Gamorrah Falls
Dawn was slowly coming, sneaking up behind him like a wolf from a darkened forest, and the first hint of sunlight pierced through the roiling bulk of the night's last remaining storm cloud. He could see a pale glimmer of silver gradually stretching down the length of the gun's barrel. A cool draught of air streamed in through the open window and the breeze carried the promise of a new day into the gloom-shrouded room. He could smell a faint hint of jasmine and mint, mixed with the wetness from the night's storm, on the wind. He also caught the scent of burnt gunpowder and Ballistol oil from the gun in his tightly clenched fist and it was the perfume of murder.
His name was Bryant Arthur Kane and he had killed more times in his life than he could remember.
He sighed through clenched teeth. There were six dead men in the debris-strewn hotel room with him and he knew he wouldn't have long until others with lethal intent charged up the stairs and down the corridor outside to burst in on him. The gun's clip was almost empty. He didn't have enough bullets to fend off any new enemies. Not that it mattered. He relied on the gun out of habit, not because he needed it. As brutal and inhumane a thing as the Beretta 8000 Cougar .357 magnums automatic was, the violence it represented was his last tether to humanity. It was technology. A tool. Man made. It was a thing, inanimate, and it only became a horror when it was used against the living. Conversely, he was far worse than any mere gun; he, himself, was a weapon, a horror, a monster, all steel-thewed muscle and blinding speed and claws and fangs...
... and hunger. A rapacious, all-consuming, nerve-shredding, driving hunger. It lit his insides like an inferno, it hollowed him out like a bottomless bowl that demanded to constantly be filled. Furious ancient hunger.
He prayed he could hold on until daybreak. He wanted to see the sun one last time before the shrieking, bestial thing inside him finally broke free to maim and murder -- like that very same primordial urge had done inside the men he had already killed.
He had to hold on.
Funny how the vision of a little boy danced across his mind, supplanting the chaotic imagery of torn and shredded human flesh from only minutes ago. It had been the end of a long and hot summer's day from some fifteen years past when he'd come across the ceramic jar laying half-buried in a mound of dried, weed-speckled dirt outside the fence. The fence, water-stained, mud-spattered and in a serious state of disrepair, had encircled the yard to the old Wilton Place in the town of Gamorrah Falls. Ragweed and stinging nettles vied with poison sumac plants in the spaces between piles of moldy paper pulp garbage following twenty yard path right to the front door of the abandoned manor. The ramshackle two-story mansion had been a mess, with its partially collapsed roof, three attic gables with broken windows, weathered wood exterior and partially stripped paint nearly hidden behind the foliage of a trio of wide-boled, gnarled oak trees.
Hezekiah and Aristesia Wilton, wealthy owners of the local meat-packing plant that had employed a third of Gamorrah Falls' population, had lived and died in that old house. They'd been hard, unsympathetic people and local townsfolk on the whole hadn't liked them nor really much cared for the way they'd run their business at the slaughterhouse. The couple had run the Wiltonworks plant on the banks of the West Gamorrah River like they were slave-owners and their workers were indentured slaves, and when they'd died, the pair of them within days of one another, no one had mourned. Not even their children, the emaciatedly gaunt boy, Jemson, a snobbish social climber, who'd gone to an eastern Ivy League school to become an attorney, and mannish, unfriendly Cecilia Jean, who'd closed down the ancestral estate after their deaths, sold the meat-packing plant to a corporate food giant and vanished with the money to someplace overseas. Missing the noxious, foul-tempered presences of Hezekiah and Aristesia Wilton was considered, for the most part, a ludicrous exercise. The Wiltonworks Plant's new owners, though largely faceless and impersonal as most modern corporations were, was a welcome relief to most. Wilton Place had remained empty and unloved for a dozen years. And the town had almost forgotten the existence of the estate's acreage except for those occasions when rowdy, beer-fueled, hormonally-supercharged parties were thrown there by renegade, delinquent teenagers from Hackmenster High School.
But many were the stories about the Crow Jars, as the locals called them, quart-sized mysterious ceramic jars with strange and colorful markings rumored to contain anything from hidden gold and jewels the Wiltons had hidden from tax collectors to the fetuses of the twins sons Aristesia had supposedly miscarried decades ago. The Crow Jars, of which there were seven, had first been entered into Gamorrah Falls local legendry back when Jemson Wilton was an ungainly thirteen year old. Rumor had it that Jemson had befriended a old, one-eyed Native American Indian named Marcus Two Knives when a pair of bullies had tried beating the old man down one drunk Saturday night. Native Americans weren't at all well-liked by some of Gamorrah Falls' less Christian townsfolk and it didn't take much for some of the barely literate, periodically unemployed and unemployable bullies who frequented the town bars to take exception to having the Indian population around. Car mechanic Marcus Two Knives was a drinker, like most mid-thirtyish men busting their asses working to barely stay just above the poverty-level in the town, and he was known to secretly provide romantic services to a few of the lonely wives in the community. So it came to pass that a few of the rougher crowd just weren't having that, so they ambushed him one warm, mosquito-plagued night and applied their fists and boots to his backdoor, pussy-snaking ass. And, seeing this, Jemson Lloyd Patrick Wilton, who had hated rednecked bullies even more than he'd despised redskins, pulled out his father's Army-issue .45 caliber pistol and fired off a few warning shots at the drunken mob. Cursing them, the bullies had run off.
