Chapter Three: Containing the Complete Origin of Darwin Flynn and His Continuing Adventures

 

THE WORLD WILL DIE SCREAMING

Starring Darwin Flynn, the Scarlet Saint

by Phil Bledsoe

Chapter Three: Staring into the Abyss

The long mountain road stretched out before the Scarlet Saint with its promise of both danger and victory. His guns were still warm in their holsters from putting down a herd of Mad Cow-infected humans that were the starter batch of a potential zombie army. Their warden, a nameless Romanian warrior had been bested, thus leaving to Darwin a beautifully made scimitar-style kilij sword made of fine Damascus steel. Its weight on his left hip, supported by a baldric going across his right shoulder, perfectly balanced with the ironwood shepherd's crook in his right hand as he walked.

Darwin Flynn, known to a handful of people across the world as the Scarlet Saint and known only to himself and a few ghosts as the Gatekeeper of the Underworld, marched on with purpose in his stride. His family, going back generations, had met with one misfortune after another. They had been burned by the Inquisition as witches, and had been cursed by those who were actually guilty of the crime; some of them had deserved their fate, but many others had not. They had been cursed, saint and sinner alike, for centuries. Darwin had the dubious honor of being the last surviving scion of several unfortunate bloodlines. Throughout history, they had sought to reverse their fate by study of religion and the occult, or by outright combat with the forces of darkness and wicked men that beset them. They had all failed, but in their numbers their failure gave them strength and that strength allowed them to reach out from beyond the grave and speak to their last living descendant. Darwin had been plagued by nightmares since the cradle, which developed into waking hallucinations in adolescence. His father, a rationalist and physician who had named him to spite Darwin's pious mother, had sought medical solutions to the boy's ills until his life was taken by less rational men over a case of mistaken identity. Darwin's mother, who had been coaxed out of convent by his father's rugged machismo and craggy handsomeness, immediately retreated to her only comfort: the church. Persuading Darwin to enter the priesthood, she was sure that the holy vows would protect him from madness.

She could not have been more wrong. Neither the spiritual virtues of seminary school nor the physical discipline of his ROTC training curbed Darwin's increasing delirium. After several embarrassing public episodes, Darwin was compelled to leave the school and seek solace elsewhere. His father had left him a tidy sum to live on as he pleased, as well as several notebooks containing his own research into Darwin's condition. Armed with these and several prescriptions for psychiatric medications, Darwin settled in a small, rural community. Unbeknownst to him this decision, like many others in his life, was actually guided by the invisible hand of his deceased forbears. They led him to a quiet community in which he could not help but stand out, and which was soon struck by a series of grisly murders. The police were baffled, but the town minister was certain the deaths were the work of a werewolf and Darwin fit the role of scapegoat perfectly. Fortunately, along with the family curse Darwin had also inherited a very thick skull and the silver bullet that eventually found him became lodged halfway between the bone and his frontal lobe. This silver bullet somehow transformed his brain from the equivalent of two tin cans connected by string into a satellite dish aimed at the spirit world, with his dead ancestors' voices coming in loud and clear. Once his role was explained, he knew that his purpose in life was a just one. He would undo the damage wrought on his family, and on the rest of the world by the greed and power-lust of evil men. Dark magic and perverted science had set the Earth and the human race off their natural course, opening gateways to the unknown that should have remained closed. Darwin's task, his sacred quest, was to close these gateways by thwarting the plans of those who would exploit them. In doing so, he would eventually permit his ancestors their much-deserved rest in the afterlife, granting him the solitude and peace he had so long desired.

No stranger to irony, Darwin had christened himself the Scarlet Saint, scarlet being seen as anathema to virtue and holiness, as in the Scarlet Woman of the Book of Revelations, the Whore of Babylon, or the Scarlet Letter associated with those cast out by the Puritans, according to one Nathaniel Hawthorne. This was even before he saw the mask. Tucked away in a glass case in an old family estate in Ireland, Darwin had found a black domino mask adorned with a blood red fleur-de-lis. The mask was made of sheepskin, very well-preserved, and both the black and red dyes were derived from some manner of animal blood. Several family members had traced its origins to an eccentric philosopher of ancient Greece, Heraclitus the Obscure, who was thought to be another ancestor of theirs. The abiding theory was that Heraclitus had somehow anticipated or foreseen the woe that would descend upon his progeny and had crafted the mask as a protective charm using some ancient form of alchemy. Many who had studied it and tried to trace its origins believed it was a remnant of the legendary Golden Fleece of Greek mythology, the pelt sought by Jason and the Argonauts for its magical powers; the dye was believed to be the blood of the invincible Nemian lion, whose impregnable hide had become armor for Hercules himself. None of this could be confirmed, but what was known was that whoever wore the mask seemed to never fall ill or suffer infection when wounded, and that their wounds healed exceptionally quickly; they also seemed to require less food and sleep, and poison seemed to pass through their bodies harmlessly.

