The Big Reap (20 page)

At the very top of the highest peak in sight was a castle.

The ruins of a castle, to be more precise. No mere winter palace, this; everything about it – from its thick stone walls, stained with age and crumbling, to the narrow slit windows that graced its many parapets, to its very position atop the craggy, un-bum-rushable terrain, accessible only by a narrow dirt road that switched back time and again as it wound its way up the mountain – suggested this place was built to be defended, to withstand war.

Or to repel the advances of the angry, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding hordes.

I squinted up at it and wondered how it would fare against me.

If this village – or the castle looking down upon it – had a name, it was neither indicated by sign upon approach nor on any of the road maps that I carried. And these past two weeks, I'd accumulated plenty of them.

After the debacle that was Colorado, I'd decided my days of hitching rides in amateurs were over, at least until the Brethren were dead and gone. If I was going toe-to-toe with the biggest, baddest oogly boogly I'd yet seen, I was for damn sure gonna do it armed, preferably in someone battle-trained. And since I didn't know precisely where this hunt was gonna take me, I needed a meat-suit with a valid passport, the kind of vessel no one would question if they were to bounce erratically around the map Indiana-Jones style. That ruled out cops (too parochial) and military (who tend to raise hackles when they go AWOL.) Covert ops types are, by nature, hard to come by, and anyways, I hear tell both Langley and the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade employ mystical countermeasures to keep out the likes of me. Which is how I settled on an air marshal.

Picked this one up in Chicago. Frank Malmon, according to his passport and the license in his wallet. No pics inside of pets or family, just the ID, two credit cards, and twenty bucks in ones and fives. And no wedding ring on his finger. That's why I chose him.

The Federal Air Marshals have an office in Chicago, makes them easier to spot than in the wild. Taken in ones and twos, they tend to blend in with their environment – by design, not accident. Their whole point is to look like just another airline customer until the shit goes down. Then you find out they've been trained to quick-draw their sidearm and pop a guy head and chest in a people-crammed tin can hurtling through the air thirty thousand feet above the ground at five hundred miles per hour without so much as grazing an innocent passenger or depressurizing the cabin. But in a crowd you know to be rife with them – say, the main concourse in O'Hare – a pattern begins to emerge. Early thirties. Compact build. Hair trimmed high and tight but not too, like a cop's, or maybe former military. Jeans, polos or button-downs, a windbreaker usually to hide their piece. No bright colors, no garish logos or bold graphics on their clothes. Polite but taciturn when addressed. Always watching, listening, assessing threats.

But never imagining the likes of me.

Grabbed this one when he ducked into the can. Not literally, mind. The orderly I'd ditched way back in Colorado. I'd cabbed it out to the airport from my liquid brunch half-smashed, and then body-hopped into an iPhone-noodling teenager who was in line with his parents to check in for their flight to Boston. Hood up, hat brim down, and headphones in, which meant I could – and did – make it all the way to the Windy City without his parents catching wise, or for that matter, speaking to another soul. When I body-hopped in, the kid's mouth flooded with saliva and his stomach fluttered, but I focused on calming both, conjuring an image of a dial marked “nausea” in my mind, and dialing it from eleven where it was pinned back down to zero. The kid's body's urge to purge itself of me abated.

My only gripe with the kid was the ten seconds of ear-splitting skronk I was treated to before I found the pause button on his smart phone's music thingy. I don't know what a Skrillex is – some kind of power tool for grinding metal by the sound of it – but whatever it is, it sounded like his was broken. It was all I could do not to yank the earbuds from my ears. But I figured that would blow my cover, so I left them in, and handled his phone like it was packed solid with nitroglycerin; I couldn't figure out how to shut the damn thing off, and I lived in mortal fear of triggering that aural assault anew at any time.

Anyways, I hopped the kid to Chicago, and used his layover to scope out my air-marshal options. Narrowed it down to two, when just my luck: my top choice decided to hit the restroom. I left the kid in one stall, walked out the other in a brand new Malmon-suit. His nausea
dial was only set to six or so. Even if I hadn't concentrated on adjusting it downward as I did, I suspect he woulda been just fine. It was disturbing to me how easy this possession thing was getting.

