Toby threw his apron down and stomped on it. “Don’t tell me it was nothin’. Your papa gave you a Taser doohickey. And you didn’t tell me.”
“Papa didn’t give me no Taser, fuckwad. I don’t know what happened. Now will you shut up?”
The two men glared at each other. Jeff remembered that Toby—forty-five years old and still living with his mama—was actually the brains of the operation. He balanced the books and ordered stock and generally kept the S-TOC from putting them out of business. That didn’t make him very smart, though.
“You’re a gol-derned liar. You got yourself a Taser doohickey, and I want to see it right now.”
Sammy grabbed his crotch. “I got your Taser right here.”
Mac’s cackle floated in from outside. “Holy piss in a station wagon! That was fucked-up.”
Jeff walked out to them, grateful to step away from the bickering men. He took a deep breath of the cool evening air. “You guys all right?”
Danny was lying down in the bed of the pickup. He pulled himself into a sitting position. “What happened? Did I pass out again?”
“I think God farted,” Mac said.
Danny nodded. “You know, I’ve always appreciated your sense of class and propriety. Nay, sir, thou art not a beer drinker although thee appears so. Thou art a true connoisseur of the divine inspirations. I was just telling my friend Jeff here the other day…”
As Danny and Mac continued their banter—and now Mac was hawking a tremendous loogie—Jeff surveyed their surroundings. The pumps at the Gas ’N’ Sip next door flashed like Christmas lights, off and on. Dogs and sirens wailed in the distance. And it was hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like smoke poured out of the windows of a house down the street.
Jeff turned to his drunken friends to suggest they go investigate with him. If it was a house fire, they would need to summon help.
He turned back at the sound of footsteps. Lots of them.
About two dozen people rounded the street corner, running at full speed. Men and women. Older. Several moved strangely, like they had sprained knees and couldn’t keep their balance, but they more or less ran in a pack. They wore dirty suits and dresses. A few sported bloodless gashes across their necks and faces. Mud caked their hands. They didn’t make a sound.
They were running straight at Sammy’s Grocery.
Mac got off the truck and came to stand by Jeff. “You think they’re freaked out ’cause of the quake?”
“They’ve definitely been drinking,” Danny said. “Look at the way they’re running.”
The pack closed the distance, and Jeff realized they weren’t running away from something. They were running to something. To Jeff and Danny and Mac.
Several had black holes in the place of eyes.
He started to back up. “Get inside. Now.”
From the corner of his vision, he saw Danny look between him and the approaching horde. “Uh, Mac? I’m gonna go inside now.”
“Okay, Danny boy. I’m gonna see if they need an ambulance.”
By now, Jeff and Danny were backpedaling to the store. Jeff thought of collaring Mac, who stood there like a clueless islander before a tidal wave. But there was no time. Jeff turned and ran as the crazed mob knocked Mac over.
All Mac managed was a “shit!” before he disappeared under a mountain of bodies. Jeff saw now they were all covered in dirt. Men in their seventies. Women without eyes. Nearly all wore dark suits and patterned dresses. Some faces gleamed with layers of pancake make-up, as if they’d come from the set of a stage show.
Jeff pulled open the warped door to Sammy’s Grocery as Danny went down beside him. An old woman wallowed on his back, clawing and biting his shoulder. He was too drunk to fight her.
The fat actor was there, watching with bug eyes from the other side of the threshold.
“Criswell!” Jeff screamed. “Hold the door!”
A rake leaned against the outside wall. Jeff used it to strike the head of the woman on top of Danny. When that had no effect, he circled around and stabbed the handle into her eye. Blood spurted over her cheek. She screeched and rolled off him.
Jeff pulled Danny to his feet. “Come on, you dumb asshole.”
He looked back when he heard Mac shriek. Three people were holding him down and tearing at his eyes with hooked fingers.
“Mac!”
In that pause, the actor pulled shut the front door to the grocery from the inside. He held it shut as Danny beat on the glass.
