Tenth Man

by Tamara Sheehan

Chapter 24

Saul was carried up, weightless, and moved along a sea of red clay men. He flopped from grip to grip, rolled pathetically unresisting on a tide of manufactured hands, of bodies pressed into shape according to the terrible stamping machine that had crushed out his father’s life. He stared at the blackened ceiling, head lolling on his neck like a rag doll.

Mbeki pointed, his direction shifted. His eyes flitted to take in his destination. A massive machine, shrouded in cloth and darkness that stood near to the platform.

Brand new, isn’t she beautiful?

He could hear his classmates laugh as the old man patted the stamping machine affectionately. A sick chill swept through Saul.

He knew the hovering blackness, knew the depths inside were bowl-shaped and irregular, the mould a parody of a human form. He remembered his father’s final moment, the sudden rush of darkness.

“Just like your dad, Saul,” Mbeki shouted down at him.

Saul jerked away from the hands that propelled him, jack-knifed off their shoulders, tumbled down among their feet. Huge, red clay hands reached down. Saul squirmed, twisting, fast as a snake propelling himself to his feet, he bolted.

The golems crowded around the machinery, carefully keeping away from levers and pulleys, as if loath to damage what had made them. Saul pressed his body against the wall, sliding along the shadows toward the platform where Mbeki stood.

Even through the noise of the golems and the thundering heart in his chest, Saul could hear voice talking. The sounds of men and patterns of thought were as simple to hear as the creaking, groaning limbs of the golems around him.

Toven, he realized with a wrench of worry. Ian and Audel have Toven.

“Worry about yourself, Saul,” Mbeki called down to him. Saul looked up, saw that he was grinning. His mouth moved with unheard words, more and more golems crawled out of boxes and bins. Red vats of clay fell, broke on the concrete and slowly oozed toward him.

A door opened under the mezzanine and Mbeki. Saul caught his breath. Audel entered, began to hurry up the flight of stairs. Ian was towing Toven along behind him like a rag doll, the young man’s limbs trailing behind him, his head twisted to one side.

“Not dead.” Saul heard himself breath it “Not dead, oh God, don’t be dead.”

Mbeki raised his hand.

Sound and movement stopped. The golems, wherever they stood, suddenly froze. The air vent clattered and fell silent. Mbeki’s head swiveled toward it.

“There,” he said very softly.

Ian let Toven go, casting his arm back onto his body with a negligent flip. He leapt up to the vent and slammed it wit the flat of his hand. The warehouse echoed with the boom.

“Come out!” he shouted, “or I’ll bring you out.”

Bridget hardly heard the voice for the ringing in her ears. Howie’s jaw was clenched, his eyes squeezed shut. He had pulled her close, wrapped her head in his arms as if to shield her from the horrific noise.

“I said come out!”

She held her breath. Light, sound came from the vent just to her left. She could see the pale Englishman circling the space beneath the vent. Howie held a finger to his lips.

It’s too late, he knows we’re here. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. Howie squeezed her shoulder. Sweat discolored his shirt, glistened on his face and arms. His eyes were fixed on hers.

He knows I’m here. The realization brought sudden calm. No one knows about Howie. He’s our ace. If everything goes wrong, he can still get out. She grabbed the cigarettes in Howie’s pocket and straightened up.

“Goodbye,” she mouthed.

Howie’s eyes flared wide. He shook his head. She could read the protest written on his face.

Bridget inched forward, pressed her finger to her lips just as she had done before.

Howie gripped her hand, skin slick and impossibly warm. He shook his head again, mouth twisted in a grimace.

She smiled, kicked out the vent cover and dropped down into the warehouse.

Saul heard himself groan. She dropped from the vent perfectly calm, cast a quick smile at him, nodded as if in greeting.

“Bridget,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK,” she answered in a strange, perfectly serene voice, and reached into her pocket. She withdrew a crumpled pack of cigarettes and put one to her lips. “Got a light?” she asked Ian.

Her perfect calm sent a ripple of fear into Saul. Ian was staring at her, his thoughts clear and foul in Saul’s head. How can she not hear them? How can she be so calm?

“Bring him up here.” Audel told Mbeki.

Mbeki moved, gestured. Saul felt a tug under his navel, was propelled forward as if a magnet pulled him. He slipped over the floor, under the machinery in his haste to get to the stairs, stumbled going up them. The raw metal cut his hands when he pushed himself up to hurry on. Audel was waiting at the top of the stairs. He pointed down to the golems, frozen, to Toven’s still form.

“Saul, do you see?” Audel was whispering the words, hands sliding over the rail. “Do you see the cost of disobedience? I am not a cruel man, Saul, but you wronged me again and again and again. I had to kill your father, you see? I had to have him put down. He’d have ruined me, ruined this place. You would have helped him do it.”

“Why are you so afraid of me?”

Audel rocked back and lashed out with the back of his hand. Saul’s head jerked back, his eyes stung, blood trickled out of his mouth. “I am not afraid of you.” he hissed, but Saul felt his thoughts like frantic mice. He did not have to read the mind to know the acrid scent in the air was fear, the shaking of Audel’s limbs was adrenaline.

