Part 16 (2/2)

James broke the awkward silence. ”So what now?”

Brock eyed Hannah, reminding himself she was indeed by his side again. ”We wait for him to come home.”

WAITING.

Not a word was spoken between the three of them during the coming moments. They each listened, because the voices on the air returned. Brock considered it ghosts on the wind. Spirits having open conversations. They were sharing anecdotes and cheering on the idea of the living becoming the dead. Click of tongues against the roofs of mouths, the smacking of dry lips, the drag of low vocals preaching, singing, lecturing, warning, and then shrieks and screams and ceremonious chanting continued in spastic, random cycles. What changed was the noises traveling through the woods. The clanging of metal happened every few minutes, like the jingling of an enormous penny purse. The items were banging, clas.h.i.+ng, and sc.r.a.ping together so hard he imagined they drew sparks upon their collisions. Brock wondered if this was happening everywhere in Blue Hills. Then he prayed Angel was safe out there, regretting that he had to hide her body outside, though he knew he had no choice. Hannah bunched up closer to him, deriving any comfort she could steal from him. James was s.p.a.ced out, his eyes focused on the head of the stairs, ready to aim the nail gun and fire when the need arose. Nothing happened for several hours until the noises of metal and the dead ceased once again.

That's when Chuck Durnham arrived home.

Many things happened quickly. Brock suffered stuttered versions of events that occurred in those three minutes. They rushed upstairs to intercept the axe man. The man clutched his golden axe in the living room as if he knew they were already there. He tossed the axe like a hatchet, the gold weapon spinning and swoos.h.i.+ng through the air. The blunt end smacked James right in the face, the man spilling backwards down the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs with blood mushrooming out of his nose. In reflex, James fired the nail gun once with a hermetic poot of air. That's when the pain exploded in Brock's foot. A nail was driven into his big toe. He pulled back his foot, losing his shoe, tripping into the hallway, but somehow managing to stand right back up in front of Hannah to awkwardly to defend her.

”Stay away from us,” Brock challenged, raising the sledgehammer at Chuck. ”You either tell us what we want to know, or I bash your skull in with this.”

Chuck's eyes studied them. The man was so pale, weakly looking, but he towered above them so strong, so confident. He didn't speak. That's another thing Brock noticed about him the few times they'd encountered one another. He was a drone, as if waiting for the next instructions from someone else.

Hannah whispered to him, ”What's he waiting for?”

”Don't be too upset he's not doing anything,” Brock muttered, tightening his grip on the sledgehammer. ”He's still dangerous, even without his axe.”

Chuck's neck popped, turning his head at them. And that's when Brock followed his eyes to the bottom of the stairs.

The man wanted his axe back.

Brock was startled when the man charged down the stairs, but to get to the stairs, he had to barrel through Brock. The man sent an upper-cut into Brock's abdomen. The blow knocked him off of his feet and sent him down the stairs, rolling hard down each step. Hannah was screaming. Brock was dizzy, taking in the pain until he landed on the floor near James downstairs. Blinking stars out of his eyes, he woke to a bad situation.

White glinting against gold, the axe head caught the dull amber light from the workshop of corpses. Chuck was already down the stairs. He bent down to grab the axe and clutched it in both hands. It was impossible to do anything except beg for his life, though even that was performed poorly.

”Just leave us alone!”

Seconds pa.s.sed, and Brock wasn't bleeding or on his way to being dead. That's because Hannah had jumped on Chuck's back. Tangled together, she was thrown forward over his shoulders, the backs of her shoes striking the ceiling as she was forced into a front flip. She struck the floor back-first, inches from where Brock lay.

Crawling forward, and Brock having no clue why he was doing this, his defense mechanism buried under layers of fear, exhaustion, and starved senses. It was then Brock located the hammer. He threw it ahead of him, and it struck home. Chuck growled and cursed, his giant arms covering his face as his nose gushed blood. He staggered back two steps, absorbing the pain.

Brock was confused by what came out of the man's mouth in surprisingly clarity and dread. ”Why am I feeling this? Why am I feeling pain again?”

Brock's vision was slowly returning. He was barely standing, his limbs shaking to hold himself up. He imagined himself ramming his upper body into Chuck to knock him down and gain the upper hand when he was cut off by the noises: Poot! Poot! Poot!

Chuck was thrown up against the wall, and then he swiftly fell to the ground. The attacker issued pained gasps and audibly gulped in large breaths of air. The main stayed on the ground weeping.

James kept the gun extended to take another shot if the axe man dared to make another move. ”Stay where you are.”

Brock stole the axe. He was ready to interrogate him, but he checked on Hannah first. She was clutching her side and the back of her head, watching him intently through her agonized features, somehow saying with her eyes, ”I'll be okay later, just not right now.”

When Brock regarded Chuck, the man's face was human again. It was bent in a sadness so deep Brock wanted to turn away and leave him alone. Instead, Brock studied the man's wounds. There were two nails in his chest and one dead-on in the middle of his clavicle bone. He was immobilized and maybe dying.

It was that moment he spoke to Brock. ”I bleed my own blood. It used to be black. It was their blood. It was the stuff coming out of the ground, but now I'm bleeding my own blood again. I don't understand it.”

Brock noted the black gel that was in puddles on the ground, what had initially spilled out of him at first. But what was oozing from him now was red. The black puddle on the floor stank of decay long pent-up in the ground and finally released on the open air.

”You must listen,” Chuck wheezed, choking on his own blood and letting it run down both sides of his mouth. ”Caaaaagh, I won't live much longer. Please, listen hard. Come closer.”

James was right behind him.

Brock knelt closer, letting the man speak his peace.