The second I hopped into the Air Marshal, I knew I'd struck pay dirt. Didn't even have to check under my jacket to recognize the weight beneath for what it was – a big-ass handgun. But, thorough fellow that I am, I did anyways, and discovered it to be SIG Sauer P226 with two spare mags of fifteen .357 rounds each, meaning I had forty-five in total.

I walked Malmon straight out of the restroom and to the nearest ticket agent, flashed my badge, and said I needed to be on the next flight to Bucharest. The nice young man behind the counter didn't even bat an eye. I spent five minutes in line at security wondering why the TSAs were giving me the hairy eyeball before I realized they probably saw me twice a day. A couple pilots wheeled past the shuffling masses in their stocking feet with cheerful indifference, and slipped the black nylon barrier thing out of its track for long enough to duck behind it. As they refastened it, I ducked out of line and followed suit, and what do you know? No one stopped me.

I worried Romanian Customs would give me trouble over the piece, but it's amazing what the proper ID can get you. They kept me standing there a while after scanning my passport to make sure it came back clean, but once it did, they were all smiles, and I was on my way.

What I hadn't realized was that I was on my way to two weeks of fruitless poking around every tiny mountain hamlet for miles around the glacial waters of Bucura Lake without even a whiff of otherworldly foul play to show for it. I questioned villagers, visited small-town coroners by dead of night, trudged through crumbling ruins, inspected smoke-houses thick with the prickly spice-scent of curing sausage. I poked through rickety old barns and long-abandoned burned-out thatch huts and even, in the case of one creepy Lugosi-looking local whose odd demeanor set my Spidey sense erroneously a-tinglin', dug through a basement chest freezer. But I found no heads, nor blood, nor creepy monsters seeking same. Just normal folk leading normal lives.

Least the landscape was beautiful, I thought.

And boy howdy was it. Rolling hills rising high to peaks of green and gray, verdant valleys teaming with wildlife, shallow mountain streams running so cold and clean they seemed to be handed down by God himself to slake the thirst one developed hiking through the rarified, sun-warmed air. The days topped out near seventy. The nights were darn near cold enough to frost. And though everything, from the pitch of the roofs to the guarded cast to the faces of the locals, spoke of a culture used to hard winters and even harder rule, I found that by and large I was welcomed here, and I responded with rare good cheer.

I soon learned maps were useless here. Half these towns weren't on them, and the other half weren't where they were supposed to be. The one in which I currently stood was a bit of both. It, and the castle that once lorded over it, were referenced only once by a cartographer as far as I could tell from my extensive research, the valley labeled simply
“moarte”
, meaning death. The map itself was burned half to cinder when the library that housed it mysteriously caught fire some three hundred years back. And when I inquired around as to how I might find the town and the ruins of said castle today, the directions I got from the few historians and/or local mountain guides who would even deign to talk about it to me were at once so vague and contradictory, I got the impression that not only had they never seen the place of which I spoke, they clearly had no desire to do so. And those were the ones who didn't storm off or hang up on me when I broached the topic. Odd for a nation so reliant on tourism, and so proud of their nation's history and great natural beauty.

A whole country full of people avoiding the same village en masse? That sounded like Brethren mojo writ large to me. Which meant one way or another, I was gonna find the place.

The problem is, how do you find someplace that doesn't want to be found? And the answer I came upon was slow and painstaking, but ultimately worthwhile. I drove around the countryside for weeks, the car loaded up with bottled water, coarse Romanian jug wine, and cured meats, not to mention two cans of spare gas stashed in the trunk. Every time I came across an intersection, I flipped a coin, assigning one direction heads, the other tails (or, in the case of the Romanian ten-Bani coin I was using, the less satisfying crest and stamped number value, respectively). Whichever route won the toss, I skipped, opting to take the losing path instead.

