The Dead Run (26 page)

 

CHAPTER 46

G
alvan tore at the heart with all his might, knowing he had to make quick work of it. Seth's goons and brainwashed followers might not have been able to take his place, but they sure as hell could take his life and figure the rest out later.

The organ was slippery, hard to grip. Finally, Galvan managed to get a solid hold, cram a forefinger into a ventricle, and rip.

Or try to.

The heart would not give.

He tried again, raking his fingernails across the soft surface until he found purchase. Rending with all the strength he possessed, plus some on loan from the universe.

Nothing doing.

He dropped an elbow onto the thing, tried to flatten and squeeze, scrabble and scratch.

Resilient. Impervious.

Impossible.

Galvan looked up, realizing all at once that the bum-rush was not on, that Seth's men had been given no order to attack.

The cult leader's voice, pitched razor sharp, sliced through the air.

“My father is no fool, Messenger. The sacred vessel cannot be destroyed. Only consumed. Come to your senses. There is but one path.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Galvan snatched up the heart and rose, wild-eyed. He reared back his arm.

It wasn't a plan. It was an impulse. Fling the unassailable, accursed thing as far as he could. Consign it to the desert, deny them a Messenger, hope some marauding undead virgin sniffed it out before Seth did.

Die on his feet, with a prayer for Sherry on his lips.

A single drop of blood changed all that.

It was the sum total of Galvan's attempts to damage the heart—all that he could choke, wrest, mangle from it.

Or perhaps the crimson speck was a gift. Delivered to Galvan through some dim, lingering sentience, or from some plane of being of which he could not conceive.

It whipped through the air, landing on Galvan's lower lip just as his arm reached its fully cocked position and Aaron Seth's minions realized his next move and came alive, rushing toward him in a churling blur of white.

Reflexively, Galvan's tongue darted from his mouth and licked the drop away.

He tasted it and crumpled to the ground, a man yanked loose from time and space.

Galvan's brain dilated wildly as vast, strange quantities of knowledge pumped through it. He bucked and spasmed, the information turning suddenly imagistic, written on his inner eyelids in pure electricity.

Cucuy. A triumphant gleam in his cold eyes as he threw back his head in exultation.

Cucuy, shedding his body like a chrysalis. The age-crisped skin shriveling, peeling back to expose—

Aaron Seth.

The father, reborn as the son.

God does not die for man. Man dies for god.

His body glowing with unearthly power, brighter and brighter—

A blinding light cleaved that image from the next. For the briefest of instants, a radiant vision of the woman in yellow bloomed across his consciousness, then exploded into ash.

Another starburst of light, and then Galvan was staring at Seth again, animal pleasure slathered across the newly born god's face as he stood behind a bent female form, hips thrusting maniacally.

He raised an arm to the heavens, and then four knifelike fingernails swooped down, like hawks descending on a field mouse, and tore straight through the flesh of the girl's back, seeking her heart.

She howled, and twisted to look at her killer, as the life drained from her.

It was Sherry.

Galvan howled, and the universe went black.

The next thing he knew, he was back on his feet, back on the clock, the pocket-world of horror he'd just inhabited a popped soap bubble.

The white-robed cultists were precisely where he'd left them—two steps into their mad rush.

He'd been out about a second, then. Two, at most.

Galvan tensed for the onslaught, his mind and body connected by only the thinnest of filaments, each one buzzing electric with the snarl of knowledge the blood visions had imparted.

If the sacred vessel can do that—

“Enough!” Seth thundered. “Back to your places, now!”

The order froze them in their tracks, and then, slowly, the sea of white robes receded. Seth cut through their ranks, his face aflame. Behind him, at the forsaken altar, Buchanan stepped to Sherry's side and clamped his paw around her arm.

Seth stopped six feet from Galvan and opened his mouth.

Jess beat him to it, the words hitting the air before he'd thought them through.

“He's gonna kill you.” He swallowed, mouth parched, then shook his head. “It's not what you think. You're getting played.”

The victim of my enemy is my . . .

Seth's eyes bored through Galvan like ice picks. But when he spoke, it was to Marshall Buchanan.

“In three seconds, break her arms. And you—”

He flicked a finger in the direction of the van, the Natives.

“Kill them both. Now.”

A click, as the doors swung open on Nichols and Cantwell.

Seth stepped forward. “You've wasted enough time, Messenger.”

