Apocalypse Weird: Genesis (The White Dragon Book 1) (13 page)

They left the sandy road and moved toward what was left of the fence. Vines had covered it over the years and had pulled parts of it to the ground. The warehouse behind it didn’t look much better. Kasey’s hope that Jack could be in there sank. It looked utterly abandoned. Many of the narrow windows higher up were broken. Some were covered in fading plywood. Others were left intact, and had been like that for a decade it seemed. The surrounding grounds were overgrown with weeds and thorny bushes.

“Doesn’t look like anyone has been here in ages,” Kasey said. She suddenly couldn’t believe that she put all her hopes of getting Jack back into a single piece of information off a license plate. But what she saw and what she felt were two different things altogether. If her fear was any indication, there was something in this warehouse and the closer they came, the surer she was.

“There’s an entrance on the other side,” Blair said. “At least there was.”

They slowly made their way around the building. Blair reached the opening first. The overgrown metal door hung half off its hinges. It was rusty and covered in graffiti. From there, they entered a small room. The walls were black with mold. The smell made Kasey gag. It was sweet as it crawled up her nose and left a sour aftertaste when she breathed out. Kasey had never smelled death before.

“Someone died here,” Jennifer said.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s the smell of a dead person.”

“Could it be an animal?” Blair asked.

“Yes. But it would have to be a big one.”

The ground was covered with a slimy substance. It reminded Kasey of decomposing leaves. The door on the other side of the room was shut. When they got there, she put her hand on the rusty doorknob and pulled. Nothing happened at first, but on the second try, the door opened with a screeching sound. So much for keeping this a surprise.

Kasey saw several things at once. Ahead of her, about fifty feet away and in the center of the huge space, knelt Jack. His hands were tied to a pole above his shoulders. He looked pathetic and even though Kasey had steeled herself in preparation for this moment, the shock made her gasp.

The second piece of information had to do with the light, or the lack thereof. The sun had risen at that point and the windows high up should have illuminated most of the space. The area beyond the circle of light that surrounded Jack, however, lay in impenetrable darkness. Kasey couldn’t see anything beyond that. Except the dark red glow of a dozen skeletons.

She caught them in the wild — the mustangs — as they flew across the plain, free as only wild horses can be. The rangers she had hired for the job came from the surrounding farms. They were fathers and sons, workers and stable hands. She offered them one month’s pay for a single day’s work.

The horses had grazed high up on a plateau overlooking the Rio Grande as it gently flowed in the setting sun, a sliver of gold in the dry landscape below. The rangers were experienced folk. They had dealt with horses all their lives. The steep cliffs on one side made it easy to steer the herd downstream and into a makeshift corral. It hadn’t been there yesterday. And tomorrow, if an accidental hiker had passed it, he’d have thought it was abandoned years ago — the wood of the fence decayed, the buildings fallen in. And he would’ve felt an emptiness inside, as if his heart had been vacated and made lonely. Until he’d pass it and, on his way out of the valley, not even remember encountering this place. He’d have thought it a trick his mind played if he’d seen the fog at the end of the meadow as it crawled low to the ground, circling slowly, glowing with an orange light.

Branding. Each of the rangers knew his way around it, was familiar with every step in the process. At the end of the corral, the fence abutted a small barn. The rangers led the horses in one by one — one horse with one ranger. The rangers thought their jobs would be completed less than an hour later. Once the horses were branded and led into the corral beyond the barn, they would receive their pay for a job well done.

But the rangers were deceived.

She waited inside, next to a squeeze chute, a branding iron resting in glowing embers. First, she would push the iron deep into the horse’s flank and when she took it away, the scorched image of a black dragon coiling around itself had been burnt into the horse’s skin. The horse’s screams fueled her senses and when she was done with it, she would grab the ranger by his throat, pulling him against the bars of the chute. They wanted to cry out but their voices abandoned them as they looked into the abyss. And the abyss looked back at them as she pushed the branding iron into the center of their chests.