That was when a thankful Marcus Two Knives had stumbled bloody back to his rusted pick-up truck and shown his benefactor one of the three Crow Jars in his possession. No one could really grasp the logic in that act. Why, after getting the bejesus kicked out of you by a bunch of racist drunks, would you show the man who saved you, a man just as racist as your assailants, what was in a pair of special ceramic jars? And why would that same unfriendly reluctant samaritan kill you and then steal the jars? It didn't make sense. After that, the local legend got pretty murky. No one seemed able to agree upon the events that occurred thereafter.
Some say Jemson saw the jars were filled with gold nuggets and that's why he stole them away from Two Knives. Others said that Two Knives showed Jemson the future reflected in a mysterious mercury-like fluid that filled the jars. A few said that Marcus Two Knives showed Jemson that each jar held the dead, desiccated embryo of the unborn bastard twins who were Jemson's brothers, brothers fathered by Two Knives himself. And still others said that Marcus Two Knives had been a shaman, a Native American Holy Man, and that inside the jars were dark devils that a greedy Jemson Wilton enslaved to do his bidding. Piffle. Insanity. Bullshit.
The man in the room hotel waiting for the sun to finish rising, the same man who had, as a little boy, found one of those legendary ceramic jars, knew the truth.
Hunger had been in the Crow Jars, an abominable, millennia-old, hell-bred, alien hunger beyond any human understanding. There had been things in those jars, dead organic things, remnants of animal flesh, tattered skin, torn veins and shattered bone, decomposed bits and pieces of shredded meat, and those remains had been alive. Incredibly, impossibly, demonically alive.
They were called "the Nihasa" and they were spirits, devils who infected human flesh with the relentless, insatiable urge to torture and consume other human flesh. The crazed cannibal appetite with which the Nihasa infected the accursed was as dreamy and soul-numbing a kick as a heroin high, it was as mind-altering an elevator drop as Ecstasy, it was as heart-freezingly enervating, as supercharged, as methamphetamines. And when the hunger had been satiated, even though that satiation was only temporary, it was a feeling better than even the most intense sexual orgasm. It could not be resisted. Want it. Crave it. Need it. Hell, the poor soul infected with that hunger didn't WANT to resist it.
And that was what he, as an awkward little boy just entering his teen years, had found in a dirty, mud-stained, quart-sized, cracked ceramic jar fifteen dark years ago.
And, yes, to his eternal shame and damnation, he had willfully tasted the flesh of his fellow man and woman many times in the years since. Almost thirty years old, he had schemed, lied, hunted, trapped, murdered and slaughtered his way through high school, college and after.
The shame had become unbearable. Men and women, boys and girls, athletes and the infirm, he preyed on them all. But in his heart he knew the truth: this was someone's brother, someone's son, someone's sister or their mother, a lover, a husband, a wife -- the flesh he consumed belonged to people who belonged to other human beings, to families, to beings who had value in other people's lives... He was a monster.
He couldn't go on like that, living as some demonic animal disguised as a man. Living a phantom existence among a society unaware that alien millennia-old evil lurked ever behind gentle, pale blue eyes. He'd decided a year ago that he'd needed to do something about it.
He'd decided to find all the Crow Jars and all their recipients. He would set things right. He'd decided to bring them a long-delayed cold and final justice.
The six dead men in the room, brains blown out the back of their shattered skulls, their hearts ripped in half by thundering magnum bullet shells, had been the finders, reluctant owners, and finally slaves of the other Crow Jars.
He, himself, was the last.
The morning's sun shone a flood of golden light through the jagged-edged remnants of the broken window in the corpse-strewn room.
When he pulled the trigger of the weapon poised under his chin he wept with joy. It was going to be a beautiful day in Gamorrah Falls. He pulled the Beretta's trigger. A clap of thunder eclipsed his world and everything went black...
Two hours later, belching, feeling bloated, sitting amid a bloody pile of freshly gnawed bones, the bones of the others accursed by the Crow Jars, he came to senses, realizing the truth.
The last slave of the Nihasa could not end the curse. It was not allowed. As he had executed the others, someone would have to execute him. He couldn't commit suicide. He had to be killed. Murdered. And when that happened he would pass along the curse to someone new: the thing inside him would take up residence in the skin of his executioner. He would infect his killer.
Damn. Damn it all to hell.
He had to hold on. There was still work to be done. His name was Bryant Arthur Kane and he knew he had a lot more killing ahead of him.
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