A vision of Sherry filled Galvan's mind.

Not as she was, but as she would be.

Mindless.

Heartless.

Neither alive nor dead.

Her will not set against Cucuy's, like the woman in yellow and her army, but subsumed by his.

Enslaved.

There was no fate Galvan would not endure to prevent it. All the sacrifices he had ever made—all the gallant, foolhardy times he'd charged headlong toward danger to protect the innocent, and all the losses he'd accrued as a result—had led him here. The girl in the bar in Juárez. The barefoot boy in the desert. Betty and Veronica. They'd all been practice for this moment, and Galvan couldn't have felt more at peace.

If he had to wander the Dominio Gris as a hollow, aching wraith, so be it. The knowledge that he had saved his child, his world, would turn that hell into a heaven
.

“Time's up, Seth,” he heard himself say, tremoring with fear at what he was about to do. But though his body shook, there was not a wisp of doubt in Galvan's mind.

He locked eyes with Sherry.

“I'll always love you,” he said.

And Galvan crammed the heart into his mouth.

 

CHAPTER 47

I
t had resisted his every assault, but now the heart seemed to melt on Galvan's tongue, as if eager to pass out of existence.

Or to inflict its curse.

Seven and a half ounces of muscle slid down Galvan's throat in less time than it took Aaron Seth to lunge at him—desperation twisting the cult leader's features into a death mask as a low wail emanated from his throat.

Galvan squeezed his eyes shut and waited to be transformed. For soul to vacate flesh, and an eternity of hunger and nameless torment to commence. For a gray wasteland to replace the lush green world, an animal craving to deaden all compassion, love, and thought.

It would be worth it.

Instead, a shock wave of energy more powerful than anything Galvan had ever felt exploded through him.

As if the heart had undergone some kind of reverse transubstantiation.

The flesh made spirit. A holy ghost swirling through his veins, turning his blood to fire.

Every cell in Galvan's body burned in ecstasy. Fifty trillion microscopic orgasms. His entire being was being overrun. Overwritten. Reprogrammed.

This was some fucked-up shit.

He couldn't move, or feel the ground beneath his feet—external reality gone vague, the senses focused inward to the exclusion of all else.

But where was Seth? Galvan concentrated his entire will on finding out, and his eyes popped open.

The world before him was sharper than he'd ever seen it, and Galvan had fighter-pilot vision to begin with. But these were new lenses he was looking through; this was a level of detail, a depth of range, beyond—

Beyond what, motherfucker? Say it.

Beyond human.

The air he breathed tasted as sweet as nectar, each draft filling his lungs and suffusing the mosaic of tiny cells that ferried oxygenated blood throughout his system. Galvan felt each one, newly aware of the magnificent symphony his body conducted every moment.

Seth was still hurtling at him, his snarling visage unchanged. The robed men still trailed in his wake, their torches throwing sparks into the blue-black night.

Except for one thing.

All of it was happening at half speed. At least to Galvan's rewired nervous system.

Another breath, and he had the reins to his body back. Full muscular control. A pocket-eternity in which to map and counter the vector of attack.

He eye-checked Sherry, founded her unharmed, and felt gratitude surge within him. Tossed a look over his shoulder at the bikers and smelled their confusion, nobody overly eager to commit here in this new world order—and then Seth was upon him, arms outstretched for the choke-out, as if he might arrest the heart's journey down the Messenger's larynx. Galvan ducked away and answered with a compact jab to the gut, short and sweet, everything flowing like water.

The blow's impact threw Seth back a good five feet—and it would have been more, had he not crashed into a pair of acolytes and brought them down atop him, one big puddle of melting vanilla soft-serve.

Holy shit. Did I do that?

Nobody moved. Not Seth or his disciples. Not Sherry or Buchanan. Not the Natives, clustered by the open van door. Not the doctor or the sheriff, peering out from the inside.

Nobody did a thing but stare.

Galvan followed their gazes, and realized why.

His arm was regenerating.

Repairing itself, before all their eyes. Invisible hands were stitching the appendage back into existence, cell by cell. Tendrils of sinew and muscle wrapped themselves around pure-white bone. Skin poured itself over the form, slow and deliberate as spilled milk. Tiny hairs sprouted like spring chutes from new-made pores.

Forearm. Wrist. Palm.

Knuckles, fingers, nails.

