by C.G. Banks
Chapter 44: Fall Out
For a moment he couldn’t get his mind around it. The bonfire, the gathering of people, the inverted cross. He’d heard about shit like this, devil worshippers and Big Foot fan clubs, but had never given them any special attention. Outside of working their crimes, that is. Fucking loonies or kids playing around mostly. Satanic graffiti scrawled on walls and used condoms he’d seen in dirty abandoned buildings held about equal interest, that being next to nothing. But this was real.
He tried to estimate the number of people he was dealing with, probably upwards of thirty. Moving and chanting like a bunch of stoned-out junkies. What the fuck had happened to these people? Surely the whole fucking neighborhood hadn’t lost its mind? But from the looks of this, well…it still didn’t change the facts. He’d stumbled across some sort of devil worshipper’s coven, and right now, this very second, the woman he’d come to talk to (save, his mind persisted) was strapped upside down to a cross. Arnold seemed to remember something like that from a Bible story he’d heard as a kid once or twice but couldn’t come up with a name. Paul, Peter? Not that it mattered; he knew the name of this one.
He squinted through the flames and tried to see if she was still breathing. It looked like it, but then again, it was hard to tell amid the fire and moving bodies. She was completely nude, blood running down in a line from between her legs. Ropes were tied around her wrists and ankles but Arnold couldn’t see if these nuts were more serious than that. Surely not fucking spikes or nails but her hands and legs were bloody too. Jesus Christ, how long could a person hang upside down like that? He bit his lip and tried to think.
And the chanting stopped.
At first he thought he’d been spotted, considered standing up and throwing down on these motherfuckers, but thankfully, reason held sway. He dug in a little deeper, hoping for some unforeseen advantage if he just kept holding out. If these nuts were serious they’d surely be able to overwhelm him, like it or not. Six shots before reloading. That’s what he had.
Something appeared to be happening just out of sight. A murmur was building on the other side of the fire and even the people closest to Arnold began spreading out, giving ground. Then a man moved into the clearing and slowly eyed the contingent of people gathered around. He was also completely nude, his prick standing out like a divining rod. Many of the gatherers acquiesced, their heads to the ground, their arms splayed out before them. He turned Arnold’s direction and the detective saw the man’s head was shaved to the scalp, his face bloodied and black, his chest bleeding from the symbols carved there. Two five-pointed stars, one on either side of his chest, another inverted cross traced upon his breastbone. He held his arms out to his acolytes. The naked woman Arnold had watched from Patsy Standish’s carport broke from the crowd and sidled up to the man. He grabbed her by the hair and spun her around, forced her down to her knees, though the expression on her face never changed from the one of drugged oblivion it already held. Then he bent her over and squatted behind her, fumbled with his cock for a moment before he began working her like something from a barnyard. Arnold shook his head and turned away, aghast. This shit was off the hook. The others likewise began shedding their clothes (at least those who’d had them on in the first place) and joined in on the rite. There were no clear delineations; men went with men, women with women, everything in between. All proceeding with a grim, silent determination that was evil to watch.
Arnold felt the air around him curdle and spasm. Shapes began to dance in the air, the sibilant voices returning as if to urge the participants on to more depravities. He watched a man grapple with a collie, a woman abused with a garden rake. His finger itched at the trigger to just have this done but still he dared not move.
Something else was approaching, not someone.
The smoke from the fire hung in the air like a funeral pall. Steam bubbled yellow and thick from the ground, forming shapes amid the revelers. In the orgy of sex, suddenly other forms coalesced from the miasma until the clearing was a wild montage of the living and dead, twisting and turning upon one another. A throwback to another, more ancient, sadistic, orgy, perhaps played again and again right here as the generations piled up around them. The man of the shaved head threw it back and pulled out of the woman balled on the ground before him. He shot viciously across her back and the crowd howled. Others working to their own frenzied finish, men and women, living and dead, sprawled in the dust of the clearing, sawing away at each other until, eventually a vast silence took the land. Sedate flesh writhed on the ground. A couple no more than fifteen feet away from Arnold grunted like pigs after a rut, their skin slicked with perspiration.
The shaved man pushed the woman away, his prick spent. He backed up, his arms outstretched, his face a mask of blood. His eyes shone with the hardness of stones in a Druidic altar. The acolytes inched toward him on their knees, all human decency lost as they crawled over as one to be closest to their magus. His arms descended as if calling for a silence he already owned. He uttered a guttural command and all motion ceased. Walked over through the stirring dust to stand several feet from the cross where the Standish woman hung. She moved slightly in the night, a woman embedded in nightmare, her eyes fluttering, her face devoid of reason. Her tongue lolled suddenly out of her mouth. The man pointed at her and smiled draconically.
