“He’s a liar.”
“No! No! No!”
“Yes. He’s the liar. Tell me his name.”
The woman was shaking now, contorting. Tears ran from her eyes and a revolting stench issued from her that smelled almost like burning flesh and singed hair. It was hot and febrile. “He has no name!”
“Yes, he does. Tell me.”
“I will not!”
“Yes, you will.”
“But you must.”
Her head whipped from side to side. “
“I’ll find him. I’ll hunt him down. I’ll make him pay for all this.”
“No!”
Slaughter stood up and picked up his rifle. “Tell me his name.”
But she wouldn’t so he put the barrel of the M-16 up to her eye and put his finger on the trigger. She thrashed and cried out, flailing and weeping, calling out mixed-up prayers and psalms, her legs kicking and her hands flailing. Her face ran with sweat. Her tongue lolled from her mouth. Her eyes rolled back white again. And her voice, shrill and screeching and nearly inhuman in tone, said,
She was moving with wild greased gyrations by that point. The burning smell was stronger about her and blood ran from her mouth. It filled her eyes and dripped from her ears. Then she slumped over and hit the floor. As she laid there, obviously dead, limbs askew, mouth still wide, eyes still staring, steam began to rise from her like she was melting. It carried an acrid stink of burning flesh.
Something was happening.
Something revelatory.
Maria was openly crying out in her fear, but Slaughter was close to something, he thought, or maybe miles distant. Yet, he knew what was happening was not by accident. He had the most uncanny feeling that it was meant for him and him alone. As the steam continued to rise, filling the hut with a sickening odor, he used the barrel of his rifle and pulled the woman’s shirt up and there it was as he knew it must be. Her belly was rising like bread dough, pushing up to form letters that were going from pink to red like scalded flesh. Then there was a searing, burning stench and he saw it, he saw it once again:
Just like all the others, it was branded right into her. Upraised and branded right into the flesh and just the sight of it made him take a stumbling step towards the door. He stepped out into the air which, although dank and cool, was comparatively fresh compared to what he’d been breathing in the hut. He was dizzy. Woozy. His knees were weak and his legs were shaking. He found an overturned crate and dropped his ass on it, breathing in and out, clearing his mind.
“Are you all right?” Maria said, wiping tears from her face.
He was still trembling. “Yeah…I’m okay.”
“I told you we should leave,” Maria said to him. “I told you that they say things. Things you don’t want to hear.”
He nodded. “Question is: how much of what she said can we believe?”
“I don’t know.”
“She knew things she shouldn’t have known. I can’t explain that with ordinary logic, now can I? And, even if I could, I sure as hell couldn’t explain those words burned into her.” Before he could stop himself he told Maria about that word and where he had seen it before. “I don’t know what it means but Black Hat is behind it.”
“Black Hat?”
Since he had started telling the tale, he went through the whole spiel, telling her about that video at the compound in Wisconsin, his dreams, and specifically about Frank Feathers and the Skeleton Man.
Maria was silent for a moment when he was finished. “I’ve seen it before,” she finally said.
“You’ve seen it, too?”
She shook her head. “Just in a book.”
She explained that in college she was into occultism and New Age stuff, everything from healing crystals to pyramid power and the tarot. It was just a kick and lot of kids were into it. “In 1611, I think, this priest named Father Louis Gaufridi was executed for sending demons to possess the nuns of Aix-en-Provence in France. During his trial they found a pact with the Devil signed in blood. It bore the reverse signatures of six major demons of Hell and was countersigned by a seventh.”
Slaughter was sitting forward now. “Tell me the name.”
“Leviathan,” she said.
Slaughter heard it, felt it echo through his head and knew it was right. He formed the word silently with his lips.
“Sure,” she said, “people call whales leviathans. It sometimes means a fire-breathing sea monster. But in demonology, Leviathan is one of the four crown princes of Hell. He’s the gatekeeper. He tempts men with carnal sin, murder, and avarice. He is a god of chaos. His direction is west. West, traditionally, being where people thought the dead went because the sun sets in the west so they thought it was the land of the dead.”
“So he’s the lord of the dead?”
She shrugged. “It’s open to interpretation, I guess. All that stuff is.”
But it would fit. He had seen those weird little altars in several towns, like offerings made to some pagan god. Maybe that pagan god was Leviathan and maybe his worshippers were the zombies. It made a crude sort of sense. In Exodus, he had seen the wormgirl, the death-goddess, maybe she was like some kind of high priestess. Again, he was reaching but it all seemed to make some kind of sense, for who else would the undead worship but something like Leviathan? Back in Victoria, where he’d found all those impaled corpses on the green, he also found that old man with the words burned into his back, the signature of Leviathan. And what had the old man said? The one who perpetrated that atrocity said his name was
“Yes, to all living things you certainly are.”
“What?” Maria asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.” Then the obvious occurred to him. “Can Leviathan mean the Devil or something like the Devil?”
“Yes.”
She was very uncomfortable with it all and he could see that. He didn’t know what to think about it all. He had never in his life believed in the Christian Devil. He had always pretty much associated it as being symbolical for the animal side of men and their primal past. With all he had seen, was he now ready to believe in something as intrinsically offensive to a reasoning mind as a demon or the Devil himself? He wasn’t sure. He really wasn’t sure. Maybe not the Devil, but perhaps the sort of thing that had inspired such belief. Because it really fit. All of it did. Frank Feathers had told him of the brutal murders in Crabeater Creek in association with the Skeleton Man. The murder part fit. The chaos thing did, too, because the worm rains had certainly created chaos. And the west being the Land of the Dead…well, that was certainly true enough.
If what that worm-witch had said was true, then Black Hat was expecting him, knowing that, inadvertently, Slaughter was following him. They were going to meet. Slaughter knew that. And it was going to be an ugly affair when they did. Who was he to fight something like Leviathan? He did not know. Yet, he almost felt that it was
