Rob Thurman - Blackout

The porch was still standing with a dim light on, hard to believe, and with a man in a rocker. He looked up when I slammed the car door. He had short ginger-turning-white hair—snow on the mountain as they said here. His skin was dark and spotted from the sun and he had a wide yellow smile. It was the man whom I’d caught a glimpse of when working in the diner. He’d walked past, with pale orange hair and Miss Terrwyn’s stamp of wickedness on him. I hadn’t known Miss Terrwyn long, but in that time she had always been right. This one proved it. “Well, there you are, Mr. Caliban. They told me to wait for you, but I didn’t know it’d be so long.” He jerked his head back and forth hurriedly as if they could see him or hear him. He didn’t know then … about his masters. The Auphe were gone—the true Auphe… .

“But I’d have waited. For as long as it took. I’m Jesse, but what few people I see call me Sidle, ‘cause I’m so good at sidling out of sight when I have to.” He put down the book he was reading, a Bible—no understanding that one unless he probably skipped to the smiting parts. Yeah, I could see that. Mmm. Got to love me some smiting, he’d say. Not righteous with the Lord—any Lord—but Keeper of the Flock.

“They’re inside. Waiting for you. I kept them all alive. Can’t say they’re happy, but that wasn’t the point, was it? Keep them here, good and miserable, until you came and showed them what misery really is.” I saw a spark of red in his eyes flare then, buried behind the I’m-a-good-dog facade. Takes a thief to catch a thief, a killer to catch a killer, an Auphe to watch the Auphe. Here was another failure—an Auphe without teeth. Worse, an obedient, fawning one. They would’ve despised him even as they used him. “Go on. Go up and see for yourself. Taste that pain, ripe and juicy, and show ‘em worse.”

Keeper of the Flock. Keeper of the Fucked.

I did. I walked past him, not wasting words on him. What would you say to something like him? Inside, the first floor was empty except for rotting furniture and a kitchen with a huge humming refrigerator stocked to the gills with raw meat. It wouldn’t do to let the brothers and sisters starve while they were waiting for me to show up years later. My toys, the Auphe had said. My failed brothers and sisters. And what do you do with failures? The Auphe had told me that too. You “play.”

Even monsters knew, all work and no play …

Upstairs was one open area. I flicked on the lights to see a long-ago ballroom with boarded-up windows, boarded then banded with rebar. The room was lined with cages, although one was empty and long so from the lack of blood and the accumulation of dust. Good old Watch-me-Sidle had lied about keeping them all alive. One had apparently not survived his tender loving care. Considering what was up here, a lie was the least of his sins. Eight cages and that was where they were, the failures. The cage bars weren’t just vertical, but horizontal too. The guard downstairs didn’t trust them to do the job, though; the prisoners also had chains anchoring them to the wall. The manacles had been on their ankles so long that flesh had grown over them in spots. That was why they were failures. They couldn’t travel; they couldn’t make a gate out of this hell. My traveling was the only reason the Auphe had needed me. I’d been the first one capable of that. I was the first breeding program success—which meant they’d all been here longer than twenty-three years. God knew how long that was. There were seven of them—all naked. Some male, some female, but it wasn’t easy to tell. Some were more Auphe in appearance than human. None looked completely human, not close. Hair hung to the floor in a matted mass, some Auphe silver white; some ordinary human brown or black. Some had gnawed their hair off until it hung just long enough to cover their face. The stench was unbelievable, so god-awful that my sense of smell cut out immediately.

“Brother.” The one in the closest cage looked up. His eyes were light blue, not far from my own gray, shining through the tangled black hair that hung in his face. He was pale too. He had black hair like me, pale like me, eyes close to mine. And then he grinned. The hundreds of sliver thin metal teeth were brighter than his eyes. And the eyes were no party when you looked into their depths. They were the eyes of something rabid. There was someone home in there, but you didn’t want to know who it was, what it was, or what it would do to you given the chance. “You have come. Let us go. All of us. We are family. We will hunt and rip and tear and kill.”

We didn’t share the same mother and most likely not the same father. There had been hundreds of Auphe when I was young. Plenty of sires to be had. We weren’t family … but when you were the last of a race, albeit a created perversely, twisted hybrid race, were they that wrong to say we were?

The others echoed him, a murmuring bloody wind. “Hunt, rip, tear, kill.” Claws, Auphe black or torn human nails, clutched at the bars. I guess the Auphe hadn’t told them that all the hunting and killing was the kind I was supposed to do to them. No, that wouldn’t be right. That wasn’t the Auphe way. They’d have told them all right—wanting them to suffer, but sometimes you forget what you don’t want to know. I had. So had they. All they wanted was freedom—the freedom to kill until they didn’t have the energy to kill anymore. Rest and then kill again until they could find nothing left to kill. Then worse—they would breed. The Auphe would live again … in a way—distorted and less, but killers all the same.

The Auphe had been wrong. These offspring were far more the success than I was.

Yet more than twenty-three years of living hell. It was hard to blame them. I looked at them all, every face. Red eyes and dark skin. Blue eyes and jagged metal teeth. Silver eyes, silver hair, blackened teeth and nails, and every yearning, murderous face was the same—as Auphe as the Auphe themselves had been; murder given life; homicide given a host.

Some things done can’t be undone. Some things made can’t be unmade.

Monsters who had been tortured would’ve been monsters who would have tortured if things had ended up with me the failure behind the bars and them loose on a world full of human sheep. “Kill, brother.” The first one wore a crust of dried blood over his mouth. “So tired. We are so tired of dead flesh fed to us. We want the real prey. We want to bury our teeth into the living and tear it away and bathe in the blood. Let us out, brother.”

Some things once done can’t be undone.

More echoes: “Brother, brother, brother, set us free. Brother, brother, brother, brother.”

Some things made can’t be unmade.

“Brother, brother …”

Shit happens.

“Brother …”

“I have only one brother,” I said as I shot the first one in the head.

The others were harder. They were thrashing, trying to climb the walls, the ceiling, but in the end they were only fish in a barrel in their tiny cells. There was another good, down-to-earth country saying: shooting fish in a barrel. I was patient, aimed at the spaces between the bars, and in ten minutes they were dead, every last one. I made sure. When they were lying on the floor unmoving, I double-tapped them all. Triple-tapped, I guessed—the first one that had put them down, followed by the two in the head just in case. I ejected the mostly empty clips and filled the Eagle and Glock with fresh ones.

They wanted freedom. Now they were free in the only way they could be. It was the best I could do for them. The only thing I could.

I went back down the stairs, thinking who was the lucky one? The failures or the success? Those upstairs or me? At the moment I didn’t have an answer. It could’ve easily gone the other way. Very easily.