Silas: A Supernatural Thriller (32 page)

“Cut the crap, dude,” I said, bluntly. “Tell me what I need to know.”

Paul sighed and tapped his cane on the floor. Silas flinched when he did so, but stayed put. My look-alike seemed to notice this and gave me a small nod of approval.

“I’m sorry for misleading you, Ken,” he said. Despite his words, I sensed no sincerity in his mannerisms. “Some things had to be done. There was no other choice.” He cleared his throat, and his next words rang out with authenticity. “Although I never once lied to you.”

I rolled my eyes. “You said that if I read that letter, you were dead or captured. That’s not a lie?”

“Not in the slightest,” he replied. “Every word was true.”

“But you’re certainly not dead, and you don’t look to be anyone’s prisoner.”

“Ah, but appearances can be deceiving, my friend.”

“Explain.”

“No.”

“Asshole. Lying asshole.”

Paul seemed to grow angry. His cheeks flushed red and his voice chortled as if he had a bubble of spit in his throat that he couldn’t get rid of. He jabbed his cane against the floor. “There were things that had to be said,” he exclaimed. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come! Don’t you see that?”

“See what?” I asked. “I don’t know anything, man. All I
do
know is what you told me. So tell me – are you The One, or is
he?
” I pointed toward the sleeping robot at our feet.

“No,” he said. “Well, yes. I don’t know. I just wrote what the Oracle told me to. But that doesn’t matter anymore, because what I need you for is quite simple.”

“And what’s that?”

He moved much faster than I could’ve anticipated given his frail appearance. In one gesture he brought the cane up over his right shoulder, stepped over the robot corpse, and took a swing at me. The cane’s hard shaft struck the side of my face and my vision exploded with fireworks. I teetered to the side and tripped over Silas. My hip – the same one I’d injured earlier – slammed into the computer console on my way down. I heard Silas let out a helpless, surprised yelp, and then I hit the ground. My entire being cried out in pain.

I heard a ruckus and managed to get up on one elbow. My vision cleared enough to see Silas leap at my attacker. Paul, still with that uncanny quickness, twirled just in time and jabbed the cane at Silas. Its clear tip let loose a volley of blue sparks when it connected with Silas’s chest. Silas tottered backward and collapsed, shaking while electricity rippled over him. His eyes rolled to the back of his head.

“Silas!” I screamed. In my rage, the pain in my face and hip became mere traces of discomfort.

I struggled to my feet and charged, but Paul was once again the swifter of us. He brought the cane down on my shoulder without even turning around. The force of the blow compelled me to my knees. Numbness streaked through me. I remembered the time I stuck a fork into an electrical outlet when I was a kid. The sensation I felt then was very similar to now, only a thousand times worse.

Paul drew back his combination walking stick/sedation weapon. I toppled over, finally able to breathe. I didn’t black out as Silas had, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

“What…do you…want…” I gasped. It felt like someone had shoved a dry sponge down my throat.

“I need your life to mean nothing,” he replied softly.

52

I wanted to give Paul a wise-ass response, something like,
well, you’re too late, because my life stopped meaning anything long before I met you
, but I fought the urge. My whole body ached and Silas was unconscious only six feet away. The last thing I wanted to do was prod the crazy bastard into doing something to hurt my boy.

With the two of us down for the count, Paul seemed to revert to his previous, feeble state. He turned his head to the side and shouted in what sounded like German –
hatten
see
esoof
was what I heard – and then faced me. The black circles surrounding his green eyes darkened, as if he’d expended all his energy and needed to be recharged. He stabbed at the floor with his cane and leaned on it, breathing in heavy, rasping bursts. I didn’t try to make a move. I’d seen how quick he was when he wanted to be and didn’t want to provoke a repeat performance.

Paul stared at me without saying a word. He blinked, and I noticed a change coming over his eyes. They’d been green not five seconds ago, but now the right one looked pale, going on gray, growing murkier as the seconds ticked away. The left eye followed suit.

Pretty soon they’ll be the same color as mine
, I thought.

His right eye blinked again, all by itself. It looked like he winked at me, but his expression was still slacked with joyless indifference. I decided that he’d gone insane. That had to be the case. There was no way the man who left me that letter, the man who cared so deeply for the two boys back in the bunker, would be capable of such callousness and violence.

As if to answer this contemplation, Paul muttered, “I’m sorry.” His voice sounded different somehow – softer, more delicate, with an underlying hint of dismay.

It didn’t last. He suddenly shot up straight and twirled the cane. His head twisted to the side again, as if he’d been slapped. When he turned back to me the change in his eyes reversed, becoming green once more. I wondered if they’d ever
really
shifted, or if it had been an effect of the inconsistent light from the fluorescents.

“As I mentioned before,” said Paul with an indifferent shrug, “your life has to mean nothing.”

I let my eyes wander to Silas, who was still unconscious just to the left of Paul. Silas’s chest still rose and fell, which was good, and he began squirming. He was okay. Paul noticed this too, and he brought the electrified tip of his cane off the ground ever so slightly.

With him paying attention to Silas, I drew my right knee beneath me and prepared to leap if the moment presented itself. I took a deep breath into my dry, cracked throat, and managed to speak in the most staid tone I could.

“Touch him and I’ll kill you.”

