In that moment of indecision, the monster pounced. It spread out above me, face contorted in a snarl of rage, talons outstretched, and barbed cock hanging obscenely between heavily muscled legs.
The shotgun slammed against my shoulder. Flame poured out the end of the barrel, spouting death toward the face poised just above me. The blast took him at the juncture of neck and torso, nearly decapitating him. Great gouts of black blood erupted above me, showering down on my face, splattering into my eyes and mouth seconds before the body landed on top.
The beast landed on the end of the shotgun, the impact driving a blast of fetid air into my face. I jerked the slide and pulled the trigger again. Its back exploded, flinging chunks of stringy red meat toward the sky.
I cried out, twisting and scrambling to get out from under it, blinded by blood so hot it hissed against my skin. My eyes felt as if someone had rammed a red hot poker into the sockets. My mouth tasted of bile, putrid flesh, and rancid meat, the sensation so strong my stomach heaved in an immediate rejection. Choking back vomit, I kicked, spat, and twisted under the beast. It scrabbled at the ground, trying to dig claws into me even as it died. One talon ripped a bloody gash down my side. Another scored a taut line across my cheek.
The sound that burst from my chest lingered somewhere between a bleat of sheer terror and a shout of defiance. Planting both feet in its stomach I shoved as hard as I could. The creature rose above me, but not enough to throw it clear. It hung for a moment, dying mouth snapping at the air, and then tottered toward me. I kicked out again and managed to deflect the falling body enough to scramble free.
“Son of a BITCH!” I shouted, as I climbed shakily to my feet.
The acrid blood in my mouth felt as if it were flaying the flesh off my gums. Tears streamed down my face as tear glands desperately tried to wash the burning poison from my eyes. Reaching down, I grabbed the front of my T-shirt and tried to scrub away the searing pain. Even the skin on my hands and arms turned pink where the acidic liquid had splattered.
The foul taste spread, leaking down my throat and wafting up through my nostrils in a fetid odor close to the smell of a decaying and bloated corpse sweltering in midsummer heat. My stomach couldn’t take any more. Leaning over I vomited the water I’d drunk earlier, spitting and coughing as tainted air spilled down in my lungs.
I turned, with a long string of yellowed drool spilling from one side of my mouth and watched through blurred vision as Baby slithered over the front row of seats like a snake. Seconds later her head popped up in the door like a ferret peeking up out of its den. She flicked her head to one side and then jerked it back the other way in quick bird-like motions. Raising her empty eye sockets toward the sky, she sniffed the air, nostrils twitching.
Stomach heaving, I spat a thick wad of slime and bile.
Baby’s head jerked toward the sound. She pulled herself upright and slid bare feet out on the sand.
“Where you Wee-Lee-Um?”
She rose up out of the Suburban on unsteady feet, moving slowly in my direction with shuffling steps and holding her hands out in front of her as if feeling the air for the taste of my scent. The empty pits where her eyes should have been looked as if someone had taken a drill to her face and bored holes into her skull. The cloud pants had disappeared somewhere along the line. A thick bush of black hair clung to the juncture between her legs in a wild tangle that looked both obscene and vulgar next to the dead, jellied flesh of her thighs. One breast hung limp and lifeless, nipple pointed toward the ground. The other dangled from skin ripped into shreds from the claws that had nearly severed it from her body. Midway between them the huge rip in her stomach flapped open.
From the neck up she looked as if she had stuck her fingers in a light socket. Her hair frizzed out in a wild tangle and her mouth hung open revealing white teeth jammed into shriveled gums. Dried blood streaked down the side of her face where the beast had clawed her before killing her.
I reached slowly into my pocket, eased out the pack of cigarettes, and tossed it onto the sand to my left. Baby swiveled instantly, homing in on the sound.
She was still ten feet away, feet slip-sliding through sand that should have been wet, but slid over her bare feet dry and easy. The shotgun lay on the ground between me and the thing I had just killed. I reached down, grabbed it by the slide, and jerked another round into the chamber.
She pivoted in my direction, sniffing like a dog. Something that looked like a black worm crawled half way out of one nostril and quickly slid up in the other, its body slipping across the tiny flap of skin between them in a long, glistening movement that reminded me of slugs crawling across the carport. Even before the tail had disappeared, the other end poked out of one eye socket, then quickly retreated.
I raised the shotgun and centered the barrel on her chest. I had no idea how one was supposed to kill what was already dead. At the same time, I knew the buckshot could rip her limb from limb. I might not be able to kill Baby, but I could leave her flopping on the ground with no way to walk.
I pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped forward in a sharp steel-on-steel click. I looked down at the gun.
Three fucking rounds?
I couldn’t believe Mr. Felix Unger posing as an Eddie Bauer wanna-be hadn’t pulled the plug out of the damned thing so it would hold more than the factory allowed. I hissed in frustration and turned my attention back on the woman.
Baby shuffled closer, her hand reaching out, fingers splayed wide.
I eased quietly to one side. She moved forward a couple of dragging steps and stopped. Raising her head she sniffed again and turned toward me in a series of jerks.
“Why you run?”