A prickling sensation, at the extremities. An intense warmth, as fierce as the blue flame of the blowtorch that had cauterized his wound, but without pain.

In ten seconds, what had been taken from Galvan was fully restored.

He held his hand before his eyes, flexing and turning his arm in awe. It was exactly as it had been—down to the birthmark on his inner wrist, the weight-bar callus at the ring finger's base.

Time to take it for a test drive.

“Any of you bastards wanna die for your leader, now's the time,” Galvan announced.

And with that, he darted toward Seth—covering the distance faster than he could believe and knowing there were higher gears than this one, yet to be explored.

Of the eighteen white-robed true believers, only two stepped between Galvan and his quarry.

Looked like fanaticism had its limits.

Neither man was a fighter. Galvan looked them over—fists doubled up, stances all wrong, sweat popping from their hairlines—and felt a pang of mercy, followed by a jolt of relief that he was still capable of that emotion.

Then he remembered what these men had journeyed here to witness. To sanctify. The vileness to which they had spent years, decades, in thrall.

The two of them rushed him at once. Less a coordinated attack than a simultaneous bracing of nerves.

Galvan cocked two arms and threw two punches. He caught each man on the outside temple, the force of the blows driving their heads together with a surprisingly humble knock.

They were dead before they crumpled to the ground. Or very, very unconscious. Whatever. Who gave a fuck.

He stepped between them and loomed over Seth, the cult leader still sprawled atop his allies.

The man's crumpled form filled Galvan's visage, but he could sense the presence, the position, of every other living soul; if anybody else made a move, he'd know it before the first synapse fired. He might not have been able to dodge a bullet—then again, maybe he could—but if the Natives got frisky, Galvan felt pretty goddamn confident he could be at their throats before the guns were cocked.

He bent at the waist and watched Seth cower.

“You've preyed on your last innocent,” Galvan whispered, and clamped a hand around his neck.

Seth was a good-sized man—six feet, one eighty. Galvan lifted him as easily as a rag doll—straight into the air, until his elbow locked and Seth's blanched face was framed against the giant crimson-orange moon.

Galvan started to squeeze.

Hand like a vise, electricity still jangling through him. This would soon be over. All of it.

Seth looked down at him, mouth agape, watery blue eyes bugging out of his head. Galvan stared back evenly, hardly exerting himself, and doubled the pressure. Waiting for the struggle to go out of him, the embers in Seth's eyes to flare and die, just like that poor girl on that stone slab. And the thousands before her.

Instead, they lit up like Christmas bulbs—flashing with an incredulity no dying man had any right to. “Father?” Seth gasped with the last of his breath. “Is that—you?”

Motherfucker's delirious,
thought Galvan.

Then he heard himself reply.

In a voice he neither recognized nor controlled.

“I am not your father anymore.”

What the fuck?

Galvan felt his hand tighten around Seth's neck, but it was not an order he had given. It came not from his own mind, but from another. From the
thing
residing inside him, feeding off his life force like a parasite and filling him with power.

The thing that had suddenly seen fit to let its presence be known.

From
—

Aaron Seth's neck snapped with a quiet pop, and Galvan threw his lifeless corpse headlong into the dust.

His failure is complete,
the voice said, speaking inside Galvan's head now. It did not make a sound, any more than his own voice, inside his own head, would have. It was merely a thought, in the shape of words.

But Galvan heard it loud and clear.

And this . . . ,
it continued.
This is very . . . interesting.

Cucuy,
Jess answered inwardly, as a sense of revulsion filled him. It was followed, immediately, by a panicked desire to find and destroy the monster—to maim himself, if necessary, to burn or sever whatever part this entity had colonized, to banish it at any cost.

But Galvan knew better. The presence was incorporeal. A ghost in the machine. Dim and lurking, part of him and not. Galvan sensed it moving, testing, probing. Trying to determine the contours of its power, its control.

How to take over.

Never.

Get the fuck out,
Galvan screamed inside himself, realizing even as he did that it was the thought of an insane person, a textbook padded-cell line.

It seems we are related,
the Ancient One said, the words slithery in Galvan's brain
. The blood of holy men runs through your veins—a great blessing, for us both. This world can be yours, my son. You have but to claim it.

“I don't want it,” Galvan said aloud. “And I'm not your son.”

One body cannot contain two souls, he thought. Not for long. One had to dominate, to seize control. And Cucuy had about five hundred and thirty years of diabolical experience on him.