I won't lie, I had my share of doubts that it would work, but the nature of the place I was looking for meant I couldn't trust my doubts, for they might not truly be my own. And no doubt, the strange aversion-mojo the Brethren seemed to so delight in employing was not the only tactic of dissuasion at play here, because even though I'd cooked up a method to thwart it, that damn coin led me down a whole lot of metaphorical blind alleys in the form of quaint little villages with nary a monster or set of creepy ruins in sight.

As I climbed out of my car beside the nameless town's square, though, I felt suddenly sure I had found the town at last. Because the second my foot touched the ground, an icy finger of anxiety dragged across my spine, and I was gripped with the sudden realization I'd left the iron on. Never mind I'd been living out of my rental car – which as far as I was aware did not boast an iron among its standard features – or that I hadn't found myself with cause to iron since I last counted myself among the living. Knowing that didn't prevent me from wanting to hop back in the car, hightail it out of here, and check the last five places I'd laid my head, just to make sure I hadn't inadvertently lit any of them on fire.

It's funny; the place didn't look like it'd exude such a village-of-the-damned vibe. It was clean and well-kempt, its buildings timeworn but charming. And it was veritably teeming with life for so small a town, folks no doubt driven outside by the beautiful spring day. A flock of small children ranging from maybe four to ten moved as one across the square – giggling, chattering, and shrieking in the way that children do when they're excited – with a soccer ball at the flock's center. An old man fed the birds between puffs on a corncob pipe from a bench beneath a willow tree. Younger men – some dressed like farmhands, others tidier as if more accustomed to life behind a counter or a desk – walked to and fro across the square, waving and smiling at one another as they passed, or ducking into one of the tidy little shops. Occasionally, one of them would reemerge with a paper sack of meats or cheese or bread, and head back the way they came, noshing on a little something for their troubles. Sure, they all cast the occasional sidelong glance at me, but who could blame them? I was an outsider, after all.

But then there was the small matter of the women. And of the windows.

Namely, I didn't see any of the former. A few pigtailed little girls mixed in among the little boys playing in the square, but none older than that, despite there being loads of men in sight from teenaged to elderly. And though the day was just as pretty as could be, all the windows that faced the square save for the storefronts were shuttered.

I suppose it could have been a fluke. Two flukes, I mean. The women were perhaps all off together having tea. The windows shuttered because no one occupied those upper floors. But two flukes seemed a little hard to swallow. Particularly in light of the twist of anxiety I felt the second I set foot here.

Well, I thought, guess it's time to poke the hive and see what comes buzzing out.

I strolled across the small town square in a diagonal, skirting the octagonal gazebo, map and guidebook in my hands, a smile on my face. All for show, of course. “Excuse me,” I called to a young man headed past me in the opposite direction. He slowed a moment, eyes meeting mine, and I saw a flicker of understanding cross his face, as if he spoke enough English to've understood my interruption of his walk, at least. “I was wondering if you could help me,” I continued, emboldened by his reaction. “I'd like to know about the castle.” I pointed toward the ruins on the hill to underline my meaning. “It isn't on my map.”

When I gestured toward the ruins, his eyes widened, and his pace quickened. “
Eu nu vorbesc limba engleza
,” he told me as he passed. I don't speak English
.
I'd heard the phrase plenty since landing in-country, often said apologetically, as if it was some failing of the speaker's and not my own ignorance of foreign tongues that was to blame for our linguistic impasse. But this guy was far from apologetic.

He was brusque.

Hostile.

Frightened.

I tried again with my inquiry, this time targeting a couple older gentlemen ensconced in genial conversation at park's edge. “Excuse me, sirs?” I called, trotting toward them. They looked up at me and frowned – language barrier or sun's glare, I wasn't sure. “Pardon,” I amended (pronouncing it par-DOHN), making a show of consulting my guidebook as I did, as if I hadn't learned that word or asked the question that followed ten dozen times since landing in this country weeks ago. “
Vorbi?i engleza?
” Do you speak English?