The mask was but one of the accoutrements of the Scarlet Saint's motley garb. He had accumulated tools, weapons, and armor from the strangest places in his travels. His gunbelt was itself a marvel of emergency preparedness. It carried his pistols, ammunition, a bullwhip, a deck of tarot cards, flashlights, his recently acquired sword, and several charms, fetishes, and relics he had collected in his adventures. His fencing gauntlets and weighted opera cloak were worn at the insistence of a disgraced French Musketeer somewhere in his family tree, as well as a couple of Victorian gentlemen who had affected a fascination with dueling. His iron bracers had been manacles aboard a 19th-century slave ship, and had been struck from the wrists of their last captive to fall forgotten in the earth. The same extrasensory perception that allowed Darwin to converse with ghosts had also opened his mind to the presence of evil thoughts and supernatural energies, and had made his brain a living metal detector. He had stumbled across the manacles quite by accident, but they had proven useful: the combination of Darwin's psychic sensitivity and rapid reflexes had allowed his late uncle, the Magisterial Mysteriouso, to take his stage magic bullet-catching trick a step further. With Mysteriouso guiding Darwin's movements, he could use the thick iron to actually block incoming bullets and rebound them where he pleased with some degree of accuracy.

All of these factors, as well as the copious knowledge and skills of the unquiet dead who inhabited his consciousness, had made Darwin Flynn a force to be reckoned with. Hundreds of years of study, training, and experience were at his fingertips, although he had found that those who had been dead the longest were the slowest to respond to his calls for assistance. He also depended on their good will and cooperation. Several restless spirits merely bombarded him with complaints and disappeared into the mental aether. At least one recent relative refused to divulge his identity, apparently out of habit due to his work in government intelligence. Heraclitus was back there somewhere, possibly the earliest ancestor that Darwin could perceive, but he remained incommunicative. Hence, he had so far failed to explain the origins or the nature of the fleur-de-lis mask.

All of this had led Darwin to the path he now followed. A ravenous beast, unlike any natural animal, had been terrorizing the Romanian countryside. Locals had hunted it unsuccessfully, and many blamed the deaths caused by the monster on nearby traveling Gypsies. In addition to the danger posed by the creature itself, there was the added danger of men's intolerance and the violence it begat. Darwin's guide had brought him to a cave that may have been the beast's lair, but the cave had taken him deep under the mountains where he had seen things he preferred not to recall. Coming out on the far side of the mountains, he had found an airfield stocked with dangerous drugs, chemicals, and disease cultures. The herd of “Mad Cow zombies” and their equally mad guardian had been part of some horrific scheme to blanket this area of Romania in dangerous substances that would kill most of the population and raise them again as a super-charged hybrid of zombies, and unstoppable clan of meta-zombies.

Darwin's only clues to the source of this nefarious plot were glimpses of a deteriorating castle on one of the peaks, beneath which there was apparently a hollow shaft leading down to the stygian depths of the caverns below. Darwin had sensed from that castle a tidal wave of evil thoughts that had been like boiling acid inside his skull. He had felt them from miles away, and he had since seen the depths of depravity and perversion to which those thoughts led. He had executed several unfortunate beings whose lives had become naught but nightmarish suffering at the hands of the nameless master of the castle. In all of this, the role of the monster he had originally hunted had been revealed: whatever it was had been placed to guard the master's operations at the airfield, to ensure that the zombies did not wander off and no interlopers intruded. It had abandoned its post for reasons of its own, and the homicidal maniac who had replaced it had called it an abomination. Coming as it had from a one-handed swordsman in the deep throes of partial zombie infection, the word gave Darwin chills.

Certainly, through the eyes of his ancestors Darwin had experienced the horrors of war, imprisonment, torture, and privation. In his own lifetime he had already faced threats that would leave most men weeping in a fetal position. But when a madman near death can call something else an abomination, it gives one pause. Darwin recalled a small Mexican village he had encountered; it had looked so peaceful by the moonlight, until he looked more closely and saw the bodies of its residents strewn across its streets. A sudden, mass outbreak of lycanthropy and a marked shortage of fresh meat had put them at each other's throats at the first full moon. He remembered the pleading eyes of a teenaged girl, her mouth filled with a ball gag as she was exorcised of a demon that would not leave her without a fight; her eyes pleaded not for his assistance, or her freedom from demonic possession, but for death. She had looked insistently, tears streaming down her face, from Darwin's eyes to the pistol at his side over and over again. In the end, his bullet had been the greatest mercy she could receive. He shut out the memory of another set of eyes: the searing red glow from the pupils of a half-human chupacabra in Ecuador. It had stared at him from the shadows of the trees, giggling and licking its lips as Darwin had slowly and methodically reloaded with the one arm the creature hadn't yet mangled.