“THIS BITCH,” he bellowed, his bullfrog voice carrying to every corner of the clearing, “HAS DEFIED ME!” He reached across and grabbed a handful of her hair, wrenched it savagely. The crowd mooned over it like kids at a puppet show. The Colt had grown huge and cold in Arnold’s hand. He felt a flashpoint fast approaching. “PICKED FOR SUCH A GREAT DUTY, SHE HAS FAILED!” he continued, twisting his hand into her hair, forcing her head to an excruciating angle. She began to moan, low, like an injured cat. Her hands flexed at the end of the crossbeams. “SHE TOOK IT UPON HERSELF TO UNDO WHAT I HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED, THIS GREAT WORK, AND NOW PEOPLE,” and with this he sneered malevolently, “NOW SHE WILL FUCKING PAY!”
Arnold’s mind raced in his skull, trying to make sense of this madness. A random memory surfaced of the bloody coathanger on the floor of the bedroom, the bloody track etched from the woman’s pubis in ragged tendrils to her chest. No, he thought. Surely… but he didn’t have long to consider the implication.
Someone was walking toward the shaved priest. Some old shambling man, his pate as bald as an egg, skinny shanks trembling as he presented the machete. The shapes in the air began to move faster, as if stirred by some fell wind. The roar from the fire intensified. A woman screamed and broke from the group, charged into the depths of the flame. A shower of livid sparks railed into the sky and Arnold watched in horror as the burning shape thrashed and blackened, logs knocked askew, her screams dwindling to horrible burbling shrieks. The priest watched it all in silence, every eye in the clearing suddenly diverted from its purpose as the black legs in the fire kicked weakly and were consumed like wax. No one in the crowd moved. Another woman seemed to be holding back a young boy, hellbent on the same fate. A man standing beside her clubbed the boy on the side of the head with a shovel and the escalation ceased. Amid popping sounds of fat, the crowd found the man again, this time with machete upraised.
“TO EVERYTHING ITS PURPOSE!” he screamed, raising the blade over his head and turning to the woman on the cross.
Time stopped. For Arnold it was as if he was the only moving piece in a moment of still-life. His eyes took in everything effortlessly: the childlike crowd down on their knees before the homicidal maniac, the body still twitching nervously in the depths of the flames, the woman moaning like some old testament prophet, and finally, worse than all the rest, the face of the high priest, no more than something dug out of the deepest pit of hell.
He was moving before he even knew it.
Breaking free of his concealment, not a word of warning, the gun swinging up into position, reverting back to the two-fisted grip. Groups of eyes suddenly swung his way but it was no matter. He locke
d down on the priest, the man suddenly moving now too, turning away from the woman, surprise on his face as he sought the source of the disturbance.
“Motherfucker you’re going down,” Arnold muttered and pulled the trigger.
The first shot missed but the next caught the man somewhere in the upper chest or shoulder, spinning him around and then to the ground. Arnold was moving ahead now, mowing through the crowd like an automaton. People moved out of his way, shying away from the Colt like it was a snake. The shaved-head motherfucker was trying to get up again and Arnold fired a third shot, catching him in the back and seeming to punch him into the very ground itself. Arnold was no more than twenty feet away, smoke drizzling from the muzzle of the gun, the body twitching momentarily before it went completely still. Arnold watched the right hand claw randomly at the ground, then it froze up. Arnold heard moans break around him, a woman wailing high and hard to the moon. He stopped and fanned the clearing with the Colt, wishing someone would make a go at him, knowing as he thought so he only had three shots left. He chanced another look at the form in the dust and tore his attention away once satisfied the man was gone.
The woman on the cross opened her eyes, stricken, twisting at the ropes that bound her hands and feet. A freshet of blood welled from points on her wrists and feet. From this close up Arnold saw she had indeed been impaled with long, rusty spikes, railroad ties. Her head was at eye-level and he walked up to her, mindless of the cacophony of noise rising up on all fronts.
“Mrs. Standish,” he said, using every bit of reserve he had left to calm his voice. She looked confused, lost, as if suddenly finding herself in the midst of a nightmare from which, up til now, she’d been ignorant of. “I’m going to get you out of here.” And with this he looked to the spikes. He took hold of the closest with his free hand, began working it back and forth. The wood was old and worm-chewed and the spike moved freely. The woman reared back her head and screamed, bestial, a universe of agony. He didn’t let it stop him. Behind him the crowd had grown eerily quiet and he reminded himself that time was short. Once the immensity of what he’d done hit, there was no telling what sort of retribution would be forthcoming.
The first spike kicked out of the wood.
Without a pause, Arnold moved over and attacked the second. Within moments, it too, was free. He watched with uncanny fascination as the hands clenched and splayed, blood welling out from the holes. She’d stopped screaming, looked as if she’d passed out from the pain and that was all right with him.
One to go.