Galvan realized his eyes were squeezed shut, and opened them.

The black van's brake lights glowed into being like enormous fireflies, the True Natives no gluttons for punishment. Nichols and Cantwell jumped away as the rear tires spit a backwash of sand and gravel, and the vehicle tore away into the night.

Galvan felt an urge to chase it down and tear the bikers limb from limb. But it was not his; it was Cucuy goading him, trying to insinuate the thought into the stream of Galvan's consciousness undetected, like a dose into a drink. Wanting him to seal their new partnership in carnage, force Galvan to commit an act that would open his soul to the pleasures of power.

He was testing. Needling. Playing.

Galvan steeled himself and watched the big bully of a van disappear down a decline, then turned to the sixteen remaining white-robed men who knelt before him, faces raised to Galvan like confused sunflowers. Farther away, the white-clad girls scattered among the rocks had assumed the same posture.

Slaughter them all, my son. Baptize the New World in blood. Explore your newborn strength, your newborn glory.

There was something newly honeyed to the sound of Cucuy's words in his head, something alarmingly mellifluous about the way they slid into his consciousness. Already, Cucuy was growing more dangerous.

Galvan drowned him out with the sound of his own voice. “Get the fuck out of here,” he bellowed at Seth's followers, cutting a path through their midst, toward Sherry and Buchanan.

Later for the Natives; later for the brainwashed. Later for Cucuy and for himself. The world could fall into a goddamn black hole, as far as Galvan was concerned. Hell, maybe it already had. He'd deal with all that only after his daughter was free. Whatever ordeal was beginning for Galvan, Sherry's was going to end. Right now.

Forward march.

Seth's thug had a knife to her throat, an elbow crooked around her windpipe. But his wolfish eyes were jittery. He'd seen what had happened, what Galvan could do. He knew there was no percentage in this. Just couldn't figure out another way to play it.

Galvan stopped before him and fixed the man with a wordless stare.

Less talk, more rock.

The knife clattered to the ground.

Cucuy's voice raged inside Galvan's head, like a prisoner rattling the bars of a jail cell.
This girl is no longer your daughter. Her value to us lies elsewhere—a value you cannot begin to fathom . . .

With a tremendous, strength-sapping effort—a whole-body exertion he felt in every fiber of every muscle—Galvan tuned him out. He could feel Cucuy straining against him. Within him. Trying to push words through Galvan's mouth, scrabbling toward the puppet strings behind his limbs.

“What are you?” Buchanan whispered.

And then, stepping away from Sherry, he straightened his spine, lifted his eyes to Galvan's.

“I can be of use.”

Jess's impulse was to kill him where he stood—this beast, this kidnapper, this man who'd served Seth in so many unknown and abhorrent capacities. But he could not be sure that the impulse was his; what if it was Cucuy's? What if that monster, that ancient master of sorcery and deceit, had already found some more subtle way of exerting his influence? Realized the limits of his sway, the dilute nature of his blood link to Galvan, and resorted to other tricks?

There was only one thing he could be sure Cucuy would never truck in.

Mercy.

“Get out of my sight,” Jess told Buchanan, and opened his arms to Sherry.

A flash of panic, as she stepped toward him. What if this, too, was a trick? What if Cucuy's power over his body was greater than Galvan thought, and as soon as Sherry was in the monster's clutches—

She buried herself in his arms, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He still had Cucuy locked down—the effort constant, a dull ache spreading through his body and his mind.

But still.

“You okay, baby?” he asked her.

Sherry nodded, into his chest—then pulled away and looked up at him with tears trembling in the corners of both eyes. “Are you?”

Some shit you keep to yourself,
Galvan thought. This was a war no one could fight on his behalf—a custody battle that even two-time State Bar Association Family Lawyer of the Year Baxter Shanley wasn't going to be able to swing.

And if he couldn't win, Galvan reflected, as a chill went through him, he'd have to make sure Cucuy lost, too. Fall on his sword, before anybody could stop him.

Easy, Jess. You're getting ahead of yourself, here.

“I'm good,” he told his daughter, willing it to be true. “Better than good. I've got my baby back. Now let's get out of here.”

Fear jumped into her eyes, and for an instant Galvan wondered if it was him—had Cucuy seized hold of a hand? He ran his eyes over his frame, spot-checking for irregularities,
a house divided against itself cannot stand
.