her to look at him. “Do they always do this? Does shooting up that worm juice make them read minds?”
“Sometimes.”
“Just sometimes?”
Maria shrugged, then sighed. “Some of them just go into a stupor and mumble. Others lose their minds. Some, like this one, have certain abilities. They can see things and know things.”
The woman’s eyes rolled in their sockets, then focused with a glassy clarity. “He said you would come because this is the land of the dead and you will ascend the throne of death because it is your calling.”
“Bullshit.”
Again that simply awful laughter which raised goosebumps on the backs of Slaughter’s bare arms.
“He caused all this, didn’t he?”
The woman just stared at him.
“All of this was from his hand?”
“Men caused this.”
But Slaughter didn’t believe that. Not entirely. Maybe it was close proximity to this worm-witch (as he was beginning to think of her) but in his mind so many things that had long been vague and unformed were taking on a curious sort of shape. “No, not men. Men are puppets to a thing like him. He feeds off death and pain and insanity. He revels in it. He mainlines it. He’s nothing but a fucking leech.”
“No!”
“Yes. He’s responsible for bringing this death into the world. The worm rains and the wars that followed it… it’s all a fucking page written in his hand, in his book.”
“You lie!” the woman nearly screamed at him. “He said Death would lie! That Death despaired of the truth!