“Why you want me?” I shot back, mimicking her odd sentence.
She craned her head to one side as if considering the question.
“You Wee-Lee-Um. All Wee-Lee-Ums die.”
I eased away from her outstretched fingers.
“All of us? You mean every William must die? Why?”
Overhead, rain ticked at the leaves, softly and gently, but none fell under the giant oak where I’d crashed the Suburban.
Her head snapped around. She lurched forward, hands clawing at the air. As dangerous as she was in the car, here in the open, blind and scuffling her feet along, she was as close to harmless as a dead woman intent on grabbing hold of you could be.
“Master say kill Wee-Lee-Um.”
“Who’s master?” I asked, slipping to the side again.
She stopped dead still and dropped her arms. Glaring light from the high beams burned through the frizzy hair spewing out from her skull. For a long moment, she looked like a desecrated statue standing in the clearing. Then she turned her head, the movement mechanical and jerky until the black holes of her eyes stared straight at me.
“I show you.”
The thing that had stood on the beach two days before, huddling up against her husband, sprung like a cat, leaping toward me so incredibly fast I barely had time to register the evil grin on her face before she was on me. We hit the ground rolling. The shotgun tumbled from my grasp at the impact. The woman fought like a tiger, fingernails raking across my face, bared teeth snapping at my nose. I tried to push her away, but she clung to me with inhuman strength.
I could feel her arms closing around me like a vise. She leaned forward.
“You want know?” she hissed. A foul string of drool dripped from her mouth and splashed across my face.
“Here him.”
She opened her mouth wide, so wide that her jawbones cracked under the strain. The worm that had slid up her nose minutes before poked out, straining toward me, trembling in anticipation.
I jerked sideways as the cold, oily skin touched mine. The thing wasted no time. It slithered across my cheek and wriggled toward one nostril, leaving a wet, slimy trail behind it. I had no illusions. I’d seen it work its way into her head. If it reached my nose, I would be more than dead. I would be a flopping, screaming piece of flesh w
rithing on the ground while it consumed my brain and my soul.
She ground her pelvis against me in an obscene motion, as if the thought of the worm crawling inside me had driven her into a sexual frenzy. The dry hiss of her wooly bush swished across my pants, the sound grotesquely sexual and sickening at the same time. I fought with every last ounce of strength I had, but whatever possessed her was stronger than any man I’d ever known. The arms circling me were like bands of steel, clamping down so tight they threatened to rob what little breath I had left.
The thing snaked across my lips and nudged at the entrance to my nose. I flung my head sideways. It followed quickly, jabbing its pointed head toward one nostril. Baby chortled above me, grinding her hips in a lewd fucking motion as if she had mounted her steed and craved everything he could give her.
I shoved against her, trying to push her away, but the move had little strength behind it. The thing sensed the weakness and doubled its efforts to slide up inside my head.
Death squirmed at the edge of my lips, its tip poking and prodding against my nose. Virgil’s calm voice slid through my mind in that instant.
“Your attacker always has a weakness, William. It’s your job to figure out what it is.”
I only had one weapon left. I quit struggling and lay panting as it worked its way across my lips and started up inside one nostril. The instant the tip penetrated, I opened my mouth wide and bit down hard. The worm flopped wildly. I sawed my head side to side forcing my teeth deeper and deeper into the gelatinous flesh. Baby threw her head back in a startled moan.
“Nooooo Wee-Lee-Um.”
With one final jerk, I bit the thing in half. Baby’s sightless eyes went wide and her gripped relaxed. I shot upward as hard as I could with bits of worm meat still wriggling in my mouth and rammed my forehead against her face. She fell backward in a crazy tumble of legs and hair.
Scrambling to my feet, I reached up and grabbed the thick worm. The part in my mouth still wriggled frantically, trying to force itself upward. Pulling it free, I threw it on the ground and stomped the squirming atrocity into a shapeless mass that looked like quivering black jelly. The other end inched toward my leg, tip stretching forward hungrily. I didn’t waste any time stomping it into oblivion either.
I stumbled away from both. The instant I felt safe enough, I fell to my knees and vomited. The taste the worm had left seething in my mouth was infinitely more disgusting than the demon’s blood. I have no words to describe it. If you took everything foul and sick and rotten imaginable, poured it into a soup pot, diced a few putrid entrails into the mix, and then guzzled it down, the sickening flavor wouldn’t be close.
I puked until nothing came up, retching for what seemed an eternity. I couldn’t stop, even knowing that Baby might be slithering across the sand toward me, nostrils twitching at every sound. When the heaving had subsided enough that I could raise my head, I looked toward Baby. She lay in a crumpled heap.
Was she dead, truly dead this time? I had no idea. All I knew for certain was that I had no fight left in me. Whatever came would just have to come. My body was spent and my mind so shaken that I couldn’t have formulated a sentence if I tried.
I sat in the little clearing under the giant oak with my knees pulled up against my chest. When I finally moved, I reached out with trembling fingers and slid the cigarette pack across the sand. It took another three or four minutes to work the top open, pull one out, and get it between my lips. I don’t know how long it took to make my numb fingers work the wheel on the lighter.