“It might have just been you, Saul. You might have spared them. You should have just done as I told you. Your father should have done the same.”

Dad.

He called out, he never quite knew why. The memory of the school trip was so vivid it was almost tangible. Saul grasped it, took it like a bit between his teeth.

Audel was talking but Saul wasn’t listening to him, he was listening for thought. He couldn’t hear spoken words clearly anymore. Kill, own, eat... Ian’s thoughts bored into his head as if the creature was screaming them. Something cold and terrible took hold of Saul. He ignored Audel, felt power and hate from Mbeki, felt a vast sea of thoughtlessness below him. Heard Ian over and over again, the hideous carousel of all his desires.

Kill, eat, own...

You leave her alone.

Ian turned to him and bared his teeth in a grin.

“Ian, Martin,” Audel called from the top of the stairs. “I believe I’ve made my point.”

“Mbeki,” Ian called up, grinning. “The wizard is yours.”

It was the same tug under his navel, but this time Saul was ready for it. No. He clung to the rail, refused to allow his feet to move. Energy like electricity coursed through his limbs. He clutched the memory of the school trip before his eyes. Am I going to die here too?

Mbeki’s hands fit familiar around his neck. He felt the pressure, heard the sound of muffled shouts. Cold air was blowing in his face from above, made his eyes tear. He found the wheel of questions that had turned every night since he’d gotten the news.

How was it possible? Why my dad? But he knew them questions all, had answered them all, they held no appeal for him any more. And now something was reaching out of the darkness toward him. He knew the panic, the darkness, the stamping mechanism, the simple, incredible violence of such a death. He knew it all. He shared a memory with something in the warehouse.

He waited, time spread out, thin and brittle.

One of the golems moved.

Unfinished, incomplete, unthinking. Saul reached out and clasped its mind like fingers interlocking. Something familiar was there, an instant of communication. Something touched his thoughts like the fluttering of a moth’s wing. The golem became his.

Move!

He ordered and felt the power of a body, not his own, flooding through him. It was impossible to control the creature the way he had controlled Howie. There was no stream of thought to plug with his own suggestion, no sense of self to manipulate. There was only a vague sense of function; Obedience was the red clay that formed them, their movements violence.

He moved the golem by remembering the school trip, the creeping aggression of laying the bombs. The creature’s knowledge of its surroundings was founded by Saul. The memories that had long been Saul’s method of personal destruction, the moment of his father’s death the explosive core. The creature waited. Saul trembled.

Break them! Break all of them!

He heard the crashing, the first sounds of destruction in that space, and craned to see.

The golem was thrashing, flailing massive, red clay arms. Those around it fell, shattered to component parts. Red dust rose like a cloud of smoke, hung above the polished floor like a haze of blood. The creature lumbered forward. He saw Ian, felt a wave of revulsion, felt the miasma of the incubus like nausea and wrenched his mind back from it.

His disgust attracted the golem. Reached out, the creature took Ian’s head in its hands as if picking a fruit from a tree. Ian stumbled, helpless, toward the great red body. His arms whirled like windmills, he thumped the clay chest, scrabbled uselessly at the arms like a rat in the grip of a trap.

The golem pushed him slowly, almost carefully toward the stair, and then pushed down. The bones of his skull crunched against the rail. Ian howled once, and then lay still.

Saul blinked. It was getting hard to breathe, to think. He coughed, felt renewed pressure around his throat. Something was squeezing, but his mind was too occupied to take it in. He was half golem, swept up in the twisting, smashing of the massive red arms. He took such pleasure in the carnage that he bared his teeth in a smile.

And then his grip on the golem slipped. His eyes focused on the pale grin, the white eyes like moons hovering above him. He realized the crushing pressure on his throat, wrenched himself backward, thumping on the arms that held him.

“Now, Howie!”

Bridget was screaming. Saul could see her white face, her red hair so askew, her suit so covered in dust it was bizarre, comical. “Now, Howie, now, now!”

Here, here! He tried to call the golem but felt none of the obedience, none of the precise violence waiting for command. He’d lost the creature. Despair and terror. His eyes fixed on Mbeki’s. The big man was grinning, triumphant already, even before the blood vessels burst from the pressure in Saul’s eyes, even before he had choked the life out of the son.

Saul could hear Bridget screaming above the pounding in his ears.

“Now, Howie! Now, now, now!”

Howie came out of the vent above Mbeki like a bullet. Mbeki staggered backward, whirled, stared at Howie with his mouth agape.

“Didn’t you learn the first time?” Howie was primed, coiled. The muscles of his arms were bunched like cords. “Don’t screw with us.”

Mbeki’s eyes bulged. It seemed to Saul that he seemed to stumbled back and fell, but something massive and red had grappled him around the waist. Saul could see the expression on his face, horrified and disbelieving. He thrashed and jack-knifed his body, but the golem still moved. In a stately, inexorable fashion, Mbeki was taken to the stamping machine.

Kill. The memory was not Saul’s, the thought was not Saul’s.

Saul heard the whir of machinery, heard the bang of a man scrabbling around inside the metal mould. He turned away and closed his eyes.

A whir. A swish of wind. A cry that ended in a crunch.

To be continued...