She did this with each rider and each horse, and when she was done, the riders mounted their horses in the corral on the other side. She opened the gate at the most westerly end. Horses and riders pushed through the grass past the gate and into the open field. And while they rode — forty-four riders on forty-four horses — at full speed across the plain and toward the orange fog, the unsuspecting eye would have caught a transformation of utterly disturbing proportion.

The horses had changed. Now infused with the evil of their host, they cried out in pain as their legs, flesh and skin and bone, transformed into machine. And what entered the fog were horses no longer. The rangers, void of any past emotion, their families forgotten, their loved ones obliterated from their mind, had become something utterly displaced — imbued with an evil will that was not their own. Their thirst for blood gave them their name.

And power was given unto them to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.

Kasey squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. The red glow in the darkness across from where Jack was kneeling was still there. She counted about a dozen but suspected there were more to her left and outside her field of vision. She took a step back. Her brain was unable to process the information. It was too much. Her emotional state didn’t allow for more input. She was shutting down. Something in her gave up, and the part of her that wanted to save Jack simply drowned in the terror she felt. It was as if she stared into a chasm of incomprehensible fear.

“They’re here,” she whispered.

“Who?” Jennifer whispered back.

“The riders. About a dozen. Maybe more.”

“How is that possible?”

“Stay here,” she said quietly. “Don’t follow me. Under any circumstances.”

She didn’t know what made her step forward. It was something inside her that she had no connection with. It was a part of her so deeply buried she had only gotten in touch with it through fragmented dreams in the past.

“Jack?” she said as she walked toward him. She saw him shake his head no. “Jack!”

She saw the glowing skeletons to her left and slightly behind her as well. Two dozen. She doubted the others could see them, could see anything other than complete darkness there.

She ran the last ten feet and knelt in front of him. His face was deeply bruised. One of his eyes was swollen shut, the other looked at her. Kasey saw hope in it, and despair.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so very sorry.”

Her heart broke when she saw his tortured body up close. His right rib cage was black and blue and covered with dried blood. He could barely hold himself up.

“They want the amulet,” he said. His voice cracked. “They want you to take it off and give it to them. For some reason, they can’t touch it.”

“Jack, I’m getting you out,” she said quietly. And while she said it, she reached around his neck with both hands, unlocked the amulet and put it around her own neck.

“Better they leave you out of this,” she said.

“Kasey!”

The voice behind her sounded both familiar and utterly strange. When Kasey turned, she had no idea what to expect. Nothing could have prepared her for this.

Out of the shadows stepped a child. Kasey couldn’t see more than a silhouette at first. The child was about eight years old, she guessed. Her long blond hair was straight and fell over her shoulders. She was wearing a flowery dress. Kasey remembered that dress. She had grown out of it about five years ago, but before that, she wore it almost every day during the summers.

“Kasey,” her younger self said.

In her peripheral vision, she noticed that the others had stepped out of the small room and were moving toward them.

“Remember me?” young Kasey asked.

There was something so real about this. Not just the girl’s appearance but her emotional footprint was undeniable. Kasey
knew
this girl was herself. There was no doubt. The question how this was even possible didn’t register. Kasey had kept pictures of herself when she was younger but they were all part of a past that was gone and no longer part of her.

“I’d like you to give me my amulet back,” young Kasey said. “I had it first.”

“Don’t give it to her,” Jack said from behind her. “That’s not you.”

“Silence!” the younger Kasey screamed. Then she smiled again. “You’re a thief and a liar, Kasey. You know that. You lied to our parents all the time. You lied to them when they asked you where you were when you skipped school. You lied to them when you told them nothing happened with that boy. Remember Richie? You lied about him.”

Young Kasey came closer, each step bridging the gap between them.

“You slept with him. You had
sex
with him. Your mother told you not to see him anymore and you did it anyway. You sneaked out of the apartment and drove away in his car and you did it in his car, you
dirty little filth
. And you came back home two hours later and sneaked back into your bed like a dog.”

