by John Russo
The sergeant pursed his lips thoughtfully. He said, “I’m tired of playing games with you two. We know you’re guilty. Your van was spotted near the place where that poor girl was found raped and stabbed to death. You can’t lie your way out of it. We have to make you pay, and we don’t much care if we bring you in alive or dead.”
“We’re entitled to a trial,” Hank insisted. “We’re innocent!” He knew why they were picking on him, he thought, but it didn’t make any sense for them to be so down on Tom.
The short, wiry one gestured with his revolver. “Get your asses up out of those sleeping bags—pronto! Which one are we going to question first, sergeant?”
Tom pleaded, talking desperately: “No! I just remembered—we saw a big heavy man in farmers’ bibbed coveralls. I almost ran him down; he was standing right in the road. He was carrying a heavy bundle—it could’ve been a body. It must’ve been one. Is he the one who turned us in? If so, you can see he was trying to divert suspicion from himself. My father’s a lawyer back in Boston. He—”
But neither deputy apparently believed Tom’s story, for they both started chuckling. The chuckling turned into derisive laughter as Tom and Hank crawled out of their sleeping bags and stood in front of the dead campfire looking hurt and helpless.
Nancy, who had come back from the stream, was hiding behind some bushes about fifty yards away, observing what was going on. At first she had been alarmed by noises of scuffling and arguing coming from the direction of the campsite. Then when she saw the two policemen, she was afraid they were out to arrest her and bring her home. So she stayed in concealment, hoping to learn more about the situation. To her amazement, she saw Tom and Hank being handcuffed.
The corporal seized Hank’s handcuffed wrists and yanked him in an about-face. Hank trembled, feeling totally at these unreasonable men’s mercy and reaching a point of panic. All at once he started to run, trying with all his energy to get away. The corporal crouched, sighted, and fired twice. Hank crumpled and hit the turf, sliding on his chest and face, then lying very still.
Tom yelled, “You killed him, you stupid redneck! You didn’t need to do that! We’re innocent! Innocent, goddamn you!”
His face was a mask of rage and anguished helplessness, and bitter tears rolled down Tom’s cheeks. He made a move to go to Hank, but the sergeant made him stay in one place by jabbing him severely with his revolver.
Standing over Hank’s body, the corporal gave a long glance back at Tom, a faint wry smile on his face. Then he took careful aim at Hank’s head and squeezed the trigger. The loud report all but blotted out Tom’s scream. Then there was silence.
After a moment the corporal said, “I warned the spade he could get his head blown off. But he had to try me. Serves him right, the young punk.”
Dazed and rapidly going to pieces, Tom mumbled, “You must be crazy . . . crazy . . .”
“Come off it!” the sergeant barked in his loudest tone yet. “Your buddy was resisting arrest. You want to try the same? I guarantee you you’ll end up the same way, too. You ready to confess to raping and killing that girl? I knew her and her family, see. I’m willing to go to any lengths to bring in her killers. People in this county will turn their heads to any irregularities, as long as they feel they got justice.”
Practically screaming, Tom said, “But I tell you I’m innocent! What proof could you possibly have? This is all so cockeyed, I don’t understand it. Let me call a lawyer. Please/ One innocent life has already been lost.”
Still watching from her hiding place, Nancy was terribly frightened. Rooted there by fear, she was not about to show herself. She wanted to do something to help Tom, but she was powerless, at a total loss. And she hadn’t heard enough of what was said to really understand the situation.
The corporal came over to Tom and jammed his gun into the boy’s abdomen. “You ready to confess, or do we have to beat it out of you?”
Tom’s dilemma was beyond his comprehension. He spoke weakly, in. a near-whisper. “You might as well kill me, too. That’s what you’re going to do, aren’t you?”
The sergeant replied sternly. “Well, we know you’re guilty, so actual confession is merely a formality. The fact that your partner tried to run doesn’t make you look very innocent. Me and the corporal like to save the taxpayers money every place we can.”