Whatever lay ahead, Darwin felt confident that he was ready. The road that he followed was leading him up the mountain to the castle, where he could deal with the febrile mind behind the horrors he had seen the last few days. The planes that would have infected the area were disabled, the zombies at the airfield were destroyed, and the only living human he had encountered since parting company with his guide Razvan was dead. The materials at the airfield could be destroyed in due course, and whoever was at the heart of this would soon learn the error of their ways.

Unexpectedly, Darwin felt a tingle in his mind that grew into a veritable explosion. It was a sensation familiar to him, yet still disorienting. He could only compare it to driving at high speed down an open highway, only to see a brick wall suddenly thrust into the road in front of you. It was the telltale sign of an approaching bullet. Fortunately, Darwin had learned to react to such things faster than he could consciously think about them and his left arm was already up, ready to block. The bullet had rebounded off the iron band around his wrist before he even heard and felt the sound of its impact. Without having seen where it came from, he could hardly deflect it back to its source and so it was seen sailing of into the sky where it could do no harm.

“Excellent!” said a muffled voice from nearby. The Scarlet Saint, relying on the acute hearing of a blind Franciscan monk of the 16^th century and the reflexes of a Western gunfighter called “Gutshot” Pete, spun to face his attacker's hiding place. His cloak whirled about him in a halo of darkness as he aimed the silver-plated Mauser pistol that had appeared in his gloved hand as if by magic.

“Show yourself!” the Saint demanded. As he said it, he reached out with his mind and felt the prickling of evil behind the rock pile before him. He also felt and tasted the heft and shape of the gun that had fired at him; it was old, and crafted of German steel like his own. Geometry and quantum physics overlapped in his mind as he surveyed the terrain; a claustrophobic Swiss mountaineer with a taste for geology found a firm, flat stone in the right place, and Gutshot Pete gave it his stamp of approval. He fired a single shot, which ricocheted off of the rock and behind the natural barricade that hid Darwin's assailant. An animal cry that was equal parts pain and rage escaped from behind the rocks and the ground shook. A foot appeared.

It was shaped like an ape's foot, almost like an exaggerated human hand, but its nails were long and pointed like talons. On top of it was a layer of hard, chitinous tissue encircled by puckered scars. Another, similar plate of armor-like chitin adorned the front of the shin, surrounded by more ugly scars, which were themselves surrounded by spiky black hair. No, not hair, Darwin realized, but quills. A hand seized the edge of the rocky barrier with the same wickedly sharp claws, organic armor across the knuckles, and quills sprouting behind that. When the head hove in view, it was as ugly as its limbs had promised: a lion's fanged snout set into an ape's enormous skull, patchworked with armor and quills. Its eyes were albino pink and white, atop its snarling countenance.

“Stand your ground!” a voice said, still muffled and obviously not from the creature's mouth. As it stepped fully from behind cover, the other hand presented the muzzle of an antique Luger but Darwin scarcely noticed. His eyes could not leave its chest.

Approximately where its heart should be, in the middle of a chest at least four feet wide, there rose a transluscent dome of something like thin glass. The dome was divided into three chambers inside, each one filled with a bubbling, clear liquid. Floating in each of these chambers as near as Darwin could tell, were human brains plugged into a series of wires and tubes. A tiny, chrome speaker box was fastened to the underside of the dome and this appeared to be the source of the muffled voice.

“Don't bother shooting the glass,” the voice said. It sounded now like three men speaking in unison, played back over an old-fashioned wax cylinder recording. “It is quite bulletproof.”

“What the hell are you?” the Scarlet Saint asked. His gun was tracking the creature's head instead of the dome, but after his earlier experience with mountain goats he was unsure of the wisdom of his target choice.

“We are the master's faithful hound,” it said with a touch of sarcasm. “We are set to guard his flock, but our desire to chase wild game has led us astray.” Its tone became more serious as it said: “We are Legion. We are many minds in a body that is many creatures.”