It, unfortunately, was above his head and there was nothing close by with which he could reach it. He thrust his hand into his back pocket and withdrew the buck knife he’d pulled from the drawer in the kitchen right before leaving the house. It had a six-inch blade and could shave hair. He took another look at the woman, glanced over his shoulder at the crowd and noticed they were coming out of their fugue. There was a nest of them huddled around the priest’s body, some even then eying him like hungry dogs. He knew it wouldn’t be easy but was not surprised. As far as he could tell, they had one chance. It would hurt like hell but it was all they had.
He clenched his teeth and slashed at the bonds that held her left hand. The knife moved as if through butter and then he was on the other. He moved in close to catch her and she fell. The spike in her feet gave out from the weight, heeling over as the weight of her body pulled the bonds that bound her tighter still around the ankles. She woke up screaming again, her breasts at her chin, her eyes bulged to plate size. He grabbed her at the waist and went up on tiptoe, slashing randomly at the ropes. He nicked her once and then he was through. Her body came down in a tumble in his arms.
He sunk to the ground, cradling her body, the Colt like an iron rod against her back. She cried out something incomprehensible and Arnold let her be, stood up from the woman and turned back to the crowd.
An old man, unclothed, edged forward with a garden trowel, growling far down in his throat and Arnold didn’t even pause. He raised the gun and drilled him between the eyes, the man’s brain exiting in a spray from the back of his head. Bits of bone, blood. The violence was enough to staunch a few of the others’ forward momentum but Arnold knew he’d only bought a second or two.
He turned back to the woman and scooped her into his arms. Looked around the clearing wildly. It was a long way back to the highway and he’d never make it carrying her like this. This place was a power keg about to fucking blow. She began mewling like some damaged animal and he pulled her tighter, his eyes busy on a random search.
And then…right there. One thin chance.
On the far side of the clearing was a four wheeler. He hadn’t been able to see it from his hiding spot but it drew him like a magnet now. It was rigged out with a deer rack. If only the keys…
He stumbled in that direction. Shot a naked, charging woman in the abdomen and watched her fly backward, knocking down two others on the way. Please God, he tried. The keys…please. He laid the woman across the rack, noticing the fall of hair along her back, how her hands went seemingly lifeless almost to the ground. He couldn’t worry about that now. All he wanted was to get the hell out. The crowd seemed to sense his purpose and closed ranks. Shovels, garden rakes, hoes, all these things coming to light. It wouldn’t be long. He raised the gun and fired twice more, the last two, one directly at the closest interloper and the next a random punch into the crowd. Unearthly howls rained out and Arnold flipped the gun around to the handle. Threw it like a boomerang at the horde. It caught a maniacal youngster in the forehead and he went down like a dead fall.
Mere seconds left.
Arnold strattled the tank and looked down at the ignition. Right there, some god looking over them from its heaven. He turned the key and the engine fired to life, its roar a clarion bell of life.
But it wasn’t over.
He looked up from the gauges and saw how close they were. Feet really, no more. Something hard and sharp bounced off his forehead and he almost went over. Blinked his eyes to still the stars. It couldn’t be but had the crowd somehow pulled the priest to his feet? Arnold shook his head and dropped the ATV into gear. No, no, he’d shot that motherfucker three times. Three goddamn times. The lurching thing at the mailman’s house entered his mind now like a raging hurricane. No, no, fuck no. He couldn’t think about that now. He thought he saw the man’s eyes open and he let off the clutch, the machine surging ahead, the front rack catching a crazed man in the chest. Arnold felt the wheels grind him under, felt a million hands and fists clutching at him, pummeling. Others had formed a tight circle around where he could have sworn he’d seen the priest standing. With one arm on the woman and the other on the handlebar he screamed forward, cutting a zigzag swath through the mass of bodies, letting the other thing go; there was no time. Something else hit him just above the right eye and it was suddenly full of blood, an icy jab of steel between his ribs but his throttle-hand never faltered. He felt hands pulling at the woman but his arm was a steel buttress, his hand a metal clamp.
He veered off just in time to miss the edge of the bonfire and then, miraculously, he was free of the crowd. There were stragglers at every point but he could steer around them, through them if it served. At the edge of the clearing something hit him hard in the back of the head and his mouth snapped shut, breaking teeth. Then he was into the underbrush, throttle wide open, doing his best to avoid the bigger saplings in his way, praying there were no hidden rocks to dodge. The woman’s body bounced on the rack like an unwieldy sack of potatoes and the ground gave way before them. He remembered the ditch at the end of the road and forced the handle bars right, hoping to ride the incline and not dump them both in the rill. He could barely see now and his shirt was soaked where the blade had gone in. He fought the sensation to cough, terrified of its implication.
The ATV made the far bank like a lopsided hobbyhorse and Arnold slumped forward, trying to see with his only good eye. When they burst through the brush to the gravel it
was like entering an empty stage.
But that was only for a moment.