Paul spun around, glaring at me, his lips pursed and his eyebrows raised. I knew what was going to come out of his mouth, so I cut him off just as he started to speak.

“Because he’s my boy,” I snarled. “You’d do the same thing if it was one of
your
boys laying there. That’s right, Kaiser and Will. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t. Being a douche doesn’t become you.”

He peered at Silas as if he was going to go in that direction and then faced me again. He seemed confused. One moment his eyelids squeezed shut in anger, the next they bulged as if he’d seen a ghost. All the while his mouth kept opening and closing, uttering incomprehensible words to no one in particular. He looked like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Just as his body started to shake, Paul did a very odd thing. In a split-second of clarity his eyes smiled at me and he nodded, as if beckoning me forward. After that his eyes rolled back, revealing their yellowing, sickly underbellies. His body lurched to the side and his arm almost didn’t move fast enough to wedge the cane beneath him to break his fall.

My moment had arrived. Gritting my teeth so tight I could feel pressure build in my sinuses, I used the foot tucked underneath me like a spring and jumped, soaring over the cataleptic robot, my shoulder aimed at Paul’s chest. In my haste my targeting was off and I hit him on the side. My body went careening. I hit the ground and rolled while Paul staggered and then teetered over, unnaturally stiff. He landed flat on his back with a wet thud.

Around the time Paul’s body hit the floor, Silas had regained a bit of his senses. He lifted his head, his eyes groggy. I waved at him and he seemed to register my presence before burying his face in the crook of his arm. Edginess gnawed at my insides. Paul had fallen close enough to my boy that his twitching fingers were only a precious few inches away from his naked rump.

I scampered on all fours and before I knew it I was close enough to pounce. I landed on Paul’s midsection. A burst of the most pungent breath I’d ever smelled blustered between his lips, along with a stream of bloody saliva. It dripped down my cheeks and a strand hung from my nose, but I didn’t care. The crazy bastard was
not
going to hurt my dog, my boy, my
gi-faht
.
No way, no how,
nosiree
Bob.

I balled my fist, not feeling any pain. Paul’s eyes started doing that shifting thing again, but just as with my pain, it didn’t register. My rage, the urge to
protect my kin
, was all that mattered.

My fist hit paydirt and Paul’s head snapped to the side. A torrent of his bloody spittle painted a jagged line across the dusty steel floor. His eyelids fluttered and he trilled in a weak voice. I punched him again, this time on his ear. My knuckles slid and a section of skin just below his lobe sloughed away like putty, revealing a patch of glistening red.

My stomach lurched and one primal reaction overtook another – I dropped to the floor and dry heaved. The world spun while I used my palms, wet and slippery from my sweat and Paul’s blood, to pull myself away from him. I heaved again, then again, and after one more time I waited, my body tense, anticipating another pitch that thankfully didn’t come. I uttered a soft cry and saw Silas staring at me with his big, brown-blue eyes. He crouched a few feet away with a half-smile on his human face.

Silas cautiously inched toward Paul, who gasped for breath while his wrecked ear bled out. I wanted to yell out for him to stop, but something about his expression held my tongue. He looked eerily similar to the way his doggy self did the first time he set eyes on the dead body of Bridget Cormier. He rested his head on Paul’s thigh, whose surprisingly gentle hand then ran through his nest of black hair. The sight of this threw me overboard.

“Get your hand of him!” I said. “That’s
my
boy!”

Silas lifted his head and looked at me, seemingly oblivious to the burden my voice projected. Paul glimpsed my way, as well, and I noticed the color of his eyes waver once more. His corneas became a shifting weave of emerald green and dark brown. His jaw worked up and down while his nostrils flared. I found myself mesmerized.

The whirlpool of color ceased churning and a pair of brown eyes flecked with gold, very much like mine, stared at me. They appeared both kind and tormented. The face containing them, stripped of superciliousness and anger, became an older version of my own. My breathing hitched and I tilted my head.

“What the…,” I said aloud. “I don’t…”

Paul brought up his right hand. It seemed to take a great amount of effort for him to do so. He dabbed a finger into the gory mess of his ear and he stared at the red stain on his fingertips. He grimaced, glanced at Silas, and then turned my way again. His expression seemed urgent, and soon I understood why.

His corneas began to eddy.

His lips moved and the voice that came from between them was aggrieved and jarringly familiar. “Come here,” he said. “Please.”

I crept forward on my hands and knees until I hovered over him. I put my hand on his shoulder, feeling how slender and frail he was beneath his long white coat. He looked impossibly old now, malnourished to a point near death. How he could’ve been capable of the incredible feats of strength he displayed earlier was beyond me.

“Look,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.

“Where?” I asked. Silas had joined me by then, and he looked worried. Paul tugged on the lower hem of the yellow undershirt that clung to his much-too-slender torso. He didn’t seem to have the strength to pull it up. I reached down to help him.

“Hurry,” he muttered. He coughed, and the blood from his lips painted streaks on his shirt. “There isn’t…much…time.”

I yanked up his top. The sickly-sweet aroma of decay I’d come to know from my time in the ditch at the Mancuso farm filled my nostrils. I gagged. Silas did, as well, and scurried away. I covered my mouth and nose with the collar of my shirt – a shirt that had originally belonged to the man below me – and gazed with horror at what I’d uncovered.