“I am not going to call you `Legion,' you scripture-quoting freak,” Darwin growled. “Forget it. I can see that some of you used to be human. You must have had names.”

“You ridicule us at your peril,” it said.

“Peril is mother's milk to me,” the Scarlet Saint replied bitterly. “Pile it high and don't spare the garnish. Give me a name to put on your gravestone or I'll call you Harvey just for spite.”

“You amuse us. We were once an assistant to the master, and we were also his rival, and we were also his lover and now we are this, and we are one with the beast.”

“Cute. So he disposed of the three people who may have known about his plans, and turned you into the guardian of his operations? Why did you leave?”

“The thrill of the chase. The beast has a brain as well, and its instincts to hunt and kill and eat are deliciously satisfying. We have tasted men, but we have preferred to savor the children,” it said. Darwin shuddered. “One of our little morsels used this,” it said, wagging the pistol in the air. “We kept it. It could not hurt us, and neither can you.” Probing more carefully, Darwin detected flattened slugs embedded in the layers of fleshy armor on the thing's abdomen. Their metal matched the bullets still loaded in the Luger.

“There are ways to hurt you,” Darwin said. “And I will find them; I've already wounded you once. Your master has committed one of gravest sins: he has opened a gateway. You represent the threshold of the gateway between man and beast, and your death will help close it. The two worlds were meant to coexist peacefully, side by side, not to be mingled together like this. I would not see those people who you once were live like this, in the body of a monster.”

“You are an amusing little germ,” the monster said. “Perhaps I'll keep you as a pet.” Gutshot Pete took the reins and blasted the Luger out of the creature's grasp with a single shot, adding two more shots through the palm to cripple the hand before it could regain its weapon. The armor plate across the knuckles burst free from the back of the hand, propelled by the bullets. It exposed a morass of tendon-like cords and something like surgical sutures made of crudely formed living tissue. Whoever had constructed this monstrosity had been highly creative, but extremely rushed and sloppy; Darwin had found that your garden-variety mad scientist tended to be so, always hurrying towards the fruition of the latest crazy idea so that they could clear the blackboard and move on to the next. Concept was everything, and execution often suffered as a result.

“Oh, ho,” chuckled Nigel Deaves in Darwin's mind. Nigel had been a lesser known serial killer in London in the late 1880s, predating and contemporary with Jack the Ripper. The Ripper had actually stolen part of Nigel's body count, and all of his press. Nigel had started as a medical student who found that vivisection of cadavers lacked a certain verisimilitude, and quickly dropped out of school for more nocturnal pursuits. Darwin never responded to Nigel's communications and Nigel typically stayed out of Darwin's forebrain. But this creature was nothing but a walking pile of surgical grafts, one on top of another, held together by sinew and stitches; to Nigel it was little more than a living sweater with a dangling bit of yarn begging to be pulled until it unraveled.

Wailing in pain and fury, the beast crouched and sprung. A Parisian bohemian named Tolouse, with a penchant for both socialism and Le Parkour, lent agility and thrust to Darwin's legs, sending the masked man vaulting over the monster's hideous head. The staff made a perfect lever to achieve extra altitude, and the swirling cloak blinded the charging animal as it whipped across its face. A well-placed kick to its shoulder served both to partially dislocate the joint and to impart a twist that landed the Scarlet Saint behind his prey facing its exposed back. He could see the entry wound from the earlier blind ricochet, just below the right buttock. The back was bare of any of the hastily added chitin armor. Darwin could see cylindrical lumps between the jointed shoulder blades, under the skin where the brains' life support equipment was housed. A quick, leaping approach brought the monster within reach and Darwin's blindingly fast hands exchanged his pistol for his sword. Nigel Deaves reveled coldly in the bloody precision as the sword was guided by a Belgian physicist and sabre champion, a defrocked Spanish priest who liked to hack up vampires with a machete, and the aforementioned disgraced Musketeer. Before the monster could turn to face him, Darwin had carved away a squarish patch of quill-studded flesh to expose the chemical canisters and batteries in its back.