“Yep,” agreed the corporal. Again he prodded Tom with his gun. He jammed the weapon hard, over and over, into the boy’s ribs, making him cry out painfully. “Why don’t you run, too?” he suggested diabolically. “How much of this kind of treatment could you take before you decide to run?”
The sergeant pointed his revolver at Tom, saying to the corporal, “Step aside. Gimme a clear shot.”
Tom trembled and closed his eyes. Without further ado, the sergeant pulled the trigger, shooting Tom in the chest. As the boy sagged and fell, the sergeant fired again . . . then again. Tom lay on the ground not far from Hank, both bodies bloody messes.
From her hiding place, Nancy screamed and started running in total hysterical panic. Both deputies wheeled and spotted her simultaneously. The corporal instantly crouched and aimed, ready to fire. But the sergeant stopped him, shouting, “No! Take the girl alive! We want her alive! Don’t get carried away now! After her!”
The two deputies started running, trying to catch up with Nancy. She plunged into the woods on the far side of the clearing, running and running for all she was worth. The two deputies kept coming after her, at a steady trot, as if they were not particularly worried that there was any real chance of her getting away. They kept plodding after her relentlessly, waiting for her to tire herself out. Every time she looked back they appeared to be just over her shoulder; she couldn’t seem to lose them, though she tried to put her last ounce of energy into it, out of fear and desperation.
Nancy broke out of the patch of woods onto a dirt road, a section of the one the van had traversed yesterday. She ran down the road, looking behind her now and then to see how close her pursuers were, screaming for help now and then and looking frantically for someplace to hide.
When the two deputies got out onto the road, Nancy seemed to have gained on them, but she had merely disappeared around a bend. For a moment this confused them as to which way she may have gone, and they halted, peering up and down. Then, realizing she couldn’t have gone right or she’d be visible on the straightaway, they took off running to their left, toward the bend in the dirt road. They put on speed, loping along, making up lost distance. Both men were now breathing hard, but their pace was still relentless.
Nancy spotted a red brick house with white columns, set far back off the road. She ran across the vast lawn and up onto the veranda and beat fiercely on the front door and tried to open it. But it was locked. She yelled and yelled for someone to come and let her in. No one answered. She ran around the side of the house and up the steps of the back porch. In a panic, she yanked at the door, which was stuck, but it finally gave way and swung open. Nancy dashed into the house, slamming the door behind her and locking it with a sliding brass bolt.
She found herself in the kitchen. She looked all around, breathing hard, amazed at its vastness, taking in at a glance the enormous Colonial fireplace. Then her eyes fell on a huge mahogany highboy filling one corner of the kitchen. Taking quick strides toward the piece of furniture, she pulled open a drawer and in her haste overturned it. Silverware clattered out onto the floor, making a tremendous racket, hurting Nancy as it struck her on the legs and feet. She dropped the drawer with a loud, resounding crash. Nancy stooped and rummaged feverishly among the silverware on the floor—but to her dismay there were no knives, only forks and spoons. This was as odd at it was disappointing. She needed something with which to defend herself.
Pivoting sharply, she headed for the front of the house, crossing the threshold of a large, elegant dining room—only to be brought up short upon seeing a young woman in a white dress sitting at the dining table, engaged in a game of solitaire. Th
is strange young lady, about Nancy’s age, with comely features and black hair worn in a tight bun, laid a playing card face up on the table and gazed at Nancy placidly.
Nancy stammered, “I . . . uh . . . thought nobody was home. I was calling for help. Why didn’t you hear me? Do you have a telephone?”
The young woman did not reply to any of this, as Nancy’s momentum carried her into the room.
“Are you deaf?” Nancy wondered out loud. Still getting no reply, she darted her eyes beyond the woman at the card game and saw into the next· room and immediately let out an ear-shattering scream. In frozen horror she stared into the living room, where two mangled corpses were hanging from the cross-beamed ceiling. The bodies were those of men, clothed only in bloody underwear. Each corpse had four or five knives protruding from various parts of the anatomy, which explained the absence of knives in the kitchen.
