He remembered coming home after the last run, after letting Jimmy go and lying to his Master about what had happened. Caroline had met him at the door. She’d smiled as she held up a wooden meat tenderizer, the blocky head covered with her blood. She was naked and red wet smeared the insides of her legs.
I’m glad you’re back, hon. My hand was getting tired. Would you mind?
Caroline had returned to normal after a couple hours, but the message was clear. If he wanted to enjoy the blessings of his Master, he’d damn well better deliver from now on.
That was easier commanded than accomplished, though. With the amount of blood Dan had lost, he feared he might pass out at any moment. If that happened, the girl would be free—and if she was smart, she’d take his knife and cut his throat before running off. The thought of dying didn’t bother Dan, but he couldn’t bear to think of what would happen to Caroline and Lindsey when he was gone. For them he kept picking up one foot and putting down the other, ignoring the pain in his ankle, the fire in his shredded bicep, the blackness nibbling away at the edge of his vision.
“Holy shit, is that where you Master lives?”
Without realizing it, Dan had been staring down at his feet as he walked, as if he were forcing them to continue moving through willpower alone. Now Dan looked up, startled by the girl’s voice. The Way sloped downward here, and they stood at the highest point of the highway. Less than a quarter of a mile downslope, set back a few hundred feet from the road, a gigantic figure reached upward toward the sour-yellow sky. It was visible from the waist up only, as if it were some manner of ancient subterranean giant that had awakened and clawed its way to the surface, stopping for some unknown reason when it was only partially free. It rose a hundred feet into the air, its surface a dingy white, bearded face turned skyward, its expression of beatific joy marred by the empty black hollows where its eyes had once been. In front of the figure a fountain streamed upward, liquid arcing back down to splash into a man-made pond. Once the fountain had sprayed clear water, but now jets of red crimson rose into the air. Behind the figure were the ruins of a building that once stood two stories high, but had been reduced to a heap of broken white brick and shards of shattered stained glass during the Arrival. Once, this had been a church, and the behemoth rising out of the earth was the image of the god worshipped here. But that had been in the World Before.
Dan remembered something the biker had said. Between you and me, your Master’s got a great sense of humor—more than mine, that’s for sure.
“Yes,” Dan said in answer to the girl’s question, his voice breathy and weak. “We made it.”
“So where’s your Master?”
Dan and the girl stood on the smooth gray soil at the edge of the blood pond. Dan held the hunting knife with a trembling hand, the point dimpling the skin between the girl’s shoulder blades just above her bra. The blade was sharp, and his shaking caused the tip to dig into her flesh. A bead of bright blood welled forth, but if the girl felt it, she gave no sign. The blood in the pond was darker than hers, he thought. Much darker.
“You’re looking at him,” Dan answered. He felt light-headed, dizzy, and the vision in his left eye had gone blurry. His throat was dry, and his mouth had a strange metallic taste in it. He wished the pond had real water in it; he could use a drink right now.
“What, you mean the statue?”
Dan looked up at the visage of the empty-eyed god looming over them, raising white hands coated with years of car exhaust skyward, as if to beseech the heavens.
My Father, why hast thou forsaken me?
Dan thought it was a damn good question, and one he’d asked more than a few times himself.
To the girl he said, “The fountain.”
The girl glanced over her shoulder and gave him a skeptical look. “I’ve seen some weird-ass things since the Arrival, but do you really expect me to believe that a goddamned fountain—even one that sprays blood—is a Master?”
“Believe whatever you like. I don’t give a shit.” Dan stared at the fountain, listened to the thick, heavy plaps of blood drops falling back into the pond. His thrall-mark burned like fire now, and he could feel blood pulsing through the swollen flesh of his forehead. His Master was eager for the sacrifice, and Dan could feel his patron’s hunger as if it were his own. Old, this hunger was… older than the stars, older even than the concept of stars… It was the hunger for which the universe had been created and allowed to grow, until existence itself was ready to be plucked like a ripe fruit and finally, after unimaginable eons of patient waiting, bitten into with razor-sharp teeth and devoured, the blood of infinite multitudes dribbling down the chin like sweet, sweet nectar.
The girl turned to look forward again. A line of blood now ran down her back from where the shaking knifepoint had pierced her flesh, but still she didn’t react, even though she had to be feeling it by now.
“What next?” she asked. “You just… throw me in?”
That’s exactly what Dan usually did—when his offerings were bound hand and foot. But the girl was awake, and her feet were free. He supposed he could try to shove her in, but his bones felt watery, like half-melted ice, and he didn’t know if he could summon the strength for even a single shove. If only his Master accepted dead sacrifices. Dan had spoken to another thrall once, an elderly woman whose Master inhabited the waste treatment plant just outside of town. Not only did her Master like its offerings dead, the more rotten they were, the better. Lucky bitch.
A wave of vertigo washed over Dan as his vision went gray, and he took several stumble-steps backward. He could feel nothingness rushing in to take him, and part of him wanted to let it bear him away on its dark, dead wings.
Caroline… Lindsey…
He had a job to do, family to provide for, and he couldn’t give up… for his wife and daughter, if not for himself. Dan concentrated and fought to push back the darkness. For an endless moment, nothing happened and he thought he’d failed. But then slowly his vision began to clear.
He found himself looking at the girl’s grinning face. On her forehead was a thrall-mark, and in her hands—hands no longer bound by duct tape—was his hunting knife.
“Your Master regrets to inform you that your services are no longer required,” she said, and then slashed the blade in a vicious arc across his throat.
Dan’s own miniature blood fountain sprayed from the newly created opening above his Adam’s apple. The girl dropped the knife, grabbed his arm, and swung him toward the pond. He stumbled forward, his feet splashing in the gore. He pressed his hands to his throat in what he knew was a futile attempt to staunch the gushing red flood. As he had seen many times before, tentacles emerged from the surface of the pond, slender serpentine limbs formed from blood itself. Half a dozen in all, the tentacles lashed toward him, wrapped themselves around his arms, legs, waist, and then began pulling him downward.
He glanced back and saw the girl standing at the pond’s edge, watching with wide-eyed fascination. Remnants of duct tape were still stuck to her wrists, the ragged edges where her bonds had been torn dripping dark blood. Blood left by the tentacle that had reached out to free her when he had almost lost consciousness, Dan realized. His Master hadn’t given him a second chance after failing to deliver a sacrifice on his last run. His Master had sent him to find a replacement.