“NO!” it snarled, the voice coming surprisingly from both the speaker box and its befanged snout. Its mighty arm flailed back with talons outstretched to rend and mangle. The Scarlet Saint leaned into the blow, feeling his ribs nearly buckle as the hoary claws snagged in his chain mail and tore loose from their nail beds. Mingled blood of a reddish purple fountained from the fingertips as they passed harmlessly. Darwin felt the hot splash on his face and his physician father estimated the beast's internal temperature at well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

“It's metabolism must be phenomenal, son,” Doctor Flynn said calmly. “Keep it fighting hard enough and it should starve itself. Whoever built it didn't seem to think of including any reserves of body fat for emergency fuel.” Darwin smiled at the relaxed advice of his father, always cool under pressure. Unconsciously, Darwin was also receiving a rough anatomical sketch of the monster's body from his father as the fight progressed. Tolouse kept Darwin airborne most of the time, although Darwin knew his leg muscles would pay the price later. The shame-ridden Musketeer, who never liked to reveal his name, kept the cloak dancing and snapping; Padre Maximillian the vampire hacker had spent some time training as a matador as well, and added his deft hand to using the cloak for misdirecting the enemy. Soon, Darwin was satisfied that he had exposed enough of the life support system for his purposes and weakened the seams at the edges of the brain globe. He vaulted once more behind the thing and dropped his staff to draw both guns.

“Perfect,” Gutshot Pete sighed. Two simultaneous shots burst the compressed gas tanks that processed the brains' oxygen supply. Geysers of white fog shot from between its shoulders as the cold gasses hit the mountain air. The batteries were next, leaking their acidic contents into the monster's conglomerated innards. Several more shots removed any intervening ribs, burst dense muscle tissue, and opened the path to the underside of the globe. Both guns were flipped to fully automatic and Darwin himself cut loose with the remaining rounds in the magazines. A gelatinous explosion erupted from the monster's chest, coating the earth in front of it with a scintillant glaze. The destruction of the brains' life support system had also confounded the speaker box's function and the anticipated primal scream never came. The animal's mouth tried to form words as its eyes watered and nostrils trickled gore.

It spun around with a gaping, glass shard-encircled round hole in its chest. The three brains dangled lifelessly, their support cables flailing from the maw of the thing's torso. Darwin raised his empty guns, barrels pointed towards the sky and pressed the skull medallions set into the stock panels. Triangular, razor-sharp blades popped out of the butts of the pistols and Darwin found himself uncomfortably smirking with his own lips the sinister smirk that Nigel Deaves once shewed upon the cobblestoned streets of Whitechapel.

“`Ello, lovely,” Darwin drawled in an awkward Cockney accent. The monster paused, partly in shock from its wounds and partly in confusion at this change in its opponent. The rest of Darwin's ancestors reluctantly rallied behind Nigel, and Dr. Flynn added his steady surgeon's hands to the slasher's reckless ones. The Scarlet Saint lunged forward, blades protruding from the pistol butts at the bottom of his fists. As the monster went for his throat, he cut the tendons and muscles in the bend of its elbow and the arm that still bore claws went limp. The declawed, bleeding hand that had raked Darwin's armor scrabbled for purchase, getting only handfuls of cloak. The bladed pistols darted and bit, dissecting joints and denuding nerve centers to the cold mountain air. Nigel chuckled as he neatly carved the chitin armor away from the arms and chest. The artificial fibers that had anchored it were poorly anchored, and easily cut. The chuckle rose into a maniacal cackle as the terrified creature voided its bladder in fear; its nearly mindless, rheumy eyes were wide with the knowledge of its impending destruction.

Darwin retracted his blades, holstered his guns, and drew out his sword with both hands. Spinning himself in a full circle, he built up the momentum to bring the curved edge of the blade around at great speed. It hissed through the air with a sound like fine silk softly ripping and struck the thing's head from its shoulders to tumble haphazardly across the rocks and down the mountain.

Shoving Nigel back down into the depths of his subconscious, Darwin reasserted full control and shut out the madman's mental capering and sniggering. He would have liked to have incinerated the monster's corpse, but he had nothing appropriate to the task available to him. Instead he used the hem of his opera cloak to wipe the mutated blood from his glistening sword before he resheathed it. He cleaned and reloaded his pistols yet again. Although his gauntlets and bracers had blunted the quills of the thing's wicked pelt, several had penetrated and now had to be painfully extracted by a strong grip and gritted teeth. Any toxin their barbs may have carried was remedied by the presence of the leather mask the Saint wore, and the wounds themselves bled very little and showed no sign of infection. He knew they would close with days with little or no sign that they were ever there at all.

The Scarlet Saint retrieved his shepherd's crook from where he had let it fall and waited while spasms wracked his legs from the superhuman exertions to which he had pushed himself, using Tolouse's skill and agility. Once the pain passed, he planted his feet firmly on the path and looked up the mountain to the barely-visible towers of the distant castle of the beast's “master.”

“Your last defense is fallen,” said the Gatekeeper of the Underworld. “You will soon follow, and your madness with you.” He strode purposefully, choosing his steps with care.

TO BE CONTINUED....