Because she was so horror-struck by the sight of the dangling bodies, at first Nancy didn’t see that the demented man in bibbed coveralls was in the living room, also, standing just behind and to the right of the corpses. He had in his hand a large butcher knife, which he was sharpening on a whetstone. He smiled at Nancy as she continued screaming, terror rooting her in her tracks.
The young woman at the dining table played another card, calmly laying it face up, red on black, as if nothing of unusual interest was going on around her.
Nancy bolted and ran, the man with the butcher knife taking a step or two after her. She unbolted the kitchen door and ran out into the backyard—straight into the arms of the two deputies, who instantly pounced upon her, wrestling her to the ground and pinning her arms behind her back. While the deputies were busy subduing Nancy, a hand reached out and pulled the kitchen door shut and the man with the butcher knife did not come out of the house.
Hauled to her feet by the two deputies, Nancy struggled and babbled hysterically. “Ohh! Please . . . let me go! I . . . you killed my friends—both innocent! The real murderers are in there!” She stared at the closed door of the house, her eyes flashing wildly.
“Well, now,” said the sergeant, “let’s have a look. Got to investigate . . . see if this young lady is telling the truth.”
He and the other deputy began dragging Nancy up onto the back porch. She screamed and dug her heels into the ground, trying with all her might to resist their pulling her along. “No! Please!” she cried. “I don’t want to go in there!”
The corporal said to the sergeant, “She’s stark-raving mad, I’m afraid. Doesn’t want to come along with us and prove her innocence. Maybe she’s lying.”
The two deputies pushed open the back door and dragged Nancy into the house. She fought back, grabbing onto the doorframe, but they methodically punched her hands loose. Finally, they knocked her down and pulled her across the floor by her ankles—through the dining room, where the young woman playing cards looked up disinterestedly—and into the living room, where the two corpses hung from the rafters.
The man in bibbed coveralls chortled, watching the girl he had spied on yesterday being dragged helplessly over the living room carpet. At the far end of the large room were three wire cages, of the sort used to cage and transport show dogs. In one of the cages was a young woman, wild and disheveled looking in her underwear, who cowered in her cage as Nancy was being dragged across the floor. The other two cages were empty.
The man in bibbed coveralls, still chortling, moved to one of the empty cages and opened the door for the two deputies, who were maneuvering Nancy into position. As she lay flat on her back in front of the opened cage, one of the men—the corporal—straddled her and laughed and started pulling off her jacket and blouse. When she resisted, he slapped her face. The man in bibbed coveralls looked on, leering and chortling, swishing his sharp butcher knife through the air above Nancy’s head.
The other girl cowered and cried in her cage while Nancy was being beaten and undressed down to her bra and panties, the three men flinging her garments around the living room. The undressing completed, Nancy was forced into a cage and the wire door was locked. The man in bibbed coveralls pranced insanely around the cage, laughing and grinning, prodding Nancy from one side to the other by jabbing at her with his long-bladed knife. She alternately screamed and cowered, trying to avoid being stabbed. For a time the two deputies enjoyed this game, elbowing each other in the ribs with amusement.
But at last the sergeant spoke up: “Enough! Enough, Cyrus! Look at the mess you made in here!” He pointed disapprovingly at the hanged bodies. “We have got to get this house cleaned up. Mama doesn’t like it like this. You know she’s got a bug for keeping things tidy.”
The two deputies pushed the man in bibbed coveralls ahead of them out of the room, and, fear-ridden, Nancy watched them go. For the first time she noticed the holes in the backs of the deputies’ shirts, streaked with dried blood, and she knew for sure now that the real deputies were hanging from the ceiling. She shuddered. Her situation was hopeless. She had fallen into the hands of a quartet of homicidal maniacs. In her agony she broke down sobbing, throwing herself down onto a ragged, musty quilt on the bottom of her cage, and in a while, due to exhaustion and shock, she lost consciousness. Her last thoughts were of Hank and Tom.
The girl in the other cage watched her sleep.