As she got closer Kasey saw that her hair wasn’t blond. At least not like a few minutes ago. It was darker now, as if she hadn’t washed it in a long time.

“And what about this boy,” she continued, pointing toward Jack. “He’s no better than Richie. You know that. You think he won’t break your heart, too? What happened after that night when you gave away your virginity? When you became a whore and a filth. Huh? What happened? You were all whiny, ‘but I love him!’. You wrote in your little diary. ‘I love him so much!’ blah, blah, blah. It’s pathetic. You’re pathetic.”

Young Kasey licked her lips in enjoyment.

“Whores never get the good guys,” she said. “You must know that by now. Never get the good guys. The good guys stay with good girls. You get scum.”

Kasey felt shame creep up inside her. She didn’t want to believe her but she did.

“I want my amulet back and you’ll give it to me or I’ll kill him which will make you a whore
and
a murderer, for this will be on you.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Jack said.

“Yeah, don’t listen to her,” Jennifer said. She stood ten feet away, the rifle pointed at young Kasey. “She’s talking complete nonsense.”

“Jennifer Wang,” young Kasey said. “When this is over, you will be but another casualty. Nothing more. A foot soldier sacrificed by someone who doesn’t give a damn.”

She looked straight at Kasey.

“What do you want me to do?” Kasey asked.

“What I want you to do is give me what’s mine. Put in on the ground right in front of you and leave. Take Jack with you. You can both tell each other how wrong I was in my assessment of you while deep down you know that what I told you is the truth. But you can go and continue with your pathetic little lives.”

“Why do you want it?” Kasey asked.

For the last few seconds, beneath the shame that was festering in her mind, she was aware of something else. She couldn’t pinpoint it. A presence. And with that, the faint wish for freedom, the longing for open fields and wide vast grasslands.
Help us,
it seemed to whisper.

“Why do you want it?” Kasey asked again.

“It belongs to me. It was meant for me. Not for you.”

Kasey realized that the thing that stood across from her had spoken the truth. At least from its perspective. It wasn’t her younger self who demanded it back. It was whatever that thing was that looked like her. The man who gave Kasey the amulet ten years ago, it had seemed as if he’d come specifically to her. There weren’t many people out on the beach that morning. A few runners perhaps. But the fact that he came straight to her told her that it was intended for her and that she wasn’t just some random person he’d handed it to.

“What does it matter—”

“
That does not concern you!
” it screamed.

The thing began to pull at its hair and ripped out a chunk, but got itself under control a few moments later.

“She will give it to me,” it said in a suppressed voice.

“Or what?” Kasey said. She knew she was in way over her head. She had no plan of action, no idea where to go from here. Whatever she did was sheer instinct.

“It’s dark in here, don’t you think?” it said. “Let’s light up the place, shall we?”

As the windows above became more transparent, the light increased. The darkness that had covered the riders until now dissipated.

“Oh shit!” Kasey heard Blair behind her.

Help us,
something whispered inside her.

“She will give it to me or her friends will suffer,” it said. “Aarika, sweet Aarika, he’ll go first, I’m guessing. He’s just not cut out for this. Do you know that he had thought several times about running to your car and driving away? He’ll be the first. And once I tell Blaire Singleton that his wife died in the plane crash… oops.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Jennifer said.

“
I’ve had enough of you!
” it screamed.

It moved with incredible speed. All Kasey saw was a blur. Then it stood in front of Jennifer who, out of sheer reflex, pulled the trigger on the rifle. The bullets hit its body several times. The last one was a headshot. The Young Kasey thing didn’t flinch. It grabbed the rifle and wrested it from Jennifer’s hands. Then it grabbed Jennifer by the throat and hair, pulling her to the ground. It put her foot onto Jennifer’s throat while holding on to her hair. Jennifer winced in pain.

“You don’t understand the severity of the situation!” it said.