“Open the fucking door!”
The mob was losing interest in Mac. They stood up, ready to focus its attention on Jeff and Danny.
Jeff looked at them in a numb disbelief. Time slowed down, like it had that afternoon in the plane, when the meteor almost killed them. Were they already dead from that, and this was a fantasy? Death was finally done toying with him. He’d had his last hay roll with the wife, and now it was time to say goodbye.
Oh my god. This is how it ends.
The crowd turned as a young man ran up behind them. He waved his hands for attention. “It’s all right! I’m alive! Don’t hurt me!”
The lynch mob pounced en masse. They slammed the young man into the side of Jeff’s car. He screamed as he went down under a dog pile of bodies.
The movie actor was still holding the door closed. A sign on the door said, Come in, we’re open!
Danny pulled at the door handle. “Let us in, you fucking asshole!”
Two beefy arms encircled the actor and pulled him away from the door. It was Sammy. He opened it and ushered them in.
Jeff lost his balance and fell headfirst into the rotating display of paperbacks. It fell over with a crash and sent its worthless books fluttering everywhere.
Sammy motioned at someone else outside, yelling, “Come on!” A pair of teenaged boys hurried in. He then slammed the door shut.
A second later, the mob outside beat on the door.
Jeff floundered in the wreckage. People surrounded him, staring down with wide, frightened eyes. Sammy, Danny, the actor. They were killing Mac outside—they’re killing him!
And he felt it again: the heat of the meteor on his face as it passed by. The bile rising in his throat. Paula, looking at him with her happy and expectant face, moving under him as he struggled for his climax and the vomit hitting the runway as light moved over his body in darkness saying this is me, this is me, I am death, and I walk with thee.…
Chapter 7
KELTON
Officer Paul Kelton sighed with relief as he relaxed in the break room at the Nilbog General District Court building. He sank into a couch, holding a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee in one hand and a chocolate doughnut in the other. Heaven.
After an intense, best-two-out-of-three round of Rock Paper Scissors, Larry had drawn the scut work of booking Myra Applewhite at the jail, which adjoined the courthouse. Fingerprinting, arraignment by a magistrate, the whole bit. That meant Kelton could process sugar and caffeine in the break room. He wasn’t sorry at all. You fuckin’ pigs and I hope your dicks fall off—and ooh, that was a new one—by that walking ashtray of a woman was enough to sap anyone’s energy. If you don’t get them girls away from their granddaddy, more bad shit’s gonna happen. You mark my words. Yeah, right. He intended to sit right here and refuel until his partner was done with her. Hopefully it would take long enough for him to finish the whole doughnut box. He felt he deserved it by now.
But Chief Simpson called him through the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “Thirty-one.”
Kelton put down his cup so he could answer. “Thirty-one, go ahead.”
“Kelton, get back to Henry Rooter’s place. Go by yourself if you have to.”
“What? We just left there.”
“I know, but something’s up. Henry just called. He says Emily’s missing.”
***
Back on the road, alone this time, Kelton debated whether to use the lights and siren. He enjoyed their rush of power and authority, the
way vehicles melted off the road before him, but this wasn’t an all-fired emergency and he still had half a doughnut left. Emily was probably just outside anyhow, hiding behind the spoonman scarecrow. It wouldn’t be the first time.
And yet, even as he thought that, he knew it wasn’t true. A sinking feeling told him he would throw the diminutive Rachel Rooter into jail with her sister before the night was through. Still, he had an obligation to first talk to Henry.
Kelton was passing the entrance road to the ketchup factory when a ribbon of blue light moved across the road. It looked like sunlight dancing on the bottom of a swimming pool. He was complimenting himself on that particular poetic comparison when the light slammed into the car.
Several things happened at once.
The first was the car engine choked off and the dashboard lights winked out. Just like that. With no power steering or brakes, he wrestled the vehicle onto the road shoulder.