The smoke felt and tasted delicious. I drew in deep and held it, letting the nicotine work through my system. When I’d burned the cigarette down to the filter, I tossed it away and lit another. Baby never moved. The forest remained eerily silent as well. No frogs croaked. Nothing rustled in the bushes. Not even crickets put voice to the night. Other than the tick-tock of a slow and gentle rain against leaves high above, the only sounds that filtered through were the thump of my heart pounding in my ears and the hiss of my own breath pouring out into the darkness.
I finally rose and limped past the woman’s body. What had been a snarling, hideous creature walking on jerky legs a few minutes before looked pitifully human and most certainly dead. She lay with her cheek kissing the sand and one hand spread out against it in the same way a woman might nuzzle against a man’s chest. Looking down at her, I realized, I’d never known her name. Baby wasn’t a name. It was an endearment and the man responsible for it would never speak the word again.
The Suburban looked as if it had been run through a demolition derby. Dark scratches ran down the side facing me. Deep dents pockmarked the roof. Inside, the fabric covering the overhead hung in shards where talons had pierced through the metal. The driver’s-side mirror hung at a crazy angle. Less than an hour before, the vehicle could have sat on a showroom floor. Now, it looked ready for the junk yard.
I climbed inside and turned the key. The motor cranked slow in a whamp whamp sound before it caught. Pulling the door closed, I pushed the transmission into drive and pulled away from the massive oak. Metal groaned as the SUV cleared the tree. One tire wobbled alarmingly, but held.
For all the drama the first part of the journey held, the last fifteen minutes seemed tame. A light mist wet the windshield for much of the distance, only turning into true rain when the tree cover diminished enough to let the gentle drops come down unimpeded. Fog began creeping out of the swamp as I drew close to the old village in thin, misty fingers that slid through the trees and wafted across the road.
I turned the heater on to ward off the chill, but most of the trembling that wracked my body didn’t come from the cold. It came from the gallons of adrenaline pumped through my system. The thought struck me that a medical type might laugh at the term gallons. I decided then and there that the first one who did would get face time with the next Baby I ran across.
When I pulled up outside the station, I called Elsie and told her I was outside, heading in. She snorted into the phone. I hung up somewhere in the middle of her asking me in a testy manner if they could consider me safe. Even as I pushed the end button, I sighed at the apologies I’d have to make in order to turn her sharp tongue elsewhere.
I opened the door after hearing the bar slide back and stepped into the weak light inside. Everyone looked stunned. Elsie sat upright in her chair and brought her hand to her mouth. For the first time, I noticed the age spots splattered across it like giant freckles. Someone let out a gasp. Half of them looked as if they were looking at a dead man walking. I could appreciate that thought since it was close to how I felt.
Daniel studied me with the same solemn expression on his face that he always carried. I wondered how it felt to be six years old and seeing death and destruction every time you lifted your eyes.
“Who are they, Daniel?”
He sat for a moment, still and silent and then shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“Why do they want me?”
He considered that one for a bit.
“Because the angel you killed makes you the right wee-lee-um.”
The words struck me like a hammer, harder than anything Baby or the beast had thrown at me. They drove into the heart of a guilt that had plagued me for more years than anyone had known, not my father, not even my wife at the time, a guilt I had eventually come to terms with or at least told myself that I had. The boy’s somber eyes and simple tone ripped across that lie like talons ripping through flesh.
“I didn’t kill him, Daniel. He was my son. He died in his sleep.”
In the eyes gazing back lay the simplicity I imagined one would see standing before God with the Book of Life lying open before them. It was the kind of innocence that could put lives in one hand and thoughts in the other and weigh them without the added burdens of lies and rationalizations.
“You didn’t turn on the machine. No one can say if it would have sounded an alarm, but you have always believed it would have. He was the nex
t Keeper, Mr. William.”
“What do you mean, keeper?” I asked in a choked voice.
He frowned slightly. The expression seemed too natural for him.
“I don’t know.”
I wanted to scream at him, to get down on eye level and demand how he could know about little William, and not know why evil, filthy beasts were crawling the face of the earth and slaying men with my name. Tears came instead, blurring my vision with a sudden swell of grief so shocking in its intensity that it threatened to shred the little hope I had left in myself, in others, in the world in general.
“I don’t understand why all Williams must die.” I finally said.
He smiled faintly.
“Because they don’t know which of you is the right one.”
“How do you know I am the right one? And what does it mean to be right?”
“You are the father of the Keeper,” he said simply and looked over at Jessie. “I know the same way I know whose ghosts will walk this island.”
The girl turned white.
Elsie snatched him up and pulled him close.
“Come on, Daniel. It’s time for bed.”
She looked at me with mixed emotions. She wanted to be angry with me, I could tell. A great sadness swept across her face instead.
“Get yourself cleaned up, Hill William. Get some rest.”
I stood next to the bar, watching as she herded him down the hall and up the staircase. No one moved around the table. The silence in the room was so deep, so intense that I could hear my own heart beating. A long time passed before I felt the soft, cool hand slide up my arm.
Kelly stood beside me.
The Island - Part 4 Page 10