“If you do hurt her, I won’t give you anything,” Kasey announced defiantly.

The Young Kasey thing looked at Kasey. She smiled. Then she pulled Jennifer’s head off her torso. Kasey let out a scream. The Young Kasey thing screamed as well — in the same voice as Kasey while holding Jennifer’s head up in the air. At the same time, the engines of the motorcycles started to roar and chaos buried them under its insane premise.

“
You are not in control!
” it screamed at Kasey and over the cacophonous screeching. “
She will give it to me or he will be next!
” it pointed at Jack.

Kasey couldn’t think. She was frozen in her own scream. Something in her registered that there was no blood, that Jennifer’s head and neck didn’t bleed. Her eyes found the thing’s eyes. Kasey nodded in defeat. The thing smiled. The cacophonous noise stopped. All that was left was the low gurgling sound of the engines. For a moment, it sounded like hooves running on the ground.

“She will give it to me?” the thing asked.

“Yes.”

It dropped Jennifer’s head. It didn’t fall to the ground. The illusion of the separated head simply ceased to exist. Kasey watched in disbelief as Jennifer, her head fully attached, moved to the side, coughing several times and holding her throat.

“But you have to let Jack go,” Kasey said. “If you want me to give you the amulet, you have to let Jack go. And my friends.”

The thing stood there, rocking back and forth. There was drool dripping from her mouth. Her teeth were no longer white but had taken on a dark yellow tone.

“Cut him loose,” she said.

From behind her, one of the men who had taken Jack approached him. He cut the ties on his wrists and took away the pole behind his knees. Jack fell to the ground. Kasey knelt next to him and held him as best as she could.

“I’m gonna give it to her,” she whispered into Jack’s ear.

“Don’t do it.”

“I have to.”

“No. You don’t. She can’t touch you now. Leave me here and go.”

“Time’s up!” it said.

Kasey kissed Jack very gently on the mouth. The gurgling sound of the engines spoke to her of the wind moving through vast grasslands; of the unbound steppe and a sun setting in the free air.

“Get ready,” she said as she got up.

What Kasey intended to do next was not a fleshed out plan. Not even close. Rather it was the desperate act of someone pushed toward the edge of a cliff by a pack of wolves. She stopped thinking about Jack and the others. She stopped thinking about herself, her life or her death. She was utterly and completely rooted in this very moment of existence.

“I need to tell you something,” she mumbled while looking at the thing. Its appearance was slowly deteriorating. Areas of bloody, pale and raw skin were visible through her hair. Thin black veins appeared across her face and arms. She was twitching. Her whole body was in constant motion.

“I need to tell you something,” Kasey whispered again. “Something you need to know before I give it to you.”

“She will lay it on the floor, yes she will.”

“I will put it on the floor.”

“Do it. She will do it now.”

Slowly, Kasey went down on one knee. She lifted up her hands to her neck and at the same time bowed her head.

All through high school, she was one of the members of the track and field team. That and softball were her two favorite school sports. This last year, she had trained for the sixty-yard sprint. Her fastest time, just three weeks ago, had been 7.0 seconds. She was faster than any of the kids in her grade, including boys.

The thing rocked back and forth, from one side to the other. For Kasey, she was a moving target. When she put her fingers on the clasp of the necklace, she knew she had the thing’s full attention.

Without any indication of her intentions, Kasey pushed herself off the ground and jumped forward and toward the thing, which didn’t react. It didn’t even lift its arms. It didn’t feel fear. It was in utter and complete control. Or so it thought. Kasey rammed into it and wrapped her arms around its body, pulling it toward her and holding it tight.

The screams seemed to come from the depth of the earth, like a thunderous wave of sound crashing against Kasey’s mind. There was no bracing against that. All she could think was to not let go.

“Run!” she shouted. She didn’t see the others. In fact, she didn’t see anything. There was an abyss, and at its bottom lay her mother — eyes open in death but reaching for her, telling Kasey to join her.