The second was that his heart kicked into overdrive, like someone had jammed a hypodermic of adrenaline into his chest. Not as poetic, but that’s what it felt like. His dick even got hard. Afterward, he would reflect it wasn’t a sexual erection, just a physiological fact, like waking up with morning wood because he needed to pee.
Gasping and holding his chest, he turned the ignition key. But the car remained as dead and dark as the street lights around him, which had also gone out.
He tried the police radio and his cell phone. Dead.
The hell happened? Heat lightning?
For one tense moment, he wondered if they’d dropped the bomb. Probably Charlottesville or Richmond. He saw that once on a TV miniseries. The Commies H-bombed a city, and in the suburbs, all machinery stopped working. They called it the E.M. pulse. He had no idea what E.M. meant.
“Shit. Oh, shit shit shit.”
Then, as suddenly as everything lost power, it all came back. The dashboard lights sputtered to life, the police radio hissed static, and the cell phone on his belt chimed that it was turning on. His heart finally slowed down.
That didn’t mean anything worked right. He tried calling dispatch on the police radio and his phone. But it was like everything was being jammed.
In the woods, a cat screamed. Sent chills right up his back. He hated the way cats sounded like children sometimes.
On his fourth or fifth try—about the time the street lamps came back on—Kelton succeeded in restarting the car. He tried the police radio again, but reception was still out.
He put the car into gear and gunned it toward the Rooter place. This time, he decided to turn the lights and siren on.
***
“That bitch. She took ’er.” Henry Rooter swept a knuckle under his runny nose and resumed his arms-crossed stance in his doorway. Behind him, the moose kept watch from the wall.
“Who took her?” Kelton said, but he was afraid he already knew.
“Rachel. I seen her van driving off when I come outside.” He gestured toward the end of the street. “Emily was just out here playing after dinner. Her mama must’ve picked her up.”
Kelton questioned the wisdom of letting a first-grader play unsupervised outside, at night. But he had bigger fish to fry. “Did you actually see Emily in the van with your ex?”
“No. Didn’t have to.”
“Did you try calling Rachel?”
“’Course I did. She ain’t answering. ’Sides, phones are out now.”
Sarah appeared by her father’s side in the doorway. She looked up at Kelton and actually smiled at him, which he didn’t think he’d ever seen before. “Hi, mister officer.”
“Hi, Sarah. Why weren’t you outside with your little sister?”
“Grandpa needed me. We’re getting ready.”
“For what?”
Instead of answering, she waved goodbye and disappeared into the house.
Kelton sighed and turned back to Henry. “All right. I’ll head out to Rachel’s place and look for your daughter. Stay here, and call the police if she turns up.”
“We ain’t got no working phones.”
Kelton returned to his car. As he got in, Henry shouted again, “We ain’t got no phones, you fuckin’ pig!” and burst out laughing.
Some gratitude. Kelton pulled onto the road.
Maybe he would use the lights and siren again. The sooner he could get this over with, the better. Instead, he tried the police radio and was rewarded with more static.
He turned out of Henry Rooter’s neighborhood and passed under an enormous elm tree that spanned the road. It was a monster, decades old, the kind of tree Verizon routinely trimmed because it posed a danger to telephone lines.
As Kelton drove under it, a woman dropped out of its limbs overhead. She fell twenty feet and landed on the police car with a thunk.
The hood buckled under the impact. The windshield cracked. Kelton cried out and stomped the brakes. The woman flew forward onto the road.
Kelton got out of the car. “Holy shit! Are you all right?”
She lay there facedown, not moving. She was older, wearing a mud-caked dress. More mud covered her hands. The fingernail and skin had peeled back from her right forefinger like a glove, revealing bone. It was like she had dug her way out of the ground.
He was reluctant to touch her. He looked back at his dented police car, debating whether to fetch the first aid kit from the trunk.
I don’t believe this. I just killed somebody.
He decided to check for a pulse.
As Kelton reached for the woman’s neck, her head swiveled all the way around on its shoulders.
