James Baldwin - Stained Glass

The tunnel ended in a small, domed room with two doors on the same wall. One was open, the other locked. Inside the open door was a room where the stench was thickest. Jenner barged ahead, while I searched the wall for a light switch. There was none, and so I turned my flashlight back to look over things as Zane stepped in beside me, his hand over his mouth.

The bunker looked like a Cold War survivalist relic. Besides the lack of light, the interior was surprisingly modern, though Spartan. It was also quite large for a building of its type. The walls were smooth but unfinished, nothing but stained concrete. There was a shabby lounge suite interspersed with dining chairs set in a ring around a rug, a kitchenette with no visible food, and closed doors along the walls. A stack of bibles on a coffee table came into sharp relief as I swept the beam of light across. When I turned the light down to the floor, I saw something that made me pause in consternation. Bloody paw-prints that were larger than my head, the distinctive pinched triangle and jelly-beans pattern of a feline foot.

I was headed from the first when a piercing cry of rage echoed from the open door at the other end of the underground longhouse.

“God dammit, Rex.” Zane muttered. “GOD help us, she had to find Mason like this, of all people…”

We drew up to the doorway to see Jenner crouched beside the bed, her mouth twisted in a pained expression of grief.

“I… I…” Jenner was in tears, eyes huge in the beams of the flashlights. “I don’t understand.”

The corpse of what could only be John Spotted Elk was torn open like a sacrifice, his body trapped in a hideous state between human and deer. His eyes were gone. His chest and belly were torn open, ribs cracked apart, and everything above his diaphragm was simply missing. The rest of his internal organs were scattered on the bed and floor around him. His hoof-like hands were still up by his face in a posture of defense, the dark flesh ripped open by claws.

The mattress he lay on was gouged, the springs crazed. The mingled smell of rotting meat, urine and feces was so powerful that it made my eyes sting. As difficult as it was to think, the defensive posture of his hands, the expression on his face, his spilled abdomen and the deep puncture wounds on the side of his neck all spoke of the same thing. He’d been mauled by an animal far larger and far stronger than he was. It had happened quickly, and death had taken him by surprise.

Numbly, I turned the torch up to check the ceiling and the wall. Above the bed was a sigil, far more crudely rendered than the one discovered over Lily and Dru’s: An eye with a blank iris drawn through with a cross. The flashlight dipped as I stared at it in dawning recognition.

The day that Vassily had gone to prison, I’d had a dream with Zarya and this very same mark: the cross and eye. Jana, the psychotic sorceress who had tried to enslave me for an unknown Master, had displayed this symbol in her downstairs basement oratory over a blank black altar.

“Mason… Mason wouldn’t do this,” Jenner said. She got to her feet, nearly tripping over the upended dresser behind her. “He wouldn’t do this!”

“Jenner…” Zane called to her from the doorway.

“He wouldn’t. He never killed anyone without good reason. Ever. He wouldn’t kill him. Neither would Michael.”

“I know that symbol.” I also took a step back. The reek was making my face hurt. “I have spare gloves if you want to search the room… but don’t touch the body. If someone reports it, we need to make sure we can’t be traced.”

“If we tell Ayashe we found this… Oh fuck.” Jenner moved back, her hands clenched in her hair. “Mason, Michael. What the fuck?”

“What do you mean, ‘if’?” I turned to find Zane clenching the edge of the doorframe. He was pale and sweaty. “We have to report this, Jenner. He’s the oldest fucking Elder in the city.”

“If the Vigiles get wind of this, they’ll kill him!” Jenner said. “They’ll kill both of them. We won’t know… we won’t have any way to find out why , or… or how.”

“We need to leave now,” Zane snapped. “This isn’t a job for us, Prez.”

“We have to find something. This is no way for an Elder to die. Rex. Give me the gloves.” Jenner held her hand out.

“Jenner, come on.”

“ZANE.” Jenner flashed him a hard look over my shoulder. “Shut the fuck up and see if you can find anything in the rest of this place. Both of you. I need time to think.”

Without a word, I passed one of my pairs of latex gloves to her, squared my shoulders, and headed for the main room.

“This is so wrong. Fuck… I can’t believe this.” Zane scruffed his hair and pulled away from the door, coughing.

There was no sign of the missing Spook. While Jenner sorted through the remains of the bedroom, I padded back out and did my amateurish best to put everything together. The paw prints were everywhere, meandering around the floor. There were human footprints, too. A few cupboards were smashed, a few bookshelves fallen. There were murals on the walls that I hadn’t seen on entering the bunker: Apocalyptic murals depicting nuclear war and the Rapture. The sky was gray and orange and dull red, with a formation of stars that had a crimson star glowing at the center.

Beware the Red Star in the Morning… beware the time when the sky screams…

They have begun the Third War, a War as old the ManLands which bore you.

You will see the Star, HuMan Hound… He comes for you again.

My stomach jerked. Rubbing it, I moved away to search for other clues.

There was a gun safe near the prayer circle – I assumed that was what the furniture arrangement was – but it had a two-ring combination lock and there just wasn’t time to puzzle it out. The first door I opened was a bathroom. The second was a bedroom lined with bunks. Six bunk beds, enough to sleep twelve people. It was set up like a military dorm, with trunks at the end of each bunk. I looked inside: they were full of children’s clothing, most of it soiled. I rifled through it, but there was nothing of interest.

After half an hour of fruitless searching in the dank underground, I took a single Bible from the table while we gathered outside. Zane separated from us to stare out into the forest, lost in his own thoughts. Duke had finished puking and was chain-smoking mixed tobacco and marijuana joints to settle his nerves and stomach, Binah on his lap. The regular scent of tobacco was very green to me; these cigarettes smelled dark green and bright blue, a weird combination of abrasive and sweet-sharp color-tastes.

“You know, I always had my doubts about the Four Fires.” Standing off to the side, Jenner held none of her usual energy. Her shoulders were hunched, her voice quiet and firm with the kind of steadiness that only someone who had faced atrocity could muster. “They were always so up themselves, you know? They’d go on about a ‘shapeshifting community’. John came up with all this inclusive language bullshit. Sat on the panels and lobbied for inclusion in the Vigiles and everything. Now he’s fucking dead, and I don’t know what to think about him, about the Pathfinders… I don’t where anyone’s gone.”

“Guess we know what his Ka is, anyway.” Duke said.

“He didn’t even have time to shift,” Zane said. “I can’t even… I can’t believe it. Maybe that Spook is still around here. I mean, what kind of power does it take to catch someone in the middle of the change? And where the hell is Michael?”

Duke’s dark eyes slid to the side, glancing at Jenner. “Sorry to say it, boss, but… I dunno. Maybe Mason took him somewhere. Maybe Michael took Mason somewhere. There’s no way to know.”