In the next room, Luke Barnes, still in his deputy’s uniform, stood before his sister, Cynthia. She was nineteen now. It had been ten years since they had killed their first demon. Cynthia, eerily pretty and pale, her pallid complexion accentuated by her bun of coal-black hair, looked up from her game of solitaire.
Luke said, “Sister, you’ve. got to help us straighten up the house. For Mama’s sake. Or else Mama is going to be mad.”
Cynthia eyed her brother sternly. “You had better go up and talk to her, Luke. You know darn well she’s going to chastise you for killing that other girl ahead of time. Mama told us we’re supposed to have three, for the Easter services.”
“I’ll have another by Good Friday,” Luke promised. “I’m not about to let the whole congregation down.”
“But now we’ve got to go out and catch us another one,” Cynthia complained. “And catching them is the dangerous part—people are liable to get wise. You and Cyrus and Abraham know that. How many times did Mama tell you?”
Chagrined, Luke said, “I’ll go up and talk to Mama soon as the living room is cleaned up. We’re not in any trouble yet. Mama won’t yell at me for no reason—you wait and see.”
When Nancy came to, opening her eyes slowly and recoiling from the shock of her surroundings, she found the girl in the other cage looking at her piteously. “My name is Gwen Davis,” the other girl whispered. “They killed my sister.”
Gwen stifled a sob. She was about twenty-five years old, probably attractive, if not so beaten up and scared. Her brown hair was plaited into two pigtails that made her look girlish, so that you had to look closely to get an idea of her true age. One of the pigtails was tied with red ribbon, but the other ribbon had been lost, no doubt in a struggle with her captors, and the ribbonless pigtail was coming undone.
“The two deputies . . . the real ones,” Gwen said, “maybe could’ve saved us . . . but they’re hanging from the rafters. You and I have to pull together . . . figure a way to get out of here . . . before they kill us.”
“How are we going to do that?” Nancy said hopelessly, and she started to sob, burying herself in the ragged quilt on the bottom of her cage.
Luke, Abraham, and Cyrus clomped into the room. Nancy kept her head and eyes buried and continued to cry softly while they went about the business of cutting down the bodies and getting them out of there. Luke and Abraham were in jeans now.
Luke backed his pickup truck out of the garage and kept it parked in the driveway with the engine idling. Abraham and Cyrus came out the front door carrying the body of one of the slain deputies, wrapped in a blanket, and heaved it into the bed of the truck. In a little while, after going back into the house, they c
ame out with the second body, also wrapped up, and laid it into the truck, too. Abraham and Cyrus then squeezed into the cab of the pickup truck and Luke backed it out of the driveway.
Cynthia came out on the porch and watched the truck go, churning up dust, then went back into the house, shutting the front door behind her. She started cleaning up the living room, every now and then glancing at Nancy and Gwen.
“Let us go,” Gwen tried.
But Cynthia only chuckled.
“But you’re a young girl like us,” Gwen said. “Surely you must have some feelings for what we’re going through. How can you condone torture and . . . imprisonment?”
Cynthia came over to Gwen’s cage. Gwen looked up at her, thinking how young and pretty she was, her figure so lithe and girlish; it just didn’t seem possible that she could be as evil and perverted as her brothers—except for the intense gleam of her black eyes, which leant her face a scary kind of radiance despite the paleness of her complexion. Looking down at Gwen, she said, “I’m not like you. Don’t ever try to tell me that. I have special powers. A congregation of my own. They believe in me. You’ll see for yourself, come Friday at midnight, when the services start.”
“What if I believed in you, too?” Gwen asked. “Could I be part of your congregation?” She was hoping to continue a dialogue that might cause Cynthia to waver and perhaps think about letting her and Nancy go.
“It is too late for you to be saved,” said Cynthia. “A false profession of faith will not fool me.”
The pickup truck pulled into the camping area where Tom Riley and Hank Bennet had been shot to death. The white van was still parked there, the sleeping bags strewn all around. Luke, Cyrus, and Abraham got out of their truck and laid the bodies of the two slain deputies on the ground, on top of the cold embers of the campfire.