The old woman stared at him with one good eye. The other was a red ruin. She hissed like a cat, revealing dentures that wouldn’t stick to her gums.
She climbed to her feet and ran away.
Kelton was so dumbfounded that he just watched her go. She disappeared behind a house. It was like she’d never been there. He looked back at the dents on his car’s hood to confirm it had really happened. She’d left a dark stain on the pavement.
In a daze, he returned to the car. He closed and locked the door. Couldn’t think of what else to do other than try the radio again.
This time, the Chief answered. “Kelton. Thank God. We just got power back.”
“Chief, I…” Words eluded him. “I just saw a woman. She was covered in mud. And, I don’t know…” He let go of the transmitter button, as if radio silence would speak for him.
“Was she injured?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think it was from my car.”
“What? Kelton, come back. What about your car?”
“Nothing. Yes, she appeared to be injured. How did you know?”
“Been getting calls. Everyone says injured people are walking through their neighborhoods and attacking folks.”
Kelton sat up straighter when an odd-looking couple crossed the street not fifty yards in front of him. One was missing an arm. Both were covered in mud.
“Kelton, you there?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
“Reception’s going in and out. Listen, Jimmy and Justin Owens need help. Someone just killed their mother in the backyard.”
Kelton was putting the car back in gear before the Chief finished talking. The mother lived next door to the Rooter house. Damn, he just left there a few minutes ago. And that afternoon, Jimmy Owens was doing an oil change in his mother’s driveway. Surreal.
“I’m around the corner from them, Chief. I’ll check it out.”
“They’re barricaded inside. Bring those boys here if you have to.”
He arrived at the Owens homestead moments later. Next door, smoke poured out of Henry Rooter’s open front door. What the hell could’ve happened in so short a time?
When he got out of the car, he heard Henry and the old grandfather shouting.
The Owens door flew open. Jimmy Owens and his twelve-year-old brother came out, waving for him.
“Get back inside, and close the door.” Kelton ran past them into the Rooter hou
se. He drew his gun.
As he passed the moose in the foyer, he heard a strange fizz-fahwump sound in the kitchen. Grandfather Rooter shouted again. The smoke was also coming from back there.
Kelton was so focused on reaching the kitchen that he stumbled over the body lying facedown in the hallway. Kneeling, he turned it over, already noting the familiar wife-beater T-shirt. Butch Rooter’s throat had been torn out as if by a dog. The man’s eyes stared at nothing.
“Good Jesus.”
Henry Rooter’s laughter echoed down the hall, plus that sound again: fizz-fahwump.
Kelton continued to the kitchen.
He found the grandfather lying on his back on the kitchen table. Another man lay on top of him. It was another senior citizen, a man in a muddy business suit. He snapped and dug at old man Rooter’s face.
Henry Rooter stood behind them, a can of Black Flag in one hand and a lit Zippo lighter in the other. Flames enveloped the draperies around a sliding glass door and spread across the ceiling. Sarah was nowhere in sight.
Before Kelton could stop him, Henry again sprayed the aerosol through the flickering cigarette lighter. A cone of fire arced onto the men on the table.
Henry laughed maniacally as Kelton tackled him.
The room was a confusion of smoke, flame, and the old man’s panicked screams. Kelton wrestled the spray can and lighter away from Henry. Then he turned as the Owens boys rushed into the room.
“Oh my god!” Jimmy Owens shouted. The college boy grabbed a folded table cloth off a side cabinet and threw it over the burning bodies on the table.
Henry Rooter twisted out of Kelton’s grasp. He fled down the hallway and out the front door.
In the confusion, Kelton had dropped his gun. He searched frantically until he found it on the floor. As he holstered it, he tried to yell at the boys—coughed out smoke—and tried again. “Get out of here!”
The fire spread across the ceiling faster than he would have thought possible.
The boys didn’t go anywhere. They watched wide-eyed as Kelton shoved the attacker off of old man Rooter. He heaved the grandfather onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and headed for the front door.
Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization Page 7