The Isle of Blood

It was close to dawn on the last night of our bitter harvest, and so far only one of the stricken had stumbled into our trap. Kearns shot him, and then pushed the body onto its back and stared down with disappointment at its face.

“Where is he?” he wondered aloud. “Where is my Minotaur?”

“Dead, I’d guess,” answered Warthrop.

“Oh, don’t say that! Should I fail to take him, I would feel the entire enterprise was for naught.”

“What, not enough death for you, Kearns?”

“That’s the wonderful thing about life,” retorted Kearns heartily. “It’s just chock-full of all the death you can handle!”

“I hope you get your fill, then, before the Dagmar returns tomorrow.”

“It’s tomorrow? Then we must

find my Minotaur tonight. Perhaps we should return to the locus. He might be up there, ready to pop.”

“You see the condition of this one,” replied Warthrop, referring to the victim at their feet. “If the uninfected populace has isolated itself safely, the contagion has nearly run its course. The odds are he has already ‘popped.’”

Kearns was not willing to let it go easily, however. He decided to bleed the latest victim instead of burning him, hoping the smell of blood would succeed where the fire had failed. Then he shooed us away. “Have a good rest. We’ve quite a hike down to the sea in the morning. I won’t abandon you, I promise.”

“Perhaps that is his plan,” mused the doctor after we had retired to our shelter. “Sneak off and trust we won’t find our way out in time.”

I thought my master was being naïve. A man like John Kearns did not leave such things to chance.

“We should do it now,” I said. “He thinks we’ve gone to sleep. I’ll do it, if you’d like.”

“You will do ‘it’? What is ‘it’?”

“Hit him over the head.”

“Again, I understand the appeal of such an act…”

“You heard him, sir. He won’t go to sleep today, and today we are going to Gishub to meet the Dagmar

.”

“We could wait till he quits for the night,” he proposed. “He’ll have to lay his rifle down at some point.”

“Why would he do that?” I felt myself losing patience with him. Me, with Pellinore Warthrop! “He plans to kill us today, as soon as the sun rises.”

“Yes. Yes, of course you’re right, Will Henry. That must be his plan. And he must suspect ours, so he will be on his guard. How do we lower it?”

I told him my idea. He raised several objections to it, the chief of which being the most obvious—Kearns might smell a rat.

“And if he does,” the monstrumologist said, “most certainly you will pay the ultimate price.”

But he could think of nothing better. We needed to act quickly; at any moment Kearns might decide our time had come.

Before we parted, he touched my shoulder and looked deeply into my eyes. I saw a question in his. I repeated what I’d said to him at Dover: “I am not afraid, sir.”

“I know that,” he said gravely. “And that makes me afraid.”

There is no monster, John Kearns had said. There are only men.

He heard my approach long before I reached his hiding place, and he whirled to face me as he brought the rifle round. I drew up at once and called to him softly, “Dr. Kearns! Dr. Kearns!”

“What is it?” he called back softly. “Where is Warthrop?”

“We heard something… back there.” I pointed down the path. “He went to see what it was.”

“He went… Why did he do that, Will?”

I stepped closer. He did not lower the rifle. That gave it away. If he had lowered the rifle, I might have thought the doctor and I were indulging in a paranoid delusion. But he did not lower the rifle; he kept it trained at the exact center of my chest.

“To see what it might be,” I answered.

“Then he has lost his mind. All he had to do was join me here and wait for it to come to us.”

“It was very close to the cave,” I said in a quivery voice. “Just on the other side of the boulders. He didn’t want to chance it. It was very close, sir, and he’s been gone too long. I’m afraid…”

“Are you?” he asked. “Are you?”

He stepped down from his perch and walked slowly over to stand before e.

“Are you?” he asked again. His gray eyes shone hard in the firelight. His expression was uncharacteristically serious.

“Can we go find him, please?” I whimpered. There was the familiar tightening in my chest, the compacting force that could break the world in half, and the doctor’s voice in Aden, saying, We must be indispensable to each other.

“Well, of course. We’ll go together, Will. Strength in numbers, yes?”

He broke out his Kearns-ish grin, shifted the rifle into the crook of his arm, and patted me kindly on the head, the way an uncle might a beloved nephew.

“There is no need to be afraid,” he said.

I lifted up my eyes—Oculus Dei, Kearns had called them—and looked directly into his, and he recognized in them his own, but too late, too late, and before he could raise the gun or pull away, Awaale’s long knife came whistling around and buried itself in his neck.