"Damn it!" Carlos shouted as he shoved the book off the table and onto the floor. The pieces had finally clicked into place for him. The book landed with a thump, open to a page with a picture of a giant squid thing that I knew all too well. He reached across the table and grabbed Hood by the shirt and jerked him forward. "It's you! You're behind these outbreaks, aren't you? Answer me, you son of a bitch!"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Hood stammered. Then Carlos slugged him in the face, brutally hard. He grabbed the fat kid by his curly hair, yanked him out of his chair and shoved his face down against the open book. Blood dripped onto the pages.
"Liar!" Carlos shouted, enraged.
"All right, all right!" Hood cried. Carlos jerked him up and brutally shoved him back into one of the shelves. Books crashed to the floor. "Let go of me, please," he sobbed.
"It was you all along. I can't believe this!" Carlos released him and stepped away, hurt and disbelief obvious in his voice. "Why? Why'd you do it?"
"I had to! You don't understand what's at stake. We have to learn the mysteries or we're doomed."
"You're doomed all right. How many innocent people have died because of you? You know what the Feds are going to do when they discover you've been raising the dead? You're going to prison for the rest of your life."
Suddenly Hood went from simpering to in command. The change was shocking, like somebody had flipped a switch and another personality stepped forward. "Oh, that's where you're wrong, mate. You won't tell the Feds a word." Blood ran down his nose and dripped down the crease of his double chin but he didn't wipe it away. His eyes burned with the fervor of a true believer and for the first time I saw the man who would become the Shadow Lord. "Because you're going down with me if you do. I'll say that you ordered me to raise those zombies for the PUFF bounties."
"Oh, I am, huh?" Carlos responded as he pulled his pistol from inside his waistband. "We'll see about that."
"You won't shoot me," Hood stated flatly. "If I die, then I've left evidence for the authorities that not only did I create those undead, but that I did it on behalf of not just you, but all of MHI. The government will destroy you all for that. You love this company too much."
"Bastard!" The angry Hunter raised the gun and pushed it into Hood's cheek.
"Do it. I dare you," Hood snapped. "Kill your teammate. Murder your friend. Then explain that to the authorities. Explain that to the others while you try to convince them I wasn't making enough zombies to make you a millionaire."
Carlos hesitated, doubt creasing his features. "Damn!" he shoved the fat kid to the floor and stomped away, trapped. He paced back and forth for a moment. "You idiot. What've you done?"
"I'm fulfilling my destiny. I'm going to stop the Old Ones, once and for all." He finally paused to wipe his nose. "The bounties are funding my research. Animating the dead is letting me hone my skills. This is just the beginning of an epic work. You'll see."
Carlos shoved his pistol back into its holster before grabbing Hood by the neck and dragging him toward the door. "No. You're coming with me. We're going to see Harbinger. He'll know what to do."
We were back in the original void. Darkness in every direction.
"I didn't know what else to do. He was my responsibility and I failed. I turned to the one man who I knew would have the answers. We left that night, me, Hood, and that infernal book, and caught the first flight. I remember that he came along willingly, telling me the whole time about how he was right and how he would persuade Harbinger to see. I think he wanted me to dwell on his argument…When we arrived, there were a bunch of Hunters there, and unfortunately, it was the full moon. I had been too preoccupied to even realize that, so we weren't able to speak to him."
The night Hood died, I thought to myself.
"Exactly," he answered. There was a terrible, rending sonic wail. It came from the distant void. "Feeder's coming. I have to finish this."
We were standing on the edge of a circle of chaos. The little stone shack, the old slave quarters of the Shackleford family estate, was before us. Hunters were milling around. There was blood everywhere, stark red against the black and white of the rest of the world. Hood's dismembered body was at the entrance. A faceless Hunter was holding the body, trying in vain to help. I knew that the erased man was Myers. Other unknowns attended to a second injured person. A leg, severed at the knee, lay half chewed off to the side.
"He committed suicide."
"So I thought. Nobody but me knew about Hood's crimes. I felt terrible. I blamed myself for his death and the whole situation. I had failed."
I walked through the carnage. Hood was obviously dead, literally torn apart. There was now a struggle, a fight, between Myers and someone else who could only have been Ray Shackleford. The words were erased, but I knew that Myers wanted nothing more than to avenge his friend's death. "You never told the others."
"No. I didn't. I thought that Hood had killed himself out of guilt. Everyone loved him. What good would tarnishing his memory serve? Plus, I was afraid…somehow I could have done something different, somehow it was my fault. No, it was my secret to bear. No evidence ever arose after his death, so Hood must have been bluffing about that, so I just left it alone. I hid his stupid book."
"You didn't destroy it?"
"I couldn't. It wouldn't burn. I should have tried harder."
Suddenly, something rose over the Shackleford ancestral home, above the slave quarters, a shadow as big as the house, only shaped like an earwig. The sonic wail tripled in intensity as the shadow of pincers covered the full moon.
FOOD. The scream slammed through my skull.
"Holy shit!"
"Feeder's here," Carlos said nonchalantly. "Good. I won't miss this one anyway. Come on, I've got one more. Three years later."
A new place, a large older house in a pine forest, on the top of a hill. A team of Hunters were moving quickly through the darkened trees, weapons hot. They were sweaty, panting, a few of them had sustained injuries. This memory was the clearest of all. The others even had faces.
Carlos must be reading my mind. "Yeah, Feeder hasn't touched this one. This is the worst of all. I couldn't tell you who any of these people are, but it likes to let me watch them die, again and again."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Don't be. This is now the only memory I have left of my entire life. Well, there's actually one other. I can remember mi madre singing nursery songs to me when I was little. I think that's the oldest one I've got. For some reason, Feeder has left that one alone. I think he likes the music…Please, don't forget your promise."
"I won't."
"Good," he said. "Watch."
There were six of them. They were coming up on the house in three pairs, moving fast. They stopped in the trees just outside the yard. I focused in on their leader as he tried his radio, frustration was plain on Carlos' face. "We lost radio contact as soon as we arrived. Then we were cut off, surrounded, driven through the forest by undead. It wasn't until later that I realized we'd been herded to this place. He wanted it that way. He wanted us on our own at the end. He knew our methods, our procedures, he knew exactly what we'd do."
The Hunters hit the house. One pair on the back door, one on the front, the final held the perimeter. The teams cleared the Victorian-style house, finding it empty, boarded-up, furniture sitting under tarps, covered in dust. The first pair discovered the stairs to the basement.