Collision of Evil by John Le Beau Read Free Book Online Page A

Deutsche marks. That had been almost a decade ago. This meant that nature and its attendant court of insects had doubtless done their work. The corpses would be nothing more than shreds of denim and fabric, and a collection of bones.
The couple had been camping under a tarpaulin in the woods, no doubt retreating from the society that they thought they had rejected but that had, in fact, cast them out. Their great misfortune was to have seen him as he made his way one late afternoon to the cave.
“Hi, man,” the male had said with a total lack of cognition.
It had been instantly clear that the two had to die. He could not risk any chance that they might follow him to his destination.
The rest had been simple, over in a couple of brutal, screaming minutes. He had walked wordlessly up to the two, pulled from his backpack the machete he used to cut through the brush, and started to slash. The male went first. The first slash was straight to the neck and delivered swiftly before the boy could raise his arms to ward off the blow. He went down, blowing a mist of blood with a gurgling wheeze. The female just whimpered during the seconds it took to kill her mate and didn’t even attempt to run. He swung his blade with full force into her dirty black sweater and she let out a loud, surprisingly baritone “Ooohh,” as she crumpled to her knees.
He had gone to the cave, taking the pairs’ tarpaulin with him, fished out a rusting shovel from a crate of tools, and returned to bury the sacks of dirty flesh. He had been careful to cover the site with generous mounds of pine needles, fir cones, and twigs. He had done this in such an accomplished manner that the area seemed undisturbed and he had difficulty finding the spot a week later. With trepidation he had read the newspapers for weeks after the murders and listened to the hourly radio news on
Bayern Funf.
But there had been no mention of a twin disappearance. He had concluded that the victims were such societal detritus that they enjoyed no family ties and were missed by no one. And so the circle of life and death for the two dropouts had closed seamlessly and quietly.
But all of that had been long ago, his memories of those moments less vivid, as if the color had drained from his recollections, leaving only a sepia trace. He now had to focus on the future and on moving the crates. He might be required to kill again, but he was content to let fate arbitrate that particular matter.

Chapter 7
     
    Gamsdorf slumbered in the waning sun of a long-shadowed late afternoon, its buildings looking much as they had for decades. The village was arranged in typical Bavarian form; a centuries-old church at its center, a whitewashed stone steeple rising high above it. The steeple was topped with a green-patina copper dome, shaped like a gigantic onion. A cemetery surrounded the church on all sides, braced by a low wall designed either to keep undesired visitors out or restless spirits in. The permanent residents of the churchyard comprised a democratic selection of the recently deceased and those who had lain in their graves for centuries. Some gravestones were so old that time and the elements had rendered them nearly blank stone slates, with only a gothic letter or two still discernible.
In one corner of the cemetery stood a large granite rectangle, relentlessly polished, topped with a gilded crucifix and a German soldier’s steel helmet. The monument memorialized the villagers, mostly young men with last names still common to the village, who had fallen in battle during the lost World Wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945. Their remains were not here, but scattered on battlefields from Tannenberg to Kiev, from Normandy to Tobruk.
Most of the graves, and the war memorial, too, were well tended and graced with bright flowers. The community of the dead was a full partner of the community of the living and often visited by the villagers, if mostly by the elderly, as if they were carefully