”They filled me with the black to give me strength and knowledge. It was all to do their bidding. The dead promised me I'd have my family back if I did what I was supposed to do.” He took a pause, living down another shot of agony. The voices of the dead played on the air again, circling overhead outside like spiritual vultures. ”I-I can hear my wife and my child speak to me, but it's not them. They're evil like the rest of the dead. They lied to me. My family helped convince me to do the dead's bidding. And I'll be like them when I die. I'll be miserable. I'll hate everything and everybody like they now do. I'll be pure evil.”

Brock was confused. ”Tell us what's happening. Why is everyone killing each other for money? Why do we shut down without money in our bodies?”

Chuck cast a resigned look, knowing he had caused this terrible scenario. ”It's very hard to explain. T-there are so many people dead and buried in the ground. So many restless bodies in the earth are trapped in their coffins. Billions and billions of restless dead corpses wither in the ground. They want their ambitions to be realized. Think about how many people have died in our history of existence. Think about how many premature deaths have occurred. How many times brilliance was cut down before its time. Imagine those killed in the womb before having a chance at life. Soldiers cut down in the fields of battle. Those cheated of their life's ambitions. Those who'd cheated themselves out of their own ambitions. Death is permanent, but their ideas,” he coughed up a wad of thick blood, then said more insistently, ”dead men's ideas never die. They live on, and now they're alive. They're jilted, turned hideous by the darkness of death. This won't be the first place this will happen, and it surely won't be the last. The ground spits out the dead's ideas and ambitions and brings them to fruition. The earth is ripe with possibilities. And one man's ambition has taken over Blue Hills, in particular. His name is Tim Hawker.”

James gasped, taken by surprised. ”Tim Hawker. He died like fifteen years ago. I remember him. He was my friend. Why would he do this? He was a friendly person.”

Brock listened harder, waving down James so the man could continue his explanation.

”I-it is possible,” Chuck coughed. ”Consider this. The dead hold onto their ideas, millions and billions of monads. Have you ever heard of monads?”

Brock vaguely had an idea of what monads were. ”It's a philosophy thing. It's bulls.h.i.+t. Floating ideas, right? Invisible ideas float around that have yet to be discovered.”

”Some-something like that, sort of. Ideas are in the air, except with the dead, they're under our feet. The soil is compacted with ideas from what the dead held in when they were sent to the grave. The earth can't hold them back anymore. Whether fully realized, failed, or something that has never left their minds, the ideas are coming up to the surface, and it's caused what's been happening around us to be possible. My G.o.d, they're so powerful. But the problem is the dead have rotted in their graves. Their harmless ambitions and dreams have been warped by coffin rot. Their minds are ma.s.ses of putrid jellies and worms. What could've been good for the world has been rendered into something diabolically evil. Tim Hawker's ideas have been jilted and turned to the extreme.”

”What were Tim's ideas?” Brock asked, fearing Chuck wouldn't survive to finish his explanation. ”Come on, Chuck, we want to end this. Tell us everything you know.”

”Tim died with an obsession with coin-operated machines. He imagined what it would be like if people were like those machines. He was obsessed with the old mechanical museums too. His great uncle owned one when he was a child, and he worked there as a teenager.”

James said, ”Yeah, yeah, Tim loved mechanical museums. It makes sense. But why would he do this to people?”

”The man drew up pictures of people as coin-operated machines. The man was growing soft in the head in his old age. He was growing old, suffering Alzheimer's, and he constantly viewed the world and the people in it as coin-operated machines. I guess it was a way for an old man to re-live the better part of his life.”

Brock was puzzled. ”So the guy dies, and he kept imagining the world as a big coin-operated machine, and now that there are too many dead people in the ground, their ideas are becoming real. Is that what I'm supposed to believe?”

”Ye-es,” Chuck managed through a wince. ”It's far fetched, but look at what's around you and try to explain it away. The problem, other dead people are competing for their ideas to become real too. Tim Hawker's ideas won't last much longer. This place is about to be turned upside down. You'll see. You must escape before that happens. The coins are almost all in one place. Soon, the final event will be taking place. I've seen their great event when the black of their bodies was running through my veins. I've had visions. I know what's going to happen. It'll be a spectacle.”

Hannah asked, ”Is there anything we can do to save ourselves?”

”You're not getting out until you fix what I've installed. If you look around, you'll see boxes of metal components, steel boxes, and springs. They just appeared in my work s.p.a.ce after the black oil took my wife and child from me. I used these pieces to install coin-operated machines inside people. You see, the mist in the air, it's all their essence. They have their way with things. They can change your body to fit their ambitions. Anything's possible here, even if it's against reality.”

Chuck pointed on the floor at the power drill. ”Quick, before they lock that up. Didn't you notice how you could fire that nail gun without having to put another coin into first? They wanted me dead. They have no more use for me. They almost have all the coins and money in town, and if you don't hurry, they'll take what's inside of you, and you'll...you'll be dead if they do that. The coins will explode out of you. Tear you up from the inside out. The coins are all going to a hole in Tim Hawker's house. The coins are being collected. They've been saving them up. And they're going to be used very soon.”

Brock picked up the power drill and hurried back to Chuck. ”Then what do I do to save these two?”

Chuck's eyes were rolling in the back of his head, ”You drag your finger along each shoulder blade and feel for the bolt. You remove the screws, and doing that, you remove the coin-operated device. You have your own body again. It's, it's that simple.”

Chuck was fading fast. His coughs were turning into compressed belches of air. ”Feel for the bolts...free yourself...and get the h.e.l.l out of this town before it all happens...”

The man breathed one final time, and he then he mouthed, ”I pray I see my family again as they once were...I'm sorry for what I've done.”

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